Vico’s New Science: A Philosophical Commentary 9781501701863

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VICO’S NEW SCIENCE

Copyright © 2016. Cornell University Press. All rights reserved.

A P H I LOS O P H I CA L CO M M E N TA R Y

Donald Phil l ip Verene

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

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Copyright © 2015 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2015 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Verene, Donald Phillip, 1937– author.   Vico’s New science : a philosophical commentary / Donald Phillip Verene.   pages cm   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-1-5017-0016-3 (cloth : alk. paper)   1. Vico, Giambattista, 1668–1744. Principi di una scienza nuova. I. Title.   B3581.P73V49 2015  195—dc23   2015017335 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cover illustration: Dame Metaphysic seated on the celestial globe, from the title page of the 1744 edition of Vico’s New Science.

Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/suss/detail.action?docID=4412740. Created from suss on 2021-02-14 21:00:44.

Contents

Preface ix Bibliographical Note  xvii Abbreviations and Notes on Citations  xxi

Pa rt One:  Generalities Concerning the New Science

1.  Sense and Method of the New Science 3 2.  Genesis of the New Science 10 3.  Structure of the New Science 18 Pa rt Two:   Idea of the Work

Introduction 29 4.  Genesis of the Frontispiece  32

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5.  Structure of the Frontispiece  40 Pa rt Three:   Establishment of Principles

Introduction 53 6.  Chronological Table  56 7. Elements  71 8. Principles  89 9. Method  96 Pa rt Four:   Poetic Wisdom

Introduction 107 10.  Tree of Poetic Wisdom  110 11.  Poetic Metaphysics  119 12.  Poetic Logic  128

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viii    Contents

13.  Poetic Morals, Economy, and Politics  140 14.  Poetic Sciences  151 Pa rt Five:   Discovery of the True Homer

Introduction 169 15.  Search for the True Homer  172 16.  Discovery of the True Homer  181 Pa rt Six: Course a nd Recourse of the Nations

Introduction 191 17. Threefold Structure of the Course of the Nations  195 18.  Recourse of the Nations  210 Pa rt Seven: Conclusion of the Work

19.  On an Eternal Natural Republic  221 Notes 239 Glossary of Italian Terms  251

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Key to English Equivalents  271 Chronological Summary of Vico’s Life and Principal Works: Historical, Philosophical, and Juridical  273 Some Works of Secondary Literature on Vico  275 Index of Names  279 Illustrations begin on page 161.

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P reface

In the last decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first, scholars have witnessed a renaissance in the study of the ideas and writings of Giambattista Vico unequalled by the amount of attention given his thought since the definitive edition of his New Science appeared in 1744. Over half a century after Vico’s death, the use of his doctrines by the Italian historian Vincenzo Cuoco provided the groundwork for Vico to become more than a figure in the tradition of the Neapolitan jurisconsults. The New Science became the book of the Risorgimento that inspired Italian patriots, who went abroad, carrying forth Vico’s concept of nation and the common nature of the nations, bringing international attention to Vico. The best known of these patriotic figures is the novelist, poet, and critic Ugo Foscolo. Another was Gioacchino de’ Prati, who brought the New Science to the attention of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge wrote to Prati: “I am more and more delighted with G. B. Vico,” and Coleridge, like many others who discovered Vico during their career, found that the New Science contained, ahead of him, many ideas he had come to hold, especially concerning language, history, and human knowledge. Coleridge’s first mention of Vico is in his Theory of Life, in a quotation borrowed from Jacobi, who had been loaned a copy of the New Science by Goethe, who had received it as a gift while in Naples on his Italian travels. Earlier, in Germany, awareness of Vico is connected to Herder, who learned of Vico before writing his famous Ideas toward the Philosophy of the History of Mankind. Herder first learned of Vico through a letter he received from his mentor, Hamann, “the Mage of the North,” who came across Vico while pursuing the topic of political economy. Beyond the acclaim received in the Risorgimento, sustained international scholarly attention to the New Science was given by Victor Cousin and Jules Michelet, the French nineteenth-century historians and philosophers of history, and in the early twentieth century by Benedetto Croce, in his system of philosophical idealism and aesthetics, and later by James Joyce, by prominently using a version of Vico’s cycles of ideal eternal history as a trellis on ix

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x    Preface

which to arrange Finnegans Wake. Michelet wrote: “From 1824 on, I was seized by a frenzy caught from Vico, an incredible intoxication with his great historical principle.” Joyce, when asked about the New Science by the Danish writer Tom Kristensen, replied: “I don’t believe in any science, but my imagination grows when I read Vico as it doesn’t when I read Freud or Jung.” In the current renaissance of Vico studies, modern translations of the New Science have appeared in English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Turkish, and Bulgarian; and in Italy, new, critical editions of Vico’s works have appeared for some years and continue to appear. Facsimile editions and concordances have been published of Vico’s first version of the New Science (1725) and of the second version (1744). Modern critical editions of the 1730 and 1744 texts have also been published. The reader seeking literature on Vico will find more pages than any but the most dedicated scholar can read, including an array, in the major European languages, of single-authored works interpreting Vico’s thought in terms of many, diverse themes. Missing from this embarrassment of riches is a section-by-section commentary that can take the philosophically oriented reader through the genesis and structure of the New Science. What follows is such a commentary. My intent is to bring to light Vico’s principal ideas in the philosophy of history, philosophy of mythology, and philosophy of law and society, and to do so in a manner that may aid the potential reader simply to see what much of the text says and how it says it, with some attention to Vico’s sources and to those figures and doctrines he opposes. My intention, in commenting on any part of the work, is not to avoid interpretation. My aim is to go through Vico’s text as he wrote it, to bring forth its fundamental points as I see them, without the attempt to prove, improve, or criticize what is said. Although the subtitle of this work designates it as a philosophical commentary, I wish to emphasize that I do not regard philosophy as separate from or an opponent of rhetoric. Vico was throughout his career a professor of rhetoric, and he approached philosophical as well as historical issues in rhetorical terms. By this I mean he held, with Aristotle, that rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic, and he understood that above all we make our world through our power of speech to form it. It is within this world so formed that philosophy can arise and on which it continues to depend. The one modern and original thinker influenced by Vico who has maintained this interconnection between rhetoric and philosophy is Ernesto Grassi, principally in his small book Rhetoric as Philosophy. As Grassi shows, the humanist tradition from the Renaissance through Vico and beyond has never understood metaphysical or moral philosophy as simply an extension

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Preface     xi

of the logical power of language. Instead, they require the principles of poetic and rhetorical speech that surround philosophical thought and give it agility and life as well as its access to the distinctively human. The reader who opens the New Science for the first time finds in the table of contents an array of topics that is fascinating in itself, but bewildering as to their combined significance: poetic wisdom; the universal flood; giants; poetic metaphysics; poetic logic; monsters; metamorphoses; poetic characters; hieroglyphics; family arms; metals and money; the natural law of the gentes; rhythm, song, and verse; the logic of the learned; poetic economy; vulgar virtues; religion and matrimony; families and famuli; cities; the first republics; origins of the census and the treasury; Roman assemblies; divine providence; the question of popular liberty instituted by Junius Brutus; heroic customs; poetic physics; heroic sentences; the coming of Aeneas to Italy; the search for the true Homer; divine judgments; duels and reprisals; an eternal natural royal law; refutation of the political theory of Jean Bodin; punishments and wars; barbaric history; and the idea of an eternal natural republic. It is perhaps comparable to entering the contents of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, but even in that complicated work, with some initial concentration a philosophically experienced reader can come to see an intellectual pattern. Also perhaps comparable are the contents of works of the Italian Renaissance, such as the headings of Polydore Vergil’s On Discovery—although these headings are myriad, one sees that they signify types of discovery or invention; or the complicated internal titles of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the Pagan Gods—but one knows at least that these are all instances of deities and their deeds. With Vico’s text, however, one knows only that, somehow, these are the contents of what is claimed to be a new science, unlike any that one can imagine, and it concerns the common nature of the nations. But what nations? And what is it they have in common? The only choice the reader has is to begin reading, with the promise Vico makes—that the idea of the work will be explained through the items depicted in the engraving of the frontispiece. The meaning of the work is cast immediately in a procedure the reader is not likely to have encountered before, except, perhaps, in terms of Rousseau’s remarks on the frontispiece of his First Discourse. But Rousseau’s remarks are brief and fairly clear. Or the reader may recall the symbolic frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan, which incorporates the sentence on the power of the Leviathan from the book of Job of the Latin Vulgate. The first sentence of the New Science refers the reader to the now obscure first-century Tablet of Cebes, as an analog for approaching the meaning of the frontispiece, saying that he will present a table of civil things, as Cebes the Theban presented a table of morals. Thus the reader is

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xii    Preface

immediately directed to another work that must be understood in order to understand Vico’s work. The potential reader encounters difficulty even in crossing the threshold of the New Science. Vico distinguishes between two types of potential readers of his work. He states this distinction most clearly in a fragment, “To the Equable Readers,” that survives from a first draft of his Universal Law, the precursor to the New Science. (For a translation of this fragment, see the Bayer and Verene volume cited in the bibliographical note.) He says he would not consider anyone worthy of the name “reader” who would not have read his work from beginning to end in a continuous and methodical manner. One is reminded of Hegel’s dismissal, at the end of his preface to the Phenomenology, of those readers who would make pronouncements on works after having read only prefaces or first paragraphs or reviews of them. In the commiato, or postface, of Vico’s first published book, On the Study Methods of Our Time (1709), Vico claims that wisdom is a knowledge of the whole, and that “the whole is really the flower of wisdom.” He is echoing Cicero’s definition—and Varro’s—that wisdom is a knowledge of things divine and human, joined with Quintilian’s principle that eloquence is speaking completely on a subject. To comprehend Vico’s thought the reader must meditate his work as a whole. In the conclusion to his autobiography, Vico emphasizes that in his teaching he followed the humanist conception of eloquence as “la sapienza che parla,” eloquence understood as “wisdom speaking.” He says further, regarding his approach to teaching, that “others were concerned with the various parts of knowledge, but he strove to teach it as an integral whole in which each part accords with every other and gets its meaning from the whole.” In the Universal Law fragment, Vico claims that the two types of readers of his work can be “an erudite youth” or “a person most expert in every kind of erudition.” He instructs the youthful reader to ask, above all, if he has studied carefully the subjects and the main authors that his work treats, such as metaphysics, theology, moral and civil customs, language, history, and Roman jurisprudence. Should the youthful reader not have engaged in such preparation by reading the essential books, the reader has no right to attribute to Vico any difficulties in the comprehension of his work: “I ask you to be careful not to attribute darkness and fogginess to me as a defect characteristic of my manner of writing.” The youthful reader must look first to his own inadequacies before attributing any difficulties of comprehension to Vico. At the end of the introduction to the Idea of the Work in the 1730 edition of the New Science (a passage not included in the 1744 edition), Vico expands his instructions to the young reader who may wish to profit from his new

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Preface     xiii

science. He addresses the young reader directly, by enumerating seven points to consider. First, he says, the reader must be able to think abstractly and engage in pure mental activity, independent of everything corporeal and without resorting to the imagination. Second, to be able to reason in accordance with the geometric method the work employs, to consider whether certain premises are true and to establish what may be deduced from them. Third, to realize that the work presupposes a wide-ranging body of knowledge and scholarship (what Vico defines in the New Science as philology). Fourth, the reader will need a comprehensive mind, that is, one that can bring together the conceptual meanings of philosophy with the historical analyses of philology, and to grasp these as a totality. Fifth, the reader will need a strong acuity of mind to grasp the many and diverse discoveries that are presented in this new science. Sixth, because these discoveries are wholly new, the reader must be prepared to read the work three times. Seventh, the reader will need to make the science, in a sense, for himself, in order ultimately to achieve its coherence and truth. Vico’s sixth instruction—to read the work three times—reflects the program of reading he devised for himself, in his autodidactic attempt to master the Latin writers against the Tuscans. As he reports this in his autobiography: “On successive days he would study Cicero side by side with Boccaccio, Virgil with Dante, and Horace with Petrarca.” He read these “always three times each on the following plan: the first time to grasp each composition as a whole, the second to note the transitions and sequence of things, the third in greater detail to collect the fine turns of thought and expression.” This program of reading is based on the principles of composition expressed by both Cicero and Quintilian: inventio, the amassing of materials; dispositio, their arrangement; and elocutio, their formulation in language. The three phases of reading any work correspond to the three phases necessary to the composition of any work. Only on this threefold method of meditating the work can one count oneself a true reader of it. Vico’s greatest concern, I think, is with the young but prepared reader. This reader may become lost and turn away from the work, and it is in such readers that the future of the work truly lies. The reader “expert in every kind of erudition” is the potential critic. Vico says he asks such a reader “to consider only these two things: first, if I have decreed erroneous principles, second, if I have deduced blasphemous conclusions from such principles.” This statement is not unlike that of Hugo Grotius, whom Vico both criticizes and admires, in concluding his “preliminary discourse” introducing his Law of War and Peace, where Grotius says: “If anything has here been said by me inconsistent with piety, with good morals, with Holy Scripture and the Christian Church, or with any aspect of truth, let it be as if unsaid.”

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xiv    Preface

Vico further points out that a reader would not be equable if he were to reject his work simply because it draws new conclusions and contains new discoveries not in accord with those that occur in common use. He says that should one decide to attack his claims, it is not enough simply to criticize what is said. Rather, the critic is obliged “to put together in one system, more easily and more happily by a different method, more truth than I have worked out in the universal history of the gentes—in poetry, in philology, in moral and civil doctrine conforming in an absolute manner to Christian jurisprudence; only in this way will you show that my system itself falls and crumbles.” Vico thus removes the critic from a privileged position of striking here and there at points in his work or formulating various objections by extracting quotations from its various parts. The true critic must take up Vico’s cause and perfect it in a better version. Vico very much takes this approach himself, in his attack on the inadequacies of the seventeenth-century natural-law theorists Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, and John Selden. He criticizes their systems of natural law throughout the New Science, but he does so while presenting a more adequate account of the natural law of the gentes, grounding it in a doctrine of providence as governing the historical life of the nations. He rejects the view of Polybius, that there could be a society solely of philosophers or knowers, but in so doing he presents a new theory of the origin of society based on three fundamental principles of humanity—religion, marriage, and burial. In the end, Vico is a Socratic thinker in the sense that he regards thought as properly conducted in the agora, not as a private activity of the study. Socrates is the figure to whom he compares himself in the last lines of his autobiography. Although he strongly reacts to unfair criticisms of his work, such as in his defense of the New Science of 1725 in the text known as Vici Vindiciae, when attacked by a false and malicious book notice of it placed in the prestigious journal Leipzig Acta Eruditorum, he, as a great thinker, sees human knowledge as requiring the community of scholars acting in the Republic of Letters. (For a translation of the Vici Vindiciae, see the Bayer and Verene volume cited in the bibliographical note.) Vico is dedicated to a standard of excellence in thought and speech to which he wishes to hold not only himself but others who would claim to be custodians of human knowledge. As he states, in what became the final proclamation of his career, his short address to the Academy of Oziosi (1737): “I hold the opinion that if eloquence does not regain the luster of the Latins and Greeks in our time, when our sciences have made progress equal to and perhaps greater than theirs, it will be because the sciences are taught completely stripped of every badge of eloquence.” His objection to both the Stoics and the Epicureans is that they advocate a doctrine of solitaries, of a wisdom that is not sufficiently tied to the Socratic

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Preface     xv

method of elenchos as conducted in the agora. In addressing the reader in the postface of the Study Methods, Vico says: “In my life I have always had the greatest apprehension of being alone in wisdom; this kind of solitude exposes one to the danger of becoming either a god or a fool.” Years later, in the conclusion of his autobiography, he says he was “choleric to a fault” and that he was prone “to inveigh too violently against the errors of thought or scholarship or against the misconduct of those men of letters who were his rivals.” However, he says “he was correspondingly grateful to those who formed a just opinion [of him and his works].” He adds: “Among the caitiff semi-learned or pseudo-learned, the more shameless called him a fool, or in somewhat more courteous terms they said that he was obscure or eccentric and had odd ideas.” Vico was simply not understood in his own time. In two letters he wrote at the time of the publication of the first edition of the New Science, Vico makes clear how greatly he regards it as an achievement of his thought, and why he believes it received such a cold reception. On October 25, 1725, Vico wrote to his Capuchin friend Father Bernardo Maria Giacco that he regarded the New Science as the crowning achievement of his life, the work toward which all his other works had been leading. He says he sees himself “clothed as a new man,” and that the work has filled him with a “heroic spirit,” such that he does not fear death. He later develops this idea of a “heroic spirit” as the basis of true human education, in the oration “On the Heroic Mind” (1732). Although Vico regards his discovery of the new science as a unique achievement of the greatest importance, he complains that his words are like those of someone crying in the desert (like those of his namesake, John the Baptist), and that persons he meets by chance in the city to whom he sent a copy of his book, make no acknowledgment of it, which is so unpleasant that he makes efforts to avoid them. In January 1726 Vico wrote to Abbé Giuseppe Luigi Esperti, who had aided him with distribution of copies of the New Science in Venice and Rome, that his book had come out in an age whose spirit—“in the expression of Tacitus in which he reflects on his times that greatly resemble ours—is ‘to seduce and to be seduced’ [corrumpere et corrumpi seculum vocatur], and because the book either disgusts or disturbs the many, it is unable to attain universal applause.” The New Science, he says, “treats the idea of providence as the basis for justice in the human race, it refers the nations to a strict standard.” This idea of providence as an absolute standard goes against the fashionable views of the day, which tend toward ideologies drawn from Stoicism or Epicureanism. Thus, Vico concludes, “the only books that please are those which, like clothes, are produced in accord with fashion.” Vico is reported to have said that “misfortune will follow me even after my death,” and it has—in the sense that, until recently, the greatness of his

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xvi    Preface

thought was recognized by only the few, from time to time, and often simply by those few who wished to bend his thought in the direction of their own views, making Vico seem always a precursor rather than an original thinker with a genuine position in the history of thought. Today, however, with the recent and sustained renaissance in Vico studies as background, the opportunity is quite open to become the equable reader Vico sought, to grasp his odd ideas and comprehend their internal order and implications. What follows is a readers’ guide and companion to the text, written from the perspective of my reading of Vico for nearly fifty years. Because this is a commentary, and readers may wish to consult its chapters out of order but in relation to the divisions of Vico’s text, it is necessary and natural to repeat points and passages from one chapter to another, an approach that Vico also takes in his text. Vico’s New Science, in all of its parts, is always a twice-told tale. If the equable reader finds my comments of use, my purpose has been served. No book is the work solely of its author. I wish to acknowledge several of the debts I have incurred in writing this one. I thank, first of all, Molly Black Verene for the herculean task of transposing the sheets of my handwritten manuscript into typescript, guided by the master key of her copyediting skills, textual insights, and suggestions. I thank Nancy DuBois Marcus for more than once urging that I write a commentary on the New Science. I thank my colleagues at Emory and at other universities who so kindly were the first readers of this work: Raymond Barfield, Thora Ilin Bayer, Ann Hartle, Benjamin Kleindorfer, Donald Kunze, Donald Livingston, David Lovekin, Frederick Marcus, and Jeffrey Wilson. I owe a debt to the Emory Department of Philosophy’s Institute for the History of Philosophy, sponsor of the summer seminar on “Vico and the Humanist Tradition” in 2011, to the scholars of the various universities who were members of it, and to Brian Copenhaver, who served with me as its coleader. It was a valuable opportunity to present and discuss some of the central themes of this commentary. Finally, I warmly acknowledge the debt I owe to my longtime colleague the late Giorgio Tagliacozzo, whose indefatigable efforts to promote Vico in the English-speaking world over nearly half a century are responsible for much of the attention the New Science receives today. I also express my great debt to the late philosopher of the Italian humanist tradition Ernesto Grassi, whose friendship and whose conversations over many years at the Zürcher Gespräche in Switzerland and at his villa on Ischia, off the Neapolitan coast, influenced my thinking about rhetoric and philosophy more than any other. May the earth lie lightly upon them.

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B i b l i og ra phica l Note

The standard English-language edition of Vico’s major work is The New Science of Giambattista Vico, translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch, published by Cornell University Press (orig. pub. 1948; rev. ed. 1968; repub. 1984). Bergin and Fisch began their translation in 1939 at Naples and on Capri, in consultation with Fausto Nicolini and Benedetto Croce, but were interrupted by World War II. By merging the talents of the Italianist Bergin and the philosopher Fisch, the translation mirrors Vico’s method of making the new science itself through the joining of philology and philosophy. It preserves Vico’s sense of the etymology of words, especially those in Roman law, as well as his use and modifications of philosophical terminology as developed to his day. Their edition also contains an invaluable system of interlinear cross-references, allowing the reader to see connections among passages in a work that treats topics diversely. The Bergin and Fisch translation is based on the third edition of the Scienza nuova (1744) as it appears in the collected edition of Vico’s works by Nicolini (8 vols. in 11; Bari: Laterza, 1911–41). There is a second full English translation of Vico’s New Science by David Marsh, first published in 1999 by Penguin Books. The purpose of this translation, as Marsh states in the translator’s preface, is to make Vico’s work “readable for the modern reader.” In his preface to the reprint of this translation in 2001, Marsh compares his translation to that of Bergin and Fisch: “This printing corrects several misprints and oversights in the first edition, but none of the departures from the Bergin-Fisch Vulgate, which some regard as heretical errors. Bergin and Fisch provide a trot; I provide a translation. Scholars will consult Vico’s original text.” Actually, Marsh did make a change, adjusting the wording of Vico’s phrase “la barbarie della riflessione” in paragraph 1106 of his conclusion to the New Science from “This barbarism of calculation” in the 1999 edition to “This calculating barbarism of reflection” in the 2001 reprint, bringing the wording closer to Vico’s own. Yet in Vico’s original there is no term corresponding to “calculation” or “calculating.” As philosophical terms, calculation and reflection are quite different and separate functions of the mind. xvii

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xviii    Bibliographical Note

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “trot,” in this regard, as “a literal translation of a text used by students; a ‘crib.’ ” Marsh’s comment is unfair. The Bergin and Fisch translation is not a trot. Their translation has been hailed by several generations of scholars as a model of translation for its reliability and readability, led by Isaiah Berlin, who, in the preface to his widely read Vico and Herder (1976; 2nd ed., 2000), states: “I have relied on the admirable translation of Vico’s Scienza nuova by Professors T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch for the quotations from, and references to, it in this book.” Those readers who wish to approach Vico’s terminology and manner of thought as closely as possible in English will find the Bergin and Fisch translation indispensible. What Marsh calls “heretical errors” or deviations in his translation from what he calls the “Bergin-Fisch Vulgate” principally refer to his departure from translating Vico’s philosophical terms by their English equivalents, often using terms quite disparate from the original, whereas Bergin and Fisch consistently endeavor to keep close to the original. Where possible, Bergin and Fisch translate Vico’s major terms with their English cognates; Marsh generally does not. For example, Bergin and Fisch render Vico’s favola as “fable,” Marsh as “myth”; Bergin and Fisch render Vico’s caratteri poetici as “poetic characters,” Marsh, variously, as “poetic symbols” or “archetypes”; Bergin and Fisch render Vico’s lingua comune mentale as “common mental language,” Marsh as “conceptual language.” The reader of the critical literature on Vico in English should also keep in mind that the terminology of the Bergin and Fisch translation is what has been employed for more than the past fifty years. For a comparison of the Bergin and Fisch and the Marsh translations, especially regarding Vico’s terminology, see Donald Phillip Verene, “On Translating Vico: The Penguin Classics Edition of the New Science,” New Vico Studies 27 (1999): 85–107. The present commentary is based on the facsimile edition (ristampa anastatica) of the Scienza nuova as first published by the Stamperia Muziana at Naples in 1744: Principj di Scienza nuova d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni, edited by Marco Veneziani (Florence: Olschki, 1994). Citations employ the paragraph enumeration introduced by Nicolini in the Laterza edition, which is preserved in both of the English translations and in many modern Italian editions. Quotations in English follow the Bergin and Fisch translation, with occasional modification. Two modifications I have made throughout concern Bergin and Fisch’s use of “institution” for Vico’s cosa, and “commonwealth” for his repubblica. At the end of their introduction Bergin and Fisch explain their reasons for using “institution,” and they note at the end of their preface that they have employed “commonwealth” to avoid misleading associations of “republic” in English. Cosa is the common word in Italian for “thing”

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Bibliographical Note     xix

and can have much the same function as res does in Latin. I find “institution” to be a cumbersome word in this context. I have replaced it in quoted passages with “thing,” “matter,” or “affair,” as in cose civili—civil things, civil matters or affairs—rather than “civil institutions.” I have replaced “commonwealth” in all quoted passages in which it occurs with “republic” in an effort to bring the reader closer to the original text, with the provision that what Vico means by repubblica in particular instances remains problematic and not equivalent to the specific sense of the English word “republic.” See the glossary for discussion of these terms. For an Italian edition of the Scienza nuova, as well as a selection of Vico’s other major writings, the reader may consult the edition of Vico’s Opere by Andrea Battistini, 2 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1990). This edition contains extensive, erudite notes, in which Battistini provides plentiful citations of modern scholarship. The reader seeking scholarly illumination of specific passages may wish also to consult the earlier Nicolini, Commento storico alla seconda Scienza nuova, 2 vols. (Rome, 1945–50). It may also be useful to consult La scienza nuova 1744, edited by Paolo Cristofolini and Manuela Sanna, vol. 9 of the critical edition of Opere di Giambattista Vico (Rome: Storia e Letteratura, 2013). For a bibliography, see Croce, Bibliografia vichiana, enlarged and revised by Nicolini, 2 vols. (Naples, 1947–48), and the supplements by various compilers in the series Studi vichiani (Guida Editori) as part of the program of research of the Centro di Studi Vichiani at Naples, which also publishes the Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani (1971–). For a comprehensive bibliography of English-language literature on Vico, see Molly Black Verene, “Works on Giambattista Vico in English from 1884 through 2009,” New Vico Studies 27 (2009): 83–304, published as part of the program of research of the Institute for Vico Studies at Emory University. For a full, year-by-year chronology of Vico’s life and career, as well as a concise account of his fortuna, the development and interpretation of his ideas in Continental and Anglo-American thought, see Donald Phillip Verene, Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico’s New Science and “Finnegans Wake” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 30–39 and 207–19. For an account of Vico’s autobiography, see Donald Phillip Verene, The New Art of Autobiography: An Essay on the Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). For a sourcebook of some of Vico’s additions to the New Science and several writings that underlie it, as well as a comprehensive listing of Vico’s writings in English translation, see Thora Ilin Bayer and Donald Phillip Verene, eds., Giambattista Vico: Keys to the New Science; Translations, Commentaries, and Essays (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).

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A bbrevi ati ons a nd Notes on C itations

A

The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico. Translated by Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983. Cited by page number.

FNS The First New Science. Edited and translated by Leon Pompa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Cited by paragraph number.

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UL

A Translation from Latin into English of Giambattista Vico’s “Il Diritto Universale”/“Universal Law.” 2 vols. Translated by John D. Schaeffer with “Synopsis of Universal Law” translated by Donald Phillip Verene. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011. Cited by book, chapter, and section number.

Passages from The New Science of Giambattista Vico (translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984) are cited by paragraph number alone, unaccompanied by any further designation. Greek and Latin authors are cited in standard form using Loeb Classical Library editions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), with some terms and phraseology occasionally adjusted.

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VICO’S NEW SCIENCE

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Pa rt O ne

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Generalities ­Concerning the New Science

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Ch ap ter 1

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Sense and Method of the New Science

It is said, and rightly, that Giambattista Vico is the founder of the philosophy or science of history. Isaiah Berlin puts it this way: “Vico virtually invented a new field of social knowledge, which embraces social anthropology, the comparative and historical studies of philology, linguistics, ethnology, jurisprudence, literature, mythology, in effect the history of civilization in the broadest sense.”1 Writers of history from Herodotus and Thucydides, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Polybius, Livy, and Tacitus, to Lorenzo Valla, in his exposure of the Donation of Constantine (1440), Leonardo Bruni, in his History of the Florentine People (1442), and Francesco Guicciardini, in the History of Italy (1561), to Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, in his unfinished Discourse on Universal History (1681), and Johann Gottfried Herder, in his Ideas toward the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–87) have advanced views of not only their subject matter but also of the nature of history. However, to hold historiographical views is not the same as to have a philosophy or science of history. Even to say, as Aristotle does in his famous claim in the Poetics, that poetry is more philosophical and a higher thing than history, as it tends to express the universal where history treats of the particular fact, is not to offer a philosophy of history; it is only to make a claim concerning history. The hypothetical accounts of the origins and stages of development of human society that are found in philosophical works such as Plato’s Laws 3

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4    GENERALITIES

CON CERNING THE NE W S C IEN CE

(book 3) and Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things (book 5), or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s post-Vichian portrayal of the origin and foundation of inequality in the Second Discourse (1755) are not philosophies of history. They are speculative conceptions of human society. In his Universal Law, prior to the full realization of his new science, Vico is able to declare: “History does not yet have its principles [Historia nondum habet sua principia]” (UL 1.104). These principles, both in the sense of beginnings and in the sense of explanations, can be achieved only when the separation of philosophy and philology can be overcome, such that the universals of human nature can be employed to illuminate the deeds actually performed by human beings in the course of their affairs from obscure times to the present. Such an investigation will lead us to a systematic comprehension of the entire world of the nations. To the new science of history Vico adds a second new science—that of mythology—which provides access to the origin of the life of the nations. As Ernst Cassirer puts it: “Giambattista Vico may be called the real discoverer of the myth. He immersed himself in its motley world of forms and learned by his study that this world has its own peculiar structure and time order and language. He made the first attempts to decipher this language, gaining a method by which to interpret the ‘sacred pictures,’ the hieroglyphics, of myth.”2 The ancient tellers of tales, the historians, the poets, as well as the philosophers, make constant use of myths. Easily called to mind are the “likely stories” that inhabit the Platonic Dialogues, and scenes such as that at the beginning of the Phaedrus in which Socrates is pressed to say whether he thinks true the myth in which Boreas, the north wind, is said to have carried off the fair Orithyia; or Aristotle’s claim at the beginning of the Metaphysics that like philosophy, myth begins in wonder (thauma), that the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of wisdom since myth is composed of wonders. The works of the ancient mythographers—such as the semiphilosophical treatise of Euhemerus in which the gods of mythology were claimed to be but deified mortals, which became the basis of the general interpretation of myths as traditional accounts of historical persons and events known as Euhemerism; or the Library of Apollodorus, which was an attempt to produce a complete but rather uninspiring mythical history of Greece; or the Summary of the Traditions concerning Greek Mythology by the Stoic Cornutus, which expounds the principles of Stoic criticism of myths, explaining them allegorically—give the range of approaches to myths that persisted to Vico’s day. Close to Vico in time, and notable for its approach antithetical to Vico’s, is Pierre Bayle’s treatment of myths in his influential Historical and Critical

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SENSE AN D M ETHO D OF THE NE W S C IEN CE      5

Dictionary (1697), a work admired by all sides of the Enlightenment. Prior to Bayle, Spinoza and Hobbes had already well established the rationalistic rejection of myth. Bayle went further in an effort to satirize and dramatize myths as not only irrational and absurd but dangerous to everything human and worthy. Illustrative of this is Bayle’s treatment of Jupiter, in his anonymous entry, as the most monstrous of the gods, who is defiled by commission of every known crime, in contrast to Vico’s characterization of Jove in the New Science as the presence that causes the giants to engage in their first human acts. Vico states: “The first science to be learned should be mythology or the interpretation of fables” (51). In inventing this science, the specific discovery Vico made is that the first gentile peoples, as they devolved from the giants, spoke in poetic characters, by means of which they formed imaginative universals. This discovery, Vico says, “is the master key to this Science, which has cost us the persistent research of almost all our literary life” (34). Vico’s new science, then, is the science of history combined with the science of mythology. That the science of history must begin with a science of mythology that comprehends the origin of the nations is grounded in Vico’s central methodological axiom that “doctrines must take their beginning from that of the matters of which they treat” (314). The order of thought must follow the order of things and things manifest their nature in a pattern of origin, development, maturity, decline, and fall that Vico calls “ideal eternal history,” a cyclic pattern that is the subject matter of his science of history, that maintains that all nations develop in terms of a corso of three ages—of gods, heroes, and humans—that is repeated as a ricorso. The title Vico gave his work is intended to alert the reader to the fact of its originality: Principles of New Science of Giambattista Vico concerning the Common Nature of the Nations—Principj di Scienza nuova di Giambattista Vico d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni. This echoes the title of Galileo’s late work, Dialoghi delle nuove scienze, the first great work of modern physics, originally published in 1638 under the title Discorsi e dimonstruzioni mathematiche, intorno à due nuove scienze attimenti alla meccanica ed ai movimenti locali. Vico’s two new sciences, then, are the science of history combined with the science of mythology (due Nuove Scienze). In his autobiography, in discussing Jean Le Clerc’s review of the first two books of his Universal Law, Vico emphasizes that Le Clerc says that “it is constructed by ‘mathematical method,’ which ‘from few principles draws infinite consequences’ ” (A 164). Vico’s axioms in the New Science are intended in their own way to reflect this sense of dimonstruzioni mathematiche, that is, from few principles (116 axioms) infinite consequences for the comprehension of history are drawn. As Galileo

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6    GENERALITIES

CON CERNING THE NE W S C IEN CE

produced a knowledge of the motions in nature through these discourses and demonstrations, so Vico claims to have produced a knowledge of the motions and mechanics of history that comprise the life of the nations. Vico’s use of the term “principles” (principj) as the first word of his title recalls Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), more commonly known by the shortened title Principia. When the New Science was published in its first version, in 1725, Vico sent a copy to Newton, which might have reached him not long before his death in 1727.3 Vico’s term Scienza nuova further reflects Bacon’s Novum Organon, which Bacon intended to replace Aristotle’s treatise on “analytics,” or logic, known as the Organon. Bacon’s New Organon was intended to provide “true directions concerning the interpretation of nature.” Vico’s new organon, or logic of the life of the nations, puts forth the true directions concerning the interpretation of history. In his autobiography Vico designates Bacon as one of his “four authors” (A 139, 146), and, as will be shown later, the first four axioms of the New Science are versions of Bacon’s famous four idols, reformulated to apply not to the investigation of nature but to the investigation of history (120–28). Finally, Vico’s title recalls the principal work of his fourth author, Hugo Grotius, De iure belli ac pacis—The Law of War and Peace, part of the subtitle of which indicates that in its three books “the law of nature and nations” (in quibus ius naturae et gentium) is explained. In the First New Science (1725) Vico employs a subtitle of “the principles of another system of the diritto naturale delle genti [the natural law of the gentes].” In its main title he employs nazioni, “nations.” In the titles of both editions of the Second New Science (1730, 1744), Vico uses only the term nazioni and not the Italian word genti, which reflects the Latin. But Vico’s expression in his title of “the common nature of the nations” naturally brings to mind, for the potential reader, the “law of nations” that is so closely associated with Grotius’s Law of War and Peace and that is regarded as the real beginning of the science of international law. Grotius held that actions were bound by natural law based on man’s own nature and that on the basis of this natural law it was possible to form a coherent code suitable for all times and places. Vico’s new science, by going back to the ius gentium of Roman law and conceiving it in terms of the historical development of nations, was to supersede the beginning made by Grotius. But it is Grotius’s famous work more than any other that the latter part of Vico’s title is meant to call to mind. What Galileo, Newton, and Bacon had done for our comprehension of nature, Vico would do for our comprehension of history. What Grotius had begun for our comprehension of law and the life of nations, Vico would correct, transform, and complete. Thus we may add, to Vico’s two new sciences of history and mythology, his

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SENSE AN D M ETHO D OF THE NE W S C IEN CE      7

new science of law that provides us with a jurisprudence of the human race based on his conception of the perfection of civil wisdom present in Roman law, which will be discussed later. Vico not only considered his new science was to history what Galileo’s and Newton’s were to nature, and that it corrected the mistakes of Grotius and the seventeenth-century natural-law theorists, he also saw it as the completion of the program of Renaissance humanism begun by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in his announcement in 1484—to defend against anyone nine hundred Conclusiones or philosophical-theological theses embracing all of human knowledge to be introduced by his now-famous Oration on the Dignity of Man. Karl-Otto Apel, in his early study of the idea of language in the tradition of humanism from Dante to Vico, states: “Vico is as Humanist a conclusion, indeed the Owl of Minerva of Italian Renaissance culture.”4 Apel’s reference is to Hegel’s image that philosophy, like the owl, takes its flight only at the falling of dusk, that is, when the events of the day are concluding. Ernesto Grassi makes a similar claim in his study of the rhetorical basis of philosophy, that in Vico “the whole humanist tradition reached its highest philosophical consciousness.”5 In his autobiography Vico gives Pico’s proposal to sustain “conclusions concerning all the knowable” as the beginning point of his conception of the new science, which he connects to the drafting of his “Synopsis of Universal Law,” to announce the preparation of his large work and first version of his new science in the books of the Universal Law, published in the 1720s. Pico’s failure, Vico holds, was not in regard to his approach to philosophy in presenting conclusions concerning the knowable, but in regard to the fact that “he left aside the great and major part of it, namely philology, which, treating of countless matters of religions, languages, laws, customs, property rights, conveyances, sovereign powers, governments, classes and the like, is in its beginnings incomplete, obscure, unreasonable, incredible, and without hope of reduction to scientific principles” (A 157). The method on which Vico founds the new science is to join philosophy and philology, which in the New Science he calls a “new critical art” in which, he says, “philosophy undertakes to examine philology (that is, the doctrine of all the things that depend on human choice; for example, all histories of the languages, customs, and deeds of peoples in war and peace)” (7). This new critical art sorts out and organizes all the “certains” (i certi), those things done by choice and backed by authority of the histories of the gentile peoples in terms of the universal “trues” (i veri) formulated by philosophy, that provide the common pattern of ideal eternal history exhibited by all nations. This pattern is the presence of providence in history, as will be discussed later;

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8    GENERALITIES

CON CERNING THE NE W S C IEN CE

thus Vico’s humanism, like Pico’s, is a Christian humanism that affirms the dignity of man. Despite Vico’s disagreements with the seventeenth-century natural-law theorists and other specific disagreements that he has throughout the New Science, such as his rejection of Polybius’s view that there could be a society of philosophers, that is, that religion is not a necessary principle for the life of nations, he pursues, in a modified form, Pico’s doctrine of syncretism. In essence, Pico holds that there is a philosophia perennis—that all philosophical schools and thinkers contain valid insights that can be brought together in a compatible manner. Pico’s view is not an early version of the Hegelian conception of a dialectical progression of philosophical positions, each expressing a partial truth, and neither is Vico’s involvement with other positions. But as the reader goes through the New Science it becomes evident that he or she takes from other positions what is found to be true within them, such that their partial truths can be combined in the universal truth of his new science. In Vico’s union of philosophy and philology we do not encounter the law of parsimony of Occam’s razor. Instead we encounter what we can call Vico’s magnet, which draws all the truths of the human world together in a systematic manner to make the new science. To comprehend what Vico means by “science” it is necessary to consider the verum-factum principle of the opening chapter of his early Latin work on metaphysics, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians (1710). This is the principle that the true is the selfsame as the made (verum esse ipsum factum). Vico affirms this first as a principle of mathematics. Mathematical thinking is not an activity of discovering rational truths to which our thinking corresponds; it is an activity in which we make such truths and know them to be such because we made them. Benedetto Croce describes the transference of this discovery from mathematics to history: “The importance of this new discovery, the discovery of the truth which Vico now recognized in the moral sciences, lay in the realization of a new implication of the theory of knowledge laid down by himself in the former period of his speculations; namely, the criterion of truth consisting in the ‘convertibility of the true with the created [il fatto].’ The reason why man could have perfect knowledge of man’s world was simply that he had himself made that world.”6 Vico’s discovery of the verum-factum principle as the basis of knowledge allows him to define science as a process of self-knowledge in which the known is the knower in a different aspect. The knower knows what the knower has done. Since human beings made the things of the human world through their actions, they in principle have perfect access to forming a knowledge of them. There can, then, be only a science (scienza) of the human

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SENSE AN D M ETHO D OF THE NE W S C IEN CE      9

world. There cannot be a science of the natural world, as the things of the natural world are not made by the actions of the knower. Natural “science” can rightly be described only as a deliberate and systematic form of consciousness (coscienza). Natural scientific knowledge is a kind of elaborate witnessing of the world, the objects and events of which are not made but found or discovered as different in kind from the knower. Experiment, Vico holds, has such a key role in natural science because in an experiment it is as if the thing to be known is to some extent made. With the rise of the mathematical investigation of nature and the term “science” beginning to separate itself from the older term of “natural philosophy,” Vico redefines “science” as a term applicable only to the new science of history, to the human world of the nations. He takes the word “science” as properly applying only to his own work. This is a stupendous and original claim, but Vico will have nothing less. Thus, as Vico states in closing the fifth and last book of the New Science: “Hence we could not refrain from giving this work the invidious title of a New Science, for it was too much to defraud it unjustly of the rightful claim it had over an argument so universal as that concerning the common nature of nations, in virtue of that property which belongs to every science that is perfect in its idea” (1096). He goes on to gloss Seneca: “This world is a paltry thing unless all the world may find [therein] what it seeks.” The New Science in its final version is a complete speech in which we can find not only ourselves but in principle anything human of which we can think. Seneca’s line is from his Natural Questions (7.30.5), and he has in mind the natural world and that it has within it something for every age to investigate. Vico, without saying so, has transferred this claim to the world of nations.

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Cha p te r 2

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Genesis of the New Science

The genesis of the New Science is marked by two principal decisions made by Vico. The first is his rejection of Cartesianism, which came to dominate the intellectual life of Naples and, more generally, to represent the modern conception of knowledge as the quest for certainty. The second, following his loss of the concourse for the chair of civil law, is his decision to abandon the ordinary pursuits of academic research, to write in Italian rather than Latin, and in so doing to expand his conception of universal law into a conception of universal history. When Vico resumed permanent residence in Naples in 1695, at age twenty-seven—after his nine years as tutor to the children of the Rocca family at Vatolla in the Cilento, south of Naples, during which time he had fully educated himself in the wisdom of the ancients—he found that all forms of classical learning had been supplanted by the Cartesian view that there is one and only one method that governs right reasoning in the sciences. As he puts it in his autobiography: “With this learning and erudition Vico returned to Naples a stranger [forestiero] in his own land, and found the physics of Descartes at the height of its renown among the established men of letters” (A 132). The physics of Aristotle, Vico says, had become a laughingstock (una favola, a fantastic tale). The metaphysics of the cinquecento and the writings of the great humanists in poetry and rhetoric were of no interest; even 10

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GENESIS OF THE NE W S C IEN CE      11

medicine and jurisprudence and the study of Greek and Latin had fallen into disrepute, such that “in the city taste in letters changed every two or three years like styles in dress” (A 133). Because of his attachment to the humane studies and the forms of thought cultivated in them, “Vico lived in his native city not only a stranger [straniero] but quite unknown” (A 134). Vico finds himself to be a foreigner, an outsider, and, even more, an alien. In his oration On the Study Methods of Our Time (1709), Vico attacks the Cartesian dismissal of the ancients by addressing the question “Which study method is finer and better, ours or the Ancients’?”1 His theme is not to place the ancients over the moderns, but to access the value of each and to argue that a true curriculum of studies must offer a balanced education in the forms of knowledge of both. Vico carries this theme of balance throughout his career. The opposition is between eloquence or rhetoric, that is, the key to the law, which Vico regards as the basis of civil wisdom itself, and analytic geometry, that is, the key to the conducting of right reasoning in the natural sciences. Descartes, in the Discourse on the Method, puts rhetoric aside, as unnecessary for the speaking of truth: “Those with the strongest reasoning and the most skill at ordering their thoughts so as to make them clear and intelligible are always the most persuasive, even if they speak only low Breton and have never learned rhetoric.”2 The Port-Royal Logic of Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, L’art de penser (1662), turns this critical attitude toward rhetoric as separate from rather than as a counterpart to logic or dialectic, as Aristotle maintains, into a program of education. One thing that is clear beyond all doubt is that education in the law is not possible based on Descartes’s famous four-step method of right reasoning that he puts forth in the Discourse. While it is perhaps the first precise statement of the scientific method—in effect, to begin with what is clearly established, divide the problem into its smallest parts, consider each in sequence, and correct for error—it offers no means whereby a case could be tried in a court of law. Right reasoning in the law requires the principles of rhetoric because it treats of probabilities, not logical or indubitable certainties. Jurisprudence is prudence (phrone¯sis, prudentia, i.e., practical wisdom) connected to the principle of ius (right, law). It is notable that Descartes through his works offers no account of jurisprudence or of reasoning as it functions in the law. Descartes stands in the background of the Study Methods, but this is not the case a year later, in Vico’s On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians Drawn from the Origins of the Latin Language (1710). In the first chapter Vico addresses Descartes and his first truth of the cogito ergo sum directly. Vico finds

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12    GENERALITIES

CON CERNING THE NE W S C IEN CE

a precedent for this first truth in Plautus’s comedy Amphitryon. In the first act, while Amphitryon, commander in chief of the Theban army, is away at war, he is cuckolded by Jupiter, who has assumed his guise. The guise is so perfect that his wife, Alcmena, innocently presumes the disguised Jupiter to be her husband. In this comedy of errors Mercury assumes the guise of Sosia, a slave of Amphityron. Now returned with his master from war, Sosia discovers his double and begins to doubt his own existence. Mercury tells him that he is mistaken about his own identity—that in fact he, Mercury, is Sosia—and says: “Oh, you can have the name when I don’t want it: I’m Sosia and you’re nameless. Now get out!” Sosia then looks into a mirror and develops his “Cartesian” proof, concluding: “But, when I think, indeed I am certain of this, that I am and have always been [Sed quom cogito, equidem certo sum ac semper fui].”3 I do not find this connection that Vico makes with Plautus to have become a topic of discussion in the literature on Descartes. Vico’s emphasis is on certo sum, on the claim of certainty, because in terms of the distinction Vico makes between consciousness (conscientia) and knowledge or science (scientia), Descartes has produced only an assertion of certainty. He has not given an account per causus because he has not provided a grasp of the genus or form by which the thing in question is made. Vico concludes that Descartes’s cogito claim is “commonplace knowledge available even to a person without any learning, like Sosia, not some rare and exquisite truth which requires the meditation of a great philosopher to invent.”4 In his response to one of the reviews of the Most Ancient Wisdom, Vico says: “Descartes used to say,‘To know Latin is to know no more than Cicero’s servant girl’; and since the same thing is understood to apply to Greek, the cultivation of these two languages has suffered considerable losses.”5 This statement is not to be found in Descartes’s published works, but it is likely a view commonly attributed to Descartes in Vico’s time.6 It is similar to Descartes’s comment on bas Breton, mentioned above, regarding rhetoric (the study of rhetoric being grounded in the mastery of Latin). In tying Descartes’s famous cogito to the Vulgar Latin of the slave in Plautus’s comedy (and to Greek, since it is originally a Greek play), Vico has thrown back at Descartes his alleged jibe about the servant girl. A principle of certainty is not a truth because it does not tell us the nature of the thing of which we are certain. It does not provide us with its form or cause; that is, it does not make it intelligible for us. Verum, as in Vico’s verum-factum principle mentioned in the previous chapter, can be understood as meaning “intelligible.” Max Fisch explains verum as follows: “Vico’s verum means the true, not the truth, and its plural vera means not truths but trues or intelligibles; that is, the things, other than sentences or propositions, that are

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GENESIS OF THE NE W S C IEN CE      13

true in the transcendental sense of intelligible.”7 What can be known to be true or what is intelligible to the knower is what the knower makes (  factum). Vico has not only dismissed Descartes’s first truth on its own ground, he has, in the Most Ancient Wisdom, offered the basis from which rightly to obtain first truths. His thesis is that the first truths are to be discovered, not by the logical procurement of clear and distinct ideas through a process of hypothetical doubt, but by going back through the layers of language by means of etymology, to the first philosophical meanings of words. Precedent for this is Plato’s Cratylus, Vico’s favorite dialogue, as well as the ancient grammarians generally. Vico says that he discovered within the Latin language learned meanings of words that could not be original to the Romans, who devoted themselves to nothing but farming and war. He finds these meanings to be those that flourished among the Ionian philosophers, who were expert in reasoning about the world, and the Etruscans, who were expert in religion and sacred rites. Unlike Descartes, Vico demonstrates that metaphysics can rightly take its beginnings from the original insights of the most ancient mentalities, and not from the abstractions of logic and hypothetical doubt. In one of his additions to the New Science Vico confronts Descartes by saying: “For the metaphysics of the philosophers must agree with the metaphysic of the poets, on this most important point, that from the idea of a divinity have come all the sciences that have enriched the world with all the arts of humanity.”8 It could not be more clear: philosophy must begin its reasoning from the insights of the poetic wisdom of the beginnings of humanity. Philosophy must attempt to make sense of the original insight of the idea of a divinity, an insight that is given to philosophy to consider. Philosophy does not need to generate the idea of this divinity by logical argument, as Descartes attempts in the Meditations on First Philosophy, acting as though culture did not exist as the actual ground of all things human. Vico’s second major decision was to realize that the doctrine of universal law that he had expounded in the 1720s could be extended to a doctrine of universal history. He prepared his work on law as a basis for promotion to a higher university position. This opportunity arose when the morning chair of civil law became vacant in December 1722. The following April, in 1723, Vico gave his lecture for the concourse in competition for the appointment, but withdrew his application when it became apparent that there was insufficient support for his candidacy. Vico found himself a victim of academic politics, as the chair was awarded to Domenico Gentile of Bari, a notorious seducer of servant girls, who committed suicide over one of them in 1739, and whose only book was withdrawn from the press for plagiarism.

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14    GENERALITIES

CON CERNING THE NE W S C IEN CE

Vico reports in his autobiography, regarding the loss of the concourse, that this misfortune “made him despair of ever holding a worthier position in his native city,” but “that after this blow of adverse fortune, which would have made another henceforth renounce all learning if not repent of having ever cultivated it, he did not even suspend his labors on other works” (A 164–65). Vico now saw the possibility of realizing the new science that he had sketched in the second book of his Universal Law with the title “Nova Scientia Tentatur” (“A New Science is Essayed”) (UL 2.2.1). This section presents a chronological table of the chief events of the history of ancient nations, beginning from the time of the universal flood. It is a shorter version of the Chronological Table that appears in the Second New Science of 1730/1744, but does not appear as such in the First New Science of 1725. Following this table in the Universal Law, Vico presents a series of chapters that state many of the principles of the history of the nations that make up the content of both versions of the New Science. Vico retained his lower-level position in the university throughout the rest of his career, but now decided to pursue the original ideas that were to shape his new science. His loss of the concourse left him free to do this without concern for the norms of academic acceptance. Indeed, as he notes at the end of his continuation of his autobiography in 1731: “Among the caitiff semi-learned or pseudo-learned the more shameless called him a fool, or in somewhat more courteous terms they said that he was obscure or eccentric and had odd ideas” (A 199–200). By putting his new science into Italian rather than Latin, the language of the schools, Vico placed his new science among the works of Galileo and Discours of Descartes—in the sphere of the moderns—yet what was said had its ground in the wisdom of the ancients. It also placed Vico’s work in the company of the Tuscan eloquence of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarca. In the university but now not of it, Vico joined the great Republic of Letters and found himself “born for the glory of his native city and therefore of Italy” (A 165). By the end of 1724 Vico had finished the major part of what he later called the “Scienza nuova in forma negativa” (“New Science in Negative Form”). The cost of the publication of his work was to be underwritten by Cardinal Lorenzo Corsini, to whom it was dedicated, and the text had received its imprimatur on July 15, 1725. But on July 20 Vico received a letter from the cardinal, saying that because of unusual expenses he could not support the printing costs. It was clear to Vico that if the work was to be published he would need to find the means personally. He could not afford the cost of printing such a large manuscript, but he says he felt honor bound to publish it. In order to make printing less costly, Vico recast the entire work

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GENESIS OF THE NE W S C IEN CE      15

in a positive form, and in so doing greatly reduced the size. To finance the cost he sold a family ring. He retained the dedication to Cardinal Corsini and included an inscription addressed to the universities of Europe, hoping, as he did all his life, for significant recognition from the scholars of the north. Throughout his career, however, he received nothing more than the brief and rather general response from Le Clerc, mentioned in the previous chapter, concerning his work on law. Because the manuscript of the “New Science in Negative Form” is lost, there is no precise knowledge of its contents. It was likely an extended series of criticisms of the seventeenth-century natural-law theorists, with a subtext of Vico’s own views. In recasting it in positive terms Vico inverted its structure, expanding his own themes regarding the world of nations and retaining as critical passages the essence of his attacks on the natural-law theorists. This, at least, is the character of the text he published at Naples in October 1725 that became the so-called First New Science. In a letter to Father Bernardo Maria Giacco of October 25, 1725, mentioned above, Vico says he felt “filled with a certain heroic spirit” and felt himself clothed as a “new man.”9 But Vico also says in the same letter that as he goes about his business in Naples he attempts to avoid embarrassing encounters with those to whom he has sent a copy of his book, as they give him no sign they have even received it. The one notice that Vico received from the north was even worse than what he describes to Father Giacco as the local response. In August 1727 there appeared in the book notices of the Acta Eruditorum in Leipzig a false and malicious announcement of the publication of the New Science. Among other things, it said, on the authority of “an Italian friend,” that the author of the work was an “abbé” of the Vico family, and went on to distort systematically the subject matter of the book. The notice was not signed; apparently the Acta had assumed it was genuine and published it as received. A copy of the issue of the Acta did not reach Naples until August of 1729, when it appeared in the window of a bookseller. At the end of November Vico circulated a pamphlet known as Vici Vindiciae, refuting each of the claims of the false book notice. The authors of this false notice in the Acta were very likely several of Vico’s colleagues at the university.10 It is certainly true that Vico suffered such indignities as he describes, and the false book notice was extraordinarily cruel. But he had also been elected to several academies: that of the Infuriati, reorganized as the Uniti, and the very prominent Academies of Medinaceli and the Arcadia of Rome. In 1730 he was elected to the Academy of Assorditi. He was a part of the circle of friends around the prominent mathematician and metaphysician Paolo

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16    GENERALITIES

CON CERNING THE NE W S C IEN CE

Mattia Doria, to whom he dedicated the Most Ancient Wisdom, and in 1726 he had been commissioned to appraise the library of Giuseppe Valletta, the greatest collection of books in Naples. Vico also received recognition from prominent scholars, such as Carlo Lodoli and Antonio Conti in Venice, who were behind the invitation for Vico to write his autobiography and who wished to reprint the New Science in a revised edition in Venice, an important center for publishing and a crossroads for intellectual exchange between northern Europe and Italy. Lodoli, who was censor of publications at Venice, invited Vico to make any additions or corrections to the text for a new edition. Vico then offered Lodoli “a manuscript of nearly a thousand pages, in which he had set about proving his Principles by a negative method” (A 191). This was the original manuscript of the “New Science in Negative Form.” He intended this to be added to the New Science. He tried to pass it off onto Lodoli, but Lodoli returned it. In October 1729 Vico sent Lodoli a revised manuscript of the New Science that was nearly six hundred pages long. At this point, however, Vico claims he became dissatisfied with the attitude of the Venetian printers because they seemed to act as though he were obliged to have his work printed there, and so he withdrew the manuscript (A 192). To the reader of the autobiography this ground for withdrawing the work seems very odd. Why should Vico care about the attitude of the printers? They are simply in charge of the work of the printing; they are not intellectual critics. The real reason has emerged only in the last few years, in the form of a file recently discovered in the Archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, which shows that the Venetian edition of the New Science was in fact blocked by the Holy Office.11 Because of the manuscript’s large size, Vico, seeking a publisher in Naples, once again faced the problem of printing costs. In order to reduce such costs Vico devised a plan similar to his earlier one in relation to the First New Science: to resurrect the revised book by completely rewriting it as a new whole. This meant he had to meditate and rewrite the work in the course of its printing. Vico says: “An almost fatal fury drove him to meditate and write it so rapidly, indeed, that he began it Christmas morning [1729] and finished it at nine o’clock Easter Sunday evening [April 9, 1730]” (A 194). Vico produced the definitive version of his New Science of 1730 in little more than three months, the amount of time it would take to write by hand so many pages. As he produced these pages he passed them to the printer. Vico was constantly revising. He wrote a set of annotations to the New Science even while he was rewriting and printing it. He wrote a second set immediately after its publication and then went on to write a third set of

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GENESIS OF THE NE W S C IEN CE      17

notes in August 1731. He rewrote the first set into a fourth set in 1733 or 1734. He regarded these revisions as the basis of a third edition of the New Science, which he was to begin seeing through the press ten years later, at the time of his death. These revisions remain unincorporated, but survive.12 In summary, Vico published three editions of the New Science, in 1725, 1730, and 1744, under titles with variant wordings. Prior to these editions, in the books of the Universal Law of 1720–1722, Vico in effect published a first draft of his science. In 1724 he wrote the now-lost manuscript of the “New Science in Negative Form,” which he rewrote in positive form as the first, 1725, edition. Between December 1729 and April 1730 he rewrote and reduced the six-hundred-page manuscript he had withdrawn from Venice that became the second, 1730, edition of the New Science. This was merged by Fausto Nicolini with the 1744 edition to become the Second New Science. In the early years of the twentieth century, Nicolini published the first modern, critical edition of Vico’s works (the Laterza edition), and in so doing introduced the paragraph enumeration to both the First New Science and the Second that is preserved in the English translations and many Italian editions. The enumeration is not original to Vico’s texts. A study is yet to be written systematically comparing the First New Science with the Second New Science. Vico states in the continuation of his autobiography in 1731 that, of all his works, “he wished only the New Science to remain to the world” and that he wished the first edition only to be “left standing for the sake of three passages” with which he was fully satisfied (A 191–92). These passages concern Vico’s conception of a universal etymologicon, or “common mental dictionary.” In fact, he incorporated the content of these passages into the Second New Science. Although I cite the First New Science as well as other works of Vico as they bear on certain points, my commentary takes the Second New Science as the definitive statement of his thought. Finally, we may say that the genesis of Vico’s new science does not simply begin with his sketch of it in the Universal Law but goes back to his confrontation with Cartesianism in his oration On the Study Methods, from which he realized, over more than a decade, that Descartes’s dismissal of the humanistic wisdom of the ancients could not be set aside in simply pedagogical terms. Ultimately, Descartes’s fatherhood of modern science could be offset only by another new science, that of history, in which philosophy is joined with philology.

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Cha p te r 3

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Structure of the New Science

In interpreting the New Science, much commentary approaches it from beginning to end in philosophical terms, focusing on its theory of knowledge, or in political terms, focusing on its theory of society. Vico’s own field of thought is rhetoric as the key to the law as the wisdom and order of civility. Vico taught the art of rhetoric throughout his life, preparing students for the law, employing his own textbook, Institutiones Oratoriae (1711–41).1 His first large major work, as mentioned in the previous chapter, is the Universal Law, more than one hundred pages longer than the definitive version of the New Science. Vico thinks in rhetorical and juridical terms. He regards the Roman law of the Digest as a complete system of civil wisdom, such that iurisprudentia as found in it achieves in practical terms for human conduct what the Greeks sought speculatively in the pursuit of philosophia. Indeed, the Roman ius gentium—law of the peoples or nations—is the basis for Vico’s ideal eternal history as the law of the development of the nations within the great city of the human race. What governs human conduct, as what governs conduct under the law, is practical wisdom or prudence—the enactment of which depends on rhetorical thought and speech governed by probabilities. As described in my preface, the reader, on opening the New Science, is immediately puzzled as to what the order of its contents means. Expecting a logical order of topics, the potential reader remains confused but perhaps intrigued by 18

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STR U C T U RE OF THE NE W S C IEN CE      19

the imaginative array of principles and subject matters. Is there a way to comprehend what Vico has in mind as the structure of his text? One need look no further than the divisions of forensic oratory of Vico’s Institutes. Let us presume that Vico’s New Science is a written oration, like Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man but of a much greater length. Pico’s was designed as a prefatory speech leading to his arguments of the Conclusiones. Vico’s is designed as a complete speech, to stand by itself, and embodying the elements necessary for the reader to remake the speech of the new science for himself in order to obtain a kind of self-knowledge of human nature and a proof of the law of ideal eternal history, as Vico advocates in his section on method (349). Vico’s oration is forensic, not deliberative or epideictic. His opponents are the Cartesians, in regard to their conception of human knowledge and metaphysics, and the founders of modern reflective philosophy generally, including Locke and Spinoza, as will be discussed later, and the seventeenth-century natural-law theorists Grotius, Pufendorf, Selden, and also Hobbes, in regard to their conception of the origin of human society. Vico’s aim is to deliver a speech that neither modern metaphysics nor modern politics can answer. The speeches of Vico’s opponents are already in the ear of the reader. The reader can supply them at the appropriate moments, absorbing Vico’s case and comprehending his replies. When we turn to Vico’s Institutes we find that the divisions of forensic oratory correspond to the parts of the New Science. Vico’s Institutes follow the Institutes of Quintilian, who, in accord with classical rhetoric generally, distinguishes five divisions of oratory: invention (inventio), disposition (dispositio), elocution (elocutio), memory (memoria), and delivery (pronuntiatio) (Inst. 3.3.1). The first three divisions apply to any composition, whether written or spoken. Invention involves securing the materials that will comprise the content of the oration. In forensic oratory it requires the art of topics, whereby the lines of argument appropriate to the case are found. The art of topics depends on the training and skill of the orator to discover the middle terms from which to draw forth syllogisms. The middle terms must be commonplaces that strike the intended audience as true opinions they share with the orator, who may likely develop the arguments as enthymemes and sorites. The art of criticism comes into play in choosing among the topics from which to expound the case. Disposition is the overall plan of development or arrangement of the issues. In general terms it provides form for the content amassed by invention. Elocution is the expression in words of what has been collected and ordered in thought. It involves the great tropes of metaphor and irony and the various figures of thought and speech. Memory and delivery concern

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20    GENERALITIES

CON CERNING THE NE W S C IEN CE

only oral speech. In the final chapter of his Institutes Vico puts both of these aside, in several sentences, unlike Quintilian, who gives them more due. Vico claims memory is fundamentally an innate virtue; if it is to be taught it requires the mastery of mnemonics, which is its own science. Delivery, he holds, is also an innate virtue that can be acquired more by nature and imitation than by any precepts that can be formulated and learned. The following table shows the correspondences between Vico’s divisions of forensic or judicial oration and the divisions of the New Science. DIVISIONS OF FORENSIC ORATION FROM VICO’S INSTITUTES

DIVISIONS OF THE NEW SCIENCE Book 1

Invention (topics) (chap. 23)

Chronological Table (43–118)

Disposition (24)

Elements, Principles, Method (119–360) Book 2

1. Exordium (25)

On Wisdom (361–373)

2. Narration (26)

Poetic Wisdom (374–779) Book 3

Digression (27)

True Homer (780–914) Book 4

3. Proposition (28)

Course of the Nations (915)

Division (29)

Series of Threes (916–979)

4. Confirmation (30)

Proofs (980–1045)

Amplification (31) Copyright © 2016. Cornell University Press. All rights reserved.

Book 5 5. Confutation (32)

Recourse of the Nations (1046–1096)

6. Peroration (33)

Conclusion (1097–1112)

The first division, invention, corresponds to Vico’s “Notes on the Chronological Table in Which the Materials Are Set in Order.” Here the topics (topoi, loci) are not lines of argument. They are “certains” (i certi), actions or events that make up the “places” of the histories of the various ancient nations to which we may apply the trues (i veri) that comprehend these histories as having the providential order of “ideal eternal.” Each of these historical places is something done or made (    factum) by human choice. As chronologies, the activity of the gentile peoples is the subject of philology. But these actual histories of the nations must always be kept in mind as we progress through the New Science. They are its content.

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STR U C T U RE OF THE NE W S C IEN CE      21

The second division, disposition, corresponds to Vico’s sections of the 114 axioms, the principles of religion, marriage, and burial, and the method. By means of these the content of the Chronological Table is set in order to demonstrate the “common nature of the nations.” The elements, principles, and method are what make Vico’s account a science, not simply a general history. They are what will guide Vico’s case as he puts forth his oration proper. Book 2, “Poetic Wisdom,” begins with the exordium, or opening speech, in which Vico informs the reader of the idea of poetic wisdom as part of human wisdom in general and of its connection to the beginning of the gentile nations from the universal flood and giants. Following this is the body of the largest book of the work, the narration of the parts of the tree of poetic wisdom—poetic metaphysics, logic, morals, economy, and politics—followed by the poetic sciences of physics, cosmography, astronomy, chronology, and geography (374–779). In the narration is the third classical principle of composition, elocution, putting into language what is gathered together as materials and ordered in thought. Although in classical rhetoric not all theories advocate the digression, Vico is generally in favor of it, stating in the Institutes: “After you have narrated a case, if there is something which is extraneous [extra causam] but yet is relevant [ad causam] so that either what has to be said be more easily understood, or could be confirmed with greater ease, or amplified more richly, then it is permitted to run through that material separately with moderation.”2 The digression corresponds to book 3, “The Discovery of the True Homer” (780–914). Unexpectedly, the question of Homer as author of the Iliad and Odyssey is raised and explained, including the question of whether Homer was ever a philosopher. This is a digression, but it allows Vico to solidify his theory of poetic characters and to offer in final terms his solution to the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, thus demonstrating the sense in which poetry is a wisdom but one different in kind from that pursued by philosophy. Homer is also the most ancient source of elocution. It is to Homer we must ultimately look as the source of the art of using language. Next is the statement of the proposition, which includes in summary form all of the case. This is given by Vico in his introductory paragraph (915) of book 4, “The Course the Nations Run.” In connection with the proposition is the division, or partitio, in which, as Vico says in the Institutes, “we list how many, about what things, and in what order we shall present them.”3 He says this listing is added to the proposition for the benefit of the listeners. Book 4 consists simply of a listing of three kinds of natures, customs, languages, and so forth, eleven sets in all, in accord with the three ages of

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22    GENERALITIES

CON CERNING THE NE W S C IEN CE

ideal eternal history. These lists are followed by a series of proofs drawn from ­various aspects of Vico’s case that confirm the course of nations. These proofs correspond to the confirmation, which may include amplification connected with the arguments. Vico’s arguments or proofs here are not abstract syllogisms but are interwoven with historical examples to amplify his case. Book 5, “The Recourse of Human Affairs Which the Nations Take When They Rise Again,” corresponds to the confutation (1046–96). Here Vico confutes those who would see the modern age, in which we and Vico live, as progressing from the origins of humanity and would hold, with the seventeenth-century natural-law theorists, that society originates through a covenant or contract rationally endorsed. He wishes to establish that the latest period of history is a barbarism because of the recourse of the nations. The confutation is intended to demonstrate that the present age, or any late age in the life of nations, is a recourse and not an exception to the providential order of history as cyclic. No nation transcends history’s repetitions. Anyone who would think otherwise must confront Vico’s evidence concerning the returned barbarism of the ricorso. Finally there is the peroration, intended to close what has been said in a short summary of the entire oration. In describing the peroration in the Institutes Vico says: “Since the complete oration consists of the arguments and the emotions, there are therefore two parts to the epilogue—‘the enumeration of the arguments’ [enumeratio argumentorum] and ‘the moving of the emotions’ [commotio affectuum].”4 Vico’s conclusion (1097–1112) is his peroration. Here he summarizes the case of the New Science. In this summary we encounter the second-most poetic passage in the work, the first being the oft-quoted “night of thick darkness” passage, in which he introduces his three principles of humanity—religion, marriage, and burial (331)—an optimistic passage. In the peroration is the pessimistic passage concerning when “the peoples are rotting in that ultimate civil disease” and a state in which moderns are “made more inhuman by the barbarism of reflection than the first men had been made by the barbarism of sense” (1106). Vico’s appeal to the emotions is comparable to that of the lowest stages of Dante’s Inferno, in which all human relations break down and become corrupt such that there is treachery against relatives and friends and against guests and hosts. Vico finally allows his case to rest with the pronouncement: “To sum up, from all that we have set forth in this work, it is to be finally concluded that this Science carries inseparably with it the study of piety, and that he who is not pious cannot be truly wise” (1112). Memory does enter into Vico’s oration, but not in the sense of mnemonics or “artificial memory” as practiced by classical oratory as a means of inner

Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/suss/detail.action?docID=4412740. Created from suss on 2021-02-14 21:00:44.

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STR U C T U RE OF THE NE W S C IEN CE      23

writing, in which points to be made in a speech are previously associated with places and their mental images used as devices of recall as the speech is delivered. Vico’s New Science as a whole is a kind of memory theater in which all of the human world is recalled, at least in principle, in accord with Aristotle’s conception of recollection in his little treatise On Memory: “When one wishes to recollect, that is what he will do: he will try to obtain a beginning of movement whose sequel shall be the movement which he desires to reawaken. This explains why attempts at recollection succeed soonest and best when they start from a beginning” (451b). Aristotle says further: “But one must get hold of a starting-point. This explains why it is that persons are supposed to recollect sometimes by starting from ‘places’ ” (452a). Vico is insistent on the need to find the origin of the world of nations in order that, with him, we can recollect the whole. In regard to the New Science as a recollection of the whole in terms of the origin of the human mind, it falls within the great memory tradition marked by the sixteenth-century theater of Giulio Camillo.5 Camillo constructed a theater populated with mythological images made up of a system of pitture and places, such that the adept, standing before them on the stage, could with proper concentration and study know all there was to know and produce the complete speech of the world. These images, being the first thoughts of the human mind, allow the adept to draw forth a total recollective comprehension of all that can be thought. The human mens recapitulates the divine mens. All that can ever be is there in the origin. Thus in Vico’s terms, as will be more fully discussed later, the poetic characters or imaginative universals formed by the theological poets—the founders of the gentile nations—are the first speech from which all subsequent speech and meanings are an elaboration in the way that the true meanings of all words can be recovered by etymology guided by the philosophical grasp of the principles that govern human nature and the human mind. Not included in Vico’s oration is the “Idea of the Work,” the text of which is an explanation of the meaning of the engraving or frontispiece (1–42). This is a self-contained little work, a systematic summary that can stand on its own. In his comment on it in his autobiography Vico refers to it as “quell picciol volume [this little volume]” (A 194). It is analogous to the “Synopsis” of Universal Law that Vico prepared in advance of the publication of the full text to show potential readers its nature. Vico planned to begin the New Science with what he called a “Novella letteraria,” printing the correspondence he had with Father Carlo Lodoli to document the problems he encountered in attempting to have the work published in Venice and stating his reasons for withdrawing it to Naples.

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24    GENERALITIES

CON CERNING THE NE W S C IEN CE

At the last moment, while the work was in press, he abandoned this, probably because of a conciliatory letter from Lodoli, and he commissioned the engraving, or dipintura (picture, depiction), as a frontispiece, replacing, with his explanation, the pages that would have presented the Novella (A 194). Because the pages of the Novella had already been typeset, the pages of the “Idea of the Work” were printed in larger type to fill the space. This larger type can be seen only by examining a copy of the first edition of the 1730 New Science in its original printing. The text of the Novella is lost, and the reader of the New Science is spared what would have been an exchange of no intrinsic or lasting interest. In its place is a little masterpiece, a complete speech of Vico’s complete speech. The third principle of composition, elocution, of Quintilian’s divisions remarked on above does not correspond to any particular part of Vico’s text because it applies to the work as a whole. Because it is a complete speech we can say that the New Science is eloquent, in accord with Quintilian’s explanation of eloquence. Eloquence is putting the whole into words; it is not simply the formation of elegant and ornate phrases. Eloquence does require copia in that it joins together many aspects of its subject. Cicero was renowned for the felicity of his copiousness, and Demosthenes could speak of quite distant things, going outside his case only to bring his audience back with the lightning flash of his “mighty enthymeme.” Vico mentions these characteristics of Cicero and Demosthenes in his remarks on the relation between philosophy and eloquence, the last public oration of his career, to the Academy of Oziosi in 1737, and they serve as his models.6 We may add to this Quintilian’s comment: “The verb eloqui means the production and communication to the audience of all that the speaker has conceived in his mind, and without this power all the preliminary accomplishments of oratory are as useless as a sword that is kept permanently concealed within its sheath” (Inst. 8.pr.15–16). In his university oration of 1732 Vico addressed the idea of the “heroic mind” as the ideal of education. This oration is, in truth, Vico’s portrait of himself as well as of Socrates. Having discovered the new science, he is heroic mind. The achievement of the heroic mind is sublimity. Longinus defines sublimity as the high point of thought: “A well-timed flash of sublimity scatters everything before it like a bolt of lightning and reveals the full power of the speaker at a single stroke” (Subl. 1.4). Especially important to Longinus’s conception of sublimity is “synthesis,” which refers to the arrangement of words, putting words together and making a whole of them (8.1–2). He speaks of this synthesis as being like a melody; a sublime composition is a kind of “melody in words: these words must be a part of man’s nature, that reach not only the ears but the soul” (39.3).

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STR U C T U RE OF THE NE W S C IEN CE      25

Vico does not directly cite Longinus in this oration but what he says is close to this rhetorical sense of the sublime, and he presumes his audience will know Longinus’s famous work. Vico concentrates his notion of the sublime on the process of thought itself, saying that to be sublime one must direct thought above nature, to God, and then back to the marvels of nature in general and specifically to the greatness of human nature. Vico says: “Make your way in this fashion through all three worlds, of things human, things natural, and things eternal.”7 The traversing of these three worlds is what Vico claims for his New Science, as depicted in the engraving of its frontispiece (42). Vico’s elocutio is based on his belief that “the whole is really the flower of wisdom,”8 that eloquence is this “wisdom speaking,” and further, that this speaking requires a “heroic mind” that is manifested in its well-timed flashes of sublimity. Finally, we might add to these aims of the New Science the three principles of poetry that Horace claims in Ars poetica: that the purpose is to instruct, delight, and move (Ars. P. 333). Vico’s science aims to instruct the reader in the principles of history but in so doing to delight the imagination, or fantasia, and to move the reader. The reader is moved by meditating and narrating the actions of providence in history, taking them as a model to grasp the sense of prudence that is necessary for any individual action that is in accord with human nature. Vico intends his oration not for the critic but for the audience of the prepared reader who is willing to enter his world and see how all of its dimensions fit together. In conclusion, the reader may wonder whether Vico intended the New Science to be approached as an extended oration. Vico never says it is such. The analogies between the parts of Vico’s text and the divisions of forensic oration are explicit from the foregoing remarks and, in the conclusion to the “Idea of the Work,” Vico aligns the Chronological Table with the principle of inventio and the elements with dispositio (41). But that the New Science is a written oration remains a hypothesis. To approach the structure of the work in this way is an attempt to comprehend it in its own terms and from the perspective of the subject matter in which Vico specialized—rhetoric. Oration and its principles is a means for bringing together philosophy, law, and history and in so doing to bring forth the light they shed on the three worlds of the divine, human, and natural. In oration these forms of knowledge and these three worlds can be kept in constant juxtaposition, always governed by a sense of the whole. The reader can be drawn into this oration until the reader can make it himself, thus proving its truth by making or remaking it along with Vico. Vico’s science is a rhetorical science.

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26    GENERALITIES

CON CERNING THE NE W S C IEN CE

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This making or remaking is the power of eloquence—to be wisdom speaking. As moderns we are not familiar with this way of thinking. It is a natural tendency, as Vico notes in the second axiom of the New Science, to attempt to transform the unfamiliar when we encounter it into familiar terms, but to do so is to engage in a wrong course. Instead, we are well advised to move from what is familiar into the unfamiliar and original, if we are to discover what we do not already know and to discover a way to know it.

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Pa rt Two

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Idea of the  Work

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Introduction

On opening the original edition of the 1744 New Science, the reader first encounters, on the verso page, an engraving of a bust of Vico and, on the recto, the engraving of the dipintura. These opposing pages are followed by the full title page containing the impresa. Following the title page is Vico’s eight-page dedication to Cardinal Acquaviva, inscribed “Naples 10 January 1744” and signed by Vico as “most humble, most devoted, and most obligated servant.” Following this are six pages of official declarations of Vico’s scholarly credentials and imprimaturs of the ecclesiastical and state censors. This completes the front matter. Then, on a recto page numbered in Arabic, the text proper begins with the Idea of the Work: “Explanation of the ­Picture [Dipintura] Placed as Frontispiece to Serve as Introduction to the Work.” In English translations the reader will find only a reproduction of the dipintura from this front matter. Modern Italian editions include reproduction of the dipintura, and some include reproduction of the title page with the impresa, but the portrait of the bust of Vico is missing. Reproductions of the bust, dipintura, and impresa can be found among the illustrations herein. The engraved portrait of the bust was commissioned by Vico when he was preparing the third edition of the New Science at Naples, not long before his death during the night of January 22–23, 1744. It is derived directly from the one life-portrait of Vico, done by Francesco Solimena, which was destroyed in a fire in 1819. But in 1804 Villarosa, editor of Vico’s writings, 29

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30    I D EA

OF THE W OR K

had a copy painted for the Academy of Arcadia, which is the one source of knowledge of Vico’s appearance.1 The original dipintura, that of the 1730 edition of the New Science, was done at Vico’s direction by Domenico Antonio Vaccaro, a pupil of Solimena, and the engraving was by Antonio Baldi, a prominent engraver. The publisher was Felice Mosca. For the 1744 edition the dipintura was redone by Francesco Sesone, who, at Vico’s commission, also prepared the portrait of the bust. The publisher of the third edition was the Stamperia Muziana. As will be discussed below, the two versions of the dipintura are not identical. Beneath the engraved portrait of the bust of the 1744 edition is an inscription by the Jesuit Domenico Lodovico, to the effect: “Here is Vico; the artist could depict his countenance; Oh, that someone could depict his character and genius.” On receiving a copy of the original 1730 New Science, Lodovico wrote Vico, suggesting that a dwarf should be added beside the alphabet in the dipintura, like Dante’s mountaineer, who is struck dumb with astonishment when he enters the city, and that beneath the dwarf should be written: “Lodo-Vico” (“I praise Vico”).2 It is a strange letter, suggesting that when readers (Lodovico among them) enter Vico’s “great city of the human race” they will be astonished at all the sights that greet them. The decision to include Lodovico’s couplet beneath the bust may stem from his status, at the time of publication of the 1744 New Science, as rector of the Collegio Massimo del Gesù Vecchio, the Jesuit school that the young Vico attended in 1680 and 1681.3 The impresa on the title page is not discussed by Vico, nor is it signed by any artist or engraver. Perhaps Vico simply asked Sesone to prepare it as an extension of the reformation of the dipintura. But even without documentation of its origin or genesis we may still ask after its significance in the work. Impresa, deriving from Late Latin, has survived as an archaic English word, defined by the OED as “an emblem or device, usually accompanied by an appropriate motto.” Impresas were common in sixteenth-century works; the treatise Delle imprese, classifying and examining the various types, was published in Naples by Giulio Cesare Capaccio in 1592.4 In presenting the idea of the work, Vico calls the new science a metaphysic: “this New Science or metaphysic [questa Nuova Scienza o sia la metafisica]” (31). Vico’s phrase in Italian uses the subjunctive (sia) of the verb “to be” (essere), equating the new science with metaphysic. It is a metaphysic in the sense that it meditates the motions of the nations in terms of the order of divine providence. Vico is conceiving this metaphysic as analogous to the root sense of the term in Aristotle, as the study of the order of the natural world that goes beyond the issues of the Physics, especially as found in Book Lambda of the Metaphysics. Vico’s metaphysic is that of the order of the

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INTRO D U C TION      31

human world as meditated beyond the “certains” of the historical figures and events as understood by philology. The impresa and the dipintura are “before and after” pictures of metaphysics.5 In the impresa, Dame Metaphysic in a Minerva-like image is seated on the globe, leaning on a base or plinth. The globe is on the ground, not raised onto the altar as in the dipintura, nor does it have the zodiacal belt bearing the signs of Leo and Virgo that girds the celestial globe of the dipintura (3). Dame Metaphysic is gazing into a mirror and holding a triangle of three unequal sides, in contrast to the equilateral triangle of the divine eye of the dipintura and that formed by the celestial ray refracted from the jewel on the breast of Metaphysic onto the figure of Homer. Dame Metaphysic is self-involved. She is attempting to grasp the triangle by reflection. Her physical act parallels the mental act that both Descartes and Locke formulate as the basis of modern metaphysics—Vico’s “barbarism of reflection” (see chapter 19, below). The attempt to reflect the geometric image is further reminiscent of dianoia, whose objects are ta mathe¯matica on Plato’s Divided Line—thought that reasons from assumptions and falls below noe¯sis. All is terrestrial in the impresa. Instead of divine illumination there is self-reflection. There is no depicted source of divine light that could direct intellection. On the plinth is the motto ignota latebat. This inscription means “She [Metaphysic], unknown, was lying hidden.” This is metaphysic before Vico’s new science of metaphysic. The parts of the dipintura are there in the impresa, but in a static state. Once the new science is discovered they become dynamic. The circular mirror that Metaphysic holds is raised to the heavens to become the circle surrounding the divine eye of providence, which then does not reflect, but illuminates. The plinth bearing the inscription becomes the altar that supports the globe. The triangle disappears as an abstract geometric shape and is replaced by the array of hieroglyphs of the civil world that are the “certains” of Vico’s metaphysic of history. Homer is added and stands in the dipintura as representative of Vico’s discovery of the master key of the new science—that the first gentile people from which the historical world of nations arises first thought in poetic characters (34). The impresa, then, is the emblem of metaphysic as Vico found it among the moderns, before his discovery of the new science. It thus stands at the beginning of his book. The dipintura stands, in effect, at both the beginning and the end of his book, as it is a complete summary of the new science, but it is also the beginning, because it functions as an introduction for the reader. Vico’s work is a circle, a perfect motion of thought to be entered into by the equable reader, who will be freed by it from the deaf necessity of the Stoics and from the blind chance of the Epicureans.

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Cha p te r 4

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Genesis of the Frontispiece

Vico’s decision to delete the Novella letteraria with which he planned to begin the New Science and to replace its pages, already set in type, with the dipintura he commissioned and an explanation of it, was discussed in the preceding chapter. The question remains as to why Vico chose this means to replace the deleted pages. The answer, I think, involves both Hobbes and Shaftesbury. Nicolini suggests that Vico would have seen the original edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan, published in 1651, containing the allegorical frontispiece depicting the all-devouring figure of the ruler of the state wearing a crown and holding a sword in the right hand and in the left a crosier that signifies the omnipotence of the state.1 Vico may have intended the central figure of his frontispiece, Dame Metaphysic, to stand in opposition and represent the purest values of the spirit. Hobbes’s frontispiece combines within it the device of the impresa by placing above the head of his figure the line from the book of Job in the Latin Vulgate, warning that there is no power greater on the earth than Leviathan (“Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei”). This serves as a motto for Hobbes’s work, which is the first secular use of the term “Leviathan” in English. Along one side of Hobbes’s engraving are symbolic depictions of the elements of political or civil order; along the other are symbolic depictions of the elements of ecclesiastical order. Hobbes has his frontispiece stand simply on its own. He does not provide his reader with comment, as does 32

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GENESIS OF THE FRONTIS P IECE      33

Vico in regard to the dipintura, although Hobbes’s materialistic-scientific ­interpretation of the state and his biblical interpretations supporting it take respective places within his book. Throughout the New Science Vico argues repeatedly with Grotius, Pufendorf, and Selden as principal representatives of seventeenth-century natural-law theory, but he cites Hobbes in only four passages, three of which are references in passing (338, 553, 1109). In explaining axiom 31, claiming that whenever a people has become violent such that the rule of law no longer holds, the only effective means for reducing such savagery is religion, Vico turns to the example of Hobbes. What is missing from Hobbes’s conception of society is the providential basis of natural law. Vico says: “This [providential] principle of things Thomas Hobbes failed to see among his own ‘fierce and violent’ men.” The reason for this, Vico says, is that Hobbes searched for his principles in Greek philosophy such that he “fell into error with the ‘chance’ of his Epicurus,” and “the result was as unhappy as the effort was noble.” He says Hobbes would not “have conceived this project if the Christian religion had not given him the inspiration for it, though what it commands is not merely justice but charity toward all mankind” (179). Hobbes failed to ground justice in a providential order that causes men to bring their violent actions under control. Vico’s approach to Hobbes is quite positive, suggesting that Hobbes almost had it right—and indeed would have if, in an Augustinian fashion, he had employed Greek philosophy corrected by the principles of Christianity. Instead Hobbes engages in biblical criticism to support his scientific materialism. The Italian historian Eugenio Garin remarks: “Only in Hobbes has there been coherent ‘humanistic’ application of the link between verum–factum, because in him the State is truly a human work, and solely human, without providential intervention, whereas just for this reason Vico appears as the destroyer of the atheism of Hobbes (and in another direction of Bayle).”2 It may be too strong to designate Vico as the “destroyer” (eversore) of the “atheism” of Hobbes because Vico’s conception of history as corso and ricorso owes more to ancient philosophy than to the Christian idea of history as a drama of salvation. But it is quite correct that for Vico the world of the nations is not simply the work of man governed by the conversion of the true and the made because this human making of history is regulated by the providential order of the three ages of ideal eternal history, which is divinely begotten and determines the necessary conditions under which the contingencies of human making and human choice can occur. If it may be true that Vico saw his frontispiece as an opposite to that of Hobbes, the question remains as to the precedent, if any, for Vico’s specific

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34    I D EA

OF THE W OR K

symbolism and for his method of explaining it. The answer to this question lies in the Second Characters of Shaftesbury and Bacon’s conception of the art of memory. Vico’s dipintura falls directly within the Renaissance emblem tradition that persists into the eighteenth century. The emblem tradition is part of the art of memory that Bacon describes in De augmentis and that Shaftesbury applies to moral philosophy. Bacon writes: “The Art of Memory is built upon two intentions; Prenotion and Emblem.” He says: “By Prenotion I mean a kind of cutting off of infinity of search. For when a man desires to recall anything into his memory, if he have no prenotion or perception of that he seeks, he seeks and strives and beats about hither and thither as if in infinite space.” Bacon understands prenotion as part of “artificial memory.” Bacon says: “For in artificial memory we have the places digested and prepared beforehand; the images we make extempore according to the occasion.” The orator, following the procedure called “artificial memory” in rhetoric, prepares a speech by associating points to be made with physical places, the images of which can be held in mind and recalled as a kind of inner writing, allowing the orator to progress through his speech. “Emblem,” Bacon says, “reduces intellectual conceptions to sensible images; for an object of sense always strikes the memory more forcibly and is more easily impressed upon it than an object of intellect.” An emblem is a concept put in sensible form. Prenotion and emblem are the devices for the “Art of Retaining or Keeping Knowledge.”3 Vico’s opening lines explaining the dipintura as an introduction to the New Science are as follows: “As Cebes the Theban made of Morals, we here present for view a Tablet of Civil things, which may serve the Reader to conceive [concepire] the Idea of this Work before reading it, and to bring it back most easily to memory [memoria] with such aid as the imagination [fantasia] may provide, after having read it” (1, my translation). Vico has combined both facets of Bacon’s art of retaining and keeping knowledge. The reader is supplied with a prenotion of Vico’s work because the dipintura offers in a single finite space the intersections of the three worlds of the human, natural, and divine, and Vico has supplied these fundamental places as images (42). These place-images give us in advance a grasp of the work, its central concepts, and also stand as aids to memory to recall it. In his first sentence Vico has inserted the elements of his threefold doctrine of memory he describes in a passage concerning his discovery of the true Homer: “Memory [memoria] takes three aspects; it is memory [memoria] when it remembers things; imagination [fantasia] when it alters, and simulates them; ingenuity [ingegno] when it encompasses them, and puts them into proper order and affect” (819, my translation). Ingegno (Latin ingenium) is the power required for the mind to

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GENESIS OF THE FRONTIS P IECE      35

form a concept (concepire) because it enables us to bring one thing together with another based on something they have in common. What does Vico mean by this analogy of the New Science with the Tablet of Cebes? The Tablet of Cebes is a moral treatise that portrays the course of human life in the form of a dialogue between a wise old man, or senex, and a group of pilgrims. The pilgrims ask the senex to explain the meaning of a picture on a tablet that they see inside a temple of Saturn. As Vico says, “From Saturn (whose Greek name, Chronos, means time) new principles are derived for chronology or the theory of times” (3). We are moral because we are mortal and live in time. The gods, being immortal, have no sense of morality and require no sense of the “best life.” The picture portrays a crowd of people standing outside a circular wall, within which are smaller concentric enclosures. These circles represent stages of human life. As the figures pass from one circle to another, choosing between vice and virtue, ignorance and error, their ascent leads toward true education. Most people mistake false education for true; only a few are depicted as arriving at the ultimate inner circle of happiness. The Tablet is by an anonymous author of the first century AD, but sixteenth-century humanists believed the author to be Cebes (one of Socrates’ Pythagorean interlocutors in the Phaedo), who had learned this doctrine of the via virtutis from Socrates. The Tablet was translated into most European languages, and many representations of the scene described in the text were made.4 Various versions of it would have been familiar to any humanist scholar in Vico’s time. A translation of the Tablet appears in the reconstructed text of Shaftesbury’s Second Characters, but his commentary was never written. Both Nicolini and Fisch regarded Shaftesbury’s Second Characters as the likely source for Vico’s use of an allegorical engraving with a commentary.5 Shaftesbury spent the last fifteen months of his life in Naples, from November 1711 to February 1713. The year 1712 was one of the most creative periods of his life. His project was his incomplete Second Characters, which was to be a sequel to his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, which he prepared for the press just prior to departing for Italy, where he hoped to find a climate to offer him relief from his asthma. In the Second Characters Shaftesbury developed a method of combining allegorical engravings with a commentary so as to produce a moral philosophy based on emblems. His plan was to promote an awareness that would improve men through art, putting art to ethical use. On February 12, 1712, he wrote: “I have a Noble Virtuoso Scheme before me, and design if I get Life this Summer to apply even this great Work (the History Piece bespoke, and now actually working)

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36    I D EA

OF THE W OR K

to Credit & Reputation of Philol.”6 Philol. is used by Shaftesbury to refer to philosophy, often specifically to moral philosophy or the study of morals. Shaftesbury wished to combine the study of the fine arts, or what he called “virtuosoship,” with the study of morals, which would offer a new doctrine of moral philosophy. He had an engraver working in his palazzo on the pictures for his book. In his correspondence Shaftesbury does not mention Vico, but he writes of conversing with Giuseppe Valletta, the owner of the most distinguished collection of books in Naples, which, as mentioned earlier, Vico appraised when it was purchased by the Fathers of the Oratory, and with Paolo Mattia Doria, Vico’s lifelong friend to whom, also mentioned earlier, he dedicated the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians. As an act of their friendship Doria gave Shaftesbury a tame deer. Shaftesbury helped establish communication between Newton and Valletta and Doria’s circle of scholars in Naples.7 He transmitted to Newton “some small literary works” that Fisch and Nicolini believe likely included Vico’s published oration On the Study Methods of Our Time as well as the Most Ancient Wisdom. This perhaps established the precedent that led Vico to send a copy of the first New Science to Newton. Vico, a mature and established scholar, although junior in status to Valletta and Doria, would have been included in some of these conversations, and there would have been much discussion in the salons and academies in Naples of Shaftesbury’s project of a “noble virtuoso scheme” of moral philosophy. The text of the translation from Greek of the Tablet of Cebes included in the Second Characters was likely dictated by Shaftesbury, as its manuscript is not in his own hand, but its inclusion shows that he intended to employ the Tablet in his work along with other depictions and commentaries on them, such as the “Judgment of Hercules” based on the incident in Xenophon’s Memorabilia where Hercules must choose between the two goddesses, Virtue and Pleasure (Mem. 2.1.21–33), which Shaftesbury left in completed form.8 Faced with the problem of filling the space left by the deleted pages of the Novella letteraria in 1730, Vico thought back to Shaftesbury’s procedure of moral philosophy and to the picture and text of the Tablet of Cebes, the archetype of such a procedure of connecting an emblem to a discourse. He saw this procedure as a way to explain the “Idea of the Work.” In the first New Science of 1725, Vico’s “Idea of the Work” consists simply of a single statement declaring that it is a work “in which is meditated a science concerning the nature of the nations, from which arose humanity of itself, that all began with religions and came to pass with the sciences, the disciplines and the arts” (FNS 2). The “Idea of the Work” of the second New Science is an elaboration of the meaning of this statement, taking the reader through all its implied dimensions.

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GENESIS OF THE FRONTIS P IECE      37

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Beyond his first sentence of the Second New Science Vico makes no ­ ention in it of the Tablet of Cebes, nor is it a topic he discusses elsewhere. m Vico’s claim that his new science moves from an account of moral things to an account of civil things does not take his work out of the province of moral philosophy. Underlying this assertion is clearly Vico’s belief that the Roman law of the Digest is a complete civil wisdom, in the sense that it contains all that one needs to know, or can in fact know, as a guide to human conduct. The Digest offers the citizen not just a complete comprehension of the law; it offers a complete ethics. As Vico transposes the principles of Roman law into the principles that govern the life of the nations, he simply expands and redefines moral philosophy by making jurisprudence the basis and guide to prudence as such. He converts the conventional relation between prudence as the standard of ethical conduct—that guides habit and custom from which law and jurisprudence are claimed to be the codification—so that, instead, law is the basis of ethics. Both the individual and the nation learn prudence from jurisprudence. Vico would have known well the claim, in the beginning of the text of the Tablet of Cebes, concerning the sense of the threshold. The principle of the threshold is deep in the humanistic mind. It often comes with a warning, as in Dante’s entrance into the Inferno in the third canto: “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.” It comes forth in the sixth book of the Aeneid, where Virgil describes the warning of the Sibyl to Aeneas, that to pass through the gates to the underworld and return he must secure the golden bough. So it is with the senex when the pilgrims ask him to tell them what the picture means. In the translation from the Second Characters, it is as follows: “Strangers,” said he, “I do not at all grudge you that satisfaction, but this you must understand, that the relation carries something of a danger with it.” “And what is that?” Said I. “Why,” said he, “that if you give attention and understand the things that are told you, you will become wise and happy; but if you do not you will become fools and unhappy, vicious and ignorant, and will pass your days wretchedly. For this relation is like the riddle that the Sphinx used to propose to men. If a man understood it he came off with safety, but if he understood it not he was destroyed by the Sphinx. It is the same with this relation, for folly is a sphinx in men.”9 In the New Science Vico says: “The Sphinx, who puts riddles to travelers and slays them on their failure to find a solution,” forecasts the fate of the

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38    I D EA

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“plebeians who, contending with the heroes for a share in the auspices, are vanquished in the attempt and cruelly punished” (648). The plebeians, in contrast to the heroes or nobles, are like sailors, travelers, and wanderers in the fable of the Sphinx. They have failed to grasp the true order of things and have no moral or civil wisdom. The speech of the senex implies that the Tablet contains an esoteric wisdom that offers the true path for human life. It is a doctrine for the few, those who know or can come to know, not for the many, the hoi polloi, the famuli, the plebeians. The doctrine of those who know runs deep in the humanist tradition—so much so that it functions almost as a presupposition. Camillo begins his L’idea del theatro with the reminder that “the most ancient and wisest writers have always had the habit of entrusting to their writings the secrets of God under obscure veils, so that they are not understood except by those who (as Christ says) have ears to hear.”10 In issuing this warning Camillo is echoing Plato’s admonition to Dionysius of Syracuse, in his Second Letter, that he should be cautious and not allow Plato’s teaching to be disclosed among untrained people. It also echoes the warning in the Asclepius of the Hermetica, that a discourse of such lofty themes should not be profaned by a throng of listeners. The Zohar of the Cabala contains a warning to those who would disclose secrets. The Bible is metaphorically described as a woman hidden under many veils who is revealed by lifting them one by one. Marsilio Ficino (in the Banquet of Plato) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (in the Dignity of Man) make a similar point concerning the conveying of esoteric wisdom.11 Those “who have ears to hear” are mentioned in many places in the books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear” (Mt 11:15); “If any man has ears to hear, let him hear” (Mk 4:23); “As he said this he called out, ‘He who has ears to hear, let him hear’ ” (Lk 8:8). To enter a book of wisdom is to cross a threshold and follow its narration. Vico’s citation of the Tablet of Cebes includes its warning. It suggests that Vico’s New Science is a noble scheme of heroic mind, and there is a danger for the impious reader, the reader who may find himself unable properly to grasp the principle of the providential order of the world of nations. Like all humanist writers, Vico assumes his reader knows the texts on which he draws—that the reader is not simply ignorant of those great sources of self-knowledge and the layered meanings of words, nor of the images that shape intuition and memory. The esoteric wisdom to be learned or “heard” that is spoken in the New Science requires the sublimity of “heroic mind.” Vico does not expect everyone to comprehend its originality. The opposite of the heroic thinker is the

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GENESIS OF THE FRONTIS P IECE      39

fool. The theme of Vico’s second inaugural university oration is “there is no enemy more dangerous and treacherous to its adversary than the fool to himself,” which he glosses from Plato’s claim in the Laws concerning the dangers resulting from a misguided upbringing (766a). Vico says: “The man who is a fool is the most ferocious of all animals.”12 In concluding his seventh oration, On the Study Methods, Vico says: “In my life I have always had the greatest apprehension of being alone in wisdom; this kind of solitude exposes one to the danger of becoming either a god or a fool [ne aut deus fierem, aut stultus].”13 This apprehension is also that of Vico’s reader, should he become a Vichista or an appassionato of Vico—making Vico’s thoughts his own, raising up the great city of the human race, not from the Garden of Eden, from which sacred history begins, but from the great forest of the giants of the gentile nations, guided by the ray from the providential eye. The humanist reader must unfold the riddle of the New Science, and if unsuccessful, the reader learns from Vico’s citation of the Tablet what fate awaits. The central distinction that runs throughout the Tablet is between “true education” and “false education” and the consequences of mistaking the false for the true. If this is applied to the New Science, then Vico has not abandoned his early interest in a pedagogy based on bringing the ancients into a balance with the moderns. Without this balance, wisdom is not attainable in the sense in which Cicero defines it: “Wisdom [sapientia] is the knowledge of things divine and human and acquaintance with the cause of each of them” (Tusc. 4.26.57). Vico, referring to Varro’s lost work The Antiquities of Divine and Human Things, says: “True wisdom, then, should teach the knowledge of divine things [divine cose] in order to conduct human things [cose umane] to the highest good” (364). The heroic mind in pursuit of true education (paideia) moves between oppositions, the ancient and the modern, the divine and the human. It does not designate one side as error and the other as true; instead it finds the true in their balance and the false in their imbalance. Rhetoric persists as the counterpart of dialectic as the content of these oppositions is meditated and narrated. In this way we discover and demonstrate what “providence has wrought in history [di fatto istorico della Provvedenza]” (342). When we find this truth, providence becomes our divine guide in the pursuit of civil wisdom, and Vico, like Virgil, becomes our guide through the lower world of the nations.

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Cha p te r 5

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Structure of the Frontispiece

The genesis of the frontispiece or dipintura and Vico’s claim that it is modeled on the Tablet of Cebes does not answer the question of how it provides the reader with a conception of the work before reading it and an aid to recalling it after it is read. The first two-thirds of Vico’s Idea of the Work is an inventory (2–30). The last third, beginning with his declaration that “this New Science” and “metaphysic” are synonymous, is a description of the central concepts of the science and their interconnections (31–42). The central figure of the dipintura is metaphysic, standing atop the globe. Paolo Rossi conjectures that the source of this image is a composite of the figures of metaphysic and mathematic in the Iconology (1593) of Cesare Ripa, which functioned as a widely used manual for later artists and engravers for depicting myths, allegories, and concepts and was published in many editions. Ripa’s representation of metaphysic is a female figure with a globe. His representation of mathematic is a female figure with wings on her head. Ripa comments: “She is depicted with wings because there is no science where the intellect cannot raise itself to the contemplation of things.”1 This certainly accords with Vico’s conception of the donna Metafisica as both reflecting and directing vision toward the divine eye. Ripa’s representations, however, are quite static, lacking the agility of the figure of the dipintura. They are truly emblems in the Baconian sense of graphic presentations of concepts, whereas Vico’s figure activates a whole intellectual narrative. 40

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STR U C T U RE OF THE FRONTIS P IECE      41

If Ripa’s emblem book provides the pattern from which Vaccaro began his drawing of the donna Metafisica, the question remains as to the substantive source of the figure, its idea. One precedent comes immediately to mind—the most famous personification of philosophy in the history of philosophy—the female figure of philosophy, or Lady Philosophy, that appears to Boethius in prison in his Consolation of Philosophy, and which accompanies him and guides him in his meditation. As the figure of metaphysic brings the light of the divine eye into the world of things civil by reflecting it onto the statue of Homer, the Lady Philosophy of Boethius brings the divine light, expelling the false poetry of the Muses and replacing them with her own sources of inspiration (1.1.26–41). In discussing the Latin language in his Institutes, Vico calls Boethius “Latino Platone.”2 In a letter congratulating Niccolò Gaetani, Duke of Laurenzano, on a work he had published on the moderation of the passions, Vico compares its language with that of the verses of Boethius, “il Platon Cristiano,” in the Consolation of Philosophy.3 Boethius’s work is a prosimetrum, a work in prose interspersed with verse, which encompasses the dialogue between Boethius and Philosophy. The Consolation is a masterpiece that became one of the several books of universal appeal throughout the Middle Ages. (In late Latin, consolatio meant “aid” or “support” rather than “consolation” or “comfort.”) It omits explicit reference to Christianity, yet it treats Christian themes such as God as the highest good and providence in the manner of Neoplatonic philosophy. Pagan philosophy and Christian divinity are woven together in a manner not unlike what one finds in Vico. Boethius reports that the dress of Lady Philosophy was made of very fine thread, and “on its lower border was woven the Greek letter Π (P) and on the upper, Θ (Th), and between the two letters steps were marked like a ladder, by which one might climb from the lower letter to the higher. But violent hands had ripped this dress and torn away what bits they could” (1.1.18–24). The two letters represent practical and theoretical philosophy. The dress of Metaphysic in the dipintura is irregular, perhaps torn. The belt of the zodiac around the globe on which Metaphysic stands has the signs of Leo and Virgo. Vico says that Leo “signifies that our Science in its beginnings contemplates first the Hercules that every ancient nation boasts as its founder.” He says that the lion is the great forest that covered the earth after the universal flood, that was burned and brought under cultivation by Hercules, and the subsequent harvesting of crops began the first time reckonings, which we owe to the Greeks. Virgo “signifies that Greek history began with the golden age. . . . This golden age of the Greeks has its Latin counterpart in the age of Saturn,

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42    I D EA

OF THE W OR K

who gets his name from sati, sown [fields].” Vico concludes: “Thus from Saturn (whose Greek name Chronos means time) new principles are derived for chronology or the theory of times” (3). The movement from Leo to Virgo is from time reckoning by the practical activity of cultivation and harvests to time reckoning in terms of historical ages requiring the principles of a theoretical or chronological conception of time. Vico puts the movement from practice to theory in terms of the life of nations based on this new critical art of joining philosophy with philology. In Boethius we find the ladder by which we go from practice to theory as a movement within philosophy alone. As Philosophy explains her career to Boethius, she informs him that his plight in prison is not the first time that wisdom has been attacked by a wicked society, referring to Socrates having a martyr’s death for his dedication to philosophy. Philosophy says: “And after Socrates the crowd of ­Epicureans and Stoics and the rest strove as far as they could to seize his legacy, carrying me off protesting and struggling, as if I were part of the booty, tearing my dress, which I wove with my own hands, and then went off with their torn-off shreds, thinking they possessed all of me” (1.3.21–27). Vico says that in the dipintura the convex jewel on the breast of Metaphysic illuminated by the ray of the eye of divine providence “denotes the clean and pure heart which metaphysic must have, not dirty or befouled with pride of spirit or vilenesses of bodily pleasures, by the first of which Zeno was led to put fate, and by the second Epicurus to put chance, in the place of divine providence” (5).4 It is not possible to know whether Vico intended the reader to associate Boethius’s figure of Philosophy with that of Metaphysic of the dipintura, but the learned reader easily does so, and since this association is so close, it would not have escaped Vico. The scene of the dipintura is ordered in threes, including the interplay of the three basic geometric shapes—circle, square, and triangle. The eye of divine providence, the infinite mind’s eye, projects its ray of light onto the convex jewel of the breast of Metaphysic, which reflects it onto the shoulder of the statue of Homer. Homer signifies Vico’s discovery of poetic characters that is the master key to the new science and that Homer himself is a poetic character of the Greek people. The two rays form two sides of an equilateral triangle, imitating the equilateral triangle that holds the divine eye. The circle that encompasses the triangle of the divine eye is imitated by the globe of nature on which Metaphysic stands. In the background is the great forest of the earth with the clearing in which the altar stands. In the middle ground from this are the plow, rudder, and alphabet, signifying the cultivation of the land and the migration of the peoples. In the foreground are the hieroglyphs

Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/suss/detail.action?docID=4412740. Created from suss on 2021-02-14 21:00:44.

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STR U C T U RE OF THE FRONTIS P IECE      43

representing the instruments of social classes and social order. In the middle of the dipintura is representation of Vico’s three principles of humanity: the altar (religion), the torch and jar of water (marriage, aqua et igni of Roman nuptials), and the urn inscribed D.M., Dis Manibus, “into the gods’ hands” (burial). This order of threes runs throughout the New Science and is used by Vico in the last third of his explanation (31–42) when he turns from the inventory of items of the dipintura to the account of its central concepts, ending with his reminder that “the entire engraving represents the three worlds,” namely, the civil world of the nations, the world of nature as observed by the physicists, and the divine world of minds and God contemplated by the metaphysicians (42). In Vico’s inventory of the objects in the dipintura the last ones are “the Roman fasces, a sword and a purse leaning against the fasces, a balance and the caduceus of Mercury” (24). Vico does not include the winged cap of Mercury lying to the left of the caduceus and in front of the base of the statue of Homer. In fact, in his series of paragraphs describing each of these hieroglyphs Vico explicitly says, “The caduceus is the last of the hieroglyphs” (30). The winged cap is the only item pictured on which he makes no comment, and it is the one item that is placed slightly differently from the 1730 original in the redrawing of the frontispiece in the 1744 edition. In the 1730 edition the cap is shown tipped up against the base of the statue of Homer, and it has somewhat more the appearance of the petasos, or broad-brimmed hat with wings added, which the Greek Hermes—Roman Mercury—is shown to be wearing in various traditional depictions. The winged cap in the 1744 dipintura has more the appearance of a helmet. In his discussion of the various divinities of the mythological canon in book 2, “Poetic Wisdom,” Vico refers to Mercury as wearing a winged cap, “un cappello pur’alato,” and as having wings on his heels, which by tradition Mercury always has. The winged cap corresponds to the winged temples of Metaphysic, but the figure of Metaphysic does not appear to have winged feet or winged sandals. Mercury is a mediator between divine and human wisdom. In the fourth Homeric hymn it is said that Hermes is declared by his father Zeus to be “the herald of the gods” and that “he consorts with all mortals and immortals” (570–75). Hermes, or Mercury, delights in the assemblies of men and their deliberations, and in relation to this activity he is god of eloquence. With his winged cap and sandals he travels the heavens and the earth and is also the god of travelers and commerce. His connection with mankind extends to his being an envoy to Hades, making him a guide of souls, or psychopompos.

Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/suss/detail.action?docID=4412740. Created from suss on 2021-02-14 21:00:44.

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In his interpretation of Mercury in his discussion of the mythological canon, Vico gives Mercury a unique role. He says: “It is he who carries the law to the mutinous famuli in his divine rod (a real word for the auspices), the same rod [the caduceus] with which as Virgil tells he brings back souls from Orcus” (604). In the development of the nations, the famuli are originally those offspring of the giants who did not respond to the appearance of Jove as the thunderous sky after the drying out of the earth in the centuries following the universal flood, as did those who became the founders and fathers of families. Those who became famuli sought the protection of the families and indentured themselves to them. But as this original social order developed into that of heroic republics, the famuli became mutinous, and the heroic poets imagined Mercury as bringing these famuli, scattered and lost in a lawless state, back into the protection of the heroes; otherwise they would have been swallowed up by the Orcus of such lawless existence. Mercury is imagined by the poets of the heroic age to have carried to them the first agrarian law, making them plebeians. The heroes or nobles reserved for themselves the quiritary ownership of the land but granted bonitary ownership to the famuli. Vico says that as a result, the cap of Mercury “remained a hieroglyph of [lordly] liberty” (604).5 Why is the cap of Mercury moved away from the statue of Homer in the 1744 dipintura? I think it likely a graphic revision that Vico makes, analogous to the many amendments and revisions he made to the text. The cap of Mercury is associated with the development of law in the nations, not as such with the discovery of the true Homer, although there is a parallel with the discovery of the true origin of the Law of the Twelve Tables. Why does Vico omit any commentary on the cap, when he comments on every item in the dipintura, even on the piece of Corinthian column on which the tablet of letters is leaning? It is not an oversight, because Vico overlooks nothing and constantly repeats points. Mercury’s cap is Vico’s cap. But it would be impious for him to suggest an analogy with a pagan figure. He puts himself in the corner of the dipintura. Like Mercury, Vico is the messenger, the interpreter of divine and human wisdom, who travels through the life of nations holding their certains together with their trues, using law as the model. Like Mercury bringing the first agrarian law, Vico brings the first law of the gentile nations—the law of their three ages. Vico’s speech is eloquent, a speech of the whole, “wisdom speaking.” In general, Vico as Hermes or Mercury embodies the positive characteristics of the god, but like every god, it also has another side. In the Cratylus Socrates says: “Well then, this name ‘Hermes’ seems to me to have to do with speech; he is an interpreter (herme¯neus) and a messenger, is wily and

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STR U C T U RE OF THE FRONTIS P IECE      45

deceptive in speech, and is oratorical. All this activity is concerned with the power of speech” (407e–408a). Vico’s complete speech will strike the reader at times as wily, especially its etymologies, which, while persuasive, often seem too good to be true. But this is the nature of etymological claims; etymology, as is widely known, can be used to prove whatever is needed. Moreover, it is the nature of complete speech that some of what is included must be contrived because it is always the truth of the whole that matters. The details must always be there, but it is not always clear how everything completely fits or how transitions are made. The guiding principle in philosophical speech, like speech in the law courts, is that it must be true, but its truth must also be persuasive. The cap lying there is an invitation for the reader, too, to take it up and make the science for himself by learning to weave all its details together, seeking their mutual resolution.6 Vico says that this Greek Mercury was the Thoth or Thrice-Great Hermes, Mercurius Trismegistus, who was said to give laws to the Egyptians (605). All of the new science is thrice great. To verify this sense of things, one has only to consider the threefold order of book 4, which Vico summarizes in the last third of the explanation. In the Phaedrus Socrates says the Egyptian god that the Greeks identified with Hermes first discovered writing, measuring, and calculation: “it was he who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters” (274c–d; see also Philebus 18b). As mentioned above, Vico discovered the connections among the threefold unity of history, language, and law. We should also recall that Mercury, in the guise of Sosia, is the figure from Plautus’s play that Vico employs to compromise the profundity of Descartes’s cogito in the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians. Following his explanation of the contents of the dipintura, Vico summarizes the New Science as follows. First, there are three ages through which each of the gentile nations pass: an age of gods, of heroes, and of men (31). Second, these correspond to three kinds of language: a mute language, with symbols having natural relations with the objects signified; a heroic language of emblems and inscriptions; and a human language, using words with articulated meanings agreed on by those using it. These correspond to hieroglyphic, symbolic, and epistolary or vulgar forms of language. These three types of languages correspond to types of letters, and Vico discovers that languages and letters develop together. The original form of thought and speech is that of poetic characters, which are the original genera of the fables of mankind. These three languages stem from a mental dictionary or an ideal lexicon that the languages attempt to express but is not fully embodied in

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any of them. The nature of this dictionary will be discussed as part of the “Elements” and “Poetic Wisdom.” Third, corresponding to the three ages and types of language are three types of jurisprudence. The first is a primordial theology, a wisdom based on divination and oracles and expressed in fables. The second is a heroic jurisprudence in which the heroes were the only citizens and ruled over the plebeians. The third is a jurisprudence of natural equity based on universal laws. These are the main ideas of the New Science, showing, as mentioned above, that the essence of Vico’s genius was to grasp the interconnections among history, language, and law and to comprehend their unity genetically. Finally, in comprehending Vico’s dipintura we may consider a part of his explanation of it that appears in the 1730 edition. It follows the paragraph with which the 1744 edition ends (42). It speaks for itself and stands as both an inversion of the dipintura and a condemnation of the Stoics and the Epicureans. Vico condemns them in both their ancient forms and modern counterparts, which, for Vico, are Cartesian and Spinozistic rationalism and Lockean empiricism.7 These passages have been overlooked in the critical literature, and appear here for the first time in English translation. The numbered paragraphs refer to the “Brani delle Redazioni” of the Laterza edition.8 In the original 1730 edition, Vico presents this as a single long paragraph. 1120 You will easily be able, O reader, to grasp the beauty of this divine Dipintura from the horror that certainly will be produced in you by the ugliness of this other, wholly opposite, one I will now present to you. 1121 The radiant and clairvoyant triangle illumines the terrestrial globe; because it is divine providence that governs it. 1122 The false, and because false, queen metaphysic has her winged temples facing the globe, fixed toward the opposite part that is covered in shadows, because she could not (and cannot), because she would not wish (nor does she know because she does not wish) to raise herself above the world of nature; whence, within its darkness, she teaches either the blind chance of Epicurus or the deaf fate of the Stoics; and impiously opines that the world itself is God, operating either by necessity, which the Stoic Benedict Spinoza wishes, or by chance, as follows from the metaphysics that John Locke makes from Epicurus, and (which both) having removed from man all choice and counsel, having removed from God all providence, teaching that everywhere caprice must reign, in order to meet with either the chance or the fate that she herself desires. In her left hand she holds the purse, because such poisonous doctrines are not taught except by desperate men, they, either vile persons who have never been part of the state, or arrogant persons of low standing with no promise of honor of which they, because of their conceit, believe

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STR U C T U RE OF THE FRONTIS P IECE      47

themselves worthy, are malcontents of the state; for this reason Benedict ­Spinoza, who, because a Jew, had no republic at all, discovered metaphysics by destroying all the republics of the world. With the right hand she holds the balance, because it is science that produced the criterion of the True, or the art of good judgment; but by being overly fastidious and delicate, she is unable to be satisfied with any truth, finally falling into skepticism. She deems of equal weight the just and the unjust. She, like the most monstrous Gallic Senones [two interrelated peoples of Gaul] did with the Romans, loads the pan of the balance with a sword, imbalancing the face, making it weigh more heavily on the side opposite to that where the caduceus of Mercury is, which is the symbol of the laws, thus teaching that the laws must be served by unjust force of arms. 1123 The altar is destroyed, the augur’s crook broken, the jar overturned, the fire extinguished; and thus to a God, deaf and blind, all divine honors are denied; everywhere divine ceremonies are banished, and in consequence, solemn matrimony is completely removed from all nations, and disapproving of all divine ceremonies, they celebrate concubinage and prostitution. 1124 The Roman fasces is unbound, dissipated, and dispersed, and every moral commandment of religion is extinguished along with the annihilation of the ceremonies; with the dissolution of matrimony all domestic economic discipline is eliminated, political doctrine perishes entirely, whence all order of civil rights comes to be dissolved. 1125 The statue of Homer is knocked over, because the poets along with religion founded all of gentile humanity. 1126 The tablet of the alphabet lies shattered on the ground, because the knowledge of languages, the means by which religions and laws speak, is that which preserves them. 1127 The cinerary urn carries the inscription “Fabled Ghost” within the forest; the universal belief in the immortality of the soul has been eliminated, leaving cadavers unburied above ground; the plow has its point broken and the cultivation of the fields is abandoned, even the cities are disinhabited; and the rudder (hieroglyphic of impious men without any human language and customs) is taken back into the woods, and the feral community of goods and women returns, women who must submit themselves to men with violence and blood. 1128 Indeed, O benign reader, much of what is said so far facilitates the lesson of this work. There now remains very little for me to say in order to invite a benign judgment of it. 1129 It is for those who would judge to know that most useful advice that Dionysius Longinus, revered by all as the prince of critics, gave to

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OF THE W OR K

orators: that, in order to make sublime orations, they must seek the eternity of fame, and, in order to obtain such, he gave them two practics for it; we, by employing eloquence in all of whatever is elevated to science, in meditating this work, have always had these practics before our eyes. The first practic is: How would a Plato, a Varro, a Quintus Mucius Scaevola receive these things that I meditate? The second practic is this: How will posterity receive these things that I write? Because of the esteem I have for you, I have appointed to myself the judgments of such men—those, despite the changing of ages, nations, languages, customs, and modes and fashions of knowledge, are not at all diminished in repute—the first the divine philosopher, the second the most learned philologist of the Romans, the third the most sapient jurisconsult, who the Crassus, the Marcius, the Sulpicius, the Caesar, and the Cicero [various Roman families and gens] venerated as an oracle. 1130 Furthermore, it is for those who would judge to make this calculation: If this work were recently disinterred from a city destroyed for a good thousand years, having the author’s name obliterated, would you not judge it for itself? Thus if you would now make a less than benign judgment of this work, might you not consider that it is my time, my life, my name that may be causing you to do so? This motto: “Where was the man whose presumption was such that he could anticipate in hope an eternity of fame?” graciously recounts in the Annals of Tacitus [11.7] what can be said only of men who are kings; and it reflects that the same can be said even of the emperor Claudius, though a stupid prince, a vile servant of loathsome and avaricious libertinage, and who disapproved of indecency while at the same time making use of it. In the history of philosophy, Vico’s sense of inversion in these passages is comparable to Hegel’s image of the inverted world (verkerhte Welt) in the Phenomenology of Spirit, in which consciousness in its attempt to realize itself as a subject becomes confused and entrapped in its own reasonings and loses even the ability to distinguish a thing from its opposite or moral from immoral. As has been said earlier, Vico’s dipintura is connected to the Renaissance emblem tradition of hieroglyphics. Vico’s whole manner of thinking is hieroglyphic.9 He thinks through the power of the imagination. He never puts his points in an abstract, purely conceptual form. What he says always takes the shape of what can be called a rational image so that the reader is able both to think and to see what is meant. Vico attributes his emphasis on philology to “Bacon’s method of philosophizing, which is ‘think [and] see’ (cogitare videre)” (359). Bacon’s method connects concepts with what can be

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STR U C T U RE OF THE FRONTIS P IECE      49

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observed empirically in nature. Vico’s philological objects are those of history; thus what is seen is not something of the senses but of the imagination. This “seeing” is the attraction of Vico’s text. His science is a science of imagination and, once his readers are taken into it, their thinking about history is transformed. Just as Bacon, with his new organon of induction, transformed the scientific investigation of nature, so Vico confronts the reader with a new organon of history.

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Pa rt Thr e e

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Establishment of ­Principles

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Introduction

In the title of book 1—Establishment of Principles—Vico intends the term “principles” to be understood in two senses, which correspond to the two types of its contents. In its first sense, principio corresponds to the first, nontransferred meaning of the Latin principium—a beginning, origin. One way to understand anything is to determine its birth or origin and to grasp its genesis. This understanding takes the natural form of narratio; we discover and present in rhetorical terms its story. The second sense in which Vico intends the reader to interpret principio is the second, or transferred, meaning of principium—a groundwork, foundation. Another way to understand anything is to derive its nature from elements, first principles. This understanding is essentially logical or “geometric” and can be associated with ratio in the sense of a reckoning, account, and more specifically with a method, theory, or doctrine. The first section of book 1—the Chronological Table—shows the origin and genesis of the ancient nations, which are the groundwork of Vico’s science of their common nature. The three sections that follow, the largest of which is the Elements, present and indicate how to apply first principles or axioms to the historical particulars of these nations in order to achieve the new science of humanity. In terms of the conception of Vico’s work as an oration, the Chronological Table is the inventio, or amassing of materials on which the composition is based and in which their meaning is explained. 53

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The sections on Elements and Method and, to an extent, the section on Principles, are the dispositio, or arrangement of the materials, in the sense that they show the reader how they are to be arranged when the reader makes the new science for himself and the principles Vico has employed as he makes the science for the reader. The inventio is accomplished by philology. In order to have a science of history Vico must collect what is known of the ancient nations. In the second part of the second book of the Universal Law—On the Constancy of Philology—Vico asks: “What is history?” and his one-sentence answer is: “History is the witness of time [Historia autem est temporum testis]” (UL 2.2.1.5). His answer echoes Cicero’s claim, that “history is indeed the witness of time, the light of truth [Historia vero testis temporum, lux veritatis]” (De or. 2.9.36). History is the product of conscientia, of witnessing consciousness that presents us with humanity as it actually is at any one time. The dispositio of what is supplied to us by this witnessing requires us to discover the eternal principles that lie within what philology can observe and analyze. For these principles we require philosophy, which looks within these particulars that are witnessed in order to discover the workings of divine providence. What happens in history is governed not by chance or by necessity but by a common pattern of course and recourse that can be seen by conceiving the ius gentium naturale, the natural law of the gentes, as the chief principle of the historical life of the nations. The result is a scientia of history based on the truth that, since human beings are the makers of history in accord with their own human nature, they can turn this nature back on itself and, in an act of self-knowledge, make a knowledge of their own making. The short, third section of book 1, titled Principles, takes “principles” in its sense of “beginning.” It has the character of a digression, coming between the 114 axioms and the Method. Here Vico reduces the origin of all human society to three customs—those relating to religion, marriage, and burial. In modern anthropological terms Vico is quite correct in this claim. In excavating any archaeological site, the two signs that indicate human habitation are evidences of religion and burial. The custom of marriage in some form, necessary for procreation and rearing of offspring, is often incorporated into religion. In the concluding paragraph of book 1 Vico emphasizes the importance of these three principles, saying that the new science itself rests, more than anything else, on the validity of these three principles lying at the basis of all humanity. Vico ends this paragraph with these strong words: “Since the criterion it [the new science] uses is that what is felt to be just by all men or by the majority must be the rule of social life [vita socievole] (and on these

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INTRO D U C TION      55

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principles and this criterion there is agreement between the vulgar wisdom of all lawgivers and the esoteric wisdom of the philosophers of greatest repute)—these must be the bounds of human reason. And let him who would transgress them beware lest he transgress all humanity” (360). Vico’s last words here—trarsi fuori da tutta l’umanità—are most eloquent, and even Dantesque. Not to acknowledge divine providence, the moderation of the passions through marriage, and the immortality of the soul through burial, is to go outside humanity and to go outside the bounds of human reason, the very faculty that is divine in human beings and what distinguishes them as human beings. Thus Vico’s science is not just another science, but the science founded on what makes the human, human. Much is at issue, then, for the reader. It is a claim very like the sentence mentioned earlier in relation to the Tablet of Cebes, regarding the danger of hearing its meaning.1 In the telling of the Myth of Er in the Republic, Plato suddenly says: “It should be our main concern that each of us, neglecting all other studies, should seek after and study this thing [how to choose the truly human or good life]” (618c). To do otherwise is to risk losing our own humanity. Vico will show us how the human is writ large in history, the great city of the human race.

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Cha p te r 6

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Chronological  Table

Vico’s headnote to the Chronological Table claims that it is “based on the three epochs of the times of the Egyptians, who said all the world before them had passed through three ages: that of the gods, that of the heroes, and that of men.” In his opening comments on the construction of the table itself, Vico gives Herodotus as his source for this doctrine of three ages, which are the ages of ideal eternal history (52). The passage in Herodotus that supports this claim is that the Egyptians “use two kinds of writing; one is called sacred, the other common” (2.36). The sacred writing is hieroglyphic, the picture script of the ancient Egyptian priesthood. The common, or demotic, writing was a simplified form of hieratic script, used chiefly for business and social purposes. Hieratic script, a cursive form of writing also used by the priestly class, was simpler and less pictorial than the hieroglyphic. Vico cites the work of Johann Scheffer, De Natura et Constitutione Philosophiae Italicae seu Pythagoricae (On the Nature and Constitution of Italian or Pythagorean Philosophy), published in 1664, as the source for these three types of languages, corresponding to the three ages: “the first hieroglyphic, with sacred characters; the second symbolic, with heroic characters; the third epistolary, with characters agreed on by the people” (52; see also UL, Diss., chap. 12, sec. 2). Vico proceeds to say that Varro, the “most learned of the Romans,” is another source for these three ages of the world of the Egyptians: “he divided the times 56

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C HRONOLOGI C AL TA B LE      57

of the world into three: a dark time, corresponding to the Egyptian age of the gods; a fabulous time, corresponding to their age of the heroes; and a historic time, corresponding to their age of men” (52). He says, however, that Varro “traced Roman things to purely native origins, with no admixture of anything foreign” (990). Nearly all Varro’s corpus is lost, including his great work on The Antiquities of Divine and Human Things. The source for Varro’s doctrine of these three ages is the little-known work of the Roman grammarian Censorinus, who attributes it to Varro in De die natali (Natal Day), dedicated to a prominent Roman, Q. Caerellius, on his birthday in 238 AD. The first part of this work deals with human life and its origins; the second part, in which the view of Varro is mentioned, deals with time and its divisions. Censorinus says: “Varro says there are three periods of time: the first from the origin of man to the first Cataclysm, which because of our ignorance is called the ‘Uncertain’; the second from the first Cataclysm to the first Olympiad, which because many legends are ascribed to it, he calls the ‘Mythical’; and the third, from the first Olympiad to our time, which he calls the ‘Historical,’ because the events which occurred in it are contained in factual histories.”1 Although Censorinus is regarded as a valuable source for the competent transmission of Varro’s views, the distinction of these three ages, so central to Vico’s work, hangs by a historical thread, found in this obscure little book. Nicolini, in his commentary on this passage (52), cites Diodorus Siculus, Library of History (1.44) as a source for these three ages. Diodorus remarks: “Some of them [Egyptian priests] give the story that at first gods and heroes ruled Egypt for a little less than eighteen thousand years, the last of the gods to rule being Horus, the son of Isis; and mortals have been kings over their country, they say, for a little less than five thousand years down to the One Hundred and Eightieth Olympiad, the time when we visited Egypt and the king was Ptolemy, who took the name of The New Dionysus” (1.44). Gods, heroes, and mortals are mentioned in the sequence Vico gives, and, although Vico cites Diodorus elsewhere, he does not specifically give him as a source for the three ages. Vico takes the three ages of the Egyptians and universalizes them into the three ages of the corso common to the origin and development of all the nations of the gentiles. The entries of the Chronological Table can be read from left to right and from top to bottom. Vico employs the biblical years of the world, dating the universal flood to 1656 and the founding of Rome between 3223 and 3290. The source for Vico’s “Years of the World,” at least in part, is likely the Latin edition of the Irish archbishop James Ussher’s widely known Annals of the World, which appeared in the early 1650s (English edition in

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1658).2 Ussher dated the creation of the world as the evening preceding October 23 in 4004 BC or, in the years of the world, 1 AM (Anno Mundi). Ussher gives the year of the universal flood as 1656 AM. Some of the other years on Vico’s table correspond exactly to those of Ussher (Ninus founds the Assyrian Empire 2737 AM; Troy destroyed 2820 AM; reign of Saul 2909 AM; Psammeticus rules Egypt 3334 AM; Cyrus, king of Persia, 3468 AM; Pythagoras 3457 AM); some are approximate (call of Abraham 2133 AM; God gives law to Moses 2513 AM); and some—for example, much of Vico’s entries for the Greeks and Romans—do not appear as such in Ussher’s dating. It seems likely that the dates of entries that do not have a specific relation to those of Ussher’s Annals may have been Vico’s own reckonings or what he inferred from other histories, ancient and modern, and transferred onto his chronology. Vico says: “This Chronological Table sets forth in outline the world of the ancient nations, starting from the universal flood and passing from the Hebrews through the Chaldeans, Scythians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans down to the Second Carthaginian War” (43). In commenting on this passage, Battistini points out that Vico may be following a historiographical topos of the transference of civility from Orient to Occident, a kind of historical circle. He calls attention to the precedent for this topos in Dante’s line in the sixth canto of Paradiso: “After Constantine turned back the Eagle counter to the course of the heavens.” Dante’s reference is to Constantine’s transference of the seat of the empire from Rome to Constantinople, carrying the eagle, the bird of God and symbol of power, from West to East, counter to the course of Aeneas from Troy to Italy, where he became the father of the Roman people.3 The Chronological Table is not Vico’s fanciful invention or speculative device, or a kind of appendage to his theory. He intends it to show the philological basis for the universal principles of the new science, and the notes to the table contain numerous arguments with and corrections of standard historical works employed in Vico’s time. His first sketch of the new science itself is based on a version of the Chronological Table he gives in the Universal Law—“Nova scientia tentatur” (“A New Science Is Essayed”) (UL 2.2.1). Here he connects it to Varro’s three periods of time. The fundamental issue Vico wishes to settle in terms of the Chronological Table is that the Hebrews, not the Egyptians, are the most ancient of the nations, and that, because of this, sacred history can be kept distinct from the history of the gentile nations. The Hebrews have a different origin than the gentile peoples; they develop apart from them, and are not subject to the corso and ricorso of ideal eternal history. Once Vico’s conception of sacred

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C HRONOLOGI C AL TA B LE      59

history is clarified, the whole project of the new science can be precisely comprehended.4

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Hebrews Vico says: “The first column [of the Chronological Table] is dedicated to the Hebrews, who, on the most reliable authority of Flavius Josephus the Jew and Lactantius Firmianus, lived unknown to all the gentile nations. . . . The Hebrews were the first people in our world and . . . in the sacred history they have truthfully preserved their memories from the beginning of the world” (54). In describing the collecting of books for the royal library in Egypt by the Athenian peripatetic philosopher Demetrius of Phalerum, Josephus reports, in Jewish Antiquities: “He added that he had been informed that among the Jews also there were many works on their law, which were worthy of study and of a place in the king’s library, but, being written in the script and language of their people, they would be no small trouble to have translated into the Greek tongue” (12.14). The Hebrews preserved their own laws in their own language, without influence from other peoples. In Against Apion; or, On the Antiquity of the Jews, Josephus writes: “Ours is not a maritime country; neither commerce nor the intercourse which it promotes with the outside world has any attraction for us. Our cities are built inland, remote from the sea; and we devote ourselves to the cultivation of the productive country with which we are blessed” (1.12.60; cf. Vico’s citation in 94). Josephus continues: “Above all we pride ourselves on the education of our children, and regard as the most essential task in life the observance of our laws and of the pious practices, based thereupon, which we have inherited” (ibid.; cf. Vico’s comment on Hebrew memory in 166). Josephus concludes: “If to these reasons one adds the peculiarity of our mode of life, there was clearly nothing in ancient times to bring us into contact with the Greeks, as the Egyptians were brought by their exports and imports, and the inhabitants of the sea-board of Phoenicia by their mercenary devotion to trade and commerce” (ibid.; cf. Vico’s comment on the Hebrews’ isolation, in 94–95). The gentile nations have their origin in the offspring of those sons of Noah who disperse after the universal flood, and whose offspring become giants and lose their religion and principles of humanity (195, 369). A part of the offspring of Shem, however, remain pious and of normal stature, whereas the impious portion of the race of Shem wander feral for one hundred years, and the offspring of Ham and Japeth wander for two hundred (373, 736). Those Semites who retain their piety and normal stature live in isolation from the giants. They become the Hebrews. Vico says: “Sacred history tells us of

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whole peoples called emim and zomzommim” (371). In ­Deuteronomy: “The Emim—a large and numerous people, as tall as the Anakim” (2.10–11). And: “Rephaim formerly inhabited it, though the Ammonites call them Zamzummim, a strong and numerous people, as tall as the Anakim” (2.20–21; see also Gn 14.5). As the Oxford Annotated Bible comments, Emim and Rephaim were “names reflecting the legendary view that the aboriginal inhabitants of the land were fearsome giants.”5 Since these offspring of Shem retain their religion, they have no need of divination, as do those giants who, through their experience of the thunderous sky as Jove, become the fathers of the first families. Vico says, in axiom 24: “The Hebrew religion was founded by the true God on the prohibition of divination on which all the gentile nations arose” (167). The Hebrews maintain a constant way of life that is based on the direct interaction of God. The events listed on the column of the Hebrews on the Chronological Table are the Call of Abraham, God’s giving of the written law to Moses, and the Reign of Saul. Vico says, of the prohibition of divination among the Hebrews: “This axiom [24] is one of the principal reasons for the division of the entire world of the ancient nations into Hebrews and gentiles” (168). Had the Hebrews not existed Vico would have needed to invent them, because sacred history is the constant against which cyclic history is to be understood. The gentile nations come to populate the globe, but the Jews, with their constant memory, remain within but apart from the world of the gentiles, and their presence in history is indispensible for the validity of Vico’s new science. In history the gentile nations rise and fall in a common pattern, losing their culture in the close of a corso, to regain it in a ricorso. But the Jews persevere through their strong memories, dedication to education, and the constancy of their laws. Vico, writing under the eye of the Inquisition, then operating unofficially in Naples, but a real force nonetheless, manages to maintain this conception of sacred history, as well as the pagan conception of gentile history as cyclic rather than as a drama of salvation moving toward the final day of divine judgment.6

Chaldeans The column to the left of the Hebrews is that of the Chaldeans, the ancient precursors of the Assyrians, who became dominant in Babylonia and were known for their practice of divination and occult arts. The earliest entry in the column, and in the table as a whole, is the Chaldean figure Zoroaster, whom Vico dates to 1756, only a century after the universal flood. He says that Zoroaster was slain by Ninus, and that the Chaldeans originally had

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C HRONOLOGI C AL TA B LE      61

an aristocratic government (55). This claim is in accord with Vico’s general view that the first governments of the gentile nations were natural aristocracies, under the rule of the fathers of the first families. Ninus, in accord with the principles of the three ages of the ideal eternal history, was the founder of a heroic monarchy. Zoroaster is the first poetic character. As Vico says: “Zoroaster is shown in this work to have been a poetic character of founders of peoples of the East. There are as many of these founders scattered through that great part of the world as there are Herculeses scattered through the opposite part, the West” (59). According to the Chronological Table, in 1856, a century later, under the Chaldeans, Nimrod and the confusion of tongues takes place; thus the purity of the sacred antediluvian language became lost. Vico says this confusion of tongues “should be understood as referring to the languages of the Eastern peoples among whom Shem propagated the human race. It must have been otherwise in the case of the nations of all the rest of the world; for the races of Ham and Japheth were destined to be scattered through the great forest of this earth in a savage migration of two hundred years. Wandering and alone, they were to bring forth their children, with a savage education, destitute of any human custom and deprived of any human speech, and so in a state of wild animals” (62). Nimrod, whose kingdom included Babel, is a descendent of Ham (Gn 10:6–10). When the Lord examines the tower those of Nimrod’s kingdom had built, He said: “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them” (Gn 11:6). The Lord confuses their speech and they leave off building the tower, “and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth” (Gn 11:9). In Vico’s account, once the offspring of Ham and Japheth are scattered throughout the earth they are “deprived of any human speech.” Following the Jove experience, which will be discussed fully in regard to Poetic Wisdom, the giantized descendants of these two sons of Noah must reinvent human language. Some offspring of Shem retain and preserve their own language, but, as they live as a nation separate from the rest of the world, their power of speech, and the power of memory that resides in it, remain unknown to others. Vico says that the founders of the gentile nations that migrated away from the East “turned to a kind of divination which consisted in divining the future from the thunder and lightning and from the flights of eagles which they held to be birds of Jove” (62). But the Easterners, he says, developed a more refined divination through observation of the heavenly bodies. “Thus,”

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Vico says, “Zoroaster is honored as the first wise man among the gentiles” (62). Zoroaster, then, is a poetic character embodying the vulgar wisdom of divination. Hercules is a poetic character of the great labors exerted in clearing the first lands for cultivation (14). The other entry on the Chronological Table that falls within 1856, corresponding to Nimrod and the tower of Babel, is in the column of the Greeks. This is the theft of fire by Prometheus. Vico makes this comment on the Prometheus entry: “From this fable we perceive that Heaven reigned on earth, when it was believed to be no higher than the mountain tops, according to the vulgar tradition that also tells that it left great and numerous benefits to the human race” (64). The fable of Prometheus’s theft of fire from the sun makes sense if, as the giants thought, according to Vico’s theory, Jove as thunderer was no higher than the mountaintops. And, as Vico holds, the fables were the beginning of history (51). Vico describes Prometheus as stealing fire from the sun. Other accounts say it was from the heavens or from the forge of Hephaestus (e.g., Plato, Prt. 321d). The Promethean tale, like that of Nimrod, is a tale of human hubris and divine retribution. Because fire is the province of the gods, Prometheus is chained to the Caucasus by Jove, and the eagle, Jove’s bird, gnaws each day at his liver, a point Vico mentions (387, 503; see Hesiod, Th. 510–34). Jove is the lord of the gentiles. The Lord of the ancient Hebrews realizes that the attempt to build the tower of Babel, reaching to the heavens, based on perfect cooperation among the builders because of their common language, must be stopped by the creation of a confusion of languages.

Scythians The third column, of the Scythians, or ancient Russians, has only one entry and that is very late, the year of the world 3530, and it is opposite the Greek Peloponnesian War as chronicled by Thucydides. This entry notes that Idanthyrsus was then king of Scythia. The Scythians are in the third column to show their greater antiquity than the Egyptians (48). Vico’s evidence for the Scythians’ antiquity is the response by Idanthyrsus to the declaration of war made against him by the Persian Darius the Great. Idanthyrsus “answered him with five real words in the form of five objects, since he did not even know how to write with hieroglyphs” (48). In his discussion of the origin of languages and letters, in the “Poetic Wisdom,” Vico explains the meaning of the five real words, which were a frog, a mouse, a bird, a plowshare, and a bow. According to Vico, the first language of the gentile nations was mute, based on using actual objects from nature as words.

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Vico says: “The frog signified that he, Idanthyrsus, was born of the earth of Scythia as frogs are born of the earth in summer rains, so that he was the son of that land. The mouse signified that he, like a mouse, had made his home where he was born; that is, that he had established his nation there. The bird signified that there the auspices were his; that is, that he was subject to none but God. The ploughshare signified that he had reduced those lands to cultivation, and thus tamed and made them his own by force. And finally the bow signified that as supreme commander of the arms of Scythia he had the duty and the might to defend her” (435). In reporting this incident in The Persian Wars, Herodotus has a somewhat different list of what was brought to Darius: “The Scythian kings sent a herald bringing Darius the gift of a bird, a mouse, a frog, and five arrows. The Persians asked the bringer of these gifts what they might mean; but he said that no charge had been laid on him save to give the gifts and then depart with all speed; let the Persians (he said), if they were clever enough, discover the signification of the presents” (4.131). Darius thought these items signified that the Scythians were surrendering themselves to him. But Gobryas, who was a slayer of the Magian when they ruled the Persians, had the reverse interpretation, namely, that the Scythians’ message was that they would overcome the Persians. This interpretation is close to that of Vico, whose concern is primarily how the message was symbolically conveyed. Vico adds the plowshare to the list and replaces the five arrows with a bow. The bow is a complement to the arrows. But the plowshare is an addition that fits with Vico’s hieroglyph of the plow in the frontispiece, which represents the cultivation of the lands of the founding families in the first age of ideal eternal history. The gentile nations develop in accordance with the ages of ideal eternal history, but at different rates. Thus the Scythians, because of their isolation, were still at a very primitive level of language in comparison to the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans.

Phoenicians The fourth column, the Phoenicians, contains only three entries, the first two of which state that Dido of Tyre founds Carthage and that Tyre was celebrated for navigation and colonies. Vico says that Dido comes “at the end of the heroic time of the Phoenicians,” having been driven out in a heroic contest over power (78). Vico’s entry places the founding of Carthage between 2737 and 2752. He places the Trojan War in 2820 and the wanderings of Ulysses and Aeneas thereafter. Aeneas seduces and then abandons

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Dido, rejecting her offer of the kingdom of Carthage as her dowry, in one of his adventures on the journey to Italy following the Trojan War as related in the Aeneid (an incident Vico mentions in the “Poetic Wisdom,” 611). In the Aeneid Dido is introduced as “matchless in beauty” (4.60). Vico’s dating, on the Chronological Table, of the period between Dido’s founding of Carthage and the arrival of Aeneas at Carthage in his wanderings after the Trojan War, would make Dido nearly eighty years of age when they met. Vico reminds the reader at the end of his notes on the Chronological Table that all the dates on it are uncertain, but this discrepancy seems remarkable. Virgil certainly intends Dido to be younger, but as a poet he is most concerned in the Aeneid to solidify its theme. Vico may be concerned only in historical terms with the dates of the founding of Carthage and the Trojan War. The Phoenicians are placed after the Chaldeans and before the Egyptians because they “brought from the Chaldeans the use of the quadrant and the knowledge of the elevations of the polestar” (57). Vico considers the Chaldeans as the discoverers of astronomy and claims that the Phoenicians, probably because of their skills in navigation, brought “astral theology to the Greeks” (727). Furthermore, the Phoenicians brought writing in vulgar letters to the Egyptians and Greeks. The third entry under the Phoenicians’ column is the writing of histories in vulgar letters by Sancuniates. Vico says: “He wrote the history of Phoenicia in vulgar characters, while the Egyptians and the Scythians, as we have seen, wrote in hieroglyphs” (83). He adds: “And Sancuniates wrote in vulgar Phoenician characters at a time when vulgar letters had not yet come into use among the Greeks, as we have said above” (83). Vico claims that Cadmus the Phoenician founded Thebes in Boeotia and introduced vulgar letters into Greece in 2448.

Egyptians The Egyptians are column five, the most prominent entries of which concern the Thrice-Great Hermes the Elder, who is followed approximately five centuries later by Thrice-Great Hermes the Younger. The elder marks the Egyptian age of the gods and the younger the Egyptian age of the heroes. Vico places the receipt of the written law by Moses more than four centuries after Thrice-Great Hermes the Elder. He is concerned to demonstrate, however, “that Moses did not learn from the Egyptians the sublime theology of the Hebrews” (68). Vico wishes to refute the established view of the seventeenth-century historians John Marsham, John Spenser, and Otto van Heurn that the Hebrews received their wisdom and laws

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C HRONOLOGI C AL TA B LE      65

from the Egyptians. If the Hebrews did receive such from the E ­ gyptians, then their independence as a nation separate from the gentile nations could not be maintained and the distinction between sacred and gentile history would collapse. The formidable source of the Egyptian origin of the wisdom of Moses is the claim in the New Testament that the Pharaoh’s daughter adopted Moses and brought him up as her own son: “So Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in his words and deeds” (Acts 7:22). Augustine, whom Vico once refers to as “my particular protector,”7 does not accept the Egyptian education of Moses as the source of his adult wisdom. In City of God Augustine argues that not even the wisdom of the Greeks “antedated in time our genuine theologian Moses, who gave a truthful account of the one true God, and whose writings now stand first in the authorized canon” (18.37). He admits that it is written in the Christian scriptures that Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, but points out that the wisdom of the Hebrews descended from Abraham. Augustine says that “written Hebrew began with the law that was given through Moses” (18.39). He concludes: “Therefore let no nation with any false pride boast of the antiquity of its wisdom as surpassing that of our patriarchs and prophets, in whom divine wisdom was found; since not even Egypt, who is wont falsely and foolishly to boast of the antiquity of her learning, is found to antedate with any wisdom of her own, whatever its quality, the wisdom of our patriarchs. . . . For research shows that it was at the time of Moses’ birth that Atlas lived, that great astronomer, brother of Prometheus and maternal grandfather of the elder Mercury, whose grandson was the aforesaid Mercury Trismegistus” (18.39). Mercury, or Hermes Trismegistus, is a Greek translation of the Egyptian “Thoth the very great,” with the adjective emphasized by repetition. Thoth is the inventor of hieroglyphs and is endowed with complete knowledge and wisdom, having invented all the arts and sciences. He is also the model of a peaceful ruler for the Egyptians. Vico interprets the Thrice-Great Hermes according to his doctrine of poetic characters: “He must therefore have been, not an individual man rich in esoteric wisdom who was subsequently made a god, but a poetic character of the first men of Egypt who were wise in vulgar wisdom and who founded there first the families and then the peoples that finally composed that great nation” (68). Vico repeats this point in axiom 49, saying that the Egyptians in the age of gods could not form the genus “civil sage” to refer to the inventor of the things necessary to the human race, so “they imagined it forth as Thrice-great Hermes” (209).

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The Thrice-Great Hermes, like Zoroaster or Homer, was not a philosopher commanding e­ soteric wisdom but the vulgar mentality of the peoples of the particular gentile nations themselves.

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Greeks The sixth column on the Chronological Table is the Greeks. It contains the largest number of entries. Vico’s first entry is Iapetus, who, according to Hesiod, is one of the offspring of Heaven, or Sky (Uranos) and Earth (Gaia) (61). Iapetus is one of the Titans, which fits with Vico’s doctrine of the giants as the race of protohumans who wander the great forest of the earth after the universal flood. Vico dates Iapetus, whose son is Prometheus, as 1856, exactly two centuries after the universal flood of 1656. Vico has entries for the Greek ages of gods and of heroes. With Hercules the age of heroes reaches its climax (82). Vico says that “every ancient gentile nation had a Hercules as its founder” (514). Hercules “was the son of Jove” (196). Also: “every gentile nation had its Jove” (193). Jove is to the age of gods what Hercules is to the age of heroes. “Jove hurls his bolts and fells the giants” (193) and religion is born, the essence of the age of gods. Hercules “performs the great labor of slaying the Hydra or the Nemean lion (reducing the land to fields for sowing)” (734) and valor is born, the essence of the age of heroes. Finally, toward the bottom of the column is the entry indicating the origination by Socrates of rational moral philosophy and the flourishing of Plato’s metaphysics, along with the general cultivation of all the arts. This is the beginning of the third age of ideal eternal history of the Greeks, in which the virtues embodied in the poetic characters of the heroes become intelligible or abstract universals and subject to the elenchos of philosophical dialogue. This age is ushered in by the appearance of the Seven Sages of Greece, of whom one is Solon the lawgiver and another is Thales, who began philosophy with his physics that all is water (92). Prior to this is Aesop, whom Vico says “was not an individual man in nature but an imaginary type or poetic character of the socii or famuli of the heroes, who certainly came before the Seven Sages of Greece” (91). Vico wishes to show that Aesop presents, in the fables, a vulgar moral philosophy and that he is not an individual with an esoteric wisdom such as can be found only later, once philosophy is born and developed at Athens. The events recorded in the column of the Greeks are familiar to us from Greek mythology, history, and philosophy. They become the principal models, along with those of the Romans, for grasping Vico’s three ages.

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C HRONOLOGI C AL TA B LE      67

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Romans The seventh and last column is that of the Romans, beginning with “Saturn or the Latin age of the gods.” Vico says this corresponds in its character to the Greek age of gods. He says: “Saturn was so called by the Latins from sati, sown [fields], and is called Chronos by the Greeks, among whom chronos means time, whence comes the word chronology” (73). The Italian age of heroes comes before the founding of Rome and is marked by Hercules and Evander the Arcadian. Evander left Arcadia and reached Italy, landing on the left bank of the Tiber prior to the founding of Rome. Livy, in his History of Rome, reports that Evander was the inventor of the Roman alphabet: “He was a man revered for his wonderful invention of letters, a new thing to men unacquainted with the arts” (1.7). Hercules visited this area of the Tiber and slew Cacus, a shepherd who had stolen his cattle, the cattle Hercules had acquired after slaying the monster Geryones, his tenth labor. Through this incident, he encountered Evander, who controlled that region. Evander, recognizing him as Hercules, the son of Jupiter, established the Ara Maxima, dedicated to the cult of Hercules. According to Virgil in the Aeneid, when Aeneas comes to visit, Evander tells him the tale of the heroic act of Hercules and the altar raised to its memory, saying: “Saved from cruel perils, Trojan guest, we celebrate the rites, and repeat the worship due” (8.188–89). After Aeneas secures the golden bough on the advice of the Sibyl, in order to enter the underworld and have safe passage for his return, he meets Anchises, the shade of his father, former prince of Troy. Anchises shows Aeneas his future—how he will marry his Italian wife, Lavinia, and how, from this union, the Trojans will produce the race that will populate Latium and Italy. He shows him the figure in Elysium who will be his last-born and will rule Alba Longa, and how, from this noble line, will come Romulus, who will found Rome. Vico places the kingdom of Alba approximately two centuries prior to the founding of Rome. The Romans’ column is centered on the founding of Rome, dated 3054 by the year of the world of the Chronological Table. Three centuries later, the Law of the Twelve Tables, the basis of Roman law, is established. It corresponds to the period in which moral philosophy and the arts flourish in Athens. Vico says: “At this time there is brought from Athens to Rome the Law of the Twelve Tables [Nel qual tempo da Atene si porta in Roma la legge delle XII Tavole], just as uncivil, rude, inhuman, cruel, and savage as it is shown to be in our Principles of Universal Law” (102). This, to say the least, is a strange statement by Vico. In his continuation of the autobiography in 1731, Vico

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calls attention to the argument in the Universal Law that the Attic origin of the Law of the Twelve Tables is a “fable” (A 193). At the end of the second part of the Universal Law Vico raises the question: “What in the Twelve Tables was imported from Attic Law?” (UL, bk. 2, chap. 36). His answer is to assess the content of the Twelve Tables in this regard, and his conclusion is that very little in them corresponds to Attic law. He concludes his assessment by quoting Cicero’s De oratore: “It seems to me, I solemnly declare, that, if anyone looks to the origins and sources of the laws, the small manual of the Twelve Tables by itself surpasses the libraries of all the philosophers, in weight of authority and wealth of usefulness alike. . . . You will win from legal studies this further joy and delight, that you will most readily understand how far our ancestors surpassed in practical wisdom the men of other nations, if you will compare our own laws with those of Lycurgus, Draco and Solon, among the foreigners. For it is incredible how disordered, and well-nigh absurd, is all national law other than our own; on which subject it is my habit to say a great deal in everyday talk, when upholding the wisdom of our own folk against that of all others, the Greeks in particular” (1.44.195–97). Vico is quite clear that all Roman law, including its earliest form in the Twelve Tables, is a product of Roman intelligence, custom, and virtue. It was not the result of importing Greek law.8 Battistini interprets this entry on the Chronological Table as an ironic assertion, adding that from the Athenian civilization at the time of Socrates it would not have been possible to provide laws as gross as those of the Twelve Tables.9 Vico says, in what is known as the Ragionamento primo, his addition to the New Science, regarding the claim that the Law of the Twelve Tables was brought to Rome from abroad: “The damages that this fable of the foreign origin of the Law of the Twelve Tables has caused until now to the science of right, of government, of Roman history, and of jurisprudence, have been most serious and numberless.”10 Vico’s criticism of the “fable” of the Twelve Tables as imported from Athens to Rome is in accord with the standard modern view. The source for the view of their Greek origin is the statement by Pomponius in the Digest that “it was decided that there be appointed, on the authority of the people, a commission of ten men by whom were to be studied the laws of the Greek city states and by whom their own city was to be endowed with laws” (1.2.2.4). This was an effort to have a definite version of laws instead of “working with vague ideas of right and with customs of a sort rather than with legislation” (1.2.2.3). Andrew Borkowski, in Textbook on Roman Law, comments that: “It is improbable that the commission would have made a potentially perilous voyage to Greece; more likely that ‘the Greek city states’ mentioned referred to

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C HRONOLOGI C AL TA B LE      69

cities in southern Italy. But there is little in the Twelve Tables that can be clearly ­identified as Greek.”11 Vico, like Cicero, regards Roman law as a perfect system and completely Roman in its source and development. If the Twelve Tables are Roman, then how did they come about? Vico is quite clear in his answer to this question, which he gives only several paragraphs further on from his sentence concerning the bringing of the Twelve Tables to Rome from Athens (102). He says that the Publilian Law (that of Publilius Philo) in the year of Rome 416 declared that the constitution of the Roman Republic had been changed from aristocratic to popular (104). Later, and as a consequence, Servius Tullius granted the workers bonitary ownership of the fields that were the property originally of the fathers of the first families, and at the same time instituted the census. These workers, as a class, were originally the clienteles who fled to the asylum of the fathers when Romulus founded Rome. Vico says: “This law of Servius Tullius was the first agrarian law of the world” (107). Subsequently, under Junius Brutus, the Roman Republic was restored to its original form by casting out the Tarquin tyrants, and the liberty of the patricians was reestablished. But the liberty of the people against the patricians (descendants of the first families) was not reestablished, and the nobles took back the fields from the plebs after they had cultivated them (108–9). The plebeian tribunes now demanded the Law of the Twelve Tables and, by this law, the nobles conceded quiritary ownership of the fields to the plebs. It would seem that table 6, “concerning acquisition and possession,” and table 7, “rights concerning land,” would have been the most applicable to this issue. Vico says the Law of the Twelve Tables “was the second agrarian law of the ancient nations” (109). The Law of the Twelve Tables, then, is wholly Roman and arises out of the clash between the two classes of the Roman Republic. Vico wishes to emphasize that the Law of the Twelve Tables, as he explains in his original discussion of them in the Universal Law, are reflections of the rude and often cruel customs of a rural society. By stating in the Chronological Table that the Twelve Tables came from Athens to Rome, Vico may simply intend to record the traditional view, and, by connecting it to the judgment of its crudeness and cruelty, as he has demonstrated in the Universal Law, he may presume the reader will realize that he does not subscribe to this “fable.” This first law of the Romans arises when the Greeks have passed beyond the age of heroes and entered into the age of men, at which time Greek philosophy arises and flourishes. As it develops at the hands of the Roman jurisconsults, law and jurisprudence will come to be the great contribution of the Romans, as philosophy is that of the Greeks.

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In concluding his notes on the Chronological Table, Vico, as mentioned above, reminds the reader that all that this table contains is uncertain: “So that in all this we have entered as it were into a no man’s land where the rule of law obtains that ‘the [first] occupant acquires title’ [occupanti conceduntur]” (118). He says that only when we can reduce the facts of the histories of these gentile nations to scientific principles can we reconcile these histories into a universal history. This can be done by understanding how each gentile nation begins in the same way (through poetic wisdom) and adheres to the same course (ideal eternal history). Vico says: “For until now they have seemed to have no common foundation or continuous sequence or coherence among themselves” (118). We can see in these remarks Vico’s realization that he must invent the philosophy of history in order to comprehend the nature of the human world as separate from both the divine world and that of nature.

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Ch ap ter 7

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Elements

Vico says that the axioms he here puts forth are intended to give form to the materials presented on the Chronological Table. This form will be not static but dynamic: “And just as the blood does in animate bodies, so will these course through our Science and animate it in all its reasonings about the common nature of nations” (119). Vico employs the image of the circulation of the blood in his oration On the Study Methods of Our Time to describe how the aim of the learning process should never be lost sight of from its beginning to its end. The aim “should circulate, like a blood-stream, through the entire body of the learning process.”1 The aim is to study the ancients against the moderns in an effort to find a balance between them. Vico ends the First New Science with a list of “General Discoveries” made in it, which is a precursor to some of the main claims made in the much larger list of axioms in the Second New Science. He announces these discoveries in the same way he announces the axioms: “In addition to the particular discoveries made in particular places, we now present a summary of certain general discoveries which, like blood through the body, are diffused and spread through the whole of this work” (FNS 519). It may seem that Vico’s organic image of the circulation of the blood goes against the geometric image of elements, but he may see them as compatible. In his autobiography he reports on a theory he devised concerning the circulation of the blood, based on a conception of “slack and tight,” opposed 71

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to that of Descartes, based on heat and cold. Vico says that “the operating principle of all things in nature would be corpuscles of pyramidal shape” (A 149). He says he sought to extend this physics of corpuscles to a doctrine of medicine: “For those same Egyptians who represented nature by the pyramid had a distinctive mechanical medicine, that of ‘slack and tight’ ” (A 150). In the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, Vico developed a doctrine of “metaphysical points” that would ground his physics in a suitable metaphysics.2 He says he “showed that these points are the only hypothesis for descending from abstract to bodily things, just as geometry is the only way to proceed scientifically from bodily things to the abstract things by which the bodies are constituted” (A 151). The metaphysical points give us the basis for the physics of animate bodies that extends to the motions of the corpuscles in the circulation of the blood. Vico says: “The definition of the point as that which has no parts amounts to the founding of an infinite principle of abstract extension. As the point, which is not extended, by an excursion makes the extension of the line, so there must be an infinite substance that as it were by its excursion, that is by generation, gives form to finite things” (A 151–52). Vico says that if we follow out this geometric sense of extension we can obtain all the essential figures in nature, including the square, triangle, and circle, the symbol of God’s perfection. He says: “Thus we might easily come out with the physics of the Egyptians, who conceived nature as a pyramid, which is solid with four triangular faces. The Egyptian medicine of slack and tight would also fit in” (A 152). The axioms will circulate through our comprehension of the history of the gentile nations in the manner of slack and tight (del lasco e dello stretto). They will allow the certains (i certi) of the nations (those things that are the result of choice) to extend themselves in time; then they will be tightened in terms of various trues (i veri) that make these particulars aspects of the principles of ideal eternal history. The axioms will allow us to grasp the expansions and contractions of history. In introducing the axioms Vico says he proposes the following assiomi or degnità (i sequenti assiomi o degnità) (119). In the Bergin and Fisch translation these two words are given by the single word “axioms,” which masks Vico’s double terminology. Why does Vico use both these words? Assioma is the Italian spelling of the Latin axioma, which is a transliteration of the Greek , αξι´ωμα (axio-ma). Axio-ma is from axioun, “to think worthy, think fit.” The modern sense of “axiom” as a principle that is assumed as the basis of demonstration derives from the association of “that which is thought fit” with that which is issued by an office holder or official as a “decree.” The Italian degnità (dignità) is dignity, rank (Latin dignitas, from dingus, worth, worthiness,

Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/suss/detail.action?docID=4412740. Created from suss on 2021-02-14 21:00:44.

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ELE M ENTS      73

merit). It is associated in Italian with the verb degnare, “to regard as worthy,” and with degno, which is attributable to someone or some office deserving honor. Beyond his one initial combination of “assiomi” and “degnità,” Vico refers to his axioms always as degnità, which preserves the original Greek sense of “a thought worth thinking, a thought that fits.” Dictionaries often cite Vico as the leading user of degnità as the philosophical term for “axiom,” but the first to use degnità in this manner is likely Giambattista Domenico Gelli, a member of the Florentine Academy.3 Gelli pursued etymological studies into the origins of the Florentine (Tuscan) language, claiming Florentine descended from Etruscan, and it from Aramaic and Syriac. His views were popularized in a dialogue by Pierfrancesco Giambullari, Il Gello (1549). Vico refers to Giambullari in axiom 102, claiming that the view is correct that Etruscan is of Syriac origin, and claiming that this origin was due to a transmission of the language by the Phoenicians, since they were the first navigators of the ancient world (305). Vico saw Tuscan as a language capable of the richest forms of intellectual expression. He did not need to invent a new terminology for his new science. In Tuscan he had at his disposal a natural language, capable of heroic forms of expression that reflected meanings found in the ancient Latin, Greek, and Semitic languages. Vico’s set of axioms range from such postulates as “Things do not settle or endure out of their natural state” (axiom 8, par. 134); to such maxims of common wisdom as “Wonder is the daughter of ignorance; and the greater the object of wonder, the more the wonder grows” (axiom 35, par. 184); to assertions so specific that they appear more to be making a claim of historical fact than stating an axiomatic principle: “The Phoenicians were the first navigators of the ancient world” (axiom 101, par. 302). Vico’s axioms have none of the characteristics of the metaphysical geometry associated with rationalist philosophy; they make no pretense to a rigorous internal order. The axioms are interspersed with discussions of their various implications. Vico often pauses to explain how several of the axioms form a group of interrelated principles. One of Vico’s most important methodological axioms for the new science, “Doctrines must take their beginning from that of the matters of which they treat” (axiom 106, par. 314), falls near the end of the entire set. It echoes Plato’s claim in the Timaeus that “in regard to every matter it is most important to begin at the natural beginning” (29b). Vico says this axiom might have been placed in his general axioms at the beginning, but he has placed it here because of its importance for the natural law of the gentes, which is the subject of some of his last axioms. The reader wonders why it

Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/suss/detail.action?docID=4412740. Created from suss on 2021-02-14 21:00:44.

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should not be placed the other way around, that is, among the general axioms, then cited in one of Vico’s running comments. Vico’s general axioms are numbered 1 through 22; of these, 1 through 4 are a doctrine of criticism that he says “give[s] us the basis for refuting all opinions hitherto held about the principles of humanity.” Axioms 5 through 15 “give us the foundations of the true [il vero].” And 16 through 22 “give us the foundations of the certain [il certo].” Vico says that by using these axioms “we shall be able to see in fact this world of nations which we have studied in idea, following the best ascertained method of philosophizing” (163). These general axioms are guides to pure thought about the world of nations, the verities needed to guide the comprehension of the specifics of this world. These general properties “are the basis of our Science throughout.” Vico says the axioms that follow (axioms 23–114) “are particular and provide more specific bases for the various matters of which it treats” (164). These ninety-two axioms have no further explicit general divisions. As I said, Vico does no more than associate various of them together in terms of their common themes, whether they concern some aspect of the origin of language, the ideal eternal history, the nature of Roman history, or the natural law of the gentes. But among these axioms of particularity are many very general propositions, such as “The order of ideas must follow the order of things [cose]” (axiom 64, par. 238) and “Governments must conform to the nature of the men governed” (axiom 69, par. 246). Overall, this large set of particular axioms moves from axioms related to the various aspects of Vico’s doctrine of poetic wisdom to his doctrine of ideal eternal history as it is connected to the histories of the various ancient nations found in the Chronological Table. One has the sense that Vico wrote his axioms down as he thought of them, that one led to another, and then some point expressed in one caused him to think back to another—and occasionally he thought of a general principle that should have been at the beginning, but which he included at the point that prompted him to think of it. As one concentrates on the axioms, they set up an internal motion in the reader’s mind, going back and forth, connecting one to another. In a sense the axioms, taken as a whole, are sublime: they can produce moments of epiphany. As a set they also seem beyond the mind’s ability to put them together in a logical or static order, to grasp them as a whole. Because Vico titles his axioms “Elements,” we tend to associate them with Euclid. Proclus compares Euclid’s elements, as assertions on which all that follows them depends, to the letters of the alphabet (Eucl. 1, 72ff.). Elements and letters of the alphabet have the same name in Greek—stoicheia.

Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/suss/detail.action?docID=4412740. Created from suss on 2021-02-14 21:00:44.

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Plato implies the connection between the two in the Theaetetus (201e). In Aristotle stoicheion is “the primary component immanent in a thing, and indivisible in kind into other kinds, e.g., the elements of speech are the parts of which speech consists and into which it is ultimately divided. . . . The elements of geometrical proofs, and in general the elements of demonstrations, have a similar character” (Metaph. 1014a). Vico’s elements are like what Aristotle describes in that they are all-prevailing principles out of which the true knowledge of the world of nations can be made. They are not part of something else; all else is part of them. In Novum Organum, Bacon calls the principles of his new logic for the investigation of nature “aphorisms”; Vico enumerates his axioms in a manner similar to Bacon’s aphorisms. In their style and wording many of Vico’s axioms sound like Bacon’s aphorisms. “Aphorism” is from the Greek aphorismos, from aphorizein, to mark off by boundaries, to separate, or define. Such definitions are put in the form of a maxim. Vico’s first four axioms parallel Bacon’s four idols.4 Nothing like these are to be found in Euclid’s Elements. Bacon says: “The doctrine of Idols is to the Interpretation of Nature what the doctrine of the refutation of Sophisms is to common Logic.”5 Concentration on Bacon’s idols is a way to clear the mind for the proper comprehension of the world of nature. In like manner, Vico’s first four axioms clear the mind for the proper comprehension of the world of nations and are propaedeutic to the constructive use of the other axioms. Vico’s first axiom asserts that “man makes himself the measure of all things” (120). Hobbes asserts this in Leviathan: “For men measure, not only other men, but all other things, by themselves.”6 The source for this is Protagoras’s “Man is the measure of all things,” as reported by Plato (Theat. 160d), applied to the doctrine that all knowledge is perception. Vico alters the maxim from man being the measure to man making himself the measure (egli fa sé regola dell’universo). Because man makes the civil world and his knowledge of it, the error enters with the making. The tendency to this form of error is rooted in the fact that we are in a state of ignorance. To relieve this ignorance we make things fit our own measure. Bacon’s idols of the tribe arise when the human senses are taken to be the true standard of things. This tendency is a difficulty common to the tribe of men (human race) because as humans we can experience the world only through our senses. Our senses are “uneven mirrors” that distort the properties of objects; we apprehend the world as having more measure, more regularity than it actually has. Vico says that the first axiom explains two human traits: that rumor grows in the absence of a thing, and that rumor is defeated by its presence. Vico’s advice, then, to overcome the difficulty stated

Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/suss/detail.action?docID=4412740. Created from suss on 2021-02-14 21:00:44.

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in the first axiom is to examine as closely as possible the actual things of the civil world, to keep from allowing our natural ignorance to influence our judgments. Vico’s following three axioms are in essence variations on the meaning of the first. The second axiom is that “whenever men can form no idea of distinct and unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar and at hand” (122). This makes more specific how the mind tends to resolve its natural ignorance. It is Vico’s principle of “familiarity,” the tendency to familiarize the unknown rather than to attempt to meet it on its own terms. What we want to comprehend may be much stranger than we would wish it to be. Bacon’s idols of the den are those blindnesses of vision common to all men because each is an individual with an orientation toward experience peculiar to himself. This orientation is shaped by such factors as the individual’s disposition, education, intercourse with others, and state of mind at any given moment, and the authorities he admires. These are factors that will cause distortion in the observation of nature, not simply because such observation depends on human senses in general but because such observations must be done by particular individuals. What is to be known can be wrongly made to fit the terms the knower brings to it. Vico’s third and fourth axioms follow from his principle of “familiarization.” They involve two “conceits” or “arrogances” (borie). His third axiom is the conceit of nations (boria delle nazioni), the belief of a nation that “it before all other nations invented the comforts of human life and that its remembered history goes back to the very beginning of the world” (125). Vico says this axiom “is a great proof of the truth of sacred history” (126). It points to the error in the claim the various ancient civilizations invoke, that each is the founder of humanity. No gentile nation is the first nation of history, and none can claim to dominate the historical process of birth, development, maturity, decline, and fall. All nations are arrogant because they do not see themselves as subject to the strictures of ideal eternal history. Bacon’s idols of the marketplace arise from the intercourse among persons in society. The basis of this commerce is language. Language tends to build its own world of meanings, apart from the objects to which the meanings refer. Bacon’s idols of the marketplace and Vico’s conceit of nations are similar because both are fallacies that arise in the social definition of reality. Human beings acting socially develop their own versions of the world and exclude from their sight and thought all that lies outside what they find familiar through their common sentiments and meanings. Vico’s fourth axiom is the “conceit of scholars” (boria de’dotti), “who will have it that what they know is as old as the world” (127). Vico says this

Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/suss/detail.action?docID=4412740. Created from suss on 2021-02-14 21:00:44.

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ELE M ENTS      77

conceit has led us to misread the nature of ancient systems of wisdom. It has caused us to attribute mystic meanings to Egyptian hieroglyphics and to treat Greek fables as though they were allegorical statements of philosophical truths. The conceit of scholars causes us to believe that the minds of the ancients are exactly like our own. Instead of seeing that there is an original, archaic mentality, a “poetic wisdom” from which our forms of rational mentality develop, we act as though the human world has always been the same; then we must invent fantastic theories to explain why the ancients wrote and thought as they did, in hieroglyphs and fables. This is not only the error of historians and philologists, it is also the source of the seventeenth-century natural-law theorists’ conception of society as founded through a rational agreement or covenant. Bacon’s idols of the theater are scholarly dogmas that have crept into men’s minds from various systems of philosophy. Such systems are like large fictions or stage plays of ideas that are not grounded in any empirical understanding of nature, and by transfixing the mind they prevent us from considering experience as it actually is. In Bacon’s conception of scholarly error, we are cut off from the reality of empirical experience of nature; in Vico’s conception we are cut off from the reality of the past. These first four of Vico’s axioms describe what has prevented us from having a science of the civil world and what must be overcome in order to have such a science, just as Bacon’s idols describe what has prevented us from having an empirically based science of nature and the principles of inductive logic that it requires. If we keep these critical principles and conceits in mind, attempting to avoid the errors they describe, how do we employ the positive axioms that follow? These positive axioms are the elements whereby the oration of the new science is made. Oratio requires both ratio and narratio. The oration of the new science must overall be a story, a narration that is true. As Vico says of a myth, an oration must be vera narratio, true narration. The truth of the myth is like the truth of perception; it simply forms what is there. There can be no question of error, because it is immediate. An oration must avoid error; its narratio must have an internal method, a ratio, a consistent structure of thought that governs its eloquence. The ratio of Vico’s speech is supplied by the axioms. The axioms are not logical principles as such, but logical principles embodied in rhetorical form. Like Bacon’s aphorisms, Vico’s axioms are maxims, but they are not maxims simply in the sense of general statements. Aristotle says that a maxim is not just a statement of a general kind; maxims “are only about questions of practical conduct, courses of conduct to be chosen or avoided. Now an enthymeme is a deduction, dealing with such practical subjects. It is therefore

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roughly true that the premises or conclusions of enthymemes, considered apart from the rest of the argument are maxims” (Rh. 1394a). Vico’s axioms are maxims in the sense that they state the principles of practical wisdom or phrone¯sis whereby the life of nations is conducted. Law and custom, the basis of the life of nations, depend on human choice. They are the result of authority. Acts of choice governed by authority are the certains (i certi) of the human world. But the trues (i veri) of the human world are not simply theoretical, because they express what is true in the acts out of which the life of nations is formed. Maxims, as Aristotle says, are either the premises or conclusions of enthymemes. An enthymeme is a syllogism, one of the propositions of which is implied (either its major or minor premise or its conclusion), the other two propositions being given. The enthymeme, particularly in the sense of the maxim, is the device of the orator. Demosthenes, the first of the great orators, was known for his “invincible enthymeme.” The enthymeme is forceful because it condenses the power of the full argument into a single statement. Even Vico’s odd axiom, mentioned above, that “the Phoenicians were the first navigators of the ancient world” (axiom 101, par. 301), is an enthymeme. It is the conclusion to a syllogism, the major premise of which is that the Phoenicians lived in Tyre, the oldest maritime city in the East. The minor premise is that Tyre was famous for its navigation. Therefore the Phoenicians were the first navigators in the ancient world. Vico says that the original city of Tyre must have been moved from inland to the shore and then to an island in the Phoenician sea more than a thousand years after the flood, and that Tyre was already famous before the Greek heroic age, both for its navigation and for its colonies. He claims that, after their feral wanderings inland, “the Phoenicians scattered the first nations through the remaining parts of the world” (736). The syllogism implicit in an enthymeme depends on the art of finding the middle term, as Vico calls it in The Study Methods. He says the art of the middle term is ars topica.7 The middle term (terminus medius) is what allows the maker of the syllogism to assert the connection between the major and minor terms of the conclusion. It is the commonplace or topos on which the maker of the syllogism and those to whom it is directed must agree in the rhetorical use of the syllogism. The middle term contains what the maker of the syllogism and its recipients hold in common, the opinion they share. In this case it is the nature and fame of the ancient city of Tyre. For Vico’s purpose—the tenability of his maxim of the Phoenicians being the first navigators of the world—the middle term cannot be simply incidental between a speaker and a specific audience he is trying to convince. Vico’s

Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/suss/detail.action?docID=4412740. Created from suss on 2021-02-14 21:00:44.

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ELE M ENTS      79

aim is to convince anyone of his assertion. Thus the middle term must be grounded in a topos, a commonplace of the human mind itself. Aristotle says: “By an element I mean the same thing as a commonplace; for an element is a commonplace embracing a large number of particular kinds of enthymeme” (Rh. 1403a). Tyre is a city, and as a city, its origin derives from the clearings made by the fathers of the first families in the great forests of the earth. Behind the city is the father. The father is an example of Vico’s mental dictionary. The mental dictionary is the repository of mental places or commonplaces that contain the elements of all languages and hence the most fundamental topoi that bind humanity together. The mental dictionary is the collection of topoi from which the enthymeme embodied in any axiom can be drawn forth. The resulting maxims can be used to comprehend any act of human choice, any historical event that occurs in the world of nations. In this way the axioms circulate through the body of history and produce a science of it. The result is a kind of “rhetorical geometry” that no other science of the life of nations has been able to achieve. How is this mental dictionary to be conceived, which Vico cites in axiom 13 (145; see also 162, 240, 294)? The single best example of Vico’s combination of philology and philosophy is this conception of a mental dictionary. It establishes two of his most important claims: the existence of a common sense (senso comune) of humanity and the validity of a new critical art (nuova arte critica). These support his discovery of the world of poetic wisdom, on which his science depends. In the First New Science Vico describes the idea of a “universal etymologicon” (FNS chap. 42), which leads to the idea of a “dictionary of mental words [voci mentali] common to all nations” (FNS chap. 43). These two ideas go back, in the development of Vico’s thought, to his conception of the most ancient wisdom of the Italians “unearthed from the origins of the Latin language.” Vico discovered that the vulgar language of the ancient Romans contained meanings that they, a culture of farmers and soldiers, could not have formed. These meanings, he claims, were imported into ancient Latin from the recondite wisdom of the Ionian philosophers and the Etruscans, who were expert in religious knowledge. Vico establishes a dialectic between his etymology of Latin words and a system of philosophical and religious ideas that are embodied in them. Vico’s procedure goes back to Plato’s Cratylus and the ancient grammarians—that a science of the correctness of names can be established by going back to the original meanings of words. These original meanings capture the nature of the things themselves. As this is attempted by Socrates for Greek words in the Cratylus, Vico attempts for Latin in the Most Ancient Wisdom. Socrates comes to a dissatisfaction with the philosophical

Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/suss/detail.action?docID=4412740. Created from suss on 2021-02-14 21:00:44.

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s­ignificance of this procedure, but Vico does not. He is guided by Varro’s De lingua latina, by the researches into the causes of the Latin language made by the Italian humanist Giulio Cesare Scaligero, by the Spanish humanist Francisco Sanchez El Brocense, and by the Dutch scholar Gerard Jan Voss in his Etymologicon Linguae Latinae.8 A passage from the First New Science that Vico says should be preserved concerns the origins of the Latin language. Vico reasons from what can be said of Latin to the idea that the same can be done for all languages and that this would provide the basis for a mental dictionary. In the Second New Science Vico says: “The aforesaid Dictionary develops in a new way the argument presented by Thomas Hayne [in his Linguarum cognatio (1639)]” (495). Vico cites Hayne’s work as three separate works, referring to its subtitle, “sen de linguis in genere, et de variorum linguarum harmonia,” as two separate additional works. The fact that Vico cites this work in this confused way may mean that he did not know it but was taken by its idea. Hayne’s work contains no concept of a “mental dictionary” but is concerned with the traditional problems of etymology, of tracing words back to their original meanings.9 Vico’s etymologicon is in a sense Adamic, but it is not literally Adamic because the etymologicon holds for gentile, not sacred, history. Gentile history is made from human nature itself, and human nature is a product of divine making. Language is an original human function through which the human world is made. In the Cratylus Socrates, having shown himself to be an expert practitioner of the art of etymology, argues that the knowledge of names is in the end unimportant. To know the nature of things and learn the truth we must go beyond words, and through philosophy we must grasp the nature of things in themselves, whose meanings do not change, as do the meanings of words. Vico’s conception of the “idea of a dictionary of mental words common to all nations” (FNS chap. 43) is an attempt to take this step of Socrates but not to separate philosophy from rhetoric and philology in so doing. The things to which the original meanings of the words apply are human matters, which are themselves made and which exhibit a divine providential order. These are the actual human things of the civil world, the order of ideas or “mental words” that apply to them, and the particular words of the languages of the various nations that express them. Vico has taken the elements of the threefold distinction that Plato employs in his quarrel with poets in the Republic and put them into positive relationship. The actual things of the human world correspond to the visible object as made by Plato’s artisan, and the words that reflect it in the speech of the poets are the original meanings reached by etymology. Plato claims that the form or idea of the visible object is likely made by a god. Vico transforms

Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/suss/detail.action?docID=4412740. Created from suss on 2021-02-14 21:00:44.

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ELE M ENTS      81

this third element into the mental words of his dictionary, which consists of the forms of human nature that are at the basis of history. Vico gives one full example of the content of his mental dictionary; it is in the First New Science (FNS 388–89), and he refers to it in the Second New Science (445). He does this, as mentioned above, as an enumeration of the properties of the fathers of the first families, which later give rise to cities. These are the forms or the properties in which the fathers participate that make them what they are—the beginners of the gentile world: imagining deities, begetting children in marriages, taking auspices, claiming sovereign dominion over lands, turning their power into law, and so forth. These properties are the mental words or principles in Vico’s dictionary that define the nature of those who begin any nation, and who are called by various names. The original meanings of these names designate these properties. Vico’s etymologicon of the ultimate sources of the words of articulated languages is connected to his discovery of his science of blazonry. Prior to the rise of articulated language there is a mute language of things themselves, which are used as hieroglyphs. This mute language was the first language of the natural law of the gentes, which was a law of force based in the first families’ need to maintain and defend themselves, later extended to the defense of cities and nations by their armies. The forms of this mute language were recorded on a family’s coat of arms, military insignia, heroic heraldry, and, later, on coins and medals. The law of force is based on divine law or the fas gentium in that the families base their actions on the ability of the first fathers to take the auspices of Jove. Vico says this is why the Latin heralds, in matters of both war and peace, would cry: “Audi, Jupiter, audi fas [Hear us, Jupiter, hear us, divine law]” (FNS 329; see also 177–80). Mute language arises through gestures connected to things or through using things themselves as gestures. Articulate language originates in onomatopoeia, in the imitation of the thing itself. Thus Jove is originally named through the cry of “pa! pape!” that imitates thunder and lightning (448). Law is born along with letters and languages. Vico says: “Along with this first birth of characters and languages was also born law, which the Latins called ious, and the ancient Greeks diaïon, celestial, from Dios, of Zeus or Jove. (Later, as Plato says in the Cratylus [412e], diaïon became dikaion [just] for the sake of euphony).” The need to understand changes in the meaning of legal terms provides Vico with the model for his universal etymologicon. Vico says that “just as the Roman jurisconsults, for example, possessed both a science of the languages of the civil law and a history of the times in which the words of the Law of the Twelve Tables had other, different meanings, so the juris-

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consults of the natural law of the gentes [i.e., those who practice the new science] should have such a science by means of a universal etymologicon” (FNS 385). In the Universal Law Vico claims this same ability to interpret the changing meanings of words to the proper power and constancy of the jurisprudent. The validity of Vico’s conception of the natural law of the gentes on which his new science depends is produced by the mental dictionary. The mental dictionary contains the ideas or norms through which the natural law of the gentes functions to produce the ages of the ideal eternal history. The mental dictionary is based on the claim that different historical languages presuppose interior psychological and structural constants that are common to all peoples. These constants that persist in historical languages are elements from the mentality of the first humans. This first mentality is an original common sense that Vico defines as “judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire people, an entire nation, or the entire human race” (axiom 12, par. 142). Vico says that this axiom will provide “a new art of criticism concerning the founders of nations” (143). “Common sense” (il senso comune) is conceived by Vico as social. It does not refer to a form of thinking that is protoscientific or prototheoretical in the way that “common sense” is understood in the Cartesian bon sens or by the British empiricists or in modern theory of knowledge. The thought-forms of rationality are grounded in the sentiments and sensibilities that arise within each nation and are held in common by it and all other nations. Vico says: “Uniform ideas originating among entire peoples unknown to each other must have a common ground of truth” (axiom 13, par. 144). Criticism requires a standard or criterion by which truth claims can be evaluated and placed in an order of relation to each other. Vico’s new art of criticism is based on the discovery of this new standard of a common sense of humanity, which has not been available to previous philological thought. Vico says that “this axiom [13] is a great principle which establishes the common sense of the human race as the criterion taught to the nations by divine providence to define what is certain in the natural law of the gentes. And the nations reach this certainty by recognizing the underlying agreements which, despite variations of detail, obtain among them all in respect of this law.” Vico says, “Thence issues the mental dictionary for assigning origins to all the divine articulated languages. It is by means of this dictionary that the ideal eternal history is conceived, which gives us the histories in time of all nations” (145). This new art of criticism depends on the “Idea of a Mental Dictionary,” which allows us to reduce the meanings of all

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d­ ifferent articulate languages “to certain unities of ideas in substance, which, ­considered from various points of view, have come to be expressed by different words in each” (445). In one sense Vico’s mental dictionary is never given in any specific form, for he offers only some examples of the contents of such a dictionary (473–82 and FNS 387–89). In another sense the New Science itself is such a dictionary, for in it we come to a knowledge of the common nature of the nations. Vico likely intends that, once we have the New Science in the dynamic form of its full statement, we do not need the dictionary as a thing in itself. In his explanation of the dipintura, as discussed earlier, Vico says that the “master key” to his science was the discovery that the first gentile peoples “were poets who spoke in poetic characters” (caratteri poetici) (34). Using logical terminology, he also calls these “imaginative genera” (generi fantastici) or “imaginative universals” (universali fantastici). The discovery of this master key, Vico says, cost him most of his literary life, a good twenty years. The axioms that support this master key are principally axioms 47 through 49. As a logic of universals or concept formation, Vico’s imaginative universals are a primary form of thought, presupposed by the universals of Aristotelian class logic. What Vico calls “intelligible universals” (universali intelligibili) correspond to the universals of class logic, to the ordering of particulars into classes that typify our commonsense view of the world. Thus we group a number of persons, places, or things into a class and attribute to them a common property. This common property (attribute or quality) is literally or “univocally” predicated of each of them. We, for example, can bring together a group of individuals and say that they are wise, meaning that we can literally predicate of each of them the virtue of wisdom. Wisdom is a property abstracted from the particular existence of each individual and from wisdom as a concept, a type of virtue that can be thought of apart from its embodiment in any one individual personality or another. Vico’s doctrine of poetic wisdom depends on his discovery that this manner of forming class concepts is not the first form of human thought. We feel the world before we make it intelligible in terms of logical classes. The way in which the world is felt is formed by our power of imagination, or fantasia. Fantasia is a primordial faculty for Vico. It is the power through which we originally make the human world. As opposed to imagination (immaginazione), understood as the functioning of the mind to organize perceptions into images so that they may become objects of conceptual thought, fantasia is a power fully and completely to order the world. In accordance with Vico’s principle that “the true is the made,” fantasia, as was said previously, may be called the “making imagination.” Vico’s conception of the poet plays on the

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double meaning of the Greek poiein—“to make” and “to compose poetry.” The first human poets, from their power of fantasia to form the world as they feel it with their senses and their bodily passions, create the fables of mythology. Because of this, Vico says the “first science to be learned should be mythology or the interpretation of fables” (51). Fables depend on “poetic characters,” and these poetic characters are the first universals of thought. Vico says: “ ‘Character’ means ‘idea,’‘form,’‘model’ [‘idea,’ ‘forma,’ ‘modello’]; and certainly poetic characters came before those of articulate sounds [that is, before alphabetic characters]” (429). Poetic characters are particulars that function as universals, that is, for the ages of gods and heroes they accomplish what class concepts accomplish for the third age of purely human or logical thought. Universality of the imagination uses a particular as a universal. To Vico these fables are “ideal truths” that are used as “certain models or ideal portraits, to reduce all the particular species which resembled them” (209). Vico says: “So that, if we consider the matter well, poetic truth is metaphysical truth, and physical truth which is not in conformity with it should be considered false.” He gives the example of Godfrey, the hero in Tasso’s epic poem Jerusalem Delivered: “The true war chief, for example, is the Godfrey that Torquato Tasso imagines [finge]; and all the chiefs who do not conform throughout to Godfrey are not true chiefs of war” (205). The individuals in question are each in some fundamental sense Godfrey. Their being is literally Godfrey’s being. They are not “like” Godfrey but “part” of Godfrey. They are Godfrey dispersed. Vico’s term for Tasso’s imagining Godfrey is fingere, not fantasticare, because Tasso is not a poet of the age of gods or heroes. Yet the logic by which he forms the hero Godfrey is that of the heroic mind itself. The mentality of the heroic age did not imagine, in the sense of pretending or feigning, but univocally predicated the figure of a particular hero of a class of individuals. Imaginative class concepts (generi fantastici), Vico says, “have a univocal signification connoting a quality common to all their species and individuals (as Achilles connotes an idea of valor common to all strong men, or Ulysses an idea of prudence common to all wise men)” (403). Thus to the heroic mind, which thinks and acts in the world only in accordance with fantasia, it is entirely natural to say of this, that, and the next strong man that each is literally Achilles. Achilles, whom we grasp as a particular figure, not a property or attribute, is univocally predicated of diverse individuals. These individuals are not analogous to Achilles, not “like” Achilles, each of them literally is Achilles. It is just as natural to the heroic mind univocally to predicate Achilles of these individuals as it is natu-

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ral to our cognitively formed minds univocally to predicate the virtue of “valor” as an attribute equally true of each of the members of the class of strong men. From this original way of forming class concepts through fantasia there develops the power of the mind to abstract “valor” as an intelligible universal from the particularity of the figure of Achilles. Although we can understand this logic of the imaginative universal, and can find what is left of its original presence in poetry in the third age, we cannot truly experience what it would be to think about the world exclusively in such terms. Vico concludes his list of 114 axioms by saying that axioms 109 through 114 “establish that the natural law of the gentes was instituted by providence” (328), and that Grotius, Pufendorf, and Selden “believed that natural equity in its perfect form had been understood by the gentile nations from their first beginnings” (320). Vico’s criticism of Grotius, Selden, and Pufendorf is that they regard the natural law of the gentes as the result of arrangements made among men, when in fact its cause is providence. God arranges history. Each nation is a birth (nascere, to be born) and each has a nature in the way that all humans have a nature. Although these seventeenth-century natural-law theorists accept a divine cause for the world, and regard natural law as in accordance with God, they fail to understand the role of providence. They fail to understand God’s original presence as the cause of the world of nations. They do not understand Vico’s method of beginning where the subject matter begins. Vico says they “should have taken their start from the beginnings of the gentes where their subject matter begins. But all three of them err together in this respect, by beginning in the middle; that is, with the latest times of the civilized nations” (394). By beginning in the middle, the natural law they develop is the natural law of the philosophers—an ideal based on reason, not a law by which the nations actually develop the order of their life. Grotius begins the common nature of nations not from God but from the power of human judgment, and from this he asserts its agreement with divine will. He says that the power men have over animals is the power to discriminate and judge what is agreeable or harmful. Thus “whatever is clearly at variance with such judgment is understood to be contrary also to the law of nature, that is, to the nature of man. To this exercise of judgment belongs moreover the rational allotment to each man, or to each social group, of those things which are properly theirs.”10 Grotius holds that the source of law is human intelligence: “This maintenance of the social order, which we have roughly sketched, and which is constant with human intelligence is the source of law properly so called.” He underscores this: “What we have been saying would have a degree of validity if we should concede that which

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cannot be conceded without the utmost wickedness, that there is no God, or that the affairs of men are of no concern to Him.”11 Grotius regards God as a source of law—in addition to its source in human nature or reason. This view is what Vico means by the natural law of the philosophers, who base natural law on reason, but hold that it is also in accord with divine will. Grotius says: “Herein, then, is another source of law besides the source in nature, that is, the free will of God, to which beyond all cavil our reason tells us we must render obedience. But the law of nature of which we have spoken, comprising alike that which relates to the social life of man and that which is so called in a larger sense, proceeding as it does from the essential traits implanted in man, can nevertheless rightly be attributed to God, because of His having willed that such traits exist in us.” Grotius, however, emphasizes that the law of nature is based on mutual consent: “So by mutual consent it has become possible that certain laws originate as between all states, or a great many states. . . . And this is what is called the law of nations, whenever we distinguish that term from the law of nature.”12 Pufendorf takes the same approach as Grotius, in basing natural law on an analysis of the human condition. He says: “There seems to us no more fitting and direct way to learn the law of nature than through careful consideration of the nature, condition, and desires of man himself.”13 Pufendorf sees the origin of human society as lying in the general sociable attitude men have in common. He agrees that mutual goodwill alone is not sufficient to account for the origin of nations, as fear is also a motive that compels men to come together. He claims: “This method of deducing the natural law, we feel, is not only genuine and clear, but also so sufficient and adequate that there is no precept of the natural law affecting other men, the basis of which is not ultimately sought therein.” He claims further that “if these dictates of reason are to have the force of laws, it is necessary to presuppose the existence of God and His Providence, whereby all things are governed, and primarily mankind.”14 Pufendorf says he disagrees with Grotius’s claim that such laws would hold even if they were not in accord with divine will. Selden says: “I cannot fancy to myself what the law of nature means, but the law of God.”15 He understands natural law to be of divine origin and identical with certain precepts that were communicated by God to Adam and by Adam to Noah. Noah is held to have passed these down to his descendants, and thence to the gentile nations. Vico says that Selden does not comprehend the distinctions God made in the world of nations between the Hebrews and the gentiles, that although Selden “pretends that the Jews presently taught their natural law to the gentiles, he is entirely unable to prove it” (396). Vico claims that on the basis of axiom 105 it is clear that

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God gave natural law to the Hebrews that is separate from natural law of the gentile nations: “The natural law of the gentes is coeval with the customs of the nations, conforming one with another in virtue of a common human sense, without any reflection and without one nation following the example of another” (311). The Hebrews have their own natural law, which is different from the natural law of the gentes because Hebrew society does not exist in ideal eternal history. God acts on events directly in sacred history. God as providential force acts within gentile history. The Hebrews are a necessary nation for Vico’s new science because they are a standard or constant against which gentile history develops and comprehends itself. Vico says: “Thus our treatment of natural law begins with the idea of divine providence, in the same birth with which was born the idea of law.” Vico claims that ius “is a contraction of the ancient Ious (    Jove)” (398). Vico’s doctrine of the natural law of the gentes begins with not only an act of divine providence but also the first act of comprehension of divine providence, by the gentiles—in the Jove-experience. Grotius, Pufendorf, and Selden are unable to make a proper distinction between the natural law of the Hebrews, that of the gentiles, and that of the philosophers, because of their faulty conception of providence. They are unable to see that from their common creator the nations are the same in their form of origin, that law is present with language from the beginning. Thus, from men already being in the world, the natural-law theorists attempt to see how men came to the idea of law. They are unable to make Vico’s crucial discovery that all nations originally think in terms of poetic characters and that, from this type of unreflective thought, governed by fantasia, there develops reflective thought and the human society that is based on it. The Vichian axioms circulate and recirculate through the science of the world of nations, expanding and contracting with the motions of the nations as each approximates the divine providential pattern, providing us with a jurisprudence of the human race, a rational civil theology by which to take the auspices of origin, development, maturity, decline, and fall. In the twenty-fourth chapter of Leviathan, Hobbes speaks of the way monies are collected to fill the coffers of the state and which then flow back to the populace as public payments. He says: “And in this also, the Artificiall Man maintains his resemblance with the Naturall; whose Veins receiving the Bloud from the severall Parts of the Body, carry it to the Heart; where being made Vitall, the Heart by the Arteries sends it out again, to enliven, and enable for motion all the Members of the same.”16

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In this way the state maintains itself, but this circulation is without purpose except to prevent us from falling back into the state of nature. Hobbes’s science of the body politic offers us an account of things human but not of things divine, and it is thus an incomplete wisdom. Vico’s science of the great city of the human race passes from the human to the divine order that is its basis, and so provides us with the vision of an eternal natural republic ordained by providence.

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Ch ap ter 8

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Principles

As explained in the introduction to part 3, Vico intends “principles” to be taken in two senses: as that which is first in the genesis of something, its origin, and as that which is first in thought about it. If we adhere to Vico’s axiom that “Doctrines must take their beginning from that of the matters of which they treat” (314), these two senses of principles coincide. The principles on which all human society depends and from which it originates are religion, marriage, and burial. These three things are distinctive to rational animals in their sociality and are unique only to them. These things are what identify human groups as human. Religion, marriage, and burial appear as components of the dipintura: “The luminous triangle with the seeing eye is God with the aspect of His providence” (2); “Among these [hieroglyphs] the most prominent is an altar, because among all peoples the civil world began with religion” (8); marriage is “symbolized by the torch lit from the fire on the altar and leaning against the jar” (11); and burial is “symbolized by a cinerary urn” (12). Marriage and burial derive from religion because they both are signified through ceremonies governed by religious doctrine. The civil world is founded through religion, but the civil world is ordered and continued through marriage, which is the immediate basis of the family, and through burial, which, by establishing ancestors and lineage, is the basis of the family over time.

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Before Vico develops the theme of these three principles, he opens this short section of Principles with two prominent reflections on the construction of the new science in general. In the first paragraph of the section he asks the reader “to consider what has hitherto been written concerning the principles of any subject in the whole of gentile knowledge, human and divine” (330). When the reader does this, Vico says, “he will perceive that all that has so far been written is a tissue of confused memories, of the fancies of a disordered imagination; that none of it is begotten of intelligence” (330). He says that what might have been of value in this confusion has been rendered useless by the conceits of scholars and of nations. These conceits prevent us from discovering the true histories of the things of the civil world. We are left with a panorama of disordered facts and claims about them, which Vico has attempted to bring together in a provisional way in the Chronological Table, coupled with the elements or axioms that, when applied to them, will allow us a consistent grasp of their interconnections and meaning and will at the same time not exclude any content that is to be explained by them. This charge to the reader is carried forward in the next section, on Method, where Vico asserts that the proof of the science is for the reader to make its truth for himself (349). Vico says that because the conceit of scholars and the conceit of nations has dominated our previous knowledge of the gentile nations, we cannot secure what is needed for a true science of the civil world from either the philosophers or the philologians, at least as their knowledge stands prior to the new science. He says: “So, for purposes of this inquiry, we must reckon as if there were no books in the world” (330). As a declaration to underscore his claim that the new science is new and not an extension of already-established knowledge, Vico’s assertion is comprehensible. It has a resonance with Descartes’s observation at the beginning of the Meditations, that much of what he had learned was in error and that he must think everything through for himself. It also accords with Bacon’s instruction to “think and see,” which Vico will cite in the philological proofs of the section on Method (359), which is of a piece with the aphorism with which Bacon begins the Novum Organum: that we can only understand of nature what we have in fact observed and thought. If a method or the science that embodies it is truly new, it must put aside what has gone before, in the way that Galileo and Newton put aside the physics of Aristotle by replacing linguistic descriptions of events and natural motions with mathematical formulations of them. But the New Science is a text interlarded with the authority of quotations and references from other works, and the course of study Vico took to arrive at it was an exercise in erudition. In his conclusion to the Vici Vindiciae, his

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defense of the authorship and validity of the First New Science, Vico says: “For a good twenty years I have consulted all works possible with my weak powers to make a contribution to the doctrine of the natural law of the gentes; working tirelessly, I entombed myself completely in the silence of a great library rich in all the various works of human thought, where I meditated on the most ancient authors of all nations from whom after more than a thousand years modern writers take their beginnings.”1 Vico read the ancients against the moderns, and it is to the ancients he most often turns for authority in his citations in the New Science. So perhaps he means we should reckon as if there are no modern books in the world in order to reach the standpoint of his new science. It is the moderns who have turned away from eloquence and the importance of the studia humanitatis generally. It is the seventeenth-century natural-law theorists as well as the seventeenth-century historians (as we have seen in the Chronological Table) who have gotten things wrong in their attempts to account for the world of nations. In this same passage of the Vici Vindiciae, Vico compares his approach to that of Hobbes: “Thomas Hobbes proceeded in this way [reading the ancients] and among his literary friends and contemporaries he prided himself in being the initiator of the doctrine of natural law and of having enriched philosophy with it, but he was instead mistaken in this self-praise because he did not consider Divine Providence.”2 Although Vico consistently rejects Hobbes’s materialism, he never attacks him, as he does Grotius, Pufendorf, and Selden, and in fact he hardly mentions Hobbes in the New Science. The reader who reads both the Leviathan and the New Science will see the Leviathan as a constant shadow behind much of Vico’s text.3 In the second paragraph of this section on Principles, Vico makes the first of his two most impassioned and poetic pronouncements in the New Science, the second being in his conclusion, regarding the “ultimate civil disease” of the “barbarism of reflection” (1106). This pronouncement, like that concerning barbarism, has Dantean overtones. Vico says: “But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects on this cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature, which, since God made it, He alone knows; and that they should have neglected the study of the world of nations, or civil world, which, since men had made it, men could come to know” (331).

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The “night of thick darkness” (densa notte di tenebre) recalls the dark wood (una selva oscura) in which Dante finds himself at the beginning of the Divine Comedy. The “eternal and never failing light” recalls his glimpse of the heavenly radiance of the delectable mountain (il dilettoso monte) that he sees in the distance and which urges him on his journey through the underworld toward Paradise. Vico, by immersing himself in the silence of the great library of the ancients, apprehended the principle of divine knowing as it applies to the human mind. God knows the world because He makes it, and in God, knowing and making are a perfect equation. Man can have a true knowledge only of what man makes. The philosophers have directed their attention to nature, which cannot truly be known except by God. The most a science of nature can accomplish is a conscientia of the natural world, a consciousness of it. The most a science of nations can accomplish, however, is a scientia of the civil world, because man stands to it in the divine relation of its maker as God stands to all creation, including man, as its maker—the difference being that God’s making is an immediate begetting of what is made, a creating. Man must first make history through the powers of choice and authority, and only after the actions of the civil world are complete can man make a knowledge of them, by seeing them with the mind’s eye, with the imagination and the intellect. The new science rests on the truth that the world of nations “has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore found within the modifications of our own human mind.” Religion, marriage, and burial are these principles, as are the axioms that reveal their effects within the gentile nations in their origin, development, maturity, decline, and fall. Religion, for Vico, may best be thought of in the sense of civil religion, that is, as an institution that acts to produce civility in human society. As a social force, religion moderates the passions. Vico emphasizes that only religion can overcome violence when it arises in a society, as it does originally in the establishment and governance of the first gentile families through the first fathers taking the auspices of Jove. Vico thus takes religion in its primary meaning of religio—supernatural constraint, sanction, deriving perhaps from religare, to restrain, re- combined with ligare, “to tie back” (ligature). Vico is careful to insist that the true religion is Christianity, which is in accord with human nature and reason itself, but he often treats religion anthropologically, as an institution present in various forms of society and necessary to society itself. He thus in several places dismisses the claim he ascribes to Polybius, “that if there were philosophers in the world . . . there would be no need in the world of religions” (334; see also 179 and 1110).

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Vico could agree with the widespread view among the philosophes of the Enlightenment, that whether or not the tenets of religion were true or whether they were essentially superstitions, religion is necessary to keep order in the populace. But Vico would add that religion is the very basis of human society itself and there cannot be human society without religion. Thus he would not share the skepticism that lay behind the endorsement of the philosophes. Vico is especially concerned to convince the reader that there are not primitive societies actually existing without some form of religion—and also that there is no possibility of some advanced form of society in which religion has been completely eclipsed by philosophy. He says that claims that there are people in remote places such as South Africa, Brazil, and other nations of the New World who live without religion are simply based on travelers’ erroneous tales. He thinks that Bayle may have been taken in by such stories as the basis of his claim “that peoples can live in justice without the light of God” (334), a claim Vico finds even more extreme than that of Polybius. Although all people at all times believe in a provident divinity in some form, Vico says there are only four primary religions: that of the Hebrews, the Christians, the pagan gentile nations who believe in a pantheon of gods, and the Mohammedans (334). Vico is aware of India, China, and Japan, but he does not know of Hinduism, Buddhism, or Taoism as world religions. Furthermore, Vico says, “no nation has believed in a god all body [as Epicurean philosophers would hold] or in a god all mind but not free [as Stoic philosophers would hold]” (335). He claims that the God of Stoicism could not be a basis for laws in a republic because the ultimate principle of human affairs would be fate. Vico singles out Spinoza, whom he regards as a prime example of a modern Stoic philosopher. And, with Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus in mind, he says Spinoza “speaks of the republic as if it were a society of hucksters [come d’una società che fusse di mercandanti]” (335). Such a society would be just above the society for pigs of which Socrates speaks in the Republic, a state that would exist for no more reason than to provide for the means of the exchange of goods among its citizens to fulfill their basic wants. In reply to the Epicurean conception of a God whose being is all body, Vico cites Cicero’s demand in De legibus, which he invokes when arguing with the Epicurean, Atticus. Cicero asks Atticus to grant “that it is by the might of the immortal gods, or by their nature, reason, power, mind, will, or any other term which may make my meaning clearer, that all Nature is governed? For if you do not admit it, we must begin our argument with this problem before taking up anything else” (1.7.21). Atticus grants this, saying that he does so privately, without other members of his school knowing of it. Vico’s

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point appears to be that Epicureans may philosophically hold a doctrine of God as all body, with all governed by chance, but it is not possible on a human level for anyone, even them, to in fact believe it. Vico then concludes: “Such is the compatibility of these two sects, the Stoic and the Epicurean, with Roman jurisprudence, which takes divine providence as its first principle!” (335). The exclamation point indicates that Vico intends this assertion of “compatibility” as ironic, even sarcastic. Such is his contempt for the ethics and metaphysics of these two opposite sects, with which his disagreement is not simply technical or purely intellectual. Beginning with the Universal Law, Vico has emphasized the agreement of divine providence with the jurisprudence of the Roman Digest. Vico says: “We observe that all nations, barbarous as well as civilized, though separately founded because remote from each other in time and space, keep these three human customs: all have some religion, all contract solemn marriages, all bury their dead” (333). These three customs, then, are cultural universals that provide content for Vico’s ideal eternal history as a transformation of the Roman ius gentium into a law of historical development of all nations. Each nation comes into existence by the practice of these three customs and develops in terms of them. The prime example in the Digest of ius naturale is marriage. Recall that, for the Digest, natural law is what is to some extent common to both humans and animals. Marriage is the custom through which each society provides for its own continuance, by governing procreation and the protection and rearing of children. The Digest states: “Ius naturale is that which nature has taught to all animals; for it is not a law specific to mankind but is common to all animals—land animals, sea animals, and the birds as well. Out of this comes the union of man and woman which we call marriage, and the procreation of children, and their rearing. So we can see that the other animals, wild beasts included, are rightly understood to be acquainted with this law” (1.1.3). The reasoning of the Digest is that although animals do not create customs and thus do not engage in marriage, nature provides for patterns of animal behavior whereby procreation and the necessary protection and nourishment of the young occur. There is a parallel in nature, then, with the custom of marriage, and it is necessary to human society. Marriage makes possible the family, which is the first form of the nation. In so conceiving of the family, Vico endorses Aristotle’s claim in the Politics: “The household is the partnership constituted by nature for [the needs of] daily life” (1252b). The purpose of marriage, for Vico, is not the fulfillment of romantic love (although his doctrine is not opposed to it) but the establishment and continuance of the family as the fundamental structure of

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P RIN C I P LES      95

human society. As every gentile nation had a Hercules as its founder, so, we can say, every such nation had a Juno, who is the goddess of marriage (513). He says that “piety and marriage form the school wherein are learned the first rudiments of all the great virtues” (514). This view, too, accords with Aristotle, who, in the Nicomachean Ethics, originates all virtue in habit (ethos) first instilled in the individual by family and friends (1103b). Burial is tied to our humanity. Vico cites Tacitus, who, in the Annals, reports on the executions ordered by Tiberius, in which the bodies were piled up to rot before being thrown into the Tiber, and relatives and friends were not permitted even to weep over them (337). Tacitus observes: “The ties of our common humanity had been dissolved by the force of terror; and before each advance of cruelty compassion receded” (6.19). Burial of the dead reminds us that we are all human, that we have a common bond. Not to respect the dead is to transgress one’s humanity. Even in war, the enemy is allowed to bury its dead. Vico says: “With good reason burials were characterized by the sublime phrase ‘compacts of the human race’ (  foedera generis humani)” (337). This phrase echoes Livy, who describes the slaying of Tolumnius in battle by the Roman Aulus Cornelius Cossus, who exclaims: “ ‘Is this the breaker of human leagues [ruptor foederis humani], the violater of the law of nations?’ ” (Hist. of Rome 4.19.3). Vico concludes with a gloss on Seneca’s letter to Lucilius, to the effect that when we discourse on immortality, it is important to our purpose not to depart from the consensus of men who either fear the inferno or believe in it. Vico could make use of Seneca’s full statement, which is: “in our eyes the fact that all men agree upon something is a proof of its truth. For instance, we infer that the gods exist, for this reason, among others—that there is implanted in everyone an idea concerning deity, and there is no people so far beyond the reach of laws and customs that it does not believe at least in gods of some sort. And when we discuss the immortality of the soul, we are influenced in no small degree by the general opinion of mankind, who either fear or worship the spirits of the lower world. I make the most of this general belief ” (Ep. 117.6). This is a concise formulation of Vico’s case that all peoples have a belief in a deity or deities of some sort and a belief in the immortality of the soul, with varying conceptions of the status of the afterlife. The existence of God and the soul do not require a rational proof such as Descartes propounds in the Meditations. Vico presents them as evident from the communal sense (il senso comune) of mankind. To make his points, Vico cites the Epicurean Atticus from Cicero, and the Stoic Seneca. Thus Vico shows that even the two philosophical positions he finds most false do not deny the truth of the principles on which his science of humanity rests.

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Cha p te r 9

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Method

Vico begins this section by saying that to complete the establishment of ­principles it remains to discuss the method which the science is to follow. He says the key to this method is axiom 106: “Doctrines must take their beginning from that of the matters of which they treat” (314), an axiom, Vico says, that could have been asserted among the general axioms. The establishment of the beginning of the subject matter of the new science must be derived, on the one hand, from the philologists and, on the other, from the philosophers, since the new science itself is predicated on the joining of these two forms of knowledge. The philologists will take us back to the myths of the origin of men from natural objects, such as the myth of Deucalion and Pyrrha bringing forth men from stones they throw over their heads (79); or the fable of Cadmus slaying the great serpent and sowing its teeth, and from the plowed furrows armed men spring forth (679). The philosophers provide theories of proto­ humans, such as the simpletons of Grotius or Plato’s identification of the first men with the Cyclopes of Homer (296). Vico also says we must fetch this origin from “the frogs of Epicurus, from the cicadas of Hobbes” (338). Nicolini points out that Vico may have in mind a passage in Censorinus: “According to Democritus of Abdera, humans were first formed from water and mud. Epicurus is not far behind.”1

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M ETHO D      97

The reader may rightly be puzzled by Vico’s reference to the “cicale di Obbes.” In Hobbes’s De Cive 8 there is a metaphor of primitive men arising like mushrooms. The word for a species of edible mushroom or fungus is the Tuscan cicciole. The simplest explanation for this phrase may be a typesetter’s error, of mistaking the cio in cicciole for a when transposing Vico’s manuscript, even though Vico’s handwriting, in the samples that survive, has the clarity of a notary’s. In the First New Science Vico associates the cicadas with Epicurus and the frogs with Hobbes: “such as the men whom Epicurus imagined as cicadas and Hobbes as frogs” (FNS 269). The most we may conclude is that Vico is claiming that these materialist philosophers offer a naturalistic conception of the origin of men. Although Vico generally joins philology with philosophy, he does not derive his conception of the giants, from which the gentile nations arise, from any of the above. The giants result from the offspring of Ham and Japheth, and a portion of the offspring of Shem, during the two centuries that the world dries out following the universal flood. Once the first families are founded, the gentiles progressively recapture normal stature. Vico’s doctrine of the first men, or protohumans, is neither mythical nor philosophical, but biblical. This doctrine, however, required Vico to account for the actual nature of the giants and to enter their mentality. He says: “To discover the way in which this first human thinking arose in the gentile world, we encountered exasperating difficulties which have cost us the research of a good twenty years. [We had] to descend from these human and refined natures of ours to those quite wild and savage natures, which we cannot at all imagine [immaginare] and can comprehend [intendere] only with great effort” (338; cf. 34). In portraying the difficulty of entering into the being of the giants Vico uses immaginare, the sense of imagining that accompanies conceptual comprehension, not fantasticare, the sense of imagining by means of which the thought of the first men forms poetic characters and thus makes an original order in the world. Vico, without citing Hobbes, presents a picture of the original state of human existence among the gentiles in the same terms we find in the Leviathan, with the exception of the presence of the deity. Vico says that “we must start from some notion of God such as even the most savage, wild, and monstrous men do not lack. That notion we show to be this: that man, fallen into despair of all the succors of nature, desires something superior to save him. But something superior to nature is God, and this is the light that God has shed on all men” (339).

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Hobbes, in his famous passage on war as the original state of human e­ xistence, acknowledges the need for a common power by which men can be kept in awe, but he considers this only in civil, not divine, terms: “Out of Civil States, there is alwayes Warre of every one against every one. Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.” In such a state of war there is “continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” Furthermore: “In such a Warre, nothing is Unjust. To this warre of every man against every man, this is also consequent; that nothing can be Unjust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice have there no place. Where there is no common Power, there is no Law: where no Law, no Injustice.”2 Vico says: “But men, because of their corrupted nature, are under the tyranny of self-love, which compels them to make private utility their chief guide. Seeking everything useful for themselves and nothing for their companions, they cannot bring their passions under control to direct them toward justice” (341). Vico’s tyranny of self-love is in accord with Hobbes’s view that “every man looketh that his companion should value him, at the same rate he sets upon himselfe.”3 Vico is able to avoid Hobbes’s war of all against all because of the awe instilled in the giants by the experience of Jove. The covenant with the deity makes unnecessary a covenant among men in order for them to overcome the violence generated by self-love that supports a state of nature of constant warfare. The deity provides a standard of justice. Vico says of man as he evolves from his bestial state: “it is only by divine providence that he can be held within these institutions [ordini] to practice justice as a member of the society of the family, of the city, and finally of mankind. Unable to attain all the utilities he wishes, he is constrained by these institutions [ordini] to seek those which are his due; and this is called just. That which regulates all human justice is therefore divine justice, which is administered by divine providence to preserve human society” (341). Vico says that the new science, in one of its principal aspects, must be a “rational civil theology of divine providence” (342). Such a theology has been lacking from the philosophers and is in fact not possible on the basis of the chance of the Epicureans or on the basis of the fate of the Stoics. Providence as a doctrine of ultimate causality goes between the horns of the dilemma posed by these two metaphysical doctrines, because it is the conception of a necessary order of events in the sense of an overall pattern of their development, but exactly how the events enter into this pattern is rooted in their particular circumstances, allowing for the eventualities of chance.

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M ETHO D      99

A rational civil theology is possible because the new science has discovered those principles by which providence acts in history. Thus the new science is an activity of rational divination that supersedes the auguristic divination employed by the founders of the first families to comprehend the actions of the deity. Vico says: “Our new Science must therefore be a demonstration, so to speak, of what providence has wrought in history, for it must be a history of the institutions [ordini] by which, without human discernment or counsel, and often against the designs of men, providence has ordered this great city of the human race” (342). Vico here employs the Augustinian phrase “this great city of the human race [questa gran città del gener umano].” He adds that the institutions (ordini) that are established in this great city by providence are “universal and eternal” (342). Providence unfolds these ordini as the natural customs of men. But providence also acts “against the designs of men,” in that changes in institutions or laws may come about for the good of mankind in history, but such changes are not the result of the pursuit of virtue and reason by a given social class or form of government. For example, the nobles, while pursuing the ends of a heroic aristocracy, restrict the rights of the plebeians—to the extent that they rise up against the existing order, forcing the nobility to grant them a greater equality, which finally becomes the basis of a popular republic.4 Vico says the proofs of this science that support this rational civil theology are obtained by our discovering that the movements of history become comprehensible. We are actually able to read the events of history and, in so doing, to apprehend the workings of the divine mind of providence. He says: “In doing this the reader will experience in his mortal body a divine pleasure as he contemplates in the divine ideas this world of nations in all the extent of its places, times, and varieties” (345). The new science is based on the achievement of a sublime metaphysics in which the mind is raised to the level of the deity with the bodily manifestation of a “divine pleasure” (divin piacere). Longinus says that writers of genius “are above all mortal range. . . . Sublimity lifts them near the mighty mind of God” (36.1). Vico says: “These sublime natural theological proofs will be confirmed for us by the following sorts of logical proofs” (346). These logical proofs are produced by the philosophical part of the new science and they will be followed here by its philological proofs. Vico says: “In its second principal aspect, our Science is therefore a history of human ideas, on which it seems the metaphysics of the human mind must proceed” (347). Providence reveals itself through the development of human customs, orders of society, and institutions in history. Corresponding to the

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forms of society through which men act are forms of mind that generate the ideas through which men think. These ideas do not begin when men begin to think philosophically; they begin with the earliest myths or fables, when men begin to think poetically, that is, when the human mind begins to form the world through images. Philosophy cannot reason from the world around it as a given, taking reason itself as a given. It must, instead, give an account of how the world it encounters comes about, how the given comes to be given. Vico says that the new science applies its new art of criticism in a metaphysical manner to determine this history of human ideas, and that in so doing it employs as a standard axiom 12, regarding the “common sense of the human race [il senso comune d’esso gener umano]” (348). The common sense of the human race is the awareness of the presence of providence in all human affairs. Thus it is the providential order of history that can be grasped by the philosophical principles of the new science. Vico says: “The decisive sort of proof in our Science is therefore this: that, since these institutions [ordini] have been established by divine providence, the course of the affairs of the nations had to be, must now be, and will have to be [dovettero, debbono e dovranno] such as our Science demonstrates, even if infinite worlds were born from time to time through eternity, which is certainly not the case [è falso di fatto]” (348). The new science offers not simply a history of events in the sense of describing the flow of events in time. It offers a relation of these events per causas, that is, as a necessary order as ordained by providence. What is true of this world would be true of any conceivable world. But, as Vico declares, there are not in fact infinite worlds. In adding this claim Vico intends to dismiss the pantheism of Giordano Bruno. In his dialogues On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (1584), Bruno endorses the physics of Epicurus: “We declare that there are an infinity of earths, an infinity of suns, and an infinite ether—or, as Democritus and Epicurus have it, an infinite Plenum and an infinite Vacuum, the one placed within the other.”5 For Vico, God creates one world governed by providence. Vico, however, certainly shares with Bruno a sense of the coincidence of opposites and of man as microcosm. Vico says: “Our Science therefore comes to describe at the same time an ideal eternal history traversed in time by the history of every nation in its rise, development, maturity, decline, and fall. Indeed, we make bold to affirm that he who meditates this Science narrates to himself this ideal eternal history so far as he himself makes it for himself by that proof ‘it had, has, and will have to be’ [dovette, deve, dovrà]” (349). Here Vico repeats his doctrine of the necessary order of history as comprehended by the principles of the new science. But in this instance he places his assertion in quotation marks, indicating its connection with Hesiod’s attribution to the Muses. Hesiod says

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M ETHO D      101

that the Muses tell “with harmonious voices of things past and present and to come” (Th. 38–39). This power of the Muses to foretell connects with Vico’s conception of rational civil theology as a transformation of the art of divination of the founders of the first families. Hesiod also says: “Fortunate is the man whom the Muses love: Sweet words flow from his lips” (Th. 96–97). When the Muses are present, “the gifts of these goddesses instantly direct the mind” (Th. 103). In citing the power of the Muses as the very basis of the proof of his science, Vico is deliberately opposing Hobbes’s claim that “no man can know by Discourse, that this, or that, is, has been, or will be; which is to know absolutely: but only, that if This be, That is; if This has been, That has been; if This shall be, That shall be: which is to know conditionally; and that not the consequence of one thing to another; but of one name of a thing, to another name of the same thing.”6 Hobbes sees this reasoning as the ground of doubt not of proof. Without this discourse reflecting the causal order of divine providence, Hobbes can conclude no more. The mother of the Muses is Memory (Mnemosyne). To the power of memory to connect the moments of time Vico adds the power of philosophy to transform their connection into a necessary order of causes: from was, is, and is to come, to had, has, and will have to be. How does the mind acquire the principle of ideal eternal history from which to transcend time? Ideal eternal history is not derived; it is a first principle. It must be grasped in an instant by the philosophical mind, in a manner analogous to the apprehension of the thunderous sky as Jove by the first men. Jove is the first imaginative universal, and from it poetic metaphysics takes shape. In the Jove-experience, memory comes into existence as a power from which to transcend the immediacy of the stream of ongoing sensations and produce the first name. From this experience men begin to make their world of the nations. The Jove-experience is given; it is not made—but all is made from it. The potential new scientist, faced with all the scholarship of history, looks at the events of the history of the nations represented by the Chronological Table and suddenly sees that all nations follow the pattern of the ages of ideal eternal history—all rise and fall by the same logic. “Ideal eternal history” might be called a recollective imaginative universal, for through it all can be recollected in a common pattern. It is recollection in Aristotle’s sense, in On Memory, that, when one wishes to recollect, “he will try to obtain a beginning of movement whose sequel shall be the movement he desires to reawaken” (451b). The poetic character of Jove is based on what can be called a collective imaginative universal, for through the fantasia of the first men the various

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moments of thunder are remembered (collected in memory) to form the first name of the divine, and suddenly Jove comes into their existence. Recollection turns temporal sequence into a series of inferences. This recollection is accomplished by the ability to meditate (meditare), joined with the ability to narrate (narrare). For Vico, meditation is narration. Unlike Cartesian meditation, Vichian meditation is not a search for first principles from which a deduction can be made; it is a search for how such principles, given immediately to the imagination, can take on the form of a rationally structured oration in which the human world can be recalled from its beginning. Vico repeats his claim of the maker’s conception of knowing: “History cannot be more certain than when he who makes the things also narrates them” (349). He follows this statement with the one passage in the New Science in which he clearly makes reference to his principle of verum-factum that he presents in the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians. There he presents it as most evident in mathematical reasoning, in which the trues of mathematics are not discovered but are made from its elements. Vico states: “Now, as geometry, when it constructs the world of quantity out of its elements, or contemplates that world, is making it for itself, just so does our Science, but with a reality greater by just so much as the institutions [ordini] having to do with human affairs are more real than points, lines, surfaces and figures are” (349). Vico holds that the new science is built on a geometric method, meaning that from a few elements all sorts of trues (i veri) can be fashioned regarding particulars. The objects of the new science are not “mathematicals,” not the products of pure thought, but the products of actions formed by human choice and authority, or certains (i certi). The trues of these certains are formed by the art of metaphysical criticism. That the new science depends on the convertibility of the true and the made (verum et factum convertuntur) places its practitioner in the position of imitating the divine. The human mens, as the divine element in man, recapitulates the divine mens. Vico says: “And this very fact is an argument, O reader, that these proofs are of a kind divine and should give thee a divine pleasure, since in God knowledge and making are one and the same thing” (349). The new science is the self-knowledge that Socrates seeks but cannot fully accomplish because he did not have a conception of divine providence at his disposal, but he resides among the virtuous pagans in the philosophic family of Dante’s fourth canto of the Inferno, at only the very beginning of the underworld. Vico concludes the section on Method with a list of seven philological proofs: (1) the mythologies or fables agree with the order of things as formulated in the new science and are the civil histories of the first peoples; (2) the

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M ETHO D      103

heroic phrases and their punctilious nature also agree; (3) the etymologies of native languages also agree; (4) these languages are particular embodiments of the mental vocabulary discussed in axiom 22; (5) the truth preserved in vulgar traditions is recognized; (6) the fragments of antiquity are pieced together and restored to their meanings; and (7) the effects or certains narrated in the life of nations are traced to their necessary causes. These philological proofs, which are to be joined with the preceding philosophical proofs, spell out Vico’s definition of philology, given in the Idea of the Work as “the doctrine of all the things that depend on human choice; for example, all histories of the language, customs, and deeds of peoples in war and peace” (7). Descartes’s method, as the full title of his Discourse indicates—Discourse on the Method of rightly conducting one’s reason and seeking the truth in the sciences (Discours de la Méthode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la verité dans les sciences)—tells one how to reason by his four-step method in the sciences, such as in the three sciences treated in the essays, for which the Discourse is the introduction. When we look to how Descartes’s philosophy itself is to be approached and comprehended, he states: “I am presenting this work only as a history [comme un histoire] or, if you prefer, a fable [comme un fable].”7 Descartes’s philosophy is outside his own method of right reasoning: his principles of beginning with what is evident and true, dividing any difficulties into parts, proceeding from the simplest points to the most complex, and, finally, reviewing it all to be certain the reasoning is complete. None of these steps apply to the making or the comprehending of a history or a fable, nor would they allow one to compose an oration or pursue a case in a court of law. Vico intends the reader to think of the difference between Descartes’s famous method and his. Vico’s method is self-reflexive. It is a history and a fable. Unlike most philosophers, Vico instructs the reader as to what must be done to prove his science, and throughout his text he is both presenting his case and showing the reader how to make it also for himself. Vico knows that we are never convinced of a philosophy or a new science unless we can make it for ourselves. Vico’s approach is rooted in the legal commonplace, going back to Quintilian, that it is not enough that a case be true, it must also be plausible. The form in which to meditate all that is human in terms of the human is the narration, which allows us and, indeed, leads us to its truth—a knowledge of causes, of what was, is, and will have to be.

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Pa rt Fo u r

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Poetic Wisdom

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Introduction

When Plato, in the tenth book of the Republic, raised the question of the r­elation between the poetic image and the philosophic idea, he set the agenda of Western philosophy. The philosophic language of ideas is the natural speech of reason, and reason aims at a form of knowing that is absolute and free of the image as well as the emotions and sensations that the image embeds. The attempt at pure noetic expression always fails because the metaphor intrudes in order to have a beginning point and in order to carry it along. Philosophical speculation requires the constant companionship of imagination and reason in order to extend the mind’s eye to the unseen as it resides in the seen. No philosopher makes more use of the image than Plato, yet no philosopher takes reason further beyond the perceptible than Plato, with the doctrine of the forms. The “ancient quarrel” haunts philosophy as it develops from Plato, even in those thinkers in which it goes unacknowledged, who pretend to ignore the issue. Yet nothing condemns a philosophy more quickly than the claim that it is simply poetry. Vico’s term, which heads the largest book of the New Science, “poetic wisdom” (sapienza poetica) appears to be an oxymoron. Wisdom—which, as Cicero defines it, reflecting the general view of the ancients, is a knowledge of things divine and human and the causes of each—is the aim of philosophy. Poetry does not provide such knowledge. It provides pleasure, but no one becomes wise by being taken here and there by the images of poetry inspired by the 107

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W IS D O M

poets themselves, or by the rhapsodes, who would further stir our ­passions and interpret and lead us through the world of images the poets make. Vico identifies the basis of the ancient quarrel as resting on the claim that Homer’s poems contain an esoteric wisdom, a claim he treats at length in the third book of the New Science. We may regard all poetry as a footnote to Homer, as we may regard all philosophy as a footnote to Plato. The resolution of the quarrel, as Vico shows, is to recognize that Homer’s wisdom is an exoteric or vulgar wisdom and, further, to recognize that this exoteric wisdom is presupposed by the esoteric wisdom philosophy seeks. Once this distinction is made, the ancient quarrel is resolved. Poetry is not a form of philosophy, done in images. Its thought is different in kind from philosophical thought, yet philosophical thought presupposes the poetic grasp of the world. Philosophy begins in the image but proceeds beyond it. Poetry, like myth, does not ask questions. It immerses us in the pleasure and emotions of the image. Philosophy calls into question what the image simply presents. The wisdom the philosopher loves is expressed in universal principles. Poetic wisdom is the comprehension of the particular man, of Achilles or Ulysses, or Zoroaster. Philosophic wisdom is the comprehension of man as such, not the comprehension of particular gods, but of God as divine providence. This view of philosophy allows Vico to pass from the ars topica, in which poetry and rhetoric share, to the ars critica, in which metaphysics and logic share. The productions of the first poets are also the first histories of the gentile nations. This fact allows Vico to produce not simply a new philosophy but to pass beyond philosophy as he finds it, especially among the moderns, to a new science, which includes philosophy as the thought of universals joined with philology as the thought of particulars, which are the product of human choice and authority. The new science, which is neither philosophy nor philology but both, is based in a new critical art. This new ars critica takes its standard from the common sense of the human race, which is judgment without reflection on which the commonality of the smallest human groups is based and which extends to that of the human race itself. The new science is a rational art of divination that can read the book of history as the actions of divine providence. The book of history is written in the characters of the mental dictionary, just as the book of nature is written in the formulations of mathematics, as Galileo has shown. Both of these are divine languages and each requires its own new science to read them. Vico’s new science is a science of imagination (fantasia) understood in a twofold sense. It is a science of imagination in that it demonstrates the way in which the gentile nations first make the human world through the power of fantasia.

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INTRO D U C TION      109

And it is a science of imagination in that it is itself made through the power of fantasia. Vico at every turn in his thought draws on the power of fantasia to enable the reader to see the trues he elicits from the certains of the great city of the human race. Argument alone is insufficient to take us to the standpoint of the whole, “the flower of wisdom.” We must be able to imagine the world of the gentile nations as moving through the three ages of ideal eternal history. Unless we can look at history and see this providential order, no amount of rational argument will take us to this level of vision. For every argument concerning the nature of things, there is a counterargument that is not beyond human wit to discover. If we remain on the level of thought as argument, our grasp of things dissolves into skepticism, such as in the Pyrrhonism of Bayle. And if this occurs, Stoicism or Epicureanism await us as forms of withdrawal from an ethic of civil wisdom and from a metaphysic of divine providence. The first things of the world being made through the fantasia of the first fathers is analogous to the first knowledge of the world being made through the fantasia of the first new scientists. All in this new science so fully imagined must agree with both fact and reason, in the sense that fact and reason must agree with each other as they ideally do in the art of jurisprudence. The law, being a combination of divine and human law, is what holds the gentile nations together. The thought that allows us to comprehend them—to meditate and narrate their historical reality—is jurisprudential in form. The past is remembered as precedent for the present. This connection, and its divinatory connection to the future, is rooted in ingenium, the seeing of the similar in the dissimilar, on which individual prudence and collective jurisprudence depend. Our comprehension of the human world is always a comprehension over time, in which we think from the origin through to the future. This thought over time is the art attributed by Hesiod to the Heliconian Muses, who, born of Zeus and Memory, capture time in song. Further, as Hesiod relates, they can sing both true and false songs—but true ones when they wish. Fantasia is musical in that it can relate the true to the false and from this arrive at a grasp of the true that comes about by the interconnection of the true and the false, the effect the one has on the other. To think with Vico is to think with the Muses in the background and to think with the background of the Muses—that is, with their mother, Mnemosyne, or Memory. In the New Science we step onto the ancient Theatrum Mundi that becomes the teatro della memoria in which the entire history of the gentile nations is recollected as a sequence of what had, has, and will have to be.1 It has the logic of a fable, a vera narratio in which we can find in principle all there is concerning the common nature of the nations that, when we apply our reason to it, reveals its divine order.

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Cha p te r 1 0

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Tree of Poetic Wisdom

Having presented the materials, axioms, principles, and method by which the new science will proceed, Vico states its purpose: “Throughout this book [book 2] it will be shown that as much as the poets had first sensed in the way of vulgar wisdom, the philosophers later understood in the way of esoteric wisdom; so that the former may be said to have been the sense and the latter the intellect of the human race” (363). Poetic wisdom (sapienza poetica) is a wisdom of the senses that is presupposed by philosophic wisdom (sapienza filosofica), a wisdom of the intellect. Vico says: “Now, before discussing poetic wisdom, it is necessary for us to see what wisdom in general is. Wisdom is the faculty which commands all the disciplines by which we acquire all the sciences and arts that make up humanity” (364). Thus wisdom is the whole, and this whole is the aim of all the specific studies undertaken by humanity in the attempt to form human nature. Wisdom is, further, a whole that joins these human pursuits with the pursuit of the knowledge of the divine and in so doing directs these pursuits toward the highest good. In his oration On the Study Methods of Our Time Vico endorsed the need for proper education to be based on a wisdom of the whole. He holds that among the ancients a single thinker was a whole university. But among the moderns, students are taught by various specialists without what is taught being governed by a vision of the whole. Vico says in the modern university, ­­ 110

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TREE OF P OETI C W IS D O M      111

while students “may become extremely learned in some respects, their c­ ulture on the whole (and the whole is really the flower of wisdom) is incoherent. To avoid this serious drawback, I would suggest that our professors should so co-ordinate all disciplines into a single system so as to harmonize them with our religion and with the spirit of the political form under which we live.”1 Vico says: “Wisdom among the gentiles began with the Muse, defined by Homer in a golden passage of the Odyssey as ‘knowledge of good and evil,’ and later called divination” (365). Vico is referring to the eighth book of the Odyssey, in which Odysseus has arrived at the court of Alcinous and the Phaeacians. Alcinous will honor him with a banquet before giving him a ship and a crew to speed him on his way. As the banquet is being prepared, “the herald approached leading the good minstrel, whom the Muse loved above all other men, and gave him both good and evil; of his sight she deprived him, but gave him the gift of sweet song” (8.63–65). The Muses’ power to sing of what was, is, and is to come is the origination of divination, an art they get from the divine power of their father, Jove, and their mother, Memory, for it is through the power of memory over the past that we can anticipate the future. This power connects good and evil, just as good and evil are connected within the minstrel’s condition of being blind and blessed with song, both of which are bestowed on him by the Muses. Divination is the first divine wisdom, which was employed to take auspices and anticipate natural events. Later it was extended to a wisdom of the governing of republics, a basis for civil wisdom and laws. “Still later,” Vico says, “the word ‘wisdom’ came to mean knowledge of natural divine things; that is, metaphysics, called for that reason divine science, which, seeking knowledge of man’s mind in God, and recognizing God as the source of all truth, must recognize him as the regulator of all good” (365). Metaphysics, then, is a form of divination performed by the intellect. Above metaphysics is a conception of wisdom as theological, which comes to the Christians from the Hebrews. This is “the science of eternal things revealed by God; a science which, among the Tuscans, considered as knowledge of the true good and true evil, perhaps owed to the fact the first name they gave it, ‘science in divinity’ [scienza in divinità]” (365). In the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians Vico cites the Etruscans (the ancient Tuscans) as expert in sacred rites: “And that the Etruscans were a most erudite people is confirmed by their learning in grandiose sacred rites, for which they were distinguished (for where civil theology has been cultivated, there also natural theology is cultivated, and where more august religious observances are upheld, there opinions more worthy of the supreme Deity are also upheld; and the reason amongst us Christians there are the

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most chaste religious ceremonies of all is that there are the holiest dogmas about God of all).”2 The “science in divinity” is at once a science of divinity and a divine science, a science above all other sciences. Vico makes a connection between the pagan and the Christian, which exists throughout the New Science itself. The pagan anticipates the Christian, but the Christian puts its precursor into its true form. Thus Jove is the incomplete pagan grasp of the divine that is supplanted by the true grasp of the true Deity. Vico’s new science must be able to make this connection or it cannot support its fundamental claim that the gentile nations can be comprehended only genetically, in terms of how they arise in history. Vico offers two schemes in which to organize the fields of knowledge in their original poetic form: as a tree of knowledge and as the nine Muses. The first of these appears in the published text of the New Science, and the second is an addition to it that Vico drafted.3 Vico says that the poetic sciences must be traced to their origin in a poetic metaphysics—that from this poetic metaphysics, “as from a trunk, there branch out from one limb logic, morals, economics, and politics, all poetic; and from another, physics, the mother of cosmography and astronomy, the latter of which gives their certainty to its two daughters, chronology and geography—all likewise poetic” (367). In Genesis the Lord creates among the trees of Eden “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (2:9). In the Timaeus Plato says man is a tree upside down: “We declare that God has given to each of us, as his daemon, that kind of soul which is housed in the top of our body and which raises us—seeing that we are not an earthly but a heavenly plant—up from earth towards our kindred in the heaven. And herein we speak most truly; for it is by suspending our head and root from that region whence the substance of our soul first came that the Divine Power keeps upright our whole body” (90a–b). The arbor inversa is mentioned by Dante in Purgatorio: “And as a fir-tree tapers upward from branch to branch, so downwards did that [e come abete in alto si digrada / di ramo in ramo così quello in giuso]—I think so none may climb it.” The two poets, Dante and Virgil, approach the tree, and it speaks to them.4 The modern conception of the tree of knowledge is set in the second book of Bacon’s Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Moral in 1605 and in the better known De Dignitate (Of the Dignity and Advancement of Learning) in 1623. A key fact of Bacon’s scheme is his grounding of all branches of learning in three basic faculties of human understanding. Bacon says: “The parts of human learning have reference to the three parts of man’s understanding, which is the seat of learning: history to his memory, poesy to his imagination, and philosophy to his reason.”5 Vico’s claim that memory has three

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TREE OF P OETI C W IS D O M      113

aspects—memory, imagination, and ingenuity—is exactly parallel to these divisions made by Bacon. Vico says that because memory has these three aspects, “the theological poets called Memory the mother of the Muses” (819).6 Vico’s poetic sciences are all products of memory in that we must employ memory in its largest sense of recollection to penetrate the mentality of the first age of ideal eternal history and draw forth these original forms of each of the branches of human knowledge. In formulating his tree of the poetic sciences, Vico would have expected the reader to call to mind the tree of knowledge of Genesis because it concerns the knowledge of good and evil. The pagan science of divination that originates with the Muses is also a science of good and evil. Vico’s division of the poetic sciences into a branch that holds the moral sciences, or what in his above-mentioned addition he calls the “active sciences,” and a branch that generates the physical or natural sciences, what he in his addition calls the “speculative sciences,” is parallel to Bacon’s division of philosophy into human philosophy and natural philosophy. The reader should further consider Vico’s tree against that in Descartes’s “author’s letter” in the French edition of his Principles of Philosophy of 1647, which Descartes conceived as a preface to that work. Descartes says: “Thus the whole of philosophy is like a tree. The roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches emerging from the trunk are all the other sciences, which may be reduced to three principal ones, namely medicine, mechanics and morals. By ‘morals’ I understand the highest and most perfect moral system, which presupposes a complete knowledge of the other sciences and is the ultimate level of wisdom.”7 In Vico’s tree the trunk is metaphysics, from which the two branches of the sciences extend. Descartes’s tree has metaphysics as its roots, from which comes physics as the trunk, from which the other sciences extend. Descartes has precluded the human sciences from the method of right reasoning in the sciences; thus only physics grows from metaphysics. Yet as the highest science on the tree Descartes designates morals, which is impossible to derive from physics. Thus in the Discourse Descartes decides to follow, at least provisionally, the morals of the times. Descartes never produces his “moral system.” His moral philosophy is to be found in his letters to Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, in which he settles for giving her advice based on the tenets of Stoicism. As discussed earlier in relation to Vico’s use of the Tablet of Cebes, the whole of the New Science is a prudential system based on the recognition of providence as the principle guiding the course of the gentile nations. Having eliminated the human sciences—the studia humanitatis of the Renaissance—from proper human knowledge, Descartes has no way back to

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them, given his method of right reason. He has especially precluded rhetoric and jurisprudence, Vico’s two great sources for the comprehension of the human world, his science of humanity. In the paragraph Vico wrote as an addition to his tree of the poetic sciences, he says the poetic sciences, generated from the sublimity of metaphysics, “are the primary thread with which the fabric of this book is woven and the first lines with which the design of our history of ideas begins to be conveyed” (1199). After commenting briefly on each of the poetic sciences, he concludes: “So the nine sciences must be the nine Muses, those that the poets sang of as all being the daughters of Jove [508]; and now through all these things is restored to Jove the proper historical significance of the motto A Iove principium Musae [391]; ‘From Jove the Muse began’ ” (1211). Vico’s reference is to Virgil, Eclogues: “With Jove my song begins; of Jove all things are full” (3.60). The remarkable feature of these added paragraphs is Vico’s final statement—that the poetic sciences must be the nine Muses of which the poets sang. Nowhere in the First New Science or the Second does Vico make this identification. In the Second New Science Vico speaks of the Muses in three ways: (1) as associated with Apollo and as being the arts of humanity (79, 508, 534, 537), dwelling on Mount Parnassus; (2) as the daughters of Mnemosyne, or Memory (699, 819); and (3) as the science of divination or first wisdom, the “knowledge of good and evil” of Homer (365, 381, 391). From this third sense of the Muses, Vico concludes that “the first Muse must have been Urania, who contemplated the heavens to take the auguries. Later she came to stand for astronomy” (391; see also 508). He asserts that Urania and the other Muses “sing in the sense in which the Latin verbs canere and cantare mean ‘foretell’ ” (508, 534). Clio is the other Muse that Vico comments on by name in the Second New Science. He says that the greater gentes “must have conceived the second of the Muses, Clio, the narrator of heroic history” (533; see also 555). He says the first history must have been the genealogies of the heroes as in sacred history it is the genealogies of the descendants of the patriarchs. He notes that Apollo, to whom the Muses are dear, begins this gentile history by pursuing Daphne. In the myth, Daphne escapes from Apollo by disappearing into the earth with the aid of Gaia. In her place springs up a laurel tree. Vico regards this as the basis of why the gentiles call genealogies “trees.” In the Universal Law, Vico also puts forth his doctrine of Urania as the first Muse. It is the basis of his account of how astronomy began among the Greeks after Homer (UL, Diss., chap. 13, sec. 35). Vico repeats this view of Urania as the first Muse in the First New Science. He then calls

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TREE OF P OETI C W IS D O M      115

Melpomene the “next Muse” and Clio the third Muse (FNS 290; on Urania, see also 30; on Clio, see 339). He mentions Melpomene only once in the First New Science and does not mention her in his discussions in the Second New Science. These three are the only Muses that Vico mentions by name in the sequence of his systematic works: the Most Ancient Wisdom (in which the Muses are mentioned only collectively), the Universal Law (Muses and ­Urania), the First New Science (Muses, Urania, Melpomene, Clio), and the Second New Science (Muses, Urania, Clio). His interpretations of Urania and Clio are based on the functions assigned to them by the various late authors of antiquity. According to them, Urania is astronomy and Clio is history, and they describe Melpomene as the Muse of tragedy. Vico, in his mention of her in the First New Science, writes, “Melpomene, serba le memorie de’ maggiori con le sepulture [Melpomene preserves the memory of ancestors through their tombs]” (FNS 290). Battistini points out that “Melpomene characteristically is the Muse of tragedy, without direct connection to the memory of the ancestors.”8 There is no Muse who represents the memory of ancestors, so Vico has not mistaken one Muse for another. If we presume Vico’s assertion is deliberate, what might he mean? Certainly his characterization of Melpomene is so brief as to be unnecessarily obscure for the reader. The connection Vico intends between Melpomene and the ancestors is not obvious. In contrast, the connection he intends between the traditional view of Urania and divination and that between Clio and heroic history is plausible. Melpomene (Μελπσμε´νη) is the Songstress, from με´λπω, “to sing,” which is associated with “to sing to the harp or lyre,” as found in the Odyssey, “μετὰ δε´ σφιν ε’με´λπετο θειˆος α’οιδὸς φορμίζων” (Od. 4.17; cf. 13.27). I think Vico is playing on Melpomene not as the Muse of tragedy, as assigned by later authors, but on the name originally assigned her by Hesiod, connecting her to singing and to the accompaniment of the lyre (Th. 77). In a portrayal of the Muses on a Greek sarcophagus in the Louvre, Melpomene is shown playing a lyre.9 In Vico’s doctrine of the founding and governing of society, the lyre has a particular significance. In the “Synopsis of Universal Law” Vico writes that the clients who fled their masters against the law “were mancipated with sinew—that is, tied, rope not being in use; this sinew also was called fides [the binding of the body is like the incorporeal bond or cord of fidelity], which later remained to signify the string of the lyre.”10 He says this was “the first word of dominion.” Vico repeats this point of the connection of binding and the lyre in the Universal Law, noting that the lyre was invented by Mercury and given to Apollo, and that with its sound the Muses sing (UL, bk. 1, chap. 183; bk. 2,

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pt. 2, chap. 22, sec. 3). In the Second New Science Vico writes that the cord was called chorda in Greek and fides in Latin, as in the phrase fides deorum (force of the gods, 523). He says it persists in phrases such as recipere in fidem (to receive in trust or protection). Vico also identifies the lyre with the invention of law. It was the union of the cords or forces of the fathers who created civil power, putting an end to private force and violence: “Hence the law was defined with full propriety by the poets as lyra regnorum, ‘the lyre of kingdoms’ ” (615). As the cord of the lyre binds the classes together and establishes civil power, so it binds the heroes together with the ancestors. Vico writes, “Achilles sings to his lyre the praises of the heroes who have gone before” (908). Achilles with the lyre calls up the memory of those who had gone before, as Orpheus tamed the beasts of Greece to humanity, and Amphion with the lyre made the stones move and raised the walls of Thebes (523; see also 79). Vico writes, “These were the stones that Deucalion and Pyrrha, standing before the temple of Themis (that is, in the fear of divine justice) with veiled heads (the modesty of marriage), found lying before their feet” (523). All of Vico’s three principles of humanity are connected to the cord of the lyre. The cord signifies the force of the gods and divine justice (religion) and also signifies the bonds inherent in the basic institutions of society (marriage and family). The power of the lyre, through song, ties us to the ancestors (burial). If genealogy is born of Clio, Clio is accompanied by Melpomene as the Songstress, through which we are tied to those who have gone before. Vico’s mention of Melpomene as the third Muse in the First New Science is enthymematic. His claim that Melpomene (as Songstress) preserves the memory of the ancestors implies that the lyre is the middle term joining the major premise “The lyre preserves the memory of the ancestors,” and the minor premise that “Melpomene (as Songstress) preserves the lyre,” making a syllogism of AAA first figure. This formulation does not include the idea of the memory of the ancestors as occurring through tombs. A possible tie between the lyre and the ancestors are Vico’s comments in the second book of the Universal Law, where he remarks on the significance of the cippus (small pillar) used by the Romans in their houses to support the busts of their ancestors—which also became a gravestone. Vico claims that these sepulchral pillars were the physical basis of the custom of creating genealogical lines (UL bk. 2, pt. 2, chap. 20, sec. 61). What does Vico intend in the identification of the nine Muses with the nine sciences of his poetic tree of knowledge (1211)? There does not seem to be a one-to-one correspondence between the characteristics or functions of Vico’s nine sciences and the identities assigned to the Muses by the authors of

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TREE OF P OETI C W IS D O M      117

late antiquity beyond Vico’s interpretations of Urania (astronomy) and Clio (history). In the standard list the others are Melpomene (as discussed), Thalia (comedy), Calliope (epic poetry), Polyhymnia (hymns to the gods, and later pantomime), Terpsichore (dance accompanied by song), Erato (lyre playing and lyric poetry accompanied by it), and Euterpe (flute playing and lyric poetry accompanied by it). Vico’s aim is to claim how each of his sciences originate from the science of divination, the object of which is the knowledge of Jove’s actions. Jove is the father of these sciences and the father of the Muses, having conceived each on nine nights in union with their mother, Memory. The ancient poet is both a singer of songs and a teller of the future through his ability to recall the past, which is the basis of what is to come in the future. The ancestors look down on the world and see all of time. As with Melpomene in her original role as Songstress, the mediator of the past is the poet and what the poet can make. The science of divination is thus part of the poet’s art of memory. In Vico’s world of the third age we are divorced from the original power of the poet to sing and foretell. We have no direct access to the Muses. This is true of Vico’s new scientist as well as of everyone else in the third age. The new scientist does have access to the original poetic sciences, but only barely. The new scientist cannot truly think on the level of the poetic sciences themselves, but can think about them. Thought about them allows us to realize how the poetic or mythic is at the basis of human knowledge and how each of these sciences is a way in which the human is based in the divine. Poetry is the original form of this wisdom (la sapienza poetica). Each of these nine sciences is connected in their original being with Jove. We know this because each of them is a transformation of the original science, which is scienza in divinità. The explanation of this for each of the nine sciences is Vico’s aim in these added paragraphs, a point he has not made so systematically in the second book of the Second New Science proper. Hence he made it an addition as he began revision of the work. Although there is no correspondence of individual Muses to particular sciences, Vico’s addition allows us to know why there are nine sciences in number on his poetic tree of sciences with metaphysics as its trunk. The significance of nine is not evident from the New Science as published. As the Muses provided guidance to the theological poets and are invoked by all later ancient poets, the poetic sciences provide the necessary guidance to the new scientist in his grasp of history. From a knowledge of them the whole world of nations can be resurrected in Vico’s theater of memory. In this resurrection, Vico’s strange claim about Melpomene is a key.

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Like Melpomene’s art of the song, Vico’s new science must open the tombs of the ancestors, and from them encompass the total arc of time. Of the three principles of humanity, religion, marriage, and burial, it is on burial that Vico comments the least. The principle of burial is the principle of history. What is on the tombs, what is known of the ancestors, is the key to the past, to historical knowledge. The ancestors are not only keys to the historical details of the past; being beyond time, they also symbolize the transcendence of the temporal itself. Looking down on the world from their position beyond it, they see all of time at once. The new scientist grasps history through an act of palingenesis or resurrection, of bringing back to life what once was, the revivifying of the origin. Burial is a form of memory, the attempt not to forget but in some way to preserve the sense of the ancestors and what they were. To preserve the memory of the ancestors is humanizing in the sense that Vico claims humanity takes its name from humare, to bury. The new science is a science of humanity.

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Ch ap ter 1 1

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Poetic Metaphysics

Poetic metaphysics is the trunk of Vico’s tree of poetic sciences, which, as discussed above, correspond in their number to the nine Muses. By implication, poetic metaphysics, being the source of these sciences, corresponds to the mother of the Muses—Mnemosyne or Memory. The full source is Mnemosyne and Jove, since it is through their union on nine nights that the Muses are born as their daughters. The subject matter of poetic metaphysics is Jove, but, as will be brought forth, Memory plays the key role in the giants’ ability to form the thunderous sky as Jove. Vico ends his introduction concerning wisdom and the tree of poetic sciences with a description of the universal flood and the origin of the giants. Gentile humanity is descended from the offspring of the sons of Noah—Ham, Japheth, and Shem, although some of the offspring of Shem became the nation of the Hebrews. The offspring who giantize renounce the religion of Noah, dissolve the institutions of marriage and family, and wander the great forest of the earth. Vico says: “The race of Ham wandered through southern Asia, Egypt, and the rest of Africa; that of Japheth through northern Asia or Scythia, and thence through Europe; and that of Shem through all middle Asia toward the East” (369). The role of the Hebrews as a nation apart from the gentile nations has been discussed earlier in regard to the Chronological Table. Here Vico’s focus is on the nature of the giants. Among the giants, children were ­abandoned 119

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and grew up in the manner of the wild beasts that roamed the forest with them. Vico says: “Mothers, like beasts, must merely have nursed their babies, let them wallow naked in their own filth, and abandoned them for good as soon as they were weaned. And these children, who had to wallow in their own filth, whose nitrous salts richly fertilized the fields, and who had to exert themselves to penetrate the great forest, grown extremely dense from the flood, would flex and contract their muscles in these exertions, and thus absorb nitrous salts into their bodies in greater abundance” (369). Vico’s view echoes that of Cicero’s in De inventione: “For there was a time when men wandered at large in the fields like animals and lived on wild fare; they did nothing by the guidance of reason, but relied chiefly upon physical strength; there was as yet no ordered system of religious worship nor of social duties; no one had seen legitimate marriage nor had anyone looked upon children whom he knew to be his own” (1.2). For Cicero as for Vico, this was a world without reason, speech, or society. These protohumans, or bestioni, Vico says, would have been without fear of the gods, and their upbringing would have been even more savage than that ascribed to the ancient Germans by Caesar and Tacitus. Tacitus says in Germania that no one would willingly migrate to Germany: “Who, to say nothing about the perils of an awful and unknown sea, would have left Asia or Africa or Italy to look for Germany? With its wild scenery and harsh climate it is pleasant neither to live in nor look upon unless it be one’s home” (2). Of the children, he says: “There then they are, the children, in every house, growing up amid nakedness and squalor into that girth of limb and frame which is to our people a marvel” (20). Vico concludes his remarks on the giants by reaffirming what was stated in the axioms (172)—that “the entire first world of men must be divided into two kinds: the first, men of normal size, which includes the Hebrews only; the second, giants, who were the founders of the gentile nations” (372). He then states that “the giants there were in turn two kinds: the first the sons of Earth, or nobles, from whom, as being giants in the full sense of the term, the age of giants took its name as we have said (and it is these whom sacred history defines as ‘strong, famous and powerful men of the age’); the second, less properly so called, those other giants who were subjugated” (372). The subjugated giants are those who become famuli when they seek the protection of the fathers of the first families, who are giants of the first kind. The nobility of the giants of the first kind is analogous to the “warriors of renown” who are distinguished from the Nephilim, the race of giants who exist at the same time as these warriors, prior to the universal flood. Genesis states: “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also

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afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown” (6:4; see also Nm 13:33; Dt 2:10–11). These warriors as products of divine-human intercourse are distinguished from the Nephilim. The “sons of Earth” of Vico’s account exist after the universal flood and have a human origin. Their nobility comes from their ability to recognize the divine in the form of Jove as the thunderous sky. Vico derives the term “sons of Earth” from pagan history, which he puts forth in axiom 42 (193). He says: “Such giants were scattered over the earth after the flood. We have seen them in the fabulous history of the Greeks, and the Latin philologians, without being aware of it, have told us of their existence in the ancient history of Italy, where they say that the most ancient peoples of Italy, the so-called aborigines, claimed to be autochthones, which is as much as to say sons of Earth, which among the Greeks and Latins meant nobles.” Vico then adds: “And in the fables the Greeks quite properly called the sons of earth giants, and the Earth mother of giants” (370). This sentence refers to Hesiod’s account of the birth of the Titans from their mother, Earth (Th. 154–210). Vico’s merging of the pagan and biblical conceptions of the sons of the Earth is an example of how easily he moves between these two worlds, in the tradition of Augustine, Dante, and the Italian Christian humanists, such as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Those giants who are the sons of the Earth are the first theological poets because they think only with their senses and imagination (fantasia), and the object of their thought is first and foremost their experience of the divine. Their wisdom is poetic. Vico says: “Hence poetic wisdom, the first wisdom of the gentile world, must have begun with a metaphysics not rational and abstract like that of learned men now, but felt and imagined [sentita ed immaginata] as that of these first men must have been, who, without power of ratiocination, were all robust sense and vigorous imagination [fantasia]. This metaphysics was their poetry, a faculty born with them (for they were furnished by nature with these senses and imaginations [fantasie])” (375). Because these first men were ignorant of the causes of everything, everything was a matter of wonder (maraviglia, ammirare) for them. The first men, like children, responded to inanimate things as animate, as though these things were living beings. Thus they created their world according to their own ideas: “But this creation was infinitely different from that of God. For God, in his purest intelligence, knows things, and by knowing them, creates them; but they, in their robust ignorance, did it by virtue of a wholly corporeal imagination [corpolentissima fantasia]” (376). God creates by knowing and knows by creating. The being of God is pure mind; his intelligence is

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incorporeal. The first men create their world through fantasia. This fantasia is derived from sensation because nothing is in fantasia that is not first in the senses. Thus fantasia is a bodily form of thought. God, as Jove appearing to the first men or noble giants, being identified with the sky, is imagined as a great body. The divine is not originally apprehended as pure mind or pure intelligence. Vico says because these first men were creators of their world through their primordial powers of fantasia, “they were called ‘poets’, which is Greek for ‘creators’ [criatori]” (376). Vico’s reference is to the fact that poiein in Greek means both “to make” and “to compose poetry.” The poet, in a general sense, is a maker. Vico says great poetry accomplishes three things: “to invent sublime fables suited to the popular understanding, to perturb to excess, with a view to the end proposed: to teach the vulgar to act virtuously, as the poets have taught themselves; as will be presently shown” (376). This threefold sense of poetry is a modification of Horace’s view in Ars poetica that the purpose of poetry is to delight, move, and instruct (Ars P. 333). In regard to the third, to instruct in virtue, Vico’s claim is counter to that of Plato in the Republic. In the Platonic view, poets have no ability to instruct in virtue because both good and bad acts are the subjects of poetry. The poet is unable to instruct in virtue unless what the poet makes is placed in the service of reason, the province of the philosopher. Vico, as we have seen and will further see, in relation to his interpretation of Homer, claims poetic wisdom to be propaedeutic to philosophical wisdom, and in this manner he confronts the “ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.” Vico’s claim here is not that these first poets are philosophers and thus can teach virtue to themselves and to the vulgar, but that they are theological. These first poets are guided not by philosophers but by divine providence, which they first apprehend as Jove. Hence their poetry can instruct in virtue, since all virtue is an instantiation of the divine. Vico thought that the few giants who were to become the first families, after the world dried out from the universal flood, became aware of the sky, which they pictured to themselves as a great animated body. These giants “expressed their very violent passions by shouting [urlando] and grumbling [brontolando]” (377). Vico’s verbs are precise: urlare is a howl or shout of a human (it is both human and animal); brontolare is “to grumble” or “to rumble of thunder” (their sound is naturally imitative of the thunder of Jove). The thunder these giants experience is tuoni spaventosissimi, thunder that is extremely frightening, that invokes terror (spavento), not ordinary fear (timore). In associating the experience of the divine with such fear, Vico’s view anticipates the conception of the holy advanced in Rudolf Otto’s

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famous book, The Idea of the Holy, which begins the modern study of the history of religion. The experience of thunder as the presence of Jove causes these giants to begin “to exercise [celebrare] that natural curiosity [la naturale curiosità] which is the daughter of ignorance and the mother of science [scienza], and which, opening the mind of man, gives birth to wonder [la maraviglia] as is defined among the Elements” (377). In axiom 39 Vico defines curiosity as an “inborn property of man [proprietà connaturale dell’uomo]” (189). This primordial fear that is initially experienced turns into curiosity and wonder. Aristotle, in his famous passage in the first book of the Metaphysics, states that both philosophy and myth begin in wonder: “It is through wonder [thauma] that men now begin and originally began to philosophize; wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities. . . . Now he who wonders and is perplexed thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of wisdom, for myth is composed of wonders)” (Metaph. 982b). Thus wonder is required for the beginning of poetic wisdom or myth and then later required for the beginning of philosophy. Jove is a break in being for the experience of the first men or theological poets, which invokes wonder. Wonder in philosophy originates from a perplexity in reasoning, an aporia (see Aristotle, Top. 145b). For Vico the original communication among the noble giants is mute, that is, through gestures and simple sounds or utterances. Cassirer’s conception of language as a symbolic form offers a perspective from which to understand Vico’s assertions regarding the giants’ first apprehension of Jove. The giants apprehend Jove at the level of pure expression. Their cries and gestures express directly their passions. Cassirer claims that below any sense of articulate language is the gesture. Gestures divide into two fundamental types, neither of which is derived from the other, but they exist side by side in human expression. Cassirer says: “On one side stands the indicative [die hinweisenden] and on the other is the imitative [die nachahmenden] gesture.”1 The indicative gesture or utterance is an act of pointing to the object. Underlying this form of gesture is the act of simple grasping, but the transformation of this act into that of pointing is the first appearance of human language: “For no animal progresses to the characteristic transformation of the grasping movement into the indicative gesture.”2 The indicative gesture is “clutching at a distance” and is distinctively human. The imitative gesture is in itself human, but as simple imitation the human is tied to the impression it attempts to duplicate: “In imitation the I remains a prisoner of outward impression and its properties; the more accurately it repeats this impression, excluding all spontaneity of its own, the more fully

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the aim of imitation has been realized.”3 The act of pointing is repetitive, the same act or gesture being used over and over. The act of imitating alters in accord with what is imitated. The object is not grasped at a distance but taken up into the medium of the body or the voice. The giants are all body and communicate with their bodies. When they feel the presence of Jove as the sky they indicate Jove’s existence by shouting (urlando) in an effort to express their passions. When they further begin grumbling (brontolando), they imitate Jove’s actions of thunder; they feel Jove’s presence in their own bodies. These two separate gestures are the means to allay their great initial fright (spavento) at this new phenomenon of the thundering sky. The appearance of Jove causes them to act or feel in unison, and in so doing they form the first thought, or, more properly, image, that allows them to separate sky from earth, the primal separation that is necessary for living in a world. From this separation other separations in the great trackless forest can be made, resulting in the clearings that become the dwelling places of the first families and in the apprehension of all the types of flora and fauna as gods, to be worshipped under Jove in the first religions of the founders of the first families. The indicative sign is the basis of wonder, which is predicated on distance from its object. The imitative sign is the basis of curiosity, which draws the maker to the object and ultimately to a grasp of its inward nature. The giants exist in a flow of immediate sensations—a world, Vico reminds us, “that we can now scarcely understand and cannot at all imagine how the first men thought who founded humanity. For their minds were so limited to particulars that they regarded every change of facial expression as a new face, as we observed in the fable of Proteus, and for every new passion, they imagined a new heart, a new breast, a new spirit” (700). Thus for the first men every instance of thunder was a new object, not the appearance of a single, constant force manifest in a series of instances of it. Vico says: “The minds of the first men of the gentile world took things one at a time, being in this respect little better than the minds of beasts, for which each new sensation cancels the last one” (703). In semiotical terms, once these first men or noble giants apprehend thunder as Jove, they find again, in one instance of thunder, all other instances of it. In so doing they make the first name—and thought, mind, and language are born together. Once one thing is named, all can be named, because the power of the name is extended throughout all experience. Vico says: “Thus, in accordance with what has been said about the principles of the poetic characters, Jove was born naturally in poetry as a divine character or imaginative universal [universale fantastico], to which everything

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having to do with the auspices was referred by all the ancient gentile nations, which must therefore all have been poetic by nature” (381). In the various gentile nations, “every gentile nation had its Jove” (380), although he is known by various names. Each gentile nation makes the first name by finding again in the immediate sensation other sensations of the same kind, thus mediating the original immediacy. This mediation occurs first in relation to the divine, not to any ordinary experience, and from this the art of divination began. Thus we can say, from Jove the Muse began, which is the meaning of Jove being the father of the Muses. Their mother is Memory, which in Vico’s semiotics means that the finding again of multiple instances of thunder through one instance depends on memory to act collectively—to remake these instances in terms of a single instance. Thus memory comes into existence with the appearance of Jove. Prior to this the giants, living in a constant flow of sensations, have no memory. With the Muses, who sing of what was, is, and is to come, memory comes into existence for the gentile nations. Since memory is the same as fantasia, in forming the imaginative universal, fantasia is the power of memory to be collective of the moments of the immediacy of sensation. This formation of the imaginative universal of Jove is the result of fear. Prior to the giants’ apprehension of Jove they are fearless, being all violent passions guided by nothing beyond themselves, in a Hobbesian state of war of all against all. Their fear would be of other men or of beasts they encounter. But Vico says: “It was fear [timore] which created gods in the world; not fear awakened in men by other men, but fear awakened in men by themselves” (382). Vico takes the Lucretian view that gods arise out of men’s fear and superstition and turns it from a negative judgment to a positive. Lucretius states: “For assuredly a dread holds all mortals thus in bond, because they behold many things happening in heaven and earth whose causes they can by no means see, and they think them to be done by divine power” (1.151–54). Vico moves back and forth in referring to fear as spavento and as timore. In this context, timore is human fear that becomes spavento when the giants face the presence of Jove. Paura, the other Italian word for fear, is more ordinary fear of ordinary dangers. Vico uses paura only once in the New Science, and only in passing (1006). Vico concludes: “That such was the origin of poetry is finally confirmed by this eternal property of it: that its proper material is the credible impossibility [l’impossible credibile]. It is impossible that bodies should be minds, yet it was believed that the thundering sky was Jove” (383). Vico’s claim that poetry has the eternal property of making the “credible impossibility”

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reflects Horace’s view of poetic license in Ars poetica (1–14). As discussed in chapter 7, it is an impossibility that all courageous warriors are literally Achilles, or all prudent warriors are literally Ulysses, or that all true chiefs of war are the Godfrey that Tasso imagines, but when formed as an imaginative universal these become credible impossibilities. These are heroic imaginative universals or poetic characters, which are forms of the human. But before the appearance of such poetic characters, which form human virtues as imaginative universals, there are poetic characters that form physical and biological processes and events into gods as imaginative universals. Vico ends the section on poetic metaphysics with a list of seven corollaries or principal aspects of the new science. (1) The new science is a “rational civil theology” that begins with the vulgar wisdom of the lawgivers and which later is demonstrated in the natural theology of the philosophers. (2) The new science is a “philosophy of authority” that begins with divine authority, moves to the authority derived from human nature based on the exercise of free will and intellect, to the authority of natural law, which is a reflection of the rights claimed by the ancient noble houses, from which came the first kingdoms and cities. (3) The new science is “a history of human ideas” derived from the practice of divination and later from the practical sciences and speculative sciences. (4) The new science is “a philosophical criticism” that is a development of the history of ideas that will allow us correctly to assess the truth of the details of the development of the gentile nations advanced by philological criticism. (5) The new science is “an ideal eternal history” of all the gentile nations as presented in books 4 and 5. (6) The new science is “a system of the natural law of the gentes,” which corrects the errors of Grotius, Selden, and Pufendorf (as discussed in chapter 7). (7) The new science is a science of “the principles of universal history” that begins with the first age of the world after the universal flood and thus for the first time supplies the beginning that profane universal history has lacked; to accomplish this history it supplies a way to read the fables of the poets of the gentile nations as the first histories. The key to this history is that there is an original poetic wisdom from which all arises. In his addition to the New Science stating a reprehension of the metaphysics of Descartes, Spinoza, and Locke, Vico provides an ultimate justification for the need for poetic metaphysics. He says: “For the metaphysics of the philosophers must agree with the metaphysic of the poets, on this most important point, that from the idea of a divinity have come all the sciences that have enriched the world with all the arts of humanity: just as this vulgar [poetic] metaphysic taught men lost in the bestial state to form the first human thought from that of Jove, so the learned must not admit any truth

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P OETI C M ETA P H YSI C S       127

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in metaphysics that does not begin from true Being [l’Ente], which is God” (1212, my trans.). The metaphysics of the philosophers has its true beginning in what is handed down to it by the poets. Our knowledge of Being begins, not in reason, but in the thought of the senses, and reason must begin when the first thoughts begin. No metaphysics can begin simply from reason, unaided by the senses, that is, cannot simply be grounded in certainty generated by hypothetical doubt, having no account of the origin of reason itself. Neither can metaphysics remain with the impressions of the senses, making reality all body, unable to pass from it to the human mind, which is generated from the divine mens.

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Cha p te r 1 2

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Poetic  Logic

Poetic logic is the first science of the first branch of the Tree of Poetic Sciences. It is also the first of the nine sciences that correspond to the nine Muses. Yet it occupies a special status because poetic logic is presupposed by all the other sciences in a manner analogous to traditional logic, which Aristotle regards as not a particular science in itself but as that which treats of the forms of reasoning required of all the sciences. Thus poetic logic is propaedeutic to the active sciences of poetic morals, economy, and politics, as well as the speculative poetic sciences of nature. It also has a special relationship to metaphysics. While the establishment of Jove and divine providence by metaphysics is the necessary presupposition of the other sciences, poetic logic is the direct counterpart of poetic metaphysics. Their relationship is analogous to that which exists between traditional logic and traditional rational metaphysics. Vico says: “That which is metaphysics insofar as it contemplates things in all the forms of their being, is logic insofar as it considers things in all the forms by which they may be signified” (400). We now are to regard that same poetry of divine substances not metaphysically but logically, in terms of the way the first men signified them. Poetic logic is presupposed by logic in the same sense that the imaginative universal is presupposed by the intelligible universal. The logic of poetic characters is the necessary precursor of the logic of classes. Class concepts are first made by fantasia as images of particularized universals that later become 128

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orders of particulars grouped under abstract classes or universals subject to the ­intellectual operations of conversion, obversion, and the syllogism. Vico derives logic itself from the form of the poetic. He says: “ ‘Logic’ [Logica] comes from logos, whose first and proper meaning was fabula, fable, carried over into Italian as favella, speech. In Greek the fable was also called mythos, myth, whence comes the Latin mutus, mute” (401). “Logic” can be associated with logos, but they do not share the same etymology. An early reference to the word logike¯ can be found in Cicero’s Academica (1.30), but there it is associated with dialectical reasoning, not logic as such. Although Aristotle is the first to formulate logic as a field in the six small treatises of the Organon, he understands the study of reasoning as “analytics.” Alexander of Aphrodisias, the commentator on Aristotle, is the first writer to use logike¯ in the sense of logic. Logos is word, reason, speech, account. In the Platonic Dialogues, however, when someone is using reason to make a speech such that we would term it an argument, it is an instance of logos. Vico claims that the “first and proper meaning” of logos was fabula, “talk, a tale, story, fable,” and that in Italian it is favella, which in fact means “speech.” The ancient tellers of tales were the logopoioi (Herodotus 2.134.143). Fabula in Italian is favola, but favella is akin to fabula through the verb favellare (fabellare, from fabella, diminutive of fabula). The passage from logos to fabula is more problematic than that from fabula to favella. Logos is the counterpart of mythos, “tale, speech, myth.” They are both speech but of two different kinds, to some extent analogous to the difference between Latin ratio and narratio. Vico says that in Greek, fable was called mythos, from which, he says, comes Latin mutus, or “mute.” Mutus is “mute,” but is it mythos? Vico wishes to make this identification because of his doctrine that the first language was one of mute signs. Mute, from mutus, is akin to Greek mykos. According to the lexicographer, Hesychius of Alexandria, mykos has the meaning of aphonos—“voiceless, dumb.”1 Herodotus uses aphonos to describe the son of Croesus, who could not speak but, on seeing a Persian about to kill his father, cried out not to kill Croesus. “This was the first word he uttered; and after that for all the days of his life he had the power of speech” (1.85). Behind Vico’s claim may lie an association of mý thos with mykós, perhaps based partly on their sounds. If we consider these Greek words as associated, we can appreciate Vico’s claim, even though it is not a strict etymology and is unusual. Vico’s claims are not arbitrary or unfounded conjectures. Here and throughout the New Science, in regard to etymologies of various terms, Vico may be most correctly interpreted as modeling his linguistic assertions on Plato’s Cratylus, his favorite dialogue, and the inspiration for his On the Most Ancient Wisdom

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of the Italians Drawn from the Origins of the Latin Language. In regard to his ­etymologies we can consider Vico as the last of the ancient grammarians. Vico says: “Thus the first language in the first mute times of the nations must have begun with signs, whether gestures or physical objects, which had natural relations to the ideas. For this reason logos, or [verbum] word, meant also deed [fatto] to the Hebrews and thing [cosa] to the Greeks” (401). Battistini notes that Vico’s assertion is likely a reflection of a sentence in Gerard Jan Voss’s Etymologicon (1695), an author to whom Vico refers in other places (428, 641, 858): “Hebraeis, davar, non tantum verbum, sive sermonem, quae propria eius notio est, est etiam rem, seu factum notat.”2 The gist of Voss’s equation is that the Hebrew davar means not “word” but “discourse” (sermo)—not something that denotes a thing (res) but rather refers to something done or made (factum). In the Gospel of John logos is used in this sense of the made: “In the beginning was the Word [logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (1:1). The word or logos of God is not simply speech; it is God’s preeminent agent in the world (see Gn 1:3: “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light”). In God, speaking, knowing, and making are one, a single equation. Once the first men possess the power of the name or word (as described in relation to poetic metaphysics in chapter 11, above), they can bring the world into existence as an object for them, not simply as something that exists in itself. Logos is joined with mythos as the form of this original speech of making and, because it is first, mythos is vera narratio or “true speech,” meaning it is natural speech. Vico says it is “the natural speech which first Plato and then Iamblichus said had been spoken in the world at one time” (401). Plato writes, in the Cratylus: “It will, I imagine, seem ridiculous that things are made manifest through imitation in letters and syllables; nevertheless it cannot be otherwise. For there is no better theory upon which we can base the truth of the earliest names, unless you think we had better follow the example of the tragic poets, who, when they are in a dilemma, have recourse to the introduction of gods on machines. So we may get out of trouble by saying that the gods gave the earliest names, and therefore they are right” (425d). Vico says, however, that Plato’s attempt to recover this original, natural, true speech in the Cratylus was in vain. It was in vain because Plato sought to discover an original rational speech and he was unable to find such true speech. Plato states: “Then since the names are in conflict, and some of them claim that they are like the truth, and others that they are, how can we decide, and upon what shall we base our decision? Certainly not upon other names differing from these, for there are none. No, it is plain that we must look for something else, not names, which shall show us which of these two kinds

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P OETI C LOGI C      131

are the true names, which of them, that is to say, show the truth of things” (438d). The error Plato makes here in regard to the original speech is like the error he makes in regard to claiming Homer has an esoteric wisdom in the ancient quarrel with the poets, thus rendering his account unable to grasp the necessary role Homer and poetry play in giving birth to philosophy—to comprehend poetic wisdom as a precursor to philosophic wisdom. This original speech, the speech of mythos, is not an Adamic speech naming the true nature of things. Vico says: “For that first language, spoken by the theological poets, was not a language in accord with the nature of the things it dealt with (as must have been the sacred language invented by Adam to whom God granted divine onomathesia, the giving of names to things according to the nature of each), but was a fantastic speech [un parlare fantastico] making use of physical substances endowed with life and most of them imagined to be divine” (401). In maintaining this distinction between Adamic language and the language of the theological poets, Vico retains and reinforces the distinction between the sacred history of the Hebrews and the history of the gentile nations on which the whole of the new science rests. The theological poets imagine physical substances to be divine and animate. Vico says: “This is the way in which the theological poets apprehended Jove, Cybele or Berecynthia, and Neptune, for example, and, at first mutely pointing, explained them as substances of the sky, the earth, and the sea, which they imagined to be animate divinities and were therefore true to their senses in believing them to be gods. By means of these three divinities, in accordance with what we have said above concerning poetic characters, they explained everything appertaining to the sky, the earth, and the sea” (402). Once the sky, earth, and sea are named as gods, all types of natural phenomena can be named and the first men begin to live in a world.3 In order to live in this world in which men are surrounded by deities present in animate substances, divination becomes a necessary art. This art is coupled with mythologies. Myth is the thought-form of ritual and thus directs the acts through which divination, the taking of the auspices, takes place. Vico says: “Thus the mythologies, as their name indicates, must have been the proper languages of the fables, the fables being imaginative class concepts [generi fantastici] as we have shown, the mythologies must have been the allegories corresponding to them” (403). For Vico the fable is a statement of what something is: Jupiter Tonans, Jove is thunder. The god is a class concept univocally predicated of all the instances of thunder, making them appearances of the sky-body of Jove. The fable of Jove as thunder is expanded into the myth of Jove, the telling of all the acts of Jove. These acts

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are literally—that is, univocally—Jove. They are not events that are analogous or similar to each other, such that they are grouped together as Jove-like. These are not diverse species of acts collected under the genus of Jove (a diversiloquium). The imaginative universal is a particularized universal and is the medium of poetic language. When poetic language turns into vulgar language the identity of Jove with his acts dissolves such that the acts become acts of Jove. They are likenesses of Jove, but Jove is something separate from his acts. Vico says: “We also have the definition of the word ‘etymology’ itself as meaning veriloquium, just as fable was defined as vera narratio” (403). Etymology, then, is true speech, what the word means in and of itself, which corresponds to its original meaning. This is to be distinguished from its transferred meanings, in which some aspect of its original meaning is projected into another context. When such meanings are extended far enough, they turn into other words as synonyms, which are like the original and are analogous to it. These words can be grouped back together as dissimilars, having a similarity as a type of word or meaning, making the original word or stem this type. Vico follows his statement of the concept of poetic logic with a series of corollaries expounding various aspects of it in relation to poetic tropes, speech, languages and letters, style and song, law, and the art of topics. He distinguishes four tropes. He says “that all the tropes (and they are all reducible to the four types), which have hitherto been considered ingenious inventions of writers, were necessary modes of expression of all the first poetic nations, and had originally their full native propriety” (409). The first trope is metaphor, which Vico says is the most illuminous and “the most necessary and frequent” (404). Metaphor is the key trope for the making of poetry; without it poetry is not possible. Every poet knows that a poem begins with the epiphanic appearance, before the mind, of a metaphor, a gift and device of the Muses on which the poet naturally calls. For, as Aristotle says: “The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others, and it is a sign of genius” (Poet. 1459a). The theological poets of the gentile nations are masters of metaphor. Vico says: “The first poets attributed to bodies the being of animate substances, with capacities measured by their own, namely sense and passion, and in this way made fables of them” (404). He concludes: “Thus every metaphor so formed is a fable in brief [talchè ogni metafora sì fatta vien ad essere una picciola favoletta]” (404). Favoletta is the diminutive of favola (fable) to which Vico adds picciola (little, brief) for even more emphasis. Metaphor here has the sense of what can be called a radical or “root metaphor.”

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P OETI C LOGI C      133

In discussing the power of metaphor, Cassirer, in Language and Myth, says: “The simplest mythical form can arise only by virtue of a transformation which removes a certain impression from the realm of the ordinary, the everyday and profane, and lifts it to the level of the ‘holy,’ the sphere of mythico-religious ‘significance.’ ” The “simplest mythical form” in Vico’s terms is the fable, the form of which is the “poetic character.” Cassirer says further: “This involves not merely a transference, but a real μετα´βασις εἰς ἄλλο γε´νος; in fact, it is not only a transition to another category, but actually the creation of the category itself.”4 Metaphor in this sense is not the epistemic process of likening one thing to another, the finding of a similarity in dissimilars, the using of the name of one thing for another—it is the metaphorical act of bringing something into existence that was not there for the mind before. The metaphorical act, then, is also a metaphysical act. Metaphor in this primordial sense is governed by identity, being, not similarity. “Jupiter Tonans” is an utterance of metaphorical identity. The mind does not have before it the idea of Jove and the phenomenon of thunder and then see a similarity between them. For these first men, as we have seen, Jove and thunder come into being as one entity; before they appeared as one there was, for the first men, neither Jove nor thunder. As Vico explains: “Imaginative metaphysics” (metafisica fantasticata), unlike rational metaphysics, “shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them [homo non intelligendo fit omnia]” (405). Man makes the things out of himself, because they do not exist for him as something ontologically prior, from the idea of which he makes a knowledge of them. The second trope is metonymy, which is the using of the name of one thing for another with which it is associated. In the poetic minds of the first men, metonymy is based on the inability of their minds to abstract forms and qualities from things. Vico says: “Certainly metonymy of cause for effect produced in each case many little fables [picciole favole], in which the causes were imagined to be women clothed with their effects as ugly Poverty, sad Old Age, pale Death” (406). The third trope is synecdoche, the using of a part to designate a whole. In this trope the poetic thought of the first men elevated particulars into universals. For these theological poets, synecdoche is not a matter of artful thought—it is the result of an inability to form universals. Thus, Vico says, they speak of so many heads when referring to people or so many sails in reference to the number of ships or instead of forming the conception of so many years they speak of so many harvests (407). The power of metaphor, joined to or realized as synecdoche, produces poetic characters.

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The fourth trope is irony, a mode of speech whose intended implication is the opposite of the literal sense of the words. Irony is the philosophic trope, which, Vico says, “certainly could not have begun until the period of reflection, because it is falsehood by dint of a reflection which wears the mask of truth” (408). In his Institutes Vico describes irony as “the trope with which we say the contrary of what we think [that is, what is opposite to our true sentiments].”5 Vico may wish specifically to include, under irony, Socratic irony, in the sense of a pretended ignorance in order to bring out the contrary of a particular position and so test its truth and internal consistency. Vico emphasizes that irony is not possible in regard to the poetic wisdom of the theological poets because “the first fables could not feign anything false” (408). Falsehood is not possible for these fables because they are like perceptions; they are direct formations of what the first men sense, and what is sensed is by its nature true. Truth and falsehood can be introduced only through judgment, when what is sensed is thought, that is, reflected upon. Modern poetry—the poetry of the third age of ideal eternal history of any nation—can involve irony and is not as such true narration because such poetry is the product of a mind capable of ars critica. The poetry of the first men is mythology. Myth is ontological; a direct presentation in language of what is, to ontos on, the really real formed in the image. Vico accounts for monsters as part of poetic wisdom by saying that sensations can be mixed together. At the level of sensation any sensation can be combined with any other. Thus ideas at the level of sensation can pass into one another. The first precept Horace gives in Ars poetica is that, although poetic license allows for the creation of fantastic images by mixing sensations, it does not condone the creation of monsters: “This licence we poets claim and in our turn we grant the like; but not so far that savage should mate with tame, or serpents couple with birds, lambs with tigers” (11–13). He says: “The distinguishing of ideas produced metamorphoses” (411). Metamorphoses allow for the ordering of forms, one becoming the ground of another, its developed consequent. All the forms of the world—human, natural, and divine—can be apprehended as one form changing into another. In Metamorphoses Ovid says: “My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms. Ye gods, for you yourselves have wrought the changes, breathe on these my undertakings, and bring down my song in unbroken strains from the world’s very beginning even unto the present time” (1.1–4). Poetic speech does not end when nations develop past their origins. Vico says: “The poetic speech which our poetic logic has helped us to understand continued for a long time into the historical period, much as great and rapid rivers continue far into the sea,

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P OETI C LOGI C      135

keeping sweet the waters borne on by the force of their flow” (412). The modern repository of this poetic speech is children, whose minds are naturally poetic. In the childhood of the individual, the poetic grasp of the world in the childhood of the human race is recapitulated. Poetic speech survives not only in the mentality of children; it also is the medium of vulgar wisdom. Vico says that Aesop was a poetic character of the socii of the heroes. Aesop’s fables represent a way slaves and plebeians were able to communicate (425). These are not the fables of the original metaphors of the first men through which the gods were brought into the gentile nations. The fables of Aesop contain specific moral meanings but they are not instances of moral philosophy. It is a mistake to attribute to Aesop an esoteric wisdom in the same sense that it is a mistake to attribute such to Homer. Moral philosophy does not appear until the Seven Sages of Greece began to import precepts of morality in the form of maxims, the most famous being Solon’s “Know thyself ” (424). Maxims were stated in prose and later became subjects of philosophical inquiry. Vico says: “Socrates, father of all the sects of philosophers, introduced by induction the dialectic which Aristotle later perfected with the syllogism, which cannot proceed without a universal” (424). The fables of Aesop were originally in heroic verse, later in iambic, and finally were written down in prose form (426). The language of the vulgar goes no further than maxims. Only the esoteric wisdom of the philosophers takes the logical forms of dialectical and deductive use of language. Like Aesop, Vico is a master of the use of fables. Vico’s third corollary concerning languages and letters is an account of the origin of language among the gentile nations, with the overriding thesis that languages and letters develop together. He says that scholars have failed to understand the way in which languages and letters began. They “have failed to understand how the first nations thought in poetic characters, spoke in fables, and wrote in hieroglyphs” (429). Scholars have been unable to give an adequate account of the origin of language because they have had until now no account of the origin and development of the gentile nations themselves. Once the ages of ideal eternal history are understood, we can see how languages and letters develop in accord with these ages. Vico says: “To enter now upon the extremely difficult [question of the] way in which these three kinds of languages and letters were formed, we must establish the principle: that as gods, heroes, and men began at the same time (for they were, after all, men who imagined the gods [che fantasticaron gli dèi] and believed their own heroic nature to be a mixture of the divine and human natures), so these three languages began at the same time, each having its letters which developed along with it” (446).

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This is an important statement not only for Vico’s conception of the origin and development of languages and letters but for how we are to understand the three ages of ideal eternal history, namely, that “gods, heroes, and men began at the same time [lo stesso tempo cominciarono gli dèi, gli eroi e gli uomini].” Each age of the corso and of the ricorso of ideal eternal history is potentially present at the beginning of gentile humanity and is actualized one from another. In this process of actualization the mode of the previous age is not lost but becomes sublimated to the dominant mode of the succeeding age. In other words, we do not lose the ability to communicate with mute gestures as the symbolic language or insignias of the heroic age come into existence, nor is either of these lost with the appearance of alphabetic writing and the grammar of fully articulated language. Vico says: “Articulate language began to develop by way of onomatopoeia, through which we still find children happily expressing themselves” (447). He says that by the Latins Jove was called Ious from the roar of the thunder, and Zeus by the Greeks from the whistle of lightning. Human words were then formed as interjections: “In all languages these are monosyllables. Thus it is not beyond likelihood that, when wonder [la maraviglia] had been awakened in men by the first thunderbolts, these interjections of Jove should give birth to one produced by the human voice: pa!; and that this should then be doubled: pape!” (448). From this interjection, Vico says, comes padre (father), signifying that Jove is the father of humanity. Battistini notes that padre is the derivation of pater from “pa,” which is an infantile exclamation for father.6 Pappa is from Late Greek papas, pappas (baby talk)—father. The original utterance of Jove as pape is a kind of stammering, as thunder itself is a kind of natural stammering. Vico says: “The strong men in the family state, from a natural ambition of human pride, arrogated to themselves this divine title of fathers (a fact which may have been the ground for the vulgar tradition that the first strong men of the earth had caused themselves to be adored as gods)” (449). These are analogous to the biblical “sons of God” or giants, mentioned earlier in regard to poetic metaphysics (see Genesis 6:4). Vico says that next were formed pronouns, which are monosyllables. Articles were next, because they are joined to nouns, and then particles, which are for the most part monosyllables, and which are units of speech serving almost as loose affixes, expressing some general aspect of meaning or some connective or limiting relation. Then Vico says nouns were formed, followed by verbs. He says: “For nouns awaken ideas which leave firm traces; particles signifying modifications, do the same, but verbs signify motions, which invoke past and future” (453). He says: “Our assertion may be supported by a medical observation. There is a

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P OETI C LOGI C      137

good man living among us who, after a severe apoplectic stroke, utters nouns but has completely forgotten verbs” (453). The stroke has caused this man to revert to a more primordial or childlike level of language. In his corollary regarding poetic style and song, Vico holds that although the first language was mute, the first human sounds must have been not only interjections but musical. He says: “Concerning song and verse, since men are shown to have been originally mute, they must have uttered vowel sounds by singing, as mutes do; and later, like stammerers, they must have uttered articulate consonantal sounds, still by singing” (461). By mute expression Vico does not mean to exclude the use of the voice. He conceives mute communications in regard to the voice more in the sense of “mute cries,” that is, sounds that are direct expressions of passions but which are in no way articulate sounds, not part of a system of sounds that is necessary for words. As Vico employs the example of the man who suffered a stroke to illustrate the primacy of nouns, he uses the example of a tenor with a speech defect to demonstrate the connection between stammering and singing: “Thus there was among us in my time an excellent tenor with this speech defect, who, when he stumbled over a word, would break into the sweetest song and so pronounce it” (462). With heroic mind and society comes verse, which is the style of language natural to song. Only in the third age of ideal eternal history does prose come to dominate human expression. Vico has said in various places that the law was originally a serious or severe poem. Here he cites Cicero’s claim that Roman children “learned the Law of the Twelve Tables by singing it tanquam necessarium carmen, as a required song” (469). Cicero, in the Laws, says: “We learned the Law of the Twelve Tables in our boyhood as a required formula [carmen]; though no one learns it nowadays” (2.23.59). This singing was likely formulaic and can be imagined as on the order of children learning to sing their ABCs. In the next to last of these corollaries, Vico connects the origin of language with that of law: “Along with this first birth of characters and languages was also born law, which the Latins called ious and the diaïon, celestial, from Dios, of Zeus as Jove. (Later, as Plato says in the Cratylus, diaïon became dikaion for the sake of euphony.)” (473). In the Cratylus Plato says that many believe that the universe is in motion and “that there is some element which passes through all this, by means of which all created things are generated. . . . Since, then, it superintends and passes through (διαϊόν) all other things, this is rightly called by the name δίκαιον [“just”], the sound of the kappa being added merely for the sake of euphony” (412d–e). Vico’s association of diaïon with Dios is intended to connect law with Zeus in the same sense that he implies that ious is contracted to ius (law in the sense of

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right) (see 489). After enumerating the various nations in which Jove was regarded as the sky, Vico concludes: “From the foregoing we gather that the first laws everywhere were the divine laws of Jove” (482). Thus both law and language originated from the first name of Jove, and the ways in which law was conceived and expressed follow the three ages of ideal eternal history. Vico’s final corollaries concern the “Logic of the Learned.” His purpose here is to affirm the primacy of ars topica over ars critica in the sense of showing that topics must always precede criticism in thinking about anything. He refers to the idea of “sensory topics” (topica sensibile), which he says is the basis of the formation of the poetic genera of the first men (495). Topics are commonplaces (topoi) from which arguments in logical reasoning can be drawn forth. In the syllogism topics is the art of finding the middle term, as Vico discusses in his oration On the Study Methods of Our Time, in which he asserts that, although the study of topics was nurtured by the ancients as an essential part of the education of the young, “in our days, instead, philosophical criticism alone is honored. The art of ‘topics,’ far from being given first place in the curriculum, is utterly disregarded.”7 Vico wishes in this corollary to the learned to correct this disregard of topics by showing not only that it is presupposed by criticism but that, in the very development of the human mind, the formation of topics comes first. The original topics are sensory in the sense that the first men passed by means of their “corpolentissima fantasia” (376) from the thundering sky to the poetic character of Jove as the first name from which they could form the earth, sky, and sea, and all that is in them. Vico says: “So that we may truly say that the first age of the world occupied itself with the primary operation of the human mind [that is, the art of topics]” (496; see also 699). To underscore this point, Vico adds: “And first it [the human mind] began to hew out topics, which is an art of regulating well the primary operation of our mind by noting the commonplaces that must all be run over in order to know all there is in a thing that one desires to know well; that is, completely” (497). In chapter 7 above, in discussing the nature of Vico’s axioms, it was pointed out that they have a rhetorical and topical function rather than a deductive function. Vico’s claim concerning the art of topics as regulating well the operation of the mind implies that, as the first men hewed out the sensory topics with which to know the world completely, so the axioms as commonplaces allow us to hew out the common nature of the nations by running over them in order to know all there is to know in the great city of the human race. Vico says: “Topics has the function of making minds inventive, as criticism has that of making them exact” (498). Applying this to the new science itself, the topical function of the axioms provides the basis

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P OETI C LOGI C      139

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for us to employ the “new art of criticism” so as to complete the science of humanity that is the New Science. Finally, Vico says that the arts of life had been invented in Greece before the advent of the philosophers. He says these arts arise by imitation in which both children and the first men excel and that “the arts are only imitations of nature and consequently in a certain sense real poetry. Thus the first peoples, who were the children of the human race, founded first the world of the arts; then the philosophers, who came a long time afterward and so may be regarded as the old men of the nations, founded the world of the sciences, thereby making humanity complete” (498). This distinction is carried over into that between what may be called the poetic arts—morals, economy, and politics—and the poetic sciences—physics, cosmography, astronomy, chronology, and geography. The poetic arts are those by which the human world is known, and the poetic sciences those by which the natural world is known. The balance between these two objects of knowledge is what Vico, in the Study Methods, says he is seeking between the ancients and the moderns.8 Here in the New Science he demonstrates that such a balance is possible because it originally exists within the primordial form of wisdom—poetic wisdom.

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Cha p te r 1 3

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Poetic Morals, Economy, and Politics

Morals, economy, and politics fall within the scope of Aristotle’s episte-   me-   praktikai or “practical” sciences, which involve actions that follow upon a deliberate choice. Morals or ethics (e¯thika) pertains to choice in regard to individual actions and is concerned with character (e¯thos) understood as the product of habit. Economy (oeconomica, the ordering of households) is the smallest unit of statecraft from which the nation arises. Aristotle says: “By a nation we mean an assemblage of houses, lands, and property sufficient to enable the inhabitants to lead a civilized life. . . . From this definition of a nation, it is evident that the art of Housecraft is older than that of Statecraft, since the household, which it creates, is older; being a component part of the Nation created by Statecraft” (Oec. 1343a). Politics concerns statecraft and differs in kind from housecraft: “the ruler over a few people is a master; over more the head of a household, over more still, a statesman or king” (Pol. 1252a). Politics or political science concerns the kinds of states or nations that exist and the principles by which they are ruled. Vico is concerned to show how each of these “active” or practical sciences is first realized as a part of poetic wisdom—how the origin of each of them can be traced back to the experience of Jove by the first men. Vico says that the morality of the first men was derived from the “terror of Jove” (terrore di Giove). Their fear of Jove as present in the thunderous sky made them humble, god-fearing, and pious. He says: “Thus poetic morality 140

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P OETI C M ORALS , ECONO MY, AN D P OLITI C S      141

began with piety [pietà], which was ordained by providence to found the nations, for among them all piety is proverbially the mother of all the moral, economic, and civil virtues.” He continues: “Religion alone has the power to make us practice virtue, as philosophy is fit rather for discussing it. And piety sprang from religion, which properly is fear of divinity” (503). Fear is the first passion and piety the first virtue or basis of the virtues. The second passion is shame (pudore), which is the cause of the first men forming marriages and copulating out of the sight of Jove by going into caves. Vico says: “Thus the act of human love was performed under cover, in hiding, that is to say, in shame; and they began to feel that sense of shame which Socrates described as the color of virtue. And this, after religion, is the bond that keeps nations united, even as shamelessness [l’audacia] and impiety [l’empietà] destroy them” (504). Vico says that “marriage emerged as the first kind of friendship in the world” (554). In the Euthyphro Socrates says: “It is then not right to say ‘where there is fear there is also shame,’ but that where there is shame there is also fear, for fear covers a larger area than shame. . . . Where there is piety there is also justice, but where there is justice there is not always piety, for the pious is part of justice” (12 c–d). Where there is shame there is fear and where there is piety there is justice. Piety engenders justice, but once realized as a virtue, justice can be self-determining. Fear engenders shame, but it is also wide enough to be responsible for piety. When an act of injustice is done, shame and impiety are the result. Vico says that “piety and marriage form the school wherein are learned the first rudiments of all the great virtues” (514). He says that piety and religion made the first men prudent because they took the auspices of Jove. They also become just as a response, first to Jove and then to other men in reflection of this. They become temperate because marriage acts to control their passions, and they further become strong, industrious, and magnanimous (516). Vico has in effect delineated the four cardinal virtues of the Greeks, prudence being in one sense a virtue and in another, what is necessary for the exercise of the virtues, as Aristotle thought. “Strong, industrious, and magnanimous” stand in the place of courage or fortitude. When a society becomes impious, fearless, and shameless, it begins to revert to a state of barbarism in which there is ignorance, injustice, arrogance, and weakness (1106). Vico grounds poetic morals in the age of gods, that is, in the establishment of the first principles of humanity—religion, marriage, and burial—in the founding of the first families. He concludes: “So much may be said of the divine morality of the first peoples of the lost human race. The heroic morality we shall discuss in its place” (519). Vico’s reference is to the corollary with

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which he concludes his discussion of heroic politics (666–78). Here he passes into the features of poetic economy, which is the achievement of the heroic families, the second age of ideal eternal history. Vico understands economy in the same manner as Aristotle. Greek oikonomia is from oikos, house, and nomos, manager (nemein, to distribute). The heroes develop the family into its full form, from which arise the social classes, the fundamental distinction being that between the fathers of the first families and their offspring and the famuli who become part of the economy of the family once they are taken in for protection. From this division arise the nobles on the one side and the plebeians on the other. But these two components of economy, the fathers and the famuli, do not arise immediately in the heroic age. The family itself as a social and biological entity arises first. Vico says: “The heroes apprehended with human senses these two truths which make up the whole of economic doctrine, and which were preserved in the two Latin verbs educere and educare. In the prevailing best usage the first of these applies to the education of the spirit [animo] and the second to that of the body [corpo]” (520). The education of the spirit (animo, Latin: animus) faced the problem of bringing forth from the giants, who were all body, the animating principle of the active or rational soul that was embedded in them and which had survived in this suppressed state from the period immediately after the universal flood, when the sons of Noah, the originators of the gentile nations, were still Hebrews having human minds and bodies of normal stature. The form of the human had to be brought forth from the matter of the human body. At the same time, heroic education needed to reduce the huge bodies of the giants to normal human size. The fathers of the first families, because they had apprehended the thunderous sky as Jove, tamed their offspring by communicating the force of this divinity to them. The powerful cyclopean figures of these fathers set about to teach their children through force the nature of human duties, which they themselves had only just become able to grasp. Vico says: “Since they were unable to express this force abstractly, they represented it in concrete physical form as a cord, called chorda in Greek and in Latin at first fides, whose original and proper meaning appears in the phrase fides deorum, force of the gods. From this cord (for the lyre must have begun with the monochord) they fashioned the lyre of Orpheus, to the accompaniment of which, singing to them the force of the gods in the auspices, he tamed the beasts of Greece to humanity” (523). The use of song to tame the body and bring forth the soul is in accord with Vico’s account, in the poetic logic, of the origin of language in song.

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P OETI C M ORALS , ECONO MY, AN D P OLITI C S      143

With the process of educere underway, the fathers, under the subtle d­ irection of divine providence, could also begin the process of educare. Vico says: “As for the other part of household discipline, the education of bodies, the fathers with their frightful religions, their cyclopean authority, and their sacred ablutions began to educe, or bring forth, from the giant bodies of their sons the proper human form” (524). In the original state of nature of the giants, children were left to wallow in their own excrement and inhale the nitrous salts. The fathers themselves had taken the first baths, as sacred ablutions, in response to their fearful reaction to Jove. Sacred ablutions are connected to sacrifices and the taking of auspices. Vico says: “It was by becoming imbued with this cleanliness of body and this fear of gods and of fathers—in both cases a fear we shall find amounting to terror in the earliest times—that the giants diminished to our normal stature” (371). Vico regards this importance attached to water as reflected in the use of water and fire, aqua and igni, in the Roman marriage ceremony. Thus the human use of water is connected also to the second principle of humanity, or marriage. The universal practice of the washing of the body before burial would appear to extend their connection to the third principle, or burial. Vico regards water as a human need as coming just before fire, in establishing human economy, but fire also connects the three principles of humanity. Fire produces the human practice of preparing the first meals. Vico says that the giants, originally living in caves and feeding from the fruits of nature, emerged from these conditions “having been taught by that same religion to set fire to the forests in order to have a prospect of the open sky whence came the auspices, they then set about the long, arduous, and heavy task of bringing their lands under cultivation and sowing them with grain, which, roasted among thorns and briars, they had perhaps discovered to be useful for human nourishment” (539). Through education in cleanliness (taking the first baths), the cultivation of crops, and the cooking of food (eating the first meals), the giants reduce their size. With the distinction between the raw and the cooked, humanity begins to set itself off from nature. We may presume that with this distinction also came table manners and clothing. These practices caused them to cease their wandering like beasts in the forest and instead to settle in one place. Vico says: “While after they began to remain in one place with their women, first in caves, then in huts near perennial springs and in the fields which, brought under cultivation, gave them sustenance, providence ordained that, from the causes we are now setting forth, they should shrink to the present proper stature of mankind” (524). Once this economy of place and discipline

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of activity is accomplished the foundation is made for the rise of cities and heroic life, which eventually develops the powers of the mind through customs, emblems, and distinct forms of speech. Burial is a necessary principle for the humanizing of the giants. Vico says: “The god-fearing giants, those settled in the mountains, must have become sensible of the stench from the corpses of their dead rotting on the ground near by, and must have begun to bury them” (529). Vico claims that from the universal practice of burial came the universal belief in the immortality of the soul. Vico asserts this connection but does not explain it. His argument appears to be that to hold funerals for the dead and to bury them means that the dead are more than bodies, that there is a form to this matter, and this means that the dead are persons. The interment of the body is an act of respect for the departing soul, which goes into the gods’ hands—Dis Manibus—as Vico has inscribed on the cinerary urn in the dipintura (12). In relation to this, here and elsewhere, Vico claims that “humanitas in Latin comes first and properly from humando, burying” (12; see also 531). By depicting burial as a cinerary urn, Vico acknowledges that fire connects all three principles of humanity—this connection of religion and marriage to fire—as discussed above. But he also wishes to emphasize burial in the earth as a means by which the economy of the first families established not only a chronology of ancestors, thus placing them in relation to time, but also marking the land as theirs. Vico says: “Thus by the graves of their buried dead the giants showed their dominion over their lands” (531). These noble “sons of the Earth” return to the earth and establish the dominion of their families over time and over place. Vico’s claim that humanitas derives from humare is controversial, as are many of his etymologies. Humanitas is from humanus, akin to homo, “man, human being.” It would seem that humare would be associated with humus, “ground, earth, soil” (akin to Greek χαμαί, which carries the same meaning). To bury a dead body is to inter it (Italian, interrare), from Latin terra, earth. But Vico insists on the association of human and humare. He repeats this several times in the First New Science (FNS 75, 144, 418, 461) and asserts it in the earlier work on Universal Law (e.g., bk. 1, chap. 104, sec. 12). This etymology is a verification of Vico’s third principle of humanity. The only justification for this etymology is its similarity with Plato’s procedures in the Cratylus, which allows for a sense of “associative” etymology in which words can be connected because of their similarity of meaning or sound. Such association is, of course, perilous in itself, for then anything can be claimed about words if it has some plausibility. Vico can claim, however, that since his principles of humanity are themselves demonstrated on many other grounds,

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P OETI C M ORALS , ECONO MY, AN D P OLITI C S      145

the ­derivation of humanitas from humando must be correct. The theory verifies the etymology, not the reverse. Throughout the poetic economy, and stretching back into poetic morals and forward into poetic politics, Vico exposits a mythological canon in terms of the pursuits that establish civil society. He states this canon in axiom 108: “Jove; Juno, Diana, Apollo; Vulcan, Saturn, Vesta; Mars, Venus; Minerva, Mercury; Neptune” (317). His descriptions of these and the roles he assigns to each are illustrative of his claim that the fables can be read as histories of the gentile peoples. The role of Jove as the beginning of religion has been delineated in regard to poetic morals (502), as well as that of Juno as the divinity of solemn, lawful marriages (511). Juno is also responsible for the labor of Hercules. It was Juno “who set this task for the nourishment of the families” (540). Hercules is the poetic character of the heroes who cleared the first fields for cultivation. These first families “imagined the earth in the aspect of a great dragon, covered with scales and spines” (540). The dragon became the symbol of power and rule. Vico says the Chinese “charge their royal arms with a dragon and bear a dragon as the emblem of the civil power. Such must have been the Dragon [Draco] who wrote the Athenian laws in blood . . . Holy Scripture too, in the book of Ezekiel, bestows on the king of Egypt the title of the great dragon lying in the midst of his rivers” (542). “Thus says the Lord God: I am against you, Pharaoh king of Egypt, the great dragon sprawling in the midst of its channels, saying, ‘My Nile is my own; I made it for myself ’ ” (Ez 29:3). Although Hercules is not a god, next to Jove he is the great figure for the origination of the conditions necessary for the existence of the gentile nations. The power of the dragon and the power to slay the dragon is a symbol of the heroic. Diana represents the first human need—that of water—in establishing households near springs (528). Apollo is the brother of Diana and is apprehended as god of civil light, who dwells on Mount Parnassus where the Muses dwell, and who must have begun the genealogies of the heroes (533). Vulcan, Saturn, and Vesta form a triad of deities: “First Vulcan, then Saturn (so called from sati, sown fields, whence the age of Saturn among the Latins corresponds to the golden age of the Greeks), and thirdly Cybele or Berecynthia” (549). Vico says among the Romans Cybele was called Vesta, “goddess of divine ceremonies, for the lands ploughed at that time were the first altars of the world” (549). Next are Mars and Venus. Mars was a poetic character of the heroes as they fought for their altars and hearths. Mars fought on fields behind shields (562). Hence “the first shield in the world was the ground of the field where the dead were buried, whence in the

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science of heraldry the shield is the ground of the arms” (563). It is on the shields that the heroes placed the insignias of their clans and families. Venus was a poetic character of civil beauty: “whence honestas had the meanings of nobility, beauty, and virtue” (565). Venus had the persona of virtue for the nobles but was represented in nakedness by the plebeians and signified passionate love (567). This dual sense of Venus is representative of the fact that these deities generally appeared one way to the nobles and another to the plebeians. Vico says: “Such double fables or characters must have been necessary in the heroic state in which the plebeians, having no names of their own, bore those of their heroes; to say nothing of the extreme poverty of speech that must have prevailed in the first times” (581). Each of the social classes grasped the deities according to their abilities and needs. Minerva was a goddess related to poetic politics more than poetic economy. She was called the goddess of wisdom, but this was a result of the philosophers later attaching to her the most sublime metaphysical knowledge. For the theological poets she was quite different. As presented by Homer, in her other role she had the epithet of “warlike.” Vico says: “And the owl and olive were sacred to her not because she spends the night in meditation and reads and writes by the light of the lamp, but rather to signify the dark night of the hiding places in which humanity had its beginnings, and perhaps more properly to signify that the heroic states that composed the cities conceived their laws in secret” (590). Thus Minerva is a political symbol or heroic poetic character of the wisdom of cities, the way in which the nobles commanded them. Mercury is imagined by the heroic poets as “he who carries the law to the mutinous famuli in his divine rod (a real word for the auspices)” (604). Vico says: “There are two wings at the top of the rod (signifying the eminent domain of the [heroic] orders), and the cap worn by Mercury is also winged (to confirm their high and free sovereign constitution, as the cap remained a hieroglyph of [lordly] liberty). In addition, Mercury has wings on his heels (signifying that ownership of the fields resided in the reigning senates)” (604). Mercury is a fundamental deity of poetic politics, signifying the rule of the nobles. He also was the god of commerce, signifying exchanges among heroic states. Neptune is the last major deity of Vico’s mythological canon, because “the naval and nautical arts were the last invention of the nations, since it took the flower of genius to invent them” (634). Vico conceives the gentile nations as originally developing themselves in inland cities and only later engaging in commerce through navigation. The life of the gentile nations was originally centered in the clearing of areas of the great forest, allowing

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P OETI C M ORALS , ECONO MY, AN D P OLITI C S      147

the first families to develop cultivation of the fields and to take the auspices of Jove. Navigation begins to place the cities of the heroes in a world, and with this comes the politics that requires the law of the ius gentium, the sense of law that captures what each system of law has in common with every other, such that there can be “a great city of the human race,” based on the common nature of the nations—the fact that they all are born, develop, mature, decline, and fall according to the same pattern of three ages, although at different rates in relation to each other. Poetic politics is founded when those giants who were unable to respond to the thunderous sky as Jove, and remained feral wanderers, seek the protection and tutelage of the giants who became fathers of families and learned to take the auspices of the actions of the great sky-body of Jove. Those giants seeking asylum were famuli and “were the first socii in the world” (582). Vico intends socii here in the sense of subject peoples, rather than in its meaning as associates, the sense of the term he later applies to those indentured to the heroes. These famuli become part of the first families, but they have little more status than that of slaves. They are at least bondmen in bail to the fathers who are their lords, who have complete authority over their life and death and possessions. They cultivate the fields and perform the work of the households. The generally violent potential of the multitudes of the rebellious famuli causes the heroes to unite themselves into orders, and among these orders of heroes emerge kings, creating the first aristocracies, which is the first form of government in the world (585). The result was that “the first cities were made up solely of nobles, who were in command” (597). This distinction between the heroes and the famuli, or clients, led to the establishment of the first agrarian law, in which the nobles conceded to the clients the least they could, which was bonitary ownership of those fields the nobles chose to assign to them. Bonitary ownership of property, under Roman law, is protected not by the ius civile, or civil law, but by praetorian edict, unlike quiritarian ownership, which is statutory as opposed simply to equitable or beneficial. The agrarian law “was dictated by the following natural law of the gentes since ownership follows power, and since the lives of the famuli were dependent on the heroes who had saved them by granting them asylum. . . . Thus the famuli merged to form the first plebs of the heroic cities, in which they had none of the privileges of citizenship” (597). Vico’s description of poetic politics is an interpretation of Roman social and legal history, which involves considerable detail. It is Vico’s point that if the new science, by applying its universal principles, is capable of interpreting the history of one gentile nation, the example of which is Rome, then it is capable of interpreting in a similar fashion the history of any and all gentile

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nations. He claims that all republics are born from certain eternal principles of fiefs (feudi). The republics “were born in the world with three kinds of ownership for three kinds of fiefs, which were held by three kinds of persons over three kinds of things” (599). The first is the bonitary ownership granted to the plebs by the first agrarian law. The second was the quiritary ownership of the nobles or heroes who united to keep sovereignty over their farms. The third was civil ownership or eminent domain—the claim of divine right of sovereignty or dominion over the lands themselves, a right that cannot be altered by any change in social conditions. Vico describes the origins of the census and the treasury in Roman history and the origin of Roman assemblies, as well as the institution of the ius gentium, which claims that a part of Roman law corresponds to what is and must be a part of every other system of law. He refers to Livy’s History of Rome regarding the view that Junius Brutus instituted popular liberty and thus restricted the royal power. Livy says: “Moreover you may reckon the beginning of liberty as proceeding rather from the limitation of the consuls’ authority to a year than from any diminution of their power compared with that which the kings had exercised. All the rights of the kings and all their insignia were possessed by the earliest consuls” (2.1.7–8). Vico is concerned to show that the nobles did not relinquish their power; it was only limited in the sense the power of the consuls’ terms were limited and they were subject to recall. This did not institute true popular liberty. He says: “This one passage of Livy shows both that the Roman kingdom was aristocratic and that the liberty instituted by Brutus was not popular (the freedom of the people from their lords) but lordly (the freedom of the lords from the Tarquin tyrants)” (664). Vico holds that Roman life remained heroic and did not pass into the third age of ideal eternal history at this time. Roman history as the master example of divine and heroic history shows that such history is not governed by a quest for virtue. It is governed by the clash and tensions between the power and self-interest of the lords or nobles and that of the plebs, who are always potentially or actually in rebellion. Vico says: “For certainly Roman history will puzzle any intelligent reader who tries to find in it any evidence of Roman virtue where there was so much arrogance, or moderation in the midst of such avarice, or justice or mercy where so much inequity and cruelty prevailed” (668). Whatever virtue manages to appear in human affairs is the result of the pursuit of its opposite—the vices rooted in the defects of human character. It is through the tendency of vice to vitiate itself that divine providence directs history toward the positive. But this providential nature of history can be understood only by means of a command of the whole of ideal eternal history. Prudence as a guide

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to living within history must be based on a comprehension of providence. Even then we cannot alter the course and recourse of the nations in their birth, development, maturity, decline, and fall, for Vico’s conception of these cycles does not include an ideal of progress. As he says in axiom 67: “The nature of peoples is first crude, then severe, then benign, then delicate, finally dissolute” (242). Vico concludes his presentation of divine and heroic history with three epitomes (repilogamenti). These are three fables that convey a severe truth: “The fables in their origin were true and severe narrations” (814). The first is that of Cadmus: “This whole divine and heroic history of the theological poets was only too unhappily described for us in the fable of Cadmus” (679). Cadmus, like Hercules, slays the great dragon, that is, clears the great forest of the first men. He sows the teeth, that is, plows the first fields. From the furrows armed men spring forth, that is, the heroes come forth to unite in arms against the plebs. Cadmus changes into Draco, the dragon that wrote the laws in blood establishing the authority of the aristocratic senates. He finally brought forward vulgar characters so that a written record of this history could be made (446). The second fable is from the Iliad, regarding the scepter of Agamemnon as he addresses the great gathering of armies for the expedition to Troy, followed some passages later by the famous catalog of ships. Homer writes: “Then among them lord Agamemnon stood up, holding in his hands the scepter which Hephaestus had toiled over making. Hephaestus gave it to lord Zeus, son of Chronos, and Zeus gave it to the messenger Argeïphontes; and Hermes, the lord, gave it to Pelops, driver of horses, and Pelops in turn gave it to Atreus, shepherd of men: and Atreus at his death left it to Thyestes, rich in flocks, and Thyestes again left it to Agamemnon to carry, to be lord of many isles and of all Argos” (Il. 2.100–8). This fable shows the passage of ruling from Jove, or Zeus, down through the heroes. The symbol is the serpent or dragon, which also adorns the rod of Hermes, or Mercury. The heroes call themselves gods because they receive their power and lineage from gods and they rule by divine right. The third fable is that of the shield of Achilles, also described in the Iliad, on which, Vico says, is depicted the history of the world (681). Hephaestus, responding to the plea of Achilles’ mother, Thetis, makes the shield, carrying three depictions on its surface. First “he fashioned the earth, on it the heavens, on it the sea, and the unwearied sun, and the moon at the full, and on it all the constellations with which heaven is crowned” (Il. 18.483–617). Second, “he made also two fair cities of mortal men.” One city shows marriages and feasts and the means to settle disputes in justice. The other city

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is encircled by two armies of warriors, under armed siege. Vico says: “The two cities, regarding each other as alien, carried on eternal hostilities against each other with their heroic raids” (685). In Vichian terms, the two cities correspond to the nobles versus the plebeians. Vico says that “lastly there was portrayed on the shield the history of the arts of humanity, beginning with the epoch of families” (686). The third part of the shield depicts, first, the arts of cultivation and agriculture, and then those of pleasure and aesthetic cultivation, such as dance. The shield is a theater of memory on which all of poetic wisdom depends. Recall that Vico regards the burial grounds of the first ancestors as the first shield. Burial is the basis of memory for the first families. The two cities of the shield of Achilles are parallel to Lorenzetti’s presentation of Good Government, Buon governo, and Bad Government, Mal governo (1337–40) in the Palazzo Communale at Siena, which Frances Yates regards as an example of the art of memory, as it causes us to recall the difference between virtues and vices.1 In Good Government the people are happy and dancing, all is prospering, including the cultivation of crops. In Bad Government the people are dismal, all is in decline and disarray, including agriculture. The fables, as they become images of history, become instruments of moral instruction in the manner of the Tablet of Cebes, as discussed in relation to the dipintura.2

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Ch a p ter 14

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Poetic Sciences

Vico considers all the branches of his tree of poetic wisdom to hold poetic sciences, taking sciences in the sense of fields of knowledge, but those issuing from the second limb of the trunk are natural sciences. Poetic logic, morals, economy, and politics each occupy a separate branch from the first limb, but the poetic natural sciences are described as a configuration, branching off from each other. It was pointed out in the preceding chapter that logic occupies a special place in regard to the other humanistic sciences, as they presuppose the tropes and uses of language and letters it distinguishes. In the poetic natural sciences, physics has a corresponding role to logic. In this case, Vico speaks of cosmography and astronomy as branching off from physics (it being the mother of these two) and chronology and geography branching off from astronomy (as two daughters) (367 and 687). Metaphysics contemplates things in the forms of their being, and logic in the forms whereby they are known or signified. Physics is related to metaphysics, as its name means in Greek, in that metaphysics considers those questions of the nature of things that come after the physics, that pass beyond beings in nature to the being of nature itself. In Vico’s scheme, the movement of thought is not from the questions of physics to the larger questions of metaphysics, but the reverse. Metaphysics is first in the order of the sciences because it treats of what comes first in genetic terms of the mind’s making of the world or the experience 151

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of it derived from the apprehension of Jove as ultimate reality. From its ­apprehension of the really real, the mind proceeds to develop a knowledge of the forms of the civil and natural world that come from it. The human mind then follows the order of creation; it does not find the world as given and then contemplate it. Vico devotes several pages to the treatment of each of the poetic natural sciences, unlike the very large sections on poetic logic (400–500) and politics (582–678). The reader is presented more with an inventory of their natures than with a full analysis. Vico’s concern is to demonstrate that there is a poetic version of these sciences, but since they are directed to nature they inform us only indirectly of a science of the civil world—the subject of the new science. His focus is to understand how these sciences are reflections of human nature and human beings’ conceptions of themselves as part of the world of nature. Vico says: “The physics the theological poets considered was that of the world of nations, and therefore in the first place they defined Chaos as confusion of human seeds in the state of the infamous promiscuity of women. It was thence that the physicists were later moved to conceive the confusion of the universal seeds of nature” (688). Physics was initially a conception man had of himself, of the biology of human activity. Later chaos was conceived by the physicists as the prime matter of natural things, which took on the forms of nature. Vico is aware that although natural science is directed to nature as that which exists independently from the human world with its own laws, as discovered by the founders of modern physics, such as Galileo, Newton, and Boyle, science is part of man’s self-knowledge. Science is a human activity, and the civil world exists within the natural. To know what is not human is also to know what is human. Vico’s genetic method of thought traces natural science to its origin in the human as human beings apply science first to themselves and then to nature as such. Vico says: “The world of the theological poets was composed of four sacred elements: the air whence Jove’s bolts come, the water of the perennial springs whose divinity is Diana, the fire with which Vulcan cleared the forests, and the tilled earth of Cybele or Berecynthia” (690). These elements are not simply forms of prime matter for the first men. They are the four elements in divine ceremonies by means of which the first men take the auspices and act in accordance with the presence and will of the gods. These elements are divinities themselves that are understood in terms of the fables. Poetic physics in the first age of ideal eternal history is a way of contemplating nature as divine. In the second age, that of heroes, poetic physics becomes a way of contemplating man. Vico says: “But the greatest and most

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important part of physics is the contemplation of the nature of man” (692). Vico then reminds the reader of the point in household economy—that the great bodies of the giants needed to be reduced to normal size. Poetic physics became a means for understanding the bodily functions so as to exercise control over them. Vico says the Latin heroes understood the verb sum, the most abstract concept of human existence, as having the sense of eating—to be is to be able to eat. Words that have purely intellectual meanings were first rooted in the parts and functions of the body. For example, regarding bones and joints, Vico says that joints “were called artus from ars, which to the ancient Latins meant the force of the body, whence artitus, robust of person; later ars was applied to any set of precepts which steadies and directs some faculty of the mind” (694). Vico constructs such etymologies by associating words in accordance with his genetic method of understanding the development of the human world. He continues this etymology in regard to spirit, anima. Vico says: “As for the other part [of our human form], the soul (anima), the theological poets placed it in the air (which is also called anima by the Latins) and they thought of it as the vehicle of life” (695). His reference here is to the derivation of anima from breath, the breath of life. In relation to poetic physics Vico, like Aristotle in the De anima, regards the soul as a subject of physical science. Aristotle says: “This investigation seems likely to make a substantial contribution to the whole body of truth, and particularly to the study of nature; for the soul is in a sense the principle of animal life” (De An. 402a). Vico says that these theological poets must “have felt that spirit (animus) is the vehicle of sensation” (696). He holds that the animus must be connected in the body to the nerves and the anima must be present in the blood, the former being ether and the latter being air. He says the theological poets “reduced all the internal functions of the spirit to three parts of the body: the head, the breast, and the heart” (699). He says they assigned all cognitive functions to the head. These functions include memory, imagination, and ingenuity (699; see also 819). These three functions are the basis of the art of topics. What is generated by the art of topics later became the basis of the art of criticism. Vico says these poets “made the breast the seat of all the passions which has beneath it the vital organs such as the stomach and the blood which is involved with the liver.” Thus: “In a rough way they understood that concupiscence is the mother of all the passions, and that the passions reside in our humors” (701). He says: “The heart they made the seat of all counsel, whence the heroes ‘kept turning over their cares in their hearts’ (agitabant, versabant,

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volutabant corde curas)” (702). Although he does not say this, the heart appears to be the seat of the will, in that what is cared about results in deliberate judgment and action. These three functions correspond in a general pattern to the Platonic parts of the psyche¯, which has dominated the concept of the self in the Western tradition—intellect, will, and passions or appetites. In poetic physics these arise through parts of the body. Vico says: “Finally they [the heroic poets] reduced the external functions of spirit [animo] to the five senses of the body, but senses keen, vivid, and strong, for these men were all robust imagination [fantasia] with very little reason. Evidence of this may be found in the terms they used for the senses” (705). Hearing (audire) was associated with haurire (to drink, draw in), as the ears drink in the air that has been set in motion to produce sound. Seeing distinctly was cernere (to distinguish with the senses) oculis. Cernere is connected with cribrum (a sieve); Vico says the eyes are like a sieve, the pupils allowing light through them. He says the general expression for seeing was usurpare oculis, as though what is seen is taken possession of. “Tangere, to touch, meant also to steal, for to touch a body is to take something away from it” (706). Vico may have in mind the words of Jesus to Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection, which in the Latin Vulgate are “noli me tangere” (touch me not) (Jn 20:17). “Smelling they called olfacere, as if by smelling odors they created them” (706). Vico’s comment is a play on the word facere (to make). He then claims that sapientia (wisdom, sagacity) derives from sapere (to taste). He says: “And lastly they called tasting sapere, a word which properly applies to the things which have savor, because they assayed things for the savor proper to them. Hence later, by a fine metaphor, they used the term sapientia, wisdom, for the faculty of making those uses of things which they have in nature, not those which opinion supposes them to have” (706). In the way that we move from seeing with the bodily eye to seeing with the mind’s eye, we move from tasting with the tongue to speaking with the mother tongue that captures the exact meanings of the things meant. Vico says that later, as men entered the age of reflection, the senses became less sharp and, as this sharpness fades, our poetic sense of the world is diminished as is our sense of bodily presence. Poetic physics is followed by poetic cosmography and astronomy. This cosmography comes about by the extension of the principles of poetic physics to the world outside of man. The theological poets conceived of the sky and the underworld as worlds composed of gods and of a realm of gods intermediate between earth and sky. Vico says: “For the poets the first sky was no higher than the summits of the mountains, where the giants were halted in their feral wanderings by Jove’s thunderbolts” (712). The underworld is seen

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P OETI C S C IEN C ES      155

as no deeper than a ditch, as it is portrayed by Homer in the eleventh book of the Odyssey, in the famous scene when Odysseus visits the kingdom of the dead. Vico says: “With the practice of burial the idea of the underworld was extended, and the poets called the grave the underworld (an expression also found in Holy Scripture)” (715). Among the references in the Hebrew Bible is: “So they with all that belonged to them went down alive into Sheol; the earth closed over them, and they perished from the midst of the assembly” (Nm 16:33). Sheol is the underworld abode of the dead, a realm of shadowy existence. The Hebrew Bible has no conception of a separate heaven and hell. The descent of Aeneas with the golden bough into the underworld, guided by the advice of the Sibyl, shows it to be a region with its own features much more distinct than the ditch of the Odyssey. The fables that surround the gods of the sky, earth, and underworld contain a poetic cosmography, just as the fables are the first histories of the nations, as Vico often points out. Poetic astronomy is an extension of poetic cosmography in that “the first peoples wrote in the skies the history of their gods and heroes” (729). Everyone is familiar still today with the sky-maps showing the constellations portraying various deities and heroic figures as well as animals. Vico says: “In view of all that has been set forth, it must be affirmed that the predominating influence which the stars and planets are supposed to have over sublunar bodies, have been attributed to them from those which the gods and heroes exercised when they were on earth” (731). Recall that Vico claims that the heroes originally called themselves gods in order to affirm their power over the famuli, who had become the class of plebs. Through poetic astronomy, this power is taken up into the sky and made a matter of astrology. Having established the nature of earth and sky in the poetic terms of the ages of gods and heroes, it remains for Vico to demonstrate the poetic nature of time (chronology) and place (geography). Cassirer, in his philosophy of mythical thought—the only full philosophy of mythology by a major modern philosopher, and to which he regards Vico as the precursor—describes mythic time as altogether qualitative and concrete and not in any sense quantitative and abstract. Cassirer says: “For myth there is no time ‘as such,’ no perpetual duration and no regular recurrence or succession; there are only configurations of particular content which in turn reveal a certain temporal gestalt, a coming and going, a rhythmical being and becoming.”1 Vico says: “The theological poets gave beginnings to chronology in conformity with their astronomy. For that same Saturn, who was so called by the Latins from sati, sown [fields], and who was called Chronos, or Time, by the Greeks, gives us to understand that the first nations (all composed of farmers) began to

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count their years by their harvests of grain” (732). The “rhythmical being and becoming” of the sowing of fields and harvests is the foundation of chronological time. Cassirer says further: “The fact is that long before the human consciousness forms its first concepts concerning the basic objective differentiations of number, time, and space, it seems to acquire the subtlest sensitivity to the peculiar periodicity and rhythm of human life.”2 Vico says that since these first men who cultivated the fields were mute, “they must have held as many ears or straws and made as many reaping motions as the number of years they meant to signify” (732). From this beginning of time as the sown fields, Vico presents a chronological reckoning through his reading of the fables. He claims on this basis that “the age of the gods must have lasted at least nine hundred years from the appearance of the various Joves among the gentile nations, which is to say from the time when the heavens began to thunder after the universal flood” (734). If we consult the Chronological Table, this period would correspond to the column of the Romans, with the entry for the year of the world 2491, indicating “Saturn, or the Latin age of the gods” (see also 73). Vico says that “the age of heroes runs for two hundred years” (735). This would place the summit of the heroic age in the column of the Greeks on the Chronological Table approximately with Hercules, “with whom the heroic time of Greece reaches its climax” (see also 165), and in the column of the Romans with “Hercules with Evander in Latium, or the Italian age of the heroes” (see chapter 6, above). In discussing chronology Vico takes the perspective of showing how what is said in the fables of the gods and the heroes fits the ideal eternal history, rather than considering how from within these ages a chronology was conceived, except for the origination of chronology itself. Thus Vico concludes: “For by an axiom above stated [314], chronology has here begun her doctrine where her subject matter began: that is, with Chronos or Saturn (after whom time was called Chronos among the Greeks), the reckoner of the years by the harvests; with Urania watcher of the skies for the purpose of taking the auspices [Urania being in Vichian conception the first of the Muses]; and Zoroaster, contemplator of the stars in order to give his oracles from the paths of falling stars” (739). Zoroaster appears, as the first of all the entries on the Chronological Table, as an imaginative universal or poetic character of the Chaldeans, who were the first astronomers (see chapter 6). Vico says: “It remains for us now to cleanse the other eye of poetic history, namely poetic geography. By the property of human nature that ‘in describing unknown or distant things, in respect of which they either have not had

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P OETI C S C IEN C ES      157

the true idea themselves or wish to explain it to others who do not have it, men make use of the semblances of things known or near at hand’ ” (741). In discussing metaphor in regard to poetic logic, Vico asserts: “It is noteworthy that in all languages the greater part of the expressions relating to inanimate things are formed by metaphor from the human body and its parts and from the human senses and passions” (405). He gives a series of such bodily metaphors. “Thus, head for top or beginning; brow, shoulders—in front and at the back; eyes of grapevines and those that are called lighted parts of houses; mouth—any aperture; lip—edge of a vase or other vessel; tooth of a plough, a rake, a saw, a comb; beard—roots; tongue of the sea; throat or mouth of rivers or hills; neck of land; arm of a river; hand, for a small number; bosom of the sea—gulf; flanks and sides, corners; rib [coast] of the sea; heart for center (which is called ‘umbilicus’ by the Latins); leg or foot of land, and foot for end; sole of a foot for base or foundation; flesh, stone of fruits; vein of water, rock, mined ore; blood of the vine—wine; bowels of the earth; smile of the heavens, the [laugh of the] sea, whistle of the wind; murmur of the wave; groan of a body under a great weight” (405).3 Although poetic geography is directed to designating the places of the world of the gentile nations, all geography first rests on the formation of space in human terms. Geography is an extension of such formation to those places that lie beyond the immediate location of any nation. Cassirer says: “Myth starts from a spatial-physical correspondence between the world and man and from this correspondence infers a unity of origin. This transference is not limited to the relationship between world and man, which despite its vast importance remains particular, but is universally applied to the most diverse spheres of existence.”4 Vico does not introduce poetic geography with these metaphors of the body that he gives earlier, but we might keep them in mind, as they fit with the logic of poetic physics in which man’s bodily existence is its subject. Cassirer says further: “Just as there is a magical anatomy in which particular parts of the human body are equated with particular parts of the world, there is also a mythical geography and cosmography in which the structure of the earth is described and defined in accordance with the same basic intuition. Often the two, magical anatomy and mythical geography, merge into one.”5 Vico claims that poetic geography, in the sense of identifying and naming places and regions, began with the Greeks when they became a maritime nation. This pattern was taken up by other ancient nations. The life of the first families was to remain in one place and occupy the clearings in which they could cultivate the fields. It is only later that ancient peoples began to circulate in the world and identify deities with various locations. Each nation

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had its own names for these places based on their own mythology. Vico constructs an account of this process based on Greek mythology, which, he says, was assumed by the Latins as they moved through the world. On the basis of his conception of poetic history, Vico includes an account of how Aeneas came to Italy, founding in Alba what was to become the Roman nation. From the principles of the new science Vico offers an explanation of what underlies the well-known account of the Aeneid. He concludes: “Thus, by two different manifestations of the conceit of the nations [axiom 3]—that of the Greeks in making such a stir about the Trojan War, and that of the Romans in boasting an illustrious foreign origin—the Greeks foisted their Aeneas upon the Romans and the latter finally accepted him as their founder” (772). By accepting the story of Aeneas, the Romans can trace their origin to the Trojan side of the Trojan War. The Romans, later borrowing so much from Greek culture, can still see themselves as a people separate from the Greeks, but on Vico’s account they even receive Aeneas from the Greeks. Vico’s account of Aeneas is an example of his procedure, throughout the New Science, of demonstrating how his new critical art can reveal the true historical basis of an event long thought to be otherwise. Another example of the effective use of the new critical art is his demonstration that the Law of the Twelve Tables was not imported from Greece and was generated over time, originating from the first agrarian law.6 Vico follows his corollary on Aeneas with a final corollary on the nature of heroic cities. The clearings of the first families became the places of the heroic cities. Vico says: “Now, since the parts of geography are nomenclature and chorography, that is to say the denomination and description of places, principally of cities, it remains for us to examine these matters in order to complete our discussion of poetic wisdom” (774). The first families raised altars from which to take the auspices and to conduct ceremonies and sacrifices in the clearings. This sense of the altar was expanded to the conception of cities as altars, or arae. Vico says: “This word ara, uniform in sound and meaning in so many nations widely separated from each other by space, time, and customs, must have been the root of the Latin word aratum, plough, the moldboard of which was called urbs” (778). “Altar” is connected to the original cultivation of the fields. From cultivation come cities. The city is always at the center of the world and is an imago mundi, connected directly to its gods. In his abovementioned examples of projections of the human body and bodily sensations onto the world, Vico gives one example that refers to the umbilicus as the center of the world. In the ancient

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P OETI C S C IEN C ES      159

forum at Rome there is inscribed, near the Arch of Septimius Severus: “Curia umbilicus urbis Romae.” A curia is one of the thirty divisions into which the Roman patricians were divided by Romulus, which also refers to the meeting place of a curia, in this case the meeting place of the senate at Rome. The center is a transference from the bodily image of the navel. All ancient nations as well as all primordial peoples live at the center or navel of the world, having been born of the gods. The urbs, or walled city, in Vichian terms derives from the original clearings in the great forest, in which the first families settled and plowed the fields. The walls of the city replace the surrounding circle of trees. An example of the attribution of animation to inanimate objects is the horos, or boundary stone at the entrance to the ancient marketplace, or agora, of Athens, which bears the announcement: “I am the boundary of the Agora,” in letters that date from ca. 500 BC. The stone itself speaks to those who would enter there. Socrates spoke before the cobbler shop nearby, to those who would listen, once the age of the philosophers arrived. Vico concludes his treatment of poetic wisdom, the longest book in the New Science, by reminding the reader of two things: the conceit of scholars and the conceit of nations. These conceits have led us to discover poetic wisdom in order to pass beyond the provincialism that such conceits engender. Had the claim of these conceits not been made, no such inquiry as the New Science might have been undertaken. Although these conceits distort the origin and in fact prevent us from a true account of it, if we accept their terms, they nonetheless point to the fact that the question of the common nature of the nations can be found only by thinking from the origin, combining philosophy with philology to attain the new art of criticism, coupled with the transformation of ius gentium into the law of the development of the nations, their ideal eternal history. Only then does the new science emerge in its correct form. In this way we are able to find the true meaning of the fables of mankind. We find it in the original, vulgar wisdom of the peoples. Vico says: “For in these, as in embryos or matrices, we have discovered the outlines of all esoteric wisdom. And it may be said that in the fables the nations have in a rough way and in the language of the human senses described the beginnings of this world of sciences, which the specialized studies of scholars have since clarified for us by reasoning and generalization” (779). The new science as a master science can give us access to all of the specialized sciences of the tree of the poetic sciences by taking us back to their origin in the appearance of Jove and the portrayal of it in the sensations and passions of the theological poets.

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Vico’s last sentence asserts: “From all this we may conclude what we set out to show in this [second] Book: that the theological poets were the sense and the philosophers the intellect of human wisdom” (779). The genetic method, by which Vico connects these two things—sense and intellect—poetry and philosophy—both offers a resolution of the Platonic, ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry and employs the psychology of Aristotle’s De anima, by aligning the human race with the individual. The mind of the human race, like the mind of the human individual, cannot comprehend anything unless it appears first as an impression of the senses.

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Engraving of Vico from the 1744 edition of the New Science, done from the portrait by Francesco Solimena.

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Dipintura, or frontispiece, of the 1744 edition of the New Science.

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Imprésa, “Ignota latebat,” from the title page of the 1744 edition of the New Science.

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Dipintura, or frontispiece, of the 1730 edition of the New Science.

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Chronological Table from the 1744 edition of the New Science.

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The Tablet of Cebes, from Vaenius, Theatro Moral de la Vida Humana.

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Pa rt  F ive

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Discovery of the True Homer

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Introduction

Book 3, Vico’s search for and discovery of the true Homer, is a digression. The reader, on first looking into the New Science, is likely to be the most puzzled by the inclusion of a study of the famous and longstanding question of who wrote the Iliad and Odyssey in a work dedicated to the common nature of the nations. What does the Homeric question have to do with the science of history, society, and politics? There is an old principle of philosophy, however, that the most important points of a philosophical speech are to be found in its digressions. This is true of the speeches of Socrates in the Platonic dialogues, which come alive through their digressions. The tenth book of the Republic can qualify as a digression in that the city in speech that is the purpose of the work has been completed, including the role of the poets and the lengthy discussion of poetry in the third book, but unexpectedly the issue of the relation of philosophy to poetry is raised, along with the role of Homer as the teacher of the Greeks, ending with the retelling of the Myth of Er, a digression within a digression. Real philosophy is always digressive. This is also true of great orations. In his address to the Academy of Oziosi, Vico noted the digressive ability of both Demosthenes and Cicero: “Yet Demosthenes came forth from the Platonic Academy where he had listened for a good eight years, and he came armed with his invincible enthymeme, which he formed by means of a very well regulated excess, going outside his 169

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OF THE TR U E HO M ER

case into quite distant things with which he tempered the lightning flashes of his arguments, which, when striking, amazed the listeners so much the more by how he had diverted them.” Of Cicero, the greatest orator of the Romans, Vico says: “From the same Academy Cicero professed himself to be endowed with the felicity of his copiousness, which, like a great winter torrent, overflows banks, floods countrysides, crashes down over cliffs and hillsides, rolling before it heavy stones and ancient oaks; and triumphant over all that had given resistance, he returns to the proper riverbed of his case.”1 Vico’s claim regarding Homer appears in his first sentence of book 3 of the New Science, where he asserts that in his demonstration of poetic wisdom it was shown that the peoples of ancient Greece were theological and later heroic poets (780). Thus Vico expresses a first-order enthymeme, that is, the major premise of an implied syllogism: poetic wisdom is the form of thought of the Greek peoples. The implied minor premise that Vico nearly makes explicit is: Homer’s works are formulations of poetic wisdom. Making the conclusion: Homer is identified with the Greek peoples. In effect the reader is presented with an AAA first-figure valid syllogism, the figure and mood thought most excellent in Aristotelian logic. The purpose of book 3 is to explain how this conclusion is generated in terms of Homeric scholarship and its implications. The Vichian Homer provides a connection between the poetic wisdom of book 2 as a doctrine of origin and ideal eternal history as realized in books 4 and 5 regarding the course and recourse of the nations. Homer is placed at the acme of poetic wisdom. Homer is the summary figure of the ages of gods and heroes in the corso of the Greek nation and at the beginning of the age of men, when poetic wisdom gives way to philosophical reason. Any knowledge of these first two ages must be obtained from Homer, and Homer as the teacher of the Greeks is replaced, in the third age, by Plato and the philosophers before him. In the ricorso of Western history the pivotal figure is Dante, whom Vico calls “the Tuscan Homer” (786).2 Dante is the summary figure of the first two ages of the ricorso and stands just before the arrival of the Renaissance philosophers of humanism, who reinvent philosophy by recovering Plato and the ancients. In addition to the role Vico assigns Homer in his doctrine of poetic wisdom and ideal eternal history, the digression on Homer is proof of Vico’s “new critical art.” Without it Vico could not have discovered the true Homer. By combining philological proofs with philosophical ones, Vico reaches the interpretation that Homer is simply the Greek peoples themselves. The works attributed to Homer are not authored by an individual but

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INTRO D U C TION     171

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are the product of a collective poetic mentality, a vulgar wisdom of the Greek peoples, originally preserved orally and later written down. Vico’s view of the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey continues to be considered today in the study of the question of Homer’s identity. Bernard Knox, in discussing the analysis by Milman Parry of how Homer’s works were composed and communicated as an oral tradition, in his introduction to the Fagles translation of the Iliad, concludes that such analysis “leaves very little room for Homer as an individual creative poet. It seems in fact to be a return to the idea of Giambattista Vico: the poems are the creation of a people, of a tradition, of generations of nameless bards.”3 The question of who Homer was and the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey is by no means settled, but Vico’s view must be taken into account. Unlike other accounts that approach these questions in strictly literary or linguistic terms, Vico’s view rests within a full theory of human history and the place of the poetic and mythic within it.

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Cha p te r 1 5

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Search for the True Homer

The idea of the true Homer implies a false Homer from which the true Homer can be distinguished. There are two senses in which Homer is falsely conceived. Vico will show that it is false that there was a single author who wrote either or both the Iliad and the Odyssey. He will also show that these works attributed to Homer do not contain an esoteric wisdom, that is, that Homer was not a philosopher. The tenth book of the Republic is very like what in the above introduction I have called a digression. In it Plato sets the agenda of Western philosophy by raising the question of the difference between philosophy and poetry. In perhaps the second-most-famous line of the Republic, the first being that concerning philosopher-kings, Plato says: “Let us, then, conclude our return to the topic of poetry and our apology, and affirm that we really had good grounds then for dismissing her from our city, since such was her character. For reason constrained us. And let us further say to her, lest she condemn us for harshness and rusticity, that there is an old quarrel between philosophy and poetry” (607b). Socrates does not say that there actually is an old quarrel between philosophy and poetry; he says that we makers of a city in speech should put it this way in order not to appear unrefined to the poets, rhapsodes, and supporters of poetry. This claim, like that of the possibility of a philosopher becoming king or a king acquiring the love of wisdom, is ironic. Plato has invented the terms 172

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SEAR C H FOR THE TR U E HO M ER     173

of the quarrel that is now declared old, and Plato was then and remains the most poetic and sublime of all philosophers. As Longinus says: “Though the stream of his words flows as noiselessly as oil, he none the less attains sublimity” (Subl.13.1). The irony is brought even further by Socrates expressing a willingness to resolve this quarrel and admit poets into the ideal city if they can offer any argument (even if it be in lyrics or in some other poetic form) to show that they should be returned from exile to play a role in the polis. This would require the conversion of mythos into logos, an impossibility of human speech. We are left with the question of what is to be the positive doctrine of the relation between poetry and philosophy, for philosophy itself cannot exile poetry, since it requires a form of speech that dialectically joins or moves between argument and image, as the Platonic Socrates does in moving from the elenchos to the “likely story” throughout the dialogues. The “ancient” quarrel between philosophy and poetry presupposes that Homer’s wisdom is in contest with Plato’s. Indeed, for the Athenians, Homer’s poetry is the source from which to draw the wisdom needed for common life, as in later times this role is assigned to the Bible. Philosophy is the one field of thought that takes its own nature and existence as a problem. Unless philosophy can determine its identity as separate in principle from other forms of thought, it is simply a school or version of them or one of them. The question for the Greeks that has been building up from the pre-Socratics to Plato’s time was whether philosophers were a new school of poets or whether they were the bringers of a new kind of wisdom: a new knowledge of things divine and human and the causes of each. Thus for Plato the distinction between the wisdom he seeks and the wisdom in Homer is crucial. It is not sufficient to treat poetry in political terms; it must be treated also in intellectual terms. The quarrel between philosophy and poetry rests further on the fact that both the philosopher and the poet are makers through words. Poiein is “to make” and “to compose poetry.” The medium of poetry is words, but in poetry these words are employed to form images. As Horace is later to say, “A poem is like a picture” (Ars P. 361). Poetic images are formed as mimetic of the visible world, what is seen with the bodily eye. The philosopher is also a maker in words, but these words are in a sense mimetic of the ideas, or eide¯, the forms of things themselves. What the philosopher makes can be seen only by the mind’s eye. Poetry is dangerous not because it is so obviously different from philosophy but because it is so close to being or seeming to be philosophy. Poetry with its immediacy appears to make accessible what philosophy seeks and can access, if at all, only mediately, as something noetic, reached through the dialectic of the elenchos.

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How is this quarrel to be resolved? Vico answers this question in a single stroke with an answer so obvious, so simple and correct, that one wonders why it was not realized sooner in the history of philosophy. Vico shows that there is a poetic wisdom that is distinct from philosophical wisdom, and that this poetic wisdom precedes and is required by philosophical wisdom just as the imagination of childhood precedes and is required by the reason of adulthood. Homer is not a philosopher. But philosophical wisdom is generated from Homer’s wisdom and is different in kind from it. Vico’s claim is substantiated by modern studies of the origin of philosophy from Greek myth. In The Discovery of the Mind Bruno Snell describes how Greek thought moves from myth to logic in terms of the development from Homeric similes to the comparisons of Empedocles. Homeric similes always amplify the characteristics of a particular figure, such as Achilles. They intensify the heroic figure of Achilles. But Empedocles’ similes compare what is common among things in terms of a tertium comparationis. Thus in philosophical thought it is possible not to convey something that is true of a particular man but to conceive something that is true of man as a universal.1 To solve the question of the ancient quarrel Vico required a doctrine of what today would be called mythical thought, to realize and show that myth or poetic wisdom is a complete form of thought done at the level of perception, feeling, and imagination (  fantasia). The first form of human thinking, like that of the child, is not based on reason; rather, reason is based on it and develops as a process from it. The ancient quarrel is transformed into a friendship that is at least that of Aristotle’s friendship of utility, if not ultimately that of mutuality. To resolve this question Vico sets out to demonstrate step by step that Homer is not a philosopher but has a wisdom that both philosophy and the nations themselves require to become what they are. The evidence Vico gives that Homer could not have been a philosopher focuses on the violence and crudeness that Homer describes as engaged in by the Greek heroes as well as the inconsistencies in the actions of the gods (781–87). Indeed, anyone reading the Iliad must be impressed by the unchecked emotions of Homer’s figures: how the gods as well as men are capable of anything. Vico says: “The constancy, moreover, which is developed and fixed by the study of the wisdom of the philosophers, could not have depicted gods and heroes of such instability” (786). Vico’s complaint is Platonic: the poet follows the passions, and what he makes appeals to them. There are no standards of conduct, no moderation of the passions. Longinus writes: “I feel indeed that in recording as he does the wounding of the gods, their quarrels, vengeance, tears, imprisonment, and all their manifold passions, Homer has done his best to make the men in the Iliad gods and the gods men” (Subl. 9.7).

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SEAR C H FOR THE TR U E HO M ER     175

The great Greek virtue of so¯phrosyne¯ is absent even in Achilles, who e­ mbodies courage—but courage driven by his arrogance and anger. Ulysses embodies phrone¯sis, practical wisdom or prudence, but it is driven by a wily ingenuity to achieve whatever end he can. He is “the man of twists and turns,” as the opening line of the Odyssey announces. Homer reflects the mentality of the vulgar; there is no transcendent ethic guiding what he says, no higher wisdom that guides the human condition. Homer’s art is great; he is the greatest of the poets. But great poetry is not great philosophy. Had Homer the sentiments and soul of the philosopher, he could not have written in the way he did. So it is mistaken to attribute an esoteric wisdom to Homer. There are no reliable reports as to who Homer was or whence he came, because “almost all the cities of Greece claimed to be his birthplace and there were not lacking those who asserted that he was an Italian Greek” (788). Cicero says, in Pro Archia: “Colophon asserts that Homer is her citizen, Chios claims him for her own, Salamis appropriates him, while Smyrna is so confident that he belongs to her that she has even dedicated a shrine to him in her town; and many other cities besides engage in mutual strife for his possession” (8.19). The reason for these claims is not simply local pride; they are connected to Vico’s claim that Homer is the Greek people themselves. Vico concludes, regarding the question of Homer’s fatherland: “As for the contest among the Greek cities for the honor of claiming Homer as citizen, it came about because almost all of them observed in his poems words and phrases and bits of dialect that belonged to their own vernaculars” (790). This claim fits to some extent with the analysis by Milman Parry of Homer’s language and expressions, as mentioned in my introduction to this part of the commentary. Vico has not come to this conclusion through having done the kind of detailed analysis Parry did, but what Vico claims is plausible and fits his general thesis as grounded in what he calls his “metaphysical art of criticism” (348) as an embodiment of his “new critical art.” In considering the question of Homer’s fatherland and the age in which he wrote, Vico speaks as though there were a single figure who was Homer and who wrote both the Iliad and the Odyssey. He says since all reports and speculations on these questions are unreliable he must proceed on what can be found in Homer’s works themselves. But he quickly concludes that the Homer of the Odyssey and the Homer of the Iliad cannot be the same, on the basis of a passage at the end of the seventh book of the Odyssey in which Alcinous tells Odysseus that his men “shall row you over the calm sea until you come to your country and your home, or to whatever place you wish, even if it is much farther than Euboea [one of the largest islands of Greece

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in the Aegean sea]” (7.9.19–22). Vico says: “This passage shows clearly that the Homer of the Odyssey was not the same as the Homer of the Iliad, for Euboea was not far from Troy” (789). Indeed, Alcinous says it was reported to him to be “the farthest of lands.” In claiming that Homer did not write both works Vico could be classified as a modern version of the ancient chorizontes, or “separators.” But Vico does not hold, as does this view, that two individuals were the authors of the two poems. As to Homer’s age, Vico concludes: “We confirm the opinion of those who place him after the Trojan War. The interval runs to as much as 460 years, or until about the period of Numa. Indeed we believe we are humoring them in not assigning him to a time nearer our own” (803). C. M. Bowra, in his entry for the Oxford Classical Dictionary, in considering both textual and external evidence, concludes: “We may then perhaps place Homer before 700 B.C.”2 Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, has the traditional dates of 715–673 B.C. Thus Vico’s view of Homer’s age is well in accord with the general view. Vico says: “We must suppose that the two poems were composed and compiled by various hands through successive ages” (804). Vico cites Seneca to verify that the issue of whether the Iliad and Odyssey were attributable to the same author was a celebrated debate among ancient grammarians (789). Seneca himself finds this question tedious and pedantic: “It was once a foible confined to the Greeks to inquire into what number of rowers Ulysses had, whether the Iliad or the Odyssey was written first, whether moreover they belong to the same author, and with other matters of this stamp, which, if you keep them to yourself, in no way pleasure your secret soul, and, if you publish them, make you seem more of a bore than a scholar” (De brevitate vita 13.2). Vico, I think, can agree with Seneca, because there is no way to solve this debate in literary terms. Its issues must be placed within a larger conception of poetry and history. Having confronted the question of where Homer is from and when he lived, Vico turns to the question of Homer’s greatness. Why is Homer the first great poet? Vico agrees with Josephus that there has not come down to us any writer more ancient than Homer, who “was the first author of the Greek tongue; and, since we owe to the Greeks all that has reached us of the gentile world, he was the first author of that entire world” (438). Josephus says: “Throughout the whole range of Greek literature no undisputed work is found more ancient than the poetry of Homer. His date, however, is clearly later than the Trojan War; and even he, they say, did not leave his poems in writing. At first transmitted by memory, the scattered songs were not united until later; to which circumstance the numerous inconsistencies of the work are attributable” (Ag. Ap. 1.2.12).

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SEAR C H FOR THE TR U E HO M ER     177

On Homer’s greatness Vico also cites Horace’s advice in the Ars poetica that poets should attempt to take their characters from Homer’s poems (806). Horace says: “Either follow tradition or invent what is self-consistent. If haply, when you write, you bring back to the stage the honouring of Achilles, let him be impatient, passionate, ruthless, fierce. . . . It is hard to treat in your own way what is common: and you are doing better in spinning into acts a song of Troy than if, for the first time, you were giving the world a theme unknown and unsung” (119–30). Homer is not only first in the historical sense of the beginning of literature; he is first in the sense of the imaginative universals from which any later poetry can be formed. As Vico puts it: “For his poetic characters, which are incomparable for the sublime appropriateness which Horace admires in them, were imaginative universals [generi fantastici], as defined above in the Poetic Metaphysics, to which the peoples of Greece attached all the various particulars belonging to each genus” (809). Vico explains that only his conception of poetic wisdom joined with that of ideal eternal history can account for why, as Horace points out, it is so difficult to create tragic heroic figures after Homer. The conditions of life that produce heroes exist before Homer. After Homer comes the power of the imagination to invent fictitious characters such as typify the New Comedy, in contrast to the Old Comedy, which took subjects from real life (806–8). The sentiments, modes of speech, and actions that are wild, crude, and terrible are the elements of poetic creation prior to Homer. Vico says: “Such works the Greeks could produce only in the time of their heroism, at the end of which Homer must have come” (808). As shown in Vico’s Poetic Wisdom, these first passions and figures were expressed in fables that “were all at first true histories, which were gradually altered and corrupted, and in their corrupt form finally came down to Homer. Hence he must be assigned to the third age of the heroic poets” (808). The ages of gods and heroes in the course of the Greek nation culminate in the poetry of Homer, who stands as the transitional figure between the age of heroes and the third age of men, in which fantasia gives way, as the faculty forming the world, to the intellect, which will generate codified laws and philosophy. Homer is the Greeks’ memory of their origin. Tragedy as a poetic form that comes after Homeric epic requires the recovery, through art, of what went before Homer and is preserved in the works attributed to him. Once the conditions of life that produce heroism are gone, heroes no longer arise. Homer’s greatness is due not to any sense of individual genius but to the memorial power of his poetry, which is the memory of the Greek peoples themselves.

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What follows these points is a list of “philosophical proofs” and one of “philological proofs” leading to the discovery of the true Homer. Both lists repeat points established earlier in the Elements and Poetic Wisdom, applying them to the idea of the true Homer being the Greek peoples themselves and emphasizing what has just been said regarding Homer’s origin, identity, and greatness. This twofold approach is intended to highlight how the search for the true Homer is based in the new critical art on which the new science itself is based—the union of philosophy, with its power to elicit universals, and philology, with its power to analyze and relate particulars. The reader familiar with the doctrine of poetic wisdom will recognize the content of these proofs. The one passage that stands out for comment is the ninth on the list of philosophical proofs, which states Vico’s threefold conception of memory that runs throughout the New Science itself. Vico has made the point that the fables of the first theological poets were the first histories, thus going against Aristotle’s famous assertion in the Poetics that poetry is more philosophical than history because history treats of particulars (1451b). In his conception of poetic characters or imaginative universals as the foundation of the fables, Vico has shown that the poetic imagination (fantasia) makes the particular into a universal in such a way that the particularity is preserved in the universal and the universal meaning of the particular is kept immediate and concrete. Thus the fables were true narrations. Vico says that the first histories embedded in the fables depended on the memories of the first peoples of the gentile nations, “who were almost all body and almost no reflection, must have been all vivid sensation [vivido senso] in perceiving particulars, strong imagination [fantasia] in apprehending and enlarging them, sharp wit [ingegno] in referring them to their imaginative genera [generi fantastici], and robust memory [memoria] in retaining them” (819). These faculties, Vico says, appertain to the mind but have roots in the body. He says that “memory is the same as imagination [la memoria è la stessa che la fantasia].” As reference, Vico cites a line from Terence’s Woman of Andros in which the Latin memorabile is used in the sense of “imaginable” (625). In fact, the fundamental source is Aristotle’s little treatise On Memory, in which it is said: “If asked, of which among the parts of the soul memory is a function, we reply: manifestly of that part to which imagination [phantasia] also appertains; and all objects of which there is imagination are in themselves objects of memory” (450a). Vico says that in “returned barbarian times an ingenious man [uomo d’ingegno] was called an imaginative man [uomo fantastico]” (819; see also 699). Thus imagination becomes a middle term between memory, in

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SEAR C H FOR THE TR U E HO M ER     179

the sense of reminiscence, and ingenuity, with all three terms held together in memory as in the mutual interaction of them. Vico then says: “Memory [memoria] takes three aspects: it is memory [memoria] when it remembers things; imagination [fantasia] when it alters, and simulates them; ingenuity [ingegno] when it encompasses them, and puts them into proper order and affect” (819, my translation). Omitted from this second formulation is the fact that both memory and imagination originate in sense perception, as Aristotle claims: “As to the question of which of the faculties within us memory is a function, it has been shown that it is a function of the primary faculty of sense-perception, i.e., of that faculty whereby we perceive time” (Mem. 451a). Nothing is in memory that is not first in perception, which in the first humans was of great strength and vivacity. To imagine something is to simulate a perception of it made from the actual prior perception stored in memory. Vico concludes by saying: “For these reasons the theological poets called Memory [la Memoria (Mnemosyne)] the ‘mother of the Muses’ ” (819). Since the Muses sing of what was, is, and is to come, they are the source of time. In the Topics Aristotle says: “Perception is a state, whereas movement is an activity . . . for memory is never a state, but rather an activity” (125b). In the De anima Aristotle connects imagination with movement: “Imagination must be a movement resulting from an actual exercise of a power of sense. As sight is the most highly developed sense, the name phantasia (imagination) has been formed from phaos (light) because it is not possible to see without light” (429a). Homer, then, is the memory of the Greek peoples in that his works, when recited, recall what has happened in the ages of gods and heroes and simulate them in images and, even further, to order what is recalled into a temporal narrative. Vico says, citing Aristotle in his Poetics (1460a): “Only Homer knew how to invent poetic falsehoods” (809). Only by ingenuity can Homer re-create the worlds of Achilles and Odysseus. Thus memory that is threefold, including memory as the first term, might best be understood as recollection, in Aristotle’s sense (anamne¯sis). Homer’s narratives must have a beginning, middle, and end. In On Memory Aristotle says: “When one wishes to recollect, that is what he will do: he will try to obtain a beginning of movement whose sequel shall be the movement which he desires to reawaken. This explains why attempts at recollection succeed soonest and best when they start from a beginning” (451b). To engage in memory in the sense of recollection is to employ ingenuity, for ingenuity is the power to apprehend similarities in dissimilars. It is the same power that Aristotle attributes to metaphor. Finding these similari-

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ties is what holds together what is remembered over time. Aristotle further says: “The object of memory is the past. All memory, therefore, implies a time elapsed; consequently only those animals which perceive time remember, and the organ whereby they perceive time is also that whereby they remember” (449b). James Joyce, who used the ports of call of the Odyssey as the basis of his Ulysses and a modification of Vico’s corso e ricorso of the Scienza nuova as the basis of Finnegans Wake, seized on Vico’s claim in his discussion of Homer, that “memory is the same as imagination.” Joyce’s friend, Frank Budgen, wrote: “I once broached the question of imagination with Joyce. He brushed it aside with the assertion that imagination was memory.”3 Richard Ellmann, the Joyce biographer, says Joyce “often agreed with Vico that ‘Imagination is nothing but the working over of what is remembered.’ ”4 The reader who wishes to grasp fully how, for the poet, imagination is memory may wish to go first to the works of Homer, then to Dante, and then to Joyce. There is likely no better way to comprehend this claim that stretches, in poetic theory, from Aristotle to Vico to, perhaps, Hegel. The passages that can be regarded as the search for the true Homer, leading up to the section that Vico calls the “Discovery of the True Homer,” have the form of an amassing of materials and the principles for ordering them. In the section that follows, Vico’s purpose is to synthesize his argument and show its implications for the interpretation of ancient poetry generally.

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Ch ap ter 1 6

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Discovery of the True Homer

Vico introduces this section with the assertion that not only did Homer as an individual author not exist, the Trojan War that he describes never occurred: “All these things, I say, now compel us to affirm that the same thing has happened in the case of Homer as in that of the Trojan War, of which the most judicious critics hold that though it marks a famous epic in history it never in the world took place” (873). Although the ancient Greeks considered the Homeric poems to be relations of historical events, modern critics agree with Vico. Heinrich Schliemann’s famous excavations of Troy can tell us of the destruction of Bronze Age Troy VIIa, but they cannot establish whether the fire that destroyed it was the result of the Trojan War, although traces of human bones in houses and streets suggest violence. Bernard Knox, in his introduction to the Fagles translation of the Iliad, concludes: “The only evidence that its destroyers were an Achaean army led by the lords of Mycenae and all the cities listed in the Achaean catalogue in Book 2 of the Iliad [the catalogue of ships] is the poem itself, a poem that is supposed to have preserved the memory of these events over the course of some five illiterate centuries.”1 Vico says that in the First New Science he had not conceived of the problem of the true Homer. In that work he makes many references to Homer but employs him as an ancient source in the way he employs other ancient writers. But if we look back to the “Dissertations” that come at the end of 181

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Vico’s two books of Universal Law, especially chapter 4, “On Homer and His Two Poems,” Vico seems to be coming very close to his view of Homer as the embodiment of heroic mind itself. He also affirms the view that Homer is a historian: “From all that we have discussed, it follows that Homer in his stories was a true historian; he only seemed to be a false one because of the later alterations in the first meanings of his words” (UL, Diss. 4.5.46). Vico also emphasizes that Homer was simply a reflection of the sentiments of the early Greek peoples: “In an age when people were crude, Homer flourished as the greatest poet. According to our account of the origins of poetry, he was the greatest of poets simply because he flourished in an age of crude peoples when the Greeks were outstanding in sensation, fantasy, memory, imagination, but with little reason or judgment” (UL, Diss. 4.6.73). It is a short step from Homer being a reflection of the Greek peoples in their heroic age to Homer being the Greek people themselves. The vivid treatment of Homer in the “Dissertations” is not carried over into the First New Science. Vico claims his lack of attention to the question of the true Homer was because this first version of his new science “was not worked out on the same method as the present” (873). By “the same method” Vico appears to mean his axioms, which are not present in the First New Science. The axioms, both philosophical and philological, give Vico the means to produce his proofs regarding his interpretation of Homer as the dividing point in the ages of ideal eternal history between the first two ages, which are ages of poetic wisdom, and the third, in which reason and reflective judgment develop. Although in the First New Science Vico presents his account of the principles of poetry as they are connected to the development of language (book 3), he does not have a full theory of poetic wisdom, as he does in the Second New Science. In the First New Science he does distinguish the three ages of poetic wisdom up to Homer (FNS 288–92) and he also discusses the aspects of the poems of Homer that account for their greatness (FNS 295–97). In concluding his introductory remark on the discovery of the true Homer, Vico says that in the controversy surrounding the question of Homer he will “take the middle ground [la metà] that Homer was an idea or heroic character [carettere eroica] of Grecian men [uomini greci] in so far as they told their histories in song” (873). Calling Homer a “heroic character” suggests that Homer himself is a “poetic character” as are the heroic characters of his poems—Achilles and Ulysses (809). Since the mind of the Greeks in the age of heroes forms genera or universals as poetic characters, they form Homer in the same way.

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D IS COV ER Y OF THE TR U E HO M ER    183

Homer is a precursor of Vico’s idea of “heroic mind,” which is realized as such only after the age of heroes has closed.2 Homer does not have the esoteric wisdom of the heroic mind of Socrates, but the exoteric or vulgar wisdom of the Homeric poems is a necessary foundation for it. “Grecian men” would not be able to form the concept of a particular individual who is the author of the Homeric poems, so they form the author or poet himself as a poetic character standing alongside the heroic and poetic characters of the poems. It is not possible for us to think fully in this way, any more than we, as stated in axiom 49, can comprehend the fables as expressing “univocal, not analogical, meanings for various particulars comprised under their poetic genera” (210). Vico’s claim concerning the mind of the Grecian men suggests that when they attributed the poems they recited and heard recited to Homer, they were not mistakenly thinking that an individual named Homer composed them. They were not thinking in those terms at all. Vico’s true Homer is in essence a rewriting of Longinus’s view of Homer in accord with Vico’s principles of poetic wisdom. Longinus writes: “Throughout the Odyssey, which for many reasons we must not exclude from our consideration, Homer shows that as genius ebbs, it is the love of storytelling that characterizes old age. . . . In fact the Odyssey is simply an epilogue to the Iliad. . . . Writing the Iliad in the heyday of his genius he made the whole piece lively with dramatic action, whereas in the Odyssey narrative predominates, the characteristic of old age. So in the Odyssey we may liken Homer to the setting sun: the grandeur remains without the intensity” (Subl. 9.11–13). In youth, dramatic action predominates, while in old age, memory comes to the fore and narrative becomes a natural occupation. Vico writes: “Thus Homer composed the Iliad in his youth, that is, when Greece was young and consequently seething with sublime passions, such as pride, wrath, and lust for vengeance” (879). These are the passions of Achilles. Vico continues: “But he wrote the Odyssey in his old age, that is, when the spirits of Greece had been somewhat cooled by reflection, which is the mother of prudence, so that it admired Ulysses, the hero of wisdom” (879). Thus when the Greek peoples were young and without the power of reflection they sang of the passions embodied in the poetic character of Achilles. When they were nearing the end of the heroic age, they moved from a focus on the physical virtue of courage to the intellectual virtue of prudence, as represented by the actions of the poetic character of Ulysses. The Greek peoples are still forming their world in terms of poetic characters up to the eighth century, but with the age of Homer they are also beginning to think in intelligible genera, and the fables that were originally true narrations were

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becoming corrupted. Homer is a creator of fictions embedded in his poetic history. Longinus writes: “Henceforth we see the ebbing tide of Homer’s greatness, as he wanders in the realm of the fabulous and incredible. In saying this I have not forgotten the storms in the Odyssey and such incidents as that of the Cyclops—I am describing old age, but the old age of a Homer—yet the fact is that in every one of these passages the mythical element predominates over the real” (Subl. 9.13–14). Vico writes: “But more than ever to Homer belong by right the two great pre-eminences which are really one: that poetic falsehoods, as Aristotle says, and heroic characters as Horace says, could be created only by him” (891). Horace, as mentioned earlier, advises poets if possible to take their character models from Homer, or, if not, to be consistent. Aristotle says in the Poetics: “It is above all Homer who has taught other poets the right way to purvey falsehoods: that is, by false inference” (1460a). By false inference Aristotle explains he means that if we normally perceive a connection between a and b such that b is the consequent of a, the poet can present us with b and we will naturally assume or infer a as its antecedent. Aristotle says: “Things probable though impossible should be preferred to the possible but implausible” (1460a). Thus in poetry we can accept fictions as true. The creation of falsehoods or fictions is the beginning of the trope of irony, which, as Vico says in the Poetic Logic, “certainly could not have begun until the period of reflection, because it is fashioned of falsehood by dint of a reflection which wears the mask of truth” (408). In their fables, the early theological poets had no access to the trope of irony and depended entirely on the trope of metaphor, which, as Vico says, is always a fable in brief (404). Only after the fables are corrupted, in the time of Homer, the third age of heroic poetry, can we find deliberate fictions. As Vico says: “The first fables could not feign anything false; they must therefore have been, as they have been defined above, true narrations” (408). Aristotle’s advice concerning the need for poetic plausibility merges with Horace’s advice concerning consistency. Falsehoods or fictions are not plausible if they appear inconsistent or irrational. The fictions of Homer formed by dint of a reflection must imitate the true narrations that are natural and uncontrived by the early theological poets. Vico says that the vulgar have a custom of creating fables of famous men and that “these fables are ideal truths suited to the merit of those of whom the vulgar tell them; and such falseness to fact as they contain consists simply in failure to give their subjects their due” (205). The need for poetic plausibility is parallel to what Quintilian endorses in forensic rhetoric. He says:

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D IS COV ER Y OF THE TR U E HO M ER    185

“No one should think there is anything reprehensible in my suggestion that a Narrative which is wholly in our favour should be plausible, when it is in fact true. There are many true things that are not very credible, and false things are frequently plausible. We must therefore make just as much effort to make the judge believe the true things we say as to make him believe what we invent. These virtues which I have just mentioned belong of course to other parts of the speech too” (Inst. 4.2.34–39). Vico says further that his interpretation of Homer assures Homer’s title “to the three immortal eulogies that are given him” (898). The first of these is that “of having been the founder of Greek polity or civility” (899). Polity and civility require the moderation of the passions, but Homer does not present his poetic characters as moderating such passions. Indeed, as mentioned earlier, as Longinus says, glossed by Vico, Homer “made men of gods and gods of men” (889), along with using base sentences, reporting vulgar constructs, and making crude comparisons (883–85). Vico says Plato in the Republic “made of Homer a stupid founder of Greek civility, for, however much he may condemn, he nevertheless teaches those corrupt and decadent customs which were to come long after the nations of Greece had been founded” (879). In the tenth book of the Republic, Plato reminds us that the poets cultivate in us all the appetites and pains and pleasures of our psyches. The poets foster all sorts of uncontrolled feelings that will corrupt the creation and ruling of any state, including our ideal one. Socrates says: “ ‘Then, Glaucon, when you meet encomiasts of Homer who tell us that this poet has been the educator of Hellas, and that for the conduct and refinement of human life he is worthy of our study and devotion, and that we should order our entire lives by the guidance of this poet, we must love and salute them as doing the best they can, and concede to them that Homer is the most poetic of poets and the first of the tragedians, but we must know the truth, that we can admit no poetry into our city save only hymns to the gods and the praises of good men” (606e–607a). Socrates is being ironic in saying that we must salute these opinions of the hoi polloi, but we few who understand the difference between poetry and philosophy know that only philosophy offers us a way to moderate the passions and to base civility on reason. Socrates, not Homer, then, is the founder of Greek polity and civility. Why, then, does Vico assert that, on his interpretation of the true Homer, Homer can rightly bear the title of the founder of Greek polity and civility? The answer rests on Vico’s crucial claim that Homer is not a philosopher, not a bearer of esoteric wisdom. Homer is the founder of Greek polity and civility because it is through the passions as formed by fantasia that human

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society first came about and on which religion and marriage are based, and religion, as Vico often reminds the reader, is necessary to temper violence in society, both in its origin and at any point where it erupts. Without the ages of the gods and heroes, there could be no Greek nation. Homer transmits the poetic characters of these ages on which all later forms of thought and society are based. The second distinction to which Homer, in terms of Vico’s interpretation, can lay claim, is “of having been the father of all other poets” (900). This second title follows directly from the first because the powers of Homer comprise the whole range of poetic wisdom. If we may say that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato, we can equally say that all poetry is a footnote to Homer. Plato sets the agenda of Western philosophy, and Homer for Western poetry. Homer does this by being the embodiment of poetic wisdom itself, the principles of which are elicited in the new science. Vico says the third title that can be attributed to Homer is that “of having been the source of all Greek philosophies,” and Vico adds: “None of these eulogies could have been given to the Homer hitherto believed in” (901). Only when we are armed with the doctrines of poetic wisdom and ideal eternal history can we see both that Homer is not a philosopher and that Homer is necessarily presupposed by philosophy and thus resolve the so-called ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry that remained unresolved until the new science discovered the terms by which to resolve it. This third title of Homer makes all the other attributions to Homer possible. It allows us to bring all the traditional claims about Homer into a single coherent picture on which the new science rests. Vico ends his remarks on the true Homer by asserting that Homer is “the first historian of the entire gentile world who has come down to us” (903). Just as the fables of the theological and heroic poets were the first histories, Homer, as the key figure for our access to them, is the first historian. In saying this Vico is echoing the assertion he makes in the “Dissertations” in the Universal Law (Diss. 4.5.46–57). He makes an analogy between the discovery of the true Homer and the discovery of the true origin of the Law of the Twelve Tables: “The same fate has befallen the poems of Homer as the Law of the Twelve Tables” (904). The new science discovered that the Twelve Tables were not imported into Latium from Greece but were in fact the outgrowth of the agrarian law of the Romans. This view, Vico says, “has up to now concealed from us the history of the natural law of the heroic gentes of Latium, so the Homeric poems, having been regarded as works thrown off by a particular man, a rare and consummate poet, have hitherto concealed from us the history of the natural law of the gentes of Greece” (904). By the

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D IS COV ER Y OF THE TR U E HO M ER    187

new critical art or metaphysical art of criticism, Vico has uncovered the true nature of both, which stand as the cornerstones of the new science of the common nature of the nations. In the last few passages of book 3 (in what is designated as an appendix to it in the Bergin and Fisch translation), Vico draws out the implications of his interpretation of Homer’s epic poems for the origins of dramatic and lyric poetry: “the explanation of the ideas of the earliest nations naturally formed, can illuminate and distinguish for us the history of the dramatic and lyric poets, on which the philosophers have written only in an obscure and confused fashion” (905). The issue is the origin of lyric poetry and tragic poetry. Vico says: “To solve this difficulty we must declare that there were two kinds of tragic poets and two kinds of lyric poets” (907). To put Vico’s answer in succinct terms: there was a first kind of sacred lyric poet who wrote praises of the gods, corresponding to the first age of ideal eternal history, and who later wrote heroic lyrics celebrating the great deeds of the heroes. Then there were the new lyric poets: “The new lyric poets were the melic poets, whose prince is Pindar, and who wrote in verse what we in Italian call arie per musica, airs to be set to music” (909). In regard to tragedy, Vico says its origin must have been the satyr play: “There is strong ground for conjecture that tragedy had its beginnings in this chorus of satyrs” (910). These satyr plays invented the first mask by having the actors cover their feet, legs, and thighs with goat skins. Vico is following Aristotle, who suggests in the Poetics that satyr plays were an early form of tragedy (1449a). At the Athenian dramatic festivals the satyr play survived, with each trilogy of tragedies followed by a semicomic satyr play written by the same author, in which the chorus was always composed of satyrs. Vico says: “Then Aeschylus brought about the transition from the Old Tragedy, that is, the satyr play, to Middle Tragedy by using human masks and by converting the dithyramb of Amphion [i.e., Arion], which was a chorus of satyrs, into a chorus of men” (911). Vico holds that the Middle Tragedy must have been the origin of Old Comedy because Old Comedy portrayed actual persons onstage. He says the final form of tragedy was that of Sophocles and then Euripides. And Old Comedy ended with Aristophanes, because of how Socrates was treated in the Clouds. New Comedy, which was formed in terms of fictitious rather than real persons, was bequeathed us by Menander. As lyric grows out of its original embodiment of the passions, so tragedy grows out of the coarseness of the satyr play. These comments appended to the true Homer allow Vico to show the contribution his new critical art can make to aesthetic theory and how his principles of poetic wisdom can absorb traditional questions regard-

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ing ­classical literature. In so doing Vico suggests that any such traditional ­questions will find an answer in these principles. In fact, if this were not the case, the doctrine of poetic wisdom would be defective. Since Vico adheres to the general position that the true is the whole, any part of his new science must in principle contain an explanation of any particular issue that falls under it. Vico need not discuss each and every such issue, but any such must be discussable, just as any issue of the course or recourse of the nations must be illuminated by sustained application of the axioms of the new science to it.

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Pa rt S ix

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Course and Recourse of the Nations

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Introduction

In books 4 and 5 of the New Science, Vico casts the ideal eternal history in schematic and summary form. The threefold enumerations of the kinds of natures, through three kinds of languages and characters, to the “sects” of times make clear in almost mechanical fashion the forms of action and thought that are compresent in each of the three ages of the corso of each nation. These enumerations offer the reader a structure that, in principle, can be found in the early development of ancient gentile nations, which appear on the Chronological Table, as well as the American Indians (had they not been conquered by the Europeans) (1095), the Britons, the peoples of continental Europe, Mauretania, and North Africa (750), Patagonia (170), China (50), and Japan (1091). But when Vico describes the three ages of the ricorso, drawing parallels with those of the corso as found principally among the ancient Greeks and Romans, he concentrates almost exclusively on the history of Europe from the Dark Ages to his own time. Bergin and Fisch point out, in their introduction to the English translation: “Vico admits that the nations which do not quite conform to his ideal eternal history are more numerous than those that do. In the ancient world of nations only Rome approximates it at all closely; in the modern, only certain European nations.”1 Vico’s eternal history is ideal, not in the sense of what should be the course of the nations in the world of nations but in the

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sense that any nation, in its actual rise, development, and fall, approximates this course and can be understood in terms of the principles that govern this course common to all nations. The more we examine philologically the details of the history of the various nations, the more we will see how the history of each illustrates the universal principles that can be philosophically comprehended. In the final paragraphs of book 4 Vico connects the new science to the central doctrine of philosophy: “Know thyself ” (gnothi seauton). Ernst Cassirer begins An Essay on Man with the assertion: “That self-knowledge is the highest aim of philosophical inquiry appears to be generally acknowledged. In all the conflicts between the different philosophical schools this objective remained invariable and unshaken.”2 Vico attributes the precept of self-knowledge to Solon, who he says first was wise in vulgar wisdom and later was held to be wise in esoteric wisdom (1043). Of the Seven Sages of Greece, each of whom has been held to be the author of this inscription on the pronaos of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, Vico attributes it exclusively to Solon. His reason for this is that Solon is the lawgiver to the Greeks and Vico wishes to claim that, among the Greeks, philosophy was born of the laws. Vico claims that “from Solon’s advice to the Athenians, ‘Know thyself,’ came forth the popular republics; from the popular republics the laws; and from the laws emerged philosophy” (1043). Vico interprets “Know thyself ” as first becoming an instruction of vulgar wisdom to the plebeians, “to reflect upon themselves and to realize that they were of like human nature with the nobles and should therefore be made equal with them in civil rights” (414). Vico says: “Later the learned preferred to regard it as having been intended for what in fact it is, a great counsel respecting metaphysical and moral things, and because of it Solon was reputed a sage in esoteric wisdom and made prince of the Seven Sages of Greece” (416). Philosophy arises along with the social doctrine of equality in the popular republics. Vico says that the new science has as one of its advantages that it allows us to tell the history of philosophy philosophically, and this comprehension of the origin and effect of “Know thyself ” is an example of this philosophical history of philosophy. He holds that the “ancient Romans must also have had such a Solon among them” (415). This would account for the Roman plebeians’ demand for equality with the patricians and the change in the Roman republic from aristocratic to popular form. For Vico, philosophy does not develop in a vacuum. His view appears to be very close to Hegel’s famous dictum that philosophies are their own times apprehended in thoughts. Vico’s view goes even beyond this in holding that

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INTRO D U C TION    193

not only are philosophies reflections of their times but that the times themselves produce their philosophies. Vico claims that this philosophical grasp of the origin of philosophy in law, that is, in a particular form of civil wisdom, offers another proof of the many that are brought forth in the New Science against Polybius, “who said that if there were philosophers in the world there would be no need of religions. For if there had not been religions and hence republics, there would have been no philosophers in the world, and if human civil matters had not been thus conducted by divine providence, there would have been no idea of either science or virtue” (1043). Philosophy is not an activity sui generis. Philosophical thinkers like Polybius are prone to forget that philosophy can be done only as an activity within society. Philosophy is not thus reduced to politics or a form of political thought. For Vico, philosophy is always in a particular form of society but it is never of it, because philosophy produces the universal in thought. Philosophy is a divine activity that, done rightly, connects us to providence and the actions of providence in the civil world—the course and recourse of the nations. Vico concludes book 5 with a gloss on a line from Seneca’s Natural Questions: “Pusilla res hic mundus est, nisi id, quod quaerit, omnis mundus habeat—This world is a paltry thing unless all the world may find [therein] what it seeks” (1096). Vico intends this line to capture for the reader the sense in which his New Science contains an argument that is universal regarding the common nature of the nations. Every science to be truly a science must claim universality for its principles. This universality must be based on the claim that it is “perfect in its idea,” that is, no science need be complete or perfect in all its specifics. It need not in fact give an account of each and every thing that falls under its explanations, but it must claim that this is possible in principle. If a science is defective in its principles, it is not a science, or it is at the least a deeply flawed one. Bergin and Fisch point out that Vico’s gloss or misquote of Seneca’s line indicates how Vico intends it to apply to his conception of the new science. Vico changed the phrase nisi in illo quod quaerat as it appears in Seneca’s original to nisi id, quod quaerit: “so that the meaning is not ‘unless it holds something for all the world to seek,’ but ‘unless it holds what all the world seeks.’ ”3 Vico is not simply drawing an analogy between what Seneca says of the science of nature and what he wishes to claim for the science of history, namely, that there is always more to be known as we pursue research in nature, and the same is so for our researches in history. Vico means more than this comparison. The new science is not complete as it stands, but as we pursue it, its truth will become more and more evident.

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The lines of Seneca that follow the line of Vico’s gloss are: “Some sacred things are not revealed once and for all. Eleusis keeps in reserve something to show to those who revisit there. Nature does not reveal her mysteries once and for all. We believe that we are her initiates but we are only hanging around the forecourt. Those secrets are not open to all indiscriminately. They are withdrawn and closed up in the inner sanctum. This age will glimpse one of the secrets; the age which comes after us will glimpse another” (7.30.6). History is not an open book. Only those who are able to grasp the new science, which means to grasp in an instant the ideal eternal history as a universal of the world of nations, will truly be able intellectually to enter this world. Vico’s science, like Galileo’s, is not over and finished in a single stroke. It is a correct beginning from which the right path can be found and pursued in further research. As in nature, so in history. Eleusis keeps something in reserve and the secrets are not open to all indiscriminately. Mario Papini makes a most notable comment on Seneca’s statement.4 It has within it a juncture of two perspectives on the world that are held together in a tension, one an affirmation and the other a negation. From one perspective the world is a pusilla res, a small thing but within which all is concentrated in all to form a Zenonian point. Papini’s reference recalls Vico’s doctrine of metaphysical points that Vico develops in The Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians and mentions in the autobiography (A 127 and 151).5 This is a complicated thesis Vico attributes to “Zeno,” and it remains problematic as to which of the ancient Zenos Vico means. It is a theory of real points from which motion can be generated in the way that a line can be generated from the extension of points in geometry.6 From the smallest real unit all of the really real (to ontos on) can be derived. From another perspective, the world is a pusilla res, a truly paltry thing, a nothing-in-particular. If the world is this nothing, then we may find in it anything we wish. It allows us to construct its reality and even its existence in an unlimited fashion. The world is an indefinite receptacle in which all is possible. Papini’s comment suggests that in the new science we may find a dialectic between these two perspectives. On the one hand the reader realizes that Vico’s magnet has attracted to this doctrine all that there is in the world of nations. On the other hand, since the true is the made, men can make the things of the civil world in an unlimited number of ways. The variations on ideal eternal history are seemingly without restriction. Yet there is one further consideration that must be added to this tension within the claim of Seneca as it bears on the new science. The making of the nations, as we have seen, is ultimately governed by providence, and, since human nature is a divine creation, what is made in the life of nations is always an extension of what is already condensed in human nature itself.

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Ch ap ter 1 7

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Threefold Structure of the Course of the Nations

Following the digression on the true Homer, in which the power of the doctrine of poetic wisdom is demonstrated, Vico turns to the confirmation of the second major claim of the new science, that of ideal eternal history. In terms of the parts of forensic oration, Vico’s book 4 begins with a statement of the proposition. This statement appears as its first paragraph (915). In this long paragraph Vico reminds the reader what has occurred in the foregoing books. He then states: “We shall now, by the aid of this philosophical and philological illumination [the discovery of the true Homer and the true origin of the Law of the Twelve Tables], and relying on the axioms concerning the ideal eternal history, discuss in Book 4 the course the nations run, proceeding in all their various and diverse customs with constant uniformity upon the division of the three ages which the Egyptians said had elapsed before them in their world, namely, the successive ages of gods, heroes, and men” (915). Vico then lists the eleven triads that he will summarize in what follows and emphasizes that these eleven triadic unities “are all embraced by one general unity.” Furthermore, it will be shown, he says, that many other such triadic unities derive from these eleven. He also reminds the reader that these unities that reside in one general unity are so because of the unity of a provident divinity “that informs and gives life to this world of nations.” Vico concludes his statement of the proposition: “Having discussed these 195

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things above in widely separate passages, we shall here exhibit the order of their development.” In forensic oration the proposition prepares the ground for the division, or partitio, of the subject into a list so that those to whom the oration is directed can hold more easily in mind what is said and be convinced of it when the phase of confirmation is added. The question Vico is answering in book 4 is: What is a nation? To be a nation a people’s history must be comprehensible in terms of these triadic unities so correlated as to constitute a general unity. These unities are ideal in that there is no history so perfectly formed. There are two principal ways to define a thing: one is logical, the other is rhetorical. To define something in a logical fashion, we attempt to state its characteristics or properties with sufficient specificity so as to show how it is distinct from all other similar things. Such static definition is suited to a substance-based metaphysics. To define something in a rhetorical fashion, we attempt to state its genesis, to relate the narrative of its origin and development. Such dynamic definition is suited to a functional or process-based metaphysics. Both of these senses of definition can be made to work together in the sense that Aristotle joins rhetoric and dialectic as strophe and antistrophe in the first sentence of the Rhetoric (1354a). A distinction can be made between what a nation is and what it is not, but Vico intends a play on the word nazione, as implying “birth,” nato. A nation must be understood as something having a life, and this life follows a course it has in common with other nations. Metaphysically, the new science implies a view that all things have an inside, an internal order that is self-developed but that follows a universal pattern that makes it part of a world. Inside each nation is a corso that is particular to it in its details, but in its general form it develops in phases that are common to it and other nations. The partitio or sequence of eleven triads contains three sets of three triads, introduced by a triad of three kinds of natures and concluded by three sects of times. Intervening between these opening and closing triads are: (1) three triads of kinds of customs, natural laws, and governments; (2) three triads of kinds of languages, characters, and jurisprudence; and (3) three triads of kinds of authority, reason, and judgments. The three kinds of natures designate three ways of being human, and the three sects of times designate three ways of being in history. The intervening triads designate orders of civil things that arise from the kinds of human natures and that generate from these the ways of living in history that are the three sects of times.

Three Kinds of Natures The first manifestation of human nature is the exercise of the poetic power of imagination (fantasia) to form the world as full of gods. In this way the

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religion of the theological poets is created. These were not the true gods, nor was this the true religion, because the gods were simply the projections of the passions of these first humans. But it was from these origins that the true religion evolved. This religious nature was succeeded by heroic nature. The heroes believed themselves to be of divine origin, to be sons of Jove. In this way they acquired a natural ability and became princes of the human race. Those who did not become heroes remained bestial, and sought the protection of the heroes. From these two types arose the class of nobles and that of plebeians. The heroic nature was succeeded by the third or fully human nature. This nature is centered on the intellect—the divine element in the human. Human conduct is guided by conscience, reason, and duty. These three natures correspond to the well-known Platonic conception of three parts or aspects of the psyche or soul—appetite, will, and intellect. The appetites, and the passions connected to them, have a basis in the body. The will corresponds to the heroic nature. The will controls and commands the passions and directs the actions they motivate. The intellect is the seat of reason. Reason directs the will and employs it as the moderating agency with the passions and bodily urges. Each of Vico’s three natures is human, but to allow the appetites and passions to dominate is to be less than what is distinctly human in the human. The will is also reductive because it overcomes the function of the intellect. The intellect is what is unique to human being. In the Platonic conception the just soul creates a harmony among the three, while at the same time keeping each in proportion to the others at the direction of the intellect. Vico enlarges each of these three parts of the soul into a nature that represents a stage in the development of human society. This historical enlargement is Vico’s version of the Platonic doctrine of the state as the individual writ large, in the Republic.

Three Kinds of Customs Vico says each of the three arise from the three natures. The first customs were the result of the pious response the first humans or giants have to the appearance of Jove. These customs are presented and preserved in the myths of the theological poets. Vico’s example is the tale of Deucalion and Pyrrha, his wife, who, in front of the temple of divine justice on Mount Parnassus, make the stones before their feet into men. Deucalion and Pyrrha embody the custom of marriage, one of Vico’s principles of humanity, and their turning the stones into men symbolizes the discipline of household economy as the basis of the families (79). The second kind of customs, Vico says, were “choleric and punctilious, like those related of Achilles” (920). The hero is careful to observe the precise

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rules of proper conduct. The hero is virtuous in this sense, not in the Socratic sense of contemplating the cardinal virtues as guides to how to act in accordance with human nature, or in the sense of pursuit of the Aristotelian mean as the midpoint between two extremes of any given virtue. The heroic sense of virtue is “punctilious” (puntigliosi), that is, the hero pays strict attention to details of conduct and ceremony in any situation. The hero is meticulous in this respect. Vico explains this in reference to Achilles’ actions in relation to his contest with Hector. Although Achilles’ temperament is choleric, he channels his rage so that he will act honorably even in his personal grievance with Agamemnon. Vico speaks of “the virtue of punctiliousness, on which the duelists of the returned barbarian times based their entire morality, and which gave rise to the proud laws, the lofty duties, and the vindictive satisfactions of the knights-errant of whom the romances sing” (667). Achilles’ battle with Hector may be seen as the primordial model of the duel. Vico says the third type of custom is based on duty and taught to everyone as appealing to each person’s sense of civil duty. The sense of duty Vico is presupposing recalls the principle of decorum in Cicero’s De officiis. Duty is based on what is right and reasonable. Cicero claims he is not seeking a speculative notion of the good, as in Greek philosophy, but a sense of the good in the way that it can be found in the practice of human affairs. This concept of civil duty is in accord with the claim that Roman law, as gathered in the Digest and Institutes, is a perfect instruction for the individual in civil wisdom—that Roman iurisprudentia is the realization of what is sought through inquiry in Greek philosophia.

Three Kinds of Natural Law Vico’s term “natural law” (diritto naturale) is a modification of the conception of ius naturale in the first book of the Digest. In Roman law, ius naturale is what is in accordance with nature and shared by human beings and all other animals. Marriage is the example the Digest gives for natural law, in that it is based on the act of procreation and rearing of offspring, in which both animals and humans engage. This view of natural law differs from the modern conception of natural rights that are God-given, inalienable, based directly on reason, and stand above any system of law. (Book 1.11 of the Digest does suggest something of this philosophical sense of natural law in claiming that what is always fair and good is the meaning of natural law.) Vico says that the first form of natural law was divine in that it was equated with the rule of the gods. The second form was heroic, which was a law (diritto) of force. Vico says: “This law of force is the law of Achilles,

Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/suss/detail.action?docID=4412740. Created from suss on 2021-02-14 21:00:44.

THREEFOL D STR U C T U RE OF THE CO U RSE OF THE NATIONS      199

who referred every right [ragione] to the tip of his spear” (923). Vico repeats his often-made claim that religion originally tames the ferocious nature of the first peoples because through religion, as providence ordains, they subject themselves to divine will, which they establish by means of divination. It is only religion as a social force at any point in a nation’s course that has the power to control the passions. The heroes replace divine authority with their power and thus rule in terms of it. The third natural law is fully human law, based on reason. This is natural law in the sense that it is an extension of the power distinctive of human nature into law.

Three Kinds of Governments From the three kinds of natural law come three kinds of governments—divine, heroic, and human. In the first, all are subjected to divine will of the gods and ruled by those fathers of families who can take the auspices. In the second, the fathers are succeeded by the heroes, who become a class of nobles and who claim a divine origin. These nobles, or Quirites among the Romans, ascribe civil rights only to themselves. They rule over the plebeians, who are regarded as having only bestial origins and who enjoy natural liberty, that is, the pursuit of appetites. The heroes function as an aristocracy, pursuing their own conceptions of virtue and honor. In the third, social equality is instituted, in which all are citizens commanding popular liberty under monarchies, which have the force of arms reserved only to themselves.

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Three Kinds of Languages Vico conceives language in the broadest possible sense—to include bodily gestures, ceremonies, blazonings, emblems, and speech, first formed by interjections and later connected to grammatical structure and the letters of alphabets. The first mode of communication was in terms of mute acts, which became the basis of ceremonies, on which religion depends. The physical act of mancipation of the clients, to cultivate the lands of the nobles in which they were nexi, or tied to, their condition, became the basis of the symbolism of the knot, involved in any transaction within Roman law, known as the actus legitimi (558). Mute speech that is naturally connected to the objects and events meant gives way to the world of heroic symbols that are typical of military insignia and family coats of arms. These are devices that, although mute, contain contrived meanings. Finally, added to ceremonies and emblematic devices, is articulate speech, through which abstract meanings are conveyed. This third

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kind of language allows for the addition of liturgy to ceremony and learned mottos to emblems (484).

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Three Kinds of Characters The three kinds of characters have been discussed at length in relation to poetic wisdom. Vico has two kinds of imaginative universals, in which particulars function as universals. The first kind is represented by Jove and Juno, which are imaginative genera, “as to Jove everything concerning the auspices, to Juno everything touching marriage, and so on” (933). These imaginative universals are those on which the nations themselves come into existence. The second kind is represented by Achilles and Ulysses, which are imaginative genera of virtues, “as to Achilles all the deeds of valiant fighters and to Ulysses all the devices of clever men” (934). The third kind of character arises when the mind is able to abstract forms and properties from particulars to create intelligible universals, “which prepared the way for the philosophers, from whom the authors of the New Comedy, which came from the most human times of Greece, took the intelligible genera of human customs and portrayed them in their comedies” (934). The thought-form of these intelligible genera finds expression in vulgar languages. These “are composed of words, which are genera, as it were, of the particulars previously employed by the heroic languages” (935). The heroic expression “The blood boils in my heart” is replaced in vulgar language with the statement “I am angry.” Instead of calling a valiant fighter Achilles, in vulgar speech he can be described as having the virtue of courage. Instead of calling a clever man Ulysses, he can be said to be prudent. This vulgar, abstract mode of speech is required for free peoples to have sovereignty over their laws. The laws, like such language and intelligible characters, carry universal meanings that stand apart from the particulars they order.

Three Kinds of Jurisprudence Vico says there are three kinds of “jurisprudence or wisdom” (937). In equating jurisprudence with wisdom (sapienza), Vico is conceiving jurisprudence as a kind of prudence (phrone¯sis, prudentia) or practical wisdom. Jurisprudence is civil wisdom. He says the first kind of jurisprudence was “a divine wisdom [una sapienza divina]” (938). This was a science of divination practiced by the first sages of the gentile world, who were also the first theological poets. By taking auspices these sages dictated the first standards

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of civil conduct, which later survived in the solemnity of religious or divine ceremonies among the Romans. The second jurisprudence or civil wisdom was heroic, which depended on “taking precautions by the use of proper words” (939). The wisdom of the heroes, such as that of Ulysses, achieved their ends by speaking adroitly and employing a propriety of words. Although Vico does not offer this as an example, he might have in mind Ulysses’ clever and precise speech by which he and the remainder of his men escaped the Cyclops. Vico could expect his readers to recall the scene in the ninth book of the Odyssey, in which the Cyclops, Polyphemus, asks Odysseus what his name is. Odysseus replies that his name is Nobody (Greek outis, formed from ou tis, “not anybody”). When Polyphemus wakes and realizes Odysseus has blinded his single eye, his neighbor Cyclopes hear his cry, and call from their caves, asking what has happened. Polyphemus’s famous reply is: “Nobody’s killing me,” causing the other Cyclopes to conclude that he is alone and not being attacked by any mortal. Homer, in fact, engages in a further wordplay—in that the neighboring Cyclopes do not use ou tis but a different form for “no one” or “not anyone”—me¯ tis, which sounds exactly like me¯tis—a key word that expresses the primary characteristics of Odysseus: craft and cunning in both his actions and his words. The heroic precision in speech, Vico says, survived in the reputation the Roman jurisconsults had for advising their clients on how to speak with caution in the law courts. The punctiliousness observed by the heroes in their actions that Vico cites in his remarks on heroic custom (920) is also characteristic of their practical and wise use of words. The third jurisprudence is human. It “looks to the truth of the facts themselves and benignly bends the rule of law to all the requirements of the equity of causes” (940). Divine and heroic jurisprudence, Vico says, were centered in the certain (il certo). The certain depends on choice in a particular situation. Prudence is to deal with the resolution of each particular situation in its own terms, as Ulysses does. Human jurisprudence, Vico says, “looked to the true [il vero]” (941); that is, practical wisdom of the third kind is the application of universal principles to a particular case. From this equitable sense of the law or jurisprudence the philosophers emerged (327). The philosophers pursue the universals or the trues of human nature that are writ large in the course of the nations.

Three Kinds of Authority These three kinds of jurisprudence are assisted by three kinds of authority—divine, heroic, and human; the divine authority of the auspices

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of the fathers of the families, the force and words of the heroes, and the republics and monarchies of purely human society. Vico applies these three kinds of authority to the three sorts of authority appertaining to senates in the development of Roman law. The first authority in this development was that of property ownership, which Vico says was always called auctoritas in the Law of the Twelve Tables. Vico may have in mind table 6 of the Twelve Tables, which concerns possession of property, or usucapion in Roman law—a mode of acquiring title to property by uninterrupted possession of it for a definite period, varying in length, depending on whether it was moveable or immoveable. The words usus auctoritas are used (T.T. 6.3). Also, an action to be brought forth in regard to the transfer of property is termed an actio auctoritatis. This first authority was divine in its origin because it was believed that everything belonged to the gods. This divine authority was followed by the authority of the senates of heroic aristocracies. This authority gave way to the authority of the senate acting the role of guardianship of the people—a tutorial authority (auctoritas tutorum)—and this guardianship of popular liberty gave way to monarchy. The result was a third kind of authority, in which the jurisconsults were said to be auctores. This third or human authority was “based on the trust placed in persons of experience, of singular prudence in practical matters, and of sublime wisdom in intellectual matters” (942).

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Three Kinds of Reason The three kinds of reason are divine, state, and natural. Vico’s term is ragione, which equates with the English word “reason” but also involves a play on its further meaning, in Italian, of right or just in a legal sense. Thus ragione can be extended to mean diritto, giustizia, or a causa giusta (right [ius], justice, or just cause). What is giusto is what is right. Thus reason is tied to a sense of authority. Reason is not here discussed as a faculty of scientific inquiry or abstract thought. Vico says: “In God who is all reason, reason and authority are the same thing” (948). He says human beings understand divine reason only to the extent it has been revealed to them. The Hebrews have a direct grasp of divine reason, which was revealed to them first, and to the Christians second. This revelation can be through the internal speech of the human mind as derived from the divine mind of God or it can be through external forms, such as the speech of the Hebrew prophets and, for the Christians, through the speech of Jesus to the apostles. Originally the gentile nations grasped divine reason only through the auspices and the oracles, that is, by reading

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the corporeal signs supposed to come from the gods, accessed by the fathers of the first families. Vico says, “The second was reason of state called by the Romans civilis aequitas, which Ulpian defined for us as not naturally known to all men but only to the few experts in government who are able to discern what is necessary for the preservation of mankind” (949). The heroes naturally looked to civil equity and they formulated laws in their senates that benefited themselves but that also provided social order for those under them. In accord with their sense of propriety, the heroes were careful of the words in which these laws were expressed, even though they may have been severe, harsh, and cruel. Vico says: “Thus civil equity naturally subordinated everything to that law, queen of all others, conceived by Cicero with a gravity adequate to the matter: Suprema lex populi salus esto (‘The safety of the people shall be the supreme law’)” (950). This principle, for Cicero, is to direct the actions of “two magistrates with royal powers. . . . They shall be subject to no one” (Leg. 3.3.8). This power is predicated on a concern for the public good, such that the heroes saw their private interests as tied to the public interest. Vico says: “Hence naturally as magnanimous men they defended the public good, which is that of the state, and as wise men they gave counsel on affairs of state” (950). This connection between the heroes and the state is very close to Plato’s principle, in the Republic, that the state is the individual writ large. Vico says that in this second form of right or the reason of the state the subjects are commanded to pursue their own private interests and to leave the public interest to the heroes or prince. In the third kind of reason or right, the concerns that occupy the ordinary individuals’ “love of ease, tenderness toward children, love of women, and desire of life” become the concerns of the state. These concerns recall those of the craftsmen and farmers of Plato’s Republic, who are governed by the lesser virtues rather than the cardinal virtues of wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice that guide the guardian class. In this third kind of reason the attention of the populace is directed to the smallest details of their lives, in an effort to bring their concerns with them to an equality with those of others. Vico says: “This is the aequum bonum considered by the third kind of reason to be discussed here, namely, natural reason, which is called aequitas naturalis by the jurisconsults” (951). This is the only reason of which the multitudes are capable. It is natural reason in the sense that the Digest, as mentioned earlier, understands natural law, or ius naturale, as that which is to some extent shared by humans with other animals. The state here is to guarantee a ­common denominator among citizens; it is not to reach out to the standard of excellence present in the heroic virtues.

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Three Kinds of Judgments On the basis of these three kinds of reasons or rights, three kinds of j­ udgments can be made: divine, ordinary, and human. Judgments (giudizi) here have the sense of ways of settling disputes; they are judgments in a protolegal or legal sense. These are not judgments in a scientific or epistemological sense, that is, they are not conclusions that are drawn on the basis of inquiry into the nature of things for the sake of advancing human knowledge and satisfying our desire to know. In the first kind of judgments there were no civil authorities to which one could appeal a wrong. Thus the fathers of the first families took their grievances directly to the gods, to bear witness to the justice of their cause. Vico says: “Such accusations and defenses were the world’s first orations, in the primary and proper sense of that word, and oratio continued to be used in Latin for accusation or defense” (955). Appeals to the gods are the origin of ars oratoria, or rhetorical speech, in which any later court case is pursued and decided. The gods sit as judges, and the person who can give the best divinatory interpretation of what is in accord with the heavenly order of the gods prevails. Vico says: “From the practice of these judgments in private affairs, the peoples went forth to wage wars which were called pure and pious, pura et pia bella, and they waged them pro aris et focis, for altar and hearth, that is for civil affairs both public and private; for they regarded all human affairs as divine” (958). Vico claims that wars are extensions of the practice of duels and reprisals that were originally part of private disputes. Wars are duels between nations or peoples. He says, “Duels contained real judgments, which because they took place in re praesenti, in the presence of the disputed object, had no need of the formal denunciation” (961). Since there is no civil authority that presides over disputes among nations, disputes are ultimately resolvable by force. This sense of resolution by force, which is governed by certain customs and rules, is first learned by individuals engaging in duels. Divine judgments are followed by ordinary judgments (giudizi ordinari). These are “ordinary” judgments in a legal sense of an ordinary jurisdiction. Giurisdizione is a legal meaning of ordinario. The Italian as well as the English “jurisdiction” derive from Latin iurisdictio, from iuris (genitive of ius, “right, law”) joined with dictio, “the act of saying, delivery in public speaking.” Vico says the strictness of the wording that typifies ordinary judgments has its origins in the requirement that the sacred formulas of divine affairs and ceremonies cannot in any way be modified. He says this precision was carried over into the ancient precept in the law regarding legal actions, that “he

Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/suss/detail.action?docID=4412740. Created from suss on 2021-02-14 21:00:44.

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who drops a comma loses his case” (965). Ordinary judgments are those of the society of heroes who are punctilious in their actions and their words. The heroes, as Vico has said before, thought themselves gods and so functioned as if divine. This precision of speech was carried over into heroic oaths, which had a sacred quality. Vico says that this status of oaths is reflected in the Law of the Twelve Tables. It relates specifically to the transfer of property: “When party shall make bond or conveyance, according as he has named by word of mouth, so shall right hold good. (That is, according as he shall have pronounced or spoken them by name, so shall the right [ius] hold good)” (T.T. 6.1a). The terms used are mancipium (bond) and nexum (bound). Persons called nexi were debtors who were held in mancipatio as bondsmen to their creditors. Vico describes, then, how the need for the precise use of language in the law derives from the production of divine judgments as transformed into ordinary judgments. He concludes: “The strict law observed in words, which is properly the fas gentium [divine law or immutable natural law of the gentes], is as natural in barbarous times as that benign law is in human times which is measured by the equal utility of causes, which should properly be called fas naturae, the immutable law of the rational humanity, which is the true and proper nature of man” (973). The third kind of judgments, human judgments, are all extraordinary (straordinari). These judgments are extra-ordinary, or extra ordinem. Vico says: “In these [judgments] the governing consideration is the truth of the facts, to which, according to the dictates of conscience, the laws benignly give aid when needed in everything demanded by the equal utility of causes” (974). Judgments in this sense bring the generality of the laws to bear on the facts or certains of a case. The certain, then, is part of the true. This is in contrast to the laws of the age of heroes, in which judgments are ordinary in the sense of general and which are not adjusted in terms of particulars or interpreted in terms of precedent cases. Their truth is in the precision and inalterability of their wording, which is not modifiable in meaning in relation to the truth of the facts.

Three Sects of Times The three sects of times are religious, punctilious, and civil. Setta in Italian, as “sect” in English, derives from Latin secta, from sequi, “to follow,” and refers to a way of life, school of thought, or class of persons. A religious way of life is characteristic of the age of gods and a dedication to codes of honor and oaths is characteristic of the punctilious way of life of the age of heroes.

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A civil way of life, Vico says, corresponds in Roman jurisprudence with the time of popular liberty. Civil life is one of equity, openness, and generosity. Vico says that the jurisconsults in Roman law justify their views as to what is just by appealing to the way of life of their own times. In the third age this is as true as in the two earlier ages. To conclude his remarks on these sects of times, Vico quotes from Tacitus’s Germania, a quotation that likely leaves the reader puzzled: “For the customs of the age [secolo] are the school of princes, to use the term applied by Tacitus to the decayed sect [setta] of his own times [tempi], where he says, Corrumpere et corrumpi seculum vocatur—they call it the spirit of the age to seduce and be seduced—or, as we would now say, the ‘fashion’ [‘moda’]” (979).1 Tacitus is describing the life and customs of the tribes of Germany, which are in moral contrast with his own age. He wrote: “No one laughs at vice there; no one calls seduction, suffered or wrought, the spirit of the age [nemo enim illic vitia ridet, nec corrumpere et corrumpi saeculum vocatur]” (19). In describing the details of Germanic chastity and married life—the relations of husband and wife, the rearing of children, and so on, Tacitus says that “good habits have more force with them than good laws elsewhere” (19). Vico has taken the line of Tacitus out of context but he has not distorted it, as he takes it to mean that Tacitus would by implication apply the claim concerning seduction to his own time. Throughout his presentation of these triadic unities Vico generally characterizes the third in irenic terms. His unexpected introduction and interpretation of this nonirenic line from Tacitus goes together with the “barbarism of reflection” that he describes as characterizing the third age, in the conclusion of the work (1106). With his series of triads, Vico has completed the partitio of his subject matter and has presented the ideal eternal history so that the reader can comprehend it and hold it in memory. In his extended oration of the New Science itself he now turns to the phase of confirmation, interwoven with amplification. There are two ways to convince the reader of what has been put forth—to offer proofs that confirm it by appeal to the intellect or to amplify what is said by expressing aspects of the subject that appeal to the spirit (animus). Vico says in his Institutes: “Thus amplification differs from argumentation because amplification wins credibility by arousing the spirit in addition.”2 Longinus says: “To give a rough definition, amplification consists in accumulating all the aspects and topics inherent in the subject and thus strengthening the argument by dwelling upon it. Therein it differs from proof, which demonstrates the required point” (Subl. 12). Vico concludes book 4 with a section titled “Other Proofs Drawn from the Properties of the Heroic Aristocracies,” followed by another titled “Final

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Proofs to Confirm the Course of Nations.” Vico intends to couple these proofs with amplification by calling his readers’ attention to the greatness of Roman history and Roman law, thus stirring the readers’ spirit in contrast to the corruption of our own time, as characterized through the words of Tacitus. Regarding the first of these two sections, Vico says that although we, as readers, should already have constrained our minds to receive the truth of the principles of the new science as applied to the structure of ideal eternal history, we can see even their further implications. Thus, “in order to leave no room for doubt, we shall add the explanation of other civil phenomena which can be explained only by the discovery, made above, of the heroic republics” (980). He explains that the two greatest properties or achievements of the heroic aristocracies are, first, the guarding of the confines: “for it was necessary to set up boundaries to the fields” (982). This serves to eliminate the bestial wanderings and promiscuity of those who were not part of the original founding families, from which came cities and, finally, nations. The second is the guarding of the civil customs that derive from the principles of humanity, such as marriage, that began from Juno, the goddess of solemn matrimony (985). The guarding of these civil matters or customs “carries with it that of the magistracies and priesthoods, and hence also that of the laws and of the science of their interpretation” (999). Vico’s concern is to show how the heroic age in the course of a nation is pivotal. The heroes, in their dedication to strict actions and strict speech, preserve what is begun in the divine age of the founding of the first families so that it can be transmitted to the age of men. His model is Rome, such that, if Roman history, politics, and customs can be understood by these principles, then any nation can be so understood. An example of how Vico amplifies his arguments is his claim concerning the greatness of Roman civilization. It is great because of its adherence to laws and to the guidance of the Law of the Twelve Tables from which it never departs. He says: “Thus the cause which produced among the Romans the wisest jurisprudence in the world is the same that made the Roman Empire the greatest in the world” (1003). The reader’s spirit is stirred to see into the inner form of Rome’s greatness and realize how its heroism transferred the speculative civil wisdom sought in the philosophia of the Greeks into the civil wisdom of iurisprudentia of the Romans, from which came all of the civilization of Italy and the Western world. The central and most original point that Vico makes concerning Roman law in the section of “final proofs” is that “all ancient Roman law was a serious poem [seriosa poema], represented by the Romans in the forum, and ancient jurisprudence was a severe poetry [severa poesia]” (1037; see also UL,

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bk. 1, chap. 182, and FNS 365). It is thought that human law generally, and Roman law in particular, arose as custom that was later codified. Custom was ius non scriptum—law that was not written down. Custom in this regard consisted of practices so firmly established that they had obligatory power over civil matters. This view of the origin of Roman law is affirmed, for example, in Andrew Borkowski’s Textbook on Roman Law: “There was no doubt that Roman law was almost entirely customary in origin.”3 Vico’s view that Roman law was first a serious poem does not go against the conception of its origin in custom. It answers the question of how such custom was formulated. It took the shape of fables. Vico’s evidence for this claim is the remark in the Institutes of Justinian concerning “the fables of ancient law—antiqui iuris fabulas” (1037). The Institutes of Justinian is the textbook, a condensation of the Digest, to be used by law students. The sentence in the Institutes to which Vico refers is: “Our intention was to give you an elementary framework, a cradle of the law, not based on obscure old stories [non ab antiquis fabulis discere] but illuminated by the light of our imperial splendor, and to ensure that you hear and adopt nothing useless or out of place but only the true principles at the heart of the subject” (pr. 3). As Vico notes, this statement is derisive of these fables, but it nonetheless cites their existence. The thought-form of the fables is explained in Vico’s logic of imaginative universals or poetic characters in the Poetic Wisdom. Thus the principles of the new science can truly illuminate the origin of law. Ancient jurisprudence was a “severe poetry” because the fables were the means for the interpretation of the customs. Vico says: “The founders of Roman law, at a time when they could not understand intelligible universals, fashioned imaginative universals. And just as the poets later by art brought personages and masks onto the stage, so these men by nature had previously brought the aforesaid names and persons into the forum” (1033). In the First New Science Vico says, “Ancient Roman law was a serious, dramatic poem” (FNS 365). The hearing of cases in law is a form of drama, and its origins are in the actions of the early families in public places. Vico says: “There appeared in the marketplace [piazza] as many masks as there were persons (for persona properly means simply a mask) or as there were names” (1033). In the times of mute speech, as we know from Poetic Wisdom, the families used coats of arms to identify themselves. These were personae, or masks of the fathers of families, behind which were all of his children and servants, the total of his household. This world of fables and emblems represents and governs the customs that later became laws. Vico reiterates his point that “laws certainly came first and philosophies later” (1040). He says that the

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THREEFOL D STR U C T U RE OF THE CO U RSE OF THE NATIONS      209

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Athenian citizens must have come to the idea of intelligible universals by observing the enactment of laws because the law states something universal that is applied to a particular case. From the observation of legal process, then, “Socrates began to adumbrate intelligible genera or abstract universals by induction; that is, by collecting uniform particulars which go to make up a genus of that in respect of which the particulars are uniform among themselves” (1040). The gist of these final proofs is to show how there is a jurisprudence of the human race such that even law itself derives from a poetic wisdom, as do all other activities and thoughts on which the life of the nations is based in the course and recourse of ideal eternal history.

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Ch ap ter 18

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Recourse of the Nations

Having completed the confirmation or proofs for his ideal eternal history Vico turns to the next-to-last part of his oration that is the New Science—the confutation. In forensic oration the confutation is intended to refute conclusively the basis of the opponent’s case. Vico’s principal opponent throughout the New Science is seventeenth-century natural-law theory, as represented by its three princes—Grotius, Pufendorf, and Selden. In the earlier part of the work Vico periodically criticizes their views. In his foregoing presentation of the triads and proofs he puts these criticisms aside, and now, in this brief book 5, he does not mention these figures by name. But the reader may recall the shades of these figures and imagine they have re-presented their case. As Bergin and Fisch note in their introduction, the modern form of Vico’s conceit of scholars is seventeenth-century natural-law theory.1 Vico says: “The three princes of this doctrine, Hugo Grotius, John Selden, and Samuel Pufendorf, should have taken their start from the beginnings of the gentes, where their subject matter begins [as does the new science (314)]. But all three of them err together in this respect, by beginning in the middle; that is, with the latest times of the civilized nations (and thus of men enlightened by fully developed natural reason), from which the philosophers emerged and rose to meditation of a perfect idea of justice” (394). No matter how barbaric they describe the state of nature, these natural-law theorists ascribe 210

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RECO U RSE OF THE NATIONS      211

to men in this state the ability to recognize the dictates of natural reason and to form society in terms of these rational views. These natural-law theorists or their later followers could argue that in his account of the course the nations originally run, Vico has only given a more genetic description of the state of nature than they have. They could then argue that, once the nations have passed beyond their original barbarity, as described by Vico, civil society is in fact guided by reason, and that there is no transitional age of heroes. However generated, they could argue, once the nations emerge from their original state they progress as though society has behind it a social contract or covenant. Vico may have shown that the gentes are not originally capable of rational thought, but this can be considered only a more elaborate view of the state of nature than that held by the natural-law theorists. The ultimate basis of Vico’s confutation is that the natural-law theorists omit not only the age of heroes but also the presence of divine providence. Divine providence has directed the course of the nations and it then directs their recourse. As divine providence governs the first barbarism, so it governs the second. The natural-law theorists do not understand the cyclic nature of history. They think that society once formed by an act of natural reason continues to perfect itself, a view that later in the eighteenth century becomes a doctrine of progress in the thought of the philosophes and encyclopedists. If Vico can demonstrate that the modern nations rest on a recourse ordained by divine providence, the natural-law theorists are wrong, not only concerning the origin of the world of nations; they are also wrong concerning the development of the modern world of nations. In axiom 104 Vico says that free choice is aided naturally by God in His providence: “This is what Grotius, Selden, and Pufendorf should have founded their systems upon before everything else, in agreement with the Roman jurisconsults who define the natural law of the gentes as having been instituted by divine providence” (310). In his confutation of the recourse of the nations, Vico is not derisive of the natural-law theorists’ views. In his Institutes he says, of confutation in forensic oration: “I would therefore rather wish that the adversary be reproached more for an oration which is excellent and carefully worked out [exquisita et elaborata oratio] than for one which is disorganized and unadorned [incondita et inornata oratio].”2 It should be remembered that Grotius is the fourth of Vico’s “four authors,” as he reports in his autobiography, and that at one time he began drafting a commentary on Grotius’s De Jure Belli ac Pacis (A 154–55). When Vico originally wrote the new science as the “Scienza nuova in forma negativa,” it was likely an extended confutation with Grotius, Pufendorf, and Selden.

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By ricorso, Vico means literally the retracing of the same three ages of the corso in the same order (41). Ricorso also has the legal sense of a retrial. Vico says, in this fifth book of the New Science: “We shall bring more light to bear on the period of the second barbarism, which has remained darker than that of the first” (1046). The “Dark Ages” is the term with which fifteenth- and sixteenth-century thinkers characterized the Middle Ages—those between their own day and antiquity. Coming after Dante, “the Tuscan Homer” (786), the age of Renaissance humanism saw itself as an age of light, youth, vigor, and innovation based on a recapturing of the greatness of antiquity. A ricorso, like a retrial, is not a simple repetition of what went before. A corso is the beginning of a nation from a state of the “barbarism of sense” that enacts the Jove-experience that is at the beginning of the gentile nations, following the drying out of the world from the universal flood. The first age of the ricorso is marked by a return to religion, as Vico says, “when, working in superhuman ways, God had revealed and confirmed the truth of the Christian religion by opposing the virtue of the martyrs to the power of Rome. . . . Following this eternal counsel, he brought back the truly divine times, in which Catholic kings everywhere, in order to defend the Christian religion, of which they are the protectors, donned the dalmatics of deacons and consecrated their royal persons (whence they preserve the Sacred Royal Majesty)” (1047–48). Thus the first age of the ricorso is an age returned by providence to religion. But in the place of the fathers of the families of the corso are the Catholic kings, who are the heroic fathers of the Church. Vico says there was a return to certain kinds of divine judgments and heroic raids and reprisals (1052–54). These heroic centers of power reinstituted the practice of asylums, like those of the ancient world (1056). This first age of the ricorso, then, is not the creation of religion as in the corso; it is the reestablishment of religion. This first age corresponds to the beginning of the heroic age of the corso. The ricorso is built on the memory of the corso, whereas in the original corso memory itself is brought into being as the giants commence the formation of gods within the immediacy of the flux of impressions, in which “every change of facial expression [is regarded] as a new face” (700). Vico intends the first age of the ricorso to correspond to “the fifth century onward, when so many barbarous nations began to inundate Europe and Asia and Africa as well” (1051). Vico, then, is characterizing the early Middle Ages, or the “Dark Ages,” within the Middle Ages generally. As Vico has reiterated in various places, religion is the only institution that can bring order into society when it is overcome by the ferocity of the passions and violent actions that are generated from them. He says:

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RECO U RSE OF THE NATIONS      213

“For everywhere violence, rapine, and murder were rampant, because of the extreme ferocity and savagery of these most barbarous centuries” (1056). As the fathers of the first families of the corso took into asylum the famuli, and ruled by divine authority and divine judgments, based on their knowledge of divination, so the churches became sanctuaries and protection was offered by ecclesiastical sovereigns. Vico says: “Hence we may assume that in all those unhappy centuries the nations had reverted to communicating with each other in a mute language” (1051). This mute language was not that of the “real words” of the earliest mentality of the corso, in which natural objects were used to convey meanings, along with simple mute gestures, such as the five “real words” used by Idanthyrsus in his message to Darius (435). The mute language of the ricorso was heroic in the sense of artificial or made devices. Vico says: “Because of this paucity of vulgar letters, there must everywhere have been a return to the hieroglyphic writing of family coats of arms, which, in order to give certainty to ownership, signified seignorial rights usually over houses, tombs, fields, and flocks” (1051). The early Middle Ages, which were quasi-heroic and correspond to the divine age of the corso, develop into the high to late Middle Ages of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Vico says, in the second section of book 5: “These divine times were followed by certain heroic times, in consequence of the return of a certain distinction between almost opposite natures, the heroic and the human” (1057). Unlike in the corso, in which the heroic age truly precedes the human age, in the ricorso the heroic age of the high Middle Ages has within it a rudimentary contrast with the human or third age that will follow it. Evidence for this presence of a concept of the human, Vico says, is “why in feudal terminology the rustic vassals, to Hotman’s surprise, are called homines, men” (1057). These vassals, although human, are under the baron of a fief ’s ownership and correspond to the clienteles in Roman history. Vico’s aim in this section is to draw parallels between ancient Roman law and feudal law. He pursues these correspondences in detail in order to confute any claim that might be made that modern states have come about by a unique course of history, different from ideal eternal history, that is, on the basis of natural reason rather than their development being determined by the aims of divine providence. Roman law arose through the phases natural to human law itself; thus it is the perfect model on which to comprehend this aspect of ideal eternal history. Vico says: “The term signori for the barons can only come from the Latin seniores, for of such elders the first public parliaments of the new realms of

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Europe must have been composed, just as Romulus had applied the term senatus to the public council, which he must naturally have composed of the older members of the nobility” (1062). Vico finds a counterpart of the first agrarian law instituted by Servius Tullius along with the first census (1065). He says, further, that the nexi that were freed by the Petelian Law (658) “correspond exactly to the vassals, who must at first have been called liege men as being bound (legati) by this knot” (1066). Vico says: “There was a return of mancipations, the vassal placing his hands between the hands of his lord to signify fealty and subjection” (1072). Vico presents an inventory of correspondences and parallels, a kind of tour de force of his case. He says that it is “from all these beautiful and elegant expressions of ancient Roman jurisprudence, with which the learned feudists do in fact mitigate and might even further mitigate the barbarousness of feudal doctrine” (1085). Vico says that Roman law was born of the fiefs of the first barbarism of Latium and these originated the first republics in the world. He is concerned to show that the feudal system of fiefs is in fact a recourse of those of the Romans. He concludes: “As we demonstrated this above in one of our chapters on the poetic politics of the first republics, so here in Book Five, in a demonstration promised in the Idea of the Work, we have seen that the kingdoms of modern Europe have their origins within the eternal nature of fiefs” (1085). Vico claims that the transition from this order of fiefs of the second or heroic age of the ricorso to that of the age of human government occurs through the opening of the schools of law in the universities of Italy of the high Middle Ages. He likely has in mind principally the medieval university of Bologna, which was famous for the teaching of law. The laws taught, as Vico says, were those in the Digest and Institutes of Justinian and the “laws therein [were] based on the natural law of human gentes” (1086). This teaching of Roman law would reinforce the distinction between canon and civil law and would provide a basis for the pursuit of rights and equity that are fostered by access to the authority of the law itself rather than to authority as promoted in heroic states. In the third section of book 5, Vico gives a brief final survey of the governance of the nations of the modern world. For the most part, these nations, especially those of Europe, have entered the third age of ideal eternal history. This third age is one of the decline of heroic rule and the appearance of popular liberty in republics. But these republics take the form of monarchies. Vico says: “Today a complete humanity seems to be spread abroad through all nations, for a few great monarchs rule over this world of peoples” (1089). There are still some barbarous peoples who are ruled by monarchs and who have persisted in vulgar wisdom. But also in this third age some aristocracies

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RECO U RSE OF THE NATIONS      215

of the heroic age persist. Vico warns that “the few remaining aristocratic republics must take infinite pains and shrewd and prudent measures to keep the multitude at the same time dutiful and content” (1087). He says that “in Europe today there are only five aristocracies: namely, Venice, Genoa, and Lucca in Italy, Ragusa in Dalmatia, and Nuremberg in Germany. Almost all of them have small territories” (1094). Because of the influence of Christianity Europe generally enjoys good government, as Vico says: “Christian Europe is everywhere radiant with such humanity that it abounds in all the good things that make for the happiness of human life, ministering to the comforts of the body as well as to the pleasures of mind and spirit” (1094). He concludes that the Christian religion is the best in the world because it unites revealed divine authority with reason. He says this reason is based on “the choicest doctrine of the philosophers and the most cultivated erudition of the philologists” (1094). Thus Vico’s method, on which the new science itself is founded—the union of philosophy and philology—is a manifestation of the sublimity of the Christian religion. In introducing his thesis of book 5 Vico says that it will show “how the Best and Greatest God has caused the counsels of his providence, by which he has conducted the human affairs of all nations, to serve the ineffable degrees of his grace” (1046). This declaration is close to that of the conclusion that Grotius states to his Law of War and Peace: “May the almighty then (who alone can do it) impress these maxims on the hearts of Christian powers; may he enlighten their minds with the knowledge of every right, divine and human, and inspire them with the constant and dutiful sense of their being the ministers of heaven, ordained to govern men; men, for whom, of all his creatures, God has the greatest regard and affection.”3 Grotius’s claim regarding God’s interest and regard for man is in accord with the Renaissance humanist tradition, which has its classic statement in Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man: “I have read in the records of the Arabians, reverend Fathers, that Abdala the Saracen, when questioned as to what on this stage of the world, as it were, could be seen most worthy of wonder replied: ‘There is nothing to be seen more wonderful than man.’ In agreement with this opinion is the saying of Hermes Trismegistus:‘A great miracle, Asclepius, is man.’ ”4 Vico’s conception of divine providence takes this Renaissance and seventeenth-century conception of the relation of the divine to the human a step further by placing it within history. Human beings exercise and come to know their divine origin and nature by their ability to make the things of the great city of the human race, but their making is subject to the principles of ideal eternal history, which are applied by providence.

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The question Vico leaves unanswered, and in fact unformulated, in his generation of the ricorso of the modern nations from the corso in which the ancient gentile nations of the Chronological Table come into existence, is this: What does the future hold for the nations or any given nation that, over centuries, comes to the end of the ricorso? Commentators on the New Science often use the expression corsi e ricorsi to characterize Vico’s conception of history, but Vico never uses these terms in the New Science in the plural. He never claims that any nation will undergo corsi e ricorsi. Corso can be used in the plural, corsi, in the sense that each of the ancient nations, which are the first gentile nations of the world, comes about through a corso of three ages. Thus there are multiple corsi because there are multiple nations. We may say the same concerning the ricorsi of the modern nations. Vico is clear that all nations live a life in history. Vico says that in accord with ideal history there are “eternal laws which are instanced by the deeds of all nations in their rise, progress, maturity, decadence, and dissolution” (1096). This statement of these phases of the life of any nation in history reflect the important axiom 66: “Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance” (241). A ricorso, like a corso, has a beginning and an end. Vico could answer the question of what lies at the end of a ricorso of a nation by saying it is in the hands of divine providence, and we can know only what divine providence has wrought in history to the present. We have no full knowledge of the ways or nature of God. Yet in his discussion of the method of the new science, Vico says the reader may establish the validity of ideal eternal history: “So far as he makes it for himself by that proof ‘it had, has, and will have to be’ ” (349). Like the singing of the Muses, the meditation and narration of the maker or re-maker of the new science should command a degree of divinatory power, reminiscent (and a rational transposition) of the science of divination of the founders of the first families. Vico might add, to the first possible answer, a second observation. Unless there is a universal, divinely caused, catastrophic event that destroys all the world of nations and reduces humanity itself to conditions analogous to the universal flood that would initiate a repeat of the corso, any ricorso of a given nation might be followed by another ricorso. It would not be a corso because the return to religion and the dark ages of the nation’s recovery would be predicated on some memory of the elements of the previous ricorso. On this view Vico’s dyad of corso and ricorso would in principle and perhaps in fact be followed by ricorsi (348, 1096). Thus we might speak not of corsi e ricorsi but of corso e ricorsi. More than this, I think, cannot be said.

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RECO U RSE OF THE NATIONS      217

A further question the reader may raise here, prior to Vico bringing the aspects and implications of his new science together in the conclusion, is: What, on Vico’s view, is the best form of government? No government masters the forces of history and transcends it as eternal, but for what might we wish now, living—with Vico—in the third age of the ricorso? As mentioned above, Vico warns the surviving aristocracies of the difficulties facing their continuance. The forces at work in ideal eternal history are against them: “From the brooding suspicions of aristocracies, through the turbulence of popular republics, nations come at last to rest under monarchies” (1025). Sweden, Denmark, Poland, and England are constitutional monarchies, but Vico says they seem to be administered as aristocracies: “But if the natural course of human civil affairs is not impeded in their case by extraordinary causes, they will arrive at perfect monarchies” (1092). Vico is not an opponent of monarchies, as he sees them as a means to modify the undisciplined tendencies of popular liberty, and he sees monarchy as an inevitable form of government in the third age of the ricorso. But he makes clear his preference for aristocracies. He speaks of the Swiss cantons and the united provinces of Holland, as well as the fact that Germany is composed of a system of free cities with sovereign princes (1092). These confederations of aristocratic governments, Vico says, are the last form of civil states: “We cannot conceive in civil nature a state superior to such aristocracies, this same form must have been the first, which, as we have shown by so many proofs in this work, was that of the aristocracies of the fathers, sovereign family kings, united in reigning orders in the first cities. For this is the nature of principles, that things begin and end in them” (1093). In these surviving aristocracies in the modern nations the beginnings (principi) of human government come full circle. This is Vico’s Platonism—of the rule of the best joined with the process of history. His advice to the monarchies that dominate this last age of the ricorso is to look to these aristocracies for guidance, and such surviving aristocracies can be comprehended as models of human government only if they are understood in terms of the new science, which shows how they are a ricorso of the origin of the gentile nations themselves. And ultimately we must look to the ideal of an eternal natural republic, as Vico claims in his conclusion.

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Pa rt S e ve n

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Conclusion of the Work

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Ch a p ter 19

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On an Eternal Natural Republic

Vico’s conclusion to the work is the peroration described in chapter 3 of this commentary. In accord with the principles of peroration, Vico first summarizes the essential points of the new science and then moves the reader’s emotions with the remarkable picture of a people who, through malgovernance, “are rotting in that ultimate civil disease” (1106). This is a state of the “barbarism of reflection” that infects Vico’s time as well as our own, because his time and ours is the same period of history. To conclude the work, Vico connects the first of his “four authors,” Plato, to the first principle of his new science, providence, and to the first requirement for attaining wisdom, piety. Although these three sources of Vico’s thought are present throughout the New Science, his treatment of them here causes us to think through the work in a new way. Plato and Neoplatonism are constant in the New Science, but Vico’s interpretation of Plato’s Republic in these final paragraphs is unexpected. Vico’s first sentence is: “Let us then conclude this work with Plato, who conceives a fourth kind of republic [una quarta spezie di Repubblica], in which men honest and decent would be supreme lords; this would be the true natural aristocracy” (1097). Battistini attributes the source of this sentence to Jean Bodin’s Six Books of the Republic (Six livres de la république, 1567) as it appeared in the Italian edition of Lorenzo Conti. Vico’s wording of this sentence is nearly the same as that of that edition. Bodin states: “All the ancients agree that 221

Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/suss/detail.action?docID=4412740. Created from suss on 2021-02-14 21:00:44.

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there are at least three types of republic. Some have added a fourth composed of a mixture of the other three. Plato added a fourth type, or rule of the wise. But this, properly speaking, is only the purest form that aristocracy can take. He did not accept a mixed state as a fourth type.”1 Plato’s fourth type is the basis for Vico’s ideal of “an eternal natural republic.” In his discussion of poetic wisdom Vico criticizes Bodin’s placement of aristocracies as the latest type of government in the development of political order. Bodin, Vico says, “falls into the common vulgar error of all preceding political theorists that monarchies came first, then tyrannies, then popular republics, and finally aristocracies” (663; see also 1009–1019). Vico holds that aristocracy is the first form of government of the gentile nations as ordained by providence and established by the rule of the fathers who founded the first families. These are the “men honest and decent,” the “supreme lords” that constitute the “true natural aristocracy.” Through piety to God, whom they perceive as Jove, the thundering sky, they form marriages, create lineages, bury their dead, cultivate the fields, and take the famuli under their protection. Puzzling is the claim that this Neoplatonic and distinctive Vichian version of aristocratic government corresponds to Plato’s fourth kind of government in the Republic. In the famous discussion of the decline of the state in the eighth book of Plato’s work, the fourth type of state is the worst. Glaucon, recalling their earlier discussion, speaks to Socrates: “ ‘I am eager myself to hear what four forms of government you meant.’ ‘There will be no difficulty about that,’ said Socrates. ‘For those I mean are precisely those that have names in common usage: that which the many praise, your Cretan and Spartan constitution [timocracy]; and the second in place and honour, that which is called oligarchy, a constitution teeming with many ills, and its sequent counterpart and opponent, democracy; and then the noble tyranny surpassing them all, the fourth and final malady of a state’ ” (544). The next major passage recalls that there is also another form of government, making a total of five: the rule of the best, or the aristocracy, that, when the ruling class becomes divided with itself, declines into a timocracy (545). In Vico’s account, the natural aristocracy of the fathers does not dissolve because of divisions arising among them. Instead they begin to govern their clients, the famuli, harshly, such that “when they had thus departed from the natural order, which is that of justice, their clients rise in mutiny against them” (1100). This establishes a pattern in which (in each of the three forms of government of Vico’s three ages) the government falls because the ruling class inevitably abuses its power to such a point that those who are ruled revolt. This dialectic of class struggle differs from that of Plato’s conception in the Republic that he puts in the form of a rhetorical question: “Or is this

Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/suss/detail.action?docID=4412740. Created from suss on 2021-02-14 21:00:44.

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ON AN ETERNAL NAT U RAL RE P U B LI C      223

the simple and unvarying rule, that in every form of government revolution takes its start from the ruling class itself, when dissension arises in that, but so long as it is at one with itself, however small it be, innovation is impossible?” (545d). Plato reasserts this point in the Laws: “Is the dissolution of a kingdom, or of any government that has ever yet been dissolved, caused by any other agency than that of the rulers themselves?” (683e). Vico puts the founders of the gentile nations in nearly the same position in relation to God as he claims true of the ancient Hebrews, at least that part of the offspring of Shem who remain pious and of normal stature and live as a nation in isolation from the gentile peoples, as discussed earlier in relation to poetic chronology (736). The offspring of the other sons of Noah and the impious offspring of Shem grow into the giants and disperse themselves throughout the great forest of the earth after the universal flood (373). From these giants originate those virtuous few who become the founders of the families. Although these fathers apprehend God through their senses, yet as something beyond them, they have an immediate, although momentary, pious relationship to God and so constitute themselves as a natural aristocracy. But as this apprehension of God’s presence wanes, these fathers take up divination and become subject to the providential process of ideal eternal history. The Hebrews prohibited divination (167–68) and thus maintained their direct relationship with their deity. The Hebrews preserve their memories and form of education from the beginning of the world (166) and thus would seem also to represent a natural and enduring aristocracy. The problem remains as to what Vico intends by speaking of a fourth kind of republic that is natural and eternal. Putting Plato’s distinctions aside, Vico may be understood to mean that outside of the three forms of government that correspond to those of the three ages of ideal eternal history, there is an eternal republic that overlays the world of the gentile nations as a whole: “This is the great city of the nations that was founded and governed by God” (1107). In Bodin’s thought this corresponds to the conception of a “Respublica mundana.”2 Without this absolute standard of a true, natural, and eternal governance of the world of nations, the sense of aristocratic government could not have been communicated by providence to the founders of the first gentile nations who stood as “supreme lords.” If we turn not to Plato’s Republic but to the Laws, we find a sense of a fourth kind of government that is to some extent analogous to this providential eternal natural republic. Plato says: “From the wandering course of our argument, and our excursion through various polities and settlements, we have now gained this much: we have discerned a first, a second and a third State [(1) single families autocratically governed; (2) collections of fami-

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lies under an “aristocracy” or monarchy; (3) cities with various individual constitutions], all, as we suppose, succeeding one another in the settlements which took place during vast ages of time. And now there has emerged this fourth State—or ‘nation,’ if you so prefer—which was once upon a time in course of establishment and is now established” (683a). By this fourth state Plato intends a league of cities composed of those found in the third form of the state, as described above. It is a short step conceptually from the idea of a nation of cities to a “great city of the nations” or the “great city of the human race.” Tyranny, the fourth defective form of state in Plato’s scheme in the Republic, has no clear counterpart in Vico’s three ages. The third age is a democracy that falls apart through its own pursuit of pure equality, but out of this chaos no Vichian version of a tyrannos emerges to seize office without legal justification and attempt to rule by absolute power, having likely attained this by a coup. Instead, on Vico’s account three possibilities arise to allay or resolve what he calls a “fall from a perfect liberty into the perfect tyranny of anarchy or the unchecked liberty of the free peoples, which is the worst of all tyrannies” (1102). Providence may allow a monarch to arise from within, with the ability to take the laws and customs in hand and regulate civil activity, bringing the people back to a proper sense of religion and natural liberty (1104). Or, failing this, providence may allow the nation to be conquered from without by a better nation, thus illustrating two principles: “First, that he who cannot govern himself must let himself be governed by another who can. Second, that the world is always governed by those who are naturally fittest” (1105). But failing either of these remedies, providence will bring the course of the nation’s life to an end; its way of life and civilization will fall to pieces. This third option is tied to Vico’s conception of barbarism. On Vico’s view there is no distinct stage of tyrannical government that intervenes between the dissolution of democracy and one of the three providential solutions. Democracy itself becomes a kind of collective tyranny. Battistini notes that in Vico’s opening sentence of the conclusion the expression “uomini onesti, e dabbene” (men honest and decent, that is, men who are good) corresponds to “kaloi kagathoi” as employed by Aristotle in the fourth book of the Politics in describing those types of persons required for government by aristocracy. Aristotle says “for it is right to apply the name ‘aristocracy’—‘government of the best’—only to the constitution of which the citizens are best in virtue absolutely and not merely good men in relation to some arbitrary standard, for under it alone the same person is a good man and a good citizen absolutely” (1293b).

Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/suss/detail.action?docID=4412740. Created from suss on 2021-02-14 21:00:44.

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ON AN ETERNAL NAT U RAL RE P U B LI C      225

In introducing this definition of the best, Aristotle says there are four forms of government: “(and the four meant are monarchy, oligarchy, democracy and fourth the form called aristocracy), but there is a fifth, entitled by the common name of them all (for it is called constitutional government), but as it does not often occur it is overlooked by those who try to enumerate the forms of constitution, and they use four names only (as does Plato) in the list of constitutions” (1293a). Aristotle’s reading of Plato places aristocracy as the fourth type of government, just as Vico does in glossing Bodin’s sentence. And it is Aristotle who is reflected in the phrase concerning honest and good or decent men. For Vico the absolute standard for such men is supplied by providence with the conception of an eternal natural republic. Vico’s designation of aristocracy as Plato’s fourth form of state remains puzzling, but Vico’s conception of aristocratic government does not. It accords with Plato’s rule of the best but connects this to providence and Vico’s narration of the beginnings of the gentile nations. Vico retells the Platonic decline of the state in accordance with his three ages of ideal eternal history: the rule of the fathers takes on the character of a timocracy as their rule of the famuli becomes more harsh; the ensuing revolt of the famuli results in the granting to them bonitary ownership of the lands under the first agrarian law; this timocratic rule passes on into the heroic rule of the nobles over the plebs, which breaks down under the plebs’s claim to be of equal human nature with the nobles and that they should enter into the civil affairs of the cities. In this way popular governments were born and the more industrious citizens acquired wealth and power in the manner of an oligarchy, but the desire for justice by the people commanded good laws for all. These conditions gave birth to philosophy as a means to make virtues understood, and from this need eloquence was born. As the popular republics became corrupt in their drive for perfect liberty without authority, the philosophers descended into skepticism accompanied by a false eloquence of upholding either side of a case indifferently; thus democracy itself became a kind of tyranny of the many (1098–1102). What does Vico mean by this final idea of the new science—“an eternal natural republic, the best of its kind, ordained by divine providence”? The counterpart to an eternal natural republic is the ideal eternal history. This history is eternal because its order of three ages is ordained and governed by divine providence as being the human condition in each nation. No nation transcends this history. It is Vico’s version of the Fall. Human beings live in the cycle of birth, development, maturity, decline, and fall, both as individuals living lives and collectively, as nations in history. If the new science had the power to transcend this pattern, it would take us to the end of history. Instead

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226    CON C LU SION

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we live in time. In time, events repeat themselves; there is no p­ rogression to an end. An eternal natural republic is an aristocracy, the best kind of government, based on divine providence. It is eternal because it is divine and it is natural because it is a reflection of the best in human nature. This aristocracy ordained by providence appears in the human world at its beginning, in the natural aristocracy of the founders of the first families of the gentile nations, derived from their apprehension of the divine as Jove, but it does not persist through time as the ages of ideal eternal history succeed themselves in the corso. Providence attempts to teach again its truth in the ricorso, but it too moves through the ages of ideal eternal history. Although the new science cannot overcome the Fall, it can hold forth, for those who can grasp its principles, what providence has wrought in history, and in so doing project the eternal natural republic that is ordained by providence outside of time as a standard by which to judge that which is in time. In his picture of the ultimate decline of a people Vico inverts the concept of aristocracy to obtain the concept of the barbarism of reflection (la barbarie della riflessione) (1106). Here the honest, decent, good men required for the rule of the best are inverted into men of “malicious wits” (degl’ingegni maliziosi). Such a person, “under soft words and embraces, plots against the life and fortune of friends and intimates [dentro le lusinghe, e gli abbracci insidia alla vita, e alle fortune de’ suoi confidenti, ed amici].” This barbarism of reflection, coming at the end of a nation’s course, Vico says, is more inhuman than the barbarism of sense (la barbarie del senso) that exists at its beginning. The latter is a “generous savagery” from which one could defend oneself or take flight, but the former is a “vile savagery.” It is vile because it is not violent; it corrupts the soul and destroys the relationships of trust on which human society depends. Violence in the barbarism of sense is motivated by a disturbance of the passions, but the barbarism of reflection is a corruption of the soul, of human reason, the very faculty that makes the human animal, human. Vico’s picture of a people “rotting in that ultimate civil disease” is comparable to the lowest level of Dante’s Inferno, which holds the sins of deceit and treachery. These are the most deadly sins because they destroy the relationships on which human society itself depends: treachery against guests and hosts, against relatives and friends. They are below the sins of the body such as lust and gluttony, and those of the passions such as anger and violence. Dante says: “For where the instrument of the mind is added to an evil will and to great power, men can make no defense against it [ché dove l’argomento de la mente s’aggiugne al mal volere e a la possa, nessun riparo vi può far la gente].”

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ON AN ETERNAL NAT U RAL RE P U B LI C      227

The “instrument of the mind” (l’argomento de la mente) is the faculty of the mind, that is, reason.3 In the Politics Aristotle says that the source of man’s chief good is his ability to form a partnership with others: “For as man is the best of the animals when perfected, so he is the worst of all when sundered from law and justice. . . . Hence when devoid of virtue man is the most unscrupulous and savage of animals” (1253a). Thomas Aquinas, in commenting on Aristotle’s description of human wickedness in the Nicomachean Ethics (1149a), states: “The unjust man is worse than injustice and the evil man worse than a brute because an evil man can do ten thousand times more harm than a beast by his reason which he can use to devise very diverse evils.”4 Life under the conditions of the barbarism of reflection is a sophisticated version of the Hobbesian first men—“solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes says this is “a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth only in Death.”5 Vico says: “Thus no matter how great the throng and press of their bodies, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since each follows his own pleasure or caprice” (1106). It is a life of Stoicism, “of deep solitude of spirit and will,” and of Epicureanism, with each following “his own pleasure or caprice.” Although all are living together, there is no partnership or true friendship. As Cicero says in his Republic: “And who does not believe that those are more alone who, though in the crowded forum, have no one with whom they care to talk” (1.17.28). Once in this condition, having not found a capable ruler from within and having not been conquered from without by a better nation, there is no way out. No means remain for the people to reform themselves. In the Discourses Machiavelli says, of this type of government: “That one is most unhappy that has departed farthest from good order; and that one is farthest from it which in its customs is wholly out of the straight road that might lead it to a perfect and true end, because for those in this class [of governments] it is almost impossible that through any happening they can set themselves right again.”6 Vico’s solution is that they can be set right only by providence bringing down their cities and returning the survivors to the forest again to experience the necessities of life and the truth of religion: “Providence decrees that, through obstinate factions and desperate civil wars, they shall turn their cities into forests and the forests into dens and lairs of men” (1106). In the barbarism of reflection the two civilizing passions are lost that originally moved the first protohumans to religion and to marriage—fear (spavento) and shame or modesty (pudore) through the Jove-experience.

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228    CON C LU SION

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The modern person has no fear of the unknown or transcendent and is shameless, wholly immodest. In modern society nearly anything can be said and done; there is no authority that governs beyond individual opinion. All natural curiosity (la naturale curiosità) and wonder (la maraviglia) (377, 34), on which imagination (fantasia) depends and which accompany the Jove-experience, are lost. Ingenuity (ingegno), which springs from them and is part of memory (819), preserving and forming tradition, in its modern barbaric form becomes simply wit, an instrument of cleverness and deceitful manipulation, eroding the social order. Vico uses the term “barbarism of reflection” only once in the New Science (1106). Why is this barbarism a barbarism of reflection? The answer lies in Vico’s modern representatives of Stoicism and Epicureanism—Descartes and Locke.7 Reflection is a modern term. There is no cognate term in ancient Greek for the modern sense of reflection as a philosophical and psychological term.8 “Image” in the sense of eidolon or eikon, and phantasia as a power associated with images, are subjects of discussion in Greek philosophy, as are the physical phenomena of mirrors, the reflection of light, and the visual perception of objects. But “reflection” meaning a process of the mind turning back on itself within itself is not to be found. In Latin, reflectere occurs as a term among classical authors, carrying meanings of “to bend back” (for example, parts of the body), “to turn around” (for example, to retrace one’s steps), “to turn away” (for example, the face or gaze), and “to turn back or reverse” (such as a person or a person’s mind) from a course of action.9 Cicero in De oratore speaks of the need for the orator to develop insight into human nature and motives, “whereby our souls are spurred on or turned back [quibus mentes aut incitantur, aut reflectuntur]” (1.53). In the tenth book of Virgil’s Aeneid, when Juno is appealing to Jupiter concerning the fate of Turnus, Jupiter suspects that she hopes the whole course of the war may also be altered. He informs her that her hope is idle. Juno departs straightaway, saying, “Thou, who canst, wouldst bend thy purposes to a better end! [In melius tua, qui potes, orsa reflectas]” (10.632). As a classical Latin term, reflectere carries no meaning of the mind thinking itself. The philosophical meaning of reflection enters modern languages from Late Latin. Reflexio is not used in the sense of “self-knowledge” prior to the thirteenth century.10 Descartes in the Discourse on Method (1637) is the historical source in French for the philosophical meaning of réflexion.11 In part five of the Discourse Descartes uses the phrase “après y avoir fait assez de réflexion” in claiming certain laws that God has established in nature have also been implanted in our minds: “After adequate reflection we cannot doubt that they are

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ON AN ETERNAL NAT U RAL RE P U B LI C      229

exactly observed in everything which exists or occurs in the world.”12 In his proof for the existence of God in the fourth part of the Discourse, Descartes employs the term reflection in arguing from doubt as part of the proof of his own existence to the existence of God: “reflecting upon the fact that I was doubting [faisant réflexion sur ce que je doutais].”13 Descartes proceeds to present his Dubito, ergo Deus est. In a letter written to Arnauld on July 29, 1648, answering objections raised to some of his views in the Principles, Descartes writes: “We make a distinction between direct and reflective thoughts corresponding to the distinction we make between direct and reflective vision, one depending on the first impact of the rays and the other on the second.” Descartes says the simple thoughts of infants are direct and not reflective, such as when they have feelings of pain or pleasure originating in the body. Reflection can occur in adults. “But when an adult feels something, and simultaneously perceives that he has not felt it before, I call this second perception reflection [hanc secundum perceptionem reflexionem appello], and attribute it to the intellect alone, in spite of its being so linked to sensation that the two occur together and appear to be indistinguishable from each other.”14 In this passage Descartes draws the analogy that is the basis of the modern conception of reflection. He compares the reflection of light in perception, the subject of optics, with reflection in the intellect, the subject of mental philosophy. As Descartes is the first to use reflection as a modern philosophical term in French, Locke is the first to do so in English. Although the term reflection exists as such in English before Locke, his An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) is the historical source for the use of reflection as a philosophical term in English. In describing the origin of our ideas, Locke distinguishes between those from external, sensible objects and those from the internal operations of our minds. He says, “These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can naturally have, do spring.”15 Locke says that one source of what is in the mind is what the senses convey to it from external objects (for example, yellow, white, hot, cold, soft, hard, bitter, sweet): “This great source of most of the ideas we have, depending wholly upon our senses, and derived by them to the understanding, I call sensation.”16 The other source of ideas is the experience our own mind has of its operations, which cannot be had from without (for example, perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing). Locke says: “This source of ideas every man has wholly in himself; and though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called internal sense. But as I call the other Sensation, so

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230    CON C LU SION

OF THE W OR K

I call this reflection, the ideas it affords being such only as the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations within itself.”17 All of the above, I think, is implied in the originality of Vico’s term “barbarism of reflection.”18 Vico grasped that modern philosophy, which is concerned above all with the theory of knowledge as connected to metaphysics, is based on the idea of reflection. Reflection is essentially a kind of wit or ingenuity regarding the relation of knower and known that turns philosophy toward ars critica and away from ars topica. It is the way of thinking that is pictured in the impresa of the New Science, discussed at the beginning of this commentary. Thought becomes a self-contained circle, moving from subject to object and back to subject. Although Vico, like us, lives in a modern world of reflective thinking, his method, unlike that of Descartes or Locke, is the ancient one of meditation that issues forth in narration, as he states when giving his proof of the new science (349). In the new science the thinker or new scientist is taken out of himself, out of the circle of reflection between knower and known, to meditate on the beyond, which is the Divine, and what it, as providence, has wrought in history. This puts Vico in the company of the ancients and lets him balance their wisdom of the True as the whole against the moderns with their concern to distinguish truth from error, certainty from probability, in relation to specific problems methodologically and critically approached. In so doing Vico is not an early postmodern; he is and remains a premodern who has seen through the veil of reflection on which modernity is based. Vico ends his conclusion with the reminder that both Bayle and Polybius before him are wrong in holding that society could exist without religion, the first of Vico’s principles of humanity. The new science has not only corrected the erroneous conceptions of the origin of society of the seventeenth-century natural-law theories, especially those of Grotius, Pufendorf, and Selden, it has, through the doctrine of providence, answered the Pyrrhonian skepticism of Bayle and shown that Polybius’s view of history, that religion could in principle be replaced by the rule of wise men, is misguided. His doctrine of providence has also shown us a way between the deaf necessity of Stoicism and the blind chance of Epicureanism. Although from axiom 31 on, to the end of the New Science, Vico accuses Polybius of holding that “if there were philosophers in the world there would be no need in the world of religions” (1110; see also 179), it should be noted that Polybius’s statement is not quite as clear-cut as Vico recalls. Although Polybius claims that superstition and religious convictions were important to the cohesion of the Roman state, and that such matters were clothed in pomp in both public and private life, he says: “My own opinion

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ON AN ETERNAL NAT U RAL RE P U B LI C      231

at least is that they have adopted this course for the sake of the common people. It is a course which perhaps would not have been necessary had it been possible to form a state composed of wise men, but as every multitude is fickle, full of lawless desires, unreasoned passion, and violent anger, the multitude must be held in by invisible terrors and suchlike pageantry” (6.56). The Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century would share this view with Polybius that, while they were questioning the truth of religion, they held it necessary for the governing of the masses. Vico says that “providence, through the order of civil things discussed in this work, makes itself palpable for us in these three feelings: the first, the wonder [maraviglia], the second, the veneration [venerazione], hitherto felt by all the learned for the matchless wisdom of the ancients, and the third, the ardent desire [ardente disiderio] with which they burned to seek and attain it” (1111). These sentiments were perverted by the conceits of nations and of scholars of the moderns. The sentiments of the ancients directed by attaching them to the infinite wisdom of God will carry the reader into the heart of the new science. Thus the wisdom the New Science teaches is knowledge of things divine and human. This wisdom is to have ever before us the ideal of an eternal natural republic. In the last sentence of the work, Vico connects piety to wisdom: “To sum up, from all that we have set forth in this work, it is to be finally concluded that this Science carries inseparably with it the study of piety, and that he who is not pious cannot be truly wise” (1112). In the corollaries to the principal aspects of the new science, in Poetic Wisdom, Vico says that the contemplation of the heavens as the source of the divine by the ancients led easily to the philosophers’ later assertion “that the beginning of wisdom is piety [che ’l principio della Sapienza sia la Pietà]” (391). In his final statement Vico endorses this claim, but in so doing he does not say what piety is. He presumes awareness of the well-known references in the Hebrew Bible of Job 28:28, Psalms 111:10, Proverbs 1:7 and 9:10, and Ecclesiastes 1:16. All of these except Ecclesiastes, which focuses on wisdom as distinct from folly, advance the theme that fear of the Lord is the beginning or the basis of wisdom. Piety is the fear of the Lord. The giants who apprehend the thunderous sky as Jove respond in profound fear, and this fear is transformed into their piety that causes them to begin to acquire virtue, manifested in their practice of marriage, and wisdom that comes to take the form of divination. This last sentence of the work refers the reader indirectly to the book of Job and to one of the great themes of the wisdom books of the Hebrew Bible, in order to comprehend the pursuit of the new science. The biblical reference that Vico may have most in mind is that of Job because it is the

Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/suss/detail.action?docID=4412740. Created from suss on 2021-02-14 21:00:44.

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great treatise on piety. Job is introduced with the statement: “That man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil” (1:1). It is asked: “Where then does wisdom come from? And where is the place of understanding? It is hidden from the eyes of all living, and concealed from the birds of the air. . . . God understands the way to it, and he knows its place” (28:20–23). God then says to humankind: “Truly, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding” (28:28). The New Oxford Annotated Bible comments that this verse “provides an interpretative key to the entire poem. It makes the point that Wisdom, which is not discoverable by mortals, is about a way of being. The One who knows where Wisdom is to be found instructs mortals that piety, clarified as departure from evil, is Wisdom.”19 Hobbes, as mentioned earlier in this commentary in regard to Vico’s dipintura, inserts, at the top of the frontispiece of his Leviathan, the description the Lord gives of the Leviathan. “On the earth it has no equal.” The second line, completing the verse, is “a creature without fear” (41:33). The New Science shows that the materialistic science of society cannot produce wisdom for it is not founded in piety. Like all modern thought, no matter how well reasoned, such science cannot apprehend the providential order of events that is captured in Vico’s doctrine that the great city of the human race is governed by the principle of ideal eternal history, and we may take this providence as a guide to our own prudence, on which we must rely in barbarous times. Hobbes’s use of the quotation from Job suggests that the Leviathan is a modern book of Job. Here the creature without fear that has no equal is the state, not nature. Hobbes calls the Leviathan “that great Mortall God.” The unchecked power of the greatest being in nature is transformed into the unchecked power of the greatest artificial being of the state. Modern man faces an artificial power as incomprehensible as that of the Leviathan as a force of nature. Hobbes’s book is advice for modern man, or how to survive by presenting to the individual the scientific principles by which the artificial man or the state functions. Knowing these principles or the science of politics allows the individual to survive, or attempt to survive. It is the materialism of this science that is mistaken. Vico’s New Science, by supervening these principles and grounding the political order in providence, provides the true advice to modern man. The historical process has no equal, for it engulfs all the nations, but within it is God as providence, and to this divinity modern man must react with piety. Only in this way can modern man realize true human nature and live within the course and recourse of the nations. The workings of providence are com-

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ON AN ETERNAL NAT U RAL RE P U B LI C      233

prehensible only to a degree, and to this extent there can be a new ­science of ideal eternal history. Overriding this history is the ideal of an eternal natural republic. But the ways of God are also transcendent. The founders of the gentile nations attempted to grasp the actions of Jove by divination. In the new science Vico’s “mathematical method” replaces divination, but the transcendent power of the deity and the events that result from it in the life of nations are beyond our comprehension, and we, like Job, must find a way to accept it. For this acceptance the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. In 1984 Bergin and Fisch added to their translation of the New Science an appendix, “Practic of the New Science” (“Pratica della Scienza nuova”), which corresponds to paragraphs 1405–11 in the Laterza edition of Nicolini. This was one of the additions Vico drafted to the second version of the work, to become part of a third edition. It was written in the summer of 1731, part of a year after the publication of the Second New Science in December 1730. He intended it to be a second chapter of the conclusion.20 In Italian scholarship it is known simply as the Pratica. In the Zingarelli Italian dictionary pratica is given in its philosophical meaning as “the complex of actions that intend the realization of the useful and of the moral good.”21 It is the feminine substantive of pratico, from Late Latin practicus, from Greek praktikos, adjective of praxis (“action”). Practic is the English cognate of pratica and has a similar derivation. As an obsolete verb in English, practic is related to the Italian praticare: “to put into action or operation.”22 Practic as a noun in English is simply practica. Zingarelli has a sentence from Leonardo da Vinci: “Theory [teoria] is best but practic [pratica] gives the desired; science is the captain and practic is the soldiers.”23 The antonym to pratico is teorico. Teorico is from Greek theo¯rikes, related to theo¯ria, act of viewing. Teorica is from teorico and is the obsolete counterpart term to pratica, having the meaning of a complex of rules that should be the guide to practic (pratica). Zingarelli provides a line from Galileo: “I believe that this proceeds because I wish . . . to place theoric [teorica] before practic [pratica].”24 Theoric as an archaic English word means “speculation, theory,” and the Italian is cognate in meaning. As it stands in the finished text, Vico’s Conclusion to the Work becomes the first of two chapters, with the Pratica intended as the second. The first chapter, then, ends with piety defined indirectly through its resonance with the Hebrew Bible, but wisdom, being wise (saggio), is left undefined in the first chapter. Lo saggio can include the idea of wisdom both in a speculative and a theoretical sense and in the sense of prudence or practical wisdom. Vico clarifies this issue in the first words of the Pratica: “This entire work has

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234    CON C LU SION

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so far been treated as a purely contemplative science [scienza ­contemplativa] concerning the common nature of the nations. It seems for this reason to promise no help to human prudence [prudenza umana] toward delaying if not preventing the ruin of nations in decay. It consequently seems to be lacking in the practic [pratica] that all those sciences should have which are called ‘active’ as dealing with matters that depend on human choice” (1405). Vico’s distinction between scientific contemplation and human prudence is Aristotelian, as found in the Nicomachean Ethics. Contemplation (theo¯ria, theo¯rein) is in its fundamental meaning “to look on, observe” (from which derives the English word “theater”). In Aristotle and Plato it comes to mean the act of regarding something simply to understand it. This looking aims at an understanding that is its own end unconnected to any goal of doing or making. As contemplation, then, the new science allows us a guide simply to look on and understand what providence has wrought in history. But Vico continues: “That practic can easily [facilmente] be derived [data] from the contemplation of the course the nations run” (1406). This practic is equivalent to having practical wisdom or prudence (phrone¯sis), which permits its possessor to choose that action that is correct for any particular situation and to carry it out well guided always by the right or suitable reason. Prudence is an intellectual virtue that is also inseparable from moral virtue in general and required as a kind of means for the success of any virtuous action. Vico does not say how the wisdom of thinking generates the wisdom of doing. He simply asserts that “the wise men and princes of the republics” will be able easily to enact this connection (1406). Vico is echoing perhaps the most famous sentence in Plato’s Republic. Socrates says: “Unless either philosophers become kings in our states or those whom we now call our kings and rulers take to the pursuit of philosophy seriously and adequately, and there is a conjunction of these two things, political power and philosophical intelligence, while the motley horde of the natures who at present pursue either apart from the other are compulsorily excluded, there can be no cessation of troubles for our states, nor, I fancy, for the human race either” (473d). In the Laws Plato says: “Whenever the greatest power coincides in man with wisdom and temperance, then the germ of the best polity and the best laws is planted; but in no other way will it ever come about” (712a). And, we ought to “order both our homes and our States in obedience to the immortal element within us, giving to reason’s ordering the name of ‘law’ ” (713e). In the Seventh Letter Plato speaks both critically and diagnostically, in a manner that aligns with a passage in the First New Science. He says: “Looking at all the States which now exist, I perceived that one and all they are badly

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ON AN ETERNAL NAT U RAL RE P U B LI C      235

governed; for the state of their laws is such as to be almost incurable without some marvelous overhauling and good-luck to boot. So in my praise of the right philosophy I was compelled to declare [in Republic 473d] that by it one is enabled to discern all forms of justice both political and individual.” Plato concludes: “Wherefore the classes of mankind (I said) will have no cessation from evils until either the class of those who are right and true philosophers attain political supremacy, or else the class of those who hold power in the States becomes, by some dispensation of Heaven, really philosophic” (326a–b). Vico says this science contains two practics (due sono le Pratiche): “the first is that of a new critical art, which serves it as a torch with which to ­distinguish the true within obscure and fabulous history. The second is a diagnostic art, as it were, which, regulated in accordance with the wisdom of mankind, provides the stages of necessity and utility in the order of human affairs, and thus, as its final consequence, provides this Science with its principal end: knowledge of the indubitable signs of the state of the nations” (FNS 391). If we ask of Vico how contemplation and prudence are to be connected such that from the former is generated the latter, he can reply that he can say no more than Plato; that is, unless they can be so joined the ills of nations cannot be addressed or resolved. Yet Plato does not assure us that this truly is possible. He only claims that such a juncture is required. There is no guarantee that it can be done. In fact, there is an ironic element in Plato’s assertion that what is actually needed may remain only an ideal. Vico in his autobiography says that Plato contemplates man as he should be, not as he is (A 138). In these lines of the Pratica Vico asserts that the turn from contemplation to prudence can easily be done. But in his earlier three remedies for the decline of nations he leaves the problem in the agency of providence. Herein lies a possible solution. In the humanist tradition generally, prudence was thought to be learned by the study of great figures, but in Vico’s science the model is not individual lives but the action of providence in the life of nations as a whole. Providentia and prudentia are synonymous. Thus the study of the actions of providence allows us to look for the providential order in any human event—to grasp its beginning, middle, and end, what it was, is, and is to come. This insight that all things civil as all things natural have a life and must be approached in such terms is the key to prudence, which is first reached by contemplation of the providential order of the life of nations in their ideal eternal history. Vico can then agree with the Florentine historian Francesco Guicciardini: “All that which has been in the past and is at present will

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236    CON C LU SION

OF THE W OR K

be again in the future. But both the names and the appearances of things change, so that he who does not have a good eye will not recognize them. Nor will he know how to grasp a norm of conduct or make a judgment by means of observation.”25 Guicciardini’s “good eye,” his buono occhio, is the key to understanding particular human affairs and to understanding human history. It is the ability to see by means of ingenuity (ingenium) the commonalities over time. Vico’s “new science concerning the common nature of the nations” is based on this ability to see the repetition in human events and to formulate their principles. Thus it depends on the threefold nature of memory: memory, imagination, and ingenuity (819). The contemplative study of the eye of providence produces the prudent good eye of those who can act against the barbarism of reflection. Vico says that “the practic of the science that we as philosophers can offer is such as can be completed within the academies” (1406). As will become evident, the practic of the new science requires that philosophy be joined with jurisprudence. Philosophy has the role of making us aware of the good that is in accord with human nature. We require a knowledge of the positive doctrine advanced in the New Science, but to comprehend the consequences of not adhering to this doctrine we should consider its inverse—all of its elements replaced by their opposites (guardare a rovescio). To accomplish this, Vico says, we need only look back at his comments on the disintegration of the dipintura that came at the end of the 1730 version of the Idea of the Work, in which we see what would happen to the figure of metaphysic and the things of the civil world if they were taken over by the Stoics or Epicureans.26 Philosophy can provide the basis for the practic but not the practic itself. The practic may easily follow on, in the sense of the Socratic principle that to know the good will cause us to do the good. Practical wisdom or prudence is a natural outgrowth of theoretical or speculative wisdom. In making the new science philosophy needed to be joined with philology because, as Vico says in the autobiography, “the wise man should be formed both of esoteric wisdom such as Plato’s and of common wisdom such as that of Tacitus” (A 139). The practic of the new science requires philosophy to be joined with law or jurisprudence. In this way we can pass from knowing the good to doing the good. Vico concludes the Pratica by advocating that the young must above all be educated in jurisprudence. He says: “Wherefore in [the dedication of] the first [edition of the] New Science [in 1725] we proposed to the universities of Europe that jurisprudence should be treated in the whole context of human and divine erudition, and on that account we put it above all the other sciences” (1411).

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ON AN ETERNAL NAT U RAL RE P U B LI C      237

As mentioned before, the presupposition of Roman law is that what the Greeks sought in philosophia the Romans accomplished in iurisprudentia. Roman law is a complete diagnostic analysis and guide to action in civil things. Thus the principles of human prudence are all to be found in Roman jurisprudence. Jurisprudence understood in terms of the New Science is the practic of Vico’s new science. Iurisprudentia is prudentia, which is ultimately based in its synonym, providentia. Roman law as presented in the Digest is in accord with both human nature and divine law. Ethics or morality is not something separate from jurisprudence; they are one and the same. To understand how to interpret the law is to know how to act rightly in all things civil. Prudence as jurisprudence is not a matter of the individual acquiring a wisdom to conduct his own particular affairs. Jurisprudence is a common wisdom, rooted in custom, in common life, that can be codified as law. Law is the system of practical wisdom of a people but it is also human wisdom itself because it springs from human nature. As human nature has its basis in the divine, so does human wisdom or jurisprudence. Vico’s final words in the Pratica are: “And the youths will thus be brought to the true crossroads of Hercules, who founded all the gentiles. Namely, whether they will take the road of pleasure, with baseness, scorn, and slavery for them and for their nations, or the road of virtue, with honor, glory, and happiness” (1411). Vico thus takes the reader back to the first sentence of the explanation of the dipintura, in which he makes reference to the Tablet of Cebes: “As Cebes the Theban made of Morals, we here present for view a Tablet of Civil things, which may serve the Reader to conceive the Idea of this Work before reading it, and to bring it back most easily to memory with such aid as the imagination may provide, after having read it” (1, my translation). The Tablet of Cebes is an expanded version of the Prodicus myth, which takes its name from the story of Hercules that Xenophon in his Memorabilia attributes to the wise man Prodicus, who, Xenophon reports, recited this account of virtue to throngs of listeners (2.1.21–34). In De officiis, his work of moral philosophy, Cicero, one of Vico’s prime authors, gives an account of the essence of this myth, which in the Tablet of Cebes is related by the senex. Cicero, claiming to be quoting Xenophon, relates: “When Hercules was just coming into youth’s estate (the time which Nature has appointed unto every man for choosing the path of life on which he would enter), he went out into a desert place. And as he saw two paths, the path of Pleasure and the path of Virtue, he sat down and debated long and earnestly which one it were better for him to take” (1.32.118). Cicero goes on to say that such a crossroads may happen to a Hercules, “scion of the seed of Jove,” but rarely if at all does it

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238    CON C LU SION

OF THE W OR K

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happen to most people. Most people drift into one path or another depending on their parents or accidental circumstances of life. Vico, however, has now warned the reader that such a choice exists, and as described in my preface to this commentary, Vico is most concerned with his young readers, who hold in their hands the future of this new science. His warning is parallel to that in the retelling of the myth of Er at the end of the Republic, where Plato, in the scene where the souls are choosing what life they want to be reborn into, interjects: “And there, dear Glaucon, it appears, is the supreme hazard for a man. And this is the chief reason why it should be our main concern that each of us, neglecting all other studies, should seek after and study this thing—if in any way he may be able to learn of and discover the man who will give him the ability and the knowledge to distinguish the life that is good from that which is bad” (618c). If we can make this proper choice, Plato says, then “we shall fare well [εὐˆ πρα´   ττωμεν].” And we can fare well if, in the state we find ourselves, of the barbarism of reflection, we keep before our mind’s eye the ever-glowing light of an eternal natural republic, ordained for us by providence.

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Notes

1. Sense and Method of the New Science

1.  Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment:Vico, Hamann, Herder, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Pimlico, 2000), 22. 2. Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History since Hegel, trans. William H. Woglom and Charles W. Hendel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950), 296. 3.  Letter of Giuseppe Athias, February 25, 1726, in Giambattista Vico, Epistole con aggiunte le epistole dei suoi corrispondenti, ed. Manuela Sanna (Naples: Morano, 1992), 134–35. See also Vico’s autobiography (A 174). 4.  Karl-Otto Apel, Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis Vico, 2nd ed. (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1975), 320–21. My translation. 5. Ernesto Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition, trans. John Michael Krois and Azizeh Azodi (1980; Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), 37. 6.  Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, trans. R. G. Collingwood (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2002), 23.

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2. Genesis of the New Science

1.  Giambattista Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 5. 2. René Descartes, Discourse on the Method, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1:114. 3.  Giambattista Vico, De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia ex Linguae Latinae Originibus Eruenda, in Opere filosofiche, ed. Paolo Cristofolini (Florence: Sansoni, 1971), 72. My translation. Above is the way Vico gives the line, perhaps quoting from memory; the last part of the line in Plautus’s original reads: “. . . certo idem sum qui semper fui” (Amphitryon 447). 4.  Giambattista Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians Drawn from the Origins of the Latin Language, trans. Jason Taylor (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 33. 5.  Giambattista Vico, response to the second article in Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia, in On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians Unearthed from the Origins of the Latin Language, Including the Disputation with the Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia, trans. L. M. Palmer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 183.

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240    NOTES TO

PAGES 12–25

6.  Francisque Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (Paris: Ch. Delagrave, 1868), 2:537 and n., does not find this statement in Descartes but says it is similar to reports by Sorbière, Relations, lettres, et discours de M. de Sorbière sur diverses matières curieuses (Paris, 1660) and Adrein Baillet, La vie de Monsieur Descartes, 2 vols. (Paris, 1691). 7.  Max H. Fisch, “Vico and Pragmatism,” in Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Hayden V. White (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 408. 8.  Giambattista Vico, “The Reprehension of the Metaphysics of René Descartes, Benedict Spinoza, and John Locke,” trans. Donald Phillip Verene, in Giambattista Vico: Keys to the New Science; Translations, Commentaries, and Essays, ed. Thora Ilin Bayer and Donald Phillip Verene (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 179–80. 9. Letter to Bernardo Maria Giacco, October 25, 1725, in Giambattista Vico, Epistole con aggiunte le epistole dei suoi correspondenti, ed. Manuela Sanna (Naples: Morano, 1992), 88–90. 10.  Donald Phillip Verene, “Vico’s Reply to the False Book Notice: The Vici Vindiciae, Translation and Commentary,” in Vico: Keys to the New Science, 85–135. 11.  Gustavo Costa, “Perchè Vico pubblicò un capolavoro incompiuto? Considerazioni in margine a La scienza nuova, 1730,” Italica 82 (2005): 567; Costa, “Vico e l’Inquisizione,” Nouvelles de la République des Lettres 2 (1999): 93–124. 12.  These revisions, corrections, and additions are printed in Opere di G. B. Vico, ed. Fausto Nicolini, 2nd ed., 8 vols. in 11 (Bari: Laterza, 1928), vol. 4, pt. 2. For translations and commentary on two of the most philosophically significant ones, see Vico: Keys to the New Science, pt. 3.

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3. Structure of the New Science

1.  Giambattista Vico, Institutiones Oratoriae, ed. Giuliano Crifò (Naples: Istituto Suor Orsola Benincasa, 1989); The Art of Rhetoric (Institutiones Oratoriae, 1711–1741), trans. Giorgio A. Pinton and Arthur W. Shippee (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996). 2.  Ibid., chap. 27. 3.  Ibid., chap. 29. 4.  Ibid., chap. 33. 5. Giulio Camillo, L’idea del theatro, ed. Lina Bolzoni (Palermo: Sellerio, 1991). For interpretation, see Lina Bolzoni, Il teatro della memoria: Studi su Giulio Camillo (Padua: Liviana, 1984), esp. chap. 3. A schematic drawing of the theater can be found in Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), chap. 6. For a translation and discussion of the iconology of L’idea, see Lu Berry Wenneker, “An Examination of L’idea del theatro of Giulio Camillo” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1970). 6. Giambattista Vico, “The Academies and the Relation between Philosophy and Eloquence,” trans. Donald Phillip Verene, in Giambattista Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 87–88. 7.  Giambattista Vico, “On the Heroic Mind,” trans. Elizabeth Sewell and Anthony G. Sirignano, in Vico and Contemporary Thought, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo, Michael

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NOTES TO PAGES 25–36     241

Mooney, and Donald Phillip Verene, 2 vols. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979), 2:237. 8. Vico, Study Methods, 77. Part II. Introduction

1.  Fabrizio Lomonaco, Nuovo contributo all’iconografia di Giambattista Vico (1744– 1991), (Naples: Guida, 1993), 21–26 and 62–65. 2.  Letter of Domenico Lodovico, December 24, 1730, in Giambattista Vico, Epistole con aggiunte le epistole dei suoi corrispondenti, ed. Manuela Sanna (Naples: Morano, 1992), 159. There is one other short letter from Lodovico to Vico in 1733, expressing appreciation for Vico’s oration “On the Heroic Mind.” Ibid., 174. The image of the mountaineer is in Dante, Purgatorio, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 283 (canto 26, lines 67–70). 3. Vico, Epistole, 304 (biographical note on Lodovico). See also Lomonaco, Nuovo contributo, 23, n21. 4.  For a discussion of Capaccio’s Delle imprese, as well as the impresa tradition in relation to Vico generally, see Mario Papini, Il geroglifico della storia: Significato e funzione della dipintura nella ‘Scienza nuova’ di G. B. Vico (Bologna: Cappelli, 1984), pt. 2. 5.  Donald Phillip Verene, “Vico’s ‘Ignota latebat’: On the Impresa and the Dipintura,” in Giambattista Vico: Keys to the New Science; Translations, Commentaries, and Essays, ed. Thora Ilin Bayer and Donald Phillip Verene (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 143–66. See also Mario Papini, “ ‘Ignota latebat’: L’impresa negletta della Scienza nuova,” Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani 14–15 (1984–85): 179–214, and Andrea Battistini, “Theoria delle imprese e linguaggio iconico vichiano,” Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani 14–15 (1984–85): 149–77.

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4. Genesis of the Frontispiece

1. Fausto Nicolini, Commento storico alla seconda Scienza nuova, 2 vols. (1949; Rome: Storia e Letteratura, 1978), 21. 2.  Eugenio Garin, “Appunti per una storia della fortuna di Hobbes nel Settecento italiano,” Rivista critica di storia della filosofia 17 (1962): 518. My translation. 3.  Francis Bacon, Works, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (1870; New York: Garrett, 1968), 4:436–37. 4. See Cebes’ Tablet: Facsimiles of the Greek Text, and of Selected Latin, French, English, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, and Polish Translations (New York: Renaissance Society of America, 1979). For a modern edition with Greek and English opposed texts, see John T. Fitzgerald and L. Michael White, The Tabula of Cebes (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983). 5.  Max Harold Fisch, introduction, A 81–82; Nicolini, Commento, 1:21. 6.  Robert Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 1671–1717 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 309–91. 7.  Ibid., 392–94. 8.  Anthony, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Second Characters; or, the Language of Forms, ed. Benjamin Rand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 64–87.

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242    NOTES TO

PAGES 37–48

9.  Ibid., 65. 10.  Giulio Camillo, L’idea del theatro, ed. Lina Bolzoni (Palermo: Sellerie, 1991), 47. My translation. 11.  See the analysis of Camillo’s sources in Lu Berry Wenneker, “An Examination of L’idea del theatro of Giulio Camillo” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1970), 39–40, 360. 12. Giambattista Vico, On Humanistic Education (Six Inaugural Orations 1699– 1707), trans. Giorgio A. Pinton and Arthur W. Shippee (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 30. 13.  Giambattista Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 80.

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5. Structure of the Frontispiece

1.  Quoted in Paolo Rossi, Le sterminate antichità: Studi vichiani (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1969), 185. My translation. In addition to Ripa’s figure of metaphysic, the title page of the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (Rome, 1646) can be considered, as it shows an elevated figure with reflected rays, but the connection seems distant. A reproduction of this title page can be found in Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), opposite p. 124. 2.  Giambattista Vico, Institutiones Oratoriae, ed. Giuliano Crifò (Naples: Istituto Suor Orsola Benincasa, 1989), 246. 3.  Letter to Nicola Gaetani di Laurenzano, March 1732, in Giambattista Vico, Epistole con aggiunte le epistole dei suoi correspondenti, ed. Manuela Sanna (Naples: Morano, 1992), 167. 4.  See below, the reference to Epicurus and the Stoics in the translation of the passages from the 1730 New Science (1122). See also the letter to Luigi Esperti, 1726, in Vico, Epistole, 127 and A 122. 5. Rossi, Le sterminate, 185–86, finds precedent in Ripa’s Iconology for Vico’s hieroglyph of La Libertà. 6.  For a theory of how the hieroglyphs of the dipintura can be arranged to correspond to the five books of the New Science, based on Vico’s omission of comment on the cap of Mercury, see Mario Papini, Il geroglifico della storia: Significato e funzione della dipintura nella “Scienza nuova” di G. B. Vico (Bologna: Cappelli, 1984), 94–96. Papini is one of the few commentators to notice the fact that Vico omits comment on the cap of Mercury. 7.  “Vico’s Reprehension of the Metaphysics of René Descartes, Benedict Spinoza, and John Locke,” trans. Donald Phillip Verene, in Giambattista Vico: Keys to the New Science; Translations, Commentaries, and Essays, ed. Thora Ilin Bayer and Donald Phillip Verene (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 179–98. 8.  Giambattista Vico, La scienza nuova seconda, ed. Fausto Nicolini (Bari: Laterza, 1953), 171–73. See also Giambattista Vico, La scienza nuova 1730, ed. Paolo Cristofolini and Manuela Sanna (Naples: Guida, 2004), 55–57. 9.  Liselotte Dieckmann, “Giambattista Vico’s Use of Renaissance Hieroglyphics,” Forum Italicum 2 (1968): 383.

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NOTES TO PAGES 55–71     243

Part III. Introduction

1.  See John T. Fitzgerald and L. Michael White, The Tabula of Cebes (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983), 65.

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6. Chronological Table

1. Censorinus, The Birthday Book, trans. Holt N. Parker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 48. 2.  James Ussher, The Annals of the World (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2006). On the date of the universal flood, see p. 19. 3.  See the comment on this in Dante, Paradiso, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 112. 4.  See Frederick R. Marcus, “Vico and the Hebrews,” New Vico Studies 13 (1995): 14–32; “Vico’s New Science from the Standpoint of the Hebrews,” New Vico Studies 27 (2009): 1–26. 5.  The New Oxford Annotated Bible, 3rd ed., ed. Michael D. Coogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 246n. 6.  There was an ecclesiastical censure pronounced of Vico’s New Science of 1725 on October 19, 1729. See Gustavo Costa, “Vico e l’Inquisizione,” Nouvelles de la République des Lettres 2 (1999): 93–124. 7.  Vico signed his extensive third set of “Corrections, Meliorations, and Additions” to the New Science of 1730 with “Terminato la vigilia di santo Agostino (27 agosto), mio particolare protettore, l’anno 1731).” See L’autobiografia, il carteggio e le poesie varie, ed. Benedetto Croce and Fausto Nicolini, 2nd rev. ed., Opere di G. B. Vico (Bari: Laterza, 1929), 5:377. See also Vico’s prayer, inspired by Augustine, that concludes his address to the Academy of Oziosi, “The Academies and the Relation between Philosophy and Eloquence,” trans. Donald Phillip Verene, in Giambattista Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 90. 8.  For an account of the development of Vico’s view of the Twelve Tables, see Max H. Fisch, “Vico on Roman Law,” New Vico Studies 19 (2001): 5–9. In the First New Science, in discussing the origin of the Twelve Tables, Vico says: “After the famous embassy returned [from Athens], carrying her laws in a sack” (FNS 166). But he also explains these laws in terms of agrarian law arising from the conflict between the Roman social classes. 9. Giambattista Vico, Opere, ed. Andrea Battistini, 2 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1990), 2:1514. 10.  Giorgio A. Pinton, “Vico’s Primo and Secondo Ragionamento (Translated with Notes and Comments)” New Vico Studies 19 (2001): 112. 11.  Andrew Borkowski, Textbook on Roman Law, 2nd ed. (London: Blackstone, 1997), 29. 7. Elements

1.  Giambattista Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 6.

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244    NOTES TO

PAGES 72–99

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2.  Giambattista Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians Drawn from the Origins of the Latin Language, trans. Jason Taylor (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 57–71. The physics of which Vico speaks was to be a second book of the Most Ancient Wisdom. It may have been advanced in a now-lost manuscript, De Aequilibrio Corporis Animantis (On the Equilibrium of Animate Bodies). 3.  James Robert Goetsch, Jr., Vico’s Axioms: The Geometry of the Human World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 109–10. 4.  Francis Bacon, Works, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denton Heath, (1870; New York: Garrett, 1968), 4:53–64, 431–34. 5.  Ibid., 54. 6. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (New York: Penguin, 1979), 87. 7. Vico, Study Methods, 15. 8.  Andrea Battistini, La degnità della retorica: Studi su G. B.Vico (Pisa: Pacini, 1975), 124–52. 9.  W. Keith Percival, “A Note on Thomas Hayne and His Relation to Leibniz and Vico,” New Vico Studies 6 (1988): 97–101. 10.  Hugo Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis, libri tres, trans. Francis W. Kelsey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925), 2:13. 11.  Ibid., 12, 13. 12.  Ibid., 14, 15. 13.  Samuel Pufendorf, De jure naturae et gentium, libri octo, trans. C. H. Oldfather and W. A. Oldfather (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934), 2:205. 14.  Ibid., 215. 15.  John Selden, The Table Talk of John Selden, ed. Samuel Harvey Reynolds (Oxford: Clarendon, 1892), 101. Selden elaborates this position in De Iure Naturali et Gentium iuxta Disciplinam Hebraeorum (Strasbourg, 1665). 16. Hobbes, Leviathan, 301. 8. Principles

1.  Giambattista Vico, Vici Vindiciae, trans. Donald Phillip Verene, in Giambattista Vico: Keys to the New Science; Translations, Commentaries, and Essays, ed. Thora Ilin Bayer and Donald Phillip Verene (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 134. 2. Ibid. 3.  See the remarks on the frontispiece of the Leviathan and the dipintura in chapter 4, on the state of nature in chapter 9, and on Hobbes’s purpose in the Leviathan and Vico’s in the New Science in part 7, below. 9. Method

1. Censorinus, The Birthday Book, trans. Holt N. Parker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 7. 2.  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (New York: Penguin, 1979), 185–88. 3.  Ibid., 185. 4. See the discussion of these transformations of government in chapter 17 herein.

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NOTES TO PAGES 100–124     245

5.  Giordano Bruno, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, in Dorothea Waley Singer, Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought (New York: Schuman, 1950), 283–84. 6. Hobbes, Leviathan, 131. 7. René Descartes, Discourse on the Method, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1:112.

Part IV. Introduction

1.  See R. Bernheimer, “Theatrum Mundi,” Art Bulletin 28 (1956): 225–31; Paolo Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory, trans. Stephen Clucas (New York: Continuum, 2006), chap. 3.

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10. Tree of Poetic Wisdom

1.  Giambattista Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 77. 2.  Giambattista Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians Drawn from the Origins of the Latin Language, trans. Jason Taylor (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 5–6. 3.  For a translation of these additional paragraphs (1199–1211), see Giambattista Vico: Keys to the New Science; Translations, Commentaries, and Essays, ed. Thora Ilin Bayer and Donald Phillip Verene (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 167–69. 4. Dante, Purgatorio, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 235–45 (canto 22). 5.  Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. G. W. Kitchin (Philadelphia: Paul Dry, 2001), 68. 6.  See the discussion of this threefold meaning in chapter 15. 7. René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1:186. 8. Giambattista Vico, Opere, ed. Andrea Battistini, 2 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1990), 2:1844. 9.  Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, trans. Richard Aldington and Delano Ames (New York: Prometheus, 1960), 128. 10. Giambattista Vico, “Synopsis of Universal Law,” in Vico: Keys to the New Science, 21.

11. Poetic Metaphysics

1. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953), 1:180. English translation is adjusted to the German. 2.  Ibid., 181. 3.  Ibid., 182.

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246    NOTES TO

PAGES 129–158

12. Poetic Logic

1.  See H. G. Liddell and R. Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon (Clarendon: Oxford, 1990), s.vv. μυˆκος and μυκός. 2. Giambattista Vico, Opere, ed. Andrea Battistini, 2 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1990), 2:1569, n7. 3.  See the discussion of the nature of poetic characters in chapter 7, and of the semiotics of Jove as the first name in chapter 11. 4.  Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. Susanne K. Langer (New York: Dover, 1953), 87–88. 5.  Giambattista Vico, Institutiones Oratoriae, ed. Giuliano Crifò (Naples: Istituto Suor Orsola Benincasa, 1989), 326. My translation. 6. Vico, Opere, 2:1591, n11. 7.  Giambattista Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 14. 8.  Ibid., 5. 13. Poetic Morals, Economy, and Politics

1.  Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 92. 2.  The shield of Achilles is an example of the type of image that fits Shaftesbury’s conception of “a Noble Virtuoso scheme” of morals, like the Tablet of Cebes, in his Second Characters; or, the Language of Forms, ed. Benjamin Rand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914). See chapter 4, above.

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14. Poetic Sciences

1.  Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, Mythical Thought, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955), 108. Cassirer states: “Anyone aiming at a comprehensive system of human culture has, of necessity, turned back to myth. In this sense, Giambattista Vico, founder of the modern philosophy of language, also founded a completely new philosophy of mythology” (3). See also Donald Phillip Verene, “Vico’s Influence on Cassirer,” New Vico Studies 3 (1985): 105–11. 2. Cassirer, Symbolic Forms, 108. 3.  The Bergin and Fisch translation of this passage bears the note: “Several of Vico’s examples for which there is no common English parallels are here omitted, and substitutions made for several others” (note to 405). I have adjusted the translation of this passage to keep closer to the original, with the understanding that such metaphors vary in their aptness from culture to culture. 4. Cassirer, Symbolic Forms, 91. 5.  Ibid., 92. 6.  See Vico’s account of the Law of the Twelve Tables and the Royal Law of Tribonian in his addition to the New Science in Giorgio Pinton, “Vico’s Primo and Secondo Ragionamento (Translated with Notes and Comments),” New Vico Studies 19 (2001): 87–160.

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NOTES TO PAGES 170–194     247

Part V. Introduction

1. Giambattista Vico, “The Academies and the Relation between Philosophy and Eloquence,” trans. Donald Phillip Verene, in Giambattista Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 87–88. 2.  On Dante, see Vico’s fragment of 1728/1729 known as “Discovery of the True Dante” and his letter to Gherardo degli Angioli in Dante: The Critical Heritage, ed. Michael Caesar (London: Routledge, 1989), 346–55. 3. See Bernard Knox, introduction, in Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1990), 18. 15. Search for the True Homer

1.  Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, trans. T. G. Rosenmeyer (New York: Harper, 1960), chap. 9. See also F. M. Cornford, Principium Sapientiae: The Origins of Greek Philosophical Thought, ed. W. K. C. Guthrie (New York: Harper, 1965), esp. chap. 7; and H. Frankfort, H. A. Frankfort, et al., Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man; An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East (Baltimore: Penguin, 1961), esp. chap. 8. 2.  The Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. N. G. L. Hammond and H. H. Scullard, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 524. 3. Frank Budgen, Myselves When Young (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 187. 4.  Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 661n.

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16. Discovery of the True Homer

1.  Bernard Knox, introduction to Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1990), 23–24. 2.  Giambattista Vico, “On the Heroic Mind,” in Vico and Contemporary Thought, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo, Michael Mooney, and Donald Phillip Verene, 2 vols. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979), 2:228–45. Part VI. Introduction

1.  Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch, introduction, in The New Science of Giambattista Vico (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), xxxvii–xxxviii. In Vico’s text, see 1088–95. 2.  Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1944), 1. 3.  Bergin and Fisch, New Science, xxxvii. 4.  Mario Papini, Il geroglifico della storia: Significato e funzione della dipintura nella ‘Scienza nuova’ di G. B. Vico (Bologna: Cappelli, 1984), 293. See also Battistini’s note in Giambattista Vico, Opere, ed. Andrea Battistini, 2 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1990), 2:1748.

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248    NOTES TO

PAGES 194–227

5.  Giambattista Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians Drawn from the Origins of the Latin Language, trans. Jason Taylor (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), chap. 4. 6. For an explanation of “metaphysical points,” see Donald Phillip Verene, Knowledge of Things Human and Divine:Vico’s New Science and “Finnegans Wake” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 110–18. 17. Threefold Structure of the Course of the Nations

1.  Vico also employs this sentence from Tacitus to describe the poor reception the New Science has received. See Giambattista Vico: Keys to the New Science; Translations, Commentaries, and Essays, ed. Thora Ilin Bayer and Donald Phillip Verene (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 86. 2.  Giambattista Vico, The Art of Rhetoric (Institutiones Oratoriae 1711–1741), trans. Giorgio A. Pinton and Arthur W. Shippee (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 95. 3. Andrew Borkowski, Textbook on Roman Law, 2nd ed. (London: Blackstone Press, 1997), 26.

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18. Recourse of the Nations

1. Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch, introduction, in The New Science of Giambattista Vico (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), x–xi. 2.  Giambattista Vico, The Art of Rhetoric (Institutiones Oratoriae 1711–1741), trans. Giorgio A. Pinton and Arthur W. Shippee (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 100. 3.  Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, ed. Richard Tuck, 3 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), 3:1643. 4. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” trans. Elizabeth Livermore Forbes, in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 223. 19. On an Eternal Natural Republic

1. Giambattista Vico, Opere, ed. Andrea Battistini, 2 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1990), 2:1748, n1. This parallel of Vico’s and Bodin’s assertions is also noted by Girolamo Cotroneo, “A Renaissance Source of the Scienza nuova: Jean Bodin’s Methodus,” in Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Hayden V. White (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 58. For the quotation, see Jean Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, trans. M. J. Tooley (Oxford: Blackwell, n.d.), 52 (bk. 2, chap. 1). 2.  See Cotroneo, “Renaissance Source,” 58. 3. Dante, Inferno, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 331 (canto 31, lines 55–57); see also commentary, 568. 4.  Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, trans. C. I. Litzinger, 2 vols. (Chicago: Regnery, 1964), 2:650.

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NOTES TO PAGES 227–233     249

5. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (New York: Penguin, 1979), 161. 6.  Niccolò Machiavelli, Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others, trans. Allan Gilbert, 3 vols. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), 1:196. In the three remedies for a nation in its decline, Vico’s remarks are quite close to the distinctions made between kinds of republics in bk. 1, chap. 2 of the Discourses, in Chief Works, 1:195–201. 7. See “Vico’s Reprehension of the Metaphysics of René Descartes, Benedict Spinoza, and John Locke,” trans. Donald Phillip Verene, in Giambattista Vico: Keys to the New Science; Translations, Commentaries, and Essays, ed. Thora Ilin Bayer and Donald Phillip Verene (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 179–98. 8. For corresponding expressions in going from English to Greek, see S. C. Woodhouse, English–Greek Dictionary: A Vocabulary of the Attic Language (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), s.vv. “reflect,” “reflecting.” 9.  Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), s.v. “reflecto.” 10.  The Revised Medieval Latin Word-List from British and Irish Sources, comp. R. E. Latham (London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1965), s.v. “reflexio.” 11.  Le Grand Robert de la langue française, 12th ed. (Paris: Robert, 1985), 8:148, s.v. “réflexion.” 12. René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–91), 1:131; Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery, 12 vols. and suppl. (Paris: Cerf, 1897–1913), 6:41. 13. Descartes, Philosophical Writings, 1:127; Oeuvres de Descartes, 6:33. Descartes uses réflexion in the Discours to refer to mental activity in three places other than those discussed above (see Descartes, Philosophical Writings, 1:115, 125, 143; Oeuvres de Descartes 6:9, 28, 63). 14. Descartes, Philosophical Writings, 3:357; Oeuvres de Descartes 5:220–21. 15.  John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1894), 1:122. 16.  Ibid., 1:123. 17.  Ibid., 1:123–24. 18.  For a more complete account of reflection and its connection to the discovery of the science of optics, see Donald Phillip Verene, Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), chap. 1. 19.  The New Oxford Annotated Bible, 3rd ed., ed. Michael D. Coogan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 747. 20.  The translation of this addition first appeared in Giambattista Vico’s Science of Humanity, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Donald Phillip Verene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 451–54; see also Max H. Fisch, “Vico’s Pratica,” in Vico’s Science of Humanity, 423–30. 21.  Nicola Zingarelli, Vocabolario della lingua italiana, 10th ed. (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1970), s.v. “pratica.” 22.  O.E.D., s.v. “practic.”

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250    NOTES TO

PAGES 233–236

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23. Zingarelli, Vocabolario, s.v. “pratica.” 24.  Ibid., s.v. “teorica.” 25.  Francesco Guicciardini, Ricordi (Milan: Rizzoli, 1977), 131. My translation. 26.  See the translation of these passages in chapter 5, above. These passages appear only in the 1730 edition and do not appear in the Bergin and Fisch translation. See also Fausto Nicolini, Commento storico alla seconda Scienza nuova, 2 vols. (Rome: Storia e Letteratura, 1978), 2:201–2.

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G lossa ry of I ta l i a n  Te rms

autorità (Latin, auctoritas; authority). Vico claims that the new science, in one of its principal aspects, provides a philosophy of authority. The new science is made by philosophy undertaking to examine philology. Philology examines all things that depend on human choice in the histories of the nations, among which are customs and laws through which authority is established (7, 350). Vico holds the original meaning of auctoritas to be property ownership, and that the word is always used in this sense in the Law of the Twelve Tables, the foundation of Roman law. Authority was first divine authority, which caused the giants who were able to fear Jove to flee into caves, to form marriages out of the sight of Jove. This divine authority was followed by human authority when these new men were able to cease wandering the great forest of the earth and began to exercise their power of free will and choice. This human authority led to the authority of natural law, on the basis of which the first families were founded and which became the noble houses that generated the first kingdoms and cities (386–89). In book 4 Vico delineates three kinds of authority present in the development of jurisprudence and corresponding to the three ages of ideal eternal history. The first is the divine authority derived from the gods by the first families. The second are the heroic societies that derived from them, having their power to attain guardianship over their constituency through the creation of their laws. The third comes about by passage of popular liberty into monarchy, in which authority is associated with reputation for wisdom or the authority of counsel, which is commanded by the jurisconsults who advise the emperors (942–46). See also storia ideale eterna (ideal eternal history). barbarie (barbarism). Vico speaks of an original or first barbarism in the life of the nations that he says lasted among the Greeks until the time of Herodotus (7). This barbarism extends into the heroic age of the corso of Western history. There is a second or “returned” barbarism that occurs in the corresponding ages of the ricorso of Western history; that is, the early ages of Christianity to the heroic activity of the medieval period to the age of modern society (1047–87). In the Conclusion of the Work, Vico makes a distinction between the barbarism of the beginning of a corso, the barbarism of sense (barbarie del senso), and that which occurs at the end of a corso, the barbarism of reflection (barbarie della riflessione) (1106). The barbarism of sense is the original state of savagery, in which the giants or protohumans responded to the world and to each other in terms of their senses and passions. Vico says this was a generous savagery, from which one could take 251

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252    GLOSSARY

OF ITALIAN TERMS

flight or against which one could defend oneself. But he says the barbarism of reflection that occurs in the third age is a base savagery, in which people practice duplicity and fraud, even against friends and intimates. For this barbarism there is no remedy, unless a people in this state are conquered by a better nation from without or are brought back to the conditions of their origin by the power of providence. See also corso (course); ricorso (recourse).

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boria (conceit, arrogance). In the third and fourth axioms (125–28) Vico speaks of the boria delle nazioni and the boria de’ dotti, the conceit or arrogant claim of any nation that its history goes back to the beginning of the world and the conceit or arrogant claim of scholars that what they know is as old as the world. The English word “conceit” in this context has the sense of conceited or arrogant as opposed to the literary or tropic use of a “conceit,” in the sense of an elaborate or strained metaphor. caratteri poetici (poetic characters). The discovery that the first gentile peoples were poets who spoke in poetic characters, Vico says, is the master key to his new science, a discovery that cost him the efforts of most of his literary life (34). Vico defines “character” as idea, form, model (429). Poetic characters are made by means of antonomasia, which is a specific type of synecdoche, one of Vico’s four tropes. The others are metaphor, metonomy, and irony, and are part of the corollaries of poetic logic (404–8). Synecdoche is a trope by means of which the whole is taken for the part or the part for the whole. Antonomasia, in this case, refers to the use by the first gentile peoples of a proper name to designate a class (768). Communication by such poetic characters, or “particularized universals,” precedes communication by class terms or genera formed abstractly and phonetically through the characters of an articulated alphabet. Vico distinguishes three kinds of characters. The first are divine, which correspond to the first age of a nation’s ideal eternal history—the age of gods. In this age, all occurrences subject to auspices are apprehended as appearances of Jove and all things pertaining to marriage are the presence of Juno. Vico calls these divine poetic characters hieroglyphs (933). He says the first nations thought in poetic characters, spoke in fables, and wrote in hieroglyphics. Hieroglyphic is a kind of mute speech in which a meaning is conveyed by calling attention to some physical object, such as the five real words sent by Idanthyrsus to answer Darius the Great—a frog, a mouse, a bird, a plowshare, and a bow (435). Or it may be the “mute speech” (that is, unarticulated speech) of onomatopoetic interjections, such as the human voice imitating the thunder of Jove (448). Hieroglyphic communication can also be resorted to by the use of symbolic images by the mind that has achieved the power of articulated speech. Thus Vico calls the images in his frontispiece that represent the things of the civil world “hieroglyphs” (2). The age of heroes of ideal eternal history employs poetic characters by reducing various species of heroic acts to heroic figures. Unable to form the property of valor or courage to classify a certain set of deeds, the mind of the heroic age reduced them to Achilles; in like manner all devices of clever men were reduced to Ulysses (809, 934). In contrast to the poetic characters of the gods and the heroes, in the third age, that of men, vulgar characters arise. What would require

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an enormous number of hieroglyphic characters to achieve a full range of meanings can now be expressed by the few characters of an alphabet. These alphabetic characters can express abstractions, such that the heroic phrase “Blood boils in my heart” becomes “I am angry” (935). See also generi intelligibili (intelligible genera); storia ideale eterna (ideal eternal history); universali fantastici (imaginative universals). certo (certain). In the first book of Universal Law (chap. 82), Vico introduces the principle “The certain is part of the true [certum est pars veri].” As a principle of jurisprudence, the certain is from authority, in the sense that law is something made by the power of a ruler or a legislative agency. Positive law is something particular and is in this regard something certain, a fact. The true is from reason, which is something universal. A law once enacted cannot stand solely on the authority of the ruler or agency responsible for it. It must also be invested with the authority of reason, that is, it must be an instance of law (ius) itself, of what is universally right and reasonable. In the New Science, Vico transposes this jurisprudential principle of the interrelation of the certain and the true into a principle of the historical life of the nations. The “certains” of a nation are all the things that depend on human choice; for example, its language, customs, laws, and deeds. These are the subject matter of philology (7). What is true, that is, what is universal, is the sense of how these certains unite under the pattern of ideal eternal history. The principles that govern all of history are the subject matter of philosophy (163). The new science is achieved by connecting philosophical reasoning with philological analysis (138–40). Vico’s sense of certain is completely other than that sought in logic, mathematics, or rationalist metaphysics. In these fields, what is certain is a proposition that is indubitable, either because it is self-evident, or because to attempt to deny it is to engage in a self-contradiction, or because it is claimed to be deduced from some set of infallible principles. This sense of certainty is a product of reason. Vico’s “certains” are the product of human choice. They are certain in the sense that they are the facts of a nation’s historical life. See also vero (true). corso (course). A corso is the initial sequence of ideal eternal history—the ages of gods, heroes, and men—experienced by a nation, commencing at the moment of its birth and ending in collapse and return to the rude conditions life had at its origin, which set the stage for a ricorso. The elements or features of each of the three ages are summarized in book 4. See also ricorso (recourse); storia ideale eterna (ideal eternal history). cosa (Latin, res; thing). Vico uses this word throughout the New Science, beginning in the first sentence of the work and ending in the last sentences of the conclusion. He frequently uses it in the combination cose civili, “civil things” or “civil affairs or matters.” Bergin and Fisch render cosa as “institution,” as they explain in the final section of their introduction. Vico uses the Italian word istituzione only once, and that is as a technical term in Roman jurisprudence (993). Bergin and Fisch intend the term “institution” to capture Vico’s doctrine that the things

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of the life of nations are made, not in the sense of deliberate contrivance, but in the sense of responses to the conditions encountered variously in each of the ages of ideal eternal history. Institutions come about as the result of certain biological and social conditions. The reader should keep in mind that where “institution” occurs, Vico is almost always using the very simple and flexible term “thing” (cosa). Note that “thing” can carry the meaning both of an object and a deed, of something merely there or as something made or done. In the present commentary, “thing” or a variant thereof, rather than “institution,” is used when cosa appears in the original.

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coscienza (Latin, conscientia; consciousness or conscience). Coscienza may be rendered as “witnessing consciousness.” It is the form of thinking that both observes and recognizes what is made. Coscienza has il certo, the certain, as its object. Philology studies the “certains” that make up the life of the nations, that is, those things that are contingent on human choice—the languages, customs, deeds, and laws of peoples. Coscienza is contrasted by Vico to scienza, which has as its object il vero, the true, in the sense that philosophy aims at eliciting those principles that are true, or common, to all nations in their birth, development, maturity, decline, and fall. Coscienza yields a knowledge of historical particulars. Scienza yields a knowledge of historical universals. See also certo (certain); scienza (Latin, scientia; science); vero (true). degnità (axiom). Vico titles the section of the first book of the New Science, that containing the axioms—Elements, calling to mind the geometry of Euclid. Proclus, in On Euclid, describes elements in geometry as leading theorems that function as the commanding principles for those that follow from them. He compares them to the letters of the alphabet, as they have the same name in Greek, stoicheion. Vico would also have had in mind Newton’s Principia, which was presented on the model of Euclid’s Elements and which begins with a statement of eight definitions and three “axioms or laws” of motion followed by the deduction of theorems and corollaries. Vico’s New Science is “mathematical” in the sense that from a relatively small number of axioms, it orders a great body of specifics. It is possible that Vico’s reduction of the origin of all the motions in the world of nations to his three principles of humanity—religion, marriage, and burial—has an analogy with Newton’s reduction of all motions in the world of nature to his three laws. Vico uses assioma only once in the New Science, and he equates it with degnità. In the sentence introducing his list of 114 axioms, Vico says, “We propose now the following ‘assiomi, o degnità ’ ” (119). Throughout the list of axioms, and throughout the rest of the text, he uses the term degnità where the term axiom occurs in the English translation. Degnità is the obsolete spelling of dignità (dignity), related to the verb degnare, “to deem worthy” and to the obsolete verb degnificare, “to dignify; to render worthy.” In using degnità, Vico is preserving the original Greek sense of axio¯ma, from axioun, “to think worthy, to think fit.” In the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle states: “An immediate deductive principle I call a posit if one cannot prove it but it is not necessary for anyone who is to learn anything to grasp it; and one which it is necessary for anyone who is going to learn anything whatever to grasp, I call an axiom [axio¯ma] (for there are some

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such things); for we are accustomed to use this name especially of such things” (72a 16–18). In Zingarelli, Vocabolario della lingua italiana, 10th edition, assioma is given as the philosophical meaning of degnità, and in Reynolds, The Cambridge Italian Dictionary, 2 vols., degnità is given as “(philos., esp. Vico) axiom,” suggesting Vico as the prime reference for this use of degnità. This is also confirmed by the entry for degnità in Enciclopedia filosofica, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (Florence: Sansoni, 1967), which cites this as a characteristic term of Vico, but not in contemporary use for assiomi. There is also a precedent for Vico’s use in the scholastic philosophical and theological employment of the Latin term dignitas to signify truth that is immediately evident. Vico describes his axioms as both philosophical and philological, but they are neither self-evident nor deductive, although he does claim the new science is based on a geometric method of thought. The axioms may be thought of as the principles most necessary, fitting, and of greatest worth for comprehending the common nature of the nations. They have the status of “topics” (topoi) or commonplaces from which the principles that order the particulars of the new science can be drawn forth. diritto naturale delle genti (natural law of the gentes). Italian, like other European languages, makes a distinction between law conceived as what is right, reasonable, and proper in itself (diritto) and law enacted by a legislative body or authority (legge). This distinction parallels that in Latin between ius and lex as they appear in the Digest of Justinian, codifying Roman law. Ius, as the Digest states, is derived from iustitia, or justice, a virtue, meaning the art of goodness and fairness. In book 1.1 of the Digest, the distinction is drawn between three senses of ius—ius naturale, ius gentium, and ius civile. Ius naturale, or natural law, is defined as that which nature has taught to all animals. It is shared by human beings and all other animals of land, sea, and air. The example the Digest gives of natural law is marriage directed to the activity of procreation and rearing of children. Human beings and animals share the adherence to this activity. This sense of natural law differs from the modern sense of natural law as being the basis of those rights that are given by reason or by divine being to all human beings regardless of the laws or actions of any particular state. In book 1.11 of the Digest something of this sense of natural law is stated in claiming that what is always fair and good is the meaning of natural law. Ius civile, or civil law, is law distinctive to particular peoples or states and varying among such states. It neither wholly diverges from nor wholly follows ius naturale or ius gentium. Ius civile is what is commonly called positive law, enacted law. Ius gentium lies between ius naturale and ius civile. It is the law of all nations, what all nations hold in common among their various systems of law. It is not coextensive with natural law, since it is not common to all animals, but common only to human beings themselves. It is also not an ideal sense of law, transcending all specific or positive systems of law (what Vico calls the natural law of the philosophers). It is natural in the sense of being actual and universal to human society. Digest 1.2–3 gives some examples of ius gentium as religious duties toward God, duty to obey parents, duty to country, the right to bodily security, and the right to self-defense if violated.

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Vico, by employing the universality of ius gentium among peoples or nations, formulates it as ius naturale gentium, which in Italian is il diritto naturale delle genti— “the natural law of the gentes” (e.g., 394). Gens (plural, gentes) in its root meaning is a Roman clan embracing the families of the same stock, having a common name and ancestry. Vico connects this sense of the law to his doctrine of the origins of society in the establishment of the first families, from which come the nations through their development in accord with the three ages of ideal eternal history. This “law” of the three ages is the transformation of the ius gentium as a static principle of c­ ommonalities among nations into a dynamic principle of a necessary pattern of development common to all peoples. See also storia ideale eterna (ideal eternal history).

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dizionario mentale (mental dictionary). Vico uses the terms vocabolario mentale (35), dizionario mentale (145), and lingua mentale comune (161) interchangeably, to convey his concept of a common mental language or universal set of meanings that are common to all the various languages, living or dead (161–62, 482). As this language or dictionary is mental, it is not as such spoken or written down, but Vico claims it may be constructed by linguistic scholars, given the common nature of the nations as demonstrated in the ideal eternal history of the new science (161). The common mental language is that of human nature itself, apart from any particular language or conditions of human existence. It is analogous to the natural law of the gentes (il diritto naturale delle genti) (394), that part of the law in the Roman Digest that is common to all other systems of law, the ius gentium. See also diritto naturale delle genti (natural law of the gentes). Ebrei (Hebrews). Vico says the sons of Noah—Ham, Japheth, and Shem—all disperse after the universal flood; their offspring become giants and lose their religion and principles of humanity (195, 369). It is from these giants that the gentile nations arise. The Hebrews arise, following the flood, from those of Shem’s offspring who remain pious. The offspring of Ham and Japheth remain feral for two centuries, but “a span of only a hundred years of feral wandering was consumed by the impious [part of the] race of Shem in East Asia” (736). They regain normal stature. In the Chronological Table following the universal flood of the biblical year 1656, we find three events of the Hebrews listed—the call of Abraham, the deliverance of the laws to Moses, and the reign of Saul. Across from these are timelines of the events of the gentile nations of the Chaldeans, Scythians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. The Hebrews live in isolation from the gentile peoples (54, 94–95). Vico says that the Hebrews, in addition to living separately from the gentile peoples, have preserved their memories through education from the beginning of the world (166). The gentile nations arise from divination that is practiced by the founders of the first gentile families (365, 381), but the God of the Hebrews prohibited divination (167–68). The gentile nations are acted on only through divine providence as it governs their corso and ricorso of ideal eternal history, but the God of the Hebrews is one of direct transcendent acts. Vico consistently uses the term “Hebrews.” Other than in reference to the author, Philo Judaeus (54, 169), Vico uses the term “Jews” (Giudei) in only one

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GLOSSARY OF ITALIAN TERMS     257

passage, which concerns the conflict between those Jews called Hellenists and the Jews of Jerusalem (94). See also gentiles (gentiles); giganti (giants).

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eroi (heroes). In the ideal eternal history, the age of heroes mediates between the age of gods and the age of men. When human society develops to the level where more than divine judgments determined by the taking of the auspices by the fathers of the first families are needed for civil order, the figures of heroes are required to act as models of conduct and customs. The minds of the peoples in their heroic age are unable to form virtues as abstract universals of human conduct, so they form them in the poetic characters of heroes. Vico’s two abiding examples are Achilles, to which, he says, such peoples attached all the properties of heroic valor and the feelings and customs arising from such, and Ulysses, to which they attached all the feelings and properties of heroic practical wisdom (809). These are the main figures of the Homeric poems, the Iliad and Odyssey, but Vico also refers to Homer himself as a heroic character (carattere eroico) of the Greek men (873). Another heroic figure is Hercules. Vico says that along with the god, Jove, every gentile nation had a Hercules as its founder (196, 514). These Hercules figures cleared the great forests so they could be brought under cultivation by the founders of the first families. Hercules as a heroic figure straddles the age of gods and the age of heroes. But once a nation enters its age of men the heroic figures cease to be the basis to govern thought and action. See also storia ideale eterna (ideal eternal history); universali fantastici (imaginative universals). famoli (Latin, famuli; persons in servitude). Vico employs an Italian spelling of the Latin word famuli. Where famoli occurs in the original, Bergin and Fisch employ the Latin famuli in their translation. Among the giants or protohumans who wander the great forests of the earth after the universal flood, some respond to the thunderous sky as the presence of Jove and form marriages. They also acquire the art of divination by taking the auspices of Jove’s actions in the great body of the sky. These giants become the founders of the first families, which are the first aristocracies. The founders of the first families are the first monarchs of the world, whose power is subject only to God. They have the power of life or death over their children and those of their households. Those giants who do not grasp the thunderous sky as Jove continue to wander the forests in a feral condition, but eventually seek the protection of the founders of the first families, who indenture them to cultivate the fields in the clearings in the forest that they have established (256–57). Later, famuli may be prisoners taken in war, who become the property of the victorious nobles. In regard to the founders of the first families, Vico is using “family” in its original Latin meaning of familia (from famulus), an estate, including a household of servants or slaves, under the rule of a paterfamilias. In the Notes of Universal Law (87), Vico suggests that famuli and familiae come from fama (fame). Fama is what is talked about; report or rumor. He says what the poets in mythology call fame is to proclaim the names of the bravest men, but it also is to listen to the rumors of the common people and the prayers of those seeking asylum. From this function of listening to what is talked about comes famuli. See also giganti (giants); soci (Latin, socii; attendants).

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fantasia [ fanta’zia] (imagination). Fantasia, in the New Science, is the primordial faculty through which the giants apprehend the thunderous sky as Jove and form the world in the ages of gods and heroes through poetic characters. Because the world is formed in this way, fantasia might be translated or thought of as the “making imagination.” It is derived from the Greek phantasia—the power by which an object is presented to the mind, the object being an appearance or image. It is related to light (phaos) and to the verb phantazein, to make visible or present to the mind. Fantasia is not correctly rendered as “fancy,” which has the sense of a liking formed by caprice rather than reason or “fantasy,” which has the connotation of something unreal, formed only in the mind. Vico uses immaginativa twice in the New Science. He says it is beyond our power to enter into the vasta immaginativa of the first men; we can scarcely understand (intendere) or imagine (immaginare) how the founders of gentile humanity thought (379; see also 338). He says that the imaginative universals (generi fantastici) of Achilles and Ulysses were created by “powerful imaginations [fortissime imaginative]” (809). Vico uses both the verbs immaginare and fantasticare. For example, he uses the phrase “metafisica fantasticata” in contrast to “metafisica ragionata” (“rational metaphysics”) (405). He says to give utterance to our comprehension of spiritual things we must employ our fantasia (402). Zingarelli, Vocabolario della lingua italiana, 10th ed., defines fantasticare as seeking with fantasia an explanation, reason, idea, etc. This active sense of fantasia epistemologically is opposite to the passive sense of imagination (immaginazione) as the faculty that receives impressions from the senses and forms them into images that can become the basis of concepts. In this active sense of fantasia Vico captures the sense of the Greek poiein—to make and to compose poetry, since the first men, as theological poets, make the world in their speech of imaginative universals (universali fantastici). As Vico says, these original poets (poeti) were creators (criatori) (376). See also caratteri poetici (poetic characters); universali fantastici (imaginative universals). favola (Latin: fabula; fable). Vico says that the first science to be learned should be mythology or the interpretation of fables (51). In describing the first of his four tropes of poetic logic, Vico says that when the first poets attributed to bodies the being of animate substances, they formed fables of them. He says that every metaphor so formed is a fable in brief (una picciola favoletta) (404). Thus poetic characters are the basis of fables. Vico claims that favola is fundamental to the conception of both logos and mythos (401, 808, 814). In discussing poetic logic he says the word logica comes from logos, which he claims means favola, and which is carried over into Italian as favella. In Greek, logos means speech, and in Latin, fabula means talk or speech as well as fable, fabula being the source of Italian favola. Favella is from Latin fabellare, from fabella (little story), diminutive of fabula. Vico further says that favola in Greek was also called mythos, and he claims that from mythos is derived the Latin mutus or “mute” (401). The language of the first nations was mute, conveying meanings by gestures or objects displayed to bring forth their natural relations to the world. Vico consistently uses the word “fable” as the type of speech and thought required by poetic characters. The word mito (myth) never appears in the text

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GLOSSARY OF ITALIAN TERMS     259

of the New Science. Vico uses mitologia (mythology, or the science of myth) less than twenty times in his text. In focusing on fable as a key term to describe poetic wisdom, Vico is keeping with its use as commonly found in early eighteenth-century works on mythology and seen as an ancient way of teaching in which the truth is related in an ingenious manner. Vico preserves this sense in his insistence on mythos as mute speech, preceding that of fabula as vera narratio, or true speech, speech made in words. See also caratteri poetici (poetic characters); fantasia (imagination); universali fantastici (imaginative universals).

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filologia (philology). Vico defines philology in a broader sense than its root meaning in Latin as the love of talk, speech, or argument, deriving from Greek—love of argument, learning, and literature (philologos, love of words). This root meaning is close to what is meant today; philology is considered to be the study of all that is relevant to literature or to language used in literature. For Vico, philology is to be understood as the study of all things that depend on human choice, such as the histories of languages, customs, and deeds of peoples at war and in peace (7, 138–39). Vico’s conception of philology accords with that found in the eighteenth century, e.g., George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776): “All branches of philology, such as history, civil, ecclesiastic, and literary: grammar, language, jurisprudence, and criticism” (1.1.5.125). Vico’s conception of philology corresponds to the topics related of the various peoples by the ancient Greek and Latin historians, the prime example of which, for Vico, is Tacitus. In designating Tacitus as one of his four authors in his autobiography, Vico says Tacitus “contemplates man as he is” (A 138). Philology, for Vico, is the study of all the “certains” (certi), or particulars, of the life of nations, the great city of the human race. When philology is combined with philosophy the result is the science of the common nature of the nations (163). See also certo (certain); filosofia (philosophy). filosofia (philosophy). Vico takes philosophy in its root sense of the love of wisdom: philosophia being composed of the two Greek words philia, “friendly love or fondness for,” and sophia, “wisdom.” He is concerned to show that the poets, including Homer, were not philosophers. Instead, the poets sensed in terms of vulgar wisdom what the philosophers later formulated in terms of esoteric wisdom (363). In the ideal eternal history of the gentile nations the philosophers do not appear until the third age, in which reflection governs thought (313). Philosophical wisdom presupposes poetic wisdom and develops from it. Vico opposes philosophy and philology and asserts that philosophers have erred by ignoring what philology studies (7). Philosophy understands man as he should be; philology understands man as he is. Philosophy employs reason to grasp the true (il vero), i.e., what is universal, whereas philology is directed to a knowledge of the certain (il certo), i.e., what is particular. The new science aims to connect philosophical reasoning concerning human nature and providence with philological analysis of human activity that is due to choice and authority. See also filologia (philology); sapienza (Latin, sapientia; wisdom); vero (true).

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generi intelligibili (intelligible genera). Intelligible genera are the class concepts of Aristotelian logic, that is, they are the terms that designate a class of objects. As genera they would strictly be terms that comprise various species of things, but Vico employs “intelligible genera” more widely to mean class concepts, that is, any abstract term that denotes either various species or particulars having a defining property in common. Vico also uses as synonyms universali intelligibili (intelligible universals) (209, 501, 1033) and universali astratti (abstract universals) (1040). The contrasting terms are generi poetici (poetic genera) (210) and generi fantastici (imaginative genera) (403) as well as universali fantastici (imaginative universals) (209). Intelligible genera or class concepts are the stock-in-trade of philosophic sentences and cannot be formed through the poetic wisdom of the ages of gods and heroes in ideal eternal history. Vico says the ancient Egyptians could not form the genus “civil sage,” and moreover they could not abstract the intelligible genus “civil wisdom.” Thus they imagined all their inventions as Thrice-Great Hermes, who, like Achilles or Ulysses, was a poetic character (209, cf. 403). See also caratteri poetici (poetic characters); universali fantastici (imaginative universals). gentili (gentiles). The gentile nations or peoples are those that originate from the dispersal of the offspring of the sons of Noah after the universal flood. The races of these three sons gradually renounce the true religion of their father, Noah, dissolve their marriages, desert their children and families, and wander through the great forests of the earth, growing from human beings of normal stature into giants (369–73). An exception to this are some of the offspring of Shem, who retain normal stature and hold themselves separate, and create the postdiluvian nation of the Hebrews that appears in the first column of the Chronological Table (54). Vico says: “The time at which the founders of the gentile nations reached this condition is fixed a century after the flood for the race of Shem, and two centuries for those of Japheth and Ham” (373; see also 62). There are two types of giants, or protohumans. When the world becomes sufficiently dry for thunder and lightning to occur, some of the giants respond to it as the presence of Jove, form marriages, and acquire the power of divination. These giants become the founders of the first gentile families. Others, who remain feral, eventually seek the protection of the families and are indentured to them to cultivate the land and to serve them as famuli. From these origins the giants devolve into human beings of normal stature, social classes develop among them, and the gentile nations arise in accordance with the providential pattern of ideal eternal history. See also Ebrei (Hebrews); famoli (Latin, famuli; persons in servitude); giganti (giants); storia ideale eterna (ideal eternal history). geroglifici (hieroglyphs). Vico claims that all nations first spoke a mute language in which gestures and objects were used that have natural relations with the meanings they wish to convey (225, 435). From this mute language arose hieroglyphs (226). Hieroglyphics are characters that for the most part can be recognized as pictures of objects. This first language is the language of the age of gods.

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This hieroglyphic or pictorial manner of depicting the world gives way to that of the age of heroes, which is symbolic in the sense of employing signs and devices such as family coats of arms and blazonings. This emblematic language gives way in the age of men to epistolary language or language based on alphabetic characters (432, 928–31). Thus hieroglyphs occupy a specific place in the ideal eternal history of the life of nations. Vico also uses the term geroglifici to designate the items of the civil world displayed in the lower part of the engraving of the frontispiece of the New Science (2). In the Idea of the Work he explains the meaning of these, and in so doing he is combining a sophisticated version of the language of the first age with that of the third, while the depicted items themselves have something of the symbolic or emblematic status of the second age. giganti (giants). Vico says that the entire human race was originally divided into two species: gentiles and Hebrews. The gentiles were giants who came about through the offspring of the sons of Noah, namely, Ham and Japheth, after the universal flood. The Hebrews were of normal stature and originated from some of the offspring of Shem (62, 172, 373). Of the giants there were two classes. There were those who are called “sons of the Earth,” who founded the first families by taking the auspices of Jove and forming the first marriages. The others were feral, those who were unable to grasp the meaning of the appearance of Jove and who later sought protection of the nobles and became members of their households as famuli, cultivating the fields. Vico consistently uses giganti for the protohumans that wander the great forests of the earth following the universal flood. On one occasion he refers to them as bestioni (beasts) (374), and he often calls the first men or giants “bestial” (bestiale). He also compares the giganti to the gross wild creatures reported to be present in Patagonia, at the tip of South America—the country, Vico says, called “de los patacones” (big feet) (170). See also Ebrei (Hebrews); gentili (gentiles); famoli (Latin, famuli; persons in servitude). Giove (Jove). Throughout the New Science, Vico uses the Italian Giove for the Roman god Jupiter, which corresponds to the Greek god Zeus. Vico’s use of Giove resonates with Ious, the archaic form of Iuppiter. Following the universal flood, as the world sufficiently becomes dry, Jove appears, to the giants wandering the great forests of the earth, as the terrifying, thundering sky—Jupiter Tonans (377–78). Those giants who respond to this new phenomenon utter the first name by imitating the sound of thunder and lightning as pa! and pape! This onomatopoetic utterance gives birth to the title of Jove as father (pater) of men and gods (448). Vico claims that every gentile nation has its Jove, although Jove may be known by different names (194, 380). Those giants who apprehend the thunderous sky as the appearance of Jove begin to take the auspices of his movements and become the fathers of the first families from which arises the world of the gentile nations. In his conception of Giove Vico presupposes the combined Greek and Roman traditions. Zeus (formed from Dis, genitive Dios) has the root meaning of

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“brightness” or “brilliance.” Zeus evokes the idea of the luminous sky, as does Iove, whose Indo-European root is Iov, that is, “luminous sky.” Homer has Zeus rule the lower air (ae¯r); rain and storms come from him. Iuppiter is connected both with dies (day) and divus (divine, a god). Another name for Iuppiter (Iup-piter) is Diespiter (dies-pater), pater as in paterfamilias, the head of a household under Roman law. Vico claims the central term of Roman law, ius (law, right), is a contraction of Ious (398). Thus law, on Vico’s view, has a direct philological connection to the origination of the nations. Vico’s source for this etymology is likely the Etymologicon linguae latinae (1695) of Gerard Jan Voss, which, as Nicolini quotes in his Commento (see bibliographical note) on this paragraph asserts: “ious o ius = Iovis os.” The claim of ius as derived from Ious is also made by Hugo Grotius in De Iure Belli ac Pacis (1625) (see prolegomena, sec. 12). See also gentili (gentiles); giganti (giants); spavento (terror). ingegno (Latin, ingenium; ingenuity). Ingegno, and its Latin cognate ingenium, has no clear-cut cognate in English. Bergin and Fisch translate it in various ways depending on the context. In addition to “ingenuity” it can mean “wit, genius, intellectual acuity, invention, and talent,” among other things. Epistemologically, ingegno is the ability to perceive or grasp connections between otherwise disparate things, and see them in a new relationship. It underlies Aristotle’s conception of metaphor in the Poetics, where he describes the making of metaphors as dependent on the ability to see similarities in the dissimilar and asserts: “The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius” (1459a 5–7). Metaphor, Vico’s first trope, is in essence a fable (404). Thus the power of ingegno underlies the creation of poetic characters or imaginative genera by the first peoples (819). In stating this point in this paragraph Vico uses ingegno, which appears in the Bergin and Fisch translation as “sharp wit.” In this same paragraph Vico describes memory as having three different aspects: memory (memoria) when it remembers things, imagination (fantasia) when it alters and simulates them, and ingegno when it puts them into proper order and affect (819). In this statement Bergin and Fisch translate ingegno as “invention.” Ingegno is not invention in the sense of creating something new or novel but is instead the ordering of what is in memory. Its function is comparable to what Aristotle ascribes to recollection (anamne¯sis), in his small treatise On Memory, that is, when a specific content of memory is ordered in terms of a beginning and formed as an intelligible sequence (451b 29–31). See also memoria (memory). memoria (memory). Vico claims that memory is the same as imagination (fantasia) (819). In asserting this Vico is endorsing Aristotle’s statement, in On Memory, that all objects of the imagination (phantasia) are objects of memory (450a 21–23). Vico also claims that in children and in the consciousness of the first men, memory is most vigorous and imagination is most vivid (211, 699). To the connection of memory and imagination Vico adds ingenuity (ingegno). Memory has three aspects: memory (memoria) when it remembers things, imagination (fantasia) when it alters and simulates them, and ingegno when it

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encompasses them and puts them into proper order and affect (819). The addition of ingegno suggests that memory in its full sense is what Aristotle, in On Memory, would call recollection (anamne¯sis), which involves not simply the recall of images but the ordering of what is recalled as a sequence developing from something fixed as a beginning and involving inference (435a6–10). This sense of memory as recollection describes what is required to grasp the sequence of the three ages of ideal eternal history that governs the life of nations. The interconnection between memoria and fantasia is asserted in the first lines of the New Science, where Vico indicates that the engraving of the frontispiece will offer a basis for the exercise of these faculties by which the reader may recall the work after it is read (1). Vico also claims that the frontispiece will allow the reader to conceive (concepire) the idea of the work before reading it. This act of conception requires the power of ingegno to grasp the relations among the objects depicted, and might also be presupposed in the reader’s act of recall after reading the work. Ingegno is especially appropriate if concepire is taken in its active sense of to engender rather than in the passive sense of supplying intellectual form to what is apprehended. See also fantasia (imagination); ingegno (Latin, ingenium; ingenuity). metodo (method). The central axiom of Vico’s method is that “doctrines must take their beginning from that of the matters of which they treat” (314; axiom 106). This axiom directs us to begin the science of the principles of humanity from the time the giants began to think humanly (338). From this beginning point we must discover the order by which the nations develop as placed in history by divine providence: “Our new Science must therefore be a demonstration, so to speak, of what providence has wrought in history” (342). This rational civil theology of divine providence replaces the original science of divination, practiced by the founders of the first families, to take the auspices of the actions of Jove in the motions of the sky. The providential order in the motions of history can be brought forth by joining philosophy with philology. Philosophy and philology are joined through a narrative that makes in speech what has been made by human beings in forming the great city of the human race. Vico says: “Indeed, we make bold to affirm that he who meditates this Science narrates to himself this ideal eternal history so far as he himself makes it for himself by that proof ‘it had, has, and will have to be’ ” (349). To meditate (meditare), for Vico, is to narrate (narrare). Thus “history cannot be more certain than when he who makes the things also narrates them” (349). The method of the new science is genetic, that is, the comprehension of what a thing is by discovering its origin and providing an account of the necessary phases of its development. The proof of the new science requires that the reader remake Vico’s account of the world of the nations for himself. In so doing the reader will be convinced of its truth and this truth will be a self-knowledge because it will be a knowledge of the reader’s own human nature, made by the reader. In his autobiography Vico describes his study of how “both Plato and Aristotle often employ mathematical proofs to demonstrate what they discuss in philosophy” (A 122). He pursued the study of geometry in order to learn the

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manner of such reasoning, so that “if he ever had occasion to reason in that manner he would know how” (A 126). He cites with pride Jean Le Clerc’s opinion, in his review of the first book of Universal Law, that it is “composed by a strict mathematical method” (A 126). By “mathematical method,” Le Clerc meant that Vico’s work “from a few principles draws infinite consequences” (A 164). The first half of Vico’s method in the New Science—meditation—is mathematical in this sense. The “few principles” are the axioms of the Elements of book 1 and are Vico’s ratio, the type of thought that generates a list or account of a subject. When joined with the second half of his method—narration—this sense of ratiocination transforms the story of what was, is, and is to come into the necessary causal sequence of what “had, has, and will have to be [dovette, deve, dovrà]” (349). Vico’s complete speech of the New Science, his oratio, is composed by joining ratio and narratio, making these two methods of thought into one. See also degnità (axiom); provvedenza (providence); scienza (Latin, scientia; science); storia ideale eterna (ideal eternal history). nazione (nation). Etymologically, a nation is a birth (Latin: nation–, natio, from natus, born; Italian: nascita, birth, nascere, to be born). Vico’s use of nazione has no reference to the modern nation-state, nor to its meaning as primarily a set of political structures. A nation originates as a people having a common birth and development. Nations begin as families who form themselves into clans or gentes that later develop into social classes, such as plebeians and nobles. Each nation has its own customs, laws, language, and deeds, but each also develops according to the three ages of ideal eternal history. Nations in their barbarous beginnings are impenetrable (303). Each nation originates separately within the world of nations. When Vico speaks of the “common nature of the nations,” as he does in the full title of the New Science, their commonality is due to their development in terms of ideal eternal history. Their nature is due to their coming into being (nascimento) at certain times and in certain guises or manners. The nature (natura) of a nation is determined by its birth (147–48). See also principio (Latin, principium; principle). nuova arte critica (new critical art). The new science of the common nature of the nations depends on a new critical art (7). This art has as a principal subject matter mythology or the interpretation of fables (51). Its discovery is that the fables are the first histories of the peoples and that the nations arise out of the common sense of the human race (142–43). Philological criticism prior to the new critical art of the new science, Vico holds, has been concerned with only the works of writers that came into being over a thousand years after the beginning of the gentile nations (348, 392). Thus philology has ignored the critical understanding of the fables of the mythological imagination. The new critical art entails a philosophical or metaphysical criticism that can examine the fables and elicit from them a mentality and pattern of origin common to all nations governed by divine providence. The product of this new critical art is the discovery of the doctrines of poetic wisdom and ideal eternal history. In producing these doctrines, philosophy must undertake to examine philology (7). Philosophy must

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connect its reasonings to the languages, deeds, customs, and laws of the actual life or common sense of the nations at war and in peace, and by so doing elicit the origin and the universal principles of development common to all nations.

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principio (Latin, principium; principle). Vico uses the term “principles” (principi) as part of his full title of the New Science, and it appears in the title of book 1, “The Establishment of Principles.” He also uses principi to designate the three customs that lie at the basis of all human society—religion, marriage, and burial (333). These are the principles of humanity in the sense of its beginnings. In using “principle” in this way Vico combines the logical idea of a principle as being a fundamental truth with the historical idea of something from which a thing takes its origin. What a thing is, is to be found through a knowledge of the beginning and development of that thing (314). See also nazione (nation). provvedenza (providence). Provvedenza is the archaic spelling of provvidenza, “divine providence.” “Providence” is derived from Latin providentia, which has the basic meaning of “foresight” or “foreknowledge,” and which is a synonym for prudentia, “prudence.” Provvedenza carries the sense of the verb provvedere, “to see or act in advance in terms of what is useful or necessary,” i.e., to be prudent. Vico introduces the idea of divine providence through his explanation of the figure of Dame Metaphysic in the engraving of the frontispiece. Metaphysics is the contemplation of God in relation to his presence as providence in the civil world or world of nations (2). Vico says that the new science is “a rational civil theology of divine providence” (342, 385). This civil theology demonstrates what providence has wrought in history in the sense that it shows the corso and ricorso of any nation according to the ages of ideal eternal history. This providential order is begotten by God and provides the terms in which human beings make their history within the life of the nations. The practitioner of the new science, knowing this providential order, commands a kind of prudence or foresight in being able to make a science of history (349). See also nazione; storia ideale eterna (ideal eternal history). repubblica (Latin: respublica; republic). Repubblica, reppublica, occurs in 261 lines of the Italian text of the Scienza nuova. “Republic” in English as well as modern Italian refers, with variations, to a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch and who is elected by a particular political body or by its citizens for a designated period. Bergin and Fisch consistently use “commonwealth” where Vico uses repubblica. For the Anglo-Saxon term “commonwealth” there is no Italian cognate, although its meaning as a whole body of people united by common consent to form a nation, state, or politically organized community is broad enough to cover what Vico includes in various places under repubblica. Vico was certainly aware of the classical Greek and Roman traditions of republicanism as well as the Renaissance republican theory of Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, but the reader should know that Vico attaches his own meanings to repubblica at different points throughout the New Science, which can be understood only through their contexts. Where the Bergin and Fisch translation of the New Science has “commonwealth,” in this commentary, “republic” is used.

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ricorso (recourse). The ricorso of a nation is the retraversing of the three ages of ideal eternal history once the nation has completed its original corso and returned to the rude, barbaric conditions of life, to some extent comparable to those of its origin (41, 393). The ricorso is not a simple repetition of the original corso because the ricorso involves the reviving of what was first made in the corso. What was made is now remade. As Bergin and Fisch point out in their introduction, the ricorso is a historical process but it also has the legal sense of a retrial or appeal. The nation must once again attempt to achieve the goal of a republic ordained by providence. Vico summarizes his insights into the ricorso in book 5 and portrays the barbarism into which it falls in his conclusion (1106). In the critical literature interpreting Vico’s New Science, the plural corsi e ricorsi (courses and recourses) is often used, but Vico, in the New Science, never uses these terms in the plural in reference to the life of any nation. There are plural courses and recourses in the sense that there are many nations in the world of nations undergoing the processes of ideal eternal history at different rates. But it remains problematic as to what follows any ricorso. Some accounts in the critical literature mistakenly approach the ricorso as though Vico means it to be the beginning of a progressive upward spiral, thus introducing into Vico’s philosophy of history some version of the Enlightenment ideal of an overall progress in history governed by providence, rather than Vico’s providence of the cycles of corso and ricorso of his ideal eternal history. See also corso (course); storia ideale eterna (ideal eternal history). sapienza (Latin, sapientia; wisdom). Sapientia is from sapiens, as in homo sapiens. The English cognate is “sapience”—sagacity or wisdom. Cicero, in his well-known definition of wisdom (sapientia), says that it is knowledge of things divine and human and the causes of each (Tusc. 4.26.57). Vico identifies wisdom (sapienza) with the same two types of knowledge, connecting these to Varro’s lost work on Rerum divinarum et humanarum (364). The title of book 2, the largest book in the New Science, is Poetic Wisdom (La sapienza poetica). This announces Vico’s unique claim to have discovered the origin of human wisdom in the poetic productions of the first men. There is an original wisdom, formed through poetic characters, that is presupposed by later rational or philosophical wisdom, which is articulated in abstract or intelligible class concepts. The New Science is itself a book of sapienza, for it provides a knowledge of the origin and action of the divine in human history or providence as well as all things of the civil world that are made by human choice and actions. See also generi intelligibili (intelligible genera); provvedenza (providence); universali fantastici (imaginative universals). scienza (Latin, scientia; science). Vico’s conception of scienza is first put forth in On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians (1710), which begins by advancing his principle of verum ipsum factum or verum et factum convertuntur—the true is the same as the made or convertible with the made. He states this principle as the basis of mathematical reasoning: mathematical truths are such because they are made in accordance with the principles of mathematics. He makes prominent reference to the verum-factum principle once in the New Science (349). The new science is a

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science whose truths are made. Human beings make the things of human history and thus they can make a true narration of them. The world of nations is human nature writ large, and in the narration of the life of nations, human nature makes a knowledge of itself. Natural science, for Vico, is coscienza, a witnessing consciousness. Because the objects of natural science—the things of nature—are not made by the knower, there can be no conversion of the true and the made. There can only be a true scienza of history or the world of nations, because here the object to be known is in fact the knower, that is, the world is made by the knower as the extension of human nature. True scienza is a form of self-knowledge (416). See also coscienza (Latin, conscientia; consciousness or conscience). senso comune (Latin sensus communis; common sense). Il senso comune, in Vico’s terms, is “communal sense.” As Vico defines it, it is “judgment without reflection [giudizio senz’alcuna riflessione]” (142). This can be the sense of things shared by a class (ordine), people, nation, or the entire human race. That there is a common sense of the human race is reflected in Vico’s claim, in the title, that the New Science is of the “common nature of the nations.” Despite the diversity of “certains” (certi) among the nations, that is, the laws, languages, customs, and deeds particular to each, all nations develop these in accord with the common order of ideal eternal history (144–46, 311). Vico says that, as the Latin terms certum and commune are opposed to each other, so a nation is composed both of what is certain or particular to it and what is common in it with all other nations in the world of nations (321–22). Vico’s doctrine of il senso comune as social and historical carries with it the sense of community and common ways of acting and thinking. Today this sense of comune is preserved in its use to designate an urban district, a village, town, or municipality. Common sense is communal sense. It contrasts with the Cartesian bon sens, or something that is to be evident to anyone by the natural light of reason. It also contrasts to the view of the eighteenth-century Scottish common-sense school of philosophy, that there are certain intuitively known general truths or principles independent of social or historical conditions. See also certo (certain); storia ideale eterna (ideal eternal history). soci (Latin, socii; attendants). Vico uses an Italian spelling of the Latin word socii. Where soci appears in the original, Bergin and Fisch employ the Latin socii in their translation (e.g., 258–59). Socii correspond in the heroic age of ideal eternal history to famuli in the earlier, divine age of the founding of families (91, 425, 582). The famuli have the status of indentured servants, working the fields of the first families. The socii are those who act as attendants to the heroes. The socii have a higher status than famuli, as they are an extension of the activity of the heroes. But the heroes, like the fathers of the first families, have the power of life or death over the socii. Vico intends the term in a more restricted sense than the ordinary meaning of the Latin socius, which can have the sense of a companion or associate, even a political ally or a commercial partner. See also famoli (Latin, famuli; persons in servitude).

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società (Latin, societas, from socius, associate; society). Vico uses the term “society” in the second paragraph of the Idea of the Work to describe the agency of providence in bringing men out of their original bestial state to the proper human state of living in justice with others. He says it is one of the chief purposes of the New Science to demonstrate how this sociality distinctive to human nature is realized (2). He says divine providence caused men to become social by means of the terror originally instilled in the first men in the Jove-experience (177–79). Vico uses the phrase the “whole society of the human race [tutta la società del gener umano]” (179). This phrase calls to mind Vico’s Augustinian phrase, in which he speaks of providence ordering “this great city of the human race [questa gran città del gener umano]” (342). He also uses the phrase “social life [vita socievole],” saying that the new science is directed to a comprehension of the thoughts men have of the utilities and necessities that constitute their social existence (161, 347). Vico’s use of “society” is an early use in the development of the term in modern thought. In general, Vico appears to echo Aristotle’s definition of man as an animal of the polis, but in so doing he expands this to the whole of the human race as it is governed by the providential pattern of corso and ricorso. See also corso (course); ricorso (recourse); soci (Latin, socii; attendants). spavento (terror). Concerning the emotion governing the relation between human beings and the divine, Vico used two terms: spavento, terror, extreme fear, and timore, fear in a less extreme sense, even connoting awe. Vico says it is fear (timore) through which gods are created in the world, not fear of other men but fear that is awakened in men by themselves (382). He quotes from Statius’s epic, Thebaid: “Primos in orbe deos fecit timor!”—“Fear first made gods in the world” (3.661) (191). In describing the Jove-experience, wherein the giants or protohumans first confront the divine, Vico uses spavento. In mentioning it for the first time in the New Science, Vico uses the phrase “un terribile spavento” (a terrible terror) (13). In discussing piety as the beginning of poetic morality he says that piety sprang from religion and that religion is properly “timore della divinità” (fear of divinity) (503). A few lines further he speaks of “la spaventosa religione degli auspici di Giove” (the terrifying religion of the auspices of Jove) (503). In describing the principle that authority first came about as divine, he says the giants were kept chained to the earth “per lo spavento del cielo e di Giove” (by the terror of the sky and of Jove) (387). This terror struck them when the sky first thundered. He explains that this sense of immobilization by fear is captured by the Latins in the phrase terrore defixi (387). In describing the primal scene of the Jove-experience as the basis of poetic metaphysics, Vico uses the phrase “tuoni spaventosissimi” (terrorizing thunder). He says the giants were “spaventati ed attoniti” (terrorized and astonished) (377). The reader will find that Bergin and Fisch render both timore and spavento as “fear” or “fright,” perhaps allowing the context somewhat to convey the meaning. In general, however, Vico repeatedly uses spavento to designate the original experience of the divine—the appearance of the sky as Jupiter Tonans, from which religion as the first principle of humanity is born. He often uses timore to designate the sense of fear or awe of the gods and the divine generally, through

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which the institution of religion is maintained in the life of the nations. But Vico does not consistently keep separate the senses of spavento and timore.

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storia ideale eterna (ideal eternal history). “Ideal eternal history” refers to the design or pattern that all nations experience in their rise, development, maturity, decline, and fall. Vico uses these five phrases to describe this history in various places (e.g., 245, 349). In axiom 66 Vico gives this as a sequence of the gentiles responding, first to necessity, then utility; next seeking comfort, then pleasure, then luxury; and finally going mad and wasting their substance (241). Vico also states this sequence of the nature of the peoples as being, first, crude, then severe, then benign, subsequently delicate, and finally dissolute (242). At the beginning of book 4, Vico says he will rely on the axioms concerning ideal eternal history (241–45) to describe the course the nations run (915). He elucidates eleven sets of three phases of the life of any nation in accord with the ages of gods, heroes, and men. In introducing these he refers the reader back to the more fluid five- or six-phase description of this history in the axioms. These multiple phases appear to be overridden by the three ages that dominate Vico’s conception of history as corso and ricorso. This history is “ideal” in that each nation develops at its own pace and in its own particular way. A cross-section of the total world of nations at any one time would reveal nations in differing phases of the three ages, but all nations undergo the phases and ages of this history. The fact that all nations do so means that this history is eternal. It is governed by providence, and with the exception of the Hebrews, no nation exists under other conditions. See also corso (course); Ebrei (Hebrews); provvedenza (providence); ricorso (recourse). topica sensibile (sensory topics). The distinction in logic and rhetoric between ars topica and ars critica is incorporated by Vico into his conception of the development of mind. Topics (topoi) are commonplaces from which to draw forth arguments. Vico associates ars topica with the form of thought of the first founders of humanity, who created sensory topics (topica sensibile), from which arose poetic genera (generi poetici) (495). The giants, or protohumans, live in a stream of ongoing sensations in which each sensation is a new thing. Once they are able to associate several sensations together as one thing, they form a sensory commonplace, a sensation that transcends the ongoing immediacy of the stream of sensations. They now command a mental place from which to confront immediacy. Ars critica always presupposes ars topica because an argument must be invented before it can be critically considered. Human minds, in accord with Vico’s view, invent the world in a topical fashion, resulting in the ages of gods and heroes of poetic wisdom. When minds become reflective in the third age of ideal eternal history, they can engage in criticism, applying standards of truth and falsity to what is brought forth in mind (494–98, 699). See also caratteri poetici (poetic characters). universali fantastici (imaginative universals). In the Idea of the Work Vico claims that the master key to the new science is that the first gentile peoples were poets who spoke in poetic characters (caratteri poetici) (34). Vico makes clear that

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270    GLOSSARY

OF ITALIAN TERMS

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these poetic characters are imaginative genera or universals (generi o universali fantastici) (209). Vico also uses the terms caratteri fantastici (431), generi poetici (210, 495), generi fantastici (403), and universali poetici (933) as synonyms for universali fantastici. These are models or ideal portraits to which these poets or first gentile peoples reduce all particular species that resemble these models. These imaginative genera or universals are formed because the minds of the first men did not have the power to form intelligible genera (generi intelligibili) (209). Because they were unable to form such abstract genera, the first men formed all diverse species and all diverse individuals who were courageous and strong men as Achilles, and they formed all prudent or wise men as Ulysses (403). Thus of all these diverse species or individuals they univocally predicated of them “Achilles,” or “Ulysses,” etc., that is, in each case they literally said it was the particular poetic character. In describing poetic characters in this way Vico is presenting them as a protoform of Aristotelian class logic. Genera are class concepts that state the property common to the species that fall under them. They predicate this common property literally. Infima species bring under them all individuals of a certain type. Intelligible genera of class logic presuppose, in the development of the mind, imaginative genera that employ poetic particulars as universals. See also caratteri poetici (poetic characters); generi intelligibili (intelligible genera). vero (true). Il vero (the true) is Vico’s companion term to il certo (the certain). The object of philosophy is to employ reason to gain a knowledge of the true. The object of philology is to provide observation of the certain, which are those things that are the result of human choice, such as laws, customs, and deeds in the life of the nations (138, 163, 325). The certain in Vico’s doctrine is always what is particular. The true is what is universal. The true is convertible with the made in accordance with Vico’s principle verum et factum convertuntur, which is affirmed in his presentation of method (349). Because human beings make the certains of history, they can make the trues that govern history. The new science is made by having philosophy undertake to examine philology (7, 140). This union of the philosophical and the philological is the basis of Vico’s new art of criticism and is what makes Vico’s science new. See also certo (certain); nuova arte critica (new critical art).

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K ey to E ng l ish Equiva l e nts

authority, autorità axiom, degnità barbarism, barbarie certain, certo common sense, senso comune commonwealth. See republic conceit, boria consciousness, coscienza course, corso fable, favola famuli, famoli* fear. See terror gentiles, gentili giants, giganti Hebrews, Ebrei heroes, eroi hieroglyphs, geroglifici ideal eternal history, storia ideale eterna imagination, fantasia imaginative universals, universali fantastici ingenuity, ingegno institution. See thing intelligible genera, generi intelligibili invention. See ingenuity Jove, Giove memory, memoria mental dictionary, dizionario mentale method, metodo nation, nazione natural law of the gentes, diritto naturale delle genti new critical art, nuova arte critica philology, filologia philosophy, filosofia poetic characters, caratteri poetici principle, principio providence, provvedenza recourse, ricorso republic, repubblica 271

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272    Key to

English Equivalents

science, scienza sensory topics, topica sensibile society, società socii, soci* terror, spavento thing, cosa true, vero wisdom, sapienza

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*For Vico’s Italian, Bergin and Fisch use the Latin cognate.

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Chronological Summary of Vico’s Life and Principal Works Historical, Philosophical, and Juridical

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1668 1675

Born at Naples on June 23. Fractures skull in serious fall, requiring three years of convalescence. Completes grammar school, followed by periods of more advanced 1678–1686 formal instruction by professors in logic, metaphysics, and law, supplemented by self-directed program of reading. 1686–1695 Spends nine years as tutor to children of the Rocca family at Vatolla, with occasional visits to Naples; continues his own reading program; matriculates at the University of Naples and receives a degree in both civil and canon law in 1694; publishes first work, the canzone “Affetti di un disperato” (Feelings of One in Despair), in 1693. 1695 Resumes residence at Naples. 1699 Becomes professor of Latin eloquence (rhetoric) at University of Naples (a position he holds until 1741); marries Teresa Caterina Destito; eight children are born in the marriage. 1699–1707 Delivers six inaugural university orations (1699, 1700, 1702, 1705, 1706, 1707). Probable date of the draft of Vico’s history of the Conspiracy of 1703 Macchia of 1701 (Principum neapolitanorum coniurationis), an earlier version of which exists, titled De parthenopea coniuratione (On the Neapolitan Conspiracy). 1708–1709 Delivers seventh inaugural university oration in 1708, which is expanded and published as a small book, On the Study Methods of Our Time (De nostri temporis studiorum ratione), in 1709. Publishes the first book of On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the 1710 Italians Drawn from the Origins of the Latin Language (De antiquissima Italorum sapientia ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda) on metaphysics; two further books, one on physics and the other on morals, were projected but never written. 1716 Publishes On the Life and Deeds of Antonio Carafa (De rebus gestis Antonii Caraphaei), Vico’s commissioned biography of this military figure. 1720–1722 Publishes the three books of Universal Law (Il diritto universale): On the One Principle and One End of Universal Law, On the Constancy of the Jurisprudent, and Notes and Dissertations. 1723 Loses concourse for the chair of civil law.

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274    CHRONOLOGY

OF VICO’S LIFE AND PRINCIPAL WORKS

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1724

Writes “Scienza nuova in forma negativa,” the manuscript of which is lost. Vico rewrites the work, which becomes the first edition of the New Science. 1725 Publishes The Principles of a New Science concerning the Nature of the Nations through Which the Principles of a New System of the Natural Law of the Gentes Are Discovered (Principi di una scienza nuova intorno alla natura delle nazioni per la quale si ritruovano i principi di altro sistema del diritto naturale delle genti), which later becomes known as the First New Science. 1728 Publishes autobiography, begun in 1725, titled “Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself ” (“Vita di Giambattista Vico scritta da se medesimo”), in the first volume of the journal Raccolta d’opuscoli scientifici e filologici at Venice. (A continuation is written in 1731, which did not appear during his lifetime but is a part of the modern editions of the work.) 1729 In response to an issue circulated in Naples of the Leipzig Acta Eruditorum, dated August 1727, containing the anonymous, malevolent, short review of the New Science of 1725, Vico publishes and circulates the pamphlet known as the Vici Vindiciae (Vindication of Vico). 1730 Publishes Five Books of Giambattista Vico of Principles of a New Science concerning the Common Nature of the Nations (Cinque libri di Giambattista Vico de’principj d’una Scienza nuova d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni), which, when combined with the third edition, later becomes known as the Second New Science, although some passages, such as Vico’s instructions to the young reader and his comments on the inversion of the dipintura of the frontispiece, are not carried over into the third edition. 1731 Writes “Third corrections, meliorations, and additions” to the New Science, including a discourse on the Law of the Twelve Tables and one on the Law of Tribonian (after preparing a first and second set of corrections, meliorations, and additions in 1730, as the Second New Science appeared). 1732 Delivers and publishes the inaugural university oration “On the Heroic Mind” (De Mente Heroica). 1735 Appointed Royal Historiographer by Charles of Bourbon. 1737 As custode of the renewed Academy of Oziosi, delivers the inaugural oration concerning the relation between philosophy and eloquence. 1741 Succeeded in his professorship by his son Gennaro. 1743–1744 Reviews printer’s proofs of half of the third edition of the New Science in December 1743; dictates the dedication of the edition to Cardinal Troiano Acquaviva on January 10, 1744. 1744 Dies during the night of January 22 –23; Principles of New Science of Giambattista Vico concerning the Common Nature of the Nations (Principj di Scienza nuova di Giambattista Vico d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni) is published at the end of July.

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Some Works of Secondary L iteratu r e on Vico

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Below are some book-length interpretive studies of Vico. For citations to the standard bibliographies containing all critical literature on Vico, see the bibliographical note in the front matter. Adams, Henry Packwood. The Life and Writings of Giambattista Vico. London: Allen and Unwin, 1935. Reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1970. Amoroso, Leonardo. Lettura della Scienza nuova di Vico. Turin: UTET, 1998. Apel, Karl-Otto. Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis Vico. 2nd ed. Bonn: Bouvier, Grundmann, 1975. Badaloni, Nicola. Introduzione a G. B.Vico. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961. Battistini, Andrea. La degnità della retorica: Studi su G. B.Vico. Pisa: Pacini, 1975. ——. La sapienza retorica di Giambattista Vico. Milan: Guerini and Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, 1995. ——. Vico tra antichi e moderni. Bologna: Mulino, 2004. Bayer, Thora Ilin, and Donald Phillip Verene, eds. Giambattista Vico: Keys to the New Science; Translations, Commentaries, and Essays. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. Bedani, Gino. Vico Revisited: Orthodoxy, Naturalism, and Science in the Scienza Nuova. Oxford: Berg, 1989. Berlin, Isaiah. Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas. New York: Viking Press, 1976. Reprinted in Three Critics of the Enlightenment, edited by Henry Hardy. London: Pimlico, 2000. Cantelli, Gianfranco. Mente corpo linguaggio: Saggio sull’interpretazione vichiana del mito. Florence: Sansoni, 1986. Costa, Gustavo. Vico e l’Europa: Contro la “boria delle nazioni.” Milan: Guerini and Instituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, 1996. Cristofolini, Paolo. Vico pagano e barbaro. Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2001. Croce, Benedetto. The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico. Translated by R. G. Collingwood. 1913. Reprint, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2002. Fassò, Guido. I “quattro autori” del Vico: Saggio sulla genesi della “Scienza nuova.” Milan: Guiffrè, 1949. Flint, Robert. Vico. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1884. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1979. Fubini, Mario. Stile e umanità di Giambattista Vico. 2nd ed. Milan: Ricciardi, 1965. Gentile, Giovanni. Studi vichiani. 3rd ed. Edited by Vito A. Bellezza. Florence: Sansoni, 1968. Goetsch, James Robert, Jr. Vico’s Axioms: The Geometry of the Human World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. 275 Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/suss/detail.action?docID=4412740. Created from suss on 2021-02-14 21:00:44.

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276    WORKS OF SECONDARY LITERATURE ON VICO

Grassi, Ernesto. Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980. Reprint, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001. Haddock, Bruce A. Vico’s Political Thought. Swansea: Mortlake Press, 1986. Kelley, Donald R. Faces of History: From Herodotus to Herder. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Kunze, Donald. Thought and Place: The Architecture of Eternal Places in the Philosophy of Giambattista Vico. New York: Lang, 1987. Lilla, Mark. G. B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Mali, Joseph. The Rehabilitation of Myth: Vico’s New Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Marcus, Nancy du Bois. Vico and Plato. New York: Lang, 2001. Marshall, David. Vico and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Mazzotta, Guiseppe. The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Milbank, John. The Religious Dimension in the Thought of Giambattista Vico. 2 vols. Lampeter, Dyfed, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991–92. Miller, Cecilia. Giambattista Vico: Imagination and Historical Knowledge. London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Miner, Robert C. Vico: Genealogist of Modernity. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2002. Mooney, Michael. Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Reprint, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994. Naddeo, Barbara Ann. Vico and Naples: The Urban Origins of Modern Social Theory. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Otto, Stephan. Giambattista Vico: Grundzüge seiner Philosophie. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1989. Papini, Mario. Arbor humanae linguae: L’etimologico di G. B.Vico come chiave ermeneutica della storia del mondo. Bologna: Cappelli, 1984. ——. Il geroglifico della storia: Significato e funzione della dipintura nella “Scienza nuova” di G. B.Vico. Bologna: Cappelli, 1984. Piovani, Pietro. La filosofia nuova di Vico. Edited by Fulvio Tessitore. Naples: Morano, 1990. Pompa, Leon. Vico: A Study of the “New Science.” 1975. 2nd rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Rossi, Paolo. The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico. Translated by L. G. Cochrane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. ——. Le sterminate antichità e nuovi saggi vichiani. 1969. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1999. Schaeffer, John D. Sensus communis:Vico, Rhetoric, and the Limits of Relativism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990. Sevilla Fernández, José Manuel. Giambattista Vico: Metafísica de la mente e historicismo antropológico. Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1988.

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WORKS OF SECONDARY LITERATURE ON VICO     277

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Tagliacozzo, Giorgio. The Arbor Scientiae Reconceived and the History of Vico’s Resurrection. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993. Trabant, Jürgen. Vico’s New Science of Ancient Signs: A Study of Sematology. Translated by Sean Ward. London: Routledge, 2004. Verene, Donald Phillip. Knowledge of Things Human and Divine:Vico’s New Science and “Finnegans Wake.” New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. ——. The New Art of Autobiography: An Essay on the “Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself.” Oxford: Clarendon, 1991. Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO), 2011. ——. Vico’s Science of Imagination. 1981. Reprint, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991.

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In dex of Nam es

Abdala (Abdallah ibn-Yasin), 215 Abraham, 58, 60, 65 Achilles, 84 – 85, 108, 116, 126, 149 – 50,    174 – 75, 177, 179, 182 – 83, 197 – 98, 200 Acquaviva d’Aragona, Troiano, Cardinal, 29 Adam, 86, 131 Aeneas, xi, 37, 58, 63 – 64, 67, 155, 158 Aeschylus, 187 Aesop, 66, 135 Agamemnon, 149, 198 Alcinous, 111, 175 – 76 Alcmena, 12 Alexander of Aphrodisias, 129 American Indians, 191 Ammonites, 60 Amphion, 116, 187 Amphitryon, 12 Anakim, 60 Anchises, 67 Apel, Karl-Otto, 7 Apollo, 114 – 15, 145, 192 Apollodorus mythographus, 4 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 227 Argeïphontes, 149 Aristophanes, 187 Aristotle, x, 3 – 4, 6, 10 – 11, 23, 30, 75, 77 – 79, 90, 94 – 95, 101, 123, 128 – 29, 132, 135, 140 – 42, 153, 160, 174, 178 – 80, 184, 187, 196, 198, 224 – 25, 227, 234 Arnauld, Antoine (1612 – 1694), 11, 229

Artreus, 149 Asclepius, 215 Assyrians, 58, 60 Atlas, 65 Atticus, Titus Pomponius, 93, 95 Augustine, St., 65, 99, 121 Bacon, Francis, 6, 34, 48 – 49, 75 – 77, 90, 112 – 13 Baldi, Antonio, 30 Battistini, Andrea, xix, 58, 68, 115, 130, 136, 221, 224 Bayle, Pierre (1647 – 1706), 4 – 5, 33, 93, 109, 230 Berecynthia. See Cybele Bergin, Thomas Goddard (1904 – 1987) and Max Harold Fisch (1900 – 1995), xvii – xix, 72, 187, 191, 193, 210, 233 Berlin, Sir Isaiah (1907 – 1997), xviii, 3 Boccaccio, Giovanni, xi, xiii, 14 Bodin, Jean (1530 – 1596), xi, 221 – 23 Boethius, 41 – 42 Boreas, 4 Borkowski, Andrew, 68, 208 Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne (1627 – 1704), 3 Bowra, C. M., 176 Boyle, Robert, 152 Bruni, Leonardo (1370 – 1444), 3 Bruno, Giordano (1548 – 1600), 100 Brutus, L. Junius, xi, 69, 148 Budgen, Frank, 180 279

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280    INDEX

Cacus, 67 Cadmus, 64, 96, 149 Caerellius, Q., 57 Caesar, C. Julius, 120 Calliope, 117 Camillo, Giulio (c. 1480 – 1544), 23, 38 Capaccio, Giulio Cesare, 30 Cassirer, Ernst, 4, 123, 133, 155 – 57, 192 Cebes of Thebes, xi, 34 – 35, 237 Censorinus, 57, 96 Chaldeans, 58, 60 – 62, 64, 156 Chronos, 35, 42, 67, 149, 155 See also Saturn Cicero, xii – xiii, 12, 24, 39, 54, 68 – 69, 93, 95, 107, 120, 129, 137, 169 – 70, 175, 198, 203, 227 – 28, 237 Claudius, Emperor, 48 Clio, 114 – 17 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, ix Constantine the Great, 58 Conti, Antonio (1677 – 1749), 16 Conti, Lorenzo, 221 Cornutus, 4 Corsini, Lorenzo (Pope Clement XII), 14 – 15 Cossus, Aulus Cornelius, 95 Cousin, Victor (1792 – 1867), ix Croce, Benedetto (1866 – 1952), ix, xvii – xix, 8 Croesus, 129 Cuoco, Vincenzo (1770 – 1823), ix Cybele, 131, 145, 152 Cyrus the Great, 58 Dante Aligheri, xiii, 7, 14, 22, 30, 37, 58, 92, 102, 112, 121, 170, 180, 212, 226 Daphne, 114 Darius the Great, 62 – 63, 213 Demetrius of Phalerum, 59 Democritus, 96, 100 Demosthenes, 24, 78, 169

Descartes, René, 10 – 14, 17, 31, 45, 72, 90, 95, 103, 113, 126, 228 – 30 Deucalion and Pyrrha, 96, 116, 197 Diana, 145, 152 Dido, 63 – 64 Diodorus Siculus, 57 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 3 Dionysius of Syracuse, 38 Doria, Paolo Mattia (1662 – 1746), 16, 36 Draco, 68, 145, 149 Egyptians, 45, 56 – 59, 62 – 66, 72, 195 El Brocense, Francisco Sanchez (1523 – 1600), 80 Elizabeth, Princess of Bohemia, 113 Ellmann, Richard, 180 Emim, 60 Empedocles, 174 Epicurus, Epicureans, xiv – xv, 31, 33, 42, 46, 93 – 98, 100, 109, 227 – 28, 230, 236 Erato, 117 Esperti, Giuseppe Luigi, xv Etruscans, 13, 79, 111 Euclid, 74 – 75 Euhemerus, 4 Euripides, 187 Euterpe, 117 Evander the Arcadian, 67, 156 Ezekiel, book of, 145 Ficino, Marsilio (1433 – 1499), 38 Fisch, Max Harold, 12, 35 – 36 See also Bergin and Fisch Foscolo, Ugo (1778 – 1827), ix Freud, Sigmund, x Gaetani, Niccolò, 41 Gaia, 66, 114 Galileo Galilei, 5 – 7, 14, 90, 108, 152, 194, 233 Garin, Eugenio (1909 – 2004), 33

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INDEX     281

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Gelli, Giambattista Domenico, 73 Gentile, Domenico, 13 Germans, 120, 206 Geryones, 67 Giacco, Bernardo Maria, xv, 15 Giambullari, Pierfrancesco (1495 – 1555), 73 Gobryas, 63 Godfrey of Bouillon, French crusader, 84, 126 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, ix Grassi, Ernesto (1902 – 1991), x, xvi, 7 Greeks, xiv, 18, 41 – 42, 45, 58 – 59, 62 – 69, 114, 121, 130, 136, 141 – 42, 145, 155 – 58, 169 – 71, 173 – 87, 191 – 92, 207 Grotius, Hugo (1583 – 1645), xiii – xiv, 6 – 7, 19, 33, 85 – 87, 91, 96, 126, 210 – 11, 215, 230 Guicciardini, Francesco (1483 – 1540), 3, 235 – 36 Ham, 59, 61, 97, 119 Hamann, Johann Georg (1730 – 1788), ix Hayne, Thomas (1582 – 1645), 80 Hebrews, 58 – 60, 62, 64 – 65, 86 – 87, 93, 111, 119 – 20, 130 – 31, 142, 202, 223 Hector, 198 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, xi – xii, 7, 48, 180, 192 Hephaestus. See Vulcan Hercules, 36, 41, 61 – 62, 66 – 67, 95, 145, 149, 156, 237 Herder, Johann Gottfried von (1744 – 1803), ix, 3 Hermes Thrice-great Hermes the elder, 45, 64 – 66, 215 Thrice-great Hermes the younger, 64 See also Mercury Herodotus, 3, 56, 63, 129

Hesiod, 62, 66, 100 – 101, 109, 115, 121 Hesychius of Alexandria, 129 Heurn, Otto van (1577 – 1648), 64 Hobbes, Thomas, xi, 5, 19, 32 – 33, 75, 87 – 88, 91, 96 – 98, 101, 125, 227, 232 Homer, xi, 21, 31, 34, 41 – 44, 47, 66, 96, 108, 111, 114, 122, 131, 135, 146, 149, 155 – 56, 169 – 88, 195, 201 Horace, xiii, 25, 122, 126, 134, 173, 177, 184 Horus, 57 Hotman, François (1524 – 1590), 213 Hydra, 66 Iamblichus, 130 Iapetus, 66 Idanthyrsus, King of Scythia, 62 – 63, 213 Ious. See Jove Isis, 57 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich (1743 – 1819), ix Japheth, 59, 61, 97, 119 Jesus, 154, 202 Jews, 59 – 60, 86 See also Hebrews Job, book of, xi, 32, 231 – 33 John, Gospel of, 130, 154 John the Baptist, xv Josephus, Flavius, 59, 176 Jove (Jupiter), 5, 12, 44, 60 – 62, 66, 81, 87, 92, 101 – 2, 111 – 12, 114, 117, 119 – 26, 128, 131 – 33, 136 – 38, 140 – 43, 145, 147, 149, 152, 154, 156, 197, 200, 212, 226 – 28, 233, 237 Joyce, James, ix – x, 180 Jung, Carl Gustav, x Juno, 95, 145, 200, 228 Jupiter. See Jove

Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/suss/detail.action?docID=4412740. Created from suss on 2021-02-14 21:00:44.

282    INDEX

Knox, Bernard, 171, 181 Kristensen, Tom, x

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Lactantius, Firmianus, 59 Latins, xiv, 67, 121, 136 – 37, 145, 153, 155, 158 See also Romans Lavinia, 67 Le Clerc, Jean (1657 – 1736), 5, 15 Leo, 31, 41 – 42 Leonardo da Vinci, 233 Leviathan, xi, 32, 232 Livy (Titus Livius), 3, 67, 95, 148 Locke, John, 19, 31, 46, 126, 228 – 30 Lodoli, Carlo (1690 – 1761), 16, 23 – 24 Lodovico, Domenico, 30 Longinus, Dionysius, 24 – 25, 47, 99, 173 – 74, 183 – 85, 206 Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, 150 Lucilius Iunior, Gaius, 95 Lucretius Carus, Titus, 4, 125 Luke, Gospel of, 38 Lycurgus, 68 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 227 Magdalene, Mary, 154 Mark, Gospel of, 38 Mars, 145 Marsham, John (1602 – 1683), 64 Matthew, Gospel of, 38 Melpomene, 115 – 18 Memory, mother of the Muses. See Mnemosyne Menander, 187 Mercurius Trismegistus. See Hermes Mercury (Hermes), 12, 43 – 45, 47, 115, 145 – 46, 149 Michelet, Jules (1798 – 1874), ix – x Minerva, 31, 145 – 46 Mnemosyne (Memory), 101, 109, 111, 113 – 14, 117, 119, 125, 179

Moses, 58, 60, 64 – 65 Mucius Scaevola, Quintus (the elder), 48 Muses, 41, 100 – 101, 109, 111 – 17, 119, 125, 128, 132, 145, 156, 179, 216 See also individual names Nephilim, 120 – 21 Neptune, 131, 145 – 46 Newton, Sir Isaac, 6 – 7, 36, 90, 152 Nicole, Pierre (1625 – 1695), 11 Nicolini, Fausto (1879 – 1965), xvii – xix, 17, 32, 35 – 36, 57, 96, 233 Nimrod, 61 – 62 Ninus, King of Assyria, 58, 60 – 61 Noah, 59, 61, 86, 119, 142, 223 Numa Pompilius, 176 Occam, William of, 8 Odysseus, 111, 155, 175, 179, 201 See also Ulysses Orcus, 44 Orithyia, 4 Orpheus, 116, 142 Otto, Rudolf, 122 Ovid, 134 Papini, Mario, 194 Parry, Milman, 171, 175 Pelops, 149 Persians, 63 Petrarca, Francesco (1304 – 1374), xiii, 14 Phoenicians, 58 – 59, 63 – 64, 73, 78 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni (1463 – 1494), 7 – 8, 19, 38, 121, 215 Pindar, 187 Plato, 3 – 4, 13, 31, 38 – 39, 48, 55, 62, 66, 73, 75, 79 – 81, 96, 107 – 8, 112, 122, 129 – 31, 137, 144, 160, 169 – 70, 172 – 73, 185 – 86, 197, 203, 221 – 25, 234 – 36, 238

Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/suss/detail.action?docID=4412740. Created from suss on 2021-02-14 21:00:44.

INDEX     283

Plautus, 12, 45 Polybius, xiv, 3, 8, 92 – 93, 193, 230 – 31 Polyhymnia, 117 Polyphemus, 201 Pomponius, Sextus, 68 Prati, Gioacchio de’, ix Proclus, 74 Prodicus, 237 Prometheus, 62, 65 – 66 Protagoras, 75 Proteus, 124 Psammeticus I, 58 Ptolemy Philadelphus, 57 Publilius Philo, 69 Pufendorf, Samuel (1632 – 1694), xiv, 19, 33, 85 – 87, 91, 126, 210 – 11, 230 Pyrrhonism, 109, 230 Pythagoras, 35, 56, 58

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Quintilian, xii – xiii, 19 – 20, 24, 103, 184 Rephaim, 60 Ripa, Cesare, 40 – 41 Romans, 13, 18, 37, 43, 47, 56, 58, 63, 66 – 69, 116, 137, 143, 145, 147 – 48, 156, 158 – 59, 170, 186, 191 – 92, 198 – 203, 206 – 8, 213 – 14, 237 Romulus, 67, 69, 159, 214 Rosa di Villarosa, Carlo Antonio III, 29 Rossi, Paolo, 40 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, xi, 4 Sancuniates, 64 Saturn, 35, 41 – 42, 67, 145, 155 – 56 See also Chronos Saul, 58, 60 Scaligero, Giuilo Cesare (1484 – 1558), 80 Scheffer, Johann (1621 – 1679), 56

Schliemann, Heinrich, 181 Scythians, 58, 62 – 64 Selden, John (1584 – 1654), xiv, 19, 33, 85 – 87, 91, 126, 210 – 11, 230 Seneca the Younger, 9, 95, 176, 193 – 94 Servius Tullius, 69, 214 Sesone, Francesco, 30 Seven Sages of Greece, 66, 135, 192 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of (1671 – 1713), 32, 34 – 37 Shem, 59 – 61, 97, 119, 223 Sibyl, 37, 67, 155 Snell, Bruno, 174 Socrates, xiv, 4, 24, 35, 42, 44 – 45, 66, 68, 79 – 80, 93, 102, 135, 141, 159, 169, 172 – 73, 183, 185, 187, 209, 222, 234 Solimena, Francesco, 29 – 30 Solon, 66, 68, 135, 192 Sophocles, 187 Sosia, 12, 45 Spenser, John (1630 – 1695), 64 Sphinx, 37 – 38 Spinoza, Benedict, 5, 19, 46 – 47, 93, 126 Stoics, Stoicism, xiv – xv, 4, 31, 42, 46, 93 – 95, 98, 109, 113, 227 – 28, 230, 236 Tacitus, Cornelius, xv, 3, 48, 95, 120, 206 – 7, 236 Tasso, Torquato, 84, 126 Terence, 178 Terpsichore, 117 Thales, 66 Thalia, 117 Themis, 116 Thetis, 149 Thoth. See Hermes, Thrice-great the elder Thucydides, 3, 62 Thyestes, 149 Tiberius, 95

Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/suss/detail.action?docID=4412740. Created from suss on 2021-02-14 21:00:44.

284    INDEX

Tolumnius, 95 Trojans, 63 – 64, 67, 158, 174, 177, 181

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Ulpian, 203 Ulysses, 63, 84, 108, 126, 175 – 76, 182 – 83, 200 – 201 See also Odysseus Uranos (Urania), 66, 114 – 17, 156 Ussher, James (1581 – 1656), 57 – 58 Vaccaro, Domenico Antonio (1681 – 1750), 30, 41 Valla, Lorenzo (1406 – 1457), 3 Valletta, Giuseppe (1636 – 1714), 16, 36 Varro, Marcus Terentius, xii, 39, 48, 56 – 58, 80 Venus, 145 – 46 Vergil, Polydore, xi Vesta, 145 Vico, Giambattista, xii – xv, 10 – 17 Vico, Giambattista, works cited (other than New Science, 3rd ed., 1744) On the Study Methods of Our Time (1709), xii, xv, 11, 17, 36, 39, 71, 78, 110, 138 – 39 On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians (1710), 8, 11 – 13, 16, 36, 45, 72, 79, 102, 111, 114, 129 – 30, 194 Institutiones Oratoriae (1711 – 1741), 18 – 22, 41, 134, 206, 211 Universal Law (1720 – 1722), xii, 4 – 5, 7, 13 – 14, 17 – 18, 23, 54, 58,

67 – 69, 82, 94, 114 – 16, 144, 182, 186, 207 – 8 “New Science in Negative Form” (1724), 14 – 17, 211 New Science, 1st ed. (1725), x, xiv – xv, 6, 14 – 17, 36, 71, 79 – 83, 91, 97, 114 – 16, 144, 181 – 82, 208, 234 – 36 Autobiography (1725 – 1731), xii – xv, 7, 10 – 11, 13 – 17, 23, 67 – 68, 71 – 72, 194, 235 – 36 Vici Vindiciae (1729), xiv, 15, 90 – 91 New Science, 2nd ed. (1730), xii, 6, 14, 16 – 17, 30, 43, 46 – 48, 233, 236 “On the Heroic Mind” (1732), xv, 24 “The Academies and the Relation between Philosophy and Eloquence” (1737), xiv, 24, 169 Villarosa, 29 Virgil, xiii, 37, 39, 44, 64, 67, 112, 114, 228 Virgo, 31, 41 – 42 Voss, Gerard Jan (1577 – 1649), 80, 130 Vulcan (Hephaestus), 62, 145, 149, 152 Xenophon, 36, 237 Yates, Frances A., 150 Zamzummim, 60 Zeno of Citium, 42, 194 Zeus, 43, 81, 109, 136 – 37, 149 Zoroaster, 60 – 62, 66, 108, 156

Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/suss/detail.action?docID=4412740. Created from suss on 2021-02-14 21:00:44.