Pagina 27 - BCSV, XLI, 2

REFLECTIONS ON THE IDEAL ETERNAL HISTORY 27
a position to do so. However, if we accept Croce’s claim that poetic
man could not have operated without concepts in the way we ourselves
do, the difficulty is removed. Certainly we do not inhabit the world of
poetic man but, as I have argued earlier, there could have been no such
world. But setting that aside, if we accept that, though we cannot some-
how get inside the vast imaginations of poetic man, there remains a
sense in which we can understand his activities 32. But we do this by
ascribing to him the rationality that Vico denies. So we can understand
the measures he takes, even in Vico’s empirical hypothesis, to assuage
his fear of the gods, but we do this by assuming these to be guided by
an instrumental rationality, involving the ability to work out what
would be the consequences, given the assumed nature of the gods, of
offering them blood sacrifices and of taking all the other protective and
placatory measures that Vico describes. Thus a world such as Vico
describes could have been a world of humans, but only had he not
incorrectly denied them the ability to reason. But, had he realized that
the ability to reason and to possess concepts is as basic to human nature
as the other capacities he ascribes to it, he would then have had no
need for an ideal eternal history, incorporating a series of allegedly
more rational types of behavior and institutions to explain how the
institutions and practices of his own society arose.
VI. I want now to turn to the question of how human history is possi-
ble. It is clear that Vico’s account of the human world becomes much
more plausible when he reaches first the heroic and then the human
age. And the reason for this is that he is here dealing with documentary
evidence. He now has the works of poets, historians and jurists to draw
upon and he deals with them in exemplary fashion, in his interpreta-
tions of Homer, and of the changing nature of the Roman state and
Roman law. He not only reveals considerable personal ingenuity in
challenging the interpretations given in the works of others but also
shows genuine understanding of the nature of historical research by
developing a series of excellent canons of rules to serve as the relevant
methodology. But because he was here dealing with the practices and
activities of clearly rational agents, the claim that this is possible only
because it is supported by its location as a phase in a necessary meta-
32 Vico, himself seems uncertain how far, with our allegedly civilised and more
intellectual minds we are capable of entering into the mind of poetic man.