Giambattista Vico as a Philosopher of Place: Comments on the Recent Article by Mills

Abstract

William J. Mills' scholarly and provocative article, 'Positivism reversed: the relevance of Giambattista Vico' (Trans. Inst. Br. Geogr. N. S. 7: 1-13) has cancelled a debt which has slowly been accruing to geographers during the recent resurgence of interest among philosophers and social scientists in general in the life and work of this original eighteenth century Neapolitan thinker. Three international conferences, a flurry of publications, an increasingly frequent mention of Vico by prominent scholars, and the founding of a new journal devoted exclusively to his work and influence have all occurred within the last fifteen years with little recognition from geographers.' Mills, within the limitations of a journal article, has presented the essential flavour and significance of this difficult thinker, and at the same time has suggested an initial means of extending Vico's philosophy of culture to the study of landscape. The reason for Vico's relative anonymity among geographers is not hard to explain, for Vico's originality and difficult style has put him at some distance from the modern tradition, which still exemplifies in many ways the Cartesianism which Vico opposed in his own day.2 For professional geographers, who have a natural association with the physical sciences and are pragmatic rather than theoretical in their general outlook, the difficulties of understanding Vico are multiplied. It is as though the discipline, in dividing its interests between 'objectivity' as a model of scientific procedure and 'subjectivity' as a humanistic concern for questions of value and meaning, has totally missed Vico's argument for a viewpoint which subsumes both subject and object in a theory of history and culture. As Mills has written, 'the very distinction between subject and object becomes transcended, with each observer being his own observed'.3 And, as Mills has emphasized, this transcendence is made possible by Vico's original and positive approach to the knowledge of culture, the principle of verum ipsum factum, 'one may know that which one has made'.4 Mills has introduced Vico by setting off the verum-factum principle against the positivistic tendency to subordinate the human sciences to the physical sciences. Where knowledge is defined as 'a knowledge of causes', positivists have argued that one can presume to have some access to objects which have no mind of their own, objects which are the same for any observer and can thus be subjected to experiment, manipulation, and constraint. Human thought and intention, which appear as 'black boxes' to this way of thinking, are regarded today in much the same way as they were in Vico's time: that is, given to caprice and illusion and in no way subject to laws except, perhaps, those which are beyond or hidden from consciousness. Vico's singular contribution to the study of culture is to see the uncertainty of the human condition