VICO'S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE: SECOND PHASE
The will to believe, which in Vico's case was very strong, and the
complete sway which the Catholicism of his country and age held over
his mind, bound him firmly down to the Christian Platonic metaphysic
and theory of knowledge; a theory whose inherent contradictions were
prevented by the above psychological facts from coming explicitly
before his mind. The idea of God at once dominated and supported him;
he neither had the audacity nor realised the necessity to probe to the
bottom such problems as the validity of revelation, the conceivability
of a God apart from the world, or the possibility of affirming the
existence of God without in some sense demonstrating and therefore
creating him. For Vico to open up and partially traverse a new path,
which should lead the human mind to transcend that of the Christian
Platonists, providence--to use for the moment an idea of his own which
we shall explain later on--had perforce to deceive him; to lead him by
a long and circuitous way to the commencement of the new path without
letting him suspect where it would end.
The writings in which Vico expounds his first theory of knowledge, _De
ratione studiorum_ and _De antiquissima Italorum sapientia,_ together
with the polemical works bearing upon them, belong to the four years
from 1708 to 1712. In the following decade Vico was gradually led
to devote himself more and more to research in the history of law
and of the State. He read Grotius as a preparation for writing the
life of Antonio Carafa, and plunged into the controversy on Natural
Rights. He pursued his studies of Roman law and the science of law in
general, in order to fit himself for a chair of jurisprudence at Naples
University. He pondered upon the origins of languages, religions, and
states, out of dissatisfaction with his own historical theories as
set forth in the _Be antiquissima_; perhaps also his convictions were
shaken by a well-directed criticism by the editor of the _Giornale
dei letterati._ His profession, the teaching of rhetoric, gave him
continual opportunities for meditating upon the nature and relations
of poetry and the forms of language. Thus even if it is inaccurate to
say that Vico was led to his later position culminating in the _Scienza
Nuova_ by a philological, not a philosophical process (since clearly
a philosophical position can only come into being through a process
no less philosophical), it is at least certain that the material and
stimulus for his new thought were supplied by philological studies.
These studies seem to have impressed upon him a fact of great
importance; namely, that this subject-matter could only be and had
actually been worked over by his thought through the aid of certain
necessary principles, appearing on every page of the history which
he had chosen for investigation. He had once believed that the moral
sciences, as compared with the mathematical method, took the lowest
place as regards certainty. But now, in his daily acquaintance with
these sciences, he had come to hold the opposite view; namely, that
nothing could be firmer than the foundation of the moral sciences!
This certainty was not the simple self-evidence of Descartes, in which
the object, however internal it is said to be, remains extrinsic to
the subject. It was a truly internal certainty, reached by an internal
process. In the assimilation of historical facts, Vico felt himself
to be making more truly his own something that already belonged to
him; to be entering into possession of what was his by right. He was
reconstructing the history of man; and what was the history of man but
a product of man himself? Is not the creator of history simply man,
with his ideas, his passions, his will, and his actions? And is not the
mind of man, the creator of history, identical with the mind which is
at work in thinking it and knowing it? The truth of the constructive
principles of history then comes not from the validity of the clear and
distinct idea, but from the indissoluble connexion of the subject and
object of knowledge.
The importance of this new discovery, the discovery of the truth which
Vico now recognised in the moral sciences, lay in the realisation of
a new implication of the theory of knowledge laid down by himself in
the former period of his speculations; namely, the criterion of truth
consisting in the "convertibility of the true with the created." The
reason why man could have perfect knowledge of man's world was simply
that he had himself made that world. "When it happens that he who
creates things also describes them, then the history is certain in the
highest degree."
Connected as it thus was with his earlier view, the assertion of the
possibility of the moral sciences did not, to Vico's own mind, present
the importance and bring with it the consequences of a revolution
entirely overthrowing the structure of his ideas, and compelling him
to adjust them afresh. On the one hand, this assertion seemed to him a
confirmation of his former doctrine, a new example to be added to those
he had already collected of perfect knowledge; namely, God's knowledge
of the universe and man's of the world of mathematics. On the other
hand, it seemed to be an extension of the field of knowledge, whose
boundaries (for definite boundaries still existed) had at first been
too narrowly drawn. Formerly he had described a small luminous sphere
in the centre of a vast and dimly lighted field; now the luminous
sphere underwent a definite increase in size, and the penumbral region
a corresponding diminution. This increase involved no sort of conflict
with his religious beliefs; in fact, it seemed to support them and to
gain support from them in turn. For did not religion teach the liberty,
responsibility, and consciousness which man has in respect of his own
acts and creations?
Thus Vico did not feel obliged to write a new treatise on metaphysics.
It seemed enough to add a mere post-script to his former work, and
to correct to some extent his earlier assertions. His new theory of
knowledge, while adhering strictly to the criterion of truth enunciated
by him in opposition to that of Descartes--the principle, that is, that
only the creator of a thing can know it--divided the whole of reality
into the world of nature and the world of man. But, while it laid down
that the world of nature is created by God and that therefore God alone
knows it, it restricted its agnosticism to this field. It asserted,
on the other hand, that the human world, being man's creation, is
known by man. In this way it raised the knowledge of human affairs,
formerly considered merely approximate and probable, to the rank of
perfect science; and it expressed surprise that philosophers should
so laboriously endeavour to attain to science of the world of nature,
which is a sealed book to mankind, while passing over the world of man,
the science of which is attainable. The cause of this error he traced
to the ease with which man's mind, involved and buried as it is in the
body, feels bodily things, and the labour and pains it costs it to
understand itself, as the bodily eye sees all objects outside itself,
but in order to see itself requires the help of the mirror.
In everything else his system remained unchanged. Beyond the world
of man lay the supernatural world, inaccessible to man, and the world
of nature, itself also in a sense supernatural. Beyond the perfect
knowledge which man could have of himself lay the metaphysic of
Christian Platonism, now reduced to impotence, but continuing none
the less to embarrass mankind. The natural sciences were now, as
before, regarded as incomplete forms of knowledge: mathematics as a
system of abstractions, absolutely valid in the abstract but in face
of reality powerless. The Aristotelian syllogism, the Stoic sorites,
and the Cartesian geometrical method were pursued with the same hatred
as before; and the same enthusiastic praise was lavished upon the
induction advocated and illustrated in his _Organum_ by Bacon, that
"great philosopher and great statesman," and fruitfully employed by his
countrymen in experimental philosophy.
Vico's frequent claim to have constructed the science of human affairs
on "a strict geometric method" might seem to indicate a change of
opinion as to the applicability of that method. But his continual
warnings, during the same period and in the same works, against the
use in physical and moral questions of the mathematical method, which,
"where there are no figures either of lines or numbers, either gives
us no conclusiveness, or else, instead of demonstrating the truth,
may often give an appearance of demonstration to falsehood," would
flatly contradict the supposed change of front were it not that we
could interpret it so as completely to restore the coherence of Vico's
thought. This interpretation is quite simple. Once the power of
converting the true with the created is seen to attach to the moral
sciences no less than to geometry, these sciences could and indeed must
develop on a method analogous to the synthetic method of geometry,
the method which proceeds from a truth to its immediate consequence.
In this manner they follow the progress of the world of man from its
ideal origin to its perfect development; so that the student must
not hope to be able to investigate these sciences _per saltum,_ but
must traverse them from beginning to end in detail, without refusing
to accept unforeseen conclusions any more than he can refuse to do
so in geometry; but concentrating his attention on the firmness of
the bond between premisses and conclusion. Thus the method could be
called geometric by analogy or synecdoche; in fact, however, it was
essentially speculative, and not to be confused with the application of
mathematics to questions of morals, of which the Cartesians and Spinoza
have left examples.
Nor can we agree without reservation to the opinion of certain
commentators that Vico, in asserting the existence of a single science
of man, to be studied in the modifications of the human mind, was
retreating to the position of a follower of Descartes. This opinion
is often reinforced by another statement of Vico's, namely, that
to conceive his New Science it would be well to return to a state
of absolute ignorance, as if no philosophers, philologists, nor
books had even existed in the world. It is true that with the new
form of his theory of knowledge Vico himself joined the ranks of
modern subjectivism, initiated by Descartes. In a sense, indeed,
he had already done so in his activistic doctrine of truth as the
reconstruction of the created. In this quite general sense Vico might
himself be called a Cartesian. Nevertheless, if he was still behind
Descartes in making his subjectivism a principle not of the whole of
knowledge but of the knowledge of the world of man only, in another
way he was ahead of the French philosopher, in that for him the
truth attained in the world of man was not static but dynamic, not a
discovery but a product, not consciousness but science.
As for the advice that one should proceed as if there were no books,
no philosophical or philological doctrines in the world, its meaning
is merely the necessity of ridding oneself of all prejudice, of all
common habitual assumptions, of all accretions of memory and fancy,
in order to attain "the state of pure understanding, empty of every
particular form," which is necessary for the discovery and apprehension
of any new truth. So far removed is this advice from the Cartesian or
Malebranchian renunciation of learning and authority, that--to mention
one fact only--in the very passage to which we have just referred we
find the warning that the New Science presupposes a comprehensive and
varied mass both of doctrine and of learning, the truths of which
it takes over as already known, and uses them as terms in its new
propositions.
In a word, Vico in his new theory of knowledge became not more
Cartesian but more Vician--more himself. Descartes seemed to him not
even a serviceable path by which to attain proof of the possibility
of constructing the science of mind by means of the mind. The true
path was Vico's own criterion of truth, brought into relation with its
author's observations made in the course of his historical studies.
If we wish to look for precedents in the history of philosophy for
Vico's theory of knowledge in its second form, the division between the
two worlds of reality and the two spheres of consciousness, and the
preference for moral as compared with natural studies, would lead us
back to the position adopted by Socrates as against the "Physiologists"
of his time, and the feeling of religious mystery which brought the
Athenian philosopher to a standstill in face of the natural world and
directed his efforts to the study of the mind of man. Again, as to the
superior transparency of the moral sciences, as dealing with objects
created by man himself, we might recall the Aristotelian division of
the sciences into physical, treating of motion external to man, and
practical and "poietic," which deal with man's own creations. The
distinction passed into the philosophy of the schools: Thomas Aquinas
speaks of nature as "an order which reason contemplates but does not
create" (_ordo quem ratio considerat sed non facit_), and of the world
of human activity as "an order which reason creates by contemplation"
(_ordo quem ratio considerando facit_). But no such reference is made
by Vico, fond as he was of expressing the debt of his own thought to
the ancient philosophers; and admitting that the doctrine had some
force before his time, the divergence between this earlier view and
that of Vico on the knowableness of the world of man is as great as
that between the assertion of the omniscience of God the Creator and
the theory of knowledge which Vico was able to draw from it.
Of this theory, his doctrine of the moral sciences was neither more
nor less than the first legitimate application. Both its author and
the majority of his commentators are using inaccurate language in
describing it as a simple extension of the previous applications--a
second instance, added to that of the mathematical sciences, already
examined.
In the mathematical sciences, the principle of the conversion of
the true with the created had been applied in appearance only.
The principle itself was original and sound: so was the theory of
mathematics. But the connexion between the two truths was altogether
artificial and false. What was lacking was, unless we are mistaken,
an effective relation between the concept of God who creates the
world and, as creating it, knows it, and that of the man who
arbitrarily constructs a world of abstractions, and in doing so either
knows nothing at all, or else, when he ceases to be a geometer or
arithmetician and becomes a philosopher, when he is composing not
Euclid's Elements but the theory of knowledge in the _De antiquissima,_
knows merely that his procedure is arbitrary. If the mathematical
sciences construct their concepts as they please, if they produce not
truth but definitions, they are as a matter of fact not sciences at
all, nor any form of knowledge, and cannot be compared with the divine
knowledge, the knowledge of actual reality. In mathematics, says Vico,
"man, holding within himself an imaginary world of lines and numbers,
operates in this world by abstraction just as God operates in the
universe by reality." It is a luminous comparison; but perhaps its
light is that of metaphor rather than logic.
In the moral sciences, on the other hand, the comparison is so entirely
logical that it should frankly be called coincidence. Human knowledge
is qualitatively identical with divine, and knows the world of man
equally well; it is, however, quantitatively more restricted, and
does not extend like the divine to the world of nature. In the human
field we no longer find the expedients of weakness, definitions and
falsifications; knowledge is here at its highest point of concreteness.
Man creates the human world, creates it by transforming himself into
the facts of society: by thinking it he re-creates his own creations,
traverses over again the paths he has already traversed, reconstructs
the whole ideally, and thus knows it with full and true knowledge. Here
is a real world; and of this world man is truly the God.
It seems undeniable, then, that the application of the _"verum-factum"_
made in the New Science is the only one which corresponds to the
criterion previously formulated. The earlier attempt at an application
of it to mathematics, though important in other respects and well
calculated to free the mind from mathematical prejudice, cannot be
considered a true or strict use of it. It is possible that Vico
was sometimes vaguely conscious of the difference between the two
applications, the strict and the metaphorical, which as a rule he
confused and treated as identical. The science of the world of man, he
says, proceeds exactly as does geometry, which while it constructs
out of its elements or contemplates the world of quantity, itself
creates it; but with proportionately greater reality, since order has
no connexion with human affairs, containing as they do neither points,
lines, surfaces, nor figures. Another indication of his gradually
dawning consciousness that he had now for the first time in his
doctrine of the world of man discovered a true and proper knowledge,
not a mere fiction of knowledge, may perhaps be seen in the much
greater conviction, warmth, and enthusiasm with which he now uses the
epithet "divine": quite a different thing from the chilly, if not
absolutely ironical, _ad Dei instar_ of the _De antiquissima._ The
proofs of the New Science, he says more than once, with fervour, "are
divine in their nature, and should give thee, Reader, a divine joy:
since in God knowledge and creation are one."
The conversion of the true with the created was bound to react upon
the treatment of certitude in one, perhaps the chief, of the various
meanings in which Vico uses the word, namely, historical fact: the
_peculiare, certum,_ as opposed to the _commune_ or _verum._ This forms
the other important section of Vico's second theory of knowledge. In
the former theory these cognitions were, as we saw, legitimised and
protected by being put on a level with all other kinds of knowledge,
all of them equally weak or equally strong, being all alike founded on
probability or authority, whether of the individual (autopsy) or of
mankind.
But now that the knowledge of the human mind and its laws was rescued
from the region of authority and probability, historical fact, although
still in a sense, by its very nature, founded upon authority, was
placed in a new light. The certain must enter into a new relation,
confronted as it now was not by another certainty, that is, mere
probable knowledge of the human mind, but by a truth, a piece of
philosophical knowledge.
This relation is also called by Vico the relation between philosophy
and philology: the former dealing with necessities of nature,
_necessaria naturae,_ and contemplating the reason from which issues
the science of truth; the latter with decisions of the human will,
_placita humani arbitrii,_ and following the authority whence comes
knowledge of the certain. The one considers the universal, the other
the individual; the one, as Leibniz would have said, the _vérités de
raison,_ the other the _vérités de fait._ With Vico the distinction
is not so clearly expressed: in fact, authority as opposed to reason
sometimes, according to him, becomes a part of reason itself, or is
confused with the knowledge of the human will as opposed to that of
rational volition; but the general sense is none the less quite plain.
By philology Vico means not only the study of words and their history,
but, since words are bound up with the ideas of things, he means also
the history of things. Thus philologists should deal with war, peace,
alliances, travels, commerce, customs, laws and coinage, geography and
chronology, and every other subject connected with man's life on earth.
Philology in a word, in Vico's sense, which is also the true sense,
embraces not only the history of language or literature, but also that
of events, philosophy, and politics.
It is true that philology, the truth of fact or certitude, had not
always been so brutally treated as it was by the Cartesians. Grotius
had given evidence of immense historical learning employed on behalf
of his doctrine of natural right. Gravina, Vico's contemporary and
fellow-countryman, demanded as necessary to the student of law not
only "the art of reasoning" (_ratiocinandi ars_) but "skill in the
Latin tongue" (_Latinae linguae peritia_) and "knowledge of history"
(_notitia temporum_). And Leibniz, whom we have just named, reasserted
the value of learning as against the Cartesians, and extended his
patronage, _en grand seigneur,_ to the varied collection of historical
anecdotes which he scattered freely over his pages. But Vico observed
that the philosophy and philology of his time always remained external
to one another, as they had been almost entirely in Greece and Rome.
All the quotations from historians, orators, philosophers, and poets
accumulated by Grotius were a mere embellishment. Perhaps Vico would
have passed the same judgment upon the liberal use made of history by
Leibniz, if he had known of it and expressed his opinion. In reading
the works of philologists he was conscious of such a sense of vacuity
and weariness in the unintelligent jumble of historical observations,
that he was almost led to agree with Descartes and Malebranche in their
hatred of scholarship: for a time, in fact, he did entirely agree with
them. But these two philosophers--so his later thought ran--ought,
instead of despising erudition, rather to have asked whether it were
possible to reclaim philology to philosophical principles; and the
philologists for their part, instead of marshalling facts for a display
of learning, ought to strive to make them the aim of science. Philology
must be reduced to a science. This was Vico's idea of the relation of
certitude to truth, or philology to philosophy.
What was the meaning of reducing philology, or history, which is
the same thing, to a science or philosophy? Strictly speaking, the
reduction is impossible: not because they deal with subject-matter
different in kind, but because their subject-matter is in point of
fact homogeneous. History is already essentially philosophy. It
is impossible to make the most insignificant historical statement
without moulding it with thought, that is with philosophy. But since
the existence of this philosophical basis of philology was not at
that time realised, indeed it was none too often realised in later
times, and in consequence easily denied; and since most people, as we
have seen, imagined either an aristocratic geometrical philosophy,
hating and avoiding the "profane mob" of facts, or else, as at first
Vico did, a philosophy and a history equally devoid of cogency, and
merely matters of opinion: for these reasons Vico, after the change
of his philosophical point of view, now that he had attained to the
consciousness of the speculative method in the science of man, and
understood more deeply the human mind, was bound to see how much
current history stood in need of reform and extension; to feel the lack
of an improved philology as a consequence of the improved philosophy,
and to express it in terms of the theory of knowledge by the formula
reuniting philology to philosophy: "that this second science, as is
fair, should be the consequence of the first" (_ut haec posterior, ut
par est, prioris sit consequentia_). He was bound, in other words, to
rescue history from its condition of inferiority, where it was a mere
slave to caprice, vanity, moralising and precept-making, and other
irrelevant aims, and to recognise its own true end as a necessary
complement of eternal truth. Philosophy nowadays is full of and
intimate with historical fact: and this gives it greater breadth and a
more lively sense of dealing with concrete reality. This is no doubt
one meaning of Vico's formula concerning the union of philosophy and
philology, and the reduction of the latter to a science.
It is, however, certain that in propounding this formula he had in
view a further and, as often happened, a different meaning. This other
meaning might be most simply illustrated by comparing it, as Vico
himself did with Bacon and his "more certain method of philosophising":
that method which Bacon expressed in the title of his work by the words
_Cogitata et visa,_ and Vico proposed to "transfer from the natural to
the human or political world." In a word, he demanded the construction
of a typical history of human society (_cogitare_) which was then to be
discovered in the facts (_videre_). Thus the ideal construction would
acquire certainty from the facts, and the facts truth from the ideal
construction: authority would be confirmed by reason and reason by
authority. He demanded a science which should be at once a philosophy
of man and a universal history of nations. Now this structure which
he required--something intermediate between _cogitare_ and _videre,_
thought and experience, this mixture of the two processes--is
intrinsically different from the unity of philosophy and philology, in
so far as that is a philosophical interpretation of factual data. Such
an interpretation is living history: the other is neither philosophy
nor history, but an empirical science of man and society, drawing its
materials from schemata which are neither the extra-temporal categories
of philosophy nor the individual facts of history: although it can
never be constructed without philosophical categories and historical
facts. It is an empirical science; and as such, neither exact nor true,
but only approximative and probable, and subject to verification and
correction from the side both of philosophy and of history.
It would be impossible to decide either which of these two meanings
of philology reduced to history is that of Vico himself, since both
are included in his thought: or which is the prevailing one, since in
point of fact now one, now the other prevails: although the second, or
empirical, signification is the more often formulated. We might even
say that when Vico entitled his treatise _Scienza Nuova,_ the principal
meaning he attached to this "invidious" name referred precisely to this
empirical science, the science, that is, which was to be at once a
philosophy and a history of man: the ideal history of the eternal laws
which govern the course of all nations' deeds in their rise, progress,
points of rest, decline and fall. The fact is, Vico did not and could
not unify the two different meanings; he maintained the duality which,
simply because it was never made explicit, presented an appearance
of unity. Thus each of the tendencies shown by his interpreters is
partially justified: one group of whom maintain that Vico laid down
and employed the speculative method; another, that his procedure was
both in intention and in effect empirical, inductive and psychological:
the former believing that he aimed at a systematic philosophy of man,
the latter that he was bent upon a scheme of sociology or social
psychology. Both views are one-sided, but the second more so than the
first. If there actually were in Vico elements both of Bacon and of
Plato, of the empiricist and the philosopher, yet when we look at his
intellectual personality as a whole, when we penetrate into the depths
of his mind and share in his difficulties and his colossal labours,
we must recognise that whatever he meant and believed Vico was of the
stuff of a Plato and not a Bacon: that even the Bacon of whom he speaks
is in part his own invention, a Bacon tinged with Platonism: and that
the New Science seemed so new to him fundamentally, not because it
was an empirical structure on Bacon's lines--indeed in that case no
science could be older: we need only cite Aristotle's _Politics_ and
Machiavelli's _Discourses,_ --but because it was impregnated throughout
by a new philosophy, which did in truth break into it on every side,
through all his empiricism.