Vico: Past and present

BOOK REVIEWS Vito: Past and Present. ties Press, 1981).

ed. Giorgio

Tagliacozzo

(Atlantic

Highlands,

N. J.:Humani-

Vico: Past und Pwsent is the fourth in a series of large volumes of essays devoted to Vito, written by a diverse and impressive body of international scholars. The essays in this latest collection are based on papers delivered at the 1978 conference on Vito held at Venice. The collection is prefaced by a useful account by Andrea Battistini of ‘contemporary trends in Vichian Studies’. He contrasts the Italian approach which has recently concentrated on monographs describing particular aspects of the historical background, and the Anglo-Saxon (largely American) one which tries to appropriate Vito for contemporary understanding. He also mentions the Germans whose efforts have in many ways sought to combine these two approaches, but for some reason the German contributions at the Venice conference are only represented in this volume by a single essay by Eckhard Kessler. In accordance with this division the first half of the book is devoted mainly to contextual and exegetical studies and the latter half to mediations between Vito and later thinkers and disciplines. The first six essays deal with Vito’s position in relation to the traditions of renaissance and humanist thought. Emmanueie Riverso succinctly shows how Vito rejects the concept of the Prisca Theol~g~cu, while giving a much more profound sense to the idea of our ultimate dependence on a primitive theological wisdom; namely that it was the poetic invention of the gods as imaginative universals which allowed the human world to come into being. An article by Margherita Frank4 argues rather unconvincingly that Vito’s use of an emblem to introduce and summarise his new science suggests the similarity of his thought to that of the hermetic encyclopaedists of an earlier generation. Emblems and mnemonic devices of all sorts were so universal in the Baroque Age that one cannot infer a simple, consciously held theory behind their usage. Attempts to relate Vito to the hermetic traditions do not take one very far. Of much more significance is his standing in relation to the main currents of humanist thought; the traditions of reflection on law and written texts. Donald R. Kelley’s article ‘Vito and Gaianism’ suggests that one should investigate further the claims of Roman Jurisprudence to be a complete philosophy as a key to Vito’s attempts to combine ‘rational’ and ‘historic’ methods. An article by Eugenio Garin on ‘Vito and the Heritage of Renaissance Thought’ is more expansive and contains several very significant points in regard to Vito’s intellectual situation. In the first place Garin agrees with Eckhard Kessler in an article on ‘Vito’s Attempts towards a Humanistic Foundation of Science’ that Vito looks back towards elements of fourteenth-century humanism, expressed particularly in Petrarch and Salutati who already stress man’s ‘poetic’ role in determining his own history in the shape of law, language and other institutions. In the second place, however. Garin argues that Vito is not so eccentric to his time as has sometimes been thought. If there are neoplatonic elements in his writings then we should realise that they are there for precisely the reason that neoplatonism was becoming once again fashionable in Europe at this time; namely that the Pythagorean identificatjon of numbers with 99

reality had been subjected to sceptical destruction by Bayle and others, posing the question of the relation of the ideal to the material as once more mysterious and problematic. Vito’s realisatio~l that the explanations hitherto successful in physics will not serve so well in the life sciences is likewise a contemporary insight, and contemporary also is his interest in the possibility of a human science. All the same Garin considers that Vito’s escape from the sceptical dilemma is distinctive and owes much to the return to earlier humanist currents already mentioned: physics is to be regarded as simply one other projection by which tnan constructs and articulates his world; its distinctive character resides in its technological success - not in a privileged ontological access. Consequently the discovery of the limitations of mathematical physics and the lack of any final guarantee of its objectivity need not result in a general scepticism about all human knowledge. (Aith~~u~h one may add that it does for Vito compel a recognition of its ‘partial’ character.) Garin’s article recommends itself through its demonstration that Vito was evoking a particular tradition to solve a contemporary problem. Eckhard Kessler adopts a similar procedure when he shows that Vito deals with the problem of how for Cartesian&m extra-mental reality is supposed to correspond with thought, by returning to the earlier humanist view that more precise correspondence is achieved to the degree that we can make a thing (both materially and theoretically) for ourselves. For this reason Kessler argues. geometry originally came to be seen as paradigmatic, and Vito simply restores the original perspective. While this point is probably accurate. one would have some reservations about Kessler’s desire to associate the humanist tradition about making and knt~will~ with the conceptualism, voluntaris~n and nominalism of the later scholastics. The rel~~ti~~nship between these two currents was surely more complex than Kessler allows, and for example the philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa provides an account of knowing as making which attempts to overcome the nominalist/realist, intellectualist/v(~luntarist divides. It may be argued that the Vito of the De A~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~u~u~[~~z S~~~e~~~~adopts a perspective very similar to that of Cusanus. Three essays are devoted to “The Philosophical Role of the Imagination’. Leon Pompa (‘Imagination in Vito’) convincingly demonstrates against Donald P. Verene and Ernest0 Grassi that empathetic imagination did not for Vito play the leading role in the reconstruction of the past. The problem of how the axiom Vcrurn ef Frrcfwr~ Cunverruntw applies to history not only preoccupies this section but resounds throughout the book. Why should the fact that one person makes a thing guarantee that another can ‘come to know it’? Linda Gardiner Janik thinks that Vito posits some sort of collective human subject. Verene and Grassi opt for the traditional version of historical i~ersrehen as empathy. while Peter Rickman and Martin Jay tend to conclude that the problem is insoluble. Hilliard Aronovitch, however, resolves the matter in resounding fashion: the whole attention to the subject is a misleading one: history and in particular primitive history can be reconstrLicted because it is ,~~~~~~~~. that is to say made according to a particular logic which records a particular human interpret~ition of the world. (Even if this interpretation was not made with full consciousness.) Aronovitch asks what criteria would guarantee a correct grasp of this logic, or a correct reading of the human text? He rejects the idea that we have special privileged access to the experience of children which then allows us to reconstruct by analogy the experience of primitive man. We cannot real/y think as children any more than we cm think as primitive men. Rather, our grasp of past logic becomes plausible if it can bc placed in a coherent narrative: if. for example, we can give a convii~cin~ account of how poetic, metaphoric thought leads to abstract con~eptuafisin~ thought. To construct such narratives we will certainly have to isolate relatively constant features (for Vito these are the concrete ones of marriage, burial and religion) and our first sense of

Book Reviews a narrative

wilf be derived

101 from the experience

of emerging

from childhood.

The three essays dealing with ‘Epistemology and Methodology’ are among the most impressive in the book. Robert Crease’s essay on ‘Vito and the “Cogito”’ expresses very precisely why Vito can never be totally assimilated to the traditions of idealism stemming from Descartes and Kant. For Vito there are no isolatable elements of thought that are purely apriori because the human subject always possesses its unity as the result of a particular series of interactions with nature and other men. NO element of thought can then constitute a ‘ground’ in the manner desired by idealism. Consequently when one reflects on the mind one is not in a situation so very different from the interpretation of a text; what counts as ‘first’ and fundamental depends upon its position in the story of humanity and the degree to which it helps to hold other elements together as a significant whole. Crease’s article is even more interesting in terms of the questions that it raises: if what reflective thought first has access to is simply the contingent process of human appropriation of the world, then the question arises, is this process arbitrary‘? If it is not then the idea of some sort of transcendental ground for this process in Vito (as briefly argued for in this collection by Rudolf A. Makkreel) is not excluded along with the other Cartesian-Kantian notion of a rationally graspable, isolatable, “foundation’. In fact throughout Vito’s writings it is clear that he wishes to provide some transcendental foundations for humanist studies and the processes of construction of the human world. Furthermore, the explicitly metaphysical and theological form given to these foundations by Vito cannot be as easily argued away as is commonly thought. For if Vito refuses the idea that one can isolate the categories of knowledge independently of the contents of knowledge, then he is saying that one studies human knowing only in conjunction with certain ontological assumptions or a certain determination of the way the world is. This does not mean that Vito returns to the perspectives of a realism according to which a fixed essence of objects measures the exactitude of thought. Rather it seems that a philosophy concentrating on the human making of the world hovers between realism and idealism. It is fitting that the foundation for this process in Vito should be human participation in divine creation as something which establishes simultaneously the being and the intelligibility of things. In accordance with this outlook, truth and goodness for Vito force themselves on human attention not in pure introspection, nor in mere contemplation of the world but in the aesthetic forms that emerge in human making. Vito arrives at this perspective. which is arguably very similar to that of Cusa and Hamann (who has many sources in common with Vito) through a combination of Baroque aesthetics, trinitarian theology and the scholastic traditions concerning the intellectual word or ~rhunz. Unfortunately these themes which emerge strongly in many of Vito’s shorter writings (De ~~~~~~~~~j~~u, the htitutiones Oratoriae, the 0ratione.s and the Vici Vindiciae) have not been much examined recently and are not represented in this volume. The essays by Bhattacharya and Faj underline the general point made by Crease. Bhattacharya argues that Vito’s theory of natural science amounts to recommendations of procedures for successful experimentation, rather than criteria for sifting sense data. An experiment succeeds and provides a good basis for theorisation when it successfully imitates a natural effect and at the same time is ‘modelled’ on a prior theory. In this conception there is no need for rigid distinctions between u priori and a posteriori, contingent and necessary or scheme and context. Faj commendably investigates the under-considered teaching manual on rhetoric, the institutinnes Oratoriae and shows that Vito considered ‘acute’ or metaphorical thinking to exemplify the e~~c~e~~~~u or formally imperfect syllogism in which the argument proceeds by enfurging the sense of the middle term. The axioms at the beginning of the New

102

Book Reviaws

Science he considers are really conclusions of such ep~~~?~rei~u. If this is the case there can be no doubt about the irreducibly analogical character of Vito’s thought in the New Science and the degree to which it depends on a shared sense of human value in the determination of historical truth. The question of the kind of study the New Science is, is at issue in the three or four articles devoted to the questions in the philosophy of history. Does Vito seek interpretations of history, as argued by Bruce A. Haddock and Jonathan I.. German or explanations as argued by Leon Pompa? Haddock’s view of interpretation seems confined to recovery of the original historical viewpoint, and this is clearly inadequate as a reading of Vito. Gorman argues along with Buford Rhea in a later article that Vito does not seek any ‘covering laws’ for human affairs but rather laws for the construction of an historical narrative. However, when he tries to elucidate what these might be, he appears to be thinking of criteria for what would count as historical evidence, a perspective which ignores the primacy of interpreting the meaning of a text before its evidential character (which can be of many different kinds) will emerge. Leon Pompa insists with a great force of argument that Vito wants to explain why one human state had to emerge from another. It might, however, be suggested that the more ‘explanatory’ passages in Vito relate in particular to human determination by quasi-physical ‘subconscious’ urges more susceptible to causal consideration. The shape of Vito’s narrative as a whole seems to demand in addition to this a commitment to certain meanings as valuably human meanings, both on the part of the makers and interpreters of the process. Part II of the volume, devoted to modern appropriations of Vito, is considerably less successful. However, the essay on ‘CoIlingwood on Vito’ by Joseph M. Levine and the essays on Auerbach by Rene Wellek and Timothy Bakti do cast some light on the development of the two t~~entieth-century authors in relation to their reading of Vito. Among the articies on Vito and contemporary human studies, that of Naomi S. Baron entitled ‘Writing and Vito’s Functional Approach’ stands out in particular. More successfully than the other articles she shows how a particular Vichian claim. in this case that writing is older than speech, presents a challenge to contemporary investigation. There are indeed, she says, reasons to think that writing has a direct relation to things represented rather than one mediated through its own representation of speech. Moreover Vito’s view that the first written signs are metaphoric makes more sense than modern assumptions that they are naively iconic, because all significance is socially determined. Finally Vito’s view that phonetic language coincides with a new social configuration is more sophisticated than the view that it is adopted ;f~ ‘less cumbrous’. After ah, hierogIyphics are only cumbrous if there are many and complex things to express, which may not for certain societies be the case. A short article by Arshi Pippa makes the valid point that Vito regards the emergence of law and language as inseparably connected with property relations. This alone is enough to justify the comparison of Vito with Marx and two articles in the collection by Hilliard Aronovitch and Martin Jay are devoted to this subject. Aronovitch considers that for both Vito and Marx there is a reciprocity between the human creation of society and the social creation of human beings. As Aronovitch argues, behind this picture and concomitant phenomena concerning the heterogenesis of ends, lies the assumption that human needs and human actions are SO irreducibly relational that no single subject can sufficiently define or determine them, This perspective along with the view that ideas are just as basic products as material goods constitutes one would have thought the permanent relevance of Vito to a humanist Marxism, in view of which it is surprising to find Martin Jay concluding that this

IO3

Book Reviews

interest must now be considered at an end. His reasons for this conclusion are inadequate but interesting. First of all he supposes that the historical Verum-Facturn supposes a meta-subject. We have seen that it does not. Secondly he thinks that the new science allows only retrospective understanding of history and does not suggest any guidelines for practical action. A reading of ‘all the versions’ of the New Science from the De U-to to the Scienza Nmva Secundu does not bear this out. Thirdly he considers that Vito dangerously isolates culture from nature; in fact for Vito conscientia of what we have not made constantly interweaves in an indeterminate fashion (as Bhattacharya in his article points out) with scientin of what we have made. In the fourth place Jay thinks that Vito’s making is restricted to a technological model of manipulation, inappropriate to human interaction. Acquaintance with Vito’s early writings would have shown that he diversifies praxis between mere fechne, artistic poesir and ethical praxis (the last distinctiol~ after Aristotle). Habermas in Theory and Practice (1974) (which he cites) is perfectly aware of the importance of Aristotelean praxis in Vito and Apel’ (whose thought is at least Marxist influenced) certainly regards Vito as concerned with ethically significant action in the future. Jay fails to mention Ape1 at all. This leads me to a final reflection on the volume as a whole. Although some of the articles are outstanding, there is often a failure to engage in detail with Vito’s texts themselves. This may in part be due to the length of the articles, which is in general much too short but it is certain that both contextual and appropriative readings will only succeed if they are combined with attention to the inner coherencies of Vito‘s writings. Many, many obscurities remain in the texts, and some avenues of historical explanation which would help to clarify them remain reiatively unexplored. (For example, Vito’s references to Herbert of Cherbury, to Malebranche and to Scholasticism which occasion many puzzling statements in his early writings.) But despite Battistini’s strictures on ‘overall’ readings of Vito, there are so many structural and metaphoric echoes within Vito’s writings from the earliest to the latest. that it might be assumed that obscurities could also be clarified by systematic procedures of internal comparison. In the last analysis only a recovery of Vito’s sense will provide us with that elusive unity which many of the commentators in this book sense to lurk behind the array of diverse and prodigious insights. John Milbank

NOTES 1. See K. 0. Apel,

Die Idee der Spruche (1963), pp. 318-81.

Contemporary Political Philosophy: Radical Studies, ed. Keith Graham University Press, 1982), 1.59 pp., P.B. $7.95.

(Cambridge

One of the main virtues of socialist political theory has been to point out that the liberties and liberal values espoused by conventional liberal theory are merely formal or at least can never be effective in bourgeois society. But socialist political practice, particularly that of Marxian and authoritarian socialists, has emphasised effectiveness at the expense of liberties and liberal values. Presently existing socialist regimes have all too often destroyed liberties and liberal values without realising them.