Vico's Historicism and the Ontology of Arguments

S T E P H E N H. D A N I E L

GIAMBATTISTA VICO has now become one of those figures who disrupts the historiographic impulse for classification. No sooner do we place him in one or another category than we see the need to realign our categorial schemes.

The characterization of Vico as a historicist is a case in point. By emphasiz- ing how meaning develops in exchanges that constitute history and that guide our interpretat ions o f it, Vico points to central tenets of historicism. His verum-

fac tum principle (in which the true is unders tood in terms of the process by which it is made) and his focus on etymology as the basis for interpret ing both written and oral tradit ion identify seminal components in the development o f the historicist tendency of modern thought.~ By indicating how different ages are intelligible only in their own terms, Vico warns against the anachronisms of totalizing interpretations of history. He thus subordinates history to histori- ography by showing how the depiction o f the past is itself an expression of the values of particular epochs.

O f course, this way of describing Vico's position glosses over the herme- neutic circularity that informs all historicism. For in saying that an epoch's mentality, paradigm, or episteme defines what can and cannot be said or thought , the historicist implies that the t ruth of such a statement is itself independent of all mentalities. Though the meaning of this historicist proposi- tion may be embedded in the discursive practices of a mentality, the truth of the proposit ion can be independent of its historicity, even if what it means to say- - tha t the proposition is t rue- - i s historically bounded.

' See, for example, Elio Gianturco's Introduction to Giambattista Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), xxx; the Introduction by Max H. Fisch and Thomas G. Bergin to The Autobiography ofGiambattista Vico (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 56; and B. A. Haddock, Vico's Political Thought (Brynmill, Swansea: Mordake Press, x986 ), 87, 2o3. Cf. Leon Pompa, Human Nature and Historical Knowledge: Hume, Hegel, and Vico (New York: Cam- bridge University Press, x 99o), 177-

[431]

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Vico proposes just this way out of the circle when he invokes his doctrine of ideal eternal history. According to that doctrine, every culture's rise, develop- ment, maturity, decline, and fall enacts the corso-ricorso established by divine providence." As that which provides the rationale for ideal eternal history, divine providence is not limited to any historical context. But because Vico has to describe the process by which providence is involved in history by appealing to the vocabulary of his own historical epoch, he invites the kind of problem that historicism embodies.

However, the question raised by referring to Vico's philosophy as historicist does not deal with divine providence as such. Rather it concerns our knowledge of how divine providence functions in ideal eternal history. It is on this point that Vico appears to lend himself to a historicist reading in claiming that, because history itself is a human creation, its certainty and authority do not depend on anything other than its narrative formulation: "Indeed we make bold to affirm that he who meditates this Science narrates to himself this ideal eternal history so far as he himself makes it for h imse l f . . . . For the first indubi- table principle is that this world of nations has certainly been made by men, and its guise must therefore be found within the modifications of our own human mind. And history cannot be more certain than when he who creates the things also narrates them" (NS w also w Because the process by which we make history recounts the mind's modification of itself, the narration of history is at the same time the history of narration. Insofar as the order of the mind con- forms to the order of human institutions, it is certain and speaks with (civil) authority. However, the truth, rationale, meaning, or significance of human authority depends on its conformity to the pattern of eternal reason (in terms of which it is intelligible).3 In narrating the operations of the human mind as a history, the New Science thus treats the history of the mind as the proper object of science itself. Validation of the knowledge it provides consists in its ability to point to its own history specifically as a narration.

As I will point out, the issue of Vico's historicism can be resolved by noting how the certain and the true function in his account of ideal eternal history. Historicist attempts to equate the two presume an ontology that relegates rhetorical expression to a status ancillary to the historical generation of mean-

�9 The New Science ofGiambattista Vico, 3rd edition 0744), tr. Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), paragraphs 245, 348-49, 9~5 - Paragraph numbers in the New Science are identified in the text by NS.

~Gf. Giambattista Vico, l l diritto universale, uno printipio et fine uno (17zo), Opere l l - l , ed. Yausto Nicolini (Bari: Laterza, t936), 35, 83-84, and Haddock, Vico's Poht~cal Thought, 93- See Patrick H. Hutton, "The Problem of Oral Tradition in Vico's Historical Scholarship," Journal of the History ofldeas 53 (199~): 9; and Donald P. Verene, "The New Art of Narration: Vico and the Muses," New Vico Studies t (t983): 2 t -38 .

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ing. But Vico recommends another approach, one in which historical events are treated on the model of legal pronouncements and grammatical reforma- tions of syntax. This approach (I suggest) assumes the ontology that informs the propositional logic of the early Stoics rather than the predicate logic adopted by ancient and modern thinkers, for whom rhetoric is a mere embel- lishment of argumentation.

1. I D E A L E T E R N AL H I S T O R Y

As students of the New Science have often noted, the truth of ideal eternal history is (for Vico) independent of the imaginative or rhetorical exchanges that constitute history. Insofar as God provides the providential rationale for the cycles of human history, He makes history true by making history possible in terms of the various ages of a culture.4 Even though human beings make history (and thus make history determinate or certain), they do not make history true; for they cannot provide a justification for the specific order of events in history, nor can they account for the universality of human institu- tions. As Vico himself notes: "Our new Science must therefore be a demonstra- tion, so to speak, of what providence has wrought in history, for it must be a history of the institutions by which, without human discernment or counsel, and often against the designs of men, providence has ordered this great city of the human race. For though this world has been created in time and particu- lar, the institutions established therein by providence are universal and eter- nal" (NS w Because knowledge (scienza) of the true is limited to what one makes, only God can know why history exhibits the order it does. But though human beings cannot provide a justification for the specific order of historical events (since they do not create the conditions for history), they nonetheless can discern the patterns that constitute history (NS w ~). It is the task of the New Science, Vico insists, to provide such discernment.

The verum-factum principle applies to the providential character of the corso-ricorso of human history insofar as God makes history possible and even (in its earliest stages) true. The human actions and choices that define human history can be known to be true only when they are cognized in terms of history understood as guided by providence (i.e., ideal eternal history). But

4 On Vico's t reatment of providence, see Luigi Bellofiore, La dottrina della provvidenza in G. B. Vico (Padova: CEDAM, 1962); A. Robert Caponigri, Time and Idea: The Theory of History in Giambattista Vico (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968 ), 91-1o8; Sandra Rudnick Luft, "Creative Activity in Vico and the Secularization of Providence," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 9 (1979): 337-55; James C. Morrison, "How to Interpret the Idea of Divine Providence in Vico's New Science," Philosophy and Rhetoric 12 (1979): 256-61; Sandra Rudnick Luft, "A Genedc Interpretat ion of Divine Providence in Vico's New Science,"Journal of the History of Philosophy 20 (1982): t 51-69; and Gregory L. Lucente, "Vico's Notion of 'Divine Provi- dence' and the Limits of Human Knowledge, Freedom, and Will," MLN 97 (1982): 183-9 I.

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even though the cognition of such order occurs late in the development of humanity, it is made possible by the same principle of creation that allows human beings to achieve any knowledge of the true, namely, the verum-factum principle (NS w

Together divine providence and human customs and practices constitute the two complementary institutions that comprise what Vico refers to simply as the subject matter of jurisprudence (NS w Apart from divine provi- dence, human institutions exhibit their own forms of intelligibility. But those forms (as the historicist is correct in pointing out) are intelligible only in their own terms. In order to provide a justification for human history at large, the New Science alludes to the structure revealed as ideal eternal history. But, as Vico makes clear in his section on method, the examination of the divine institutions--that is, divining the auspices--in order to discover the rationale for the totality of human history is beyond the scope of the New Science (NS w In acknowledging this limitation, Vico indicates how human institu- tions depend on the divine institutions, but he does not claim that a thorough understanding of the auspices is required to justify and legitimate the New Science itself.

Herein, though, lies a difficulty with Vico's enterprise, one that inspires both the historicist reading of Vico and the historicist critique of Vico. In terms of Vico's own analysis of history, what is sensible or intelligible differs from one age to another depending on rhetorical and imaginative social forms. But if that is true, then Vico's recognition of a justification or rationale for history must be itself historical, which means that its rationality is limited to that of the rather late age of recorded history, the age of humanity.

It is this claim, that reason itself is to be understood in terms of its historical character, that figures most prominently in historicism. Specifically, historicism draws attention to how social and cultural practices determine the concepts in terms of which they are understood. As Ian Hacking puts it, historicism is "the theory that social and cultural phenomena are historically determined, and that each period in history has its own values that are not directly applicable to other epochs. In philosophy that implies that philosophical issues find their place, importance and definition in a specific cultural milieu."5 Insofar as philosophy is a social or cultural phenomenon, it expresses the values of the epoch of which it is a part. This does not necessarily imply that historicism leads to historical relativism, for the designation of what constitutes the epoch determines the

5 Ian Hacking, "Two Kinds of 'New Historicism' for Philosophers," New Literary History 21 (199~ 344-45- Also see Jonathan R~e, "The Vanity of Historicism," New Literary History ~2 (1991): 966; and William Dean, History Making History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), x.

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transcendental conditions for making comparisons among cultures. 6 But it does mean that any proposed unity or continuity between epochs or cultures must rule out the possibility of radically incommensurable systems of thought.

Historicism has been developed in two radically different directions. (1) In the Hegelian-Habermasian program, history inscribes the humanistic and evolutionary course of reason. Past epochs are interpreted as historical or even prehistoric in terms of Enlightenment rationality. (9) In the Kuhnian- Foucaultian version, the possibility of real historical difference is protected from a totalizing appropriation by Reason (with a capital R) by the assump- tion that differences in cultural practices constitute the meaning of rational- ity (with a small r). In both versions of historicism, though, there is a sense that intelligibility is linked to the historical practices of an epoch, even if the limits of the epochs are extended (as in the Hegelian model) to include all recorded or intelligible history.

The circularity of Vico's apparent historicism can, no doubt, be minimized by noting that, for him, history is meaningful, determinate, or certain in virtue of the commonplaces that unite a culture (or "nation"); whereas historical narrations are true insofar as they express the universal and eternal character of Providence (NS w 141-42, 163).7 This resolution of the problem, however, comes at the cost of concluding that the truth of history is only accidentally related to the meaning of history, because historical meaning is a product of human activity considered independently of any divine determination. Consis- tent with a historicist perspective, truth itself becomes a function of meaning. Even if providential guidance in ideal eternal history provides the truth condi- tions for human historical activity, the meaning of such conditions depends on the very activity it supposedly verifies.

As several commentators have noted, the issue here centers on whether Vico's historicism is compatible with the commitment to universal, progressive enlightenment implicit in his doctrine of ideal eternal history, s For if the actual pronouncements and judgments of human beings provide the narra- tive of history, then insofar as those expressions characterize the mentality of the age of reflective humanity, they cannot reveal how expressions in the earlier ages of human development participate in the same ideal eternal his-

Cf. Joseph Margolis, "Historicism, Universalism, and the Threat of Relativism," The Monist 67 (1984): 3o8-17; and Robert D'Amico, Historicism and Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 1989), ix-xii, 73-t44.

7Cf. Luiz Costa-Lima, "Erich Auerbach: History and Metahistory," New Literary History 19 0988), 478; and Haddock, Vico's Political Thought, 193-99.

s Cf. Emanuele Riverso, "History as Metascience: A Vichian Cue to the Understanding of the Nature and Development of Sciences," New Vico Studies 3 0985): 51-52; Haddock, Vico's Political Thought, 126-29, 144, 158-59; and Patrick H. Hutton, "Vico's Significance for the New Cultural History," New Vieo Studies 3 0985): 78-79 .

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tory. In fact, that very inability of critical rationality (in the human age) to appreciate the immediacy and vitality of divine and heroic expression com- prises the "barbarism of reflection" that heralds the demise of the human age (NS w lo6). As Vico admits, to try to recover the ability to think in terms of those earlier ages is one of the most difficult tasks for anyone trying to master his New Science (NS w But he says that such an undertaking is absolutely essential for understanding how his work discloses the imaginative and rhetori- cal ontologies of the ancients without reducing them to the terms of reflective humanity.

However, the historicist interpretation of Vico highlights the problem of introducing talk of an ideal eternal history into this scenario. If the mentality of earlier ages is so different from our own--as Vico suggests in claiming that he spent most of his life trying to understand how they thought- - then it seems unlikely he can escape the charge that his description of ideal eternal history is itself a product of the age of human rationality. At best, his descrip- tion seems merely to assimilate (in Hegelian fashion) characteristics of the earlier ages without acknowledging the radical discrepancies between their strategies of intelligibility and that of human rationality.

In regard to this charge Vico insists that the master key to his New Science-- the recognition that early humans spoke in poetic characters--respects the integrity of those earlier mentalities by showing how expression (speech, ges- ture, word) carves out the world of objects with which thought is concerned (NS w As he notes, because prehistoric mentalities do not presume a rationality that legitimates and guides expression, they cannot be retrieved by searching for some rationale common to all mentalities. For as Vico is at pains to point out, rationality itself characterizes only the age of reflective humanity: "Men were for a long period incapable of truth and of reason" (NS w Any attempt to impose the values and strategies of rationality onto the ancients would fall victim to the very objections raised by historicists.

So instead of assuming that we share ideas with the ancients, Vico suggests that we limit ourselves to what we know we share, namely, expressions. Because expressions identify the determinate relations of things with one another, any changes in expressions would chronicle the changes in how things are rede- fined in different ages and in how the ages themselves are different in virtue of expressional realignments. Instead of marking the uniform development of reason, then, history and the historicity of things designate how different rhe- torical practices constitute different guidelines of intelligibility. No underlying structure unites these sets of practices, for the practices themselves define the structures in virtue of which things are defined and can be known. In short, there is no metanarrative. Rather, only by exhuming the etymological heritage of expressions can we have access to ancient mentalities, because for the an-

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cients (unlike us) there is no divorce between the spoken and the intelligible, the figural and the cognitive, the rhetorical and the rational.

In his On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians (a71o), Vico outlines the metaphysical presuppositions that underlie this rhetorical ontology. For the ancients, he notes, expressions ("arguments") combine discovery and judg- ment; they express in narration the ontological condition for the progression of thought; they identify the "topics" that direct simple apprehension.9 In short, expressions or arguments embody an ontology that does not begin with the distinctions of subject and predicate, thing and word, substance and prop- erty, that are more characteristic of the age of reflective humanity. Instead, in the ontology of the ancients, propositions are the ultimate components of intelligibility. Propositions cannot be analyzed into simpler components, for to do so would ignore how the meanings of terms in such expressions depend on their appearances in those expressions. It would also erase the patterns of reasoning constituted by those expressions, in virtue of which patterns terms are intelligibly related to one another.

For Vico the rhetorical ontology of the ancients is not as far removed as we might originally suspect, for many of these same themes are commonplaces in the doctrines of Peter Ramus and his followers. Indeed, Vico's repeated ap- peal to the vocabulary of the Stoic tradition revived in Ramism reveals how he retrieves the union of rhetoric and metaphysics from the subject-predicate ontology in terms of which it is misunderstood by his Cartesian and Lockean contemporaries.

For the Ramists, as for the ancients, arguments are the things that comprise the universe. They are, at one and the same time, the ultimate simples of both sensation and terminology (simplicia sensa, simplicia nomina). '~ They are the "corpuscles" of being, thought, and speech, whose rhetorical discovery, "inven- tion," or "finding" is the aboriginal or proto-'~judgment" of mere identity and difference. At this level of simple apprehension, no reasoning occurs, only the differentiation of signifiers. H The possibility of their discrimination--indeed, their very existence--depends on their placement in a discourse by which they are meaningfully related and distinguished as commonplaces in that discourse. As expressions of generative discourse, arguments identify the commonplaces

0See Giambattista Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, tr. Lucia M. Palmer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988 ), 99, 178. Subsequent page references to this work are designated in the text as AW.

,o Cf. Walter J. Ong, s.J., Ramns, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 66, 203, 21o; Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York: William Sloane Assoc., 1949), 148-49; and Stephen H. Daniel, The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards: A Study in Divine Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), ch. 3.

H Cf. Ong, Ramus, 114, 184-87; and Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 9 - lo.

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(the topoi or loci) of differentiation in discourse, and in this way they identify things. This is why, for Ramus, arguments are things and things are arguments.

The order of reason that governs argumenta is the order of commonplaces, the "grammar without verbs" that unites and separates things affectively in terms of their "agreement" or "consent" with one another. Pronouncing judg- ment or sentence on those relations requires a second 'Judgment," in which one argument is arranged with another to form an "axiom" whose truth consists in its being enunciated, pronounced, or asserted? 2 The aim of dialec- tic (the doctrina of discourse) is to pronounce judgment on arguments, thereby validating their mutual arrangement, dispositio, or "collocation" as something already implicit in their sensible juxtaposition. In doing so, the teacher/judge provides an order and rationale for arguments within history. The visual discrimination of things touted in the theoria of Plato and Aristotle is thereby subordinated to the felt ordering of things in assertions. 'S But that historical ordering cannot suffice as an explanation for history itself. This is why Ramus concludes that a third judgment is required, namely, one in which a Stoic concept of providence can be invoked without necessarily implying that spe- cific historical events are determined by fate or are related to one another as subjects or predicates or to history itself as predicates?4

Because the ancients assume mentalities vastly different from that of reflec- tive humanity, Vico's New Science does not attempt to appropriate them in terms of a subject-predicate ontology. Nor does it attempt to incorporate them into the subject-predicate account of history that characterizes human rational- ity. Instead, the New Science appeals to an ontology in which the development of human rationality is understood as the gradual displacement of aboriginal significance by the constrained and artificial organon of classical (Platonic- Aristotelian) metaphysics. In that organon, subject and predicate are intelligi- ble independently of one another, that is, apart from their actual appearances in determinate rhetorical expressions. When the topics of an expression are removed from their sensual immediacy in the distinction of subject and predi- cate, their reunion in subsequent expressions appears to be arbitrary. This is why rhetoric is dismissed in the human age as mere embellishment, having no ontological character or significance.

In the mentalities of the ancients, though, each expression identifies a commonplace as part of a narration or history that comprises the matrix of sensual or figural intelligibility. Apart from that matrix no expression can function as an "argument," because it no longer has the power to guide or

~" See Ramus's Dialecticae libri duo (157~), cited in Ong, Ramus, 64, ~52. 3 Cf. Ong, Ramus, 1 o7, 195, 3 o8; Miller, New England Mind, 124, a 5 o. ,4Cf. Ong, Ramus, 188-89.

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influence behavior and thought insofar as it loses its resonances with other expressions. In his discovery of this alternative form of intelligibility--a form in which the ancients spoke and thought in terms of"poetic characters"--Vico appeals to an ontology and a logic thoroughly at odds with those of rational humanity. Insofar as this ancient onto-rhetoric is incommensurable with ratio- nality, it cannot be interpreted in terms of rationality. To characterize it as another form of rationality or as the means by which rationality is defined differently would simply be to reveal a historicist penchant for equating intelli- gibility with rationality. Since he does not propose ideal eternal history as a rational account but rather as an account that includes rationality as one of it~ moments, he needs only to allude to providence as the jurisprudential under- pinning or argumentative justification for human institutions. I f he were to try to give a human rationale for all human institutions, or a human rationale for divine institutions, he would clearly be committed to a historicist position.

Instead, Vico's New Science reveals how historicism presumes the propri- ety of classical ontology insofar as the subject of a historicist analysis is still a product of predication. Admittedly, historicism turns the table on the classical Aristotelian treatment of substances and their accidents by claiming that the meaning of a subject (in this case, history) is determined by its predicates. From the Aristotelian perspective, the nature of the subject determines which predicates follow from it. But since history is not a substance as such, its patterns of predication can be nothing more than purely accidental, "merely" rhetorical. The accidents of history are the predicates that might make history more intelligible to us; but no predication as such transforms the nature of history itself into something other than a pastiche of accidentally connected events.

It is this notion of history that at first glance seems to lie behind Vico's need to invoke some ideal eternal history that providentially guides human develop- ment. It is also the notion most vulnerable to the historicist critique. But histori- cism appeals to an ontology that more properly characterizes a Platonic notion of history. Instead of giving priority to the subject, the Platonic ontology identi- fies a thing in terms of its predicates. In that view history has significance in virtue of its predicates; its predicates explicate and thus identify the subject. Like a Leibnizian monad, history comes into being by playing out all of the predicates that identify it specifically as the kind of thing it is. Understood in terms of any one of those predicational characterizations, the subject of history again appears unified according to an ideal and eternal scheme that resolves all apparently inconsistent predicates within the logic of the dialectic.

In the Hegelian rendition of this, the dialectic of Absolute Spirit appropri- ates the mentalities of earlier ages by validating their malformed attempts to express the truth recognized finally in the human age. But historicism adds a

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twist to the Hegelian notion of history: Instead of claiming that history consti- tutes the predicates in terms of which Absolute Spirit is explicated, the his- toricist notes that even the discussion of Absolute Spirit occurs in a specific historical context outside of which the doctrine would be unintelligible. The accidents o f history, then, do not identify some Absolute Spirit as such, but ra ther identify a particular "spirit of the times," an authorized world-view in terms of which the historian constitutes himself as the subject o f history. O f course, the humanism implicit in this kind of historicism dismisses the possibil- ity of retrieving anything like what Vico describes as radically di f ferent ways o f conceiving the world. From the historicist perspective, his appeal to an ideal eternal history appears to be nothing more than an expression of the impulse o f enl ightenment rationality to appropriate all prior mentalities in terms of its own conceptual categories.

It is precisely because the ancients employ a mentality so at odds with that of the Enl ightenment that they seem to be excluded from the totalizing grasp of an ideal eternal history. Either Vico is therefore blind to the very ideas that are at tr ibuted to him as the putative father of historicism, or he is simply wrong in claiming to have retrieved an unders tanding of ways of thinking lost in the philosophical rationality of the human age.

As I have suggested, there is a way of avoiding both of these negative assessments. The clue lies in recognizing how universalist theories of history and historicism trade on an ontology of metaphysically distinguishable sub- jects and predicates that Vico's New Science rejects. In its place he turns to the rhetorical ontology of jur isprudence, an ontology in which rhetoric and logic are uni ted in forensic performances that both identify ("invent") topics for adjudication and lay out the strategies for their disposition.'5 By invoking this ontology Vico indicates how the issue of historicity requires a philological examination of the common-law heritage o f any topic. Vico thus unites a theory o f the commonplaces or ins t i tu t iones of Roman law with the Stoic logic of propositions that underlies it.

2. ZENONIAN ARGUMENTS

As a professor o f rhetoric and a scholar thoroughly familiar with the philoso- phy of Roman law, Vico is especially sensitive to how the ancient Stoic logic of

'~ For other views of Vico's theory of law, see Haddock, Vico's Political Thought, 38, 72-112; Max H. Fisch, "Vico on Roman Law," in Essays in Political Theory: Presented to George H. Sabine, eds. Milton R. Konvitz and Arthur E. Murphy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1948), 62-88; Donald R. Kelley, "Vico's Road: From Philology to Jurisprudence and Back," in Giambattista Vico's Science of Humanity, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Donald P. Verene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), x5-29; Guido Fass6, Vieo e Grozio (Napoli: Guida, 1972); and Dino Pasini, Diritto, societit e stato in Vico (Napoli: Jovene, 197o ).

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propositions (rediscovered in the Renaissance by Rudolph Agricola and Peter Ramus) provides an alternative to the logic of predication. In the Stoic-Ramist logic of propositions, real things are always already engaged in relations of signification. What a thing means or signifies (the lekton) is neither a Platonic idea nor a concept located in a speaker's mind, but rather an event, the evocation or designation of particular objects as intelligible and discriminated in virtue of their being expressed.

In this explicitly Ramist context, words and things are joined by the "ligamen" of their being functions in a discursive practice.~6 Their intelligibil- ity consists in their designations as the topoi or commonplaces upon which judgments are to be passed. By means of such judgments they become known as true. But prior to those judgments they simply identify the relations by which things or terms are cognized as certain or determinate.

In terms of the Agricolan-Ramist vocabulary of the logic of supposition that Vico appropriates, a term in a proposition is merely the supposition of the intelligibility of the proposition in which it appears. In like manner, the suppo- sition of the truth of an expression is what makes the expression certain. In contrast to the logic-of-predication treatment of supposition as an activity of some mind, propositional logic makes supposition the prerequisite for deter- minate intelligibility?7

A supposition is therefore not something we do; rather it is the displace- ment of a term in a proposition, by means of which displacement the term has meaning as posited in the proposition. As an indication of how this logic of supposition itself situates and thus makes intelligible the activity of mental supposing, Vico concludes his New Science by pointing out how Locke (among others) simply misses the point about supposition. Even for the mind to sup- pose its own existence requires that its intelligible differentiation and cause of its truth first be supposed (or supposited): "Locke should consider whether the idea of true being exists by supposition [supposizione], an idea which I find myself to have before the idea of my being, which is as much as to say before my having supposed. ''~s Prior to any supposition that I make about God, the idea of God is always already supposed for me as the topic in terms of which my judgment can be intelligible. Furthermore, the possibility that my judg- ment might be true must also be supposed as prior to my having the judg-

~6 See John D. Schaeffer, Sensus Communis: Vico, Rhetoric, and the Limits of Relativism (Durham: Duke University Press, 199o), 57-58, 65.

'7 For more on the ontology of supposition, see Daniel, Philosophy of Edwards, ch. 3; and Ong, Ramus, 72.

,s Cf. Donald Philip Verene, "Giambattista Vico's 'Reprehension of the Metaphysics of Ren~ Descartes, Benedict Spinoza, and John Locke': An Addition to the New Science (Translation and Commentary)," New Vico Studies 8 (199o): 3, l~.

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ment. T h e supposit ion o f the t ru th conditions o f a j u d g m e n t is implicit in the very fact that a j u d g m e n t is made; for in the absence o f some sort o f valida- tion, the j u d g m e n t remains merely a historical certainty, merely the supposi- tion o f the true.

This recognit ion o f the essential unity o f rhetorical expression and ontol- ogy is ignored in the classical philosophies o f Plato and Aristotle, but it is the hal lmark o f the early Stoic logic that operates in Roman jur i sprudence . In terms o f such a logic, to abstract elements o f the law f rom their places in part icular j udgmen t s (e.g., as Hobbes does) is to t reat components o f pro- nouncements as if they can have meaning apart f rom their appearance in specific j udgmen t s (that is, as if they can be moved a round and inserted into o ther j udgmen t s without changing their meaning). As Vico notes, though, a legal "finding" or j u d g m e n t causes the case to be part o f all subsequent discur- sive exchange. T o plead a case is thus to plead a cause, to en ter a plea in terms o f which the cour t can find cause for considering it a case; that is why "for the Latins the terms causa (cause or case) and negotium (business and activity) [litigation] are synonymous" ( A W 64). T h e finding in the case is precisely that which identifies it as a case (otherwise it is thrown out o f court). By agreeing to hear the case, the cour t tentatively agrees to consider the possibility that there is cause; but that is not de te rmined until a j u d g m e n t is made. '9

In ontological terms this means that a thing comes into being when it is recognized as having and being a cause. But that recognit ion itself is not caused; ra the r it is the rhetorical p ronouncemen t that determines what a thing would mean if it were unders tood ei ther to exist or not to exist. Based on this legal model, an ontological finding is at the same time a rhetorical discov- ery o f a topic as having or being a grammatical case. Its case ending (e.g., nominative, dative, accusative) reveals its de terminate appearance in a discur- sive expression; that is, the case ends in a "verdict," a verum dictum, a saying o f the true.

By collapsing rhetoric, g rammar , and ontology into one another , this move highlights the fact that the judicial p ro n o u n cemen t o f a sentence identifies a thing as a topos, par t o f the jus gentium, the common law. As a topos, everything is thus unde r s tood as par t o f a heri tage o f the common sense or discursive practices o f a nation. Tha t is how topics can direct simple apprehens ion , and how without them there is no means for discriminating one thing f rom an- other . In this way, the art o f topics is "the art by which t ruth is app rehended ,

'9On how the verum-factum principle functions in Vico's legal theory, see Guido Fass6, "The Problem of Law and the Historical Origin of the New Science," in Giambattista Vico's Science of Humanity, 3-14. On the verum-certum distinction and law, see Haddock, Vico's Political Theory, 85, 96, xo6-xo 7, 13o.

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because it is the art o f seeing u n d e r all the topical heads whatever there is in the mat te r at issue, which will enable us to distinguish well and have an adequate concept o f it" (AW 178).

Not accidentally, then, legal cases and grammatical cases are uni ted in their c o m m o n legacy o f de facto expressions, o f sentences having been p r o n o u n c e d in the nar ra t ion that constitutes history. T h e "fate" o f an expression lies in its having been spoken, which means that its chance occurrence [casum] is its "fall" into being a case, that is, into having a case ending [casum]. As Vico remarks in a rich passage, the fated o rde r o f causes in the world identifies the ways God's words have become encased. For no word or thing exists apart f rom its having a case, that is, apar t f rom its funct ion in a part icular expression.

For the Latins dictum (said) was the same as certum (fixed, certain). For us certain is the same as determined. Moreover,fatum (spoken, i.e., fate) is the same as dictum; andfactum (made) and verum (true) are interchangeable with verbum (word). And when the Latins themselves wanted to express agreement that something could be quickly done, they said dictum factum (no sooner said than done). And they called the final outcome of both deed and word casum (fall, chance, case). So the Italian sages who first thought up these words [must have] believed thatfatum was the eternal order of causes, and that casum was the outcome of that eternal order. Thus, the deeds of God are His words, and the outcomes of things are the fate (cases) [casus] of the words that He speaks, and fate the same as what is made. (AW lo6-1o7; cf. NS 965)

In p ronounc ing sentence, a narra t ion issues a finding, an inventio that identi- fies the topic or "argument ." When sentence is p ronounced , the topic or a rgumen t is in that very same act embedded in the discursive practices that enable the p ronounc ing o f sentence in the first place. This a r r angemen t o f a rguments in what Vico (like Ramus) calls method, "the art o f governing dis- course," constitutes the j u d g m e n t o f the case, the validation o f the f inding (AW 18o). 2~ Methodic "order ings o f thought" do not simply a r range (or "steal," as Vico says) previously discriminated elements; ra ther , "method is the for tui tous means by which one discovers th rough ar ranging elements [topics]" (AW 183-84; translation modified). The re fo re , a rguments and their me- thodic a r r a n gemen t can never proper ly be separated f rom one another . Un- less a topic is de terminate ly identified, no j u d g m e n t can be made about it; and unless a j u d g m e n t is made about how the topic functions in the matr ix o f discursive practices, there is no way to de te rmine its intelligibility. As Vico says: " T h e r e is no invention without j u d g m e n t and no j u d g m e n t without invention" (AW i oo). 2~ By means o f this characteristically Ramist conflation o f

�9 o F o r almost identical positions in Ramus, see Ong, Ramus, 184-87, 252. �9 ~ Cf. Stephen H. Daniel, Myth and Modern Philosophy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,

199o), i~9-57; and Schaeffer, Sen~u~ Communis, 31 .

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invention and judgment, Vico retrieves the possibility of showing how the assumptions of law, rhetoric, and ontology are inherendy historical.

It quickly becomes evident, though, that as long as Vico is interpreted in terms of the classical logic of predication, he will not be able to escape the hermeneutic circle of invention and judgment, of the certain and the true, of the figural and the rational. It is, of course, the same circle that suggests that there is a conflict between his supposed historicism and his doctrine of ideal eternal history. However, Vico avoids the circle by rejecting the ancient separa- tion of discovery and judgment in terms of which such a logic is expressed. Because (he notes) the Academics (Platonists, Aristotelians) focus their ener- gies on discovering the natures of subjects and predicates, they relegate the propositions in which subjects and predicates appear to the status of acciden- tal relations. The later Stoics, by contrast, attend almost exclusively to how terms function in judgments without examining how the terms are distinguish- able in the first place (AW 99). Only "the ancient philosophers of Italy" seem to have understood that there was something fundamentally flawed in trying to treat discovery and judgment independently. Only they seem to have appre- ciated how discovery and judgment are brought together in the argumen or argumentura, the discernment of "a likeness or ratio between things very differ- ent and far removed from one another" (AW lO2).

For anyone immersed in the rhetorical tradition as much as Vico was, this invocation of the concept of arguments would have been an unmistakable reference to a well-known Ramist doctrine which both Agricola and Ramus had credited to the early Stoics (e.g., Zeno of Citium and Chrysippus). ~ In contrast to the middle and later Stoics (whom Vico refers to simply as Stoics), these early thinkers he calls Zenonians. By confusing Zeno the E|eatic (fl. 464 B.C.) with Zeno of Citium (d. ~64 B.C.), Vico mistakes the early Stoics for ancient philosophers of Italy. In so doing, however, he reiterates the ontologi- cal character of the Zenonian (early Stoic) theory of arguments by appealing to the doctrine of indivisible metaphysical points developed by Zeno the Eleatic (AW 69). This fortuitous combination of Eleatic metaphysics and Stoic logic is eminently plausible once we note how the Ramists retrieve an ontology that considers arguments as the ultimate principles of being and intelligibility.

In the Ramist doctrine of arguments, nothing--not even the smallest parti- cle or a tom--can exist apart from its expression in a discourse; therefore, a thing cannot be determinate apart from its coming into being in the process of

,2 Unlike the classical notion of rhetoric assumed in Michael Mooney's Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), this Stoic-Ramist notion places rhetoric at the center of philosophical activity. See Nancy S. Struever, "Rhetoric and Philosophy in Vichian Inquiry," New Vico Studies 3 0985): 133.

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communicative exchange. According to Vico, this is why Zeno (the Eleatic) says that the origin of things is explained in terms of nonextended, metaphysi- cal points (AW 69, 72-74). These points have no meaning apart from their being understood as the principles by which things come to have meaning in some historical pronouncement or argument. In themselves they are unintelli- gible noises, marks, or movements prior to being cognized with case endings; they are mere opportunities for rhetorical validation, delineated as solids ("matters at hand") in "metaphysical argumenta" (AW 73). They are the specific yet arbitrary determinations of God's will, the elements from which human beings synthesize things in pronouncing sentences, that is, in constituting human history (AW 76). In expressing arguments, human beings become arguti, sharp wits who move previously unconnected and meaningless ele- ments into juxtapositions that give them tense, power, motion (AW 78, lo2).

The divine pronouncement of sentence provides the judgment in terms of which human history is verified as intelligible. Without the judgment of God's narration of the ideal eternal history, human history in general would lack a matrix in terms of which it can be understood. As certain and determinate as each thing is in virtue of its topical inscription in human history, it lacks truth until a judgment or pronouncement is made about that narrative. So each thing's identity depends on its having a place not only in human history but also in a providential discourse, and its meaning or significance depends on its being cognized in those terms.

In this early Stoic ontology, the very possibility of being or meaning assumes a strategy of pedagogic, communicative, or rhetorical activity. God's providen- tial creation must of necessity be an act of teaching, a communication, a pro- nouncement of judgment on the order of discourse. Agricola makes this point in claiming that all discourse is directed to teaching (doctrina), and Ramus re- peats the idea. Learning places--that is, finding arguments (inventio)--means learning the teachings of discursivity itself.*3 In pronouncing sentence on argu- ments, the teacher reinforces the commonplaces in terms of which subsequent judgment is possible. But before a judgment can be made using arguments, the meaning of such arguments must be determined. Finding or determining that meaning requires that the teacher place the argument into the traditional ex- pressions of a culture.

For Vico, the classicist, linguist, and philologist all recover the oratorical legacy of discourse by identifying how the commonplaces or topoi of a nation serve as the communal bases for thought and action that constitute the history of the nation. By retrieving the expansive possibilities of the ontology of the

~3See Ong, Ramus, lO3, 114, 122, 16o. Cf. Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, i5oo-i7oo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), 23-24.

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early Stoic tradition, the New Science reveals how even a history of nations or cultures is possible in terms of that same narrative dynamic. For just as the pronouncements of sentence in the discursive practices of a nation define the intelligibility of a nation's history, so also the ideal eternal history designates the ontological or onto-rhetorical condition for the providential education of the history of nations.

The onto-rhetorical character of providential verification thus accepts the central feature of historicism, namely, that the determination of meaning is a product of discursive practice. By extending that notion to include divine activity, Vico makes possible his appeal to an ideal eternal history without at the same time historicizing God. For in describing God's creation of the world as a speech, Vico appeals to much more than a provocative metaphor. Like a legal pronouncement or a cultural commonplace, the providential guidance of history is not the mere external expression of some idea that God (as a private subject) has independently from His speech. Instead, for Vico, the onto-rhetoric of constitutive pronouncements of both God and human beings identifies the conditions for historical generation and discrimination. Apart from that expressive activity, there is no intelligibility.

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