Pagina 23 - BCSV, XLI, 2

REFLECTIONS ON THE IDEAL ETERNAL HISTORY 23
This acknowledgement that we are part of the animal kingdom
might seem to absolve him from the charge that he has not allowed
poetic man faculties sufficient to ensure the basic necessities of his
material life. For animals are capable of acquiring the wherewithal nec-
essary for their own sustenance and that of their progeny, though they
do not appear to do so only through fear of the terrifying religions that
poetic man had imagined as posited by Vico. But to see how far the
admission of the fact that we are parts of the animal kingdom might
help Vico here, it is necessary to turn to the account of the nature of
animals he gave in On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians. Before
doing so, it is worth noting that Descartes had already categorized ani-
mals as purely mechanical automata. He did this on the basis of the
ontological and epistemological distinctions he drew between mind and
body24 . But although Vico could not accept the way in which Descartes
drew this distinction, it is instructive to note that, for entirely different
reasons, he came to the same conclusion. In Chapter Five, Part II, he
addressed the nature of animals directly, having already in Part I, given
a completely naturalistic account of the working of air, blood and the
body in humans. In a difficult passage, contorted by his efforts to align
his views with those of the ancient Italians, he claims that the ancients
held that animals were immobile, despite the fact that they moved, and
that this must have meant that they believed that animals were distin-
guished from humans because they «lacked their own inner principle of
movement and were moved only by external objects serving as a mech-
anism»25. Despite the dubious hypothetical argument by which he
reaches this conclusion, it amounts to his sharing with Descartes the
belief that animals were simply mechanisms or autonoma.
But if it might seem that, on this view of the nature of animals, his
admission that we share with them the power of sensing the world
24 «It is [...] a very remarkable fact that although there are very many animals that
exhibit more skill than we do in some of their actions, we at the same time observe that
they do not manifest any at all in many others. Hence the fact that they do better than
we do, does not prove that they are endowed with mind, for in this case they would
have more than any of us, and would do better in all other things. It rather shows that
they have none at all, and that it is nature which acts in them according to the disposi-
tion of their organs [...]» (Philosophical Works of Descartes, tr. E. S. Haldane and
G. R. T. Ross, Dover, 1931, p. 119).
25 G. VICO, On The Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians , tr. by L. M. Palmer,
Ithaca-New York, 1988, p. 87.