Giambattista Vico
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.
Places
Ideas
Words
“The true and the made are convertible: we can truly know only what we ourselves have made.”
“This world of nations has certainly been made by men; its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind.”
Works
Life & Moments
Born above a Naples bookshop
Born the son of a poor bookseller, and nearly killed at seven by a fall from the shop ladder that left him, he said, with his melancholic temperament. He was largely his own teacher among his father's books.
Professor of rhetoric
Won the poorly paid chair of rhetoric at the University of Naples and held it for over forty years, twice failing to obtain the lucrative chair of law he deserved: a disappointment that freed him, he later reflected, to write the New Science.
The New Science
Published the Scienza Nuova at his own expense, selling a family ring to pay the printer, and kept rewriting it until his death. Ignored in his century, it waited for Michelet, Marx, and Joyce to discover what it had seen first.
Influence
Influenced by
- Descartes
Vico built the New Science against Descartes: since we can only truly know what we ourselves have made, it is history and human institutions, not mathematics or nature, where certain knowledge is possible.
- Niccolò Machiavelli
Vico took from Machiavelli the study of states as they actually behave, and set it inside a theory of how nations pass through recurring ages.
Influenced
- Johann Gottfried Herder
Herder's insistence that every people and period carries its own inner measure follows the path Vico opened, though Herder came to his work late and partly through intermediaries.
