Pagina 16 - BCSV, XLI, 2

LEON POMPA 16
they reach decisions in the world of chance in which they live.
Nevertheless, to associate Tacitus’s investigations into these matters as
resulting from the employment of a metaphysical mind is highly reveal-
ing: for it shows that Vico was beginning to think that metaphysics
must, in some or other way, relate to matters that are normally taken to
belong to the empirical world. To Plato, however, is reserved a loftier
vision: that of the man of intellectual wisdom. By meditating on the
thought of these two great minds, Vico proceeds, he was foreshadow-
ing the later idea of «an ideal eternal history to be traversed by the uni-
versal history of all times […]»3. In a subsequent remark, he explains
what it was in Plato’s philosophy that particularly interested him. After
a passage in which he has criticized Descartes for his inability to
explain ‘the operations of the human mind’, he adds:
This reading therefore served only to confirm him still further in the doctrines
of Plato, who from the very form of our human mind, without any hypothesis,
establishes the eternal idea as the principle of all things on the basis of the
knowledge and certainty that we have of ourselves. For in our minds there are
certain eternal truths that we cannot mistake or deny and which are therefore
not of our making […]. But for the eternal truths which are not of our mak-
ing and have no dependence on our bodies, we must conceive as principle of
all things an eternal idea, altogether separate from body, which, in its con-
sciousness, when it wills, creates all things in time and contains them within
itself, and by containing them, sustains them. By this principle of philosophy
Plato4 establishes, in metaphysics, abstract substances as having more reality
than corporeal ones. From it he derives a morality well adapted throughout for
civil life, so that the school of Socrates, both in itself and through its succes-
3 Ivi, p. 139.
4 It is not possible in an essay of this length to trace the sources in Plato from which
Vico derived these claims. But for an interesting investigation of Vico’s debt to Plato,
see N. DU BOIS MARCUS , Vico and Plato, New York, 2001. Du Bois presents a convinc-
ing case to show that Vico’s conception of a necessary sequence of political states,
although different in detail from Plato’s sequence, was undoubtedly influenced by it.
But when it comes to the question of whether these are coherent conceptions, she con-
cludes that Vico went beyond Plato in identifying history as the temporal unfolding of
a Platonic idea. This requires us to understand the difficult conception of an eternal
idea that is flexible rather than static. But she does not tackle the problem of how even
such a flexible Platonic idea, as she conceives it, can relate to the contingent events of
history without rendering the latter as being determined rather than the consequence
of human choice, as Vico claims. The problem of the relation of the eternal and the
contingent remains unresolved in this interpretation.