VICO, GIOVANNI BATTISTA (Giambattista Vico; 1668–1744)

VICO, GIOVANNI BATTISTA (Giambattista Vico; 1668–1744), Italian philosopher of history, law, and culture. Vico was born in Naples on the eve of the Feast of St. John the Baptist (23 June). He lived all his life in and near Naples, where his father was the proprietor of a small bookshop, above which the family lived in a single room. Vico's mother was illiterate. In a society dominated by wealth, political power, aristocracy, and clergy, Vico was self-made and self-taught. From grammar school on he spent only short periods in formal instruction. The center of his mature education was a self-devised program of reading the ancients against the moderns, carried out while tutoring the children of the Rocca family for nine years at Vatolla (1686–1695). In 1699 he won the concourse for the professorship of Latin eloquence (rhetoric) at the University of Naples, a position he held until succeeded in 1741 by his son Gennaro. As part of his duties Vico presented a series of orations to inaugurate the academic year, the two most prominent being "De nostri temporis studiorum ratione" (1709; On the study methods of our time) and "De mente heroica" (1732; On the heroic mind). This series of orations taken collectively constitutes a full doctrine of pedagogy.

In 1710 Vico published De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia (On the most ancient wisdom of the Italians), the first part of a system of philosophy directed against Cartesianism. (The planned second and third parts were never completed.) The work contains one of Vico's best-known principles, "that the true is the made." He first applied this as a principle of mathematical reasoning; later he applied it in his science of history—because human beings make history, they can make a complete knowledge of it. In 1720–1722 Vico published a large, three-part work, De Universi Juris Uno Principio (Universal law), in anticipation of qualifying for a university chair in civil law. In 1723 he suffered the greatest disappointment of his career, his failure to succeed in the concourse for this position, described in his Autobiografia (1728–1731).

Universal Law was a prelude to his magnum opus, Principi di una scienza nuova d'intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni (1725, 1730, 1744; Principles of new science concerning the common nature of the nations). Failure of the concourse left him free to develop the versions of this work. Through an analysis of Roman law begun in Universal Law and in particular the concept of ius gentium (the law of the peoples)—that part of Roman law which it has in common with the laws of all other nations—Vico developed his conception of "ideal eternal history," according to which all nations develop through a natural law of three ages. The age of gods, in which all of nature and basic social institutions are ordered in terms of gods, is followed by the age of heroes, in which all virtues necessary to society are embodied in the character of the hero, followed by the age of humans, in which custom is replaced by written law and thought becomes abstract and rational.

This ideal eternal history stands against the seventeenth-century natural-law theories of Hugo Grotius (Huigh de Groot [1583–1645]), Samuel von Pufendorf (1632–1694), John Selden (1584–1654), and Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). In place of a state of nature, from which human beings form a covenant, passing from a state of war of all against all to a state of rationally governed civility, Vico formulates his conception of "poetic wisdom" or, in modern terms, "mythical thought." Societal life first depends upon the human power of fantasia (imagination) to narrate the meanings of events through myths. From mythical commonalities, rational forms of understanding gradually develop. Against the Enlightenment principle of progress, Vico sees history as cyclic, that is, each nation passes through a corso (course) of the ages of ideal eternal history and falls, only to rise again in a ricorso.

Vico's influence on later thinkers is sporadic. Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), Karl Marx (1818–1883), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), and William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) discovered Vico and realized their connection to him after their own views were largely formulated. The major figure of the nineteenth century fully influenced by Vico was Jules Michelet (1798–1874), who translated Vico's works into French, making them the basis of his own philosophy of history. The two figures most influenced by Vico in the twentieth century and who in turn introduced Vico to many readers were Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) and James Joyce (1882–1941). Croce merged Vico's conception of history and society with his own philosophical idealism, making Vico into the Italian Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). Joyce was influenced by Vico throughout his career. Most prominently Joyce based the cycles of Finnegan's Wake (1939) on Vico's New Science, as he had based Ulysses (1922) on the ports of call of Homer's Odyssey.

See also Cartesianism ; Grotius, Hugo ; Herder, Johann Gottfried von ; Philosophy ; Political Philosophy .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Vico, Giambattista. The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico. Translated by Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin. Ithaca, N.Y., 1975. Translation of Vita di Giambattista Vico Scritta da se medesimo.

——. The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. Ithaca, N.Y., 1984. Translation of Principi di una scienza nuova d'intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni.

——. Opere. 2 vols. Edited by Andrea Battistini. Milan, 1990. Edition of many of Vico's major works, including most helpful commentary and notes on each.

Secondary Sources

Berlin, Isaiah. Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder. Edited by Henry Hardy. London, 2000. Treats Vico's philosophical ideas as the beginning of the Counter-Enlightenment.

Mazzotta, Giuseppe. The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico. Princeton, 1999. Connects Vico's thought to the basic figures and themes of the Renaissance.

Verene, Donald Phillip. The New Art of Autobiography: An Essay on the "Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself." Oxford, 1991. An analysis of Vico's autobiography and its connection to New Science.

——. Vico's Science of Imagination. Ithaca, N.Y., 1981. An assessment of Vico's philosophical ideas and their originality.

Donald Phillip Verene