In memory of Giovan Battista Vico! Edmund Wilson considered Vico such an important and revolutionary thinker, he made him the first prophet of the modern movement to reform society thru philosophy in To the Finnland Station Vico is best known for his verum factum principle, first formulated in 1710. The principle states that truth is verified through creation or invention and not, as per Descartes, through observation: “The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. (And he noted, the earliest known use of the latin word fact means to have been MADE.) Or, to put in two cent words, truth can only refer to what is agreed upon. An aspect of reality that is not accepted cannot be described as being true, and truths are relative to context. Example, for the majority of history, for the majority of humans, the statement the earth is flat, is true, while the statement, the earth is a sphere is nonsense, or blasphemy, but in the extremely narrow context of the last few centuries, the statement the earth is a sphere became vitally important for the practice of Global trade, while in thmy lifetime, it has become vital to astrogation as well, and has come to dominate so thoroughly that the truth that the earth is flat is regarded as ignorance or superstition. Vico went so far as to regard (correctly) that even the understanding of math is socially constructed, as demonstrated by the dominance of Euclidean geometry, which, while good enough to work on the local scale, fails globally, since, in a hemisphere, parallel lines must be UNEQUAL, while in a sphere, equal parallels MUST meet He excludes mind itself from the realm of consensually constructed facts, and makes it the noumenon, the dang in sich which must be taken as axiomatic (or, to me, as the needful starting premise) Accordingly, he sez, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself.” Or, as I put it, I know thinking occurs. All else is conjecture. This criterion for truth would later shape the history of civilization in Vico’s opus, the Scienza Nuova (The New Science, 1725), because he would argue that civil life – (and even) mathematics – (are) wholly constructed. ( I suspect math is aware, is creating itself, and we are an unnoticed side effect. That is the creation myth that makes the most sense to me.) I have said most of what can be said about his accomplishments without getting so technical it would bore even me, but I salute Vico, as a revitalizer of rhetoric as an instrument of discovery, for his placing fact, even if it is constructed, over theory, which he recognized was equally constructed, and, with less admiration than a would have had a millennia ago, back in 1999, for saying, centuries before Marx, that it was not a philosophers duty to merely understand the world, but also change it (Ouch! Ideological imperialism? Humanitarian intervention, anyone?) I like Vico so much, that even tho I love Biko, I sometimes sing, Vico, oh Jovan Vico! youtube/watch?v=3ncVyxQRw70
Posted on: Sat, 24 Jan 2015 00:06:16 +0000
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