Pagina 29 - BCSV, XLI, 2

REFLECTIONS ON THE IDEAL ETERNAL HISTORY 29
we are entitled to accept what we discover, on the strength of good his-
torical practice, as what it is: the truly contingent, and therefore poten-
tially unpredictable, course of history. To accept this constraint is not to
say that that history does not make sense, for though there is always the
possibility, in a contingent world, of human miscalculations as to how
to secure desired ends or of unforeseen circumstances, physical or
moral, intervening to thwart even the best of calculations, this does not
mean that it cannot be understood in relation to human beliefs and
practices.
VII. I wish now to arrive at some concluding points. The first is that,
apart from attempting to found human history on a faulty metaphysics
of human nature, as did Vico, the very idea of limiting history by any
substantive theory of human nature at all is faulty 36. For history is about
the contingent past and not just about the past as it impinges on, and
is seen through, human activities. The development of geological histo-
ry is evidence of the way in which taking the past in this wider sense
can explain certain features of the human past, such as migrations and
changing modes of subsistence. This is not to deny that we may well
have a greater interest in the more limited conception of the human
past as such, or that the latter may well be a necessary mode of access
to the former, as the necessity of utilizing written human records sug-
gests. Indeed, had we never had access to accounts of contingent events
or societies through written remains, it is unclear how we would have
begun to have much idea of the past at all37. The second is that, though
nations who, however much their concepts may differ from that of those attempting
the decipherment, share with them the same basic structures of rational agency.
36 It is well known that Vico went to great lengths to give special explanations for
events that appeared to be exceptions to what the ideal eternal history demanded. See
W. H. WALSH, The Logical Staus of the Ideal Eternal History, in Giambattista Vico’s
Science of Humanity, eds. G. Tagliacozzo and D. Ph. Verene, Baltimore, 1976, pp. 141-
154. Walsh draws attention to a number of such moves, pointing out how frequently he
has recourseto a hypothetical explanation of what ‘must have happened’. But although
this is true of Vico’s actual procedures, the basic fault is not that he was unwilling to
accept the validity of counterevidence. It lies in the idea of constraining the relations
between the various res gestae, which are contingent, by a theory of the necessary direc-
tion of human history determined by a metaphysical theory of human nature.
37 Vico and his contemporaries were unfortunate in having few of these available
and this explains why they attempted to limit their state of nature theories to relative-