The Philosophy of Giambattista VicoCroce, Benedetto
Philosophy
The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico
Croce, Benedetto
Vico, Giambattista, 1668-1744
Finally, Vico's providence, the rationality
and objectivity of history, which obeys a logic different from that
attributed to it by the fancies and illusions of the individual,
acquires a more prosaic name, but without changing its nature, in
the "cunning of the reason" formulated by Hegel: it appeared again,
ingeniously but perversely treated, in Schopenhauer's "cunning of
the species," and again, treated with little ingenuity on a purely
psychological method, in Wundt's so-called law of the "heterogenesis of
ends."
Almost all the leading doctrines of nineteenth-century idealism, we
have seen, may be regarded as refluxes of Vician doctrines. Almost
all; for there is one of which we find in Vico not the premonition but
the necessity, not a temporary filling but a gap to be filled. Here
the nineteenth century is no longer a reflux of, but an advance upon
Vico; and discordant voices of warning or reproach rise up against
him. His distinction of the two worlds of mind and nature, to both of
which the criterion of his theory of knowledge, the conversion of the
truth with the thing created, was applicable, but applicable to the
former by man himself because that world is a world created by man,
and therefore knowable by him, to the second by God the Creator, so
that this world is unknowable by man; this distinction was not accepted
by the new philosophy, which, more Vician than Vico, made the demigod
Man into a God, lifted human thought to the level of universal mind or
the idea, spiritualised or idealised nature, and tried to understand
it speculatively in the "Philosophy of Nature" as itself a product of
mind. As soon as the last remnant of transcendence was in this way
destroyed, the concept of progress overlooked by Vico and grasped and
affirmed to some extent by the Cartesians and their eighteenth-century
followers in their superficial and rationalistic manner shone out in
its full splendour.
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