Vico Quotes

The most sublime labour of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things; and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons... This philological-philosophical axiom proves to us that in the world's childhood men were by nature sublime poets...

A city divided by religion is either already in ruins or close to it.

Because of the indefinite nature of the human mind, wherever it is lost in ignorance man makes himself the measure of all things.

efferfreshpainted livy, in beautific repose, upon the silence of the dead, from pharoph the nextfirst down to ramescheckles the last bust thing. The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin.

peoples, like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy, or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure. Thus no matter how great the throng and press of their bodies, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since each follows his own pleasure and caprice.

In every [other] pursuit men without natural aptitude succeed by obstinate study of technique, but who is not a poet by nature can never become one by art.

To be human means above all to bury,’ declares Robert Pogue Harrison in his study of burial practices, The Dominion of the Dead, boldly drawing on Vico’s suggestion that humanitas in Latin comes first and properly from humando, meaning ‘burying, burial’, itself from humus, meaning ‘earth’ or ‘soil’. We are, certainly, a burying species as well as a building species – and our predecessors were buriers too.

I have begun with the assumption that the Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there either. We must take seriously Vico’s great observation that men make their own history, that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography: as both geographical and cultural entities—to say nothing of historical entities—such locales, regions, geographical sectors as “Orient” and “Occident” are man-made. Therefore as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West. The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other.

Vico, who looks at the whole of human history and says, “mind made all this,

Love your neighbor. Love the stranger. Hear the cry of the otherwise unheard. Liberate the poor from their poverty. Care for the dignity of all. Let those who have more than they need share their blessings with those who have less. Feed the hungry, house the homeless, and heal the sick in body and mind. Fight injustice, whoever it is done by and whoever it is done against. And do these things because, being human, we are bound by a covenant of human solidarity, whatever our color or culture, class or creed. These are moral principles, not economic or political ones. They have to do with conscience, not wealth or power. But without them, freedom will not survive. The free market and liberal democratic state together will not save liberty, because liberty can never be built by self-interest alone. I-based societies all eventually die. Ibn Khaldun showed this in the fourteenth century, Giambattista Vico in the eighteenth, and Bertrand Russell in the twentieth. Other-based societies survive. Morality is not an option. It’s an essential.

Examining the Homeric epics from the perspective of when and by whom they were composed, Vico refutes generations of interpreters who had assumed that because Homer was revered for his great epics he must also have been a wise sage like Plato, Socrates, or Bacon. Instead Vico demonstrates that in its wildness and willfulness Homer’s mind was poetic, and his poetry barbaric, not wise or philosophic, that is, full of illogical fantasy, gods who were anything but godlike, and men like Achilles and Patrocles, who were most uncourtly and extremely petulant.

Uniform ideas originating among entire peoples unknown to each other must have a common ground of truth [D4].

The giants were by nature of enormous build, like those gross wild creatures which travelers report finding at the foot of America, in the country of the so-called Patagones [Big Feet].

The Roman jurisconsults established worship of God as the first and foremost part of the natural law of the gentes. For where there is neither rule of law nor force of arms, and men are accordingly in a state of complete freedom, they can neither enter nor remain in society with others except through fear of a force superior to them all, and, therefore, through fear of a divinity common to all. This fear of divinity is called ‘religion’.

We observe that all nations, barbarous as well as civilized, though separately founded because remote from each other in time and space, keep these three human customs: all have some religion, all contract solemn marriages, all bury their dead.

Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature’s Technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organisation, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former, but not the latter? Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them. Every history of religion, even, that fails to take account of this material basis, is uncritical. It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly core of the misty creations of religion, than, conversely, it is, to develop from the actual relations of life the corresponding celestialised forms of those relations. The latter method is the only materialistic, and therefore the only scientific one. The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality. [Chapter Fifteen: Machinery and Modern Industry; Footnote 4]

And as if, finally, providence had not made provision for this human necessity: so that, lacking letters, all nations in their barbarous period were first founded on customs, and [only] later, having become civilized, were governed by [statutory] laws!

– Puoi andare via se non ti senti di restare. Mi concede tutto, anche la libertà. Provare a stargli vicino è difficile. Camminare al suo fianco è starno. In mezzo alla gente sono io la più alta ma le sue ruote sono più veloci delle mie gambe. – Non lasciarmi mai indietro – gli chiedo.

... rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them ... imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them ... for when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them.

[Cadmus the Phoenician founds Thebes in Boeotia and introduces vulgar letters into Greece. Year of the world 2448.] 72 Since he introduced the Phoenician alphabet there, Boeotia should have been from its literate beginnings the most ingenious of all the nations of Greece; but it produced men of such doltish minds that “Boeotian” became a proverbial term for a man of slow wit.

With the sole aim of liberating themselves from the servitude of religion, which alone could preserve them in society, and, lacking any other restraint, they turned their backs upon the true God of their fathers, Adam and Noah, and descended into a bestial liberty in which, dispersed throughout the great forest of the earth, they lost their language and weakened every social custom.

[Saturn, or the Latin age of the gods. Year of the world 2491.] 73 This is the age of the gods beginning among the nations of Latium and corresponding in character to the golden age of the Greeks, among whom our mythology will show [544ff] that the first gold was grain, by the harvests of which for many centuries the first nations counted their years [407]. Saturn was so called by the Latins from sati, sown [fields], and is called Chronos by the Greeks, among whom chronos means time, whence comes the word chronology.

Ho avuto il potere di sfidare i miei limiti. Di alzare l’asticella della resistenza al dolore e alla stanchezza. Ma non ho avuto la forza di resistere al sentimento che provo quando la guardo in quegli occhi del blu degli zaffiri. Non è una pietra preziosa. È una pietra affilata che apre ferite profonde, come l’incidente non è stato in grado di fare. Sarei crollato, nel tempo, se lei non fosse tornata. Non so ancora se è un momento di comprensione ma lei è qui e mi tiene la mano sul cuore mentre ci muoviamo verso casa sua.

That the flood was world-wide is proved, not indeed by the philological evidence of Martin Schoock, for it is far too slight, nor by the astrological evidence of Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, followed by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. For this latter evidence is too uncertain, indeed quite false, relying as it does on the Alphonsine Tables, which were refuted by the Jews and are now refuted by the Christians, who, having rejected the calculations of Eusebius and Bede, now follow those of Philo the Jew [54]. But our demonstration will be drawn from physical histories discerned in the fables [192–195, 380].

Bacon da Descartes da biri empirist, öbürü rasyonalist yoldan insan aklının doğuca ve aracısız olarak doğal gerçekliğe yönelip doğal olgular arasındaki nedenselliği saptayabileceğine inanırlar. Oysa Vico, çağının temel eğilimine tamamen karşıt bir tutumla şunu sorar: Acaba gerçekten de fiziksel dünya hakkında bir nedensel bilgiye ulaşabilir miyiz? Onun bu soruya verdiği yanıt, kendi döneminin ve tüm yeniçağın bu soruya verdiği yanıta karşıttır: Bizler ancak kendimizin neden olduğu ve kendimizin yaptığı şeyi nedensel, temelli ve doğru olarak bilebiliriz. Oysa doğa bizim yaptığımız ya da nedeni olduğumuz bir şey değildir; doğayı yaratmadığımıza, tam tersine yaratılmış bir şey olduğumuza göre, bizlere doğayı doğrudan ve yetkin olarak tanıma yolu açık değildir. Bizler, Descartes'in formulüe ettiği şekliyle, matematiğin idelerinden yararlanıp deney ve gözlem yoluyla doğayı ''bilimsel'' olarak ele aldığımızda ''gerçek'' doğal nedenleri değil, düşünme gücümüzün soyut tasarımlarına ve duyarlık yetimizin bize sağladığı duyumlarımıza açık olduğu kadarıyla doğanın ''bize görünen nedenleri''ni saptamakla yetiniriz. Descartes'in sarıldığı rasyonel kesinlik (..) ancak görünür gerçekliğin bilgisini elde etmede bize hizmet edebilir. (..) Descartes matematiksel idelerin kesinliğini, apaçıklığını vurgulamakta haklıdır; ama o, ideleri bizim yarattığımızı atlamış, onları Tanrı'nın doğuştan içimize yerleştirdiği şeyler saymış ve onlarda bulduğu kesinliği doğaya taşımaktan çekinmemiştir. Vico için ise sayılar, geometrik şekiller, doğanın gerçeğini bilmek için asla zemin oluşturamayacak soyutlamalardır. (..) Sayılar ve şekiller ''toplumların doğası'' hakkında ne ifade edebilirler ki?

Jamás existió en el mundo nación de ateos, pues empezaron todas con alguna religión, y las religiones, sin salvedad, echaron su raigambre en aquel deseo, naturalmente común a los hombres, de vivir eternamente: y este universal deseo de la naturaleza humana nace de un común sentido, celado en la hondura de la mente humana, según el cual los ánimos de los hombres son inmortales.

And here we determine the άκμή [acme], i.e. perfect state, of the nations, which is enjoyed when the sciences, disciplines and arts, all of which draw their being from religion and the law, are in service to religion and the law. Hence when the nations conduct themselves in a different way, as they would with the Epicureans and Stoics, or with indifference to it, as with the sceptics, or contrary to it, as with the atheists, they proceed to their downfall, losing their own dominant religions and, with them, their own laws. And because they do not value their own religions and laws as being worthy of defence, they proceed to lose also their own arms and languages and, with the loss of these properties, the further property of retaining their own names within those of other dominant nations. Hence, having proved that their nature is such that they are incapable of governing themselves, they lose their own governments. Thus, in accordance with the eternal law of Providence, the natural law of the heroic gentes, in which there is no equality of justice between the weak and the strong, recurs.

Y aquí se determina el άκμή, o sea el estado perfecto de las naciones que se goza cuando las ciencias, las disciplinas y las artes, así como todas recibieron el ser de las religiones y leyes, sirven todas a las leyes y a las religiones. De modo que cuando obran diversamente de tales fines, como los epicúreos y los estoicos, o con indiferencia hacia ellos, como los escépticos, o contra ellos, como los ateos, las naciones están próximas a caer y a perder las propias religiones dominantes, y con ellas las propias leyes; y ya que no sirvieron para defender las propias leyes y religiones, perderán aún las armas y las lenguas; y con la perdición de éstas sus propiedades, deberán sobrellevar otra, la de sus nombres, extraviados entre los de las naciones señoreadoras: y por todo ello, demostradas naturalmente incapaces de gobernarse a sí mismas, perderán los gobiernos; y así por ley eterna de la Providencia, que quiere a toda costa conservar, regresar el derecho natural de las gentes heroicas, mediante el cual no hay entre débiles y fuertes igualdad de razón.

E qui si determina l'άκμή, o sia lo stato perfetto delle nazioni, che si gode quando le scienze, le discipline e le arti, siccome tutte hanno l'essere dalle religioni e dalle leggi, tutte servono alle leggi e alle religioni. Talché, quando elleno o fanno diversamente da ciò, come gli epicurei e gli stoici, o con indifferenza a ciò, come gli scettici, o contro di ciò, come gli atei, le nazioni vanno a cadere e a perdere le propie religioni dominanti, e, con esse, le propie leggi; e, poiché non valsero a difendere le propie religioni e leggi, vanno a perdere le propie armi, le propie lingue; e, con la perdita di queste loro propietà, vanno a sperdere quell'altra de’ propi nomi dentro quelli delle nazioni dominanti; e per tutto ciò, sperimentate naturalmente incapaci' a governare esse stesse, vanno a perdere i propi governi. E sì, per legge eterna della provvedenza ricorre il diritto naturale delle genti eroiche, per lo quale tra’ deboli e forti non vi ha egualità dì ragione.

Fra i corollari dell'applicazione del metodo vichiano per la ricostruzione del passato uno dei più interessanti è quello che ho chiamato del pluralismo culturale... l'idea perenne della società perfetta, in cui verità, giustizia, libertà, felicità e virtù convivono e si fondono nelle loro forme più compiute, è non soltanto utopistica (cosa che pochi negano) ma intrinsecamente incoerente... Ogni cultura si esprime in opere d'arte e di pensiero, in maniere di vivere e di agire che possiedono ognuna il proprio peculiare carattere, e questi diversi caratteri non possono combinarsi insieme, e neppure costituiscono necessariamente tappe di un unico cammino verso un'unica meta universale.

[Su G.B. Vico e J.G. Herder] Siamo esortati a guardare alla vita come al serbatoio di una pluralità di valori, tutti ugualmente autentici, ugualmente ultimi e, soprattutto, ugualmente oggettivi; e pertanto non suscettibili di essere ordinati in una gerarchia atemporale, o giudicati in funzione di un qualche metro assoluto... Questa dottrina è chiamata pluralismo. Esistono molti fini oggettivi, molti valori ultimi (alcuni incompatibili con altri), fatti propri da società differenti in tempi diversi, o da gruppi differenti entro la medesima società, da intere classi o Chiese o razze, o da individui particolari in seno a queste; e ciascuno di questi fini può trovarsi soggetto alle istanze contraddittorie di altri fini non armonizzabili e nondimeno ugualmente ultimi e oggettivi.

According to Vico, primitive man, surprised in the sexual act by a clap of thunder, is stricken with fear and guilt at what he imagines is the angered voice of God. He retires into a cave to conceal his activities and it is this act which inaugurates civilisation. Language arises when man attempts to reproduce the sound of thunder with his own vocal organs.

... rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them ... imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them ... for when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them.

Le ho offerto il mio passato portandola a Ortona. Il mio presente sudato e stanco nella palestra. La mia fragilità tra le ballerine e l’alcol. Prendi anche il mio domani, che sia impotente o meno. Prendi il domani di Giorgia.

First come the wild and solitary, then those tied to a few in faithful friendship, next those who side with the manyto attain civil ends, and finally, in pursuit of particular ends of utilityor pleasure, the whollydissolute , who, amidst the great multitude of bodies, return to the first solitude of the soul.

Los hombres ambiciosos que afectan señoría en sus ciudades, ábrense en ellas rumbo mostrándose parciales de la muchedumbre, y halagándola con ciertos simulacros o apariencias de libertad.

Sin religión alguna de una Divinidad, jamás los hombres en nación se concertaron; y así comode cosas físicas, o sea de los movimientos de los cuerpos, no cabeciencia segura sin la guía de las verdades abstractas de la matemática, así no cabe en las cosas morales sin el aprecio de las verdades abstractas de la metafísica, y por tanto sin la demostración de Dios.

Aquellos hombres primeros de los que luego surgieron las naciones gentiles, que para librarse de la servidumbre de la religión del Dios creador del mundo y de Adán, única que podía tenerles en cintura y por consiguiente en sociedad, se disiparon con impías vidas, errando feroces por la gran selva de la Tierra fresca, desde la Creación en adelante y después de las aguas del Diluvio hacha frondosísima. Constreñidos se vieron los tales a buscar sustento o agua, y mucho más a ampararse contra las fieras que por desdicha abundarían en la gran selva; y abandonando a menudo los hombres a las mujeres, madres e hijos, sin modo de poderse recobrar, con lo que llegaron gradualmente en su posteridad a desamparar la lengua de Adán, y sin más ideas que la satisfacción del hambre y la sed o el fomento de la libídine, llegaron a aturdir en sí mismos todo sentido de humanidad.

We begin our principles with the idea that is the first in any work whatsoever: divine Providence, who is the architect of this world of nations. For men cannot unite in a human society unless they share ahuman sense that there is a divinity who sees into the depths of their hearts, since a society of men can neither begin nor remain stable without a means whereby some rely upon the promises of others and are satisfied by their assertions in secret matters. For it frequently happens in human life that promises need to be made and accepted, and actions undertaken, with regard to things for which, though not wrong in themselves, others need some assurance, but which lack the support of any human documentation. It might be argued that such assurance could be gained through the rigour of penal laws against lie telling, but while this could obtain in the state of the cities, it would not have been possible in the state of the families from which the cities arose, where there was as yet no civil or public rule under which two family fathers, for example, would be equally subject in justice to the armed force of the law.

Este universo es una gran ciudad en la que con una ley eterna Dios condena a los necios a hacer una guerra contra sí mismos. (...) Si algún idiota, por maldad perversa, por relajación o por pereza, o incluso por imprudencia, actuara mal, siendo reo de alta traición, ¡hágase él mismo la guerra a sí mismo!

A central thesis then begins to emerge: man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’ We enter human society, that is, with one or more imputed characters—roles into which we have been drafted —and we have to learn what they are in order to be able to understand how others respond to us and how our responses to them are apt to be construed. It is through hearing stories about wicked step-mothers, lost chddren, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and go into exile to live with the swine, that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are. Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words. Hence there is no way to give us an understanding of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resources. Mythology, in its original sense, is at the heart of things. Vico was right and so was Joyce. And so too of course is that moral tradition from heroic society to its medieval heirs according to which the telling of stories has a key part in educating us into the virtues.

se vogliamo entrare nella via del piacere con viltà, disprezzo e schiavitù loro e delle loro nazioni, o in quella della virtù con onore, gloria e felicità" SN, 1411

Insomma, da tutto ciò che si è in quest'opera ragionato, è da finalmente conchiudersi che questa scienza porta indivisibilmente seco lo studio della pietà, e che, se non siesi pio, non si può daddovero esser saggio, SN 1112

To maximize pleasure and to minimize pain - in that order - were characteristic Enlightenment concerns. This generally more receptive attitude toward good feeling and pleasure would have significant long-term consequences. It is a critical difference separating Enlightenment views on happiness from those of the ancients. There is another, however, of equal importance: that of ambition and scale. Although the philosophers of the principal classical schools sought valiantly to minimize the role of chance as a determinant of human happiness, they were never in a position to abolish it entirely. Neither, for that matter, were the philosophers of the eighteenth century, who, like men and women at all times, were forced to grapple with apparently random upheavals and terrible reversals of forture. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 is an awful case in point. Striking on All Saints' Day while the majority of Lisbon's inhabitants were attending mass, the earthquake was followed by a tidal wave and terrible fires that destroyed much of the city and took the lives of tens of thousands of men and women. 'Quel triste jeu de hasard que le jeu de la vie humaine,' Voltaire was moved to reflect shortly thereafter: 'What a sad game of chance is this game of human life.' He was not alone in reexamining his more sanguine assumptions of earlier in the century, doubting the natural harmony of the universe and the possibilities of 'paradise on earth'; the catastrophe provoked widespread reflection on the apparent 'fatality of evil' and the random occurrence of senseless suffering. It was shortly thereafter that Voltaire produced his dark masterpiece, Candide, which mocks the pretension that this is the best of all possible worlds. And yet, in many ways, the incredulity expressed by educated Europeans in the earthquake's aftermath is a more interesting index of received assumptions, for it demonstrates the degree to which such random disasters were becoming, if not less common, at least less expected. Their power to shock was magnified accordingly, but only because the predictability and security of daily existence were increasing, along with the ability to control the consequences of unforeseen disaster. When the Enlightened Marquis of Pombal, the First Minister of Portugal, set about rebuilding Lisbon after the earthquake, he paid great attention to modern principles of architecture and central planning to help ensure that if such a calamity were to strike again, the effects would be less severe. To this day, the rebuilt Lisbon of Pombal stands as an embodiment of Enlightened ideas. Thus, although eighteenth-century minds did not - and could not - succeed in mastering the random occurrences of the universe, they could - and did - conceive of exerting much greater control over nature and human affairs. Encouraged by the examples of Newtonian physics, they dreamed of understanding not only the laws of the physical universe but the moral and human laws as well, hoping one day to lay out with precision what the Italian scholar Giambattista Vico described as a 'new science' of society and man. It was in the eighteenth century, accordingly, that the human and social sciences were born, and so it is hardly surprising that observers turned their attention to studying happiness in similar terms. Whereas classical sages had aimed to cultivate a rarified ethical elite - attempting to bring happiness to a select circle of disciples, or at most to the active citizens of the polis - Enlightenment visionaries dreamed of bringing happiness to entire societies and even to humanity as a whole.

Bacon, like Vico, held that the ancients were not classic models for the moderns, but their primitive ancestors – an idea that lies at the core of the New Science.

This cyclical view of history, whether in Joyce, Rattray Taylor, Vico (Joyce’s source), Hegel-and-Marx, etc. is only part of the truth, but it needs to be stressed because it is the part that most people fearfully refuse to recognize. Whether we speak in terms of Taylor’s Matrist-Patrist dialectic, Vico’s cycle of Divine, Heroic and Urbanized ages, the Marx-Hegel trinity of Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis, or any variation thereon, we are speaking of a pattern that is real and that does repeat. But it only does so to the extent that people are robotized: trapped in hard-wired reflexes.

At first, words flew through Alessandro’s head like machine-gun bullets clearing the air over the trenches. His education, still intact, was suddenly fired up. Just the names—all the Greeks, of course, and Descartes, Locke, Shaftesbury, Leibniz, Vico, Eberhard, Herder, Schiller, Kant, Rilke, Keats, Schelling, and a hundred others, loaded all the cannon and made them ready to fire. And he was ready to marshal the principles of intuition, analogy, sympathy, historicism, intellectualism, spiritualism, the relation of physics to aesthetics, various schools of theology. . . . But in the end, he realized, it was all talk, lovely talk, with no power. In the end, beauty was inexplicable, a matter of grace rather than of the intellect, like a song.

If metaphors require an underlying cultural framework, then the heiroglyphhic language of the gods cannot be a merely primitive stage of human consciousness: it needs the presence of both the symbolic language of heroes and the epistolary language of me as its starting point. Thus Vico is not speaking of a linear development from a metaphorical language to a more conventional language, but of a continual, cyclical activity. The language of the gods is a heap of unrelated synedoches and metonymies…

Vico believed that it was God’s voice heard through thunder that brought the third or human age to an end and frightened humanity back into caves where the cycle of ages began anew. There are ten thunder words in Finnegans Wake, nine with 100 letters and the tenth with 101 letters. The first thunder word begins “bababa…” in imitation of thunder with the idea that stuttering signals God’s guilt for messing up the creation business in so horrid a manner. (See thuthunder.)

It contains another point of the greatest importance in [the history of] Roman institutions, for by this law the plebeians were released from the feudal liability of becoming liege vassals of the nobles on account of debts, for which the nobles used to compel the plebeians to work for them, often for life, in their private prisons [612]. But the senate retained the sovereign dominion it had over the lands of the Roman imperium, though the imperium itself had already passed to the people. And under the provisions of the senatus consultum which was called ultimum, of last resort, the senate kept this power for itself by force of arms as long as the Roman commonwealth remained free.

This is the Hermes who, on the authority of Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods [3.22.56], was called by the Egyptians [Thoth or] Theuth (from which the Greeks are said to have derived theos),

Varro had the diligence to collect thirty thousand names of gods—for the Greeks counted that many. These were related to as many needs of the physical, moral, economic, or civil life of the earliest times.

Men at first feel without perceiving, then they perceive with a troubled and agitated spirit, finally they reflect with a clear mind.

(omne ignotum pro magnifico est).

It is another property of the human mind that whenever men can form no idea of distant and unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar and at hand.

132 Legislation considers man as he is in order to turn him to good uses in human society. Out of ferocity, avarice, and ambition, the three vices which run throughout the human race, it creates the military, merchant, and governing classes, and thus the strength, riches, and wisdom of commonwealths.

195 This same axiom with its preceding postulate should make it clear to us that for a long period of time the impious races of the three children of Noah, having lapsed into a state of bestiality, went wandering like wild beasts until they were scattered and dispersed through the great forest of the earth, and that with their bestial education giants had sprung up and existed among them at the time when the heavens thundered for the first time after the flood [369ff].

Homer, whose own language was certainly heroic, in five passages from his two poems [437] mentions a more ancient language and calls it “the language of the gods.

He lays down as an axiom Dio’s dictum that “custom is like a king and law1 like a tyrant; which we must understand as referring to reasonable custom and to law1 not animated by natural reason.

C6 Now Vico here agrees with Aristotle. When he calls the world of nations the world of men, he means that what were beasts in the world of nature become men in the world of nations, and it is by the becoming of the world of nations that they become men. Or, as he puts it otherwise, in a sense they make the world of nations, and in the same sense they make themselves by making it [367, 520, 692].

It is in the connection between the philosophical concern with eternal necessity and the philological concern with the things produced by choice and human will that the ‘‘newness’’ of Vico’s new science lies. Vico’s claims in the De constantia are another way to see how he is a philosopher in only a general sense. Vico is in fact a jurisprudent whose subject is ‘‘the jurisprudence of the human race’’ and whose ‘‘constancy’’ includes philosophy. Vico is the jurisprudent first and the philosopher second. Vico’s concern, extending from the Universal Law to the New Science, is to provide a constancy of judgment, not as a means by which we can interpret a given body of law but as a way in which we can interpret the ‘‘law of the nations’’ itself. Constancy is not simply the consistency of making the same judgment over and over. It requires the knowledge and balancing of opposites as they bear on particular human events. ‘‘counsel and constancy. ordination of omen, onus and orbit. distribution of danger, duty and destiny. polar principles’’ (FW 271.R 1–13).

The constancy of philosophy is based on a proper comprehension of our own human nature. Vico’s purpose in De constantia philosophiae is to combine Platonic philosophy with Christian doctrine and to distinguish it from the falsity of Stoic and Epicurean philosophy, in terms of both their metaphysical and their moral doctrines. Vico begins his treatment of philosophy by calling attention to the Augustinian distinction of nosse, velle, and posse (knowledge, will, and power) and reminds the reader that these are the basis of all divine and human learning (De con. philos., ch. 1; see also Notae in lib. alt., no. 3). He emphasizes the sense in which these three elements are the basis of the definition of God and are also the principles necessary to the mind for any science, and for virtue. Vico understands these elements as a circle that goes from God to man to God, from the infinite mind to the human mind, in such a way that the human mind is taken back to its dependency on the divine (De uno, conclusio).

As Augustine does at greater length in the City of God, Vico in De constantia philosophiae determines what in pagan philosophy is in agreement with Christian doctrine. He says that first of all skepticism must be diminished, above all in moral doctrine. Vico does not here present an argument against skepticism. He simply claims that there are notions of the eternally true, possessed universally by the human race. He says that skeptics are dan- gerous to the civil order because they will prove there is justice in human affairs one day and refute it the next. This would make the skeptics worse than the poets in Plato’s criticism in the Republic. The poets are dangerous to society because they present the gods as involved in both good and bad conduct and have no standard of virtue by which to judge. The poets are naive, but the skeptics, as Vico portrays them, are deliberate in their attempt to show there is no moral standard.

Vico’s remedy for skepticism is to have us perceive the common notions of humanity, the chief of which is God as infinite mind. If this is unsuccessful, Vico’s remedy is like that of Plato with the poets—to banish the skeptics from society, as he says the Skeptic Carneades was once driven from Rome (De con. philos., ch. 2). In the Ancient Wisdom Vico gives an argument against the skeptics, based on his principle that the true is the made. He claims that the skeptics admit effects and that they admit that effects have their own causes. But they claim to be ignorant of the nature of these causes, denying that they can know the genera or forms by which each thing is made. Vico claims that even the skeptic must admit that we can come to know those things that are made in the human mind by combining postulates. There must be a ground for this activity that contains all forms and causes. To possess all forms and causes requires an infinite mind whose activity is imitated in the making of what is true by the finite mind.

The skeptic can argue back at Vico. But, as Vico holds in the Universal Law, skepticism is ultimately not an intellectual matter but a social matter. There cannot be a society of skeptics. Neither could there be what Polybius believes—a society of philosophers (De con. philos., ch. 4; cf. NS 179, 1043, 1110). All societies require religion, and all philosophers require society in which to live. There is no society whose basis is pure reason. Vico’s ultimate answer to skepticism is his conception of ‘‘true heroic wis- dom’’ (‘‘vere heroica sapientia’’), which is: ‘‘To know with natural facility the external trues, to act with everyone and in every case with full and open freedom, to speak always truly, and to live with complete delight of the spirit [animus], in a way that conforms to reason’’ (De uno, ch. 19). This conception of ‘‘heroic wisdom’’ foreshadows Vico’s conception of ‘‘heroic mind’’ in his oration of 1732, where it becomes a doctrine of human education. The answer to the skeptic is ultimately the Socratic attempt simply to continue to philosophize. In the additions Vico wrote to the New Science in 1731, he explains skepticism as a symptom of the third age in ‘‘ideal eternal history,’’ when society becomes wholly secular. Skepticism is a corruption of Socrates’s doc- trine that he ‘‘knows nothing.’’ In Socrates’s hands it is a heroic principle that motivates the pursuit of truth and virtue; in the hands of the Skeptics it is a principle of the nothingness of thought (see Vico’s ‘‘demonstration by historical fact against skepticism,’’ NS 1363–64).

As Vico portrays heroic wisdom in the above passage it is social, a way to thinking that instructs, delights, and moves. The skeptic is unable to attempt heroism of thought. The skeptic suffers from a lack of courage, a timidity of soul, and little can be done about it by way of a cure. Heroic wisdom is connected to piety ( pietas), which is dutifulness not only toward God in Chris- tian doctrine but also, as in Platonic philosophy, toward parents, relatives, and one’s native country or city (De con. philos., ch. 4). Vico’s last words in the New Science are that this science is inseparably bound to the study of piety, and ‘‘he who is not pious cannot be truly wise’’ (NS 1112). Wisdom, as Joyce says, requires ‘‘a genuine dash of irrepressible piety’’ (FW 470.30–31) that the skeptic is unable to reach. Vico takes from Plato, but more accurately from the Christian Neo-Platonic tradition, three metaphysical doctrines: ideas as eternal truths, the immortality of the spirit or animus, which is subsumed under the human mind or mens as the seat of the eternal truths, and divine providence, that is, the divine mind that governs the eternal order of things and that is the ground whereby we come to know the eternal truths. Against these three doctrines Vico places the metaphysics of the Stoics and the Epicureans. He rejects the doctrine of fate ( fatum) of the Stoics because it denies free will. He rejects the doctrine of chance (casus) of the Epicureans because it explains everything in terms of void and body, denying the incorporeality of the mind.

In his letter to Abbé Esperti on the nature and publication of his First New Science (1726), Vico associates the Stoic idea of fate or ‘‘deaf Necessity’’ (‘‘sorda Necessità’’) with Descartes, as opposed to the chance or ‘‘blind Fortune’’ (‘‘cieca Fortuna’’) of Epicurus.≤≤ Vico also partially identifies chance with Locke.≤≥ He says that today thought fluctuates between these two alter- natives, not attempting to regulate Fortune by reason or attempting to moder- ate Necessity where possible. This is Vico’s fork, and the movements of mod- ern thought are always caught on one tine or the other. Vico says his own doctrine is based on the idea of divine providence. Vico’s metaphysics of providence combines the general necessity of the divine order of things with the contingency of specific acts of free will. Providence is a metaphysical principle of the true and the certain. It is authority as an agency of rational choice that operates within the rational order of the nature of things. The ultimate metaphysical principle that guides the constancy of the jurisprudent is providence. Its analogue in universal law is Vico’s ius gentium naturale, which in the New Science becomes part of Vico’s ‘‘ideal eternal history.

Vico rejects the moral philosophy of both the Stoics and the Epicureans. Vico is against the indifference to society of the Stoic ideal of autarkeia and against the ethic of the cultivation of the pleasurable state of mind of Epicurus’s ideal of ataraxia. Vico’s specific criticisms of each moral position re- duce to the sense in which each of these positions is self-involved. The Stoic withdraws into the self-sufficient individual, and the Epicurean withdraws the individual into the garden. Vico puts this most succinctly in his autobiography: ‘‘For they are each a moral philosophy of solitaries: the Epicurean, of idlers inclosed in their own little gardens; the Stoic, of contemplatives who endeavor to feel no emotion’’ (A 122). Moral philosophy for Vico is part of civil wisdom, which functions in the agora. Moral philosophy has its roots and purpose in the jurisprudential, in the wisdom that governs human affairs, prudentially based in the divine providential order of things. Vico sees the truth in Christian morality as resting on its emphasis on the divinity of the human mind over the claims of the body.

Only human beings, Vico says, are free. Liberty and its two parts, dominion and tutelage, are the sources of all laws and civil society (ch. 4; De uno, 74). A human being is born free, and this freedom takes the two basic shapes of the right to property, to ownership of what is necessary and useful to the person’s existence, and the right to protect oneself against transgression. Without these three just powers of humanity there can be no civil society. Vico’s principles of humanity as given here are jurisprudential. In the New Science his principles of humanity remain three in number, but they appear as social institutions rather than rights: religion, marriage, and burial. Vico’s three rights in the Universal Law derive from human nature itself. Vico’s three principles in the New Science are claimed to be customs observed by all nations, whether barbarous or civilized (NS 333). Vico conceives of these principles anthropologically: they are what denote a human community as opposed to an animal society.

Having said that from pudor and libertas comes liberalitas, Vico does not discuss this further. Associated with the studia humanitatis, which Vico con- nects to the general meaning of humanitas, is Cicero’s term artes liberales (liberalis, relating to freedom). The liberal arts are the ‘‘humanities.’’ ‘‘Liberality’’ is the quality or state of being free, of kindness, courtesy, or generosity. If we speculatively extend Vico’s mention of liberalitas it suggests that the law, once beyond the enactment and support of rights basic to human nature, contains and promotes a humane wisdom. Law extends the original feeling of common humanity that takes shape in the basic uses of language in human society. This humane wisdom is justice, in the Platonic and humanist sense of proportion or balance in the faculties of the soul, and in the order of society. Vico adds to his principles of humanity two principles of history. He says universal history is the history of things and the history of words (rerum et verborum). Etymology is the history of words, and mythology is the first history of things (ch. 7). This establishes the detailed exposition of Varro’s obscure period of the nations that is reformulated as ‘‘poetic wisdom’’ (sa- pienza poetica) in the second book of the New Science, its longest book. Etymology, as in the Cratylus, allows us access to the original meanings of the words of languages. But at the end of the Cratylus Socrates turns from words to the things themselves. Mythologies give us the first histories, as Vico ex- plains in the Dissertationes of the third book of the Universal Law. Vico says in the New Science: ‘‘The first science to be learned should be mythology or the interpretation of fables’’ (NS 51).

Vico states in the De uno that ‘‘history does not yet have its principles’’ (ch. 104). It will have its principles when ‘‘philosophy undertakes to examine philology’’ (NS 7). Vico has made his first attempt at this union in the De constantia, but in it history does not completely have its principles. Missing from Vico’s account are axioms that he formulates in the New Science. Only when we comprehend these elements do we have a full basis from which to grasp the union between philosophy and philology. It falls to the reader of the New Science to make the science for himself, but in this work Vico has presented the reader with a full philosophy of history with which to do so. In the De constantia it is symptomatic that philosophy and philology are treated in two separate books. Their union is ultimately at the hands of the jurisprudent, who must look to each and then combine them in the process of interpretation of the law.

Vico states in the De uno that ‘‘history does not yet have its principles’’ (ch. 104). It will have its principles when ‘‘philosophy undertakes to examine philology’’ (NS 7). Vico has made his first attempt at this union in the De constantia, but in it history does not completely have its principles. Missing from Vico’s account are axioms that he formulates in the New Science. Only when we comprehend these elements do we have a full basis from which to grasp the union between philosophy and philology. It falls to the reader of the New Science to make the science for himself, but in this work Vico has presented the reader with a full philosophy of history with which to do so. In the De constantia it is symptomatic that philosophy and philology are treated in two separate books. Their union is ultimately at the hands of the jurisprudent, who must look to each and then combine them in the process of interpretation of the law. powers of language that nourish the imagination and its fictions. This poetic form of the law is not false. It is the first formulation of its truth, which ‘‘bursts forth’’ from the certains of the heroic actions and practices that originally establish legal order. Jurisprudential thinking interprets the law properly only when it does so in terms of a knowledge of things divine and human, and considers how the connection between the divine and human is enacted in the various ages of the course the nations run. In this way, ‘‘We annew’’ (FW 594.15).

Vico is Joycean in that he is always forcing the reader to comprehend the double meaning or double truth of the words upon which he structures the new science. Joyce does this through puns. Vico does it through ambiguity. Ambiguity is a form of fallacy in ordinary logic, a specific instance of which is equivocation, or using a word in two senses. No argument is valid that changes the meaning of its terms in its course. In the doctrine of the syllogism this is known as the fallacy of four terms. But ambiguity is the key to poetical meaning and to much of oration. The orator will play on the various meanings of words to draw forth for his hearers a central point.

Vico’s terminology follows the principle of his oration Study Methods: to balance the moderns against the ancients. The reader is asked to have Joyce’s ‘‘two thinks at a time’’ (FW 583.7), to move between the modern and Vico’s meaning. Vico does not simply replace modern meanings with his own original ones. He repeatedly faces the reader with both.

Los gobiernos deben conformase a la naturaleza de los hombres gobernados.

Los gobiernos deben conformase a la naturaleza de los hombres gobernados, porque de la naturaleza de los hombres gobernados salen sus gobiernos.

Los gobiernos deben conformase a la naturaleza de los hombres gobernados, porque de la naturaleza de los hombres gobernados salen sus gobiernos, por eso las leyes deben ser administradas en conformidad a los gobiernos y, por esa causa, deben interpretarse a partir de la forma de los gobiernos.

Governments must conform to the nature of the people governed. This axiom indicates that, by the nature of human civil institutions, the public school of rulers is the morality of the people.

En las monarquías los héroes son los que se sacrifican por la gloria y grandeza de sus soberanos. De donde ha de concluirse que los pueblos afligidos desean a un héroe de este tipo, los filósofos lo explican y los poetas lo imaginan; pero la naturaleza civil, como hemos explicado en una dignidad, no aporta este tipo de beneficios

bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk! FW 3.15-17 n. Onomatopoeia for the sound of thunder. This is the first of 10 thunder words in Finnegans Wake, it and eight others having 100 letters and the 10th having 101 letters, making 1,001 letters that suggest the Arabian Nights or, in Wakese, “this scherzarade of one’s thousand and one nightinesses.” As a numerical palindrome, 1001 suggests the circular system of Vico and the Wake’s never-ending, never-beginning stylistic structure. In Vico’s system, the Divine Age is the first of three ages in which humanity hears the voice of God in thunder and, driven by fear (“the fright of light”) to hide in caves, pray “Loud, hear us!” “Who in the name of thunder’d ever belevin you were that bolt?” In keeping with this theme, the first thunder word is made up of many words similar to thunder in various languages: “kamminarro” (Japanese kaminari); “tuonn” (Italian tuono); “bronnto” (Greek Bronte); “thurnuk” (Gaelic tornach); “awnska” (Swedish aska); “tonner” (French tonnerre and Latin tonare); “tova” (Portuguese trovao); and “ton” (Old Rumanian tun).

Self-critique ends up in self-destruction; flow becomes glut; accretive construction becomes unwieldy exaggeration; self-reflection becomes a disappearance through petrification; gathering becomes obsessive hoarding; order becomes disorder; consumers become producers, as the audience turns on the show. Through excess, through writing being taken beyond reasonable limits of sense and on into an exuberant sense of fun, Joyce replicates the moment in the historical cycle of the ricorso, the extreme point of the historical process. He takes his writing to a distant place where it teeters through the last anarchic stage of Vico’s cycle, as it moves from one epoch to another.

How, for example, after liberating themselves from servitude to the religion of God, the creator of the world and of Adam, which alone could hold them within duty and, therefore, within society, did the impious life of those first men from whom the gentile nations arose bring them to disperse in a ferine wandering through the great forest of the earth, grown dense through saturation by the waters of the Flood? And how, constrained to seek food and water and, even more, to save themselves from the wild animals in which the great forest must unfortunately have abounded, with men frequently abandoning their women and mothers their children, and with no way of reuniting, did their descendants gradually come to forget the language of Adam and, without language or any thought other than that of satisfying their hunger, thirst and the foment of their lust, deaden all sense of humanity?

As a result of all these difficulties, [the solution to the mode of] the division of the fields must be sought exclusively in religion. For when men are ferocious and wild, and their only equality consists in the equality of their ferocious and wild natures, should they ever have united without the force of arms or the rule of law, the only possible way in which they can have done so is through belief in the force and strength of a nature superior to anything human and through the idea that this superior force has constrained them to unite. This leads us led to meditate on the long and deceptive labour of Providence, whereby those of Grotius’s simpletons who were more awakened from their stupor, were roused by the first thunderbolts after the Flood and took them to be the warnings of a divinity who was the product of their own imagination. Hence they occupied the first empty lands, where they stayed with certain women and, having settled on them, begot certain races, buried their dead and, on specific occasions afforded them by religion, burnt the forests, ploughed the land and sowed it with wheat. Thus they laid down the boundaries of the fields, investing them with fierce superstitions through which, in ferocious defence of their clans, they defended them with the blood of the impious vagabonds who came, divided and alone, for they lacked any under standing of the strength of society, to steal the wheat, and were killed in the course of their theft.

Achilles replies that there is no equality of right between the weak and the strong, for men have never made pacts with lions nor have lambs and wolves ever shared the same desires. This was the law of the heroic gentes, based on the belief that the strong were of a different and more noble nature than the weak. Hence arose that law of war through which, by force of arms, the victors deprive the defeated of all their rights of natural liberty, so that the Romans took them as slaves in place of material things.

As a result of all these difficulties, [the solution to the mode of] the division of the fields must be sought exclusively in religion. For when men are ferocious and wild, and their only equality consists in the equality of their ferocious and wild natures, should they ever have united without the force of arms or the rule of law, the only possible way in which they can have done so is through belief in the force and strength of a nature superior to anything human and through the idea that this superior force has constrained them to unite. This leads us led to meditate on the long and deceptive labour of Providence, whereby those of Grotius’s simpletons who were more awakened from their stupor, were roused by the first thunderbolts after the Flood and took them to be the warnings of a divinity who was the product of their own imagination. Hence they occupied the first empty lands, where they stayed with certain women and, having settled on them, begot certain races, buried their dead and, on specific occasions afforded them by religion, burnt the forests, ploughed the land and sowed it with wheat. Thus they laid down the boundaries of the fields, investing them with fierce superstitions through which, in ferocious defence of their clans, they defended them with the blood of the impious vagabonds who came, divided and alone, for they lacked any under standing of the strength of society, to steal the wheat, and were killed in the course of their theft.

Monarchies conform best to human nature and therefore constitute the most durable form of state.

Esas naciones, en cuanto poseedoras de religiones y leyes propias, y para la defensa de sus leyes y religiones, dotadas de sus propias armas, y cultivando la lengua de sus religiones y leyes: naciones, pues, propiamente libres, cuanto más se desasieren de tales cosas, más pronto irán a extinguirse entre el furor de las guerras civiles, en las que prorrumpen los pueblos que huellan sus leyes y religiones: y entonces por designio de la Providencia van así a someterse a otros pueblos que las conservan.

Nations that have their own religions and laws, cultivating the language appropriate to them, and which they defend with their own arms, such nations alone are properly free. But Providence ordains that when nations lack these things, rather than annihilate themselves in the rash of civil wars that breakout when peoples trample on their laws and religions, they proceed to submit themselves to preservation under other better nations.

Hence Polybius is refuted by the fact that had there been no religion in the world there would have been no philosophers in it. Thus true, then, is his claim that had there been philosophers in the world, there would never have been need of any religion! Thus also is Bayle, with his belief that nations can reign without religions, refuted by fact. For, without a provident God, there would have been no states in the world other than those of wandering, bestiality, ugliness, violence, ferocity, depravity and blood, and probably, or even certainly, throughout the great forest of the earth, hideous and mute, mankind would not now exist.

For Vico civilisation starts when three basic conditions are met: the establishment of a religion, marriage rites, and burial rites.

Vico’s name for this process in the Age of Men, by which reason comes to undermine the social bonds that hold a civilisation together, is ‘The Barbarism of Reflection’.

The brilliance of Vico lies in his anticipation of many currents of thought that would follow him, including the Romantics, Friedrich Nietzsche (whose idea that ‘God is dead’ in many ways fulfils Vico’s prophesy), the cultural relativism of Oswald Spengler, and various postmodern critics of the second half of the twentieth century who shared his scepticism about the Enlightenment.