Giovanni Battista Vico (1668–1744)

Giovanni Battista Vico (1668–1744)

• Neapolitan philosopher, historian, and jurist

• Goal was to recognize in history meaningful

general patterns.

• Vico best-known for verum factum principle

– first formulated in 1710 in De Italorum Sapientia.

• truth is verified through creation or invention and not, as per

Descartes, through observation:

– “The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it.

Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a

criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the

mind perceives itself, it does not make itself.”

– SO: history is what the human mind constructs of the

past, NOT the past itself.

Vico’s cycles of History

• Civilizations develop in a recurring cycle

(ricorso) of three ages:

– the divine,

– the heroic,

– and the human.

– In each of these stages, the way that we

communicate shapes the age

Vico’s Divine Age

• Divine Age Language:

– we use metaphor

• God is our father

• we are God’s children

• we are God’s family

Vico’s Heroic Age

• Heroic Age Language (Poetic):

– we use metonymy and synecdoche

• -metonymy: using one word to represent a collective larger meaning

– "The pen is mightier than the sword“:  pen is a metonym for "writing" and sword is

a metonym for "violence".

• synechdoche: 

– A part of something is used for the whole

» "threads" for clothing, "wheels" for car

• The whole is used for a part

– "body" for the trunk of the body, "the Pentagon" for the top-ranking generals in the

Pentagon building

• The species is used for the genus

– "kleenex" for facial tissue, "coke" for soda

• The genus is used for the species

– "milk" for cow's milk

• The stuff of which something is made is used for the thing

– "ivories" for piano keys, "plastic" for credit card

• In the Heroic age, “God” then represents that which humans cannot

comprehend, or do, or see; “Man” represents humans.

– and God acts THROUGH heroes.

Vico’s Human Age

• In the Human age:

– We use irony

• a figure of speech in which there is a gap or incongruity

between what a speaker or a writer says, and what is

understood.

• H. W. Fowler (in Modern English Usage):

– “Irony is a form of utterance that postulates a double audience,

consisting of one party that hearing shall hear and shall not

understand, and another party that, when more is meant than

meets the ear, is aware, both of that ‘more’ and of the

outsider’s incomprehension.”

– Example:  In June, 2005, the State of Virginia Employment

Agency, which handles unemployment compensation,

announced that they would lay off 400 employees for lack of

work, because unemployment is so low in the state.

– THUS: God is only messing with us.

• And that sense of abandonment leads to what Vico termed

“barbarism of reflection,”

• and civilization descends once more into the poetic (heroic)

era.

Vico’s Cycles

• These cycles represent Vico’s concept of

“ideal eternal history.”

Edward Gibbon (1737 - 1794)

• English historian

– probably the most important historian since Tacitus.

• remembered mostly for his magnum opus, The History of the

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published between

1776 and 1788)

• The first “modern” historian:

– although he claims that history is not a very noble

profession

• He describes history as "indeed, little more than the register

of the crimes, follies, and misfortune of mankind.“

• (Thank you -- some nice Vico-an ironic language there, Mr.

Gibbon!)

Gibbon as historian

• He emulates the Greek and Roman

Classical Historians in terms of content:

– "Wars, and the administration of public affairs,

are the principal subjects of history."

• But he also argues that "history...

undertakes to record the transaction of the

past, for the instruction of future ages"

Gibbon as historian

• And his METHODS are modern (dependence on

primary sources)

• Never content with secondhand accounts when

the primary sources were accessible.

– “I have always endeavoured, to draw from the

fountainhead; my curiosity, as well as a sense of duty,

has always urged me to study the originals; and if

they have sometimes eluded my search, I have

carefully marked the secondary evidence on whose

faith a passage or a fact were reduced to depend.”

Gibbon as historian

• Gibbon espouses no dogma of natural and

inevitable progress in history

– he is not a historicist

– he is an anti-historicist

• although human passions are timeless,

circumstances are never the same.

Scientific History

• At the end of the 18th century

– archaeology and philology (study of ancient

texts and languages) emerge as SCIENCES.

• which contributes to the rise of critical objective

history as an academic discipline.

– Father of the new objective school: Leopold

von Ranke

– Rankeans made history writing into a

profession and founded the formal academic

study of history

Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886)

• reliance on primary sources

• emphasis on narrative history

– and especially international politics

(Aussenpolitik)

• commitment to writing history "as it

essentially [was]" (wie es eigentlich

gewesen).

Ranke, Theories, and Laws

• Ranke did not believe general theories could cut

across time and space.

– Instead, only primary sources tell us what happened

• "My understanding of 'leading ideas' is simply that they are

the dominant tendencies in each century. These tendencies,

however, can only be described; they cannot, in the last

resort, be summed up in a concept."

• He had no interest in learning the laws which

govern history

– empiricism over philosophy

• empiricism: “all human knowledge ultimately comes from the

senses and from experience”6

According to Ranke, the historian

must be old

• From his diaries, January 1877:

– “The proverb tells us that poets are born. Not only in the arts, but

even in some scholarly fields, young men develop into full

bloom, or at least show their original energy. Musicians and

mathematicians have the expectation of attaining eminence in

early years. But a historian must be old, not only because of the

immeasurable extent of his field of study, but because of the

insight into the historical process which a long life confers,

especially under changing conditions.

– It would hardly be bearable for him to have only a short span of

experience. For his personal development requires that great

events complete their course before his eyes, that others

collapse, that new forms be attempted.”

– (Every year, this seems truer to me…..)