Giambattista Vico: "The New Science" (1725)

Occupante Concede: History Demands a Coherent Narrative

A History of Epistemes and Paradigms

"Custom is like a King, and the Law, like a Tyrant"

- Dio Chrysostom (Natural Law being adopted by social custom, not novel Legislation)

Natural law contrasts with legal positivism, which views laws as solely based on societal rules or the will of the legislature.

Excerpts from video above:

This natural law was born of human customs, which sprang from the common nature of nations, which is the universal subject of my science. And this natural law preserves human society, for there is nothing more natural, because more pleasing, than observing natural customs. Consequently human nature, which is the source of human customs, is sociable.

So we can see that this idea of natural law is a function of human customs. We create what we see as essential in human development and action. And nevertheless, Vico is going to try to say, and I'm really not sure of the validity of this, that behind human custom is a fundamental human nature, a commonality to all humans which among other things is our sociality, which acts as the basis by which we can enter a common historical development. That we can see ideas develop in various paradigms that connect to each other in a temporal sequence.

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Vico attempts to develop a sort of common grammar or logic by which society develops. He says, that we observe that the barbarous and civilized nations of the world, despite their great separation in space and time and their separate foundations, all share these three human customs: which is all have some religion (and he sees this as the proof of the historical revelation and presence of divine providence), second all contract solemn marriages (which he sees as the proof of the family as the fundamental social unit), and third all bury their dead (which he sees as the proof of the eternal nature of the human Spirit).

And thus the notion of humanity is constantly recursively developing itself through history in every nation, no matter how savage and crude, no rights are celebrated with more elaborate ceremonies or more sacred solemnities than those of religion, marriage, and burial. So he's trying to find some sort of common conceptual vocabulary that we use to frame our actions.

Thus the philosophers, he says, have made a fundamental error by avoiding the historical development of these concepts. He says that the philosophers should have discussed Providence, as revealed in the economy of civil institutions. This is clear from the proper meaning of the word Divinity, which was applied to Providence. This noun derives from the Latin verb "divinari", to divine. In other words, to understand either what is hidden from men, meaning the future, or what is hidden within them, meaning their conscience.

All right, so this idea of the future, of the unfolding of ideas, of a sense of becoming that Hegel is going to develop, and this idea of conscience, of a developing historical consciousness, which is going to become for Hegel self-consciousness, and thus the resplendant truth of the development of a dialectical unfolding of Geist, of Spirit for Hegel.

My new science, he says, is therefore a demonstration, as it were, of Providence as a historical fact. That is, it must provide a history of the orders and institutions which provide bestowed on the great polity of humankind without the knowledge or advice of humankind and often contrary to human planning. For although by its creation our world is temporal and particular the orders which Providence establishes in it are universal and eternal. So essentially, governing and managing the immense variety of experiences, ideas, and peoples is a series of definite orders, which are these you know, Ages of the Divine, the Heroic, and Mankind; which are going to frame the historical development of our species and thus of civility itself.

Now there's a lot more that I could say about this. He's going to talk about the development of language from monosyllabic grunts and song, as well and its' relationship to mythology. There's some interesting stuff in here, and a lot of it, we know now, is incorrect. A lot of his etymologies are wrong. They are in fact, made up. But I think that there's a slight magic in this, which is, that we're seeing a break in the way we conceive of history from a simple tabulation of facts, to a conception of narrative and coherence that blends us through a development of ideas that are recursively and self-reflexively understanding their relationship to the past, and the future. so I think that this is a very incisive moment in the history of philosophy and in the philosophy of history