Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico's New Science and Finnegan's Wake

by Donald Phillip Verene

This is the first book to examine in full the interconnections between Giambattista Vico’s new science and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Maintaining that Joyce is the greatest modern “interpreter” of Vico, Donald Phillip Verene demonstrates how images from Joyce’s work offer keys to Vico’s philosophy. Verene presents the entire course of Vico’s philosophical thought as it develops in his major works, with Joyce’s words and insights serving as a guide.
The book devotes a chapter to each period of Vico’s thought, from his early orations on education to his anti-Cartesian metaphysics and his conception of universal law, culminating in his new science of the history of nations. Verene analyzes Vico’s major works, including all three editions of the New Science . The volume also features a detailed chronology of the philosopher’s career, historical illustrations related to his works, and an extensive bibliography of Vico scholarship and all English translations of his writings.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Religion, Literature

278 pages, Hardcover

First published September 10, 2003

Reviews

[Benji · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘‘All that which has been in the past and is at present will be again in the future. But both the names and the faces of things change, so that he who does not have a good eye will not recognize them. Nor will he know how to grasp a norm of conduct or make a judgment by means of observation.’’
Francesco Guicciardini

'Job, the individual human, is subject to the power of nature that no one can tame. No hook is large enough to catch Leviathan. The book of Job is advice to ancient man. Hobbes’s Leviathan is advice to modern man, warning that it is not nature that is to be feared and that cannot be fully mastered—it is the state. The knowledge of the civil world that Hobbes provides is a guide for life in the modern condition. It is a noble effort, although based in error. Vico has corrected Hobbes’s error by a truer perception of providence, and he offers to the individual a new advice, based on a narration of ideal eternal history. The New Science is, in the end, an oration for modern man, an oration on the oldest maxim of Western consciousness—which, as Vico says, was attributed to Solon: ‘‘Know thyself.’’ The New Science is ‘‘a great counsel respecting metaphysical and moral things’’ (416). For the reader ‘‘to decembs within the ephemerides of profane history, all one with Tournay, Yetstoslay and Temo- rah’’ (FW 87.6–8), Vico’s New Science is required. It is the severe and true narration needed to live with prudence among the moderni of the barbarism of reflection, even if as a stranger in one’s own land.'

[Aloha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Too short for me but dense. Some great literary criticism makes me want to know more. On to Vico's work.