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: âVico 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.â1
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 BĂ©nigne Bossuet, in his unfinished Discourse on Universal History (1681), and Johann Gottfried Herder, in his Ideas toward the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784â87) 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 Platoâs Laws (book 3) and Lucretiusâs On the Nature of Things (book 5), or Jean-Jacques Rousseauâs 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: âHistory does not yet have its principles [Historia nondum habet sua principia]â (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 scienceâthat of mythologyâwhich provides access to the origin of the life of the nations. As Ernst Cassirer puts it: âGiambattista 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 âsacred pictures,â the hieroglyphics, of myth.â2
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 âlikely storiesâ 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 Aristotleâs 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 mythographersâsuch 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 allegoricallyâgive the range of approaches to myths that persisted to Vicoâs day.
Close to Vico in time, and notable for its approach antithetical to Vicoâs, is Pierre Bayleâs 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 Bayleâs 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 Vicoâs characterization of Jove in the New Science as the presence that causes the giants to engage in their first human acts.
Vico states: âThe first science to be learned should be mythology or the interpretation of fablesâ (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, âis the master key to this Science, which has cost us the persistent research of almost all our literary lifeâ (34). Vicoâs 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 Vicoâs central methodological axiom that âdoctrines must take their beginning from that of the matters of which they treatâ (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 âideal eternal history,â 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 agesâof gods, heroes, and humansâthat 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 NationsâPrincipj di Scienza nuova di Giambattista Vico dâintorno alla comune natura delle nazioni. This echoes the title of Galileoâs 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 Ă due nuove scienze attimenti alla meccanica ed ai movimenti locali. Vicoâs 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 Clercâs review of the first two books of his Universal Law, Vico emphasizes that Le Clerc says that âit is constructed by âmathematical method,â which âfrom few principles draws infinite consequencesââ (A 164). Vicoâs 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.
Vicoâs use of the term âprinciplesâ (principj) as the first word of his title recalls Newtonâs 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 Vicoâs term Scienza nuova further reflects Baconâs Novum Organon, which Bacon intended to replace Aristotleâs treatise on âanalytics,â or logic, known as the Organon. Baconâs New Organon was intended to provide âtrue directions concerning the interpretation of nature.â Vicoâs 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 âfour authorsâ (A 139, 146), and, as will be shown later, the first four axioms of the New Science are versions of Baconâs famous four idols, reformulated to apply not to the investigation of nature but to the investigation of history (120â28).
Finally, Vicoâs title recalls the principal work of his fourth author, Hugo Grotius, De iure belli ac pacisâThe Law of War and Peace, part of the subtitle of which indicates that in its three books âthe law of nature and nationsâ (in quibus ius naturae et gentium) is explained. In the First New Science (1725) Vico employs a subtitle of âthe principles of another system of the diritto naturale delle genti [the natural law of the gentes].â In its main title he employs nazioni, ânations.â 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 Vicoâs expression in his title of âthe common nature of the nationsâ naturally brings to mind, for the potential reader, the âlaw of nationsâ that is so closely associated with Grotiusâs 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 manâs 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. Vicoâs 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 Grotiusâs famous work more than any other that the latter part of Vicoâs 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 Vicoâs 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 Galileoâs and Newtonâs 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 1484âto 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: âVico is as Humanist a conclusion, indeed the Owl of Minerva of Italian Renaissance culture.â4 Apelâs reference is to Hegelâs 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 âthe whole humanist tradition reached its highest philosophical consciousness.â5
In his autobiography Vico gives Picoâs proposal to sustain âconclusions concerning all the knowableâ as the beginning point of his conception of the new science, which he connects to the drafting of his âSynopsis of Universal Law,â 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. Picoâs 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 âhe 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 principlesâ (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 ânew critical artâ in which, he says, âphilosophy 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)â (7). This new critical art sorts out and organizes all the âcertainsâ (i certi), those things...