Numbers in brackets indicate the start of a page in the original text.

Words in brackets were added by the translator to improve readability.

Commentary by S. Kaminski appears in the left margin.

Vico on Ingenium from Giambattista Vico. On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians. Trans. L.M. Palmer. London: Cornell University Press, 1988. 31-34, 96-104. Originally published 1710.

[31]

[From the Introduction by L.M. Palmer]

Ingenium and Descartes’s Res Cogitnas

To follow this reading it helps to understand the differences between Descartes and Vico. Early on, Vico looked up to Descartes, but he came to reject his emphasis on geometric or mathematical logic. You may recall Descartes' name from high school geometry: Cartesian coordinates, mapping objects with numbers on x, y and z axes, was Descartes effort to mathematically define the world.

Consider Descartes approach to rhetoric, which you can find on the list of definitions. He considered rhetoric to be only for the display of ideas derived from logic. Logic was the key to knowledge and persuasion for Descartes.

Vico rejected this approach by saying that mathematical logic can only give a limited view of truth. Human beings operate rhetorically--artistically. These dimensions become critical to persuasion in human affairs, such as business and politics.

Some management theorists have tacitly adopted Descartes' scientific approach to human affairs. For example. Frederick Taylor set forth the Principles of Scientific Management in 1911. However, this approach to management is severely limited since it ignores the fundamentally non-scientific character of human motivation. Even other management theorists who take a more humanistic perspective miss the inherently rhetorical nature of every aspect of business.

Ingenium plays a role in human communication by revealing connections that advance knowledge and persuade people without resorting to the methods of logic or mathematics.

In Vico’s physical universe there are no rectilinear motions, no principle of inertia. The force of conatus keeps the universe alive and in motion.

In the final chapters of De Antiquissima, where Vico develops his psychology and his theory of mental activities, the same force becomes the unifying principle of the human mind. Earlier he had argued against Descartes’s failure to account adequately for the world of extension and motion. Now he uses the unifying principle of life to reject Descartes’s dualism of mind and body. He concludes the De Antiquissima by developing his philosophy of mind grounded on ingenium and on a logic of discovery based on topics.

Contrary to what several commentators have argued, there is a strong relation between the verum-factum principle, the metaphysics of Zenonian points, and the psychology based on the gradual development of thinking from feeling and sensing. Just as the verum-factum [32] principle validates the metaphysics of points and refutes Cartesian mechanicism, so in Vico’s psychology the verum-factum certifies a view of the human mind at variance with any form of Cartesian phenomenalism. In addition, just as conatus explains the origin and conservation of the physical world, so in these final chapters the principle of life—what Vico calls air—explains the origin and development of thinking.

Badaloni offers ample evidence of the debates among members of the Academy of the Investigators on the theory of air as a cosmological principle.

He correctly traces the obvious naturalism of these final sections to the “modern Platonism” that characterizes the school of the followers of Galileo at the beginning of the eighteenth century. This form of Platonism, well known to Vico, centers around the theory of the continuous creation of the world’s soul and of human nature. As mentioned earlier, Vico never wrote the projected volume on physics, but summarized his views on the science of nature in the De Aequilibrio Corporis Animantis, of which he gives a sketch in his autobiography. In this work he argues that the Latins used the word anima for air as the principle that gives the universe motion and life and on which the ether acts as male on female.

The ether insinuated into living beings the Latins called animus; hence the common Latin distinction anima vivimus, animo sentimus, “by the soul we have life, by the spirit sensation.” Accordingly, the soul—that is, the air insinuated into the blood—would be the principle of fife in man, and the ether insinuated into the nerves would be the principle of sensation. To the degree that ether is more active than air, the animal spirits would be more mobile and quick than the vital spirits. And just as soul is acted on by spirit, so spirit would be acted on by what the Latins called mens, or thought; hence the Latin phrase mens animi, the mind of the spirit. And this thought or mind would come to men from Jove, who is the mind of the ether.

Vico repeats almost verbatim this argument at the beginning of his analysis of mental activities, and he uses it to conclude his criticism of Descartes’s res cogitans and to reject the hypothesis of the pineal gland. The view Descartes presents is that of the mind directly moving the pineal gland. This gland is suspended in the center of the brain, and thus it affects the “animal spirits,” which are the causes of [33] mechanical changes in the body. Using his theory of the conservation of motion, Descartes postulates that the direction of motion of these spirits is affected by the soul, but not the direction of their speed.

To Vico this hypothesis is “the invention of a man entirely ignorant of metaphysics” and poorly acquainted with medicine. Descartes introduces the device of the pineal gland because he is ignorant of the causes and origin of thinking. He fails to distinguish animus from anima and he misunderstands the function of the animal spirits. Thus Descartes does not see how improbable it is for the mind to reside in that part of the body which is the most inert and passive, nor can he explain how people with a damaged brain are able to reason and argue correctly. Because air, or ether,[66] is the vehicle of both vital and animal spirits, the difference between animus and anima is a difference in degree and not in kind. Animus is autonomous, free, and immortal. From animus mind originates as mens animi, the most subtle part of spirit and life. The faculty of desire which is “for everyone his God” pushes animal spirits into vital spirits, and from these thinking originates. As Badaloni remarks, in this theory of mind thinking is no longer an a priori datum, but “the result of an objective force.” It is, in fact, the expression of the divine conatus which moves the physical universe.

Vico’s view of the divinity of the mind differs from that endorsed by some of Descartes’s followers. Malebranche, for example, accepts Descartes’s Cogito and argues that ideas are created by God. To Vico this form of spiritualism places conditions on God. Hence he argues that if Malebranche were to be consistent, he would have to accept the logical implications of his theory, namely, when “I think,” it is really God who thinks in me and in God “I recognize my mind.” Malebranche remains, in the long run, a Cartesian; but Vico detaches himself from this tradition and introduces a view of thinking conditioned by its divine nature, which is therefore action, invention, and ingenium. As many commentators have pointed out, the view of the creative powers of mental faculties can be traced historically to the [34] tradition of Herbert of Cherbury and to several British empiricists, including Locke and Berkeley. Yet the path Vico takes to refute Descartes’s phenomenalism and its concomitant skepticism is original with him.

There are no traces in his theory of the Cartesian view of the mind as a substance whose essence is thinking. Neither res extensa nor res cogitans is given—one to be mathematized, the other to be analyzed. The mind is active, constructive, and productive in all of its functions. As Vico ingeniously puts it, the faculties of the mind are “facilities to make.” We create colors in seeing and flavors in tasting. We represent and make images of things in imagination. Even understanding is a “facility” because through the process of understanding a thing we make it true. Thus mathematics, geometry, and mechanics are products of human faculties because in these sciences we make the truths we demonstrate.

Finally, ingenium is the original and natural faculty of humans; it is the proper faculty with which we achieve certain knowledge. It is original because it is the first “facility” young people untouched by prejudices exemplify upon seeing similarities between disparate things. It is natural because it is to us what the power to create is to God. just as God easily begets a world of nature, so we ingeniously make discoveries in the sciences and artifacts in the arts. Ingenium is a productive and creative form of knowledge. It is poietic in the creation of the imagination; it is rhetorical in the creation of language, through which all sciences are formalized. Hence, it requires its own logic, a logic that combines both the art of finding or inventing arguments and that of judging them. Vico argues that topical art allows the mind to locate the object of knowledge and to see it in all its aspects and not through “the dark glass” of clear and distinct ideas. The logic of discovery and invention which Vico uses against Descartes’s analytics is the art of apprehending the true. With this Vico come full circle in his arguments against Descartes.

We are the makers of truths because it is only when we produce that we become like God. There is a difference between God’s knowledge as the model for human knowledge and God being the foundation and ultimate guarantor of human knowledge, as in Descartes’s system. In the latter, human nature is bound to be passive; in the former, it had better be creative if it wants to be fully human. The idea of the origin and development of institutions as a way of saving humans from dissolution is not far off.

[96]

[From Most Ancient Wisdom by Vico]

IV. Ingenium

What ingenium is—Why it is called acute and obtuse—Ingenium is synonymous with nature—Ingenium is the nature peculiar to man—Only man sees the measures or proportions of things—God is the artificer of nature, man is god of artifacts—Why “known” is used for the beautiful—Why, among the sciences arithmetic and geometry are the most well established—Why engineers are so named

Ingenium is the faculty that connects disparate and diverse things. The Latins called it acute or obtuse,[5] both terms being derived from [97] geometry. An acute wit penetrates more quickly and unites diverse things, just as two lines are conjoined at the point of an angle below go degrees. A wit is obtuse because it penetrates simple things more slowly and leaves diverse things far apart, just as two fines united at a point he far apart at the base when their angle is greater than go degrees. And so an obtuse wit joins diverse matter more slowly, an acute wit more rapidly. Furthermore, ingenium (mother wit) and natura (nature) were one and the same to the Latins. Is this because human wit is man’s nature inasmuch as our wit can see the symmetry of things and recognize what is apt, fitting, beautiful, and ugly, whereas brutes are denied this? Or is it because, just as nature generates physical things, so human wit gives birth to mechanics and, as God is nature’s artificer, so man is the god of artifacts? [6]

Certainly scientia (knowledge) comes from the same roots as scitum (the known). And the Italians render these no less elegantly as ben inteso (well understood) and aggiustato (arranged).[7] Is this because human knowledge is nothing but making things [in the mind] correspond to themselves [in the world] in beautiful proportion, which only those endowed with wit can do?

Therefore, geometry and arithmetic, which teach these things [proportion, etc.], are the most certain of sciences. Those who excel in their application we Italians call ingegneri (engineers).

V. The Faculty of Certain Knowledge

The three mental operations (perception, judgment, reasoning) are directed by the three arts (topics, criticism, method)—Why the ancients did not have any peculiar art of method—Geometrical method is useful neither to morality nor to public speaking—Cicero’s order of argumentation. Demosthenes’ confusion—Demosthenes’ force of eloquence is contained in the disturbed order [98] of his argurnentation—Method is not the fourth operation of the mind, but the art of the third—All ancient dialectic is divided into topics and critics—Without topics, Cartesian critics are not precise—How Aristotle’s topics and categories are useful to discovery—The arts are the laws of the community of letters—Why the Greeks separated topics from criticism—Ingenium is the proper faculty of knowledge—It develops in man from childhood—What common sense is—Likeness is the mother of all invention—Why argument is so named and who the arguti are—What ingenium is—Invention is both the procedure and the result of ingenium—Ancient dialectic used induction and analogy—What syllogism and sorites are—What type of argument is acute and what subtle—Why the geometrical method is useful for discovery in geometry, but only useful to organize inventions outside of it—In physics demonstration, not geometrical method, must be applied—When geometry sharpens ingenium—Synthesis finds truths, analysis makes them—Imagination is the eye of ingenium, judgment the eye of understanding

These thoughts afford us the opportunity to investigate which proper faculty for knowledge has been given to man. For man perceives, judges, reasons, yet often he perceives falsely, judges rashly, and reasons fallaciously. The Greek schools of philosophy maintained that these were the faculties that had been given to man for knowing, and that each one was governed by its own set of rules: the faculty of perception by topics, judgment by criticism, and reason by method. But they have not handed down any teaching on method in their dialectics because children learned more than enough method through practice itself while studying geometry. With the exception of geometry, the ancients believed that the ordering [of studies] should be left to prudence, which is not governed by any art; indeed, practical wisdom is prudence because it is not governed by art. Only artisans instruct [apprentices] that you do this first, that next, and then the other things in order: this method (ratio) does not mold a man of practical wisdom but some type of craftsman.

Underline added.

Truly, if you were to apply the geometrical method to practical life, “you would no more than spend your labor on going mad rationally,"[8] and you would drive a straight furrow through the [99] vicissitudes of life as if whim, rashness, opportunity, and luck did not dominate the human condition. To compose a public address according to the geometrical method would be the same as excluding everything clever from it, carefully demonstrating nothing but what is quite obvious, treating the audience like children and putting nothing but pap in their mouths, and to sum up in one word, playing the part of pedant instead of being the speaker at an assembly.

And indeed, I cannot help but marvel that those who recommend the use of the geometrical method in public speaking so vigorously propose Demosthenes as the one paragon of eloquence. For—may God help us!—Cicero is dismissed as imprecise, disorderly, and all mixed up. Yet the world’s most learned men have all, till now, admired the order and cogency that they have noticed in his work; this is such that what he says first opens itself in a certain way and embraces what he says next; so that what comes later in the speech seems not so much to be asserted by him, as to emerge from and flow out of the facts themselves, while Demosthenes, for heaven’s sake, offers nothing but hyperbata from beginning to end, as Dionysius Longinus, the most discriminating rhetorician of all, rightly remarks.[9] To his opinion, I might add this: that in Demosthenes’ disturbed order of speaking, the whole enthymematic capacity of speech is strained like a catapult. For he usually sets forth his argument to give his listeners notice of what is at issue; but soon he is running on about things that seem to have nothing to do with the matter announced, so that, to some extent, he alienates and distracts his audience. Then, at the end, he explains the analogy that links the subject now under discussion with what he first set forth, so that the thunderbolts of his eloquence fall all the harder the more unforeseen they are.

Underline added.

We must not think that all antiquity employed only a crippled [faculty of] reason because the ancients did not recognize the operation of the mind which is today counted as the fourth. For method is not the fourth operation of the mind, but rather the art of the third, by which reasoning is ordered. So all ancient dialectic is divided into the art of discovery and that of judgment: the Academics were concerned only with the former, the Stoics only with the latter. Both were [100] wrong, because there is no invention without judgment and no judgment—without invention. Thus, how can a clear and distinct idea of our mind be the criterion of truth unless it has seen through all [of the elements] that are in the things, or are germane to it? And how can anyone be certain that he has seen through all of them completely unless he has examined all the questions that can be asked about the matter at hand. And first, he must examine the question “Does the thing exist?” so as to avoid talking about nothing. Second, the question “What is it?” so as to avoid arguing about names. Third, “How big is it?” either in size, weight, or number. Fourth, “What is its quality?” under which he considers color, taste, softness, hardness, and other tactile matters. Fifth, “When was it born, how long has it lasted, and into what [elements] does it break down?” On this pattern, he must take it through the remaining categories comparatively and set it beside everything that is somehow germane to it. The causes from which it arose and the effects it produces or what it does must be compared with other things like it, or different, with contraries, with things greater, smaller, and equal to it.[10]

Underline added.

Thus, Aristotle’s Categories and Topics are completely useless if one wants to find something new in them. One turns out to be a Llull[11] or Kircher[12] and becomes like a man who knows the alphabet, but cannot arrange the letters to read the great book of nature. But if these [101] tools were considered the indices and ABC’s of inquiries about our problem [of certain knowledge] so that we might have it fully surveyed, nothing would be more fertile for research. And from the same founts from which well-equipped speakers spring, there also might come forth the best [scientific] observers. But if someone is confident of having looked all through a thing in a clear and distinct mental idea [of it], he can easily be mistaken and may often think that he knows the thing distinctly when he has still only a confused knowledge of it, because he does not know all [the elements] that are in the thing and which distinguish it from others. But if he will scrutinize all the “places” distinguished in the Topics with a critical eye, then he will be certain that he knows the thing clearly and distinctly because he has turned the matter over in his mind and answered all the questions that can be asked with respect to the subject under discussion. And by completing this process of questioning, topics itself will become criticism.

For the arts are, in a way, the laws of the republic of letters. For they are the observations of nature made by all learned men, which have gone away into the rules of the disciplines.[13] A man who makes something in accordance with the art can be certain to be in agreement with all learned men; but one who does not have the art is easily mistaken because he puts his trust in his own nature.

Underline added.

Oh, my most wise Paolo, you too agree with me when, in the education of your prince, you do not send him straight to the critical art, but have him imbued with examples for a long time before he is initiated in the art of making judgments about them. Why else is this but first to bring his mother wit into full bloom and then to let it be cultivated by the art of judgment?

Underline added.

Ingenium is epistemic in that it creates knowledge. Therefore, it operates as a counterpart to science, which attempts to create knowledge by means of a logical method. Note how Collins and Porras describe the epistemic character of vivid descriptions in forming a company's purpose.

Again, Vico describes the person with ingenium as the one who can see connections between remote things. It is wit and acumen. It is essential to invention, the creative discovery of truth.

Underline added.

This division between invention and judgment arose first among [102] the Greeks just because they did not pay attention to the  proper faculty of knowing. This faculty is mother wit, the creative power through which man is capable of recognizing likenesses and making them himself. We see it in children, in whom nature is more integral and less corrupted by convictions and prejudices, that the first faculty to emerge is that of seeing similarities. For example, they call all men fathers and all women mothers and they make likeness: “They build huts, hitch mice to little wagons, play odds and evens, and ride on a great hobby horse of a stick.”[14]

Moreover, the likeness of customs among peoples gives birth to common sense.[15] And those who have written about the inventors of things have relayed to us the belief that all arts, and the conveniences with which the crafts have enriched mankind, were discovered either by chance and luck or by some likeness that even inferior creatures could have noted, or in what men had already thought out in their enterprise,[16] The logical relation that the scholastics call the middle term the Italian school, called argumen or argumentum. This remnant of the ancient language proves that they knew what we have said so far. Argumentum is derived from the same root as argutus (clear, bright, sharp) or from acuminatus (sharpened). Moreover, the sharp men (arguti) are the ones who are able to find a likeness or ratio between things very different and, far removed from one another, some way in which they are cognate, or who leap over the obvious and recall from distant places the connections appropriate for the things under discussion. This is the type of mother wit that is called acumen. Hence, wit is essential to invention because, in general, to find new things requires both the work and the activity of wit alone.

Underline added.

Since this is the case, it is a likely conjecture that the ancient philosophers of Italy did not prove things by syllogisms or sorites, but used induction by analogy in their discussions. Chronology supports this conjecture. For induction was the oldest dialectic and the analogy of like cases, which Socrates was the last to use. After him, Aristotle argued by syllogism and Zeno by sorites.[17] In truth, a man who uses the syllogistic argument does not so much compare diverse things as, [103] rather, unfold from the very heart of the genus something specific, which is already contained in it, and a man who uses the sorites weaves a chain linking each cause together with the next one. Those who excel in either mode are not joining two lines in an acute angle, but are extending a single line; each, therefore, seems to be more subtle than acute. The logician of sorites is more subtle than the logician of syllogism inasmuch as genera are more inclusive than the peculiar causes of each thing.

Descartes’s geometrical method corresponds to the sorites of the Stoics. But Descartes’s method is useful in geometry because geometry is adapted to it, in that the defining of names and the postulation of possible [constructions] is allowed. But when it is taken from the discussion of three measures and of numbers, and is imported into physics, the method is not useful for making new discoveries so much as for setting in order the discoveries we have already made. You yourself, most learned Paolo, are a proof of this for me. For why is it that although many others have a practical knowledge of that method, they are not able to discover the things that you think of?

You were already a grown man when you applied your mind to the things of the mind. You had already spent a life in litigation about an immense fortune with princes and magnates who were your relatives. In this unduly demanding generation, you fulfill all duties incumbent on a gentleman all day long and for a large part of the night. Yet, in a short time, you have accomplished so much that hardly any other man could have done it, even if he had devoted his whole life to these studies. Let not your modesty credit the method for the fruits of your inspired wit. Let us conclude finally that demonstration, and not the geometrical method, ought to be introduced into physics. The greatest geometricians saw physical principles in the principles of mathematics. Among the ancients, there were Plato and Pythagoras; among the moderns, Galileo. In this view, we have to explain the particular effects of nature by the special type of experiments which are the distinctive results of geometry. In Italy, this has been the concern of the great Galileo and other outstanding physicists who explained countless natural phenomena of great importance in this way (ratio) before the geometrical method was introduced in physics. This is the one thing that the English are today seriously concerned about, and for that reason they are prohibited from publicly teaching physics according to the geometrical method. [104]

Underline added.

This final comment reflects Vico's verum-factum principal: you can best know a thing if you make the thing. We can know geometry because we have created geometry. We cannot completely know the physical world because we did not make the physical world.

Underline added.

This is how physics can be advanced. To that end, in my essay On the Method of Studies of Our Time I argued that it is possible to avoid the pitfalls of physics through the cultivation of ingenium. This may be surprising to anyone who is concerned with method. Since method inhibits intuitive wit while aiding facility, it dissolves curiosity while providing for truth. Geometry does not sharpen the wit when it is taught by method only, but when it is employed with creative wit upon diverse complicated, different, and disparate [problems]. Therefore, I wanted it to be taught in the synthetic rather than the analytical way, that is, through demonstration by composition, so that we do not just discover the truth, but make it. Discovery is the result of luck; making, the result of hard work. I wanted, therefore, to have geometry taught through forms, not through numbers or species, so that, even if learning did but little to develop the wits, yet it would strengthen the imagination, which is the eye of mother wit, just as judgment is the eye of intellect. In fact, those Cartesians whom you, Paolo, so neatly call “the Cartesians of the letter not the spirit” could well take note that they themselves practice what we preach even though they deny it in words. Except for the one truth that they borrow from consciousness, Cogito ergo sum, all of the truths that they use as norms to direct everything else they borrow from arithmetic and geometry and nowhere else, namely from the true that we make. They praise this, saying, “Let a truth follow this model: three plus four makes seven; the sum of any two angles of a triangle is greater than the third angle.”[18] This is tantamount to looking at physics from the point of view of geometry. And whoever postulates that in reality postulates this physical thing will be true only for whoever has made them, just as geometrical [proofs] are true for men just because men make them.