Sources

Works Cited:

Bacon, Francis. Great Instauration and Novum Organum. Whitefish: Kessinger, 1996.

Daems, Jim & Nelson, Holly Faith, eds. Eikon Basilike with Selections from Eikonoklastes. Buffalo: Broadview, 2005.

Descartes, Rene. Discourse on the Method for Conducting One's Reason Well and for Seeking Truth in the Sciences. New York: Hackett, 1998.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. New Haven: Yale, 2006.

Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico’s Science of Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell, 1981.

Vico, Giambattista. Trans. by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Ithaca: Cornell, 1984.

What does this mean for us?

Particular images such as frontispieces are the subject of much study in modernity. They are especially important not only to Vico, but to the philosophical/literary movements of Transcendentalism, Aesthetics, and many others. Emblems have entire organizations dedicated to their study, and the modern doctrine "what is is for us" makes direct appeal to practices such as engaging emblems, embracing the subjective in our study of the world.

Referring back to the Article by Father Ong that we read to begin our course, we discussed Ong's criticism of a claim made in Plato's Phaedrus. Plato claimed that the adoption of popular writing would destroy the memory of individuals. If we consider this in light of Vico's claim that imagination is the manipulation of memory, where does it leave us? The gradual elimination of images in our literature might then leave us in a sour place as regards memory. It might also simply signify a deterioration in our ability to manipulate our memory, a deterioration of our memory.

On the other hand, perhaps we reject Plato's claim. He, after all, used writing to instruct his followers. He also used mythology, despite his stated distrust for poetry. We might then label Plato a hypocrite, or at the very least ambiguous about his true intentions. He might be trying to captivate us, to swindle us in a grand act of political imposture. When it comes down to it, both the poet and the philosopher put us in a place to suspect their intentions. Whether intentional or not both try to capture the loyalty of the reader in one way or another.

The important question, then, is: should we accept the powerful, associative, imaginative consciousness of the poet or the cold, analytical reasoning of the philosopher/scientist? Vico would almost certainly say both, in balance. We need to recognize our original relation to nature and our place within the grand historical scheme, which we then inch forward with a balance of reasoning and imagination. Does the slow disappearance of the frontispiece signal an imbalance in the way we think? How about the destruction of wilderness, the capitalist economy, or the strangling grips of our culture? Forgive the political rant; the point is, there are important decisions that we all make in developing a view of the world. Are young people free to make those decisions if the system is weighted in one direction? And what sorts of things signal such conditions? In a world of constantly appearing (and disappearing) technologies we ought to be mindful of the change, and keep ourselves centered.

Examples and Information

Examples:

From Giambattista Vico's New Science

Vico makes it a point to discuss the Frontispiece at length in the introduction to his book. The bearded figure is Homer, the first great poet of humanity. Higher up we find the female figure of metaphysics atop the globe, representing nature. The eye is God, whose gaze meets that of Homer in metaphysics. There are numerous other symbols, including a clock, a sword, an alphabetical text, and religious tools, among others. Vico considers the frontispiece to be a reminder for all readers of the text's contents and message.

From Francis Bacon's Great Instauration

Bacon's ship is the ship of knowledge, possibly making references to older texts such as Plato's Ship of State. The ship, the technology itself a sign of human progress, departs between two classical pillars (representing antiquity, Greece, etc.) upon a vast seascape, signifying the seemingly endless mysterious potential of human knowledge. Also notable is another ship in the distance, probably representing another mind or a beacon of some kind.



From Eikon Basilike

This frontispiece represents the loyalty, piety, and resilience of King Charles the 1st of England. He receives light even through vast darkness in the sky, and though brought to a kneel he faces and reaches for heaven. On the ground by his knees is his Crown, in his hand a crown of thorns likening him to Christ. He is as stalwart as the large boulder in the distance, and is a beautiful tree even with weights hanging from his branches. There are a number of Latin scrolls in the illustration that suggest similar interpretations.

From Henry David Thoreau's Walden

This frontispiece depicts Thoreau's solitary existence in the woods by Walden Pond. It contains his simple, makeshift house with a singular window, a single, man-made path (presumably) up to the entrance, and the surroundings of wilderness. In his journals Thoreau reveals that though the drawing was completed by his sister, he initially wanted it withheld due to certain imperfections of its representation of the woods (i.e. the types of trees, the absence of a certain hill, etc.). In the text of Walden (particularly the chapter "Reading") he gives the reader a strategy for approaching his work in a very careful and intentional way, as it was written. This necessarily includes the frontispiece, part of the classical whole.

Testimonials on Imagery

Eisenstein gives us the following quotation in The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, relating the spread of printed text to memory:

In Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris a scholar, deep in meditation in his study . . . gazes at the first printed book which has come to disturb his collection of manuscripts. Then . . . he gazes at the vast cathedral, silhouetted against the starry sky . . . 'Ceci tuera cela,' he says. The printed book will destroy the building. The parable which Hugo develops out of the comparison of the building, crowded with images, with the arrival in his library of a printed book might be applied to the effect on the invisible cathedrals of memory of the past of the spread of printing. The printed book will make such huge built-up memories, crowded with images, unnecessary. It will do away with habits of immemorial antiquity whereby a "thing" is immediately invested with an image and stored in the places of memory. (Francis Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1966), 131)

Near the end of her book Eisenstein writes: "As previous remarks suggest, the effects produced by printing may be plausibly related to an increased incidence of creative acts, to internally transformed speculative traditions, to exchanges between intellectuals and artisans, and indeed to each of the contested factors in current disputes" (293).

Vico gives us the following in terms of memory: "In that human indigence, the peoples, who were almost all body and almost no reflection, must have been all vivid sensation in perceiving particulars, strong imagination in apprehending and enlarging them, sharp wit in referring them to their imaginative genera, and robust memory in retaining them . . .” In this passage Vico identifies memory as having three forms: traditionally understood memory, imagination when it “lathers or imitates”, and invention when it “gives them a new turn or puts them into proper arrangement and relationship” (819).

Descartes says that he stopped reading text altogether for purposes of ingenuity:

I entirely abandoned the study of letters. Resolving to seek no knowledge other than that of which could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world, I spent the rest of my youth traveling, visiting courts and armies, mixing with people of diverse temperaments and ranks, gathering various experiences, testing myself in the situations which fortune offered me, and at all times reflecting upon whatever came my way so as to derive some profit from it. (Descartes, Discourse on the Method)

If we accept Vico's theory, memory and imagination give us an inside relation to things, a "for us". Creating something seems to be a necessary part of abstracting from it. Verene brings up the idea of the imaginative universal as a theory of conditions for thought--he says of the intelligible universal: "it can grasp none of the terror of formlessness which accompanies the attempt to make a new intelligibility, the attempt to perform an original conversion of the true and made . . . Any genuine beginning in thought requires the power of fantasia (imagination) to produce true speech." (93)

Introduction to the Frontispiece

A Frontispiece is a decorative illustration on the opening page of a text.

The Frontispiece is viewed as an essential part of a classical reading experience in many texts but in modern literature it has fallen from popular use. Perhaps more importantly, it is an image.

"Imagery has often been believed to play a very large, even pivotal, role in both memory (Yates, 1966; Paivio, 1986) and motivation (McMahon, 1973). It is also commonly believed to be centrally involved in visuo-spatial reasoning and inventive or creative thought."

Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) was a professor of rhetoric and jurisprudence at the University of Naples. After René Descartes helped revolutionize science and philosophy Vico developed an original yet largely ignored response--The First New Science. Vico, like Descartes, developed his philosophy to address concerns in the same vein as Francis Bacon. He wanted to discover a method by which people could break with the traditionally taught methods of the time period in order to make progress toward true knowledge. In his Meditations on First Philosophy Descartes begins from the cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), and later arrives at a faith in pure mathematics. He then tries to apply his mathematical method to the rest of the sciences. Vico starts epistemologically from verum esse ipsum factum (the true is what is made), and proceeds in articulating just how that is (in direct response to Descartes). Vico thinks that if something is true for us, we must have created it. We do so by ingenium, our natural creative faculty. He speaks in terms of universals--the intelligible universal, the generalizing abstract concept we use today, and the imaginative universal, the means by which early humans came to terms with the particular sensations of their world. Vico grounds everything in an idealized history, proceeding with an eye for how all forms of science are essentially productions of their time period.

As Donald Verene puts it in his Vico's Science of Imagination, we can conceive of Vico’s construction of the New Science in terms of a question: “If we as modern thinkers form concepts in terms of intelligible genera, how did the first men think such that our manner of concept formation can be understood as developing from a first form of thought?” (73) Vico’s ideal eternal history starts with brutish figures so limited to particulars that we cannot imagine them. The first men “took things one at a time, being in this respect little better than the minds of beasts, for which each new sensation cancels the last one” (703). The giants broke away from this by looking to the sky and observing the lightning and thunder of Jove: “Jove hurls his bolts and fells the giants, and every gentile nation had its Jove.” (193) They identified these natural phenomena with a figure in the sky—the first thought—and began to fear and worship it, the beyond. So this thought, entirely derived from the senses was the source of their “poetic morality” and all human institutions (502). “Thus they began to exercise that natural curiosity which is the daughter of ignorance and the mother of knowledge” (118), and the science of divination was soon developed to understand this bodily (sensory) language—eventually, all other arts and sciences followed.

In the Western world there has been a rift between science and poetry (literature) since at least Ancient Greece. The former might have images disregarded as too subjective for serious analysis, an exercise in leisure. The latter might insist upon their preservation and utilization for our ingenuity, happiness, and freedom.

http://emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/SES/

Again, I posit that the frontispiece was and still is an essential part of the classical reading experience for many texts--authors demanded that one approach their work in the proper way, very carefully and intentionally, starting with the frontispiece. It is supposed to serve both as a reminder of what the text means and as a launching-off point for readers. Bearing that in mind, what might explain the relative disappearance of the frontispiece as a book technology, and should we be okay with it?