Instruments plus Knowledge-Making as a Holistic Art of Balance in Vico

Vico, to me, seems to believe that knowledge should be holistic. I must be careful when I use that term. Holistic implies “the whole.” If I did not further specify, the term would be too general to use here, but in this case, I am specifically wondering if Vico thinks that a more “whole” version of human knowledge is the same thing as a fusion of current measurement-based “study methods” (which he wants to improve upon, since he thinks they are, in ways, “inferior ” to more ancient methods (Vico 866)) and the antique corpus of knowledge and knowledge-making practices (which promote argumentation) we no longer have (866), which he wants to remember (and re-implement).

Not just this, but I think he is advocating a balance (which means we use both practices when we ought, in order to learn as we ought, and not inordinately) between the two because he believes that if you lend yourself too much to one you're incapable of adequately addressing the other: "We should be careful to avoid that the growth of common sense” (which he says steers eloquence) “be stifled in them by a habit of advanced speculative criticism”(which Vico seems to think stems out of  modern methods of study)… (868).

Vico is making a case that idolatry of intellectualism that is based on measure is impractical; that’s why we need a balance between knowledge-making practices that are founded in measurement and knowledge-making practices that are founded in argument; to him, the ancients had it right in that they used philosophical criticism in order to explore the arts, like "imagination or memory," and did not over-focus on it like his own generation (868) (Campbell also makes the argument that we should encourage and engage the imagination for the sake of capturing vividness in order to communicate (924) since vivid images promote memory (925)).

Since we live with what Vico considers a societal prevalence of "incertitude" (869), we must rely on argument in association with modern study. In section seven on page 871, Vico makes the claim that we pay too much "attention to the natural sciences" and, in a way, disregard the fact that, in order to understand ourselves, we must resort to the study of ethics (a discipline with no clear-cut, measurable answers) because humanity is ambiguous and we are creatures filled with nuance because we have free will and act upon it. It's almost as if he saying that if we do not embrace ambiguity alongside certainty, we are setting ourselves up to fail (which I'm here using to mean "acquiring an education that is limited and missing essential understanding of human nature and other non-measurable natural phenomenon"), because we're only addressing those things that can be proven or predicted.

What strikes me particularly about Vico’s piece, in this respect, is that he says criticism can be an instrument, and then he seems to conflate the idea of eloquence (which he defines as "wisdom, ornately and copiously delivered in words appropriate to the common opinion of mankind" (877)) and criticism (869), which means he could be saying that eloquence is a knowledge-making instrument (when it comes in contact with the post-Enlightenment individual, who can make decisions about and act on the eloquence, as we discussed in class on Tuesday). I think this connection is fascinating, but it's for another blog post (but I especially like considering pathos (in Vico but especially in Campbell) as a knowledge-making instrument, and perhaps thinking about what Condit might say).

We know that Vico considers instruments to be implicit in the creation of knowledge because, in an effort to flesh out his conception of “study methods,” he describes them as such when distinguishing between two subsections within that system: on one hand, he talks about “new arts, sciences, and  inventions” and “instruments and aids to knowledge” on the other (866). He says that the “former are the constituent material of learning; the latter are the way and the means, precisely the subject of our discourse" (866). So, to Vico, instruments are the “way and the means” of modern study; this is significant, especially considering that he also says "instruments are antecedent to the task of learning" (866).

“Instruments,” as per the term’s use in Vico’s work, can be considered concrete, like a ruler, or abstract, like a math formula. I think Vico would definitely consider the databases and graph generators we used for exploratory three to be instruments because they were pivotal to our acquisition of knowledge. They provided us with a plethora of results that we able to analyze. They weren’t perfect, and we had to consider affecting variables and the limitations of each in our assessments, but ultimately, they gave us a “way and means” of finding information that we could assimilate into knowledge, and we would have had no other way of (easily) finding that information otherwise.

And just as Vico longs for measurable and non-measurable approaches to knowledge, the websites provided us with measurements, and we were charged with making abstract connections. And we couldn't prove any of them- we could only argue for their existence. So, in that way, I think I see Vico's ideas in this week's assignment.