The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  Not until the reaction against the classification of all human experience in terms of absolute and timeless values – a reaction which first began in Switzerland and England among critics and historians of Greek and Hebrew literature, and, penetrating to Germany, created the great intellectual revolution of which Herder was the most influential apostle – did history, as we understand it today, come into its own. Nevertheless, it is to Voltaire, Fontenelle and Montesquieu (who, contrary to the accepted view of him, was no less convinced of the absolute and timeless nature of ultimate human ends, however much means and methods might vary from clime to clime) that we owe the more scientific branches of later historical writing: economic history, the history of science and technology, historical sociology, demography, all the provinces of the knowledge of the past which owe their existence to statistical and other quantitative techniques. But the history of civilisation which Voltaire supposed himself to be initiating was in the end created by the Germans, who looked on him as the arch-enemy of all that they held dear.

  Yet even before the Counter-Enlightenment of the Swiss and the English and the Germans, a new conception of the study of history came into being. It was anti-Voltairean in character, and its author was an obscure Neapolitan of whom Voltaire had almost certainly never heard: and, if he had, would have treated with disdain.

  III

  Giambattista Vico was born in Naples in 1668 and lived there or in its environs until his death in 1744. Throughout his long life he was little known, the very exemplar of a lonely thinker. He was educated by priests, worked for some years as a private tutor, became a minor professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples, and after many years of composing inscriptions, Latin eulogies and laudatory biographies for the rich and the great in order to supplement his meagre income, was rewarded in the last years of his life by being appointed official historiographer to the Austrian Viceroy of Naples.

  He was steeped in the literature of humanism, in the classical authors and antiquities, and especially in Roman law. His mind was not analytical or scientific but literary and intuitive. Naples under Spanish and Austrian rulers was not in the vanguard of the new scientific movement; although experimental scientists were at work there, so were the Church and the Inquisition. If anything, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was something of a backwater, and Vico, by inclination a religious humanist with a rich historical imagination, was not in sympathy with the great scientific materialist movement that was determined to sweep away the last relics of the scholastic metaphysics. Nevertheless, in his youth, he fell under the sway of the new currents of thought: he read Lucretius, and the Epicurean conception of gradual human development from primitive, semi-bestial beginnings remained with him, despite his Christian faith, all his life. Influenced by the all-powerful Cartesian movement, he began by believing mathematics to be the queen of the sciences. But evidently something in him rebelled against this. In 1709, at the age of forty, in an inaugural, lecture, with which professors in the University of Naples were obliged to start each academic year, he published a passionate defence of humanist education: men’s minds (ingenia) were shaped by the language – the words and the images – which they inherited, no less than their minds, in turn, shaped their modes of expression; the search after a plain, neutral style, like the attempt to train the young exclusively in the dry light of the Cartesian analytic method, tended to rob them of imaginative power. Vico defended the rich, traditional Italian ‘rhetoric’, inherited from the great humanists of the Renaissance, against the austere and deflationary style of the French rationalist science-influenced modernists.

  Evidently he continued to brood on the two contrasted methods, for in the following year he arrived at a truly startling conclusion: mathematics was indeed, as had always been claimed for it, a discipline which led to wholly clear, irrefutable propositions of universal validity. But this was so not because the language of mathematics was a reflection of the basic and unalterable structure of reality, as thinkers since the days of Plato or even Pythagoras had maintained: it was so because mathematics was not a reflection of anything. Mathematics was not a discovery but a human invention: starting from definitions and axioms of their own choosing, mathematicians could, by means of rules of which they or other men were authors, arrive at conclusions that did indeed logically follow, because the man-made rules, definitions and axioms saw to it that they did so. Mathematics was a kind of game (although Vico did not call it that), in which the counters and the rules were man-made; the moves and their implications were indeed certain, but at the cost of describing nothing – a play of abstractions controlled by their creators. Once this system was applied to the natural world – for instance, as in physics or mechanics – it yielded important truths, but inasmuch as nature had not been invented by men, and had its own characteristics and could not, like symbols, be freely manipulated, the conclusions became less clear, no longer wholly knowable. Mathematics was not a system of laws which governed reality, but a system of rules, in terms of which it was useful to generalise about, analyse and predict, the behaviour of things in space.

  Here Vico made use of an ancient scholastic proposition at least as old as St Augustine: that one could know fully only what one had oneself made. A man could understand fully his own intellectual or poetical construction, a work of art or a plan, because he had himself made it, and it was therefore transparent to him: everything in it had been created by his intellect and his imagination. Indeed, Hobbes had asserted as much in the case of political constitutions. But the world – nature – had not been made by men: therefore only God, who had made it, could know it through and through. Mathematics seemed so marvellous an achievement precisely because it was wholly man’s own work – the nearest to divine creation that man could attain to. And there were those in the Renaissance who spoke of art, too, in this fashion, and said that the artist was a creator, quasi deus, of an imaginary world created alongside the real world, and the artist, the god who had created it, knew it through and through. But about the world of external nature there was something opaque: men could describe it, could tell how it behaved in different situations and relationships, could offer hypotheses about the behaviour of its constituents – physical bodies and the like; but they could not tell why – for what reason – it was as it was, and behaved as it did: only he who made it, namely God, knew that – men had only an outside view, as it were, of what went on on the stage of nature. Men could know ‘from the inside’ only what they had made themselves and nothing else. The greater the man-made element in any object of knowledge, the more transparent to human vision it will be; the greater the ingredient of external nature, the more opaque and impenetrable to human understanding. There was an impassable gulf between the man-made and the natural: the constructed and the given. All provinces of knowledge could be classified along this scale of relative intelligibility.

  Ten years later Vico took a radical step: there existed a field of knowledge besides that of the most obviously man-made constructions – works of art, or political schemes, or legal systems, and, indeed, all rule-determined disciplines – which men could know from within: human history; for it, too, was made by men. Human history did not consist merely of things and events and their compresences and sequences (including those of human organisms viewed as natural objects) as the external world did; it was the story of human activities, of what men did and thought and suffered, of what they strove for, aimed at, accepted, rejected, conceived, imagined, of what their feelings were directed at. It was concerned, therefore, with motives, purposes, hopes, fears, loves and hatreds, jealousies, ambitions, outlooks and visions of reality; with the ways of seeing, and ways of acting and creating, of individuals and groups. These activities we knew directly, because we were involved in them as actors, not spectators. There was a sense, therefore, in which we knew more about ourselves than we knew about the external world; when we studied, let us say, Roman law, or Roman institutions, we were not contemplating objects in nature
, of whose purposes, or whether they had any, we could know nothing. We had to ask ourselves what these Romans were at, what they strove to do, how they lived and thought, what kind of relationship with other men they were anxious to promote or frustrate. We could not ask this about natural objects: it was idle to ask what cows or trees or stones, or molecules or cells, were at: we had no reason to suppose that they pursued purposes; or, if they did, we could not know what they were; since we had not made them, we could have no God-like ‘inside’ view of what ends, if any, they pursued or had been created to fulfil. There was, therefore, a clear sense in which our knowledge was superior, at least in kind, about intentional behaviour – that is, action – to our knowledge of the movement or position of bodies in space, the field of the magnificent triumphs of seventeenth-century science. What was opaque to us when we contemplated the external world was, if not wholly transparent, yet surely far more so when we contemplated ourselves. It was therefore a perverse kind of self-denial to apply the rules and laws of physics or of the other natural sciences to the world of mind and will and feeling; for by doing this we would be gratuitously debarring ourselves from much that we could know.

  If anthropomorphism was falsely to endow the inanimate world with human minds and wills, there was presumably a world which it was proper to endow with precisely these attributes, namely, the world of man. Consequently, a natural science of men treated as purely natural entities, on a par with rivers and plants and stones, rested on a cardinal error. With regard to ourselves we were privileged observers with an ‘inside’ view: to ignore it in favour of the ideal of a unified science of all there is, a single, universal method of investigation, was to insist on wilful ignorance in the name of a materialist dogma of what could alone be known. We know what is meant by action, purpose, effort to achieve something or to understand something – we know these things through direct consciousness of them. We possess self-awareness. Can we also tell what others are at? Vico never directly tells us how this is achieved, but seems to take it for granted that solipsism needs no refutation; and, moreover, that we communicate with others because we can and do grasp in some direct fashion, less or more successfully, the purpose and meaning of their words, their gestures, their signs and symbols; for if there were no communication, there would be no language, no society, no humanity. But even if this applies to the present and the living, does it also apply to the past? Can we grasp the acts, the thoughts, the attitudes, the beliefs, explicit and implicit, the worlds of thought and feeling of societies dead and gone? If so, how is this achieved? Vico’s answer to this problem is perhaps the boldest and most original of his ideas.

  He declared that there were three great doors that lead into the past: language; myths; and rites, that is, institutional behaviour. We speak of metaphorical ways of expression. The aesthetic theorists of his day (Vico tells us) regard this simply as so much embellishment, a heightened form of speech used by poets as a deliberate device to give us pleasure or move us in particular ways, or ingenious ways of conveying important truths.13 This rests on the assumption that what is expressed metaphorically could, at least in principle, be as well expressed in plain, literal prose, although this might be tedious and not give us the pleasure caused by poetic speech. But, Vico maintains, if you read primitive utterances (Latin antiquities, which he knew best, provide him with the majority of his examples) you will soon realise that what we call metaphorical speech is the natural mode of expression of these early men. When we say that our blood is boiling, this may for us be a conventional metaphor for anger, but for primitive man anger literally resembled the sensation of blood boiling within him; when we speak of the teeth of ploughs, or the mouths of rivers, or the lips of vases, these are dead metaphors or, at best, deliberate artifice intended to produce a certain effect upon the listener or reader. But to our remote ancestors ploughs actually appeared to have teeth; rivers, which for them were semi-animate, had mouths: land was endowed with necks and tongues, metals and minerals with veins, the earth had bowels, oaks had hearts, skies smiled and frowned, winds raged, the whole of nature was alive and active. Gradually, as human experience changed, this, once natural, speech, which Vico calls poetical, lingered on as turns of phrase in common speech whose origin had been forgotten or at least were no longer felt, or as conventions and ornament used by sophisticated versifiers. Forms of speech express specific kinds of vision; there is no universal, ‘literal’ speech which denotes a timeless reality. Before ‘poetical’ language, men used hieroglyphs and ideograms which convey a vision of the world very different from our own – Vico declares that men sang before they spoke, spoke in verse before they spoke in prose, as is made plain by the study of the kinds of signs and symbols that they used, and the types of use they made of them.

  The task before those who wish to grasp what kinds of lives have in the past been led in societies different from their own is to understand their worlds: that is, to conceive what kind of vision of the world men who used a particular kind of language must have had for this type of language to be a natural expression of it. The difficulty of this task is brought home most forcibly by the mythological language which Vico cites. The Roman poet says ‘Jovis omnia plena.’14 What does this mean? Jove – Jupiter – is to us the father of the gods, a bearded thunderer, but the word also means sky or air. How can ‘everything’ be ‘full’ of a bearded thunderer, or the father of the gods? Yet this, evidently, is how men spoke. We must therefore ask ourselves what the world must have been like for those to whom such use of language, which is almost meaningless to us, made sense. What could be meant by speaking of Cybele as an enormous woman, and also, at the same time, as the whole of the earth, of Neptune as a bearded marine deity wielding a trident, and also as all the seas and oceans of the world? Thus Heracles is a demigod who slew the Hydra, but is at the same time the Athenian and Spartan and Argive and Theban Heracles; he is many and also one; Ceres is a female deity but also all the corn in the world.

  It is a very strange world that we must try, as it were, to transpose ourselves into, and Vico warns us that it is only with the most agonising effort that we can even attempt to enter the mentality of the primitive savages of whose vision of reality these myths and legends are records. Yet it can, to some degree, be achieved, for we possess a faculty that he calls fantasia – imagination – with which it is possible to ‘enter’ minds very different from our own.

  How is this done? The nearest we can come to grasping Vico’s thought is his parallel between the growth of a species and the growth of the individual: just as we are able to recollect the experiences of childhood (and in our day psychoanalysis has probed further than this), so it must be possible to recapture to some degree the early collective experience of our race, even though this may require terrible effort. This is based on the parallel between the macrocosm and the individual microcosm – phylogenesis resembling ontogenesis, an idea which dates back at least to the Renaissance. There is an analogy between the growth of an individual and that of a people. If I can recollect what it was to have been a child, I shall have some inkling of what it was to have belonged to a primitive culture. Judging others by analogy with what I am now will not do: if animism is the false attribution of human characteristics to natural objects, a similar fallacy is involved in attributing to primitives our own sophisticated notions; memory, not analogy, seems closer to the required faculty of imaginative understanding – fantasia – whereby we reconstruct the human past.

  The categories of experience of different generations of men differ; but they proceed in a fixed order which Vico thinks he can reconstruct by asking the right questions of the evidence before us. We must ask what kind of experience is presupposed by, renders intelligible, a particular use of symbols (that is, language), what particular vision is embodied in myths, in religious rites, in inscriptions, in the monuments of the past. The answers will enable us to trace human growth and development, to visualise, ‘enter into’ the minds of men creating their wo
rld by effort, by work, by struggle. Each phase of this process conveys, indeed communicates, its experience in its own characteristic forms – in hieroglyphs, in primitive song, in myths and legends, in dances and laws, in ceremonial and elaborate religious rites, which to Voltaire or Holbach or d’Alembert were merely obsolete relics of a barbarous past or a mass of obscurantist hocus-pocus. The development of social consciousness and activity is traceable (Vico maintains) also in the evolution of etymology and syntax, which reflects successive phases of social life, and develops pari passu with them. Poetry is not conscious embellishment invented by sophisticated writers, nor is it secret wisdom in mnemonic form – it is a direct form of self-expression of our remote ancestors, collective and communal; Homer is the voice not of an individual poet but of the entire Greek people. This notion, in this specific formulation of it, was destined to have a rich flowering in the theories of Winckelmann and Herder, who, when they first developed their ideas, had not, so far as one can tell, so much as heard of Vico.

  As for the unaltering character of basic human nature – the central concept of the Western tradition from the Greeks to Aquinas, from the Renaissance to Grotius, Spinoza, Locke – this could not be so, for man’s creations – language, myth, ritual – tell a different story. The first men were savage brutes, cave-dwellers who used ‘mute’15 signs – gestures and then hieroglyphs. The first peal of thunder filled them with terror. Awe – a sense of a power greater than themselves brooding over them – awakened in them. They gathered together for self-protection; there follows the ‘age of the gods’ or patres, stern heads of primitive human tribes. Outside their fortifications there is no security: men attacked by other men stronger than themselves seek protection and are given it by the ‘fathers’ at the price of becoming slaves or clients. This marks the ‘heroic’ age of oligarchies, of harsh and avaricious masters, users of ‘poetic’ speech, ruling over slaves and serfs. There comes a moment when these last revolt, extort concessions, particularly with regard to marriage and burial rites, which are the oldest forms of human institution. They cause their new rites to be recorded – this constitutes the earliest form of law. This, in turn, generates prose, which leads to argument and rhetoric, and so to questioning, to philosophy, scepticism, egalitarian democracy, and, in the end, the subversion of the simple piety, solidarity and deference to authority of primitive societies, to their atomisation and disintegration, to destructive egoism and alienation,16 and ultimate collapse, unless some Augustus restores authority and order, or an earlier, more primitive and vigorous tribe, with still unexhausted energies and firm discipline, falls upon it and subjugates it; if this does not happen, there is a total breakdown. The primitive life in caves begins again, and so the entire cycle repeats itself once more, corsi e ricorsi, from the barbarism of savage life to the second barbarism of decay.