Giambattista Vico: Principles of the New Science of Giambattista Vico Concerning the Common Nature of Nations. Book Two: Poetic Wisdom. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch translation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.

 

“The nature of everything born or made betrays the crudeness of its origin”—man very much included (II.361). “Throughout this book it will be shown that as much as the poets had first sensed in the way of vulgar wisdom, the philosophers later understood in the way of esoteric wisdom; so that the former may be said to have been the sense and the latter the intellect of the human race” (II.363) (emphasis added).

By “wisdom,” Vico means “the faculty which commands all the disciplines by which we acquire all the sciences and arts that make up humanity,” the faculty that perfects both intellect and will or spirit (II.364). Whereas the highest things are oriented toward God, the best things are oriented toward “the good of all mankind”; lest anyone take him to mean that the highest, divine things are not the best, Vico immediately adds that “true wisdom…should teach the knowledge of divine things in order to conduce human things to the highest good” (II.364). 

How to achieve, or at least approach, wisdom? “Divination” or the knowledge of good and evil was prohibited by God, and this prohibition is the foundation of Judaism and Christianity (II.365). Human beings must understand God’s intention in this: hence theology. There are three kinds of theology: poetic theology, embodying “the civil theology of all the gentile nations”; natural theology, propounded by metaphysicians; and “our Christian theology, “a mixture of civil and natural with the loftiest revealed theology,” united “in the contemplation of divine providence” (II.366). Vico thus directs his reader’s attention to the providential or ‘historical’ aspect of the divine instead of (for example) God’s attributes. This is because poetic/civil, natural, and revealed theology appeared in that order, over time. “Divine providence has so conducted human things that starting from the poetic theology which regulated them by certain sensible signs believed to be divine counsels sent to man by the gods, and by means of the natural theology which demonstrates providence by eternal reasons which do not fall under the senses, the nations were disposed to receive revealed theology in virtue of a supersensual faith, superior not only to the senses but to human reason itself” (II.366). The New Science, “our science” of philology, “comes to be at once a history of the ideas, the customs, and the deeds of mankind. From these three we shall derive the principles of the history of human nature, which we shall show to be the principles of universal history, which principles it seems hitherto to have lacked” (II.366). The eminent Bishop of Meaux, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, had written his Universal History in the previous century. Vico evidently is not impressed with the work of the eminent Catholic divine.

Vico gives an example of how philology works to uncover the truth about ancient peoples. Throughout their history, he writes, the Hebrews remained men of “the proper stature” for human beings because their laws required cleanliness of them (II.371). Meanwhile, gentile children wallowed in their own filth, absorbing “nitrous salts” which fertilized them, making them grow to gigantic stature. In those days, there were giants, and that is why (II.371). The Cyclopes lived in caves, had no civic life. According to philology, the Greek word for polity, politeia, derives from the Latin politus, which means clean, neat. Gentiles only came out of their caves, out of the woods, when the founders of the first settlements enforced cleanliness, bringing the inhuman or pre-human gentiles back to the right size. 

The divine pervades the first poetry because the giants imagined things they didn’t understand to be gods; they were animists, believing themselves to be surrounded by natural things they supposed divine. “All the theories of the origin of poetry” from Plato to the moderns are wrong (II.384). Homer was no philosophic poet purveying esoteric wisdom founded on reason; “the wisdom of the ancients was the vulgar wisdom of the lawgivers who founded the human race,” giants who brought other giants out of their caves, out of the wilderness (II.384). This wisdom had nothing to do with “the esoteric wisdom of great and rare philosophers,” who, if anything, have prevented the production of similarly sublime poetry by subjecting poetry to rational analysis (II.384). Sublime means a thing that sublimates; ancient poetry and ancient lawgiving were sublime because they sublimated the savagery of the giants. Book Two concerns this poetic or vulgar wisdom.

It was the ancient lawgivers who turned the superstitious religion of the giants to good use by presenting law as divine, interpreting thunder as the rebuke of the giants’ way of life by angry gods, thereby frightening the giants out of the wilderness, away from their wandering, nomadic way of life, and into the clearings, into settlements, where they could begin to live a civil life. The philological evidence Vico cites for this is that the word for law, ius, is a contraction of ious, Jove. This was the civil theology of the ancients, seen in their poetry.

Vico considers poetic wisdom in ten dimensions. The first five are human topics: logic, morals, economy, politics, history; the second five non-human physical topics: physics cosmography, astronomy, chronology, and geography. There was a kind of logic in ancient poetry, but it wasn’t syllogistic. Ancient wisdom had a ‘metaphysical’ aspect insofar as it “contemplate[d] things in all the forms of their being”; it was logical “insofar as it consider[ed] things in all the forms by which they may be signified” (II.400). But it did not express these forms in words, as philosophers prior to Vico had supposed. In the beginning, logos was mute; it consisted of ideas of a certain sort. Indeed, “it is the eternal property of religions that they attach more importance to meditation than to speech” (II.401) The ancient poets often produced fables; irony, that technique of Socrates, is the product of a more reflective age. [1] 

Speech nonetheless existed, even if contemplation or meditation was prior to it. Language should be understood historically. The “first men of the gentile world conceived ideas of things by imaginative characters of animate and mute substances”; that is, they supposed them to be divinities (II.408). They expressed themselves initially not in words but in gestures or by holding up physical objects that served as symbols of their ideas, such as swinging a scythe three times to represent three years. “They thus expressed themselves by a language with natural significations” (II.431). It is this strong connection with nature, albeit nature misconceived as divine, that we owe the diversity of languages. That is, not from a divine curse hurled at the Tower of Babel. The settlements in clearings outside of the wilderness existed in different places with different climates; the peoples thus settled acquired “their different natures and customs,” resulting in different languages (II.445). That human beings are nonetheless all of the same species may be seen in their proverbs, those “maxims of human life” which are “the same in substance but expressed from as many points of view as there are or have been different nations” (II.445). In addition to these national differences originating in nature, each language also registered the difference between the aristocrats and the many, the vulgar, the plebs. “This is confirmed by the two languages of which Homer speaks: the one of gods, the other of men, which we have interpreted as the heroic and the vulgar language, respectively” (II.443). One should pause to admire “interpreted.”

If we count the languages of gods, heroes, and ordinary men as three languages, all of these “began at the same time,” inasmuch as the gentiles’ gods were imagined by the gentiles themselves (II.446). The three languages differed. The language of the gods remained “almost entirely mute”; the language of the aristocratic heroes mixed articulateness and muteness in equal measure; the language of the vulgar was talkative (II.446). Heroic speech thus began with the compressed, metaphorical language of poetry, not with discursive prose, which may be seen in the fables of the vulgar. Poets form poetic speech “by associating particular ideas,” as in the metaphorical phrase, “the blood boils in my heart” (II.460). Prosaic writers ‘abstract’ from such particularity, taking “the blood, the boiling, and the heart” and making “of them a single word,” anger (II.460). “By means of these vulgar genera, both of words and letters, the minds of the peoples grew quicker and developed powers of abstraction, and the way was thus prepared for the coming of the philosophers, who formed intelligible genre,” making logos into logic, the ability to find contradictions in custom-bound speech (II.460). Significantly, in section 465 Vico folds Hebrew poetry into this ‘gentile’ framework. Later, in a footnote to section 499, he describes Bacon’s inductive method as the logical capstone of philosophy.

More immediately, the development of language permitted the development of law, said to be divinely inspired (as seen in the philological connection between ‘law’ and ‘Jove,’ mentioned earlier). “This shows that all the nations were born in the persuasion of divine providence,” although it must be said that this persuasion was derived from the imagination (II.473). Here, Vico prudently exempts the Hebrews, who worshipped “the true All Highest, who is above the heavens,” not a natural object or force on earth or in the sky (II.481). Among the gentiles, law and right were derived from strength; the rule of the best, the aristocrats, was really the rule of the strong, “the fathers in the family state” which preceded the civil state, the owners of property (II.490). “The so-called commonwealths of the optimates were also commonwealths of the few”; there was nothing ‘common’ about their wealth (II.490). 

This “history of human ideas” disproves the “popular belief in the superlative wisdom of the ancients” (II.499). The ancient lawgiver-heroes worked independently of one another, establishing various sets of customs in the various climates in which they settled and began to civilize the pre-human (yet also formerly human, deformed-human) giants, whose inhuman giantism had resulted from childhood wallowing in filth, which acted like fertilizer. There was no universal law among the ancient gentiles, and thus no superlative wisdom worthy of the term ‘philosophy.’ There was a sort of lower wisdom, whereby the heroic lawgivers got the giants out of the wilderness by manipulating their superstitious beliefs in terrifying gods. 

Poetic morality has a similarly modest origin. The “vulgar virtues” were “taught by religion through the institution of matrimony” (II.502). It is true that “the metaphysics of the philosophers, by means of the idea of God, fulfills its first task, that of clarifying the human mind, which needs logic so that with clear and distinct ideas”—as Descartes had said—it “may shape its reasonings, and descend therewith to cleanse the heart of man with morality” (II.502). But in the poetic age, that was a long way off. The lawgivers of the “poet giants, who had warred against heaven in their atheism,” vanquished the giants with “the terror of Jove, whom [the giants] feared as the wielder of the thunderbolt” (II.502). The lawgivers worked not by reason, which would have had no effect, but “by the senses, which, however false in the matter, were true enough in their form—which was the logic conformable to such natures as theirs” (II.502). The lawgivers made them “god-fearing,” and this was “source of their poetic morality,” which induced the giants “humble themselves” (II.502). To this day, “atheists become giants in spirit,” ready to assail Heaven in their folly (II.502). Thus, “poetic morality began with piety,” as “religion alone has the power to make us practice virtue, as philosophy is fit rather to discuss it” (II.503). Religion simply is “fear of divinity,” and it caused the giants to want to settle in safe places outside the wilderness, not to wander exposed to its dangers (II.503). 

Sexual activity moved indoors, as fear of the gods led to shame in exposing oneself to their gaze. This enabled lawgivers to introduce the custom of marriage, which removes shame from sexual activity by making it sacred in the eyes of the gods. Religion and shame bind thus bind nations together, while impiety and shamelessness destroy them. Marriage bound families together under the gods, as “husbands shared their first human ideas with their wives” (II.506). “From this first point of all human institutions gentile men began to praise the gods” (II.506). These original gods were a chaste and sober lot. Later depictions of their behavior as amoral merely registers the decadence of the poets of later generations.

In turn, religion “gave birth to all the arts of humanity” (II.508). It gradually changed the nature of giants, who became “the first men,” who began to exhibit prudence, justice, moderation (as seen in marriage to one woman), and made them strong, industrious, and even magnanimous (II.516). “Such were the virtues of the golden age, which was not, as effeminate poets later pictured it, an age in which pleasure was law” (II.516). The first men “took pleasure only in what was permitted and useful, as is still the case, we observe, with peasants” (II.516). Nor do philosophers guess right when they claim that the golden age men “read the eternal laws of justice in the bosom of Jove” (II.516). “This vulgar tradition together with the false belief in the matchless wisdom of the ancients tempted Plato to a vain longing for those times in which philosophers reigned or kings were philosophers” (II.522). No, these first men had “the virtues of the senses,” mixing “religion and cruelty, whose affinity may still be observed among witches” and were then seen in the practice of human sacrifice, which Vico calls “inhuman humanity”—inhuman in its cruelty but human in its self-humbling piety, its eagerness to appease the feared gods (II.517). The golden age was no age of innocence, whether of innocent pleasure or innocent communion with Jove. Initially, the innocence of the Golden Age was only “the extreme savagery of the Cyclopes” (II.547). “In fact, it was a fanaticism of superstition which kept the first men of the gentiles, savage, proud, and most cruel as they were, in some sort of restraint by main terror of a divinity they had imagined,” poetically (II.518). This is why modern Enlightenment philosophes are wrong. “No nation in the world was ever founded on atheism” (II.518). To do so would only cause men to revert to savagery, as seen in the Jacobin terror and the later, far vaster, reigns of terror imposed by the ideological rulers of modern tyrannies, some two centuries after Vico.

Vico next turns to the oikonomia or household management of the first humans. The first men, he has said, taught the first women about the gods, after households had been established. Educere, he writes, means education of the spirit or will; educare means education of the body; both mean bringing forth of the human from within the giants’ souls and bodies. “In those times, full of arrogance and savagery because of the fresh emergence from bestial liberty,” there was monarchic rule within each household but not in the societies as such, as “one cannot conceive of either fraud or violence by which one man could subject all the others to a civil monarchy” (II.522). 

They could, however, subject some of the others. Household economy was based on fathers laboring to leave a patrimony for their sons. Some of the fathers were able to control the water supply, thereby dominating the other families, who became the plebeians. “Apropos of all this, we often read in Holy Writ of Beer-sheba, ‘well of the oath’ or ‘oath of the well'”—another sly blurring of the distinction between gentiles and the Hebrews (II.527). [2] The increasingly aristocratic fathers, who took themselves to be gods, also established property, setting and maintaining boundaries on the earth to supplement their control over water. Pace Locke, this was no “deliberate agreement among men…carried out with justice and respected in good faith”; there was no “armed public force” and “no civil authority of law” (II.550). “It cannot be understood save as taking place among men of extreme wildness, observing a frightful religion which had fixed and circumscribed them within certain lands, and whose bloody ceremonies had consecrated their first walls” (II.550). When Remus jumps over the fence demarcating his property from Romulus’ property, Romulus kills him, “consecrat[ing]” with his brother’s blood “the first walls of Rome” (II.550). This happened everywhere. “The natural law of the gentes was by divine providence ordained separately for each people, and only when they became acquainted did they recognize it as common to all” (II.550). This ‘sanctified’ establishment of settlements, households, and property, ruled by fathers for the benefit of sons, shows why “it was the perpetual custom of the nobles to be religious” and, moreover, why it is “a strong sign of the downfall of a nation when the nobles disprize their native religion,” as occurred in Rome and as was happening in the Europe of Vico’s time (II.551). 

The fact that fathers provided for their children has led both philologists and philosophers mistakenly to suppose that “the families in the so-called state of nature” were what we now call ‘nuclear’ families, consisting exclusively of aristocrats (II.552). Not so. They included famuli, also—the weak, the plebeian, the men whose motive never rose above the useful. Such families were protected by the strong while serving as their slaves. “To distinguish the sons of the heroes from those of the famuli, the former were called liberi, free” (II.556). But this surely did not mean refinement or delicacy, the way of life seen in the modern titled aristocrats. “Among the ancient Romans the family fathers had a sovereign power of life and death over their children and a despotic dominion over the property they acquired, so that down to imperial times there was no difference between sons and slaves as holders of property” (II.556). Rather, liberi meant not only rule over property but nobility, “so that artes liberales are noble arts, and liberalis kept the meaning of well-born, and liberalitas that of the gentility” (II.556). “Only nobles were free in the first cities,” and these were the seeds of fiefdom, Vico maintains in section 556, the central section of the 1744 edition.

Because there were no contracts in the heroic age, insufficient trust among patriarchs to allow contracts to be struck, barter was the basis of commerce and ground rent was the only kind of rent. There were no partnerships. The rule of ancient civil law was, “No one may acquire by a person not under his power” (II.577). And those under the power of the aristocrats could not form legal marriages, sanctified marriages, only “natural marriages” (II.579). 

Household life led to political life, the life not of contracts and of democracy but of a severely aristocratic “poetic politics” (II.582). “Since the fathers were sovereign kings of their families, the equality of their state and the fierce nature of the cyclopes being such that no one of them naturally would yield to another, there sprang up of themselves the reigning senates, made up of so many family kings” (II.584). They did this “without discernment or counsel,” uniting “their private interests in a common interest called patria, which, the word res being understood, means ‘the interest of the fathers'” (II.584). The nobles were henceforth called patricians, “the only citizens of the first patriae, or fatherlands” (II.584). In this way, “in the earliest times kings were chosen by nature,” not by deliberation and choice solemnized by contract (II.584). Hence Moses describes the descendants of Esau as “kings” (II.585). Indeed, “one cannot conceive in civil nature any reason why the fathers, in such a change of forms of government, should have altered anything of what they had had in the state of nature, save to subject their sovereign family powers to these reigning orders of theirs”; it is “the nature of the strong…to surrender as little as possible for what they have acquired by valor, and only so much as is necessary to preserve their acquisitions” (II.585). “The eminent domain of civil states” emerged from “the paternal natural domains” (II.585). When we look at Apollo’s lyre, Vico claims, we contemplate the symbol of “the union of the cords or forces of the fathers,” united in their civil authority (II.615).

Meanwhile, the plebeians, products of natural marriages, “could not name their fathers” (II.587). Resentment and civil war followed, bringing about the formation of cities, again in the self-interest of the patricians. The patrician fathers formed “a closed order against the mutinous famuli,” an arcana imperii or secret set of laws ordained by the heroic senates (II.604). In addition to their superior strength and their superior authority, they now had superior knowledge. The owl of Minerva flies by night, that is, in secrecy, gliding from one patriarch to another while the many are civilly asleep, unaware. The rule of law in cities, of laws formulated in “the dark night of the hiding places,” began to make men more fully human, quite unintendedly (II.590). The goddess Minerva represented as wisdom was a later invention; initially, she represented the “armed aristocratic orders” (II.596).

Still, the patricians needed the plebeians to serve them. And so, “by a common sense of utility the heroes were constrained to satisfy the multitude of their rebellious clients,” negotiating “the first agrarian law in the world, under which, as the strong do, they conceded the least they could, which was bonitary ownership of the fields the heroes might choose to assign them”—a subordination justified by the protection the heroes provided to the plebeians (II.597). No rights of citizenship were granted, no intermarriage allowed. As the Roman patricians were happy to explain to the plebeians, “if they were to share with them the connubium of the nobles, the resulting offspring would be like Pan a monster of two discordant natures brought forth by Penelope who had prostituted herself to the plebeians” (II.654). Such was aristocratic political science, which Vico defines as “the science of commanding and obeying in states” (II.629). 

Two political divisions resulted: aristocrat/citizen and plebeian, aristocrat/citizen and hostis—stranger or enemy. Indeed, heroic nations regarded foreigners as “eternal enemies,” one reason why polis and polemos are near cognates, according to Vico’s rather fanciful etymology (II.639). Eventually, the Roman civil structure was re-founded upon a system of classes based on wealth, not birth. Whatever their pedigree, however, whether aristocratic or oligarchic, the rule of the few in the heroic or poetic age should not be confused with later definitions of ‘peoples’ as including the plebeians, or of liberty as a right shared with the many, or of kingship as a regime that offered succor to the many poor. And as for wars in those times, all of them were “wars of religion, which, for the reason we have taken as the first principle of this Science”—that all nations are founded on religion—made them “always extremely bitter” (II.675). “The vanquished were regarded as godless men,” rightly enslaved along with the existing plebeians (II.676). 

Poetic history is the topic of Book II’s central chapter. Vico re-emphasizes the class division of the heroic age, citing the fable of Cadmus and the dragons’ teeth as an allegory of a conflict over land between heroes and plebeians, and interpreting Achilles shield as a depiction of the history of the world. The warlike but besieged city of Troy represents the plebeians, a hostile city-within-the-city everywhere at that time.

Poetic physics posited an original Chaos, an image of cosmic forces which Vico claims was borrowed from the condition of “infamous,” Pan-like “promiscuity” among the gentiles (II.688). Out of this, Jove began “the world of men” rather as the heroes began civil life, “beginning the world of men by arousing in them the conatus”—in Spinoza, the innate force in every living creature to preserve itself—which “is proper to the liberty of the mind, just as from motion, which is proper to bodies as necessary agents, he began the world of nature” (II.689). It is noteworthy that Vico associates both human nature in particular and cosmic nature generally with motion, no perdurable form—orderly motion, to be sure, but motion, nonetheless. Although not exactly a ‘historicist’ in the later sense of the word, Vico puts motion first, only then praising the heroic civil beauty embodied by Apollo and the civil and natural beauty embodied by Venus. 

“The greatest and most important part of physics is the contemplation of man” (II.692). Such contemplation yields the claim that “the founders of gentile humanity in a certain sense generated and produced in themselves the proper human form”; gentile humanity made itself—an act of supreme poetic making (II.692). Vico treats the senses differently than any previous philosopher had done. Others had valorized the sense of hearing (whereby one heeds the Word of God), seeing (whereby one perceives the Ideas), or touch (the source of certain knowledge in Machiavelli). Viconian philology associates wisdom, sapientia, with the sense of taste, with the act of assaying. Taste is “the faculty of making those uses of things which they have in their nature, not those uses which opinion supposes them to have” (II.706). Motion, change, use: thus Vico invites his readers to understand human nature, itself made by neither by prophets, nor philosophers, nor even ‘princes’ of Machiavellian atheism, but by founders who regarded themselves as divine heroes bringing the giants out of the wilderness and into the life of human beings. 

Like all else in remote antiquity, poetic astronomy sprang from low origins. The first peoples were not scientists. They “wrote in the skies the history of the gods and their heroes”—with each nation writing its own gods and heroes into the skies, inasmuch as “nations, if not emancipated in the extreme of religious liberty (which only comes in the final stages of decadence), are naturally wary of accepting foreign deities” (II.729). For the first gentiles, “the predominating influences which the stars and the planets are supposed to have over sublunar bodies, have been attributed to them from those which the gods and heroes exercised when they were on earth. So little do they depend on natural causes!” (II.731).

Poetic chronology reaffirms Vico’s contention that monarchy is not the first but “the last form of human government,” one arising “as a result of the unchecked liberty of the peoples, to which the optimates subject their power in the course of civil wars” (II.737). With the aristocrats weakened, monarchs soon take over the rule of the people, whose liberty they initially champion against aristocratic rule but then abolish once firmly in power. The exception to this general rule was maritime Phoenicia, enriched by commerce, “remain[ing] in the stage of popular liberty” because the many had the wherewithal to defend themselves against both the few and the one (II.737).

Finally, poetic geography may be seen in the tales of the wandering ancient heroes. There were as many as “forty Herculeses among the ancient nations,” learning the features of the earth even as they brought home glory to their peoples (II.761). This manifests “the conceit of nations” (as seen, for example, in the Greeks, “who made such a stir about the Trojan War,” and the Romans, “in boasting an illustrious foreign origin” in the figure of Aeneas of Troy) (II.772). 

In sum, in these ancient stories “we have discovered the outlines of all esoteric wisdom,” particularly the science of politics, of ruling and of being ruled, written even in the earth, the stars, in all of nature by the founders of the first settlements, who also ‘founded’ or formed the first human beings after the Esavians had been deformed into giants (II.779).

 

Notes

1. Vico identifies the lawgiver Solon as the founder who brought about the transition from the fabulous to the reflective way of thinking. “He must have been a sage of vulgar wisdom, party leader of the plebs in the first times of the aristocratic commonwealth at Athens.” Athens was ruled by aristocrats or “optimates,” as was “universally the case in all the heroic commonwealths.” Considering themselves to be of heroic, indeed divine origin (demigods, like Hercules and Achilles), the aristocrats supposed that “the gods belonged to them, and consequently that the auspices of the gods were theirs also.” The auspices were their carefully guarded means of maintaining their authority over the many, the plebeians, “whom they believed to be of bestial origin and consequently men without gods and hence without auspices,” entitle only to “the uses of natural liberty.” Note well: “This is a great principle of institutions that are discussed through almost the whole of the present work.” Solon’s democratizing reform was to tell the plebeians “to reflect upon themselves and to realize that they were of like human nature with the nobles and should therefore be made equal with them in civil rights.” It was not the supposedly divine oracle at Delphi who originated the command to “Know yourself.” It was Solon. This suggests that philosophy could only become possible after a democratizing lawgiver taught the many to know their own nature. 
2. Two other examples appear fairly soon: in section 542, where Vico integrates the Biblical story of Ezekial into his framework, and section 544, where he does the same thing with the story of Job.

 

 

Giambattista Vico: Principles of the New Science of Giambattista Vico Concerning the Common Nature of Nations. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch translation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.

 

At the time Vico published his book, the phrase “new science” would have invoked Francis Bacon and his Novum Organum. As a philosopher, Bacon primary topic was commonly understood to be nature; progress in knowledge of nature would proceed by experimentation, what Bacon described as a procedure of torturing nature to force her to reveal her secrets. In the terms of ancient philosophy, Bacon was at first glance a ‘natural philosopher,’ not primarily a political philosopher, although he undeniably wrote important works of political philosophy and his natural philosophy called upon men not to contemplate nature but to conquer it.

Socrates famously turned philosophy away from the direct contemplation of nature to consideration of political opinions, laws, and customs—toward ‘political philosophy.’ He doesn’t abandon inquiry into nature but instead maintains that nature, and especially human nature, can only be understood by undertaking the dialectical testing of human conventions. 

Vico follows Socrates not in order to oppose but to supplement Bacon. In contradistinction to, but not in contradiction of, Bacon’s new science as usually understood, he offers a new science that considers “civil institutions”; in the illustration that serves as the frontispiece to his book, he has the triangle, symbol of the all-seeing eye of God—not a god like Aristotle’s, which sets the cosmos in motion, a god best understood by contemplation, but a providential God. In the old science, “Metaphysic” was considered through “the order of natural institutions/things” (E.2). [1] In the new science, Metaphysic “contemplates in God the world of human minds, which is the metaphysical world, in order to show His providence in the world of human spirits, which is the civil world or world of nations” (E.2). The common nature of nations comes to light through their civil practices. It is first of all the human mind in which we find both the nature of nations and divine providence. As he puts it, the jewel of Metaphysic is convex, scattering the Sun’s rays, God’s providence, through many nations, with many sets of civil customs. 

Vico distinguishes the nations, the gentiles, from the Israelites. As our contemporaries would say, he seemingly ‘brackets’ Israel, thereby avoiding undue controversy. The one, universal God of the Bible commands His creatures to assume one set of laws—His own. The numerous gods of the nations require something like the perspectival vision seen in the artists of the early modern period, those critics of unidimensional medieval art. If we look at the zodiac, we see the prominence of Leo and Virgo, which “more than the others, appear in majesty, or, as is said, in perspective” (E.3). But Vico immediately turns his reader away from astronomy, away from the contemplation of the heavens, toward human things, gentile things. Leo “signifies that our Science in its beginnings contemplates first the Hercules that every ancient gentile nation boasts as its founder, and that it contemplates him in his greatest labor,” killing the lion and setting fire to the Nemean forest (E.3). The lion symbolizes the wildness of that forest, which Hercules brings under cultivation. Hercules, then was “the type of the political heroes who had to precede military heroes,” since military heroes require armies, and armies require civil organization (E.3). As for Virgo, “described by the poets as crowned with ears of grain,” she signifies the Golden Age, which means the age of cultivating fields of gold, grain fields (E.3). In this Golden Age, “the poets assure us faithfully, the gods consorted on earth with the heroes” (E.3). Men of “vigorous imaginations encumbered with frightful superstitions,” poets depicted a time when men “believed that they saw the gods on earth” (E.3). In his esteem for the Herculean struggle against the wilderness that is nature and the heroism it took found the first civil societies, Vico intends to reach Bacon’s destination, but along a different pathway.

This is another reason to ‘bracket’ the not only the Hebrew Bible but the Christian Bible, which provides a record of God on earth. Vico hurries to remark the link between Leo and Virgo, the founders of the nations and their establishment of agriculture: both, he writes, invoke the matter of time, of “chronology or the theory of times” (E.3). Vico’s new science, like the calculus, the geometry of the moderns which measures points in motion, timed events, not only captures modern ‘perspectivalism’ but modern conquest of nature in time. 

But again, unlike Bacon, Vico approaches the human things primarily through human thought, the human mind, human opinion. We first see “the commencement of truly human thinking among the gentiles” in Homer (E.6). But “the true Homer” has been hidden until now; the “New Science” of philology unlocks that truth (E.6). Philology is “the doctrine of all institutions that depend on human choice” (E.7). Human choice does not seem to lend itself to a scientific account, but philosophy can now reduce philology to “the form of a science by discovering in it the design of an ideal eternal history traversed in time by the history of all nations” (E.7). Because human choice in and between nations entails politics, “our Science may be considered a philosophy of authority” (E.7). 

Vico claims that philological investigation can show the significance of the ancient fables, as seen in Homer. This provides a theogony, but a “natural theogony,” decoding accounts of the origin of gods in terms of nature (E.7). “The two poems of Homer are found to be the great treasure houses of discoveries of the natural law of the gentes among the still barbarous Greeks,” a period that lasted until the time of the first historian, Herodotus (E.7). In the two central paragraphs of his introduction, Vico explains that the New Science can distinguish “the origins of ancient words” from “those that are unquestionably of foreign origin” (E.22) This matters because native etymologies are “histories of institutions/things signified by the words in the natural order of ideas” (E.22). They trace “the order of all progress” from the woods to “cultivated fields and huts, next to little houses and villages, thence cities, finally academies and philosophers,” nation by gentile nation (E.22). What Origen does with the Bible, Vico does with Homer. Looking backward at other philosophers, Vico finds philosophic value in ancient fables in a way that Socrates (at least initially) does not, and Locke does not, at all. (Locke in fact re-writes the ancient fables, turning them to his own purposes.) [2] Looking forward to subsequent philosophers, his recourse to philology and his interest in nationality remind one, however remotely, of Heidegger.

“Among all peoples the civil world began with religion,” which animated three human institutions: marriage, burial, and property or division of the fields (E.8). Marriage is “the seed-plot of the family,” which is “the seed-plot of the commonwealth,” as in Aristotle (E.11). Philologically, the term humanitas resembles the word humande, burying; to give special attention to the dead marks a difference between human beings and all or almost all animals. Property was the first step away from the wild and scattered existence that occurred after the repudiation of family seen in the dispersion of Ham, Japheth, and Shem after surviving the universal Flood. Three “principles” derived from these institutions: solemn matrimony; belief in the soul’s immortality; and divine providence (E.13).

Each of these principles consists of a relationship between human beings and the divine. In every nation, perhaps including the Shemites before the Abrahamic covenant with one tribe of them, founding heroes—Vico calls them “Herculeses”—subdued “the lands of the world and brought them under cultivation” (E.14). Before then, men lived in forests, their bodies hidden there, their minds also hidden by the “sacred terrors” bedeviling them (E.14). These “first founders of the gentile nations” exhibited four virtues: justice (thanks to “the supposed piety of observing the auspices which they believed divine commands of Jove,” whose name philologically considered means “law”); prudence in interpreting the auspices; moderation (seen in their establishment of marriage); and strength. “Hence new principles are given to moral philosophy, in order that the esoteric [or “recondite”] wisdom of the philosophers may conspire with the vulgar wisdom of the lawmakers” (E.14). All of these virtues “have their roots in piety and religion, by which alone the virtues are made effective in action” (E.14). 

For example, the family resulting from matrimony consists of partly of sons. Unable to understand “commonwealth and laws, they are to reverence and fear their fathers as the living images of God, so as to be naturally disposed to follow the religion of their fathers and to defend their fatherland, which preserves their families for them, and so to obey the laws ordained for the preservation of their religion and fatherland” (E.14) (emphasis added). “For divine providence ordered human institutions with this eternal counsel: that families should first be founded by means of religion, and that upon the families commonwealths should then arise by means of laws” (E.14).

As to property, it initially consisted of burnt sections of the woods. (Moses, he writes, went still farther, condemning “the woods themselves to be burned wherever the people of God extended their conquests.”) (E.16) Why? So that “those who had already arrived at humanity should not again become confounded with the wanderers who remained” in the woods, “in the nefarious promiscuity of things and women”—the latter point alluding to the critical importance of solemnized marriage (E.16). And as to the “promiscuity of things,” the woods themselves consist of just such a promiscuity—trees, bushes, animals. Man separates himself from animals by emerging from the woods.

For Vico, then, cities are good; there is no Nimrod-like figure among the gentiles. There is a strict natural hierarchy in cities. As in Aristotle, “those who use their minds should command and those who use their bodies should obey” (E.18). True, given the diminished capacity of the human mind after the Fall, even the best minds need philosophy to supplement them, but only the few can benefit from philosophy—which, moreover, did not exist at the time the cities were founded. Hierarchy brings danger and benefit, as propertyless men rebelled against their rulers and, in defeat, fled to new lands, as the Israelites fled from Egypt. This distinction between the rule of the few over the many characterizes all cities, “which had at their birth a most severe aristocratic form, in which the plebeians had no share in the civil law,” as does commerce (made possible by the laws of property), and public treasuries (E.26). 

The aristocratic or heroic regimes gave way to the first “human” regimes, regimes which were “at first popular in character” (E.29) “The people had finally come to understand that the rational nature (which is the true human nature) is equal in all men” (E.29). But after bringing the aristocrats “to civil equality in popular commonwealths,” the people could not maintain their rule because rival aristocrats ruined their regimes in civil wars (E.29). It thus “came about naturally that, obeying a natural royal law or rather natural custom of human peoples, they sought protection under monarchies, which constitute the other type of human government” (E.29).

The New Science, then, is a “metaphysic,” an account, perhaps as much artful as scientific in the ordinary sense, deploying philology to study “the common nature of nations in the light of divine providence,” discovering the origins of divine and human institutions among the gentile nations,” thereby establishing “a system of the natural law of the gentiles” through three ages: the age of the gods, in which men lived in terror in the woods; the age of heroes, rule by strongman aristocrats who “held themselves” to be naturally superior to the many; and the age of man, “in which all men recognized themselves as equal in human nature,” although the political exigency of factionalism among the few brought them to call for a king (as even the Israelites did) (E.31). Each “age” had its own kind of language: first, the mute language of signs, hieroglyphic; then, the symbolic language of emblems, images, metaphors (one thinks of aristocratic heraldry); and finally, the language of “the vulgar,” consisting of word consented to by all (E.32). Hence Vico writes The New Science in Italian, the vulgar tongue, not in Latin: of course, Latin itself is already a highly developed ‘vulgar’ tongue, but by Vico’s time it was associated with a sort of aristocracy, the Catholic Church.

“We find that the principle of these origins both of language and of letters lies in the fact that the first gentile peoples, by a demonstrated necessity of nature, were poets who spoke in poetic characters” (emphasis added) (E.34). And that is “the master key of this [New] Science,” since meanings extracted from poetic fables are “not philosophical but historical.” Here is a central distinction between Vico’s understanding of nature and the understanding of nature seen in most of his philosophic predecessors. This is still nature, but it is natural history, nature conceived as if the one ‘constant’ isn’t Platonic forms or Aristotelian categories but motion itself.

Vico can now outline the structure of his book. Book One elaborates the principles illustrated on the frontispiece as decoded in the Introduction, in imitation of the procedure of finding the symbolic meanings in the aristocratic language of signs. In Book Two, “Poetic Wisdom,” and Book Three, “Discovery of the True Homer,” Vico applies the New Science or art of philology to the epic poems of the quintessentially aristocratic bard. He turns to the nations, the third “era” of man, in Book Four, showing how those nations move in Book Five.

Near the beginning of Book One, Vico exclaims, “How uncertain, unseemly, defective, or vain are the beginnings of the humanity of nations” (I.43). The nations scattered around the world in the aftermath of the Flood achieved little readily noticeable advancement in civilization until the era of classical Greece, as the Egyptians made “the greatest errors in philosophy and astronomy,” “their morality was dissolute,” their theology mere superstition, magic, and witchcraft, their arts “extremely crude” (I.45). Both they and the ancient Chinese were vain, “ascribing to themselves merits they did not have” (I.48). Greece alone, “the nation of philosophers, shone with all the fine arts that human genius has ever discovered,” thanks to the artists’ attention to “the surface of the bodies they represent” (I.45). Not for them the hieratic, stiff statuary of Egypt, bodies frozen in death. But Greek achievement rested on earlier, if less glorious, foundations, and to uncover those foundations Vico has recourse to the philological study of myths.

Although “the Hebrews were the first people in our world,” and their history is accurate (I.54), the Chaldeans were “the first gentile sages,” beginning with Zoroaster (I.55). As for the “universal history” of the gentiles, it begins with the Assyrians but “must have begun to take shape among the Chaldean people,” who had passed it to the Assyrians under Ninus, himself a Chaldean who founded the kingdom with the aid of his fellow Chaldeans and with the support of the Assyrian plebeians, not the aristocrats—a pattern similar to that seen in Rome. Zoroaster had been an aristocratic and heroic personage; Ninus overthrew and killed him (I.55). This revolution was an important step away from the heroic era. The first laws were the unwritten customs of this people. The customs, and not written laws, “established” the “natural law of the gentes,” carried to Greece, the Assyrian empire’s westernmost conquest (I.67). Ninus claimed to be the son of a god, and “fabulous history acquaints us with one of the peculiarities of this age, namely that the gods consorted with men on earth” (I.69). As for the gods themselves, Vico ascribes their origin to “the natural imaginations of the Greeks on certain occasions of human need or utility, in which they felt they had received help or comfort in the early childhood of the world, when it was overwhelmed by the most frightful religions” (I.69) The “universal profane history,” the history of the nations, begins with this poetic or imaginary theogony which, though fanciful, nonetheless bespeaks a turn in the direction of humanity, of civilization, founded on the need and/or utility of getting out of the “woods,” the realm of human terror at menacing gods, perhaps suggested to their minds by sylvan darkness and tangle (I.69). It is noteworthy that whereas most philosophers up to his time had distinguished nature from convention quite sharply—even a political philosopher, Plato’s Socrates, who begins with opinion nonetheless makes much of the rational ascent from the cave of human idols—Vico seeks nature in the conventions, in words, in poems, in fables.

The mythical teacher of humanity to the Greeks was Orpheus, in whose fictitious person perhaps a thousand years of civilization-building were compressed by myth-spinning poets. While it is likely that the Assyrians brought civilization to Greece, Orpheus as founder-sage has no stated connection to Zoroaster, the Chaldean sage. 

But what was so civilized about the Greek gods, those licentious beings who could scarcely be acceptable in polite society anywhere in the world? Vico assures his readers that this is one of the false claims that barnacled onto the original myths. These “will be avoided by the principles of this Science, which will show that such fables in their beginning were all true and severe and worthy of the founders of nations, and only later (when the long passage of years had obscured their meanings, and customs had changed from austere to dissolute, and because men to console their consciences wanted to sin with the authority of the gods) came to have the obscene meanings with which they have come down to us” (I.81). The New Science of philology scrapes such ugliness away.

Vico pauses to dispose of the claim that the Greeks received their wisdom from the Jews, via Pythagoras. Jewish priests “kept such doctrine secret even from their own plebs, whence indeed it was everywhere called sacred doctrine, for sacred is as much as to say secret” (I.95) Rather, Pythagoras and Plato “exalted themselves” “by virtue of a most sublime human science,” to acquire some of the Hebrews’ knowledge of “divine truths” (emphasis added) (I.95). This, Vico adds in a glaring non sequitur, stands as “a most luminous proof of the truth of the Christian religion” (I.95). 

Despite the vaunted power of philology, a reader might be excused to find Vico relieved at telling the story of the Romans, which comes to us in large measure from historians, not poets. The figures of its heroic age, beginning with Romulus—who “founded the city of Rome within the asylum opened in the clearing,” out of the woods— are presented in the writings of men like Livy (I.114). Roman myth as recorded by historians provides a template for “the history of all the other cities of the world in times we have so far despaired of knowing,” “an instance of an ideal eternal history traversed in time by the histories of all nations” (I.114). Yet even Roman myths as set down by Roman historians must be vetted by scholars wielding the “scientific principles” or “elements” of philology (I.118). 

“Just as the blood does in animate in bodies, so will these elements course through our Science and animate it in all its reasonings about the common nature of nations” (I.119) First, philologists must recognize the fallibility of the human mind. The mind is “indefinite”; when it doesn’t know something, it makes itself the measure of all things (I.120). Thus the tales of rumormongers often tell you more about themselves than they do about those they’re whispering about. Second, and following from this, when we can form no idea of distant and unknown things, we “judge them by what is familiar and at hand” (I.122). This is why scholars and nations imagine grander origins for things than were actually the case. Taking a group near to hand, Vico remarks that scholars “will have it that what they know is as old as the world” (I.127) that it is “the wisdom of the ancients” (I.128). In selecting Bacon’s phrase, Vico makes explicit what Bacon prefers to conceal: that the ancients weren’t especially wise at all.

Like Bacon, and like Machiavelli before him, Vico wants philosophy to be “useful to the human race,” not an exercise in theorizing (I.129). For this, “philosophy must raise and direct weak and fallen man, not rend his nature or abandon him in his corruption” (I.129). This means that philosophy, though necessarily limited to the few, can be made supremely useful, indeed; hitherto, Christians hitherto had depended upon God alone to raise and direct them. Vico makes no mention of Christians, of course, instead calling attention to two philosophic schools. The Stoics “seek to mortify the senses”; the Epicureans “make them the criterion” of judgment (I.130). That is because “both deny providence, the former chaining themselves to fate, the latter abandoning themselves to chance” (I.130). They “should be called monastic, or solitary, philosophers” (I.130). “Monastic” is a clear hint. But what is “providence” in Vico?

Consistent with the ‘Socratic turn’ he took in the Introduction, Vico cites the political philosophers, “first of all the Platonists, who agree with all the lawgivers on these three main points: that there is divine providence, that human passions should be moderated, and made into human virtues, and that human souls are immortal” (I.130). By itself, however, “philosophy considers man as he should be and so can be of service to but a very few, those who wish to live in the Republic of Plato and not to fall back into the dregs of Romulus” (I.131). Legislation, by contrast, “considers man as he is in order to turn him to good uses in human society” (I.132). Some human beings are fierce; legislation turns them into soldiers. Some are avaricious; legislation turns them into merchants. Some are ambitious; legislation turns them into “governing classes” (I.132). “Out of these three great vices, which could certainly destroy all mankind on the face of the earth, [legislation] makes civil happiness” (I.132). “This axiom proves that there is divine providence and further that it is a divine legislative mind,” one wise enough to convert the passions of men, “each bent on his private advantage, for the sake of which they would live like wild beasts in the wilderness”—as Vico has described—and “made the civil institutions by which they may live in society” (I.133). (To choose the word “wilderness” may be to allude not only the Rome but to the Israelites and their lawgiver, Moses.) In this way, the many non-philosophers, “men who do not know what is true of things, take care to hold fast to what is certain”—the authority of promulgated laws—so that, “if they cannot satisfy their intellects by knowledge (scienza), their wills at least may rest on consciousness (conscienza)” (I.137). [3]

That is where philology comes in. “Philosophy contemplates reason, whence comes knowledge of the true; philology observes that of which human choice is author, whence comes consciousness of the certain” (I.138). These two tasks should be made complementary. Philosophers have “failed” because they have not given “certainty to their reasonings by appeal to the authority of the “philologians”; philologians have also failed by “not taking care to give their authority the sanction of truth by appeal to the reasoning of the philosophers” (I.140). That is what the New Science is for; it makes philosophy useful by availing itself of solid philological research instead of idle speculation. Philologians appear to take the place of theologians, at least with regard to gentile “customs and laws” (I.139). The New Science is a political philosophy, re-founded on what Vico takes to be solider ground.

Human beings have “needs or utilities” (I.141). These are the sources of “the natural law of the gentes”—low but solid, indeed (I.141). What makes human choice, “by its nature most uncertain,” certain is neither philosophy nor scholarship but “common sense,” which is “judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire people, an entire nation, or the entire human race” (I.142). Philology provides a window through which philosophers can see into this long-entrenched common sense, back to “the founders of nations” who established the institutions and the ways of life that enable human beings to judge without reflection in a civilized way, freeing them from the bondage of the woods (I.143). Although “uniform ideas originating among entire peoples unknown to each other must have a common ground of truth” (I.144), natural law did not have one origin but “separate origins among the several peoples” (I.146) To understand these, one needs to understand those origins; the nature of institutions, customs, and laws is their origin. Their forms and purposes are secondary. The New Science is a genealogical science aimed at improving human ‘teleology’—our attempts which aim at securing our needs or utilities. [4]

Language is “a great witness to the customs of the early days of the world,” as seen in Homer’s poems (I.152). What is more, the Greeks and the French, having passed rapidly from barbarism to philosophy (rapidly, that is, in contrast with other nations), preserved the wisdom of their traditions with minimal distortions. (This is the not-so-remote ancestor of Heidegger’s claim that one can philosophize only in Greek or German.) Vico’s philology uncovers not only the separate origins of natural law among the various peoples but certain underlying, universal natural laws. He asserts that “there must be in the nature of human institutions…a mental language common to all nations, which uniformly grasps the substance of things feasible in human social life and expresses it with as many diverse modifications as these same things may have diverse aspects” (I.161). We see this in many ‘sayings’ or proverbs, shared in their substance by many nations, “ancient and modern.” With philology, “linguistic scholars will be enabled to construct a mental vocabulary common to all the various articulate languages living and dead” (I.162). Philology is for political philosophy what experimentation is for Bacon’s natural philosophy. Indeed, Bacon has set down “the best ascertained method of philosophizing,” while the New Science carries it over from the study of nature to the study of “the institutions of mankind” (I.163).

Despite some hints to the contrary, Vico continues explicitly to separate the sacred history of the Old Testament from the “profane histories that have come down to us” (I.165). Scripture is older than they are; it provides “great detail” (I.166); it describes a period of more than eight hundred years “the state of nature under the patriarchs,” which as “the state of the families out of which, by general agreement of political theorists, the peoples and cities later arose” (I.165). Profane histories provide “nothing or little, and that little quite confused,” when it comes to this state of nature (I.165). Vico takes care to say also that “the Hebrew religion was founded by the true God on the prohibition of the divination on which all the gentile nations arose” (I.167). Is there nonetheless a common ground among all peoples, Israelites and gentiles alike? “The world of peoples began everywhere with religion” because only religion can draw human beings out of savagery (I.176). Then as now, “whenever a people has grown savage in arms so that human laws have no longer any place among it, the only powerful means of reducing it is religion” (I.177). It may be prudent to assume that “peoples” refers only to the gentiles, here, that the children of Abraham never reduced themselves to savagery, although they unquestionably did deviate from God’s regime, God’s way of life, on many occasions, and religious renewal unquestionably pulls them back to the right path. 

Vico charges that Hobbes missed the providential principle of political institutions. Instead of seeing religion as necessary to civilization, Hobbes went astray, taking the materialism of the Epicureans, with its emphasis on chance concatenations of elements, and attempting to derive political institutions from that; he also attempted to take the universalism of the Stoics and, again, make that political. “Nor would Hobbes have conceived this project if the Christian religion had not given him the inspiration for it, though what it commands is not merely justice but charity toward all mankind” (I.179). That is, even the atheist Hobbes was ‘inspired’ by a religion, a universalist religion. Religion forms the social and political substratum of politics and philosophy or, more accurately the generative cause of them. Vico rejects “the false dictum of Polybius, “that if there were philosophers in the world there would be no need of religions” (I.179). On the contrary, “without religions no commonwealths can be born, and if there were no commonwealths in the world there would be no philosophers in it” (I.179). The false doctrine of Polybius sounds also rather like that of the Enlightenment philosophes.

It is also true that human beings often misunderstand religion. Many explain causation as the continuous, direct intervention of God in the course of events. This “physics of the ignorant” simply “refer[s] the causes of things they do not know to the will of God without considering the means by which the divine will operates” (I.182). Both children and as-yet uncivilized peoples exercise their imagination, not reason. They are poetical, not rational, when they conceive of their gods and their heroes. “Poetry founded gentile humanity” (I.214). Between the subhuman wilderness ‘men’ who felt without perceiving and the fully civilized men who “reflect with a clear mind,” lived the poetic humans who “perceive with a troubled and agitated spirit” (I.218), “vent[ing] great passions by breaking into song” (I.229) and “form[ing] their first languages by singing” (I.228). Reflect: it takes time and effort for the mind to develop the capacity to look into itself. Vico cites as “the universal principle of etymology in all languages” the way “words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to signify the institutions of the mind and spirit” (I.237) In fact, the word “spirit” initially meant “wind.” 

Such philological inquiry has led Vico to provide an outline of human habitats, feelings, sensibilities, types, and regimes. When living in the forests, men felt the weight of sheer necessity; their sensibility was crude, their characteristic human type large and grotesque (as seen poetically in Homer’s Cyclopes). The political regime was patriarchy in an extended family. Once having secured themselves against immediate necessities, human beings began to reach out for the useful. They lived in huts; their sensibility was severe, as befits the proud and magnanimous Achilles. Politically, they were ruled by aristocrats—warrior spirits nonetheless careful about going to war, “lest they make warriors of the multitude of plebeians” (I.273). Eventually, the aristocrats began to seek comfort in addition to necessary and useful things. They moved the people into villages; their sensibility became benign, and the characteristic human type became ‘an Aristides,’ that is, valorous and just. This brought popular liberty. Villages then became cities, wherein liberty began to decline as secure comfort enabled rulers to achieve luxury, fostering either vulgarly glorious sensibilities (Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar) or the melancholy and reflect sensibility of a Marcus Aurelius. (“Civil servitude is clapped on with goods of fortune not essential to life.”) (I.290). The regime consonant with those kinds of souls in monarchy, and it is also in the cities where academies were first established. Whether from luxury, from academies, or some malign combination of the two, the final step is dissolution and madness, as seen in Caligula, who could go from turning a phrase to severing a head. The result of such men is the overthrow of monarchy, but the many may become tyrants, too, as “they wish to put themselves above the laws” in “anarchies, or unlimited popular commonwealths, than which there is no greater tyranny” (I.292).  Religion, or the rejection of it, has informed each one of these historical eras. Plato’s Socrates spoke, if ironically, about the rule of philosopher-kings as the solution to the troubles of the polis, but in fact, “in all nations the priests wore crowns,” not the philosophers (I.254).

Rome, the gentile nation with the clearest history, shows that once cities were founded, contestation for rule over them ensued, a contestation Rome managed to its own benefit. Early Rome saw “three public virtues”: magnanimity (originally the virtue of the aristocrats living in huts) was now seen in the plebs, who wanted “to share the civil rights and laws of the fathers; for their part, the fathers showed “strength…in keeping those rights within their own order”; finally, the jurisconsults displayed “wisdom…in interpreting the laws and extending their utility little by little as new cases demanded adjudication” (I.281). Roman history may be summarized in a sentence: “The weak want laws; the powerful withhold them; the ambitious, to win a following, advocate them; princes, to equalize the strong with the weak, protect them” (I.283). The many, who are weak and poor, were the center around which Roman regime politics revolved.

In the end, peace reigned in Rome under the rule of the Emperor Augustus, protector of the plebs by means of “the natural royal law”—natural in Vico’s sense of customs designed to secure certain fundamental necessities of human life (I.292). He quotes Tacitus: “When the world was wearied by civil strife, [Augustus] subjected it to empire under the title of Prince” (I.292). Would Bacon or Hobbes disagree?

More generally among the gentiles, philology reveals similar patterns elsewhere, insofar as ancient customs have been recorded or can be deciphered by etymology. Vico concurs with Dio Cassius’ judgment that “custom is like a king and law like a tyrant,” if this means “reasonable custom” as distinguished from “law not animated by natural reason” (I.308). Custom itself originates in the “sociable nature” of man, itself a register of his reasonableness, his ability to speak; this is why some customs are universal (I.309). Unreasonable customs register the “fallen and weak” nature of man; he is “not unjust by nature in the absolute sense,” as “created by God,” but now stands in need of “the Catholic principles of grace,” which releases the human potential for good works, otherwise “ineffectual” (I.310), “This is what Grotius, Selden, and Pufendorf should have founded their systems upon before everything else, in agreement with the Roman jurisconsults who define the natural law of the gentes as having been instituted by divine providence” (I.310). It is noteworthy, however, that Vico immediately writes that the natural law of the gentiles originated in unreflecting common sense, which he then identifies with providence. A “sociable nature” may characterize man, but this only comes about after the pre-humans are induced to come out of the woods. Human nature is not inherent; it develops over time as the result of external natural necessity and the will of founders.

Vico distinguishes between the natural law of the Hebrews, the natural law of the gentiles, and the natural law of the philosophers. Unlike the others, the Hebrews “had extraordinary help from the true God” (I.313). For their part, the philosophers perfected the natural law by their practice of rigorous rational scrutiny, a practice that didn’t “appear until some two thousand years after the gentile nations were founded” (I.313). This gave Hebrews a considerable ‘early start’ on the gentiles, justifying their scrupulous self-separation from them. But if the divinely assisted Hebraic law is nonetheless natural law, does Vico mean that God, in revealing it to them, accelerated the recovery of at least some of the human virtues from human fallenness?

Laws are certain, not because they are unambiguous but because their judgments are “backed only by authority” (I.321). “We find them harsh in application yet are obliged to apply them precisely because they are certain” (I.321). To address this difficulty, we need “reason of state” or “civic equity”—prudent application of the law to the case at hand (I.322). Such judgments belong in the hands of the prudent few. Prudential wisdom is “the science of making such use of things as their nature dictates,” and impartial utility is the law of “intelligent men” (I.326). ‘Providence’ begins more and more to look like such reason of state, civic equity, prudential wisdom when it is backed by authority.

Revealed religion induces certainty. The political philosophers of classical antiquity, from Socrates to Cicero, men who didn’t confront a serious challenge from revealed religion, needed only to suggest that their conclusions were tentative, probabilistic, and more likely than tales about the gods told by priests. The modern political philosophers faced a different intellectual landscape. The Bible warns against those who are “always seeking, never finding” (Samuel l:1-27), “ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 3:7)—men who might “spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the traditions of men, after the rudiments of the world” (Colossians 2:8). Christianity, by contrast, offers a satisfying certitude founded on truth bestowed by the Holy Spirit Himself. From Machiavelli, who advises the prince to “make sure” of other men, to the quest for self-evident truths from Descartes to Locke, the moderns have attempted to challenge religion on its own ground in a contest in which each party seeks to cast doubt on the opinions and ‘methods’ of the other. Vico joins the fray: “In the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest ambiguity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind” (I.331). This is the basis of his version of the Socratic turn: “Whoever reflects on this cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature, which, since God made it, He alone knows; and that they should have neglected the study of the world of nations, or civil world” (I.331). It is true that this is difficult, since the mind prefers to look outward at the body, “find[ing] the effort to attend to itself too laborious,” even as “the bodily eye sees all objects outside itself but needs a mirror to see itself” (I.331). The mirror for the human mind isn’t Cartesian introspection but historical inquiry.

What is the philosophic purpose in so proceeding? If God knows His creation better than we can ever do, then surely we can know ourselves, and especially our own minds, by examining our own ‘creations,’ namely, “this world of nations” (I.332). This raises the problem that God as Creator created not only the cosmos but the human mind itself, so He knows it better than we can know it. Vico prefers to address this problem indirectly. “Since this world of nations has been made by men, let us see in what institutions all men agree and always have agreed”; “these institutions will be able to give us the universal and eternal principles (such as every science must have) on which all nations were founded and still preserve themselves” (I.332). He identifies three “eternal and universal customs”: religion, marriage, and burial of the dead (I.333). He also identifies four “primary religions”: Judaism, Christianity, polytheism, and Islam (I.334). All of them solemnize those customs. That is, if Vico were to respond to the Apostle Paul’s ridicule, he could say that religions exhibit much of the same variation as philosophic doctrines. They induce not simple certainty but a plethora of certainties. But if we discover and examine the religio-political principles they share by considering the eternal and universal customs seen after historical inquiry, we will be able to answer the questions raised by the contradictions prevailing among national/political customs, as well as philosophic and religious doctrines.

Vico chooses as his example sexual unions “between free men and free women without solemn matrimony” (I.336). Some say that these “do not offend the law of nature,” but “all the nations of the world have branded [them] as false” by custom (I.336). That alone might not convince a philosopher that the nations are right, however. Vico then identifies a reason for the universality of the custom: “such parents, since they are held together by no necessary bond of law, will proceed to cast off their natural children,” who “must lie exposed to be devoured by dogs” or, if they survive, will have “no one to teach them religion, language or any other human customs,” thus bringing on the possibility that the world will “revert to the ancient forest through which in their nefarious feral wanderings once roamed the foul beasts of Orpheus,” the ‘pre-humans’ among whom “venery was practiced by sons with mothers and by fathers with daughters” (I.336). Human nature “forbids” incest; forbidding incest by custom was necessary to the transition from the forest to civilization, the transition of pre-human beasts to human beings. It only reappears when a nation reaches “the last stage of corruption, as among the Persians” (I.336). [5]

Here is where religion comes in. “In their monstrous savagery and unbridled bestial freedom there was no means to tame the former or bridle the latter but the powerful thought of some divinity, the fear of whom is the only powerful means of reducing to duty a liberty gone wild” (I.338). This suggests a parallel to the teaching of the Old Testament, that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom—again suggesting that Hebrews are not so different from the gentiles as they say they are. Be that as it may, without that initial, salutary fear, our ancestors would fall into “despair of all the succors of nature” (I.339). This is why they want “something superior to save” them (I.339). It is true that “man in the bestial state desires only his own welfare” and that of his family (I.341). But once he has “entered upon civil life,” he begins to desire the city’s welfare along with his own and eventually the welfare of the nations his city may come to rule in an empire. Once “nations are united by wars, treaties of peace, alliances, and commerce,” self-love extends to “the entire human race” (I.341). “Therefore, it is only by divine providence”—previously defined as common sense—that man “can be held within these institutions to practice justice as a member of the society of the family, of the city, and finally of mankind” (I.341). Here, “divine” means the power of divining—that is, the power “to understand what is hidden from men—the future—or what is hidden in them—their conscience” (I.342). 

The New Science, then is “a rational civil theology of divine providence,” which Vico then quickly asserts to be an expression of “the omnipotent, wise and beneficent will of the best and greatest God” (I.345). It is nonetheless clear that the necessities and utilities of social life constitute “the two perennial springs of the natural law of the gentes” (I.347). Moreover, this science proceeds by uncovering the “history of human ideas, on which it seems the metaphysics of the human mind must proceed”—again, on the premise that we know best what we make (I.347). “History cannot be more certain than when he who creates the things also narrates them” (I.349). Now, “in God knowledge and creation are one and the same thing” (I.349). If so, man is Godlike in the sphere of this world. The New Science indeed become “a philosophy of authority” (I.350), a way of philosophizing about authority but more, a way of philosophic rule that can instantiate the Socratic notion of philosopher-kings, without Socrates’ own zetetic irony.

 

 

Notes

1. “E” refers to the title of Vico’s introduction to the book, “Explanation of the Picture Placed as Frontispiece to Serve as Introduction to the Work.” The number that follows refers to the number of the paragraph; Vico numbers each paragraph.
2. See John Locke: Aesop’s Fables (London: A. and J. Churchil, 1703). For commentary, see Robert H. Horwitz and Judith B. Finn: “Locke’s Aesop’s Fables,” Locke Studies 25 (1994). 
3. Leo Strauss identifies this passage as more or less identical to a line in Descartes and goes on to say that for Vico the human mind is finite, the will infinite. Vico does differ from Descartes, as seen in his preference for philology over introspection as the source of certainty. See Leo Strauss: “Seminar in Political Philosophy: Vico.” Session 6: October 16, 1964. In Strauss Archive (online).
4. Strauss clarifies this point, saying that in Vico there is no teleology in the classical sense; there are indeed results of human action, ends achieved, but they have no independent causal status. To use Aristotelian vocabulary, there are ‘efficient’ causes (genealogical causes) and ‘material’ causes, but no ‘formal’ causes and no ‘final’ causes. As in Spinoza, the law of the gentiles depends on natural necessity and/or the human will. See ibid., Strauss’s final comment in the session. 
5. Why, specifically, does the practice incest block the founding of human settlements?  Why must it be abhorred if pre-humans are to become human? Vico does not say, beyond maintaining that it must be so because the prohibition against it is universal, or nearly universal. It may be, however, that the establishment of settlements requires a degree of sociality, a lessening of what Vico later calls “the tyranny of self-love,” of which incest might be considered a prime example, an extreme form of love of one’s own.