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Vico and Descartes: from Rationalism to Historicism VICO AND DESCARTES VICO AND DESCARTES: FROM RATIONALISM TO HISTORICISM By FIORE GUIDO, B.A. A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts (September) 1986 MASTER OF ARTS (1986) McMASTER UNIVERSITY (Philosophy) Hamilton, Ontario TITLE: Vico and Descartes: From Rationalism to Historicism AUTHOR: Fiore Guido, B.A. (University of Toronto) B.A. (McMaster University) M.A. (McMaster University) SUPERVISOR: Professor Albert Shalom NUMBER OF PAGES: vii, 156 ii This work is dedicated to the solitary individual: Though he may have not understood, he and he alone would not have misunderstood. iii ------------ ABSTRACT In this work, we shall argue that the originality of Giambattista Vico in the history of anti-Cartesianism lies not simply, as it is generally believed, in his dissent from the anti-historical tenets of Cartesianism, but in his radical departure from the Cartesian conception of the universe. For Vico, in our view, was one of the very first, if not the first, thinker to recognise fully the implications of Cartesian mechanism and to, consequently, reject the Cartesian conception of nature and (correlatively) the Cartesian conception of man. His "nuova scienza", with its intrinsically dynamic universe and its fundamentally historical man, must therefore be understood as a fundamentally anti-Cartesian science of reality. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work owes its existence to the support and assistance of various individuals whose contribution must be acknowledged, though I alone am responsible for its imperfections. I am extremely grateful to my supervisor, Professor Albert Shalom, a great teacher and a truly compassionate individual, who willingly bore the burden of guiding an impulsive and insecure young scholar through the task of writing his first thesis. I am also grateful to Professors Samuel Ajzenstat and Tom Willey for their acceptance of a difficult situation and their contribution to the completion of this task. And the assistance of Felice Accogli, who contributed to the translation of various key passages of Vico's Opere, must also be acknowledged. On a more personal level, I wish to express my gratitude to my mother and father, Ines and Antonio, to my uncle Luigi, and to Fiorina, Corrado, and David for their constant support and encouragement; to Marilyn for keeping my body and soul together while working on "Beagle"; and to Laurie for "the instant". Finally, I would like to thank the Department of Philosophy, especially its Chairman, Professor Evan Simpson, for allowing me to return to fi~ish this unfinished business. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ••...•...•......•.•..•..••...••......•.... 1 Chapter One: GIAMBATTISTA VICO: THE OBSCURE INDIVIDUAL I. The Revolution . 6 II. The Neapolitan Awakening .•.•...•.....•.......... 10 III. A "Learned Scholar" •...•...•..•......•......•... 15 IV. Obscurity. .................................... .. 29 v. The Rediscovery of a Genius 34 Chapter Two: THE HISTORICIZATION OF MAN I. The Cartesian Enterprise ..•..................... 43 II. An Analysis of Vico's Cosmology ......•...•....•. 49 1. A Summary of Stoic Physics 51 2. Vico's Physicus 4 ••••••••••••• 57 3. Vico's Metaphysicus 69 Chapter Three: I~N QUA CREATOR I. The Faculties of the Soul 86 II. The Creative Theory of Knowledge 91 1. Cartesian Epistemology 9: 2. Towards the Verum-Factum Principle 95 3. The Verum-Factum Principle 97 4. Knowing, Making, and History 106 vi III. Making and Self-Making III CONCLUSION ............................................ 116 NOTES Chapter One 118 Chapter Two ........................................... 126 Chapter Three ......................................... 139 BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................... 150 vii INTRODUCTION The "nuova scienza" of Giovanni Battista Vico is fundamentally an anti-Cartesian science of man. Ir-deed it is beyond question that the source of the "nuova scienza" was Vico's conviction that Cartesian rationalism was propounding a false conception of nature and thus (correlatively) a false conception of man and that it was therefore imperative to put an end to its advancement. Consequently Vico constructed his radical science of man not merely, as it is generally believed, in defence of the humaniora against the methodological monism characteristic of the Cartesian approach to science, but in explicit opposition to the entire Cartesian philosophical enterprise. The primary reason for Vico's anti-Cartesianism was his dissatisfaction with the Cartesian conception of nature. What Descartes had failed to realize, according to Vico, was that nature is in fact an essentially dynamic and evolutionary process and that to attain a "true" understanding of reality its ontogenetic constitution must be recognized and incorporated into the very fabric of scientific thinking. Consequently, Vico attempted to replace Cartesian mechanism with his revised version of Stoic dynamism which, modified by the Judaeo-Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo, propounded an essentially teleological conception of nature. Naturally: the conception of nature as an essentially dynamic and evolutionary process became the foundation of Vico1s entire philosophical enterprise, just as the Cartesian conception , 2 of nature as pure matter in motion had become the foundation of Descartes' entire philosophical enterprise. It is, therefore, not surprising that Vico rejected Cartesian rationalism: for the Vichian understanding of reality is fundamentally different from the Cartesian understanding of reality. The immediate philosophical consequence of the transformation of nature as pure matter in motion to nature as process is the transformation of being as the changeless substratum of reality to being as becoming, which in turn ultimately manifests itself as the transformation of man as a "thinking substance" to man as an int~grality, a complex and concrete evolutionary reality. For within an essentially dynamic and evolutionary universe, all natural phenomena, including man, are in nature and are consequently complex and concrete realities forever in movement from potentiality to actuality. That is to say, all natural phenomena are compound and unified entities which go through the process of life: birth, development, maturity, decay, and death. To put it in specifically Vichian terms, all natural phenomenon come to be what they are in and through history. Thus, just as nature is a dynamic and evolutionary process, man is a dynamic and evolutionary creature; and just as nature unfolds in and through space and time, man unfolds in and through history. In other words, man, because he is a constituent element of nature and its dynamic and evolutionary processes, is a fundamentally historical being. Moreover, the identification of being and the his,torical process engendered a radical transformation in the nature of philosophical thinking the transformation of thinking into historical thinking. Since for Vico being is becoming, to understand the nature of an object we must 3 understand its birth: the mode of its development out of its origins. To understand nature we must understand how it came to be what it is: we must understand its history. To understand man we must understand how he came to be what he is: we must understand his history. This emphasis on genesis (history) engendered Vico's central epistemological thesis: verum et factum convertuntur, the identity of the true with what has been made or done, that is, with that which owes its being to having been brought into existence. This formula in turn reinforces Vico's assertion that knowledge is cognition of the genus or mode by which a thing is made. Together these two epistemological principles delimit the scope of human knowledge. Since to know is to make the thing known and since God, not roan, has made the world of nature, only God can know the natural world. But man has himself made the world of nations, and thus he can know the historical world. Thus history, not science, becomes the primary source of human knowledge and the basis from which to understand reality. Thus what emerged from Vico's critical analysis of the rational understanding of reality was an essentially historical understanding of reality. By incorporating the ontogenetic constituton of nature and its processes into the very fabric of scientific thinking, Vico constructed a unique conceptual structure which engendered both the historicization of roan and the transformation of thinking into historical thinking. We can, therefore, confidently state that historicism emerged directly out of Vico's criticism of Cartesian rationalism. We are confident that this thesis can be easily demonstrated by an analysis of Vico' s essentially Stoic cosmology. For the cosmology, which was propounded in the De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, a work published in 4 1710, fifteen years before the Scienza Nuova prima and thirty-four years before the Scienza Nuova terza, not only presents us with an explicitly anti-Cartesian science of the universe, but also firmly establishes an essentially dynamic and evolutionary conception of nature and thus (correlatively) an essentially dynamic and evolutionary conception of man as the grounds of Vico' s new historical science of man. The cosmology, in other words, leaves no doubt whatsoever that Vico's "nuova scienza" is indeed fundamentally an anti-Cartesian science of man. Indeed we are confident that this analysis will not only substantiate our thesis, but also
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