26. To know and to Know
Excuses: work, travel, more travel, family, slamming my head into the walls of a topic
The big cause of the last of these is that there are two strands I'd like to pursue, one which leads to what (I think) is my main interest: the gods. The other, more philosophical and abstract (perhaps), that seems to be a necessary supplement. Today, I'll engage with the latter, in the hope that it leads-eventually, somehow-to the former.
Again, we're going to harken back to the ancients and the medieval tradition which followed them. Classically, "science" referred to knowledge from causes. Take Aristotle in the Posterior Analytics: "We suppose ourselves to possess unqualified scientific knowledge of a thing, as opposed to knowing it in the accidental way in which the sophist knows, when we think that we know the cause on which the fact depends, as the cause of that fact and of no other, and, further, that the fact could not be other than it is." We only know something scientifically, if we know it causally. For Aristotle and his intellectual heirs, this meant that things known scientifically are also known certainly. They cannot be otherwise.
We still generally take science to be concerned with the investigation of causes, albeit the scope of causal observation is often limited to the natural world and to a certain sort of knowledge of causes, i.e. in terms of the measurable, what can be rendered mathematically (we might be polemical and say "reduced to mathematics). This limitation is the consequence of attempting to retain the certainty of the classical conception in a world, i.e. the Reformation era, of increasing epistemological uncertainty, by predicating the conclusion of the sciences on the certainty of math.
So, modern science begins in astronomy and physics, the former already considered to be a sort of applied mathematics in the Middle Ages, and comes to encompass chemistry, the biological sciences, and then the world of human affairs in the social science, steadily running into more and more difficulties maintaining the ostensible certainty of its mathematical base as it goes. Here, I mean "goes" both in the sense of deepening its investigation into individual realms and in its expanded scope. Today, scientific claims exist in an odd flux, where in popular discourse we still vaguely presume the certainty of the Aristotelian science (TRUST SCIENCE!), but it is openly admitted that these claims are not in fact certain, but probabilistic and thus not at all scientific in the Aristotelian sense.
Now, I know you're asking at this point, "How is it possible you haven't yet mentioned Vico?" Fear not. For Vico inherits the classical understanding of science and lays out two sorts of knowledge, scienza and conscienza. The first, as you can probably guess, is "science" in the classical sense of knowledge through causes, and which is generally translated simply as "knowledge" in English editions of his works. The second might be translated as "consciousness" and this is what we come to know, not through causes either because we don't or cannot have access to them, but through witness.
To this division, Vico adds one of his most famous and most fundamental principles: verum esse ipsum factum, "the true is precisely what is made," or verum et factum convertuntur, "the true and the made are convertible." What this means is that we can only truly know, only truly possess scientific knowledge of, things if we know how they came to be as products of human action. We can only know things insofar as we are their makers.
Therefore, on his account, the advocates of science in his day and in ours have it precisely backwards. We cannot, even in principle, have scientific knowledge of the natural world, because its causes lie beyond humanity, i.e. in God who is its maker. The natural world can, as we now admit, only be known in terms of probability. It can only be witnessed and thus only be an object of conscienza. The human world, i.e. civil society and culture, however, can be the object of true, scientific knowledge, since it is made by human beings.1
To gain this knowledge, it is necessary to go back to the origins of the human world, hence his tracing of ideas an institutions into the past, in essence the whole method of his New Science which leads us to the myth of the giants and the subsequent history of development he traces outward from that myth. The New Science is not a mere acquisition of knowledge for its own sake, though. What a maker's knowledge of the human world enables us to do is to map out the contours of what is not human, to properly witness and thus gain conscienza of what lies beyond us, the truths of divine making.
Think back to the myth of the giants and the thundering sky. The giants encounter thunder, something outside themselves, and from themselves they create the first idea, the first topos, Jove. This idea is what allows us to experience, to witness, the nature that lies beyond us as an object of cognition. With this topos we can gesture to the thundering sky and say, "that!" And from it the other topoi flow, filling the world with gods and making our experience of the whole sweep of nature possible. It makes witness possible, and what is witnessed can then be imitated.
An example, marriage, Juno, is the thought that follows Jove. The goddess, the topos, is the criteria of the real. A marriage is not like Juno, it is Juno, and the degree to which it is not Juno is the degree to which it is not a marriage. To marry, therefore, is to create ourselves in imitation of Juno.2
The purpose of Vico's New Science is to apply this process to history, and so discern the underlying pattern which conditions the development of nations, the pattern that resists conversion into maker's knowledge. This pattern is the hand of God in time, providence.3
So, we examine human things to seek the divine that lies beyond them.
How does faith fit into this picture? To believe is to participate in the knowledge of a knower, and to live in faith is to partake in the knowledge of the divine. Since God possesses maker's knowledge of all creation, spatially in nature and temporally as providence, does this not mean that through faith we can transcend the division of conscienza and scienza and attain to the unity of truth in God? Vico doesn’t touch on this subject, and I can’t help but think that’s a problem.
note: Juno is less the jealous victim of infidelity, more the instantiation of good and faithful marriage, than her Greek counterpart, Hera. Vico would classify the attributes of the latter to later tradition.
The key demonstration of providence in the course of history, that which proves most resistant to maker's knowledge, is that civilization arises from impulses that would seem to imply the opposite of civic happiness: terror, lust, ferocity, greed, and ambition and collapses into madness through the glories of the highest human faculty, reason.