THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS
Vico's other doctrines on the theoretical reason, that is to say on
the logic of philosophy, of physical and mathematical science and of
historical study, have been expounded above in the statement of his
theory of knowledge, and are drawn almost entirely from his early
works, since in the New Science the phase of the "completely developed
mind" hardly appears except as a limit of the field of study. Here it
will suffice to mention that he also touches upon the problem of the
relation of poetry to history: but, still because of the confusion
of philosophy with social science, he fails fully to solve it. From
one point of view it seems to Vico that history is prior to poetry,
because the latter, as he says, presupposes reality and contains an
"imitation of the second degree": from another, poetry is the primary
form, because among primitive peoples history is poetry, and the first
historians are poets. At any rate he insists upon the poetic element
essential to history: of Herodotus, the father of Greek history,
he observes that not only are "his books full, for the most part,
of fables," but "the style retains a very great Homeric element, a
feature which all subsequent historians retained, using as they did
a phraseology intermediate between the poetic and the colloquial":
"almost the words of the poets," _verba ferme poetarum,_ as he says
elsewhere in a phrase borrowed from Cicero.
Nor are the relations between theory and practice, intellect and
will, explained in detail by Vico, although on the whole he suggests
the general idea that as in God intellect and will coincide, so it
is in man, God's image; whose mind is not divided into thought and
will--thought proceeding according to one method and will according to
another--but his thought and will interpenetrate and form one single
whole: a view far superior to that of the contemporary philosophy
of Leibniz, which retained the idea of a divine arbitrament and
therefore of irrationality. Another view, peculiar to Vico, might
be taken by a hasty interpreter to imply the priority of practice
to theory. He says that philosophers arrive at their conceptions
thanks to experience of social institutions and laws in which men
agree as a kind of universals: that Socrates and Plato, for instance,
presupposed the Athenian democracy and law-courts. But the succession
of religions producing republics, republics producing laws, and laws
producing philosophical ideas, which he calls "a fragment of the
history of philosophy philosophically narrated," is really a theory of
sociological, not of philosophical value.
As regards his doctrines of practical reason, which we are here
beginning to consider, it might be thought that Vico, unlike his
attitude with regard to the theoretical reason, did not stand in sharp
opposition to the thought of his time, but actually united himself with
a contemporary movement, namely the school of natural rights. The head
of the school and leader of the movement, Hugo Grotius, was called by
Vico one of his "four authors," together with Plato, from whom he had
drawn his aspirations towards an idealistic philosophy, Bacon, who had
aroused in his mind the idea of a positive and historical science of
society, and Tacitus, his debt to whom, or at least the debt which he
believed he owed him, we shall examine later on. Along with Grotius he
frequently mentions the other chief authorities on natural rights,
Selden and Puffendorf, omitting their innumerable followers, whom he
considers less as scientific authorities than as "adorners" of the
Grotian system.
His adherence to the school, in a certain sense, is clear, and is
admitted and proclaimed by Vico himself. But it is also beyond doubt
that he was no mere adherent: he was not a follower of the kind that
retains the general or leading ideas while developing and correcting
details. He was a follower in the dialectical sense only, that is,
in so far as he thought it necessary to contest the primary theses,
or to accept them only in a profoundly modified form. Natural right
offered him not solutions but problems: and of these, while some came
before him already clearly formulated, others, and these were the more
important, arose only in his own mind: problems either unsolved or
unrealised, till Vico propounded and in part solved them.
Natural rights presented many aspects and many tendencies: and it
would be well to begin by distinguishing and enumerating these. In
the first place, the school taken as a whole and in its essential
character expressed the social progress by which Europe, on emerging
from feudalism and religious warfare, acquired a new consciousness,
distinctively bourgeois and non-clerical in character; and it
observed that the growth of this consciousness was contemporaneous
with the anti-clerical and bourgeois institution of "masonry." The
word "natural" meant, among other things, "not supernatural": and
hence implied hostility or indifference towards the supernatural,
the institutions representing it, and the social conflicts resulting
from it. It was not by accident that Grotius was an Arminian; that
Puffendorf went to law with theologians; that Thomasius is remembered
as one of the champions of freedom of conscience. The protestations of
respect for religion and the church, habitually and liberally inserted
by these publicists in their works,--which are draped, so to speak,
with a veil of piety,--were merely politic safeguards, enabling the
author to threaten the enemy unobserved and to strike from under cover.
This caution is praised, in Grotius's case for example, by a follower
of the school (the author of _Pauco plenior iuris naturalis historia,_
1719), who extols the master as "the instrument of divine providence,"
coming like Messiah to redeem the "natural light" from its bondage to
the "supernatural," and as such gifted with all the power and ability
he could need: so that after tasting the persecutions of Scholasticism,
"he behaved with caution, to avoid further irritating the jealousy
against his natural and reasonable prudence that had issued forth from
its lair at his threats" (_caute versabatur ... ne maius bilem adversus
prudentiam naturalem et rationalem ex latebris productam tam minis
irritaret_), and in proceeding to separate human from divine laws,
did not execute a frontal assault on the theological school when he
attacked its fundamental errors, but even praised it in the preface to
his work. The word "natural" also denoted what is common to individuals
of different nations and ranks: and hence from a practical point of
view provided an admirable war-cry for uniting the bourgeoisie of
different countries in definite common aspirations and struggles. The
treatises of natural rights were for the bourgeoisie of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries what the "Manifesto of the communists" and the
cry "Proletariates of the world, unite" attempted to be for the working
classes of the nineteenth.
In so far as this school and this publicism were signs of a practical
movement, the philosophical interest held in them a secondary place
and discharged a function of minor importance: so that, secondly, the
works on natural right, philosophically considered, did not as a rule
rise above a simple popular empiricism. The principles on which they
rest are not examined and often not even superficially reconciled: the
concepts which they use are less concepts than general representations:
and the form of the writing is systematic in appearance only. Some
of these writers endeavoured to harmonise their doctrines of natural
right with the Platonic, Stoic or Cartesian philosophies, or appealed
to logical or metaphysical axioms, or made use of deduction and the
mathematical method. But all this was mere aggregation, not fusion;
ornament, not reinforcement: at most, it was of value as a proof of
diligence and earnest intentions.
The philosophy, however, which was more or less implicit in the
pamphleteers of natural rights, and explicit in the philosophers who
set out to elaborate the doctrine, agreed with the spirit of the
time, whose general characteristics are well known. Thus arose the
third or ethical aspect of natural right, namely its utilitarianism;
sometimes more or less concealed, sometimes openly declared, and
worked out from time to time by a philosophy of mathematical or
sensationalistic methods, and of materialistic or rationalistic
tendencies: or else, what comes practically to the same thing, an
abstract and intellectualistic morality, threatening at any moment to
fall into utilitarianism. From this intellectualism and utilitarianism,
combined with the practical and revolutionary character of this mental
movement,--which was bent rather upon bringing about the triumph of
an abstract system of right than upon recognising that which really
develops in history, in all the complexity of its many forms and
vicissitudes--derived its fourth characteristic, the lack of historical
sense, or the anti-historical attitude of the school, which set up the
abstract ideal of a human nature apart from human history instead of
fused with and living in it.
Finally, bourgeois, anticlerical, utilitarian and materialistic as it
was, the movement of natural right had a fifth important trait, namely
its aversion to transcendence and its tendency towards an immanental
conception of man and of society. This characteristic is neither fully
explained nor fully worked out in the doctrines, but is none the less
easily recognised among the total views of the school.
Now Vico's genius was truly and indeed exclusively theoretical, and not
at all practical or reformatory: his method was profoundly speculative
and contemptuous of empiricism, his mind idealistic and opposed to
materialism and utilitarianism: his theory of knowledge eager for the
concrete, for "certitude," and, as such, of historical sympathies.
Consequently his doctrine of the practical reason, though deriving its
impetus from the theory of natural rights, was bound to emerge in a
shape different from or even contrary to that theory in all the first
four characteristics enumerated above. And if it did in one respect
coincide--which it only does in the conclusion, not in the path by
which the conclusion is reached--it did so in the very point in which
Vico would least have wished it: in its immanental or anti-religious
tendency.
But since our subject is not the criticisms and modifications which the
theory of natural right received from Vico's thought, but rather that
thought itself, it is time to pick up the thread of the exposition,
following an order somewhat different from that in which we have
summed up the various characteristics of the theory, and beginning by
observing Vico's opposition to the professed or implicit utilitarianism
of the school, and the ethical doctrine by which he replaced it.
The two chief representatives of utilitarianism in the seventeenth
century, whom Vico always keeps in view, are Hobbes and Spinoza: but in
addition to them, he refers to Locke and Bayle and, in the preceding
century, Machiavelli; and going back to the ancients, the Stoics with
their conception of faith and the Epicureans with that of chance,
Carneades and his scepticism, and finally the unconscious theory
contained in the saying "_Vae victis_" attributed to Brennus, chief
of the Gauls who took Rome. He admired Hobbes's splendid attempt to
enrich philosophy by a theory which had been lacking to the greatest
days of Greece, the theory of man considered in the whole society
of the human race: but he pronounced the result unsatisfactory, and
the attempt, whose outcome, like that of Locke's system, was hardly
distinguishable from Epicureanism, a failure. Hobbes did not observe
that he could never have propounded his problem of the natural rights
of mankind had not his motive been supplied by the Christian religion
itself, which commands not indeed justice but charity to all mankind.
With the Stoics on the other hand, with the fatalism and determinism
which made it impossible for them to reason soundly about the state and
laws, with the so-called "Spinozists of antiquity," he ideally united
Spinoza; the uniqueness of whose utilitarianism, equally removed from
the Lockian spirit and the Hobbist, since Spinoza "judges of the truth
of things by the mind, not by sense" (_mente non sensu de veris rerum
diiudicat_), did not escape Vico's notice. But unique though it was,
it led Spinoza to think of the state in a somewhat undignified way
"as of a mere society of shopkeepers." These utilitarian doctrines,
with their libels upon human nature, seemed to Vico only fit for men
without hope, too insignificant ever to have a share in the state or
proud enough to believe themselves repressed and denied access to the
positions of which in their arrogance they thought themselves worthy.
Among these he counted the unfortunate Spinoza, who, he thinks, having
as a Jew no country of his own, was moved by envy to devote himself to
the construction of a metaphysic "intended to overthrow all the nations
of the world." He passes stern judgment upon the state of contemporary
ethics, which was all that it could be on the basis of a mechanistic
and materialistic metaphysic without a gleam of finalism. Descartes
produced nothing at all in this field, since his few written remains
on the subject do not amount to a doctrine, and his treatise of the
Passions belongs rather to medicine than to morals. Malebranche and
Nicole were equally sterile, and Pascal's _Pensées,_ the one exception,
are "but scattered lights." Of the Italians, Pallavicino's treatise
_Del bene_ offers no very profound depths of ethics: and Muratori's
attempt in his _Filosofia Morale_ was a very unsuccessful one.
Utility is not the explanatory principle of morality, because it
proceeds from man's bodily nature, and on that account is subject to
change, while morality, _honestas,_ is eternal. To derive morality
from utility is to confound the occasion with the cause, to confine
oneself to the surface and to offer no explanation at all of the facts.
None of the various modes in which philosophers have successively
called the utilitarian principle to life, fraud or imposture, force,
desire,--none of these accounts for differentiation, that is, for the
social organism. What fraud could ever have seduced and deceived the
supposed simple and frugal first owners of the land, living as they did
perfectly contented with their lot? What force could have succeeded,
if the rich, the alleged usurpers, were few, and the poor, the
robbed, were many? Such explanations are ridiculous, and unworthy of
a serious problem. These strong and powerful men were really powerful
with something other than mere strength: thus they became protectors
of the weak and enemies of destructive and anti-social tendencies:
their rule was one of force, it is true, but "imposed by a more
powerful character" (_a natura praestantiori dictata_); a fact which
the barbarian Brennus may be pardoned for not knowing, but not so a
philosopher. The force which created and organised the earliest states
was nothing but "noble human nature," to which states must always hark
back, although they may have been won by fraud and force, in order
to subsist and maintain themselves: which agrees with Machiavelli's
advice to hark back to the beginnings, but with the implication that
the deepest beginnings are to be found in mercy and justice. Men are
held together by something stouter than utility. Human society cannot
originate and endure without mutual trust; unless people accept each
other's promises and take each other's word for facts they cannot
examine. Could this trust be perhaps ensured by strict penal laws
against falsehood? But laws are a product of society, and this mutual
trust is necessary that society may arise. It may be said, as it is by
Locke, that we are dealing with a psychological process, by which men
gradually acquired the habit of believing when some one spoke to them
and promised to tell the truth. But in that case these men already
understood the idea of a truth which by mere disclosure compelled
assent without any personal teaching; and the psychological principle
of habituation is transcended.
The true cause of human society then is not utility, which only assists
the action of the cause as its occasion, and brings it about that men,
with all the weakness and poverty of their nature, and the divisions
among them due to original sin, are led to extol their social nature
"under compulsion of facts" (_rebus ipsis dictantibus_), in the phrase
of the jurist Pomponius, quoted with approval by Vico. Objects, facts
and circumstances in morality change, though morality itself does not
change: and hence arises the illusion of the utilitarians, who cling
to the external, confine themselves to the appearance and see the
change but not the permanence. Murder is forbidden: but the approval,
bestowed upon the man who when his life is threatened and he cannot
otherwise save himself kills his unjust aggressor, does not imply that
the moral judgment upon homicide varies; since in these particular
circumstances the case is really one not of homicide but of capital
punishment inflicted by the unjustly attacked person finding himself
alone: a power tacitly delegated to him so to speak by society. Theft
is forbidden: but the man who in order to preserve his life steals a
loaf from another does not violate morality because he is exercising a
right founded upon equity.
The only philosophy which carries with it a true ethic seems to Vico
to be the Platonic, resting as it does upon a metaphysical principle,
the eternal idea which draws out of itself and creates matter: while
the Aristotelian ethic is founded upon a metaphysic leading to a
physical principle, that of the matter from which particular forms are
drawn, a principle which makes God a potter shaping objects external
to himself. The ethic of the Roman lawyers was doubtless rich in fine
aphorisms: but it was nothing but a mere art of equity, conveyed by
means of endless minute maxims of natural justice, sought for by the
writers in the reason of the laws and the will of the lawgiver. Hence
it cannot be regarded as a moral philosophy, in which the best method
is to proceed from a very small number of eternal truths, established
by ideal justice in the fabric of metaphysic. For analogous reasons
Vico could not rest satisfied with Grotius and the school of natural
rights: of which in general he makes the perfectly just remark that
their ponderous tomes, in spite of the impressive titles they bear,
contain nothing that is not universally known. If Grotius's principles
be weighed in the accurate balance of criticism, they are all found to
be probable or plausible rather than necessary and incontestable. In
dealing with the question of utility, Grotius missed the exact point by
failing to distinguish the occasion from the cause: nor did he "nail
down"--that is, he did not end--the ancient dispute as to whether right
is a question of nature or of human opinion only, the same controversy
as that carried on by philosophers and theologians with Carneades the
sceptic and Epicurus: he advances the hypothesis of primitive men
who were "simpletons," but quite omits to give reasons for it. And
since these "simpletons" of his, after suffering injuries from their
beast-like isolation, initiated a sociable life, a step to which they
were determined by utility, Grotius himself slipped unawares into
utilitarianism and Epicureanism.
Vico on the other hand answered the question, whether right is natural
or conventional, by the grave aphorism "except in their natural
condition, things neither progress nor endure." To the question,
whence society arises, he replies by mentioning the common feeling of
humanity, the conscience, the need which man feels of escaping from
the internal enemy, which tortures his heart. The origin of society
certainly lies in fear, but it is fear of oneself, not of another's
violence: it lies in the agonies of remorse, the shame whose tinge
suffusing the cheeks of the earliest men lit the first beacon of
morality upon earth. Shame is the mother of all virtues, honour,
frugality, honesty, loyalty to the pledged word, truthfulness in
speech, abstention from others' property, and chastity. In extolling
society, man is extolling human nature.
Shame or the moral consciousness, translated into terms of the
corresponding empirical science, becomes that common consciousness of
man upon matters of human necessity or utility which is the source of
the natural right of nations. This common consciousness, says Vico,
is an unreflective judgment, felt in common by a whole class, a whole
people, a whole nation and the whole of mankind. An unreflective
judgment is not strictly a judgment at all, since reflection is
inseparable from judgment: it is not judgment, because it is felt
and not thought. But on the other hand it is not what is called a
"feeling,"--a vague term unknown to Vico, as it is to traditional
philosophy. It is rather a practical attitude of mind, similar on the
whole in persons living in similar conditions and producing similar
customs in the various social groups, from the customs of a particular
class to those of all mankind. The attitude is quite spontaneous, and
for this very reason unreflective; so that customs arise from within,
not from without, and their similarity does not depend upon imitation
("without one nation taking example from another"). Through this
_sensus communis_ the moral consciousness embodies itself in compact
and unyielding institutions: and thus the _sensus communis_ reduces to
certitude the free will of man, which is in itself quite uncertain.