A quotation from Giambattista Vico

Giambattista Vico

1668 CE – 1744 CE

He invented the philosophy of history and proposed its central paradox: the past is both alien and self-made, foreign to us yet entirely ours.

Vico spent most of his life as a poorly paid professor of rhetoric in Naples, largely ignored by the Cartesian fashion of his age, and produced a work, the New Science, that would not be properly read until the nineteenth century. His central argument is the verum-factum principle: we can only truly know what we have made. Mathematics we know with certainty because we invented it. The natural world we cannot fully know, because God made it. But history (human institutions, laws, languages, myths, rituals) we can genuinely understand, because humans made it. He developed from this a theory of historical cycles: nations pass through ages of gods, heroes, and men, decline into barbarism, and begin again. He read myth not as poetic fancy but as the compressed thought of an earlier mode of consciousness, alien to our abstraction but not less real. He was wrong about many details and right about something that most of his contemporaries could not see.