Rousseau on Herodotus on The State of Exception:

"Throw out morality and justice
and folks will do the right thing".

– Lao Tse

Herodotus tells the story that after the murder of the false Smerdis, when the seven liberators of Persia had assembled to discuss the form of government which they would give the state, Otanes firmly declared his preference for a republic, a recommendation all the more extraordinary from the mouth of a satrap since, in addition to the claim which he could make to the empire, aristocrats fear more than death a form of government which requires them to respect men.

Ontanes, we can well believe, was not listened to at all and, seeing that they were going to proceed to the election of a monarch and not wishing to obey or to command, willingly gave up his right to the crown to the other contestants, requesting as his total compensation that he and his posterity could be free and independent, a condition which the others granted him.

If Herodotus did not tell us of the restriction which was set on this privilege, it would be necessary to assume it. Otherwise, Otanes, not recognizing any sort of law and not having to account to anyone, would have been all-powerful in the state and stronger than the king himself. But there was hardly any indication that a man capable of remaining content with such a privilege in a case like this was capable of abusing it. In fact, we do not see that this right ever caused the least trouble in the kingdom, either on the part of the wise Otanes or of any of his descendants.

– Rousseau

"It is the poetic heroes and not the philosopher kings which create society."

To Vico, a normative legal text is utterly meaningless without living speech to clarify it. "Such manuals foster a habit of abiding by general maxims whereas in real life nothing is more useless"(Mooney: Principles of Language p.209). It was better in his view to use the heroic Roman method of a minimum of laws where equity came with the skill of an eloquent lawyer.

Poetic wisdom was the synthesis of wisdom and eloquence, of res and verba. Poetry was not merely a product of the mind, but actually the logic of the mind's development...Society would fall apart when the philosophers forgot how to communicate and the rhetoricians became merely clever.

– Erik Growen, Vico's sensus communis

Imagination is considered a mere subject matter, never a mode of philosophical thought. At best the image and the metaphor become devices to illustrate conceptual philosophical meanings. Plato is exemplary here. In his dialogues, the image remains outside the form of philosophical thought to be used only when conceptual reasoning rises toward what he considers a view of the whole, or it is used as a simple instrument of communication to liven up the thought. Vico to the contrary insists that philosophy, astronomy, economics, morality, politics, history, even logic can be poetic (see book II of The New Science).

Paradoxically, without imagination, a view of the whole cannot be reached. See the image of the charioteer and the two winged horses in the Phaedrus and then read book X of the Republic where the rational idea is separated from the wisdom of Homer (a figure most prominently displayed in Vico's frontispiece). This contemptuous cavalier attitude toward the image considered inferior to the idea, has dogged Western philosophy for twenty four centuries. Vico proves that indeed there is no such thing as an individual called Homer: he is the representation of the oral poetical tradition of the Greeks and in that sense, despite Plato's esoteric opinion, he is the exoteric "educator of Hellas."

Vico shows the reader: he works his way back to the world of original thought (the myth) since for him "verum factum convertuntur," the true and the made are convertible and Man can return to origins via what he himself has made: history, institutions, languages, artifacts, etc., in fact he can do that more surely than with science observing a nature that he has not made. Through his discovery of the imaginative universal, of fantasia as a way of thinking and acting, Vico finds a new origin for philosophical thought.

– Emanuel L. Paparella, Vico's Poetic Philosophy

TALKING POINTS ("Public Opinion") & SONG, SPIRIT & MIGHT (and their inversions!)

IF the skill of a doctor were bespoken to effect the cure of a madman, and he proceeded to attempt the systematising of the insane ravings while giving no heed to the existence of the madness one would say there was little to choose from in soundness of mind between doctor and patient. Yet no one marvels when from all those who have a nostrum to offer as a cure for the disease of civilisation and its complications no voice is heard drawing attention to the species of sickness which is its antecedent cause. It remains nameless and unsuspected, to be indicated only by a description of its symptoms.

It begins with the failure of the self-assertive principle of the vital power: a failure of courage. Tolerated, it acts on the power of the heart and thins it out to a degree at which it is too light to retain its seat there, and forthwith mounts to the head where transmutation begins. The power of the heart, already grown virtueless and thin, distills poisonous clammy vapours which emerge from the head. As they grow denser they settle, a heavy cloud of mist about the head. Descending, they breathe a film upon the eyes and dim the senses. Within, the heart left tenantless of power is contracted by ghostly hands – the hands of fear. The face becomes pallid under the Thought-wreaths with the chillness of fear. The vapours become the breath of his nostrils and are breathed in as Duty and Circumspection. They penetrate each limb and fibre, inoculate with obedience and virtue. The hands fold meekly: the man walks with circumspection. He is already civilised: he awaits merely the idiosyncracy of the particular civilisation. 

The ordinary human animal, as a matter of fact, is not as obvious as at first sight he appears. He has left his soul naked neither to his enemies nor to his neighbours. The cheap and handy means of cant* he has converted into the bricks, laths and plaster with which he builds himself a house of refuge. If his spiritual house is even more ramshackle and jerry-built than the one in which he shelters his person, it nevertheless often serves him a very good turn as a protection: of which form of protection Public Opinion is not the least. Its protective effects carry just as far as it can continue to produce the impressive, i.e., the illusion of weight; with those, however, who go beyond the impression and take to measuring its weight by force, it proves to be something less of a protection than a house of lath and plaster: it reveals itself an affair of wind and words shot with the lurid flashes of atmosphere which oratory can create. It proves a mirage. At the approach of those who are primed for violence it vanishes. Cant – the haven of the feeble – has this defect: it attracts those who are least in a position to rely on it. It has this advantage: it screens the eyes of the feeble from the danger which impends: it gives the comfort of safety in the midst of the perilous; it also allows to the strong, relief from the former's prying questioning as to the intent and possible effects of the latter's activities. It is potent to comfort and to inflate confidence for a period, to deceive for a period, to attract into alliance a few impressed ones may be: and when real business is on foot, where strong and genuine interest meet, it knows better than to intrude: it does not hamper the ground; it vanishes like a spent breath...

lt is in virtue of the vast extensions it has made in the realms of cant that the period through which we are living is called "The Verbal Age." It has accepted the given pieces as valid material for building purposes with the unquestioning acceptance of a child of its toys. It has sought to "specialise" as the "Constructive" age, and in the diverting task of manipulating its ready-made materials it has drugged its adventurous energy into a tamely pleasant submission.

Delineation of the "ways of men," delineation without comment, is out of the question: the constructive ideal interposes itself between observers and what they would observe. When the ways "ought" and "ought not" to be such and such it addles the mind of the observer to be confronted with what they actually are. So they dispense with things as they are and soar loftily into the "ideal"! Psychology is a farce because it must be "constructive" too: mental scheme-spinning is the limit to which psychology aspires or can hope to aspire as long as words pass non-suspect. Minds clogged up with the cheap and all too handy set – systems of words cannot generate the steady force which emotional analysis requires. What view must a mind take of forces – their origin, course or tendency – when it is withering with rage against them, not because they are hostile, but because they are "wrong." If they are "wrong" the inference waits to follow: that being wrong they are not there: the "should not" promptly is made more valid than the "are." Forces accordingly burst in upon this verbal plane as disruptive forces – all uncalculated for and sinning blasphemously against the Holy Ghost, because they have grown athwart the spirit of the scheme: unconcernedly spoilt the mosaic.

It cannot be expected to be otherwise: a matter-of-fact statement as to existent forces could be listened to only as the out-pourings of the children of Beelzebub: the mental currents which carry in them the momentum of habits of thinking of generations cannot be doubled back on themselves and set in an opposing direction without giving rise to a troubling of the waters. The solvent acid of analysis cannot be set working in this age of "Causes" and "Movements" without causing heart-burnings, and causes and movements are as far as this age attempts to go. The two run together: a cause is a form of activity energised by a slogan: which ensures it going thus far and no farther, the slogan being the form of speech which is intended to dam up thinking, while a movement mentally necessitates a standing still; a pause before the fixed idea. Analysis would gobble up the war-cry and the inhibited mental processes would flow on, overwhelm the stationary idea, and put an end to the "Cause." War cries exist only because they are protected from analysis; as ice exists only by being protected from heat. Slogans and analysis require to be kept apart: an analysed war-cry is a contradiction. The workings of an analytic spirit in this pretty, pretty age of "problems" and catch-words would mean devastation. It would produce only such a solution of the "problems" as fire would with the problems set out on the chess board: solve them by destroying them: the last thing to be desired by the posers of problems. Only by keeping the catch-word intact can the problem with its accompanying "cause" be made permanent, and the to-do about verbalities kept up. And failing verbalities only forces remain, and force is too violent, unmanageable, unimpressible by oratory, to hold anything save horror for a delicate age.

Turned, for instance on that problem of "emancipation," analysis reveals this alluring seducer of the energies of centuries with a clarity which the lovers of liberty – the friends of freedom – can ill brook. It appears as yet one other of the screen of illusions by which cant veils the harder necessities: and emancipators as the comforting deceivers of the people. Yet many of the "saviours of the people" are earnest, and would learn, if they could, why the freedom-winners result ever in a flow and ebb of achievement which mounts onward only to draw back. By seeking after a freedom which is not synonymous with powerdom. but which is tacitly and otherwise implied to be, they encourage the unintelligent revolt against the "nature of things," but not the only kind of revolt which is worth while: an individual's revolt against his own failure to exploit [sic] the nature of things. They would appreciate the difference if they saw it, but between them and the vision stands the opaque Word.

-- Dora Marsden

* Cant: a sing-song list of preconceived notions, pleasant to hear, but only to the ear. The music soothes, the lyrics are meaningless; originally in Latin, a convenient language due to its morbid state.