Vico, Giovanni Battista

VICO, GIOVANNI BATTISTA. - Italian philosopher, b. in Naples on 23 June 1668, d. there on 22 Jan. 1744.

I. LIFE

Born to a modest bookseller, G. B. V., after his early studies, partly on his own and partly with the Jesuits, was set on the path of philosophy by the nominalist Father Del Balzo; he then continued with Father Ricci and ended by studying Suárez on his own. He then studied law and served his apprenticeship with a lawyer. But his metaphysical mind could not be satisfied with the quibbles of forensic disputes. He therefore accepted the invitation to go as a tutor to the house of the Rocca family, at Vatolla, in the Cilento, and remained there nine years. This is the decisive period of his humanistic formation through the study of the Italian and Latin classics, of Roman law and of Greek and Christian philosophy. Having returned to Naples, in 1699 he won the chair of rhetoric at the University.

These were politically difficult years, since, through the War of the Spanish Succession, the Kingdom of Naples was detached (1707) from Spain, where the Bourbons were establishing themselves, and passed temporarily under the Austrian crown. V., however, being estranged from politics, lived a rather retired life, attending with equal scrupulousness to his duties as father of a family and as a teacher. He never managed to secure a stable prosperity that would free him from economic worries, which he sought to meet by accepting commissions for dedications and commemorative inscriptions that he composed in excellent Latin. Unfortunate with his children, clumsy in his relations with others, embittered in academic life - he did not obtain the chair of jurisprudence for which he competed in 1723 - V. lived wholly absorbed in the effort to clarify to himself and to communicate to others the great intuitions of the New Science, which he kept continually reworking, always dissatisfied, down to the definitive edition, published a few months before his death. A late comfort - though most vividly felt by him, as he most vividly felt every recognition, as well as every failure to recognize his merits - had come to him in 1735 with his appointment as royal historiographer and in 1741 with the confirmation of the succession of his son Gennaro to the chair of rhetoric that he had held at the University for so many years.

Among the many problems concerning V.'s life, some bear more directly on his philosophical formation and his position with respect to orthodoxy. Was V. implicated in the famous trial of the Neapolitan "atheists" of 1688-93? It is certain that during the nine years at Vatolla V. was not so self-taught and without contacts with the world as one might think on reading the Autobiography; he had relations with circles and persons, the name of some of whom appears among those incriminated in the famous trial. But no proof exists that he himself was implicated. Again, some would see an indication of a period of youthful doctrinal heterodoxy in the canzone Affetti di un disperato and in certain expressions of a letter to Father Giacco (of 12 Oct. 1720) that allude to "youthful weaknesses and errors." But the pessimism of the former, however unusual for the philosopher of Providence, can be understood within the limits of a psychological crisis, and as for the "weaknesses and errors" of the latter there is no reason to regard them as specifically theoretical, philosophical, religious. It is the idealistic interpretation (Nicolini, Croce) that, aware of the intrinsic weakness of its own doctrinal reconstruction of Vichianism, would wish to bring it the comfort of extrinsic reasons, drawn from the philosopher's life. Moreover, in the face of the orthodoxy of a body of thought entrusted to the mass of his writings, youthful strayings and heterodoxies would have very little (philosophical) interest, even if documented, since those works would precisely contradict them (v., on this matter, C. Cappello, G. B. V. e il processo contro ateisti napoletani del 1688-93, in Salesianum, 1947, pp. 326-42).

A question of more real interest is that concerning the formation of Vichian philosophy. The Autobiography, a fundamental document moreover, but written very late, and therefore with foreshortenings, juxtapositions and omissions that can mislead, must be completed and corrected by an examination of the other writings (cf. F. Nicolini, La giovinezza di G. B. V., Bari 1932, and J. Chaix-Ruy, La formation de la pensée philosophique de J.-B. V., Gap 1945). V. studied St. Augustine, knew scholastic thought, certainly Suárez and Scotism, read at least the Ethics of Aristotle, but at the same time kept abreast of the philosophical novelties then vigorously debated in Naples, where, particularly in certain circles, Epicurus, Descartes, Gassendi, Bacon, Bruno, the Italian Neoplatonists and the anti-curial ideas of part of the Neapolitan bourgeoisie were brought together. The problem of the sources evidently entails a twofold judgment: on the authors studied or in any case known by V. and on the influence they exercised on the Vichian mind. Now, it may be admitted that to some of these authors - and particularly to Descartes - V. owes more than he shows himself willing to acknowledge, but it remains incontestable that the formation of Vichian philosophy is in an anti-Cartesian, anti-sensistic, anti-Enlightenment sense. The possible suggestions of heterodox philosophies - such as those of Epicurus, Hobbes, Bruno - resolve themselves in the end into cultural, erudite and philosophically rather negative suggestions, just as, analogously, anti-curialism, if it is not episodic and superficial, nevertheless never covers anticlericalism and irreligiosity. V. himself wished to summarize in four names the influences he considered decisive for his doctrinal conception: Plato, Tacitus, Bacon, Grotius. Present-day criticism recognizes the legitimacy of this declaration insofar as Plato would represent the demand for the true and for philosophy, Tacitus that for the certain and for philology, Bacon that for the synthesis of both, and Grotius would indicate the way for the realization of this synthesis, which, as is well known, is the undertaking of the New Science (cf. G. Fassò, I quattro «autori» del V., Bologna 1949).

II. WORKS

All of V.'s significant writings are oriented toward the masterpiece, preparing it. Setting aside the occasional pieces (inscriptions, dedications, commemorations, allocutions, eulogies), the minor writings (among which should be remembered the Vindiciae, an energetic reply to a rude review of the Scienza nuova that appeared in 1727 in the Acta eruditorum of Leipzig; the De mente heroica, published in 1731; a Commento all'epistola ai Pisoni and the Institutiones oratoriae of 1711, reworked in 1738, writings that introduce us to his university teaching) and the writings on historical subjects (such as the De rebus gestis Antonii Carfei [1716] and the Principium neapolitanorum coniunctionis anni 1701 historia, which is the history of the so-called conspiracy of Macchia, unpublished until the last century), the works of more properly philosophical commitment are indicated. Between 1699 and 1707 V. delivered seven Orazioni for the inauguration of the academic year, of which only one was then published (1708), reworked and considerably expanded under the title De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, and it contains a first effective critique of the Cartesian orientation of culture and of studies. The other orations, although of a predominantly rhetorical-pedagogical character, are not lacking in points of philosophical interest, important for the history of the formation of Vichian doctrine. Of 1710 is the De antiquissima italorum sapientia, conceived in three parts — metaphysics, physics, ethics — of which only the first remains. The title refers to the framing of the work, in the sense that V. claims to derive the doctrines that expounds from the analysis of the Latin language understood as bearing the traces of the most ancient wisdom of the Italic peoples. In the first section the gnoseological ideas are set out, among them the famous one of the verum factum. In the other sections cosmological and metaphysical concepts are developed, giving of the world a vision of a monadistic type, referred to Zeno of old, and which has in part an analogy with the monadism of Leibniz, in opposition to the mechanism of Descartes. It aroused lively polemics, whose knowledge is important for defining the sense of certain passages of the work, in general anything but perspicuous. These are two articles in the Giorn. dei letterati d'Italia, to which V. opposes two Risposte, in the years 1711-12. On the problem of the relations between the De antiquissima and the Scienza nuova opinions are not in agreement, some emphasizing their convergence, others their divergence. Among the latter, B. Croce, as against the «rationalism» of the Scienza nuova, would like to see in the De antiquissima an «absolute scepticism» (Le fonti della gnoseologia vichiana, in Saggio sullo Hegel, Bari 1913, p. 246). After a decade of preparation, between 1720 and 1723, there appears the so-called Diritto universale, which consists of the De universi iuris uno principio et fine uno, of the De constantia iurisprudentis, and of a volume of Notae, amplifications and elucidations of the two preceding treatises.

With these works V. has by now definitively centred his interest and his speculative effort on the field of human society, whose law he studies as its most significant manifestation, in order to understand it in its evolution and to justify the modes by which it developed among the various peoples and the various ages. Present in the Diritto universale are almost all the motifs that will later constitute the web and the foundation of the Scienza nuova, so much so that some wish to consider it as a first, immature redaction of the masterpiece, the latter extending to the interpretation of the whole of historical becoming principles and methods of which the former made trial in the limited sector of the juridical world. It is known from V. himself that the first exposition of the Scienza nuova was «in negative form» (Autob., p. 48) [of this as of the other works cited reference is made to the Nicolini ed.], but there remain only the various redactions of the Scienza nuova «in positive form», the first of which bears the date 1725 and the title Principi di una Scienza nuova d'intorno alla natura delle nazioni. In 1730 a 2nd ed. appeared which, in fact, is a complete reworking of it. On this V. continued to rework, add, clarify, with a view to the definitive ed. of 1744. Very important documents for the knowledge of the formation and the meaning of Vico's philosophy are the Epistolario and the already cited Autobiografia, written in 1725 and then completed with additions up to 1731.

The works of V. are today available in the ed. edited by F. Nicolini (Bari 1914 ff.), provided with very accurate historical-biographical information. It comprises 8 vols. and renders almost useless the preceding edd. both partial — such as those of Villarosa (4 vols., Naples 1823) and of Corcia (2 vols., ibid. 1834) — and complete — such as that of Ferrari (6 vols., Milan 1835-37). The masterpiece, the Scienza nuova, has had many other edd. Nicolini has published a Commento storico alla seconda Scienza nuova (Rome 1949) and reissued the Autobiografia (Milan 1947).²

III. DOCTRINE

From a generic opposition to Cartesianism as culture and formation, whose most notable documents are the De studiorum ratione and certain letters (especially that of 12 Jan. 1729 to Estevan and that of 20 Jan. 1726 to De Vitry), V. passes to a more precise critique of Cartesianism as method and philosophical system, entrusted particularly to the De antiquissima.

Cartesianism, as culture, gives exclusive importance to the physico-mathematical disciplines and to pure abstract reason. On the contrary, the rights of humanistic and classical culture must be vindicated, wherein poetry, the arts, law, and history develop the whole of the human spirit, rich in ingenuity, feeling, and imagination, as well as in critical reason. Cartesianism as philosophy is erroneous in its criterion and in its starting point: in its criterion (the clarity and distinctness of the idea), which is subjective and from which nothing else can be derived than "a skepticism gilded over with truth" (Seconde risposte, p. 274); in its starting point, which is the "cogito," a vulgar-pre-critical starting point, and not a critical-philosophical one. The critical and scientific character of knowing consists, in fact, for V., in the reflective and the mediated, whereas the "cogito" is immediate presentness and pure ascertainment: it "is the undoubted sign of my being," that is, it gives me certainty of it, but "does not induce in me science of being," that is, it does not give me its truth (Prime risposte, p. 209). In the De ant. V. therefore arrives at the formulation of his new criterion, aimed at deepening the explanatory character of the intellect, the verum factum. If to explain a thing is to know the cause, to know the cause however entails being the cause. To be the cause, efficere, must be understood in the cognitive sphere and not in the existential sphere. "To make the object" means to possess its elements in the mind in such a way as to be able to reconstruct for oneself the structure of the object; in which act of reconstruction the critical certainty of truth is acquired, whereby knowing (critically) and making — the verum and the factum in this sense — are identified: "dum mens colligit eius veri elementa, quod contemplatur, fieri non potest quin faciat vera, quae cognoscit" (De ant., p. 135; cf. p. 141).

The idealistic conception according to which knowing is making in the sense of "positing the object in being" is therefore extraneous to the Vichian meaning of the famous principle. In it, the vindication of the dynamism of knowing as a condition of its critical value leads neither to the denial of its informative value nor to the denial of the transcendence of the norm that makes it such (the divine science is that "ad cuius veri normam vera humana metiri debemus" (De ant., p. 141).

The application of the criterion leads to the confirmation of divine omniscience "quia Deus in se continet elementa ex quibus omnia componit" (De ant., p. 132). As for human science, it cannot concern physics, but only mathematics as an abstract construction of the mind, and history as a concrete construction of that same mind. The application of the verum factum to history had not yet been achieved in the De ant., which, despite its anti-Cartesian polemic, remained set out according to a still philosophical-scientific mentality. Only through the Diritto universale had V. arrived at the new standpoint of philosophical-historical interest, which would allow him to exploit the epistemological principle of the De ant. in a brilliant and previously unnoticed manner. V.'s problem is the problem of history. Not, then, a prospective problem, but rather a retrospective one, even if in its solution V. believes he has attained principles such (those constituting the eternal ideal history) as to allow him to give the Scienza nuova a deductive character and, indeed, a prophetic attitude (cf. L'arte diagnostica della Scienza nuova prima). History is seen by V. at once as science and as philosophy. As science insofar as it is a "critical art... that gives the rules for sifting out the true in all gentile histories" (Scienza nuova prima, § 91; cf. Autob., p. 49). As philosophy insofar as it seeks in the ultimate reasons of history some absolute law of human becoming, the "eternal ideal history" (Scienza nuova, § 34.9). In V. the two meanings are not always distinguished, and this certainly does not contribute to the clarity of V.'s masterpiece; but there can be no doubt that such is the pregnant sense of the expression "Scienza nuova." Now, the "scientific" character of historical knowledge derives from the applicability to it of the verum factum criterion: "this civil world has certainly been made by men, whence its principles can, because they must, be rediscovered within the modifications of our own human mind" (Scienza Nuova, § 331).

History, according to V.'s discoveries, is at once a setting out of the certain and an ascertaining of the true, the certain being what is established, that is, the given, the particular (not the physical given, which is founded on nature, but the civil given, such as laws, customs, etc., which is founded on human authority), the true instead being what is truly known, that is, reason, the universal. History is then also at once a synthesis of philology (which "observes the authority of human free will, whence comes the consciousness of the certain"; Scienza nuova, axiom 10) and of philosophy (which "contemplates the reason whence comes the science of the true"; Scienza nuova, ibid.). With this V. rescues history from the twofold danger of remaining an insignificant though most exact erudition and of filling itself with anachronistic arbitrary meanings: a condemnation of the historiographical fashions of his time and of those that followed, positivistic and idealistic. In history thus understood there is revealed the concrete richness of human nature according to a rhythm that V. defines as that of sense, imagination, and reason, expressing itself in three successive moments of historical becoming: the age of the gods, of the heroes, of men; in which men first "feel without noticing, then notice with a disturbed and moved mind, finally reflect with a pure mind" (ibid., axiom 53). V. believes he has thereby grasped the law of historical becoming, that is, "the eternal ideal history upon which the histories of all nations run in time" (ibid., § 349). By it one will therefore be able to "verify" the historical course of events and introduce into it that "it had to be, it has to be, it will have to be" (cf. ibid., § 348), without which history is not "science."

The problem of history presented itself to V. essentially as the problem of origins. The field of origins — even for highly civilized nations such as Greece — swarms with chronological, moral, etc. incongruities and absurdities (ibid., §§ 79-80). If V. has the key to understanding human history, this key must show itself capable of unlocking, first of all, the closed doors of that absurd world. Indeed, V. straightway poses the problem of the absolute origins of human civilization, which he takes up again from that pre-social state, a hypothesis then common among the natural-law theorists, and which he vividly depicts in famous pages such as that of the primitive "great beasts" (ibid., I. II, Prolog., ch. 3). But V.'s "great beast" is filled with a meaning entirely different from that of Hobbes and of the natural-law theorists with whom V. always polemicizes. For it, on the one hand, is reconnected with the biblical datum (ibid., axiom 42), and on the other is recognized in its integral humanity, however degraded (ibid., § 6, 446 etc.). The problem, then, is posed, in general, as follows: how is it that "fallen Adam," that is, primitive men, rough, all sense and passion, have known known how to build the society and civilization that, in the age of fully developed reason, they are not even able to preserve (ibid., § 79-80). The answer to this question introduces the concept of Providence; the disproportion between the ends and the means of action on the one hand (one's own advantage and the narrowness of the primitive mind) and the result achieved on the other (society and civilization) implies the presence of a divine collaboration: the law of the heterogeneity of ends is Vico's proof of Providence (ibid., § 1108). Not for nothing does the New Science also claim to be a "reasoned civil theology of divine providence" (ibid., § 342). This Providence, transcendent, acts in history not through miracles, but through natural ways, through human knowledge and will. Insofar as minds know, venerate, fear, and love a Being superior to them, God (and this knowledge and will are religion), men succeed in overcoming egoism and passions, in moralizing and civilizing themselves. Hence the intimate and necessary connection between religion and civilization, which is one of the dominant themes of the New Science. The beginnings of civilization coincide with the first kindling of the idea of God (cf. degn. 30). However aberrant and imperfect, such religions are better than atheism, since "with those most luminous nations arose, but with atheism not one was ever founded in the world" (ibid., § 518). But then it is also clear that, if society and civilization are due to a human-divine collaboration, abandoning God means compromising society and civilization. This is possible when the spontaneity of the sensory-fantastic nature, naturally open to the true, is succeeded by the reflection of fully developed reason, which, through abuse of freedom, the creator of malice, can close itself off from and rebel against the true.

In this overall vision the tripartition of sense, fantasy, and reason reveals itself as a rather mechanical and superficial scheme, and acquires its authentic and profound meaning only insofar as it resolves itself into the dichotomy of spontaneity-reflection, vulgar wisdom-reflected wisdom, which constitutes the true and profound dialectic of history.

A large part of the New Science (book II) is devoted to delineating the primitive world, which — as has been said — is the one that most interests Vico. This world, first of the bestioni, then of the giants and the heroes, is indeed the world of sensory-fantastic spontaneity, the world of the human race as a child (cf. degn. 49), but it is also the world of "poetic wisdom." Wisdom, since in it the true is present. The sensory-fantastic moment is not an alogical moment; if it were such it would be inhuman. But the logos, the truth present in it, is not present in its perfect form, the critical form of reason, but in an imperfect form, the form of common sense in the wrapping of imaginative expression, which is precisely the characteristic of the poetic attitude (cf. the doctrine of the fantastic universal or poetic character, e.g., degn. 49). Here we have the recognition of a precious value not only practical but also theoretical in common sense, the true "wisdom of the human race" (First New Science, § 46), and therefore in the poetry in which it lives. In his doctrine of poetry, conceiving it as the natural expression of the fantastic mind, Vico sets himself against the dilettantish and intellectualist aesthetics of his time and of every time, claiming for himself the merit of being the initiator of modern aesthetics; and, vindicating a value of truth in poetic expression, he detaches himself from the exalters of pure fantasy and anticipates modern mythological science. A large part of the New Science is indeed devoted to the unveiling of myths, hitherto erroneously understood as idle inventions and obscene fables or disguises of philosophical truths. They, instead, are "true and severe histories" (New Science, § 7); they always express a natural truth (like Neptune, who signifies the sea) or a civil truth (like Minerva, who signifies armed heroes in assembly) or a metaphysical truth (like Jove, who signifies the first notion of the divine). Myths, thus, are the witnesses and authentic documents of the ages in which they were born, ages which it is vain to think of reaching by following the traces of writers and historians, such as Herodotus and Livy, or by applying reflective conventionalist and intellectualist criteria. In this same poetic wisdom lies the value of human authority, which is found at the foundation of customs, laws and civil usages, that is, the foundation of that certain which is therefore not only effectuality and historicity, but also reason, however much "obscurity of reason" (degn. 111), as Vico takes care to show, one may say, in all the pages of the Universal Law and of the New Science.

Everything in the earliest ages arises naturally, taking shape according to the logic of sense and fantasy, of passion and feeling: language and religion, property and family, economy and law and even geography and physics and astronomy. On the basis of such fantastic logic Vico attempts to discover the authentic meaning of what the logic of reason has hitherto declared foolish, absurd and — in any case — unintelligible, succeeding in giving us an original and singularly effective picture of many aspects of ancient civilization. In this field Vico has not infrequently anticipated the most recent historical criticism, deducing from his philosophical canons what historical erudition later reached by its slow paths. Among the innumerable anticipations in the field of the most ancient history of Rome and Greece, it suffices to recall the bold thesis that Homer was not a historical person, but a poetic character "of Greek men insofar as they narrated, singing, their own histories" (cf. the whole of book III of the New Science).

Vico's best-known and most misunderstood doctrine is that of corsi and ricorsi. It presents itself, without doubt, as a law of historical becoming, but it induces neither the necessity nor the repetition of events, since it does not concern the content of history, the events, but only their form, that is, the mentality that "verifies" them. The course of history, having arrived, through sensory-fantastic spontaneity, at the reflection of fully developed reason, where this dissolves in the dissolution of civil society, does not come to a halt, for in that dissolution man rediscovers the spontaneous primitive mind which, by conditioning the renewal of contact with God, religion, makes possible the resumption of the journey. What recurs is therefore the mind, the form, and not the facts, the things: infinite contents and infinite values can be expressed both in a sensory-fantastic modality and in a reflective-rational one. Vico believes he finds a demonstration of his thesis of the ricorso in the Middle Ages, of which he attempts a brilliant interpretation precisely as a return of the primitive, sensory-fantastic mentality (ibid., book V).

IV. FORTUNE OF VICHIAN THOUGHT

The vicissitudes and fortunes of Vichian thought are reconstructed step by step by Nicolini in the Bibliografia vichiana (v. bibl.). The interest of contemporaries was directed particularly at certain revolutionary assertions concerning the history of Rome (the thesis of the autochthonous origin of the law of the Twelve Tables was especially contested). But the profound meaning of the Scienza nuova was not perceived throughout the century even by that group of Neapolitan scholars who kept alive the study and almost the cult of the Scienza nuova (Cuoco, Lomonaco, Pagano, etc.) and, dispersing after the events of '99, carried it to Lombardy. The reasons for this misunderstanding are to be found both in the estrangement of Enlightenment interests and minds from Vichian interests and mind, and in the intrinsic difficulty of the Scienza nuova, exaggerated to such a degree that, toward the end of the 18th century, it would furnish a pretext for the legend of its intentionality, meant to mask a presumed heterodoxy of thought. In the 19th century interest in V. not only continued and revived in Italy, but also spread to France, especially through the work of Michelet, to whom the translation of the Scienza nuova is also owed. A more secure penetration and evaluation of the philosophy of the great Neapolitan then began. Those interested in it included Tommaseo, who devoted an entire monograph to it, Rosmini, Manzoni and, above all, Gioberti and the Giobertians of Naples (Fornari, Acri, Galasso, etc.). The positivist period took little interest in V., even though it has left an important monograph (Cantoni). The recovery of V. for philosophy is chiefly the merit of Italian idealism. Particularly B. Croce brought V. to the consideration that was his due as a figure among the greatest of European philosophy, even if his interpretation of Vichianism cannot but suffer unfavorably from the exegete's immanentist preconception. In recent years the thought of V. has been the object of ever wider interest, even outside Italy.

Franco Amerio