The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico

by Benedetto Croce

Vico's doctrine of mythology, while no less original and profound than that of poetry, is also, like the latter, not entirely lucid: for the relations between poetry and myth are so close that the shadow cast upon the one must of necessity extend to some degree over the other.

In proceeding to inquire, as we have hitherto done and shall continue to do, into the state of contemporary knowledge of the several sciences and problems with which Vico set out to deal, we may briefly recall à propos of the study of mythology not only the great literary collections of myths formed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of which Boccaccio had already given an example in the fourteenth century, but also the learned defences of the two explanatory theories, already known to classical antiquity and not entirely unknown in the Middle Ages. These were, first, the theory of myth as allegory of philosophical truths (moral, political and so forth), and secondly, the theory of myth as the history of actual persons and events, adorned by the fancy which made heroes into gods (Euhemerism). The former tendency inspired among other works the Mythologiae sive explanationis fabularum libri decem of Natale Conti (1568) and Bacon's De sapientia veterum (1609); in which, however, this system had been advanced with a certain hesitation, and with the explicit caution that, even if it were not valid as historical interpretation, it would always be of value as moralisation (aut antiquitatem illustrabimus aut res ipsas: "we shall explain either antiquity or the facts themselves"). The latter was authoritatively represented by John Leclerc (Clericus), the learned Dutch Genevese for whom Vico expressed so much respect and gratitude for the attention he had deigned to bestow upon his Diritto universale. His edition of Hesiod's Theogony marked an epoch in the study of mythology, and he was followed among others by Banier, author of the work Les Fables expliquées par l'histoire(1735). A third system, also not without some ancient precedent, derived myths from particular nations, the Egyptians or the Hebrews, or from the original works of individual philosophers and poets. This view, when it neither resolved itself into a pure and simple historical supposition as to the origin of some or all myths, nor appealed to divine revelation, clearly involved the theory that myth is not an eternal form but a contingent product of the mind, born at a certain time and capable of dying or already dead.

Vico strongly opposed the first and third of these views of mythology, namely the allegorical theory and that of historical derivation. On the allegorical view, he mentions Bacon's treatise, which had stimulated him to the study of the subject, out which he considered "more ingenious than sound": on the other school, which regarded myths as sacred history altered and corrupted by the Gentiles and especially by the Greeks, he refers to Vossius's De theologia gentili (1642) and to a dissertation by Daniel Huet. Myths or fables do not contain esoteric wisdom, that is to say, rational concepts, subtly concealed by the veil of fable: hence they are not allegorical. Allegory implies on the one hand the concept or thing signified, on the other the fable or medium of concealment, and between the two, the art by which both are kept in equilibrium. But myths cannot be split up into these three moments, nor even into a thing signified and a thing which signifies it: their meaning is univocal. The theory also implies that a believer in the content does not believe in the form: but the makers of myths believed fully and ingenuously in their own work. Once, for instance, that first divine fable was created, the myth than which none greater was ever afterwards invented, that of Jupiter, king and father of gods and men, in the act of thundering, the very men who had invented him believed in him, and with their religion of terror feared, reverenced and worshipped him.

Myth, in a word, is not fable but history of such a kind as could be constructed by primitive minds, and strictly considered by them as an account of actual fact. The philosophers who arose later made use of myths to expound their doctrines in an allegorical manner; or deceived themselves into thinking that they found them there owing to the feeling of veneration which attaches to antiquity, and increases as our comprehension of it diminishes; or thought it expedient to make use of such things for political purposes, like Plato Homerising, and at the same time Platonising Homer: and in doing this they turned the myths into fables, which they were not originally, and are essentially not. Thus we may say that the philosophers and students of mythology who indulged in such strange fancies about the legends were the real poets, while the primitive poets or myth-makers were the true students, and intended to narrate the actual facts of their time. For the same reason, namely, because myth is an essential part of poetic or barbaric wisdom, and, as such, a spontaneous product of all times and places, it cannot be attributed to one single nation as its inventor, from which it passed to others; as if it were a particular discovery of a particular man or the object of revelation.

This doctrine, superior as it is to the allegorical and historical theories, is another aspect of Vico's vindication of the non-logical forms of knowledge as against the intellectualism which denied them and merely represented them either as artificial forms or as due to supernatural causes. Nor does the opinion seem acceptable which attaches Vico to the Neo-Euhemeristic school. He does not indeed explicitly combat this school, and we may even grant that he presents certain superficial resemblances to it: but together with the resemblances there is this radical difference, that for Vico the stories are not alterations of actual history, but are essentially history; their supposed alteration is the actual truth as it appeared to the primitive mind.

Vico did not and could not give a more precise determination of the nature of myth, precisely because owing to the fluctuating character of his concept of poetry, itself he was not in a position to lay down the boundary between the two forms. He talks generally of poetry and myth as distinct things, but he does not establish the distinction. And yet Vico was familiar enough with the concept which supplies this distinctive criterion, and had enunciated it: but instead of using it for his doctrine of mythology, he had made of it one or more of his various definitions of poetry. That "poetic character," that "imaginative universal" whose introduction into aesthetic as the explanatory principle of poetry causes so many insuperable difficulties, is really the definition of mythology, and as such provides the science of mythology with the true principle that is required. If the concept of accomplishing great labours for the common welfare cannot be disengaged from the idea of a particular man who accomplished one of these labours, this concept becomes for instance the myth of Hercules: and Hercules is at once an individual man who does individual actions, and kills the Lernaean hydra and the Nemean lion or cleanses the stables of Augeas, and also a concept: just as the concept of beneficent and glorious labour is at once a concept and Hercules: a universal and an imaginary idea: an imaginative universal.

Again, that sublime task which Vico declared proper to poetry, the task of giving life to inanimate objects, belongs properly not to poetry but to myth. Mythology, embodying its concepts in images, which are always individual things, at last animates them like living beings. Thus primitive man, ignorant of the cause of lightning and therefore not possessing the scientific definition of it, was led by the mythological tendency to conceive the sky as a vast living being, who, like man himself when, in the grip of his fierce passions, he shouted, muttered or roared, spoke and meant something by his speech. It is mythology again, not poetry, whose origin must be traced to "poverty," to the weakness of men's minds and their inability to deal with the problems they would solve, in their incapacity for thinking in rational universals and expressing themselves in accurate language, whence arose imaginative universals and metonymy, synecdoche and metaphor of all kinds. The contradictions we have seen in the imaginative universal which make it incapable of acting as the foundation of an aesthetic doctrine are quite in keeping in the doctrine of myth: for myth consists precisely of these contradictions: it is a concept trying to be an image and an image trying to be a concept, and hence a kind of poverty, or even of powerful impotence,—a contrast, a mental transition where white no longer exists and black has not yet come into being. Finally, poetic wisdom, that is, the theology, science, cosmography, geography, astronomy and the whole system of other ideas and beliefs of primitive nations as Vico describes them, was really mythology, not, as he says, poetry, for the good reason, given by himself, that these things were their history: and poetry is poetry and not history, even more or less imaginary history. The Homeric poems are poetry in so far as they express the aspirations of Hellenism: the same poems, in so far as they were recited and heard as accounts of actual facts, are history: the two things being forms of mental products which, though they seem to be materially united in a single work, are not for that reason to be identified.

All this was both seen and not seen, or rather, sometimes realised and sometimes overlooked, by Vico: and hence he cannot be said to have succeeded in determining satisfactorily the distinction, and solving the problem of the relation, between mythology and poetry. Another problem of importance relating to the science of mythology, and still the subject of controversy, namely, the question whether myth belongs to philosophy or to history, might be supposed to have been decisively solved by Vico: since he repeats over and over again that myths contain the historical judgments of primitive peoples, not the philosophical. But in reality when we examine the point closely it appears that he neither solved the problem nor even propounded it. The historical judgments of which Vico is speaking are contrasted strictly not with philosophical judgments in general but with the "mystical judgments of the earliest philosophy" and the "judgments of analogy" which the writers criticised by Vico found in mythology. Thus on the one hand his words repeat the criticism of the allegorical theory and, on the other, controvert that fallacious method of historical interpretation which ascribes the ideas and customs of to-day to the nations of antiquity. The fact is that Vico's theory is just as much in agreement with the theory connecting myth with philosophy as with that which connects it with history; and as much with the eclecticism which admits both these elements as with the speculative view which also admits them both, but because philosophy and history both in themselves and as constituents of myth are at bottom one and the same.

Considered as "poverty," myth must be superseded. In the natural effort of the human mind to rejoin God, the true One, from whom it has come, and its inability owing to the exuberant animal nature of primitive man to make use of the faculty, buried as it is beneath his too keen senses, of abstracting from subjects their properties and universal forms,—in these circumstances, it constructs for itself fanciful unities, imaginary genera or myths: but in its subsequent progress and development, it gradually resolves the imaginary genera into intelligible genera, poetic universals into rational, and sets itself free from mythology. Thus the error of myth passes into the truth of philosophy. Vico knew and employed a concept of error, error properly so called, which proceeds from the will, not from thought, which is never in error as regards itself, "for the mind is always put under compulsion by truth, since we can never lose sight of God" (mens enim semper a vero urgetur quia numquam aspectu amittere possumus Deum); the error which consists in the arbitrary conjunction of unmeaning words, "but words very often, by the will of him who is lying, escape the force of truth and desert the mind, or even do violence to the mind and turn away from God" (verba autem saepissime veri vim voluntate mentientis eludunt ac mentem deserunt, immo menti vim aciunt et Deo absistunt); the error, in a word, which exists when, in his own powerful language, "though men speak with their mouth, they have nothing in their minds; since within their minds there is falsity, which is nothing." But he also knows that error is never pure error, simply because there is no such thing as a false idea and falsity consists only in the wrong combination of ideas, and therefore it always contains truth, and every fable has a certain element of truth. Hence, far from despising fables, Vico recognised their value as embryonic forms so to speak of stored-up knowledge or of what will one day develop into philosophy. The poets (which means, in Vico's new sense of the word, myth-makers) are the senses (that is, in its new meaning, rudimentary and imperfect philosophy): the philosophers are the intellect of mankind, that is the more highly developed philosophy which derives from the former. The idea of God evolves by degrees from the God who strikes the imagination of the isolated man, to the God of the family, divi parentum, the God of a social class or country, divi patrii, the God of nations, and finally to the God "who is Jupiter to all men," the God of humanity. The fables stimulated Plato to understand the three divine punishments which not men but only gods could inflict, oblivion, infamy and remorse: the passage through the lower world suggested to him the concept of the purgatorial journey by which the soul is purified of passions, and the arrival in Elysium suggested the journey of union by which the mind comes to unite itself with God by the contemplation of the eternal divine ideas.

From the similes and metaphors of the poets Aesop drew the examples and fables by which he gave advice: and the instance founded upon a single case which satisfies an untutored mind developed into induction, drawing its validity from several similar cases, as taught dialectically by Socrates, and thence the syllogism invented by Aristotle, which cannot exist without a universal. The etymologies of words reveal the truths observed by primitive man and deposited by him in his language: for instance the fact, laboriously proved by modern philosophers, that the senses themselves create the so-called sensible qualities is already suggested in the Latin word olfacere, which implies the idea that the sense of smell "makes" the odour. Vico attaches such importance to this connexion between poetic universals and rational universals, between myth and philosophy, that he is led to assert that such judgments of philosophers as cannot find parallel or precedent in poetic and popular wisdom must be wrong. Here we have another meaning sometimes assigned by him to the relation of philosophy to philology: namely, a reciprocal confirmation of common wisdom by esoteric wisdom and vice versa, both of which are united in the idea of an everlasting philosophy of man.