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New Science
Barely acknowledged in his lifetime, the New Science of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) is an astonishingly perceptive and ambitious attempt to decipher the history, mythology and laws of the ancient world. Discarding the Renaissance notion of the classical as an idealised model for the modern, it argues that the key to true understanding of the past lies in accepting that the customs and emotional lives of ancient Greeks and Romans, Egyptians, Jews and Babylonians were radically different from our own. Along the way, Vico explores a huge variety of topics, ranging from physics to poetics, money to monsters, and family structures to the Flood. Marking a crucial turning-point in humanist thinking, New Science has remained deeply influential since the dawn of Romanticism, inspiring the work of Karl Marx and even influencing the framework for Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake.
560 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1725
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About the author
Giambattista Vico
234 books128 followersGiovanni Battista (Giambattista) Vico or Vigo was an Italian political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist. A critic of modern rationalism and apologist of classical antiquity, Vico's magnum opus is titled "Principles/Origins of [re]New[ed] Science about the Common Nature of Nations" (Principi di Scienza Nuova d'intorno alla Comune Natura delle Nazioni). The work is explicitly presented as a "Science of reasoning" (Scienza di ragionare), and includes a dialectic between axioms (authoritative maxims) and "reasonings" (ragionamenti) linking and clarifying the axioms. Vico is often claimed to have inaugurated modern philosophy of history, although the expression is alien from Vico's text (Vico speaks of a "history of philosophy narrated philosophically"). He is otherwise well-known for noting that verum esse ipsum factum ("true itself is fact" or "the true itself is made"), a proposition that has been read as an early instance of constructivist epistemology. Overall, the contemporary interest in Vico has been driven by peculiarly historicist interests as expressed most notably by Isaiah Berlin, Tagliacozzo, Verene, and Hayden White.
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March 10, 2011I can't imagine what Vico was thinking when he wrote his observations. I've never read anything that contains so many seeds of future thought. Marx! Darwin! Chomsky! Freud! Durkheim! Nietzsche! Foucault! Adorno! Rorty! You're all here! No wonder everyone from James Joyce to Edward Said has cited Vico as an overriding influence. OK, so he's an ultra-Catholic who believes in giants and refers to obscure Romans. I'm OK with that. He lived in different times. Regardless, I feel like I'm gaining insight into one of the most radically open minds in history, and he's able to examine the entire span of knowledge in his time. And the thing is, Vico would be the first one to admit his own historical contingency.
September 24, 2009
Amazing. Over 250 years ago Vico laid the ground work for a huge amount of modern social/critical thought. His analysis of human culture based on language and physical geography, his refusal to glorify the past by drawing attention to the ridiculous ways we try project our own mental states onto distant history, his identification and analysis of the origins and evolution of human institutions, his analysis of conflict arising from the desparities between ultra wealthy citizens and common plebians...its all just so shockingly ahead of its time. Reading through it you can actually see the jumping off points for thinkers and writers like Marx, Foucault, Sassure, the Frankfurt school in general, Freud, Jung, Joyce, Benjamin, even Derrida and Darwin at times. Some of the Christian stuff is a bit off putting, but that's kind of missing the trees for the forest. It's sort of got two prongs to it, he creates a methodology and then shows how it works by using it to analyse human history. It's a genuine shame that this has been so neglected. An aweful lot of inquiry and theory (knowingly or otherwise) has been spun out of ideas that Vico first laid down here. I can't recommend this too highly
February 10, 2020
Despite that this historic book ‘New Science’ by Giambattista Vico (written around 1744) is one which broke new ground in studying ancient myths, law, and history, I cannot get past his constant boosting of Christianity as being so clearly superior to all other religions especially since his belief is that the Christian God is real while these other gods are barbaric. Not, gentle reader.
How Vico can ignore the similarities of bibical myths along with the other admirable insights he gained through his academic studies of ancient texts from China, the Far and Near East, and the Mediterranean (Athens, Rome, Egypt) is beyond me.
Vico’s book publicized and synthesized, although he wasn’t the first to come up with the thought, the idea a people's culture is linked to their myths. He brought out into the light of day the idea Culture evolves. If we cannot understand the historical timeline and the cultural framework of a myth, it is because the culture is very different from the current reader's time. We need to try to understand the culture of a civilization to understand the myth.
Vico's idea of using architectural observation of ancient texts and cultural artifacts, taking these at their face value and applying it to conclusions of academic studies, was contrary to the philosophical thought at the time. Thinkers like the philosopher Descartes was positing only Reason was a valid way to know things about things, that culture was eternal and unchanging because people were permanently unchanging. Vico states there is no ‘universal’ culture because people were radically different in thought and beliefs in the past as demonstrated by archeological discoveries and texts. He thought civilizations went through cycles of evolution.
Gentle reader, I am only a retired secretary, not a philosopher, historian or scientist. If I have got this wrong, comment below and educate me.
There is an extensive Index and Glossary section.
How Vico can ignore the similarities of bibical myths along with the other admirable insights he gained through his academic studies of ancient texts from China, the Far and Near East, and the Mediterranean (Athens, Rome, Egypt) is beyond me.
Vico’s book publicized and synthesized, although he wasn’t the first to come up with the thought, the idea a people's culture is linked to their myths. He brought out into the light of day the idea Culture evolves. If we cannot understand the historical timeline and the cultural framework of a myth, it is because the culture is very different from the current reader's time. We need to try to understand the culture of a civilization to understand the myth.
Vico's idea of using architectural observation of ancient texts and cultural artifacts, taking these at their face value and applying it to conclusions of academic studies, was contrary to the philosophical thought at the time. Thinkers like the philosopher Descartes was positing only Reason was a valid way to know things about things, that culture was eternal and unchanging because people were permanently unchanging. Vico states there is no ‘universal’ culture because people were radically different in thought and beliefs in the past as demonstrated by archeological discoveries and texts. He thought civilizations went through cycles of evolution.
Gentle reader, I am only a retired secretary, not a philosopher, historian or scientist. If I have got this wrong, comment below and educate me.
There is an extensive Index and Glossary section.
September 2, 2019
We were all in a natural state of nature living as Cyclops and giants and early man whilst in a cave we decided to forcibly take women and ended up marrying them and leading to a divine age followed by the heroic age and ultimately to our current (1725 A.C.E.) vulgar (barbaric) times, and history as a whole will cycle back to the divine age (or in other words, history is circular as illustrated by the unreadable book ‘Finnegans Wake’ or the highly readable book ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’).
One would think such a story telling would be maddening to today’s modern sensibilities. One would be wrong. Vico is must reading for today’s historian. Weaved within Vico’s bizarreness is a beginning of seeing who we are today by remotely observing the past as they would have observed themselves. Vico will create universal axioms describing the development of the world, and he usually thinks in terms of three categories.
Two thinkers slightly after Vico would have been Benjamin Franklin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The first, Franklin, read Plutarch’s ‘Parallel Lives’ in order to learn how to live a meaningful live in his day, and Rousseau read it in order to see how people never lived and where not to find meaningfulness. Vico humanizes history (and quotes from Plutarch frequently) in terms of itself as it was unfolding in its period not through the lens of his day. The renaissance idealized the past of the Greeks and the Romans and froze it with the ideals of their own time period, while Vico humanizes them within themselves.
The Reverend Bayes (who is obviously not mentioned since almost no one had heard of him in that time period) is a contemporary of Vico and knows in mathematical formulation the same thing that Vico is getting at: everything that we know about the world (or the history of the world) gets filtered by our current experiences as discounted by expectations of the future as weighted by our prior experiences (our reality is shaped by our hopes of the future discounted by our likelihood function derived by our previous experiences. We are all statisticians but we just don’t know it!). Vico will implicitly apply that Bayesian formulation while considering the history of humanity using the proper contextual human terms of the time period.
Vico gives credit to Hobbes. He doesn’t hide the debt he owes to him. Hegel does the same. Toynbee and Spengler (the first feted by everyone’s least favorite fascist, Hitler, the second a fascist but not a Nazi) both do not like Hegel, and don’t really hide their dislike for him and I don’t think they mention Vico (not sure), and would have both been well served to have read Vico. Both, attempt to create a universal history, while both don’t quite get what Vico had already done. (I would also put Joseph Campbell into the category of ‘universal history’ and who should have read Vico but did not, though he does stay narrowly focused on myths and a universal human psychology. Vico will cover those topics but he also covers a lot more). Obviously, Marx read Vico and clearly understood him.
There were parts of Vico’s story telling which read as if I was reading Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of Mind’. There’s an ‘end of history’ that Hegel has which lies outside of his ‘Phenomenology’ that intersects with what Vico is getting at. In addition, both do not like the Epicureans and Titus Lucretius (my favorite all time book is ‘On the Nature of Things’) and Hegel and Vico do not like the ‘swerve’ at the last moment in which it gives us our freedom beyond nature; Vico will attribute it to God’s Grace through the gift of free will and Hegel will attribute our Freedom to that which is the cause of itself inherent within us (yes, Hegel’s position would be way more complicated but for the sake of brevity I kept it short). For Vico, Hobbes’ Leviathan is required in order to lead us out of the pitiful state of nature we would be in otherwise.
Vico tells his reader that he knows what Descartes has unleashed and is revaluating the valuation of all values while at the same time making stupid statements such as ‘Hebrew, Greek and Latin’ are the end all be all for language (similarly, Heidegger will say that about German and Greek and within Heidegger there is a ‘historicity’ that is also within Vico) .
Sparta, Rome and sometimes Athens are dissected within their own terms. Enlightenment thinkers such as Vico love the perfect order they saw within Sparta and the stoic resolve of the Romans (Cicero is quoted frequently) and he just seems to only tolerate the democratic Athenians with their random Epicurean motion (Mandeville would have published his ‘Fable of the Bees’ before Vico wrote, but Vico is not influenced by it nor would he agree with that essay, and for the curious, Hegel definitely seemed to have been influenced by Mandeville and would agree with him).
No doubt this is a seminal book about history or at least meta-history. I would even say I would offer a huff at a historian who has not read it or doesn’t know about this book. Yes, there are bizarre things in this book, but when one connects it with what came before it and what will come after it, it is obvious why it is such an important book.
One would think such a story telling would be maddening to today’s modern sensibilities. One would be wrong. Vico is must reading for today’s historian. Weaved within Vico’s bizarreness is a beginning of seeing who we are today by remotely observing the past as they would have observed themselves. Vico will create universal axioms describing the development of the world, and he usually thinks in terms of three categories.
Two thinkers slightly after Vico would have been Benjamin Franklin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The first, Franklin, read Plutarch’s ‘Parallel Lives’ in order to learn how to live a meaningful live in his day, and Rousseau read it in order to see how people never lived and where not to find meaningfulness. Vico humanizes history (and quotes from Plutarch frequently) in terms of itself as it was unfolding in its period not through the lens of his day. The renaissance idealized the past of the Greeks and the Romans and froze it with the ideals of their own time period, while Vico humanizes them within themselves.
The Reverend Bayes (who is obviously not mentioned since almost no one had heard of him in that time period) is a contemporary of Vico and knows in mathematical formulation the same thing that Vico is getting at: everything that we know about the world (or the history of the world) gets filtered by our current experiences as discounted by expectations of the future as weighted by our prior experiences (our reality is shaped by our hopes of the future discounted by our likelihood function derived by our previous experiences. We are all statisticians but we just don’t know it!). Vico will implicitly apply that Bayesian formulation while considering the history of humanity using the proper contextual human terms of the time period.
Vico gives credit to Hobbes. He doesn’t hide the debt he owes to him. Hegel does the same. Toynbee and Spengler (the first feted by everyone’s least favorite fascist, Hitler, the second a fascist but not a Nazi) both do not like Hegel, and don’t really hide their dislike for him and I don’t think they mention Vico (not sure), and would have both been well served to have read Vico. Both, attempt to create a universal history, while both don’t quite get what Vico had already done. (I would also put Joseph Campbell into the category of ‘universal history’ and who should have read Vico but did not, though he does stay narrowly focused on myths and a universal human psychology. Vico will cover those topics but he also covers a lot more). Obviously, Marx read Vico and clearly understood him.
There were parts of Vico’s story telling which read as if I was reading Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of Mind’. There’s an ‘end of history’ that Hegel has which lies outside of his ‘Phenomenology’ that intersects with what Vico is getting at. In addition, both do not like the Epicureans and Titus Lucretius (my favorite all time book is ‘On the Nature of Things’) and Hegel and Vico do not like the ‘swerve’ at the last moment in which it gives us our freedom beyond nature; Vico will attribute it to God’s Grace through the gift of free will and Hegel will attribute our Freedom to that which is the cause of itself inherent within us (yes, Hegel’s position would be way more complicated but for the sake of brevity I kept it short). For Vico, Hobbes’ Leviathan is required in order to lead us out of the pitiful state of nature we would be in otherwise.
Vico tells his reader that he knows what Descartes has unleashed and is revaluating the valuation of all values while at the same time making stupid statements such as ‘Hebrew, Greek and Latin’ are the end all be all for language (similarly, Heidegger will say that about German and Greek and within Heidegger there is a ‘historicity’ that is also within Vico) .
Sparta, Rome and sometimes Athens are dissected within their own terms. Enlightenment thinkers such as Vico love the perfect order they saw within Sparta and the stoic resolve of the Romans (Cicero is quoted frequently) and he just seems to only tolerate the democratic Athenians with their random Epicurean motion (Mandeville would have published his ‘Fable of the Bees’ before Vico wrote, but Vico is not influenced by it nor would he agree with that essay, and for the curious, Hegel definitely seemed to have been influenced by Mandeville and would agree with him).
No doubt this is a seminal book about history or at least meta-history. I would even say I would offer a huff at a historian who has not read it or doesn’t know about this book. Yes, there are bizarre things in this book, but when one connects it with what came before it and what will come after it, it is obvious why it is such an important book.
August 21, 2021
It's mAAD how underappreciated Vico is as the father of sociology. Aside from his crucial influence over Joyce's Finnegans Wake, there's a whole swathe of critical theory in here. From Marx's dialectical history to Durkheime's analysis of nations. There's even postmodern thinking in here in regard to Vico's theory of how we construct religion and customs - and hence why we should be able to understand society first and foremost ahead of God.
His historical and mythological analysis here is particularly tantalizing though. The passage about pre-modern humans, in the age of poetic theology (á la Mycenean Greece), being mute was astounding. It's an insight into the creative consciousness of a culture which sees humanity as inextricably bound to nature. The wind howls and waves murmur because they are just like us, a willing being full of elan vital.
It's that form of vitalism, tempered by his Platonic Christian framing, that makes Vico a masterfully paradoxical thinker. He's at once the Enlightenment's greatest and first historicist - while being it's biggest anti-modern critic. He's at once the most open-minded perennialist while also the most strict pagan-condemning Catholic.
More than anything Vico is a refreshing thinker. He demonstrates that there is a middle way between Rousseau and Hobbes. He's an eye-opener for those who are stuck in the AC Graying or Bertrand Russell mythological analytic story of philosophy.
His historical and mythological analysis here is particularly tantalizing though. The passage about pre-modern humans, in the age of poetic theology (á la Mycenean Greece), being mute was astounding. It's an insight into the creative consciousness of a culture which sees humanity as inextricably bound to nature. The wind howls and waves murmur because they are just like us, a willing being full of elan vital.
It's that form of vitalism, tempered by his Platonic Christian framing, that makes Vico a masterfully paradoxical thinker. He's at once the Enlightenment's greatest and first historicist - while being it's biggest anti-modern critic. He's at once the most open-minded perennialist while also the most strict pagan-condemning Catholic.
More than anything Vico is a refreshing thinker. He demonstrates that there is a middle way between Rousseau and Hobbes. He's an eye-opener for those who are stuck in the AC Graying or Bertrand Russell mythological analytic story of philosophy.
July 11, 2025
Giambattista Vico begins his work by providing an interpretation on a picture that has been made especially for this work, intended as a mnemoic. But the problems began for me as I couldn't find all the items that he was describing. After that, I was treated with more than a hundred "axioms"* that range from excellent observations like "[W]hen man is sunk in ignorance, he makes himself the measure of the universe." to oddly specific and silly statements like (paraphrastically) "Giants were big people" and "Witches sacrificed babies". Many corollaries or additions to the axioms promised plenty of clarifications to come, and I was quite amused to find out that many a time these "clarifications" were merely unreferenced statements, which were then followed by "As we have just seen..."
For today's reader, plenty of Vico's ideas are inevitably dated. He begins with the assumption that the Bible got it right regarding the world's age, and that the most ancient of the pagan nations was Greece. While the idea of providence which he touts throughout the work could be faintly linked to an idea of a natural law à la Darwin (i.e. providence whose main goal is to preserve the human race), Vico's views on the primitives (or "barbarians" or "savages") are hopelessly elitistic, as the first ancients are portrayed as largely unwieldy and restricted people who wallow in their faeces, are unable of any abstract thought and are merely shackled to the particulars (to such an extent that, as the myth of Proteus purportedly proves, a new facial expression meant a new face) and can only gape, cower and rape. As for Vico's etymological soupçons, I checked quite a many of them on Wiktionary (where, despite everything, one at least finds sources) and I swear way more than half of them were erroneous or deemed as unfeasible in that great game of educated guesswork.
The main argument Vico offers might thus be on a shoddy foundation, but its inspiring quality cannot be gainsaid. He wanted to find a natural law for states, seeing that states consisted of man-made institutions that bore considerable resemblances to each other, regardless of the culture. He then asserted that, guided by the almighty providence of God, the world's cultures and nations go through a cyclical loop in terms of age, government, language and law etc., from superstition, awe and symbolic mute language to the age of cruel and powerful heroes and from there to civilisation. As the medieval times (unspecified) represented a "return to barbarism" for Vico, it is clear that these cycles come and go, always guided by Providence for the preservation of the human race, and it is also clear that the cyclical changes are not even, some cultures having entered another era prematurely according to Vico. The mapping of all these different decisions of providence is called as "rational civil theology of divine providence". (Yet the ultimate product that Vico has to offer is far more sprawling and a bit difficult for me to sum up.)
New Science is a prime example of those old yet exciting scientific works, where one needs plenty of background information in order to navigate all the pitfalls of argumentation, referencing and the biases of Christianity. Such information is not provided in this Penguin edition, presumably due to the immense size that such an edition would require, since Vico is a monster when it comes to allusions and references (both in that he had read a lot and that he had very idiosyncratic ways of sharing his views scientifically). But it makes a terrifically fascinating read and it is not without signs of mad genius. My ambivalence towards the work can be well demonstrated in the case of Vico's mythical exegesis. On one hand, it is invigorating how he takes the myths completely seriously and sees them as historical documents of the primitives: as his theory was that poetry antedated verse and thus symbols and metaphors were the primary means of communication (e.g. "my heart is boiling" preceded "I am angry"), these imaginative tales of heroes and monsters were not supposed to be that colourful but rather were the result of primitive storytelling, entirely to be rationalised by yet never fully understood by more civilised people precisely due to their civilisation and atrophied senses. On the other hand, such a blinkered view on myths inevitably standardises them and produces occasionally awkward interpretations, where the same Vulcan can suddenly be a plebeian (when he was thrown out of the heaven) and a patrician (when he caught the two plebs, Mars and Venus, in his net). And above all, such po-faced ratiocination tries to destroy some of the wonderful ambiguity and wonder encased in those ever-burning stories.
While Vico's sources are all over the place and sometimes so well hidden that they didn't even reach the page, it's not like Vico is simply producing data out of his Arschloch: he does give exact credit to authors time and again (albeit occasionally erroneously) and when it comes to topics that I'm not so au fait with, such as Roman politics, I simply cannot tell whether he uses his references rightly or not. However, I merely pointed this out to show what kind of a minefield Vico's scienza is. It is not through any solidness of its arguments or any coherence of its theses but through the rich ideation and ingenious syncretism that Vico's work truly shines. In particular, I was struck by his constant insistence that the likes of Hercules, Aesop, Orpheus and even Homer were not actually real people, but abstractions of types of people, like heroes, storytellers and poets – born through the restricted capability of abstraction of the primitives. And I must say that while I absolutely am against such sweeping statements, Vico does provide some convincing interpretations at times (far too many to mention here, unfortunately).
Of course, one must not forget the Joyce aspect. While I haven't read Beckett's analysis of the then-named Work in Progress, I could guess how Joyce was influenced by this work. Its careful attention to language, its frenetic insistence that etymology provides the key to all problems and the stressed importance of poetry must have fired Joyce's imagination. I was also reminded of Finnegans Wake myself as Vico was constantly repeating himself in the work and mixing in different mythologies and historical periods in the course of his argumentation.
Vico's pompously entitled work is a remarkable concentration of erudition, acuteness, parochialness and arrogance. One can see why it would be influential in so many fields from anthropology to social sciences and language studies, and I can highly recommend it to anyone who wants to go through all the cornerstones of Western thoughts (while at the same time being prepared for quite preposterous things).
* I am not sure whether Vico just grossly misunderstood the use of this term or whether it was used in a very general way back in the day. Go figure.
For today's reader, plenty of Vico's ideas are inevitably dated. He begins with the assumption that the Bible got it right regarding the world's age, and that the most ancient of the pagan nations was Greece. While the idea of providence which he touts throughout the work could be faintly linked to an idea of a natural law à la Darwin (i.e. providence whose main goal is to preserve the human race), Vico's views on the primitives (or "barbarians" or "savages") are hopelessly elitistic, as the first ancients are portrayed as largely unwieldy and restricted people who wallow in their faeces, are unable of any abstract thought and are merely shackled to the particulars (to such an extent that, as the myth of Proteus purportedly proves, a new facial expression meant a new face) and can only gape, cower and rape. As for Vico's etymological soupçons, I checked quite a many of them on Wiktionary (where, despite everything, one at least finds sources) and I swear way more than half of them were erroneous or deemed as unfeasible in that great game of educated guesswork.
The main argument Vico offers might thus be on a shoddy foundation, but its inspiring quality cannot be gainsaid. He wanted to find a natural law for states, seeing that states consisted of man-made institutions that bore considerable resemblances to each other, regardless of the culture. He then asserted that, guided by the almighty providence of God, the world's cultures and nations go through a cyclical loop in terms of age, government, language and law etc., from superstition, awe and symbolic mute language to the age of cruel and powerful heroes and from there to civilisation. As the medieval times (unspecified) represented a "return to barbarism" for Vico, it is clear that these cycles come and go, always guided by Providence for the preservation of the human race, and it is also clear that the cyclical changes are not even, some cultures having entered another era prematurely according to Vico. The mapping of all these different decisions of providence is called as "rational civil theology of divine providence". (Yet the ultimate product that Vico has to offer is far more sprawling and a bit difficult for me to sum up.)
New Science is a prime example of those old yet exciting scientific works, where one needs plenty of background information in order to navigate all the pitfalls of argumentation, referencing and the biases of Christianity. Such information is not provided in this Penguin edition, presumably due to the immense size that such an edition would require, since Vico is a monster when it comes to allusions and references (both in that he had read a lot and that he had very idiosyncratic ways of sharing his views scientifically). But it makes a terrifically fascinating read and it is not without signs of mad genius. My ambivalence towards the work can be well demonstrated in the case of Vico's mythical exegesis. On one hand, it is invigorating how he takes the myths completely seriously and sees them as historical documents of the primitives: as his theory was that poetry antedated verse and thus symbols and metaphors were the primary means of communication (e.g. "my heart is boiling" preceded "I am angry"), these imaginative tales of heroes and monsters were not supposed to be that colourful but rather were the result of primitive storytelling, entirely to be rationalised by yet never fully understood by more civilised people precisely due to their civilisation and atrophied senses. On the other hand, such a blinkered view on myths inevitably standardises them and produces occasionally awkward interpretations, where the same Vulcan can suddenly be a plebeian (when he was thrown out of the heaven) and a patrician (when he caught the two plebs, Mars and Venus, in his net). And above all, such po-faced ratiocination tries to destroy some of the wonderful ambiguity and wonder encased in those ever-burning stories.
While Vico's sources are all over the place and sometimes so well hidden that they didn't even reach the page, it's not like Vico is simply producing data out of his Arschloch: he does give exact credit to authors time and again (albeit occasionally erroneously) and when it comes to topics that I'm not so au fait with, such as Roman politics, I simply cannot tell whether he uses his references rightly or not. However, I merely pointed this out to show what kind of a minefield Vico's scienza is. It is not through any solidness of its arguments or any coherence of its theses but through the rich ideation and ingenious syncretism that Vico's work truly shines. In particular, I was struck by his constant insistence that the likes of Hercules, Aesop, Orpheus and even Homer were not actually real people, but abstractions of types of people, like heroes, storytellers and poets – born through the restricted capability of abstraction of the primitives. And I must say that while I absolutely am against such sweeping statements, Vico does provide some convincing interpretations at times (far too many to mention here, unfortunately).
Of course, one must not forget the Joyce aspect. While I haven't read Beckett's analysis of the then-named Work in Progress, I could guess how Joyce was influenced by this work. Its careful attention to language, its frenetic insistence that etymology provides the key to all problems and the stressed importance of poetry must have fired Joyce's imagination. I was also reminded of Finnegans Wake myself as Vico was constantly repeating himself in the work and mixing in different mythologies and historical periods in the course of his argumentation.
Vico's pompously entitled work is a remarkable concentration of erudition, acuteness, parochialness and arrogance. One can see why it would be influential in so many fields from anthropology to social sciences and language studies, and I can highly recommend it to anyone who wants to go through all the cornerstones of Western thoughts (while at the same time being prepared for quite preposterous things).
* I am not sure whether Vico just grossly misunderstood the use of this term or whether it was used in a very general way back in the day. Go figure.
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April 29, 2020According to Goodreads biography: Giovanni Battista (Giambattista) Vico or Vigo was an Italian political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist. A critic of modern rationalism and apologist of classical antiquity, Vico's magnum opus is titled "Principles/Origins of [re]New[ed] Science about the Common Nature of Nations".
I am still currently reading this magistral universal history, but my first impressions of this work is that it is very much a history of literature. The heroic age is described in the introduction by Vico to his work and his quotations of Homer and Virgil to suffice as a history of the bronze age are frustrating to any historian. But faulted as it is, it was a unique work and very much of its time. Universal history was a very new concept in the West, even though in the Near East the first universal history had been sitting in libraries for over 400 years, and this was maybe the very first proper western attempt at a universal history. In this book, Vico collects information from the ancients about the ancient civilisations of the past: the Babylonians, assyrians, greeks, Chaldeans, romans, Egyptians etc and then attempts to assess this information and look deeper into the reasons why these long dead civilisations flourished and what conditions sufficed to make them do so etc.
Like I said before, I am still reading this and I will update my review once finished. But even from the first 30 pages, a general gist of this can be attained. It is a unique historical achievement by a great thinker of the 17th century who was often ignored in his lifetime and re-discovered din the late 18th century. He left an influence on Ranke, Marx, Joyce etc. and is regarded as one of the great early enlightenment figures. He was a deeply catholic man and viewed paganism with deep resentment, but went onto to influence many atheists of the next few centuries.
I shall end this review with a quote by Vico that I am particularly fond of:
“Peoples, like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy, or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure. Thus no matter how great the throng and press of their bodies, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since each follows his own pleasure and caprice.”
I am still currently reading this magistral universal history, but my first impressions of this work is that it is very much a history of literature. The heroic age is described in the introduction by Vico to his work and his quotations of Homer and Virgil to suffice as a history of the bronze age are frustrating to any historian. But faulted as it is, it was a unique work and very much of its time. Universal history was a very new concept in the West, even though in the Near East the first universal history had been sitting in libraries for over 400 years, and this was maybe the very first proper western attempt at a universal history. In this book, Vico collects information from the ancients about the ancient civilisations of the past: the Babylonians, assyrians, greeks, Chaldeans, romans, Egyptians etc and then attempts to assess this information and look deeper into the reasons why these long dead civilisations flourished and what conditions sufficed to make them do so etc.
Like I said before, I am still reading this and I will update my review once finished. But even from the first 30 pages, a general gist of this can be attained. It is a unique historical achievement by a great thinker of the 17th century who was often ignored in his lifetime and re-discovered din the late 18th century. He left an influence on Ranke, Marx, Joyce etc. and is regarded as one of the great early enlightenment figures. He was a deeply catholic man and viewed paganism with deep resentment, but went onto to influence many atheists of the next few centuries.
I shall end this review with a quote by Vico that I am particularly fond of:
“Peoples, like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy, or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure. Thus no matter how great the throng and press of their bodies, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since each follows his own pleasure and caprice.”
May 8, 2023
The Enlightenment was just starting to bud into existence, but an Italian scholar thought the “modern” thinking was ignoring the light of knowledge from classical antiquity and the Renaissance that he proposed had not been looked at properly. New Science by Giambattista Vico was meant to be the debut of a new scientific method that was better than the rationalism that was developing among the European intelligentsia, but what he helped developed was something completely different than his intent.
Using the mythology and histories from Greece, Rome, and other ancient civilizations Vico proposed a ‘history of philosophy narrated philosophically’ which would be a new variant of Renaissance humanism. However what Vico produced has been interpreted as ‘cycles of history’ by later philosophic thinkers or inspiring anthropologists and sociologists by using myths to figure out a culture’s historical memory and how language, knowledge, and society interact with one another. While Vico’s overall ideas were interesting and I could see how his ideas would later influence others in years and centuries to come, this wasn’t the best written book especially because the modern translator had to insert multiple corrections to Vico’s text because he had the wrong person referenced even though this was the third and last edition of his work. While I was intrigued while reading, if I had never seen this book, I would not have missed anything.
New Science is an interesting read, Giambattista Vico’s theories didn’t not have the exact impact he was hoping for, but they were influential.
Using the mythology and histories from Greece, Rome, and other ancient civilizations Vico proposed a ‘history of philosophy narrated philosophically’ which would be a new variant of Renaissance humanism. However what Vico produced has been interpreted as ‘cycles of history’ by later philosophic thinkers or inspiring anthropologists and sociologists by using myths to figure out a culture’s historical memory and how language, knowledge, and society interact with one another. While Vico’s overall ideas were interesting and I could see how his ideas would later influence others in years and centuries to come, this wasn’t the best written book especially because the modern translator had to insert multiple corrections to Vico’s text because he had the wrong person referenced even though this was the third and last edition of his work. While I was intrigued while reading, if I had never seen this book, I would not have missed anything.
New Science is an interesting read, Giambattista Vico’s theories didn’t not have the exact impact he was hoping for, but they were influential.
July 2, 2022
I first read Giambattista Vico while studying James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which employs Vichian concepts in its organization. Inasmuch as the history of the Jewish peoples is recorded in the Bible, in The New Science Vico reconstructs the history of the non-Jewish peoples, the Gentiles. His unconventional approach to this history involves the analysis of Classical myths, etymology and figures of speech. He is thought to be one of the first “modern” historians.
Acquired 1993
The Word, Montreal, Quebec
Acquired 1993
The Word, Montreal, Quebec
January 4, 2015
Giambattista Vico's New Science (which is in fact a loopy theory of the history of literature) has proved to be a great flintstone. Three times every century since it was published, some young thinker scratches his nose against it, sparks fly off and a new theory derived from it emerges.
In the New Science Vico proposes that human history advances in a recurring cycle of three phases: the divine, the heroic, and the human. A special political system and language are proper to each age. The divine age is characterized by metaphohe, the heroic age by metonymy and the human age by irony.
Michelet and Northrop Frye are amongst the many writers who have built on Vico's theory. I advise all young graduate students to read this book carefully. You may be able build a model from it that you will be able to lever into a career.
In the New Science Vico proposes that human history advances in a recurring cycle of three phases: the divine, the heroic, and the human. A special political system and language are proper to each age. The divine age is characterized by metaphohe, the heroic age by metonymy and the human age by irony.
Michelet and Northrop Frye are amongst the many writers who have built on Vico's theory. I advise all young graduate students to read this book carefully. You may be able build a model from it that you will be able to lever into a career.
February 26, 2013
Three ages, mythic, heroic, and human, matched with their own concepts of knowledge production, including, early, the poetic. The master tropes that Vico identifies match up with K. Burke's master tropes, which are, in both rhetoricians' arguments, a kind of reasoning (cf 404-409). Because anceint minds couldn't conceive of abstracts, they invented poetic forms, "certain models or ideal portraits" like Hermes the civil sage (209 and 767-8). The first fables, Vico says, were history (817)Claims that religion, marriage, burying of the dead are universal institutions. In this way, I'd argue that Vico is actually a psychological archetypist, who sees subconscious truths expressed in the myths of the early, more poetic, ages. Creating these corporeal truth is "marvelous sublimity" (376).
Other thoughts:
Topics make minds "inventive as criticism" makes "them exact" (498).
Government is extension of family responsibilities and servitude to protector.
Vico also has some kind of capitalist theory: "out of the passions of men each bent on his private advantage[...] it has made civil institutions"(133), "this public virtue was nothing but a good use which providence made of such grievous, ugly and cruel private vices" (38).
Poetry requires "the natural gift" (822).
also here describes Konrad III's seige of weinsburg, one of my favorite stories.
Other thoughts:
Topics make minds "inventive as criticism" makes "them exact" (498).
Government is extension of family responsibilities and servitude to protector.
Vico also has some kind of capitalist theory: "out of the passions of men each bent on his private advantage[...] it has made civil institutions"(133), "this public virtue was nothing but a good use which providence made of such grievous, ugly and cruel private vices" (38).
Poetry requires "the natural gift" (822).
also here describes Konrad III's seige of weinsburg, one of my favorite stories.
December 10, 2008
This will seriously bore you unless you are interested in Joyce, linguistics, philology, scholarly studies. I read it during my Joyce phase.
March 24, 2015
jittery rightwinger makes marxist-seeming predictions but with fear & trembling at imminent ochlocratic anarchistic egalitarianism. OH NOS!!
Read
September 7, 2023Every so often, one stumbles across a work that is obviously wrong, yet in such a way that it is more useful and interesting than many other works that are nearer to being right. Vico’s “Scienzia Nuova” is among the best examples of those books that I’ve ever encountered. To accept his argument wholesale requires buying into the past existence of giants, an odd cosmography, and all sorts of historical or anthropological “facts” long ago disproved by modern empirical science. Fun to entertain; impossible to take seriously nowadays.
Nevertheless, the book is so rich with ideas that you can profitably mine the crevices between outdated nonsense. This is true not only in its status as a predecessor of Marx, or Hegel, or Nietzsche; not only in its early arguments for cultural and historical relativism or its influence on writers like James Joyce — I suspect that “New Science” still has new veins of gold that are yet to be uncovered.
For example, Vico claims that the institutions of each age set spring traps that necessarily lead to the subsequent age; in other words, the foundations of an epoch are laid by its predecessor. He was not the first to propose a cyclical view of history—Hesiod’s ages of men or Ibn Khaldun’s cycles of settled and nomadic societies (driven by ‘asabiyyah) long predate Vico—but he is original in his emphasis on the way that these embedded institutions affect the actual thinking, culture, and even language, of each era and civilization. Marx clearly took his inspiration from Vico in his (here simplified) contention that capitalism would lay the material and cultural groundwork for communism. It immediately calls to mind the question of how much our current institutions shape the very language that we use to talk about them or interact with each other. The broad cultural proliferation of HR-speak and HR-style thinking might be one ongoing example of such institutional force.
Vico was one of the oddities of the Enlightenment, a learned man who was confined to a backwater and largely ignored in his own time. His book is an interesting counterweight to the great Enlightenment thinkers, who often supposed their own inevitability. Vico writes that “the weaker its power of reasoning, the more vigorous the human imagination grows,” and the ‘New Science’ is a case in point. Nobody will study this for its attention to detail or its tightly-wound mechanical reasoning, like Spinoza, but its power of imagination is strong enough to make the book a font of ideas that would later revolutionize many intellectual fields. There is a lesson in this last point that our hyper-materialist, hyper-rationalist age might be able to use, should we ever discover it.
Nevertheless, the book is so rich with ideas that you can profitably mine the crevices between outdated nonsense. This is true not only in its status as a predecessor of Marx, or Hegel, or Nietzsche; not only in its early arguments for cultural and historical relativism or its influence on writers like James Joyce — I suspect that “New Science” still has new veins of gold that are yet to be uncovered.
For example, Vico claims that the institutions of each age set spring traps that necessarily lead to the subsequent age; in other words, the foundations of an epoch are laid by its predecessor. He was not the first to propose a cyclical view of history—Hesiod’s ages of men or Ibn Khaldun’s cycles of settled and nomadic societies (driven by ‘asabiyyah) long predate Vico—but he is original in his emphasis on the way that these embedded institutions affect the actual thinking, culture, and even language, of each era and civilization. Marx clearly took his inspiration from Vico in his (here simplified) contention that capitalism would lay the material and cultural groundwork for communism. It immediately calls to mind the question of how much our current institutions shape the very language that we use to talk about them or interact with each other. The broad cultural proliferation of HR-speak and HR-style thinking might be one ongoing example of such institutional force.
Vico was one of the oddities of the Enlightenment, a learned man who was confined to a backwater and largely ignored in his own time. His book is an interesting counterweight to the great Enlightenment thinkers, who often supposed their own inevitability. Vico writes that “the weaker its power of reasoning, the more vigorous the human imagination grows,” and the ‘New Science’ is a case in point. Nobody will study this for its attention to detail or its tightly-wound mechanical reasoning, like Spinoza, but its power of imagination is strong enough to make the book a font of ideas that would later revolutionize many intellectual fields. There is a lesson in this last point that our hyper-materialist, hyper-rationalist age might be able to use, should we ever discover it.
January 24, 2023
Joyce said, "My imagination grows when I read Vico as it doesn't when I read Freud or Jung. "
October 19, 2022
The book is long. It is overwhelming in detail. Like reading poetry, one has to decide how much effort to expend on deciphering what is being said, and whether its thought is worth one’s time. I started to read, then skimmed, then skipped to the end, which I didn’t read. I suppose this alone could be my book review.
Vico (1668-1744) is cited by a few others. Durant’s history (Volume X ) devotes 3-4 pages to him (Croce also wrote a book, The Philosophy of Giovanni Vico). Reading some background on Vico, a summary might be as follows: This book is said to be a philosophy of history, meaning that the history can be divided into three historical eras, each with its own primary characteristics tied to the evolution of humankind. (As with his stage theory Vico breaks all of his descriptions into threes, or what Durant calls Vico’s “Tridic Scheme,” e.g. the social behaviors common to all social existence are religion, marriage, and burials). The first era is the age of gods when humanity subjected itself to divine forces. This was followed by the age of heroes when strong leaders governed, with or without divine assistance. This was followed by a third era when humankind rebelled against aristocratic rule; regarding themselves as equal, the common people emerged capable of self-rule.
The third era is where Vico’s reputed humanistic theory is revealed. In making this point, he contrasts his thinking with the Stoics and the Epicureans, both of whom were stuck in the first era mode of being. The former, because they mortified the senses and gave in to fate and externalized rule; the latter, because they glorified the senses, without being guided by divine providence. In his third stage, Vico sees humankind expressing itself in an enlightened, Platonist way: “That there is divine providence, that human passions should be moderated and made into human virtues, and that human souls are immortal….Out of ferocity avarice and ambition, the three vices which run throughout the human race, it creates the military, merchant, and governing classes, and thus the strength, riches, and wisdom of commonwealths. Out of these three great vices, which could certainly destroy all mankind on the face of the earth, it makes civil happiness….man has free choice, however weak, to make virtues of his passions; but that he is aided by God, naturally by divine providence and supernaturally by divine grace.” (Note the three vices, the three classes, the three characteristics of commonwealths).
The humanist theme in Vico’s philosophy is the transformation of bestial vice into enlightened virtue: One’s own self-interest (utility) is understood to be tied to the self-interest of others. Such understanding emerges, with divine assistance, in the development of humankind.* This transformation from one stage to the next is the emergence of the divine in human affairs. In era one bestial vice gives way to divine virtue. In era two, aristocratic rule gives way to self-rule with divine guidance. In era three, self-rule becomes infused with divine justice, which is the transformation of one’s self-interest without regard for the other to the notion that one’s interest includes the interest of the other.
Durant calls this an epochal book of cyclical development and decay, but I’m not sure why. Apparently, self-rule in the third era results in decay and chaos (the sensual indulgence, or the walking away from divine guidance) necessitating monarchical rule, which I took to mean some form of Plato’s philosopher-king. Vico is also said to have broken with social contract theorists but I don’t understand why. The move from self-rule to monarchical rule seems like it would be a contractual-like arrangement, as with Hobbes.
Three comments about Vico’s stage theory of history: First, the authors of the Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, argue that there are no such things as the sharp divisions that Vico and much of contemporary writing reflects. Hunter-gatherers practiced agriculture. Agricultural societies engaged in hunting-gathering. Some of the former were hierarchical; some of the latter were not. Second, these era-by-era definitive characteristics of Vico are not qualitatively different. They are expressions of who we have been, who we are, and who we will always be. The only deference is in scale, both from population increases and technological change. The reason for the cyclical side to Vico’s theory is because of the repeated expressions of dynamics inherent in human nature. Third, Vico’s “philosophy of history” is the unfolding of an underlying divine form that manifests itself in particular content. But remove the divine and you can see underlying biological being instead. Vico’s three aspects that constitute the core of existence – religion, marriage and burial – are the very essence of our biological being: the origin of religion is the need to survive, in this life and eternally; marriage is about genetic union and the propagation of one’s kind and life itself; burial is about the end of life and its re-emergence into an eternal spiritual (because the physical body is obviously dead) realm.
Spending some time with this book, it occurred to me that it was the product of a robust imagination, a creative re-framing of history. Perhaps this is the reason Durant’s quote that, toward the end of his life, Vico’s “mind gave way, and he lapsed into a mysticism bordering on insanity,” caught my attention, as this book (his third and most revised edition) was published in 1744, the year of his death.
*Vico writes: “But men, because of their corrupted nature, are under the tyranny of self-love, which compels them to make private utility their chief guide. Seeking everything useful for themselves and nothing for their companions, they cannot bring their passions under control to direct them toward justice. We thereby establish the fact that man in the bestial state desires only his own welfare; having taken wife and begotten children, he desires his own welfare along with that of his city; when its rule is extended over several peoples, he desires his own welfare along with that of the nation; when the nations are united by wars, treaties of peace, alliances, and commerce, he desires his own welfare along with that of the entire human race. In all these circumstances man desires principally his own utility. Therefore it is only by divine providence that he can be held within these institutions to practice justice as a member of the society of the family, of the city, and finally of mankind.”
Vico (1668-1744) is cited by a few others. Durant’s history (Volume X ) devotes 3-4 pages to him (Croce also wrote a book, The Philosophy of Giovanni Vico). Reading some background on Vico, a summary might be as follows: This book is said to be a philosophy of history, meaning that the history can be divided into three historical eras, each with its own primary characteristics tied to the evolution of humankind. (As with his stage theory Vico breaks all of his descriptions into threes, or what Durant calls Vico’s “Tridic Scheme,” e.g. the social behaviors common to all social existence are religion, marriage, and burials). The first era is the age of gods when humanity subjected itself to divine forces. This was followed by the age of heroes when strong leaders governed, with or without divine assistance. This was followed by a third era when humankind rebelled against aristocratic rule; regarding themselves as equal, the common people emerged capable of self-rule.
The third era is where Vico’s reputed humanistic theory is revealed. In making this point, he contrasts his thinking with the Stoics and the Epicureans, both of whom were stuck in the first era mode of being. The former, because they mortified the senses and gave in to fate and externalized rule; the latter, because they glorified the senses, without being guided by divine providence. In his third stage, Vico sees humankind expressing itself in an enlightened, Platonist way: “That there is divine providence, that human passions should be moderated and made into human virtues, and that human souls are immortal….Out of ferocity avarice and ambition, the three vices which run throughout the human race, it creates the military, merchant, and governing classes, and thus the strength, riches, and wisdom of commonwealths. Out of these three great vices, which could certainly destroy all mankind on the face of the earth, it makes civil happiness….man has free choice, however weak, to make virtues of his passions; but that he is aided by God, naturally by divine providence and supernaturally by divine grace.” (Note the three vices, the three classes, the three characteristics of commonwealths).
The humanist theme in Vico’s philosophy is the transformation of bestial vice into enlightened virtue: One’s own self-interest (utility) is understood to be tied to the self-interest of others. Such understanding emerges, with divine assistance, in the development of humankind.* This transformation from one stage to the next is the emergence of the divine in human affairs. In era one bestial vice gives way to divine virtue. In era two, aristocratic rule gives way to self-rule with divine guidance. In era three, self-rule becomes infused with divine justice, which is the transformation of one’s self-interest without regard for the other to the notion that one’s interest includes the interest of the other.
Durant calls this an epochal book of cyclical development and decay, but I’m not sure why. Apparently, self-rule in the third era results in decay and chaos (the sensual indulgence, or the walking away from divine guidance) necessitating monarchical rule, which I took to mean some form of Plato’s philosopher-king. Vico is also said to have broken with social contract theorists but I don’t understand why. The move from self-rule to monarchical rule seems like it would be a contractual-like arrangement, as with Hobbes.
Three comments about Vico’s stage theory of history: First, the authors of the Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, argue that there are no such things as the sharp divisions that Vico and much of contemporary writing reflects. Hunter-gatherers practiced agriculture. Agricultural societies engaged in hunting-gathering. Some of the former were hierarchical; some of the latter were not. Second, these era-by-era definitive characteristics of Vico are not qualitatively different. They are expressions of who we have been, who we are, and who we will always be. The only deference is in scale, both from population increases and technological change. The reason for the cyclical side to Vico’s theory is because of the repeated expressions of dynamics inherent in human nature. Third, Vico’s “philosophy of history” is the unfolding of an underlying divine form that manifests itself in particular content. But remove the divine and you can see underlying biological being instead. Vico’s three aspects that constitute the core of existence – religion, marriage and burial – are the very essence of our biological being: the origin of religion is the need to survive, in this life and eternally; marriage is about genetic union and the propagation of one’s kind and life itself; burial is about the end of life and its re-emergence into an eternal spiritual (because the physical body is obviously dead) realm.
Spending some time with this book, it occurred to me that it was the product of a robust imagination, a creative re-framing of history. Perhaps this is the reason Durant’s quote that, toward the end of his life, Vico’s “mind gave way, and he lapsed into a mysticism bordering on insanity,” caught my attention, as this book (his third and most revised edition) was published in 1744, the year of his death.
*Vico writes: “But men, because of their corrupted nature, are under the tyranny of self-love, which compels them to make private utility their chief guide. Seeking everything useful for themselves and nothing for their companions, they cannot bring their passions under control to direct them toward justice. We thereby establish the fact that man in the bestial state desires only his own welfare; having taken wife and begotten children, he desires his own welfare along with that of his city; when its rule is extended over several peoples, he desires his own welfare along with that of the nation; when the nations are united by wars, treaties of peace, alliances, and commerce, he desires his own welfare along with that of the entire human race. In all these circumstances man desires principally his own utility. Therefore it is only by divine providence that he can be held within these institutions to practice justice as a member of the society of the family, of the city, and finally of mankind.”
November 19, 2021
The first time I started this book, I thought "You gotta be kidding! How did this book not find its way into oblivion?" Within a few years from that time, it had become the most dog-eared, written-in, essential book on my shelf. I'm not sure how or when that happened, but it did.
There's something irresistible about his thesis that the ancients weren't people just like us except that they were wearing togas. There are profound differences between and among the ages, and those differences are murky because we don't see the world the same way that [some of] our predecessors did.
This is not mainstream philosophy. It would, I think, have more appeal to the poet than to the philosopher. In fact, it's his mysterious, half-baked (how could it be otherwise?) accounts of the ur-ancient Theological Poets that hooked me the most: poets as lawmakers, poets as city-builders, poets as philosophers... Just this idea is enough to make one have to reevaluate a lot of what we thought we knew about certain eras in the cyclical past; in the medieval troubadour era (for example), the poet again has an important function, perhaps even a religious one, while at an earlier time the fate of the Roman Republic (long before the Roman Empire) was remarkably similar to things that are going on in our world now. If we accept his idea of cycles, we start to see why medieval Europe seems much more remote from us than Rome was at its height. Now, some of this is based on my own inferences, but Vico's description of the era of Publilius Philo makes him seem like a prophet foreseeing our own unsettled times.
I think he must have influenced some later thinkers such as Oswald Spengler. In literature, this book has been described as the structural foundation for Finnegans Wake, in which Vico and his theory are mentioned in the first sentence: "...brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation...". Dismissed as an eccentric outsider in his own time, there are now statues of him erected in the parks and courtyards of Naples, alongside the likes of Giordano Bruno and Thomas Aquinas.
There's something irresistible about his thesis that the ancients weren't people just like us except that they were wearing togas. There are profound differences between and among the ages, and those differences are murky because we don't see the world the same way that [some of] our predecessors did.
This is not mainstream philosophy. It would, I think, have more appeal to the poet than to the philosopher. In fact, it's his mysterious, half-baked (how could it be otherwise?) accounts of the ur-ancient Theological Poets that hooked me the most: poets as lawmakers, poets as city-builders, poets as philosophers... Just this idea is enough to make one have to reevaluate a lot of what we thought we knew about certain eras in the cyclical past; in the medieval troubadour era (for example), the poet again has an important function, perhaps even a religious one, while at an earlier time the fate of the Roman Republic (long before the Roman Empire) was remarkably similar to things that are going on in our world now. If we accept his idea of cycles, we start to see why medieval Europe seems much more remote from us than Rome was at its height. Now, some of this is based on my own inferences, but Vico's description of the era of Publilius Philo makes him seem like a prophet foreseeing our own unsettled times.
I think he must have influenced some later thinkers such as Oswald Spengler. In literature, this book has been described as the structural foundation for Finnegans Wake, in which Vico and his theory are mentioned in the first sentence: "...brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation...". Dismissed as an eccentric outsider in his own time, there are now statues of him erected in the parks and courtyards of Naples, alongside the likes of Giordano Bruno and Thomas Aquinas.
April 15, 2011
Vico, like most great writers, is hard to read. I don't agree with all of his ideas. He is very Christian and hostile to our faith and polytheistic people. However, many of his ideas are very profound. All Odinists should read Vico, along with Plato's Republic, Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West in order to understand why the West is in the mess it is today. Vico gave a very good defense of feudalism.
July 13, 2017
The butler did it.
(The butler = providence.)
(The butler = providence.)
Read
May 17, 2025A profound work in many ways. Vico is clearly very learned, and the insights he mines from Greek and Roman myth will leave lasting imprints on me. However, this work does suffer from its Eurocentrism. I can imagine an even more magisterial work that looks at African, Native American, and Asian myths with the same care and adds even more insight. I’m sure as I revisit both Virgil and Homer I will need Vico by my side.
I can’t properly rate this because it has no clear basis for critique. Should I dock Vico points for including since proven inaccuracies? Should I judge him for only taking Judeo-Christian creation myths seriously? I’m not sure. So, therefore I’m leaving it with no rating, but with a recommendation.
I can’t properly rate this because it has no clear basis for critique. Should I dock Vico points for including since proven inaccuracies? Should I judge him for only taking Judeo-Christian creation myths seriously? I’m not sure. So, therefore I’m leaving it with no rating, but with a recommendation.
Read
June 10, 2021A bit of a slog for me and my attention was often waning. The positivism is bizarre, the christianity is boring, and the ethnocentrism is laughable. Still, it's clear that the seeds of a lot of future thought is in here. Still, it's easy to see the seeds of a lot of later philosophy here. Edmund Wilson draws a straight line from Vico to Michelet and all socialism, then to Marx and Bakunin. It's also easy to see the origins of Nietzsche, Foucault, etc. Most interestingly, in a move Derrida must have found interesting, Vico posits that speech and writing emerged at the same time.
January 4, 2025
a pretty big deal. a huge deal, actually.
February 25, 2011
The text itself of the New Science consists of an overview, “Idea of the Work,” coupled with a picture depicting a female figure, Metaphysics, standing on a globe of the Earth and contemplating a luminous triangle containing the eye of God, or Providence. Below stands a statue of Homer representing the origins of human society in "poetic wisdom." This is followed by five Books and a Conclusion, the first of which, "Establishment of Principles,” establishes the method upon which Vico constructs, in 1112 numbered paragraphs, a history of civil society from its earliest beginnings in the state of nature to its contemporary manifestation in seventeenth century Europe.
Purpose
Vico’s self-proclaimed most important work is his Scienza nuova or New Science. Vico “sets out to show that his predecessors and contemporaries had misunderstood both the capacities of the human mind and the development of the human race.” This New Science is a “demonstration of providence as historical fact. That is, it must provide a history of the orders and institutions which providence bestowed on the great polity of humankind without the knowledge or advice of humankind, and often contrary to human planning. For although by its creation our world is temporal and particular, the orders which providence establishes in it are universal and eternal.” Vico defines his three principals as “divine providence, the moderation of passions through marriage, and the immortality of human souls attested by burial. These are the boundaries of human reason, and transgressing them means abandoning our humanity.” Many themes are incorporated into the Vico’s New Science to establish as base from which to grow to his final purpose and these include: wisdom, history, truth, causality, philology, rhetoric, philosophy, poetry, and the relative strength and weaknesses of ancient and modern learning. These all come together to “seek scientific principals which will explain the origins of certain known historical facts, and give them a solid and coherent historical basis” because the “great labor of…Science” is to recover “the grounds of truth, truth which, with the passage of years and the changes in language and customs has come down to us enveloped in falsehood.”
Vico’s most important purpose for history is to expose the truth and to somehow link science, nature, history, and philosophy.
Meaning
Vico insists that “The inherent properties of things are produced by the mode or manner in which they arise. Such properties therefore allow us to verify an institution’s exact nature and nascence.” This explains that since Vico is attempted to find the exact nature of these nations or institutions that each history or philosophy he uses has inherent meaning and that history itself has an inherent meaning. Since history itself, in Vico's view, is the manifestation of Providence in the world, the transition from one stage to the next and the steady ascendance of reason over imagination represent a gradual progress of civilization, a qualitative improvement from simpler to more complex forms of social organization. Vico characterizes this movement as a "necessity of nature" which means that, with the passage of time, human beings and societies trend increasingly towards realizing their full potential. From a general point of view history reveals a progress of civilization, through Vico’s New Science, through actualizing the potential of human nature, Vico also emphasizes the cyclical feature of historical development. Society progresses towards perfection but never reaches it, thus history is “ideal.” This reach towards perfection, Vico explains is interrupted by a return to a relatively more primitive condition. Out of this reversal, history begins its course anew, albeit from the irreversibly higher point to which it has already attained.
Breisach
According to Breisach, Vico “gave historians not new methods but a full-fledged theory of history, including proper methods of truth finding.” Breisach explains that Vico believed, “Human history was inherently understandable because all human beings experienced they hopes, fears, efforts, deeds, and wishes which entered into human events; they forever remained “outsiders” to nature, though.” Breisach gives great insight into Vico and incorporates him into historiography in a very rich way and explains that Vico began a new school of thought, “historicism.”
Purpose
Vico’s self-proclaimed most important work is his Scienza nuova or New Science. Vico “sets out to show that his predecessors and contemporaries had misunderstood both the capacities of the human mind and the development of the human race.” This New Science is a “demonstration of providence as historical fact. That is, it must provide a history of the orders and institutions which providence bestowed on the great polity of humankind without the knowledge or advice of humankind, and often contrary to human planning. For although by its creation our world is temporal and particular, the orders which providence establishes in it are universal and eternal.” Vico defines his three principals as “divine providence, the moderation of passions through marriage, and the immortality of human souls attested by burial. These are the boundaries of human reason, and transgressing them means abandoning our humanity.” Many themes are incorporated into the Vico’s New Science to establish as base from which to grow to his final purpose and these include: wisdom, history, truth, causality, philology, rhetoric, philosophy, poetry, and the relative strength and weaknesses of ancient and modern learning. These all come together to “seek scientific principals which will explain the origins of certain known historical facts, and give them a solid and coherent historical basis” because the “great labor of…Science” is to recover “the grounds of truth, truth which, with the passage of years and the changes in language and customs has come down to us enveloped in falsehood.”
Vico’s most important purpose for history is to expose the truth and to somehow link science, nature, history, and philosophy.
Meaning
Vico insists that “The inherent properties of things are produced by the mode or manner in which they arise. Such properties therefore allow us to verify an institution’s exact nature and nascence.” This explains that since Vico is attempted to find the exact nature of these nations or institutions that each history or philosophy he uses has inherent meaning and that history itself has an inherent meaning. Since history itself, in Vico's view, is the manifestation of Providence in the world, the transition from one stage to the next and the steady ascendance of reason over imagination represent a gradual progress of civilization, a qualitative improvement from simpler to more complex forms of social organization. Vico characterizes this movement as a "necessity of nature" which means that, with the passage of time, human beings and societies trend increasingly towards realizing their full potential. From a general point of view history reveals a progress of civilization, through Vico’s New Science, through actualizing the potential of human nature, Vico also emphasizes the cyclical feature of historical development. Society progresses towards perfection but never reaches it, thus history is “ideal.” This reach towards perfection, Vico explains is interrupted by a return to a relatively more primitive condition. Out of this reversal, history begins its course anew, albeit from the irreversibly higher point to which it has already attained.
Breisach
According to Breisach, Vico “gave historians not new methods but a full-fledged theory of history, including proper methods of truth finding.” Breisach explains that Vico believed, “Human history was inherently understandable because all human beings experienced they hopes, fears, efforts, deeds, and wishes which entered into human events; they forever remained “outsiders” to nature, though.” Breisach gives great insight into Vico and incorporates him into historiography in a very rich way and explains that Vico began a new school of thought, “historicism.”
January 29, 2024
When I was younger and a lot more adventurous, I bought Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. At first the word puns were amusing, but after 100 pages of it, I just got tired. Even though I like challenging myself, I still enjoy understanding texts, and the Wake was almost impenetrable. Students of it advised people to read Giambattista Vico’s New Science, which was the foundation of that work.
There were quite a few things that made it difficult for me to read Vico’s New Science: no store stocked it here in the Philippines (because no one else would read it), and it was rather esoteric that copies were quite expensive. Having finished Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason last year, however, I finally decided that 2024 was going to be the year that I would finish New Science.
Last December, I bought it of a second-hand bookstore online. When it arrived, it turns out that it was never read: I can say it because the plastic is now creased, and my note taking within the book’s margins has bent the spine of the book. Knowing myself, I had to limit the amount spent in the book: if I didn’t have that burst of reading, it would just be like the false starts of other challenging works such as Ulysses: I might not understand everything, but I’ll bulldoze through the book within a few days.
Yesterday night was my personal deadline: I have reports to complete over this week, and might not be able to return to the book, so I sought to finish it, using my rest periods in the gym to squeeze more reading time instead of listening to music.
Vico’s New Science is foundational when it comes to the philosophy of history and its historiography. While I do not concur with a few of his notions, his theses are robust and well-researched. They’re extremely well-researched that I have even a hard time grasping the people whom Vico refers to: I have read Mommsen’s History of Rome, and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but history is extremely rich that my knowledge of it remains miniscule. I did not know of what happened with Tarquinius Superbus, or with the many names cited by Vico, as I’m not classically educated. It is with these names that I merely scanned through the text.
The book’s introduction clearly identifies the gist of Vico’s New Science: humanity has three institutions that has endured and persisted, which gradually allowed the birth of nations. These are:
• Religious belief
• Sanctity of marriage
• Burial of the dead
I loved how Vico described the necessity of religious belief as one of the foundations of civilization. When man first appeared in the world, he was unfamiliar with the phenomena in it, and because his intellect was still undeveloped, as he was merely a sensory animal, the most fearful phenomena will, to him, have godlike tendencies. It is not coincidental that the first popular Greek god was Jove or Zeus – lightning is destructive, and thunder is noisy, and both can neither be expected nor controlled. The gods were what man feared.
Certain beings (through evolution, or particular genetic aberration) were believed to be heroes – these were special individuals that were blessed or regarded well by gods, such as Hercules. The Bible itself, Vico noted, identified that there was a race of giants known as the zamzummim who were driven away by the Ammonites. Vico also interjects that this may just be as poetic license, “because of the indefinite nature of the human mind, whenever it is lost in ignorance man makes himself the measure of all things.” Perhaps they were indeed a larger or taller people, but they might have been huge from the perspective of the Hebrews.
I loved how Vico foreshadowed cognitive psychology in his historiography. This is a restatement of the availability heuristic: because his self easily occurs to him, he evaluates other peoples from his own limited experience. Vico wrote: “Whenever man can form no idea of distant and unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar and at hand.”
He even identifies the affect heuristic: “Human choice, by its nature most uncertain, is made certain and determined by the common sense of men with respect to human needs and utilities ... Common sense is judgment without reflection.”
This critical analyses by Vico leads to the dichotomy between nobles and plebeians: the aristocracy and the plebs. The heroes set the foundation of the nobility, where the plebeians have to trust in the nobility because of the influence on the divine on them. Finally, of course, when corruption has become rampant, the plebeians strike back and finally become a human people, which is sustained by laws and virtue. Vico cites Achilles’s characteristics as inconsistent with our current definition of virtue: while talking to Hector, he responds: “When have men ever made pacts with lions? And when were wolves and lambs ever of one mind?” Further, “If I kill you, I shall drag you naked, bound to my chariot, three days around the walls of Troy, and finally I shall give your body to my hunting dogs to eat.”
Rather than equality and justice, Achilles manifests hubris and ambition. It is only later, in the evolution of humanity, that fairness and justice, with the development of equitable laws, became the focus. Without the inequality brought forth by the heroes, however, a human conception of civilization could not have been realized, but the heroes could not have existed without divine providence.
The second institution is the sanctity of marriage. Vico shows his brilliance in that prior to the establishment of the sanctity of marriage, men would just maraud and take a woman into their cave, where they would have a family and fight with other men for food and shelter. Eventually, this bestiality was replaced with settlement and bestial lust was restrained. Probably as an offshoot of the heroic phase, Roman history featured only nobles being able to marry in a process known as connubium. One of the problems was that the plebeians were left unable to pass their land and fortune to their children, because without the process of connubium, the state would take over the properties of the deceased plebeian or revert it to the nobles (quiritary ownership). Eventually, the plebeians revolted against this and then universalized the sanctity of marriage, but of course the issue was a lot more complex. Marriage is also important as a safe haven for a family, which would eventually be the foundation of the state.
Finally, the third institution is the burial of the dead. In early Rome, this was not practiced consistently, with Tarquinius Superbus refusing to bury his rival after defeating him. However, with the development of mythology and poetic history, the burial of the dead reflected belief in an afterlife. Not only was it sanitary, it was also humane, and to Vico was one of the foundation of nations. Reflection would think of it as correct, as disease would more easily spread to those peoples who have not learned to bury their dead, and few people cannot a nation make.
This is just merely scratching the surface of the book. I myself don’t feign total understanding, because New Science is a masterpiece of scholarship and erudition. However, I will acquit myself in that I will also be reading an analysis of the text a few days after today, to boost my understanding of the text. In its analysis of history, New Science encourages the reader to be more critical and also provides context to understanding the fabulous and outrageous stories that tell of ancient history. To Vico, the earliest histories were written by poets, who were sensually immersed in the time, but it would take a philosopher to write with wisdom and intellect to craft a more accurate history.
While this is an excellent text in historiography, however, there are inconsistencies that have come to light with recent scholarship. Catalhoyuk, for instance, cited by Fromm in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, was an egalitarian society where both women and men were equal, and order was maintained. The idea that prior to the earliest known societies then, which include Mesopotamia, man was bestial is questionable. Aside from artwork and the presence of a deity, Catalhoyuk was identified to be clean and organized. Despite these minor issues, however, New Science remains to be a robust text.
There were quite a few things that made it difficult for me to read Vico’s New Science: no store stocked it here in the Philippines (because no one else would read it), and it was rather esoteric that copies were quite expensive. Having finished Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason last year, however, I finally decided that 2024 was going to be the year that I would finish New Science.
Last December, I bought it of a second-hand bookstore online. When it arrived, it turns out that it was never read: I can say it because the plastic is now creased, and my note taking within the book’s margins has bent the spine of the book. Knowing myself, I had to limit the amount spent in the book: if I didn’t have that burst of reading, it would just be like the false starts of other challenging works such as Ulysses: I might not understand everything, but I’ll bulldoze through the book within a few days.
Yesterday night was my personal deadline: I have reports to complete over this week, and might not be able to return to the book, so I sought to finish it, using my rest periods in the gym to squeeze more reading time instead of listening to music.
Vico’s New Science is foundational when it comes to the philosophy of history and its historiography. While I do not concur with a few of his notions, his theses are robust and well-researched. They’re extremely well-researched that I have even a hard time grasping the people whom Vico refers to: I have read Mommsen’s History of Rome, and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but history is extremely rich that my knowledge of it remains miniscule. I did not know of what happened with Tarquinius Superbus, or with the many names cited by Vico, as I’m not classically educated. It is with these names that I merely scanned through the text.
The book’s introduction clearly identifies the gist of Vico’s New Science: humanity has three institutions that has endured and persisted, which gradually allowed the birth of nations. These are:
• Religious belief
• Sanctity of marriage
• Burial of the dead
I loved how Vico described the necessity of religious belief as one of the foundations of civilization. When man first appeared in the world, he was unfamiliar with the phenomena in it, and because his intellect was still undeveloped, as he was merely a sensory animal, the most fearful phenomena will, to him, have godlike tendencies. It is not coincidental that the first popular Greek god was Jove or Zeus – lightning is destructive, and thunder is noisy, and both can neither be expected nor controlled. The gods were what man feared.
Certain beings (through evolution, or particular genetic aberration) were believed to be heroes – these were special individuals that were blessed or regarded well by gods, such as Hercules. The Bible itself, Vico noted, identified that there was a race of giants known as the zamzummim who were driven away by the Ammonites. Vico also interjects that this may just be as poetic license, “because of the indefinite nature of the human mind, whenever it is lost in ignorance man makes himself the measure of all things.” Perhaps they were indeed a larger or taller people, but they might have been huge from the perspective of the Hebrews.
I loved how Vico foreshadowed cognitive psychology in his historiography. This is a restatement of the availability heuristic: because his self easily occurs to him, he evaluates other peoples from his own limited experience. Vico wrote: “Whenever man can form no idea of distant and unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar and at hand.”
He even identifies the affect heuristic: “Human choice, by its nature most uncertain, is made certain and determined by the common sense of men with respect to human needs and utilities ... Common sense is judgment without reflection.”
This critical analyses by Vico leads to the dichotomy between nobles and plebeians: the aristocracy and the plebs. The heroes set the foundation of the nobility, where the plebeians have to trust in the nobility because of the influence on the divine on them. Finally, of course, when corruption has become rampant, the plebeians strike back and finally become a human people, which is sustained by laws and virtue. Vico cites Achilles’s characteristics as inconsistent with our current definition of virtue: while talking to Hector, he responds: “When have men ever made pacts with lions? And when were wolves and lambs ever of one mind?” Further, “If I kill you, I shall drag you naked, bound to my chariot, three days around the walls of Troy, and finally I shall give your body to my hunting dogs to eat.”
Rather than equality and justice, Achilles manifests hubris and ambition. It is only later, in the evolution of humanity, that fairness and justice, with the development of equitable laws, became the focus. Without the inequality brought forth by the heroes, however, a human conception of civilization could not have been realized, but the heroes could not have existed without divine providence.
The second institution is the sanctity of marriage. Vico shows his brilliance in that prior to the establishment of the sanctity of marriage, men would just maraud and take a woman into their cave, where they would have a family and fight with other men for food and shelter. Eventually, this bestiality was replaced with settlement and bestial lust was restrained. Probably as an offshoot of the heroic phase, Roman history featured only nobles being able to marry in a process known as connubium. One of the problems was that the plebeians were left unable to pass their land and fortune to their children, because without the process of connubium, the state would take over the properties of the deceased plebeian or revert it to the nobles (quiritary ownership). Eventually, the plebeians revolted against this and then universalized the sanctity of marriage, but of course the issue was a lot more complex. Marriage is also important as a safe haven for a family, which would eventually be the foundation of the state.
Finally, the third institution is the burial of the dead. In early Rome, this was not practiced consistently, with Tarquinius Superbus refusing to bury his rival after defeating him. However, with the development of mythology and poetic history, the burial of the dead reflected belief in an afterlife. Not only was it sanitary, it was also humane, and to Vico was one of the foundation of nations. Reflection would think of it as correct, as disease would more easily spread to those peoples who have not learned to bury their dead, and few people cannot a nation make.
This is just merely scratching the surface of the book. I myself don’t feign total understanding, because New Science is a masterpiece of scholarship and erudition. However, I will acquit myself in that I will also be reading an analysis of the text a few days after today, to boost my understanding of the text. In its analysis of history, New Science encourages the reader to be more critical and also provides context to understanding the fabulous and outrageous stories that tell of ancient history. To Vico, the earliest histories were written by poets, who were sensually immersed in the time, but it would take a philosopher to write with wisdom and intellect to craft a more accurate history.
While this is an excellent text in historiography, however, there are inconsistencies that have come to light with recent scholarship. Catalhoyuk, for instance, cited by Fromm in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, was an egalitarian society where both women and men were equal, and order was maintained. The idea that prior to the earliest known societies then, which include Mesopotamia, man was bestial is questionable. Aside from artwork and the presence of a deity, Catalhoyuk was identified to be clean and organized. Despite these minor issues, however, New Science remains to be a robust text.
August 3, 2018
I was afraid that this was going to be really dry and incredible dated, but it turns out I didn't know enough about the history and structure of society and its institutions to be able to tell whether that was the case or not.
The most admirable thing about this entire book was the scope and depth that Vico seemed to have brought to his project. In the foreward to the actual text it mentions the place and time of the books conception, and how the in vogue scholastic thinking in Europe was built around the Rationalism (and in Vico's mind Reductionism) of Descartes and his followers. It is a relevant criticism to this day, as I know many skeptic and self-professed rationalists who often see the world not as a complex set of interacting systems so much as reducible basic elements which alone somehow constitute the whole of realty and thought.
Vico's attempt to try to speak to the wealth of contributing factors and how they grow over time through cause and effect relations is very inspiring. He cover's this in terms of linguistics, he looks into the politics of social interactions over time, he inspects changes in law, and how the myths and religions have altered over time. Things for Vico do also come from axioms- like the rationalists- that he sets forth in the opening, but all these lead to a great deal of twists and turns. Knotting themselves together in a web of social meanings.
The book was always pitched to me as showing how it can be very erroneous to judge the past and the peoples in it purely by our current day mindset and ideas. We need to attempt to situate things withing their true contexts and use scholarship to really pour over the histories and documents that have been left behind. Looking always for consistencies, contradictions, and connections that will speak to a more realistic portrait regardless of whether it seems in line with what we know or feel about human beings.
Again, this seems a noble goal. I think it is accomplished quite well considering the time and place of its author. I think the importance of the work on other fields within what is now the Social Sciences makes the book alone worth reading, though I will also be very interested in seeing how much he seems to have actually gotten wrong. There has been progress in the few centuries past. There will continue to be more. What will people think of our times and ideas?
The most admirable thing about this entire book was the scope and depth that Vico seemed to have brought to his project. In the foreward to the actual text it mentions the place and time of the books conception, and how the in vogue scholastic thinking in Europe was built around the Rationalism (and in Vico's mind Reductionism) of Descartes and his followers. It is a relevant criticism to this day, as I know many skeptic and self-professed rationalists who often see the world not as a complex set of interacting systems so much as reducible basic elements which alone somehow constitute the whole of realty and thought.
Vico's attempt to try to speak to the wealth of contributing factors and how they grow over time through cause and effect relations is very inspiring. He cover's this in terms of linguistics, he looks into the politics of social interactions over time, he inspects changes in law, and how the myths and religions have altered over time. Things for Vico do also come from axioms- like the rationalists- that he sets forth in the opening, but all these lead to a great deal of twists and turns. Knotting themselves together in a web of social meanings.
The book was always pitched to me as showing how it can be very erroneous to judge the past and the peoples in it purely by our current day mindset and ideas. We need to attempt to situate things withing their true contexts and use scholarship to really pour over the histories and documents that have been left behind. Looking always for consistencies, contradictions, and connections that will speak to a more realistic portrait regardless of whether it seems in line with what we know or feel about human beings.
Again, this seems a noble goal. I think it is accomplished quite well considering the time and place of its author. I think the importance of the work on other fields within what is now the Social Sciences makes the book alone worth reading, though I will also be very interested in seeing how much he seems to have actually gotten wrong. There has been progress in the few centuries past. There will continue to be more. What will people think of our times and ideas?
April 4, 2014
So this book is in turns repetitive, dogmatic, and insightful. Somehow its insistence on being "systematic", and finding these grand parallels everywhere, gets in the way of the more inquisitive (and, admittedly speculative) moments. The etymological musings, the notion of a "mental dictionary" and the development story about language and culture were certainly thought-provoking though at times a bit silly and forced. The final two books seemed largely either repetitive or simply an affirmation of Vico's own place in history. The "Discovery of the True Homer" is what led meto read this book in he first place. Almost all of the observations I made above apply to it in miniature. Still, the mythic view of Homer it espouses does have defenders in contemporary scholarship, which is usually a good thing.
If you're reading this bc of James Joyce, you'll find a lot that is helpful. You'll get beyond just this really shallow idea that Joyce used Vico's ideas of historical cycles, and see all sorts of other parallels between Vico and both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake on nearly every page.
That said, the argument on its own has a forced and idiosyncratic quality that's hard to get past.
If you're reading this bc of James Joyce, you'll find a lot that is helpful. You'll get beyond just this really shallow idea that Joyce used Vico's ideas of historical cycles, and see all sorts of other parallels between Vico and both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake on nearly every page.
That said, the argument on its own has a forced and idiosyncratic quality that's hard to get past.
February 23, 2019
Sprawling, incongruous, cyclical, even at times incoherent, Giambattista Vico's monumental New Science is, nevertheless, the most significant philological account on the history of law, civilization, religion, and mythology prior to the nineteenth century. Vico is, to be sure, an inconsistent writer: oft-repeated words, phrases, even whole ideas pervade the work with an annoying level of persistence (if I read "just like the Cyclops were the original fathers" I was going to hurl my book across the room!); but his intricate mind, philological erudition, and classical mastery allow him to make propositions regarding ancient Greece and Rome, the quest for the "true Homer," and other matters of political philosophy with great skill and capacity.
Perhaps he won't interest people outside of the Classics (and their early modern reception), but I find Vico a helpful companion alongside theorists of religion, like Mircea Eliade or Victor Turner. There are some intersections between religion and politics that he uncovers in Rome here that readers interested in the history of religion will find especially intriguing!
Perhaps he won't interest people outside of the Classics (and their early modern reception), but I find Vico a helpful companion alongside theorists of religion, like Mircea Eliade or Victor Turner. There are some intersections between religion and politics that he uncovers in Rome here that readers interested in the history of religion will find especially intriguing!
September 10, 2016
Из-под пера (гусиного, не иначе) Вико выходит очень уютный мир, понятный и разложенный по полочкам. Его любовь к систематизации чарует. Но это и объяснимо - будучи лириком, он так пытается попросту не сойти с ума от непостижимости того, что ему предшествовало и что его окружает. А рехнуться было с чего. Недаром он стоит особняком в культурном пейзаже своего времени - как метафизик, антирационалист и, вообще говоря, предтеча постмодернизма. Ироничен он донельзя - взять, к примеру, параграф 301 про сыновей Ноя.
Его "принципы" - вершина здравомыслия в осмыслении истории. Вико - очень здравый циник, весьма недовольный и уровнем развития мышления у своих соотечественников, и качеством мысли предшественников. Самое ценное и показательное у него (для меня и в этот раз, по крайней мере) - что в числе инструментов анализа и описания у него фигурируют такие понятия, как здравый смысл, гармония, воображение, поэтическая мудрость и проч. Философ и филолог в его фигуре нерасторжимы. Очень освежает.
Его "принципы" - вершина здравомыслия в осмыслении истории. Вико - очень здравый циник, весьма недовольный и уровнем развития мышления у своих соотечественников, и качеством мысли предшественников. Самое ценное и показательное у него (для меня и в этот раз, по крайней мере) - что в числе инструментов анализа и описания у него фигурируют такие понятия, как здравый смысл, гармония, воображение, поэтическая мудрость и проч. Философ и филолог в его фигуре нерасторжимы. Очень освежает.
March 5, 2012
stunning. it documents and challenges the conventionaly view of history as we may have been taught. it is very religious in places and some of the theories are a bit bizarre but this is a really rich book and full of juicy bits of information. the stufy of words and why certain things were called what they were (roman and greek origins of words mainly) fascinated me enormously. it reminded me of a more eloquent and arty and slightly left field version of jared diamonds guns, germs and steel. it talks about the origins of man and how mankind developed from the huntergatherer style existence to a more civilised one. the summary chapter is a perfect summary of the book which you can read in under 10 minutes and get the jist of the book. it is a slightly boring in a few places but only a few. highly recommend this book.
February 11, 2021
I don't want to get into reviewing books I read for my degree, but I had to allow this one because of how mad it is.
I was torn between giving this 1* or 5* because it is just pure bat shit crazy. Essentially, Vico wants to counteract the protestant natural law tradition, but accepts that they've moved philosophy beyond Catholic aristotelian scholasticism. So this is his attempt to create a natural law history of the world beginning with God's catholic providence.
There is sex, there are giants who shrink in the rain and go into caves to have sex, there are mirrors which allow homer to write poetry, there are native americans etc etc. This book is fucking crazy and so much fun, all of it nonsense.
If vico were alive today, he would surely be a Trump staffer/Prager U director
I was torn between giving this 1* or 5* because it is just pure bat shit crazy. Essentially, Vico wants to counteract the protestant natural law tradition, but accepts that they've moved philosophy beyond Catholic aristotelian scholasticism. So this is his attempt to create a natural law history of the world beginning with God's catholic providence.
There is sex, there are giants who shrink in the rain and go into caves to have sex, there are mirrors which allow homer to write poetry, there are native americans etc etc. This book is fucking crazy and so much fun, all of it nonsense.
If vico were alive today, he would surely be a Trump staffer/Prager U director
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