QUOTES

1 " Vico states in the De uno that ‘‘history does not yet have its principles’’ (ch. 104). It will have its principles when ‘‘philosophy undertakes to examine philology’’ (NS 7). Vico has made his first attempt at this union in the De constantia, but in it history does not completely have its principles. Missing from Vico’s account are axioms that he formulates in the New Science. Only when we comprehend these elements do we have a full basis from which to grasp the union between philosophy and philology. It falls to the reader of the New Science to make the science for himself, but in this work Vico has presented the reader with a full philosophy of history with which to do so. In the De constantia it is symptomatic that philosophy and philology are treated in two separate books. Their union is ultimately at the hands of the jurisprudent, who must look to each and then combine them in the process of interpretation of the law. "

― , Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico’s New Science and "Finnegans Wake"

2 " It is in the connection between the philosophical concern with eternal necessity and the philological concern with the things produced by choice and human will that the ‘‘newness’’ of Vico’s new science lies. Vico’s claims in the De constantia are another way to see how he is a philosopher in only a general sense. Vico is in fact a jurisprudent whose subject is ‘‘the jurisprudence of the human race’’ and whose ‘‘constancy’’ includes philosophy. Vico is the jurisprudent first and the philosopher second. Vico’s concern, extending from the Universal Law to the New Science, is to provide a constancy of judgment, not as a means by which we can interpret a given body of law but as a way in which we can interpret the ‘‘law of the nations’’ itself. Constancy is not simply the consistency of making the same judgment over and over. It requires the knowledge and balancing of opposites as they bear on particular human events. ‘‘counsel and constancy. ordination of omen, onus and orbit. distribution of danger, duty and destiny. polar principles’’ (FW 271.R 1–13). "

― , Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico’s New Science and "Finnegans Wake"

3 " The constancy of philosophy is based on a proper comprehension of our own human nature. Vico’s purpose in De constantia philosophiae is to combine Platonic philosophy with Christian doctrine and to distinguish it from the falsity of Stoic and Epicurean philosophy, in terms of both their metaphysical and their moral doctrines. Vico begins his treatment of philosophy by calling attention to the Augustinian distinction of nosse, velle, and posse (knowledge, will, and power) and reminds the reader that these are the basis of all divine and human learning (De con. philos., ch. 1; see also Notae in lib. alt., no. 3). He emphasizes the sense in which these three elements are the basis of the definition of God and are also the principles necessary to the mind for any science, and for virtue. Vico understands these elements as a circle that goes from God to man to God, from the infinite mind to the human mind, in such a way that the human mind is taken back to its dependency on the divine (De uno, conclusio). "

― , Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico’s New Science and "Finnegans Wake"

4 " As Augustine does at greater length in the City of God, Vico in De constantia philosophiae determines what in pagan philosophy is in agreement with Christian doctrine. He says that first of all skepticism must be diminished, above all in moral doctrine. Vico does not here present an argument against skepticism. He simply claims that there are notions of the eternally true, possessed universally by the human race. He says that skeptics are dan- gerous to the civil order because they will prove there is justice in human affairs one day and refute it the next. This would make the skeptics worse than the poets in Plato’s criticism in the Republic. The poets are dangerous to society because they present the gods as involved in both good and bad conduct and have no standard of virtue by which to judge. The poets are naive, but the skeptics, as Vico portrays them, are deliberate in their attempt to show there is no moral standard. "

― , Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico’s New Science and "Finnegans Wake"

5 " Vico’s remedy for skepticism is to have us perceive the common notions of humanity, the chief of which is God as infinite mind. If this is unsuccessful, Vico’s remedy is like that of Plato with the poets—to banish the skeptics from society, as he says the Skeptic Carneades was once driven from Rome (De con. philos., ch. 2). In the Ancient Wisdom Vico gives an argument against the skeptics, based on his principle that the true is the made. He claims that the skeptics admit effects and that they admit that effects have their own causes. But they claim to be ignorant of the nature of these causes, denying that they can know the genera or forms by which each thing is made. Vico claims that even the skeptic must admit that we can come to know those things that are made in the human mind by combining postulates. There must be a ground for this activity that contains all forms and causes. To possess all forms and causes requires an infinite mind whose activity is imitated in the making of what is true by the finite mind. "

― , Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico’s New Science and "Finnegans Wake"

6 " The skeptic can argue back at Vico. But, as Vico holds in the Universal Law, skepticism is ultimately not an intellectual matter but a social matter. There cannot be a society of skeptics. Neither could there be what Polybius believes—a society of philosophers (De con. philos., ch. 4; cf. NS 179, 1043, 1110). All societies require religion, and all philosophers require society in which to live. There is no society whose basis is pure reason.
Vico’s ultimate answer to skepticism is his conception of ‘‘true heroic wis- dom’’ (‘‘vere heroica sapientia’’), which is: ‘‘To know with natural facility the external trues, to act with everyone and in every case with full and open freedom, to speak always truly, and to live with complete delight of the spirit [animus], in a way that conforms to reason’’ (De uno, ch. 19). This conception of ‘‘heroic wisdom’’ foreshadows Vico’s conception of ‘‘heroic mind’’ in his oration of 1732, where it becomes a doctrine of human education. The answer to the skeptic is ultimately the Socratic attempt simply to continue to philosophize. In the additions Vico wrote to the New Science in 1731, he explains skepticism as a symptom of the third age in ‘‘ideal eternal history,’’ when society becomes wholly secular. Skepticism is a corruption of Socrates’s doc- trine that he ‘‘knows nothing.’’ In Socrates’s hands it is a heroic principle that motivates the pursuit of truth and virtue; in the hands of the Skeptics it is a principle of the nothingness of thought (see Vico’s ‘‘demonstration by historical fact against skepticism,’’ NS 1363–64). "

― , Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico’s New Science and "Finnegans Wake"

7 " As Vico portrays heroic wisdom in the above passage it is social, a way to thinking that instructs, delights, and moves. The skeptic is unable to attempt heroism of thought. The skeptic suffers from a lack of courage, a timidity of soul, and little can be done about it by way of a cure. Heroic wisdom is connected to piety ( pietas), which is dutifulness not only toward God in Chris- tian doctrine but also, as in Platonic philosophy, toward parents, relatives, and one’s native country or city (De con. philos., ch. 4). Vico’s last words in the New Science are that this science is inseparably bound to the study of piety, and ‘‘he who is not pious cannot be truly wise’’ (NS 1112). Wisdom, as Joyce says, requires ‘‘a genuine dash of irrepressible piety’’ (FW 470.30–31) that the skeptic is unable to reach.
Vico takes from Plato, but more accurately from the Christian Neo-Platonic tradition, three metaphysical doctrines: ideas as eternal truths, the immortality of the spirit or animus, which is subsumed under the human mind or mens as the seat of the eternal truths, and divine providence, that is, the divine mind that governs the eternal order of things and that is the ground whereby we come to know the eternal truths. Against these three doctrines Vico places the metaphysics of the Stoics and the Epicureans. He rejects the doctrine of fate ( fatum) of the Stoics because it denies free will. He rejects the doctrine of chance (casus) of the Epicureans because it explains everything in terms of void and body, denying the incorporeality of the mind. "

― , Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico’s New Science and "Finnegans Wake"

8 " In his letter to Abbé Esperti on the nature and publication of his First New Science (1726), Vico associates the Stoic idea of fate or ‘‘deaf Necessity’’ (‘‘sorda Necessità’’) with Descartes, as opposed to the chance or ‘‘blind Fortune’’ (‘‘cieca Fortuna’’) of Epicurus.≤≤ Vico also partially identifies chance with Locke.≤≥ He says that today thought fluctuates between these two alter- natives, not attempting to regulate Fortune by reason or attempting to moder- ate Necessity where possible. This is Vico’s fork, and the movements of mod- ern thought are always caught on one tine or the other.
Vico says his own doctrine is based on the idea of divine providence. Vico’s metaphysics of providence combines the general necessity of the divine order of things with the contingency of specific acts of free will. Providence is a metaphysical principle of the true and the certain. It is authority as an agency of rational choice that operates within the rational order of the nature of things. The ultimate metaphysical principle that guides the constancy of the jurisprudent is providence. Its analogue in universal law is Vico’s ius gentium naturale, which in the New Science becomes part of Vico’s ‘‘ideal eternal history. "

― , Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico’s New Science and "Finnegans Wake"

9 " Vico rejects the moral philosophy of both the Stoics and the Epicureans. Vico is against the indifference to society of the Stoic ideal of autarkeia and against the ethic of the cultivation of the pleasurable state of mind of Epicurus’s ideal of ataraxia. Vico’s specific criticisms of each moral position re- duce to the sense in which each of these positions is self-involved. The Stoic withdraws into the self-sufficient individual, and the Epicurean withdraws the individual into the garden. Vico puts this most succinctly in his autobiography: ‘‘For they are each a moral philosophy of solitaries: the Epicurean, of idlers inclosed in their own little gardens; the Stoic, of contemplatives who endeavor to feel no emotion’’ (A 122). Moral philosophy for Vico is part of civil wisdom, which functions in the agora. Moral philosophy has its roots and purpose in the jurisprudential, in the wisdom that governs human affairs, prudentially based in the divine providential order of things. Vico sees the truth in Christian morality as resting on its emphasis on the divinity of the human mind over the claims of the body. "

― , Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico’s New Science and "Finnegans Wake"

10 " Only human beings, Vico says, are free. Liberty and its two parts, dominion and tutelage, are the sources of all laws and civil society (ch. 4; De uno, 74). A human being is born free, and this freedom takes the two basic shapes of the right to property, to ownership of what is necessary and useful to the person’s existence, and the right to protect oneself against transgression. Without these three just powers of humanity there can be no civil society. Vico’s principles of humanity as given here are jurisprudential. In the New Science his principles of humanity remain three in number, but they appear as social institutions rather than rights: religion, marriage, and burial. Vico’s three rights in the Universal Law derive from human nature itself. Vico’s three principles in the New Science are claimed to be customs observed by all nations, whether barbarous or civilized (NS 333). Vico conceives of these principles anthropologically: they are what denote a human community as opposed to an animal society. "

― , Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico’s New Science and "Finnegans Wake"

11 " Having said that from pudor and libertas comes liberalitas, Vico does not discuss this further. Associated with the studia humanitatis, which Vico con- nects to the general meaning of humanitas, is Cicero’s term artes liberales (liberalis, relating to freedom). The liberal arts are the ‘‘humanities.’’ ‘‘Liberality’’ is the quality or state of being free, of kindness, courtesy, or generosity. If we speculatively extend Vico’s mention of liberalitas it suggests that the law, once beyond the enactment and support of rights basic to human nature, contains and promotes a humane wisdom. Law extends the original feeling of common humanity that takes shape in the basic uses of language in human society. This humane wisdom is justice, in the Platonic and humanist sense of proportion or balance in the faculties of the soul, and in the order of society.
Vico adds to his principles of humanity two principles of history. He says universal history is the history of things and the history of words (rerum et verborum). Etymology is the history of words, and mythology is the first history of things (ch. 7). This establishes the detailed exposition of Varro’s obscure period of the nations that is reformulated as ‘‘poetic wisdom’’ (sa- pienza poetica) in the second book of the New Science, its longest book. Etymology, as in the Cratylus, allows us access to the original meanings of the words of languages. But at the end of the Cratylus Socrates turns from words to the things themselves. Mythologies give us the first histories, as Vico ex- plains in the Dissertationes of the third book of the Universal Law. Vico says in the New Science: ‘‘The first science to be learned should be mythology or the interpretation of fables’’ (NS 51). "

― , Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico’s New Science and "Finnegans Wake"

12 " Vico states in the De uno that ‘‘history does not yet have its principles’’ (ch. 104). It will have its principles when ‘‘philosophy undertakes to examine philology’’ (NS 7). Vico has made his first attempt at this union in the De constantia, but in it history does not completely have its principles. Missing from Vico’s account are axioms that he formulates in the New Science. Only when we comprehend these elements do we have a full basis from which to grasp the union between philosophy and philology. It falls to the reader of the New Science to make the science for himself, but in this work Vico has presented the reader with a full philosophy of history with which to do so. In the De constantia it is symptomatic that philosophy and philology are treated in two separate books. Their union is ultimately at the hands of the jurisprudent, who must look to each and then combine them in the process of interpretation of the law. powers of language that nourish the imagination and its fictions. This poetic form of the law is not false. It is the first formulation of its truth, which ‘‘bursts forth’’ from the certains of the heroic actions and practices that originally establish legal order. Jurisprudential thinking interprets the law properly only when it does so in terms of a knowledge of things divine and human, and considers how the connection between the divine and human is enacted in the various ages of the course the nations run. In this way, ‘‘We annew’’ (FW 594.15). "

― , Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico’s New Science and "Finnegans Wake"

13 " Vico is Joycean in that he is always forcing the reader to comprehend the double meaning or double truth of the words upon which he structures the new science. Joyce does this through puns. Vico does it through ambiguity. Ambiguity is a form of fallacy in ordinary logic, a specific instance of which is equivocation, or using a word in two senses. No argument is valid that changes the meaning of its terms in its course. In the doctrine of the syllogism this is known as the fallacy of four terms. But ambiguity is the key to poetical meaning and to much of oration. The orator will play on the various meanings of words to draw forth for his hearers a central point. "

― , Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico’s New Science and "Finnegans Wake"

14 " Vico’s terminology follows the principle of his oration Study Methods: to balance the moderns against the ancients. The reader is asked to have Joyce’s ‘‘two thinks at a time’’ (FW 583.7), to move between the modern and Vico’s meaning. Vico does not simply replace modern meanings with his own original ones. He repeatedly faces the reader with both. "

― , Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico’s New Science and "Finnegans Wake"