The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico

by Benedetto Croce

As regards his doctrines of practical reason, which we are here beginning to consider, it might be thought that Vico, unlike his attitude with regard to the theoretical reason, did not stand in sharp opposition to the thought of his time, but actually united himself with a contemporary movement, namely the school of natural rights. The head of the school and leader of the movement, Hugo Grotius, was called by Vico one of his "four authors," together with Plato, from whom he had drawn his aspirations towards an idealistic philosophy, Bacon, who had aroused in his mind the idea of a positive and historical science of society, and Tacitus, his debt to whom, or at least the debt which he believed he owed him, we shall examine later on. Along with Grotius he frequently mentions the other chief authorities on natural rights, Selden and Puffendorf, omitting their innumerable followers, whom he considers less as scientific authorities than as "adorners" of the Grotian system.

His adherence to the school, in a certain sense, is clear, and is admitted and proclaimed by Vico himself. But it is also beyond doubt that he was no mere adherent: he was not a follower of the kind that retains the general or leading ideas while developing and correcting details. He was a follower in the dialectical sense only, that is, in so far as he thought it necessary to contest the primary theses, or to accept them only in a profoundly modified form. Natural right offered him not solutions but problems: and of these, while some came before him already clearly formulated, others, and these were the more important, arose only in his own mind: problems either unsolved or unrealised, till Vico propounded and in part solved them.

Natural rights presented many aspects and many tendencies: and it would be well to begin by distinguishing and enumerating these. In the first place, the school taken as a whole and in its essential character expressed the social progress by which Europe, on emerging from feudalism and religious warfare, acquired a new consciousness, distinctively bourgeois and non-clerical in character; and it observed that the growth of this consciousness was contemporaneous with the anti-clerical and bourgeois institution of "masonry." The word "natural" meant, among other things, "not supernatural": and hence implied hostility or indifference towards the supernatural, the institutions representing it, and the social conflicts resulting from it. It was not by accident that Grotius was an Arminian; that Puffendorf went to law with theologians; that Thomasius is remembered as one of the champions of freedom of conscience. The protestations of respect for religion and the church, habitually and liberally inserted by these publicists in their works,—which are draped, so to speak, with a veil of piety,—were merely politic safeguards, enabling the author to threaten the enemy unobserved and to strike from under cover. This caution is praised, in Grotius's case for example, by a follower of the school (the author of Pauco plenior iuris naturalis historia, 1719), who extols the master as "the instrument of divine providence," coming like Messiah to redeem the "natural light" from its bondage to the "supernatural," and as such gifted with all the power and ability he could need: so that after tasting the persecutions of Scholasticism, "he behaved with caution, to avoid further irritating the jealousy against his natural and reasonable prudence that had issued forth from its lair at his threats" (caute versabatur ... ne maius bilem adversus prudentiam naturalem et rationalem ex latebris productam tam minis irritaret), and in proceeding to separate human from divine laws, did not execute a frontal assault on the theological school when he attacked its fundamental errors, but even praised it in the preface to his work. The word "natural" also denoted what is common to individuals of different nations and ranks: and hence from a practical point of view provided an admirable war-cry for uniting the bourgeoisie of different countries in definite common aspirations and struggles. The treatises of natural rights were for the bourgeoisie of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries what the "Manifesto of the communists" and the cry "Proletariates of the world, unite" attempted to be for the working classes of the nineteenth.

In so far as this school and this publicism were signs of a practical movement, the philosophical interest held in them a secondary place and discharged a function of minor importance: so that, secondly, the works on natural right, philosophically considered, did not as a rule rise above a simple popular empiricism. The principles on which they rest are not examined and often not even superficially reconciled: the concepts which they use are less concepts than general representations: and the form of the writing is systematic in appearance only. Some of these writers endeavoured to harmonise their doctrines of natural right with the Platonic, Stoic or Cartesian philosophies, or appealed to logical or metaphysical axioms, or made use of deduction and the mathematical method. But all this was mere aggregation, not fusion; ornament, not reinforcement: at most, it was of value as a proof of diligence and earnest intentions.

The philosophy, however, which was more or less implicit in the pamphleteers of natural rights, and explicit in the philosophers who set out to elaborate the doctrine, agreed with the spirit of the time, whose general characteristics are well known. Thus arose the third or ethical aspect of natural right, namely its utilitarianism; sometimes more or less concealed, sometimes openly declared, and worked out from time to time by a philosophy of mathematical or sensationalistic methods, and of materialistic or rationalistic tendencies: or else, what comes practically to the same thing, an abstract and intellectualistic morality, threatening at any moment to fall into utilitarianism. From this intellectualism and utilitarianism, combined with the practical and revolutionary character of this mental movement,—which was bent rather upon bringing about the triumph of an abstract system of right than upon recognising that which really develops in history, in all the complexity of its many forms and vicissitudes—derived its fourth characteristic, the lack of historical sense, or the anti-historical attitude of the school, which set up the abstract ideal of a human nature apart from human history instead of fused with and living in it.

Finally, bourgeois, anticlerical, utilitarian and materialistic as it was, the movement of natural right had a fifth important trait, namely its aversion to transcendence and its tendency towards an immanental conception of man and of society. This characteristic is neither fully explained nor fully worked out in the doctrines, but is none the less easily recognised among the total views of the school.

Now Vico's genius was truly and indeed exclusively theoretical, and not at all practical or reformatory: his method was profoundly speculative and contemptuous of empiricism, his mind idealistic and opposed to materialism and utilitarianism: his theory of knowledge eager for the concrete, for "certitude," and, as such, of historical sympathies. Consequently his doctrine of the practical reason, though deriving its impetus from the theory of natural rights, was bound to emerge in a shape different from or even contrary to that theory in all the first four characteristics enumerated above. And if it did in one respect coincide—which it only does in the conclusion, not in the path by which the conclusion is reached—it did so in the very point in which Vico would least have wished it: in its immanental or anti-religious tendency.

But since our subject is not the criticisms and modifications which the theory of natural right received from Vico's thought, but rather that thought itself, it is time to pick up the thread of the exposition, following an order somewhat different from that in which we have summed up the various characteristics of the theory, and beginning by observing Vico's opposition to the professed or implicit utilitarianism of the school, and the ethical doctrine by which he replaced it.

The two chief representatives of utilitarianism in the seventeenth century, whom Vico always keeps in view, are Hobbes and Spinoza: but in addition to them, he refers to Locke and Bayle and, in the preceding century, Machiavelli; and going back to the ancients, the Stoics with their conception of faith and the Epicureans with that of chance, Carneades and his scepticism, and finally the unconscious theory contained in the saying "Vae victis" attributed to Brennus, chief of the Gauls who took Rome. He admired Hobbes's splendid attempt to enrich philosophy by a theory which had been lacking to the greatest days of Greece, the theory of man considered in the whole society of the human race: but he pronounced the result unsatisfactory, and the attempt, whose outcome, like that of Locke's system, was hardly distinguishable from Epicureanism, a failure. Hobbes did not observe that he could never have propounded his problem of the natural rights of mankind had not his motive been supplied by the Christian religion itself, which commands not indeed justice but charity to all mankind. With the Stoics on the other hand, with the fatalism and determinism which made it impossible for them to reason soundly about the state and laws, with the so-called "Spinozists of antiquity," he ideally united Spinoza; the uniqueness of whose utilitarianism, equally removed from the Lockian spirit and the Hobbist, since Spinoza "judges of the truth of things by the mind, not by sense" (mente non sensu de veris rerum diiudicat), did not escape Vico's notice. But unique though it was, it led Spinoza to think of the state in a somewhat undignified way "as of a mere society of shopkeepers." These utilitarian doctrines, with their libels upon human nature, seemed to Vico only fit for men without hope, too insignificant ever to have a share in the state or proud enough to believe themselves repressed and denied access to the positions of which in their arrogance they thought themselves worthy. Among these he counted the unfortunate Spinoza, who, he thinks, having as a Jew no country of his own, was moved by envy to devote himself to the construction of a metaphysic "intended to overthrow all the nations of the world." He passes stern judgment upon the state of contemporary ethics, which was all that it could be on the basis of a mechanistic and materialistic metaphysic without a gleam of finalism. Descartes produced nothing at all in this field, since his few written remains on the subject do not amount to a doctrine, and his treatise of the Passions belongs rather to medicine than to morals. Malebranche and Nicole were equally sterile, and Pascal's Pensées, the one exception, are "but scattered lights." Of the Italians, Pallavicino's treatise Del bene offers no very profound depths of ethics: and Muratori's attempt in his Filosofia Morale was a very unsuccessful one.

Utility is not the explanatory principle of morality, because it proceeds from man's bodily nature, and on that account is subject to change, while morality, honestas, is eternal. To derive morality from utility is to confound the occasion with the cause, to confine oneself to the surface and to offer no explanation at all of the facts. None of the various modes in which philosophers have successively called the utilitarian principle to life, fraud or imposture, force, desire,—none of these accounts for differentiation, that is, for the social organism. What fraud could ever have seduced and deceived the supposed simple and frugal first owners of the land, living as they did perfectly contented with their lot? What force could have succeeded, if the rich, the alleged usurpers, were few, and the poor, the robbed, were many? Such explanations are ridiculous, and unworthy of a serious problem. These strong and powerful men were really powerful with something other than mere strength: thus they became protectors of the weak and enemies of destructive and anti-social tendencies: their rule was one of force, it is true, but "imposed by a more powerful character" (a natura praestantiori dictata); a fact which the barbarian Brennus may be pardoned for not knowing, but not so a philosopher. The force which created and organised the earliest states was nothing but "noble human nature," to which states must always hark back, although they may have been won by fraud and force, in order to subsist and maintain themselves: which agrees with Machiavelli's advice to hark back to the beginnings, but with the implication that the deepest beginnings are to be found in mercy and justice. Men are held together by something stouter than utility. Human society cannot originate and endure without mutual trust; unless people accept each other's promises and take each other's word for facts they cannot examine. Could this trust be perhaps ensured by strict penal laws against falsehood? But laws are a product of society, and this mutual trust is necessary that society may arise. It may be said, as it is by Locke, that we are dealing with a psychological process, by which men gradually acquired the habit of believing when some one spoke to them and promised to tell the truth. But in that case these men already understood the idea of a truth which by mere disclosure compelled assent without any personal teaching; and the psychological principle of habituation is transcended.