I.1 Vico and the Maker’s Knowledge Tradition

In 1710, Giambattista Vico published a small treatise with a lengthy and rather uninspiring title: De antiquissima italorum sapientia ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda (On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians Unearthed from the Origins of the Latin Language). While the book slipped out largely unnoticed, it was one of the most fascinating texts on the philosophy of knowledge ever written. Against Descartes, Vico argued that knowledge was not about having clear and distinct ideas but rather was about making. Humans know insofar as they produce the object of inquiry. The limit of our understanding lies in the constraints of our creations. Vico’s view implied a host of remarkable corollaries: knowledge was more about creativity and invention than rationality and speculation, more about ingenuity and imagination than analysis and calculation, and more about tinkering and experimenting than inferring and judging. Vico called the intertwinement of making and knowing the Verum Ipsum factum principle (hereafter the VFP): the true (verum) and the made (factum) are interchangeable. Vico’s epistemic agenda did not attract an immediate following; it was like a supernova exploding in the sidereal void. We can appreciate its shining light today because his perspective is surprisingly contemporary. Vico’s work was largely ignored until the nineteenth century when it was discovered by scholars who were busy debating the distinction between natural and human sciences. As a keen advocate of historical knowledge, Vico was immediately hailed as one of the fathers of the humanities. But his premature and anachronic classification as a hero of the human sciences obscured one of his main agendas: to construct new foundations for empirical and non-empirical knowledge.

I call Vico’s philosophy of knowledge ‘praxis epistemology’. Yet, this particular kind of epistemology had not born an adult in the head of Vico as Athena had been born from the head of Zeus. It grew slowly and clumsily within what Antonio Pérez-Ramos has appropriately called the ‘maker’s knowledge tradition’ (Pérez-Ramos 1988). The figures who contributed to this tradition emphasised, in one way or another, the fundamentality of making and producing in the process of knowledge. Francis Bacon was certainly one of the most eminent protagonists of the tradition, and Vico was deeply indebted to his intellectual agenda. Yet Vico’s version of ‘praxis epistemology’ was different, and perhaps more radical, for three main reasons.Footnote ¹ First, unlike Bacon and many of his followers, who conceived ‘making’ as an activity aimed to know something, Vico identified knowing with making. With the verb ‘to make’, Vico did not refer to the activity of the experimenter who ‘tortures’ and ‘extorts’ the secrets of nature. For Bacon, experiments were tools aimed at truth. He held that naturalists should put forward hypotheses and then observe and experiment to rule out possible explanations. Once the naturalist has ruled out alternative explanations, she might reach some consensus regarding a true representation of nature (Farrington Reference Farrington1966; Zagorin Reference Zagorin1999; Rossi Reference Rossi2008). Vico, instead, argued that experiments were tools for truth only as expedients for reproducing natural phenomena. In De antiquissima, Vico suggests that by reproducing natural phenomena, we can grasp them partially because we are somewhat rehearsing God’s creative activity on an infinitely smaller scale. Vico believed that natural phenomena could be controlled and predicted but that they could never be fully understood because only God, as a maker, knows them. Vico did not expect that we could provide timeless and definitive knowledge of nature. Because we know what we make, and we cannot make nature, we only really know our own productions, whether artefacts, languages, codes, theorems, games, myths, religions, or poems.Footnote ²

Second, for Vico, human knowledge was not at the service of material development but instead at the service of human self-understanding. Bacon believed that sciences had to improve the material conditions of humanity; Vico was rather sceptical about the virtuous connection between knowledge and power. To him, technical power without philosophical wisdom was the symptom of historical decadence, not an epistemic virtue. Third, unlike Bacon, Vico did not believe in any linear progress prompted by the wise use of a powerful scientific method. For Vico, humans would never free themselves from dogmatism and the alluring powers of the received traditions. No ‘Year One’ from which a definitive new modern world could blossom. No redeeming utopia would expect us at the doors of technical society. For Vico, any civilisation was doomed to fall back to previous stages of human development. In this context, Vico conceived his ‘praxis epistemology’ not as a tool for prompting unlimited progress but as an antidote against human arrogance and as a therapy against any quest for misplaced dogmatism. ‘Praxis epistemology’ was meant to emphasise the intrinsic limits of human cognitive possibilities.

But besides his important divergences with Bacon, there is a further, perhaps more important, reason why I consider Vico’s epistemology particularly important and worth our attention: his philosophical grammar is entirely at odds with most of what we normally read about traditional, modern epistemology, which is squarely divided between rationalists and empiricists, mind and world, theory and experience. Isaiah Berlin expressed very clearly this point when he observed that Vico’s notion of knowledge was ‘neither inductive nor deductive (nor hypothetico-deductive), neither founded on the direct perception of the external world nor a fantasy which lays no claim to truth or coherence’ (Berlin Reference Hausheer and Berlin2013).Footnote ³ While Vico’s contemporaries quarrelled about impressions, judgements, reason, representations, and beliefs, Vico talked about ingenuity, making, poetry, metaphors, inventions, instruments, institutions, history, and imagination. Vico’s open stance is interestingly unsettling because it cannot be easily squeezed into one of our historiographic categories. That is why Vichian scholarship is a kaleidoscope of disparate and often contradictory interpretations. There is an ‘idealist’, a ‘materialist’, a ‘pragmatist’, a ‘historicist’, an ‘anti-historicist’, a ‘reactionary’, a ‘revolutionary’, a ‘pagan’, ‘devout catholic’, ‘premodern’, a ‘modern’, an ‘unmodern’, and a ‘postmodern’ Vico (together with other possible hybrid versions).Footnote ⁴

No doubt, the complexity of Vico’s texts feeds such hermeneutical pluralism.Footnote ⁵ However, beyond the virtues and shortcomings of Vico’s several interpretations, I think that any of those categories can hardly embrace the contents of his philosophy and, in particular, his epistemology, for a simple reason: we have forgotten (or dismissed) many of the philosophical alternatives that were available to Vico back in the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁶ We might try to force Vico’s philosophy into one of our intellectual pigeonholes, whether we refer to realism, rationalism, empiricism, constructivism, pragmatism, relativism, internalism, externalism, or even historicism. Still, Vico’s cogitations slip away constantly through these categories, touching all and none.Footnote ⁷ By confusing and mixing our received convictions, Vico allows us to realise that most of our current interests and debates result from a contingent history in which particular approaches and concepts survived while others were discarded. There are other options beyond empiricism or rationalism, realism, or constructivism. We only need to reopen the Pandora’s box of philosophy’s history. To study Vico today, in fact, means also to be available to question many of our cherished beliefs about the roles, methods, concepts, and ideals of philosophy itself and human science more generally.

But how should we situate Vico in the history of Western philosophy and, more specifically, epistemology? In other words, was Vico a lonely genius who put forward an entirely new philosophy of knowledge that is now widely forgotten? Could Vico’s epistemology be the outcome of an isolated, contingent, and instant spark of inspiration? Furthermore, could Vico have really thought things other philosophers had only suggested much later, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? In Chapters 1 and 2, I deflate the myth of an isolated genius and show that Vico’s view resulted from an eclectic – and confusing – synthesis mixing ancient and modern sources.Footnote ⁸ Vico was far from being alone, and his insights reflected the environment in which he lived. Vico did not invent the idea that we know what we make.Footnote ⁹ His ‘praxis epistemology’ was a sort of ‘chimaera’ composed of diverse ideas taken from many disparate authors. What was new in Vico’s thinking was an original articulation of ideas that coherently connected the identification of making with knowing and a conception of human knowledge as something socially and historically produced – a conception that was reconsidered or rediscovered and unpacked several times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially as developed in the Marxist, Pragmatist, and Phenomenological traditions.

I.2 Situating Vico’s ‘Praxis Epistemology’

In 1969, the Italian scholar Rodolfo Mondolfo published Verum-Factum: From After Vico to Marx. Mondolfo was a renowned philosophy historian based at the University of Bologna. In 1939, as a Jew, he had to flee from Italy after the fascist government issued its racial laws. He found asylum in Argentina, where he died forty years later after publishing several books about the history of ancient and modern philosophy. Mondolfo’s book outlined the entire story of the MKT, and the account consists of a sweeping condensation of more than 2,000 years of cogitations while covering less than 100 pages. He pulls together an ambitious narrative, beginning with Hippocrates and ending with Marx. The book is a very old-fashioned intellectual history based on a hasty list of significant figures, ideas, and arguments, yet we might still find it inspiring for two reasons. First, it provides a general overview of how the VFP had been discussed several times over two millennia. He showed, quite convincingly, that Vico’s epistemology needed to be contextualised into a long tradition of scholars going back to Hippocrates. Secondly, and more importantly, Mondolfo’s old book is a goldmine of fascinating references. While going through the thick lists of sources, we can realise that, in the 1930s and thereafter, there was a vibrant community of historians and philosophers, many of them now forgotten, who were committed to reconstructing the history of this apparently ‘marginal’ tradition that had been much less marginal than one might have expected.

Through Mondolfo, we discover that many seminal scholars interested in the history of the ‘Maker’s knowledge tradition’ (MKT onwards), framed their narratives around Marxist coordinates. This is not surprising. Since the nineteenth century, both Marx himself and later Marxists had emphasised the fundamentality of praxis, of human action, in tying human’s collective will with nature, transforming both the latter and the former over time. Through the concept of praxis, Marxists questioned the idea that humans approached reality as contemplating minds. Humans are already into reality as acting, flesh-and-blood beings. ‘Reality’ itself, and our comprehension of nature, is the outcome of a constant, historical, dialectic relation between practice and theory. The insight spurred a host of new studies emphasising the categories of ‘practice’, ‘labour’, and ‘making’ in the history of human thought. Some, like Mondolfo or Benjamin Farrington, were persuaded that the unity of practice and theory typical of the philosophy of praxis could be traced back to the ancient Greeks (Farrington Reference Farrington1936; Mondolfo Reference Mondolfo1971). Others, like the American literary critic Edmund Wilson, argued that the history of European socialism began with Vico’s verum/factum and, especially, with Michelet’s rediscovery of it in the nineteenth century (Wilson [Reference Wilson1940] 1972).Footnote ¹⁰ Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue and the socialist engineer Georges Sorel and the Austrian philosopher Max Adler saw Vico’s concepts as precursors of many Marxist ideas precisely because they saw Vico as a philosopher of praxis (Jay Reference Jay1984). For all of them, Vico had produced a fundamental milestone in the overall history of socialist thought with his emphasis on making (interpreted in Marxist terms) and his supposed ‘cyclical’ historicism.Footnote ¹¹

But Marxist-inspired narrative of the MKT hid two fundamental shortcomings: first, by stressing the continuity and persistence of some specific ideas, they provide misleadingly unified narratives leading directly to Marx. They tend to overlook the fact that many ideas composing the tradition had been reinvented several times in different places. Such reinventions mirrored different cultures, languages, and needs, whether they had surged in Miletus, Athens, Rome, Naples, Paris, London, or Boston. In other words, no linear history of the MKT could be plausibly written to place Vico or any other of its protagonists unequivocally and to form a coherent sequence of great minds leading directly to Marx’s revolutionary notion of praxis. The very notions of ‘making’, ‘art’, ‘action’, ‘work’, ‘production’, and the like had changed dramatically over time. Hippocrates’s technē is not identical to Aristotle’s technē, and Nicholas of Cusa’s facere is not the same as Bacon’s opus, Vico’s facere/factum and then Marx’s produktion.Footnote ¹² As the MKT has been paved by too many breaks and reinventions, the very concept of ‘making’ seems hopelessly ambiguous and prismatic. There is no one stable concept – say ‘labour’, ‘art’, or ‘making’ – moving through history but a galaxy of many fundamentally vague concepts that are approximately related.Footnote ¹³ But there is a second shortcoming, which directly touches the scopes of this book: Marxist narratives use the very philosophical framework that was itself the historical upshot of the MKT. In fact, in this book, I show that we should not frame ‘praxis epistemology’ into Marxism but, on the contrary, we should contextualise Marxism into the MKT.Footnote ¹⁴ Marxist epistemology is a particular kind of praxis epistemology. We do not have a Marxist history of the MKT but instead a more comprehensive history that includes Marxism itself. If anything, the MKT’s history reveals the deep connections of Marxism to older traditions that also fed important aspects of pragmatism and phenomenology in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

I think there is a more promising and non-teleological alternative with which to approach the history of the tradition, and that comes from the first American scholar of Vico, Max Harold Fisch.Footnote ¹⁵ The biography of Fisch, like that of Mondolfo, is inherently fascinating. He was born in a small town near Seattle in 1900 and died ninety-five years later in Los Angeles. He came across Vico in the 1930s while writing a dissertation on Stoicism and Roman law at Cornell University. He was so intrigued by Vico’s hypothesis about the origins of Roman law that he decided to learn more about it even though no English translations were available (Marshall Reference Marshall2016). At the beginning of World War II, Fisch managed to travel to Italy to meet two of the most outstanding Vico scholars, Benedetto Croce and Fausto Nicolini. They encouraged him to translate Vico’s Autobiography and his opus magnum, The New Science, into English. While in Naples, with the crucial support of Thomas Goddard Bergin, an authority in Italian studies at Yale, Fisch began to translate Vico’s convoluted prose. Together, they produced the first complete translation of Vico’s New Science after the war in 1948. Fisch rightly became the first and foremost North American expert on Vico. Yet his unique expertise was complemented by another professional devotion: Charles Sanders Peirce and the pragmatic tradition. Not surprisingly, Fisch’s considerations about Vico and the pragmatic philosophy are extremely interesting.

First, Fisch argued that there were extraordinary coincidences between Vico’s philosophy and pragmatist epistemology. Yet he did not expect any direct line of influence between Vico and the pragmatists. Neither Peirce nor James or Dewey had probably ever read Vico; and even if they had, Vico’s influence was essentially nil. To Fisch, if we wish to explain their intellectual coincidences, we should not hunt for improbable direct influences connecting Vico to pragmatism. He believed that something deeper and perhaps more interesting was at stake: both Vico and pragmatists were reacting against the same philosophical tradition. They had a common enemy, and the enemy was the Cartesian theory of knowledge. Fisch observed that Vico and the pragmatists rejected the idea that to know meant representing the world outside us in our minds in the best possible way. They refused to believe that we could reach certainty and that such knowledge would relate to an objective description of the world. They reacted against the idea that truth involves transparent relationships among our thought, our language, and the world. Vico did not influence pragmatists, but the latter unwittingly revisited some Vichian ideas while questioning what John Dewey called ‘the spectator theory of knowledge’. In short, by challenging traditional epistemology, pragmatists had unintentionally resurrected Vico.

Fisch’s insight can be pushed even further and expanded. More than tracking down the network of influences that eventually led the ancient world to many other philosophical traditions – and then providing an unrealistic teleological narrative of the MKT, as many Marxists did – we might explore the possibility that Vico’s epistemology is a sign of a recurrent tension between two philosophical approaches: a clash between two ways of conceiving the nature and aims of knowledge. Following Fisch, we might test the hypothesis that ever since the seventeenth century, philosophers have been struggling between two opposite notions of knowledge, with Vico representing one branch. On the one hand, we have what Dewey called the quest for certainty – a quest superbly pursued by Descartes and his avatars. The quest consisted of the idea that knowledge needs to be grounded in universal, eternal, and objective principles. The dangerous enemies of knowledge are subjectivity, contingency, and, therefore, history. On the other hand, we have Vico’s more modest option that as basically limited beings, we can only know what we make. Thus, if we wish to understand how and what humans know, we cannot wander in the frictionless worlds of abstraction; we need to get our minds ‘dirtied’ by history. The epistemic act cannot be grasped through introspection, intuition, or pure reasoning but rather through its genetic reconstructions. We know something, Vico observed, not when we have a distinct representation of something inside our heads but instead when we can identify the causes behind its development, whether it is an idea, an institution, or an artefact. More generally, all of this means that philosophy (and thus epistemology) cannot be reduced to a critique of abstractions, as Whitehead wonderfully put it, but instead assimilated into a critique of human practices and institutions, as Fisch emphatically replied on Vico’s shoulders (Fisch Reference Fisch1956).

This is an exciting frame for telling a counter-history of epistemology. Such a history was not a procession of minor or great figures who defended an idiosyncratic theory of knowledge based on a unique notion of ‘making’. Rather, it was a history of a struggle between two camps inspired by powerful perspectives. In antiquity, the opposition had been between Platonists and materialists, as the Irish historian Benjamin Farrington wonderfully illustrated in his too-often-overlooked studies of the history of science in the ancient world (Farrington Reference Farrington1947). The clash continued with different strengths and intensities until the Renaissance, when scholars as diverse as Juan Luis Vives, Marsilio Ficino, Francisco Sanches, Giordano Bruno, and Francis Bacon reinforced the crucial relationship between theory and practice in the history of knowledge. Yet, in the seventeenth century, Descartes renewed the ancient trust in the absolute powers of the mind. Vico’s ‘praxis epistemology’ was a reaction against the excesses of abstraction and the overenthusiasm for any form of universal mathesis. Vico denounced the limits of a pure and ahistorical philosophy of knowledge a century later. But if we want to get to the core of such a conflict, beyond and behind a dry confrontation of philosophical arguments, we need to zoom out our analysis and reconsider the agenda of what we call ‘modernity’. Once we do that, we realise that Fisch’s suggestion of a clash between ‘universalists’ and ‘historicists’ had been provoked by a persistent continental ‘rift’ that was much deeper, larger, and more complicated.

I.3 Two Modernities?

In 1970, an American historian of the Renaissance, William Bouwsma, defended a fascinating hypothesis about the origins of secularisation in Europe.Footnote ¹⁶ He observed that what we call ‘secularisation’ began with an interdict imposed on Venice by the Pope in 1606. The interdict aimed to force Venice’s secular authority to bow to the spiritual will of the church. The resistance of Venice triggered a series of deep philosophical discussions addressing political, moral, and epistemic issues. For Bouwsma, the real concern was whether ‘it was permissible to conduct the various affairs of this world in accordance with the principles derived only from the human ends they served or, on the contrary, whether they must be controlled by and made to serve larger spiritual ends’ (Reference Bouwsma1990, 114). The Venetian leaders contended that temporal issues had to be considered as autonomous from spiritual ones, and the former could not be subsumed under the latter. The clergy, instead, argued that the cleavage between temporal and spiritual issues was a blow against the divine and universal order of the world. While Venetians insisted that ‘eternal truths are inaccessible to the human intellect, and that only the limited insights afforded by experience in this world are relevant to the earthly career of the human race’ (Reference Bouwsma1990, 114), the clergy condemned the supposedly impious view that human reason could be thought to be detached from the divine plan endorsed by the Pope and his emissaries. What makes Bouwsma’s analysis particularly fascinating for the purposes of this book is his insistence that the difference between secularised and non-secularised thought could not be reduced to the distinction between religious and non-religious sensibilities. On the contrary, for him, the distinction referred to two conceptions of human nature and knowledge, which were equally religious. However, while Venice represented the pragmatic, unsystematic, concrete, modest, and more pietist mentality of the temporal sovereignty, Rome embodied the highly abstract, systemic, absolutist, and generalising intellect of the spiritual power. Whereas Venice emphasised the limits and situatedness of human experience and knowledge, Rome stressed the universalising power of reason over everyday affairs. Bouwsma asserted that the success of Cartesianism in the seventeenth and then in the eighteenth century lay in the fact that this philosophy could be effectively used for grounding the clergy’s pretentions to universality. In the seventeenth century, the reaction against the spirit of the Renaissance embodied by Venice was the revival of the systematising approach of Descartes:

The offensive against Venice was a philosophical attack against the secular values of the Renaissance. What we normally call ‘modernity’ was, for Bouwsma, a sort of counterrevolution against temporal scepticism. The traditional cleavage between human affairs and spiritual certainties was solved in favour of the latter, which had to orient and underpin the former. Twenty years later, in 1990, the British philosopher Stephen Toulmin pushed Bouwsma’s insights further. Like Bouwsma, Toulmin argued that the Cartesian philosophical obsession with certainty and immutability had arisen from specific historical conditions. Yet he explored the possibility that the bloodshed of the Thirty Years’ War, which killed between four and eight million Europeans from 1618 to 1648, caused humanism, as well as the largely sceptical philosophies of the Renaissance, to go out of fashion. The end of the ‘secularised’ Renaissance was not determined by the victory of Rome over Venice but by the tragic and collective trauma prompted by war’s religions. Toulmin suggested that a moderate and tolerant attitude could be easily accepted in a relatively peaceful environment, but that scepticism had become a luxury no one could afford amid violent ideological and religious clashes. Toulmin believed philosophers such as Descartes and later Leibniz embraced a quest for certainty to provide an intellectual framework in which people of different persuasions (and religions) could discuss and eventually agree rather than cutting each other’s throats.

There are significant shortcomings in Toulmin’s argument, yet his central insight is deep, provocative, and heuristically fruitful.Footnote ¹⁷ He suggested that modernity had two stages. The first one was the humanism of the Renaissance in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the second consisted of the surge of scientific rationality in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Toulmin’s narrative partially (and interestingly) coincides with the Bouwsmanian idea that the philosophical and scientific revolution of the seventeenth century was, in truth, a Counter-Renaissance. “Modern” philosophy was not a direct response to medieval dogmatism and fanatism through the light of reason and science. Instead, it was a reactionary response against the weakness of the humanists’ ecumenic pluralism. For Toulmin, the epistemology of the Counter-Renaissance, as epitomised by Descartes, was a sort of ‘politics of certainty’ prompted by the endless carnage of the seventeenth century. The new science, rooted in mathematics and geometry, offered a privileged model for overcoming all sorts of destructive diatribes. Before the Thirty Years’ War, the philosophers of the Renaissance – imbued with the recently rediscovered ancient sceptic tradition of Pyrrhus, Sextus Empiricus, and Carneades – had inclined toward tolerant, open-minded, ecumenic, and practically oriented philosophies. Figures such as Erasmus, Rabelais, Montaigne, and Bacon had upheld a humanist worldview in which absolute certainty had no place. Their epistemology was a sort of politics of ‘relaxed tolerance’. Toulmin concluded that the significant difference between humanists and rationalists lay in how they addressed praxis. While the formers were essentially interested in mundane, situated, particular, and concrete issues that could never be arranged and solved once and for all, the latter idolatrised universality, eternity, abstraction, systematicity, and inflexible rigour. Whereas humanists embraced ambiguity, most seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rationalists proudly despised it. Rationalists, Toulmin added, were ‘theoretically centred’, and humanists were ‘practically minded’ (Toulmin Reference Toulmin1990, 34).Footnote ¹⁸

Toulmin felt that Descartes’s response to tolerant scepticism was brilliant but ineffective. We do not need to go deeply into the Meditations to grasp Descartes’s strange and brilliant strategy to defuse scepticism. To challenge the sceptic, Descartes invented an imaginary ego as a pristine mind stripped of all bodily elements: a pure speculative substance entirely opposed to any material thing, an ethereal mind attached to an ephemeral body thrown into a cryptic and foreign world. The problematic offshoot of this remarkable invention is that the extreme separation between mental and physical substances leaves the ego wondering how she can ever know anything beyond herself. While the life of the mind and the life of the body are astutely cleaved to guarantee the certainty of pure thought, external reality becomes something distinctively puzzling. Descartes’s strategy rested upon shaping a very peculiar idea of an ego which dismissed all practical issues that could trigger human disagreements by feeling the world. The mind and body dichotomy consists of a modern and perhaps more radical restatement of a Platonic epistemology. Descartes’s man, like Plato’s philosopher, was once again the transcendent ‘spectator’ witnessing the world from above and beyond it. But the modern Cartesian ‘spectator’ was not Plato’s aristocrat seeing the light out of the cave. Instead, she was a shy solipsist chasing a small rational light deep into the furthest corners of her mind.

Not surprisingly, the entire philosophical attitude of overcoming doubt by escaping the world was at odds with the Renaissance’s sensibility. The sceptic physician Francisco Sanches, for example, argued that the act of cognition was both physical and mental. To him, an intangible knowledge produced by a disembodied subject was an oxymoron: ‘It is futile to say that the mind understands, just as it is to say that the mind hears. It is the human being who does both, using body and mind in both instances’ (1988, 262). Vico, in his first inaugural oration, delivered in 1699 and dedicated to self-knowledge, would wryly state that ‘the human mind in the ear hears, in the eye sees, in the stomach shows anger, in the spleen laughs, in the heart discerns, and in the brain understands…’ (Vico in Pinton Reference Pinton1993, 41). As we will see in Chapter 2, Vico felt that the modern quest for certainty implied the fabrication of an ethereal ego. He understood that to overcome scepticism, modern philosophers had invented a ghost detached from and uncontaminated by the vagaries of practices, ambiguities, traditions, and contexts, that is, an alienated ego incapable of living and thriving in a flesh-and-blood community of fellows. The price for having a kernel of certainty within a self-fashioned ‘ghostly’ subject was very high, and many immediate post-Cartesian philosophers, like Vico, were unwilling to pay it.Footnote ¹⁹

We may disagree with most of Bouwsma’s and Toulmin’s narratives, and, in fact, I partially do. There have been countless studies charting the history of enlightenment and modernity, and it would not be difficult to find a good number questioning Bouwsma and Toulmin. I selected these perspectives because they clarify Vico’s place in the history of modern philosophy instead of confusing it.Footnote ²⁰ In fact, those scholars who have classified Vico as a champion of anti-modernism have assumed that only one modernity is possible, and that is the ‘modernity’ promoted by Descartes (Berlin Reference Berlin1979a, Reference Berlin1979b, Reference Berlin1992; Lilla Reference Lilla1994). In that case, we are left with two equally unappealing alternatives, which, in my view, mislead Vico’s aims. Vico was either an uncompromised anti-modern, a sort of conservative crank rowing against the tempting lights of modern science, or an obscure rhetorician who had nothing really worth saying about his world and ours (Lilla Reference Lilla1994).Footnote ²¹ But if we assume that more ideas of modernity were imagined back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Vico’s philosophy of knowledge immediately becomes much more interesting. His arguments acquire a new light, and his intentions become more intelligible. We realise that Vico was not only reacting against something (viz. Cartesianism) but was also proposing something different and, especially, something that could complement or even transcend Descartes’s philosophy.Footnote ²² In short, Vico wished for ‘modernity’ as Descartes did, but he did not wish for Descartes’s modernity. Vico was not against a new modern world in general (after all, he wrote a book titled The New Science), but he was against one reduced version of modernity, a version emptied of all those elements that constitute the kernel of human experience (myths, rituals, languages, artworks, poetry, and the like).Footnote ²³

The argument I put forward in this book is that if we understand Vico’s version of modernity, we realise that it was much more radical, and more successful in hindsight, than most readers might expect. But the radicality of Vico’s view can only be seen when we put his proposal in the proper historical frame. Fisch’s, Bouwsma’s, and then Toulmin’s historical and philosophical frameworks are on the right track. Descartes’s ‘modernity’ is much less straightforward than previously thought. Yet I think that their views are still misleadingly incomplete and need to be further unpacked. By focusing all attention on the dichotomy such as certainty versus uncertainty, they have missed an important point: the very notion of ‘certainty’ more equivocal and ambiguous than one might think, especially in the light of Vico’s contributions. We can consider at least two kinds of ‘certainty’ that we can identify in these debates, one speculative (theoretical) and the other situated and practical. More specifically, we have a propositional and non-propositional kind of certainty. I suggest that more than distinguishing between absolutist versus historical or pragmatic philosophies, Vico aimed to differentiate between these two kinds of certainties: the propositional certainty of Descartes and the familiar and practical certainties of our historical and social world. He noted that the Cartesian certainty was the result of a method that began with what was directly familiar to us and transcended it with the sheer power of our reasoning. When we properly apply this method, we eventually arrive at some undoubtable premises from which we can build our theoretical knowledge. In this case, all qualitative experience can be ‘abstracted’ into quantities and thus generate the absolute and universal ‘objectivity’ we are seeking.Footnote ²⁴

The second kind of certainty, instead, begins with the awareness that we are social beings who live in an historical world. In this case, what is certain is not the undoubtable formal sentence we might extract from our methodological inquiry, but the cognisance that we are part of a meaningful world that we have made and continue to make. In other words, certainty is not something that can be wrapped up into one undeniable proposition (or a set of sentences), but it is something that we identify once we realise that we are part of an entire, irreducible nexus of meanings. This notion of certainty was first glimpsed by Vico while criticising Descartes’s Cogito: it is one thing to be aware of something (i.e., that we exist and think) and another thing to know that something (i.e., to explain why and how we exist and think). We are certainly aware that we exist in a world even though we are uncertain about what this world is and how it came about.Footnote ²⁵

But Vico develops further the insight through three editions of the New Science: not only we are certainly aware of our existence, but we are also certainly aware that we are part of a history we have made. As Vico famously wrote in the last edition of the New Science, ‘In the dense and dark night which envelops remotest antiquity, there shines an eternal and inextinguishable light. It is a truth which cannot be doubted: The civil world is certainly the creation of humankind’ (Marsh Reference Marsh2013, [331] 119).Footnote ²⁶ To Vico, what is certain are our stories, myths, languages, and laws, as well as our concrete and material productions. What is certain are the cultural, linguistic, and material facts that we produce and that give sense to our surrounding world. In short, what is certain is the product of our praxis, which not only anticipates but also provides meaning to any abstract or theoretical cogitation.Footnote ²⁷ Again, this praxis is not certain in the sense that it involves some indubitable or absolute beliefs but rather in the sense that praxis is the very condition for having any meaningful belief at all. Philosophical games that play with scepticism already presuppose a previous engagement with a shared meaningful world made of languages, concepts, and histories. All the knowledge that we might obtain regarding nature and natural processes is ultimately rooted in the human collective world, which is the veritable source of our ‘certainties’, including the Cartesian ones.Footnote ²⁸

Thus, by considering different conceptions of ‘certainty’, we can explore the possibility that the difference between the two modernities – the Cartesian and the Vichian – did not lie in the clash between universalism and historicism. It did not refer to what Richard Rorty called the quest for mirroring nature, as it is opposed to more tolerant historical perspectivism. Rather, we have a clash between those who wanted to transcend the human world and observe it from ‘nowhere’ and those who believed that we could comprehend ourselves and our historical world from within.Footnote ²⁹ Vico understood that a new science, whatever it could be, could not start with an abstract ego who reckons his or her bare existence, but with the concrete and living human being, who shares a common history, society, and tradition.Footnote ³⁰ This new science should not start with abstract certainties, but with the practical certainty that we are historical beings who make and remake the world in which they live.Footnote ³¹ A new science, accordingly, was not inherently anti-foundationalist but foundationalist from a practical viewpoint. In other words, knowledge is not grounded in some undoubtable, universal, and necessary proposition, but rooted in our surrounding, historical, and cultural world. The world of technē, and more specifically, our world of praxis, is the certain condition for having all sort of propositional knowledge.

No doubt, the two modernities responded in radically different ways to the challenges of dogmatism and scepticism. The modernism of Descartes aimed to transcend both by contriving a universal formal method. The Cartesian bet was to reach ‘objectivity’ by eliminating any trace of history, subjectivity, culture, and quality through quantity and abstraction. The vagaries of qualitative experiences needed to be tamed by the precision of mathematics and geometry, which would deliver the best ‘clear’ and ‘distinct’ ideas. On the contrary, the goal of Vichian modernism was not to transcend dogmatism or scepticism through any formal method but to understand them as cultural and historical products. What is ‘really real’ in the Vichian world are not quantities or geometrical figures we sift from the chaos of human experience, but human history itself and its products. From a more general perspective, the radicality of Vico did not merely consist of severing two kinds of sciences, the natural and the human, but it consisted of subsuming the latter under the former. Insofar as the natural world is something we have not produced, it is only partially intelligible to us. Instead, the human historical world is fully visible because it is our own creation. As we will see particularly in Chapters 2 and 3, Vico glimpsed the idea that it is the human historical world that can ground human abstractions and cogitations, including any of those employed in the natural sciences. But the profound insight required another two centuries to flourish. The insight was in fact unpacked by Marxists, pragmatists, and then phenomenologists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In the twentieth century, Dewey, then Richard Rorty, and Toulmin argued that modern philosophy, with its quest for foundations and certainty, had led us to a dead end.Footnote ³² They pointed out that the problem of whether our representations determine the world (anti-realist) or vice versa, whether the world determines our representations (realist), was the outcome of this unnatural (and unnecessary) separation between subject and object (and, therefore, theory and practice), which began with Descartes’s clever invention. They suggested that once we challenge this dichotomy, the quest for certainty loses ground. Instead, I suggest going a few steps back and then a step further: first we go back to Vico to understand how the Cartesian agenda was first concocted and enforced upon the philosophical world. Then we go forward and realise that the crucial philosophical quest has never been a struggle between those who want certainty and those who deny its very possibility. The struggle has been between those who seek formal and atemporal certainties and those who focus on situated and practical certainties. The radicality of Vico’s proposal consisted in replacing a quest for a view from ‘nowhere’ – whether the view was rooted in an all-powerful God, an eternal universe, or a rational ego – with an agenda based in the fundamental belief that the ‘now’ and ‘here’ is the outcome of our history itself. The human world, the real world for human collectives, is nothing but history: praxis and history. Since Descartes and Vico, we have been stuck in a permanent swaying between those two modernities: one obsessed with the source of ahistorical certainty and the other grappling with the source of historical meaning. The constant failure of the former explains why Vico is constantly resurrected after the repeated failures of the latter.

I.4 Plan of the Book

This book addresses three related concerns. It engages with the long and complex history of the MKT, it introduces the crucial contribution of Vico to this tradition, and it shows how many of Vico’s ideas have resurfaced in three important philosophical traditions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Marxism, pragmatism, and phenomenology. I argue that, through his broad and original synthesis of ancient and Renaissance sources, Vico formulated one of the first versions of what I call ‘praxis epistemology’. This approach consisted of connecting five main ideas: the idea that practices (making) precede theories (speculation); the idea that knowledge is a collective – social – enterprise situated in history; the idea that human knowledge, as historically situated, cannot aspire to transcend the cultural and material conditions from which it emerges; the idea that any analysis of our knowledge must begin with scrutinising and comprehending our prejudices, and more generally our presumed everyday world, rather than dismissing or transcending them; and, finally, the idea that there are no definitive rational foundations in knowledge because knowledge (including scientific knowledge) emerges from our intentional and meaningful engagements with the world. These thoughts have been directly or indirectly resurrected through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in different forms, contents, and combinations.

The book’s structure is the following: in Chapter 1, I explore the history of the MKT preceding and informing Vico’s cogitations. We will see that ever since antiquity, philosophers, naturalists, and scholars of different persuasions have been deeply concerned about the relationship between making and knowing. From Hippocrates to Plato and from Alexander of Aphrodisias to Marsilio Ficino to Giordano Bruno, a fascinating and twisted history of the MKT remerges. The history is vast and complex, and in Chapter 1, I could only provide a selective and partial account, which condenses more than 2,000 years into a handful of pages. I thus devised an episodic history, focusing on what I consider five decisive moments of the tradition. As a voracious reader of ancient and modern sources, Vico was one of the most distinguished heirs of such tradition. Chapter 1 also introduces the main conceptual thread that will connect all the chapters: since its very beginnings, the MKT has been characterised by the intuition that through human art or practice (technē), our natural and social world is revealed and made intelligible. In Chapter 2, I reconstruct the intellectual world of Vico in Naples and explore the philosophical content of the Verum/factum principle, as he stated in 1710. I delve into Vico’s radical philosophical message, which can be briefly stated as follows: while we have no access to the world sub-specie aeternitatis, we move and muddle through it. Knowledge is not the true representation of something out there; instead, it refers to our capacity to address ourselves and the world. The scope and limits of our understanding rely on our own operations and productions. Once we renounce the ideal of ‘truth’ as the correspondence between our representations and the world, we are free to inquire how humans obtain reliable – albeit local and unstable – knowledge of their worlds and themselves. Again, the realm of practice (technē) precedes and reveals physical and social realms. Then, in the final part, I address the relationship between history and epistemology in Vico’s magnum opus, The New Science, and assess the limits and implications of the Verum/Factum principle and its relation to ‘praxis epistemology’.

Chapter 3 charts the fortunes of Vico’s ‘praxis epistemology’ in the nineteenth century when it was rediscovered by the French historian Jules Michelet. I briefly describe the French (Parisian) context in which Vico’s ideas were discussed. I connect ‘praxis epistemology’ to what John Tresch has called ‘the labour theory of knowledge’. I argue that Vico’s philosophy was rediscovered in France precisely because Paris was at the centre of industrial modernity, where new cogitations on the relation between making and knowing were hotly debated. The idea that we know through action and transformation was shared by thinkers as different as Maine de Biran, André-Marie Ampère, Karl Marx, Auguste Comte, and Georges Sorel. I will particularly focus on Marx’s and Sorel’s engagement with Vico’s philosophy. Marx shared with Vico the idea that theory and practice are parts of the same endeavour. Marx emphasised the importance of considering human beings in concrete historical situations. He believed that human nature is historically determined while history moves around multifarious and ever-changing human needs, both material and non-material (Tagliacozzo Reference Tagliacozzo1983). Not surprisingly, Vico has also been a constant source of influence for many of Marx’s followers, whether he was correctly read or widely misinterpreted.Footnote ³³ Profoundly inspired by Marx, the polytechnician Sorel used Vico’s philosophy to reshape Marx’s historical materialism to introduce a new agenda for the social sciences and imagine a new philosophy and history of science based on human labour.

In Chapters 4, 5, and 6, I examine how ‘praxis epistemology’ spread in different forms through the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I relate it to three great philosophical traditions: Marxism, pragmatism, and phenomenology. The order is largely arbitrary. While Marxism (broadly understood as a wide-ranging philosophical doctrine disseminated by Engels after Marx’s death) and pragmatism (usually rooted in Peirce seminal papers published in the 1870s) are products of the late nineteenth century, phenomenology is admittedly more recent (it often associated to Husserl’s seminal two-volume work, Logical Investigation, originally published in 1900–1901). But beyond the chronological order, what I want to highlight is that each tradition developed singular aspects of the relations between making and knowing. I suggest that those philosophical approaches represent three possible paths emerging from a Vichian ‘pragmatic’ epistemology.

Marxists stressed how labour and industry had changed our relationship with the world and our understanding of it. They observed how collective needs and practices had produced particular forms of knowledge. Marxist scholarship in the history and philosophy of science was particularly fertile in the twentieth century: from Nikolai Bukharin to Boris Hessen, from Edgar Zilsel to Benjamin Farrington, from György Lukács to Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Max Horkheimer, there is an entire intellectual continent to rediscover and reassess. Pragmatists, by contrast, underscored the experimental and adaptive strategies we employ to adjust to different environments. In criticising the so-called spectator theory of knowledge, instrumentalists such as John Dewey argued that knowledge did not concern a subject contemplating an external object but an experimental process by which a particular problem or collective concern was solved. Like Vico, pragmatists were deeply suspicious of the dichotomy of subject versus object, as well as experience versus nature. Although the philosophical affinities between Vico and the pragmatists are easily identifiable (Palmer Reference Palmer2002), it is improbable that the latter were familiar with Vico’s cogitations. I will introduce a new, counter-history of pragmatism that emphasises the strong relationships between American and European scholars variously imbued with Vichianism, Nietzscheanism, and Bergsonism, to name just a few. I argue that the outcome of these relationships was a fascinating debate that attempted to redefine pragmatism as a sort of neo-humanism.

In Chapter 6, I focus on phenomenology and neo-phenomenology. I show how phenomenologists and hermeneuticists, especially after E. Husserl’s Crisis, emphasised the relevance of activities and practices in providing the conditions which made human understanding possible. Deep and rich philosophical concepts such as Husserl’s Lebenswelt, Heidegger’s Dasein, and Gadamer’s reinterpreted notion of praxis highlight the fundamentality of pre-theoretical experience for underpinning any kind of human cogitation and, therefore, all types of knowledge. The practical, often unnoticed, everyday world shapes and underlies our most abstract concepts. Our ordinary dealings and makings precede our conscious understanding and rational, a posteriori, reconstructions of our behaviour, aims, and theoretical knowledge.Footnote ³⁴ I show how the idea that practices and things precede concepts and theories is reminiscent of Vico’s famous statement in axiom LXIX of his New Science: ‘The order of ideas must follow the order of things.’Footnote ³⁵ Against Descartes, Vico argued that we could never transcend our own situated traditions and cultures. To him, any form of rationality emerged from a network of values and conceptual presuppositions that could not be bracketed or suspended at will in the act of knowing. They were part of an irreducible and hardly analysable ‘common sense’. In these three chapters, I frame the three traditions within the history of the MKT (and praxis epistemology). I argue that they highlight disparate aspects of the making–knowing relationship and enrich, in different ways, Vico’s general insight that the verum and factum are convertible. I claim that those traditions highlight different aspects of the link between technē and physis, where, again, practice anticipates and provides the fundamental frame to understand physis. I conclude that the approaches are not contradictory but complementary.

The Conclusion chapter returns to Vico. It addresses the historicisation of knowledge and practices that began with him and ended with historical epistemology. I return to the discussion of two modernities: one based on the idea that knowledge aims to domesticate, order, and reduce human experience to a few rational principles, and the other grounded in the notion that knowledge is something we use for engaging with the social and natural worlds in a meaningful way. The understanding of ourselves as inherently historical and situated beings is not less modern than the understanding of ourselves as basically rational beings. I argue that Vico, on the shoulders of other ‘humanist’ scholars, concocted a powerful version of modernity in which human knowledge consists of historicised ‘practices’ aimed to navigate an uncertain and increasingly complex world an uncertain world. I claim that this view is timelier than ever and should be seriously readdressed, whether seen from social (Marxist), experimental (pragmatist), and noetic (phenomenological) perspectives or some ingenious synthesis of them. In fact, I believe that a ‘praxis epistemology’ fit for the twenty-first century should eclectically merge those traditions in one coherent combination. This merging would involve combining economic, social, instrumental, existential, and hermeneutical aspects of knowledge.