Pagina 31 - BCSV, XLI, 2

REFLECTIONS ON THE IDEAL ETERNAL HISTORY 31
be taken to refer to the contents of our historically generated con-
sciousness, rather than the necessary truths he found in Plato. If we
accept the thesis that history, including human history, is contingent,
the thesis that man is a historical being must then involve acknowledg-
ing that the content of human consciousness is itself historical and that
this also is a contingency. This cannot mean only that such conscious-
ness is simply a blind causal consequence of the deeds and facts of the
past, but rather that our knowledge of the past depends upon the way
in which our beliefs about it have been acquired internally and criti-
cally by our predecessors who lived through, recorded and passed on
critically endorsed beliefs about it38. It may only be a contingency that
we have acquired beliefs not only about the institutions and events of
the past but also about much else, such as the theories and laws devel-
oped in the natural sciences, but it is a contingency of the first conse-
quence, without which we would have had no determinate idea of the
past or that it had had a shape and, hence, of our temporal and cultur-
al place in relation to it 39. Learning how our consciousness has come
to have its present content is the lesson that Vico’s insight makes avail-
able to us.
LEON POMPA
38 This is implied by Vico’s claim that the agents of the past created their institu-
tions ‘with intelligence’.
39 I have argued this point at length in Chapter IV of my Human Nature and
Historical Knowledge , Cambridge, 1990, Pb. 2002. It is mentioned, and to a certain
extent endorsed, by Professor Bruce Haddock in his A Vichian Defence of Ideal Eternal
History , in Il Mondo di Vico/Vico nel Mondo, cit., pp. 219-230. There are, of course, a
variety of ways in which our beliefs about the past come configured to us in our con-
sciousness of it but these depend upon the different subject matters concerned, be they
personal, institutional, political, national, cultural and so on. But it is clear that not any-
thing is possible and that we are not free to configure the shapes in which we have
received these beliefs, or impose shapes upon them at will, as is so often claimed. The
question of the importance of the acquisition of our beliefs about a determinate past is
not to be confused with the problem of the metaphysical status of time and of the
necessity of a conception of temporal priority, which Kant did so much to explore in
the First Critique.