MY TOPIC – THE RELATIONSHIP of Vico’s views to the notion of a perfect society – is not an issue central to Vico himself. He does not directly treat it, so far as I know, in any of his published works. But I hope to show that his central thesis is relevant to this idea – one of the most persistent in the history of human thought – and indeed incompatible with it. It is one of the marks of writers of genius that what they say may, at times, touch a central nerve in the minds or feelings of men who belong to other times, cultures or outlooks, and set up trains of thought and entail consequences which did not, or could not, occur to such writers, still less occupy their minds. This seems to me to be the case with regard to Vico’s celebration of the power and beauty of primitive poetry, and the implications of this for the idea of progress in the arts, or culture, or the concept of an ideal society against which the imperfections of real societies can be assessed.
The concept of the perfect society is one of the oldest and most deeply pervasive elements in Western thought, wherever, indeed, the classical or Judaeo-Christian traditions are dominant. It has taken many forms – a Golden Age, a Garden of Eden in which men were innocent, happy, virtuous, peaceful, free, where everything was harmonious, and neither vice nor error nor violence nor misery was so much as thought of; where nature was bounteous and nothing was lacking, there was no conflict, and not even the passage of time affected the full, permanent and complete satisfaction of all the needs, physical, mental and spiritual, of the blessed dwellers in these regions. Then a catastrophe occurred which put an end to this condition; there are many variants of this – the flood, man’s first disobedience, original sin, the crime of Prometheus, the discovery of agriculture and metallurgy, primitive accumulation, and the like. Alternatively, the Golden Age was placed not in the beginning but at the end: in the millennial rule of the saints which will precede the Second Coming; or in life beyond the grave, in the Isles of the Blest, in Valhalla; or in the paradise of the three monotheistic religions; Homer finds a semblance of earthly paradise on the isle of the Phaeacians, or among the blameless Ethiopians whom Zeus loved to visit. When the hold of myth and institutional religion weakened, secular, no longer wholly flawless, more human Utopias began to succeed these – from the ideal communities of Plato, Crates, Zeno, Euhemerus, to Iambulus’ Islands of the Sun, Plutarch’s idealised Sparta, Atlantis, and the like.
Whatever the origins of such visions, the conception itself rests on the conviction that there exist true, immutable, universal, timeless, objective values, valid for all men, everywhere, at all times; that these values are at least in principle realisable, whether or not human beings are, or have been, or ever will be, capable of realising them on earth; that these values form a coherent system, a harmony which, conceived in social terms, constitutes the perfect state of society: that indeed, unless such perfection is at least conceivable, it is difficult or impossible to give sense to descriptions of existing states of affairs as imperfect; for the miseries, vices, and all the other shortcomings of existing human arrangements – cruelty, injustice, disease, scarcities, mental and physical torments, everything, indeed, that afflicts men – must be seen as so many fallings-short of the ideal or optimal state of affairs. How this optimum is to be attained is another question. But whether the answer is to be found in sacred texts, the visions of inspired prophets, institutionalised religion, metaphysical insights, or in more historically rooted social ideals, or the constellations of the simple human values of beings uncorrupted by destructive civilisation, there is a common assumption which underlies all these conflicting doctrines: namely, that a perfect society is conceivable, whether it is an object of prayer and hope, a mere vision of unrealised and unrealisable human potentialities, a nostalgic sighing after a real or imaginary past, the final goal toward which history is inexorably marching, or a practical programme which enough ability, energy and moral clarity could in principle realise.
The neoclassicism of the Renaissance gave birth to a great revival of such visions of perfection. More and Patrizi, Doni and Campanella, Christian Utopians of the early seventeenth century, Francis Bacon, Harrington, Winstanley, Foigny, Fénelon, Swift, Defoe, mark only the beginning of such visions of society, which continued until comparatively recent times, when, for reasons that will be familiar to everyone, they suffered a considerable slump. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were singularly rich in such romances, fed by fanciful accounts of the peace and harmony of primitive societies in America or elsewhere. All this is familiar enough. The principal point I wish to make is that not the least original of Vico’s attributes is that in this instance, too, he took an independent line of his own and sailed his boat against the stream.
It might be said that since he felt himself to be a pious Christian, the temptation to construct a secular Utopia was, in his case, not too strong: man cannot attain to perfection on this earth, the kingdom of God is not of this world; man is weak and sinful, the attempt even to imagine a perfect kingdom on earth implies a denial of the irremediable finiteness of man and his works, even of the works of his mind and imagination. Yet Campanella was a monk and a Christian, whatever the Inquisition may have thought; so, indubitably, were Sir Thomas More, who died for his faith, and Samuel Gott, and Archbishop Fénelon, and the authors of Antagil and Christianopolis, and many others – but this did not seem to deter them from designing earthly Utopias. Nor is there any emphasis in Vico’s work on human impotence and wickedness; if anything, he stresses the opposite – man’s magnificent creative capacities, which make him the instrument of Providence in transforming his social and cultural life.
Nor is this all: there is the curious paradox of a faithful son of the Catholic Church who nevertheless advocates a cyclical theory of history, which seems to leave no room for the radical transformation of history, once and for all, by the incarnation and the resurrection of Christ, nor for the movement of history toward the single far-off divine event by which it is completed and transcended. To reconcile Vico’s belief in corsi and ricorsi with Christian revelation has been (or should have been) a standing crux to his interpreters – greater, if anything, than the difficulty of fitting Plato’s cyclical theory of successive social orders with his apparent belief in, at any rate, the theoretical possibility of an ideal State. Whatever the explanation in Plato’s case, for Vico there can surely be no avenue to total fulfilment on earth: if no social structure can last, if collapse into the ‘barbarism of reflection’1 is inevitable before the new beginning, in the endless repetitive spiral of cultural development, the notion of a perfect society, which implies an unchanging, static order, seems automatically excluded. That, indeed, is perhaps why, for example, Polybius, who believes in cycles, offers no Utopia. Nor does Machiavelli, who holds a similar view and predicts that even his neo-Roman State, which he regards as feasible and not Utopian, will not last. It is this doctrine, rather than the mounting empiricism of Vico’s age, that seems to me to be a decisive anti-Utopian influence. For even if, like Bodin or Montesquieu, one pays due attention to the variety of human lives caused by differences in natural environment, climate and so on, one can still suppose that every type of society is free to strive for, and certainly to conceive of, its own individual path to perfection. Moreover, Bodin and Montesquieu, while they maintain that the means open to dissimilar societies may differ, seem to have no doubt about the universality, objectivity, immutability of ultimate values – peace, justice, happiness, rational organisation and, in Montesquieu’s case, individual freedom to do what is right and avoid what is wrong. With Vico, matters are somewhat different. Let me try to explain why I believe this to be the case.
Vico is not essentially a relativist, though he has sometimes been called that. The world of primitive savages is utterly different from our own glorious age, but by means of an agonising effort it is possible to enter the minds of those orribili bestioni, see or attempt to see the world with their eyes, and understand their Weltanschauung, their values, their motives, aims, categories, concepts. For Vico, to understand them and their world is to see their point, to grasp the way in which they necessarily belong to, and indeed express, a particular stage of social development, a stage which is the origin of our own condition, a phase of the creative process, to understand which is the only way to understand ourselves. Each epoch in Vico’s storia ideale eterna1 is related by a species of social causation to both its predecessor and its successor in the great chain the links of which are connected in an unalterable, cyclical order. But whereas for those metaphysical thinkers who believe in progress nothing that is of permanent value need be lost irretrievably, for in some form it is preserved in the next higher stage; and whereas for those who contemplate the perfect society all ultimate values can be combined, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, in the single, final solution, for Vico this cannot be so. For change – unavoidable change – rules all man’s history, not determined by mechanical causes, as he thinks it is for the Stoics or Spinoza, nor due to chance, as it is for Epicurus and his modern followers. For it follows a divinely determined pattern of its own. But in the course of this process gains in one respect necessarily entail losses in another, losses which cannot be made good if the new values, which are part of the unalterable historical process, are, as indeed they must be, realised, each in its due season. If this is so, then some valuable forms of experience are doomed to disappearance, not always to be replaced by something necessarily more valuable than themselves. And this means that it must always be the case that some values are not compatible, historically compatible, with others, so that the notion of an order in which all true values are simultaneously present and harmonious with each other is ruled out, not on the ground of unrealisability due to human weakness or ignorance or other shortcomings (the overcoming of which could be at least imagined), but owing to the nature of reality itself. This means that the idea of perfection is ruled out not so much for empirical reasons but because it is conceptually incoherent, not compatible with what we see history necessarily to be.
Let me give the most vivid example of this in Vico’s New Science. In the second book, called ‘Poetic Wisdom’, Vico declares that
the first men of the gentile nations, children of nascent mankind, created things according to their own ideas [ … ] by virtue of a wholly corporeal imagination. And because it was quite corporeal, they did it with marvellous sublimity; and sublimity such and so great that it excessively perturbed the very persons who by imagining did the creating, for which they were called ‘poets’, which is Greek for ‘creators’.1
And again: ‘The most sublime labour of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things’, as children talk in play to inanimate things as if they were living persons.1 For ‘in the world’s childhood men were by nature sublime poets’.2 And again: ‘Imagination is more robust in proportion as reasoning power is weak.’3 Because men’s senses were stronger when men were more brutish, since Providence gave these to them for physical self-protection, and grew less so in the age of reflection – reflection which took the place of instinct – ‘the heroic descriptions, as we have them in Homer, are so luminously and splendidly clear that all later poets have been unable to imitate them, to say nothing of equalling them’.4 Yet the heroes of the age (toward the end of which Homer lived) are described by Vico as being ‘boorish, crude, harsh, wild, proud, difficult and obstinate’.5
Vico has no illusions about either the age of the gods or that of the heroes. He speaks of the practice of human sacrifice – by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Gauls, Germans, American Indians, Scythians, in the golden age of Latium (Plautus’s Saturni hostiae) – and remarks: ‘Such a mild, benign, sober, decent, and well-behaved time it was!’6 Such is man in ‘the innocence of the golden age’.7 He does not doubt that it was this religious-Cyclopean authority,8 based on terror, that was needed to create the first disciplined savage human societies.9
Then came the heroes. The central figure of the heroic age is Achilles, the Achilles ‘who referred every right to the tip of his spear’.10 ‘This is the hero that Homer sings of to the Greek peoples as an example of heroic virtue and to whom he gives the fixed epithet “blameless”!’11 Vico compares this to the barbarian times of the ricorso (the age of medieval Christian chivalry) and ‘the vindictive satisfactions of the knights-errant of whom the romancers sing’.12 Such heroes are Brutus, who killed his sons; Scaevola, who burnt his hand; Manlius, who killed his children; Curtius, the Decii, Fabricius and the rest – ‘what did any of them do for the poor and unhappy Roman plebs?’1 What they did, Vico tells us, was to ruin, rob, imprison, whip them. Anyone who tried to help the plebs – Manlius Capitolinus, or King Agis in Sparta – was declared a traitor and killed. In these societies, according to Vico, there is no virtue, justice, mercy, but avarice, arrogance, inequality, cruelty. This is the heroic age, the age to which Homer belonged and which he celebrated. Heroic ages are times of cruel laws, ‘supreme arrogance’, ‘intolerable pride, profound avarice and pitiless cruelty’:2 ‘the haughty, avaricious, and cruel practices of the nobles toward the plebeians, which we see clearly portrayed in Roman history’.3
In the third book of the New Science, called ‘The Discovery of the True Homer’, Vico notes that ‘Scaliger is indignant at finding almost all [Homer’s] comparisons to be taken from beasts and other savage things’,4 but this is part of his poetic genius:
to attain such success in them – for his comparisons are incomparable – is certainly not characteristic of a mind chastened and civilised by any sort of philosophy. Nor could the truculent and savage style in which he describes so many, such varied, and such bloody battles, so many and such extravagantly cruel kinds of butchery as make up all the sublimity of the Iliad in particular, have originated in a mind touched and humanised by any philosophy.5
Yet this barbarian poet made it difficult, according to Horace, to invent any new characters after him.6 This is so because, Vico declares, ‘Homer, who preceded philosophy and the poetic and critical arts, was yet the most sublime of all the sublime poets’, so that ‘after the invention of philosophies and of the arts of poetry and criticism there was no poet who could come within a long distance of competing with him’.1 The sentiments and the ‘modes of speech’ and the actions of such ‘sublime natures’ can be ‘wild, crude, and terrible’, and this can be produced only in a heroic age – at the end of one of which the Homeric poems were created; later this is no longer possible.2
According to Vico, this is so because this kind of sublimity ‘is inseparable from popularity’.3 Homer’s poetic characters are ‘imaginative universals’4 to which all the attributes of a genus are attributed. They are generic types (not altogether dissimilar to Weber’s ideal types), so that to these men Achilles is heroic valour, quick temper, pride, honour and liability to anger and violence, right as might; Ulysses is heroic wisdom – ‘wariness, patience, dissimulation, duplicity, deceit’.5 Once true concepts – abstract universals – are created by the civilised reason and not the imagination of an entire society, this kind of sublimity comes to an end. This is so because, before writing is invented, men possess ‘vivid sensation’, ‘strong imagination’, ‘sharp wit’, ‘robust memory’, which they later lose.6
Homer is ‘the father and prince of all sublime poets’.7 He is ‘celestially sublime’, possesses a ‘burning imagination’.8 ‘The frightfulness of the Homeric battles and deaths gives to the Iliad all its marvellousness.’9 This could not have sprung from ‘a calm, cultivated, and gentle philosopher’.10 This is what makes Homer the greatest of poets for Vico. It is this that makes him a master of ‘wild and savage comparisons’11 or ‘cruel and fearful descriptions of battles and deaths’12 and ‘sentences filled with sublime passions’,13 with ‘expressiveness and splendour’14 of style impossible in the ages of philosophy, criticism, poetry as a civilised art, which came later.15
Vico’s central point is that poetic feeling, which ‘must plunge deep into particulars’,1 cannot exist when men think in concepts: inspired singers, of whom Homer is the greatest, cannot coexist with philosophers. Whatever these later, milder, more rational times – the age of men – may create, namely, the arts and sciences of elaborate civilisations, they cannot give us within the same ‘cycle’ ‘burning imagination’ or celestial sublimity.2 This has vanished. We can realise the splendour of this primitive poetry only by understanding the ‘wild, crude, and terrible’3 world from which it springs; we can do this only if we abandon the idea of the artistic superiority of our own ‘magnificent times’.4
All this was composed at a time when one of the dominant aesthetic theories was still that of timeless and objective criteria of excellence in the arts, in morality, in every other normative sphere. Some critics believed in steady progress in the arts, based on growth in rationality and the gradual elimination of the savage world of myth and fable and primitive, unbridled imagination, the dark and brutal age which we have left behind us. There were also those who believed that classical poetry, and especially Roman, was superior to that of the moderns. In both cases, it was assumed without much question that there existed a single, timeless standard of judgement whereby some thought that they could demonstrate the superiority of, say, Racine or Addison to Milton or Shakespeare or Homer, while others believed that they could demonstrate that Sophocles or Virgil were greater poets than any poet of a later age. A corollary of this was that the quality, the degree of excellence, of an art was part and parcel of the general quality of an age and its culture. For Voltaire or Fontenelle, the art or poetry of classical Athens or Rome, or Renaissance Florence, or France under Louis XIV, were magnificent, inasmuch as they were produced by and for enlightened men like themselves, in contrast with the ages of ignorance, fanaticism, barbarism, persecution, the art of which was as degraded as the societies in which a few savage captains quarrelled with a handful of fanatical bishops for control over a collection of idiotic serfs (to use Voltaire’s summary of early medieval Europe).1
Vico’s position was radically different from this and a harbinger of things to come. He does not deny the cruelty, avarice, arrogance, inhumanity of the master class of the ‘heroic’ ages. But a certain kind of sublime art can spring only from such soil. Clearly, an age in which there is a recognised standard of justice for all men, in which human sacrifice is not practised and rational methods of uncovering the facts of the past have superseded myth and legend, is in certain obvious respects superior to a culture in which Agamemnon causes his daughter to be slaughtered as an offering to the goddess, or men see the sky as a huge, animate body whose anger is expressed in thunder and lightning. But the increase in humanity and knowledge (which means the peak of a cycle) is inevitably accompanied by a loss of primitive vigour, directness, imaginative force, beyond any made possible by the development of the critical intellect. Each succeeding age develops its own unique mode of expression, which is repeated, with perhaps some variation, at the corresponding stage of each successive cycle of the ‘ideal eternal history’. There is no need to compare and grade on some single scale of merit each cultural phase and its creations and forms of life and action; indeed, it is not possible to do so, for they are evidently incommensurable. Nevertheless, the children of one culture can attain to an understanding of the life and activity – the thought, behaviour, art, religion, the entire vision of life – of another culture, of what our ancestors could create while we cannot, because they were what they were, and we are what we are, occupying, as we do, different segments of the same cycle.
This is not relativism, for we are able not merely to record but to understand the outlooks of other societies, however imperfectly, without assimilating them to our own; nor is it the old absolutism whereby we can pronounce their works to be superior or inferior to each other, or to our own, by the use of some unaltering criterion valid for all men, everywhere, at all times. But if this is so, then the very notion of a harmonious synthesis in one perfect whole of all that is best is not so much attainable or unattainable (even in principle) as unintelligible. The unparalleled power of the imagination in the early ages cannot, conceptually cannot, be combined with a developed critical capacity, philosophical or scientific knowledge, depth of intellectual analysis. It is absurd to ask whether Aeschylus’ Agamemnon is a better or worse play than King Lear. When Shaw said ‘There is nothing in the Bible greater in inspiration than Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony’1 he uttered (if Vico is right) a proposition which was neither true nor false but one that, on examination, turns out to be senseless.
To a disciple of Vico, the ideal of some of the thinkers of the Enlightenment, the notion of even the abstract possibility of a perfect society, is necessarily an attempt to weld together incompatible attributes – characteristics, ideals, gifts, properties, values that belong to different patterns of thought, action, life, and therefore cannot be detached and sewn together into one garment. For a Vichian this notion must be literally absurd: absurd because there is a conceptual clash between, let us say, what gives splendour to Achilles and what causes Socrates or Michelangelo or Spinoza or Mozart or the Buddha to be admired; and since this applies to the respective cultures, in the context of which alone men’s achievements can be understood and judged, this fact alone makes this particular dream of the Enlightenment incoherent. The scepticism or pessimism of a good many thinkers of the Enlightenment – Voltaire, Hume, Gibbon, Grimm, Rousseau – about the possibility of realising this condition is beside the point. The point is that even they were animated by a conception of ideal possibilities, however unattainable in practice. In this, at least, they seem to be at one with the more optimistic Turgot and Condorcet. After Vico, the conflict of monism and pluralism, timeless values and historicism, was bound sooner or later to become a central issue. If Vico had done no more than raise it, indirectly yet at its profoundest level, in his seminal chapter on ‘The Discovery of the True Homer’, this alone should have been sufficient to reveal the power and originality of his thought.
1 NS 1106.
1 locc. cit. (145/2).
1 He goes on to say that one of the labours of ‘great poetry’ is ‘to invent sublime fables suited to the popular understanding’. He then [mis]quotes Tacitus’ ‘fingebant simul credebantque’ – ‘they no sooner imagined than they believed’ (Annals, book 6). NS 376.
1 NS 186.
2 NS 187.
3 NS 185.
4 NS 707.
5 NS 708.
6 NS 517.
7 NS 518.
8 NS 523.
9 NS 518.
10 NS 923.
11 NS 667.
12 ibid.
1 NS 668.
2 NS 38.
5 ibid.
3 NS 272.
4 NS 785.
6 NS 806.
1 NS 807.
2 NS 808.
3 NS 809.
4 locc. cit. (129/1).
5 ibid.
6 NS 819.
7 NS 823.
8 NS 825.
9 NS 827.
10 NS 828.
11 NS 893.
12 NS 894.
13 NS 895.
14 NS 896.
15 NS 897.
1 NS 821.
2 NS 825.
3 NS 808.
4 NS 123 (cf. 139/1).
1 Essai sur les moeurs, chapter 24: M xi 304.
1 ‘The Bible’, in ‘Parents and Children’ (preface to Misalliance), The Works of Bernard Shaw (London, 1930–8), xiii 99.