Giambattista Vico · Civilisations
Vico’s revolutionary principle - that we can truly know only what we ourselves have made - and how it founded a distinctive way of knowing the human world.
At the heart of Vico’s philosophy lies one of the most original principles in the theory of knowledge: the verum-factum principle - ‘the true and the made are convertible’ (verum et factum convertuntur). The principle holds that we can truly and fully know only what we ourselves have made: that genuine knowledge of a thing requires having made it, because only the maker knows a thing fully - knows it from the inside, knows its causes and principles, knows it as the maker who brought it into being. We know fully only what we make; the maker’s knowledge of his creation is the model of genuine, complete knowledge. This principle - that the true and the made are convertible, that we know fully only what we make - is the foundation of Vico’s distinctive theory of knowledge and of his whole New Science.
The deep intuition behind verum-factum is that the maker of something has a special, inside knowledge of it that no external observer can have. The maker knows his creation from the inside - knows its causes and principles (because he supplied them), knows why it is as it is (because he made it so), knows it as the one who brought it into being and understands it from within. An external observer, by contrast, can only know a thing from the outside - can observe its appearances and behaviour, but cannot know its inner causes and principles as the maker does, cannot enter into it from within. Applied to the human world: because we humans made society, history, and institutions, we can know them from the inside - we can understand the human motives, purposes, and meanings that animate them, enter into them as fellow human beings who share the nature that made them, grasp them from within. We cannot do this with nature, which we did not make and cannot know from the inside, but only externally. This - the maker’s inside knowledge, our ability to know the human world from within because we share the human nature that made it - is the deep intuition behind verum-factum and Vico’s distinctive epistemology of the human sciences.
Vico’s verum-factum principle founds the autonomy of the human sciences - the idea that the study of the human world (history, society, culture) is a distinctive kind of knowledge, with its own distinctive method (understanding from within), fundamentally different from and not reducible to the natural sciences. This was a profound and influential idea, especially as a defence against the growing tendency to treat the natural sciences as the only model of genuine knowledge and to demand that all knowledge, including the study of the human world, conform to the methods of natural science. Vico insisted, against this tendency, that the human world is a distinctive domain, knowable in a distinctive way (from within, through the understanding of human meaning), with its own distinctive method appropriate to its distinctive character - and that the study of the human world should not be forced into the alien methods of natural science, but should develop its own distinctive method of understanding from within. This defence of the autonomy and distinctive method of the human sciences - against the imperialism of the natural-scientific model - is one of Vico’s most important and influential contributions, and a founding principle of the human sciences.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned Vico’s verum-factum principle: that we can know what we make. Explain the principle and its consequence - that the human world is more knowable to us than the natural world - in your own words.
Leads to Karl Marx.
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