The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico

by Benedetto Croce

We should certainly be better informed as to the precedents of Vico's criterion if we knew more of his studies preparatory to the De antiquissima, and if in general we had more literary evidence about his youth. Perhaps even the precedents I have indicated, which I only called probable, are not quite free from an element of chance; they may be connexions only imagined by myself and non-existent for Vico's mind, while others not accidental may perhaps be still unknown, or await discovery by a student more fortunate than myself. But it may not be out of place to remark that the search for "precedents" does nothing to explain the new thought that followed them; much less does it detract from the value of that thought. Such information, though on the one hand it enriches our knowledge of the history of philosophy, on the other hand has absolutely no effect upon the determinate thought under examination. It is valuable in the biography of a philosopher, but valueless for the comprehension of the proper meaning of the new theory, which must be sought essentially in the new problem which it faces and attempts to solve. In the history of philosophy the same principles hold good as in that of literature. Take for example the episode of Argante and Tancred in canto xix. of "Jerusalem Delivered"; Argante, while taking up his position for the fight with his adversary, turns "as if in doubt" to the "afflicted city," towards Jerusalem attacked by the crusaders; and when Tancred brutally mocks him, asking whether he does this out of fear, he replies:—

I was but thinking how this city,
The immemorial green of Juda's realm,
Is falling, vanquished; whose unhappy fate
I have in vain endeavoured to repel.

Here the precedents are easily found; Hector parting from Andromache and foreseeing the unhappy fate of Ilion, Priam and all his people (ἒσσεται ἧμαρ, etc., II. vi. 448-9); or Aeneas as he gazes upon its downfall (ruit alto a culmine Troia: ... si Pergama dextra, etc., Aen. ii. 290-92). And yet the tragic melancholy of Argante is an entirely new creation, and altogether original to Tasso.

Ficino, Cardano, Tommaso Cornelio, Scotus and Occam, and any others who have been or shall be added to the list, have or may have anticipated this or that element of Vico's formula: and yet when we turn from their statements to the De antiquissima and the polemics that follow it, and read the definition of science, of true science, as the conversion of the true with the created, it strikes us as an entirely original theory. The fact is that Vico had not to face the same opponents and to solve the same problems that were faced and solved by the schoolmen, nominalists and mystics of the Middle Ages or by the Platonists and naturalists of the Renaissance, nor yet those of Descartes in his Discours sur la méthode; and the saying that "he alone knows things who creates them" acquires a new value, a new meaning (and this is its proper meaning) from its being used to refute the Cartesian cogito and the doctrine of immediate knowledge. Vico takes an old rusty sword and makes of it at least a glittering and trenchant weapon. For the same reason the phrase is no longer a mere accident or incident, but the starting-point of a special study, the foundation of a new philosophy, and Vico could quite well describe it as something not learnt from another but thought out and established by himself. And when he wants to find some original for it, he invents a history which is really a fiction or a myth; namely the history of ancient Italian wisdom which used this criterion as its supreme guide and left a trace of it in the Latin language in the synonymity of the words verum and factum.

The refutation of the Cartesian criterion (which De Sanctis thought "complete," the "last word of criticism"[34]) is the negative aspect of Vico's theory of knowledge. Its positive side, absent in the De antiquissima, is developed as we have said in the Scienza Nuova, where the human knowledge of the mind and of history is raised to the level of divine knowledge. And since some critics have not only chosen to ignore the obvious difference between these two phases of Vico's thought but have spoken of a too easy transition from the one to the other, it will be well to observe that this transition was for Vico if not entirely conscious at least very slow and very difficult. He must at one time have shared Descartes' and Malebranche's contempt for history; in the speech of 1701 he even echoed a saying of Descartes against philologists:—"You, Philologist, boast of knowing everything about the furniture and clothing of the Romans and of being more intimate with the quarters, tribes and streets of Rome than with those of your own city. Why this pride? You know no more than did the potter, the cook, the cobbler, the summoner, the auctioneer of Rome."[35] But eleven years later, in the second reply to the Giornale dei letterati, Vico refers to the same phrase with the contrary conclusion, and deplores that "the study of languages is to-day considered profitless, thanks to the authority of Descartes, who says that to know Latin is to know no more than did Cicero's servant-girl."[36] Vico had in the meantime become conscious of the importance of the "probable" knowledge of history and politics. He refers to his former anti-historical Cartesianism in a passage of the De constantia philologiae which has generally escaped notice. Speaking of philology he says: "I, who have all my life delighted in the use of reason more than in memory, seem to myself the more ignorant the more facts I know in philology. Whence René Descartes and Malebranche were not far wrong when they said that it was alien to the philosopher to work much and for long at philology." But he adds that later he perceived that "these two most notable philosophers ought, it they had been zealous for the common glory of Christendom, not for the private glory of philosophers, so to have pressed forward the study of philology as to see whether philology could be attached to the principles of philosophy (ut viderent philosophi an philologiam ad philosophiae principia revocare possent)."[37] The elevation of philology to the rank of philosophy, of the knowledge of the world of man to the level of divine knowledge, is the positive aspect of Vico's theory of knowledge. It is this that is developed in the Scienza Nuova, towards which the De antiquissima, with the indication of the historical sciences as against Cartesianism, only prepared the way.

Thus of the three points in which I placed the originality and value of Vico's first theory of knowledge, two, namely the criterion of knowledge opposed to that of Descartes and the defence of concrete as opposed to abstract sciences, are not only left intact by the inquiries into their sources which I have just described, but are actually reinforced.

There remains the third of my points: the Vician theory of the arbitrary nature of mathematics, the originality of which has also been impugned by arguments which seem to me to have even less foundation than those I have examined above.

Do we find the doctrine that the fundamental objects of mathematics, the unit of arithmetic and the point of geometry, are unreal or fictitious, propounded before Vico's time? Do we find it—this is the chief point—propounded not as a casual remark or an intuition of a truth, but as a consciously reasoned concept from which legitimate consequences are drawn as to the limitations of mathematics and its inability to furnish real knowledge of mind, nature and history?

All through the Middle Ages the Aristotelian theory of mathematics is continually enunciated. According to this theory mathematics is the most certain of the sciences because the simplest; it abstracts from all sensible matter, but not from intelligible matter (ὖλη νοητή) which exists in sensible objects but not qua sensible (ἐν τοῑς ἀἰσθητοῑs ὑπάρχουσα μὴ ᾖ ἀἰσθητά)[38] According to Cassiodorus it constituted the body of doctrinalis as opposed to naturalis (physical) science and divina. Albertus Magnus followed Aristotle in defining mathematical entities as separable "in imagination," "in thought" but not "in reality" (in phantasmate, secundum rationem, non secundum esse) from the sensible matter to which "they are conjoined by existence" (per esse sunt coniunctae); and St. Thomas said that mathematics "though the objects it considers are not separate, yet considers them in so far as they are separate" (etsi sunt non separata ea quae considerat, tamen considerat ea in quantum sunt separata).[39] The arbitrary character of its foundations was never suspected. Dante, when he wished to indicate "the things which not being subject to our power we can only contemplate and not create," enumerated "the objects of mathematics, physical science and divinity" (mathematica, physica et divina).[40]

Just as mathematics was not always equally valued in antiquity, so, and much more so, after the Renaissance of learning, it was variously exalted or despised. Giordano Bruno satirised the abuse of it, and said that without physical science "to be able to calculate and measure, to understand geometry and perspective, is but a pastime of ingenious fools," and warned his readers against confusing mathematical "signs" and real "causes": "a reflected or direct ray, an acute or obtuse angle, a perpendicular, incident or straight line, a greater or smaller are of a circle, such and such an aspect, are mathematical circumstances and not natural causes. To play with geometry is one thing, to prove by means of nature is another. It is not lines and angles that make the fire more or less hot, but near and far situations, short and long spaces of time."[41] Campanella flatly denied Aristotle's assertion of the superiority of mathematics to physical science, declaring that its alleged purity was really weakness (debilitas), its simplicity was inability to include more things (plura accipere), its universality a contradiction against the nature of true science which is always of particulars (de singularibus), its demonstrative method by signs not by causes (per signa, non per causas); and finally that it is not a science investigated for its own sake and is valueless unless it is applied to physical matters (nisi applicentur physicis rebus).[42] Bacon is of the same opinion, that mathematics taken by itself is useless, and is useful only as an "auxiliary science," a "great appendix" to the physical sciences.[43] These definitions and restrictions, and others like them, might have yielded as a conclusion the entirely instrumental and practical character of mathematical science: but the conclusion was not drawn, so far as I know; and Bacon himself considered mathematics as in itself too exclusively and uselessly theoretical. "For since," he goes on in the passage above quoted, "it is a fact of human nature, no doubt to the great detriment of science, that it rejoices in the open plains of generalities, so to speak, rather than in the forests and closes of the particular, no discovery is more pleasant and gratifying than mathematics wherewith to sate this love of wandering and of meditation."