Vico’s Ring
257
epistemically. Our earlier exposition of Spinoza’s epistemology
would suggest that Vico’s assessment is the reverse of Spinoza’s,
based as the latter’s is on the undisputed primacy of the third
kind of knowledge
543
.
Vico’s insistence on the epistemic priority of “poetry” over
“philosophy” is further argued on the basis of its primordial,
originary force. In what is, since Nicolini’s numbering, referred
to as Chapters V and VI of Section I, “Philosophical Proofs”,
comprising §§ 810 to 838, and “Philological Proofs”, §§ 839 to
872, Vico establishes that civilization began with predominantly
“poetic” rather than “philosophical” mind sets and creative abili-
ties: «Inasmuch as the poets came certainly before the vulgar his-
torians, the first historians must have been poets» (§ 813)
544
. In
going back to the beginnings of human culture, Vico adhered to
his own originally established principles in Book I, and Axiom
LXIV, in particular: «The order of ideas must follow the order of
institutions (
cose
)» (§ 238). The virtually identical statement, in its
fundamental constituents, in Spinoza’s
Ethics
(Part II, Proposi-
tion 7: «The order and connection of ideas is the same as the or-
der and connection of things») is plausibly considered as laying
behind Vico’s epigram
545
. However, if that is taken to be the
case, then Vico’s specific, or concrete, “application” of the prin-
ciple needs to be taken into consideration also, and already in the
Axioms, his non-Spinozan, if not ironically anti-Spinozan, thrust
is evident, namely, in the immediately following Axiom LXV that
bears a contrarian relationship to Spinoza’s metaphysics: «This
was the order of human institutions (
cose umane
): first the forests,
after that the huts, then the villages, next the cities, and finally
the academies» (§ 239)
546
. And it gets worse, in Book III, the
cose
umane
come to the fore in the guise of the «vulgar feelings [and]
vulgar customs of […] barbarous Greece», in evidence of which
he adduces «that the gods are esteemed according to their
strength» and capacity for violence
547
, as well as citing the «inhu-
man custom […] of denying burial to enemies slain in battle,