GIAMBATTISTA VICO
In their studies of the Neapolitan philosopher, Croce and Gentile have
done their work so thoroughly that to anyone approaching the same
subject it would be very nearly impossible to say anything both new and
good. The material here used to illustrate the contribution of Italy’s
most original thinker to modern speculation and practical life will be
drawn from the works of Gentile and Croce.
Vico is the most Italian of Italy’s thinkers. Yet a close survey of his
ideas reveals in his works, besides the most Italian of intellectual
heritage, the presence of the deepest and richest tendencies of the
modern philosophy of Europe, be it French, English, or German. He is
thus the best illustration of his own theory. In the man of genius
the most concrete historical determinations blend with the broadest
universality of ideas. But his critics have usually chosen to look
exclusively to either of these according to their own nationality; and
this way of abstracting from one of his qualities has made him obscure
and baffling.
While his countrymen lived upon the contribution of France and
England, Vico, to the naturalistic intuition of atomism, which implies
individualism in morals and politics, opposed the idealistic intuition
of history as the developing process of mankind. To the abstract
contemplation of clear ideas that were a matter of mathematical
intuitions and deductions he opposed the self-generated progress of
mankind that goes on creating its own world. In this he revealed
himself as a direct son of the Italian Humanism and Renaissance, an
anachronism, and the fact was nearly fatal to his fame, as this put
him, as a writer, in a position of great inferiority to Locke or
Descartes. He never deals with the question he had sat down to treat,
because he never realised beforehand where he was going, and it was
only on his way that his mind became properly fixed on the point that
was obscurely tormenting him. One ought not to read either the titles
or prefaces of his books, for he usually starts on a traditional and
even stale matter. Thus it is that starting as a good Platonist to
write what Michelet took his Scienza Nuoa to be, that is to say a
philosophy of history, he got stranded in the deepest speculation on
the nature of man’s mind quite in contradiction to the doctrine of
Plato. He had begun by considering the origin of man’s intellectual
activity. The difficulty was great, but he casually observes that
whatever the difficulty of the problem and its obscurity, one always
has the steady light of the conviction that _the world of the Gentile
nations is the achievement of men; and that the principles of it must
be found in the nature of our human mind and in the force of our
understanding_.
Such proclamation of man’s power to create his own world, the only
historical world, was indeed a revolution and Rousseau’s theories,
evolved to ensure the liberty of man to arrange society to suit his
requirements, are childish compared to this sublime thought of a man
who was a Catholic with all the humility and simplicity of a child.
The qualities of the historian were in him balanced by those of the
jurist and through the researches that were meant to give a philosophy
of history he went on building a philosophy of Mind. But before
starting to expound the forms of Mind’s activity, for which he claimed
the right of historical citizenship, it may be good to note that Vico’s
criticism or continuation of previous systems was simply dialectical;
inasmuch as he contradicted the main thesis of his favourite authors
just as well as those of Descartes, who was his pet aversion, or
accepted them to transform them. For instance, he took the Cartesian
certitude and opposed it to truth; calling certain that which is the
result of particularising knowledge if one may term it so, or of
knowledge directed to the particular. And he took the nature of man as
Grotius or Hobbes had misunderstood it, a kind of mechanism the laws
of which were as fatally unalterable as the instinct of beasts, and
changed it into the nature of Mind, quite spiritual and—there is no
other word—Christian.
Vico turned to the periods of history which were the most remote from
the psychology of his time. Consequently he was led to study the
inferior forms of mind such as imagination, violence, simplicity;
whereas others had meditated only upon the nature of man as they found
him refined by Religion and laws, and had grounded their theories on
his mature intellect. They ignored the imagination of his youth. They
studied his will morally trained and overlooked the wild passions of
his forefathers. It is, therefore, legitimate to say that Vico came
to reject the basis of man’s natural rights grounded as they were
on a false notion of human nature; and gave concrete ground for the
assertion of man’s spiritual rights and duties.
Art, or as he calls it, poetry, is not born through the caprice of man
to give pleasure or clothe philosophic sayings. It was born out of
natural necessity, it is in short the first operation of man’s mind.
Man, before he can conceive a notion, such as table or dog, realises
them with an operation not of the intellect, but of his imagination.
Before he can reflect with a pure mind, he perceives with emotion.
Before he can speak in prose he speaks in verses. The nearer poetry
gets to the particular, the better it is; the higher reflection rises
towards the universal the more perfect it is. Yet if one can say that
the poet is the sense of mankind and philosophy its intellect, one’s
conclusion coincides with the saying of Scholasticism, _Nihil est in
intellectu qui prius non fuerit in sensu_, since without poetry it is
impossible to have philosophy and civilisation. After many views on the
subject, often contradictory, his real idea is undoubtedly that the
first form of mind is poetry, anterior to the intellect and free from
reflection and reason. Myths, he holds, do not refer inevitably to real
men, they are essentially historical truth under the form it is wont to
take in primitive minds. Any myth is an individual, as Hercules, and
accomplishes individual actions—as he kills the Hydra or cleanses the
stables—but it is also a concept, the notion of useful and glorious
activity. It is, therefore, both a universal as the expression of a
concept and a creation of man’s imagination as a particular fancy.
Passing to morality and to society, although he reacted against
rationalism, Vico’s assertion of the irrational has nothing to do with
Rousseau’s. He took for his ground history, literature, archæology and
above all, law. Thus his first discovery led him to substitute for the
Golden Age that had been postulated as the initial stage of mankind,
“the natural state of man,” an obscure period in which man did not
differ much from the wild beasts and was at best an irrational and
non-intellectual being. He was to develop the great and immortal notion
that lay hidden at the core of “jus naturalism,” the notion of society
as immanent in man, which had been in the air since Thomas Aquinas had
spoken of it as of a sixth sense of man.
Utilitarianism is the first target on which Vico opens fire, and he
takes it as Hobbes and Spinoza had formulated it. Utility cannot be a
sufficient ground for morals since it springs from the temporal part
of man whilst morals are grounded on his eternal part. No principle
of utilitarianism, whatever the forms ascribed to it by philosophers,
can justify the process of differentiation, which is the constant
development of social organisations. Deceit, force, need, imply as
already in existence the society they are supposed to have produced.
How could the supposedly happy and simple first owners of the soil be
deceived into giving up their claims, if they had no desire whatever
and no relation of any kind. For relations imply some kind of social
state even if tacitly agreed upon. As to force, the first rulers were
not merely strong in their individual force; their power had a far
deeper root as they invariably appear at first as protectors of the
weak and as antagonists of all anti-social and destructive tendencies;
and their law was force indeed, but force _a natura præstantiori
dictata_. The real ground of society is, therefore, moral, and as such
essentially spiritual.
Yet at first sight Vico’s view of the origin of law and society
appears very much akin to that of “jus naturalism”; but as soon as
it is understood that Vico’s notion of man’s nature is the Christian
or spiritual one, then the difference is quite evident. Law to him is
natural to man because what is not natural can neither stay nor last.
Fear is certainly the origin of society; not, however, the mere fear of
wild beasts or hunger but the fear of oneself; fear of solitude due to
remorse and shame. Out of shame Vico sees arising the senses of honour,
fidelity, probity, trust in promises, truth in words, honesty in deeds.
So that society comes to have moral consciousness for its ground,
and one can indeed consider society as the realisation of man’s best
nature, of man’s spiritual conscience. This sense of shame or modesty
could be called by empiricism the sense common to all men that enables
them to realise without judgment what is necessary or useful to men. It
is through this sense of decency or shame that the moral consciousness
is enabled to embody itself in institutions and give stability and
certitude to the freewill of man which is of its nature most uncertain.
The nature of this fear, manifesting itself in remorse or shame, of
this sense of decency giving rise to moral consciousness, is easy
for us to understand on account of the systematic treatment Mind has
received in subsequent studies, above all in the works of Croce and
Gentile. This fear is what we usually call self-consciousness; and
when we say that a child has grown self-conscious we mean that he
thinks too much of the opinion of the people who surround him. Now in
this case common language, as in many instances, lays a trap for our
understanding, since at first sight it seems to imply that the child’s
uneasiness of manners is due to a self-centred conception of himself;
whereas it is in fact his realising the importance of his surroundings
that makes him wish to please his elders, to attract their notice, or
to appease their indignation when he feels guilty. It is, therefore,
the consciousness of the non-self that we term self-consciousness.
But this trap is easily avoided, for philosophy knows nowadays that
it is impossible to reach self-consciousness except through the
conscience of that which we are not, for _We_ without the rest of
the world in opposition to which we are _We_, means nothing at all.
Thus the self-awe in which Vico sees the first origin of society is
the consciousness man has of his not-self, of the exterior world, or,
to use an image, of the immense shadow that surrounds him and is in
reality his own negativity, all that which he is not. So that if man
knows shame and remorse in the most absolute solitude it is because in
his own heart he feels the presence of a nameless Power.
Vico’s is not a speculative hypothesis. Primitive men wandered savage
and ferocious, without family ties or matrimonial bonds, were the prey
of the wildest passions. Whence could they receive the law that would
prevent their mutual destruction? They cannot be saved by the wisdom
of men since human wisdom does not exist as yet, neither by God, He
has retired among His chosen people and left to its fate the rest of
mankind. But He has left them the character of men and their humanity
is sufficient to save them. Thunder strikes them with fear, and the
consciousness of their impotency, of their own limitation, suggests
the confused and obscure notion of that which is not limited. And to
appease the Almightiness of this infinite and enjoy its favour they
refrain from some things and do others. They refrain from satisfying
some of their physical cravings and Mind’s liberty is the result; so
that liberty is born with her twin sister, moral law, out of the fear
of God, out of the awe-inspiring consciousness of the not-self. The
land becomes covered with altars; the caves behold the union of men and
women eager to ensure the Divine favour to their nuptials; the soil is
broken to receive the body of the dead who return to the gods. Ethics
are born with the three fundamental institutions of society, the cult
of the Deity, matrimony as the first call of society, the veneration of
the dead as the first assertion of immortality.
Why has Croce been able to state, after this energetic assertion of
Vico on the essentially religious origin of society, that the father
of the philosophy of Mind agrees with the school of natural law in
their purely immanent notion of ethics? Because like them he constructs
his science of society independently of revelation. The natural law
of the Gentile nation spontaneously created by men is the matter of
his research not the supernatural law that came down on Sinai for the
benefit of the Chosen People. It is not on the idea of law and its
origin that he criticised Grotius, Pufendorf, and the rest, it is their
idea of religion that is distinctly quite alien to his.
Religion for Vico can be understood first as a conception of reality as
such; and this is the reason why it is in Gentile’s theories one of the
essential moments of Mind as recognition of the not-self, or object.
Second, it belongs to practical reality as the basis of ethics. In this
case religion is the very essence of ethics as it is the very essence
of truth.
It is, therefore, evident that what Vico intuitively, perhaps,
unconsciously, is striving to assert is the eternity of religion,
historically proved apart from any revelation. Thus in his search for
the ground of morality he can abstract from positive religion, but how
could he abstract from the knowledge of truth, or more than knowledge,
the consciousness of truth? Plutarch, after describing the primitive
religions and their horrors, wonders if it would not have been better
not to have had any religion than to worship the gods in such impious
ways. And Vico, after quoting him, observes that surely when he wrote
this he must have lost sight of the fact that from such atrocious
superstitions luminous civilisation developed in due time, whereas
nothing ever grew on atheism. There is no such thing as historical or
social life without a religion, full either of tenderness or ferocity,
rational or fantastic, but in any case providing man with the idea,
more or less clear, more or less noble, that there is something which
transcends the individual, in which all individuals weld into one, and
which provides man’s morality with the object of his moral will, and
thereby means Law.
In his understanding of the period in which man had been a brute,
Vico was much nearer to the Bible than the Protestants had been. He
accepted as a matter of fact the distinction between the Gentiles and
the Jews, as implying the radical privation of any supernatural help
bestowed on the former, and he thought of them as being in a pre-moral
state, a state that was indeed devoid of morality, but full of moral
tendencies, and from which mankind emerged through the realisation of
those tendencies. Such realisation is not on the other hand the effect
of a Divine grace, it is NATURAL, due merely to the development of
the natural light granted to every man that comes to life. Man’s free
will is weak and between passions and virtue might succumb if he was
not upheld in his efforts by Providence. For Vico makes an absolute
distinction between the grace of God and Providence. The grace of God,
in which he firmly believed, is an extraordinary help granted to some
men and particularly to the Chosen People; Providence is the ordinary
help of God granted to all men as their birthright so to speak, as
inherent in their nature as men.
Vico stood henceforth as the best antidote to the dangerous side
of Anglo-French speculation. The philosophy of Mind had yet to be
developed, but it was sufficiently asserted to claim man and all his
activities as belonging to spiritual reality, to historical reality.
Thus what Vico called Providence provided the ground for a more human,
that is to say, more spiritual, idea of liberty, just when the men who
were going to popularise Illuminism were preparing for their task. But
his was a far more difficult idea, and less palatable as well, for his
liberty springing as it does from Religion, hand in hand with morality,
is a double-faced divinity. One never can, according to such a
conception of life, grasp liberty without law, or enjoy a right without
satisfying the corresponding duty.
Passing from religion to law, Vico in his objective understanding of
history rejects a justice that should consist in measuring everything,
for says he, first this would not be the philosophy but the mathematics
of law; then it is the duty of men to share the common goods in such
a way as to preserve the differences required by the differences of
deserts, and thus to maintain that which is the only true equality
of men. The natural law, according to him, was born at first under
the form of just desires, just violences; then it took the form of
moral fables; ultimately it was asserted in all its rationality and
generosity. Away goes with this the abstract and anti-historic notion
of an eternal and natural law, superior to positive laws. Vico goes
on bowing to the _jus naturale philosophorum_ but instead of putting
it high above history, he looks for it exclusively where it can be
found—that is to say in history, making it thus historical.
After accepting Plato’s idea of an eternal Republic, Vico breaks it
to pieces to come out with a quite different conception of his own.
The only really eternal Republic is the eternal process of history
in all the variety and succession of its modes of realisation, from
the man-brute down to Plato. Every single truth has its practical
manifestation, its practical consequences; to think in this or that way
implies living and acting in this or that way. The divorce of theory
and practice resulting from the difficulties that arose a century
before between scientific men and their churches is here absolutely
annulled.
Vico calls men to realise that in the human world of history, the
only one real to man, since it is the work of man as Nature is the
work of God, thought and action go hand in hand. Theories bring
inevitably a modification of practical life. Man does not exist, at
least not to our knowledge, as an individual devoid of a social and
therefore historical frame. Art is the moment in which man moves in a
self-centred world, abstracting from the universal, and is therefore
the subjective moment of liberty, the moment of intuition. Religion
is the moment in which man stands full of awe in front of the world
which is his not-self, abstracting from the individual he is, and is
therefore the objective moment of Law, the one link from the intuitive
to the rational realisation of life as morality and, therefore,
society. History, however, never shows the one apart from the other,
as nature never shows one of two correlative terms absolutely apart
from the other. Light or darkness may be prevalent, both are always
there. Liberty and law have alternately held their sway over our
modern, that is to say Christian world, and their synthesis may now
be called into being by the grandsons of Vico. His theories could not
be understood by the general public before practical life had shown
the soundness of his criticism of the theories that were fostering the
abstract individualism and liberty against which Fascism is reacting;
and reacting through not a retrograde process, but through a forward
movement which shall enforce liberty as the correlative term of law,
and allow religion to discharge its function as the essential basis of
man’s spiritual life and not as an instrument of politics.