The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico

by Benedetto Croce

This certainty was not the simple self-evidence of Descartes, in which the object, however internal it is said to be, remains extrinsic to the subject. It was a truly internal certainty, reached by an internal process. In the assimilation of historical facts, Vico felt himself to be making more truly his own something that already belonged to him; to be entering into possession of what was his by right. He was reconstructing the history of man; and what was the history of man but a product of man himself? Is not the creator of history simply man, with his ideas, his passions, his will, and his actions? And is not the mind of man, the creator of history, identical with the mind which is at work in thinking it and knowing it? The truth of the constructive principles of history then comes not from the validity of the clear and distinct idea, but from the indissoluble connexion of the subject and object of knowledge.

The importance of this new discovery, the discovery of the truth which Vico now recognised in the moral sciences, lay in the realisation of a new implication of the theory of knowledge laid down by himself in the former period of his speculations; namely, the criterion of truth consisting in the "convertibility of the true with the created." The reason why man could have perfect knowledge of man's world was simply that he had himself made that world. "When it happens that he who creates things also describes them, then the history is certain in the highest degree."

Connected as it thus was with his earlier view, the assertion of the possibility of the moral sciences did not, to Vico's own mind, present the importance and bring with it the consequences of a revolution entirely overthrowing the structure of his ideas, and compelling him to adjust them afresh. On the one hand, this assertion seemed to him a confirmation of his former doctrine, a new example to be added to those he had already collected of perfect knowledge; namely, God's knowledge of the universe and man's of the world of mathematics. On the other hand, it seemed to be an extension of the field of knowledge, whose boundaries (for definite boundaries still existed) had at first been too narrowly drawn. Formerly he had described a small luminous sphere in the centre of a vast and dimly lighted field; now the luminous sphere underwent a definite increase in size, and the penumbral region a corresponding diminution. This increase involved no sort of conflict with his religious beliefs; in fact, it seemed to support them and to gain support from them in turn. For did not religion teach the liberty, responsibility, and consciousness which man has in respect of his own acts and creations?

Thus Vico did not feel obliged to write a new treatise on metaphysics. It seemed enough to add a mere post-script to his former work, and to correct to some extent his earlier assertions. His new theory of knowledge, while adhering strictly to the criterion of truth enunciated by him in opposition to that of Descartes—the principle, that is, that only the creator of a thing can know it—divided the whole of reality into the world of nature and the world of man. But, while it laid down that the world of nature is created by God and that therefore God alone knows it, it restricted its agnosticism to this field. It asserted, on the other hand, that the human world, being man's creation, is known by man. In this way it raised the knowledge of human affairs, formerly considered merely approximate and probable, to the rank of perfect science; and it expressed surprise that philosophers should so laboriously endeavour to attain to science of the world of nature, which is a sealed book to mankind, while passing over the world of man, the science of which is attainable. The cause of this error he traced to the ease with which man's mind, involved and buried as it is in the body, feels bodily things, and the labour and pains it costs it to understand itself, as the bodily eye sees all objects outside itself, but in order to see itself requires the help of the mirror.

In everything else his system remained unchanged. Beyond the world of man lay the supernatural world, inaccessible to man, and the world of nature, itself also in a sense supernatural. Beyond the perfect knowledge which man could have of himself lay the metaphysic of Christian Platonism, now reduced to impotence, but continuing none the less to embarrass mankind. The natural sciences were now, as before, regarded as incomplete forms of knowledge: mathematics as a system of abstractions, absolutely valid in the abstract but in face of reality powerless. The Aristotelian syllogism, the Stoic sorites, and the Cartesian geometrical method were pursued with the same hatred as before; and the same enthusiastic praise was lavished upon the induction advocated and illustrated in his Organum by Bacon, that "great philosopher and great statesman," and fruitfully employed by his countrymen in experimental philosophy.

Vico's frequent claim to have constructed the science of human affairs on "a strict geometric method" might seem to indicate a change of opinion as to the applicability of that method. But his continual warnings, during the same period and in the same works, against the use in physical and moral questions of the mathematical method, which, "where there are no figures either of lines or numbers, either gives us no conclusiveness, or else, instead of demonstrating the truth, may often give an appearance of demonstration to falsehood," would flatly contradict the supposed change of front were it not that we could interpret it so as completely to restore the coherence of Vico's thought. This interpretation is quite simple. Once the power of converting the true with the created is seen to attach to the moral sciences no less than to geometry, these sciences could and indeed must develop on a method analogous to the synthetic method of geometry, the method which proceeds from a truth to its immediate consequence. In this manner they follow the progress of the world of man from its ideal origin to its perfect development; so that the student must not hope to be able to investigate these sciences per saltum, but must traverse them from beginning to end in detail, without refusing to accept unforeseen conclusions any more than he can refuse to do so in geometry; but concentrating his attention on the firmness of the bond between premisses and conclusion. Thus the method could be called geometric by analogy or synecdoche; in fact, however, it was essentially speculative, and not to be confused with the application of mathematics to questions of morals, of which the Cartesians and Spinoza have left examples.

Nor can we agree without reservation to the opinion of certain commentators that Vico, in asserting the existence of a single science of man, to be studied in the modifications of the human mind, was retreating to the position of a follower of Descartes. This opinion is often reinforced by another statement of Vico's, namely, that to conceive his New Science it would be well to return to a state of absolute ignorance, as if no philosophers, philologists, nor books had even existed in the world. It is true that with the new form of his theory of knowledge Vico himself joined the ranks of modern subjectivism, initiated by Descartes. In a sense, indeed, he had already done so in his activistic doctrine of truth as the reconstruction of the created. In this quite general sense Vico might himself be called a Cartesian. Nevertheless, if he was still behind Descartes in making his subjectivism a principle not of the whole of knowledge but of the knowledge of the world of man only, in another way he was ahead of the French philosopher, in that for him the truth attained in the world of man was not static but dynamic, not a discovery but a product, not consciousness but science.

As for the advice that one should proceed as if there were no books, no philosophical or philological doctrines in the world, its meaning is merely the necessity of ridding oneself of all prejudice, of all common habitual assumptions, of all accretions of memory and fancy, in order to attain "the state of pure understanding, empty of every particular form," which is necessary for the discovery and apprehension of any new truth. So far removed is this advice from the Cartesian or Malebranchian renunciation of learning and authority, that—to mention one fact only—in the very passage to which we have just referred we find the warning that the New Science presupposes a comprehensive and varied mass both of doctrine and of learning, the truths of which it takes over as already known, and uses them as terms in its new propositions.

In a word, Vico in his new theory of knowledge became not more Cartesian but more Vician—more himself. Descartes seemed to him not even a serviceable path by which to attain proof of the possibility of constructing the science of mind by means of the mind. The true path was Vico's own criterion of truth, brought into relation with its author's observations made in the course of his historical studies. If we wish to look for precedents in the history of philosophy for Vico's theory of knowledge in its second form, the division between the two worlds of reality and the two spheres of consciousness, and the preference for moral as compared with natural studies, would lead us back to the position adopted by Socrates as against the "Physiologists" of his time, and the feeling of religious mystery which brought the Athenian philosopher to a standstill in face of the natural world and directed his efforts to the study of the mind of man. Again, as to the superior transparency of the moral sciences, as dealing with objects created by man himself, we might recall the Aristotelian division of the sciences into physical, treating of motion external to man, and practical and "poietic," which deal with man's own creations. The distinction passed into the philosophy of the schools: Thomas Aquinas speaks of nature as "an order which reason contemplates but does not create" (ordo quem ratio considerat sed non facit), and of the world of human activity as "an order which reason creates by contemplation" (ordo quem ratio considerando facit). But no such reference is made by Vico, fond as he was of expressing the debt of his own thought to the ancient philosophers; and admitting that the doctrine had some force before his time, the divergence between this earlier view and that of Vico on the knowableness of the world of man is as great as that between the assertion of the omniscience of God the Creator and the theory of knowledge which Vico was able to draw from it.

Of this theory, his doctrine of the moral sciences was neither more nor less than the first legitimate application. Both its author and the majority of his commentators are using inaccurate language in describing it as a simple extension of the previous applications—a second instance, added to that of the mathematical sciences, already examined.