Vico's "New Science": A Philosophical Commentary

VICO’S

NEW SCIENCE

A PHILOSOPHICAL COMMENTARY

Donald Phillip Verene

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

In memory of

Giorgio Tagliacozzo

1909–1996

Founder

Institute for Vico Studies

…by a commodius vicus of recirculation

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

Contents

Preface

Bibliographical Note

Abbreviations and Notes on Citations

Part One: Generalities Concerning the New Science

1. Sense and Method of the New Science

2. Genesis of the New Science

3. Structure of the New Science

Part Two: Idea of the Work

Introduction

4. Genesis of the Frontispiece

5. Structure of the Frontispiece

Part Three: Establishment of Principles

Introduction

6. Chronological Table

7. Elements

8. Principles

9. Method

Part Four: Poetic Wisdom

Introduction

10. Tree of Poetic Wisdom

11. Poetic Metaphysics

12. Poetic Logic

13. Poetic Morals, Economy, and Politics

14. Poetic Sciences

Part Five: Discovery of the True Homer

Introduction

15. Search for the True Homer

16. Discovery of the True Homer

Part Six: Course and Recourse of the Nations

Introduction

17. Threefold Structure of the Course of the Nations

18. Recourse of the Nations

Part Seven: Conclusion of the Work

19. On an Eternal Natural Republic

Notes

Glossary of Italian Terms

Key to English Equivalents

Chronological Summary of Vico’s Life and Principal Works

Some Works of Secondary Literature on Vico

Index of Names

Illustrations begin on page 161.

Preface

In the last decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first, scholars have witnessed a renaissance in the study of the ideas and writings of Giambattista Vico unequalled by the amount of attention given his thought since the definitive edition of his New Science appeared in 1744.

Over half a century after Vico’s death, the use of his doctrines by the Italian historian Vincenzo Cuoco provided the groundwork for Vico to become more than a figure in the tradition of the Neapolitan jurisconsults. The New Science became the book of the Risorgimento that inspired Italian patriots, who went abroad, carrying forth Vico’s concept of nation and the common nature of the nations, bringing international attention to Vico. The best known of these patriotic figures is the novelist, poet, and critic Ugo Foscolo. Another was Gioacchino de’ Prati, who brought the New Science to the attention of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Coleridge wrote to Prati: I am more and more delighted with G. B. Vico, and Coleridge, like many others who discovered Vico during their career, found that the New Science contained, ahead of him, many ideas he had come to hold, especially concerning language, history, and human knowledge. Coleridge’s first mention of Vico is in his Theory of Life, in a quotation borrowed from Jacobi, who had been loaned a copy of the New Science by Goethe, who had received it as a gift while in Naples on his Italian travels. Earlier, in Germany, awareness of Vico is connected to Herder, who learned of Vico before writing his famous Ideas toward the Philosophy of the History of Mankind. Herder first learned of Vico through a letter he received from his mentor, Hamann, the Mage of the North, who came across Vico while pursuing the topic of political economy.

Beyond the acclaim received in the Risorgimento, sustained international scholarly attention to the New Science was given by Victor Cousin and Jules Michelet, the French nineteenth-century historians and philosophers of history, and in the early twentieth century by Benedetto Croce, in his system of philosophical idealism and aesthetics, and later by James Joyce, by prominently using a version of Vico’s cycles of ideal eternal history as a trellis on which to arrange Finnegans Wake. Michelet wrote: From 1824 on, I was seized by a frenzy caught from Vico, an incredible intoxication with his great historical principle. Joyce, when asked about the New Science by the Danish writer Tom Kristensen, replied: I don’t believe in any science, but my imagination grows when I read Vico as it doesn’t when I read Freud or Jung.

In the current renaissance of Vico studies, modern translations of the New Science have appeared in English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Turkish, and Bulgarian; and in Italy, new, critical editions of Vico’s works have appeared for some years and continue to appear. Facsimile editions and concordances have been published of Vico’s first version of the New Science (1725) and of the second version (1744). Modern critical editions of the 1730 and 1744 texts have also been published. The reader seeking literature on Vico will find more pages than any but the most dedicated scholar can read, including an array, in the major European languages, of single-authored works interpreting Vico’s thought in terms of many, diverse themes.

Missing from this embarrassment of riches is a section-by-section commentary that can take the philosophically oriented reader through the genesis and structure of the New Science. What follows is such a commentary. My intent is to bring to light Vico’s principal ideas in the philosophy of history, philosophy of mythology, and philosophy of law and society, and to do so in a manner that may aid the potential reader simply to see what much of the text says and how it says it, with some attention to Vico’s sources and to those figures and doctrines he opposes. My intention, in commenting on any part of the work, is not to avoid interpretation. My aim is to go through Vico’s text as he wrote it, to bring forth its fundamental points as I see them, without the attempt to prove, improve, or criticize what is said.

Although the subtitle of this work designates it as a philosophical commentary, I wish to emphasize that I do not regard philosophy as separate from or an opponent of rhetoric. Vico was throughout his career a professor of rhetoric, and he approached philosophical as well as historical issues in rhetorical terms. By this I mean he held, with Aristotle, that rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic, and he understood that above all we make our world through our power of speech to form it. It is within this world so formed that philosophy can arise and on which it continues to depend.

The one modern and original thinker influenced by Vico who has maintained this interconnection between rhetoric and philosophy is Ernesto Grassi, principally in his small book Rhetoric as Philosophy. As Grassi shows, the humanist tradition from the Renaissance through Vico and beyond has never understood metaphysical or moral philosophy as simply an extension of the logical power of language. Instead, they require the principles of poetic and rhetorical speech that surround philosophical thought and give it agility and life as well as its access to the distinctively human.

The reader who opens the New Science for the first time finds in the table of contents an array of topics that is fascinating in itself, but bewildering as to their combined significance: poetic wisdom; the universal flood; giants; poetic metaphysics; poetic logic; monsters; metamorphoses; poetic characters; hieroglyphics; family arms; metals and money; the natural law of the gentes; rhythm, song, and verse; the logic of the learned; poetic economy; vulgar virtues; religion and matrimony; families and famuli; cities; the first republics; origins of the census and the treasury; Roman assemblies; divine providence; the question of popular liberty instituted by Junius Brutus; heroic customs; poetic physics; heroic sentences; the coming of Aeneas to Italy; the search for the true Homer; divine judgments; duels and reprisals; an eternal natural royal law; refutation of the political theory of Jean Bodin; punishments and wars; barbaric history; and the idea of an eternal natural republic.

It is perhaps comparable to entering the contents of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, but even in that complicated work, with some initial concentration a philosophically experienced reader can come to see an intellectual pattern. Also perhaps comparable are the contents of works of the Italian Renaissance, such as the headings of Polydore Vergil’s On Discovery—although these headings are myriad, one sees that they signify types of discovery or invention; or the complicated internal titles of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the Pagan Gods—but one knows at least that these are all instances of deities and their deeds. With Vico’s text, however, one knows only that, somehow, these are the contents of what is claimed to be a new science, unlike any that one can imagine, and it concerns the common nature of the nations. But what nations? And what is it they have in common?

The only choice the reader has is to begin reading, with the promise Vico makes—that the idea of the work will be explained through the items depicted in the engraving of the frontispiece. The meaning of the work is cast immediately in a procedure the reader is not likely to have encountered before, except, perhaps, in terms of Rousseau’s remarks on the frontispiece of his First Discourse. But Rousseau’s remarks are brief and fairly clear. Or the reader may recall the symbolic frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan, which incorporates the sentence on the power of the Leviathan from the book of Job of the Latin Vulgate. The first sentence of the New Science refers the reader to the now obscure first-century Tablet of Cebes, as an analog for approaching the meaning of the frontispiece, saying that he will present a table of civil things, as Cebes the Theban presented a table of morals. Thus the reader is immediately directed to another work that must be understood in order to understand Vico’s work. The potential reader encounters difficulty even in crossing the threshold of the New Science.

Vico distinguishes between two types of potential readers of his work. He states this distinction most clearly in a fragment, To the Equable Readers, that survives from a first draft of his Universal Law, the precursor to the New Science. (For a translation of this fragment, see the Bayer and Verene volume cited in the bibliographical note.) He says he would not consider anyone worthy of the name reader who would not have read his work from beginning to end in a continuous and methodical manner. One is reminded of Hegel’s dismissal, at the end of his preface to the Phenomenology, of those readers who would make pronouncements on works after having read only prefaces or first paragraphs or reviews of them.

In the commiato, or postface, of Vico’s first published book, On the Study Methods of Our Time (1709), Vico claims that wisdom is a knowledge of the whole, and that the whole is really the flower of wisdom. He is echoing Cicero’s definition—and Varro’s—that wisdom is a knowledge of things divine and human, joined with Quintilian’s principle that eloquence is speaking completely on a subject. To comprehend Vico’s thought the reader must meditate his work as a whole. In the conclusion to his autobiography, Vico emphasizes that in his teaching he followed the humanist conception of eloquence as "la sapienza che parla, eloquence understood as wisdom speaking. He says further, regarding his approach to teaching, that others were concerned with the various parts of knowledge, but he strove to teach it as an integral whole in which each part accords with every other and gets its meaning from the whole."

In the Universal Law fragment, Vico claims that the two types of readers of his work can be an erudite youth or a person most expert in every kind of erudition. He instructs the youthful reader to ask, above all, if he has studied carefully the subjects and the main authors that his work treats, such as metaphysics, theology, moral and civil customs, language, history, and Roman jurisprudence. Should the youthful reader not have engaged in such preparation by reading the essential books, the reader has no right to attribute to Vico any difficulties in the comprehension of his work: I ask you to be careful not to attribute darkness and fogginess to me as a defect characteristic of my manner of writing. The youthful reader must look first to his own inadequacies before attributing any difficulties of comprehension to Vico.

At the end of the introduction to the Idea of the Work in the 1730 edition of the New Science (a passage not included in the 1744 edition), Vico expands his instructions to the young reader who may wish to profit from his new science. He addresses the young reader directly, by enumerating seven points to consider. First, he says, the reader must be able to think abstractly and engage in pure mental activity, independent of everything corporeal and without resorting to the imagination. Second, to be able to reason in accordance with the geometric method the work employs, to consider whether certain premises are true and to establish what may be deduced from them. Third, to realize that the work presupposes a wide-ranging body of knowledge and scholarship (what Vico defines in the New Science as philology). Fourth, the reader will need a comprehensive mind, that is, one that can bring together the conceptual meanings of philosophy with the historical analyses of philology, and to grasp these as a totality. Fifth, the reader will need a strong acuity of mind to grasp the many and diverse discoveries that are presented in this new science. Sixth, because these discoveries are wholly new, the reader must be prepared to read the work three times. Seventh, the reader will need to make the science, in a sense, for himself, in order ultimately to achieve its coherence and truth.

Vico’s sixth instruction—to read the work three times—reflects the program of reading he devised for himself, in his autodidactic attempt to master the Latin writers against the Tuscans. As he reports this in his autobiography: On successive days he would study Cicero side by side with Boccaccio, Virgil with Dante, and Horace with Petrarca. He read these always three times each on the following plan: the first time to grasp each composition as a whole, the second to note the transitions and sequence of things, the third in greater detail to collect the fine turns of thought and expression. This program of reading is based on the principles of composition expressed by both Cicero and Quintilian: inventio, the amassing of materials; dispositio, their arrangement; and elocutio, their formulation in language. The three phases of reading any work correspond to the three phases necessary to the composition of any work. Only on this threefold method of meditating the work can one count oneself a true reader of it.

Vico’s greatest concern, I think, is with the young but prepared reader. This reader may become lost and turn away from the work, and it is in such readers that the future of the work truly lies. The reader expert in every kind of erudition is the potential critic. Vico says he asks such a reader to consider only these two things: first, if I have decreed erroneous principles, second, if I have deduced blasphemous conclusions from such principles. This statement is not unlike that of Hugo Grotius, whom Vico both criticizes and admires, in concluding his preliminary discourse introducing his Law of War and Peace, where Grotius says: If anything has here been said by me inconsistent with piety, with good morals, with Holy Scripture and the Christian Church, or with any aspect of truth, let it be as if unsaid.

Vico further points out that a reader would not be equable if he were to reject his work simply because it draws new conclusions and contains new discoveries not in accord with those that occur in common use. He says that should one decide to attack his claims, it is not enough simply to criticize what is said. Rather, the critic is obliged to put together in one system, more easily and more happily by a different method, more truth than I have worked out in the universal history of the gentes—in poetry, in philology, in moral and civil doctrine conforming in an absolute manner to Christian jurisprudence; only in this way will you show that my system itself falls and crumbles. Vico thus removes the critic from a privileged position of striking here and there at points in his work or formulating various objections by extracting quotations from its various parts. The true critic must take up Vico’s cause and perfect it in a better version.

Vico very much takes this approach himself, in his attack on the inadequacies of the seventeenth-century natural-law theorists Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, and John Selden. He criticizes their systems of natural law throughout the New Science, but he does so while presenting a more adequate account of the natural law of the gentes, grounding it in a doctrine of providence as governing the historical life of the nations. He rejects the view of Polybius, that there could be a society solely of philosophers or knowers, but in so doing he presents a new theory of the origin of society based on three fundamental principles of humanity—religion, marriage, and burial.

In the end, Vico is a Socratic thinker in the sense that he regards thought as properly conducted in the agora, not as a private activity of the study. Socrates is the figure to whom he compares himself in the last lines of his autobiography. Although he strongly reacts to unfair criticisms of his work, such as in his defense of the New Science of 1725 in the text known as Vici Vindiciae, when attacked by a false and malicious book notice of it placed in the prestigious journal Leipzig Acta Eruditorum, he, as a great thinker, sees human knowledge as requiring the community of scholars acting in the Republic of Letters. (For a translation of the Vici Vindiciae, see the Bayer and Verene volume cited in the bibliographical note.) Vico is dedicated to a standard of excellence in thought and speech to which he wishes to hold not only himself but others who would claim to be custodians of human knowledge. As he states, in what became the final proclamation of his career, his short address to the Academy of Oziosi (1737): I hold the opinion that if eloquence does not regain the luster of the Latins and Greeks in our time, when our sciences have made progress equal to and perhaps greater than theirs, it will be because the sciences are taught completely stripped of every badge of eloquence.

His objection to both the Stoics and the Epicureans is that they advocate a doctrine of solitaries, of a wisdom that is not sufficiently tied to the Socratic method of elenchos as conducted in the agora. In addressing the reader in the postface of the Study Methods, Vico says: In my life I have always had the greatest apprehension of being alone in wisdom; this kind of solitude exposes one to the danger of becoming either a god or a fool. Years later, in the conclusion of his autobiography, he says he was choleric to a fault and that he was prone to inveigh too violently against the errors of thought or scholarship or against the misconduct of those men of letters who were his rivals. However, he says he was correspondingly grateful to those who formed a just opinion [of him and his works]. He adds: Among the caitiff semi-learned or pseudo-learned, the more shameless called him a fool, or in somewhat more courteous terms they said that he was obscure or eccentric and had odd ideas.

Vico was simply not understood in his own time. In two letters he wrote at the time of the publication of the first edition of the New Science, Vico makes clear how greatly he regards it as an achievement of his thought, and why he believes it received such a cold reception. On October 25, 1725, Vico wrote to his Capuchin friend Father Bernardo Maria Giacco that he regarded the New Science as the crowning achievement of his life, the work toward which all his other works had been leading. He says he sees himself clothed as a new man, and that the work has filled him with a heroic spirit, such that he does not fear death. He later develops this idea of a heroic spirit as the basis of true human education, in the oration On the Heroic Mind (1732). Although Vico regards his discovery of the new science as a unique achievement of the greatest importance, he complains that his words are like those of someone crying in the desert (like those of his namesake, John the Baptist), and that persons he meets by chance in the city to whom he sent a copy of his book, make no acknowledgment of it, which is so unpleasant that he makes efforts to avoid them.

In January 1726 Vico wrote to Abbé Giuseppe Luigi Esperti, who had aided him with distribution of copies of the New Science in Venice and Rome, that his book had come out in an age whose spirit—"in the expression of Tacitus in which he reflects on his times that greatly resemble ours—is ‘to seduce and to be seduced’ [corrumpere et corrumpi seculum vocatur], and because the book either disgusts or disturbs the many, it is unable to attain universal applause." The New Science, he says, treats the idea of providence as the basis for justice in the human race, it refers the nations to a strict standard. This idea of providence as an absolute standard goes against the fashionable views of the day, which tend toward ideologies drawn from Stoicism or Epicureanism. Thus, Vico concludes, the only books that please are those which, like clothes, are produced in accord with fashion.

Vico is reported to have said that misfortune will follow me even after my death, and it has—in the sense that, until recently, the greatness of his thought was recognized by only the few, from time to time, and often simply by those few who wished to bend his thought in the direction of their own views, making Vico seem always a precursor rather than an original thinker with a genuine position in the history of thought. Today, however, with the recent and sustained renaissance in Vico studies as background, the opportunity is quite open to become the equable reader Vico sought, to grasp his odd ideas and comprehend their internal order and implications.

What follows is a readers’ guide and companion to the text, written from the perspective of my reading of Vico for nearly fifty years. Because this is a commentary, and readers may wish to consult its chapters out of order but in relation to the divisions of Vico’s text, it is necessary and natural to repeat points and passages from one chapter to another, an approach that Vico also takes in his text. Vico’s New Science, in all of its parts, is always a twice-told tale. If the equable reader finds my comments of use, my purpose has been served.

No book is the work solely of its author. I wish to acknowledge several of the debts I have incurred in writing this one. I thank, first of all, Molly Black Verene for the herculean task of transposing the sheets of my handwritten manuscript into typescript, guided by the master key of her copyediting skills, textual insights, and suggestions. I thank Nancy DuBois Marcus for more than once urging that I write a commentary on the New Science. I thank my colleagues at Emory and at other universities who so kindly were the first readers of this work: Raymond Barfield, Thora Ilin Bayer, Ann Hartle, Benjamin Kleindorfer, Donald Kunze, Donald Livingston, David Lovekin, Frederick Marcus, and Jeffrey Wilson.

I owe a debt to the Emory Department of Philosophy’s Institute for the History of Philosophy, sponsor of the summer seminar on Vico and the Humanist Tradition in 2011, to the scholars of the various universities who were members of it, and to Brian Copenhaver, who served with me as its coleader. It was a valuable opportunity to present and discuss some of the central themes of this commentary.

Finally, I warmly acknowledge the debt I owe to my longtime colleague the late Giorgio Tagliacozzo, whose indefatigable efforts to promote Vico in the English-speaking world over nearly half a century are responsible for much of the attention the New Science receives today. I also express my great debt to the late philosopher of the Italian humanist tradition Ernesto Grassi, whose friendship and whose conversations over many years at the Zürcher Gespräche in Switzerland and at his villa on Ischia, off the Neapolitan coast, influenced my thinking about rhetoric and philosophy more than any other. May the earth lie lightly upon them.

Bibliographical Note

The standard English-language edition of Vico’s major work is The New Science of Giambattista Vico, translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch, published by Cornell University Press (orig. pub. 1948; rev. ed. 1968; repub. 1984). Bergin and Fisch began their translation in 1939 at Naples and on Capri, in consultation with Fausto Nicolini and Benedetto Croce, but were interrupted by World War II. By merging the talents of the Italianist Bergin and the philosopher Fisch, the translation mirrors Vico’s method of making the new science itself through the joining of philology and philosophy. It preserves Vico’s sense of the etymology of words, especially those in Roman law, as well as his use and modifications of philosophical terminology as developed to his day. Their edition also contains an invaluable system of interlinear cross-references, allowing the reader to see connections among passages in a work that treats topics diversely. The Bergin and Fisch translation is based on the third edition of the Scienza nuova (1744) as it appears in the collected edition of Vico’s works by Nicolini (8 vols. in 11; Bari: Laterza, 1911–41).

There is a second full English translation of Vico’s New Science by David Marsh, first published in 1999 by Penguin Books. The purpose of this translation, as Marsh states in the translator’s preface, is to make Vico’s work readable for the modern reader. In his preface to the reprint of this translation in 2001, Marsh compares his translation to that of Bergin and Fisch: This printing corrects several misprints and oversights in the first edition, but none of the departures from the Bergin-Fisch Vulgate, which some regard as heretical errors. Bergin and Fisch provide a trot; I provide a translation. Scholars will consult Vico’s original text. Actually, Marsh did make a change, adjusting the wording of Vico’s phrase "la barbarie della riflessione" in paragraph 1106 of his conclusion to the New Science from This barbarism of calculation in the 1999 edition to This calculating barbarism of reflection in the 2001 reprint, bringing the wording closer to Vico’s own. Yet in Vico’s original there is no term corresponding to calculation or calculating. As philosophical terms, calculation and reflection are quite different and separate functions of the mind.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines trot, in this regard, as a literal translation of a text used by students; a ‘crib.’ Marsh’s comment is unfair. The Bergin and Fisch translation is not a trot. Their translation has been hailed by several generations of scholars as a model of translation for its reliability and readability, led by Isaiah Berlin, who, in the preface to his widely read Vico and Herder (1976; 2nd ed., 2000), states: "I have relied on the admirable translation of Vico’s Scienza nuova by Professors T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch for the quotations from, and references to, it in this book."

Those readers who wish to approach Vico’s terminology and manner of thought as closely as possible in English will find the Bergin and Fisch translation indispensible. What Marsh calls heretical errors or deviations in his translation from what he calls the Bergin-Fisch Vulgate principally refer to his departure from translating Vico’s philosophical terms by their English equivalents, often using terms quite disparate from the original, whereas Bergin and Fisch consistently endeavor to keep close to the original.

Where possible, Bergin and Fisch translate Vico’s major terms with their English cognates; Marsh generally does not. For example, Bergin and Fisch render Vico’s favola as fable, Marsh as myth; Bergin and Fisch render Vico’s caratteri poetici as poetic characters, Marsh, variously, as poetic symbols or archetypes; Bergin and Fisch render Vico’s lingua comune mentale as common mental language, Marsh as conceptual language.

The reader of the critical literature on Vico in English should also keep in mind that the terminology of the Bergin and Fisch translation is what has been employed for more than the past fifty years. For a comparison of the Bergin and Fisch and the Marsh translations, especially regarding Vico’s terminology, see Donald Phillip Verene, "On Translating Vico: The Penguin Classics Edition of the New Science," New Vico Studies 27 (1999): 85–107.

The present commentary is based on the facsimile edition (ristampa anastatica) of the Scienza nuova as first published by the Stamperia Muziana at Naples in 1744: Principj di Scienza nuova d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni, edited by Marco Veneziani (Florence: Olschki, 1994). Citations employ the paragraph enumeration introduced by Nicolini in the Laterza edition, which is preserved in both of the English translations and in many modern Italian editions.

Quotations in English follow the Bergin and Fisch translation, with occasional modification. Two modifications I have made throughout concern Bergin and Fisch’s use of institution for Vico’s cosa, and commonwealth for his repubblica. At the end of their introduction Bergin and Fisch explain their reasons for using institution, and they note at the end of their preface that they have employed commonwealth to avoid misleading associations of republic in English. Cosa is the common word in Italian for thing and can have much the same function as res does in Latin. I find institution to be a cumbersome word in this context. I have replaced it in quoted passages with thing, matter, or affair, as in cose civili—civil things, civil matters or affairs—rather than civil institutions. I have replaced commonwealth in all quoted passages in which it occurs with republic in an effort to bring the reader closer to the original text, with the provision that what Vico means by repubblica in particular instances remains problematic and not equivalent to the specific sense of the English word republic. See the glossary for discussion of these terms.

For an Italian edition of the Scienza nuova, as well as a selection of Vico’s other major writings, the reader may consult the edition of Vico’s Opere by Andrea Battistini, 2 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1990). This edition contains extensive, erudite notes, in which Battistini provides plentiful citations of modern scholarship. The reader seeking scholarly illumination of specific passages may wish also to consult the earlier Nicolini, Commento storico alla seconda Scienza nuova, 2 vols. (Rome, 1945–50). It may also be useful to consult La scienza nuova 1744, edited by Paolo Cristofolini and Manuela Sanna, vol. 9 of the critical edition of Opere di Giambattista Vico (Rome: Storia e Letteratura, 2013).

For a bibliography, see Croce, Bibliografia vichiana, enlarged and revised by Nicolini, 2 vols. (Naples, 1947–48), and the supplements by various compilers in the series Studi vichiani (Guida Editori) as part of the program of research of the Centro di Studi Vichiani at Naples, which also publishes the Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani (1971–). For a comprehensive bibliography of English-language literature on Vico, see Molly Black Verene, Works on Giambattista Vico in English from 1884 through 2009, New Vico Studies 27 (2009): 83–304, published as part of the program of research of the Institute for Vico Studies at Emory University.

For a full, year-by-year chronology of Vico’s life and career, as well as a concise account of his fortuna, the development and interpretation of his ideas in Continental and Anglo-American thought, see Donald Phillip Verene, Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico’s New Science and Finnegans Wake (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 30–39 and 207–19. For an account of Vico’s autobiography, see Donald Phillip Verene, The New Art of Autobiography: An Essay on the Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). For a sourcebook of some of Vico’s additions to the New Science and several writings that underlie it, as well as a comprehensive listing of Vico’s writings in English translation, see Thora Ilin Bayer and Donald Phillip Verene, eds., Giambattista Vico: Keys to the New Science; Translations, Commentaries, and Essays (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).

Abbreviations and Notes on Citations

Passages from The New Science of Giambattista Vico (translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984) are cited by paragraph number alone, unaccompanied by any further designation.

Greek and Latin authors are cited in standard form using Loeb Classical Library editions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), with some terms and phraseology occasionally adjusted.

Part One

Generalities Concerning the New Science

Chapter 1

Sense and Method of the New Science

It is said, and rightly, that Giambattista Vico is the founder of the philosophy or science of history. Isaiah Berlin puts it this way: Vico virtually invented a new field of social knowledge, which embraces social anthropology, the comparative and historical studies of philology, linguistics, ethnology, jurisprudence, literature, mythology, in effect the history of civilization in the broadest sense.¹

Writers of history from Herodotus and Thucydides, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Polybius, Livy, and Tacitus, to Lorenzo Valla, in his exposure of the Donation of Constantine (1440), Leonardo Bruni, in his History of the Florentine People (1442), and Francesco Guicciardini, in the History of Italy (1561), to Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, in his unfinished Discourse on Universal History (1681), and Johann Gottfried Herder, in his Ideas toward the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–87) have advanced views of not only their subject matter but also of the nature of history. However, to hold historiographical views is not the same as to have a philosophy or science of history. Even to say, as Aristotle does in his famous claim in the Poetics, that poetry is more philosophical and a higher thing than history, as it tends to express the universal where history treats of the particular fact, is not to offer a philosophy of history; it is only to make a claim concerning history.

The hypothetical accounts of the origins and stages of development of human society that are found in philosophical works such as Plato’s Laws (book 3) and Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things (book 5), or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s post-Vichian portrayal of the origin and foundation of inequality in the Second Discourse (1755) are not philosophies of history. They are speculative conceptions of human society.

In his Universal Law, prior to the full realization of his new science, Vico is able to declare: "History does not yet have its principles [Historia nondum habet sua principia]" (UL 1.104). These principles, both in the sense of beginnings and in the sense of explanations, can be achieved only when the separation of philosophy and philology can be overcome, such that the universals of human nature can be employed to illuminate the deeds actually performed by human beings in the course of their affairs from obscure times to the present. Such an investigation will lead us to a systematic comprehension of the entire world of the nations.

To the new science of history Vico adds a second new science—that of mythology—which provides access to the origin of the life of the nations. As Ernst Cassirer puts it: "Giambattista Vico may be called the real discoverer of the myth. He immersed himself