Pagina 26 - BCSV, XLI, 2

LEON POMPA 26
this sense, his procedure is akin to that of Descartes, who, appalled by
what he took to be the manifest confusions he found in the empirical
learning of his day, concluded that he could make no advance in knowl-
edge unless he could find a basis for it beyond all doubt. This is what
he claimed to have found in his consciousness of his own thinking,
underwritten by the necessity of a benevolent god. Unfortunately, by
then deciding to treat all truth-claims which might possibly be false as
actually being false, he denied himself of all sorts of empirical truths
and confined the world of knowledge to necessary truths, thus betray-
ing an entire misunderstanding of the nature of empirical knowledge30.
It is in search of a similarly indubitable basis that Vico now introduces
his fundamental metaphysical claim:
But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity so remote
from ourselves, there shines the eternal and 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. Whoever reflects on this cannot but marvel that the
philosophers [...] should have neglected the study of the world of nations or
civil world, which, since men had made it, man could come to know31.
V. It has frequently been pointed out that the men who created the
world of nations are not identical with those who could come to know
it, for the former are the historical agents of the past, whereas the lat-
ter can only be the members of the later societies, historians or philoso-
phers, for whom the Scienza nuova has been written and who could
profit from it. Much has been written to try to show how it would be
possible for the members of later societies to come to understand the
world of poetic man, as that is described by Vico. It could, of course,
be understood in the way we might, for example, describe the proce-
dures of an extremely unusual contemporary tribe – or, indeed, the
moves and ploys in a game of chess – without knowing the rules that
govern these activities. This would be tantamount to a purely mechani-
cal description of meaningless movements. But if this were how we are
meant to understand the world of poetic man, there would have been
no need to invoke the structures of an ideal eternal history to put us in
30 Philosophical Works of Descartes, cit., pp. 143-157.
31 Sn44, 331.