Pagina 30 - BCSV, XLI, 2

LEON POMPA 30
Vico was mistaken in limiting an account of history by a substantial
metaphysical theory of human nature, he was not wrong in insisting
that there must be some applicable limits. When «in the night of dense
darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity so remote from ourselves» he
appeals to «the modifications of our own human mind» to provide a
basis for studying the world of nations, he is correctly pointing out that
our knowledge of history cannot be free of all constraints, especially if,
as he later claims correctly, man is an essentially historical being.
Although, as I have argued above, this is unacceptable if it is construed
to mean that human nature itself develops, or even changes, in history,
Vico is correct in the underlying claim that our knowledge of history
cannot be wholly unconstrained, for where there are no constraints
anything is possible. Thus, even if the only constraints were that inso-
far as human beings figure in the historical past, they must be as recog-
nisable to us as the humans that we now are, this purely formal require-
ment would still leave the past as an open field about which, with suf-
ficient ingenuity, anything whatsoever could be asserted with an equal-
ly common lack of authority or entitlement to be believed.
The question of how Vico’s insight can be used correctly means
that we must come to a different understanding of his claim that man
is an essentially historical being. The fundamental mistake in his devel-
opment of this thesis was, as I have argued, that it was incompatible
with accepting that the facts of history, i.e. what actually happened, are
contingent. This means that his attempt to reconcile a metaphysical
Tacitus with Plato was doomed from the start, especially as, via the
ideal eternal history, he proceeded to give pride of place to a platonic
metaphysics. In effect, he tried to base his insight that man’s nature is
historical upon a substantive non-historical principle. He was, never-
theless, correct in claiming that the starting point of historical knowl-
edge must come from within our own human nature, though this must
ly recent times. It also explains Vico’s attempt to limit his own world of poetic man to
some period after the Universal Flood, as a result of his taking the sacred scriptures as
the oldest extant story. This therefore forced him to produce a fairly brief temporal
hypothesis to try to bring his account rather rapidly up to the Greek and Roman peri-
ods, rather than the many thousands of years that modern historical and archaeologi-
cal research now suggest that human societies have existed. Vico can hardly be criti-
cised for this but the fact of his having to do so must be acknowledged in any attempt
at a critical assessment of the main features of his philosophy of humanity.