Appendix Ii

THE LATER HISTORY OF VICO'S THOUGHT

The history of the vicissitudes of Vico's reputation must not be allowed to replace or be confused with the exposition and valuation of his thought, by losing sight of the history of philosophy properly so called or confusing it with the history of culture. But even when we pass to this second history, we must guard against another kind of error, namely the pretence of determining by its means whether Vico's work was or was not of use in the advancement of culture, and what degree of utility we should grant it. The inquiry is meaningless, and the degree cannot be measured: for rightly considered one disciple may be worth tens or hundreds, one effect produced after centuries may compensate its age-long delay, one point undeservedly forgotten may become as notable and instructive as the best-deserved reputation, and one single truth twice discovered independently may from this re-discovery and seeming superfluity receive a confirmation of its inevitable necessity. The work of Vico--such is the usual verdict--was entirely useless, because it appeared out of its due time and prematurely, and remained unknown or was known only because it could convey nothing new. Such language is a blasphemy against history, which allows nothing to be useless and is always and throughout the work of Providence, whose vast utilities must not be measured by the pettiness of the human span.

Was Vico appreciated in the course of the eighteenth century? Did any one read him, understand him and follow his lead? The question has been answered with equal decision in the affirmative and the negative. The affirmative answer has been supported by a diligent collection of scattered passages up and down the writers of the century mentioning his name and doctrines and an accumulation of possible or apparent traces of his thoughts visible though unacknowledged in Italian and foreign literature. But a thinker like Vico can only be said to be known when his fundamental thought has been grasped and the spirit that animated him has been felt. Now the majority of the facts alleged as proof of the efficacy of his work concerns particular doctrines detached from the whole and accepted or contested just like those of any other scholar and critic or any paradox-monger of his time. This is true in the first place of his theory on the origin of the Twelve Tables, discussed in the controversy between Bernardo Tanucci and Guido Grandi from 1728 to 1731, contested in 1736 by Damiano Romano, accepted in France by Bonamy in 1735 and recalled in 1750 by Terrasson; of the views on the history and primitive government of Rome, mentioned by Chastellux, adopted and expanded by Duni, and used by Du Bignon who learnt them from Duni; of the hypotheses as to the prehistoric period and the origins of humanity, employed and modified by Boulanger in France and Mario Pagano in Italy; and lastly, of some conceptions upon poetry and language which reappear in Pagano, Cesarotti and some others.

A more essential question was that of the method of studying and judging political institutions and laws; a question upon which Montesquieu has been compared with Vico and accused of freely using the Scienza Nuova without acknowledging his debt. It is now established through Montesquieu's journal that in 1728 Antonio Conti at Venice advised the future author of the Esprit des Lois to buy Vico's book at Naples; and Montesquieu must have followed this advice on reaching Naples in the following year; for a copy of the 1725 edition of the Scienza Nuova is still preserved in the library at the château of La Brède. But the mind of the French writer was too different from and inferior to that of Vico to draw vital nourishment from a work such as the Scienza Nuova; and the traces of imitation alleged to have been discovered in the Esprit des Lois are very doubtful and in any case of minor importance. It must be said on the other hand that the merit generally attributed to Montesquieu of having introduced the historical element into positive laws and thus considering legislation in a truly philosophical manner (as Hegel said later), that is, as a moment depending upon a totality relative to all the other determinations which go to form the character of a people or a period; this merit, in order both of time and of excellence, belongs in reality to Vico.

Like Montesquieu in the science of legislation, so Wolf in the Homeric question has been suspected of tacitly deriving help from Vico's speculations. But at the time when he published the Prolegomena ad Homerum in 1795 Wolf did not know the Scienza Nuova; which he knew in name only in 1801 and in fact the year after, when Cesarotti presented him with the book. We must observe that Vico's judgment as to the barbaric nature of the Homeric epos and the absence in it of esoteric wisdom had been published in 1765 by the Gazette littéraire de l'Europe; and further, that the Scienza Nuova was known and used by the Danish philologist and archaeologist Zoega, who quotes it in an essay on Homer composed in 1788 though not published till long afterwards; and that Zoega corresponded with Heyne, who afterwards accused Wolf of having derived from his own lectures the theory set forth in the Prolegomena. Heyne had in fact expressed the idea of a gradual genesis of the Homeric poems in 1790. In a word we may say that Vico's views had to some extent penetrated into the atmosphere of German philology: in which case Wolf may have originally had a certain indirect knowledge of them. Even apart from this indirect communication the fact remains, and is recognised by all students of the question, that the Homeric theory conceived by Wolf must really be called not Wolfian but Vician, since such it truly is in its fundamental characteristics. Moreover, Wolf, as a philologist far superior to Vico but much less great as a thinker, was not in a position to understand the ideas which had led his predecessor to the doctrine he held concerning Homer: a fact which is clear from the somewhat superficial article he wrote on the subject in 1807.

There was certainly at Naples during the eighteenth century a vague consciousness in many minds of the greatness of Vico's work; but in what precisely this greatness consisted nobody could determine, owing to the lack of adequate experience and preparation. Outside Italy, especially in Germany, where this preparation existed or at least was much greater, Vico's work remained generally unknown, partly through the discredit into which Italian books had fallen since the end of the seventeenth century, and partly through the dimculties which Vico's style presented to a foreign reader. When the Scienza Nuova did fall into the hands of men competent to understand it, a series of insignificant accidents interposed to prevent such an understanding. Hamann procured the Scienza Nuova from Florence in 1777, at which time he was engaged upon economics and physiocracy, fancying that it dealt with these subjects; and the delusion was not dispelled when in glancing over it he found himself faced by a collection of philological studies and studies carried out with considerable carelessness. Goethe received it at Naples in 1787 from Filangieri, who warmly recommended it, took it back to Germany and lent it in 1792 to Jacobi; but it was a happy coincidence rather than a true knowledge or a clear intuition that led him to couple Vico's name with that of Hamann. Herder, who may also have known Vico's work less through his correspondence with Hamann in 1777 than by his travels in Italy in 1789, speaks of it in 1797 in quite general terms, without noticing one of the many connexions between Vico and himself, especially as regards the theory of language and poetry.

The only men in the eighteenth century who really to some extent penetrated into the fundamental thought of Vico and proclaimed though unwillingly his genuine greatness were--and this is another proof of the solid mental fibre of Catholicism--his Catholic opponents, of whom there were plenty: Romano, Lami, Rogadei, and above all Finetti. They saw that in spite of his stubborn protestations of religious orthodoxy Vico held a conception of Providence very different from that of Christian theology; and that though he continually used the name of God he never allowed him to operate effectively in history as a personal God; that he made so sharp a distinction between sacred and profane history as to reach a purely natural and human theory of the origin of civilisation, by means of the state of nature, and of the origin of religion, by means of fear, shame and the imaginative universal; while the traditional Catholic doctrine admitted a certain communication between sacred and profane history, and recognised in pagan religion and civilisation the leaven of some kind of vague recollection of the primitive revealed truth; that though protesting that he accepted and reinforced the authority of the Bible, he threatened and shook it on many points; and that his criticism of profane historical tradition, conducted in a haughty spirit of rebellion against the past, might open the road to the most dangerous abuses, since it provoked the application of the same spirit and method to sacred history, which happened in the case of Boulanger. In this accusation are faithfully indicated all the points destined later to enter into the nineteenth century's solemn eulogy of Vico. Thus churchmen began to be suspicious of him; and this bore fruit later in the restoration period, in the anti-Vician polemic of Bishop Colangelo, and somewhat earlier in a verdict of the royal censor Lorenzo Giustiniani, who pronounced the Scienza Nuova "a work marking a most unfortunate crisis in European history."

This tendency was opposed by the enthusiastic young students of social and political matters at Naples at the end of the eighteenth century, preparing themselves for an active part in the imminent revolution. Among them Vico came to be considered as an anti-clerical and anti-Catholic, and the legend arose, mentioned elsewhere in this volume, that Vico purposely and deliberately made his work obscure in order to escape ecclesiastical censure. These young men applied themselves to the study and praise of the Scienza Nuova; they proposed to reprint it, since it had become rare, together with the other works and unpublished manuscripts of the author; they prepared expositions and criticisms of Vico's philosophical and historical system; some like Pagano tried to work it up afresh by adding to it the ideas of French sensationalism, others like Filangieri did not let their admiration of it dispel their rosy dreams of reform. In 1797 the German Gerning on coming to Naples noted the zeal with which Vico was studied, and projected a translation or at least a summary of the Scienza Nuova in German. When the fall of the Neapolitan Republic in 1799 drove these young men, or rather those of them who escaped the massacres and the gallows of the Bourbon reaction, into exile in Northern Italy and especially in Lombardy, the cult of Vico was for the first time ardently propagated. Vincenzo Cuoco, Francesco Lomonaco, Francesco Salfi and other southern patriots passed the knowledge of the Scienza Nuova to Monti, who mentioned it in his inaugural lecture at Pavia in 1803, to Ugo Foscolo, who absorbed many of its ideas into his poem the Sepolcri and his critical essays: to Alessandro Manzoni, who was later to institute in his Discorso sulla storia longobarda a famous comparison between Vico and Muratori: and to others of less importance. Cuoco introduced Vico's work to Degérando, then at work on his Histoire comparée des systèmes philosophiques; another exile, De Angelis, put the Scienza Nuova into the hands of Jules Michelet; Salfi mentioned Vico in articles in the Revue Encyclopédique and in books and minor works in French. It was also through the suggestion of these Neapolitans that the Scienza Nuova was reprinted at Milan in 1801; and other editions and collections of Vico's smaller works were not long in appearing. Thus in the first decade of the nineteenth century Vico's reputation, which had till then been merely local to Naples, spread over the whole of Italy.

But, suitably to their personal disposition and to the spirit of the times, the first and chief debt which the patriotic students of Vico owed to his thought was political in character or rather belonging to political philosophy; and consisted in a criticism of that Jacobinism and philo-Gallicism of which they had had such unhappy experience in the events of 1799. Vico's thought led them to more concrete concepts; and this is particularly visible in Vincenzo Cuoco's admirable Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione napoletana (1800). Similarly Ballanche some decades later in his Essais de palingénésie sociale (1827) wrote that if Vico had been known in France in the eighteenth century he would have exercised a beneficial influence on the subsequent social revolutions. Another particular aspect of Vico's work, the reform undertaken by him of historical methodology and social science as an aid to history, was observed and emphasised by the archaeologist Cataldo Iannelli in his work Sulla natura e necessità della scienza delle cose e delle storie umane (1818). Foscolo and those who drew their inspiration from him chiefly introduced into literary criticism and history something of Vico's conceptions on the historical interpretation of poetry.

In Germany on the other hand Jacobi, who had read the De antiquissima, immediately placed himself in the centre of the Vician philosophy by discovering and pointing out in 1811, in his work Über den göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung, the close connexion between the principle of the convertibility of the true and the created and the Kantian theory that one can perfectly conceive and understand only what one is able to construct: a single step from which position leads, as he observes, to the system of identity. The same fact was recognised by Baader, who found in this system the confirmation and foundation of the principle enunciated by Vico. But the translation of the Scienza Nuova made by Weber in 1822 seems to have been unsuccessful; and it does not appear that Vico was known to Hegel, with whom he has so many substantial and formal affinities, especially in the Phenomenology; and whose mania for triads might be blamed just as the Catholic Finetti had blamed Vico for always standing "upon rule of three." The resemblances again of Vico's theories to the new German philological doctrines of Niebuhr, Müller, Böckh and many others were not at all willingly admitted. The attitude of Niebuhr is characteristic. Whether he knew Vico's work or not when he published the first edition of his Römische Geschichte, he certainly knew it later through Savigny and through the article entitled Vico und Niebuhr published in 1816 by the Swiss Orelli; and yet he continued to ignore him, through some kind of contempt or depreciation; an attitude hardly praiseworthy but imitated by Mommsen.

In France, the spread of knowledge concerning Vico's thought was due to Michelet, who translated his works and in his last years described Italy as "the second mother and nurse who in my youth suckled me upon Virgil, and in my maturity nourished me with Vico; potent cordials that have many times renewed my heart." Michelet was the first or one of the first to proclaim, in his introduction, that Vico was not understood in the eighteenth century because he wrote for the nineteenth. Michelet was joined by Ballanche, of whom we spoke above, and also by Jouffroy, Lerminier, Chateaubriand, and Cousin, some of whom grasped the connexion between Vico and the German philosophy that Cousin was at this time propagating in France; and later by Laurent, Vacherot, De Ferron, Franck, Cournot and many others. Vico was read and admired by Comte, who mentioned him in a letter to John Stuart Mill in 1844, and lastly Léon Gambetta conceived in his youth a general history of commerce upon the scheme of the Vician "reflux." The popularity of Vico's name in France at this period was so great that it is several times mentioned in joke in passages of Balzac's novels and in Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet. But thought of the quality of Vico's could never have a very deep or lasting influence in the persistently intellectualistic and spiritualistic atmosphere of France. Perhaps the most conspicuous results it produced were the theories of Fustel de Coulanges on the ancient city and the origin of feudalism.

But, to return to Italy, if the aspirations towards a national uprising, which tended to vindicate and glorify all the ornaments Italy could boast, raised Vico's name almost to a level with that of Dante, the simultaneous renaissance of philosophy, which was shaking off the sensationalism and materialism of the eighteenth century, was bound to attach itself to the last great idealistic philosopher, to use his thoughts and to shelter itself behind his authority. Vico's complete works were now collected and editions of the single treatises multiplied. And since in the national uprising two currents could be distinguished, partly successive and partly fused, the neo-Guelphian and the radical, and since this distinction was represented in the philosophical awakening by that between Catholic idealism and rationalistic idealism, the schools of Rosmini and Gioberti on the one hand and Bruno and Hegel on the other; Vico, at once a Catholic and a free philosopher, lent himself admirably, as is easy to understand, to the contrary sympathies and interpretations of the two schools. Thus originated two different pictures of him, both historically justified, though the one painted him as he would have wished to be, the other as he was. The Vico of the liberal Catholics was above all the Vico of the metaphysical points, the Platonist, the mystic of the unknowable God, the traditionalist of the prologues to the Diritto universale, and hence the strictly Italian philosopher as opposed to those of the rest of Europe, sons of the Reformation: whereas the Vico of the rationalists, the bold and heretical author of the Scienza Nuova, is a European philosopher to be set side by side with Descartes and Spinoza, Kant and Hegel. The former picture may be seen in the works of Rosmini, Gioberti, Tommaseo and many others, among which we must not forget those of a Neapolitan writer of lofty spirit, Enrico Cenni, perhaps the best of all, who draws a loving picture of the Vico of the Catholics. The latter portrait is found in the philosophers and critics who from 1840 onwards acquired their education in the school of German idealism; especially Bertrando Spaventa and Francesco de Sanctis, who were the first to see clearly Vico's relations to earlier and later European thought and to substitute for mere observations and vague impressions on the subject a scientific interpretation and a determinate judgment. That the second school of interpreters and critics were in the right, and that the liberal or idealistic Catholics had taken up an untenable position and reproduced in their irresolution and incoherence the irresolution and incoherence of Vico himself, was proved by the fact, among others, that less liberal but more consistent Catholics like the Spaniard Jaime Balmes show an inflexible distrust and hostility towards the author of the Scienza Nuova.

The study of history in Italy during this period was less deeply modified by Vico's influence; chiefly perhaps because the impulse of the national uprising led to the neglect of primitive and Roman history and the devotion of all its best energies to research into the origin and vicissitudes of the Italian republics, a subject Vico had entirely ignored. On the other hand, jurisprudence especially in the south was dominated by his thought; and though it produced in this field no great scientific results, it gave to the jurists a loftiness and breadth of judgment and a concreteness of view which were long remembered and regretted.

After 1870, with the decay of philosophy in Italy and elsewhere, the study of Vico also decayed: and for more than forty years there was no demand for a reprint of his works. The monograph by Cantoni in the year 1867, in spite of some valuable passages, already shows unmistakable signs of the decadence, founded as it is upon the idea that Vico's value is greater according as he is less of a metaphysician and more of a psychologist and historian: a position due not so much to the intrinsic weakness ascribed to him by Cantoni in philosophical matters as to the implicit conviction on the critic's part that metaphysic in general is a valueless thing, useful only for rousing enthusiasm in the addled heads of southern Italians. The great idealist of the New Science was subjected, as a final insult, to the praises of the positivists, who in their astonishing ignorance almost amounting to innocence did not--and still do not--hesitate to allege as a confirmation of their formal profession of faith the words "verum ipsum factum," which according to them means that the truth is the fact which we see and touch. Writings making any serious contribution to the knowledge of any particular point on Vico's doctrines were rare. Interest in Vico only reawoke within the last decade with the general reawakening of philosophical studies.

Of the two best comprehensive works on Vico published towards the end of last century one is due to the German Catholic Karl Werner (1881) who expounds his philosophical and historical doctrines with great care, judging them from the point of view of speculative theism, a theory evolved under the influence of Baader and the second philosophy of Schelling, and tending much more to the comprehension of Vico than the psychology of Cantoni. The other is the work of an Englishman, Robert Flint (1884), who wrote for the collection of Philosophical Classics a brief monograph upon the subject, accurate in detail, and if not profound at least guided by clear and sound sense. Recently Sorel in France has shown the fruitfulness of certain views of Vico's, especially that of the reflux, by applying them to the history of primitive Christianity and the theory of the modern proletarian movement, while in Germany Biese and Mauthner have brought his conceptions of metaphor and language once more into favour.

But in spite of all this Vico has never had justice done him in works devoted to the history of modern philosophy. These, in the case both of Höffding's book and of the greatly superior work of Windelband, and in fact of all others, either pass over the Italian philosopher in complete silence or else merely mention him as an experimenter, later than Bossuet and earlier than Herder, in the dubious science of the "philosophy of history." This lack of attention arises partly from an insufficient knowledge of Vico's real nature; his fertile activities in the theory of knowledge, in ethics, in aesthetic, in law and in religion are all hidden behind that one label "philosopher of history." Partly however it is due to the reaction of the history of politics and culture on the history of philosophy; which produces the effect that thinkers whose social influence came to an end with the fall of the peoples or states to which they belonged, or who for some reason or other had no considerable influence on European civilisation, are sacrificed to others much less important from a philosophical point of view but more influential or better known as exponents of social life and representatives of cultural tendencies; so that where it would be thought impossible to ignore, for example, Paley or d'Holbach or Mendelssohn, it seems natural to pass over Giambattista Vico, though in such company he is a giant among pigmies. The historical injustice of this course has been already shown theoretically by the distinction we have emphasised between the history of philosophy and the history of culture; and in Vico's special case by our whole work, which clearly shows the lacuna left by the omission of Vico in the general history of European thought at the beginning of the eighteenth century.