Here, I explore the life and works of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) who was one of the most astute critics of Cartesian modernism (rooted in the false belief that we have a Transcendental Soul called an "I" and that everything outside of that "I" is contingent whereas the ego alone is necessary and certain.  N.B.: In truth, the Cartesian subject appears more like a god than a man.). 

 

Vico was skeptical of closed systematic accounts of reality that bely a false sense of self-mastery and reductionist accounts of knowledge.   Often hastily described as the first 'historicist', what he claimed was that all human knowledge was fundamentally historical due to its reliance upon signs and figures that had a historical origin in themselves (hence, his fondness for yielding ethnography from etymology).   A believer in the "Great Chain of Being", Vico did not deny a Transcendental reality behind the events that humanity was mired in.  He simply said that mankind could only indirectly sense the meaning of their civilization through the logic of historical development itself but only when acquainted with the origins of things as half-remembered in the obscured histories of language, law, custom.

 

A Neoplatonist often mistaken as a modern sociologist, Vico also maintained that the unfolding of this historical development was not attributed to the users of such signs and figures directly, so much as Divine Providence at work behind the development of cultures in the patterned unfolding of institutions, traditions, and the civic makeup of human societies that responded to the actual natural needs and proclivities that arise spontaneously in humankind (e.g. marriage arose institutionally from the twin need of staving off unruly desire and fruitfully achieving procreation-- but also the fear of Heaven to solemnize such unions.  According to Vico, divine terror misattributed to lightening and storms still imprinted itself upon Fallen Humanity).

 

In short, there is a human nature in Vico's thought, but that nature is the working out, or "development", of historical beings with recursive self-knowledge that often obscures the truth just as often as it preserves it in collective memory!  This recursiveness is in fact the essence of culture (even if Vico doesn't much use that term): e.g. speaking German, cooking Sauerbraten, or not understanding a joke can in principle be learned and reproduced with both continuity and variation, such as reading Goethe in the 21st century, putting a twist on Oma's recipes, or continuing to not understand the joke that is the European Union!  Not only can cultural tropes or "memes" be learned, but they have a long track record of being learned one generation after the next. 

Cultures are learnable but not totally explicable and form the individual within a living community that the individual cannot fully comprehend (after all, he or she was not there at the beginning; hence, the need for piety or respect not to speak for the past but to listen).  Cultures are inherited, not engineered ex nihilo.  The problem with the modern world is that it believes that it can engineer everything-- including the self.  This has led to centuries of self-mutilation and outright atrocity in the Dr. Frankenstein pursuit of perfection.  At the political level, you get the Cult of Reason, Communism, Fascism, Liberal Consumerism.  What we get in the end is horror.

 

While acknowledging that man only knows what he himself constructs through time (and somewhat arbitrarily in terms of the facts and details of his half-remembered pursuits), Vico was an opponent of the idea that this process took place on a blank canvas.  Again, humanity is not something to be engineered but nurtured.  We are not built, but raised.  To understand who we are is to raise historical questions and not merely zoological ones.  Human knowledge pursues this end and is accumulative and builds upon itself, but it cannot truly be called "knowledge" if the whole is not understood as synthesis of the parts.  This is why culture draws its terminology from an agricultural reference, not an industrial one.  Unlike designers who draw upon a blank page, agrarians work with the landscape.  There is a kind of healthy respect for what one knows well, but familiarity is not the same as understanding.

 

Thus, history as a question of synthesis mattered to Vico-- indeed, greatly so.  That said, history could only explain so much...  On the other side of history was Providence where all the answers were and where the outcome of things were being played out.  To this end, the other side of Vico is often forgotten by modern scholars: that he saw himself as an inheritor and great synthesizer of ancient thought of the Platonic tradition, particularly as it related to the metaphysical basis of legal tradition (Vico was a lawyer) and the constitution of civil and religious institutions.

 

Given this blog's interest in exploring the traditional sources of Theological Semiotics & its application to Biosemiotics for a metaphysically impoverished modernity long poisoned by the hateful mélange of inhumane techno-pragmatism, arbitrary abstractionism and naive empiricism and entitled sentimentalism (on top of the actual poisoning of the "Environment" and normalization of medically procured murder among a host of other lab-created abominations), the use of Vico for spiritual AND civic ends is of the greatest urgency... 

 

To each of these modern tendencies of the self-reliant, I must say on behalf of the great Neapolitan sage: (1) Man doesn't truly know what he wants; thus, his "pragmatism" counts for little in the end because he doesn't recognize a permanent end to anything (And alas, he is mortal!  And so surely recognizes permanent ends: namely, an end to himself!  Does he not?); (2) Man can build his large crystal palaces high in the sky to boast of himself, and is free to do so as long as he has breath enough to boast and breath enough to build crystal palaces, but he need be mindful that such impressive edifices of his creative insights are not constructed on shifting sands (unfortunately, history reminds us that they always are.  Utopianism tends in the end towards mass murder.); and (3) Why do you believe your senses above all else when your senses has been proven inadequate for the task time and time again? 

 

NOTE: Vico was not a religious thinker exactly, even if a devout lay Catholic in a traditionally Catholic society, and this is an important distinction to the mind of modern men and women who think of "God" primarily in religious terms (as opposed to natural terms of philosophy); rather, Vico was a juris doctor of the natural law who understood historical development of legal traditions and, more importantly, their metaphysical presuppositions.  I hope in this section to recover the notion that "GOD" is also central to legal history (e.g. "act of God" and insurance law, etc.) among other disciplines of a worldly orientation.  I want to provide the domestic churches with knowledge of what intellectual life was like before God became entirely sequestered into matters of religion only.

[MORE TO COME]