Giambattista Vico
Italian philosopher
born June 23, 1668, Naples
[Italy]
died Jan. 23, 1744, Naples
Main
Italian philosopher of cultural history and law, who is
recognized today as a forerunner of cultural anthropology,
or ethnology. He attempted, especially in his major work,
the Scienza nuova (1725; “New Science”), to bring about the
convergence of history, from the one side, and the more
systematic social sciences, from the other, so that their
interpenetration could form a single science of humanity.
Early life and career.
Vico was the son of a poor bookseller. In his family’s home
everyone was miserably huddled together in a mud-floored,
ground-level room used simultaneously as a bookshop, living
room, and kitchen. When he was scarcely seven, Vico injured
his head falling from the ladder that led to the small
second-floor attic that served as the sleeping room. The
injury appeared so serious that the doctor predicted that it
would lead to death or imbecility. Although the injury
healed, he became stern and melancholy in nature. Vico later
acknowledged this in his autobiography and observed: “such a
nature do men with profound and active spirits possess.”
He attended various
schools, including a Jesuit college, for short periods but
was largely self-taught. He had to study by candlelight in a
miserable room crowded with a large family. He often skipped
his classes, because his mediocre teachers could offer him
nothing more than an arid Scholasticism, the system of
Western Christian philosophy that flourished from the 11th
to the 15th century but had declined greatly by the time of
Vico. Despite his life of poverty, he was able to escape
occasionally to the countryside; these excursions opened
immense horizons beyond his limited early environment. In
fact, personal experience, rather than reading, was the
primary source of Vico’s unique genius, although his reading
was extensive, varied, and always distinguished by a
personal interpretation.
In the course of his
reading Vico encountered his first master, the Greek
philosopher Plato. A critical spirit quickly intervened, and
he turned to Tacitus, a Roman historian, and to Machiavelli,
an Italian statesman and political philosopher, who
portrayed men not as they should be but as they
unfortunately are. Thus, contrasts soon became an important
element in his thought: between nature and spirit; between
the body, as “this sombre prison,” and the soul; between the
high aspirations of the imprisoned soul and the fall that
awaits it when it yields to the desires of the senses.
Vico’s thought became
increasingly independent, and he preferred to meditate in
solitude; but, at the same time, he frequented the
fashionable salons, where he met several scholars of the
time, such as Thomas Corneille, a French dramatist, and
Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni, a literary historian, with whom
he debated. Gradually, this circle of scholars became
attracted by the ideas of René Descartes, Benedict de
Spinoza, and John Locke, which were penetrating Naples at
the end of the 17th century. Although Vico was distantly
involved in the controversies, he continued to depend more
upon the course of his own self-instruction.
Following an attack of
typhus, Vico left Naples and accepted a tutoring position in
the home of the Duca della Rocca at Vatolla, south of
Salerno, where he wrote his most authentic, and most
despondent, poetry. There, secretly infatuated with his
pupil, the young Giulia della Rocca, he discovered the pain
of “social barriers”—barriers that were insuperable, because
they were the vestige of entrenched ancient structures.
Giulia, who admired Vico, died at the age of 22, shortly
after her marriage to a young man “of her sphere.” Although
Vico always had a longing for a peaceful world, he felt that
the discord that governs the individual spreads and that
history itself only partially obeys the designs of
Providence.
After his return to Naples,
Vico found the next few years less difficult. He recovered
from his ill-fated passion and in December 1699 married a
childhood friend, Teresa Destito, who was well intentioned
but almost illiterate and incapable of understanding him. In
the same year he obtained a chair of rhetoric at the
University of Naples. One of the duties of the professor of
rhetoric was to open the academic year with a Latin oration,
and Vico carried out this responsibility by giving the
introductory lectures between 1699 and 1708. The last one,
printed in 1709 under the title De Nostri Temporis Studiorum
Ratione (“On the Method of the Studies of Our Time”), is
rich with his reflections about pedagogical methods. This
work was followed almost immediately by the publication of
Vico’s great metaphysical essay De Antiquissima Italorum
Sapientia (“On the Ancient Wisdom of the Italians”), which
was a refutation of the Rationalistic system of Descartes.
This tranquil interval,
during which he brought his aging father to live with him,
did not last. Three of his eight children died at an early
age, and another, Ignazio, caused his parents grave anxiety
and was even imprisoned for his debts. Vico was also
disappointed in his own career, which had initially appeared
promising. He failed to obtain the more prestigious and
better paid chair of law that he actively sought. When a
notice contemptuous of his work appeared in one of the
scholarly publications, his fiery temper was sparked, and he
wrote his pamphlet “Vici Vindiciae” (“The Vindications of
Vico”) in reply. It was distressing for him to see so many
mediocre thinkers favoured and to be unable to ensure
publication of his most important work.
Period of the “Scienza
Nuova.” The outline of the work that he planned to call
Scienza nuova first appeared in 1720–21 in a two-volume
legal treatise on the “Universal Law.” The outline was
written in Latin and appeared in a chapter entitled “Nova
Scientia Tentatur” (“The New Science Is Attempted”). The
ideas outlined here were to be fully developed in a version
that the powerful cardinal Corsini, the future pope Clement
XII, agreed to sponsor. According to contemporary practice,
this meant that he would assume the costs of publication. At
the last moment the Cardinal withdrew, pleading financial
difficulties. It is probable, however, that the Cardinal was
alarmed by certain of Vico’s propositions, which were bold
for that period, such as the notion that human society went
through a “bestial” stage and that it is possible for
society to revert to this primitive barbarism in which men
possess only an obscure form of reason.
According to his
autobiography, since he lacked money to publish the full
text of his work, Vico sold the only jewel he possessed—a
family ring—and reduced his book by two-thirds. It appeared
in 1725 under the title Scienza nuova but was unsuccessful.
Vico complained bitterly of the virtually universal
indifference that his masterpiece evoked. He quickly
regained his confidence, however, and returned to his work
with energy. His mind was crowded with ideas, but ordering
and systematizing them was a trying task for him. He thought
as a poet, not as a dialectician. Nevertheless, he began a
total revision and restructuring of his work.
In his autobiography Vico
revealed that a vain hope had been born in him when Jean
Leclerc, an encyclopaedist and one of the greatest scholars
of the time, had written to him from Amsterdam in 1722
asking for information about him. Vico had sent his
two-volume legal treatise to him, and Leclerc had devoted 17
two-column pages in the 1722 edition of his Bibliothèque
ancienne et moderne (“Ancient and Modern Library”) to Vico.
This, however, was a trifle in comparison with the 70 pages
devoted to Paola Mattia Doria, a friend of Vico from the
salons of Naples. His hope was further betrayed when the
Scienza nuova was not mentioned in subsequent volumes of the
celebrated Bibliothèque.
Vico’s effort to
restructure his masterpiece was completed as the second
edition of the Scienza nuova. It was actually the fourth
edition, if the outline contained in the legal treatise and
the “fragments” written between 1729 and 1732 are taken into
account. The definitive edition that appeared posthumously
in 1744, however, was marked terza impressione (“third
edition”) and was conceived according to a very different
and greatly revised plan.
Vico’s contemporaries
portray him, in his old age, awakening intermittently from
his exhaustion to dash off prophetic lines or to comment on
a text from some classical author for the few pupils
remaining to him. He found satisfaction in the fact that his
eldest son, Gennaro, succeeded him in his chair at the
university. Surrounded by the three survivors of his once
numerous family (Ignazio had died shortly after his release
from prison), Vico died. Since the stairway of his house was
too narrow to permit passage of his coffin, it had to be
lowered through a window, and then it was unceremoniously
borne to the church of the Oratorian priests, where his
remains are still kept.
Vico’s vision.
Vico had his own vision of man and the universe, and, in a
time when the deductive method brought into fashion by
Descartes was much employed, he posed the modern problem of
sense: the sense of life and of history. He discovered the
irrational, the small flame that at certain times grows
imperceptibly in the heart of reason. His philosophy
recognized the aspirations of humanity, its obsessions and
dreams, its precarious achievements, and its frustrations
and defeats. He described human societies as passing through
stages of growth and decay. The first is a “bestial”
condition, from which emerges “the age of the gods,” in
which man is ruled by fear of the supernatural. “The age of
heroes” is the consequence of alliances formed by family
leaders to protect against internal dissent and external
attack; in this stage, society is rigidly divided into
patricians and plebeians. “The age of men” follows, as the
result of class conflict in which the plebeians achieve
equal rights, but this stage encounters the problems of
corruption, dissolution, and a possible reversion to
primitive barbarism. Vico affirmed that Providence must
right the course of history so that humanity is not engulfed
in successive cataclysms.
According to Vico, the
origin of unequal social classes, which often retain the
rigidity of primitive castes, must be attributed to
imperfect forms of religion, not to technological progress.
All of Vico’s anthropology is based on the affirmation of
the absolute primacy of religion, which was no doubt
suggested to him by the thought of Giovanni Pico della
Mirandola, an Italian Renaissance philosopher. Vico observed
that three principles are dominant in the birth and
regeneration of nations: “All the people have a religion;
official marriages are celebrated among them; and the burial
of the dead is a properly human and universal custom.”
Modesty and piety are the basic moral sentiments, the
pillars on which the family is built. When they crumble, the
descent toward the bestial state of man accelerates. Without
expressly saying so, Vico thought that the degeneration that
struck down the idolatrous religions of ancient times could
even overtake what for him was the true
religion—Christianity, which had established monasteries as
refuges from the world and had secured the purity of
sentiments and morals.
A second basic notion of
Vico is that man has a mixed nature: he remains closer to
the beast than to the angel. For Vico the second stage of
barbarism, which closes the age of men, arises from an
excess of reflection or from the predominance of technology.
This stage heralds an imminent new beginning of history. The
fundamental perversity of the second stage of barbarism
makes it, in fact, more dangerous than the first, which in
its excess of strength contains noble impulses that need
only to be brought under control. Man becomes a coward, an
unbeliever, and an informer, hiding his evil intentions
behind “flattery and hypocritical wheedling.” Families live
huddled together in tentacled cities, veritable “deserts of
souls.” These degenerate peoples do not hesitate to rush
into the worst of slaveries to find shelter and protection.
Money becomes the only value. This dissolution from the age
of men to the bestial state exposes humanity to a fate far
worse than arrests or regressions of civilizations. Vico
hoped to serve warning to men of the evils that could
overtake them if they became worshippers of a materialist
ideology or the servants of a science uninformed by
conscience.
Influence.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great German writer,
received a copy of the second edition of Scienza nuova from
an enthusiastic student of Vico whom he visited in Naples in
1787. In an article published that same year, Goethe spoke
of the dead writer whose “wisdom is now endlessly praised by
Italian legal writers.” He said that the work had been
handed to him “as though it were a sacred thing” and that it
contained “prophetic insights on the subject of the good and
the just that we shall or must attain in the future,
insights based on sober meditation about life and about the
future.” Convinced by the strength of Vico’s demonstration,
Goethe henceforth believed that the evolution of humanity
should be represented not by a continually ascending line
but by a spiral. Nevertheless, it appears that Vico’s work
was not widely read during the 18th century.
In the 19th century, Jules
Michelet, a great nationalist and romantic historian of
France, called Vico “his own Prometheus,” his intellectual
forerunner. Michelet eventually abandoned the idea of
recourse to Providence but continued to cite Virgil and Vico
as his authorities. Auguste Comte, the French Positivist
philosopher, hailed Vico as an influence in the formulation
of his law of the three states, or ages, of mankind. Karl
Marx, who developed an economic interpretation of history,
owed a great deal more to Vico than he himself acknowledged;
in fact, there was a close relationship of dependence. They
were separated, however, by their major difference over
religion. Today, many scholars see in Vico the forerunner of
the sciences of anthropology and ethnology. In fact, in
recent times, despite the obscurity of his style, Vico has
been increasingly recognized as one of the important figures
in European intellectual history, and Scienza nuova has been
accepted as one of the landmark works in that history.
Jules-Marie Chaix-Ruy
