Imagination and Historical
Knowledge in Vico:
A Critique of Leon Pompa’s Recent Work
Randall E. Auxier*
[From HUMANITAS, Volume X, No. 1, 1997. ©
National
Humanities Institute]
In the view of many scholars, Leon Pompa has played a crucial role in
reviving the study of Vico in the English-speaking world. The first edition
of his book Vico: A Study of the New Science in 1975 was the first
major work in English on Vico in nearly four decades.1
His place and importance in this field are matters worthy of examination
in their own right, but a number of larger philosophical issues make this
task still more desirable. Let me begin by making clear to the reader what
these issues are.
Ernst Cassirer called Vico "the real discoverer of myth,"
2
and Cassirer holds Vico to be the first modern philosopher of history and
the first European thinker to understand fully the problem of historical
knowledge. Cassirer writes:
The first thinker to raise this question [of the relation between
history, human nature and mathesis universalis] was Giambattista
Vico. The real value in Vico’s "philosophy of history" does not lie in
what it teaches (in terms of content) concerning the historical process
and the rhythm of its individual phases. . . . But what he did see clearly,
and what he defended with complete decisiveness against Descartes, was
the methodological uniqueness and distinctive value of historical knowledge.
Nor is he slow in elevating this value above that of pure mathematical
knowledge and in finding in it the first true fulfillment of . . . sapientiahumana.3
In short, Vico strove to articulate what we might now call a humanistic
(in the classical sense) "value-centered historicism" (to borrow a phrase
from the thought of Claes Ryn)—a view which, while recognizing human nature
as embedded in history and human discourse as originating in myth and imagination,
does not give up on the idea of truth and universal order. The study of
Vico is of great benefit to all those who now debate the possibility and
value of historical knowledge, and Vico’s profound insights can be marshaled
in service of those who defend specifically the idea of a value-centered
historicism. We need not, according to Cassirer, necessarily accept Vico’s
claim that the nations run a predictable course in three ages—an age of
gods, an age of heroes and an age of men—in order to benefit from Vico’s
account of myth, imagination and history. But Vico is exceedingly difficult
to read and still harder to interpret. Those who attempt it are certain
to turn to the secondary literature in an effort to glean what Vico is
trying to demonstrate in his masterwork The New Science. This inflates
the importance of an interpreter such as Pompa.
This essay is a critical assessment of Pompa’s most recent contributions
to the study of Vico. I will concentrate primarily upon what is new in
Pompa’s second edition of Vico: A Study of the New Science,4
and the section on Vico from his Human Nature and Historical Knowledge.5
These are best understood in conjunction with the other items Pompa has
published on Vico in the last ten years (cited below), and since no comprehensive
treatment of the first edition of Vico: A Study of the New Science
has ever appeared in this journal,6
it is only fair to say something about Pompa’s full interpretation. The
reason such an assessment is now called for is that Pompa has, it appears,
changed his view—or so I will argue. Pompa himself does not say that his
view has changed, and a change of view would not, in and of itself, warrant
a full treatment such as I attempt in this essay. In my view, however,
Pompa’s arabesque is detrimental to Vico studies and to any attempt to
employ Vico’s thought in service of a value-centered historicism. If those
trying to read Vico for the first time use Pompa as their guide, the results
could be unfortunate. Of course, it is hardly enough simply to assert this;
it must be demonstrated.
A word of caution Pompa addressed to his readers in one of his older
publications is also applicable here: "It is only proper to warn the reader
that the view I propound below is itself contentious, being based upon
the supposition that Vico meant something fairly rigorous by the term‘science’."
7
This states the primary issue to be treated in this study, as well as the
manner in which I will treat it. Pompa develops his interpretation very
aggressively, but always as a gentleman and scholar, without petty hostility.
Although I have concentrated upon the points of disagreement between
my understanding of Vico and Pompa’s, there are many unstated points of
agreement. Still, my own disagreements with Pompa’s interpretation run
deep, and my criticism is at times quite severe. For Pompa contends directly
against both Vico and the group of interpreters with whom I most closely
identify. Thus, in the course of reviewing Pompa’s work of the past decade,
I hope to answer his complaints against the proponents of the primacy of
imagination in Vico’s philosophy and of the view that Vico’s account of
historical knowledge is, precisely on account of its reliance upon imagination,
reconcilable with an evolutionary view of human nature. My criticism of
Pompa should be viewed as a step toward articulating a positive alternative
to his interpretation of Vico. For if Pompa has interpreted Vico correctly,
then Vico (as Pompa himself concludes) is very wrong about the things that
were most important to him. In short, a defense of Vico must show that
Pompa has not understood him rightly.
I
It is traditional to read Vico’s Scienza Nuova8
as a work "which was conceived in deliberate opposition to Descartes and
was destined to remove rationalism from historiography and based rather
on the logic of phantasy than on the logic of clear and distinct ideas."
9
Pompa’s interpretation is in many ways diametrically opposed to this view.10
The primary criticisms that have been advanced regarding Vico: A Study
of the New Science since it first appeared in 1975 concern its willingness
to jettison "providence" from Vico’s historical metaphysics (cf. SNS, 58-59,
123, 142-143) and its readiness to emphasize certain Cartesian continuities
between the earliest (1725) and latest (1744) versions of the Scienza Nuova.11
These criticisms have given Pompa occasion to increase the length of his
book by nearly a third. He has added two sizable chapters which address
some perceived weaknesses in his interpretation. In many ways, these two
chapters are a continuation, restatement, and elaboration of Pompa’s essay
"Imagination in Vico" (cited above). Inasmuch as the two new chapters take
into account literature which had not yet appeared when the essay was written,
they are more comprehensive. However, they are less convincing and straightforward
because the question of the ground of "knowledge" in Vico has become more
tangled as more study has been devoted to it.
Pompa’s first new chapter (XVII, entitled "Law, Providence and the Barbarism
of Reflection") attempts to answer his critics by showing how his original
positive interpretation can accommodate the findings of more recent studies.
The second new chapter (XVIII, entitled "Appendix: Humanist Interpretations")
endeavors to find flaws in the alternative accounts which have been put
forward as competitors with Pompa’s interpretation. Pompa has also rewritten
the preface to the book, and it now contains more criticism of his "humanist"
counterparts. Before I discuss these two chapters, however, it is necessary
to summarize the objections which I believe have given rise to the new
edition. In what follows I have synthesized criticisms from many different
sources into a single, sustained critique.12
Pompa’s interpretation of Vico is quite systematic, and thus, when one
objects to a small feature of his view (such as his emphasis on "reflection"),
the shock waves run through the whole of it.
Indeed, much of the controversy centers on the notion of rational "reflection,"
and the extent to which Vico endorses it as the instrument of knowing par
excellence. There can be little dispute that in Vico’s "third age,"
the age of reflection and of the philosophers, what can be known is generally
known in this way. Where Pompa differs with some other interpreters (such
as Isaiah Berlin,13 Donald PhillipVerene,14
Benedetto Croce,15 Ernesto Grassi,16
and Ernst Cassirer17) is in his
identification of philosophical reflection with knowledge itself. On Pompa’s
account, there is nothing beyond what is obtained through rational "reflection"
upon the "modifications of our own human minds" (SNS, 42-43, 45, 113-115,
145, 154-159, 161-165, etc.) that would count as "knowledge" for Vico.18
Pompa says that "the logic of the concepts of imagination and knowledge
is entirely different. It is internal to the concept of knowledge that,
when claims of knowledge are made, it is always in order to ask how the
claim has been arrived at and what reasons there are for accepting it.
This is not so, however, with regard to the concept of imagination" (SNS,
234). Whatever the logic of imagination (or "phantasy," as Cassirer is
wont to call it) produces, it cannot be "knowledge" according to Pompa.
Yet, he claims that earlier forms of consciousness (imaginative, sensuous)
necessarily evolve into rational reflection, almost in spite of their inferiority
to reflective thought (SNS, 197).
To put this in a more familiar idiom, we can say (without injustice
to Pompa) that this arrangement would commit Vico to the view that the
mind is more easily known than the body (let alone the social world), for
it is rational reflection upon the present (or "timeless") state of the
individual ego that permits human beings to know everything they do know.
Historians, for instance, can have knowledge (according to Pompa’s Vico)
only because they can assume that the makers of history had minds like
their own:
The identity between historian and historical agent, upon which the
possibility of history itself depends, is therefore more than purely formal,
it involves in addition an identity of fundamental genetic and social structure
which is, in the last analysis, contingent or factual. For Vico, the peculiar
intelligibility of history rests upon insights into our own nature which
are accessible to us by virtue of our capacity to reflect upon ourselves
in our various social and historical activities, so that we can be aware
not merely of the different ways in which we see and react to our world
but also of the different conditions which cause us to see and react thus
(SNS, 167, my emphasis; cf. also 169).19
The act of "reflection" involved here is the analysis of "the modifications
of our human minds" (a phrase which occurs dozens of times in Pompa’s study).
Pompa’s willingness to identify reflection with knowledge, and even with
Vico’s sense of "scientific" knowledge (SNS, 170), as a matter of necessity
in the third age, is controversial, but not nearly so controversial as
his willingness to reduce all wisdom and self-knowledge to this same act
of reflection—an act which Vico himself refers to as "barbarous." This
last move is in my view the Cartesianizing of all wisdom, and it fails
to take seriously the idea that reason and reflection are themselves products
of an historical development, imaginatively generated and providentially
ordered. I think Pompa narrows Vico in an unacceptable way here, and simply
gets the text wrong.
Pompa acknowledges the following:
(1) the primacy of imagination for Vico, both tacitly and explicitly
(SNS, 44, 102-103, 114, 129, 134, 162, 165, 184, 214-215, 230);20
(2) the unity of the first age is constituted by the imagination (SNS,
117, 134, 183-184, 230; HNHK, 139);
(3) the imaginatively created customs and institutions of the first
age give rise to and condition all subsequent institutions and forms of
thought (SNS, 114, 162, 164, 184, 193, 214, 228; HNHK, 139-140, 146-147);
(4) the historical unity of institutions in the three ages is not rational
(SNS, 117; HNHK, 137, 139), but is rather the product of "absolute common
sense" imaginatively created by the first human beings and common to all
subsequent ages (SNS, 30-34, 179-183); and that
(5) "all knowledge requires the use of imagination" (SNS,228).21
Still, Pompa denies that what counts as "knowledge" from the standpoint
of reflection must presuppose a broader sort of knowledge or wisdom which
pervades the whole development of human history (especially the first two ages).22
It seems to me that insofar as reflection is the characteristic form
of conscious knowing in the third age, it cannot be the case that reflection
is the sole instrument of knowing in history—unless it also is claimed
that human beings had neither knowledge nor wisdom before the third age.
This is not Vico’s view, given that he thought poetry to be a kind of wisdom
(SN, Book II). In short, Pompa seems to have forgotten that while primitive,
imaginative human beings do not reflect (at least not in the way that modernsdo),23
reflective human beings doimagine.24
Reflection does not appear until the third age, but for Vico poetry is
a sort of wisdom, and the idea of a wisdom completely devoid of knowledge
is absurd.25 The first human
beings have knowledge (of a sort) without reflection (SN, 365, 381, 391),26
and thus, metaphysical knowledge cannot be equivalent to "reflection on
the modifications of our minds," as Pompa says.27
The move into Cartesian reflection which Pompa undertakes is related
to his willingness to say that providence is not of central importance
to Vico’s philosophy. According to Pompa, providence does no more than
Vico’s notion of the sensus communus can do by itself (SNS, 58,
60, 198-199).28 Even Gino Bedani,
an admirer of Pompa’s interpretation, has aptly called this "neutralization
of the concept" of providence in Vico’s philosophy "the most profoundly
mistaken of all" the moves Pompa has made.29
The reader gets the sense that in 1975 Pompa wished to protect Vico from
off-handed dismissal by twentieth-century philosophers by pointing out
that Vico really does not have all that much invested in his conception
of God and the workings of God in human history.
Such a defense may well make Vico appear respectable to some epistemologists
who reflect upon such things, but it distorts Vico’s philosophy. It never
occurs to Pompa to ask whether Vico’s conception of God might be different
from or even richer than the traditional Christian conception. Certainly
Vico’s amazing capacity to understand how the idea of God functions in
diverse cultures is an argument for the idea that he is not to be thought
of as a narrow or dogmatic eighteenth-century Christian. It makes one doubt
whether twentieth-century respectability purchased at such a price is worth
having, and whether the approbation of the reflective thinker in the third
age is not, in the end, a serious condemnation of the philosopher so approved.
That Vico "believed in God" in some sense is something I cannot doubt,
but what that meant to him is a very tangled question. Whether belief in
God should cost a thinker his twentieth-century respectability surely depends
upon what sort of God he believed in and whether the twentieth century
supplies a standard to which we owe philosophical allegiance.
That Descartes (or his philosophical progeny, like Pompa) should at
length have found a way to read Vico such that he (and they) could make
sense of this philosophy as a product of reflection cannot be a result
Vico would find agreeable. Insofar as Pompa has assumed the superiority
of philosophy without God (a post-Nietzschean phenomenon), is he not guilty
of the error Vico warned against: the conceit of scholars and nations?
Vico says:
. . . whenever men can form no idea of distant and unknown things,
they judge them by what is familiar and at hand. This axiom points to the
inexhaustible source of all the errors about the principles of humanity
that have been adopted by entire nations and by all the scholars. For when
the former began to take notice of them and the latter to investigate them,
it was on the basis of their own enlightened, cultivated, and magnificent
times that they judged . . . (SN, 122-123).
Not only do we have a clear indication of Pompa’s error here, but also
of the character of Vico’s historicism in relation to knowledge. It is
not that scholars cannot know the past; rather, they are their own worst
enemies in the attempt to do so, owing to a sort of metaphysical provincialism.
In Pompa’s case, what sorts of concerns call forth such extravagant effort
to minimize the role of providence for twentieth-century Anglo-American
sensibilities? Is providence as Vico saw it not understandable in terms
of some idea in our own time which is viable in our view? There is work
to be done here before judgments are made, and my suspicion is that it
has not even been begun. It is highly unlikely that the notion of providence
as Vico understood it has vacated our present thinking about the problem
of historical knowledge, but it has likely changed.
On a related issue, one may wonder whether Pompa has not also acted
from scholarly conceit in introducing twentieth-century distinctions into
Vico’s thought—such as the distinction between the "historico-sociological"
and metaphysical levels of Vico’s philosophy upon which Pompa organizes
the entire "system" of Vico’s thought (cf. SNS, especially 15, 176-177).30
Thus, when a commentator remarks that Pompa "has reconstructed Vico’s arguments
with a precision not to be found in Vico himself,"
31
we can see that this may not be praise. The two conceits may lie at the
bottom of such reconstructions.32
Max Fisch has rightly pointed out that "Pompa likes to avoid the technicalities
of Vico’s time and substitute technicalities of our own."
33
Finally, it is perhaps the two conceits, together with Pompa’s neutralization
of the role of providence in Vico’s thought, which account for his failure
to recognize the meaning and importance of Vico’s recurrent analogy of
God’s knowledge of the natural world to human knowledge of the historicalworld.34
The fact that human knowledge is finite, and limited to what human beings
have made, does not indicate that "knowledge of nature" is of an inferior
grade compared to "knowledge of the historical world" as Pompa claims (cf.
SNS, 167-168, 170).35 Nor does
this indicate that the natural world is less intelligible than the historical
world from the standpoint of metaphysics (although it is certainly less
knowable empirically speaking). Rather, what is indicated by the analogy
is that the impoverished act of rational knowing (to which human beings
are relegated after sufficient historical decline) is inadequate to its
own task if it aims to know the natural world directly (as if human beings
had made it).36
If, on the contrary, human beings approach the natural world as something
to be known analogically, the false pride of the natural scientists is
avoided, and the relationship between human institutions and the natural
world is seen to be providential. For Vico, the work of providence makes
nature intelligible to us by manifesting itself within our own historical
development. That is, since God is involved in creation as we are ourselves,
the intelligible order of the natural world—birth, growth, and decay—is
seen to be at work in the human world of institutions just as it is innature.37
This point cannot be put any better than Friedrich Ueberweg put it well
over a hundred years ago. Ueberweg said that, for Vico, "Providence, acting
in no mysterious way, but through the spontaneous development of human
activity, is the basis of all history, which reveals itself in the evolution
of language, mythology, religion, law and government."
38
On Pompa’s interpretation, nature must remain an adorable mystery, for
he thinks of human consciousness and creativity as entities which stand
over against nature and which take the measure of nature by reflecting
upon the mind (as in Descartes), rather than as entities which unfold within
nature in accordance with providence (as in Vico).39
II
If the foregoing discussion provides the reader with some idea of the
criticisms against which Pompa has written his newest work, then perhaps
a summary of that work is now understandable in context. It needs to be
remarked at the outset that Pompa draws heavily and freely upon the Scienza
Nuova Prima (1725) and other early writings for textual support in
the two new chapters of SNS and in the Vico chapter of HNHK. He does not,
however, offer an adequately detailed account of Vico’s development, nor
does he refer to any other such account.40
In the main text of SNS he makes only a single reference to Vico’s Autobiography
(SNS, 76). All of this makes it difficult to evaluate much of the textualsupport.41
Regarding the charge of Cartesianism, which can be rephrased in a number
of different ways, Pompa chooses to defend his reading by acknowledging
that Vico’s science is indeed "a highly unusual sort of science" (SNS,
186). Pompa does not mean to reduce it to analytical post-Cartesian science,
for "unlike many natural sciences, it is, in the last analysis, based upon
insights about human nature" (SNS, 186). Pompa explicitly says that Vico’s
science involves and requires interpretation.
He then tries to show that his account of Vico is indeed compatible
with giving rhetoric and topics (in the Aristotelian sense of those terms42)
a "constitutive role" in Vico’s science. In the end, Pompa holds that rhetoric
and topics are subsumable under Vico’s account of common sense, where "reflection
upon the modifications of our human minds" tells us what we ultimately
are (see SNS, 195). It is unfortunate that Pompa did not take into account
John Schaeffer’s arguments on this matter.43
Pompa effects this reduction of rhetoric and topics by arguing that law,
where rhetoric and topics are most clearly operable, provides an example
of exactly the sort of institutional evolution he has shown in the broader
case of common sense (SNS, 196-197), and law thus becomes a special case
of sensus communus. Nevertheless, Pompa acknowledges Vico’s "general
distrust of purely abstract reasoning and of rigid adherence to abstract
rules" (SNS, 194).
One would think that this acknowledgment alone allows "the humanists"
to carry the day, but since Pompa does not consider whether the sort of
"reflection" to which his account is committed is an instance of "purely
abstract reasoning," he does not draw this conclusion. While he readily
admits that as laws become more abstract through the three ages, interpretation
and judgment as to their applicability in particular situations become
increasingly necessary (SNS, 194)—a process which calls for rhetorical
prowess and topical acuity—still, he holds that such interpretation and
judgment arise from what we know of human nature, and our knowledge of
human nature arises from an act of reflection upon the modifications of
our minds.44 In brief, the entire
process is an example of Cartesian method applied to the problem of the
relation between law and human nature.
Thus, Pompa does not change his view of the dispensable role of providence
in Vico’s philosophy, but stands by his reduction of providence to common
sense, as the latter works in conjunction with individual desire over time
(SNS, 198-199). The workings of providence through human desire can be
known, he claims, only by way of reflection, and only by rational human
beings. Pompa thinks that for Vico human development can be described as
the "rise from a state of bestiality to one of the highest intellectual
refinement" (SNS, 199). Yet, I would point out that such "refinement,"
wherever and whenever it appears, is, for Vico, clear evidence of a civilization
in its death throes (according to Vico’s "ideal eternal history"). This
fact places the onus upon Pompa to explain his own delight in the act of
reflection—a delight which Vico evidently did not wholeheartedly share
(SN, 1106, among other places).
Thus, Pompa is aware that in order to make his interpretation of Vico
seem viable, Vico’s concept of "the barbarism of reflection" must also
be "neutralized" (alongside providence) so as to vindicate Pompa’s own
questionable emphasis upon reflection as the most basic kind of knowing
in Vico’s "system." After examining some alternative explanations for Vico’s
lamentations regarding the barbarism of the third age (SN, 1106), Pompa
finally declares that "it is not . . . clear that Vico believed that social
disintegration is absolutely inevitable in the fully rational age" (SNS, 204).45
Pompa offers no text in direct support of this claim, and although there
are some passages that might be interpreted this way, it is hard to be
sure what Pompa has in mind. In my view, Pompa’s contention amounts to
saying that Vico did not think death is inevitable, since Vico holds "absolute
common sense" (i.e., the most indispensable facts of human culture which
identify it as human) to require funereal rituals (at least the burying
of the dead, pace Antigone’s dilemma). The historical course that
the nations run is a macrocosm of this "absolute common sense" (which I
will discuss in a moment). In other words, the course of history, as seen
from the level of the development of nations, must be analogous to the
facts of human experience in the microcosm, which includes (as it indeed
must) death and the appropriate rituals that accompany death. If nations
are not subject to birth, growth and death, then the analogy between individual
life and the development of human history dissolves. That would be a problem
for Vico because we are obliged to understand the nature of the social
and historical through the nature of individual desire and experience,
and vice-versa. Nations and their histories would become unintelligible
to us unless they decline and die, in Vico’s view.
This makes Pompa’s contention that the third age need not entail a disintegration
of culture very questionable, since it strikes not only at the heart of
Vico’s ideal eternal history, but undermines Vico’s entire epistemological
position with regard to the relation between individual and social experience.
While it is true that Vico held the belief in immortality to be one of
the three principles upon which civilizations rise (SN, 360), this hardly
amounts to the same thing as saying that earthly death can be indefinitely
forestalled (regardless of whether one is speaking of an individual or
a civilization). It is also quite obvious that without earthly death, "immortality"
would not be a matter of belief, but of fact. Death is a necessary prerequisite
to the belief in immortality, and thus a necessary condition of the progression
through the three ages—if one wishes to reason about this matter abstractly.
Hence, for Vico, there would be no civilization at all if humans did not
realize they must die. Both logically and empirically, the cathedral is
erected upon the potter’s field.
But the problem of asserting that the third age need not entail a disintegration
of culture runs still deeper. It undermines not only Vico’s epistemological
stance with regard to the relation between individual and social experience;
it also undermines the crucial link between human nature as historical
and human nature as natural. In this regard, we begin by noting that Pompa
claims Vico thought the proper use of his own new science could prevent
or forestall the decline of civilization (SNS, 205 ff.). This contention
is not entirely without textual support. Yet, for Vico, birth, growth and
decay are the manifestations of providential order within both human institutions
and nature more generally. As I mentioned above, the evolution of human
institutions is predicated upon "absolute common sense," that is, that
there must be social rituals which mark all three of these basic stages
in the lives of individuals (SN, 360). Removal of one of these (i.e., "death"
at the level of the individual, institution, or civilization) presents
more than a mere disanalogy between the natural and the historical. It
undermines the condition for the possibility of human historical development,
for "absolute common sense" is thereby rendered a fiction. The intelligibility
of history is lost without "absolute common sense." Why? Pompa apparently
does not see that birth, growth and decay is both a natural and a historical
cycle—the intelligible link between humanity and the natural world (rendering
the latter intelligible to the former in some degree). For Vico, the link
is comprehended analogically, its workings attributed to providence, and
then revered (or recollected, since worship is an institutionalized act
of memory) in the public practice of religion—the human institution within
which absolute common sense finds expression in all three ages.
Yet, Pompa’s "triumph of reason" (SNS, 204) is the decline of religious belief.46
He is willing to neutralize providence, though he tacitly admits Vico would
not (SNS, 58-59, 208-209, 213-214).47
Through Pompa’s reason-colored glasses providence, natural humanity and
nature itself are all equally spurious fictions for Vico. This is simply
a bad reading of Vico. When reason finds itself through reflection, it
thinks it needs nothing more, but this is truer of Pompa than of Vico.
The truth of the matter is that reason alone "only constructs meaningless
networks of artificial and pedantic distinctions," as Collingwood puts it.48
Perhaps in an ironic way Pompa has the story right after all, but fails
to recognize his own place in the picture he paints. He does agree that
there can be no salvation for the human race once it has fallen into the
barbarism of reflection, but he does not think this necessarily happens
in connection with the rise of reason and rational philosophy (SNS, 211;
HNHK, 165), if indeed it happens at all. But what would the barbarian of
reflection say? Would it not be something very like this? Pompa does not
tell us how the inevitable return to the forest does come about. Nor are
we told what this alleged "stage" between the advent of reason and the
descent into the barbarism of reflection might be called (for Vico has
certainly not given it a name). This limbo in which Pompa thinks we live
seems to be an historical "holding pattern" which is unnatural at best,
impious at worst, and, at all events, not in Vico.
Thus, Pompa makes Vico’s "science" the cultural equivalent of an iron
lung—a technological device which merely prolongs the agony of what must
inevitably happen in any case—the death of civilization (SNS, 205 ff.)—and
he asserts that Vico’s pessimism about the inevitability of decline was
unwarranted and mistaken (SNS, 215-217; HNHK, 165 ff.). Instead, Pompa
holds, a consistent application of Vico’s method would really end in a
social utopia (SNS, 217). This conclusion substitutes a linear view of
history for Vico’s cyclical view, and Pompa makes it explicit that he does
intend to depart from Vico on this matter (SNS, 221). At this juncture,
however, he has (in my opinion) departed so thoroughly from Vico’s worldview
as to render the similarities between his account and Vico’s superficial.
One cannot dispense with providence and the cyclical view of history and
still claim to speak for or interpret Vico. Rather, Pompa speaks for himself,
a matter which becomes perfectly clear as Pompa begins to construct his
own philosophy of history in HNHK, chapter four.
Pompa finishes his study of law, providence and the barbarism of reflection
by saying that Vico was terribly mistaken in his understanding of his ownphilosophy,49
and that the "barbarism of reflection" is not a necessary stage or feature
of the ideal eternal history (SNS, 220; HNHK, 165 ff.). He then outlines
and enumerates a number of basic mistakes in Vico’s philosophy that, if
Pompa were correct, would surely render the reading of Vico a questionable
investment of time (SNS, 219-221).
III
The final chapter of the new edition of Vico: A Study of the New
Science explicitly addresses the interpretations of Berlin, Verene,
and B. A. Haddock.50 A detailed
summary is not needed here, for Pompa’s complaint comes down to the same
thing in all three cases. Each of these interpreters has emphasized, in
a different way, that imagination is the ground of Vico’s theory of knowledge
(SNS, 223, 229-230, 237, 241). Pompa, the advocate of reflection, does
not think this is an adequate epistemology. But his argument is odd.
While he acknowledges that the imagination permits us to enter into
the life of previous ages, he does not think it allows us to see the workings
of providence in human history, and this, he says, "provides a strong reason
for rejecting Verene’s account of the role of imagination in knowledge"
(SNS, 235). Similar conclusions are applied to Berlin and Haddock.
Without knowledge of providence, Pompa asserts, we have no way of knowing
the ideal eternal history, and, thus, no science (SNS, 235-236). I call
this odd because, if it is a criticism, it also applies to Pompa’s own
account. He thinks knowledge of providence is not necessary to Vico’s system
and that Vico was mistaken in thinking that it was necessary (as I have
already pointed out; cf. also HNHK, 165 ff.). I do not think Pompa would
claim that reason/reflection is more adequate to the task of "knowing the
mind of God" than is the imagination. In this case, it seems that knowledge
of the ideal eternal history is problematic for all four accounts equally,
given the way Pompa has set things up. The question of the adequacy of
the imagination to what is eventually "known" in Vico’s science remains
open, of course. I am not claiming that Verene, Berlin and Haddock have
solved this problem by looking to the imagination. I have my doubts about
whether the imagination is adequate to discerning the workings of providence,
but that it is more adequate to that task than "reflection upon the modifications
of our minds" I do not doubt. I have suggested earlier that exploring the
analogy between what God knows and what humans know may hold the answer,
but this would require considerable development.51
Before moving to a brief discussion of Pompa’s work on Hume’s, Hegel’s
and Vico’s respective historical metaphysics, it should be mentioned that
Pompa is not at all opposed to emphasizing the influence of "humanism"
upon Vico’s philosophy,52 in
spite of the fact that he labels the interpreters with whom he disagrees
"humanists." His main complaint against the "humanists" is really more
that they are "so impressed by Vico’s rejection of Cartesianism as to think
it carried with it a rejection of any notion of necessity in human history
and, therefore, of the possibility of producing a science with some, at
least, of the necessity involved in a natural science" (SNS, 239).53
This is hard to understand for three reasons: first, Pompa himself has
characterized Vico’s rejection of "Cartesian rationalism" as "total," precisely
because of its inadequacies in knowledge of nature (SNS, 75-76); second,
given the "epistemological superiority of the human sciences" (SNS, 168,
185), as asserted by Pompa, it is hard to see why Pompa should wish to
draw upon any of the methodological features of the natural sciences; third,
Vico’s rejection of necessity in history and his rejection of Cartesianism
are quite different issues, since the former is worked out by Vico more
in terms of the failures of Stoicism and Spinozism while the latter involves
more method than metaphysics. I would suggest that perhaps Pompa has neither
fully understood nor taken seriously enough Vico’s rejection of Descartes,
although it must be admitted on all sides that Vico’s relation to Descartes
is one of the cloudiest areas in Vico studies.
IV
Croce says that "Vico’s historical thought . . . belongs neither to
the Protestant Reformation nor the traditions of the Catholic Church, but
solely to the Renaissance." 54When
this broad claim is unpacked, it turns out to mean something very like
what Pompa has argued in Human Nature and Historical Knowledge (cf.
HNHK, 135). The Renaissance departed from both sides of the Christian tradition
in its far-sighted willingness to understand human nature as an emergent
development, even if it is not quite "evolutionary" enough to satisfy Pompa
in the end. The traditional Christian conception is rooted in a presupposition
of the permanence of human nature, and while it is hard to pin this view
on Vico, Pompa does not think Vico goes far enough in remedying the problem.
Pompa’s central contention in HNHK is that Hume and Hegel have so much
invested, methodologically, in the permanence of human nature that their
philosophies of history cannot sufficiently allow for the very genuine
possibility that human nature changes, develops and grows (cf. HNHK, 1-3).
These claims mean quite different things in the two cases, for on Pompa’s
reading, while Hume posits the constancy of human nature, Hegel decries
theories that rely upon such an assumption (HNHK, 8-11). Yet, in the end,
Pompa believes that Hegel is committed to an a priori set of determinations
which constrain the possibilities for change in human nature; and while
Hegel’s view is preferable to Hume’s, it cannot withstand a genuinely evolutionary
critique (HNHK, 8, 11-12, 69 ff., 73-74, 142-143). I will not give a detailed
explication of Pompa’s arguments here, except to say that, if one is persuaded
by the accounts of human nature in Hume and Hegel given by Pompa, then
one will be persuaded by his conclusion.55
The question of Vico is another matter. Regarding the rise of reason
in human history, Pompa says that Vico presents it
as the transformation of the imagination under the twin influences
of a historically developing desire for individual self-preservation and
an ever-increasing capacity to grasp the truth. . . . Nevertheless, . .
. [Vico] does so only by embodying this general philosophical conception
in a substantial theory of historical development in which we are dealing
not with the concept of a human nature which may have changed but with
that of one which must change in a particular way. As a result, it becomes
impossible for him to justify his preference for one substantial theory
rather than some other, as a necessary presupposition of knowledge of historical
fact (HNHK, 11; cf. also 172 ff.).
The words "must change in a particular way" derive their force from Vico’s
"ideal eternal history" (HNHK, 149, 152 ff., 158). Pompa presumes the rectitude
of much of what he argues for in SNS, both here and throughout this second
study (particularly the identification of providence with absolute common
sense or "human nature," such that to hold a substantial theory of the
one is to hold a substantial theory of the other—which I have questioned
earlier [cf. HNHK, 137 ff., 159 ff., 172 ff.]). Still, his central argument
in HNHK seems directly opposed to the principles he established only with
great effort in the older (1975) portions of SNS—that is, Pompa’s argument
establishing that alternatives to Vico’s version of history can be ruled
out (beginning at SNS p. 155 and climaxing at pp. 167-169).56
In SNS, Pompa argues that Vico’s account of the concrete events in history
answers both to the formal constraints of the ideal eternal history and
to all empirical, factual historical data which could ever emerge in historical
researches. His conclusion is that all alternative accounts would be inferior;
they would necessarily fail to be truly human histories "in any intelligible
sense of that word" (SNS, 167, 169) because human nature cannot be just
anything at all, but must have certain generic traits (e.g., absolute common
sense). Human nature presents the historian with certain constraints, which
Vico has adequately met (according to Pompa’s earlier book), even if human
nature and its corresponding constraints change over time. In SNS, Pompa
is quite satisfied with the adequacy of Vico’s response to the possibility
of alteration in human nature, as he interprets it, and he is content with
Vico’s response to the supposition that alternative accounts of human development,
ones quite different from Vico’s, could be given. They could be given,
but they could not be confirmed as Vico’s account can be.
In HNHK, however, Pompa argues that Vico’s inadequacies in this same
regard render his view sufficiently "ahistorical" to necessitate a genuinely
"historical" account such as Pompa outlines in his final chapter (HNHK,
192 ff.). This is a post-Darwinian view which generalizes biological evolution
into a philosophical principle. In so doing, Pompa is now simply ignoring
Vico’s warnings about the inferiority of knowledge gained in natural science
due to the fact that all such knowledge is mediated by the primacy of the
historical human world. We would today say that the critique of scientific
communities provided by sociologists of knowledge undermines the claims
of natural science to objectivity. Pompa seems unconcerned about this,
although Vico was.
This is really all that needs to be said regarding this later study
(HNHK), for it is sufficient to indicate clearly the drift of Pompa’s most
recent work. There has been a marked change between the work published
by Pompa in the 1970s and early ’80s and that which appeared in the early
’90s. Recently he is much more eager to bring out what he takes to be Vico’s
shortcomings and errors of self-understanding. Where he once thought Vico’s
views were adequate or even superior, he now thinks them inadequate or
inferior. Undoubtedly, this indicates personal philosophical growth on
Pompa’s part, best evidenced by the positive theory he begins to propound
at the close of HNHK. It would have been a boon to the reader if Pompa
had plainly said that he has changed his mind about Vico, but he has made
no such acknowledgment.
Whether the Vico Pompa has "outgrown" is the true Vico may be questioned,
however. I think he has possibly outgrown a Cartesian straw-man he believed
to be Vico, and I have argued accordingly. Yet, what is good for Pompa
may be bad for Vico studies. Hume scholars and Hegel scholars who read
HNHK may mistakenly trust Pompa’s judgment regarding Vico, although they
are unlikely to be satisfied with his grasp of their own heroes. With these
new books, then, Pompa invites what may be called "the Rorty Effect"—the
tendency to trust a scholar’s judgment of thinkers except for the ones
we know first-hand that he has misrepresented. Thus, for example, Rorty’s
interpretation of Dewey satisfies no Deweyans, but is good enough for Heideggerians,
while his interpretation of Heidegger satisfies Deweyans but not Heideggerians.
At some point it begins to dawn on us that Rorty misrepresents everyone,
but only after considerable confusion has been generated. Pompa has accomplished
essentially the same thing with respect to Vico, Hume and Hegel. This is
most unfortunate, for it clouds the already cloudy waters surrounding the
all-important question of historical knowledge.57
Notes
*Randall E. Auxier is Chairman of the Department
of Philosophy and Director of the Master of Liberal Arts Degree Program
at Oklahoma City University. He is the editor of the Personalist Forum.[Back]
1 This is not to neglect such works as Richard Manson’s
The
Theory of Knowledge of Giambattista Vico (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books,
1969), but one must often measure the importance of a book by its impact
upon the public and the scholarly community, and Pompa’s book is the notable
event in this respect. [Back]
2 Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge, vol. 4,
trans. W. H. Woglom and C. W. Hendel (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1950), 296. [Back]
3 Ernst Cassirer, The Logic of the Humanities, trans.
C. S. Howe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 52. [Back]
4 Leon Pompa, Vico: A Study of the New Science,
2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Henceforth this
work will be referred to as "SNS" and cited parenthetically in the main
text. [Back]
5 Leon Pompa, Human Nature and Historical Knowledge:
Hume, Hegel and Vico (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Henceforth this work will be referred to as "HNHK" and cited parenthetically
in the main text. [Back]
6 An historical discussion of the book, and summary
of the immediate scholarly response, by G. Tagliacozzo has been published
in New Vico Studies, vol. III (1985), 7-14. My own essay does not
duplicate anything that has been discussed there. [Back]
7 Leon Pompa, "Introduction," in Vico: Selected
Writings, ed. and trans. Leon Pompa (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982), 13n. The sentiments regarding the "rigorousness" of Vico’s
science are repeated with greater detail given at SNS, xii-xiv.
[Back]
8 Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista
Vico, trans. Bergin and Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968).
Henceforth all references to this work will be abbreviated "SN" and cited
parenthetically by paragraph number. [Back]
9 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 209. Cassirer treats this same topic in more
detail in "Descartes, Leibniz and Vico," in Symbol, Myth and Culture,
ed. Donald Phillip Verene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), especially
pp. 102-105. For a full treatment of the extent of Vico’s anti-Cartesianism
cf. also Robert Crease, "Vico and the ‘Cogito,’ " in Vico Past and Present,
ed. G. Tagliacozzo (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1981), 171 ff;
and, for a very different approach, cf. Yvon Belaval, "Vico and Anti-Cartesianism,"
in Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium, ed. G. Tagliacozzo
and H. White (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969). [Back]
10 Pompa has acknowledged Vico’s departure from Descartes
explicitly in, among other places, his essay "Imagination in Vico," in
Vico
Past and Present, ed. G. Tagliacozzo (cited above), 163-170. Still,
he believes that other interpreters "over-dramatize Vico’s reaction against
Cartesianism" (165). He also gives an account of Vico’s departure from
Cartesianism in the "Introduction" to Vico: Selected Writings, 8-9.
Cf. also SNS, 237. [Back]
11 These continuities, and Pompa’s willingness to
draw heavily upon the first and second editions of the Scienza Nuova,
emerge in his evidence in spite of his own claim elsewhere (in the "Introduction"
to Vico: Selected Writings, cited above, pp. 12-13) that, in Vico’s
view, the second edition "entirely superseded" the first, and that "there
is no reason to believe that he [Vico] did not consider this [third edition]
to be the definitive edition of the New Science." It is also worth
noting that throughout this essay, I have called Pompa’s emphasis upon
reflection "Cartesian," which I believe it to be. Pompa would reject this
label (cf. SNS xiv, 76, etc.), but I do not believe he is acknowledging
the weight of his own debt to Descartes. Hayden White has preceded me in
choosing just this epithet for Pompa’s interpretation. See History and
Theory, 1976, no. 2, 188; reprinted in part in New Vico Studies,
vol. III (1985), 11. [Back]
12 Cf. Giorgio Tagliacozzo, "Toward a History of Recent
Anglo-American Vico Scholarship, Part III," in New Vico Studies,
vol. III, 7-14. This essay contains a wealth of responses to Pompa’s Vico
interpretation, and this is my primary source for claims about "where the
criticism is centered," etc. [Back]
13 Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies
in the History of Ideas (London: Hogarth Press, 1976). Cf. also "The
Philosophical Ideas of Giambattista Vico," in Art and Ideas in Eighteenth
Century Italy (Roma: Edizione Di Storia E Letteratura, 1960).
[Back]
14 Donald Phillip Verene, Vico’s Science of the
Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981); and The New
Art of Autobiography: An Essay on ‘The Life of Giambattista Vico Written
By Himself’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). [Back]
15 Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista
Vico, trans. R. G. Collingwood (London: Howard Latimer, 1913). Croce
would not identify knowledge with the act of reflection (which is subjective),
but with objective reason. This is where he differs from Pompa. Cf. HNHK,
133 ff. [Back]
16 Grassi has written on Vico in more places than
one can list, but representative essays are "Vico as Epochal Thinker,"
trans. Roberta Piazza, and "The Priority of Common Sense and Imagination:
Vico’s Philosophical Relevance Today," trans. Azizeh Azodi. Both essays
are in Vico and Humanism: Essays on Vico, Heidegger and Rhetoric,
ed. Donald Phillip Verene (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 179-199, 19-40,
44-46. [Back]
17 Cf. especially "Descartes, Leibniz and Vico," in
Symbol,
Myth and Culture (cited above), 95-107. Cassirer discussed Vico in
numerous other places (some of which are cited below) and throughout his
career. [Back]
18 Cf. also "Imagination in Vico," 165.
[Back]
19 This passage is difficult to square with Pompa’s
account in the "Introduction" to Vico: Selected Writings in which
he explicitly argues in detail that the historian and historical agent
must be different, and he accuses Vico of equivocating about which is the
real maker/knower of history (25-26, 29). As in all such cases, I have
taken SNS to express Pompa’s definitive view of the matter, since it is
his latest statement. [Back]
20 Cf. also "Imagination in Vico," 163.
[Back]
21 It is difficult to understand why Pompa would say:
"all knowledge requires the use of the imagination, at least in the sense
that it requires the creation and application of methods, hypotheses and
theories" (SNS, 228) when he claims only a few pages later (SNS, 234) that
the logic of imagination and that of knowledge are entirely different (quoted
above). One would think that whatever the imagination "creates" would thereby
be rendered useless for "knowing" anything, and that "reason" would be
obliged to create its own methods, hypotheses and theories if it expects
to gain any "knowledge" from them (although how analytic reflection or
reason could "create" anything escapes me). [Back]
22 Cf. Pompa’s "Imagination in Vico," 168; and also
New
Vico Studies, vol. III (1985), 10. This denial is, however, difficult
to square with Pompa’s statement elsewhere that "imagination is both historically
and ontologically prior to reason, or, to put it in Vico’s language, that
reason is a modification of imagination" ("Introduction" to Vico: Selected
Writings, 24). This makes it rather unclear just what Pompa’s position
on imagination and reason really is, but again I have taken the later statement
to be definitive of his position. [Back]
23 Pompa thinks Vico is mistaken to claim this, but
he does acknowledge that Vico holds this view (SNS, 221). [Back]
24 Pompa says that
the imagination, which is both the original source of religion and
of its later forms in history, is either absent in the fully rational age
or is so etiolated as to be incapable of creating the world of belief found
in the early history of the nation. This is certainly Vico’s view. For
a primary assumption, throughout the whole of his writings, is that the
imagination grows weaker as reason grows stronger (SNS, 214-215).
It is not easy to see how we can rely upon something which is either absent
or extremely etiolated to create our "methods, hypotheses and theories"
as Pompa says a few pages later (SNS, 228), unless we wish to have very
bad methods, hypotheses and theories. Fortunately there is no evidence
(in Vico or elsewhere) that imagination disappears entirely from every
individual in the third age (and Pompa offers none, later admitting this
is not the case at SNS, 218). No one would deny the atrophy of imagination
in the third age, but this presents no problem for the "humanists" (Berlin,
Croce, Cassirer, Grassi, Verene, B.A. Haddock), so long as some individuals
(although they be few in number) are still capable of the art of memory
(cf. Verene, Vico’s Science of Imagination, 96-101, for the inversely
proportional relation of imagination and reason). Pompa also softens his
claim about the "etiolation" of the imagination in the third age only a
few pages later, and it seems to me that the passage cited is pure polemics
aimed at the proponents of imagination in Vico.
[Back]
25 In "Imagination in Vico," Pompa also claims, in
effect, that imagination yields no knowledge at all, and cannot, therefore,
be the basis of Vico’s theory of knowledge. He says that no evidence for
making imagination the basis is to be found, and that "the logic of the
concepts of imagination and reason are so diverse that there seems no possibility
of substituting one for the other as a constituent in a theory of knowledge"
(165), a theme echoed at SNS, 228.
Regarding the first claim, evidence that Vico did think imagination
begets knowledge is to be had at SN, 365, 381, 391 (cf. Verene, Vico’s
Science of Imagination, 97-98). Regarding the second, it should be
noted that Pompa’s stark disjunction of imagination and reason (repeated
in the "Introduction" to Vico: Selected Writings, 19), and his attempt
to "substitute" the logic of imagination for the logic of reflection begs
the question. It uses the standards set by reason (disjunction, excluded
middle, truth-preserving substitutivity) to take the measure of whether
imagination can be the foundation of a theory of knowledge. To address
this question adequately, Pompa would have to respond to Verene’s and Grassi’s
contentions regarding the "imaginative universal" as the ground floor of
Vico’s theory of knowledge (cf. Grassi, "Vico as Epochal Thinker," 184
ff.; and Verene, Vico’s Science of Imagination, 65 ff.).
Still, Pompa’s "argument" here can tell us little, since it has already
been acknowledged on all hands that the logic of reason and imagination
are different. Pompa’s reduction of imagination to the standards of reflection
is made total later in "Imagination in Vico," 168-169. Yet, he softens
this considerably at SNS, 218 ff., admitting that reason and imagination
can and do exist in co-ordination (if not harmony) in all human beings
in the third age. Since this last passage is written later, we should probably
conclude Pompa has changed his mind on this question.
[Back]
26 Max Fisch also shares the view that imagination
begets a kind of knowledge. Cf. the passage in his introduction to SN at
K4. [Back]
27 Verene has suggested that "recollective fantasia"
is the best candidate for the means whereby knowledge of the other two
ages is gained by those in the third. He has sharply contrasted this with
Pompa’s emphasis on "reflection." Cf. Vico’s Science of Imagination,
155. For Berlin, it is the "reconstructive imagination" which fulfills
this function (cf. Vico and Herder, 107, 113-114). [Back]
28 It should be noted that Pompa gives a completely
different, though perhaps compatible, account of providence in HNHK, 163
ff. In HNHK, providence is merely the greater wisdom that is gained through
reflecting upon the growth and change of historical institutions, which
had to change due to their failure to be adequate to their very own ideals.
Providence is thus something like "rational hindsight" which yields historical
explanations. It seems to be a concept similar to Dilthey’s account of
the emergence of historical consciousness, but there is no text to support
the claim that this is how Vico understands providence. Also, how this
is consistent with the role of "absolute common sense" in Pompa’s SNS is
not obvious to me, but perhaps a story could be given. In both cases, however,
Pompa has dispensed with God as the agent behind providence, and providence
becomes immanent rather then transcendent. This claim is simply not in
Vico’s text. Pompa’s identification of providence and sensus communus
is far too fast and easy. For a worked-out and viable account of this relationship,
cf. John Schaeffer, Sensus Communus: Vico, Rhetoric and the Limits of
Relativism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990). [Back]
29 Gino Bedani, Vico Revisited: Orthodoxy, Naturalism
and Science in the ‘Scienza Nuova’ (Oxford: Berg Publishers Ltd., 1989),
216-217. In the "Introduction" to Vico: Selected Writings, Pompa
seems to acknowledge the centrality and indispensability of providence
to Vico’s philosophy (13-14, 21-22), but this is more implied than explicit,
and thus insufficient as evidence that Pompa has had second thoughts about
this move. A third incompatible view is also expressed by Pompa in HNHK,
where he argues that although providence can be dispensed with in the New
Science, Vico fails to do so and ends up being inconsistent with himself
as a result (HNHK, 159 ff.). This acknowledges the centrality of providence
to Vico’s philosophy, but holds it to be a mistake. I do believe someone
is being inconsistent with himself in all this, but it does not seem to
me to be Vico. [Back]
30 Cassirer points out that
Vico is perfectly aware of the fact that human culture has to be studied
and explained according to sociological principles and methods. He does
not strive after a sociological explanation in the modern sense. He regards
civilization as an organic whole, as a teleological order ("Descartes,
Leibniz and Vico," 105).
Cassirer’s method of avoiding the conceits is to see the way in which both
final and efficient historical causation are combined in Vico’s view (the
former through the workings of providence). Pompa retains only the efficient
level of causation in distinguishing the "historico-sociological level"
of Vico’s philosophy of history from the "metaphysical level" (SNS, 15).
To sharpen this basic difference of interpretation, Pompa says in the
"Introduction" to Vico: Selected Writings that "Vico is presenting
a causal ontology in teleological robes" (23), which suggests again that
providence and final cause need not be taken seriously. Nevertheless, in
HNHK, Pompa changes his view again, acknowledging that providence and teleology
are both crucial enough to Vico’s account to undermine it in the end (HNHK,
159 ff.). [Back]
31 Donald Phillip Verene, "Review of Pompa’s Vico:
A Study of the ‘New Science,’ " in Philosophy and Rhetoric, vol.
IX, No. 1, 1976, 59-61. [Back]
32 It becomes rather clear in Pompa’s SNS chapter
XVI that he is interested in using "Vico’s" philosophy of history as a
tool for criticizing contemporary philosophers of history (i.e., Toynbee
and Spengler, SNS, 174-176), and also ahistorical, inductive, statistical
methods in the social sciences (cf. SNS, 178). Having such axes as these
to grind leaves one somewhat vulnerable to the two conceits, although the
desire for seeing Vico’s contemporary relevance is praiseworthy enough.
Cf. Verene’s discussion of the risks involved in the task of interpreting
Vico in The New Art of Autobiography, 126 f., and Collingwood’s
illuminating discussion of the conceits in The Idea of History,
ed. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 68-71. [Back]
33 Max Fisch, "Comment on Professor Pompa’s Paper,"
in Vico and Contemporary Thought, ed. G. Tagliacozzo, M. Mooney
and D. P. Verene (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1976), 56. [Back]
34 Pompa clearly recognizes that the analogy is important
(cf. SNS, 168n-169n, 183), but he does not, in my view, see what its importance
is. A fine example of Pompa in the process of missing the meaning of the
analogy is at HNHK, 167-168, where he fails to see the significance of
the fact that birth, growth and decay are operative in all phenomena in
both the human and natural worlds. [Back]
35 Pompa calls this the "epistemological superiority
of the human sciences" at SNS, 168, and again on p. 185. The inferiority
of natural knowledge is also discussed in "Imagination in Vico," 169-170,
and HNHK, 136. In the latter place Pompa even suggests that Vico believes
the study of natural science "should be disregarded because it is, at best,
only relatively intelligible." This is too extreme in my view. [Back]
36 This is an interesting anticipation of Kant’s limitation
of human knowledge of the natural world some forty-five years later in
the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. [Back]
37 The most poignant intertwining of providence, nature
and human history in the Scienza Nuova is probably in paragraphs
629-633. Cf. also SN, 241-245, 915. [Back]
38 Friedrich Ueberweg, A History of Philosophy,
Volume 2, trans. George S. Morris (New York: Scribner, Armstrong &
Co., 1874), 474. [Back]
39 Cf. Cassirer’s fine account of the relation between
convention and nature in Vico which brings out Vico’s analogical naturalism.
Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms Volume 1: Language,
trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 149 ff.
Pompa has given a more naturalistic account of the relation between human
knowledge and nature in the "Introduction" of Vico: Selected Writings
(28-29), but since this does not fit straight-forwardly with the account
in SNS, I can only mention it and pass on, assuming the later statement
to be definitive. He has most recently spoken directly against a naturalistic
interpretation of Vico at HNHK, 167-168. In light of so many changes it
is difficult to discern what Pompa’s view of Vico is. What is clear is
that Vico is neither wholly naturalistic nor wholly transcendental in his
account of providence. Like the Christian God, Vico’s providence is in
this world but not of this world. I do not claim to understand how this
should be understood, but I am quite sure that Pompa does not grasp it
either. [Back]
40 Cf. Cecelia Miller’s Giambattista Vico: Imagination
and Historical Knowledge (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993) for an
account of Vico’s development in context, an argument about the relative
value of the various editions of the New Science. [Back]
41 A very cursory account of Vico’s development is
offered at SNS, 75-84. There is also the hint of one in Pompa’s "Introduction"
to Vico: Selected Writings (1-29), but it is not detailed enough
to support Pompa’s nearly unrestricted use of evidence from Vico’s early
writings to make philosophical points about his mature views. If anything,
this introduction is often inconsistent with such a practice and with the
account in SNS more generally (other instances have been indicated previously).
[Back]
42 See the discussion of the role of rhetoric and
topics in Vico’s philosophy in James R. Goetsch, Vico’s Axioms: The
Geometry of the Human World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995),
53-68. Also the recent translation into English of Vico’s Institutiones
Oratoriae makes accessible for the first time to the English-speaking
world Vico’s most important statements about rhetoric and topics. See Vico,
The
Art of Rhetoric, trans. and ed. G. A. Pinton and A. W. Shipee (Amsterdam
and Atlanta: Rodopi Editions, 1996). [Back]
43 Schaeffer’s book (cited above) would not have been
available to Pompa in time to take account of it, but Schaeffer’s important
article "Sensus Communus in Vico and Gadamer," New Vico Studies,
vol. 5 (1987), 117-130, was available in plenty of time for the new edition
of SNS. [Back]
44 This progression is quite clearly stated by Pompa
in "Response by the Author" to Fisch’s commentary, in Vico and Contemporary
Thought, 59 [Back]
45 Although Pompa does not cite him, this is a view
shared by Cassirer. Cf. "Descartes, Leibniz and Vico," 105-106. One possibility
that Pompa overlooks, but which Collingwood brings out, is that the cycle
of history does not entail that history repeats itself exactly (cf. The
Idea of History, 67-68). Thus, the barbarism of reflection is not a
return to the original state of barbarism as Pompa claims (HNHK, 166-167),
but to a very different sort of "forest."
[Back]
46 Pompa does not himself recognize that the rise
of reason is coeval with the advent of the "barbarism of reflection" (cf.
SNS, 211), and he believes Vico himself to have been unclear on this point
(cf. SNS, 204). Yet, insofar as he acknowledges that reason dispels religion
(SNS, 213-215) and disrupts social cohesion by robbing humanity of its
three principles (providence, moderation and immortality), one would expect
him also to acknowledge that the ascendancy of proud reason obliges providence
to intervene and relieve humanity of its hubris in order to restore its
piety (SN, 1106). In a very real sense, the death of God is the defining
moment and problem of the third age, and Vico is seen to have anticipated
Nietzsche’s declaration by 150 years. The age of the gods returns precisely
because the humans in their forgetfulness have come to ignore the gods.
There is nothing unclear about this in Vico’s text. Yet, Pompa thinks there
might still be a place for rational religion, or religion aided by the
certification of reason (SNS, 214). [Back]
47 Pompa explicitly admits this in the "Introduction"
to Vico: Selected Writings, 9; and in HNHK, 165. [Back]
48 Collingwood, The Idea of History, 67. Collingwood
is speaking of Vico’s "barbarism of reflection" in this passage.
[Back]
49 Cf. also HNHK, 167, where Pompa makes a similar
charge. Verene has devoted a lengthy chapter to the question of the extent
of Vico’s own understanding of what he was doing in the Scienza Nuova,
which directly opposes Pompa on this matter. Cf. The New Art of Autobiography,
126-160, especially 158-160. [Back]
50 Bruce A. Haddock, An Introduction to Historical
Thought (London: Edward Arnold, 1980), and Vico’s Political Thought
(Swansea: Mortlake Press, 1986). [Back]
51 Collingwood has taken notice of the fact that analogy
was also Vico’s manner of arguing from one age to another, and this could
be a further suggestion for solving the problem of historical knowledge
in Vico. Cf. Collingwood, The Idea of History, 67. [Back]
52 Cf. SNS, 19, 222; "Introduction" to Vico: Selected
Writings, 10. [Back]
53 A similar complaint about overreactions to Vico’s
rejection of Descartes is to be found in "Imagination in Vico," 165. To
gauge accurately the extent of Vico’s rejection of Descartes, and of rationalistic
metaphysics, it is probably best to consult "Reprehension of the Metaphysics
of René Descartes, Benedict Spinoza, and John Locke," trans. Donald
Phillip Verene, New Vico Studies, vol. VIII (1990), 2-18. [Back]
54 Benedetto Croce, History as the Story of Liberty,
trans. Sylvia Sprigge (New York: Meridian Books, 1955), 135. [Back]
55 It does warrant mentioning that, in the case of
Hume, Donald Livingston has given a comprehensive account of Hume’s theory
of knowledge and human nature which does allow for such an evolution of
human nature (indeed, mandates it), and this, if correct, would undermine
Pompa’s account of Hume. Livingston’s interpretation of Hume also squares
fairly well with Vico. Pompa acknowledges this, but takes no trouble to
answer Livingston (cf. HNHK, 14), leaving it rather to the reader to decide
who is correct. Cf. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). In the case of Hegel, Pompa’s
entire explication of Hegel’s theory of historical knowledge derives almost
exclusively from the "Introduction" to the Philosophy of History,
trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover Books, 1956). Pompa points out that this
work is not often treated by Hegel scholars in developing their accounts
of Hegel’s theory of historical knowledge (HNHK, 67-68), but he seems unaware
that this is due to the fact that it is not considered as authoritative
as some of Hegel’s other writings which propound the same general theories.
These lectures were not intended for publication, and were pieced together
(albeit carefully) from ten years’ worth of scattered notes written by
Hegel and his students. [Back]
56 All of this material is reprinted without alteration
in the new second edition, and I take that to mean that Pompa still holds
this view. [Back]
57 If the reader is curious as to my recommendation
regarding which secondary sources are reliable introductions to and interpretations
of Vico, I would name Verene’s Vico’s Science of Imagination and
Goetsch’s Vico’s Axioms (both cited above) as the best guides. I
would like to thank both of these authors for their reading and helpful
suggestions on this article, as well as Edmund Jacobitti, Cecelia Miller,
Claes Ryn and Joseph Baldacchino. [Back]
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INSTITUTE
Updated 29 July 2010