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.
If he has a conscience he will suffer for his mistake. That will be his punishment-as well as the prison.
As individuals, people are inherently good. I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. And I remain extremely concerned when I see what's happening in our country, which is in many ways the luckiest place in the world. We don't seem to be excited about making our country a better place for our kids.
I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism—religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality.
When we try to describe the truth with words, we distort it and it's no longer truth--it's our story. The story may be true for us, but that doesn't mean it's true for anyone else.
On the road halfway between faith and criticism stands the inn of reason. Reason is faith in what can be understood without faith, but it's still a faith, since to understand presupposes that there's something understandable.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
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