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Vico,
De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia -

Vichiana





There is a difference between what Vico meant and what Vico means, but it is with difficulty that the two questions are separated and it is not clear that a complete separation of the one from the other would be desirable even if it were possible.

If we wish to decide what it was that Vico meant, then we shall be committed to an inquiry into the meaning of his writings in the periods in which they were written.

If, on the other hand, it is what Vico means that interests us, then we shall examine the meaning of his writings in the present, whenever that happens to be.

These twin inquiries, Vico nel suo tempo e nel nostro, suffer from a similar difficulty, however, for just as the present is in this context a ‘whenever,’ so the phrase ‘in the periods in which they were written’ is rich in equivocation.

Nor is the problem solved if we concern ourselves only with one work, the
De Antiquissima ItalorumSapientia
, and one present, now. It is true that the
De Antiquissima
bears the date 1710, but it is also true that the work is supplemented in some subsequent editions by the two short works published byVico in response to the review of the
De Antiquissima
in the
Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia
.
1
In anumber of modern editions, the three pieces written by Vico are published together with the threenotices that appeared in the
Giornale
.
2
It was suggested by the
Giornale
that Vico’s completemetaphysics would emerge if the text, the reviews and Vico’s responses to those reviews were takentogether as a single work; and it ought to be noted that Vico approved of this suggestion.
3
Thus, evenif we allow ourselves the interpretative luxury of assuming that Vico wrote the first book of the
De Antiquissima
in as it were an intellectual instant, continuously and in one state of mind – allowingourselves to ignore the fact that the author announced the
De Antiquissima
as the first installment of athree-volume work that would in time add books on physics and ethics and an appendix on logic tothe first Liber Metaphysicus – it is nevertheless impossible to suppose that there is a unitary period inwhich the
De Antiquissima
was written and to which we can direct ourselves if we wish to find themeaning of the work when it came into being. Similarly, even if we define the present as
this
presenthere and now we shall find ourselves undermined not only by the commonplace that any instantidentified is already past, but also by the fact that at least with regard to reception there is no nowthan must not also be conceptualized as a here. That is to say, your now and my now are differenteven if they are simultaneous because the questions that you take to the
De Antiquissima
areunavoidably different from the questions that I take to the
De Antiquissima
. Every now is thus both
1
Vico,
Risposta del signor Giambattista Vico, nella quale si sciogliono tre opposizioni fatte da dotto signore contro il primolibro
De antiquissima italorum sapientia
, ovvero Della metafisica degli antichissimi italiani tratta da’ latini parlari
, Napoli,Felice Mosca, 1712;
Risposta di Giambattista Vico all’articolo X del tommo VIII del
Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia, Napoli,Felice Mosca, 1712.
2
Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia
, volume V, 1711, article VI, 119-30; volume VIII, 1711, article X, 309-38; volume XII,1712, article XIII, 417-8.
3
Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia
, volume VIII, 1712, article X, 335-6. The entire passage is cited by Vico in his SecondResponse where he adds ‘Talché io voglio, e devo volerlo, che ’l mondo creda, con questa
Risposta
me non contender conesso voi, ma avervi ubbidito,’
Opere Filosofiche
, Paolo Cristofolini (ed.), Firenze, Sansoni, 1971, 168.
1
temporal and spatial, spatial in the sense that a reader is a cognitive locus. Furthermore, even if it islegitimate to think of a reader as a unitary spatial locus, it does not follow that the reader is unitary ina temporal sense, for a reader is coinvolved in a complex temporal process that may be thought to possess past, present, and future dimensions: past when a text exists prior to the reader; present in thesense that the cognitive events that constitute a reading take place in the present; future when a textremains open to contrual. This essay will consider Vico’s
De Antiquissima
from this multiple perspective. Indeed, the essay will multiply this perspective, for it will make sense to think of thereader of the
De Antiquissima
as being subjected to pluperfect and future perfect tenses as well: Vicois a reader of Aristotle reading Zeno, and we shall also be considering an essay by Max Fisch thatadopts the perspective of how Vico (and the essay) will (and would) have been received. The firstsection examines an observation on the
verum
=
factum
principle made by Fisch in an essay intitled‘Vico and Pragmatism;’ the second, Vico’s approach to reading in the
De Antiquissima
itself; and thethird, the author’s involvement with the book’s immediate reception. It will be the conclusion of thisessay that the meaning of Vico’s
De Antiquissima
is not temporally located, is only more or lessdeterminate, is coordinate with the commitments and entitlements that may in the end be legitimatelyascribed to it and that the author of the work himself has an essentially similar, or at least compatibleaccount of meaning, although he does not articulate it.

At the end of a rather fine essay Max Fisch intimates to the reader that he is not finished, that he hasmore to say, but that he may never say it. It is characteristic of Fisch to use a cryptic style that hopesto make up with precision what it lacks in explicitation. Fisch, pragmatist philosopher, scholar of C.S. Peirce and translator of Vico, is not ashamed, but instead proud to signal to the reader that thereis more to be done and, indeed, it is a mark of his pragmatism that he puts such store – faith would bethe wrong word – in future research communities. The insistence on the future-orientated status of inquiry finds its inspiration in Peirce’s articulation of the coincidence of reality and, what he calls,inquiry in the long run. ‘The real,’ argues Peirce, ‘is that which, sooner or later, information andreasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you.Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves thenotion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase in knowledge.’
4
Addressing himself to this indefinite community, Fisch concludes the essay withA last suggestion. What if Peirce, toward the end of his life, had heard of Vico’s
verum
=
factum
? He would have said: “The way to take that is to turn it first into Greek,the native language of philosophy, and then from Greek into English. The Greek for itis
το αληθες
=
το πραγµα
. The English unpacking is that the true in the transcendental
4
C.S. Peirce,
Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce
, 8 vols., Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1931-58,5.311; the passage is cited by Max Fisch, ‘Vico and Pragmatism,’ in
Giambattista Vico. An International Symposium
,Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969, 416-7.
2
sense – the unconcealed, that which hides nothing, that which is intelligible withoutremainder – is the deed, action, behavior, practice, affair, pursuit, occupation, business,going concern. The Greek formula has several advantages over the Latin. The Latin
factum
emphasizes the completed actuality, the pastness, of the deed; the Greek
το πρ αγµα
covers also an action still in course or not yet begun, and even a line of conductthat
would
be adopted under circumstances that may never arise. The Latin isretrospective; the Greek is, or may be, prospective. The Latin is, on the face of it,individual, and it took Vico’s genius and years of struggle to make it social in the
NewScience
. The Greek would have offered no such resistance. The Greek leaves room for possibility and for generality, and so for Scholastic realism; the Latin, while perhapsnot excluding realism, favors nominalism. Further, the transcendental sense of “true”is more obvious in the Greek
το αληθες
than in the Latin
verum
. Now the doctrine of transcendentals, though metaphysical, includes a theory of knowledge, and the theoryof knowledge includes, at least by implication, a theory of meaning. The Greek formula lends itself better than the Latin to the disengaging of the theory of knowledgefrom the metaphysics, and of the theory of meaning from the theory of knowledge.Vico disengages the theory of knowledge but not that of meaning. He saw that thequestion of truth in the transcendental sense is logically prior to that of truth in the non-transcendental sense; he did not see that the question of meaning is also prior to that of truth in the non-transcendental sense. If he had thought in Greek instead of Latin, hemight have taken that final step of disengaging the theory of meaning. If he had takenit, the result would have been pragmatism.
Πραγµα
prompts us, as
factum
does not, tofind the meaning of probability (for example) in (for example) the insurance business.And the meaning it prompts us to find is not so much how that business
has been
,
hascome to be
, or
is
conducted, as how it
would
be conducted in a rational society.
5
The paragraph wants and warrants explicitation. First, let it be said that Fisch’s supposing of a Peircewho had read Vico is illegitimate (and negligible for the historian who does not indulge in counter-factuals) only if we are able to deny Fisch’s claim that the conditional is an integral part of meaning. Now, when Fisch speaks of ‘the true in the transcendental sense’ he assumes that ‘
verum
, true, as atranscendental, refers to the truth of things, not of propositions, and means intelligible.’
6
Likewise,when he talks of a theory of meaning that follows from the
verum
=
factum
principle analogous to thetheory of knowledge that Vico derives from the equation, Fisch intends to refer to a pragmatist theoryof meaning according to which, as Peirce puts it, ‘the only real significance of a general term lies inthe general behavior which it implies.’
7
Fisch’s belief that meaning is somehow a function of usesupports his intuition that it is significant that the author of the
De Antiquissima
was writing in Latin and that it makes sense to say not only that he wrote in Latin but that he “thought in Latin” and thathe would have thought differently, but subtly so, had he thought in Greek.Fisch’s suggestion is tremendously acute, but it simplifies the use that Vico makes of theterms
verum
and
factum
in the argumentative mêlée of both the
De Antiquissima
and his responses toits review in the
Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia
. Fisch is quite correct, however, to insist on theimportance of the syntactic position of the word
factum
. With a close reading of the
De Antiquissima
we see that Vico’s conceptualization of the participle’s temporality is not consistent in the way that
5
Max Fisch, ‘Vico and Pragmatism,’ 424.
6
Max Fisch, ‘Vico and Pragmatism,’ 403.
7
C.S. Peirce, MS L 321, draft of a letter to Howes Norris, Jr., May 28, 1912; cited in Max Fisch, ‘Vico and Pragmatism,’418.
3
Fisch would have us believe, but that nevertheless the word moves, conjugates on precisely the axisthat Fisch has indicated with his Peircean gloss. Fisch’s point seems well served when Vico uses the perfect infinitive,
fecisse
on three separate occasions early in the work.
8
But the infinitive is, of course, a rather particular grammatical form that denies its own temporal determination. The perfectinfinitive is a kind of limitlessness that is bounded at one end by the present and the present infinitiveoccupies a temporal position only insofar as it is not explicitly the perfect or future infinitive. WhenVico comes to use the present infinitive in the work’s conclusion a peculiar thing happens to theequation between
verum
and
factum
. Those two terms appear grammatically comparable; they bothfunction as neuter adjectives and in the examples he cites from Plautus and Terence Vico is concernedwith the status of the words as comparable adverbs (‘indeed’ and ‘nicely done’); but in fact therelationship is asymmetrical in that
verum
does not stand to an infinitive as
factum
stands to
facere
.Vico explores this asymmetry when in the conclusion to the
De Antiquissima
he addresses PaoloMattia Doria with the words ‘Etenim habes verare et facere idem esse.’
9
In saying that Doria believes
verare
and
facere
to be identical Vico is putting his own words in Doria’s mouth, which is somethingthat he does also with Zeno, as we shall see. What is more important here though is Vico’sconcession to good analogical form. The pressure of proximity to
facere
generates the word
verare
.In translating
verare
it is difficult to ignore the direct transliteration ‘to verify’ even though it does notfollow from the standard translations of
verum
as ‘the true’ or ‘the intelligible.’ If we accept thatVico’s Latin stands in the vicinity of ‘to verify,’ we must conclude that syntactic pressure has alteredsemantic content because verification is significantly different from, although related to,intelligibility. This is a point to which we shall return when we come to discuss the semanticdimension of Fisch’s Peircean gloss of Vico, but for the moment it is important to note that there arefurther syntactic consequences to this syntacto-semantic development. With the infinitive equation
verare
=
facere
we have an equation of processes that must be conceptualized as taking place over time, although, by the same token, it cannot be conceptualized as taking place in any one of the past, present or future tenses.There is more, though. The dialogical quality of Vico’s address to Doria is in itself of littleimportance, but it mirrors an episode of considerably more significance in which Vico casts theotherwise impersonal
verum
=
factum
into a dialogical frame. Having indicated his belief that whatGalilei and his peers in English natural philosophy were doing with experimentation in physics was akind of
verum
=
factum
, Vico concludes by arguing that, although the Cartesians deny that they arecoinvolved in the probabilistic business of experimental verification, what they are in essence practising follows from the quite correct proposition that ‘mihi physica vera erunt, cum feceris; utgeometrica ideo hominibus sunt vera, quia faciunt.’
10
Physicals will be intelligibles for me, says Vico putting words in the mouth of an imagined Cartesian, when you will have made them, just as
8
Vico,
De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia
, in
Opere Filosofiche
, 69, 75, 93.
9
Vico,
De Antiquissima
, in
Opere Filosofiche
, 131.
10
Vico,
De Antiquissima
, in
Opere Filosofiche
, 125.
4
geometricals are intelligibles for men because they themselves make them. The extension of geometrical method to physics is right, but the Cartesians have misunderstood the nature of the move,which ought not to be motivated by a desire to found in physics a science as certain and sceptic-proof as the science of mathematics, but rather by a desire to practise in physics a kind of constructioncomparable to that practised in geometry. This sentence had its origin in a passage in the
De NostriTemporis Studiorum Ratione
where Vico had argued that ‘geometrica demonstramus, quia facimus; si physica demonstrare possemus, faceremus,’ that
geometricals we demonstrate because we make themand that were we able to demonstrate physicals, we should be able to make them too.
11
The premisemissing from this sentence is that God and not Man makes physicals and it follows that we must notthink ourselves capable of creating physicals in the same sense in which we create geometricals, thatis
ex nihilo
. The relationship between these two passages is often misunderstood. They are neither synonymous nor contradictory. Vico repeats the
De Ratione
sentence in the
De Antiquissima
withapproval.
12
Vico still maintains that it is mistaken to suppose that the certainty we have as a result of our definitional proceedures in mathematics can be applied to physics, but he does not mean therebyto deny that the
verum
=
factum
cannot be applied in some sense to the study of physical phenomena.The syntactic dimension of this issue is highly suggestive, but it is the semantic that is moreconclusive. Vico says in his autobiography of the period in which the
De Antiquissima
was writtenthat although useful in medicine and pharmacy he distained experimentalism because it seemeduseless to him in the field that interested him primarily, namely law.
13
This passage has encouragedsome to speak of a ‘rigetto vichiano della filosofia corpuscolare e della fisica sperimentale’ but giventhe explicitness of Vico’s advocacy of experimentation in the
De Antiquissima
it is not possible torely on an account written in 1725 of a work written in 1710.
14
Vico states quite clearly in the FirstResponse to the review of the
De Antiquissima
that the
verum
=
factum
principle accounts for whyexperiments are convincing, for they are performances in which making is a form of proving. Vico isquite serious in implying, thus, that experiments are geometrical method applied to physics but astopic, and not as critic. That is to say, experiments do not merely succeed or fail. They do not merely prove or disprove the propositions of which they are operations. Experiments partake of a history inwhich they appear not only as judgments but also as testimonies, contributing to the resolution of some questions and raising others. Speaking here in the language of law is quite appropriate, as weshall soon see, and the elision between natural philosophical inquiry and rhetoric should not be readas an obliteration of the former by the latter, but as an inclusion of the latter with the former. Theconsequence of saying that natural philosophical inquiry is opinable is not that all opinions areintellectually indistinguishable and that therefore disputes are settled in favour of the party that is
11
Vico,
De Nostris Temporis Studiorum Ratione
, in
Opere Filosofiche
, 803.
12
Vico,
De Antiquissima
, in
Opere Filosofiche
, 83.
13
Vico,
Vita di Giambattista Vico scritta da se medesimo
, in
Opere Filosofiche
, 14. Note that Vico reiterated hisinterpretation of experiment as a form of
verum
=
factum
in the
Vici Vindiciae
of 1729, for which see
Opere Filosofiche
, 353.
14
See Paolo Casini,
L’antica sapienza italica. Cronistoria di un mito
, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1998, 183.
5

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