Borrowed Light

Vico, Hegel, and the Colonies

Timothy Brennan

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780804790581
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

A critical revaluation of the humanist tradition, Borrowed Light makes the case that the 20th century is the "anticolonial century." The sparks of concerted resistance to colonial oppression were ignited in the gathering of intellectual malcontents from all over the world in interwar Europe. Many of this era's principal figures were formed by the experience of revolution on Europe's semi-developed Eastern periphery, making their ideas especially pertinent to current ideas about autonomy and sovereignty. Moreover, the debates most prominent then—human vs. inhuman, religions of the book vs. oral cultures, the authoritarian state vs. the representative state and, above all, scientific rationality vs. humanist reason—remain central today.

Timothy Brennan returns to the scientific Enlightenment of the 17th century and its legacies. In readings of the showdown between Spinoza and Vico, Hegel's critique of liberalism, and Nietzsche's antipathy towards the colonies and social democracy, Brennan identifies the divergent lines of the first anticolonial theory—a literary and philosophical project with strong ties to what we now call Marxism. Along the way, he assesses prospects for a renewal of the study of imperial culture.

1

VICO, SPINOZA, AND THE IMPERIAL PAST

[Vico,] the true precursor of all German thought.

Marcel Grilli ¹

VICO’S UNTIMELINESS

Like the corsi and ricorsi of his cyclical history, Giambattista Vico, it appears, had to be discovered twice. No longer can one pretend to introduce him for the first time, since from the age of the philosophes onward, he has been a thinker whose ideas were debated throughout his native Italy and avidly read, paraphrased, and plagiarized by many of the most famous intellectuals of France and Germany. Circles dedicated to his work could be found in nineteenth-century Buenos Aires. Montesquieu repeated him and Rousseau found in him the central ideas of his “Essay on the Origin of Languages” (1871). Among German thinkers, Goethe read him on his travels to Naples; the great German Enlightenment independent, Johann Georg Hamann, passed his secrets along to Herder, with lasting effects on Romance philology. And on the other side of the continent, Coleridge did his best to acknowledge, formally, the momentous impact of Vico in an England already familiar with his theories in their borrowings by Scottish empiricists. All across Europe and parts of the Americas, the history of ideas attests to Vico’s distant presence—admired, contested, engaged, a source of ideas found to be expressing what later readers somehow knew but did not know why.

It is only the twentieth century, strangely, that discovers a different Vico. Despite the labors of Benedetto Croce in La filosofia de Giambattista Vico (1911) and in his Bibliografia vichiana (with Fausto Nicolini, 1947–48) in standardizing editions of Vico’s works, popularizing his system, and explaining his significance internationally, Vico subsided into an obscurity he had not known since the 1720s.² Always an enthusiasm among specialists, antiquarians, and Italianists, he was no longer considered a serious source of philosophical learning as he had been for the ground-clearers of the French Revolution. There were exceptions. Georges Sorel’s idiosyncratic study of Vico in 1896 based on Jules Michelet’s equally selective translations from earlier in the century provided a weapon in Sorel’s assault on the economic determinism of early interpretations of Marx.³ A long chapter on Vico in The Economic Determinism of Karl Marx (1909) by Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, played a similar role.⁴

But neither they nor their contemporaries fully grasped the fact that entire fields of inquiry became imaginable only in his wake. For it is really in Vico that we see the first hints of what would later become qualitative sociology, cultural anthropology, social history, comparative linguistics, hermeneutics, world literature, and even, I would argue, Marxist cultural criticism. If the originality of Vico’s revolt had faded from view, especially after World War II, it took with it the ability to see at a glance that thinkers such as Friedrich August Wolf, Ernst Cassirer, Arnold Toynbee, and R. G. Collingwood were following in his footsteps. It also made invisible the earlier fact that some of the most important eighteenth-century ideas—for example, aspects of Kant’s ethics—are equally indebted to Vico.

Much of what mid-nineteenth-century French intellectuals after Michelet, Vico’s tireless promoter, took for granted about the latter’s project had to be relearned. This active rediscovery was, for example, Erich Auerbach’s major postwar undertaking. In laying out his translation of The New Science in 1924 (not the first in German), Auerbach declared Vico his model and master, going so far as to argue that no one before him had penetrated Vico’s ideas to the same degree. Indeed, part of the twentieth-century retreat from Vico can be attributed to Auerbach’s incorrect comment in his introduction that “Herder, the Romantics, and Hegel knew nothing of him.” He does, however, hedge on this claim by conceding that Vico was read in wider circles after the eighteenth century but then goes on to say that he was subject to “a long series of misunderstandings,” making it important for Auerbach to be the one who “grasped the true content of Vico.”⁵ Vico remains as much an open secret as a puzzle today. Even though his name is immediately recognizable, his work has not been engaged in anything like the depth enjoyed by many lesser thinkers.

As a result of wars on Europe’s periphery in the early twentieth century, as well as the waves of anticolonial insurrection that followed, Vico’s ideas took on a particular shape in new surroundings. My contention at the outset is that this “particular shape” prompted a philosophical reaction that for complicated reasons sought not only to consign Vico to obscurity but also to disarticulate his philosophy’s premises and methods. In turn, this reaction has led to an evacuation of the generalist mode of inquiry Vico called “philology,” a term that in his hands had none of the quasi-technical and -scientific associations it acquired in its high–nineteenth-century form. The implications of Vico’s challenge—polymathic, humane, vernacular, and irreverent—have consequently been rendered largely unintelligible to those seeking to understand the twentieth century as, above all, the anticolonial century.

Influential but heterodox thinkers such as Auerbach and Edward Said tested the waters by bringing Vico back into the conversation—the first devoted to the literary comity of Europe after the devastations of war, the second to a literary reckoning with colonialism itself. But their efforts to make Vico relevant remained tentative and somewhat cryptic. To be sure, scholarship on Vico, including theirs, has never stopped being brilliant and broad. But it says very little, finally, about what Vico offers for an understanding of the European colonial past or resistance to the imperial order.

His contribution, it turns out, runs deep. He invented a body of terms and concepts that set the stage later for others to deride chauvinism and undermine the authority of foreign conquest. For in Vico we find the human being exuberantly extolled without triumphalizing “reason” as it was passed down from the scientific Enlightenment. He importantly sees the disregard of the aristocracy toward the peasantry in terms of a rejection of foreigners and so links class prejudices with colonialist mentalities. His confidence in the epistemology of the archive is offset by his excitement for “metaphorical” knowledge—a literary knowledge that for him takes precedence over the physical sciences, and in that way he can be said to offer an entirely original and compelling theory of the politics of literature itself. In many ways, in his current reception, he is speaking directly to and against what we today call “posthumanism,” particularly its reliance on the tropes of technoscience.

Vico, then, is helpful for letting us appreciate a different way of arguing than is common today. Consider the affective differences between reading Spinoza, whose star has been in the ascendant ever since Louis Althusser brought him back into vogue, and Vico, who now signifies only as a name. Spinoza wrote in a prose carefully shorn of all personality, a medieval scholastic Latin crafted precisely to remove all sense of personal character, opinion, or taste. His findings are consciously made to appear to arrive from no particular conjuncture or setting, immanently—an important stylistic feature that captures the tone of his portrait of an impervious and eternal nature. In Vico, by contrast, there is color, anger, and mockery. He is not shy about foregrounding his debates with various antagonists, and The New Science is the first of his books he did not write in Latin, choosing instead (and also appropriately) the Italian vernacular. If Vico insists that his study does for philology what Bacon’s did for scientific method and Newton’s for the laws of motion, he is no mere iconoclast. He loves, in fact, to dwell on precursors, drawing on a number of obscure masters from antiquity to whom he readily pays homage—Diodorus Siculus, Eusebius, Marcus Terentius Varro, and others. Vico’s sources are amazingly cosmopolitan, especially when one considers the breadth of ancient learning he derives from Damascus, Tyre, Alexandria, and Antioch.

Is Vico current? The linguistic implications of his work, for one thing, dramatically reorient the story of the turn to language in twentieth-century philosophy. But even more, despite the fact that Spinoza has been the philosophical source for an influential school of contemporary neo-Marxism, Vico is by far the more likely precursor to Marx. This is so not only because he defends history and historiography against their detractors (a move popularized by Althusser’s rejection of historicism) or because he so elaborately portrays class struggle and the centrality of labor, but because Vico invents the idea that specific ideas, linguistic innovations, and forms of art correspond to a period’s conditions of social organization. He inaugurates, in other words, a nonpresentist form of historicism that is the genesis of Marx’s historical materialism. Vico’s importance for Marxism may lie even more clearly, though, in his ricorsi. Against the backdrop of the fall of the Berlin wall, the emergence again, after great effort, of that which had been roundly defeated earlier is not simply possible but wholly logical in his particular mapping of human time. Because history as he imagines it is never exactly repeated, we can be sure that it will reappear in forms we cannot yet imagine.

The troubled sense of the term “philology” today (in the aftermath of Orientalism) is clarified in Vico along the lines of a generalist intellectual program that, in later centuries, would be vital to the Left Hegelian tradition. In Vico, finally, we find the early instruments for a de-centering of European culture and a respect for foreign peoples that is the basis of what would come to be known, further down the line, as world literature. My purpose here is to explore the reasons for the disjunction between Vico’s appearance and reality. How, in other words, can he today appear so out-dated and yet be at the head of a lineage from which many of our most contemporary ideas and frameworks are derived? My aim is to show the links between Marxism and philology in the ways in which they take shape in Vico’s reception and in the form in which Vico’s early eighteenth-century text contains them, however implicitly.

If Vico’s predecessor Spinoza is the talisman of some current and popular versions of theory in the humanities, we might wonder at the exactly counterpoised Vichian exclusion. For if there are obvious disagreements between Vico and Spinoza, there is also a lot of common ground, found above all in their hermeneutic theories. But the larger question that I want to address via this counterposition is how the contemporary creation of “Spinoza” (to be distinguished from Spinoza himself or his writings) is primarily about finding a foil to Hegel. To put it differently, how did the non-Vico become the anti-Hegel? My interest, then, is less in denying Spinoza’s relevance to antinomian thought than in making a specific case for Vico because he has been overlooked. In addition, there are consonances between Vico and Spinoza that deserve to be treated in an account of the historical precedents of anticolonial thinking in the West.

ANTICOLONIAL IMAGINATION

The New Science (1725–44) is a vivid, bulky, formally innovative compendium of linguistic archaeology, iconographic readings of antique prints, and imaginative recountings of prehistory before the development of writing and the tools of the historian. A long and asymmetrical work, it was written over an extended period of time, with additions and amendments along the way. The study reads as such: a confabulation of brilliant, often brief, précis, factoids, apothegms, documentary snippets, and heated marginal commentaries. The work resists genre, filled as it is with dramas of class conflict, insurrection, intertribal warfare, and conjectures about the rise of the first cities and the first books, as well as the first empires. Vico’s guiding principle throughout is that no one people, race, or region has priority in the story of human beings. His history, as he puts it, is “gentile” in the sense that it traces human origins from the first gentes (tribes, extended families), leaving to the side the providential story of the chosen people already revealed in the Bible.⁶

Consequently, the book’s thesis is prophetically nondenominational. He provides a unified theory of fragmentary events and peoples, showing what is common in human practices over many millennia. And, although unified, The New Science is unorthodox in method—découpaged from oral myths, tattered scraps of ancient poetry and prose, commentaries of philologists from antiquity, and the iconography of early etchings. Like pieces of broken pottery reconstituted from their scattered shards, the study is less history than metahistory, showcasing an approach to reading that Vico proudly refers to as “a new critical art that has hitherto been lacking” (NS, 6).

The radicalism of Vico’s project involves the challenge his theories posed not simply to the established authority of the church, to classical pieties, or to aristocratic power structures but to countertheories widely perceived as defining radicalism in his time. This is very important, for here, too, there are resonances with the current moment. His critique is, in this sense, two-pronged, and he is involved as much in shrugging off his own earlier, mistaken enthusiasm for views deemed at the time dangerous and subversive as in shaking up the complacent status quo. The most uncompromising critic of Cartesianism of his day, he could afford his anger, since he had been a dedicated Cartesian up to the writing of Universal Law (1720–22) and the first New Science (1725). In time he would reject Cartesianism from the Left, as it were, for he takes the view that the refined ratiocination of philosophy was the by-product of “the disputations of the Athenian assembly and courts”—a collective product unfolding over generations rather than the work of extraordinary celebrities.⁷

Despite Vico’s perceived irrelevance in many circles, the shock of what The New Science proposes bears stating baldly to get a full sense of its insult to prevailing norms.⁸ He is saying, after all, that civilization was the invention of brutes; that instinct, feeling, intuition, and figurative language are forms of reason; and that the first philosophical thought was based on poetic characters. Moreover, in a devoutly Catholic milieu, he builds his case on mostly pagan and Protestant sources.⁹ With respect to the word “radical,” his postulates had the capacity to scandalize followers of Descartes just as much as they did emissaries of the pope or, more to the point, the monks and priests who were his friends and whose goodwill he counted on in Naples, with his growing alienation from Cartesian freethinkers.¹⁰ Vico’s riposte to Cartesianism was a methodological coup. Humanistic studies have as their goal vero (the true), the sciences certo (the certain). It is in the fancies and rough verbal utterances of the vulgate, in other words, that Vico finds relief from the fictions of math. The scientist’s arbitrary postulates (let x be 1) offer up a merely deduced, and therefore sterile, certitude.

Perception is stricken by algebra, for algebra sees only what is right under its eyes; memory is confounded, since when the second sign is found, algebra pays no further attention to the first; imagination goes blind, because algebra has no need of images; understanding is destroyed, because algebra professes to divine. [This leaves the young] less apt in the affairs of civil life. (AGV, 125)

This is not to say that Vico disparaged all scientific inquiry—far from it. He revered the discoveries of Newton, saw himself as carrying on the spirit of Bacon, and considered Leibniz one of the great minds of the age. At one point he praises his own efforts in employing Descartes’s theory of heat and cold (“cold being motion inward from without and heat the reverse motion outward from within”) to “build thereon a system of medicine” (AGV, 150). Vico’s projected complete system of philosophy, De antiquissima, had as its second book the now-lost De aequilibrio corporis animantis (On the equilibrium of living bodies), dedicated to the medical implications of physics and the philosophy of nature. His position, rather, was that physics had to be grounded in a suitable metaphysics and rarely was, or, put differently, that the drift of scientific inquiry in his age was toward an “arid and dry” reasoning that “reduced natural signs of magnitudes to certain ciphers at will” (AGV, 124). From this thinking flowed his claim that ultimately we can know fully only what we have made. This is the view underlying Vico’s famous verum-factum distinction. The word he chooses in Italian for this product of human making is cosa (literally, “thing,” “affair,” “matter,” or “insti...