Vico's "New Science"

A Philosophical Commentary

Donald Phillip Verene

• Editorial: Cornell University Press
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501701856
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Modern Philosophy

Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) is best remembered for his major work, the New Science ( Scienza nuova ), in which he sets forth the principles of humanity and gives an account of the stages common to the development of all societies in their historical life. Controversial at the time of its publication in 1725, the New Science has come to be seen as the most ambitious attempt before Comte at a comprehensive science of human society and the most profound analysis of the philosophy of history prior to Hegel. Despite the fundamental importance of the New Science, there has been no philosophical commentary of the text in any language, until now.

Written by the noted Vico scholar Donald Phillip Verene, this commentary can be read as an introduction to Vico's thought or it can be employed as a guide to the comprehension of specific sections of the New Science. Following the structure of the text scrupulously, Verene offers a clear and direct discussion of the contents of each division of the New Science with close attention to the sources of Vico's thought in Greek philosophy and in Roman jurisprudence. He also highlights the grounding of the New Science in Vico's other works and the opposition of Vico's views to those of the seventeenth-century natural-law theorists. The addition of an extensive glossary of Vico's Italian terminology makes this an ideal companion to Vico's masterpiece, ideal for both beginners and specialists.

Part One

Generalities Concerning the New Science

Chapter 1

Sense and Method of the New Science

It is said, and rightly, that Giambattista Vico is the founder of the philosophy or science of history. Isaiah Berlin puts it this way: “Vico virtually invented a new field of social knowledge, which embraces social anthropology, the comparative and historical studies of philology, linguistics, ethnology, jurisprudence, literature, mythology, in effect the history of civilization in the broadest sense.”¹

Writers of history from Herodotus and Thucydides, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Polybius, Livy, and Tacitus, to Lorenzo Valla, in his exposure of the Donation of Constantine (1440), Leonardo Bruni, in his History of the Florentine People (1442), and Francesco Guicciardini, in the History of Italy (1561), to Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, in his unfinished Discourse on Universal History (1681), and Johann Gottfried Herder, in his Ideas toward the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–87) have advanced views of not only their subject matter but also of the nature of history. However, to hold historiographical views is not the same as to have a philosophy or science of history. Even to say, as Aristotle does in his famous claim in the Poetics, that poetry is more philosophical and a higher thing than history, as it tends to express the universal where history treats of the particular fact, is not to offer a philosophy of history; it is only to make a claim concerning history.

The hypothetical accounts of the origins and stages of development of human society that are found in philosophical works such as Plato’s Laws (book 3) and Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things (book 5), or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s post-Vichian portrayal of the origin and foundation of inequality in the Second Discourse (1755) are not philosophies of history. They are speculative conceptions of human society.

In his Universal Law, prior to the full realization of his new science, Vico is able to declare: “History does not yet have its principles [Historia nondum habet sua principia]” (UL 1.104). These principles, both in the sense of beginnings and in the sense of explanations, can be achieved only when the separation of philosophy and philology can be overcome, such that the universals of human nature can be employed to illuminate the deeds actually performed by human beings in the course of their affairs from obscure times to the present. Such an investigation will lead us to a systematic comprehension of the entire world of the nations.

To the new science of history Vico adds a second new science—that of mythology—which provides access to the origin of the life of the nations. As Ernst Cassirer puts it: “Giambattista Vico may be called the real discoverer of the myth. He immersed himself in its motley world of forms and learned by his study that this world has its own peculiar structure and time order and language. He made the first attempts to decipher this language, gaining a method by which to interpret the ‘sacred pictures,’ the hieroglyphics, of myth.”²

The ancient tellers of tales, the historians, the poets, as well as the philosophers, make constant use of myths. Easily called to mind are the “likely stories” that inhabit the Platonic Dialogues, and scenes such as that at the beginning of the Phaedrus in which Socrates is pressed to say whether he thinks true the myth in which Boreas, the north wind, is said to have carried off the fair Orithyia; or Aristotle’s claim at the beginning of the Metaphysics that like philosophy, myth begins in wonder (thauma), that the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of wisdom since myth is composed of wonders. The works of the ancient mythographers—such as the semiphilosophical treatise of Euhemerus in which the gods of mythology were claimed to be but deified mortals, which became the basis of the general interpretation of myths as traditional accounts of historical persons and events known as Euhemerism; or the Library of Apollodorus, which was an attempt to produce a complete but rather uninspiring mythical history of Greece; or the Summary of the Traditions concerning Greek Mythology by the Stoic Cornutus, which expounds the principles of Stoic criticism of myths, explaining them allegorically—give the range of approaches to myths that persisted to Vico’s day.

Close to Vico in time, and notable for its approach antithetical to Vico’s, is Pierre Bayle’s treatment of myths in his influential Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697), a work admired by all sides of the Enlightenment. Prior to Bayle, Spinoza and Hobbes had already well established the rationalistic rejection of myth. Bayle went further in an effort to satirize and dramatize myths as not only irrational and absurd but dangerous to everything human and worthy. Illustrative of this is Bayle’s treatment of Jupiter, in his anonymous entry, as the most monstrous of the gods, who is defiled by commission of every known crime, in contrast to Vico’s characterization of Jove in the New Science as the presence that causes the giants to engage in their first human acts.

Vico states: “The first science to be learned should be mythology or the interpretation of fables” (51). In inventing this science, the specific discovery Vico made is that the first gentile peoples, as they devolved from the giants, spoke in poetic characters, by means of which they formed imaginative universals. This discovery, Vico says, “is the master key to this Science, which has cost us the persistent research of almost all our literary life” (34). Vico’s new science, then, is the science of history combined with the science of mythology. That the science of history must begin with a science of mythology that comprehends the origin of the nations is grounded in Vico’s central methodological axiom that “doctrines must take their beginning from that of the matters of which they treat” (314). The order of thought must follow the order of things and things manifest their nature in a pattern of origin, development, maturity, decline, and fall that Vico calls “ideal eternal history,” a cyclic pattern that is the subject matter of his science of history, that maintains that all nations develop in terms of a corso of three ages—of gods, heroes, and humans—that is repeated as a ricorso.

The title Vico gave his work is intended to alert the reader to the fact of its originality: Principles of New Science of Giambattista Vico concerning the Common Nature of the Nations—Principj di Scienza nuova di Giambattista Vico d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni. This echoes the title of Galileo’s late work, Dialoghi delle nuove scienze, the first great work of modern physics, originally published in 1638 under the title Discorsi e dimonstruzioni mathematiche, intorno à due nuove scienze attimenti alla meccanica ed ai movimenti locali. Vico’s two new sciences, then, are the science of history combined with the science of mythology (due Nuove Scienze). In his autobiography, in discussing Jean Le Clerc’s review of the first two books of his Universal Law, Vico emphasizes that Le Clerc says that “it is constructed by ‘mathematical method,’ which ‘from few principles draws infinite consequences’” (A 164). Vico’s axioms in the New Science are intended in their own way to reflect this sense of dimonstruzioni mathematiche, that is, from few principles (116 axioms) infinite consequences for the comprehension of history are drawn. As Galileo produced a knowledge of the motions in nature through these discourses and demonstrations, so Vico claims to have produced a knowledge of the motions and mechanics of history that comprise the life of the nations.

Vico’s use of the term “principles” (principj) as the first word of his title recalls Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), more commonly known by the shortened title Principia. When the New Science was published in its first version, in 1725, Vico sent a copy to Newton, which might have reached him not long before his death in 1727.³ Vico’s term Scienza nuova further reflects Bacon’s Novum Organon, which Bacon intended to replace Aristotle’s treatise on “analytics,” or logic, known as the Organon. Bacon’s New Organon was intended to provide “true directions concerning the interpretation of nature.” Vico’s new organon, or logic of the life of the nations, puts forth the true directions concerning the interpretation of history. In his autobiography Vico designates Bacon as one of his “four authors” (A 139, 146), and, as will be shown later, the first four axioms of the New Science are versions of Bacon’s famous four idols, reformulated to apply not to the investigation of nature but to the investigation of history (120–28).

Finally, Vico’s title recalls the principal work of his fourth author, Hugo Grotius, De iure belli ac pacis—The Law of War and Peace, part of the subtitle of which indicates that in its three books “the law of nature and nations” (in quibus ius naturae et gentium) is explained. In the First New Science (1725) Vico employs a subtitle of “the principles of another system of the diritto naturale delle genti [the natural law of the gentes].” In its main title he employs nazioni, “nations.” In the titles of both editions of the Second New Science (1730, 1744), Vico uses only the term nazioni and not the Italian word genti, which reflects the Latin. But Vico’s expression in his title of “the common nature of the nations” naturally brings to mind, for the potential reader, the “law of nations” that is so closely associated with Grotius’s Law of War and Peace and that is regarded as the real beginning of the science of international law.

Grotius held that actions were bound by natural law based on man’s own nature and that on the basis of this natural law it was possible to form a coherent code suitable for all times and places. Vico’s new science, by going back to the ius gentium of Roman law and conceiving it in terms of the historical development of nations, was to supersede the beginning made by Grotius. But it is Grotius’s famous work more than any other that the latter part of Vico’s title is meant to call to mind. What Galileo, Newton, and Bacon had done for our comprehension of nature, Vico would do for our comprehension of history. What Grotius had begun for our comprehension of law and the life of nations, Vico would correct, transform, and complete. Thus we may add, to Vico’s two new sciences of history and mythology, his new science of law that provides us with a jurisprudence of the human race based on his conception of the perfection of civil wisdom present in Roman law, which will be discussed later.

Vico not only considered his new science was to history what Galileo’s and Newton’s were to nature, and that it corrected the mistakes of Grotius and the seventeenth-century natural-law theorists, he also saw it as the completion of the program of Renaissance humanism begun by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in his announcement in 1484—to defend against anyone nine hundred Conclusiones or philosophical-theological theses embracing all of human knowledge to be introduced by his now-famous Oration on the Dignity of Man. Karl-Otto Apel, in his early study of the idea of language in the tradition of humanism from Dante to Vico, states: “Vico is as Humanist a conclusion, indeed the Owl of Minerva of Italian Renaissance culture.”⁴ Apel’s reference is to Hegel’s image that philosophy, like the owl, takes its flight only at the falling of dusk, that is, when the events of the day are concluding. Ernesto Grassi makes a similar claim in his study of the rhetorical basis of philosophy, that in Vico “the whole humanist tradition reached its highest philosophical consciousness.”⁵

In his autobiography Vico gives Pico’s proposal to sustain “conclusions concerning all the knowable” as the beginning point of his conception of the new science, which he connects to the drafting of his “Synopsis of Universal Law,” to announce the preparation of his large work and first version of his new science in the books of the Universal Law, published in the 1720s. Pico’s failure, Vico holds, was not in regard to his approach to philosophy in presenting conclusions concerning the knowable, but in regard to the fact that “he left aside the great and major part of it, namely philology, which, treating of countless matters of religions, languages, laws, customs, property rights, conveyances, sovereign powers, governments, classes and the like, is in its beginnings incomplete, obscure, unreasonable, incredible, and without hope of reduction to scientific principles” (A 157).

The method on which Vico founds the new science is to join philosophy and philology, which in the New Science he calls a “new critical art” in which, he says, “philosophy undertakes to examine philology (that is, the doctrine of all the things that depend on human choice; for example, all histories of the languages, customs, and deeds of peoples in war and peace)” (7). This new critical art sorts out and organizes all the “certains” (i certi), those things...