Vico, Giovanni Battista

WORKS BY VICO

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

Giovanni Battista Vico, Italian jurist, philologist, and philosopher, was born in Naples in 1668 and died there in 1744. His contribution to European thought may be characterized as an attempt to combine Enlightenment ideas of natural law and Renaissance literary theory within a comprehensive theory of myth as the basis for a new conception of social dynamics. He is best known for his philosophy of history, set forth in The New Science (1725).

Vico, the son of a poor bookseller, was largely self-educated. He held the chair of Latin eloquence (rhetoric) at the University of Naples from 1699 to 1741. He had originally been interested in jurisprudence, on which he wrote a number of works; but when he failed to win the competition for the chair of civil law in 1723, he turned to the study of history and to the articulation of his so-called New Science, which occupied him up to the time of his death. In 1735 Vico was appointed royal historiographer to the Neapolitan house of Bourbon, but this was a belated and niggardly reward for a life that had combined consistent dedication to learning with unrelieved poverty, marital tragedy, public indifference to his work, and betrayal by a succession of patrons.

Vico’s prime intellectual enemy was Descartes. He objected to Descartes’s belief that man was everywhere, always, and equally rational. In his view, rationality was a historical acquisition, not a constant component of human nature. Vico’s secondary target was the natural-law tradition as represented by Selden and Pufendorf. The thinkers upon whom he drew for inspiration most often were Plato, Tacitus, and, among the moderns, Grotius and Francis Bacon. In the New Science Vico tried to combine Plato’s notion of the relation between sense data and ideas, Tacitus’ insight into historical process, and the inductive method advocated by Bacon in the Novum organum. But Vico was no mere eclectic; the New Science was a highly original synthesis of the various philosophical creeds and scholarly disciplines of his own time, a synthesis which took into account the materialism of a Hobbes and the idealism of a Descartes, but which framed them in a new approach to history, conceived as the study of human consciousness as it has evolved in time and space.

The New Science—main principles . The main arguments of the New Science can be discussed in terms of a question and three assumptions. The question is, How does it come about that men, who are basically ferine, selfish, and vicious (as Machiavelli and Hobbes argued), are able to form communities, to submit themselves to the rule of law, and to serve the well-being not only of themselves but of others too? According to Vico, none of the received intellectual traditions could solve this problem. Classical philosophy could not even conceive of it, because it denied the fact of change. Modern philosophers posed it, but then went on to solve it by holding that ancient man was just as rational as modern man and formed human society in much the way that modern men form a commercial concern or corporation. Christian theology begged the question by appealing to divine intervention to explain the formation of human communities out of the primitive animal nature. Even if Christian theologians were right about the way in which the ancient Hebrews had been formed into communities, there remained, Vico noted, the problem of explaining how the “gentile” nations were able to raise themselves above the animal level without the direct aid of the one, true God. And it is to this question that Vico’s work addresses itself.

This brings us to the three assumptions that underlie Vico’s New Science: that cultural artifacts are creations of human consciousness, nothing more and nothing less; that a human mind in the past operated in the same way that a present one does; and that men are capable of understanding human phenomena in ways that are not possible with respect to natural phenomena. Hence Vico’s methodological principle—one can understand only what one has created or is in principle capable of creating. In effect this means that since God, not man, is the creator of the natural world, then only God, and not man, can understand it fully. Since man is a part of nature, he can, to be sure, understand nature in part. But there will always be something in nature that he cannot comprehend fully; there will always be something mysterious about nature for everyone but its creator. It follows, therefore, that the Enlightenment was altogether misguided in its attempt to construct a science of human nature on the basis of a study of physical nature: understanding cultural phenomena, which are creations of men alone, in terms of incompletely understood natural principles is doomed from the start. Man can understand himself and everything he himself has created, i.e., the whole realm of human culture; but he can do so only on the basis of an inductive study of culture, not by proceeding from the study of nature. Thus, according to Vico, the proper basis for a science of culture and a metaphysics of mind can be found only in a historical investigation of the encounters between human consciousness and nature as they occur in different parts of the world at different times and in different situations.

However, if past human consciousness is understandable by present human consciousness, it must not be thought that past problems were the same as present ones or that the specific responses of men to those past problems were similar to what present responses to those problems would be. Quite the contrary—and here is the core of Vico’s historicism—each age has its own problems, and its responses to those problems will vary according to the level of rationality achieved by the culture in question. Cultural change is a macrocosm of the changes that occur microcosmically in the individual human being as he passes from birth to maturity: each age has its own needs, capabilities, and preconceptions; and each age calls forth the institutions and values necessary for it to deal with the world as it conceives of it. In order for modern man to understand primitive man, then, it is necessary for the modern to enter sympathetically into a world in which nature seemed alive and governed by hostile spirits whose power over man was exceeded only by their malignity. A proper understanding of human consciousness requires that we return to the time when humanity was a child, when men lived and acted like animals, and then show how the very nature of nature itself set up a process of development that lifted man out of his natural brutality, in spite of his own egoistic impulses, and set him on the road to civilization.

Vico’s social theory . If primitive man is as ignorant of the nature of nature and is as irrational in his responses to nature as a child is, then it follows, according to Vico, that human society resulted not from abstract considerations of utility or from rational self-interest, as Hobbes believed, but, rather, from immediate responses to real or imagined physical threats. The basic unit of society, the family, was formed when primitive man was frightened by such natural occurrences as thunder or lightning, took refuge in caves with his women, and grew used to living in groups. A similar fear lay at the base of primitive religious belief. Since men translate the unfamiliar into terms of the familiar, the processes of nature are at first experienced as anthropomorphic spirits that must be propitiated and placated, an activity that falls to the heads of families. Thus was born the “age of the gods,” the time when men lived in patriarchal communities (familii), bound together by blood ties alone and ruled over by strong men who combined the roles of priest and king.

These primal communities were expanded when fugitives from the original ferine competition sought protection by the patriarchs in return for their labor. The first truly social classes appeared at this point, for the refugees (socii) were not linked by blood to the primal kinship groups but were affiliated only by services rendered and received. The division of power and privileges thus established on functional lines generated tensions within the primal group, and the socii soon began to demand fuller participation in the benefits of the group to which they contributed their labor. This required that the patriarchs of the various tribes come together to protect themselves from the socii. Here, according to Vico, is the origin of aristocratic societies In such societies the ruling group claimed descent from the gods; it was characterized by punctilious adherence to codes of honor and achievement; and its dominant style of life was perpetuated by a specific kind of poetry, the heroic epic. Thus, the “age of the gods” gave way to “the age of heroes,” the age of religion to that of poetry, and the rule of priest-kings to that of nobles— this succession being a result of the demands of power relationships and the pursuit of individual privilege.

The very success of each ruling group in each age bred the conditions for its overthrow. The security and order established by the aristocrats resulted in the enrichment of the plebeians: the latter grew stronger and rebelled, and then justified rebellion by appeals both to their contribution to the general welfare of the community and to the humanity that they shared with the nobility. The struggle between aristocrats and plebeians resulted in the transition from the age of heroes to the age of peoples, from the language of poetry to that of prose, and from a customary code of conduct to legal systems in which the written contract came to define relations between parties enjoying definable rights and specific privileges in the commonwealth. Only then was monarchy possible, for monarchy was imaginable, for Vico, only as rule by one in the interests of an internally differentiated social whole.

Such is the basic pattern of the corso, or cycle, which, according to Vico, all nations follow in their development from primitivism to civilization. He did not rule out the possibility of cultural borrowing, but he insisted that cultures which have embarked upon their corsi will borrow only those ideas, institutions, and values which conform to their needs at the particular stage at which they have arrived by an inherent logic of evolution. Of course, it is possible for nations to become “arrested” in their development, or even annihilated, if they come into conflict with other cultures at more advanced stages of growth. But on the whole, cultures develop in response to needs and desires peculiar to them at specific times in their cycles.

All of this points to the relationship between human needs, on the one hand, and institutional forms and modes of expression, on the other. It provides a critical tool for the historian, allowing him to penetrate the opaque language of myth and legend. And it suggests that religious, poetic, and even philosophical systems must be viewed primarily as rationalizations of achieved social relationships. As Vico put it, “The order of ideas must follow the order of institutions.” This is the essence of the New Science. Vico employed this insight with special subtlety to criticize contemporary thought about the nature of Homeric poetry and of Roman law.

Idea of history . Although Vico shared the Enlightenment belief in the providential nature of history, he rejected the idea that humanity as a whole developed inevitably in linear sequence from lower to higher forms of self-consciousness and rationality. In most cultures, he held, each stage is an improvement over the preceding one, but every third stage (the philosophical, or scientific, stage), which follows the religious and heroic stages, is always followed by a period of decline, a time of barbarism rendered more barbarous by the refinements on savagery that sophistication provides— in other words, true decadence. Thus, for Vico, providence seems to operate only within cultures (rather than across cultures) to turn private self-seeking to public good—and only for a while. In the end, providence is assimilated into human consciousness and thus becomes identical with the activities of a humanity liberated from all fear of nature and God by the New Science. Private self-seeking then predominates, in the form of mere pursuit of pleasure, and results in a breakdown of civic responsibility and therewith the disintegration of culture.

Vico did not rule out the possibility of a greater, macrocosmic providence operating across cultures as well, that providence revealed by the Christian religion which allows Western man to experience the cyclical recurrence of the cultural process in an ultimately progressive way. For example, the “second barbarism” of the early Middle Ages constituted a positive advance over the “first barbarism” of the Homeric age and the barbarism of pre-Roman Italy. And Vico saw the expansion of Western civilization over the globe as an anticipation of a new humanity, unifying peoples hitherto separated and imprisoned within their specific cyclical patterns of rise and fall. In short, human history in general does not develop in either a linear or a cyclical pattern, but more like a spiral, consisting, as it were, of a motion in which every two steps forward is paid for by one step backward; this conception is similar to the dialectical pattern envisaged by Hegel and Marx a century later.

And, like Hegel and Marx, Vico seems to have regarded his own philosophical activity as evidence that mankind was at last entering into its kingdom here on earth. The New Science is both evidence of the birth of a new historical consciousness and the instrument by which humanity is to be liberated from cyclical determinism. It is liberating in that it shows man not as the product of fate or of physical process alone or of divine will alone, but as free creator of his own destiny. Just as Christianity is the one true religion for all men everywhere, so the New Science is the one true philosophy for all men everywhere. And just as Christianity had freed man from servitude to an imagined hostile nature by divesting that nature of all spirits, so the New Science will free man from servitude to religion itself, not by destroying religion but by revealing it for what it really is, i.e., man’s vision of what he might become. In the New Science men are revealed as creators of their own humanity, are liberated from myth, and are charged to undertake creation of themselves selfconsciously and positively.

Vico’s influence . Vico’s philosophy was not very influential during the eighteenth century, but it did prefigure many of the ideas that later appeared in romanticism. Therefore, Vico became fully appreciated only in the nineteenth century, largely as a result of Michelet’s popularization of his work. Vico’s influence on nineteenth-century social and literary theory was profound: Goethe, Mazzini, Coleridge, Thomas Arnold, Taine, Marx, and Engels all admitted debts to him. In the present century his influence has been even greater, encompassing thinkers and writers as diverse as Croce, Gentile, and Collingwood in philosophy; Joyce and Yeats in literature; Toynbee and Trotsky in historiography; Pareto, Sorel, and Sorokin in social science; and Edmund Wilson and Erich Auerbach in literary criticism. It is only in the present century that Vico’s highly original Autobiography, first published in 1728 and reissued with an addition in 1731, has been fully appreciated. Here Vico applied the principles of the New Science to the analysis of his own intellectual evolution, thus providing, or so he believed, a confirmation on the ontogenetic level of the phylogenetic pattern of human evolution.

Hayden V. White

[For the historical context of Vico’s work, seeHistory, article on The philosophy of history; and the biographies ofBacon; Descartes; Grotius; Hobbes; Plato. For discussion of the subsequent development of his ideas, seeSociology, article on The development of sociological thought; and the biographies ofCroce; Pareto; Sorel; Sorokin; Trotsky.]

WORKS BY VICO

(1725) 1948 The New Science. Translated by Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. → First published in Italian. A paperback edition was published in 1961 by Doubleday.

(1728-1729) 1944 The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico. Translated by Max H. Fisch and Thomas G. Bergin. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. → First published in Italian.

Opere. Edited by Fausto Nicolini. 8 vols. Bari: Laterza, 1911-1941.

Opere. Edited by Fausto Nicolini. Milan: Ricciardi, 1953. → A one-volume selection.

Opere. Edited by Paolo Rossi. Milan: Rizzoli, 1959.

Il pensiero di Giambattista Vico. Edited by Paolo Rossi. Turin: Loescher, 1959.

Tutte le opere. Edited by Francesco Flora. Vols. 1—. Milan: Mondadori, 1957—.

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, Henry P. 1935 Life and Writings of Giambattista Vico. London: Allen & Unwin.

Amerio, Franco 1947 Introduzione allo studio di Giambattista Vico. Turin: Società Editrice Italiana.

Caponigri, A. Robert 1953 Time and Idea: The Theory of History in G. B. Vico. Chicago: Regnery.

Chaix-ruy, Jules 1943 La formation de la pensée philosophique de G. B. Vico. Gap (France): Jean.

Ciardo, Manlio 1947 Le quattro epoche dello storicismo: Vico, Kant, Hegel, Croce. Bari: Laterza.

Corsano, Antonio 1956 Giambattista Vico. Bari: Laterza.

Croce, Benedetto (1911) 1964 The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico. Translated by R. G. Collingwood. New York: Russell. → First published in Italian.

Croce, Benedetto 1947-1948 Bibliografia vichiana. 2 vols. Revised and enlarged by Fausto Nicolini. Naples: Ricciardi.

Nicolini, Fausto 1949-1950 Commento storico alia seconda Scienza nuova. 2 vols. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura.

Giambattista Vico

The Italian philosopher and jurist Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) is considered the founder of the philosophy of history. His main work, "The New Science, " is an examination of social and political institutions in terms of their connection with phases of human development.

Apart from being known by a few German thinkers, such as Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried von Herder, the work of Giambattista Vico was ignored until modern times. Yet the belated recognition of his genius and contribution is such that some scholars suggest that his mode of historical thinking is capable of modifying the intellectual relations between the pure and social sciences.

Vico was born in Naples on June 23, 1668 the only child of Antonio and Candida Vico. Except for one sustained period he lived his entire life in the city of his birth. During this period of political turmoil Naples was ruled by a succession of foreign powers (Spain, Austria, and France) and domestically controlled by the powerful Jesuit order. Intellectually, the city became the center of Italian Cartesianism. Vico, who was in opposition to all of these forces, was unable to advance his career. His lack of recognition and success in his professional work, as well as personal misfortunes, made him a bitter man who was periodically subject to melancholia.

In childhood Vico nearly died as the result of a fractured skull, which prevented him from attending school. Because his father was a bookseller, the child read quite extensively but at random. Although he attended a Jesuit university for a brief time, he went only to those classes that interested him. He spent a great deal of time studying logic and scholastic metaphysics until he found himself attracted to the study of law. Despite his lack of formal legal training, he successfully defended his father in a lawsuit when he was only 16 years old. But he developed a distaste for law as a profession and never practiced again.

From 1685 to 1695 Vico tutored relatives of the bishop of Ischia and lived in Vatolla. These were the happiest years of his life, and he used his free time to pursue his intellectual interests. He read widely in the fields of philosophy, history, ethics, jurisprudence, and poetry. His knowledge of science remained cursory, and he had a positive dislike for mathematics.

Vico returned to Naples in 1697 and became professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples. Part of his duties consisted of offering a lecture at the opening of each academic year from 1699 to 1708. These essays show the development of his thought, and On the Study Methods of Our Time ranks as a classic defense of liberal education. Between 1720 and 1722 he published a three-volume study, Universal Law. In 1725 he wrote his Autobiography; the same year he published the first edition of The New Science, which he modified and expanded in editions of 1730 and 1744. Despite these activities, Vico was not appointed to the chair of civil law and, because of his large family, he was forced to supplement his income by writing commissioned poems and prose encomiums. He died on Jan. 22/23, 1744, in Naples after a long and painful illness.

His Thought

René Descartes, credited with being the originator of modern classical philosophy, attempted to reform scientific thinking by a strict adherence to mathematical reasoning. Vico, who came to the study of philosophy from law, questioned the criterion of rationalist truth on the basis that real knowledge is by way of causes. He believed that ultimately we can know fully only that which we have caused. The true, or verum, is identical with the created factum. Despite its obscurities, Vico's intuition about history remains quite suggestive. Only God knows the natural cosmos perfectly, and the rationalist model of perfect demonstrable knowledge is attainable only in the realm of mathematical abstractions. But we can know history because it has been created by man, and its originative principles can be discovered by a reconstructive interpretation of our own mind.

Accordingly Vico's New Science anticipates the later thought of G. W. F. Hegel, Auguste Comte, and Arnold Toynbee: "Our philosophical and philological investigations revealed an ideal eternal history which has been traversed in time according to the division of the three ages …" Vico was indebted to Egyptian mythology for his basic metaphor of poetic, heroic, and natural natures. But the scope of his immense and diffuse learning enabled him to systematically associate these three types as reflected in customs, laws, language, institutions, and political authority; or, in brief, in the manifestations of nations as well as individual characters.

For example, primitive cultures are notoriously mythological in their thinking. To Vico this fact was a clear reflection of their ignorance of natural causes and the compensating strength of their imaginations. He believed the study of common language in its progression from oracular to expressive to vernacular provides a "mental dictionary" of character, nation, and time. Similarly, he believed a close study of laws and the facts of commerce yields more insight about a civilization than a study of its science or philosophy.

Vico's comparative method issued in a concept of political organization. In aristocracies the nobles "by reason of their native lawless liberty" will not tolerate checks upon their power. When plebeians increase in number and military training, they force the aristocracy to submit to law, as in democracies. Finally, in order to preserve their privileges, the lords accept a single ruler, and monarchies are established.

Further Reading

Studies of Vico include R. Flint, Vico (1884); B. Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (1913); and A. R. Caponigri, Time and Idea: The Theory of History in Giambattista Vico (1953).

Additional Sources

Burke, Peter, Vico, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Verene, Donald Phillip, Vico's science of imagination, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.

Albano, Maeve Edith, Vico and providence, New York: P. Lang, 1986. □

Giovanni Battista Vico , 1668–1744, Italian philosopher and historian, also known as Giambattista Vico, b. Naples. In 1699, Vico became professor of rhetoric at the Univ. of Naples, and in 1734 he was appointed historiographer to the king of Naples. Vico is regarded by many as the first modern historian; he was the first to formulate a systematic method of historical research, and he developed a theory of history that was far in advance of his times. For Vico, history is the account of the birth and development of human societies and their institutions. He thus departed from previous systems of writing history—either as the biographies of great men, or as the development of God's will. Opposing the antihistorical elements of the prevailing Cartesianism (see Descartes, René ), he asserted that history is a valid object of human knowledge because man himself created history. Vico urged the study of language, mythology, and tradition as techniques for the investigation of history. As a philosopher, Vico believed that every period in history had a distinct character, and that similar periods recur throughout history in the same order. He departed from the old cyclical theories of history, however, in asserting that these periods do not recur in exactly the same form, but are subject to the modifications that new circumstances and developments impose. Thus the historian can never be a prophet. Vico also wrote on law, affirming an innate human sense of justice and natural law. Vico's major theories were developed in his New Science (1725), which he revised completely (1730; 1744). Vico's work was little known in his own time, and his importance was not recognized until the 19th cent.

Bibliography: See his autobiography (tr. by M. H. Finch and T. G. Bergin, 1944); G. Tagliacozzo and H. V. White, ed., Giambattista Vico (1969); H. P. Adams, The Life and Writings of Giambattista Vico (1935, repr. 1970); B. Croce, The Philosophy of Giovanni Battista Vico (1913, repr. 1970); F. Vaughan, The Political Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (1972); L. Pompa, Vico: A Study of the New Science (1975); C. L. Stephenson, Giambattista Vico and the Foundations of a Science of the Philosophy of History (1982); P. Burke, Vico (1985).

Vico, Giovanni Battista (1668–1744), Italian jurist and philosopher. His main work was his Principii di una scienza nuova d'intorno alla natura comune delle nazioni (1725; commonly known as the Scienza nuova). Responding to R. Descartes' attack on the value of historical study, Vico drew a distinction between the aims and methods of natural science and those of history; the realm of nature, he argued, being a divine and not a human creation, is largely obscure to human beings, whereas history, which describes the behaviour of human beings, is a human creation and therefore open to human understanding; ‘the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and its principles are therefore to be found in the modifications of our human mind’. Language and the nature of ritual and myth are, he held, the keys to understanding society; through the use of metaphor, they reveal its values.

Vico, Giambattista (1668–1744) Italian philosophical historian. In his New Science (1725, revised 1730 and 1744), Vico advanced the arguments of historicism: that all aspects of society and culture are relevant to the study of history, and that the history of any period should be judged according to the standards and customs of that time and place. Overlooked until the late 19th century, he is now regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of history.