METAPHYSICS
By "metaphysics" we understand Vico's conception of reality as a
whole, not of the world of man by itself; and we also include in the
meaning of the word his ultimate negative conclusion asserting the
unknowability or the imperfect knowability of one or more spheres of
reality, or of that highest sphere in which the others reunite.
In point of fact, as we observed in considering the second and latest
form of his theory of knowledge, Vico drew a sharp line between the
world of man and the world of nature: the former transparent to man
because created by him, the latter opaque, because only God its
Creator has knowledge of it. And his conception of the total and
ultimate reality, the metaphysic which he expounds together with his
earlier theory of knowledge, retains the value granted to it by that
theory and no other: it is a probable conjecture, but one incapable
of verification, and reaches completion in the certitude of revealed
theology. Hence this metaphysic remains out of all possible connexion
with the New Science, which proceeds by the certain method of truth and
cuts itself off from revelation. Vico never rejected it. He discusses
it in his autobiography of 1725, the year of the first _Scienza Nuova;_
he refers to it with satisfaction in 1737, seven years after the
second _Scienza Nuova,_ when his scientific life was, as he himself
considered, at an end. But though he never rejected it he always kept
it aside, so to speak, in a corner of his mind.
This point established, it might seem that there can be nothing more to
be said of any philosophical importance about Vico's metaphysics. But
this is not the case. Since every department of philosophy implies in
itself every other, and since we can therefore always deduce from the
treatment of one of the so-called particular philosophical sciences the
character of the whole, it is legitimate to examine the New Science
and to consider what metaphysic is implicit therein; to determine what
philosophical complement is logically supported and demanded by this
science.
The New Science, which asserted the full knowability of human affairs,
not merely on the surface, like a psychological treatment, but in
the depths of their nature: the New Science, which transcended the
individual to attain the conception of the mind which informs all
things and is Providence: the Science which with divine pleasure
contemplated the eternal cycle of the mind, elevated as it was to such
a height, necessarily tended to interpret the whole of reality, both
Nature and God, as Mind. That this tendency was objective to the New
Science, and not subjective to Vico, in whose mind the science so to
speak thought itself out, need hardly be repeated. Vico personally not
only did not encourage it but actually curtailed and repressed it so
energetically as to leave no trace of it in his works. There was no
philosophical doctrine of which he had such terror and against which
he so frequently waged war as that of pantheism; and perhaps this
polemical preoccupation is the only trace, though quite an involuntary
trace, visible in his writings of the tendency which he must have
observed in himself. He was, and wished to remain, a Christian and a
Catholic; transcendence, the personality of God, the substantiality
of the soul, though his science did not lead him towards them, were
uncontrollable necessities to his consciousness. But just as this fact
allowed Vico to repress but not to eradicate the essential logical
tendency of his thought, so it enables us to recognise that tendency
in the facts themselves. An Italian critic, Spaventa, is right when he
says that in Vico the necessity of a new metaphysic makes itself felt;
another, a German Catholic, is equally right in denning his system
as "semi-pantheistic." It would perhaps be more dangerous to go on
to say, with the Italian above mentioned, that Vico makes an advance
on the Cartesian idea of two substances and the Spinozistic of two
attributes, and even on the Leibnitian doctrine of the monad, and that
he transcends parallelism and pre-established harmony by distinguishing
the two providences, the two attributes, nature and mind, in such a way
that the one is a step to the other, and by conceiving the point of
union and the origin of the opposition as an unfolding or development,
so that nature is regarded as the phenomenon and proper basis of
mind, the pre-supposition which mind creates to itself in order to be
really mind, to be a true unity. For while we may doubt whether the
distinction of the two attributes or two providences, the natural and
the human, is a well-grounded and inevitable consequence of conceiving
substance as mind and thought, it is impossible to deduce the
evolutionary transition from one to the other as a tendency implicit in
Vico's conception of thought. There is certainly particular documentary
evidence for this latter particular tendency: but it is scanty and
unconvincing, and occurs not in the system of the New Science but
rather in the chronologically earlier system.
For the metaphysic laid down by Vico in the earlier phase of his
thought is not, as it has seemed to some, and as it may at first sight
appear, entirely devoid of significance and value. It shows the same
aversion to materialism and the same love of idealism which inspire
the meditations of the New Science. The philosophy of Epicurus, which
takes as its starting-point matter already formed and divided into
ultimate particles of various shapes, composed of other parts which
are supposed to be indivisible owing to the absence of void between
them, seemed to him a philosophy such as to satisfy the naïve mind of
a child or the uncritical mind of a woman; and the delight with which
he followed the explanation of the forms of material nature according
to this philosopher, in the poem of Lucretius, was equalled by the
amusement and pity with which he watched him forced by stern necessity
to lose himself in countless ineptitudes and follies in trying to
explain the phenomena of thought. Vico accused the Cartesian physics
no less than the Epicurean of a "false position," since it also takes
ready-formed matter as its starting-point, differing from the Epicurean
matter in that, while the latter limits the divisibility of matter at
the atoms, the former makes its elements infinitely divisible; that
the one places motion in the void, the other in the solid; the one
initiates the shaping of its infinite worlds by a casual declination
of atoms from the downward path of their own weight and gravitation,
the other generates its indefinite vortices from an impetus imparted
to a section of inert and therefore not yet divided matter, which on
receiving this motion divides into fragments, and, hampered by its
mass, necessarily makes an effort to move in a straight line, and
being unable to do so through its solidity begins, divided as it is
into fragments, to move about the centre of each fragment. In this way
while Epicurus entrusted the world to chance, Descartes subjected it
to fate; and it was in vain that to save himself from materialism he
superimposed upon his physics a quasi-Platonic metaphysic, by which he
attempted to establish two substances, the one extended and the other
intelligent, and to make room for an immaterial agent; for these two
parts were not reconciled in his system, since his mechanical physics
included in itself a metaphysic like the Epicurean, establishing
one kind and one only of active material substance. For similar
or analogous reasons Vico rejected the philosophies of Gassendi,
Spinoza and Locke; and the physical science of other authors such as
Robert Boyle seemed to him valuable for purposes of medicine and the
"spargiric art," but useless for philosophy. Galileo he considered to
have looked at physical science with the eye of a great geometrician,
but without the aid of the full light of metaphysics. He had sympathy
with philosophers who were also geometricians, and therefore with the
Pythagorean or Timaean physics, according to which the world consists
of numbers; with the Platonic metaphysics, which from the form of our
minds without any other hypothesis establishes, upon our knowledge
and consciousness of certain eternal truths which are in our mind and
cannot be ignored or denied, the eternal idea as the principle of all
things; with the doctrine of metaphysical points, attributed by him
to Zeno the Stoic; and finally with the philosophy of the Italian
Renaissance, the period adorned by Ficino, Pico della Mirandola,
Steuco, Nifo, Mazzoni, Piccolomini, Acquaviva and Patrizio.
The fundamental concept of his cosmology was supplied by the
metaphysical point, in which the employment of mathematics in
metaphysics, a process admitted by Vico as analogous to that of
construction, found expression. Just as from the geometrical point
proceed the line and the surface, and the point which is defined as
having no parts supplies the proof that lines otherwise incommensurable
can be divided equally into their component points, so it is legitimate
to postulate points not geometrical but metaphysical, which though not
extended generate extension. Between God, who is rest, and matter,
which is motion, the intermediate place is taken by the metaphysical
point, whose attribute is conation, the indefinite energy and attempt
on the part of the universe to bring into being and sustain each
particular thing. The existence of matter is nothing but an indefinite
power of keeping the universe extended, which underlies all extended
objects equally however unequal they may be, and also an indefinite
power of motion underlying all particular motions, however unequal.
Behind a grain of sand lies something which when this particle is
divided gives to it and preserves in it an infinite extension and
magnitude; so that the whole mass of the universe is included in the
grain of sand, if not actually, yet potentially and in capacity. This
effort of the universe, underlying each smallest particle of matter,
is neither the extension of the particle nor the extension of the
universe: it is the thought of God, which, free from all materiality,
gives motion and impulse to the whole. Every particular determination
of reality agrees with this fundamental truth. Time is divisible,
eternity indivisible; disturbances of the mind wax and wane, its
quiescence has no degrees; extended things are corruptible, unextended
things permanent in their indivisibility; body can be divided, mind
cannot; possibilities are at a single point, accidents are everywhere;
science is one, while opinion produces differences; virtue is neither
in one place nor another, vice walks up and down in every direction;
the good is one, the bad is innumerable; in every kind of thing in a
word the best occurs in the category of the indivisible.
Substance in general, which underlies and sustains things, is divided
into two species, extended substance or that which equally supports
unequal extensions, and thinking substance which equally supports
unequal thoughts. And just as one part of extension is divided from
another but indivisible in the substance of the body, so one part of
thought, that is to say a determinate thought, is divided from another
but indivisible in the substance of the soul. Activity or freedom is
peculiar to the soul, and entirely denied to body: and Descartes, in
making a conation of body the beginning of his physics, was strictly
adopting the methods of a poet and falling into the anthropomorphic
conceptions of primitive races. The phenomena which students of
mechanics call activities, forms, or powers, are insensible movements
by which bodies move either, as the ancients said, towards their
centres of gravity, or, as the modern theory of mechanics asserts, away
from their centre of motion. The communication of motion, moreover,
is just as inconceivable in body as is activity. To grant it would be
equivalent to granting the interpenetration of bodies, since motion
is nothing but matter in motion; the blow given to a ball is only the
occasion for the energy of the universe, which was so weak in the ball
as to make it seem at rest, to expand and thus to give it an appearance
of more sensible motion. On the other hand, Vico agreed with the
Cartesians, especially Malebranche, as to the origin of ideas, which
he inclined to believe that God creates in us from time to time. He
also held with the Cartesians that the lower animals are automata;
and he agreed with all contemporary thought as to the subjectivity of
secondary qualities.
Setting aside these last doctrines, which are not Vico's own, indeed
he scarcely refers to them, the fundamental doctrine of metaphysical
points is all his own. His attribution of it to an imaginary Zeno,
in whose person were combined and confused the Eleatic and the Stoic
(a mistake common in the philosophical literature of the time), can
deceive nobody, and did not even deceive Vico himself, who when pressed
explained how he had been led to that interpretation of Aristotle's
statements about Zeno, and finally says that if the doctrine cannot
be accepted as that of Zeno, he will adopt it as his own, without
the patronage of any great names. Nor on the other hand can it be
traced to the Leibnitian monadology. We cannot be sure that Vico
was acquainted with this doctrine. In any case he does not mention
it, while Leibniz he does mention in terms of deep respect: and the
resemblance is very vague, for the metaphysical points are not monads.
The discovery by Leibniz and Newton of the differential calculus may
however be said to have influenced him. It was then for the first time
becoming known in Italy; and its terminology of maximum infinities,
greater and less infinities, and so on would, says Vico, completely
baffle the human understanding, since the infinite admits neither of
degrees nor of multiplication, but for the help of a metaphysic which
shows that all actual extension and actual movement is a power or
capacity for extension and motion always equal to itself and infinite.
The contributions of Platonic lines of thought (the Platonism of the
Renaissance) and those of Galileo, especially the latter, to Vico's
conception have been worked out with even more justice: his originality
however is in no degree impaired by these facts.
The idea in which his originality found expression was, no doubt,
fantastic and arbitrary, and in consequence bound to remain undeveloped
and without influence on Vico's other conceptions. To the reviewer
in the _Giornale dei letterati,_ who called this metaphysic a mere
sketch, the author replied that it was quite complete: an abortion in
fact, rather than a sketch, and, as such, complete. And in the _Scienza
Nuova,_ beside a few references to the refusal to attribute activity to
matter, there is one fugitive but interesting attempt at a connexion
with a geometrical or arithmetical metaphysic on the model of that
described above. In this passage it is stated that upon the order of
material and complex civil affairs the order of numbers, which are
abstract and absolutely simple, is imposed: and the fact is noted that
governments begin with the one, in domestic monarchy, pass to the few
in aristocracy, advance to the many and the all in popular republics,
and finally return to the one in civil monarchies, so that humanity
moves perpetually from the one to the one, from domestic monarchy to
civil monarchy.
But if we can and must deny all value to Vico's cosmology, if the
contradictions and obscurities in which he involves himself are
manifest, and were observed by critics of his own time, still we cannot
deny its dynamic nature as opposed to the mechanicism of contemporary
philosophy. The theory of metaphysical points, in which God appears as
the great geometrician who creates by knowing and knows by creating the
realities of the universe, is as it were a symbol of the necessity of
interpreting nature in idealistic language. We find here and there a
theologian Vico, an agnostic Vico, or even a fanciful Vico composing
cosmological and physical romances: but look where we will among his
works, we shall never find a materialistic Vico.
Even this by no means overbold metaphysic aroused suspicions of
pantheism, though the author insisted upon the theological doctrine
that God's activity is convertible _ab intra_ with the thing created
and _ab extra_ with the fact, and that therefore the world was created
in time; that the human soul, which as a mirror of the divine thinks
infinity and eternity, is not bounded by the body and therefore not
by time, and is therefore immortal; and that man, even if God were to
reveal it to him, cannot understand how the infinite enters into finite
objects. However, he thought it necessary to conclude his replies to
his critics by collecting statements demonstrating his orthodoxy, and
clinching the matter with the remark that "since God is in one sense
substance and in another His creatures, and since the _ratio essendi_
or essence is proper to substance, the created substances even as
regards their essence are diverse and distinct from the substance of
God."
Vico's thought was limited by the idea of transcendence, which
prevented him from attaining not only the unity of reality, but also
a truly complete knowledge of that world of man which he had so
powerfully explained by means of the opposite principle. We now see why
Vico, though he did not deny the fact of progress, could have no real
conception of it. It has been observed that the conception of progress
is foreign to Catholicism and dates from the Protestant Reformation,
and that therefore the Catholic Vico was bound to deny himself the
use of it. But the conception of an immanent providence is no less
irreconcilable with Catholicism, and yet Vico is saturated with this
idea. This means that he did not lack the impulse: rather he was unable
to pass a certain point beyond which his faith would have been too
obviously defeated. Progress, deduced from the immanent providence and
introduced into the New Science, would have accentuated the difference
within the uniformity, the origin at every moment of something new,
the perpetual enrichment of the flux at every reflux: it would have
changed history from an orderly traversing and retraversing of the line
drawn by God under the eye of God to a drama whose _ratio essendi_ is
contained within itself: it would have enmeshed and drawn with it the
whole universe and realised the thought of infinite worlds. In face
of this vision Vico paused in apprehension and stubbornly refused to
proceed: the philosopher in him had yielded to the Catholic.