Giovanni Battista Vico: Philosophical Position and Argument

With many writings and works in his life, Giambattista Vico’s most popular and valuable view, which he depends on for general development and has infected later philosophers a lot, is his view on the relationship between history and human and the ‘Verum-Factum’ Principle.

As Vico denotes ‘For the Latins, verum and factum are interchangeable, or to use the customary language of the schools, they are contributable.’ (Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians.) Form this, Vico argues that the truth (verum) and what is made or facts (factum) are interchangeable, which means that creating something or being the cause of one thing is the priority for one to understand the concept of the thing. If one could not be the cause or know the cause of one thing or one idea, then one could not understand the thing. This is the ‘Verum-Factum’ principle that Vico taking as an axiom during his development of views and arguments. 

For further development, Vico views that God made the natural world while humans could contribute to the human world such as poets, writings, society, and nations. From this, Vico develops his view on the relationship between history and humans. He believes that God made a natural world, which could only be interpreted and known by God itself. Humans, on the other hand, could only understand the human world because humans produced it. 

With this principle, he refutes Descartes and Cartesian View that ‘God is certain’, where the human world, things other than God, and the natural world in Vico’s view, is uncertain. He also attacks Descartes’ famous view ‘ I think therefore I am’, which is frequently used for attacking skeptics as Vico considers it does not attack the essentials of the Skeptics views. (Goetsch, Vico’s Axioms: The Geometry of the Human World.) Vico considers that ‘Skeptics’ know the existence of themselves but not the essence of existence, which is the reasons and criteria of existence. Vico also formats his own argument against the Skeptic’s view, especially one that knowledge is impossible. The Skeptics could not understand what are the reasons that they think of the idea that ‘knowledge is impossible. That is, they are not the cause of the ideas if knowledge is impossible. Taking the Verum-Factum Principle, Skeptics are not able to understand the truths human beings made. 

This principle and his view on the relationship between human and history has been used by Vico in his argument of the formation and development of history. The first kind of history, History I, true history, is considered as the product of human actions. At this period, Vico denotes, human beings used poetic wisdom (creativity or wisdom of creativity) to create history, including philosophy, science, art, society, nations, and all other human products (Vico, New Science). Then, Vico praised the effect of poets— ‘Poets are primitive writers for all men.’(Vico, New Science) Then, in History III, the history of human ideas is also made by human beings in Vico’s view, in the form of epics and mythology. He explains that primitive human beings would deify natural phenomena they are scared of or could not explain, things they largely depend on, and facts that could not be understood, and poets endowed them with known knowledge so that could be in a form interpreted by that current society. 

With this principle and his view of history, Vico successfully starts a new subject as the philosophy of history, which offers a new value not only for historians to record the events but also integrate similar events or periods of history for evaluation and reason findings. Thus, the Verum-Factum principle and Vico’s view are essential for the study of modern history and humanity. 

Bibliograph

Goetsch, James Robert. Vico’s Axioms: The Geometry of the Human World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Vico, Giambattista. New Science. Penguin UK, 1999.

Vico, Giambattista. On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians. Cornell University Press, 1988.

Glossary

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