Individuality and Completeness in Vico and Hegel

Vico showed, as Michael Mooney has put it, that if we are "to know what man is," we must grasp him "genetically, as a being in time."^[3] But this insight can lead in several directions, and Vico's legacy has proven particularly complex. Some place Vico in the tradition of rhetoric, of sensus communis , of practical wisdom, a tradition that had developed from Aristotelian phronesis to Renaissance civic humanism but that by Vico's time apparently had to be refurbished in light of the claims of the newly dominant Cartesians. Others view Vico as a protohistoricist who showed that reason is not universal, that cultures are disparate individualities, that there are discrete ways of organizing worlds, none correct in some absolute sense. Poetic wisdom has an integrity of its own,

[2] Hans Blumenberg, "The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel," trans. David Henry Wilson, in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism: A Collection of Essays , ed. Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 32–33, 33n.

[3] Michael Mooney, Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 261.

affording access to a realm of truth foreclosed to conceptual thinking. Thus Vico could serve the romantic insistence on the autonomy—and even superiority—of art in the face of universalizing rational philosophy and the developing cult of science.^[4] Still, Vico himself embedded his understanding of poetry in a wider science of the human world, based on the different ways human beings use language.^[5] In developing this conception, however, he offered elements for a deeper kind of historicism, accenting not the discreteness of "individualities" but the radical immanence of the whole human world, which simply grows on itself.

Vico agreed with contractualists like Thomas Hobbes and Hugo Grotius that we must start from the beginning, imagining the situation of human origins and thinking the human situation through from there. In this sense, he was not seeking simply to continue an earlier tradition of practical wisdom, common sense, and rhetoric. But Vico remained sufficiently within the protohistoricist tradition of Italian Renaissance philology to deplore the anachronism that he found characteristic of his own age, with its geometric turn of mind and corresponding deemphasis on the significance of historical difference. Explicitly in opposition to the ascendant Cartesians, he insisted on the need to avoid presentist conceits, especially the assumption that present concepts already embody whatever there is.^[6]

For Vico, then, it was axiomatic that the founding act of humanity could not have been a rational social contract by people who think as we do, for we think as we do only because of all the experience we have had. The emerging or happening of the human world could only have begun with the simplest, most concrete things conceivable. At the beginning of history was an act of imagination occasioned by the thunderclap that, Vico suggested, led the feral prehumans to look up in astonishment and to see, in the living, roaring sky, a god speaking to them. Thus began the specifically human process of imagining a particular world. Vico sought to conceive the first humans as utterly immanent, able to respond to novel experience, to represent to themselves what was happening, only in terms of what they already "knew," on the basis of absolutely nothing but what they had experienced so far. At the beginning, they did not even have "the seat of their pants" to go by, only their own bodies; they could only imagine "metaphorically," in light of their limited bodily experience. Vico sought to envision what it must have been like for those who had to imagine what was

[4] This point has been widely made but nowhere better than in several of Isaiah Berlin's essays in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (New York: Penguin, 1982); see pp. 80–129.

[5] Thus, for example, Donald Verene found in Vico a new science of the imagination, with anticipations of Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms. See Donald Phillip Verene, Vico's Science of Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981).

[6] See, for example, Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico , trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 60 (nos. 120, 122–123).

happening in this way—and to think through what it means that human culture began in such a way.^[7]

Vico's myth of human origins, though fanciful in one sense, offered a brilliant way of conceiving the starting point naturalistically, with no appeal to some transcendent sphere. At the origins, the first humans were, to be sure, in contact with something "given"—with their own bodies, or with the thunder, so that we may still ask, what is thunder really ? But Vico made that contact as empty as possible. The founding moment rests on metaphor, and things move contingently, by means of new metaphors, from there; all "parallel" or mimetic representation between humanity and some external "reality" is lost at the outset. Thus it is futile to conceive the human situation in terms of the familiar subject-object dualism of the modern philosophical tradition. Even the term "metaphor" is misleading, insofar as it connotes an independent reality that language either represents indirectly or misrepresents. The gap between language and reality collapses.

In the same way, there is no privileged, transcendent human subject. Human beings land running, already in motion, already caught up in creating a human world, most fundamentally by means of inherently creative language. From the start, that human world can only grow on itself by responding to itself, because there is nothing else.

Vico's myth of origins, then, enables us to grasp the world as "always already" a set of imaginative representations based on preceding experience. As far back as we can conceive, even at the beginning, there is only creative, imaginative language, so that anything we could characterize as humanity is always already caught up in a linguistically constructed world, and there is nothing outside this language. The growing human world of imaginative language is thus self-contained; it is reality itself.

It follows that we today are still doing what human beings have done from the beginning, coming to terms with new experience by imagining in terms of what we have experienced so far. The only difference is that by now a considerably more complex world has resulted, and our repertoire—our language—is correspondingly larger as a result. And that repertoire will continue to grow as we respond to the novel world that has resulted from the aggregate of human response so far. The coming to be of the human world is a single continuing event happening through the creativity of human beings in language.

Although for Vico the conceptual thinking characteristic of the "age of men" differs from the earlier poetic thinking, imagination remains fundamental because the "poverty of language" characterizes not just the human situation at

[7] Ibid., 116–118 (nos. 374–378); see also pp. 37–38 (no. 62). It is worth considering Vico's reduction to metaphor and rhetoric in light of Hans Blumenberg's "An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric," trans. Robert M. Wallace, in After Philosophy: End of Transformation? ed. Kenneth Baynes et al. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 429–458; see esp. pp. 439, 444, 456.

the founding moment. Rather, language is forever "poor"—inadequate fully to encompass and fix the world—not least because, through every new act of knowing-imagining, the world outgrows the language that has resulted so far.

Although knowledge would thus seem finite and provisional, it was crucial for Vico that we can claim genuinely to know. With his axiom of verumfactum , Vico meshed knowing with making; we can know what we have made. Thus while we humans may measure and describe the natural world, only God can know it, because it was He who made it. However, we can know the human world, the world resulting from history, precisely because we have made it.^[8] Yet a fundamental tension marked Vico's conception, for though he had bracketed God, and though his account of knowing suggested that knowledge is endlessly finite, practical, and provisional, he aspired to a divine kind of knowledge, which entailed a definitive grasp of the eternal and completed.

It was crucial, to be sure, that the level of the necessary and eternal could not be apprehended directly, through the mere exercise of reason; thus Vico's assault on the rational universalism of the contractualist and the natural law traditions. Cultures develop historically as discrete individualities, so we could hope to know a finished whole only through historical inquiry. But for Vico, it was possible to discern suprahistorical structures or patterns—an "ideal eternal history"—at work in the particular phenomena of the human world. This suprahistorical dimension was the focus of Vico's new science, which specified the necessary cycle of human cultural approaches and corresponding institutions.

Although that cycle might be conceived as providential, Vico's orientation generally remained radically immanentist. What we come to know, through his new science, is not so much the will of God as "what man is." So such knowing amounts simply to mind grasping its own nature.^[9] Underlying the disparate phenomena of history were a priori forms of the imagination, characterizable in terms of the rhetorical tropes and manifesting the deep structure of mind itself. By studying the progression of particular manifestations in history, we can have access to that structure.^[10] This notion of mind knowing itself points toward modern structuralism, and thus, for example, Terence Hawkes began his survey of the structuralist tradition precisely with Vico. And thus Hayden White embraced Vico as he too sought to delineate a progression of cultural strategies characterizable by the rhetorical tropes.^[11]

[8] Vico, New Science , 96–97 (no. 331). Verene, Vico's Science , 48, is especially good on Vico's way of moving from the verum-factum principle to the ability of thought to connect itself to itself, thereby creating intelligibility.

[9] See Verene, Vico's Science , 161–162, for an especially effective characterization.

[10] See Vico, New Science , 78–79 (nos. 241–245), 112 (no. 368), 129–130 (no. 405), 131 (no. 409), 414–415 (no. 1096), on the principles of ideal eternal history and their links to the rhetorical tropes.

[11] Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1977), 11–15; Hayden V. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).

With a slight shift in the weighting of the elements, however, Vico's thinking leads to something very different—a kind of totalizing historicism. From this perspective, the focus of interest is not on the a priori forms of the mind's imagining but on what the mind has imagined so far, the particular world that has resulted, and that is resulting still, from its particular acts of imagination. The actual course of our historical experience does not simply reveal structures of mind that are already in place but actually determines what mind can do, can be, as it proceeds.

Even insofar as we think in terms of a priori forms making possible whatever happens, it is possible to make the historical content—what has already resulted from imagination, and the basis for further imagination—so rich that the forms become relatively empty. Rather than on mind, we focus on the actual course of history because further imagining rests more interestingly on what has been imagined so far than it does on the ongoing forms of the mind's capacity to imagine. Moreover, while we ourselves can imagine as suprahistorical the mind's capacity to imagine in characteristic, classifiable ways, our conception of what those ways involves will be historically specific—part of the history being generated by our ongoing imagining—because they will reflect what has in fact been imagined by human beings in each of those ways.

As we saw above, growth by means of imagination continues even with the coming of rational thought in Vico's "age of men." Thus, as Donald Verene has emphasized, Vico's notion of ideal eternal history is itself an act of fantasia —in our terms, a historically specific imagining of the whole in light of experience so far, including experience of the human conceptual tools thereby elaborated.^[12] This suggests that, on every level, verum-factum is a matter of knowing endlessly provisional particulars and not the relatively empty suprahistorical forms—the ideal eternal history, the cycle of structuring tropes.

From this perspective, knowing never transcends the human world but occurs entirely within it. Now understood as historically specific and provisional, knowing cannot satisfy metaphysical demands for certainty, but it is adequate to our needs, serving the ongoing making-happening of the world. We come to know the world in some particular way as we respond imaginatively to what the world has become so far, and our way of knowing it contributes to its growth, its becoming something different.

On one level, this weak, Vichian form of knowledge revives the tradition of Aristotelian phronesis, which similarly specified a provisional, practical wisdom based on human experience so far. But if we follow the more radical of the directions Vico opens up, his thinking points even beyond phronesis. History is not simply the mundane embodiment of eternal principles of effective practical conduct, understood as provisional only in their application, only because circumstances change. Rather, what had been taken to be suprahistorical

[12] Verene, Vico's Science , 108–113.

principles appears ever more empty as it comes to seem that the world grows, is ever new, on every level.^[13]

We have seen that Vico, in his quest for a new science of the human world, sought to discern suprahistorical structuring principles in the particulars of history. For Hegel, in contrast, the mundane facts and events of history are significant not as instances of suprahistorical types or as members of some class that science apprehends and classifies. Rather, each is unique, unrepeatable, and each plays an irreplaceable part in a unique process, helping make the world the particular way it is. There is no scope for transcending, through a generalizing science, this particular process to some higher, truer level.

Sympathetic students of Hegel like George Dennis O'Brien and Robert C. Solomon have accented this "individualizing" dimension in opposition to essentialist philosophy, to Enlightenment universalism, and to the culture of science.^[14] But it is equally crucial that for Hegel, the individualities of history form a totality; history is a single, unified, and all-encompassing process. Moreover, that process is meaningful, significant. For Hegel, the fact that there is history, with its variability and difference, is not a mundane imperfection but is essential to what the world is and necessary for its purpose to be achieved. But this was to posit a kind of metaphysical frame, so Hegel's way of positing the world as a single history entailed a still-metaphysical dimension that Vico sometimes seemed poised to do without. Vico's conception was potentially more open-ended.

Hegel competed with Johann Gottlieb Fichte within German idealism for the terrain beyond Kant, whose epistemology, leaving an unknowable noumenon, seemed incomplete and inadequate. Hegel's solution posited history as the arena in which what there is—spirit—comes to full self-understanding, thus achieving the complete knowledge that Kant had seemed to preclude. At the same time, Hegel's experience of the era of the French Revolution, which he greeted with fervent expectation, brought home the reality of change and the possibility of genuine significance on the historical level. Perhaps the Revolution portended the redemption glimpsed in the Christian tradition, a state of fulfillment that, we only now come to realize, was to be achieved not simply at the end of time but actually through the historical process.

As Hegel saw it, history results from the self-externalization of spirit, which makes itself radically immanent precisely to achieve self-knowledge, to become fully conscious of itself as spirit, or freedom. Indeed, time is generated

[13] It is symptomatic that Mooney's failure to distinguish these directions leads him, by the end of his fine study, to link the tradition of practical wisdom to social science. See Mooney, Vico , 255, 261–263. If we emphasize that direction in Vico, the provisional rough-and-ready quality of practical wisdom is lost. Insofar as there is change in what there is to be known and what needs to be known, practical knowledge must be more radically open-ended and provisional.

[14] See, for example, George Dennis O'Brien, Hegel on Reason in History: A Contemporary Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), esp. pp. 78–79, 95–96, 114–115.

only because spirit must externalize itself in order to have the experiences necessary to come to know itself. But this means that for Hegel the historical process has a particular content and direction, given a priori. It is the process of coming to self-knowledge, which we achieve only with the completeness at the end of the process. At that moment spirit grasps not only its own essence but also the meaning of all that has meaning in what has happened. We understand the rational necessity of the process whereby we came to this understanding. So whereas for Hegel, in contrast to Vico, mind cannot grasp its own nature in some direct, immediate way through scientific detachment, we do achieve complete, genuine, even Godlike knowledge through the totality of the historical process.

To be sure, Hegel is open to a variety of interpretations regarding the nature of both the process and its end. Some accent the necessity, others the contingency, of the individual moments, the relationship among them, and their chronological sequence. The completeness to be attained may be conceived as relatively full and restrictive—as for those who emphasize the achievement of a particular set of political institutions—or as relatively empty and open-ended.

Sympathetic recent observers, such as O'Brien, Solomon, and even Rorty, tend to portray the Hegelian process and telos in the latter light as they play up Hegel's open-ended "historicism." Adapting Gertrude Stein, Solomon envisions us proclaiming, when we get to the end of Hegel's process, that "there's no there, there." Completeness is nothing but full awareness of the endless open-endedness of history, and thus of human freedom.^[15] In the same vein, David Hoy notes that Hegel has room for such a radically open-ended conception insofar as "thought changes itself in the course of trying to understand both itself and the world."^[16]

But Hegel admits only a relatively restricted measure of openness; such readings tend to jump the gun. It has become tempting to read him in this contemporary way only because of the ongoing inflation of history that has accompanied the waning of metaphysics. Even if, with Solomon, we understand the dialectical mechanism to be looser and the chronological order, the actual deployment in time, to be more contingent than has generally been assumed, a given set of experiences remains necessary for the spirit to know itself, to achieve full self-consciousness. And even if we understand the telos as a completely empty sort of self-knowledge, there is still an end given at the beginning, stemming from the suprahistorical necessities of spirit, and there remains

[15] Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel: A Study of G. W. F. Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit," 14–16, 636–637; see also pp. 190–191, 235. Although Solomon, much like Rorty, finds in Hegel what he calls a "central indecision," an "awkward and sometimes confused mixture of absolute idealism and historicism," he explicitly plays up the historicist emptiness and incompleteness throughout his study. For his characterization of the tension in Hegel, see esp. p. 239, but also pp. 4–5, 315, 360n, 498.

[16] David Couzens Hoy, "Taking History Seriously: Foucault, Gadamer, Habermas," Union Seminary Quarterly Review 34, no. 2 (Winter 1979): 90-91.

something privileged about whatever furthers movement toward that end.^[17] Because the world spirit in Hegel's conception is already, on some level, here, complete, there is an a priori frame for what happens, can happen, or can be meaningful in history.

So even as each embraced history in unprecedented ways, Vico and Hegel kept history in bounds because each operated in terms of an image of "divine" completeness. On some level, the world is complete, and suprahistorical principles on that level govern history. Completeness is required for real knowing, as opposed to the merely provisional knowledge of historical particulars that we can achieve prior to the completion of the process. In the final analysis, then, neither Vico nor Hegel offered the scope for novelty and creativity, or the scope for a radically historical approach to the world, that each, in certain of his formulations, seemed to invite.

But in inflating history as they did, they invited a new set of questions. How do we conceive the world as historical if, with the waning of metaphysics, we can no longer conceive of a frame or goal? How do we characterize a world in which contingency and endless incompleteness mix with the individuality of things? In a world with this consistency, what is the place of human being?