Harfield - The Occasions of Community: Giambattista Vico and the Concept of Society

Giambattista Vico and the Concept of Society

Timothy D. Harfield

Foreword by Donald Phillip Verene

I t is a pleasure to add a voice of acclaim to Timothy Harfields views of community and society, especially as they originate from Vicos masterpiece, Principles of New Science concerning the Common Nature of the Nations . Vico, and Hegel after him, are the founders of the modern philosophy of history. Both teach us, in different ways, that anything human is properly understood only when we begin from its origin and elicit the necessary phases of its development. In the human world each thing lives a lifehas a beginning and an end.

Human society, for Vico, begins in poetic wisdom ( la sapienza poetica ), or what in contemporary terms would be called mythic thought, an age in which all events of nature and all forms of human activity are full of gods. This sense of the origin of human thought and society leads Cassirer, in the fourth volume of his Problem of Knowledge , to call Vico the real discoverer of the myth. As Vico says, in one of the axioms of his science, Doctrines must take their beginning from that of the matters of which they treat. In accordance with this axiom, Vico says that the first science to be learned should be mythology or the interpretation of fables.

Our understanding of human society must begin with a grasp of the rituals and myths in terms of which human beings first order the world. Vicos new science takes the ladder of human life a rung lower than Hegels science of the experience of consciousness that begins in his Phenomenology of Spirit with sense-certainty ( die sinnliche Gewissheit ), a stage in which the gods have already disappeared and consciousness has achieved the ability to apprehend its objects as pure sense-particulars.

To regard the human world as having a definite beginning is also to realize that any nation or society within the human world comes to a definite end. The life of any nation runs its course ( corso ). At the end of its course is not Hegels Absolute, unless we see Hegels Absolute as a vision of the presence of Providence in history. In another of his axioms, Vico says, Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance. No society outlives history. All rise and fall within it. As Stephen says, in Joyces Ulysses , History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

Societies, in Vicos view, fall apart because they lose their original power of imagination ( fantasia ) to keep in touch with the divine and because they fail to preserve the customs that make human beings truly human. As Rousseau puts it, in his Discourses , Finally, men chased the gods out in order to live in the temples themselves. Nations are consumed by the subtleties of malicious wits, and become scenes of the citizens following their own inclinations to pleasure and caprice, dissolving politics into ideologies and regarding laws not as instructions in civil wisdom but as obstacles to be circumvented on behalf of their own opinions and desires.

Vico says that in this state of society people are turned into beasts made more inhuman by the barbarism of reflection than the first men had been made by the barbarism of sense. The end of a nation is marked by the onset of a rational madness, by the minds eye seeing by lamplight rather than by the sun. Providentially, however, the end of a corso is also the condition for a new beginning, a ricorso , in which human society can attempt again to reach the state of a republica rule of the bestthat is eternally present as an ideal for those who can grasp it.

The bibliography of works on Vico in English fills a volume of more than two hundred pages. Those in Italian and other languages expand this list multiple times, not including Nicolinis early, two-volume Bibliografia Vichiana . Yet, in this large body of literature, little has been devoted to the concept of society that derives from Vico. It is our good fortune that Harfields important study allows us to begin to fill this gap.

Donald Phillip Verene

Charles Howard Candler Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy

Director of the Institute for Vico Studies

Emory University