Vico's intellectualmagnum opus is the bookScienza Nuova orNew Science (1725), which attempts a systematic organization of thehumanities as a single science that records and explains the historical cycles by which societies rise and fall.[10]
"In this little room Giambattista Vico was born on June 23 1668. Here he resided until he was seventeen years old, and in the subdued little workshop of his bookseller father he used to spend the nights in his study. Youthful eve of his sublime work. The city of Naples poses." Tombstone in the house where he was born in Via San Biagio dei Librai.
Born to a bookseller inNaples, Italy, Giovan Battista Vico attended several schools, but ill health and dissatisfaction with thescholasticism of theJesuits led to his being educated at home by tutors. Evidence from his autobiographical work indicates that Vico likely was anautodidact educated under paternal influence, during a three-year absence from school, consequence of an accidental fall when the boy was seven years old.[11] Giovan Battista's formal education was at theUniversity of Naples from which he graduated in 1694, as Doctor of Civil and Canon Law.[11]
In 1686, after surviving a bout oftyphus, he accepted a job as a tutor, in Vatolla, south ofSalerno, which became a nine-year professional engagement that lasted till 1695.[11] Four years later, in 1699, Vico married Teresa Caterina Destito, a childhood friend, and accepted a chair inrhetoric at the University of Naples, which he held until ill-health retirement, in 1741.[11] Throughout his academic career, Vico would aspire to, but never attain, the more respectable chair ofjurisprudence; however, in 1734, he was appointedhistoriographer royal, byCharles III, King of Naples, at a salary greater than he had earned as a university professor.
Vico's version ofrhetoric is a product of hishumanistic andpedagogic concerns. In the 1708 commencement speechDe Nostri Temporis Studiorum Ratione (On the Order of the Scholarly Disciplines of Our Times), Vico said that whoever "intends a career in public life, whether in the courts, the senate, or the pulpit" should be taught to "master the art of topics and [to] defend both sides of a controversy, be it on Nature, Man, or politics, in a freer and brighter style of expression, so he can learn to draw on those arguments which are most probable and have the greatest degree ofverisimilitude"; yet, inScienza Nuova, Vico denounced defending both sides in controversies asfalse eloquence.
As Royal Professor of Latin Eloquence, Vico prepared students for higher studies in the fields of Law and ofJurisprudence; thus, his lessons were about the formal aspects of the canon of rhetoric, including the arrangement and the delivery of an argument. Yet he chose to emphasize theAristotelian connection of rhetoric withlogic anddialectic, thereby placing ends (rhetoric) at their center. Vico's objection to modern rhetoric is that it is disconnected from common sense (sensus communis), defined as the "worldly sense" that is common to all men.
In lectures and throughout the body of his work, Vico's rhetoric begins from a centralargument (medius terminus), which is to be clarified by following the order of things as they arise in our experience.Probability and circumstance retain their proportionate importance, anddiscovery—reliant upon topics (loci)—supersedesaxioms derived through reflective, abstract thought. In the tradition of classical Roman rhetoric, Vico sets out to educate theorator (rhetorician) as the transmitter of theoratio, a speech withratio (reason) at the centre. What is essential to the oratorical art (Gr. ῥητορική,rhētorikē) is the orderly link between common sense and an end commensurate with oratory; an end that is not imposed upon theimagination from above (in the manner of the moderns and dogmatic Christianity), but that is drawn from common sense, itself. In the tradition ofSocrates andCicero, Vico's true orator will be midwife to the birth of "the true" (as an idea) from "the certain", the ignorance in the mind of the student.
Rediscovery of "the most ancient wisdom" of the senses, a wisdom that ishumana stultitia ("human foolishness"), Vico's emphases on the importance of civic life and of professional obligations are in the humanist tradition. He would call for a maieutic oratory art against the grain of the modern privilege of the dogmatic form of reason, in what he called the "geometrical method" ofRené Descartes and the logicians at thePort-Royal-des-Champs abbey.
As he relates in his autobiography, Vico returned to Naples from Vatolla to find "the physics of Descartes at the height of its renown among the established men of letters." Developments in bothmetaphysics and the natural sciences abounded as the result of Cartesianism. Widely disseminated by the Port Royal Logic ofAntoine Arnauld andPierre Nicole, Descartes's method was rooted in verification: the only path to truth, and thus knowledge, was through axioms derived from observation. Descartes's insistence that the "sure and indubitable" (or, "clear and distinct") should form the basis of reasoning had an obvious impact on the prevailing views of logic and discourse. Studies in rhetoric—indeed all studies concerned with civic discourse and the realm of probable truths—met with increasing disdain.
Vico's humanism and professional concerns prompted an obvious response that he would develop throughout the course of his writings: the realms of verifiable truth and human concern share only a slight overlap, yet reasoning is required in equal measure in both spheres. One of the clearest and earliest forms of this argument is available in theDe Italorum Sapientia, where Vico argues that
to introduce geometrical method into practical life is "like trying to go mad with the rules of reason", attempting to proceed by a straight line among the tortuosities of life, as though human affairs were not ruled by capriciousness, temerity, opportunity, and chance. Similarly, to arrange a political speech according to the precepts of geometrical method is equivalent to stripping it of any acute remarks and to uttering nothing but pedestrian lines of argument.
Vico's position here and in later works is not that the Cartesian method is irrelevant, but that its application cannot be extended to the civic sphere. Instead of confining reason to a string of verifiable axioms, Vico suggests (along with the ancients) that appeals tophronēsis (φρόνησις orpractical wisdom) must also be made, and likewise appeals to the various components ofpersuasion that comprise rhetoric. Vico would reproduce this argument consistently throughout his works, and would use it as a centraltenet of theScienza Nuova.
Vico is best known for hisverum factum principle, first formulated in 1710 as part of hisDe antiquissima Italorum sapientia, ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda (1710) ("Of the most ancient wisdom of the Italians, unearthed from the origins of the Latin language").[12] The principle states that truth is verified through creation or invention and not, as perDescartes, through observation: "The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself." This criterion for truth would later shape the history ofcivilization in Vico's opus, theScienza Nuova (The New Science, 1725), because he would argue that civil life—likemathematics—is wholly constructed.
Title page ofPrincipj di Scienza Nuova (1744 edition)
The New Science (1725,Scienza Nuova) is Vico's major work. It has been highly influential in the philosophy of history, and for historicists such as Isaiah Berlin and Hayden White.
InKnowledge and Social Structure (1974), Peter Hamilton identified Vico as the "sleeping partner" of theAge of Enlightenment.[13] Despite having been relatively unknown in his 18th-century time, and read only in his native Naples, the ideas of Vico are predecessors to the ideas of the intellectuals of the Enlightenment. Moreover, recognition of Vico's intellectual influence began in the 19th century, when the French Romantic historians used his works as methodological models and guides.[13]
InCapital: Critique of Political Economy (1867),Karl Marx's mention of Vico indicates their parallel perspectives about history, the role of historical actors, and an historical method of narrative.[14] Marx and Vico sawsocial-class warfare as the means by which men achieve the end ofequal rights; Vico called that time the "Age of Men".[citation needed] Marx concluded that such a state of affairs is the optimal end of social change in a society, but Vico thought that such complete equality of rights would lead to socio-political chaos and the consequent collapse of society. In that vein, Vico proposed a social need for religion, for a supernaturaldivine providence to keep order in human society.[15]
InOrientalism (1978),Edward Said acknowledged his scholar's debt to Vico,[16] whose "ideas anticipate and later infiltrate the line of German thinkers I am about to cite. They belong to the era ofHerder andWolff, later to be followed byGoethe,Humboldt,Dilthey,Nietzsche,Gadamer, and finally the great twentieth century Romance philologistsErich Auerbach,Leo Spitzer, andErnst Robert Curtius."[16] As a humanist and early philologist, Vico represented "a different, alternative model that has been extremely important to me in my work", which differed from mainstream Western prejudice against the Orient and the dominating "standardization" that came with modernity and culminated inNational Socialism.[16] That the interdependence of human history and culture facilitates the scholars' task to "take seriously Vico's great observation that men make their own history, that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography. As geographical and cultural entities—to say nothing of historical entities—such locales, regions, and geographical sectors as 'Orient' and 'Occident' are man-made."[16]
De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia ex Linguae Originibus Eruenda Libri Tres (On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians Unearthed from the Origins of the Latin Language). 1710, Palmer, L. M., trans. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.
Institutiones Oratoriae (The Art of Rhetoric). 1711–1741, Pinton, Girogio, and Arthur W. Shippee, trans. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 1984.* "On Humanistic Education", trans. Giorgio A. Pinton and Arthur W. Shippee. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993.
On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.
Universal right (Diritto universale). Translated from Latin and Edited by Giorgio Pinton and Margaret Diehl. Amsterdam/New York, Rodopi, 2000
On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians: Unearthed from the Origins of the Latin Language, trans. L. M. Palmer. Ithaca, Cornell UP, 1988.
Scienza Nuova (The First New Science). 1725, Pompa, Leon, trans. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.
The New Science of Giambattista Vico, (1744). trans.Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2nd ed. 1968.
De rebus gestis Antonj Caraphaei (1713×1715), trans. Giorgio A. Pinton,Statecraft: The Deeds of Antonio Carafa (Peter Lang, 2004), a biography ofAntonio Carafa (died 1693).
^Gambarota, Paola (2017). "Giambattista Vico, the Vernacular, and the Foundations of Modern Italy".Irresistible Signs. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. pp. 99–144.doi:10.3138/9781442695269-004.ISBN9781442695269.
^Lollini, Massimo (2011). "Vico's More than Human Humanism".Annali d'Italianistica.29:381–399.JSTOR24016434.
^Ernst von Glasersfeld,An Introduction to Radical Constructivism.
^Bizzell and Herzberg,The Rhetorical Tradition, p. 800.
^The contemporary interpretation of Vico is by Verene, Donald Philip. See: "Giambattista Vico" (2002),A Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, Steven M. Nadler, ed. London:Blackwell Publishing,ISBN0-631-21800-9, p. 570.
^Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas
^Giambattista Vico (1976), "The Topics of History: The Deep Structure of the New Science", in Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Donald Philip Verene, eds,Science of Humanity, Baltimore and London: 1976.
^Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Hayden V. White, eds. Johns Hopkins University Press: 1969. Attempts to inaugurate a non-historicist interpretation of Vico are inInterpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy[1], Spring 2009, Vol. 36.2, and Spring 2010 37.3; and inHistoria Philosophica, Vol. 11, 2013[2].
^The Penguin Encyclopedia (2006), David Crystal, ed., p. 1,409.
^abcdCostelloe, Timothy (Fall 2022)."Giambattista Vico".The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved16 June 2024.
^His wording was "Verum et factum reciprocantur seu convertuntur" ("The true and the made are convertible into each other"), an idea which can be found also inoccasionalism andScotistscholasticism
Bizzell, Patricia, and Bruce Herzberg.The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Macmillan; Boston, Ma: Bedford Books of St Martin's Press, 2001. Pp. Xv, 1673. (First Ed. 1990). 2001.
Colilli, Paul.Vico and the Archives of Hermetic Reason. Welland, Ont.: Editions Soleil, 2004.
Croce, Benedetto.The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico. Trans. R.G. Collingwood. London: Howard Latimer, 1913.
Danesi, Marcel.Vico, Metaphor, and the Origin of Language. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993
Grassi, Ernesto.Vico and Humanism: Essays on Vico, Heidegger, and Rhetoric. New York: Peter Lang, 1990.
Hösle, Vittorio. "Vico und die Idee der Kulturwissenschaft" inPrinzipien einer neuen Wissenschaft über die gemeinsame Natur der Völker, Ed. V. Hösle and C. Jermann, Hamburg : F. Meiner, 1990, pp. XXXI-CCXCIII
Levine, Joseph.Giambattista Vico and the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns.Journal of the History of Ideas 52.1(1991): 55-79.
Lilla, Mark.G. B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Mazzotta, Giuseppe.The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Miner, Robert.Vico, Genealogist of Modernity. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002.
Schaeffer, John.Sensus Communis: Vico, Rhetoric, and the Limits of Relativism. Durham: Duke UP, 1990.
Verene, Donald.Vico's Science of Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.
Verene, Molly Black "Vico: A Bibliography of Works in English from 1884 to 1994." Philosophy Documentation Center, 1994.
Alain Pons,Vie et mort des Nations. Lecture de la Science nouvelle de Giambattista Vico, L'Esprit de la Cité, Gallimard, 2015
Rafferty, Michael (1913). "VICO (1668-1744)". InMacdonell, John; Manson, Edward William Donoghue (eds.).Great Jurists of the World. London: John Murray. pp. 345-389. Retrieved11 March 2019 – via Internet Archive.
