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Vico, Voltaire and the Beginnings of Cultural History
Vico and Voltaire are figures who in a way symbolise two different concepts of culture,
which is why I chose them. They were contemporaries in different circumstances.
Voltaire was one of the most famous men of his age. Everyone read him. He was not a
great original thinker, but he was a marvellous writer, a great polemicist, and his corrosive
and still marvellous wit managed to achieve an enormous intellectual effect in destroying
a great deal of prejudice and superstition and cruelty and fanaticism in the eighteenth
century, and indeed influenced the whole course of superior eighteenth-century culture.
It had a vast influence on people like Hume and the entire rationalist and empiricist leftwing anti-clerical movement in the eighteenth century.
Vico on the other hand was the exact opposite. Unlike Voltaire he did not care
for science and for rational progress. He was born poor and obscure in Naples, and
hardly moved out of that city during his lifetime. He was the son of a bookseller. He was
a hunchback, possessed of a very bad and unreadable style, which is why his work of
genius was unread then, and is unread now. On the other hand, unlike Voltaire he
possessed bold ideas of genius of a wholly original kind. All his life he was a devout and
pious Christian, he was brought up by, and lived in the company of, priests and other
members of the Church, and held views which were on the whole incompatible with
those of Voltaire. They stand for very different concepts of culture.
Vico must have heard of Voltaire, because everybody in the world had heard of
Voltaire. Voltaire is most unlikely to have heard of Vico, because very few people outside
Naples had heard of him then. So the contrast is as sharp as is possible. Voltaire was
successful, he was rich, he must have made more money out of his books than anyone
had done before his time. Vico on the other hand remained poor. All he ever wanted to
do was to become Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Naples, and never
succeeded, and remained only a poor Professor of Rhetoric, who received a salary about
a quarter of that of the Professor of Jurisprudence, and eked out a very poor life by
writing Latin inscriptions and a few poems, biographies of famous men, and otherwise
living the life of a fairly miserable and not very highly thought of hack. Although there
were people who were aware that he was a remarkable thinker even in his lifetime, and
after his death he did acquire a large local reputation in Naples, his real reputation came
in the nineteenth century, as I hope to say.
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Let me go back to the subject of the concept of culture itself, where I am trying
to draw a contrast. There are at least two notions of culture which can be conceived. One
is the old notion of cultura animi. It is an old Latin phrase used by Cicero, by Seneca, by
various other Latin authors. It means ‘cultivation of the mind’, even as there might be
cultivation of the soil. It means the conscious, deliberate development of one’s artistic
and intellectual faculties, of one’s creative faculties in general – self-cultivation – and the
contrast is with barbarism or with philistinism or with mobs or with every form of
philistine and intellectually unenterprising activity of any sort, acceptance of things,
conformity. This is the sense in which it is used in the Middle Ages, when there is a thing
called cultura Christi, in the Renaissance, by Bacon, who talks about culture as ‘the
Georgics of the soul’, and by the entire eighteenth century. In this way it passes into the
nineteenth century. That is what, no doubt, Goethe meant by culture – a culture of élites,
a culture of superior persons. That is what Matthew Arnold meant when he spoke of
culture as being the best that was said and thought by mankind. That is what is meant by
people like T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis. It does mean the culture of a superior kind of
certain selected persons with a kind of carefully chosen, a deliberate aiming at, intellectual
or moral or aesthetic or some other kind of humane excellence. That is one sense.
The other sense is a somewhat different sense in which we speak of cultural
history. The first person who comes into our mind, I suppose, would be Jacob
Burckhardt, who wrote the famous history of the civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy,
mainly about Florence. That sense of culture does not mean the culture of élites
especially, or the culture of the few persons interested in the arts, or the sciences or
scholarship, which is what the other people of whom I spoke were themselves mainly
interested in. In a sense it is a kind of perfectly permissible self-propaganda. The other
sense is the sense in which culture is the general style of life, the general self-expression
of an entire society: its mores, its attitude to life in general, what its basic values and
concepts are, what is nowadays called lifestyle, the attitude of men to other men in a
given society, the attitude of men to God, the attitude of men to death or love or all the
most important and central ends of life. That is the sense in which, for example,
Burckhardt tried to describe what it was to be a Renaissance man, not necessarily a
superior Renaissance man, although of course he paid more attention to such people,
and he got it, I suppose, from his teacher Boeckh, who was a great classical scholar, who
spent his life in editing Greek texts, but whose last work, unfinished and unpublished,
was called Hellene, ‘The Greek’, in which he tried to convey what it was to have been a
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Greek – what the Greek view of life was, in fact, what it was like to have been an Ancient
Greek. That goes back in turn to the great scholars of Göttingen, and from them to
Herder, who, I suppose, was the German thinker who first put on the map the idea that
there were such things as patterns of culture, that each human society had a collective
way of expressing itself which was different from that of other human societies. If you
were a German there was a way of thinking and feeling, a way of passing legislation,
writing songs, getting up and sitting down, doing your hair, eating, drinking, and at the
same time of conducting the more important aspects of life as well. All these things had
something in common: there was some kind of central pattern which made you a
German, which meant that you could be understood by other persons brought up in the
same tradition, with the same collective memories, living on the same soilA – that you
could be understood more immediately and directly than you could be understood by,
say, the Portuguese, who also passed legislation, also ate and drank, also wrote songs,
also danced, also had various kinds of attitudes towards God, or love, or life, or whatever
it might be, but had it in a Portuguese sort of way. Therefore the notion is that every
human group in some way possesses some kind of internal pattern: a Volksgeist, Herder
called it – nothing to do, in his case at least, with blood or race, but mainly a matter of
language, soil and tradition – which made its stamp on each society, which somehow
penetrated it, and could be expressed by all its multifarious activities, which had a certain
common pattern which all of them in some way reflected, so that you could in some way,
if not actually deduce one from the other, see them as being part of the same kind of
lifestyle. That is a different sense of culture from that in which anthropologists use it, in
which it is possible to talk about the cultures of various primitive communities in exactly
the same sense as cultures of advanced communities, which is not at all the same as the
élitist notion of the first sense of culture. This is the sort of culture of which, I suppose,
Vico was the true founder, and that is why I wish to say something about him. In fact, if
you like to use a modern example, I suppose civilisation as Lord Clark speaks of it fits
the first sense of the word, the sense in which Goethe and Arnold talked about it. The
criticism of him by various populist critics, Raymond Williams and so on, proceeds from
a second point of view, in which they do not regard civilisation as that, but as some kind
of total expression of a society, and not simply particular attitudes or tastes or forms of
activity on the part of selected superior individuals in it. So that the battle between the
two continues to this day and is to that extent relevant and modern.
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One of the presuppositions of the first sense of ‘culture’, certainly at least in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – we need not go further back (I do not know
whether it was so among the Romans and the Greeks) – is that there are certain fixed
human goals which all men, to some extent, seek; there are certain central human
questions to which the intelligent answers must be the same at all times, in all places.
This is the old idea of natural law, that which all men, in all places, at all times, if they are
intelligent and seek for the truth in the correct fashion, will find to be true: quod ubique,
quod semper, quod ab omnibus. Certainly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the idea
grew up that to all the central human questions there must be one true answer, all the
other answers being false. This true answer could be discovered by anyone applying
himself sufficiently carefully, with a sufficient degree of intellectual training, wherever he
might be and whenever he might be. This is certainly the view which was enormously
acceptable, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when with the great
progress of the natural sciences it became clear that it really was possible to advance
knowledge by the use of a method very different from that which had been used in the
middle ages, a new method which was public, which was rational, which any man could
track for himself. No occult sources of knowledge, no tradition, no prescription, no
dogma, no authority – these were the enemies which Voltaire and the Encyclopaedia
fought against. These notions were used by unscrupulous men to throw dust in the eyes
of innocent men in order to acquire power over them. But now light would shine, the
truth could be discovered by any honest man seeking it by the appropriate method, and
his results could be checked and verified or falsified by any other man using the same
method. The method was communicable, public and checkable. That is the new notion –
and that what is true for the ancient Greeks is true for us now. There is a body of
knowledge which can be cumulatively established. We can progress, and simply add to
the knowledge of past generations our own knowledge, and in this way a great corpus of
knowledge would grow up.
The question therefore naturally came up: What about history? History became
an interesting subject, if a rather moot subject, in the sixteenth century, partly because
under the Reformation arguments for and against the authority of the Roman Church
took a historical form. That is perhaps why there was a certain awakening of interest in
history. There had always been a good deal of scepticism about the reliability of history
as an instrument. Historians were biased, historians were subjective. How did one ever
check their results? How did one ever know about the past? Plutarch pointed out that
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Herodotus was biased. Various persons in the middle ages pointed out that Plutarch was
biased. Herodotus was biased because he preferred the East to the West, according to
Plutarch. Plutarch was biased because he obviously aggrandised the Greeks at the
expense of the Romans, and so forth. In fact you already get some rather sharp remarks
about history in the early sixteenth century – from Cornelius Agrippa, for example, who
says: It is absurd to suppose that history is a dependable instrument. Historians are liable
to passion, they are liable to biases, they aggrandise their heroes, they denigrate their
enemies, they are full of all kinds of loves and hatreds, they do things for their masters or
out of patriotism, or out of hatred of this or that cause or institution or religion, or for
money, because they are bribed, or whatever the reason may be; and when they do not
know the facts they invent them, and nobody can check them. They give their fantasy
absolutely free play. How can this be called a serious occupation?
Later in the same century Patrizi, who is an Italian humanist of a latish kind, says:
In point of fact all history is ultimately founded on eye-witness evidence. Unless
somebody was there you do not of course know what happened. Well, if the thing is a
crisis, which is what history often is about – important events – you are probably
engaged on one side or the other in the controversy. If you are engaged on one side or
the other, you are obviously partial, you are a partisan. Therefore you are not likely to
produce an impartial or objective account. If you are not engaged, if for example you are
an objective historian, cool, detached, and really want the truth, then you are not likely to
be engaged, you have to rely upon the accounts of people who are engaged. Therefore
either you are engaged and biased, or, if you are objective, you do not see classified
information, you are at the mercy of people who themselves have it in their interests,
whether honestly or dishonestly, to distort the facts. Upon such foundations no serious
subject can be erected.
The most lethal attack on history was probably produced by the great Descartes.
Descartes had a very clear conception of what science was. He thought that on the basis
of undeniable axioms, and by means of unbreakable deductive rules, you could establish
firm conclusions, which would be as certain as the premisses on which they were
founded, and as the rigorous argument by which they were reached. But what about
history? Where are the axioms? Where are the rigorous rules? What credence can be
given to the conclusions? Take our great Roman historians, he says, even the great
historians of the seventeenth century. What do they know about Rome which was not
known to Cicero’s servant-girl? Why is this therefore regarded as a major achievement of
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a human genius? In science we really do advance. A schoolboy today knows more than
Pythagoras knew, or than Euclid knew, or than the mathematicians of Rome might have
known. A doctor today knows more than Hippocrates knew, or Galen knew, but what
do we know in the seventeenth century about Rome which was not known to some
average Roman? And so forth. He believed in a real advancing corpus of knowledge, that
we stand on the shoulders of our predecessors – we need not go through what they went
through again. We refute their errors, we keep their truths, and we build upon them. This
is not how the humanities – not merely history, but the humanities in general – proceed.
If you wish to spend your time on this, Descartes has no objection. It is rather like travel,
which is a perfectly agreeable occupation for people with leisure hours; or like learning
some exotic language such as Swiss or Bas-Breton, he says. There is no objection. But
the idea of regarding this as a serious occupation for people anxious to discover the truth
is obviously ludicrous. Similarly Malebranche, one of the leading Cartesians, says: History
is nothing but organised gossip.
This, roughly speaking, is the view of the seventeenth century. I do not say that
everybody held it, of course. There was a great deal of serious historical work done by
learned monks trying to defend the Church against all kinds of historical attacks upon it –
various misquotations, interpolations, distortions of manuscripts, forgeries and the like –
so that great Catholic historical antiquarian schools such as the Bollandists and the
Maurists arose at about that time, and there were eminent historians towards the end of
the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, this was the attack which the new movement
mounted; and Pierre Bayle, the great sceptic, was of course delighted to produce
conflicting views on the part of historians, a phenomenon which did not obtain in the
sciences, where some consensus was possible. So there was what is called a formidable
case against history as a serious intellectual discipline.
This, I think, in some way deeply wounded Vico. But before we come to him, let
me say that the man who really accepted all this was the great Voltaire. The great Voltaire
did not look upon individual facts as very important. He accepted these sceptical
conclusions. Maybe we cannot reach individual facts; maybe historians do lie; maybe they
do conflict with each other; maybe there is a lot of bias; but the purpose of history, for
him, is not simply the discovery of the truth for its own sake. He is not really interested
in reconstructing the past as such, or finding out where we come from, or what
happened in a Rankian sort of sense. He thinks that history teaches morality by
examples. He thinks the use of history is to show men what human beings can achieve
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and how they fail. He thinks the purpose, in other words, is utilitarian and moral. In that
sense it is not perhaps so terribly important to be exact as far as individual facts are
concerned, provided you have some general notion of an age and its achievements in
very broad terms.
For Voltaire, as for the scholars who believe in natural law, truth is one,
unalterable, everywhere. Human nature does not alter: under the influence of the same
causes it operates in exactly the same way. This is more or less what behaviourists have
believed from that day to this. What is important, for Voltaire, is to show what the bright
moments of history are. He thinks that there are certain moments in which human
beings rise to their full stature, and these are the moments which they ought to
contemplate with pleasure and profit. There are only four such ages. One is ancient
Greece, roughly from fifth-century Athens to Alexander the Great; one is Rome towards
the end of the Republic and in the time of the early Caesars; one is Florence during the
Renaissance; and finally there is the great age of France under Louis XIV. These are the
finest hours of mankind. This is when the arts flourish, sciences flourish, and bigotry,
cruelty, oppression are somewhat less, in his opinion, than they were before. Some kind
of effort is made to check the natural stupidity, viciousness and barbarism of human
beings – in which he believes. It does not last very long, but so long as it does last it is
something which human beings can contemplate with pride and interest.
This is what historians should illuminate. These short periods of light, in which
human beings reach their full stature, in which some degree of civilisation curbs the
natural human tendency towards vice and stupidity, he thinks – these periods, roughly
speaking, are for him the same. It is a kind of imaginary museum, in Malraux’s sense, in
which he hangs like four great friezes, next door to each other, Athens, Rome, Florence,
seventeenth-century France – in which great art, great science, learning, scholarship and
humane manners occur. That is what historians should concentrate on, as against the
frightful darkness by which the rest of humanity is surrounded, which he must take no
interest in. Why should people bother to find out about all the stupidities, the cruelties,
the miseries, and all the frightfulness to which human beings have been, or probably
always will be, liable?
Let me quote a fairly typical passage from Voltaire in order to give a taste of the
kind of thing he says. He imagines that his mistress, Mme de Chatelet, says to him, ‘What
is the point, for an educated Frenchwoman like me, of knowing that in Sweden Egil
succeeded Haquin, or that Ottoman was the son of Ortugul?’ She is perfectly right, says
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Voltaire: there is no point. In the great Essai sur les moeurs, the famous essay on mores, on
manners, he says: There is no point in knowing in which year one prince who does not
deserve to be remembered succeeded another barbarian prince of some uncouth nation.
If you have no more to tell us than that one barbarian succeeded another barbarian on
the banks of the Oxus or the Ixartes, what use are you to the public? Why should we be
interested in the fact that in China Quancum succeeded Kincum, or Kicum succeeded
Quancum? Why should we want to know about what barbarian captain in the middle
ages contended with some bishop or other about rule over some imbecile serfs? We do
not want to know about the life of Louis the Fat or Louis the Obstinate. We do not want
to hear about the barbarous Shakespeare or the unreadable Milton. What we want to hear
about are the achievements of Galileo, Newton, Tasso and Addison, not about
Shalmaneser of Mardokempad. Historians must not clutter the minds of their readers
with accounts of idiocies, religious wars or other stupidities which degrade mankind, or
with the foundation of religious sects, which were always founded on some idiocy or
other. Of course, from time to time they ought to do this in order to show them how
low human beings can sink, in order to prevent them from doing this; and that is why, no
doubt, we ought to write about Philip II of Spain or, let us say, St Bartholomew’s Eve, or
Cromwell – about the sort of figures who are to be avoided at all costs. What is worth
knowing is why, for example, the Emperor Charles V did not profit more by the capture
of King Francis I of France, or the importance, say, of the dirigiste policy of Colbert in
France compared with that of Sully. He is extremely intelligent, in some ways, Voltaire –
do not let me guy him too far. He says: What we want to know is not simply a lot of stuff
about treaties or conquests or frontiers or political history, which is dreary and
unimportant and has no intellectual content. What we want to know about is customs,
laws, manners, commerce, finance, agriculture, population, trade, industry, colonisation
and the development of taste. We want to know how men lived, travelled, dressed, slept
and made war.
Well, this is very enlightened, and if Voltaire had actually been as good as his
word it would have been very important, and that is why he is usually regarded as the
father of philosophical history, or even of cultural history. The trouble is that, having
enunciated this programme, Voltaire, when he came to writing history himself, for
example the history of Charles XII of Sweden, which is a very sprightly, extremely gaily
written history, told it in the old-fashioned manner of a lot of anecdotage. The label on
the bottle was extremely promising and right, but the liquid in the bottle was somewhat
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disappointing, because his actual attempts in history are not terribly impressive, and he
does not in fact deal with these economic factors with any degree of detail or indeed
credibility.
But still, the propaganda is quite clear. Voltaire is a man who gives marks. He
gives marks for virtue and for vice, for light and for darkness. The German historian
Meinecke called him ‘the banker of the Enlightenment’, the man who kept accounts, a
sort of book-keeping account, of who was good, who was bad, who was to be praised,
who was to be blamed. Voltaire is constantly contrasting, for example, the great heroes
who uphold light against darkness – Athens, the Rome of the virtuous Caesars against,
for example, Jerusalem, which is to him an absolute anathema; the Rome of the Popes,
which is terrible, against the short moment of light under Julian the Apostate; Julian the
Apostate versus the appalling Gregory of Nazianzus. He says: Why should we confine
ourselves only to Europe? It is ridiculous to write the history of nothing but Europe and
a small part of the Middle East, from which all the frightful woes of mankind come in
the form of the three ghastly religions. What we must concentrate on is China, India and
other civilised countries where enlightened mandarins manage to rule over the
population in a most rational, successful and elegant manner, and so on.
Well, there was a great deal to be said against Europocentrism, and there is no
doubt that Voltaire and others did certainly stimulate what might be called the more
scientific branches of contemporary history – economic history, the history of science,
historical sociology, demography. All the provinces of knowledge to which mathematics
can be applied successfully were given a great fillip by Voltaire and his contemporaries.
But so far as actual history is concerned, he to some extent degraded it, by which I mean
he devalued the historical nature of history. His interests are moral and aesthetic and
social. He is not interested in the relativity of values or the multiplicity of values, or the
notion of change. He is not interested in what he came from. He mainly thinks history is
a kind of accumulation of facts which you connect, which you try to make as interesting
as possible, and from which you try to devise a proper kind of moral. That was Voltaire’s
fundamental principle. But in general he believed that high culture was the same always,
and the great thing was simply to celebrate these great moments, show their similarities,
and contrast them with the frightful moments of darkness, misery and vice with which
wicked men have blinded the eyes of a lot of stupid men, and sometimes made
themselves stupid too. The world for him is really a history of villains throwing dust in
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the eyes of fools, and fools throwing dust in the eyes of fools. That was human history
and historians must show how this happens. Vico is a very different story.
I have said something about Vico’s circumstances in Naples. He was of course,
to begin with, under the influence of Descartes, because everybody in the seventeenth
century was. He was born in 1668, and until about 1708 he did not write anything very
significant. But during that period he fell under the influence of Descartes, because, as I
say, most men interested in anything of an abstract nature were under the influence of
Cartesianism. In 1708 or so, when he was about forty, it suddenly occurred to him to ask
himself why it was that mathematics was regarded as the queen of the sciences. He gave a
very – in those days – startling answer. He said: It is true that mathematics is an
unbreakable chain of propositions the validity and truth of which is guaranteed. It is
perfectly true that it is transparent, it is rigorous: nothing could be more firm than a
proper mathematical structure. But why is this? Descartes thinks it is because it reflects in
some way the ultimate structure of reality, the most general characteristics of being. Not
at all, says Vico. Mathematics is valid, mathematics is perfect, mathematics is irrefutable
because it reflects nothing, because it describes nothing at all. Mathematics is a sort of
game. Mathematics is a procedure in which you invent the ciphers and you invent the
rules. Naturally the conclusions follow, because you have invented the rules yourself.
This is something which he owes, perhaps, to previous thinkers. I think Hobbes believed
something not unlike that. When Hobbes said that we can understand civil society
because we make it, but we do not understand nature because we do not make her, he
was meaning something approximately of the sort. Certainly Hume too said it afterwards.
But Vico went further than that. Mathematics for him was not even a concatenation of
tautologies, it was a kind of game. It is rather like chess or something of the sort. If in
chess you suddenly say, ‘How do you know that the king in chess moves only one square
at a time?’, and someone says, ‘One dark evening I saw the king in chess move across
three squares’, this is not regarded as contrary evidence because there is confusion here
between laws, which describe what actually happens in the world, and rules, which are
conventions which you either obey or disobey in a game.
For Vico mathematics is conventional. I do not say this had not been said before:
perhaps it had. But to say against Descartes, against the marvellous authority of
Descartes, that mathematics did not describe reality was something quite bold. Vico says:
Once you apply it to the world – say physics or mechanics – then the situation is
different, because of course these things exist in the world, they are lumps of stuff, three-
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dimensional objects in space. These things of course are not invented by us. So there the
truths are rather more precarious. We apply mathematical methods, but we cannot
guarantee the results with that degree of certainty, because nature is not something which
we have invented. He here harks back to an old scholastic truth, which starts, roughly
speaking, with Augustine, I think, and is then repeated by various schoolmen, who say:
True knowledge can be obtained only of that which we have ourselves made. People can
truly understand only what they have created. An artist can understand his work of art
because he made it. A painter can understand his painting, a man who produces a
blueprint for a building can understand it, because he has actually made it, and so he sees
it through and through, there is nothing not to see through, so to speak. The whole thing
is his invention. But nature is not like that. Only God can understand nature because he
made her. Nature is opaque. We can record only what happens: we can record what is
next door to what, what is above what and below what and to the left of what and to the
right of what and before what and after what and simultaneous with what, and make
generalisations. In this respect he is very empirical and rather like Hume. All that we can
do is to produce huge generalisations about what we observe. We can perform
experiments. But if you ask yourself ‘Why is a thing as it is?’, in the case of a work of art
you can answer why, because the artist can tell you; in the case of a blueprint the
architect can tell you what he wants to achieve by this means; but in the case of nature
only God can tell you, because only God knows why he has made nature as he has. So
that what for God are rules are for us laws. What for God is intentional is for us given.
There is a certain sense, therefore, in which we can understand only what we ourselves
have made, and nature in that respect is less intelligible, for Vico, than mathematics or art
or things of that sort.
So far by 1709 or 1710. We understand geometry because we create it. We do not
understand physics, because we have not created nature. At least we do not understand
in that transparent, perspicuous sense. By 1720 he lights upon the proposition of his life,
which is: There is a sphere of knowledge the methods of which people have neglected in
the past, where too we have knowledge superior to that which some people say we have
– namely, human history. There is a sense in which we make history, in which we do not
make nature.
This is a very bold move indeed, which occurs when he is aged about fifty. He
knew that it was a bold move, and he wrote it down, and in 1725 he published the New
Science – the Scienza nuova – which is of course a frightfully unreadable work because he
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puts into it all the knowledge he has. There are endless divagations, there are digressions,
there are digressions from digressions, there are a great many new ideas all trying to be
expressed at the same time through a narrow bottleneck, they conflict with each other,
they confuse themselves. It is very dramatic, it is very intense, you feel that a great deal is
being said – and a great deal that is bold and original and new and interesting – but it is
said in a very confused and compressed fashion, which does not make for lucidity. That
is perhaps why the work fell pretty dead-born from the press – nobody really read it very
much, certainly not in its own time. This is partly due also to the fact that he wrote a
book four times the size of what he published, could not get a publisher to publish it,
and applied to a Cardinal, who first promised him some money, then pleaded some
previous commitments, so that Vico could not get it published. He had a ring, he sold it,
and with this ring he managed to publish one quarter of what he had written, destroying
the rest, which I daresay did not do the work very much good.
So there were various misfortunes that dogged this unfortunate man. But his
point is this: there is a certain sense in which we understand ourselves, a sense in which
we do not understand things. Human beings have motives, they have purposes, they
strive for something, they are at something. If you ask why people do what they do, this
is an intelligible question because you are a human being yourself, and if you are asked
why you do this rather than that you can say what your goals are, what your motives are,
what your fears are, what your hopes are, what you are striving towards and what you are
trying to explain to yourself. All these are human activities. Activities are purposive. They
are intentional, they have objects. YOu cannot say this about cows or sheep or tables,
because you do not know whether they have motives or not. You can say it about human
beings because you are a human being. You cannot say what a table is at – it is a
meaningless notion, because, first of all, a table may not be at anything. If it is at
something, you cannot tell, for you have never been a table. Nor have you ever been a
cow, and therefore it is impossible in that case too. In the case of nature you can describe
only externally; in the case of men you have an inside view, you can describe something
from within. This is Vico’s great moment of illumination. He says: When we think about
human history we are able at least to understand by a certain faculty which we have –
fantasia, he calls it, imagination – we can make out what it is that these previous people
were at. We can make it out because they are men, men like us, and therefore we can
ascribe some of our own attributes to them. No doubt they were very different from us,
but still sufficiently similar for the analogy not be absolutely absurd. How do we know
13
what happened in the past? Not through the accounts of mendacious historians, who
very likely did get things wrong. But, he says, there are two great paths into the past
which nobody has properly used before, and which I have found. After twenty years, he
says, of the most unremitting and painful labour I can tell you that we can now enter into
the minds of early barbarians whose minds are totally unlike ours – crude, primitive,
ghastly, diffused with darkness, very very unlike ourselves. Nevertheless one can make
something out if only you use the methods which I have discovered. These two methods
are language and myth. This is very new and very original.
First, language. Vico says: If you read poetry you will find that a great deal of it –
particularly early poetry – is chock-a-block with metaphor. Metaphors in our glorious
times, in the seventeenth century, are used by poets simply to enhance sensibility, simply
as aesthetic devices for the purpose of attracting people’s attention, for the purpose of
making things more elegant, more interesting, more amusing. But this is not how
metaphor begins. If you see what these early men wrote, they were clearly not using it as
a kind of trick. In early literature metaphor plays a very different part. When you read
early Roman poetry, which is what he knew most about – early law and early poetry –
when you read early Roman poetry and somebody says ‘Blood boils round my heart’,
meaning rage, he says: For these men rage really was more like blood boiling round one’s
heart than it is for us. For us it is a dead metaphor. People now maintain that metaphors
are used as some kind of embellishment, some sort of trick, or maybe to convey secret
wisdom. Not at all, he says. Metaphor was a natural mode of speech of these early men.
If you look at their poetry, he says, you will see that their world was different from ours.
For them it was animate. For them it was full of nymphs and dryads, for them it was full
of divinities. They were animists, they were anthropomorphic. No doubt they were
mistaken in thinking that the world was full of these spirits, but you can understand what
their world must have looked like to them if you follow the kind of metaphorical usage
which they produced.
He gives you a list of what he regards as relevant metaphors in that sense. For
example, he says, when people talk about teeth of ploughs, mouths of rivers, lips of
vases, necks or tongues of land, veins of metal or of minerals, the bowels of the earth,
when skies smile or frown or winds rage or tables groan – and I daresay, although he did
not say it, willows weep – if you talk about, for example, small numbers as handfuls, or
flesh of fruits, or the blood of grapes, in all these various cases, for these people, the
analogy was much closer. They saw the world in these animate terms, and if you want to
14
know what they meant you must try to transpose yourself into a universe where this kind
of talk conveyed reality much more vividly and much more directly than it could in later
and more sophisticated ages.
You must remember that he did this at a time when metaphor was terribly
frowned upon: it was exactly against his age. Let me quote Thomas Sprat, one of the
founders of the Royal Society, who said that ‘specious tropes and figures’ must be
banished ‘out of all Civill societies as a thing fatal to peace and good Manners’. The Royal
Society must avoid ‘myths and uncertainties’ and return to ‘a close, naked, natural way of
speaking … as near the mathematical plainness as they can’.1 For this reason Hobbes also
banished metaphor, because, he said, he was going to search for the truth in a rigorous
manner. A famous authority, M. H. Abrams, tells us that metaphor is connected with ‘the
false world of ancient superstitions, dreams, myths, terrors with which the lurid,
barbarous imaginations peopled the world, causing error and irrationalism and
persecution’.2 Vico’s idea about metaphors was athwart the entire drive of his age.
The second thing is myth. He takes, for example, such a phrase from Virgil as
‘omnia plena Jovis’ – ‘everything is full of Jove’ – and he says: What does this mean? Jove
is a bearded thunderer, the father of the gods, who throws thunderbolts. Yet ‘Everything
is full of Jove’ – it does not mean anything to us to say ‘Everything is full of a bearded
thunderer.’ Yet these men must have meant something: it does not mean nothing. What
must the world have been for this kind of sentence to have conveyed a real vision of
something? Why, they must have thought of the sky, I suppose, or the whole of the air,
as a huge body emitting some kind of enraged, furious sounds, namely thunder –
something of that sort – and Jove must have appeared to them as a huge sky-like
organism thundering at them. So too take, for example, Hercules. Well, there is of course
a strong man who strangles hydras or cleanses stables, but also there is the Argive
Hercules, the Athenian Hercules, the Spartan Hercules, the Thracian Hercules – they are
all different, and they are all one. How can there be one Hercules and many? Well,
obviously, they had no universals, they could not express themselves in terms of
concepts, and therefore this is their way of saying something in the particular language
which they had. You must understand what the world must have seemed like to people
who used language in this highly unfamiliar and to us almost unintelligible way. Cybele is
a woman, and also the whole of the earth. Ceres is a goddess, and also all the corn there
1
[Cf. Vico and Herder, p. 104.]
2
[Cf. ibid.]
15
is – and so on. He says: You must make an enormous imaginative effort of an extremely
agonising kind – which I have made, he says, and it cost me twenty years of unremitting
search, and so on – to place yourself in the universe of these barbarous creatures, these
grossi bestioni, these huge human beasts in their caves, from which we derive our being,
who are totally unlike us, and immersed in the senses, wholly incapable of any degree of
abstract thought, and you must try to imagine what their universe must have looked like
to them. If you do not do that, you will not know what they were like, you will not know
what human history is, you will not know where we came from, you will not understand
their language. To try to translate their language into our language is the grossest
misrepresentation of the whole of the past and will lead to nothing but complete
ignorance and misunderstanding. This was really a very large move.
For example, he says this about Homer: The seven cities contended for Homer
not because he was born in one of them but because he was born in none of them. He is
the Greek people, for Vico, speaking in some collective voice. You must try to imagine
what the society must have been which gave forth Homer. It must, he says, have been a
society which was cruel, ambitious and avaricious. He does not praise this society, but he
says that the two great epic poems, the Odyssey and the Iliad, which obviously are not
written by the same person – he is one of the early dismemberers of Homer – can have
been generated only in this barbarous and savage society. It is a great masterpiece which
cannot possibly have been produced in a more critical, more enlightened and more
civilised age.
This is incompatible with what everyone else around him was saying. The whole
burden of seventeenth-century criticism is that we are progressing, that we are better
than our predecessors. These were barbarous ages – barbarous Shakespeare and so on.
Some people thought that Sophocles was superior to Racine and some people thought
that Racine was superior to Sophocles, and there was a famous battle of the ancients and
moderns. But the assumption was that there was a single criterion in terms of which you
could measure these people. For Vico these things are incommensurable. The kind of
universe that generates Homer is not our world, and to judge the merits of Homer, or to
try to understand the meaning of the sentences of Homer, in the terms which we use for
Molière or for Racine is to misunderstand everything. This is certainly not something
which anybody else said or thought, and went plumbs against the entire drive of his time
and his own culture.
16
From this you do derive an extraordinary notion of history, and he tells you his
own version of the historical story. This is not particularly credible, but here it is, for
what it is worth. He thinks we start in the caves, where great barbarous creatures –
cavemen – wander about slaughtering each other, sunk, as he says, in the senses, with no
kind of development of mind at all. Then there is thunder and they are terrified. They
feel there is something greater than themselves which looms over them – the beginnings
of religion. They drag their women into their caves, and in this way marriage begins. The
patres of the original age of the gods, as he calls it, create steadings which defend them
against the powerful vagrants who roam about the earth. Weaker creatures who are
victims of the vagrants seek protection from the few steadings, and they are given this
protection at the cost of becoming clients or slaves – they are enslaved by the patres. At
this point you have no language – you have gestures, moot signs, as he calls them, and
ultimately things like hieroglyphs and ideograms, which are the earliest forms of written
language, almost before spoken language, for him. This gradually develops. The clients
become discontented. They accumulate and they gang up on the masters and they
demand certain rights, such as rights of burial or marriage, which reflect very primitive
human desires and needs, and these are ultimately granted to them and have to be
recorded. In this way language is invented, prose is invented, laws are created, and you
have the society of heroes, out of which Homer springs, which is, as I say, cruel,
avaricious and ambitious – very brutal, but bound together by terrifying religion. At this
period, for functional reasons, laws are regarded as guaranteed by fearful sanctions of a
supernatural kind, otherwise people would not obey them. (Hence you have the whole
idea of reification, afterwards, in people such as Hegel and Marx, in which all the rules by
which men live have to be represented as issuing from outside.) They create gods: they
are afraid of death and so they create gods who are more powerful than death. They are
afraid of chaos and so they create impersonal laws which contain their chaos. Then
gradually manners soften, arts develop, and aristocracy, that is, the heroic age, yields to
plutocracy. Then, as the result of the invention of prose and laws, people begin arguing
about the meanings of these laws. Argument produces rhetoric. Rhetoric produces
political argument, in turn. Political argument leads ultimately to people asserting their
rights, which leads to democracy. Democracy leads to the tearing apart of the original
frightening solidarity which obtained in the heroic age. As a result of democracy,
scepticism begins, laws are undermined, and the society in the end collapses. Vico is
anything but a democrat.
17
There are three things which can happen at this point. Either another barbarian
nation at a fresher period of development – stronger – overcomes the decayed
democracy and conquers it; or some man like Augustus comes and puts you back on the
rails and gives you another century or two of settled rule; or, finally, you really do
collapse into bows and arrows, and the whole thing begins again. That is Vico’s famous
doctrine of cycles – corsi e ricorsi – his least original doctrine, which of course is already
there in Plato, in Polybius, in Machiavelli and other thinkers.
The final collapse of democracy, he says, is this: men, though ‘they still physically
throng together, live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of the spirit and will, scarcely any
two of them able to agree’.3 They are ‘base savages under soft words and embraces’.4
Each person is surrounded by his own materialism and his own egoism, and in this way
the bonds which unite men are gradually severed and society falls to pieces. That is his
prophecy about what is likely to happen in each case of progress.
This holds only of gentiles. Vico is of course a pious Christian, and he believes
that God revealed to the Jews the true course of history, from which they wander at their
cost. His cyclical story happens only to people who have not been vouchsafed the word
of God, the gentile nations, who have to go through a certain rigid series of phases of
what he calls ‘ideal eternal history’, phases which every nation has to pass through, from
rise, to growth, to maturity, to decline, to fall. He says the nature of people is crude, then
severe, then benign, then delicate, then dissolute. This leads to collapse, and the whole
thing begins again.
This account need not be followed in detail, but the valuable idea in it is of
course that man is a self-transforming creature whose each next age is the result of the
satisfaction of the needs of the previous ones, and that the idea that there is a fixed
human nature, which is what the sophisticated natural lawyers of the seventeenth century
certainly assumed, and indeed the Catholic Church too – that there is such a thing as
natural law engraved upon the hearts of men, so that all men know certain eternal truths
(even if they are not explicit about them), and behave in accordance with their behests,
and this is what fixed, permanent human nature is – must be an absurdity. For Vico
everything is growth. Natura is nascimento: nature is genetic. You start off with these
monstrous beasts. Gradually you win your way through towards civilisation, of which he
does not particularly approve – I do not think he has a theory of progress, exactly.
3
[Cf. Vico and Herder, p. 63.]
4
[Cf. ibid.]
18
Indeed from his praise of Homer it becomes absolutely clear that he thinks that you
cannot compare one literature with another. He does not believe that the later, the better;
or that there is such a thing as gradual perfectibility. Each human period expresses itself
through its own symbolism. If we want to know about the past, we must learn what this
symbolism is, by trying to reconstruct – by means of what he calls imagination, or fantasia
– the kind of world in which these words made sense. You cannot be certain that you
have got it, but if it is coherent, and if it appears to express or explain what these people
mean, there is a probability that you have got it right. These ages cannot be compared
with each other. Each age has its own mode of expression, its own perfection, its own
climaxes, its own particular form of both artistic and intellectual achievement. Although
there is such a thing as primitivism, that has its beauties. There are the beauties of the
middle period, there are the beauties of the later period, but they are not commensurable,
and therefore the idea of anachronism becomes very prominent in Vico. It is absurd, he
says, to try to judge these early ages in terms of our own grand and noble age. The Italian
humanist Bruni said in the early fifteenth century: ‘Anything which can be said in Greek
can be said in Latin too.’5 This for Vico is absolutely false. What you say in one language
you cannot say in another. What you see through one pair of spectacles you do not see
through another. What you see through one window you do not see through another.
Therefore the whole notion of anachronism, of things which are typical, of things which
are characteristic of this age rather than that age, is born with him. When people talk
about ‘typically Renaissance’ or ‘typically eighteenth-century’ or ‘typically Balkan’ or
‘typically American’ or ‘typically’ anything, which therefore in some sense springs from,
expresses, belongs to a particular pattern which is unique in some way, although not so
unique that you cannot understand it – sufficiently similar to you to be intelligible, but
not sufficiently similar to be truly comparable – unless you understand that, you will not
know how human history develops.
Another thing which is original in Vico is that all these myths, to him, oddly
enough, signify class war. He is one of the earliest fathers of the materialist theory of
history. For example, he thinks that myths reflect critical, traumatic moments in the
history of society, which are embodied in the myths; and you can discover something of
what this means. For example, he thinks the story of Theseus and Ariadne is concerned
with early seafaring life. The Minotaur is the pirates who abduct Athenians and ships,
because the bull is a characteristic ancient emblem on a ship’s prow – and piracy is held
5
[Cf. Vico and Herder, p. 139.]
19
in high honour both by the Greeks and by the ancient Germans. Ariadne is the art of
seafaring, Ariadne’s thread the symbol of navigation. The labyrinth is the Aegean Sea.
Alternatively, if you want to treat it another way, the Minotaur is a half-caste child, a
foreigner come to Crete, an early emblem of racial conflict. Well, it does not matter, all
this may be fantastic, it may be imaginary, it may not be true. But the very idea that
myths in some way embody or represent, or can be searched for representations of, early
collective experience, which can be conveyed only in the kind of language that is open to
these people, because that is how they saw nature and that is how they spoke, is very
different from the conception of myths of Voltaire and Fontenelle, the leaders of their
age.
For Voltaire myths are either ravings of savages, or pretty inventions by poets; or
at best, I suppose, they are epigrams which convey things in an elegant and agreeable
fashion; most often they are inventions by wicked priests for the purpose of befuddling
the minds of their subjects in order to hold on to power, and the idea of treating myths
seriously is a very grave and dangerous thing. Similarly Fontenelle says: Well, myths, yes,
if you like you can use myths for abstract qualities, it does not matter if you represent
prudence or wisdom by some elegant lady sitting on some kind of chariot or something
of the sort, or in an armchair, that is all right, because at least prudence and wisdom are
real, they do exist, they are qualities. But once you begin talking about Hercules and
Diana and god knows what, and Apollo and so on, who really do appear to be some kind
of mythological creatures, that is a very dangerous and wicked thing, because it makes
people think that things exist which do not exist. Myths are false statements about reality
and should be eliminated. For Vico they are the sole door – or if not the sole door, one
of the few doors, together with language and ritual – into the life of early man. So in that
sense Vico can be regarded as the founder of comparative mythology, comparative
philology, comparative etymology and social anthropology, as derived from the attempt
to place yourself into, entrare, as he said, descendere – to descend into the minds of these
primitives, to enter into the outlooks of these strange, uncouth but at the same time
human creatures. That is really Vico’s principle achievement.
Let me sum up. What this comes to, really, is that Vico is the inventor of two
things: first of all, of a new concept of knowledge, which is quite a thing to have
produced; and secondly of the concept of culture, which is also quite a thing to have
created. First, the new concept of knowledge. Until his day, it would be reasonable to say,
knowledge could be subdivided as follows: knowledge by revelation, given by what you
20
read in the Bible or through the qualified interpreters of sacred tests (of other nations
too); or you have knowledge, for example, not by revelation but my metaphysical
intuition on the part of some profound philosopher. That is also a form of knowledge –
a priori knowledge, as Descartes, for example, or Leibniz thought it to be, about the
most eternal, unaltering, universal truths, true for all men, everywhere, at all times, which
all men could in theory discover at any time. Thirdly there is inductive knowledge,
scientific knowledge from experiment and observation, which is not entirely certain,
which is probable, but which the sciences, which are the most refined forms of
discovering, are very good at. Finally there is common-sense knowledge – I know that
there is cheese in the cupboard by looking – ordinary empirical common-sense
knowledge. These are all forms of knowledge. If you like to add Gilbert Ryle’s sense of
knowledge how – knowledge how to ride a bicycle or how to speak French – you can do
that too.
For Vico, however, there is a different kind of knowledge, which is knowledge of
what it is like to be in a situation – in the sense in which people say ‘The world of the
rich is different from the world of the poor’, ‘The world of bankers is different from the
world of poets’, in which I know what it is to be poor, I know what it is to be a traitor, I
know what it is to be a dictator, I know what it is to suffer; in the sense in which I
understand a friend, in which I understand a joke, in which I understand a whole form of
life, I catch on to it, I get hold of it, I get the hang of it. This, he thinks, can be done only
by the development of the imagination, and he accuses the French of stressing the
intellect at the expense of the imagination, of putting it at the head of all forms of
educational development, of forcing children into some sort of Cartesian logic in
mathematics which desiccates them, instead of developing them by poetry and by
rhetoric, which he thinks makes them more responsive to experience beyond their
immediate horizons. This is the sense of ‘knowledge’ in which you say ‘I know what it is
like’, either by imaginative means, as novelists do, or through having lived through it
yourself. This is the kind of knowledge with which, I suppose, novelists of genius
possess; the kind of knowledge which, say, Walter Scott produces profound effects upon
Europe in the nineteenth century, by revealing what appear to be other ages.
This, I think, is Vico’s invention, and this lies at the root of his conception of
culture as a central pattern, as the style, as some kind of shape, of a society, which reflects
itself in most of its activities, perhaps not in all – perhaps you cannot define it precisely –
but in terms of which you can attribute a particular activity to a particular kind of way of
21
living, a way of feeling, a way of willing, a way of acting, a way of striving; and this we
know because we know ourselves. If you say ‘How did Vico know these things?’, he does
not tell you very clearly, he does not talk about empathy, he does not talk about entering
into – he does say ‘entrare’ but we do not know what he means. The nearest to it is this.
He thinks: You know what it is like to have been a child; if you remember what it was
like to have been young and to have developed, to have grown, then you will realise that
there is such a thing as growth, not merely on the part of individuals, but also on the part
of nations. Therefore you will to some extent be able to see how one thing comes out of
another. It is no good trying to subtract a common kernel out of different cultures and
say ‘This is human nature with various knobs on’, corresponding to the various
modifications. There is no common kernel, there is only a kind of Wittgensteinian family
relationship: A is like B, and B is like C, and C is like D, and D is like E, but A is not like
E; but you can get from A to E by travelling back through D and C and B – that is
Vico’s great invention. That is Vico’s doctrine, and he is the father of the kind of cultural
history which then led to all the social sciences of man, and in particular, of course, to
social anthropology and structuralism and that kind of thing.
Who read him? Very few people outside Naples. Goethe came to Naples in 1777
and was presented with a copy of the New Science; he writes to a friend saying: ‘I was
given a marvellous book here; what wonderful pictures of humanity and its future Vico
draws.’6 Well, there is nothing about the future, and there is nothing about pictures of
humanity, really. Goethe obviously did not read the book and could not be expected to
read it. So he just sent it on to his friend after making these rather perfunctory
observations.
Herder, whose views are very like those of Vico, got to read it only in 1797,
whereas his own views were already fairly complete by 1774. The great Homeric scholar
F. A. Wolf, who wrote the famous Prolegomena to Homer, in which he argued that Homer
was not one person, had it pointed out to him that Vico had said something of the sort
before, and was extremely cross. Niebuhr, the great Roman historian, was told that Vico
had used Roman ditties and early Roman law and fragments of early Roman folk-lays for
the purpose of reconstructing Roman society – the voice of the people – and he was also
very cross, in fact he said nothing about it at all. He had it pointed out to him twice when
he was the Prussian ambassador in Paris, and when he died in 1830 the obituary by
Savigny had to apologise for him by saying: ‘Vico was one of those men whose fitful
6
[Cf. Vico and Herder, pp. 90-1.]
22
genius, like lightning, does more to confuse the traveller on the path than to illuminate
it’7 – or something of the sort – and that that is why Niebuhr did not bother to
acknowledge him.
Poor Vico, the first time that anyone made anything of him was in 1824. The
great French historian Michelet was given this text by a friend because a certain amount
of propaganda for the Italians was being done in Paris at that time, and he caught fire,
and he thought it was the most marvellous book he had ever read, and produced a free
translation of it, and popularised it, and said ‘I had no master but Vico; my whole
teaching lies in him, it all comes out of him.’8 Well, of course he interpreted Vico in his
own fashion, and even towards the end of his life he kept saying that Vico was the most
marvellous genius in the historical sciences who ever lived, because it is a story of man
struggling to fulfil himself. He did to some extent alter Vico’s views. He dropped the
cycles, he made it progressive, he made the whole thing rather left-wing, about men
fighting against oppression, men fighting against nature, men fighting against various
obstacles. Nevertheless there is no doubt that he was inspired by Vico into writing the
kind of history that he did; and for about thirty, forty years, perhaps, Vico was quite
famous. Karl Marx refers to him with approval: he says that what Darwin did for the
evolution of species we ought to do for the evolution of technology, as Vico has taught
us to do. He is mentioned even by Trotsky with some approval. However, because he
wrote as he wrote, because the text is so dark, so tangled and so unreadable, by 1860,
1870, once again – oblivion. Then the Italian philosopher Croce revives him, and again
he lives. Collingwood translates Croce’s book on the subject, and again he is read, in the
1920s; by the late 1930s nobody reads him much. Then he is translated into English.
There are various people scattered here and there who read him. Thomas Arnold
thought he provided rather a good defence of spirituality and Christianity against
mounting positivism, and F. D. Maurice, the Christian Socialist, read him, and Flaubert
refers to him, Stendhal refers to him. He is referred to as a kind of obscure thinker
whom nobody reads but people have vaguely heard of.
Then finally a certain number of tercentenary celebrations occur. At the moment
he is having a short boomlet, but I can predict that in time, because of the wretched
nature of his style, he will be re-buried, and then one day again resurrected, and so it will
go on for ever – endless reburials, constant resurrections.
7
[Cf. Vico and Herder, p. 92.]
8
[Cf. Vico and Herder, p. 93.]
23
University of Adelaide, 1975