Giambattista Vico: Principles of the New Science of Giambattista Vico Concerning the Common Nature of Nations. Book Two: Poetic Wisdom. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch translation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.
“The nature of everything born or made betrays the crudeness of its origin”—man very much included (II.361). “Throughout this book it will be shown that as much as the poets had first sensed in the way of vulgar wisdom, the philosophers later understood in the way of esoteric wisdom; so that the former may be said to have been the sense and the latter the intellect of the human race” (II.363) (emphasis added).
By “wisdom,” Vico means “the faculty which commands all the disciplines by which we acquire all the sciences and arts that make up humanity,” the faculty that perfects both intellect and will or spirit (II.364). Whereas the highest things are oriented toward God, the best things are oriented toward “the good of all mankind”; lest anyone take him to mean that the highest, divine things are not the best, Vico immediately adds that “true wisdom…should teach the knowledge of divine things in order to conduce human things to the highest good” (II.364).
How to achieve, or at least approach, wisdom? “Divination” or the knowledge of good and evil was prohibited by God, and this prohibition is the foundation of Judaism and Christianity (II.365). Human beings must understand God’s intention in this: hence theology. There are three kinds of theology: poetic theology, embodying “the civil theology of all the gentile nations”; natural theology, propounded by metaphysicians; and “our Christian theology, “a mixture of civil and natural with the loftiest revealed theology,” united “in the contemplation of divine providence” (II.366). Vico thus directs his reader’s attention to the providential or ‘historical’ aspect of the divine instead of (for example) God’s attributes. This is because poetic/civil, natural, and revealed theology appeared in that order, over time. “Divine providence has so conducted human things that starting from the poetic theology which regulated them by certain sensible signs believed to be divine counsels sent to man by the gods, and by means of the natural theology which demonstrates providence by eternal reasons which do not fall under the senses, the nations were disposed to receive revealed theology in virtue of a supersensual faith, superior not only to the senses but to human reason itself” (II.366). The New Science, “our science” of philology, “comes to be at once a history of the ideas, the customs, and the deeds of mankind. From these three we shall derive the principles of the history of human nature, which we shall show to be the principles of universal history, which principles it seems hitherto to have lacked” (II.366). The eminent Bishop of Meaux, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, had written his Universal History in the previous century. Vico evidently is not impressed with the work of the eminent Catholic divine.
Vico gives an example of how philology works to uncover the truth about ancient peoples. Throughout their history, he writes, the Hebrews remained men of “the proper stature” for human beings because their laws required cleanliness of them (II.371). Meanwhile, gentile children wallowed in their own filth, absorbing “nitrous salts” which fertilized them, making them grow to gigantic stature. In those days, there were giants, and that is why (II.371). The Cyclopes lived in caves, had no civic life. According to philology, the Greek word for polity, politeia, derives from the Latin politus, which means clean, neat. Gentiles only came out of their caves, out of the woods, when the founders of the first settlements enforced cleanliness, bringing the inhuman or pre-human gentiles back to the right size.
The divine pervades the first poetry because the giants imagined things they didn’t understand to be gods; they were animists, believing themselves to be surrounded by natural things they supposed divine. “All the theories of the origin of poetry” from Plato to the moderns are wrong (II.384). Homer was no philosophic poet purveying esoteric wisdom founded on reason; “the wisdom of the ancients was the vulgar wisdom of the lawgivers who founded the human race,” giants who brought other giants out of their caves, out of the wilderness (II.384). This wisdom had nothing to do with “the esoteric wisdom of great and rare philosophers,” who, if anything, have prevented the production of similarly sublime poetry by subjecting poetry to rational analysis (II.384). Sublime means a thing that sublimates; ancient poetry and ancient lawgiving were sublime because they sublimated the savagery of the giants. Book Two concerns this poetic or vulgar wisdom.
It was the ancient lawgivers who turned the superstitious religion of the giants to good use by presenting law as divine, interpreting thunder as the rebuke of the giants’ way of life by angry gods, thereby frightening the giants out of the wilderness, away from their wandering, nomadic way of life, and into the clearings, into settlements, where they could begin to live a civil life. The philological evidence Vico cites for this is that the word for law, ius, is a contraction of ious, Jove. This was the civil theology of the ancients, seen in their poetry.
Vico considers poetic wisdom in ten dimensions. The first five are human topics: logic, morals, economy, politics, history; the second five non-human physical topics: physics cosmography, astronomy, chronology, and geography. There was a kind of logic in ancient poetry, but it wasn’t syllogistic. Ancient wisdom had a ‘metaphysical’ aspect insofar as it “contemplate[d] things in all the forms of their being”; it was logical “insofar as it consider[ed] things in all the forms by which they may be signified” (II.400). But it did not express these forms in words, as philosophers prior to Vico had supposed. In the beginning, logos was mute; it consisted of ideas of a certain sort. Indeed, “it is the eternal property of religions that they attach more importance to meditation than to speech” (II.401) The ancient poets often produced fables; irony, that technique of Socrates, is the product of a more reflective age. [1]
Speech nonetheless existed, even if contemplation or meditation was prior to it. Language should be understood historically. The “first men of the gentile world conceived ideas of things by imaginative characters of animate and mute substances”; that is, they supposed them to be divinities (II.408). They expressed themselves initially not in words but in gestures or by holding up physical objects that served as symbols of their ideas, such as swinging a scythe three times to represent three years. “They thus expressed themselves by a language with natural significations” (II.431). It is this strong connection with nature, albeit nature misconceived as divine, that we owe the diversity of languages. That is, not from a divine curse hurled at the Tower of Babel. The settlements in clearings outside of the wilderness existed in different places with different climates; the peoples thus settled acquired “their different natures and customs,” resulting in different languages (II.445). That human beings are nonetheless all of the same species may be seen in their proverbs, those “maxims of human life” which are “the same in substance but expressed from as many points of view as there are or have been different nations” (II.445). In addition to these national differences originating in nature, each language also registered the difference between the aristocrats and the many, the vulgar, the plebs. “This is confirmed by the two languages of which Homer speaks: the one of gods, the other of men, which we have interpreted as the heroic and the vulgar language, respectively” (II.443). One should pause to admire “interpreted.”
If we count the languages of gods, heroes, and ordinary men as three languages, all of these “began at the same time,” inasmuch as the gentiles’ gods were imagined by the gentiles themselves (II.446). The three languages differed. The language of the gods remained “almost entirely mute”; the language of the aristocratic heroes mixed articulateness and muteness in equal measure; the language of the vulgar was talkative (II.446). Heroic speech thus began with the compressed, metaphorical language of poetry, not with discursive prose, which may be seen in the fables of the vulgar. Poets form poetic speech “by associating particular ideas,” as in the metaphorical phrase, “the blood boils in my heart” (II.460). Prosaic writers ‘abstract’ from such particularity, taking “the blood, the boiling, and the heart” and making “of them a single word,” anger (II.460). “By means of these vulgar genera, both of words and letters, the minds of the peoples grew quicker and developed powers of abstraction, and the way was thus prepared for the coming of the philosophers, who formed intelligible genre,” making logos into logic, the ability to find contradictions in custom-bound speech (II.460). Significantly, in section 465 Vico folds Hebrew poetry into this ‘gentile’ framework. Later, in a footnote to section 499, he describes Bacon’s inductive method as the logical capstone of philosophy.
More immediately, the development of language permitted the development of law, said to be divinely inspired (as seen in the philological connection between ‘law’ and ‘Jove,’ mentioned earlier). “This shows that all the nations were born in the persuasion of divine providence,” although it must be said that this persuasion was derived from the imagination (II.473). Here, Vico prudently exempts the Hebrews, who worshipped “the true All Highest, who is above the heavens,” not a natural object or force on earth or in the sky (II.481). Among the gentiles, law and right were derived from strength; the rule of the best, the aristocrats, was really the rule of the strong, “the fathers in the family state” which preceded the civil state, the owners of property (II.490). “The so-called commonwealths of the optimates were also commonwealths of the few”; there was nothing ‘common’ about their wealth (II.490).
This “history of human ideas” disproves the “popular belief in the superlative wisdom of the ancients” (II.499). The ancient lawgiver-heroes worked independently of one another, establishing various sets of customs in the various climates in which they settled and began to civilize the pre-human (yet also formerly human, deformed-human) giants, whose inhuman giantism had resulted from childhood wallowing in filth, which acted like fertilizer. There was no universal law among the ancient gentiles, and thus no superlative wisdom worthy of the term ‘philosophy.’ There was a sort of lower wisdom, whereby the heroic lawgivers got the giants out of the wilderness by manipulating their superstitious beliefs in terrifying gods.
Poetic morality has a similarly modest origin. The “vulgar virtues” were “taught by religion through the institution of matrimony” (II.502). It is true that “the metaphysics of the philosophers, by means of the idea of God, fulfills its first task, that of clarifying the human mind, which needs logic so that with clear and distinct ideas”—as Descartes had said—it “may shape its reasonings, and descend therewith to cleanse the heart of man with morality” (II.502). But in the poetic age, that was a long way off. The lawgivers of the “poet giants, who had warred against heaven in their atheism,” vanquished the giants with “the terror of Jove, whom [the giants] feared as the wielder of the thunderbolt” (II.502). The lawgivers worked not by reason, which would have had no effect, but “by the senses, which, however false in the matter, were true enough in their form—which was the logic conformable to such natures as theirs” (II.502). The lawgivers made them “god-fearing,” and this was “source of their poetic morality,” which induced the giants “humble themselves” (II.502). To this day, “atheists become giants in spirit,” ready to assail Heaven in their folly (II.502). Thus, “poetic morality began with piety,” as “religion alone has the power to make us practice virtue, as philosophy is fit rather to discuss it” (II.503). Religion simply is “fear of divinity,” and it caused the giants to want to settle in safe places outside the wilderness, not to wander exposed to its dangers (II.503).
Sexual activity moved indoors, as fear of the gods led to shame in exposing oneself to their gaze. This enabled lawgivers to introduce the custom of marriage, which removes shame from sexual activity by making it sacred in the eyes of the gods. Religion and shame bind thus bind nations together, while impiety and shamelessness destroy them. Marriage bound families together under the gods, as “husbands shared their first human ideas with their wives” (II.506). “From this first point of all human institutions gentile men began to praise the gods” (II.506). These original gods were a chaste and sober lot. Later depictions of their behavior as amoral merely registers the decadence of the poets of later generations.
In turn, religion “gave birth to all the arts of humanity” (II.508). It gradually changed the nature of giants, who became “the first men,” who began to exhibit prudence, justice, moderation (as seen in marriage to one woman), and made them strong, industrious, and even magnanimous (II.516). “Such were the virtues of the golden age, which was not, as effeminate poets later pictured it, an age in which pleasure was law” (II.516). The first men “took pleasure only in what was permitted and useful, as is still the case, we observe, with peasants” (II.516). Nor do philosophers guess right when they claim that the golden age men “read the eternal laws of justice in the bosom of Jove” (II.516). “This vulgar tradition together with the false belief in the matchless wisdom of the ancients tempted Plato to a vain longing for those times in which philosophers reigned or kings were philosophers” (II.522). No, these first men had “the virtues of the senses,” mixing “religion and cruelty, whose affinity may still be observed among witches” and were then seen in the practice of human sacrifice, which Vico calls “inhuman humanity”—inhuman in its cruelty but human in its self-humbling piety, its eagerness to appease the feared gods (II.517). The golden age was no age of innocence, whether of innocent pleasure or innocent communion with Jove. Initially, the innocence of the Golden Age was only “the extreme savagery of the Cyclopes” (II.547). “In fact, it was a fanaticism of superstition which kept the first men of the gentiles, savage, proud, and most cruel as they were, in some sort of restraint by main terror of a divinity they had imagined,” poetically (II.518). This is why modern Enlightenment philosophes are wrong. “No nation in the world was ever founded on atheism” (II.518). To do so would only cause men to revert to savagery, as seen in the Jacobin terror and the later, far vaster, reigns of terror imposed by the ideological rulers of modern tyrannies, some two centuries after Vico.
Vico next turns to the oikonomia or household management of the first humans. The first men, he has said, taught the first women about the gods, after households had been established. Educere, he writes, means education of the spirit or will; educare means education of the body; both mean bringing forth of the human from within the giants’ souls and bodies. “In those times, full of arrogance and savagery because of the fresh emergence from bestial liberty,” there was monarchic rule within each household but not in the societies as such, as “one cannot conceive of either fraud or violence by which one man could subject all the others to a civil monarchy” (II.522).
They could, however, subject some of the others. Household economy was based on fathers laboring to leave a patrimony for their sons. Some of the fathers were able to control the water supply, thereby dominating the other families, who became the plebeians. “Apropos of all this, we often read in Holy Writ of Beer-sheba, ‘well of the oath’ or ‘oath of the well'”—another sly blurring of the distinction between gentiles and the Hebrews (II.527). [2] The increasingly aristocratic fathers, who took themselves to be gods, also established property, setting and maintaining boundaries on the earth to supplement their control over water. Pace Locke, this was no “deliberate agreement among men…carried out with justice and respected in good faith”; there was no “armed public force” and “no civil authority of law” (II.550). “It cannot be understood save as taking place among men of extreme wildness, observing a frightful religion which had fixed and circumscribed them within certain lands, and whose bloody ceremonies had consecrated their first walls” (II.550). When Remus jumps over the fence demarcating his property from Romulus’ property, Romulus kills him, “consecrat[ing]” with his brother’s blood “the first walls of Rome” (II.550). This happened everywhere. “The natural law of the gentes was by divine providence ordained separately for each people, and only when they became acquainted did they recognize it as common to all” (II.550). This ‘sanctified’ establishment of settlements, households, and property, ruled by fathers for the benefit of sons, shows why “it was the perpetual custom of the nobles to be religious” and, moreover, why it is “a strong sign of the downfall of a nation when the nobles disprize their native religion,” as occurred in Rome and as was happening in the Europe of Vico’s time (II.551).
The fact that fathers provided for their children has led both philologists and philosophers mistakenly to suppose that “the families in the so-called state of nature” were what we now call ‘nuclear’ families, consisting exclusively of aristocrats (II.552). Not so. They included famuli, also—the weak, the plebeian, the men whose motive never rose above the useful. Such families were protected by the strong while serving as their slaves. “To distinguish the sons of the heroes from those of the famuli, the former were called liberi, free” (II.556). But this surely did not mean refinement or delicacy, the way of life seen in the modern titled aristocrats. “Among the ancient Romans the family fathers had a sovereign power of life and death over their children and a despotic dominion over the property they acquired, so that down to imperial times there was no difference between sons and slaves as holders of property” (II.556). Rather, liberi meant not only rule over property but nobility, “so that artes liberales are noble arts, and liberalis kept the meaning of well-born, and liberalitas that of the gentility” (II.556). “Only nobles were free in the first cities,” and these were the seeds of fiefdom, Vico maintains in section 556, the central section of the 1744 edition.
Because there were no contracts in the heroic age, insufficient trust among patriarchs to allow contracts to be struck, barter was the basis of commerce and ground rent was the only kind of rent. There were no partnerships. The rule of ancient civil law was, “No one may acquire by a person not under his power” (II.577). And those under the power of the aristocrats could not form legal marriages, sanctified marriages, only “natural marriages” (II.579).
Household life led to political life, the life not of contracts and of democracy but of a severely aristocratic “poetic politics” (II.582). “Since the fathers were sovereign kings of their families, the equality of their state and the fierce nature of the cyclopes being such that no one of them naturally would yield to another, there sprang up of themselves the reigning senates, made up of so many family kings” (II.584). They did this “without discernment or counsel,” uniting “their private interests in a common interest called patria, which, the word res being understood, means ‘the interest of the fathers'” (II.584). The nobles were henceforth called patricians, “the only citizens of the first patriae, or fatherlands” (II.584). In this way, “in the earliest times kings were chosen by nature,” not by deliberation and choice solemnized by contract (II.584). Hence Moses describes the descendants of Esau as “kings” (II.585). Indeed, “one cannot conceive in civil nature any reason why the fathers, in such a change of forms of government, should have altered anything of what they had had in the state of nature, save to subject their sovereign family powers to these reigning orders of theirs”; it is “the nature of the strong…to surrender as little as possible for what they have acquired by valor, and only so much as is necessary to preserve their acquisitions” (II.585). “The eminent domain of civil states” emerged from “the paternal natural domains” (II.585). When we look at Apollo’s lyre, Vico claims, we contemplate the symbol of “the union of the cords or forces of the fathers,” united in their civil authority (II.615).
Meanwhile, the plebeians, products of natural marriages, “could not name their fathers” (II.587). Resentment and civil war followed, bringing about the formation of cities, again in the self-interest of the patricians. The patrician fathers formed “a closed order against the mutinous famuli,” an arcana imperii or secret set of laws ordained by the heroic senates (II.604). In addition to their superior strength and their superior authority, they now had superior knowledge. The owl of Minerva flies by night, that is, in secrecy, gliding from one patriarch to another while the many are civilly asleep, unaware. The rule of law in cities, of laws formulated in “the dark night of the hiding places,” began to make men more fully human, quite unintendedly (II.590). The goddess Minerva represented as wisdom was a later invention; initially, she represented the “armed aristocratic orders” (II.596).
Still, the patricians needed the plebeians to serve them. And so, “by a common sense of utility the heroes were constrained to satisfy the multitude of their rebellious clients,” negotiating “the first agrarian law in the world, under which, as the strong do, they conceded the least they could, which was bonitary ownership of the fields the heroes might choose to assign them”—a subordination justified by the protection the heroes provided to the plebeians (II.597). No rights of citizenship were granted, no intermarriage allowed. As the Roman patricians were happy to explain to the plebeians, “if they were to share with them the connubium of the nobles, the resulting offspring would be like Pan a monster of two discordant natures brought forth by Penelope who had prostituted herself to the plebeians” (II.654). Such was aristocratic political science, which Vico defines as “the science of commanding and obeying in states” (II.629).
Two political divisions resulted: aristocrat/citizen and plebeian, aristocrat/citizen and hostis—stranger or enemy. Indeed, heroic nations regarded foreigners as “eternal enemies,” one reason why polis and polemos are near cognates, according to Vico’s rather fanciful etymology (II.639). Eventually, the Roman civil structure was re-founded upon a system of classes based on wealth, not birth. Whatever their pedigree, however, whether aristocratic or oligarchic, the rule of the few in the heroic or poetic age should not be confused with later definitions of ‘peoples’ as including the plebeians, or of liberty as a right shared with the many, or of kingship as a regime that offered succor to the many poor. And as for wars in those times, all of them were “wars of religion, which, for the reason we have taken as the first principle of this Science”—that all nations are founded on religion—made them “always extremely bitter” (II.675). “The vanquished were regarded as godless men,” rightly enslaved along with the existing plebeians (II.676).
Poetic history is the topic of Book II’s central chapter. Vico re-emphasizes the class division of the heroic age, citing the fable of Cadmus and the dragons’ teeth as an allegory of a conflict over land between heroes and plebeians, and interpreting Achilles shield as a depiction of the history of the world. The warlike but besieged city of Troy represents the plebeians, a hostile city-within-the-city everywhere at that time.
Poetic physics posited an original Chaos, an image of cosmic forces which Vico claims was borrowed from the condition of “infamous,” Pan-like “promiscuity” among the gentiles (II.688). Out of this, Jove began “the world of men” rather as the heroes began civil life, “beginning the world of men by arousing in them the conatus”—in Spinoza, the innate force in every living creature to preserve itself—which “is proper to the liberty of the mind, just as from motion, which is proper to bodies as necessary agents, he began the world of nature” (II.689). It is noteworthy that Vico associates both human nature in particular and cosmic nature generally with motion, no perdurable form—orderly motion, to be sure, but motion, nonetheless. Although not exactly a ‘historicist’ in the later sense of the word, Vico puts motion first, only then praising the heroic civil beauty embodied by Apollo and the civil and natural beauty embodied by Venus.
“The greatest and most important part of physics is the contemplation of man” (II.692). Such contemplation yields the claim that “the founders of gentile humanity in a certain sense generated and produced in themselves the proper human form”; gentile humanity made itself—an act of supreme poetic making (II.692). Vico treats the senses differently than any previous philosopher had done. Others had valorized the sense of hearing (whereby one heeds the Word of God), seeing (whereby one perceives the Ideas), or touch (the source of certain knowledge in Machiavelli). Viconian philology associates wisdom, sapientia, with the sense of taste, with the act of assaying. Taste is “the faculty of making those uses of things which they have in their nature, not those uses which opinion supposes them to have” (II.706). Motion, change, use: thus Vico invites his readers to understand human nature, itself made by neither by prophets, nor philosophers, nor even ‘princes’ of Machiavellian atheism, but by founders who regarded themselves as divine heroes bringing the giants out of the wilderness and into the life of human beings.
Like all else in remote antiquity, poetic astronomy sprang from low origins. The first peoples were not scientists. They “wrote in the skies the history of the gods and their heroes”—with each nation writing its own gods and heroes into the skies, inasmuch as “nations, if not emancipated in the extreme of religious liberty (which only comes in the final stages of decadence), are naturally wary of accepting foreign deities” (II.729). For the first gentiles, “the predominating influences which the stars and the planets are supposed to have over sublunar bodies, have been attributed to them from those which the gods and heroes exercised when they were on earth. So little do they depend on natural causes!” (II.731).
Poetic chronology reaffirms Vico’s contention that monarchy is not the first but “the last form of human government,” one arising “as a result of the unchecked liberty of the peoples, to which the optimates subject their power in the course of civil wars” (II.737). With the aristocrats weakened, monarchs soon take over the rule of the people, whose liberty they initially champion against aristocratic rule but then abolish once firmly in power. The exception to this general rule was maritime Phoenicia, enriched by commerce, “remain[ing] in the stage of popular liberty” because the many had the wherewithal to defend themselves against both the few and the one (II.737).
Finally, poetic geography may be seen in the tales of the wandering ancient heroes. There were as many as “forty Herculeses among the ancient nations,” learning the features of the earth even as they brought home glory to their peoples (II.761). This manifests “the conceit of nations” (as seen, for example, in the Greeks, “who made such a stir about the Trojan War,” and the Romans, “in boasting an illustrious foreign origin” in the figure of Aeneas of Troy) (II.772).
In sum, in these ancient stories “we have discovered the outlines of all esoteric wisdom,” particularly the science of politics, of ruling and of being ruled, written even in the earth, the stars, in all of nature by the founders of the first settlements, who also ‘founded’ or formed the first human beings after the Esavians had been deformed into giants (II.779).
Notes
- Vico identifies the lawgiver Solon as the founder who brought about the transition from the fabulous to the reflective way of thinking. “He must have been a sage of vulgar wisdom, party leader of the plebs in the first times of the aristocratic commonwealth at Athens.” Athens was ruled by aristocrats or “optimates,” as was “universally the case in all the heroic commonwealths.” Considering themselves to be of heroic, indeed divine origin (demigods, like Hercules and Achilles), the aristocrats supposed that “the gods belonged to them, and consequently that the auspices of the gods were theirs also.” The auspices were their carefully guarded means of maintaining their authority over the many, the plebeians, “whom they believed to be of bestial origin and consequently men without gods and hence without auspices,” entitle only to “the uses of natural liberty.” Note well: “This is a great principle of institutions that are discussed through almost the whole of the present work.” Solon’s democratizing reform was to tell the plebeians “to reflect upon themselves and to realize that they were of like human nature with the nobles and should therefore be made equal with them in civil rights.” It was not the supposedly divine oracle at Delphi who originated the command to “Know yourself.” It was Solon. This suggests that philosophy could only become possible after a democratizing lawgiver taught the many to know their own nature.
- Two other examples appear fairly soon: in section 542, where Vico integrates the Biblical story of Ezekial into his framework, and section 544, where he does the same thing with the story of Job.
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