The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico

by Benedetto Croce

Some antidote is doubtless necessary to the exuberance of the imagination. But this must be sought in linear geometry rather than in logic: for geometry is to some extent pictorial in character, while it strengthens the memory by the great number of its elements, ennobles the imagination by the delicacy of its figures and stimulates the inventive faculty by forcing it to review all these figures in order to choose those suitable to the demonstration of the quantity required. But the whole value of geometry also was annulled by the method then in favour with the schools, the algebraic method; which like the scholastic logic numbs all the vigour of youthful faculties, obscures the imagination, enfeebles the memory, and renders the inventive power and the understanding sluggish; thus damaging the liberal arts in four distinct ways, in the knowledge of languages and history, in invention and in prudence. More particularly algebra is fatal to the inventive faculty, because in using the algebraic method one is conscious only of the immediate field of vision; it weakens the memory because once the second sign is found the first need no longer be remembered; it blinds the imagination, because that faculty is not used at all; it destroys the understanding, because it lays claim to the power of divination. Young men who have devoted their time to it on proceeding to deal with the affairs of civil life find themselves, to their great grief and remorse, unfitted for such a life. Hence, to make it useful in some degree and to prevent these ill effects, it should be studied for a short time only at the close of the mathematical course, and employed only as a means of abbreviation. The habit of reasoning is formed much better by metaphysical analysis, which in all questions begins by taking truth in the infinity of being, and then descends by degrees; through the genera of the substance, eliminating in every species that which the thing is not, till it arrives at the ultimate differentia constituting the essence of the thing we wish to know.

Education as a whole was suffering from an excess of mathematics and a lack of concreteness. As if boys, on emerging from academic life, were to enter a human world composed of lines, numbers and algebraic symbols, their heads were crammed with the magnificent phrases "demonstration," "demonstrative truth," and "evidence," and the rule of probability was condemned; though this rule is the only guide of statesmen in their counsels, generals in their campaigns, orators in their treatment of a cause, judges in giving a decision, physicians in treating bodily diseases, and moralistic theologians in treating those of the conscience; the rule which the world accepts, and upon which it rests in all disputes and controversies, in all measures, and in all elections; which are universally determined by unanimity or the majority of votes. Such an education bred up an empty and inflated generation, pedantry without wisdom and argument without truth.

The educators themselves, that is to say, the general atmosphere of culture, resembled this scheme of education. Poetry was dead. The analytic methods had "numbed" (to repeat once more a word which Vico uses with great frequency and force) "all the generosity of the better poetry." And indeed Europe was never so entirely barren of all poetic growth as it was in the first half of the eighteenth century. Italy was reduced to the drama of Metastasio; France had produced no one to succeed Corneille and Molière; in Spain the national drama, that great outburst of the national spirit, was dead, and a rationalism imitating that of France was taking its place; England seemed to have entirely forgotten that she once gave birth to Shakespear, and even Germany was wasting her time over neo-classical imitations. Not only did nobody create new poetry, but nobody wanted it. The philosophers, following Descartes and Malebranche, had declared a war of extermination against all the faculties of the mind which depend upon sense, and especially against the imagination, which they hated as the source of every error. They condemned the poets on the false pretext that they told "fables," as if the fables they told were not those eternal properties of the human mind which to the political philosophers, economists and moralists are the subject-matter of reasoning, and to the poets that of representation.

The Cartesians also used their authority to belittle the study of languages. Did not Descartes say that the knowledge of Latin was no greater knowledge than was possessed by Cicero's servant-girl? Serious scholarship in Latin and Greek had come to an end with the writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the study of oriental languages was confined to the Protestants; and Holland was the only country in which law was still a subject of research. The famous library of Valletta at Naples, rich in the finest editions of Greek and Latin works, was generously bought by the fathers of the Oratory, but for less than half its original value owing to the depreciation of books. In France the library of Cardinal Dubois found no purchaser and was sold in small lots. Princes no longer loved good Latin, and none of them thought of preserving to posterity by the pen of pure Latin scholarship even an event so weighty as the War of the Spanish Succession, comparable only to the second Punic war.

New methods were in great favour: but none of these could point to new facts discovered by their help. New formulae, old facts; and instead of facts, a futile hope of attaining universal knowledge in the shortest time and with the smallest effort. Civil and political learning was neglected for physical science, and physical science for mathematical; experience was almost ignored; the inventive thought of the previous century all but entirely exhausted. Scepticism, the result of the Cartesian method, invaded the field of knowledge.

The whole of Europe was during this period still under the dominion of the French language, a language which differs from the Italian in its hostility to poetry and eloquence; rich, says Vico, in terms of substance, and consequently, since substance is a brutal and immobile thing and does not admit of comparisons, incapable of giving colour, amplitude or weight to its statements; it resists inversion and is barren of metaphor. The French have no periods but only members of periods: their prosody has no verse better than the so-called Alexandrine, a system of couplets more thin and lifeless than the elegiac: and their words admit of no accent except those on the last two syllables. French is a language incapable of the sublime, but well adapted to the petty: owing to its abundance of terms of substance or abstract terms it is adapted also to the didactic style, and instead of eloquence it offers esprit. It was not unfitting that criticism and analysis originated in France and made use of the French tongue.

The only possession of value which grew up day by day in all this poverty was the abstracts, the encyclopaedias, the dictionaries of science which bore the names of such men as Bayle, Hoffmann and Moreri: the idlest and most casual method of learning that could possibly be devised. The genius of the age was more drawn towards expounding second-hand knowledge in an abbreviated form than towards attempting to enlarge its bounds. That seemed impossible: so men went on compiling dictionaries of mathematics. Every one felt a thirst for cheap science. To be thought good, a book must be clear and simple, capable of being discussed with ladies as a pastime; if it demanded wide and copious erudition of the reader, and forced upon him the unpleasant exercise of thought and synthesis, it was condemned as unintelligible.

These dictionaries and abstracts recalled to Vico's mind the similar products of the Greek decadence, the anthologies, lexicons and encyclopaedias of Suidas, Stobaeus and Photius. The whole culture of his time seemed to him to be repeating the downfall of Greek science, exhausting itself in a metaphysic either useless or harmful to civilisation and a mathematics engaged in investigating quantities intangible by rule and compass, and incapable of application. Like others among the best minds of his country he was persuaded that the republic of letters was approaching dissolution, if the divine providence failed by one of its innumerable secret paths to infuse new vigour into it. Where was now the wise man, the real "sapiens" whom Vico had found in history, first in the barbaric figure of the theologian-poet, then in the civilised and rational figure of Greek philosopher and Roman jurist, the man whom for to-day he hoped to find in the master of eloquence like himself, called to give unity, life and power to all knowledge? Wisdom is indeed not this or that science, nor yet the sum total of science; it is the faculty which rules over all studies and by which all the sciences and arts that go to make humanity are acquired. And since man is both thought and spirit, intellect and will, it must satisfy both these sides of man, the second as a result of the first: it must teach the knowledge of divine things, to bring to perfection things human. The wise man is man in his totality and entirety, the whole man.