Giambattista Vico (born Giovan Battista Vico
, Italian: [ˈviko]; 23 June 1668 – 23 January
1744) was an Italian political philosopher
and rhetorician, historian and jurist, of
the Age of Enlightenment. He criticized the
expansion and development of modern rationalism,
was an apologist for Classical Antiquity,
a precursor of systematic and complex thought,
in opposition to Cartesian analysis and other
types of reductionism, and was the first expositor
of the fundamentals of social science and
of semiotics.
The Latin aphorism Verum esse ipsum factum
("What is true is precisely what is made")
coined by Vico is an early instance of constructivist
epistemology. He inaugurated the modern field
of the philosophy of history, and, although
the term philosophy of history is not in his
writings, Vico spoke of a “history of philosophy
narrated philosophically." Although he was
not an historicist, contemporary interest
in Vico usually has been motivated by historicists,
such as Isaiah Berlin, an historian of ideas,
Edward Said, a literary critic, and Hayden
White, a metahistorian.Giambattista Vico's
intellectual magnum opus is the book Scienza
Nuova (1725, New Science), which attempts
a systematic organization of the humanities
as a single science that recorded and explained
the historical cycles by which societies rise
and fall.
== Biography ==
Born to a bookseller in Naples, Italy, Giovan
Battista Vico attended several schools, but
ill health and dissatisfaction with the scholasticism
of the Jesuits led to his being educated at
home by tutors. Evidence from his autobiographical
work indicates that Vico likely was an autodidact
educated under paternal influence, during
a three-year absence from school, consequence
of an accidental fall when the boy was seven
years old. Giovann Battista’s formal education
was at the University of Naples from which
he was graduated in 1694, as Doctor of Civil
and Canon Law.In 1686, after surviving a bout
of typhus, he accepted a job as a tutor, in
Vatolla, south of Salerno, which became a
nine-year professional engagement that lasted
till 1695. Four years later, in 1699, Vico
married Teresa Caterina Destito, a childhood
friend, and accepted a chair in rhetoric at
the University of Naples, which he held until
ill-health retirement, in 1741. Throughout
his academic career, Vico would aspire to,
but never attain, the more respectable chair
of jurisprudence; however, in 1734, he was
appointed historiographer royal, by Charles
III, King of Naples, at a salary greater than
he had earned as a university professor.
== The rhetoric and humanism of Vico ==
Vico's version of rhetoric is product of his
humanistic and pedagogic concerns. In the
1708 commencement speech De 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 of verisimilitude”; yet, in Scienza
Nuova, Vico denounced defending both sides
in controversies as false eloquence.
As Royal Professor of Latin Eloquence, Vico
prepared students for higher studies in the
fields of Law and of Jurisprudence; thus,
his lessons were about the formal aspects
of the canon of rhetoric, including the arrangement
and the delivery of an argument. Yet, Vico
chose to emphasize the Aristotelian connection
of rhetoric with logic and dialectic, 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 central
argument (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, and discovery — reliant upon
topics (loci) — supersedes axioms derived
through reflective, abstract thought. In the
tradition of classical Roman rhetoric, Vico
sets out to educate the orator (rhetorician)
as the transmitter of the oratio, a speech
with ratio (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 the imagination
from above (in the manner of the moderns and
dogmatic Christianity), but that is drawn
from common sense, itself. In the tradition
of Socrates and Cicero, 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 is humana 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 (jurisprudential)
oratory art against the grain of the modern
privilege of the dogmatic form of reason,
in what he called the “geometrical method”
of René Descartes and the logicians at the
Port-Royal-des-Champs abbey.
== Response to the Cartesian Method ==
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 both metaphysics and the natural sciences
abounded as the result of Cartesianism. Widely
disseminated by the Port Royal Logic of Antoine
Arnauld and Pierre 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 the De 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
to phronēsis (φρόνησις or practical
wisdom) must also be made, and likewise appeals
to the various components of persuasion that
comprise rhetoric. Vico would reproduce this
argument consistently throughout his works,
and would use it as a central tenet of the
Scienza Nuova.
== The principle of Verum factum ==
Vico is best known for his verum factum principle,
first formulated in 1710 as part of his De
antiquissima Italorum sapientia, ex linguae
latinae originibus eruenda (1710) ("On the
most ancient wisdom of the Italians, unearthed
from the origins of the Latin language").
The principle states that truth is verified
through creation or invention and not, as
per Descartes, 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 of civilization
in Vico’s opus, the Scienza Nuova (The New
Science, 1725), because he would argue that
civil life – like mathematics – is wholly
constructed.
== The Scienza Nuova ==
The New Science (1725, Scienza Nuova) is his
major work and has been highly influential
in the philosophy of history, and for historicists
such as Isaiah Berlin and Hayden White.
== Influence ==
Samuel Beckett's first published work, in
the selection of critical essays on James
Joyce entitled Our Exagmination Round His
Factification for Incamination of Work in
Progress, is "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce".
In it, Beckett sees a profound influence of
Vico's philosophy and poetics — as well
the cyclical form of the Scienza Nuova — on
the avant-garde compositions of Joyce, and
especially the titular Work in Progress, viz.
Finnegans Wake.
In Knowledge and Social Structure (1974),
Peter Hamilton identified Giambattista Vico
as the “sleeping partner” of the Age of
Enlightenment.
Despite having been relatively unknown in
his 17th-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.In Capital:
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.
Marx and Vico saw social-class warfare as
the means by which men achieve the end of
equal rights; Vico called that time the "Age
of Men". 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 would lead to socio-political chaos
and the consequent collapse of society. In
that vein, Vico proposed a social need for
religion, for a supernatural Divine Providence
to keep order in human society.In Orientalism
(1978), Edward Said acknowledged his scholar’s
debt to Vico; whose “ideas anticipate and
later infiltrate the line of German thinkers
I am about to cite. They belong to the era
of Herder and Wolf, later to be followed by
Goethe, Humboldt, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Gadamer,
and finally the great Twentieth Century Romance
philologists Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer,
and Ernst Robert Curtius.” 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 in
National Socialism. 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.”
== 
Works ==
Opere di G.B. Vico. Fausto Nicolini (ed.),
Bari: Laterza, 1911-41.
De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia ex Linguae
Originibus Eruenda Librir 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.
== See also ==
Recapitulation theory
Finnegans Wake
== Notes ==
== References ==
Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Vico, Giovanni
Battista". Encyclopædia Britannica. 28 (11th
ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Fabiani, Paolo. "The Philosophy of the Imagination
in Vico and Malebranche". F.U.P. (Florence
UP), Italian edition 2002, English edition
2009.
Goetsch, James. Vico’s Axioms: The Geometry
of the Human World.. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995.
Mooney, Michael. Vico in the Tradition of
Rhetoric. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1985.
Pompa, Leon. Vico: A Study of the New Science.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
Giambattista Vico entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy
== Further reading ==
Andreacchio, Marco. "Autobiography as History
of Ideas: an Intimate Reading of Vico's Vita
(from «Lord Vico» to «The Names of Law»)"
in Historia Philosophica: An International
Journal. Vol. 11.
Bedani, Gino. Vico Revisited: Orthodoxy, Naturalism
and Science in the Scienza Nuova. Oxford:
Berg Publishers, 1989.
Berlin, Isaiah. Vico and Herder. Two Studies
in the History of Ideas. London, 1976.
Berlin, Isaiah. Three Critics of the Enlightenment:
Vico, Hamann, Herder. London and Princeton,
2000.
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
Fabiani, Paolo, "The Philosophy of the Imagination
in Vico and Malebranche". F.U.P. (Florence
UP), Italian edition 2002, English edition
2009.
Fisch, Max, and Thomas G. Bergin, trans. Vita
di Giambattista Vico (The Autobiography of
Giambattista Vico). 1735-41. Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 1963.
Giannantonio, Valeria. Oltre Vico – L'identità
del passato a Napoli e Milano tra '700 e '800,
Carabba Editore, Lanciano, 2009.
Grassi, Ernesto. Vico and Humanism: Essays
on Vico, Heidegger, and Rhetoric. New York:
Peter Lang, 1990.
Hösle, Vittorio. "Vico und die Idee der Kulturwissenschaft"
in Prinzipien 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
== External links ==
Works by Giambattista Vico at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about Giambattista Vico at Internet
Archive
Institute for Vico Studies
Entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Entry in the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary
Theory
Verene, Donald Phillip. Essay on Vico's humanism
at the Wayback Machine (archived May 20, 2002),
archived from Johns Hopkins University Press.
Vico's Poetic Philosophy within Europe's Cultural
Identity, Emanuel L. Paparella
Leon Pompa, Vico's Theory of the Causes of
Historical Change, archived at The Institute
for Cultural Research
Portale Vico - Vico Portal
Text of the New Science in multiple formats
Essays on Vico's creative influence on James
Joyce's Finnegans Wake
Samuel Beckett's essay on Vico and Joyce
Vico's creative influence on Richard James
Allen's The Way Out At Last Cycle
Vico's Historical Mythology
