Vico's Doctrine of the Natural Law of the Gentes

Vico's Doctrine of the Natural Law of the Gentes JAMES C. MORRISON Novus Orbis Scientiarum sive Desiderata: Idea justitiae universalis, sive de fontibus juris. Francis Bacon Bacon sees that the sum of human and divine knowledge of his time needs supplementing and emending, but as far as the laws are concerned he does not succeed with his canons in compassing the universe of cities and the course of all times, or the extent of all nations. Giambattista Vico THE NATURAL LAW OF THE GENTES is the central concept of Vico's philosophy of law and one of the central concepts of the New Science in general. In what follows I attempt to give an interpretation of the natural law of the gentes with reference both to Vico's philosophy of law and the general problematic of the New Science as a whole. I shall try to show (I) how the basic problem of Vico's philosophy--the unification of philosophy and philology (history)--arose out of his early study of the law and (II) how his solution to this general problem applies to the special problem of the truth and certainty of the law itself. Finally (III) I shall discuss some of the basic implications of the doctrine of the natural law of the gentes for Vico's philosophy of man and, in particular, political philosophy. My major thesis is that the doctrine of the natural law of the gentes implies a radical transformation of the traditional doctrine of natural law and thus of traditional political philosophy itself: political philosophy becomes the philosophy of history. I. In his Autobiography Vico gives two distinct but interrelated explanations of why he chose to write an account of his own life. The first occurs in the opening pages: "Rather, with the candor proper to a historian, we shall narrate plainly and step by step the entire series of Vico's studies, in order that the proper and natural causes of his particular development as a man of letters may be known. ''1 But toward the end of the work Vico says that he wrote about his own life "as a philosopher, meditating the causes, natural and moral, and the occasions of fortune TheAutobiography ofGiambattista Vico,trans. M. H. Fisch and T. G. Bergin (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1963), p. 113; emphasis mine. Vico explicitly contrasts himself with Descartes, who "craftily feigned as to the method of his studies simply in order to exalt his own philosophy and mathematics and degrade all the other studies included in divine and human erudition" (ibid.), The reference is no doubt to the Discours. See Descartes'scomparison of his work to un tableauand his statement that the reader may consider it "comme une histoire, ou, si vous l'aimez mieux, que comme une fable..." (Discours de la M~thode, ed. Etienne Gilson [Paris: J. Vrin, 1966], p. 48). [47] 48 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY . . . and lastly the effect of his own exertions in right directions, which were destined later to bear fruit in those reflections on which he built his final work, the New Science, which was to demonstrate that his intellectual life was bound to have been such as it was and not otherwise. ''2 The Autobiography, then, is both a historical and a philosophical work. It is concerned with the particular and general causes of the development of Vico's philosophy as contained in the New Science. As such, it explains the causes of the New Science itself, just as the latter explains the causes (both historical and philosophical) of civil society. The Autobiography is the New Science "writ small": an application to a particular case--the life of Vico--of the universal principles applying to civil society in general. 3 According to the Autobiography, the fundamental problem of the New Science emerged in the following way. Having been encouraged by his father to study law, Vico says that he "found a great pleasure in two things." One was the "general maxims of justice" the Scholastic interpreters of the law had abstracted from "the particular considerations of equity" of the j urisconsults. The other was "the wording of the laws," which was the chief...