Giambattista Vico and Ideal Eternal History

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

It is the 356^th anniversary of the birth of Giambattista Vico (23 June 1668 – 23 January 1744), who was born in Naples, then part of the Kingdom of Naples, on this date in 1668. The Kingdom of Naples ruled most of the southern part of the Italian Peninsula for more than 500 years.

Vico has been a chapter in the book of many philosophers of history. Vico is a chapter in Lowith’s Meaning in History, a section Collingwood’s The Idea of History, and the better part of Isaiah Berlin’s Vico & Herder, later republished as Three Critics of the Enlightenment, with a section on Hamann added. Of Vico, Isaiah Berlin wrote,

“Vico’s life and fate is perhaps the best of all known examples of what is too often dismissed as a romantic fiction—the story of a man of original genius, born before his time, forced to struggle in poverty and illness, misunderstood and largely neglected in his lifetime and (save among a handful of Neapolitan jurists), all but totally forgotten after his death.”

Despite the poverty and obscurity of his life, Vico left a number of books that came to be read and eventually become influential. Many identify Vico as the founder of sociology, though certainly the terms of his thought are not to be found in contemporary sociology, but there is a sociological dimension to Vico’s thought much as we have found in ibn Khaldun, as well as more recent philosophers of history who have also been sociologists, like Raymond Aron and Georg Simmel.

Mark Lilla calls Vico an anti-modern; Isaiah Berlin incorporated Vico into this rogue’s gallery of anti-Enlightenment figures. But if Vico was an anti-Enlightenment figure, he was an anti-Enlightenment thinker before the Enlightenment even occurred. Accordingly, instead of reacting against Voltaire or Condorcet, for example, Vico reacted against Descartes. While the Enlightenment hadn’t yet occurred in his lifetime, the scientific revolution had occurred, and Descartes was the paradigmatic philosopher of the scientific revolution.    

In his autobiography, which is written in the third person, Vico repeatedly mentions the dominance of Cartesianism in his time, and even among his friends. For example:

“…returning to Naples at the time when the Cartesian physics was most in vogue, Vico heard this assertion that Descartes’s metaphysics would drive Aristotle’s from the cloisters often made by Gregorio Caloprese, a great Cartesian philosopher, who held Vico very dear.”

And:  

“…Vico returned to Naples a stranger in his own land, and found the physics of Descartes at the height of its renown among the established men of letters. That of Aristotle, on its own account but much more because of the excessive alterations made in it by the school men, had now become a laughingstock.”

Vico himself studied Descartes, since Descartes was all the rage at the time, and, while he reacted against Descartes, we can occasionally see an influence. In my episode on Descartes I quoted several well known section from the Discourse on Method in which Descartes expressed his disdain not only for history, but more generally for the humanities. Descartes believed that the kind of knowledge that he recognized as the only legitimate knowledge was to be derived from the physical sciences, and he set out to construct an epistemology that would be adequate to the construction of philosophically rigorous knowledge based on the physical sciences. Or, since Descartes was something of a foundationalist, it might be better to say that he sought to construct an epistemology that could serve as the foundation for the physical sciences.

Descartes is often called the Father of Modern Philosophy, and his patrimony is sometimes expressed as the epistemological turn in philosophy. That is to say, Descartes redirected philosophy away from the Scholastic metaphysics cultivated in the universities of his time, and toward epistemological questions, which are questions of how we know what we know. But the Cartesian approach leaves out a lot. All the humanities that Descartes rejected were those disciplines that were to be central to Vico’s work.

In spite of this rejection of Cartesianism, we can see the continuity from Descartes to Vico in that Vico’s point of departure in what he called his new science was an epistemological point of departure. Vico is well known for what is called the verum-factum principle,  which is the idea that we understand what we have made—“verum-factum” is derived from the Latin, Verum esse ipsum factum (“truth is itself something made”), or Verum et factum convertuntur (“The true and the made are interchangeable”). Here is how Vico formulated it:  

“‘The true is precisely what is made’ (Verum esse ipsum factum). And, therefore, the first truth is in God, because God is the first maker; this first truth is infinite, because He is the Maker of all things; it is completed truth, because it represents to Him all the elements of things, both external and internal, since He contains them. But to know (scire) is to put together the elements of things. Hence discursive thought (cogitatio) is what is proper to the human mind, whereas intelligence (intelligentia) is proper to God’s mind. For God reads all the elements of things whether inner or outer, because He contains and disposes them in order, whereas the human mind, because it is limited and external to everything else that is not itself, is confined to the outside edges of things only and, hence, can never gather them all together. For this very reason it can indeed think about reality, but it can not understand it fully. On that account, the human mind partakes of reason, but does not possess it fully.” (On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, p. 46)

What we have not made we can think about, but we will never be able to understand it in the way we can understand that which we have made. As the quote from Vico makes clear, his thought takes place within a theological framework. Mark Lilla’s book, G. B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern, argues that Vicos thought not only originates in a theological conception of the world, but that it also converges on a theological end state:

“…he was a far more profound critic of the modern age than has previously been supposed, and that his departure from the premises of modern thought led him in a new and disturbing direction—not toward a more humane tempering of Enlightenment doctrines, but toward a highly novel appeal to order and authority made in the new language of modern science. Vico writes his first philosophical works in the idiom of theological metaphysics, and his last in the idiom of the modern sciences. As the following pages try to establish, it is precisely this combination of pre-modern theology and modern method that is the key to understanding his thought.” (p. 6)

Lilla writes that many have identified Vico as a counter-Enlightenment thinker, but also as a pluralist—as though his pluralism softens the counter-Enlightenment blow—with the idea of Vico’s pluralism largely derived from Isaiah Berlin’s essay on Vico. Even though Vico’s thought is formulated in pervasively theological terms, it should be emphasized that his is not a theodicy, i.e., a demonstration of divine justice such as worked out by his elder contemporary Leibniz, and not providential philosophy of history. Karl Löwith made this observation:

“…in Vico’s ‘demonstration’ of providence nothing remains of the transcendent and miraculous operation which characterizes the faith in providence from Augustine to Bossuet. With Vico it is reduced to an ultimate frame of reference, the content and substance of which are nothing else than the universal and permanent order of the historical course itself. Vico’s God is so omnipotent that he can refrain from special interventions. He works completely in the natural course of history by its natural means: occasions, necessities, utilities. And for those who can read this natural language of factual historic providence in man’s social history, history is, from its first to its last page, an open book of admirable design.”

With the theological context of Vico’s philosophy noted, let’s move on to further examine his epistemology. Despite his rejection of Cartesianism, he presented his own thought semi-formally, with axioms, not unlike Descartes in his early Rules for the Direction of Mind or the later Principles of Philosophy. It is often commented how confused Vico’s exposition can be, but he did try to be clear and systematic, even if the result is not all the later generations would like.

Vico’s rejection of Cartesianism can be compared to Husserl’s criticism of Galilean science in The Crisis of European Sciences. We need not completely reject science and scientific knowledge if we recognize that scientific knowledge is not an exhaustive knowledge of the world. We can take the scientific way of knowing as one form of knowing among many. This is already familiar to us from several episodes in which I have discussed the idea that history represents a distinct kind of science, as in Windelband and Rickert. Isaiah Berlin held that history is no kind of science at all, and to pursue scientific history is to falsify history.

Ever since the scientific revolution there have been critics of the methods of science, whether Cartesian, Galilean, Newtonian, Einsteinian, or otherwise. Vico belongs to the loosely defined tradition of the critics of scientific epistemology, and, as I said earlier, Descartes pursued an epistemology closely aligned with the physical sciences, while Vico pursued an epistemology aligned with the humanities. The knowledge of the natural work that Descartes pursued was, for Vico, illusory. Since human beings had no part in making the natural world, we could never know it as its maker knows it. However, we are the makers of the humanities, and we can know them as only a maker can.

Human history was traditionally studied as a humanistic discipline, aided by other humanistic disciplines like linguistics and philology, which were Vico’s specialty. The traditional course of study for an historian was to master ancient languages in order to read ancient texts and therefore to write history based on primary sources. With this appeal to the verum-factum principle as the epistemic legitimation of the humanities, we can see why Vico’s conception of history is not a providential philosophy of history.

If God had made history through continual providential intervention in the historical process, then history would not have been made by human beings, and human beings would have no more chance of understanding history than we have of understanding the natural world, which we did not create.

We can therefore identify a position in the philosophy of history, a road not taken as it were—at least, not taken by Vico, or by anyone else that I know of—according to which the verum-factum principle obtains, and history is a function of providential intervention, therefore human beings can think about history, but they can never understand it as it can only be understood by its maker. Again, this isn’t Vico’s position, but I thought it was worth pointing this out. Vico does hold that human beings have made history and that they can therefore understand history as only the maker of something can understand it. Against Cartesianism, we can understand history in a way that we can never understand the natural world.

So, to cut to the chase, how exactly did Vico understand history? The book for which Vico is remembered is The New Science, which first appeared in 1725, the second edition in 1730, and the third edition in 1744. In the following passage Vico discusses his influences and introduces what he called ideal eternal history:

“Up to this time Vico had admired two only above all other learned men: Plato and Tacitus; for with an incomparable metaphysical mind Tacitus contemplates man as he is, Plato as he should be. And as Plato with his universal knowledge explores the parts of nobility which constitute the man of intellectual wisdom, so Tacitus descends into all the counsels of utility whereby, among the infinite irregular chances of malice and fortune, the man of practical wisdom brings things to good issue. Now Vico’s admiration of these two great authors from this point of view was a foreshadowing of that plan on which he later worked out an ideal eternal history to be traversed by the universal history of all times, carrying out on it, by certain eternal properties of civil affairs, the development, acme and decay of all nations. From this it follows that the wise man should be formed both of esoteric wisdom such as Plato’s and of common wisdom such as that of Tacitus.”

What is ideal eternal history? This is the pattern of historical development that we find exemplified in all known societies. Vico sketches his ideal eternal history in axioms 66-68 in The New Science:

LXVI (66)

24I Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance.

LXVII (67)

242 The nature of peoples is first crude, then severe, then benign, then delicate, finally dissolute.

LXVIII (68)

243 In the human race first appear the huge and grotesque, like the cyclopes; then the proud and magnanimous, like Achilles; then the valorous and just, like Aristides and Scipio Africanus; nearer to us, imposing figures with great semblances of virtue accompanied by great vices, who among the vulgar win a name for true glory, like Alexander and Caesar; still later, the melancholy and reflective, like Tiberius; finally the dissolute and shameless madmen, like Caligula, Nero, and Domitian.

244 This axiom shows that the first sort were necessary in order to make one man obey another in the family-state and prepare him to be law-abiding in the city-state that was to come; the second sort, who naturally did not yield to their peers, were necessary to establish the aristocratic commonwealths on the basis of the families; the third sort to open the way for popular liberty; the fourth to bring in the monarchies; the fifth to establish them; the sixth to overthrow them.

245 This with the preceding axioms [LXV-LXVII] gives a part of the principles of the ideal eternal history traversed in time by every nation in its rise, development, maturity, decline and fall.

Here is another version of essentially the same idea, from paragraph 1108:

“Men mean to gratify their bestial lust and abandon their offspring, and they inaugurate the chastity of marriage from which the families arise. The fathers mean to exercise without restraint their paternal power over their clients, and they subject them to the civil powers from which the cities arise. The reigning orders of nobles mean to abuse their lordly freedom over the plebeians, and they are obliged to submit to the laws which establish popular liberty. The free peoples mean to shake off the yoke of their laws, and they become subject to monarchs. The monarchs mean to strengthen their own positions by debasing their subjects with all the vices of dissoluteness, and they dispose them to endure slavery at the hands of stronger nations. The nations mean to dissolve themselves, and their remnants flee for safety to the wilderness, whence, like the phoenix, they rise again. That which did all this was mind, for men did it with intelligence; it was not fate, for they did it by choice; not chance, for the results of their always so acting are perpetually the same.”

This sounds like a familiar schema, both in ancient sources like Polybius, and recent sources like Spengler. Spengler, like Vico, posited the incommensurability civilizations, but at the same time each incommensurable civilization exhibits certain predictable stages of development. And there is another sense in which we can compare Vico to Spengler. One of the aspects of Spengler’s work that is missed by those who know it only by reputation is the baroque detail of Spengler’s presentation. Philosophy, science, mathematics, law, art, language, religion, and so on are all linked in every civilization in a web of subtle relationships distinctive to each civilization, and Spengler attempts to describe all of this.

Critics focus on the handful of big picture ideas in Spengler, but I suspect that Spengler’s first generation of readers were taken by the sheer density of his thick descriptions of distinct civilizations. For this thick description, Spengler relied on the same humanities that were knowable according to Vico’s verum-factum principle. The idea that a civilization, or the history of a society, might be predictable in regard to its development even while being utterly unique in its properties not constrained by developmental stages, has become a kind of pons asinorum that very few philosophers of history can cross—or are willing to cross. I am reminded of a passage from Frege from his posthumously published Introduction to Logic.  

“This way academics have of behaving reminds me of nothing so much as that of an ox confronted by a new gate: it gapes, it bellows, it tries to squeeze by sideways, but going through it—that might be dangerous.”

To me it makes perfect sense that a history or a civilization might be constrained and predictable in some particular ways and unconstrained in other ways. It would be difficult to name anything known to us of which this isn’t true. For example, everything we experience in life is constrained by the laws of physics, but that doesn’t mean that everyone’s experiences are the same. Again, every human being fortune enough to live a long life experiences infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age, and death. But that we all experience the same ontogenetic developmental sequence doesn’t mean that we are all the same.

If we limit our view of a human life to only this aspect of life, by adopting some abstract conception of human life, then all human beings will be, by definition, the same, but we know that this doesn’t reflect the experience of human life. We could just as well adopt a different abstract conception according to which all human lives are different from one another. We may be impressed by turns by the sameness of all human beings on the one hand, or, on the other hand, the differences among human beings, but that there are both similarities and differences is not difficult to grasp. This is all that Vico and Spengler are saying about human history: there are constraints that govern the formation, development, and extinction of all societies, but within these constraints each history is so different from every other history than the results are incommensurable.

Now let’s come at Vico’s ideal eternal history from another angle, but by way of another philosopher. Not only is it Vico’s birthday today, it is also the birthday of William H. Dray, who wrote a widely available introduction to the philosophy of history in which Vico is mentioned in passing a few times. Dray makes this interesting observation:  

“At the most general level of analysis, there are, of course, only three possibilities open. Either history will be found to have a linear pattern—it will be ‘going somewhere’; or it will be cyclical, repeating itself endlessly in succeeding peoples and periods; or it will appear chaotic, exhibiting (as H. A. L. Fisher puts it) only ‘the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.’ A linear account may, of course, be progressive or regressive… Various combinations of the basic possibilities may also be encountered. A cyclical development may be linked with a linear one to form the kind of spiraling advance asserted by Vico in his New Science. A theory which is chaotic at one level may admit fragmentary developments of either cyclical or linear type at another.”

And here is how Collingwood describes this spiral development of history in Vico:

“…this cyclical movement is not a mere rotation of history through a cycle of fixed phases; it is not a circle but a spiral ; for history never repeats itself but comes round to each new phase in a form differentiated by what has gone before. Thus the Christian barbarism of the Middle Ages is differentiated from the pagan barbarism of the Homeric age by everything that makes it distinctively an expression of the Christian mind. For this reason, because history is always creating novelties, the cyclical law does not permit us to forecast the future, and this distinguishes Vico’s use of it from the old Greco-Roman idea of a strictly circular movement in history (found for example in Plato, Polybius, and Renaissance historians like Machiavelli and Campanella) and brings it into line with the principle, to whose fundamental importance I have already referred, that the true historian never prophesies.” (pp. 67-68)

One of the reasons that philosophy is history is often held in low esteem is due to the absurd over-simplification of the historical schemes that are imposed on history. These schematic conceptions of history are what Dray calls “the most general level of analysis,” and Dray says we may also find various combinations of linearity, cyclicality, and chaos. Here be begin to approach a more realistic modeling of history, and this is where Dray places Vico, with a spiraling model of history. But we can model history in greater detail and accuracy if we allow for many more permutations and combinations of simpler elements, because this is exactly what history is—an enormously complex concatenation of a multiplicity of elements.

Here the theorist of history faces an obvious dilemma. You can present an overly simplified model of history that is obvious wrong, but which can be explained while your listener stands on one foot. Obviously this isn’t going to go well. This level of oversimplification has led us to philosophies of history that are almost laughable, and it’s not surprising when others don’t take these efforts very seriously. Alternatively, you can present a model that is sufficiently complex to capture some of the complexity of history itself, but no one will stay to hear all of it explained. I don’t have an answer to this dilemma, but it’s something I’ve thought about a lot. Vico’s ideal eternal history approximates over-simplification, while his thick description of human societies approximates adequacy and so tends to the level of complexity that is off-putting. Perhaps this is why Vico had no readers in his own time.

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