Vico, Giovanni Battista

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Vico, Giovanni Battista

Giovanni Battista Vico, Italian jurist, philologist, and philosopher, was born in Naples in 1668 and died there in 1744. His contribution to European thought may be characterized as an attempt to combine Enlightenment ideas of natural law and Renaissance literary theory within a comprehensive theory of myth as the basis for a new conception of social dynamics. He is best known for his philosophy of history, set forth in The New Science (1725).

Vico, the son of a poor bookseller, was largely self-educated. He held the chair of Latin eloquence (rhetoric) at the University of Naples from 1699 to 1741. He had originally been interested in jurisprudence, on which he wrote a number of works; but when he failed to win the competition for the chair of civil law in 1723, he turned to the study of history and to the articulation of his so-called New Science, which occupied him up to the time of his death. In 1735 Vico was appointed royal historiographer to the Neapolitan house of Bourbon, but this was a belated and niggardly reward for a life that had combined consistent dedication to learning with unrelieved poverty, marital tragedy, public indifference to his work, and betrayal by a succession of patrons.

Vico’s prime intellectual enemy was Descartes. He objected to Descartes’s belief that man was everywhere, always, and equally rational. In his view, rationality was a historical acquisition, not a constant component of human nature. Vico’s secondary target was the natural-law tradition as represented by Selden and Pufendorf. The thinkers upon whom he drew for inspiration most often were Plato, Tacitus, and, among the moderns, Grotius and Francis Bacon. In the New Science Vico tried to combine Plato’s notion of the relation between sense data and ideas, Tacitus’ insight into historical process, and the inductive method advocated by Bacon in the Novum organum. But Vico was no mere eclectic; the New Science was a highly original synthesis of the various philosophical creeds and scholarly disciplines of his own time, a synthesis which took into account the materialism of a Hobbes and the idealism of a Descartes, but which framed them in a new approach to history, conceived as the study of human consciousness as it has evolved in time and space.

The New Science—main principles . The main arguments of the New Science can be discussed in terms of a question and three assumptions. The question is, How does it come about that men, who are basically ferine, selfish, and vicious (as Machiavelli and Hobbes argued), are able to form communities, to submit themselves to the rule of law, and to serve the well-being not only of themselves but of others too? According to Vico, none of the received intellectual traditions could solve this problem. Classical philosophy could not even conceive of it, because it denied the fact of change. Modern philosophers posed it, but then went on to solve it by holding that ancient man was just as rational as modern man and formed human society in much the way that modern men form a commercial concern or corporation. Christian theology begged the question by appealing to divine intervention to explain the formation of human communities out of the primitive animal nature. Even if Christian theologians were right about the way in which the ancient Hebrews had been formed into communities, there remained, Vico noted, the problem of explaining how the “gentile” nations were able to raise themselves above the animal level without the direct aid of the one, true God. And it is to this question that Vico’s work addresses itself.

This brings us to the three assumptions that underlie Vico’s New Science: that cultural artifacts are creations of human consciousness, nothing more and nothing less; that a human mind in the past operated in the same way that a present one does; and that men are capable of understanding human phenomena in ways that are not possible with respect to natural phenomena. Hence Vico’s methodological principle—one can understand only what one has created or is in principle capable of creating. In effect this means that since God, not man, is the creator of the natural world, then only God, and not man, can understand it fully. Since man is a part of nature, he can, to be sure, understand nature in part. But there will always be something in nature that he cannot comprehend fully; there will always be something mysterious about nature for everyone but its creator. It follows, therefore, that the Enlightenment was altogether misguided in its attempt to construct a science of human nature on the basis of a study of physical nature: understanding cultural phenomena, which are creations of men alone, in terms of incompletely understood natural principles is doomed from the start. Man can understand himself and everything he himself has created, i.e., the whole realm of human culture; but he can do so only on the basis of an inductive study of culture, not by proceeding from the study of nature. Thus, according to Vico, the proper basis for a science of culture and a metaphysics of mind can be found only in a historical investigation of the encounters between human consciousness and nature as they occur in different parts of the world at different times and in different situations.

However, if past human consciousness is understandable by present human consciousness, it must not be thought that past problems were the same as present ones or that the specific responses of men to those past problems were similar to what present responses to those problems would be. Quite the contrary—and here is the core of Vico’s historicism—each age has its own problems, and its responses to those problems will vary according to the level of rationality achieved by the culture in question. Cultural change is a macrocosm of the changes that occur microcosmically in the individual human being as he passes from birth to maturity: each age has its own needs, capabilities, and preconceptions; and each age calls forth the institutions and values necessary for it to deal with the world as it conceives of it. In order for modern man to understand primitive man, then, it is necessary for the modern to enter sympathetically into a world in which nature seemed alive and governed by hostile spirits whose power over man was exceeded only by their malignity. A proper understanding of human consciousness requires that we return to the time when humanity was a child, when men lived and acted like animals, and then show how the very nature of nature itself set up a process of development that lifted man out of his natural brutality, in spite of his own egoistic impulses, and set him on the road to civilization.

Vico’s social theory . If primitive man is as ignorant of the nature of nature and is as irrational in his responses to nature as a child is, then it follows, according to Vico, that human society resulted not from abstract considerations of utility or from rational self-interest, as Hobbes believed, but, rather, from immediate responses to real or imagined physical threats. The basic unit of society, the family, was formed when primitive man was frightened by such natural occurrences as thunder or lightning, took refuge in caves with his women, and grew used to living in groups. A similar fear lay at the base of primitive religious belief. Since men translate the unfamiliar into terms of the familiar, the processes of nature are at first experienced as anthropomorphic spirits that must be propitiated and placated, an activity that falls to the heads of families. Thus was born the “age of the gods,” the time when men lived in patriarchal communities (familii), bound together by blood ties alone and ruled over by strong men who combined the roles of priest and king.

These primal communities were expanded when fugitives from the original ferine competition sought protection by the patriarchs in return for their labor. The first truly social classes appeared at this point, for the refugees (socii) were not linked by blood to the primal kinship groups but were affiliated only by services rendered and received. The division of power and privileges thus established on functional lines generated tensions within the primal group, and the socii soon began to demand fuller participation in the benefits of the group to which they contributed their labor. This required that the patriarchs of the various tribes come together to protect themselves from the socii. Here, according to Vico, is the origin of aristocratic societies In such societies the ruling group claimed descent from the gods; it was characterized by punctilious adherence to codes of honor and achievement; and its dominant style of life was perpetuated by a specific kind of poetry, the heroic epic. Thus, the “age of the gods” gave way to “the age of heroes,” the age of religion to that of poetry, and the rule of priest-kings to that of nobles— this succession being a result of the demands of power relationships and the pursuit of individual privilege.

The very success of each ruling group in each age bred the conditions for its overthrow. The security and order established by the aristocrats resulted in the enrichment of the plebeians: the latter grew stronger and rebelled, and then justified rebellion by appeals both to their contribution to the general welfare of the community and to the humanity that they shared with the nobility. The struggle between aristocrats and plebeians resulted in the transition from the age of heroes to the age of peoples, from the language of poetry to that of prose, and from a customary code of conduct to legal systems in which the written contract came to define relations between parties enjoying definable rights and specific privileges in the commonwealth. Only then was monarchy possible, for monarchy was imaginable, for Vico, only as rule by one in the interests of an internally differentiated social whole.

Such is the basic pattern of the corso, or cycle, which, according to Vico, all nations follow in their development from primitivism to civilization. He did not rule out the possibility of cultural borrowing, but he insisted that cultures which have embarked upon their corsi will borrow only those ideas, institutions, and values which conform to their needs at the particular stage at which they have arrived by an inherent logic of evolution. Of course, it is possible for nations to become “arrested” in their development, or even annihilated, if they come into conflict with other cultures at more advanced stages of growth. But on the whole, cultures develop in response to needs and desires peculiar to them at specific times in their cycles.

All of this points to the relationship between human needs, on the one hand, and institutional forms and modes of expression, on the other. It provides a critical tool for the historian, allowing him to penetrate the opaque language of myth and legend. And it suggests that religious, poetic, and even philosophical systems must be viewed primarily as rationalizations of achieved social relationships. As Vico put it, “The order of ideas must follow the order of institutions.” This is the essence of the New Science. Vico employed this insight with special subtlety to criticize contemporary thought about the nature of Homeric poetry and of Roman law.

Idea of history . Although Vico shared the Enlightenment belief in the providential nature of history, he rejected the idea that humanity as a whole developed inevitably in linear sequence from lower to higher forms of self-consciousness and rationality. In most cultures, he held, each stage is an improvement over the preceding one, but every third stage (the philosophical, or scientific, stage), which follows the religious and heroic stages, is always followed by a period of decline, a time of barbarism rendered more barbarous by the refinements on savagery that sophistication provides— in other words, true decadence. Thus, for Vico, providence seems to operate only within cultures (rather than across cultures) to turn private self-seeking to public good—and only for a while. In the end, providence is assimilated into human consciousness and thus becomes identical with the activities of a humanity liberated from all fear of nature and God by the New Science. Private self-seeking then predominates, in the form of mere pursuit of pleasure, and results in a breakdown of civic responsibility and therewith the disintegration of culture.

Vico did not rule out the possibility of a greater, macrocosmic providence operating across cultures as well, that providence revealed by the Christian religion which allows Western man to experience the cyclical recurrence of the cultural process in an ultimately progressive way. For example, the “second barbarism” of the early Middle Ages constituted a positive advance over the “first barbarism” of the Homeric age and the barbarism of pre-Roman Italy. And Vico saw the expansion of Western civilization over the globe as an anticipation of a new humanity, unifying peoples hitherto separated and imprisoned within their specific cyclical patterns of rise and fall. In short, human history in general does not develop in either a linear or a cyclical pattern, but more like a spiral, consisting, as it were, of a motion in which every two steps forward is paid for by one step backward; this conception is similar to the dialectical pattern envisaged by Hegel and Marx a century later.

And, like Hegel and Marx, Vico seems to have regarded his own philosophical activity as evidence that mankind was at last entering into its kingdom here on earth. The New Science is both evidence of the birth of a new historical consciousness and the instrument by which humanity is to be liberated from cyclical determinism. It is liberating in that it shows man not as the product of fate or of physical process alone or of divine will alone, but as free creator of his own destiny. Just as Christianity is the one true religion for all men everywhere, so the New Science is the one true philosophy for all men everywhere. And just as Christianity had freed man from servitude to an imagined hostile nature by divesting that nature of all spirits, so the New Science will free man from servitude to religion itself, not by destroying religion but by revealing it for what it really is, i.e., man’s vision of what he might become. In the New Science men are revealed as creators of their own humanity, are liberated from myth, and are charged to undertake creation of themselves selfconsciously and positively.

Vico’s influence . Vico’s philosophy was not very influential during the eighteenth century, but it did prefigure many of the ideas that later appeared in romanticism. Therefore, Vico became fully appreciated only in the nineteenth century, largely as a result of Michelet’s popularization of his work. Vico’s influence on nineteenth-century social and literary theory was profound: Goethe, Mazzini, Coleridge, Thomas Arnold, Taine, Marx, and Engels all admitted debts to him. In the present century his influence has been even greater, encompassing thinkers and writers as diverse as Croce, Gentile, and Collingwood in philosophy; Joyce and Yeats in literature; Toynbee and Trotsky in historiography; Pareto, Sorel, and Sorokin in social science; and Edmund Wilson and Erich Auerbach in literary criticism. It is only in the present century that Vico’s highly original Autobiography, first published in 1728 and reissued with an addition in 1731, has been fully appreciated. Here Vico applied the principles of the New Science to the analysis of his own intellectual evolution, thus providing, or so he believed, a confirmation on the ontogenetic level of the phylogenetic pattern of human evolution.

Hayden V. White

[For the historical context of Vico’s work, seeHistory, article on The philosophy of history; and the biographies ofBacon; Descartes; Grotius; Hobbes; Plato. For discussion of the subsequent development of his ideas, seeSociology, article on The development of sociological thought; and the biographies ofCroce; Pareto; Sorel; Sorokin; Trotsky.]

WORKS BY VICO

(1725) 1948 The New Science. Translated by Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. ? First published in Italian. A paperback edition was published in 1961 by Doubleday.

(1728-1729) 1944 The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico. Translated by Max H. Fisch and Thomas G. Bergin. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. ? First published in Italian.

Opere. Edited by Fausto Nicolini. 8 vols. Bari: Laterza, 1911-1941.

Opere. Edited by Fausto Nicolini. Milan: Ricciardi, 1953. ? A one-volume selection.

Opere. Edited by Paolo Rossi. Milan: Rizzoli, 1959.

Il pensiero di Giambattista Vico. Edited by Paolo Rossi. Turin: Loescher, 1959.

Tutte le opere. Edited by Francesco Flora. Vols. 1—. Milan: Mondadori, 1957—.