Vico and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe

Vico and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe Considered the most original thinker in the Italian philosophical tradition, Giambattista Vico has been the object of much scholarly attention but little consensus. In this new interpretation, David L. Marshall examines the entirety of Vico’s oeuvre and situates him in the political context of early modern Naples. He demonstrates Vico’s significance as a theorist who adapted the discipline of rhetoric to modern conditions. Marshall presents Vico’s work as an effort to resolve a contradiction. As a professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples, Vico had a deep investment in the explanatory power of classical rhetorical thought, especially that of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. Yet as a historian of the failure of Naples as a self-determining political community, he had no illusions about the ease with which democratic and republican systems of government could be established in the post-classical world. As Marshall demonstrates, by jettisoning the assumption that rhetoric only illuminates direct, face-to-face interactions between orator and auditor, Vico reinvented rhetoric for a modern world in which the Greek polis and the Roman res publica are no longer paradigmatic for political thought. David L. Marshall is assistant professor of humanities at Kettering University. He has contributed to the Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani, Napoli Nobilissima, New Vico Studies, and Intellectual History Review.

Vico and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe

david l. marshall

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore S˜ao Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, usa www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521190626  c David L. Marshall 2010

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2010 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Marshall, David L., 1973– Vico and the transformation of rhetoric in early modern Europe / David L. Marshall. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-521-19062-6 (hardback) 1. Vico, Giambattista, 1668–1744. 2. Rhetoric–Philosophy. I. Title. b3583.m375 2009 195–dc22 2009038063 isbn 978-0-521-19062-6 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

page vii

Acknowledgments 1

Introduction The Thesis of Sublimation Current Literature Vico’s Place in Intellectual History

2

At the Limits of Classical Rhetoric Antilogy and Rhetorical Historiography Historiography without Oratory Rendering the 1701 Conspiracy of Macchia The Impersonal Character of Action

3

Redacting the Art of Persuasion Ingenium in the Lectures on Rhetoric The Ars Topica as Modernist Sublimating the Sublime

4

An Epistemic Rhetoric Iterations of the Possible Rhetoric and Semiosis Self-Estrangement as Rhetorical Capacity

5

Toward a Hermeneutic Theory of Law and Culture Beyond Forensic Oratory Parameters of the Here and Now Legal Hermeneutics and Representation

6

The New Science of Rhetoric From Topoi to Axioms Sapienza Poetica and Being with Others v

1 3 13 21 31 35 39 49 59 68 73 85 102 111 113 128 140 151 157 166 175 193 195 207

vi

Contents Homer as Rhetorical Institution Vichian Historicity and the Manifold Structure of Time

7

Conclusion

Bibliography of Works Cited Index

229 246 263 279 295

Acknowledgments

I am singularly indebted to Nancy S. Struever. She has been the great inspiration and constant critic of this project from beginning to end. I am very grateful to Andrea Battistini and Donald Phillip Verene, both of whom read the entire manuscript and made a number of important ¨ suggestions. My thanks also go to Rudiger Campe, David Nirenberg, Matthew Roller, and Walter Stephens, who served as examiners when an earlier version of this work was accepted as a dissertation at the Johns Hopkins University in 2005. I would like to thank Frances Ferguson, Anthony Grafton, and J. G. A. Pocock, who read parts of the manuscript, together with Reinhart Koselleck, who generously attended and commented upon a presentation of the final chapter. Guido Giglioni read several parts of the work in a number of different versions as well as the entirety of the final text. On account of his philosophical acumen and philological rigor, the text is considerably better than it otherwise would have been. Coralie Daniel, Lars Maischak, Peter Marshall, Arndt Niebisch, Benjamin Perriello, Benjamin Redekop, Denise Stodola, and Thomas Willette all critiqued different parts of the work. I would also like to thank Beatrice Rehl at Cambridge University Press. Support for this research was generously provided by the Department of History, the Center for Research in Culture and Literature, and the Charles S. Singleton Program in Italian Studies (all at Johns Hopkins), together with the Deutsche Akademischer Austausch Dienst and Kettering University. With the permission of the publisher, material has been quoted from Giambattista Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, edited c 1988 by Cornell University and translated by L. M. Palmer (copyright  Press) and Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, transc lated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (copyright  1948, reissued 1970, by Cornell University Press). vii

viii

Acknowledgments

In the course of writing this book, I have benefited from academic communities at Johns Hopkins, the Villa Spelman, the Centro di Studi Vichiani, and Bielefeld University. Parts of this study were presented at Johns Hopkins, the Villa Spelman, the American Academy in Rome, the University of New South Wales, the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Cornell University, the University of California, Los Angeles, the Bosphoros University, Bielefeld University, the University of Helsinki, the University of Navarra, the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, the University of Southern California, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the Warburg Institute. I am grateful to those who commented on my research in these forums. Any errors remain mine.

1 Introduction

Few thinkers of comparable stature have resisted integration into European intellectual history to the same degree as Giambattista Vico. Vico—professor of rhetoric in eighteenth-century Naples—is customarily regarded as the most original thinker in the Italian philosophical tradition. Yet there is no consensus on where to categorize him. No one is satisfied with the conclusion that Vico was intellectually isolated and should simply be considered sui generis. But, by the same token, a good deal of excellent scholarship has failed to uncover a set of rich and robust interchanges between Vico and his contemporaries that could anchor him in a particular sequence of intellectual inquiry. Traditionally, scholars have characterized Vico as another father of history, a modern Herodotus anticipating the historicists of the nineteenth century who imagined that history as a whole had some kind of cognizable form. In this reading, Vico prefigures thinkers in the German historicist tradition—Herder, Hegel, Marx—and depending on who is doing the narrating, this is thought to be either heroic or tragic. Either way, Vico is taken to be a thinker who licenses the ideologically motivated interventions in history that distinguish the modern age. But in recent decades, scholars have shown that in order to reduce Vico to a philosopher of history, one has to ignore a whole host of intellectual interests that are basic to Vico’s oeuvre and to his masterpiece, the Princ`ıpi di scienza nuova d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni.1

1 Thus,

Croce famously described Vico as il secolo decimonono in germe, “the nineteenth century in embryo.” Benedetto Croce, La filosofia di Giambattista Vico (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1997), 229. Edmund Wilson traced Lenin’s arrival in St. Petersburg in 1917 back to Vico, among many others, in To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (New York: Doubleday, 1940).

1

Vico and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe

2

To characterize Vico as the first historicist is to read him retrospectively through thinkers who come after him. Yet it is also possible to see him as a terminus rather than a point of origin, for there is also a sense in which he is the last great Italian humanist. As the historian of Italian philosophy, Eugenio Garin, has explained, it is impossible to understand Vico without relating him to the Renaissance. Vico shares with many Renaissance thinkers some of the most basic humanist presuppositions. Vico believes that human beings make themselves measures of the world they inhabit, that they function best when the words they use arise directly from their own experience, that imagination is the most crucial cognitive faculty because it permits human beings to situate themselves between the merely sensory and the merely intellective, and that the vita activa is the most intense mode of humanistic practice. These are the intellectual commitments that link Vico to what has become the canonical expression of Renaissance humanism—namely, civic humanism—and the presuppositions shared by Vico and the humanist chancellors of fifteenth-century Florence have a common source: rhetoric. Vico shared with the likes of Leonardo Bruni a profound immersion in the legacy of Greco-Roman rhetoric. Both saw the world through texts by Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero, Quintilian, and others that deal with the theory and practice of public speech.2 For a long time, Vico has oscillated indeterminately between his roots in Italian humanism and his afterlife in German historicism. That a thinker should be thought of as an intermediary between the Italian and German intellectual traditions is not strange. One of the major issues in European intellectual history is precisely the originality with which modern German thinkers received and reformulated early modern Italian ideas. But that a progenitor of historicism should have been at the same time a descendent of rhetoric is paradoxical, because each of these traditions has a fundamentally different attitude toward the centrality of what I shall term the analytical categories of the here and now. Everything in rhetoric is oriented toward the hic et nunc of oratorical performance and its reception. By contrast, historicism continually subordinates that which is temporally and spatially most immediate for the purpose of identifying master narratives that exceed the bounds of particular times and places. This book contends that Vico maintains basic affiliations to 2 In

Dal Rinascimento all’illuminismo: Studi e ricerche (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1970), Eugenio Garin’s opening narrative stretches from Campanella to Vico, whereas in Karl-Otto Apel’s Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus: Von Dante bis Vico (Bonn: Bouvier, 1963), the arc extends from Dante to Vico.

Introduction

3

both these traditions, and it explains that in this case what appears to be a paradox is in fact an irony. Vico manages to embrace the contradiction between humanism and historicism by transferring rhetorical categories of analysis that are oriented to the here and now to societies where those categories are habitually subordinated. It certainly is ironic that categories of analysis born in the intensive immediacy of the Greek polis and the Roman republic could become even more intellectually decisive in the worlds of modernity where disciplines such as economics and sociology thrive precisely because they play down the significance of individual phenomena. But not every irony is a mere self-contradiction, and the work of this book will be to show that Vico specified a multitude of ways in which rhetorical analysis could remain decisive even in ostensibly nonrhetorical circumstances.3

I. The Thesis of Sublimation If one reads the work of Giambattista Vico from beginning to end, a problem appears: Where has rhetoric gone? To be sure, Vico begins with rhetoric. His early work engages the classical rhetorical tradition directly in the canonical texts of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. Vico’s monograph on the 1701 coup d’etat at Naples, the De coniuratione principum neapolitanorum, ventriloquizes speech between mass and elite. In his first significant publication, the De nostri temporis studiorum ratione of 1709, he denounces the study methods of Cartesian inquiry (a totem for philosophical modernism and its critics) and revises the topical, rhetorical approach of the ancients. And for decades, as professor of rhetoric from 1699, he introduces students to the art of persuasion itself. But after 1710 this manifest concern for rhetoric disappears from his published work. The De antiquissima Italorum sapientia of that year is a metaphysics. Vico surveys the lexicon of Roman Italy for signs of an esoteric wisdom, a philosophy embedded in the Latin language itself. He advances the humanist claim that human beings genuinely understand only those artifacts that they themselves have brought into being—mathematics, with its postulates, is paradigmatic. He combines that claim with the notion that human beings are merely witnesses to the world of nature but they are causes in the world of men. A decade later, with the publication of his historical investigation into Roman law, the Diritto universale, Vico 3 The

` liminal quality of Vico’s rhetorical interests is aptly signaled in Giuliano Crifo, “L’ultimo retore, il primo scienziato?,” in Institutiones oratoriae: Testo critico, versione e commento di Giuliano Crif`o (Naples: Istituto Suor Orsola Benincasa, 1989).

4

Vico and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe

announces a major new research program. Turning to political philosophy, he takes on the response of seventeenth-century natural law theorists to the rise of skepticism. Grotius, he argues, was right to look for a ius gentium, a law of peoples to anchor justice where jurisdiction was contested or absent. But, for the Neapolitan, the search for the ius gentium must historicize. The archive is Roman law. By the time of the Scienza nuova, where he explores the conditions of possibility for human society, a new paradigm of historical inquiry is dominant. Vico places Homeric poetry alongside Roman law, perceiving an analogy: Just as Roman law had no single source (no Solon, no Lycurgus), so Homer was no individual author. In Vico’s opinion, what has come down to us in the Iliad and the Odyssey is the distilled essence of popular storytelling, oral performance (and, in broad terms, this is what classicists now believe). The word rettorica does not appear once in the 1725 edition of the Scienza nuova. In the final 1744 edition, the term surfaces three times, but it is never pivotal in an argument. Is this apparent disappearance of rhetoric in Vico a story worth telling? One might say that Vico was simply a rhetorician by profession, that in fact he coveted a position in a different discipline (law), and that the occlusion of rhetoric indicates nothing more than a progressive decline in the relevance of rhetoric to his chief research interests. Or, one might say that rhetoric—once the capstone of a Greco-Roman education—was a declining force in European intellectual culture and that Vico, attuned to the rise of other problems, is symptomatic of a more general disenchantment with the art of persuasion, indicative therefore of a belief that the ars rhetorica could be nothing more than an old-fashioned accoutrement to a genteel education. Neither of these narratives would warrant sustained exposition. In reality, however, the progressive withdrawal of rhetoric from the surface of Vichian inquiry testifies to an intellectual process of embedding in which rhetoric came to occupy an absolutely constitutive and yet invisible place in the foundations of Vico’s thinking. I term this process sublimation. The principal contention of this book is that if one wants to construct an overarching account of what Vico achieved as a thinker, then the single best line of inquiry to follow is his sublimation of rhetoric. By sublimation I mean three things. First, sublimation in its original alchemical signification is change from solid to gas (and vice versa) without passing through an intermediary liquid phase. Just so, Vico shattered rhetoric as the art of persuasion— atomized it into its constituent concepts—and then proceeded to reconstitute it in an almost unrecognizable form. Because the intermediary

Introduction

5

stages of this reconfiguration are very difficult to perceive, the process has escaped scholarly attention. On the surface, few markers indicate Vico’s movement from the art of persuasion to his “new scientific” inquiry. For this reason, scholars have overlooked the most basic—and most telling—trajectory in his thought. Specific parts of the rhetorical enterprise remain active in the Scienza nuova—topoi become axioms, elocutio becomes a poetic logic, pronuntiatio reappears as Homer, the temporal orientations of forensic, epideictic, and deliberative rhetoric evolve into a very particular analysis of historical consciousness. Yet if these aspects of Vico’s mature thought are not properly situated in a narrative of sublimation, the simultaneously classicizing and modernist trajectories of Vico’s intellectual achievement do not come into alignment and the rhetorical terms that remain in the Scienza nuova seem to be nothing more than so much flotsam and jetsam. Without a precise attunement to their rhetorical provenance, it is impossible to grasp Vico’s core concepts in their entirety. Once liberated from the discipline of rhetoric, however, those concepts take on decisively novel roles and solidify new paradigms for research in the humanities. Second, sublimation is a rendering sublime that is psychodynamic in nature. As in Longinus, this second sense of sublimation denotes elevation to what classical rhetoric identified as “the high style” (as distinct from the low and the middle styles, deemed appropriate for speaking on occasions that are not highly formal or extraordinary). The Scienza nuova concentrates on episodes from Greek and Roman history that required language fashioned in the high style. The work traces the afterlife of oratorical performances originally occasioned in periods of crisis or radical indeterminacy. It follows those acts from their birth in circumstances of overt confrontation to their undead existence in culture in the form of assumptions and habitual intuitions. This sense of sublimation clarifies the stakes of Vico’s ultimate obsession with “the autochthonous,” which becomes a metaphor denoting complete embeddedness. For him, what springs up directly from the earth untouched by anything foreign is a site for exploring what lies beyond the attentions of self-consciousness. Vico eliminates reflection as much as possible and focuses instead on communities that are out of control, communities that exist in a constant state of cultural improvisation. Yet in a loosely Freudian sense, this “rendering sublime” also forces affect down into the substructure of memory. Vico reconceptualizes the mechanisms of cultural memory. Compare his narration of Neapolitan crisis in the De coniuratione with his diagnosis of Greek and Roman crisis

6

Vico and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe

in the Scienza nuova. One does hear the echo of Masaniello—the plebeian hero of Neapolitan republicanism in 1647 who became a cult hero in the city’s collective memory—in Vico’s version of the 1701 Conspiracy of Macchia. Thus, we can say that even before his reinvention of rhetoric the topos “Masaniello” interests Vico. But, armed in 1744 with his revisionist understanding of Homeric poetry, Vico is able to offer a much more potent account of such topoi insofar as they sublimate moments of crisis into figures of enduring cultural significance. In the Scienza nuova, the pagan gods transubstantiate civil strife. Episodes that arose in civil war are set down in the form of fables: Minerva is born when Vulcan strikes Jove. That is to say (in Vico’s decoding), the city-state, the citt`a is born when plebeians challenge patriarchs.4 In this way, the Scienza nuova sublimates rhetoric by showing how crisis becomes custom in the course of being remembered time and time again. Third, sublimation—an atomization that both raises up and forces down—is also an overcoming. Vico overcomes a basic contradiction confronting rhetoricians in the eighteenth century. On the one hand, classical rhetoric had been a discipline specialized in the adroit calibration of oral performance in institutions where orator and auditor appeared in the same space and time. On the other hand, the minds of early modernity faced a world of nascent nation-states and transoceanic trade that was pushing at the limits of politics conducted on a human scale. Vico’s Naples was merely a provincial node in shifting European empires— Spanish, Austrian, then Spanish again. Empire eclipsed the city-state, which had been the muse of civic humanist values both in antiquity and in the Renaissance, and Vico thinks of himself as, in part, a historian of this very transition from city-state to empire. When Vico argues in the Scienza nuova that there was no civil royal law by which the Roman people acclaimed Octavian as Augustus, when he posits instead that there is a natural royal law according to which all republics must become monarchies or perish, he is living in a world of Machiavellian anxiety about the possibility of a republic that extends far beyond the walls of the city-state.5 The Roman example, Vico intuits, illustrates a basic political fact—government struggles to localize itself, struggles to manifest itself in the here and now on a scale that is commensurate with individual

4 Giambattista

Vico, Princ`ıpi di scienza nuova d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni, in Opere, ed. Andrea Battistini (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1990), §589 (henceforth, “1744 Scienza nuova”). 5 Ibid., §29.

Introduction

7

human beings. In Vico’s eyes, empire is a more likely than not outcome of the instability of republican modes of governance. Sublimation, then, is the best way to describe the threefold process by which rhetoric faded from view in Vichian inquiry and yet remained crucial. Vico’s Scienza nuova is a sublimation because it requires an overcoming of classical rhetoric’s most absolute presupposition—the presupposition that analysis of confrontations taking place within the parameters of the here and now is the necessary and sufficient business of political analysis. This conceptual sublimation, this overcoming, succeeded in reinventing rhetorical inquiry as an invaluable civilian capacity for societies radically different from those that had produced the art of persuasion in the first place. Vico is a key figure because he demonstrates that, even if it developed in the city-states of the ancient and early modern worlds, civic and humanist analysis does not remain entirely dependent on those rather unusual forms of social and political organization. To be as explicit as possible, my chief claim is that Vico’s oeuvre takes on a new unity and sense of purpose when it is understood as a sequence of responses to the following question: How can rhetorical inquiry give an account of politics useful for a society that does not possess institutions capable of guaranteeing public debate? My claim is that Vico overcomes classical rhetoric’s inappropriateness for modernity by jettisoning the assumption that orator and auditor are immediately present one to another in place and time. To be sure, Vico never describes his agenda in these terms. It will require considerable reconstruction of the logic and evolution of Vico’s thought to show that his works constitute a series of answers to this question. Turning the attention of rhetoric away from direct confrontation was a radical move. It entailed among other things an absolute evisceration of the fifth canon of rhetoric, the canon of delivery that advised orators on everything pertaining to live performance. Live performance had been at the heart of what made rhetorical inquiry distinctive, and none of the tactics that Vico redacted from the art of persuasion into his new science would have existed had it not been for the relentless orientation to the here and now that the participatory institutions of the ancient world had demanded. The absence in Vico’s Naples of any truly meaningful political venue for oratory forced him to rewrite the ars rhetorica in a new mode. But what was for Naples a political debility was for Vico an intellectual boon. It liberated him from the duty of telling people what to do when they stood up to speak, and permitted him instead to concentrate on a relatively small number of concepts that really distinguish rhetoric.

8

Vico and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe

Having won such a separation from immediate practice, Vico was able to reinvent those concepts as a series of tools for uncovering the workings of the human world. Vico’s legacy has so often been understood primarily in terms of his impact on historical theory for the same reason that his work is clearest when understood as a sublimation of rhetoric. Both historical theory and sublimated rhetoric concentrate on how the dead live on in culture even in their absence. Sublimated rhetorical inquiry is chiefly concerned with how it is that human society can be at its heart public, even under circumstances of radical fragmentation where no quorum of constituents ever comes together to meet in one place and time for the purpose of debating and deciding. Under these conditions the very definition of public must be altered in a subtle but decisive way. Instead of immediate reciprocity between multiple parties who are free to state their opinions, have them critiqued, and respond to such criticisms, the new mode of publicity that enables radically fragmented societies to overcome isolation (although not necessarily solitude of spirit) is predicated on the notion that a public act is an act that becomes the condition of possibility for a future act. There is no presumption that the future act will be undertaken with an understanding of the historical circumstances out of which the original act emerged into public circulation. Certainly, there is no presumption that the person doing the “glossing” has any memory whatsoever of the person (or persons) who authored that original act. Only the objectivity of the word or deed counts, only its existence beyond the individual in a world inhabited by others. On this definition of publicity, a whole array of new media take the place formerly occupied by the city-state, the polis as the hub of rhetorical inquiry. The rhetorical institutions of antiquity remain some of the most beguiling images in the history of political thought, situated as they are between concept, promise, and threat. Vico, I argue, is to be understood against the background of this image. He is neither a proponent nor a critic of rhetorical institutions as a paradigm for self-government. Vico is a paradox: the rhetorician who has quite simply transposed himself beyond rhetorical institutions and their presumptions of interaction in the here and now. In order to reconstruct this tension between the immediate publicity of rhetorical institutions and Vico’s mediated publicity, this book contrasts the definition of the polis put forward by Hannah Arendt with the definition of an institution advanced by Max Harold Fisch, the mercurial scholar of Roman law, Vico, and C. S. Peirce. For Arendt, the polis “is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the

Introduction

9

space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly.” For Fisch, an institution is “any provision or arrangement of means or conditions for subsequent activity, additional to or in modification of the means or conditions that are already present prior to the institution, whether present in nature prior to all institutions or present in nature only as modified by previous institutions.” The pivotal difference here is that whereas Arendt the Hellenist stipulates multiple parties must be immediately present for an interaction to count as a space of appearance in the widest sense, Fisch the Romanist allows for the interposition of a host of media between an originator and a perpetuator. Instead of being a polis in the sense of a localized place and time in which I appear to you as you appear to me, the realm on which Vico focuses his attentions is an institution, where that term denotes any initiative that becomes the condition of possibility for some subsequent initiative.6 The centrality of the Greek—and particularly Athenian—polis for the generation of rhetorical consciousness in Greece and Rome is undeniable. It is certainly not coincidental that Aristotle not only makes the polis central to his account of what it is to be human but also defines the polis in rhetorical terms. As he describes it, a city-state must be large enough to be economically self-sufficient, but it must be small enough that the orator’s voice can reach and the orator’s gaze can encompass the entirety of the body politic.7 The Pnyx brought together the 6,000 Athenian citizens who constituted the ekklesia, and it made is¯egoria—the right of all Athenian citizens to speak on matters of public interest— possible. As classicists such as Josiah Ober have argued in recent years the rhetorical awareness that was forged in that assembly and its democratic analogues must be put at the center of Athenian political theory. After all, the Athenian critics of democracy, who have done so much to 6 Hannah

Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 198–9; Max Harold Fisch, “The Critic of Institutions,” in The Owl of Minerva: Philosophers on Philosophy, ed. Charles J. Bontempo and S. Jack Odell (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975), 138. Arendt is, of course, more than simply a Hellenist, but her account of politics is disproportionately influenced by the Athenian experience; Fisch wrote his doctoral dissertation at Cornell on “The Influence of Stoicism on Roman Law.” In fact, as Arendt scholars are beginning to appreciate, the Arendtian space of appearance is not nearly so unmediated as her definition of the polis implies, so that the juxtaposition proposed here actually reveals a spectrum running between “poleis” and “institutions” that draws Arendt and Fisch into dialogue. See David L. Marshall, “The Polis and its Analogues in the Thought of Hannah Arendt,” Modern Intellectual History (forthcoming). 7 Aristotle, Politics, 1253a and 1326b.

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Vico and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe

determine the structure of European political debate, were responding to these oratorical practices and their rhetorical articulation.8 Romanists too have emphasized the centrality of the spaces of immediate encounter that lay at the heart of both the city and the constitution of republican Rome. Indeed, Fergus Millar goes so far as to describe the Rome of the fourth century BCE as a polis. Quite whether—or how— Rome ought to be classified as a democracy remains undecided, but it is true that by the first century BCE the basic anomaly of the Republican political order was that Roman citizens throughout the Italian peninsula, even freed slaves, had the right to vote and yet they could only exercise that vote in the city of Rome itself. The Roman polity had to collapse in on itself, so that the populus Romanum could manifest itself in the comitia tributa. The nation-state, as Millar terms it, could only express itself through the institutional relics of the city-state. If this space was transformed in the course of the first century into the eye of a storm that destroyed the Republic, this means simply that any account of Roman history in that period must deal directly with the very particular—and very particularly rhetorical—parameters of the here and the now set out by the Forum.9 Vico’s transformation of rhetoric needs to be understood in the context of his rejection of the immediate interactions that were so crucial for the Athenian and Roman political experiences. In this way, Vico is also to be understood as someone who rejects the notions of participation that were essential to Renaissance reinventions of republican political theory. The reemergence in the late medieval period of city-states as potent and

8 To

flesh out this tension between rhetorical articulation of democratic realities and philosophical criticism of democracy, compare two books by Josiah Ober—Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) and Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). For a more complex, comparative introduction to the Greek poleis, see Mogens Herman Hansen, Polis: An Introduction to the Ancient Greek City-State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 9 Fergus Millar, The Roman Republic in Political Thought (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2002), 2 and The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998). Millar’s argument that Rome ought to be thought of as a kind of direct democracy has not persuaded everyone. But, even among those who are cautious about that claim, there is a heightened awareness of the crucial role of spaces like the Forum in Roman political life. Thus, in Mass Oratory and Political Power in the Late Roman Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Robert Morstein-Marx puts the Forum front and center in his account of the contio, and historians of rhetoric too are demonstrating an increased attention to the spatial configurations of Roman oratory. See William J. Dominik and Jon Hall, eds., A Companion to Roman Rhetoric (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007).

Introduction

11

at least partly democratic modes of government led to a body of neoclassical political thinking that drew on the ancient experiences.10 Famously, scholars such as Hans Baron argued that republicanism as a theory of government and citizenship emerged as a defense of city-states such as Florence.11 The Florentine legacy entailed both a return of the city-state as essential to political theory and a return of rhetoric as essential to the city-state. As J. G. A. Pocock has argued, “the theory of the polis—which is, in a certain sense, political theory in its purest original form—was cardinal to the constitutional theory of Italian cities and Italian humanists” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.12 Moreover, scholars such as Quentin Skinner, who have attempted to couple the Aristotelian inheritance that Pocock emphasized with neo-Romanist initiatives among the thinkers of the Renaissance, have continued to emphasize the centrality of rhetoric for early modern political theory.13 Yet the irony is that the best treatments of rhetoric in the early modern period are not those that investigate the direct relationship between rhetoric and the politics in the republican city-state. My work on Vico builds on such treatments, but seeks to go beyond them. Many historians of rhetoric in the early modern period have a narrow understanding of what constitutes rhetorically informed inquiry. Such an understanding leads to a fixation with the rhetorical handbooks that are both the lifeblood and the bane of rhetoric as an intellectual tradition. The work of Nancy S. Struever is both learned in the ars rhetorica itself and powerful conceptually, and it is highly significant that her studies of early modern rhetoric should have taken the form of intellectual histories of historical and ethical inquiry. The explanation of this irony is that, in early modernity with the brief flourishing and then eclipse of the 10 See

Anthony Molho, Kurt A. Raaflaub, and Julia Emlen, eds., City-States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991). 11 In Baron’s classic analysis, “civic humanism” was an ideology developed by Renaissance Florentines in defense of the city-state and its republican form of government where citizen participation in public affairs was decisive. For Baron, moreover, the Renaissance city-state connoted the Greek polis. Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), xxviii. Compare recent reevaluations in James Hankins, ed., Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 12 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 74. 13 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 1.27ff and Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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city-state as a crucible for republican political experience, rhetoric is first revived and then displaced into a range of other intellectual endeavors.14 Like Struever, Pocock reveals the transformation of classical concepts under very specific early modern conditions. Thus, Harrington’s Oceana is a “dispersed polis” in Pocock’s characterization, and in more general terms he claims that languages of commerce became increasingly influential for political thinking in the eighteenth century at the same time as older languages focused directly on the experience of political action (languages that often drew on rhetoric directly) were fading or being reinvented.15 The city-states of the ancient world are at the heart of Vico’s research, especially after about 1720. But his interest is not in traditional democratic or republican theorizations of political participation in the life of the city-state. Vico’s attitude toward the polis is tersely summarized in his etymology of the Greek term. Folding together Plato’s intimation that “the commonwealths [repubbliche] were born on the basis of arms,” Aristotle’s acknowledgment that “in the heroic commonwealths [repubbliche] the nobles swore eternal enmity against the plebs,” and the saying that “servants are the paid enemies of their masters,” Vico—departing from Vossius’s Etymologicon—contends that the Greek word polis gave rise to the term polemos, “war.”16 The polis qua war is speechless—fraught 14 See

Nancy S. Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970) and Theory as Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)—together with Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 15 J. G. A. Pocock, “Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century,” in Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 114. Pocock has explicitly connected his own narrative of the rising importance of commerce as a reference for political thought in the eighteenth century to Arendt’s vision of modernity as an age in which true political experience has been marginalized to the revolutionary tradition. Pocock, “Present at the Creation: With Laslett to the Lost Worlds,” International Journal of Public Affairs 2 (2006): 15. 16 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §588: “la qual istoria [of eternal enmity between the nobles and the plebs] i greci ci conservarono in questa etimologia, per la quale, appo essi, da polis, ‘citt`a,’ polemos e` appellata la ‘guerra.’” Plato, Laws, 626a; Aristotle, Politics, 1310a. The etymology is a revision of the one related in the first edition of the Scienza nuova—which Vico took from Gerardus Joannes Vossius, Etymologicon linguae Latinae (Amsterdam: apud Ludovicum et Danielem Elzevirios, 1662), 397–8—in which polis is said to give rise to the Latin terms polire and politus, “polished.” Giambattista Vico, Princ`ıpi di una scienza nuova intorno alla natura delle nazioni per la quale si ritruovano i princ`ıpi di altro sistema del diritto naturale delle genti, in Opere, ed. Battistini, §102 (henceforth, “1725 Scienza nuova”): “con la polizia dell’educazione (onde forse dalla stessa origine viene polis a’ greci ‘citt`a’ ed a’ latini ‘polio’ e ‘politus’) degradarono dalla loro [the giants of prehistory] smisurata grandezza alla nostra giusta statura.”

Introduction

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to the point of a violence that can only be brought into language long after the fact. Vico’s achievement was to propel rhetoric as a field of intellectual inquiry beyond the controlled discursive negotiation of the democratic or republican city-state. As a rhetorician, he inherited the experience of rhetorical politics passed down in the lineage of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. In doing away with the rhetorical institutions of the city-state as models for the contentious but peaceful coming together of a people in place and time, he set himself on a path to conceptualizing the myriad ways in which individuals make themselves available to others in more mediated ways. For the most part, such mediation did not involve consciously giving up on one’s contemporaries and addressing oneself to posterity. Instead, it entailed objectifying oneself (putting oneself into the world in some objectified form) in such a way that even in one’s absence—perhaps even long after one’s death—an act could endure and become a condition of possibility for some other action. Vico’s sublimation of rhetoric, thus, consists in the transformation of classical rhetoric into an account of media that turn words and deeds into conditions of possibility for future action.

II. Current Literature This book argues for a very particular account of what is most distinctive— and most valuable—in Vico. It bases that claim on the discovery of a single line of development in the Neapolitan’s thought that, I submit, does most to represent his various initiatives as stages in the development of one unified project. To offer this overarching account is to reject some previous scholarly conclusions regarding Vico and to redact others. The basic thesis of this book is incompatible with depictions of Vico either as an antimodern thinker in the Counter-Enlightenment tradition or as a covertly modern thinker who can relatively easily be folded into the Radical Enlightenment. On the other hand, the book’s thesis is compatible with a good number of other characterizations. The thesis that Vico sublimates Greco-Roman rhetoric redescribes and subsumes many of the conclusions advanced by other scholars. As a result, this book synthesizes depictions of Vico as philosopher of history, philosopher of imagination, Neapolitan investigator, Roman legalist, cognitive scientist, political theorist, humanist, semiotician, and pragmatist.17 17 The relationship between the thesis of this book and recent research on Vico is examined

in more detail in David L. Marshall, “The Current State of Vico Scholarship,” The Journal of the History of Ideas (forthcoming).

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Probably the most famous synoptic account of Vico in the Anglophone world is that first articulated by Isaiah Berlin in his work Vico and Herder and further developed by Mark Lilla in G. B. Vico: The Making of an AntiModern. Berlin read Vico as a key writer in the Counter-Enlightenment tradition, and Lilla makes the best possible case for Berlin’s highly portable interpretation. The thesis that Vico is antimodern cannot stand, however. Justly, Lilla stresses the importance of the Christian Fall in Vico’s thought. However, he mistakes chaste delineation of human capacity— which is properly humanist in all but that tradition’s most na¨ıve and self-satisfied variants—for an attack on reason and liberty as foundations for human community. Whereas Vico worked assiduously to escape the debilitating aut–aut of the false dilemma “either ancients or moderns,” Lilla concludes that if Vico was replying to the early modern skeptics (which he was), then he must have been rejecting modernity (which he was not). But to reject the conclusion that Vico was an antimodern is not to embrace immediately the equal and opposite error of seeing Vico as a closet Enlightener. Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment turns Lilla’s argument on its head, but it makes essentially the same assumptions. Israel identifies coded references in Vico to Spinoza together with a disguised modernist program—antifeudal, egalitarian, revolutionary. Operating in an intellectual environment made oppressive by the activities of the Roman Inquisition, Israel’s Vico connives to transform Catholic theodicy into a justification for radical change. Israel cites Giovanni Francesco Finetti’s eighteenth-century denunciation of Vico’s “Lucretian” vision of human origins as evidence that something radical lurked behind Vico’s politic use of the word providence. Yet refusing (as Israel does) to take Vico at his word is just as unsatisfactory as misinterpreting (in the manner of Lilla) what Vico did say in order to situate his own project.18 Lilla states with admirable clarity the mistaken premise that he and Israel share. The choice, for them, is stark and momentous: “either one resigns oneself to living within the broad Enlightenment tradition that values reason, skepticism, and freedom, or one sets off with the 18 Mark

Lilla, G. B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), see 3–6 for the (not uncritical) debt to Berlin; Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 664–70. Henry Hardy has reinforced the notion that Vico is to be understood through Berlin as a forerunner of the Counter-Enlightenment with the reissuing of Berlin’s essays on Vico, Herder, and Hamann as Three Critics of Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Introduction

15

Counter-Enlightenment thinkers who abandoned those principles in the pursuit of order, authority, and certainty.” What is more, “the modern world offers no third alternative.”19 The desire to retreat into such a binary world view may be understandable. But the impulse must be resisted. The polarization of reason and certainty, freedom and authority is misleading not only in reference to Vico but also with regard to the alternatives set out in modernist inquiry. Vico pursues certainty (certum) in order to reveal new dimensions of reason in his study of logica poetica. Arendt—who, like Vico, is not antimodern so much as responsive to the debilities of modernity—asks “What is Authority?” and then immediately “What is Freedom?” She does so not because authority and freedom are alternative paradigms but because they are, to her way of thinking, the same process seen from different perspectives.20 For both thinkers (and for many other unmistakably modern writers) the crucial interest is exemplarity, the process by which particular words and deeds produce a cultural topography. It is the broad frame of rhetorical inquiry that brings these initiatives into focus. Indeed, rhetoric is a prime example of the alternatives that Lilla fails to perceive. Vichian rhetoric finesses the binary oppositions, poisonous for intellectual historiography, between reason and the passions, logic and imagination, individual and community, innovation and tradition—and, indeed, between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. Vico disabuses.21 This book redacts a good deal of scholarship on Vico and rejects some of it outright. It also continues an emphasis on rhetoric that has driven some excellent work on Vico in recent decades. Although the book draws extensively on this literature, it makes fundamentally different assertions about what Vico did to the art of persuasion. The thesis of this work—that Vico sublimates rhetoric by jettisoning the key presumption that orator 19 Lilla,

G. B. Vico, 13. two essays appear side by side in Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking, 1968). 21 The debilitating opposition of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment is a massive attenuation of the historical imagination. Preferable is J. G. A. Pocock’s more nuanced use of the term in “Historiography and Enlightenment: A View of Their History,” Modern Intellectual History 5 (2008): 83–96. Pocock responds to John Robertson’s The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), which attempts to argue that if even the Scottish and Neapolitan Enlightenments were similar then it must be meaningful to speak of “the Enlightenment” in the singular. Robertson begins with an excellent intuition—that a shared debt to Mandeville’s reception of Bayle renders Vico and Hume comparable—but eventually the tenuousness of Vico’s reception of his fellow early moderns (which appears particularly threadbare in comparison to his rhetorical inheritance) renders the attempted contextualization inert. 20 The

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and auditor appear together—distinguishes it from the work of four groups of scholars who have likewise addressed the relationship between Vico and rhetoric. These four groups include those who suggested that Vico’s “overcoming” of rhetoric was in fact a wholesale emancipation from the commitments of a spent intellectual force, those who have pointed to the parallels between Vico’s works and classical rhetorical treatises without articulating any distinct account of his novelty, those who have shown in more precise but ultimately piecemeal ways that Vico reinvents specific rhetorical tactics, and finally those who have hoped that Vico might become an agent for the reintroduction in modernity of the dialogical practices that originally characterized the principles of is¯egoria as it was articulated by the Athenian polis. Ever since Benedetto Croce’s epochal resurrection of Vico in the early twentieth century, rhetoric has been an element in the narration of Vico’s development as a thinker. But in Croce’s account, it was only by escaping rhetoric that Vico could participate in the rise of a new science of aesthetics—the theory of art when art is understood as “an unreflective intuition of being.” For Croce, whereas rhetoric is merely an art dedicated to determining the wills of others, aesthetics is a study of art per se (that is, art not bent toward any particular purpose).22 What Croce despises is the tendency of rhetoric to become a mechanism of persuasion. Indeed, he is correct to say that rhetoric’s attention to form—the taxonomy of the tropes is his example—runs the risk of reifying analytical categories, treating them as sacrosanct and presuming that the classification of such categories is an end in itself.23 There is more than enough evidence to indict the handbooks of rhetoric on this charge as instruments of a merely academic discipline that establishes itself far from the hard business of the vita activa. Nevertheless, criticizing rhetoric insofar as it was an art of persuasion was not Croce’s mistake. His mistake was to presume that

22 Benedetto Croce, “Aesthetica in Nuce,” in Filosofia, poesia, storia: Pagine tratte da tutte le opere

a cura dell’autore (Milan–Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, 1951), 197, 199: “L’arte non e` filosofia, perch´e filosofia e` pensamento logico delle categorie universali dell’essere, e l’arte e` intuizione irriflessa dell’essere . . . L’arte non e` didascalica od oratoria, cio`e arte oltrepassata e asservita e limitata da un intento pratico, quale che esso sia, cos`ı quello d’introdurre negli animi una certa verit`a filosofica, storica o scientifica, come l’altro di disporli a un certo particolare sentire e alla corrispondente azione. Tutt’insieme, l’oratoria toglie all’espressione l’‘infinit`a’ e l’indipendenza, e, facendola mezzo per un fine, la dissolve in questo fine.” 23 Croce, “Aesthetica in Nuce,” 211.

Introduction

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rhetoric had never been (and could never be) anything other than a techn¯e.24 Revisionist scholarship has rejected the conclusion advanced by Croce—and his collaborator Fausto Nicolini—that Vico forswore rhetoric without remainder.25 Yet demonstrating that rhetoric was a key source for Vico has proved easier than answering the question of precisely how Vico transformed the discipline. At the end of a highly erudite study, Michael Mooney is only able to narrow the range of his answer to that question by means of an analogy. Galileo, he says, had taken mathematics from its position in the quadrivium and transposed it to the foundations of a new physical science. In just the same way, Vico detached rhetoric from the trivium and used it instead as the basis for a new science of culture. This answer is not so much wrong as vague. The heroic task of cataloguing all of Vico’s unfootnoted references to the rhetorical tradition has overwhelmed Mooney’s ability to pinpoint the senses in which Vico did not simply reproduce Greco-Roman rhetorical precedents, but rather reconfigured them in the most remarkable ways. Thus, the most concerted account of Vico’s place in the tradition of rhetoric is brought up short by this simple question: What is new?26 There have been some superb investigations into Vico’s inheritance of rhetoric that do answer this question in more powerful ways. Although he has not written a comprehensive account of what Vico did to the art of persuasion, Andrea Battistini has set the standard for focusing tightly on particular thematic concerns in Vico that can only be understood on the basis of a heavy-duty awareness of the ars rhetorica. In Battistini’s work one finds an extraordinary capacity to triangulate the differences between 24 Croce

is admirably explicit about his sense of continuing the project that Vico had begun, explicit in his aim of eviscerating retorica from estetica: “Sceverare la filosofia dello spirito dalla storia, le modificazioni della mente umana dalle vicende storiche dei popoli, l’Estetica dalla civilt`a omerica; e, continuando le analisi del Vico, determinare piu` esattamente le verit`a dal lui affermate, le differenze poste, le identificazioni intravvedute; purgare, infine, l’Estetica dai residui delle vecchie Rettoriche e Poetiche e da qualche affrettato schematismo del suo autore: questo il campo di lavoro, questo il progresso che era da compiere, dopo la scoperta dell’autonomia del mondo estetico, dovuta al genio di Giambattista Vico.” Benedetto Croce, Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale: Teoria e storia, ed. Giuseppe Galasso (Milan: Adelphi, 1990), 295. 25 Fausto Nicolini agreed with Croce, and in his critical edition of Vico’s lectures on rhetoric he describes aesthetics as a “teoria filosofica d’una forma ingenua, primigenia, alogica,” while deriding rhetoric as a “pseudoscienza empirica e meramente normativa.” See Giambattista Vico, Opere di G. B. Vico, ed. Fausto Nicolini (Bari: Laterza, 1940), 7.222. 26 Michael Mooney, Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 255–63.

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Vico’s work, the classical rhetorical tradition, and the redactions of classical rhetoric in early modernity.27 In the United States too, rhetoric has been the point of departure for a number of highly sophisticated scholars, including Hayden White and Struever.28 Struever’s work in particular has been decisive. Like Battistini, she has been able to illuminate the rhetorical dimensions of essential Vichian pursuits—such as inquiry, etymology, conatus, impersonality.29 Work of the kind done by Battistini and Struever was greatly facilitated when, in 1989, the legal scholar Giuliano Crif`o published a critical edition of the Institutiones oratoriae (Vico’s university lectures on rhetoric) that replaced Nicolini’s problematic abbreviation of the text. The edition made it possible to trace Vico’s debt to classical rhetoric with much greater precision.30 But, although there has been incisive work since then on isolated topics—such as Vico’s relation to literary mannerism, the sensus communis tradition, the rhetorical use of axioms, and his rhetorical conception of myth—there has been no general articulation of how it was that Vico transformed rhetoric as a mode of inquiry.31 27 In

La degnit`a della retorica: studi su G. B. Vico (Pisa: Pacini, 1975), Battistini reveals the rhetorical genealogies of autobiography, etymology, and the four master tropes. In La sapienza retorica di Giambattista Vico (Milan: Guerini, 1995), he folds readings of the sublime and pathos into an account of Vichian rhetoric between hermeneutics and anthropology and adopts the term opera aperta from Eco in order to clarify the encyclopedic nature of Vico’s enterprise—an adoption that revises Battistini’s earlier interest in the produit productif of text and anticipates my own concern with the transformation of actions into conditions of possibility for future actions. 28 White was a key figure in re-reading Vico’s historical consciousness as a working out of his theory of the tropes. The terms of that gloss are most expansively articulated in Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), esp. 415–22, but the key texts in relation to Vico are “What is Living and What is Dead in Croce’s Criticism of Vico,” in Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium, eds. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Hayden V. White (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969) and “The Tropics of History: The Deep Structure of the New Science,” in Giambattista Vico’s Science of Humanity, eds. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Donald Phillip Verene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 29 Struever has written a series of articles addressing the relationship, broadly conceived, between Vico and rhetoric that have been constitutive for the present work and inform it throughout. For a selection of her essays, see Nancy S. Struever, ed., The History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History (Farnham: Ashgate Press, 2009). 30 Crifo ` was instrumental in asserting the strong connection in Vico between rhetoric and law. See the introduction to his critical edition of Vico’s lectures on rhetoric: “L’Ultimo Retore, Il Primo Scienziato,” xv–cxii. See also the volume of essays published in con` critical edition, namely Tullio Gregory, ed., Retorica e filosofia in junction with Crifo’s Giambattista Vico: Le institutiones oratoriae, un bilancio critico (Napoli: Alfredo Guida, 1994). 31 See Leo Catana, Vico and Literary Mannerism: A Study in the Early Vico and His Idea of Rhetoric and Ingenuity (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), John Schaeffer, Sensus Communis:

Introduction

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The most ambitious account of Vico’s relationship to rhetoric came from Ernesto Grassi.32 For him, “the essence of Vichian thought emerges by recognizing . . . that the problem of Vico is the realm within which man appears as his concrete and total realization.”33 Grassi pioneers the view that rhetoric “is not, nor can it be the art, the technique of an exterior persuasion.”34 Not merely a techn¯e, rhetoric becomes a program for strengthening those realms in which meaningful public appearance is possible. This is a mandatory insight, but the present study departs from Grassi’s analysis by reconceiving the meaning of realm. When Grassi used that word, he meant at base “polis,” and for him the task was to recreate the kind of dialogical interaction that distinguished the Athenian polis and its institutions dedicated to is¯egoria.35 Rhetoric—broadly conceived—was the frame he chose to advocate this resuscitation of dialogical values, because “rhetorical discourse will never be anonymous, or ahistorical, since neither the orator nor the situation is replaceable.”36 But these dialogical values are precisely what Vico did not take from classical rhetoric. In Vico, discourse is almost always anonymous. Vico has utterly obliterated both the canon of delivery and the person of the orator. Realm shifts its meaning from polis to institution, as I use those terms (following the definitions from Arendt and Fisch). It turns out that Vico is primarily interested in individuals insofar as they become “signs,” which is to say insofar as they become examples taken up by others as instantiations of particular concepts. The shift is from an Arendtian space of immediate appearance to a Fischian institution in which, as a sign, an individual becomes a condition of possibility for a host of subsequent exchanges. Moreover, Vichian discourse—historicist without peer in some respects—may even be described as ahistorical if one requires that historiography produce sustained narrative pivoting on a particular

Vico, Rhetoric, and the Limits of Relativism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), James R. Goetsch, Vico’s Axioms: The Geometry of the Human World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), and Alberto Bordogna, Gli idoli del foro: Retorica e mito nel pensiero di Giambattista Vico (Rome: Aracne, 2007). 32 Ernesto Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990) and Vico and Humanism: Essays on Vico, Heidegger, and Rhetoric (New York: Peter Lang, 1990). 33 Grassi, Vico and Humanism, 166; emphasis added. 34 Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy, 20—repeated verbatim at 65. 35 Grassi derives his concept of “polis” from Heidegger. Arendt (who, like Grassi, was a student of Heidegger’s) also developed her definition of the polis in response to her teacher’s phenomenology. Grassi, Vico and Humanism, 164–5. 36 Ibid., 3.

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hic et nunc. In effect, Vichian providence “replaces the situation” incessantly. Unintended consequence—the seedbed of historical irony—is the afterlife of actions in unanticipated situations. Vichian historicity compounds the episodic “heres and nows” that live on in language, conceived etymologically. In Vico, culture is the matrix for diffused politics. Language is both the aftershock of political conflicts past and the condition of possibility for future rhetorical action. Vico breaks with the long-standing default understanding of rhetoric as an art of persuasion. Relentlessly, the Neapolitan distances himself from rhetoricians who only want to know how to achieve a particular result given certain conditions. Grassi understood that it is debilitating to conceive of rhetoric as nothing but a set of suggestions for what to consider when one is forced to voice one’s opinion. What he did not understand so clearly was the evolutionary nature of rhetorical inquiry, which responds to the historically particular conditions of living in society with others. In this way, “rhetoric” is not a form of intellectual discipline that one can think of as a world view over against the world view promoted by philosophy. Instead, rhetoric is a constantly evolving set of concepts that have come into focus as a result of work done by investigators sensitive to the inevitable diversity of human opinion. Rhetoric is a grammatical fiction that is better understood as a set of related practices. Rhetoric in this sense is not an art, but rather a form of inquiry, and inquiry in this usage denotes an intellectual response to doubt that is historically contingent.37 Understood in this way, the close study of rhetoric in Vico has consequences for many who do not consider themselves Vichians in any sense. Students of rhetoric itself have a lesson to learn from Vico. The lesson can be stated in relatively simple terms, but it is a lesson that must provoke incessant and unpredictable revisions. As an exponent of rhetorical inquiry, Vico demonstrates that—although it has strong classicizing tendencies—the rhetorical tradition can and must be understood as a series of reinventions that respond to new historical conditions. What is more, those who have invested in the relevance of the Athenian polis for political theory today will find in Vico’s sublimation an account of rhetoric that is not hamstrung by its dependence on the very particular 37 My sense of the word inquiry is derived from Struever, Theory as Practice. Struever herself is

influenced by “The Fixation of Belief,” in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, eds. Nathan Houser and Christian J. W. Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 1:114: “The irritation of doubt causes a struggle to attain a state of belief. I shall term this struggle inquiry.”

Introduction

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historical conditions of ancient Athens—the Pnyx and its isegoric analogues. Once Vico’s sublimation of rhetoric is clearly understood, moreover, students of the humanities in the eighteenth century will gain a powerful new lens through which to conceptualize the massively expanding sciences of man in that age. This, in turn, has consequences for intellectual historians who, by and large, have failed to see how a history of rhetorical inquiry is possible—or, if possible, pertinent. The history of rhetoric as practiced in this book becomes a new line of inquiry for intellectual historians interested in how thinkers have understood orientation toward others. An intellectual historical topos informed by rhetoric, this problem makes it possible to locate genealogies for a host of modernist concepts, both in the eighteenth century and beyond.

III. Vico’s Place in Intellectual History This book argues that it is wrong to co-opt Vico into narratives of Radical Enlightenment or Counter-Enlightenment. It proposes instead that he be understood as a pivotal figure in the transformation of rhetoric as a form of intellectual inquiry from ancient to modern. This is not to say, however, that Vico can only be read in the company of thinkers who were not his contemporaries. Granted, despite the considerable amount of research that has attempted to specify eighteenth-century contexts for Vico, it remains true that he cuts an isolated figure in comparison to other thinkers of the same rank in the history of European thought.38 The year 1744 is simply not as potent a context for Vico as 1651 is for Hobbes—but disconnectedness is not irrelevance. And analogous processes of sublimation can be located in other “postrhetorical” thinkers of the eighteenth century, in whom rhetorical categories often play discrete but decisive roles. Rhetoric is crucial in the rise of German aesthetics, for instance. Thus, aisthet¯a in Baumgarten, phantasia in Lessing, and hypotyposis in Kant all connote rhetoric.39 In fact, when we understand the true 38 After almost half a century, the most brilliant intellectual contextualization of Vico is still

Nicola Badaloni’s Introduzione a G. B. Vico (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961). But even there, the massive amount of work that is put into describing Neapolitan inquiry in the seventeenth century is only partially offset by what are, in comparison, relatively modest gains in understanding the nature of Vico’s project. 39 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Meditationes Philosophicae de Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus, trans. Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), §§116–17: as logic deals with noet¯a, “things that are known,” so aesthetics deals with aisthet¯a, “things that are perceived” and just as “general poetics” is “a science which treats generally of the

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nature of Vico’s reinvention of rhetoric we discover a host of new ways to perceive the relevance of the history of rhetoric for the eighteenth century more generally. In particular, it allows us to discern new analogies between Vico’s project and the intellectual agendas advanced by some of the century’s most distinctive political thinkers. Those minds, like Vico’s, were preoccupied by a series of problems that arose from the necessity of moving beyond the democratic or republican city-state as an icon for ideal sociality. Historians of rhetoric have been too concerned with charting the fate of the handbook tradition in the eighteenth century, whereas historians of political thought have not made a sufficiently large investment in the history of rhetoric. This work attempts to overcome these twin failures by emphasizing Vico as a case of someone who transformed rhetoric in response to the eclipse of the isegoric city-state.40 Clearly, the thesis of sublimation developed in this book both glosses and is glossed by the rise of the concept of the sublime in the eighteenth century. My notion of sublimation draws on Edmund Burke’s transposition of the sublime beyond rhetoric. The sublime object for Burke is whatever exceeds the parameters of perceptibility, whatever resists domestication within one field of vision, one definition, or any other unit of “here-and-now-ness.”41 Yet despite this modernist attunement to objects that annihilate the human capacity for making distinctions (and provoke sentiments that conjoin terror and delight), Burke shares with Longinus—his rhetorical forebear—a classical commitment to the presence of the orator who overloads the imagination of his auditors not so much with the verbal representation of an absent (and therefore potentially sublime) object as with the apparent authenticity of his own emotional reaction to that representation. The deeper point is this: perfected presentations of sensate representations,” so “general rhetoric” is “scientia de imperfecte repraesentationes sensitivas proponendo in genere”; Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laoco¨on: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 74–5, 153–7, 207–8, 239; Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 226: “all hypotyposis (exhibition, subiectio ad adspectum) consists in making [a concept] sensible.” I am indebted to Christopher Wild for setting out this sequence of debts to rhetoric. 40 In a recent review article, I argue that Vico is emblematic of a host of intrinsically interesting eighteenth-century reconfigurations of rhetoric that have begun to receive attention from historians of rhetoric. See David L. Marshall, “Early Modern Rhetoric: Recent Research in German, Italian, French, and English,” Intellectual History Review 17 (2007): 75–93. 41 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (London: Routledge, 1958), 63: “hardly any thing can strike the mind with its greatness, which does not make some sort of approach towards infinity; which nothing can do whilst we are able to perceive its bounds.”

Introduction

23

Although rhetoric routinely idealized the Athenian polis and the Roman res publica as conditions of possibility for the appearance of the citizen in space and time, rhetorically motivated inquiry also has the capacity to understand the hic et nunc as a constriction, a constriction that both concentrates reality and sets limits on the information that the channels of human sensitivity can bear.42 Ironically, the awareness of human limitation that is made explicit in the process of conceptualizing the sublime has beneficial consequences for humanist inquiry. Both Burkean and Kantian notions of the sublime in fact lead to the intensification of individuation, as the subject defines itself through its resistance to the overwhelming scope of the sublime object. Indeed, Kant’s account of the sublime as the alternation between terror and delight as the mind switches between sensory and intellectual modes of cognizing an object that suggests but cannot achieve infinity leads to an interest in the aesthetic ideas of the imagination that can reinforce the mind’s capacity to operate in the middle ground between what Kant calls “intuitions” and “concepts.” In this connection, all that separates Kant’s attempt to mediate between the first and second critiques and Vico’s account of imaginative universals is the German’s willingness to subsume the beautiful under the terms of the moral and the Neapolitan’s greater sensitivity to the connection between poetry and oratory.43 What is more, escape from the parameters of immediate presence is imperative for many of the eighteenth-century texts that rehearse accounts of the origin of human ideas. Ideas emerge from the resolute here-and-now-ness of sensations by virtue of the perceptions of similarity that bridge the gulf between a momentary appearance today and a momentary appearance yesterday. The great virtue of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding is its deeply semiotic understanding of the relationships among sensations and ideas. Signification is one of his chief concerns and, in light of the present work on Vico, we can understand 42 Burke,

Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 175–6: “the truth is, all verbal description, merely as naked description, though never so exact, conveys so poor and insufficient an idea of the thing described, that it could scarcely have the smallest effect, if the speaker did not call in to his aid those modes of speech that mark a strong and lively feeling in himself.” Both Longinus and Quintilian had described such “contagion of the passions” by means of phantasia in their classical rhetorical treatises. 43 Compare therefore Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §§400–501 and Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 130: “synthesis as such . . . is the mere effect produced by the imagination, which is a blind but indispensable function of the soul without which we would have no cognition whatsoever, but of which we are conscious only very rarely.”

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the Lockean semiotic initiative as another precise locale for sublimated rhetoric.44 For empiricists, each perception of a quality is a condition of possibility for the subsequent perception of another similar quality and such accretion of quality upon quality dictates the origin of ideas. To his detriment, Locke—in awe of the English Revolution like so many of his contemporaries—was highly suspicious of rhetoric. This suspicion perhaps explains why he did not perceive the constitutive role of the tropes in organizing similarity, but at least one of his readers—Leibniz—did. And another classical exponent of the empiricist perspective—Hume— noted that one could categorize the association of ideas according to the figures of speech revealed by rhetoric.45 Had any of these authors read the “poetic logic” section of Vico’s Scienza nuova, they would surely have understood themselves more clearly.46 Thus, early modernity embedded rhetoric at the level of cognition. In this lineage we can place not only Locke and Leibniz, but also Hume, du Marsais, d’Alembert, Destutt de Tracy, even the association of ideas as a philosophical project. Some have suggested that there is a story to be told of the transformation of rhetoric—through associationism, romanticism, and utilitarianism— into psychoanalysis.47 The jury is still out on that particular hypothesis, 44 Paul

de Man made a similar observation about the relationship between rhetoric and Lockean empiricism in “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” Critical Inquiry 5 (1978): 13– 30. However, without the aid of Vico’s deeply political reading of the tropes de Man’s initiative remains confined to the theory of knowledge. 45 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, eds. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 45. 46 In Locke, Language, and Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), Hannah Dawson gives a fine account of Locke as a philosopher of language who is highly sensitive to the destructive potential of rhetoric. William Walker counters with a provocative reading of basic empiricist strategies as rhetorical. See “John Locke,” in Eighteenth-Century British and American Rhetorics and Rhetoricians: Critical Studies and Sources, ed. Michael G. Moran (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994), esp. 158–60. Walker makes the connection to Leibniz, for which see Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 134–5: “the ideas which are received by sensation are often altered by the judgment of the mind in grown people, without their being aware of it” and Leibniz goes on to describe the “figures of rhetoric” as the kinds of preconceived patterns that impose subliminal judgments on perception. See also William Walker, Locke, Literary Criticism, and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 117–18. 47 Responding to de Man, Harold Bloom contended that “when the Associationists—Locke, Hume, Gay, Hartley, Tucker being the progression of founders—developed their psychology, they founded it (perhaps unconsciously) upon the topics or commonplaces of rhetoric, precisely because they wished to usurp the place and function of rhetoric. But Wordsworth, Coleridge and their followers, by translating the commonplaces to their own purposes brought back a powerful, implicit psychologized rhetoric in which topics regenerated tropes, and these tropes in turn elaborated themselves as defensive

Introduction

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but what can be said with certainty is that a host of eighteenth-century thinkers grappled with the intimate connections between the tropes and cognitive psychology. On the interpretation set out in this book, Vico becomes symptomatic of a tension that pulses through eighteenth-century political thought. On the one hand, publicity itself was becoming increasingly important as a principle that could justify a startling diversity of practices and institutions. The principle of publicity is, in effect, a curious reconstitution of the republican assertion that appearance in public is valuable both in itself and in its consequences, and should as such be maximized. On the other hand, this principle of publicity was in practice becoming virtual. That this should have been the case is not surprising. Any concerted emphasis on publicity quickly encounters the logistical problem of guaranteeing equality of access. Presence in person would seem to be the highest possible realization of access, but it is not. In classical rhetorical settings, only one person can speak at a time and spatiotemporal proximity can generate conformity as easily as dissent. Writing and reading, by contrast, can take place simultaneously; anonymity can be a liberation and a virtual community can draw on a more diverse population than one that lives face to face. By the same token, however, the attenuated sensory stimulus of text impoverishes human expression. Every technology for participation, thus, has its weaknesses. Absolute democratization exceeds the boundaries of the possible. Yet if the diffusion of politics is a challenge, it is also an intellectual opportunity—one taken up by a rich array of thinkers.48 Writing a history of such initiatives since Vico would be a monumental task. That task is not attempted in this book, and yet without some sense of what that history would entail one cannot fully understand the ramifications of my conclusions about Vico. In my opinion, Vico reveals a new structures of consciousness. Happily unaware of this return of repressed rhetoric, the main Associationist tradition passed on to Bentham and the Mills. Freud, translating the younger Mill, took over from him the Lockean notion of object-representation, which thus became the common ancestor both of Freud’s system of defenses and of the tropological patterns of Romantic imagery.” Harold Bloom, “Poetic Crossings: Rhetoric and Psychology,” Georgia Review 30 (1976): 508. 48 Compare the genealogies traced by political theorists. Where I speak of a “diffusion” of politics, Bonnie Honig—in her Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993)—speaks of its “displacement.” Where I speak of a sublimation of rhetoric, Sheldon Wolin—in his Vision and Politics: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004)—speaks of a “sublimation of politics.”

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dimension of a problem located at the heart of eighteenth-century political thought—namely, the decentering of the experience of politics itself. That decentering draws attention to the rise of theories of representation in which direct interaction between members of the public is somehow suspect. Rousseau, recall, is highly suspicious of debate. He contends that if a political entity cannot deliberate as one single body it must not deliberate at all. The peculiarity of his republicanism—born in Geneva but practiced in France, a transplantation that is itself emblematic of the broader historical shift from city-state to nation-state—is explained in part by a not uncommon fear of faction, but that fear can itself also be understood in relation to the large-scale democratic politics that came into being during the eighteenth century.49 Among the pioneers of political economy too, the increasing emphasis on publicity entailed a turn away from traditional rhetorical concerns.50 Thus, Smith—a rhetorician as well as a theorist of moral sentiment and a political economist—asserts that the stranger and not the friend is the better model for “the man in the breast” who surveys and evaluates the self. For the Scot, a certain species of ignorance contributes to objectivity, for actions must be evaluated on their own terms and not in reference to the agents who perform them. That Smith should also have said that individuals can only promote the common good if they pursue their own respective self-interests is no paradox. In both cases, individuals are required to liberate themselves from concerns about persons in their immediate vicinity. The public spirit embodied in local community is a false idol, on this account, because genuinely impartial rationality requires anonymity. The Smithian market embodies strong commitments to publicity—transparency is a key value—but, ironically,

49 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The

Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 60: “it is important, then, that in order to have the general will expressed well, there be no partial society in the State, and every Citizen state only his own opinion.” On the relationship between Rousseau’s republicanism and the Genevan context out of which it emerged, see Helena Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, 1749–1762 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). On the issue of Rousseau’s engagement with rhetoric, see also Arash Abizadeh, “Banishing the Particular: Rousseau on Rhetoric, Patrie, and the Passions,” Political Theory 29 (2001): 556–82. 50 For the intrication of political and economic argumentation in the early modern period, see also Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) and Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Capitalism and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

Introduction

27

that publicity can only be achieved when traditional rhetorical appeals to the butcher, the brewer, and the baker are denounced.51 Kant, what is more, redescribes all classical uses of reason in politics as more or less “private,” and permits only a sublimated form of ideal communication in which print mediates between writer and reader for the purpose of maximizing the distribution of opining. The preacher is only able to address a partial gathering by means of speech; but the scholar, in print, overcomes such circumscribed “domesticity.”52 Cultivating a certain obliviousness to what is immediate in the name of a purer orientation toward others is an irony observable elsewhere too— in, for example, Herder, Beccaria, and Bentham. A paradox similar to the one observed in Kant is operative in Herder, where the desire for publicity undermines the claims of rhetoric because all rhetorical publics are deemed too partial with the result that Herder consistently promotes the medium of writing over that of speech. Beccaria promotes his penology as a way of preferring “persuasion” to “force” and yet concedes that “neither eloquence, nor exhortations, nor even the most sublime truths have been enough to hold back for long the passions.” What appears to be a paradox is in fact a redefinition of what counts as “persuasion.” As Beccaria says elsewhere, it is best to work non di fronte, ma di sbieco (not front on, but at an angle). Just so he proposes a legal system that does not confront criminals after the perpetration of their crime in a ritual of physical destruction but instead modulates the potential criminal’s actions continually by presenting him with a clear narrative of predictable consequences. In a similar fashion, a host of distinctively modern mechanisms of evaluation follow from Bentham’s insight that the value of an action only becomes perceptible when close reading of the individual case is passed over in favor of a more statistical approach that gauges the value of a particular performance only in relation to other comparable performances.53 51 Compare Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eds. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 3.3.38, 153–4 with An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, eds. R. H. Campbell and Andrew S. Skinner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 26–7. On Smith as a rhetorician, see Stephen J. McKenna, Adam Smith: The Rhetoric of Propriety (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006). 52 Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 18. 53 These interpretations of Herder and Bentham draw on Benjamin Redekop, Enlightenment and Community: Lessing, Abbt, Herder, and the Quest for a German Public (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2000), esp. 217–18 and Frances Ferguson, Pornography, The Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004) respectively. See also Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments and Other

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To read Vico alongside the likes of Rousseau, Smith, and Kant or Herder, Beccaria, and Bentham is to place him in a new tradition. It is to read all of them together not as partisans in a blinkered debate between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment but as particular cases among a wide range of responses to problems made acute by basic historical transformations taking place in the early modern period. Such a reading links Vico to thinkers who do not simply prize the republican activity of citizens and then lament that political participation of this kind is extremely difficult under modern conditions. These are thinkers who derive from that contradiction the impetus to create new ways of thinking about the old issue of democratization. But they are not thinkers who are necessarily for or against democratization. Rather, they are occupied with a profound series of historical transformations in which the power of the masses finds new modes of expression even as those modes of expression do not always indicate a growth in the political self-consciousness of the many. To be sure, Vico’s late eighteenth-century Neapolitan successors did not—for the most part—understand him in this way. In the eyes of Francescantonio Grimaldi, Gaetano Filangieri, and Francesco Maria Pagano, Vico was essentially an analyst of the feudal imagination.54 For whatever reason, the immediate Neapolitan reception of Vichian inquiry was mostly tangential to what I argue constituted the main thrust of his project. Even Filangieri’s Scienza della legislazione is not (as is often supposed) an adaptation of Vico’s jurisprudential thought.55 Vico’s Diritto universale stipulates that the law is always evolving and resists codification, whereas codification of the law is at the heart of Filangieri’s project. It is only with Vincenzo Cuoco’s history of the 1799 republican revolution at Naples, together with his proposals for reform at Naples during the French Decade before the return of the Bourbons in 1815, that—for example—Vico’s reconceptualization of institutions is taken up.

Writings, ed. Richard Bellamy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4, 9, 83–4. Beccaria’s phrase non di fronte, ma di sbieco is cited in Ezio Raimondi and Andrea Battistini, Le figure della retorica (Turin: Einaudi, 1990), 225. 54 Franco Venturi, “Introduzione,” in Illuministi italiani: Riformatori napoletani (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, 1962), xv. 55 Vincenzo Ferrone, La societ` a giusta ed equa: Repubblicanesimo e diritti dell’uomo in Gaetano Filangieri (Rome: Laterza, 2003), 121.

Introduction

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Yet this attenuated uptake is particularly revealing, for it places Vico alongside a whole range of attempts to conceptualize the new public spheres of early modern Europe without recourse to the now antiquated model of the democratic polis and its unmediated reciprocities. In effect, Cuoco argued that traditional rhetorical institutions—the piazze of Naples itself—failed the Neapolitan people in 1799 and that a new form of communication was required to build a viable political community. The revolution failed, according to Cuoco, because the gulf between mass and elite at Naples could not be bridged. The ideas of the reformers were too French; the words they used, too Tuscan.56 Nevertheless, this verdict did not lead Cuoco to the conclusion that reformers should simply embrace the Neapolitan dialect. Investment in the vernacular was important, but he also stipulated that the rhetorical relationship between orator and auditor must be rendered impersonal. A new universal educational system was Cuoco’s prime example. The school as an institution—and not the person of the pedagogue—was to supersede the orator. In his analysis, Cuoco replaced the word retorica with comunicazione. That he should have done so is indicative of very basic reorientations in society and social thought.57 Communication is, of course, a modern discipline that inherits the mantle of rhetoric, but—like Vico—it jettisons antiquity’s assumption that orator and auditor appear together. Within the terms of the contrast between polis and institution on which this book is constructed, communication is an “institutionalization” of rhetoric that is much more expansively aware of the degree to which human commerce can be mediated. Yet because of the emphasis on cultural mediation, which dominates in Vico and endures in Cuoco, the modernized rhetoric of the Neapolitans does not immediately raise the paradox that plagues the modern science of communication. That paradox consists in the swift alternation between hopes of instant access and fears of radical isolation.58 On his own, Vico cannot function as a hinge that links ancient rhetoric and modern communication. He is, however, 56 Vincenzo

Cuoco, Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione napoletana di 1799, ed. Fausto Nicolini (Bari: Laterza, 1929), 127; Vincenzo Cuoco, Scritti vari: Parte seconda, periodo napoletano (1806–1815) e carteggio, eds. Nino Cortese and Fausto Nicolini (Bari: Laterza, 1924), 5, 67. 57 Cuoco, Scritti vari, 2.2, 5. 58 The point is drawn from John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 5.

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a vital node in that complex and fundamental transformation. In this interstice between rhetoric and communication the true nature of Vico’s achievement becomes clear. Extrapolated beyond democratic or republican rhetorical institutions, rhetoric retains an intellectual potency in the modern world, riddled as that world is with communication of a profoundly mediated kind.

2 At the Limits of Classical Rhetoric

Two years after Vico was appointed professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples in 1699, the city was rocked by the Conspiracy of Macchia. A group of Neapolitan nobles—led by Gaetano Gambacorta, the Prince of Macchia—attempted to overthrow the Spanish administration. The objective was not Neapolitan independence. Instead, the nobles were satisfying personal ambitions, hoping for advancement under an Austrian rather than a Spanish viceroyalty. The assassination attempt against the Viceroy was foiled, Austrian reinforcements did not arrive, and when the nobles turned in desperation to the ordinary people of the city for support, no one joined them. The conspiracy failed.1 In the long history of Neapolitan subjugation to foreign powers, the 1701 attempted coup is little more than a momentary ripple. But the sequence of events is of real interest to the present study because Vico wrote a history of the conspiracy, a history he never published or even publicly acknowledged. The reasons for Vico’s silence are uncertain, but the De coniuratione principum neapolitanorum is nevertheless highly revealing of the difficulty he had in applying classical rhetorical forms to the contemporary political realities of his native city. What is most striking about this encounter between rhetoric and Naples is simply the limited utility of rhetorical historiography traditionally conceived. Although Vico never wrote a concerted treatment of the city using the kinds of conceptual tools and habits that he developed in the Scienza nuova, it is possible to extrapolate from that theoretical text to an analysis of Neapolitan cultural and political 1 On

the conspiracy, see Angelo Granito, Storia della congiura del principe di Macchia e della occupazione fatta dalle armi austriache del regno di Napoli nel 1707 (Naples: Stamperia dell’Iride, 1861), Giuseppe Ferrarelli, Tiberio Carafa e la congiura di Macchia (Naples: 1883), and Giuseppe Galasso, “Napoli nel viceregno spagnuolo. 1696–1707,” in Storia di Napoli (Naples: Societ`a Editrice Storia di Napoli, 1972).

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life that is far superior to that on display in the De coniuratione. I contend that the tension between modes of historiography developed in Athens, Rome, and Florence, on the one hand, and the experience of Vico and his contemporaries at Naples in 1701, on the other, precipitated the following question: What would it take to reconfigure rhetorical inquiry for Neapolitan conditions? In this chapter, I shall consider the emplotment of action in Vico’s account of the Conspiracy of Macchia of 1701. The plot as it is represented by Vico is unremarkable in itself. There, as elsewhere, a delicately balanced Europe awaits the death of the sickly and heirless Charles II of Spain (1661–1700), and a brief interregnum follows after the confirmation of rumors of the king’s death and before the validation of the succession of Philip, Duke of Anjou (1683–1746), second-born of the French Dauphin. A group of Neapolitan nobles forms that favors the succession of Charles, Archduke of Austria (1685–1740), son of Emperor Leopold I (1640–1705). This group makes a pact with Vienna to overthrow the Spanish regime in Naples. The conspirators plan to assassinate the Viceroy on 22 September 1701 and occupy the Castel Nuovo, but the Spanish authorities learn of the plot and move to prevent it. At first unsure whether to flee or to fight, the conspirators then attempt to raise the city against the Spanish. The uprising is initially successful and the Viceroy retreats from the Palazzo Reale to the Castel Nuovo. But in time popular support for the coup wavers, and when the administration sends out an expeditionary force it finds that the city has abandoned the rebellion. Cornered in the neighborhood of San Lorenzo, the conspirators are defeated by the Viceroy’s forces. Some are killed, others executed; some are captured and others escape. In this its most basic form, the plot is invariant in all of the written accounts of the conspiracy, published and unpublished. Vico’s account is, however, distinctive in other respects and chiefly for the studied manner in which it goes about complicating this chain of events, and for the use it makes of debates staged as direct discourse to express that complication. For the purposes of the present work, I adopt Fausto Nicolini’s hypothesis that the De coniuratione (unpublished prior to the nineteenth century) was written soon after the conspiracy and certainly before Naples came under Austrian rule in 1707.2 Nicolini’s hypothesis appears to be 2 There are ten known extant manuscripts of the work, nine of a first redaction and one of

a second redaction. Nicolini admits that it is puzzling that Vico never made any mention of this work, but he discounts the various hypotheses that Vico did not write it, that he wrote it (but only after July 1735 as Royal Historiographer), or that he began work

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confirmed by a new source. A manuscript contained in the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli refers to Vico’s De coniuratione. The manuscript is attached to a dedicatory epistle that is dated 25 January 1702. If the date on the letter is a reliable index for dating the manuscript, then a version of Vico’s history was in circulation within months of the event itself.3 Vico’s De coniuratione is the story of an action intended but not fully executed, of an action that in the midst of its execution becomes something else. From an elite conspiracy the action is almost changed into a popular uprising. Vico is therefore constrained and permitted to examine the question of whether the action begun by those he calls “patricians” was available for appropriation by those he calls “plebeians.” Under the pressure of circumstances, the conspirators are forced to address themselves to the people of Naples and to justify their action and to specify its meaning. They hope thereby to make their conspiracy available to the plebs for continuation. In this they fail—the mass uprising dissipates and the elite conspirators are isolated—but in Vico’s historical account their failure opens the way to the conceptualization of an action that is articulated by one group and then appropriated by another for other ends. This shift in emphasis from intention to reception is one that is visible not only in the De coniuratione but also in the Vichian oeuvre more generally. It is, moreover, a chief claim of the present work that unless one traces this shift in emphasis it is impossible to grasp the sense in which the Scienza nuova is a sublimation of rhetoric, a sublimation of the emphasis on the orator’s production into an emphasis on the auditor’s reception and then furthermore into an intuition of what I shall call the “disaggregated reciprocity” of Homer. That reciprocity consists on the piece before the political change of August 1707, but having completed only a rough sketch put it aside, later thinking it unworthy of mention even after the ousting of Austria in March 1734. Nicolini prefers the hypothesis that, having brought the piece to completion before August 1707, Vico for some reason decided not to discuss the work publicly. On the question of why Vico’s history was never published, Nicolini is not as confident as was Croce that Vico’s work was written with publication as the official state history in mind, only then to be passed over (along with another work by Giuseppe Macrino) in favor of one by Carlo Maiello for political reasons. See Fausto Nicolini, “Vicende e codici della ‘Principum neapolitanorum coniuratio’ di Giambattista Vico,” in Vico storico, ed. Fulvio Tessitore (Naples: Morano, 1967), 409–48 and Benedetto Croce, “Giambattista Vico, scrittore di storie,” in Uomini e cose della vecchia Italia (Bari: Laterza, 1927), 235–71. 3 Anon., “Congiura de nobili napoletani fatta nell’anno 1701. Cavata dala deposizione di d. Carlo di Sangro, sinceramente come fu scritta in processo,” MS X.D.91, Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, Naples, Italy.

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in the openness of the Homeric poems as cultural artifacts that capacitate a multitude of authors, oral composers who began as auditors. In the De coniuratione the beginnings of this transformation are visible. In particular, Vico pays considerable attention—albeit untheorized—to the impersonality of action. With the phrase “the impersonality of action” I mean to locate and harness an irony. One of the distinctive aspects of “actions” in contradistinction to “events” is that they are undertaken by persons. Nevertheless, an action undertaken by one person and not in any way received by another person is not an “action” in the fullest sense of the word. An “action,” on this account, requires multiple persons performing multiple roles. Paradoxically, however, this multiplicity of persons gives action an impersonal character: If all have a stake in an action, then no single person owns it. Eventually, Vico will come to render this “impersonal character” in his own terms as “providence” and this rubric for impersonality will replace what in classical rhetoric was understood as the source of proof from character, or ethos. In the present context, it is important to indicate how the category of the impersonal first emerged in a Vichian vernacular and to indicate which aspects of the classical and neoclassical historiographic tradition it incorporated and transformed.4 In the first place, tracing the origins of the impersonal will require an examination of the classical models available to and utilized by Vico as he was composing the De coniuratione. Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae will be decisive here and a close reading of that work will reveal that, in its commitment to the staging of speeches for and against particular actions (a stagecraft that Vico will adopt and adapt for his own purposes in a Neapolitan context), the Sallustian model prefigures the impersonalization of action that Vico extends. Vico’s own preoccupation with the impersonal character of action in the text of the De coniuratione itself will become legible against this historiographic background and, having described Vico’s historiographic choices in the De coniuratione itself, it will be opportune to consider in more general terms the precise meaning of the phrase “impersonal character of action” as a preparation for the further transformation of intention into reception, first in the De antiquissima sapientia and then in the Diritto universale. Impersonality is a 4 For

another sense of the impersonal in this connection, compare Nancy S. Struever, “The Impersonal in Vico: ‘The classical endures because it is impersonal’,” in Il corpo e le sue facolt`a. G. B. Vico, eds. Giuseppe Cacciatore, Vanna Gessa Kurotschka, Enrico Nuzzo, Manuela Sanna, and Alessia Scongamiglio, Laboratorio dell’ISPF (www.ispf.cnr.it/ispf-lab) 2, no.1 (2005).

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conceptual device for overcoming the parameters of the here and now that dominate classical rhetoric with its focus on the individual orator and the individual speech situation. Vico pushes as far as he can toward impersonality while retaining the basic structure of rhetorical historiography, but as his own thinking evolves after the De coniuratione, he drops the genre of historical monograph and analyzes impersonality by other means.

I. Antilogy and Rhetorical Historiography Antilogia is not one of the rhetorical terms that Vico examines in his Institutiones oratoriae. It was one of the most conventional rhetorical figures in the genre Vico adopted when he wrote the De coniuratione—namely, the historical monograph. Antilogia is the original Greek term denoting the practice of contradiction that became so central to rhetoric in the form of in utramque partem disputare (arguing on both sides of the case) and declamatio (the pedagogical practice of having students argue against each other). The French classicist Jacqueline de Romilly is of the opinion that antilogy originates in tragedy and constitutes a midway point between the Athenian tragedies of the fifth century and the philosophical dialogues of the fourth century. She believes also that like much of the rest of the rhetorical tradition, antilogy was fostered by the sophists, who specialized in the practice of contradicting. De Romilly thinks that Protagoras was particularly important for antilogy and that Thucydides is the great example of the application of sophistic practices in historiography.5 As a concept, antilogia appears in Protagoras’s reception of Heraclitus, where the controversial character of speech replicates a basically dialectical nature of reality—for Heraclitus understands all phenomena to be the temporary balance of opposing forces. As a term, it appears explicitly in Thucydides, where (as generations of readers have seen) Pericles is the only speaker in the History of the Peloponnesian War who is permitted to speak without rebuttal.

5 Jacqueline

de Romilly, Histoire et raison chez Thucydide (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1956), 233–5. Barbara Cassin argues that sophistry belongs properly to a tradition that holds language to be a matter not of speaking of, but of speaking to and argues further that “l’histoire, telle qu’en particulier Thucydide la fait connaˆıtre, est sophistique au moins en ce sens que les pr´agmata racont´es sont essentiellement des l´ogoi; les l´ogoi sont non seulement causes des e´ v´enements, il sont les e´ v´enements eux-mˆemes, ils font et sont ´ l’histoire politique.” Barbara Cassin, Le plaisir de parler: Etudes de sophistique compar´ee (Paris: ´ Les Editions de Minuit, 1986), 26.

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Moreover, antilogy intrudes on the historian’s craft in the form of conflicting recollections. As Thucydides says, regarding the speeches given at the outset of the war and during it, “it has been difficult to recall with strict accuracy the words actually spoken.” But because in Thucydides’s judgment the specificity of the speeches is essential to understanding the history of the war, he decides to recraft the speeches “in the language in which, as it seemed to me, the several speakers would express, on the subjects under consideration, the sentiments most befitting the occasion.” From logoi, words, Thucydides proceeds to erga, actions, noting that “as to the facts (erga) of the occurrences of the war, I have thought it my duty to give them, not as ascertained from any chance informant nor as seemed to me probable, but only after investigating with the greatest possible accuracy each detail.” Yet having separated words and things, opinions and facts, Thucydides finds himself obliged immediately to confound the two once again, for “the endeavor to ascertain these facts was a laborious task, because those who were eye witnesses of the several events did not give the same reports about the same things, but reports varying according to their championship of one side or the other, or according to their recollection.”6 In this way, antilogy emerges from the inevitable plurality of accounts describing human actions, whether those actions have already taken place or are about to be decided upon. Antilogy reflects the pliability of actions. Such indeterminacy is not the result of radical unknowability. Instead, it testifies to the contested nature of action, which can be woven into new narratives or high-jacked for new purposes. Antilogy is a tactic of representation that is particularly appropriate in the historical monograph because it centers alternative perspectives on turning points, points at which entire worlds are brought into existence (or are foreclosed) as a result of particular decisions. By representing one opinion and then its opposite in the context of a fast-moving political event, antilogy is able to bring into focus all of the counterfactual, hypothetical futures that are in play when decisions of consequence are being taken. One of the best examinations of antilogy in classical historiography is, in point of fact, precisely the example that was foremost in Vico’s mind when he chose to structure his De coniuratione around a sequence of antilogies. That classical exemplar is the Bellum Catilinae of Sallust, vehemens Sallustius as Vico calls him in his lectures on rhetoric. Beyond the superficial parallels—the coup d’etat mounted by disaffected noblemen 6 Thucydides,

History of the Peloponnesian War, 1.22.

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contrasted with the almost heroic demise of their endeavors—there are a host of stylistic reasons for supposing that Vico was thinking of Sallust’s representation of events at Rome in 63 BCE when he was writing of the Conspiracy of Macchia.7 Chief among these stylistic parallels in this case is antilogy. Contrary to what we might suppose, the real climax of the Bellum Catilinae is not the heroic death at the end of the monograph of Catiline, the aristocrat who has attempted to take control of the state. The climax comes earlier and in the form of a senatorial debate centered around speeches by Gaius Julius Caesar and Marcus Porcius Cato for and against leniency in punishing Catiline’s accomplices.8 That Vico paid close attention to Sallust’s representation of Caesar’s speech is certain, for he gives it as an example—not of antilogia, but of insinuatio—in his lectures on rhetoric.9 Making references to the development of Roman law, Caesar argues that treason is punishable with exile and that citizens may not be executed without trial. Caesar proposes instead that the traitors be stripped of their possessions and imprisoned, lest the senate set a dangerous precedent in sanctioning the execution of citizens. Having noted the structural irony that he who holds the highest office has the least freedom of movement,10 Caesar observes acutely that “all bad precedents have originated in cases which were good; but when the control of the government falls into the hands of men who are incompetent or bad, your new precedent is transferred from those who well deserve and merit such punishment to the undeserving and blameless.”11 The structure of the observation is ironic, and it is from insights of this kind that Vico develops his interest in impersonality. Caesar would appear to be underscoring the fragility of one of the chief insights of the Roman constitution, which provided for the extraconstitutional activity of dictators in times of crisis and could therefore 7 See

Claudia Pandolfi, “Modelli classici della Principum neapolitanorum coniurationis anni MDCCI historia,” Bollettino del centro di studi vichiani 7 (1977): 31–57. 8 Syme agrees. See Ronald Syme, Sallust (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), 68 and 103–20, and The Roman Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 25–6. 9 It becomes a model of insinuatio, a mode of beginning a speech where a direct opening is not possible. Giambattista Vico, Institutiones oratoriae, ed. Giuliano Crifo` (Naples: Istituto Suor Orsola Benincasa, 1989), 158–61. 10 Sallust, Bellum Catilinae, 51.12–13. 11 Sallust, Bellum Catilinae, 51.27. Vico does not cite this passage in his lectures, but he does invoke Caesar’s injunction that “omnis homines, patres conscripti, qui de rebus dubiis consultant, ab odio, amicitia, ira atque misericordia uacuos esse decet.” Vico, Institutiones oratoriae, 158–9. Compare Polybius, The Histories, 36.13.

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countenance extreme measures without establishing them as precedents. Cato notes that under the older law of the Twelve Tables, treason was punishable by scourging and execution and argues that the developing political crisis requires a swift and powerful response. Both orators anchor their arguments in the past, but it is Cato’s present that wins out over Caesar’s future. The traitors are promptly executed. Sallust’s suggestion is that it is often the force of circumstances that reifies actions, the urgency of the present that lays down signs for future litigation. Just as Sallust’s narration reaches out beyond the immediate scope of the action he is describing, so Vico’s history repeatedly arrests the train of events in order to examine potential continuations. Sallust’s is an extension of context; Vico’s, a dilation of time. Both serve to loosen the unity of the action narrated. The dominance of antilogy in the De coniuratione cannot be understood except against this classical background. It should be noted, however, that Vico’s deep investment in rhetoric has made him retrograde in the context of the ars historica as it was practiced among his peers. Very little use of antilogy is made by his contemporary Neapolitan chroniclers of the Conspiracy of Macchia. The reason was not simply that eighteenthcentury Naples was not fifth-century Athens, republican Rome, or even quattrocento Florence—where the humanist chancellor Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444) articulated one of the broadest possible articles of faith for antilogy in historiography and oratory in politics, when he said that “wickedness cannot perhaps be avoided in one or two or a few men,” but “that an entire people, after public debate, should act basely and deliberately break its good faith and promises, is utterly abhorrent,” that is to say, unthinkable.12 Beyond this, and quite apart from the absence of an ideology of civic humanism and its concomitant institutions, historians themselves had begun to find the fabrication of historical speeches improper. In the context of debates about the scholarly rigor of the ars historica in the seventeenth century, for example, while Gerardus Joannes Vossius (1577–1649) continued to defend the practice in his 1623 Ars Historica, Agostino Mascardi (1591–1640) inveighed against the use of antilogy in his Dell’arte historica in 1636. Mascardi emphasized that there is a science of erudition governing the critique of sources and the establishment of their reliability. He insisted that philology takes precedence over artistry. 12 Leonardo Bruni, History of the Florentine People, ed. and trans. James Hankins (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 7.73.

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Once again, however, the tension created by Vico’s adherence to rhetorical practices that others were beginning to attack as outmoded does not find its ultimate expression in a simple recalcitrance. Here too, Vico is not reactionary but rather motivated to push against the limits of the inherited body of rhetorical precepts. Viewed against the background of Anthony Grafton’s recent treatment of the early modern ars historica, Vico becomes a particularly telling example of how rhetorical historical commitments could be redirected into a decisively modern historical consciousness. Sketching a debate between Jean Le Clerc (1657–1736), the editor of the Biblioth`eque ancienne et moderne, and the Dutch scholar Jacob Perizonius (1651–1715), Grafton argues that the older concerns of the ars historica, which had been centered on the notion of historia magistra vitae, had decisively fallen by the wayside. “Where Le Clerc found his standard for judging literary texts in the clear and distinct reason of Descartes,” contends Grafton, “Perizonius found his in the historicism, the contextual reading and thinking most notoriously represented, in his world, by Spinoza.” Although it was Le Clerc’s imprimatur that Vico sought as a scholar, his later work ought to be understood as a continuation of the interest in contextualism that drove Perizonius. Context, what is more, is in significant ways a corollary of the rhetorical concept of decorum, and Vico’s retention of antilogy is simply the beginning of a conceptual process revolving around the impersonal character of action that by the time of the Scienza nuova will be transmogrified into what Amos Funkenstein has appropriately termed a secularized theory of Providence.13

II. Historiography without Oratory The classical historiographic tradition of Thucydides and especially Sallust was without doubt an extremely important source for Vico’s 13 Anthony

Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 18; Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 279–89. Regarding Mascardi’s critique of antilogy, see Eraldo Bellini, Agostino Mascardi tra “ars poetica” e “ars historica” (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2002). Struever has set out the crucial contribution made by rhetoric to Renaissance historiography in Language of History, while Eric Cochrane accepts that one factor in the decline of the ars historica in the seventeenth century was “the increasingly apparent failure of the experiments aimed at overcoming its topical limitation to the Renaissance equivalent of the ancient polis,” in Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 479.

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understanding of the importance of rhetoric as a discipline that could strengthen the representation of historical actions. Antilogy is probably the clearest example of the intersection between historiography and rhetoric in Greco-Roman literature, and Vico’s own De coniuratione revolves around a series of public speeches that clearly owe their form to classical antilogy. But Greco-Roman historiography is certainly not the only source on which Vico draws when he writes the De coniuratione. His sense of the historian’s craft is also influenced by the initiatives of his Neapolitan contemporaries. Vico was involved in academic societies at Naples that invested a great deal of intellectual energy in historical representation. The historical work produced by his contemporaries, what is more, finds a certain degree of expression in Vico’s own work. From the point of view of the thesis that overall Vico’s work is best characterized as a sublimation of rhetoric, the most interesting point is the tension between ancient rhetorical historiography, on the one side, and contemporary Neapolitan initiatives, on the other. Put simply, classical texts from Thucydides and Sallust assumed that (for better or worse) the most crucial decisions, the decisions with the greatest historical impact, were those arrived at through public debate, whereas the largely unpublished historical works produced by Neapolitan academicians immediately prior to the 1701 coup d’etat assumed the opposite. They assumed, that is, that public speech was either deeply dissimulatory or historically inconsequential. Vico has deep intellectual commitments to both these traditions. My argument is that Vico’s De coniuratione is best understood as the beginning of a process of sublimation in which his desire to remain faithful to two commitments that appear to contradict each other drives him to make radical innovations in both rhetoric and historiography. The most immediate source of information on Vico’s exposure to contemporary Neapolitan historiographic initiatives is clearly the lectures given in the Palatine Academy of Medinaceli. Between its inauguration in March 1698 and its dissolution in September 1701, the Academy was convened regularly in the Palazzo Reale by Luis de la Cerda, Duke of Medinaceli, Spanish Viceroy at Naples from 1695 until 1702. It was a forum for both the presentation of lectures and the recitation of poetry.14 14 On

the Palatine Academy of Medinaceli, see Guido Rispoli, L’accademia palatina del Medinaceli: Contributo alla storia della cultura napoletana (Naples: 1924); Giuseppe Ricuperati, “La prima formazione di Pietro Giannone: L’accademia Medina-coeli e Domenico Aulisio,” in Saggi e ricerche sul settecento (Naples: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici, 1968), 94–171 and “A proposito dell’accademia Medina Coeli,” Rivista storica italiana 84 (1972): 57–79; Silvio Suppa, L’accademia di Medinacoeli: Fra tradizione investigante e nuova scienza

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Lectures in natural philosophy and mathematics were given (such that the Palatine Academy does to some extent continue in the tradition of its more famous predecessor, the Academy of the Investigators), but the great majority of lectures were concerned with history. Such activity brought into the ambit of the Academy many of the most prominent intellects in Naples. Lectures were given by, among others, Gregorio Caloprese, Giuseppe Lucina, and Nicol`o Caravita, a member of the neoclassical literary movement of the Arcadians and a leading participant in the controversy over the Inquisition’s activities at Naples at the turn of the century. Also involved in the academy were Giuseppe Valletta, whose extensive library served as a hub around which much of Neapolitan intellectual life was organized and who had also been a polemicist in the Inquisition controversy of the 1690s, together with Carlo Russo and Nicola Sersale, whose manuscript collection of the lectures given in the Medinaceli is the chief source for the Academy’s work. Carmine Nicolo` Caracciolo was also involved, along with and Paolo Mattia Doria—Vico’s lifelong friend and interlocutor. In addition, the two great luminaries of eighteenth-century Neapolitan historiography— namely, Giannone and Vico himself—both attended the lectures of the Academy. Giannone did not give a lecture. Vico gave one: “Delle cene sontuose de’ Romani.” Vico read this lecture on the dining practices of the Romans to his fellow academicians in 1699, having taken up the position of professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples and having being elected to the Palatine Academy in that same year. Vico himself has no great pretensions for the lecture. It is an occasional piece of writing that does not attempt to bring the full weight of his general intellectual concerns to bear on the task at hand. Conscious of his place alongside other academicians who have addressed the Spanish Viceroy with accounts of the undertakings of the Roman emperors, Vico aims more to delight than move. But even this erudite excursion into the finer details of Roman hospitality can be understood as taking up a place at the limits of classical rhetoric. Immediately, the lecture contrasts republican Rome with its afterlife in civile (Naples: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici, 1971), Enrico Nuzzo, Verso la “vita civile”: Antropologia e politica nelle lezioni accademiche di Gregorio Caloprese e Paolo Mattia Doria (Naples: Alfredo Guida, 1984), and Harold S. Stone, Vico’s Cultural History: The Production and Transmission of Ideas in Naples 1685–1750 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), esp. 97. The lectures have been published by the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, under the direction of Michele Rak, as Lezioni dell’accademia di palazzo del duca di Medinaceli (Napoli 1698–1701), 5 vols. (Naples: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, 2000–2005).

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the Empire—and its modern analogues, like the Spanish Empire, to which Vico was addressing himself as it was represented in the person of the Viceroy. Moreover, the focus is shifted from the negotium of the affari del giorno to the otium of entertaining guests. However, the shift from business to pleasure, from the public spaces of the city to the private spaces of the home, does not entail a complete effacement of rhetorical interest. If rhetorical inquiry is best understood as inquiry into the positioning of human beings relative to one another, then Vico’s interest in the spatial hierarchies of the triclinium is properly rhetorical.15 And indeed there is much to be said by way of decoding the power structures of such hospitality.16 In the lecture, Vico begins with Sallust but he moves increasingly toward Petronius and others writers of the later Empire as sources on Roman social spaces that centered on food and drink. Following his peers beyond the forum and its republican modes of interaction, Vico begins to specify new locales for rhetorical inquiry even in the more hierarchical spaces of postrepublican Rome. Vico’s contribution to the historical picture of the ancient world developed in the Palatine Academy is atypical. Almost all of the other contributions fall into two well defined and quite distinct genres: histories of empires and biographies of Roman emperors. It is not difficult to understand why this might have been the case. The structure of the Neapolitan polity at the turn of the century—ultimate political decision making vested in Spain, executive institutions geared toward the collection of taxes, judicial institutions embodying a degree of Neapolitan self-governance, legislative or representative institutions heavily attenuated or nonexistent—predisposed the city and the region to historical and therefore historiographic concerns of an either imperial or biographical nature. In Vico’s Naples, the life of the imperial organism was concentrated in and around the person of the sovereign. Speculation about the impending death of the heirless Spanish monarch Charles II greatly accentuated these concerns. Given its brief three years of activity, the Academy’s proceedings were remarkably intense. There was investigation into the origin of empires generally speaking, together with histories of Assyrian, Hebraic, Persian, Greek, and Roman political structures. The focus on the history of empires entailed inquiry into the lives of the Roman emperors, where biographies were presented on Julius Caesar and twenty-four emperors from Augustus to Decius. 15 Giambattista

Vico, Delle cene sontuose de’ Romani (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 1993), 33–4. for example, Matthew B. Roller, Dining Posture in Ancient Rome: Bodies, Values, and Status (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

16 See,

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For the purpose of contextualizing Vico’s history of the 1701 conspiracy and presenting the modes available for Vico’s consideration of historiographic problems and solutions, the Palatine lectures are significant and some of them are highly instructive.17 It may be that claims for the Academy’s importance in the development of political, historical, and anthropological inquiry in Naples in the generation of Vico and Giannone have been overstated. After all, many lectures are unoriginal and few facilitate collective intellectual work. Yet Vico’s De coniuratione is to be understood as taking up a position in the gulf between the macronarratives of the imperial state and the micronarratives of political personalities. The macronarratives of the history of empires in the Palatine Academy delimit human intentionality, circumscribing it with fate, chance, and providence. The micronarratives of the biographies manifest the difficulty of divining an individual’s character from his actions, for the everyday demands of dissimulation are at times contradictory and an individual’s passions are not always his own. In the absence of a politics of collective self-determination, in which rhetoric traditionally thrived, Vico was faced with limited opportunities to exercise the tools of Greco-Roman rhetorical criticism. In the Academy, Vico encountered modes of historiography in which action had in various ways become impersonalized from above and below the level of the individual person. The De coniuratione synthesizes qualities from both traditions. Before coming to examine in detail the historiographic structure of the De coniuratione, it will first be necessary to outline the two dominant modes of Neapolitan historiography in the period immediately prior to the coup d’etat of 1701. Those modes—the history of ancient empires and the biography of Roman emperors—inform Vico’s understanding of what I shall term impersonality. It is in the conceptual domain of this impersonality that subsequent Vichian inquiry is to be located. Narrating the centuries-long birth, growth, maturity, decline, and fall of empires tends naturally toward impersonality because the undertakings of individuals are so out of proportion with, so minute in comparison to, the overarching historical arc of the civilization. Yet, ironically, the same is 17 Other

aspects of Neapolitan historiographic production in these years are certainly relevant, not least the disciplinary histories: Lionardo di Capoa, Parere del signor Lionardo di Capoa divisato in otto ragionamenti (Naples: Bulison, 1681) for medicine, Giuseppe Valletta’s Opere filosofiche, ed. Michele Rak (Florence: Olschki, 1975) for philosophy, Giacinto Gimma’s Idea della storia dell’Italia letterata esposta coll’ordine cronologico (Naples: Mosca, 1723) for “the sciences,” and Gianvincenzo Gravina’s De ortu et progressu iuris civilis (Naples: 1701), together with Pietro Giannone’s Istoria civile del regno di Napoli, ed. Antonio Marongiu (Milan: Marzorati, 1970) for the historical dimension of jurisprudence.

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true of narratives that lay out the course of single lives. Instead of demonstrating the sui generis nature of individuals, biography often enmeshes its subjects in the concerns of their contemporaries. Even in biography the boundaries of the possible and the impossible are beyond the control of the individual, such that all action qua action must be understood as transactive—that is, as happening between persons. In the first place, action understood in this way as transactive is interpersonal. In time and by degrees, it becomes impersonal insofar as the value of an individual is a value assigned by others and not by the individual himself. Because the individual action is more cognizable than the individual actor, actions must be compared not to the other actions of the particular actor in question, but to all other actions of a similar kind. Moreover, every action is an action that impinges on the actor as much as anyone else. Vico focuses on the grammatical categories of action that lie between active and passive. He is interested in the terrain of the middle voice—the reflexive and the reciprocal. Vico does not theorize the grammar of action in the De coniuratione. In the De antiquissima sapientia of 1710, he very nearly does. I am arguing that conscious attention to these categories illuminates what is going on in the De coniuratione qua historiography, how that monograph reconciles the contrary impulses of Greco-Roman and Neapolitan historiography, and where there is a conceptual continuity between the De coniuratione and the De antiquissima sapientia. The considerable interest among Vico’s contemporaries in the tactics required to write the history of empires is clearly a context for many of the categories that structure the Scienza nuova. The canvas on which Vico works in that work is profoundly macronarratival. The rise and fall of civilizations is a primary analytical frame, as is clear in the chronological table (which appears at the beginning of the Scienza nuova) that schematizes the basic events of Hebraic, Chaldean, Scythian, Phoenician, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman civilization. Moreover, the major metahistorical categories that Vico uses to discuss such massive temporal phenomena also find a source in the lectures of the Palatine Academy. Thus, those lectures constitute one point of transmission for the concepts of chance, fate, and providence that Vico uses to organize his historical imagination. Perhaps the most potent connection between the lectures on imperial history in the Palatine Academy and historiographic categories that are important in Vico’s later work is the shared tendency to perceive mind and nature as different manifestations of a single historical process. The Vichian category of providence that is central to the Scienza nuova can, in part,

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be traced back to seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Neapolitan debates about the intelligibility of long-term historical processes, such as the rise and fall of empires, that seem to hover between natural and civil history. Thus, in the lectures of Giuseppe Lucina (described by Vico in his Vita as “a man of great erudition in Greek, Latin, and Tuscan”), one finds a denunciation of the kind of fatalism that Lucina thinks ensues from an elision of the difference between mind and nature.18 In his lectures on the principles of philosophy and the art of divination practiced by the Assyrians, Lucina argues that the Assyrians espoused an impious philosophy later taught by Pythagoras and Democritus. He argues that “the ancient Assyrians judged our souls to be derived from and sustained by the substance of God.” Individual historical actors engage in actions that achieve a kind of unity of form in the long run because they are in fact simply aspects of the divine. Lucina argues that the omnipresence of God implied fatalism and not providence because, as he put it paraphrasing the Assyrians, “all things being full of eternal sentiment and of divine mind, they said themselves to be in need of the support of divine spirits for their souls to be moved.” As Lucina reasons, “if they supposed that, then they certainly must admit that binding chain of causes, that incontrastible fate, wherefrom, practically dragged, everything is said to be subject to necessity, and whereby our minds follow the eternal order of the heavens.” This fatalism is a heresy, Lucina states, transmitted to Europe from the Assyrians through the Chaldeans, the Pythagoreans, the Atomists, the Gnostics, and the Manicheians.19 Ironically, the metahistorical categories of fate, chance, and providence are all categories that strip the here and now of decisive and relatively predictable influence on the future. The exploration of such categories is an understandable response to the experience of disempowerment. At the periphery of the Spanish Empire and subject to decisions taken by others, the Neapolitans had a use for debates on the antitheses of historical agency. Indeed, Lucina himself was entering such a debate when he condemned Assyrian—that is, Pythagorean and Democritean— fatalism. On the one side, Lucina condemned Democritus’s reading of providence as necessity, such that it is indistinguishable from fate. On the

18 Giambattista

Vico, Vita di Giambattista Vico scritta da se medesimo, in Opere, ed. Battistini, 1.26–7 (henceforth, “Vita”). 19 Giuseppe Lucina, “Ragionamento secondo delle arti d’indovinare degli Assiri,” in Rak, Lezioni dell’accademia, 1.79.

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other side, Giuseppe Valletta defended Democritus by reading his necessity as providence, such that it is coterminous with judgment.20 Both Lucina and Valletta show a striking willingness to understand providence as another word for necessity or to take chance as another term for fate, and this willingness is also conspicuous in Vico’s De antiquissima sapientia of 1710. Nevertheless, the debate turns on whether the ultimate emphasis of these metahistorical categories falls on necessity or judgment—a difference of opinion that has clear political consequences from a Neapolitan perspective. But the kind of judgment imagined by Valletta is not the judgment of a moralizing or vindictive God who casts down civilizations that have become corrupt. Instead, Valletta conceptualizes such “judgment” as a metaphysical precondition for the integrity of a system, the complexity of which far exceeds the capacity of any individual or individual organism contained with in it to comprehend. Judgment here consists in the maintenance of a record—a tabulation—of actions and events such that the consequences of those actions and events are not lost when they recede from view. It is for this reason that providence works not only beyond the perspective of human agents but also beneath that perspective. As Gregorio Caloprese (the well-known Cartesian and teacher of the librettist Pietro Metastasio) says in his investigation into the origins of empires—which functions as a kind of methodological prelude to the work of the other Medinaceli academicians who write on empire— nothing can be understood except by means of its parts. Thus, empires cannot be understood except as the composite of a series of smaller entities: cities, men, and the constitution of men’s souls that governs their movements and workings.21 Providence expresses itself intelligibly only in the long term, and yet it works through media that are literally omnipresent. 20 Lucina,

“Ragionamento secondo,” 1.79–80. Lucina observes that “nemeno il medesimo Democrito se ne [‘l’error s`ı empio e pestilenzioso’] seppe spogliare, ammettendo ben egli quell’occulta providenza, siccome dice Teodoreto [Teodoreto, in pseudo-Plutarch, Placita philosophorum, 6.13], che per le vertigini de’ cieli fosse di tutte cose cagione, la quale egli chiama necessit`a.” Valletta had argued in his Istoria filosofica, which was circulating in Naples as a manuscript around the turn of the century and which was published without the author’s consent in 1703–1704, that “dicendo Democrito farsi le cose a caso, intese egli del Fato. E per Fato intendea l’ordine delle cause stabilite dalla Provvidenza e dall’Autor della Natura, da lui detto Necessit`a” and that Galen reports that for Democritus “Necessit`a, Fato, Giudicio, e Provvidenza” were the same and that “il Fato altro non fusse, se non che una legge, per la cui provvidenza si regge il tutto.” See Valletta, Opere filosofiche, 235. 21 Gregorio Caloprese, “Dell’origine dell’imperi,” in Rak, Lezioni dell’accademia, 1.7.

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Thus, providence is a category of thought that is capable of arguing for a connection between the most macronarratival and the most micronarratival concerns. This rapprochement between the massive and the miniscule is something that appears in the later Vico too, where the phrase Jovis omnia plena (“everything is full of Jove”) becomes a commonplace on which to found a wide variety of investigations into primitive minds and into the origins of the concept of providence.22 In many ways, this concern to establish connections between the infinitesimally small and the infinitely large is characteristic of thinkers who have lost the experience of political action conducted on a human scale—that is to say, on a scale where input and outcome, endeavor and result bear a relationship to each other that is more or less immediately visible and intelligible. Yet, although Vico transcends what are conventionally recognized as the parameters of humanistic inquiry, he remains a humanist on account of his relentless application to the phenomena attendant to human speech and action. What is more, the best intellectual historian of the intersections between Neapolitan natural and civil philosophy— Nicola Badaloni—takes Vico’s achievement to be characteristic of a distinctly Neapolitan engagement with the institutions and ideas of the law.23 Just as this kind of historiography of empire impersonalized action by making it part of a broader natural system, so biographical study in the Palatine Academy impersonalized action by enmeshing the will of the individual in circumstance. The Palatine investment in biography was heavy and was concentrated exclusively in the lives of the Roman emperors. Perhaps the most interesting lectures, from the point of view of the biographical genre and its limitations, were given by Carmine Nicolo` Caracciolo on Augustus. In contrast to Suetonius’s account of Augustus (which is divided between the emperor’s public and private behavior and is, by the Suetonian standards, terse), Caracciolo’s account is chronological, and he transforms the task of writing the life of Augustus into an opportunity to write the history of Rome in the Augustan age. Certainly, this does not diminish the “personality” of Augustus, but it does 22 Vico,

1744 Scienza nuova, §379. See also Vico’s gloss of the relationships among anima, animus, and mens in his autobiography. Vico, Vita, 39. On the phrase Jovis omnia plena, see also Augustine, The City of God, 4.9–10. 23 Badaloni, Introduzione a G. B. Vico, 337–8. On the connections between natural and civil philosophy at Naples, see in particular Badaloni, Introduzione a G. B. Vico, 190– 9; Ricuperati, “Prima formazione di Pietro Giannone,” 106–7; Suppa, L’accademia di Medinacoeli, 76–7.

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raise the stakes of biography. Therein lies one of the structural difficulties of biography. If a biography of Augustus is a list of his achievements, then it will be concerned with matters of public import—like Augustus’s autobiography, the Res gestae, of which the Romanist Ronald Syme says, “none can have fabricated history with such calm audacity.”24 To be sure, this makes the Res gestae an acutely personal effort. Nevertheless, in Caracciolo’s gloss, Augustus is a cipher—somehow indeterminate as a person. Structured by the diachronic irony that Augustus as princeps was more virtuous than Octavian as triumvir (“a chill and mature terrorist,” in Syme’s opinion), Caracciolo’s treatment is punctuated by observations on the theoretical difficulty of representing a man in action.25 A man can only be said to have acted out of character if the nature of his character is already known. Yet the nature of a man’s character can only be determined from his actions. Augustus is, in Caracciolo’s opinion, an arch-dissimulator, and his is a complex position in extremely complex times.26 The nature of his character is consequently obscure, and Caracciolo’s diagnosis of that obscurity is delicately phrased: “certain it is, however, that just as he was not cruel by nature, much less did he by artifice prove himself to be merciful and pious, since, even if he appeared inhuman on many occasions, yet on many more did he make show of a sincere benevolence.” From such ambiguity Caracciolo is only willing to draw the conclusion that “ever various in himself he yet made himself appear by turns both cruel and generous.”27 Conscious simulation and dissimulation overrides a more basic incoherence at the level of 24 As Syme has observed of the genre, “at its worst biography is flat and schematic: at its best,

it is often baffled by the hidden discords of human nature.” He also notes that “from Sallustius history acquired that preoccupation with human character, especially in its secret thoughts and darker operations, which it never lost so long as the art was practiced in the classical manner of the Roman and the senator, archaic yet highly sophisticated, somber but not edifying.” Syme, Roman Revolution, 7, 249–50, 522. 25 Syme, Roman Revolution, 191; Carmine Nicolo ` Caracciolo, “Della vita di Cesare Augusto,” in Rak, Lezioni dell’accademia, 1.457. 26 The source for the characterization of Augustus as a political chameleon is Julian the Apostate, The Caesars, 309a: “Octavian entered, changing colour continually, like a chameleon, turning now pale now red; one moment his expression was gloomy, sombre, and overcast, the next he unbent and showed all the charms of Aphrodite and the Graces.” Syme considers Augustus’s duplicity exemplary: “The failure of Cicero as a statesman showed the need for courage and constancy in all the paths of duplicity. A change of front in politics is not disastrous unless caused by delusion or indecision. The treacheries of Octavianus were conscious and consistent.” Syme, Roman Revolution, 122. 27 Caracciolo, “Della vita di Cesare Augusto,” in Rak, Lezioni dell’accademia, 1.416: “sempre vario in se stesso nello stesso tempo s’appales`o or crudele ed or generoso.”

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the individual, an incoherence that reappears in Vico’s discovery of the incapacities of the Homeric heroes. The members of the Palatine Academy did not self-consciously theorize the impersonal character of action. Nevertheless, their concerns about the future of the Neapolitan polity funded an intensive investigation into the relationship between structural constraints and individual initiatives, especially in the Roman Empire. In their eyes, the paradox of the imperial system was that it invested extraordinary powers in individuals only to prove that individuals with such power were not entirely free to exercise it. As Caesar had said, he who holds the highest office has the least freedom of movement. At Naples this insight was expressed in a naturalistic idiom where nature and mind were indistinguishable. It was expressed with attention to the opaque qualities of individuals. The emperors—Augustus most clearly—were the focus of extraordinary attention, but that multiplicity of perspectives served only to multiply the explanations of behavior, so that greater public exposure equaled greater opacity. Rome is the historical archive that Vico’s Neapolitan peers used to explore the nature of imperial government, but the interest in Rome was far from antiquarian. It derived in large part from the Neapolitan experience of Spanish imperial rule at Naples, a system of government that went into crisis with the death of the heirless Charles II in 1700.

III. Rendering the 1701 Conspiracy of Macchia Against this background, both classical and contemporary, the significance of the choices that Vico makes in his history of the Conspiracy of Macchia becomes clearer. In that history, one finds techniques of historical representation that recall both the tactics pioneered by democratic Athens and republican Rome and continued in the Italian Renaissance, as well as those made necessary under the conditions of imperial rule that developed at Rome in the age of Augustus and that obtained at Naples in the early modern period. In the De coniuratione, Vico finds a way to utilize both modes of representation even though they had each developed for the purpose of understanding radically different, even mutually opposed systems of government. But that synthesis of investigative modes is relatively unstable, and the dialectic between republican arts like the ars rhetorica and imperial political systems like that at Naples continued to drive Vico’s intellectual development long after the completion of the De coniuratione. In the long term, the elision of categorical distinctions

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between civil and natural history will have a greater impact on Vichian historiography. But in the short term, it is the Palatine Academy’s erosion of confidence in divining individual motivation that is more decisive in the De coniuratione. In that work, Vico’s treatment of will never presumes to have a privileged access to private thoughts. In uncertain times, intentions are covert, multiple, and contradictory. Dissimulation is the rule and the everpresent possibility that appearances deceive drives the historian toward a conjectural mode of presentation, where possible as opposed to actual continuations are always at issue. In the Vichian narrative, figures in the ecclesiastical hierarchy at Naples begin to praise the house of Austria before the beginning of the coup d’etat. Vico speculates on the motivation for this action and supposes that perhaps they fear that Louis XIV has taught Philip how a King may discipline a Church, or that they think that Rome favors Austria. Or perhaps they praise Austria, Vico conjectures, in order to oppose Cardinal Giacomo Cantelmo, Archbishop of Naples, or in order to please Filippo Casoni, the Papal Ambassador to Naples—or for all these reasons together.28 Similarly, Vico reports differing opinions on the question of whether Gambacorta, bent on insurrection himself when he returned to Naples, knew of the conspiracy already being planned by Giuseppe Capece and Carlo Di Sangro. Vico declines to adjudicate between these differing opinions.29 When the conspiracy recruits Gaetano Francesco Caetani, Prince of Caserta and Cesare d’Avalos, Marquis of Vasto, Vico notes laconically that the similarity of their actions belied the difference in their motives.30 Furthermore, when d’Avalos writes a letter of congratulation to the Kings of Spain and France upon the succession of Philip, Vico reports that d’Avalos has done so partly because it was his duty as a citizen and partly because he wished to know by their replies whether he was trusted. Yet Vico emphasizes his doubt that the motivations of such a man can, in such times, be determined with any precision.31 Vico is skeptical of such causal explanations. Already, he is expressing that skepticism in an idiom characteristic of the Scienza nuova: The curiosity and stupidity of men is such, he says, that in the absence of a causal

28 Giambattista

Vico, La congiura dei principi napoletani 1701, ed. Claudia Pandolfi (Naples: Morano, 1992), §9.2, 60–1, 206–7. 29 Ibid., §11.3, 76–7, 219. 30 Ibid., §11.15, 78–9, 221. 31 Ibid., §12.3, 82–3, 223.

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explanation, they will invent one.32 Addicted to metonyms, men construe all events as effects and search therefore for causes, reasons. For Vico, the premeditation of action is important insofar as it generates conjecture (in both the agents of historical action themselves and in the readers of historiography). Insofar as it depicts intention, however, he prefers to bracket premeditation as indeterminate. If the sources of action in the De coniuratione—the frustration and ambition that move the patrician leaders of the revolt—are opaque, it is also true that as the event unfolds its consequences are made to seem indeterminate by the pace of Vico’s now peremptory, now open-ended emplotment. He emphasizes possibility, although in the end the action can only be described as a largely inconsequent failure. The work ends with no peroration of any kind. The newly crowned Philip V’s entry into Naples in 1702 is not used to close the episode. The reader is simply informed that “as for Chassignet, Di Capua and the two Acquavivas [four of the leaders of the coup], they were transported with [Vittorio Maria, the Duke of] Estr´ees to France there to be held in custody shortly before the departure of Medinaceli.”33 Nicolini does not think that the inconclusiveness of this ending indicates that Vico never finished the work. The abrupt ending is, in his opinion, deliberate.34 It is difficult to be certain. Vico does not appear to have prepared a final text for publication, but the ending is largely consistent with the historiographic choices made by the author in the work as a whole. With the Viceroy recalled to Spain and these conspirators imprisoned in France, Naples is at the end of the monograph as it was at the beginning laid open to Europe. Under foreign rule, neither the nobility nor the plebs (nor even the, for now, inactive ceto civile) had proven itself capable of a concerted or effective political action. The polity, like the ending, is dissolute. Vico’s refusals to ascribe definitive intentions to the political actors of the De coniuratione and to draw the action to an unequivocal close are part of a more general emphasis in that monograph on the category of possibility. Vico compares his work in historiography to the work of a painter. As he says, “I wish in fact to imitate those worthy painters, who place principal figures in the foreground of a painting, reproducing them with greater vivacity and care, painting the lesser figures more 32 Vico,

De coniuratione, §13.22, 96–9, 233–4. Compare, for example, Vico, 1725 Scienza nuova, §§110–11. 33 Vico, De coniuratione, §22.81, 162–3, 274. 34 Nicolini, “Vicende e codici,” 413.

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cursorily in the background.” He continues, saying that “just so I shall with greater care set before the eyes of the reader icons of the undertakings of the conspirators, namely the killing of the Viceroy and the occupying of the Castelnuovo.”35 Vico’s emphasis on perspective and his comparison of personal and geographical representations of power are striking.36 Perhaps more striking, however, is the desire to represent two events that never came to pass. Vico’s comparison of historiographic with painterly representation is not uncommon. In the lectures given at the Palatine Academy, one finds similar comparisons in Valletta, Russo, and Sersale. But in their company, Vico’s interest in possibility becomes even more distinctive. Unlike his contemporaries, he is not concerned with the legitimacy of omitting detail. Instead, he is preoccupied with the representation of actions not as they are, but as they might be.37 Thus, the De coniuratione itself is replete with stylistic devices that serve to emphasize the counterfactual dimensions of a process that in fact realizes very little of its potential. A host of literary tactics reinforce the sense that the conspiracy is up for grabs: Motives are complicated, the ending remains open, and unrealized aims are visualized. But antilogy is the most conspicuous device Vico employs to emphasize possibility. Vico’s De coniuratione is punctuated with great regularity by speeches: the reader hears the Spanish Viceroy address the people of Naples in order to announce Charles II’s death and the succession of Philip V, and the reader hears the conspirators declare the succession of the Austrian Archduke Charles. One hears Carlo Di Sangro telling his fellow conspirators to abandon Naples after they have failed to assassinate the Viceroy, as well as Gaetano Gambacorta arguing conversely that the conspirators ought to raise the plebs against the Spanish. One hears the plebs themselves speaking, and an unnamed plebeian rejecting Gambacorta’s attempt to incite the populace to rebellion. One hears also Nicola Navarette advise the Viceroy not to retreat to the Castel Nuovo, Emanuele de Sylva rebut him, and Tommaso d’Aquino later counsel the Viceroy to counterattack. Vico is not alone among the Neapolitan historians of the Conspiracy of Macchia 35 Vico,

De coniuratione, §14.24 at 98–101 and 235. this passage, compare Giuseppe Mazzotta, New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of G. B. Vico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 70–6. 37 Giuseppe Valletta, “De l’imperio de’ Persiani,” Carlo Russo, “Intorno all’imperio de’ Greci,” Nicola Sersale, “Dell’imperio Romano,” in Rak, Lezioni dell’accademia, 1.200, 249, 329. The comparisons between history and painting are many. They belong also to a broader relation between rhetoric and painting, which has classical roots (see, for example, Plato, Phaedrus, 264c, or Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 7.10.16) and was the object of strong uptake in the Renaissance. 36 On

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in using direct speech. In other histories of the conspiracy, Naples herself is made to speak as (it is said) Rome would have spoken in the time of Catiline, and the dialect of the plebs finds itself briefly represented too. But Vico is distinctive for the degree to which he uses such speech and for the extent to which he was intellectually invested in it.38 In these speeches, we see Vico at his most classically rhetorical. The speeches are all short. None of them are highly literary compositions in the style of Sallust’s representations of Caesar and Cato addressing the Roman Senate—nor do they aim to be. Not one of the speeches is clearly dissimulatory either. In time, Vico will come to devise a theory of authorship (and indeed authority) on the basis of his interest in a kind of speech that is a true expression of the speaker rather than a true representation of reality. He will come to think that words betray their users more than their users betray them. Speech in the De coniuratione does not yet possess this significance for Vico, although what the reader encounters in that work is quite compatible with such views. Instead, speech is a vehicle for the representation of the demands of occasion involved in persuasion and decision. Speech registers distension into conjecture (again, both the conjecture of actors in history and the conjectures of readers of historiography) that such pressure produces. All the speeches in Vico’s history bear the mark of temporal constriction. They are tactical rather than strategic. They evaluate possibilities that are immediate. The speeches that are most important here are those made by the conspirators and the populace of Naples. There are two key instances. After addressing the leaders of various plebeian neighborhoods, Gambacorta hears them reject the conspiracy. Later, the conspirators address the plebs with more success through a herald, announcing the succession of Charles of Austria.39 In the first of these communicative actions Vico emphasizes the plebeian sentiment that the cause of the patricians cannot be a cause for the general populace. He relates that when Gambacorta, one of the leaders of the coup d’etat, moves through the poorest quarters of the city in the hope of drawing the lower classes into the rebellion, he receives a diversity of responses. Some of the plebeians reply that they wish to consult with their companions. Others reject the proposed alliance—but moderately, saying that they are happy enough with their lot, even as they see 38 Anon.,

Congiura succeduta in Napoli, la congiura succeduta in Napoli nel settembre del 1701 (Venice [Naples?]: 1702), 16v–18r; Anon., “Dell’accaduta in Napoli nell’anno 1701,” MS XV.G.30, Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, Naples, Italy, 65r–65v. 39 Vico, De coniuratione, §18.7–9, 112–15, 243–4; §20, 126–7, 252–4.

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that the nobles are driven by ambition. The response that Vico relays in direct discourse, however, is a bitter rejection of the outlandish idea that the plebeians should come to the aid of the patricians. The particular orator who voices this, the ultimate opinion of the plebs, is nameless, but the sentiment is unmistakable: “under the leadership of Masaniello, we tried to relieve the city of the heavy burden of taxes and duties and to reinstitute observance of the exemptions given by Charles V,” says the plebeian referring to the revolt of Masaniello at Naples in 1647. “You opposed us then,” the plebeian orator continues, “when it would have been right for the nobles to have supported us and to have protected the weak,” and “it was by you, on your orders, against all sense of justice, that our movement was put to the sword.” Compare that yesterday to today, when “among those you are asking to help you there is almost no one who was not then deprived of his parents in the cruelest manner.” The plebeian leader concludes that “now would be our chance to return the favor, but we prefer to stand aside and let you face your fate alone.” 40 As a speaker, this plebeian is beholden to no rules of speech. He holds no institutional office. He has only the streets around the Piazza Mercato as his forum. Nonetheless, he is clearly depicted by Vico as the spokesperson for the plebs—their synecdoche. The plebs, characterized by Vico in the preceding sentence as “wholly unconcerned with the future, as those living from day to day,” in fact prove themselves mindful of the past and sure of their conflation of the nobles of yesterday with those of today.41 It is difficult to read this apparent inconsistency as anything other than a deliberate irony on Vico’s part— a sending up of a common topos used to describe the lowly and the enslaved. Vico would be pointing out that the Neapolitan pleb is indeed a political actor, but one whose political actions have no traditional forum for expression. The result is that the actions of this group are sporadic and unsustained. There are few historiographers to signal what they do 40 Vico,

De coniuratione, §18.9, 114–15, 244: “alios benigne quidem respondisse fertur velle ea de re cum suis deliberare; alios modeste his verbis negasse:—Vos meliorem captatis fortunam; nos nostra contenti vivimus—. Sed et ex iis unum non sine invidia:—Nobis gravissimo vectigalium onere urbem allevare eique Caroli V iura asserere, Masanello duce, conatis, quos patricios par erat iuxta tenuiorum desideria fovere, vos obstitistis; nostrique ordinis vestra potentia, unde minime decuit, ita opes afflictae, ut fere nemo sit eorum quos nunc in dubia et ardua vocatis, cui per crudelissimos cruciatus et pessimas cruces parentum orbitatem non fecissetis. Esset modo ut vices rependeremus, sed praestat vestra pericula spectare tutos—.” Compare Benedetto Croce, Storia del regno di Napoli (Bari: Laterza, 1931), 137. 41 Vico, De coniuratione, §18.8, 112–15, 244: “nihil futuri solliciti, ut qui in diem vivunt.”

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achieve, so that the memory of those actions is occluded, or constituted (as is certainly the case with, for example, Masaniello, the plebeian hero of the revolt of 1647) by a complex amalgam of poetic conceits. In the second speech, the conspirators attempt to close the distance between the patricians and the plebeians. Events have forced the conspirators to turn to an idiom of Neapolitan independence. “We, the nobles as much as the plebs, we, the most faithful people of Naples,” the conspirators begin, “recalling how long we have had to endure the yoke of a foreign nature (which is something truly unworthy of the ancient glory of Italy and especially of this most flourishing kingdom, which has forever had its own autonomous prince), calling to mind how many and how grievous have been the injustices we have endured in this deplorable state of affairs, and finding ourselves now freed from every sacred sworn obligation, deprived as we are, with the death of Charles II, of any legitimate heir whatsoever, after long and considered reflection, have decreed the creation of a king who will have his seat and his kingdom in this city, capital of the kingdom and mother city to the provinces.” Contrasted to the direct syntax of the plebeian response, the conspirators’ address appears circumlocutory, officious, doubtful. Pressing on, the conspirators announce that “we wish and we decree that Charles, Archduke of Austria shall be our king,” and they explain that “we have therefore thought to issue the present edict, so that the world, both present and future, might see what have been the motives of our undertaking, namely the service of God and the public good.” This protestation of public spirit is undermined at once, however, by the imperatives of the immediate situation, which hangs in the balance. In its final sentence, the proclamation turns deadly: “in the name of Charles VI, our king designate, we proclaim publicly to every order in this city that all those who hold fast to their obstinate perfidy and wish to continue to live as the most vile people born for an undignified servitude, all those who have not by tomorrow thrown in their lot with us against the Spanish will be proscribed, their houses will be sacked and burned, they will be struck off the register of the noble piazze and this honor will be given to all those responsible persons who have done their duty.”42 42 Ibid.,

§20, 126–7, 252–4: “—Cum tam patricii quam plebs, fidissimus populus Neapolitanus, memoria repeteremus quandiu externarum nationum pertulerimus iugum (rem sane antiqua Italiae gloria, et imprimis hoc florentissimo Regno, cui semper suus proprius fuit Princeps, indignam!), cumque ad animum revocaremus quot quantaque eo deplorando rerum statu mala perpessi sumus, ac in praesentia, morte Caroli II herede legitimo destituti, omni iuramenti religione soluti agamus, post longam ac prudentem

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Vico’s sympathy would certainly seem to lie more with the plebeians than with the patricians: The recollection of Masaniello in the first speech is apposite, whereas the protestation of pious motivation in the second is dubious. Not without reason has it been said by the Italian historian Giuseppe Giarrizzo that “Vico shows he does not believe in the ‘liberal,’ but rather in the ‘reactionary’ origin of the aristocratic conspiracy, which succeeds on that account in attracting only marginalized groups in the nobility, some of the literati and the lower plebs,” while not touching “the artisans, the merchants, or the middling citizens.”43 I would argue, however, that there is more to be said. Vico stages this speech by the conspirators not simply for the purpose of showing how insincere the motivations of Gambacorta and his allies were. Instead, Vico goes out of his way to highlight how the desperation of the conspirators leads them to represent their action in ways that may be appropriated by the plebs. It is certainly true that readers are encouraged to see the insincerity of the attempt by the conspirators to convince the plebs that their cause is just. Introducing the speech, Vico notes that Gambacorta himself was in the audience eliciting applause, interrupting the reading continually. Immediately following his rendition of the speech, Vico notes that it was Bartolomeo Ceva Grimaldi who reputedly inserted the last sentence concerning deletions and additions to the register of the nobility. This can be read in two ways. It may serve to reveal the true motivations of the conspiracy, for it is private rancor rather than concern for the public good that moves Grimaldi. It may also serve to represent the complexity of the conspiracy’s motivation and its modulation over time. The authorship of the proclamation is fractured. Gambacorta is orchestrating the speech, but Grimaldi has had a hand in its composition, and a third person (the herald) is reading it.

animi reputationem Regem creare decrevimus qui in hac urbe, Regni capite et provinciarum regula, regiam locet sedem. Quamobrem, cum in Archiduce Carolo Austrio, praeter augustissimae familiae decora, cunctae conspicui Principis dotes coeant, eum nostrum Regem volumus et iubemus, animis freti (ut ex regiis eius codicillis parebit) eum sui semper victricibus armis brevi nobis affuturum, et quibusvis facturum obviam qui huic nostro praeclaro incoepto resistere audeant. Ea igitur de re hoc edictum concepimus, quo et nostram Dei pietatem et charitatem reipublicae, huius facti caussas, et praesentes et posteri probent. Itaque, Caroli VI [III nella prima stesura] nostri Regis nomine, cunctis huius civitatis ordinibus edicimus qui si in sua perstent perfidia et gens vilissime ad servitutem nata porro vivere velint neque ad insequentis diei mane ab Hispanis ad nos defecerint, proscripti sint; eorum domus diripiantur, incendantur; ex nobilium curiarum albo deleantur eoque honore modesti omnes, qui debitam servaverint fidem, donentur.” 43 Giuseppe Giarrizzo, Vico, la Politica e la Storia (Naples: Alfredo Guida, 1981), 65.

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What is more, the crowd that has gathered to listen to the proclamation has had an impact on its composition, as has the noble audience to which Grimaldi has addressed the final sentence. As Vico notes in the De ratione, “everything in eloquence depends on those who are listening and we must modulate our speaking in accord with their opinions.”44 Rhetoric is an art of persuasion that manipulates, but orators who take on the opinions of those to whom they speak may find that those opinions work on them in ways that they have not anticipated. In time, it is this cross-infection of opinions that will interest Vico more than dissimulation. When Vico says that Gambacorta, having displayed a portrait of the Archduke on the walls of San Lorenzo, the seat of the City Council, had the aforementioned proclamation read so that the action of the conspirators might seem to be lawful, ut iure agere videretur, he has phrased things most delicately indeed.45 Gambacorta’s actions are calibrated to increase the likelihood of the conspiracy being seen as lawful. His action, then, is self-conscious and to an extent simulatory and dissimulatory, but his self-consciousness is mirrored not only in his expectation of plebeian belief but also in his conception of what both he and they understand by lawfulness. It is not necessary to attribute sincerity to the conspirators’ speech act in order to entertain the possibility that their protestation of the conspiracy’s public-spiritedness, and its patriotic purpose in repatriating the Neapolitan head of state, could have been used against them by those who took (or feigned to take) the proclamation at face value. The word videretur is an unsteady foundation on which to predicate the political agency of the Neapolitan plebs. But in conceptual terms Vico’s formulation is distinguished by its delicacy. Vico returns to the word videri in the 1709 De ratione, where he praises the circumspection of the Romans who always cloaked their assertions with the rider “it seems,” which for them—Vico points out—was shorthand for “what men as a whole think.” This antilogical moment in which the phrase ut iure agere videretur appears is one of the first traces of Vico’s enduring interest in common sense as a terrain for discursive contestation.46

44 Giambattista Vico, De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, in Opere, ed. Battistini, 108–9 (hence-

forth, “De ratione”): “tota eloquentiae res nobis cum auditoribus est, et pro eorum opinionibus nos nostrae orationi moderari debemus.” 45 Vico, De coniuratione, §19, 124–7. 46 Vico, De ratione, 1.132–5: “ipsi de rebus iudicant, quales esse oportuerit, et res, ut plurimum, temere gestae sunt. Et cum sensum communem non excoluerint, nec verisimilia unquam secuti sint, uno vero contenti, quid porro de eo homines communiter sentiant, et an iis quoque vera videantur, nequicquam pendunt . . . Recte igitur sapientissimi Romani

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Nor is it fanciful to read Vico in this way. In general terms, Vico’s characterization of the conspirators is consistent with his description of the Neapolitan nobility as an order at once arrogant in their dealings with the plebs and disdainful of public activities, moved only by its own discontents and rivalries. Yet compared to other representations of the conspirators and their motives, Vico’s is not entirely ungenerous.47 Of the deal struck with Vienna, Vico says that the conspirators agreed to gift the kingdom to Charles in return for the military assistance of the Emperor, that the seat of government would be Naples, that the kingdom would have its own laws, that Neapolitan citizens would hold all the civil and military offices, and that a senate composed of nobles would be constituted, judicial procedure regulated, and right of appeal from the judges to the nobles guaranteed.48 Vico goes on to give details of the various fiefs that the conspirators would divide among themselves as reward for their conspiratorial enterprise. The future of relations between the citizenry and the nobility in such a system is unclear. What is important to note is that, where other historians of the conspiracy stress the private over the public interests of the deal, Vico goes out of his way to indicate the extent of the conspirators’ flirtation with legality. Carlo Maiello, for example, whose narrative was published by the Spanish administration as an official history of the coup, describes what each of the conspirators stood to gain individually and passes a bitterly sarcastic judgment on their civic pretensions.49 Another account does not so much as mention the existence of such pretensions.50 Even a pro-Austrian account says nothing of the conspirators’ plans for the polity or for repatriating the office of head of state. Indeed, it notes that the Prince of Caserta was to be permanent Viceroy in the Archduke’s place.51 Note also Vico’s account of the suggestion that, upon the King’s death, authority devolved automatically from Charles II (and from the Viceroy as his representative) to the Neapolitan Corpo di Citt`a—the Corpo di in prudentiae rebus quid videretur spectabant; et cum iudices, tum senatores per verbum ‘videri’ suas sententias concipiebant.” 47 Vico, De coniuratione, §2, 44–5, 196. 48 Ibid., §13.6, 86–7, 226. 49 Anon., “Storia dell’ultima congiura di Napoli nel 1701. Versione dal francese di Garonne Baconcopia,” MS XXI.A.15, Societ`a Napoletana di Storia Patria, Naples, Italy, 29–30. A similar account is given in Anon., “Narrazione anonima della congiura del principe di Macchia 1701,” MS XXVI.A.18, Societ`a Napoletana di Storia Patria, Naples, Italy, 4v–5r. 50 Anon., Congiura succeduta in Napoli, 12v–13v. 51 Anon., “Congiura de nobili napoletani,” 29. A later manuscript, which incorporates much of this earlier one, adds Vico’s description of the plans for a Senate and a review of the organization of the judiciary. See Anon., “Dell’accaduta in Napoli,” 55r–56r.

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Citt`a being the six Noble Electors and the one Popular Elector who constituted one of the few “representative” institutions mandated by the Neapolitan constitution during the period of Spanish hegemony.52 In other accounts of the coup, the future conspirators Gerolamo Acquaviva and Malizia Carafa suggest that this is the way in which power devolves upon the death of the monarch. Those accounts then proceed to dismiss this reading of the Neapolitan constitution as a self-serving machination of the conspirators. In Vico’s version, Acquaviva and Carafa are said to have persuaded the Corpo di Citt`a itself to advance the opinion. To suggest that the Electors themselves believed that power had passed to the Corpo di Citt`a in the interregnum is to suggest that there was indeed a kind of constitutional discontinuity into which the conspirators were inserting themselves. That they might, therefore, have been taken to represent the Corpo di Citt`a or its interests is significant. Again, none of this should be taken as evidence that Vico harbored sympathies for the conspirators or even as circumstantial corroboration of the hypothesis that Vico’s history was never published and never publicly mentioned by the author because it was deemed offensive by the Spanish authorities. What it does suggest is that Vico was equipped, although only in part, to read and represent the Conspiracy of Macchia as part of a more complex historical dynamic in which the eruption of noble frustration and ambition could have, but did not, become part of and subordinate to the rule and history of law. Moreover, it suggests that in the absence of any direct outlet for rhetorical performance—in the absence of strong and viable institutions of republican governance outside the law courts—Vico was forced to consider how rhetoric might be transformed into a sophisticated analysis of political action made collaborative and reciprocal only over time and by means of ironic appropriations and inversions.

IV. The Impersonal Character of Action With the exception of the Institutiones oratoriae, the De coniuratione is the most rhetorically classical of Vico’s works. It is the most significant of Vico’s “occasional” writings, and it is the text in which the parameters of Vico’s here and now—eighteenth-century Naples—are most 52 Vico,

De coniuratione, §5.5, 55–5, 202–3. Compare Anon., “Storia dell’ultima congiura,” 12 and Anon., “Narrazione anonima della congiura,” 2r. Both these accounts say that it was Francesco Spinelli rather than Acquaviva who, with Carafa, proposed that the Viceroy had no official standing after the death of the Spanish King. This Spinelli, Prince of Cantelluccia, is not to be confused with Vico’s pupil Spinelli, Prince of Scalea.

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in play. Readers find him in that text putting conventional rhetorical tactics such as antilogy to work. The result is decidedly limited. The event itself takes on the form of a momentary outburst, one of the sporadic episodes in early modern Neapolitan political history—the revolt of Masaniello in 1647, the republican revolution in 1799—that resists co-optation into anything remotely resembling a narrative of Neapolitan self-determination, or any other highly coherent narrative for that matter. Likewise, Vico’s history of the event appears on the surface to be nothing more than the literary remnant of a form of inquiry that had been developed for other times, for other places. My contention is that the De coniuratione is more than simply a tranquil relic of a bygone era in which rhetoric was a dominant mode of inquiry. At the center of the De coniuratione are tensions between a form of historiography that turns on moments of decision that are locatable in singular times and places and a form of historiography that continues to employ the elements of rhetorical inquiry and yet makes no presumption that the parameters of historical time are sufficiently concentrated that a single individual can witness the entire life cycle of a historical action. In the De coniuratione, Vico shows that any given undertaking should be examined not simply for what it is but also for what it might augur. Every action is a sign. An action is an indeterminate sign of the motivations that stand behind it, but it is also a sign in the sense that the meaning of an action is sufficiently indeterminate that different groups can compete to define it, to own it, and to continue it. The central paradox of the text is that although the event was undeniably abortive, Vico chooses to concentrate above all on the pregnant possibility of the sequence. He conjectures, and he refuses to close. The epicenter of this coexistence of classical rhetorical assumptions and what will become Vico’s sublimated rhetoric is antilogy. On the surface, Vico’s use of antilogy appears extremely classical. Upon closer examination, however, antilogy becomes the part of contestation that can potentially give birth to a historical process that vastly exceeds the parameters of the original speech act. Vico’s formulation ut iure agere videretur is the point of greatest disproportion between what is and what might be, yet analyzed in isolation this moment of disproportion seems ephemeral and insignificant—frail. Only in the context of Vico’s subsequent development as a thinker will these concepts assume a greater robustness. Charting Vico’s development is the work of this book as a whole, but three particularly important dimensions of that subsequent development grow directly out of the De coniuratione and should be discussed immediately.

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As is clear from the example in Sallust (where Caesar counsels Cato to be wary of setting unpredictable precedents), antilogy is a rhetorical device that is intimately connected with irony. Irony is a key interest in Vichian inquiry, and if the full afterlife of antilogy in Vico’s work is to be understood, it must be put in the context of Vico’s thinking on irony. Vico’s two most direct considerations of irony do not promote an understanding of the trope that covers the use he makes of it in historiography. In his lectures on rhetoric, Vico says simply that irony is in Latin called dissimulatio or illusio and that it is the trope by means of which one says the opposite of what one thinks.53 In the Scienza nuova of 1744 he uses the word only once, observing that “irony certainly could not have begun until the period of reflection, because it is fashioned of falsehood by dint of a reflection which wears the mask of truth.” Vico derives from this the following insight into human institutions: “since the first men of the gentile world had the simplicity of children, who are truthful by nature, the first fables could not feign anything false; they must therefore have been, as they have been defined above, true narrations.”54 In this last phrase the predicate vero (true) asserts not that the first fables represented historical events veridically, but that they represented the narrators faithfully.55 Irony is alien to such narrators. As Vico theorizes irony, it is dissimulation for effect. But as he uses it, irony is the historical mode in which providence produces public goods out of private vices, or rather general interests out of particular ones. Thus, Vico argues in the Scienza nuova that when the plebeians of Rome successfully instituted the office of the tribune to guard their natural rights against the aristocracy rejuvenated by Junius Brutus, and likewise when the census tax imposed by Servius Tullius became, instead of a feudal duty, a public treasury from which to pay the plebeians when they fought for the state, providence had acted ironically to sublimate 53 Vico,

Institutiones oratoriae, 326–7: “Latine dicitur ‘dissimulatio,’ sive ‘illusio,’ et tropus est quo contra quod dicimus, sentimus.” 54 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §408: “i primi uomini della gentilit` a essendo stati semplicissimi quanto i fanciulli, i quali per natura son veritieri, le prime favole non poterono fingere nulla di falso; per lo che dovettero necessariamente essere, quali sopra ci vennero diffinite, vere narrazioni.” 55 Note the hint that Fisch gives of the provenance of such an idea: “According to some Scholastics, including Duns Scotus, a thing may be said to be true by reason of its conformity to its maker as well as by reason of its conformity to an intellect that knows it.” See Max Harold Fisch, “Vico and Pragmatism,” in Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium, eds. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Hayden White (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 403.

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human intent by transforming natural into civil right and private into public finance.56 Now, insofar as Vico consciously employs irony in the De coniuratione, it is of the dissimulatory variety.57 Nor is a highly developed understanding of irony as the mode in which providence operates evident in the work’s underlying structure. Nevertheless, I am arguing that the work prepares the way for such use of irony in historiography by bracketing individual intentions, by emphasizing the public, impersonal character of action, and by testifying to the power of speech both to specify action and to render it available for public use. Whether the author of the work was himself intent on producing or conscious of having produced these effects is an interesting but ultimately secondary question. One of the most distinctive aspects of the De coniuratione is the extent to which Vico emphasizes contingency. The detailed examination of any event tends to reveal the myriad ways in which small differences could have contributed to utterly transformed outcomes. Ordinarily, one would presume that contingency or chance is diametrically opposed to the category of fate. Fate, as a metahistorical concept, insists that there is an iron law at work in history such that if one event comes to pass another event has in that moment become absolutely necessitated. But the kind of contingency that for Vico is embedded in antilogy is not opposed to fate. Vico says as much in the De antiquissima sapientia of 1710, where he says that chance, fate, and providence are all actually the same historical process understood from different perspectives. In the De antiquissima sapientia, Vico’s argument moves in two stages. First, he uses the equivocation of the terms determinatum and casum to argue that fate and chance are coordinate rather than contradictory. The determination of a thing is both the necessitation of its issue (esito in Italian, exitus in Latin) and the specification of its qualities. Anticipating the Diritto universale, Vico says that the determinate is, thus, the certain, which means both necessary and individual. Necessary here is a reification of doubtless. Similarly, casum denotes not only chance (in the sense of luck) but also case (in the sense of instance). Thus, Vico conjectures that the ancient Italians took fate to be the eternal order of causes and chance to be the eventum, the instance and the outcome of that eternal order of causes, so that the difference between fate and chance is simply

56 Vico,

1744 Scienza nuova, §111.

57 See, for example, Vico, De coniuratione, §22.16–17, 134–7, 259 and §22.43, 146–7, 265–6.

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one of perspective.58 The macrohistorical perspective of fate is complemented by the microhistorical perspective of chance. That is, fate is the concatenation of chance events that do not appear to have the power to be decisive and yet are decisive when they are combined. Second, Vico argues that the universe is a republic of nature in which God cares as a Prince for the whole and that private evil is public good. As he understands it in the De antiquissima sapientia, private evil is simply public good seen from the perspective of the individual. A substantial modification of this idea is required before it is identifiable with the ironic historiography that Vico masters in the Scienza nuova. The private evil must be particularized, instantiated in time, then appropriated by another actor (who similarly works solely for his own end), and the private evil must then finally be turned against its original intent. A genuinely ironic historical outcome is one in which the private intents of both actors are first enacted and then synthesized into a public good. Vico’s ironic providence is produced by the intersection of these two premises. He is overcoming the dogmatic opposition between fate and chance. Fate is action in its past dimension—the Romans “regarded fate as inexorable because what is done cannot be undone.”59 Chance is action in its future dimension as eventuality—the Romans “called the final outcome of both deed and word casum (fall, chance, case).”60 Thus, “the Italian sages who first thought up these words [must have] believed that fatum was the eternal order of causes, and that casum was the outcome of that eternal order.”61 When Vico says in that same chapter that fatum and dictum were also synonyms for the Romans, we can intuit a historiographic import and a philosophical rationale for the emphasis that Vico places in his history of the Conspiracy of Macchia on speech, for speech is fundamental to the process by which a thing or an action is made particular: Determination and definition are literally synonymous.62 That is 58 Giambattista

Vico, De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, in Opere filosofiche, ed. Paolo Cristofolini (Florence: Sansoni, 1971), 129 (henceforth, “De antiquissima sapientia”). 59 Ibid., 129: “fatum putarunt inexorabile, quia facta infecta esse non possunt.” 60 Ibid., 129: “et rerum et verborum exitum ‘casum’ dixerunt.” 61 Ibid., 129: “Igitur qui Itali sapientes has voces primi excogitarunt, aeternum caussarum ordinem ‘fatum,’ eius aeterni caussarum ordinis eventus ‘casum’ esse sunt opinati: ita ut facta Dei dicta sunt, et rerum eventa verborum, quae Deus loquitur, casus, et fatum idem ac factum.” 62 See also Giambattista Vico, De universi iuris principio et fine uno, in Opere giuridiche, ed. Cristofolini, 100ff (henceforth, “De uno”), where Vico takes Ulpian’s phrase certa lex est, sed vera prorsus non est to mean that the law is certain, but it is not entirely true. Speech is the point at which the verum-factum of the De antiquissima sapientia and the verum-certum of the Diritto universale are closest. It is also the point at which one can see most clearly the

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to say, the best definition of a thing delineates the sum total of all its legitimate applications. If fatum is action completed and casum is the exitus, the upshot to come of action undertaken, then providentia is a kind of good form between fatum and casum. It is an intelligibility of historical sequence. But Vichian providentia never makes special interventions in the course of events, either natural or civil. In the De antiquissima sapientia, the implication is that a Christian god has ordered the universe in a way that obviates the need to interfere. Good order in the “republic” that is the Creation is established at the outset, although that good order is expressed in vicissitude. In the Scienza nuova, the implication is that provvedenza is not so much a structure outside of time as a part of the structure of time itself. As foresight, future orientation, or anticipation, provvedenza is, in the Scienza nuova, an imaginative capacity. Thus, for Vico, providence does not so much reject chance and fate as subsume them. My chief contention here is that what appears in the De coniuratione as a poetic practice of the impersonal character of action becomes a theory of fate, chance, and providence in the De antiquissima sapientia, the Diritto universale, and the Scienza nuova. The De coniuratione represents the first appearance of an idea that will continue to evolve in Vico’s work, with significant consequences. Vico’s concern for what the conspiracy might have been but was not, his concern for irony, and his concern for the way in which seemingly chance events can become integral to the deep structure of fate—all of these concerns point toward the development of a series of tools for tracing the consequences of an action. If one begins with the De coniuratione, this development has three chief stages. First, in the De coniuratione Vico is interested in showing how potentially underdetermined historical processes are. By concentrating closely on local, calamitous events Vico makes it possible to imagine a situation in which apparently innocuous beginnings lead to profound change. Had the Viceroy been assassinated, the coup might have succeeded. Had Austrian troops arrived, the question of Neapolitan sovereignty might never have arisen. Had the plebeians seized control of the situation, they might have contributed their own interpretation to the phrase ut iure agere videretur. That none of these things came to pass simply confirms the striking gulf between what might have been and what is. fundamental role played by the historicization of speech effected by Vico in the Diritto universale and subsequently in the Scienza nuova.

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Second, in the De antiquissima sapientia Vico sets out an account of the purported synonymy of the Latin terms verum (the true or the intelligible) and factum (the made or the done). In what has come to be known as his verum-factum principle, Vico says that being able to make something is an index of being able to understand it. Whereas making had been profoundly underdetermined in the De coniuratione, in the De antiquissima sapientia the opposite is true. In the De antiquissima sapientia, to make something is to bring an object into being that has a very circumscribed set of potential permutations. Where the De coniuratione is historical, the De antiquissima sapientia is essentially ahistorical. Yet it does introduce the possibility of acts of making that bring into being objects that are defined chiefly by their intellectual content. In the De coniuratione, the Viceroy either dies or does not die. But in the De antiquissima sapientia mathematical definitions (of point, line, and plane, for example) bring the intellective domain of geometry into existence, a domain that is understood perfectly precisely because it is—to Vico’s way of thinking— purely artificial. Third, in the Diritto universale—Vico’s works on Roman law published between 1720 and 1722—the verum-factum principle of the De antiquissima sapientia is replaced by a tension between verum and certum.63 Certum replaces the term factum and the consequences are major. For Vico, certum denotes that which is free from doubt and particularized (determinate in a double sense). Thus, certum is the product of a conscience free from doubt: certum gignit conscientia dubitandi secura.64 But the term ought also to be understood in opposition to the indeterminate: “in overelegant Latin, certum and commune, the certain and the common, are opposed to each other.” As he puts it in the 1744 Scienza nuova, “the certain in the laws is an obscurity of judgment backed only by authority, so that we find them harsh in application, yet are obliged to apply them just because they

63 Vico,

De antiquissima sapientia, 62–5; Vico, De uno, 100–1. On the relationship between the verum-factum and the verum-certum, see Croce, Filosofia di Giambattista Vico, Ch. 1– ` “The Problem of Law and the Historical Origin of the New Science,” in 2; Guido Fasso, Giambattista Vico’s Science of Humanity, eds. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Donald Phillip Verene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Goetsch, Vico’s Axioms, 18; Donald Phillip Verene, Vico’s Science of Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 26, 57; Lilla, G. B. Vico, 29. Consider especially Verene’s opinion that “time introduces a factor of externality within the mind’s relation to its own creation, to human thought and action.” Verene, Vico’s Science of Imagination, 55. 64 Vico, De Uno, 34.

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are certain.”65 Whereas the verum-factum principle had denoted a reciprocity between making and knowing, the verum-certum principle stands for a tension between the general articulations of the equitable and the particular judgments of the law. Instead of considering the kind of intellective domains brought into being by mathematical definitions, Vico is thinking about the differential between particular legal pronouncements and the general precedents that such pronouncement are supposed to fund. The three-stage evolution of the impersonality of action from the De coniuratione, through the De antiquissima sapientia, to the Diritto universale describes something approaching a dialectic. In the third stage, Vico has returned to a historical domain, but he has maintained the interest in the worlds brought into being by verbal pronouncements that function like postulates. However, by giving a historical dimension to definitions, Vico returns to a domain where apparently infinitesimal beginnings give rise to processes that come into focus over time. The law begins in a series of examples but the intellectual life of those examples is elucidated over time as new cases reveal new dimensions in old precedents. What is important here is that antilogy renders more intelligible a process that defines Vico’s turn from mathematics to law. By bringing the rhetorical origins of Vico’s tools into sharper focus, it becomes possible to identify other aspects of Vico’s evolution as a thinker that are best understood as covert continuations of rhetorical interests. Vico establishes it as the eleventh element of his 1744 Scienza nuova that “human choice, by its nature most uncertain, is made certain and determined by the common sense of men with respect to human needs or utilities, which are the two sources of the natural law of the gentes.”66 As always, this is a very compact way of expressing a thought that has become decisive for Vico’s intellectual project. What is missing from this formulation of the thought is a clarification of how it is that “the common sense of men with respect to human needs or utilities” ascertains “human choice, by its nature most uncertain.” Between the De coniuratione and the Scienza nuova there is a fundamental alteration of temporal scale. 65 Vico,

1744 Scienza nuova, §321: “‘certo,’ che in buon latino significa ‘particolarizzato’ o, come le scuole dicono, ‘individuato’; nel qual senso ‘certum’ e ‘commune,’ con troppa latina eleganza, son opposti tra loro.” See also Andrea Atzeni, “La struttura del ‘certo’ nelle opere giuridiche vichiane,” Bollettino del centro di studi vichiani 31–32 (2001–2002): 67–86. 66 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §141: “L’umano arbitrio, di sua natura incertissimo, egli si accerta e determina col senso comune degli uomini d’intorno alle umane necessit`a o utilit`a, che son i due fonti del diritto naturale delle genti.”

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Certainly, the De coniuratione is wholly preoccupied with human choice. The same is true of the Scienza nuova. The difference is that whereas the uptake of human decisions must happen immediately or not at all in the De coniuratione, such uptake is permitted in the Scienza nuova to evolve and accrete over centuries and even millennia. Common sense itself is both cause and effect of such accretion. I argue that it is the attenuated nature of republican interaction in 1701, together with the concomitant diminished capacity of rhetorical historiography to represent political action, that reveals the turn away from classical rhetoric. Vico does represent speech—and just like Thucydides, he purports to report historical debates verbatim in direct discourse. But the political events that he has, as it were, at his disposal pale in comparison to those available to Sallust when the Roman wrote the Bellum Catilinae or to Bruni when he wrote his Historiae Florentini Populi. The streets around S. Lorenzo in 1701—just like the Piazza Mercato for the plebeian hero Masaniello in 1647 and the Piazza del Plebiscito for the republicans Francesco Mario Pagano and Vincenzo Cuoco in 1799—are indeed rhetorical institutions, but they cannot be compared as spaces of appearance for political agon to the assemblies of Demosthenian Athens or Ciceronian Rome. For the sensitive and sincere observer, the Neapolitan locations demand a different rhetorical sensibility and a different approach to understanding the role of language in society. If, in the first instance, this loss of democratic and republican sophistication appears to be a decline in civic fortune—and indeed it is—it should not be supposed that there is not in this loss of political innocence a gain in critical ability. The history of rhetoric has been and continues to be littered with well-intentioned naivety that is beholden to the supposition that rhetorical institutions of the kind eulogized in (and quite possibly projected back onto) the classical and Renaissance past are either possible under modern conditions or sufficient. The brute fact of the matter is that modern societies—for a wide variety of reasons, many of which have a great deal to do with scale—do not possess institutions that can sponsor and sustain public debate to a degree that would be commensurate with either a purely democratic or a moderately republican understanding of the kind of political participation required in order to say that one lives truly in either a democracy or a republic. This means that if Vico’s question really is, as I argue, “what would be the use of rhetorical inquiry for a society that does not possess institutions capable of supporting and sustaining public debate,” then it is a question as modern as it is Neapolitan.

3 Redacting the Art of Persuasion

When Vico took up the position of professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples in 1699, the discipline was already in decline. Many scholars have attempted to explain this eclipse of rhetoric. For Roland Barthes, it was the rise of three new forms of “evidence” – an immediacy of proof that requires no particular linguistic presentation – in the religious sphere with Protestantism, in philosophy with Cartesianism, and in the sciences with empiricism.1 Likewise, according to Todorov, an emphasis on inspiration personelle could be taken to render issues of rhetorical form obsolete.2 Schmidt-Biggemann has emphasized the failed investment of rhetorical energies in a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century topica universalis that was supposed to drive an encyclopedic renovation of knowledge but that in the end proved utopian and delusory.3 In the opinion of Ricœur (and many others), rhetoric became attenuated, removed ever more from practical exigencies of argument and composition, concerned disproportionately with the mere classification of figures.4 And in a much-cited article, Wellbery and Bender have spoken of the early modern conditions of rhetoric’s impossibility: ascendant scientific “objectivity” with its concomitant values of transparency and neutrality, a new emphasis on individual originality that displaced classicizing modes of imitatio, liberalism’s displacement of republicanism in political theory, the

1 Roland

Barthes, “L’Ancienne rh´etorique: Aide-m´emoire,” Communications 16 (1970): 192. 2 Tzvetan Todorov, Th´eories du symbole (Paris: Editions ´ du Seuil, 1977), 80. 3 Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Topica universalis: Eine Modellgeschichte humanistischer und barocker Wissenschaft (Hamburg: Meiner, 1983), 250. 4 Paul Ricœur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multidisciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 45.

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dominance of literacy over orality, and the rise of the vernacular language nation-state.5 Some scholars have also emphasized that the decline of rhetoric coincided with the emergence of a number of other disciplines. Gadamer and Dockhorn may have argued about the extent to which the new discipline of hermeneutics remained embedded in rhetoric, but they had no doubts that the eighteenth century was a period of crucial transformation. For Gadamer, rhetoric was inexorably bound up with issues of immediacy in time and place and, for him, such immediacy had to be overcome in hermeneutics if the aesthetic experience forged in the process of interpretation was to exist purely for itself—and not be instrumentalized for some or other purpose.6 For Dockhorn, on the other hand, the detachment from emotion that Gadamer sought was a chimera and a betrayal of rhetoric’s ancient promise of being a genuine alternative to philosophy and its rationalizing modes of inquiry.7 Equally convinced that hermeneutics is a descendent of rhetoric but less invested in narrating this inheritance as either a culmination or a theft, Raimondi and Battistini have emphasized the possibility of rhetorical inquiry that approximates “a systematic hermeneutic of everyday being-together.”8 Just so, a

5 John

Bender and David Wellbery, “Rhetoricality; On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric,” in The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice, eds. John Bender and David Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 22. 6 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Rhetorik, Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik: Metakritische Er¨orterungen zu ‘Wahrheit und Methode’,” in Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), 62: “die Redekunst als solche . . . ist an die Unmittelbarkeit ihrer Wirkung gebunden.” Compare Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 1975), 354: “speech itself shares in the pure ideality of the meaning that communicates itself in it. In writing, this meaning of what is spoken exists purely for itself, completely detached from all emotional elements of expression and communication. A text is not to be understood as an expression of life, but in what it says. Writing is the abstract ideality of language.” 7 Klaus Dockhorn, “Rezension von Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Method,” G¨ ottingische gelehrte Anzeigen 218 (1966): 169, where Dockhorn speaks of rhetoric as a “zweite Bildungsweg der Antike neben und gegen¨uber der Philosophie.” Thus, rhetoric entails a fundamental commitment to the irrational—see Klaus Dockhorn, Macht und Wirkung der Rhetorik: Vier Aufs¨atze zur Ideengeschichte der Vormoderne (Bad Homberg: Gehlen, 1968), 49: “f¨ur die Rhetorik steht das Irrationale nicht als Problem neben anderen Problemen, sondern ist ihr bewegendes Prinzip.” 8 Battistini and Raimondi, Figure della retorica, 513: “un’ermeneutica sistematica dell’‘essere-assieme’ quotidiano.” This claim must be compared to Heidegger’s claim that Aristotle’s Rhetoric is “die erste systematische Hermeneutik der Allt¨aglichkeit des Miteinanderseins.” Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (T¨ubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1957), 138.

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number of scholars have seen the rise of the human sciences generally— and especially anthropology—in the eighteenth century as a continuation of rhetorical inquiry by other means.9 Some scholars have gone so far as to suggest that rhetoric’s attention to situation and its attendant dimensions of doubt and action anticipates existentialism.10 The tectonic reorganization of European inquiry that came with the demise—and, I argue, sublimation—of rhetoric in early modernity has generated some highly provocative research tracing the progressive transformation of rhetorical categories as they were put to new uses. Criticized as he has been for his at times unilinear emphasis on technology, Ong’s interpretation of the progressive transformation of topics from a rhetorical subdiscipline oriented to oral interaction to one deeply concerned with the space of writing on the printed page remains extremely perceptive.11 Moreover, Campe’s pairing of the decline of the ars topica with the rise of literary criticism raises interesting issues about deep-set modal categories such as probability in early modern epistemology.12 And there can be little doubt that the circulation and displacement of rhetorical sensibilities among artist, artwork, and art critic between the fifteenth century and the eighteenth has a history worth narrating.13 9 The

connection between rhetoric and anthropology is most fully explored in Josef Kopperschmidt, ed., Rhetorische Anthropologie: Studien zum homo rhetoricus (Munich: Fink, 2000). Moreover, Fumaroli claims that it is Vico who realizes the anthropological potential that had been latent in classical rhetoric. See Marc Fumaroli, ed., Histoire de la rh´etorique dans l’Europe moderne: 1450–1950 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), 1291: “Vico fait surgir ce qui e´ tait latent dans la rh´etorique antique et humaniste, une nouvelle science proprement humaine capable, a` des degr´es et des aˆ ges de la v´erit´e, de faire contrepoids a` la nouvelle science des physiciens-m´etaphysiciens modernes: c’est l’anthropologies g´en´erale et historique que dessinent les versions successive de la ‘Scienza Nuova’.” On the importance of rhetoric for the rise of the human sciences in early modernity, see Gilles Declercq, “La rh´etorique classique entre e´ vidence et sublime,” in Rh´etorique dans l’Europe moderne, ed. Fumaroli, 701 and Michael Walzer, Rhetoric in the Age of Enlightenment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 30–1. 10 Dockhorn, “Rezension von Hans-Georg Gadamer,” 183. 11 Walter Ong, Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 307–8. 12 Rudiger ¨ ¨ Campe, “Umbruche und Wandlungen der Rhetorik,” in Die Wende von der ¨ Aufkl¨arung zur Romantik 1760–1820: Epoche im Uberblick, eds. Horst Albert Glaser and Gy¨orgy Mih´aly Vajda (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001), 590–1. Thus, “arguments concerning the theory of the novel arise from a long poetological and rhetorical tradition about probability that has its beginnings in Aristotle’s Poetics.” R¨udiger Campe, “‘Improbable Probability’: On Evidence in the Eighteenth Century,” The Germanic Review 76 (2001): 153. 13 Consider the lines of inquiry sketched in Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 131; Caroline van Eck, Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts in Early Modern

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Timmermans argues that even as rhetoric ceded ground in the course of the eighteenth century to grammar, philosophy of history, empiricism, and romanticism, it also embedded basic assumptions about the significance of interaction between inquirer and audience.14 Gross contends that the eighteenth century saw the emergence of a distinctively apolitical form of psychology that heralded a shift from a rhetorically informed conception of affect to a more neuroscientific one; in his account, this meant replacing the assumption that affect was always particular and always different in different situations (because affect was essentially an internalization of one’s relations to, and representations of, others) with a tendency to see classes of affect—such as love and hate—as essentially physiological and therefore invariant from one situation to the next.15 Other scholars have argued that the decline of rhetoric is more precisely understood as a shift from one mode of rhetoric to another – such that many of the famous criticisms of rhetoric in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ought to be seen as instances of rhetorica deployed contra rhetoricam.16 The apparent paradox that rhetoric might be deployed against itself is only one of the deep-set ironies that characterize the historiography of early modern rhetoric. For all the boundless precision and verve of Fumaroli’s depiction of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century “Age of Eloquence” (with its Jesuitical ekphrasis and Gallican Atticism, both in the parlements and in the Port-Royal convents), his structural—bordering on structuralist—presuppositions make it difficult to explain why the eighteenth century constituted such a major break in the history of

Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 12; Marc Fumaroli, L’´ecole du silence: Le sentiment des images au XIIe si`ecle (Paris, Flammarion, 1994), 9; and Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 3. 14 Benoˆıt Timmermans, “Renaissance et modernit´ e de la rh´etorique,” in Histoire de la rh´etorique des Grecs a` nos jours, ed. Michel Meyer (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1999), 228: “La rh´etorique, bien que vaincue par la grammaire g´en´erale, par les philosophies de l’histoire, par l’empirisme et bientˆot par le romantisme, impose pourtant un nouveau paradigme philosophique et e´ pistemologique, qui est celui de l’interaction (par le langage) du ‘sujet,’ non seulement avec son objet d’´etude (‘le monde’), mais aussi avec l’auditoire auquel il destine son e´ tude (‘autrui’).” 15 Daniel M. Gross, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 67, 158. 16 Wilbur Samuel Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 441–7 and Dietmar Till, Transformationen der Rhetorik: Untersuchungen zum Wandel der Rhetoriktheorie im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (T¨ubingen: Niemeyer, 2004), 31.

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rhetoric; one is left with the paradoxical impression of a history so masterfully inscribed that it can have no satisfactory denouement.17 Equally, Kennedy is struck (and he is not alone) by the paradox that although rhetoric was indisputably the product of vibrant democratic cultures in antiquity it disappeared most decisively in an age that witnessed the rise of modern democratic states.18 That paradox is only accentuated by Hans Blumenberg’s extraordinarily compact observation that “modernity,” understood as a topos, is associated with a principle of insufficient reason, in which the multiplicity of options attendant to a decision entail a freedom experienced as insecurity. Blumenberg, in turn, compounds the paradox by contending that this distinctively modernist principle of insufficient reason is also the Hauptsatz, the “fundamental theorem” of all rhetoric—its antique ur-forms included.19 Vico’s sublimation of rhetoric can only be understood against the backdrop of these long-term processes. But, conversely, Vico’s place in this longer history can only be understood on the basis of a thorough reading of his entire oeuvre—not simply the 1744 Scienza nuova, but also the De coniuratione, the Institutiones oratoriae, the De ratione, De antiquissima sapientia, Diritto universale, as well as the 1725 and 1730 Scienze nuove. Vickers’s observation that in Vico (and in other comparable figures) “rhetoric is fragmented and then subordinated to an alien enterprise” is both right in some ways and also deeply misleading.20 Fragmentation and subordination are both significant processes in Vico’s trajectory as a thinker. But one must understand that the ars rhetorica Vico taught at the University of Naples was unified in name only. Stripped of their core function in public debate, Vico’s lectures on rhetoric amount to a series of acute observations in search of a purpose. Moreover, there is no doubt that the new science of rhetoric Vico had forged out of those observations by the end of his life differed in a host of significant ways from its classical antecedent. Nevertheless, it is wrong to categorize Vico’s new scientific

17 Marc

Fumaroli, L’ˆage de l’´eloquence: Rh´etorique et “res literaria” de la Renaissance au seuil de l’´epoque classique (Geneva: Droz, 1980), 671–2, 678; “Pr´eface,” in L’ˆage de l’´eloquence: Rh´etorique et “res literaria” de la Renaissance au seuil de l’´epoque classique (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), xiii. 18 George Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (London: Croom Helm, 1980), 242. 19 Hans Blumenberg, “Anthropologische Ann¨ aherung an die Aktualit¨at der Rhetorik,” in Wirklichkeiten in denen wir leben (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981), 124: “der Hauptsatz aller Rhetorik ist das Prinzip des unzureichenden Grundes (principium rationis insufficientis).” 20 Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 447.

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enterprise as simply “alien” to rhetoric. As this book argues, Vico reinvents rhetoric for a world that is distinctively anti-rhetorical. The purpose of this chapter is threefold: to examine the precise nature of Vico’s direct engagement with rhetoric as a discipline (beginning with his activities as professor of rhetoric), to identify the particular issues addressed by the ars rhetorica that interested him most, and to specify the ways in which he departed from his intellectual inheritance on these particular issues. There are three issues that are particularly pertinent to Vico’s direct reception of rhetoric: the faculty of ingenium, the ars topica, and the register of the sublime as it pertains to conceptualizations of pathos. Out of the first of these, Vico fashions a general theory of innovation that reinstates rhetoric as a crucial component of historical analysis even as it no longer has a role to play in the reenactments of antilogy. From the second, Vico generates an account of virtual aggregation in which the topical methods of deploying probable arguments and locating all the possible arguments for a given issue are transformed into analyses of how intellectual inquiry proceeds and of how experimentation in the natural sciences can be glossed as a particular application of the ars topica. In the third case, we see—in the case of sublime affect—an example both of how mundane rhetorical analysis could be in its guise as a university discipline and of how brilliant Vico’s reinvention of it was once he had liberated it from the strictures of a lecture course. Vico’s originality is only visible in relation to those he was engaging. With ingenium, this was Aristotle and his Baroque interlocutors—Peregrini, Pallavicino, and Tesauro. With regard to the ars topica, the classical points of reference are Aristotle and Cicero, but especially Quintilian, whereas the early modern refractors are not only Descartes and Arnauld (as is well known) but also Edward Herbert, Lord of Cherbury. In the case of pathos, the sequence is not so much Aristotle and Hobbes (as it might have been), but rather Longinus and Vico’s rediscovered Homer.

I. Ingenium in the Lectures on Rhetoric Ingenium is a recurrent interest throughout the Vichian corpus. Even when Vico is fulfilling—in a somewhat perfunctory manner—a commission to write the biography of the Neapolitan general Antonio Carafa (published in 1716), he is drawn to represent the general’s anthropological approach to studying life at the Austrian court. Carafa operates at court with disciplined reticence. He forgoes the Castiglionian courtier’s nonchalant attention to sprezzatura and adopts instead a Tacitean

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attention to simulation and dissimulation in affairs of state. To this Vico adds a Grotian frame of honoring promises. Carafa makes a particular study of the sovereign’s ingenium, “what he resisted and what he accepted, the customs of the empresses, the manner of the ministers, the constitution of the empire and the hereditary kingdoms, the education of his subjects, the state of the treasury and its administration, [examining] both what was evident and what was hidden.”21 Thus, the rhetorician becomes anthropologist: Carafa’s power of making connections between phenomena that appear distant and dissimilar reenacts the emperor’s own acts of mental ingenuity in resisting and accepting, and in relating what is evident to what is hidden in the behavior of his court. Likewise, it would be entirely appropriate to read Vico’s autobiography as an inquiry into the genealogy of his own ingenium and its habitual forms. The deeply intricated syntax of that Vita (written by installment in 1725, 1728, and 1731) is indicative of a desire to represent the diversity of data, premises, and inferences out of which Vico fashions a research agenda. Equally, the twenty-four appearances of the word ingegno in the 1744 Scienza nuova denote a semantic field that does significant work in a treatise that specializes in the double meaning of poiesis. Poiesis indicates not only the literary composition of poetry, but also and more importantly the pragmatic composition of ways of life: Culture for Vico is a fabric of extrapolations from individual cases to class concepts, cultural topoi, social habits, and normative rules. In order to understand all of these subsequent developments, it is necessary to begin with Vico’s redactions of ingenium in the Institutiones oratoriae. Vico’s professional engagement with the discipline of rhetoric began in 1698 when he competed in a concorso for the chair of rhetoric at L’Universit`a degli Studi, Federico II after the death in 1697 of Giuseppe Toma, the previous holder. The chair of rhetoric had been created in 1614–1616 as a replacement for an earlier chair of humanities (unfilled

21 Giambattista Vico, La gesta di Antonio Carafa, ed. Manuela Sanna (Naples: Alfredo Guida,

1997), 1.3.46–7: “ibi Antonius Principis ingenium, quidve adversaretur, quove propenderet, Augustarum mores, Ministrorum artes, Imperj, Regnorumque hereditariorum constitutionem, subditorum studia, aerarj opes usumque sedulo serioque observare quae prompta erant, scrutari abdita instituit.” Sprezzatura is, of course, the key concept in Castiglione’s Il cortigiano (1528), a word that Castiglione coins at 1.4.83. On sprezzatura as an early modern appropriation of classical accounts of irony, where deliberate understatement is crafted to appeal to a select public and thereby slight a more general public, see Eduardo Saccone, “Grazia, Sprezzatura, and Affettazione in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier,” Glyph 5 (1979): 34–54.

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since 1581) that traced its origins back to the Neapolitan Renaissance under the reign of Ferdinand I (1423–1494). Only the professor of Greek received a stipend smaller than that attached to the chair Vico assumed in 1699. But the course in rhetoric was not without some importance, given that it functioned as an introduction to the University’s primary concentration: law. Of the twenty-nine chairs at the University, twelve were in law, with five each in medicine and theology. This distribution was to have been significantly altered in 1703, but reform was delayed and then suspended during the period of Austrian rule between 1707 and 1734. The number of professorships dedicated to law was reduced only in 1735, while new chairs in botany, chemistry, anatomy, experimental physics, astronomy, church history, Hebrew, and municipal law were established in 1742.22 The chair in rhetoric had wide disciplinary responsibilities and this was something Vico emphasized. In a speech opening the academic year in 1708, he argued that the founders of the university had intended the professor of rhetoric to be a person educated in all the arts and sciences, so that when he was called upon to give an oration at the opening of the academic year he would be able to invoke the full spectrum of available disciplines.23 Some echo is discernable here of Aristotle’s opinion that rhetoric is comparable to dialectic in that “both have to do with matters that are in a manner within the cognizance of all men and not confined to any special science,” although the more immediate influence (at least on Vico’s reading of the professor of rhetoric’s responsibilities) is surely the Ciceronian injunction that the orator be competent in the various fields of knowledge.24 Vico gave the inaugural address at the opening of

22 See

Ricardo Filangieri di Candida “L’et`a aragonese,” in Storia della universit`a di Napoli, ed. Francesco Torraca (Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, 1924), 151–99, esp. 190 and in the same volume Nino Cortese’s “L’et`a spagnuola,” 204–431, esp. 255–71, 301–4, 335–6, 354–7. 23 Vico, De ratione, 1.210–11. Vico reiterates the sentiment in his autobiography: “non ragion`o mai delle cose dell’eloquenza se non in s´eguito della sapienza, dicendo che l’eloquenza altro non e` che la sapienza che parla, e perci`o la sua cattedra esser quella che doveva indirizzare gl’ingegni e fargli universali, e che l’altre attendevano alle parti, questa doveva insegnare l’intiero sapere, per cui le parti ben si corrispondan tra loro e ben s’intendan nel tutto.” Vico, Vita, 1.84. 24 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1354a. Cicero, it ought to be added, was aware that such an omnicompetence would appear “a vast and indeed limitless enterprise,” and he was willing to accept divisions of intellectual labor. The point is that “unless there is such knowledge, well-grasped and comprehended by the speaker, there must be something empty and almost childish in the utterance.” Cicero, De oratore, 1.6.

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the academic year nine times in all, seven times between his appointment in 1699 and 1708 and twice more in 1719 and 1732. As professor of rhetoric, Vico’s chief ceremonial duty was the inaugural oration, but his prime professional obligation was to teach the introductory course in rhetoric. A number of manuscripts survive from those courses in the form of notes taken by students. They have appeared a number of times as the Institutiones oratoriae, first published in the nineteenth century. In this work Vico’s interest is, by and large, centered on what is described in the Greek rhetorical lexicon as proofs from argument (logos) and in the Roman rhetorical lexicon as the duty to teach (docere). Unaware of the simultaneously decisive and deleterious effect that his discovery would have as it was repeated incessantly (and often uncritically) in the history of rhetoric, Aristotle had observed that “the proofs furnished by speech are of three kinds.” He explained that “the first [ethos] depends on the moral character of the speaker, the second [pathos] upon putting the hearer into a certain frame of mind, the third [logos] upon the speech itself, in so far as it proves or seems to prove.”25 But the best theoreticians in the Roman tradition were not overawed by the elegance of the division. In Cicero’s reception of Aristotle’s typology, ethos becomes mores and the category of decorum becomes an extremely thick layering of perceptions correlating expectation and performance.26 According to Cicero, persuasion from mores is very closely related to persuasion from appeals to the perturbationes animi (the passions), such that the distinction between arguments from ethos and arguments from pathos is blurred. As Cicero observes, “if however an arbitrator is neutral and free from predisposition, my task is harder, since everything has to be called forth by my speech, with no help from the listener’s character [natura].”27 Quintilian addresses the slippery distinction between ethos and pathos directly, rejecting any dogmatic separation. Intuiting the radicalization of ethos that will be central to the new sciences of man in the eighteenth century, Quintilian notes that some “explain pathos as describing the more violent emotions and ethos as designating those which are calm and gentle”—so

25 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1356a. On the relationship between logos and pathos in the Aristotelian

formulation, see Pierre Aubenque, “Logos et Pathos,” in Corps et aˆ me: Sur le De anima d’Aristote, ed. Gilbert Romeyer Dherbey (Paris: Vrin, 1996). 26 Cicero, De oratore, 2.184: “so much is done by good taste and style in speaking, that the speech seems to depict the speaker’s character [ut quasi mores oratoris effingat oratio].” For a close analysis of the reception of the Greek pisteis in the Roman tradition, see Jakob Wisse, Ethos and Pathos from Aristotle to Cicero (Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1989). 27 Cicero, De oratore, 2.185–7.

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that “ethos is continuous, while pathos is momentary.”28 Normalization proceeds by degrees. Although Vico works directly with the Latin inheritance from classical antiquity (his reception of the Greek tradition was mediated for the most part through Latin), he is not immune to the ossification of the classical categories that had ensued with the multiple recensions of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian in the intervening centuries. In the third chapter of the Institutiones, Vico declares his preference, simply enough, for docere. Noting that the orator’s aim is “to bend the spirit by his speech,” he argues in a Latinate fashion that there are three principal means of achieving this end: by pleasing, teaching, or moving. He concedes that the best orators will always ingratiate themselves to their audiences at the outset—delectare. An open mind having thus been secured, the way is cleared for an orator to mount a credible case with an assortment of arguments. Credibility must be turned to account, so minds thus opened and informed must also be propelled by “bringing [the audience’s] spirit to its limits by his fiery eloquence,” arousing the emotions selected by the orator—commovere. With such gentleness, sharpness, and forcefulness, “the orator seizes his listeners with pleasure, holds them with truth, and turns them about by feelings.” But whereas pleasure can become insidious and feelings can become treacherous, Vico holds that an orator’s true power (both political and moral) lies in his arguments—docere. Rather less piously, Vico adds that whereas the wise can be led with the unadorned truth, the many must be seduced and terrorized.29 Like many other early modern conduits of ancient rhetoric, Vico’s reception of rhetoric is at times mechanical. But, despite the prominence of Latin taxonomy, this focus on the logical plane of persuasion entails,

28 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 6.2.8–9: “emotions however, as we learn from ancient author-

ities, fall into two classes; the one is called pathos by the Greeks and is rightly and correctly expressed in Latin by adfectus (emotion): the other is called ethos, a word for which in my opinion Latin has no equivalent: it is however rendered by mores (morals) and consequently the branch of philosophy known as ethics is styled moral philosophy by us.” But is Quintilian’s reading simply mistaken? Who are the “ancient authorities” to whom he refers? See William W. Fortenbaugh, “Quintilian 6.2.8–9: Ethos and Pathos in the Ancient Tradition,” in Peripatetic Rhetoric After Aristotle, eds. William W. Fortenbaugh and David C. Mirhady (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994). 29 Vico, Institutiones oratoriae, 14: “quia eloquentia multitudini et vulgo facta est, quibus verum est ingratum, nisi illecebris quibusdam iucundum quoque fiat, nec recte quidem faciunt, nisi quadam libidinis impotentia abrepti, idcirco moribus delinenda, affectibus inflammanda est oratio.”

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in the context of the Institutiones oratoriae, a focus on Aristotle.30 This focus on Aristotle allows Vico to break free of rhetoric’s tendency toward ossifying classifications. This is nowhere clearer than in Vico’s appropriation of the Aristotelian description of the eye for resemblance, and the role that it plays in both poetic composition and logical inference. In the lectures as a whole, Cicero functions predominantly as a source of examples and Quintilian as a grammarian. Given that Vico repeatedly stresses the importance of examples over precepts, this is no great slight of Cicero. Nevertheless, Aristotle is a more stimulating source of theoretical insight for Vico and it is Cicero and Quintilian, rather than Aristotle, who are faulted for being textbookish on occasion in their formulation of precepts.31 The key concept in the Institutiones is ingenium, by which Vico means the faculty of finding the point of similarity between things that appear dissimilar. Drawing on Aristotelian theory, Vico emphasizes how the tropes (metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, and irony are the Vichian master categories) are products of an eye for resemblance, and how syllogisms (especially when they are abbreviated as enthymemes) are themselves products of the eye for intersection. Metaphor identifies resemblances of quality. Synecdoche organizes resemblances of hierarchy between part and whole, species and genus. Metonymy is sensitive to resemblances of sequence, and pairs causes with effects. Irony perceives the particular dissimilarity that is apparent contradiction and renders such tension plausibly coherent. In the Institutiones, Vico is particularly concerned with the orator’s dependence on an audience’s capacity to intuit the intersection of premises. The orator employs abbreviated arguments, enthymemes. The auditor is charged with intuiting what is missing.32 Vico accepts that

30 On

the reception of Aristotle in Quintilian, see Michael Winterbottom, Problems in Quintilian (London: University of London, 1970). 31 Vico, Institutiones oratoriae, 96. 32 Vico, Institutiones oratoriae, 190–1, 282–5. This account of the enthymeme is contested. Myles Burnyeat argues that, in the original Aristotelian formulation, the enthymeme is a distinctive kind of specifically rhetorical syllogism because it employs only premises that are probably true and does not deal with matters of definition. Myles Burnyeat, “Enthymeme: The Logic of Persuasion,” in Aristotle’s Rhetoric: Philosophical Essays, eds. David J. Furley and Alexander Nehamas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 38–9. Robert Brandom has another account of enthymemes—he says that enthymemes may be materially good inferences that do not derive their validity by virtue of being abbreviations of formally good inferences possessing both major and minor premises. Robert Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 80–96.

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an exaggerated dependence in the orator on the auditor’s acuity is symptomatic of literary decline. But he affirms his commitment to acuity: If auditors are to be persuaded, they must be able to participate in the creation of an oratorical performance. At least nominally, Vico follows the traditional division of the art of rhetoric into five parts. He begins with inventio, proceeds through dispositio and elocutio, and ends with memoria and pronuntiatio. In fact, he pays significant attention only to the first three. The last two are treated cursorily in the final chapter of the Institutiones oratoriae, where Vico states simply that there are no arts of memory or delivery, despite the extensive early modern literature on the ars memoria and despite Demosthenes’s famous opinion that in rhetoric delivery was first, second, and third in importance.33 But the one point at which the text adopts a logic of question and answer (as distinct from the logic of exposition that dominates for the most part) is a chapter in which Vico considers the topos “De sententiis, vulgo ‘del ben parlare in concetti.’” A sententia (literally, a sentence or an opinion; at base, a “maxim”) is an utterance that states in a compact, abbreviated form a combination of the key premises or conclusions in a rhetorical argument. A concetto (“concept” is the direct transliteration, but “conceit” is more accurate) is the Italian equivalent; there the emphasis is on the cryptic quality of the utterance’s compactness. Vico’s discussion of maxims is based, in the first place, on Aristotle. Ironically (and in a way that is characteristic of his habit of subverting and inverting the categories of analysis he inherits), Vico tends toward a rehabilitation of the highly self-conscious form of acutezza by emphasizing its Aristotelian roots.34 Vico cites two celebrated passages from the Poetics and the Rhetoric where Aristotle states that the capacity to invent metaphors is extremely rare and significant.35 To invent a metaphor is to understand a complex of relationships between things that appear dissimilar, but are in fact somehow proximate. Vico is moved to recall these classical sources on account of the attack on metaphor as a cognitive device mounted by the French Jesuit Dominique Bouhours 33 Vico,

Institutiones oratoriae, 430. With regard to Demosthenes’s purported emphasis on delivery, the sources are Cicero, De Oratore, 3.213 and Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 11.3.6. 34 See Catana, Vico and Literary Mannerism, 27–39. 35 Aristotle, Poetics, 1459a: “It is a great thing to make a proper use of each of the elements mentioned, and of double words and rare words too, but by far the greatest thing is the use of metaphor. That alone cannot be learnt: it is the token of genius. For the right use of metaphor means an eye for resemblances.” See also Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1412a.

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(1628–1702) in his La mani`ere de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit (1687). The Frenchman’s book had been criticized by Giovanni Giuseppe Orsi (1652–1733) in Considerazioni sopra un famoso libro franzese (1703). Bouhours had argued that metaphors are either false formulations that seem true or true formulations that seem false. The former would be broadly speaking figurative and suspect, because what seems at first true in them is but poetic conceit, something that has no real significance. The latter would be ironic and superfluous, because the joy produced by realizing that a paradox can be rectified and made a truth is merely an engaging way of passing time, a luxury. Against Bouhours, Vico wishes to maintain the position that what is divined in figures and ironies alike is unexpected similitude. Bouhours criticized metaphor because he believed that an undue fascination with overheated style had marred much seventeenth-century writing. In Italy, this literary mannerism was termed secentismo or marinismo; in Spain, gongorismo or conceptismo; in France, pr´eciosit´e. In Italy the term marinismo comes from the lyrical poet Giambattista Marino (1569–1625), whose verse is characterized by sustained figurative intricacy where the relationship between author and reader is established by means of a dialectic between elocutio and inventio. In such poetry, expression and conceit exist in a constant tension. A tactful resistance to decoding is required from the author and a generous predisposition to, patience for, and delight in decoding is demanded of the reader. In Spain, the writings of Balthazar Graci`an (1601–1658) on speaking in conceits have a political dimension too, for the brevity of conceits imitates the laconic but pregnant style of Tacitus. Certain authoritarian political situations breed oblique inventive forms, because critique must be tacit and tactful. In order to defend speaking in conceits against Bouhours, Vico draws upon a number of seventeenth-century baroque texts. He cites the Delle acutezze (1639) of Matteo Peregrini (1595–1652). He also cites the Trattato delle stile e del dialogo (1646) of Sforza Pallavicino (1607–1667), professor at the Jesuit Collegio Romano and interpreter of Galilei’s rhetorical strategies. One text that Vico does not cite directly, but that is essential to the present discussion, is Il cannocchiale aristotelico (1654) of Emanuele Tesauro (1592–1675), the Piedmontese theorist of Marino’s poetics. Tesauro contextualizes Vico, because he lays out one pole in an argument that preoccupied Peregrini and Pallavicino. Tesauro’s work— which considers Aristotle’s Rhetoric a telescope through which to examine all the perfections and imperfections of eloquence—is generally thought of as a locus classicus for surveying and justifying the mannerist

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tendencies of Baroque prose. Tesauro presents an essential account of ingegno naturale, the faculty that produces paradoxical maxims (which are also concetti, acutezze, argutezze, acuities, aperc¸us, witticisms). According to Tesauro, ingegno naturale encompasses two natural talents: perspicacia and versabilit`a. Perspicacia is the ability to “penetrate” distant and minute circumstances by way of substance, matter, form, accident, property, cause, effect, end, sympathy, similarity, contrariety, equality, superiority, inferiority, or proper and equivocal names. Versabilit`a is the ability to bring such diverse circumstances together by connecting and dividing, increasing and decreasing, deducting, accentuating, and substituting. In short, like Aristotle’s eye for resemblance, the two constitute an ability to create metaphors.36 Vico is working in the tradition represented by Tesauro when he gives a similar defense of ingenium as one of the principal sources of rhetorical argument. Somewhat surprisingly, however, it is to Peregrini that Vico turns to state the case for speaking in conceits. Peregrini was more skeptical about the seriousness of these paradoxical maxims than both Tesauro and Vico himself. Peregrini characterized acutezze in the following manner: they are not arguments, merely statements; they are beautiful and delightful; the qualities of resemblance utilized by the acutezze do not characterize the objects referred to by the figure of speech; and their beauty and delightfulness lie only in the artifice of the manner of speaking.37 Depending on one’s experience an action may appear either courageous or foolhardy. Speakers who use such qualities to derive their maxims are free to emphasize the qualities they desire (or need) even when the object itself possesses competing or indeterminate qualities. Given such description, Peregrini is unconvinced that these acutezze can really be integral to rhetoric. Why else, he asks, would Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian have treated them so haphazardly? Why else are they today ignored by serious politicians?38 Pallavicino, on the other hand, is regarded by scholars as having found something like a middle ground between the positions of Tesauro and Peregrini. On the one hand, Pallavicino has been described as overcoming the opposition between poetic and scientific discourse, by emphasizing the common commitment in both to a close observation of sensory

36 Emanuele

Tesauro, “Il cannocchiale aristotelico,” in Trattatisti e narratori del seicento, ed. Ezio Raimondi (Milan–Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, 1960), 32. 37 Matteo Peregrini, Delle acutezze, in Trattatisti e narratori del seicento, ed. Raimondi, 114. 38 Ibid., 139, 141.

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particularity.39 On the other, he does think that wit is crucial to the work done by an acutezza, although he is less willing than Peregrini to describe humor as a reaction to beauty, citing Aristotle in support of his observation that humor comes not from the bello, but from the brutto non doloroso—that which is ugly or bad but not injurious.40 In Vico’s representation of him, Pallavicino distinguishes himself by arguing that the pleasure of the acutezza in fact consists in the novelty of the conceit, whereas Aristotle had imagined that a paradoxical maxim is effective in rhetoric on account of the pleasure deriving from the ease with which the audience supplies what the orator has left tacit.41 Vico concedes that Greek, Latin, and now Italian have all experienced ages of great literary elegance followed by ages of overcomplication. If literary decline is often identifiable with a penchant for nicety, for artifice and contraction, is “sententiousness,” he asks, not to be considered a fault? Vico’s answer is a very classical “no”: Sententiae are integral to persuasion and are the epitome of compositional skill, for they represent the intersection of competence in inventio and elocutio.42 Vico is particularly concerned with paradoxical maxims. A paradoxical maxim is one in which the contradiction expressed is only apparent. Actually, contradiction is too strong a word with which to capture the full range of meaning here, for it marks but one extreme on a semantic continuum that extends through non sequitur to mere surprise. It is the apparent quality of the contradiction, non sequitur, or surprise that is key. It must be possible for the audience to desire and achieve a reconciliation of the disparate parts of the utterance and to be, in the process, struck by having learned a truth it had not previously suspected. The stakes in these debates are high for Vico because his entire understanding of the role played by ingenium in ordinary mental life is being called in question by those who have reacted against the mannerist excesses of the seventeenth century. In order to make ingenium a process that takes place naturally and unconsciously, Vico needs to see it as a capacity of the mind that is not simply drawn upon by highly selfconscious literary types. If ingenium is to move beyond the polis, understood as a domain of artificially enhanced consciousness of speech, then 39 “Introduzione,”

Trattatisti e narratori del seicento, ed. Raimondi, xii. Pallavicino, “Trattato dello stile e del dialogo,” in Trattatisti e narratori del seicento, ed. Raimondi, 198. Aristotle, Poetics, 1449a. 41 Vico, Institutiones oratoriae, 290–1. 42 Vico, Institutiones oratoriae, 282–3, 294–5; Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1394b; Cicero, De oratore, 2.231ff. See also Quintilian, 6.3.1ff. 40 Sforza

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he has to defend an account of ingenium that makes its functioning more natural than artificial. Only if ingenium is in some sense natural to human beings, the argument goes, will it be practiced as much by the masses as it is by the literary elite. For Vico, the driving force of ingenium—namely, similitude—is the fundamental category of all learning. The senses operate for Vico on an axis of similitude that runs through both the tropes and topics. That is to say, similitude drives the eye for resemblance, and the eye for resemblance drives discursive intervention. Vico’s sense of speaking in conceits is itself highly redacted.43 The reason that there are no arts of memory or delivery is that there is no art of metaphor.44 Nevertheless, the absence of an art in no way implies the absence of a faculty. As Vico will later formulate it in the 1744 Scienza nuova, the Latins were right in calling memory “fantasy,” because “imagination . . . is nothing but the springing up again of reminiscences, and ingenuity or invention is nothing but the working over of what is remembered [cose che si ricordano].”45 Memory on this account is not a passive repository but rather an active and dialectical mode of establishing similitudes. All similitude requires a temporal dimension in which one thing can recall another. Likewise, just as Vichian metaphor fuses the traditionally separate domains of inventio, elocutio, and memoria, so it colonizes pronuntiatio also. Metaphor is an implicit, enthymematic mode of expression in which responsibility is given to the public to supply the necessary complements in order to render such speech intelligible. Speech thus becomes an arena in which the public is co-involved in the construction of meaning, the superaddition of premises and middle terms. In his pared down version of Vico’s Institutiones oratoriae in the seminal complete works edition that he put together in collaboration with

43 John

Schaeffer comes to a similar conclusion: “Vico, in a flash of insight, solved the problem of describing how such argumentation [speaking in conceits] can occur by synthesizing the classical notion of the topoi with the Latin sententia and the Baroque conceit. It was Vico’s brilliant discovery that the finding of arguments, the focusing of them on a case and their stylistic expression, could be accounted for in one mental act, and it is in this synthesis that we find what Vico came to understand by sensus.” Schaeffer, Sensus Communis, 61. 44 Compare Quintilian’s opinion that “some regard memory as being no more than one of nature’s gifts; and this view is no doubt true to a great extent; but, like everything else, memory may be improved by cultivation.” Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 11.2.1. 45 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §699. I would argue that in this passage the phrase cose che si ricordano denotes not the passive voice (as Fisch and Bergin render it), but rather the middle-voiced relation of reciprocity that exists between things that share a quality, by means of which each calls to mind the other.

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Croce, Fausto Nicolini wished to indicate the gulf between Vico’s profession and his calling. To do so Nicolini followed his friend and colleague Croce, and emphasized the deep opposition between rhetoric and aesthetics. In order to explain away the appearance of the tropes in both the early versions of the lectures on rhetoric and the late Scienza nuova, Nicolini was forced to say that, because the significance of the tropes is transformed from one context to the next, Vico found it impossible to keep them within the rhetorical frame, excised them from the later versions of the lectures, and reinscribed them (transformed from arti` with a more critical fice to na¨ıvet´e) in the Scienza nuova. Giuliano Crifo, evaluation of all the available manuscripts, has argued that there is no such suppression of the theory of the tropes in the later versions of the lectures.46 His conclusion is that it is unnecessary, indeed, unreasonable to presuppose a structured antipathy between Vico’s reception of the tropes in the ars rhetorica and his deployment of them in the logica poetica of the Scienza nuova. The function, then, of ingenium in the Institutiones oratoriae is to compress the different parts of rhetoric, to focus them on the problem of innovation beyond the rarefied domain of literary theory and practice. What I want to emphasize here is Vico’s extension of metaphorical work from orator to auditor. The eye for resemblance is a faculty that both parties to discursive exchange must share. What this opens up is the possibility that non sequitur is construed as aperc¸u. The retrospective rationalization of semiotic interaction is a crucial component of Vico’s understanding of culture as a cognitive process. The Neapolitan is, thus, able to locate innovation in reception. But he locates innovation not only in figures, but also in the nodes of divergent opinion that accrete around contentious issues—loci. We turn now to his appropriation of classical topics. Here, too, his emphasis is on activity: Auditors do not passively receive metaphor, they construe metaphor; likewise, inquiry does not simply receive experience, it experiments with it. In his reinvention, the ars topica is inquiry driven by tactics oriented toward contention. In place of the forum—where orator and auditor may meet—Vico substitutes the topos as a “virtual” ground of encounter, where arguments and not individuals confront one another. Impersonal in its orientation, the Vichian ars topica is a very precise instance of his general sublimation of rhetoric.

46 Vico,

Institutiones oratoriae, xv–cxii.

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II. The Ars Topica as Modernist In Vico’s sublimation of rhetoric, no single reinvention is as decisive as the reception of topics—“a method,” as Aristotle originally defined it, “by which we shall be able to reason from generally accepted opinions about any problem set before us and shall ourselves, when sustaining an argument, avoid saying anything self-contradictory.”47 A comparison of the treatment of topical theory in the Vita, the Institutiones oratoriae, the De ratione, the De antiquissima sapientia, and the Scienza nuova reveals a sequence of fundamental transformations. In the Vita, Vico recalls that in the competition for the chair of rhetoric that he assumed in 1699 he spoke on the chapter De statibus causarum in Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, where topical theory is explicitly tied into forensic practice. In his lectures on rhetoric, Vico construes the ars topica as the art that indicates common places to dialecticians and orators, common places that include the Aristotelian categories. But it is in the De ratione that Vico declares his deep allegiance to this part of the rhetorical canon, arguing resolutely against the tendency of modern philosophy (and Cartesianism in particular) to dismiss the art’s utility. In the De antiquissima sapientia, 47 Aristotle,

Topics, 100a. In his gloss of this passage, Jacques Brunschwig notes that “les deux parties de cette phrase correspondent aux deux rˆoles que se partagent les interlocuteurs du d´ebat dialectique: la premi`ere d´efinit les normes de conduite du questionneur, la seconde celles du r´epondant. La m´ethode topique s’inscrit ainsi d’embl´ee dans le cadres d’une technique de la discussion dont les usage fondamentaux sont d’ores et d´ej`a fix´es. L’entretien dialectique, en effet, n’est pas une libre conversation, ni une discussion anarchique. L’´echange verbal y est pris dans un r´eseau de conventions e de r`egles, qu’il est tr`es e´ clairant de concevoir sur le mod`ele des codes institutionnels qui r`eglementent la pratique d’un sport ou d’un jeu, et qui asservissent selon des lignes bien d´efinies le d´eroulement concret de toute ‘partie’ r´eelle ou possible.” Jacques Brunschwig, “Introduction,” in Aristote: Topiques (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1967), xxii–xxiii. In the opinion of W. A. de Pater, Aristotle’s consideration of the rules of dialectic makes him the inventer of dialectic considered as a systematic enterprise: “nous avons vu dans notre premi`ere section que Platon mettait la dialectique a` l’oeuvre dans ses recherches sur l’essence des choses, et nous avons pu d´egager les lois et les r`egles qui y e´ taient employ´ees. Mais il e´ tait r´eserv´e a` Aristote de faire la th´eorie de ces e´ l´ements, sous une forme syst´ematique.” W. A. de Pater, Les topiques d’Aristote et la dialectique platonicienne: La m´ethodologie de la d´efinition (Fribourg, Switzerland: St. Paul, 1965), 68. On the concept of “place” in Aristotle, see W. A. de Pater, “La Fonction du Lieu et de l’Instrument dans les Topiques,” in Aristotle on Dialectic: The Topics, ed. G. E. L. Owen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). On the close relationship between topics and forensic disputation, see Theodor Viehweg, Topik und Jurisprudenz (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1974), especially his exposition of “Vicos Hinweis.” On the attempt to revitalize topical inquiry (with reference also to Vico), see Otto P¨oggeler, “Dialectik und Topik,” in Hermeneutik und Dialectik, eds. R¨udiger Bubner, Konrad Cramer, and Reiner Wiehl (T¨ubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1970), together with Schmidt-Biggemann, Topica universalis.

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Vico’s attempt to graft the ancient methodological habits of the ars topica onto modern inquiry produces a remarkable gloss of natural philosophy in which experimentation itself becomes a kind of critical topics. By the time of the Scienza nuova, Vico innovatively calls the most basic accretions of experience and expectation a “sensory topics.” Vico’s use of topical theory is expansive. He does not think of it as simply a tool with which orators can find arguments. In this respect he rejuvenates an initiative, which had been present from the beginning of topical theory, to move beyond oratory and its institutions in the polis. In Aristotle, the Topics performs the function of surveying the range of probabilistic arguments employed in Greek disputation. The Topics is not subsumed within the Rhetoric and the later interpreters of Aristotle who canonized the Prior and Posterior Analytics, the Categories, the De interpretatione, and the Sophistic Refutations as the Organon excluded the Rhetoric even as they included the Topics. As so often, Vico’s reception of the classical rhetorical precedents is mediated. In the case of topics this mediation of the originally Aristotelian project comes through Quintilian, who himself had contributed to the development of stasis theory, a deployment of topical thinking for the public speakers of the law courts. As Vico recalls it almost three decades later in his Vita, his performance in the competition for the chair of rhetoric consisted of “an hour’s lecture on the opening lines of Fabius Quintilian’s long chapter De statibus causarum,” in which he limited himself to “the etymology of the term status and the distinction of its meanings.”48 Stasis theory is generally concerned with investigating the kinds of problems and questions at issue in legal disputes. It is closely related to the ars topica, but is sometimes thought to have developed out of the experiences and exigencies specific to forensic rhetoric. With regard to the etymology of the term stasis or basis (the Greek terms for the Latin status), Quintilian reports that “the term seems to be derived from the fact that it is on it that the first collision between the parties to the dispute takes place, or that it forms the basis or standing of the whole case.”49 There is no record of what Vico actually said when he glossed this etymology. What one can say is that the metaphor of basis, standing, or ground is fraught. In the present context, it will be a question whether Vico’s reception of topical theory

48 Vico,

Vita, 28. Institutio oratoria, 3.6.4.

49 Quintilian,

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through stasis theory predisposes him to an emphasis on the problematics of disputation over and above the purely derivative quality of common places as clich´es.50 Now, whereas some have maintained that the bases pertained only to forensic themes, according to Quintilian they are pertinent in all three rhetorical modes—that is, in deliberative and epideictic rhetoric too.51 Quintilian even implies that any point of dispute whatsoever will have its own particular bases. This is a point of some importance because it establishes a more expansive domain of the disputable. Such expansiveness is characteristic not only of the Aristotelian categories (which are different in different fields), but also of Vico’s survey of the different disciplines of early modern inquiry.52 Reviewing Aristotle’s categories, Quintilian concludes that the first four—essence, quality, quantity, relation—concern bases, whereas the remainder are simply “topics for argument.”53 Quintilian summarizes the terms of the debate within the ancient rhetorical tradition, referring to Cicero and Aristotle in particular.54 The kind of question asked and the mode of its being asked will change depending on the field of inquiry—as will become clear presently in Vico’s reception of Edward Herbert’s “zetetica,” a rendition of topical inquiry that has very interesting implications—but what is at issue here is particularly clear with respect to law. As Quintilian explains, plaintiff and defendant will open their disputations with points of contention like the following: “you have killed a man—I have not killed him,” or “I have the right to bring this action—you have not the right,” or “Horatius

50 To

the Jesuit historian of media Walter Ong, the history of topics is the history of a movement from oral to visual modes of thought, so that where the classical authorities describe by way of the categories modes of predication that are implicitly about utterance, the act of assertion is effaced in medieval and early modern logicians like Peter of Spain and Agricola by an abstract concern for formal logic that employs instead loci of classification. This transition from verbal actions in time to spatial repositories outside of time prepares the way, in Ong’s opinion, for a profound spatialization of thought with the advent of moveable type, with the key theoretical exemplar being Peter Ramus. Ong, Ramus, 108, 111–112. Compare Michel Meyer’s diagnosis of rhetoric as problematology. He defines rhetoric as “la n´egociation de la distance entre individus a` propos d’une question.” Note how this definition attempts to overcome the difference between space and time by synthesizing them. Meyer, Histoire de la rh´etorique, 293. 51 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 3.6.1. 52 Ibid., 3.6.7: “every question has its basis, since every question is based on assertion by one party and denial by another.” 53 Ibid., 3.6.24. 54 The chief references to Cicero are Topica, 25.93; Orator, 14.45; De inventione, 1.8.10. The chief references to Aristotle are Rhetoric, 1374a, 1416a.

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has committed a crime, for he has killed his sister—he has not committed a crime, since it was his duty to kill her for mourning the death of an enemy.”55 Whereas the first point turns on the question of whether an action has taken place, the second and third turn on the qualities of particular persons, rights, and actions. Broadly speaking, there are four modes of defense in a court of law: deny involvement in the affair; deny there was ever an injury; concede having performed the action in question, but deny that it qualifies in this instance as an offense; or hide behind a technicality.56 In Quintilian’s account of stasis theory, Vico encountered rhetoric’s reflection on the fact that particular rituals of confrontation usually throw up a series of decisive issues, issues on which those confrontations turn.57 In the case of stasis theory, the institutionalized confrontations typical of rhetoric in the polis are central. The institutionalized locality of stasis theory is to some extent mirrored in Vico’s early explorations of topics too. In the Institutiones oratoriae, topics is a habit of inquiring into the “topography” of argumentation, a training essential to the orator’s formation in running through all the arguments that pertain to a case or cause in order better to select the most appropriate. As Vico defines it in the thirteenth lecture of his rhetoric course, “the ars topica indicates common places to orators and dialecticians,” so that “it can be defined as the art of finding arguments with respect to any given problem.”58 We should be especially attentive to the distance between “indicating common places” and “finding arguments.” That connection appears utterly natural to Vico. It is not. Aristotle does not emphasize it in the first instance. In the early Vico, “finding arguments” is indeed an ars. In the later Vico, “finding arguments” is no longer a competence of the orator. It becomes a rhetorico-hermeneutic capacity of all persons insofar as they invent arguments in grappling with particular domains and modes of social dispute. Here once again, the trajectory described by the arc of Vico’s development as a thinker is away from situations of direct confrontation toward accounts of the less explicit, more indirect (but just as potent) cultural configurations in which the presence of others is virtual, not actual. One of the aspects of topical theory that makes it transportable beyond immediate interaction is its capacity to replicate itself beyond institutions that have been designed or recognized as venues for discursive 55 Quintilian,

Institutio oratoria, 3.6.73, 76. 3.6.83. 57 Ibid., 3.6.4. 58 Vico, Institutiones oratoriae, 50–3. 56 Ibid.,

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confrontation. The expansiveness of topics demands that it be constantly reinvented as discursive habits change. This process of continual revision is evident in the tradition that Vico inherits. In the De antiquissima sapientia, when Vico says that “Aristotle’s Categories and Topics are completely useless if one wants to find something new in them,” he means that each community must rewrite (and constantly revise) its own account of the habitual domains of debate. His pairing of the Categories and the Topics is revealing, for it is possible to understand the predicables of the Categories as the most basic, most unchanging topoi of debate. That Aristotle gives different lists of predicables in different places is evidence of the difficulty one has in making universal statements on the kinds of questions that can be asked of any given issue. The topoi dealt with in the Topics, on this account, are comparable in function but significantly less universal in their reference. Vico is implying that the grammatical rigor of the Categories is mistaken for comprehensiveness, such that the injunction of the Topics to always regard the ars topica as a tool and not a repository is ignored. Among the moderns, Vico cites Llull and Kircher as examples of scholars who have treated the topical writings of the Organon as finished products that are not themselves in need of continual reinvention for new circumstances.59 As Vico lists them in the Institutiones oratoriae, the common places where arguments are to be found are definition, division, etymology, cognates, genus, species, the whole, parts, cause, efficient cause, author, matter, form, purpose, consequences, subject, circumstances whether of persons, places, or times. Employing a common comparison, Vico describes these topoi as, so to speak, the alphabeta of argumentation. He who does not master the common places is like someone who knows the alphabet, but cannot isolate words in the sea of letters presented by written text. Facility in the ars topica means being able to respond at any moment to the most pressing issues of any given question by deploying the most pertinent arguments after having surveyed the totality of possible arguments. This is clearly a capacity oriented to confrontations in the here and now. But with practice, says Vico, this consciously tended faculty will become second 59 Vico,

De antiquissima sapientia, 120–3. Llull was the target of some ignorant hatred in the early modern period. Compare the more interesting judgment of Mark D. Johnston, The Spiritual Logic of Ramon Llull (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 314–15: “Llull is a ‘super-Realist.’ For him, the predicables name not class relationships but levels in the contraction of universals to particulars, conceived either physically as a relation of part to whole or more often metaphysically as limits of participation through resemblance.” Consider also the more informed connection of Llull and Kircher to the Leibnizian ars combinatoria in Schmidt-Biggemann, Topica universalis, 188–90.

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nature. Just as the experienced reader does not read each and every letter in recognizing a word, individuals will find themselves pushed toward pertinent arguments without laboriously computing and considering all possible permutations.60 What begins in moments of self-conscious crisis and contention swiftly becomes the stuff of unconscious habit. The possibility of reinventing the ars topica for modern inquiry is precisely the point of contention in the De ratione between Vico and critics of the art, chiefly Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694), a leader of the Jansenist movement, and Pierre Nicole (1625–1695), who collaborated with Arnauld in anti-Jesuit polemics and also on the Port-Royal Logique. Arnauld and Nicole (influenced by Descartes’s disparaging remarks about the studia humanitatis generally) deny in the Logique (1662) that the classical art of discovering arguments continues to be useful.61 They admit that “it is necessary to have the subject matter in order to organize it,” so that the discovery of arguments must precede judgment of them, but they deny that it is necessary “to learn how to find the subject matter before learning how to organize it.” There is no need for an art dedicated to the discovery of arguments, they say, because “the mind and common sense [l’´esprit et le sens commun] always furnish enough of these without needing to borrow from any art or any other method.”62 Citing Quintilian’s admission that topics cannot involve the active pursuit of all possible arguments pertaining to any given case, together with Augustine’s observation that the rules of eloquence are vindicated in the best orators not because they are consciously following rules laid down by the art, but because they are themselves eloquent, Arnauld and Nicole make the ironically Vichian argument that although someone like Ramus could point out examples of arguments in Virgil derived from the topical category of efficient cause, it would be quite wrong to suppose that Virgil had consulted the ars topica before composing the verse. In order 60 Vico,

Institutiones oratoriae, 50–3. Compare Aristotle’s discussion of definition, property, genus, and accident at Topics, 101bff. 61 Both the Logic (1662) and the Rhetoric (1675) of Lamy discourage education in topical method on the grounds that it produces a too copious growth of ideas, few of which are significant in the matter to be considered and none of which are impossible to obtain by a methodical application of the analytic and synthetic capacities of the intellect. Cicero is the chief defendant of the tradition in the eyes of Arnauld and Nicole, and they cite De oratore, 2.38.160. See Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, Logic, or the Art of Thinking, trans. and ed. Jill Vance Burocker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 183– 4, 227, 233–4, 238, and 240; and also Bernard Lamy, “The Art of Speaking,” in The Rhetorics of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Lamy, ed. John T. Harwood (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 349–51. 62 Arnauld and Nicole, Logic, 181; emphasis added.

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“to produce such noble and lively verses, he would have had not only to forget these rules if he had known them, but in some sense to forget himself to be swept away by the passion he was portraying.”63 Topics, they charge, is theory rather than practice, mechanical and redundant. Orators (lawyers and preachers are the examples) do not work this way.64 All that topics is good for is copiousness—the “various, ordinary, and remote thoughts, such as Llullists find by means of their tables”—but that wealth of options is debilitating when judgment is forced to decide among them.65 The Port-Royal authors do provide a skeletal version of topical categories, which they have appropriated from the Logica vetus et nova (1654) of Johann Clauberg (1622–1665), the leading German Cartesian of his generation. But, although Arnauld and Nicole allow that Aristotle was rather fine on the subject of topics in the Rhetoric, they find the Topics itself a concatenation of “strangely confused books.”66 In the De nostri temporis studiorum ratione of 1709, Vico launches an attack on Arnauld and Nicole’s rejection of topics. He argues that in contrast to the ancients—who had cultivated, as we have seen, the art of discovering arguments—the moderns have concentrated exclusively on the development of judgment. Descartes is not named (although he is in 1710 in the De antiquissima sapientia, where Vico further develops some of these criticisms), but it is the Cartesian approach to inquiry, with its method of hyperbolic doubt as a means to the end of indubitable certainty, that Vico identifies with modern critical inquiry. Vico takes on Arnauld as a representative of the Cartesian tradition. Later in the Vita, he will be even more dismissive, arguing that Descartes’s metaphysics does not generate a specifically Cartesian logic, “for Arnauld erects his on the basis of Aristotle’s.”67 Ironically, however, the mature Vico will share with Arnauld and Nicole the notion that the ars topica can be sublimated into common sense such that it is unnecessary to presuppose a separate theory of topics put to use by self-conscious orators who face moments of decision inside the confrontational space of the polis and its cognates. Yet because Vico defends topics as an art in 1709 his understanding of sensus communis is still deeply rhetorical in 1744—but “rhetorical” in a sublimated sense. 63 Arnauld

and Nicole, Logic, 182–83. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 5.10.122; Augustine, De doctrina christiana, 4.3. 64 Arnauld and Nicole, Logic, 182. 65 Ibid., 183. 66 Ibid., 184–88. 67 Vico, Vita, 22.

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Vico shares the Port-Royal intuition that common sense is at the heart of rhetorical competence, but he has a rather different understanding of sensus communis. Vichian common sense is not le bon sens, not the wisdom of the ages, not the synaesthesia of the inner senses, not the sense of obligation to the commonweal, not an anticipation of the opinions of others, but rather particular opinions shared as judgments without reflection by multiple individuals in any given community. In addition to “a shared opinion,” sensus communis and senso comune also denote for Vico “a shared faculty or institution of perception.” Whereas for Arnauld and Nicole common sense is a substitute for the ars topica, for Vico it is a consequence of that same art. Vico’s understanding of the ars topica is much closer to Quintilian’s than it is to Ramus’s. Where the latter promotes a machine for the generation and retention of binary distinctions, the former attempts to describe in general terms the kinds of disagreement that arise in particular sites of social contestation. Feasibility is a key concept here: Common sense considers action and the probabilities that pertain to the uncertain consequences of action, success and failure. More than feasibility, common sense delineates normativity too: Beneath Quintilian’s kinds of disagreement, there are Aristotle’s topoi of major, formative disagreements in particular fields of inquiry.68 Beyond normativity itself, common sense is in Vico a condition of possibility for normativity. Considered as a faculty or institution of perception, common sense is a conquest of time. Between past and future, common sense is born of the cultivation of memory and imagination, which as Vico says in the De ratione are almost the same thing.69 The human temporal manifold—its presentist perspective on past and future—does not have a divine perspective on eternity, so who can be certain of having seen everything? Vichian topics is, one might say, an activism with regard to experience. This is expressed as experimentalism in the De antiquissima sapientia. In the Scienza nuova, it becomes the assertion that a society is only a society insofar as it perceives together. Vico does not conclude 68 Thus,

Aristotle says that the Topics is useful in “mental training, conversations and the philosophic sciences” and that “further, it is useful in connexion with the ultimate bases of each science; for it is impossible to discuss them at all on the basis of the principles peculiar to the science in question, since the principles are primary in relation to everything else, and it is necessary to deal with them through the generally accepted opinions on each point. This process belongs peculiarly, or most appropriately to dialectic; for, being of the nature of an investigation, it lies along the path to the principles of all methods of inquiry.” Aristotle, Topics, 101a-b. Localized accretions of “generally accepted opinions” in any given field of inquiry or culture are thus topoi. 69 Vico, De ratione, 1.104–7.

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that perceiving together means coming to the same conclusion or having the same assumptions. Perceiving together means equal access to perception itself. It means sharing a language, where language is understood as shared sensitivity to phenomena based on common terms and shared habits of recognition. Topics is, in this sense, a means by which to dilate time, to consider a problem from multiple points of view. Dilation here denotes a process of remembering: The aggregation of reputable opinions pertaining to a particular problem is an overcoming of the present tense, of oblivion. As we shall see presently, when Vico in the De antiquissima sapientia presumes to think of experimentation as a form of topical praxis, it can reasonably be said that experiment in natural philosophy is an artificial human intervention in the fabric of natural time, a rupture that can be termed the appearance of a new form of time that is neither pure artifice nor pure nature (both of which are more easily thought of as noncumulative, cyclical and repetitive). Experiment is a proactive mode of experience and the sequences of experimental inquiry are victories for memory against oblivion. Bacon—who (after Plato and Tacitus, and before Grotius) is the third of Vico’s four chief authorities and who appears at both the beginning and the end of the De ratione—had proposed that there were three broad historical categories: the ordinary course of natural events, the ordinary course of human events, and the experimental interventions of man in nature.70 This tertium quid spawns a fourth domain in which past human action has a cumulative effect on future human action. The radical humanism of the Scienza nuova is the self-reflexive effect of human artifice on human nature, and it is constitutive of the new field of cultural 70 The

community of inquiry exhibits qualities of both co-presence and temporal articulation. Philosopher and historian of science Nicholas Jardine was emphasizing this double nature when he paired The Fortunes of Inquiry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) with The Scenes of Inquiry: On the Reality of Questions in the Sciences (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). The open or closed nature of the community of inquiry in one place and time is Hobbes’s concern when he criticizes the exclusiveness of the Royal Society. See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). Likewise, the continuity of the community of inquiry is what is at stake in Jardine’s criticism of Thomas Kuhn’s historiography of paradigm shifts. Consider also the terse formulation of C. S. Peirce: “The real is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you.” Hence, “the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of [an indefinite] increase in knowledge.” C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958), 5.311.

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history. Artifice ossified as habit becomes a second, historical nature that extends beyond the parameters of the polis.71 Vico forges a strong connection between the ars topica and the faculty of ingenium and that faculty becomes a second, historical nature when Vico glosses faculty with facility. To be expert in topics, Vico goes on to say, is to be versed in the art of finding the middle term: the very word argument is related to acuity.72 Having praised Cicero’s ability to offer a diversity of arguments to his audiences so that each auditor might find at least something in his oration that spoke directly to him and, then, abruptly introducing Arnauld’s disdain for topics, Vico asks, who are we to believe, Cicero or Arnauld?73 Clearly, Vico stands with Cicero, but, as in the work as a whole, the Neapolitan attempts to arrive at a rapprochement between the ancients and the moderns. Because topics often takes up as true things that turn out to be false and because criticism left to its own devices habitually rejects the merely probable, both the ars topica and the ars critica are to be cultivated.74 Vico’s position on the relationship between the ars topica and the ars critica is considerably more incisive in the De antiquissima sapientia, published a year after the De ratione. There, Vico argues that the Port-Royal Logique errs in delineating four basic mental functions (perceiving, judging, reasoning, ordering). He contends that the fourth of these is simply the art of the third, so that, just as the ancients (in Vico’s opinion) 71 There

is a concomitant fifth domain too in which past natural events have a cumulative effect on future natural events. Evolution is the paradigmatic theorization of this form of natural historicity. However, it would be unreasonable to conclude too quickly that natural historicity is a conceptual consequence of human historicity, both because Bacon is an ambiguous figure in this story and because the Scienza nuova itself begins by intervening in debates around the true age of the earth, where geological and biblical narratives intersect. It may be that natural historiography influenced civil historiography, or that the two were mutually constitutive. With regard to the question of the primacy of human action or natural history, consider the contrasting interpretations of Bacon. Antonio Perez-Ramos casts Bacon as a key figure in the maker’s knowledge tradition, but Guido Giglioni counters that Bacon attends more to the hylozoistic activism of nature itself than to the interventions of human beings in nature. Compare Antonio Perez-Ramos, Francis Bacon’s Idea of Science and the Maker’s Knowledge Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) with Guido Giglioni, “The Darkness of Matter and the Light of Nature: Notions of Matter in Bacon and Comenius and Their Theological Implications,” Acta Comeniana, 17 (2003): 9–31 and “The Hidden Life of Matter: Techniques for Prolonging Life in the Writings of Francis Bacon,” in Francis Bacon and the Refiguring of Early Modern Thought. Essays to Commemorate The Advancement of Learning (1605–2005), eds. Catherine Gimelli Martin and Julie Robin Solomon (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2005). 72 Vico, De ratione, 106–7. Vico, Institutiones oratoriae, 182–3. 73 Vico, De ratione, 108–9. 74 Ibid., 108–11.

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thought of topics as the art of perceiving, and of the ars critica as the art of judging, so ordering (or method) ought to be recognized as the art of reasoning. In this way, Vico is able to impute to his opponents the patently ridiculous instruction that the second part of rhetoric, dispositio or arrangement, ought to be replaced by geometrical method. This would be to argue for the elimination of what Vico dutifully described in the Institutiones oratoriae as skill in deploying exordium, narratio, digressio, propositio, partitio, confirmatio, amplificatio, confutatio, and peroratio. It would be to promote the methodical establishment of indubitable premises followed by exhaustive sequences of soritic argumentation in the manner of Descartes—or at least in the manner of Descartes, as Vico imagines him.75 As Vico concludes, “to compose a public address according to the geometrical method would be the same as excluding everything clever from it, carefully demonstrating nothing but what is quite obvious, treating the audience like children and putting nothing but pap in their mouths, and to sum up in one word, playing the part of pedant instead of being the speaker at an assembly.”76 The assembly, as an organ of the polis, is still a point of reference for Vico, but in the De antiquissima sapientia he is shifting debate from the polis to scientific communities. Although the focus is still on explicit disputation in such scientific communities, the parameters of the here and now are being pushed back so that an international inquiry sequence that lasts decades (or even centuries) is now thinkable. When Vico goes on in the De antiquissima sapientia to say that “there is no invention without judgment and no judgment without invention,” the meaning of the second clause is manifest: Without objects perceived, there is nothing to judge.77 The meaning of the first clause is less clear. On closer examination it turns out to be a contraction of his insight on the relationship between ingenium and the ars topica, for he means to say that always already in perception there exists the tendency to perceive similarity, because the cognition of truly isolate objects is either rare or impossible. Perception itself is driven by the differential calculus of the 75 On

the contrary, as Vico notes and is clear to readers of the Discours de la m´ethod, the cogito—whatever one concludes about its philosophical status—is a superlative literary narrative, replete with the most well-chosen frametales, comparisons, and digressions. Thus, “il resoconto metodologico cartesiano viene appunto qualificato come ‘une histoire.’” Andrea Battistini, Lo specchio di dedalo: Autobiografia e biografia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 43. 76 Vico, De antiquissima sapientia, 118–25. 77 Ibid., 121: “neque . . . inventio sine iudicio, neque iudicium sine inventione certum esse potest.”

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topical categories—the more and the less, for example. This is what Vico means when he suggests that the ancients viewed topics as the art governing perception. It also explains why topics and what modern philosophers call “phenomenology” are so closely intertwined in Vico’s program. The connection between topics and phenomenology will become particularly important to the legal hermeneutics of the Diritto universale and the poetic wisdom of the Scienza nuova. Within the space of a few pages in the De antiquissima sapientia, Vico arrives at the locution topica ipsa critica erit, topics itself will be criticism. What does he mean and under what conditions might topics become criticism? The argument in the body of the De antiquissima sapientia itself is almost too cryptic to decipher. There are further clues in the articles published in the Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia in 1711 and 1712, written by Vico in response to the review of the De antiquissima sapientia, where he makes oblique references to the De veritate of Edward Herbert (1583– 1648), a book first published in 1624 in Paris, translated into French in 1639 (most probably by Mersenne), and admired by Descartes. When the relationship between these three passages—the assertion that topics will become criticism in the De antiquissima sapientia and the two references to Herbert in the Giornale—is properly understood, it will become clear that Vico has, in point of fact, done something radical to the ars topica. He has done nothing less than theorize the transposition of topics to experimental natural philosophy. This transposition marks a profoundly modernist turn in Vico’s reception of the ars topica. This claim requires some clarification.78 Vico believes that the Categories and Topics of Aristotle are fundamental texts in the topical tradition that he is defending. Yet he says in the De 78 Herbert

later became famous as a purported pioneer of English Deism, and a good deal of emphasis has been put on his (relatively short) assertion in the De veritate that there are natural religious ideas shared by all peoples. Recently, one scholar has argued that in the early reception of Herbert’s work little attention was paid to questions of natural religion. Richard Serjeantson, “Herbert of Cherbury Before Deism: The Early Reception of the De veritate,” Seventeenth Century 16 (2001): 229. It is also said that the inscription on Herbert’s tombstone reads auctoris libri, cui titulus est de Veritate. See R. D. Bedford, The Defence of Truth: Herbert of Cherbury and the Seventeenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979), 8. Nicola Badaloni emphasized the importance of the relationship between Vico and Herbert. See his Introduzione a Vico (Bari: Laterza, 2001), 8–17. Elsewhere, the same scholar emphasizes the issue of natural religion too and gives a more precise evaluation of Vico’s construal of Herbert’s account of faculty: Whereas Vico spoke of a new faculty emerging in the human mind for every new sensation, Herbert spoke of new faculties as analogues corresponding to new differentiae in objects. Nicola Badaloni, Laici credenti all’alba del moderno: La linea Herbert-Vico (Florence: Le Monnier Universit`a, 2005), 135.

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antiquissima sapientia that they are completely useless if one approaches these texts wanting to find in them quid novi, “something of novelty.” Approached in this way, the produit productif of the categories transforms the investigator into a Llull or a Kircher, who for Vico are each comparable to “a man who knows the alphabet, but cannot arrange the letters to read the great book of nature.” For Vico, reading the book of nature is something comparable to writing it, or rather composing (that is, recomposing) it. Indeed, reenactment is the hermeneutic form of much early modern experimentation. Vico conjectures that, in a research community where topics has been appropriately calibrated to modern imperatives and initiatives, orators and observers (of natural and artificially precipitated phenomena) would spring from the same fount.79 Vico then goes on to argue that demonstration, rather than geometrical method, ought to be introduced into physics. By demonstration, moreover, he means experiment. He says as much when he argues that we are to understand particular effects of nature, peculiaria naturae effecta, by means of particular experiments, peculiaribus experimentis, which are themselves to be thought of as particular works of geometry, peculiaria geometriae opera.80 What Vico says here is itself experimental. In order to understand these passages fully, it is necessary to bear in mind the full pragmatic dimensions of the De antiquissima sapientia. Vico is able to make himself a little clearer in his second response to the book’s reviewers. There Vico makes two crucial references to Herbert. First, he says that “the main thesis of his metaphysics is that for each sensation a new faculty unfolds and manifests itself in us.”81 Second, he says that Herbert’s “book is nothing but topics transferred into the field of experimental physics.”82 Vico is clearly right with regard to the first of these assertions, for this is 79 Vico,

De antiquissima sapientia, 122–23. With regard to the statement “reenactment is the hermeneutic form of early modern experiment,” consider the following expansion of the maker’s knowledge paradigm: “to know something would now mean to make or be able to make something. A notable, different instance of this kind of knowledge, however, should not be forgotten: the claims to know made by someone who has been the agent or an agent of, or in, something non-material such as a ‘mental act’ (actio/passio) which involves one or several participants. The transmission of this type of knowledge is sometimes taken to be empathetical; the operation of the understanding accounting for it is usually termed Verstehen and, generally, presupposes a putative capacity for reenactment by others of the actio/passio in question (of its ‘inside’, that is). Again, maker (doer, agent) and knower coincide—this time ideally.” Perez-Ramos, Bacon’s Idea of Science, 49. 80 Vico, De antiquissima sapientia, 118–25. 81 Vico, 1712 Risposta, 155. 82 Ibid., 163: “una topica trasportata agli usi de’ fisici sperimentali.”

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how Herbert himself describes his project. There is no manifest sense in which the second is true at all, however. Herbert says no such thing. Vico makes him say it and in doing so he radicalizes Herbert’s project in a way consonant with its original design. But in radicalizing Herbert’s project, Vico reveals his own. For, in the De veritate, Herbert had attacked the reification of Aristotelian categories in scholastic philosophy. What he understood as the tendency to believe in the absolute rather than merely relative existence of substances and qualities, leads him, as he puts it, “to dismiss the common predicaments, where the items are so carelessly arranged.” In their place Herbert reports that he has “substituted all the Questions which can be asked on every possible subject.”83 On the one hand, this appears to be a move away from investigation into the logico-ontological structures implied by the use of the predicaments and toward what Vico finds in Quintilian’s report on stasis theory, namely an emphasis on the flexible appraisal of the kinds of questions that can be asked in any particular circumstance and of the dimensions of potential controversy. The movement from categories to what Herbert describes as his “zetetica” is a movement from reifications to problems. Zetetica derives from the Greek z¯et¯ema, “a question to be decided.” On the other hand, when Herbert goes on to say that the questions he has in mind are “whether the thing exists,” “what it is,” “what its quality is,” “what its quantity is,” “what relation it has,” “in what manner it exists,” “when it exists,” “whence comes it,” and “for what purpose it exists,” we can see that he has transposed the categories into an interrogative form.84 Moreover, when he applies each of these questions in turn to each of the categories (asking “does the essence exist,” “does the quality exist,” “what is the essence of the quality,” “what is the quality of the essence,” “whence comes the quality?”), it appears that he has permitted a desire for comprehensiveness to transform his zetetica in an abstract and arcane combinatorial.85 In the first instance, Vico’s understanding of what Herbert has done in De veritate is rather different. The Neapolitan does not emphasize the Englishman’s zetetica, but rather his account of human faculties. As noted, for Vico the principal claim of the De veritate is that “for each

83 Edward

Herbert, De veritate, trans. Meyrick H. Carr´e (London–Tokyo: RoutledgeThoemmes/Kinokuniya, 1992), 242. 84 Herbert, De veritate, 242. On the kinds of question, compare Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 3.5. 85 Herbert, De veritate, 243.

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sensation a new faculty unfolds and manifests itself in us.”86 Herbert defines a “faculty” as an “inner conforming principle,” which one may understand as a capacity to conform mind to world.87 Drawing explicitly on analogical comparisons of macrocosm and microcosm in the field of medicine, Herbert argues that we should understand that experience is not simply something that forms our ideas about the world, but that experience also configures our ability to experience.88 One can think of nature writing itself into the human mind, so that ideas are formed by experiences. The figure that he employs is one of inscription: Objects are “mental beams which thrust through the apertures of the senses and pick out the appropriate specific essences according to the mutual analogy of things.”89 But for Herbert our ability to have future experiences is also capacitated by our past experiences: “whatever excites a new sensation possesses a new principle of individuation”90 and once a principle of individuation has been isolated, a new category of perception is inaugurated. It is significant to note that this principle of individuation shares the same structure as Vico’s poetic character. Both partake of the logic of the exemplum: one datum becomes the rubric for a novel class of data. Influenced in part by Herbert, Vico argues in the De antiquissima sapientia that the Latin term facultas derives from facilitas, “which signifies an unhindered and ready disposition for making,” so that faculty is “the ability to turn power into action.” We can therefore say that “soul is power, sight an activity, and the sense of sight [or for that matter ‘sensation, imagination, memory, and intellect’] a faculty.”91 In the De antiquissima sapientia, this means for Vico that all the powers of the human mind—from the least mediated sensation through imagination to the least embodied intellection—are faculties that are brought into being and delimited by exercise. In turn, exercise should be understood to include all forms of interaction between mind and world. This process is indeed interactive. Mind is stimulated by exigency, developing concepts as it needs them. But the world is not simply given. The historical world is a “built environment,” and the human capacity to act into nature gives it a “civil” history. 86 Giambattista

Vico, “Risposta di Giambattista di Vico all’articolo X del tomo VIII del ‘Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia,’” in Opere filosofiche, ed. Cristofolini, 155 (henceforth, “1712 Risposta”). 87 Herbert, De veritate, 153. 88 Ibid., 171. 89 Ibid., 109. 90 Ibid., 109. 91 Vico, De antiquissima sapientia, 112–15.

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What this concept of a faculty implies for Herbert in the De veritate (and will subsequently mean for Vico in the Scienza nuova) is that the mind has a future history rich and diverse in proportion to the richness and diversity of the objects of sense that will be cognized in the long run. Herbert asks, what “hinders the possibility, as long as new objects daily make their appearance, of unlimited numbers of faculties being aroused in us?”92 The history of mind is now correlate with the history of sensation. It is on account of this that Vico places a good deal of emphasis on the natural philosophical discoveries occasioned by the inventions of the telescope and the microscope. Now, in taking Herbert’s art of questioning to be a general theory of experimentation, Vico transforms what appears in Herbert as a fastidious combinatorial into a potentially sophisticated and supple account of inquiry in the modern age. Herbert himself is very abstract in his articulation of the comparability of his zetetica and natural philosophical experimentation, so that it is quite remarkable that Vico intuits the consequences for reproducibility implicit in a sentence such as “the essence [of an object] can be expressed when the limiting features which comprise objects are so arranged, that upon the conditions being given the conformity of the objects to our perception is also given.”93 The central z¯et¯ema for Herbert’s proto-experimentalism comes in the section headed “The Faculty Which Refers to the Question ‘How? Through What? Or By What Means?’” There it is asserted that “the whole secret of science consists in the discovery of means,” so that failure to know an object is equivalent to, and in effect an admission of, an inability to produce the conditions under which that object exists.94 It is thus clear that Herbert does everything but connect his account of “topics-become-zetetica” explicitly to developments in natural philosophy that were taking place around him. Herbert does not position his zetetica in relation to Bacon’s great instauration. But Bacon is one of Vico’s chief influences, and so the Neapolitan cannot help but read Herbert through the lens of Bacon, Herbert’s English contemporary. What Vico says, when he imputes to Herbert the innovation of having appropriated topics for experimental physics, is that the ars topica is the art of seeing by circling an object and subjecting it to all the questions that may be put to it. This is a form of interrogating by doing and a form of 92 Herbert,

De veritate, 113. 249. 94 Ibid., 269, 270, 271. 93 Ibid.,

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making nature speak by contorting it in particular artificial ways. What Vico is doing here, in terms of the sublimation of rhetoric, is proposing that topics is skill in bringing together and analyzing opinions that address the same issue and are divergent, but that otherwise would not encounter one another. Confrontation, thus, is no longer limited to actual confrontations between persons—tenuously coinciding in space and time. Opinions, encoded in language, take on a life beyond their utterance. When they coalesce, they generate topoi, redactions of dissent. The function of topics is to turn an issue over and survey it from all possible angles, so that nothing is left out that ought to be included. When Vico connects this to the experimental enterprise he is saying that we can be active in taking up positions from which to gain multiple perspectives on an object. Indeed, what experiential-experimental instruments like the telescope and the microscope do essentially is invent new angles by augmenting the human sensorium. On this reading, in a sense that will be clarified in this work’s treatment of the Scienza nuova, “Homer”— when that domain is understood properly—becomes another kind of experiential-experimental instrument. Just as Aristotle’s Rhetoric was for Tesauro, so “Homer” is for Vico a particular form of cultural memory and repository of norms that augments the human sensorium by introducing new modes of sensitivity. Eventually in the Scienza nuova (especially in the editions of 1730 and 1744), Vico will argue that Homer was no individual genius, but was instead a poetic locution denoting not only the Homeric rhapsodes who performed the Homeric poems, but even the various Greek publics, present in different times and places, at Homeric performances. I contend that in the Scienza nuova topics has become a theory and practice of invention, utterly decentralized and distributed throughout the primitive communities of sense in preclassical Greece and Rome. At that point all that Vico must say on the subject is that “the first founders of humanity applied themselves to a sensory topics, by which they brought together those properties or qualities or relations of individuals and species which were, so to speak, concrete, and from those created their poetic genera.”95 In that brief compass is articulated much of the Scienza nuova’s most basic originality. This is the destination of the ars topica in Vico. Its origin has been clarified here. The full nature of the terminus of that trajectory will be discussed in Chapter 6. 95 Vico,

1744 Scienza nuova, §495.

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III. Sublimating the Sublime In the cases of both ingenium and the ars topica, it was Vico’s transposition of classical rhetorical issues beyond the bounds of oratory as it had been traditionally conceived that was decisive. The same is true for Vico’s reinvention of rhetorical concerns with emotion. In Vico’s Institutiones oratoriae, the reader finds a particularly stilted, rather perfunctory repetition of the conventional categorizations of emotion and their utility for the orator. But the rhetorical tradition had much to say about emotion. This is particularly true of Aristotle, and Hobbes is proof that some in early modernity were attuned to the Aristotelian legacy. But Hobbes’s use of Aristotelian psychology does not only produce a brilliant account of fear. It also provides critics of rhetoric with a rationale for attacking the discipline as a potent source of irrationalism. Vico accepts the ubiquity of Hobbesian fear in and around the state of nature that accompanies the origin of human society (although Vico’s account of the emergence from the state of nature is radically different from Hobbes’s), but he refuses to cast emotion as a blindly irrational force. He argues instead that the most intense emotions are the very foundations of language and not simply a threat to sober language use. Essential to this neutralization of irrationalism is Vico’s reading of Longinus in the Scienza nuova, and it is in Longinus that Vico encounters another of rhetoric’s ur-categories—the sublime. Now, Vico’s reception of Aristotle in the Institutiones oratoriae is concentrated on the domain of logos, and on the rehabilitation of metaphor as a vehicle not simply of frivolous literary effect or bitter political dissimulation, but of properly inventive, eloquent, persuasive discourse. But elements of Vico’s discussion of affect in the Institutiones oratoriae are important too. In the Scienza nuova, the anger of Achilles will bear comparison to Aristotle’s reading of the Homeric evocation of anger—“far sweeter than dripping honey down the throat [anger] spreads in men’s hearts.”96 But in the Institutiones, the gloss of emotion is less provocative. Vico’s commentary on Aristotelian pathos displays a characteristic investment in analogical form, an investment that at times enables him to dissolve the grammatical constraints of the academic discourses within which he works, but that here is superficial and pious: “the first source of all emotions is love by which we pursue the good; its first-born son is hate by which we avoid the evil.” From such a comparatively thin, binary code Vico extrapolates “the remaining family of all the emotions—zeal 96 Aristotle,

Rhetoric, 1378b; Homer, Iliad, 18.109.

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and aversion, hope and despair, alacrity and faintness of spirit, gladness and anguish, unrestrained joy and lamentation, exultation and dullness, mildness and rage, good will and ill will, grace and contempt, indignation and compassion, emulation and ambition, modesty and shyness.”97 In the Institutiones oratoriae, what commentary Vico does offer on the passions fails to replicate the standard of analysis achieved by the Greek original. Vico does report the Aristotelian line of inquiry into types of souls and the transactions of their affects—“the best of orators will be he who knows which men are ordinarily led either to this or to that emotion of arousal or calmness, toward whom, and for what reasons they are thus led,” notes Vico, adding that “Aristotle explained this teaching best in the Rhetoric and even more in the Ethics.”98 In contrast, Aristotle had been working at the intersection of the linguistic and the life sciences.99 The logical concerns of the Organon and the biological concerns of, for example, the De motu animalium coincide in the De anima too, and likewise in the De interpretatione, which begins by stating that words are symbols of the passions of the soul. But in the Rhetoric Aristotle gives his analysis of emotion a political edge: The Stagyrite’s phenomenology of political emotion is meant to explain “the motives that make men do wrong to others.”100 Nor, for that matter, does Vico’s gloss come close to that staged by his early modern peer Thomas Hobbes. There is a clear and muscular line of development from Aristotle’s examination of pathos in the Rhetoric through Hobbes’s Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique to the crucial definitions of the passions in Part I of Leviathan.101 97 Vico,

Institutiones oratoriae, 90–1. 90–1. 99 The relevant section is Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1369b 31–1372a 2. The continuity within the Aristotelian program between logical and biological research is explored by Kathleen V. Wilkes, “Psuche versus the Mind” and Richard Sorabji, “Intentionality and Physiological Process: Aristotle’s Theory of Sense Perception,” both in Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima, eds. Martha C. Nussbaum and Am´elie Oksenberg Rorty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), as well as Martha Nussbaum in her critical edition Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium: Text with Translation, Commentary, and Interpretative Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). In texts other than the Institutiones oratoriae, Vico replicates this “bio-logical” cache of interests. See in particular Nancy S. Struever, “The Medical-Theoretical Background in Naples of Vico’s New Science,” New Vico Studies 15 (1997): 11. 100 Aristotle, De interpretatione, 16a 3; Rhetoric, 1372a 5. 101 Consider, for example, the sequence of inflections in the case of anger: Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1378b; Thomas Hobbes, “The Whole Art of Rhetoric,” in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. William Molesworth (London: John Bohn, 1839–1845), 6.452; Hobbes, Leviathan, in English Works, 3.43. On Hobbes’s appropriation of Aristotelian rhetorical categories, see Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, its Basis and its Genesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, and 98 Ibid.,

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Thus, Vico’s reception of rhetorical inquiry into the emotions is relatively inert in the Institutiones oratoriae. But elsewhere in his oeuvre his deployment of rhetorical tools for analyzing affect is far more significant. The decisive conduit through which the analysis of pathos becomes generative of new forms of investigation is the affective domain defined by the classical category of the sublime. In the lectures on rhetoric, Vico repeats the commonplace that, in addition to the five parts and three genres, there are three rhetorical styles, namely the humble or plain, tempered or moderate, and the noble or sublime.102 Vico describes the noble or sublime style as one appropriate to matters of “great moment, as in those of state,” where emotions run high. On such occasions “new, rare, and admirable” thoughts are not out of place. Thus, the rules of decorum that are here in play permit fluency that is not ostentation, poetry that does not offend common sense, archaisms that appear dignified rather than antiquated, and a deployment of the full armature of rhetorical effect with metaphors, figures of words, disjunction, conjunction, figures of thought, together with extraordinary syntax. Neither too loose, nor too harmonious, advises Vico, the sublime oration ought to resound, to be marked by dactyls, and to employ unusually long sentences.103 Vico’s principal source for thinking about the sublime was the Peri upsous.104 He appears to have encountered the text in Gerard Langbaine’s seventeenth-century edition.105 Neither the author nor the date of composition for the Peri upsous is certain, but Longinus or a pseudoLonginus is usually given as the author, and the text is thought to have been composed during the period of the Second Sophistic. Its circulation was very limited until it was published at Basel in 1554 by Robortello. When the work appeared in the French translation of Boileau in 1674, it became a publishing phenomenon as early modern readers became deeply impressed by the literary critical skill of the author. But the Peri upsous is more than merely a surpassingly good example of ancient literary criticism. It is also fundamentally a rhetorical text. Indeed, the text is emblematic of the oft repeated relocation of rhetorical skills to literary Nancy S. Struever, “Review: Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes,” Quarterly Journal of Speech (May 1998): 247–50. 102 Vico, Institutiones oratoriae, 424. 103 Ibid., 424. 104 Consider Neil Hertz, “A Reading of Longinus,” Critical Inquiry 9 (1983): 579–96 and “The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime,” in The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 105 In his “Discovery of the True Homer,” Vico cites evidence from Langbaine’s preface to Longinus. Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §856.

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analysis. For this reason, not only Homer but also Demosthenes figures significantly in the Peri upsous.106 Longinus ends the work by considering a problem that he says was recently put to him by a philosopher. The philosopher had said, “it surprises me, as it doubtless surprises many others too, how it is that in this age of ours we find natures that are supremely persuasive and suited for public life, shrewd and versatile and especially rich in literary charm yet really sublime and transcendent natures are no longer, or only very rarely, now produced.”107 The philosopher wonders whether the demise of the republic can really, as is often suggested, be a satisfactory explanation for such a disappearance. Longinus replies by suggesting instead that “what spends the spirit of the present generation is the apathy in which all but a few of us pass our lives, only exerting ourselves or showing any enterprise for the sake of getting praise or pleasure out of it, never from the honorable and admirable motive of doing good to the world.”108 Longinus is reporting a trope of virtue’s corruption that will pervade eighteenth-century political discourse. It demonstrates that, like Vico, Longinus was brought to the literary remains of Homer and Demosthenes by a profoundly historical and anthropological problem: To what extent were the souls of the Greek heroes different from those of the ages of the Roman Empire, and how could one account for that difference? In the context of this question, the category of the sublime takes on a much more than merely classificatory role. Instead, it distinguishes certain emotional processes and poses question about the historicity of those processes. Vico’s corso delle nazioni is an ideal type sequence of historical ages that can be understood as a version of this narrative of movement from the

106

For Vico’s use of Longinus in Book III of the 1744 Scienza nuova, see §§780, 803, 817, 856, 866, 868, 890. 107 Longinus, On the Sublime, 206r. David Hume and Hugh Blair make comparable statements, perhaps derived from Longinus, in reference to the British eighteenth century. Hume says that ancient eloquence “was infinitely more sublime than that which modern orators aspire to.” Although Blair believes that the sublime style of Demosthenes would still be persuasive in a British assembly of the eighteenth century, he like Hume is surprised by the fact that the British have highly developed democratic institutions but are nevertheless surpassed in rhetorical sensibility by the ancients. See Hume’s essay “Of Eloquence,” in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), 97–110; and Blair’s twenty-sixth lecture, in Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. Harold F. Harding (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), 2.31–2. 108 Longinus, On the Sublime, 207v.

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heroic to the human, but because Vico is more interested in the conditions of possibility of human society he is more interested in origins than in declensions. From Longinus, Vico derives the idea that there are five sources of the sublime: the command of full-blooded ideas, the inspiration of vehement emotion, the proper use of figures, a nobility of phrasing, and grandeur.109 The dominant notion is one of extremism, scale, excess. Vico makes use of this conception of excess in order to fuel an account of the continuity of sense, passion, judgment, and assertion in the heroic soul by showing the reader a series of contiguities: The overstimulation of sense is perceived by the heroic soul as the impinging of a foreign action that is received as passion; the overstimulation of passion precipitates the separation of judgment from reaction; the overstimulation of judgment is enacted as speech and read as predication. To put the matter thus is to be more explicit than Vico. Nevertheless, this is the mechanism that drives the Neapolitan’s account of the heroic soul. The whole slew of emotional and discursive reactions that constitute the objects of Vichian inquiry in the Scienza nuova are effects of being overwhelmed, and the ur-event that symbolizes the initiation of this process is thunder and lightning, sublimated as Jove speaking, because such experiences are experiences of the traumatically disproportionate. Whereas the Institutiones oratoriae is concentrated on the domain of logos, I am arguing here that the Scienza nuova is concentrated on the domain of pathos or rather that the conceptual interests developed in logos are transferred in the later book to pathos.110 I am arguing also that the vehicle of that transfer is the concept of the sublime.111 There is a great distance between the historical musing attached to the end of the Peri upsous and the historicist revolution effected by Vico in the Scienza nuova. Nevertheless, both texts identify a related problem—namely, the nature of the soul in a sublime age and the difference between such a soul and one educated in an age of self-consciousness and philosophical reflection. Certainly, the word that more often than any other qualifies the nature of true poetic form in the Scienza nuova is sublime. Homer, so crucial to the agenda of the Scienza nuova, is the most sublime of all the 109

Ibid., 182v. Andrea Battistini has a similar idea: “Vico . . . interpreta ogni aspetto del mondo primitivo dal punto di vista del pathos e della retorica del movere.” Battistini, Sapienza retorica, 83. 111 Battistini likewise believes that the sublime is a key concept in the Scienza nuova. Battistini, Sapienza retorica, 86. In this connection, see also Massimo Lollini, Le muse, Le maschere, e il sublime: G. B. Vico e la poesia nell’et`a della “ragione spiegata” (Naples: Alfredo Guida, 1994). 110

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sublime poets.112 The task for Vico is to understand more fully what the imaginative world of the sublime age reveals about the first beginnings of human culture. For him, to understand the imaginative world of the sublime age is to identify a particular, foundational mode of human being that remains a permanent possibility. The psychological qualities of the Homeric heroes prompted Vico—as early as the Notae and Dissertationes appended to the Diritto universale in 1722—to conjecture the origins of the human capacity for community. Through the lens of Aristotle’s De anima and its highly rhetorized psychological categories (many of which are repeated and augmented in Book II of Aristotle’s Rhetoric), Vico conceptualizes beings that are extremely adept at perceiving phenomena but comparatively incapable of thinking them as concepts. Possessing, as Kant would put it, no inner principles of infinity—namely, concepts—the Homeric heroes are extremely volatile, passing incoherently from one impulse to the next. But this particular form of behavior ought not to be termed a simple irrationalism, for the vast disproportion between powers of sensation and powers of intellection gives rise on Vico’s account to a poetic logic in which particular instances come to stand in place of as yet undeveloped concepts. Thus, the fickle heroes are also oddly intransigent. In Vico’s analysis of the Iliad, Briseis comes to represent something more like a principle to Achilles and so his fit of pique is sustained even through the series of defeats inflicted upon the Greeks by Hector. The merely sensory qualities of Briseis would be incapable of perpetuating such a response were those qualities not immediately present, and so Vico comes to understand imagination as a protoconceptual domain sustained by highly charged affects. Achilles’s sentiment of entitlement, of possession, can only be produced dialectically through an alteration in the presence and absence of the object of his lust and cupidity. Briseis represents for Achilles a set of legal principles concerning conquest, gifting, and possession that he is not capable of formulating in the abstract, such that his withdrawal becomes a mute assertion of his case. She represents also the battle of wills between two powers—Achilles and Agamemnon— that do not recognize in a formal, established way any ratio that expresses the power of the one in terms of the power of the other. Because the Greek alliance of the Iliad is constitutionally weak and is really a coalition of households such that Agamemnon is not true king, but only a primus inter pares, Achilles is incapable of acquiescing. In this case, the dynamic 112

Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §807.

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is sublime not because one party is clearly more powerful than the other, but rather because each power is incomparable with the other—each is sui generis. Vico is ultimately concerned with accounting for the possibility of coming into (and passing through) such states that approach but do not achieve anarchy. His histories of law and poetry narrate the emergence of human beings into such states of indecisive contestation. The parameters of Vico’s historical imagination are the most purely promiscuous anarchy and the most purely regimented autarchy. But for the Neapolitan, human beings are incapable of resting at either of these extremes, and so he concentrates almost exclusively on the domain of imagination that is correlative with indecisive contestation. However, as the example of Achilles and Briseis demonstrates, the sublimation of individua into imaginative genera that do not become abstract is a process that takes place in the absence of the objects concerned. Thus, although the zone of indecisive contestation is the domain on which Vico focuses the resources of his poetic politics, it would be a mistake to see in this a pure resurrection of the republican reciprocities that follow from the alternation of ruling and being ruled. Vico’s recalibration of the sublime into an account of heroic psychology that turns on epistemological questions of a being’s power of operating with sense, imagination, and intellect does not, therefore, involve a return to the immediate presences of the polis. That Achilles withdraws within the boundaries of the oikos, the household, means that he becomes subpolitical (in the classical republican understanding of politics). But this does not prevent him from standing also as an icon for the superpolitical, where the agent withdraws to a sphere beyond and not beneath politics. In both cases, the classical rhetoric of the polis and the republic must be redirected into a new form of rhetorical inquiry that concentrates on the perpetuation of rhetorical processes even in the absence of parties to the debate. On the surface, Vico’s lectures appear to be similar to many of the other school-book rhetorics that make up such a large proportion of rhetoric as it remains in the historical record—something that has in many ways plagued the discipline. The lectures are redactions. They present the tools of analysis rather than analysis itself. It is possible, therefore, to mistake the precepts and examples of the textbook for the sum total of rhetorical inquiry. What has become clear in the course of this examination is that despite the overwhelmingly derivative appearance of the lectures on rhetoric themselves, Vico’s appropriation of rhetorical categories is particularly dexterous.

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On the one hand, his intervention in debates about the place of ingenium in rhetorical and literary performance in the Institutiones overcomes the schematic division of rhetorical inquiry into five parts. Thus, Vico is able to transcend the hard distinction between inventio and elocutio by claiming that argument originates in an acute observation of unexpected similitude that is ubiquitous in nature and in human society. Less explicit, but entirely comparable, is Vico’s presentation of both tropes and syllogisms as similarly invested in the production of an eye for resemblance in rhetorical publics, which cements the dual function of maxims as both accepted or acute observations that are inclined to persuade when employed as premises. On the other hand, his vindication of ancient discursive modes of inquiry is highly original, particularly in his redescription of the ars topica as not only an art of perception but also a modernist art of criticism. In calling the ars topica both a fit governance of the senses and an effective substitute for what Descartes called “method,” Vico was engaging in a project that to many of his peers must have seemed tremendously implausible, perhaps quixotic. But once we reintegrate the classical and early modern sources, from which Vico was working, the nature of the revolution is perceptible. With respect to Vico’s reception of stasis theory from Quintilian, we have only a phrase or two from his autobiography. Nevertheless, the recovery of that context raises the possibility that, for Vico, topical theory is not so much concerned with the abstract logicoontological structure of predicability as it is occupied with particular and various terrains on which human opinion comes into conflict. This was a painstaking recovery of an ancient agenda. But Vico’s construal of the recovery is decidedly modernist. With regard to Herbert, the recovery of the De veritate context provides an even more revealing angle on Vico’s project, for it is not so much in relation to what Herbert does say as in relation to what he does not say that the character of Vico’s imputations make most sense. In this chapter, however, we have already seen the way in which, for Vico, experiment exists on a flexible continuum between the constructivist control of natural conditions and the reconfiguring of the conditions of possibility for experience within the human sensorium itself— that is to say, in the faculties. If experiment is a human doing in the domain of nature, then experience is a natural doing in the domain of the human (or the irritable). Herbert understood this reciprocity as strictly analogous and emphasized experience over experiment. Vico, when he emphasizes experiment over experience, is showing himself to

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be a reader both willful and perceptive. To be sure, the result is entirely impressionistic. Vico’s assertions that the ars topica is become an ars critica and that Herbert’s De veritate is nothing other than a topics transported to the uses of the experimentalists are barely intelligible without considerable reconstructive effort. But that effort is repaid with the realization that if topics—especially as stasis theory or zetetics—is an art of asking questions, then it is useful to think of experimentation as a particular version of the logic of question and answer. That insight will lead in turn to the protopragmatist insights of the De antiquissima sapientia, which, as is commonly recognized, are decisive for the Diritto universale and the Scienza nuova.

4 An Epistemic Rhetoric

The pattern of Vico’s creative reinvention of classical rhetoric for modern societies that do not possess the institutional preconditions for direct, open debate is becoming clear. Immersed in the genres of the classical rhetorical legacy and deeply invested in its taxonomies and devices, Vico responds to the difficulty of deploying that tradition in his own city. He replies to attacks on the rhetorical tradition by isolating elements of the mode of inquiry explored by Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and Longinus and by pushing these elements beyond their traditional applications. The same process of sublimation is discernable in Vico’s most purely philosophical work, the De antiquissima Italorum sapientia of 1710. In that work, Vico makes three closely related arguments. First, he contends that the ability to make something is the best index of understanding it. If something is not doable, it is not intelligible. Second, he argues that reading is a plausible metaphor for this account of understanding because reading is essentially a process of rendering something intelligible by reenacting in oneself the thought processes that led to the particular formulation with which one is confronted. In the absence of such reenactment, reading is a basically alienating experience. Third, Vico criticizes theories of consciousness—primarily Cartesian—in which individuals are assumed to have some privileged access to their own mental lives on account of the distinction between introspection and the observation of external phenomena. Vico argues that individuals are as much strangers to themselves as they are to others and that, as a result, the criterion of reenactment that applies to the intelligibility of external events also applies to their own mental lives. In all three cases Vico has taken either an identifiably rhetorical topos or a concern characteristic of rhetorical inquiry and turned it toward new intellectual challenges. One of the most basic delineations of 111

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classical rhetoric’s sphere of concern had been the injunction that rhetorical inquiry does not concern itself with anything that may not be otherwise. As distinct from the necessary truths of, for example, mathematics, rhetoric limited itself to that which was capable of variation—that which could be altered. In Aristotle, this becomes a thoroughgoing concern with motion, a category that embeds his Rhetoric in a host of transdisciplinary concerns that run through the De anima, the De motu animalium, and the Physics. In time, the rhetorical concern with being otherwise was displaced into the understanding of politics as the art of the possible. In the De antiquissima sapientia, Vico takes this rhetorical injunction and turns it into a theory of knowledge that enables him to give an account of distinctive modern practices such as experimental natural philosophy. Vico’s extension of this maker’s theory of knowledge to an account of reading as reenactment likewise draws on precedents from the ars rhetorica. For Vico, reading—like the experience of signs in general—begins in a moment of alienation when phenomena are taken to represent more than themselves. In the first instance, therefore, reading is experienced as a shock, a fear that what is present to the senses denotes something massive that is not contained in the limited presence of the here and now of sensation. Reading is the process of domesticating the displacement of this semiosis by reenacting locally what is taken to be the will of the absent author of the signs that are present. Vico’s means of expressing the experience of semiosis is entirely rhetorical. In this instance, he draws once again on topics. The art of finding arguments is put to use as the capacity to reenact phenomena as thought. In this transposition, Vico not only universalizes rhetoric by equating phenomena with speech acts (so that the most lonely wilderness may become as rhetorical as the most tightly organized meeting place), but also reverses the perspective of rhetoric by regarding it primarily as hermeneutics. From the art of speaking, Vico effectively turns rhetoric into to an art of listening—or, more generally, a discipline concerned with receiving signs. The close relationship between rhetoric and hermeneutics has been a recurrent topos in the history of thought (particularly in the German tradition), and Vico makes a decisive contribution to the extension of rhetoric beyond the polis by proposing that the absent author of textual materials is a potential model for a great deal of cultural practice that is not limited to purely textual media. Vico, however, does not suppose that the domestication of external phenomena—by means of reenacting the circumstances of their appearances and extrapolating from motions to reasons and purposes—involves

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a kind of megalomaniacal humanism that assumes itself, regardless of its own local peculiarities, to be the standard of measurement for all things. Vico is impersonal. Projection works in both directions: The world forms human beings in its image as they form the world in theirs. For this reason Vico turns impersonal strategies of rhetorical inquiry—which must always consider an action from the perspective of others—into a critique of the theory and practice of introspective intuition. Self-alienation, defamiliarization of the self is a rhetorical capacity, and Vico turns this into an argument against the Cartesian cogito. He extends this theoretical critique of the cogito into a practice of self-criticism. Crucially, the hermeneutic situation of Vico reading himself, as he attempts to explicate the meaning of his own work, also lacks the manifestness that Arendt associated with the polis. Vico on Vico is prefigured in the exchange with the Giornale and explored seriously in the Vita. In both cases, the writer’s confrontation with himself is mediated by texts and only the text can function as a public space in which he can encounter the multitude of his past selves.

I. Iterations of the Possible In one of his most famous arguments, Vico contends that the Romans used the words verum and factum interchangeably and locates a philosophical explanation for this curious philological fact. Drawing on passages from Plautus and Terence, Vico argues that in Latin one could say factum, “done” when one meant verum, “true.” From this he intuits and then explores the argument that only things made or done are intelligible. It follows from the fact that God created the universe, says Vico, that he is omniscient. Likewise, nothing is as intellectually transparent to human beings as the calculations of mathematics precisely because human beings have defined mathematics into existence. Vico’s arguments on this matter have come to be known as his verum-factum principle.1 They are arguments that have a wide purchase because the relationships between God and the cosmos and between the geometer 1 The interest in the kind of knowledge peculiar to a maker spans Vico’s entire intellectual

life. In his first inaugural oration—that is, in 1699—he says, “in the end, God is the maker of nature, but surely I may say that the human mind is the God of art.” Giambattista Vico, Le orazioni inaugurali I–VI, ed. Gian Galeazzo Visconti (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1982), 1. In a letter to Muzio Gaeta—dated October, 1737—Vico recalls that in the De antiquissima sapientia he was attempting to demonstrate that “l’Uomo e` Dio nel Mondo delle grandezze astratte, e Dio e` Geometra nel Mondo delle concrete, ch’`e tanto dire quanto nel Mondo della Natura, e de’ corpi.” Giambattista Vico, Epistole con aggiunte le epistole dei suoi corrispondenti, ed. Manuela Sanna (Naples: Morano, 1992), 196–7.

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and the permutations of geometrical axioms are intelligible to a broad public. The quotidian experiences of homo faber, of the human being considered as a fabricator of objects, appear to confirm the epistemological privilege of creators. Any artisan understands that to make something is to know it in a particularly intimate way. To make something is to know it from causes: One knows the materials from which the artifact is fashioned, and one knows the tools and processes needed to move from raw material to finished product. Moreover, making entails an understanding of the difference between functioning and malfunctioning, because one makes the object with a particular purpose in mind. The coincidence of power and knowledge in the creators of artifacts leads to the supposition that if one is not capable of bringing something into existence then one cannot be said to understand it. Intellectual historians have been particularly interested in this aspect of Vico’s work because it connects the Neapolitan to a much longer tradition of thinking about the distinctive kind of understanding possessed by the maker of an artifact.2 What scholars have not noticed, however, is that Vico’s articulation of the verum-factum principle finds another context in the history of inquiry, one that is not usually linked to the epistemology of the maker’s knowledge tradition. That context is the history of rhetorical inquiry. In fact, Vico’s verum-factum principle redeploys concepts developed by rhetoric in significant ways. There are four steps in my argument that the verumfactum principle is another aspect of Vico’s sublimation of rhetoric. First, the verum-factum principle only appears to deal with the demonstration of necessary truths (as opposed to contingent ones) and actually draws on Aristotelian rhetorical interests in the modality of possibility.3 Second, the most interesting example of the verum-factum principle in Vico’s De antiquissima sapientia is not mathematics, as is not infrequently supposed, but rather experimentation, and Vico asserts that natural philosophers involved in experimentation and orators enmeshed in public debate both rely on an identical intellectual faculty: the rhetorical faculty of ingenium. Third, when the category of possibility becomes embroiled in contingent, historical situations, such as experiments, it becomes the category of compossibility (defined as the quality possessed collectively by 2 See

Rodolfo Mondolfo, Il ‘verum-factum’ prima di Vico (Naples: Alfredo Guida, 1969) and Arthur Child, Making and Knowing in Hobbes, Vico, and Dewey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953), as well as Fisch, “Vico and Pragmatism” and P´erez-Ramos, Bacon’s Idea of Science. 3 Aristotle entrenches rhetoric’s concentration on the possible by making it a mode of inquiry into to dynat¯on, “the possible.”

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things that are not mutually exclusive and can appear together), and Vico understands this concept through the rhetorical tradition—Quintilian, in particular—and not by drawing on Leibniz, his rough contemporary.4 Fourth, the concept of compossibility leads Vico to understand that every action can also be perceived from the point of view of that which suffers the action (that is, as a “passion”), and Cicero is a significant source for Vico’s investigation into the relationship between being able to suffer and being able to act. One of the principal reasons that scholars have overlooked the hypothesis that Vico draws on the rhetorical tradition when he is confecting his verum-factum principle is that the De antiquissima sapientia appears to concentrate on demonstrable, necessary truths whereas rhetoric had very self-consciously styled itself as the examination of merely contingent truths. On the one hand, mathematics is the clearest example in the De antiquissima sapientia of what Vico means when he says that the intelligibility of an object is related to its artificiality. On his account, mathematics is wholly artificial. Geometry, for example, does not exist in nature. For Vico, it is a purely human invention. Only after the definition of such terms as point, line, and surface does the artificial world of geometry come into existence—and it comes into existence ex nihilo. Because the constituent parts of mathematics derive from definitions, the premises of mathematical syllogisms are not empirical—or doubtful in any empirical sense. Moreover, all mathematical inferences can be restated in the form of deductions. As a result, the truths of mathematics are absolutely necessary. As in the Pythagorean theorem, given certain definitions, certain conclusions must follow. On the other hand, Aristotle began his Rhetoric by asserting in no uncertain terms that rhetoric does not deal with matters that are necessary in the sense just described. The premises of rhetorical arguments are not usually definitions, but rather assertions that may or may not 4 Quintilian,

it should be noted, is the conduit through which Aristotle’s modal terminology conditions modern philosophical terms. When he came to translate the Aristotelian rhetorical legacy into Latin, Quintilian found that his own language had no real equivalent to the Greek term to dynat¯on that Aristotle had used to denote “that which may be otherwise.” To fill the gap, Quintilian coined the term possibile, and scholars believe that this was indeed the first appearance of that term in Latin. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 3.8.25. Quintilian’s interest in contingency is conspicuous too in his gloss of eik¯ota, “probable indications” (as distinct from tekm¯eria, “necessary indications”) as simply s¯eme´on. See Bel´en Saiz Noeda, “Proofs, Arguments, Places: Argumentation and Rhetorical Theory in the Institutio oratoria, Book V,” in Quintilian and the Law: The Art of Persuasion in Law and Politics, ed. Olga Tellegen-Couperus (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003), 101–2.

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be true. Moreover, the syllogisms deployed in rhetorical arguments are almost always framed as examples, enthymemes, analogies, and inductions rather than deductions. Rhetoric deals with the contingent rather than the necessary because all human arguments turn on matters that could be otherwise than they are. As Aristotle puts it, “we only deliberate about those things which seem to admit of issuing in two ways.”5 As Quintilian explains in his gloss, “where there is necessity there is no room for deliberation, any more than when it is certain that something is impossible,” because “all deliberation is about doubtful things.”6 If it were not possible for the accused in a court of law to be either guilty or innocent, there would be no point in a trial. If there were not multiple plausible responses to a problem (including inaction), there would be no discussion in the assembly. If ferocity could not on occasion be more accurately described as inhumanity (with the compliment thereby transformed into an insult), then there would be no possibility of using the epithet Achillean for the purpose of either praising or blaming. If Vico’s verum-factum were concerned only with necessary truths, then it would be very difficult to argue that in part it originates in a discipline like rhetoric that focuses entirely on the modality of possibility. But Vico’s concentration on necessary as opposed to contingent truths in the De antiquissima sapientia is only apparent. Beyond the clear example of mathematics with its necessary truths, Vico takes up the question of what he terms metaphysical points for the purposes of solving what he takes to be the riddle of Aristotle’s interpretation of the spatial and temporal paradoxes set out by Zeno. Vico argues that in Aristotle’s presentation, Zeno’s paradoxes make no real sense and concludes that whereas Aristotle understood Zeno to be speaking about physical processes of division (such that the phenomena of continuity appeared to be paradoxical), Zeno had in fact been discussing pure potentialities for division. The basic term for Vico’s analysis of this debate is vis, power. Although Vico understands metaphysics to be a domain of necessary truths like mathematics, the category of vis establishes the condition of possibility for alteration in physics (and in mathematics too, where the definition of a line is arrived at through the “movement” of the definition of a point).

5 Aristotle,

Rhetoric, 1357a. In Aristotle’s discussion of it, possibility is very basically linked to compossibility—namely, the ways in which the possibility of one thing is affected by the existence of another (Rhetoric, 1392a 6–8). On the concept of possibility at its intersection with rhetoric, see in particular Struever, Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity. 6 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 3.8.25.

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Thus, a key category in the De antiquissima sapientia is centered on the power of alteration—namely, power as possibility. Yet at the level of metaphysics, Vico’s conceptualization of possibility is indistinct because the metaphysical deals with the eternal and necessary insofar as it is a condition of possibility for the temporal and contingent. It is in Vico’s treatment of natural philosophy that the relevance of rhetoric for Vico’s verum-factum principle becomes clearer. In an argument that is often passed over or misunderstood, Vico contends that the validity of the experimental method employed by early modern natural philosophers—which, for Vico, means Galilei and the investigators of the English Royal Society—can be accounted for by the verum-factum principle. Natural philosophers come to understand the works of nature by reconstructing those works artificially in experiment. Experiments are less precise than the demonstrations of mathematics, given that they do not bring into existence ex nihilo the materials they use to reconstruct the workings of nature. But, for Vico, the epistemological principle at work in experimentation is essentially the same as the principle that accounts for mathematical knowledge. Vico is unequivocal in asserting that the verum-factum principle accounts for the impressive experimental achievements of Galilei and his peers in English natural philosophy.7 Yet scholars have failed to recognize the point because of the false perception that the verum-factum principle discourages human inquiry into nature. Some scholars have supposed that when Vico says that God has made nature whereas man has made the human world he means to imply that natural philosophical inquiry is necessarily futile because investigators cannot understand what they have not themselves brought into being. But Vico is not so pessimistic about the possibility of knowing the world of nature. He even argues that Cartesian modes of inquiry can illustrate the verum-factum credentials of experimentalism. Although the Cartesians deny that they are involved in the probabilistic business of experimental verification, he contends, what they are in essence practicing follows from the quite

7 Remarkably,

this point continues to be contested on occasion. It is true that Vico does later say that as he was writing the De antiquissima sapientia he was not much impressed with the utility of experimental natural philosophy. Vico, Vita, 20. This comment, however, comes some fifteen years after the fact. It is not reasonable to ignore clear evidence from 1710 on account of evidence from 1725 that appears to contradict it. Note that Vico reiterated his interpretation of experiment as a form of verum-factum in his response to the review of the 1725 Scienza nuova in the Acta eruditorum. Giambattista Vico, Vici vindiciae, in Opere filosofiche, ed. Cristofolini, 353.

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correct proposition that mihi physica vera erunt, cum feceris: ut geometrica ideo hominibus sunt vera, quia faciunt.8 Physicals will be intelligibles for me, says Vico, putting words in the mouth of an imagined Cartesian, when you will have made them, just as for men geometricals are intelligibles because they themselves make them. The second person addressed here—feceris—is not God, but rather a peer in the community of inquiry. The extension of geometrical method to physics is right, says Vico, but the Cartesians have misunderstood the nature of the move, which ought not to be motivated by a desire to establish physics as a science as certain and skeptic-proof as the science of mathematics, but rather by a desire to practice in physics a kind of construction comparable to that practiced in geometry. The assertion that mihi physica vera erunt, cum feceris had its origin in a passage published the previous year in the De ratione, where Vico had argued that geometricals we demonstrate because we make them and that if we were able to demonstrate physicals, we should be able to make them too.9 The premise missing from this sentence is that God and not man makes physicals. It follows that human beings must not think themselves capable of creating physicals in the same way that they create geometricals—that is, ex nihilo. The relationship between these two passages—one from the De antiquissima sapientia, the other from the De ratione—is often misunderstood. They are neither synonymous nor contradictory. Vico repeats the De ratione sentence in the De antiquissima sapientia with approval, and he maintains that it is a mistake to suppose that the certainty deriving from our definitional procedures in mathematics can be applied to physics. But he does not mean thereby to deny that the verum-factum can be applied in some sense to the study of physical phenomena. For Vico, human beings are not capable of bringing natural objects into being, which counts as a process of generation (yielding genitum) and not making (yielding factum). Yet they certainly are capable of manipulating physical objects that already exist in ways that reveal their properties and capacities for transformation—revealing the potentiality embedded in their actuality, one might say. In comparing the demonstrations of mathematics to the demonstrations of natural philosophical experiment, Vico makes his position comparable to other early modern justifications for the seriousness of 8 Vico,

De antiquissima sapientia, 125. De ratione, 116: “geometrica demonstramus, quia facimus: si physica demonstrare possemus, faceremus.”

9 Vico,

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knowledge arrived at experimentally.10 But he is also extending his nontraditional use of the rhetorical tradition. Vico is making a deeper point about the intellectual process of discrimination and synthesis at work in the natural philosopher’s concoction of an artificial, constructed environment in which to reproduce and test natural phenomena. As Vico puts it, if one were to take up Aristotle’s Categories and Topics (which Vico reads through Herbert of Cherbury) as modes of questioning that can be adapted to a variety of disciplinary domains, then “from the same founts from which well-equipped speakers spring, there also might come forth the best [scientific] observers.”11 Precisely because natural philosophers are not mathematicians (and, therefore, do not create the objects they explore in their research), the domain of the experiment is a domain of observation and interpretation. A host of factors contribute to the occurrence or nonoccurrence of a phenomenon, and the natural philosophical observer is responsible for sifting vast amounts of sensory information—most of it irrelevant— through a series of hypotheses used to focus attention on a small number of processes in nature. The natural philosopher needs judgment, but it is a judgment forged in a domain that specializes in the asking of questions. Experimentation is, as Bacon implied, a form of mute interrogation. In contradistinction to the productive capacity of the mathematician, the facta that natural philosophers bring into being are distinguished by their particularity. An experiment is not an abstract stipulation of the kind “let it be the case that.” Instead, even as they attempt to become impersonal and objective, such that they may be reproduced by others in different times and places, experiments are in constant danger of mistaking local peculiarities for universal features of a phenomenon witnessed in an experimental context. But for Vico, the potential peculiarity of local circumstances is cognitively helpful. For him it is in part the particularity of experimental events that distinguishes them from what he describes as the inappropriate generality of Aristotelian physics. Galilei and his English peers succeed, in Vico’s mind, precisely because of their capacity to bring particular conditions into being with the fabrication of 10 Funkenstein,

Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 178: “the study of nature in the seventeenth century was neither predominantly idealistic nor empirical. It was first and foremost constructive, pragmatic in the radical sense. It would lead to the conviction that only the doable—at least in principle, is also understandable: verum et factum convertuntur”—a phrase that is taken from Vico. 11 Vico, De antiquissima sapientia, 121: “ut ex iisdem fontibus, ex quibus copiosi oratores et observatores etiam maximi provenire possint.”

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experiments. Thus, although Vico effaces the situatedness of the rhetorical concept of possibilitas for the purpose of achieving a general criterion of intelligibility, he retains this sense of situatedness in order to criticize Aristotelian accounts of physics.12 Ingenium is the decisive link between Vico’s rhetorical heritage and his verum-factum principle. Ultimately, I would argue, the basic “fount” from which both the best orators and the best observers of nature spring is ingenium—the faculty of bringing objects that are distant one from another into close relationships of consonance and contradiction. As Vico puts it, “rational mechanics, fostered by the flower of human wit [ingegno], seeks to work out for us that likeness of nature.”13 It is no mere coincidence that ingenium is the etymological conduit for engineering and that the verum-factum principle is the baseline epistemology for homo faber. In the De antiquissima sapientia, Vico claims that ingenium and natura were synonymous in Latin. He proposes that, as the capacity to connect diverse and disparate things, ingenium is integral to the nature of human beings and that, moreover, ingenium is the faculty through which human beings generate a world of artifacts just as God created the world of nature.14 But in arguing that experiment is a mode of the verum-factum principle, Vico demonstrates that it is not as simple as one might suppose to maintain a clear distinction between natural processes and artificial ones.15 The bridge provided by the rhetorical concept of ingenium between human action and natural processes is one that has become increasingly important in late modernity. That Marx should have mistaken Vico for a thinker asserting the radical difference between human history and natural history even as Marx himself was exploring the historical dialectic of “man’s metabolism with nature” is just one more of the ironies that litter the reception and interpretation of Vico’s work.16 The more pertinent 12 Ibid.,

77: “quo nomine Aristotelis physica hodie male audit, quod nimis sit universalis: quando contra genus humanum innumeris novis veris ditarunt ignis et machina, instrumenta, quibus utitur recens physica, rerum, quae sint similes peculiarium naturae operum, operatrix.” 13 Giambattista Vico, Risposta del signor Giambattista di Vico nella quale si sciogliono tre opposizioni fatte da dotto signore contro il primo libro De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, in Opere filosofiche, ed. Cristofolini, 139 (henceforth, “1711 Risposta”). 14 Vico, De antiquissima sapientia, 117. 15 This is a point made most forcefully by Karl L¨ owith, Vicos Grundsatz: Verum et factum convertuntur, seine theologische Pr¨amisse und deren s¨akulare Konsequenzen (Heidelberg: Winter, 1968), 35. 16 Marx, Capital, 406: “Since as Vico says, the essence of the distinction between human history and natural history is that the former is made by man and the latter is not,

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irony for this study of Vico’s transplantation of rhetoric beyond the polis is the way in which the Neapolitan’s gloss of the zone of experimentation reproduces the structure of publicity so crucial to the polis and yet pushes that publicity beyond the spatial and temporal limitations of the classical city-state. The zone of experimentation is, on Vico’s account, an analogue of the polis in the sense that both rely on the disciplined demarcation of a space for asking questions in which judgments about the past direct actions undertaken in the future. But, as Vico well knew, the academic societies conducting experiments that began to appear across Europe in the seventeenth century were designed to facilitate an international community of research aiming at a linear history of cumulative results that would extend beyond the life-span of particular generations. What emerges from Vico’s discussion of possibility in the context of natural philosophical experiments is an understanding of the rhetorical situatedness of experiments (which are never wholly abstracted from the natural and social systems in which they are embedded) that is at the same time a situatedness capable of promoting inquiry sequences that are international and long term in scope. By turning from the necessary truths of mathematics to the contingent hypotheses involved in experimentation, Vico transposes his verum-factum principle into human activities that occur in particular times and places and that, therefore, must take into account the particular conditions that obtain there and then and are not necessarily universalizable. This transposition involves an increasing interest in the concept of “compossibility.” Over and above being merely possible, two things are compossible if they can exist not simply on their own but in conjunction with each other. Compossibility is a conceptual category that is made necessary by the utterly quotidian occurrence that things, which are certainly possible in the abstract, suddenly become impossible under particular circumstances because they come into conflict with conditions that are antipathetic to them. “Antipathy,” in this context, is an extremely broad category that extends from mere tension through conflict (that can be sublated into irony) to murderous incompatibility and logical incompossibility.

would not the history of human technology be easier to write than the history of natural technology? By disclosing man’s dealings with nature, the productive activities by which his life is sustained, technology lays bare his social relations and the mental concepts that flow from them.” See Martin Jay’s gloss of Marx’s usage of Vico in his Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Luk´acs to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 35.

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When Vico turns from the relatively simple world of mathematical definitions to the human world of circumstance, the complications of context increase inordinately. The number of conceptual parts involved in the syntheses of geometry is relatively low. In experiment, the number of factors to be controlled increases significantly. In historical processes, the number of contingencies that have a role to play in the coming to pass of a phenomenon is often inordinately large—so large, in fact, that it is practically impossible to run a simulation that reconstructs an event from its causes. Nevertheless, it is precisely the capacity of ingenium to bring into proximity scattered and ostensibly irrelevant factors that contributes to the reenactment of a natural or civil process. This is precisely what Vico means when he explains the synonymy in Latin between causa (“cause,” but also “case”) and negotium (“business,” as in “activity”): “it is likely that the ancient philosophers of Italy believed that proving from causes consists in giving order to the matter or the chaotic elements of a thing, and composing [componat] its scattered parts into a whole.”17 Causa and negotium are both terms that specify factum, so that Vico is no longer talking simply of a making or a doing in the abstract, but is rather concerned with those makings and doings that take place under conditions that are already rendered particular by other makings and doings. Vico’s more classical Latin (componere) is less abstract than Leibniz’s neo-Latin (compossibilitas), and for this reason it specifies more successfully the myriad forms of constraint on acting in time.18 In order to classify and conceptualize the different degrees to which a matter can be complicated by context, Vico draws explicitly on the rhetorical tradition. Vico reports that under the rarefied conditions of rhetorical attention to classificatory terminology, the terms causa and negotium were not synonymous but were used instead to indicate the distinction between the Greek terms up¯othesis (hypothesis) and per´stasis (circumstance).19 He is referring to a passage in which Quintilian sets 17 Vico,

De antiquissima sapientia, 83. does describe Leibniz (alongside Newton) as one of the leading minds of the age, but there is no evidence that he engaged directly with Leibniz’s concept of compossibility. Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §347. For a sense of the different preoccupations of Vichian and Leibnizian compossibility, compare the discussion here with Gregory Brown, “Compossibility, Harmony, and Perfection in Leibniz,” The Philosophical Review 96 (1987): 173–203. 19 Vico, 1711 Risposta, 134; the Quintilian passage is discussed by the reviewers of the Giornale too, although they concentrate on the distinction between causa (in the sense of “efficient cause”) from negotium. See Vico, Ancient Wisdom, 146. 18 Vico

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out another means of classifying the kinds of questions dealt with in the ars topica according to the degree to which a question is abstracted from context. Quintilian classifies both causa and negotium as different grades of what he calls definite questions, namely questions that attend in some way to context. Both are distinct from indefinite questions that make no allowance for particular conditions. Thus, “should one take a wife?” is an indefinite question whereas “should Cato take a wife?” is definite (but not as definite as “should Cato take a wife now?”). Quintilian reports that the Greek term for indefinite questions is th¯esis and that Cicero has translated the Greek with the term propositum.20 Vico’s reception of this rhetorical terminology for classifying progressively constrained degrees of compossibility is crucial for his extension of the verum-factum principle to law (an extension that is decisive for his work in the 1720s). Vico clearly believes that the verum-factum principle applies to law just as it applies to mathematics and to experimentation. One might suppose that, on account of their common investment in the definition of terms, the disciplines of law and mathematics would have much in common particularly in the context of Vico’s exploration of their relationship to the verum-factum principle. In fact, Vico goes out of his way to say that this is not the case. The law is embroiled in the particularities of circumstance more than experimentation. Even if legal statutes may eventually express themselves in an apparently abstract language, the law always begins (in Vico’s account) by stipulating its terms in the form of examples rather than in the form of context-independent propositions concerning the nature of justice. As Vico puts it, one does not think well of “the jurist who because of his strong memory masters ‘thetic’ . . . law”—law that begins with a th¯esis or propositum. Instead, the distinguished jurist is “the jurist who can see with acute judgment [acri iudicio] the distinctive characteristics in his cases, the circumstances [peristases seu circumstantias] through which they deserve the application of equity, or the exceptions through which they escape from the general law.”21 For Vico, judgment is absolutely central, and it is a faculty that consists in an adroit diagnosis of the discrepancy between the general 20 Quintilian,

Institutio oratoria, 3.5.5–18; Cicero, Topica, 79–80. Compare also Vico’s account of gnome (a general maxim) and no¯ema (a particular one) in the lectures on oratory. Vico, Institutiones oratoriae, 374–5. 21 Vico, De antiquissima sapientia, 77: “indidem iurisprudentia non censetur, qui beata memoria ius theticum sive summum et generale regularum tenet; sed qui acri iudicio videt in caussis ultimas factorum peristases seu circumstantias, quae aequitatem, sive exceptiones, quibus lege universali eximantur, promereant.”

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formulations of the law and the particular circumstances of the case at hand. This line of inquiry into the particularizing effect of circumstance will lead Vico to transform the verum-factum principle of the De antiquissima sapientia into the verum-certum dyad of the Diritto universale, but the interest in possibility can also be traced further afield to the Scienza nuova. That work is itself a development of the interest in knowing from causes that organizes the De antiquissima sapientia, and the Scienza nuova will focus on isolating the conditions of possibility—the protocauses—that undergird human community. But Vico’s search for causes in the Scienza nuova is profoundly conjectural. Indeed, the skill that he says he wants to develop in his readers is a skill of imagining a greater diversity of “possible causes,” cagioni possibili, for particular developments.22 Providence in the Scienza nuova is the demonstrable capacity of human institutions to evolve in ways that appear anathema to the intentions of all the diverse groups that contributed to the coming into being of those institutions. Vico’s readers—qua rhetorized hermeneuts—are expected to develop an ability to conjecture a multitude of potential plot lines that present a particular event as potentially one episode in a much larger (and as yet indistinct) narrative. Just as in his reading of experimentation and law, Vico emphasizes the faculty of judgment, the ability to distinguish the distinctive qualities of a particular situation and simultaneously to synthesize that distinctive quality into something approaching a universal (or, in this case, a more general process), so that the particular event can be understood in the context of a larger narrative that is not immediately perceptible. Again, Vico’s innovation is to take a faculty identified under the intense interpretative and pragmatic conditions of the polis and project that faculty out beyond the city-state’s spatial and temporal limitations. One should take immediate notice of the shift in perspective on possibility from, as it were, perpetrator to victim. In the De antiquissima sapientia, Vico is focused on possibility as a category that pertains to an agent’s ability to bring something into being. But possibility is also something that pertains to an object’s capacity to “suffer” a particular transformation. It is not possible for some metals to endure some degrees of manipulation.

22 Vico,

1744 Scienza nuova, §345, emphasis added: “la propia continua pruova che qui farassi sar`a il combinar e riflettere se la nostra mente umana, nella serie de’ possibili la quale ci e` permesso d’intendere, e per quanto ce n’`e permesso, possa pensare o piu` o meno o altre cagioni di quelle ond’escono gli effetti di questo mondo civile.”

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If a material’s parameters of malleability are exceeded, it breaks. Likewise, it is not possible to leave an imprint in molten wax because the wax will not retain the action for long if its temperature remains high. Constricted possibility—as Vico explores it in the terms propositum, causa, and negotium—is a category that pertains equally to the agent of an action and the medium in which that action is instantiated. In this way, any particular action can be redescribed as a “passion”—redescribed, that is, from the point of view of receiving as opposed to sending. This is a way of thinking about motion that saturates Aristotle’s entire research program and structures the opening of the De interpretatione, where pr¯agmata, “things done,” and path¯emata, “things suffered,” are all but inseparable. In Vico’s case, the decisive moment in which the distinction between the active and the passive is elided is in his etymology of the word for faculty itself. In part, Vico’s discussion of faculty is an engagement with Herbert of Cherbury’s De veritate. It is also a refraction of the rhetorical tradition. Rewriting a passage from Cicero that deals with facultas as a category describing the potential attributes of an action, Vico contends that “the word facultas is a contraction from faculitas, from which comes the later word facilitas, which signifies an unhindered and ready disposition for making (facere).”23 Vico goes on to give an account of the faculties of sense in which he emphasizes the active role of the senses in generating perceptible sensations. The sensible qualities of things are not, argues Vico, against scholastic interpretations of Aristotle, in the objects themselves. They are instead generated in the process of sensing itself. Like the faculties of imagination, memory, and intellect (which can be understood as radically active in the sense that they generate objects that are not present), the faculties of sense actively construct the objects of their own perception. Vico is, in effect, laying the foundations for a theory of cognitive imbalance between mind and world.24 Ideally, there would be an approximate 23 Vico,

De antiquissima sapientia, 113; Cicero, De inventione, 1.27.41: “facultates sunt aut quibus facilius fit aut sine quibus aliquid confici non potest.” 24 This assertion begins with and departs from the brilliant aperc ¸ u of Max Harold Fisch. Motivated by a passage from C. S. Peirce according to which “our minds having been formed under the influence of phenomena governed by the laws of mechanics, certain conceptions entering into those laws become implanted in our minds, so that we readily guess at what the laws are,” Fisch ventures the thought “not verum=factum . . . , but verum=faciens: it is not what our minds have made up, but what has made them up, that is intelligible to them.” Fisch, “Vico and Pragmatism,” 419. Peirce, Collected Papers, 6.10. By substituting the active present participle faciens for the passive past participle factum, Fisch means not just to question the opposition between the past and future tenses, but in fact also to refigure the opposition between the passive and active voices. Tacitly, he is

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equality between the mind’s being written on by the world and the world’s being written on by the mind. This is what Herbert of Cherbury imagined in his De veritate, when he said that “truth is a harmony between objects and their analogous faculties,” arguing that “when we have grasped this we can see that a double movement takes place; objects affect us and we affect them; but both activities occur at the same moment, so that the difference between them is almost unnoticeable.”25 In the De anima (the primordial text on this issue for both Herbert and Vico), Aristotle had figured this reciprocity in terms of a unity, such that “what has the power of sensation is potentially like what the perceived object is actually” while “the thinking part of the soul must . . . be potentially identical in character with its object without being the object.” For Aristotle, the soul is distinguished by its capacity to receive and retain the forms of objects it encounters. But insofar as the soul is imaginative and appetitive (as opposed to simply sensitive and intellective), this capacity for suffering is balanced by a poetic capacity for inflicting. Thus, when Aristotle says that “while at the beginning of its process of being acted upon the two interacting factors are dissimilar, at the end the one acted upon is assimilated to the other and is identical in quality with it,” he makes his point in a fashion that promotes two distinct readings.26 Mind can assimilate world when it is “the one acted upon,” but likewise world can assimilate mind when it is “the one acted upon.” Vico picks up on precisely this ambivalence. In the De antiquissima sapientia, the role of the senses is made more active with regard to the generation of sensations, and in the Scienza nuova this imbalance is extended even further. In a paraphrase of the Aristotelian account of cognition put forward in the De anima, Vico asserts in the Scienza nuova that “rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them.” But Vico has called into question the capacity of the mind to assimilate itself into the world in pushing at the limits of the Latin. That is to say, the “doing” here identified, which is convertible with the constitution of the true, is a dialectical generation of subject and object that is reflexive, reciprocal, and transitive. The subjects and objects of these transactions are, what is more, epiphenomenal to the process itself. They are statistical outliers. For an analysis of the subject/object distinction as it came to be reified progressively through medieval readings of Aristotle’s De anima, see F. Edward Cranz, Reorientations of Western Thought from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Nancy S. Struever (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 11.359–76. 25 Herbert, De veritate, 148. 26 Aristotle, De anima, 418a and 429a. Compare the account given in Sorabji, “Intentionality and Physiological Processes,” 209.

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the Scienza nuova, and so the Neapolitan responds by reformulating the Aristotelian dictum. Vico counters that it is more true to say that “man becomes all things by not understanding them.” What he means to say is that the mind’s power to imprint its own measures and qualities on the world is greater than the world’s power to draw the potentiality of the mind into the world’s own particular actuality.27 For this reason, Vico’s Scienza nuova is an inquiry into the civil—not natural—world that has been brought into being through the poetic work of the human imagination. What this amounts to is a rejection of the kinds of reciprocity that obtain in the ideal type of the polis, where—as Arendt has it—I appear to others as others appear to me. This reciprocity of appearances is absent in the world beyond the polis as experienced and theorized by Vico. In the world beyond the polis, the mind’s capacity to live in imagination as opposed to the world is limited only by the extent to which individual imaginations are brought into contact with the imaginative constructions of others. Because the contestations of the imagination are less immediate than the oratorical contestations in the assemblies, courts, and festivals of the polis, they are more liable to become modes of individual isolation as opposed to loci of common existence. Having absented himself from the polis even at the level of epistemology, locating a medium in which individual imaginations come into contact one with another will be a major problem for Vico in the Scienza nuova. Without the reciprocity or the agon of the polis, Vico’s bestioni risk living in a profound solitude of spirit. The drama of the Scienza nuova, which turns on the cycles of isolation and communication through which human societies pass, is thus the continuation of a tension that first finds its expression in the verum-factum principle of the De antiquissima sapientia. Seen from the perspective of the rhetorical tradition, the verum-factum principle exhibits a tension between making in isolation and making in the context of others and the parameters of possibility that these others establish. Rhetoric—in this case, particular passages from Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian—gives Vico the tools to examine making in the context of others. Once again, though, rhetoric does not become enmeshed in Vico’s research without being itself transformed. In the De antiquissima sapientia, the rhetorical orientation toward the possible becomes a theory of knowledge.

27 Vico,

1744 Scienza nuova, §405.

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II. Rhetoric and Semiosis Because scholars have grown so accustomed to paraphrasing rhetoric as the art of persuasion, it has become difficult to remain mindful of the very basic connections between rhetoric and hermeneutics. The term hermeneutics has also become so abstracted in academic parlance that it is either equated with a bland paraphrase such as the art of interpretation or reduced to the brilliant but deceptively particular tradition of German hermeneutic thought that began in the modern era with Schleiermacher and continued through Gadamer. What is lost in both those denotations is a living sense of the connection within the Aristotelian research program of the Rhetoric and the De interpretatione. In the opening to the De interpretatione, we find precisely the terms pr¯agmata and path¯emata that have been at the center of the discussions just completed of the De anima and its reconfiguration in Vico’s Scienza nuova. The Aristotelian corpus points to a deeper continuity in Greek rhetorical inquiry between acting and being acted upon with words and deeds. If rhetoric really is more than simply a techn¯e, then it is inquiry into the complex motions exchanged between the senders and receivers of signs. It is important to use the somewhat awkward locution senders and receivers of signs instead of the more natural orators and auditors because it involves no presumption that the voice and the ear are the primary media through which these motions are conveyed. Moreover, in the De antiquissima sapientia, it is precisely on the question of medium that Vico works once again to reinvent classical rhetoric. The De antiquissima sapientia is driven throughout by a very particular sensitivity to signs. In this respect, it remains a “rhetorical” text. But the signs that move Vico to his conjectures on the meaning of the verum-factum equivalence are the written remnants of a language that, beyond the walls of the academy, had largely passed out of everyday use. Vico brings rhetorical terms and sensitivities to this “hermeneutic” predicament. By liberating rhetorical inquiry from its devotion to the medium of the spoken word, he opens new avenues for rhetorical inquiry in a modern world increasingly characterized by media innovation. To be sure, the movement of interests and skills between rhetoric and hermeneutics has a long antique, medieval, and early modern history.28 Vico avails himself of the fruits of this confluence when he speaks of reading as a metaphor for cognition in general. Vico’s fellow early moderns 28 See

Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

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spoke habitually of “reading the book of nature,” and Vico himself understands all the acts of ingenium that characterize the cognition of natural objects as well as human artifacts as modes of legere and collegare, “reading” and “collecting.” Ingenium (as Vico explained in his Institutiones oratoriae) is the power of identifying similarities in objects that are distant one from another, and are in some or perhaps in almost all respects different. Ingenium, thus, permits beings to overcome their radical situatedness in the here and now so that connections between here and there, past, present, and future become possible. Thus, for Vico, the experience and faculty of reading—which oscillates between lectio and collectio—lies at the heart of what it is to be a finite being anchored in space and time. To Vico’s way of thinking, the degree to which a being is situated spatially and temporally is one of the most basic modes of distinguishing one form of being from another. The degree of attachment to the here and now is a continuum that runs from primitive forms of animal being that respond to only the most immediate sensory stimuli to divine being, which experiences being from every possible perspective simultaneously. Human being, says Vico, is to be located between animal and divine being because it is a kind of being that is characterized by imagination, which he understands as a capacity to remove oneself from the contexts of the here and now—but only partially. Indeed, right at the outset of the De antiquissima sapientia, Vico distinguishes between intelligere (which is the divine activity where verum and factum coincide) and cogitare (which is the human equivalent). Reading, cogitating, and intellecting are all parallel processes, he says, because “as words are symbols and signs of ideas, so ideas are symbols and signs of things.” As a result, “just as legere (to read) is applied to one who combines the written elements of which words are composed, so intelligere (to understand) may be the combining of all parts of an object from which its most perfect idea may be expressed.”29 Reading, like the verum-factum principle, is concerned with construction, with the ordering and compositioning of words and their parts. It is, we might say, a search for meaning that organizes syntax. Moreover, it is analogous to the divine activity of intellecting. Instead of “expressing,” however, it is concerned with “composing.” Instead of working only with things and their elements, it traffics in words that are symbols and notes of ideas that are symbols and notes of things.

29 Vico,

De antiquissima sapientia, 63.

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Vico is making a double move. First, he is redirecting rhetorical competences (the theory and practice of ingenium) into hermeneutic concerns with receiving (as distinct from sending) signs, signs that may or may not be perceived aurally. Second, he is preparing the way for an extension of the definition of a sign from words to ideas and even to “things” themselves. On this account, even natural philosophers are distinguished by their capacity to “listen” to nature. The natural philosopher must be sensitive to the phenomena of nature, not simply by being able to measure the manifold qualities of those phenomena accurately but also by being able to make informed statements about what past experience has to say about future experience. All things are signs potentially, for any thing can potentially be understood as the manifestation of a process that will express itself again in the future. The best natural philosophers and the best orators draw on the same set of skills, a statement that, for Vico, is verified in the example of Galileo—simultaneously a great experimentalist and a great prose stylist.30 Vico explains the dual genius of Galileo with the assertion that ingenium is a cognitive skill, first recognized by rhetoric, that ranges across all domains of human endeavor.31 The practice of ingenium— whether in the orator, the reader, or the natural philosopher—begins with what one might term the semiotic moment, the moment in which a phenomenon is perceived to be something that in knowing one knows more. In the Scienza nuova, Vico understands this semiotic moment to be the origin of language itself. Unlike many of his eighteenth-century contemporaries, Vico locates the origin of language neither in the voice nor in the vocal expression of emotion—the “cry.” Vico argues instead that the origin of language should be dated to the origin of writing, not speech.32 In the first instance, it may appear surprising that a rhetorician like Vico should not think of the voice and the ear as the prime movers of language. In fact, the priority of writing over speech is a further confirmation of the hypothesis that Vico sublimated rhetoric by isolating its key terms and extending them to new issues that are most pressing in societies that do not possess institutions bringing the voice and the ear into close cooperation.33 30 Ibid.,

121: “ex iisdem fontibus, ex quibus copiosi oratores et observatores etiam maximi provenire possint.” 31 This line of argumentation also explains the otherwise surprising fact that Battistini, the historian of Italian literature, is an expert on both Vico and Galileo. See Andrea Battistini, Introduzione a Galilei (Rome: Laterza, 1989). 32 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §429. 33 On Vico as a semiotician, see especially Jurgen ¨ Trabant, Neue Wissenschaft von alten Zeichen: Vicos Sematologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994).

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The original semiotic moment, as Vico depicts it in the Scienza nuova, is in point of fact not a moment in which one human being recognizes the existence of another human being and takes a phenomenon produced by that other being as an indicator of some desire for the future. Semiosis begins—as Galileo would have appreciated—in the dialogue between mind and nature. Vico writes in the 1744 Scienza nuova that “the first men, who spoke by signs, naturally believed that lightning bolts and thunderclaps were signs made to them by Jove; whence from nuo, to make a sign, came numen, the divine will, by an idea more than sublime and worthy to express the divine majesty.” Vico goes on to say that “they believed that Jove commanded by signs, that such signs were real words, and that nature was the language of Jove” and that “the science of this language the gentiles universally believed to be divination, which by the Greeks was called theology, meaning the science of the language of the gods.”34 The first “use” of signs is, thus, hermeneutic rather than rhetorical in the sense that language originates in the reception and not the sending of signs. Decisive here is the imputation of something like a will to something like an event. Vico renders the actual existence of an agent possessing that will irrelevant. It is the reader, the receiver who is poet in Vico, not the divine artifex. Regardless of whether there really is a communicative situation, it is in behaving as if a communicative situation already exists that the possibility of language is established. Moreover, if Vico’s bestioni mistake thunder and lightning for Jove’s judgments, then Vico is proposing that they are presuming not only that there is a judge capable of delivering an answer, but also that there is a supplicant capable of asking a question. That is to say, this semiotic moment shades from the hermeneutic into the rhetorical because perceiving a sign is so tightly bound up with the question of how to respond to it. The De antiquissima sapientia itself is emblematic of the kind of inquiry that turns rhetorical competence into hermeneutic activity. Vico is not only theorizing but also practicing the sensitivity to phenomena— whether natural or cultural—that can produce the shock of the semiotic moment. The verum-factum principle itself originates in simple surprise, 34 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §379: “i primi uomini, che parlavan per cenni, dalla loro natura

credettero i fulmini, i tuoni fussero cenni di Giove (onde poi da ‘nuo’, ‘cennare’ fu detta ‘numen’ la ‘divina volont`a’, con una troppo sublime idea e degna da spiegare la maest`a divina), che Giove comandasse co’ cenni, e tali cenni fussero parole reali, e che la natura fusse la lingua di Giove; la scienza della qual lingua credettero universalmente le genti essere la divinazione, la qual da’ greci ne fu detta ‘teologia,’ che vuol dire ‘scienza del parlar degli d`ei.’”

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wonder: How could it be reasonable to use the expressions true and done interchangeably? Vico regards the coincidence of the words as a philological phenomenon and sets about accounting for it in a way that draws no basic divisions between the works of nature and the works of mind. Shock occasions investigation when Vico is reading Terence’s Andria too.35 The pairing in one line of that play of memoria with astutia, memory with cunning, seems odd to Vico; in order to reconcile the passage he conjectures that by memoria the Romans might also mean ingegno. Vico proceeds immediately to say that “what we call ‘imagination’ and ‘to imagine’ is called by the Latins ‘to remember’ and ‘memory.’” Memory is ingenuity when it functions as a power of “bringing to mind” that makes it possible to “collate” similar experiences that are distant one from another in time. In the same play, a similar striking use of the word memorabile alongside credibile provokes Vico to speculate that memorabile must mean conceivable over and above its denotations of “that which is capable of being called to mind from the past” and “that which is easily called to mind.”36 It is only the appearance of the word in a particular context—the word considered as philological phenomenon particularized by the restriction of possibility—that can provoke a sensitive reader like Vico to perceive the occurrence as a sign of something hitherto unsuspected about the word. In this case, the sign in question is a sign pertaining to a sign (a metasemiotic piece of data that reveals something new about a word). But, considered as a semiotic moment, this experience is indistinguishable from the origin of language as conjectured in the Scienza nuova.37 The shift to hermeneutics in the De antiquissima sapientia is crucial to an account of Vico’s sublimation of rhetoric, because the encounter with the text—together with annotation or revision of the text—becomes a paradigm through which to conceive of the intrusion of absent thoughts into the hic et nunc and the ongoing collation of absent initiatives. Vico reports another semiotic moment in the second Risposta, where 35 Terence,

Andria, 722–3. Vico, 1712 Risposta, 152. Andria, 625–8. Vico, 1712 Risposta, 152. 37 Indeed, the very same passage from Terence reappears in the Scienza nuova with the following gloss: “la memoria e` la stessa cosa che la fantasia, la quale perci`o ‘memoria’ dicesi da’ latini (come appo Terenzio truovasi ‘memorabile’ in significato di ‘cosa da potersi immaginare,’ e volgarmente ‘comminisci’ per ‘fingere,’ ch’`e propio della fantasia, ond’`e ‘commentum,’ ch’`e un ritruovato finto); e ‘fantasia’ altres`ı prendesi per l’ingegno (come ne’ tempi barbari ritornati si disse ‘uomo fantastico’ per significar ‘uomo d’ingegno’ . . . E prende tali tre differenze: ch’`e memoria, mentre rimembra le cose; fantasia, mentre l’altera e contraf`a; ingegno, mentre le contorna e pone in acconcezza ed assettamento. Per le quali cagioni i poeti teologi chiamarono la Memoria ‘madre delle muse.’” Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §819. 36 Terence,

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he says that “I have to confess that, when the significance of the two terms punctum and momentum gave me occasion to meditate on the metaphysical points, I turned my mind to Zeno,” because “I have always considered that, just as relying entirely on authority is like walking blindly, so trusting one’s own judgment entirely is like traveling without a guide.” Vico reasons further that “authority must make us think of investigating what could have led our authors—even the most profound ones—to think in one way or another.” Now, “like everyone else, I held Zeno in great esteem, especially in metaphysics,” and yet “I considered his view about the points according to Aristotle’s report of it to be improbable: that body consists of geometrical points is tantamount to the claim that a real thing is composed of abstract things.” Therefore, says Vico, “I set myself seriously to pondering what reasoning could ever make such a view probable.”38 In order to save the reasonability of both Aristotle and Zeno in this matter, Vico argues that Aristotle’s reading was a misprision of Zeno, that Aristotle “speaks of the division of body, which is motion and actuality, whereas Zeno speaks of powers whereby every tiny corpuscle corresponds to an infinite extension.”39 In order to take the credit for resolving it, Aristotle spoke of a paradox where perhaps only a dialectical exercise had existed. Vico hopes to reconcile the authors by taking Zeno to be speaking not of physical points (atoms perhaps), but rather of metaphysical points—the power of, or condition of, possibility for movement and extension. Vico theorizes these metaphysical points as virtu` or conatus, and these terms should be understood as descriptions of possibility in its active dimension. In this part of the discussion of the De antiquissima sapientia, however, it is the mode of the reading that is more important. In approaching the problem of Aristotle’s representation of Zeno in Book VI of the Physics, Vico establishes a tension between what he terms authority and one’s own judgment. Complete obedience to authority makes genuine critical inquiry impossible, but to investigate with the critical faculties of one’s own judgment only is to do without the experience of those who previously have conducted comparable investigations. The specific problem of Zeno’s meaning could be produced neither by an inquiry into authority alone, because it would be impossible to question Aristotle’s representation of his debate with Zeno, nor by an inquiry into the 38 Vico, 39 Vico,

1712 Risposta, 156–7. 1711 Risposta, 141.

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problem abstractly conceived, because Aristotle’s opinion of Zeno would have no status. This dialectic between authority and judgment is functionally identical to that theorized by the 1744 Scienza nuova in axiom X, where Vico argues “the philosophers failed by half in not giving certainty to their reasonings by appeal to the authority of the philologians, and likewise . . . the latter failed by half in not taking care to give their authority the sanction of truth by appeal to the reasoning of the philosophers.”40 When this axiom is located in Vico’s transposition of rhetorical talents to semiotics, one realizes that the disciplinary designations philosopher and philologian are more properly subordinated in Vichian thought to the semiotician who has followed rhetoric beyond the polis. Vico’s presumption that all striking phenomena may be presumed in some way rational appears by turns indulgent and na¨ıve. But this presumption is neither simply a repetition of early modern credulity toward ancient authorities nor simply an invocation of the mantra that nature does nothing in vain, nothing casually. Vico’s hermeneutic caritas is in fact a displacement of the rhetorical presumption that moments of decision only arise on the back of a host of very particular, local conditions. Classical rhetoric had presumed that action is situated, that in the absence of a penetrating capacity to identify the distinguishing characteristics of each individual case general rules are good for nothing except ineffectual moralizing. Ingenuity, what is more, is ironically the product not of radical freedom—where no local circumstances are taken into account—but rather of the constriction of choices. Fewer choices mean more intensely felt choices. Dilemma, the most intensely felt of all choices, is the kind of dialectical tension that can produce genuine innovation. Vico’s sublimation of rhetoric is the resolution of such a dialectical tension and, even if the meaning of the word dialectical in this context would be foreign to Vico himself, it is nevertheless true that Hegel too is to be understood in terms of the long history of rhetoric’s modern transformation. Vico, therefore, is not troubled by allegiance to old forms of knowing such as rhetoric. If such allegiances create tensions for modern understandings, then so much the better. When the reviewers of the Giornale adopt the pose of philologists or historians and ask Vico to document more precisely Zeno’s ownership of the arguments put forward by Vico 40 Vico,

1744 Scienza nuova, §140: “questa medesima Degnit`a [§138] dimostra aver mancato per met`a cos`ı i filosofi, che non accertarono le loro ragioni con l’autorit`a de’ filologi, come i filologi che non curarono d’avverare le loro autorit`a con la ragion de’ filosofi.”

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in his name, the Neapolitan responds to the Venetians by saying that the whole point of his argument is that he has intuited something that is not itself documentable, but that may be reasonably inferred from what is documented. Vico does not go on to say that the idea was really his all along, and that Zeno had been functioning only as a mouthpiece or stalking horse. Instead, he outflanks the doubts of the reviewers by saying that, if they refuse to entertain even the possibility that the doctrine of metaphysical points was Zeno’s, then let them at least examine the idea independently—on its merits, as if it were Vico’s. Vico’s case does not stand or fall on philology. Just so, Vico’s philological errors should not lead readers to reject the text out of hand. It is odd that a reader of Plato’s Parmenides and Cicero’s Academica could suppose that the Eleatic in the former and the Stoic in the latter were one man. It is ironic that someone who was later to become famous for reading authors, such as Hermodorus and Homer, out of existence should be guilty of reading authors into existence in his early work. Nevertheless, this error should not obscure the more important point, which is that Vico’s approach to reading in the De antiquissima sapientia is profoundly dialogical. That is to say, Vico treats the statements of others as imperatives. It is as if he is being forced on the basis of his interpretation to make a decision and select a particular course of action. The transformation of rhetorical capacities in the De antiquissima sapientia into a more general analysis of a semiosis that extends beyond the parameters of the here and now is very precisely attested to by Vico’s gloss of the opening passages in Aristotle’s De interpretatione. Aristotle had said that “words spoken are symbols or signs [sumbola] of affections or impressions [path¯emat¯on] of the soul,” and that that these affections or impressions “of which these words are primarily signs [s¯eme´a], are the same for the whole of mankind, as are also the objects [pr¯agmata] of which those affections are representations or likenesses, images, copies [homoi¯omata].”41 At the beginning of the De antiquissima sapientia, Vico says that verba idearum, ita ideae symbola et notae sunt rerum, that “words are symbols and notes of ideas, just as ideas are symbols and notes of things.”42 These assertions—and indeed the differences between them— may appear at first glance innocuous. They are not. In fact, the contrasts between these sentences from Aristotle and Vico reveal several highly significant ways in which the Neapolitan transforms 41 Aristotle, 42 Vico,

De interpretatione, 16a. De antiquissima sapientia, 63.

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his rhetorical inheritance. First, Aristotle is consciously attending to spoken words in contradistinction to written words; Vico is concerned simply with verba and the move to greater abstraction is part of a more general move beyond the acoustic parameters of the polis that for Aristotle structured both rhetoric and politics. Second, Aristotle argued for different relationships between words spoken and passions of the soul (where the former are s¯eme´a of the latter) and passions of the soul and the objects of those passions (because path¯emata are homoi¯omata of pr¯agmata). In contrast, Vico assumes that ideae are notes and symbols of res in just the same way as verba are notes and symbols of ideae. As a result, mental life in Vico takes on an existence that is considerably more independent—and, I shall argue, far more susceptible to historical variation. Third, Aristotle explicitly interjects that both path¯emata and pr¯agmata are “the same for the whole of mankind,” whereas Vico deploys his account of the relationships among verba, ideae, and res in an argument that implies that any given place and time’s exposure to the entirety of a word or an idea’s signification is limited—because man is a being that participates in reason but does fully possess it. The difference between Aristotle’s assertion that path¯emata are homoi¯omata of pr¯agmata and Vico’s assertion that ideae are symbola et notae of res appears to be minimal, but in fact it is part of a much more profound reorientation conducted by medieval and early modern receptions of ancient thought. F. Edward Cranz has argued that neither the Greeks nor the Romans distinguished categorically between ideas in the mind and things in the world. Translations of ancient thought into contemporary systems from approximately 1100 onward—by Anselm, Abelard, and others—introduced this distinction. As a result, Aristotle’s argument that the soul somehow is all the things that it cognizes became essentially unintelligible. Cranz argued that, in a manner comparable to Aristotle, neither Cicero nor Quintilian permitted the existence of “meanings” interposed between res and verba. For them, res denoted not only objects in the world but also those objects as they occurred in cognition. In contrast, the early modern commentator Antonius Pinus misinterpreted both Quintilian and Aristotle in his 1542 commentary on the Institutio oratoria when he glossed Quintilian’s assertion that every speech consists of res et verba by invoking the opening of Aristotle’s De interpretatione and arguing that one should understand that notions mediate between res and verba.43 43 Cranz, Reorientations of Western Thought, 12.219ff. Cicero, Ad familiares, 9.22.1; Quintilian,

Institutio oratoria, 3.5.1.

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Vico’s insertion of ideae between res and verba is essentially analogous to Pinus’s insertion of notions. But the use that he makes of this insertion is highly distinctive. Others in early modernity who inserted “ideas” between words and things—Locke, for example—worried that because ideas originated in experience and because the experiences of different individuals would always be different, it followed that men were habitually in the position of using the same words in their discourses with each other and yet associating different ideas with those same words. Political discord, on this account, was a function of an epistemological impossibility: knowing the thoughts that lay behind the utterances of others.44 Locke’s response to this problem was to insist on the greatest possible self-consciousness and consistency in the definition of terms. In the 1725 Scienza nuova, Vico explicitly rejects Locke’s linguistic contractarianism and argues instead that, because it was impossible to know whether parties to an assertion understood that assertion in the same way, such parties could only route their understanding of the assertion through a notion of God who was privy to the application of the assertion to circumstances not as yet anticipated. Even at the level of a concept like truth, Vico extends his analysis beyond the immediacy of political discord.45 Vico inserts ideae between verba and res not because he fears the effects of equivocation on political debate, but because he wants to acknowledge that different communities establish imaginative domains that are highly distinctive. The De antiquissima sapientia, after all, is an attempt to recover the imaginative domain of the ancient Italians, a domain that rendered the synonymy of verum and factum intelligible. When one understands idea properly as not simply a sign but also a principle of development—a seed—and when one understands res properly as not merely an object but even a process, ordeal, or matter, then the divisions between verba, idea, and res appear much less strict. As a result, the tripartite semiotic structure set out by those terms appears much less arbitrary.46 If res qua 44 Thus, Dawson, Locke, 218: Locke’s “revolutionary contribution to early-modern linguistics

is to assert that language is inherently and inadvertently equivocal”; emphasis added. 1725 Scienza nuova, §45. 46 In his reading of the De antiquissima sapientia, Vincenzo Vitiello emphasizes the double meaning of idea as used by Vico. Vincenzo Vitiello, “Il medio assente: Sul concetto di verit`a nel De antiquissima sapientia,” in Studi sul De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, ed. Giovanni Matteucci (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2002), 86. Likewise, Fisch argues that Vico’s usage of the word cosa in the Scienza nuova mirrors a Latin usage of res to denote “institution” rather than “thing.” Max Harold Fisch, “Introduction,” in The New Science of Giambattista Vico (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), xliii–iv. 45 Vico,

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“situation” remains dynamic, then it can only be approximated by an idea qua “seed” that remains in motion even as it comes into focus. Under such conditions of instability in experience, verba itself cannot remain static as an arbitrary term attached self-consciously to an experience, once and for all time—in the manner of a mathematical definition. Etymology becomes a rhetorical tactic for laying bare the impacted responses of verba to the developments of ideae and res. Indeed, Vico’s later insistence that etymology is an especially useful tool for analyzing the history of power relations in communities where a domestic vocabulary has endured without borrowing extensively from foreign languages is another continuation of classical rhetoric. Classical rhetoric had listed etymology under inventio, on the grounds that the history of words could function as a stimulus for the invention of arguments. Indeed, Vico’s usage of the terms symbola and notae to characterize the relationships among verba, idea, and res glosses a passage from Cicero that entrenches Vico’s argument that the history of words runs parallel to (and is integral to) history proper. When Cicero transliterated the Greek rhetorical legacy into Latin, he used the term notatio to render etumologia. His reasoning was that the Greek term symbolon—which literally means “thrown together”—goes to the heart of what is at stake in etymology (because etymology is the compounding of usages that are thrown together over time by circumstance and necessity), and that nota, token, is the best Latin equivalent of symbolon.47 Vico takes a technique, identified by classical rhetoricians, that enhanced an orator’s capacity to perceive all the possible lines of continuation from a particular situation and turns it into a practice of bringing into close proximity words that had given birth to each other but that in the course of centuries had evolved apart such that their genetic relationship had been forgotten. Etymology thus makes a rhetorically sophisticated inquiry into historical time possible because it brings ideae that never appeared alongside one another in any single place and time together in the form of narratives tracking the evolution of verba. Political narratives that were invisible to the classical orator thus become visible to the Vichian inquirer. In this way, Vico reinvents the Ciceronian practice of notatio and augments a society’s capacity to understand its history beyond the temporal parameters of the polis.

47 Cicero,

Topica, 35–7.

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Sensitivity to signs in the broadest sense is a fundamental fact about human being. To understand rhetoric as part of a larger set of concerns that span both rhetoric and hermeneutics, both the sending and receiving of signs, is to understand it most basically as inquiry into sensitivity to signs. Vico is a pivotal figure in the history of rhetoric because he expands the understanding of properly rhetorical interests massively. On his (sublimated) understanding of rhetoric, a host of other thinkers and other investigative moments come into play. When Socrates reconstructs Simonides’s desire to distinguish between being good and becoming good, he saves the poet from the contradiction that Protagoras imputes to him.48 When Horace reports in his Ars poetica that it is a delightful thing “if a skilled setting makes a familiar word new,” he may be taken to mean that it is something to be admired in poets if they can momentarily defamiliarize a word and at the same time lead the reader to understand the word’s broader range of resonances.49 And, in early modern thought, when Hobbes speaks in his Dialogus physicus of the way in which hypotheses must “save” phenomena, he means to indicate that it is the function of natural philosophical hypotheses to account for the apparent irrationality of natural events.50 Finally, when R. G. Collingwood describes his stupefaction at the monstrosity of the Albert Memorial, he himself goes on to explain how the experience led him to formulate an account of what he calls the logic of question and answer. Here he proposes that central to the comprehension of anything that may be taken as a kind of answer or resolution is an inquiry into the nature of the question or imperative that occasioned it.51 With the possible although not certain exception of the Hobbes, these examples point to the importance of interpretative difficulty and of assuming that the apparently unintelligible or surprising has something to say. Vico takes his place in this—remarkably diverse—inquiry sequence. Indeed, when his reinvention of classical rhetoric beyond the bounds of the polis is properly understood, Vico brings this inquiry sequence into focus as an identifiable tradition. 48 Plato,

Protagoras, 339–347. Ars poetica, 46–8: “in verbis etiam tenuis cautusque serendis/ dixeris egregie, notum si callida verbum/ reddiderit iunctura novum.” 50 Hobbes, “Hobbes’s Physical Dialogue,” in Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the AirPump, 361–2: “the hypotheses are by no means absurd. It remains that you show their use in saving the phenomena of which I am now about to speak.” 51 R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), 29ff. 49 Horace,

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III. Self-Estrangement as Rhetorical Capacity Vico’s understanding of the concept scrittura, “writing,” is expansive. He takes it to be the most basic form of language. Indeed, he takes “writing” to be an adequate synecdoche for semiosis in general, regardless of whether the “use of signs” in question involves authorship or merely the perception of signs in what might turn out to be an entirely inanimate environment. This is a theory of media ecology appropriate for a modern world that teems with an overabundance of signs, most of them studiously ignored. The irony for conventional rhetoricians is that Vico’s extremely rhetorized semiotic consciousness is more attuned to situations of asymmetry in the sending and receiving of signs than it is to the situations in which there is a symmetrical reciprocity between senders and receivers who recognize each other’s presence immediately. The bestioni of the Scienza nuova perceive themselves interpellated by an entity that is everywhere—Jovis omnia plena—and therefore nowhere (because the parameters of human cognition are such that human beings can only engage with objects that are neither spatially nor temporally infinite). The irony of this asymmetry, however, is that it does not produce assumptions that the absent interlocutor is known in a way that is totally different from the way that the self understands itself. One might suppose that the isolated sign user would lapse into a kind of imbecilic solipsism, but on Vico’s account this is absolutely not the case. For him, the isolation of signs from their absent authors—the thunder and lightning in the omnipresence (and absence) of Jove or the Andria in the absence of Terence—is a cue for the same kind of impersonalization described in Chapter 2 with the De coniuratione. The traditional rhetorical tactic of considering how others will perceive what one is about to say is reconfigured as a consideration of one’s own writing as if one had not written it oneself. This, of course, had been one of the distinctive facts about writing since Plato feared that it would destroy memory, for writing does overcome time, and it had always enabled the self to encounter itself after the fact in the same manner as it would encounter another. But it is also undeniably true that the print culture of the eighteenthcentury world was making experiences of both disembodied authorship and time-delayed encounters with the self more common. Kant’s interest in the disinterestedness of judgment—whatever the merits or demerits of his account—is simply the most famous among a host of conceptual developments that recognized what scholars have come to refer to as the structural transformation of the public sphere.

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The De antiquissima sapientia addresses this transformation in two key respects. In the first place, Vico experiences himself as an artifact of public contestation by virtue of the reviews of the De antiquissima sapientia that appear in the Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia, together with the responses he contributes. The simple time delay between publication, review, response, and counterresponse introduces a kind of self-scrutiny that more traditional oral interactivity does not usually generate. Vico finds that the indeterminacy of his own signs makes his relationship to himself indistinguishable from his relationship to others. This is a major practical insight, and Vico turns it to good account by also developing a theoretical critique of Descartes’s cogito (and its associated valorization of intellectual intuition) that draws on assumptions concerning the impersonality of semiotic life—both mental and worldly—that had played a role in the De coniuratione. As became clear in the earlier discussion of the De coniuratione, the paradox of Naples is that it is a city saturated in seeing and being seen that does not possess powerful institutions permitting immediate and symmetrical interactions between interlocutors engaged in debate. True, in his Istoria civile del regno di Napoli, Giannone had praised the early modern Neapolitan interlocution of what Francesco D’Andrea called i nobili fuori di Piazza. But as Giannone himself was very much aware, the Academy of Medinaceli was oriented toward a viceroyalty that itself looked to Madrid (later to Vienna and always in part to Rome). As a result, the independence of the sphere of public opinion from the state and from the church was questionable. Granted, there are specific, self-conscious vindications of the Neapolitan scene of inquiry. Giuseppe Valletta’s Istoria filosofica (published clandestinely in 1703–4) wishes to insist on the distinctiveness of seventeenth-century discursive modes in general and of the discursive modes of the Neapolitan Accademia degli Investiganti in particular. Valletta wishes to declare, against the control of the Schools and of the Church, that filosofia is nothing but filosofare, and that filosofare is nothing but opinare. It may indeed be a sign of robust debate in the Neapolitan saloni and salotti of the day—where Valletta’s Istoria circulated in manuscript—that the author appears to contradict himself on the question of the utility of Aristotelian dialectic.52 52 See

Valletta, Opere filosofiche, 340–54 and 347ff for the qualification of his criticism of dialectic, which he had started out at 341 by describing, in a way one would assume to be coordinate with his understanding of filosofia as nothing more and nothing less than opinare, as “esercitazion di Filosofo, dimostra intorno all’opinabile a cagion della

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Yet Valletta’s criticism of Aristotle’s Organon and his claim for the novelty (or renovation) of “modern” argument is greatly weakened by his lack of attention to the Topics and the Sophistic Refutations. In this respect, Valletta replicates the errors of his enemies and fails to anticipate Vico’s vindication of topics in the De ratione of 1709. Furthermore, the very existence of the Istoria filosofica, which was written in the wake of the Roman inquisition’s intervention against the perceived atheist tendencies of Neapolitan inquiry, testifies to the heavily policed quality of the public sphere in which Valletta (and Vico) operated. In short, the history of the public use of reason at Naples is complex. Nevertheless, the Kantian phrase the public use of reason (appropriated by Habermas and others) is tremendously felicitous. There is no point in denying that the Vico who is engaged with the reviewers of the Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia is a writer intimately involved in the historical development announced by Ludovico Muratori, theorized by Habermas, and evident in the appearance of (among many others) Denys de Sallo’s Journal des savants in 1665, Otto Mencken’s Acta eruditorum in 1682, and Thomasius’s Monatsgesprache in 1688. Certainly, reason made public under the very particular conditions afforded by the Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia is on display in the six-part exchange between the Neapolitan author of the De antiquissima sapientia and its Venetian reviewers. The De antiquissima sapientia was published by the Neapolitan Felice Mosca in 1710 and was reviewed in the Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia in 1711. Vico replied to the review with a first Risposta, and then with a second Risposta after the Giornale had printed a reply to the first. In essence, the exchange is a subtle but significant modulation of the parameters for sending and receiving signs. In contrast to the kind of public space attended to most closely by classical rhetoric, what Vico faced was a vastly expanded spatial parameter that exceeded almost all measurements of the “here” combined with a practice of pseudosimultaneity that rewrote the nature of the “now.” The Giornale made the following generous suggestion: “if Giambattista Vico, whose gentility we have always considered equal to his learning, shall wish to regard this our Reply as worthy of some new Response, then we, joining together as if in one single body both his first short work of Metaphysics and the second potest`a di contradire.” The nature of the Neapolitan public sphere has been the subject of renewed interest recently: Anna-Maria Rao, ed., Editoria e cultura a Napoli nel XVIII secolo (Naples: Liguori, 1998); Vincenzo Trombetta, Storia e cultura delle biblioteche napoletane: Librerie private, istituzioni francesi e borboniche, strutture postunitarie (Naples: Vivarium, 2002); Stone, Vico’s Cultural History.

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short work of his Response, together with that which we will have said in the present article and that which will have seemed right to him to reply to us; then, I say, we shall believe ourselves to have achieved our aim, which is that all of these works together will form, no longer the briefest outline of a metaphysics, but instead an entire metaphysics, perfect in all its parts.” Vico approved.53 This proposal, made by the reviewers of the Giornale and accepted by Vico, that their exchange be considered a kind of completion of the De antiquissima sapientia might be considered na¨ıve in many ways, but it is also evidence of a genuine commitment to the process and consequences of discursive negotiation. The genre within which they worked was a highly particular one, however. That genre had a significant impact on how willingness in theory was modulated in practice. Something can be said of the way in which the De antiquissima sapientia came to be reviewed in the Giornale owing to a letter written by Vico to Apostolo Zeno, founder of the Accademia degli Animosi at Venice and of the Giornale in 1710 (with Antonio Vallisneri and Scipione Maffei). The letter—dated “ultimo d’ottobre 1710” and accompanied by a copy of the De antiquissima sapientia—indicates that the work is the first of several projected volumes (although the proposed volumes on physics and ethics, together with an appendix on logic never appeared). Vico asks Zeno—the Venetian, not the Eleatic or the Stoic—to read it with the same consideration demonstrated by the review in the Giornale of the De ratione. He says that he would be very grateful were Zeno to send copies to Bernardo Trevisani and Biagio Garofalo.54 This reference to Trevisani confirms the plausibility of Croce’s suggestion that it was that Venetian critic who wrote the reviews of the De antiquissima sapientia, but it is difficult to be certain of this.55 What is certain is the structure of address within which the Giornale exchange took place. Vico addressed his first Risposta to an “Osservandissimo signor mio,” but in the second he addresses himself to “le Signorie Vostre illustrissime,” the editors of the Giornale. In the second Risposta, he describes the recipient of his first Risposta as “un dotto signore anonimo.” 53 Giornale

de’ letterati d’Italia, 8 (1712): 335–6. In response, Vico cites the entire passage, and adds “talch´e io voglio, e devo volerlo, che ’l mondo creda, con questa Risposta me non contender con esso voi, ma avervi ubbidito.” Vico, 1712 Risposta, 168. 54 Vico, Epistole, 83–4. 55 In Croce’s opinion, the reviews were written “con assai probabilit` a da Bernardo Trivisano (1653–1720), che, a ogni modo, era colui che in quella rivista s’occupava a preferenza della rubrica filosofica.” Benedetto Croce, Bibliografia vichiana, accresciuta e rielaborata da Fausto Nicolini (Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, 1947), 1.173.

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The Giornale articles are themselves written consistently in the first person plural. Although the second article refers at one point to the reviewer in the first article as an individual it returns quickly to the collective responsibility of the plural. Vico chooses to assume that the author of the first article was an individual and that the author of the second was a group. In this way, he hopes that it will be recognized that the Giornale has seen fit to respond as a public body rather than as a private individual. As he construes it, “out of your generosity, you did not decide, as you reasonably might have”—only that which could be otherwise can be a sign of intention—“that the anonymous critic should himself refute my response privately.” Instead, Vico goes on to explain, “your whole committee, like a university of scholars, has favored me with a reply in the open pages of your journal.” In this way, says Vico, “you have made me worthy in a way to stand beside you as an equal, though I certainly am not, have never dared, and could never dare to lay claim to such a status.”56 Evidently, Vico is highly conscious of the public quality of this exchange, anxious on account of both the dangers and the possibilities it presents. The publicity of these opinions affects the exchange in a number of ways. The Giornale elides the public it imagines for itself with the public reading Vico’s De antiquissima sapientia and consequently criticizes Vico for being more obscure than is desirable. Vico counters that his was a word to the wise: Better to be laconic than verbose (although, in his letter to Zeno, Vico said that Trevisani would be an ideal reader of the De antiquissima sapientia because the man had published a book written in a manner fit, as Vico puts it, for the understanding of women and of the court).57 Vico is, in essence, imagining a public of peers and manages to profess himself honored to be, wrongly he says, numbered among their equals. The Giornale, on the other hand, is in the business of constructing its own public. Having (in a section relating the literary news from Naples for the months January, February, and March 1711) described the uncovering of temple ruins in Herculaneum, the Giornale promises to keep the republic of letters informed of developments. This gesture to a public that is widespread, contemporary, and implicitly future is partly a recognition of the audience that the Giornale has and partly a suggestion of what kind of audience it ought to have. That the first notice of Vico’s “unearthing” of an ancient Italic wisdom appears in a periodical that announces the first news of archeological finds around Vesuvius is 56 Vico, 57 Vico,

1712 Risposta, 145. 1712 Risposta, 152; Vico, Epistole, 84.

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a rather pleasant irony—made possible, moreover, by the way that the Giornale presented intellectual news. This public display of intellectual intimacy between parties partly known and partly unknown to each other also exhibits elements of tension. Vico had been offended by the criticisms of the Giornale, to which the reviewers responded in their second notice by trying to distinguish more clearly between the person and the opinions of the author, after which Vico is just self-aware enough to confess that he may be a person too sensitive—di cotal natura o feroce o delicata is his rather ironic phrase—for such public dispute. The pretensions of this exchange are sentimental, but they imply that passions are not private, but rather public states of mind—a situation that Hobbes diagnoses with great acuity when he says that “the nature of the passions” consists “in the pleasure men have, or displeasure from the signs of honor and dishonor done unto them.”58 (Hobbes’s insight is, once again, rhetorical in origin; it derives from Hobbes’s redaction of Aristotle’s Rhetoric into a breviary.) In the case of Vico’s public exposure in the Giornale, his emotions are subjected to a kind of blind projection. Precisely because the readers of the periodical are unknown and invisible to him, his anticipation of their interpretation of the Giornale’s representation of him is all the more difficult to calibrate. In addition, the wooden imitation of oral debate in a print medium sustains misprision, delays correction. Vico eventually manages to clarify that at first he had supposed the reviewers to be faulting him for not completing a full survey of the field of metaphysics as such when they called the De antiquissima sapientia an “idea” only, where he later understood that they wished him only to describe completely his own metaphysical system.59 Vico suspects that the equivocation of critica (like the equivocation of idea) is responsible for their disagreement on the question of whether criticism is the art governing the faculty of judgment.60 The interactivity characteristic of dialectic—a quality in the name of which, recall, Socrates is prepared to harangue and humiliate in the Protagoras— is absent here, and Vico resorts in his own responses to impersonating an immediate but fictitious interlocutor of his own in order to raise and 58 Hobbes,

cited in Nancy S. Struever, “Hobbes and Vico on Law: A Rhetorical Gloss,” New Vico Studies 19 (2001): 68. Struever is also glossing Paul Dumouchel’s account of affect. ´ See Paul Dumouchel, Emotions; Essai sur le corps et le social (Paris: Synth´elabo, 1995), 43, 71–2, 92. 59 Vico, 1712 Risposta, 151. 60 Ibid., 163–4.

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deal with objections with greater alacrity.61 The attempt by both parties to formulate clearly the points at issue is both an index of the sincerity of their dialogue and a sign of the technical difficulty imposed by the written medium. The Giornale and Vico himself are equally at pains to say that the dialogue was conducted politely and concluded satisfactorily. In this case, however, asserting the opinion undermines it.62 Correlate to the notion that Vico must police the Giornale’s representation of him during this exchange is the notion that he must represent himself to the Giornale and the public that it brings into being. In representing himself, Vico acts as if the author of the De antiquissima sapientia were another man, a third party. What is more, this is a practice that follows from his accounts of representation and of the self. When Vico speaks of representation in the De antiquissima sapientia, he is not thinking of a pictorial but rather a legal relationship. It is not the relationship between a face and a picture of a face that Vico takes to be designated by representation, but rather the relationship between a client and a lawyer. Descartes and Hobbes clarify what Vico is doing here and how he understands representation. The Neapolitan’s position is an amalgam of the Frenchman’s and the Englishman’s. Descartes had been concerned in his Dioptrique to point out that although resemblance may appear to be one of the dominant modes of semiotic relationship, a closer examination of the faculty of sight will reveal the irony that it may be precisely on account of a lack of resemblance that one thing may represent another efficiently and reliably to the mind.63 Hobbes, by contrast, when he came to discuss representation in Leviathan spoke of it as primarily a relationship between people: One says that a man represents another when he has power of attorney to act for that other.64 Vico’s point of view is an interesting confection of the two, and this synthetic work is nowhere clearer than in his discussion of Roman “civil 61 Vico,

1711 Risposta, 140–2. de’ letterati d’Italia 12 (1712): 417–18; Vico, Vita, 42. 63 Ren´ e Descartes, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology, trans. Paul J. Olscamp (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1965), 89–90. 64 Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.16, in English Works, 3:147–52. Representation is, however, a difficult revision of classical political theory: “At the core of Hobbes’s moral theory is indeed the statement that it is only when I become capable of owning another’s actions as my own that I become a being capable of civic morality; but the zoon politikon, the being naturally civic, must act immediately and in his own person. Rousseau, an ambiguous master within the classical tradition, had insisted that there was no virtue in the mere choice of a representative and that consequently people governed by plenipotentiary representatives of their own choosing were not free.” Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 518–19. 62 Giornale

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skepticism.” Vico wonders, “did the Romans make their solemn declarations with words like videri (seem) and parere (appear) and their oaths with ex animi sui sententia (according to his state of spirit), because they thought that no one was able to represent [praestare] his own mind devoid of affect [affectu vacuum], and because they had a religious awe in judging and swearing, lest, things having been held other than they were, they were perjuring themselves?”65 This thought turns on the verb praestare, the combined effect of which is to suppose a fracture between the self that reports and the self that is reported. Perjury refers usually to willful misrepresentation—simple error in witnessing is not an offense in the eyes of the law—but the caveat “so it seems to be with me” insures against perjury only if nonwillful error in testimony regarding one’s own state of mind is both possible and culpable. Moreover, praestare means most literally “to stand for” but also “to become surety or guarantee for, to be responsible for,” and this Hobbesian inclination of the Latin word is confirmed by Vico’s use of the Italian transliteration in the 1744 Scienza nuova.66 The interest in self-representation is Cartesian in provenance—or better, it is Vico’s engagement with and rejection of Cartesianism that inflects his account of self-representation. Vico’s Malebranchian revision of Descartes’s cogito is justly famous. It speaks directly to Vichian discursive practice in the Giornale exchange. Says Vico of Malebranche, “I wonder why he agrees with Ren´e Descartes’s primary truth, Cogito ergo sum.” Given that Malebranche “recognizes that God creates ideas in me,” Vico reasons that he should say instead quid in me cogitat; ergo est, “something thinks in me; therefore, it exists.”67 Vico’s revision of the Cartesian cogito is part of his general program of asserting the ubiquity of mind. This 65 Vico,

De antiquissima sapientia, 109: “an ideo Romani suas sententias per verba ‘videri,’ ‘parere’ et iuramenta ‘ex animi’ quisque ‘sui sententia’ concipiebant, quia neminem de se animum affectu vacuum praestare posse arbitrabantur, et iudicandi ac iurisiurandi religio erat, ne, rebus aliter se habentibus, peierarent?” (translation modified). On the Latin usage, see Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 8.5. Note that the phrase “animum affectu vacuum” recalls the way in which Aristotle defines the law as a mind free from passions. 66 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §945: “dalla legge di Publilio Filone in poi, con la quale fu dichiarato il popolo romano libero ed assoluto signor dell’imperio, come sopra si e` detto, l’autorit`a del senato fu di tutela; conforme l’approvagione de’ tutori a’ negozi che si trattano da’ pupilli, che sono signori de’ loro patrimoni, si dice ‘auctoritas tutorum.’ La qual autorit`a si prestava dal senato al popolo in essa formola della legge, conceputa innanzi in senato, nella quale, conforme dee prestarsi l’autorit`a da’ tutori a’ pupilli, il senato fusse presente al popolo, presente nelle grandi adunanze, nell’atto presente di comandar essa legge, s’egli volessela comandare; altrimente, l’antiquasse e ‘probaret antiqua,’ ch’`e tanto dire quanto ch’egli dichiaresse che non voleva novit`a.” 67 Vico, De antiquissima sapientia, 111.

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is a philosophical assertion of what appeared earlier as the impersonal character of action. The individual is not self-possessed and, ironically, the individual is brought into a greater focus as its being is alienated into the world through action. As Vico says, immediately after articulating the verum-factum principle at the opening of the De antiquissima sapientia, the human mind is limited, and everything that is not calibrated for the human mind is beyond it. Insofar as this is true, human mind is forced to go about “cogitating” things (cogitare), but not “joining” them (intelligere).68 The difference between cogitare and intelligere here is the difference between being exposed to a variety of stimuli sequentially and beholding them all simultaneously. This is a metaphysical assertion of what will be in the Scienza nuova a political assertion that it is not a theory of institutions of co-presence that is required, but rather a theory of legal and cultural reciprocity. The limitations of the verum-factum—articulated immediately by Vico—underscore the revision of the Cartesian cogito. I do not think; something thinks in me. Just so, human mind quare particeps sit rationis, non compos: Mind participates in reason and does not possess it. Vico does even better in his first Risposta, where he says “I cannot help but notice that Descartes misuses language when he says, ‘I think; hence, I am.’” In the Neapolitan’s opinion the Frenchman ought to have said “I think; therefore, I exist.” Vico’s point is that “had he taken this word in the sense that its learned origin dictates, he would have made a shorter journey when he wishes to reach essence from his existence.” In this way, Vico reasons, the cogito, ergo sum is really equivalent to “I think; therefore, I am here.” Vico then argues that this “here” ought to have led to the supposition that “therefore, there is something that sustains me, which is substance.” Now, “substance carries with it the idea of sustaining, not that of being sustained,” such that “it is on its own account” and “therefore, it is eternal and infinite.” Finally, Vico concludes that “therefore, my essence is God, who maintains my thoughts.”69 Soritic in the extreme (turning as it does the conclusions of previous syllogisms into premises in subsequent syllogisms), this reasoning forces the reader to recognize how opaque introspection really is. Introspection, in Vico’s account, reveals a radical disjuncture between the individual—located 68 Ibid.,

63: “mens . . . humana, quia terminata est, et extra res ceteras omnes, quae ipsa non sunt, rerum duntaxat extrema coactum eat, nunquam omnia colligat; ita ut de rebus cogitare quidem possit, intelligere autem non possit; quare particeps sit rationis, non compos.” 69 Vico, 1711 Risposta, 143.

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precisely in place and time, “here”—and the eternal, infinite substans that holds the individual together. If one witnesses internal events in a way not radically dissimilar from external events, then introspection is simply another form of testimony, unprivileged, and autobiography cannot be radically dissimilar from biography. That is an implication one could also take from Vico’s third-personal life of himself, the Vita. It is the argument of the third part of the essay that the temporal situation established by readers differs in particulars and in degree, but not in kind from the interpretative practice exhibited in discursive exchanges between contemporary interlocutors. Thus, the Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia’s reading of Vico and Vico’s of the Giornale cannot be categorically distinguished from reading that traverses different historical periods. The possibility of response maintained in the present by contemporary interlocutors does generate a capacity to critique that is considerably greater, a means of contradiction that is more responsive than that maintained by texts whose authors are dead, but in the course of any one articulation or response the position of the contemporary interlocutor is essentially identical to that of the noncontemporary interlocutor. In an ongoing dialogue the interlocutor’s utterance is a continually evolving amalgam of memory and imagination, memory of past responses and their construals, imagination of future responses and their ripostes. In this way, the text refuses to become a dead letter and continues to accrete new questions and new answers. Vico is becoming engrossed in precisely the kind of reading that capacitates community. What is most noteworthy is that the Neapolitan finds the same hermeneutic opacity in himself that he finds in others. Selfrepresentation is thus also a form of reading as cultural construal. It is time sensitive, liable to error, open to correction. I am arguing that the upshot of the De antiquissima sapientia is a very powerful critique of the notion that anything in isolation is meaningful. It is a theoretical vindication of community. Crucially, however, this vindication of community requires a renunciation of the assumption that face-to-face interactions are paradigmatic. Vico does not simply demonstrate that a community can be a community even when it does not convene in oral speech interactions. He demonstrates that inquiry into human being as a collective and not merely individual phenomenon can only realize itself fully when it transcends the limits of hic et nunc. What Vico has done in the De antiquissima sapientia is recalibrate the dimensions of debate. In the De coniuratione, plebeian uptake of Gambacorta’s conspiracy must happen immediately if it is to happen at all. It does not. In the De antiquissima

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sapientia, verbal actions from antiquity are alive. Even the most intense public discursive engagement of Vico’s life is only almost as intense as his engagement with the ancients. This shift of attention from speech to writing is significant, for it heralds a deeper shift from zones of immediate antilogical interaction toward the impacted iterations of cultural forms that span vast tracts of space and time. It establishes the conditions of possibility for Vico’s sublimation of rhetoric. It obviates the need to predicate rhetorical reciprocity on the contemporary interaction of orator and auditor. Writer and reader may be contemporary or co-present, but they need not be. Most often, especially in the early modern intellectual world with its equally heavy investments in classical antiquity and transnational communities of inquiry, they are not. Moreover, “writer” and “reader” may be human, but they need not be. All that is required for a phenomenon to become an object of interest for Vico’s sublimated rhetoric is that it be involved somehow in the universal commerce of signs, those things that in knowing one knows more.

5 Toward a Hermeneutic Theory of Law and Culture

Vico’s extension of rhetorical topoi and tactics beyond the narrow confines of the art of persuasion is both a creative reinvention and, to some extent, a rediscovery. Ancient rhetorical thought had at times been attuned to the transdisciplinary potential of rhetorical inquiry. Take, for instance, antiquity’s interest in the basic problem of the relationships among mind, signs, and world that Vico had examined closely in the De antiquissima sapientia of 1710. Vico emphasized what I have called “the semiotic moment” of language, where the mind takes a particular aspect of the world to be indicative of a reality that extends beyond the merely particular. Under such conditions of surprise or shock, a thing can become its own name insofar as the experience of it becomes a point around which similar experiences accrete following the work of ingenium, which classifies like with like. The coming into being of signs is one of the foundational self-creative acts of the mind itself, and this issue of semiosis is a broad problem that appears in a host of guises across the disciplines of antique inquiry. Thus, even as he is attempting to put limits on good language use in his Sophistic Refutations, Aristotle accepts that homonymy—the use of a single name for several things—is a necessity and not a luxury because, as he says, there are more things in the world than there are names for them.1 In turn, Cicero deals with this thought on the relationship between the finitude of language and the infinitude of reality in the centerpiece of his rhetorical theory, the De oratore. There he explains that metaphor is precisely the semiotic phenomenon that explains the homonymy Aristotle had called unavoidable. Because language is outstripped by reality, 1 Aristotle,

Sophistic Refutations, 165a 11–12: “names and a quantity of terms are finite, whereas things are infinite in number; and so the same expression and the single name must necessarily signify a number of things.”

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a single term must be used in different registers to denote similar but actually distinct things. Cicero uses this account to show that far from being some kind of optional addition to language, metaphor “sprang from necessity.”2 It is this aspect of rhetorical theory that Vico appropriates and radicalizes when he argues that not just metaphor but poesia itself is to be understood, in the first instance, as a necessary and not optional response to the poverty of signs possessed by the “primitive” mind. What is more, Vico also concluded that the mind is always primitive to a greater or lesser degree in relation to the evolving complexity of the world. In the Scienza nuova, Vico does distinguish between degrees of “primitiveness” when he speaks of the differences among what he terms the languages of gods, heroes, and men. But he replicates the insights of Aristotle and Cicero when he asserts that there is “no vulgar language”—by which he means no language that possesses divine, heroic, and human dimensions—“so copious that there are not more things than it has words for.”3 Once again, we see in Vico the almost verbatim application of ancient topoi to new investigative initiatives. In this case, however, the essentially rhetorical (because semiotic) insight that Vico reinvents comes to him not only from the heart of ancient rhetoric (Cicero’s De oratore) but also from allied sites of inquiry, namely from Aristotle’s Sophistic Refutations and—in an example that will function as the point of departure for this chapter’s examination of the evolution of rhetorical concepts in Vico’s treatment of law—from the Roman corpus iuris civilis. Rhetoric and the institutions of the law had always shared an intense symbiotic relationship. Thus, it is no surprise to see the Roman jurist Ulpian replicating Aristotle’s understanding of homonymy and Cicero’s account of metaphor for the particular purposes of the law when he is quoted by the Digest of Justinian as saying that “it is implicit in the nature of reality that there are more types of transactions than names for them.”4 If Cicero’s account of metaphor explains 2 Cicero,

De oratore, 3.38.155: Metaphor “sprang from necessity due to the pressure of poverty and deficiency, but it has been subsequently made popular by its agreeable and entertaining quality.” On the poverty of Latin, see also Lucretius, De rerum natura, 1.136–9, Cicero, De finibus, 3.3, and Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 8.3.33. 3 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §446. On the connection between poetic and legal fictions more generally, see Kathy Eden, Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 4 Digest, 19.5.2–4: “2. CELSUS libro octavo digestorum: (nam cum deficient vulgaria atque usitata actionum nomina, praescriptis verbis agendum est); 3. IULIANUS libro quarto decimo digestorum: in quam necesse est confugere, quotiens contractus existent, quorum

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how Aristotle’s phenomenon of homonymy begins, then Ulpian’s use of the term transactions, negotia, goes a long way to showing that Ciceronian metaphor has an essentially pragmatic dimension, for it is in the sphere of legal transaction that a poetic sensitivity to the specificity of terms, and their tense relationship to the more fluid reality they try to contain, is obviously a matter of necessity rather than choice. This sequence of reiterations in Aristotle, Cicero, Ulpian, and Vico is more than simply a series of coincidences. The massive program of jurisprudential research upon which Vico embarked after the publication of his biography of Antonio Carafa in 1716 finds its point of focus in precisely this problem of negotiating the gap between the phenomena of the world and the terms adopted by the mind for the purpose of dealing with those phenomena. Vico’s reception of Roman law’s negotiation of this gap is most visible when, in 1723, he competed for a position in the faculty of law at the University of Naples. He was offered the choice of speaking on one of three legal issues: vindicatio of property, peculium, or actions using prescribed words.5 Vico chose the last of these options, because (as he reports in his Vita) “it was taken from Papinian who of all jurisconsults had the loftiest of faculties, and had to do with the definitions of legal terms, which in jurisprudence is the hardest task to carry out well.”6 Vico chose to speak on the problem of defining legal terms because he had been focusing on precisely this constellation of problems in the sequence of publications that had followed his Sinopsi del diritto universale of 1720: the De universi iuris uno principio et fine uno (1720), the De constantia iurisprudentis (1721), and an appendix of Notae and Dissertationes (1722). The Digest passage on which Vico spoke in 1723 relates that “sometimes it happens that the instituted forms of litigation and the normal actions are inapplicable, and so we cannot find an appropriate basis of action.” In such instances, Papinian goes on, “we may readily resort to actiones in factum.” The Digest clarifies the problem identified by Papinian with texts from Celsus and Julian, together with the passage from Ulpian on names for negotia cited earlier. As Celsus relates, “when the normal and well-used bases of action fail us, suit must be brought praescriptis verbis.” Similarly, Julian notes that praescriptis verbis must be followed “whenever contracts arise whose names were not instituted in civil law.” As Alan Watson’s appellationes nullae iure civili proditae sunt; 4. ULPIANUS libro trigesimo ad Sabinum: Natura enim rerum conditum est, ut plura sint negotia quam vocabula.” 5 All three passages are contained in the Digest: 6.1, 15.1, and 19.5.1. 6 Vico, Vita, 48–50.

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critical edition of the Digest makes clear, “already in the classical period both praetors and jurists began to open the law, by devising exceptional actiones in factum . . . through analogy with the body of civil-law contracts.” As a result, “they came to be called civil-law actiones in factum (or civil-law actions for an indefinite sum), and many generalized rules of liability from contract law were applied to them as well.” As the Watson edition goes on to explain, “in the postclassical period, the actio praescriptis verbis was generalized to refer to this broad category of actions,” and “it takes its name from a (classical) judicial preamble describing the special circumstances leading to the action.” The upshot of this reflection on improvisation was “a move toward a generalized theory of contract, which the classical jurists probably already envisaged.”7 Thus, in order to represent himself and the jurisprudential credentials he had carefully prepared with his publications between 1720 and 1722, Vico chose in the concorso of 1723 to speak on the semiotic problem of the paucity of terms compared to the surfeit of practices as it had been experienced by Roman jurists such as Papinian. He is concerned with the genuinely rhetorical problem of how to tailor words for a very particular occasion, the particularities of which are not fully accounted for in any more general set of precepts. But unlike the most classical speech situations examined by ancient rhetoric, the words tailored in such contracts to these eruptions of novelty into social practice must be weighed not only for their immediate effects, but also for their medium- and long-term consequences. The verbal scrupulosity of the law—which leads to written forms and a whole concomitant arsenal of hermeneutic practices—alters the temporal parameters of the signs that are in use. Antilogy, as the De coniuratione shows, entails the possibility of such unexpected continuations but the contracts, the actiones praescriptis verbis, on which Vico was speaking in 1723, build expectation of such continuations into the formulation of new signs from the very beginning. According to his recollection in the Vita, Vico’s lecture “proceeded immediately to interpret the words of the law one by one, in a style as unusual in such competitions as it was common among the Roman jurisconsults.”8 Having elaborated Papinian’s meaning in this way, Vico “illustrated it by reference to Cujas and showed how it agreed with the definition of the Greek interpreters.” Defending the work of the French jurist Jacques Cujas (1520–1590)—who was much admired by the likes of 7 The

Digest of Justinian, ed. Alan Watson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 2.575n. 8 Vico, Vita, 50, 162.

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Francesco D’Andrea and Pietro Giannone and whose Opera omnia was in the course of publication at Naples in the 1720s—Vico attacked the work of Antoine Favre (1557–1624). Favre had disparaged the interpretations of the Digest text advanced by Accursius (1182–1260), Andrea Alciati (1492–1550), Franc¸ois Hotman (1524–1590), and Cujas himself. As Vico relates it, the lecture was well received so he distributed copies (although, apparently, none have survived). For reasons he does not explain, however, he later withdrew his application for the chair in law on the advice of Domenico Caravita—the son of Vico’s early patron Nicola Caravita and an important figure in the Neapolitan forum.9 Despairing of any further advancement within the university, Vico remained in his position as professor of rhetoric. Writing no longer in Latin, he embarked on a new intellectual project in Italian that would eventually become the Scienza nuova. A professional dead end, this lecture on the Digest is nonetheless very revealing of Vico’s understanding of the law as an institution.10 From Vico’s point of view, what is at stake here is the negotiation that takes place within a legal community that is both cognizant of the verbal rigidity of the sources of law and sensitive to transactions that are not named by the law, but for which it must find remedy. Law registers social innovation by coding it in precise verbal formulations. Rhetoric’s sharp awareness of the relationships between words and actions is in play here, but the domain of forensic rhetoric has been transformed. The community that concerns Vico here is not the speech community that exists in a single place and time within the tribunal populated by orators and auditors who are co-present. Instead, Vico is preoccupied by a scriptural community that exists in a multitude of places and times and can be said to 9 The

autobiography relates that “the next day [Vico] wrote out his lecture just as he had delivered it, and distributed copies [giving] one to Don Domenico Caravita, leading advocate of these tribunals and very worthy son of Don Nicola, for he had been unable to be present.” Vico, Vita, 52. Nicolini was aware of no extant copies of such a text. Fausto Nicolini, “Sulla dispersa lezione di prova preparata dal Vico per il concorso alla cattedra mattutina di diritto civile presso l’universit`a di Napoli,” in Saggi vichiani (Naples: Giannini, 1955). Since then a letter has been located referring to such a text, but no exemplars have been located. In a letter dated 11 October 1728, Vico reports sending to the addressee Angelo Caloger`a a text entitled Recitazion solenne della legge prima del digesto praescriptis verbis for possible publication in the Raccolta d’opuscoli scientifici e filologici. Vico, Epistole, 139–40. 10 The literature on Vico and law is significant. In addition to the work of Giuliano Crif` o detailed below, note especially the articles of Donald Kelley, together with Max Harold Fisch, “Vico on Roman Law,” in Essays in Political Theory Presented to George Sabine, eds. Milton Ridvas Konwitz and Arthur Edward Murphy (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1972), and Struever, “Hobbes and Vico on Law.”

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exist as a community when a text—in this case the Digest—intervenes in the exchange between readers and when readers may also function as writers by adding in some way to the text as they construe it creatively in response to new circumstances. The Digest is paradigmatic, then, of a text that manifestly has multiple authors, and authors of different kinds: jurisconsults like Papinian, Celsus, and Ulpian, but also commentators such as Accursius, Alciati, Cujas, Hotman, and Favre. One of the most remarkable features of Vico’s sublimation of rhetoric is the regularity with which the transposition of very particular rhetorical topoi from one investigative domain to another set the terms of future inquiry in the most profound ways. The capacity of such compact topoi to set the agenda for massive innovations in research is very much in evidence here too, in the case of law. When Vico transposes the handful of sentences he has from Papinian, Celsus, and Ulpian to the massive judicial apparatus at Naples, he confects an understanding of the law as a register of social tension that opens up vast tracts of Roman history and prepares the way both for a vindication of Neapolitan forensic practice and for the theoretical concerns of the Scienza nuova. Vico comes to understand that the semiotic difficulty identified by Papinian, Celsus, and Ulpian is symptomatic of a much deeper tension that organizes understanding of social contestation beyond the strict spatial and temporal limits of the polis and its analogues. As Vico frames it, the law is an institution where past, present, and future achieve a particularly sophisticated form of conflict. The present outstrips the past when cases are brought that do not conform to established protocols, and the future outstrips the present by forcing officers of the court to consider every upheld contract as a form of precedent. The language communities that are brought into being by such compaction and preservation of past, present, and future contestation inform the law courts in which orators and auditors contemporary to Vico operate. Vico, who explicitly considers his work a theorization of Neapolitan forensic practice, takes it upon himself to lay out the political consequences of forensic oratory’s engagement with such a scriptural tradition. As Vico understands it, this engagement is in fact a kind of confrontation between text and speech. In the terms set out in this study, Vico is sublimating rhetoric by taking the law as a very precise record of collisions between the Arendtian polis and the Fischian institution. That is, the immediate reciprocity of orator and auditor in forensic rhetoric is confronted with the complex tissue of precedents past and future that have been or will be incorporated into the law as written signs. The encounter

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between text and speech is, as Vico figures it, an encounter between the arcane (arcanum as certum) and equity (aequitas naturalis as verum). But in Vico’s reading “equity” is not always desirable in the long run and “the arcane” is not an unmitigated evil. The essence of Vico’s position on the sublimated rhetoric achieved through the institutions of the law consists in the following irony: In being at least partially arcane, the law promotes healthy politics. The arcane quality of the script held by the jurisconsults was instrumental, at Naples for example, in generating eloquent articulations of claims for equity.11 Vico explores the dimensions of this irony throughout his oeuvre, and this chapter will focus on tracing the evolution of his ideas in three particular locations: the De ratione of 1709, the Diritto universale of 1720–1722, and the Scienze nuove from 1725 onward.

I. Beyond Forensic Oratory In the De ratione the broad irony that arcane law promotes healthy politics involves arguing that Roman jurisprudence offers up contradictory lessons for those who, in the eighteenth century, would ask how legal institutions can play a critical role in the constitution of a healthy society— which is a question especially pressing for theorists like Vico who live in societies where legal institutions are the most highly developed sites of governance. Vico argues that de facto the Neapolitan courts have reconciled two contradictory lessons from antiquity. First, the arcane quality of the law as a secret possession of the patricians advanced the interests of the res publica as a whole under the Roman republic. Second, the public quality of the law as a vehicle for the expression of natural equity led to the dominance of private over public interests in the Roman principate. Vico advocates a tense coexistence between the law as, on the one hand, an arcane artifact deposited in the present by means of a centurieslong process of scriptural accretion and, on the other, a more traditional rhetorical forum dedicated to direct appeal (based on natural equity) from tongue to ear. He seeks a working partnership between hermeneutics and rhetoric, a partnership of the kind that he demonstrated when he spoke on the meaning of each word in the text from Papinian that he glossed in 1723. In this collision of words written and words spoken, Vico 11 Vico, De ratione, 166: “ubi vero ipsi quoque ad caussas legitimas agendas in forum oratores

descenderent, quia verba ad ius, voluntas ad aequum spectat, in caussis legitimis, quae ex scripto et voluntante constarent, utrique pro suo instituto, iurisconsulti ius, summi oratores aequum defendebant: nam, quia iuris summa sanctitas erat, aequum in iudiciis, nisi summa eloquentia obtineri non poterat.”

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hoped to deepen the foundations of the Neapolitan civitas and thereby guard against the limited temporal horizons that had led to the volatility of city-states both ancient and modern. As we saw in Chapter 3, the De ratione is a general consideration of the state of the arts and sciences at the beginning of the eighteenth century and of how those arts and sciences were taught. But by far the longest section of the De ratione deals with the science of law as understood in Athens, Rome, and Naples. Vico’s discussion of ancient and modern legal practices is not merely a reproduction of his general critique of the querelle des anciens et des modernes on a more finely observed scale. One might suppose that Vico’s critique of Hugo Grotius in the Diritto universale is analogous to his critique of Arnauld and Descartes in the De ratione, for in Vico’s opinion the natural law theories of the former are as abstract as the critical method projects of the latter. But Vico decides in Section XI of the De ratione not to attack any single philosophy of law. Instead, he offers a reading of the history of Roman legal institutions that simultaneously vindicates and criticizes both the priority of civil equity over natural equity in the age of the republic and the priority of natural equity over civil equity in the age of the principate. The historical canvas on which Vico works in Section XI, then, is a triptych: The legal system of the Roman republic stands in opposition to that of the principate, and the legal practice of Vico’s Naples is compared now to the republican, now to the principate mode. Vico’s first question in his 1709 treatment of law asks why it is that “whereas we moderns possess an immense number of books on law, as did the Romans after the promulgation of the Edictum perpetuum, prior to that time the Romans had very few, and the Greeks possessed no works on law.”12 The republican legal mode is, according to this De ratione pr´ecis, a product of the machinations of the patrician order. Vico argues that the patricians used the law as a means by which to establish themselves as the dominant order in the republic over the plebeians and the knights. The patricians, understanding that they had sole authority of the sacred law of the auspices through their control of the religious colleges and offices, managed to link the three kinds of law—sacred, public, and private—in such a way that whoever could not practice all three forms was not permitted to practice any one form. In this way, the patricians turned their monopoly of the sacred law into a monopoly of law generally. In order to consolidate their power, the patricians kept the nature of the 12 Ibid.,

158–9.

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law hidden from the other orders, and in time a system developed in which the authority of the law derived from its secrecy, penury, and severity. That is to say, this system entrenched itself by failing to publicize any written legal code. The republican system as it was first established by the patricians also kept the parts of that secreted code small in number and general in formulation. The patricians kept their grip on legal power by rendering decisions either in strict accordance with the letter of the law (which served, in Vico’s mind, to impress on the populace the sanctity of the law qua arcanum) or by fashioning legal fictions (which enabled judgments to serve the interests of utility or equity without appearing to violate that arcanum). “That body politic is most fortunate, indeed,” says Vico paraphrasing the patrician rationale, “where the rigorous observance of the law binds citizens together like the worship of an unknown god; where communal discipline is maintained with no less impartiality and firmness than in an army, where no soldier is allowed to question an order, his only duty being to await commands alertly and execute them.”13 Authoritarian political power, thus, is based on an extreme form of philology in which the authority of the text is such that it cannot be made public and cannot generate a reliable set of predictions concerning future judgments that are broadly understood. Each determination of the law emerges, as it were, ex nihilo and absolute. Vico argues that this description of the republican legal mode explains why there are no technical books on the law that date from the centuries before Augustus. In stark contrast to the appearance of such books in the principate and to the proliferation of scholastic and humanist commentaries upon those books, the republican age produced no compendia of legal principle—no handbooks of legal technique, no commentaries on statute or case law.14 The restricted and ritual quality of legal formulae in early Rome created, one might say, an oral hermeneutic community heavily dependent on a mnemonic system governing both the appropriate form and appropriate deployment of legal utterance.

13 Ibid.,

162–5: “nam illa respublica beatissima, in qua legum, tanquam ignoti numinis, religio cives teneat. Ita namque disciplina urbana non minori aequabilitate et constantia custoditur, quam militaris: per quam nefas militi caussam imperii requirere, et unae eius partes id alacrem expectare, impigrum exequi.” Vico is surprised that the arcane quality of early Roman jurisprudence is not commented upon by Arnold Clapmeier in his De arcanis rerum publicarum libri sex (Bremen: J. Wesselii, 1605). Vico, De ratione, 178–9. 14 Vico, De ratione, 186–7.

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Vico contends that Athens shared with Rome this discursive silence in jurisprudential matters, but for a different reason. In Greece, legal work was divided between the philosophers, the pragmatics, and the orators. The philosophers (Plato in his Laws for example) concerned themselves with knowledge of legal theory, with inquiry into the nature of justice. The pragmatics were expert in the detail of positive legislation and its history. The orators were skilled in forensic engagement, in the arguing of cases by invoking common sense and not technical legal issues. According to Vico, this division of labor fractures jurisprudential sensibility: The philosophers are content to inquire only into what ought to be without concerning themselves with what is; the pragmatics feel no need to reduce their field to an art, because they argue no cases; and the orators are not compelled to immerse themselves in legal detail, because they argue only those cases which turn on points of equity. In Vico’s rendition of Roman history, the new political order of the principate is first and foremost a new legal order. During the republic, the patricians had used the law to entrench themselves against the plebeians. Under the empire, the emperors used the law to entrench themselves against the patricians and to elide the different orders (not only the plebeians, the knights, and the patricians now, but also the new citizens of the provinces) by means of equality before private law. Under the republic, argues Vico, the citizens of Rome had been familiar with public law and private law had been kept secret. Under the principate, the emperors reversed the situation by rendering the articles of private law well known even as public law became ever more illegible to the public. The emperors promoted equity in legal interpretation in matters of private law by establishing the office of the quaestor and by appointing to that office those well disposed to imperial interests.15 Whereas the arcanum of republican law had, in its own perhaps perverse way, promoted the civil equity of the state, the openness of principate law encouraged, by deliberate imperial design, the natural equity of individuals. The republican system had produced exceptions: utility or equity had, in specific circumstances, demanded that legal fictions be created in order to reconcile facts to laws, and these exceptions were known as privilegia. The principate system did not simply produce but, in point of fact, aimed to produce exceptions to the letter of the law. The rulings of the quaestors in particular cases were termed ius respondendi ex auctoritate principis. The republican system, according to Vico, functioned 15 Ibid.,

168, 174–6.

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in a highly conservative fashion. It discouraged putting the law in writing in the first place, and even after the plebeians succeeded in extracting written commitments from the patricians the system discouraged the practice of absorbing new realities into the fabric of the law by way of judgments that become precedents. In contrast, the principate system attempted to empower the princeps against the patricians by establishing a legal bureaucracy geared to recognizing the claims of ordinary citizens in the form of judicial opinions that would inform remedies handed down by the courts. Vico admitted that there was a certain similarity between the privilegia of the earlier period and the ius respondendi of the later, but denied that they were the same in structural terms on the grounds that the ius respondendi had themselves the force of law where the privilegia had been regarded simply as exceptions rather than precedents. In this way, he argues, law in the principate began to adjust itself to facts, whereas in the republic facts had been adjusted to the law.16 Vico goes on to reason that the Roman emperors were happy to encourage the appearance of continued aristocratic power by appointing predominantly those of noble birth to the office of quaestor, even as they undermined that power by encouraging the quaestors to deliver equitable verdicts. In time, the emperors came to control the meaning of quaestorial interpretations and praetorial injunctions by compiling them into the great concordances of civil law for which Rome became famous. In incorporating fictions as precedents, however, the body of civil law in the principate made itself explicit and thus began to appear as an exhaustive catalogue of precepts. Indeed, the jurists of the Empire did not write decisions in particular cases. They considered questions of law abstractly in a way comparable to appellate judges, discussing general propositions rather than the facts of individual cases. In Vico’s terms, jurisprudence was transformed from a science of the just into an art of equity.17 Although the Empire was extraordinarily large and remarkably long lived, it succumbed to history. As for his former colleagues in the Palatine Academy of Medinaceli, it is important for Vico to impress upon his audience the causes of Roman decline and fall. For Vico, the history of Roman law is a crucial dimension of this story of decline. For his sublimation of rhetoric, that explanation is important because it shows him moving away from a focus on forensic oratory and toward an analysis 16 Ibid., 17 Ibid.,

166–7. 172–3.

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of the way in which signs function in the legal system and have consequences for politics. Although the principate exceeded the republic in its promotion of natural equity and in this sense advanced further the cause of justice per se, for Vico, it promoted natural equity at the expense of civil equity. The emperors promoted private contention in order to solidify not the commonwealth itself, but rather their dominance of the commonwealth. In so doing, Vico reasoned, they dissolved the connections between the philosophy of civil right, the practice of civil right, and the eloquence of natural right that had held the republic together in such dynamic tension between patricians and plebeians. The philosophy of civil right suffered as a result of the proliferation of private law in the public sphere through the judgments of the quaestors and the compendia of the emperors. The creative tension between written arcanum and oral argument based on equity was not sustained, Vico argued, because forensic oratory fell silent as private law became increasingly technical.18 For Vico, the lesson to be learned from Roman decline and fall was that there must be a synthesis of philological and philosophical skill in the administration of a legal apparatus in which public and private law are not strictly separated. This lesson was to be directly applicable to the contemporary Neapolitan situation, because the structures of Roman and Neapolitan law were similar. Vico notes but one way in which contemporary legal practice differed from both the republican and principate modes. Whereas the republic had separated the roles of the jurist and the orator and while the principate had simply replaced the orator with the jurist, Naples was—for Vico—living proof that forensic experts might be both technically erudite and well spoken. Exemplars of this forensic expert are to be found in the highest courts and assemblies of Naples, says Vico, and it is probable that he is making reference to the likes of Francesco D’Andrea and Gaetano Argento. In his lectures on rhetoric, Vico singles out D’Andrea, the leading Neapolitan lawyer of the second half of the seventeenth century for special attention. He describes D’Andrea as having developed a way of speaking in the public sphere comparable to Cicero’s. Because rhetoric is concerned with persuasion, it concentrates on the will. Because the will is concerned only with acting and avoiding, rhetoric is focused on what is to be done. But Vico goes on

18 Ibid.,

172–3. Shortly afterward, in another context, Vico invokes an ancient text on this decline of rhetoric in the courts. Ibid., 174–5. He appears to be citing Quintilian’s De causis corruptae eloquentiae, but that work is lost. In his edition of the Opere, Battistini takes the Neapolitan to be referring to Tacitus’s Dialogus de oratoribus.

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to explain that, although action is always more or less pressing, deliberation will attend not only to particular circumstances but also to general considerations. D’Andrea, he says, mastered both of these requirements. In his Istoria civile del regno di Napoli, Giannone credits D’Andrea with introducing precisely the same mastery of both jurisprudential erudizione and the orare of forensic practice into the Neapolitan courts as Vico.19 Likewise, in his lectures on rhetoric, Vico says that Argento perfected what D’Andrea had begun. In his 1731 epitaph for Argento, he explains himself more fully: Argento was one who was able to speak from general causes in forensic matters of the greatest particularity.20 Vico’s De ratione is to be understood as a speech act directed toward the new Austrian Emperor and to the Emperor’s incarnation in the person of the Neapolitan Viceroy.21 Vico notes in his Vita that the inaugural 19 Giannone,

Istoria civile, 4.418. Many of the leaders of the movement that Vico associates with D’Andrea and Argento have been the subjects of scholarly inquiry. For D’Andrea, see Salvo Mastellone, Francesco D’Andrea, politico e giurista (1648–1698): L’ascesa del ceto civile (Florence: Olschki, 1969). For Valletta, see Vittor Ivo Comparato, Giuseppe Valletta: Un intellettuale napoletano della fine del seicento (Naples: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici, 1970) and Michele Rak, La parte istorica: Storia della filosofia e libertinismo erudito (Naples: Alfredo Guida, 1971). For Giannone, see Giuseppe Ricuperati, L’esperienza civile e religiosa di Pietro Giannone (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, 1970) and Raffaele Ajello, ed., Pietro Giannone e il suo tempo (Naples: Jovene, 1980). 20 Vico, Institutiones oratoriae, 16–23: “at dicendi genus ipse Tullius in forum Romanum, uti in Neapolitanum Franciscum ab Andrea primum intulisse profitetur, quod Caietanus Argensius ad summam usque perfectionem perduxit.” The 1731 epitaph for Argento (cited in Ibid., 443) reads as follows: “I. Genus dicendi ex genere caussas in Neapolitanum primus intulit uti Cicero in Romanum Forum se primo importasse gloriatur tanto praestantius eo quo caussae orantur in specie quantum scientia praestet arti. II. Incendii instar suo ipsius auctu plura depascentis caussas oravit tanto ingenii acumine tanta iuris eruditione doctrina et solertia ut quae distracta extraria aliena videbantur coniuncta intima propriaque probaret unde rara illa et praeclara orationis copia affluebat ut quae in caussis ipse non viderit in immenso iuris oceano neque extare neque adeo esse diceretur.” 21 My attitude toward the use of speech act theory to conceptualize Vico’s intellectual activity is ambivalent. It makes sense to think of Section XI of the De ratione as a speech act. It is much more difficult to conceive of the Scienza nuova in those terms. A question is therefore raised for intellectual historians motivated by speech act theory: Do they not risk assuming that the conditions of possibility for speech acts are themselves historically constant—when, of course, they are not? In 1709 Vico had a very immediate sense of his audience and says so in his Vita. In a letter to Bernardo Maria Giacco (dated 14 July 1720), enclosing a copy of his Sinopsi del diritto universale, Vico notes that the Sinopsi is circulating throughout the city and “has found favor among the most learned men, because the powerful are always generous, while the weak are always jealous.” Vico, Epistole, 86–7. The situation after 1725 is, at least as Vico reads it, radically different. In a letter dated 25 October 1725 (again to Giacco), Vico remains hopeful that the universities of Europe will receive his Scienza nuova (the first edition of which had appeared earlier that year) with interest, because certainly the Neapolitans had rejected it. He laments that in his

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oration of 1708 was to be dedicated to the new Hapsburg Emperor, Charles VI, delivered in the presence of the new Neapolitan Viceroy, Cardinal Grimani, and published for public consumption.22 The illocutionary force of Vico’s description of Roman legal practices is simple enough—exhortation. The intervention advocates the wisdom of local provincial practice to the new cosmopolitan regime. In Vico’s estimation, the discursive practices of D’Andrea and Argento are at once philologically and philosophically sophisticated. This means that for him such speech balances the conservative tendencies of law fetishized purely as letter with the progressive tendencies of law imagined purely as spirit. When Vico says at the conclusion of Section XI that “in our Supreme Court at Naples [the Sacro Consiglio], some lawsuits are decided contrary to provisions of Roman law ex certis causis,” he means the reader to infer that the Neapolitan forum recognizes the way in which the specificities of social transaction outnumber in kind the names and protocols that the body of law recognizes explicitly. As the Romans had exceptional actiones in factum, the Neapolitans arrive at decisions ex certis causis. But the genius of the Neapolitan court, according to Vico, is that although it is willing in this way to depart from the letter of the law in unusual cases, it nevertheless refuses to determine all cases on the basis of natural equity alone. As Vico goes on to say in the next sentence, “in that highest Assembly of this Kingdom, aequitas civilis, i.e. considerations of public interest, are given precedence over grounds of purely ‘natural equity,’” which is to say private interest.23 This balancing of values is, however, the achievement of particular individuals. Vico’s praise of the Neapolitan system is more than merely a description of it. It is a plea (a disguised injunction, humbly imperative) to the new Austrian administration: Consider how you might institutionalize in the Neapolitan constitution the synthesis that the likes of D’Andrea and Argento have achieved. native city the book seems to have gone out into a “desert.” He avoids public places so as to avoid the people to whom he had sent copies, for they do not even mention having received the work. Vico, Epistole, 113. Five years later with the publication of the second edition in 1730, Vico’s prognosis for the book is bleak. He says that he wrote the book to be read by Plato, Varro, and Quintus Mucius Scaevola. Or perhaps, he adds, someone may find the book amidst the ruins of a city that has been dead for a thousand years. Giambattista Vico, La Scienza nuova 1730, eds. Paolo Cristofolini and Manuela Sanna (Naples: Alfredo Guida, 2004), 57 (henceforth, “1730 Scienza nuova”). Is it legitimate, then, to assume that Vico has a purpose after 1725 directly comparable to his purposes prior to 1725? 22 Vico, De ratione, 188–9; Vico, Vita, 36. 23 Vico, De ratione, 194–5.

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On this issue, Vico can be thought of as an advocate for what has come to be described as the Neapolitan ceto civile. Modern scholars use the term ceto civile to identify a group of Neapolitans, many of whom were themselves legal professionals, who—especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—emphasized the role to be played by the rule of law at Naples.24 Thus, Vico stands beside Giannone. For his part, Giannone represents the history of the supreme tribunal at Naples as a rising tide of bureaucratic accretion: “we observe that in the Kingdom of the Normans, and of the Swabians, the Gran Corte was the supreme tribunal,” while “in the Kingdom of the Angevins the Corte del Vicaria held the field.” Later, “in the Kingdom of the Aragonese, the new tribunal of the Sacro Consiglio di S. Chiara obscured the other two,” and “in the Kingdom of the Austrians the Consiglio Collaterale emerged above all the others.”25 What is particularly noteworthy in Giannone’s description of these institutions is how they combine judicial and executive powers in a way that is commensurate with Vico’s injunction that natural equity

24 If Francesco D’Andrea’s Avvertimenti ai nipoti is any indication, however, it may be that the

sociological position of members of this ceto was complex. D’Andrea advises men who, like himself, have gained a substantial living from practicing law at Naples to invest their family fortunes in land and affiliate themselves thereby with the feudal system that in some models is structurally opposed to the statism of the lawyers. Francesco D’Andrea, I ricordi di un avvocato napoletano del seicento, ed. Nino Cortese (Naples: Luigi Lubrano, 1923), 206–8. Perhaps the most provocative statement of Vico’s relationship to Neapolitan legal praxis is Nicola Badaloni’s. In his magisterial investigation into the medicotheoretical background of Vico’s Naples, Badaloni argues that in the Neapolitan context natural philosophy and humanism cannot be thought of as separate, let alone opposed, and that there is a strong connection at Naples between inquiry into nature and inquiry into natural law. Jovis omnia plena is both natural philosophical and civil historical for Vico and his intellectual associates. Badaloni, Introduzione a G. B. Vico, 337–8. Raffaele Ajello has been a principal figure among historians who have examined the ideological and institutional role of law in Neapolitan governance. Several of his works are important: “Legislazione e crisi del diritto comune nel regno di Napoli,” in Studi e ricerche sul settecento (Naples: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici, 1968), Il problema della riforma giudiziaria e legislativa nel regno di Napoli durante la prima met`a del secolo XVIII (Naples: Jovene, 1965), Arcana juris: diritto e politica nel settecento italiano (Naples: Jovene, 1976), and Il collasso di Astrea: Ambiguit`a della storiografia giuridica italiana medievale e moderna (Naples: Jovene, 2002). See also Pier Luigi Rovito, Respublica dei togati: Giuristi e societ`a nella Napoli del seicento (Naples: Jovene, 1981), Salvo Mastellone, Pensiero politico e vita culturale a Napoli nella seconda met`a del seicento (Messina: G. D’Anna, 1965), Vittor Ivo Comparato, Uffici e societ`a a Napoli (1600–47): Aspetti dell’ideologia del magistrato nell’et`a moderna (Florence: Olschki, 1974), and Anna Maria Rao, “The Feudal Question, Judicial Systems and the Enlightenment,” in Naples in the Eighteenth Century: The Birth and Death of a Nation State, ed. Girolamo Imbruglia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 95–117. 25 Giannone, Istoria civile, 3.54.

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ought to be balanced with civil equity.26 For Vico, however, aequitas civilis is more than mere “reason of state” because of the profoundly impersonal formulations that are inscribed into the letter of the law as it is handed down from one generation to the next as text. Vico’s interest in the history of Roman law originates in a desire to buttress his recommendation of legal institutions that are capable of sublimating the results of forensic oratory.

II. Parameters of the Here and Now Between 1720 and 1722 Vico vastly expanded the interests in the history of Roman law that in 1709 had taken up only the eleventh chapter of the De ratione. In a three-volume work that he referred to as the Diritto universale, Vico set out a close reading of the origin and evolution of Roman legal institutions. Almost all scholars agree that, although it is seldom examined by modern readers, this series of texts constitutes a crucial transitional phrase between Vico’s early intellectual interests and his mature work in the Scienze nuove from 1725 onward. Scholars are less certain about the kind of transformation that was taking place in the course of the Diritto universale, but one of the most influential interpretations begins with Vico’s own characterization of the work as a response to a resurgence of ancient skepticism in modern thought.27 This is the skepticism of Carneades, who—as Vico puts it in the De uno—“discussed whether justice human affairs was possible, since he could argue both sides of the case equally well.” According to the Neapolitan, one found precisely this kind of skepticism about the possibility of justice in Machiavelli’s Il principe, Hobbes’s De cive, Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus, and Bayle’s Dictionnaire. In those books, he argues, one can discern the notion that the law is not to be taken at face value and ought instead to be understood as “the collusion of the powerful to dominate the many.”28 26 Giannone,

Istoria civile, 1.25. Thus, during the period of Spanish hegemony from 1503 to 1707, “to satisfy the demand of the local e´ lites for a share in government, the Viceroy was supported by a Consiglio Collaterale. Made up of both nobili di toga and nobili di spada, it became the most important advisory body and the supreme court of justice, competent to settle conflicts of jurisdiction.” Rao, “Feudal Question,” in Naples in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Imbruglia, 95. 27 In recent scholarship, the work that places the greatest emphasis on the Diritto universale and uses it to construct an account of Vico’s overall project is Lilla, G. B. Vico, 8–9, 58ff. 28 Vico, De uno, 31: “quare adhuc Carneadem de iustitia an sit in rebus humanis, aequis momentis in utranque partem dissertare, adhuc Epicurum, Nicolaum Macchiavellum De principe, Thomam Obbesium De cive, Benedictum Spinosam in Theologo politico et nuper Petrum Baylaeum in magno Dictionario gallice conscripto, illa obtrudere vulgo audias:

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The argument defended here is that although Vico buttresses his project with references to early modern intellectual developments, the key to understanding the project that he is undertaking in the Diritto universale lies in a phrase that he uses to denote the characterization of law that he is opposing. Vico is reacting against the notion that “law is to be judged according to its utility in a particular here and now”—ius utilitate aestimari, temporique locoque servire. To Vico’s way of thinking, the kind of skepticism to which he is referring proceeds by unmasking the interests behind ostensibly disinterested articulations of the just. The language of the law—so this argument goes—may be framed in an impersonal way that purports to render justice blind, but in fact the law is nothing more than an expression of the interests of those who have the power to make legal pronouncements. But Vico’s response to this skepticism is not na¨ıvely moralistic. He does not simply say that human beings—even those in positions of power—are capable of speaking sincerely. Instead, he says in effect that the peculiar quality of legal pronouncements is that they outlive the purposes that prompted them. He outflanks skepticism by arguing that even if the powerful speak in the most perfectly bad faith, their utterances can be taken seriously at a later date. As in the De ratione, Vico articulates this defense of the law as a defense of the particular kind of jurisprudential practice that exists—at least in part—at Naples.29 The significance of the point, however, is not contained by that motivation. In fact, Vico’s use of the language of the law in order to critique skepticism is more precisely understood as another stage in his transformation of rhetoric. The parameters of the here and now delineate a domain that is too tightly confined if one wants to investigate the ways in which language makes community possible even in the absence of institutions dedicated to the spoken word. One might suppose that, when Vico describes the Diritto universale as a book that critiques the kind of skepticism that originated in Carneades and that was reborn in many of the most prominent political theorists of the early modern period, he is describing a book that breaks decisively ius utilitate aestimari, temporique locoque servire; imbecillos postulare ius aequum; at ‘in summa fortuna’ ut Tacitus ait, ‘id aequius quod validius.’ Ex quibus colligunt et concludunt metu contineri societatem humanam, et leges esse potentiae consilium, quo imperitae multitudini dominetur.” 29 Vico dedicated the work to the Neapolitan jurist Francesco Ventura (De uno, 21), praised the forensic exemplars Gaetano Argento and Domenico Caravita (De uno, 21; Giambattista Vico, Dissertationes, in Opere giuridiche, ed. Cristofolini, 856—henceforth, “Dissertationes”), and argued that at Naples the civil courts had achieved a praiseworthy synthesis between eloquence and jurisprudence (De uno, 305).

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with the rhetorical tradition. Carneades, after all, is in an important figure in the history of rhetoric. He left no texts to posterity, but he made an indelible impression on the Romans—Cato the Elder, in particular— when as a member of the Athenian embassy to Rome in 155 BCE he gave speeches for and against the concept of justice on consecutive days. Carneades has been credited with inaugurating the rhetorical theory and practice of speaking in utramque partem, on both sides of the case. A Carneadean awareness of the sheer ubiquity of contention—both actual and potential—is certainly a basic rhetorical insight. What Vico is really rejecting when he rejects Carneadean skepticism, however, is not the rhetorical inheritance of speaking in utramque partem but rather the pretence that what is said one day has no relevance to what is said the next. Vico does leave behind a rhetoric that is oriented almost exclusively to the hic et nunc, but he is transposing many of the habits and terms of rhetorical analysis into an examination of a language system—the language system of Roman law as it evolved in the monarchy and early republic—that is for him a quintessentially historical phenomenon. Thus, one finds relatively frequent references to the rhetorical concepts of ingenium, sensus communis, and pathos throughout the Diritto universale.30 More decisively, Vico goes so far as to describe the discipline of rhetoric as something like a substitute for the otherwise nonexistent theory of legal interpretation at Athens; thus, for Vico, Greek rhetoric is a kind of ars iuris. For Vico, the Romans had a much more sophisticated legal sense, and they developed a fully fledged theory of legal interpretation to take over the role played by rhetoric at Athens. Where the Greeks tended to use rhetoric to inform arguments drawing on conceptions of what is naturally equitable from the point of view of private individuals, on Vico’s account, the Romans more often decided legal matters with reference to the interests of the community as a whole. The Roman theory of legal interpretation thus becomes a kind of civil prudence. Nevertheless, it is highly significant that Vico should think of the Roman art of legal interpretation as essentially analogous to Greek rhetoric.31 In his comparison of the Greek and Roman arts of legal interpretation, Vico emphasizes a contrast between the arguments from equity that he believes characterized the former and the arguments from reason of

30 Ingenium

(De uno, 21, 93, 189–91; Giambattista Vico, De constantia iurisprudentis, in Opere giuridiche, ed. Cristofolini, 451–71—henceforth, “De constantia”), sensus communis (De uno, 85, 87; De constantia, 405), and pathos (De constantia, 459). 31 Vico, De uno, 23–9.

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state that characterized the latter. But the shift is also one from institutions in which the spoken word was decisive to one in which theory and practice was directed toward the written word. In this way, it makes sense to describe Vico’s transformation of rhetoric as, in significant ways, a transference of rhetorical competences to hermeneutics. Doubt about the capacity of institutions dedicated to the spoken word to bring into being communities that are immune to the skeptical argument that the powerful might speak about the just in one way and act in another is palpable in the way that Vico discusses the councils, assemblies, and democratic procedures of the ancient world in the Diritto universale. For Vico, the political histories of Athens and Rome are dominated by the clashes and compromises of mass and elite. Describing the ways in which they came together—in peace or in conflict—thus becomes a crucial means of characterizing Athens and Rome as polities.32 In a way that is characteristic of Vico, the gods of antiquity themselves become symbols of different ways in which the community can be said to be deliberating with itself. Experiences of the elite deliberating in council are sublimated into the goddess Minerva; analogous deliberations among the mass become Pallas; and Mercury—as the god of communication—comes to render substantial the assorted predicates deriving from missions between mass and elite undertaken in times of constitutional crisis.33 The “presence” of aristocratic heads of households before the people is a crucial issue for Vico, and he goes so far as to say that originally “the law” itself was the very presence of the fathers in the assemblies, ius fuerat ipsa praesentia patrum in comitiis.34 But instead of being markers of the participatory nature of the early commonwealths, the assemblies in Vico’s analysis are the focal points of an extremely cagey politics of exclusion and inclusion. At Rome, the patricians kept the law from the plebs so that they might worship it as an unknown God (as Vico put it memorably in the De ratione), and the first legal announcements were oracular and poetic in quality so that “the responses of the jurisconsults” would be seen to have come from “the hidden recesses of the law.”35 In the earliest times, before the use of script, the law was expressed in song and the plebs had to be called into assembly “in order to learn the examples [of the law] from the mouths of the patrician order.”36 On this account, however, the 32 Vico,

De constantia, 655, 703. uno, 191; De constantia, 621; Dissertationes, 905–7. 34 Vico, De uno, 157. See also 225 and 245–7. 35 Ibid., 269. 36 Vico, De constantia, 485. 33 De

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assembly was an institution in which the patricians disclosed only what it served them to disclose. If the word plebiscitum could be used to describe these earliest of laws, it could not be applied in the sense that the plebs had passed legislation themselves but only in the sense that the law had been made known to the plebs—plebis scitum.37 This doubt about whether institutions like the assemblies could be places in which citizens might come together in space and time and deliberate in a rhetorical fashion is coupled with an increasing emphasis on writing as the medium through which legal community was fashioned. Thus, perhaps Vico’s most telling assertion in the Diritto universale is the observation that Rome was the great historical entity of antiquity because unlike Sparta it wrote its laws down and unlike Athens it did not rewrite those laws continually. The Roman art of legal interpretation— performing the same function as rhetoric had at Athens, but in a more highly developed way—arose because “at Rome . . . the plebs forced the fathers to write down the Law of the Twelve Tables.” As Vico relates it, Lycurgus had forbidden the writing down of the law at Sparta, while at Athens lawgivers were elected for terms of one year and were in the habit of revising annually “laws that were useless or too strict.”38 The fact that the Romans wrote their laws down but did not rewrite them continually introduced a very particular form of textual community, according to Vico. Instead of the simultaneous presence of mass and elite in the assemblies, there emerged nonsimultaneous communities gathered around the focal point of particular legal stipulations. Most parties to such interpretation—who came after, perhaps long after the legislative act—had not been involved in the promulgation of the law, and so their reconciliation of the language of the law to new circumstances necessarily reflected new imperatives. The quality of Roman legal language that Vico specifies in his comparison of Roman practices to those of Sparta and Athens is the bedrock on which he founds many of the most significant concepts of the Diritto universale. Interpretatio—considered by Vico to be the Roman replacement for Greek rhetoric—is a historical process in which the written remnants of past speech communities are extended so that they can be said to sponsor decisions about new social practices. As Vico puts it in the De uno, “interpreting positive law means finding a more universal 37 Ibid.,

609. Sinopsi del diritto universale, in Opere giuridiche, ed. Cristofolini, 8 (henceforth, “Sinopsi”); De uno, 175, 273–5, 291.

38 Vico,

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reason that subsumes the rationale of the individual law and thus extends the will of the lawgiver and imposes the form of law on completely new situations.”39 From this gloss of interpretation, Vico derives the tension between verum and certum that structures the entirety of the Diritto universale and that refines the earlier combination of verum and factum. In the revised version, particular acts of legal pronouncement are rendered more universal as they are extended (often by means of tropes) to gloss new situations. From here too derives Vico’s notion that certum est pars veri—that “the particular is a part of the true”—by which he means that even the most partisan legalized violence partakes in the development of the true (considered as the impartial and the equitable) insofar as that violence is rendered rhetorically particular qua legal text susceptible to future gloss. This, in turn, explains Vico interpretation of Ulpian’s observation that the law may be harsh but at least it is written, durum est, sed scriptum est; the notion is that legal pronouncements are always potentially redeemable because they are open to future reinterpretation in a way that is highly distinctive.40 The turn to legal interpretation takes Vico far afield from the domain of rhetoric traditionally conceived—and circumscribed, as in Aristotle’s definition of the polis, by the very strict spatial and temporal parameters imposed by orality. The origin in rhetoric remains palpable, however, as does the utility of rhetoric in providing particular devices that allow Vico to analyze the historical dimensions of legal language that exceed the hic et nunc. When in the Diritto universale Vico picks up on Aristotle’s observation that “the law is reason unaffected by desire,” he is transposing the Stagyrite’s insight that the law is a principle of continuity that permits individuals in a democratic, isegoric, and rhetorical community to both rule and be ruled in turn into a new context—that of a textual legal community. Lex as mens affectibus vacua arose, Vico says, in the context of the “free republics” where rhetorical institutions were most fully developed. His explanation of Aristotle’s point is that the law is a linguistic formulation that must be taken on and used by a variety of individuals, such that what remains unrepealed in the law is mind shorn of anything that is the product of individual interest. For Vico, Rome’s legal superiority to Aristotle’s Athens consists in the much more diverse community that it brings into being around the text of the law: The more diverse the 39 Vico,

De uno, 103: “et est universalior ratio, quae, rationem iuris conditi sub se habens, voluntati legislatoris indit in nova facti specie formam iuris.” 40 Ibid., 100.

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community that gathers around the written text (and not the spoken word), the more disinterested and universal the legal stipulation.41 In Vico’s eyes, therefore, the law is an institution that is able to bring a particular kind of community together that extends beyond the parameters of simultaneous presence. But rhetorical institutions are not simply superseded by legal institutions; rhetoric also provides many of the concepts that Vico uses to understand how legal language accretes new members to its transhistorical communities. The clearest example of this is etymology, which plays a particularly conspicuous role in Vico’s reconstruction of early Roman legal history in the Diritto universale. Relaying a point made by Cicero in his Topica, Vico in his Institutiones oratoriae lists notatio—the Latin term for etymology—as one of the many means of finding an argument included in the ars topica.42 He goes on in those lectures to indicate that among the early moderns—and he names Valla, Popma, Martini, and Vossius—etymological inquiry became at once a history and a philosophy of language.43 As he himself uses it in the Diritto universale, etymology becomes a means for collating multiple glosses on particular legal concepts, so that he can not only chart the history of, for example, proprietas but also demonstrate that property holding at Rome was a legal theory and practice that brought the most diverse iterations of Roman society into extremely close interpretative contact—even if they were separated temporally by hundreds of years of intervening history.44

41 Vico,

De uno, 177: “namque ea [respublicae liberae] forma est omnium maxime excogitata, quia praestantis acuminis est intelligere genera rerum, ex quibus leges proprie dictae conciperentur; legem esse ‘mentem affectibus vacuam,’ ut praeclare Aristoteles dixit; et singulos falli posse, ac magnum argumentum veri esse quod idem omnibus videatur.” Aristotle, Politics, 1287a 28. 42 Vico, Institutiones oratoriae, 50, 54. 43 Ibid., 262. 44 Vico, De constantia, 412–22. Vico reconstructs a line of metaphorical extensions of the legal concept of property from the suum (that which properly speaking is owed to one, namely one’s own person) through consumptio (the right of consumption), perceptio (the right of taking into possession), occupatio (the right of enjoying what one possesses), custodia (the right of protecting, safekeeping), to limites (the right of controlling what one possesses), and arrives finally at voluntas (the voluntary act by which one disposes of one’s property in a testament, a will). In his excellent treatment of Vichian etymology, Battistini demonstrates that the Neapolitan borrowed extensively from Vossius, but he also comes to the conclusion that “se per il Voss la voce Latina e` il piu` delle volte la semplice traduzione dell’equivalente termine straniero, per il Vico la parola originaria e` corposa, concreta, di evidente comprensione, sensibile.” Battistini, Degnit`a della retorica, 149. Thus, Vico emphasizes that etymology reveals transhistorical communities within particular nations and not between them. On Vichian etymology, see also Nancy S. Struever, “Fables of Power,” Representations 4 (1983): 108–27.

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The most famous result of Vico’s investigations in the Diritto universale is his revisionist interpretation of the Law of the Twelve Tables. Here too Vico’s innovation is essentially to take a struggle for power—which had traditionally been located in a particular place and time and that had been narrated in the style of rhetorical historiography with its concentration on word and deed—and transform that historically particular struggle into a multitude of diffuse accretions to a tissue of legal statements that comes together only in the course of centuries. The Twelve Tables were reputed to be the ur-text of Roman law, and in the standard version of events—taken from Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Pomponius and repeated until Vico’s intervention in the eighteenth century—they emerged out of a constitutional crisis in the fifth century BCE. The plebs were pushing for the establishing of a written legal code that might guarantee their rights by making them explicit. The patricians—thinking it a challenge to their monopolization of power—resisted the move and managed to delay the process by sending an embassy to Greece with the mission of obtaining copies of the laws of Solon and other Greek codes. A commission of ten men was appointed in 451, charged with setting out Roman law in statute form, and they ratified ten tables; two more tables were added by a second commission of decemviri in 450.45 As it figures in the De ratione, Vico thinks of the Twelve Tables as a discrete compendium of all Roman law, conveniently redacted between the covers of one thin book. In the republic, he imagines, Roman boys would memorize it in order to acculturate themselves. In the Diritto universale, the Twelve Tables is no longer a booklet. There, Vico represents it as a series of fragments pieced together by philologists. By the time of the 1744 Scienza nuova, Vico argues that the Twelve Tables were only “twelve” in the sense that twelve was a poetic locution for “a great many” or “an infinity.” Moreover, they were never “tables” in the sense that they were deliberately tabulated.46 Likewise, Vico slowly but surely whittles away the supposition that the founding document of Roman law owed anything to the Greeks.47 He effaces the role of Hermodorus, the 45 Livy,

History of Rome, 3.31–41; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, 10.55–60; Pomponius, Digest, 1.2.2.4. See Herbert F. Jolowicz, Historical Introduction to the Study of Roman Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 106–11. 46 Vico, De ratione, 184; Vico, De constantia, 706–29; Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §642. 47 In a letter dated 1 July 1736, Niccolo ` Concina reports that he has taken up Vico’s opinion that the Twelve Tables were not brought to Rome from Greece. This has precipitated a debate with a professor of civil jurisprudence at the University and he is writing to Vico to request references that will dispute the story as related by Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. On 16 August 1736, Vico replies, asking Concina to wait for the

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Ephesian who—as Pomponius relates—played a role in drawing up the legal statutes set forth by the decemviri. In the Diritto universale, Vico argues that Hermodorus played a less significant role in the generation of the Twelve Tables than had traditionally been accorded to him—and that had led to the erection of a statue in his honor in the Forum. In the 1725 Scienza nuova, Vico expresses doubts that an individual names Hermodorus ever existed. And in the 1744 Scienza nuova, Hermodorus is erased complete; his name, not even mentioned.48 Vico eviscerates individual moments and individual authors so as to concentrate instead on the way in which particular legal stipulations become nodes onto which can accrete utterances that have become separated from the times, places, and persons in which they originated.49 What this trajectory describes is of a piece with the sublimation of rhetoric that is at the heart of this study. With regard to law, Vico demonstrates a consistently increasing interest in dealing with the effects and not the process of forensic oratory. Vico steps back from the court room and releases himself from more traditional concerns about how lawyers should find and present arguments to defend the interests of their clients or the state. Instead, he becomes concerned with legal institutions as forums for a semiotic discipline that permits language to overcome the limitations of the here and now imposed by the mouth and the ear. The insertion of metaphorical increments between the first legal pronouncements of early Rome and the subsequent incursions of plebeian power publication of a manuscript on which he was working and gives one argument for not believing the story of the Twelve Tables as told by Livy that comes out of his reading of Polybius. This is the argument that is then expressed in the 1744 Scienza nuova at §285. Vico, Epistole, 183–5. The provenance of the Twelve Tables was an issue at this time. Note the controversy entered into after 1728 by Bernardo Tanucci, Guido Grandi, and Giovanni Lami that is discussed by Croce and Nicolini in their Bibliografia vichiana, 1.206–9. Vico is invoked in the early rounds of this debate. Then Vico’s position is attacked directly in Damiano Romano’s Difesa istorica delle leggi greche venute in Roma (Naples: Stamperie di N. Migliaccio, 1736) and again in his subsequent L’origine della giurisprudenza romana (Naples: Roselli, 1744). 48 Vico, De constantia, 716–28; Vico, 1725 Scienza nuova, §§83–4. 49 Kelley argues that “the most striking thing about the legists of the sixteenth century was not their use of Roman law, as has so often been said, but their insistence upon the primacy of native traditions”; in this context, Vico’s assertion that Roman law did not draw on Greek models appears to be the creative extension of an established topos. Donald Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law and History in the French Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 198–9. Some have argued for the radical originality of Vico’s revision of the traditional narrative; see, for example, Michael Steinberg, “The Twelve Tables and Their Origins: An EighteenthCentury Debate,” Journal of the History of Ideas 43 (1982): 380.

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into patrician privilege derives from Vico’s new sublimated rhetorical understanding of forensic oratory, where the assertion of rights partakes of a history that is not experienced by any one generation. The erosion of Hermodorus as a figure in Roman constitutional history is a parallel dissolution of single individuals and single moments into a considerably more complex historical record of speech-become-script. That even the Twelve Tables itself is dissolved such that it becomes a poetic locution gathering together all the legal innovations of the early Roman republic instead of a literal body of laws issued in 451 and 450 is, in Vico’s eyes, a further demonstration of the capacity of legal institutions to make sense of historical processes so complex that no mind that directly experiences the process has any proper conception of it. Rhetoric, in this environment, is no longer a preceptive art of persuasion. Nor is it a theorization of a society’s forms of disputation. Rhetoric instead is the ongoing field of legal inquiry. Construal dominates utterance. The longue dur´ee dominates short-term manipulation. But the longue dur´ee itself is an accretion of construals provoked by crisis. In the Scienza nuova, the law becomes a model for a kind of social system that has potent but unconscious powers of recall, that inscribes the precise terms of discord into the community’s chief public possession—namely, language. Law therefore replaces the institutions of classical rhetoric by guaranteeing a sensitivity to others and their claims over time that replaces the literal co-presence of orator and auditor. Of course, Neapolitan legal institutions retain elements of literal co-presence. They exist in real time. But Vico’s point is that the formal mnemonic commitments of the law make it a domain of simulated co-presence. The orators and auditors of past litigation are not literally present in the tribunal, but the words transacted between them are, and—in a certain manner of speaking—this is a life after death.

III. Legal Hermeneutics and Representation One of the chief concerns of Vico’s sublimation of rhetoric was to overcome the assumption embedded in classical rhetoric that the most essential elements of political analysis could be contained within the narrow confines of the here and now occupied by orators and their auditors. Rhetoric presumed a politics of more or less immediate presence. Representation was the chief mechanism used by modern political theorists of democracy to displace the emphasis of classical republican thinkers on participation in the political process. The politics of representation was a

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modern sublimation of the ancient politics of presence, which had taken the form of direct democracy at Athens and participatory republicanism at Rome. In broad terms, Vico’s sublimation of rhetoric was a dimension of this modern transformation of classical political theory. Yet Vico’s attitude toward “representation” is entirely untypical. The law is a model institution, on Vico’s account, for the variety of ways in which it can make the past present again, can re-present it in the here and now. The majority of modern political theorists of representation are concerned with the problem of making present those who are spatially excluded, whether because they inhabit districts too distant from the capital to participate regularly, because the size of the population makes direct interaction impracticable, or because the majority of the citizens are happy enough to forgo the burden of active participation. Vico, by contrast, is chiefly concerned with representing the past in the present. Text entrenches the past amidst the more often than not presentist cultures of oral interaction, and the textual institutions of the law make the piecemeal aggregation of the past practical. Thus, in Vico, representation functions more along a temporal axis than a spatial one. Vico extrapolates from his own account of the powers of representation embedded in legal institutions to an interest in the power of other cultural sites to represent the past. Through these channels, legal hermeneutics founds a rhetorical anthropology in Vico that analyzes the power of representing the past. In the third, supplementary volume of the Diritto universale, this rhetorical anthropology takes the form of an examination of the limits of heroic personality, and in the Scienza nuova it becomes an interest in the power of what Vico calls the “piazza” to be a public space where the legal dimensions of personality are represented. For Vico, the piazza is a metaphor for the kind of everyday presence with others that is not organized by the self-conscious attention to establishing reciprocity between orators and auditors characteristic of classical rhetorical institutions such as the courts and the assemblies. When Vico turns his legal hermeneutics toward the piazza, he is asking about the power of everyday cultural protocols to represent those qualities of legal personality that have been accreted in the course of centuries—qualities of legal personality that differentiate, for example, patrician from plebeian. Vico’s interest in heroic personality derives from his interest in those legal institutions that represent the past. The law’s capacity to metabolize the new challenges of the present into the body of its existing terms results in a kind of constancy that is highly prized by Vico. This capacity

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to metabolize is directly analogous to the sometimes strong, sometimes weak capacity of individual persons to confront a challenge that is genuinely unprecedented in a way that nonetheless appears in some way characteristic of them. Vico shares this interest with some of his Neapolitan contemporaries. One such example is Pietro Giannone, whose Istoria civile del regno di Napoli was the most controversial work produced by the eighteenth-century Neapolitan jurisprudential school. Giannone’s civil history of Naples is a frank admission that there is no “nation” on which one could predicate a narrative. In the absence of a Neapolitan nation, Giannone wrote a civil history of the state, where state refers to the institutions of power that exist independently of any single ruler. Istoria civile, as Giannone famously defined it, consisted in a history of polizia, a history of institutions that in the case of Naples was fifteen centuries long: “the academies, the tribunals, the magistrates, the jurisconsults, the seignories, the offices, the orders; in short, all that which belongs to the form of its government, both political and temporal and ecclesiastical and spiritual.”50 Radically different in any number of respects, Giannone and Vico nevertheless share a basic assessment of the genius of the Roman legal achievement qua language. What is remarkable about Giannone’s history is the way in which it is able to develop coherent narrative and macronarrative structures. The relationship of Naples to the Roman Church clearly dominates Giannone’s macronarratival and polemical agenda. At the level of narrative, however, it is the law that makes it possible to say something coherent about what has for the most part been an extraordinarily chaotic civil history. In this respect, the tradition of the Roman jurisconsults is exemplary: What is characteristic of the Roman example, says Giannone, is the constancy of its language use, its orazione. In order to explain what he means by this kind of “constancy” in the use of language, Giannone cites the example of Cicero—the oratorical stylist. 50 Giannone, Istoria civile, 1.25. Note, however, that this history did not predicate a coherent

sociological development on the continuity of institutions: “Giannone’s strength, as a historian of jurisdiction, was that he could turn weakness into strength by recounting each event imposed upon Naples by history in terms so vividly particular as to make it autonomous and reduce the powerful outside agent—the popes and emperors, the Norman and Angevin adventurers, the Spaniards with their global empire—to actors in the historical contingency to which they had subjected the regno. It was the obverse of English ancient-constitutionalism; the lack of a Neapolitan constitution was itself ancient and gave the kingdom’s history a meaning of its own, rooted in contingency.” J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. Volume II: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 39–40.

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Echoing the sentiments of Lorenzo Valla and Guillaume Bud´e, Giannone remarks on the striking consistency, l’ugualit`a, of Cicero’s letters. For all of these critics, it is as if one single Cicero rather than “many Ciceros” composed those letters. This remark assumes, of course, that there is something surprising about individual integrity. The remark assumes that what Vico says is distinctive of the Homeric heroes is actually quite common. The remark assumes that just as Achilles, Ulysses, and their kind are profoundly inconsistent (as if the principle of individuality is not far advanced in them), so the same is true of most individuals—with the exception only of the likes of Cicero. If Cicero’s ugualit`a is striking, adds Giannone, more remarkable is the uguale e perfetta expression of the jurisconsults collected in the Pandects, for they lived not as one individual in different moments, nor even as one community in a single age, but rather as a community separated by hundreds of years and united only by a particular linguistic practice.51 Like Giannone, Vico perceives this analogy between constancy of legal discourse and constancy of personal style, character, but his faith in the capacity of individuals to be constant is even weaker than Giannone’s. Vico’s sublimation of rhetoric is in part an argument about scale. The here and now of a community at one place and time is too limited a stage on which to encompass adequately the forms of semiosis that are at work there. If that is true for Vico, then he ought to be even more skeptical of the capacity for integrity possessed by the extremely limited hic et nunc that is an individual person—and so he is. In the Notae and Dissertationes of 1722, Vico begins to explore the theme of the inconstancy of persons who are, for the most part, constitutionally incapable of reliably representing the sum of their past selves in the present. In the first two volumes (the De uno and the De constantia), Vico’s characterization of the heroic mind had been generous. He ascribed an open heart and a benevolent nature to the patrician. In the fourth dissertation appended to the Diritto universale, however, Vico wonders whether such a characterization is not at odds with the literature of antiquity. Looking at the heroes and gods of the Iliad and the Odyssey, Vico is struck by how they can be greatly disturbed at one moment and quite calm at the next, struck by how the simplest speech or even a single word can effect an emotional reversal, struck also by the similarity between the greatest figures of ancient literature and the 51 Giannone,

Istoria civile, 1.66–7: “egli e` veramente cosa degna d’ammirazione che l’eleganza del dire sia in tutti cos´ı uguale e perfetta, ancorch´e non fiorissero in un tempo medesimo, ma distanti per secoli interi.”

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children of today, who have minds so weak and hold opinions so lightly.52 Vico is arguing that the Homeric heroes are made inconsistent by time. Overwhelmed by circumstance, they are written upon—imprinted. Yet Achilles and Ulysses are for Vico not so much characters as signs. As signs invented, recalled, and construed in Homeric poetic practice, they exhibit extraordinary powers of continuity over time and through space. As persons Achilles and Ulysses are fickle; as signs they endure. Once again, Vico’s sublimation of rhetoric is both precise and radical: The constancy one cannot expect from heroic personalities as individuals is found in the afterlife of those personalities as signs. What makes the emotional state of the hero and the child at once intense and changeable is impressionability: What is felt is felt strongly even if fleetingly. Vico goes on in the fourth dissertation to describe the heroic mind as difficult, frail, and slow. Achilles stands aloof from the Greeks for so long, and yet rescues them at the decisive moment. Ulysses one moment is overcome by the telling of his sorrowful travels and the next is happy to feast merrily. To Vico, Ulysses seems dull in deliberating, for he hesitates to make simple decisions, and he seems to discourse with himself as with a stranger. The heroic conception of self, Vico concludes, is dim and as yet undifferentiated. The heroic locutions denoting mental events are curious. Homer says intellexit sacrum robur Antinoi, the venerable force of Antinous understood, and allocuta est vis sacra Telemachi, the inner power of Telemachus spoke, as if the first persons were in fact some supernatural third persons. Homer refers not to prudence and fortitude, but to prudences and fortitudes because, so Vico argues, he conceives always of just so many discrete acts and never of a faculty per se or a habit per se.53 Heroic interpretative capacity is scrupulous. At first, scrupulous meant “virtuous” for Vico; only later did it denote “narrow-minded,” where narrow-minded joins both the ritualistic and the punctilious.54 In the Notae and Dissertationes, this narrow-mindedness is explained as incapacity

52 Vico,

Dissertationes, 860–1: “quid autem quod cum heroes, tum dii, quum maxime commoti sunt, alterius levi oratione unove dicto sedantur, et contrarium induunt animum, nisi sint tanquam pueri, qui infirmas gerunt mentes, et leviori quam foeminae sunt sententia? . . . Contra autem, Achilles nulla ratione diu induci potest ut iram leniat et graecis, ad naves de summa rerum periclitantibus, fatale ferat auxilium: quae summa difficultas nunc proprie diceretur rusticorum.” 53 The argument resembles a point made in Aristotle, De anima, 404a–b. 54 Vico, De constantia, 674–5; Ulysses is the heroic character for scrupulosit` a in the 1744 Scienza nuova, §38.

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rather than sagacity. Adjudication is most often severe in heroic jurisprudence not because the heroes are sadists, but because they are unable to value reasons that are overly acute. They are unable to evaluate oversubtle reasons because they are incapable of perceiving them. Vico says that heroic adjudication is capable of weighing reasons, but not counting them. Such comparing by means of weighing lacks discernment. There is no sound protocol of measurement either, for in the first instance weighing permits only a topical differentiation of the more and the less, the heavier and the lighter. Only subsequently is it possible to enumerate units of quantity, mass, and the like. Vico’s revision of heroic personality in the course of the Diritto universale is a continuation of a line of thinking that had begun with the criticism of the Cartesian cogito in the De antiquissima sapientia a decade earlier. Individuals are not present to themselves in anything that remotely resembles an immediate way, and, for Vico, personality must be understood as a very complex process of representing past actions that have been licenced by the self. Representing past actions in a way that responds accurately to the very specific circumstances of the here and now is an extraordinarily complex cognitive activity. No single human mind is capable of recalling all pertinent experience into the present, and, for Vico, the vast majority of human minds should be thought of as generally incapable in this matter. But what is extremely difficult or impossible for individuals is, in Vico’s opinion, more possible for institutions. For this reason, Vico predicates the structural integrity of heroic personalities—considered as signs, or as he terms them maschere, “masks”—on institutions and not individuals. Through its confrontation of text and spoken word, the law had enveloped individuals who were immediately present one to another in a series of social categories and relationships, the history of which was immeasurably more impacted than they were themselves, considered as individuals. In the Scienza nuova, Vico returns what he has gleaned from legal hermeneutics to a more conventional rhetorical domain, the piazza. Nevertheless, Vico’s perspective on the tightly bound hic et nunc of the piazza is a sublimated rhetorical perspective because he sees the everyday space of the piazza as a site for the performance and glacial evolution of the most basic legal categories. This concern to map the longue dur´ee of legal history onto the quotidian space of the piazza is clearest in the corollary appended to Book IV of the Scienza nuova, where Vico compares the history of Roman law to a serious poem. He says that the marketplace (piazza) is naturally what the stage is artificially, so that “there appeared in the marketplace as

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many masks as there were persons.”55 A person here is not simply any human being; it is the human being who is recognized by the community in which he lives as a person of gravity. Thus, persona does not derive from personare, but from personari: It was not in making oneself heard that one became a personage, but rather in wearing the pelts of animals as a hero.56 “All ancient Roman law,” says Vico, “was a serious poem, represented by the Romans in the forum,” but ironically in order to maintain an equation between the letter of the law and the world of facts, the conservative interpreters of the law were forced to introduce a whole range of fictions—“so many empty masks without subjects.” The letter of the law at any one time did not anticipate the extraordinary range of actions and dilemmas that society would produce over time.57 To this point, the 1730 and 1744 versions of the corollary are essentially the same, but the 1744 edition inserts six additional paragraphs that reflect further on the kind of publicity established by the claim that “all ancient Roman law was a serious poem, represented by the Romans in the forum.”58 As Vico had said in 1730, “finally with the coming of the human times of the popular commonwealths, the intellect was brought into play in the great assemblies [grandi adunanze] and universal legal concepts abstracted by the intellect [le ragioni dall’intelletto astratte, ed universali] were thenceforward said to have their being in the understanding of the law—consistere in intellectu juris.”59 This observation is repeated in 1744, but there the passage introduces a series of further reflections. Vico conceives of the “great assemblies” as venues where intellects abstracted and specified the law in attempting to mediate between letter and fact by way of retrospecting original intent. As he explains, “universal legal concepts abstracted by the intellect” were concerned “with the intention 55 Vico,

1744 Scienza nuova, §1033: “si portarono in piazza tante maschere quante son le persone, ch´e ‘persona’ non altro propiamente vuol dire che ‘maschera.’” 56 Ibid., §1034: “perch´ e ‘persona’ non dev’essere stata detta da ‘personare,’ che significa ‘risuonar dappertutto’ . . . ma dev’esser venuto da ‘personari,’ il qual verbo congetturiamo aver significato ‘vestir pelli di fiere’ . . . , e ci e` rimasto il verbo compagno ‘opsonari,’ che dovette dapprima signficare ‘cibarsi di carne selvaggine cacciate,’ che dovetter essere le prime mense opime, qual’appunto de’ suoi eroi le descrive Virgilio.” 57 Ibid., §§1036–37: “tutte le finzioni dell’antica giurisprudenza furono verit` a mascherate; e le formole con le quali parlavan le leggi, per le loro circoscritte misure di tante e tali ` n´e meno, n´e alter—si dissero ‘carmina,’ come sopra udimmo dirsi da parole—n´e piu, Livio quella che dettava la pena contro di Orazio.” 58 Ibid., §§1039–44. 59 Vico, 1730 Scienza nuova, 348; likewise Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §1038. With regard to the phrase consistere in intellectu iuris, compare what Papinian says at Digest, 5.3.50. The connection is more explicit at Vico, 1725 Scienza nuova, §193.

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which the lawmaker has expressed in his law (this intention being called ius), an intention which was that of the citizens brought into agreement upon an idea of a common rational utility.”60 The sequence charted here from individuals to assemblies to the law as an institution that exists in historical time is a very precise sublimation of the republican instincts that displaced interest in individuals into interest in communities. That the individual only flourishes in community with others is a republican presupposition. In Vico, it becomes the stipulation that communities only flourish if they possess institutions—such as the law—that bring them into contact with themselves over long periods of time, periods that are measured in centuries. Now, the “common rational utility,” the comune ragionevole utilit`a, brought into focus by such institutions is a very particular achievement. What Vico is saying, albeit in a very condensed form, is that, in the popular assemblies, the Romans resolved (for a time) the dilemma posed by the different imperatives of civil and natural equity that, as we saw, Vico took to be the central problem of the history of Roman law as he had diagnosed it in 1709. In 1744, he defines civilis aequitas, civil equity, in the following manner: “golden is the definition which Ulpian assigns to civil equity: ‘a kind of probable judgment, not naturally known to all men (as natural equity is) ‘but to those few who, being eminently endowed with prudence, experience, or learning, have come to know what things are necessary for the conservation of human society.’”61 Just how few these “few” really are is a crucial issue, and it is here that Vico’s attitude toward democracy must be situated. As Vico goes on to explain later in the Scienza nuova, in this respect “the heroic senates [in all societies] were naturally wise, and above them all the Roman senate was most wise both in the times of aristocratic liberty, when the plebs was permitted no voice in public institutions, and in the times of popular liberty, so long as the people were guided by the senate in public affairs, which is to say down to the times of the Gracchi.”62 60 Vico,

1744 Scienza nuova, §1038: “il qual intelletto e` della volont`a che ’l legislatore ha spiegato nella sua legge (la qual volont`a si appella ‘ius’), che fu la volont`a de’ cittadini uniformati in un’idea d’una comune ragionevole utilit`a.” 61 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §320. Vico’s usage of Ulpian here has a complex history, for ` “Ulpiano e Vico: Diritto romano e ragion di stato,” in Sodalitas: which see Giuliano Crifo, Scritti in onore di Antonio Guarino, eds. Vincenzo Giuffr`e and Antonio Guarino (Naples: Jovene, 1984). 62 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §949: “della quale furono naturalmente sappienti i senati eroici, e sopra tutti fu il romano, sappientissimo ne’ tempi della libert`a cos`ı aristocratica, ne’ quali la plebe era affatto esclusa di trattar cose pubbliche, come della popolare, per tutto

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Now, when Vico describes aequitas naturalis, natural equity, as the disaggregation of public interest into the disparate private interests of individual citizens, and as the sense of “the smallest details which may bring their private utilities into equality with those of others,” and as “the only reason of which the multitude are capable,” he is implicitly arguing that public institutions promote the development of an understanding of public interest understood as common rational utility. He implies that this public interest is more than merely some collation of private interests, that in the process of legal hermeneutic practice a conception of the public interest emerges that is distinct from the calculus of private pleasures and pains. But Vico is far from convinced that direct democracy is the best institutional means to produce such an appreciation of the public interest. He believes that evolution from popular commonwealths to monarchical commonwealths is a law of history. This belief leads him to the conclusion that democratic public institutions cannot be relied upon in the long term to produce conceptions of the public interest that are distinct from the calculus of pleasure and pain.63 Faction (and civil war) is a result of failure to produce such conceptions consistently. The monarch—or in the Neapolitan context, the monarch’s representative, which for Vico is not so much the office of the Viceroy as it is the institution of the Sacro Consiglio—is forced to assume the role of vox populi because the people cannot speak for itself. But if, on the one hand, this looks like a negative judgment of the capacity of the populace at large to engage in debate about public interest as a whole, it can also, on the other hand, be read as a negative judgment on the capacity of certain historical institutions to provide spaces of appearance for co-presence. If Aristotle had said that the total number of people that a single orator can address at any one time is the maximum number of citizens in a healthy polis, then Vico’s is a rejoinder that any quorum that is limited by the il tempo che ’l popolo nelle pubbliche faccende si fece regolar dal senato, che fu fin a’ tempi de’ Gracchi.” 63 Ibid., §1008: “this natural royal law is conceived under this natural formula of eternal utility,” namely that “since in the free commonwealths all look out for their own private interests, into the service of which they press their public arms at the risk of ruin to their nations, to preserve the latter from destruction a single man must arise, as Augustus did at Rome, and take all public concerns by force of arms into his own hands, leaving his subjects free to look after their private affairs and after just so much public business, and of just such kinds, as the monarch may entrust to them. Thus are the people saved when they would otherwise rush to their own destruction.” The political relationship imagined here between citizen and ruler is very particular: “as the citizens have become aliens in their own nations, it becomes necessary for the monarchs to sustain and represent the latter in their own persons.”

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boundaries of the here and now is too limited to draw on all the sources that must be drawn on in order to make an informed and genuinely democratic decision. On this account, a genuine democracy would be one in which all those who would be affected by a decision would be able to vote for or against it. Because the effects of decisions are so historically diffused, however, such a democracy is necessarily impossible. As such, other means must be found to give the future a say in the present. The law, which is forever amendable, is one such institution.64 If it is impossible to articulate the public interest through the apparatus of popular assemblies and if the public interest must instead be articulated by those who are privy to the aequitas civilis, then it is better to institutionalize a language community that is beholden to its own language use. This is preferable, implies Vico, to the rule of a monarch whose language use may be purely arcane and arbitrary. If the wisdom of the many cannot be institutionalized in a public that is present in one place and time, one may read him as saying, then institutionalize that wisdom in a public that subsists in the language of the law through millennia. These broad conclusions about Vico’s modification of democratic theory are borne out in the details of his discussions of Roman representative institutions. Vico notes that Roman institutions included the comitia curiata and the comitia tributa. The comitia curiata was the assembly of patricians and the name curiata derived, according to Vico, from quir (spear), which had given rise to the word quirites for the patricians, for only they were permitted to bear arms.65 The comitia tributa was the assembly of plebeians, and the name tributa derived from tribus (tribe), which in turn came from tributum (tribute), for most often the tribes of the plebeians met only in order to receive demands for contributions to the treasury.66 The treasury itself was an institution that betrays a deeply ironic set of movements between private and public. Vico describes this as the most difficult research that he has done into the origin of Roman institutions.67 As he narrates it, in the generations after the expulsion of 64 Aristotle,

Politics, 1326a–b: “experience also shows that it is difficult and perhaps impossible for a state with too large a population to have good legal government . . . Law is a form of order; but an excessively large number cannot participate in order . . . The best limiting principle for a state is the largest expansion of the population with a view to self-sufficiency that can be taken in at one view.” Compare also 1276a 19ff. 65 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §624. 66 Ibid., §625. 67 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §622. Vico’s research may have been painstaking, but it is not very reliable. Nicolini unravels the many errors Vico makes in his history of the Roman treasury, yet he concludes that Vico’s main contention stands. See Fausto Nicolini,

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Tarquinius Superbus, the senate had required the plebeians to pay tax not to the nobles privately as they had formerly done, but to a centralized public treasury. Thenceforth, the public treasury would finance the costs of war. Centralization of the treasury, however, precipitated over time a rationalization of the rubric for calculating contributions. The upshot of these fiscal reforms was the breaking of the binary class distinction between plebeians and patricians, for the spectrum of wealth from poor to rich was now divided into three: senators, knights, and plebeians. With the unity of the spectrum of wealth came a single assembly in which the Roman people as a whole might be said to gather, the comitia centuriata or assembly by hundreds, although the comitia curiata and comitia tributa continued to exist.68 Once again, it is irony that drives civic development. Vico is consistently attentive to the way in which private law founds public law, for the boundary of citizenship (and therefore access to the rule of private law) is determinant in the history of the Roman constitution, but his gloss of the public domain established by the comitia tributa and its plebiscites is nonetheless deflationary. Plebiscite, according to Vico’s etymology, means “made known to the people” rather than “promulgated by the people.”69 Similarly, Vico has it that lex (law) comes from illex (oak). From that he intuits that the law meant “a collection of citizens, or the public parliament.” That is to say, “the presence of the people was the lex” because from the holm oak acorns fell and, feeding on the acorns, swine—namely, the popolus—congregated.70 But Vico’s pessimism about the capacity of the Roman popolus to manifest itself in place and time is not dismissive, but rather anxious. Vico conceives of representation in terms of a legal relationship. Consider Commento storico alla seconda Scienza nuova (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1949), 1.271–3. 68 Of the five sources of law at Rome during the republic (statutes, plebiscites, opinions of pontiffs or prudentes, edicts of magistrates, and custom), the first were resolutions of the comitia centuriata whereas the second were promulgated by the comitia tributa. The Hortensian law of 287 BCE recognized the equal status of statutes and plebiscites. As Fisch calculates them, approximately 800 leges (statutes and plebiscites combined) survive. Of these the preponderance appears to have been plebiscites, while the vast majority (770 of the 800) were matters of public law. Significantly, all 30 of the leges on private law are plebiscites. Fisch, “Vico on Roman Law,” 78. 69 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §627. Robert Morstein-Marx suggests something comparable when he says that the public domain of the conditiones in republican Rome co-opted popular support for the Senate-oriented, patrician establishment. See his Mass Oratory and Political Power. 70 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §240: “‘lex’, che dapprima dovett’essere ‘raccolta di ghiande’, da cui crediamo detta ‘ilex’, quasi ‘illex’, l’elce . . . , perch´e l’elce produce la ghianda, alla quale s’uniscono i porci.”

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Vico’s gloss of the relationship between senatus and popolus in the wake of the constitutional reform of Q. Publilius Philo, who stipulated in 339 BCE that decisions of the plebeian assembly, plebiscita, were to be binding on the whole people. Vico argues that authority here is a “tutorial authority.” It is comparable to the authority that guardians have over wards: Approval for transactions is given by the guardians, but the wards remain masters of their patrimonies. But note the reversal of the representative relationship. At first it is the Senate that has a tutorial authority over the Roman people. Then this tutorial authority is conferred, si prestava by the senate on the people, just as the authority of the guardian must be conferred, prestarsi on the ward. Vico transmutes this tutorial authority into a form of presence. He repeats the word presente three times, and he means here what I mean by the word co-presence, which denotes “presence of multiple parties each to each other.” Vico’s repetition of presente is nervous, and the issue is simultaneously political and historical: If the senate is not present in the people, present in the popular assembly, present in the act of decreeing the law (should the popular assembly decide to decree it), then the senate will invalidate the innovations of the plebeians.71 Invalidating here is described as “antiquating”: Unless the senate is “present,” they may antiquate the plebiscite, l’antiquasse. Vico’s use of the verb in a transitive sense is exquisitely poetic, and it lays down a properly political value. The tension between certum and verum is a tension between patrician and plebeian that turns on the difference between conservation and innovation. I would add that tradition is the battlefield, because tradition denotes the process of “construing” and “refusing to construe.” This is the core of Vico’s sublimation of rhetoric. The epicenter is located at the intersection of institution in its spatial and temporal senses. Vico insists that the senate be presente al popolo. By presente, he means present in the same space of appearance, because Vico believes it imperative that the patricians and the plebeians witness each other reciprocally. But presente means also “simultaneous.” At issue is whether the patricians 71 Ibid.,

§945: “dalla legge di Publilio Filone in poi, con la quale fu dichiarato il popolo romano libero ed assoluto signor dell’imperio, come sopra si e` detto, l’autorit`a del senato fu di tutela; conforme l’approvagione de’ tutori a’ negozi che si trattano da’ pupilli, che sono signori de’ loro patrimoni, si dice ‘auctoritas tutorum.’ La qual autorit`a si prestava dal senato al popolo in essa formola della legge, conceputa innanzi in senato, nella quale, conforme dee prestarsi l’autorit`a da’ tutori a’ pupilli, il senato fusse presente al popolo, presente nelle grandi adunanze, nell’atto presente di comandar essa legge, s’egli volessela comandare; altrimente, l’antiquasse e ‘probaret antiqua,’ ch’`e tanto dire quanto ch’egli dichiarasse che non voleva novit`a.”

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and the plebeians can license the same legal innovation, whether they can undertake the same action, whether they have the same sense of past, present, and future. Yet the insistence on spatial co-presence is being occluded by the time of the Scienza nuova. Vico had turned away from the legislative assembly as a means by which a people could live together in a state of reciprocity. Perhaps this was a loss of faith. More probably it was a question of what was more urgent, a theory of legislative reciprocity or a theory of judicial and cultural reciprocity. Vico’s work is a theory of judicial and cultural reciprocity—the Twelve Tables and Homer, respectively. Where the Twelve Tables had made disaggregated reciprocity possible for the few, Homer as a rhetorical institution made such reciprocity available to the many. Crucial, however, to the transformation of rhetorical inquiry was the move from co-presence in place and time to the sublimated co-presence of acting and being acted upon in the longue dur´ee. I prefer the term co-presence to presence, because it renders explicit the sense in which any congregation of political agents necessarily involves multiple relationships extending in multiple directions. Moreover, co-presence signifies a sufficiency of presence, a quorum. Classical rhetorical institutions are highly self-conscious about who may speak, when and how. To write a rhetoric for a society without rhetorical institutions is to write for a society that has not institutionalized its conclusions about appropriate speech, or for one that has done so only in an attenuated fashion. What I am terming the “sublimation of rhetoric” is thus a transformation of the paradigm for the discussion of what would be an appropriate quorum, agenda, site, and procedure for discursive negotiation. The transformation of the paradigm consists in counting as “voices” or “votes” a greater range of communicative, semiotic acts. Consumption will become one mode whereby individuals “elect,” and the market will be one institution that takes over the communicative function of the assembly, the tribunal, and the forum. Vico is not an advocate of substituting commerce for politics in this way, but he is engaged in a comparable process of substitution. Vico is, in effect, arguing that construal (which is simultaneously uptake and innovation) counts as a “vote.” The temporal and not spatial domain of the tribunal—that is to say, the law considered as a particular modulation of memory and imagination, rather than a spatial location—will thus become an institution for sublimated rhetoric. If this gloss seems too great an extrapolation from what Vico says explicitly, then consider what the Neapolitan goes on to say in the Scienza nuova. Vico offers a gloss on Plato that goes some way to anticipating

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the classicist Josiah Ober’s opinion that the great Athenian philosophers were in fact products of the very democratic system that they exerted such intellectual energy to denounce. According to Vico, Plato meditates “the highest intelligible ideas of created minds” by reflecting that “in such public assemblies the minds of particular men, each passionately bent on his private utility, are brought together in a dispassionate idea of common utility.”72 Dialectic, which in Plato becomes the weapon of the philosopher-king, begins as the question and answer of the popular assemblies. But just how is private interest sublimated into public interest in such assemblies? Vico does not provide an explicit answer. What he does say is that “men individually [partitamente] are swayed by their private interests but collectively [in comune] they seek justice.”73 He does not elaborate on the distinction between partitamente and in comune. He cites the passage as if it is a well-known article of folk wisdom. In fact, it recalls a passage of his own from the 1725 Scienza nuova: “men can choose to live in justice, a common sense that is confirmed by the common desire men naturally have for laws when they are not moved otherwise by the passion of some self-interest.”74 Law stands here for reciprocity that extends through time. It is the insight provided by Sallust’s Caesar. Whereas Caesar was generous enough to pretend that all bad precedents begin in innocence, however, Vico is here implying that legal reciprocity funds selflessness. Plato’s reduction of the “artificial man” of the Athenian assembly to the philosophical hero “who commands his passions at will” is therefore an abbreviation of the argument that we have here been exploring in detail (and that Kant will develop into an account of disinterested judgment in his Third Critique).75 As Vico contends, Plato’s philosophical hero 72 Vico,

1744 Scienza nuova, §1041: “Platone, dal riflettere che ’n tali ragunanze pubbliche le menti degli uomini particolari, che son appassionate ciascuna del propio utile, si conformavano in un’idea spassionata di comune utilit`a.” See Ober, Political Dissent, Ch. 4. 73 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §1041: “gli uomini partitamente sono portati da’ loro interessi privati, ma in comune voglion giustizia.” 74 Vico, 1725 Scienza nuova, §9: “gli uomini abbiano elezione di vivere con giustizia; il quale comun senso e` comprovato da questo comun desiderio che naturalmente hanno gli ` uomini delle leggi, ove essi non sien tocchi da passione di alcun propio interesse di non volerle.” 75 See Plato, Laws, 792c–d: “the right life ought neither to pursue pleasures nor to shun pains entirely; but it ought to embrace that middle state of cheerfulness (as I termed it a moment ago), which . . . is the very condition of God himself.” See also Plato, Laws, 840c. Compare also Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §515: “above poetic heroism Plato raised his own philosophic heroism, placing the hero above man as well as beast [Republic, 391d]; for

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is like the public assembly that has lifted itself above and beyond interests of a purely private kind by means of dialogue. The assembly recalls experience and scrutinizes it publicly, but its capacities for memory and imagination are clearly outstripped by the institution that exists in the past, present, and future simultaneously on account of its extremely conservative use of language. According to Vico, “the way was thus prepared for the divine definition which Aristotle later gave us of a good law as a will free of passion.”76 Aristotle, Vico goes on to relate, “understood justice as queen of the virtues, seated in the spirit of the hero and commanding all the others.”77 But Vico is not content with these generic observations about the way in which publicity (as reciprocal exchange) functions to sublimate private interest: He insists that each public forum inflects, calibrates publicity in a different manner. Aristotle, Vico says, “had observed legal justice seated in the spirit of the sovereign civil power and dictating prudence in the senate, fortitude in the armies, and temperance at festivals.”78 Moreover, justice is too important in the 1725 formulation to remain unqualified by Vico. The common sense in this instance—“justice, a common sense that is confirmed by the common desire men naturally have for laws when they are not moved otherwise by the passion of some self-interest”—is a tissue of aesthetic responses to proportion.79 Different public forums demand different senses of the equal: “distributive justice [dominates] in the public treasuries and commutative justice for the most part in the forum; the latter employing arithmetical proportion and

the beast is the slave of his passions, while the hero at will commands his passions; and thus the heroic nature is midway between the human and the divine.” 76 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §1042. As indicated earlier, Vico had glossed the phrase in the Diritto universale too. Vico, De uno, 177. Recall also the discussion of Roman civil skepticism from the De antiquissima sapientia: “an ideo Romani suas sententias per verba ‘videri,’ ‘parere’ et iuramenta ‘ex animi’ quisque ‘sui sententia’ concipiebant, quia neminem de se animum affectu vacuum praestare posse arbitrabantur.” See Aristotle, Politics, 1287a 32: “the law is wisdom without desire.” 77 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §1042: “Aristotile poscia divinamente ci lascio ` diffinita la buona legge: che sia una ‘volont`a scevera di passioni,’ quanto e` dire volont`a d’eroe, intese la giustizia regina, la qual siede nell’animo dell’eroe e comanda a tutte l’altre ` See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1129b 27: “justice . . . is perfect Virtue, though virtu.” with a qualification, namely that it is displayed towards others.” 78 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §1042: Aristotle “aveva osservato la giustizia legale (la qual siede nell’animo della civil potest`a sovrana) comandar alla prudenza nel senato, alla fortezza negli eserciti, alla temperanza nelle feste.” 79 Compare Vico’s revision of Grotius’s comments on the Aristotelian distinction between commutative and distributive justice in the Diritto universale. Vico, De uno, 72–81.

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former geometrical.”80 As we saw earlier, heroic adjudication is more or less obtuse. We are now in a position to see clearly that in Vichian inquiry the obtuse takes over as a category of analysis from the arcane. This is a sublimation of intention. Where the arcane had been secretive by design, the obtuse is blank on account of ignorance. But ignorance, it should be understood, is a very potent form of incapacity in Vico: Knowledge is an index of the mind’s capacity for suffering. The geometric proportions of distributive justice are a leap forward in the ability to perceive equality, to “suffer” from that perception. Formerly, as Vico says, “only arithmetic proportion had been understood; wherefore Astraea, heroic justice, was depicted for us with the scales, and in the Law of the Twelve Tables all the punishments . . . reduce either to the double (duplio) if pecuniary and to the like (talio) if corporal.”81 The state’s calculus for retribution is predicated on its judges’ capacity to perceive a diversity of equalities. Investment in reading Vico’s engagement with law closely reveals just how radical his revision of the rhetorical tradition was. Compare Vico’s gloss of law as judgment to Aristotle’s representation of law as legislation. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle had argued that “laws, properly enacted, should themselves define the issue of all cases as far as possible, and leave as little as possible to the discretion of the judges.” Vico has a fundamentally different sense. The life of the law for him is experience, not logic, and so it is a scrupulous attention by the community to the difference between past values and present facts that drives the law’s historical articulation into the future. In Vico’s understanding, law—as either legislation or adjudication—is a vast matrix of discrete and not entirely coherent promises. The meaning of each promise is determined only over time, with effort and painfully. How to reconcile one promise with another is understood one confrontation at a time, if at all. For Vico, the law is the most powerful instrument that a society possesses for representing the community to itself in all its historical complexity. Compare also Aristotle’s rationale. Whereas for Vico the law is a way of confronting the community with itself, for Aristotle legislation should be undertaken by the few, because “it is easier to find one or a few men 80 Vico,

1744 Scienza nuova, §1042: “cos`ı distributiva negli erari, come per lo piu` com` mutativa nel foro, e al commutativa la proporzione aritmetica e la distributiva usare la geometrica.” See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1131b 12, 29. 81 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §1042: “innanzi non si era inteso altro che la sola aritmetica; onde Astrea, la giustizia eroica, ci fu dipinta con la bilancia, e nella legge delle XII Tavole tutte le pene . . . tutte si leggono richiamate a ‘duplio’ quelle in danaio e ‘talio’ l’afflittive del corpo.”

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of good sense, capable of framing laws and pronouncing judgements, than a large number.” The lawgiver is to be entrusted with the power of establishing norms, because the best are necessarily few. Moreover, Aristotle advocates a general perspective. “Legislation,” he says, “is the result of long consideration, whereas judgments are delivered on the spur of the moment, so that it is difficult for the judges properly to decide questions of justice or expediency.” In addition, the long consideration of the legislator is not only a dilation of the present tense of decision, it is also an attention to the future: “what is most important of all is that the judgment of the legislator does not apply to a particular case, but is universal and applies to the future, whereas the member of the public assembly and the dicast have to decide present and definite issues, and in their case love, hate, or personal interest is often involved, so that they are no longer capable of discerning the truth adequately, their judgment being obscured by their own pleasure and pain.”82 Vico must be seen as first accepting the terms of this rhetorical argument and then turning it on its head. He certainly accepts that time is the dimension in which law exists. Moreover, he certainly agrees that length of consideration is paramount. But he parts ways with Aristotle when the Stagyrite says that the lawgiver’s is the best vantage point. The best perspective on eternity, Vico implies, is “the moving now.” Law is phenomenology, a phenomenology of social transactions. It is for Vico a sensory faculty recording the trade of meum with tuum. Insofar as the law does indeed record that trade and make it available for future use, it defeats presentism, oblivion of things past and neglect of things future. Aristotle’s lawgiver can certainly contemplate future legal imperatives, but it is clear to Vico that there will always be fundamental social changes that the lawgiver fails to foresee. Legislating, therefore, is best done from the bench, precisely because it is in the court and not in the assembly that the specificity and subtlety of social change is confronted. To be sure, individual judges in individual cases will make obtuse or corrupt decisions. Nevertheless, to the extent that their pronouncements are expressed and recorded in a language that recognizes the letter together with the spirit of the law and that at the same time at least pays lip service to the public interest impartially understood, the judicial system becomes for Vico a kind of democratic assembly convened through the centuries to replace the democratic assemblies that cannot be convened at any one place and time. 82 Aristotle,

Rhetoric, 1354a–b.

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Vico completes his writings on law by saying that “from all the above we conclude that these principles of metaphysics, logic, and morals issued from the market place of Athens.”83 The law has become for Vico a congeries of “principles of metaphysics, logic, and morals.” Moreover, the true location of the law is not in the spatial institutions of the tribunals. Vico states that it is, instead, located in the sum of the social transactions that it regulates in the piazza. When we understand that piazza means for Vico all those domains in which persons are perceived by other persons, we understand that law has been sublimated into culture itself. Culture, what is more, is self-confrontation. Vico stipulates that the ultimate expression of the representation of the law as poetry in the piazza was Solon’s dictum: “Nosce te ipsum.”84 This means that in the Scienza nuova Vico’s position on jurisprudence has become a hermeneutic theory of culture generally. Clarifying the sense in which that hermeneutic theory is a sublimation of rhetoric is the task of the next chapter.

83 Vico,

1744 Scienza nuova, §1043: “dallo che tutto si conchiude che dalla piazza d’Atene uscirono tali princ`ıpi di metafisica, di logica, di morale.” 84 Ibid., §1043: “e dall’avviso di Solone dato agli ateniesi: ‘Nosce te ipsum” . . . uscirono le repubbliche popolari, dalle repubbliche popolari le leggi, e dalle leggi usc`ı la filosofia.”

6 The New Science of Rhetoric

The Scienza nuova—first published at Naples in 1725 and rewritten considerably in 1730 and 1744—is the reason that Vico has become a major figure in the history of European thought. It is also the work in which Vico’s sublimation of rhetoric is most inconspicuous and yet most fully articulated. The Scienza nuova is an attempt to found a new mode of inquiry that examines the origins of human community. It is an investigation into the conditions of possibility for living in society with others. At base, rhetoric too had been an application of the human mind to the issues raised by living in community with others. Speech is the most discerning medium for the registration of human diversity, because speech is the chief means by which human beings distinguish themselves from others. Persuasion is a process that follows from the collision of inevitable diversity of opinion and the inescapable necessity of making collective decisions that license actions. On the surface, though, the Scienza nuova bears almost no resemblance to the ars rhetorica as one encounters it in Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. I have been arguing that Vico revised rhetoric primarily because he was both deeply committed to its insights and deeply aware of the political incapacity of his own community. Caught in this contradiction, Vichian rhetoric emerged as a new science dedicated to the investigation of living with others in the absence of institutions that guarantee the possibility of open debate. Vico’s genius, the genius of the Scienza nuova, consists in the facility and brilliance with which he was able to reconfigure rhetorical insights such that they might remain revealing and take on new roles even under circumstances profoundly different from the circumstances that generated rhetorical insights in the first place. There are four different sets of ideas that Vico salvages from classical rhetoric and reconfigures in his new science. First, he takes rhetorical 193

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theories of loci communes, common places, and reinvigorates them by showing that topoi are not simply inert stores of folk wisdom that orators deploy in order to co-opt their audiences, but can also be presuppositions or axioms that ground humanistic inquiry. No longer a tactic of the orator, the commonplace is an opinion—atomized and ripped from its original context—that may be placed in new situations where fellow rhetoricians, fellow inquirers extrapolate from the instance to a rule and evaluate the utility of the conjectures that follow. Second, Vico takes rhetoric’s elucidation of the role of figures of speech and thought in persuasion and transforms those figures into an account of how the human mind evolves. Rhetoric’s traditional insistence that public speech must avoid abstraction and must be firmly planted in the imagination—with its sensuous images and semiotic substitutions— becomes in Vico a history of the mind’s oscillations between sensation and intellection. Instead of being an awareness of the needs of audience, rhetoric becomes a set of tools for analyzing human culture in all its self-conscious and unconscious forms. Third, the traditional supposition that Homer represents a series of examples testifying to the original forms of public debate in archaic Greece becomes in Vico a way of understanding semiotic institutions that bring individuals into the same community even though they never meet each other. When Vico argues that Homer is not an individual but rather the sum total of aesthetic judgments and actions produced by an entire people in the course of centuries, he provides a way of understanding how a culture can be demotic and primordially democratic even in the absence of political institutions that establish foundations for a people’s recognition of itself, its power, and its actions in any particular place and time. Fourth, rhetoric’s traditional interest in the simultaneity of past, present, and future as memory, attention, and anticipation becomes in Vico an investigation into the categories that make it possible for a single place and time to be fractured into a series of subcommunities that do not share a set of basic imaginative habits when dealing with issues of temporality. When Vico says that the ages—and the mindsets—of gods, heroes, and men may be contemporary, he provides modern rhetoricians with a means of analyzing the political incapacity of communities in terms of their desynchronization. A society that possesses institutions where citizens gather, debate, decide, and act is a society that synchronizes its members, so that they all share basic points of reference in past, present, and future. In the absence of such institutions, the temporal

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and historical framework of the community dissolves as those common points of reference disappear.

I. From Topoi to Axioms The least famous of the three editions of the Scienza nuova appeared at Naples in 1730. It has never been translated into English and only recently has a modern critical edition of the Italian appeared. For the most part, scholars have overlooked the 1730 edition, presuming that in essence it is no different from the 1744 edition and that the nature of the substantial evolution of Vico’s ideas in the Scienza nuova can be accurately gauged from a comparison of the 1725 and 1744 editions. In fact, there are a host of reasons why it is important to use the 1730 edition to mediate between the other two.1 One particularly revealing aspect of Vico’s project is present in 1730 and absent in both of the other editions. Appended to the 1730 Scienza nuova as part of the third set of Correzioni, miglioramenti, ed aggiunte is what Vico terms a Pratica di questa scienza. Here, Vico claims that the Scienza nuova as it stands is a “contemplative science” lacking the practical quality of those sciences that treat matters dependent on human will, which are called “active.”2 That Vico should have written a short appendix making the case for the utility of his Scienza nuova is not surprising. Equally unsurprising is the fact that the Pratica was a dead end. Vico left no instructions on whether to include or exclude the Pratica from the 1744 edition, which was published shortly after his death. One can imagine the author caught between a desire to convey to his readers the sense that the Scienza nuova was a book one could live with and the recognition that if the literary form of the Scienza nuova itself could not generate an active response in the reader then no amount of pleading on the work’s behalf would secure the kind of reception he desired for it. Everything about the form and content of the Scienza nuova rejects the notion of an easy transition from “theory” to “practice.” On the one hand, the work is a prose poem that must be read in a relentlessly figurative 1 See

Paolo Cristofolini and Manuela Sanna, “Introduzione,” in 1730 Scienza nuova. 1730 Scienza nuova, 511: “ma tutta quest’Opera e` stata finora ragionata, come una mera SCIENZA contemplativa d’INTORNO ALLA COMUNE NATURA DELLE NAZIONI: pero` sembra per quest’istesso mancare di soccorrere alla Prudenza Umana, ond’ella s’adoperi, perch`e le Nazioni, le quali vanno a cadere o non rovinino affatto, o non s’affrettino alla loro rovina; e ‘n conseguenza mancare nella Pratica, qual dee essere di tutte le Scienze, che si ravvolgono dintorno a materie, le quali dipendono dall’umano arbitrio, che tutte si chiamano Attive.”

2 Vico,

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fashion. The reader must constantly assume that Vico is saying something by means of saying something else. The text is not at all allegorical, but no assertion may be taken at face value, and every assertion must be moved around the text so that it comes into contact with every other assertion in the work. On the other hand, the book continues to adhere to the axiom that drove Vico’s works on jurisprudence in the 1720s—namely, that there are always more things in the world than there are names in language. In the Scienza nuova, that axiom becomes a stipulation that the language used to grapple with the world must remain resolutely particularistic. Abstraction is an emaciation of language that robs it of its metaphorical capacity to denote particular phenomena with words that denote things sharing particular likenesses with those phenomena. The Scienza nuova’s almost complete abstention from an abstract analytical vocabulary derives from this attitude toward language and requires readers to place themselves in the position of poets as they reconstitute the text for themselves. The ambivalent attitude toward practice that is embodied in the stillborn Pratica of 1730 is indicative of another aspect of Vico’s sublimation of classical rhetoric. The single most common misunderstanding of rhetoric is that it is an art of persuasion. As techn¯e or ars, rhetoric appears like a body of precepts informing adepts of the means they must use in order to achieve their political ends by way of persuasion rather than naked force. Small wonder, then, that rhetoric is commonly attacked as inherently deceitful and manipulative. Although Aristotle stipulated that “the function of Rhetoric . . . is to deal with things about which we deliberate, but for which we have no systematic rules,” there is also a sense in which rhetoric itself is responsible for the misapprehension that the ars rhetorica is a compendium of rules for speaking in public.3 The manuals that make up the greater part of the rhetorical legacy do often appear to reduce the discipline to a series of precepts. If one read only Vico’s Institutiones oratoriae, one might suppose the stereotype of rhetoric as a set of precepts confirmed. But Vico cannot be counted among those who presume that rhetoric is a body of precepts ready for deployment in public life. Once again, it is ironically the absence of oratorical institutions in eighteenth-century Naples that drives Vico toward a more sophisticated understanding of rhetoric. For Vico, rhetoric is nothing less than the richest body of axioms 3 Aristotle,

Rhetoric, 1357a. Indeed, in his lectures on rhetoric, Vico says that he wants a discipline of rhetoric unencumbered by precepts and replete with examples. Vico, Institutiones oratoriae, 44–5.

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underpinning humanistic inquiry. Throughout his work—from the De coniuratione on—his practice has been to fragment the classical rhetorical corpus and to take up freshly isolated rhetorical topoi and use them as assumptions that organize research into new problems unanticipated, or only dimly imagined, by the authorities of classical rhetoric. In the Scienza nuova, the problem that he wishes to investigate is this: What are the most basic conditions of possibility for human community? As Vico puts it, the purpose is “to show how uncertain, unseemly, defective, or vain are the beginnings of the humanity of the nations.”4 Moreover, this practice of fragmentation that equates to the alchemical sense of the term sublimation—that is, proceeding from solid to gas without passing through a liquid phase—is clearly visible in the first book of the 1744 Scienza nuova. In that book, Vico lays out in highly fragmented form the results of decades of reading classical literature together with its early modern scholars through the medium of rhetoric. He eventually calls these fragments elementi, “elements, axioms,” and they constitute a rich array of lenses through which to perceive and reconceive the conditions of possibility for human community. Vico proposes, then, that we know a thing by its beginnings, or conditions of possibility. Any investigation into humanity must begin with an account of its origin. Thus, Axiom CVI stipulates that “doctrines must take their beginning from that of the matters of which they treat.”5 Vico’s Scienza nuova is not primarily a new science of prehistory in which the obscure meaning of unreliable sources will somehow be clarified or certified. It is a new science of historicity – more precisely, a genealogy of humanity. That word humanity is not, however, at all banal or lightly invoked. What Vico succeeds in underscoring is the extent to which humanity is an achievement, won with difficulty, lost with ease. I shall be arguing that Vichian humanity stands in the end for a particular disposition toward others. This “being with others” does not (or does not yet) stipulate in some abstract sense the equality, or the dignity of others, or their right to existence and respect. Rather, it is a being with others that is coterminous with (because alive to) vulnerability, impingement, trespass. If the Scienza nuova takes as its object of study the cosa civile, if the cosa civile is a genealogy of humanity, and if that humanity consists primarily 4 Vico,

1744 Scienza nuova, §43.

5 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §314: “le dottrine debbono cominciare da quando cominciano

le materie che trattano.” See, on this issue, the gloss of Vico in Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975).

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in recognizing the shadow cast by others, then in what sense is the Scienza nuova a science? Is this an Aristotelian science, a knowing from causes, rather than a recognizably modern form of science? Is this a BaconianGalileian science consisting in extortions of nature and singular (not controlled, or mass) experiments? Or is this an early form of social science attempting to induce generalizations from particulars, deduce particular predictions on the basis of those induced generalizations, and compare its predictions with the archive of the historical world? Vico’s is a science that we could characterize as partly Aristotelian, partly BaconianGalileian. Knowing is for Vico a knowing from causes, but at the same time it is also a temporal activity concentrated on the movement from experience passively received to experiment actively contrived: Experiment itself, because intimate as artificial experience, is a self-knowledge from causes. When Vico says in the last paragraph of Book V that the corsi and ricorsi of ancient and modern nations reveal not merely the particular histories of particular nations, but even “the ideal history of the eternal laws which are instanced by the deeds of all nations in their rise, progress, maturity, decadence, and dissolution,” and when he goes on to describe this as the new science, it is not unreasonable to suppose that it is the lawabiding quality of historical phenomena that is the true object of Vichian science.6 In fact, however, what Vico goes on to say in this paragraph is that the object of the Scienza nuova is the comune natura delle nazioni, the common nature of nations, the shared experience of distance from and proximity to public life, the cosa civile. The axiom just cited—“doctrines must take their beginning from that of the matters of which they treat”—is a case in point. Having articulated the temporal parameters within which he will work—the metahistorical frontispiece, emblem of the course of human institutions, and the chronological table, index of scholarly opinion about mythological history—and having indicated that his inquiry will be genealogical rather than academic, Vico sets out a series of degnit`a (axioms). Vico announces that these axioms are intended to give form to the matter laid out in the chronological table and to circulate through the Scienza nuova like blood, animating inquiry.7 In the 1725 edition, there had been no such

6 Vico,

1744 Scienza nuova, §1096. §119: “per dar forma adunque alle materie qui innanzi apparecchiate sulla Tavola cronologica, proponiamo ora qui i seguenti assiomi o degnit`a cos`ı filosofiche come filologiche, alcune poche, ragionevoli e discrete domande, con alquante schiarite

7 Ibid.,

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section; in 1730, it had been titled Assiomi, o degnit`a filosofiche, e filologiche, diffinizioni, e poche discrete domande, che deven’ essere gli elementi di questa scienza dell’umanit`a; in 1744, simply Degli elementi.8 When Vico says that his philosophical and philological “dignities” are not only elements, but even domande poche discrete, indiscrete questions and later schiarite diffinizioni, clarifying definitions, he is suggesting that these degnit`a, these thoughts worth thinking, are not axiomatic in any traditional sense. They are neither intuitions indubitable, nor definitions foundational. They are aperc¸us, insights, witticisms, sayings, common senses, problemata, acutezze.9 As is clear from his Institutiones oratoriae, Vico placed particular emphasis in his use of rhetoric on the acute sentences of Baroque rhetorical theory—what Tesauro, Graci`an, Pallavicino, Peregrini got from Aristotle. It is reception that gives acutezza its function. Likewise, it is not what the axioms themselves do, but rather what may be done with them that is decisive in the Scienza nuova. The metaphor of circulation stands for appropriation: The axioms must be transported by readerly ingenuity. By turns general and particular, the value of these axioms lies in their being extrapolated, applied to problems they were not originally intended to resolve. Vico’s aim in the Scienza nuova is not to persuade the reader. Profoundly rhetorized, the Scienza nuova is singularly unpersuasive. Vico’s artfulness is instead invested in showing the reader a very particular form of intellectual discipline. Vico demands that readers do their own work of extrapolation. Ironically, Vico’s axioms attempt to simulate ignorance and narrowness of mind. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle argues that auditors are delighted to hear their own particular experiences expressed by orators as general maxims (troublesome neighbors is the example).10 In Vico’s redaction, the point is compressed and consequently altered to the maxim “men

diffinizioni; le quali, come per lo corpo animato il sangue, cos`ı deono per entro scorrervi ed animarla in tutto cio` che questa Scienza ragiona della comune natura delle nazioni.” 8 In 1730 there are 109 axioms; in 1744, 114. The additional axioms are Axioms I, XIII, XLVIII, LI, and LII. 9 Compare the following conclusions: “when we meditate Vico’s axioms, we return to the originary makings which are constitutive of what it means to be human.” Or, “axioms become pisteis, means of persuasion, by which we come to understand the realities of our situation.” Again, “a ‘maxim’ qua sensory topic, as an element of social life, embodies the complex social and cultural web that the proairesis, or moral choice, of the first humans set in motion [and] recall that proairesis primarily means ‘choosing one thing before another’ and thus came to signify ‘preference’ or ‘deliberate choice.’” Goetsch, Vico’s Axioms, 126, 127, 129. 10 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1395b.

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of limited ideas erect every particular into a maxim.”11 Founding his science on a canon of maxims, Vico necessarily invests in an enthymematic structure that requires the ingenuity of others in order to function.12 In making the auditor an integral part of the orator’s performance, Vico is able to sublimate the rhetorical situation and, in one instance, to recalibrate persuasion as heroic incapacity. By beginning with maxims, some of them resolutely particular, he makes his readers as well as his protagonists into minds of limited ideas—which is to say, poets. Indeed, the value of the axioms exceeds their truth value, for it is not so much in being veridical statements in and of themselves that these axioms have an effect. Rather, it is in producing other assertions and revelations, questions and habits of inquiry that they take on meaning. When Vico relates in the first of his axioms that, “because of the indefinite nature of the human mind, wherever it is lost in ignorance man makes himself the measure of all things,” he is not merely asserting the Protagorean—and rhetorical—principle pant¯on chremat¯on metr¯on estin anthr¯opos. Rather, he is also licensing a host of derivations concerning the tropological extension of human dimensions to the nonhuman, not just structural categories (sense, imagination, intellect), or subcategories (touch, smell, taste, hearing, sight), but even body parts (hand, head, nape).13 In this way, the human measure is itself a fractured and 11 Vico,

1744 Scienza nuova, §816: “delle quali [heroic natures] e` eterna propiet`a d’ingrandir sempre l’idee de’ particolari: di che vi ha un bel luogo d’Aristotile ne’ Libri morali, ove riflette che gli uomini di corte idee d’ogni particolare fan massime. Del qual detto dev’essere la ragione: perch`e la mente umana, la qual e` indiffinita, essendo angustiata dalla robustezza de’ sensi, non puo` altrimente celebrare la sua presso che divina natura che con la fantasia ingrandir essi particolari.” Where Vico says libri morali, he should mean the Rhetoric. 12 On the close connection between maxims and enthymemes, consider what Aristotle says at Rhetoric, 1394a: “as the enthymeme is, we might say, syllogism dealing with such things [‘the objects of human actions’], maxims are the premises or conclusions of enthymemes without the syllogism.” Compare what Vico says at Institutiones oratoriae, 292–3, where he is glossing another passage from Aristotle’s Rhetoric : “the orator, uttering an acute phrase, creates something beautiful that is left to be discovered by the auditor. The auditor, in fact, upon hearing the acute saying uttered, searches for the scarcely indicated connection, discovers the link, compares the poles [of the argument], notes the convenience of the phrase and reenacts for himself the elegance fashioned by the orator. Whereupon it seems to the auditor that he himself is ingenious, and the acute phrase is enjoyed as if it came not from the orator but rather from the mind of the auditor himself.” Just prior to this passage, Vico has referred explicitly to Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1410b 10. 13 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, Axiom I, §120: “l’uomo, per l’indiffinita natura delle mente umana, ove questa si rovesci nell’ignoranza, egli fa s´e regola dell’universo.” The Protagorean principle—which Arendt (The Human Condition, 158–9) interprets as “man is the measure of all use things (chremata), of the existence of those that are, and of the

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discontinuous congeries of measures. Similarly, to say that “the human mind is naturally impelled to take delight in uniformity” is not so much true as provocative. There is a deep irony in this short sentence. On the one hand, the perception of uniformity is the means by which the human mind makes for itself genera, or class concepts. These class concepts in turn aid the perception of individuals as agglomerations of particular qualities. On the other hand, however, this rounding off of difference—this elision of individuality—effaces alterity by eliminating those qualities of individua that are not pertinent to the class concept in question.14 Again, Vico’s classification of the sentence “mutes make themselves understood by gestures or objects that have natural relations with the ideas they wish to signify” as an axiom forces the reader to consider what there might be in this sentence that is paradigmatic. Read expansively, the sentence suggests—pace classical rhetoric—that the voice is not the most basic instrument of expression and that the mute is a figure for semiosis more generally where the presence of human beings (gestures) is not essential to the appearance of objects that are taken to have “natural relations” to other objects. Moreover, Vico is forcing such consideration not only on the reader, but also on himself as writer. Without such compulsion, one would not suspect that semiosis is as much interpolation as interpellation. That is to say, Vico’s axioms interpellate the reader. They behoove the reader to respond. The reader’s response is then interpolation, supplementing the partial utterances of others and making of those utterances action statements for whatever problems are at hand. The axioms thus replicate for the reader of the Scienza nuova what Vico takes to have been the originary interpellative situation in which language was invented, when the bestioni sensed in the thunder and lightning a will intent on singling them out. Once material objects have been added to gestures in the lexicon of the mute, the world itself—natural history—becomes interpretable, and there is no thing that cannot be a sign in the uncertain light of providence, which is foresight or futurity as such.15 In the context of the axioms, this means that any statement in non-existence of those that are not”—is glossed by Plato at Theaetetus, 152a, Cratylus, 385e, and Laws, 716d. 14 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, Axiom XLVII, §204: “la mente umana e ` naturalmente portata a dilettarsi dell’uniforme.” 15 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, Axiom LVII, §225: “i mutoli si spiegano per atti o corpi c’hanno naturali rapporti all’idee ch’essi vogliono significare.” The “semioticization” of nature is conspicuous also in Tesauro’s exposition of argutezze, where there are divine and natural,

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the Scienza nuova can become axiomatic and any example can become a paradigm. Vico’s degnit`a contravene most expectations of the literary form of axioms. They are seldom abstract, never univocal. They often point beyond themselves by placing an example where one would expect a rule, and they not infrequently take the form of reported speech. Book I of the Scienza nuova is, in fact, a commonplace book, an early modern practice that itself derived from the first part of classical rhetoric— inventio. Folded into the fabric of Vico’s axioms are his remarkably inclusive appropriations of the aperc¸us of others. Iamblichus alleges that the Egyptians attributed to Hermes Trismegistus “all discoveries useful or necessary to human life.”16 Eusebius argues that at first the theology of the Egyptians was a kind of fabulous history, but that later generations, ashamed of such credulity, imputed to these fables an esoteric significance.17 Aristotle relates that, at first, the heroic commonwealths passed “no laws to punish private offenses or to right private wrongs.”18 Dio Cassius (according to Vico, but actually Dio Chrysostom) insinuates that “custom is like a king and law like a tyrant.”19 Ulpian defines civil equity as “a kind of probable judgment, not naturally known to all men.”20 These are topoi. Brief, portable, and “transparent,” these topoi accrete judgments. Resituated into the Scienza nuova, they act as lenses through which Vico and his fellow new scientists bring the phenomena of the Scienza nuova and the world it describes into focus. The axioms are points of departure, stimuli for inquiry, demanding supplement. The constructive element of that supplement is key, both for Vico’s inquiry and for the mode of inquiry that Vico hopes to provoke in the reader. The verum-factum principle returns in the Scienza nuova, transformed from a gnoseological principle predicated in large part on mathematics to a hermeneutic principle applying to civil society.

as well as human argutezze : meteors, constellations, thunder, and lightning have an acute semiotic structure. See Il cannocchiale aristotelico, in Trattatisti e narratori del seicento, ed. Raimondi, 24–46. 16 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, Axiom XLIX, §207; Iamblichus, On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, 1. 17 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, Axiom LV, §222; Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, 2. 18 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, Axiom LXXXV, §269; Aristotle, Politics, 1268b 39f; 1269a 11f. 19 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, Axiom CIV, §308; Dio Chrysostom, Discourse, 76. 20 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, Axiom CX, §320; the source in Ulpian is not clear, but compare Digest, 47.4.1.1.

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Just as Vico had argued in 1710 that we know what we make (because we know it from causes), so Vico argues (already in 1725 and again in 1730 and 1744) 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.”21 This is a form of radical humanism, asserting that nothing human is alien.22 Every human action—no matter how “uncertain, unseemly, defective, or vain”—can be reenacted imaginatively. Having been made by man, therefore, is a criterion of intelligibility. But in the Scienza nuova that intelligibility has come to approximate empathy, for that which has been made by man is man himself. If a thing has been made once, then it can be made again in imagination. This hermeneutic verum-factum capacitates common sense, so that the possessive pronoun our can be inserted between modifications and mind. Vico’s task in the Scienza nuova is to render intelligible— imaginable would be the better word, or even inhabitable—the range of primitive rhetorical operations that constitute the first principles of the civil world. Just so, he relates that it was the research of twenty years to regress imaginatively to the point where he could “discover the way in which this first human thinking arose in the gentile world,” for it was necessary “to descend from these human and refined natures of ours to those quite wild and savage natures.”23 Vico’s humanism does not assume that reconstructing the imaginative being of others is always easy—just that it is always possible. Some of Vico’s axioms are themselves fragments taken from the rhetorical tradition.24 Others are distilled from elsewhere in the Greco-Roman legacy. Even where the sources are not themselves rhetorical, however, the mode of deployment in the Scienza nuova is. The axioms are topical theory in action. They are a tissue of topoi, loci communes, elementi that constitute the building blocks of Vico’s arguments about the conditions of possibility for human community. Where Aristotle said in the Rhetoric that “I mean by ‘element’ and ‘topic’ the same thing,” Vico said in the Institutiones oratoriae that “common places are as it were the elements of 21 Vico,

1725 Scienza nuova, §40; 1730 Scienza nuova, 122; 1744 Scienza nuova, §331. Heautontimorumenos, 1.77: “homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto.” See also the Stoic appropriations in Cicero, De Legibus, 1.12.23 and Seneca, Epistulae, 95.93. In his lectures on rhetoric, Vico cites the famous passage from Terence as an example of the commonplace coniugatio. Vico, Institutiones oratoriae, 54–5. 23 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §338. 24 See, for example, Ibid., §§122, 142, 211–12, 283–4. 22 Terence,

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arguments.”25 There is, thus, a clear line from ancient topics to Vichian axioms. In the words of James R. Goetsch, “as degnit`a [thoughts worth thinking] the elementi are gnomic enthymemes, meant to engage the ingenium of the reader,” while as topics they are “the elements of archaic logic, arguing from the beginnings of humanity in the master images that formed the human world.”26 The axioms replicate Vico’s basic rhetorical commitments by placing writer and reader alike under pressure to find their way to meaning from the most particular and occasionally arcane beginnings. Crucially, this explains why the reader takes up such an important position in Vico’s text, and why so much imaginative work is left to the reader. The reader, it might be added, is conceived of in a very particular way in the 1730 Scienza nuova. Having made the outrageous claim that he himself has not read anything in twenty years, Vico says that he has written the 1730 edition for a very select group of readers: Plato (philosopher), Varro (philologist), and Quintus Mucius Scaevola (jurisconsult). The reception of the first edition of the Scienza nuova in 1725 was so disastrous that Vico supposes his work may, at best, be read by someone who has disinterred it from the ruins of a city a thousand years dead.27 What Vico says is that “he who meditates this Science narrates to himself this ideal eternal history [the metahistorical icon of the frontispiece rather than the fabular histories of the chronological table] so far as he himself makes it for himself by that proof ‘it had, has, and will have to be.’”28 Thus, in the first instance, Vico sets about alienating the reader. He proposes to the actual reader that the ideal reader is either long dead or still to be born. But then he reverses the tactic and co-opts his audience, enlisting it in reenactments of the text. The phrase “had, has, and will have to be”—dovette, deve, dovr`a— appears deterministic. In fact, it emphasizes contingency and decision. As Vico says in the third set of Correzioni, miglioramenti, ed aggiunte to the 1730 Scienza nuova, “the dovette, deve, e dovr`a of the ideal eternal history is an archetypal, almost creative mode, since dovette means simply ‘was done,’ deve means ‘does,’ and dovr`a means ‘might do.’” The task of the reader,

25 Aristotle,

Rhetoric, 1403a 17; Vico, Institutiones oratoriae, 50: “hi loci sunt veluti elementa arguendi.” 26 Goetsch, Vico’s Axioms, 125, 128. 27 Vico, 1730 Scienza nuova, 57. 28 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §349.

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therefore, is an imaginative reconstruction of the habits, actions, and undertakings of humanity from its primitive to oversophisticated incarnations. As Vico puts it, “the human mind with this science proceeds to produce by itself this world of nations,” just as the divine mind produces the world of nature. The reconstruction of past human action is the simultaneous perception of that which happened nonsimultaneously.29 Vico, however, instructs the reader that the oscillation of civilizations is taking place not only in the past and in the future, but also in the present. The compounding of “had to be,” “has to be,” and “will have to be” asserts unilaterally that the processes described in the Scienza nuova ignore simple chronology. The ages of gods, heroes, and men are perennial and the goal of the science is to provide readers with a way of distinguishing the various forms of being with others that exist in the world they inhabit—wherever and whenever they may be. In the Scienza nuova the reconstruction of past decisions involves a reconstruction of the possible futures that were foreclosed by historical actors choosing to act in one way and not another. Thus, Vico introduces the potential dimension of the doable. In his words, “the proper and continual proof [of this science] here adduced will consist in comparing and reflecting whether our human mind, in the series of possibilities it is permitted to understand, and so far as it is permitted to do so, can conceive of more or fewer or different causes than those from which issue the effects of this civil world.”30 The task of calculating and experimenting with such permutation is delegated immediately to the reader. That reader is then charged with considering whether the effects of this civil world do not constitute the sum total of all possibility. Vico’s answer is that Homeric poetry and Roman law do constitute an archive rich enough to serve as

` e` una 1730 Scienza nuova, 429: “per tutto cio` quel DOVETTE, DEVE, DOVRA maniera archetipa, e quasi creativa, la quale non si puo` avere che nell’Idea eterna di Dio: poich`e ` quanto tanto vagliono DOVETTE, quanto fu fatto, tanto DEVE quanto si fa; tanto DOVRA, vale farassi; Talch`e cos`ı in un certo modo la Mente Umana con questa Scienza procede a produrre da s`e questo Mondo di Nazioni; come la Mente di Dio procede nel produrre il Mondo della Natura: il qual sommo Facitore nel suo Principio, nel suo Verbo, nella sua Eterna Idea disse in tempo quel fiat, et facta sunt: in cotal guisa questa Scienza, come nelle Degnit`a avvisocci Aristotile, vien ad esser de aeternis, et immutabilibus.” 30 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §345, emphasis added: “la propia continua pruova che qui farassi sar`a il combinar e riflettere se la nostra mente umana, nella serie de’ possibili la quale ci e` permesso d’intendere, e per quanto ce n’`e permesso, possa pensare o piu` o meno o altre cagioni di quelle ond’escono gli effetti di questo mondo civile.” 29 Vico,

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a template for inquiry into human development generally. Universality, however, is subordinate to the pleasure of appropriating particular exempla. As Vico intimates, “the reader will experience a divine pleasure as he contemplates in the divine ideas this world of nations in all the extent of its places, times, and varieties.”31 For Vico, the cognizability of this diversity and the pleasure it generates differentiate the providential account of human history from, as he terms it, the chance of the Epicureans and the fate of the Stoics. Thus, in order to demonstrate that human affairs are neither underdetermined nor blindly determined, the full diversity of human actions must be reenactable by the reader. Vico places a great deal of responsibility on the reader of the Scienza nuova.32 The language that the Neapolitan forged for the project has come to be recognized in the context of the Italian literary canon as a singular creation. Resolutely particular in its choice and placement of words, the work nevertheless demands that the reader construe, extrapolate, and reenact at all times. This makes the work tremendously difficult to read. The arcane quality of the Scienza nuova as prose-poem forces the reader into a position comparable to the position of the heroes that the work describes. In the same way, then, as the Scienza nuova forces readers to become poets (makers of the text), the language situations described by Vico in Book II force the first human beings to construe as semiotic the world in which they live. In both cases, the emphasis is on reception. Hence, what was in the writings on law an emphasis on construal in legal interpretation becomes an emphasis on construal as itself integral to cultural interaction. As a result, the heroic incapacity Vico describes as “poetic wisdom” is, properly speaking, a hermeneutic competence focused on the reception of signs. The auditor, now understood as a reader, is the true poet.

31 Vico,

1744 Scienza nuova, §345. Battistini too, the Scienza nuova possesses as a science a hermeneutic form: in a tradition that “exalts the greatness of the philosophical hero and the purifying creativity of the act of reading,” Vico contends that “knowledge is acquired as pathos, invention, imagination.” Battistini adopts the rubric of the encyclopedia in order to describe the Scienza nuova—as does Mazzotta in Poetic Philosophy of Vico—but this does not imply an established body of accepted fact. Instead “in Vico the encyclopedic model loses the sacrality that guaranteed order and becomes opera aperta, instrument of research in an unknown land still to be explored.” Battistini, “Retorica vichiana tra ermeneutica e antropologia,” in Sapienza retorica, 86, 107. When Battistini uses the term opera aperta, he is—of course—invoking the work of Umberto Eco.

32 For

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II. Sapienza Poetica and Being with Others In his commentary on the Ars poetica of Horace (written at some point between the second and third editions of the Scienza nuova), Vico intimates that the 1730 edition is in fact a kind of extended commentary on fewer than twenty lines of the Roman’s work. In the section to which Vico refers, Horace says that at a time when men roamed the woods in a state of feral liberty, it was the poets—Orpheus, the prophet of the gods and Amphion, the founder of Thebes—who drew primitive humanity together. Orpheus made them shrink from brutality; Amphion moved the stone-like peoples of Thebes and made them a citadel.33 Such was the purpose of poetry for Horace: to divide public and private right, to separate the sacred from the profane, to regulate matrimony and curb license, to build towns and inscribe the laws.34 In his commentary, Vico glosses Horace by saying that the history of poetry reveals “the origins of republics, laws, and all the arts and sciences that make up civilization.”35 Vico, thus, goes out of his way to indicate that the Scienza nuova takes the classical literary legacy as its point of departure. But Horace himself is not so much a point of origin as a conduit. The Ars poetica relays to Vico concerns and contentions from rhetoric, for Horace’s is the classic statement of a topos that appeared earlier in Cicero and earlier still in the Greek rhetorical tradition. The Greek rhetorician Isocrates expressed the matter with great clarity when he said that “because there has been

33 This

is certainly Patrizi’s interpretation of the passage from Horace (Ars poetica, 394–5): “altro non vuol dire se non se ch’[Amphion], col canto della sua poesia, persuadesse a’ cittadini a cignere di mura Tebe.” Francesco Patrizi, Della poetica, ed. Danilo Aguzzi Barbagli (Florence: Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, 1969), 1.19. 34 Horace, Ars poetica, 391–407: “silvestris homines sacer interpresque Deorum/caedibus et victu foedo deterruit Orpheus,/dictus ob hoc lenire tigres rabidosque leones;/dictus et Amphion, Thebanae conditor urbis,/saxa movere sono testudinis et prece blanda/ ducere quo vellet. fuit haec sapientia quondam,/publica privatis secernere, sacra profanis,/concubitu prohibere vago, dare iura maritis,/oppida moliri, leges incidere ligno./sic honor et nomen divinis vatibus atque/carminibus venit. post hos insignis Homerus/Tyrtaeusque mares animos in Martia bella/versibus exacuit; dictae per carmina sortes/et vitae monstrata via est et gratia regum/Pieriis temptata modis ludusque repertus/et longorum operum finis: ne forte pudori/sit tibi Musa lyrae sollers et cantor Apollo.” 35 Giambattista Vico, Commento all“Arte poetica di Orazio”, ed. and trans. Guido de Paulis (Naples: Alfredo Guida, 1998), 190–3. De Paulis is of the opinion that what we possess of Vico’s commentary on Horace are two different versions of notes taken by students from a course of lectures given by Vico, but some scholars have argued that at least one of the texts comes directly from Vico himself.

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implanted in us the power to persuade each other and to make clear to each other whatever we desire, not only have we escaped the life of wild beasts, but we have come together and founded cities and made laws and invented arts.”36 Thus, the kind of originary language use that Horace calls “poetic” is understood as “rhetorical” in the writers from whom Horace was borrowing. Once again, however, Vico does not simply replicate classical precedent. He radically revises it. From the feats of Orpheus and Amphion, Vico confects an extraordinarily thick description of what he terms sapienza poetica, by which he means the poetic faculties that were brought into being by the first semiotic acts of human communities. Vico makes two essential assertions. First, he asserts that if poetry preceded prose and founded communities that developed prose only later, then poetry must be understood as the more basic form of sign use. Poetry, thus, is the antithesis of decorative choice. It is the faculty that permits human beings to build concepts. Second, Vico asserts that the primary relationship established by language is the relationship between present and future. Signs permit human beings to emerge out of the eternal sequence of incomparable nows. But this opening up of the future in human imagination is at once the advent of opportunity and risk, so that the primary emotional terrain brought into the open by language is fear and its modulations. Vico proceeds to found his understanding of the origins of humanity on this notion of exposure to possibility. He transforms Horace into an account of sapienza poetica that turns rhetoric into an inquiry into being with others. By removing self-consciousness from the equation altogether, Vico is able to bring rhetorical completeness to bear on semiotic situations where the senders of signs do not know what they are saying and where the receivers of those signs are for the most part absent. Moreover, by turning rhetoric toward the problem of future orientation brought into being by the nature of signs, he inaugurates a new inquiry sequence where it is the characterization of diverse orientations toward the future that preoccupies rhetorical inquiry. Certainly, one of Vico’s most overt claims in the Scienza nuova is that the dominant authorities in Renaissance poetic theory have misunderstood poetry in a very basic way. Against Francesco Patrizi da Cherso

36 Cicero,

De inventione, 1.2.2–3, De oratore, 1.8.33; Aristophanes, Frogs, 1031–6; Isocrates, Nicocles or the Cyprians, 6. For discussion of this lineage, see Mooney, Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric, 171–4 and Friedrich Solmsen, “Drei Rekonstruktionen zur antiken Rhetorik und Poetik,” Hermes 67 (1932): 133–54.

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(1529–1597),37 Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558),38 and Lodovico Castelvetro (1505–1571),39 Vico contends that poetry is the origin of all human powers of ratiocination.40 For Vico, poetry is not primarily 37 For

Patrizi in his Della poetica (1582), Aristotle’s account of the origins of poetry is incoherent. Aristotle had said in the Poetics that “speaking generally, poetry seems to owe its origin to two particular causes, both natural.” First, “from childhood men have an instinct for representation.” Second, “we have, then, a natural instinct for representation and for tune and rhythm . . . and starting with these instincts men very gradually developed them until they produced poetry out of their improvisations.” Aristotle then goes on to say that “poetry then split into two kinds according to the poet’s nature.” On the one hand, “the more serious poets represented fine doings and the doings of fine men,” whereas on the other hand, “those of a less exalted nature represented the actions of inferior men, at first writing satire just as the others at first wrote hymns and eulogies.” But when Aristotle sketches this typology, he constructs an analogy: “as are the Iliad and Odyssey to our tragedies, so is the Margites to our comedies” (Aristotle, Poetics, 1448b). Patrizi objects that Aristotle cannot have it both ways: He cannot say that poetry is a product of nature, that the character of a poet is represented in the character of his poetry, and that Homer’s poems are both “magnificent and abject, serious and ridiculous.” One soggetto cannot contain such contrarie. Patrizi prefers the account given by Theophones as adopted by Theophrastus and related by Plutarch. The causes of poetry are the same as the causes of music. The causes of music are three: dolore, allegrezza, entusiasmo. Patrizi’s account (which delineates seven different meanings) highlights the equivocal sense of “natural” in Aristotle, but instead of privileging something like “artifice,” Patrizi ends up emphasizing precisely the somatic and psychic naturalism that Aristotle himself may have wished to emphasize. Patrizi, Della poetica, 2.37–59. 38 For Scaliger in his Poetices libri septem (1561), speech is the postman of the mind; poetry instructs as well as delights; prose is older than poetry; Homer was not a teacher of tragic and comic register, but was rather pupil to the country folk and old wives of the Greek world; poetry and rhetoric, at first quite distinct, came to perfect each other; and Virgil did not so much imitate Homer as show us how he ought to have written. Julius Caesar Scaliger, Select Translations from Scaliger’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Frederick Morgan Padelford (New York: Henry Holt, 1905), I.1 (1), I.1 (2), I.2 (12), I.5 (37), III.25 (52–3), V.3 (81). 39 For Castelvetro in his Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta (1570), poetry cannot initially have been, as it was for Aristotle, a form of spontaneous versifying that people thought divine because it surpassed their own poetic capacities. Poetry, like oratory, requires very sophisticated premeditative strategies and cannot be composed in performance extemporaneously. The poet must have a clear understanding of why he does what he does and Homer—who, austere in the Iliad and the Odyssey and jocund in the Margites, was nonetheless one single individual—must have been a man with an inquiring mind who was adept in studying his own nature as well as the nature of those around him. Lodovico Castelvetro, Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta, ed. Werther Romani (Bari: Laterza, 1978), 1.90, 1.92, 1.95–6, 1.107. In making his point about the difficulty of extempore composition, Castelvetro refers to Cicero, De oratore, 1.33ff and Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 10.7. 40 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §384: “come la metafisica ragionata insegna che ‘homo intelligendo fit omnia,’ cos`ı questa metafisica fantasticata dimostra che ‘homo non intelligendo fit omnia’; e forse con piu` di verit`a detto questo che quello, perch´e l’uomo con l’intendere spiega la sua mente e comprende esse cose, ma col non intendere egli di s´e fa esse cose e, col transformandovisi, lo diventa.”

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a literary form. Poesia is not a thing or product, but rather a faculty of production, a particular faculty of making.41 Indeed, poesia is poiesis, so that the poet is a creator but a creator in the Greek sense: a maker, a demiurge.42 The tropes that constitute the most basic forms of poetic composition—metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, irony—are not mere fancies, but are rather concepts with consequences. The language of the law is a fabric woven from acts of phron¯esis in which unfamiliar things have been glossed by familiar terms. Poetic wisdom is certainly, in the first instance, cognitive. The partial cognitions embodied in poetic conceits are the first approximations of concepts made by minds that perceive particular qualities only, because their modes of perception are so anchored in presence and are exposed only piecemeal to objects that exceed the parameters of the here and now. The piecemeal nature of these substitutions is crucial, and the best scholars of the subject have emphasized the resolute opposition to abstraction that courses through Vico’s account of thinking.43 In this way, Vico argues alongside Aristotle that there is nothing in intellect that is not first in sense.44 In order to transform particular senses into intellectual phenomena, imagination must intervene and identify a particular as similar to, part of, or cause of a class of particulars. Achilles is ferocity; Ulysses is cunning.45 Against the Patrizis, the Scaligers, and the Castelvetros, Vico argues that poetic form is not a choice, but rather a necessity. Poets express themselves in figures not because they want to 41 Ibid.,

§375.

42 Ibid., §376: “in cotal guisa i primi uomini delle nazioni gentili, come fanciulli del nascente

gener umano, quali gli abbiamo pur nelle Degnit`a divisato, dalla lor idea criavan essi le cose, ma con infinita differenza per`o dal criare che fa Iddio: perocch´e Iddio, nel suo purissimo intendimento, conosce e conoscendole, cria le cose; essi, per la loro robusta ignoranza, il facevano in forza d’una corpolentissima fantasia, e, perch’era corpolentissima, il facevano con una maravigliosa sublimit`a, tal e tanta che perturbava all’eccesso essi medesimi che fingendo le si criavano, onde furon detti ‘poeti,’ che lo stesso in greco suona che ‘criatori.’” 43 See especially Verene, Vico’s Science of Imagination, 82: “the fixation of the particular is not a process in which one sensation in the flux is grasped as like the rest. It is a process in which the is itself is made.” But see also Daniel Strassberg, Das poietische Subjekt: Giambattista Vicos Wissenschaft vom Singul¨aren (Munich: Fink, 2007), 30: the Vichian imaginative universal is a “nicht-hierarchisch serielle Allgemeinheit, die das Besondere nicht zerst¨ort.” 44 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §363; Aristotle, De anima, 432a. 45 At 1744 Scienza nuova, §809 Vico appropriates Horace’s summation (Ars poetica, 119ff) of Achilles’s character: a man of “quick temper, punctiliousness, wrathfulness, implacability, violence, the arrogation of all right to might.” Likewise, Ulysses is characterized by “wariness, patience, dissimulation, duplicity, deceit, always preserving propriety of speech and indifference of action, so that others may of themselves fall into error and may be the causes of their own deception.”

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delight comparably ingenious audiences—in fact, their audiences are as ingenuous as the poets—nor even because they believe that, in order to instruct the brute multitude, they must speak to them in a language they will understand. Instead, poets express themselves figuratively because they are incapable of expressing themselves literally. Poetry precedes prose. Thus, in accordance with Axiom II—“whenever men can form no idea of distant and unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar and at hand”—the earliest languages are replete with somatic metaphors: Engagement with the world is mediated through engagement with the body, and the world is at first the body writ large.46 The beginning of something is its head or top, a hill has shoulders, needles have eyes, an opening is a mouth, a cup has a lip, a rake has teeth, wheat has a beard, shoes have tongues, rivers have gorges, peninsulas have necks, clocks have hands, the center of something is its heart, sails have bellies, the end or bottom of something is its foot, fruit has flesh, stones have veins, and the earth has bowels.47 Vico’s humanism, his deployment of the human being as a congeries of measures, is so relentless that he adopts and revises Aristotle’s assertion in De anima that, in understanding a thing, human beings become it. For Vico, in misunderstanding a thing, human beings make it out of themselves.48 Substantives are not absolutely primary, for Vico, but they are more primary than adjectives and verbs. Substantives are more primary than adjectives, because qualities are aggregations of individua. They are likewise more primary than verbs, with the result that there are more agents named in early languages than actions. Metonymies of agent for act abound: the augur stands for auguring. Likewise, metonymies of subject for form and quality are common: Achilles is a poetic character for ferocity. Also, there are metonymies of cause for effect, and the temporal elasticity there generates foreshortened plots expressed as epithets: poverty is ugly, old age is sad, death is pale.49 Yet even substantives are themselves abstractions, for Vico. They are principles of unity that express decisions made about spatial and temporal dimension at the grammatical level. Synecdoches of part for whole proliferate: A man is a head, because Vico fantasizes that in the primeval 46 Vico,

1744 Scienza nuova, Axiom II, §122. §405. 48 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §405. Compare Aristotle, De anima, 431a: “actual knowledge is identical with its object.” 49 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §406. 47 Ibid.,

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forest only the head was visible. Synecdoches of whole for parts are also integral: “man” is an extraordinarily sophisticated reification of multiple physical parts, mental faculties, and spiritual dispositions.50 As Vico puts it, primitive men “were so limited to particulars that they regarded every change of facial expression as a new face, as we observed above in the fable of Proteus, and for every new passion they imagined a new heart, a new breast, a new spirit.”51 The earliest peoples were unable to recognize the continuity of individuals through time. Each grief and joy was a new persona—hence the paradox that Ulysses could cry one moment and laugh the next. Homer registers no contradiction, because continuity and integrity were not the criteria of character.52 If the perception of continuities of quality, parts and wholes, and causes and effects is an achievement that is historic, the perception of discontinuity is an even more advanced accomplishment.53 Irony—the fourth of the major tropes identified by Vico—is a very particular perception of discontinuity. Irony transforms apparent contradiction into some kind of meaningfulness on another level. One of the clearest ironies of heroic history at Rome is, according to Vico, the foundation of a public treasury: In place of extorted labor (military service), the patricians instituted extorted payment (military levies), but by creating thereby a treasury and a cash economy for the military, the patricians in fact brought into being a key state institution, a res publica that later facilitated claims for rights by the plebeians. In isolation, the contradiction between intention and outcome appears merely incongruous, nothing more than the frustration of desire. But irony finds meaning in incongruity, and in this case the irony is an aperc¸u: Formal institutions of governance undermine exploitation (but only in the long run). Irony had been a long-standing interest. In the Scienza nuova, however, its status becomes more conspicuously anomalous. On the one hand, irony is a self-consciousness that Vico says can only come into existence 50 Ibid.,

§407. 1744 Scienza nuova, §786. But again, the primitivity in question is also a form of perceptual sensitivity that capacitates the human faculties. As Herbert argued in his De veritate, there are more than five human senses, there being as many faculties of sense as there are differentiated affects. Hunger, thirst, sensual impulse, apathy, envy, melancholy are forms of internal sense, but then so are “lust, itching, tickling, laughter, sloth, yawning, stretching, sleep, grief, irritability, rage, fear, terror, weeping, nightmare.” If in one sense the Homeric hero experiences each emotion as a new emotion because he is imprisoned in the present tense and possesses no faculty of memory, in another sense he experiences each emotion as a new emotion because he is extraordinarily gifted in differentiating modes of affect. See Herbert, De veritate, 165–6. 52 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §700; Odyssey, 8.59ff. 53 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §408. 51 Vico,

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in more highly sophisticated—and mendacious—historical times, where there may be a distance even in the mind of the orator (who, for Vico, is more often mastered by events than master of them) between what is said and what is meant. As Vico defines it in the Institutiones oratoriae, irony is in Latin dissimulatio, or illusio. The difference between what one said and what one meant is supposed to be made clear—perhaps to some auditors and not others—by the tense relationship between what one said and what it is perceived one ought to have said.54 On the other hand, irony is actually related to the first development of semiosis as such. Irony is metalinguistic. It asserts the possibility of meaning where no such possibility was initially perceived. In place of blind chance or mechanical development, an ironic historical consciousness identifies more complex plot continuations. The perception that a communicative situation exists is essential to communication itself, so that incongruity (like the shock of the bestioni terrified by thunder and lightning) provokes the question, “What might that mean?” Vico’s account of the tropes reveals his revision of the art of persuasion. It is a sublimation that denotes simultaneously condensation and a release of energy. What appears inert and derivative in the Institutiones oratoriae—although not in the De ratione and De antiquissima sapientia—as the ars topica returns condensed and rejuvenated in the Scienza nuova in the form of a gradual capacitation of heroic cognition by means of the tropes. Indeed, it is not inappropriate to parse Vico’s poetic logic in an Aristotelian vernacular and say that metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, and irony are the four Vichian “categories.” The contents of the Institutiones oratoriae—and by extension the rhetorical tradition—is reproduced but the long form is replaced by a condensed, sublimated rhetoric focused on the problem of the origins of cognitive operations that are essential to human community. The genus, species, totum, and partes of the Institutiones oratoriae are the constituents of synecdoche. Causa (and it various modes as auctor, materia, forma, finis) and effecta are the diachronic poles of metonymy, together with antecendentia and consequentia. Similia and dissimilia, congruentia and repugnantia are the axes of continuity that constitute metaphor. The three types of opposition, contraria, privantia and contradictoria, are the conditions of possibility for irony, together with comitantia.55 It has been established that Vico’s specification of four master tropes derives at least from Ramus (most probably through Vossius). 54 Vico,

Institutiones oratoriae, 326–7. Vico, Institutiones oratoriae, 50–1 with Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §§404–11. Note that, in the lectures on rhetoric too, Vico stipulates that the four basic tropes are metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, and irony. See Vico, Institutiones oratoriae, 312–13.

55 Compare

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Vico, however, does not simply replicate the classification of the tropes into four master types. He deploys that classification as an account of the cognitive sensitivities that found conceptuality as such. In Vico’s renovation, the first part of rhetoric, inventio and its elaboration in the ars topica, establishes a more or less general theory of invention.56 Recall, however, that this is a theory of invention that applies not simply to the field of human language (which tends to be associated with articulate speech), but more generally to the field of semiosis. And, for Vico, semiosis is not so much an art of representation as a disposition toward community: It always has political, civil import. Semiosis is the coming into being of a communicative situation where meaning is forever deferred by the question, “What does that augur?” Future orientation, what is more, is indeterminacy—the coming into being of possibility, hope and fear. Likewise, discussion of the tropes is liable to leave one with the impression that Vico is concerned with verbal ingenuity only. In fact, he is preoccupied with more than merely articulate speech and epistolary writing. “Writing” is a phenomenon that Vico interprets much more capaciously to include a wide variety of actions and even events that are perceived as actions. Vico argues that Gerardus Joannes Vossius (1577–1649), Herman Hugo (1588–1629), Bernard von Mallinckrodt (1591–1664), and Ingewald Eling (d. 1688) have misunderstood the question, “Whence lettere?” For the Neapolitan, the origin of writing and the origin of language are one problem.57 When Vico argues that language and writing are connaturale (that is to say, born simultaneously), he is supposing that writing means not merely vulgar or hieroglyphic letters, but in fact any event the significance of which may be investigated. The advantage of calling such semiosis “writing” is that it matters not whether there is an author 56 On

the history of the classification of the tropes into four basic types, see Battistini, “Tassonomia dei tropi,” in Degnit`a della retorica, 153–72 and Vickers, Defence of Rhetoric, 439. 57 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §428–9: “ma la difficult` a della guisa fu fatta da tutti i dotti ` ch’essi stimarono cose separate l’origini delle lettere dall’origini delle lingue, per cio: le quali erano per natura congionte; e ’l dovevan pur avvertire dalle voci ‘grammatica’ e ‘caratteri.’” Note how applicable is Simon Glendinning’s gloss of the hermeneutic situation that is language per se: “by making perspicuous structural features internal to all such behavior (speech, writing, sign-language, expressive gesture, etc.) it is shown that the general space of their possibility can be described in terms traditionally thought to be applicable only to writing.” Likewise, “writing can do without the presence of the writer and still function [and] one of the central arguments of this book is that this feature can be generalized to all significant behavior.” Simon Glendinning, On Being with Others: Heidegger–Derrida–Wittgenstein (London: Routledge, 1998), 4, 11.

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in the vicinity, or anything that might function as an author. Thus, lightning, entrails, birds in the sky are all forms of divine writing. They are parole reali, real words. The first men believed that nature was a language through which Jove was addressing them. The very word for god (numen) derives, in Vico’s genealogy, from the word for making a sign (nuo). Nature in fact is a theology, which—literally rendered—means not a science of the gods, but rather a speaking with, through, or by means of the gods (“theo-logic”).58 Vico propels himself beyond the polis by extending his analysis of signs beyond the parameters of speaking and listening. The first men, learning the category of language from thunder and lightning, communicate at first in the same way—that is, by means of physical signs, cenni (indications, gestures, notes).59 The first epistles are “written” with real objects. As Herodotus relates, Idanthrysus wanted to say in response to Darius the Great’s declaration of war that he was born of the earth of Scythia, that he had established his nation there, that he was master of the auspices, that he had domesticated the land, and that he held a monopoly on violence there. In order to convey these ideas, he sent the Persian king a frog, a mouse, a bird, a ploughshare, and a bow. As Vico explains, frogs flushed out by rain emerge from the earth autochthonous, mice make their homes wherever they are born, birds are a divine script foretelling the future, ploughshares mix labor with the soil, and bows denote military force.60 The first religious ceremonies enchant with their ritualized bodies-in-motion even before those ceremonies become articulate with incantation. The first political directives are compared to mime: By decapitating poppies, Tarquinius Superbus indicates to a messenger that his son should murder the leaders of Gabii.61 Thus, Vico’s analysis of signs simply traverses the parameters 58 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §379—where teologia is glossed as “scienza del parlar degli dei.” 59 Vico,

1744 Scienza nuova, §379. And, as Tesauro makes clear, “le parole son cenni senza movimento; e i cenni son parole senza romore.” Such somatic semiosis, moreover, yields the insight that the body is a piece of paper on which text can be written and read— “tutto il corpo e` una pagina sempre apparecchiata a ricever nuovi caratteri e cancellarli.” This raises more directly the question of whether simulation and dissimulation are not derivative rhetorical modes, derivative that is of the inadvertent, because it is commonly accepted that the body is a tissue of symptoms. Medicine, thus, is a form of hermeneutics. See Tesauro, Cannocchiale aristotelico, in Trattatisti e narratori del seicento, ed. Raimondi, 50. 60 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §435. Herodotus, Histories, 4.131. 61 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §435. The moral of the story is clearer in the 1725 Scienza nuova, §327. When Livy (1.54.6) relates the story, he makes it seem that Tarquinius is speaking in a kind of self-conscious code, because he wants his son, but not the messenger to understand his order. In his edition of the 1725 Scienza nuova, Leon Pompa urges

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of the here and now and analyzes promiscuously situations in which there may or may not be an approximation of immediacy between sender and receiver. The notion that semiosis begins in the attribution of the qualities of intended action to an event would seem to rely on the primacy of intention. But the frequent absence of the author—the Jove who is everywhere and nowhere—means that signs often assume the character of symptoms. Thus, Vico believes that the fables of Greco-Roman antiquity are revealing, not because there were authors who were intent on revealing the truth of things by means of their fables, but because the peoples who lived in and through those fables could not help but reveal things about themselves. Poets are veritieri, “truth-sayers,” and they are incapable of lying, because their every move is simply self-revelation. Thus, the fables must have had some pubblico motivo di verit`a.62 Of course, the figures of words and figures of thought catalogued by the discipline of rhetoric were not, in the first place, merely so many simulations and dissimulations. On the contrary, they were pathological symptoms, forms of breathlessness, imputed responses, sublime improvisations—affect. According to Vico, the belief of the veritieri is univocal and not analogical.63 This to say, the inventions of the poets are not tacit abbreviations of prosaic longhand. He will argue that the metaphor “all things are full of Jove” does in reality function as the belief “that Jove commanded by signs, that such signs were real words, and that nature was the language of Jove.”64 Likewise he will translate the compound metaphor “Vulcan . . . split with an ax the forehead of Jove, whence sprang Minerva” as an allegory for “the multitude of the famuli practicing servile arts (which came under the poetic genus of the plebeian Vulcan) broke (in the sense of weakening or diminishing) the rule of Jove.”65 But although he represents these poetic locutions in prosaic form to his comparison with the similar story of Thrasybulus and Periander in Herodotus, Histories, 5.92. Giambattista Vico, The First New Science, trans. Leon Pompa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 188n. 62 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §771. 63 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §§34, 210, 403. See also Vico, 1725 Scienza nuova, §265. 64 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §379. 65 Ibid., §589: “quivi le nazioni greche immaginarono la decima divinit` a delle genti dette maggiori, che fu Minerva. E la si finsero nascere con questa fantasia, fiera ugualmente e goffa: che Vulcano con una scure fendette il capo di Giove, onde nacque Minerva; volendo essi dire che la moltitudine de’ famoli ch’esercitavan arti servili, che, come si e` detto, venivano sotto il genere poetico di Vulcano plebeo, essi ruppero (in sentimento d’‘infievolirono’ o ‘scemarono’) il regno di Giove (come rest`o a’ latini ‘minuere caput’ per ‘fiaccare la testa,’ perch´e non sappiendo dir in astratto ‘regno,’ in concreto disero

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readers, he contends that the veritieri who composed and used them had no conception of the distance between poetry and prose and no understanding of the way in which their phrase “all things are full of Jove” extrapolated a symptomology of their own bodies through a symptomology of nature’s body to a symptomology of the body politic (civil theology as rhetorical practice). Not by force and not by fraud were the first religious and public institutions established, says Vico. Belief was crucial and it was not self-conscious. If belief is that on the basis of which a person is prepared to act, then Vico is describing the belief that underlies habit rather than the belief that emerges from dilemma.66 Ostensibly, Vico is most concerned to argue that poetry was not a choice and was instead a necessity imposed on the first human beings by their severe cognitive limitations, principally their inability to think abstractly. Thus, Vico explains how it was that humanity traversed the great distance between brute stupidity and semiotic competence by invoking a plethora of imaginative strategies for identifying metaphorical, metonymic, synecdochic, and ironic connections, for turning facts into values or events into signs, and for ordering the inferential relationships between diverse signs. Beyond its status as cognitive achievement, however, Vico’s poetic wisdom is a primary mode of connection between persons. The sapienza poetica, I am claiming, is properly rhetorical in the sense that it establishes a way of understanding being with others. Poetry for Vico is the transformation of things into signs, signs that found social values. It is an interrogation of the past cose civili that hopes to illumine the future. In Vichian inquiry, Orpheus becomes a poetic character for obligation, for the stipulation of connections between persons. In the first households, the force of the patriarchs was expressed not abstractly but concretely as a cord: force was expressed by chorda in Greek and fides in Latin. The lyre of Orpheus stands for taming the wild beasts of Greece, harnessing them with the chords, bonds of obligation, and rendering them, thus, human.67 Further, to become human is, in Vico’s rendition, ‘capo’), che stato era, nello stato delle famiglie, monarchico, e cangiarono in aristocratico in quello delle citt`a.” 66 Ibid., §§522, 1009–15. 67 Ibid., §523: “tanta forza divina e tale vi abbisognava per ridurre a’ doveri umani i quanto goffi altrettanto fieri giganti! La qual forza non potendo dir in astratto, la dissero in concreto con esso corpo d’una corda . . . ed in latino da prima si disse ‘fides,’ la qual, prima e propiamente, s’intese in quel motto ‘fides deorum,’ ‘forza degli d`ei.’ Della qual poi, come la lira dovette cominciare dal monocordo, ne fecero la lira d’Orfeo, al suon della quale egli, cantando loro la forza degli d`ei negli ausp`ıci, ridusse le fiere greche all’umanit`a, ed Anfione de’ sassi semoventi innalzo` le mura di Tebe.”

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to become susceptible to obligation. That is, susceptibility is the onset of exploitation: The Bacchantes dismember Orpheus, and they are, in Vico’s gloss, the plebs remembering themselves.68 Similarly, Vico underscores Tacitus’s insight that the introduction of letters into Britain by the Romans not only polished the Britons’ humanity, but also entrenched their servitude: et humanitas vocabatur, quae pars servitutis erat, “what was called humanity was part of their servitude.”69 Just so, the motif for eloquence that Vico resurrects in the Scienza nuova is Gallic Hercules, from whose mouth issues a chain of poetic gold (which for Vico symbolizes the grain of the first agricultural communities) bound to the ears of the multitude, controlling it thereby. But Vico implies that (contrary to what had previously been said) this Gallic Hercules represents a form of rhetorical incorporation that existed before the coming of articulate speech. This is a redescription of rhetoric, where the kind of being with others at the center of rhetorical concern is located in a preverbal, hieroglyphic, kinetic dimension.70 Vico is forever representing the matrix of social obligation as a spectrum; the multiplication of claims made by persons upon each other is a kind of tropological glissando (descending): potere, civili potest`a, potenze, forza, fede, giuramenti, ossequio, protezione. This spectrum is, one might say, the radius of what Vico calls the orbe civile. At the center of this sphere—which at first is not the polis but rather the heroic household, the fief—are the first fathers. Their power is not abstract. It is felt (sentito) rather than reasoned (ragionato). It is an asymmetrical reciprocity between obsequiousness and protection.71

68 Ibid.,

§659: “Orfeo . . . il fondatore della Grecia, con la sua lira o corda o forza, che significano la stessa cosa che ’l nodo d’Ercole (il nodo della legge Petelia), egli e` morto ucciso dalle baccanti (dalle plebi infuriate), le quali gliene fecero andar in pezi la lira (che, a tante pruove fatte sopra, significava la legge): ond’a tempi d’Omero gi`a gli eroi menavano in mogli donne straniere e i bastardi venivano alle successioni reali; lo che dimostra che gi`a la Grecia aveva incominciato a celebrare la libert`a popolare.” 69 Vico, 1725 Scienza nuova, §471. Vico’s recollection of the Latin differs slightly from the original. See Tacitus, Agricola, 21. Compare Herbert, for whom humanity also denotes susceptibility: “whatever principles . . . make the same impression on us and are universally received in the same way, must be assumed to be Common Notions. Anyone who prefers persistently and stubbornly to reject these principles might as well stop his ears, shut his eyes and strip himself of all humanity.” See Herbert, De veritate, 131. 70 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §560: “Ercole gallico, il quale con catene d’oro poetico (cio` e del frumento), che gli escono di bocca, incatena per gli orecchi moltitudine d’uomini e gli si mena, dove vuol, dietro; il quale e` stato finora preso per simbolo dell’eloquenza, la qual favola nacque de’ tempi che non sapevano ancora gli eroi articolar la favella, come si e` appieno sopra dimostro.” 71 Ibid., §602.

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Thus, Vico’s focus on poesia precipitates an investigation not only of the originary logic of the tropes but also of the origin of affect in signs. The Scienza nuova is replete with analysis of what rhetoric had termed the pistis of pathos. Achilles, the emblematic hero of the Iliad, is both impervious and touchy in the Scienza nuova. Immersed by Athena in the river Styx, he is made not so much invulnerable to the attacks of others as deaf to their claims on him. By the same token, however, he takes umbrage at the slightest provocation. The Achilles heel, one might conjecture, is a metaphor for sudden, unexpected vulnerability to others. The hero’s motives are perfectly private: Achilles withdraws from the fray because Agamemnon steals Briseis, and he returns not because Hector is decimating his countrymen, but because he slays Patroclus, a friend. As Vico interprets the episode, “the same Achilles, even while impiously determined not to forgive a private injury at the hands of Agamemnon . . . is pleased . . . to see all the Greeks fall to ruin and suffer miserable defeat at Hector’s hands; nor is he moved by love of country or by his nation’s glory to bring them any aid.” In the end, says Vico, “he does it . . . only to satisfy a purely private grief.”72 The simultaneously inviolate and thin-skinned nature of Achilles is on display when Hector proposes that the victor in their duel bury his enemy. Achilles replies that men do not make pacts with lions, that wolves and lambs do not negotiate. Vico takes this reply to be a denial of the most essential foundations for justice—namely, perceived equality of station and the common lot of men in general (which is to say, reciprocity as empathy).73 When Priam, defenseless, comes to him in order to recover the corpse of his son, Achilles threatens to cut off his head—contravening the rules of hospitality.74 Moreover, when Homer 72 Ibid.,

§§783, 786. §667: “di Achille, ch’`e ’l massimo de’ greci eroi, Omero ci narra tre propiet`a dello ’n tutto contrarie a cotali tre idee de’ filosofi. E, d’intorno alla giustizia [the first], egli ad Ettorre, che con esso vuol patteggiare la seppoltura se nell’abbattimento l’uccida, nulla riflettendo all’egualit`a del grado, nulla alla sorte comune (le quali due considerazioni naturalmente inducono gli uomini a riconoscere giustizia), fece risponde:—Quando mai gli uomini patteggiarono co’ lioni, o i lupi e l’agnelle ebbero uniformit`a di voleri?” 74 In this episode, Vico pays more attention to Achilles’s ferocity than his beneficence. Compare Iliad, 24.552ff and Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §786: “quel fatto d’Achille, che riceve alla sua tenda Priamo . . . , l’ammette a cenar seco; e, per un sol detto il quale non gli va a seconda, ch’all’infelicissimo padre cadde innavvedutamente di bocca per la piet`a d’un s`ı valoroso figliuolo—dimenticato delle santissime leggi dell’ospitalit`a; non rattenuto dalla fede onde Priamo era venuto tutto solo da esso lui, perch´e confidava tutto in lui solo; nulla commosso dalle molte e gravi miserie di un tal re, nulla dalla piet`a di tal padre, nulla dalla venerazione di un tanto vecchio; nulla riflettendo alla fortuna comune, della quale non vi ha cosa che piu` vaglia a muover compatimento;—montato in una collera bestiale, l’intuona sopra volergli mozzar la testa.” 73 Ibid.,

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habitually attaches to Achilles the epithet “blameless,” Vico is moved to insist that if we suppose Homer to be teaching as well as delighting (that is, invoking a rhetoric of docere as well as delectare), then we must conclude that he is singing the praises of punctiliousness. And the punctilious man is impervious to imagination. He is incapable of seeing that he is to others as they are to him.75 In Vico’s gloss, the punctiliousness of Ulysses has a quite different quality. He is legalistic, but not for want of imagination. He is aware of the mismatch with Polyphemus the Cyclops and uses it to his advantage. Ulysses understands the linguistic difference between a proper name and a pronomial placeholder, but Polyphemus finds himself unable to extricate himself from the apparent contradiction that he has been blinded and that “no one” has blinded him.76 Ulysses is not impervious; he dissimulates. He is, therefore, in a sense overly aware of others. In Ulysses, lying is a form of hypersensitivity to others, an awareness of how the world will look to others in the hypothetical event that they believe the lie that he is about to put into circulation. Achilles and Ulysses demonstrate the range of Vichian analysis into human capacity with signs. Indeed, one might even say that, together, Achilles and Ulysses denote for Vico the parameters of Homeric being with others—Achilles the minimally human, Ulysses the maximally and even excessively human. Vico’s is a new science of the cosa civile. It is the social role played by language in bringing human beings into a state of cohabitation that is fundamental. Poetry is actually an exit from solitude of spirit, and Vico’s exposition of sapienza poetica is a sublimated rhetorical inquiry into the beginnings of community. In the 1725 Scienza nuova especially, Vico is bent on representing the civilizing role of shame, a prototypically social emotion in which it is the thought of oneself in the eyes of others that dominates. For Vico, divinity is the purest expression of observation as omniscience. Divinity is the lens through which the reciprocity of seeing and being seen establishes self-consciousness. He glosses religion as the fear of the divine. After the promiscuity of the first ages after the Flood, it is religion that institutes shame. Before pudore, before even vergogna, it is the corporeal rossore that inaugurates civil marriage contracts. Expelled from Eden, Adam and Eve live in fear of the divine. Indeed, humanit`a begins when vergogna confronts men with divinity— omniscience as panoptic, conscience as literally a “knowing with an other” 75 Vico,

1744 Scienza nuova, §667; Iliad, 22.261ff. Odyssey, 9.364ff.

76 Homer,

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(con-scientia).77 Likewise, Vico claims for the Greek polis (city) and the Latin politus (polished) a common etymological source. It is as if he wishes to suggest that it is the quality of “rubbing up against” that is definitive in the urban crucible, decisive in cutting the heroic giants down to civil proportions.78 What separates the human from the bestial is the forza della societ`a, without which there is nothing but a bestial solitudine.79 But that force of society only comes into being by degrees. Before force can be expressed, understood, or even sensed as number (a measure that is in fact profoundly abstract) it must first register as dimension, and before that as weight.80 Vico’s sublimation of rhetoric is so supple, so liberated from received categories that the Scienza nuova makes no use of the distinction between logos and pathos. Instead the cognitive innovations of the tropes and the affective dimensions of vulnerability to signs come together in emphasis on the social dimension of sign use in his history of Greek inferential form. As Vico relates it, the history of Greek inference begins with autopsia (the evidence of the senses) in Epicurus and becomes example (more persuasive than any general maxim) in Aesop. Then, dialectic (or as Vico describes it “induction from analogy”) in Hippocrates and Socrates is followed by synthesis (induction from particulars to universals) in Pythagoras. Syllogistic (deduction of particulars from universals) in Aristotle gives rise to sorites (the compounding of syllogisms) in Zeno.81 To write such a history of inference is to conceive of logic as an essentially social tissue of commitments. Historicity here implies multiple authorship of particular syllogistic engagements. Placing utterances in a particular inferential order becomes, in this line of thinking, a function of memory and imagination, experience and expectation. Argument aims at agreement (although it is true that such agreement may reasonably be called either domination or consensus), and particular arguments are predictions of agreement in particular places and times. The deployments of autopsy, example, dialectic, synthesis, syllogistic, soritic are so many hypotheses about what will precipitate consensus in certain communities and under certain speech conditions. This is an account of logic that emphasizes 77 Vico,

1725 Scienza nuova, §§57–8. §102. 79 Ibid., §114. 80 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §713: “gli uomini sentirono prima il peso, poi la misura, assai tardi il numero, nel quale finalmente si ferm`o la ragione.” 81 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §499. Once again, rhetoric is the source. See the discussion of inferential form in Vico, Institutiones oratoriae, 202–3. Compare also the discussion in Vico, De ratione, 1.209. 78 Ibid.,

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reasonability over rationality, for it is the susceptibility of auditors to the force of certain reasons that predominates rather than the “ratios” that exist between particular things or propositions about things.82 What Vico is doing in his exposition of poetic wisdom is radicalizing the traditional rhetorical focus on topoi koinoi or sensus communis, common sense by refusing to regard it simply as a presumption that idioms, sayings, folk wisdom, fables, assumptions, common places, topoi, even clich´es and the like will function effectively as major premises (either overtly and explicitly in syllogisms, or covertly in enthymemes and implicitly in exempla). In this way, he transforms it into a diagnosis of the coming into being of public perception, but the publicity of that perception does not require a traditional rhetorical forum that can function as the condition of possibility for deliberate, concerted action. Instead, common sense— as Vico recasts it—is a publicity of perception that makes possible a common passion, a shared suffering. Or rather, because the grammatical opposition of active and passive voice is too stark in this case, sense and its commonality express a middle-voiced locale in which acting is itself a being acted upon and poiesis is simultaneously autopoiesis. Witness the role that common sense plays in Vico’s axioms.83 Axioms XI, XII, and XIII develop a very particular gloss on common sense. First, Vico says that “human choice, by its nature most uncertain, is made certain and determined by the common sense of men with respect to human needs or utilities, which are the two sources of the natural law of 82 In

a humorous response to a parodic review of his 1725 Scienza nuova in the Acta eruditorum, Vico restates his commitment to the foundation of logic in imagination. Vico takes the absence of laughter in animals as a sign of the absence of rationality in them, as laughter is a sure sign of the capacity to put unlikes together, in an ungainly, ironic fashion. Vico, Vici vindiciae, 355. The ars topica, the art of inventing arguments, comes before the ars critica, the art of judging them, and topics is fundamentally imaginative because it is in perceiving the harmony or disharmony between potentially distant objects that, for example, Demosthenes was able to demonstrate the consequences of assertions to his more or less obtuse Greek audiences. His enthymemata enlist tacit assumptions. Demosthenes was in this respect a good pupil of Plato, Vico goes on to say, and Plato of Socrates. It was the latter who introduced this mode of questioning, which the Greeks called dialectic, in order to capacitate the logical dimension of human nature. Vico, Vici vindiciae, 359. In putting the matter thus, Vico commits himself to an account in which logic is not only a means to an end, but an end in itself—a properly political value. Dialectic here stands for the possibility of persuasion. 83 See especially Gadamer, Truth and Method, 19ff, but compare Dockhorn, “Rezenzion von Hans-Georg Gadamer,” 172ff. See also Ernesto Grassi, “La priorit`a del senso comune e della fantasia in Vico,” in Leggere Vico, ed. Emanuele Riverso (Milan: Routledge, 1983), 128–42; Giarizzo, “Del ‘senso comune’ in Vico,” in Vico, la politica e la storia, 125–41; Giuseppe Modica, La filosofia del “senso comune” in Giambattista Vico (Caltanissetta–Rome: Sciascia, 1983), Schaeffer, Sensus Communis.

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the gentes.” This is common sense inflected by the hermeneutic tendencies of jurisprudence described in Chapter 5. That is to say, it is sense made common by communities of interpretation. In the first instance, “human choice” is uncertain, that is to say indeterminate. Precedent is a sketch filled in and reframed in the course of subsequent interpretation. Thus, “human choice” is rendered determinate by common sense, that is to say by the judgments that accrete to a precedent as it is evaluated over time with reference to “human needs or utilities.” Needs and utilities— the manifestations of natural equity—drive the unfolding of natural law in historical time.84 In Axiom XII, Vico goes on to define common sense in terms of judgment: “common sense is judgment [giudizio] without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire people, an entire nation, or the entire human race.” In its most literal meaning, common sense denotes for Vico sensory perception that is common to more than one percipient. It is collective witnessing. What the Neapolitan does here is emphasize that collective witnessing is not necessarily the foundation of a discussion that involves reflection. Moreover, he argues that such unreflected collective witnessing can constitute judgment. This means that a sense can be a judgment, such that it promotes certain actions and not others, even when it does not register as a belief to be defended self-consciously in discourse.85 84 Vico,

1744 Scienza nuova, Axiom XI, §141: “l’umano arbitrio, di sua natura incertissimo, egli si accerta e determina col senso comune degli uomini d’intorno alle umane necessit`a o utilit`a, che son i due fonti del diritto naturale delle genti.” 85 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, Axiom XII, §§142–3. Vico’s definition of common sense as un giudizio senz’alcuna riflessione bears comparison to its competitors. In the De ratione, Vico had said “the first thing that ought to be formed in adolescents is sensus communis, so that, having matured they do not indulge in odd and arrogant behavior. Just as common sense derives from the probable, so science derives from the true and error from the false. For the probable is as it were between the true and the false, since that which is for the most part true is rarely false.” Vico, De ratione, 104–5. Compare Quintilian’s instruction that the orator must from his youth live in a state of publicity, in media rei publicae luce, and the role played by such a habituation in developing sensum ipsum, qui communis dicitur. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 1.2.18ff. Compare also Cicero’s description of a “tacit sense” possessed by all for judging rhythm: Only an expert will be able to scan analytically the meter of an utterance and explain why it works as it does, yet almost everyone will already have arrived at the same aesthetic judgment. Cicero, De oratore, 3.50.195. For Aristotle, common sense had been “that which is held generally or by most.” See Prior Analytics, 24b11, 70a 3; Topics, 100a 30: “reasoning is dialectical which reasons from generally accepted opinions”; Rhetoric, 1357a 36. For Kant, “by ‘sensus communis’ . . . must be understood the idea of communal sense, i.e., a faculty for judging that in its reflection takes account (a priori) of everyone else’s way of representing in thought, in order as it were to hold its judgment up to human reason as a whole . . . not so much to the actual as to the merely possible judgment of others.” Kant, Critique of Judgment, §40. See Hannah

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Common sense asserts community because it is a set of presuppositions that are shared unconsciously. Such unconscious predisposition to action we call habit. The effect is to reduce the distance between sensation, imagination, and appetition that Aristotle struggles to establish in his rhetorized psychology, the De anima. Sensations of pleasure and pain, desire and aversion that are shared with others are already judgments qua collective dispositions toward action. The removal of any requirement that judgment be the result of debate explains how for Vico sense that is judgment without reflection can be common to persons who have never been co-present. Ordinarily, collective witnessing requires some kind of co-presence or co-proximity in space and time. Such co-presence is not required in this case, because the object perceived is by definition something that can never be exhaustively represented in any single place and time. The object perceived is human nature, but it is a nature that is coterminous with history, for as Vico says in Axiom XIV “the nature of institutions is nothing but their coming into being (nascimento) at certain times and in certain guises.” Just so, the next axiom reads “uniform ideas originating among entire peoples unknown to each other must have a common ground in truth.”86 As Vico understands it, there are proclivities toward particular sensitivities that distinguish human beings from other life forms. But although the beginnings of such shared sensitivities are relatively few—marriage, burial, religion—the history of common sense is as open as the human sensorium itself insofar as the senses of some human beings can be brought into proximity with the senses of others by sublimated rhetorical institutions that go beyond the explicitness of the polis. The crucial grammatical transformation here is a movement from the uncountable noun common sense, sensus communis, to the plural noun common senses, sensi comuni (which in turn makes common sense a singular, countable noun). In effect this alteration in the grammatical substratum particularizes common sense and strips it of the abstract layers of meaning it has accreted. In a usage that delineates the domain of inquiry for the 1744 Scienza nuova (but that is not repeated there), Vico speaks in 1725 of providence, marriage, and burial as the tre sensi comuni del Genere Umano.87 Later, in a related usage, he describes the popular wisdom (la sapienza volgare, which is the phrase used in 1725 for what will become la Arendt’s particularly incisive gloss of Kant’s conception in her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 70ff. 86 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, Axiom XIII, §§144–6. 87 Vico, 1725 Scienza nuova, §10.

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sapienza poetica of Book II in 1744) as “a common sense, possessed by all peoples or nations, that regulates social life, in all our human activities [azioni], in such a way that they accord with what everyone in each people or nation senses in common.” What is more, “the concordance of the common senses [sensi comuni] of all peoples or nations is the wisdom of mankind.”88 What Vico is presenting is another conceptual glissando, this time between “sense” as “sensory faculty” and “sense” as “meaning,” the former tending toward (but not reaching) form and the latter tending toward (but not reaching) content. Providence (which will be religion in most passages in 1744), marriage, and burial become more than mere institutions. They become faculties of perception comparable to touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight. They become modes of social being, fractures in the shell of spiritual solitude. In fact, there is another reason that explains why the representation of providence as a sensory faculty is not at all farfetched. In 1744 Vico speaks of questo senso universale, che sia la Divinit`a Provvedente.89 Provvedente—an adjective deriving from the present participle provvedendo and distinct from the more commonly used term provvedenza—emphasizes what providence is literally: “pro-vidence” is an activity of “fore-seeing.” Imagination, anticipation, desire, and aversion, thus, are closely affiliated faculties in the human sensorium concentrated on future orientation. Future orientation, what is more, is an asserted faith in historical continuity, an assumption that the symptoms of the present say something (although nothing definite) about the future. Such continuity requires institutions. Vico characterizes the denotation of “providence” as “office,” when he glosses it as la Regina delle faccende degli uomini, “sovereign over the affairs of men.”90 More than merely formal, however, this sensory faculty is inseparable from the ceremonies, beliefs, and habits of religion that mask and mark human susceptibility. Just so, this senso is also a persuasione.91 This sense is common not only between societies, but also within them. Moreover, each society exists as a society to the extent that it propagates the “sensorial glissando” from sense as faculty to sense as meaning. This means not only that particular beliefs must be held in common, but also that there must be common institutions through which beliefs are experienced and replicated. This is a point of considerable importance and has often been misunderstood. 88 Ibid.,

§46. 1744 Scienza nuova, §365. 90 Ibid., §312. 91 Ibid., §473. 89 Vico,

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Consider Aristotle’s stipulation that “what appears to all, this we call Being.”92 In Arendt’s gloss of this passage, she takes Aristotle to be saying that, insofar as the polis facilitates common sense, it is a condition of possibility for being. She argues, in a formulation that I have adopted as an axiom in this work, that “the polis . . . is not the city-state in its physical location.” Instead the polis is “the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely the space where I appear to others as others appear to me.” She then goes on to reason that “whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes away like a dream, intimately and exclusively our own but without reality.”93 To say this is to say that “reality” is a function of history. If one person experiences something that happens in the world, then that experience is said to be real. But without institutions like poetry, genuinely singular experiences have no effect on the subsequent development of mind and world. Marooned as a statistical outlier, the experience is as good as nonexistent. Only senses that are shared, that are held in common, even unconsciously, achieve reality. Confecting Aristotle through Herbert of Cherbury, Vico anticipates Arendt’s gloss. Like Herbert, Vico believes in a version of Aristotle’s contention that “actual knowledge is identical with its object.”94 For them this means that whatever appears to man also appears in him—and constitutes him insofar as that impression remains as a facility or faculty for receiving such impressions in the future.95 What Vico does is historicize Herbert’s redaction of Aristotle. The result is an awareness that not all judgments without reflection are shared by the entire human race. Most are very much more local. But the locality of these sensi comuni is not the locality of the polis. It is precisely the capacity of these sensi comuni to exist in particular places and times in the absence of institutions that bring the population together that enables Vico to transcend the parameters of classical rhetoric. It is in this context that we must interpret Vico’s assertion that the principle of natural right is il Giusto Uno (literally “the just one,” figuratively “unequivocal justice”). He means to adhere to what he identifies as the Platonic dictum that “it is necessary to follow as criterion of the true,

92 Aristotle,

Nicomachean Ethics, 1172b 36ff. Human Condition, 198–9. 94 Aristotle, De anima, 431a. 95 Herbert, De veritate, 119–20; compare the etymology of facultas from facilitas in Vico, De antiquissima sapientia, 113. 93 Arendt,

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that which seems one, or the same, to all.”96 It would be trite and dangerous simply to assert that the most common opinion is the most true. It is something quite different to assert, as Vico does, that commonality of experience is a precondition for the insertion of truth into human community. If Vico is right, then it is only by living as it were together that it becomes possible to live in truth. Insofar as rhetoric’s theoretical competence is precisely “living together” in this sense, it follows that rhetorical practice is a condition for the possibility for living in truth. Here, Vico’s sublimated rhetoric anticipates the broader agenda of pragmatism, which is not simply to insist that what works is true, but rather to claim that the community of inquiry is the condition of possibility for truth itself. Failure to distinguish clearly between common senses as shared beliefs and common senses as shared faculties of perception has serious repercussions. If Vico believes that a society must share particular kinds of belief in order to be stable, then he is a conservative political thinker. But if his point is rather that the health of a society depends on the faculties of perception that it shares in common, then there is nothing immediately conservative or progressive about his account of common sense.97 If one thinks of religion not as a common sense or even as an institution, but 96 Vico,

1725 Scienza nuova, §71: “solo Platone promuove il Giusto Uno; che stima doversi seguire per regola del Vero, cio` che sembra Uno, ovvero lo stesso a tutti.” 97 Witness the violence done to the notion of common sense by construing it as a prop for political conservatism in John D. Schaeffer, “Thomas More and the Master Tropes: The Deep Structure of A Dialogue Concerning Heresies and Giambattista Vico,” Moreana, 38 (2001): 5–24. In his more concerted treatment of sensus communis in Vico, Schaeffer is more circumspect, noncommittal. On the one hand, he says that “Vico’s concept of sensus communis challenges our received notions of relativism,” for “it says that community must have some shared values, some limits to its tolerance of differences, and it requires that this limit exist not merely in theory but in practice: in education, in law, in politics.” He then goes on to say that “sensus communis is grounded in the language, literature, and institutions of a community and relates to the community’s social and political world, a relation that is consensual and concrete,” but the significance of the word institutions is not made explicit. On the other hand, Schaeffer also recognizes that “sensus communis allows for social innovation and adaptation and the creation of new institutions, while at the same time guaranteeing social continuity.” Schaeffer, Sensus Communis, 150–1. Likewise, in a reading that depends on a profoundly anti-Vichian understanding of rationality, Lilla finds himself insisting that “the political lesson of the divine age,” which in his opinion is paradigmatic for Vico’s understanding of politics in all places and times and emblematic of his status as a so-called antimodern, “is that these social customs—religion, marriage, and property—precede the creation of political society, and therefore have deeper roots in human nature than any political contract imagined by the moderns.” To conclude, as Lilla does, that “irrational ‘common sense’ precedes rational politics” is extremely misleading. Lilla, G. B. Vico, 154.

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rather as a collection of particular beliefs about the divine, then one can suppose that when Vico says there can be no society without religion, he means that there is something indispensable about belief in Jove, Christ, and their analogues.98 When we recall that religione had been provvedenza in the early 1725 Scienza nuova and when we recall that the literal meaning of provvedenza is foresight, however, then we understand that Vico wants to insist that a society exists only on the basis of being sensitive to the signs of the future that litter the present. Homer, thus, is the true religion of the Greeks. In effect, Vico contends that it is not the Olympian gods themselves that constitute Greek religiosity, but rather the stories about the gods that are woven into the Iliad and the Odyssey. It is above all else narrative that is religious, for narrative is a modulation of expectation, a shared store of fables like the Homeric poems that is at base a shared body of expectations about how the future ensues from the present. When Vico intimates that a society requires religion he means that no society exists in the absence of shared orientations toward the future. For Vico, the opposite of relativism is not orthodoxy. It is publicity. Pyrrhonism is destructive of humanity for Vico because it condones multiple truths and provides no mechanism beyond violence or power for reconciling diversity of opinion. It might be answered that when skepticism is merely procedural, when doubt is not hyperbolic to the point that epistemology dominates inquiry, it is concerned precisely with the community of inquiry insofar as it believes that a plurality of opinions promotes engagement. Fine, but Vico’s answer is not that diversity as such is debilitating—who after all is as evocative of the multiform piazza as Vico? Rather, skepticism is a phase in the history of philosophy, for Vico, where inquiry becomes merely academic, academic in the sense of addressing only a narrow public. Likewise, “Epicureanism dissipates [humanity] because it would leave judgements of utility to the sense of each individual; and Stoicism annihilates it because it disregards the utilities or necessities of our corporeal nature and recognizes only those of the mind, upon which only the Stoics’ own sage is allowed to pass judgement.”99 Pyrrhonism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism destroy humanity, for Vico, because they undermine the ground of common sense that the sapienza poetica has fabricated. 98 Compare

Vico’s criticism of Bayle for supposing that “peoples can live in justice without the light of God.” Note, however, the conceptual refraction introduced by Vico’s insertion of the word light. Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §§334, 1110. 99 Vico, 1725 Scienza nuova, §71.

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Thus, on closer inspection, it is clear that Vico’s poetic wisdom is a properly rhetorical insight into being with others. Poetic wisdom is the convivenza of human beings. It is the conglomeration of signs within which human beings come to feel the impositions of others. It is a future orientation, a shared sensitivity to perceiving signs as augurs of the future. It is a common enterprise and is destroyed when the commonality of that enterprise is fractured. As such, humanity for Vico is dependent on the very part of rhetoric that is most absent in his account, namely institutions of public debate that are capable of generating genuinely informed, open, and reciprocal political decision making. To live in a society with rhetorical institutions that guarantee such publicity is to live in a society where the reality principle—as understood by Aristotle—is strong. Vico’s particular (and peculiar) rhetorical problem is to theorize an orazione (that is to say, una vita civile, una convivenza) appropriate to a society that lacks such institutions. It is no coincidence that Vico’s Naples was just such a society; likewise, it is no coincidence that the principal sites of Vichian inquiry are Greece and Rome before and while they developed such public institutions. Therefore, the question to be answered next is this: What kind of institution can sustain sensi comuni in a society that does not possess rhetorical institutions of public debate?

III. Homer as Rhetorical Institution It is my contention that Homer becomes Vico’s model of an intense form of semiotic accretion that is able to function as a rhetorical institution for societies that do not possess classical rhetorical institutions analogous to the boule or ekklesia at Athens. That contention derives primarily from a section of the Scienza nuova that Vico includes for the first time in the 1730 edition, entitled Della discoverta del vero Omero. In this, the third book of the Scienza nuova, Vico’s chief preoccupation is to assert that the name Homer does not refer to an individual human being, but stands rather for an entire class of oral poets and their audiences. At first, contends Vico, the poems were nothing other than an oral practice. He imagines an entire class of rhapsodes improvising their tales of the siege of Troy and the wanderings of Ulysses for the peoples of archaic Greece. Only after the fact, he conjectures, were the poems written down in the form that is familiar today. Vico’s “discovery” may well have been made through the lens of Lorenzo Valla’s Latin translation of the Greek epics. This would appear to weaken Vico’s philological claims. But his insight can be taken seriously, for his is one of the earliest and most sophisticated intuitions

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of a hypothesis concerning the genesis of the Homeric poems that is generally accepted by classicists today.100 In their twentieth-century comparison of the composition forms of the Homeric poems with modern Serbo-Croat oral poetry, Milman Parry and Alfred Lord substantiated the Neapolitan’s proposition that the poems originated as an amalgam of oral performances. With regard to scholarly debate as he understood it, Vico thinks of himself as someone trying to find a middle ground between those who say that Homer was a gifted individual and those who say that he was “a purely ideal poet who never existed.” In a series of arguments dealing with the uncertainty surrounding where and when Homer lived, Vico reasons that we must be dealing with a fictitious authorial persona who stands as a synecdoche for a vast range of different individuals. If all the Greek cities claimed him as a citizen, but none of them with any certainty, it was because there was a Homer for all places and times in preclassical Greece. Homer is “an idea or a heroic character of Grecian men insofar as they told their histories in song.”101 In this reading, “the Greek peoples were themselves Homer.” Thus, the poet is “lost in the crowd of the Greek peoples.”102 For Vico, the multiplicity of the authors and the gradual way in which they worked to accrete the Homeric poems also explains the incongruous proximity of the barbarous and the refined in the poems.103 In making these arguments, Vico is liberating himself from one of the major ancient interpretations of Homer. Among the ancient commentators, one finds many variations on the theme that Homer was a kind of philosopher who cloaked his teachings in a poetic form so that both the few and the many could grasp them. One finds this, for example, in pseudo-Plutarch. One finds it also in Heraclitus’s Homeric Allegories and Porphyry’s Homeric Questions.104 Just so, Vico attacks pseudo-Herodotus’s Life of Homer for depicting the poet as a lone genius. On the other hand, 100

It is Nicolini who suggests that Vico read Homer in the Latin translation of Valla. Fausto Nicolini, La giovinezza di Giambattista Vico: Saggio biografico (Bari: Laterza, 1932), 136. 101 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §873. 102 Ibid., §§875, 882. 103 Ibid., §804. 104 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §§780, 867. Thus, when Heraclitus describes the central concept of “allegory,” he says directly that one calls allegory that figure which consists in speaking of one thing when one wishes thereby to indicate something quite different. Heraclitus, Homeric Allegories, 5.2. There is therefore a strict differential between the surface of the text and its intended meaning, which renders Homer (in the idiom of Vico) an esoteric sage. With regard to Porphyry, note especially the phenomenology of Homeric rage that follows on the question “how, then, does rage share in pleasure?”

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there were some among the ancient commentators who wished to see Homer as a nobody, essentially a vehicle for divinely inspired versification by accounting for him as a kind of natural or divine poetic force. Thus, the final representation of Homer by pseudo-Herodotus as a poor, infirm, itinerant minstrel who is buried on the foreshore at Ios prepares the way for the interpretation of Dio Chrysostom. In turn, Dio Chrysostom begins by citing Democritus’s inference that Homer was “blessed with a divinely inspired genius.”105 What, other than the divine, insinuates Democritus, could explain the preternatural gifts of one so unprivileged?106 Eigtheenth-century inquiry into Homer had a quite different agenda. Homer became, for example, a topos in the so-called quarrel of the ancients and the moderns. Drawing on an alternative ancient tradition (in Josephus, Plutarch, and Aelian), the likes of Charles Perrault questioned the authorship and authenticity of the Homeric poems in an attempt to assert the independence of modern writers from such classical paradigms.107 On this account, Homeric Greece was a vulgar society, unpolished and violent. Among Vico’s contemporaries, Homer came increasingly to represent a window on a past civilization, a historical text rather than a purely poetic one. With regard to the integrity of the Homeric texts, Franc¸ois H´edelin had insisted that poems the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey could not have been recorded by memory alone. He reasoned therefore that we should think of the sixth-century-BCE Pisistratid recension of the text as a collation of oral compositions that had accreted separately. On that score, the Scot Thomas Blackwell (who drew on the 1730 edition of the Scienza nuova) argued that Homer was an editor of earlier traditions as well as the object himself of subsequent editorial activity.108 On the question of whether Homer’s had been an esoteric as a gloss of Iliad, 18.109–10: anger “that sweeter far than trickling honey waxeth like smoke in the breasts of men.” Porphyry, Homeric Questions, §13. 105 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §867; (Pseudo-)Herodotus, 36–7; Dio Chrysostom, 53.1. It was precisely this “divine inspiration” that led to Plato’s skepticism about the political value of Homer. What good was a manner of speaking that could offer no account of itself? 106 Note Dodds’s critical evaluation of Democritus’s inference: “it is to Democritus, rather than to Plato, that we must assign the doubtful credit of having introduced into literary theory this conception of the poet as a man set apart from common humanity by an abnormal inner experience, and of poetry as a revelation apart from reason and above reason.” See E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 82. Cf. Horace, Ars poetica, 295ff. 107 Kirsti Simonsuuri, Homer’s Original Genius: Eighteenth-Century Notions of the Early Greek Epic (1688–1798) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 42. 108 On the history of Homeric interpretation, see John Myers, Homer and His Critics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), Simonsuuri, Homer’s Original Genius, and

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wisdom, Richard Bentley took issue in 1713 with Anthony Collins’s repetition of the topos that Homer was “the epitome of all arts and sciences.” In the Preface to his famous translation of the Iliad (1715–1720), Pope entreated the reader to see in the poem an authentic picture of a civilization 3,000 years old. In the context of such early modern thinking about Homer, Vico’s analysis of Homeric vulgarity is an attempt to avoid the false dilemma of choosing between ancients and moderns. His redescription of Homer is not moralistic. He does not attempt to resurrect Homer as a model to be imitated in the eighteenth century. He attempts to bring out into the open what is really distinctive—and significant—about the Homeric poems. In this sense it is wrong to assume that Vico simply anticipates the cult of the primitive that emerged in the course of the eighteenth century. For Vico, things Homeric remain a permanent possibility in human society. Instead of exhorting us to adulate or abhor Achilles and Ulysses, Vico simply analyzes what the Homeric poems do. It is not even true to say simply that Vico lays bare the kind of world and personality brought into focus by the Homeric poems. He does that too, but he is more concerned with the kind of imaginative being with others that the oral composition and accretion of the poems entails. Thus, the true nature of Vico’s reinvention of Homer cannot be grasped only in comparison to what other scholars of his age were arguing. Vico’s real intellectual project operates at a quite different level, one that is most palpable in the context of the history of rhetoric. There are a number of senses in which one could describe Homer as “rhetorical.” One might say that he provides paradigmatic examples of public deliberation—and certainly this is true of the Iliad in particular. As Vico himself notes, there are in Homer two types of assembly described, “one, called the boule, secret, where the heroes met to consult by word of mouth about the laws; and another called the agora, public, in which, also by word of mouth, the laws were published.”109 Alternatively, one Annalisa Andreoni, Omero italico: Favole antiche e identit`a nazionale tra Vico e Cuoco (Rome: Jouvence, 2003). 109 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §67. The extent to which the world of Ulysses possesses the political institutions that are associated with the Greek poleis is a matter of debate. Finley asserts that “neither poem has any trace of a polis in its political sense [and] polis in Homer means nothing more than a fortified site, a town.” Moses Finley, The World of Odysseus (New York: New York Review, 2002), 27, 74, 76. Scully, by contrast, concludes that Greeks conceived of the polis as a sacred space of human habitation delineated by the raising up of walls. Stephen Scully, Homer and the Sacred City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 1, 5.

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could say that the Homeric poems are rhetorical in the sense that they are written with a profound sense of audience. If Homer really was the teacher of all Hellas and if his poems were the exoteric form of an esoteric philosophy, then we should congratulate him primarily for speaking to the vulgar in a language they can understand—namely the language of epic. Such tailoring of speech to context is what most people understand by “rhetoric.” This is mere rhetoric—the art of persuasion as an often insincere self-consciousness. Vico, however, is not at all interested in this “self-consciousness of the con-artist.” Finally, one might also say that the Homeric poems are rhetorical in the sense that they offer a range of brilliant readings of archaic Greek interaction, and indeed the poems are studies in heroic personality. But Vico’s rhetorical revision of Homer is not limited to his explorations of heroic psychology. He is also very much interested in Homer as a kind of practice. In proposing that Homer is a poetic character, a synecdoche for an entire class of rhapsodic composition, Vico is doing more than simply anticipating a point made with more certainty and sophistication by modern scholars about the oral composition and formulaic structure of Homeric epic.110 That would be significant. I am suggesting, however, that what Vico is actually doing in his discovery of the true Homer is theorizing a new mode of publicity, a publicity in which orator and auditor interact at a distance but are nevertheless able to construct a public domain. In the De ratione of 1709, Vico had said that in rhetoric the relation between orator and auditor is paramount.111 That relationship is central to the Scienza nuova too from 1730 onward, but because the “orator” (Homer) has become multiple and because that multiple author has also been identified with Greek audiences, direct hierarchical relationships between orator and auditor are avoided. “Homer” now denotes for Vico a public domain—a kind of polis in embryo. In the first instance, this public domain is spatial. Thus, the cyclic poets, “who preserved the fabulous history of Greece from the origins of the gods down to the return of Ulysses to Ithaca,” were like the Homeric rhapsodes. Vico reasons that they were called “cyclic” not because they often digressed, but because they were “simple men who would sing the fables to the common people gathered in a circle around them on festive

110

See Alfred Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960) and Gregory Nagy, Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 111 Vico, De ratione, 108–9.

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days.”112 Likewise, Vico believes that the rhapsodes can be thought of as occupying a very literal place in the orbe civile. They “went about the cities of Greece singing the books of Homer at the fairs and festivals, some singing one of them, others another.”113 Vico understands also that these rhapsodic practices were specific enough in place and time to be the object of legislation, and he repeats Cicero’s report of Plato’s report that the Pisistratids decreed that the rhapsodes should sing their Homer at the Panathenaic festivals.114 But the public domain that is “Homer” is spatial only in a superficial sense. In fact, this creative process overcomes the limits of the here and now that political theorists commonly mistake for the parameters of both the polis and any institution capable of performing polis-like functions. In a deeper sense, Homer becomes a rubric for the interpretation of creative acts that are profoundly disaggregated. “Homer” finds a way to record spontaneous performance. When I incorporate and rework another poet’s verse into my performance, I combine myself with that poet even though I am not his or her contemporary. There may never have been a meeting in the flesh. When the performance of others is a condition of possibility for my performance, we become parties to a creative process that is at least in part public. Paradoxically, memory and spontaneity are closely bound together.115 The human capacity to absorb the good performance (and forget the bad) outstrips consciousness of such performances. This amounts to a sublimation of civic humanism in the sense that for Vico the demos, the populus, the volgo can participate in the piecemeal fabrication of a literary culture that focalizes the most essential and previously inarticulate political concerns. In this way, the uptake of audiences formulates and announces protocols for living with others, and this uptake extends beyond the performance itself to all those areas in which the exemplary forms of the epics could influence the interpretation of behavior. “Homer,” Vico now says, “truly lived on the lips and in the memories of the peoples of Greece throughout the whole period from the Trojan War down to the time of 112

Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §856; emphasis added. Cf. Horace, Ars poetica, 132. Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §851. 114 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §854; Cicero, De oratore, 3.34.137; Plato, Hipparchus, 228b. See also Pausanias, 7.26.13. 115 Lord, Singer of Tales, 5: in describing the Homeric poems as “oral narrative poetry,” Lord is at pains to stipulate that “oral . . . does not mean merely oral presentation. Oral epics are performed orally, it is true, but so can any other poem be performed orally. What is important is not the oral performance but rather the composition during oral performance.” 113

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Numa, a span of 460 years.”116 Homer becomes the locus classicus for heroic common sense, so that Achilles and Ulysses were poetic characters “agreeable to the common sense of an entire nation.”117 Achilles and Ulysses are “the manner of thinking of entire peoples.”118 Such poetic characters are, in fact, publicly generated concepts. When Vico describes the fables, sentences, customs, language, and verse of Homer as “the properties of entire peoples and consequently common to all individual men of these peoples,” he means the word propriet`a to denote not only the power of possession that peoples exercise over the poetry, but also the power to fashion culture (to give it certain properties and not others) that the poetry exerts over peoples. Thus, when I, as a Homeric poet, attach a predicate to the subject “Achilles” I begin an inquiry into the cultural life of that predicate. When you, as a subsequent Homeric poet, attach a second predicate to mine (both now anchored in the topos “Achilles”), you are implicitly making an assertion about compossibility: You assert that it is not impossible for predicate “A” to coexist in the same subject with predicate “B.” When they, all those Homeric poets who come after us, retain that particular conjunction of predicates they are voting for its verisimilitude, its plausibility.119 Vico goes to great lengths to generalize and thereby transform the rhetorical relationship between orator and auditor, sender and receiver within the framework of Homeric publicity. This is most evident in his etymology of the poet’s name. In a radical departure from PseudoHerodotus’s account of the origin of Homer’s name (which centers on Homer’s blindness), Vico relates that “homeros is said to come from homou, together, and eirein, to link; thus signifying a guarantor, as being one who binds creditor and debtor together.”120 The analogy is revealing. In longhand, what Vico is proposing is this: The Homeric performances 116

Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §876. Ibid., §809. 118 Ibid., §816. Homer thus expresses what Vico terms a natural tendency toward the preservation of “the institutions [ordini] and laws that bind them within their societies” (§811). 119 Ibid., §809: “ad entrambi tali caratteri [namely, Achilles and Ulysses] attaccarono l’azioni de’ particolari, secondo ciascun de’ due generi, piu` strepitose, le qual’i greci, ancora storditi e stupidi, avessero potuto destar e muover ad avvertirle e rapportarle a’ loro generi.” 120 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §852. See Antonino Pagliaro, “Omero e la Poesia Popolare in G. B. Vico,” 466–7, cited by Battistini, Opere, 2.1700. Compare the analysis of nexus as bond relation in the Diritto universale. Vico, De constantia, 594–5. Vichian inquiry scrutinizes an expanded spectrum of transaction. In this respect, the Neapolitan’s program is of a piece with other eighteenth-century research programs. 117

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are a form of cultural capital, a kind of liquidity that permits cultural exchange, commercio in its broadest communicative sense. When you take up my predicate or verse you are borrowing from the common store. But you cannot pay me back, because I am dead—or at least gone. You can retire your debt only if someone else borrows from you. Homer is, as it were, the financial integrity of this system of borrowings: the record of completed and ongoing transactions.121 Crucial to the present interpretation of Vico’s rediscovery of Homer is a redefinition of the meaning of the word institution itself. Recall the definition of institution given by Fisch that was cited at the beginning of this study: An institution is “any provision or arrangement of means or conditions for subsequent activity, additional to or in modification of the means or conditions that are already present prior to the institution.”122 Fisch alters the grammatical position of the word institution by transposing it from a spatial to a temporal domain. An institution is no longer defined simply as a location where particular rules and not others obtain. Rules now determine not just the lawfulness or unlawfulness of particular performances, but even determine whether particular performances may become themselves regulative. For Fisch, then, an institution is an intervention in the tissue of rules governing particular performances, an intervention that alters that tissue of rules in a way that makes the promulgation of new rules, perhaps even new kinds of rules possible. I am arguing that the disaggregated reciprocity of promulgation—any party to cultural performance can influence its evolution—is a sublimation of rhetorical reciprocity. To be sure, if “Homer” is a rhetorical institution, it is a rather peculiar institution. There is indeed a collective subject established by Homer, but it is not a collective subject that can arrive at and act on particular

121

I would argue that the piazza, the marketplace, is a basic figure for being with others in Vico’s mind. Vico uses the term commercio to characterize all forms of human interaction, and he is consistently mindful of the word’s origin in divine mercy and journey through mutual retribution. See Vico’s etymology at §26. See also the connection between commerce and Mercury made at §606. Money itself is one of the basic human institutions. The Scienza nuova recalls Aristotle’s observation that there is an etymological relation between nomos (law) and nomisma (money). Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §433; Aristotle, Ethics, 1133a 30. In 1730, Vico even indulges in the fancy that there is a connection between money and monition and admonishing, that is to say recording and remembering. Vico, 1730 Scienza nuova, 163. 122 Fisch, “Critic of Institutions,” 184. Recall that in the revised edition of their translation of the Scienza nuova, Fisch and Bergin decided to translated Vico’s cose umane e divine as human and divine institutions.

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decisions in specific places and times. There is no spatiotemporal copresence of “orators” and “auditors” who might debate and do all the things that are usually associated with forensic, deliberative, or epideictic rhetoric. To this extent, there are essential differences between “Homer” and the tribunals, assemblies, and other such forums of a traditionally rhetorical nature. Nevertheless, it is meaningful to speak of Homer as something comparable to these forums. What they share is a series of properly rhetorical commitments. They both attend to the potentially decisive minutiae of verbal expressions. They are both deeply interested in imaginative genera, where names oscillate between denotations of individual objects and classes of such objects. And they both revolve around a distinctive capacity to co-involve audiences in performance itself. What “Homer” possesses that the more traditional rhetorical institutions do not is an utterly habitual and unconscious practice of memorization, a more potent means of comparing present performance with past performances, and a finer sense of the paradigmatic status of distinction in performance. Vico is, in effect, arguing that construal (which is simultaneously uptake and innovation) counts as a “vote.” What this means in the context of the law is relatively obvious. Construal is manifestly central to legal hermeneutics, and a legal opinion on a matter of interpretation is analogous to a “vote.” What this means in the context of Vico’s Homer is less obvious—even though law and poetry are essentially similar for Vico. In the Scienza nuova, the Homeric poems as they have come down to modern readers are the results of what might be called aesthetic elections. The most popular versions of the poems are the ones most often repeated. Because the poems originally had many authors and not one, these elections are demotic. The poems are not properly democratic, however, because the procedures for ensuring that the many have the opportunity to “vote” are so informal.123 Vico has displaced the normativity of the classical Demosthenean and Ciceronian exemplars. He is saying that language itself is a public institution so powerful and so

123

Some scholars have intimated that there is a subtle or unfulfilled democratic dimension to Vichian inquiry. See, for instance, Trabant, Vicos Sematologie, 97: “die W¨orter sind also ‘konventionell,’ weil wir uns auf der dritten Stufe in einer sematogenetischen Demokratie befinden und nicht mehr in der sematogenetischen Diktatur einzelner.” See also Monica Riccio, Governo dei molti e riflessione collettiva: Vico e il rapporto tra filosofia e democrazia (Naples: Alfredo Guida, 2002), 50–1: “Vico, insomma, finisce per sovrapporre alla propria lettura delle democrazie quella, eterogenea e spesso scarna e riduttiva, offerta dalla tradizione.”

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demotic that, far beyond the capacity of any single individual to understand it, language represents the votes of the “non-co-present” and the dead.124 Thus, the decisive difference between reciting Homer and voting is that the specificity of one’s own innovation endures its absorption into the whole. Votes are lost in the sea of tallies, but predicates, lines, and verses remain distinct, for they are unique and memorable. What Vico’s discussion of such a broad array of institutions does is permit a concept of community in a most basic sense of being with others. This coexistence has a variety of different modes that range from cosensing (when objects of touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight are perceived by a multitude that may be aggregated or disaggregated in space and time), to cotestimony (when the representation of sensations— as memory and imagination—is communal), co-interpretation (when the meaning of a sign is determined by a group even over long stretches of time), and coaction (when a collective subject undertakes an action that may take longer than the life-span of any individual subject). Interaction, which apologists for rhetoric sometimes assume is the criterion of true publicity, is only one of a number of modes of co-presence. In any case, insofar as a community exists as a public (and Vico’s point is that it need not and perhaps rarely does), it exists through such institutions, piecemeal and particular. The interpretation advanced here is considerably more explicit than Vico’s own articulation of his position. It may be suspected, therefore, that the Neapolitan is being made to speak in a way that he would not recognize. This is an understandable objection. The interpretation that for Vico Homer represents a space of appearance that can exist in the absence of a polis is a hypothesis. If it is unhelpful in explaining other parts of Vico’s system, then it should be discarded. But it does help to explain other parts of the Neapolitan’s project. Vico’s contentions about Homer are only the most fully developed instance of a set of related arguments that he makes about the sense in which Roman law ought to be understood as a kind of collectively authored poem that took a millennium to compose.125 Indeed, the transposition of Vico’s earlier 124

My usage of the term co-presence derives from the following passage, in which Luhmann identifies the distinguishing characteristic of mass media: “the crucial point at any rate is that no interaction among those co-present can take place between sender and receivers. Interaction is ruled out by the interposition of technology, and this has far-reaching consequences which define for us the concept of mass media.” Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media, trans. Kathleen Cross (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 2. 125 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §786—not to mention the more obvious analogues such as Vico’s dismembering of Hermodorus, Moses, and Dante, il toscano Omero. For the reference to Moses, see §794.

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discovery of “the true Hermodorus” to the case of Homer makes Vico’s legal hermeneutics a cultural hermeneutics, but both discoveries alter the meaning of institution in the same way. There are three further analogues that confirm the utility of the hypothesis that Homer becomes a model for the kind of cultural institution that can substitute for the courts, the assemblies, and the public spaces of the polis. First, the Scienza nuova is in fact a kind of phenomenology of institutions that surveys the range of social entities that structure the movement out of spiritual solitude. Second, that phenomenology emphasizes the movement from more exclusive to less exclusive social entities that paradoxically heralds a declension of forms of social representation from public to private. This is the same irony that characterized Vico’s history of Roman law in the De ratione, and it reappears as a “rational history of Greek drama” appended to Book III of the Scienza nuova. Third, providence itself becomes—in what is arguably Vico’s chief contribution to metahistory—a kind of Homer and a kind of Twelve Tables. This too is a rhetorical sublimation in a very specific sense. Vico’s providence is a sublimation of arguments from ethos that transposes individual integrity and the honoring of promises onto a metahistorical level. Throughout the Scienza nuova, discussion of human institutions generally moves along the spectrum that extends from more exclusive to less exclusive publics. This is true of all the institutions that Vico discusses, whether the overarching institutions of religion, marriage, and burial or the particular institutions of household and marketplace, altar, city, and wall, assembly, treasury, and law. All these institutions are protocols for dealing with alterity. Religion is a collective response to the alterity, the unpredictability of the future.126 Marriage “is the seed plot of the family, as the family is the seed plot of the commonwealth,” and for Vico the family is the institution that enables the hierarchies of the present to perpetuate themselves against the anarchic promiscuity represented by the young.127 Burial comes to mean property as such, an investment in 126

` ed osservaIbid., §9: “un lituo, o sia verga, con la quale gli a` uguri prendevan gli auguri van gli ausp`ıci; il quale vuol dar ad intendere la divinazione, dalla qual appo i gentili tutti incominciarono le prime divine cose. Perch´e, per l’attributo della di lui provvedenza, cos`ı vera appo gli ebrei—i quali credevano Dio esser una Mente infinita e, ’n conseguenza, che vede tutti i tempi in un punto d’eternit`a; onde Iddio (o esso, o per gli angioli che sono menti, o per gli profeti de’ quali parlava Iddio alle menti) egli avvisava le cose avvenire al suo popolo,—come immaginata appreso i gentili—i quali fantasticarono i corpi esser d`ei, che percio` con segni sensibili avvisassero le cose avvenire alle genti,—fu universalmente da tutto il gener umano dato alla natura di Dio il nome di ‘divinit`a’ da un’idea medesima, la quale i latini dissero ‘divinari’ ‘avvisar l’avvenire.’” 127 Ibid., §11.

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the earth that lays claims on others.128 The patriarchs are simulacra or images of God for those who are incapable of understanding publicity (intender republica).129 The gentes precede cities, and both expand the parameters of here-and-now-ness embedded in families.130 The household in the early stages of public power is a space of perfect impunity.131 Therefore, the grip on power of the first kings is weak: They neither hold nor possess that power, but only “have” it.132 The marketplace is the first public space in which the plebs come to understand themselves as a class of like persons, which is why we read that the Solonic motto “Know Thyself” was on display in all the public places of Athens.133 The first cities were almost all “altars,” predicated on domesticating the future.134 They were also without walls, which denotes their status as loose conglomerations of more firmly entrenched households.135 Eventually, however, the social formation overtakes the simple coincidence of proximity in importance, and the citizenry, the civitas, comes to be distinguished from the geographical location of the city, the urbs.136 Likewise, the civitas does not necessarily embrace all those who live within the city limits, but rather only those who are recognized socially as full citizens, for it is only under conditions of popular liberty that “the whole people constitute the city.”137 Human history is a history of institutions: woods, huts, villages, cities, academies.138 But Vico’s most basic instincts about the course of human history are all ironic. Human beginnings are brutal but poetic; their endings are sophisticated but dissolute. Between the two extremes is the promise of a form of imaginative scruple—embodied at Naples by the lawyers D’Andrea and Argento—the stability of which is undermined by the irrepressible fluidity of history. Thus, as an institution Homer plants the 128

Ibid., §13. Ibid., §14. 130 Ibid., §316. 131 Ibid., §601. 132 Ibid., §645: “Tacito, avvedutissimo, lo ci avvis` o in quel primo motto degli Annali: ‘Urbem Romam principio reges habuere,’ usando il verbo che significa la piu` debole spezie delle tre che della possessione fanno i giureconsulti, che sono ‘habere,’ ‘tenere,’ ‘possidere.’” 133 Ibid., §416. 134 Ibid., §17: “si truoveranno le citt` a essere state dette ‘are’ dappertutto il mondo antico della genetilit`a.” 135 Ibid., §1014: “ne’ tempi barbari primi non vi eran fortezze, e le citt` a eroiche, le quali si composero dalle famiglie, furono lungo tempo smurate.” 136 Ibid., §971. 137 Ibid., §621. 138 Ibid., §239. 129

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seed of its own destruction. Homer’s function in the Scienza nuova is to establish a public domain in which co-presence is possible for a diversity of Greek peoples disaggregated in place and time. Homer is a kind of agora that is a condition of possibility for the common life of persons scattered across Greece and divided by centuries who have little in common—that is to say, no point of connection other than parts of the language that they use. Crucially, however, the heroic culture prominent in Homer is also in a state of decay. It is clear, Vico says, that in Homer the period of popular liberty had already begun, for heroes contracted marriages with foreigners, and bastards were recognized.139 “Homeric publicity” is essentially ironic for Vico in the sense that this kind of publicity tends to undermine its own public qualities and to produce new forms of private existence. The very proliferation of rules that is the gift of Homer to Greece creates and then fragments public life, for it generates such a diversity of publics that they become public only to themselves and then private to each other. Indeed, what the Scienza nuova gives us from a historiographic point of view is a very sophisticated ability to inquire into the historicity of publicity, its coming into being and its passing away. Vico’s rational history of Greek drama (appended to Book III of the Scienza nuova in 1730) focuses on this coming into being and passing away of publicity. Vico relates that before tragedy there was Arion with his dithyramb and Pindar with his airs set to music.140 The Neapolitan argues that tragedy derives from satire, which was invective or the hurling of insults at one’s betters. Thus, the origin of tragedy lies either with Thespis and his satyr plays staged on carts during the harvest, where the first masks were invented, made out of goat skins (as Horace says), or with Aeschylus and his tragedies commanded by Bacchus (as Pausanias says).141 Out of the satyr play Aeschylus fashioned tragedy, using human masks and converting Arion’s chorus of satyrs (which Vico equates with the dithyramb) into a chorus of men.142 But after tragedy came the old and then the new comedy, and this transition marks a fundamental transition from a society of public heroes to one of private citizens. Thus, Menander and the new comedy were “built around private and fictitious personages, who could be fictitious because they were private, and therefore could be believed to be real,” so that “there was no longer

139

Ibid., §802. Ibid., §§906, 908. 141 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §§906, 910, Horace, Ars poetica, 275ff; Pausanias, 1.21.2. 142 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §911. 140

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any room for the chorus, which is a public that comments, and comments only on public matters.”143 For Vico, therefore, the chorus of high Greek tragedy was a figure for the closest possible approximation of a society in which the entire public spoke and spoke only on matters with which all were equally acquainted. The chorus, thus, is one version of the archetypal polis institution governed by a kind of equilibrium between seeing and being seen. By the time of the new comedies, however, realism had begun to derive from fiction. The representations of lives lived outside the public domain of common sense and collective memory become true precisely because there is no testimony that could confirm or contest those representations. The narrative drive of Vico’s history of genres is from public to private, and the irony is that the very publicity of tragedy is a step in the direction of the privacy enacted by comedy. The same irony that is explicit in section XI of the De ratione is implicit here in 1744: The greater publicity of the legal system is the condition of possibility for the greater privacy of individual concerns, and the publication of the law is a precondition for the notion of individual rights. The irony is deep and recurrent in Vico’s thought. Publicity, to a Vichian way of thinking, has two antonyms: As openness, it is opposed to secrecy; as public interest, it is opposed to private interest. Publicity takes up a deeply ironic position between secrecy and private interest. On the one hand, it is the public struggle of the plebeians to claim a role in the promulgation of legislation and the administration of justice that contributes to the decline of secretive political practices in the republican period of Roman legal history. On the other hand, observes Vico, once such public political struggle has achieved a more equitable attention to individual rights, it contributes to a “privatization” of legal discourse in which only claims of private interest are articulated and recognized.144 Likewise, the very realism pioneered 143 144

Ibid., §911. Vico, De ratione, 172: “his de caussis iurisprudentia, ex scientia iusti, ars aequi facta est: et iurisconsulti ex instituto aequi momenta in caussis invenire, et de iure privato innumeros libros scribere. Sed quia formulae adhuc vigebant, adhuc oratores ad aequum defendendum in foro versabantur: sed ita, ut quantum aequitas naturalis invalescebat, tantum forensis eloquentia silesceret.” Likewise, Smith thinks of a market as a transparent forum for the expression of private interests, and Kant stipulates that reason may be used publicly only by private citizens. I would argue that the central role played by this irony in Vico’s own ambiguous political position—which essentially advocates a rule of the one in which political disputation is diverted into legal institutions that are both conservative and progressive, arcane and equitable insofar as they honor both the letter and the spirit of the law—accounts for the contradictory conclusions drawn by scholars on the question of Vico’s relationship to Enlightenment political theory.

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by the genre of comedy leads to a preoccupation with domesticity, which is the opposite of reality when reality is conceived of not as that which all experience individually, but as that which all experience collectively. When one understands the sense in which Homer denotes an institution conceived of as a regulation of the development of rules over time, Vico’s analysis of Roman and Greek institutions takes on a new clarity. Perhaps the strongest confirmation of the hypothesis, however, is the sense that it makes of Vico’s account of providence. Providence itself, it turns out, is the ultimate expression of Vichian institutionalism. What is more, Vico’s account of providence is a radicalization of the part of rhetoric that deals with arguments from ethos. In Aristotle, arguments from ethos were described as proofs depending on “the moral character of the speaker.”145 For Vico, character is a kind of integrity, but this is an integrity witnessed by a conscience that is not located in the self, but rather in the community. It is a unity of action predicated on a person rather than a plot. But the “person” upon which action is predicated here is nothing so literal as a Demosthenes. Vico transfers onto an institutional level the rhetorical proof that registers in Aristotle (sometimes although not always) as a concern with the character of individual orators and in Theophrastus as research into the identifying characteristics of assorted personality types. In the first instance Vico’s characters are the deities of Greek mythology. Thus, “the first divine fable” was Jove, a plot line of desire and aversion instituting religion as fear that is followed by other fables of a similar nature: Juno, a “divine character” for “solemn matrimony;” Diana, “representing the first human need,” water; Apollo, “apprehended as god of civil light;” Vulcan, Saturn, and Cybele; Mars and Venus; Minerva; with Mercury and Neptune coming last, representing commerce and navigation.146 Each divine character represents an institution. In fact, they are institutionalizations of character. Impersonality is the result and it is characteristic of the Scienza nuova.147 Vico attempts to do for the myths and legends of Greece and Rome what Theophrastus did for the individuals of democratic Athens. That is, Vico redacts the multiplicity of 145

Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1356a. Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §§379, 511, 528, 533, 549, 562, 589, 604, 634. 147 As Alain Pons has said, Vichian new science is histoire sans noms propres. Likewise, Struever has argued that impersonality is a key Vichian concern. Olivier Remaud makes a similar point when he argues that the Scienza nuova is a science of the kind of impersonality that manifests itself through the medium of creative beliefs that have been stripped of their original aims. Olivier Remaud, Les archives de l’humanit´e: Essai sur la philosophie de ´ Vico (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2004), 264. 146

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acts and narratives into a partially conceptualized type to be employed as a lens through which to perceive other behavior more clearly. Like Theophrastus, Vico turns the oratorical consideration of ethos—the disposition of the orator and auditor toward character—into an anthropological inquiry into cultural types. Providence denotes the purest form of character insofar as character is institutionalized in the imaginative universals of the deities. Providence is the guarantor of a regime of truth in human affairs in the long term. But this is not the integrity of either the subject or the object, the active or the passive partners in any given social transaction, but rather the integrity of that system of social transaction itself. Providence is the ethos of intersubjectivity as it registers in the collaboratively instantiated objects of the world. In this context, world is to be understood as the principle of identity that links past and future. Such a world often takes the form of a community of percipients who have no relation to each other except their shared relationship to the single object that they witness from different places and times. Providence is an abstract articulation of the folk wisdom expressed in the maxim “the truth will out.” Providence is foresight, and Vico’s entire account of signs is oriented to the future. In the 1725 Scienza nuova, he makes the very idea of truth itself appear as a corollary of the divine in the aspect of providence. Drawing implicitly on the Grotian formulation of the problem, Vico equates the category of truth with the practice of making promises. Truth is a kind of fidelity.148 He argues that men could not understand the normative dimension of an utterance (that is, understand it as a contract) unless they already had an understanding of a future in which lying or nonfulfillment of a contract might become explicit. As Vico says, “it frequently happens in human life that promises need to be made and accepted and actions undertaken, with regard to things for which, though not wrong in themselves, others need some assurance, but which lack the support of any human documentation.” Asserting the truthfulness of a promise, 148

Compare this with what Vico says about verum in the De uno: “verum gignit mentis cum rerum ordine conformatio.” Vico, De uno, 34–5. Compare also the De antiquissima sapientia account where Vico says not only that “verum et factum convertuntur,” but also that “verum creatum convertatur cum facto, verum increatum cum genito” and that “in eo [the divine word that calls into being ex nihilo the genitum] idem sit verum ac comprehensio elementorum omnium, quae hanc rerum universitatem componit.” Vico, De antiquissima sapientia, 62–5. Whereas the emphasis in 1725 is on the integrity of the system, the emphasis in 1720 was on conformity; in 1710 there had been a double stress on artifice and totality.

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to Vico’s mind, presupposes that men “already understand an idea of truth such that the revelation of a truth would suffice to oblige others to believe it without [the support of] any human documentation.” This idea of truth, this guarantor in human transactions, is, the Neapolitan interjects, “nothing other than the idea of God in the attribute of Providence, i.e. an eternal and infinite mind that penetrates and foresees everything.”149 In Vico, unlike in Feuerbach (with whom the Neapolitan shares so much), it is never clear whether truth is the figure for God or God is the figure for truth. Not providence itself, but rather being persuaded of providence founds the first nations: Vico takes tutte le Nazione esser nate sulla persuasione della Provvedenza Divina.150 When he describes the Scienza nuova as a rational civil theology of divine providence, he immediately sets about distinguishing his account of providence from the contingency of the Epicureans and the fate of the Stoics, arguing that instead of attending to the blind chance and inexorable cause of the world considered as nature they ought to have investigated providence as it manifests itself in the world of civil institutions. Had they done that, Vico continues, they would have understood the equivalence between providence and human orientation to the future. “They ought,” says Vico, “to have studied [providence] in the economy of civil institutions, in keeping with the full meaning of applying to providence the term “divinity” [i.e., the power of divining], from divinari, to divine, which is to understand what is hidden from men—the future—or what is hidden in them—their consciousness.”151 Neither the future nor the intentions of others may be approached except by means of extremely uncertain signs. The institution of the promise and the notion of a system that will detect and register broken promises are all that human community can offer. Providence is the sum total of all protocols and rituals instantiated in social systems that aim at coming to terms with the alterity, the unpredictability of the future. Providence, therefore, is the ultimate expression, within a Vichian way of thinking, of the discovery of the true Homer. Homer is an institution that exists in no one time and place. It is an institution that exists in a diversity of times and places as an evolving fabric of normative perceptions, judgments about decorum (the 149

Vico, 1725 Scienza nuova, §45; Hugo Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis libri tres, trans. Francis W. Kelsey et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 2.2.328–31. 150 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §473. 151 Ibid., §342.

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feasible, the plausible, the credible, the reasonable). Providence (insofar as it is understood as the institutionalization of human foresight) is a comparable fabric of normative perceptions. Vico idealizes the rituals of predication and placation, together with the calculus of means and ends as the human belief that all human actions and passions are perfectly visible to God. This imputation of omniscience registers in the human world as a presupposition that such a thing as providence exists. This way of thinking creates a quandary. For Vico, truth in human affairs is fidelity. It is being held accountable. This regime of truth is institutionalized by the human belief both in the possibility of perfect publicity and also in the actuality of perfect publicity in the omniscience of God. God knows all things, regardless of whether they have “the support of any human documentation” in the world or simply remain desires and aversions. But in this case mere belief is insufficient. God’s omniscience is not registered as human memory. Divine total recall is epiphenomenal to the human system, and each human system can only live in truth to the extent that it does its own remembering. Yet the human capacity to remember (and to remember appropriately) is profoundly defective. The institutionalization of protocols in providence creates a tension between the linear form of perfect inscription and retrieval and the cyclical form of remembering and forgetting. Dealing with imperfections in the institutionalization of memory, attention, and imagination is the next problem.

IV. Vichian Historicity and the Manifold Structure of Time A remarkable contradiction continues to mar interpretation of Vichian historical consciousness. On the one hand, Vico is read as a herald of the collective historical subject that achieves self-consciousness and then self-determination in history—historicism in nuce. Thus for some, “Vico’s ‘divine providence’ furnishes what has aptly been termed a ‘natural right to insurrection’ arising from man’s inevitable eventual quest for selfliberation from oppression and exploitation.” On the other hand, he is taken to have said that there are structural limitations on the powers of human reason that condemn human beings to an eternal recurrence of the same. So for others, “what still deserves explanation is how Vico’s scientific conquest of reason could, in the centuries that followed, be construed as a victory for human freedom.” How can it be that Vico is understood by some as a radical who asserts that for human beings history is an artifact of their own making and by others as a conservative who

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stipulates that in order to mitigate the cycle of growth and decay a political science must be cultivated that opposes skepticism and entrenches traditional mores?152 Vico’s conceptualization of providence is the central problem. As Croce noted, “Vico used the word ‘providence’ promiscuously in a subjective and an objective sense: now as the human belief in a provident deity controlling their destinies, now as the actual operation of this providence.”153 Choosing to emphasize the meaning of providence as either a human belief or an aspect of the divine has consequences. Providence as belief is the object of inquiry into foresight generally speaking, together with the nature and consequences of human future orientation. After all, why should one speak of God’s perspective of the nunc stans as a mode of foresight unless one is tacitly anthropomorphizing that deity by suggesting that the divine must experience some kind of future orientation in order to see for itself Plato’s moving image of eternity? Providence, as an aspect of the divine, leads not only to a worshipping of the future as an unknown god (that is, to fatalism), but also to a heightened awareness of the role of irony in historiography. Moreover, in Vico that awareness of irony in historiography increases the acuity of attention both to unintended consequence and to the possibility of systemic social change. I shall argue that this debate is unlikely ever to be resolved, because it is wrongheaded. Certainly, the “radical” and “conservative” dimensions of Vichian thought do find some expression in the texts. The texts, however, reveal a future orientation and a cyclicism that need not be contradictory. They can be reconciled when one understands Vico’s metahistorical 152

The two quotations come from Jonathan Israel (who is quoting Remaud) and Mark Lilla, respectively. Israel believes that, for Vico, Rome represented the effective synthesis of civil equity (reason of state) and natural equity (justice considered from the point of view of each individual’s utilities and rights). In his estimation of Vico’s political affiliation to monarchy, the “enlightened absolutism” of Augustus justifies retroactively and providentially the “resistance theory” of Octavian. Lilla, by contrast, although he agrees that Rome is the paradigm for providential historical form, understands providence as an antimodern mechanism. He places a great deal of emphasis on the barbarism of reflection and reads it as a narrative of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. This leads him to see Vico’s critique of the barbarism of reflection as a denunciation of the Enlightenment project of modernity. In the Neapolitan’s original formulation, however, the barbarism of reflection was a counterfactual alternative to the rule of Augustus. When a republic becomes as fractious as Rome in the first century BCE, it may turn itself into a monarchy or face the barbarism of reflection that heralds a returned barbarism of sense. Rome chose authority, but for Vico it became an authority invested in the law. Compare Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 670 and Lilla, G. B. Vico, 234. 153 Croce, Filosofia di Vico, 109.

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imagination as one that sublimates rhetoric’s consciousness of time as a temporal manifold. What emerges then is an extraordinarily complex matrix of temporal interconnections in which the plurality of pasts and futures that—as memory and expectation—are simultaneous in any given social system constitutes a fragmentation commensurate with the fragmentation of collective, institutional decision making effected by Vico. I make three claims. First, it is true that the future is a category that plays a very important role for Vico. Second, it is also true that the basic structures of Vichian historiography are cyclical. Third, future orientation and cyclicism are subsumed in a reading of Vichian historiography where past, present, and future are understood as simultaneous dimensions of human perception. Once again, the source for Vico’s innovation is rhetoric. His exploration of the simultaneity of the ages of gods, heroes, and men echoes the Augustinian perception that past, present, and future are simultaneous as memory, attention, and expectation. In turn, Augustine’s autobiographical self-consciousness is itself a creative redaction of the basic divisions of oratorical performance, as discussed by Aristotle, between speech referring to past, present, or future.154 As Aristotle put it, to each of the basic rhetorical genres, “a special time is appropriate: to the deliberative the future, for the speaker, whether he exhorts or dissuades, always advises about things to come; to the forensic the past, for it is always in reference to things done that one party accuses and the other defends; to the epideictic most appropriately the present, for it is the existing condition of things that all those who praise or blame have in view.”155 Moreover, rhetoric’s analysis of the passions asserts the intensity of the human being’s location in time. Anger in Aristotle is the anticipation of retribution for a wrong previously received, which effectively stipulates that anger is a bodily phenomenon that exists in an extended temporal dimension such that the body itself pulls human consciousness out of its pretemporal solitude of spirit and stretches it on the rack of time.156 Rhetoric’s temporal manifold anchors Vico’s statement that memory is almost the same thing as imagination.157 There is a fundamental comparability between one’s ability to remember and one’s ability to fantasize; 154

Augustine, Confessions, 10.20. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1358a–b. Plato considers the orator’s attention to time a form of bondage. Consider Theaetetus, 173a–b, where the Athenian characterizes the forensic orator as a slave to time, who, hiring out his opinions in the defense of others, has been warped, becoming dwarfed and crooked. 156 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1370b. 157 Vico, 1712 Risposta, 152; Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §819. 155

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from the perspective of the nunc stans, both recollection and expectation are forms of rendering the nonpresent present. As indicated here, Vico believes that the invention of Jove was the coming into being of language. In the present context, it can be added that the use of signs requires and creates a new dimension: time. The metonymic movement from effect to cause, from thunder and lightning to Jove, is a movement into the past. It is an extrapolation from act to agent. One calls that relation “intention.” At the same time as the first men push back the boundary of their ignorance by supposing a timeline that extends into the past, they discover the future as well. If an agent has intended an act, then that agent has intended it in order to achieve something else, a something that must lie beyond the act itself. Thus, the perception of time is a cognitive achievement. As Vico intimates, “verbs signify motions which involve past and future, which are measured from the indivisible present, which even philosophers find very hard to understand.”158 Any ability to talk about temporality is deeply sophisticated. Because the bestioni take Jove to have uttered an instruction, they must necessarily believe in a future domain of compliance or noncompliance.159 That “beyond” is not one that can be mapped in space. A future time must be imagined, a temporal locale in which the agent’s act takes on a meaning. Or rather, the best that their small minds can do is instantiate this new temporal domain on the outer reaches of their spatial consciousness. Jove was no higher than the mountaintops, for he was a poetic character of the horizon, and the horizon is a metaphor for the difference between here and there, now and then. But all of this is implicit while linguistic capacity is developing, and the temporal structure of semiotics becomes explicit only with the introduction of verbs, which Vico says were the last parts of speech to be developed.160 Likewise, Vico’s account of inquiry depends on a particular understanding of futurity. His opposition to method—his critique of French rationalist pedagogy—comes from his conviction that knowledge is judgment, and the early emphasis on judgment will later become his entry point into historical theory. His assertion that acting is a kind of making, that phron¯esis is a kind of poiesis, underpins his entire account of cultural history. In the De ratione of 1709, the critique of method is expressed as a concern for orators who must possess a training that enables them 158

Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §453. Ibid., §379. 160 Ibid., §453. 159

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to improvise effectively in the public domain.161 A year later, in the De antiquissima sapientia, the critique of method becomes an emphasis on the pragmatic nature of British experimental philosophy, which is neither idealist, nor even empiricist, for it is dedicated to the Baconian project of reconstructing nature and knowing its causes by approximating its effects.162 In one of his later orations, this critique of method even becomes an explicit declaration of the not merely unpredictable, but in point of fact generative quality of the future. In an age like ours, says the Neapolitan, that has witnessed such technological innovation, would it be wise to predict what will and what will not be possible in ages to come? Citing the compass, ships propelled only by sails, the telescope, Torricelli’s barometer, Boyle’s air-pump, the discovery of the circulation of the blood, the microscope, the domain of whole numbers, infinitesimals, the canon, the cupola, the map, and the watch among other inventions, Vico asks “how could it be that the creativity [natura] of the human mind has been exhausted so suddenly that one ought to despair of the arrival of other inventions of equal importance?”163 Thus, “the world rejuvenates itself again.” Vico’s usage of the word natura to denote something in the area of “creativity” is both characteristic and decisive for his Scienza nuova d’intorno alla commune natura delle nazioni. Once again, key Vichian terms tend toward their Latin roots, such that natura as concept denotes for Vico something approaching natality as such. Thus, although specific inventions by their very nature cannot be predicted, an average rate of innovation can. Moreover, tools effect not merely a quantitative but also a qualitative alteration in the possible, such that the Vichian future is—despite the cyclical form of underlying historical rhythms—in a real sense open. Of course, Vico’s attitude to the future reflects and has implications for his attitude to the past. In both directions radical difference is possible. In truth, this notion is explored with far greater attention to the past than to the future. In the first instance, his unearthing of an ancient wisdom of the Italians from the Latin language (that is to say from its scriptural remains) was a quasi-utopian project that aimed ostensibly at the recovery of a metaphysics from the ancient past that was superior to that of the moderns. But this just goes to show how fine is the line between utopia as radical difference in the past and utopia as radical difference in the future. It might be added that this is a line that was 161

Vico, De ratione, 104–13. Vico, De antiquissima sapientia, 125. 163 Vico, Varia, 164–5. 162

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traversed in the early modern period before and after Vico. Significantly, it is precisely on the issue of the interdependence of past and future as categories of the historical imagination that the best historians of eighteenth-century historiography have worked. If J. G. A. Pocock is committed to describing how early modern minds came to conceptualize radical difference in the past, then Reinhart Koselleck is preoccupied with understanding how the Enlightenment came to possess such a faith in the possibility of radical difference in the future. Both believe that such historical imagination is constitutive of political action. Utopia becomes a corollary of antiquity when the antique can be understood as a complex of sociocultural operations that exhibit systemic differences from the modern.164 In the first instance, then, the invention of Jove seems to be indicative of a general tendency in Vico to think of language as a dimension of society brought into existence by readers acting as poets after the fact, who are construing past utterance for future use. Vico’s account of poetic wisdom asserts that philosophy appears only as an owl of Minerva after the real cultural work of establishing a common language has been completed, insofar as it can be. This orientation to the future by asking what signs portend is not, in fact, coordinate with some of the most obvious things that Vico says with regard to time and history. Vico’s basic historical sense is, of course, cyclical. He transposes Polybian accounts of the birth, rise, maturity, decline, and fall of civilizations to produce the cyclical structure of corsi-ricorsi. What is more, this cyclicism funds a belief in the eternal quality of history (la storia ideale eterna) for circulation is a perfect motion—that is, the only motion that can maintain itself in perpetuity.165 Thus, the Scienza nuova purports, among other things, to be a representation of the course run by nations in their development from aristocratic commonwealths to popular commonwealths and eventually to monarchies. The cycle that Vico observes is one of the birth, growth, maturity, decline, and fall of nations. The three sects of time (tre S`ette di Tempi) that Vico appropriated from Egyptian chronology—the ages 164

Compare J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 1–2 and Reinhart Koselleck, “‘Spaces of Experience,’” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 267– 88, and “Temporalization of Utopia,” in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 84–99. 165 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §§385–99. Vico says that la storia ideale eterna is one of the seven principal aspects of the Scienza nuova.

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of gods, heroes, and men—are crucial to his temporal typologies.166 In speaking of the Egyptian notion of an age of gods, an age of heroes, and an age of men, Vico cites Homer, Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, and Censorinus. Censorinus lays out Varro’s three ages—the last of which is historical—and Vico projects Varro’s three ages onto the Egyptian triad. A good deal of imagination is required to derive such an idea from Herodotus and Homer, but Diodorus Siculus articulates the idea explicitly. The notion that the Egyptians were conscious of a dark age out of which their civilization emerged can also be gleaned from what Critias says in Plato’s Timaeus or from what is reported by Plato in the Critias itself, where the gods are said to have raised the Greeks up as herdsmen do their flocks, “only it was not our bodies that they constrained by bodily force, like shepherds guiding their flocks with stroke of staff, but they directed from the stern where the living creature is easiest to turn about, laying hold of the soul by persuasion, as by a rudder, according to their own disposition; and thus they drove and steered all the mortal kind.”167 Even when immersed in ancient conceptions of history, Vico cannot avoid rhetorical presuppositions. Vico spends a good deal of time (including the entire fourth book of the Scienza nuova) projecting this triptych onto the different categories of analysis that are for him most crucial, such as natures, customs, natural laws, governments, characters, forms of jurisprudence and authority, judgments, and ages. Thus, civilization begins in the age of gods, when the myths and legends of the divinities provided a series of cultural topoi through which the first peoples expressed themselves, theological poets all to the extent that they participated in the linguistic commerce of primitive societies that saw in the natural world portents, the parole reali of divine intent. For Vico, civilization then evolves into an agonal society of heroes that confects the lexicon of Homer’s epic poems, rich in poetic characters, in order to articulate and exercise an understanding of person, plot, and punishment in the nascent public sphere governing life in and around the patriarchal household. In the course of such transformations, it becomes a more human, democratic or republican, and ultimately monarchical polity as private anonymous individuals come to be represented on the stage of 166

Homer, Iliad, 1.250ff and 20.215ff; Herodotus, Histories, 2.36; Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History of Diodorus of Sicily, 1.44; Censorinus, Natal Day, 21. See Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §§52, 432. At §1099, for the genealogy of the gods, Vico also cites Diodorus Siculus, 4.2ff, 6.1ff, Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, 2.2, and St. Cyril of Alexandria, Against the Emperor Julian, 7.235ff. 167 Plato, Critias, 109b–c.

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society as self-conscious entities. Moreover, the law begins to recognize nonaristocratic persons as individuals with individual utilities and rights and to articulate juridical protocols for dealing with such individuals in a written script that turns actions at law into legislative acts with a life of their own beyond the intent and control of individual courts. There are two chief gains in historical consciousness that follow from Vico’s appropriation of the Egyptian ages. The first is unintended consequence. It is unclear whether providence states Vico’s allegiance to a bounded, exhaustive reading of history or simply heightens the acuity with which he identifies the ironies of misprision. That is to say, providence itself has a pragmatist dimension because providence is simply a word that stands for the fact that human beings appropriate the actions of others for their own ends and render ambiguous utterances more precise by adapting them to new circumstances. The De coniuratione raises the question in an oblique fashion—how might the plebeians of Naples have appropriated the patrician coup d’etat had they risen against the Spanish regime in 1701 as they had in 1647. Likewise, the Scienza nuova is rich in its description of the ways in which intention is, over time, frustrated and transformed into outcomes that are contrary to original motivation. Providence is, at an ontological level, a guarantor of unity over time. Radical chance and radical fate (in the senses that Vico denies to these words) would destroy providence’s ability to speak rhetorically. Providence is Vico’s way of giving history a specific rhetorical speech pattern, one that is neither overdetermined (a soritic historical march from major and minor premises to conclusion and thence to the next major premise), nor underdetermined (mere gibberish). Providence speaks in the language of maxims and the movement of history expresses the same enthymematic structure as Demosthenes’s prosecution of Meidias.168 The second gain in historical consciousness afforded by the Scienza nuova is historical time. Historical time is different from time conceptualized simply as an axis that denotes constant motion. Although an event’s proximity to other historical events is immaterial from the point of view of time in this ordinary sense (because it possesses units of measurement that are not themselves events), such proximity is essential for historical time. Historical time asserts that the unit of significance is not the individual event, but rather the matrix of relationships between the events, practices, and structures of a particular epoch. That matrix becomes a context in which particular events, practices, and structures 168

Compare White, “Tropics of History,” 65–85.

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take on particular values (veridical, social, ethical, aesthetic) that they would not possess in other contexts.169 Such contexts are contingent, significant compossibilities. That is to say, they could be other than they are, but are nonetheless meaningful as they are and signify something beyond the sum of their parts. They express a historical totality. This form of “historicism as contextualism” is a radicalization of the rhetorical concept of decorum, as a systematic inquiry into the fabric of suitability woven by any given social system. This is what Vico means by S`ette di Tempi, as he explains when he says that “the customs of the age are the school of princes, to use the term [seculum, age] applied by Tacitus [in the Germania] to the decayed sect of his own times, where he says, Corrumpere et corrumpi seculum vocatur—‘They call it the spirit of the age to seduce and be seduced’—or, as we would now say, the fashion.”170 The historian’s task is, thus, implicitly rhetorical. Applying the orator’s sensitivity to the expectations of others, the historian is able to speak about the common assumptions that unite parties to historical conflict. The other central component of Vico’s metahistorical imagination is, on the surface, the recourse of human institutions in nations that, having disintegrated, rise again, beginning the cycle of birth, growth, maturity, decline, and fall all over again. A society may fail, he argues, because it achieves a conceptual overextension that becomes what Vico terms la barbarie della riflessione, the barbarism of reflection. He describes this as a state in which individuals recognize only their own individual rights and utilities and are unable to feel the force of rights and utilities that pertain to others. As Vico says, “no matter how great the throng and press of their bodies, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will,” for hardly any two individuals are “able to agree since each follows his own pleasure and caprice.” Grown overly self-conscious with the proliferation of abstract terms, these individual calculating machines become incapable of social existence and “turn their cities into forests and the forests into dens and lairs of men.” Indeed, “through long centuries of barbarism, rust will consume the misbegotten subtleties of malicious wits that have turned them into beasts made more inhuman by the barbarism of reflection than the first men had been made by the barbarism of

169

Auerbach’s is one of most concise expressions of this interpretation of Vico, and Funkenstein’s is one of the most sophisticated. See Erich Auerbach, “Vico and Aesthetic Historicism,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 8 (1949): 110–18 and Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 279–89. 170 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §979; Tacitus, Germania, 19.

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sense.”171 This decline and fall, Vico suggests, is a providential development, a mechanism that returns victims of the barbarism of reflection back to a state of barbarism of sense. Their intellectual powers ruined, the imaginative powers of these regenerate bestioni are restored. Some characterize rhetoric itself as a barbarism of reflection. They suggest that this “barbarism of reflection” is a transliteration of the age of reason or the domain of rhetoric qua the art of persuasion. After all, while Vico says that, in the age of Scipio Africanus and the popular commonwealth providence permitted eloquence to arise out of the various schools of philosophy and that this was “a robust and most prudent eloquence,” he also says explicitly that the point of crisis at Rome (in the first century BCE) saw the rise of “a false eloquence, ready to uphold either of the opposed sides of a case indifferently.” The tribunes of the plebs abused eloquence and provoked the civil wars that transformed Rome into an empire. This was the charge Vico leveled at Carneades, the skeptic too. In fact, to infer that this falsa eloquenza impugns rhetoric might not be misleading with regard to the art of persuasion. Vico does correlate the rise of eloquence with the rise of sophistry, sophistry in the sense of speech that has no master other than effect. He does link such self-consciousness to selfishness and thence to spiritual solitude. But the inference that Vico rejects rhetoric along with Carneades is profoundly wrong with regard to rhetoric qua inquiry into being with others, for the barbarism of reflection is precisely a profoundly antirhetorical state that the Vichian inquirer is able to diagnose as a totality of speech situations in which no one feels the force of the claims made on them by others.172 The cycle of civilization described by the evolution from the barbarism of sense to the barbarism of reflection and back again is a metahistorical imagination that mirrors one of the primary temporal experiences. The cycle of human affairs is analogous to the cycle of nature. For Vico, the chronology of the annual cycle of seasons is the basic point of reference for human beings. Relative to the passing of the seasons, humans 171

Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §1106. The key irony specified by the barbarism of reflection is that it is possible to experience a greater isolation in society than outside of it. This, then, is a spiritual and not corporeal solitude, solitudine d’animi and solitudo animorum as the Neapolitan expresses it. Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §1106; Vico, Orazioni inaugurali, 6. Compare Cicero, De republica, 1.17.28: “who does not believe that those are more alone [solos] who, though in the crowded forum, have no one with whom they care to talk, than those who, when no one else is present, either commune with themselves or, as we may say, participate in a gathering of most learned men, finding delight in their discoveries and writings?” 172 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §§1101–2.

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perceive the monthly phases of the moon and the passing of day and night, and derive from those decades, centuries, and millennia, on the one hand, and hours, minutes, and seconds, on the other. But for Vico this chronology is actually a cycle of human activities before it is a cycle of astronomical phenomena. As a result, the quality of this time as human experience is prior to its quality as cosmological event. This is precisely how Vico frames the matter in the “Poetic Chronology” of Book II in the Scienza nuova, where he says that “even nowadays the peasants of Tuscany, the nation most highly regarded for its speech in all Italy, instead of saying ‘three years’ . . . says ‘we have harvested three times.’”173 The structure of the cognition here is metonymic, for, as Vico explains in his lectures on rhetoric, a metonym not only transposes a cause for an effect or vice versa, but also uses one concomitant circumstance in place of another.174 If one takes Vico’s investment in the ages of gods, heroes, and men too literally, one supposes that he is interested only in setting out an ideal, eternal logic of historical development that (other things being equal) will express itself in the development of a nation. But even Vico’s discussion of the barbarism of reflection occurs in the context of elaborating the three possible futures that await a polity divided by civil war. The first century BCE is the crucial point for Vico, and the three possible futures are the coming of an Augustus who will substitute imperial peace for republican discord, a conquest of the nation by a healthier more potent foreign power, or an end of the civilization corrupted by a selfishness that has become a solitude of spirit that returns sophisticates to the isolation enjoyed and suffered by their primitive ancestors, the bestioni. Moreover, there is something antihistorical about the emphasis on the different ages and their repetition, for it overwhelms the fine micronarrative observation that for the most part characterizes Vichian historical consciousness, replacing that observation with repetitive macronarrative. Yet, in fact, that very same repetition is indicative of a relentless temporality, a biological imperative to move.

173 174

Ibid., §732. Vico, Institutiones oratoriae, 318–19: “Latine dicitur ‘transnominatio,’ et tropus est quo causae datur nomen effectus vel subiecto nomen adiuncti, et vicissim.” This version of metonymy is directly comparable to “datability” as conceived of by Heidegger. In William D. Blattner’s paraphrase, “‘Dasein’s experience of the Now is not just of an abstract moment, but rather of a time when such and such happens.” William D. Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 129.

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The frontispiece to the Scienza nuova is an iconic version of Plato’s description of time as a moving image of eternity, and Vico’s indication that human society traverses the zigzagging structure of the frontispiece betrays a Platonic opposition to a sense of time as a becoming that is more than mere repetition.175 Yet the cycle for Aristotle is the paradigmatic form of time, for the rotation of the heavens functions as a “calculable measure or dimension of motion with respect to before-and-afterness.”176 Repetition keeps time, rather than voiding it. More than Platonic or Aristotelian, however, Vico’s sense of time is Plotinian and Augustinian. For Plotinus, if one asked time how it had come into being, it would say something like this: “since there was a restlessly active nature which wanted to control itself and be on its own, and chose to seek for more than its present state, this moved, and time moved with it.”177 Moreover, this “life of soul” is expressed as a ceaseless desire for being other, with the result that there is what Plotinus calls a perpetual futurity in all life.178 Crucially, Plotinus argues that time is not to be conceived of as outside of the soul, as an independent axis along which soul measures its movements. Time simply is the motion of the soul in its desire not to be present or entirely manifest in itself. This will to motion is expressed in Vico as conatus, which is the Neapolitan’s way of resolving Aristotle’s representation of the Zenonian spatiotemporal paradoxes. If life itself is the tendency toward forward, that is to say future, motion, then that tendency is constantly articulated from the always in motion, never still perspective of the present. No one has articulated the anomalous nature of the present with greater concision than Augustine, the last of the classical rhetoricians. Neither past nor future can properly be said to have existence for they are not, although they have been or will be; the present has no duration (for if it had duration it would contain both a past and a future) and so the nature of its existence is likewise anomalous.179 “Neither things to come, nor things past, are,” says Augustine, “nor do we properly say, there be three times, past, present, and to come; but perchance it might be properly said, there be three times: a present time of past things; a present time of present things; and a present time of 175

Plato, Timaeus, 37d. Aristotle, Physics, 219b. 177 Plotinus, Enneads, 3.7.11. 178 Compare Vico’s use in the “Practic of the New Science” of Plato’s distinction between matter (“formless, defective, dark, sluggish, divisible, mobile . . . ‘other’”) and form (“perfection, luminous, active, indivisible, constant . . . ‘itself’”). Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §1408. 179 Augustine, Confessions, 11.10–31. 176

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future things.”180 Thus do human beings possess memory, attention, and expectation. The necessary presentism of the creature’s perspective on life renders the present a kind of knife-edge between past and future. One encounters the future as a pressure opposing or inciting motion, so that time seems not to flow in one direction only.181 In Augustine, time is always a relation between at least two points—a now and a then in the past or the future. Vico has the same sense that time ought to be understood from the perspective of the beings that experience it as a disjunction between here and there. As he puts it in the De antiquissima sapientia, “time is a composite mode because it involves two places, one which stands still while the other is in motion.”182 How does this predisposition to thinking of time—not as a sequence of nows (which may be discrete or continuous), but rather as a temporal manifold in which future and past are experienced as affective and cognitive dimensions of a plastic and mobile present—express itself in the 1744 Scienza nuova? For the most part Vico’s appropriation of the conceit that there was an age of gods, an age of heroes, and an age of men tends to represent those ages as chronologically and historically sequential. But on several occasions he asserts that these ages can be contemporary. Poetic speech, he intimates, flows from the ages of gods and heroes into historical time just as a powerful river pushes its way out into the ocean.183 Likewise, the religious way of thinking (whereby what men did themselves, they attributed to the gods) continued to exist in the age of human government.184 Moreover, the scrupulous observation of words characteristic of a Ulysses and characteristic of he who has not the wit to go beyond the letter to the spirit of the law is, says Vico, to be observed in peasants and other crude men of his own day.185 It is even axiomatic in the new science of the nature of nations that customs do not change all at once but only by degrees over a long period of time. It follows specifically from this axiom that, although the three basic forms 180

Ibid., 10.20. Both Nietzsche and Kafka have represented that knife-edge; both Heidegger and Arendt have interpreted their representations. In Kafka the future is Zukunft or avenir in the literal sense that it is a force continually pushing the present back on the past. See Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, ed. Mary McCarthy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 1:202–4. 182 Vico, De antiquissima sapientia, 99: “modus compositus tempus, nam duo loci sunt, quorum alter stat, alter movetur.” 183 Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §412. 184 Ibid., §629. 185 Ibid., §38. 181

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of political organization (rule by the few, the many, and the one) are essentially different as forms and ideally follow one after another in this precise sequence, they nonetheless may also exist simultaneously and be admixtures of the preceding with the succeeding form.186 Furthermore, Vico also says that the poetic speech, religious mentality, scrupulosity, and patrician hegemony characteristic of the ages of gods and heroes coexist with the prose, skepticism, natural equity, and demotic government of historical times as more than remnants. Vico wishes to account for the way in which the three fundamental kinds of languages originated. Corresponding to the language of gods, heroes, and men are three different forms of character: mute signs, poetic characters, and epistolary letters, respectively. In order to lay out the origins of these various language forms, the Neapolitan finds it necessary to stipulate that just as gods, heroes, and men began at the same time, so the three kinds of language began at the same time too. What Vico says is that, in order “to enter now upon the extremely difficult [question of the] way in which these three kinds of languages and letters were formed, we must establish this principle: that as gods, heroes, and men began at the same time (for they were, after all, men who imagined the gods and believed their own heroic nature to be a mixture of the divine and human natures), so these three languages began at the same time, each having its letters which developed along with it.” Vico goes on to specify that these modes of language began with three very significant differences. He contends that “the language of gods was almost entirely mute, only very slightly articulate.” In contrast, the language of the heroes was “an equal mixture of articulate and mute, and consequently of vulgar speech and of the heroic characters used in writing by the heroes, which Homer calls semata.” Finally, the language of men was “almost entirely articulate and only very slightly mute, there being no vulgar language so copious that there are not more things than it has words for.”187 Vico’s statement here that these various historical compossibilities are themselves compossible is very striking.188 It is dangerous to put too much emphasis on a single passage. Einmal ist keinmal.189 Yet, in this case, attempts by scholars to neutralize what 186

Ibid., §§249 and 1004. Ibid., §446. 188 Croce’s response was to say that “since the nature of the mind which underlies these cycles is outside time and therefore exists in every moment of time, we must not exaggerate the difference of the periods.” Croce, Filosofia di Vico, 125. 189 Whereas Nicolini sees nothing out of the ordinary in the passage, Pagliaro has placed a great deal of emphasis on Vico’s assertion that the three ages of gods, heroes, and 187

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appears to be a statistical outlier have been unconvincing.190 Taking this passage to be fundamental rather than anomalous is extremely clarifying. A society that possesses powerful institutions guaranteeing public debate is a society capable of, as it were, synchronizing the temporal and historical points of reference relied upon for orientation in time by its citizens. To meet for the purposes of addressing an alleged wrong in the past, or in order to praise or blame the circumstances of the present, or especially with the intention of making a plan for the future is to draw a population into a set of common points of reference in memory, attention, and expectation. Societies that do not possess such institutions live not only in a kind of spatial isolation, such as the “dens and lairs of men” that Vico describes after the fall from the barbarism of reflection to a renewed barbarism of sense. Citizens in such societies without powerful oratorical institutions live also in a state of temporal isolation from each other. The shared sense of past, present, and future becomes attenuated. As elsewhere, however, Vico’s interest is in demonstrating that it would be wrong simply to conclude that the absence of a classically shared historical sensibility is necessarily the absence of any notion of historicity. In Vichian new science, myth is a form of shared memory. Homer, what is more, is proof of the capacity of disaggregated publics to generate a shared cultural inheritance even in the absence of traditional rhetorical institutions. Vico demonstrates, thus, that there are a host of ways in which mythological senses of the past differ from historical ones, and he himself alternates between laying out the insertion of time itself into the age of gods, the development of narrative capacity in the fables of the heroes, and the patrician antiquating of legislation brought by the plebeians in the popular assemblies of the age of men. men are simultaneous, arguing as Battistini explains that “il rapporto complementare e non piu` di esclusione tra l’attivit`a fantastica del creare immagini e l’attivit`a raziocinativa dell’organizzare le voci convenzionali consente un esame del linguaggio di tipo fenomenologico, al posto di quello meramente genetico.” Pagliaro argues that this passage responds to a weakness perceived by Vico in his account of the evolution of signs. Nicolini, Commento storico, 1.183; Antonino Pagliaro, “Lingua e poesia secondo G. B. Vico,” in Altri saggi di critica semantica (Messina: D’Anna, 1961), 421–4; Vico, Opere, ed. Battistini, 2.1590. 190 Pagliaro’s reading is contested by Gino Bedani, who argues that when Vico “states that the three epochs and the three corresponding forms of language began ‘at the same time,’ he does not mean at the same time as each other but rather at the same time or point in (the histories of) the different nations.” Gino Bedani, Vico Revisited: Orthodoxy, Naturalism and Science in the Scienza Nuova (Oxford: Berg, 1989), 63–4. But Pagliaro’s reading is considerably more reasonable.

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The more important point, however, is that Vico not only lays out these differences, but also asserts that they may be contemporary. Any given generation of infants has to come into possession of basic temporal categories—like past, present, and future. The cognitive victories of the bestioni over the eternal present are absolutely analogous to the cognitive victories of the developing child (as Vico says on more than one occasion). Most human individuals conquer these basic concepts and share them as a common possession with others. But historical consciousness is a more sophisticated elaboration of those basic categories. Here, any given population begins to exhibit broad variation not simply in terms of different interpretations of the same historical events (the nobles and the people of Naples remember 1647 differently), but also in terms of asserting the importance of entirely different events. Vico’s genius is to imply that societies that do not possess classical rhetorical institutions are divided into groups that have profoundly different modes of cognizing time—and time’s more complex modulation, history. This line of inquiry into the manifold quality of temporal experience may appear speculative. In fact, it produces an interpretation of Vichian historical consciousness that incorporates all the valid claims put forward by other accounts—such as the radical and the conservative—and also reconciles the contradictions that appear to render those accounts incompatible. What Vico’s investment in metahistory yields is a very much richer taxonomy of temporal experience as it is construed socially. The key to understanding this taxonomy is the assertion that the ages of gods, heroes, and men may be contemporary. When the significance of that assertion is properly understood, Vico’s apparently unequivocal claims to have written a new science of history take on a wholly new meaning. The science here is not social scientific, but rather hermeneutic. In no sense does Vico believe that he is setting up a new academic discipline with his Scienza nuova. The book selects a very curious readership. It does so purposefully. The kind of hermeneutic engagement demanded by the book, moreover, is one that the Scienza nuova is itself describing. Poetic wisdom is a form of expression open to construal because it has particulars function as universals. The lengths to which people are willing to go as hermeneuts in domesticating the chaotic, arcane, mindless, vicious, incoherent, and surprising world that they encounter is a never-ceasing wonder. It is a testament to the willful caritas of readers, a mark of their attention to being with others. But the point that Vico is making when he reveals his discovery of the true Homer is that these acts of readerly judgment and transposition ought to be understood as

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thoroughly disaggregated. The institutions of adjudication and deliberation, praise and blame with which rhetoric had traditionally been concerned are fractured by Vico’s discovery. The moments of decision are therefore multiplied inordinately, along with the publics that witness them and that are party to them. The body of the law, replete with underdetermined and overdetermined rules for construal, multiplies these moments and their audiences and constitutes a new mnemonic technology. “Homer” stands for the generalization of this hermeneutic normativity to culture as a whole. Nevertheless, this fragmentation of institutions does not merely multiply the moments of decision and their publics. It also fragments the sense of time that accompanies all decision. When Vico says—strikingly given what he implies elsewhere in the Scienza nuova—that the ages of gods, heroes, and men may also be contemporary, he is saying that the representation of past and future as experience and expectation, the witnessing of an event, the value of an event as decorous or indecorous, the dilation of an event, the metonymic coding of an event as a “now when” may all together constitute an extraordinarily complex web of temporalities that exist in a particular society simultaneously. The intractableness of politics for Vico—who after all had no inkling of the vast power of the totalitarian state to represent a simulacrum of simultaneous experience, expectation, and purpose to the nation under the conditions of mass society—is diagnosed with reference to the sheer plurality of temporal scales, desires, and aversions endemic to a society that cannot generate genuine co-presence by means of institutions. It may be that there is no society capable of generating anything more than a dangerous simulacrum of such co-presence. Such pessimism simply underscores Vico’s point.

7 Conclusion

Notoriously, Vico’s impact in the history of thought was far from immediate. He was well known at Naples in the eighteenth century, but as the principal figures of the Neapolitan Enlightenment began to theorize the new forms of publicity that they saw emerging in Europe they did not take up his reconfiguration of rhetoric. When they did engage with his work, they perceived a discovery of the feudal mind. This is the conclusion of the Italian historian Franco Venturi, who was instrumental in laying the foundations for a history of the Italian Enlightenment.1 But, within the canon of Neapolitan reformers recognized by Venturi as important intellectual figures in the development of new ideas in the eighteenth century, the reception of Vico is anemic. This is true, what is more, despite the deep (if not always obvious) connections between the issues taken up by Vico and the issues taken up by his fellow Neapolitans. One finds in Antonio Genovesi (1713–1769), an early leader of Neapolitan reformism and at one time a student of Vico’s, the vague admission that man outside society is very weak and that the aggregation of individuals is not merely additive, but multiplicative. Yet Genovesi’s gloss of what it means to live in community with others is particularly thin in comparison with the sheer ambition of his projects for Neapolitan self-knowledge.2 Likewise, one finds in Gaetano Filangieri (1753–1788), the principal theorist of legislative reform at Naples, the question-begging assertion that public 1 See

Illuministi italiani, ed. Venturi, xv: “alla ricerca delle origini [of feudalism], finirono [Francescantonio Grimaldi, Gaetano Filangieri, Francesco Mario Pagano] per scoprire Giambattista Vico, che, con Hume, Robertson, Boulanger, Chastellux e Voltaire fu il loro grande maestro. Vico parve loro, attraverso il mistero delle sue formule, colui che solo era riuscito a penetrare in un mondo mentale che essi volevano distruggere, il solo che aveva inteso le menti dei padri, dei nobili ed aveva sperato in ‘governi umani.’” 2 Antonio Genovesi, Discorso sopra il vero fine delle lettere e delle scienze, in Illuministi italiani, ed. Venturi, 107, 119, and esp. 270.

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opinion is in all states the determinant political force. One ought not to suppose, however, that Filangieri’s attitude toward public opinion is entirely deferential: if public opinion is so powerful, then it must be “rectified, directed, and corrected.”3 One finds in Francesco Longano (1729–1796) the shocking reduction of senso comune to amor proprio. Longano had been for a time Genovesi’s replacement for the chair of political economy at the University of Naples, and he was both a priest and a radical utilitarian. For him, it was only private utility, self-interest that aggregates the concerns of the many, reuniting them in a single body. Thus, although Longano partakes in a discussion on utility that was essential to Vico’s investigations into the law, he shows no signs of having noted Vico’s profound skepticism about what we might call the social utility of utility. Note, however, the proximity—characteristic of utilitarianism— of this thoroughgoing individualism to doctrinaire sociality: Within two paragraphs Longano also declared that “in nature no being is isolated, for the one acts necessarily on another.”4 Longano is blind to Vico’s depiction of the barbarism of reflection where individuals can only take others into account through the calculation of utility. Or take, for example, the case of Francesco Mario Pagano (1748– 1799), one of the primary intellectual leaders in the short-lived Parthenopean Republic of 1799 and the driving force behind its constitution. One finds there the striking and yet indiscriminate comparison of the public to “a vast animal, that is served by an infinity of eyes, always open, and by an infinity of ears, always listening, and that sees and hears everything, always.” Pagano’s comparison is striking because it articulates a basic truth about cities like Naples that are so densely populated. He 3 Gaetano

Filangieri, La scienza della legislazione, in Illuministi italiani, ed. Venturi, 735. The relationship between Vico and Filangieri is complicated and liable to be simplified. I would argue that they have profoundly different understandings of the univocity of the law. The account of the difference between feudalism and monarchy is essentially the same, however. Witness Filangieri’s description at 720: “cosa e` feudalit`a? E´ una specie di governo che divide lo stato in tanti piccioli stati, la sovranit`a in tante picciole sovranit`a; che smembra dalla corona quelle prerogative che non sono comunicabili; che non ripartisce l’esercizio dell’autorit`a, ma divide, distrae ed aliena il potere istesso.” Communicability, what is more, is a criterion. On Filangieri and jurisprudence, see Ferrone, Societ`a giusta ed equa. 4 Francesco Longano, Filosofia dell’uomo, in Illuministi italiani, ed. Venturi, 371: “il senso comune di tutti gli uomini s`ı solitari che compagnevoli e` l’amor proprio. Ma l’amor proprio denota il proprio utile. L’interesse dunque e` il gran mobile della spezie umana. Sicch´e il proprio interesse condenza tutti e gli riunisce in un sol corpo. Donde si fa manifesto un nuovo principio di societ`a universale nella spezie umana.” But then “in natura niun essere e` isolato, mentre l’uno agisce necessariamente sull’altro.”

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depicts the public in such an urban crucible as an open air, panoptic, and panacoustic domain of common sense. If it be doubted that Pagano means something like piazza when he says popolo, consider what he says earlier in the same paragraph: “rather better than a single individual or a few individuals who are in a position to govern, the public as a whole understands and tallies its own needs as well as the quantity of buyers [compratori].” The public, “having nothing else to do than take account of itself in the public piazze, measures the supply of goods much better than the few.”5 Where Vico understood the piazza primarily in terms of the representation of public personas, Pagano analyzes it in terms of exchange. But the consumer is not the only lens through which society perceives itself, according to Pagano. In his Progetto di costituzione della repubblica napolitana, published on 1 April 1799, the modern paradigm of commerce is complemented by the ancient paradigm of virtue: In Pagano’s plan each canton will elect a college of censors annually to police vivere democraticamente, “living democratically”; citizenship entails military service; the judiciary is to be a body of “ephors,” representatives of the people with powers of veto over both the legislative and the executive. Pagano is highly conscious of the historical stage on which Naples is acting. Great strides have been made in America, he says to his fellow Neapolitan cittadini rappresentanti. Likewise, he notes, France has given to the world one of the finest constitutions “hitherto produced.” Indeed, Pagano even considers constitutionalism a nuova scienza. Vico is not invoked, but Pagano handles the phrase with palpable self-consciousness.6 When Pagano describes the public beast as “vast,” he is drawing attention to the disproportion between the mechanisms through which the public perceives and the sum total of its perceptions. The public is both 5 Francesco

Mario Pagano, Ragionamento sulla libert`a del commercio del pesce, in Illuministi italiani, ed. Venturi, 844–5: “il popolo e` un vasto animale, che d’infiniti occhi, e sempre aperti, d’infiniti orecchi, e sempre intenti, e` fornito, ed in tutti i momenti e tutto vede, e tutto ascolta.” Moreover, “il publico, assai meglio che un solo, o pochi, i quali lo governano, i suoi bisogni e la quantit`a de’ compratori intende ed annovera; altro a far non avendo che nelle publiche piazze a tener conto di se stesso; e molto meglio, che pochi, l’abbondanza delle merci misura.” 6 Francesco Mario Pagano, Progetto di costituzione della repubblica napolitana, in Illuministi italiani, ed. Venturi, 908ff: “gran passi avea gi`a dati l’America in questa, diremo, nuova scienza, formando le costituzioni de’ suoi liberi stati.” On the relationship between ancient and modern political paradigms in Pagano, see especially Anthony Pagden, “Francesco Mario Pagano’s ‘Republic of Virtue’: Naples 1799,” in The Invention of the Modern Republic, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 139–53.

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the organ and the object of perception: Self-observation and autoregulation is the essence of public opinion. Each individual is a cognitive apparatus in the synaesthetic matrix of the public constituted by its fellow citizens. In calling the public a “beast” and in endowing it with sensory organs, Pagano is supposing that the sensations each individual calls his or her own are in fact modes of information contributing to public perception itself. Insofar as those individuals communicate they become receptacles and transmitters in an array. Each receptacle in the sensory array, however, is unconscious of the role that it ultimately plays, because it loses track of the information it transmits to the system. It is ignorant of consequences. In Pagano, the sequence of semiotic cause and effect is not so complicated, because the range of possible signs is relatively limited, buying and selling being the principle parts of “speech.” In Vico, who I would argue has a very similar sense of the public as a synaesthetic matrix, the problem is considerably more complicated, because the range of signs is multiplied inordinately. Homer, for Vico, is a kind of marketplace for aesthetic ideas. But although the iteration of a topos in a future performance is equivalent to an order to buy, the ideas of the Homeric marketplace are far more nuanced and variable than orders to buy and sell because the goods bought and sold are underdetermined signs and cannot be reduced to a tabulation of profit and loss without denuding them of everything that distinguishes their being. What is more, in Vichian rhetoric, Homer is simply a pared down, easily comprehended model for sublimated rhetorical institutions that are vastly more complex. In the context of such complexity, ignorance of one’s own role in public perception is thus compounded, because it is the construal of action (which itself may not have been imagined either prospectively or retrospectively by the actor) that circulates in the social semiotic system. Transposing Vico’s Homer into an early modern idiom, one might say that despite the disaggregation of the Neapolitan populace through time, Masaniello lived equally on the lips of the publics manifested in the Chiesa del Carmine in 1647, around the Piazza Mercato in 1701, and in the Piazza Nazionale in 1799. Witness the fundamental role played by the Chiesa del Carmine as a concrete condition of possibility for political speech during the Revolt of Masaniello.7 Recall Vico’s representation of the plebeian response to Gambacorta as he addressed them in the 7 Compare

the descriptions of Aurelio Musi and Peter Burke. For Musi, “la chiesa del Carmine e` insieme la ‘reggia dei popolari’ e il maggiore tempio del culto mariano a Napoli.” He recalls that Michelangelo Schipa had described the church as the meeting

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area around the Piazza del Mercato in 1701. Masaniello functioned in the De coniuratione as a historical example with normative force, a fact as value. Consider the function of the piazza as a mechanism through which sovereignty could manifest itself: Vincenzo Cuoco reports that in 1798 Ferdinand IV refused to appear before the people after Neapolitan forces had been defeated by the French, while some months later the Monitore related that at republican rallies in the Piazza Nazionale “shouts of Long Live Liberty! and Death to the Tyrants! would form an echo, drawn out, returning amplified to assault the ear.”8 The church, the street, the piazza—these were institutions in both the spatial and the temporal sense. They established spaces of appearance, and they embodied a variety of mnemonic practices.

place for the secret committee headed by Giulio Genoino that purportedly was manipulating Masaniello from behind the scenes. Aurelio Musi, La rivolta di Masaniello nella scena politica barocca (Naples: Alfredo Guida, 1989), 116, 152. Masaniello was murdered in the church, and one historian has been moved to argue that with regard to the revolt’s cultural rules “the necessary continuity was provided by the Virgin.” Peter Burke, “The Virgin of the Carmine and the Revolt of Masaniello,” Past and Present, 99 (1983): 14. Some find this second claim exaggerated. See Rosario Villari, The Revolt of Naples, trans. James Newell and John Marino (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993) and “Masaniello: Interpretazioni Contemporanee e Recenti,” in Elogio della dissimulazione: La lotta politica nel seicento (Bari: Laterza, 1987), 79–106. Villari establishes a wider social and economic context for the revolt. 8 Cuoco, Saggio storico, 74–5; Il monitore, 25 May 1799, in Il monitore napoletano 1799, ed. Mario Battaglini (Naples: Alfredo Guida, 1974), 579, emphasis added: “i gridi di VIVA LA LIBERTA’, MORTE A’ TIRANNI formavano un eco, che si prolungava, e poi ritornava piu` vibrato a ripercuotere l’orecchio.” Cuoco maintained throughout that it was the piazza and not the half-private, half-public sale patriottiche that should have been the locus of republican debate, and indeed the Monitore reports that some attempt was made to transform Naples’s central piazza into a device for discursive negotiation. A stage is erected in the center of the piazza—designed, however, more for a monological haranguing of the people than a dialogical engagement with it (‘destinato per l’allocuzione al Popolo’)—and it is adorned with symbols of the revolution and with the slogans of the republic. Cuoco, Saggio storico, 163; Monitore, 25 May 1799, in Monitore napoletano 1799, ed. Battaglini, 577ff, 592ff. The simulation of a sublime political experience—the experience of a sublime political object such as “the people”—by means of the piazza was a political tactic that was consciously utilized during the French Decade too. What had been the Piazza Reale, and had become the Piazza Nazionale, became under Bonaparte and Murat what it remains today, the Piazza del Plebiscito. Architecturally too, the piazza took its present form during the revolutionary period. Buttressed on the northeast side by the Palazzo Reale, the piazza is bounded by a semicircular colonnade on the southwest side that was designed and constructed by Leopold Laperuta from 1809 on the orders of Murat, who wanted a civil forum. After 1815, the colonnade was made to accommodate S. Francesco di Paola, a church intended by Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies to be an imitation of the Pantheon and a sign of his beneficence after the recovery of the Kingdom.

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Thus, Pagano’s “vast animal,” his semiotic Leviathan, is disaggregated in both space and time. That is to say, the piazza is an emblem of literal co-presence, and yet Pagano understands the marketplace of compratori as a strictly coded synaesthesia in which not all participants—in fact, very few participants—are “visible” one to another at any given place and time. The public recognizes itself in the piazza, but the piazza also sets in motion cultural processes that exceed its own bounds. That excess extends both spatially and temporally: There are multiple piazze functioning simultaneously in the city, and each piazza perpetuates the memory and cultural codes of its former existences. The sensory circuit that is the public has too many parts to be perceived in one place and time— those parts are “infinite.” Pagano’s is a fundamental insight, perhaps even Vichian. But note the immediate effacement of Vichian discrimination. Seeing and hearing all things at all times, Pagano’s public is merely divine and has lost all trace of cultural specificity. Only in Francescantonio Grimaldi (1741–1784) does one find a more sophisticated, Rousseau-inspired critique of alienation in the city. The critique replicates some of Vico’s insights on how cities are founded on dispositions toward being with others, dispositions that subsequently become habitual, like masks worn unconsciously.9 And only in Melchiorre Delfico (1744–1835)—another of the republicans actively involved in 1799, but one who survived the Bourbon reprisals after the fall of the Republic on 23 June—does one find anything that even resembles an analysis of politics as discursive negotiation. Witness his history of democracy’s transformation at San Marino from direct to representative (a transformation that is itself essential to the emaciation of and hostility toward classical rhetoric in modernity). Unhappily, “the power of vocal organs exceeds the power of intellectual organs,” and, recognizing this, he says that the people of San Marino gathered together in a popular assembly and voted against such popular assemblies, choosing instead a 9 Francescantonio

Grimaldi, Riflessioni sopra l’ineguaglianza tra gli uomini, in Illuministi italiani, ed. Venturi, 558ff. In light of Vico, consider also Grimaldi’s comparison at 558 of the natural and the reflected: “due sono i principali segni, a senso mio, che distinguono la nazione barbara dalla civile: la totale perdita dell’independenza naturale sotto l’aspetto della libert`a civile; e la totale trasformazione de’ sentimenti naturali, e simpatici, coverti colla maschera de’ sentimenti di riflessione.” Compare also Vico’s account of natural equity’s role in developing a calculus of private utility with the connection made by Grimaldi at 559 between social relations and needs: “nelle nazioni barbare i bisogni crescono a proporzione de’ rapporti socievoli, e per conseguenza l’independenza diminuisce; nelle nazioni civili finalmente i bisogni sono di un numero indefinito, donde viene che l’independenza quasi svanisce.” Consider Venturi’s remarks at 521 on the relationship between Grimaldi and Vico with regard to legal institutionalism.

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council where the most honest, the most educated, and the most active would be “preselected” to represent the general will.10 What is left unsaid by this mass of literature is the structural difficulty encountered by a public sphere that combines a large population with weak institutions of public debate, specifically when the population is forced to consider or undertake a concerted political action with constitutional implications. Vico addressed this problem with special reference to the relationship between patricians and plebeians. What he adds to the comments of Livy, Polybius, and Machiavelli on the relationship between plebeians and patricians in ancient Rome is an analysis of radical difference between the orders. For Vico’s patricians, the plebeians were not citizens initially—they were not even human—and the children of mixed parentage were to be counted as abominations, civil monsters. Moreover, when Vico says that the ages of gods, heroes, and men might be contemporary after having differentiated those ages in fundamental semiotic ways, he is saying that polities will have to deal with differences of a radical nature that collide in particular locations. When he goes on to say that in his own day peasants and plebeians resemble the most primitive men, he is anticipating a description of class relations as they were also imagined in 1799 by the reformers, turned republican revolutionaries. The revolution at Naples in January 1799 had been passive, foisted upon the kingdom by a foreign power, the French. Therein lay the problem, as many have noted. The Republic needed to foster an active revolution in its population. It needed a citizen army. As the republican newspaper Il monitore stated, however, the citizens who were to constitute this force spoke a different language from their would-be leaders. The Monitore meant this both figuratively in the sense that the citizens were largely illiterate and literally in the sense that the dialect they spoke was Neapolitan not Tuscan.11 The Monitore called repeatedly for a vernacular 10 Melchiorre

Delfico, Memorie storiche della repubblica di San Marino, in Illuministi italiani, ed. Venturi, 1250–1: “la forza degli organi vocali supera quella degl’intellettuali . . . Riconosciuta adunque tale infelice situazione, il nostro popolo [at San Marino] radunato in general arringo trasformo` la pubblica rappresentanza, riducendola ad un Consiglio, fatto nella piu` gran proporzione relativa al numero de’ cittadini. I piu` probi, i piu` istruiti ed attivi furono prescelti a rappresentar la volont`a generale.” Note also that for Delfico at 1225–6, Vico was primarily a scholar of Roman constitutional history. 11 Monitore, 5, 9 February 1799 and 4 May 1799 in Monitore napoletano 1799, ed. Battaglini, 40, 66–7, 497. On the Neapolitan press, see Mario Battaglini’s introduction to his critical edition of the Monitore. For a more thorough bibliography of the Neapolitan periodicals, see Benedetto Croce, La rivoluzione napoletana del 1799: Biografie, racconti, ricerche (Bari: Laterza, 1926), 72–4. For a survey of the cultural memory of the revolution, consult

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press, but by and large the populace at Naples together with the rural peasantry remained unmoved by republican (and Tuscan) exhortations. Within six months, the Parthenopean Republic fell.12 The absence of popular support for an action undertaken in the name of the people raised deep issues of an ultimately rhetorical nature. In the aftermath of the revolution, the question emerged of how a more robust rhetorical reciprocity between mass and elite might be achieved at Naples. The question is clearest in Vincenzo Cuoco’s history of the failed revolution, published in 1800 while the author was in exile at Milan. Cuoco (1770–1823) had been an active member of the republican movement in Naples. He explains that he wrote a Saggio storico, a “historical essay” rather than a history proper, because he wanted to speak to the issue of the revolution’s failure rather than simply emplot an account of the Parthenopean Republic’s rise and fall. The Republic failed, he argued, because it was established on the basis of foreign troops and foreign ideas. Republicanism at Naples, he argued, spoke with too French an accent to be taken up by the populace at large. Two different peoples lived at Naples, he said, and it was as if they came from two different centuries and two different climates.13 Contrast that to his belief that il popolo is the great and sole agent of revolutions and counterrevolutions. Compare also his conclusion that all sense of popular rhetoric had been replaced at Naples by a mechanical declamation.14

Marina Azzinnari, ed., La repubblica napoletana del novantanove: Memoria e mito (Naples: G. Macchiaroli, 1999). 12 Barbara Naddeo has analyzed the significance of Neapolitan dialect in Enlightenment debates. She concludes that “representations of the ‘dialect’ in eighteenth-century Naples gave content to Enlightenment theories of civilization. Both playwrights and linguists juxtaposed the ‘poetic’ and the ‘rational’ or the ‘savage’ and the ‘civil’ members of society, constructing a spatio-temporal divide between the socioeconomic groups internal to the civic community.” Barbara Naddeo, “Urban Arcadia: Representations of the ‘Dialect’ of Naples in Linguistic Theory and Comic Theatre, 1696–1780,” Eighteenth Century Studies 35 (2001): 59. In the nineteenth century, one likewise sees anthropological investigation into the diversity of semiotic forms at Naples. Thus, de Jorio’s inquiry into Neapolitan gesture is an echo of the Vichian expansion of semiotic range and is itself a form of sublimated rhetorical inquiry. Andrea de Jorio, La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano (Naples: Fibreno, 1832). 13 Cuoco, Saggio storico, 127: “diversi per due secoli di tempo e per due gradi di clima.” Cited by Croce in Storia del regno di Napoli, 229–30. As Naddeo emphasizes, the reading of social difference as historical difference was an established agenda in eighteenthcentury Naples. Naddeo, “Urban Arcadia,” 41–65. 14 Cuoco, Saggio storico, 5, 105: “abbiamo perduto ogni idea dell’eloquenza popolare: la nostra non e` che l’eloquenza delle scuole.”

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Scholars have noted that Cuoco was among the first to write within a Vichian historical framework.15 Yet they have not pursued the point; they have not added that he was also the first to intuit Vico’s sublimation of rhetoric. Witness in particular the Rapporto al re Gioacchino Murat e progetto di decreto per l’organizzazione della pubblica istruzione.16 In 1806, the French had returned. Napoleon had placed first his brother and then Murat on the Neapolitan throne. Cuoco, having returned from exile, played a significant role in the drafting of the Rapporto, which was commissioned in January of 1809. It proposed a massive expansion of the Neapolitan school system: For education to be useful, the report maintained, it must be universal, public, and uniform.17 The degree to which universal really meant universal was an issue; still, basic skills of literacy and numeracy were to be as widely distributed as possible. The proposition led to the drafting of legislation, but the project immediately ran short of funds. Only a partial and much reduced version of the plan was ever introduced. In intention, however, the Rapporto is highly suggestive of the revolutionary generation’s reaction to the problem of rhetoric as it was underscored by the failure of the Republic.18 The Rapporto addresses rhetoric directly. Initially, the discipline is criticized as a merely mechanical, schoolroom exercise that cannot fail to produce turgid speechifying. In this respect, the Rapporto compared rhetoric to poetry: One can impart a technical understanding of the rules for good meter, and one may be able thereby to impart a critical faculty capable of distinguishing skillful from unskillful verse. Such technique, however, will almost always fail to produce good art, for the reason that

15 Cuoco

affiliates himself to what he identifies as a Neapolitan strain of reformism, which goes back through Genovesi to Vico, that is committed to conservative (although one might also describe it as modest) historiography. Cuoco, Saggio storico, 39. The Revolution also raises a question for him that Vico himself had considered under the rubric of Providence, namely the possibility that radical structural change could be effected in spite of the fact—and worryingly because of the fact—that no one had planned, wanted, or worked toward it. As Cuoco had it, the Revolution was understood by few, approved of by very few, and desired by almost no one. Cuoco, Saggio storico, 40. On Cuoco’s reception of Vico, see especially Croce, Bibliografia vichiana, 407ff. See also the work of Fulvio Tessitore, who has written extensively on Cuoco, mostly recently in Filosofia, storia e politica in Vincenzo Cuoco (Lungro: Marco, 2002). 16 Cuoco was on the commission charged with writing the report, and the report is published in the second volume of his Scritti vari. 17 Ibid., 2.3. 18 Ibid., 2.158–60 for a summary of the legislative history of the proposed reforms.

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the best poetry does not follow rules. It establishes them by example.19 If poetic capacity is founded on the eye for resemblance, then men will be poets by nature or not at all.20 To say that a talent is found naturally or not at all, however, is not the same as saying that it is unimportant. School rhetoric may be worthless as a discipline, but the parts of rhetoric may be usefully reallocated to other and new disciplines. Thus, invention was salvaged as a new discipline, to be called “heuristic.”21 In Cuoco, as in Vico, there is the same rejection of the ars rhetorica as a body of precepts designed to ensure effective oratory. This rejection of school rhetoric did not entail the rejection of rhetoric as practiced in antiquity, merely its redescription. When Vico taught rhetoric, his course functioned essentially as an introduction to Latin literature and a preparation for studying the law. The ancients, however, had firmly distinguished between the grammarian, who taught literacy and literature, and the rhetorician, who because he taught the most difficult subject taught it last.22 Instead of teaching rhetoric as literary criticism (belletrism) to those whose capacity to read is still being formed, the Rapporto stipulated that rhetoric be taught as the philosophy of eloquence. Philosophy in this instance, however, is to be understood simply as an inquiry into the causes of phenomena. This draws the Neapolitan enterprise back toward the original Aristotelian project in which rhetoric had been not simply the art of persuasion, but an understanding of all the modes of persuasion available in a particular case. The proposed reform thus emphasizes interest in the phenomenon of persuasion, over and above the task of persuading itself.23 The Rapporto makes the point that Naples had produced geniuses, but adds that Telesio, Campanella, Bruno, Tasso, and their ilk had not forged a language common to mass and elite, “nor any mode whatsoever of communication.”24 In this light, Vico’s discoveries of the true Homer (and later the true Dante) take on a clearly political valence: What, we might ask, did the Greek and Tuscan city-states have that Naples lacked? “A vulgar eloquence shared by the entire citizenry” is the implicit

19 Ibid.,

2.29. As we saw in Chapter 1, the notion that performance establishes rules and does not follow them is an ancient topos. See Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 5.10.122; Augustine, De doctrina christiana, 4.3. 20 Cuoco, Scritti vari, 2.58. 21 Ibid., 2.29. 22 Ibid., 2.30. 23 Ibid., 2.55, 2.134. 24 Ibid., 2.5, 2.67.

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response.25 To address this problem, the Rapporto stated that “the education of the many has as its aim the facilitation of communication between the few and the many.”26 The word comunicazione can in this context be given a quite literal reading that emphasizes the role that semiosis (signaling) plays not simply in moving messages from sender to receiver, but in effecting some kind of rapprochement between sender and receiver, such that their respective idiosyncrasies are loosened. Understood literally, communication is a process taking place between independent persons in which something emerges that is common, comune. Education, thus, is not purely the formation of virtuous character. Instead it is institutionalized habit-taking, forming a wide range of competences. “Everything,” notes the Rapporto, “contributes to the education of the people,” for “a workshop, a factory is a school for the people,” and “it ought to be the responsibility of whoever is in charge of education to make it so that all public institutions of that kind become useful to instruction.”27 The retreat from the forum to the classroom is utterly standard in the history of rhetoric. But the innovation here is the scale of the proposed solution, the degree to which the individual pedagogue is effaced. Mass education is the condition of possibility for a new rhetorical situation—fantasized, if not realized—in which the interlocutors are the state and the nation. Rhetoric becomes communication, and the point of rhetorical interaction is fractured and dilated. The shift from rhetoric to communication entails a shift from the polis and its analogues to institutions that facilitate the diffusion of information without requiring that all parts of the system encounter all other parts of the system, either simultaneously or serially. Insofar as the school incorporates mechanisms for redesigning itself in response to the individuals it socializes, it becomes 25 Compare

the equal and opposite interpretations of Homer and Dante in Vico and his contemporary Gianvincenzo Gravina. It is interesting to speculate, but difficult to prove, that whereas Vico’s understanding of the poet develops in relation to Homer and is applied later to Dante, Gravina’s understanding uses Dante to measure Homer. Gravina’s emphasis on the politico-poetic, that is to say, rhetorical self-consciousness of the poet, is sustained in the case of Dante not only by biographical detail that illumines the poetic corpus, but also by the Florentine’s prose works, Monarchia and De vulgari eloquentia. Compare Gianvincenzo Gravina, Scritti critici e teorici, ed. Amedeo Quondam (Bari: Laterza, 1973), 277ff and Vico, “Discoverta del vero Dante, ovvero nuovi principi di critica dantesca,” in Giambattista Vico, Opere, ed. Fausto Nicolini (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, 1953), 950–4. 26 Cuoco, Scritti vari, 2.5: “L’istruzione de’ molti ha per oggetto di facilitare la comunicazione tra i pochi ed i moltissimi.” 27 Ibid., 2.2: “tutto concorre all’istruzione del popolo. Una fabbrica, una manifattura e ` per lui una scuola. Deve esser cura di chi avr`a la direzione di far s`ı che tutt’i pubblici stabilimenti di tal natura diventino utili all’istruzione.”

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some kind of substitute for the polis with its more immediate interactive reciprocities. The classical role of orator is not replaced by the teacher, but rather by the public institutions of the school. The “school” stands for all conceivable forms of social institution insofar as they produce habit. Such institutions will be more effective at inculcating certain patterns of behavior precisely because they make no self-conscious appeal or exhortation. Belief is achieved not by means of appeal, but by accrued sensibility—judgment without reflection. In this way, the moralization of political discourse is avoided to the extent that exhortation is rendered obsolete. Indeed, the word etica is used in its less normative sense to mean not so much a science of duties as a science of habits.28 In Cuoco, investigation of character is transformed from the study of personal capacity, to the study of individual types, and then to the study of “national” habit. In point of fact, he attributes this series of transformations to precisely the lineage Aristotle, Theophrastus, Vico.29 Recall that in his Rhetoric Aristotle had taken ethos to be “the moral character of the speaker”: “the orator persuades by moral character when his speech is delivered in such a manner as to render him worthy of confidence,” and “we feel confidence in a greater degree and more readily in persons of worth in regard to everything in general, but where there is no certainty and there is room for doubt, our confidence is absolute.”30 Recall also that in his Characters Theophrastus had begun in medias res with only the briefest of introductions before proceeding to the first observation 28 Ibid.,

2.43: “‘etica’ vuol dire ‘scienza de’ costumi’ e non gi`a ‘de’ doveri.’” 2.42–3: “si dovrebbe prima di tutto risolvere il problema assolutamente e ne’ suoi termini i piu` generali; indi analizzare ad una ad una le modificazioni che tale soluzione puo` ricevere nell’individuo per l’et`a, pel temperamento, per l’educazione, ecc. ecc.; analizzare le azioni di tale individuo, ed indicare quel punto di mezzo nel quale sta la ` cio`e il bello ed il buono morale (metodo praticato con tanta cura dagli antichi, virtu, ed specialmente da Aristotile, e che i moderni hanno forse senza ragione trascurato); descrivere, a modo di Teofrasto, i caratteri che seguono ciascuna virtu` e ciascun vizio, onde si possano riconoscere anche quando non sono in azione; passare dall’individuo alle nazioni, e calcolare l’effetto che producono sui sentimenti di ciascuno le opinioni, i pregiudizi, le abitudini di tutti; scorrere le varie et`a di tali nazioni, le quali par che invecchino e rimbambiscano al pari degli uomini; e, seguendo l’orme di Vico, descrivere la storia eterna della loro mente e dare i veri fondamenti della legislazione.” 30 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1356a. Compare the following account of ethos: “the argument from ethos, the task of justification of the speaker’s character is constrained by the principle of decorum, the necessary selection of the factors apt, appropriate to the time, place, persona of the inquirer’s decisions, factors which mark them as ‘moral,’ characterful.” Nancy S. Struever, “Rhetoric: Time, Memory, Memoir,” in A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism, eds. Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 435. Essential on this issue is Eugene Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 29 Ibid.,

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that “the dissembler is the sort who goes up to his enemies and is willing to chat with them.”31 Now, in Vico, ethos was mos, which he glossed as a word crucial to the epideictic of praise and blame between patricians and plebeians over cultural privileges (such as marriage) and their juridical consequences.32 Or ethos became providence, the ultimate calculus of human action. For Cuoco, the movement that he identifies from individual (Aristotle) through type (Theophrastus) to culture (Vico) establishes a mode of ethical inquiry into habits focused on institutions. This may not be a good reading of Aristotle. (The Stagyrite after all was no individualist despite his focus on the person of the orator.) Cuoco’s is a perceptive appropriation of Vico, however, intended to address the problems confronted at Naples after 1799. The Rapporto completed Vico’s socialization of ethics by equating ethics with the theory of moral sentiments, so that the assumptions that connect Vico to Smith—both believe that reading oneself as a stranger is the only viable form of self-knowledge—also connect the Rapporto to Bentham’s account of the way in which modern institutions do and must render human actions mutually visible and quantifiable. Common sense is institutionalized by a school system that monitors and recalibrates all stimuli. Moreover, at least notionally, the evaluation of performances becomes more perspicuous as the rules of the game become more transparent. Action in this conceptual world has undergone a very significant recalibration, as has the relationship between private and public. The rise of publicity as a principle of political compact has brought with it a concomitant rise in the awareness of just how partial all the practicable forms of publicity really are.33 This particular response at Naples to the political and rhetorical failure of the 1799 revolution was utopian. The supposition that circuits of communication would replace or make up for the absence of properly 31 Theophrastus, Characters, 1. Compare, of course, Theophrastus’s project in the Characters

to Aristotle’s discussion of the virtues and the vices at Nicomachean Ethics, 1107a 33–1108b 7. See especially William W. Fortenbaugh, “Theophrastus, the Characters and Rhetoric,” in Peripatetic Rhetoric, ed. Fortenbaugh and Mirhady. 32 Consider, for example, Vico, 1744 Scienza nuova, §567. 33 Cuoco, Scritti vari, 2.42–3, 63, 109: In the section detailing University education, the study of “etica o teoria de’ sentimenti morali” is located in the Faculty of Belles-Lettres immediately before “filosofia dell’eloquenza.” The notion that Bentham was concerned to make human actions visible not to the state but to all those human actors engaged in the same institutional game and indeed to the “agents” of those actions themselves is emphasized by Frances Ferguson, who criticizes Foucault’s state-centered account on this point. Ferguson, Pornography, 15–20.

276

Vico and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe

rhetorical institutions of co-presence and discursive negotiation was wishful. Had the utopian agenda been approximated in fact, it would have been a move from the minute observation of rhetorical interchange where chance and decision necessitate rapid revisions of choice to the blind assertion that the open system, the opera aperta of genuinely communicative societies must necessarily result in greater happiness, utility, or truth. Such a move is politically problematic. Of course, “inquiry in the long run” in the Peircean sense is an article of faith. The projection of value into the future constitutes a kind of credit where the line between appropriate leverage and overextension is imperceptible. If future pleasure is thought to overrule present pain, then the future can become a kind of tyrant, utterly unreasonable because it never presents itself for judgment. In this continuation of the Vichian plot line, the sublimation of rhetoric may become the sublimity of communication. The vital semiotic encounter between the I and the you is no longer understood as a rhetorical encounter with literal co-presence in the public assembly and is understood instead as a communicative sequence of encounters routed through a recursive system in which the encounter of the I with the you is iterated through the he, the she, the it, the one, and the they. When this happens the basic assumptions of humanism are negated. Politics is no longer conducted on a human scale. The architecture of the modern state is incommensurate with the individual except insofar as the value of that individual can be aggregated. That is to say, being both bureaucratic and democratic, the modern state cannot engage with individuals and yet is forced to recognize the vox popoli as sovereign. At the end of this study of Vico, then, we are faced with another dialectic of Enlightenment.34 I would argue that what we have seen in the evolution of Vico’s thought in the De coniuratione, the Institutiones oratoriae, the De ratione, the De antiquissima sapientia, the Diritto universale, and the Scienza nuova, together with its occluded continuation at Naples in 1799, is the tremendous power and irony of Vico’s answer to the question “what would be the use of rhetorical inquiry in a society without institutions that guarantee public debate?” His answer is, in effect, that such inquiry would have to theorize and describe the vital and specific 34 The

reference to Horkheimer and Adorno is not gratuitous. Horkheimer had included Vico in his survey of philosophies of history, and although the references to Vico in Dialectic of Enlightenment itself are relatively few, they are important and revealing. For them, Vico embodies thinking the general in the particular. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 16–17.

Conclusion

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institutions that sponsor and sustain reciprocities, while eliminating the precondition of literal co-presence. Reciprocity here is transformed from its ideal form as doing unto you as you do unto me. It is generalized into the faith that as I construe, so shall I be construed. The literal co-presence of you and I is expanded into the sublimated co-presence of what Vico calls nazioni, which are at base recursive communities of interpretation. The irony of Vico’s answer is made clearer in Cuoco’s profoundly Vichian response to 1799. That irony consists in the simultaneously democratic and demotic quality of communicative institutions where only the erasure of the distinctness of individual encounters can create a system in which individual encounters are properly valued. The connections between Neapolitan and European Enlightenment thought are complex, and they need to be pursued further.35 Nevertheless, Vico’s sublimation of rhetoric establishes a problem that is worth investigating in a diversity of European contexts. That problem is the transformation of the theory of rhetoric into the theory of communication. Classical rhetoric and modern communication share basic modes of analysis, but one key difference is the attitude to co-presence. The institutions imagined by classical and neoclassical rhetoric as domains where deliberative, forensic, and epideictic rhetoric would take place are institutions in which, as Arendt says of the polis, “I appear to others as others appear to me.” Gradations of hierarchy may certainly exist within such institutions, so that an institution can be rhetorical even when I do not appear to others in a manner precisely symmetrical to the manner in which they appear to me. But some kind of co-presence in place and time is essential. Communication sets no such precondition. A raft of institutions that have become cultural practices lend themselves to theorization from the perspective of communication qua sublimated rhetoric. Considered as institutions in the temporal and not spatial sense, Roman law and the Homeric poems are two such domains. Kant’s public use of reason, Smith’s spectatorial market, and Rousseau’s general will are institutions of the same peculiar grammatical structure. The conclusion to be drawn is ironic. Illuminismo was not a rubric that defined Vico, and yet his gloss of Enlightenment is key.

35 In

addition to the fundamental work of Venturi on the Italian dimension of Enlightenment, see also more recent work from Vincenzo Ferrone, I profeti dell’illuminismo: La metamorfosi della ragione nel tardo settecento italiano (Rome: Laterza, 2000), together with Robertson, Case for the Enlightenment.

Bibliography of Works Cited

Works by Vico The corpus of Vichian texts is currently under review. The old Nicolini, Gentile, and Croce edition has been superseded. A new edition of the complete works is underway. As a result, a number of different editions have been used in the present study. Page references are to texts in the language of composition. Standard English translations that have been used are listed in square brackets. Occasionally, I have altered translations. Those interventions are marked “translation modified.” Unless otherwise indicated, translations of ancient sources are from the Loeb Classical Library. References to works by Vico are abbreviated as follows: 1711 Risposta

1712 Risposta

1725 Scienza nuova

1730 Scienza nuova

Risposta del signor Giambattista di Vico nella quale si sciogliono tre opposizioni fatte da dotto signore contro il primo libro “De antiquissima Italorum sapientia”. In Opere filosofiche. Edited by Paolo Cristofolini. Florence: Sansoni, 1971. [In On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians. Translated by L. M. Palmer. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.] Risposta di Giambattista di Vico all’articolo X del tomo VIII del “Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia”. In Opere filosofiche. Edited by Paolo Cristofolini. Florence: Sansoni, 1971. [In On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians. Translated by L. M. Palmer. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.] Princ`ıpi di una scienza nuova intorno alla natura delle nazioni per la quale si ritruovano i princ`ıpi di altro sistema del diritto naturale delle genti. In Opere. Edited by Andrea Battistini. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1990. [The First New Science. Translated by Leon Pompa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.] La scienza nuova 1730. Edited by Paolo Cristofolini and Manuela Sanna. Naples: Alfredo Guida, 2004. 279

280 1744 Scienza nuova

Carafa Commento all “Arte poetica”

De antiquissima sapientia

De coniuratione De constantia

De ratione

De uno

Delle cene sontuose Dissertationes

Epistole Institutiones oratoriae

Notae

Bibliography of Works Cited Princ`ıpi di scienza nuova d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni. In Opere. Edited by Andrea Battistini. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1990. [The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.] La gesta di Antonio Carafa. Edited by Manuela Sanna. Naples: Alfredo Guida, 1997. Commento all “Arte poetica di Orazio”. Edited and translated by Guido de Paulis. Naples: Alfredo Guida, 1998. De antiquissima italorum sapientia. In Opere filosofiche. Edited by Paolo Cristofolini. Florence: Sansoni, 1971. [On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians. Translated by L. M. Palmer. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.] La congiura dei principi napoletani 1701. Edited by Claudia Pandolfi. Naples: Morano, 1992. De constantia iurisprudentis. In Opere giuridiche. Edited by Paolo Cristofolini. Florence: Sansoni, 1974. [On the Constancy of the Jurisprudent. Translated by John D. Schaeffer. New Vico Studies 23 (2005): 1–308.] De nostri temporis studiorum ratione. In Opere. Edited by Andrea Battistini. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1990. [On the Study Methods of Our Time. Translated by Elio Gianturco. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.] De universi iuris principio et fine uno. In Opere giuridiche. Edited by Paolo Cristofolini. Florence: Sansoni, 1974. [On the One Principle and One End of Universal Law. Translated by John D. Schaeffer. New Vico Studies 21 (2003): 23–274.] Delle cene sontuose de’ Romani. Edited by Domenico Corradini Broussard. Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 1993. Dissertationes. In Opere giuridiche. Edited by Paolo Cristofolini. Florence: Sansoni, 1974. [Dissertations. Translated by John D. Schaeffer. New Vico Studies 24 (2006): 1–80.] Epistole con aggiunte le epistole dei suoi corrispondenti. Edited by Manuela Sanna. Naples: Morano, 1992. ` Institutiones oratoriae. Edited by Giuliano Crifo. Naples: Istituto Suor Orsola Benincasa, 1989. [The Art of Rhetoric (Institutiones Oratoriae, 1711–1741). Translated by Giorgio A. Pinton and Arthur W. Shippee. Amsterdam–Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996.] Notae in duos libros. In Opere giuridiche. Edited by Paolo Cristofolini. Florence: Sansoni, 1974.

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281

Le orazioni inaugurali I–VI. Edited by Gian Galeazzo Visconti. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1982. Sinopsi del diritto universale. In Opere giuridiche. Edited by Paolo Cristofolini. Florence: Sansoni, 1974. [Synopsis of Universal Law. Translated by Donald Phillip Verene. New Vico Studies 21 (2003): 1–22.] Vici vindiciae. In Opere filosofiche. Edited by Paolo Cristofolini. Florence: Sansoni, 1971. Vita di Giambattista Vico scritta da se medesimo. In Opere. Edited by Andrea Battistini. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1990. [The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico. Translated by Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1944.]

Unpublished Material Anon., “Congiura de’ nobili napoletani fatta nell’anno 1701. Cavata dala deposizione di d. Carlo di Sangro, sinceramente come fu scritta in processo,” MS X.D.91, Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, Naples, Italy. Anon., “Dell’accaduta in Napoli nell’anno 1701,” MS XV.G.30, Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, Naples, Italy. Anon., “Narrazione anonima della congiura del principe di Macchia 1701,” MS XXVI.A.18, Societ`a Napoletana di Storia Patria, Naples, Italy. Anon., “Storia dell’ultima congiura di Napoli nel 1701. Versione dal Francese di Garonne Baconcopia,” MS XXI.A.15, Societ`a Napoletana di Storia Patria, Naples, Italy.

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Index

Abelard, Peter, 136 Academy of Medinaceli, 40–44, 47, 49–50, 52, 141, 161 Academy of the Investigators, 41 Accursius, 155–156 Achilles, 102, 107–108, 178–179, 210–211, 219–220, 232, 235 Acquaviva, Bernardino, 51 Acquaviva, Gerolamo, 51, 59 Adam, 220 Aelian, 231 Aeschylus, 241 Aesop, 221 Agamemnon, 107, 219 Alciati, Andrea, 155–156 Amphion, 207–208 Anselm of Canterbury, 136 Anthropology, discipline of, 18, 70, 74, 176 Antinous, 179 Apollo, 207, 243 Arendt, Hannah, 8–9, 12, 15, 19, 113, 127, 200, 224, 226, 258, 277 Argento, Gaetano, 162–164, 167, 240 Arion, 241 Aristotle, 2–3, 9, 12–13, 69–70, 73, 75–82, 85–92, 96, 101–103, 107, 111–112, 114–116, 119, 125–127, 133–136, 142, 145, 147, 151–153, 171–172, 179, 183–184, 189–191, 193, 196, 199–200, 202–204, 209–211, 221, 223–224, 226, 229, 236, 243, 248, 257, 274–275 Categories, 86, 89, 96, 119 De anima, 103, 107, 112, 126, 128, 179, 210–211, 224, 226

De interpretatione, 86, 103, 125, 128, 135–136 De motu animalium, 103, 112 Nicomachean Ethics, 103, 189, 190, 226, 236, 275 Organon, 86, 89, 103, 142 path¯emata, concept of, 125, 128, 135–136 Physics, 112, 133, 257 Poetics, 70, 79, 82, 209 Posterior Analytics, 86 pr¯agmata, concept of, 125, 128, 135–136 Prior Analytics, 86, 223 Rhetoric, 69, 75–76, 79–80, 82, 86–87, 91, 101–103, 107, 112, 115–116, 128, 145, 190–191, 196, 199–200, 203–204, 223, 243, 248, 274 Sophistic Refutations, 86, 142, 151–152 Topics, 85–86, 89–92, 96, 119, 142, 223 Arnauld, Antoine, 73, 90–92, 94, 158 Ars historica, 38–39 Ars iuris, 168 Astraea, 190 Athena, 219 Pallas Athena, 169 Augustine, St. (Aurelius Augustinus), 47, 90–91, 248, 257–258, 272 Augustus, 6, 42, 47–49, 159, 183, 247, 256 Bacon, Francis, 93–94, 100, 119, 198, 250 Badaloni, Nicola, 21, 47, 96, 165 Baron, Hans, 11 Barthes, Roland, 68 Battistini, Andrea, 6, 12, 17–18, 28, 45, 57, 69, 95, 106, 130, 162, 172, 206, 214, 235, 260

295

296

Index

Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 21 Bayle, Pierre, 15, 166, 228 Dictionnaire historique et critique, 166 Beccaria, Cesare, 27–28 Bender, John, 68–69 Bentham, Jeremy, 25, 27–28, 275 Bentley, Richard, 232 Berlin, Isaiah, 14 Blackwell, Thomas, 231 Blumenberg, Hans, 72 Boileau Despr´eaux, Nicolas, 104 Bouhours, Dominique, 79–80 Boyle, Robert, 250 Briseis, 107–108, 219 Bruni, Leonardo, 2, 38, 67 Bruno, Giordano, 272 Bud´e, Guillaume, 178 Burke, Edmund, 22–23 Caetani, Gaetano Francesco, Prince of Caserta, 50, 58 Caloprese, Gregorio, 41, 46 Campanella, Tommaso, 2, 272 Campe, R¨udiger, 70 Cantelmo, Giacomo, 50 Capece, Giuseppe, 50 ` 41, 47–48 Caracciolo, Carmine Nicolo, Carafa, Antonio, 73–74, 153 Carafa, Malizia, 59 Caravita, Domenico, 155, 167 ` 41 Caravita, Nicolo, Carneades, 166–168, 255 Cartesianism, 68, 85, 147 Casoni, Filippo, 50 Cassius Dio, 202 Castelvetro, Lodovico, 209–210 Catiline (Lucius Sergius Catilina), 37, 53 Cato (Marcus Porcius Cato), 37–38, 53, 61, 123, 168 Celsus, 153, 156 Censorinus, 252 Certum, concept of, 15, 65–66, 157, 171 Chance, 43–46, 62–64, 206, 213, 245, 253, 276 Charles II of Spain, 32, 42, 49, 52, 55, 58 Charles V of Spain, 54 Charles, Archduke of Austria, 32, 52–53, 55, 58, 164 Chassignet, Francesco, 51 Christ, Jesus, 228

Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero), 2–3, 13, 48, 67, 73, 75–79, 81–82, 87, 90, 94, 111, 115, 123, 125, 127, 135–136, 138, 151–153, 162–163, 172, 177–178, 193, 203, 207–209, 223, 234, 237, 255 Academica, 135 De oratore, 75–76, 82, 90, 151–152, 208–209, 223, 234 Topica, 138, 172 Clauberg, Johann, 91 Collingwood, Robin George, 139 Collins, Anthony, 232 Comitia centuriata, 185 Comitia curiata, 184–185 Comitia tributa, 10, 184–185 Compossibility, concept of, 114–116, 121–123, 235, 254, 259 Co-presence, concept of, 93, 148, 175, 183, 186–187, 224, 237–238, 241, 262, 268, 276–277 Counter-Enlightenment, 13–15, 21, 28 Cranz, F. Edward, 126, 136 ` Giuliano, 3, 18, 37, 84, 155, 182 Crifo, Croce, Benedetto, 1, 16–17, 33, 54, 65, 84, 143, 174, 247, 259, 269–271 Cujas, Jacques, 154–156 Cuoco, Vincenzo, 28–29, 67, 267, 270–275, 277 Rapporto al re Gioacchino Murat, 271–273, 275 Saggio storico, 29, 267, 270–271 Cybele, 243 d’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 24 D’Andrea, Francesco, 141, 155, 162–165, 240 d’Avalos, Cesare, 50 Dante Alighieri, 2, 238, 272–273 d’Aquino, Tommaso, 52 Darius I of Persia, 215 de Sylva, Emanuele, 52 Decius (Gaius Messius Quintus Decius), 42 Delfico, Melchiorre, 268–269 Democratization, process of, 25, 28 Democritus, 45–46, 231 Demosthenes, 2, 79, 105, 222, 237, 243, 253 Descartes, Ren´e, 39, 73, 90–91, 95–96, 109, 141, 146–148, 158 Dioptrique, 146

Index Destutt de Tracy, Antoine Louis Claude, 24 Di Capua, Giambattista, 51 Di Sangro, Carlo, 50, 52 Dialectic, 75, 85, 88, 92, 141, 145, 188, 221–222, 276 Diana, 243 Dio Chrysostom, 202, 231 Diodorus Siculus, 252 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 173 Dockhorn, Klaus, 69–70, 222 Doria, Paolo Mattia, 41 du Marsais, C´esar Chesneau, 24 Eling, Ingewald, 214 Enlightenment, 13–15, 21, 28, 242, 247, 251, 263, 270, 276, 277 Italian, 263 Neapolitan, 277 Epicureanism, 206, 228, 245 Estr´ees, Vittoria Maria, Duke of, 51 Eusebius of Caesarea, 202, 252 Eve, 220 Experimentation, 73, 86, 93, 97, 100, 110, 114, 117, 119, 121, 123–124 Fate, 43–46, 62–64, 206, 245, 253 Favre, Antoine, 155–156 Ferdinand I of Naples, 75 Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies, 267 Ferdinand IV of Naples, 267 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 245 Filangieri, Gaetano, 28, 263–264 Finetti, Giovanni Francesco, 14 Fisch, Max Harold, 8–9, 19, 61, 83, 114, 125, 137, 155, 185, 236 Fumaroli, Marc, 70–72 Funkenstein, Amos, 39, 119, 254 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 69–70, 128, 222 Galilei, Galileo, 17, 80, 117, 119, 130–131 Gambacorta, Gaetano, 31, 50, 52–53, 56–57, 149, 266 Garin, Eugenio, 2 Garofalo, Biagio, 143 Genovesi, Antonio, 263–264 Giannone, Pietro, 40–41, 43, 47, 141, 155, 163, 165–166, 177–178 Istoria civile del regno di Napoli, 141, 163, 177 Giarrizzo, Giuseppe, 56 Goetsch, James R., 19, 65, 199, 204

297

Graci`an, Balthazar, 80, 199 Grafton, Anthony, 39 Grassi, Ernesto, 19–20, 222 Grimaldi, Bartolomeo Ceva, 56–57 Grimaldi, Francescantonio, 28, 263, 268 Grimani, Vincenzo (Cardinal and Viceroy of Naples), 164 Gross, Daniel, 71 Grotius, Hugo, 4, 74, 93, 158, 189, 244, 245 ¨ Habermas, Jurgen, 142 Harrington, James, 12 Hector, 107, 219 H´edelin, Franc¸ois, 231 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1, 134 Heraclitus, 35, 230 Herbert, Edward, Lord of Cherbury, 73, 87, 96–100, 109–110, 119, 125–126, 173, 212, 218, 226 De veritate, 96, 98–100, 109, 110, 125–126, 212, 218, 226 Hercules, Gallic, 218 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 1, 14, 27–28 Hermeneutics, 18, 69, 96, 112, 128, 132, 139, 157, 169, 176, 180, 215, 237, 239 Hermes Trismegistus, 202 Hermodorus of Ephesus, 135, 173–175, 238–239 Herodotus, 1, 215–216, 231, 252 Hic et nunc, category of, 2, 20, 23, 132, 149, 168, 171, 178, 180 Hippocrates, 221 Historicism, concept of, 2–3, 39, 246, 254 Hobbes, Thomas, 21, 73, 93, 102–103, 139, 145–146, 166 A Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique, 103, 145 De cive, 166 Dialogus physicus, 139 Leviathan, 103, 146, 268 Homer, 4–6, 33, 73, 101–102, 104–106, 135, 179, 187, 194, 205, 209, 212, 219–220, 228–241, 243, 245, 252, 259–262, 266, 272–273 Iliad, 4, 102, 107, 178, 209, 219–220, 228, 231–232, 252 Odyssey, 4, 178, 209, 212, 220, 228, 231 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), 139, 207–208, 210, 231, 234, 241 Ars poetica, 139, 207, 210, 231, 234, 241 Hotman, Franc¸ois, 155–156

298

Index

Hugo, Herman, 214 Humanism, concept of, 2–3, 11, 38, 93, 113, 165, 203, 211, 234, 276 Hume, David, 15, 24, 105, 263 Idanthrysus, 215 Impersonality, quality of, 18, 29, 34–35, 37, 39, 43–44, 49, 62, 64, 66, 113, 119, 140–141, 148, 166–167, 243 Institution, concept of, 19, 156, 236, 274 Institution, definition of, 8–9, 19, 236 Isocrates, 207–208 Israel, Jonathan, 14, 247 Iulius Caesar, Gaius, 37–38, 42, 49, 53, 61, 188 Iunius Brutus, Lucius, 61 Ius gentium, concept of, 4 Josephus (Flavius Iosephus), 231 Jove, 6, 47, 106, 131, 140, 215–217, 228, 243, 249, 251 Julian (Salvius Julianus), 153 Julian the Apostate (Flavius Claudius Iulianus), 48 Juno, 243 Justinian I (Flavius Petrus Sabbatius Iustinianus), 152 Digest, 152–156, 173, 181, 202 Kant, Immanuel, 21–23, 27–28, 107, 140, 142, 188, 223–224, 242, 277 Kennedy, George, 72 Kircher, Athanasius, 89, 97 Koselleck, Reinhart, 251 Langbaine, Gerard, 104 Le Clerc, Jean, 39 Leibniz, Gottfried, 24, 115, 122 Leopold I of Austria, 32 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 21–22 Lilla, Mark, 14–15, 65, 166, 227, 247 Livy (Titus Livius), 173–174, 215, 269 Llull, Ramon, 89, 97 Locke, John, 23–24, 137 Longano, Francesco, 264 Longinus, 5, 22–23, 73, 102, 104–106, 111 Peri upsous, 104–106 Lord, Alfred, 230, 233 Louis XIV of France, 50 Lucina, Giuseppe, 41, 45–46 Lycurgus, 4, 170

` 166, 269 Machiavelli, Niccolo, Il principe, 166 Maffei, Scipione, 143 Maiello, Carlo, 33, 58 Malebranche, Nicolas, 147 Mallinckrodt, Bernard von, 214 Marino, Giambattista, 80 Mars, 243 Martini, Matthias, 172 Marx, Karl, 1, 120–121 Masaniello, 6, 54–56, 60, 67, 266–267 Mascardi, Agostino, 38–39 Medinaceli, Luis Francisco de la Cerda, Duke of, 40 Meidias, 253 Menander, 241 Mencken, Otto, 142 Mercury, 169, 236, 243 Mersenne, Marin, 96 Metastasio, Pietro, 46 Millar, Fergus, 10 Minerva, 6, 169, 216, 243 Mooney, Michael, 17, 208 Morstein-Marx, Robert, 10, 185 Mosca, Felice, 142 Mucius Scaevola, Quintus, 164, 204 Muratori, Ludovico, 142 Navarette, Nicola, 52 Neptune, 243 Nicole, Pierre, 90–92 Nicolini, Fausto, 17–18, 29, 32–33, 51, 84, 155, 174, 184, 230, 259–260, 273 Ober, Josiah, 9–10, 188 Ong, Walter, 70, 87 Orpheus, 207–208, 217–218 Orsi, Giovanni Giuseppe, 80 Pagano, Francesco Maria, 28, 67, 263–266, 268 Progetto di costituzione della repubblica napolitana, 265 Pallavicino, Sforza, 73, 80–82, 199 Papinian (Aemilius Papinianus), 153–154, 156–157, 181 Parry, Milman, 230 Patrizi da Cherso, Francesco, 208, 210 Patroclus, 219 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 8, 93, 125, 276 Peregrini, Matteo, 73, 80–82, 199

Index Pericles, 35 Perizonius, Jacob, 39 Perrault, Charles, 231 Petronius Arbiter, 42 Phenomenology, 19, 96, 103, 191, 230, 239 Philip, Duke of Anjou, 32, 50–52 Pindar, 241 Pinus, Antonius, 136–137 Plato, 12, 52, 93, 135, 139–140, 160, 164, 187–188, 201, 204, 222, 231, 234, 247–248, 252, 257 Critias, 252 Laws, 160, 188 Parmenides, 135 Protagoras, 145 Timaeus, 252, 257 Plautus, Titus Maccius, 113 Plotinus, 257 Plutarch, 209, 231 Pocock, John Greville Agard, 11–12, 15, 146, 177, 251 Poiesis, concept of, 74, 210, 222, 249 Polis, 3, 8–12, 16, 19–20, 23, 29, 39, 82, 86, 88, 91, 94–95, 108, 112–113, 121, 124, 127, 134, 136, 138–139, 156, 171, 183, 215, 218, 221, 224, 226, 232–234, 238–239, 242, 273–274, 277 Polis, definition of, 8, 19 Polybius, 37, 174, 251, 269 Polyphemus, 220 Pompilius, Numa, 235 Pomponius, Sextus, 173–174 Pope, Alexander, 232 Popma, Ausonio, 172 Porphyry of Tyre, 230–231 Priam, 219 Protagoras, 35, 139, 200 Proteus, 212 Providence, 14, 20, 34, 39, 43–47, 61–64, 124, 201, 224–225, 228, 239, 243–247, 253, 255, 271, 275 Pseudo-Herodotus, 230–231, 235 Pseudo-Plutarch, 46, 230 Publilius Philo, Quintus, 186 Pyrrhonism, 228 Pythagoras, 45, 221 Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus), 2–3, 13, 23, 52, 73, 76–79, 81–83,

299

85–88, 90–92, 98, 109, 111, 115–116, 122–123, 127, 136, 147, 152, 162, 193, 209, 223, 272 Institutio oratoria, 52, 77, 79, 83, 85–88, 91, 98, 115–116, 123, 136, 147, 152, 209, 223, 272 Raimondi, Ezio, 28, 69, 81–82, 202, 215 Ramus, Petrus, 87, 90, 92, 213 Res publica, concept of, 23, 157, 212 Rhetoric acutezza, 79–82, 199 amplificatio, 95 and communication, 29–30, 273, 276–277 and mannerism, 18, 80 antilogy, 35–40, 52, 60–62, 66, 73, 154 ars critica, 94–96, 110, 222 ars topica, 18, 24, 70, 73, 83–97, 100–102, 109–110, 112, 123, 142, 172, 203–204, 213–214, 222 as techn¯e, 17, 19, 128, 196 auditor, 6–7, 16, 22, 29, 33–34, 78–79, 84, 94, 128, 150, 155–156, 175–176, 199–200, 206, 213, 222, 233, 235, 237, 244 commonplace book, 202 confirmatio, 95 confutatio, 95 declamatio, 35 decorum, 39, 76, 104, 245, 254, 274 delectare, 77, 220 deliberative, 5, 87, 237, 248, 277 digressio, 95 dispositio, 79, 95 docere, 76–77, 220 ekphrasis, 71 elocutio, 5, 79–80, 82–83, 109 enthymeme, 78, 83, 116, 200, 204, 222, 253 epideictic, 5, 87, 237, 248, 275, 277 ethos, 34, 76–77, 239, 243–244, 274–275 etymology, 12, 18, 86, 89, 125, 138, 172, 185, 226, 235–236 exemplum, 99, 206, 222 exordium, 95 forensic, 5, 85–87, 155–156, 160–163, 166–167, 174–175, 237, 248, 277 high style, 5 homonymy, 151–153 hypotyposis, 21–22

300

Index

Rhetoric (Cont.) imagination, faculty of, 2, 15, 21–23, 28, 44, 83, 92, 99, 107–108, 125, 127, 129, 132, 187, 194, 200, 203, 206, 208, 210, 220–222, 238, 246, 248, 252, 255 imitatio, 68 in utramque partem, 35, 168 ingegno, 74, 81, 120, 132 ingenium, 73–74, 78, 81–84, 94–95, 102, 109, 114, 120, 122, 129–130, 151, 168, 204 insinuatio, 37 inventio, 79–80, 82–83, 95, 101, 109, 138, 202, 206, 214, 272 irony, 61, 64, 78, 210, 212–213, 217 is¯egoria, 9, 16, 19 locus commune, 84, 194, 203 logos, 76, 102, 106, 221 low style, 5 maxim, 79, 81–82, 109, 123, 199–200, 221, 244, 253 memoria, 5–6, 8, 55, 79, 83, 92–93, 99, 101, 123, 125, 132, 187, 194, 212, 221, 231, 234, 238, 242, 246, 248, 258, 260, 268 metaphor, 5, 78–81, 83–84, 102, 151–153, 176, 210, 213, 217, 219 metonymy, 78, 210–211, 213, 217, 249, 256, 262 middle style, 5 modality, 70, 114, 116–117, 120 mos, 74, 76–77, 247, 275 movere, 77 narratio, 95 orator, 6–7, 9, 15, 19, 22, 29, 33, 35, 38, 54, 57, 75, 77–79, 82, 84–86, 88, 90–91, 97, 102–103, 105, 114, 120, 128, 130, 138, 150, 155–156, 160, 162, 175–176, 183, 194, 199–200, 213, 223, 233, 235, 237, 243–244, 248–249, 254, 274–275 partitio, 95 pathos, 18, 73, 76–77, 102–104, 106, 168, 206, 219, 221 per´stasis, 122 peroratio, 95 perspicacia, 81 phron¯esis, 210, 249 pistis, 219

pronuntiatio, 5, 7, 19, 79, 83 propositio, 95 sensus communis, 18, 57, 66, 90–92, 104, 160, 168, 188–189, 203, 222–228, 235, 242, 264–265 sententia, 79, 82–83 sorites, 95 sprezzatura, 73–74 stasis theory, 86–88, 98, 109–110 sublimation of, 3–8, 13, 21–22, 25, 33, 40, 70, 72, 84–85, 101, 111, 114, 132, 134, 150, 156, 161, 174–176, 178–179, 186–187, 192–193, 221, 271, 276–277 sublime, the, 5, 18, 22–23, 27, 73, 102, 104–108, 216, 267 synecdoche, 54, 78, 140, 210–213, 217, 230, 233 temporal manifold, 92, 248, 258 th¯esis, 123 topos, 5–6, 21, 54, 72, 79, 84, 232 up¯othesis, 122 versabilit`a, 81 Ricœur, Paul, 68 Robortello, Francesco, 104 Romilly, Jacqueline de, 35 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 26, 28, 146, 268, 277 Russo, Carlo, 41, 52 Sallo, Denys de, 142 Sallust (Gaius Sallustius Crispus), 34, 36–40, 42, 53, 61, 67, 188 Saturn, 243 Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 209–210 Schmidt-Biggemann, Wilhelm, 68, 85, 89 Scipio Africanus (Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus), 255 Semiosis, 112, 131, 135, 140, 151, 178, 201, 213–216, 229, 273 Sersale, Nicola, 41, 52 Simonides of Ceos, 139 Skinner, Quentin, 11, 103 Smith, Adam, 26–28, 242, 275, 277 Socrates, 139, 145, 221–222 Solon, 4, 173, 192, 240 Sophistic, 35, 104, 255 Spinoza, Baruch, 14, 39, 166 Tractatus theologico-politicus, 166 Stoicism, 9, 206, 228, 245

Index Struever, Nancy S., 11–12, 18, 20, 34, 39, 103–104, 116, 126, 145, 155, 172, 243, 274 Suetonius (Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus), 47 Syme, Ronald, 37, 48 Tacitus, 80, 93, 162, 167, 218, 254 Germania, 254 Tarquinius Superbus, Lucius, 185, 215 Tasso, Torquato, 272 Telemachus, 179 Telesio, Bernardino, 272 Terence (Publius Terentius Afer), 113, 132, 140, 203 Andria, 132, 140 Tesauro, Emanuele, 73, 80–81, 101, 199, 201, 215 Theophrastus, 209, 243–244, 274–275 Characters, 274–275 Thespis, 241 Thomasius, Christian, 142 Thucydides, 35–36, 39–40, 67 Timmermans, Benoˆıt, 71 Todorov, Tzvetan, 68 Toma, Giuseppe, 74 Torricelli, Evangelista, 250 Trevisani, Bernardo, 143–144 Tullius, Servius, 61 Twelve Tables, law of the, 38, 170, 173–175, 187, 190, 239 Ulpian (Domitius Ulpianus), 63, 152–153, 156, 171, 182, 202 Ulysses, 178–179, 210, 212, 220, 229, 232–233, 235, 258 Valla, Lorenzo, 172, 178, 229, 230 Valletta, Giuseppe, 41, 43, 46, 52, 141–142, 163 Istoria filosofica, 46, 141–142 Vallisneri, Antonio, 143 Varro (Marcus Terentius Varro), 164, 204, 252 Venturi, Franco, 28, 263, 268, 277 Venus, 243 Verum-certum principle, 63, 65–66, 124, 171, 186 Verum-factum principle, 63, 65–66, 113–118, 120–121, 123–124, 127–129, 131, 148, 171, 202–203

301

Vickers, Brian, 72, 214 Vico, Giambattista ages of gods, heroes, and men, concept of, 194, 205, 248, 252, 256, 258–262, 269 and historicism, 1 and humanism, 1–2 as mediator between Italian and German intellectual traditions, 2–3 axiom, use of, 5, 18, 134, 194, 196–204, 211, 222–224, 226, 258 barbarism of reflection, concept of, 247, 254–256, 260, 264 barbarism of sense, concept of, 247, 255, 260 bestione, concept of, 127, 131, 140, 201, 213, 249, 255–256, 261 cenno, concept of, 131, 215 conatus, concept of, 18, 133, 257 corsi e ricorsi, concept of, 198, 251 cosa civile, concept of, 197–198, 217, 220 De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, 3, 34, 44, 46, 62–66, 72, 85, 89, 91–97, 99, 110–120, 122–129, 131–133, 135, 137, 141–151, 180, 213, 226, 244, 250, 258, 276 De coniuratione principum neapolitanorum, 3, 5, 31–36, 38, 40, 43–44, 49–54, 57–60, 62, 64–67, 72, 140–141, 149, 154, 197, 253, 267, 276 De constantia iurisprudentis, 153, 168–169, 172–174, 178–179, 235 De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, 3, 57, 72, 75, 85, 90–94, 118, 142–143, 157–159, 163–164, 166–167, 169, 173, 213, 223, 233, 239, 242, 249–250, 276 De universi iuris uno principio et fine uno, 63, 65, 153, 166–172, 178, 189, 244 degnit`a, concept of, 198–199, 204 Delle cene sontuose de’ Romani, 41–42 Diritto universale, 3, 28, 34, 62–66, 72, 96, 107, 110, 124, 157–158, 166–174, 176, 178, 180, 189, 235, 276 Dissertationes, 107, 153, 167, 169, 178–179 Institutiones oratoriae, 3, 18, 35, 37, 59, 61, 72, 74, 76–79, 82–85, 88–90, 94–95, 102–104, 106, 108–109, 123, 129, 163, 172, 196, 199–200, 203–204, 213, 221, 256, 276

302

Index

Vico, Giambattista (Cont.) logica poetica, concept of, 5, 15, 24, 84, 107, 213 metaphysical point, concept of, 116, 133, 135 Notae in duos libros, 107, 153, 178, 179 parola reale, concept of, 131, 215, 252 Pratica di questa scienza, 195–196 Risposta (1711), 120, 122, 133, 142–143, 146, 148 Risposta (1712), 97, 99, 132–133, 142–145, 248 sapienza poetica, concept of, 208, 217, 220, 225, 228 Scienza nuova (1725), 4, 12, 51, 72, 117, 137, 157, 163–164, 174, 181, 188–189, 193, 195, 198, 203–204, 215–216, 218, 220–222, 224, 227–228, 244–245 Scienza nuova (1730), 72, 101, 164, 181, 193, 195–196, 199, 203–205, 207, 229, 231, 233, 236, 241 Scienza nuova (1744), 4–7, 12, 23, 24, 31, 33, 39, 44, 47, 50, 61–67, 72, 74, 83–86, 92–94, 96, 100–102, 104–107,

110, 122, 124, 126–128, 130–132, 134, 137, 140, 147–148, 152, 155–156, 163, 173–176, 179–182, 184–185, 187–190, 192, 195, 197–216, 218–221, 223–225, 228–232, 234–239, 241, 243, 245, 248–258, 261–262, 275–276 sensory topics, concept of, 86, 101 Sinopsi del diritto universale, 153, 163, 170 Vita di Giambattista Vico scritta da se medesimo, 45, 47, 74–75, 85–86, 91, 113, 117, 146, 149, 153–155, 163–164 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), 90, 209 Vossius, Gerardus Joannes, 12, 38, 172, 213–214 Vulcan, 6, 216, 243 Watson, Alan, 153–154 Wellbery, David, 68–69 White, Hayden V., 18 Zeno of Elea, 116, 133–135, 221, 257 Zeno, Apostolo, 143–144 Zetetics, 87, 98, 100, 110