On Becoming Human: The Verum Factum Principle and Giambattista Vico’s Humanism

As numerous scholars have noted, Giambattista Vico is the philosopher of the beginnings of humankind, the inventor of a genetic method in social and historical studies that is concisely expressed in the fourteenth degnità in book one of his Scienza nuova: “Natura di cose altro non è che nascimento di esse in certi tempi e con certe guise” (SN 147). Vico’s philosophy becomes particularly relevant in a time like ours when the very idea of humanity and what is ‘human’ is put into question. Several contemporary writers have started speaking of a ‘posthuman’ age in which the techno-sciences in many ways make it more and more difficult to refer to the humanist idea of a privileged human subject. To appreciate the importance of Vico’s position is vital in reconsidering the evolution of the idea of humanism in a longue durée and in acknowledging that humanism has never been a unitary movement. The humanist idea engenders its opposite, even in early modern philosophers such as Leon Battista Alberti and Giordano Bruno, who under the pressure of cultural and historical events pointed to the limits of the human position, a direction that distinguishes their humanism from the one developed by Florentine Neoplatonism which emphasizes the infinite power of human intelligence and freedom as created ad imaginem dei.

Vico’s interpretation of humanity introduces a crucial distinction between sacred origins and gentile historical beginnings and has its focal point in the verum factum principle, suggesting an essential and original homology between knowing and making, including similarities and dissimilarities between divine creative power and human making. The purpose of this essay is to apply the Vichian genetic method to his own works and to study the origin of his humanist philosophy in the early work De antiquissima italorum sapientia ex lingua latinae originibus eruenda (1710), in which he first formulated the principle that “verum, & factum […] convertuntur”.¹

The reception of this early work, also known as the Liber metaphysicus, is multifaceted, with a range of different, at times opposing, views, ranging from Benedetto Croce’s reductionist interpretation to Stephan Otto’s appreciation of the text as the most fundamental of Vico’s metaphysics. Croce considers the De antiquissima as an ineffective miscarriage, an imaginative and arbitrary metaphysical and physical theory without foundation; Otto, on the contrary, regards it as Vico’s central work precisely for the formulation of the verum factum principle as the “idée regulative pour toute connaissance” and a “fundement transcendantal de possibilité pour la philosophie et la science”.² The increasing number of references to Vico’s De antiquissima, recent translations, collections of essays and monographs devoted to its interpretation confirm the importance of this early work. In the following pages I will present some further reflections on the significance of Vico’s Liber metaphysicus and briefly discuss the problem of its relationship with Vico’s Scienza nuova.

The verum factum principle in the De antiquissima

In the De antiquissima Vico holds that the constitutive and differentiating element of humanity is related to the concept of animus. He claims that the most ancient wisdom of the Italians distinguished between animus (the sensitive function) and anima (soul, the vital function). Vico argues that, according to the Latins, only human beings possess animus as an internal principle of movement, which is free from the deterministic chain of nature.³ Animus and not anima generates in humans the longing for infinity and immortality. In the animus and in the connected idea of immortality Vico sees the anthropological dimension of infinity that later was developed by Christian metaphysics. Moreover, the Latins considered ingenium, the faculty able to connect disparate and diverse things, as the nature proper to humanity. Imagination is the eye of ingenium and geometry can make the ingenium more acute. Moreover, for the Latins the true is the made (“Verum esse ipsum factum”); for them, science is cognition of how something is made.⁴

Vico argues that the first and complete truth is in God, the first Maker “quod Deus omnia elementa rerum legit, cum extima, tum intima...