PROVIDENCE
The true and only reality then, in the world of nations, is the course
of their history: and the principle which regulates this course is
Providence. From this point of view the New Science may be defined as
a "rational civil theology of the divine providence." Bacon, among his
historical sciences, had named a _Historia Nemeseos_ (history of Divine
Retribution). What for Bacon was little more than a mere name was for
Vico a clearly stated problem and a developed theory. Philosophers,
according to him, when they did not ignore Providence entirely, as
materialists and determinists, considered it solely in the sphere of
natural law, calling metaphysic by the name of "natural theology," and
supporting the identification of God with the natural order observed
in the motions of bodies, such as the spheres and the elements, and
with the final cause which was seen to exist over and above the other
natural causes. As against all this it was important to work out the
doctrine of Providence "in the economy of matters civil."
It was observed by some of his earliest commentators, and the
observation has been frequently repeated since, that Vico used the
word "providence" indifferently in a subjective and an objective
sense: sometimes to indicate the human belief in a provident deity
controlling their doctrine, sometimes to denote the actual operation
of this providence. The double or triple meaning of a single word in
Vico's terminology is a thing which by now need cause no astonishment.
We have often already been obliged to take pains to distinguish his
homonyms and unite his synonyms. Hence we may at once recognise that
one meaning of "Providence" for Vico might be and indeed is the
belief in Providence, man's idea of God, first in the form of myth
and later in the pure and rational form of philosophy. The Gentile
nations of antiquity, he says, "began their metaphysical poetic wisdom
by contemplating God in the attribute of his providence," upon which
rested augury and divination. Without this idea, then, wisdom, the
consciousness of the infinite, cannot take shape within man, nor can
morality, the fear of and respect for the higher power which governs
the affairs of men, arise. But in this sense of the word a further
discussion of providence is unnecessary, after what we have said on the
subjects of mythology and of the relation between morality and religion.
We therefore pass at once to Providence in its second sense, the real
and strict conception of it; and here it seems advisable to leave Vico
for a moment and to clear up certain points of doctrine.
It is a common observation that to create a given fact is one thing, to
know it when created quite another. The knowledge of what a fact really
is often comes in the life of the individual years later, in the life
of mankind centuries later, than the fact itself. The very persons who
are directly responsible for a given fact as a rule do not know it, or
know it in a very imperfect and fallacious manner; so much so that the
illusions which are said to accompany human activity have passed into
a proverb. The poet thinks he is singing of purity when he is really
singing of sensuality, and of strength while he is really singing of
weakness; he believes himself to be a dreadful pessimist and is really
childishly optimistic: imagines himself a devil, when he is a good
fellow without an ounce of vice in him. Philosophers deceive themselves
no less. We need not go far to find examples. The philosopher we are
studying supplies a whole series of them; few have been more in the
dark as to the real tendencies of their own thought. The politician
also deceives himself; very often he believes and declares himself
to be fighting for liberty while he is a mere reactionary, or while
believing himself to be serving the cause of reaction is really
inciting to revolt and aiding the cause of freedom: and so on. Such
illusions are easy to understand. Individuals and nations in the heat
of creation, or scarcely yet passing out of such a state, can perhaps
express their state of mind, but cannot treat it in the critical spirit
of historical narration: and accordingly, when they cannot reconcile
themselves to waiting in silence, they compose imaginary histories of
themselves, _Wahrheiten und Dichtungen_ at once. In fact this proved
difficulty of understanding one's actions while acting is one motive
of the wise advice to speak of oneself as little as possible and of
the suspicion with which autobiographies and memoirs are regarded.
Such works are interesting and possibly even valuable; but they never
present the strict historical truth of the facts they narrate.
Human labours are thus veiled in the mists of illusion which arise from
individuals. The superficial historian clings to the veil, and in his
attempt to describe the course of events, uses these illusions to make
his voice carry. In this way the history of poetry takes the form of a
narration of the intentions, opinions and aims of poets, or of those
attributed to them by their contemporaries; the history of philosophy
becomes a series of anecdotes concerning the sentiments, whims and
practical aims of philosophers: the history of politics, a tissue
of intrigue, base interests, gossip and greed. But a more careful
historian, or one of a different type, will have nothing to do with
history of this kind. His first act is to dispel the mists, to sweep
away the individual and his illusions, and to look facts in the face as
they appeared in their objective succession and their supra-individual
origin. Real, true history arises independently of individuals, as a
product growing to completion behind their backs, the product of a
force apart from individual agents, which may be called Fate, Chance,
Fortune or God. The individual, who at first was everything, and filled
the whole stage with his posturing and declamation, is now, in this
second aspect of history, less than nothing; his actions and cries,
stripped of all serious potency, provoke laughter or pity. We look in
terror at the Fate that dominates him, we stand aghast at the strange
coincidence of chance or the caprices of Fortune, we bow before the
inscrutable designs of the divine providence. The individual appears
in turn as the inert material, the powerless plaything and the blind
instrument of these forces. But deeper thought leads us beyond even
this second view of history. The pity which the individual seems to
arouse and the amusement he evokes are in reality deserved not by him
but by his fancies, or rather, by those individuals who mistake fancy
for truth. Real history is composed of actions, not of fancies and
illusions: but actions are the work of individuals, not indeed in so
far as they dream, but in the inspiration of genius, the divine madness
of truth, the holy enthusiasm of the hero. Fate, Chance, Fortune,
God--all these explanations have the same defect: they separate the
individual from his product, and instead of eliminating the capricious
element, the individual will in history, as they claim to do, they
immensely reinforce and increase it. Blind Fate, irresponsible chance,
and tyrannical God are all alike capricious: and hence Fate passes into
Chance and God, Chance into Fate and God, and God into both the others,
all three being equivalent and identical.
The idea which transcends and corrects alike the individualistic
and supra-individualistic views of history is the idea of history
as rational. History is made by individuals: but individuality is
nothing but the concreteness of the universal, and every individual
action, simply because it is individual, is supra-individual. Neither
the individual nor the universal exists as a distinct thing: the real
thing is the one single course of history, whose abstract aspects
are individuality without universality and universality without
individuality. This one course of history is coherent in all its many
determinations, like a work of art which is at the same time manifold
and single, in which every word is inseparable from the rest, every
shade of colour related to all the others, every line connected
with every other line. On this understanding alone history can be
understood. Otherwise it must remain unintelligible, like a string of
words without meaning or the incoherent actions of a madman.
History then is the work neither of Fate nor of Chance but of the
necessity which is not determination and the liberty which is not
chance. And since the religious view, that history is the work of God,
has this advantage and superiority over the others, that it introduces
a cause for history other than fate or chance, and therefore not
properly speaking a cause at all, but a creative activity, a free and
intelligent mind, it is natural that out of gratitude to this higher
view no less than by the suitability of the language we should be led
to give to the rationality of history the name of God who rules and
governs all things, and to call it the Divine Providence. In so naming
it, we at the same time purge the title of its mythical dross which
debased God and his providence afresh into a fate or a chance. Thus
providence in history, in this final logical form, has double value
as a criticism of individual illusions, when they come forward as
the entire and only reality of history, and as a criticism of divine
transcendence. And we may say that this is the point of view which
always has been and always is adopted, as if instinctively, without the
profession of an explicit theory, by all minds naturally gifted with
that particular faculty which we call the historic sense.
If now, to return to Vico, we ask how he solved the problem of the
motive force of history, and what was the precise content for him of
the concept of providence in the objective sense, it is perfectly easy
to exclude the supposition that his was the transcendent or miraculous
Providence which had formed the subject of Bossuet's eloquent
_Discours._ It is easy both because in all his philosophy he invariably
reduces the transcendent to the immanent, and repeats over and over
again here that his providence operates by natural means or (using
scholastic phraseology) by secondary causes: and because upon this
point his interpreters are practically unanimous.
No less insistent is his criticism of fate and chance, or according
to his threefold division fortune, fate and chance. He observes that
the doctrine of fate moves in a vicious circle, because the eternal
series of causes in which it holds the world bound and chained, depends
upon the will of Jupiter, and at the same time Jupiter is subject to
fate; whence it results that the Stoics are themselves entangled in
that "chain of Jupiter" with which they would imprison all things
human. These three concepts, corresponding to that of opportunity when
an object of desire is in question, to that of good luck in the case
of unhoped-for events, and to that of accident in the case of the
unexpected, are distinctions of the subjective understanding rather
than anything else: objectively they come under one single law which
may also be called fortune, if with Plato we recognise opportunity
as the mistress of human affairs: and all three are manifestations
and paths of the divine Providence which is intelligence, liberty and
necessity. The creator of the world of nations "was indeed Mind, since
men made it by their intelligence: it was not Fate, because they made
it by free choice, nor yet Chance, since to all eternity on doing thus
the same results follow."
Vico lights up in the most fanciful ways the comedy of errors formed
by man's illusions as to the end of his own actions. Men thought they
were escaping the threats of the thundering sky by carrying their
women into caves to satisfy their animal passions out of God's sight:
and by thus keeping them safely secluded they founded the first
chaste unions and the first societies; marriage and the family. They
fortified themselves in suitable places with the intention of defending
themselves and their families: and in reality, by thus fortifying
themselves in fixed places they put an end to their nomadic life and
primitive wanderings, and began to learn agriculture. The weak and
disorderly, reduced to the extremity of hunger and mutual slaughter,
to save their lives took refuge in these fortified places, and became
servants to the heroes: and thus without knowing it they raised the
family to an aristocratic or feudal status. The aristocrats, feudal
chiefs or patricians, their rule once established, hoped to defend and
secure it by the strictest treatment of their servants the plebeians:
but in this way they awoke in the servants a consciousness of their
own power and made the plebeians into men, and the more the patricians
prided themselves on their patriciate and struggled to preserve it,
the more effectively they worked to destroy the patrician state and to
create democracy. Thus, says Vico, the world of nations issues "from a
mind widely different from, sometimes quite opposed, always superior,
to the particular ends set before themselves by men: which restricted
ends have been made means to wider ends, and employed to preserve the
human race upon this earth."
It may be gathered from some of our quotations from Vico that he
sometimes tended to conceive men as conscious of their own utilitarian
ends but unconscious of moral ends. This would logically lead to
explaining social life on exclusively utilitarian principles, and to
considering morality as an accident relatively to the human will and
therefore not really moral: an external accretion more or less capable
of holding mankind together, or the obscure work of a supramundane
providence. This utilitarianism especially creeps into a passage where
he says that man, on account of his corrupt nature, being under the
tyranny of self-love which compels him to make private utility his
chief guide and to want every useful thing for himself and nothing for
his fellow, unable to hold his passions in check so as to direct them
by justice, in the state of nature desires only his own safety; after
taking a wife and begetting children, desires his safety and the safety
of his family; after attaining civil life, desires his own safety
together with the safety of his city; after extending his rule over
other peoples, he desires the safety of the nation; after joining with
other nations in wars, treaties, alliances and commerce, he desires
his safety and that of all mankind: and "in all these circumstances
he principally desires his own interest." For this reason "it can be
nothing else than divine providence that binds him down within such
ordinances as to maintain by justice the society of the family, the
state and ultimately of mankind; by which ordinances since man cannot
attain what he wants, at least he wants to attain as much utility as
is permitted: and this is what is called justice." The public virtue
of Rome, he writes elsewhere, "was nothing but a good use made by
providence of grave, unsightly and cruel private faults, that states
might be preserved at a time when human minds, being in a state of
extreme particularity, could not naturally understand a common good."
Utilitarianism was however, as we know, strongly repugnant to Vico's
observed ethics, founded as the latter is upon the moral consciousness
or shame; and hence these statements, which unconsciously tend in that
direction, can only be explained as resulting from the disturbance
sometimes produced in his mind by the lingering remains of the
transcendent or theological conception of providence, and also from the
confused character of his thought, which prevented him from keeping
the idea of individual illusions clearly distinguished from that of
individual aims; so that he sometimes substituted the second when he
ought to have been dealing solely with the first. If the provident
deity is "the unity of the spirit which informs and animates the
world of nations," these do not fail to obtain their particular ends
in order that it may move on to its universal ones, but both alike
are realised in them: and man is at every moment both utilitarian and
moral, or at least supposes himself to be moral when he is utilitarian
or utilitarian when he is really moral.
In any case, and in spite of these vacillations or rather confusions,
the conception of particular ends as the vehicle of universal and
of illusion as accompanying and co-operating with action implies a
dialectical conception of the movement of history, and the transcending
of the problem of evil. This problem is in fact very little emphasised
by Vico, owing to the strength of his belief in the universal
government of providence and of his persuasion that so-called evil is
not only willed by man under the appearance of good, but is itself
essentially a good. In a few rare passages in his earliest writings,
where he encounters the problem of evil, Vico solves it simply in the
sense that we men because of our iniquity which leads us to "regard
ourselves, not this universe of things" (_nosmetipsos, non hanc rerum
universitatem spectamus_) consider as evil those things which run
counter to us, "which yet, since they contribute to the common nature
of the world, are good" (_quae tamen, quia in mundi commune conferunt,
bona sunt_).
Vico's conception of history thus became truly objective, freed from
divine arbitrament, but freed equally from the rule of trifling causes
and gossiping explanations, and acquiring a knowledge of its own
essential end, which is to understand the nexus of facts, the logic
of events; to be the rational reconstruction of a rational fact.
Historical study at this time suffered less from the first of these
errors (the theological conception had been ever since the beginning of
the Italian Renaissance falling into universal decay) than from that
form of history which was just then acquiring the name of "pragmatic,"
which restricted itself to the personal aspect of events, and failing
by these means to reach full historical truth tried to gain warmth
and life by means of political and moral instruction. A monument of
pragmatic history arose in Vico's own country and contemporaneously
with the _Scienza Nuova:_ Pietro Giannone's _Civil History of the
Kingdom of Naples._ The author was a man of his own district and age,
and wrote a great work in the sphere of polemic, and even in certain
respects of history: but such that all its greatness only serves to
emphasise the greatness of Vico's book. If Vico had had to describe
the origins of ecclesiastical property and power in the Middle Ages,
he would have been able to write of something very different from the
guile of popes, bishops and abbots, and the simplicity of dukes and
emperors. And as we shall see, whenever he undertook to investigate any
part of history he actually did discover in it something very different
from these things.