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Vico, Voltaire and the Beginnings of Cultural History
Vico and Voltaire are figures who in a way symbolise two different concepts of culture, which is why I chose them. They were contemporaries in different circumstances. Voltaire was one of the most famous men of his age. Everyone read him. He was not a great original thinker, but he was a marvellous writer, a great polemicist, and his corrosive and still marvellous wit managed to achieve an enormous intellectual effect in destroying a great deal of prejudice and superstition and cruelty and fanaticism in the eighteenth century, and indeed influenced the whole course of superior eighteenth-century culture. It had a vast influence on people like Hume and the entire rationalist and empiricist left-wing anti-clerical movement in the eighteenth century.
Vico on the other hand was the exact opposite. Unlike Voltaire he did not care for science and for rational progress. He was born poor and obscure in Naples, and hardly moved out of that city during his lifetime. He was the son of a bookseller. He was a hunchback, possessed of a very bad and unreadable style, which is why his work of genius was unread then, and is unread now. On the other hand, unlike Voltaire he possessed bold ideas of genius of a wholly original kind. All his life he was a devout and pious Christian, he was brought up by, and lived in the company of, priests and other members of the Church, and held views which were on the whole incompatible with those of Voltaire. They stand for very different concepts of culture.
Vico must have heard of Voltaire, because everybody in the world had heard of Voltaire. Voltaire is most unlikely to have heard of Vico, because very few people outside Naples had heard of him then. So the contrast is as sharp as is possible. Voltaire was successful, he was rich, he must have made more money out of his books than anyone had done before his time. Vico on the other hand remained poor. All he ever wanted to do was to become Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Naples, and never succeeded, and remained only a poor Professor of Rhetoric, who received a salary about a quarter of that of the Professor of Jurisprudence, and eked out a very poor life by writing Latin inscriptions and a few poems, biographies of famous men, and otherwise living the life of a fairly miserable and not very highly thought of hack. Although there were people who were aware that he was a remarkable thinker even in his lifetime, and after his death he did acquire a large local reputation in Naples, his real reputation came in the nineteenth century, as I hope to say.
Let me go back to the subject of the concept of culture itself, where I am trying to draw a contrast. There are at least two notions of culture which can be conceived. One is the old notion of cultura animi. It is an old Latin phrase used by Cicero, by Seneca, by various other Latin authors. It means ‘cultivation of the mind’, even as there might be cultivation of the soil. It means the conscious, deliberate development of one’s artistic and intellectual faculties, of one’s creative faculties in general – self-cultivation – and the contrast is with barbarism or with philistinism or with mobs or with every form of philistine and intellectually unenterprising activity of any sort, acceptance of things, conformity. This is the sense in which it is used in the Middle Ages, when there is a thing called cultura Christi, in the Renaissance, by Bacon, who talks about culture as ‘the Georgics of the soul’, and by the entire eighteenth century. In this way it passes into the nineteenth century. That is what, no doubt, Goethe meant by culture – a culture of élites, a culture of superior persons. That is what Matthew Arnold meant when he spoke of culture as being the best that was said and thought by mankind. That is what is meant by people like T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis. It does mean the culture of a superior kind of certain selected persons with a kind of carefully chosen, a deliberate aiming at, intellectual or moral or aesthetic or some other kind of humane excellence. That is one sense.
The other sense is a somewhat different sense in which we speak of cultural history. The first person who comes into our mind, I suppose, would be Jacob Burckhardt, who wrote the famous history of the civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, mainly about Florence. That sense of culture does not mean the culture of élites especially, or the culture of the few persons interested in the arts, or the sciences or scholarship, which is what the other people of whom I spoke were themselves mainly interested in. In a sense it is a kind of perfectly permissible self-propaganda. The other sense is the sense in which culture is the general style of life, the general self-expression of an entire society: its mores, its attitude to life in general, what its basic values and concepts are, what is nowadays called lifestyle, the attitude of men to other men in a given society, the attitude of men to God, the attitude of men to death or love or all the most important and central ends of life. That is the sense in which, for example, Burckhardt tried to describe what it was to be a Renaissance man, not necessarily a superior Renaissance man, although of course he paid more attention to such people, and he got it, I suppose, from his teacher Boeckh, who was a great classical scholar, who spent his life in editing Greek texts, but whose last work, unfinished and unpublished, was called Hellene, ‘The Greek’, in which he tried to convey what it was to have been a Greek – what the Greek view of life was, in fact, what it was like to have been an Ancient Greek. That goes back in turn to the great scholars of Göttingen, and from them to Herder, who, I suppose, was the German thinker who first put on the map the idea that there were such things as patterns of culture, that each human society had a collective way of expressing itself which was different from that of other human societies. If you were a German there was a way of thinking and feeling, a way of passing legislation, writing songs, getting up and sitting down, doing your hair, eating, drinking, and at the same time of conducting the more important aspects of life as well. All these things had something in common: there was some kind of central pattern which made you a German, which meant that you could be understood by other persons brought up in the same tradition, with the same collective memories, living on the same soilA – that you could be understood more immediately and directly than you could be understood by, say, the Portuguese, who also passed legislation, also ate and drank, also wrote songs, also danced, also had various kinds of attitudes towards God, or love, or life, or whatever it might be, but had it in a Portuguese sort of way. Therefore the notion is that every human group in some way possesses some kind of internal pattern: a Volksgeist, Herder called it – nothing to do, in his case at least, with blood or race, but mainly a matter of language, soil and tradition – which made its stamp on each society, which somehow penetrated it, and could be expressed by all its multifarious activities, which had a certain common pattern which all of them in some way reflected, so that you could in some way, if not actually deduce one from the other, see them as being part of the same kind of lifestyle. That is a different sense of culture from that in which anthropologists use it, in which it is possible to talk about the cultures of various primitive communities in exactly the same sense as cultures of advanced communities, which is not at all the same as the élitist notion of the first sense of culture. This is the sort of culture of which, I suppose, Vico was the true founder, and that is why I wish to say something about him. In fact, if you like to use a modern example, I suppose civilisation as Lord Clark speaks of it fits the first sense of the word, the sense in which Goethe and Arnold talked about it. The criticism of him by various populist critics, Raymond Williams and so on, proceeds from a second point of view, in which they do not regard civilisation as that, but as some kind of total expression of a society, and not simply particular attitudes or tastes or forms of activity on the part of selected superior individuals in it. So that the battle between the two continues to this day and is to that extent relevant and modern.
One of the presuppositions of the first sense of ‘culture’, certainly at least in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – we need not go further back (I do not know whether it was so among the Romans and the Greeks) – is that there are certain fixed human goals which all men, to some extent, seek; there are certain central human questions to which the intelligent answers must be the same at all times, in all places. This is the old idea of natural law, that which all men, in all places, at all times, if they are intelligent and seek for the truth in the correct fashion, will find to be true: quod ubique,quod semper, quod ab omnibus. Certainly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the idea grew up that to all the central human questions there must be one true answer, all the other answers being false. This true answer could be discovered by anyone applying himself sufficiently carefully, with a sufficient degree of intellectual training, wherever he might be and whenever he might be. This is certainly the view which was enormously acceptable, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when with the great progress of the natural sciences it became clear that it really was possible to advance knowledge by the use of a method very different from that which had been used in the middle ages, a new method which was public, which was rational, which any man could track for himself. No occult sources of knowledge, no tradition, no prescription, no dogma, no authority – these were the enemies which Voltaire and the Encyclopaedia fought against. These notions were used by unscrupulous men to throw dust in the eyes of innocent men in order to acquire power over them. But now light would shine, the truth could be discovered by any honest man seeking it by the appropriate method, and his results could be checked and verified or falsified by any other man using the same method. The method was communicable, public and checkable. That is the new notion – and that what is true for the ancient Greeks is true for us now. There is a body of knowledge which can be cumulatively established. We can progress, and simply add to the knowledge of past generations our own knowledge, and in this way a great corpus of knowledge would grow up.
The question therefore naturally came up: What about history? History became an interesting subject, if a rather moot subject, in the sixteenth century, partly because under the Reformation arguments for and against the authority of the Roman Church took a historical form. That is perhaps why there was a certain awakening of interest in history. There had always been a good deal of scepticism about the reliability of history as an instrument. Historians were biased, historians were subjective. How did one ever check their results? How did one ever know about the past? Plutarch pointed out that Herodotus was biased. Various persons in the middle ages pointed out that Plutarch was biased. Herodotus was biased because he preferred the East to the West, according to Plutarch. Plutarch was biased because he obviously aggrandised the Greeks at the expense of the Romans, and so forth. In fact you already get some rather sharp remarks about history in the early sixteenth century – from Cornelius Agrippa, for example, who says: It is absurd to suppose that history is a dependable instrument. Historians are liable to passion, they are liable to biases, they aggrandise their heroes, they denigrate their enemies, they are full of all kinds of loves and hatreds, they do things for their masters or out of patriotism, or out of hatred of this or that cause or institution or religion, or for money, because they are bribed, or whatever the reason may be; and when they do not know the facts they invent them, and nobody can check them. They give their fantasy absolutely free play. How can this be called a serious occupation?
Later in the same century Patrizi, who is an Italian humanist of a latish kind, says: In point of fact all history is ultimately founded on eye-witness evidence. Unless somebody was there you do not of course know what happened. Well, if the thing is a crisis, which is what history often is about – important events – you are probably engaged on one side or the other in the controversy. If you are engaged on one side or the other, you are obviously partial, you are a partisan. Therefore you are not likely to produce an impartial or objective account. If you are not engaged, if for example you are an objective historian, cool, detached, and really want the truth, then you are not likely to be engaged, you have to rely upon the accounts of people who are engaged. Therefore either you are engaged and biased, or, if you are objective, you do not see classified information, you are at the mercy of people who themselves have it in their interests, whether honestly or dishonestly, to distort the facts. Upon such foundations no serious subject can be erected.
The most lethal attack on history was probably produced by the great Descartes. Descartes had a very clear conception of what science was. He thought that on the basis of undeniable axioms, and by means of unbreakable deductive rules, you could establish firm conclusions, which would be as certain as the premisses on which they were founded, and as the rigorous argument by which they were reached. But what about history? Where are the axioms? Where are the rigorous rules? What credence can be given to the conclusions? Take our great Roman historians, he says, even the great historians of the seventeenth century. What do they know about Rome which was not known to Cicero’s servant-girl? Why is this therefore regarded as a major achievement of a human genius? In science we really do advance. A schoolboy today knows more than Pythagoras knew, or than Euclid knew, or than the mathematicians of Rome might have known. A doctor today knows more than Hippocrates knew, or Galen knew, but what do we know in the seventeenth century about Rome which was not known to some average Roman? And so forth. He believed in a real advancing corpus of knowledge, that we stand on the shoulders of our predecessors – we need not go through what they went through again. We refute their errors, we keep their truths, and we build upon them. This is not how the humanities – not merely history, but the humanities in general – proceed. If you wish to spend your time on this, Descartes has no objection. It is rather like travel, which is a perfectly agreeable occupation for people with leisure hours; or like learning some exotic language such as Swiss or Bas-Breton, he says. There is no objection. But the idea of regarding this as a serious occupation for people anxious to discover the truth is obviously ludicrous. Similarly Malebranche, one of the leading Cartesians, says: History is nothing but organised gossip.
This, roughly speaking, is the view of the seventeenth century. I do not say that everybody held it, of course. There was a great deal of serious historical work done by learned monks trying to defend the Church against all kinds of historical attacks upon it – various misquotations, interpolations, distortions of manuscripts, forgeries and the like – so that great Catholic historical antiquarian schools such as the Bollandists and the Maurists arose at about that time, and there were eminent historians towards the end of the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, this was the attack which the new movement mounted; and Pierre Bayle, the great sceptic, was of course delighted to produce conflicting views on the part of historians, a phenomenon which did not obtain in the sciences, where some consensus was possible. So there was what is called a formidable case against history as a serious intellectual discipline.
This, I think, in some way deeply wounded Vico. But before we come to him, let me say that the man who really accepted all this was the great Voltaire. The great Voltaire did not look upon individual facts as very important. He accepted these sceptical conclusions. Maybe we cannot reach individual facts; maybe historians do lie; maybe they do conflict with each other; maybe there is a lot of bias; but the purpose of history, for him, is not simply the discovery of the truth for its own sake. He is not really interested in reconstructing the past as such, or finding out where we come from, or what happened in a Rankian sort of sense. He thinks that history teaches morality by examples. He thinks the use of history is to show men what human beings can achieve and how they fail. He thinks the purpose, in other words, is utilitarian and moral. In that sense it is not perhaps so terribly important to be exact as far as individual facts are concerned, provided you have some general notion of an age and its achievements in very broad terms.