ABSTRACT
Giambattista Vico’s (1688-1744) contribution to the history of western thought is both difficult to identify and still harder to evaluate. So much so that the overall characterization of his philosophy should perhaps be made chiefly by way of negatives: Vico is no empiricist, no experimentalist, no scholastic, no idealist, no positivist, no rationalist and so on. In fact, any philosophical classification would be a misnomer for the purported creator of a New Science, the self-appointed critic of Cartesianism, the passionate vindicator of a ‘topical’ versus a ‘critical’ pedagogy, the putative discoverer of a novel criterion of truth etc. This historiographic problem-i.e. the difficulty of classifying such a many-sided figure into a well-established canon-becomes further compounded by at least three complementary considerations: Vico’s purported isolation as an eighteenth-century thinker, the not yet corrected imbalance between his reputation in Italy (where he tends to be considered the country’s greatest philosopher) and his reputation abroad; and, more generally, the fact of his being perceived as a precursor, which conjures up the whole panoply of unresolved tensions related to that status. Vico himself made much of the first of these factors in his Autobiography of 1725-8 and in his private letters, where he grossly exaggerated his loneliness as a thinker in his native Naples; and since that time many critics and scholars have repeated the implied corollary of that book, i.e. the picture of a gigantic figure without direct forerunners or disciples. Thus, nationalistic motivations and the fervour of Neapolitan exiles in the early nineteenth-century began to cement a cult which elevated Vico to the pedestal of a cultural hero in the age of the Risorgimento-a situation which with all due modifications still prevails today.1 And, finally, the status of a precursor is particularly difficult to assess in this instance, for it sends us back to a much discussed question in the history of ideas and of philosophy proper. Such a question could be formulated in this manner: are influences the result of direct acquaintance whenever we are talking of intellectual affinities, or is there a collective wealth of patterns of thought which the human mind is compelled to resort to whenever confronted with the same or similar type of issue? Vico, for example, has been lyrically hailed as, among other titles of glory, containing the nineteenth century in embryo,2 of fathering or at least prefiguring the whole of German idealism,3 and of being the fountain-head of modern anthropology and psycho-analysis.4 Though most of these claims appear today vastly exaggerated if taken at face value, there is a sense in which the radically atypical traits in Vico’s thought are linked to further developments in western speculation, with or without direct acquaintance from author to author. It is for this reason that any historiography worth its
salt should try to asses such purported affinities, or, at least, to outline the tantalizing contours of similarities and incompatibilities.
