CONCLUSION: VICO AND THE LATER DEVELOPMENTS OF PHILOSOPHICAL AND
HISTORICAL THOUGHT
The reader need not expect that having brought our exposition to
a close we shall add a verdict upon Vico's work, or what is known
as an "appreciation" of it. If the verdict has not already emerged
as a result of the exposition itself, or as identical with it, if
description and criticism have been not one and same, the fault lies
either with ourselves or with the reader's lack of attention; and
in either case it cannot now be repaired by ornamental additions or
redundant repetitions.
We confess also that we feel no sympathy with the chapters commonly
placed at the conclusion of critical works upon philosophers and
narrating the later history of their ideas. For if these "ideas" are
understood in an extrinsic sense, in their influence upon society and
culture, such a review may indeed have a value of its own,[1] but is
foreign to the history of philosophy properly so called: if on the
other hand they are considered as real and living philosophical ideas,
their later history amounts to neither more nor less than the history
of subsequent philosophy, and there is no reason for appending it to a
study of one philosopher rather than another. Any other method implies
the uncritical theory that ideas are something solid and crystallised,
like precious stones handed on from one generation to another, whose
shape and glitter can always be recognised unaltered in the new diadems
they compose and the new brows they adorn. But in reality ideas are
nothing but the unremitting thought of man, and transmission for them
is nothing less than transformation.
It is nevertheless a fact that no one has written on Vico without
feeling a need of casting his eyes over later years and noting the
resemblances and analogies between the Neapolitan philosopher's
doctrines and those of fifty or a hundred years after. And further,
we ourselves, in spite of the antipathy we admittedly feel, and the
methodical criteria we professedly employ, yet recognise now the
same necessity. Why is this? Because Vico in his own day passed for
an eccentric and lived as a recluse; because the later development of
thought was almost entirely untouched by his direct influence; because
even to-day, though well enough known in certain restricted circles,
he has not taken the place he deserves in the general history of
thought. How then can we show the manner in which his doctrines, true
or false, respond to the deepest needs of the mind, more simply than by
recording the similarity of the ideas and attempts which later appeared
in such profusion and intensity as to stamp their individuality upon
the philosophical and historical labours of a whole century? And even
if after our intrinsic examination of his thought this comparison with
the facts of later history seems unnecessary, it will at least be
granted that if our discourse like any other must have its rhetorical
conclusion, no peroration occurs more naturally than one consisting in
a rapid review of subsequent philosophy and philology and emphasising
their points of contact with the thought of Vico.
We might even adopt the method by which he compares the second
barbarism with the first, and present the later history of thought
as a "reflux" of Vico's ideas. In the first place his criticism of
Descartes' immediate knowledge recurs, together with his conversion
of the true with the created, in the speculative movement beginning
with Kant and Hegel and culminating in the doctrine of the identity of
truth and reality, thought and existence. His unity of philosophy and
philology recurs in the vindication of history against the scepticism
and intellectualism of the eighteenth century due to Cartesianism;
in the à priori synthesis of Kant which reconciles the real and the
ideal, experience and the categories; and in the historical philosophy
of Hegel, the greatest exponent of nineteenth-century historical
tendencies. This unity of philosophy and philology, a unity with Vico
sometimes confused and impure in method, recurred in its faulty aspects
also in the Hegelian school; so that this mental tendency might with
justice be entitled "Vicianism." The limitation which Vico tried to
impose on the value of mathematics and exact science recurred, as
did his criticism of the mathematical and naturalistic conception of
philosophy, in Jacobi's critique of Spinozistic determinism and Hegel's
of the abstract intellect; and in the case of mathematics in particular
Dugald Stewart and others recognised that its validity lay not in the
postulates but in the definitions, and the "fictions" of which Vico
speaks reappear in the modern terminology of the philosophy of these
sciences. His poetical logic or science of the imagination passes
into Aesthetic, so ardently studied by the philosophers, literary men
and artists of Germany in the eighteenth century, brought by Kant
into great prominence by his criticism of the Leibnitian doctrine of
intuition as confused conception, and further advanced by Schelling and
Hegel, who place art among the pure forms of the mind and so approach
the position of Vico. Romanticism too, especially in Germany but also
more or less in other countries, was Vician, emphasising as it did
the original function of the imagination. His doctrines of language
recurred when Herder and Humboldt treated it not intellectualistically
as an artificial system of symbols, but as a free and poetic creation
of the mind. The theory of religion and mythology abandoned the
hypotheses of allegory and deception, and with David Hume recognised
that religion is a natural fact, corresponding to the beginnings of
human life in its passionate and imaginative state; with Heyne, that
mythology is "symbolic speech," a product not of arbitrary invention
but of necessity and poverty, of the "lack of words," which finds
expression "in comparisons with things already known" (_per rerum iam
tum notarum similitudines);_ and with Ottfried Müller, that it is
impossible to understand mythology without entering into the very heart
of the human soul, where we may see its necessity and spontaneity.
Religion was regarded no longer as something extraneous or hostile to
philosophy, as a piece of stupidity or of deception practised by the
unscrupulous upon the simple, but according to Vico's own doctrine
as a rudimentary philosophy; so that the whole content of reasoned
metaphysic was already to a certain extent implicit in poetical or
religious metaphysic. Similarly, poetry and history were no longer kept
distinct or set face to face to destroy each other; and as one of the
great inspirers of the new German literature, Hamann (who in many ways
resembles Vico in tendency, though unequal to him in mental power),
had already foreseen when he uttered the warning, "if our poetry
is worthless, our history will become leaner than Pharaoh's kine,"
a breath of poetry revived the historical study of the nineteenth
century; once colourless, it became picturesque: once frigid, it
regained warmth and life. The criticism of Hobbes' and Locke's
utilitarianism, and the affirmation of the moral consciousness as a
spontaneous sense of shame and a judgment entirely free from reflection
reappeared in full panoply with the Critique of the Practical Reason;
and that of their social atomism and consequent contractualism in
Hegel's Philosophy of Right. The liberty of conscience and religious
indifferentism professed and inculcated by the publicists of the
seventeenth century were negated as a philosophical doctrine; and a
nation without God seemed to Hegel, as it did to Vico, a phenomenon not
to be found in history and existing only in the gossip of travellers in
unknown or little-known lands. Carrying on the work of the Reformation,
which Vico could neither grasp nor truly appreciate, the idealistic
philosophy of Germany aimed not at exterminating religion, but at
refining it, and at giving philosophy itself the spiritual value of
religion. The certitude, the hard certitude which Vico distinguished
from truth in the sphere of law, formed the subject of thought from
Thomasius to Kant and Fichte and so on to the most recent writers, who
have sought even if they have never found the distinctive criterion
of the two forms; all or nearly all show a vivid consciousness of
what is called "constraint" or "compulsion," a fact which had been
almost forgotten in the old superficial and rhetorical moral theory.
The historical school of law, in its reaction against the abstract
revolutionary and reformatory tendencies of the eighteenth century,
was bound to recall Vico's polemic against the Platonic or Grotian
theory of an ideal republic or a natural law above and outside history
and serving as a standard for history, and to recognise with Vico that
law is correlative to the whole social life of a people at a given
moment of its history and capable of being judged only in relation to
it; a living and plastic reality, in a continual process of change
like that of language. Finally, Vico's providence, the rationality
and objectivity of history, which obeys a logic different from that
attributed to it by the fancies and illusions of the individual,
acquires a more prosaic name, but without changing its nature, in
the "cunning of the reason" formulated by Hegel: it appeared again,
ingeniously but perversely treated, in Schopenhauer's "cunning of
the species," and again, treated with little ingenuity on a purely
psychological method, in Wundt's so-called law of the "heterogenesis of
ends."
Almost all the leading doctrines of nineteenth-century idealism, we
have seen, may be regarded as refluxes of Vician doctrines. Almost
all; for there is one of which we find in Vico not the premonition but
the necessity, not a temporary filling but a gap to be filled. Here
the nineteenth century is no longer a reflux of, but an advance upon
Vico; and discordant voices of warning or reproach rise up against
him. His distinction of the two worlds of mind and nature, to both of
which the criterion of his theory of knowledge, the conversion of the
truth with the thing created, was applicable, but applicable to the
former by man himself because that world is a world created by man,
and therefore knowable by him, to the second by God the Creator, so
that this world is unknowable by man; this distinction was not accepted
by the new philosophy, which, more Vician than Vico, made the demigod
Man into a God, lifted human thought to the level of universal mind or
the idea, spiritualised or idealised nature, and tried to understand
it speculatively in the "Philosophy of Nature" as itself a product of
mind. As soon as the last remnant of transcendence was in this way
destroyed, the concept of progress overlooked by Vico and grasped and
affirmed to some extent by the Cartesians and their eighteenth-century
followers in their superficial and rationalistic manner shone out in
its full splendour.
But if in this point Vico cannot stand the comparison with later
philosophy, the failure is amply atoned by the full agreement
between his historical discoveries and the criticism and research
of the nineteenth century. Above all, he agrees with his successors
in his rules of method, his scepticism as regards the narrative of
ancient historians, his recognition of the superiority of documents
and monuments over narrative, his investigation of language as a
store-house of primitive beliefs and customs, his social interpretation
of mythology, his emphasis on spontaneous development rather than
external communication of civilisation, his care not to interpret
primitive psychology in the light of modern psychology; and so on.
In his actual solutions of historical problems he also agrees with
later historians. These restated the archaic and barbaric character
of primitive Greek and Roman civilisation, and the aristocratic and
feudal tendency of its political constitution: they took up the view
of ancient legal ceremonial as a dramatic poem containing allusions to
the actions of fighting: the transformation of the Roman heroes into
heroes of democracy came to an end with the Jacobins in France and
their imitators in Italy and elsewhere; Homer was considered great in
proportion to his ruggedness; the history of Rome was reconstructed
chiefly on the basis of Roman law, and the names of the seven kings
appeared as symbols of institutions and the traditional origin of
Rome as a late invention derived from Greece or from Greek models:
the substance of this history was seen to consist in the economic and
juridical struggle between patriciate and plebs, and the plebs was
derived from the _famuli_ or clients: the struggle of the classes,
which Vico was the first to illuminate clearly, was recognised as a
criterion of wide application to the history of all time and serving
as an explanation of the most sweeping social revolutions: the Middle
Ages, especially during the Restoration which followed the Napoleonic
period, exercised a powerful appeal to sentiment and influence
on thought, being admired and regretted as the antithesis of the
rationalistic bourgeois society, and understood in consequence as the
religious, aristocratic and poetical period discovered by Vico, the
youth of modern Europe. Thus Italy rediscovered the greatness of her
own Dante, and the criticism of that poet which Vico had initiated
was carried to completion by De Sanctis. In the same way, Niebuhr and
Mommsen brought to maturity his view of Roman history; Wolf, his theory
of Homer; Heyne, Müller and Bachhofen, his interpretation of mythology;
Grimm and other philologists his projected reconstruction of ancient
life by means of etymology; Savigny and the historical school, his
study of the spontaneous development of law, and his preference for
custom rather than statute and code: Thierry and Fustel de Coulanges in
France, Troya in Italy and a host of scholars in Germany his conception
of the Middle Ages and of feudalism: Marx and Sorel his idea of the
struggle of classes and the rejuvenation of society by a return to a
primitive state of mind and a new barbarism: and lastly the superman
of Nietzsche recalls in some degree Vico's hero. These are merely a
few names picked without care and almost at random; for to mention
all, and each in his right place, would mean writing the whole history
of the latest phase of European thought, a history which is not yet
finished, though it has undergone, under the name of "positivism," a
parenthetical recurrence of the abstract and materialistic thought of
the eighteenth century, a parenthesis which now however seems to be at
an end.
These innumerable reappearances of the work of an individual in the
work of several generations, this parallelism between a man and a
century, justify a fanciful phrase with which we might draw from the
later developments in order to describe Vico; namely that he is neither
more nor less than the nineteenth century in germ. The description may
serve to summarise our reconstruction and exposition of his doctrines,
and to contribute towards a right understanding of his place in the
history of modern philosophy. He may rightly be placed side by side
with Leibniz, with whom he has so often been compared; but not, as
has been believed, because of any resemblance (the comparisons made in
this belief have been shown to be false or superficial) but precisely
because he is unlike him and in fact his very opposite. Leibniz is
Cartesianism raised to its highest power; an intellectualist, in spite
of the _petites perceptions_ and the confused knowledge; a mechanicist,
in spite of his dynamism, which perhaps exists in his fancy rather than
in his actual thought; hostile to history, in spite of his immense
historical erudition; blind to any knowledge of the true nature of
language, though deeply interested in language all his life; devoid of
dialectic, in spite of his attempt to explain the evil in the universe.
In relation to later idealism, the Leibnitian philosophy stands as
the most complete expression of the old metaphysic which had to be
transcended: that of Vico is the sketch of the new metaphysic, only
needing further development and determination. The one spoke to his own
century, and his century crowded round him and echoed his words far and
wide. The other spoke to a century yet to come; and the place in which
he cried was a wilderness that gave no answer. But the crowd and the
wilderness add nothing to and take nothing from the intrinsic character
of a thought.
[Footnote 1: See Appendix II.]
APPENDICES
APPENDIX I
ON THE LIFE AND CHARACTER OF G. B. VICO[1]
I
The transformation, half rhetorical, half mythical, which the heat of
the national reawakening effected in poets, philosophers, and almost
every character of any importance in Italian history, representing
them as patriots, liberals, and in open rebellion or secret revolt
against the throne and the altar, tried for a time to touch with its
magic wand and to work its will upon Giambattista Vico. It was said,
among other things, that Vico, conscious of the severe blow dealt by
his thought to the traditional beliefs of religion, and warned by his
friends, took pains to plunge the New Science into such obscurity
that only the finest intellects could perceive its tendencies. But
though this legend, energetically spread as it was by the patriots and
republicans of 1799, was believed here and there, it could not long
stand out against criticism or even against common sense; and Cataldo
Iannelli was right to pass over it with a few words of contemptuous
irony.[2] It is certain from an objective point of view that Vico's
doctrines implicitly contained a criticism of Christian transcendence
and theology as well as of the history of Christianity. From the
subjective point of view it may be that Vico during his youth (of which
we know very little) was the victim of religious doubts. Such doubts
may have been suggested to him not only by his reading, but by the
society of young men of his own age, among whom "libertines," or as
contemporary literature still called them "epicureans" or "atheists,"
were not uncommon.[3] In a letter of 1720 to Father Giacchi, he says
that at Naples the "weaknesses and errors dating from his early youth"
are remembered against him, and that these, fixed in the memory, became
as often happens "eternal criteria for the judgment of everything
beautiful and complete which he subsequently succeeded in doing."[4]
What can these errors and weaknesses have been?
Again when the _De universi iuris uno principio et fine uno_ appeared,
or rather the "Synopsis" which announced its programme, "the first
voices" which Vico heard raised against him "were tinged with an
assumed piety." He found protection and consolation in the face of
such criticism in religion itself, that is to say in the approval of
Giacchi, "the leading light of the strictest and most holy order of
religious."[5] But just as we possess no detailed information as to the
criticisms levelled against him on this head, so we have no certain
knowledge even of the most general kind as to the religious doubts that
may have troubled him. All Vico's writings show the Catholic religion
established in his heart, grave, solid and immovable as a pillar of
adamant; so solid and so strong that it remained absolutely untouched
by the criticism of mythology inaugurated by himself. Nor was Vico
an irreproachable Catholic in external demonstration only. He not
only submitted every word he ever printed to the double censorship,
public and private, of ecclesiastical friends, and led his life as a
philosopher and writer among priestly vestments and monastic cowls no
less than among legal gowns; he was even scrupulous enough to desist
from his commentary on Grotius, thinking it unseemly that a Catholic
should annotate a Protestant writer;[6] and so delicate was his sense
of Catholic honour that he refused to admit polemic upon matters of
religious feeling. "As to this difficulty," he says to his critics
of the _Giornale dei letterati_, "like that which you propound to me
concerning the immortality of the soul, where it appears that you have
in hand seven distinct arguments, if they had not been prepared for me
by you, I should judge that they go deeper and penetrate to a region
which is not only protected and secured by my life and conduct, but
which to defend is to outrage. But let us return to our subject."[7]
His Catholicism was untainted by the superstition so general and so
deeply rooted at the time, especially at Naples, where St. Januarius
intervened as an actor and director in every event of public and
private life. It was the Catholicism of a lofty soul and mind, not the
faith of a charcoal-burner. But Vico never assumed the part of censor
of superstitions. He was content with not speaking of them, as one
keeps silence concerning the failings of persons or institutions which
command one's respect.
[Footnote 1: Since the preceding portions of this work are strictly
confined to the analysis of Vico's philosophy and give no information
as to his life and personal character, the reader will not be
displeased to find in this appendix a lecture delivered by myself upon
the latter subject before the Neapolitan _Società di storia patria_ on
April 14, 1909, and later written down and published in the Florence
_Voce_(1st year, No. 43, October 7, 1909). I add for convenience of
memory that Vico was born at Naples on June 23, 1668 (not 1670 as he
says in his autobiography), and died on January 23 (not 20 as all
his biographers say), 1744: the new edition of the _Autobiografia,
carteggio e poesie varie_ (Bari, Laterza, 1911), pp. 101, 123, 124.]
[Footnote 2: See for the whole question Croce, _Bibliografia vichiana,_
pp. 91-5.]
[Footnote 3: In the _Giornali_ of Confuorto (MSS. in the library of
the Neapolitan Historical Soc. xx. c. 22, vol. iii. f. 111) under
August 1692, we find "certain civil persons were imprisoned in the
prisons of St. Dominic by the tribunal of the Holy Office; among them
the doctor Giacinto de Cristofaro, son of the doctor Bernardo; many
others escaped, members of the Epicurean or Atheist sect, who believe
the soul to perish with the body." This De Cristofaro is the famous
Neapolitan mathematician and jurisconsult, for whom see F. Amodeo,
_Vita matematica napoletana,_ part iii. (Naples, Giannini, 1905), pp.
31-44; he was Vico's friend. For other notices of the "Epicureans" at
Naples at this time see Carducci, _Opere,_ vol. ii. pp. 235-6.]
[Footnote 4: Letter of October 12, 1720.]
[Footnote 5: _Ibid._]
[Footnote 6: _Autobiografia,_ in _Opere,_ ed. Ferrari, 2nd ed. iv. p.
367.]
[Footnote 7: The "subject" is therefore not the religious objections,
which he regarded as a personal insult (_Riposta al Giornale dei
letterati,_ in _Opp._ ii. p. 160).]
II
Vico's attitude towards social and political life resembles in more
than one respect his attitude towards religion. There is in him
no trace of the missionary, the propagandist, the agitator or the
conspirator as there was in some of the Renaissance philosophers,
notably Giordano Bruno and Campanella, whom although--perhaps
because--a Neapolitan, Vico never mentions. Certainly, his age and his
country were not the time or place for heroes; there was none of that
rapid social change and revolution from which heroes spring. Political
parties however were active in favour of Austria and France, and men
were arising who devoted their labours and their lives to one or other
of these parties, or were persecuted and fled into exile: and above all
this was the period in which culminated the struggle between Church
and State, between Naples and Rome, in the person of Pietro Giannone,
a man of whom Vico never speaks, just as he never mentions and in fact
seems to ignore the entire movement. Political life rolled past over
his head, like the sky and its stars, and he never wasted his strength
in a vain attempt to reach it. Political and social controversy, like
religious, was outside the sphere of his activity. He was indeed a
non-political person. We cannot describe it as a fault or a weakness,
for every one has his limitations; one struggle excludes another, and
one labour makes others impossible.
Not that he avoided all contact with political life and its
representatives. Only too often he was compelled to pay his respects
to both, in the form of histories, speeches, verses and epigrams in
Latin and Italian; and these alone would be sufficient material for the
reconstruction of Neapolitan history in all its vicissitudes from the
end of the seventeenth century to the middle of the eighteenth: the
Spanish viceregency, the conspiracy and revolution attempted by the
partisans of Austria, the reaction and re-establishment of the Spanish
viceregency, the Austrian conquest, the Austrian viceregency, the
Spanish reconquest and the reign of Charles Bourbon. But Vico, "very
pliant because of his necessity"[8] and as professor of eloquence in
the royal university, was compelled to supply the literary compositions
required by the solemnities of the day, just as the draper supplied
hangings and the plasterer volutes and arabesques. And what hangings
and arabesques he produced! The Spanish style of the seventeenth
century was still predominant in literature; and this fact is alone
almost enough to explain the extravagance and ornateness, as it seems
to us, of Vico's flood of panegyrics. The indifference and innocence of
his own attitude may be illustrated by the passage in his autobiography
where after mentioning the _Panegyricus Philippo V inscriptus_ composed
by himself to the order of the Spanish viceroy, the Duke of Ascalona,
he goes on as if it was a mere nothing, with no connexion but a simple
"soon after": "soon after, this kingdom having passed under the rule of
Austria, the lord Count Wirrigo of Daun, at that time governor of the
imperial armies in this country, _ordered me_" to compose inscriptions
for the expiatory monuments to Guiseppe Capece and Carlo di Sangro,[9]
the two rebels against Philip V. executed by the previous government
some years before in the suppression of the conspiracy of Macchia
described by Vico from the Bourbon point of view in his _De Parthenopea
coniuratione._
But this implies no baseness of character on Vico's part. It must
be said that in these writings of his, orator and panegyrist though
he is, he can never be called a flatterer. The flatterer, the man
without a conscience, reviles and calumniates the enemies of the man
he is praising, or even strikes the conquered: and this is servility.
But Vico, who though he knew who the Italian or Neapolitan was that
sent to the _Acta Lipsiensia_ the note injurious to himself, and
might easily have ruined him, since the note was anti-Catholic in
tendency, generously refused to reveal his name,[10] gave no doubt his
services as professor of eloquence but refrained from trafficking in
the interests of the patrons whom he praised. Of the _Life of Antonio
Carafa_ which he composed for a commission and married one of his
daughters on the proceeds, he says that the work was "tempered by
honour towards the subject, reverence towards princes and the just
claims of truth."[11] And to return to the case of Capece and Sangro
mentioned above, when he spoke in the _De Parthenopea coniuratione_
of the death of these two enemies to the triumphant party, he shows
here too in various details the nobility of his spirit: of Capece, who
refused to surrender to the Spanish soldiers, he writes "exposing his
breast to death, and demanding death with his warlike arms, he fell
unrepentant, a most valiant manner of death, were it only honoured in
its cause" (_ostentans pectus neci eamque infensis armis efflagitans,
inexoratus occubuit, fortissimum mortis genus si causa cohonestasset_).
Of Sangro too, having reported the rumour that Louis XIV. sent him a
reprieve which arrived too late, he adds: "whence the condemned man,
who had already suffered the penalty, is the more to be pitied" (_unde
maior damnati qui iam poenas persolverat, miseratio_).[12]
He must have known, and doubtless did know, that most of the persons
whose praises he composed were of very little worth. To read his
panegyrics, one would suppose that Naples was adorned with a nobility
resplendent in its virtue, cultivation and learning: and yet, in
giving Father De Vitry the information he desired upon the condition
of studies in Naples, Vico did not conceal the facts: "the nobles
slumber amid the enjoyments of a life of pleasure."[13] His pupil
Antonio Genovesi has preserved to us one of his satirical expressions
upon this nobility, often in extreme poverty but always proud and
ready to go hungry at home in order to drive abroad in coaches
sumptuously dressed.[14] With reference to the literary duke of
Laurenzano, he formulated the theory that "noble" writers could not
fail of excellence:[15] and yet I have discovered among his papers
the manuscript of a book by this duke, rewritten from end to end by
the same Vico.[16] Such are the contradictions and the transactions
into which a poor man falls when the pressure of want has made him
timid and cautious; so that it is not easy to determine how far his
admiration was merely assumed at command or by complaisance, or how
far his feeling of social inferiority developed into a real admiration
for those above him in the scale, who possessed riches and dignity and
everything he lacked and were the "seigneurs."
[Footnote 8: _Opp._ vi. p. 20.]
[Footnote 9: _Autob._ in _Opp._ iv. p. 394.]
[Footnote 10: Letter of December 4, 1729: in _Opp._ vi. p. 32.]
[Footnote 11: _Autob._ in _Opp._ iv. p. 366.]
[Footnote 12: _Opp._ i. pp. 367, 368.]
[Footnote 13: _Opp._ vi. p. 9.]
[Footnote 14: He said that many of them "dragged their carriages with
their own guts" (_Suppl. alla Bibl. vich._ p. 10).]
[Footnote 15: _Opp._ vi. p. 95.]
[Footnote 16: _Bibl. vich._ pp. 27-8.]
III
For, as is well known, his financial state was always of the gloomiest.
The son of a small Neapolitan bookseller, he was at first compelled to
go as a private tutor to a wild town of the Cilento; later, returning
to Naples, he tried in vain to obtain the position of secretary of the
city, and having in 1699 been elected to the chair of rhetoric, he held
that position for thirty-six years at an annual stipend of a hundred
ducats (_£17_). His attempt to pass to a chair of greater importance in
1723 failed, whether owing to ill-luck or to inability--he recognised
that he was a "man of little spirit in matters of utility,"[17]--he was
compelled to give up hopes of academic advancement. He was therefore
obliged to eke out his resources by literary work such as we have
mentioned, and still more by private lessons; he not only kept school
at his own house as well as at the university, but he went up and down
other men's steps to teach grammar to youths or even to children. His
family fife was not a happy one. His wife was illiterate, and had not
the qualities with which her sex sometimes compensates the defect;
she was incapable of any domestic employment whatever, so that her
husband had to take her place. Of his children, one girl died after a
long illness and the heavy expenses which embitter the diseases of the
poor; one boy showed such strong vicious tendencies that the father was
compelled to seek the intervention of the police and place him in a
house of correction. So sublimely irrational was his fatherly affection
that upon this occasion when he saw from the window the police officers
he had called in, coming to take his miserable and beloved son away, he
ran to him crying, "my son, flee!"[18]
He was indeed of an extremely affectionate disposition; a fact which
may be gathered for instance from the noble and touching speech he
composed on the death of his friend Donna Angela Cimini, from the
tone of pity and indignation with which in the _Scienza Nuova_ he
spoke of the oppressed plebeians whose history he is investigating or
of the tragic figures of Priam and Polyxena, the romance of which he
feels keenly; and finally, from certain stylistic details scattered
here and there, such as the aphorism (no. xl.) where he says that
witches in order to solemnise their rites "slay without pity and
cut in pieces most lovely and innocent children," quite upset, in
the most inopportune but significant fashion, by the fate of these
little persons, whom his excited imagination adorns with a superlative
loveliness. His greatest domestic happiness came from his daughter
Luisa, a cultured and poetical soul, and his son Gennaro, who shared
with him and ultimately succeeded to his chair. When, in his panegyric
on the Countess of Althann, he calls ironically upon the philosophers
who dispute as they walk in pleasant gardens or beneath painted
porticoes, free from the agony and weariness of "wives in travail" and
"children wasting away with disease,"[19] we feel that he is speaking
from his own experience and smarting under the memory of domestic
troubles.
We often meet, especially in these days, with men of some talent who
consider themselves freed from this or that humble duty: and we ought
the more to admire this man of genius who on the contrary accepted
them every one, and (to use a phrase of Flaubert's) while thinking the
thought of a demigod lived the life of a townsman or even that of a man
of the people. He had acquired the habit of reading, writing, thinking
and composing his works "while discussing matters with his friends
amid the uproar of his children."[20]
His health was never very good: his friends called him "Mastro
Tisicuzzo":[21] very weak in youth, he was in his old age afflicted
with ulcers in the throat and pains in his thighs and legs. In a word,
the repose, the peace, the tranquillity which other philosophers enjoy
all their life or for long periods together was always lacking to Vico.
He was forced to play both Martha and Mary: working at every moment for
his own and his family's practical needs and working at the same time
to fulfil the mission to which he was devoted from his birth and to
give concrete form to the spiritual world that moved within him.
[Footnote 17: _Autob._ in _Opp._ iv. p. 349.]
[Footnote 18: Villarosa in the additions to the _Autobiography (Opp._
iv. p. 420).]
[Footnote 19: _Opp._ vi. p. 235.]
[Footnote 20: _Autob._ in _Opp._ iv. p. 366.]
[Footnote 21: "Mr. Skin-and-bones": cf. _Bibl. vich._ p. 87.]
IV
Thus we need not invent or demand a heroic Vico, looking for him
in the life of religion, society or politics. The true hero is the
Vico who stands before us, the hero of the philosophic life. Others
beside ourselves have noticed his love for the word "hero" and all
its derivatives, "heroism," "heroic," and so on: and the continual
use and varied application he makes of it. Heroism was for him the
mighty virgin force which appears in the beginning and reappears in the
reflux of history. This force he must surely have felt in himself as
he laboured for the truth and, overthrowing obstacles of every kind,
opened up new paths of science. It was this force that enabled him to
overcome the youthful uncertainties, fears and defeats which sometimes
plunged him in a profound individual and cosmic pessimism, visible
in the poem entitled "Feelings of One in Despair," to rise to the
certainty of scientific method enunciated in the _De nostri temporis
studiorum ratione_ and his first attempt at philosophico-historical
research represented by the _De antiquissima Italorum sapientia_;
and from this point, abandoning in part his own thought and weaving
a new tissue of what remained, led him to the _De uno universi iuris
principio et fine uno_ and to the _Scienza Nuova_ "after twenty-five
years," as he says of the discoveries contained in that work, "of
unremitting and toilsome thought."
The work completed by this poor teacher of grammar and rhetoric, by
this pedagogue whom a contemporary satirist saw "lean, with a rolling
eye, ferule in hand,"[22] by this unhappy _paterfamilias,_ is amazing
and almost terrifying; such is the mass of mental power compressed into
it. It is a work at once reactionary and revolutionary: reactionary in
relation to the present, by its attachment to the traditions of the
ancient world and the Renaissance; revolutionary as against the present
and the past in laying the foundations of that future later to be known
as the Nineteenth century.
Within the domain of science, this humble man of the people became an
aristocrat: and the "lordly style"[23] which he falsely ascribed to the
wretched writings of the proud nobles and pompous prelates of his day
was in reality his own. He loathed the polite and social literature
which was gradually spreading in France and Italy and other European
countries, the "ladies' books."[24] But he avoided no less that other
class of treatise which we nowadays call "handbooks," which explain in
detail elementary definitions and facts ascertained by others; books
useless except to the young.[25] Vico, who suffered quite enough from
the young within the circle of his school, saw no need to sacrifice to
them any part of his own inviolable life of science. The public towards
which he looked was not composed of boys, lords and ladies. When he
wrote, his first practical thought was, "what would a Plato, a Varro
or a Quintus Mucius Scaevola think of the fruits of his thought?" and
secondly, "what will posterity think?"[26] Among his contemporaries he
looked only at the republic of letters, the brotherhood of scholars,
the Academies of Europe: a public which did not require him to
repeat what had been already discovered and stated in the course of
the history of science, and was perfectly familiar to him, but only
demanded the exposition of such thoughts as constituted a real advance
of knowledge: not voluminous works, but "little books, all full of
original things."[27] His public was an ideal one, which sometimes
in his simplicity he confused with the actual professional scholars
and the critics of literary reviews: and the mistake often caused him
surprise. Short books on metaphysical subjects seemed to him to have
a peculiar power, as in fact they have; he compares them very justly
with religious meditations "which briefly set forth a small number of
points" and are more valuable for the development of the Christian
spirit than "the most eloquent and lucid sermons of the most gifted
preachers."[28] This love of brevity inspires his refusal to burden
with many books the republic of letters, which, he says, is already
sinking beneath the weight. He left his discourses unpublished, only
printed his _De ratione_ out of a sense of duty, and often expressed a
desire that the _Scienza Nuova_ alone should survive him, as the work
which summed up in itself the concentrated and perfected fruits of all
his earlier efforts.
His aristocratic ideal was accompanied by the loftiest dignity and the
profoundest loyalty in his conception of the life of science. From his
polemics we might compile a whole catechism on the right method of
conducting literary controversy. We must aim at victory, he says, not
in the controversy but in the truth; hence he desires that it should
be conducted "in the calmest manner of reasoning," because "he who is
strong does not threaten, and he who is right does not use insults";
the dispute must at any rate be interspersed with peaceful words
"showing that the minds of the disputants are placid and tranquil, not
excited and perturbed." To opponents whose objections are vague he
replies, "the judgment is in too general terms: and serious men never
deign to reply except to particular and determinate criticisms made
upon them." When these same opponents appeal to the "refined taste of
the age, which has banished," etc., etc., he replies contemptuously,
"a grave criticism this, in truth: it is no criticism at all. In thus
taking refuge from one's opponents before the tribunal of one's own
judgment, by saying that what they say is a thing of which one has no
idea, from an opponent one becomes the judge." He refused to rely upon
his authorities, but yet did not undervalue them; authority ought to
"make us attentive to seek the causes which could have induced authors,
especially the most weighty, to adopt such and such opinions." Again,
accused of attributing errors to philosophers so as to be able to
refute them with ease, like Aristotle, he protests with dignity: "I
would rather enjoy my own small and simple stock of knowledge than be
compared in bad faith with a great philosopher." His moderation may be
illustrated by his splendid eulogy of Descartes, though he spent the
best part of his mental powers in opposing him. His loyalty is shown
by his prompt recognition of his own errors: "I admit," he says at
one point to the critics of the _Giornale dei letterati_, "that my
distinction is faulty."[29] "The reader must not think it ostentatious
in us" (he writes in the second _Scienza Nuova_), "that not satisfied
with the favourable judgments of such men as these upon our works,
we yet disapprove and reject these works. On the contrary, it is a
proof of the high veneration and respect in which we hold these men.
For rude and haughty writers uphold their works even against the just
accusations and reasonable corrections of others: some, who by chance
are of a small spirit, sate themselves with the favourable judgments
they receive and because of these go no further towards perfection:
but in our case the praise of great minds has increased our courage to
amend, to complete, and even to recast in a better form this work of
ours."[30]
His scientific life was upright, worthy of a serious searcher after
truth; his emotional life disturbed and restless, worthy of one who
sees face to face the truth he has long sought and desired, and
rejoices in the power of laying it before mankind. Hence his lofty
poetry, expressed not in verse but in prose, and especially in the
_Scienza Nuova_. "Vico is a poet," writes Tommaseo: "he brings
fire from smoke, and lively images from metaphysical abstractions:
he reasons as he narrates and depicts while he reasons: over the
mountain-tops of thought he does not walk, he flies; and in one
sentence he often compresses more lyrical feeling than may be found in
many an ode."[31] De Sanctis saw in the _Scienza Nuova_ the progress
of a poem, almost a new _Divina commedia._ Sublime like Dante, he was
more severe than Dante himself; if the lips of the Ghibelline show at
times the flicker of "a passing smile," Vico looks at history with
a face "that never smiles." Moreover, the man whose style has been
so often criticised is not a commonplace writer; he was as careful a
student of pure Tuscan[32] as he was a fine connoisseur, according to
Capasso, of Latin phraseology.[33] But he was faulty in the arrangement
of his books, because his mind did not master all the philosophical and
historical material it had accumulated; he wrote carelessly because
wildly and as if possessed by a demon: and hence arise the lack of
proportion and the confusion in the various parts of his work, within
single pages and single paragraphs. He often gives the impression of
a bottle of water quickly inverted, in which the liquid trying to
issue forth so presses against the narrow opening "that it comes out
painfully, drop by drop." Painfully, by fragments, and disjointedly.
One idea while he is expressing it recalls another, that a fact, and
that another fact: he tries to say everything at once, and parenthesis
branches off into parenthesis in a manner to make one's brain reel. But
these chaotic periods, weighted as they are with original thoughts, are
no less woven of striking phrases, statuesque words, phrases full of
emotion, and picturesque images. A bad writer, if you will, but his is
the kind of bad writing of which only great writers possess the secret.
[Footnote 22: _Bill. vich._ p. 82.]
[Footnote 23: _Opp._ vi. p. 93.]
[Footnote 24: _Ibid._ vi. p. 5.]
[Footnote 25: _Ibid._ v. p. 50 (note).]
[Footnote 26: _Ibid._ ii. p. 123.]
[Footnote 27: _Ibid._ ii. p. 148.]
[Footnote 28: For instance in his letter to Saliani, November 18,
1725, published in _Bibl. vich._ pp. 97-8, the autograph being in my
possession.]
[Footnote 29: See the _Riposte_ in _Opp._ ii. _passim._]
[Footnote 30: _Opp._ v. p. 10.]
[Footnote 31: _G. B. Vico e il suo secolo_ in the volume _La Storia
civile nella letteratura_ (Turin, Loescher, 1872), p. 104: cf. a
judgment on Vico as a writer, _ibid._ pp. 9-10.]
[Footnote 32: _Opp._ iv. pp. 333-4; vi. pp. 41, 140.]
[Footnote 33: _Bibl. vich._ p. 87.]
V
The philosophical heroism of Vico asserts itself not only in the
internal struggle with himself for the elaboration of his science.
It was exposed to other and sterner trials. The position reached by
his thought, opposed as it was to the present, and while apparently
reactionary turned in reality towards the future, inevitably prevented
him from being understood. No doubt this is the fate of every man
of genius: his inmost thought is never understood, even when social
fortune seems to favour him, even when he arouses enthusiasm and finds
a host of disciples and imitators. The words which Hegel is said
to have uttered on his deathbed--"one only of my pupils understood
me, and he misunderstood me"--admirably express this historical
necessity: the man whom his age fully understands dies with his age.
And yet the disproportion between the value of a man's thought and
his contemporaries' failure to understand it has seldom if ever been
greater than in Vico's case. If he had been free from other causes of
discontent, this alone would have been sufficient. The "desire for
praise," which in other than commonplace minds is a desire to see what
they think true and good shared, approved and universalised among other
minds, was always with him a "vain desire."
He was the more afflicted by this misunderstanding and indifference
because, as we may well suppose, he was fully conscious of the
importance of his own discoveries. He knew that Providence had
entrusted to him a lofty mission: he knew himself to be "born for
the glory of his country, and therefore in Italy; since, being born
there and not in Morocco, he became a scholar."[34] When he published
the _Scienza Nuova,_ he believed that he had fired a mine whose
loud explosion he expected every minute. Nothing happened: nobody
mentioned it to him: so that he wrote some days later, to a friend:
"In publishing my work in this city I seem to have launched it upon a
desert. I avoid all public places, so as not to meet the persons to
whom I have sent it, and if by chance I do meet them, I greet them
without stopping; for when this happens, these people give me not
the faintest sign that they have received my book, and so confirm my
impression of having published it in a wilderness."[35] He had frankly
expected a swift and immediate effect: he had hoped to find, among his
contemporaries and acquaintances at Naples, minds ready and intellects
open to receive and bear fruit of his thoughts: and he hoped this
of monks engaged in composing and learning by rote wordy sermons,
poetasters rhyming in sonnets and advocates compiling second-hand
speeches!
Instead of this, he found many sceptical and indifferent, and several
inclined to laugh. His _Diritto universale_ had been as Metastasio
informs us[36] generally "blamed for obscurity" on its publication; it
was not widely read and was hastily criticised for the extravagances
which an inattentive and superficial reading revealed at every
point.[37] Father Paoli, to whom the author had given a copy, wrote in
it a couplet making a joke of its unintelligibility.[38] The _Scienza
Nuova_ was in an even worse case. We know that Nicola Capasso, a
scholar and well disposed towards Vico, on trying to read it fancied
he had lost his wits, and by way of a joke hurried off to his doctor
Cirillo, to have his pulse felt.[39] A Neapolitan nobleman when asked
by Finetti at Venice what opinion was held of Vico at Naples, said that
for a time he had passed for a really learned man, but that later his
strange opinions had won him the reputation of an eccentric. "And when
he published the _Scienza Nuova_?" insisted Finetti. "Oh, by then,"
replied the other, "he was quite mad!"[40] His detractors even attacked
him in the modest profession by which he earned his living; they said
he was "good at teaching youths who had completed their course, that
is to say when they already knew all they needed," or again, more
insidiously, that he was fitted less for teaching than for "giving good
advice to the teachers themselves;"[41] so that they recognised his
superiority only to use it in damaging his private interests.
[Footnote 34: _Autob._ in _Opp._ iv. p. 385.]
[Footnote 35: Letter to Giacchi, November 25, 1725, in _Opp._ vi. p.
28.]
[Footnote 36: _Bibl. vich._ p. 40.]
[Footnote 37: _Opp._ vi. p. 20.]
[Footnote 38: _Bibl. vich._ p. 26.]
[Footnote 39: _Ibid._ p. 87.]
[Footnote 40: _Bibl. vich._ p. 86: cf. _Autob._ in _Opp._ iv. p. 416.]
[Footnote 41: _Autob._ in _Opp._ iv. p. 416.]
VI
The indifference of the public and the insincerity or malignity
of critics could not for Vico be compensated by the friends and
appreciative readers of whom Vico had a certain number. How indeed
could it have been otherwise, when he cultivated them artificially
with such care and anxiety? Consider for instance the way in which
he cultivated the friendship of Giacchi the Capucin. He praised his
"admirable works," his "most divine talents," the "rare sublimity" of
his "marvellous and divine ideas." He tells him that he has given to
the scholars of the city the eulogistic letter sent to him by Giacchi
and that they all admire "the sublime workmanship of the conception";
and yet he himself used to rewrite in scholar's Latin the inscriptions
Giacchi composed in monk's Latin![42] On another occasion he wrote that
the praises of a Giacchi had excited envy and had in certain quarters
been described as flatteries. He took no less pains to propitiate
the Archbishop of Bari, Muzio di Gaeta, a conceited creature full
of his own merits and incapable of speaking except about himself.
Muzio wrote a panegyric on Pope Benedict XIII., a work of which,
though Vico praised it again and again, he had never heard enough,
and was always covertly or openly demanding new praises. So Vico used
to besprinkle him patiently with the desired fluid: "the marvellous
work of Your Excellency"; his "lordly diction"; his "demosthenic
digressions"; his eloquence, that philosophic speech employed in
Greece by the Academic school, in Rome by Cicero, and "among the
Italians by none but Your Excellency!" To the advocate Francesco
Solla, who had been his pupil and had subsequently retired into the
country, he hinted that the _Scienza Nuova_ looked towards him as one
of the few men in the world possessed of a mind penetrating enough
to receive it unhampered by any prejudices concerning the origin of
mankind.[43] Such were the guileless artifices and the pitiful little
schemes by which he contrived to give an illusory satisfaction to his
thirst for recognition and praise, and a narcotic to his overwrought
nerves. But the final results were miserable enough. Giacchi's
letters contain not a word to show that he had ever grasped one of
Vico's doctrines or even that he had examined them with any serious
interest. Monsignor di Gaeta, after a labyrinth of circumlocutions,
admits that he "admired more than he understood" of Vico's works;[44]
and possibly he was so much occupied in admiring his own prose that
he never read them at all. Solla, in whom Vico placed such hopes,
thought the discourse on the death of Angela Cimini superior to all
the author's other works, including the _Scienza Nuova_ itself. Vico
received a no less incautious compliment from another admirer; though
a warm and affectionate one,--Esteban.[45] Compliments of a vague and
unintelligent kind sometimes reached him in return for the copies of
his works which he sent not only to Neapolitan scholars but to those
of Rome, Pisa, Padua and even Germany, Holland and England: he sent a
copy to Isaac Newton.[46] Generally, however, these gifts were received
in contemptuous silence. At most, Vico acquired the reputation of a
scholar among hundreds of scholars, a man of letters among thousands of
similar men; a learned man, but nothing more.
Among the modest, the insignificant, and the young, Vico no doubt had
strong admirers. Among these were the poet, later a sacred orator,
Gherardo de Angelis, Solla and Esteban whom we have mentioned, the monk
Nicola Concina of Padua, and some more. But though their affection
was strong their intelligence was weak. Even Concina admitted while
rhapsodising his enthusiasm that he did not very clearly comprehend
his master: "Oh, what fruitful and sublime lights are here! If only
I had the talent to make use of them, to comprehend their depth and
the wonderful art of which I seem to catch a glimpse!"[47] The best
service that these friends could do him was to soothe with kindly words
Vico's embittered spirit, if they could not do so by following his
inmost thoughts. This is what Esteban does at the close of the letter
in which he excuses himself for his foolish remark on the funeral
speech of Angela Cimini in phrases he must have gathered from the
master's lips: "Be confident, Sir, that Providence, through channels
unimagined by yourself, will cause to spring up for you a perennial
fountain of immortal glory!"[48] The Jesuit Father Domenico Lodovico,
who wrote the couplet inscribed beneath Vico's portrait, on receiving
the _Scienza Nuova_ sent to the author with much sound sense a little
wine from the cellar and a little bread from the oven of the Jesuit
house of the Nunziatella, together with a graceful letter begging
the author to accept "these trifles, simple as they are, since the
infant Jesus himself did not refuse the rude offerings of pastoral
peasants." He suggested too that at the side of the alphabet in the
symbolic frontispiece to the work a little dwarf should be added in the
posture of one dumb with astonishment like Dante's mountaineer, and
that beneath him should be written, "with a significant diaeresis,"
the name Lodo-vico![49] Among the young men of his school there were
some who, nourished upon his doctrines, were ready to defend their
master with their swords;[50] but we all know the value of these
youthful enthusiasms. If these scholars had really assimilated Vico's
doctrines or any part of them, we should have found traces of it in
the literature or culture of the next generation after Vico; but such
traces are entirely absent. Hardly a single one of his formulae, his
historical statements, or conceptions even superficially understood
is to be found in Conti at Venice, Concina at Padua, Ignazio Luzan
in Spain--though the last named was living at Naples when the
_Scienza Nuova_ was published;[51] or even, within the author's own
neighbourhood, in Genovesi or Galiani.
Envy, insincerity, gossip, calumny and stupidity provoked violent
outbursts of anger on Vico's part. He confesses this fault in his
autobiography where he says that he inveighed in too severe a manner
against the errors of conception or doctrine or the incivility of his
literary rivals, when in Christian charity and as a true philosopher
he ought to have ignored or pardoned them.[52] But as a matter of fact
this fault did not greatly distress him: he thought it rather an
ornament. The funeral speech for Angela Cimini contained a kind of hymn
to anger, the "heroic wrath which in noble spirits disturbs and shakes
to the depths by its boiling all those evil thoughts of the mind,
which beget the vile swarm of fraud, deceit and falsehood, and renders
the hero frank, truthful and loyal; and thus making him a partisan of
truth, arms him as the valiant knight of reason to do battle with wrong
and offence."[53]
Although in his writings he guards "with all his power" against falling
into this passion[54] we feel a scarcely repressed torrent of wrath in
his private letters whenever he denounces the "miserable pedants" who
"love learning more than truth," or the common tendency of man to be
"all memory and imagination," and so forth. In conversation also, it
seems, he could be very violent. When in 1736 Damiano Romano published
a work controverting his theory of the Twelve Tables, Vico, although
according to Romano himself he had been spoken of as "most learned"
and "most famous," together with other titles of respect, "tore the
book to pieces with his teeth in a way that made every one present
tremble with horror," rinding a sign of the deepest malignity in the
fact that "a lad like myself should join issue with him."[55] But his
outbursts of wrath were succeeded by fits of the deepest dejection. In
a sonnet he speaks of himself as over-whelmed by that fate "which the
unjust hate of others often creates," and says that for this reason he
has separated himself from human society to live with himself alone.
Sometimes he shakes off this torpor for a moment: then, he says:
I draw within myself again, and pressed
By heavy cares, return to where I stood:[56]
My fate and not my fault I do lament.
[Footnote 42: Published by me in _Napoli nobilis,_ xiii. (1904), f. 1.,
and again in _Secondo suppl. alla Bibl. vich._ pp. 70-2.]
[Footnote 43: _Opp._ vi. p. 17.]
[Footnote 44: _Bibl. vich._ pp. 103-5.]
[Footnote 45: _Opp._ vi. p. 145.]
[Footnote 46: _Ibid._ p. 110.]
[Footnote 47: _Opusc.,_ ed. Villarosa, ii. p. 277.]
[Footnote 48: _Bibl. vich._ p. 105.]
[Footnote 49: "I praise Vico." Letter published by me in _Bibl. vich._
p. 107.]
[Footnote 50: _Bibl. vich._ pp. 87-8.]
[Footnote 51: _Ibid._ p. 44.]
[Footnote 52: _Autob._ in _Opp._ iv. p. 416: cf. the evidence of a
pupil in _Bibl. vich._ p. 89.]
[Footnote 53: _Opp._ vi. p. 254.]
[Footnote 54: _Autob._ in _Opp._ iv. p. 416.]
[Footnote 55: _Bibl. vich._ p. 88.]
[Footnote 56: Sonnet published by G. Gentile, _Il Figlio di G. B. Vico_
(Naples, Pierro, 1905), p. 173.]
VII
But among all these troubles, obstacles and disappointments, in
the midst of this sadness which often draped his life in black,
Vico enjoyed one of the loftiest joys accessible to man; the "life
of meditation" freed and purified from passion, lived by man in
solitude without the turbulent and grievous company of the body:
the life of security, because it is "made one with the soul always
ready and present which shows man his being rooted in the Eternal
that measures all times and walking in the Infinite that comprehends
all finite things; it crowns him with an eternal and immeasurable
joy not restricted invidiously to certain places nor grudgingly to
certain times; but it can grow up within himself only if without envy
of rivalry or fear of diminution it spreads and communicates itself
unceasingly to more and more human minds."[57] That he has attained
truth he never doubts, though he never ceases to elaborate it further;
with the system presented in the work on _Universal Law,_ his mind,
he says, "rested content."[58] The weariness and even the pain he
had suffered were dear to him, because through them he arrived at
his discoveries: "I bless the twenty-five full years I have spent
in meditation upon this subject, in the midst of the adversities of
fortune and the checks I have often received from the unhappy example
of great thinkers who have attempted new and weighty discoveries."[59]
How could he have done anything but bless these fatigues, pains and
adversities, if, whenever he rose above the passionate perturbations
of the empirical man and the struggles of the practical man, his mind
showed him the inevitable necessity of his toil and of his sufferings,
two necessities fused into one another so as to become one and
indivisible?
His own philosophical doctrine then brought him the remedy for his
ills, and worked in his spirit the _catharsis_ of liberation; the
doctrine of the immanent Providence, or as it was later called,
historical necessity, which was his central thought. "Praise be to
Providence for ever, which, when the weak sight of mortals sees in it
nothing but stern justice, then most of all is at work on a crowning
mercy! For by this task I see that I am clothed upon with a new man;
I feel that everything that goaded me to bewail my hard lot and to
denounce the corruption of literature that has caused that lot, has
vanished; for this corruption and this lot have strengthened me and
enabled me to perfect my task. And more, it may perhaps not be true,
but it would please me, were it true, that this labour has filled me
with a certain spirit of heroism, through which no fear of death any
longer disturbs me and my mind feels no disquietude at the words of my
rivals. Lastly, it has established me as upon a mighty rock of adamant
before the judgment of God, who rewards the work of creation by the
approval of the wise, who are always and everywhere few in numbers ...
men of the loftiest intellect, of a learning all their own, generous
and great-hearted, whose only labour is to enrich with deathless works
the commonwealth of letters."[60] Thus Providence showed him the
necessity of all that had befallen or should befall him in his life,
taught him resignation and promised him glory.
[Footnote 57: _Opp._ vi. p. 287.]
[Footnote 58: _Ibid._ p. 18.]
[Footnote 59: _Ibid._ pp. 153-4.]
[Footnote 60: _Opp._ vi. pp. 29-30.]
VIII
So the hot-tempered man became at last tolerant: tolerant with that
tolerance, that lofty indulgence which must not be confused with common
toleration. The University, in which he had hoped for advancement and
towards which he directed the thought of his earlier works, would
have none of him; he retired within himself to think out the _Scienza
Nuova._ Now, says he with a smile in which we may still see a trace of
bitterness, I owe this work to the University, which, by judging me
unworthy of the chair and not wishing me to be "occupied in treating
paragraphs," gave me leisure for meditation: "what greater obligation
could I have?"[61] A friend, Sostegni the Florentine, in a sonnet to
Vico, let slip some words in condemnation of the city of Naples for
making so little of her distinguished son. Vico in his reply justifies
his native place in noble words, as being stern towards him because she
expected and desired much of him:
Stern mother, she caresses not her son,
Lest so she fall into obscurity,
But gravely listens, watching as he speaks.[62]
This was the spirit that found expression in the Autobiography, a
work which has been misjudged and in fact entirely misunderstood by
Ferrari, who censures its prevailing teleological tendency and laments
the absence of a "psychological" explanation of Vico's life;[63]
as if Vico had not himself explained that he was writing it from a
"philosophical" point of view.[64] And what is the meaning of a
philosophical treatment of a philosopher's life but an understanding
of the objective necessity of his thought and a perception of the
scaffolding it involves even where the author at the moment of thinking
did not clearly perceive it? Vico "meditates upon the causes, natural
and moral, and upon the occasions of his fortunes; he meditates upon
the inclinations or aversions he felt from childhood towards this or
that branch of study; he meditates upon the opportunities or hindrances
which assisted or retarded his progress; he meditates, lastly, upon
certain efforts of his own in right directions which bore fruit in the
reflections upon which he built his final work, the _Scienza Nuova,_
which work was to demonstrate that his literary life was bound to have
been what it was and not different."[65] Vico's _Autobiography_ is,
in a word, the application of the _Scienza Nuova_ to the life of its
author, the course of his own individual history: and its method is as
just and true as it is original. Vico succeeded in part only of his
attempt, and could not form a criticism and history of himself to the
same extent to which a modern critic and historian is in a position
to do--whose efforts will again be improved upon by those of the
future--is too obvious to need emphasising. The _Autobiography_ itself
concludes with a blessing upon the author's hardships, a profession of
faith in Providence and a sure expectation of fame and glory.
[Footnote 61: _Ibid._ p. 29.]
[Footnote 62: _Ibid._ p. 446.]
[Footnote 63: In the Introduction to vol. iv. of the _Opere._]
[Footnote 64: _Autob._ in _Opp._ iv. p. 402.]
[Footnote 65: _Ibid._]
IX
In the last years of his life Vico, enfeebled by age, domestic trouble
and illness, "entirely gave up his studies":[66]
My pen is slipping from my palsied grasp;
The door of my thought's treasury is closed,[67]
he cries in two mournful lines of a sonnet in 1735. He prepared at
this time additions and corrections for a possible reprint of the
second _Scienza Nuova,_ and incorporated them in the final manuscript
of the work; he thought for a time of printing his small work "on the
Equilibrium of the Living Body" (_De aequilibrio corporis animantis_)
composed many years earlier and now lost;[68] he still discharged
some of the duties of his office, such as the speech on the marriage
of the king, Charles Bourbon, in 1738. But from 1736 or 1737 his son
began to assist him in his professional work, and in January 1741 he
was definitely appointed to the chair on his father's resignation.[69]
Vico henceforth lived among his family like an old soldier _exacta
militia,_ thinking over his past battles and conscious of having
done his life's work. His good son read to him for some hours every
day out of the Latin classics he had once loved and studied so well.
And in this evening of his life he was at least spared the crowning
agony suffered in his last years by a philosopher more fortunate than
himself, Immanuel Kant; the agony of continuing and completing his
system of philosophy, and wearing himself out in a fruitless struggle
with thoughts that eluded his grasp and words that no longer obeyed
him. Vico had said all he had to say; a great historian of his own
life, he knew the moment at which Providence had finished its work in
him, closed the door of thought it had so freely opened, and ordered
him to lay down his pen.[70]
[Footnote 66: _Ibid._ p. 415.]
[Footnote 67: _Opp._ vi. p. 425 (Sonnet on the marriage of Raimondo di
Sangro, 1735).]
[Footnote 68: _Bibl. vich._ pp. 38-9.]
[Footnote 69: Gentile, _Il Figlio di G. B. Vico,_ pp. 30-48.]
[Footnote 70: The documents and the scattered notes used in this
lecture and quoted from the contents of my _Bibliografia vichiana_ are
now all collected in my edition of the _Autobiografia, carteggio e
poesie varie:_ cf. the present vol. _infra,_ p. 308.]
APPENDIX II
THE LATER HISTORY OF VICO'S THOUGHT[1]
The history of the vicissitudes of Vico's reputation must not be
allowed to replace or be confused with the exposition and valuation of
his thought, by losing sight of the history of philosophy properly so
called or confusing it with the history of culture.[2] But even when
we pass to this second history, we must guard against another kind of
error, namely the pretence of determining by its means whether Vico's
work was or was not of use in the advancement of culture, and what
degree of utility we should grant it. The inquiry is meaningless, and
the degree cannot be measured: for rightly considered one disciple may
be worth tens or hundreds, one effect produced after centuries may
compensate its age-long delay, one point undeservedly forgotten may
become as notable and instructive as the best-deserved reputation,
and one single truth twice discovered independently may from this
re-discovery and seeming superfluity receive a confirmation of its
inevitable necessity. The work of Vico--such is the usual verdict--was
entirely useless, because it appeared out of its due time and
prematurely, and remained unknown or was known only because it could
convey nothing new. Such language is a blasphemy against history, which
allows nothing to be useless and is always and throughout the work of
Providence, whose vast utilities must not be measured by the pettiness
of the human span.
Was Vico appreciated in the course of the eighteenth century? Did any
one read him, understand him and follow his lead? The question has
been answered with equal decision in the affirmative and the negative.
The affirmative answer has been supported by a diligent collection of
scattered passages up and down the writers of the century mentioning
his name and doctrines and an accumulation of possible or apparent
traces of his thoughts visible though unacknowledged in Italian and
foreign literature. But a thinker like Vico can only be said to be
known when his fundamental thought has been grasped and the spirit
that animated him has been felt. Now the majority of the facts alleged
as proof of the efficacy of his work concerns particular doctrines
detached from the whole and accepted or contested just like those of
any other scholar and critic or any paradox-monger of his time. This
is true in the first place of his theory on the origin of the Twelve
Tables, discussed in the controversy between Bernardo Tanucci and Guido
Grandi from 1728 to 1731, contested in 1736 by Damiano Romano, accepted
in France by Bonamy in 1735 and recalled in 1750 by Terrasson; of the
views on the history and primitive government of Rome, mentioned by
Chastellux, adopted and expanded by Duni, and used by Du Bignon who
learnt them from Duni; of the hypotheses as to the prehistoric period
and the origins of humanity, employed and modified by Boulanger in
France and Mario Pagano in Italy; and lastly, of some conceptions upon
poetry and language which reappear in Pagano, Cesarotti and some others.
A more essential question was that of the method of studying and
judging political institutions and laws; a question upon which
Montesquieu has been compared with Vico and accused of freely using the
_Scienza Nuova_ without acknowledging his debt. It is now established
through Montesquieu's journal that in 1728 Antonio Conti at Venice
advised the future author of the _Esprit des Lois_ to buy Vico's book
at Naples; and Montesquieu must have followed this advice on reaching
Naples in the following year; for a copy of the 1725 edition of the
_Scienza Nuova_ is still preserved in the library at the château of La
Brède. But the mind of the French writer was too different from and
inferior to that of Vico to draw vital nourishment from a work such as
the _Scienza Nuova;_ and the traces of imitation alleged to have been
discovered in the _Esprit des Lois_ are very doubtful and in any case
of minor importance. It must be said on the other hand that the merit
generally attributed to Montesquieu of having introduced the historical
element into positive laws and thus considering legislation in a truly
philosophical manner (as Hegel said later), that is, as a moment
depending upon a totality relative to all the other determinations
which go to form the character of a people or a period; this merit, in
order both of time and of excellence, belongs in reality to Vico.
Like Montesquieu in the science of legislation, so Wolf in the Homeric
question has been suspected of tacitly deriving help from Vico's
speculations. But at the time when he published the _Prolegomena ad
Homerum_ in 1795 Wolf did not know the _Scienza Nuova_; which he
knew in name only in 1801 and in fact the year after, when Cesarotti
presented him with the book. We must observe that Vico's judgment as
to the barbaric nature of the Homeric epos and the absence in it of
esoteric wisdom had been published in 1765 by the _Gazette littéraire
de l'Europe_; and further, that the _Scienza Nuova_ was known and
used by the Danish philologist and archaeologist Zoega, who quotes it
in an essay on Homer composed in 1788 though not published till long
afterwards; and that Zoega corresponded with Heyne, who afterwards
accused Wolf of having derived from his own lectures the theory set
forth in the _Prolegomena._ Heyne had in fact expressed the idea of
a gradual genesis of the Homeric poems in 1790. In a word we may say
that Vico's views had to some extent penetrated into the atmosphere of
German philology: in which case Wolf may have originally had a certain
indirect knowledge of them. Even apart from this indirect communication
the fact remains, and is recognised by all students of the question,
that the Homeric theory conceived by Wolf must really be called
not Wolfian but Vician, since such it truly is in its fundamental
characteristics. Moreover, Wolf, as a philologist far superior to Vico
but much less great as a thinker, was not in a position to understand
the ideas which had led his predecessor to the doctrine he held
concerning Homer: a fact which is clear from the somewhat superficial
article he wrote on the subject in 1807.
There was certainly at Naples during the eighteenth century a vague
consciousness in many minds of the greatness of Vico's work; but in
what precisely this greatness consisted nobody could determine, owing
to the lack of adequate experience and preparation. Outside Italy,
especially in Germany, where this preparation existed or at least was
much greater, Vico's work remained generally unknown, partly through
the discredit into which Italian books had fallen since the end of the
seventeenth century, and partly through the dimculties which Vico's
style presented to a foreign reader. When the _Scienza Nuova_ did
fall into the hands of men competent to understand it, a series of
insignificant accidents interposed to prevent such an understanding.
Hamann procured the _Scienza Nuova_ from Florence in 1777, at which
time he was engaged upon economics and physiocracy, fancying that it
dealt with these subjects; and the delusion was not dispelled when in
glancing over it he found himself faced by a collection of philological
studies and studies carried out with considerable carelessness. Goethe
received it at Naples in 1787 from Filangieri, who warmly recommended
it, took it back to Germany and lent it in 1792 to Jacobi; but it was
a happy coincidence rather than a true knowledge or a clear intuition
that led him to couple Vico's name with that of Hamann. Herder, who may
also have known Vico's work less through his correspondence with Hamann
in 1777 than by his travels in Italy in 1789, speaks of it in 1797
in quite general terms, without noticing one of the many connexions
between Vico and himself, especially as regards the theory of language
and poetry.
The only men in the eighteenth century who really to some extent
penetrated into the fundamental thought of Vico and proclaimed though
unwillingly his genuine greatness were--and this is another proof of
the solid mental fibre of Catholicism--his Catholic opponents, of whom
there were plenty: Romano, Lami, Rogadei, and above all Finetti. They
saw that in spite of his stubborn protestations of religious orthodoxy
Vico held a conception of Providence very different from that of
Christian theology; and that though he continually used the name of God
he never allowed him to operate effectively in history as a personal
God; that he made so sharp a distinction between sacred and profane
history as to reach a purely natural and human theory of the origin of
civilisation, by means of the state of nature, and of the origin of
religion, by means of fear, shame and the imaginative universal; while
the traditional Catholic doctrine admitted a certain communication
between sacred and profane history, and recognised in pagan religion
and civilisation the leaven of some kind of vague recollection of the
primitive revealed truth; that though protesting that he accepted and
reinforced the authority of the Bible, he threatened and shook it on
many points; and that his criticism of profane historical tradition,
conducted in a haughty spirit of rebellion against the past, might
open the road to the most dangerous abuses, since it provoked the
application of the same spirit and method to sacred history, which
happened in the case of Boulanger.[3] In this accusation are faithfully
indicated all the points destined later to enter into the nineteenth
century's solemn eulogy of Vico. Thus churchmen began to be suspicious
of him; and this bore fruit later in the restoration period, in the
anti-Vician polemic of Bishop Colangelo, and somewhat earlier in a
verdict of the royal censor Lorenzo Giustiniani, who pronounced the
_Scienza Nuova_ "a work marking a most unfortunate crisis in European
history."
This tendency was opposed by the enthusiastic young students of
social and political matters at Naples at the end of the eighteenth
century, preparing themselves for an active part in the imminent
revolution. Among them Vico came to be considered as an anti-clerical
and anti-Catholic, and the legend arose, mentioned elsewhere in this
volume, that Vico purposely and deliberately made his work obscure
in order to escape ecclesiastical censure. These young men applied
themselves to the study and praise of the _Scienza Nuova;_ they
proposed to reprint it, since it had become rare, together with the
other works and unpublished manuscripts of the author; they prepared
expositions and criticisms of Vico's philosophical and historical
system; some like Pagano tried to work it up afresh by adding to it
the ideas of French sensationalism, others like Filangieri did not let
their admiration of it dispel their rosy dreams of reform. In 1797
the German Gerning on coming to Naples noted the zeal with which Vico
was studied, and projected a translation or at least a summary of the
_Scienza Nuova_ in German. When the fall of the Neapolitan Republic
in 1799 drove these young men, or rather those of them who escaped
the massacres and the gallows of the Bourbon reaction, into exile in
Northern Italy and especially in Lombardy, the cult of Vico was for the
first time ardently propagated. Vincenzo Cuoco, Francesco Lomonaco,
Francesco Salfi and other southern patriots passed the knowledge of the
_Scienza Nuova_ to Monti, who mentioned it in his inaugural lecture
at Pavia in 1803, to Ugo Foscolo, who absorbed many of its ideas into
his poem the _Sepolcri_ and his critical essays: to Alessandro Manzoni,
who was later to institute in his _Discorso sulla storia longobarda_
a famous comparison between Vico and Muratori: and to others of less
importance. Cuoco introduced Vico's work to Degérando, then at work on
his _Histoire comparée des systèmes philosophiques_; another exile,
De Angelis, put the _Scienza Nuova_ into the hands of Jules Michelet;
Salfi mentioned Vico in articles in the _Revue Encyclopédique_ and in
books and minor works in French. It was also through the suggestion
of these Neapolitans that the _Scienza Nuova_ was reprinted at Milan
in 1801; and other editions and collections of Vico's smaller works
were not long in appearing. Thus in the first decade of the nineteenth
century Vico's reputation, which had till then been merely local to
Naples, spread over the whole of Italy.
But, suitably to their personal disposition and to the spirit of the
times, the first and chief debt which the patriotic students of Vico
owed to his thought was political in character or rather belonging to
political philosophy; and consisted in a criticism of that Jacobinism
and philo-Gallicism of which they had had such unhappy experience
in the events of 1799.[4] Vico's thought led them to more concrete
concepts; and this is particularly visible in Vincenzo Cuoco's
admirable _Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione napoletana_ (1800).
Similarly Ballanche some decades later in his _Essais de palingénésie
sociale_ (1827) wrote that if Vico had been known in France in the
eighteenth century he would have exercised a beneficial influence on
the subsequent social revolutions. Another particular aspect of Vico's
work, the reform undertaken by him of historical methodology and social
science as an aid to history, was observed and emphasised by the
archaeologist Cataldo Iannelli in his work _Sulla natura e necessità
della scienza delle cose e delle storie umane_ (1818). Foscolo and
those who drew their inspiration from him chiefly introduced into
literary criticism and history something of Vico's conceptions on the
historical interpretation of poetry.
In Germany on the other hand Jacobi, who had read the _De
antiquissima,_ immediately placed himself in the centre of the Vician
philosophy by discovering and pointing out in 1811, in his work _Über
den göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung,_ the close connexion
between the principle of the convertibility of the true and the
created and the Kantian theory that one can perfectly conceive and
understand only what one is able to construct: a single step from
which position leads, as he observes, to the system of identity. The
same fact was recognised by Baader, who found in this system the
confirmation and foundation of the principle enunciated by Vico. But
the translation of the _Scienza Nuova_ made by Weber in 1822 seems to
have been unsuccessful; and it does not appear that Vico was known to
Hegel, with whom he has so many substantial and formal affinities,
especially in the _Phenomenology_; and whose mania for triads might be
blamed just as the Catholic Finetti had blamed Vico for always standing
"upon rule of three." The resemblances again of Vico's theories to the
new German philological doctrines of Niebuhr, Müller, Böckh and many
others were not at all willingly admitted. The attitude of Niebuhr is
characteristic. Whether he knew Vico's work or not when he published
the first edition of his _Römische Geschichte,_ he certainly knew
it later through Savigny and through the article entitled _Vico und
Niebuhr_ published in 1816 by the Swiss Orelli; and yet he continued to
ignore him, through some kind of contempt or depreciation; an attitude
hardly praiseworthy but imitated by Mommsen.
In France, the spread of knowledge concerning Vico's thought was due
to Michelet, who translated his works and in his last years described
Italy as "the second mother and nurse who in my youth suckled me upon
Virgil, and in my maturity nourished me with Vico; potent cordials that
have many times renewed my heart." Michelet was the first or one of the
first to proclaim, in his introduction, that Vico was not understood
in the eighteenth century because he wrote for the nineteenth.
Michelet was joined by Ballanche, of whom we spoke above, and also by
Jouffroy, Lerminier, Chateaubriand, and Cousin, some of whom grasped
the connexion between Vico and the German philosophy that Cousin was
at this time propagating in France; and later by Laurent, Vacherot,
De Ferron, Franck, Cournot and many others. Vico was read and admired
by Comte, who mentioned him in a letter to John Stuart Mill in 1844,
and lastly Léon Gambetta conceived in his youth a general history of
commerce upon the scheme of the Vician "reflux." The popularity of
Vico's name in France at this period was so great that it is several
times mentioned in joke in passages of Balzac's novels and in
Flaubert's _Bouvard et Pécuchet._ But thought of the quality of Vico's
could never have a very deep or lasting influence in the persistently
intellectualistic and spiritualistic atmosphere of France. Perhaps the
most conspicuous results it produced were the theories of Fustel de
Coulanges on the ancient city and the origin of feudalism.
But, to return to Italy, if the aspirations towards a national
uprising, which tended to vindicate and glorify all the ornaments
Italy could boast, raised Vico's name almost to a level with that of
Dante, the simultaneous renaissance of philosophy, which was shaking
off the sensationalism and materialism of the eighteenth century, was
bound to attach itself to the last great idealistic philosopher, to
use his thoughts and to shelter itself behind his authority. Vico's
complete works were now collected and editions of the single treatises
multiplied. And since in the national uprising two currents could be
distinguished, partly successive and partly fused, the neo-Guelphian
and the radical, and since this distinction was represented in
the philosophical awakening by that between Catholic idealism and
rationalistic idealism, the schools of Rosmini and Gioberti on the one
hand and Bruno and Hegel on the other; Vico, at once a Catholic and a
free philosopher, lent himself admirably, as is easy to understand, to
the contrary sympathies and interpretations of the two schools. Thus
originated two different pictures of him, both historically justified,
though the one painted him as he would have wished to be, the other as
he was. The Vico of the liberal Catholics was above all the Vico of
the metaphysical points, the Platonist, the mystic of the unknowable
God, the traditionalist of the prologues to the _Diritto universale,_
and hence the strictly Italian philosopher as opposed to those of
the rest of Europe, sons of the Reformation: whereas the Vico of the
rationalists, the bold and heretical author of the _Scienza Nuova,_
is a European philosopher to be set side by side with Descartes and
Spinoza, Kant and Hegel. The former picture may be seen in the works
of Rosmini, Gioberti, Tommaseo and many others, among which we must
not forget those of a Neapolitan writer of lofty spirit, Enrico Cenni,
perhaps the best of all, who draws a loving picture of the Vico of
the Catholics. The latter portrait is found in the philosophers and
critics who from 1840 onwards acquired their education in the school
of German idealism; especially Bertrando Spaventa and Francesco de
Sanctis, who were the first to see clearly Vico's relations to earlier
and later European thought and to substitute for mere observations
and vague impressions on the subject a scientific interpretation and
a determinate judgment. That the second school of interpreters and
critics were in the right, and that the liberal or idealistic Catholics
had taken up an untenable position and reproduced in their irresolution
and incoherence the irresolution and incoherence of Vico himself, was
proved by the fact, among others, that less liberal but more consistent
Catholics like the Spaniard Jaime Balmes show an inflexible distrust
and hostility towards the author of the _Scienza Nuova._
The study of history in Italy during this period was less deeply
modified by Vico's influence; chiefly perhaps because the impulse of
the national uprising led to the neglect of primitive and Roman history
and the devotion of all its best energies to research into the origin
and vicissitudes of the Italian republics, a subject Vico had entirely
ignored. On the other hand, jurisprudence especially in the south was
dominated by his thought; and though it produced in this field no great
scientific results, it gave to the jurists a loftiness and breadth of
judgment and a concreteness of view which were long remembered and
regretted.
After 1870, with the decay of philosophy in Italy and elsewhere, the
study of Vico also decayed: and for more than forty years there was no
demand for a reprint of his works. The monograph by Cantoni in the year
1867, in spite of some valuable passages, already shows unmistakable
signs of the decadence, founded as it is upon the idea that Vico's
value is greater according as he is less of a metaphysician and more
of a psychologist and historian: a position due not so much to the
intrinsic weakness ascribed to him by Cantoni in philosophical matters
as to the implicit conviction on the critic's part that metaphysic
in general is a valueless thing, useful only for rousing enthusiasm
in the addled heads of southern Italians. The great idealist of the
New Science was subjected, as a final insult, to the praises of the
positivists, who in their astonishing ignorance almost amounting
to innocence did not--and still do not--hesitate to allege as a
confirmation of their formal profession of faith the words "verum ipsum
factum," which according to them means that the truth is the fact
which we see and touch. Writings making any serious contribution to
the knowledge of any particular point on Vico's doctrines were rare.
Interest in Vico only reawoke within the last decade with the general
reawakening of philosophical studies.