Discussing "The New Science" By Giambattista Vico – Part I

In this episode of Canonball we begin discussing "The New Science," which was written by Giambattista Vico and first published in 1725, before being republished in a revised edition in 1730, and a final edition in 1744. See also Part II for more on Vico. 

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Giambattista Vico was born in 1668 in Naples, which is located on the southwest side of the Italian peninsula. At that time, it was part of the kingdom of Naples. His father was a bookseller, and it seems that when he was young, he went to a few schools, but he got some kind of illness, so he had to leave them. And scholars think that for a period of maybe three years or so, he may have been largely self-taught with his parents' guidance. In 1699, he would have been about 31, he married Teresa Caterina d'Estito, who was a childhood friend of his, and they would later have eight children. And also in 1699, he accepted a chair in rhetoric at the University of Naples, and he would stay in that position for some 42 years until he retired due to ill health. And during those 42 years, he apparently always wanted to have the chair, not of rhetoric, but of jurisprudence, but he never got that position. But in 1734, he was appointed historiographer royal by the king of Naples, Charles III, and he got a little bump in his salary that way. And he died in 1744, also in Naples, at the age of 75. And he seems to have had a relatively quiet life compared to that of some of the other guys at whom we've looked, so we can get right into his thought. It seems that Vico is not terribly well-known in the Anglosphere. He's not a name that you hear a lot, but he occupies a very particular place and his writing is certainly worth studying. One movement or categorization that he's associated with is that of the counter-enlightenment. So if you're talking about the late 17th and the early 18th century, the Enlightenment is revving up and people are getting very excited about Descartes specifically around him, and he's encountering Descartes' ideas about verifiable truth being connected only to observable fact. And it seems that Vico didn't necessarily disagree with that principle, but it seems he was concerned that that doesn't always have application in the realm of human life, what people are dealing with every day. So we can think of Vico as not necessarily a counterweight to Descartes, but somebody who challenged that Cartesian worldview early on. And one thing that I found a little bit difficult about The New Science was that throughout the book he's making all of these references to various events or Roman laws or Greek myths, and he'll take an idea from one place and he'll say, and that's why over here you have this, those two things are connected. And often it's a very interesting insight and seems very persuasive, and sometimes it's not quite as convincing. Or if you're just approaching it skeptically, you could say it might well be that way or it also could not, and we don't have enough information here to evaluate it. And to understand Vico's epistemology a little bit, we can look at this phrase that he coined verum esse ipsum factum, which means truth is itself something made. And that can sound like a dangerous and relativist idea that we make truth, except that this is a very early example of what's called constructivism in epistemology. The idea that we don't read truth from the book of nature onto the blank page of the mind, even when we're doing something relatively controlled, like conducting an experiment, making observations and drawing conclusions from the results, the explanation that you develop from those results is a creation. You are creating something. You're not a mirror reflecting absolute reality. You are building an explanation that hopefully is tethered to empirical information and sound reasoning. And the best option that we have is the building of these kinds of robust explanations that withstand scrutiny, verum esse ipsum factum, truth is itself something made. But people also associate him, for reasons that will become obvious when we look at the new science, with very early sociology, social science. And a word that also comes up is semiotics, which is the study of signs and how meaning is conveyed through signs. And he's also associated with philosophy of history. And the book we're going to be looking at today, The New Science, is Vico's magnum opus. It was published three times in 1725, again in 1730, and then the final edition was published in 1744 after his death. And he had begun work on it in 1720. So Vico spent practically the last quarter century of his life working on this book. And the full title of the third edition, whose title is similar to that of the previous two editions, could apparently be translated as something like Principles of a New Science on the Common Nature of Nations. And that title tells us a bit about what his main idea is in this book. And I read an edition published by Yale University Press.that was beautifully put together, translated and edited by Jason Taylor and Robert Minor. And it has a very nice introduction, very nice footnotes throughout, the print quality is very nice. One criticism I might have about it is that this book perhaps could have done with an index, and this edition doesn't have one, but an index is a huge amount of work, and this book already clearly had a lot of research go into it, looking into Vico's references, checking various editions of the book, including the 1744 edition, and I think there are references to the manuscript, that is Vico's handwritten text before it was published. So already a lot of work went into this book, and even though this seems likely to be a standard edition in English for this text, I can't imagine that they are selling tons of copies of it, because it's a little bit specialized. So I understand maybe why they didn't want to make an index. And one other small criticism I might have is the title that they used was The New Science. And of course, in the 18th century and earlier, it was more common to have big long titles for books, which is why the book, for example, that we know as The Wealth of Nations has an original title that's much longer than that, but we just call it that. So they understandably wanted to shorten the title a little, and if you're going to pick a few words from that longer title, The New Science is not a terrible choice. It certainly grabs your attention and makes you wonder, what is this new science? But the common nature of nations, or something like that, that is grammatically exact from the Italian, would have been another choice, because that might give a clue of Vico's main thesis in the title. And his main thesis is that nations go through stages that repeat themselves and can be identified in different contexts throughout history. Specifically, he talks about the divine, the heroic, and the human ages, and he gives various characteristics of each of these. And so a title like The Common Nature of Nations reflects that a little bit more. But also I think that traditionally, something like The New Science is what has been used in Italian as the title for this book. So I also understand why somebody would follow the lead of the publishers in the original language of the book, rather than change the title very much in translation. Though I do think it would be within a publisher's right to take a different portion of the original title that the writer put on the book, to emphasize one section of it rather than another. And because he's dealing with a lot of very ancient history, and because very limited archaeology had been done by the time he was writing, and they didn't have things like radiocarbon dating, he turns a lot to a lot of very early, he uses the word Gentile, or the translation does, but pre-Christian texts. A lot of ancient Roman, a lot of ancient Greek texts, and others. And just as a sampling of some of the writers whom he cites the most often, a few of those are Livy, Plutarch, Tacitus, Thucydides, Plato, Dio Cassius, Josephus, Herodotus, Philo of Alexandria, St. Augustine, Homer, Strabo, Virgil, Francis Bacon, Terence, Pliny, Horus, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Polybius, Lucretius, Grotius, Selden, Pufendorf, Caesar, Ovid, Helodorus, Livius Andronicus, Suetonius, Giovanni Boccaccio, Hesiod, Erasmus, Salust, Eratosthenes, Quintilian, Aristarchus of Samos, Torquato Tasso, and Dante. And that list is by no means exhaustive, I just flipped through looking at the footnotes at the bottom of each page and pulled out some that seemed to recur the most. And of course a lot of those are not ancient writers, they're medieval or early modern, but you get the idea of the raw material that he's using for what he's talking about. And one thing that perhaps weakens this book a tiny bit is that while Vico was clearly a very erudite guy, and he could connect all of these different writers and all of these different texts from all of these different times and places, he on occasion misremembers things. And the good editors of this book put in a footnote, and usually it's something minor, he mentions the title of a book but he gets the title a little bit wrong. And that kind of thing could be a matter of translation, I sometimes wonder if he was looking at an Italian translation of the book and that was the title, because the title can be slightly different in translation, whereas the editors might have found an English one, but presumably they would have accounted for that. Maybe he gets the author wrong, he names the correct book but he attributes it to a different author who's similar to the correct author. And there may be one or two footnotes where the editors say, we're not sure what he's talking about here, he references something, we don't know what it is, we couldn't find it. And that doesn't necessarily mean that Vico got it wrong, the editors may have simply not been able to find it. And this kind of error on Vico's part is very limited, there's a handful of these. And he's writing again about all of these different sources at a time when he doesn't have the internet.So he would have had a lot of them on hand, probably, but fact-checking took a bit more effort than it does now, and he spent 24 years on this book, and he died before he really totally completed it, or at least before he published it. Maybe it was considered complete. It seems complete, but it is so loaded with references that it seems that Vico was the kind of guy who was just going to keep adding to this until he died, no matter what. And he was probably going through and checking references also, but some of them he hadn't gotten to or hadn't been able to check them for one reason or another. But anyway, you might have noticed that the main argument of this book is a bit Spanglarian, and Vico was obviously writing a comfortable two centuries before Spangler, so I wondered whether Spangler had read Vico. But for all the references that are in Decline of the West, when I checked the indexes of its two volumes, I couldn't see any reference to Vico. And anyway, it's not quite the same argument, though they're definitely related. And this book is praiseworthy in that it takes on a big and important question. We can talk about how effectively it answers that question, but Vico tries to address a question about the life, nature, and origin of nations. And we, with our very post-enlightenment epistemology, being a little snooty about how effectively his evidence justifies which claims, and we're right to always be on guard about claims matching evidence. But in focusing too much on that, in this case, we might miss two things that are valuable about Vico. One is that he's taken on a particularly difficult challenge in what he's trying to explain. But it reminds me of a line from Spangler, and I don't remember if we talked about that line in those episodes, but I definitely had marked it, but I might have had to cut it later. But he lays some kind of imprecation on people who only care about history starting from when it's well-documented. He basically says it's a mistake to do that. And that brings in a kind of paradox, because on the one hand, with history, we want to rely on what is very well-documented. And that's more and less difficult at different times in history. But historical claims have to be pegged down with solid evidence. But at the same time, there are wide stretches of history that have very little documentation. One being the Dark Ages, from about 476 to sometime in the 10th century, being the period following the Roman Empire. But the other is, of course, the very long stretch of time before the Roman Empire. Not that there's no documentation before the Roman Empire or the Greeks. But there's a lot less. And Vico is trying to, by using these old sources, access something about those shadowy periods about which we don't know very much, but which are very relevant to us today in that they say something about human nature and the nature, life, and origins of nations. And he's not the only political philosopher to try to reason about this period. There are two others, at least, Rousseau and Hobbes, who have their theories about what early human life was like. Rousseau thought it was heavenly. Hobbes thought it was hellish. But neither of those two guys explain that part of their thinking in a tremendous amount of detail. Neither in the scope that Vico does, nor with the kind of documentation that he uses. And both of them are standard assigned reading in undergraduate political science courses. Whereas Vico, by trying to anchor his thinking in these sources and thereby showing how that can be sometimes a little bit tenuous, has actually gone further than Hobbes and Rousseau in trying to justify his assertions about prehistory. Whereas Hobbes and Rousseau just use their reasoning, essentially. And, of course, talking about man in a state of nature or early human society are not exactly the same thing, but they're related. But so after reading this, I kind of think that Vico could very easily be placed next to Rousseau and Hobbes in that kind of political philosophy survey class or thinking about the foundations of society. Not to teach students this is the correct view, necessarily, but to show different ways that people have thought carefully about this subject. But Vico becomes challenging for the typical university student because he is so freighted with these classical references. If he had written a shorter book or an essay that explained his theory without all the references at each step, I think that would have been more likely to be studied in the kind of context that I'm talking about. And though his book and his approach is very systematic, I think if you work on anything for 24 years, it's going to expand. But so given that general explanation of some of what he's talking about, we can now look at some specifics. But rather than try to give a totally comprehensive explanation of everything that he's talking about, I'll tell you a bit about some of the points that he made that stood out to me. And hopefully that will clarify some of his points.overall thinking. One notion that comes up throughout his writing is this idea of poetic wisdom. And he says pretty early on that poetic wisdom is the oldest kind of wisdom. And we're talking now about very early human societies. And his book starts with a very long detailed exposition of this illustration that he had made. And it shows a sun and two figures and a globe and light beaming between the figures and various objects. But also in the image is an altar. And it's the largest hieroglyph, the largest symbol in the picture, he says, because civil life begins with religion. So very early on, he establishes this connection between civil life and religion. And it's worth mentioning that Vico was a devout Catholic and that comes through in his writing. But we don't have to be Catholic or followers of any religion necessarily to consider some of what he says about religion and to acknowledge that religion probably has some kind of foundational role in human social organization, certainly in its early forms. And the jury is still out whether a society can last very long without a religion, even in its modern form. And a religion may not necessarily have to be Christianity. It may simply be a collection of shared beliefs tied together by some kind of unifying narrative. So even if you were to argue that the West is on the whole, for now, on a trend away from Christianity, if only by comparing the past century, the influence of Christianity in the West in 1925, as compared to 2025, that would certainly show you a trend downward. Now you might make an argument about the past 10 years, maybe it's rising in a certain context, I don't know. But even if you were to say that trend is fine and the future of society in Europe, North America, Australia, these places that were historically Christian does not depend on their Christian religion, that may well be true. But part of the unraveling that we're seeing in those places may in part be related not to the diminishment of Christianity, but to the loss of a collection of shared beliefs with a unifying narrative of any kind. It doesn't have to be Christianity, but it might have to be something. And it may be that as Christianity withdraws, it may not disappear entirely, but it will stop being the dominant organizing ideology. It may be that that power vacuum first results in a civil war, that is an ideological civil war, a contest about what the new dominant ideology is going to be. So while it may not be that society requires a religion in the traditional sense, it may require a religion in terms of a narrative about morality and values that provides a level of social cohesion. But for now, just talking about the origins of civil life, Vico says that this begins with religion. And in an early example of this kind of etymological connection that he makes throughout the book, especially to Latin, he says that the Latin word divinare meant to warn of what is to come, and that the notion of divinity originated in this practice of divination. And divination we now use to mean conveying what God says or knowing what God knows. If you say he divined the answer, it's sort of a tongue-in-cheek explanation that God sent him the answer. But Vico is saying that divination was originally warning about what is to come. And that caught my attention because, listeners will know, that I'm very interested in the problem of political forecasting, how much energy is spent trying to do it, how much energy is spent reading the political forecasts of others, trying to assess them. There's a tremendous amount of emotional and intellectual energy on this task or riddle or puzzle on which we have gained essentially no ground. Political analysts are very good at building a narrative by which they retroactively explain events that have happened. And some narratives are better than others, and they will have different levels of predictive and explanatory power. It's not entirely random, but the political space is so complex that if you're looking at one narrow question about Turkish foreign policy, and you something about that context, you might be able to give a reasonable estimate about what might happen given two options. What path might a leader choose to take? The problem is that politics now includes the entire world, and something could happen tomorrow outside of those narrow parameters that you defined that will disrupt what's inside of them. And here, Vico is saying that the Latin word related to divinity is connected to warning about what is to come, essentially to political forecasting. And it's interesting to see that this problem was so prominent not only in the times when people were speaking Latin, but somehow it came into Latin. So maybe in Phoenician or however that word entered Latin. Again, we're starting to talk about the mists.at the front end of recorded history. And here he's using an etymological explanation that I'm granting because I pretty much don't know anything about Latin etymology to try to peer into those mists. And another concept that runs throughout the book and it takes him some time to explain what he means in detail is this notion that republics emerge from families which emerge from marriages. And somewhere I've marked a nice passage where he talks about the dark chaos of human life before marriage. And he says it nicely there, so hopefully we'll get to it eventually. But what he's talking about is a period that he imagines and demonstrates to a certain extent in very early human history where everything was held in common, including women. And it's not nice to think of women as property, but that's in part how he explains it. And the problem is that if lots of different men are having sex with one woman at different times and she becomes pregnant, it's not clear who is the father of that child. And so no man takes ownership, takes responsibility for the child, and families aren't formed. But marriage as an institution, and institution in this context seems inadequate, even if you say a social institution, because we're talking about something that is beside agriculture or probably more important than agriculture in the development of civilization according to Vico. It's not simply a tradition. It's not culturally provincial in that it appears in certain places and not others and spreads like a meme. Marriage might have spread like a meme in very early human history in that it was practiced in certain communities before it was practiced in others, but it apparently spread very decisively and maybe also rapidly because you now see it pretty much anywhere in the world that you find civilization, and it's been that way for thousands of years. And here, Vico gives an explanation of why that is. That once you have controlled who is having sex with whom, which is what marriage is in part, clear lines of paternity, women don't have this problem usually unless the baby gets mixed up somehow after the birth. But in most cases, a woman knows if she is the parent of a certain child or not because she knows if she gave birth to that child. And this can be a little more ambiguous for a man, but once that is clarified, and then the man feels or is made to feel a sense of responsibility and stewardship over the child, that that child is his in some sense, it's related to him in the way that it's related to the woman, then you can have a family. The man and the woman have some kind of connection to each other, and they together have the connection to the children. So that's how you get from marriages to families. And in getting from families to republics, I think we will have some passages to look at about that. But briefly, we can say that Vico talks about heroic families or the families of heroic men controlling a certain amount of land because of their strength. And then there are other men who are either forced to flee some situation because of a war, or maybe they are subjugated as a result of a war. And then they are the hired labor of the heroic family. So then you have the family, and then you have, he talks about familial servants. You have these other men around the family who are doing work for it. And then he gets into imagining that this collection of familial servants may revolt. And so then the collection of heroic families have a reason to organize in order to resist this kind of revolt. And very roughly from this kind of social organization, you have early republics, basically being that an early government was the self-interested coordination of those very early, we might say, noble families. And there's more to that that we'll hopefully get into, but that's enough to start. So we're starting to have this family-religion-civil-life triangle forming. And related to that, he says that children revered their fathers as gods before they understood the republic. There's a very innate, lived relationship between a child and their father that's one of awe and a perception of strength and capability that is as true for children in the 21st century as it was for children in the 10th millennia BC, Vico might argue. And from the perception of that relationship is extended a reverence for God, who is later said to be the father of the universe, and also for the state. Because you have that initial framing in the mind, it's possible to abstract it out to other entities. And in a later passage where he's talking about people sharing all things in common, because there were no marriages, there was no record kept of who would lane with who, it resulted in men lying with their mothers without knowing it. Because if all children are raised in common, then you don't necessarily know who your mother is. And I don't remember a reference to Oedipus Rex in this, but if Vico had thought of it, that's the kind of thing that he might have said, that's why such-and-such happens in this place, because this was a problem that happened in a certain context. It wasn't just a weird plot for a story. But of the men living in that...that kind of society. Vico says, quote, they had recourse for their own escape and safety to the cultivated lands of men of piety, chastity, and fortitude, who were also men of power since they had already united in familial society, end quote. So I mentioned people fleeing wars or people captured in war, but here he's actually talking about that period while the meme of marriage was still spreading. It hadn't reached everywhere, but certain people were doing marriages, other people weren't yet. And the result was that the people from the society without marriage would seek refuge in the people who were marrying because marriage made their lives more orderly for all the reasons we talked about earlier. And he might elsewhere talk about people fleeing wars. For some reason, that example was in my mind, but this shows how Vico is saying a society without marriage becomes a war zone eventually, or it always was one. And the innovation of marriage creates a stability that didn't exist before that. And people naturally fall into its orbit. And in this way, he talks about, quote, the origin of true nobility, which naturally comes to be through the exercise of moral virtue, end quote. And he says that because he's talking about political power. These guys who are in a more stable society, they have land, they have a farm maybe, they have the help of their wives to whom they've committed themselves and who have in turn committed themselves to them. And then later they have the help of their children once they reach a certain age, whom they protect and they're raising, but also they can help them to work on the farm. Vico doesn't talk about that part, but I think that's reasonably implied by what he says. And their political power comes directly from their virtue. It comes from this practice of committing themselves to one woman and taking responsibility for the children. And they maybe don't call it virtue at the time, but the process of the sublimation of something practically useful into a morality is another complicated thing. Later he writes, quote, because of corrupt human nature, without the help of philosophy, this cannot succor but a very few. The generality of men cannot act in their private lives in such a way that the mind of each one commands rather than serves the body, end quote. And that by itself is not exactly an insight, but it's something that since the ancients has been a central assumption of human existence, that most people serve their bodies rather than command them. And philosophy can help you to overcome that a little, but he says, this cannot succor but a very few. That doesn't help most people. And he says this in passing on the way to making another point, but it's worth noticing because he acknowledges this in his philosophy. Him putting that in there shows that this is part of his worldview. And it's a reasonable assumption. If you're trying to explain human group dynamics over thousands or tens of thousands of years, you need to take some kind of average of all people in most cases. And one thing that the dominant ideology of the 21st century does not acknowledge, does not emphasize, or does not teach people to try to overcome is this reality. And the reason is, I think in part, if you are somebody who can command your body, if you are master of your appetites, as we've talked about elsewhere, it's kind of hard to sell you things. So that's one way in which mass production and mass communication and capitalism have come to shape the philosophy of the period that we're living in. That while it seems observable that most people, most of the time are pushed around by their various physical impulses. This is not a central pillar in our modern dogma because acknowledging it makes a person want to strive to correct that behavior, which will carry less individual consumption as a side effect. And this is also a useful means of social and political control of a population. You can think of stoking the appetites as a means of divide and conquer. Lots of political and military history can be explained really by those three words, divide and conquer. There were two adversaries facing off. One was bigger than the other, but the smaller one figured out a way to split up the bigger one so that it started to fight itself in some way. And then the initially smaller player either became bigger than the two divided parts or it let them fight for long enough so that it could overcome them in the end, all the while stoking that fight. Divide and conquer is one of those phrases that you hear when you're a kid. And so you think you understand it because you're familiar with the words, but it's worth revisiting as an adult and looking for contexts in which it applies because it's not always obvious. Sometimes there is a divide and conquer dynamic going on that isn't apparent at first sight. And one could argue that stoking the appetites in the individual in this way is not only good for capitalism, it doesn't only help the market to sell products, but one whose mind serves rather than commands the body is also divided against himself. He wants to quit smoking, to eat more healthy, to quit drinking, to stop wasting time watching stupid TV shows. We could list other things that a person could be struggling against in the 21st century. He wants to change.aspect of his behavior, but he can't do it. And in that state, he's too busy fighting himself. He is divided against himself such that it becomes more difficult to revolt against a political system. And this order of understanding the appetites and the reason and the conflict between these two was the core of moral thought, it seems, until the 20th century. You can see casual references to it in passing in novels from before the 20th century, which suggests that the reader would have been familiar with it and wouldn't need an explanation. So whether those are the reasons why that narrative is not promoted, its suppression or waning, if we don't want to say that it was done intentionally, has both economic and political consequences. Later, he gets into various symbols that appear in very old writing and art, and he talks about the Fasces as, quote, the union of patriarchal power, end quote, with, quote, a bundle of divining rods, skipping ahead, the earliest scepters of the world, end quote. So again, in that short explanation, you have this relationship between the family, religion, and the state. He mentions patriarchal power, he talks about divining rods, and he says these are the earliest scepters. The union of fathers maybe being that collection of the heads of those noble families we were talking about. The divining rods, of course, connecting back to that semi-religious ability to warn about what is to come, and the scepters being things that kings hold. And in that image that he puts at the beginning of the book, he says that the purse is leaning on the Fasces in that image, because commerce through the use of money, he argues, did not start until long after civil power was established, that commerce depends on civil power, on an early state. And I imagine some libertarians might disagree with that reflexively, but that's how Vico views that. And related to that topic, he points out that there's no mention of coinage, of coins, anywhere in Homer. And in Homer, you have relatively advanced states. You have governments, you have kings, you certainly have families, but he mentions there's no coins anywhere in there. And it's worth pointing out that he emphasizes commerce through the use of money. So maybe he means there might have been bartering, or there must have been bartering before that, but minting coins or issuing currency is something that states do. And relatively early on, he gives a pretty good thesis statement that I'll read. He says, quote, so this new science, a metaphysics meditating in the light of divine providence upon the nature common to the nations, has discovered the origins of things divine and human among the gentile nations, and so has established a system of natural law of the gentile peoples, which proceeds with the greatest uniformity and consistency through the three ages which the Egyptians left to us, and on account of which they said their world had already fully and previously run its course, namely the age of the gods, in which gentile men believed that they lived under divine governance and that all things had been commanded to them by auspices and by oracles, the oldest things of profane history, the age of heroes, in which heroes reigned everywhere in aristocratic republics through a certain difference in human nature by which they supposed themselves superior to their plebeians, and finally the age of men, in which all acknowledged that they were equal with respect to human nature, and on account of this gave currency first to popular republics and eventually to monarchies, both of which are forms of human government as which has been said just above." And there's a lot packed into that paragraph about what he's going to say, and it's worth noticing especially that he cites specifically the Egyptians. He says this is the framework that the Egyptians left to us in saying that that's how their history had run its course. A divine age, a heroic age, and a human age that first had popular governments that then turned into monarchies, and he's saying you can take this same framework and apply it elsewhere. But since this book is a combination of dense, important, and to a certain extent overlooked, I think we can take our time getting into it. We've barely gotten our boots on here, so I think we can benefit from at least two episodes on this one. We'll see how far we get next week, but I'll close out by saying that while I love to read the authors and works whose names are very well known, it's also truly exhilarating to find a treasure like this with which you don't necessarily have to agree in its entirety, but which carries a lot of interesting material to think about and interesting material to learn where you weren't necessarily expecting to find it because it's a reminder of how much gold is still out there, how much there is to learn and discover and explore. But I'll leave it there for now. Farewell until next time. Take care and happy reading.