...Samuel Moyn Copyright © 2000 Qui Parle 2000 METAPHORICALLY SPEAKING: HANS BLUMENBERG, GIAMBATTISTA VICO, AND THE PROBLEM OF ORIGINS' Samuel Moyn "To speak of beginnings is always to be suspected of a mania for returning to origins," the contemporary German philosopher...

...” or a “religious attitude” that these invoked or imagined a “divine” order behind the contingencies of human history? Or was it that they muddled the distinction between secular history and what Said, paraphrasing Giambattista Vico, called “the order of God’s sacred history?” 2 The stakes of these questions may...

... capacity of language. In his account of the origins of man in his New Science, Vico had proposed that the first men used imaginative metaphors to anthropomorphize acts of nature that in- spired fear and terror, and more importantly he argued that this act of naming was an act...

... philosophy of Giambattista Vico (1688-1744), whose own theory of social regeneration was premised on the recovery of "the mythopoetic wellsprings of our emotions and inner drives Such thinking led Sorel to lament the inability of the general populace to appreciate the mytho-poetic power of African...

..., Warren. Adventures of the Symbolic: Post-Marxism and Radical Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Brennan, Timothy. Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel, and the Colonies. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2014. Bronfen, Elisabeth. Night Passages...

... and the subsequent reinterpretation of the familiar into the unfamiliar. Rorty's hermeneutic model of metaphor corresponds quite closely to the model of rhetoric that underlies the projects of Vico and Blumenberg, for whom rhetoric serves as a pragmatic means of self-assertion. What is unfamiliar...

... mother. These are not words one would associate with an affiliative mode of belonging predicated on critical and secular choices made by human beings. Said’s view on the institution of marriage is taken from Giambattista Vico, for whom marriage is a historically important civic institution...

... of rhetoric. Blumenberg's treatment of technology and rhetoric in the es- say derives from the doctrine of Arnold Gehlen (coming, in fact, from a long tradition dating back to Herder and Vico), according to which tools and linguistic skills are rooted in man's inadequate ad- aptation to his...