Vico and Modern Scientism

Abstract

The aspect of Giambattista Vico’s work most relevant to contemporary debates is the one least addressed in the often brilliant scholarship on his work. We hear of the verum/factum distinction, his work on Roman law, his theories of rhetoric, and his cyclical view of history, but his critique of scientism (as distinct from the natural sciences, to which he was drawn) receives little attention. This critique of scientism — the sterile rationalism of the deductive method, the application of natural laws to cultural facts, the invasion of scientific methods into humanist inquiry — took the form not only of a famous set of one-sided debates with Descartes, Spinoza, and Locke, but in his philosophical challenge to the “paralogisms” (Vico, Opere 1.145) of the major figures of the scientific Enlightenment. In a period like our own that seeks alternative intellectual traditions to undergird new political and ethical turns, Vico is the original enfant terrible confronting today’s scientistic incursions into literary theory (surface reading, distant reading) as well as the posthuman strains of science studies itself (Hayles, Latour). By contrast, he offers us a concise argument for the impossibility of any science that does not account for the civic origins of all inquiry.

Keywords:

• scientism
• materialism
• civic theology
• modern Stoicism
• modern Epicureanism
• labor
• general intellect
• the posthuman

Notes

¹ Unpublished speech, Santiniketan, India (2012).

² “quaedam naturae anatome,” and “hominem in corpus et animum, et animum in intellectum ac voluntatem dissecuit”.

³ “ingenium facultas est in unum dissita, diversa coniungendi”; through which “homo est capax contemplandi ac faciendi similia”.

⁴ “‘strict mathematical method’ that ‘from a few principles draws an infinite number of consequences’”

⁵ “vulgo describebant animantem ‘rationis participem’, non compotem usquequaque”; the human subject, rather “percipit, iudicat, ratiocinatur: sed saepe percipit falsa, saepe temere iudicat, perperam saepe ratiocinatur”

⁶ “geometria a metaphysica suum verum accipit, et acceptum in ipsam metaphysicam refundit: hoc est ad scientiae divinae instar humanam exprimit, et ab humana divinam rursus confirmat”

⁷ “et altera via in mechanicam, altera in civilem doctrinam”

⁸ “principem omni mala regni arte, qua suum Cornelius Tacitus et Nicolaus Macchiavellus imbuerunt, integrum formas”

⁹ See also The New Science: 8.

¹⁰ “riconosciuta eguale in tutti” is it able to “unicamente provenire alle nazioni i filosofi, i quali sappiano compierlo [il diritto di uguaglianza] per raziocini sopra le massime di un giusto eterno”

¹¹ Latour settles instead for the recursive, which is to say, for declarations insistently restated in lieu of argument. Quasi-object and quasi subjects, he asserts “are real, quite real, and we humans have not made them. But they are collective because they attach us to one another, because they circulate in our hands and define our social bond by their very circulation. They are discursive, however they are narrated, historical, passionate, and peopled with actants of autonomous forms. They are unstable and hazardous, existential, and never forget Being” (89).

¹² Latour asserts that modernity is defined by a categorical separation between nature and culture, and this illusion of separation is what he denies. But consider how Hegel, whom Latour dismisses as the paradigm of such modernity, belies any such categorical separation, exposing Latour’s straw man. In Elements of the Philosophy of Right Hegel observes: “As far as nature is concerned, it is readily admitted that philosophy must recognize it as it is, that the philosopher’s stone lies hidden somewhere, but within nature itself, that nature is rational within itself, and that it is this actual reason present within it which knowledge must investigate and grasp conceptually — not the shapes and contingencies which are visible on the surface, but nature’s eternal harmony, conceived, however, as the law and essence immanent within it” (12).

¹³ The academic reception of Latour has been politically unruffled and largely positive despite its Eurocentrism, quietism, and violent non-sequiturs. See, for example, Herrnstein Smith (2012).