The order of ideas must follow the order of institutions.
This was the order of human institutions,
first the forests, after that the huts,
next the villages, then the cities,
and finally the academies.
Men first feel necessity, then look for utility.
Next, attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure,
then screw disillusioned luxury, and finally go mad,
and waste their substance.
The nature of peoples is first crude, then severe, then benign,
then delicate, finally disolute.
In the human race first appear, the huge and grotesque,
like the Cyclops, then the proud and magnanimous, like Achilles,
then the valorous, and just like Scipio-Africanus.
Near to us imposing figures with great
semblance of virtue accompanied by great vices,
like Alexander and Caesar, still later the melancholy and reflective,
like Tiberius, finally the disolute and shameless madman,
like Caligula, Nero, and Domitian.
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In title opinions coming to you from KZSU on the Stanford campus,
a few select quotes from John Batista-Vico's new science
to start us off.
A few weeks ago, I promised to show on Vico and many of you
cheered, so welcome to our crystal ship.
In title opinions is setting off on gold and sail under the horizon
to the wondrous continent called the Sien Sunwold.
When Vico died in 1744, his work was known only
to a handful of intellectuals in his native city of Naples,
where he had held a poorly paid minor professorship in rhetoric
for some 40 years.
I don't know how he did it, but in a small house full of children
in a boisterous city, he wrote one of the most original
and probing books of his age.
The third and definitive edition of which was published
at his own expense with his last pennies the year he died.
Isaiah Berlin puts it well, I quote him.
Vico's life and fate provide the best of all known examples
of what is too often dismissed as a romantic fiction.
The story of a man of original genius born before his time,
forced to struggle in poverty and illness, misunderstood,
and largely neglected in his lifetime,
and all but totally forgotten after his death.
Finally, when after many years he has at last exhumed
and acclaimed by an astonished nation as one of its greatest thinkers,
it is only to be widely misrepresented and misinterpreted.
Vico's exhumation began in the 1820s when the French historian
Journ Mieschlei discovered him.
Mieschlei, one of the trustees of entitled opinions I'll add,
was seized by a frenzy when he read Vico's new science,
those are his words.
He immediately set out to translate an abridged version of it into French,
and that's when Vico started coming to the attention of people
like Coleridge, Marx, Carl von Sevigny, Diltai, and Matthew Arnold,
and later to Robin Collingwood, Eric Auerbach, and Ernst Casier.
And then of course there's James Joyce, who discovered him on his own,
and whose finnegan's wake creatively recast Vico's theory of the course so and recourse so,
the historical course and recourse of nations.
More about that later.
These days, Vico is often referred to as the forerunner of various developments
in 19th and 20th century intellectual history,
historicism, idealism, Marxism, the human sciences, and much else besides.
For what it's worth, I'm less interested in reading Vico forward than I am
and following the path he opened into the poetic wisdom of the primitive human psyche.
As he had done for Mieshle, Vico reached out from the Stygian forest
and handed me the golden bow that allows a living person to descend into the underworld
and commune with the dead in their own archaic tropes and tongues.
Where the age of enlightenment looked ahead, Vico looked back into prehistory,
and by looking back he actually saw into the future as befits a theorist of divination.
For René Descartes and other enlightened rationalists, our human past was a forest of ignorance, prejudice, and superstition
of error and error to use Descartes analogy.
Descartes resolved not to believe a word of what he was taught in school,
to doubt everything that was handed down by history and tradition,
and he went so far as to distrust the immediate evidence of his own sense perceptions.
After all, the Copernican Revolution had made a mockery of our sense that the sun and other stars revolve around the earth.
If you couldn't trust that, what could you trust?
In some Descartes asked himself, "What can I know for sure?"
and set out to found a whole new method for achieving certainty of knowledge.
It was a method based on mathematics in particular algebraic geometry.
Whatever is not susceptible to mathematical analysis,
and that includes history, law, institutions, language, myth, art,
in short everything that we call the humanities, Descartes excluded from the domain of science.
Vico, who knew Descartes' work well, had a very different concept of science and certainty,
based on an epistemological principle that he formulated in his book, "The Antiquisima,"
In English, the ancient wisdom of the Italians,
it's known as the Varum-Factum principle,
namely that one can know with certainty only what one makes or is capable of making.
I quote Vico, "Varum, the true, and Factum, the maid are interchangeable or better convertible."
So, if mathematics and geometry are true, it's because we humans invent the line, the circle, the dot, the triangle,
just as we ourselves create numbers and their relations.
Most experimental scientists today, whether they're aware of it or not,
subscribe to a version of the Varum-Factum principle.
A basic criterion of truth in the modern sciences is repeatability.
You know it if you can reproduce it. If you can measure it, if you can recreate the phenomenon in a lab.
Even predicting in eclipse is a way of putting together or remaking the elements in question.
The human mind is essentially synthetic and knows by making or remaking.
Today, we have the means to recombine genetic material.
We produce subatomic particles in our colliders, we transplant livers and hearts.
Yet, Vico's principle still stands.
We are not the primary creators of nature, therefore we can know it only relatively and recursively.
Or, as Vico says, we know the natural world from the outside.
When it comes to the civil world, on the other hand, things are different.
We can know the civil world from the inside since we humans are its authors.
This is what Vico means by a new science, namely a science of history,
a science of human institutions, along with the principles that determine they're coming into being.
In the new science, Vico declares, I quote, "In the night of thick darkness,
in developing the earliest antiquity, their shines the never-failing light of a truth beyond all question.
That the world of civil society has certainly been made by men,
and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind."
That statement not only reiterates the very own fact of principle,
it also postulates that the human mind is by nature retentive,
that its past modes of thought are conserved and carried over into its subsequent modifications,
and were the human mind not retentive in this manner.
We could not inherit the words of the dead,
nor understand the worlds from which those words come down to us,
nor decipher the hieroglyphs in the early fossil record of human culture.
Indeed, there would be no such thing as civil society in the first place,
since it is precisely in the human mind's vast reservoirs of retention that we find its first principles.
First principles and beginnings in general are crucially important for Vico.
One of the major axioms of his new science states that doctrines must take their beginning
from that of the matters of which they treat.
Thus a science of humanity must begin with the earliest human ideas in the minds of our pre-human ancestors.
In Vico's words,
"Our treatment must take its start from the time these creatures began to think humanly."
The principle labor of the new science is to open a path of access back to the time
when the primitive mind was first jolted into consciousness.
It was a labor in which, as Vico puts it,
we encountered exasperating difficulties which have cost us the research of a good 20 years.
For we were obliged to descend from these human and refine nature's of ours
to those quite wild and savage natures of the first men,
which we cannot at all imagine and can comprehend only with great efforts.
This near impossibility of penetrating the dense psychic forests of our progenitors,
this near impossibility of comprehending their earliest modes of conceiving and signifying the world
is what Vico's solitary exasperation was all about.
Because it's one thing to philosophize or philologize about language and full possession of its resources,
quite another to enter into the minds of those who first learn to express themselves
under the impulse of primitive terrors and violent inarticulate passions.
Writing more than a century before Darwin,
Vico was an evolutionary thinker who asked not about how our species evolved anatomically,
but how a habitat first became a world, namely an open realm of meaning.
That humans descend from apes tells us next to nothing
about why we are the only animal species that dwells in the extended dimensions of time
or in the openness of the logos.
How did this disclosure come about?
In the new science, Vico, careful not to provoke the Spanish inquisitors in Naples,
descends into the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity and reconstructs
a mythopoetic primal scene that he suggests must have taken place
in the primeval forests that covered the earth after the universal flood.
Wandering through that wilderness, or so, Vico postulates,
a branch of Noah's descendants gradually lost their humanities over the generations
and became solitary nefarious creatures, um, Vico,
taking his cue from the Bible calls the giants, or sons of the earth,
and whom who so later would call "lome sovage" and others called "homosil vestries".
Abandoned early on by their mothers, these ancestors of the Gentile peoples grew up unsocialized
without families or self-awareness, feeding on fruits and searching for water.
They were shy, brutal, restless, incestuous, and lacked any notion of a higher law than their own instincts and desires.
They copulated at sight aggressively and shamelessly, they exercised no restraint over their bodily motions,
and they roamed the forest incessantly.
This is what Vico refers to as their best deal freedom, a freedom from terror and authority,
a freedom essentially from fathers.
Wandering through forests grown extremely dense from the flood,
these creatures would not have suspected that beyond the canopies that shielded them,
there was such a thing as the sky.
What is the sky after all if not a prodigious abstraction we have come to take for granted?
But one day some two centuries after the flood, the earth, having dried up enough to send up exhalations or matter igniting in the air,
the sky burst with thunder and flash with lightning for the first time in generations.
Vico writes, "Thereupon a few giants were frightened and astonished by the great effect whose cause they did not know and raised their eyes and became aware of the sky."
And because in such a case, the nature of the human mind leads it to attribute its own nature to the effect,
and because in that state their nature was that of men, all robust bodily strength, who expressed their very violent passions by shouting and grumbling,
they pictured the sky to themselves as a great animated body, which in that aspect they called Joe,
the first god of the so-called Greater Ghentas, who meant to tell them something by the hiss of his bolts and clap of his thunder.
So, thunder rolls, lightning flashes, the giants terrified, raise their eyes and become aware of the sky.
But what on earth is the sky? What did the giants see when they raise their eyes?
What does one see vertically or laterally in a dense forest?
The mute closure of foliage, the boundless oblivion of the dormant mind.
What then did the giants see when they raised their eyes? They saw nothing, a sudden illumination of nothingness.
They heard the hiss of his bolts and clap of his thunder, but precisely because they saw nothing, or at least nothing definite.
They had to picture the sky to themselves in the aspect of a huge animated body, a body not seen but imagined there as beyond the treetops.
The giants act of picturing an animate, divine body overhead marks for Vico, the first humanizing event in prehistory.
The giants produce an image in the empty space of their minds, a space as empty and abysmal as the sky itself.
And in this way, the first human idea was born, that of Jove, father of the world, hurling the lightning bolt from his abode in the sky.
You can call him Jove, you can call him Jupiter, call him Zeus, call him Yahweh, Anu, or Indra.
Whatever the name, Vico was actually on the right track for we know that the Supreme deity among the Indo-European's, Hebrews, Sumerians, and Hittites,
first forth during the Bronze Age as a furious sky-god wielding thunder and lightning.
To these first bolts of lightning, in the dark night of the human psyche, Vico traces the primitive origins of the age of enlightenment, with its abstract science, metaphysics, and institutions of rational human justice.
Those bolts disclosed a realm of transcendence, an imperative beyond the bounds of what is visible.
They signaled the presence of something unearthly and bewildering.
Only the dreadful terror engendered by the lightning could ignite the first spark of consciousness in the brutish mind.
From that moment on everything in nature turned uncanny for the giants, who saw celestial phenomena as a form of divine communication and who promptly came to believe,
quoting Vico, that "jove commanded by signs that such signs were real words, and that nature was the language of jove."
In short, the world, all of a sudden, became meaningful. It became precisely a world, and no longer a mere habitat.
We're dealing here with the genesis of the first of the three universal institutions of humanity, namely religion.
The other two are matrimony and burial of the dead.
Vico's other word for religion is divine providence.
To provide means literally to foresee pro-vide to look ahead.
The sky-god was not kind to the giants, in this respect, because in the very moment of his revelation he concealed himself communicating from a distance through natural signs.
We could call him the transcendental signifier, who henceforth would play a game of hide and seek with the giants, obliging them to scrutinize the auspices in order to divine his intentions.
The auspices, or signs such as lightning, the flight of birds and eventually celestial bodies, were the language of God, or theology, and literacy in this divine language among the patriarchs of the first human families took the form of divination.
Thus, the first of all human ideas, the idea of divinity, implied an idea of providence, the intentional, meaningful, and non-random character of events.
Do we understand what this means?
With the idea of a provident divinity in their minds, the giants were suddenly projected into the frightful future of time.
But what is the future?
It's something as empty, abstract, and inscrutable as the sky, an indefinite possibility that the anxious mind seeks to render definite by its theology of divination.
Joe, who opened time, also concealed its destiny, that was his ultimate power.
In order to delay their anxieties about what awaited them, the giants took to interpreting the auspices.
Ever since that time, or let's just say ever since Greek and Roman times, we in the West, but not only us, have been a civilization of sky worshipers, children of a celestial father who identified the divine with the ether, with the thundering lightning bolt, with the meteorological,
with the eternal geometry of the stars, with the cosmic sublime.
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I could speak at length about how Vico's other two universal institutions,
but instead I'll move on and remark that one of Vico's most important and lasting contributions is his archaeology of the metaphorical origins of human thought, or what he calls the poetic wisdom of the first ages, when nature was perceived animistically, and gods were present everywhere and in everything.
The new science offers singular insights into how the primitive mind thought concretely, not abstractly, and how it conceived and signified things by means of poetic characters or imaginative universals, janitory fantastity, in Italian.
Poetic characters are personified concepts. In the giant's minds, every image or idea was a poetic character, four, quoting Vico, not being able to form intelligible class concepts, the first men had a natural need to create poetic characters, that is imaginative class concepts or universals, to which as to certain models or ideal portraits, to reduce
all the particular species which resembled them. These poetic characters account for the various deities of antiquity. In the new science, a number of mythological as well as historical figures also turned out to be poetic characters.
Homer himself argues Vico, and he was the first one to do so, was not a historical individual at all, but a poetic character for the wandering rapsoads, who recited the popular epics in towns and villages long before they were written down on papyrus.
Likewise, the legendary founder of Rome Romulus was in all likelihood a poetic character for the assembled family fathers who established the first Roman Senate.
The case of Vulcan is particularly interesting because it leads us back to the forests where everything began.
The myths tell us that Vulcan, God of Technae, was linked to the race of the Cyclops. Vico claims that Vulcan and the Cyclops must originally have been too distinct but related poetic characters.
The Cyclops were poetic characters for the pious, god-fearing giants in their respective clearings.
Vulcan, on the other hand, was originally a poetic character for the otherwise abstract concept of technical skill among these Cyclopian family fathers.
In a remarkable passage of the new science, Vico comments, every clearing was called alucus in the sense of an eye as even today we call eyes the opening through which light enters houses.
The true heroic phrase that every giant had his lucus, clearing or eye, was altered and corrupted when its meaning was lost and had already been falsified when it reached Homer.
For then it was taken to mean that every giant had one eye in the middle of his forehead.
With these giants came Vulcan to work in the first forges, that is, the forests to which Vulcan had set fire and where he had fashioned the first arms which were the spears with burnt tips.
And by an extension of the idea of arms to forge bolts for Job.
For Vulcan had set fire to the forests in order to observe in the open sky the direction from which Job sent his bolts.
Lucus, clearing, eye.
This is the eye or burnt out clearing whose poetic character was already corrupted by the time it reached Homer.
By a paradoxical reversal of poetic logic Homer places this eye in the middle of the Cyclops forehead and has Odysseus blinded with the burnt tip of an uprooted tree trunk, thus bringing the forest darkness back upon the Cyclops eye again.
Vulcan, the master of technical skill, is the one who first opens the eye of contemplation.
In a golden passage of the new science, Vico writes, "In their science of Augury the Romans used the verb Contemplari for observing the parts of the sky once the Auguries came or the auspices were taken."
These regions, called temples, marked out by the augers with their wands, were called temples of the sky, Templa Caylee, when must have come to the Greeks, their first, they were a mata and mata, things divine or sublime to contemplate, which
generated in metaphysical and mathematical abstractions.
Question, has modern science advanced very much beyond these divinatory beginnings?
For all its achievements and breakthroughs, science maintains its allegiance to the sky, to the sublime portents of space, and its principal purpose remains that of prediction.
Be it an eclipse, Haley's comet, or the death of stars.
If Vico is famous for anything, it is his theory of the course and recourse of nations.
I mentioned that James Joyce made creative use of it in Finnegan's wake, and by the way, we have a show on Vico and Joyce in the works coming your way soon, so keep an eye out for that one.
Vico and Finnegan's wake.
I don't want to delve too deeply into Vico's idea of the course so and recourse so.
Suffice it to say that Vico believed that human societies, when they develop autonomously, go through an age of gods, an age of heroes, and an age of men, each of which ages has its own distinctive forms of law, language, customs, politics, and ways of conceiving reality.
The age of gods is mostly poetic and animistic, the age of heroes primarily heraldic and symbolic, and the age of men primarily reflective and prosaic.
The three ages succeed one another, to be sure, yet Vico insists that they are also always co-present in varying degrees in any given age.
So the age of gods, while predominantly divine, also has heroic and human elements in it.
The same applies to the other ages as well.
This is important to keep in mind as we now move from Vico's archaeology of the beginnings of things human, to his vision of how the historical course of nations eventually comes to an end.
This was the order of human institutions, first the forests, after that the huts, then the villages next to the cities and finally the academies.
Men first feel necessity then look for utility, next attend to comfort still later amuse themselves with pleasure, then-scrode, disalute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance.
As a humanist in the deepest sense, Vico believed that from crude beginnings human societies, when left to their own devices, go through various stages of development as they proceed from barbarism to enlightenment, from the forests to the modern metropolis, from the austerity of the cyclops to the humane justice of law governed commonwealths.
But Vico was not a bullish French philosopher, he was a neopolitan realist.
He did his best to argue that the traditional Christian god held sway over the ideal eternal history of humankind as he called it.
Yet despite his orthodox intentions, the new science ends up telling a "disconsolate story" about the order of institutions, a story that promises little in the way of redemption.
Some inner and tropical law eventually leads to civil disorder and dissolution.
As the animistic mind gradually refines its synthetic powers through poetic characters, it becomes capable of abstract thought.
Concepts take the place of imaginative universals.
Centuries of superstition, violence and injustice create a narrow opening for enlightenment during the human age.
Unlike the divine and heroic ages that preceded it, the human age is prosaic, not poetic, it's reflective, critical, and analytic rather than imaginative and self-proturbing.
Vico speaks of it as the age of irony.
Irony he writes, "Certainly could not have begun until the period of reflection, for it is fashioned of falsehood, by dint of a reflection that wears the mask of truth."
Vico reminds us that prior to its ability to abstract, the primitive mind was unable even to conceive of a distinction between truth and falsehood.
In ironic consciousness, Vico saw both the virtues and vices of critical reason.
Reflective irony begins as a liberating force, exposing the unfounded and irrational bases of earlier institutions founded on divine or heroic law,
It's thanks to irony that a rational human justice based on the equality of human nature gets instituted among nations, and human justice for Vico is a more perfect justice than heroic or divine justice.
The problem is that irony has an inherently dissipative character.
Critical reason and science tend towards skepticism.
When brought before the tribunal of reason, the beliefs, practices, and traditions of the past lack justification.
Skepticism toward the past gives rise to an ever more reflective irony about the institutions that had hitherto preserved humanity and prevented its fall into bestiality.
If such irony follows its course unchecked, it degenerates into cynicism.
Cynicism is an aggravated form of skepticism.
It assumes that all truth is falsehood, that all news is fake news, and that all truth claims are a matter of power rather than right.
Such cynicism can easily erode the foundation of commonwealths, causing the historical course so as a whole to unravel.
Vico calls this unraveling the barbarism of reflection, and the conclusion of the new science he observes.
But if the peoples are rotting in that ultimate civil disease of cynicism, and cannot agree on a monarch from within, and are not conquered and preserved by better nations from without, then providence for their extreme ill has its extreme remedy at hand.
For such peoples, like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests, and have reached the extreme of delicacy, or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure.
Thus no matter how great the throng and press of their bodies, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since each follows his own pleasure or caprice.
By reason of all this, providence decrees that, through obstinate factions and desperate civil wars, they shall turn their cities into forests, and the forests into their own forests.
In this way, through long centuries of barbarism, rust will consume the misbegotten subtleties of malicious wits that have turned them into beasts made more inhuman by the barbarism of reflection than the first man had been made by the barbarism of sense.
Here we find that the same path Vico had opened up into the depths of prehistory now leads beyond the past, beyond his own age of enlightenment, and into our own age of postmodern desegregation.
I mean the age of unwearlding that we are living through a present, call it the terminal stages of the human age of our 21st century.
At this end stage, which can drag on endlessly, the diachronic order that had governed the succession of ages gives way to an anachronic co-presence of their historically incommensurate elements.
Remember, the human mind is essentially retentive.
Thus, during the end game, all the past ages of the order of institutions, with their concomitant creed, styles, mentalities, and so forth, they all reappear in a degenerate form co-existing simultaneously and randomly alongside one another.
This is the barbarism of reflection or the bending back of the ages, when science co-exist with magic, ignorance within enlightenment, democracy with oligarchy, slavery with socialism, arcayisms with futurisms, puritanism with libertarianism, humanism within humanism, prehumanism with posthumism.
God's heroes and men and beasts are jumbled together in a random fluctuation or deluge of the undead, as the course of that had determined the historical order succumbs to entropy.
We have, beyond a doubt, something to learn from Jambati-sevico.
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. Thanks for listening.
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