H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: RUTA

 G.: Hampshire, Oxford has behaved badly toward Vico by being too tidy about him. H.: Oxford is often tidy where it ought to be ashamed. It treated him as a philosopher of history because that was easier to shelve. G.: Quite. Collingwood could admire him while arranging him under providential traffic control. H.: And Bosanquet, in his own larger and more upholstered way, made him sound like a dignified ancestor of historical mind. G.: Whereas Berlin preferred to make him into a precursor of pluralism with sideburns. H.: Which is not wholly false, but far too English in its distribution of praise. G.: The trouble is that all three, in different accents, pushed Vico away from language and toward history as if the latter could be had without the former. H.: And you think that is precisely backwards. G.: I do. Vico is linguistic first, historical because linguistic, and political because language never remains innocent once men live together. H.: Then Ruta’s title is useful. G.: Very. Il pensiero politico di Vico is almost rude enough to be corrective. H.: You like rude corrections when they arrive from Naples. G.: Naples performs rudeness with more metaphysical confidence than Oxford. H.: So Ruta restores the politics that Oxford had deodorised. G.: Exactly. He says, in effect, stop treating Vico as a philosopher of history in a museum and notice that he is writing under civic pressure. H.: And that rhetoric is not an accidental early profession. G.: Quite. Vico taught rhetoric. That should have prevented generations of solemn misunderstanding. H.: Yet in Oxford rhetoric is what one accuses others of having when one wishes to preserve one’s own prose as morality. G.: Or as analysis, which is still more comic. H.: Then where do you put semantics in this? G.: At the front door, where it belongs. Vico knows that peoples make worlds by making meanings public. H.: And pragmatics? G.: Rears her ugly head the moment those meanings are used by institutions, laws, customs, and ceremonies. H.: You really do speak of pragmatics as a woman entering late and rearranging the silver. G.: She deserves no better and no worse. Semantics gives one the terms; pragmatics explains how the terms begin governing bodies. H.: That is almost Vichian. G.: It ought to be. Vico’s words are never merely lexical. They are social acts preserved in speech. H.: So the verum factum principle is not only epistemological. G.: Exactly. It is political before luncheon and philological after. H.: Very Oxford. G.: Very Naples, if we are being fair. H.: And Ruta helps because he insists that Vico’s thought is already a manifesto. G.: Yes. Not a party leaflet, of course. A politico manifesto in the older sense: a declaration about how a people understands itself through its institutions and speech. H.: You think the earlier versions already show that. G.: Certainly. The pre-Scienza nuova materials are full of civic anxiety disguised as learned recovery. H.: And the title itself, De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, is already suspicious. G.: Entirely. Italorum is politically loaded even before Italy exists in the later national sense. H.: Not Romanorum, not Latinorum, but Italorum. G.: Precisely. Italo before Italy, which is the sort of move only a professor of rhetoric could make look archaeological. H.: Why do you think he says wisest? Antiquissima would have done enough work. G.: Because wisdom there is not a compliment but a claim to priority and authority. H.: So the old Italians are not merely old. They are best. G.: Or wisest because their language preserves an order of thought later muddled by philosophy’s own abstractions. H.: You really want tongue to do the work of polity. G.: Why not. Zoon politikon follows from zoon logikon often enough, especially when one has a classroom to fill. H.: Aristotle might say that more carefully. G.: Aristotle was not teaching rhetoric in Naples under Spanish and then Bourbon shadows. H.: Nor was he a senator of the non-existent kingdom of Italy. G.: Exactly. Vico never sat in a senate that did not exist, so he did the next best thing and made civic theory out of language. H.: That is very good. G.: Keep it, but make it drier. H.: I shall embalm it a little. Then explain why Oxford missed this. G.: Because Oxford likes language only when it can be separated from collective destiny. H.: That is severe. G.: True enough to earn severity. Ordinary language was welcomed; national philology with civic consequences was treated as continental upholstery. H.: So Vico as language philosopher would have been inconvenient. G.: Deeply. It would force Oxford to admit that language is historical without becoming merely historical, and political without becoming mere propaganda. H.: And Collingwood, for all his virtues, had an eye for historical consciousness more than for semantic sediment. G.: Very much so. He could hear reenactment more clearly than etymological government. H.: While Berlin liked the anti-monist aroma. G.: Yes, but Berlin often preferred intellectual personalities to lexical machinery. H.: He liked foxes and hedgehogs more than nouns and institutions. G.: A fair English weakness. H.: Then what does Ruta add, exactly, beyond saying politics? G.: He adds the state, the people, the body, the social psyche, all those dangerous singulars. H.: Dangerous because they gather too much. G.: Exactly. Ruta’s vocabulary is unhealthy in a fascinating way. Corpo sano, psiche sociale, popolo italiano. One feels immediately that semantics is about to be conscripted. H.: And pragmatics enlisted. G.: With drums. Words such as people and nation never remain dictionary entries for long. H.: Then your interest in Ruta is diagnostic, not devotional. G.: Entirely. I do not read him to become sane in his sense. H.: Quite wise. G.: I read him because he sees, though often too eagerly, that intersubjectivity is not private thought multiplied but public meaning embodied. H.: Intersoggettivo è psiche sociale, as your passage has it. G.: Exactly. One would want to disinfect the formula before adopting it, but one should not pretend it lacks philosophical pressure. H.: So Vico becomes for Ruta a thinker of the social production of consciousness. G.: Yes, though with enough rhetoric left in the machine to remind us that consciousness speaks before it deduces. H.: And that is where your semantics returns. G.: Naturally. Meanings are not private possessions. They are civic survivals. H.: That sounds like a slogan you might permit yourself before a public class. G.: Only if I could then deny having said it. H.: Then let us examine Italorum again. You think it is loaded because it gathers a pre-national people into a retrospective collective. G.: Precisely. Vico is not saying Roman wisdom, which would narrow the glory, nor Latin wisdom, which would make it too grammatical. Italic wisdom is broader, older, murkier, and politically more recruitable. H.: Recruitable is the word. G.: Thank you. H.: So wisdom is claimed not from empire but from tongue and custom. G.: Yes. Which is why the title is already rhetorical politics. It makes linguistic antiquity available as civic capital. H.: And because he taught rhetoric, he knew exactly how titles behave. G.: Better than many philosophers know how arguments behave. H.: Then Vico’s politics is not merely a doctrine about states but a doctrine about how peoples become thinkable to themselves. G.: Very good. Through myths, laws, tropes, institutions, and above all publicly shared semantic habits. H.: So semantics for Vico is never just reference. G.: Heaven forbid. It is civil memory thickened into words. H.: And pragmatics? G.: The use of that memory in practice: lawgiving, religious observance, punishment, marriage, rank, all the splendid inconveniences of collective life. H.: You make it sound almost cheerful. G.: Only because it is better than reading Bosanquet on a wet afternoon. H.: That would make anything cheerful. G.: Even fascist Neapolitans, for a paragraph or two. H.: Be careful. G.: I am only comparatively cheerful. H.: Then say more about zoon logikon and zoon politikon. G.: My point is simple enough. If man is political because he can share judgments of just and unjust, useful and harmful, then his political life is inseparable from articulated speech. H.: Aristotle says as much, with more authority. G.: Yes, but Vico makes it historical. The logos is not a timeless faculty sitting polished in the soul. It grows in institutions, metaphors, and common usages. H.: So politics follows from language not abstractly but genealogically. G.: Exactly. The city is what happens when utterance hardens into custom. H.: That is almost too neat. G.: It is neat because it is true enough to irritate. H.: Then Oxford should have seen that Vico is a philosopher of language precisely by being a philosopher of social genesis. G.: Yes, but Oxford often divides what Naples joins. H.: That too is severe. G.: Deservedly. We preferred either pure analysis or dignified history. Vico gives neither in isolation. H.: He gives language already wearing civic clothes. G.: Splendid. Keep that too. H.: I begin to think you are preparing a class by theft. G.: All preparation is organised theft from one’s friends and enemies. H.: Then Ruta is useful as enemy and ally both. G.: Precisely. He overstates the political body and thereby reveals something true about the social fate of meaning. H.: While understating the danger of such collective nouns. G.: Quite. Corpo sano is one of those metaphors that begins in medicine and ends in marching. H.: That is very dry. G.: It has earned dryness. H.: Then if you were to state the correction to Oxford in one sentence? G.: Vico is not merely a philosopher of history whom language happens to serve; he is a philosopher of language whose politics and history arise from the public life of meaning. H.: That would annoy several dead men. G.: A useful secondary effect. H.: And Ruta’s contribution? G.: To remind us that Vico’s linguistic world is never politically innocent, and that any wisdom of the old Italians is already a claim about who gets to inherit a people. H.: Which is why Italorum matters more than antiquissima. G.: I should say they conspire. Antiquissima gives age; Italorum gives owner. H.: Owner is perhaps too hard. G.: In politics hard words are often the polite ones. H.: Then why not Romanorum? G.: Because Roman would be too determinate and too imperial. Italic lets Vico gather more without yet answering exactly whom he has gathered. H.: A strategic vagueness. G.: Precisely the kind a rhetorician can make look like scholarship. H.: So even the title implicates more than it says. G.: We are back where civilisation begins. H.: And where Oxford gets nervous. G.: Quite. Once titles start implying peoples, analysts grow pale. H.: You really do think the whole Vichian business turns on public language. G.: I do. The first human wisdom is not a syllogism but a socially inhabited utterance. H.: Which would shock those who prefer the first wisdom to be geometry. G.: They may recover at leisure. H.: Then perhaps your final complaint against Collingwood and the rest is not that they admired Vico wrongly, but that they admired only the part of him that looked safe in English. G.: Exactly. They Anglicised his magnificence by shelving his tongue. H.: That is a good line. G.: Keep it and improve the punctuation. H.: Happily. Now, are you prepared for your class? G.: More or less. I have Vico, Ruta, semantics, pragmatics, Italy before Italy, and Oxford after its manners. H.: And the punchline? G.: Of course. H.: Well? G.: If Vico taught rhetoric because there was no kingdom of Italy to govern, Oxford has spent a century proving that one may misgovern a philosopher perfectly well without founding any kingdom at all.