Knowledge of Things Human and Divine by Verene Donald Phillip

Author:Verene, Donald Phillip
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2006-03-18T05:00:00+00:00

A New Science Is Essayed

Vico presents the second book of his Universal Law as a reflection on the principles established in the first book. In addition to his specific interpretations of Roman law and his principle that all law begins and ends in the divine, Vico comes to the second book with three things: the definition of jurisprudence as wisdom, the meanings of verum and certum, and his conception of their interconnection. The title of the second book, De constantia iurisprudentis (On the constancy of the jurisprudent), adds the idea of constancy to the conception of jurisprudence as wisdom. To be wise is to be constant—to display judgment that is consistent, steady, firm, and uniform (the basic meanings combined in constantia). The wisdom of the jurisprudent or jurist must have this constant nature.

From what does this constancy derive? It requires a grasp both of the true and the certain and the art of showing how the certain is part of the true. In the opening paragraphs of De constantia, Vico says all disciplines reduce to two supreme kinds: those that concern natural necessities and those that concern human choice (sec. 4). Vico says the first is subsumed under philosophy, the principle of which is verum, and the second under philology, the principle of which is certum. Vico says he will show that the constancy or wisdom of the jurisprudent depends upon the jurisprudent’s interpreting the laws by giving proper attention to both their philosophical and philological aspects. The jurisprudent, like the philosopher, must look to the eternal reason of things, and, like the philologist, he must grasp the meanings of the words of the law.

As I indicated above, the De constantia is divided into two parts, De constantia philosophiae (On the constancy of philosophy) and De constantia philologiae (On the constancy of philology). The latter takes up the largest part of the total book; it begins with a chapter entitled “Nova scientia tentatur” (“A new science is essayed”), which is Vico’s first sketch of his New Science. Recall Vico’s claim that his conception of universal law goes beyond the conception of knowledge of Pico della Mirandola, because Pico did not treat of philology, namely, the countless “matters of religions, languages, laws, customs, property rights, conveyances, sovereign powers, governments, classes and the like” (A 157). Philology for Vico is historiography, the love of learning in its widest sense of studying all that is governed by human choice and authority, the certain. Philology concerns not just the languages and literatures of the nations but all the things that determine the details of historical life. This emphasis on the importance of philology as a part of philosophy is crucial for Vico. He wishes to correct the error of Greek and, to an extent, Latin philosophy in excluding these “certains” from its speculations on the human.

It is in the connection between the philosophical concern with eternal necessity and the philological concern with the things produced by choice and human will that the “newness” of Vico’s new science lies.

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