Giambattista Vico (1668 to 1744) was an Italian philosopher from Naples whose New Science taught that the first human world was built by imagination before it was built by reason. The earliest peoples, in his account, were “sublime poets” who thought in images and myths, and myth, read rightly, is the true record of how human societies came into being. He also held that human beings can understand the civil world because they made it.
Who was Giambattista Vico? #
He was born in Naples in 1668 and held a university post in rhetoric there for most of his life; he tried for the better-paid chair of law and did not get it. His works include On the Study Methods of Our Time (1709) and On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians (1710), his sharpest attack on the method of René Descartes, and above all The New Science, which he published in 1725 and reworked in 1730 and 1744, the year he died.1 Largely neglected in his lifetime, he was later read as a forerunner of the philosophy of history and culture. The philosopher Ernst Cassirer held him to be the founder of the study of human culture as a field in its own right.2
What did he mean by ‘the true is the made’? #
That we can only truly know what we have made. Vico’s principle, verum et factum convertuntur, holds that the true and the made are interchangeable. Only God fully knows nature, because only God made it. But human beings made the civil world, its languages, laws, customs and myths, and so human beings can come to know it from the inside.3 This turned Descartes on his head. Where Descartes took mathematics and clear, certain ideas as the model of knowledge, Vico held that the human world could be understood only through its history, its language and its stories.
What did he teach about myth and the first human world? #
That the first humans knew the world through imagination, and that myth was their way of knowing. “In the world’s childhood men were by nature sublime poets,” and the nations were “poetic in their beginnings”. Vico called this ‘poetic wisdom’, with its own ‘poetic logic’. Lacking abstract concepts, the earliest peoples thought in ‘imaginative universals’, vivid figures that gathered up a whole class of things, in the way the Homeric poems, on his reading, express the imaginative universals of the whole Greek people instead of the work of one author.4
His most famous picture is of thunder. In the age of the gods the first people heard the thunder as the voice of a god, and in his phrase “every gentile nation had its Jove”. Their religion, he wrote, rested on a “credible impossibility”, that bodies are minds, so that the sky was experienced as a living being.5 From that first fable, in his account, grew religion, and with marriage and burial it became one of the three principles on which every nation was founded.6
Vico saw history passing through three ages, of gods, heroes and men, each with its own kind of language: signs, then metaphors, then words.7 The peoples he wrote about were the ancient ‘gentile’ nations, above all the Greeks and Romans, farming and city-state cultures known to him through their myths, laws and languages; his ‘first people’ are a reconstruction from that evidence, not a study of any living people.
Did he think the first people were wiser than us? #
Not simply. Vico described the first people as “simple and crude”, living in a ‘barbarism of sense’, and warned against philosophers who read refined ideas back into them. Yet he thought the final age of a civilisation could fall into something worse, in which people become “beasts made more inhuman by the barbarism of reflection”, clever, calculating and cut off.8 At that point, he held, a nation may fall back towards a more primitive simplicity, a ricorso or return, and history begins its course again.9
How does Vico’s work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
In treating myth as a real way of knowing, not as decoration or failed science. In Therapeutic Shamanism mythosMythos. Metaphorical, symbolic, felt truth: the truth of art, poetry and shamanic journeys. Shamanic reality is mythologically true, not literally true, which is why journeys are interpreted, never taken at face value. More about this, what is metaphorically true, is a different kind of truth from logosLogos. Literal, factual, analytical truth: the truth of facts you can check. One of the two modes of truth, alongside mythos. More about this, what is literally true. We need both.10 Humans, unlike the other Peoples, have to learn how to be, and so we need good myths to live by and healthy stories to teach us how to live in balance on the Earth; a culture that forgets those stories is lost.11
Vico’s idea that humans made the civil world sits close to the teaching that our middle-world selfMiddle-world self. The everyday self (ego, persona, head-and-heart), made of our stories and experiences. A genuine and needed part of the Inner Tribe: of service, not in command. Read the full answer is constructed from the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.12 And his ‘barbarism of reflection’, a late civilisation grown clever and cold, meets the teaching that modern humans are strongly left-brain dominant and have almost entirely fallen into an experience of life as separateness.13 See Who is Iain McGilchrist, and what do the two halves of the brain have to do with animism? and What are the Original Instructions?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On whether the sky really is alive. For Vico, the first people’s living sky was a “credible impossibility”, something imagined. In shamanism everything is made of Spirit, Spirit is conscious, and so everything is conscious. The living world is not a poetic projection but how things are, experienced directly.14
On the first people themselves. In Vico’s picture the first wandering humans were crude, and took their own images for reality. In Therapeutic Shamanism’s picture hunter-gatherer people “were not stupid”. They knew that their stories of a golden age were mythos, not literal history, and told them to teach and remind people how to be.15 The confusion of mythos with logos, on this account, is a modern problem more than an ancient one.
On the course of history. Vico saw human societies rising from crude beginnings, under providence, through the ages of gods, heroes and men. Therapeutic Shamanism sees the birth of city-state ‘civilisation’ as the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer, a turn for the worse in how humans lived with each other and the Earth.16 The ancient nations Vico studied were already, on that account, Fallen cultures. See What is the Fall?
How has Vico been read since? #
In very different ways: as a pioneer of interpretation, as an early social scientist, as a Christian thinker joining faith and history, and as a critic of the Enlightenment. Vico claimed that his account of the course of nations follows by strict necessity. That claim has not persuaded all his readers, and many interpreters read him instead for a weaker one, that he makes myth, law and the other parts of the civil world intelligible from the inside. His picture of decline has been read as fatalistic; others point out that he ties decline to philosophy itself sliding into scepticism.17
