H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: I VERBALI DEL GRUPPO DI GIOCO DI H. P. GRICE: VICO

 G.: Hampshire, I gather you have been reading Vico again with that tone of pleased impatience which usually means you think the rest of us have been looking in the wrong place. H.: It often means no more than that I think the rest of you have been looking in too narrow a place. G.: A distinction with your usual moral ambition. Let me guess: language, imagination, and the first institutions of a people. H.: Exactly. Vico is valuable because he does not begin with propositions already cleaned and ironed. He begins where language is still thick with myth, fear, bodily image, and practical need. G.: So he does not begin where I usually do. H.: No. You begin admirably late. G.: Admirably? H.: If one wants to know how a civilised adult gets from what is said to what is meant, yes. But Vico wants to know how there came to be such adults, such sayings, and such available meanings. G.: That is fair. I look at the move in play; he looks at the game before it is recognisably a game. H.: Better: before it is recognisably a language in your sense. He is interested in the poetic and imaginative forms that make later reason possible. G.: Hampshire, you make him sound almost anti-rational. H.: Not anti-rational. Anti-thin. There is a difference, though your tribe often pretends not to notice it. G.: We notice it whenever it becomes inconvenient. H.: Precisely. Vico is inconvenient because he insists that thought grows out of images, institutions, rites, and historical pressures rather than from abstract reason contemplating its own cleanliness. G.: I would not say reason is clean. Only that at some point it becomes possible to ask what a speaker means by uttering such-and-such. H.: Yes, and Vico would ask what had to happen historically for such a question to become available at all. G.: Then one might say that I analyse the micro-mechanics of uptake, whereas Vico is concerned with the macro-history of intelligibility. H.: That is not bad. Though “macro-history” sounds as if he were writing graphs. He is not. He is tracing the movement from imaginative universals to reflective distinctions. G.: And you like that because you think philosophers of our generation neglected the imagination. H.: Not only neglected it. They often treated it as either ornament or contamination. Vico sees it as constitutive. G.: You have written that sort of thing yourself. H.: I have tried to. Primitive thought, metaphor, unconscious structure, the persistence of images in deliberate reasoning. Those matters interested me more than a philosophy of history dressed up as historical method. G.: Ah. Then we have reached Collingwood. H.: Inevitably. G.: You do him an injustice, perhaps. H.: Perhaps. But Collingwood took from Vico what Vico gave only in part. He made him chiefly the father of the philosophy of history, whereas I think the more unsettling thing in Vico is what he sees about language and the mind. G.: Meaning that men understand what they themselves have made. H.: Verum factum, yes. But one must not turn that into a slogan for historians alone. It matters because the mind understands its products differently from how it understands nature. Language, law, myth, social order, even the image of the self, these are humanly made and therefore require an interpretive intelligence proper to made things. G.: Whereas a stone may be catalogued without being reimagined. H.: Exactly. Human institutions cannot be grasped from outside as if they were pebbles. One must enter the forms of imagination that made them. G.: Which is why you were drawn to Vico through Joyce as well. H.: Joyce was one route, yes. Finnegans Wake is almost a laboratory for Vichian recurrence: language returning to its own buried origins, rational syntax dissolving into older pressures of pun, myth, etymology, and dream. G.: You sound as though you enjoyed it more than you suffered it. H.: I suffered it in the proper way. But Joyce at least taught some of us that the philosophy of language could not forever remain a matter of purified examples and gentlemanly stipulations. G.: You mean my examples of butlers and bandaged legs will not do? H.: They will do very nicely once the world in which butlers and legs are recognisably available has been conceded. Vico is interested in the prehistory of that concession. G.: Then he is less a philosopher of conversation than of the possibility of shareable meanings. H.: Precisely. He asks how a civilisation comes to have a common world of signs, institutions, metaphors, and recognisable reasons. G.: That is not wholly alien to me, you know. H.: No. You have always been more hospitable than your doctrinaire admirers. G.: Hampshire, that is almost affectionate. H.: Do not become sentimental. I merely mean that you never reduced meaning to syntax or to formal entailment. G.: Quite right. I always required intention, recognition, and the rational route from the one to the other. H.: Yes. And Vico asks what historical sediment must already exist if such routes are to be traversable by anyone at all. G.: So if I say that a hearer calculates an implicature, Vico would ask what cultural and imaginative background makes that calculation seem natural. H.: Exactly. Relevance, reasonableness, what counts as apt, what counts as too much or too little, all these are not delivered by logic alone. They are historically formed. G.: That will alarm those who prefer maxims to have descended from Sinai. H.: Then let them be alarmed. Philosophical tidiness is often an attempt to forget origins. G.: You speak now like an anti-rationalist. H.: I am anti-rationalist only in the sense that I resist the vanity of reason when it pretends to have no history, no dependence upon desire, image, conflict, and social inheritance. G.: Which is also what interested our generation. H.: Yes, and this is where Collingwood’s admirers sometimes miss the point. They take the philosophy of history, but without enough notice to the philosophy of mind that was really at issue for us. G.: Because for men born in 1913 and 1914, history was not merely something to be reconstructed; it was something that had broken through the walls. H.: Exactly. We did not need to be persuaded that historical forces matter. The question was what sort of mind could live through conflict, ideology, loyalty, fantasy, and self-deception without imagining itself transparent. G.: That is more psycho-logical than historical. H.: It is both, but the priority is with the mind in history, not with history in the abstract. Vico is useful because he sees that imagination is not the enemy of reason but its condition. G.: That is a sentence I can almost endorse without reserve. H.: Almost? G.: I should want to say not that imagination is always the condition of reason, but that some forms of reasoning presuppose historically acquired imaginative capacities and shared symbolic resources. H.: That is your way of making the sentence acceptable to the Board of Lit. Hum. G.: A body to which I no longer answer. H.: Which improves your style. G.: Hampshire, you are unjustly kind today. H.: Only because Vico encourages largeness of temper. One cannot read him profitably in a narrow mood. G.: Then tell me what most interests you in his account of language. H.: The claim that early language is not primarily descriptive in the later sense. It is poetic, bodily, socially condensed. Words are bound up with institutions, with shared fears, with the need to classify the world in images before concepts are available. G.: So metaphor comes first. H.: In an important sense, yes. Metaphor is not a decorative afterthought. It is one of the original instruments by which human beings make a world graspable. G.: That will trouble those who like literal meaning as a primary deposit. H.: They deserve to be troubled. The literal is often a later domestication of what was once imaginatively charged. G.: Then perhaps even my own distinction between what is said and what is implicated has a Vichian prehistory. H.: Of course it does. You analyse the fine surface of a mature practice. Vico reminds you that the surface was laid down over centuries of imaginative and institutional labour. G.: You are making me more historicist than I had planned to be. H.: I should not dream of making you a historicist. Only less forgetful. G.: That is a better compliment. And what of Naples? H.: Naples matters because Vico is formed not in an Oxford of tutorials and common rooms but in a civic university of rhetoric, law, and public culture. He is not a cloistered metaphysician; he is a professor of rhetoric with jurisprudence in his bones. G.: Which means that language for him is always near law, institution, and civic life. H.: Exactly. There is no pure philosophy of language detached from how a people orders itself. G.: That sounds closer to your political concerns than to mine. H.: It is. I am interested in what language discloses about conflict, selfhood, motive, responsibility. Vico makes all that thinkable without reducing it to sociology. G.: Because he still thinks forms of life have intelligible structure. H.: Yes. He is not a mere historicist relativist. He believes that what men have made can be understood because it has a form, though not one reducible to natural science. G.: Which is why he distinguishes the human sciences from the natural. H.: In effect, yes. Not with later jargon, but with greater force. Men understand civil institutions because they are their own products in a way that stars and stones are not. G.: That is where Collingwood took him up. H.: Yes, and not wrongly. Only too tidily. G.: Tidy minds irritate you more than obscure ones. H.: They do, because tidy minds often mistake arrangement for discovery. G.: I am tempted to quote your own writings at you. H.: Resist it. Self-quotation is a late vice. G.: You say that as though Vico had been spared it. H.: He was spared many modern humiliations. G.: Not all. He still had chairs, competitions, disappointed ambitions, family burdens, and Neapolitan weather. H.: Yes, which is why he remains recognisably human. One can admire the great dead best when one refuses to embalm their frustrations. G.: That is very nearly one of my own methodological slogans. H.: It should be. We should treat those who were great and are dead as if they were great and living. G.: Thank you for handing me my line back improved. H.: I have always improved you in small quantities. G.: Very small ones. Now tell me this: does Vico interest you because he offers a philosophy of origins, or because he offers a criticism of present rationalism? H.: The second through the first. He is not merely a storyteller about beginnings. He is diagnostically useful against the delusion that reflective consciousness is self-sufficient. G.: Which aligns him with some modern theories of the unconscious. H.: Yes, though one must not claim him crudely as a proto-Freudian. What matters is that he sees the mind as layered, culturally formed, and only partially transparent to itself. G.: Then he belongs with those who make self-knowledge difficult. H.: Entirely. And that is why he mattered to me more than to many Oxford analysts. He does not ask only what a concept is; he asks what sort of creature had to exist before such a concept could be lived. G.: Again, that is a larger anthropology than most of us were trained to permit. H.: Because most of you were trained to answer questions only after removing their blood. G.: Hampshire, that is almost a manifesto. H.: It is only a complaint. G.: A fertile one. Do you think Vico can still correct us? H.: Certainly. Every time philosophers speak as though language were simply there, as though norms of reason floated free of custom and imagination, as though history were only a sequence of examples rather than a maker of categories, Vico returns. G.: Croce would have liked that. The later history of thought as a ricorso of Vichian ideas. H.: Croce had the large gesture right, though he made it too clean in places. G.: Whitehead did the same for Plato. H.: Yes, and both gestures are partly true and partly flattering to their authors. G.: Then Vico is a recurring corrector rather than a school-founder. H.: That is well said. There is no formal Vichian school in Oxford, but there is an Oxford tradition of finding him useful against reductionism. G.: Yourself, Berlin, Williams at the edge, perhaps Collingwood earlier. H.: Yes, though each took something different. Berlin loved pluralism and imagination. Collingwood loved historical mind. I loved what Vico implied about motive, expression, and the layered structure of thought. G.: And I, if I may belatedly join, would take from him the historical preconditions of common ground. H.: That would be a sensible borrowing. G.: Sensible enough to disappoint those who want dramatic conversions. H.: Let them be disappointed. Philosophy improves when disappointments are exact. G.: Then how would you state the relation between Vico and modern philosophy of mind? H.: He is not a philosopher of mind in the later analytical sense, but he sees something decisive: that the mind cannot be known in abstraction from the symbolic and institutional forms it has itself generated. G.: So thought is externalised before it is introspected. H.: Very often, yes. We know what kind of mind we are by seeing what worlds we have made: laws, myths, cities, rituals, epics, insults, prayers. G.: You are almost theological again. H.: Only anthropological. Prayer is a human act before it is a metaphysical answer. G.: That too would disturb some readers. H.: Good. Philosophy is not a department of reassurance. G.: Speak for yourself. Some of us were paid partly to reassure. H.: You were paid to examine. The reassurance was extra. G.: Fair. Now, what would you say to those who insist Vico is too baroque, too encyclopedic, too rhetorically overgrown for serious use? H.: I would say that their complaint proves his necessity. They have become so accustomed to cleanly partitioned questions that a mind moving among law, language, myth, rhetoric, and history seems excessive. The excess is in the world, not in Vico. G.: That is very much your own independence of mind speaking. H.: I hope so. One should distrust any philosophy that never forces one to enlarge one’s map. G.: Then perhaps this is why I admired your reading of him, even when I was not wholly persuaded. H.: Because I refused to treat him merely as an ancestor to a discipline already certified. G.: Exactly. You treated him as a live pressure upon our own categories. H.: As he ought to be treated. The dead are useful only when they continue to make us less complacent. G.: Again, a line I should like to steal. H.: You may borrow it if you acknowledge the riding from which it came. G.: Yorkshire? H.: No, impatience. G.: Better still. Then tell me, finally, what one sentence of Vico you would wish our contemporaries to hear. H.: Not a sentence, but an orientation: that men can understand what they have made only if they grasp the imaginative forms through which it was made, and that these forms survive in language long after their makers have forgotten them. G.: That is excellent. And the corresponding Gricean sentence would be? H.: That a hearer understands what is meant not only by decoding what is said, but by recognising the rational intention that makes saying it there and then significant. G.: Then between us we have the history and the occasion. H.: Or, if you prefer, you have the occasion and Vico has the history. I merely refuse to let either be forgotten. G.: Which is why I have always liked your mind, even when it disapproved of my examples. H.: Your examples deserved disapproval only when they became too bloodless. G.: And Vico restores the blood. H.: Or at least the Naples. G.: Dry enough? H.: Sufficiently Neapolitan, with one Yorkshire cloud.