METAPHYSICS
By "metaphysics" we understand Vico's conception of reality as a whole, not of the world of man by itself; and we also include in the meaning of the word his ultimate negative conclusion asserting the unknowability or the imperfect knowability of one or more spheres of reality, or of that highest sphere in which the others reunite.
In point of fact, as we observed in considering the second and latest form of his theory of knowledge, Vico drew a sharp line between the world of man and the world of nature: the former transparent to man because created by him, the latter opaque, because only God its Creator has knowledge of it. And his conception of the total and ultimate reality, the metaphysic which he expounds together with his earlier theory of knowledge, retains the value granted to it by that theory and no other: it is a probable conjecture, but one incapable of verification, and reaches completion in the certitude of revealed theology. Hence this metaphysic remains out of all possible connexion with the New Science, which proceeds by the certain method of truth and cuts itself off from revelation. Vico never rejected it. He discusses it in his autobiography of 1725, the year of the first Scienza Nuova; he refers to it with satisfaction in 1737, seven years after the second Scienza Nuova, when his scientific life was, as he himself considered, at an end. But though he never rejected it he always kept it aside, so to speak, in a corner of his mind.
This point established, it might seem that there can be nothing more to be said of any philosophical importance about Vico's metaphysics. But this is not the case. Since every department of philosophy implies in itself every other, and since we can therefore always deduce from the treatment of one of the so-called particular philosophical sciences the character of the whole, it is legitimate to examine the New Science and to consider what metaphysic is implicit therein; to determine what philosophical complement is logically supported and demanded by this science.
The New Science, which asserted the full knowability of human affairs, not merely on the surface, like a psychological treatment, but in the depths of their nature: the New Science, which transcended the individual to attain the conception of the mind which informs all things and is Providence: the Science which with divine pleasure contemplated the eternal cycle of the mind, elevated as it was to such a height, necessarily tended to interpret the whole of reality, both Nature and God, as Mind. That this tendency was objective to the New Science, and not subjective to Vico, in whose mind the science so to speak thought itself out, need hardly be repeated. Vico personally not only did not encourage it but actually curtailed and repressed it so energetically as to leave no trace of it in his works. There was no philosophical doctrine of which he had such terror and against which he so frequently waged war as that of pantheism; and perhaps this polemical preoccupation is the only trace, though quite an involuntary trace, visible in his writings of the tendency which he must have observed in himself. He was, and wished to remain, a Christian and a Catholic; transcendence, the personality of God, the substantiality of the soul, though his science did not lead him towards them, were uncontrollable necessities to his consciousness. But just as this fact allowed Vico to repress but not to eradicate the essential logical tendency of his thought, so it enables us to recognise that tendency in the facts themselves. An Italian critic, Spaventa, is right when he says that in Vico the necessity of a new metaphysic makes itself felt; another, a German Catholic, is equally right in denning his system as "semi-pantheistic." It would perhaps be more dangerous to go on to say, with the Italian above mentioned, that Vico makes an advance on the Cartesian idea of two substances and the Spinozistic of two attributes, and even on the Leibnitian doctrine of the monad, and that he transcends parallelism and pre-established harmony by distinguishing the two providences, the two attributes, nature and mind, in such a way that the one is a step to the other, and by conceiving the point of union and the origin of the opposition as an unfolding or development, so that nature is regarded as the phenomenon and proper basis of mind, the pre-supposition which mind creates to itself in order to be really mind, to be a true unity. For while we may doubt whether the distinction of the two attributes or two providences, the natural and the human, is a well-grounded and inevitable consequence of conceiving substance as mind and thought, it is impossible to deduce the evolutionary transition from one to the other as a tendency implicit in Vico's conception of thought. There is certainly particular documentary evidence for this latter particular tendency: but it is scanty and unconvincing, and occurs not in the system of the New Science but rather in the chronologically earlier system.
For the metaphysic laid down by Vico in the earlier phase of his thought is not, as it has seemed to some, and as it may at first sight appear, entirely devoid of significance and value. It shows the same aversion to materialism and the same love of idealism which inspire the meditations of the New Science. The philosophy of Epicurus, which takes as its starting-point matter already formed and divided into ultimate particles of various shapes, composed of other parts which are supposed to be indivisible owing to the absence of void between them, seemed to him a philosophy such as to satisfy the naïve mind of a child or the uncritical mind of a woman; and the delight with which he followed the explanation of the forms of material nature according to this philosopher, in the poem of Lucretius, was equalled by the amusement and pity with which he watched him forced by stern necessity to lose himself in countless ineptitudes and follies in trying to explain the phenomena of thought. Vico accused the Cartesian physics no less than the Epicurean of a "false position," since it also takes ready-formed matter as its starting-point, differing from the Epicurean matter in that, while the latter limits the divisibility of matter at the atoms, the former makes its elements infinitely divisible; that the one places motion in the void, the other in the solid; the one initiates the shaping of its infinite worlds by a casual declination of atoms from the downward path of their own weight and gravitation, the other generates its indefinite vortices from an impetus imparted to a section of inert and therefore not yet divided matter, which on receiving this motion divides into fragments, and, hampered by its mass, necessarily makes an effort to move in a straight line, and being unable to do so through its solidity begins, divided as it is into fragments, to move about the centre of each fragment. In this way while Epicurus entrusted the world to chance, Descartes subjected it to fate; and it was in vain that to save himself from materialism he superimposed upon his physics a quasi-Platonic metaphysic, by which he attempted to establish two substances, the one extended and the other intelligent, and to make room for an immaterial agent; for these two parts were not reconciled in his system, since his mechanical physics included in itself a metaphysic like the Epicurean, establishing one kind and one only of active material substance. For similar or analogous reasons Vico rejected the philosophies of Gassendi, Spinoza and Locke; and the physical science of other authors such as Robert Boyle seemed to him valuable for purposes of medicine and the "spargiric art," but useless for philosophy. Galileo he considered to have looked at physical science with the eye of a great geometrician, but without the aid of the full light of metaphysics. He had sympathy with philosophers who were also geometricians, and therefore with the Pythagorean or Timaean physics, according to which the world consists of numbers; with the Platonic metaphysics, which from the form of our minds without any other hypothesis establishes, upon our knowledge and consciousness of certain eternal truths which are in our mind and cannot be ignored or denied, the eternal idea as the principle of all things; with the doctrine of metaphysical points, attributed by him to Zeno the Stoic; and finally with the philosophy of the Italian Renaissance, the period adorned by Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Steuco, Nifo, Mazzoni, Piccolomini, Acquaviva and Patrizio.
The fundamental concept of his cosmology was supplied by the metaphysical point, in which the employment of mathematics in metaphysics, a process admitted by Vico as analogous to that of construction, found expression. Just as from the geometrical point proceed the line and the surface, and the point which is defined as having no parts supplies the proof that lines otherwise incommensurable can be divided equally into their component points, so it is legitimate to postulate points not geometrical but metaphysical, which though not extended generate extension. Between God, who is rest, and matter, which is motion, the intermediate place is taken by the metaphysical point, whose attribute is conation, the indefinite energy and attempt on the part of the universe to bring into being and sustain each particular thing. The existence of matter is nothing but an indefinite power of keeping the universe extended, which underlies all extended objects equally however unequal they may be, and also an indefinite power of motion underlying all particular motions, however unequal. Behind a grain of sand lies something which when this particle is divided gives to it and preserves in it an infinite extension and magnitude; so that the whole mass of the universe is included in the grain of sand, if not actually, yet potentially and in capacity. This effort of the universe, underlying each smallest particle of matter, is neither the extension of the particle nor the extension of the universe: it is the thought of God, which, free from all materiality, gives motion and impulse to the whole. Every particular determination of reality agrees with this fundamental truth. Time is divisible, eternity indivisible; disturbances of the mind wax and wane, its quiescence has no degrees; extended things are corruptible, unextended things permanent in their indivisibility; body can be divided, mind cannot; possibilities are at a single point, accidents are everywhere; science is one, while opinion produces differences; virtue is neither in one place nor another, vice walks up and down in every direction; the good is one, the bad is innumerable; in every kind of thing in a word the best occurs in the category of the indivisible.
Substance in general, which underlies and sustains things, is divided into two species, extended substance or that which equally supports unequal extensions, and thinking substance which equally supports unequal thoughts. And just as one part of extension is divided from another but indivisible in the substance of the body, so one part of thought, that is to say a determinate thought, is divided from another but indivisible in the substance of the soul. Activity or freedom is peculiar to the soul, and entirely denied to body: and Descartes, in making a conation of body the beginning of his physics, was strictly adopting the methods of a poet and falling into the anthropomorphic conceptions of primitive races. The phenomena which students of mechanics call activities, forms, or powers, are insensible movements by which bodies move either, as the ancients said, towards their centres of gravity, or, as the modern theory of mechanics asserts, away from their centre of motion. The communication of motion, moreover, is just as inconceivable in body as is activity. To grant it would be equivalent to granting the interpenetration of bodies, since motion is nothing but matter in motion; the blow given to a ball is only the occasion for the energy of the universe, which was so weak in the ball as to make it seem at rest, to expand and thus to give it an appearance of more sensible motion. On the other hand, Vico agreed with the Cartesians, especially Malebranche, as to the origin of ideas, which he inclined to believe that God creates in us from time to time. He also held with the Cartesians that the lower animals are automata; and he agreed with all contemporary thought as to the subjectivity of secondary qualities.
Setting aside these last doctrines, which are not Vico's own, indeed he scarcely refers to them, the fundamental doctrine of metaphysical points is all his own. His attribution of it to an imaginary Zeno, in whose person were combined and confused the Eleatic and the Stoic (a mistake common in the philosophical literature of the time), can deceive nobody, and did not even deceive Vico himself, who when pressed explained how he had been led to that interpretation of Aristotle's statements about Zeno, and finally says that if the doctrine cannot be accepted as that of Zeno, he will adopt it as his own, without the patronage of any great names. Nor on the other hand can it be traced to the Leibnitian monadology. We cannot be sure that Vico was acquainted with this doctrine. In any case he does not mention it, while Leibniz he does mention in terms of deep respect: and the resemblance is very vague, for the metaphysical points are not monads. The discovery by Leibniz and Newton of the differential calculus may however be said to have influenced him. It was then for the first time becoming known in Italy; and its terminology of maximum infinities, greater and less infinities, and so on would, says Vico, completely baffle the human understanding, since the infinite admits neither of degrees nor of multiplication, but for the help of a metaphysic which shows that all actual extension and actual movement is a power or capacity for extension and motion always equal to itself and infinite. The contributions of Platonic lines of thought (the Platonism of the Renaissance) and those of Galileo, especially the latter, to Vico's conception have been worked out with even more justice: his originality however is in no degree impaired by these facts.
The idea in which his originality found expression was, no doubt, fantastic and arbitrary, and in consequence bound to remain undeveloped and without influence on Vico's other conceptions. To the reviewer in the Giornale dei letterati, who called this metaphysic a mere sketch, the author replied that it was quite complete: an abortion in fact, rather than a sketch, and, as such, complete. And in the Scienza Nuova, beside a few references to the refusal to attribute activity to matter, there is one fugitive but interesting attempt at a connexion with a geometrical or arithmetical metaphysic on the model of that described above. In this passage it is stated that upon the order of material and complex civil affairs the order of numbers, which are abstract and absolutely simple, is imposed: and the fact is noted that governments begin with the one, in domestic monarchy, pass to the few in aristocracy, advance to the many and the all in popular republics, and finally return to the one in civil monarchies, so that humanity moves perpetually from the one to the one, from domestic monarchy to civil monarchy.
But if we can and must deny all value to Vico's cosmology, if the contradictions and obscurities in which he involves himself are manifest, and were observed by critics of his own time, still we cannot deny its dynamic nature as opposed to the mechanicism of contemporary philosophy. The theory of metaphysical points, in which God appears as the great geometrician who creates by knowing and knows by creating the realities of the universe, is as it were a symbol of the necessity of interpreting nature in idealistic language. We find here and there a theologian Vico, an agnostic Vico, or even a fanciful Vico composing cosmological and physical romances: but look where we will among his works, we shall never find a materialistic Vico.
Even this by no means overbold metaphysic aroused suspicions of pantheism, though the author insisted upon the theological doctrine that God's activity is convertible ab intra with the thing created and ab extra with the fact, and that therefore the world was created in time; that the human soul, which as a mirror of the divine thinks infinity and eternity, is not bounded by the body and therefore not by time, and is therefore immortal; and that man, even if God were to reveal it to him, cannot understand how the infinite enters into finite objects. However, he thought it necessary to conclude his replies to his critics by collecting statements demonstrating his orthodoxy, and clinching the matter with the remark that "since God is in one sense substance and in another His creatures, and since the ratio essendi or essence is proper to substance, the created substances even as regards their essence are diverse and distinct from the substance of God."
Vico's thought was limited by the idea of transcendence, which prevented him from attaining not only the unity of reality, but also a truly complete knowledge of that world of man which he had so powerfully explained by means of the opposite principle. We now see why Vico, though he did not deny the fact of progress, could have no real conception of it. It has been observed that the conception of progress is foreign to Catholicism and dates from the Protestant Reformation, and that therefore the Catholic Vico was bound to deny himself the use of it. But the conception of an immanent providence is no less irreconcilable with Catholicism, and yet Vico is saturated with this idea. This means that he did not lack the impulse: rather he was unable to pass a certain point beyond which his faith would have been too obviously defeated. Progress, deduced from the immanent providence and introduced into the New Science, would have accentuated the difference within the uniformity, the origin at every moment of something new, the perpetual enrichment of the flux at every reflux: it would have changed history from an orderly traversing and retraversing of the line drawn by God under the eye of God to a drama whose ratio essendi is contained within itself: it would have enmeshed and drawn with it the whole universe and realised the thought of infinite worlds. In face of this vision Vico paused in apprehension and stubbornly refused to proceed: the philosopher in him had yielded to the Catholic.