Why Vico said that history was more true than physics

A brief note about Giambattista Vico's theory of knowledge and science based on a key insight from his Scienza Nuova (New Science)

Italian thinker Giambattista Vico was one of the first to write that history is more fundamental a science than physics.

If I were to say that online today, I'd be swamped by accounts who "F-ing ❤️ Science" accusing me of "woke" relativism and postmodernism.

Vico could say this because he was there at the dawn of the modern era and the very idea of The Science that we know today. Relativism, much less postmodernism (you can’t be “post” what hasn’t yet come to be) were not the least what Vico had in mind.

Vico targeted the Cartesian belief that what is true is what is certain. As Descartes saw it, a clear and distinct idea can be the only secure foundation for truth.

Consider mathematics, the only kind of knowledge that meets that standard. Numbers, axioms, points, and lines, all the raw materials of math, are self-evident and undoubtable. Likewise for the iron-clad deductions made from those basic elements, which inherit a share in their truth. Two plus two will never add up to three, five, or anything other than four, for anyone, anywhere.

For Descartes this secure certainty formed the stable ground for all knowledge and all sciences searching for it. And here we are today, near 400 years later, a culture calling itself materialistic while obsessed with phantasmal quantities.

Understand that Vico was no critic of math or physics. He didn’t doubt their usefulness or the objectivity of their results.

The trouble is that the "clear and distinct ideas" Descartes called self-evident are anything but. What is self-evident to you and me and 17th century Frenchmen may be wildly different, first of all.

More important is to see that the self-evident idea is a property of consciousness.

Descartes tried to sell certainty within the mind as the standard for truth.

Not so.

Consider, wrote Vico, that all these self-evident axioms, points, and lines used as the basic materials of geometry are creations of the conscious human mind. The precision and clarity of mathematics is not a hint to truth, but to certainty.

What is true in mathematics is true because we made it.

Matters are different when we look away from human-constructed systems.

Look out at the natural world. Look at the past of human societies. You'll find little help from numbers and calculations.

Physics isn't wrong—it's about as certain as human knowledge gets—but it isn't the truth for being certain.

Why?

Vico's key idea is that a thing can only be understand by knowing its true causes. A being only knows the true causes of a thing it has made.

We know the true causes of geometry because we invented it.

We don't have that kind of access to the causes in the natural world around us. That knowledge is reserved for God, who created all.

Verum factum et convertuntur. The true and the made are convertible, in Vico’s infamous phrase.

This means, crucially, that we don't have the power to know our own minds. Its causes are beyond our knowing because the mind is not our creation.

If we can’t know the causes of our ideas through our ideas, then Descartes’s self-evident ideas are illusions of truth.

If we want any hope of knowing, we can't start with the illusions of certainty in our minds. The proper task, said Vico, must begin with study to understand the beings who created these schemes of certain knowledge, and how.

The events of history are never mere phenomena, never mere spectacles for contemplation, but things which the historian looks, not at, but through, to discern the thought within them.

R. G. Collingwood

History and historical sciences are the path to understanding human activities. To understand what happened and why, we must look to the ideas and thoughts and attitudes and desires that make up the inner experience of human beings. History is the study of the inner world, not the objective cataloging of facts as astronomers study the stars and geologists study the physical Earth.

The proper "first science" is the study of human beings and their ideas, feelings, wants, will, goals, and actions. These are the human sciences, the so-called “soft sciences”, ranging from psychology and sociology to literature, poetry, and biography. The causes of these things we can know because we made them – we are them.

This chain of thoughts leads to a surprising conclusion. Taking Vico’s defense of the human sciences at face value, the problem with math and physics is that they aren’t objective enough. They’re fantasies appearing as hard truth.

The truth lies beyond the games we create to make sense of ourselves.

Thanks for reading.

-Matt