Verum Factum

Giambattista Vico (1688-1744)

Giovanni Battista (or Giambattista) Vico, according to this Wikipedia article, was a Neapolitan philosopher, historian, and jurist who lived in the early days of the European Enlightenment. In 1725 he wrote in the book New Science of his major idea: that truth is an act. So history, in that it is made by us, is understandable to us. We truly know only that which we make or do.

Although I am frankly somewhat over my head when it comes to interpreting the nuances of such a philosophy, still it seems to pattern with what I posted before, in The Pearlescence Principle. There I tried to suggest that "we somehow manage to make our own reality." We all have certain "pearls" of incipient belief and faith within us, but only when we begin act them out do they actually become real for us. Then and only then do we find that they cast their "pearlescence" upon our supposedly objective outer world.

Strangely enough, "that pearlescence, that opalescence, actually becomes a part of the reality we survey." Our worldview or "belief per se feeds — somehow — back into our experience of the world, coloring it, molding it, making it conform to that worldview itself."

How odd. Our faith, suitably turned into action, makes itself true.

Words with Power

Literary critic Northrop Frye says something about this in his study of the Bible, Words with Power (p. 82):

The discoverer of the the principle that all verbal structures descend from mythological origins was Vico, and Vico's axiom was verum factum: what is true for us is what we have made. ... What is true for us is a creation in which we have participated, whether we have been in on the making of it or on the responding to it. We are accustomed to think, rather helplessly, of whatever presents itself to us objectively as reality. But if we wake up in the morning in a bedroom, everything we see around us that is real, in contrast to our dreams, is a human creation, and whatever human beings have made human beings can remake. I take it that this is something of what [the poet] Wallace Stevens means by his "supreme fiction," the reality which is real because it is a created fiction, and recognized to be such.

We create our world, in other words; if not literally, then simply by means of how we respond to "objective" reality.

Put another way, our response is itself a world-creative act, a personal participation in the very act of creation which in our more simpleminded moments, if we are religious, we attribute only to God. In another passage keyed to Vico's verum factum axiom (p. 135), Frye says the Incarnation of God in the man Jesus of Nazareth "presents God and man as indissolubly locked together in a common enterprise." That enterprise concerns "the reality of God," which at the end of the Bible

... is manifested in a new creation in which man is a participant [by virtue of his] being redeemed, or separated from the predatory and destructive elements acquired from his origin in nature.

The advice Jesus gives to turn the other cheek in Matthew 5:39 impresses me as a good example of what this means: "But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also."

I interpret "resist not evil" from a Tai Chi standpoint. This ancient "moving meditation" is actually a martial art. When two masters do Tai Chi together, it becomes a sort of dance, but the inner logic of this dance is that each is performing movements that will ward off or redirect the force of the other's "attack." The "blows" hurt neither party; they are merely channeled elsewhere.

So neither "combatant" achieves superiority over the other.

How does this relate to Jesus's pronouncement? A blow on the right cheek, assuming the striker is right-handed, entails striking with the back of the hand. In Jesus's day, that would have been not just a physical assault but also a demeaning, belittling gesture, since an equal would have been struck with the palm of the hand. Therefore, "turn to him the other also" — the left cheek, that is — is to, in effect, say, "I insist that you not demean or belittle me as your inferior. I'm not going to hurt you in retaliation, but I'm going to insist on being taken as your equal."

Again, neither "combatant" achieves superiority over the other.

The one being assaulted or struck (the "strikee") is, in the Bible story, (re)creating his world, his truth, his reality. He does this in such a way as to "claim his power" — without stooping to the abuse of power manifested by his assailant.

This is a specific case in which "the reality of God" can be "manifested in a new creation in which man is a participant [by virtue of his] being redeemed, or separated from the predatory and destructive elements acquired from his origin in nature."

The strikee is liberated from the worldview of the striker. Instead, his own "pearlescence" shines forth and molds his very reality "in God's image." Verum factum, indeed.