Robert Harrison on Giambattista Vico

The order of ideas must follow the order of institutions. This was the order of human institutions, first the forests, after that the huts, next the villages, then the cities, and finally the academies. Men first feel necessity then look for utility, next attempt to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, then scroll dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance. The nature of peoples is first crude, then severe, then benign, then delicate, finally dissolute. In the human race first appear the huge and grotesque, like the cyclops, then the proud and magnanimous like Achilles, then the valorous and just like skip you africanus. Nearer to us imposing figures with great semblances of virtue accompanied by great vices like Alexander and Caesar, still later the melancholy and reflective, like Tiberius, finally the dissolute and shameless madmen like Caligula, Nero, and Demission. In tidal opinions coming to you from KZSU on the Stanford campus, a few select quotes from Jambatista Viko's new science to start us off. A few weeks ago I promised to show on Viko and many of you cheered, so welcome to our crystal ship, in tidal opinions is setting off on golden sale under the horizon to the wondrous continent called the Cheyenne Sunwald. When Viko died in 1744, his work was known only to a handful of intellectuals in his native city of Naples, where he had held a poorly paid minor professorship in rhetoric for some 40 years. I don't know how he did it, but in a small house full of children in a boisterous city, he wrote one of the most original and probing books of his age. The third and definitive edition of which was published at his own expense with his last pennies the year he died. Isaiah Berlin puts it well, I quote him, "Viko's life and fate provide 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 all but totally forgotten after his death." Finally, when after many years he has at last exhumed and acclaimed by an astonished nation as one of its greatest thinkers, it is only to be widely misrepresented and misinterpreted. Viko's exhumation began in the 1820s when the French historian Jul Michelet discovered him. Michelet, one of the trustees of entitled opinions I'll add, was seized by a frenzy when he read Viko's new science, those are his words. He immediately set out to translate an abridged version of it into French, and that's when Viko started coming to the attention of people like Coleridge, Marx, Karl von Savignee, Diltai and Matthew Arnold, and later to Robin Collingwood, Eric Auerbach and Ernst Cassir. And then of course there's James Joyce who discovered him on his own and whose Finnegan's wake creatively recast Viko's theory of the Corso and Recorso, the historical course and recourse of nations. More about that later. These days, Viko is often referred to as the four runner of various developments in 19th and 20th century intellectual history, historicism, idealism, Marxism, the human sciences, and much else besides, for what it's worth I'm less interested in reading Viko forward than I am in following the path he opened into the poetic wisdom of the primitive human psyche. As he had done for Michelet, Viko reached out from the Stygian forest and handed me the golden bow that allows a living person to descend into the underworld and commune with the dead in their own archaic tropes and tongues. Where the age of enlightenment looked ahead, Viko looked back into prehistory. And by looking back, he actually saw into the future as befits a theorist of divination. For Rene Descartes and other enlightened rationalists, our human past was a forest of ignorance, prejudice, and superstition of error and heresy to use Descartes' analogy. Descartes resolved not to believe a word of what he was taught in school, to doubt everything that was handed down by history and tradition, and he went so far as to distrust the immediate evidence of his own sense perceptions. After all, the Copernican revolution had made a mockery of our sense that the sun and other stars revolve around the earth. If you couldn't trust that, what could you trust? In some Descartes asked himself what can I know for sure and set out to found a whole new method for achieving certainty of knowledge. It was a method based on mathematics in particular algebraic geometry. Whatever is not susceptible to mathematical analysis, and that includes history, law, institutions, language, myth, art, in short, everything that we call the humanities, Descartes excluded from the domain of science. Vico, who knew Descartes' work well, had a very different concept of science and certainty. Based on an epistemological principle that he formulated in his book The Antiquissima, in English the ancient wisdom of the Italians, it's known as the "varum-factum" principle, namely that one can know with certainty only what one makes or is capable of making. I quote Vico, "varum, the true, and factum, the made, are interchangeable, or better, convertible." So if mathematics and geometry are true, it's because we humans invent the line, the circle, the dot, the triangle, just as we ourselves create numbers and their relations. Most experimental scientists today, whether they're aware of it or not, subscribe to a version of the "varum-factum" principle. A basic criterion of truth in the modern sciences is repeatability. You know it if you can reproduce it, if you can measure it, if you can recreate the phenomenon in a lab. Even predicting an eclipse is a way of putting together or remaking the elements in question. The human mind is essentially synthetic and knows by making or remaking. Today, we have the means to recombine genetic material, we produce subatomic particles in our colliders, we transplant livers and hearts. Yet Vico's principle still stands, we are not the primary creators of nature, therefore we can know it only relatively and recursively. Or as Vico says, we know the natural world from the outside. When it comes to the civil world, on the other hand, things are different. We can know the civil world from the inside since we humans are its authors. This is what Vico means by a new science, namely a science of history, a science of human institutions, along with the principles that determine their coming into being. In the new science, Vico declares, I quote, in the night of thick darkness, enveloping the earliest antiquity, there shines the never failing light of a truth beyond all question. That the world of civil society has certainly been made by men and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. That statement not only reiterates the varium-factum principle, it also postulates that the human mind is by nature retentive, that its past modes of thought are conserved and carried over into its subsequent modifications, and were the human mind not retentive in this manner, we could not inherit the words of the dead, nor understand the worlds from which those words come down to us, nor decipher the hieroglyphs in the early fossil record of human culture. Indeed, there would be no such thing as civil society in the first place since it is precisely in the human mind's vast reservoirs of retention that we find its first principles. First principles and beginnings in general are crucially important for Vico. One of the major axioms of his new science states that doctrines must take their beginning from that of the matters of which they treat. Thus a science of humanity must begin with the earliest human ideas in the minds of our pre-human ancestors. In Vico's words, our treatment must take its start from the time these creatures began to think humanly. The principle labor of the new science is to open a path of access back to the time when the primitive mind was first jolted into consciousness. It was a labor in which, as Vico puts it, we encountered exasperating difficulties which have caused us the research of a good twenty years. For we were obliged to descend from these human and refine natures of ours to those quite wild and savage natures of the first men, which we cannot at all imagine and can comprehend only with great effort. This near impossibility of penetrating the dense psychic forests of our progenitors, this near impossibility of comprehending their earliest modes of conceiving and signifying the world is what Vico's solitary exasperation was all about. Because it's one thing to philosophize or felologize about language and full possession of its resources, quite another to enter into the minds of those who first learn to express themselves under the impulse of primitive terrors and violent inarticulate passions. Writing more than a century before Darwin, Vico was an evolutionary thinker who asked not about how our species evolved anatomically, but how a habitat first became a world, namely an open realm of meaning. That humans descend from apes tells us next to nothing about why we are the only animal species that dwells in the extended dimensions of time or in the openness of the logos. How did this disclosure come about? In the new science, Vico, careful not to provoke the Spanish inquisitors in Naples, descends into the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity and reconstructs a mythopoetic primal scene that he suggests must have taken place in the primeval forests that covered the earth after the universal flood. Wandering through that wilderness, or so Vico postulates, a branch of Noah's descendants gradually lost their humanities over the generations and became solitary, nefarious creatures whom Vico, taking his cue from the Bible, calls the giants, or sons of the earth, and who so later would call Lom Sovage and others called Omo Silvestris. Abandoned early on by their mothers, these ancestors of the Gentile peoples grew up unsocialized without families or self-awareness, feeding on fruits and searching for water. They were shy, brutal, restless, incestuous, and lacked any notion of a higher law than their own instincts and desires. They copulated at sight, aggressively and shamelessly, they exercised no restraint over their bodily motions, and they roamed the forests incessantly. This is what Vico refers to as their bestial freedom, a freedom from terror and authority, a freedom essentially from fathers. During through forests grown extremely dense from the flood, these creatures would not have suspected that beyond the canopies that shielded them, there was such a thing as the sky. What is the sky after all if not a prodigious abstraction we have come to take for granted? But one day some two centuries after the flood, the earth, having dried up enough to send up exhalations or matter igniting in the air, the sky burst with thunder and flash with lightning for the first time in generations. Vico writes, "Thereupon a few giants were frightened and astonished by the great effect whose cause they did not know and raised their eyes and became aware of the sky. And because in such a case the nature of the human mind leads it to attribute its own nature to the effect. And because in that state their nature was that of men all robust bodily strength who expressed their very violent passions by shouting and grumbling, they pictured the sky to themselves as a great animated body, which in that aspect they called Joe. The first god of the so-called greater Gentes, who meant to tell them something by the hiss of his bolts and clap of his thunder. So, thunder rolls, lightning flashes, the giants terrified, raised their eyes and become aware of the sky. But what on earth is the sky? What did the giants see when they raised their eyes? What does one see vertically or laterally in a dense forest? The mute closure of foliage, the boundless oblivion of the dormant mind. What then did the giants see when they raised their eyes? They saw nothing, a sudden illumination of nothingness. They heard the hiss of his bolts and clap of his thunder, but precisely because they saw nothing, or at least nothing definite, they had to picture the sky to themselves in the aspect of a huge animated body, a body not seen but imagined there as beyond the treetops. The giants act of picturing an animate, divine body overhead marks for Viko, the first humanizing event in prehistory. The giants produce an image in the empty space of their minds, a space as empty and abysmal as the sky itself. And in this way, the first human idea was born, that of Jov, father of the world, hurling the lightning bolt from his abode in the sky. You can call him Jov, you can call him Jupiter, call him Zeus, call him Yahweh, Anu or Indra, whatever the name, Viko was actually on the right track for we know that the supreme deity among the Indo-Europeans, Hebrews, Sumerians and Hittites, births forth during the Bronze Age as a furious sky god wielding thunder and lightning. To these first bolts of lightning, in the dark night of the human psyche, Viko traces the primitive origins of the Age of Enlightenment, with its abstract science, metaphysics and institutions of rational human justice. Those bolts disclosed a realm of transcendence, an imperative beyond the bounds of what is visible. They signal the presence of something unearthly and bewildering. Probably the dreadful terror engendered by the lightning could ignite the first spark of consciousness in the brutish mind. From that moment on, everything in nature turned uncanny for the giants who saw celestial phenomena as a form of divine communication and who promptly came to believe, quoting Viko, that Jov commanded by signs that such signs were real words and that nature was the language of Jov. In short, the world, all of a sudden, became meaningful. It became precisely a world and no longer a mere habitat. We're dealing here with the genesis of the first of the three universal institutions of humanity, namely religion. The other two, our matrimony and burial of the dead, Viko's other word for religion is divine providence. To provide means literally to foresee Pro Videré to look ahead. The Sky God was not kind to the giants, in this respect, because in the very moment of of his revelation he concealed. himself communicating from a distance through natural signs. We could call him the transcendental signifier who henceforth would play a game of hide and seek with the giants, obliging them to scrutinize the auspices in order to divine his intentions. The auspices, or signs such as lightning, the flight of birds and eventually celestial bodies were the language of God or theology and literacy in this divine language, among the patriarchs of the first human families, took the form of divination. Thus, the first of all human ideas, the idea of divinity, implied an idea of providence, the intentional, meaningful and non-random character of events. Do we understand what this means? With the idea of a provident divinity in their minds, the giants were suddenly projected into the frightful future of time. But what is the future? If something as empty, abstract and inscrutable as the sky, an indefinite possibility that the anxious mind seeks to render definite by its theology of divination. Jove, who opened time, also concealed its destiny, that was his ultimate power. In order to alay their anxieties about what awaited them, the giants took to interpreting the auspices. Ever since that time, or let's just say ever since Greek and Roman times, we in the West, but not only us, have been a civilization of sky worshippers, children of a celestial father who identified the divine with the ether, with the thundering lightning bolt, with the meteorological, with the eternal geometry of the stars, with the cosmic sublime. I could speak at length about how Viko's other two universal institutions, matrimony and burial, derive from religion. But instead, I'll move on and remark that one of Viko's most important and lasting contributions is his archaeology of the metaphorical origins of human thought, or what he calls the poetic wisdom of the first ages, when nature was perceived animistically and gods were present everywhere and in everything. The new science offers singular insights into how the primitive mind thought concretely, thought abstractly, and how it conceived and signified things by means of poetic characters or imaginative universals. Janity fantasticie in Italian. Poetic characters are personified concepts. In the giants minds, every image or idea was a poetic character, four, according Viko. Not being able to form intelligible class concepts, the first men had a natural need to create poetic characters, that is imaginative class concepts or universals, to which, as to certain models or ideal portraits, to reduce all the particular species which resembled them. These poetic characters account for the various deities of antiquity. In the new science, a number of mythological as well as historical figures also turn out to be poetic characters. Homer himself argues Viko, and he was the first one to do so, was not a historical individual at all, but a poetic character for the wandering rap soads, who recited the popular epics in towns and villages long before they were written down on Papyrus. Likewise, the legendary founder of Rome, Romulus, was in all likelihood a poetic character for the assembled family fathers who established the first Roman senate. The case of Vulcan is particularly interesting because it leads us back to the forests where everything began. The myths tell us that Vulcan, God of Tecne, was linked to the race of the Cyclops. Viko claims that Vulcan and the Cyclops must originally have been two distinct but related poetic characters. The Cyclops were poetic characters for the pious, god-fearing giants in their respective clearings. Vulcan, on the other hand, was originally a poetic character for the otherwise abstract concept of technical skill among these Cyclopian family fathers. In a remarkable passage of the New Science Viko comments, "Every clearing was called a lucus in the sense of an eye, as even today we call eyes the opening through which light enters houses. The true heroic phrase that every giant had his lucus, clearing or eye, was altered and corrupted when its meaning was lost and had already been falsified when it reached Homer. For then, it was taken to mean that every giant had one eye in the middle of his forehead. With these giants came Vulcan to work in the first forges, that is, the forests to which Vulcan had set fire and where he had fashioned the first arms which were the spears with burnt tips, and by an extension of the idea of arms to forge bolts for Jov. For Vulcan had set fire to the forests in order to observe in the open sky the direction from which Jov sent his bolts. Lucas, clearing eye. This is the eye or burnt out clearing whose poetic character was already corrupted by the time it reached Homer. By a paradoxical reversal of poetic logic, Homer places his eye in the middle of the Cyclops forehead and has Odysseus blinded with the burnt tip of an uprooted tree trunk, thus bringing the forest darkness back upon the Cyclops eye again. Vulcan, the master of technical skill, is the one who first opens the eye of contemplation. In a golden passage of the new science vehicle writes, "In their science of augury, the Romans used the verb "contemplary" for observing the parts of the sky once the auguries came or the auspices were taken. These regions, called temples, marked out by the augurs with their wands, were called temples of the sky, templa keli, once must have come to the Greeks, their first, they were a matah and matemata, things divine or sublime to contemplate, which eventuated in metaphysical and mathematical abstractions. Question. Has modern science advanced very much beyond these divinatory beginnings? For all its achievements and breakthroughs, science maintains its allegiance to the sky, to the sublime portents of space, and its principle purpose remains that of prediction. Be it an eclipse, Haley's comment, or the death of stars. If Viko is famous for anything, it's his theory of the course and recourse of nations. I mentioned that James Joyce made creative use of it in Finnegan's wake, and by the way, we have a show on Viko and Joyce in the works coming your way soon, so keep an eye out for that one. Viko and Finnegan's wake. I don't want to delve too deeply into Viko's idea of the course and recourse. Suffice it to say that Viko believed that human societies when they develop autonomously. Go through an age of gods, an age of heroes, and an age of men. Each of which ages has its own distinctive forms of law, language, customs, politics, ways of conceiving reality. The age of gods is mostly poetic and animistic, the age of heroes primarily heraldic and symbolic, and the age of men primarily reflective and prosaic. The three ages succeed one another, to be sure, yet Beacon insists that they are also always co-present in varying degrees in any given age. So the age of gods, while predominantly divine, also has heroic and human elements in it. The same applies to the other ages as well. This is important to keep in mind as we now move from Beacon's archaeology of the beginnings of things human, to his vision of how the historical course of nations eventually comes to an end. This was the order of human institutions, first the forests, after that the huts, then the villages next the cities, and finally the academies. Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attempt to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow disillute in luxury and finally go mad and waste their substance. As a humanist in the deepest sense, Beacon believed that from crude beginnings, human societies, when left to their own devices, go through various stages of development as they proceed from barbarism to enlightenment, from the forests to the modern metropolis, from the austerity of the cyclops to the humane justice of law-governed commonwealths. But Vika was not a bullish French philosoph, he was a neapolitan realist. He did his best to argue that the traditional Christian god, held sway over the ideal eternal history of humankind as he called it. Yet despite his orthodox intentions, the new science ends up telling a disconsolate story. About the order of institutions, a story that promises little in the way of redemption. Some inner and tropic law eventually leads to civil disorder and dissolution. As the animistic mind gradually refines its synthetic powers through poetic characters, it becomes capable of abstract thought. Concepts take the place of imaginative universals, centuries of superstition, violence and injustice create a narrow opening for enlightenment during the human age. Unlike the divine and heroic ages that preceded it, the human age is prosaic, not poetic, it's reflective, critical, and analytic rather than imaginative and self-perturbing. Vika speaks of it as the age of irony. irony he writes certainly could not have begun until the period of reflection for it is fashioned of falsehood by dint of a reflection that wears the mask of truth. Vika reminds us that prior to its ability to abstract, the primitive mind was unable even to conceive of a distinction between truth and falsehood. In ironic consciousness, Vika saw both the virtues and vices of critical reason. Reflective irony begins as a liberating force, exposing the unfounded and irrational bases of earlier institutions founded on divine or heroic law. It's thanks to irony that a rational human justice based on the equality of human nature gets instituted among nations, and human justice for Vika is a more perfect justice than heroic or divine justice. The problem is that irony has an inherently dissipative character. Critical reason and science tend toward skepticism. When brought before the tribunal of reason, the beliefs, practices, and traditions of the past lack justification. Skepticism toward the past gives rise to an ever more reflective irony about the institutions that had hitherto preserved humanity and prevented its fall into bestiality. If such irony follows its course unchecked it degenerates into cynicism. Cynicism is an aggravated form of skepticism. It assumes that all truth is falsehood, that all news is fake news, and that all truth claims are a matter of power rather than right. Such cynicism can easily erode the foundation of commonwealths, causing the historical corso as a whole to unravel. Vika calls this unraveling the barbarism of reflection. In the conclusion of the new science he observes, "But if the peoples are rotting in that ultimate civil disease of cynicism and cannot agree on a monarch from within and are not conquered and preserved by better nations from without, then providence for their extreme ill has its extreme remedy at hand." For such peoples, like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure. Thus, no matter how great the throng and press of their bodies, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since each follows his own pleasure or caprice. By reason of all this, providence decrees that through obstinate factions and desperate civil wars, they shall turn their cities into forests, and the forests into dens and layers of men. In this way, through long centuries of barbarism, rust will consume the misbegotten subtleties of malicious wits that have turned them into beasts made more inhuman by the barbarism of reflection than the first men had been made by the barbarism of sense. Here we find that the same path Viko had opened up into the depths of prehistory now leads beyond the past, beyond his own age of enlightenment and into our own age of postmodern disaggregation. I mean the age of unwirlding that we are living through at present, call it the terminal stages of the human age of our 21st century. At this end stage, which can drag on endlessly, the diacronic order that had governed the succession of ages gives way to an anachronic co-presence of their historically incomensurate elements. Remember, the human mind is essentially retentive. Thus, during the end game, all the past stages of the order of institutions with their concomitant creeds, styles, mentalities, and so forth, they all reappear in a degenerate form, coexisting simultaneously and randomly alongside one another. This is the barbarism of reflection or the bending back of the ages when science co-exist with magic, ignorance with enlightenment, democracy with oligarchy, slavery with socialism, archaicisms with futurisms, puritanism with libertinism, humanism with inhumanism, prehumanism with posthumans. God's heroes and men and beasts are jumbled together in a random fluctuation or deluge of the undead as the corso that had determined the historical order succumbs to entropy. We have, beyond a doubt, something to learn from Jambatista Vico. I'm Robert Harrison for Entitled Opinions. Thanks for listening. [Music] [Music] (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)