Vico or Nietzsche?

Vico: Genealogist of Modernity, by Robert C. Miner, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. 232 pp.

WHEN GIAMBATTISTA VICO died in 1744, his funeral degenerated into a public controversy as the faculty of the University of Naples, where he taught, and members of the Confraternity of Santa Sofia, to which he had belonged, argued over which group should provide the pallbearers. The funeral procession was even delayed and the body left overnight in the deceased scholar's home as the disputants worked out an agreement.

The episode serves well as a symbol of Vico's intellectual legacy, which has been subject to much debate, controversy, and delayed appreciation. An obscure, poorly paid professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples for most of his academic career, Vico left behind a sprawling, puzzling body of work, at once anachronistic and prescient, historical and mythic, secular and religious, Christian and classical--and bristling with penetrating insights scattered amid long-winded analyses of dubious scholarly merit. His Principi di una scienza nuova (New Science), first published in 1725, has been widely hailed as a landmark in the history of ideas, a bold apologetic for the "human sciences" in a milieu in which the likes of Galileo, Newton, Bacon, and Descartes had championed inquiry into the natural world as the template for all human knowing.

Vico's countervailing emphasis on humanistic inquiry--what the German scholar Wilhelm Dilthey would later popularize as the Geisteswissenschaften or "spiritual sciences"--has largely been responsible for an interest in Vico that during the last century has engaged some of the most influential intellectuals in Europe and America, including Benedetto Croce, Karl Lamprecht, Aby Warburg, Karl Lowith, Erich Auerbach, Isaiah Berlin, Arnaldo Momigliano, Hayden White, and John Milbank, among others.

While Vico has been recognized for many things, it is above all his approach to history that has garnered the most attention. As the New Science makes clear, the past must be approached in its own terms. Judgments about distant epochs may be made, but they must be preceded by painstaking analysis of the social, political, and legal conditions of the time: otherwise, one ends up imposing one's own views on the past. Such an imposition, according to Vico, not only forecloses the possibility of a historical understanding of cultures remote in time, but it also prevents a developed culture from penetrating its own past and thereby gaining genuine self-understanding. Because he developed methods of historical inquiry reflecting this view, Vico has frequently been judged an early voice of "historicism" and a precursor of secular professional historiography, which subsequently got fully underway with the rise of the modern German university in the late eighteenth century.

While Robert Miner does not downplay Vico's contribution to modern historical thought and historiography, he focuses our attention on other aspects of Vico's achievement. In particular, Miner wants us to view Vico as a profoundly Christian thinker (similar to Augustine in many respects), and one prescient and creative in his misgivings of modernity. Miner equates modernity largely (but not exclusively) with the Cartesian project of acquiring rational knowledge modeled on mathematics and the Baconian project of deploying scientific knowledge to achieve human mastery over nature.

Although it is not always explicit in Vico's writings, Miner contends that the deepest wellsprings of his thought flow from religious sources, something either taken for granted, and therefore not fleshed out, or altogether ignored by Vico's more secular commentators. While Vico had great esteem for classical antiquity, particularly the thought of Plato and Aristotle, his esteem, like Augustine's before him, was tempered by the Christian insistence that "revelation" had transfigured the conditions and possibilities of human knowing. In commenting on Vico's views of pagan religious rituals and sacrifices, for example, Miner observes:

  This perspective is the standpoint of Catholic Christianity, the
  standpoint from which Vico consistently distinguishes the Hebrews from
  the gentiles. Insofar as it takes Hebrew culture as normative, the
  standard to which the pagans must constantly be compared, the Scienza
  nuova constitutes an ongoing judgment, contra gentiles. In both its
  origins and its development, pagan culture is judged as inferior to
  what is humanly possible with the assistance of divine grace. It is
  exposed as evil, in the Augustinian sense of the term; it is vitiated
  by the absence of good that ought to be present.

Moreover, while Vico admired the political and legal achievements of Rome, Miner reminds us that he never forgot "the distortive role of cupiditas in human affairs" and therefore "harbor[ed] a deep pessimism about the ultimate ability of the City of Man to sustain itself."

Vico's criticisms of pagan antiquity, mutatis mutandis, apply as well to the modern age, which was coming into its own during Vico's lifetime. Although Vico finds much to admire in the thinkers of the Scientific Revolution, he sought to deflate the pretensions of modern thought by tracing their roots in genealogical fashion back to historical, pagan, and human-all-too-human beginnings. This understanding of Vico as a "genealogist," exposing the wobbly scaffolding supporting modernity's loftiest claims, provides the leitmotif of the entire book.

Miner's discussion of Vico's genealogical understanding of modern mathematics offers a typical case in point. In contrast to the moderns, who saw in advancing mathematics a telltale sign of humanity's forward march, Vico subversively sought to demonstrate, most forcefully in his De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (1710), that mathematical knowledge arose from "a radical deficiency of the human mind." In humankind's prelapsarian state, Vico argued, the mind and nature were integrated and human beings possessed a direct, almost godlike understanding of the essence and order of things. After the Fall, however, this direct knowledge was no longer available; our distant ancestors had to resort to more proximate means of knowledge through "abstraction." Although unable to know the truth about the world as such, through a mixture of mental abilities that survived the Fall and a prideful curiosity, man was able to generate "a kind of world of forms and numbers [i.e., mathematics] which he can embrace entirely himself." Vico admits that such knowledge (like many aspects of modernity) is immensely useful, and in a qualified sense, a genuine human good.

But Vico's mathematics is not the epistemological--indeed, metaphysical--high road that it was for Descartes; rather, it is an entirely human project forever compromised by its origins in human vice and limitation. Miner concludes:

  In exposing the roots of mathematics in the vice of the human mind--
  understood as the desire of human curiositas to "seek a truth denied
  to him by nature"--Vico put forward a narrative that is meant to shock
  and discomfit its typical practitioners.... [Mathematical truths] are
  not eternal verities to be contemplated timelessly, but truths that
  come to be through the agency of creative processes whose ultimate
  warrant is deeply suspect, however useful its fruits. Although he
  avoids complete denial of its certainty or utility, Vico has in fact
  removed mathematics from its Cartesian pedestal.

It is clear throughout the book that Miner is rather self-conscious in applying to Vico the term "genealogist," a word more associated these days with Nietzsche, whom Miner regards as his (and presumably Vico's) intellectual adversary. The affinities between Nietzsche and Vico's intellectual style, however, lead Miner to discuss the two in juxtaposition. Both sought to expose the pretensions of modernity through a process of genealogical decoding, each relying on a variant of historical and philological analysis, but an analysis informed by certain intellectual commitments, not value-free neutrality. Nietzsche, of course, sought to castigate modern civilization by tracing its "deep structure" back to the truth-seeking impulses bequeathed by Socrates, Plato, and Christianity (or what he famously called "Platonism for the masses")--impulses ultimately rooted in a mendacious will to power masquerading as intellectual and moral virtue.

Vico's project, too, sought to unseat certain aspects of modern thought--not only by emphasizing our postlapsarian limitations (as in the case of mathematics) but also by claiming to have discovered unsettling continuities between the culture of secular modernity and pagan practices of idolatry, divination, and religious sacrifice. What separates the two anti-modernists, Nietzsche and Vico, is that Nietzsche, in the final analysis, is something of a one-trick pony, whose only intellectual skill is genealogical unmasking. But if one exercises this skill in extremis, Miner implies, one is led to nihilistic despair, as all certainties--even the putative postmodern certainty of exposing all certainties--become steadily bereft of intellectual or existential justification. By contrast, Vico, though a "genealogist of modernity" not unlike Nietzsche, kept one foot resolutely in the Catholic-Augustinian tradition. This tradition supplied him with the normative intellectual resources to offer qualified esteem for both classical and modern thought, while also making him acutely aware of their limitations and overweening pretensions.

If the modern or "Enlightenment project" has failed, as a chorus of postmodernist voices tell us, then we are indeed left in a situation where we must choose a different path. However, for Miner that new path immediately forks and we must choose again, not necessarily between Nietzsche and Aristotle, as Alasdair MacIntyre famously claimed in his much-discussed After Virtue (1981) but rather between Vico and Nietzsche. For both, unlike Aristotle, have borne witness to modernity's beneficial and baneful aspects. However, the two unmodern paths posited by Miner lead, finally, in radically different directions: to Rome or at least to the seat of the former Bishop of Hippo (in the case of Miner's Vico) or to the sanitarium (in the case of Nietzsche).

These are of course grand claims for a slender volume, and one might naturally wonder whether Miner's extensive time with Vico's texts have led him to magnify their author's importance beyond the pale of prudence. Is Miner himself guilty, in other words, of what Vico called the "conceit of scholars"? To a degree, perhaps. Still, Miner has given us nourishing food for thought, and this work deserves attention, not least for Miner's meticulous scholarship. If it does not in the end convince one that Vico is humanity's last best hope this side of modernity, it should at least rekindle an interest in this engaging, often neglected Neapolitan thinker. In particular, the book helps render intelligible the theological underpinnings of Vico's thought, the breadth and drama of his intellectual endeavor, and the similarities (and crucial differences) between Vico's thought and those ubiquitous, corrosive strains of "genealogy" afoot today that we recognize as the offspring of Nietzsche.

THOMAS ALBERT HOWARD is Associate Professor of History and the founding director of the Jerusalem and Athens Forum at Gordon College.