Through a Jewel, Darkly A Reading of the Frontispiece of Giambattista Vico’s

Ben DeForest Spring 2008 214.748 – Vico and the Old Science Prof Walter Stephens Through a Jewel, Darkly: A Reading of the Frontispiece of Giambattista Vico’s Scienza Nuova Editions of Vico’s New Science published since 1730 have presented a detailed frontispiece as an introduction to the text The image, which Vico refers to as the dipintura, was designed for the 1730 edition by Vico’s friend and fellow Neapolitan, Domenico Antonio Vaccaro, and was intended to serve as an allegorical representation of the philosophical system about to be presented in the text, so as “to give the reader some conception of this work before he reads it, and, with such aid as imagination may afford, to call it back to mind after he has read it.”1 The particular engraving used for the frontispiece has varied some by edition, but the major features of the image remained largely uniform: a ray of light issuing forth from a divine eye, a female figure wearing a winged cap, the blind poet Homer, and various instruments and icons representative of human history and civilization In the 1744 edition, another image of similar iconography was printed on the title page, overleaf of the dipintura This image, which in the scholarly literature has become known as the impresa, depicts a woman with a winged cap seated on a sphere, holding a builder’s square and staring into a mirror, and it bears the inscription “IGNOTA LATEBAT.”2 Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984) ¶1 Further references will be made parenthetically within the body of the essay Donald Phillip Verene, “Vico’s ‘IGNOTA LATEBAT,’” New Vico Studies, Vol (1987): pp 79-82 The scholarly literature still does not to present a uniform interpretation of all matters concerning the symbolism of the two images, but a few likely possibilities seem to have emerged Verene, for instance, writes, “I believe that the impresa and the dipintura are ‘before and after’ depictions of Vico’s ‘new science of metaphysic,’”3 and he goes on to suggest that “[t]he impresa shows metaphysic as self-sufficient and thus the producer of abstractions The dipintura shows metaphysic as the mediator of the divine and the civil and thus is a portrait of Vico’s new metaphysic.”4 Verene sees the impresa as roughly equivalent to those metaphysical systems of the early modern era that Vico outwardly denounces in his work, the dipintura as an approximate figuration of the world of Vico’s philosophy One should, therefore, be able to extract from the imagery of the dipintura the structure of Vico’s philosophical system and to define his position vis-à-vis various early modern philosophers by comparing the imagery of the dipintura with that of the impresa And so Verene writes, The right-angled triangle held in the right hand of the figure of the impresa has been merged with the circular shape of the mirror held in her left hand and has become an equilateral triangle framing the eye of God in the dipintura The mirror itself has been transformed into the convex jewel that is placed on the breast of metaphysic in the dipintura and which now reflects the triangle of the eye of God onto the statue of Homer The triangle and the mirror no longer portray an internal relationship within metaphysic (between the two hands) but are formed upwards into the divine eye, and an aspect of the mirror, its reflective power, is retained by metaphysic in the convex jewel In the dipintura metaphysic becomes a mediator between the divine eye and the world of civil things Through metaphysic the divine order is reflected into the world of civil things.5 Ibid., p 86 Ibid., p 88 Ibid., p 87 For Verene, the imagery present in the impresa all finds an analogue of sorts in the dipintura, though the role played by the imagery in each of the two pictures differs In particular, the figure of philosophical reflection—and, to borrow a modern English phrase that seems particularly apt given the appearance of the female figure’s paunch, “navel gazing”—that appears in the impresa is turned from something of a solitary act despised by Vico to a sort of civil communion with the divine Verene’s reading finds a very close echo in an essay by Angus Fletcher In his reading of the dipintura, he remarks, There we see the reflected ray of the light from the Eye of God Ancient tradition spoke of light emanating from the Divine Eye Cartesian optics continued to hold that light is an emanation of the human eye, such that we see objects much the way a blind man feels them with his stick In this context, it seems plausible to hold that Vichian sight, or “insight,” amounts to an active illumination of the objective world The world’s puzzling surface yields finally only to the mysterious capacity analogous to God’s Eye, our equivalent emanating power and organ of sight, the mind The Table thus sets up an analogy: as the Divine Eye emits divinely radiant light, so the human “eye of the mind” emits a humanly (socially) radiant light.6 On Fletcher’s reading, Vico is engaging in a sort of analogical appropriation: human beings reflect upon, illuminate and understand the world in the same way that God does The spatial plane of the dipintura seems “twisted” and objects seem displaced, according to Fletcher, and this at least in part because the characteristics of the human and divine are intermingled in an unusual manner Vico pieces together the neo-Platonic doctrine of emanation as the productive force of truth in the world with the modern conception of human beings as the active, empirical perceivers of the nature of the world Thus, a very realistically depicted human eye is placed in the position of the divine As Fletcher takes it, Vico means to suggest that just as God illuminates the world of divine creation and Angus Fletcher, “On the Syncretic Allegory of the New Science,” New Vico Studies, Vol (1986), p 37 thereby knows it, the human being can illuminate the world of human creation and thereby know it For both Verene and Fletcher, the two pictures and the two bends of the ray in the dipintura correspond to two distinct realms of analysis: two very different kinds of metaphysics and two very different kinds of observation and illumination And they both together contribute to illuminating the system of Vico’s new metaphysics I want to suggest that something slightly more complex is going on in the case of the dipintura Even if Fletcher’s reading is correct in part, it does not capture everything of the distorted character of the dipintura and the displaced positionings of its images The “twist” that Fletcher finds in the “containing space of the picture plane” and in “the Mannerist shape of the figura serpentinata”7 characteristic of Homer and dame metaphysic, and which suggests for Fletcher a radical break in the strict logical coherence of the image, can also be seen in the reflection of the divine ray off the breast of dame metaphysic That is, something very complex and ambiguous occurs with the bending of this illuminating ray, something that excludes the possibility of an interpretation of the two arms of the ray bearing a simple, analogical relation to one another Both Verene and Fletcher seem to be aware that the ray of light in the dipintura bears important implications for Vico’s account of human knowledge Its absence from the impresa suggests that a certain kind of human knowledge can fail to exist when certain conditions are lacking, and both Verene and Fletcher note that those conditions are clearly present in Vico’s new conception of metaphysics What I think they both miss, however, is the complexity of the philosophical position implicit in the dipintura If indeed, as I suggest with Verene, the dipintura represents a form of metaphysics elaborated and advanced in Vico’s New Science, and the impresa represents a Ibid., p 35 metaphysics still yet to receive the new Vichian upgrades, then there should be a great difference in the complexity of the two images The dipintura should represent a much more multifarious and sophisticated metaphysical system than that contained within the impresa Indeed, there should be something deficient about the metaphysics of the impresa I want to suggest, beyond Verene and others, that the impresa represents metaphysics not simply in a more primitive state, still yet to undergo the Vichian philosophical advancements; rather, the metaphysics of the impresa is, I think, a destitute philosophy, one that Vico wishes both to supplant and to condemn It is the metaphysics of Descartes, Locke and others; it is a metaphysics that privileges the philosophical faculties and cognitive activities of the individual over and above the community, the world, or divinity; and it is a metaphysics incipient in an age in which “reflection” has emerged as the new guiding activity through which philosophy is said to be conducted This new activity of reflection is not only central to the terminology of modern metaphysics, it even provides an accurate visualization of what characterizes this metaphysics: this is a philosophy that reflects on its own ability to function as a philosophy; it is a philosophy that looks at itself in the mirror It is a manner of thinking, in Vico’s words, that leads human civilization into the “barbarism of reflection” (1106) In moving from this destitute philosophy to his metaphysics, from the impresa to the dipintura, I suggest that Vico is attempting to counter the barbarism of reflection Vico is well aware that reflection has become the dominant mode for conceiving of human understanding, in terms of both vocabulary and imagery; he knows that in his present day, in the age of human beings, he must render an account of his metaphysics in terms of reflection His rendering of reflection, however, is drastically divergent, profoundly subtler and more complex than that which one finds, for instance, in Descartes In paying close attention to how Vico renders his conception of reflection, and especially as it appears in the dipintura, I hope better to understand how Vico’s philosophical system is intended to function Indeed, I hope to understand how, by coordinating the various branches of learning contained within his metaphysical tract, Vico aims to forestall, subvert, or even annul what he sees as following from the “barbarism of reflection”—what Stephen Taylor Holmes refers to as “the ‘modalization’ of reality.”8 I intend, in other words, to imagine Vico’s philosophical system As a way of addressing what I take to be lacking in the interpretations of the philosophical meaning of the dipintura provided by Verene, Fletcher and others, I turn now to several questions regarding the imagery of the impresa and the dipintura that still remain to my mind unanswered First among them: Whence comes the jewel? Why, as Verene suggests, is the mirror from the impresa “transformed into the convex jewel that is placed on the breast of metaphysic in the dipintura”?9 Why does it not, rather, remain a flat mirror? Presumably not for purposes of fashion But if so, then why not a flat jewel? Whence the convexity? I would be unconvinced by any suggestion that the transformation is not meaningful We cannot, for instance, dismiss the jewel as a piece of imagery borrowed uncritically from other examples of Renaissance iconography that might have served as a model for the dipintura Frankel suggests one such possible influence and cites Rossi on Stephen Taylor Holmes, “The Barbarism of Reflection,” in Vico: Past and Present, Vol 2, ed Giorgio Tagliacozzo (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981), p 221 Verene, “Vico’s ‘IGNOTA LATEBAT,’” p 87 two others,10 but none of the examples there given include any mention of a convex jewel If there are to be found other convincing accounts of possible models for the figure of metaphysic in Vico’s dipintura, and if one of those possible models bears a convex jewel on her breastplate, then perhaps the presence of the convex jewel might be chalked up to nothing more significant than staying faithful to the model image; but I know of no such suggestions Moreover, the question would still remain why the figure of metaphysic in the dipintura should have a convex jewel on her breastplate and the otherwise similar figure on the impresa should have none—indeed, not even a breastplate: just a loosely-hung, low-cut tunic of sorts, with more of a cleft showing than anything of convex shape The image of the jewel on the breastplate, even if it is to be explained, as does Verene, as a transformation of the mirror from the impresa, is something new in the dipintura, and it had no place in the picture until Vico refigured things in his “new science of metaphysic.” On my reading, then, the figure of the convex jewel marks an important transformation from the previously reigning (or “lying hidden,” if you like) metaphysics to what Vico creates in his New Science The first significant transformation to the reflective surface is to make it convex, rather than flat like the mirror in the impresa Vico could not be satisfied with depicting his new dame metaphysic with a flat mirror or any other flat reflective surface on her breast Her jewel must be convex, so that, as Vico writes in his explanation of the image, it indicates that the knowledge of God does not have its end in metaphysic taking private illumination from intellectual institutions and thence 10 Margherita Frankel, “The ‘Dipintura’ and the Structure of Vico’s New Science as a Mirror of the World,” in Vico: Past and Present, Vol 1, ed Giorgio Tagliacozzo (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981), p 46: “According to Rossi, the image of the woman whom Vico identifies as metaphysics seems to result from the combination of two images in Ripa’s Iconologia: Metaphysics and Mathematics I believe that closer to Vico’s image of metaphysics is Ripa’s Contemplative Life ” regulating merely her own moral institutions, as hitherto the philosophers have done For this would have been indicated by a flat jewel, whereas the jewel is convex, thus reflecting and scattering the ray abroad, to show that metaphysic should know God’s providence in public moral institutions or civil customs, by which the nations have come into being and maintain themselves in the world (5, italics mine) Herein, in part, consists the newness of Vico’s conception of reflection: the scientific reflection enacted by a practitioner of Vico’s new science is a reflection not solely limited to the person engaging in the reflection and not solely consequent to his or her private morals, but a reflection that illuminates properly only when it casts light upon the whole history of human civil institutions Nor should this illumination occur seriatim, dealing with one age of history or one institution of society at a time; rather, the convexity of the jewel “scatter[s] the ray abroad,” illuminating all things at once, so that there is no need to direct the ray at individual periods of history or aspects of society Vico’s conception of reflection, like that of Descartes, describes how metaphysics can in the first place be established as a possible discourse For Descartes, reflection on the existence of the ego is necessary for the establishment of a subject capable of metaphysical thought For Vico, reflection on the institutions of human civil history is necessary for the establishment of a discourse that can save humans from the loss of their ability to engage in the proper sort of reflection—a discourse that prevents the “barbarism of reflection.” But the issue is more complicated than this The bending of the ray of light that emanates from the eye of God is a turn that represents the real distinction between the world of man and the world of God I referred before to this turn as a “reflection,” but this is not quite accurate In the above-cited passage, Vico claims that “the jewel is convex, thus reflecting and scattering the ray abroad.” Here Bergin and Fisch are guilty of a significant inaccuracy in their translation: Vico does not use the word “reflecting,” riflettere, but rather “refracting,” rifrangere.11 The distinction might perhaps seem minor, but it is rather consequential for our interpretation of the dipintura The jewel on the breastplate of dame metaphysic does not act as a mirror—an opaque surface which light can never enter, but off which light can only bounce Rather, the jewel is a prism: white light enters it as a single ray and comes out as the scattered colors of the rainbow This will have significant ramifications for our interpretation of Vico’s conception of reflection,12 but before I deal with these, I would like to dwell further on this prism In order to understand the role of the prism in the dipintura, it is necessary first to discern what Vico understood about prisms Now, it is difficult precisely to determine what Vico did and did not know about the science of light, the production of colors, and the passage of light through prisms Even when it can be determined which optical treatises Vico had read, it is difficult to discern how Vico actually interpreted what he read It is certain, for instance, that Vico had read Descartes on the subject in question: in what Ashley notes is Vico’s “sole reference to Descartes in the New Science,”13 Vico 11 Giambattista Vico, Principj di Scienza Nuova, a cura di Fausto Nicolini (Torino: Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., 1976), ¶5 The passage italicized in the quotation above reads: “…lo che si sarebbe significato un gioiello piano Ma convesso, ove il raggio si rifrange e risparge al di fuori ” This error has apparently escaped the notice of several generations of students of the Bergin and Fisch translation, and it seems to have been at least in part repeated in David Marsh’s more recent translation, New Science (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), p 4: “Instead, the jewel in my picture is convex, so that the rays of providence are reflected and refracted outwards.” Though Marsh’s translation includes mention of refraction, it seems to be in a very loose sense, and apparently intended to correspond more with risparge than with rifrange Of the translations I have seen, rifrange is taken strictly as a refraction only in Prizipien einer neuen Wissenschaft über die gemeinsame Natur der Völker, Teilband 1, trans Vittorio Hösle and Christoph Jermann (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1990), p 6: “Aber er ist konvex, so daß der Lichtstrahl sich bricht und nach außen ausstrahlt ” 12 Although “refraction” is indeed what takes place in the imagery of the dipintura, I see it as appropriate to maintain the word “reflection” for referring to the philosophical activity under question “Reflection” is simply the standard philosophical parlance, de rigueur since Descartes and Locke employed it variously for their purposes (For an account of the development of “reflection” as a philosophical term in Locke and Descartes, see Verene, “Vico and the Barbarism of Reflection,” in History and the Disciplines: The Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, ed Donald R Kelley [Rochester, NY: The University of Rochester Press, 1997], pp 146-47.) I am trying to demonstrate that Vico aimed to employ a figure of reflection different from that of Descartes, one which acts to subvert and supplant Descartes’s “reflective” metaphysics 13 James Ashley, “Vico and Postmodern Reflection,” New Vico Studies, Volume 18 (2000): p 59 describes the Stoic doctrine that “from the eyes, through the pupils, sticks of light issue to touch the objects which are distinctly seen,” (706) and then goes on to attribute this same doctrine to Descartes, citing his Optics (also known as the Dioptrics), I.2 Ashley also notes, however, that Vico “distorts what Descartes actually says Descartes in the Dioptrics is quick to reject this Stoical theory.”14 In light of this difficulty, I aim not to try to discern what precisely were Vico’s views about the natural science of optics It is, after all, rather likely that he may have harbored some antipathy towards the discipline itself: Descartes’s Optics was published along with his Discourse on Method, the work against which Vico directed an attack with his On the Study Methods of Our Time Vico very likely questioned the validity of the natural scientific project of determining the nature of light and color, and it seems therefore unhelpful to try to piece together his thoughts on these issues I aim, rather, only to consider how Vico and Vico’s contemporary readers would likely have understood the way light and color appear in the natural world—that is, how they would predict things would look if light of a certain kind were to pass through, for instance, a prism After all, Vico held an especial affinity for images and appearances, and it is the relation of the figures in the dipintura and the manner of their appearance that chiefly concerns us here Since we know that Vico read Descartes’s Optics, we can assume that his beliefs about how light might appear when it reflects off or passes through certain objects might be obtained at least in part from his reading of this work On the issue of the reflection of light off surfaces of various shape, Descartes writes, 14 Ibid., p 59 Vico’s system, by contrast, seems unconcerned about contrary claims The potential for the creation of contradictions is in no way prevented; the potential is rather embraced Vico revels in ambiguity and duplicity, in the apparent convolution of the store of human wisdom His ray of refracted light is at once in its nature white light and multicolored; on top of that, it is both poetic metaphysics and philosophical Certainly these two types of metaphysics are aligned in Vico’s system As he writes near the beginning of Book II of the New Science, Throughout this book it will be shown that as much as the poets had first sensed in the way of vulgar wisdom, the philosophers later understood in the way of esoteric wisdom; so that the former may be said to have been the sense and the latter the intellect of the human race (363) These two types of metaphysics are, as can be seen, very different Nevertheless, the latter discipline, of which Vico’s new science is an example, relies upon the former for its usefulness As Vico goes on to say, the human mind does not understand anything of which it has had no previous impression from the senses Now the mind uses the intellect when, from something it senses, it gathers something which does not fall under the senses; and this is the proper meaning of the Latin verb intelligere (363) For Vico, a proper philosophy must start with the examination of philology If the history by which the impressions have been gathered is not examined, then the act of reflecting upon what has been gathered will not truly be intelligere Now, I stated at the outset of this investigation of Vico’s conception of the behavior of light that I would venture conjectures only about how Vico and Vico’s readers would have believed that things would appear in the dipintura, and not anything about the actual physical doctrines upon which such beliefs might be founded I stated this in part because of the difficulty of ascertaining what Vico had read about optics at the time of the creation of the dipintura I should note, in this regard, that Vico was certainly familiar with the works of Newton Not only does he refer to Newton’s disputes with Leibniz in paragraph 347 of the New Science, as Max Harold Fisch has noted, Vico considered Leibniz and Newton to be the greatest geniuses of the era, and he even sent a copy of the First New Science to Newton upon its publication in 1725.30 It would therefore seem almost unconceivable that Vico might have been unfamiliar with Newton’s optical theory at the time when he was writing the New Science, and thus before the production of the dipintura The other difficulty I noted is that involved with ascertaining how Vico interpreted what he read—indeed, whether he actually intended accurately to construe the doctrines of natural philosophy with which he was familiar, or whether, as I shall suggest now, he portrays them, whether intentionally or not, ironically I described above, I hope persuasively, how Cartesian and Newtonian predictions of the behavior of light are systematically both portrayed and avoided in Vico’s dipintura I suggested that Vico rejected some of the key tenets of Cartesian optics so that he would not be committed to some of the unhappy consequences of the doctrine of Cartesian metaphysics I then described how Vico revised the Cartesian imagery of disciplinarity in accordance with a Newtonian description of the behavior of light I left out, however, the one major inconsistency in my reading of the dipintura as a Newtonian conception of things The refraction, which I insist must be a refraction according to Vico’s own words, and must be a refraction passing through a prism in order for Vico to avoid falling into the trap of Cartesian metaphysics, is, in the actual image of the dipintura, a reflection Light cannot refract at an angle of lesser magnitude than 90 degrees—at least not in any 30 Giambattisa Vico, The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, trans Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1944), pp 81-82 medium known in Vico’s day—and yet the ray of light in the dipintura most certainly pivots on an acute angle Moreover, there are no depictions of refraction in the works of Descartes or Newton that portray an angle as sharp as the one in Vico’s dipintura In the absence of a possible influence that might have confused Vico into thinking that refraction could occur as it is portrayed as occurring in the dipintura, we must conclude that Vico’s figuration of his New Science in the dipintura does not, in the end, admit to a strict natural philosophical account It does, nevertheless, invite just such an account, and with an almost unrelenting insistence Vico’s detailed description, and its close resemblance to Descartes’s imagery, compels us to seek out a correspondence between the image and the doctrine, between the sense and the intellect In other words, Vico is inviting us into his new science: he is producing in us, his readers, that very type of reflection—philosophical reflection—which must come at the third stage of human history, and which is the proper aim of Vico’s philosophical metaphysics For Vico, a practitioner of the art of memory—an art in which the stuff of thought is regulated by mnemonic devices, oftentimes pictorial devices—images are not simply representations of the natural world, which has been understood by other means, and as Descartes would have it, cognitive means Rather, for Vico, images are the very stuff of thought itself If there is some master account of the appearances of things which should serve to regulate the various specialized approaches to understanding the world, that account should deal in the way things are represented to us: the way objects appear in their images, actions in their sounds, and words in their etymologies Indeed, Vico’s New Science might be seen as involving itself in the same project as Descartes’s Rules; but whereas Descartes was interested in devising analytical rules for directing the cognitive functioning of the human mind in accordance with mathematical principles, Vico was interested in describing the ways by which the very stuff of thought itself is constituted, whether represented by words or hieroglyphs, auguries or thunderclaps For Vico, these media through which thought takes place have varied throughout human history The purpose of Vico’s philosophical metaphysics, which is the proper mode of thinking for the third stage of human history, is to reflect upon the various manifestations of human thought throughout the ages The “barbarism of reflection” occurs when, as with Cartesian metaphysics, people begin to reflect on a possible arrangement of the human intellect that could hold for all ages, that would be situated on some unshakable foundations and eternal laws of the universe For Vico, proper philosophical reflection is aimed at considering not the possible arrangement of the human intellect, but its actual manifestation in the signs and symbols employed variously throughout human history Human intellect is composed of all of the past manifestations of human thought, and the only way to describe the rules by which it functions in the present day is to trace the history through which it has passed Now the relation between the systematization of disciplines and the act of reflection should be growing clearer: the reflection of philosophical metaphysics in Vico’s system is that which illuminates the workings of human intellect as it has passed through and developed within various social and cultural institutions Whether the colors of the refracted beam correspond to the seven “principal aspects of this science” described in paragraphs 386-99 or to the subdisciplines of poetic metaphysics, the various aspects or disciplines can only be described in terms of their actual development in history, and not via some sort of imaginative reflection on their possible arrangement or functioning Philosophical reflection, for Vico, is that which enables us to see the actual partitioning and arrangement of human thought into categories of functioning Moreover, reflection lets us account for the unity of these various categories of intellectual function: the various categories with which we are faced are the result of a single, universal history of the gentes The categories have their origin in the same act of divine intervention, and they share a history of development that cycles through the ages of human history The irony of the dipintura is that Vico must represent the relation between the various symbols within the picture in a manner consistent with the laws of physics known at the time, as physics was a category of intellectual functioning that contributed to the human intellect in the early 18th century So, in reflecting upon the fact that physics is a category of intellectual functioning, Vico must construct his representation using the dictates provided for him by physics This accounts, I suggest, for the deep ambiguity of the representation It is never quite clear, or example, whether the bend in the ray of light should be called a reflection or a refraction For, whereas Vico refers to it as a refraction in the text of his philosophical metaphysics, in which he is reflecting upon the image and the institutional histories implicit in it, according to the dictates of natural philosophy, the bend in the ray so depicted could only be a reflection Yet the whole interpretive framework that suggests that reflection for Vico’s metaphysics is a reflection upon the history of the disciplines and categories that compose the whole of contemporary human understanding is a framework dependent upon Vico’s designation of the bend in the ray as a refraction Otherwise, the resultant ray would not contain the rainbow of colors, united as a beam of pure sunlight, that corresponds to the multifaceted composition of the human intellect.31 And so, in a figure of irony, Vico’s system comes full circle Now, my interpretation of the relation between the white light of the divine ray and the rainbow of colored light of the ray that comes forth refracted through the jewel on dame metaphysic’s breast perhaps runs slightly in conflict with something Vico himself says of his image Earlier in the paragraph quoted above, Vico writes, The ray of the divine providence illuminating a convex jewel which adorns the breast of metaphysic denotes the clean and pure heart which metaphysic must have, not dirty or befouled with pride of spirit or vileness of bodily pleasures, by which Zeno was led to put fate, and by the second Epicurus to put chance, in the place of divine providence (5) According to Vico, the pureness of the divine ray is meant to correspond to the cleanliness and purity of the “heart which metaphysic must have.” One might assume, then, if the divine ray is to signify purity, that its changing in appearance from white light to a rainbow of colors would represent a corruption of purity Such would seem, then, to speak against my interpretation of the second bend in the divine ray as a refraction In other words, it would seem to suggest that Vico is not speaking in natural philosophical terms when he writes “rifrange” in the passage quoted above Despite appearances, though, I think that Vico does mean to be using this optical terminology in the sense he learned through Descartes and Newton, and I think that a closer look into the ambiguity of these passages will shed ever more light on Vico’s use of natural philosophical thought for his work and, thus, on his strategy for systematizing disciplines within his philosophical metaphysics 31 A similar analysis could be applied to the ambiguity of the convex nature of the jewel, which I have alluded to in footnote 15 above It is clear that we should take Vico, when he refers to the “heart,” to be speaking somehow figuratively He is ostensibly speaking about the heart of dame metaphysic (the figure in the dipintura), who has a human bodily form and, thus, presumably, a heart According to Vico, the figure of dame metaphysic stands for the discipline of metaphysics: “The lady is metaphysics,” “La donna è la metafisica” (2) So, presumably, we should read the “heart” of dame metaphysic as being analogous to some element of the discipline of metaphysics, some aspect of metaphysics that ought to be kept “clean and pure.” But the latter half of the passage above speaks to a different interpretation: Zeno and Epicurus are said to have been lead to false metaphysical doctrines because they were “dirty or befouled with pride of spirit or vileness of bodily pleasures.” The imagery of bodily characteristics in this case corresponds to the characteristics of actual practitioners of the discipline of metaphysics (viz Zeno and Epicurus), and not to the characteristics of the figure of dame metaphysic in the dipintura (and thus, by extension, to the discipline of metaphysics itself) This is a real ambiguity in the work, and it is made more complex by another surprising feature of Vico’s commentary on the dipintura According to Vico, the “ray of divine providence denotes the clean and pure heart.” It is not surprising for Vico to speak of the cleanliness and purity of the divine ray, but it would seem equally natural for him to speak of the cleanliness and purity of the jewel on the breastplate as suggesting the “clean and pure heart.” The cleanliness and purity of the divine ray is not discernable in the image—Vico must describe it as such in order to grant it such a meaning So, too, could he have described the cleanliness and purity of the jewel and granted to it the “denotation” of “the clean and pure heart.” Moreover, the latter “denotation” would seem much more suggestive given the appearance of dame metaphysic in the impresa In the impresa, her garment hangs loosely over her bosom, exposing her cleavage and suggesting things “dirty or befouled,” or the “vileness of bodily pleasures.” In the dipintura, she has covered her breast with a breastplate and adorned it with a convex jewel, seemingly in an act of modesty and prudence, and in stark contrast to the concavity of the other image It should be noted here that, for Vico, the words “providence” and “prudence” are etymologically related, to the point of being interchangeable according to the rules of signification operative in the age of the theological poets In the section on Poetic Morals in the New Science, Vico describes how early humans developed the sense of shame: they were forced to take shelter in caves as a means of escaping from the divine thunderbolts Early men brought their women lovers into their caves, and so developed the practice of making love under cover; and with this practice there developed a certain virtue of the spirit called shame, or prudence (504) Vico’s description of the divine ray as signifying the “clean and pure heart of metaphysic” seems strange, because it would have been easier for the reader to remember the signification of the image if the signification Vico prescribed for it were already suggested at the level of the imagery—at the level of the things (the divine ray and the breastplate) and their relation to the ideal eternal history, in which the real divine ray (the thunderbolts) and the real breastplate (the clothing used to cover shame) are made manifest But, in light of the equivalence of providence and prudence, Vico’s “denotation” of the divine ray as the cleanliness and purity of the heart of metaphysic makes perfect sense: that which early humans used to cover themselves lines up with the breastplate, and that which caused early humans to move into caves and develop shame lines up with the divine ray Since the two are interchangeable, it is no more natural for Vico to choose one figure rather than the other Nevertheless, Vico’s choice of the divine ray as that which signifies the “clean and pure heart” is counterintuitive The readers of the New Science not think in terms of the equivalence of prudence and providence—at least not when they are reading the “Idea of the Work” for the first time—and the proximity of the heart of dame metaphysic to the jewel on her breastplate makes that interpretation seem far more plausible Moreover, there is no “dirty or befouled” ray of light in the impresa, whereas there is something of “vileness of bodily pleasures” in the image of dame metaphysic’s chest in the impresa So the choice of the jewel instead of the divine ray would seem more appropriate in the context In choosing the less obvious of the two figures to signify the “heart of metaphysic,” Vico is, I think, emphasizing the arbitrariness of the signification The connection between the divine ray and “heart of metaphysic” is established only in the text, in Vico’s commentary in the “Idea of the Work.” Since this correspondence is arbitrary—that is, established through conventions “agreed upon by the people” (32)— Vico seems to be telling the reader to engage in scientific reflection, to understand the “denotation” of the divine ray according to the interpretive frame that Vico provides in the text If, as I suggest, Vico emphasizes in this passage the fact that, in the age of men, the signification of symbols is an arbitrary phenomenon established by conventions of popular agreement, and further in paragraph 32 that scientific reflection in the fashion of the New Science is characterized by an arbitrary element at its core, it follows that the representation of reflection present in the dipintura should portray something of arbitrariness, of chance, of the disruption and scattering of linear causality and rational teleology And here I think we find the ultimate interpretation of the moment of reflection in the New Science: the jewel on the breastplate of dame metaphysic is not simply a flat and polished reflective plane, off which a ray of light could rebound unencumbered, but a convex site of complexity and convolution—a figure in which other figures appear differently, in which local phenomena are scattered abroad and disparate things appear in their unity, and in which the act of reflection throws into question the very fact that “reflection” is the dominant modern mode for conceiving of philosophical activity In Cartesian and Lockean metaphysics, reflection is the purest mode of philosophic contemplation, and the tools of modern philosophy, science and mathematics clue us in to its value Vico, for his part, modernizes a thought from an earlier era, suggesting, “now we see through a glass, darkly.” For Vico, to embrace an element of obscurity and paradox is not to return to a dark age of bestial worship or credulous devotion, but is rather the only means by which to reconcile and coordinate the sciences that have emerged over the course of human history Vico’s refiguration of reflection is not a step backward into a dark age, but rather a contribution intended seriously for the advancement and proper practice of science In attempting, as I suggest Vico is doing, to outline the characteristics of a system of signification in which symbols are matched to their objects arbitrarily, Vico is composing “a language in which [human beings] are absolute lords a language whereby the people may fix the meaning of the laws by which the nobles as well as the plebs are bound” (32) Inasmuch as human beings are bound by the institutions and the languages of their history, in some dim, random way, they have become the enactors of their own future And, as Holmes suggests in consideration of “the barbarism of reflection,” all is enacted in the name of science: With the rise of Galilean science and the attendant discrediting of Aristotelian teleology, nature was rendered “purposeless.” The chief consequence of the scientific revolution for social philosophy was the fact that moral norms could no longer be convincingly based upon insight into imperatives purportedly etched into the structure of the physical cosmos even if nature could no longer be conceived as a reliable foundation on which society might be “built,” it still could be understood as a problem which institutions and social rules might help to “solve” The use of a problem-solution model for the reconstruction of a postGalilean theory of natural law had the advantage of allowing Vico to conceive society as indeed dependent on nature, but at the same time as independent of nature in the sense of being underdetermined by it.32 Vico was operating within the context of an intellectual milieu that entertained a real distinction between the social and moral world of man and the natural world of divine creation, yet for much of the history of that real distinction the two realms shared a crucial characteristic: both realms were intelligible to human beings according to the same strategy of inquiry Until the scientific revolution, the various modes of intellectual inquiry instantiated institutionally as disciplines of study shared the same basic structure: each discipline had a set of aims and ideals, and its methods were tailored to the fulfillment of these aims and ideals The identity of a particular discipline was determined by the particular aims and ideals—the products to be got from the inquiry The means for thematizing the unity of disparate modes of intellectual inquiry had its roots in the philosophical system of Aristotle, which organized various modes of inquiry according to precisely this model In each mode of inquiry, the cause of an event ought to admit to description in four ways: material, formal, efficient, and final 32 Holmes, pp 214-15 After Galileo, messages of human moral import could still be got from the cosmos, but the ways by which Galileo’s “sidereal messengers” transmitted their reports to human beings were light-years from astrological practices dominant prior to the scientific revolution The truth of the stars, for Galileo, was to be grasped through a series of observations and calculations made with the use of precise instruments The identity of the observer was of little importance; what mattered was the precision of the instrument and the rigor of the calculations For those committed to astrology, the observer could only gain knowledge of things by acting upon the things to be observed: by reciting an incantation or casting a spell, perhaps even with the aid of a talismanic object Moreover, for astrologers, the identity of the person inquiring of the stars determined precisely what knowledge would be gained from the enterprise The knowledge of the stars was for a particular person and facilitated by a particular kind of incantation For astrologers, the natural world provided the knowledge, just as it did for Galileo; but after the scientific revolution, the kind of inquiring that involved recourse to the identity of a particular individual or group of individuals situated in the world, or to the purposefulness of an action carried out by an individual or group of individuals, had to be strictly distinguished from the kind of inquiring that aimed to bracket the identity and situatedness of the particular inquirer undertaking an investigation As this latter kind of inquiring became more and more accepted as the means for engaging the natural world, it became more and more problematic to conceive of the natural world’s influence on the realm of the social and the moral As Holmes makes clear, the purposefulness of the moral realm could not be explained by recourse to this new kind of inquiring But even more, the mounting dominance of this new kind of inquiring forced social and moral philosophy to steer clear of purely naturalistic explanations and inquiries Natural philosophers would not put up with the likes of astrologers taking on their same objects of study and doing so with a different method Social and moral philosophers were forced to depart from an exclusive reliance on “naturalistic” explanations, not simply because such explanations were inadequate to their topic (i.e they failed to account for the purposefulness of moral and social action), but also by dint of social pressures: the new kind of inquiring emerging in natural philosophy appeared to be the final word in taking on nature as an object of study, so the kind of inquiring that would preserve, among other things, teleological explanation would need to carve out a different object of study It is in this light that theories of society such as Vico’s began to emerge Nature is not ruled out of the picture altogether, as Holmes observes; rather, it is, on Vico’s account, a part—but only a part—of an explanation of civilizational development Nature can have a place in an account of the evolution of human societies, but there must also be recourse to something other than the natural In Vico’s case, this takes the form of the supernatural Vico’s difficult account of Providence as a force both transcendent and immanent, divinely inspired yet naturally active, fills both roles—that of the natural and of the supernatural And in this light it becomes clear how the dark moment in Vico’s dipintura—the moment of reflection that also refracts and diffracts, the moment of pure unity and diverse multiplicity, the moment of human and divine—makes possible Vico’s systematic philosophy: were it not for the impassible, inscrutable, ever-obfuscating arbitrariness of the moment of reflection, the Vichian metaphysical system would fall into the easy self-sufficiency of modern reflective metaphysics If human beings could observe, create and illuminate as their God, they would as Descartes and banish all the civil institutions and intellectual disciplines from the story of human understanding: enacting a philosophy divorced from philology, they would engage in a reflection that reflects nothing In Book II of The Advancement of Learning, Bacon speaks of the human capacity for knowledge in terms of rays of light He writes, Thus have we now dealt with two of the three beams of man’s knowledge; that is, “radius directus,” which is referred to nature; “radius refractus,” which is referred to God, and cannot report truly because of the inequality of the medium: there resteth “radius reflexus,” whereby man beholdeth and contemplateth himself.33 This passage marks one of only three references to a “beam” of light in The Advancement of Learning, and neither of the other two passages provide any context for this one The passage appears obscurely; we see it only darkly It is clear, however, that it finds its way, however dimly, into the New Science Vico displays the radius directus, in all its refulgent splendor, emanating from the divine eye and illuminating the world of nature, which is the creation and the proper domain of knowledge of the divine Godhead The radius refractus shines through the jewel on the breastplate of dame metaphysic, and thus illuminates the world of human creations Through the variety of its aspects, humans seek always after knowledge of the divine The knowledge is always colored; the medium is truly a medium, a place at which a turn has taken place And in this turn, man sees himself reflected The ray by which he practices his sciences and understands the institutions of his world is an opaque ray: neither wholly dark nor wholly white, uniform in multiplicity, it shows him what he is; it shows his own creation Man stares at his own 33 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, in The Works of Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England, Vol I, edited by Basil Montagu (Philadelphia: Parry & McMillan, 1859), p 201 image—the world of his creation, darkly lit and brightly thrown from view He looks for his creation, but he cannot view it eye to eye And this he sees directly ... crucial aspect of our new reading of the dipintura is the appearance of the ray of light once it has refracted through the prism: this ray appears to the viewer of the dipintura not as a ray of. .. pass through, for instance, a prism After all, Vico held an especial affinity for images and appearances, and it is the relation of the figures in the dipintura and the manner of their appearance... image of the dipintura, a reflection Light cannot refract at an angle of lesser magnitude than 90 degrees—at least not in any 30 Giambattisa Vico, The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, trans Max