Vico and the Phenomenology of the Moral Sphere

Robert Welsh Jordan

<520>Vico's principle that to be true is the same as to be made led him, in the work we are celebrating, to conceive a comprehensive field of investigation for a new science. It is a science whose task is to comprehend the man-made world and the activities through which this world and its components are generated. Vico thus draws a distinction within the sphere of real entities. Those things which are not made by human beings cannot be known as they truly are. As they are in themselves and for God, purely natural entities, having been made by God alone, can be known by God alone. Considered as a description of actual entities, the formula for the hydrogen atom, for example, cannot be known to be true. It cannot be known to be true because no human being can experience the origin or creation of any such entity. The natural scientist cannot experience any of the things conceived in his science as they are conceived to be, and he cannot know that his concepts have any factual instances at all. On the other hand, the natural scientist's concepts do not belong to the sphere of purely natural entities. They are instead components of the historical, the man-made world. The science of physics and all of its component concepts are entities created by human beings. The scientist who constructs such a concept knows his concept as it is in itself, for it is his creation, and he has come to know it through his having constructed it. An historian who succeeded in recon- <521> structing the science would know the concept in the same way as its creator knew it. The concept and the science of which it is a part are artifacts or institutions — that is, they are products of human activity.

Purposive human activity, its products and by-products, define sharply the scope of the subject matter for Vico's science. Its subject matter is sharply delineated and coincides with that of what Hume called "moral philosophy" — in contrast to "natural philosophy." Vico's way of delineating the subject matter of his science is directly in line with the conception developed by Alfred Schutz in his Phenomenology of the Social World.[1] Schutz's conception of the Geisteswissenschaften or moral sciences as sciences whose central aim is the comprehension of actions which are purposive and subjectively meaningful was developed through a criticism and revision of Max Weber's "interpretive sociology." The criticism and revision of Weber's position resulted very largely from a sound and original application of Husserl's phenomenological psychology to the analysis of action. Moreover, Schutz rejected as a misconception Weber's attempt to differentiate between mere behavior which is devoid of subjective meaning and action in the strict sense of the word. The latter is rationally directed response to stimulation and involves restraint of passion in order to direct the response toward a deliberately chosen individual end. Uncontrolled emotional responses and automatic reactions to habitual stimuli would tend to fall under the heading of mere subjectively meaningless behavior. Since Weber's interpretive sociology is to concern itself with action — that is, with subjectively meaningful behavior — Schutz's rejection of this distinction in favor of the view that all experiences are subjectively meaningful places him much closer to Vico's conception of the subject matter proper to the moral sciences.

In using the term "moral sciences" as an equivalent for the well known German Geisteswissenschaften, I am reintroducing — for <522> the duration of this paper at least — the long-forgotten English original of which the German word is a translation. Just how for-gotten the English term has become is indicated by the fact that Sir Isaiah Berlin in his essay on "The Philosophical Ideas of Giambattista Vico" actually reverses the historical relation between the German and English terms. The word Geisteswissenschaft is, he writes, "what J. S. Mill, probably mistranslating the word Geist, somewhere called `Moral Science'. It was not a fortunate rendering and did not take."[2] The somewhere to which Berlin refers is the chapter on "The Logic of the Moral Sciences" in Mill's System of Logic. The suggestion that Mill was casting about for a way to translate Geisteswissenschaften is strange in view of the fact that this word did not occur in German before it was used in 1849 by J. Schiel to render "moral sciences" in his translation of Mill's logic.[3] Nor was Mill trying to coin a neologism for sciences dealing with whatever it is that German idealists and romantics were calling Geist, for the word "moral" had been used with much the same meaning that Mill gives it in such terms as "moral philosophy," "moral reasoning," "moral sciences" at least since Hume wrote his Enquiries. When used in this way by Hume and others as well as by Mill, the word "moral" refers to those things which are matters of or are conditioned by habit and custom. The phrase "the moral sphere" refers not just to the field of ethics but to the entire field of historical things which is the subject matter of Vico's new science as well as of the verstehende Geisteswissenschaften as conceived by Schutz. The subject matter of the moral sciences is indeed quite inseparable from the consciousness of values; this fact will be elaborated shortly. But ethics, considered as a theory of correct moral valuation, would, if possible at all, be but one branch of moral science. Even correct valuations can readily be regarded from a positive point of view simply as facts.

<523> The Subject Matter of the Moral Sciences

The moral sciences are to be contrasted not with amoral sciences but with natural sciences. Moral phenomena or historical phenomena are all of them phenomena that have been made by men. It is important to bear in mind here that in a certain sense the selfsame things investigated by the moral sciences are investigated, albeit from a quite different theoretical attitude, by various natural sciences. The point made with almost equal emphasis by Vico and Schutz along with other phenomenologists, as well as the en-tire Kantian tradition, including Dilthey, is that the natural sciences do not and cannot investigate these things as moral phenomena: their methods are not adapted to the investigation of human beings as historical or of actions as subjectively meaningful (Schutz) or of persons as rational (Kant) or of Dasein as being in the world (Heidegger) or of consciousness as intentional (Husserl). Among the philosophers just mentioned, Vico and the phenomenologists emphasize as well that we are able to know moral phenomena both because each of us makes and experiences his making such phenomena and because each of us is a moral being. Their insistence upon this point perhaps sets them off from the members of the Kantian tradition.

The things in the world around us, including ourselves and other human beings, are indeed physical things. As physical things, they are objects of sensory perception and behave in a regular fashion; they behave in a manner perfectly consistent with laws of nature, causal laws. Kant — at least so far as Kantians are concerned — provided us with a coherent account of how we come to experience these objects as unitary phenomena whose behavior follows typical patterns. But within this world, some things have dimensions of meaning which are not exhausted by their meaning as "natural" objects. In the world as a human environment, this is true by now of most, perhaps all, objects. There are in the human world things which, as Kant put it, cannot be accounted for solely in terms of natural causation.

<524> All artifacts are things of this sort. Now all artifacts can be considered as objects of sense perception; they are natural object which can be felt, seen, heard, tasted, and smelled. To perceive, a pencil visually is to apperceive it as something that can also b felt, but to perceive it as a pencil involves other sorts of reference as well.

Seeing it as a pencil involves a reference forward in time toward a use to which it can be put, toward a purpose for which the thin; can be used. Seeing the pencil as a pencil involves comprehending; the value which it has as a means toward achieving a specific sort of goal. Merely to see the thing is to experience its visual appearance, its color for example, so that seeing the thing would be, evidence that there exists something of this shape and color. The shape and color are given originally through visual perceiving But the thing's value for writing is not experienced in merely see seeing it. The fact that it is useful or valuable for writing is give] authentically or originally to me when I use it to write. My, ex experience of writing is of course founded upon the tactual as well as visual perception of the pencil in motion and the marks it makes and on the visual, tactual, and kinesthetic perception of the specific bodily motions involved in writing. But this is not by any means all there is to writing. For writing is not normally an end in its own right but a part of a more inclusive act involving; other values and having a specific place in the writer's life as whole. All of this the writer experiences; he normally has an awareness, an understanding of it; and it all enters into the subjective meaning of his action.

Moreover, a full apprehension of the thing as a pencil would involve being referred back in time to a process of production through which materials have been transformed in order to pro duce just this sort of thing with this sort of utility as a cheap instrument for writing. This process of production was itself at 'action of the sort just mentioned; more precisely, it was a set o carefully planned collective actions each of which was of that general sort. But here each participant experiences originally <525> only a part of the productive process, and the process has its place in an overall economy as well as in the lives of the direct participants. All of this is there to be understood with more or less distinctness by those who see pencils. It is not something that can be simply seen by anyone who can see colors and shapes. The ability to apperceive pencils in these ways is a matter of complex experience and can be acquired only by someone with a definite sort of personal history. In particular, the ability to apperceive the pencil as the result of a productive process will be acquired relatively late in the person's life unless for some reason he be-comes familiar with pencil factories relatively early on.

Understanding both sorts of references — the reference forward to its possible use and the reference back to its having been produced — is involved necessarily in, is essential to, the comprehension of anything at all as an artifact. Artifacts are objects which have been shaped by persons acting more or less deliberately; they are objects transformed by persons acting with specific purposes in mind. In this broad sense of the. word, all aspects of a culture are artifacts. All institutions in any culture whether they be regarded as political, economic, social, or. what have you are artifacts in this sense. Moreover, the members of a culture are each of them artifacts in this same sense. Each exists the way he does only as a result of his "training." As Vico saw clearly, what is called "enculturation" or "socialization" is a process which enables members of our biological species to become human per-sons, enables them to become participants in a culture and in a history. Each has been transformed by his parents or others, who acted, more or less deliberately, with purposes in mind and who may be said to have valued whatever it was that they intended to do to him.

The object of any moral science then is the comprehension of the actions through which artifacts in our broad sense of the word have been produced. This I believe was clearly understood by Vico as well as by the Kantian tradition, Dilthey, Weber, and phenomenologists in the tradition stemming from Husserl. Since <526> Dilthey, this conception of what the moral sciences are about has correctly been seen to link the moral sciences inseparably with psychology. For any clarification of the nature of their subject matter or of the methods they employ requires an adequate descriptive account of the nature of action as a mental process. The objections of Collingwood and his closer adherents to basing the moral sciences on psychological analysis appear to be directed chiefly against efforts such as those of John Stuart Mill — where psychology is conceived to be a positive, explanatory, and strictly empirical science. Such objections will, I hope, be removed if the relevant branch of psychology is itself conceived to be a mo science and purely descriptive in nature. This issue will be dressed more squarely in the concluding section of this paper.

Methodology in the Moral Sciences

Having presented a sketch, based on Alfred Schutz's work, for a: phenomenological conception of the subject matter of the mo sciences, I wish now to provide a stark outline of some of Schutz's conclusions regarding methodology in the moral sciences and indicate analogies with Vico. Here, too, his conclusions are b presented by way of his critique of Weber. When we are concerned with the methods in the social sciences, the basic issue is: How is it possible to understand the so-called "data" by interpreting the actions of which they are signs — that is, the actions through which the "data" have presumably resulted. Briefly, and as Schutz thinks correctly, Weber's answer is that this understanding is achieved by constructing what he called ideal types. Whenever the moral scientist attempts to understand behavior, he does so by beginning with the completed act and the artifacts in which it has resulted. He attempts to determine the type of action which produced the He then proceeds to deduce from the action type the type of person (personal ideal type) who executed the action. The point here is that the scientific understanding of action and persons is always <527> an understanding of ideal types: action types on the one hand and personal types on the other. Understanding the person-type is founded on understanding the course-of-action-type. The interpreter must begin with his own perception of someone else's behavior or of its results. His aim will be to discover the motive for the sake of which the other person was acting. The motive as re-constructed will again be an ideal type; it will be the typical motive for performing the type of action which results in this type of artifact. The typical act will be conceived to have a single typical motive or goal. On the basis of the reconstructed action and motive, the person-type is then reconstructed. The actor must be the sort of person whose actual motive could have been of the reconstructed type.

All of this seems simple enough until one realizes how badly Weber himself misconstrued the procedure he was proposing and the nature of its results. Weber's misconstruction of his own procedure is crucial. It might account in large part for the hostile reception his brand of interpretive sociology so often encounters, and it points once again to the basic need in the moral sciences for an adequate descriptive psychology. If Schutz is right in his criticism, which was mentioned earlier in this paper, of Weber's distinction between behavior and action, then Weber would have misconceived that distinction through the lack of an adequate description of what he referred to as the intended or subjective meaning of action. Schutz maintained that Weber did not adequately explicate two quite different things, both of which he calls subjective or intended meaning, and this leads to a disastrous equivocation on the term.

(1) In the first place, subjective meaning is the meaning of the action the way the agent himself is aware of it.

(2) In the second place is (1) as understood and interpreted by the observer or moral scientist. The action as interpreted is the result of:

(a) an initial comprehension called "direct observational understanding [aktuelles Verstehen]" and

(b) a further explication or comprehension, through what is <528> called "explanatory understanding" of the action as initially comprehended. This further understanding is explanatory in that it is supposedly a comprehension of the intended meaning in terms of its motives.[4]

Weber, as Schutz interpreted him, simply assumed that (1) and (2) are perfectly alike. Thus Weber wrongly assumed that (1) can be observed. We observe either artifacts or bodily behavior; and, in doing so, we place what is observed within a wider context of meaning which we ourselves, the interpreters, supply from our accumulated knowledge and experience. The meaning (2) which the observed behavior has for us its observers is thus an objective meaning from the outset. This objective meaning is the meaning which the observed behavior has, for persons other than the agent, as indicating the existence of a subjective meaning. The initial phase of understanding apperceives (comprehends) what is being observed (e.g., bodily behavior, written words, or other culturally formed objects) as a field of expression for actions having a subjective meaning. The subjective meaning which is indicated is not itself given, is not directly observed. As Dilthey might have said, the action is lived through by the agent, not by the moral scientist; what the scientist is living through is the process of understanding the action.

If Schutz is right here, then his criticism of Weber would apparently apply to Collingwood as well. For Collingwood tells us of historical knowledge that

Its object is…not a mere object, something outside the mind which knows it; it is an activity of thought, which can be known only insofar as the knowing mind reenacts it and knows itself as doing so. To the historian, the activities whose history he is studying are not spectacles to be watched, but experiences to be lived through in his own mind; they are objective, or known to him only because they are also subjective, or activities of his own..[5]

<529> It seems clear that the historian, at least when he interprets successfully, is himself living through, experiencing, an action which is perfectly like the past action he is investigating. This claim is perhaps even stronger than the one implicitly made by Weber. The claim overlooks the same fact. The intended meaning of the action as it is lived by the agent himself "remains a limiting concept even under optimum conditions of interpretation."[6] It appears that neither Weber nor Collingwood recognized this fact. The recognition is, however, crucial for a variety of reasons.

Without it, interpretive understanding appears to lay — and does in fact lay — claim to a sort of knowledge which must perplex its adherents as well as its opponents.s.

The subjective meaning (1) of the action being explicated is a limiting concept which the moral sciences strive to approximate with maximum clarity. The subjective meaning of the action which the moral scientist is explicating is something which the scientist neither has nor ever will have experienced in an original way. But this does not imply that subjective meaning is a regulative concept in a strictly Kantian sense, where what is conceived in the concept is never given in experience[7] As was emphasized earlier in this paper, Vico clearly saw that the subject matter of the moral sciences is familiar in kind. We do have absolute and indisputable — that is, apodictic — evidence that there exist in fact instances of the universals which our ideal types conceive. This above all else distinguishes the moral sciences from any science which might endeavor to describe natural objects as they are "in themselves."

It also indicates that the psychology basic to the moral sciences is of the sort which Husserl called eidetic. It is not an empirical science at all. It is an a priori science. But it is an a priori science whose factual relevance can be established conclusively. Eidetic psychology is able to ascertain the factual relevance of its a priori <530> judgments. For, accessible to each eidetic moral scientist, there is apodictic evidence that the "ideal types" his science conceives are conceptions of universals (eide) which are indeed instantiated in experiences with which he is familiar or in experiences he can imagine as possible modifications of experiences with which he is familiar.

Thus — to present this basically Vichian insight in the garb of yet another phenomenologist — Heidegger tells us that interpretation is able to "create concepts belonging to the entity that is to be interpreted and to create them out of the entity itself, or it can on the other hand force the conceptuality belonging to this entity into concepts to which the entity in question is opposed."[8] And speaking this time specifically of cognition in the moral sciences, Heidegger says that

The "circle" of interpretative understanding harbors a positive possibility for the most original sort of cognition. But this possibility is authentically realized only to the extent that interpretation has understood that its task is to guarantee that its subject matter is "scientific" by elaborating the purpose, prospect, and preconception of its interpretative activity out of the subject matter rather than letting them be determined <[vorgegeben] by fancies and popular conceits.[9]

The objective validity of any interpretation in the moral sciences depends upon the extent to which it succeeds in interpreting its "data," instances of moral existence, in terms of the a priori structure of all moral existence. Objective validity is achieved to the extent that interpretative understanding "reveals the 'universal' — even in the unique."[10]

An eidetic psychology of moral phenomena would establish necessary material (as opposed to purely formal or "analytic") conditions for truth of judgments in any moral science. As Husserl conceives them, eidetic sciences are based on intuitive evi- <531> dence, which here means clear imagination; they result in apodictic propositions concerning what is possible, impossible, or necessary. In Vico's terms, an eidetic moral science would show what sort of "modifications" mental life is capable of; it can establish the kinds of mental lives that can occur, the kinds of mental processes that can or that must occur in them, and the kinds of statements which may be, must be, and cannot be true of mental processes of a specific kind or mental lives of a specific kind. Clear imagination is a species of intuitive evidence, a species which provides evidence of eidetic or essential necessity. It can never establish factual necessity: it can provide evidence that if an event of type x occurs, then it must have properties a, b, c and may have properties d, e, f and cannot have properties g, h, i. But eidetic intuition can provide no evidence that an x actually has occurred, is occurring, or will occur. Evidence of actuality is provided by empirical intuition — that is, perception and memory, experience. Although eidetic intuition might yield evidence as to what type of experience can count as evidence for a specified type of actual occurrence, the discovery and evaluation of evidence for actual occurrences of the type would fall entirely within the province of empirical disciplines within the moral sciences.

NOTES

[1] Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, translated by George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967).

[2] Isaiah Berlin, "The Philosophical Ideas of Giambattista Vico," in Art and Ideas in Eighteenth-Century Italy (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1960), p. 172.

[3] Johannes Hoffmeister, ed. Wörterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1955), p. 251.

[4] Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, pp. 24-25.

[5] R. G. Collingwood, "Human Nature and Human History," Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1936): 16 and The Idea of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 218; emphasis added.

[6] Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World p. 38.

[7] Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. translated by W. R. Boyce Gibson (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1931), §§ 74, 83.

[8] Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Halle a. S.: Max Niemeyer, 1927), p. 150.

[9] Ibid., p. 153.

[10] Ibid., p. 395. The universals referred to here are what Heidegger otherwise calls "existentials."