ABSTRACT
Giambattista Vico’s central metaphor of the Tree of Knowledge represents a heroic attempt to relativize order and chaos by building into the structure of the human mind a capacity for unpredictability and new knowledge that nevertheless returns through itself through the recursive symmetry of the New Science itself. Moreover, because the human mind is not regarded as a modernist machine whose logical operations require that it render obsolete large functions of human perception, language and experience, Vico’s Tree of Knowledge is more akin to the Tree of Life both in its wholeness and its cultural continuity. The logic of the learned, because of its forgetfulness of the life world knowledge, arts and technologies, constitutes a barbarian culture equally ignorant of its debts to the human past and its obligation toward the continuing humanization of the future.
