Philosophy and Rhetoric in Vico’s Thought^*

^*This article was originally published with errors. This version has been corrected. Please see Erratum (https://doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2017.1282005).

Abstract

Vico’s thought is an attempt to discover a method, that is, a new science, whereby rhetoric and philosophy, politics and knowledge, would complement and inform one another. His method refuses to subordinate one to the other, and sees both as necessary to each other. At the same time, it understands the relation between philosophy and rhetoric in historical and social terms, and investigates the manner in which the former emerges from the other, such that the former looks back on its beginnings and is able to discover itself in its birth and infancy. Thus Vico’s critical and historical thought envisions reason and philosophy as the products of a long and durable struggle to achieve a civil way of living, a process whose beginnings are found in the imaginative and poetic power of speech and language.

Keywords:

• verum/factum
• logos
• consciousness
• knowledge
• conflict
• history

View correction statement:

Erratum

Notes

^* This article was originally published with errors. This version has been corrected. Please see Erratum (https://doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2017.1282005).

¹ Citations from the 1975 English translation by T.G. Bergin and M.H. Fisch are given in numbered paragraphs.

² Vico does not simply take the ancients as they represent themselves. He launches a rigorous criticism of their culture and thought. At the same time, their intellectual culture and their history provide a springboard and a scaffolding from which he attempts to reconstruct the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric and between science and philology. Vico, 2002: 12–13, 27–31. See Caponigri, 1968: 55–70.

³ What matters here is not whether or not Vico accepts the truth of Christianity, but that he sees pagan religion as the product of human activity. This in itself is an implicit questioning of Christianity’s story of its origins. In this regard see Vico, 1975: J3–J4.

⁴ See Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, 1170a25–34: “[….] if one who sees is conscious that he sees, one who hears that he hears, one who walks that he walks, and similarly for all other human activities there is a faculty that is conscious of their exercise, so that whenever we perceive, we are conscious that we perceive, and whenever we think, we are conscious that we think, and to be conscious that we are perceiving or thinking is to be conscious that we exist (for existence, as we saw, is sense-perception or thought) […].”

⁵ I use the term “post-modern” to refer to our current sensitivity to historical contingency, and our awareness of multiple socio-cultural contexts as well as to the importance of history and the historical method. Distinctions between philosophy and the history of philosophy, and ideas and the history of ideas, underline our contemporary belief in the historical and social relativity of thought. Concomitantly, the notions that humanity makes its own history and that human nature and its embodiments in sociopolitical institutions are constructs that change, relative to space and time, and are embedded in today’s Zeitgeist. This way of thinking is a major element in today’s hegemonic conception of the world and can be traced to Vico. Vico delineates the movement of human consciousness as it moves in history, taking different and multiple forms as it expresses, and becomes embedded in, a concrete society at a given historical period. Our historical and social self-awareness would not be what it is without Vico, yet this very fact seems to lessen Vico's novelty and his significant innovations in thought.

⁶ On conflict and rhetoric, Vico explicitly refers to Tacitus’ Dialogus de oratoribus (37–41), in which Vico attributes to Tacitus the opinion that “liberty and eloquence are on a par.” To the extent that conflict and competition flourish under republican institutions a close connection surely exists between free government and free speech, though the connection between rhetoric and conflict is not confined to free republics. See Vico, 1975: 1043, 1101–1102; and Manson, 1969: 46–48.

⁷ In a reference to “The Civic Skepticism of the Romans,” Vico asks: “Did the Romans make their solemn declarations with words like videri (seem) and parere (appear) and their oaths with ex animi sui sententia (according to his state of the spirit) because they thought that no one could make his spirit quite empty of passions, and because they had a religious awe in judging and swearing, lest they perjure themselves if matters stood otherwise than they thought?” (Vico, 1988: 89).

⁸ Vico writes that “[p]hilosophy contemplates reason, whence comes knowledge of the true; philology observes that of which human choice is the author, whence comes consciousness of the certain. This axiom by its second part includes among the philologians all the grammarians, historians, critics, who have occupied themselves with the study of the languages and deeds of peoples: deeds at home, as in their customs and laws, and deeds abroad, as in their wars, peaces, alliances, travels, and commerce. This same axiom shows how the philosophers failed by half in not giving certainty to their reasonings by appeal to the authority of the philologians, and likewise how the latter failed by half in not taking care to give their authority the sanction of truth by appeal to the reasoning of the philosophers. If they had done this they would have been more useful to their commonwealths and they would have anticipated us in conceiving this Science” (Vico, 1975: 138–140).

⁹ Vico says in the Institutiones (1996: 4) that “rhetoric or eloquence is the ability to speak persuasively.” (See also Quintilian: 2.15.1–22). Without this ability the truth and knowledge to which philosophy aspires could not be communicated, nor could it be transmitted across space and time.

¹⁰ In On the Study Methods of Our Time, Vico emphasizes the importance and the necessity of place and time, of contingency and context. He says that “human events are dominated by Chance and Choice, which are extremely subject to change and which are strongly influenced by simulation and dissimulation (both preeminently deceptive things. […Thus] those whose only concern is abstract truth experience great difficulty in achieving their ends. […] Since, then, the course of action in life must consider the importance of single events and their circumstances, it may happen that many of these circumstances are extraneous and trivial, some of them bad, some even contrary to one’s goal. It is therefore impossible to assess human affairs by the inflexible standard of abstract right; we must rather gauge them by the pliant Lesbic rule, which does not conform bodies to itself, but adjusts itself to contours” (34). The irreducible uniqueness of historical events, and their unpredictability due to chance and to choice, make abstract reason and absolute truth useless both in the conduct of human affairs as well as in attempting to understand them. From this can be seen the importance of place, time and specific contexts and also the centrality of decorum and to prepon. Vico’s formula “simulation and dissimulation” is noteworthy. It recalls chapter 18 of Machiavelli’s The Prince, in which he redirects and reframes the traditional virtues, and redefines them in the service of the “new prince,” the founder of new modes and orders. Thus deception is inextricably intertwined with the founding of Vico’s “mondo civile.” In this sense, the “truth” of a political order, or of a social institution, is intimately interwoven with myth-making and dissimulation. Thus too the paradox: philosophy and the quest for knowledge, which are only possible within a civil and political order, spring from deception and dissimulation. See also Vico, 1975: 1035–1036, 1043.