The New Science of Giambattista Vico

Scene from Pergolesi’s opera Il Ciarlatano by Die Neue Hofkapelle Graz at the Festival

 for Early Music (Festival voor Oude Muziek). 24 August 2019, Utrecht, Netherlands

When I would ask you to mention a famous inhabitant of Naples from the first part of the 18th century, I think that most of you wouldn’t know whom to name. Or maybe you would mention the composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, known for his Stabat Mater but who also wrote operas. Or you might mention one of the other composers from Naples of that time. But Vico? I guess that most of you have never heard of him. Nevertheless, Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) has been an influential thinker, who was read by and had an influence on many other thinkers after him, and they are not the least ones. They range from Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche till recent or current philosophers like Gadamer, Apel, Habermas and MacIntyre. Who was this man, who has been so forgotten and still is remembered?

In fact it was not by chance that Vico became a scholar, for he was a son of a bookseller, and already as a child he had a deep interest in books, which was stimulated by his father. Nevertheless, his development was seriously retarded when he fell from a staircase in his father’s bookshop and hurt his head. It took him three years to recover. Although Vico visited several schools, he considered himself an autodidact. 18 years old he accepted a job as a tutor in Vatolla, 100 km south of Naples. He felt himself isolated there, although he kept in touch with Naples. After nine years he returned to his native city. There he got a chair in rhetoric at the university. Later he was also appointed Royal Historiographer by the viceroy. He published several books and orations. His most influential work is his Principles of New Science, which is still reprinted.

Vico’s influence has been and actually still is great, as said, and his views are still interesting. In view of what I usually write about here in my blogs, I want to discuss three themes from his work.

– Vico was clearly anti-Cartesian in his views. Descartes had developed important and useful ideas, so Vico, but his method and “criteria of clear and distinct ideas could not profitably be applied outside the field of mathematics and natural science.” (Berlin, p. 9). For the science * of history and for ethics we need other methods based on understanding how things come about, such as imagination.

– This anti-Cartesian view is based on what is Vico’s most known statement: “Verum factum est”, which means “Truth is made”. This implies that what we consider true is not an objective representation of what there is in the world that we capture in the mind, but what we consider true is a construction of the mind. This made Vico a forerunner of what nowadays is called “epistemological constructivism”.

– Although he doesn’t use the term, Vico is seen as the founder of the philosophy of history, so the philosophical study of the sciences of history and historiography. One of his most fundamental principles of history is that the history of man has been made by man him and herself. Or to quote Vico: “[T]he world of civil society has ... been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our human mind. [paragraph 331] ... [H]istory cannot be more certain than when he who creates the things also narrates them.” [349] In other words, history is not a natural science but it is man-made and therefore it must not be studied with means of “objective” methods but by methods that reflect that history is man-made. And it’s also the other way round: Not only must history be studied by its own man-made methods, but also, as Apel puts it, just because man has made history, it is possible to understand it (p. 20), unlike nature, which we can only explain, but which we don’t understand, since nature just happens. This principle developed by Vico is not without consequences, for both at the end of the 19th century and again in the second half of the 20th century just the question whether the historical and social sciences have their own methods that are different from the methods of the exact sciences would lead to serious discussions if not conflicts in the philosophy of science and history.

I want to end this blog with a quotation form MacIntyre’s After Virtue: “[I]t was Vico who first stressed the importance of the undeniable fact ... that the subject matters of moral philosophy at least ... are nowhere to be found except as embodied in the historical lives of particular social groups and so possessing the distinctive characteristics of historical existence ...” (p. 265) Man-made history is the foundation of the moral and social practices, so Vico. One wonders how a philosopher who had such a big influence could have been forgotten, or almost.

* Note: “Science” in the sense of “wetenschap” (Dutch) or “Wissenschaft” (German), so including both the natural sciences and the humanities.

 ***

Sources

Apel, Karl-Otto, Die Erklären:Verstehen-Kontroverse in transzendentalpragmatischer Sicht, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979.

Bergin, Thomas Goddard; Max Harold Fisch (eds.), The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Abridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744). Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1970.

Berlin, Isaiah, Vico and Herder. Two Studies in the History of Ideas. London: The Hogarth Press, 1976.

Blaisse, Mark, Het orakel van Napels. De alternatieve waarheid van Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Balans, 2018.

MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue. London: Duckworth, 1985.

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Giambattista Vico, on https://www.iep.utm.edu/vico/#SH3b