This is the third and last of a brief sequnce of posts widely dispersed over time on three major texts, which I taught during the academic year that has just passed. The first was on the Essays of Montaigne and the second was on Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws. These are rather different cases, so that wit Montaigne it is a case of Montaigne not getting adequate attention as a major figure in the history of philosophy, as well as the attention he gets as a Renaissance literary figure and humanist. In the case of Montesquieu, the attention he get is appropriately directed at his contributions to political, social, legal, and historical thought, but despite his foundational role in all these areas he looks a bit second division, and marginal, a bit condescended to as an antiquarian of his time, and the amount of attention he gets is I believe believe below par given the level of his contributions.
What I am discussing is this post is the New Science of Giambattista Vico. It makes a slightly ironic sequel to the post on Montesquieu, since there is case for saying that Montesquieu, along with Rousseau, plagiarised Vico, particularly considering that both spent enough time in Italy that they must have had conversations about the distinguished Professor in Naples, who was at least well known in the peninsula in his own lifetime.
At least there is enough, in both Montesquieu and Rousseau, that echoes points and arguments already made in Vico, without acknowledgement that these days they would be in danger of extreme censure for plagiarism and at the very least under extreme pressure to insert acknowledgements into their publications that Vico had already covered much of the same ground.
As far as I know there is no proof of plagiarism or deliberate non-acknowledgement of similar and earlier elements in Vico's work. It was also a time conceptions we are now used to of intellectual property, copyright, and authorial originality were not so strong, and there was not the kind of organised academic publishing industry practice there are now. Not only were institutional academic expectations not as they are now, Montesquieu and Rousseau did not pursue academic careers.
We must of course acknowledge that influence can be best understood as a simplifying label for a diffuse process of transmission beyond relations between a few isolated major texts. Still, in the end, it's always good to remember how much of Enlightenment work on history, law, language, literature, and political institutions, was anticipated by Vico. Though not so significant as a thinker about metaphysics nature, and theology, the ways he connects those areas with ideas about history through human consciousness, along with his discussion about Cartesian metaphysics, is well worth studying.
It can be found in the New Science, but in a more focused way in On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians Unearthed from the Origins of the Latin Language. As the latter text was published in Latin at a time when the educated in Christian Europe and off-shoot states generally read Latin, it was at least some of the time ahead of the New Science in spreading thd direct influence of Vico's thought.
Its title gives an idea of Vico's general project, which was to use philology as as basis of the study of history and the study of the history of philosophy, since it is the knowledge of languages and texts that shows us how concepts emerge and develop. The philological-historical enterprise is particularly necessary in dealing with early texts before philosophy, and related intellectual enterprises emerged and autonomous relatively discrete areas, that is in dealing with texts full of myth, poetry and tradition.
Vico thought the study of Homer was at the centre of understanding thought before the Athenian Golden Age, and his work on Homer in the New Science sees to me enough to make that text the greatest work of philosophy and literature there has even been. Of course some it seems quaint now, but it opened up the idea that Homer was an isolated creative genius, but just the name for a collective historical process across Greece in which poetry-song was integrated in the epic we know.
Whether or not one believes that a single great poet produced the epics as we know then know, no one would deny that they absorb material going back to the Greek Bronze Age (a period ending about 1 100 BCE) upto the eight century BCE, which Vico thought was enough to cover all the essential steps of human history from a 'divine' age of pre-urban communities through the barbaric heroic-aristocratic age at the centre of the Homeric epics, to a more human democratic world in which poetic universals became the material of philosophy as abstract universals.
One blog post does not allow further elaboration of Vico's thinking, but it is worth turning to his extraordinary influence, even more extraordinary given that he notably absent from university courses and text book type material. He was certainly read by Jacobi and Herder, and known at least second hand to other German thinkers and writers of that very creative time. He was a major point of reference for Giuseppe Mazzini, the principle thinker and propagandist behind the Italian Risorgimento. He was translated into French by Jules Michelet, one of the most influential historians of the nineteenth century.
Karl Marx certainly had some awareness of Vico's ideas and drew the attention of others to them. Victor Cousin, the architect of high school teaching of philosophy in nineteenth century France was familiar with Vico. Benedetto Croce, the major Idealist Italian philosopher of the early twentieth century, with a major international reputation in his own lifetime, was a Vico advocate. The cases of Michelet, Cousin, Mazzini (whose political essays used to be influential in Italy and were translated into English), and Croce are cases of writers who are not greatly read now, but that is not a reason to ignore their part in the history of the discourses to which they contributed.
Anyway, we can certainly say that Vico was taken up by thinkers and writers who are still at the forefront. Apart from Marx, there is the literary criticism of Eric Auerbach, and that of Edward Said, whose interest in Vico is partly through Auerbach. In philosophy, there are the brief but highly significant comments of Derrida and Foucault (sorry to just label him as a philosopher, but a necessary simplification here), which suggest they situate ideas about language, history, institutions and Enlightenment, in Viconian ways, and the comparatively elaborated comments of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Commentary on Vico is nevertheless still largely to be found in the context of Italian studies and the history of rhetoric and not much of it comes from philosophy departments. The commentary from outside institutional philosophy is of course still valuable, philosophically, and in other ways, but until more philosophers take up Vico, it is still sadly the case that he is an under-recognised giant.
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