Metaphysics abstracts the mind from the senses, and the poetic faculty must submerge the whole mind in the senses. Metaphysics soars up to universals, and the poetic faculty must plunge deep into particulars.
Interpretation
This quote contrasts the abstract nature of metaphysics with the sensory immersion of poetry.
Giambattista Vico highlights the dichotomy between metaphysics and poetry. While metaphysics seeks to understand universal truths by abstracting from sensory experiences, poetry requires a deep, sensory engagement with the world, emphasizing the importance of particular details and lived experiences. This contrast suggests that both approaches are essential to grasping human understanding—one grounded in abstract reasoning and the other in tangible experience.
In practice
In a lecture on the philosophy of art, you might use this quote to illustrate the relationship between abstract thought and sensory experience.
It is true that men themselves made this world of nations... but this world without doubt has issued from a mind often diverse, at times quite contrary, and always superior to the particular ends that men had proposed to themselves.
The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.
The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself.
People first feel things without noticing them, then notice them with inner distress and disturbance, and finally reflect on them with a clear mind.
The nationalist has a broad hatred and a narrow love.
We know all their gods; they ignore ours. What they call our sins are our gods, and what they call their gods, we name otherwise.
A Religion of Evolution: that, when all is said and done, is what Man needs ever more explicitly if he is to survive and 'superlive,' as soon as he becomes conscious of his power to ultra-hominize himself and of his duty to do so.
Here's the reality. The image of a white Jesus has been used to justify enslavement, conquest, colonialism, the genocide of indigenous peoples. There are literally millions of human beings whose lives have been snuffed out by people who conquered under the banner of a white god.
The fox condemns the trap, not himself.
Europe and the world are waiting for us to defend the spirit of the enlightenment everywhere.
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