Giambattista Vico: Principles of the New Science of Giambattista Vico Concerning the Common Nature of Nations. Books III, IV, V. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch translation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.
Vico titles the third, central, book of The New Science “The Discovery of the True Homer.” Why is the true Homer so important?
He has already demonstrated to his satisfaction that “poetic wisdom was the vulgar wisdom of the peoples of Greece, who were first theological and later heroic poets” (III.780). But Plato “left firmly fixed the opinion that Homer was endowed with sublime esoteric wisdom,” and “all the other philosophers have followed in his train” (III.780). But was “Homer ever a philosopher?” (III.780). If not, Vico’s central book consists of a refutation of all previous philosophers on the status of philosophy itself, which, Vico has already asserted, developed much later than the savagery of the early centuries of human history. “Such crude, course, wild, savage, volatile, unreasonable or unreasonably obstinate, frivolous, and foolish customs” as then prevailed “can pertain only to men who are like children in the weakness of their minds, like women in the vigor of their imaginations, and like violent youths in the turbulence of the passions; whence we must deny to Homer any kind of esoteric wisdom” (III.787). For example, King Agamemnon sacrifices two lambs to consecrate the Greeks’ declaration of war against Priam and Troy, “an idea we would now associate with a butcher!” (III.801). This leaves readers to wonder what Vico thinks of similar acts of the Jewish Patriarchs, whose laws Vico has associated with the true God.
Homer’s poetic characters are conceived not in terms of rational ideas, as Plato would do, but in terms of “imaginative universals” (III.809). So, for example, the character of Achilles embodies “all the properties of heroic valor, and all the feelings and customs arising from these natural properties, such as those of quick temper, punctiliousness, wrathfulness, implacability, violence, the arrogation of all right to might” (III.809). For his part, Ulysses embodies “all the feelings and customs of heroic wisdom; that is, those of wariness, patience, dissimulation, duplicity, deceit, always preserving propriety of speech and indifference of action, so that others may of themselves fall into error and may be the causes of their own deception” (III.808). That is, these characters didn’t spring full-blown out of the mind of Homer, who was only “a binder or compiler of fables” (III.852). They were “created by an entire nation” in accordance with their “common sense” and “powerful imaginations” (III.809). Vico observes that “poetic sublimity is inseparable from popularity,” and that nations who imagine such characters then take judge their customs by the example of the heroes they themselves have drawn out of their “common sense”—that is, the sense of reality they hold in common (III.809). No esoteric, philosophic wisdom inheres in these poems. In imagining that it does, the philosophers have been as fanciful, indeed more fanciful, than the old poets.
Homer himself probably didn’t exist but was rather another imagined universal or “idea,” rather like ‘his’ characters (III.873). If Vico’s critique or ‘deconstruction’ of Homer resembles later Higher Criticism of the Bible, this may be, as Strauss remarks in his 1953 class, owing to the fact that both Vico and the Higher Critics took their cue from Spinoza. [1] However that may be, “the philosophers did not discover their philosophies in the Homeric fables but rather inserted them therein” (III.901). This does not mean, however, that Homer has no value for philosophers. On the contrary, “it was poetic wisdom itself whose fables provided occasions for the philosophers to meditate their lofty truths, and supplied them also with means for expounding them” (III.901). Theological and heroic poetry keeps philosophers, beginning with Plato’s Socrates, grounded in political reality. It suggests to them the central importance of political philosophy to all philosophizing.
Vico additionally redirects political philosophy. Rather than attempting the Socratic ascent from the cave of opinion and convention, Vico uses the poets as guides to seeing the nature philosophers seek in the opinions and conventions recorded in poetry, poetry understood as a window into not only ancient beliefs and practices but into the nature those beliefs and practices reflect and refract. This means that he integrates both the poets and the historians into philosophy much more tightly than philosophers had done hitherto. The results may be seen in Book IV, “The Course the Nations Run”—that is, the pattern of events poets and historians record.
The course nations run consists of three stages: human beings who conceive themselves as gods, or as consorting with gods; human beings conceiving themselves (or some among themselves) as heroes or demigods; human beings who understand themselves as men, simply. There are eleven triadic unities that track these stages, three kinds of natures, customs, natural laws, civil states, languages, (centrally) characters—i.e., symbols or letters—jurisprudences, authorities, reasons, judgments, and sects. All of these were “embraced by one general unity,” namely, “the religion of a providential divinity” (IV.915). Whether the religion of a providential unity rightly understands the nature of providential divinity as divine has already been cast into doubt earlier in The New Science, but readers should follow this theme here, as well.
The three kinds of natures—all of them natures of human beings or proto-humans—are poetic/creative, heroic, and human. Poetic humanity or pre-humanity sees beings ruled by a powerful imagination; reason is weak. “Creative” means “divine”; these proto-men are fierce and cruel but also fearful (if indeed fearful of only animistic ‘gods’ formed by their own imagination), and hence susceptible to a higher order of religion, which teaches that the fear of the divine is the beginning of wisdom. Heroic semi-humans have emerged from this nature; they are no longer bestial, having gradually been tamed by their fear of the gods (IV.916). Finally, human nature is intelligent, modest, benign, and reasonable—genuinely human. Similarly, the three kinds of customs seen in these eras are religious and pious, choleric and punctilious (cf. Achilles), dutiful and civil. Fully human beings have become the political animals described by Aristotle.
The first of the three kinds of natural law is the divine law, law supposed to have been given by the gods or by a god. The fact that Vico classifies “divine” law under natural law indicates his judgment regarding that supposition. Heroic law is the law of force. “This law of force is the law of Achilles”; one sees here the likely source of Simone Weil’s famous essay (IV.923). Human law embodies “fully developed human reason,” now possible in the era in which reason has established some control over imagination and passion (IV.924).
As to civil states or government, “divine” government is theocratic. “Men believed that everything was commanded by the gods,” ordained by oracles (IV.925). Heroic government was aristocratic, rule by “armed priests in public assembly,” that is, by a regularized rule of persons claiming authority derived from the gods, backing their claims with force (IV.926). In these regimes, civil rights were “confined to the ruling orders of the heroes themselves” (IV.926). Plebeians, typically enslaved under the protectorate of an aristocratic master, had no rights not revocable by the master. Human governments, by contrast, derive authority and rights “in virtue of the intelligent nature which is the proper nature of man,” and “all are accounted equal under the laws” (IV.927). This form of rule may be popular or monarchic, inasmuch as both republics and monarchies aim at such civic equality, albeit quite differently.
Each stage has its own form of language. The poetic/creative beings express a “divine mental language” in the form of mute religious acts, ceremonies (IV.938). This language “concerns [religions] more to be reverenced than to be reasoned” (IV.929). Heroic language consists of blazonings, coats of arms “in which arms are made to speak,” consistent with the rule of authoritative force (IV.930). Finally, articulate speech betokens fully-formed or true humanity, consistent with political life, ruling and being ruled primarily by speech, only secondarily by force.
Characters comprise the central triad—central because characters are as it were the elements of the languages philologists study. The first kind of characters, characteristic of the poetic/creative era, are hieroglyphs, symbols that register the “imaginative universals” discernible in the documents that have come down to us from that time (IV.933). Hieroglyphics are “dictated naturally by the human mind’s innate property of delighting in the uniform,” but since the proto-humans’ power of reasoning was weak, they “could not achieve this by logical abstraction” but instead had recourse to the “imaginative representation” seen in pictographic writing (IV.933). The “heroic” characters “were also imaginative universals,” but now in speech, not in pictures (IV.934). The epic poets sang the fables they had heard and assembled. The singers sang of the heroic demigods who embodied the most admired qualities of the several nations, as mentioned before. The last historical era has seen “vulgar” characters, words written down by the commoners in the form of letters (IV.935). And indeed the materials thereby conveyed are themselves ‘literal’; instead of saying “the blood boils in my heart,” a man in the “human” era will say, simply, “I am angry” (IV.935). “Such languages and letter were under the sovereignty of the vulgar of the various peoples, whence both are called vulgar. In virtue of this sovereignty over languages and letters, the free peoples must also be masters of their laws, for they impose on the laws the senses in which they constrain the powerful to observe them, even against their will…. This sovereignty over vulgar letters and languages implies that, in the order of civil nature, the free popular commonwealths preceded the monarchies” (IV.936).
Mystic theology heroic wisdom, and human practical wisdom comprise the three kinds of jurisprudence. Mystic theology is “the science of divine speech” or ‘divining’; it aims at interpreting the gods immanent in nature, gods who command the proto-human giants (IV.938). Heroic jurisprudence may be seen in “the wisdom of Ulysses,” who “obtains the advantages he seeks while always observing the propriety of his words” (IV.939). Ulysses negotiates with gods and his fellow heroes. Human jurisprudence “looks to the truth of the facts themselves and benignly bends the rule of law to all the requirements of the equity of the causes”; this form of jurisprudence is possible only in “enlightened” nations” (IV.941).
The three kinds of authority correspondent to the three stages of human development are divine, heroic, and human. In the first stage, “everything belonged to the gods” (IV.944). In the second stage, authority rested in the senate and the laws enacted by the senators. In the third stage, authority depends upon trust in persons of experience, persons who exhibit in practical matters and “sublime wisdom” in intellectual matters (IV.942). This is true whether the regime is a republic or a monarchy; in the latter, the wise are the monarch’s counselors.
Reason appears in three kinds. Lacking any strong form of reason in the proto-human stage, the giants “know of it only what has been revealed to them” (IV.948). “In God who is all reason, reason and authority are the same thing; whence in good theology divine authority holds the same place as reason” (IV.948). Unlike Augustine, who regards messages taken from auspices as likely demonic, the proto-humans listened to the auspices believing them to be from god. Heroic reason no longer depended upon the gods. It consisted of raison d’état and was known only to “the few experts in government,” the aristocrats. In aristocratic states, “the heroes each possessed privately a large share of the public utility in the form of the family monarchies preserved for them by the fatherland; and in view of this great particular interest preserved for them by the commonwealth, thy naturally subordinated their minor private interests,” magnanimously defending “the public good, which was that of the state” (IV.950). Vico here shows why the giants, “the cyclopean fathers,” were “induced to abandon their savage life” in the wilderness “and cultivate civility”: as aristocratic landowners and patriarchs, they maintained the authority they had enjoyed in the wilderness, but as beings honored by all, their “great private interest identified with the public interest” (IV.950). It was a rational choice.
Reason in “human times,” when “citizens have command of public wealth,” inclines to the detailed and utilitarian, aiming at equality of these “private utilities” (IV.951). This “natural reason,” the “only reason of which the multitude are capable,” attends not to large ‘reasons of state’ but to calculations about whether you are getting more than I am (IV.951). When such polities have monarchic regimes, the counselors who do think of the public good are few, leaving the many to their petty devices. Monarchy alone, however, can “make the powerful and the weak equal before the law,” inasmuch as both aristocracy and democracy are factional, securing the good of the few or of the many, but never of both (IV.953).
With respect to judgments, in the proto-human era the patriarchs could only complain to the gods, there being no civil authorities to appeal to. “The rights secured by these divine judgments were themselves gods, for in those times the gentiles imagined that all institutions were gods” (IV.955). In practical terms, such judgments came about by dueling or by revenge for an alleged wrong effected by the injured party. In the heroic stage, judgments were for aristocrats only and consisted of conforming to rigorous legalist punctilio, as seen in the saying, “He who drops a comma loses his case” (IV.965). That is, the formula was sacred, as it is in a religious rite, where every detail must be performed if the sacrifice is to be acknowledged. This was a way of moderating men such as Achilles, who inclined to “measure all right by force” (IV.966). Finally, in the third stage, “human” judgments prevail, meaning “the governing consideration is the truth of the facts” (IV.974).
The eleventh and final triad consists of “sects” or ways of life of three “times”: first, the religious times, then the punctilious times, and finally “the civil or modest times”—the habits and practices that prevail at a given stage of human development (IV.9976-978). “The customs of the age are the school of princes.” (IV. 979). Radicalized, such periodicity would yield historical relativism, and although Vico stays within the framework of nature, the later historicist philosophers would claim him as an ancestor, even as the heroes and humans must own the giants as proto-men. He identifies three sets of customs: those of “religious times” (the superstitious giants), those of “punctilious times” (the rule of the heroic aristocrats), and those of “civil or modest times” (which see both regimes of “popular liberty” and monarchic regimes) (IV.976-977). One reason for the transition from aristocrats to the popularly-based regimes, whether democratic or monarchic, was that the many plebeians destabilized the regimes of the few but strengthened the regimes of the many and of the one. The people often have found an ally against the aristocrats in the monarch “because monarchs desire all their subjects to be made equal by their laws,” lest the grandees wax too grand (IV.1023). There was no lack of what we now call propaganda along these lines, as well; Vico cites the example of Augustus, who artfully declared himself “the protector of the Roman people” (IV.996). (In this sense, one may contend that monarchies are “popularly governed,” dependent upon the opinions and sentiments of the many) (IV.1008). In terms of legitimacy, “the natural law which had previously been called that of the gentes or noble houses…was now called the natural law of nations after the rise of the popular commonwealths (in which the entire nations are masters of the imperium) and later of the monarchies (in which the monarchs represent the entire nations subject to them)” (IV.998). More specifically, “the natural royal law” consists of “eternal utility,” that is, the need for a strong and decisive leader in times of crisis (IV.1008). In fine, “the brooding suspicions of aristocracies,” with the plots and counterplots amongst the ruling class families, “through the turbulence of popular commonwealths, nations come at last to rest under monarchies” (IV.1025). What began with patriarchal monarchies within the families of the giants ends with civil monarchies in fatherlands.
The Romans governed these regime changes with considerable skill, Vico maintains. “The praetors and jurisconsults put forth every effort to ensure that the words of the Law of the Twelve Tables should be shifted from their original and proper meanings as little and as slowly as possible”—a practice that may explain why “the Roman Empire grew so great and endured so long” (IV.1003). Although Polybius attributes Roman greatness to the religion of the nobles, Machiavelli to “the magnanimity of the plebs,” envious Plutarch to mere “good fortune,” Vico credits prudence among those who tended to the fundamental laws of the regime (IV.1003).
Like all ancient law, Roman law was “poetic,” by which Vico means that legal rights were “invented by imagination” (IV.1036). “It rested its entire reputation on inventing such fables as might preserve the gravity of the laws and do justice to the facts,” putting “truths under masks” (IV.1036); “thus all ancient Roman law was a serious poem, represented by the Romans in the forum, and ancient jurisprudence was severe poetry” (IV.1037). Philology as it were unmasks the fables, enabling scholars to understand the truth beneath the surface.
After they came to rule, after the “human times” began, the plebeians brought “common rational utility” to lawmaking, de-fabulizing it, making it more prosaic (IV.1038). “The ratio, or reason, of the law is a conformity of the law to the fact”; the plebs made the law more ‘down to earth’ (IV.1039).
Despite the substantial changes wrought by the Gentiles in the various stages of human development, Vico insists that time itself neither creates nor destroys a right. Rights are eternal; ergo, they must come from God. All the various rights honored among peoples are “diverse modifications of the power of the first man,” who owned all the earth (IV.1039). By Socrates’ time, popular rule had established “an idea of an equal utility common to all [Athenians] severally” (IV.1040). In undertaking the task of political philosophy, Socrates “began to adumbrate intelligible genera or abstract universals by induction” (IV.1040). Such genera or universals are suggested by the legal criterion of equal utility, inasmuch as they result from abstraction of commonalities from particulars. The “human” or “common” way of life makes philosophic abstraction possible. “We conclude that [the] principles of metaphysics, logic, and morals issued from the marketplace of Athens,” as philosophy emerged from the laws governing that marketplace and the laws emerged from the “popular commonwealths” which put a premium on the prosaic task of buying and selling (IV.1043). “This may serve as a specimen of the history of philosophy told philosophically” (IV.1043).
In the fifth, final, and shortest Book, Vico turns to the question of nations “when they rise again.” His example, remarkably, is Christendom—not the first collectivity that comes to mind when thinking of nations in the ordinary sense of the word. In this case, by the Christian nation he evidently means the Christian regime, the Christian ecclesia. “When working in superhuman ways, God has revealed and confirmed the truth of the Christian religion by opposing the virtue of the martyrs to the power of Rome, and the teaching of the [Church] Fathers, together with miracles, to the vain wisdom of Greece, and when armed nations were about to arise on every hand destined to combat the true divinity of its Founder, he permitted a new order of humanity to be born among the nations in order that [the true religion] might be firmly established according to the natural course of human institutions themselves” (V.1047). That is, Vico considers the rise of Christianity a return to heroic times, the return of a severe, forceful aristocracy which, among other things, imposed slavery on Muslims captured in war. These, then, were “the new divine times,” when the barbarian who had sacked Rome and brought on the Dark Ages, were, like the cyclopean giants of the wilderness, driven to the “comparatively humane” Christian priests—that is, the new aristocracy (V.1056). Thus, Christian history recapitulates the Gentiles’ history everywhere else, in a prior time.
Eventually, in feudal times, many members of this Christian aristocracy served not only in the monasteries and churches but in ‘the world,’ ruling fiefdoms. This branch of the aristocracy had recourse to many aspects of the Roman law, emphasizing the right of rule by arms, not by utility. But as before, this too has changed, as the commoners rose up and shouldered the aristocrats aside, only to find that they need to call for a king to guard them against the vengeful, still-ambitious, aristocrats. “In proportion as the optimates lose their grip the strength of the people increases until they become free; and in proportion as the free people relax their hold the kings gain in strength until they become monarchs” (V.1084). Now, “just as the natural law of the philosophers (or moral theologians) is that of reason, so this natural law of the gentes is that of utility and of force” (V.1084).
Today’s Europe sees “only five aristocracies,” namely, Venice, Genoa, Lucca in Italy, Ragusa in Dalmatia, and Nuremberg in Germany—and mostly small places, at that (V.1094). “But Christian Europe is everywhere radiant with such humanity that it abounds in all the good things that make for the happiness of human life, ministering to the comforts of the body as well as to the pleasures of mind and spirit” (V.1094). “Even for human ends, the Christian religion is the best in the world,” uniting “a wisdom of [revealed] authority with that of reason, basing the latter on the choicest doctrine of the philosophers and the most cultivated erudition of”—yes, indeed—the “philologists” (V.1094).
But philosophers and philologists alike should take care. “Without order (which is to say without God) human society cannot stand for a moment” (Conclusion, 1100). Epicurus, Machiavelli, and Hobbes believe that chance rules the world; Zeno and Spinoza say it’s fate that does. But the true “political philosophers,” “whose prince is the divine Plato,” maintain that “providence directs human institutions” (C.1109). What providence provides is religion, the only thing that can draw proto-humans and barbarians out of savagery and keep them out of it. The Roman jurisconsults and Cicero followed in the Platonic line, knowing that “if religion is lost among the peoples, they have nothing left to enable them to live in society: no shield of defense, nor means of counsel, nor basis of support, nor even a form by which they may exist in the world at all” (C.1109).
Enlightenment philosophes like Bayle do not recognize the feebleness of their “reasoned maxims” (C.1110). Many religions have served the salutary purpose of maintaining political communities, but only Christianity is true, the others false. The divine grace enjoyed by Christians “causes virtuous action for the sake of an eternal and infinite good” by “moving the senses to virtuous actions” (C.1110). One may say that Vico ends his symphony on the “new science” with a note of piety.
Note
- In his class on Vico, Leo Strauss makes the important suggestion that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are stand-ins for the Old and New Testaments, respectively. For example, Vico calls Homer the “father” of a nation, but no one before him had done so, whereas many commentators had referred to Moses as the father of is nation. It is easy to see parallels between the warlike characters of the Iliad and those of the Old Testament, but what parallel can be drawn between the wily Odysseus and Jesus and His apostles? If one prefers to avoid blasphemous comparisons, one might point to Jesus’ admonition to the disciples: Be you harmless as doves, prudent as serpents.
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