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Vico’s Alchemy

Diana Hibbard Bitz

University of Florida

In 1686 at the age of eighteen, Giambattista Vico left Naples for the healthful climate and scholarly solitude of the castle of Cilento and the Rocca library.  There he began his life-long study of the Latin language and its authors beginning with Cicero, Virgil, and Horace.  Through Horace he was led to the moral philosophers and, ultimately, to Plato.  Plato introduced Vico to the metaphysical principle­­­––"the eternal idea drawing out and creating matter from itself, like a seminal spirit that forms its own egg."  Plato’s “seminal spirit” operated upon Vico, inspiring him to meditate upon "an ideal eternal law that should be observed in a universal city after the idea or design of providence."[1] 

In 1695, Vico returned to a Naples dominated by the works of Epicurus, Locke, Boyle, and most completely, by “the physics as metaphysics” of René Descartes.  Fifteen years later Vico’s first attempt at a comprehensive metaphysics, De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians) was published.  De antiquissima (1710) was to be the first volume of three (on metaphysics, physics, and ethics) describing a complete and holistic approach to philosophizing.  Although completed, the second book on physics was lost but may be recoverable through the physics of Ruggiero Boscovich.  Vico’s Scienza nuova (The New Science of Giambattista Vico) was, I believe, the third work on ethics–– a most complete speech, recollecting the whole within it. In his De antiquissima, Vico examines the etymologies of the Latin language to access the beliefs of the early sages of Italy, and specifically those concerning "the first truth, on God and on the human mind."  It is, he insists, a complete metaphysics, not a summary or abbreviated work, wherein “the True Being is established.”[2]

Vico establishes his metaphysics upon his own agonistic reading of two dialogues written by his first author, Plato: the Cratylus, and the Timaeus.  Vico cites Socrates in Plato's Cratylus as the source of his method to uncover true knowledge of being through the original names given to things.[3]  Socrates quotes an unnamed ancient who says, “knowledge of high things is hard to gain; and surely knowledge of names is no small matter.”[4]  Names are not determined by convention but are instead instruments assigned by the name-maker, the lawgiver, or the artisan of names (Cratylus 389a).  The name-maker recognizes “the name which belongs by nature to each particular thing and is able to embody its form in the letters and syllables” (Cratylus 390e). 

Everything has an “essential nature,” and every naturally correct name will truly embody or demonstrate “what each thing really is” (Cratylus 423e).  In the end Socrates denies true insight to the first legislators given that ancient names reflect “the belief that all things are in motion or flux,” the realm of mere appearances and not reality itself (Cratylus 439c).  Therefore there is no truth, no knowledge embodied in the names that the ancients assigned to things. Unlike Socrates, however, Vico considers the focus of the ancients on motion and change to constitute wisdom and not error.  Original language is privileged.  It represents the first legislators' honest and best notions or representations of things, and Vico assumes that these most ancient names can be used as the foundation of metaphysical trues.  Moreover, this metaphorical language is the best, if not only, path to these trues.   

Modern scholars have focused on the first pair of convertible terms: “Verum esse ipsum factum” (the true is the made) as a definition of human knowledge and science (AW, 45-47).  The first truth is in God the first maker––infinite, complete, and known to God as He makes and contains all things. For human knowledge, man must contain, order, and comprehend the elements or trues of the thing.  Therefore, man can only witness the creations of the divine mind. Vico himself stresses the convertibility of another related pair of terms: punctum and momentum, point and motion.   Consistent with the critical role assigned to these convertible terms within Vico's metaphysics is the location of the discussion of punctum-momentum at the center point of the De antiquissima.  The dedication of the work also points to the critical nature of this particular pair.

At the beginning of De antiquissima, Vico recollects a dinner conversation at the home of Paolo Mattia Doria, the “fine” Genoese philosopher, who “often gave forth lightning-like flashes of Platonic divinity” (Auto, 138), under whose “auspices” Vico discusses metaphysical matters, and to whom his De antiquissima is dedicated.  During the evening’s conversation, Vico argues that nature must "consist in a motion through which all things are driven to the center of their respective movements by the force of a wedge, and expelled from the center to the edge by a converse force; and I held that all things come to be, live, and perish through a kind of systole and diastole" (AW, 45).

If Plato’s Cratylus is the source of Vico’s method, Plato’s Timaeus is the source of Vico’s notions of True Being.  But, just as he overturns Socrates’ rejection of the most ancient wisdom, so Vico both adopts and adapts Platonic ideas.  Within the universe are three kinds or natures of being, or forms of reality.  The first is the intelligible, imperceptible, uncreated, indestructible, unchanging reality of the Forms.  The second is the copy of the Form, perceived by the senses, created, always in motion, coming into being and going out of existence.  The third is the middle term, the intermediary between Being and Becoming, the indivisible and divisible––invisible, unshaped, eternal, indestructible, and all-receptive––that which gives place to all created things in “an unbroken circle the gift of birth” (Timaeus 49d-51a).  If Being is the father and Becoming the offspring, then place­­––the middle term that “is” and “names” great mixing bowl––is the mother or nurse (Timaeus 50d).  Being is the object of Reason, and Becoming is the object of True Opinion aided by Sensation, but the intermediary, this Receptacle of Becoming, is baffling––apprehended by a bastard-Reason aided by non-Sensation and even then only as in a dream (Timaeus 51e-52b).

The four elements that compose the particular and concrete world of Becoming––earth, water, air, and fire––are bodies­: certain regular volumes, determined by regular planes, combinations of equilateral and isosceles-right triangles.  The pyramid, the sharpest volume, is associated with fire.  Next is the octahedron, the form of air, followed by the icosahedron of water. The planes of all three bodies are composed of equilateral triangles. The fourth solid composed of isosceles-right triangles is associated with earth (Timaeus 55-56c).  A single particle or body is too small to be visible; it becomes visible only when a sufficient number of like particles are collected together (Timaeus 56b-c).  Change from one element to another may occur according to the reconfiguration of the triangles composing the faces of the volumes, but only among those elements composed solely of equilateral triangles.  Triangles vary in size and thereby exhibit various qualities and complexities (Timaeus 57c-e).

Using the convertibility of Latin terms as used by the most ancient Italians, Vico builds a distinctive but parallel narration of being.  Vico addresses the natures or kinds of being through the convertibility of genus (kind) and forma (idea), as well as the equivalence of species (appearance), individuum (individual), and simulacrum  (copy) (AW, 58-59).   Metaphysical and physical genera differ as the form created by the architect differs from the form of the seed.  Metaphysical form is a paradeigma, a full-sized model of an architectural element or detail made by the architect himself.  The masons copy it to ensure uniformity in figure and measurement.  Such metaphysical forms are infinite in perfection, not extension.  These “ideal patterns of reality” are contained within God alone; the phenomenal world is modeled upon these patterns or paradigms.  Species are individual things, concrete particulars, simulacra or copies of the metaphysical forms.

The central topic of De antiquissima begins with a discussion of the three equivalent terms––essentia, vis, or potestas, essence, force, or power (AW, 67).  Essence is the eternal, unchangeable, indivisible, and infinite power, the power that makes and sustains all particular things.  It is the only true subject matter of metaphysics. The earliest sages held that this essence is the indivisible power of both extension and motion.  This power is revealed by the original convertibility of the Latin terms punctum (point) and momentum (movement) (AW, 69).

Prior to extended body there is the indefinite and indivisible power of extension that equally underlies the unequal extension of physical bodies.  Similarly, the indefinite and indivisible power of motion, conatus, underlies the unequal movements of physical bodies.  The powers of extension and motion arise simultaneously.  Conatus is a mode of metaphysical matter, the power of extension as the indivisible and indefinite metaphysical point.  These powers as metaphysical forms are the paradigms imitated by all particulars.  Number and geometric figure are the human link between the metaphysical and physical, the “perilous gateway.”  They are the means by which the human mind can create and represent the image of the infinite (AW, 70).

Nature as physical reality is bodies in motion, and all natural effects are born of motion.  The particular things of nature, her works, depend upon the motionless, extensionless powers of extension and motion, but are perfected as extended bodies in motion: “[Metaphysical] matter is power and effort.  Bodies move because they are constituted out of matter striving at every point and, therefore, at every instant they impede one another’s efforts through the continuity of their parts” (AW, 125).  Bodies exist (that is to say, move) and are sustained within a plenum, full, not empty, space.  Furthermore bodies are stable because they resist and are resisted by other bodies.  This resistance is the source of bodily movement.  

From this Vico speculates that Nature consists of centripetal and centrifugal motions, a systole and diastole.  Physical form is the continuous change of the thing, a change of environment or position (AW, 81).  There is a motion toward the center until sufficient resistance arises due to collisions with other impenetrable bodies at the center.  Another motion, motion from the center, is then activated and continues until sufficient resistance arises due to collisions with other impenetrable bodies at the circumference (AW, 44, 133-134). 

As Vico’s volume on physics has been lost, the works of another Arcadian, Ruggiero Boschovich ([1711-1787] elected in 1744, the year of Vico’s death), may be used to detail Vichian ideas on movement in Nature. In his Theoria philosophiae naturalis of 1758, Boscovich states that matter consists of unchangeable, identical, simple, and indivisible, unextended but separated points.  These points are centers of action.  They exhibit the property of inertia as well as active force, oscillating between attraction and repulsion, according to the distance between other points.  Points never interpenetrate.  As the distance between points diminishes, the attractive force diminishes, then vanishes, at which point it reverses itself and becomes a repulsive force.  When the distance between approaches zero, the force of repulsion approaches infinity.  Atom as extended matter is the sphere of intense attraction/repulsion on a point center.  This sphere of motion is the efficient cause of all sensible properties of matter.

In the remainder of De antiquissima, Vico addresses the spirit and the soul, the mind and its faculties, fate and fortune.  The terms animus (spirit) and anima (soul) are the source of feeling and life respectively (AW, 85-89).  Both are defined according to the motion of air, the one, a systolic-diastolic motion common to all bodies.  For the ancients, only animus, the spirit or motion as free will, is immortal.  Mind is convertible with thought, ideas created in the human mind by the gods, the origin of all motions.  The human mind thinks because the gods think within the human mind (AW, 90-91).

Facultas (faculty) is related to the verb facere (to make) and indicates a facility for making.  “Hence, faculty is the ability to turn power into action” (AW, 93).  The faculties of sensation, imagination, memory, and intellect are the mediators between soul as power and human activities.  They are the receptacle––the mother or nurse–– of human action or motion.  Memory is a mental faculty critical to the ancients but ignored by the moderns.  According to Latin usage, memoria (memory) and phantasia (imagination) are synonymous.  The Muses as forms of the imagination are the daughters of Mnemoysne, Memory.  So, memory both makes and stores the images presented to the mind. 

Related to memoria and phantasia is ingenium.  Ingenium, or ingenuity, is the faculty “that connects disparate and diverse things” and identifies the appropriate or decorous (AW, 96-97).  The acute wit is sharp, like the acute angle of a wedge; the acute wit is both intensive and extensive, quick to penetrate deeply and wide in its range of consideration.  In the Latin language, ingenium is convertible with natura.  Ingenuity or wit is the distinctive characteristic of human nature.  It is “the specific faculty of knowledge” (AW, 127).

Plato’s Socrates also converses on this faculty or art.  He declares himself a lover of such collections and divisions as “aids to speech and thought.”[5]  The two arts or principles that underlie true speech or rhetoric consist, first, of the “bringing together in one idea the scattered particulars” by which any discourse is made clear and consistent.  The second is the “dividing of things… where the natural joints are” in the manner of the skilled butcher. Those who have mastered these two arts Socrates will follow as if they were gods.  He calls such men dialecticians. (Phaedrus 265d-266b).  Dialectics allows the soul to investigate from its assumption, rising to a beginning or first principle that “transcends” the assumption without recourse to mathematicals, particular objects, or images.[6]

In his Autobiography, Vico recalls his reading of Francis Bacon’s On the Wisdom of the Ancients, the subject of another agonistic interpretation.  Looking through the school of Pythagoras to the wisdom of the Egyptians, Vico addresses the word coelum.  Coelum is both “chisel” and “great body of air,” the wedge as agent, the instrument by which nature makes all things.  This he connects to ingenium and its principal property, sharpness or acuteness.  As nature forms and deforms with a chisel of air, the hand that guides the chisel is ether, whose mind is Jove.  Anima is air as the principle that gives motion and life; in the human being, it is animus.  Coelum is both soul and spirit.  For Bacon Coelum is the most ancient god of beginnings who is castrated by his son Saturn or Chronos.  Coelum is the “vast concavity or vaulted compass that comprehends all matter; Saturn is the matter itself which takes from his parent the power of generation.”[7]  Thus, coelum is the receptacle of matter, the source of generation, conatus.

In his Scienza nuova, Vico relates conatus to the origin of moral virtue, the will to control the motions of the human body as they affect the mind in order to quiet the emotions so as to become a civil, even wise man.  Conatus is named Urania, the first of the Muses, the daughter of Jove and Mnemoysne, Memory.  She is the muse of the stars as astronomy and divination, called “the science of good and evil” by Homer.  Like Eros she is winged to represent her association with the heroes, those strong and just-proportioned men trained in the liberal arts (NS, 365,508).  Eros and Urania as Astronomy are related to the reading of the auspices­––the motions of Jove’s body as the sky––the first institution which grounds civil society.

Vico applies his metaphysics to human actions in the collection and dispersion of civil society in the course that nations run.  As the metaphysical points and conatus are the indefinite, indivisible powers that equally underlie the unequal, definite, and divisible bodies in motion, so Vico’s ideal eternal history underlies the concrete, particular, and certain histories of the gentile nations.  The ideal eternal history is the receptacle that contains and makes possible the history of the gentile nations.  Civil institutions are established according to Divine Providence and as such are universal and eternal.  The critical art of Vico’s New Science is a demonstration of what Providence has wrought in history according to the pattern of the ideal eternal history.  The practic of this art is the determination of the nation’s place within the ideal eternal history and the identification of wise action according to the nation’s location within the providential cycle.

The ideal eternal history prescribes the rise, flourishing, maturity, and decline of every nation in three stages: the age of gods, the age of heroes, and the age of men.  This course of every gentile nation follows the systolic-diastolic model of motion first described by Vico in the De Antiquissima.  In the first two ages of fantasy and fable, the movement is to the center in the creation of city and its civil institutions.  Because men of the first two ages are robust in fantasia, not reason, ideas are synthesized into concrete particulars or embodied in poetic characters, not abstracted into universal concepts.  In the third age of reason and prosaic discourse, the movement is from the center, the fragmentation and later destruction of community by the tyranny of individual self love.  As the course of nations run, so runs the life of every man.  Vico’s Autobiography demonstrates this principle.[8]

Thus all is determined by the pattern of systole and diastole: the atom, in motion within itself and without, as combined in the material elements; the movement of the human body and mind, in whole and in parts, internal and external; and the changes in civil society in the construction and destruction of community. With the powers of extension and motion Vico accounts for the unity of res extensa and res cogitans through metaphysical matter.  Metaphysical substance also makes possible the sympathetic movement of the human mind with the natural world­­––concinnitas, the harmony of Nature’s works by which man participates in the beautiful and creates beautiful things.  All arises out of matter as motion contained and determined by conatus, the receptacle or hermetic egg of the wise Thoth/Mercury, whose helmet is claimed by Vico as his own in the frontispiece of his Scienza nuova.[9]  Is Vico’s not, then, a metaphysics that accounts for and makes possible the alchemical act that transforms both material and spirit into the purest gold?