Vico Giambattista (1668–1744), Italian philosopher who founded modern philosophy of history, philosophy of culture, and philosophy of mythology. He was born and lived all his life in or near Naples, where he taught Latin eloquence at the university (1699–1741). The Inquisition was a force in Naples throughout Vico’s lifetime. A turning point in his career was his loss of the concourse for a chair of civil law (1723). Although a disappointment and an injustice, it enabled him to produce his major philosophical work. He was appointed royal historiographer by Charles of Bourbon in 1735.
Vico’s major work is the New Science (La scienza nuova, 1725), completely revised in a second, definitive version in 1730. In the 1720s, he published three connected works in Latin on jurisprudence, under the title Universal Law; one contains a sketch of his conception of a ‘new science’ of the historical life of nations. Vico’s principal works preceding this are On the Study Methods of Our Time (1709), comparing the ancients with the moderns regarding human education, and On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians (1710), attacking the Cartesian conception of metaphysics. His Autobiography (1728– 31) inaugurates the conception of modern intellectual autobiography.
Basic to Vico’s philosophy is his principle that ‘the true is the made’ (verum ipsum factum), that what is true is convertible with what is made. This principle is central in his conception of ‘science’ (scientia, scienza). A science is possible only for those subjects in which such a conversion is possible. There can be a science of mathematics, since mathematical truths are such because we make them. Analogously, there can be a science of the civil world of the historical life of nations. Since we make the things of the civil world, it is possible for us to have a science of them. As the makers of our own world, like God as the maker who makes by knowing and knows by making, we can have knowledge per caussas (through causes, from within). In the natural sciences we can have only conscientia (a kind of ‘consciousness’), not scientia, because things in nature are not made by the knower. Vico’s ‘new science’ is a science of the principles whereby ‘men make history’; it is also a demonstration of ‘what providence has wrought in history.’ All nations rise and fall in cycles within history (corsi e ricorsi) in a pattern governed by providence. The world of nations or, in the Augustinian phrase Vico uses, ‘the great city of the human race,’ exhibits a pattern of three ages of ‘ideal eternal history’ (storia ideale eterna). Every nation passes through an age of gods (when people think in terms of gods), an age of heroes (when all virtues and institutions are formed through the personalities of heroes), and an age of humans (when all sense of the divine is lost, life becomes luxurious and false, and thought becomes abstract and ineffective); then the cycle must begin again. In the first two ages all life and thought are governed by the primordial power of ‘imagination’ (fantasia) and the world is ordered through the power of humans to form experience in terms of ‘imaginative universals’ (universali fantastici). These two ages are governed by ‘poetic wisdom’ (sapienza poetica). At the basis of Vico’s conception of history, society, and knowledge is a conception of mythical thought as the origin of the human world. Fantasia is the original power of the human mind through which the true and the made are converted to create the myths and gods that are at the basis of any cycle of history. Michelet was the primary supporter of Vico’s ideas in the nineteenth century; he made them the basis of his own philosophy of history. Coleridge was the principal disseminator of Vichian views in England. James Joyce used the New Science as a substructure for Finnegans Wake, making plays on Vico’s name, beginning with one in Latin in the first sentence: ‘by a commodius vicus of recirculation.’ Croce revived Vico’s philosophical thought in the twentieth century, wishing to conceive Vico as the Italian Hegel. Vico’s ideas have been the subject of analysis by such prominent philosophical thinkers as Horkheimer and Berlin, by anthropologists such as Edmund Leach, and by literary critics such as René Wellek and Herbert Read.
See also CROCE, PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. D.P.V.