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Vico’s Ring
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Before examining the meaning of the “functorial” relation-
ships within this tripartite scheme, it is important, as well as nec-
essary, to consider the “system” as a whole, at the metalevel.
There are a number of perspectives that offer themselves, with-
out being mutually exclusive. First of all, in essential agreement
with a dualistic perspective, the world of “reason” and “the true”
under the rubric of “philosophy” is as integral to Vico’s overall
epistemology as the empirical, historical, socio-political-cultural
world
181
. It remains therefore unproblematic to refer to the cate-
gory of “philosophy” as the
a priori
, which takes its place as
source of the contravariant functor(s)
182
from “philosophy” to
the empirical world, so that indeed it can be justifiably said that it
all starts with fundamental philosophical reflection, and with the
conceptual entities that are generated by such reflection. Then
the empirical world functions as the foil against which the ideas
of the
a priori
need to be concretely validated or invalidated
183
.
On the face of it, this account, at least in terms of its most
fundamental aspects and implications, seems to comprehensively
depict Vico’s knowledge-theoretic undertaking. However, in the
functorial or category-theoretic perspective, this portrayal, while
remaining essential, becomes only one side of a complex equa-
tion. As the above figure illustrates, the relationship between the
a priori
of Vichian “philosophy” and the real «world of nations,
or civil world» (§ 331) also involves connections in the opposite
“direction”, which, for lack of a better term, can be referred to as
forgetful functors. When we, again, for the sake of argument,
avail ourselves of a dualistic view of matters, in the cognitive
movement from phenomena in the real world (of humans) to the
world of “ideas”, it is obvious that an enormous amount, quanti-
tatively and qualitatively, of substance, information, properties,
structures, interactions, must be filtered and factored out
184
. It is
only at the culmination of a complex transformative process that
Vico, therefore, was in a position to say, for example, «that hu-
man beings are naturally social and that this natural disposition