“The true and the made are convertible.”
The inspiration for Giambattista Vico’s (1668 – 1744) philosophy
of history was the work of Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650), who boldly declared
that he would believe nothing that could not be demonstrated through reason
alone. Descartes, like most philosophers before Newton, modeled his thought on
geometry - which is to say, he assumed that every area of philosophy had its
own set of axioms, and that every genuine principle of that philosophy could be
derived from them through deductive logic (The Newtonian, or empirical, model,
by contrast, works through induction, from observation to principles.) One
consequence of this approach was that history had to be disqualified as a
serious intellectual pursuit, for none of the axioms which Descartes’s system
required could be found in it. Therefore, Descartes argued, no certain
knowledge of the past was possible - the greatest historian of Rome knew no
more about it than Cicero’s servant girl. Only mathematics, and activities
modeled on it, was capable of establishing genuine knowledge.
Vico agreed with Descartes that knowledge of geometry was
more genuine, and more certain, than any other kind, but he disagreed about the
reason for this. In The New Science (1725), he argued that mathematics was a
human product, and that is what gives it its certainty – for one can only truly
know what one has made. According to this principle, knowledge can be divided
into human and natural spheres, the former consisting of whatever human-kind
had authored, and the latter of whatever it had not. The human sphere included
language, culture, history, art, and mathematics, all of which could be known in
an intuitive, inside-out fashion, because, being human products, humans could
understand how and why they worked, and also the origins and intentions behind
them. The natural sphere, on the other hand, contained physics, medicine,
astronomy, and in general the sciences, which sought to understand the world as
man finds it. Intuitive knowledge of this world, in the sense of origins and
purpose as well as function, is impossible, for it was not created by humanity,
but by God. All that humans could say of this sphere of knowledge was how it
worked, but never why or to what end.
If this was true, it suggested that knowledge of the first
kind was superior to that of the second, simply because that was the sphere in
which the fullest understanding was possible. Vico affirmed that knowledge of
history – which is to say, of the variety of human cultures – was preferable,
but he went on to deny that all cultures were trying, as the Voltaire supposed,
to answer the same question. On Voltaire’s model cultures could all be graded
as more or less rational in proportion to their success in answering a single,
cross-culturally valid set of questions, such as “how can we be happy” or “what
is the best way to organize a state.” For Vico, human nature was fundamentally
multiform, not unitary. There was no “human nature,” only “human natures”
specific to particular cultures. These in turn did not aim at the solution to a
universal set of questions, but rather at creative self-expression. Just as
there is no one, true, best, most rational form of art or music, so there is no
one, true, best, or most rational form of culture. Their diversity is not a
regrettable aberration, to be corrected through the application of reason, but
a manifestation of irreducible differences between the people who created them.
The business of history, on this view, is to understand that diversity, not to
deny it or to stamp it out.
Vico proposed that the history of language (philology) could
be used as a window not simply into the history of words, but that of the concepts
of which a culture is created. This is because words are not interchangeable and
arbitrary markers for common concepts, but concepts in and of themselves. In
other words, different words mean different concepts. Even when those concepts
seem closely related, the shades of meaning make them distinct. Philology reveals
that phonetically similar words share a common origin, which in turn suggests a
common conceptual root. Put another way, words that sound alike must have at
one time meant similar things as well. For instance “human,” and “humane” are
phonetically and conceptually very close, but not identical – to say that
someone is “humane” is to say that they have an abundance of that quality in
virtue of which someone is human, i.e. human-feeling, but it is not to say that
only a “humane” person is “human.” The phonetic and conceptual proximity of
these words suggests a recent divergence. Over thousands of years, however,
similar words can come to mean very different things – for instance the latin “lex,”
meaning law, and “legume,” meaning bean, both have a common root in “ilex,”
meaning oak tree. The key to understanding the connection between these words
(and thus concepts) is to be found in the word “aquilex,” meaning “gathering of
waters.” Thus the law is the decree of the “gathering of the people,” and
vegetables (originally acorns, from oak trees) of the harvest. We can thus surmise
that the Latin people were once forest dwellers, for their language suggests a
common association between “assembly,” “vegetable,” “law,” “acorn,” and “oak
tree” that is very difficult to explain otherwise.
Vico believed not only that each culture was distinct, but
also that it was self-contained, in the sense that its concepts and languages
were intelligible only through reference to each other, and not to the world “out
there” or to the concepts and languages of other cultures. He further believed
that each culture had a life-cycle of its own, passing from a “heroic age”
(like that of Achilles and Hector) to an “oligarchic age” (like that of Solon
and Lycurgus), and then into a “democratic age,” (like that of Socrates and
Euripides.) In the first a rigid social code backed by supernatural terrors was
necessary, for people were violent and unruly, and could not be disciplined by
any other means. In the second, conflict between groups wielding different
theological ideas became endemic as the fissures in society broadened. In the
third, the “barbarism of reflection” defeated all attempts at common
understanding and cooperation, for each person “live[d] like wild beasts in a
deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since
each follow[ed] his own pleasure or caprice.” Having become “aliens in their
own nations,” with their ability for coordination and common feeling seriously
impaired, they became vulnerable, and some younger, stronger group could eventually
shove them aside.
This was, he thought, what had happened to the Greeks in the
age of Alexander, when the half-barbarous Macedonians overran the over-civilized
Greeks. But they in turn eventually were lost in “the barbarism of reflection”
and were overrun by the Romans, who were overrun by the Germans, and so on
throughout history.
In reviving a cyclical view of history which was common in
the ancient world (but which we have not discussed because ancient philosophers
tended to despise history, and hence were not, in my opinion, in a position to
know much about it), Vico would in time have an immense influence on later
philosophers such as R.G. Collingwood, Karl Marx, and Oswald Spengler (all of which
we will eventually cover.) Isaiah Berlin acknowledged his genius, but consigned
him to the “Counter-Enlightenment” which he thought had eventually spawned the
darkest disasters of the twentieth century. In his own time he was unknown,
either for good or for evil – an obscure and menial academic in backwards and
isolated Naples, who had to provide for a large family on a very meagre salary,
and who could find only fragments of time to work on his masterpiece. He was,
indeed, so poor that he had to pawn his wedding ring to publish his work, and
even then only after he had excised many portions (now lost) in order to bring
down the cost of printing it. In light of these handicaps, his achievement and
influence is all the more remarkable.
Part of a series on the Enlightenment
Part of a series on Philosophy of History (XI of XXXV)
Additional Note: This
article is largely based on Isaiah Berlin's discussion of Vico in
"Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder." Although
Berlin is hostile to Vico, as near as I can tell from cross-checking
with other authors, he describes Vico's ideas faithfully. In that essay
the following particularly lucid passages appear:
[Vico
says] ]“Men embody their feelings, attitudes and thoughts in symbols.
These symbols are natural means of self-expression; they are not forged
for the purpose of misleading or entertaining future generations.
Consequently they are dependable evidence
of the minds and outlooks of which they are the vehicles, if only we
knew how to read it. Language is not a deliberate invention on the part
of men who think thoughts, and then look around for means of
articulating them. Ideas and the symbols in which they are expressed are
not, even in thought, separable. We do not merely speak or write in
symbols, we think and can think only in symbols, whether words or
images, the two are one. From words and the way they are used we can
infer the mental processes, the attitudes, and outlooks of their users,
for “minds are formed by the character of language, not language by the
minds of those who speak it.”
"Primitive
men, Vico tells us, do not denote things each by its own natural name
(as Adam did before the flood) but by “physical substances endowed with
life” Fables and myths, or rather the characters who occur in them, are
“imaginative universals” – attempts
to refer to whole classes of entities without, as yet, the aid of
proper general terms (for the capacity for abstraction is not, at this
stage, sufficiently developed), and therefore by means of some
magnificently conceived example of the class (not yet clearly conceived
as a class) which stands both for itself and for the entire class. Thus
“Jove” is at one and the same time the name of the sky, the father of
the gods, and ruler of the universe, and of the source of thunder,
terror, and duty – he is both the embodiment and the wielder of all the
compulsive forces before which men must, at their peril, bow down.
“Hercules” is the name of a heroic individual, the performer of vast and
beneficent labors, but also of the class of all heroes of all the
various mythologies: hence every people worships its own Hercules. …
Such images may later come to seem logical monstrosities, yet Vico is
convinced that this is not mere confusion; these are categories in which
early men thought. He warns us that unless we make a gigantic effort to
enter into this type of mentality, we shall never penetrate into the
remote world of our ancestors, which alone holds the key to our own."
