Chance, Variability, and Design in Eighteenth Century Historiography
By
Rodrigo Fernos
A new science emerges where new problems are
pursued by new methods and truths are thereby
discovered which open up significant new points of view.
-Max Weber
“Does anyone read Vico?” questioned Isaiah Berlin in
an essay that tried to make the ideas of Giambattista Vico more
accessible to the public. It is indeed strange that many
whom he preceded or shared philosophical similarities—Montesquieu,
Niebuhr, and even Herder—generally dismissed Vico after they had
received copies of his work. Twentieth century authors, who try
to extend Vico’s ideas of history into other realms of interpretation
such as literary theory, also fail to refer to the original, preferring
instead to rely mainly on synthetic studies as Pompa’s Study of the New
Science. The universal point of commonality between all analysts
of Vico is the incoherent unreadability of his magnum opus, the New
Science. It is in fact far more interesting to read what is
written about Vico, than Vico’s own work. The poor organization,
the repeatedly self-referential style, and the questionable
etymological grounds of his conclusions make the work rather
problematic and help explain its poor impact. Vico himself was
aware of the book’s limitations and influence, reading in his own
lifetime the same criticisms that would posthumously be made.
Modern intellectuals read Vico for what he suggests, rather than for
what he actually claims to have proven.
We should not, however, feel too sorry for Juan
Batista Vico. Upon the reacquisition of Naples by the Spanish
Empire, lost as a result of the tug-of-war between Austrian and French
houses during the War of Spanish Succession, Vico was made Royal
Historian in 1735. This new position more than doubled his
official salary of 135 to 235 ducats, low for the era but still an
improvement for a family of 8 children. Vico earned additional
income from lectures at funerals and marriages, two of three
institutions he believed were universal across all
societies. More importantly Vico, in comparison to Pietro
Gianonne, was never persecuted or prosecuted for his ideas by the
Inquisition. Gianonne’s Historia civil del regno di Napoli (1723)
and his Il triregno (1731) led to that Neapolitan author’s arrest in
the same year as Vico’s promotion. In the last work, Gianonne had made
a similar argument to Vico’s, but of an even more radical nature.
While Vico had argued that pagan history had to be understood in terms
of its own socio-temporal context, Gianonne had gone even further in
applying Spinozan biblical criticism to Catholic mythology
itself. That the Bible should be conceived as a human document
situated in a particular social setting was too much for some
authorities. Gianonne was deceptively lured into Turin where he
would spend the next 13 years of his life imprisoned, dying in his cell
in 1748.
Vico made sure he would not suffer the same fate.
Throughout his work Vico is vociferously Catholic, another point
universally observed. His constant allusions to the Catholic
faith formally and firmly state his anti-enlightenment allegiance;
“apart from God they [all things] are all darkness and error.” Vico
dedicated the work to Cardinal Nerdi Corsini, who eventually became
Pope Clement XII. Corsini sent a letter to Vico guaranteeing the
book’s Catholic sanction, which must have been of some relief to the
author. Perhaps more importantly, not only does Vico attack
Grotius and Pufendorf for denying the role of providence in their
analysis of history, but he assigns “divine providence” the central
role in his historical scheme. Vico also divides history into two
basic types: Catholic (Hebrew) and pagan (Greek/Roman), thereby
creating a historiographical philosophy that at first appears
counterintuitive and contradictory. While one set of
historiographical dynamics was applied to one history, the other was
guided by a different set. Vico’s ideas of historical causation
were meant only for the latter.
Some authors, while acknowledging Vico’s sincere devotion and religious
belief, claim that his formal recognition of Catholic authority was
solely due to the fear of persecution, as revealed by cases such as
Gianonne’s. Fear of the Inquisition’s impact lead many to publish
underground manuscripts that circulated but were never officially
released to the public. Yet it has also been noted that this
Roman Catholic institution was not particularly active during this
period, nor as severe as its Spanish counterpart; very few writers were
actually prosecuted in Naples. Guiseppe Valleta’s library, a
venue of contact to many free-thinkers of Naples, was never
confiscated. The conflict between the Holy Pontificate in Rome
and the city of Naples had severely weakened the Church, particularly
during Austrian rule of the city. The Roman Church, traditionally
exempt from taxes, had been forced to a limited use of arms upon
greater assertion of authority by Joseph I, the Austrian
monarch. The period of Vico’s most active intellectual activity,
1707-1735, was hence one of relatively poor intrusion by the
Inquisition into Neapolitan affairs. Vico’s genuine religiosity
must be taken at face value.
Regardless of what the social atmosphere in which
his ideas can be contextualized, there were necessary philosophical
reasons for these apparently contradictory and arbitrary
distinctions. The same philosophical problem that would affect
the acceptance of Darwinism two centuries later—the problem of
design—was a problem central to Vico’s New Science. Order
could not be conceived as a self-generative activity during this period
of Western intellectual history. An incoherent mass could not,
out of its own volition, acquire shape and form unless guided by divine
providence; shape and form had to be imposed from the outside just as a
craftsman imposed structure on a piece of wood. This belief was
held to be true for individual biological entities as for aggregate
social structures. Hebrew history naturally fit into
this prevailing paradigm. Jewish social institutions and codices, from
which Catholic institutions and codices emerged, had been
directly dictated by God in the Bible (Ten Commandments), and
thereby rendered an implicit internal order by an external force at its
beginning.
The problem which Vico and many of his contemporaries, including
Gianonne, faced was accounting for the sophistication of Greek and
Roman institutions created without the divine light of
Christianity. In proposing an internal mechanism that had
originally been conceived by God (“divine providence”) into Greek and
Roman history, Vico was able to account for what was then a predominant
historical anomaly of his era. In other words, by postulating divine
providence and the consequent mechanism set in place by It at the very
beginning of the historical process, Vico was able to account for what
today we would refer to as its emergent properties. The first
humans were giant brutes who eventually became “Greeks” as a result of
cultural changes or “modifications of men’s minds”. The ability
to socially “evolve”, according to Vico, had been built into the human
legal-linguistic social system, whereupon God had given man the ability
to ‘make himself’ within pagan history. Upon resolving this
historical anomaly, Vico created a ‘new science’, if we accept Thomas
Kuhn’s definition of a scientific revolution.
Other scholars believe that Vico’s originality lies
elsewhere. Prior to his New Science, the notion that
societies developed out of preceding epochs had not been cogently
argued or explicitly stated, despite the fact that particularities
unique to other historical periods had been widely recognized, such as
Lorenzo Valla’s observed anachronisms of Constantine’s
Donation. What seemed like a natural ‘logical step’ in
historiography took centuries to make. Vico, as Herder and Kant a
few decades later, hence broadened Western conceptions about the depth
of time; his initial obscurity entails him as the ‘Mendel’ of
history. If we accept the notion that his originality is based
mainly for his introduction of the concept and mechanism of
social evolution, then Ibn Khaldûn, whose book The Muqaddimah
(1377) similarly described the evolution of societies, could be
characterized as an even earlier precursor. Khaldûn was as
ignored by his contemporaries and future generations as Vico had been
nearly four centuries later.
Vico’s apparent religious conservatism and textual
incoherence, however, have made him an extremely difficult figure to
categorize; historians, like many other intellectuals, like to pigeon
hole. Some, as Benedetto Croce, have proclaimed him a Hegelian,
religious conservatives have adopted him as one of their own, while
Leon Pompa, at the opposite extreme , classifies Vico in a group akin
to enlightenment thinkers. As Berlin repeatedly mentioned, it is
far easier to misread Vico than to characterize the complexities of his
ideas. By far the most sophisticated and nuanced studies of Vico
are those who do not claim him to one side, but rather those which
describe the interaction of both elements in his conceptual
construct. We may place Joseph Mali’s study in this category.
Curiously, the predominant characterization of Vico today is that as
a Romantic / anti-Enlightenment thinker, or simply as a forerunner of
historicism—a claim that was suggested but not actually made by
Berlin. In contrast to French intellectuals of the era, Vico was
deeply opposed to the idea that there was some intrinsic human nature
hiding within history; he did not believe cultures could be surveyed to
eliminate the many veils under which a universal human nature was
hidden, as Voltaire had done in his study of the customs of
nations. For Vico, humanity was an entity in eternal
formation, constantly being shaped and influenced by its own cultural
creations, to such a degree that historical periods were nearly
incommensurable to one another. Only through an intensive
application of a disciplined imagination could moderns come to
understand the primitive mentality of early humans.
Given these uncertainties and disparate points of
view, it might be asked, “to what extent did Vico’s ideas in fact
constitute a “new science?” There appears to be no agreement
between contemporary vichian scholars. Half of those
surveyed answered positively, while the other half negatively.
There is no current consensus on the meaning of Vico.
*****
That Vico sent a copy of his book to Isaac Newton is
perhaps an indication of how predominant Newton’s paradigm of his
Principia (1687) had become, as well as how greatly it had influenced
Vico. The Neapolitan author proclaimed to be establishing a new science
in the title, suggesting a clear reference to the unquestionably new
science of Newton; the persistent use of the term “principles”
throughout the work are also suggestive an intended position. We
may also note parallels between the organization of both books.
Vico, as Newton, begins the essay with a series of assumptions— “axioms
” for Newton, “elements” for Vico—which both men further explore
and apply in the rest of their respective treatises. A comparison
to the images of both works is also suggestive of the an influence
which was never explicitly acknowledged by Vico. The basic visual
elements of the front piece of the Principia’s second edition (1713)
are grossly exaggerated in the front piece of the Sciencia Nuova’s
third edition (1744): altar, cup, sunrays, winged female, light of god,
etc. Vico purportedly introduced these elements at the last
moment in 1730 to provide the reader a mental image of his
argument. Newton never answered Vico’s letter.
Certainly, Vico was not in a position to take
advantage of the new science. Unlike his friend Paolo Mattia
Doria, who dedicated himself to the study of geometry over a number of
years so as to better understand the new philosophy, Vico never seems
to have attempted to master the natural sciences, possibly due to the
strongly scholastic character of his personal education. While
respecting the achievements of Galileo as a valuable Italian
contribution to the world of learning, Vico did not understood the
genuine meaning and significance of Galileo’s work. Perhaps of
greater significance was Vico’s inability to understand the application
of the new science to the human realm. Condorcet, D’Alembert, and
other Enlightenment thinkers quantified the study of man by
creating social statistics and economics. In spite of the
contingent nature of history and the role played by chance in daily
human affairs, they discovered a persistent continuity and hidden order
by their quantitative methods. Vico clearly would have
appreciated this science, had he understood it, given that he was so
deeply opposed to the Stoic doctrine of fate, which he contrasted to
the equally despicable doctrine of chance by the Epicureans . Men
were not entirely determined nor absolutely free.
Although Vico could not understand the mathematical
principles of Newton’s science, at a deeper philosophical level he made
an attempt to apply its principles to the study of society. While
disagreeing with its central epistemological position which essentially
reduced the universe only to a set of quantifiable particles in motion,
thereby eliminating all of those secondary qualities that form
the basis of history, Vico applied Newton’s basic ideas to the study of
society. The galaxy of human society was the resultant by-product
of the activity of autonomous human actors, akin to Newton’s universe
as the result of autonomous particles. Society acquired its
own unique character by the interactions of individuals upon each
other, each entirely ignorant of the ultimate result of their own
activity in much the same manner as Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” or
Hegel’s “cunning of reason.” Vico’s ‘gravitational’ laws of
society, if we may refer to them as such, emerged independently of what
each entity sought to do or intended. In seeking their own
egoistic self interest, early humans for Vico created a set of
overlapping social institutions which continually expanded the sphere
of interest beyond the individual to ever broadening realms: family,
tribe, nation, etc. These social “dynamics” explained how Rome
developed to a republic via the egoistic actions of its nobles whose
initial intention was only to keep their servants in perpetual
bondage. As in the Newtonian scheme, God the ‘watchmaker’
had built society to run its own course, a mechanism that would run
without the need for direct divine intervention once initiated.
Yet the similarities reach even further into the
core and structure of both men’s arguments. One must stand back
far enough from the details of both arguments to see the similarity of
their general contour, as others have in their study of Marx and Darwin.
In his Principia, Newton develops the proofs of the universal law of
gravitation to then apply this form of the inverse square law to
numerous physical phenomena: tides, comets, falling bodies, the shape
of the earth, Jupiter’s perturbations on Saturn, etc. Newton’s
brilliance arises from the vast explanatory nature of his theory, which
accounted for entities which had previously stood conceptually
separated. While Newton did not inductively arrive at his theory
from the events explained in the third section of his book, it can
nonetheless be said that the study of these events produced a ‘positive
feedback loop’ which fed into the theory. Robert Hooke’s
erroneous claim to have solved the problem of the path of a falling
body, ultimately stimulated to the elaboration and development of
Newton’s own ideas. Two main traits of the structure
Newton’s Principia are thus the deductive nature of his law, and its
wide application to a number of events.
Vico’s science similarly can also be characterized as being the result
of a “positive feedback loop” between theory and data in which a
‘universal law’ is formed and then applied to particular and apparently
contingent case studies. Although praising Baconian science, Vico
did not arrive at his eternal-ideal-history law from an inductivist
study of historical data. As Pompa notes, to have done so
would have been to have fallen into the Cartesian criticism pertaining
to the problematic nature of historical data and documents; any
generalizations drawn from these would have immediately invalidated
their claims to universality. Vico, instead, arrives a the
‘eternal-ideal-history’ law deductively, as Newton, and then applies it
to particular historical cases, such as the interaction between Roman
language, religious beliefs, and social structures. Comparing the
way history actually occurred with the manner in which it “needed” to
occur (ideal-eternal-history) provides Vico with the intellectual tools
necessary to give social coherence to pagan myths regardless of their
infinite variations. The gamut of Olympian deities, akin to the
gamut of natural phenomena, is hence accounted for by Vico.
Achilles, Hercules, Jupiter, Apollo, and other deities are not men but
rather symbols, archetypes, of a particular mentality and
culture. Vico unites universal philosophy with contingent
history, thereby providing the legitimate grounds for his claim of a
‘new science’. While maintaining its contingent nature, history
is given its universal (spatial) and eternal (temporal) character
which, according to Vico, defines a science.
When describing his own work, Vico himself portrayed his
efforts in this manner.
Equipped with these and other less important discoveries, of which he
[Vico] makes a great number, he [Vico] proceeds to discuss the natural
law of the peoples and shows at what certain times and in what
determinate ways the customs were born that constitute the entire
economy of the law.
The odd and peculiar nature in which the axioms at the beginning of
the New Science are tied to the data Vico proclaims to ‘explain’
validates this point. Vico never argues that he draws the axioms
from the historical instances he claims to be explaining from them,
despite the high probability that the reverse was likely the
case. Vico had to have invented them from some body of data,
regardless of whether he acknowledges the creative process. As
his central front piece purportedly demonstrated, the light of
universal metaphysics (winged goddess) in his work (axioms of the New
Science) “shined” to illustrate the true nature of historical cases
(Homer).
Ironically, Vico’s most profound affinities to enlightenment thinkers
are revealed when contrasted to his strongest enlightenment “opponent”,
Rene Descartes. Certainly, their many differences cannot be
denied. Descartes postulated there were no historical truths per
se. History was characterized by too many uncertainties for its
practitioners to ever claim to for it the status of a science, in
contrast to his own trigonometric algebra or physics. If it was
difficult to know the truth that was daily experienced, (cogito ergo
sum), then the uncertainties of historical records introduced an even
greater amount of uncertainty and ambiguity. Descartes thereby
drives the position of history and the social sciences to the lowest
rungs of the academic hierarchy, a status which even today have been
difficult for them to recover. Some humanists and philosophers
today still believe this is a valid argument, and make efforts to
defend their turf.
Although Vico’s early writings do reveal an agreement with the basic
tenets of the Cartesian system, by 1708-9 his anti-Cartesian position
had emerged in his Wisdom of the Ancients. Vico overturns
Descartes by developing a new philosophy of knowledge: the verum-factum
principle. The foundation of human knowledge was based on homo
farber, or man the maker. Geometry and other areas of mathematics
were sciences only because they were made by men. Since man could
construct all of the elements of a system in his mind, he therefore
knew how its different parts were arranged. This internal
awareness of its “mechanism” was hence the source of man’s true
knowledge of mathematics (geometry). By contrast, only God could
know the world of physical nature because He, akin to the human
geometer, had constructed all of the parts that composed nature in his
‘mind’; the physical world was merely an extension of God himself, res
extensa. While men could come to some understanding of nature via
experimentation which replicated God’s “construction” of the world,
they could not really “know” as they knew geometry because the
different parts of nature existed outside of man. Man’s knowledge
of nature could only be proximate; the Cartesian cogito for Vico was
not sapientia but rather merely self awareness (consciousness).
In his later writings Vico further developed the verum factum principle
by applying it to society. Since societies were constructed by
men, they were hence knowable to “historians.” As human
language evolved, this led to a stimulus for the creation of new
institutions in an ascending cycle, which ultimately reached an apex
only to come crashing down as man discovered reason and began to exist
‘outside of history’. Vico, in contrast to Enlightenment
thinkers, did not believe that reason would lead to a better social
order, but would rather lead to social anarchy, the last phase of his
tripartite social cycle. Society was held together only by a very
thin and delicate line, tradition; excessive reasoned questioning of
its claims would hence undermine the foundations of social order.
He is less different to Rousseau than he is to Condorcet.
It is important to point out that Vico did not believe that men could
know the past because he could somehow enter the conscience of
primitive men. Men are not their own creators. There is a
history which precedes individuals (parents) and which shapes their
consciousness during their childhood years, and hence true
self-knowledge was impossible as a result. Similarly, the manner
in which knowledge of the past was a possibility for Vico was not
directly by an empathic cogito of the past but rather by an analysis of
the creation of men’s minds, particularly their linguistic and legal
structures.
Another aspect of Vico’s originality stems from his attacking the
requisite of a pre-ordained order at the beginning of history to
account for the world to be as it was. Previous historians and
philosophers could only account for existing social structures on the
claim that the earliest humans had been perfect; modern institutions
had been present from the very beginnings of human history. The
perfection of early humans was so deeply held that Renaissance scholars
claimed human civilization had “decayed” to its current state.
The same bias, that a preordained order was necessary to account for
the current structure of the world, would also influence the
development of modern biology in the nineteenth century. It was
believed, for example, that a woman’s egg contained all of the future
embryos (humans) that would emerge from it, leading to the more easily
detectable logical problem of infinite regression, reductio ad
absurdum. By rather forcefully arguing that primitive societies
consisted of brutes, rather than of enlightened despots, Vico
struck at the foundations of the existing historical paradigm.
Man literally constructed himself through his figurative use of
language. The influence of Francis Bacon’s Renaissance position
is clear. Bacon argued that “modern man” had in fact moved beyond
the ne plus ultra of Greek thinkers, a fact proven by inventions such
as the compass and the printing press.
It is perhaps even more important to point out that, upon presuming the
existence of God (divine providence) and seeking out the autonomous or
self-acting laws (“principles”) by which God had designed history via
the will of man, Vico is also following Newton’s footsteps. Vico
may have rejected a universal human nature, but he presumed the
existence of a universal set of laws “out there” that guided all
societies, independent of human volition and the contingent
aspects of human life. Newton similarly did not presume to know
the “nature” of gravity (hypotesis non fingo) despite describing the
laws which regulated its behavior across the entire universe.
These laws were not determined by the particular chemical
characteristics of moving objects, very different to the basis of
Aristotelian physics.
Regardless of whether one accepts the argument that Vico attempted to
be the Newton of the social sciences in his New Science, one cannot
help but observe the predominant influence of other British thinkers
upon him. John Selden, John Locke, Thomas Hayne, Thomas Harriot
(United States), Francis Bacon and other British intellectual are
mentioned throughout Vico’s work. Vico read widely or was
informed of new work by his ample reading and the influential literary
review, the Giornale. Naples, at the time the third largest city
in Europe next to London, was also a thriving cosmopolitan
center. Some of Vico’s friends made it a point to travel to
London and become acquainted with its intellectual elite, as Abe
Conti. The numerous academies to which Vico belonged, akin to the
Royal Society of London in operating outside the realm of
traditional academia, is another clue to Anglo-Saxon influence.
Selden is of particular importance because many of Vico’s key concepts
seem to have been directly borrowed from his seventeenth century
essays, such as On the Law of Nature and Nations or the History of
Tithes. Selden’s point of contention, as Vico’s, was that
social institutions had to be understood within the particularities of
their historical context. For this very reason, his work was
perceived as an attack on ecclesiastical institutions by implicitly
denying their immanent and eternal nature—an attack Selden denied but
whose example helps account for the particularity of Vico’s binary
historical categories (pagan versus Jewish history) and his overbearing
Christian concern. In dividing history in two, Vico avoids
Selden’s (and Gianonne’s) dilemma in that he could still propose
radical ideas while shielding himself from Inquisitorial prosecution as
these would have no theological implications on the Church’s social
functions, legitimacy, or origins. The role of a historical
treatise, in light of the problem of institutional legitimacy of the
eighteen century, was inherently a negative one.
One should point out, however, that the relation between the Church and
historical treaties, just as that between the Enlightenment and
Romantic movements, was not as clear-cut as one might imagine.
Amos Funkenstein observed that the principle of accommodation had
widely influenced the manner in which the Bible was interpreted in the
proceeding medieval period, and allowed for a wide degree of
interpretative space. Ibn Ezra, St. Augustine, Mamonides,
and Walahfrid Strabo had all used this principle to allow for a certain
‘bending’ of the tree of biblical truth in light of changing human
conditions, clearly setting the context to Vico’s ideas. God had
not written the Bible in a literal manner, but had rather used a
particular language so that man in his primitive condition could
understand its lessons. After all, if the complexity of God’s
message surpassed man’s capability of comprehension, this message would
have been of little impact. Biblical truths were thusly
characterized by an internal core, prevalent across all biblical
lessons, and an ambiguous zone or “penumbra” which was modifiable
according to the shifting conditions of human societies. The
diversity of Christian liturgical practices and sacrifices across the
Catholic realm were not to be understood as a sign of God’s
inconsistency, lack of credibility or legitimacy. The medieval
principle of accommodation helped pave the way for much Vico’s work,
despite the limitations of his line of inquiry outside of Catholic
(Jewish) history.
*****
Where did Vico’s ideas come from; what sources of information does he
rely on? As previously mentioned, Vico was certainly well read;
the range of scholars and pagan literature cited in the New Science
span across the entire European landscape, influences typically studied
by erudite intellectual historians. Yet thinkers do not live by
words alone, and are perhaps more affected by the incidents of life,
which drive them to read so that they may understand these incidents in
the first place. It is hence surprising that one of the most
highly-mentioned features of his personal life, his children, have been
completely neglected in Vichian studies—surprising because they visibly
shaped his ideas of the mentality of primitive man: the poetic form of
life.
Vico, as usual, might have done much to draw the reader away from this
line of inquiry. He constantly complained in his Autobiography
that his children were an obstacle to his work; he had to concentrate
amidst the distractions of routine chores and unexpected
visitors. The Marquis of Villarosa, who in 1818 described the
final events of Vico’s life in the same work, noted that Vico’s wife,
Teresa Caterina Destito, was of a poor disposition and did not comply
with the accepted female roles of the era, particularly that of a
motherly and homely caretaker. Vico appears to have consequently
been forced to take a more predominant role in domestic life than he
would have otherwise desired.
While Vico’s own complaints could be used to characterize him as
a man who “succeeded” despite of it all, a characterization promoted in
his own propaganda of himself as a martyr to science, these
descriptions clearly reveal the close interaction on a daily basis
between a father and his eight children. Despite explicit
claims to the contrary, it was clear that he cared for his children
very much. Towards the end of his life he sought to assure the
inheritance of his Chair in Rhetoric to his son, Gennaro. Vico
also had a long history of ‘parenting’. One of Vico’s first jobs
was as a tutor to Rocca’s children in Vatolla, the only time he moved
away from his native city. As Jean Piaget, he learned much from
the events constantly before him: his children’s maturation into
adults. Infant ontogeny recapitulated social phylogeny in Vico’s
mind.
His characterization of the rise of man from barbarity closely
resembled the growth of an infant. The language of early modern
humans was monosyllabic, “sun”, “moon”, akin to a baby’s first words,
“da-da”, “ma-ma” (repeated monosyllables). This language was
written in the visual form of hieroglyphics, as if simplistically
finger-painted by a child to describe the most basic visual cues of
physical forms. The mind of early man was shaped entirely by his
senses, in contrast to the abstraction of ‘mature’ civilizations which
gave him a certain amount of detachment from daily concerns.
Man’s early ignorance of the world forced him to understand the world
entirely in human terms, or what known as anthropomorphism. For
Vico, this was the first step in the long ladder of scientific
knowledge; children (societies) grew to men (civilized) by projecting
themselves on the natural world. Thunder and lightning, a common
worldly phenomenon, was the way in which God spoke to men, and hence
viewed as one of the “words” of the language of God. As men
progressed, language became more complex and sophisticated, acquiring a
more polysyllabic and abstract-symbolic character. As men
acquired more knowledge of nature, they began to distinguish between
themselves and the external world; the social body gradually became
differentiated from surrounding objects of nature. Vico’s
description of social development reads much like a textbook of child
developmental psychology.
In contrast to Enlightenment thinkers and many other intellectuals of
his century, Vico took also myths to represent valid information as to
the mental states of man. Enlightenment thinkers were too ‘adult’
in that they sought too quickly to arrive at ‘reality’, hence failing
to develop a sensitivity for the unique traits of historical
epochs. Vico’s position and analysis of myth, undeveloped for
centuries, constitutes one of the most original aspects of his
work. Joseph Mali, who has given the most thorough effort to the
analysis of Vico’s “rehabilitation of myth,” accounts for this trait
principally within the intellectual context rather than psychological
predispositions, as most other students of Vico. Edward Gibbon, the
great Roman historian, believed that myths to be too slippery for
rigorous analysis, and rejected this tool for social analysis. In
contrast, for Vico the indigenous Aztec myths and their consequent
sacrificial rituals, horrific as they were to Western eyes, revealed
the profound impact of myth in forming social structures and shaping
men’s behaviors and lifetime goals. Myths had to be taken as an
integral part of men’s lives, as “real”, an attitude developed by
Joseph Campbell in our era.
It is likely that only a father with as much parental experience as
Vico would be so inclined to accept the internal components of this
imaginary world and try to firmly contextualize them within its
existing reality; it is a process which closely resembles a parent’s
effort to understand the internal psychical imaginary world of their
children. While an adult may have learned to recognize the
imaginary from the real, the lack of experience inherent to a child
will make this imaginary world as real as the external world, akin to
primitive man’s understanding of lighting as Jupiter. As Vico
describes of primitive society, imagination constitutes reality; the
mental state is based entirely on sensory data, an idea curiously
similar to David Hume and John Locke. For a child, a poster of a
shark will be as real as the shark itself; the man turned werewolf in a
movie will be as real as the policeman who regulates daily traffic;
fake Monopoly money will be of greater value than a $1,000 bill. Only
by understanding the origins and distortions of this mental reality can
the adult bridge the inherent “communication” (cognitive) gap between
the two different generations; naturally, it is only the parent and not
the child who can make this jump. (It is far easier to step
“down” to a previous mental state than it is to “step up”, a process
that requires years of socialization and experience, akin to
thermodynamic energy flows.) It seems that Vico was alluding to
this process when using the term “modification of men’s minds”—an
ambiguous term Vico fails to explicitly defines.
*****
Vico’s study of language and word forms, etymology,
is perhaps one of the most frustrating elements of his New Science, and
the one that is most rejected by modern scholars. We may portray
Vico as an archeologist who “dug” into the depths of time by studying
the basic structure of language; common ‘vulgar’ terms were also not to
be dismissed as evidence for patterns of previous mental states.
Certainly etymological evidence was not the only basis of his study,
partly because he had been encouraged to expand the use of available
evidence to reach viable conclusions by contemporaries who had read the
work. During this time other historians as Francesco Bianchini
were using visual imagery and material artifacts (coins) to study
Italian culture and determine if it was of Egyptian, Greek, or Etruscan
origins. While Vico’s use of the term “philology” expanded beyond
that of merely linguistic studies to include all forms of human
expression such as legal codes, etymology per se remained an integral
part of Vico’s analysis.
Certainly, there are profound differences between the actual practice
of archeology and Vico’s etymological excavations. While true
archeological sites contain corroborative evidence, such as pollen
samples, that can be used to determine the time stamp, age, and origins
of the artifacts therein found, linguistic ‘sites’ (word structures) do
not have such corroborative remnants beside them. A second
crucial difference is that most archeological sites typically remain
buried and protected for eons, while linguistic structures are in
constant use and modification. Gibbon certainly was correct
in his claim that evidence drawn from language is hard to generalize
and inherently “slippery” (unreliable). Incidentally, Vico took
actual fossils evidence, possibly Neanderthal fossils commonly found in
Europe at the time, to justify his claims for the existence of “giant”
brutes in the early history of societies.
Despite these problems, Vico’s linguistic analysis
is more suggestive (and frustrating) than it might appear precisely
because linguistic evidence can be used to gather important historical
clues that lead to valuable insights into the past. Again, the
presence of variability is of crucial importance to such techniques.
Language, as Thomas Jefferson realized, changes very
gradually and slowly. A person in their lifetime might perceive a
few changes in the language they learned as a child, but within this
timeframe their mother tongue will remain essentially stable.
Were it otherwise, human communication between two different
generations would not be possible due to the intrinsic linguistic
differences between each. Slow-occurring etymological
modifications can hence be used as a temporal gauge to determine
the dates of events. Once linguistic rates of change are
calculated, an analysis of similarities and/or differences between
languages can be used to determine their common ancestry—in exactly the
same manner as geneticists use genetic differences between animals to
determine their relative positions in the evolutionary tree.
(History, in this sense, can borrow biological” methodologies” to
enrich its own techniques and uncover hidden truths from the
past.) Jefferson used this technique in his Notes on the State of
Virginia to determine the temporal origins of Native Americans in the
United States and refute the claims made by the Comte de Buffon as to
the inferior traits of North American natural history. Jefferson
found that the common linguistic differences were so great, and
hence Native-American tribes shared a common ancestry that was deeply
situated in historical time. “Indians” must have been present on
the continent many thousands of years ago. As Vico perceived,
variability in linguistic structures can be used to provide historical
evidence, but not in the manner Vico suggested—a methodological flaw
possibly due to Vico’s lack of an early mathematical education.
*****
To what extent may one claim that Vico created a
“new science”? A key criteria of a science is whether newly
created research paradigms are adopted and developed by others, as
suggested by Weber. While Nicolas Copernicus created a scientific
research paradigm, Leonardo da Vinci did not. Vico’s New Science
was, ultimately, a failed effort . Although certainly a highly
original thinker who was conscious of new ideas in his own writings, as
had Ibn Khadlun, his inability to clearly express himself led to his
own demise—an auto-destructive tendency which cannot be explained away
by falsely alleging that the writing of his era was equally incoherent
and obscure. Many years prior to the formal publication of the
New Science, Vico had distributed a manuscript with the same core
ideas, which also had been highly criticized for its illegible
content. His near contemporaries as Voltaire or his predecessors
as Josephus wrote clearly, eloquently, and in an organized
fashion. Vico was simply his own worst enemy.
Nonetheless, we may state that he grappled with the
most perplexing questions of his era, pertaining at once to the issues
of chance, variability, and design in human societies. Vico
rejected the presumption of design at the earliest stages of history,
and instead postulated a (Godly-ordained) evolutive mechanism in its
place whereby societies attained their present orderly structure,
perhaps the most original element of Vico’s work. In this sense he laid
the groundwork to the idea that societies “evolved”, and in the process
confronted many of the same philosophical obstacles afflicting
the emergence of a concept such as biological evolution. He never
abandoned faith in the idea that the most commonly observed human
creations, language, could provide evidence of man’s early
history. For this reason, he sits next to Lyell and Darwin in
their shared belief that common processes found in the living present
were universal historical forces; by understanding these, man could
peer into the deepest recesses of his past and explain the contours of
history. As Darwin’s finches and Lyell’s earthquakes, Vico’s
children provided his most direct and substantial source of
information of the mind of early man. Vico may have drawn
from Newton, but he paralleled a Darwin who was his junior by
over a century.
We may rightly perceive Vico’s treatise, however, as the last effort s
by a frustrated man who had not achieved his most sought-after-goal:
obtaining a recognized juridical professorship that would allow him to
meet the economic needs of his family. It was a competition which had
been predetermined beforehand, and no amount of genius or hard work
would have affected its outcome. Despite this academic failure,
so many years of study and preparation could not be let fall by the
wayside into the empty abyss of time. Upon publication, Vico had
faith that his enterprise would someday be understood by more
enlightened men than his contemporaries. After all, he was
swimming against the tide of a genuine new science (Newtonian physics),
which still was in great need of further development and care.
While it might be pointed out that the intellectual community of Naples
knew Vico was onto something; they just didn’t know what it was.
In a broader sense, may explain Vico’s anachronism by Vico’s own
theories in noting that he went against the “common sense” or
weltanschauung of his era. Science was yet too fragile, and
men still needed to coalesce their efforts to create what we now take
for granted—the modern world. After this process was firmly in
pace by the nineteenth century, academics would be able to turn back
and try to use Vico to account for the changes which the “mind of
society”(cunning of reason, invisible hand) had wrought on
itself. The drastic social differences of industrialized
societies, when compared to “primitive” ones, had become too great to
be ignored. Unfortunately, new techniques, which Vico could not
master due to his mathematical limitations, would by then render his
own scholastic methods and form of writing obsolete. As the
remnant skeleton lying on the floor, whose extended arm and pointing
hand showed the way out of the deep geological recesses of Earth in the
movie “Journey to the Center of the Earth “(1959 ), we may view Vico’s
work as a heroic but premature effort in dealing with the
universal themes of the human condition. It pointed a way to the
basis of genuine historical analysis but did not succeed in actually
arriving there. Social changes will always supercede human
evolution because man is ultimately a creature of culture and
invention; the rate of change in the former proceeds at a pace far
above the latter. It was to these cultural processes that Vico’s
pen pointed to in his New Science; only through these can we explain
the variable aspects of societies and human nature.
ENDNOTES
1 Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, Henry Hardyed. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000), 112-118.
2 Nathan Roenstreich, "Convertibility and Alienation" in Substance and Form in History: ACollection of Essays in Philosophy of History, ed., L. Pompa and W. H. Dray (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1981), pp. 77-88; John D. Schaeffer, "The Use and Misuse of GiambattistaVico: Rhetoric, Orality, and the Theories of Discourse," in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Vesser (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 89-101; Leon Pompa, Vico: A Study of the ‘New Science’(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
3 Giambattista Vico, New Science: Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Natureof Nations, 3rd Ed.transl. David Marsh (New York: Penguin Books, 2001).
4 For examples of his self-referential style, and claims to have proven a point yet to be provenplease refer to New Science., 139, 155, 148, 150, 155, 162, 164, 182, 186, 190, 204, 219, 222, 236. His use of Josephus’s history, such a well organized history, make the unreadability hard toaccount for. Some have argued that texts at the time did not have the coherence and ‘readability’ that they have nowdays. While this might have been true of medieval texts which tied one factafter another, by the 18th century this had long ceased to be the case. Flavius Josephus, The Jewish War. (New York: Penguin Books, 1984.) Pompa in his work, acknowledging theseweaknesses, seems forced to make an argument for the deductive nature of Vico’s ideas, rather than their inductive character as Vico himself claimed. Pompa, Vico., chpt. 10
5 From the very beginning, when Vico distributed a manuscript of his early ideas, these were criticized as incoherent, a critique that would remain through the three editions of the work(1725,1730, 1744). Vico seems to have engaged in a propaganda process of acknowledging and correcting its errors. But he notes that the most significant revision of 1730 was written in greathaste, due to medical and financial problems. Vico portrays the reception of the work in a positive light in his Autobiography, showing for example that these were quickly sold out and the bookentailed a high price. However, one cannot help but note the defensive tone of his characterizations. The last edition was published the year of his death at the elderly age of 78.During the last years of his life, Vico appears to have suffered from senile dementia or Alzheimer’s; he had difficulty in recognizing his children and would sit all day long blankedly staring at the wall.Giambattista Vico, The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico. Transl. Max Harold Tisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1944), 174-180.
6 Spanish name used by Charles Bourbon in his letters to Vico.
7 Highest was 600 ducats. Autobiography, 204; Voltaire, The Age of Louis XIV, transl. Martyn P.Pollack, ed. Ernest Rhys (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1935), passim.
8 Third institution was religion.
9 Harold Samuel Stone, Vico’s Cultural History: The Production and Transmission of Ideas in Naples, 1685-1750 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1997), chpts 10.12.13.
10 Autobiography., pp. 156, 197-9.
11 New Science, Book 1, Section 1.
12 Croce goes so far as to account for Vico’s incoherent writing style on these grounds.
13 It was, however, despite eventually sold; Vico was even hired to establish its fair market price.
14 Stone, chpts. 1, 6, 7; Volatire, pp. 215-219.
15 Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (New York: Harper Touchbooks, 1965), chpts 5-6.
16 Stone, passim.
17 Vico’s God in this sense was very much like the Isaac Newton’s deity-a clockmaker who set therules from the very beginning and let it operate on this foundation.
18 New Science, Book 2.
19 According to Thomas Kuhn, the solution of anomalies lead to scientific breakthroughs and revolutions, and in this sense, one may qualify Vico’s study as a “science”. Thomas S. Kuhn, TheStructure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed., (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1970), passim.
20 Toulmin, chpt 6.
21 Ibn Khaldûn, The Muqaddimah. ed., N.J. Dawood, transl. Franz Rosenhal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), passim; Heinrich Simon, Ibn Khaldun’s Science of HumanCulture. Transl. Fuad Baali (Lahore, Pakistan: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1978).
22 Joseph M. Levine, "Giambattista Vico and the Quarrel between the Ancients and theModerns" Journal of the History of Ideas 52,2 (Jan-March 1991): 55-80; Helen Liebel-Weckowicz, "Was Vico's Theory of History a True Social Science?" The Historian 44, 4 (1982):466-482; JosephMali, The Rehabilitation of Myth: Vico's New Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), passim.
23 this position is one which seems to have swung too much to one side. Vico had more affinities with enlightenment thinkers than many historians care to recognize or acknowledge. The purposeof this essay will describe such similarities in order to help bring the ideas of Vico closer to the ‘center’. Vico was as much an ‘enlightenment’ thinker as he was a ‘romantic’ thinker—aproposition difficult to accept due to apparent contradictory nature.
24 Berlin refers to Vico as a “counter-enlightenment” thinker, not an “anti-enlightenment” thinker,which was more appropriate to Herder and the German romantic movement.
25 His approach is perhaps in most congruent within the tenets of Darwinism. The epistemologicalbasis of modern historiography still firmly resides in the enlightenment presumptions.
26 Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.Transl. I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999).
27 Ibid., 45.
28 One should not assume, however, that Newton did not write back because he disagreed with Vico. It was more likely due to the fact that Vico’s letter was received a few months beforeNewton’s death. Abbe Conti had been friends to both intellectuals, and sought to put them in touch with one another; Conti had also sent a copy of Vico’s work to Montesquieu.
29 Autobiography, passim.
30 Stone, passim.
31 Thomas L. Hankins, Science and the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), chpt. 6.
32 Mali provides a good discussion of these points, chpt 2.
33 E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (Atlantic Highlands, NJ:Humanities Press, 1952), passim.
34 Mali, chpt 1.
35 Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination: from the middle ages to the seventeenth century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), chpt 4.
36 Pompa provides a nice summary of Vico’s ideas. Pompa, Vico., chpt 3.
37 New Science, passim.
38 it is somewhat surprising that this theme has not appear to have been thoroughly analyzed. If one may draw parallels between the principles of Marxism and Darwinism, one may also do sobetween both new sciences, Vico’s and Newton’s. Garland E. Allen, “Evolution and History: History as Science and Science as History,” in Matthew N. Nitecki, and Doris V. Nitecki, eds. History andEvolution (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), 212-240.
39 Richard Westfall, The Life of Isaac Newton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); I.Bernard Cohen, The Birth of a New Physics (New York: W. W. Norton Co., 1985).
40 Leon Pompa, “Vico’s Science,” History and Theory 10: section VIII.
41 New Science, passim.
42 New Science., Axiom 22, passim.
43 Autobiography, 171.
44 We may here note another similarity. British poets as Blake claimed that with Newton “all waslight”. Vico in the front piece might be attributing to himself this Newtonian poetic metaphor.
45 Morrison does an extraordinary job in showing their similarity. James C. Morrison, "Vico'sPrinciple of Verum is Factum and the Problem of Historicism." In Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 34, no. 4, Oct.-Dec., 1978: 579-95.
46 This point does not seem to have been understood by Virasoro. See Miguel Angel Virasoro, “Juan Bautista Vico y el problema del saber historico” in Vico y Herder: Ensayos conmemorativosdel segundo centenario de la muerte de Vico y del Nacimiento de Herder (Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1948), 37-90.
47 This is in spite of postulating the existence of divine providence at the beginning of pagan history.
48 Natural historians of the 19th century argued similarly that the actual order of the world and theperfection of biological structures (such as the eye) were proofs of a divine creator, particularly God.
49 Locke is not mentioned in the New Science, but it is known that Vico’s good friend,Benevenuto Donato, dedicated himself solely to the study of Locke. Through Donato, Vico learned many of his principal ideas. Helen Liebel-Weckowicz, "Was Vico's Theory ofHistory a True Social Science?" The Historian 44, 4 (1982):466-482. Similarly, we may note that David Hume might have influenced Vico in that he argues that all knowledge comes from thesenses. Primitive men’s minds lacked abstract reasoning, and was instead based entirely on sensory data. Mali, passim.
50 Although French authors are also noted, they did stimulate the book’s schema. German authors are also noted. However, Vico appears to have read most of these works only either by translation,or through mention in Italian journals such as the Giornale dei Letterati.
51 Stone., passim.
52 Each secondary source mentions the various Neapolitan societies to which Vico belonged, approximately four in total.
53 Attacks on an opponent’s institutions, ecclesiastical or parliamentary, was based on the presumption that eternally binding social contracts were the most secure; a “history” in this senseshowed the fallibility of a given set of practices or organizations by showing their imperfect human origins. Selden claimed that he was merely interested in their “history54 Funkenstein., chpt. 4. 55 New Science., Book 2.56 Autobiography., 200-209.
57 not all children were ‘good’; one son ended up being a petty theft. Vico was forced to call thepolice on him, and just as they arrived to the house felt pangs of remorse and warned the son. The son was unable to escape; his time in prison appears to have reformed the spoiled youth. Poorsons in fact are more often the result of overly attentive parenting.
58 Thomas Keenan, An Introduction to Child Development (New York: SAGE Publications, 2002).
59 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), part 2.
60 His concept of the archetype would be turned into the basis of psychological analysis by KarlJung, while Sigmund Freud would use dreams towards these same ends in the twentieth century.
61 Joseph Campbell, The power of myth. ed. Bill Moyers and Betty Sue Flowers. (New York :Doubleday, 1988); Joseph Campbell, The hero with a thousand faces. 2d ed., (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968). Vico’s last essay had very much a tone similar to that ofCampbell’s work and interviews. Perhaps borrowing from Vico, or more likely Karl Jung who developed a theory of archetypes, Campbell believed there were underlying universal patterns or‘themes’ to all myths.
62 It would be interesting to inquire into the family lives of most enlightenment thinkers. If we takeVoltaire as a measure, it is not likely that they were much of family men.
63 This cognitive abyss helps explain why horror films and the violent nature of actions movies havethe greatest impact on the youngest, and why they should be socially regulated.
64 Poor parenting often arises from the inability of parents to make this effort....; while the childmight seem to some as a ‘small adult’ the fact is that their mental worlds are radically different.
65 While he seems to be utilizing this as “evidence” for his ideas, the logical order is actuallyreversed as previously noted (deductive rather than inductive)
66 Stone., chpts 9, 11.
67 The corrobative evidence is not to be confused with carbon-dating techniques, which only emerged in the twentieth century.68 Obviously those that do not, do not survive and hence cannot be used for study.
69 New Science, 140, passim.
70 Silvio A. Bedini, Thomas Jefferson, Statesman of Science (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1990), passim.
71 Jefferson wrongly calculated, however, that Asian races originated from the Americas.
72 R.G.A. Dolby, “The Transmission of Science,” History of Science 15 (1977), 1-43.
73 His writing style was more similar in this sense to that of the middle ages where facts were incongruously tied to one another. On the other hand, Croce points out that Vico’s incoherencemight be an effort to avoid Inquisitorial sanction. Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico. Transl. R. G. Collingwood, (London: Howard Latimer, 1963), 272.74 Relatedly, he sought to extend the basic principles of Newtonian science, society as the field of interaction between autonomously acting entities, to the study of nations—despite his unshakenCatholic belief and heritage. 75 Max Harold Fisch’s Introduction in Vico’s Autobiography, passim.76 Awareness of change in one (society) encouraged the exploration of change in the other (biology). (disc time).
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