According to Verene, Vico’s emphasis on child psychology makes him “the authentic precursor of Rousseau” and also a forerunner of Romanticism: “Misleading as may be the view that Vico was an outright pre-Romanticist, there is a whole aspect of the German Romantic movement of which he seems to have been the ancestor (via Herder, perhaps): that aspect which stresses poetical imagination, the fairy tale, the ‘primitive,’ the creative unconscious. It is with this aspect of Vico’s revaluation and rehabilitation of the phantasia puerilis over against the Cartesian dogmatization of intellectual purus is connected.”
Peter Leithart
Peter J. Leithart is President of Theopolis Institute. He is the author of numerous books on theology, literature, and culture, including Theopolitan, Defending Constantine, and Baptized Body.
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