It’s not clear whether Vico (1668-1744) had actually read Descartes (1596-1650) directly, or how much he had read. But it is clear enough that he had read and understood the Cartesianism of his time. His response is perhaps most clearly seen in his treatment of ethics.
He opposed the application of the paradigm of mathematics and physics to all courses of study. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “In De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, for example, Vico takes up the theme of modernity and raises the question of ‘which study method is finer or better, ours or the Ancients?’ and illustrates ‘by examples the advantages and drawbacks of the respective methods.’ . . .
“Vico observes that the Moderns are equipped with the ‘instruments’ of ‘philosophical ‘critique” and ‘analytic geometry’ (especially in the form of Cartesian logic) (DN, 7-9), and that these open realms of natural scientific inquiry (chemistry, pharmacology, astronomy, geographical exploration, and mechanics) and artistic production (realism in poetry, oratory, and sculpture) which were unknown and unavailable to the Ancients (DN, 11-12). Although these bring significant benefits, Vico argues, modern education suffers unnecessarily from ignoring the ars topica (art of topics) which encourage the use of imagination and memory in organizing speech into eloquent persuasion. The result, Vico argues, is an undue attention to the ‘geometrical method’ modeled on the discipline of physics (DN, 21ff.), and an emphasis on abstract philosophical criticism over poetry. This undermines the importance of exposition, persuasion, and pleasure in learning; it ‘benumbs . . . [the] imagination and stupefies . . . [the] memory’ (DN, 42), both of which are central to learning, complex reasoning, and the discovery of truth. Combining the methods of both Ancients and Moderns, Vico argues that education should aim ideally at cultivating the ‘total life of the body politic’ (DN, 36): students ‘should be taught the totality of the sciences and arts, and their intellectual powers should be developed to the full’ so that they ‘would become exact in science, clever in practical matters, fluent in eloquence, imaginative in understanding poetry or painting, and strong in memorizing what they have learned in their legal studies’ (DN, 19).”
Vico instead believed there was a spectrum of disciplines that he classifies according to his distinction between “scientia” and “conscientia” and in terms of his central claim that verum et factum convertuntur. Scientia refers to realms of knowledge in which the elements of knowledge are purely internal. That is to say that (in Robert Miner’s words; an article in JHI 1998) that the human mind has “the ability . . . to create the mathematical ficta independently of external constraints.” Mathematics thus comes closest to the perfect coincidence of verum and factum. Mathematics is the paradigmatic case of human knowing, and for theological reasons: “Just as he who occupies himself with geometry is, in his world of figures, a god (so to speak), so God Almighty is, in his world of spirits and bodies, a geometer (so to speak).” Because of the convertibility of verum and factum, mathematics – in which the elements are entirely constructed by the human mind – is the most certain of the sciences.
Conscientia are realms of knowledge in which the human mind do not “rely solely on their own procedures” but instead have to confront the external world. In these realms, “dissection” and analysis reduces the lived world to elementa, which are then collected and constructed into human knowledge. Still, knowledge is “made,” but the making is constrained by the external world. As Miner explains it, “The physicist may hypothesize any set of elements he likes, but the extent to which his postulations are true, i.e., genuine images of the elementa rei, depends on conformation from without. His scientia is con-scientia; it requires a cooperation with nature, never completely within human control.”
Thus, mathematics does have a unique place in the spectrum of disciplines, but Vico objects strongly to the Cartesian habit of reducing all areas of knowledge to mathematical form. For Vico, for instance, “Ethics is the least amenable to formal procedures, relying on prudentia. Since its elements are not grasped by dissective methods, it is almost entirely a matter of conscientia.” Ethics treats of human beings and their ends, and this end (an orientation to the infinite God) evokes infinite desires. Thus, ethical science is “most deeply hidden” and in ethics one examines “desire that is infinite.” As Miner says, this means for Vico that “any dissective procedure whose mode of operation is to resolve wholes into parts . . . is unable to comprehend the integral realities treated by ethics.”
As a result, Vico objects to Cartesian efforts to find certain foundations for ethics and to formulate a rule-based ethics were entirely misguided. “The deeds of men,” he wrote, “cannot be assessed by a straight and unbending rule of the mind; they must be viewed according to the supple Lesbic rule, which does not conform bodies to it, but alters itself according to them.” General rules are all but useless in ethics. Miner says, “At best, rules will give us access to the general features of a situation, but in practical affairs wisdom is a matter of insight into particulars.” This applies Vico’s insight that “Eternal truths stand above nature; in nature, no truths are contained but those which are variable and inconstant” to the realm of ethics. Vico insists that “An ethics centered around maxims is practically futile” and he satirizes the “imprudent savant (doctus imprudentis) who approaches ethics as if it were a manual of propositions to be memorized.” He might have been satirizing Kant before his time.
His objection is not only theoretical but practical. An over-concentration on natural sciences, and the use of the methods of natural sciences, in ethics, politics, and psychology, makes it impossible for people to live well communally: “But the greatest drawback of our educational methods is that we pay an excessive amount of attention to the natural sciences and not enough to ethics . . . .Our young men, because of their training, which is focused on these studies, are unable to engage in the life of the community, to conduct themselves with sufficient wisdom and prudence; nor can they infuse into their speech a familiarity with human psychology or permeate their utterances with passion. When it comes to the matter of prudential behavior in life, it is well for us to keep in mind that human events are dominated by Chance and Choice, which are extremely subject to change and which are strongly influenced by simulation and dissimulation (both pre-eminently deceptive things). As a consequence, those whose only concern is abstract truth experience great difficulty in achieving their means, and great difficulty in attaining their ends.” Again, “it is an error to apply the prudent conduct of life the abstract criterion of reasoning that obtains in the domain of science. A correct judgment deems that men—who are, for the most part, but fools—are ruled, not by forethought, but by whim or chance. The doctrinaires judge human actions as they ought to be, not as they actually are . . . ”
This not only anticipates the virtue ethics of contemporary moral philosophy, but also mounts a specifically rhetorical objection to Cartesian ethics. Rationalist ethics assumes an isolated individual who makes decisions and acts o n t hem according to well-founded moral rules. But in actual life, there are leaders and led, and people are swayed to right action by the eloquence of others. Without eloquence, the prudent man will be incapable of passing on wisdom to others; he will be unable “to make a practical difference” (Miner). As Vico says, “ . . . the soul must be enticed by corporeal images and impelled to love; for once it loves, it is easily taught to believe; once it believes and loves, the fire of passion must be infused into it so as to break its inertia and force it to will. Unless the speaker can compass these three things, he has not achieved the effect of persuasion; has has been powerless to entice . . . Two things only are capable of turning to good use the agitations of the soul, those evils of the inward man which spring from a single source: desire. One is philosophy, which acts to mitigate passions in the soul of the sage, so that those passions are transformed into virtues; the other is eloquence which kindles these passions in the common sort, so that they perform the duties of virtue.”
Vico also anticipates contemporary counter-Enlightenment thinking by his emphasis on history, the contingency of truth in history, the constructedness and contingency of institutions. Again, this is all developed in an overtly Christian framework. The verum-factum is in the first instance about the Trinity, and when he discusses the construction of historical communities, he excepts the Hebrew and Christian polities because he recognizes that there is direct divine construction at work in those cases. Vico develops the verum-factum connection with Descartes’s Cogito directly in view. Descartes wants to base thought on clear and certain ideas that can be arrived at through reasoning and doubt. But Vico holds to a “maker’s theory of knowledge,” the notion that we know what we make. God, being maker of the world, is the only one who knows in any kind of complete way what creation is like. We learn about creation by dissecting it into elements, and then constructing those elements into theories that conform more or less to the reality of the world. We know only what we have made it. Geometry is a human construct, and because the made and the known correspond quite directly in math and geometry, it is more certain than other human sciences.