"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