the destiny of civilizations: what are they, what happens when they crumble? vico's view from...

8/9/2019 The Destiny of Civilizations: What are they, what happens when they crumble? Vico's view from the New Science

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/the-destiny-of-civilizations-what-are-they-what-happens-when-they-crumble 1/14

The Destiny of Civilizations: Vico and the New Science

Robert C. Thornett

January 1, 2008



Introduction

What are we to make of a recent profusion of “expert” announcements of the

demise of various Western institutions? Throughout the press, cries have been heard

proclaiming the obsolescence of such phenomena as American hegemony, nation-states,

Christian Europe, industrial capitalism, work as we know it, the American Dream, and

even history itself. Are these notes of alarm part of some broader, sweeping chord ringing

in a transition, even an end, to civilization or some part of it? One cannot address such a

question without first discerning the nature of a civilization, and the early modern

Neapolitan philosopher of history and sociologist Giambattista Vico is of great help in

this task. A teacher of rhetoric and a lawyer by training, Vico sought in his New Science

to extrapolate from the particulars of history the natural laws surrounding the rise and fall

of civilizations qua the output of a natural creature, man. Working from the evidence “on

the books” of history, he arrives at a highly complex, multilayered and, at times,

theatrical outline of the patterns of history. These patterns, while abstractions, are

themselves so vivid that at instances one might think he were reporting on our times.

The Mechanics of the Corso

Vico offers a stark image of civilizations at their end, but to understand it fully

one must view this “final act” within the dramatic context of his overall philosophy of

history, which I will briefly outline here. He finds history repeats cyclically. The period

or “unit” of the cycle, as Voegelin puts it, is the corso di civilizazione or simply corso,

the course of civilizations. Following a singular origin in time sparked by revelation,

civilizations progress through a series of stages (cursi), and then, like all natural

2



creations, slide into decline and decay. Part of the intrigue of Vico is that he maps these

stages not only across time but across a variety of other seemingly-unrelated dimensions.

Geographically, for example, the center of civilization moves from forests to huts to

villages to cities to, at its acme, academies. Meantime, their governments shift from the

theocracy to aristocracy the democracy, and they move linguistically from metaphor to

metonymy to irony. These are just a few of the layers Vico reveals within the repeating

corso.

In each subsequent iteration or recurrence of the cycle (ricorso) it is not

particulars that repeat but general patterns, allowing for the progressive accumulation of

the particulars of culture across time and civilizations. Put differently, each ricorso does

not “start from scratch,” but incorporates cultural leftovers from its predecessors. For

example, Vico finds that rulers in a primitive state seek to ascend to a physical acme; in

the original classical corso of the Greeks it was mountaintops, in the medieval Christian

ricorso it is castles, recycling the building technology of the previous Roman age. Most

notable among such elements of cultural continuity is language; for example, the

Romance languages of the Christian corso recycle elements of the Latin and Greek of the

Classical corso, placing them alongside new words and innovations. Hence, Vico’s is a

“spiral” view of history, with culture progressing forward overall even while civilizations

cycle in and out of existence.

The Barbarism of Sense: Bellwether of the Dawn of Civilizations

Vico is a miner of history, especially of etymology. Unearthing the ancient

recorded circumstances surrounding the invention of words, he deduces unrecorded

circumstances that enable him to formulate scenarios surrounding the origin and decline

3



of civilizations, including prehistorical circumstances. Thus while the following brief

summary of those scenarios may seem a bit “storybook,” Vico formulated them through a

lawyerly series of deductions (with which the New Science is rife) far too long to recount

here. He found that these scenarios, while imaginary insofar as they are at least partially

undocumented, are the only logical conclusion given the facts history presents.

On Vico’s reading, history tells us that the bellwethers of the dawning and demise

of civilizations are barbarisms of two opposite forms: a) the “barbarism of sense” and b)

the “barbarism of reflection” or of “intellect.” As civilization cycles, both barbarisms

recur, one following the other. In the age of the barbarism of sense, robust senses and

instincts predominate over reflection, dragging the undeveloped intellect about. This

leads the majority of men, famuli, to live chaotic, Hobbesian lives running through forests

in a state of continual promiscuity and quarreling, which inevitably puts them and their

children in constant danger. Vico characterizes this life of the famuli as the life of

“impiety.” But the same barbarism of sense leads the strongest men, the giganti (giants),

as Vico calls them, to a different sort of life, one of piety. These giganti naturally

dominate in an age of bestial survival, and are barbaric in the conventional sense, meeting

adversaries with brutal physical aggression and hauling future wives by force to their

caves on mountaintops, where “strongest beasts naturally dwell.” Unwittingly, atop these

mountains they are in an ideal spot to “marvel” at natural phenomena which are catalysts

for revelation. Because of the heights they have attained, the Giants witness the awesome

power of nature, specifically lightning and thunder, at close range and with unmistakable

clarity, leaving them with a conception of an omnipotent god for whom they have fear

and reverence and whose name erupts in a scream: “Jove!” The subsequent worship of

4



this god, whose memory is indelibly burned in the hardy barbaric imagination, initiates

an intellectually-simple though sublime “Poetic” religion and finds sublime, though

inarticulate, expression in songs and symbols in this Poetic age.1 Under newfound divine

auspices, the practices of marriage and burial of the dead follow. Together, these three

pious practices, viz., religion along with marriage and burial of the dead under religious

auspices, comprise the indispensable foundation of all civilizations. That is, absent any of

these manifestations of piety, there is no civilization. Hence, it can be said that for Vico

civilizations live and die with piety. The piety practiced originally by a few Giants and

their families will, over many stages of civilization or cursi, spread to and become

institutionalized among the masses of famuli via direct emulation, customs, and finally

laws. Hence, we might say that the rise of civilization that follows for hundreds of years

after the Giants first experience revelation is the radiation of their sphere of piety from

the great individual to the collective. Conversely, the decline of civilization, with which

we were originally concerned and which I will next describe in more detail, would

indicate the retraction of that sphere. Before moving on, I will note, that despite the

barbarism inherent to an era of dominance of the senses and instincts, it is the strength of

these necessary functions—and not of the intellect, which is yet undeveloped—that

makes it possible to first recognize God, spurring the motions and actions of piety that

themselves found and constitute civilization.2 This is notable because common sense and

1 This idea that civilizations always begin with revelation and Poetic expression of a transcendent

inspiration clearly contradicts the premise of a multitude of regimes whose claims to legitimacy rest inempirically-based “scientific principles” regarding freedoms (human rights, equality), wealth (capitalism,

socialism, communism), and honor (ethnocentrism, tribalism, aristocracy). It also contradicts Plato’ssuggestion in the Republic that the good civilization requires a clean slate and a communal agreement to

begin, rather than resulting from gradual, organic development. See Plato, Republic, 501a “But at any rate

you know that this would be their first point of difference from ordinary reformers, that they would refuse

to take in hand either individual or state or to legislate before they either received a clean slate or

themselves made it clean.”2 Voegelin, too, makes it clear that revelation is a by-product of hardy work: man must “wrest, by the

response of his human search to a divine movement, the truth of reality from a reality pregnant with truth

5



good instincts will later disappear amid the barbarism of reflection, and it is the same

Necessity felt in times of crude scarcity by the original Giants that will bring good sense

and good instinct back. Civilization thus begins because of, rather than in spite of, the

barbarism of sense.

The Barbarism of Reflection: Bellwether of the Decay of Civilizations

Many centuries after its origin, Vico finds that civilization dissolves amid a very

different sort of barbarism. Having passed from a) the original divine or theocratic age of

sublime poetic expression in “mute religious acts and divine ceremonies” to b) the heroic

or aristocratic age of “heroic blazonings, which made arms speak” to, finally, c) the

humanistic age of articulate speech generating laws and philosophy, these long stages of

the expansion, reshaping, and redefinition of culture compile a mammoth storehouse of

artifacts among whose contents intellects readily find food for reflection.3 Customs,

symbols, songs, tales, laws, and finally philosophy, culture’s “highest achievement,” are

now available to the masses as civilization enters an age of “perfect liberty.” They are no

longer the privilege of an aristocratic few. Yet, for Vico, this widest radius of piety

cannot last, as these gifts from cultures past are prone to corrupt usage, a sort of moral

“rusting.” Though philosophy made eloquence possible, that achievement naturally

degrades into a “false eloquence” that is not interested in the search for truth, which is

philosophy’s task, but rather “is ready to uphold either of the opposed sides of a case

indifferently.”4 An “abuse of eloquence” becomes pervasive: in the annals of history,

yet unrevealed.” See Eric Voegelin, In Search of Order, Vol. 5 of Order and History, Baton Rouge, 1987 P.

153 Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. Thomas Bergin and Max Fisch, Cornell University Press,

1984, 340 “Three Kinds of Languages”4 New Science , 1102 Recall Vico is a lawyer by training.

6



“[corrupt states] descended in to skepticism. Learned fools fell to calumnating the truth.”5

This new form of intellectual savagery Vico calls the barbarism of reflection. It is the

immoral use of philosophy, the use of ideas with premeditated or “reflective malice.” To

be clear, it is not simply that men abandon or bungle established ideas by no longer

honoring antiquated meanings or propositions (though this may be the case). Nor does it

occur simply because real meanings have been lost, as, for example, with the widespread

destruction of provincial libraries by barbarian invaders during the waning years of the

Roman Empire. Nor is it merely a logistical snafu resulting when new information

outpaces society’s capacity to absorb it. All these problems would, without question,

provoke misunderstanding and frustration, but would not necessarily induce barbarism,

viz,. savagery, in the soul. These are logistical problems that could be cured by an

Information Age or the honing of a more efficient Knowledge Economy. Yet the problem

is moral and philosophical, not of the trade and shipping of knowledge. Vico attributes

the corrosion of rhetoric directly to the order of Providence, the natural course of things.

Much unlike the bold, open, and honest savagery of the dawning of civilizations,

the barbarism of reflection is a furtive, deceitful savagery. Culture under such barbarism

slides toward becoming an anti-culture, a culture of cultural abuse, as it were, as men use

philosophy for their ever-more-narrowly-conceived self-interest rather than practicing

philosophy, viz., working to understand and appreciate the wider world, their fellow man,

the transcendent realm. Vico recounts historical examples of Roman tribunes who,

chosen to speak for the plebs, used their eloquence instead to gain personal wealth and

power under false pretenses. He finds that it is this “reflective malice,” a sort of subtle,

invisible savagery, which threatens civilization by eroding community ties quietly from

5 New Science , 1102

7



within, leading to widespread mistrust and isolation of spirit even within the “throng” of

bodies. Man becomes far more “inhuman” and dangerous than during the original

barbarism of sense, for

The [barbarism of sense] displayed a generous savagery, against which one could defend oneself

or take flight or be on one’s guard; but the [barbarism of reflection], with a base savagery, under

soft words and embraces, plots against the life and fortune of friends and intimates.6

With citizens culturally- and intellectually-disoriented by the abuses of eloquence

and of culture, persuasive tyrants flashing appealing concepts (vendors of words,

Augustine might say) have little trouble finding an audience and a following, and civil

wars amongst a multitude of these factions transform an age of “perfect liberty” into one

of “perfect tyranny” and bleed the civilization out of existence. Common sense and

realism, the strong suits of the original giganti during the barbarism of sense, are

conspicuously absent during the barbarism of reflection, as men are so preoccupied with

false ideas (for Plato, shadows on the wall of the cave), the poisonous fruits dispersed by

false eloquence.

Note, however, that this scenario of dissolution is the natural end of civilization

only if left alone. It is, for Vico, only Providence’s third and final remedy for morally-

diseased civilizations, its last resort. Before reaching this stage, there may well be a) a

leader from within who whips it, morally speaking, back into shape, as Augustus Caesar

turned an age of corruption into a Pax Romana or b) another morally-hardier society that

will subsume or enslave it. But if civilization should simply decay, all the “decent

drapery of life” that Burke saw in civil society comes off:

By reason of all this, providence decrees that, through obstinate factions and desperate

civil wars, they shall turn their cities into forests and the forests into dens and lairs of

men. In this way, through long centuries of barbarism, rust will consume the misbegotten

subtleties of malicious wits that have turned them into beasts made more inhuman by the


8



barbarism of reflection than the first men had been made by the barbarism of sense. . . .

Hence peoples who have reached this point of premeditated malice, when they receive

this last remedy of providence and are thereby stunned and brutalized, are sensible no

longer of comforts, delicacies, pleasures, and pomp, but only of the sheer necessities of

life. And the few survivors in the midst of an abundance of the things necessary for lifenaturally become sociable and, returning to the primitive simplicity of the first world of

peoples, are again religious, truthful, and faithful. Thus providence brings back amongthem the piety, faith, and truth which are the natural foundations of justice as well as the

graces and beauties of the eternal order of God. . . .7

The dissolution of civilization cleans house, as it were; it brings back a “primitive

simplicity” in which necessity shakes men back to their senses in a ricorso, the recourse

or reversion to the patterns of the barbarism of sense that originally brought civilization

about. “The nations mean to dissolve themselves, and their remnants flee for safety to the

wilderness, whence, like the phoenix, they rise again.”8 The same cultural artifacts that

were abused during the barbarism of reflection now may be rediscovered and understood

rightly by those survive, sanding away what disfiguring gashes remain from an era of

false eloquence and cultural abuse. Necessity spurs men to the honest use in the

renovation of civilization.

Detecting Dissolution

Vico holds that the corso is a natural process like the growth of a tree or the

hatching of an egg. Hence the decline of civilizations is not a perversion of nature, but

rather to be expected and detectable. Our original question was whether we detected it,

whether the reports coming in of the end of civilization have merit. Vico’s account

provides several avenues for investigating this question. First, if civilization were indeed

at its end one would observe an absence of common sense, the weakening of basic

sensibility: raw necessity is most prominent during the barbarism of sense, weakest

during the barbarism of reflection. Second, one could see the prevalence of false

7 New Science , 11068 New Science , 1109

9



eloquence and cultural abuse, and hence the epidemic habituation of society to the misuse

of acts, customs, symbols, words, laws, and ideas. Third, one could see evidence of the

undermining of general belief in a “provident divinity,” because without religious belief

there can be no civilization:

“For in this work it has been fully demonstrated that through providence the first

governments of the world had as their entire form religion, on which alone the family

state was based; and passing thence to the heroic and aristocratic civil governments,

religion must have been their principal firm basis. Advancing then to the popular

governments, it was religion again that served the peoples as means of attaining them.

And coming to rest at last in monarchic governments, this same religion must be the

shield of princes. Hence, if religion is lost among the peoples, they have nothing left to

enable them to live in society: no shield of defense, nor means of counsel, nor basis of

support, nor even a form by which they may exist in the world at all.”9

Here, the state of religious belief portends the state of civilization. Yet how is one

to gauge religious belief in a society? Again, Vico provides criteria: we may evaluate the

state of the three indispensable practices of civilization, viz. (a) the worship of a single

omnipotent God and, under the auspices of that God, (b) marriage and (c) burial of the

dead. Moreover, Vico seems to suggest we can also observe what Providence holds in

store by observing social sentiments:

“Providence…makes itself palpable for us in these three feelings: the first, the marvel,

the second, the veneration, hitherto felt by all the learned for the matchless wisdom of the

ancients, and third, the ardent desire with which they burned to seek and attain it. These

are in fact three lights of divine Providence…but these sentiments were later perverted by

the conceit of scholars and by the conceit of nations—conceits we have sought in this

work to discredit.”

Thus civilization is not a static, inanimate configuration but entails marveling at,

venerating, and ardently desiring to attain wisdom as displayed by its founders and

builders. These are “palpable” feelings during the course of civilization; thus at the end

of civilization, when Providence is not “palpable,” we would see a failure specifically on

the part of the learned to marvel at, venerate, and ardently pursue such wisdom; in such

as case they are more likely, we may guess, to view the inherited ideas of the past in the


10



manner foretold by Burke, “as a heap of old exploded errors.”10 Note that Vico does not

mean to invalidate innovation in scholarship and live in a pristine past of the imagination;

he simply means to say that when civilization is in decline scholars do not regard with

due feelings of reverence the revealed divine wisdom which is—in all cases—the very

basis of the architecture of civilization that allows them to conduct philosophical enquiry.

For Vico civilization began as the response of giganti to their own feelings of awe at

concrete divine revelation, and the feelings of awe proper to scholars to which Vico

refers here are likewise of divine wisdom revealed, only much farther down the road in

the form of philosophy.

11

In such times of disregard for divine wisdom finds itself on a

slippery slope; as Plato put it “where old men have no shame, there young men will most

certainly be devoid of reverence.”12 Civilization has feelings and motions; as its feelings

recede among men, so do its motions.

It must be noted that in the relatively brief appendix “The Practice of the New

Science,” Vico changes tone and reveals a hope that his work and its continuation will

provide philosophical rulers, “the mind” of society, with an active “practic” that will aid

in real decision-making.

“That practic can easily be derived from the contemplation of the course that nations run.

Instructed by such contemplation, the wise men and princes of the commonwealths will

be able, through good institutions, laws, and examples, to recall the peoples to their acme

or perfect state.”13

10 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Par. 163, Harvard Classics Edition “And first of

all, the science of jurisprudence, the pride of the human intellect, which, with all its defects, redundancies,

and errors, is the collected reason of ages, combining the principles of original justice with the infinitevariety of human concerns, as a heap of old exploded errors, would be no longer studied. Personal self-

sufficiency and arrogance (the certain attendants upon all those who have never experienced a wisdom

greater than their own) would usurp the tribunal.” Here, the dialogues of the past are discarded as waste,

rather than mined, as Vico suggests is necessary.11

See Plato, Laws, II, 671 “Divine fear we have called reverence and shame.” See also Plato’s Philebus,

“The awe which I always feel, Protarchus, about the names of the gods is more than human-it exceeds all

other fears.” P.312 Laws , V, 72913 New Science, 1406

11



Through the academies, which are the hub of civilization at its acme, leaders

might absorb the patterns of civilization well enough to recognize them within their cities

and nations and preserve or recover what is worthy through wise legislation.

Is the New Science Historical Progressivism?

At its worst, progressivism immanentizes the eschaton, as Voegelin puts it,

aiming for ultimate perfection in this world while denying the existence of a

transcendent, metaphysical realm.14 At its best, progressivism aims at that modicum of

improvement that is possible in this earthly realm while acknowledging that ultimate

perfection is not to be found herein. Is Vico a historical progressive? Only in the latter

sense. He does not believe that history is teleological; it will continue to cycle if left to its

own devices. Therefore Vico differs from those who believe that history intends some

final earthly product, the realization of some ultimate scenario such as a universal

cosmopolitan society in which knowledge of right is ingrained (Kant), the saturation of

society with manifest absolute freedom (Hegel), or property-less communism (Marx).

Hence among philosophers of history Vico resembles Augustine in that his aim is not a

utopia but damage control, making the best of a flawed world, staving off two barbarisms

as the earth-bound pilgrim from the City of God staves off the wicked tendencies of the

City of Man.15 Vico is suggesting that distinct universal patterns of civilization exist and

14 Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 1952 P. 188, 147, 13115 For Augustine, the best one can hope for in the City of Man is to maintain a sufficiently salutary

atmosphere so as to prevent those capable of seeing God, those on pilgrimage to a transcendent realm, from being pulled down by the undertow of conflict inherent to this fallen world. The two tendencies toward

barbarism described by Vico correspond roughly with a) the two tendencies within what Joshua Mitchellidentifies as the Augustinian self, toward reclusion and recklessness and b) the two tendencies within

society identified by Plato in Statesman, those of the gentle and the brave. On this analysis, the true

Statesman described by Plato as the one skilled in weaving together the gentle and the brave is akin to the

practitioner of the New Science. Mitchell differs slightly in that, drawing on Tocqueville, he looks

primarily to institutions and associations rather than to individuals to do the mediating between the

extremes within society in a democratic age. This difference is understandable, as the democratic society

with which Mitchell and Tocqueville are concerned has no taste for relinquishing authority to a single

12



Bibliography

Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Oxford University Press, 1999

Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, Penguin Classics, New York, 1982

Mazzotta, Giuseppe, The New Map of the World: the Poetic Philosophy of GiambattistaVico, Princeton University Press, 1998

Mitchell, Joshua, The Fragility of Freedom, University of Chicago Press, 1999

Mitchell, Joshua Religion is not a Preference, Journal of Politics, Vol. 69, Issue 2, May2007 available online at http://journalofpolitics.org/files/69_2/Mitchell.pdf

Plato, Laws, trans. Thomas Pangle, University of Chicago Press, 1988

Plato, Republic, trans. Desmond Lee, Penguin Classics Edition, 2001

Plato, Philebus, trans. Benjamin Jowett, Prometheus Books, 1996

Vico, Giambattista, The New Science, trans. Thomas Bergin and Max Fisch, Cornell

University Press, 1984

Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, University of Chicago Press, 1983

Eric Voegelin , In Search of Order, Vol. 5 of Order and History, Vol. 18 of Collected

Works of Eric Voegelin, University of Missouri Press, 1987

14

the destiny of civilizations: what are they, what happens when they crumble? vico's view from...

Documents