Table Of ContentVICO’S
NEW SCIENCE
A PHILOSOPHICAL COMMENTARY
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se Donald Phillip Verene
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Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest
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Copyright © 2015 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review,
this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any
form without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage
House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.
First published 2015 by Cornell University Press
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Verene, Donald Phillip, 1937– author.
Vico’s New science : a philosophical commentary /
Donald Phillip Verene.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-5017-0016-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Vico, Giambattista, 1668–1744. Principi di una scienza
nuova. I. Title.
B3581.P73V49 2015
.de 195—dc23 2015017335
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r sthg Cresopronneslli bUlen siuveprpsliiteyr sP arnesds mstraitveersi atlos tuos et heen vfuirlolensmt eexntteanllty
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1 Cover illustration: Dame Metaphysic seated on the celestial
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Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest
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Contents
Preface ix
Bibliographical Note xvii
Abbreviations and Notes on Citations xxi
Part One: G eneralities Concerning
the New Science
1. Sense and Method of the New Science 3
2. Genesis of the New Science 10
3. Structure of the New Science 18
Part Two: Idea of the Work
Introduction 29
4. Genesis of the Frontispiece 32
5. Structure of the Frontispiece 40
.d Part Three: Establishment of Principles
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se Introduction 53
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gir llA 6. Chronological Table 56
.sse 7. Elements 71
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ytisre 8. Principles 89
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iryp 10. Tree of Poetic Wisdom 110
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11. Poetic Metaphysics 119
12. Poetic Logic 128
Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest
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viii Contents
13. Poetic Morals, Economy, and Politics 140
14. Poetic Sciences 151
Part Five: Discovery of the True Homer
Introduction 169
15. Search for the True Homer 172
16. Discovery of the True Homer 181
Part Six: Course and Recourse
of the Nations
Introduction 191
17. Threefold Structure of the
Course of the Nations 195
18. Recourse of the Nations 210
Part Seven: Conclusion of the Work
19. On an Eternal Natural Republic 221
Notes 239
Glossary of Italian Terms 251
Key to English Equivalents 271
Chronological Summary of Vico’s Life and Principal Works:
Historical, Philosophical, and Juridical 273
.d
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vrese Some Works of Secondary Literature on Vico 275
r sth
gir llA Index of Names 279
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Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest
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Preface
In the last decades of the twentieth century
and the first years of the twenty-first, scholars have witnessed a renaissance
in the study of the ideas and writings of Giambattista Vico unequalled by
the amount of attention given his thought since the definitive edition of his
New Science appeared in 1744.
Over half a century after Vico’s death, the use of his doctrines by the
Italian historian Vincenzo Cuoco provided the groundwork for Vico to
become more than a figure in the tradition of the Neapolitan jurisconsults.
The New Science became the book of the Risorgimento that inspired Italian
patriots, who went abroad, carrying forth Vico’s concept of nation and the
common nature of the nations, bringing international attention to Vico.
The best known of these patriotic figures is the novelist, poet, and critic Ugo
Foscolo. Another was Gioacchino de’ Prati, who brought the New Science to
the attention of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Coleridge wrote to Prati: “I am more and more delighted with G. B. Vico,”
and Coleridge, like many others who discovered Vico during their career, found
that the New Science contained, ahead of him, many ideas he had come to hold,
.d
evre especially concerning language, history, and human knowledge. Coleridge’s first
ser sth mention of Vico is in his Theory of Life, in a quotation borrowed from Jacobi,
g who had been loaned a copy of the New Science by Goethe, who had received
ir llA .sserP iotf a Vs iac og iifst cwohninlee citne dN toap Hlees rodner ,h wis hIota llieaanr nteradv eolfs .V Eicaorl ibeer,f ionr eG werrmitianngy h, aisw faarmenoeusss
ytisre Ideas toward the Philosophy of the History of Mankind. Herder first learned of
vin Vico through a letter he received from his mentor, Hamann, “the Mage of the
U
llen North,” who came across Vico while pursuing the topic of political economy.
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.6 Beyond the acclaim received in the Risorgimento, sustained international
1
02 scholarly attention to the New Science was given by Victor Cousin and Jules
©
th Michelet, the French nineteenth-century historians and philosophers of his-
g
iryp tory, and in the early twentieth century by Benedetto Croce, in his system
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of philosophical idealism and aesthetics, and later by James Joyce, by promi-
nently using a version of Vico’s cycles of ideal eternal history as a trellis on
ix
Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest
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x PrefaCe
which to arrange Finnegans Wake. Michelet wrote: “From 1824 on, I was
seized by a frenzy caught from Vico, an incredible intoxication with his great
historical principle.” Joyce, when asked about the New Science by the Dan-
ish writer Tom Kristensen, replied: “I don’t believe in any science, but my
imagination grows when I read Vico as it doesn’t when I read Freud or Jung.”
In the current renaissance of Vico studies, modern translations of the New
Science have appeared in English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese,
Hebrew, Turkish, and Bulgarian; and in Italy, new, critical editions of Vico’s
works have appeared for some years and continue to appear. Facsimile edi-
tions and concordances have been published of Vico’s first version of the
New Science (1725) and of the second version (1744). Modern critical edi-
tions of the 1730 and 1744 texts have also been published. The reader seek-
ing literature on Vico will find more pages than any but the most dedicated
scholar can read, including an array, in the major European languages, of
single-authored works interpreting Vico’s thought in terms of many, diverse
themes.
Missing from this embarrassment of riches is a section-by-section com-
mentary that can take the philosophically oriented reader through the genesis
and structure of the New Science. What follows is such a commentary. My
intent is to bring to light Vico’s principal ideas in the philosophy of history,
philosophy of mythology, and philosophy of law and society, and to do so
in a manner that may aid the potential reader simply to see what much of
the text says and how it says it, with some attention to Vico’s sources and
to those figures and doctrines he opposes. My intention, in commenting on
any part of the work, is not to avoid interpretation. My aim is to go through
Vico’s text as he wrote it, to bring forth its fundamental points as I see them,
.d
evre without the attempt to prove, improve, or criticize what is said.
ser sth Although the subtitle of this work designates it as a philosophical com-
g mentary, I wish to emphasize that I do not regard philosophy as separate
ir llA .sserP forfo mrh eotro rainc ,o apnpdo nheen ta popf rrohaecthoerdic .p Vhiicloos owpahsi tcharl oaus gwhoelul t ahs ish cisatroereirc aal pirsosufeess soinr
ytisre rhetorical terms. By this I mean he held, with Aristotle, that rhetoric is the
vin counterpart of dialectic, and he understood that above all we make our world
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llen through our power of speech to form it. It is within this world so formed
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.6 that philosophy can arise and on which it continues to depend.
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02 The one modern and original thinker influenced by Vico who has main-
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th tained this interconnection between rhetoric and philosophy is Ernesto
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iryp Grassi, principally in his small book Rhetoric as Philosophy. As Grassi shows,
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the humanist tradition from the Renaissance through Vico and beyond has
never understood metaphysical or moral philosophy as simply an extension
Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest
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PrefaCe xi
of the logical power of language. Instead, they require the principles of poetic
and rhetorical speech that surround philosophical thought and give it agility
and life as well as its access to the distinctively human.
The reader who opens the New Science for the first time finds in the table
of contents an array of topics that is fascinating in itself, but bewildering as
to their combined significance: poetic wisdom; the universal flood; giants;
poetic metaphysics; poetic logic; monsters; metamorphoses; poetic characters;
hieroglyphics; family arms; metals and money; the natural law of the gentes;
rhythm, song, and verse; the logic of the learned; poetic economy; vulgar
virtues; religion and matrimony; families and famuli; cities; the first republics;
origins of the census and the treasury; Roman assemblies; divine providence;
the question of popular liberty instituted by Junius Brutus; heroic customs;
poetic physics; heroic sentences; the coming of Aeneas to Italy; the search for
the true Homer; divine judgments; duels and reprisals; an eternal natural royal
law; refutation of the political theory of Jean Bodin; punishments and wars;
barbaric history; and the idea of an eternal natural republic.
It is perhaps comparable to entering the contents of Hegel’s Phenomenology
of Spirit, but even in that complicated work, with some initial concentration
a philosophically experienced reader can come to see an intellectual pattern.
Also perhaps comparable are the contents of works of the Italian Renaissance,
such as the headings of Polydore Vergil’s On Discovery—although these head-
ings are myriad, one sees that they signify types of discovery or invention;
or the complicated internal titles of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the
Pagan Gods—but one knows at least that these are all instances of deities and
their deeds. With Vico’s text, however, one knows only that, somehow, these
are the contents of what is claimed to be a new science, unlike any that one
.d
evre can imagine, and it concerns the common nature of the nations. But what
ser sth nations? And what is it they have in common?
g The only choice the reader has is to begin reading, with the promise
ir llA .sserP Vdeipcoic tmeda kiens —thteh eant gthraev iidnega ooff tthhee fwroonrkti swpiiellc eb.e Texhpe lamineeadn itnhgr ooufg thh eth we oitrekm iss
ytisre cast immediately in a procedure the reader is not likely to have encountered
vin before, except, perhaps, in terms of Rousseau’s remarks on the frontispiece of
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llen his First Discourse. But Rousseau’s remarks are brief and fairly clear. Or the
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.6 reader may recall the symbolic frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan, which in-
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02 corporates the sentence on the power of the Leviathan from the book of Job
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th of the Latin Vulgate. The first sentence of the New Science refers the reader
g
iryp to the now obscure first-century Tablet of Cebes, as an analog for approaching
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the meaning of the frontispiece, saying that he will present a table of civil
things, as Cebes the Theban presented a table of morals. Thus the reader is
Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest
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xii PrefaCe
immediately directed to another work that must be understood in order to
understand Vico’s work. The potential reader encounters difficulty even in
crossing the threshold of the New Science.
Vico distinguishes between two types of potential readers of his work. He
states this distinction most clearly in a fragment, “To the Equable Readers,”
that survives from a first draft of his Universal Law, the precursor to the New
Science. (For a translation of this fragment, see the Bayer and Verene volume
cited in the bibliographical note.) He says he would not consider anyone
worthy of the name “reader” who would not have read his work from be-
ginning to end in a continuous and methodical manner. One is reminded
of Hegel’s dismissal, at the end of his preface to the Phenomenology, of those
readers who would make pronouncements on works after having read only
prefaces or first paragraphs or reviews of them.
In the commiato, or postface, of Vico’s first published book, On the Study
Methods of Our Time (1709), Vico claims that wisdom is a knowledge of the
whole, and that “the whole is really the flower of wisdom.” He is echoing
Cicero’s definition—and Varro’s—that wisdom is a knowledge of things di-
vine and human, joined with Quintilian’s principle that eloquence is speak-
ing completely on a subject. To comprehend Vico’s thought the reader must
meditate his work as a whole. In the conclusion to his autobiography, Vico
emphasizes that in his teaching he followed the humanist conception of
eloquence as “la sapienza che parla,” eloquence understood as “wisdom speak-
ing.” He says further, regarding his approach to teaching, that “others were
concerned with the various parts of knowledge, but he strove to teach it as
an integral whole in which each part accords with every other and gets its
meaning from the whole.”
.d
evre In the Universal Law fragment, Vico claims that the two types of readers
ser sth of his work can be “an erudite youth” or “a person most expert in every
g kind of erudition.” He instructs the youthful reader to ask, above all, if he
ir llA .sserP hsuacs hs tausd mieedt acpahreyfsuicllsy, tthheeo lsougbyj,e mctso raanl da nthd ec imvial icnu astuotmhosr, sl atnhgaut ahgies, whiostrokr ytr, eaantds,
ytisre Roman jurisprudence. Should the youthful reader not have engaged in such
vin preparation by reading the essential books, the reader has no right to attribute
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llen to Vico any difficulties in the comprehension of his work: “I ask you to be
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.6 careful not to attribute darkness and fogginess to me as a defect characteristic
1
02 of my manner of writing.” The youthful reader must look first to his own
©
th inadequacies before attributing any difficulties of comprehension to Vico.
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iryp At the end of the introduction to the Idea of the Work in the 1730 edition
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of the New Science (a passage not included in the 1744 edition), Vico expands
his instructions to the young reader who may wish to profit from his new
Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest
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PrefaCe xiii
science. He addresses the young reader directly, by enumerating seven points
to consider. First, he says, the reader must be able to think abstractly and en-
gage in pure mental activity, independent of everything corporeal and without
resorting to the imagination. Second, to be able to reason in accordance with
the geometric method the work employs, to consider whether certain prem-
ises are true and to establish what may be deduced from them. Third, to realize
that the work presupposes a wide-ranging body of knowledge and scholarship
(what Vico defines in the New Science as philology). Fourth, the reader will
need a comprehensive mind, that is, one that can bring together the concep-
tual meanings of philosophy with the historical analyses of philology, and to
grasp these as a totality. Fifth, the reader will need a strong acuity of mind to
grasp the many and diverse discoveries that are presented in this new science.
Sixth, because these discoveries are wholly new, the reader must be prepared to
read the work three times. Seventh, the reader will need to make the science,
in a sense, for himself, in order ultimately to achieve its coherence and truth.
Vico’s sixth instruction—to read the work three times—reflects the pro-
gram of reading he devised for himself, in his autodidactic attempt to master
the Latin writers against the Tuscans. As he reports this in his autobiography:
“On successive days he would study Cicero side by side with Boccaccio,
Virgil with Dante, and Horace with Petrarca.” He read these “always three
times each on the following plan: the first time to grasp each composition as
a whole, the second to note the transitions and sequence of things, the third
in greater detail to collect the fine turns of thought and expression.” This
program of reading is based on the principles of composition expressed by
both Cicero and Quintilian: inventio, the amassing of materials; dispositio, their
arrangement; and elocutio, their formulation in language. The three phases of
.d
evre reading any work correspond to the three phases necessary to the composi-
ser sth tion of any work. Only on this threefold method of meditating the work can
g one count oneself a true reader of it.
ir llA .sserP ThVis irceoa’ds egrr emaateys tb eccoonmceer nlo, sIt athnidn ktu, rins wawitahy tfhroem y otuhne gw bourkt , parnedp aitr eids irne asduecrh.
ytisre readers that the future of the work truly lies. The reader “expert in every
vin kind of erudition” is the potential critic. Vico says he asks such a reader “to
U
llen consider only these two things: first, if I have decreed erroneous principles,
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.6 second, if I have deduced blasphemous conclusions from such principles.”
1
02 This statement is not unlike that of Hugo Grotius, whom Vico both criti-
©
th cizes and admires, in concluding his “preliminary discourse” introducing his
g
iryp Law of War and Peace, where Grotius says: “If anything has here been said by
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me inconsistent with piety, with good morals, with Holy Scripture and the
Christian Church, or with any aspect of truth, let it be as if unsaid.”
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xiv PrefaCe
Vico further points out that a reader would not be equable if he were to
reject his work simply because it draws new conclusions and contains new
discoveries not in accord with those that occur in common use. He says that
should one decide to attack his claims, it is not enough simply to criticize
what is said. Rather, the critic is obliged “to put together in one system,
more easily and more happily by a different method, more truth than I have
worked out in the universal history of the gentes—in poetry, in philology,
in moral and civil doctrine conforming in an absolute manner to Christian
jurisprudence; only in this way will you show that my system itself falls and
crumbles.” Vico thus removes the critic from a privileged position of strik-
ing here and there at points in his work or formulating various objections
by extracting quotations from its various parts. The true critic must take up
Vico’s cause and perfect it in a better version.
Vico very much takes this approach himself, in his attack on the inadequa-
cies of the seventeenth-century natural-law theorists Grotius, Samuel Pufen-
dorf, and John Selden. He criticizes their systems of natural law throughout
the New Science, but he does so while presenting a more adequate account of
the natural law of the gentes, grounding it in a doctrine of providence as gov-
erning the historical life of the nations. He rejects the view of Polybius, that
there could be a society solely of philosophers or knowers, but in so doing
he presents a new theory of the origin of society based on three fundamental
principles of humanity—religion, marriage, and burial.
In the end, Vico is a Socratic thinker in the sense that he regards thought as
properly conducted in the agora, not as a private activity of the study. Socrates
is the figure to whom he compares himself in the last lines of his autobiogra-
phy. Although he strongly reacts to unfair criticisms of his work, such as in his
.d
evre defense of the New Science of 1725 in the text known as Vici Vindiciae, when
ser sth attacked by a false and malicious book notice of it placed in the prestigious
g journal Leipzig Acta Eruditorum, he, as a great thinker, sees human knowledge
ir llA .sserP a(Fs orre qa utirrainnsgla ttihoen coofm thmeu Vniictiy V oinfd siccihaeo, lsaeres tahceti nBga yienr athned RVeerpeunbel ivco loufm Lee tctietersd.
ytisre in the bibliographical note.) Vico is dedicated to a standard of excellence in
vin thought and speech to which he wishes to hold not only himself but others
U
llen who would claim to be custodians of human knowledge. As he states, in what
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.6 became the final proclamation of his career, his short address to the Academy
1
02 of Oziosi (1737): “I hold the opinion that if eloquence does not regain the
©
th luster of the Latins and Greeks in our time, when our sciences have made
g
iryp progress equal to and perhaps greater than theirs, it will be because the sci-
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ences are taught completely stripped of every badge of eloquence.”
His objection to both the Stoics and the Epicureans is that they advocate a
doctrine of solitaries, of a wisdom that is not sufficiently tied to the Socratic
Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico's "New Science" : A Philosophical Commentary, Cornell University Press, 2016. ProQuest
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