Spring 2010 - Interpretation

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I n t e r p r e t a t i o n
according to our memory or imagination, but “are” in God (Risposta 1711,
part. 3 and SN30, Bk. III.5, §9). Only “in God” is the existence of things true;
only “in God” is the being of things gathered; for only in the whole Idea of
God as “Author” (Auctor) or “Father” (Pater) do the senses enter in conatus,
thereby gaining in certainty (ibid.). “Things” (cose, from caussae) themselves
are none other than “determinations,” which ancient pre-philosophical men
imagined to be sensory “deals” (Risposta 1711, part 1; compare SN44, “Of the
Elements,” XLVII).
On account of the “vulgar wisdom” of the Latins, what is
true is colloquially “made” (factum) in the sense of a fact—suggesting that, in
the absence of Christianity’s certifying God, the ancients used to refrain from
calling something “true” until it was a “done deal” (negozio), a fact having
the force of a “contract” (contratto), sensed as a fateful ordinance, or fas: the
earliest Latin peoples did not believe in “words devoid of thing” (verba sine re;
cf. De Uno, Bk. I, Ch. XLVIII and CLII.1-2). The identification of something
true with something certified or “made certain” was necessary in the absence
of a divinely revealed law allowing men to abstract “true things” out of facts
without fearing to remain empty handed: Christianity stands as guarantor
of “words without thing” or of words abstracted from things. In the absence
of Christianity, the words that Christianity’s authority helped rapidly rise to
the heavens of intellection by leaving things behind, would lose all credibility
(compare SN44, “Of the Elements,” I, XXI, XLIX, CXI). This is precisely
the predicament Vico warns modern science is headed for as it makes use
of Scholastic terminology while replacing the biblical God’s authority with
the conscience or sentiment of the human ego (De Antiquissima, Ch. I.2-3,
Risposta 1711, part 3, Risposta 1712, part 4). In the absence of the authority
of Christianity’s God, modern science’s words abstracted out of facts—its
“true things”—remain vulnerable to radical skepticism, appearing to nonscientists
as merely imaginary entities leaving reality behind.
What modern science regards as true is true only “in God,”
in the respect that real things are drawn out of sensory indetermination
through the determination of an authority—“that for all is Jove” (Riprensione,
par. 1)—under which the human conative faculty gathers existence
(esistenza) into being (essere; Risposta 1712, parts 2 and 4, and Risposta 1711,
parts 2-3). Accordingly, Vico identifies the perfect author with being itself:
“I gather in God being the only True” (raccolgo in Dio esser l’unico Vero), he
writes, leaving the thoughtful reader to wonder if in God Vico gathers his
own being; but the doubt is soon clarified by Vico himself, who concludes