The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  There is no progress from the imperfect towards perfection, for the very notion of perfection entails an absolute criterion of value; there is only intelligible change. The stages are not mechanically caused each by its predecessor, but can be seen to flow from the new needs created by the satisfaction of the old ones in the unceasing self-creation and self-transformation of perpetually active men. In this process, war between the classes, in Vico’s schema, plays a central role. Here again, Vico draws heavily on mythology. Voltaire tells us that myths are the ravings of savages and the inventions of knaves, or at best harmless fancies conjured up by poets to charm their readers. For Vico they are, as often as not, far-reaching images of past social conflicts out of which many diverse cultures grew. He is an ingenious and imaginative historical materialist: Cadmus, Ariadne, Pegasus, Apollo, Mars, Heracles, all symbolise various turning points in the history of social change.’17 What to the rational thought of a later age seemed bizarre combinations of attributes – Cybele, who is both a woman and the earth, horses with wings, centaurs, dryads and the like – are in reality efforts by our ancestors to combine certain functions, or ideas, in a single concrete image. Vico calls such entities ‘imaginative universals’,18 images compounded of incompatible characteristics, for which their descendants, who think in concepts and not in sensuous terms, have substituted an abstract phraseology. The transformation of the denotations of particular words and their modifications can also, for Vico, open windows on to the evolution of social structures. This is because language tells us ‘the histories of the institutions signified by the words’.19 Thus the career of the word ‘lex’ tells us that life in ‘the great forest of the earth’20 was followed by life in huts, and after that villages, cities, academies.21

  Vico’s particular attributions are at times wholly implausible or wild. But this matters less than the fact that he conceived the idea of applying to the accumulated antiquities of the human race a species of Kant’s transcendental method, that is, an attempt to conceive what the experience of a particular society must have been like for this or that myth, or mode of worship, or language, or building, to be their characteristic expression. This opened new doors. It discredited the idea of some static spiritual kernel of timeless and unchanging ‘human nature’. It reinforced the old Epicurean-Lucretian notion of a process of slow growth from savage beginnings. There is no timeless, unalterable concept of justice or property or freedom or rights – these values alter as the social structure of which they are a part alters, and the objects created by mind and imagination in which these values are embodied alter from phase to phase. All talk of the matchless wisdom of the ancients is therefore a ludicrous fantasy: the ancients were frightening savages, orribili bestioni,22 roaming the great forest of the earth, creatures remote from us. There is no omnipresent natural law: the lists of absolute principles spelt out by the Stoics or Isidore of Seville or Thomas Aquinas or Grotius were neither explicitly present in the minds, nor implicit in the acts, of the barbarous early fathers, even of the Homeric heroes. The rational egoists of Hobbes, Locke or Spinoza are arbitrary and unhistorical; if men had been as they are depicted by these thinkers, their history becomes unintelligible.

  Each stage of civilisation generates its own art, its own form of sensibility and imagination. Later forms are neither better nor worse than earlier, but simply different, to be judged each as the expression of its own particular culture. How can early men, whose signs were ‘mute’,23 who spoke with their bodies, who sang before they spoke (as, Vico adds, stammerers still do),24 be judged by the criteria of our own sophisticated culture? At a time when the great French arbiters of taste believed in an absolute standard of artistic excellence and knew that the verse of Racine and Corneille (or, indeed, Voltaire) was superior to anything by the shapeless Shakespeare or the unreadable Milton, or, before them, the bizarre Dante, and perhaps the work of the ancients too, Vico maintained that the Homeric poems were a sublime expression of a society dominated by the ambition, avarice and cruelty of its ruling class; for only a society of this kind could have produced this vision of life. Later ages may have perfected other aids to existence, but they cannot create the Iliad, which embodies the modes of thought and expression and emotion of one particular kind of way of life; these men literally saw what we do not see.

  The new history is to be the account of the succession and variety of men’s experience and activity, of their continuous self-transformation from one culture to another. This leads to a bold relativism, and kills, among other things, the notion of progress in the arts, whereby later cultures are necessarily improvements on, or retrogressions from, earlier ages, each measured by its distance from some fixed, immutable ideal, in terms of which all beauty, knowledge, virtue must be judged. The famous quarrel between the ancients and the moderns can have no sense for Vico: every artistic tradition is intelligible only to those who grasp its own rules, the conventions that are internal to it, an ‘organic’ part of its own changing pattern of the categories of thought and feeling. The notion of anachronism, even if others had some inkling of it, is rendered central by him. Vico tells us that Polybius once said that it was a misfortune for mankind that it was priests and not philosophers who had presided over its birth; how much error and cruelty would have been spared it but for these mendacious charlatans.25 Lucretius passionately reiterated this charge. To those who live after Vico, it is as if one were to suggest that Shakespeare could have written his plays at the court of Genghis Khan, or Mozart composed in ancient Sparta. Vico goes far beyond Bodin and Montaigne and Montesquieu:26 they (and Voltaire) may have believed in different social esprits, but not in successive stages of historical evolution, each phase of which has its own modes of vision, forms of expression, whether one calls them art or science or religion. The idea of the cumulative growth of knowledge, a single corpus governed by single, universal criteria, so that what one generation of scientists has established, another generation need not repeat, does not fit this pattern at all. This marks the great break between the notion of positive knowledge and that of understanding.

  Vico does not deny the utility of the latest scientific techniques in establishing facts. He claims no intuitive or metaphysical faculty which can dispense with empirical investigation. Tests for the authenticity of documents and other evidence, for dating, for chronological order, for establishing who did or suffered what and when and where, whether we are dealing with individuals or classes or societies, for establishing bare facts, the newly established scientific methods of investigation, may well be indispensable. The same applies to the investigation of impersonal factors – geographical or environmental or social – to the study of natural resources, fauna, flora, social structure, colonisation, commerce, finance; here we must use the methods of science, which establish the kind of probability of which Bodin and Voltaire spoke, and every historian who uses sociological and statistical methods has done ever since. With all this Vico has no quarrel. What, then, is novel in his conception of history, over which he tells us he spent twenty years of continuous labour?

  It is, I think, this: that to understand history is to understand what men made of the world in which they found themselves, what they demanded of it, what their felt needs, aims, ideals were. He seeks to recover their vision of it, he asks what wants, what questions, what aspirations determined a society’s view of reality; and he thinks that he has created a new method which will reveal to him the categories in terms of which men thought and acted and changed themselves and their worlds. This kind of knowledge is not knowledge of facts or of logical truths, provided by observation or the sciences or deductive reasoning; nor is it knowledge of how to do things; nor the knowledge provided by faith, based on divine revelation, in which Vico professed belief. It is more like the knowledge we claim of a friend, of his character, of his ways of thought or action, the intuitive sense of the nuances of personality or feeling or ideas Montaigne describes so well, and which Montesquieu took into account.


  To do this, one must possess imaginative power of a high degree, such as artists and, in particular, novelists require. And even this will not get us far in grasping ways of life too remote from us and unlike our own. Yet even then we need not totally despair, for what we are seeking to understand is men – human beings endowed, as we are, with minds and purposes and inner lives – their works cannot be wholly unintelligible to us, unlike the impenetrable content of non-human nature. Without this power of what he describes as ‘entering into’ minds and situations the past will remain a dead collection of objects in a museum for us.

  This sort of knowledge, not thought of in Descartes’ philosophy, is based on the fact that we do know what men are, what action is, what it is to have intentions, motives, to seek to understand and interpret, in order to make ourselves at home in the non-human world, what Hegel called Bei-sich-selbst-seyn.27 The most famous passage in the New Science expresses this central insight most vividly:

  … in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects on this cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature, which, since God made it, he alone knows; and that they should have neglected the study of the world of nations, or civil world, which, since men had made it, men could come to know.28

  Men have made their civil world – that is, their civilisation and institutions – but, as Marx was later to point out, not out of ‘whole cloth’, not out of infinitely malleable material; the external world, men’s own physical and psychical constitution, play their part. This does not concern Vico: he is interested only in the human contribution: and when he speaks of the unintended consequences of men’s actions, which they have not deliberately ‘made’, he attributes them to Providence, which guides men for their ultimate benefit in its own inscrutable way. That too, then, like nature, is outside man’s conscious control. But what he means is that what one generation of men have experienced and done and embodied in their works, another generation can grasp, although, it may be, with difficulty and imperfectly. For this one must possess a developed fantasia – Vico’s term for imaginative insight, which he accuses the French theorists of undervaluing. This is the capacity for conceiving more than one way of categorising reality, like the ability to understand what it is to be an artist, a revolutionary, a traitor, to know what it is to be poor, to wield authority, to be a child, a prisoner, a barbarian. Without some ability to get into the skin of others, the human condition, history, what characterises one period or culture as against others, cannot be understood. The successive patterns of civilisation differ from other temporal processes – say, geological – by the fact that it is men – ourselves – who play a crucial part in creating them. This lies at the heart of the art or science of attribution: to tell what goes with one form of life and not with another cannot be achieved solely by inductive methods.

  Let me give an example of Vico’s method: he is arguing that the story that the Romans borrowed the Twelve Tables (the original Roman code of laws) from the Athens of Solon’s day cannot be true; for it is not possible for such barbarians as the Romans must have been in Solon’s time to have known where Athens was, or that it possessed a code that might be of value to them. Moreover, even on the improbable assumption that these early Romans knew that there was a more civilised or better organised society to the southeast of them (even though the barbarous tribes of early Rome could scarcely have entertained, however inchoately, such notions as civilisation or a city-state), they could not have translated Attic words into idiomatic Latin without a trace of Greek influence on it, or used, for example, such a word as auctoritas, for which no Greek equivalent existed.

  This kind of argument rests not on an accumulation of empirical evidence about human behaviour in many times and places, upon which sociological generalisations can be made to rest. Such notions as advanced culture, and what distinguishes it from barbarism, are for Vico not static concepts, but describe stages in the growth of self-awareness in individuals and societies, differences between the concepts and categories in use at one stage of growth from those that shape another, and the genesis of one from another, to understand which ultimately stems from understanding what childhood and maturity are. In the early fifteenth century, the Italian humanist Bruni had declared that whatever was said in Greek could equally well be said in Latin too. This is precisely what Vico denies, as the example of auctoritas shows. There is no immutable structure of experience, to reflect which a perfect language could be invented, and into which imperfect approximations to such a language could be transposed. The language of so-called primitives is not an imperfect rendering of what later generations will express more accurately: it embodies its own unique vision of the world, which can be grasped, but not translated totally into the language of another culture. One culture is not a less perfect version of another: winter is not a rudimentary spring; summer is not an undeveloped autumn.

  The worlds of Homer or the Bible, or the Kalevala, cannot be understood at all if they are judged in terms of the absolute criteria of Voltaire or Helvétius or Buckle, and given marks according to their distance from the highest reaches of human civilisation, as exemplified in Voltaire’s musée imaginaire, where the four great ages of man hang side by side as aspects of the single, selfsame peak of human attainment. To say this is a truism which I may be thought to have laboured far too long: it was not a truism in the early eighteenth century. The very notion that the task of historians was not merely to establish facts and give causal explanations for them, but to examine what a situation meant to those involved in it, what their outlook was, by what rules they were guided, what ‘absolute presuppositions’ (as Collingwood called them)29 were entailed in what they (but not other societies, other cultures) said or did – all that is certainly novel and profoundly foreign to the thought of the philosophes and scientists of Paris. It coloured the thoughts of those who first reacted against the French Enlightenment, critics and historians of national literatures, in Switzerland, in England, in Germany – Bodmer and Breitinger and von Muralt, Hebrew scholars like Lowth, and the Homeric critics like Blackwell, social and cultural thinkers like Young and Adam Ferguson, Hamann and Möser and Herder. After them came the great generation of classical scholars, Wolf and Niebuhr and Boeckh, who transformed the study of the ancient world, and whose work had a decisive influence on Burckhardt and Dilthey and their successors in the twentieth century. From these origins came comparative philology and comparative anthropology, comparative jurisprudence and religion and literature, comparative histories of art and civilisation and ideas: the fields in which not merely knowledge of facts and events, but understanding – Einfühlung, empathy – is required.

  The use of informed imagination about, and insight into, systems of value, conceptions of life of entire societies, is not required in mathematics or physics, geology or zoology, or – though some would deny this – in economic history or even sociology if it is conceived and practised as a strictly natural science. This statement is intentionally extreme, intended to emphasise the gap that opened between natural science and the humanities as the result of a new attitude to the human past. No doubt in practice there is a great overlap between impersonal history as it is conceived by, say, Condorcet or Buckle or Marx, who believed that human society could be studied by a human science in principle analogous to that which tells us about the behaviour of ‘bees or beavers’ (to use Condorcet’s analogy),30 contrasted with the history of what men believed in and lived by, the life of the spirit, blindness to which Coleridge and Carlyle imputed to the utilitarians, and Acton to Buckle (in his famous attack upon him), and Croce to the positivists. Vico began this schism: after that there was a parting of the ways. Th
e specific and unique versus the repetitive and the universal, the concrete versus the abstract, perpetual movement versus rest, the inner versus the outer, quality versus quantity, culture-bound versus timeless principles, mental strife and self-transformation as a permanent condition of man versus the possibility (and desirability) of peace, order, final harmony and the satisfaction of all rational human wishes – these are some of the aspects of the contrast.31

  These conceptions of their subject-matter and method, which are by now taken for granted by historians of literature, of ideas, of art, of law, and by historians of science too, and most of all by historians and sociologists of culture influenced by this tradition, are not as a rule, and do not need to be, consciously present to the minds of natural scientists themselves. Yet, before the eighteenth century, there was, so far as I know, no sense of this contrast. Distinctions between the vast realm of philosophy – natural and metaphysical – theology, history, rhetoric, jurisprudence, were not too sharply drawn; there were disputes about method in the Renaissance, but the great cleavage between the provinces of natural science and the humanities was, for the first time, made, or at least revealed, for better or for worse, by Giambattista Vico. Thereby he started a great debate of which the end is not in sight.