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.
Even people who say that black people are minorities, there are a billion black people in the world. A billion white people. What part of that is a minority? If you separate yourself, then maybe. But I see black people as one man. When I see people beaten on the streets of America, that hurts me. I feel that.
If there is one word that you find coming out like a bomb from the Upanishads, bursting like a bombshell upon masses of ignorance, it is the word "fearlessness."
Apart from Jesus Christ, we do not know what is our life, nor our death, nor God, nor ourselves.
Isn't Hollywood a dump-in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.
We need God, not in order to understand the why, but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate wherefore, to give a meaning to the universe.
Stop trying to change the world since it is only the mirror. Man’s attempt to change the world by force is as fruitless as breaking a mirror in the hope of changing his face. Leave the mirror and change your face. Leave the world alone and change your conceptions of yourself.
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