On Becoming Human: The Verum Factum Principle and Giambattista Vicos Humanism

Massimo Lollini

MLN, Volume 127, Number 1, January 2012 (Italian Issue Supplement)) , pp. S21-S31 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/mln.2012.0047

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On Becoming Human: The Verum Factum Principle and Giambattista Vicos Humanism

Massimo Lollini

As numerous scholars have noted, Giambattista Vico is the philosopher of the beginnings of humankind, the inventor of a genetic method in social and historical studies that is concisely expressed in the fourteenth degnit in book one of his Scienza nuova: Natura di cose altro non che nascimento di esse in certi tempi e con certe guise (SN 147). Vicos philosophy becomes particularly relevant in a time like ours when the very idea of humanity and what is human is put into question. Several contemporary writers have started speaking of a posthuman age in which the techno-sciences in many ways make it more and more difficult to refer to the humanist idea of a privileged human subject. To appreciate the importance of Vicos position is vital in reconsidering the evolution of the idea of humanism in a longue dure and in acknowledging that humanism has never been a unitary movement. The humanist idea engenders its opposite, even in early modern philosophers such as Leon Battista Alberti and Giordano Bruno, who under the pressure of cultural and historical events pointed to the limits of the human position, a direction that distinguishes their humanism from the one developed by Florentine Neoplatonism which emphasizes the infinite power of human intelligence and freedom as created ad imaginem dei. Vicos interpretation of humanity introduces a crucial distinction between sacred origins and gentile historical beginnings and has its focal point in the verum factum principle, suggesting an essential and
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original homology between knowing and making, including similarities and dissimilarities between divine creative power and human making. The purpose of this essay is to apply the Vichian genetic method to his own works and to study the origin of his humanist philosophy in the early work De antiquissima italorum sapientia ex lingua latinae originibus eruenda (1710), in which he first formulated the principle that verum, & factum [] convertuntur.1 The reception of this early work, also known as the Liber metaphysicus, is multifaceted, with a range of different, at times opposing, views, ranging from Benedetto Croces reductionist interpretation to Stephan Ottos appreciation of the text as the most fundamental of Vicos metaphysics. Croce considers the De antiquissima as an ineffective miscarriage, an imaginative and arbitrary metaphysical and physical theory without foundation; Otto, on the contrary, regards it as Vicos central work precisely for the formulation of the verum factum principle as the ide regulative pour toute connaissance and a fundement transcendantal de possibilit pour la philosophie et la science.2 The increasing number of references to Vicos De antiquissima, recent translations, collections of essays and monographs devoted to its interpretation confirm the importance of this early work. In the following pages I will present some further reflections on the significance of Vicos Liber metaphysicus and briefly discuss the problem of its relationship with Vicos Scienza nuova. The verum factum principle in the De antiquissima In the De antiquissima Vico holds that the constitutive and differentiating element of humanity is related to the concept of animus. He claims that the most ancient wisdom of the Italians distinguished between animus (the sensitive function) and anima (soul, the vital function). Vico argues that, according to the Latins, only human beings possess animus as an internal principle of movement, which is free from the deterministic chain of nature.3 Animus and not anima generates in humans the longing for infinity and immortality. In the animus and in the connected idea of immortality Vico sees the anthropological
Vico, De antiquissima 1.1, italics original. See Croce, Filosofia di Vico, 146, and Otto, Interprtation transcendantale, 13. 3 In the De antiquissima Vico attributes to the Latins an esoteric wisdom that was brought to Italy by the Egyptians. In the Scienza nuova, however, he will deny any value to esoteric and occult wisdom (sapienza riposta) as he denies the very possibility of metaphysical ideas among archaic civilizations.
1 2

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dimension of infinity that later was developed by Christian metaphysics. Moreover, the Latins considered ingenium, the faculty able to connect disparate and diverse things, as the nature proper to humanity. Imagination is the eye of ingenium and geometry can make the ingenium more acute. Moreover, for the Latins the true is the made (Verum esse ipsum factum); for them, science is cognition of how something is made.4 Vico argues that the first and complete truth is in God, the first Maker quod Deus omnia elementa rerum legit, cum extima, tum intima, quia continet.5 Human making, on the other hand, does not receive the elementa rerum from revelation but it proceeds by dissecting nature and creating its own images of these elements. Humans have no direct access to the natural elements; their making is one with their knowing in the sense that it is essentially a dissection of elements already given and depending on the ontology of the divine prior unum. Human understanding is not only colligere, collecting the elements of things, but first and above all minuere, dissecting things in order to grasp them. While intelligence and understanding (intelligere) are appropriate to God, discursive thought (cogitatio) is what is proper to the human mind because it terminata est, & extra res ceteras omnes, quae ipsa non sunt, rerum duntaxat extrema coactum eat, nunquam omnia colligat.6 Vicos metaphysics elaborates an analogy between the human mind and Gods will but he does not dispel the distinction of the causa essendi and does not absorb the infinite into the finite, as happened in Saurezs Disputationes metaphysicae. Vico argues that abstraction is a defect proper to the human mind, the mother of human science: whereas God defines things according to the true, man mundum quemdam formarum & numerum sibi condidit.7 Human creativity imitates Gods creativity and this is particularly evident in mathematics, a human construct in which the mathematician creates out of nothing the primitive elements of this science: the point, the line and the surface. However, as a product of human ingenium these basics have no direct referent and remain fictions (ficta), mediations and abstractions. In other words, mathematics, the most exact science, is very useful in investigating nature but it provides no ontological evidence of its construct and can offer only a limited insight into the world of things.
Vico, Vico, Vico, 7 Vico,
4 5 6

De De De De

antiquissima antiquissima antiquissima antiquissima

1:1. 1:1. 1:1. 1:1.1.

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Vicos Liber metaphysicus seeks to reach a kind of understanding of the ultimate elements of natural things, but this is possible only by resorting to Gods comprehension of all causes as an ideal model that persists as both the limit and excellence against which all human sciences must be confronted. The metaphysical truth for Vico nullo sine concluditur, nulla forma discernitur; quia est infinitum omnium formarum principium.8 Vico follows here not only what he considers the most ancient wisdom of the Italians but also the tradition of Neoplatonic and Christian metaphysics, pointing out that the most appropriate analogy for metaphysical truth is lumen.9 Vicos physics in the De antiquissima is subordinated to his metaphysics, even when it introduces the idea of the conatus and in many respects remains distant from the mental universe of Galileos physics. Vicos Liber metaphysicus does not create cognitive objectivism or idols of knowledge. The human mind has its beginning in the body, a body that is not conceived as a pure natural object to be measured but as a creative power, already inhabited by conatus and the metaphysical points hidden under the surface of phenomena. For Vico these hidden inclinations and impulses represent the origin of the human world, the first and most important elementa rei elaborated by the human mind as mediating elements, abstractions and fictions. Croce was rightthe conatus and the metaphysical points are fictionsbut this does not detract from the methodological value of Vicos theory if we consider that for him even the mathematical elements are related to the metaphysical points and pertain to the same fictive realm, because they are not ontologically independent from Gods creation, from Gods verum genitum. The idea of animus, the mediating power of the conatus and the metaphysical points notwithstanding, Vicos metaphysics in the De antiquissima remains strictly dualistic and does not elaborate a convincing and effective bridge between human and divine nature. The human mind participates in the divine mind, but it does not have complete access to the ultimate order of causes that in a human perspective remains dependent on chance and fortune. Finally, Vicos metaphysics does not erase the alterity of the human mind compared with the divine and sets up a hierarchy of human sciences the most certain of which is Theologia revelata since it deals only with complete truth.10 The

Vico, De antiquissima 1:3. Vico, De antiquissima 1:3. 10 Vico, De antiquissima 1:1.1.

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list of Vicos sciences includes, in descending order, mathematics, mechanics, physics, medicine, logic and ethics. Mathematics is the closest science to the divine verum genitum because mathematicians operate with their own fictions and abstractions, whereas the other sciences do not construct their elements as thoroughly and independently; they are related to human conscientia more than to human scientia. More than any other science, ethics is related to conscientia, human passions and the external conditions. Nonetheless, ethics shares with the other sciences not only the constructive faculty of ingenium and the verum factum principle but also the recourse to the ars topica that, combined with ars critica, provides the basis for prudentia and Vicos idea of practical wisdom in the De antiquissima.11 Vicos terminology comes from Ciceronian humanism and theological tradition, but he reinvents them in a new philosophical perspective.12 The ars topica represents the realm of the verisimilis coniectura and provides the basis for comprehending the value of singular, particular and contingent experience. The ars critica lays the ground for comparing the individual elements within a logical structure. Certitude for Vico is possible only by combining the invenire of the ars topica with the iudicare of the ars critica. The combination of inventio and iudicium creates the tertia ars, the methodus, the mos geometricus, the via synthetica (as opposed to the via analytica) that is philosophical comprehension. However, the philosophical comprehension in the De antiquissima remains constrained within a dualistic framework, which is characteristic of Vicos early thought and will never completely disappear from his horizon. The tension between infinite divine wisdom and finite human knowledge will be articulated in the Scienza nuova in new forms based on the poiesis, the constructive power of the poetic (NMW 225). Nonetheless, Vicos metaphysics as conceived in the De antiquissima will continue to be important in his major work. As the theory of the conatus and the metaphysical points becomes less and less relevant in light of the new value of the human poiesis, their methodological significance is not disappear, because for Vico the problem of finding a medium between the divine and human knowledge is still important. As Mazzotta writes in the The New Map of the World, [m]arginality and liminality [] are crucial categories of Vicos thought that challenge the tyranny of historicism that, above all in Naples, wills to coerce all experience within the boundaries of the contingent and leaves no real room for metaphysics (NMW 14).
11 12

See Miner, Verum-factum and Practical Wisdom, 6970. See Otto, Interprtation transcendantale, 19, and Milbank, Religious Dimension, 2:32.

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Vico and the beginnings of humanity There are different opinions among scholars in regard to the problem of the continuity between the metaphysics of the De antiquissima and Vicos Scienza nuova. Notably, in her recent work, Vicos Uncanny Humanism, Sandra Rudnick Luft sees a substantial difference between Vicos ideas of the verum factum principle in the two works. She holds that the poetic language that Vico attributes to the first men in the Scienza nuova is a secularization of the linguistic agency of the Poet-God of the Hebrews, a language which is divine because it is creative of the human world.13 In Lufts interpretation the verum factum principle in the Scienza nuova loses the epistemological emphasis it had in the De antiquissima and becomes an ontological principle that identifies humans as makers who create their human world with an ontologically constructive poetic language. Both in Genesis and in Vicos Scienza nuova the origins of humanity are related to an originary linguistic event unconditioned by spiritual or subjective intent or a priori order.14 The idea of creation of the human world in the Scienza nuova is equated by Luft to the biblical conception of creation ex nihilo as an originary event that takes place outside of being. Lufts complete privileging of the theological perspective along with her bracketing of the metaphysical dimension of the De antiquissima is of arguable merit. It is evident that the relationship between physics and metaphysics in the Scienza nuova cannot be the same as in the 1710 treatise. In Vicos masterpiece the verum factum principle as indicative of the human poiesis becomes the master key to open the archeological study of the formation of the human civil world. As Vico writes, his new science is constructivist, like geometry, since mentre sopra i suoi elementi il costruisce o l contempla, essa stessa si faccia il mondo but, he adds, our science creates for itself the world of nations con tanto pi di realit quanta pi ne hanno gli ordini dintorno alle faccende degli uomini, che non ne hanno punti, linee, superficie e figure (SN 349). The problem of the metaphysical foundation of Vicos method nonetheless remains open even in the Scienza nuova, and to understand in what sense Vico speaks of the mos geometricus in his masterpiece one still needs to consider the De antiquissima and the initial formulation of the verum factum principle. Karl Lwith has indicated the onto-theological

13 14

Luft, Vicos Uncanny Humanism, xiv. Luft, Vicos Uncanny Humanism, 35, italics original.

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foundation of Vicos verum factum principle even in the Scienza nuova.15 Milbank holds that divine scientia [], or transcendent verum factum, is seen by Vico as operating as a metaphysical ground for the imperfect human truths of conscientia; it follows that the metaphysical and epistemological accounts of verum factum are compatible: [h]uman beings participate in divine being and divine knowledge.16 Vico does not want to reduce metaphysics to heuristics because he recognizes that along with human history there is the differentiating power of eternity. In his metaphysics, the human world and nature do not completely coincide with the human mind. Historicist readings reduce Vicos Scienza nuova to purely immanent terms and run the risk of condensing it into a set of formulas to explain the actual history of humanity in mechanistic terms. These readings tend to erase the metaphysical nature of Vicos philosophy that is best preserved within the archeological dimension of his hermeneutics of myth, what he identifies with the ages of gods and of heroes. This is the vital dimension of Vicos metaphysical idea of history and points to a study of how humanity came about in fabulous times. This crucial dimension is lost when one focuses only on the third age, the age of humanity, as detached from Vicos fertile mythical and narrative approach to human history, aware of the alterity that is inscribed at the core of the human mind:
[t]he New Science has told [] us that there is a world which is outside the projects and the consciousness of each individual, and this residue, which appears as a form of otherness, is also the place where every human project begins.17

In one of his memorable axioms Giambattista Vico writes, Luomo, per lindiffinita natura della mente umana, ove questa si rovesci nellignoranza, egli fa s regola delluniverso (SN 120). Vico reflects here on Pico della Mirandolas view of man in the Oratio de hominis dignitate (1486), emphasizing the excellence and majesty of the human being set by God at the center of the world as a indiscretae

Lwith, Verum et factum convertuntur, 87. Milbank, Religious Dimension, 1:99, italics original. 17 See NMW 14. This especially happens when one seeks to apply, in an abstract manner, Vicos periodization to concrete historical society and cultures. This is what happens in part with Boturinis Idea de una nueva historia general de la America Septentrional (1746), the first volume of the Historia general de la America septentrional: De la cronologia de sus principales naciones (1749). Boturini knew the 1730 version of Vicos Scienza nuova and followed literally Vicos tripartite division of universal history in applying it to the history of the ancient Mexicans.
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opus imaginis (Dign. 18). However, in dealing with the indefinite nature of the human mind Vicos emphasis is not on human freedom and excellence but on human ignorance. He is still mindful of what he wrote in the De antiquissima: the human mind is indeterminate not because of its imperfect essence but because of the functional and structural distinction between the human verum factum and the divine verum genitum. Human verum factum even though analogous to the divine creation is still contingent and unable to reach complete geometric congruence even in the final version of the Scienza nuova. Vicos accounts of the beginnings of gentile humanity are not based on the idea of creation ex nihilo but on the concrete linguistic and social practices of humans living in the world. The language of the creators of the human world is not self-contained and originary in itself but instead emerges out of imaginative reactions to external stimuli triggered by the natural environment given to humans, of which humans are themselves part. Vico does not solve the ontological problem referring to an abstract idea of nature but certainly in his vision it is not simply a secondary or subordinate element. Humans cannot have complete knowledge of nature because God creates it. The first humans of the gentile world tried to make sense of their surroundings and of their violent passions by inventing natural metaphors and myths. Their creation of the human world is not immediate; it is the result of a dialectic between freedom and necessity and, in Vicos fictive account, receives the first impulse by the mediating power of the conatus that moves the primitives to extrapolate humanitas out of the animalitas of violent passions.18 The beginning of gentile humanity for Vico took place when the primitive bestioni, frightened by thunder and lightning, named the sky Jove, inventing at the same time language, myth, poetry and religion, all out of the fear of Godtimor dei, as Vico says. The first language for Vico is monosyllabic and develops a process of signification based on visual and acoustic elements; it is not the expression of human subjectivity, freedom or action and takes place as an event deeply implicated with nature and the body, as a combination of voices, gestures, bodily expressions and natural phenomena:
i primi uomini, che parlavan per cenni, dalla loro natura credettero i fulmini, i tuoni fussero cenni di Giove [], che Giove comandasse co
18 Vico recalls the theory of the conatus elaborated in the De antiquissima in several important parts of the Scienza nuova, from the section on metodo in the first book to the Conchiusione where he writes that the bestioni to the Conchiusione where he writes that the bestoni limpeto del moto corporeo della libidine dovettero tener in conato to become humans.

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cenni, e tali cenni fussero parole reali, e che la natura fusse la lingua di Giove (SN 379).

Reason and reflection are not a point of departure for human civilization but a later development of a process that originated under the impulse of wild and ferocious passions and was triggered by the conatus, the drive toward infinity and immortality. For Vico the primitive peoples named Jove, Cybele and Neptune as sostanze del cielo, della terra, del mare, chessi immaginarono animate divinit, e perci con verit di sensi gli credevano di (SN 402). Humanity emerges out of the process of naming the substances of the sky, the earth, the sea. The names transcribe the living experience through the support of the voice and give substance to the world experienced; they create signs, a system of measurement and knowledge that constitutes at the same time a conquest and an alienation. The names are extensions of the body; humans do not give them out of nothing but from the bodys actual interaction with the natural environment. They create the conditions for becoming human and at the same time engender difference as the interruption of immediacy in relation to nature. Vicos Scienza nuova shows that behind the cultural and conventional meaning of words there is something wild deeply related to the body and elemental passions:
stato ricevuto con troppo di buona fede da tutti i filologi: chelleno significassero a placito; perchesse, per queste loro origini naturali, debbon aver significato naturalmente. [] nella lingua vulgar latina [] quasi tutte le voci ha formate per trasporti di nature o per propiet naturali o per effetti sensibili (SN 444).

The natural significations of words originate in the monosyllabic screams expressing great emotions, in an immediate and reciprocal dialogue in which human and natural languages pervasively intersect. There is a significant convergence between Vicos idea of the origin of language and that of French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty, like Vico, radically distinguishes his ideas from those of Descartes. For both Vico and Merleau-Ponty, Descartess philosophyas represented in the famous cogito ergo sum has detached the conscious subject from the world that is given in experience and has thus created the illusion that humans completely make the nature that is given to them. By refusing what he calls the bori[a] de dotti (SN 124) and pointing to an originary, pre-cultural and unspoken element about the relation of humans to nature, Vico anticipated Merleau-Pontys idea

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of intercorporeality originating human relations with nature.19 Vicos poetic language and Merleau-Pontys idea of perception do not refer to a process by which human consciousness knows nature and the external world as neutral, separated and conventional objects. Poetic language and perception, on the contrary, are behaviors affected by the body, not as an observer but as a living and active body, participating in the life of nature. In this way, humanity emerges not as a substance, an essence, not comme imposition dun pour soi un corps en soi, but as intertre, interbeing, as an event in which the body is interposed in the circuit of the world.20 Vicos humanism Vicos conatus can be considered a metaphysical figure of the intercorporeality from which humanity emerges. As was already the case with in the De antiquissima, the efficacy of this abstract idea is arguable also in the Scienza nuova but it maintains a methodological value that cannot be neglected. Nonetheless, in Vicos Scienza nuova humanity itself, rather than conatus, becomes the real medium between the infinity of God and the finite nature to which humans still belong. The poiesis of the De antiquissima is expanded in the Scienza nuova to include all the sciences and human arts. Vico is now ready to see a verum in every human factum.21 However, the tension between the two dimensions at the core of Vicos metaphysics remains operative in the conception of an Ideal Eternal History. Vicos idea of humanity is not static but dynamic. Dynamism is implicit in the human condition, the distinctive feature of which is neither the infinity of God nor the finitude of nature, but precisely the productive and living tension between the two dimensions. Humanity for Vico is not a given or revealed reality but a process of artifactual and cultural creation that is implicated both with the finitude of the body and the infinity of God, as the concept of Divine Providence elaborated in the Scienza nuova testifies. Becoming human for Vico includes not only an ontological creative process but also the alienation of the knowledge produced in human institutions and the civil world. The symbiosis between biology and technology that according to contemporary theorists is the main feature of a supposedly posthuman creature has its fundamental premises in the creation of the
See Merleau-Ponty, Nature, 278288. Merleau-Ponty, Nature, 270, italics original. 21 See Greco, Dualismo e Poiesis, 533.
19 20

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human world as described by Vico. Becoming human for Vico means first and foremost creating an extension of the human body, through naming and by virtue of the voice. It is possible to consider the human voice and originary naming as the first form of what we see nowadays as technological extensions, prostheses of the body regulated by algorithms, finite sequences of logic instructions and procedures for problem solving and data processing.22 Vicos Jove is the first manifestation of a practical and cultural function analogous to the one played by algorithms in contemporary mathematics, computing, linguistics and related subjects. The encounter between biology and technology is not a recent acquisition of human culture but the ancestral event of nature and human consciousness. For Vico it first appeared in the intercorporality that generated the human world: for him the problem is to understand the constant dynamism implicit in becoming human, rather than speculate on a human or posthuman essence. The human world emerges as an event in which linguistic extensions of the human body produce cultural artifacts, voices, images and figures comprehensive of the natural world. These figures, such as Jove, are not the product of a subjective agency, but the impersonal sensus communis of human society as emerging from the natural environment. Thus, Vicos humanism moves away from both traditional humanist and subjectivist ideas of humanity and from theological views of the human being created as an imago dei. The metaphysical mind can comprehend itself only in relation to Divine Providence, conceived as an eternal and superior mind participating in the enigma of time. Human reason is not completely self-sufficient, nor is it able to fully grasp the human factum or what still remains outside of the human facere. Human history is not the pure and intentional product of human action: for this fundamental reason Vicos nuova arte critica, as the combination of philology and philosophy, is still related to Divine Providence. This also explains why in the conclusion of the Scienza nuova he continues to admit that quite often humans, for their lack of reason and their inability to know history as they make it, have to resign themselves to the inscrutable counsels hidden in the abisso della provvedenza divina (SN 948). The methodological value of Vicos Providence in the Scienza nuova is still within the realm of his metaphysics and represents the return and the new form of the metaphysical problem first elaborated in the De antiquissima.
University of Oregon
22

Sini, Uomo, macchina, automa, 55.