Abstract
Giambattista Vico lived during the early Enlightenment period. He criticised Cartesian rationalism and advocated for a historical/philological method for human sciences. Vico believed in the concept of "verum factum," asserting that humans can only truly know what they have created, not through innate ideas or abstract reasoning.
He explored the cyclical theory of rise, corruption, and renewal in societies, guided by divine Providence and human actions, as a counter-Enlightenment thinker. His methodology involves interpreting poetic wisdom to reveal providential patterns in history, emphasising common sense, imaginative reconstruction, and the interplay of divine guidance and human agency.
Context
Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), born in the Bourbon Spanish-influenced Kingdom of Naples, lived during the early Enlightenment period. The dominant intellectual trend was Cartesian rationalism and the rise of modern science (Descartes, Newton), privileging mathematical method, deduction, mechanistic explanation, abstract reasoning and experiment.
He was trained by Jesuits and so knowledgeable in classical literature, rhetoric, and law. His thought blends Catholic providentialism with critical uses of classical philology, and he criticised mystical and purely speculative doctrines. The author was influenced by the growing interest in comparative history, antiquarianism, and the study of language, law, and myth. He drew on classical sources (Homer, Roman law, Livy) and contemporary antiquarian studies to reconstruct ancient social life.
Vico reacted to Descartes’ emphasis on innate ideas and mathematical method and argued for verum factum (we know what we make) and a historical/philological method for human sciences. He concluded that Descartes had been too enamoured of mathematics and natural philosophy (science) to the neglect or dismissal of art, law, and history as valid fields of knowledge. In his first book, On the Ancient Italian Knowledge, Vico argued that Descartes was wrong in holding awareness of his own existence as a first philosophical principle, and in trying to prove God's existence through reason alone.
Vico's view was that the mind does not make itself and for that reason cannot know how it has knowledge of itself. Concerning mathematical and even scientific certainty, Vico did not think we can arrive at it through clear and distinct ideas, as Descartes claimed. He argued that mathematical knowledge is certainly true because the human mind has created the very standard for mathematical truth, or because we have made mathematics. However, God has made the physical universe, and only He can have certain knowledge about that. Neverthless Vico did concede that when we do make things in nature, or through scientific experiment, we can gain knowledge from the confirmation of our hypotheses.
Vico also disagreed with Thomas Hobbes, and those who began with the idea of a state of nature or some other way of positing a static, unchanging human nature. Hobbes and Vico present two complementary diagnoses of political life. Hobbes supplies a coercion-focused account of why centralised authority, in the form of a monarchy, is necessary to restrain destructive impulses. His strength is clarifying the structural problem of collective action and providing a compelling rationale for political order. Vico, on the other hand, supplies a rich, historically attuned account of how communities come to create meaning and to govern. His strength is in illuminating the symbolic, imaginative, and institutional basis that gives political life coherence and legitimacy over time. Hobbes’s philosophy privileges universality and abstraction; Vico’s privileges historicity and cultural particularity.
Vico is cast as a counter-Enlightenment thinker. In the face of the Enlightenment emphasis on doing natural science through the search for clear and distinct ideas, Vico saw himself as a defender of rhetoric and humanism. Yet he engaged in the same type of philosophical investigations as other eighteenth-century thinkers. He calls his main work a ‘science’, and claims Bacon as a major influence. He searched for a universal mental dictionary, and his science may be seen as its own type of encyclopedia, a project reminiscent of the Enlightenment encyclopedistes' interests.
Vico was probably influenced by Malebranche's thinking. This is visible in their shared notion of the central role of God and providence in human affairs. For Malebranche God is the active sustaining cause and source of ideas; Vico’s theology underpins his historicism and he attributes the origins of law, religion, and social order to divine/human providence. Both philosophers are also sceptical about abstract, purely mathematical knowledge as sufficient for human affairs and both distrust the idea that the Cartesian geometric method alone can fully explain human culture and moral life. Malebranche limits sense-based knowledge and insists on divine ideas; Vico argues that human institutions require historical/poetic understanding, rather than only abstract rationalism. Both philosophers emphasise the limits of human reason alone and stress that unaided human reason is insufficient. Malebranche believes that true ideas are in God and the senses mislead; Vico thinks historical knowledge requires imaginative reconstruction and recognition of cultural unpredictability.
Summary
Gianbattista Vico's La Scienza Nuova (The New Science) was first published in Italian in 1725. It is composed of an introductory explaining the allegorical frontispiece depicting Vico’s main concepts in graphic form, followed by five books.
Introductory: The Idea of the Work
La concezione generale de La Scienza Nuova aims to establish a true science of human affairs that explains how peoples and their institutions originate, develop, decay, and can be understood scientifically. The core epistemic principle is verum factum (we can truly know only what we ourselves have made). This means that history, law, language, and customs must be studied as human productions. Vico's methodology is historical‑philological and comparative reconstruction: decoding of myths, rituals, laws, languages, and poetic texts as traces of founding acts (fait accompli) to recover the mentalities of earlier ages. He rejects Cartesian mathematical deduction for human sciences.
Vico organises the framework into three ages: An “age of gods,” in which people are dominated by religion and the fear of the supernatural; an “age of heroes,” in which societies divide themselves into “patricians” (ruling aristocrats) and “plebs” (lower-class subjects); an “age of men,” in which emerging political equality helps give rise to “popular commonwealths” and “monarchies”. It follows a cyclical theory of rise, corruption, and renewal. As explanatory tools the author uses ideal types and common notions (ideas shared by all peoples).
As sources he combines philology, jurisprudence, antiquarian evidence, rhetoric, and theology to interpret poetic wisdom (sapienza poetica). His practical purpose is to provide rulers, legislators, and historians with an empirically grounded, humanistic science of politics and culture, rather than abstract theorising through revealing providential patterns in human history.
Book One: Establishment of Principles
Book One sets out foundational propositions and terminological clarifications for the whole New Science: the principle, verum factum, the use of poetic wisdom, the classification of ages, and the methodological insistence on reconstructing origins from surviving signs (myths, laws, rituals). It establishes Vico’s thesis that to know human society we must study its origins as expressed in myth, ritual, law, and language. Knowledge is achieved by reconstructing the collective making of institutions rather than by abstract deduction.
Vico rejects contemporary Cartesian abstraction and pure mathematical method as sufficient to understand human affairs. He argues for a new science (scienza nuova) of human civilisation built on verum factum, the principle that truth is known through what humans make: we can truly know only what we ourselves have made (institutions, language, laws, customs).
Vico's method is historical, comparative, and constructive: the study of the origins and development of peoples’ institutions, myths, and languages to deduce universal principles of human societies.
Knowledge (verum factum) of human institutions comes from poetic wisdom (sapienza poetica) since early peoples expressed social realities through poetry, myth, and ritual. Myths and religious practices are genuine sources for reconstructing primitive human thought and social formation because they encode the founding acts of societies.
The three stages of human development are classified in ideal types and serve as interpretive keys for reading myths, laws, and institutions.
- The age of gods is when primitive peoples explain the world and their institutions through the actions of gods. Social order is theocratic and organised by imagined divine agency.
- The age of heroes: aristocratic/warrior rule through heroes, kinship and honour structure society when law and custom begin to be formalised.
- The age of men is the time when civil societies are governed by reason and human laws and equality and civic institutions emerge.
The origin of language, law, and institutions. Language arises from human needs, bodily affect, and social interaction. Early language is metaphorical and rooted in poetic images. Law begins as ritual and divine decree. Institutions originate from collective productive acts and agreements (founding acts), not from abstract deduction. Custom and habit solidify institutions into enduring social reality.
Vico distinguishes between universal “common notions” (notions common to all human minds and societies) and particular historical laws. His goal is to recover these common notions by philological and historical reconstruction. He uses philology, comparative myth, law, and archaeology as tools to decode the poetic wisdom of early ages.
Vico criticises Cartesian rationalism and the blind imitation of mathematics in social science. He argues that knowledge of human affairs must be rooted in human practices and origins. He attacks the idea that abstract reason alone can create political knowledge, instead historical reconstruction and empathy with earlier minds are required.
Providential history and cyclical theory: history is both human-made and governed by divine providence; cycles of rise, corruption, and renewal mark peoples’ destinies. Human freedom and creativity operate within this providential order.
Book Two: Poetic Wisdom
Book 2 focuses on the “poetic” age, the time when myths, religion, and social order were created by poets, priests, and founders. It is the imaginative founding moment where language, myth, religion, law, and social hierarchy are produced by human poetic intelligence. These cultural products are real effective causes that structure later history. Vico’s central claim is that to explain human institutions you must study how humans “made” them through metaphor, ritual, and founding acts. To understand human history we must recover the origins of institutions as produced by the human mind (ingenium) in this early, imaginative stage.
Early humans know the world by making it: truth (verum) is tied to what is made (factum). The poetic mind grasps meanings via metaphors, images, and fictions that structure social life. Myth, naming, and metaphor are cognitive tools. Names are not arbitrary labels but condensed images that express perceived qualities and relations.
Vico argues that language arises from practical needs, emotional cries, and metaphorical naming. Proper names first indicate concrete relationships (kin, place, ruler) and later become poetic or sacred. Myths are not falsehoods but mnemonic, symbolic accounts that encode social memory and founding acts. Myths personify forces (gods, heroes) to explain origins and norms.
Religion in the poetic age is the central institution: priests/poets interpret divine will and legitimise political authority. Theocratic rule links sacred origin stories with law and rulers govern by divine sanction, with law expressed as the result of ritual and mythic founding.
Law originates in customary practices and religious rites before abstract jurisprudence exists. Early laws are concrete, exemplary, and embedded in sacred narratives. Punishments and legal distinctions are symbolic and intended to uphold communal order rather than to administer abstract rights.
Vico distinguishes three principal classes in early societies: priests (interpret and preserve sacred law), warriors/aristocrats (defend and command), and producers/plebeians (farmers, artisans). Each class arises from functions and the poetic hierarchy that sanctifies them. Institutions (kingship, councils, assemblies) develop from ritualised gestures and shared fictions that fix authority.
Founding acts - oaths, consecrations, compacts - create political unity. Oaths are performative: saying binds community because language creates social reality. The origin of commonwealths is a mix of force, consent, and sacralisation, and founders use spectacle and myth to secure allegiance.
Early legal thinking is analogical and exemplary: laws teach by example and metamyths that instruct communal conduct. Memory is tradition preserved in ritual and poetry substitutes for abstract reasoning. Collective memory channels social continuity.
Book II focuses on the formative poetic age and Vico sets this stage as the necessary precursor to later ages (heroic and humanistic) and ultimately to rational civil life.
As methodology Vico asserts a cyclic view: societies pass through divine/poetic, heroic/aristocratic, and humanistic/civil stages. Knowledge of the first is recovered through “ingenious” reconstruction, not pure abstraction.
Book Three: The Discovery of the True Homer
Vico argues that Homer is not a single historical author but a product of early poetic civilisation, a collective, traditional genius shaped by the communal mind of ancient peoples. Vico reconstructs how epic poetry arose: primitive humans thought in images and metaphors, composed mythic histories, and personified natural forces and social institutions. These poems were transmitted orally by priests and rhapsodes, altered by ritual, performance, and communal needs, so “Homer” represents an evolving, institutionalised tradition rather than an individual’s biography. Vico uses philology, comparative customs, and imaginative reconstruction to show how language, theology, and law co-developed. Epic narratives encode the social, religious, and political structures of early societies. The discovery reframes Homer as a cultural artifact, revealing the mentalities and institutions of archaic peoples, supporting Vico’s broader claim that human knowledge and institutions originate in poetic wisdom and collective invention.
Book Four: The Course of Nations
This book examines the later stages of human societies: the development, decline and transformation of nations after their founding. The author moves from origins (Books II–III) to historical cycles, focusing on how civilisations evolve through institutions, laws, language, religion, and political forms toward decadence and renewal.
Nations pass through cyclical recurring ages -divine, heroic, and human - then enter stages of corruption, decline, and eventual rebirth through new social formations. Divine providence guides the broad arc of history but works through human actions, institutions, and cultural products rather than miracles. Laws express the moral and imaginative capacities of peoples. As imagination wanes and sophisticated reasoning increases, laws become abstract, eroding civic virtues and social cohesion.
Vico analyses how nations mature into complex legal and political orders, then decline as original founding virtues fade. Abstract jurisprudence replaces customary law, born of poetic-mythic imagination.
As societies grow sophisticated, metaphor and poetic meaning are stripped away. Literal and juridical thinking dominate, fostering ambiguity, deception, and rhetorical manipulation. Trade and luxury produce inequality and weaken civic mores. Economic motives replace communal bonds. Public life becomes transactional.
The interplay of class interests and institutional change produces oscillations among government forms. Vico traces pathways from mixed constitutions to monarchies and then to tyranny as civic virtue collapses. Public religion and shared rites, which grounded early societies, atrophy. Religion becomes private and speculative theology replaces sacred rites, undermining social unity.
Military expansion and encounters with other peoples alter institutions and languages, often accelerating decline but also providing materials for renewal. From collapse comes the possibility of a new founding: when peoples are reduced and recollective imagination resurges, new myths, laws, and institutions can arise, beginning the cycle anew.
Book Five: The Recurrence of Human Things in the Resurgence of Nations
Vico continues his historicist, comparative method, deriving the general principles of societies from the imaginative origins of language, law, religion, and custom described in Books I–IV. He argues for a “verum factum” principle. Truths about human institutions are known because humans made them, thus history and philology are the proper sciences for understanding law and politics.
Societies progress through stages from theocracy (age of gods), to aristocracy (age of heroes), to democracy/monarchy (age of men) and finally to ricorso (decay and cyclical return). Institutions reflect the dominant mentalities of each age: sacred law in theocratic stages, heroic honor and custom in aristocratic stages, civil law and reason in later stages.
Law rises out of language, religion, and custom: initially divine laws (laws attributed to gods), then customary heroic norms, finally civil laws created by men. Legal authority moves from poetic/magical legitimation to rational, contractual forms as societies mature. Vico emphasises the role of “common sense” (sensus communis) and shared usages in constituting law. He argues that positive law gains legitimacy from collective origins.
There are three natural kinds of government corresponding to the three ages: monarchy (rule by one), aristocracy (rule by the few), democracy (rule by the many). Mixed constitutions arise from combinations. Constitutions form by the interplay of economic conditions, religious beliefs, military practices, and language. Vico then discusses succession, counsel, magistracy, and the ways constitutions stabilise or decay.
Property and family institutions derive from early sacramental and customary arrangements. Land and kinship are central to political power. Economic practices (plunder, conquest, cultivation, commerce) shape class structure: nobles, warriors, priests, commoners, and tradespeople. Transition to a civil economy requires laws that regularise contracts, exchange, and inheritance.
Sacred rites and the personification of law (laws as divine commands) are foundational for social cohesion and authority. Ritual language and metaphor persist in legal and political forms even after their literal religious meaning fades. Legal language evolves from poetic/metaphorical origins. Rhetoric and ceremony remain crucial for legitimating institutions. Vico analyses how legal fictions, oaths, and formulae operate to bind societies.
Providence (divine governance) guides the rise and fall of nations through a recurring cycle (ricorso (rebirth). Civil institutions emerge, flourish, then corrode, leading to a new beginning. Moral and cultural degeneration (luxury, corruption, inequality) precipitate institutional collapse.
Good laws are those that spring from the nation’s own historical character and linguistic-cultural foundations, so attempts to transplant foreign institutions fail. Reforms must respect the “genius” of each people. Vico defends the importance of humanistic knowledge (philology, history, rhetoric) for political life, maintaining that wise statesmanship reads history and traditions to craft stable laws.
Conclusion of the work
The verum factum principle is Vico's epistemic foundation. True knowledge of human institutions is possible because humans make them. Historical, philological, and rhetorical inquiry (not abstract geometry) are the proper methods to know laws, languages, and societies.
Nations develop in recurring cycles (theocracy → aristocracy → democracy/monarchy → decay and ricorso (rebirth). Providence guides these cycles so that cultural renewal follows collapse. History is meaningful and ordered, not random.
Legitimate laws and institutions derive their authority from the nation’s formative imaginative acts (myths, rituals, founding deeds). Good legislation must respect a people’s historical character and linguistic roots. Human minds are chiefly imaginative in origin: metaphor, myth, and poetic personification generate social reality (gods, heroes, laws). Reason and abstract law emerge later and are rooted in earlier poetic forms. Effective political reform must be historically informed. Transplanting institutions without attending to a people's customs, language, and formative history will fail. Statesmanship requires philological and historical wisdom.
Vico offers a providential teleology: human affairs move toward periodic renewal and, implicitly, moral improvement through lessons of history. The cycles do not justify fatalism. They teach prudence.
Vico closes by urging historians, lawmakers, and citizens to study the origins of their institutions humbly and imaginatively, combining erudition with practical prudence to secure just, stable polities.
Themes
Rationalism
Vico's critique of modern rationalism was rooted in his belief that knowledge of the world could not be limited to empirical evidence and logical reasoning alone. He argued that understanding the complexity of human societies requires insight into myths, traditions, and the collective imagination of people.
"True science is the science of things made by men; not geometry alone, which reasons about things invented by the intellect, but history, which reveals the works made by humans."
Vico contended that rationalism, which emphasised the objective analysis of facts, was insufficient for grasping the full spectrum of human experience. He believed that the richness of human history was accessible only through an interpretative approach, one that accounted for the subjective and creative aspects of culture.
His criticism of modern rationalism was embodied in his advocacy for a return to the wisdom of classical antiquity. Vico saw modernity as having lost touch with the deep insights of the past, insights that could only be recaptured by studying the myths, symbols, and narratives that shape human societies.
Verum factum
One of Vico's most influential concepts is the verum factum principle, which posits that truth is something made (verum ipsum factum). This principle asserts that humans can only truly understand what they have created themselves. For Vico, this meant that our knowledge of history and society was secure because these were our own creations:
"The true is the made; and the made is truth by the work of the human intellect."
The verum factum principle also underpinned Vico's constructivist epistemology. According to this view, knowledge is not merely discovered but constructed through human experience and activity. This idea laid the groundwork for later developments in the philosophy of science and constructivist theories of knowledge.
The principle challenges the assumption that objective truth can be discovered through observation alone, emphasising instead the active role that humans play in the formation of knowledge. It is through the process of creation, Vico argues, that we come to understand the world and ourselves.
Divine Providence
In Vico's view Providence orders human history teleologically: God (the divine mind) guides the development of human societies toward increasing complexity and rationality, but does so through human actions and cultural institutions rather than by constant miraculous intervention.
Vico balances divine governance with human freedom. Providence works through human passions, interests, and institutions (families, laws, religion). Humans are free agents whose collective actions produce the historical outcomes that Providence makes possible or directs:
"Thus divine Providence, which governs human events through the wills and passions of men, directs the course of nations without ever removing their freedom."
Vico attributes to Providence an intelligence that anticipates and arranges the stages of human development. This divine mind is not an abstract clockmaker indifferent to human life, but rather the source of the moral and symbolic structures (myths, rituals, languages) that shape societies. Vico’s cyclical model (divine age → heroic/aristocratic age → human/common age → ricorso/rebirth) shows Providence as the shaping force behind the emergence, decline, and rebirth of societies. Providence allows for decay and renewal. Calamities and crises can purify and lead to new beginnings.
For Vico, the earliest religious beliefs and institutions arise from human awe and the imagination but are sanctioned by Providence because they create social cohesion. Sacred kingship, legal customs, and poetic wisdom are instruments through which Providence sustains order, until reason and jurisprudence mature.
Because human reason is historically limited, Vico argues we can know divine providence indirectly by studying the commonplaces of nations (poetic wisdom, myths, laws). History itself is the proper avenue to perceive Providence at work. Providence, in Vico’s thought, legitimises human institutions’ moral purpose while insisting on reform through historical understanding. Vico opposes abstract rationalism that ignores culture and tradition. Providence explains why historical, poetic, and legal study matters.
Common sense
Vico’s notion of common sense (sensus communis) is central to his account of how human communities know, legislate, and create meaning. It is the shared, practical judgment and imaginative faculty that ordinary people use to make sense of social life: language, law, religion, customs. It’s not simply opinion but a communal capacity grounded in bodily experience and collective life:
"Common sense is a powerful cause of civilisation; for from it arise customs, laws, and piety."
Because humans can only truly know what they themselves have made (verum factum), common sense is the cognitive foundation for historical knowledge. It offers the poetical images, metaphors, and institutions that historians must interpret to recover the origins of societies. Common sense produces the moral sentiments, customs, and legal norms that hold societies together before abstract reason or formal jurisprudence develop. It legitimates institutions through shared understanding rather than theoretical proof.
Vico links sensus communis to the imagination (fantasia). Poetic metaphors and religious images, products of common sense, encode social meanings and practical rules that later become codified law and philosophy. He opposes the Cartesian emphasis on individual, detached reason. Common sense is collective, historically situated, and prior to abstract theorising. It restores legitimacy to tradition and popular wisdom. while still allowing for critical historical inquiry. To understand other ages, the historian must recover the common sense of those peoples (the “poetic wisdom” embedded in myths, rites, and language) rather than imposing modern abstractions.
Corsi I recorsi
This summarises Vico's idea that civilisations follow historical cycles: they are born, develop, decline, and then give way to a new cycle that reproduces, with variations, previous forms.
He presents the three ages by cycle:
Age of the Gods — theocratic society, mythical thought, and poetic language; religious authority and norms founded on sacred tradition.
Age of Heroes — warrior aristocracy and honour; political institutions based on lineages, prestige, and custom.
Age of Men — emergence of the civil city, positive law, commerce, practical reasoning, and citizenship.
Peoples "fabricate" (factum) their institutions through collective imagination and metaphors. They consolidate institutions and stabalise laws so that cities flourish.
They decline through luxury, inequality, corruption, and the loss of civic virtue, which weaken their cohesion.
The Ricorso (rebirth) after the crisis: simpler orders or new formations replace the decadent ones, initiating a new cycle. It is not an identical repetition: returns reconfigure previous forms according to circumstances. History shows structural analogies rather than literal repetitions.
Vico reconciles the cycle with a Providence that guides humanity toward greater civic responsibility and rationality. It is not pure fatalism but a movement with a moral sense. This allows us to understand cultural changes (language, myth, laws) as organic processes linked to collective imagination and social formation, not only to economic or individual causes.
No comments:
Post a Comment