Tony Fahey graduated from DCU with a BA in Humanities (Philosophy and Literature). From there he moved to NUI Maynooth to complete his postgraduate studies. Whilst at Maynooth he taught philosophy at St Patricks College and Maynooth University (NUI Maynooth). On completion of these studies he returned to DCU to realise his ambition to teach philosophy with Oscail. Now retired from teaching, Tony continues to be involved in 'things philosophical': he is a long time member of the Irish Philosophical Society, a board member and Fellow of the International Society For Philosophers (www.isfp.co.uk), and is an active panel member of ISFP's Ask A Philosopher facility (http.askaphilosopher.wordpress.com).


Most recent publications:

Books:

Vico’s Road to Postmodernism, Choice Publishing. 2009

Articles:

‘Vico on the Making of the Heroic or Dignified Mind’. Maynooth Philosophical Journal, 2001

‘Philosophy, Science, Consciousness’, Philosophy Pathways E-Journal,Issue 154

‘Vico, Joyce, Beckett, Yeats’, Philosophy Pathways E-Journal, Issue 153

‘Philosophy, Language and Art’, Philosophy Pathways E-Journal, Issue 152

'Giambattista Vico-Street Catholic, House Heretic, Philosophy Pathways E-Journal, Issue 161

'Giambattista Vico on Language and Education', International Society For Philosophers Essay Archive, 2011

Welcome to the Philosophy Forum

The study of Philosophy is the study of ideas. That is, rather than advocating one worldview over another, Philosophy, ideally, as a discipline, should examine the dogmas, paradigms, worldviews or 'philosophies' : the 'big ideas', of other thinkers. Reflecting Socrates' view that the unexamined life is not worth living, the position the philosopher should hold is that no worldview should be exempted from the microscopic scrutiny of philosophical examination.

Those amongst you who are interested in the history of ideas, the development of human consciousness, medieval, modern, postmodern philosophy and the philosophy of language, may find my recent book, Vico's Road to Postmodernism, of some interest. This book should be available, as they say, 'in all good bookshops'; direct from the publisher (Choice Publishing: phone: 353 - (0)41 - 9841551) or from Amazon.co.uk from the first week of February 2009.

A brief synopsis:

Each philosopher of note has one ‘big idea’: one central thesis that is the feature of his or her entire opus. For Plato this theme is the Good: the inner force that impels all things to excellence or perfection. For Parmenides it is that being is One: immutable and unchanging. For Hegel it is the dialectical process through which the Absolute Spirit moves to self-realisation. Descartes’ central intuition is the cogito. Heidegger’s is Dasein - being in the world with others. Giambattista Vico’s ‘big idea’ is set out the most often quoted portion of paragraph 331 of his magnum opus, New Science (1744) where he says:

Still, in the dense and dark night which envelops remotest antiquity, there shines an eternal and inextinguishable light. It is a truth that cannot be doubted: The civil world is certainly the creation of humankind. And consequently, the principles of the civil world can and must be discovered within the modifications of the human mind.

The ambition of Vico's Road to Postmodernism is to examine the ‘big idea’ implicit in this quotation, and to show how the sentiments represented in it anticipate that movement which we know today as postmodernism.

What is Philosophy?
Philosophy, as any student of Philosophy will tell you, means ‘love of wisdom’. In its truest sense it is a desire to challenge, to expand and to extend the frontiers of one’s own understanding. It is the study of the documented wisdom – the ‘big ideas’ - of thinkers throughout the history of humankind. However, even in our most respected institutions, Philosophy is often presented as theology, psychology, spirituality or religion. Indeed, many exponents of these respective disciplines seem to have no difficulty in identifying themselves as ‘philosophers’ when in fact they are 'dogmatists' (sic). What can be said, however, is that Philosophy is all of the above and none. ‘All’, in the sense that it will certainly engage with the views advanced by the exponents of these disciplines. ‘None’, in the sense that Philosophy can never be constrained by views that do not allow themselves to be examined, challenged, deconstructed and demystified in the realisation that ‘wisdom’ or ‘truth’ is not something that can be caught and grasped as one particular ism.

For those really interested in Philosophy, it is important to draw a distinction between ‘a philosophy’ and ‘Philosophy’ itself. There are abroad today many colleges, institutions, societies, 'schools of philosophy' (and, for some reason 'schools of philosophy and economics'), groups, cults and sects promoting the view that they ‘teach’ Philosophy, where in fact what they are doing is promoting a particular worldview that they claim is superior to other worldviews or ‘philosophies’. What has to be said is that when a body claims that its philosophy has the monopoly on other worldviews it cannot be placed under the rubric of Philosophy - it is dogma. It is for this reason that those institutions that promote a particular religious ethos cannot, by their very nature, be said to teach Philosophy in any real sense: they are constrained by their own 'philosophical' prejudices to treat other worldviews impartially - particularly where these other approaches run contrary to their own. Moreover, by indoctrinating their students into a mindset that holds that it is their way or no way, these institutions show that their interest is not primarily in that which is best for the student, but that which is best in ensuring their own perpetuity. This approach (of using others as a means to one's own ends), as Kant reminds us, is repugnant to Philosophy - the search for wisdom. What this means is that Philosophy cannot condone any body of knowledge that advocates a closed view on wisdom or truth - one cannot take an a la carte approach to Philosophy. As the Dalai Lama, in the prologue to his book The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality advises, where scientific discoveries are made that expose weaknesses in long held traditional beliefs, these beliefs should be abandoned, and the new discoveries embraced (would that all spiritual leaders or ‘philosophers’ were so openminded!). Philosophy, then, must operate on the premise that its conclusions should ever be open to what Karl Popper calls, ‘the law of falsification’. That is where its conclusions are found to be questionable, it is imperative that these views are revisited, re-evaluated and, where necessary, either re-formulated or abandoned. Unfortunately, as history shows, many systems of belief either will not entertain such an approach, or, if or when they do, it is often so far in time removed from the initial discovery that much harm has occurred in the interim.

What should be realised is that the wisdom to which Philosophy aspires is not attained by the practice of uttering self-hypnotising mantras or prayers, nor by being initiated into some select group, sect or cult that promises that its ‘road less travelled’ is the one true road. Philosophy is not love of ‘a truth’ or ‘some particular approach to wisdom’, but a love of truth and wisdom. However, this wisdom or truth does not come pre-wrapped and packaged as one ism or another, rather it involves the courage and preparedness to engage with, to challenge and to expand the boundaries of one’s own knowledge and experience. - one's own wisdom.

In this forum, for your scrutiny, I have posted some of the 'big ideas' of those thinkers that have most influenced the way we think today (see list at top of page). From the various postings you will see, notwithstanding the esteem in which their 'philosophies' are held, that these thinkers do not always hold corresponding views. It is important to realise that the philosophy does not ask you to surrender your beliefs:your own 'worldviews', only to ensure that those you hold so dear are worthy of esteem in which you hold them.

Would the world be better off witout a concept of God?

On another forum in which to which I contribute, a question arose regarding philosopher Peter Kreeft’s thought experiment where he asks us to consider what the world would be like if no one had ever conceived of the idea of God. The question was: without a concept of God, would humanity as a whole be better or worse off?


By way of responding to this question, let us begin by asking what concept should we take as the definitive understanding of God? Is it that of Vishnu or Hari, the Superior Reality, the all-pervasive Lord who expands into everything? Is it the Greek God Zeus, God of gods, who thought nothing of copulating with mortal women and who, through the midwife Maia, produced Hermes, messenger of the gods, and from whose head emerged Athena? Is it Aristotle’s ‘primum mobile immotum’ ,the ‘first unmoved mover’: the roi fainéant, the nothing king who reigns but does not rule: a god whose only occupation is to contemplate the essence of things? Is it the God of Islam: a god who rewards those warriors who die so that others might know the true way with maidens who save their honour for this worthy cause? Is it the pantheistic God of Spinoza, or the God of Moses and the Old Testament: the all powerful jealous and angry God who demanded complete allegiance to his whims and commandments? Or is it the God of the New Testament, the God of Jesus who, whilst seemingly benign, still insists that the only way to salvation was through him? Whilst all these divinities are revered in their own way by their own adherents, for Peter Kreeft it is the God of Catholicism – the God of the New Testament - for whom he is an apologist. Now while Kreeft’s position may be admirable to those who share or are persuaded by his views, to the philosophy his 20 ways of proving the existence of God are little more than a rehashing of the same arguments extended by Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes and others –all arguments, that is, that have been found to be rationally or philosophically unsustainable. Although Kreeft accepts that science cannot prove the existence of God, he argues that it is possible to just know something without necessarily being able to prove it. This, of course, places him in the company of flat-earthists, and those who insisted that the earth is the centre of the universe.

Let us pause for a moment to consider what recent history tells us of this world of Kreeft’s God. By coincidence I have just returned from visiting the graves of those slaughtered on the battle fields of Flanders during the 1st World War, in this God’s world. In my lifetime I can recall the horrors that humans perpetrated against other humans during the 2nd World War, in Kreeft’s God’s world. I have lived at the time of the Vietnam War, of the genocide of the ‘Killing Fields’ of Cambodia, of Chechnya, Rwanda, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, East Timor, and many many more troubled lands, all which have taken place in Kreeft’s God’s world. I live in a country that, over many centuries, has been constantly torn apart by religious differences of people who, paradoxically, all believe in the same God; I have grown up in a country whose indigenous people still carry the emotional scars of a famine that reduced its population from 8 million to little more than 3 million in less than 3 years; I have learned of the misery visited on this God’s creatures by earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, and other ‘natural disasters’; I have visited ‘Ground Zero’, site of the place where the planes destroyed the iconic Twin Towers in New York; against this act of terror, and I have witnessed counter acts which, rather than punishing the perpetrators, have terrorized and destroyed the lives of innocent men, women, and children – all in Kreeft’s God’s world. I have watched those close to me struggle and win their battle against cancer and other terminal diseases, and I have seen others close to me fight the same fight and lose - all in Kreeft’s God’s world. And I have seen how leaders of the Catholic Church have for too long not only ignored the cries for justice of victims of child physical and sexual abuse by its own clergy, but also how they actively moved to protect those guilty of these crimes by moving them to parishes and/or institutions where they were free to continue their heinous practices – in Kreeft’s God’s world. And you ask if the world would be better or worse without such a God.

So let us return to the question at hand. It should not come as a surprise to learn that there are systems of beliefs that do not look to other worldly entities for social values and moral guidance. Buddhism, for example, whilst its adherents follow strict ethical guidelines, is known as the religion without a God. Secular humanists, who espouse reason, ethics and human fulfillment, make the case that humans can be ethical and moral without religion – or God; and believe it or not it is actually possible for atheists and agnostics to live perfectly moral lives without seeking direction from religion and its gods.

So what do I think of a world in which values are grounded in common sense rather than superstition? What do I think of a world built on reason rather than the imagined whims of an imagined transcendent deity? What do I think of a world in which humans, rather than attempting to conceive that which is unconceivable, would be better occupied addressing themselves to the study of the human world: the laws, institutions, customs and practices that are germane to this world rather than the next? And what do I think of a world built on pragmatism, tolerance, pluralism, and mutual respect? You know what, not only do I think that it couldn’t be worse, I actually think that it might even be better.

Giambattista's Vico’s Sources

1. Introduction
Probably the first thing that can be said of Vico’s sources is that they are many and varied and that his New Science draws freely not only from an eclectic mix of those whose work he admired and accepted, but also from those whose work he condemned and ultimately rejected. Central to Vico’s philosophy is the view that ideas and concepts are not innate but arise in virtue of the collective consciousness (or, more accurately, the collective unconsciousness) of the community – the sensus communis. That is, that one’s ideas are formed by the society to which one is exposed. When we investigate Vico’s sources we are reminded that society or community can take different forms and that the ideas that shape us are not just those found in our immediate social environment. Indeed, the concern voiced today by so many in relation to the influence of television, the internet and other outside forces bears testimony to this fact. It might be argued that what the internet is to today’s youth is what his father’s book-shop was to the young Giambattista Vico, and the library of the castle of Cilento at Vatolla was to the eighteen year old Vico who was there as tutor to the children of the Duca della Rocca – a virtual reality where values, traditional and contemporaneous, could be measured against each other. Thus, as well as the influences of the immediate Neapolitan society into which he was born, we find such literary and philosophical giants as Homer, Tacticus, Lucretius, Varro, Plato, Aristotle, Pufendorf, Grotius, Selden, Hobbes, Spinoza, Valla, Descartes, Bacon, Le Clerc and many more. Vico’s history of philosophy revolves around four central themes: (1) that the history of humankind – the ideal eternal history of humankind - is a cyclical process which moves through three different stages before returning to the original; (2) that the myths and legends of ancient nations are in fact true histories which arise from the collective common sense judgements of the community – the sensus communis, under the direction of divine providence; (3) that man can only know to be true that which he makes – the verum ipsum factum principle; (4) and that these issues can all be investigated is in the light of his new form of criticism – his scienza nouva. This paper will show that, while Vico must be credited with bringing these ideas together to form a cohesive philosophical unit, they are by no means his ideas but ideas gleaned from the “sensus communis” of his own unique environment. It will investigate Vico’s sources in order that we might locate him in the history of philosophy, and that we might see, even for thinkers of the calibre of Vico, that no philosopher’s mind is an island unto itself.

2. The history of humankind as a cyclical process involving three distinct ages
According to Giambattista Vico the history of humankind is a cyclical process involving eternal ricorsi or revolutions each of which consists of three distinct ages: the age of gods, the age of heroes, the age of men. During the age of men, human reason reaches its zenith and then descends into chaos - at which time the whole cyclical process begins again. It should be said from the outset that this notion of history as a cyclical process is not an original idea. In fact, in Medieval Italy, as well as other European countries at that time, it was commonly held that human history was governed by the same laws as the four seasons; the linear view of history was taken from the Judeao-Christian tradition which, since it derived from desert people, was not subject to the same recurring seasonal variations. Peter Burke reminds us that Vico was well familiar with this traditional cyclical view of history and says that Vico took this idea from the ancient Greek historian Polybius (c. 203-c. 120 BC) “who suggested that monarchy was naturally followed by aristocracy and aristocracy by democracy, and when democracy went into decline, monarchy came around again”. Vico himself admits familiarity with Marcus Terentius Varro’s three ages of history: (i) the mythical age; (ii) the dark age, and (iii) the historical age, and he admits also that his concept greatly profits “from the antiquity of the Egyptians” – “l’antichità degli egizi” who, according to Herodotus, says Vico, also divided the history of humankind into different phases: “(1) the age of the gods, (2) the age of heroes, and (3) the age of men” – “la prima degli dèi, la seconda degli eroi e la terza degli uomini”. Vico was also familiar with the works of Plato and Aristotle and would have known of the theory of a cyclical historical process advanced by Plato in the Republic in “The Myth of Er”, as well as Aristotle’s concept of eternal recurrence. In the Stagerite’s cyclical world process , a concept which Vico freely adopted to explain the Flood, the sun forever evaporates the waters of the earth, lifts the moisture into the atmosphere to form clouds, then falls again to reform the rivers and the seas. Like Vico, Aristotle sees human civilisation repeatedly reaching its zenith only to fall back into barbarism and begin again. Donald Kunze informs us that Vico was also familiar with the notion of eternal recurrence in Macrobius’ Commentary on the dream of Scopio. In this work Macrobius, the fifth century Latin author, brings together the threads of Cicero’s story of a dream of Scipio Africanus’ Grandson. A dream, Kunze reminds us, that “parallels in many ways the famous ‘Myth of Er’”, and in which “civilisation is explained as a “motion of the soul between wetness (the Flood?) and dryness” [Rationalism?].

While there seems to be no doubt th at Vico took inspiration for his cyclical historical process from Greek and Roman sources, he also found confirmation of his thesis in the works of the Jesuit father Michele Ruggieri, who had “seen Chinese books that were printed before the coming of Christ”, of Father Martini, whose History of China Vico had read; and of Nicolas Trigault, whose Christian Mission to China, says Vico, is “better informed that either Ruggieri or Martini". When we compare Vico’s view that “… in the dense and dark night which envelops remotest antiquity, there shines an eternal and inextinguishable light” (“… in tal densa notte di tenebre and’ è coverta la prima da noi lontanissima antichità, apparisce questo lume eterno”) with a recurring theme in some Chinese stories where “a ray of light emerges out of chaos and builds the sky”, it seems fair to conclude that not only do the Italian philosopher’s words bear a strong resemblance to those of his Oriental cousins, but also that his view that the history of humankind inevitably moves to dissolution and chaos is also strikingly similar.

That Vico took his inspiration for his cyclical concept of the history of humankind from these sources is without question. That he firmly believed this process to be a true representation of human history also appears to be also without question. However, on his own evidence this thesis fails to hold true. As Robert Flint points out, on Vico’s own admission, Assyria was only known to have experienced one of these three stages - the other two would have to be “conjecturally affirmed on the ground that the law of three stages had elsewhere prevailed”. Even in relation to Italy, Flint goes on to say, Vico represents the age of gods as a stage of history that is not proper to Roman history. It should also be pointed out that the American Indian nation, which, it might be argued, moved from the age of gods to dissolution without passing through an age of dispassionate reason, does not conform to Vico’s worldview. Indeed, it might also be argued that as long as the people of any nation continue to create the concept of the ideal human being by bestowing attributes of exaggerated heroic proportions onto some of their political, literary, and religious leaders, both past and present, they too will fail to move beyond the age of heroes. As Robert Flint says, Vico, in his anxiety to show that all histories were subject to the same historical process, “did great violence to chronology, without succeeding… in establishing the thesis”.

3. Sensus communis, myths, legends, and natural law
According to Vico the myths and legends of early man were not “absurd fantasies of helpless primitives, or deliberate inventions designed to delude the masses and secure their obedience to cunning and unscrupulous masters”, rather they were true representations of the laws, institutions, religions, and other rules of societal behaviour that arose spontaneously from man’s experience with the natural world. Vico calls the collective mind of the people the sensus communis, by which he means the common sense judgements of the community. Myths and legends, then, contain the true values of these early people’s lives. The heroes around whom these myths are built were not real men but poetical heroes – physical embodiments of an anthropomorphic mode of thought who represent “the common sense, unreflecting judgement shared by an entire social order, people, nation, or even all of humankind” (“Il senso comune è un guidizio senz’ alcuna riflessione, comunemente sentito da tutto un ordine, da tutto un popolo, da tutta una naziona o da tutto il gener umano”). For example, amongst the many popular myths of the ancient Greeks that Vico was familiar with was the anonymous Hymn of Hermes (c. the 8th or 7th century BC). Hermes was son of the midwife Maia and the god Zeus. According to the myth, Hermes finds a tortoise, cuts off its limbs and scoops out the marrow, then, with the aid of reeds and strings, turns the creature into a lyre. In Vichean terms, Hermes is a poetical or imagined hero. His instinctive creative act of “metamorphosising” the tortoise into a lyre represents the spontaneous or unreflecting arising of values or ideas from the consensus of the community – the sensus communis. In the New Science, Vico turns to Homer to illustrate his belief that ancient heroes are poetic archetypes rather than real people. Works like the Odyssey and the Iliad are not the works of one man, says Vico, but “rhapsodes of which [the Greek people] were themselves the authors” (rapsòdi… de’ quali essi eran autori). Evidence of this, and of Vico’s view that “universals” are general terms for mutable principles and values rather than givens fixed for all time, is found in the section of the New Science entitled “Discovery of the True Homer” (“Della Discoverta del Vero Omero”) where Vico points out that in the Iliad, which was composed by a youthful Homer, that is “when Greece was young and therefore burning with sublime passions” (“quando era giovinetta la Grecia e, ‘n conseguenza, ardentte di sublimi passioni”), the hero possesses such attributes as pride, anger, and revenge, such as those embodied in Achilles, “the hero of violence” (“eroe della forza”), whereas the hero of the Odyssey, which was written when Homer was in old age, that is, “when the spirits of Greece had been somewhat cooled by reflection”, (“quando la Grecia aveva alquanto raffreddato gli animi con la riflessione”), was Ulysses, “the hero of wisdom” (eroe della sapienza”). Thus, says Vico, we see that “the Homer who was author of the Iliad preceded by many centuries the Homer who was author of the Odyssey” (“l’Omero autor dell’ Iliade avere di molt’ eta preceduto l’Omero autore dell’ Odissea”). In other words, the Iliad and the Odyssey are not the works of one man, nor are they “absurd fantasies of helpless primitives”, but true representations of the spontaneous or unreflected judgements of the Greek people at different times in their history.

Gianfranco Cantelli reminds us that Vico considered his concept of the myths of the early poets as true histories of the customs of the ancient people of Greece as “the master key” to his new science. The methodology of Vico’s science, which advocates a careful and thorough examination of fables as historical documents, owes much to the work being done in Vico’s own time to Jean Le Clerc (1657-1736), the Protestant French editor of Bibliothèque ancienne et moderne (Ancient and Modern Library, 1714-22). As well as sharing Le Clerc’s view that ancient myths could be related to pagan history, Vico also took the view that the “universal” truths of the primitive man were not comparable to those of more civilised people. He agreed with Le Clerc that the history of the Hebrew people was separate from that of pagan history, and that myths were not constructed by cunning political and religious leaders in order to control the masses. However, it should be noted, that while, for Le Clerc, “the myth is a true and proper historical account, to be understood exactly like a modern historical narrative…[f]or Vico, myth constituted instead a primitive expression of fantasy”. In other words, while, for Le Clerc, myths represent a history of facts, for Vico they represent a history of the origin of ideas. Nonetheless, it must be accepted that Le Clerc’s concept of fables as historical documents had a decisive influence on Vico’s interpretation of myths.

Donald Phillip Verene, in his Vico’s Science of Imagination (1981), also reminds us that the key to understanding Vico’s science is his idea interpreting myths as representations of “universal truths” or, as Vico called them, “imaginative universals” (“universali fantastici”) which emerge in virtue of the spontaneous judgements of the sensus communis. As seen above, an example of what Vico means by myth as an “imaginative universal” is his view that heroes such as Homer, Hercules or Achilles were not representations of real heroic individuals but of a poetic thought of the heroic ideal that arose from the collective mind of the community. In the same way that each nation produced its own Jupiter, its own imagined deity, so too did each community produce its own ideal man. However, while this may indeed be the key to understanding Vico’s science, Harold Stone makes the point that the idea of the imagined archetype was not unique to Vico and that as early as the ninth century a similar notion was advanced by Agnellus da Ravenna, a writer whose work would certainly have been accessible to Vico since his book featured as a lead article in the same issue of the journal, Giornale de’Letterati, that reviewed Vico’s Study Methods of Our Time. Agnellus, an abbot, in his Liber pontificatis Ravennatenis, wrote the biographical history of the forty-five bishops of Ravenna. Notwithstanding the fact that in this work Agnellus clearly states that many of the accounts of the lives he chronicles have no oral or written tradition, he strenuously holds that from imaginative reconstructions based on portraits of these men, he could construct legitimate representations of the true character of each. Because these men were, like himself, bishops of the Church, Agnellus believed he could intuit all that was required to know of their lives. Thus, in the same way that Agnellus recreates imaginative universals of his saintly predecessors, so too does Vico’s early poets create mythical archetypes of all that they held virtuous.

Vico’s interest in natural law dates back to his youth when he was attracted to the writings of Suarez, Grotius, Selden, and Pufendorf. Francis Suarez (1558-1617) was a Spanish philosopher who questioned whether individual nations had the right to establish their own legislative systems, and whether the law of nations was synonymous with natural law. Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), of whose work Vico acknowledged “…enlarged his thoughts and gave him a strong onward impulse”, in his Law of War and Peace (1625), defined natural law as “the dictates of ‘right reason’ or ‘common sense’, summarised it as respect for others, equated it… with the law of nations, and declared that it would retain its validity even if God did not exist”. Grotius’ ambition was to establish a system of international law by arguing that, philosophically and historically, it was an extension of a rationality existing universally in the natural law of nations. While Vico acknowledges his debt to Grotius, in his New Science, he refers to Grotius’ work only to criticise it for failing to recognise the metaphysical importance of God. John Selden (1584-1654) was an English scholar who declared that natural law was “what natural reason establishes in all men”, and Samuel Pufendorf (1632-1694), a German jurist, echoed Aristotle by positing the view that man is essentially a sociable animal, and that “living in society is living according to the law of nature”. While Vico accepted that the writings of Grotius, Selden, and Pufendorf, or, as he called them, these “princes of the law of nations” (“principi… del diritto natural delle gente”), gave him insights into the way philosophy, he nonetheless held that their failure to recognise the difference between Hebrew law and pagan law, or, indeed, between historical law and philosophical law, was a serious error. Grotius, he rejected because he had severed law from religion; Selden was criticised for positing the view that the nature of early man was essentially benign, arguing that human nature was more beast than divine, and Pufendorf was reproached for his idea that man was “cast into the world without God’s aid or care” (“gittato in questo mondo senza niun aiuto e cura di Dio”). These thinkers were wrong to believe that ancients had been men and women like themselves, with thoughts and feelings like their own. For Vico, the nature of man is less the noble savage and more the Lucretian-style brute – Anthony Grafton, in his introduction to David Marsh’s translation of Vico’s New Science 1999, draws our attention to the fact that many scholars believe that Vico took his vision of the first men as bestioni – savage brutes – from Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura in which the “Roman poet described the gigantic sizes early beings attained and evoked the fear that thunder inspired in early men”. Thus, while Vico shares the view that natural law is a universal idea, unlike his “princes of natural law”, it is an idea which manifests itself in different guises during different stages of the ideal eternal history of humankind. It is a law that is a corollary of religion; it is ordained by providence, and it arises in virtue of the common sense judgements of the community - the sensus communis - to meet the spontaneous needs of the community.

As shown in his treatment of Grotius, Selden, Pufendorf, Vico makes something of a habit of denigrating many of those to whom he owed much. One other who meets this description is Benedict Spinoza (1632-77), whom Vico criticises for “making God an infinite spirit subject to fate” (“che dànno Dio in infinita mente soggetta al fato”) and for discussing “the commonwealth as if it were a society of shopkeepers” (“di repubblica come d’una società che fusse di mercadanti”), and yet whose doctrine of providence, Frederick Vaughan points out, bears a striking resemblance to that which would later emerge in Vico’s New Science. We first encounter Spinoza’s influence on Vico in his concept of providence which appears in chapter iii, “Of the Vocation of the Hebrews”, of his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus where he says: “I have said before and shown elsewhere that the universal laws of nature, according to which all things exist and are determined, are only another name for the eternal decrees of God”. This concept is developed further when, in the immediately following paragraph, he asserts, “… to say that everything happens according to natural laws and to say that everything is ordained by the decree and ordinance of God is the same thing”. When we consider these remarks and one that appears later in the Tractatus, when Spinoza remarks that “God, and consequently His providence, are merely the order of nature”, we see that Spinoza’s concept is repeated almost verbatim by Vico in his New Science where he talks of “the eternal idea of God, who is eternal order” (“[l]’ idea eterna di Dio, ch’altro non è che ordine eterno”). Thus, while it may have suited Vico to decry the work of one whose work had been put on the Index of prohibited books, it seems that he had more in common with his Dutch Protestant contemporary than he was prepared to admit.
In his Autobiography, Vico identifies Cornelius Tacitus (ca. 55-120) as one of his early influences. Along with Plato, whom he salutes because he contemplates man as he should be, he salutes Tacitus because he contemplates man as he is. However, what Vico fails to say is that Machiavelli (1469-1527), a thinker much closer to his own time than his Roman historian mentor, also calls for man to be considered as he is rather than as he ought to be. Although Machiavelli is only mentioned twice by name in the New Science, it must be argued that his shadow looms large in Vico’s philosophy. For example, Vico’s remarks that “the supreme authority of laws follows the supreme authority of arms” (“il sommo imperio delle leggi va di séguito al sommo imperio dell’armi”), and “once warfare has made a people so fierce that human laws no longer have a place among them, religion is the only means powerful enough to subdue them” (“Ove I popoli son infieriti con le armi, talché non vi abbiano più luogo l’umane leggi, I’unico potente mezzo di ridurgli é la religione”), as Frederick Vaughan points out, bear all the hallmarks of Machiavelli’s Discourses. It should also be noted that Machiavelli’s acknowledged authority for this work is Tacitus. An authority, that is, in whom he shares respect, as we have seen, with Giambattista Vico.


4. Verum ipsum factum
Vico’s “big idea” is the principle of verum ipsum factum: the principle that men can only know to be true that which they themselves make. The discovery of this principle is considered to be unique to Vico, as well as his most important contribution to the history of philosophy. In discussing the Italian philosopher’s view that the world of men is made by men, Isaiah Berlin calls it “Vico’s greatest single claim to immortality”, while Edward Said not only describes Vico’s conception of it as an “exhilarating discovery”, but goes on to describe Vico as the “prototypical modern thinker… and [that] in order to understand the debt owed Vico… we must attempt finally to understand his work as having begun a significant process”. Although Harold Samuel Stone agrees that Vico’s principle is of significant importance to the history of philosophy, he is not so sure that the concept is peculiar to Vico alone. According to Stone, there is evidence that Vico may have taken his verum ipsum factum principle, at least in part, from the primary editor of the Elzevier Greek edition of the New Testament, Daniel Heinsius. It seems that Heinsius, in his Nonnus, Paraphrasus in Joannem (Paraphrase of the Gospel of St. John, 1627) draws attention to two specific references to making and knowing in the writings of St. John. According to Stone, Vico, who was familiar with Heinsius’ work, failed to acknowledge his debt to Heinsius because the 1627 edition of Nonnus was put on the Index of prohibited books in 1632. It should not be expected that Vico, who, as Stone reminds us, is known “to have played by the rules in these matters”, would bring himself to the attention of the authorities by acknowledging his debt to one who was condemned as a heretic. However, it must be argued that the connection that Stone makes appears to be a leap too far as the references of which he speaks do not make the same case for making and knowing as Vico. That is, the first, which appears in chapter 3, verse 21 of St John’s Gospel speaks of “the one who makes the truth” (qui autem facit veritatem), and the second is found in chapter 1, verse 7 of St John’s First Epistle and appears in the form of the negative where John, discussing God as light, says “and we do not make the truth” (et veritatem non facimus), clearly refer to truths which are created by a force which is other than man.

Notwithstanding the fact that Berlin hails the verum/factum principle as Vico’s greatest contribution to philosophy he does acknowledge that, by Vico’s time, it was a theological commonplace and that its

… doctrine ultimately stems from the Augustinian dogma that God by knowing creates, that for him knowing and creating are one, [that]… God alone knows all because he creates all; man, because he is made in God’s image, has limited powers of creation, and therefore knowledge only of what he himself creates and nothing else.

Evidence to support Berlin’s view can be found in Massimo Lollini’s belief that the most likely influence of Vico’s principle came from the Renaissance humanist, Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457). Valla, whom Lollini informs us Vico had read, held that the primordial experience of the passions was the basis of human culture. Danilo Marcondas, of the Philosophy Department of the Pontificia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, also recognises the influence of Valla on Vico and says that the latter’s verum/factum principle represents Valla’s view that “meaning should be seen as a creative activity… and that in consequence the use of language shapes our experience of the world both social and natural”. As if to underline the multifarious nature of Vico’s sources, Amos Funkenstein sees Thomas Hobbes as the inspiration for Vico’s verum ipsum factum principle. Vico’s connections with Hobbes are many, says Funkenstein: “[h]e too stresses he epistemological primacy of matters political over the physical sciences: verum et factum convertuntur, and civil society is for him as it was for Hobbes a human artefact”. M. H. Fisch and T.G. Bergin, in their introduction to their translation of Vico’s autobiography, point to the fact that Vico took from Hobbes the notion that the first founders of civil society, rather than being

philosophers filled with recondite wisdom which he had hitherto thought but man-beasts devoid of culture or humanity, yet guided by an obscure instinct for self-preservation that in time would draw them into social compact and lay the foundation-stone of civilisation.

In the New Science, Vico acknowledges that Hobbes’ aspiration to consider man within the whole of the human race was a noble one, however, he tempers his admiration by adding that Hobbes’ failure to recognise the role of providence in the origin of human institutions was a serious error. In the light of the above evidence, it seems fair to conclude that Vico may well have taken his verum ipsum factum principle from concepts that were already “in the air”, developed them, coined a phrase for them, and made the principle that emerged from them his own. If this is the case, then, by Vico’s own definition, it establishes him as a latter day theological poet: one whose creations are not drawn from some transcendent realm but are reflections of spontaneous common sense judgements of the people of the community.

5. La Scienza Nuova
Although Vico was vehemently opposed to Rationalism he was by no means anti reason. In fact the methodology of his New Science, the title of which was inspired by Bacon’s Novum Organum and “still more by Galileo’s Dialogue delle Nuove Scienze”, involves a careful and painstaking study of ancient myths, literature, and languages of past nations, so that one might uncover the true history of humankind. In other words, Vico advocates a reasoned study of the laws, institutions, principles and values of past nations, as ordained by providence, and recorded in their myths and legends, as the method of his new science. This method he calls the rational civil theology of divine providence. The concern for a systematic method of enquiry is not one that is peculiar to Vico but one that had been already employed by René Descartes. Thus, while he went on to reject Descartes’ philosophical approach, he did not do so without gaining from some advantage from his scientific method. As Cecilia Miller says:

… when reading Descartes one is struck more forcefully by the parallels with Vico than the contrasts. Repeatedly the same issues were addressed (imagination, memory, will, good or common sense) even though the conclusions are contradictory… both believed they had found a new method which would explain and unify all subjects.

Miller also makes the point that Descartes deserves to rank with Vico’s four other “acknowledged autori”, Plato, Tacitus, Francis Bacon, and Hugo Grotius. Autori, that is, who, although he found imperfections in their respective philosophies, strongly influenced his own philosophical approach.

If Vico was once a Cartesian, he was also a Baconian. Indeed, while he eventually rejected Cartesianism, it could be argued that he remained something of a Baconian throughout the remainder of his life. I say “something”, for, while he held that the scientific method of enquiry advanced by Francis Bacon could not, as Bacon intended, reveal the essence of things in nature, Vico employed the same principles to investigate those things which we can know: the laws, institutions, customs, and practices made by man. In the New Science, Vico acknowledges his debt to Bacon, but informs us that he has transferred the philosophical method of the English philosopher “from the natural phenomena studied in his Thoughts and Conclusions on Nature to our human civil institutions” (“dalle naturali, sulle quali esso lavorò il libro Cogitata visa, trasoportato all’umane cose civile”). Using this method, which Bacon calls “contemplating and seeing” (“cogitare videre”), Vico aims to separate “… the truth from falsehood in whatever popular tradition has preserved for many centuries” (“… vi si vaglia dal falso il vero in tutto ciò che per lungo tratto di secoli ce ne hanno custodito le volgari tradizioni”). However, while Vico was prepared to pay homage to Bacon, he also held that the English philosopher, in dedicating himself to the study of nature, “had misunderstood both the capacities of the human mind and the development of the human race”. For Vico, only God can understand the secrets of nature, human beings should concentrate their studies, not on nature, which, since it remains outside them, they can never know, but on that which they can know: the laws, institutions, customs, and practices which they themselves make. For Vico, because Descartes’ “clear and distinct” ideas are a priori, already in the mind, they are not made by man, therefore they cannot be said with certainty to be true; and since they cannot be held to be true, they cannot be held to be the criteria for other truths, let alone demonstrate knowledge of the existence of God. Although man imitates God by creating, his creations do not privilege him to know the true nature of things, merely to knowledge of things created from his own imagination. Thus, for Vico, man’s reasoning powers are constrained by his imagination. The truths on which physics depends are truths which man himself have created and therefore cannot be held to be absolute or unalterable truths. In short, man cannot, as Bacon held, attain knowledge of things in nature; rather it is that he can know only that which he has created from within the boundaries of his own imagination. For Vico, these “imagined” truths derive from a consensus between knowledge amassed in virtue of the Baconian experimental method and the powers of reason as determined by man’s time and place in the ideal eternal history of humankind.

6. Conclusion
During Vico’s formative years Naples was the “freest thinking society in Italy”. Amongst the philosophies being explored at that time were the Epicurianism of Pierre Gassandi, the modern naturalism of the Renaissance pioneers Telesio, Bruno, and Campanella, and the experimentalism of Galileo and Bacon. Although the prevailing interest was in Gassandi and Descartes, over time, it was the Cartesianism that became the dominant philosophy of the age. Indeed, so pervasive was this philosophy that “the highest praise of a philosopher was that he understands the Meditations of Descartes”. While Vico was initially drawn into the Cartesian web, in virtue of his willingness to investigate the works and thoughts of other writers and thinkers, it became his policy never to align himself to any one system of thought. Indeed, so committed was he to the policy of keeping oneself open to the ideas of others that, in his oration “On the Study Methods of Our Timed” (“De Nostri Temporis Studiorum Ratione”), he exhorted “young students to grapple with all kinds of disciplines, and to discourse about their advantages and disadvantages, so that they may attain those and escape these” (“i giovani ad ogni genere, non è conviente che ne discorra, affinchè seguano i vantaggi ed evitino i difetti”). By the time Vico came to present this oration in a series of orations given to the Royal University of Naples between 1699 and 1707, the nuclei of much that would later emerge as the New Science was beginning to crystallise in his mind. However, while it should be acknowledged that what did emerge is a philosophical tour de force, it should also be recognised that Vico’s magnum opus is less the work of an original thinker and more a conduit in which and through which others’ ideas and concepts, albeit in a novel format, are collated and presented.

Science and Philosophy

As can be seen in an earlier posting on my blog (tonyfahey.com), and in my paper, ‘Philosophy, Science, Consciousness’ in the Pathways E-Journal, Issue 152, my position on this issue, particularly in relation to neuroscience and philosophy has been well nailed to the mast. However, to deal with the issue of the relationship between science and philosophy on a broader level, we should look much further back in time. As far back that is to the Milesians and to a time when Thales chose to challenge tradition and look for answers to the ‘Big Questions’ in the natural world, philosophy and science have been inextricably intertwined.

As A Spirkin says in his paper ‘Philosophy and Science’, science and philosophy have always learned from each other. Philosophy tirelessly draws from scientific discoveries fresh strength, material for broad generalisations, while to the sciences it imparts the world-view and methodological impulses of its universal principles. Many general guiding ideas that lie at the foundation of modern science were first enunciated by the perceptive force of philosophical thought. (see Marxists.org/reference/archive/spirkin).

Following Thales, the first person to posit the view that the earth was not flat was the philosopher Anaximander who, circa 560 B.C., held that the earth was cylindrical, and as early as 435 B.C. Anaxagoras proposed that the sun was not a ‘small glowing circle of light’, but a ‘glowing rock larger than Pelopennesus’. The fact that his calculation may have been somewhat inaccurate should not detract from the fact that his ‘scientific’ theory dared to challenge the wisdom of his time. Mind you, for daring to suggest such a thing, he was exiled from Athens.

In an earlier version of his De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium Coperniicus drew on the Greek thinker Aristarchus’s thesis that the motions of the Earth could be understood if it was assumed that the planets revolved around the Sun, and the stars were infinitely further away because they seemed to be motionless. Not wishing to compromise his originality, Copernicus later withdrew his debt to Aristarchus.

23 centuries before the Scottish geologist, James Hutton, proposed that mountains on which seashells were found were once covered by the sea, the same theory had been advanced by the Greek philosopher Xenophanes, and ridiculed as lunacy.

Aristotle’s credentials as a scientist are so well documented that I feel there is no need to list them here.

Borrowing again from Sprikin, we are reminded that the idea of the atomic structure of things voiced by Democritus. Certain conjectures about natural selection were made in ancient times by the philosopher Lucretius and later by the French thinker Diderot. Hypothetically he anticipated what would become a scientific fact two centuries later. We may also recall the Cartesian reflex and the philosopher's proposition on the conservation of motion in the universe.

On the general philosophical plane Spinoza gave grounds for the universal principle of determinism. The idea of the existence of molecules as complex particles consisting of atoms was developed in the works of the French philosopher Pierre Gassendi and also Russia's Mikhail Lomonosov. Philosophy nurtured the hypothesis of the cellular structure of animal and vegetable organisms and formulated the idea of the development and universal connection of phenomena and the principle of the material unity of the world. Lenin formulated one of the fundamental ideas of contemporary natural science—the principle of the inexhaustibility of matter—upon which scientists rely as a firm methodological foundation. (see ibid)

So overwhelming is the evidence that these two disciplines are, and have been, inextricably interlinked over the centuries that I feel any further evidence would be superfluous. As long as philosophers remain faithful to that which attracted them to philosophy in the first instance – a love of wisdom, and a search for truth – science will always have a part to play in the philosophers desire to test and extend the boundaries of their understanding.

Giambattista Vico (1668-1744)

Giambattista Vico, the sixth of eight children born to Antonio di Vico and his wife Candida Masullo of Naples, was born in a room over his father’s bookshop at 31 Via San Biagio dei Librai, Naples, Italy, on June 23, 1668. Son of a poor bookseller, he was raised in an atmosphere of abject poverty. The Vico family home consisted of a single downstairs room, used simultaneously as a bookshop, a living room, a kitchen, and a loft or garret which acted as a bedroom and accessed by ladder. When Vico was seven years of age he fell from the ladder and received a near fatal blow to the head – he remained unconscious for about five hours. So severe was the injury that the prognosis of the doctor who attended the young Italian was that if he should live it was highly probable that he would be permanently brain-damaged. While, as is evident, Vico’s injury healed, in his autobiography he attributes his melancholy and irritable temperament to this ‘mischance’. However, it seems that he considered it a small price to pay for characteristics which are also attributes of ‘men of ingenuity and depth’ Although he attended several schools, including a Jesuit college, Vico considered himself to be self-taught – a claim which has some legitimacy since he spent much of the period following his injury reading the works of Plato, Tacticus, Bacon and Grotius. His erratic early education also included grammar and the Latin classics.

In 1684 Vico began to study for a practising career in law but he abandoned this in 1686 when he accepted a tutoring position in the home of Duca della Rocca at Vatolla, south of Salerno. Whilst there he became secretly infatuated with his own student, Giulia della Rocca. However, the amorous young tutor was to learn that there are certain social barriers to which intelligence and learning are not enough to provide a key, when Giulia, notwithstanding her fondness for Vico, married someone from her own social class, only to die soon afterwards at the age of twenty-two. In 1695, Vico returned to Naples, licked his emotional wounds and, in December 1699, married a poorly educated Neapolitan young woman called Teresa Destito. Although she and Vico produced eight children, the, albeit well intentioned but the semi-literate Teresa, was a poor companion for her more erudite and stern spouse. In the same year (1699) Vico was named professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples. His ambition to hold the principal chair of jurisprudence was never realised, and, up until five years before his death in 1744, he was obliged to supplement his modest earnings in the lesser post by writing ‘Latin inscriptions, official eulogies, and laudatory biographies of important persons’.

In his autobiography, Vico presents his absence from his native city from 1686 to 1695 as a period of isolation from the lively intellectual life of Naples. In fact quite the opposite is the case for, while tutor to the children of the Duca della Rocca, he remained in contact with Neapolitan intellectual events through membership of certain private societies and salons which had arisen to counteract the conservative influence of the Church and university. Through an intensive, self-directed course of study in the library of the Franciscan Convent of Santa Maria della Pietà di Vatolla, he became acquainted with the Neoplatonists, the classical atomists such as Democritus and Lucretius, physicists such as Galileo and Gassendi, English thinkers such as Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Locke and Boyle and the rationalists, Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza and Leibniz. By the end of this period he had acquired an encyclopaedic, if idiosyncratic, understanding of the worlds of ancient and modern learning. While the activities of the Inquisition made it difficult for him to be open about his true philosophical leanings, the fact that many of his friends were suspected of being atheists, together with the poem, ‘Affettidi un disperato’, that he penned in 1692 in homage to the disciple of Epicurus Lucretius (c. 95-c. 54BC), support the view that Vico entertained heretical views that would remain with him for the rest of his life. In 1722 Vico, in anticipation of gaining the as yet unfilled chair of law that had remained vacant since 1717, had printed a publication entitled: Notes by Giambattista Vico on two books, one On the Principle of Universal Law, the other On the Consistency of Jurisprudence. His hopes of gaining the chair were heightened by his belief that ‘the life he had led in his native city, where by the work of his intellect he had honoured all, been of service to many, and harmed none’, together with, what he perceived as, the success of his performance during the lecture he had delivered for the concourse, or competition, for the chair, would not go unrewarded. However, perhaps in his enthusiasm to ensure his promotion, Vico decided to print and distribute copies of his lecture, one of which he delivered to Don Domenico Caravita, one of the people responsible for awarding the chair. On Caravita’s advice, Vico was persuaded to withdraw his application on the grounds that he could be charged with attempting to influence the judge’s decision – a charge which Vico held could more appropriately be levelled at the other candidates for the post.

Following his disappointment over his failure to procure the chair of jurisprudence, Vico turned his attention to the construction of the philosophy for which he is most famous, developing it progressively in the various versions of his New Science. In 1709 his On the Method of the Studies of Our Time, had been published by Mosca, followed in 1710 by On the Oldest Wisdom of the Italians Recoverable from the Origins of the Latin Language, then, in 1720-2, came On the Single Principle of Universal Law and its Single Purpose, culminating in 1725, just three years after the debacle with over the chair, with what Isaiah Berlin calls ‘his crowning masterpiece’, the New Science. Much of our knowledge of his intense intellectual life is derived from the first and second parts of his autobiography, written soon after the production of the first and second editions of the New Science. A third part, going up to his death, was added by the Marquis of Villarosa in 1818. In part three, the Marquis describes how Vico, unable to procure a publisher for his magnum opus, confesses that in order to realise his ambition to see his work in print he was compelled by his poverty to sell his precious diamond ring. Whilst the price received for the ring covered the cost of printing and binding copies of his book, Vico’s sacrifice proved fruitless as the New Science ‘fell almost dead from the press’.

Amongst the private students that Vico was forced to take on in order to supplement his meagre salary were the sons many of the finest gentlemen of Naples. Notwithstanding his lowly academic position, it was believed that Vico would provide them, ‘better than any other professor’, with ‘ …sound instruction along with the best moral training’. While these measures went some way to help, they were still not enough to furnish him with the means to live very far above the poverty line. Endowed with a wife who, while of ‘pure and innocent character’ was sorely lacking in ‘those talents which are required even in a mediocre wife and mother’, Vico was ‘obliged to plan and provide not only for the clothes but whatever else his children might need’. Indeed, so diligent was he in his paternal duties that he, perceiving his eldest daughter, Luisa, to possess talents ‘beyond those necessary in a woman’, instructed her with such care that ‘on reaching maturity, she distinguished herself in poetry’. Sadly, not all Vico’s children gave him such satisfaction, for his son, Ignatio, who from childhood had exhibited slothful ways, became ‘addicted …to all sorts of vices, so that he became a dishonour to the whole family’. Eventually his behaviour became so unseemly that Vico was forced to call on the police to have him incarcerated - which they did. Not before Vico, regretting his action, pleaded with his son to run and save himself. Vico’s attempts to create a sense of domestic harmony under difficult circumstances was further compounded by the added cost of medical expense incurred as a result of the chronic bad health of his other daughter, Angela Teresa. Notwithstanding these grave preoccupations, Vico, Villarosa explains, never diverted ‘from regular attendance at classes’; and ‘endured everything with heroic patience’, only occasionally sharing his troubles with an intimate friend. In time, however, Vico’s nervous system was unable to sustain the continual strain under which he was forced to operate and he began to suffer from lapse of memory. Gradually his condition became so bad that he was forced to give up private lessons and to surrender his position at the university – not before, however, arranging for his son Gennaro to succeed him. Soon he became a virtual recluse. His memory ‘was so far gone that he forgot the nearest objects and the most familiar things’ and despite the best efforts of his medical colleagues to find a remedy for his illness his condition became so acute that he failed even to recognise his own children. On January 22nd, 1744, just three years after he retired from teaching and shortly before the third and final edition of his New Science was published, Giambattista Vico died.

Into what is the universe expanding?

According to Stephen Hawking the discovery that the universe is expanding is one of the great intellectual revolutions of the 20th century. (see A Brief History of Time, 1998, p.41) Given that this is the case it seems legitimate to ask, as you do, into what is it expanding into. I must confess, given my interest in the relationship between philosophy and science, this is a question that occupied my mind for a time. My interest concerned the issue of the expansion of time in the immediate aftermath of the singularity which we call the ‘big bang’. According to Bill Bryson, most of what we know about the early moments of the universe is thanks to a theory first advanced by Alan Guth, a particle physicist at Stanford University. According to Guth, at one ten millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, gravity emerged. (see A Short History of Nearly Everything, 2003, p.36) What this means is that in less than the blink of an eye after the ‘big bang’ the universe was at the very least a hundred billion light years across. For me, the immediate consequence of this revelation is that, if the smallest measurable unit of time is equivalent to the figure stated above, then this figure is representative of the speed of that moment in time that we know as ‘the present’. Moreover, since it is clear that this instance is ungraspable by the mind, it follows that in reality we humans can never have the slightest notion of what it is to live in ‘the now’. For us ‘the present’ is both an illusion and a delusion. Rather than experiencing the present the mind is enveloped in a phenomenological membrane that is always playing catch up with the continuum of phenomena - of things as they appear to the mind - that are being filtered through the intuitions space and time, the category of cause and effect, natural inclinations, inherited dispositions, social conditioning, worldly experience, persona prejudices, memories, expectations and ambitions. Given that we can know little or nothing of that which is supposed to be so near to us, the question arises as to what can we know about that which is as remote as the outer regions of the universe? The answer to this is simple: that is, we cannot know anything.

Since this is rather a bald statement I believe it should be followed by some explanation. According to Stephen Hawking there are three models of the universe that explain the expansion of the universe. In the first model the universe is expanding sufficiently slowly that the gravitational attraction between the different galaxies causes the expansion to slow down and, in time, stop. The galaxies then begin to move towards one towards one another as the universe contracts. That is, it starts at zero, expands to a maximum, and then contracts to zero again. (op.cit., p.45) Clearly in such a case the universe is not expanding into anything outside itself. In the second model, the universe is expanding so quickly that the gravitational pull, whilst it may slow it down to some degree, it can never stop it. That is, it starts at zero and eventually the galaxies are moving apart at a steady speed. In the third model, the universe is expanding only as fast as it must to avoid collapsing into itself. In this case the expansion begins at zero and continues indefinitely. However, whilst the speed at which the galaxies move apart gets increasingly smaller, it never quite reaches zero. (see ibid.)

The thing that should be noted about the first model is that in it the universe is not infinite in space, but neither does space have any boundary. Gravity is so strong that space is bent round onto itself, rather like the surface of the Earth, where, if one were to keep going in a given direction one would eventually return to the where one had departed. However, as Hawking points out, whilst this first model may make good science fiction, because it can be shown that the universe itself would recollapse to zero size before one would it return to one’s point of departure. (see ibid., p.47) Since one would need to travel faster than the speed of light to reach the starting point before the universe came to an end, this model is a non-runner (excuse the pun).

In the first model, which expands and contracts, space is bent in on itself, and therefore finite in extent. In the second model, which expands forever, space is bent the other way, making space infinite. In the third model, space is flat, and therefore also infinite. The question is, of course, which model describes our universe. According to Hawking, present evidence suggests that the universe will more than likely continue to expand forever, but all we can be really certain of is that if it were to collapse, it would not be for at least another ten thousand years, since it has already been expanding for at least that long. (ibid., p.48). Since mankind will have long outlived its usefulness on this Earth before this time, there is little need for this statistic to concern us.

So where does all this leave us in relation to the question, "into what is the universe expanding?/ The answer of course is that for all their ingenuity, the models leave us none the wiser. We simply cannot know into what the universe expanding.

Giambattista Vico on History
Introduction:
What has to be said at the outset is, for Vico, there are two histories of humankind: the sacred history of the Jews, and the history of gentiles, or pagans. While pagans, who were also giants, “had only the ordinary help of providence”, the Jews, and as a consequence, the Christians, who were of normal stature, “had the extraordinary help of the true God”. Although the Jews had from time to time fallen into polytheism, in truth their God, as was the God of Christians, was the one true God, while for pagans, whose gods were created by their own primitive imaginings, there were many gods. Vico explains this seeming anomaly of two histories by explaining that, since Jewish origins dated back to Adam, their history was not subject to the same process as the pagans . What also has to be said is that, while Vico makes reference to the history of Jews and Christians, his storia ideale eterna predominately concerns the historical cyclical process of the gentiles.

While history is a rewarding task, Vico maintains, it is difficult and demanding. He and his contemporaries, he argues, must accept that the work of the great thinkers cannot be interpreted within the context of contemporaneous values and experiences, nor without extensive training and self-discipline. Training, that is, that involves developing an understanding of how human consciousness itself has evolved over the millennia, and understanding also that feelings were more intense and ideas more crude in primitive societies and cultures than they are in modern times. They must also come to realise that ancient myths do not contain moral lessons, but historical clues which, properly deciphered, can lead to valuable insights into the lives of those who created them.

Vico’s New Science, then, sets out to show that his predecessors and contemporaries have misunderstood both the capacities of the human mind and the development of the human race. The long-held notion that ancient Greeks and Romans bestrode well-ordered communities bedecked in robes reflecting their status, says Vico, is erroneous. In truth these societies were primitive and brutal. In studying nature – the most fashionable topic of the age of the New Philosophy of Descartes, Bacon, Copernicus and Gassandi, contemporary thinkers had failed to see that they were attempting something for which the human mind is not equipped. Understanding, he held, arises from doing or making: one can truly understand only that which one has created. Thus, only God can understand the cosmos. Human beings should address themselves to the study of the human world: the laws and institutions, customs and practices that have been created by other humans. The proper study of mankind, he maintains, must be man.

La Storia Ideale Eterna:
According to Vico, those who attempt to abstract essential or universal laws: laws which remain valid across all time and within all societies and religions are misguided. Instead of painstakingly trying to uncover and discover the actual history contained within the myths of ancient texts, philosophers have read imaginary and erroneous stories into human history. That is, rather than exploring in minutiae the ancient myths to determine the truth, philosophers have taken these ancient writings and projected them onto a contemporary canvas. As Kant might say, modern thinkers have attempted to look at ancient myths through modernist spectacles. Instead of trying to understand the present through the past, philosophers were taking the view that “bold speculation and experimentation in the world” was a more productive way of understanding the nature of the world – and of understanding the nature of man. For Descartes, for example, the study of history was nothing other than a kind of virtual travel. History, he claimed, taught only that customs vary from time to time, and from place to place: real thinkers must look beyond history for certain knowledge of God and of the cosmos. What Vico asks us to do is to attempt to put ourselves into the minds of those who occupied the ages before our time. For example, in the case of the earliest men, whose minds, he says, “were in no way abstract, refined or intellectualised; rather, they were completely sunk in their senses, numbed by their passions, and buried in their bodies”. Vico asks us to imagine ourselves in a state in which first men “feel things without noticing them, then notice them with inner distress and disturbance”, before they can “finally reflect on them with a clear mind”. That is, first we must see ourselves in a mute world: a wordless, thoughtless world in which men, who were “monstrous and grotesque beings”, live as “stupid, insensate, and horrid beasts”, and react only to their most primitive needs as nature demands. Nothing, it seems, can penetrate this husk of ignorance until a time comes when the sky, heavy with moisture evaporated from the waters of the earth, fills the heavens with its thunder and lightning. Only this violent act of nature can awaken us from our stultified slumber, raise our eyes to heaven, and make us to call out in a single spontaneous voice “Jove!” – or as we might exclaim, “God!” Thus, our first abstract thought is also our first word, and the first word is the first myth: our first imagined universal. Since it “a property of the human mind that whenever men can form no idea of distant and unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar and at hand”, we attribute to natural phenomenon anthropomorphic characteristics, so that, in this case, thunder becomes the natural voice of a god.

The constituents of Vico’s historical whole consist of three essential components which he calls ages: the age of religion, the age of heroes, and the age of men. However, as may be deduced from the above observation regarding the state of mind of primitive man, Vico’s new science is also an exploration of development of human consciousness over the passage of time, or as Vico succinctly describes it, “a history of human ideas”. Thus, in our investigation of Vico’s three ages of humankind we must also explore his notion that allied to each of these phases of history there are three states of consciousness.

While Vico’s storia ideale eterna was largely ignored during his time, many that came after him came to accept the cyclical historical process set out in the New Science as a reality. For example, it is a process not only recognised by Hegel and Marx, but also by such luminaries Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jules Michelet, Auguste Comte, Benedetto Croce, W.B.Yeats, and James Joyce. It can also be argued that in our modern, or even post-modern, world, as institutional icons are collapsed, deconstructed and/or dissolved; in a world in which reason has become the dominant faculty at the expense of imagination and feeling; as human beings come to reason that since all laws, principles and institutions are constructions of the human mind, that there is no overarching set of God-given laws, or, indeed, that there is no overarching divinity at all, Vico’s view that this age must inevitably lead to chaos and dissolution seems eerily prophetic.

Vico’s storia ideale eternal, his ideal eternal history of humankind, is more than a study of the three stages of human development. Within this paradigm there exist components as important to his world-view as the ages themselves. Thus, in the exploration of Vico’s philosophy we must not only examine the three phases into which he divides human history, but we must also consider what he means by sensus communis; what he means when he says that his new science is a nuova arte critica, and what he means by divine providence.

The Age of Religion:
According to Vico the very first histories, which were histories from the crudest age of civilisation, came in the form of poetic myths when people believed that all institutions necessary or useful to humankind were deities. The authors of these myths were the first poets, and tradition relates unequivocally that they founded the pagan nations through their myths of gods. These imagined gods were inspired by fearful religions which the poets themselves had invented and embraced. As shown above, this natural theogony, or genealogy of the gods, arose naturally in the minds of the earliest people, and thus provides a rational chronology for the poetic history of the gods.

For Vico, only the Hebrews, thanks to divine revelation, had an organised civilisation from the outset. Other civilisations, whose history only began after the Flood and whose founders, instead of being the wise legislators long celebrated in classical texts: sages such as the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus and the Spartan Lycurgus, must have been bestioni: brutish primitives, without masters or mates, enormous in size and gargantuan in appetite, who scavenged the drying marshes after the Flood and took whatever property and women they desired. Over time, says Vico, these bestioni became heroes, and, over more time, turned from heroes into rational human beings. When the primitives heard thunder they imagined that they were hearing the fearsome howling of an anthropomorphic god. From these fears and imaginings arose religion, and with religion came a sense of modesty. Sexual relations, once practised openly and without guilt, were now acts of indecency, and were to take place only within the sanctity of the married state, and in private. Over time, stable families were formed which, in further time, led to the formation of a complex hierarchical society. Those bestioni who did not conform to the emerging social structure became slaves who, in Hobbesian fashion, exchanged their individual freedom for security. However, in a manner which Hegel would later embrace, conflict arose between the slaves and their masters when the slaves came to see themselves as being as human as their masters. Thus, in the course of time, each society developed laws, codes of behaviour and institutions until, gradually, the family was replaced by the state. In Vico’s scheme of things, the state, after a period of prosperity and sophistication, becomes corrupt and relapses into a new barbarism, religion and heroes re-emerge, and the whole “vicocycle” begins again.

It should be said that Vico’s historical cyclical process is not Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence which sees human beings trapped in a kind of cosmic “Groundhog Day” cyclical process in which they are constantly reincarnated to relive events of past lives, and in which they should live each moment as though it was eternal because it recurs eternally. Rather it is that the phases of history and states of human conscious that recur are not the exact duplicates of the original states or phases, but phases and states that follow a general recurring pattern. Thus, in Vico’s scheme of things, there is no second Flood and no second age of giants. Eternal recurrence occurs when human beings, tired of the state of anarchy that has arisen as a result of man’s increased powers of reasoning, “turn again to the primitive simplicity of the early world of peoples”, and to religion.

The first men, says Vico, were, in the main, gigantic, insensate, and horrid beasts: savage creatures imprisoned in their own state of ignorance. However, out of this menagerie emerged the first scholars. These scholars or, as Vico calls them, “theological poets”, came to be recognised as interpreters of the auspices of the gods. The first wisdom, says Vico, which was poetic wisdom, must have begun with the metaphysics that arose from the senses and imagination of these early poets. Because they were deficient in the power of reason, and directed mainly by strong passions and even stronger imaginings, metaphysics was their only poetry: a poetry which arose as a spontaneous response from their own ignorance of causes. Whenever their minds were agitated by sensory experiences that evoked feelings of wonder, they imagined them to be a display of the power of some divinity. In their ignorance they ascribed to this imagined power attributes or characteristics drawn from things with which they were familiar. Support for Vico’s view of the origin of religion, albeit unwittingly, can be found in anthropologist Richard Leakey’s The Origin of Humankind (1994), where he argues that ever since the first spark of consciousness ignited the human mind “mythology and religion have been part of human history”. He goes on to say that a common theme of mythology was to attribute human motives and emotions to natural phenomena . Richard Dawkins’ view that within the histories of all people are found epic legends out of which religions arose also shows that support for Vico’s thesis can be found in modern science. Indeed, Vico’s view that ancient myths contain valuable insights into the histories of those that created them is also shared by Dawkins when he says “…it is real ancestors, not supernatural gods, that hold the key to understanding life”. Like Vico, these modern scientists have come to acknowledge that myths can contain stories of origins and that their concern with the doings of gods and heroes is actually an account of the way things were.

From today’s vantage-point we know that Vico’s view that “[t]he sacred history of the Bible is more ancient than all the secular histories that survives” has well been exploded. Like many pre-Darwinians, Vico takes Mosaic or biblical chronology as fact. The first people in the world, he says, were the Hebrews who were the direct descendants of Adam. The views of other races, such as the Egyptians, that their tradition pre-dates that of the Hebrews, he maintains, is says the “conceit of nations”. Vico sets the origin of pagan history at a time when, following the Flood, Noah’s three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, having renounced their father’s religion, together with their respective tribes, “were scattered throughout the earth’s great forest”. For Vico, the many years of wanderings undertaken by these post-diluvian rejecters of tradition reduced them to the condition of mute brutes. While one might concede that hardships suffered and endured during years of wanderings amid primeval forests may have lead to people becoming somewhat bestial, it seems highly implausible that the progeny of those who began their peregrinations with sophisticated linguistic skills would not retain or inherit at least some of those skills. Moreover, if we accept Vico’s assertion that “humankind was at first divided into two kinds of people: the giants, or pagans; and the people of normal build, or the Jews”, and that the origins of the Hebrews was altogether different to that of the pagans, then we are forced to conclude that Vico’s view that the fathers of the pagan nations were the direct descendants of Noah’s children is unsustainable.

Given that Vico’s New Science is concerned predominantly with the history of pagans, the question arises as to why he might include any reference to the Hebrew tradition at all. The response to this, it can be argued, is that the notion of two histories may not, in fact, reflect Vico’s true position of the history of humankind: that it was a view put forward to appease the Inquisition and the Index of Prohibited Books. As Harold Stone says, “It is unlikely that Vico ever forgot what happened to Giordano Bruno and Galileo”.

Not only did Vico refuse to acknowledge the influence of Hebrew tradition on pagan history, he also rejected any suggestion of cross fertilisation of ideas between different societies. For Vico “all significant transformation came from forces and conflict inherent in society”. As Robert Flint says, research has shown

…beyond all possibility of doubt that the histories, the civilisations of India, Persia, Greece, and Rome, as well as Slave, and Celt, and Teuton, had a common source; that the progenitors of the so called Aryan nations once formed a single people”.

What Vico failed to recognise was that the history of humankind cannot be reduced to the sum of separate societies whose histories begin in isolation, develop in isolation, dissolve in isolation, and re-emerge to follow the same solitary cyclical path. Thus, while it may be the case that some societies may be found to confirm Vico’s hypothesis of a number of independent beginnings, it is not the case that each nation comes into existence, develops, dissipates, and re-emerges of its own volition. Rather it is that each is part of a complex whole in which the actions of one influences and effects the actions, judgements, progress and development of the other.

The Age of Heroes:
In “the age of heroes” Vico sets out the conditions under which, what Hegelians would later refer to as, the “dialectic process” between master and slave arises. While there is no direct evidence that the Hegelian dialectic draws on Vico’s philosophy it can be argued that Karl Marx drew on the work of both Hegel and Vico. As a young man in Germany, Marx, having grappled with Hegel’s philosophy, adapted it to suit his own developing ideas. However, this reformulation not only shows the influence of the German philosopher, but also aspects of Vico’s New Science, as can be seen where he says:

My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian but is its opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e. the process of thinking (which under the name of ‘the Idea’ he even transforms into an independent subject) is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the idea’. With me, on the contrary, the idea is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind and translated into forms of thought.

So, like Vico, for Marx, ideas and concepts derive from mankind’s interaction with the real world. Thus, when we see Marx arguing that the ideals, universals, and virtues to which all communities aspire do not arise from the designs of an Absolute Mind, but from the society itself, we see the influence is more Vichean rather than Hegelian. That Marx was familiar with the work of the Italian philosopher cannot be disputed for in a letter to Ferdinand Lassalle Marx writes: “It surprises me that you seem not to have read Vico’s New Science… [it] contains… a great deal else that is original”. Lest one should think that this evidence is rather too flimsy, Max Fisch, in his introduction to Vico’s autobiography, reminds us that “Marx … seem[s] to have taken from Vico… the formula that ‘men make their own history’, from which their own historical materialism was developed. Like Marx and Hegel, Vico seeks to establish a perfect historical order in the world of mankind. For Hegel, this order takes the shape of dialectical evolution which, over time, leads to the self-realisation of the individual and the Self-realisation of the Absolute Mind. For Marx, this dialectic leads to the perfect socialist state. For Vico, while the dialectic is circular rather than vertical.

In Vico’s historical scheme of things, the age of heroes is the feudal age: the age when society is made up of plebeians and masters. It is during this age that the concept of the “ideal man” arises: when individuals, such as Homer, Hercules, or Achilles, in virtue of some deed which is deemed by the consensus of the majority to be heroic, are elevated to godlike status. In their ignorance these heroes saw themselves as children of the gods and, in consequence, as natural leaders of the masses. These leaders ruled by the sword and it was in virtue of the conflict or “dialectic” that arose between the oppressed and the oppressors that, over time, the slaves came to see themselves as equals to their masters.

Although Vico allowed that the concept of the hero derived from an amalgam of ideas circulating within a community, he resolutely rejected any suggestion that a heroic concept of one society, community, or nation, could influence the arising of a similar concept of another social grouping. Hence, while he was familiar with the myths and histories of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, he would have refused to share a view proposed by some subsequent “liberal scholars” that the Hebrews borrowed from the Babylonians the story of Noah and his Ark. According to this view, the story of Noah has its origins in the Sumerian tale The Epic of Gilmagesh. In this tale, which was written about 3000 BC, the wise and good Ut-Napishtim is told, in the face of an impending flood, to build a ship and to store within it the seeds of all living creatures. According to the “liberal scholars”, this myth was taken up by Hebrew slaves of Babylon and subsequently absorbed into their own tradition. However, whilst it seems likely that Vico would have been familiar with this legend, he would not admit that any section of the sacred history of the Bible could be predated by pagan history; nor would he accept that the history of the Hebrews might in any way be contaminated by a pagan myth.

According to Vico the age of heroes began when the some of bestioni decided to cease their wanderings to form colonies. The more powerful of these first settlers became the heroes or patriarchs of these settled communities. Those who settled afterwards became slaves to these nobles. However, according to Vico, this surrendering of freedom was not undertaken after careful and reasoned contemplation of the objective merits of entering into a social contract with the city fathers; but a spontaneous and unreflective response to their intuited needs at a specific time in the ever unfolding and refolding history of humankind. As Isaiah Berlin explains:

The theory of a social contract…which…takes it for granted that the original solitary wanderers came out of the woods to make a compact to live together already understood what a compact was [for Vico]…patently absurd.

For Vico, at this stage in the ideal eternal history of humankind, says Berlin, “such men could not have understood such a complex notion [as a social contract] – or even used it”. To understand that the bestioni were incapable of contemplating or comprehending the complexities of such a concept is to understand that something else: some other force, must have directed their actions. Unlike Hobbes’ “nasty and solitary” individuals who were motivated by self-interest to enter into a social contract with a sovereign power in order to safe-guard their families, their possessions, but mainly themselves, for Vico’s bestioni it was fear of the power of a fearsome deity that caused them to modify their passions, devise laws, and establish civil institutions. Self-interest alone, says Vico, would not have been enough to curb the savage egotism of these early giants. Thus, it was religion and not self-interest that raised men from their wild beginnings. As Berlin says:

Without such [religious] feeling, they would not have been human: without shame and awe there can be no self-control or self-direction, and without these not even the minimum of civilisation, still less liberty under the law of a later day, could ever have arisen.

Those who entertain the notion that such people entered into rationally calculated social contracts as suggested by Hobbes or Spinoza are guilty of the conceit of scholars - the conceit of believing that it is possible to understand the past through the present. For Vico, only those who employ the methods of new science can have true understanding. That is, “[o]nly those who have the imagination and knowledge to trace this process to its origins, and so reconstruct it, can understand its effects in the present or assess its value and prospects”. To hold to the notion that the nature of humankind is something that always was and always will be the same, says Vico, is a “fallacious belief”.

As shown above, the age of heroes signals a time when the bestioni came to give up their itinerant way of life. However, it should be pointed out that initially only some decided to cease their wanderings to live as an ordered community. When we consider that central to Vico’s thesis is the view it was only towards the latter end of the second age and the beginning of the third age that humankind developed the ability to reason, it seems fair to conclude that the fact that these first pagan settlers actively chose to live in a settled community contradicts this view. That is, it infers that the judgement of those who chose to settle was “reasoned” rather than spontaneous or unreflected. It should also be said that the view that decision of those who chose belatedly to join the by then established community, albeit on the lowest rung of the social ladder, also contradicts the view that at this point in time all values, judgements and laws arose, not through conscious or reasoned deliberation, but in virtue of the collective responses of the people to their most pressing needs. While it may be argued that this period of history marks a time when imagination was beginning to give way to reason, it does not account for the fact that, for Vico, this was still a time when all of humankind’s judgements were made collectively, spontaneously and without reflection: without reason.

The Age of Men:
The age of men is the age of reason, and the age when plebeians finally come to see themselves as having a nature equal to that of their masters. Thus, for Vico, the concept that all men are equal arose at that time in the history of humankind when men’s “common sense” led them to the realisation that their relationship with their masters was based on mutual need. This concept, like that of primitive man’s god of thunder, is not an a priori given, but a concept that arose spontaneously, at a given time in the history of humankind, from the common sense judgements of the community. This third phase of human history is also the age in which democracy arises. It is the age of vernacular language, and of abstract reasoning. And it is a secular age when humankind lose all belief in religion, and eventually moves into decline and into a period of chaos before it turns once again to religion for salvation. Thus we see that Vico’s history of mankind is essentially a history of ideas: the birth, rise, and demise of those aspects of human consciousness that compels us to seek a meaning to our existence.

For Vico, the true nature of human beings is not that of the Cartesian homunculi, who sit, detached from the body, in some regally isolated solipsistic realm contemplating their own “clear and distinct” ideas; instead they are, rather like Heidegger’s Dasein, not only beings in the world, but beings in the world with others. The true nature of the individual can only be understood if seen in the context of that individual’s relations with the world of others. As A. Robert Caponigri says, for Vico,

… it is only through society that man finds the fulfilment and realisation of his nature… [O]utside these relations he is, at best a hypothesis, at worst, simple alienness and absence from himself. The proper study of mankind is, indeed, therefore man; not, however, man in the abstract individualism… but man in society, because here alone, in the social structure, is the reality and fullness of man discovered.
For Vico, the impulse which impels humankind to attempt to fulfil its ends, and which can only be achieved by “society as a whole and not by individuals alone, is the history of mankind”. Like Heidegger’s Dasein, Vico’s concept of the individual is that of one thrown into a historical world whose primary sensation or experience is fear (for Heidegger this fear is called angst). Heidegger describes anxiety as the uneasiness one feels when one intuits the instability of one’s existence. As he says:

Anxiety ‘does not know’ what that in the face of which it is anxious is…That which threatens cannot bring itself close from a definite direction within what is close by; it is already ‘there’, and yet nowhere… .

In other words, anxiety, for Heidegger, is the profound fear of that which we cannot understand. For Vico this anxiety derives from the fear of that which is ‘Other’ than man. It is this primeval fear, together with an innate desire for order (as directed always by the unseen and silent hand of divine providence), that causes early men to devise or invent their own explanation for the origin of this anxiety – hence, gods, laws and institutions are created. As Berlin explains, for Vico:

Laws and customs are the social products which respond to changing social needs. They are not the embodiment of infallible rules which individual sages, lifted above the stream of history…For men evolve: there can be no timeless minds or timeless laws… .

Over time, says Vico, all societal structures become more and more fragmented. This fragmentation leads to individualism, individualism leads to excess, and, eventually, the bonds that traditionally hold society together are dissolved. As society disintegrates, individuals, realising that gods and laws are inventions of human imagination, believe that there is no God and no Law, and abandon religion and respect for those laws and institutions so essential for civil life; communities collapse and anarchy and arbitrary violence becomes the order of the day. Like Frankenstein’s monster, that which man has made to his own design becomes master and destroys its creator.

Towards the latter phase of the age of men, Vico presents us with a concept of history that envisages humankind creating a world that must inevitably dissolve in chaos. Notwithstanding the fact that our present age seems to confirm Vico historical thesis in that it bears a striking resemblance to the latter phase of the age of men: a phase during which the concept society has loses its meaning to become a place in which individuals seek to service only their own needs and desires, it must be argued that what may always have been does not always have to be. That is, if it is the case that the age in which we live seems to be hurtling ever faster towards chaos, surely we can look at Vico’s philosophy not as a prophecy but as a warning. Because the perfection of the world of humankind so dear to the Enlightenment tradition may no longer seem a realistic ambition, should not mean that it is an ambition to which we should not continue to aspire. Thus, while Vico’s thesis that the civil world is a world of our own making is valid, surely it is equally valid to argue that we can break from his traditional cyclical pattern and create a world that is free from chaos.

The Age of Ideas:
As shown above, because his history of humankind concerns the origin and development of human imagination and thought, Vico calls it the “history of human ideas” (“storia dell’ umane idee”). In the New Science, Vico says that not only are the three levels of thought (religious, heroic, and rational), identifiable as the development of human consciousness in the history of humankind, but also in contemporary society. Even in today’s world, says Vico, in the same way that “children pick up inanimate objects and talk to them as if they were living persons”, men, “ignorant of the natural causes of things, and cannot explain them in terms of similar things, they attribute their own nature to them”. In this way, then, Vico’s history of ideas can also be defined as a study of, what Cecilia Miller describes as “the different layers of each society’s consciousness”. Wilhelm Dilthey, who was amongst the progeny of the Italian philosopher, echoes this view of the development of human consciousness, where, in his Descriptive Psychology and Historical Understanding, he explains that, while we ultimately arrive at a state of awareness by which we can “intellectualise” and thus explain our experiences, this state of consciousness is only arrived at, in time, through the “concurrence of all [my italics] the powers of the psyche in the apprehension”. That is, through the powers of imagination and empathy, as well as reason. Dilthey agrees with Vico that we cannot know the nature of things-in-themselves. He also agrees with him that, by studying the history of humankind in a new way, we can come to understand that behind the surface of events there exists an underlying and recurring pattern of development of human consciousness. For Vico, this “third way”: this process of interpreting this subliminal pattern involves both philosophical reasoning and philological investigation. Philology establishes authorities, philosophical reasoning verifies these authorities. Vico calls this process his “new science”. Dilthey calls it “hermeneutics”. It should be stressed that the understanding that arises from this process does not privilege us with knowledge of absolute or unchanging truths, but with, what Vico calls, truths that derive from “common sense that arise from perception based on verisilimitude”.

For Vico understanding does not arise from the study of physical laws and dimensions of matter, nor is it given as a priori ideas or concepts. Man may create mathematical and scientific conceptions of the world, but these “are not really truths, but wear a semblance of probability… [w]e are able to demonstrate geometrical propositions because we create them… [t]he archetypal forms, the ideal patterns of reality, exist in God alone”. Rather it is that understanding comes from grasping the significance implicit in human activity in the civil world: the world of human making. For example, the significance of the Irish President Mary Robinson’s handshake with Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams cannot be understood analysing the physical dimensions of the act alone, anymore than one who has no knowledge of the history of Glasgow can understand the significance of the passionate rivalry that exists between the supporters of the football clubs Glasgow Rangers and Glasgow Celtic. As Dilthey explains, we can only know “by reference to our own existence what desire, mastery, and so on, really present in themselves as being. There is no other source from which they can gain meaning”. Thus, while some scholars look for understanding in a priori givens for understanding, and others on scientific evidence, for Vico it is only of those truths that derive from the verisimilar – the practical and the probable – that we can ever have real knowledge.

By way of explaining Vico’s, and his own, belief that ideas are given from without rather than within, Dilthey says that the development of our understanding depends entirely on the “order and mores” of our immediate familial environment. From the very moment we enter this world we are “completely immersed in the medium of common contexts” , and we learn to understand “gestures and facial expressions, motions and explanations, words and sentences only because they confront [us] as being always the same, and as always bearing the same relation to that which they signify and express”. The ideas that arise in virtue of these experiences become formed in our consciousness as imagined truths - the only truths we can know with certainty. So, when Vico talks about truths that can be known he means those truths which are made by men. When he talks about the search for truth he means that, while it is a worthy ambition to seek truth, it is an ambition that can never be fully realised, for truth itself cannot ever be caught and held as a fixed or permanent concept.

Philosophy means the pursuit of wisdom or of the knowledge of things and their causes. For Descartes, knowledge of things natural is pursued through scientific investigation in accordance with mathematical laws which exist, a priori, in the human mind; knowledge of the cause of things metaphysical are found in clear and distinct ideas which are also innate. For Francis Bacon, knowledge of things metaphysical belongs to theology and should not encroach onto the area of scientific enquiry; whereas knowledge of things natural is discoverable by scientific methodology. According to Giambattista Vico such claims are conceits. That is, any claim to have knowledge of absolutes, or of the nature of things which exist outside of human experience, is erroneous. As he says: “No doubt all that is given to know is, like man himself, limited and imperfect”. If knowledge of things and their causes cannot be found in clear and distinct, a priori, ideas or through scientific research into things natural, the question arises as to whether there is anything of which we can have certain knowledge. Vico’s answer to this question is encapsulated in what has, arguably, become the most well known passage of his magnum opus, New Science, where he says:

Still, in the dense and dark night which envelops remotest antiquity, there shines an eternal and inextinguishable light. It is a truth which cannot be doubted: The civil world is certainly the creation of humankind. And consequently, the principles of the civil world can and must be discovered within the modifications of the human mind. If we reflect on this, we can only wonder why the philosophers have so earnestly pursued a knowledge of the world of nature, which only God can know as its creator, while they neglected to study the world of nations, or civil world, which people can in fact know since they created it….

Humankind, says Vico, can only have certain knowledge of that which they themselves create. This approach to knowledge is called verum/factum: knowledge is equal in power or force to operation, and is the very antithesis of the Cartesian notion of clear and distinct a priori concepts or ideas.

Verum/Factum and the Vichean Paradox
The theory of knowledge which Giambattista Vico advanced to support his theory of history is the verum-factum theory: we can know only what we make or do. In New Science, Vico makes the claim that, since the world of nations has been made by men, its principles are to be rediscovered within “the modifications of the reflective mind”. These “modifications” provide components of his metaphysics of the human mind. According to Vico we cannot understand the history of past societies, or even earlier periods of our own history, by imposing feelings, values and ideas which shape our understanding of contemporary society. Vico’s central thesis is that philosophy should produce fundamental theories about human nature and the substantive principles which underlie human historical development, culminating in the storia ideale eterna, in the light of which fragments of historical data can be interpreted and integrated into comprehensive and coherent accounts of the actual historical past. However, for Vico, philosophy does not establish its theories a priori, but through its success in finding a set of universal and necessary principles of which all actual histories are an expression.

To grasp Vico’s verum/factum principle is to understand, what might be called, the Vichean paradox. According to Vico, human beings are not subjects of chance, for life is not a series of random events, nor is human life governed by fate, if it was we could just stand back and allow things to happen. Rather human beings possess certain intuitions or characteristics which we have come to identify as free will and individualism: intuitions and characteristics which allow us to function under the apprehension that the choices or decisions we make are made in virtue of our own volition, and that we are agents at liberty to act independent of any exterior influences or constraints. However, while these attributes appear to be innate, they are not a priori givens, but notions of selfhood peculiar to human beings at a specific place and time in the ever revolving ideal eternal history of humankind; and notions that arise from the commonsense judgements of the community: the sensus communis, as ordained by divine providence. A metamorphosis of human consciousness of such dimensions can be seen to have taken place somewhere between the years 350 and 420 AD and evidenced more particularly in the writings of Augustine of Hippo, for it is in his confessions that we find evidence, arguably for the first time, of man observing himself, not as Man, but as individual man. Indeed D.W. Hamlyn reminds us that so progressive was this work that Augustine “has for some time been seen as an anticipator of Descartes because of his use of the proposition ‘Si fallor, sum’, (‘If I err, I exist’)”. That this “vital step”, of human consciousness preceded the chaos that resulted from the fall of Rome to the barbarians, and which occurred in virtue of a decline (or dissolution) in the collective consciousness of the Roman nation, supports Vico’s corso – ricorso concept, particularly when one considers that it was only when Europe was reintroduced to the works of the ancient Greeks that it began to re-emerge from that period we call The Dark Ages. This fact is particularly relevant from the Vichean perspective in that much or most of the ancient literature that was reintroduced to Europe at this time was done so by theologians – not least amongst these contributors were the Irish monks. As Bryan Magee explains:

The Germanic tribes that destroyed Roman rule in northern Europe invaded and occupied Britain, but stopped at the Irish Sea; so Ireland was left unbarbarised. Many of the literate and learned men from Britain and the Continent fled there, with the result that an amazing period occurred in Irish history – roughly the 6th, 7th and 8th centuries – when that island was an outpost of civilisation of an otherwise uncivilised Europe.

It was from this “outpost of civilisation” that Irish monks rose to the challenge of copying anything of Western literature that they could lay hold to, and it was with these translations literally strapped to their waists that the Irish monks set off to establish communities of learning across Europe. Thus, from chaos, by turning once again to religion, humankind became civilised.

Vico’s argument that certain human attributes are specific to certain times and places is emphasised in his On the Study Methods of Our Time when he, while discussing masterpieces of art, he says that imitators cannot ever equal the original creators since they

…are not endowed with the force of imagination of their predecessors, nor with the vivacity and abundance of their animal spirits… or with the same technical experience and faculty of composition.

In other words, we cannot equal our predecessors because we do not see or understand ourselves or our world in the way that they saw and understood themselves or their world. If, as artists, philosophers, or human beings, we are to achieve our true potential, says Vico, we must eschew the paradigms of our predecessors, become our own heroes, and create our own masterpieces with those attributes peculiar to us in our own place and time. The Vichean paradox, then, is that while these attributes allow us to play our parts, not as players in a game of chance, nor as mere spectators of life’s eternal drama, but as active participants in a world in which we can make a difference, the paradigms, masterpieces, and notions of self that we create are always notions which derive from the sensus communis, in accordance with those attributes ordained by the silent hand of divine providence.

Divine Providence
According to Vico the human mind cannot have direct knowledge of God. However, grâce â his new scientific method, it can know that God exists. That is, by careful and painstaking study of the course of human history evidence of a definite chronological pattern emerges. With the conviction that this pattern is ideal and eternal, Vico concludes that the entire cyclical process is not only governed by some silent force, but that this force is an attribute of God, ergo, God exists. Thus, the axis around which Vico’s ideal eternal history revolves as well as the environ within which all human activity operates, is divine providence.

For Vico the morés that bind society together are not founded on reason, but by divine providence which operates “often contrary to human planning”. In the New Science Vico’s ambition is to show providence as historical fact. That is, to show that the pattern of the history of humankind set out by his scientific method is a “history of the orders and institutions which providence bestowed on the great polity of humankind without the knowledge or advice of humankind”. This silent attribute of God which governs the course of human history, says Vico, is not as previous philosophers held “a guide to their personal morality”, rather it is a force which operates through the collective body of a community, society, or nation often against the will of the people. While one might be forgiven for thinking that this collective mind resembles Rousseau’s notion of the “general will” , it should be noted that while, for Rousseau, law-making and law-changing occurs when people come together, deliberate, and vote in a conscious way, as in a Greek city State or Swiss canton, for Vico the laws that arise within a community do so in virtue of the collective unconsciousness of the people as ordained by God’s silent operative.

Without the intervention of divine providence, says Vico, human beings would live “in solitude like wild beasts”: a kind of Hobbesian society in which life would be ‘nasty, solitary, brutish and short’. Rather than committing mankind to such a fate, God, through providential care, ordered and arranged human institutions in such a way that the disparate and contrary practices of individuals could eschew their self-interestedness and live as human beings in an ordered society. For Vico, the natural inclination of individuals to form themselves into harmonious communities is not only the true civil nature of humankind, but a law that exists in nature independent of human beings and ordered and arranged by providential care. As Isaiah Berlin explains, Vico holds that, “by abstracting what is common to various phases of culture - what Vico calls ‘induction’ - the unalterable inner pattern… that not only shapes our world, but… is a universal principle, is eternally valid of all possible societies”. What this means is that, although the institutions and laws common to all nations are inventions of men, they are only inventions of men who, as agents of divine providence, are themselves subject to, and constrained by, the “unalterable inner pattern” which, paradoxically, they themselves create.

The Role of Sensus Communis in the History of Humankind
In the New Science Vico rejects the widely held belief that there once existed a golden age and that to uncover the mysteries contained in the myths and legends of the ancients was to gain knowledge of long lost esoteric truths. Rather than being gifted with reason and conscience from the very outset, the first men were savage brutes whose lives, laws, and customs were so removed from our own that we can only begin to understand them after long and careful study, great effort, and much imagination. Indeed, for Vico, our more cultivated minds can never fully understand a “world in which it was normal to see the sky as incarnate Jove… and nature as an immense woman or a vast animate body which feels passions and effects”. As Kathleen Gibson says, “human social intelligence… could not have suddenly emerged full-blown Minerva-like from the head of Zeus. Rather… each of these intellectual capacities must have evolved gradually”. Thus, for Vico, the study of ancient myths does not reveal lost eternal truths, but “histories of the crudest age of pagan civilisation, when people believed that all institutions necessary or useful to humankind were deities”. However, the gods of antiquity were not images carefully contrived by early poets after long and careful consideration, but spontaneous and unreflected “poetic” expressions of the collective imagination of the community: the sensus communis.

Vico defines the three principles of his New Science as “(1) divine providence; (2) solemn matrimony; and (3) the universal belief in the immortality of the soul, which originated with burial rites”. However, for Vico, these principles are neither a priori givens nor principles in revelation by a benign God, rather they are values which arise spontaneously to meet the needs of people at particular times and in particular places in the ever unfolding and refolding course of human history. Note, for example, that the notion of immortality of the soul arose from the practice of interment. Implicit in this belief is the suggestion that allied to the age of religion is the reluctance to accept that the demise of the body is also the demise of the energy that moves it. Vico holds that these spontaneous responses arise in virtue of a consensus of the people, and he calls this consensus the sensus communis, or “common sense”. Thus, for Vico, sensus communis, or common sense “… is an unreflecting judgement shared by an entire social order, people, nation or all humankind”. He also adds that he has adopted the criterion that “whenever uniform ideas originate among people… they must have a common ground of truth”. This is a development of an earlier premise in which he says that because

[t]he human mind naturally tends to take delight in what is uniform [it is]… the custom of the masses [to]… create myths which are appropriate to these conditions. These myths are ideal truths, since they truly conform to the merit of the figures they celebrate. And if they are sometimes false in fact, it is only to the extent that they inadequately recognize such merit.

These principles that arise in virtue of this criterion, says Vico, are the boundaries of human reason – to transgress them would be to abandon our humanity .

It can be argued that Vico’s view that concepts are determined by the sensus communis to meet particular needs, at particular times in the history of humankind, reveals him as a relativist. However, since he holds that within the collective consciousness of the people there exists a “providentially” directed impetus towards things moral, it seems that the charge of determinism might be more appropriate. However, if there is an “ism” under which Vico’s view that “whatever all or most people feel must be the rule of social life” can be placed it is “utilitarianism”.

The criterion which qualifies Vico’s principles fits firmly into the utilitarian camp and as such must be seen to have certain shortcomings. That is, Vico’s criterion essentially advocates that whatever is considered to be in the interest of the common good by a consensus of the majority is the order of the day. To consider the potential consequences of Vico’s rule it is necessary to adopt the principal advocated in New Science of careful examination of the utilitarian approach to social life. The fundamental tenet of Vico’s utilitarian approach is that right action is that which is decided by the majority at any given moment in time. As Vico would say, it is that action which arises spontaneously from the sensus communis. Thus, once the majority is satisfied that their action falls within the remit of the three basic principles of religion, marriage, and burial, any consensus of the majority can be justified as being ordained by divine providence. Vico confirms this view when he points to the custom of duelling, which was “necessary in barbarous ages” which was defined by the majority as being the most acceptable way of settling feuds. “No matter what the outcome of the combat they accepted its decision with such reverence that even the wronged party, if defeated, was deemed guilty. This was the profound counsel of divine providence”. In other words, even where the offended party was the victim, says Vico, such an outcome was deemed “right” and justified by the majority, as being the will of the gods. If we can take it when Vico says that the sensus communis is the unreflecting judgement of the people, that he is saying is that what is right is that which is considered to be right by a given group, community, society or nation at any particular time, then it must be argued that under this particular criterion the majority of any group can justify any action as long as it conforms to the three fundamental principles of religion, marriage, and burial. If this is the case then, by Vico’s criterion, the Holocaust could be justified, on the grounds not only that it met with the consensus of the majority of Nazi Germany at a given time in history, but that it also fell under the rubric of the three principles. That is, it was ordained by their God, it did not contravene society’s marriage principle, and they buried their dead, albeit in mass graves. It seems that those who find themselves falling on the wrong side of Vico’s criterion could get find themselves in a very unenviable situation.

Further evidence of Vico’s utilitarian approach is found in On the Study Methods of Our Time when, in relation to common sense judgements, he says, “[t]he systematization in preceptive form of many subjects that depend on common sense does harm rather than benefit to our study methods”. What Vico means is that any attempt to establish a criterion of discretion which would allow us to make dependable commonsense judgements is useless. Discretion, he says, “takes guidance from the countless particularities of events; as a consequence any attempt to grasp those detailed aspects, no matter how inclusive, is always insufficient”. Moreover, in real life nothing is more futile than to try to constrain common sense by general maxims. While for disciplines such as oratory, poetics, and art of history-writing preceptive aids are useful, says Vico, they should be considered “merely as road signs”, and never as dicta written in stone.

While these “road signs” have some merit, says Vico, the knowledge we acquire through them gives us only knowledge of surfaces. One might say that they merely yield knowledge of things as they appear to us: of phenomena rather than things in themselves. However, he goes on to say, that there is another kind of knowledge that does offer us an understanding of the inner workings of things; namely, knowledge of that which we ourselves create. In other words, while access to knowledge of things outside ourselves, of the natural world, is hidden from us, knowledge of the civil world, of ideas, laws, of human behaviour, and of the history of humankind itself can be understood, since it is not only the world of man, but is the world created by man. As Berlin says, for Vico, “[i]n the case of human behaviour, we can surely ask why men act as they do, ask not merely what mental states or events, for example feelings or volition, are followed by what acts, but also why”. Not only does Vico hold that we are entitled to ask these questions, but he insists that there is a level of understanding available to us of human affairs, institutions, laws, customs, and beliefs, that is not available to us of any object, occurrence, or event in the natural world. This world of humankind, says Vico, is the only world of which we can have true and intimate knowledge, for it is a world that has arisen in virtue of our own needs, desires, and feelings. We can have knowledge of this world because not only have our institutions and laws been invented by ourselves, but we have also created the very gods in which we believe.

Since the history of humankind was created by men, says Vico, it must be capable of being understood by men. And while it is difficult to enter into the minds of the bestioni, it is not impossible, for in the same way that imagination allows us to empathise with the feelings, thoughts, pains, and pleasures of our contemporaries, so does the same faculty privilege us to share the needs, thoughts, and feelings of early man. However, says Vico, because this knowledge can be achieved only by great effort, and because human nature is corrupt, only “the aid of philosophy, which assists only a very few”, that a certain minority can liberate themselves from the eternal chains of history. It is only because this certain minority in itself constitutes a community of like-minded souls within which a sensus communis or consensus is formed that the acquisition of such knowledge becomes possible. Thus, the implication is that while humankind as a whole is bound to a cyclical historical process which, inevitably moves from religion to chaos and dissolution, for those who apply themselves diligently to Vico’s new scientific method, modify their passions so that these become virtues, eschew the conceit of scholars, and, through the faculty of imagination, enter into the minds of those of earlier times, certain knowledge is attainable. However, it is a mistake to believe that Vico is suggesting that those who achieve this level of awareness are privileged with a state of mind that remains constant, or, indeed that it is a level of understanding that they will enjoy and develop in a life after the death of the body. For it is his conviction that the “belief that people’s souls do not die with their bodies, but are immortal [is] a notion that was first approved by the common consensus of all mankind”, and that everything in nature runs down, including human consciousness. Indeed, it might be said that his own gradual demise, during which his memory became “so far gone that he forgot the nearest objects and the most familiar things”, even the faces and names of his own children, rather poignantly and prophetically, seems to underline this belief.

La Nuova Arte Critica
The New Science, says Vico, employs a new form of criticism in attempting to establish the truth concerning the founders of pagan nations. Until now, he says, philosophy has avoided discussing questions of philology - by philology Vico means “the science of everything that depends on human volition: all histories of languages, customs, and deeds of various people in both war and peace”. Philology, for Vico, is what we now regard as history: the study of historical cultures. By treating philology as a form of science, he maintains, philosophy reveals the lineaments of a storia ideale eterna, as well as the histories of all nations past. By discovering, what he calls, “nuova arte critica”, he believes that he can demonstrate that “Greek myths were true and rigorous histories of the customs of the most ancient peoples of Greece”.

Every pagan nation, says Vico, had a Jupiter who hurled down lightning bolts and laid low giants. Every pagan nation also had its Hercules. Jupiter was a god created by the minds of primitive man to explain the phenomenon of thunder. Hercules was a hero, a giant amongst men, whose virtues, which were most admired by men, were attributed to his divine nature. The fact that each nation had its own god of thunder and its own Herculean figure, says Vico, is evidence that these nations could not have been founded without religion – nor could they have developed without virtue. It also goes to prove, Vico continues, that uniform ideas arise amongst peoples isolated from each other. From this premise, Vico concludes that the earliest myths must have contained civil truths, and therefore must have been the histories of the earliest people.

The first wise men of the Greek world were theological poets, who were followed, in the next age, by heroic poets. “All the histories of barbarous peoples have mythical origins”, says Vico. First came divine poetry, to be followed later by heroic poetry. When people consider the lives of the famous, says Vico, they create myths drawn on the conditions they imagine their heroes are experiencing. These myths are ideal truths – they are more representative of what those imagining them would like to be the case, rather than the actual reality. If these myths fail to reflect the actual it is believed that the real has not matched the ideal, rather than the ideal being untrue. As Vico says, “…poetic truth is metaphysical truth; and any physical truth which does not conform to it must be judged false”.

In the same way that children naturally attribute ideas, names of people, and names of things with which they are familiar to subsequent experiences of people, and things, so too do people superimpose that with which they are familiar onto that which is new and unfamiliar. For example, says Vico, in On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Iamblichus says that the Egyptians attributed to Hermes Trismegistus all the inventions that are “useful or necessary to human life”. In other words, they projected the imagined real onto the ideal, and then back again, paradoxically, turning the real into a heroic myth - thus, mortals became as gods. Primitive man, says Vico, “unable to conceive rational categories”, felt the natural need to invent poetic archetypes which were imaginary universals. Vico, then, compares the age of the god to childhood. In the same way that children possess “excessively vivid imaginations”, he says, so did the world’s metaphorical children – the bestioni – construct vivid poetic images which were expanded and compounded by memory. The poetry/myths that arose in the childhood of nations are similar to the imitations which arise when children ape their world. Like Aristotle, who, in his Poetics, says that “[a] universal is: The sort of thing that (in certain circumstances) a certain kind of person will say or do either probably or necessarily, which in fact is the universal that poetry aims for…”, Vico claims that art imitates nature; and also like Aristotle, he holds that universal concepts arise from humankind’s experience with the real world. “The metaphysics of Aristotle”, he says, “leads to a physical principle, from which the particular forms are drawn”. However, while he shared the Stagirite’s view that universals are drawn from experience, Vico “…found himself dissatisfied with the metaphysics of Aristotle”, whose philosophy, he claimed, “makes God a potter from the outside” and he found himself being drawn towards the notion of an ideal eternal law which followed a more Platonic pattern since it “should be observed as…the idea or design of providence”.

The Origin of Universals
To understand Vico’s notion of how the “universals” of those of the age of gods arose it may be useful to return to Aristotle’s views on the significance of mimesis in art. While Aristotle holds that reality consists in primary and secondary substances, for him, the primary substance of the universe is in the real world. Thus, while he agrees with Plato that these forms are universals, he argues that the concept of universals derives not from the world of Ideal Forms, but from empirical experience. Therefore, while, for Plato, the world of Ideas is the ultimate reality, of which everything in this world is but an inferior copy, for Aristotle, the concept of universals is a posteriori – they derive from our experience with the natural world. For Aristotle, as it is for Vico, mimesis is a copy of an idea which has its genesis in the imagination – and it is an idea which is formed from worldly experience. Stephen Buckley captures the contrast between Plato and Aristotle when he says: “…in sharp contrast to Plato’s view, Aristotle’s account does not imply that the natural (or real) is unchangeable; it requires only that changes occur as the result of the inner workings of a being”. Universals exist, says Aristotle, but only in and through their instances: they are general terms which acquire their meaning in the description of particular things. Like Aristotle, Vico too reminds us that all things, imagined and created, have a beginning and an end; and that the “universals” of yesteryear must, inevitably, give way to those of today. For the peoples of the age of the gods, these universals were formed by a fear of natural events that they could only rationalise by imagining anthropomorphic deities.

On the question of “imitation”, it is interesting to note that what might be considered an unusual connection exists between Aristotle, Vico and the contemporary radical Darwinian scientist, Richard Dawkins. Indeed it could be argued that Vico’s view of concepts arising from the sensus communis anticipates Dawkins’ notion of the “meme”. It seems that Dawkins drew the term “meme” from the Greek word mimesis, “a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” (hence, the connection with Aristotle). Dawkins informs us that he changed the two-syllable term to a monosyllable so that it would sound like the term “gene”. Memes, he maintains, can be anything from a “tune” to “ways of making pots or building arches”. In the same way that genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body by way of sperms or eggs, so do memes propagate themselves in the meme pool of the collective consciousness through imitation. On the question of God, Dawkins says that while he cannot know for certain how the notion of God arose in collective consciousness, he suggests it arose to meet the human need to provide a “plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence”. In other words, in the same way that the gods of Vico’s bestioni emerged from the sensus communis to explain natural phenomena, so too, for Dawkins, does the god meme arise from the “meme pool” to meet the psychological needs of people for something outside themselves which can give them “stability and a permanence in the cultural environment”. Like Vico’s “universals”, Dawkins’ memes can include entire world-views, or indeed any predominant societal or cultural ism. Some memes, he says, “achieve brilliant short-term success… others, such as Jewish religious laws,” can last thousands of years. Like Vico, Dawkins holds that these ideas arise to meet the demands of society at specific times in the history of humankind. These ideas, he maintains, are spread through the community, not consciously, but by subliminal imitation. In the same way that Vico’s theological poets articulate the needs and utilities of the community, so too, for Dawkins, are the demands of the people represented in the hypotheses of the mythmakers of today. For example, in the case of a meme being a scientific idea, its success “… will depend on how acceptable it is to the population of individual scientists”. In other words, the idea must meet the approval by consensus of the social grouping it represents.

However, it must be said that there is a significant and vital difference between Dawkins’ scientist and Vico’s theological poet. That is, while for Dawkins, who is a professed atheist, contemporary world-views arise solely from human experience, for Vico, the concepts represented by the theological poets arise always in virtue of divine providence. For Vico, the first and only true creator is God. Man, while he can know that which he has made, cannot ever have full knowledge of that which he has made since it is made from that which is outside him. As Isaiah Berlin says, “Only in the ideal case, where we make or design out of literally nothing, can we be said fully to understand what we have made… [t]his is how God creates”. While we can approach this ideal we can never achieve it. Thus, for Vico, while shapes, symbols, myths, and paradigms are indeed inventions of the human mind, they are always inventions drawn from sense-given material, and they are always inventions ordained by divine providence, which is the attribute of the primary and only true creator, God.

Everything heretofore known about pagan nations, argues Vico, is uncertain. Unlike his own thesis, which seeks to establish scientific principles which will explain the origins of certain known historical facts, and give them a solid and coherent historical basis, earlier studies, he maintains, have failed to reveal a “common foundation”, but also to provide evidence of a “continuity of sequence” and “coherence”. ” In other words, up until Vico, philologists had failed to see the history of mankind as an historical process that moves from an age of primordial fear of imagined deities to an age of equity and reason – before dissolving once more into barbarism.

In the final analysis, then, Vico’s philosophy of history is a history of despair: a scheme of things in which ultimately all human societies dissolves into chaos. While there is some place for those who lead virtuous lives, it is as founders in a new age of simplicity and ignorance. The virtues that Vico extols are the classical virtues of prudence, fortitude, temperance or magnanimity, and justice. The Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity, have no place in Vico’s history of gentile nations, nor is there a place for the belief in personal salvation. The self of Vico is the communal self: a self that has no identity outside that of the community. If there are geniuses, saints, or as Vico calls them, “poetic heroes”, they are icons only in so far as they are conduits through which the values or judgements of the collective mind of their societies are represented. However, while Vico’s storia ideale eterna appears to be a Pandora’s Box in which the virtue of hope is missing, it does, albeit unwittingly, contain within it a way to unhinge ourselves from the cycle of historical recurrence. That is, if, as Vico says, the civil world of humankind is indeed a world made by human imagination, then it must be that within the same power of imagination to design a paradigm in which faith, hope, and charity have a part, and in which peace and harmony are neither transient, elusive or illusory.

Conclusion
Although Vico’s work made little impact during his own lifetime, decades after his death his history of philosophy has been admired and developed, and has had a profound influence on many subsequent thinkers. During a period when philosphes were arguing that human nature was a constant; that human goals and standards were essentially the same for all people at all times; and that knowledge was already within us as innate ideas, Vico remained a lone voice crying out that this approach was too severe, too dispassionate, and above all, too homogenised. Contrary to the Cartesian doctrine of a priori knowledge, Vico held that there were no given universal standards. Neither human nature, customs, laws, institutions that govern social life, are constants. While he accepted that human history had involved a progressive evolution from primitive cultures to more sophisticated and modern cultures, this was not a permanent, linear process, but one that is cyclical and eternal, ever moving from the savage to the heroic, and on to the human, before turning once again to the savage. For Vico, these historical changes did not mean that one period or age was superior to another, only that they were different. For example, although the earliest people were the most primitive (with regard to powers of reason), in virtue of their superior powers of imagination, they were more poetic. It was only after many aeons, as human society evolved, that imagination was supplanted by reason.

Thus, while philosophes were promoting the doctrine that human nature was the same at all times and in all places, Vico was making the case that the laws governing humankind were not absolutes but products of the human mind. Even human nature itself was not constant, but something which demonstrably changed over time. And since this nature was changeable, it follows that, while certain self-evident natural rights and obligations arise within each social grouping, these rights and obligations are not absolutes written in stone, but values and judgements that arise to meet the needs and utilities of each emerging society. Everything associated with civil life has been made by man. Hence, while we cannot know that which God has made, since only God can know his creation, we can know what man has made. The Enlightenment tradition, which overshadowed Vico’s philosophy, advocated the view that there was a unity of sciences: that the same kind of laws or principles can be found in each area of inquiry, including human affairs. While it is the view, as Thomas Kelly points out, that, with the notable exception of Neo-Platonists, this approach went relatively unchallenged “until the epoch of Heidegger and Wittgenstein”, as early as the first quarter of the eighteenth century Giambattista Vico’s “new science” was challenging this approach.

In the world of today, as the world stands in fear of terrorism of all kinds, as societies continue to dissolve and fragment, as the sense of isolation and alienation continues to infect us, and as the rationale of the mighty powers seems to drive us nearer and nearer towards the edge of chaos, it can be argued that Vico’s view that reason detached from reality leads to brutality must be revisited. That is, in a post September 11th, 2001 world: a world that is concerned with social fragmentation and the increased fluidity of social identity; a world in which old certainties have been eroded; a world which no longer accepts the idea of an all-embracing philosophical system which can explain the whole of human existence, and a world which perches perilously on the verge of self-destruction, Vico’s storia ideale eterna, his “third way”, carries a poignant message: if we are to move forward from, what Vico calls “this dense night” that threatens to envelop the world, we must submit the meanings and values of the world we have inherited to our own nuova arte critica, in an attempt to ensure that the misinterpretations of the past are not replicated in the civil world of tomorrow.