New Science
- Book: The New Science. by Giambattista Vico. Yale University Press, 2020
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Description
"The New Science is the major work of Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico. First published in 1725 and revised in 1730 and 1744, it calls for a reinterpretation of human civilization by tracing the stages of historical development shared by all societies. Almost unknown during his lifetime, the work had a profound influence on later thinkers, from Montesquieu and Marx to Joyce and Gadamer. This edition offers a fresh translation and detailed annotations which enable the reader to track Vico’s multiple allusions to other texts. The introduction situates the work firmly within a contemporary context and newly establishes Vico as a thinker of modernity."
Discussion
Christopher Quigley:
"Giambattista Vico in his classic book "New Science" pointed out that the greatest achievement of mankind was the growth of civil society out of the terror of barbaric nature. In his view God had created man, but man and man alone had constructed civilization. Thus, for Vico, the greatest investigation man could undertake was to truly understand how this miracle of order and achievement was made manifest through the passage of time.
In the course of his study Giambattista came to comprehend the importance of moral order in the development of societies. This Civitas, or sense of the greater good, formed the bedrock of the social contract that built Alexandria, Sparta, Greece and Rome.
Unfortunately it is all too obvious that this old natural civic sense is dying in modern society and unless we educate our youth about the fragility of society I fear civil order will continue to breakdown. The end result could be an ongoing civil war within "developed" nations that will eventually lead to a new Dark Age of city-states and self-preservation. We need to realise That consumption alone does not bring happiness. The Earth and its resources cannot be endless exploited forever. We need to raise or consciousness to a new understanding of what “civilization” is. To quote Carly Simon we have to stop destroying paradise to put in parking lots. We must move on.
In his book "The Evolution of Civilizations" Prof. Carroll Quigley summed up the problem succinctly:
- "The third age of conflict of our society began to display the ordinary marks of such a stage about 1890. At that time, in the principal industrial countries, it became clear that the rate of expansion had reversed itself....
All the characteristics of an age of irrationality began to appear on all sides. Increased gambling, increased smoking, the growing use of alcohol and narcotics, a growing obsession with sex and perversions of sex, an increased mania for speed, for nervous tension, and for noise; above all, perhaps, a growing tendency to regard violence as a solution for all problems, be they domestic, social, economic, ideological or international. In fact, violence as a symbol of our growing irrationality has had an increasing role in activity for its own sake, when no possible justification could be made that the activity was seeking to solve a problem. All the characteristics of any age of conflict are too obvious to require further comment. They arose because the organizational patterns of our culture CEASED TO FUNCTION AS INSTRUMENTS........Religious organizations no longer linked men to God but adopted diverse mundane purposes. Our intellectual theories no longer explained anything or made us at home in the Universe. Our social patterns no longer satisfied our gregarious needs, even when we fled from the lonely anonymity of the city to the rat-race uniformity of sub- urbanism. Our political organizations increased the burden of their demands on our time, energy and wealth but provided with growing ineffectiveness the justice, public order, education, protection, or incidental amenities we had come to expect from them. And on the military level costs rose at an astronomical rate without being able to catch up with our increased danger."
Thus, the culture of the west needs to reconnect with its roots. Philosophy, learning, investigation, discipline, self-sacrifice, future orientation all these attributes need to be focused upon and nurtured for out youth. Sport, lotteries, quiz games, celebrity, reality shows, crime, are all very well but if they become the essential core of modern mentality then it bodes a society trending towards narrow self interest and terminal decline. We need to start believing in meaning again and the place to start is to believe in yourself and the power of a human life."
(email, May 2022)
Vico's Prefiguration of a Radically Constructivist Theory of Knowledge
Ernst von Glasersfeld:
"Vico’s battle cry “Verum ipsum factum” — the truth is the same as the made (factum and “fact” both come from the Latin facere, to make!) — has been quoted quite frequently since Vico was rediscovered in our century as a cultural historian and a philosopher of history. His revolutionary epistemological ideas, however, are rarely mentioned, let alone explicated. According to him, the only way of “knowing” a thing is to have made it, for only then do we know what its components are and how they were put together. Thus God knows his creation, but we cannot; we can know only what we ourselves construct. Vico even uses the word “operation” and thus preempts the main term launched by constructivists such as Dewey, Bridgman, Ceccato, and Piaget, in our century.
Vico, of course, still tries to establish a connection between human cognitive constructions and God’s creation. Reading his treatise on metaphysics, one gets the impression that he occasionally frightened himself by his own ideas. Although the theory of knowledge he has developed is logically closed because man’s knowledge is seen as man’s construction and does not (and could not) pertain to God’s ontological creation, Vico is reluctant to stress that independence. Because of that reluctance, his picture of the world could be seen as a counterpart to Berkeley’s metaphysics. For Berkeley, the principle “esse est percipi” (to be is to be perceived) does the same trick as Vico’s statement that God knows everything because he has made everything. For both, ontology is assured through God’s activities. Vico, however, also opens another way towards ontology that I find much more acceptable, because it does not involve any form of rational realism. He suggests that mythology and art approach the real world by means of symbols. They, too, are made, but the interpretation of their meaning provides a kind of knowledge that is different from the rational knowledge of construction.
For us, the important difference between Vico and Berkeley, as well as later idealists, is that Vico considers man’s rational knowledge and the world of rational experience simultaneous products of man’s cognitive construction. Thus Vico’s “knowledge” is what, today, we might call an awareness of the operations that result in our experiential world. Though Berkeley says “that all the choir of heaven and furniture of earth, in a word all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind, their being is to be perceived or known,” and thus presupposes the activity of the intellect, his accent always lies on the being, whereas Vico invariably stresses human knowledge and its construction.
There can be no doubt that Vico’s explicit use of facere, his constant reference to the composing, the putting together and, in short, the active construction of all knowledge and experience come very much closer to Piaget’s genetic epistemology and to modern constructivism in general, than did Berkeley. Nowhere does that become clearer than in a statement with which Vico anticipated the epistemological attitude of some of today’s philosophers of science: “Human knowledge is nothing else but the endeavor to make things correspond to one another in shapely proportion.
...
To sum up Vico’s thought, the construction of knowledge, for him, is not constrained
by the goal of (impossible) correspondence with an “objective” reality that can neither
be experienced or known. It is, however, constrained by conditions that arise out of the
material used, which, be it concrete or abstract, always consists of the results of prior
construction. With this idea of consistency within certain constraints that replaces the
iconic notion of “truth,” Vico, without knowing it, anticipated the basic principle of
viability in the constructivist theory of knowledge.
As elegant as his system is, it still leaves open two questions. First, what are the conditions under which a new construct will be considered compatible with what has already been constructed? Second, why should any organism undertake the task of cognitive construction? ”
(https://antimatters2.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/2-3-02-radical_constructivism.pdf)