The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico

by Benedetto Croce

The idea which transcends and corrects alike the individualistic and supra-individualistic views of history is the idea of history as rational. History is made by individuals: but individuality is nothing but the concreteness of the universal, and every individual action, simply because it is individual, is supra-individual. Neither the individual nor the universal exists as a distinct thing: the real thing is the one single course of history, whose abstract aspects are individuality without universality and universality without individuality. This one course of history is coherent in all its many determinations, like a work of art which is at the same time manifold and single, in which every word is inseparable from the rest, every shade of colour related to all the others, every line connected with every other line. On this understanding alone history can be understood. Otherwise it must remain unintelligible, like a string of words without meaning or the incoherent actions of a madman.

History then is the work neither of Fate nor of Chance but of the necessity which is not determination and the liberty which is not chance. And since the religious view, that history is the work of God, has this advantage and superiority over the others, that it introduces a cause for history other than fate or chance, and therefore not properly speaking a cause at all, but a creative activity, a free and intelligent mind, it is natural that out of gratitude to this higher view no less than by the suitability of the language we should be led to give to the rationality of history the name of God who rules and governs all things, and to call it the Divine Providence. In so naming it, we at the same time purge the title of its mythical dross which debased God and his providence afresh into a fate or a chance. Thus providence in history, in this final logical form, has double value as a criticism of individual illusions, when they come forward as the entire and only reality of history, and as a criticism of divine transcendence. And we may say that this is the point of view which always has been and always is adopted, as if instinctively, without the profession of an explicit theory, by all minds naturally gifted with that particular faculty which we call the historic sense.

If now, to return to Vico, we ask how he solved the problem of the motive force of history, and what was the precise content for him of the concept of providence in the objective sense, it is perfectly easy to exclude the supposition that his was the transcendent or miraculous Providence which had formed the subject of Bossuet's eloquent Discours. It is easy both because in all his philosophy he invariably reduces the transcendent to the immanent, and repeats over and over again here that his providence operates by natural means or (using scholastic phraseology) by secondary causes: and because upon this point his interpreters are practically unanimous.

No less insistent is his criticism of fate and chance, or according to his threefold division fortune, fate and chance. He observes that the doctrine of fate moves in a vicious circle, because the eternal series of causes in which it holds the world bound and chained, depends upon the will of Jupiter, and at the same time Jupiter is subject to fate; whence it results that the Stoics are themselves entangled in that "chain of Jupiter" with which they would imprison all things human. These three concepts, corresponding to that of opportunity when an object of desire is in question, to that of good luck in the case of unhoped-for events, and to that of accident in the case of the unexpected, are distinctions of the subjective understanding rather than anything else: objectively they come under one single law which may also be called fortune, if with Plato we recognise opportunity as the mistress of human affairs: and all three are manifestations and paths of the divine Providence which is intelligence, liberty and necessity. The creator of the world of nations "was indeed Mind, since men made it by their intelligence: it was not Fate, because they made it by free choice, nor yet Chance, since to all eternity on doing thus the same results follow."

Vico lights up in the most fanciful ways the comedy of errors formed by man's illusions as to the end of his own actions. Men thought they were escaping the threats of the thundering sky by carrying their women into caves to satisfy their animal passions out of God's sight: and by thus keeping them safely secluded they founded the first chaste unions and the first societies; marriage and the family. They fortified themselves in suitable places with the intention of defending themselves and their families: and in reality, by thus fortifying themselves in fixed places they put an end to their nomadic life and primitive wanderings, and began to learn agriculture. The weak and disorderly, reduced to the extremity of hunger and mutual slaughter, to save their lives took refuge in these fortified places, and became servants to the heroes: and thus without knowing it they raised the family to an aristocratic or feudal status. The aristocrats, feudal chiefs or patricians, their rule once established, hoped to defend and secure it by the strictest treatment of their servants the plebeians: but in this way they awoke in the servants a consciousness of their own power and made the plebeians into men, and the more the patricians prided themselves on their patriciate and struggled to preserve it, the more effectively they worked to destroy the patrician state and to create democracy. Thus, says Vico, the world of nations issues "from a mind widely different from, sometimes quite opposed, always superior, to the particular ends set before themselves by men: which restricted ends have been made means to wider ends, and employed to preserve the human race upon this earth."

It may be gathered from some of our quotations from Vico that he sometimes tended to conceive men as conscious of their own utilitarian ends but unconscious of moral ends. This would logically lead to explaining social life on exclusively utilitarian principles, and to considering morality as an accident relatively to the human will and therefore not really moral: an external accretion more or less capable of holding mankind together, or the obscure work of a supramundane providence. This utilitarianism especially creeps into a passage where he says that man, on account of his corrupt nature, being under the tyranny of self-love which compels him to make private utility his chief guide and to want every useful thing for himself and nothing for his fellow, unable to hold his passions in check so as to direct them by justice, in the state of nature desires only his own safety; after taking a wife and begetting children, desires his safety and the safety of his family; after attaining civil life, desires his own safety together with the safety of his city; after extending his rule over other peoples, he desires the safety of the nation; after joining with other nations in wars, treaties, alliances and commerce, he desires his safety and that of all mankind: and "in all these circumstances he principally desires his own interest." For this reason "it can be nothing else than divine providence that binds him down within such ordinances as to maintain by justice the society of the family, the state and ultimately of mankind; by which ordinances since man cannot attain what he wants, at least he wants to attain as much utility as is permitted: and this is what is called justice." The public virtue of Rome, he writes elsewhere, "was nothing but a good use made by providence of grave, unsightly and cruel private faults, that states might be preserved at a time when human minds, being in a state of extreme particularity, could not naturally understand a common good."

Utilitarianism was however, as we know, strongly repugnant to Vico's observed ethics, founded as the latter is upon the moral consciousness or shame; and hence these statements, which unconsciously tend in that direction, can only be explained as resulting from the disturbance sometimes produced in his mind by the lingering remains of the transcendent or theological conception of providence, and also from the confused character of his thought, which prevented him from keeping the idea of individual illusions clearly distinguished from that of individual aims; so that he sometimes substituted the second when he ought to have been dealing solely with the first. If the provident deity is "the unity of the spirit which informs and animates the world of nations," these do not fail to obtain their particular ends in order that it may move on to its universal ones, but both alike are realised in them: and man is at every moment both utilitarian and moral, or at least supposes himself to be moral when he is utilitarian or utilitarian when he is really moral.

In any case, and in spite of these vacillations or rather confusions, the conception of particular ends as the vehicle of universal and of illusion as accompanying and co-operating with action implies a dialectical conception of the movement of history, and the transcending of the problem of evil. This problem is in fact very little emphasised by Vico, owing to the strength of his belief in the universal government of providence and of his persuasion that so-called evil is not only willed by man under the appearance of good, but is itself essentially a good. In a few rare passages in his earliest writings, where he encounters the problem of evil, Vico solves it simply in the sense that we men because of our iniquity which leads us to "regard ourselves, not this universe of things" (nosmetipsos, non hanc rerum universitatem spectamus) consider as evil those things which run counter to us, "which yet, since they contribute to the common nature of the world, are good" (quae tamen, quia in mundi commune conferunt, bona sunt).

Vico's conception of history thus became truly objective, freed from divine arbitrament, but freed equally from the rule of trifling causes and gossiping explanations, and acquiring a knowledge of its own essential end, which is to understand the nexus of facts, the logic of events; to be the rational reconstruction of a rational fact. Historical study at this time suffered less from the first of these errors (the theological conception had been ever since the beginning of the Italian Renaissance falling into universal decay) than from that form of history which was just then acquiring the name of "pragmatic," which restricted itself to the personal aspect of events, and failing by these means to reach full historical truth tried to gain warmth and life by means of political and moral instruction. A monument of pragmatic history arose in Vico's own country and contemporaneously with the Scienza Nuova: Pietro Giannone's Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples. The author was a man of his own district and age, and wrote a great work in the sphere of polemic, and even in certain respects of history: but such that all its greatness only serves to emphasise the greatness of Vico's book. If Vico had had to describe the origins of ecclesiastical property and power in the Middle Ages, he would have been able to write of something very different from the guile of popes, bishops and abbots, and the simplicity of dukes and emperors. And as we shall see, whenever he undertook to investigate any part of history he actually did discover in it something very different from these things.