Eric Voegelin and Giambattista Vico: A Rhetorical Reading.

If we give a look to the contemporary debate in political philosophy regarding some central questions as the meaning of politics, the nature of its foundations, the scope of this discipline, and so on, it would be easy to conclude that we are in a period of great contrast and opacity. In general terms, it seems as if contemporary political philosophy has started to rebound monotonously between one of the two poles of a series of dichotomies - universalism VS particularism, identity VS difference, inclusion VS exclusion - without succeeding to exit this closed movement and follow other paths. In this text, in order to exit this sort of dialectic cul de sac, we will argue that is indispensable to resort to a somehow forgotten art: the ars topica, which classic rhetorical tradition taught as the indispensable partner of the ars critica (which today seems to reign alone), for every good orator. Recovering great but in a certain measure peripheral authors as Eric Voegelin and Giambattista Vico means in itself performing this art, because corresponds to explore other arguments, to walk other loci of the discourse, on a determinate issue. The effort will appear still more valuable when it is discovered that an association, a comparison between these authors, opens up very interesting insights both on a fundamental issue, as the relations between politics and its foundations, and on the two authors themselves. In this paper our main concern won't be much on their philosophies of history, an issue that has been already in part explored. What I will propose, instead, is an interpretation and a comparison of the meanings of the political experiences of the "searching for foundations" and "living in contingency", according to the vision of Voegelin, on the one hand, and of Vico and the classical and humanistic rhetorical tradition, which he continued, on the other. Through this examination, I will show how these two experiences coexist intrinsically and influence mutually, both highlighting the ultimate elusiveness of the meaning of the human world. Elusiveness rooted in the fact that this world is not only the product of the rational part of man, but of the profundities of the human soul. Such profundities are out of the reach of rational language alone, they need a metaphorical and symbolic language in order to be reached and communicated in the public world; one able to evocate, what is not perfectly conceptualized, and, at the same time, to reduce as much as possible the irreducible gap between experience and word. A 'rhetorical' perspective, which take care of these aspects, is therefore of transcendental importance for the study of politics, and in particular for the issue of foundations. Eric Voegelin and Giambattista Vico offer this kind of approach and, taken together, can provide a great contribution to the recovery of political philosophy from its contemporary state of stall. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]