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

Knowledge of Things Human and Divine

True wisdom, then, should teach the knowledge of divine things in order to conduct human things to the highest good. —New Science a wise and letters play of all you can ceive —Finnegans Wake

DONALD PHILLIP VERENE

Knowledge of Things Human and Divine VICO’S NEW SCIENCE AND F I N N E G A N S WA K E

Yale University Press New Haven & London

Copyright ∫ 2003 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Set in Sabon type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Verene, Donald Phillip, 1937– Knowledge of things human and divine : Vico’s new science and Finnegans wake / Donald Phillip Verene. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-300-09958-4 (alk. paper) 1. Vico, Giambattista, 1668–1744. Principi di una scienza nuova. 2. Myth. 3. Philosophy. 4. Social sciences. I. Title. B3581.P73V47 2003 195—dc21 2003050052 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Preface vii List of Abbreviations xiii Part I. A Portrait of Vico 1.

The Joycean Vico: A New Key 3

2.

The Life of Vico: A Career in Naples 40 Part II. Vico’s Voyage

3.

The New Art of Pedagogy: Wisdom Speaking 69

4.

The Most Ancient Wisdom: Metaphysics 96

5.

The Universal Law: Jurisprudence 119 Part III. Vico’s Science

6.

The New Science: The Life of Nations 145

vi

Contents

Postface 204 Chronology 207 Notes 221 Bibliography 241 Index 255 Illustrations follow page 66

Preface

from Atlanta to Oconee —FW 140.35 This book takes the reader through the career and works of Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) from a new viewpoint. Two major figures introduced Vico to the twentieth century—Benedetto Croce and James Joyce. From the mid-twentieth century on there was a growing desire to free Vico from the philosophical idealism of Croce, who in the early part of the century had presented Vico as the Italian Hegel. In the English-speaking world a great step was taken in this new direction by Isaiah Berlin in lectures he gave to the Italian Institute in London in 1957 and 1958, in which he focused attention on Vico’s unique conceptions of knowledge and imagination. In Italian thought, the similar concern to conceive of ‘‘Vico without Hegel’’ was led by Pietro Piovani in Vico’s city of Naples. The challenge was not to Croce’s erudition in Vico’s texts but to the Crocean merging of Vico’s voice with another, not allowing Vico to speak for himself. The large international literature that developed from a wide range of scholars during the last half of the twentieth century has shown Vico to be an original thinker whose voice has echoes in all the contemporary fields of the humanities and social thought. This literature oscillates between two approaches:

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understanding Vico as a figure in intellectual history, examining his sources and influences, and understanding him in philosophical terms, critically assessing Vico’s ideas themselves. There is a third Vico that neither of these two approaches captures. This is the Vico discovered by James Joyce and made the central figure of his great work Finnegans Wake (FW ). Joyce reminds us that Vico is a human actuality, a certain spirit to be awakened and brought to life. Through this Vico we are able to see and hear the workings of the human world in a very lively way. Joyce points us toward a unique Vico, a thinker of the first magnitude from whom we can no more steal a line than we can steal the club of Hercules. From this perspective, Vico is more than just another figure in the history of ideas and more than just another author of a philosophical system. Joyceans, with some exceptions, have given only limited attention to Vico and the Vichianisms in Joyce, usually reporting that Joyce derives his cycles from Vico’s. Vichians, with some exceptions, know little about Joyce beyond the fact that he was one of a number of figures influenced by Vico. I first read Finnegans Wake in 1979 while writing Vico’s Science of Imagination in Florence, where I borrowed a copy from the British Institute Library. After pranzo, the full midday meal, I read a few pages of Joyce’s book of the dark before ‘‘feeling aslip’’ in my pisolino, my little nap, entering into my daytime ‘‘nightmaze,’’ to awake from it to the long Italian afternoon. I had no special interest in this experiment beyond a way of reading, in the afternoon, the most unusual book of the twentieth century while, in the morning, writing about the most unusual book of the eighteenth century. I was aware that Vico was a source for Joyce, but I had no grasp of the extent of the connection. Over the past two decades circumstances have forced Joyce on me as a way to approach Vico. One of these circumstances has been my attempt to confront the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, to comprehend philosophy as a kind of literature. Philosophy is, after all, an activity of language. From Joyce’s litter comes letter and from letter comes literature. From phaos, light, comes phantasia, imagination, and, in Vico’s terms, from phantasia comes philosophia. Neither philosophy nor literature is possible without imagination. Philosophy must go to school with the poets to discover its own beginnings in the myths from which culture itself begins. Philosophy and literature respond to these myths in their own ways and form their own identities as contraries within the wider history of culture. Another circumstance that led me to Joyce was my association with the Joyce scholar Richard Ellmann, who spent the last few years of his career at Emory. We had a number of luncheon conversations that revolved mostly around Plato’s quarrel with the poets and around Vico and Joyce. I recall well my first lunch with Ellmann, at a place near campus. He astonished me when

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he ordered a bowl of chili topped with raw onions and, to drink with it, a glass of scotch ‘‘with lots of ice.’’ It reminded me of Bloom’s gorgonzola sandwich at Davy Byrne’s Moral pub in Ulysses, on which I had heard Ellmann remark in a lecture given years before. He claimed, if I remember correctly, that Joyce has Bloom make the unusual choice of gorgonzola because it is a kind of cheese that is alive. My connection with Ellmann led me to consider finding a way to bring together Joyceans and Vichians from various countries to raise the question of the combination of Joyce and Vico. This became a reality when I discovered the interest in Joyce as well as in Vico of Vittore Branca, then director of the Giorgio Cini Foundation, located in the former cloister of the Palladian church on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, opposite the Piazzetta San Marco in Venice—a setting familiar throughout the world because of its depiction on Venetian postcards. The week-long gathering began there on Bloomsday (June the 16th) in 1985. Sixteen of the papers delivered by Joyceans and Vichians appeared on Bloomsday two years later, in a volume dedicated to Max Harold Fisch, cotranslator of Vico’s New Science into English, and to the memory of Richard Ellmann, who had died shortly before it appeared. Vico and Joyce remains the only book in print that critically confronts the two thinkers head-on. Many of the other one hundred or so papers that were presented have appeared, to the good of the subject, in various journals. The connection between Joyce and Vico became for me a sleeping giant, only partially awake, like Howth Castle and Environs at the beginning of Finnegans Wake. Another circumstance has been the Finnegans Wake reading group that has met for an hour each month, for more than a decade, in the Institute for Vico Studies at Emory, each time to read aloud and discuss one page of the Wake, casually chosen and circulated in advance. I have entered each session wondering what, if anything, might be said of the page in question, and each time, without fail, I have left with a new vision of its contents. Like all Joyce’s works, Finnegans Wake is set in Dublin. Ellmann reports that Joyce asked an American visitor, Julien Levy, to investigate whether there were any Dublins in the United States. Levy found there were three (I find there are today at least ten). Joyce was anxious to know if any lie on a river, as Dublin does on the Liffey. There was one, according to Levy—Dublin, Georgia. It lies on the Oconee River—the old world in the new. Dublin, Laurens County, Georgia, appears on the first page of Finnegans Wake ‘‘by the stream Oconee’’ (Gaelic, ochón, ‘‘alas’’). In a letter to his benefactor Harriet Shaw Weaver in 1926, in which he enclosed a key to the lines of a draft of the first page of his Work in Progress that was to become Finnegans Wake, Joyce claims the town’s motto is ‘‘Dou-

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bling all the time.’’ On the first page of Finnegans Wake Joyce writes: ‘‘Laurens County’s gorgios . . . went doublin their mumper all the time.’’ I write this in Atlanta, Georgia, 132 miles from Dublin. I am happy to report that the gorgios of Dublin have doubled their mumper, their n(m)umb(p)er, as there now stands, next to Dublin, on the other side of the Oconee, an East Dublin. Joyce’s significance for comprehending Vico has forced itself on me by such circumstances, yet this book is not about Joyce but about Vico, with Joyce’s words and insights as a guide. Although I am by profession an interpreter of Vico, I remain a Joyce amateur. I am only a reader of Joyce. In the circumstances of my own life I do not share with Joyce the fear of thunderstorms or dogs, nor did I, like Vico, fall on my head in childhood. Who can say what these lacks in the circumstances of my life may have prevented me from realizing. Joyce is the one figure who has introduced Vico to the twentieth century without attachment to any doctrine but his own. His intent was not to interpret Vico but to use Vico’s theories, as he said, ‘‘for all they are worth.’’ In so doing Joyce has presented Vico in a way that has never before been done. Of those who read Joyce, all read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, many read Ulysses, but almost no one reads Finnegans Wake. Joyce believed Finnegans Wake to be the greatest work of literature of the twentieth century, a work on the level of Dante and Homer that tells the story of the human race as written in the human soul. I believe the work that follows has two principal precursors in English writing on Vico: Robert Flint’s Vico, which was published as a volume in Blackwood’s Philosophical Classics for English Readers in 1884, and H. P. Adams’s Life and Writings of Giambattista Vico, which appeared in 1935. These are the only studies of Vico in English whose aim is to review all of Vico’s works in relation to his career. Flint’s is the first book on Vico in English, and Adams’s stands alone in the twentieth century as a work in English on all aspects of Vico. Joyce was interested to obtain a copy of Adams’s work, when it appeared, and Flint’s book is mentioned in Finnegans Wake, ‘‘a chip off the old Flint.’’ In 1973, Norman O. Brown published a small volume, Closing Time, the text of which is a series of juxtaposed quotations from the works of Vico and Joyce—‘‘two books get on top of each other.’’ In 1971, at a panel on Vico and Joyce at the Third International James Joyce Symposium in Trieste, the late Giorgio Tagliacozzo, founder of the Institute for Vico Studies, spoke of Joyce’s ‘‘animus naturaliter vichianus.’’ He argued that ‘‘Joyce was the sole intuitive forerunner of the speculative reinterpretation’’ of Vico’s thought. He claimed that Joyce, because of his background and natural inclination, saw in Vico’s work a form of thought, shared with Finnegans Wake, that embodied ‘‘all of

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the main aspects of humanity in general, and of each individual, in his past, present, and future.’’ The more recent work on Vico in English, most of it excellent, is specialist. It has focused largely on the New Science and on specific themes, such as Vico as an anti-Enlightenment figure, as an embodiment of the Italian humanist tradition, and as having a unique theory of knowledge and history. Flint’s and Adams’s works are general studies, offering solid academic approaches to Vico, but they do not go inside Vico and attempt to discover the inner form of his thought. An academic approach keeps Vico where he is and does not risk making him come alive again. In writing this work I have tried to combine Vico’s method of meditation and narration with Joyce’s method, as Joyce described it to Jacques Mercanton (Les heures de James Joyce): ‘‘Chance furnishes me what I need. I’m like a man who stumbles: my foot strikes something, I look down, and there is exactly what I’m in need of.’’ If Vico is part of the litter of Joyce’s great ‘‘Dirtdump’’ of history, he is everywhere in it. If Vico is resurrected as ‘‘Earwicker’’ in Finnegans Wake, as I think he is, can Vico also be philosophically resurrected, by putting back together the pieces in which he now lies in the diverse approaches comprising the current interest in his thought? Paul Hazard wrote, at the beginning of La pensée européenne au XVIIIe siècle: ‘‘If only Italy had lent an ear to Giambattista Vico, and if, as at the time of the Renaissance, she had served as guide to Europe, would not our intellectual destiny have been different? Our eighteenth-century ancestors would not have believed that all that was clear was true; but on the contrary that ‘clarity is the vice of human reason rather than its virtue,’ because a clear idea is a finished idea. They would not have believed that reason was our first faculty, but on the contrary that imagination was.’’ Might we now lend an ear to Vico and hear what he heard in history. Might we now ‘‘Hearhere!’’ and ‘‘herehear,’’ with Vico, the thunder of Jove that reverberates in Joyce’s hundredletter thunderwords, while at the same time producing a reliable view of the whole of Vico’s work. This means that much in the ensuing chapters must be straight discussions of Vico’s works, but I have tried to punctuate these discussions with some of Joyce’s insights, to invite the reader to keep a lively perspective. It is a tall order, and I doubt I have fully succeeded. I wish at least to offer the reader a book that is a pleasure to read, so that Joyce’s advice might prevail, ‘‘Enjombyourselves thurily!’’ This book is double-jointed. It may be read in two ways. The reader, perhaps not very familiar with Vico, may wish to concentrate on the career of Vico’s thought as it develops through the phases of his major works, and to pass lightly over many of the passages from Finnegans Wake. The reader more

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familiar with Vico’s work may wish to look closely at these passages, to see how Vico entered Joyce’s words and how they offer a lively glimpse of Vico, apart from the standard interpretations. Although the aim of Vico’s thought is the humanist ideal of wisdom speaking, Vico has never been easily understood. In a letter to the lawyer Francesco Saverio Estevan, Vico said his New Science was so poorly received by the intellectuals of Naples because it ‘‘turned upside down everything they erroneously remembered and had imagined about the principles of all divine and human erudition.’’ Ezra Pound wrote to Joyce on November 15, 1926, after Joyce had sent him the Shaun chapters of Finnegans Wake: ‘‘Nothing so far as I make out, nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clapp can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherization.’’ As Ellmann has influenced my grasp of Joyce, it was Ernesto Grassi, the late European philosopher and humanist, who most influenced my grasp of Vico. My conversations with Grassi over almost two decades, in Zürich and at his villa on Ischia off the Bay of Naples, allowed me to develop the implications of my interest in Vico’s ‘‘poetic wisdom’’ and the ‘‘imaginative universal.’’ Our discussions led to what became my book on Vico’s autobiography, The New Art of Autobiography (1991), especially the thesis that Vico used his own principles of poetry to make a fable of himself. The idea for the present book came from Charles Grench, then executive editor of Yale University Press, who, when we discussed the completion of my Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge (1997), suggested I go on to write a comprehensive book on Vico, putting together his life and thought. I also wish to thank Otto Bohlmann for his kind attention to the manuscript. This work was completed during a sabbatical leave from Emory University in 2002. I warmly thank Thora Bayer, Martine Brownley, Stephen Donatelli, Alexander Gungov, Ann Hartle, Donald Livingston, and William Willeford for reading all or parts of the manuscript and offering many valuable suggestions. I wish to thank Harold S. Berman, John D. Schaeffer, and Michael Sullivan for reading the chapter on Universal Law. I thank Andrea Battistini for his kind permission to translate the chronology from his edition of Vico’s Opere that appears at the end of this book, with some minor modifications and additions. Once again I thank my at-home editor and mistress of the Institute for Vico Studies, Molly Black Verene, for her advice and insights, among other things.

Abbreviations

Giambattista Vico A

FNS NS

The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico. Translated by Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983. The First New Science. Edited and translated by Leon Pompa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984.

Citations to FNS and NS are to the paragraph enumeration introduced in the Laterza edition and common to most Italian editions, for example, Vico’s Opere, 2 vols., ed. Andrea Battistini (Milan: Mondadori, 1990). Translations of Vico’s works are occasionally modified in relation to the originals.

James Joyce P

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Edited by Seamus Deane. New York: Penguin, 1993.

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xiv

U FW L SL

Abbreviations

Ulysses. Edited by Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Vintage, 1993. Finnegans Wake. Introduction by John Bishop. New York: Penguin, 1999. Letters of James Joyce. Vol. 1 edited by Stuart Gilbert. Vols. 2 and 3 edited by Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1966. Selected Letters of James Joyce. Edited by Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1975.

Citations to FW are to both page and line. Where it is evident that the citation refers to FW, only page and line numbers appear.

P A R T

A Portrait of Vico

I

1

The Joycean Vico: A New Key

Here are notes. There’s the key. One two three. —FW 236.11–12

The Descent into History In the sixth book of the Aeneid, Virgil describes the descent of Aeneas into the Underworld. Aeneas has left the coasts of Troy and, after suffering the tribulations and wanderings caused by the wrath of Juno, he arrives at the Greek settlement of Cumae on the western coast of Italy, just north of the Bay of Naples. On one of the two summits at Cumae is the temple of Apollo, built by Daedalus in gratitude for his safe flight from his imprisonment on Crete by King Minos. With his ships at anchor and his men ashore, Aeneas seeks out the cavern of the Sibyl, which could be approached through a passageway of the temple. He wishes to learn from the Sibyl, who is possessed by Apollo, where to find the entrance to the Underworld. He hopes to encounter the shade of his father, Anchises, former prince of Troy. Aeneas learns that the gate to the Underworld is not far but is surrounded by a deep wood. The Sibyl tells him that in order to pass beneath the earth he must secure a golden bough growing high in one of

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the trees. The bough is to be brought to the queen of Pluto, god of the Underworld. The Sibyl says the bough can be plucked with ease if Fate is calling Aeneas to make this descent; if not, no amount of force can break the bough. In despair of finding the single tree in the endless wood, Aeneas prays for guidance. A pair of doves, his mother’s birds, appear and lead him to the golden bough, which he plucks easily. He returns with it to the Sibyl, and she accompanies him as they cross the threshold into Pluto’s realm. Progressing through the scenes of the souls caught in Hades, including meeting his lost comrades and a sad encounter with Dido, who, on his departure from Carthage, committed suicide over her love for Aeneas, they arrive at the end of this fearful region. There Aeneas places the offering of the bough. They enter a land of joy and green fields. Here they encounter Anchises surveying the souls that are to pass into the light above. In this intermediate state, Anchises says, each suffers in accordance with the nature of his own spirit, the genius that accompanies a person throughout life and into the other world. Some good and magnificent souls, Anchises says, go on into the Elysian Fields, and with the turning of the great wheel of time, are reborn into the world of the living. Anchises shows Aeneas his future—how he will marry his Italian wife Lavinia and how from this union the Trojans will produce the race that will populate Latium and Italy. He shows him the figure in Elysium who will be his last-born and will rule Alba Longa and how from this noble line will come Romulus, who will found Rome. Having inspired Aeneas with the love of fame, Anchises tells him of the wars he must wage in order to achieve it. Then he passes the Sibyl and Aeneas through the gate, back to the upper world. Aeneas rejoins his ships, the cycle of his life before him. With the Sibyl’s guidance he has recapitulated his past and in the present learned his future. In the first canto of the Divine Comedy, Dante begins the description of his entrance into Inferno. Midway in the journey of his life, Dante finds himself in a dark wood. Unlike Aeneas, he has not entered this wood purposefully but has strayed into it, as if in a dream. Symbolically this dark wood is the error of our lives, and Dante must strive to find in it the true way of Christian salvation. In the darkness he comes upon a hill illuminated by divine light, but as he attempts to ascend toward the light he is overcome by fear. His way is blocked, first by a leopard, then by a lion, and finally and decisively by a she-wolf. Symbolically the three beasts foreshadow the regions of the Inferno, in reverse order. The she-wolf (lupa) represents the sins of the flesh and the appetites; the lion (leone) the sins of violence and ambition; and the leopard (lonza) the sins of malice and fraud, the worst sins that corrupt the spirit and destroy friendship and social order.

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With his way finally blocked by the ferocity of the she-wolf, Dante can only glimpse the light of the delectable mountain (il dilettoso monte). In his despair there appears to him the shade of Virgil. Dante recognizes him as the author of the Aeneid, whom he calls his master in poetic style. Virgil offers to be his guide and suggests that Dante may avoid the beasts and achieve entrance to St. Peter’s gate by an arduous and indirect route passing through the regions of Inferno and Purgatorio. Unlike Aeneas, who deliberately seeks out the Sibyl, Dante acquires Virgil’s guidance unexpectedly. Dante doubts whether, as a living man, he should attempt to enter such regions. He asks Virgil why he has come. Virgil explains that he has not arrived by chance but comes at the request of Beatrice who, because of her divine love, wishes Dante to be set on the true path. Virgil is a virtuous pagan; having been born before Christ, he cannot enter heaven. He warns Dante that he cannot escort him for the full journey. At the end of Purgatorio Virgil slips away, giving Dante into the hands of Beatrice to proceed to Paradiso. As he completes his progress through Paradiso, Dante has before him not the specific events of the second half of his life’s journey but a total wisdom of things human and divine. He has grasped the beginning and the end of all things. In the last canto of the Divine Comedy he says that what he has grasped will defy the powers of language to express. Compared to what he can remember of his journey, his words, he says, will fall even more short of capturing it than would those of an infant, who can utter only expressive sounds. In the first chapter of Finnegans Wake Joyce describes the fall of the primordial giant Finnegan and his awakening as the modern family man and pub owner, H. C. E., to be known as H. C. Earwicker and by other variations on his name, such as Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, Haroun Childeric Eggebert, Haveth Childers Everywhere, and Here Comes Everybody. Finnegans Wake is Joyce’s descent into the underworld of history. It is his book of the dark, his ‘‘experiment in interpreting ‘the dark night of the soul’ ’’ (SL 327). Finnegan’s fall is the fall of humanity into history, with its constant repetitions, its courses and recourses of events, and their meanings, which can be expressed only in double truths. Finnegan’s descent is an abrupt fall, without any clear purpose: an act of chance, an accident. He wakes to find himself, whoever he is, in the dream of history. As Stephen in Ulysses says, ‘‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’’ (U 28.377). For his guide, Virgil’s Aeneas sought out the Sibyl, at a place just north of Naples, and he ended his voyage at Lavinium. For his guide, Dante takes Virgil himself, who, on a voyage while finishing the Aeneid, contracted a

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fever at Megara, died, and was buried at Naples. For his guide in the descent into history, Joyce takes the Neapolitan founder of the philosophy of history, ‘‘Old Vico Roundpoint’’ (FW 260.14–15), who showed that history ‘‘moves in vicous cicles yet remews the same’’ (134.17–18). As Vico’s metaphysical assistant Joyce takes ‘‘Bruno Nolano’’ (of Nola, near Naples), who, Joyce says, held that ‘‘every power in nature must evolve an opposite in order to realise itself and opposition brings reunion etc etc’’ (L I:226). In Lo spaccio de la bestia trionfante (The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast), Giordano Bruno writes: ‘‘The beginning, the middle, and the end, the birth, the growth, and the perfection of all that we see, come from contraries, through contraries, into contraries, to contraries.’’∞ In Finnegans Wake, Bruno’s title appears as ‘‘Trionfante di bestia!’’ (305.15). This doctrine of coincidentia oppositorum in Bruno is influenced by Nicholas of Cusa, who is presented in Finnegans Wake in terms of both Vichian corso and ricorso and Brunian contraries: ‘‘Now let the centuple celves of my egourge as Micholas de Cusack calls them,—of all of whose I in my hereinafter of course by recourse demission me—by the coincidance of their contraries reamalgamerge in that indentity of undiscernibles’’ (49.33–50.1). We find also ‘‘the learned ignorants of the Cusanus philosophism’’ (163.16–17), a reference to Cusanus’s De docta ignorantia.≤ Joyce’s principle of contraries appears on the first page of the Wake as ‘‘twone’’ (3.12). Both Bruno and Vico appear in the first sentence of Finnegans Wake as ‘‘a commodius vicus of recirculation.’’ Vicus is Vico’s Latin name, signifying a road or lane (Italian, via, vicolo), also meaning a village, vicinity. In the Dublin suburb of Dalkey there is a ‘‘Vico Road,’’ which appears in Ulysses and in Finnegans Wake. A commode or chamberpot is a ‘‘jordan’’ (Italian, Giordano), Bruno’s first name. A jordan is originally a bottle of water brought from the Jordan River by Crusaders or pilgrims, later transferred to mean a pot or vessel used by physicians and alchemists. Two of Bruno’s sources are the alchemist Agrippa of Nettesheim and the alchemist and physician Paracelsus. In Ulysses there is ‘‘loosing her nightly waters on the jordan’’ (169.806–7). The first word of Finnegans Wake is ‘‘riverrun,’’ recalling the nearly one thousand identifications of rivers in Joyce’s work, including the Jordan. Vico is connected to the Jordan River by his first name, Giambattista (Giovanni Battista), which in English is John the Baptist, the saint who preached and baptized along the Jordan. Vico, having been born on June the 23d, was named and baptized on June the 24th, the day of St. John the Baptist. Joyce has his two resurrected, ‘‘recirculated’’ philosophers: Vico, who concludes the New Science with the assertion that its wisdom must carry with it the study of piety and who throughout the work repeats that his science is for

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the glory of our true religion, and Bruno, the heretic who was burned at the stake on February 17, 1600, in the Campo de’ Fiori at Rome. Joyce says: from ‘‘a jambebatiste to a brulobrulo!’’ (FW 117.11–12). We hear the sound of the burning faggots in Joyce’s play on Bruno’s name. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Stephen records his argument with his teacher, Father Ghezzi: ‘‘He said Bruno was a terrible heretic. I said he was terribly burned’’ (P, 271). In the Latin passage of the classbook section of Finnegans Wake Joyce writes ‘‘Jordani et Jambaptistae,’’ recirculating the first letters of his own name, J. J., as the first letter of both names, using the I of Latin in its elongated form of J (the double truth of Joyce, the Catholic non-believer). This Latin passage asks us to consider an explanation given in ‘‘the Roman language of the dead’’ of how ‘‘people of the past (or you dead)’’ and those ‘‘who are still to be born’’ are the stuff from which the ‘‘great races of humanity are to arise.’’ Joyce plays on the title of Vico’s De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (1710) (On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians): ‘‘Let us turn over in our minds the most ancient wisdom [antiquissimam . . . sapientiam] of both the priests Jordan and Jambaptista: that the whole universe flows safely like a river, that the same things which were poked ( fututa is obscene) from the heap of rubbish will again be inside the riverbed, that anything recognizes itself through some contrary, and finally that the whole river is enfolded in the rival banks along its sides’’ (FW 287.23–28).≥ Joyce merges Bruno, the philosopher of opposites, ‘‘the Nolan of the Calabashes’’ (336.33), with his opposite, ‘‘Saint Bruno’’ (336.35), the founder of the Carthusian monks and the name of a pipe tobacco. A calabash is a pipe with a curved stem, made from the calabash gourd for smoking tobacco. Joyce sets off into the dark world of history with his pious Saint John the Baptist, who as H. C. E. is a modern pub owner, pouring libations for his twelve clients, and his heretic Saint Bruno of the recirculating commode, who as the Nolan was terribly burned. When Aeneas enters the opened cave of the Underworld, Virgil says the ‘‘ground rumbled underfoot’’ (Aen., VI.256). As Dante begins his descent into the Inferno he says: ‘‘A heavy thunderclap broke the deep sleep in my head, so that I started like one who is awakened by force’’ (Canto 4.1–3.). As the primordial Finnegan falls on his head on the first page of Finnegans Wake, there is heard the first of Joyce’s ten hundred-letter thunderwords (the tenth has 101 letters), the longest words in the English language: ‘‘bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!’’ (3.15–17). Finnegan falls, Humpty-Dumpty fashion, ‘‘the great fall of the offwall . . . the humptyhillhead of humself. . . .’’ (3.18–20). In Vico’s New Science, the first

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appearance of Jove to the giganti, the protohumans who roam the great forests of the earth, is a thunderclap, and they invent the first act of speech by imitating its sound. In the invention of language they awake to their human nature and begin to found families and cities. On the first page of his autobiography Vico relates his own childhood fall from a ladder in his father’s bookshop, which alters his naturally cheerful temperament into an adult temperament of melancholy and acerbity, typical of the meditative thinker. The golden bough that Aeneas carries to allow his passage alive through the Underworld is terrestrial, as is the noise that accompanies his entrance—the rumbling of the earth. Dante’s golden bough is his initial glimpse at the dilettoso monte that alerts him to the light of divine love. The appearance of Beatrice assures him of this love, and like Anchises with Aeneas she will escort him through the regions of paradise, where he will grasp the beginning and the end. Dante’s device is the number three, the terza rima, the three parts to the comedy, each with thirty-three cantos, with each of their terzine consisting of thirty-three syllables—the three of the Trinity. Three is the number of movement. In philosophical dialectic the opposition of two terms is itself in opposition to a third, which is a term in a new opposition. In terza rima the first and third lines of a tercet are in opposition to the second, the last word of which establishes the rhyme for the first and third lines of the next. Joyce’s golden bough is Vico’s providence, the divine perceived or heard within history. Joyce transforms the three ages of gods, heroes, and humans of Vico’s ‘‘ideal eternal history’’ of corso and ricorso into a structure of four, with providentiality as the fourth—the stage of dissolution, heralding renewal at the end of a cycle. There is, for example, ‘‘thunderburst, ravishment, dissolution and providentiality’’ (362.30–31); or a play on Vico’s three principles of humanity—religion, marriage, and burial: ‘‘intermittences of sullemn fulminance, sollemn nuptialism, sallemn sepulture and providential divining, making possible and even inevitable’’ (599.12–13). In a letter to his benefactor, Harriet Shaw Weaver, in March 1928, he explains the line in the passages on ‘‘the Ondt and the Gracehoper’’—‘‘harry me, marry me, bury me, bind me’’ (414.31–32)—as a play on Vico’s terms: ‘‘harry me &c = Vico, thunderclap, marriage with auspices, burial of dead, providence’’ (SL 330). Joyce’s device is the number four. Instead of squaring the circle Joyce circles the square, ‘‘circling the square’’ (186.12). As he wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver: ‘‘No, it’s a wheel, I tell the world. And it’s all square’’ (L I:251). This is the shape of Joyce’s ‘‘vicociclometer’’ (FW 614.27). His model is not the Trinity but the four Gospels, ‘‘the ‘Mamma Lujah’ known to every schoolboy scandaller, be he Matty, Marky, Lukey or John-a-Donk’’ (614.28–30). Three is always taken up into four, either directly, as in Joyce’s absorption of Vico’s

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three ages, or by multiplication, in his use of twelve—the twelve apostles, the twelve customers at H. C. Earwicker’s pub, the twelve on the jury at Earwicker’s trial, with the four judges. Three opens time; four closes it. The two of the four always doubles itself. Joyce’s coincidences are ‘‘cocoincidences’’ (FW 597.1). Joyce’s truth is derived from Dublin. Truth is double truth—‘‘doublecressing twofold thruths’’ (288.3). ‘‘Would it be in twofold truth an untaken mispatriate’’ (490.15–16). Joyce is always ‘‘doublin existents’’ (578.14). The double of Dublin is Dublin, Georgia, ‘‘by the stream Oconee’’ (Oconee River) on the first page of Finnegans Wake.∂ The title, Finnegans Wake, is doubled by omitting the possessive apostrophe. By making it plural Joyce makes it everybody’s wake, the wake of all Finnegans. Because it calls out for an apostrophe it also has the sense of a singular possessive—the Finnegan in each person. ‘‘Finn’’ is fine (Italian ‘‘end’’), that doubles the n; ‘‘-egans’’ is ‘‘again,’’ made double with the final s. The end again. ‘‘Wake’’ is to be awake, alive, but is also the wake for the dead. The wake is the path left from movement, especially by a ship; it is also what is left over in its path—the flotsam and jetsam from the voyage, the heap of rubbish that is all of history and that will be enfolded in the banks of Joyce’s riverbed. Joyce’s ten imitations of the sound of thunder in Finnegans Wake are an expansion of Vico’s own imitation of the sound of thunder in the New Science. Vico says it is likely that ‘‘when wonder had been awakened in men by the first thunderbolts, these interjections of Jove should give birth to one produced by the human voice: pa!; and that this should then be doubled: pape!’’ (448). Joyce’s eighth thunderword starts with ‘‘Pappa,’’ a double that is then doubled, ‘‘Pappappappa,’’ and includes ‘‘whackfall’’ in its spelling. On the next lines occur ‘‘Fine again’’ and ‘‘Peace, O wiley!’’ (332.5–9) (Persse O’Reilly— perce-oreille, French ‘‘earwig,’’ Earwicker, Vico, cf. use of pape at FW 146.8). Joyce’s ‘‘doubling up’’ involves not just the double meanings of words but the doubling of letters in the spelling of words. The thunderword on the first page of the Wake begins with ‘‘bababa’’ (3.15). There are echoes of ‘‘pa’’ or ‘‘ba’’ in every one of the ten thunderwords (in the ninth, ‘‘da,’’ ‘‘damandamna’’) (414.19). Vico says that from ‘‘pa’’ comes Jove’s title as ‘‘father’’ of men and gods; it is also what the first heads of families were called. Vico is ‘‘Bappy’’ (277.18) (Hindustani, Bap, ‘‘Father,’’ Italian Babbo, ‘‘Daddy,’’ ‘‘Pappy,’’ Father Vico). Joyce’s golden bough of the thunderous sound of providence depends upon his mastery of the pun as the means for passing through the underworld of history. Finnegans Wake is Joyce’s ‘‘puntomine’’ (587.8). Any word always has

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a double meaning, each of which can further double in the course and recourse of its history. Reading both Joyce and Vico requires ‘‘two thinks at a time’’ (583.7). Joyce’s master key of the pun is like Vico’s master key of the ‘‘poetic character,’’ which Vico said cost him twenty years of his career to discover. A poetic character is a double truth—a particular figure of a god or hero who at the same time embodies a universal meaning that is inseparable from its particularity. Poetic characters or ‘‘imaginative universals’’ are rooted in Vico’s conception of the ‘‘common mental dictionary’’ that is at the basis of all human thought and of all civil and divine things. It is Vico’s dictionary that Joyce employs to reconstruct the repetitions of humanity so that we may acquire a sense of ‘‘The seim anew’’ (FW 215.23) and ‘‘be on anew and basking again in the panaroma of all flores of speech’’ (143.3–4). Thunder is a noise that Joyce makes into a word, repeating the act that brought language itself into existence. Joyce, with Vico and Bruno at his side, plans to talk his way through history.

Joyce’s Schooling in Vico Joyce may have first come to know of Vico in the courses and conversations he had as a student of the Jesuit Father Charles Ghezzi, lecturer in Italian at University College, Dublin. Joyce learned Italian from him and acquired a good grounding in Dante. At this time Joyce discovered Bruno. He had ongoing discussions with Ghezzi on Italian literature and philosophy.∑ In Stephen’s journal entry concerning Bruno being terribly burned, Joyce refers to Ghezzi as ‘‘little roundhead rogue’seye Ghezzi’’ (P 271), similar to his ‘‘Old Vico Roundpoint’’ in Finnegans Wake (260.15). About 1927, on one of the walks he took in Paris with the Irish poet and playwright Padraic Colum, discussing Work in Progress that was to become Finnegans Wake, Joyce referred to Vico in a similar fashion. Colum writes: ‘‘ ‘He was one of those round-headed Neapolitan men,’ Joyce told me. I forget whom he mentioned as another of them.’’∏ The other quite likely was Bruno of Nola, since Nola is part of the comune of Naples. In Finnegans Wake, H. C. E. and Finnegan are referred to in terms of ‘‘his roundhead staple of other days’’ (4.34). In his essay on Work in Progress, done in close consultation with Joyce, Beckett calls Vico ‘‘a practical roundheaded Neapolitan.’’π This characterization is intended by Beckett (and Joyce) to oppose what he (they) see as Benedetto Croce’s claim that Vico disdained empiricism, and to uphold the view that the New Science is well grounded in the empirical details of history. If Ghezzi did discuss Italian philosophy with Joyce he probably would have brought up Vico. In the standard Catholic interpretation of Vico’s thought

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in the late nineteenth century, Vico was regarded as the only truly Catholic Italian philosopher who could be pitted against the modern philosophers of Northern Europe, whose ideas mostly had roots in the Reformation.∫ Joyce’s school friend Constantine Curran reports that one of the assigned readings of Joyce’s college course in 1901 was Raffaello Fornaciari’s Disegno storico della letteratura italiana (Historical outline of Italian literature): ‘‘The references to Bruno and to Vico, to the intuitional and pantheistic mode of Bruno’s thinking; to the indeterminate, encyclopedic sweep of mind which makes Vico, as Fornaciari says, an inexhaustible mine for future quarrying are sufficient to set an intelligence less alert than Joyce’s upon inquiry.’’Ω In his pamphlet on the Irish theatre, ‘‘The Day of the Rabblement,’’ in that same year, Joyce begins with a reference to Bruno as ‘‘the Nolan.’’ The following year, in his essay on the poet James Clarence Mangan, Joyce may have Vico in mind in his conclusion when he speaks of being enclosed in history, of legend moving down ‘‘the cycles,’’ saying that ‘‘the ancient gods, who are visions of the divine names, die and come to life many times,’’ and that ‘‘in those vast courses which enfold us and in that great memory which is greater and more generous than our memory, no life, no moment of exaltation is ever lost.’’∞≠ Joyce left Dublin with Nora Barnacle in the fall of 1904 and after some difficulties and some luck arrived in Pola, south of Trieste, to teach English in the Berlitz School there. He began an exchange of language lessons with Alessandro Francini Bruni, a Florentine who taught Italian and was deputy director of the school. Francini says that when Joyce arrived his Italian was such that ‘‘he could understand everything and read everything.’’ Joyce did not speak well because he had had Italian only in school in Ireland, but Francini reports that after a year of lessons he could speak standard Tuscan Italian perfectly.∞∞ Several months after the Joyces arrived in Pola both they and the Francinis relocated to Trieste. Joyce may have read and digested Vico as early as 1905 in Trieste, but the precise date is uncertain.∞≤ From 1911 to 1913 Joyce gave English lessons to Paolo Cuzzi, who was to become an eminent Triestine lawyer. The lessons consisted of conversations on various subjects, and Cuzzi, who was studying Vico in school, discovered in a conversation that Joyce had a passionate interest in Vico.∞≥ This conversation took place when Joyce was living in via Donato Bramante, at the Piazza Giambattista Vico, an address Joyce chose deliberately.∞∂ Croce’s La filosofia di Giambattista Vico appeared in 1911. In this same year there appeared the first two volumes (vols. 4 and 5) of the modern Laterza edition of Vico’s Opere, under the direction of Croce and Fausto Nicolini:

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La Scienza nuova seconda and L’Autobiografia. Joyce was reminded of Vico every day, when crossing the Piazza Giambattista Vico; he was also in the middle of a Vichian renaissance.∞∑ He knew Croce’s earlier Estetica (1902), a copy of which he had borrowed from his friend in Trieste, Dario de Tuoni, and which contains an important chapter on Vico.∞∏ In 1914, the year Joyce finished A Portrait, volume 1 of the Laterza edition appeared, containing Vico’s De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians) that is worked into the Latin passage quoted earlier on Bruno and Vico in Finnegans Wake. If Joyce read Vico or some of Vico earlier it might have been in one of the volumes of the nineteenth-century Ferrari edition, Opere di Giambattista Vico (2d ed., 1852–54) or in the Pomodoro edition that imitated it (1858–69), or in any one of the numerous nineteenth-century single-volume reprintings of the Scienza nuova. In the Cornell collection of Joyce’s papers there are three pages of typescript that are a copy of the last three paragraphs of the Vico entry for the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910–11), followed by passages in Italian, the source for which is probably Croce’s La filosofia di Giambattista Vico (1911). The typescript was likely done near the time of the appearance of these works, during Joyce’s Trieste period. The pages show that Joyce was collecting material on Vico’s New Science; they do not express original views of Joyce on Vico.∞π Joyce knew Jules Michelet’s French edition of La scienza nuova and Vico’s autobiography, which included a translation of the De antiquissima and extracts from other of Vico’s works (1835). Joyce also would have known Vico’s De nostri temporis studiorum ratione from its publication in the first volume of the Laterza edition and from extracts from it included in the Michelet translation (see FW 266.11–13). In his French studies at university Joyce read Michelet in 1901. Michelet had been encouraged by Victor Cousin to translate Vico. Cousin, who lectured in 1828 at the Sorbonne on the philosophy of history, including Vico’s, had also encouraged Edgar Quinet to translate Herder. Herder’s and Vico’s ideas form the basis of Quinet’s Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire de l’humanité. Joyce quotes a passage regarding cycles of history from Quinet’s work almost verbatim in French in Finnegans Wake, concerning how in history ‘‘the cities have changed masters and names’’ (281.4–13). This passage is parodied four times at full or nearly full length: it is made Irish (14.35–15.11); is made to play on Romulus and Remus (236.19–32); is associated with the image of the world as originally a garden (354.22–36); and is part of his paragraph on the ‘‘vicociclometer’’ (615.2–9).∞∫ Joyce had committed this passage from Quinet’s work to memory and once quoted it to

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John Sullivan, the Irish tenor, as they walked by the cemetery in Paris on the boulevard Edgar Quinet.∞Ω Joyce combines Bruno and Vico with the two French philosophers of history in the passage partially quoted earlier: ‘‘The olold stoliolum! From quiqui quinet to michemiche chelet and a jambebatiste to a brulobrulo!’’ (117.10–12). Joyce referred friends who wished to understand Vico but did not read Italian to Michelet’s translation. In talking with Joyce in 1927 about Work in Progress, Padraic Colum reports: ‘‘Joyce suggested I should read Vico. But had Vico been translated into a language I could read? Yes, Michelet had translated him into French.’’≤≠ Instead Colum read the article on Vico in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. When Constantine Curran visited Joyce in 1921, Joyce introduced him to Vico’s Scienza nuova, pointing out its importance for his Work in Progress. Joyce took Michelet’s translation from his shelf and lent it to Curran, directing his attention to a passage in Michelet’s introduction which says that Vico’s thought is obscure and bizarre but that in a system presented in this manner there is ‘‘une grandeur imposante et une sombre poésie qui fait penser à celle de Dante.’’≤∞ In a letter of May 13, 1927, to Harriet Shaw Weaver, giving her a key to the references in a passage in Finnegans Wake, Joyce explained the idea of the Phoenix as a ‘‘symbol used by Michelet to explain Vico’s theory’’ (SL 321). In Trieste in 1907 one of Joyce’s pupils of English, Roberto Prezioso, an editor of the newspaper Il piccolo della sera, commissioned a series of articles by Joyce on the politics of Ireland, to be written in Italian. These were gone over by Silvio Benco, a respected novelist, journalist, and literary critic in Trieste. He found Joyce’s Italian needed very little correction. In fact, he and Joyce disagreed about a word, and Joyce was right. He asked Joyce if he wrote the articles first in English and translated them into Italian; Joyce replied that he wrote them directly in Italian.≤≤ Benco also reports that years later when his wife visited the Joyces in Paris she found that the family’s customary language at home was the Triestine dialect, Triestino. (The Joyces’ two children, Giorgio and Lucia, were born in Trieste.)≤≥ In 1912 Joyce passed the written and oral examinations given by the Italian government at the University of Padua to qualify to teach in the Italian school system, but he never secured a teaching position.≤∂ Joyce was polylingual. He knew Italian and French completely. He knew Latin but never studied ancient Greek. Joyce claimed he could ‘‘speak four or five languages fluently enough [including modern Greek]’’ (L I:167). Joyce was fairly accomplished in Danish and German and took lessons in Flemish, Spanish, and Russian. As a young man he took some lessons in Gaelic, but his knowledge of it was limited.≤∑ Finnegans Wake makes repeated use of words and phrases in more than sixty

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languages and isolated use of many other languages, such as Maori (see the play on lines Joyce called a ‘‘Maori warcry’’ from a haka, a Maori posture dance, 355.16–17, 19–20) and Estonian: ‘‘But the still sama sitta’’ (625.27) (sama sitta, ‘‘same shit’’).≤∏ Joyce published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916. It had appeared in twenty-five installments in the Egotist in 1914 and 1915. Ulysses was published in 1922, having appeared in twenty-three installments in the Little Review from 1918 to 1929, with five installments in the Egoist in 1919. He began writing Finnegans Wake in March 1923; it was published in May 1939. Joyce died only a year and a half later, in January 1941. While he was writing this new work, the part of it known as Work in Progress appeared in seventeen installments in transition, in Paris between 1927 and 1938. In 1929 the first book appeared on the Wake (then Work in Progress), the collection of twelve critical articles: Our Exagmination round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. Joyce says, of the authors of these essays: ‘‘I did stand behind those twelve Marshals more or less directing them what lines of research to follow’’ (L I:283). The title is from a line in Joyce’s work (FW 497.2–3). ‘‘Exagmination’’ is examination merged with Latin agmen (a mass of persons in movement, an army on the march, a stream). ‘‘Incamination’’ contains a play on the Italian verb incamminare—‘‘to put on the right road’’ (the Vico road), also ‘‘round’’ (the Vico road ‘‘goes round and round’’), and factum (what is made, Vico’s principle of verum esse ipsum factum, ‘‘the true is the made’’). The most original and important essay in the collection is that mentioned earlier, by Samuel Beckett, ‘‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,’’ which is mostly centered on Vico’s importance for Work in Progress. Stuart Gilbert, another person close to Joyce, emphasizes Vico’s importance for Joyce in his essay ‘‘Prolegomena to Work in Progress.’’ To various people who approached Joyce while he was writing Finnegans Wake and publishing it in installments, asking him how to understand it, his advice was always to read Vico’s Scienza nuova. He urged Harriet Shaw Weaver to read the Scienza nuova to understand his new project, as he had urged her to read the Odyssey to understand Ulysses.≤π In the key he sent her to a draft of the Wake’s first page, he wrote, ‘‘passencore = pas encore and ricorsi storici of Vico’’ (SL 317). In October 1923 Joyce sent her some early pages of the Wake, remarking: ‘‘Perhaps the theory of history so well set forth (after Hegel and Giambattista Vico) by the four eminent annalists who are even now treading the typepress in sorrow will explain part of my meaning’’ (L I:205).≤∫ Of another of their walks in Paris, Padraic Colum reports: ‘‘ ‘Of course,’ Joyce told me, ‘I don’t take Vico’s speculations literally; I use his cycles as a

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trellis.’ ’’≤Ω Colum goes on to remark that Joyce could also connect his project to a line of Irish thinkers and artists, including the Four Masters. Joyce wrote Weaver in May 1926 that he had the book fairly well planned in his head, referring her to Lewis McIntyre’s book on Bruno and then adding: ‘‘I do not know if Vico has been translated. I would not pay overmuch attention to these theories, beyond using them for all they are worth, but they have gradually forced themselves on me through circumstances of my own life. I wonder where Vico got his fear of thunderstorms. It is almost unknown to the male Italians I have met’’ (L I:241). One of these circumstances was Joyce’s own fear of thunderstorms. The day before Joyce was to meet Pound at Sirmione on Lago di Garda there was a great storm. Joyce wrote Weaver, ‘‘In spite of my dread of thunderstorms and detestation of travelling I went there bringing my son with me to act as a lightning conductor’’ (L I:142). Joyce left Holland during a pleasant sojourn in the summer of 1927 to escape a spate of thunderstorms (L I:256), and, after finishing Finnegans Wake, he rejected Beckett’s suggestion of pursuing a teaching position in Italian at the University of Cape Town, at which there was an opening, because he had heard of the prevalence of thunderstorms there.≥≠ Joyce’s comment to Colum about using Vico’s cycles as a trellis appears casual but in fact is clever and precise. A trellis is a structure of lattice work for support of climbing plants. It is also possible to speak of ‘‘a trellis of interlacing streams.’’ Etymologically, ‘‘trellis’’ is a fabric of coarse weave, but specifically trilicius (Vulgar Latin) is ‘‘woven with triple thread.’’ ‘‘Trellis’’ has within it the notion of three (tres). Joyce indeed uses Vico’s cycles for all they are worth, merging them with his own terminology, adding a fourth, and so on. Joyce restudied Vico to write Finnegans Wake. He said that with Finnegans Wake ‘‘the construction is quite different from Ulysses where at least the ports of call were known beforehand’’ (L I:204). In March 1925, when writing Work in Progress, he wrote Weaver while suffering with his failing eyesight, ‘‘I should like to hear Vico read to me again in the hope that some day I may be able to write again. I put an advertisement in the Mail for a reader but got not even one reply though I have often seen advertisements from Italians in it’’ (L III:117–18). In 1940 he wrote Jacques Mercanton to ask him to get a copy of a book on Vico of which he had heard (L III:480). It was H. P. Adams’s Life and Writings of Giambattista Vico, the first study written in English on Vico since the early and very good study by Robert Flint, Vico (1884), a work which Joyce likely knew: ‘‘A chip off the old Flint’’ (83.10).≥∞ In discussing Work in Progress with Joyce, Mercanton brought up Michelet’s Vico. Joyce told him, ‘‘I don’t know whether Vico’s theory is true; it doesn’t matter. It’s useful to me; that’s what counts.’’≥≤

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The Danish writer Tom Kristensen asked Joyce for help to understand Work in Progress. Joyce referred him to Vico. Kristensen asked, ‘‘But do you believe in the Scienza Nuova?’’ Joyce answered, ‘‘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.’’≥≥ Joyce’s remark, putting Vico before Freud and Jung, was not casual. Freud thought he had discovered a ‘‘new science.’’≥∂ Because Finnegans Wake is Joyce’s book of the night and involves the sense of the dream, many readers and interpreters have presumed that Joyce was applying the ideas of dream interpretation and psychoanalysis to literature, even that Joyce was writing in a stream-of-consciousness fashion. As early as his conversations in Trieste with Cuzzi, who was reading Freud’s Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Joyce remarked that Freud had been anticipated by Vico.≥∑ In the Wake Freud and Jung are combined into one person: ‘‘yung and easily freudened’’ (115.22–23); ‘‘Jungfraud’s Messongebook’’ (460.20–21). In a letter to Weaver from Zurich in June 1921, Joyce writes of people trying to get him to enter a sanitorium ‘‘where a certain Doctor Jung (the Swiss Tweedledum who is not to be confused with the Viennese Tweedledee Dr Freud) amuses himself at the expense (in every sense of the word) of ladies and gentlemen who are troubled with bees in their bonnets’’ (L I:166). In a discussion of ‘‘Sexophonologistic Schizophrenesis’’ and ‘‘semiunconscience’’ we find ‘‘Tung-Toyd’’ (123.20). Regarding Freud there is also ‘‘freudzay’’ (337.7) and ‘‘freudful mistake’’ (411.35). Regarding Jung there is ‘‘the law of the jungerl’’ (268.F3), ‘‘young girl’’ (perhaps a reference to Joyce’s daughter Lucia, whom Jung unsuccessfully treated), but also Kerl (German, ‘‘guy,’’ chap). Joyce wrote to Weaver in November 1926, on drafting what was to be the first page of Finnegans Wake, that he was reading Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) (L I:246). Joyce must have enjoyed the pages on ‘‘Dr. Froyd,’’ who ‘‘was very very surprized at a girl who did not dream about anything’’ and who ‘‘talked to his assistance quite a lot in the Viennese landguage.’’ She concluded, ‘‘So then Dr. Froyd said that all I needed was to cultivate a few inhibitions and get some sleep.’’≥∏ In Finnegans Wake there is ‘‘landeguage’’ (478.9–10) and ‘‘Are we speachin d’anglas landadge or are you sprakin sea Djoytsch?’’ (485.12–13) (are we speaking English [d’anglais] or are you speaking Joyce? [Sprechen Sie Deutsch?]). Joyce claimed he got his conception of internal monologue from Édouard Dujardin’s novel Les Lauriers sont coupés. Richard Ellmann writes: ‘‘In later life, no matter how diligently the critics worked to demonstrate that he had borrowed the interior monologue from Freud, Joyce always made it a point of honor that he had it from Dujardin.’’ As Ellmann reports, Dujardin claimed he based his conception of monologue on a sentence of Fichte: ‘‘The I poses itself

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and opposes itself to the not-I.’’≥π In a conversation Joyce had in the 1930s with the Zurich publisher Daniel Brody, regarding Jung’s negative attitude toward Joyce’s work, he said: ‘‘People want to put me out of the church to which I don’t belong. I have nothing to do with psychoanalysis.’’≥∫ Joyce developed his own language of the dream, ‘‘dreamoneire’’ (FW 280.1); he did not take it over from psychoanalysis. In Our Exagmination the essays make no mention of Jung and there is one dismissive comment on Freud that occurs in the essay by William Carlos Williams, who says of Joyce: ‘‘It is a new literature, a new world, that he is undertaking. Rebecca West, on the other hand, has no idea at all what literature is about. She speaks of transcendental tosh, of Freud, of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, of anything that comes into her head.’’≥Ω Of the article Jung wrote on Ulysses in 1932, Joyce wrote in a letter: ‘‘Did you see Jung’s article and his letter to me. He seems to have read Ulysses from first to last without one smile. The only thing to do in such a case is to change one’s drink’’ (L III:262).∂≠ For Joyce a sense of humor was crucial. When Kristensen asked him, in the conversation mentioned above about Vico, whether it would be good to proceed by working out the multilingual puns, Joyce said, ‘‘Perhaps it would help,’’ but he smiled doubtfully. He said, ‘‘Now they’re bombing Spain. Isn’t it better to make a great joke instead, as I have done?’’∂∞ Joyce signs his letter accompanying a key to a draft of the first page of the Wake sent to Weaver ‘‘Jeems Jokes’’ (SL 316). As the Ballad of Tim Finnegan says: ‘‘Lots of fun at Finnegan’s Wake.’’ When Heinrich Staumann, professor of English at the University of Zurich, asked Joyce how to approach Finnegans Wake, Joyce told him to read Vico and advised him to approach it not in terms of research into place-names or historical events but to let the ‘‘linguistic phenomena affect one as such.’’ Staumann observed that in their conversation Joyce presented his opinions ‘‘with a certain light objectivity . . . almost more like a philosopher than an artist.’’∂≤ In 1940, after the publication of Finnegans Wake, Joyce wrote to Mercanton about the reception of the book. There were only a few, odd reviews; Joyce quoted from one in a Roman journal: ‘‘ ‘Seeing that the whole book is founded on the work of an Italian thinker’ . . . ?’’ Joyce included the ellipsis marks and question mark as a literary shrug of his shoulders, as if to say: Is it not obvious that the book is founded on Vico? He said the response to Finnegans Wake was ‘‘a complete fiasco up to the present as far as European criticism is concerned’’ (L III:463). Joyce’s works can be seen as a series making up one work. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has two prominent Vichian elements. The first element is the sense in which the central figure, Stephen Dedalus, fits the mold of one of

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Vico’s ‘‘poetic characters’’ in the age of heroes. In A Portrait, one of Stephen’s friends says: ‘‘You have a queer name, Dedalus’’ (23). Stephen Dedalus, originally ‘‘Stephen Hero,’’ is a particular figure growing up in Dublin, but he is also an imaginative universal of Western culture. One-half of his name is Saint Stephen the protomartyr, the Hellenistic, Greek-speaking Jew stoned for his claim that Christ was the prophet announced by Moses, and one of the most popular saints of the Middle Ages. The other half is Daedalus the artificer, exiled from Athens and denied return lest he reveal the secret of the labyrinth he constructed for King Minos of Crete to conceal the Minotaur, the half-beast, half-man born of the white bull and Pasiphae, wife of Minos. Daedalus made wings so he and his son, Icarus, could escape by air. Icarus flew too near the sun and melted the wax on the wings, causing him to plunge to his death in the sea. Daedalus flew on, to arrive at Cumae in Italy, where he built the temple of Apollo of the Sibyl. In the hero of A Portrait the four terms out of which Western culture is constructed are brought together: in Stephen the Judeo-Christian; in Daedalus the GrecoRoman. These four are united in Joyce’s conception of the artist. The second Vichian element occurs at the end of the book, as Stephen says: ‘‘I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race’’ (P 275–76). Vico’s coscienza (Latin conscientia) has the meaning of both conscience and consciousness; it might best be rendered ‘‘witnessing consciousness.’’ It contains all the certains (certi) of the world, all that is studied by philology—the customs, deeds, and languages of all peoples at war and in peace. Vico says ‘‘the true is the made.’’ The artist is a maker, who must forge in the smithy of his soul all that there is in the human race, including the artist’s particular race, the Irish: ‘‘A race of clodhoppers!’’ (P 272). The details of Vico’s coscienza must be made into the trues of his scienza (Latin scientia). ‘‘Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead’’ (P 276). The artist is an artificer, Daedalus, but in him is also the possibility of Icarus. The artist is a double of Western culture and a double of himself in the way that the son is a double yet an opposite of the father. This view of the artist at the end of A Portrait is in contrast to the Thomistic conception of aesthetic philosophy that Stephen examines earlier in the book—the definition of beauty in terms of integritas, consonantia, and claritas (P 227–31). Joyce does not pursue beauty as the ideal of art; he pursues the conscience of the race in his own conscience: memory, history. If he retains anything of this discussion it is the Scholastic sense of ‘‘quidditas, the whatness of a thing’’ (P 231). The artist can show the thing in its particularity but also forge its meaning in the conscience of the race. The artist must create what

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language first creates. The view of language in A Portrait is Vichian in that it begins in the song of baby tuckoo (the name for the infant Joyce). As Vico claims language is first sung, Joyce later wishes to tell the ‘‘Singalingalying. Storiella as she is syung’’ (FW 267.7–8). Joyce’s attraction to the Renaissance figure Bruno, with his dialectical sense of opposites, frees him from the rigid distinctions and classifications of Thomistic thought. Joyce makes this point in his youthful review of J. Lewis McIntyre’s book Giordano Bruno. He says certain parts of Bruno’s philosophy can be put aside because they are ‘‘so fantastical and middle aged’’ (tied to the Middle Ages).∂≥ In his earlier pamphlet ‘‘The Day of the Rabblement,’’ Joyce uses Bruno to establish the artist’s independence from the standard understandings of things derived from politics and religion: ‘‘No man, said the Nolan, can be a lover of the true or the good unless he abhors the multitude; and the artist, though he may employ the crowd, is very careful to isolate himself.’’∂∂ The rabblement, the race of clodhoppers, are Ibsen’s ‘‘trolls,’’ the enemies of art. In ‘‘Et Vers’’ Ibsen wrote, ‘‘To live is to war with the trolls.’’∂∑ Joyce does not leave Bruno behind, but as he develops toward Finnegans Wake he needs not just a doctrine of opposites but a full philosophy of history. He merges Bruno, his original philosopher of protest, into Vico: ‘‘You mean Nolans but Volans (FW 488.15); ‘‘Nolans Volans’’ (558.18); ‘‘nolens volens’’ (Latin: willing or unwilling, willy-nilly); ‘‘a nuhlan the volkar’’ (357.17); ‘‘Till Nolans go volants and Bruneyes come blue’’ (418.31); ‘‘Mr. Browne, disguised as a vincentian, who, when seized of the facts, was overheard, in his secondary personality as a Nolan and underreared’’ (38.26–28). But throughout the Wake Bruno remains the master of opposites, ‘‘alionola equal and opposite brunoipso’’ (488.9), even within his own identity, his ‘‘egobruno,’’ ‘‘Bruno at being eternally opposed by Nola’’ (488.10–11). Vico remains the master of the cycle, which is ‘‘whorled without aimed’’ (272.4–5) but which ‘‘annews’’ (277.18). Joyce’s Ulysses has its references to Vico’s name in ‘‘Vico Road, Dalkey’’ (U. 20.25) and ‘‘Dr Tibble’s Vi-Cocoa’’ (519.805–6). Many of the Vichian allusions are in the ‘‘Nestor’’ episode, where the subject is history, and in the ‘‘Cyclops’’ episode, with the cave and giants theme. The structure of Ulysses is cyclical, and this general feature of the work suggests the cyclical pattern of Vico’s conception of history. But there are many doctrines of cycles, and this connection to Vico would appear only to someone familiar with the role of Vico in Finnegans Wake. One sees it by looking backward.∂∏ The most obvious Vichian feature of Ulysses is its relation to the theme of the third book of Vico’s New Science: the search for and discovery of the true

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Homer. Vico claims that Homer is the ancient Greek people themselves and that Homer’s works are their conscience. Vico’s ability to demonstrate this by the principles of his science and his ‘‘new critical art’’ is a proof of its validity. Joyce in Ulysses (both Joyce and Vico use the Latin name for Odysseus) can in literary terms achieve a similar accomplishment. He can reveal the coincidence of the present in the past: present-day scenes and characters repeat the ‘‘ports of call’’ of Homer’s Odyssey. The true Homer is in the conscience of the race, not just in the work of Homer the ancient author. Having demonstrated this in Homer, Joyce can carry this method of juxtaposition to its limit in Finnegans Wake. Here not simply is the past in the present, but the entire art of the Muses, to sing of what is past, present, and to come, is woven into one song that can proceed backward or forward so that all is in motion in a whole, like language itself. Joyce told his close friend Frank Budgen that ‘‘imagination is memory.’’∂π In the philosophical proofs for the true Homer in the Scienza nuova Vico says: ‘‘La memoria è la stessa che la fantasia’’ (‘‘memory is the same as imagination’’) (819). ‘‘Memory thus has three different aspects: memory [memoria] when it remembers things, imagination [ fantasia] when it alters or imitates them, and invention [ingegno] when it gives them a new turn or puts them into proper arrangement and relationship. For these reasons the theological poets [the makers of the first myths] called Memory the mother of the Muses’’ (ibid.). Joyce, with Vico as his guide, invites the reader: ‘‘This way to the museyroom. Mind your hats goan in!’’ (FW 8.9).

Vico’s Ear Of all the books at the Wake, Vico’s New Science is the crucial book. This has not been realized in previous Joyce interpretation. Joyce’s ‘‘nightmaze’’ (411.8) is connected to the ‘‘night of thick darkness’’ in Vico’s New Science (331). Its principles are the trellis on which the Wake is based. The novelist and Joyce writer Anthony Burgess says: ‘‘What Joyce found in Vico was what every novelist needs when planning a long book—scaffolding, a backbone.’’∂∫ Joyce puts not only Vico’s New Science into Finnegans Wake; he puts Vico himself into the book. Adaline Glasheen, in her Third Census of Finnegans Wake, notes the similarity between Vico and Tim Finnegan, both of whom fell from a ladder, broke their skulls, and came to life again. She calls attention to Joyce’s above-quoted statement to Harriet Shaw Weaver that Vico’s theories in the New Science gradually forced themselves on him through the circumstances of his own life. Glasheen says: ‘‘Unfortunately, knowledge of this work has not forced itself on

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Joyceans, who by and large read it in an abridgement which omits much that matters in Finnegans Wake; and I find it generally supposed that The New Science is little more than an almost invisible scaffolding which encloses Finnegans Wake and is unnecessary to an understanding of Finnegans Wake. I don’t agree, and direct the reader (for starters) to Samuel Beckett’s essay in Our Exagmination.’’∂Ω Vico is certainly the maker of the scaffolding of Finnegans Wake that is clearly visible for those with eyes to see. Joyce has deliberately adopted it and adapted it. Part of his adaptation is to place Vico himself in its bracing. Joyce both re-erects Vico’s formation of history and resurrects Vico as its fabricator. Joyce accomplishes this on the first page of the Wake, which echoes the first page of Vico’s Autobiography. Vico is present both by name, vicus, and by theory, in the circle that the flow of water makes from the Liffey that runs past the church of Adam and Eve into Dublin Bay, circulating down to Bray and up to Howth at its northern extremity, and also in the circle of the first sentence beginning in the middle, with ‘‘riverrun,’’ the second half of the sentence that breaks off on the last page. As I shall discuss at length in the next chapter, Vico introduces himself in his autobiography as a child who was in constant motion, ‘‘impatient of rest’’ (impaziente di riposo). Vico is ‘‘riverrun.’’ According to the proposal sent to Vico for the format of the collection of autobiographies, of which his was to be a part, he should have described his parents and family background. Instead he presents them only as a mother and a father, ‘‘upright parents who left a good name after them.’’ They are just parents, an incarnation of Eve and Adam, the parents of the human race.∑≠ In the second paragraph of the Wake Joyce incorporates another reference to ‘‘vicous cicles’’ and another reference to Vico’s name. As I mentioned above, in the key sent to Weaver he explains ‘‘passencore rearrived’’ (‘‘passencore = pas encore and ricorsi storici of Vico’’) (SL 317). After this there is ‘‘mishe mishe to tauftauf’’ (3.9–10) (Gaelic mishe, ‘‘I am’’; German taufen, ‘‘to baptize,’’ Giambattista); ‘‘I am, I am, to baptize.’’ Recall that Vico was born on June the 23d and baptized the next day. ‘‘Tauftauf’’ is the sound of the baptismal water. The third paragraph begins with ‘‘the fall,’’ followed by Joyce’s first hundredletter thunderword. In it, along with many thunderwords from various languages, is the combination of thunder in Italian and English ‘‘tuonnthunn’’ (tuono, Italian; ‘‘thunder,’’ English), the two languages combined in the title ‘‘Finnegans.’’ The thunder announces the fall from the ladder by the hod-carrier Tim Finnegan in the Irish ballad from which Joyce takes his book title. It is the Vichian thunder of the New Science that stirs the giganti to form the first word: Jove. It is also the fall of H. C. E., the sleeping giant of the land on which Dublin

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lies, that appears in Joyce’s first paragraph as Howth Castle and Environs. In his fall in the Ballad of Tim Finnegan, Finnegan fractures his skull but is awakened at his wake by the smell of whiskey. The roundheaded Vico fractures his skull but survives by God’s grace. Joyce’s title of Finnegans Wake, incorporating the awakening of Tim Finnegan, makes a cycle within Joyce’s literary career, from first to last, in that his first publication was a review of Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken (1900). This interest in the dead juxtaposed to the living is in ‘‘The Dead,’’ the most famous short story of Dubliners, and runs throughout Joyce’s career.∑∞ Joyce told Frank Budgen there were many resurrection stories but the ballad of Tim Finnegan was the one most suited to his purpose.∑≤ In When We Dead Awaken, the focus of the play is on its main character, the sculptor Rubek, and the meaning of his greatest work, a monumental group entitled ‘‘Resurrection Day.’’ Joyce takes two ideas from Vico. One, as Joyce states it, is ricorsi storici, that all in history, all in the human world, repeats itself, that everyone is someone else—‘‘you and I are in him’’ (FW 130.34). Joyce understands that the human comedy is always recoursed, that there is no progress. If anybody is everybody, nobody is anywhere in particular, yet anyone is in some way at all places at once and also at one place. Joyce saw what so many of Vico’s past and present commentators never saw—that there is a master to the show— Vichian providence. Providence is always there, behind the appearances that are, like a river, always in motion. This causes Joyce to make a fourth age in Vico’s three ages: ‘‘providentiality’’—‘‘providencer’s divine cow to milkfeeding mleckman, bonafacies to solafides’’ (337.5–6). Providence is also one of Bruno’s central concepts, which he sees as a companion to truth. For Bruno, as for Vico, providence is both liberty and necessity. When reflected in the individual, it is prudence. Providentiality is the gap between corso and ricorso, what can only vaguely be witnessed at any time. Providence is not an ideal toward which events progress. Providence is ever present for those who can perceive its signs. Joyce understood that the important part of Vico’s theory of history is not the idea of cycle (which is found in Plato, in the Renaissance, and throughout Eastern thought) nor the principle that ‘‘men make history’’; the important point is the role providence plays in the making of the cycle. Another of Vico’s ideas important for Joyce is the conception of language and the way that its origins are bound up with poetry and myth. Joyce saw that the key to the human world is language. All human institutions depend upon language, as does all knowledge of them. Humans are naturally poetic. Until Vico’s giants acquire the power of poetry they cannot humanize themselves.

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The capitalized marginalia of the classbook, Night-lessons section (L I:406), which states most of the central principles of Vico’s New Science by parodying Vico’s terminology, begins with unde et ubi, ‘‘whence and where,’’ then sic, ‘‘in this way.’’ This is followed by Joyce’s statement of the principle of Vico’s ‘‘poetic characters’’ or ‘‘imaginative universals’’: ‘‘imaginable itinerary through the particular universal’’ (FW 260). This principle is connected through the principle of ‘‘constitution of the constitutionable as constitutional’’ (261) (poetry becomes a basis of social organization) to ‘‘probapossible prolegomena to ideareal history’’ (262) (Vico’s ‘‘ideal eternal history’’). These lead to ‘‘panoptical purview of political progress and the future presentation of the past’’ (272) (the ricorso). The way to realize this interpretation of history is to grasp words and languages as structures of human memory. Joyce finds this sense of memory in Vico’s conception of philology as based in the connections between the root meanings of words and the origin of human institutions. Vico, like Joyce, makes these connections not simply etymologically but also in terms of the associative implications of words. In his wordplay Joyce is constructing a puzzle not for the sake of a puzzle but to bring the reader to a consciousness of what Vico calls the ‘‘common mental dictionary or vocabulary,’’ the inexpressible language of humanity itself that every language in its own particularity is expressing.∑≥ Fundamental to both these ideas is that imagination is memory. Joyce remembers, imitates, and arranges what is whence and where in history. To be simply in the present is to forget that it has a past and a future that will recapitulate the past. Finnegans Wake, like Vico’s New Science, is a memory theater containing all that there is in the human world; the human is what stands between the natural and the divine. Joyce realizes that the truth of this human world is comic, a joke, an irony, just as the Ballad of Tim Finnegan is humorous, a ‘‘grand funferall’’ (111.15–16), ‘‘finfin funfun’’ (94.19). Joyce has succeeded in the rarity that Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose states as the need ‘‘to make truth laugh’’ ( fare ridere la verità).∑∂ Vico is Joyce’s guide in this descent into history, but behind both Joyce and Vico is Dante—‘‘the divine comic Denti Alligator’’ (FW 440.6). References to lines in the Divine Comedy run throughout Joyce’s works, based in Joyce’s remarkable mastery of Dante.∑∑ ‘‘My trifolinum librotto . . . Acomedy of letters!’’ (FW 425:20, 24). ‘‘I swear to you by the notes of this comedy’’ (Inf. canto 16.127–28).∑∏ Vico calls Dante the Tuscan Homer because he is the poet who stands to the ricorso of Western history as Homer stands to its corso. Each summarizes and preserves the first two ages—theological and heroic— of their cycle and is on the brink of the third—the secular, purely human age.

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Vico wrote a fragment on Dante that suggests a parallel to his discovery of the true Homer in the third book of the New Science.∑π Joyce penetrated Dante’s descent and cycle in order to penetrate Vico’s. Dante’s comedy embodies the Christian doctrine of hope and resurrection beyond history. Joyce’s comedy is based on resurrection in a joke, a joke connected to the divine vision of providence in history, ‘‘Devine Foresygth’’ (290.10–11). Vico is the protagonist of Finnegans Wake. He is Earwicker. ‘‘Wick’’ is a row of houses, or village, and is derived from the Latin vicus, Vico’s name. Vico is also the vicar, both in the sense of the custodian of divine knowledge and as the representative of the divine on earth—the agent of providence, the vicar of history. Vico is ‘‘the producer (Mr. John Baptister Vickar’’) (27). G. B. Vico is H. C. Earwicker. The initials of Earwicker can be derived from Vico’s initials by cycling one letter forward in the alphabet, thus: G. Ø H. and B. Ø C. Vico’s initials are renewed from Earwicker’s by recoursing one letter backward. Vico is vic or ‘‘old vic’’ (62.6) Ø wick. ‘‘W’’ is a double ‘‘v.’’ The ‘‘v’’ is pronounced as ‘‘w’’ in classical Latin (vicus, pronounced ‘‘weekus’’). Earwicker is Vico’s name in English. We can hear Vico in ‘‘Earwicker.’’ In part 3, Joyce merges the identities of Vico and H. C. E. Vico becomes H. C. E.’s middle name: —Hail him heathen, heal him holystone! Courser, Recourser, Changechild . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Eld as endall, earth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (481.1–3)

Vico is the courser and recourser, the child of change. He is also the changeling, the child of circumstances left by fairies in the cycles of history. Joyce continues, ‘‘I have your tristich now; it recurs in three times the same differently’’ (481.10–11). Each of the three lines of this tristich (group of three lines of verse) begins with one of the initials of H. C. E., which also recalls each of Vico’s three ages: ‘‘—Hail him heathen’’ is the appearance of Jove to the giants of Vico’s first age; the middle is Vico, as if he were a heroic figure of the second age; Eld is old age (Norwegian), the decline of the third age. In the recourse each age recurs ‘‘the same differently.’’ All comes ‘‘from the human historic brute, Finnsen Faynean’’ (481.12–13). Ossian was son of Finn. We are all the offspring of the primordial giant, Finnegan. ‘‘We speak of Gun, the farther. And in the locative. Bap! Bap!—Ouer Tad, Hellig Babbau, whom certayn orbits assertant re humeplace of Chivitats Ei’’ (481.19–21). ‘‘Babbau’’ when pronounced is the Italian ‘‘Babbo,’’ daddy. H. C. E., the father of us all, appears as ‘‘humeplace,’’ Saint Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, and ‘‘Ei’’ (German, egg). Vico is the father of our historical mentality, the

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founder of the philosophy of history, Augustine’s ‘‘great city of the human race,’’ the phrase that Vico echoes throughout the New Science. Vico is ‘‘dadaddy again’’ (496.28). Earvico is the one who hears the thunder, who hears the presence of providentiality in history. Vico has the ear for it, ‘‘for you cannot wake a silken nouse out of a hoarse oar’’ (154.9–10); ‘‘there’s no-one Noel like him here to hear’’ (588.27–28); ‘‘the old hayheaded philosopher . . . old Earwicker’’ (47.1,15) in the Ballad of Persse O’Reilly; ‘‘the ear of Fionn Earwicker’’ (108.21–22); ‘‘Ear! Ear! Weakear!’’ (568.26); ‘‘Earwicker, that patternmind, that paradigmatic ear, receptoretentive as his if Dionysius’’ (70.35–36). Vico has the mind that finds the providential patterns and the paradigmatic ear to hear them. Like ‘‘Dionysius’s ear,’’ the chamber in Dionysius’s palace in Sicily through which he could overhear what his enemies were saying, Vico can hear the murmurings in history that others cannot. Vico can hear and see what others cannot. Vico is ‘‘earsighted’’ (143.9–10). Earwicker is also associated with language. Earwicker is connected to earwig, the insect that was thought to crawl into ears. An earwig in its archaic meaning is a gossip and an eavesdropper (‘‘earwigging’’ is to circulate private talk). Gossip is language that circulates and often trades on the coincidence of events that it reports. Joyce’s Vichian ear hears everything; in Finnegans Wake all meanings of language are circulated and recirculated. Stephen Dedalus was Joyce’s imaginative universal of the four traditions of Western history. H. C. Earwicker is the imaginative universal of all humanity, the particular pub owner of Dublin and the universal everybody, ‘‘Here Comes Everybody’’; ‘‘Haveth Childers Everywhere.’’ Joyce introduces H. C. E. with a Vichian phrase, ‘‘a pleasant turn of the populace,’’ and characterizes him as a particular universal: ‘‘which gave him as sense of those normative letters the nickname Here Comes Everybody. An imposing everybody he always indeed looked, constantly the same as and equal to himself and magnificiently well worthy of any and all such universalisation’’ (32.17–21). Anthony Burgess says: ‘‘The name ‘Earwicker’ does not seem to exist in real life. I have made a hobby to look for it in the telephone directories of all the towns I visit, but I have not yet found it, though Earwaker is often there—six times, as I remember, in the London directory.’’∑∫ ‘‘Ear’’ is time as ‘‘wick’’ is place, ‘‘ever here and over there’’ (382.23). ‘‘Ear’’ is a play on ‘‘year’’ or ‘‘D’y’ear?’’ (Do you hear?). Year and place: whence and where (unde et ubi). Our sense of time physiologically is dependent on constant, small sound variations in the ear, not on sight. The visual experiences of time, the passages of day and night, the turning of the seasons, are secondary

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to the constant fluctuations of sound on the ear. Persons who become completely deaf (stone deaf, deaf as a post) can suffer difficulties with the sense of time passing because of the disappearance of sensitivity to these sound variations. Vico has heard and reproduced the thunder, which Joyce remembers, imitates, and arranges into ten different forms so that we readers or listeners can hear, if we have ears to hear. ‘‘Loud, hear us!’’ (258.25). The thunders, being composed of thunderwords from various languages, are mnemonic devices to allow us to contact the common mental language. As Joyce intended, the writing in Finnegans Wake is not just to be seen but to be read aloud. It is a ‘‘soundpicture’’ (570.14), ‘‘a halt for hearsake. A scene at sight’’ (279.9– 280.1). When we put it in our ear we catch much more of its associations. ‘‘What can’t be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for’’ (482.34–36). Joyce often associates principles of the New Science with plays on Vico’s name, or he simply plays on his name. There are plays just on ‘‘wick’’: ‘‘Eelwick’’ (134.16), ‘‘wicker’’ (108.23), ‘‘Stick wicks in your earshells’’ (435.19), ‘‘wick’s ears pricked up’’ (83.6), ‘‘the wickser in his ear’’ (311.11); plays on ‘‘vic’’: ‘‘the old vic’’ (62.6) (also the London theater), ‘‘Old Vickers’’ (330.13), ‘‘victimisedly victorihoarse’’ (472.21), ‘‘because avicuum’s not there at all’’ (473.6–7), ‘‘V.I.C.5.6’’ (495.31) (the New Science has five books and the corso and ricorso have a total of six ages, and within an age Vico also speaks of six phases; see axiom 66); ‘‘six vics odd’’ (82.27), ‘‘victis poenis hesternis’’ (596.6–7) (‘‘yesterday’s punishments having been overcome,’’ there is a return), ‘‘the ubideintia of the savium is our ervics fenicitas’’ (610.7–8) (Dublin’s motto: ‘‘Obedientia civium urbis felicitas’’—Citizens’ Obedience Is City’s Happiness). Vico is both vicar and viker: ‘‘watchouse in Vicar Lane’’ (84.18–19), ‘‘Vikens’’ (331.20), ‘‘our friend vikelegal’’ (131.22), ‘‘Viker Eagle’’ (622.8) (the eagle being the sign of Jove, Vico’s Jupiter Tonans), ‘‘Vikloefells’’ (626.18), ‘‘Vikloe vich he lofed’’ (375.33), ‘‘murrmurr of all the mackavicks’’ (101.33), ‘‘Sheem avick’’ (188.5), ‘‘she vicking well knowed them all heartswise and fourwords’’ (279.F20–21), ‘‘The victar’’ (349.25), ‘‘the aboleshqvick’’ (302.18), ‘‘Shattamovick?’’ (354.1–2), ‘‘from livicking on pidgins’ ’’ (463.28), ‘‘he confesses to all his tellavicious nieces’’ (349.28), ‘‘the vicar’s joy’’ (596.20), ‘‘me and my Riley in the Vickar’s bed!’’ (495.17) (‘‘The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly’’ [44.24–47.29], as mentioned above, perce-oreille, French ‘‘earwig,’’ Earwicker), ‘‘vicariously known as Toucher ‘Thom’ who is. I suggest Finoglam as his habitat’’ (506.28–29), ‘‘the producer (Mr. John Baptister Vickar)’’ (255.27).

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Viker is similar to Viking, as Earwicker was one of the Scandinavian invaders of Dublin. Vico is both the vicar and the Viking, the stability of the divine order in history and the instability of the political order. Vico via Earwicker also has associations with authority in the sense of viceroy, the king’s representative, ‘‘Vikeroy’’ (100.5). H. C. Earwicker is spoken of ‘‘throughout his excellency long vicefreegal existence’’ (33.30–31); ‘‘his viceregal booth’’ (32.36); ‘‘viceking’s graab’’ (18.13); ‘‘vicemversem’’ (384.27); ‘‘vicereversing’’ (227.19); ‘‘viceuvious’’ (570.5–6); ‘‘he was made vicewise’’ (286.29). The truth of Vico’s authority (auctoritas) is made in history and can convert to its opposite, ‘‘Viceversounding’’ (355.10). There are plays on the Vico road: ‘‘their Vico’s road’’ (246.24–25), ‘‘Vicarage Road?’’ (291.18), ‘‘The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin’’ (452.21–22), ‘‘Vicus Veneris’’ (551.34), and ‘‘the viability of vicinals if invisible is invincible’’ (81.1) (‘‘vicinals,’’ derived from vicinus, neighboring; vicinal roads as distinguished from highways). Roads are connected to circles: ‘‘closed his vicious circle, snap. Jams jarred’’ (98.19) (‘‘Jams jarred’’ = James Joyce); the vicious circle was closed because it was ‘‘scrapheaped by the Maker’’ (98.17) (that is, by Providence), ‘‘moves in vicous cicles yet remews the same’’ (134.16–17). ‘‘We drames our dreams till Bappy returns. And Sein annews’’ (277.17–18). ‘‘Now, to be on anew’’ (143.3). There is ‘‘Dr. Tipple’s Vi-Cocoa’’ (26.30–31) taken over from ‘‘Dr. Tibble’s Vi-cocoa’’ in Ulysses (Vico is a doctor of Triple, Doctor Threes; here also is one of Vico’s first interpreters, Vincenzo Cuoco); ‘‘Jambaptistae’’ (287.24) and ‘‘as Jambudvispa Vipra foresaw of him’’ (596.29–30) (from Sanskrit ‘‘vipra,’’ wise); ‘‘promptly tossed himself in the vico’’ (417.5–6); ‘‘Noo Soch Wilds and from Vico’’ (497.13); ‘‘disguised as a vincentian’’ (38.26); ‘‘some navico, navvies’’ (179.19); and ‘‘Nearapoblican’’ (172.23) (the Neapolitan). Two especially rich passages in which Joyce expands on his theme of Vico are, first: ‘‘Teems of times and happy returns. The seim anew. Ordovico or viricordo. Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be’’ (215.22–24). Ordo in Latin is to set in order, as Ear-Vico’s ‘‘patternmind’’ has done. Vi ricordo is Italian for ‘‘I remember you’’ (vi = you in the second person familiar plural) or I remember Vico (vi = Vico). In addition to Vico, Joyce also has specific reference here to the Ordovician rocks near Dublin and to the ‘‘Ordovices’’ (51.29), an ancient British tribe in North Wales. Anna Livia Plurabelle is identified with the power of the Muses to sing of what was, is, and is to be. As Vico’s or H. C. E.’s wife, A. L. P. is Memory, the mother of the Muses. This passage is echoed in ‘‘Themes have thimes and habit reburns. To flame in you. Ardor vigor forders order. Since ancient was our living is in possible to be’’ (614.8–10).

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The two sons of H. C. E. and A. L. P., Shem and Shaun, are the twins of Bruno’s opposites, the Irish forms of the names James and John, who take on and exchange identities throughout Finnegans Wake. In one of these Joyce is ‘‘Shem the Penman’’ (125.23) and Joyce’s brother John Stanislaus is Shaun, the Post, the less clever of the two. Joyce is ‘‘Jim the Penman,’’ the notorious nineteenth-century English barrister so called for forging £100,000 worth of checks. Jim the Penman is making up literature from the litter of history, opposite Shaun the postman. Latin pinna is ‘‘feather’’ and ‘‘pen’’ and ‘‘fin’’ = Finn. Post (a stake set in the ground) and postman are from the Latin postis. Shaun is stolid.∑Ω The second passage is in the fourth book, in which Vico and all of Joyce’s themes concerning Vico are capsulized in a single paragraph that is also a single sentence, prefaced by the word ‘‘Forget!’’ ‘‘Our wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer, a tetrado-mational gazebocroticon (the ‘Mamma Lujah’ known to every schoolboy scandaller, be he Matty, Marky, Lukey or John-a-Donk), autokinatonetically preprovided with a clappercoupling smeltingworks exprogressive process, (for the farmer, his son and their homely codes, known as eggburst, eggblend, eggburial and hatch-as-hatch can) receives through a portal vein the dialytically separated elements of precedent decomposition for the verypetpurpose of subsequent recombination so that the heroticisms, catastrophes and eccentricities transmitted by the ancient legacy of the past, type by tope, letter from litter, word at ward, with sendence of sundance, since the days of Plooney and Columcellas when Giacinta, Pervenche and Margaret swayed over the all-too-ghoulish and illyrical and innumantic in our mutter nation, all, anastomosically assimilated and preteridentified paraidiotically, in fact, the sameold gamebold adomic structure of our Finnius the old One, as highly charged with electrons as hophazards can effective it, may be there for you, Cockalooralooraloomenos, when cup, platter and pot come piping hot, as sure as herself pits hen to paper and there’s scribings scrawled on eggs’’ (FW 614.27–615.10). The four authors of the ‘‘Mammalujo’’ (379.3, 11) are joined with Joyce’s four-term transformation of Vico’s three ages, and this is joined with Joyce’s fourth but partial parody of Quinet’s passage on the cycles of history, which is joined with the theme of the hen who first creates literature by scratching up a letter from litter, in the early part of the work. History is the great ‘‘Dirtdump’’ (615.12) from which all that is in memory is returned, ‘‘being hummus the same roturns. He who runes may rede it on all fours’’ (18.5–6). This includes the coursings and recoursings of the identities of Shem and Shaun—Cain and Abel, Shem and Ham, ‘‘Yem or Yan’’ (yin and yang) (246.31). As Joyce plays on H. C. E. and Earwicker, and thus the figure of Vico, all the way through

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Finnegans Wake, so he plays, on page after page, on the combination of the four ages, the central idea he adapts from Vico’s thought. In the last lines of Finnegans Wake Joyce writes: ‘‘My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I’ll bear it on me. To remind me of’’ (628.6– 7). In the last canto of Paradiso Dante says: ‘‘Thus in the wind, on the light leaves, the Sibyl’s oracle was lost’’ (canto 33. 65–66). Earlier, in the Wake, there is ‘‘m’m’ry’s leaves are falling’’ (460.20). In the Aeneid Virgil has Aeneas be warned that the Sibyl records her prophetic verses on leaves arranged and stored in her cave: ‘‘But when at the turn of the hinge a light breeze has stirred them, and the open door scattered the tender foliage, never does she thereafter care to catch them, as they flutter in the rocky cave, nor to recover their places, nor to unite the verses; uncounselled, men depart, and loathe the Sibyl’s seat’’ (III. 448–52). Forewarned, Aeneas obtains the Sibyl’s instruction to seek the golden bough directly through her oral statement. Dante, at the end of his journey, has grasped the wisdom of divine love. Joyce is on the last leaf of his book, but he is still in history, as his last leaf reminds him. ‘‘Yes’’ (628.8) (the affirmation and last word of Ulysses). ‘‘Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair’’ (628.8–9). ‘‘Tad’’ (father in Welsh) recalls the end of A Portrait: ‘‘Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead’’ (P 276). ‘‘If I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings like he’d come from Arkangels, I sink I’d die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup’’ (628.9–11). The fate of Icarus is ‘‘to washup’’ in the wake; more piety, more ‘‘worship’’ of his father could have caused Icarus to heed his advice not to fly too near the sun. ‘‘Yes, tid’’ (tid is Danish for time)—or, ‘‘Yes, kid.’’ ‘‘There’s where’’ (whence and where, Earwicker’s time and place, the unde et ubi that begins Vico’s conception of history). ‘‘Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee!’’ (628.13–14) (‘‘far’’ is Danish for ‘‘father’’). The end is near. It is a repeat of other ends; the end again, but softly: me memormee (Greek mneme) (cf. 527.3, 21, 24), ‘‘remember me,’’ spoken by a child. Memory is what acts against the end, which comes about through forgetting. ‘‘Forget, remember!’’ (614.22). ‘‘Mememormee’’ echoes the ‘‘mishe mishe’’ on the first page of the Wake (3.9), and ‘‘Eccolo me!’’ (462.67) (Italian, ‘‘here he is, me!’’). How to be remembered in history? ‘‘The keys to. Given’’ recalls Dante’s Paradiso, ‘‘that ancient father of Holy Church [St. Peter] to whom Christ entrusted the keys of this beauteous flower’’ (canto 32.124–26). The two fathers, Daedalus and St. Peter, hold the keys to heaven. Then the sentence that encircles the book: ‘‘A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and

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Environs’’ (628.15–3.3). And we are at the beginning again, ‘‘the last of the first’’ (111.10). Finn again!

Vico’s Resurrections Vico is the inheritor of Latin thought and Italian humanism, with their interests in civil wisdom, law, memory, rhetoric, and poetic; of the speculations of the Renaissance forerunners of modern naturalism Giordano Bruno and Tommaso Campanella; of the mathematical and experimental science of Galileo Galilei, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton; of the Epicureanism of Pierre Gassendi and the rationalism of René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes; of the encyclopedias of knowledge of Giulio Camillo and Francis Bacon, and of the biological and medical researches of the Neapolitan Academy of the Investigators of Tommaso Cornelio and Lionardo di Capua. Vico’s major work was published in three editions: Principj di una scienza nuova intorno alla natura delle nazioni per la quale si ritruovano i principj di altro sistema del diritto naturale delle genti (1725) (Principles of a new science concerning the nature of the nations by which are found the principles of another system of the natural law of the peoples); Cinque libri di Giambattista Vico de’ principj d’una scienza nuova d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni (1730) (Five books of Giambattista Vico of principles of a new science concerning the common nature of the nations); and Principj di scienza nuova di Giambattista Vico d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni (1744) (Principles of new science of Giambattista Vico concerning the common nature of the nations). This 1744 third printing is the 1730 edition as it was being revised and republished by Vico at the time of his death in 1744. The 1725 edition is commonly called the Scienza nuova prima. The 1730/1744 edition is commonly called the Scienza nuova seconda. This second version, which is more than 250 pages longer than the first, is what is commonly meant by those writing on Vico when referring to the Scienza nuova. It was this second version that Joyce read in Italian and was the basis of Michelet’s French edition. Vico comes to us through a series of four resurrections. The first of these is the nationalist Vico of Vincenzo Cuoco, the result of the failure of the Neapolitan revolution of 1799. There was a continuous Vico tradition in economics and political theory, going back to Vico’s pupil Antonio Genovesi, who held the first European chair of political economy at Naples. This tradition involved Vico’s friend Celestino Galiani, who corresponded with the leaders of the French Enlightenment, and his nephew Ferdinando Galiani, who wrote a treatise On Money, using Vico’s argumentation against the social-contract theory of the origin of society.

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Gaetano Filangieri, in Science of Legislation (1780–85), attempted to join some of Vico’s views with Montesquieu and the Encyclopaedists, who debated the views of Nicolas Antoine Boulanger as to whether history follows a progressive or a cyclical course. The jurist Mario Pagano was influenced by Boulanger and by Genovesi in his Political Essays and was famous both in Italy and abroad for his work on criminal procedure.∏≠ Vico’s influence also entered Neapolitan jurisprudence through his pupil Emanuele Duni, whose Essay on Universal Jurisprudence uses Vico’s philosophical-philological approach to connect law to the customs of civilized society and the development of society. Cuoco laid the groundwork for Vico to become more than a figure in the tradition of the Neapolitan jurisconsults and to make him a leading influence in the Risorgimento. Cuoco took as his guide in his study of Vico the French reactionary Joseph de Maistre.∏∞ In his Essay on the Parthenopean Revolution of 1799 (1801), Cuoco used Vico to distinguish the elements of Italian national unity from those of the French Revolution, which had wrongly guided the Neapolitan patriots in their failed revolution. Cuoco followed this with his Plato in Italy (1803–6), in which he uses Vichian thought for a grander, imaginative expansion of his themes. Vico’s resurrection, by Italian patriots, gave impetus to the publication of new editions of his works, beginning with one of the Scienza nuova at Milan in 1801. The Scienza nuova became the book of the Risorgimento; its ideas, understood in these terms, were carried to England by Ugo Foscolo, Gioacchino de’ Prati, and Giuseppi Mazzini, and to France and Belgium by Giuseppi Ferrari and Vincenzo Gioberti.∏≤ Vico became a national and international figure, known for having a doctrine of the nation and of the ‘‘common nature of nations.’’ Vico’s second resurrection is as a philosopher of history. He became part of the creation of the French philosophy of history in the nineteenth century. Jules Michelet discovered Vico while conceiving of a history of civilization formulated from the languages of various nations. When the Neapolitan revolution scattered its participants to France, Victor Cousin introduced Michelet to one of these Neapolitan exiles, Pietro de Angelis, who gave Michelet a copy of the Scienza nuova and put the French philosophers of history in touch with his friends in Naples. Of his encounter with Vico, Michelet wrote: ‘‘1824. Vico. Effort, infernal shades, grandeur, the golden bough’’ and ‘‘From 1824 on, I was seized by a frenzy caught from Vico, an incredible intoxication with his great historical principle.’’∏≥ The French Revolution, having played a role in the resurrection of Vico to the status of a national figure in Italy, was also a cause of his resurrection in France. Romanticism, which began in England and Germany at the end of the eighteenth century, spread to France, and with it, for historians and scholars of

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letters, came the romantic interest in the past, in myths, legends, and national spirit. There was a turn to feeling, imagination, and irrationalism as a reaction to the critical and rationalist views of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. This interest in the past, in a historical sense, led to a global interest in history, which revolved around the French Revolution of 1789, around questions concerning why such events happen and what they mean for the future of a nation and for the condition of humanity in general. Against the rationalist lack of interest in the past, based on a doctrine of progress and on an interest in only its enlightened periods, on which Voltaire focused, is a sense of rediscovering the freshness of the past, its reality, and the lessons it holds. This interest in the value of the past in relation to the present brings about what Michelet calls its ‘‘resurrection.’’∏∂ Into this atmosphere appear both Vico and Herder, translated by Cousin’s young colleagues, Michelet and Quinet, as I mentioned earlier. It became popular to discuss Vico’s and Herder’s views of history together. In 1827 Michelet published his translation of Vico’s Scienza nuova under the title Principles de la philosophie de l’histoire. Pierre Simon Ballanche published the first section of his Essays on Social Palingenesis, declaring Vico ‘‘one of the most penetrating minds that ever existed.’’∏∑ Teodoro Simone Jouffrey published an article entitled ‘‘Bossuet, Vico et Herder’’ in the Globe. The following year Cousin took up these three figures in the eleventh lecture of his course on the history of philosophy, delivered at the Sorbonne before audiences of two thousand. Michelet’s translation was reissued in 1835. At the time of his first edition Michelet also wrote a substantial account of Vico’s life and work for the Biographie universelle.∏∏ In the 1835 Oeuvres choisies de Vico Michelet included a translation of Vico’s autobiography and extracts from Vico’s other works and letters. In his Histoire de la république romaine (1831) Michelet claims that all the works of modern literary and historical scholarship exist already in Vico’s Scienza nuova: ‘‘All the giants of criticism are already contained by, and comfortably lodged in, the small pandemonium of the Scienza nuova.’’∏π In 1869, reflecting on his own work, Michelet wrote: ‘‘I had no master but Vico. His principle of living force, of humanity creating itself, made both my book and my teaching.’’∏∫ The third resurrection of Vico comes in the early years of the twentieth century, in Naples again, through Benedetto Croce and Fausto Nicolini. There was a continuous tradition of interest in Vico’s doctrine of poetic wisdom and his connection of poetry to language, but Croce transformed this along the lines of his own interest and brought it forward in 1902 in his Esthetica, translated into English in 1909 (Aesthetic: As a Science of Expression and General Linguistic). The chapter on Vico gave Vico prominence in the modern

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study of aesthetics. In 1911 Croce published his La filosofia di Giambattista Vico, translated by R. G. Collingwood in 1913. Like the previous resurrections of Vico, the third also stimulated new editions of his work. In 1911, as I mentioned earlier, the first modern critical edition of Vico’s Opere appeared, guided by the exact scholarship of Nicolini and published by Laterza. Croce saw Vico as the Italian Hegel. The basis for this approach was laid by the Hegelian idealism of Francesco de Sanctis and Bertrando Spaventa. Spaventa, in his Italian Philosophy in Its Relations with European Philosophy (1862), saw Vico as the precursor of Kant and Hegel, a ‘‘Kantian before Kant,’’ as Giovanni Gentile put it.∏Ω The Italian reception of Hegel, whose philosophy dominated European thought in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, was the national homecoming of a form of thought that had already existed in Vico. Although Hegel never read Vico, in 1948 Croce wrote a piece imagining a visit of a Neapolitan scholar to Berlin in the last months of Hegel’s life. In their conversation Hegel is introduced to the thought of Vico by his visitor, who interests him in the similarity of Vico’s thought to his own, and after the visit Hegel is found quoting Vico to himself.π≠ In this third resurrection Vico is made to exit his own century and enter the next. On this interpretation, Vico, seen as the founder of historicism, requires an adjustment that takes him from his own place in history and moves him forward. The price paid for this aberration is that Croce misses, in his interpretation, the truly original sense of Vico’s discovery of the universale fantastico, the ‘‘imaginative universal,’’ and views it as an inadequate formulation of the Hegelian Begriff or ‘‘concrete universal,’’ which is a product not of the imagination ( fantasia) but of reason (Vernunft). Croce wrote on Vico extensively, not just in his book on Vico’s philosophy but also in numerous essays and studies. His interpretation is in many ways admirable; it is focused closely on Vico’s works. It is much more than a programmatic reading of Vico into Hegelianism. Croce began a period of Hegelian interpretation of Vico that finally was broken by scholars like Pietro Piovani. Piovani says: ‘‘Croce finds in Vico ‘the very concepts, the metaphors and turns of phrase of Hegel’ and notes their singularity, ‘inasmuch as the German philosopher did not know the earlier phenomenology, conceived a century earlier in Naples under the title of the New Science.’ Then Croce concludes: ‘It almost seems as if the soul of the Italian and Catholic philosopher had transmigrated into the German, to reappear, at the distance of a century, more mature, more conscious.’ ’’π∞ Having been resurrected as a nationalist by Cuoco, and as a philosopher of history by Michelet, Vico was resurrected as a philosophical idealist by Croce.

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In this third awakening Vico emerges not simply as a philosopher of history but as a philosopher per se, whose ideas are original and run the full course of philosophy. It was not until after the mid-twentieth century that Vico began to be widely apprehended in terms that were different from those set in motion by Crocean-Hegelian idealism. The resurrection that followed came from thinkers who were outside or largely outside the Italian idealist tradition from the start. The fourth resurrection of Vico has occurred in our own day. It begins with the indefatigable efforts of Giorgio Tagliacozzo to establish Vico’s importance for various fields of thought.π≤ His project to commemorate the tercentenary of Vico’s birth generated the collection of essays Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium (1969). This was the first truly prominent collected volume on Vico’s thought in English, bringing together an array of distinguished scholars from many fields. As I stated earlier, the important full interpretations of Vico that preceded this volume in English were Robert Flint’s Vico (1884) and H. P. Adams’s The Life and Writings of Giambattista Vico (1935). This resurrection, like the previous ones, was accompanied—in this case, prepared—by new editions of Vico’s works. This renaissance in Vico studies, which became worldwide, spreading from West to East, was made possible by the translation into English of Vico’s New Science in 1948, preceded by the translation of his Autobiography in 1944, by the Italianist Thomas Goddard Bergin and the philosopher Max Harold Fisch. Their translation of the New Science was begun on Capri in 1939, in contact with Croce at Naples.π≥ Once available in English, Vico’s major work could become available to many readers throughout the world. The Chinese translation is made from the English translation. Translations of Vico’s other works into English have followed as the current renaissance developed, and now all of Vico’s major works are available in English. A large step in Vico’s fourth resurrection was his entry into the world of the history of ideas and the humanities generally in Isaiah Berlin’s Vico and Herder (1976).π∂ Berlin reopened in new terms the comparison that had stimulated the French interest in Vico more than a century earlier. These new terms focused on Vico’s theory of knowledge as the key to his originality and showed, against Croce, that Vico’s conception of fantasia involved a new conception of knowledge. In advancing his view of Vico, Berlin could rely on what he called, in the preface, ‘‘the admirable translation of Vico’s Scienza Nuova by Professors T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch.’’ Berlin’s book was preceded by Leon Pompa’s Vico: A Study of the ‘‘New Science’’ (1975), which was the first book in English in our time to bring Vico into academic philosophy.π∑

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In Italy there has been continuous Vico scholarship, much of it historical and philological. Vico has been separated from the dominance of Crocean and Hegelian idealism by a line of new interpretations, going from Piovani, who founded the Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani, to Nicola Badaloni’s widely read Introduzione a G. B. Vico (1961),π∏ to Gianfranco Cantelli’s Mente corpo linguaggio (1986),ππ and to the many writings of Andrea Battistini and his two-volume edition of Vico’s Opere (1990), which includes extensive commentary with up-to-date references.π∫ In the last three decades of the twentieth century more works appeared on Vico’s thought in Italian, English, and other languages than in any other period of its study. Vico’s views have been interpreted by hermeneuticists, phenomenologists, pragmatists, idealists, Marxists, structuralists, comparativists, historicists, christologists, semioticists, cognitive psychologists, and postmodernists.πΩ Citations to Vico are to be found in Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology,∫≠ Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge,∫∞ Jürgen Habermas’s Theory and Practice,∫≤ Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method, which makes important use of Vico’s conception of rhetoric and sensus communis,∫≥ and Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue and other of his works.∫∂ Max Horkheimer’s Habilitationschrift contains a chapter on Vico’s conception of history,∫∑ and Karl-Otto Apel’s Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis Vico has a long chapter on Vico’s conception of language.∫∏ In these ways, and through many books and hundreds of essays on aspects of Vico’s thought, Vico’s ideas have gained attention in all the fields of the humanities and social thought. Vico has entered contemporary literature at several different points. Vico is part of the theme of A. S. Byatt’s novel Possession∫π and is the subject of Borges’s ‘‘The Immortal’’ in Labyrinths.∫∫ Vico and Vichian themes are prominent in the work of Carlos Fuentes, especially Terra Nostra and Christopher Unborn.∫Ω A paragraph summarizing Vico’s views appears in Salman Rushdie’s novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet.Ω≠ Harold Bloom, in The Western Canon, has organized world literature in terms of Vico’s three ages and their modification in Finnegans Wake.Ω∞ To put these resurrections in Joyce’s terms, Vico as nationalist is ‘‘eggburst.’’ He bursts upon the scene of politics as part of the Rinascimento. Vico as philosopher of history is ‘‘eggblend,’’ blended with the romantic worldview and with the interest in history of Cousin, Michelet, and Quinet. Vico as philosophical idealist is ‘‘eggburial.’’ He is interred by Spaventa, Croce, and Gentile in Hegelianism, to the point that Vico is even aufgehoben from his own century. Vico in his fourth resurrection is ‘‘hatch-as-hatch can.’’ In essay

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after essay he becomes Vico and you-name-it (Here Comes Everybody); his ideas appear connectable to every modern thinker and every modern movement. Vico is the man for all theoretical seasons. This fourth resurrection is good in the way that the earlier resurrections are good. Vico is not forgotten, and he appears as something for the age. These introductions of Vico into the movements of contemporary thought have caused a worldwide renaissance in Vico studies, but they run the risk of making Vico fit their own measure. Because Vico speaks to issues at the basis of modern thought he easily seems to be a contemporary. The risk is that of Vico’s second axiom of the New Science: ‘‘Whenever men can form no idea of distant and unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar and at hand’’ (122). Each of the three earlier resurrections presents Vico as a single figure, to be understood in a single set of terms. He has an identity. In the fourth resurrection Vico has fallen into the twentieth century, ‘‘the humptyhillhead of humself,’’ ‘‘humbly dumbly, only to washup’’ in a wake of pieces of himself. The pieces follow the modern fragmentation of knowledge and culture that do not make a whole—what Cassirer, who called Vico ‘‘the real discoverer of the myth,’’ saw as the ‘‘crisis in man’s knowledge of himself.’’Ω≤ Outside the academy and its interests, Joyce is the most important figure to have resurrected Vico in the twentieth century.Ω≥ Because Joyce came at Vico directly, with the intent to use his theories for all they were worth, connecting Vico to no work but his own, Joyce accomplished something extraordinary that no academic interpretation can offer. Joyce’s interest in Vico was tied only to his own interest in capturing the principles of humanity in his imagination and putting pen to paper. Joyce, like Vico, swore allegiance to no teacher. Each followed no school but his own. Joyce believed in no science, but he let Vico affect him, and found Vico in the circumstances of his own life. He was not sure if Vico’s theories were true but used them anyway. Joyce was not interested in interpreting Vico, only in taking what he needed, and in so doing he developed the only free-standing, magnificent presentation of Vico to date. Vico did not have a truly formative influence on any other major figure of the contemporary world. Marx has a long footnote to Vico in the thirteenth chapter of Capital, but he came to Vico with his ideas already formed.Ω∂ Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the first prominent English disseminator of Vichian ideas.Ω∑ He quoted Vico in Theory of Life in 1816 (pub. 1848), and from 1825, when he received a copy of the Scienza nuova, until his death in 1834 he had a continuing interest in Vico. He found in Vico a kindred spirit. But Coleridge also came to Vico late. His chapter ‘‘On the Imagination, or Esemplastic Power’’ in the Biographia Literaria (1817) is based on Kant.

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W. B. Yeats came to an interest in Vico in the last decade and a half of his career. In 1924 he read and annotated Croce’s Philosophy of Giambattista Vico in R. G. Collingwood’s translation of 1913. Yeats could not read Italian; his knowledge of Vico is from Croce and from Gentile’s Fascist interpretation of Vico, which he acquired secondhand and adopted while sojourning in Italy in 1925.Ω∏ He refers to Vico in A Vision, connecting him to Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West; in his introduction to his Swiftian play, Words upon the Window-Pane, he compares Jonathan Swift’s views of history and society to Vico’s. In On the Boiler he remarks on Vico’s principle that ‘‘we can know nothing that we have not made,’’Ωπ and his principle of making may play a role in Yeats’s later poems.Ω∫ Vico had a real importance for Yeats, but Vico does not enter his work in the way it enters that of Joyce.ΩΩ Joyce’s friend Louis Gillet wrote: ‘‘Of course, it is no longer a question of Time and Space in this indivisible duration where the absolute reigns. These two comrades, who did their cooking for so long on the scrap-iron stove of Kantian categories, find their pot knocked over by a kick from James Joyce. Their soup is spilled out—chronology disappears and all the centuries are contemporary.’’∞≠≠ In Ulysses Stephen remarks: ‘‘Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves’’ (U 175.1042–46). ‘‘As who has come returns’’ (FW 382.28). Vico was Joyce’s guide in his descent into history that begins with Daedalus’s flight, moves through the journey of wily Ulysses, and ends in the fall and rise, the whence and where, of Finnegan. My aim in considering Vico and Joyce together is not to create a comparative study but to use Joyce as a key for the comprehension of Vico, to see if the Humpty-Dumpty pieces of Vico can be put back together again. Joyce is a great writer, and Finnegans Wake is one of the great works of Western literature. If Dante is the Tuscan Homer, Joyce is the Hibernian Homer, in this case not standing at the line dividing the heroic and the human but attempting to recover the heroic and its origins in an age already beset by Vico’s ‘‘barbarism of reflection,’’ the rational and technological structuring we experience of all areas of life. It is useless to approach Joyce’s Vichianism in the sense of a standard interpretation of Vico. Joyce’s approach calls for the speculative comprehension of Vico, to ‘‘spy out’’ Vico in his work. To enter into Vico’s place requires that his work be remeditated and renarrated. To make it our own we must ‘‘tickle the speculative’’ and find Vico ‘‘redivivus’’ (FW 50.13, 15). Joyce confronted Vico

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as another great thinker and decided for himself what were the elements of Vico’s greatness, in order to resurrect this greatness as a basis for his own great project. Anything we look for might be found in the Wake.∞≠∞ Most of Western culture and a great deal outside it is there. Shakespeare as well as Dante and Swift are to be found throughout the Wake, as are references to Budge’s edition of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Koran, Buddhism, Confucianism, and the Upanishads. But Vico is not just one among a number of things we find: Vico is continually there as a base, a guidepost. We turn a page, we round a corner, and there is Vico, meeting us again, delivering his views. Glasheen is correct that Joyceans have not found the bearing that Vico has on Joyce because they do not really know Vico’s works. Those Joyceans who have connected Vico and Joyce have studied Vico only to the degree they felt necessary to formulate their discussions. The focus of most of these discussions is on Vico’s doctrine of ideal eternal history, which Joyceans quickly conceive of as a general doctrine of ‘‘cycles’’ and little more, in some cases even speaking of Vico’s ‘‘four ages,’’ not realizing that it was Joyce who added a fourth.∞≠≤ No one with a full and precise knowledge of Vico has gone through each page of the Wake to establish what Joyce actually did do with Vico, how Vico has forced himself off on him and how Joyce used Vico for all he is worth. It is unimaginable that Joyce, with the interest he had in Vico and the agility he had for incorporating aspects of other works in his own, would attach blinders to himself and, ignoring Vico’s other writings all around him, look only at the Scienza nuova. Joyce and Vico are a coincidence of Bruno’s contraries. Joyce the poet found his identity through Vico the philosopher, and vice versa the identity of Vico can be found through Joyce. Finnegans Wake is an auditory book of sounds in the night of the soul. Joyce attempts to have the reader hear what is in memory, in the mind’s ear, ‘‘the mar of murmury mermers to the mind’s ear’’ (254.18). Sound is the province of the poet. ‘‘Ear! Ear! Not ay! Eye! Eye! For I’m at the heart of it’’ (409.3–4). Philosophy since Socrates, since the large and small letters of the Republic and its Myth of the Cave, is based on sight. This difference of sight and sound is part of the contrariety of the poet and the philosopher. Philosophy struggles to be musical, whereas the poet comes to this naturally. The poet makes the story as it is sung. The philosopher struggles to make reason tell a story. Vico breaks with philosophical tradition to make reason come from what he hears. The mind’s ear, not the mind’s eye, is at the heart of self-knowledge. In applying Joyce to Vico there are four things to keep in mind in Vico’s thought: providence, the hero, memory (which includes language and law), and contraries (which he shares with Bruno). All of Vico’s thought approached

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though Joyce is founded on the epiphany of thunder, from which come language and its connection to falling. ‘‘First we feel. Then we fall’’ (FW 627.11). Falling involves resurrection. Vico falls and arises throughout his autobiography, and the great city of the human race does the same throughout the Scienza nuova. Language naturally carries its original sense of double truth, of universal and particular. When this bond of doubleness begins to separate, expression becomes monologic and barbaric and a new fall is near. Memory, when carried to its fullest, is at the basis of words and things, overcomes the fixity of time and place, and turns the causal sense of the progressive order of events into a circle of coincidences. All contraries are married to each other, not in a chaotic way but in patterns. We enter into worlds that are not obvious in our own conscious present. They are the ones we enter every night, in the world of sleep, to awake each morning, our daily Easter. The world awake stands to sleep as the living to the dead, and the reverse. Memory is ‘‘The keykeeper of the keys of the seven doors of the dreamadoory’’ (377.1–2). The heroic and the providential, which are tied to memory and to rise and fall, are central to a sense of the world that has the past and future in the present—that follows the Muse’s song. The heroic stands between the past and the future, bringing together what was and pointing the way toward what is to come. The providential is the presence of a truth, a permanence beyond the present comedy that keeps the present from being just a folly of events. The sense of comedy, which in philosophy emerges as irony, keeps thought honest, always showing that there is more hidden in events than appears on their surface. As the heroic generates piety, the comic, when it turns the world upside down, generates wonder at what is beyond the understood and finished. The fall that is in all events generates the melancholic temperament that Joyce and Vico share because the things of the human world of history are never what they seem. They can never be fully mastered by reason.

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The Life of Vico: A Career in Naples

the producer (Mr. John Baptister Vickar) —FW 255.27

Vico’s Fall On the first page of his autobiography Vico describes his descent from the timeless world of childhood to the underworld of a coma, from which he emerged as a child of Saturn, of Chronos, with the melancholic and acrid nature of a philosopher. Vico was transformed from a lively and restless child of fair disposition into a youth whose temperament is associated with ingenious and profound thinkers who, as Vico says, ‘‘through ingenuity flash like lightning in acuity, through reflection take no pleasure in witticism and falsity.’’∞ The cause of this transformation was Vico’s fall, at the age of seven, headfirst from the top of a ladder to the floor, probably in his father’s small bookshop in via San Biagio dei Librai, part of a series of connected streets called Spaccanapoli that split the old city of Naples. Vico’s fall fractured his skull severely, and he remained so long unconscious that the attending surgeon predicted he would either die or survive stolid. Both results are death, either natural or living; to be stolid (stolido) is to be compromised in motion, the

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primary characteristic of animate bodies. As Vico reports, by divine grace neither of the two parts of the human prediction came true. Vico, the natural, restless child, falls and is resurrected by God’s grace. Liveliness and bodily motion are no longer his primary characteristics. His animation is transferred to his mind, to his powers of ingenuity and thought. Vico’s nature bridges the gap between his two senses of barbarism in the New Science—the ‘‘barbarism of sense’’ that exists at the beginning of a nation, in which occurs the Jovian experience of the giants, who are generated from the sons of Noah and roam the trackless forest of the earth after the great biblical flood, and the ‘‘barbarism of reflection’’ that pervades the final centuries of secular human society, which has lost its sense of religion, imagination, and virtue and is motivated by wit, falsity, and instrumental rationality. Vico uses ‘‘flash like lightning’’ to describe ingenuity (ingegno, Latin ingenium). In the New Science it is the experience of lightning that leads the giants to form the first word, ‘‘Jove,’’ by imitating the thunder (448). The first act of speech, the act necessary for the formation of human society, is the name of the deity, Jupiter Tonans, connecting a natural sound and a human sound. In his sentence in the autobiography Vico uses the verb balenare, which uniquely signifies ‘‘to flash with lightning.’’ In the period of the ricorso of the Western world in which Vico finds himself, reflection, undirected and unenriched by any original acts of ingenious perception, becomes an instrument to produce ‘‘witticism and falsity.’’ Science loses its speculative dimension, and human conduct loses its attachment to virtue. Vico’s fall headfirst is a second birth. Vico is reborn with the temperament of the ancients, especially Socrates, in a world taking the shape of modernity. He is only seven years old. His fall from the paradise of childhood is not a divine punishment. His life is spared by divine grace. But he is a different person, already a stranger in his own land, whose life will be a series of rises and falls, of resurrections, governed in its general pattern by providence. Vico’s autobiography appeared in 1728 in the first issue of a journal founded at Venice, Raccolta d’opuscoli scientifici e filologici (Collection of short scientific and philological studies), edited by a young Camaldolite monk, Don Angelo Calogerà, and backed by a number of prominent scholars. Among those most closely associated with the journal were Father Carlo Lodoli, censor of publications at Venice, Abbé Antonio Conti, a Venetian nobleman, metaphysician, and mathematician, and Count Giovanni Artico di Porcìa, the author of the ‘‘Proposal to the Scholars of Italy to Write Their Own Lives,’’ which was the document sent to Vico inviting him, along with a number of others, to write his life. The conception of this project had been under discussion

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for several years among prominent thinkers in Venice and Padua. Its purpose was both patriotic and pedagogic. The collection of lives was to show, to the scholars of Northern Europe generally, and specifically to the French, that there were thinkers of the first order in Italy who made important scientific and literary discoveries. The source of the pedagogic intent of the project was a letter of March 22, 1714, from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to Louis Bourget, commenting on the work of Conti, and then saying: ‘‘Monsieur Descartes would have us believe that he had hardly read anything. That was a little too much. However, it is good to study the discoveries of others in a manner that exposes to us the source of their inventions, and that renders them in a way our own. And I wish that authors would give us the history of their discoveries, and the progress by which they have arrived at them. When they fail to do this, it is necessary to try to divine it, in order better to profit from their works.’’≤ Porcìa’s proposal, in addition to elaborating on the manner in which those invited are to comply with the idea that Leibniz originally put forth, asks the authors to give the date and place of their birth and names of their parents, and to relate honestly all the occurrences of their life rendering it most admirable and most curious that can be revealed to the readers, and to posterity, without affecting the author’s good name. Vico disposes of the particulars in his first sentence: ‘‘Signor Giambattista Vico, he was born in Naples in the year 1670 of upright parents who left behind them a very good reputation.’’ Vico does not give the names of the parents or say in any way who they are. He presents them only as upright parents (onesti parenti) who were recognized as such. Vico’s description of his parents echoes Petrarch’s phrase in his autobiographical Epistle to Posterity describing his parents as honestis parentibus. Vico, in using Petrarch’s phrase, may also have meant to imply what Petrarch says about his parents, that they were of ‘‘middling means’’ ( fortuna medioci) or, as Petrarch adds, that to tell the truth they were on the edge of poverty.≥ Certainly Vico’s parents were that, his ‘‘forced payrents’’ (FW 576.27). Vico says further only that his father ‘‘was of cheerful humor’’ and that his mother was ‘‘of a quite melancholy temper’’ (A 111). Before his fall Vico was a child with a temperament like his father’s, but after his fall his mother’s temperament became dominant. In fact, Vico’s parents were nobodies. His father, Antonio, had as a young man left his family of farmers in the province of Maddaloni, near Naples, had found work in the printing and book trade, and ten years before Vico’s birth had acquired a bookshop, above which the family slept, in a very small, dark room. Fausto Nicolini characterizes the room as a topaia, a hovel (lit. a rats’ nest).∂ The room was essentially a dormitory. The

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family cooked on a small portable stove in the street, not an uncommon practice in this section of Naples at the time. Vico’s mother, Candida Masullo, was the daughter of a handworker, a carriage maker. She was illiterate and could only sign her wedding documents with an X. Vico’s father could write after a fashion, but in a large, childish hand. Vico was the sixth of eight children. In a world organized in terms of aristocracy, clergy, wealth, and the law, Vico’s is an extraordinary success story. Born of no money, power, or influence, Vico rose to a position of note. Solely on his own intellectual merits, he acquired a career. Vico married Teresa Caterina Destito, who was illiterate and, like his mother, signed her marriage documents with an X. They also had eight children, three of whom died in infancy. Vico educated one of his daughters, Luisa, at home; she achieved some success as a poet. One son, Ignazio, was a petty criminal who later became an official in the Naples customs office. Villarosa claims that Vico’s wife was wanting in those talents required for even a mediocre wife and mother, such that Vico had to assume the household duties himself. But Nicolini reports that he found no evidence to support this, holding that there may have been a confusion with Ignazio’s wife, whose name was also Caterina.∑ Vico, like Joyce’s pub owner H. C. E., is the modern family man. Vico makes no mention of his marriage, children, or other details of personal life in his autobiography. It is an intellectual autobiography that omits these small details. Vico’s aim is to present a fable of himself. The fabulous sense of Vico’s first page is captured by Joyce in the first page of Finnegans Wake, as I mentioned earlier. Finnegan is the primordial giant or hod carrier, who falls from a ladder headfirst and fractures his skull, like Humpty-Dumpty (‘‘the humptyhillhead of humself,’’ FW 3.20). Finnegan’s fall imitates onomatopoeically the sound of the Jovian thunder in the first of Joyce’s hundred-letter thunderwords. Finnegan is that ‘‘erse solid man’’ (3.20). Vico’s fate could have been to remain ‘‘solid,’’ ‘‘stolid,’’ a large, slow child. The ‘‘commodious vicus [Vico] of recirculation’’ runs ‘‘past Eve and Adam’s’’ (3.1–2). Vico is a combination, a recirculation, of his parents. The child is the resurrection of the parents and is reborn through the grace of God into the archetype of the thinker. Vico’s fable of himself that is his autobiography, like all fables, is vera narratio, a true story. What Vico wishes to tell must fit the facts of his life, but it must also convey the ideal eternal history of these facts. Vico, in making his new science, tries it out first on himself. If he can present the history of his own life in terms of the principles that he has discovered of history in general, his autobiography will become a proof of his new science. Vico’s first autobiographical act is to fabricate his own birthdate, a key element of his first sentence. He claims it to be 1670. In fact he was born on

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June 23, 1668, the eve of the feastday of St. John the Baptist, for whom he was named. He was baptized the following day in the church of San Gennaro all’Olmo. The record of his baptism still exists in the parish book.∏ His priest knew the date he was born, his family and friends knew it, and the whole neighborhood knew it. He knew it. It is not a printer’s error. In describing his defense of his father in a civil court case brought against him by another bookseller, Bartolomeo Moreschi, Vico gives his age as sixteen (in età sedici anni) in agreement with his 1670 birthdate. Because this case is a matter in the public courts, its date can be independently established as June 20, 1686, three days before Vico’s eighteenth birthday, as Nicolini has documented. Vico intends the reader to accept his birthdate as 1670. He has puzzled all of his commentators and editors. Most editions of his autobiography have a footnote to the date in which they simply correct it, or they say ‘‘more precisely 1668,’’ or words to that effect. Commentators pass over it or remark on it as though it were insignificant. The date of 1668 is uninteresting; it has no symbolic power. The date of 1670 is quite a different matter. By putting seventy into his birthdate Vico has put his end in his beginning. Biblically the allotted lifespan is three score and ten years, which is also the ideal lifespan recognized in Greek medicine. Dante begins the Divine Comedy by saying that he is in the middle of life’s journey, namely, that he is thirty-five years old. Vico, in fact, died at the age of seventyfive by his actual birthdate. The Bible says to live beyond seventy is not necessarily an advantage (Psalms 90). It is just before this age that Vico’s health, always fragile, begins to fail. There is no independent evidence for Vico’s age having been seven at his fall. Seven is Vico’s number. In the first half of his birthdate, one and six are seven. Seven is a number of rhetorical significance, used as such by ancient historians. The number of cities conquered, the size of groups, ages of important figures, and so forth, are often given by ancient historians by variations on the number seven. There are seven hills of Rome, and Socrates is said to have died at the age of seventy. Vico uses his own birthdate as a rhetorical device to reinforce his conception of history.π A further feature of the sentence with which Vico begins his autobiography is his reference to himself in the third person, as Vico. He begins: ‘‘Il signor Giambattista Vico,’’ which he follows with ‘‘egli è nato in Napoli’’ (lit. ‘‘he was born in Naples’’). He refers to himself by his full name preceded by signor (Mr.), and even more formally as Il signor (The Mr.), il being commonly placed before the name of a thinker or figure of note in scholarly or historical writing in Italian. He uses il before Vico subsequently in the text, as he does before the names of other important figures to whom he refers. By using this convention of language on himself here and throughout his autobiography

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Vico gains such distance that he becomes his own biographer. He stands alongside the reader, realizing the course of his own life. Biography is a basic form of historical writing, which Vico practiced in his Life of Antonio Carafa, and Vico now writes of himself as a historical figure. This adds to the sense that we are reading a true account of Vico’s life. Vico says that he will not feign ‘‘what Descartes craftily feigned [che astutamente finse Renato Delle Carte] as to the method of his studies [in the Discourse].’’ He says, ‘‘Rather, with the candor proper to a historian, we shall narrate plainly and step by step the entire series of Vico’s studies, in order that the proper and natural causes of his particular development as a man of letters may be known’’ (A 113). Vico does not feign what Descartes does, to claim to have made his discovery of the method of right reasoning in the sciences by a process of logical introspection accomplished on a single day. Vico does recount the history of his thought in a step-by-step manner, but his history is accommodated to the fable, the device of rhetoric and poetic, not logic. In this Vico is adopting a feature of Descartes’s own rhetoric, where in the Discourse (pt. 1) he says it may be read as a fable or an histoire. In the 1731 continuation of his autobiography, which remained in manuscript until after his death, Vico, reflecting on his earlier text published in the Raccolta, says: ‘‘And, as may be seen, he wrote it as a philosopher, meditating the causes, natural and moral, and the occasions of fortune . . . which was to demonstrate that his intellectual life was bound to have been such as it was and not otherwise’’ (A 182). Vico’s conception of history as ‘‘ideal eternal’’ combines philosophy, which aims at universal principles, with philology, which aims at presenting the details, particular deeds, laws, languages, and customs. In the New Science Vico claims to show what ‘‘providence has wrought in history’’ (342). In his autobiography he claims to show what providence has wrought in his own history—the causes natural and moral and the occasions of fortune. For Vico, providence is a way to confront the alternatives of the ‘‘deaf necessity’’ (sorda necessità) of the Stoics and the ‘‘blind chance’’ (cieco caso) of the Epicureans. Providence as a metaphysical principle of history rejects both of these alternatives but unites their partial truths into a single principle. Providence or ‘‘ideal eternal history’’ presents events as necessarily recurring in the cycle of three ages—gods, heroes, and humans—yet allows for the particulars of the life of any nation to remain unique. In Vico’s life the causes natural and moral are interlocking and provide a comprehension of its overall pattern. The occasions of fortune are chance events unique to Vico’s career. Vico’s providence, in contrast to the Enlightenment concept of progress, and different from the Christian perception of history as a single drama with a final

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salvation and resurrection, is a corso and ricorso of fall and rebirth. Vico’s corso is the cycle written into the life of all human events—a repeated Easter. For Vico events are always ‘‘dawncing the kniejinksky choreopiscopally like an easter sun round the colander’’ (FW 513.11–12). Vico’s particular causes natural and moral and occasions of fortune are set within the three ages of his life. The first two ages fall within the originally published part of his autobiography. His first age is the period of his education that culminates with his appointment as professor of Latin eloquence at the University of Naples in 1699. In these years, especially until 1692, when he wrote his first surviving work, his poem ‘‘Affetti di un disperato’’ (Feelings of one in despair), Vico, like the first humans, is ordering the world, attempting to acquire wisdom, a knowledge of things divine and human. His goal is selfknowledge, which he describes in his first oration as the attempt to go through the whole cycle of studies in the shortest possible time, and the ‘‘whole,’’ he says in his seventh oration, ‘‘is really the flower of wisdom.’’ Once Vico had acquired his wisdom he was in a position to speak about it. He learned that his new appointment required him to give an inaugural oration to open the academic year. He devoted these early orations to pedagogy. In the same year (1699) of his first university oration Vico presented his oration ‘‘On the Sumptuous Dinners of the Romans’’ to the Palatine Academy in Naples. Vico advanced the original view that the Romans are to be understood not simply in terms of the grandeur of their political and military achievements but also in terms of their culture and its influence, which includes comprehension of the details of their daily life.∫ Vico was both philosopher and historian or philologian from the beginning. He was on his way to the formation of ‘‘heroic mind,’’ which he described in 1732 in his oration with that title. The age of heroes in his own history takes the form of heroic thoughts. These culminated in the great heroic act of producing his New Science of 1725, the description of which ends the original text of his autobiography. When Vico took up the continuation of his autobiography in 1731 he became a human, in the age of humans. He struggled to maintain his heroic stance, describing his development of the second version of the New Science, but ironically he increasingly becomes the modern professor. Much of the continuation shows Vico as involved in the barbarism of reflection of the third age of wit and solitude of the soul. In addition to an account of the difficulties involved in the publication of the Second New Science, he describes commissions he received: to write, in a matter of days, a panegyric to Philip V, king of Spain, on his departure from Naples, and to write the inscriptions, emblems, mottoes, and account of the funeral rites for Carlo di Sangro and Giuseppe Capece, leaders of the Conspiracy of Macchia. He writes of how magnificently

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these items were published. Vico must have realized the contrast between the grand format in which these were printed and the poor format in which the greatest discovery of his time was printed—his New Science of 1725. Vico reports that on the counsel of Count Carlo Borromeo he composed the inscriptions for the funeral rites celebrated in Naples at the death of Emperor Joseph of Austria and that he was commanded by Cardinal Wolfgang von Schrottenbach, the viceroy of Naples, to compose the inscriptions for the funeral rites of the Empress Eleanor. As these were never put up, Vico quotes their texts in full. He also wrote numerous nuptial odes, canzoni, sonnets, and orations for various aristocrats, and prepared a court case for one. The fact that Vico reports all this, which has little to do with his intellectual life in any real sense, has baffled critics, who wonder why he engaged in such seeming braggadocian relations. Vico has the courage to cast himself within the life of the third age. He is no heroic thinker when he is engaged in these tasks, nor is he so in his decision to include them. It would be like a thinker today, the author of great intellectual achievements, relating how honored he was to receive a request from the dean or university administration to lead a committee to report on the future of the university or to prepare a university self-study, which would be attractively printed and grandly circulated, then, as is typically the case, quickly forgotten. Such documents have no deep meaning or lasting value. Only because Vico wrote them do the pieces he describes have any genuine interest. This is true of the minor writings of most great thinkers. The interesting point is Vico’s inclusion of them in the story of his intellectual life. For Vico the cycle is in everything. The Vichian cycle accords with Bruno’s Renaissance principle of the macrocosm and microcosm. Vico’s life as a total human event is a cycle of three ages, and the events within it are smaller cycles. The cycle is the idea of birth, maturity, and end, and of every end being a new beginning. The course of every day and every event is a circle. This sense of recirculation and resurrection is what Vico and Joyce share.

The Concourse Vico calls St. Augustine his ‘‘particular protector.’’Ω In his discussion of the number seven in the City of God (xi.31), Augustine cites Proverbs 24:16: ‘‘For a righteous man falls seven times and rises again; but the wicked are overthrown by calamity.’’ Vico’s fall from the ladder is his first fall. His rise from it came after the three years that, he reports, were required for his recovery. His fall involves all three of the factors that he says he will relate. There are natural causes for his survival; these are the deep lancings the surgeon

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performed to relieve the pressure of blood in the tumor that formed from his fracture. There is the moral cause of the grace of God. The fall itself is an occasion of fortune. It is an accident, a chance event, but it is providential in that it formed Vico’s nature as a thinker; otherwise he might have become an ordinary person, simply the combined product of his parents. Vico’s second fall came when he returned to grammar school. During his convalescence Vico studied at home and began to experience his ability to become his own teacher. This experience foreshadows the fact that Vico later became a autodidact, spending little time in his formative years in academic institutions. No one could teach Vico anything. When he returned to the grammar school his ability was beyond that of the other pupils. His teacher recommended that he enter the ‘‘humanity’’ curriculum in the school of the Jesuit fathers. There the teacher pitted him against the three best pupils in the ‘‘diligences,’’ or extraordinary scholastic exercises. Vico reports that he ‘‘humbled the first of the three,’’ ‘‘the second fell ill in attempting to emulate him,’’ and the third was passed into the next grade by ‘‘privilege of ‘proficiency’ before the ‘list,’ as they call it, was read’’ (A 112). Vico recognized this promotion of the third competitor as an insult and withdrew from the school to study Emmanuele Alvarez’s work on grammar on his own. He mastered this and moved on to logic and philosophy, but he nearly ruined his mind by studying these topics at too young an age. He fell into despair and deserted his studies for a year and a half. In this way he discovered personally, at the age of fourteen, the importance of the proper order of studies, which he explains later in his seventh oration. In his autobiography he comments: ‘‘So dangerous it is to put youths to the study of the sciences that are beyond their age!’’ (A 113). After this period of convalescence from his self-induced fall Vico returned to the Jesuit school to hear Father Giuseppe Ricci lecture on metaphysics, but he decided he could learn more on his own; he returned home to study the Metaphysics of Francisco Suárez. After a year he went to the university to hear Don Felice Aquadia lecture on civil institutes, and for two months he attended the lectures of Don Francesco Verde on cases in both civil and canon law. But he decided he was learning nothing from Verde and returned home to study law on his own. At this time, Vico says, the views of his Study Methods and his Universal Law had begun to take shape in his mind. His health became endangered by tuberculosis, and the family resources had been sorely reduced. Vico, having risen from the injustice of the treatment he received in his early attempt at schooling, was now about to lose any result that his work might have produced. Then he met with an occasion of fortune—in a bookstore he became engaged in conversation with Monsignor

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Geronimo Rocca, bishop of Ischia and a distinguished jurist. The conversation concerned the right method for teaching jurisprudence, with the result that the bishop became so impressed that he urged Vico to take a position of tutor to his nephews at the Rocca family castle in Vatolla, in the mountainous region of the Cilento. Vico accepted this position both for financial reasons and for his health, the countryside and mountain air being a better environment for recovery from tuberculosis than the congested city of Naples. Vatolla is a village three days’ carriage ride south of Naples, in the mountains that rise up from the gulf of Salerno, the famous Amalfi coast. Vico found himself, at Vatolla, in not only a kind of Elysium of nature but also, for an autodidact, an Elysium of the mind. He had access to a good library in the Franciscan convent of Santa Maria della Pietà. On a visit Nicolini found the library still had three hundred volumes, although much the worse from years of infestation of mice. With such a resource at his disposal Vico could complete his advanced education. There exist photographs of a large tree under which Vico is thought to have sat to read these books—an idyll of scholarly study. Vico remained in the Rocca family for nine years, from the age of eighteen to twenty-seven. He had very friendly relations with Don Domenico Rocca, who shared Vico’s taste in poetry and treated him like a son. During this period Vico made occasional visits to Naples, accompanying the family, who had residences in Naples and at Portici, on the Bay of Naples. If Vico set about to heal himself physically at Vatolla, he also formed a program of improvement of his spirit. Prior to going to Vatolla, he reports, he was wedded to a corrupt style of poetry. This was the baroque style of the day (barocchismo). To cure this Vico developed a method of reading at Vatolla; he turned to the cultivation of the Tuscan tongue, from which derives what is now known as Standard Italian, the language in which he later wrote the New Science. To do so he read the classic Tuscan authors alongside those of classical Latin. On successive days he read the prose of Cicero side by side with that of Boccaccio, the poetry of Virgil with Dante, and Horace with Petrarca. He read these three sets of authors three times each, the first time to grasp the composition as a whole, the second to note the transitions and sequences of things, and the third to collect their fine turns of thought and expression. The key to this method is not mentioned explicitly, but it is the three classical rhetorical principles of composition: inventio, the gathering of materials, dispositio, their ordering or arrangement, and elocutio, their formulation in language. These are natural principles, used by any author and orator in the production of written texts or speeches. Vico has taken these principles employed in the composition of these works and made them principles of their comprehension by the reader. He says that he marked the turns of phrase in the books

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themselves rather than copying them into a commonplace or phrase book, as was standard practice for students and scholars of the day. This very modern procedure, Vico says, allowed him to recall the phrases in context. In the New Science of 1730, in a passage not included in the 1744 edition, Vico advises the reader to read the passage three times (1137). He does not, in this note to the reader, specify the principles guiding each of the three times. He may have assumed that a threefold reading of anything would naturally fall into a sequence of reading for the whole, then for the transitions, and finally for the phrases and modes of expression. The result of Vico’s cure is his first published poem, ‘‘Affetti di un disperato,’’ dedicated to Don Domenico Rocca (fig. 10). The poem is filled with Lucretian sentiments, not Christian. Vico does not mention it in his autobiography, although it appeared in 1693 while he was at Vatolla. He also makes no mention of the fact that in 1692, when he wrote the poem, his friends Giacinto de Cristofaro, Nicola Galizia, and Basilio Giannelli were stigmatized by the Inquisition, and that in the following year they were condemned and imprisoned. It is not possible to understand Vico’s work unless one takes into account that the Inquisition was operating throughout his career in Naples. Vico was very probably in deep sympathy with his friends. They confessed to views that there were men before Adam, who were composed of atoms like all the animals, and that these men formed societies and had a pantheon of gods. Vico himself underwent a religious crisis at Vatolla that quite probably concerned such points. The influence of Lucretius, especially the fifth book of On the Nature of Things, can be seen in the New Science, regarding the origin of language and human society (NS 925f.). What was the result of Vico’s religious crisis? He does not mention it in the autobiography, but it likely was twofold. One result was in a doctrine of origins, to separate sacred from profane history. Thus the features of preadamite man became, in Vico’s later works, those of the giants and founders of the first families of the gentile nations. Second, Vico realized that the Inquisition and the politics of Catholic doctrine had serious consequences for intellectual inquiry once one found oneself in clerical disfavor. The solution for Vico was to befriend the clergy. Once back in Naples this is exactly what he did, to the extent that later in life he was accused by his detractors of having a steady stream of clergy going in and out of his home. Throughout the New Science Vico declares that its principles are all for the greater glory of the Christian religion. He repeats this almost as an oath at various points throughout the work. Vico, in his twenties, from his distance in Vatolla, saw that the problem was not religion but the clergy. If Vico could cultivate a fraternal relation to the clergy his ideas would not seem a threat. He

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understood the ancient problem of the philosopher and the polis. Vico’s own religion, although coming from Christianity, not Judaism, may have been close to that of Spinoza, whom Vico never refutes at any length but whom he regards as a man without public religion. The clergy, as the Neapolitan historian Pietro Giannone showed, were the new polis. For his criticism of the papacy and his account of how the church had come to have dominance over civil government in his great Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples (1723), Giannone was sentenced to ten years of imprisonment and lifelong exile from Naples. Like Socrates, Vico could claim to be no enemy of public religion. Neapolitan Catholicism was a civil religion, and Vico had no quarrel with its observances. Vico reports that on resuming residence in Naples he was questioned and invited by Father Don Gaetano d’Andrea, a Theatine, to enter his order. Vico very carefully and diplomatically rejected his offer on the spot and, as he reports, the father closed the conversation by saying that it ‘‘is not your vocation’’ (A 135). In a letter to Father Bernardo Maria Giacco in 1720 Vico writes that errors of his early years are remembered in Naples and used against him.∞≠ He does not say what these errors were, but he may have harbored a fear that his early religious doubts could be held against him in some form. Having acquired a full education on his own, Vico had risen mightily from the injustice he experienced in his early attempt at a course of formal education. He returned from Vatolla to Naples only to find that, in Odyssean fashion, the house of human knowledge was full of suitors. The suitors in this case were followers of Cartesianism. Vico describes this in a biblical style: ‘‘With this learning and erudition Vico returned to Naples a stranger in his own land, and found the physics of Descartes at the height of its renown among the established men of letters’’ (A 132). He says that Aristotle had become a laughingstock. The culture and learning of the Renaissance that had based itself in the wisdom of the ancients was seen as completely outmoded. The study of rhetoric had been put aside, and the study of the fundamentals of jurisprudence had fallen into decline. Vico realized that he must chart his own course, ‘‘for in the city taste in letters changed every two or three years like styles in dress’’ (A 133). Because of his attention to the humanities and the ancients and to the mastery of Latin, Vico says he ‘‘lived in his native city not only a stranger but quite unknown’’ (A 134). He was glad he had sworn allegiance to no teacher so he was free to follow his own good genius. It was what he had relied on all along, and at this point it was all he had. Vico’s return to the modern world of the Cartesians and to anonymity is a third fall. He descends from the Elysium of Vatolla to the banality of the city, ‘‘his Nearapoblican asylum’’ (FW 172.23). Nicolini calls this Vico’s fictio,

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because he acts as though he had had no contact with the intellectual climate of Naples while in the Cilento. He returns a straniero in his own patria, a stranger in a strange land that is in fact his own. Since the Rocca family moved between its three residences (Vatolla, Portici, near Naples, and Naples), probably on a seasonal cycle, Vico would have made many trips to Naples. In fact he matriculated at the University of Naples at Salerno during those years and received a doctorate in both canon and civil law in 1694, a year before his permanent return to Naples. Once it is realized that, from the first sentence of his autobiography, Vico is constructing a fable of himself to convey the poetic truth of his own life, the fictio of his return is no surprise. But this fictio surrounding the sojourn at Vatolla may have a further dimension. Perhaps it was actually nine years that he spent in his self-education in the Cilento, but it is also a significant number with regard to Descartes’s claim, in the Discourse (pt. 3), that he spent nine years roaming ‘‘about the world, trying to be a spectator rather than an actor in all the comedies that are played out there.’’ Descartes says he spent this time in effect becoming a modern, that is, developing his powers of rational introspection, skepticism, and doubt. Vico spent the same length of time acquiring the wisdom of the ancients. In 1697, aged twenty-nine, Vico unsuccessfully attempted to secure a city clerkship. His older brother Giuseppe was a notary. A year later Vico competed successfully to obtain a chair of rhetoric; he assumed this position at the university at the age of thirty-one. He held it nearly to the end of his life (1669–1741); from his fall into anonymity he rose to some prominence. The year he obtained his chair he married Teresa Caterina Destito and moved into a proper house that had several rooms, a terrace, and a garden, in Vicolo dei Giganti, an address as interesting as Joyce’s residence on the Piazza Giambattista Vico in Trieste. His first child, Ignazio, was born in 1706. Vico delivered six inaugural orations, marking the beginning of the university’s year, between 1699 and 1707. The seventh inaugural oration, of 1708, became a small book, On the Study Methods of Our Time, published a year later. It was Vico’s first book. In 1710 Vico published On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, the first book, a metaphysics, of a work that was to have a second book, on physics, which was partially realized in his essay ‘‘On the Equilibrium of Animate Bodies,’’ and a third book, on ethics, which never materialized. The tree of knowledge that Descartes describes in the author’s letter to the Principles culminates in an ethics that Descartes never wrote. Now that he had his position Vico was prepared to answer the Cartesian suitors who would take over and destroy the Republic of Letters.

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At the end of 1722, upon the death of its holder, Domenico Campanile, the ‘‘first morning chair of law’’ became vacant. Vico, now fifty-four, could improve his salary and his position if he were selected for it. He turned his attention to qualifying for this important chair. He had been preparing for this possibility for several years because of a number of standing vacancies in the law faculty. In 1719 Vico had delivered his inaugural oration on universal law, a portion of which survives quoted in his autobiography. This was followed in 1720 through 1722 with the synopsis and three books of his Universal Law, a work larger in size than the New Science and one that stands as an early formulation of both the content and the principles of the New Science. In the period leading up to his work on Universal Law Vico had begun to formulate the conception of his ‘‘four authors.’’ In his study of the ancients he had arrived at Plato and Tacitus as the two thinkers he most admired. Between them they commanded a knowledge of how man actually is (Tacitus) and how man should be (Plato). Vico concluded that the wise man should be formed of both the esoteric wisdom of Plato and the common or vulgar wisdom of Tacitus. Vico then discovered the thought of Bacon, which was both common and esoteric. Vico now proposed to have these three unique authors ever before him in meditation and writing. They became his guides. In writing his Life of Antonio Carafa (1716) to secure a dowry for his daughter Luisa, he read Hugo Grotius’s On the Law of War and Peace. He added Grotius as his fourth author. He was impressed with Bacon’s vision of the total of human knowledge, but Bacon does not have a sufficient doctrine of laws or of the course of all nations. Grotius, Vico says, embraces in the system of universal law the whole of philosophy and philology and the history of facts and events joined with the three learned languages of antiquity, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Vico’s four authors form a square that brings together ancients and moderns and offers a total view of the human world. The square is made up of two pagans and two heretics. This square is the basis of Vico’s circle of the corso. The fourth fall of Vico is his loss of the concourse for the morning chair of law in 1723. This loss and his initial fall at the age of seven are the two most decisive events of his life. Vico was fifty-five. He was the ideal candidate to win the competition. He had prepared for it with his grand Universal Law, built upon his interpretation of Roman law. The topic from Roman law on which he chose to prepare his lecture, from among the topics offered by the prefect in charge of the examination, was on a difficult passage from the Digest, but one he had mastered. Vico says he wrote his lecture, working on it all night, until

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five o’clock in the morning, ‘‘in the midst of the conversation of friends and the cries of his children, as his custom was, whether reading, writing, or thinking’’ (A 163). Unlike the solitude in which Descartes wrote in his poêle, his stoveheated chamber, Vico wrote in his kitchen. He felt he had spoken brilliantly at the concourse. But the next day, as he distributed copies of his lecture, he was warned that he would not win, and on the advice of Domenico Caravita, a prominent attorney, Vico withdrew his name from competition. Although Vico does not report this in his autobiography, the chair was awarded to a Domenico Gentile of Bari, a notorious seducer of servant girls, who committed suicide over one of them in 1739, sixteen years later, and whose only book was withdrawn from the press for plagiarism. The injustice of this decision was foreshadowed by the injustice of the decision not to advance Vico in grammar school. In both cases a much lesser person was put ahead of Vico. He reports that the loss of the concourse ‘‘made him despair of ever holding a worthier position in his native city’’ (A 164). Vico’s despair stretches from his despair about life generally, expressed in the poem ‘‘Affeti di un disperato,’’ to his despair at his loss of the concourse. His work, it seemed, had been for nothing.

Royal Historiographer Although Vico despaired of ever obtaining a university position that reflected the level of his learning and abilities, he took some consolation in a review of his Universal Law by Jean Le Clerc, the editor of Bibliothèque ancienne et moderne, to whom he had sent a copy. Le Clerc did not really understand the work, but he perceived its originality. Le Clerc had written Vico a kind letter when he received the book, saying that he would review it and that it would show the Northern scholars ‘‘that more learned and acute things are being said by Italians than can be hoped for from dwellers in colder climes’’ (A 159). Throughout his career Vico desired approval and recognition of his work by the scholars of Northern Europe, but this review from Le Clerc was all the positive public attention from the North that he would ever receive. In his review, which appeared in 1722, Le Clerc said that Vico’s treatment of law was constructed by a ‘‘mathematical method’’ that ‘‘from few principles draws infinite consequences’’ (A 164). This claim to a mathematical method Vico carried over into his New Science. Le Clerc also said that in Vico’s work there was ‘‘a continuous mingling of philosophical, juridical and philological matters.’’ This is also a procedure that runs throughout the New Science. Vico reports that after the blow of defeat in the concourse he did not even suspend his labors. He began immediately to accomplish his own next resur-

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rection, the publication of the (First) New Science (1725). Vico announces this claim in providential terms: he says that ‘‘Vico was born for the glory of his native city [ patria] and therefore of Italy (since, being born there and not in Morocco, he became a scholar [letterato])’’ (A 165). The meaning of Vico’s contrast of Italy with Morocco is passed over by most of his commentators. An exception is Andrea Battistini, who writes that the contraposition of Italy and Morocco could be taken as an analogy with Descartes’s claim in the Discourse (pt. 3) that in formulating his provisional moral code he decided first to ‘‘obey the laws and customs of my country. . . . And although there may be men as sensible among the Persians or Chinese as among ourselves, I thought it would be most useful for me to be guided by those with whom I should have to live.’’∞∞ To hold to his own patria, customs, and traditions is especially important to Vico because of the importance he attaches to the communal sense of humanity and to the vulgar wisdom of the nations, as against the modern tendency to abstract the general human condition from social context. Even if Vico had Descartes’s comment in mind, why does he choose Morocco as his contrasting county? In the ‘‘Poetic Geography’’ of the New Science Vico says that ‘‘within Greece itself, accordingly, lay the original East called Asia or India, the West called Europe or Hesperia, the North called Thrace or Scythia, and the South called Libya or Mauretania’’ (742). He claims these names for the regions of Greece were later applied to the world at large; for example, ‘‘they gave the name Hesperia to the western part of Greece, where the evening star Hesperus comes out in the fourth quarter of the horizon. Later they saw Italy in the same quarter much larger than the Hesperia of Greece, and they called it Hesperia Magna’’ (743). His use of ‘‘Morocco’’ may be intended as a symbol for Africa as an opposite to Europe, Mauretania being the Roman term for Morocco and Libya and in its transferred meaning having the possibility of signifying Africa. Tacitus, one of Vico’s four authors, describes Mauretania and the Roman possessions of Africa as ‘‘given to civil strife and sudden disturbances because of the fanaticism and superstition of its inhabitants, ignorant as they are of laws and unacquainted with civil magistrates’’ (Hist. i.9). Morocco symbolizes a society in which a hero can emerge and embody virtues in his deeds, but in such a society a philosopher or scholar (letterato) would not arise. Vico, because he is part of the third age of the particular ricorso of Western history into which he was born, can become a ‘‘heroic mind.’’ Vico speaks of himself as a hero in this sense in his letter to Father Giacco in 1725, regarding the appearance of the (First) New Science: ‘‘This work has filled me with a certain heroic spirit.’’∞≤ He says he is no longer

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troubled by any fear of death or by the need to confront rivals. In the third age one cannot glorify one’s patria by great deeds because it is an age of reflection and the rule of written law. One can achieve such glorification only by a heroism of thought, a new discovery that can govern our comprehension of science and virtue. Just as Vico is righteously rising from his fall in the concourse, declaring himself, not for the glory of the university but for the glory of Naples and Italy, he experiences a fifth fall, one from which he recovers quickly but not painlessly. By the end of 1724 Vico had finished the major part of what he later called ‘‘the new science in negative form’’ (A 165–66). When Vico sent the draft of the first two-thirds of his autobiography to Porcìa he anticipated that his great discovery of the new science would soon be in print. He sent this portion of the autobiography through Porcìa’s agent in Rome, Abbé Giuseppe Luigi Esperti, who sent it on to Porcìa on Vico’s fifty-seventh birthday (June 23, 1725). The cost of the publication of Vico’s New Science was to be underwritten by Cardinal Lorenzo Corsini, to whom it was dedicated, and the text had received its imprimatur on July 15, 1725. But on July 20 Vico received a letter from the cardinal saying that because of unusual expenses he had incurred on a visit to the diocese of Frascati he was unable to support the printing costs. No indication was given of the specific nature of these costs or their cause, but it was clear to Vico that if the work were to be printed he would have to find the means personally. Vico could not afford the cost of printing such a large manuscript, but he says he felt honor bound to publish it. The withdrawal of financial support by Corsini was a great hardship, but it was also an act of providence. In order to afford the printing Vico recast the entire work in a positive form, during the heat of August and part of September, greatly reducing its size. To finance the costs he sold a family ring ‘‘set with a five-grain diamond of the purest water’’ (A 201). He retained the dedication to Cardinal Corsini and included an inscription addressed to the universities of Europe, once again hoping for northern recognition. Vico’s decision to retain the dedication to Corsini was not only gracious but also prudent, for later Corsini became Pope Clement XII, and Vico dedicated the Second New Science to him as pope. Because the manuscript of the ‘‘new science in negative form’’ is lost there is no knowledge of its precise contents. It was likely an extended series of criticisms of the views of the seventeenth-century naturallaw theorists, with a subtext of Vico’s own view. In recasting it into positive form Vico inverted this structure, expanding the themes of his own view of the life of nations and retaining as critical passages much from his attacks on the natural-law theorists. This is the character of the text he published at the press of Felice Mosca in Naples in October 1725.

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In December Vico drafted the pages of the final third of the original text of his autobiography, which he would send to Porcìa, along with corrections of the first part, two years later, in 1728. The pages drafted in December after the appearance of the (First ) New Science are a summary of its major themes. Vico says that in it ‘‘he discovers new historical principles of philosophy, and first of all a metaphysics of the human race’’ (A 167). He ends his original autobiography with a quotation from a letter from Cardinal Corsini, saying that the (First) New Science shows ‘‘that there still lives in Italian spirits today a native and peculiar gift for Tuscan eloquence.’’ Corsini concludes: ‘‘I congratulate upon it the fatherland that it so adorns’’ (A 173). Corsini’s letter is perhaps what suggested to Vico his claim of existing for the glory of his native city and of Italy. It also points to the fact that Vico wrote the New Science in Italian, or the Tuscan language of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. Had he won the concourse he might have continued to write in Latin, the language of university academics in which he had delivered his inaugural orations and written his early works, the Ancient Wisdom and Universal Law. In his letter to Father Giacco on October 25, 1725, Vico says, as I mentioned earlier, that he feels ‘‘filled with a certain heroic spirit,’’ but also that he feels himself a ‘‘new man.’’ This is a secular conversion experience, almost as profound as St. Augustine’s conversion and baptism at Milan. Augustine leaves the university for a new life. Vico remains in the university but is no longer of it. It was a major step for Vico to write in Tuscan, for in his reading program at Vatolla he had concluded that Latin was a finer language. He also reports that he confined his study of Greek to a basic knowledge of Gester’s Rudiments and that he turned from studying other languages, such as French, in order to master Latin, which he claims he knew as if it were his own tongue. For his New Science Vico required a modern language.∞≥ Hume said of his Treatise of Human Nature, which like Vico’s New Science is a work aimed at a science of human custom, that it ‘‘fell dead-born from the press.’’∞∂ Vico could say the same of his master work, and, in effect, he does so. In the same letter to Father Giacco in which he says he feels like a new man, he says that as he goes about his business in Naples he attempts to avoid embarrassing encounters with those to whom he has sent a copy of his book. They gave him no sign of even having received it. His would be a voice in a desert because, as he describes in this and other correspondence discussing the reception, or lack of it, of the New Science, he regards the intellectual and cultural climate of Naples to have become hollow, without respect for wisdom or eloquence. This is the result of the invasion of the modern versions of Stoicism and Epicureanism, beginning with the attraction to Cartesianism. Vico also had no response from the thinkers of the North. Some of this was simply due

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to bad luck. He had sent a copy to Le Clerc but received no reply; Le Clerc was too advanced in years to continue such scholarly exchange. Vico also sent a copy to Newton, who may have received it about a year before his death. In August 1727 there appeared in the book notices of a prominent publication in Leipzig, the Acta eruditorum, a false and malicious announcement of Vico’s New Science. Among other things, it said, on the authority of ‘‘an Italian friend,’’ that the author of the work was an ‘‘abbé’’ of the Vico family, and it went on to distort the subject matter of the book. The notice was not signed; apparently the Acta had assumed it genuine and published it as received.∞∑ Now Vico was made a mockery before the whole world, and especially before the very scholars of the North whose approval he had always sought. He wrote a reply, referred to as Vici vindiciae, in which he challenges the book notice word for word, including a digression on wit and humor and the half-animal nature of laughing men. Vico addressed the anonymous author of the notice as ‘‘Unknown vagabond’’ (Ignotus erro). He recommended this person ‘‘take his departure from the world of men and to go and live with the wild beasts in the African desert’’ (A 189). Vico may have intended this to have a resonance with Descartes’s comment, in the Discourse (pt. 3), that he had ‘‘been able to lead a life as solitary and withdrawn as if I were in the most remote desert.’’ Vico may have thought the author of the book notice to have been Giannone, who was no friend of Vico and was then in exile in Vienna—hence Vico’s term ‘‘Unknown vagabond.’’∞∏ But the author of the malicious notice was probably Vico’s colleague Nicolà Capasso, who sent it to the Leipzig Acta in collaboration with other colleagues. Throughout Vico’s career Capasso was his grand tormentatore. It was Capasso, a versifier in dialect and writer of macaronic poetry, and most likely a trivial punster, who gave Vico the cruel nickname ‘‘Mastro Tisicuzzo’’ (tisico = tubercular), an antique slur that captured Vico’s gaunt, skin-and-bones appearance. Capasso may also have known that Vico had earlier suffered from tuberculosis. It was Capasso who, on looking into the New Science, is said to have run to Nicolà Cirillo, a noted physician in Naples, to have his pulse taken, saying that he felt he might have suffered a stroke that had taken all reason from him. On being told of this, Vico replied that he had not written the book ‘‘pei poetuzzi ’’ (for petty little poets). Vico had friends as well as enemies in the Naples of his time, such as the prominent mathematician and metaphysician Paolo Mattia Doria, to whom Vico dedicated On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians. In addition to his professorship at the university Vico was a member of several academies that conducted the real intellectual life of Naples, the Uniti, the Medinaceli (before

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which the skin-and-bones figure of Vico delivered his oration ‘‘On the Sumptuous Dinners of the Romans’’), and the Assorditi, and, late in life, he was custode of the Academy of Oziosi, at which he delivered his oration ‘‘Academies and the Relation of Philosophy and Eloquence.’’ In 1710 he was elected to the Arcadia of Rome. He was commissioned to appraise the library of Giuseppe Valletta, the greatest single collection of books in Naples. Vico was recognized by major figures in the intellectual life of Venice and Northern Italy, such as Lodoli, Conti, and Porcìa, who, as I mentioned earlier, were behind the invitations to Vico and other prominent scholars in Italy and Naples to write their autobiographies. These three figures were impressed with Vico’s New Science of 1725 and wished to reprint it in a new, revised edition in Venice, which was an important center for publishing and a crossroads for intellectual exchange between Northern Europe and Italy. Vico, who, as he says, was not in the habit of visiting the post office, learned of this interest in letters from each of the three scholars that had been waiting for him there for a good part of a year. Vico was honored by their request, but from the start he was uneasy about dealing with the Venetians and the Venetian printers. He was about to experience his seventh fall. Lodoli had indicated in his letter that Vico could include in the new edition of the New Science any additions or corrections he wished to make. Vico offered Lodoli ‘‘a manuscript of nearly a thousand pages, in which he had set about proving his Principles by a negative method’’ (A 191). This was the original manuscript of the ‘‘new science in negative form.’’ He intended this to be added to the New Science. He tried to pass it off onto Lodoli, but Lodoli returned it. Vico reports that Don Giulio Torno and other prominent persons in Naples had wanted to publish the work, ‘‘but Vico dissuaded him by pointing out that the principles had already been established by the positive method’’ (A 191). Apparently Vico was testing the firmness of Lodoli’s judgment. Finally, in October 1729, Lodoli received Vico’s revised manuscript of the New Science; it was nearly six hundred pages long. At this point, Vico says, he began to dislike the attitude of the Venetian printer assigned to the work, and he demanded the return of the entire manuscript. It does not appear that the printer acted badly in any extreme way toward Vico. A file on Vico recently discovered in the Archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith shows that the Venetian edition of the New Science was blocked in 1729 by the Holy Office.∞π If Vico knew this, he gives no indication of it in his autobiography. He began arrangements to have the edition printed in Naples. Once again the cost of printing became an obstacle. Because of the large size of the manuscript Vico could not find a publisher

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willing to take on the cost. This was an act of providence parallel to that which had earlier caused Vico to rewrite the ‘‘new science in negative form.’’ He now devised a similar plan to resurrect the revised book by completely rewriting it as a new whole. This meant he had to meditate and rewrite the work in the course of its printing. Vico says: ‘‘An almost fatal fury drove him to meditate and write it so rapidly, indeed, that he began it Christmas morning [1729] and finished it at nine o’clock Easter Sunday evening [April 9, 1730]’’ (A 194). Vico ‘‘would be for a once over our all honoured christmastyde eastered man’’ (FW 590.21–22). Vico produced the definitive version of his New Science of 1730 in little more than three months, the amount of time it would take physically to write by hand so many pages. As Vico produced these pages, he passed them to the printer in Naples. He began the work by printing the exchange of letters he had had with Lodoli justifying his position in withdrawing the edition from Venice. After more than half of the volume had been printed Vico received a communication from Venice that caused him to abandon this Novella letteraria. The elimination of the letters created the absence of eighty-six pages already set in type and printed. Vico quickly commissioned a dipintura, an emblematic engraving or frontispiece, and wrote an explanation of it entitled ‘‘The Idea of the Work.’’ This was printed in larger type than was the following text, to fill the space. By the stroke of providence the reader is spared what surely would have been a very dated and dreary set of correspondence, of complaints and replies, and in its place are some of the best passages of the New Science. During this period, Vico reports, he was suffering from a long, serious illness following an epidemic of grippe, as well as from the solitude in which he says he lived. Vico is constantly a victim of his body.∞∫ It is the source of the only personal details that he reports. The fall on his head changed his life. He went to Vatolla to cure his tuberculosis. While writing the biography of Carafa he was ‘‘wracked by the cruelest hypochrondriac cramps in the left arm’’ (A 154). He reports that at the time of the false book notice he was undergoing treatment for a gangrenous ulcer of the throat. After the publication of the second version of the New Science he was suffering from ‘‘a strange disease devouring all the tissues between the palate and the lower bone of the head’’ (A 198). There is a sad irony in the fact that Vico, born in the street of San Biagio, Saint Blasius, known for cures of the throat, should have been so afflicted. The one portrait of Vico, done when he was in his sixties by Francesco Solimena, the painter of the great frescoes in the church of the Gesù Nuovo in Naples, shows him as a stern figure with an adust complexion (fig. 1). Vico’s first biographer, Nicola Solla, describes Vico as tending to be adust (‘‘l’abito

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del corpo adusto’’), one of the classic signs of a melancholy personality.∞Ω This appearance of Vico can also be seen in the engraving based on Solimena’s portrait and published in the New Science in 1744, shortly after his death (fig. 2). Vico was constantly revising. He wrote a set of annotations to the New Science even while he was rewriting and printing it. He wrote a second set immediately after its publication and then went on to write a third set of notes, in August 1731. He rewrote the first set into a fourth set in 1733 or 1734. These revisions he regarded as the basis of a third edition of the New Science. He was seeing the third edition through the press when he died, during the night of January 22–23, 1744. But these revisions remain unincorporated. Vico says that his temperament was ‘‘choleric to a fault’’ and that he often responded too strongly and publicly to his rivals.≤≠ He says that ‘‘among the caitiff semi-learned or pseudo-learned, the more shameless called him a fool [ pazzo], or in somewhat more courteous terms they said that he was obscure or eccentric and had odd ideas’’ (A 199–200). Although Vico does not report what was actually said about him, he has not simply invented this. Among surviving examples from the ‘‘caitiff semi-learned’’ (cattivi dotti) is Finetti’s tale (1768) of having heard from a Neapolitan of noble birth who had been a student and follower of Vico for many years that ‘‘until a certain time Vico was regarded by the Neapolitans as a truly learned man, but later because of his extravagant opinions he was generally held to be a fool [ pazzo].’’ When Finetti then asked him what was thought of the New Science, he replied: ‘‘Oh! by then he had become completely mad [ pazzo].’’≤∞ Vico ends his autobiography with the claim that through these responses to these adversities and detractors he had finally been led to the discovery of the New Science. He concludes the Autobiography with a quotation from ‘‘Socrates to His Friends,’’ from the Fabulae of Phaedrus: ‘‘If I were consigned his fame, I would not shun to die as he, and because I would be acquitted when I became ashes, I would endure the inequity of the sentence’’ (III.ix.3–4). Vico must have chosen this final quotation very carefully. He says that having discovered the new science he felt himself more fortunate than Socrates, of whom Phaedrus ‘‘made this magnanimous wish’’ ( fece quel magnanimo voto), the force of which is not quite so clear in the rendering of the Fisch and Bergin translation. Vico, writing this in his early sixties, is taking his readers ahead to his own death. He feels, as he says in his description of the Second New Science, that he has succeeded in placing in one book all of his thought. He says that the First New Science and the Universal Law should be consulted only for several passages; these remain important for their statements of particular discoveries

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(three chapters in the former concerning Vico’s idea of the possibility of a common mental language for all nations and his discussions in the Universal Law of the Law of the Twelve Tables and of Tribonian’s fable of the ‘‘Royal Law’’). The Second New Science, then, is a whole thought, a book of wisdom. The context of the full fable of ‘‘Socrates to His Friends’’ should not be missed. The lines Vico quotes are present in it as an aside, parenthetically stated. Phaedrus’s fables have themes like those of Aesop; the theme of this fable is friendship, that ‘‘the name of a friend is common; but fidelity is rarely found.’’ Socrates is come upon having laid a foundation for a small house and is asked why someone as famous as himself is building such a small house. He replies: ‘‘I only wish that I could fill it with real friends.’’ Only if this is understood is it clear why Vico compares himself to Socrates. His comparison is with the Socrates of the fable and is a continuation of his foregoing remarks on his status and treatment in his native city. Phaedrus frequently retorts to his own detractors in his fables, and resignation or pessimism is traditionally ascribed to his personality. The melancholic temper that Vico says he acquired as his nature from his fall at the age of seven makes a complete circle to the end. During Vico’s early years and through his sixth inaugural oration, Naples was ruled by Spanish viceroys. From then until ten years before his death it was ruled by Austrian viceroys (1707–1734). In 1734 the Kingdom of Naples was conquered by Charles of Bourbon. Vico headed the delegation from the university to congratulate Charles, and the following year Vico was appointed royal historiographer. Even this well-deserved distinction was not simply given to Vico; he had to write a letter of application to Charles, stating his qualifications.≤≤ Vico immediately composed a new dedication in his De aequilibrio corporis animantis (On the equilibrium of animate bodies) to Charles.≤≥ Vico’s appointment as royal historiographer was the first distinction to acknowledge Vico’s importance, other than his membership in the various academies and in the Arcadia. He was finally and publicly resurrected from his failure at the concourse. Vico’s son Gennaro began the next year (1736) to take over some of his teaching duties as his health failed, and Vico used his prominence to have Gennaro officially succeed him in his professorship in 1741, without a concourse. If as a young man while at Vatolla Vico developed a strategy, from which he never wavered, for dealing with the Inquisition by befriending the clergy at all levels, throughout his mature years he was astute in politics, always using his rhetorical talents to write a panegyric, an epitaph, an encomium, a funeral oration, or to include dedications in his works to those in powerful positions. Some of these were commissioned, some not. His only lapse was the failure at the concourse, which, as was true of all such academic competitions at the

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time, if not also now, was decided by university politics. Vico must have considered himself so excellent in his command of the subject that he could not be turned down for the morning chair. He was overconfident. A trained orator, he allowed himself to run out of time at his lecture, as he reports. The most interesting incident that shows Vico’s ability to go with the changes of political fortune concerns the so-called Conspiracy of Macchia. Vico did not deliver the customary inaugural oration for the university year in 1701 because of the confusion into which Naples had been thrown by the death of the Spanish king in 1700. The king’s death provoked the war of Spanish succession (1700–1713), a war Vico regarded as the modern counterpart to that between Rome and Carthage. There was a failed attempt to assassinate the viceroy, the duke of Medinaceli. Soon after, Medinaceli was recalled and replaced by the last of the Spanish viceroys, the duke of Escalona. The so-called Conspiracy of Macchia took place in September 1701, and its leaders, Giuseppe Capece and Carlo di Sangro, were put to death. Any remains of the conspiracy were definitely dispersed by February 1702, and that spring Philip V visited Naples (April 17 to June 2). Vico was appointed one of two writers to compose the official history of the disturbances, which he did (The Neapolitan Conspiracy), but it was not accepted, perhaps because of its impartiality. It was not published in his lifetime.≤∂ As Vico reports in his autobiography, on the visit of Philip V, the duke of Escalona commanded Vico to write a panegyric. In his oration Vico tells Philip, king of the Spaniards, that he is the greatest being on earth. Yet in the next paragraph of his autobiography Vico blithely reports that at a later time (1707), when the Austrians had taken charge of Naples, he responded to a request by Count von Daun, the new viceroy, to draft funeral inscriptions to honor Capece and Sangro as martyrs. He reprints the entire text of von Daun’s letter. Yesterday’s enemies of the state became today’s martyrs. Apparently Vico had no problem in taking on these two tasks and later mentioning them in the same breath; of course, he is writing about them in retrospect. Although Vico was a virtuous man who, like Socrates, made no one the worse for knowing him, he was also a Neapolitan. In an ancient city known for the practice of l’arte di arrangiarsi (the art of accomplishing the necessities of life without any visible means to do so), Vico had his own version of survival. It would be a mistake to dismiss Vico’s poetry and minor orations as simply strategic works useful to his career. Vico is not a great poet. His poems by no means command the place in the history of letters that his New Science does in the history of thought. But Vico is a poet, that is, he has genuine poetic sensibilities, and he could write poetry well in accordance with the classical standards of the Arcadia. His ‘‘Giunone in danza’’ (‘‘Juno in Dance’’) (1721), done

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for the nuptials of the principe della Rocca Giambattista Filomarino and Marcia Vittoria Carocciolo dei Marchesi di Sant’Eramo, is a highly crafted long poem based on classical mythological images. Juno, the goddess of marriage, invites the other gods to dance, and we gain an impression of the nature and significance of each. In his autobiography Vico says that he used the occasion of the poem ‘‘to expound the principles of that historical mythology which is fully worked out in the New Science’’ (A 178). In this poem Vico discovers the ‘‘principles’’ of mythology, in the sense of seeing the meanings each of the gods has in relation to human nature and human affairs, how they are not simply gods but keys to the human condition. The frontispiece of the New Science depicts many of the emblems present in the poem—for example, the Numean lion slain by Hercules, signifying the clearing of the great forests of the earth, in which first altars and then cities were founded; the fire and water on the altar, symbolizing divine ceremonies and employed in Roman nuptials; the caduceus and the sword, representing the establishment of power, authority, and law. Vico was not just a teacher of the principles of the ars oratoria—he was a truly skilled orator. His funeral oration ‘‘In morte di Donn’Angela Cimmino Marchesa della Petrella’’ (1727) celebrates not only her life but also the importance of the salon over which she presided, which brought together thinkers from all areas of knowledge in such a way as to encourage conversation, which Vico compares to the School of Socrates. The oration foreshadows themes Vico brings out in his address to the Academy of Oziosi, a decade later. Vico’s Life of Antonio Carafa (1716), commissioned by the Carafa family, is a expert work of biography. It is not simply a compilation of the official materials he was supplied with by Marshal Carafa’s nephew but a narrative of the political and military events of the Hungarian insurrection. Carafa, a Neapolitan in the service of the Austrians, ruthlessly crushed the Hungarian and Transylvanian rebels. In his aim of presenting a true history, Vico takes his second author, Tacitus, as his model, and seeks to balance the facts of Carafa’s career, the res gestae or deeds done, with the facts of the broader history of the events involved. Vico claimed that in his treatment of these events he explored the ‘‘natural law of the gentes’’ that came to play such a major role in his conception of ‘‘universal law’’ and the ‘‘common nature of the nations.’’≤∑ Although this is a highly intelligent work, had Vico not gone on to write the New Science it would be known only to specialists. This work, along with Vico’s work on the Neapolitan conspiracy, shows that Vico could not only write on the principles of history but also write history itself. In his addition to Vico’s autobiography, Villarosa remarks that Vico said ‘‘misfortune would pursue him even after his death’’ (A 204). At his death, the

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professors of the university, following custom, came to Vico’s house to accompany the remains of their deceased colleague.≤∏ The Confraternity of Santa Sofia, of which Vico had been a member, also arrived to assist in the rites, as was done for all their members. A dispute ensued as to which group had the right to bear the pall. Vico’s corpse was carried down into the courtyard and laid on a bier. No agreement could be reached. The confraternity left, abandoning the corpse where it lay. The professors had no authority to carry out the funeral rites; the corpse had to be carried back into Vico’s house. Gennaro was obliged to contact the cathedral chapter the next day and to pay for the funeral, which the professors attended. Vico was interred in the church he attended, Gerolamini. Vico’s tomb is unmarked and unknown, but later Gennaro placed an inscribed tablet in the church.≤π Vico’s fable of himself, his ‘‘fabulist’s parable’’ (FW 152.13), is the portrait of the modern philosopher. It is the story of Vico the particular individual at a particular time and place, but it is an imaginative universal. It is Vico’s search for the true Socrates. In the New Science, Vico searches for the true Homer and discovers him to be the Greek people themselves. The Homeric poems summarize the heroic age of the original corso of the West. Vico’s conception of Dante as the ‘‘Tuscan Homer,’’ coming at the end of the heroic age of Western history in its ricorso, makes Homer and Dante the summations of the common wisdom of the West. Socrates is the esoteric wisdom that arises in the third age of the corso. He is the form of Greek philosophy itself, its heroic mind in the age of humans. Socrates is the embodiment of the conflict between the philosopher and the polis. Vico is the new Socrates, the heroic form of mind in the ricorso, the esoteric wisdom of the modern age that recalls the common wisdom of the poets. Vico is the thinker of the new polis, Neapolis. If Socrates were to appear in modern society he would be ignored and ridiculed, and not taken seriously enough to be put to death. Through his fable Vico has found a way to tell us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. ‘‘Qweer [Breton, qwir, true] but gaon [Breton, gaou, false]! Be trouz [Breton, noise] and wholetrouz! Otherwise, frank Shaun, we pursued, what would be the autobiography of your softbodied fumiform’’ (FW 413.29–31). In the fable of his autobiography, John Vico the producer, the postman, has presented himself to us in his uniform, ready to deliver the letters of humanity.

P A R T

Vico’s Voyage

II

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The New Art of Pedagogy: Wisdom Speaking

they newknow knowwell their Vico’s road —FW, 246.24–25

The Circle of Self-Knowledge Joyce said that in writing Ulysses the ‘‘ports of call were known beforehand’’ (L I:204). In the New Science Vico says that ‘‘whenever Ulysses makes a landing or is driven ashore by the tempest, he always mounts a hill to look inland for a trace of smoke which will indicate that the land is inhabited by men’’ (634). Achilles and Ulysses are Vico’s major examples of the imaginative universal of the hero. Achilles embodies the virtue of valor. Ulysses is the figure to whom are attached all the properties of heroic wisdom. It is this wily wisdom that allows Ulysses to escape from each port of call and make his way home to Ithaca. Having been born into the third age of human society, governed by intelligible universals, Vico can aspire only to acts of heroic mind, not to heroic deeds. To arrive at the thoughts of the New Science he must make his way through pedagogy, philosophy, and jurisprudence. To do this, having sworn allegiance to no teacher, Vico must rely on his good genius. When he enters each of these fields of knowledge Vico looks to see in what way they inhabit

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the human world. In his journey he never leaves the circle of the human self. In this and subsequent chapters I leave Joyce somewhat aside in the body of the text, in order more directly to exposit Vico’s views, only to return to Joyce at the close of each chapter for a last word on them. In 1699, when Vico assumed his position at the University of Naples as professor of Latin eloquence (the chair of rhetoric he had won the year before), his first duty was to deliver the oration officially opening the academic year. Vico was thirty-one. These inaugural orations were delivered in Latin each year on October 18, the day of Saint Luke. This task would be comparable in today’s terms to requiring an assistant professor in the first month of appointment to deliver a major address on a topic of general importance before the assembled faculty, students, and dignitaries of the university. Although the presentation of such orations fell to Vico as part of the position he now held, he was informed by the rector of the university only a few days earlier that he was expected to deliver the oration for that year. Vico rose to the occasion, putting its importance before the manner in which he was informed of it. He began, however, by announcing the fact of this short notice, saying publicly that this duty was conveyed to him in such an abrupt and unusual way that he could have refused. As Vico said in his autobiography, he was ‘‘choleric to a fault’’ ( peccò nella collera) (A 199). But he had won his position, and he knew who he was. Vico chose for his subject the Socratic theme of self-knowledge. His argumentum, his specific thesis, was ‘‘Knowledge of oneself is for everyone the greatest incentive to acquire the universe of learning in the shortest possible time.’’∞ There are two aspects to Vico’s argument: first, how are we to understand the idea of self-knowledge itself? Second, in what sense does selfknowledge require the comprehension of human knowledge as a whole? Vico reminds his audience that a peaceful and happy society depends upon the cultivation, especially in the young, of the liberal arts and sciences. He points out that we are naturally inclined to prefer leisure over labor, but that this is offset by a genuine and specifically human desire to know, a desire especially strong in the young. Vico conceives the object of this desire to be self-knowledge as captured in the ancient dictum inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi: Gnothi seauton. Vico acknowledges that this saying is traditionally attributed to one of the Seven Sages (for example, Pythagoras, Thales, Bias, or Chilon), but Vico claims that by common consensus the dictum was finally attributed to the Pythian oracle. If it comes from the oracle, Vico argues, it is a divine command and its authorship is correctly attributed to God. Vico claims that this dictum is meant to apply not only to the abatement of arrogance but also to the

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positive instruction that we should recognize our own gifts. It is tied to that most important Greek virtue, sophrosyne, self-control, which is the subject of the second famous dictum at Delphi, m¯eden agan, ‘‘nothing too much.’’ Vico says that, according to Cicero, ‘‘Know thyself’’ means ‘‘Know your own animus’’ (Nosce animum tuum) (Tusc. I.52). The animus, the rational soul or spirit, is the divine element in the living human body. The drive to self-knowledge is connected to what is distinctively human. Interpreting ‘‘know thyself’’ in this way foreshadows Vico’s later concept of ‘‘heroic mind’’ as a doctrine of human education. He says this dictum can move man away from despair at his limitations so that he ‘‘may instead be incited and encouraged to undertake great and sublime endeavors for which he has a more than ample capacity’’ (40). Vico’s claim contrasts strikingly with Descartes’s claim, in the Discourse (pt. 1), that we must be cautious with regard to those literary and historical studies at the heart of the liberal arts so that we do not become one of those who ‘‘are liable to fall into the excesses of the knights-errant in our tales of chivalry, and conceive plans beyond their powers.’’ Vico claims that knowing one’s self means knowing ‘‘that you can attain wisdom, because you are born for wisdom [sapientia]’’ (40). He urges his hearers to have the courage to fulfill the condition of their own humanity—to acquire what is distinctively human and also divine—namely, wisdom. Vico has in mind Cicero’s definition of wisdom, taken from the Greeks: ‘‘Wisdom [sapientia] is the knowledge of things divine and human and acquaintance with the cause of each of them’’ (Tusc. IV.57), a view that Vico also claims of Varro’s lost work The Antiquities of Divine and Human Institutions (NS 364). In connecting self-knowledge to divine knowledge Vico has in mind Marsilio Ficino’s claim, in his Platonic Theology of the Immortality of Souls, that to know God requires the knower first to know himself (I.15–17). It is also very likely that Vico is thinking of Pico della Mirandola’s interpretation of the third Delphic precept, the theological greeting ei, ‘‘Thou art,’’ in his Oration on the Dignity of Man. Throughout this oration Vico proceeds as the rhetorically trained humanist, calling forth at all points the great body of Latin and Italian persuasive learning. He is never simply giving his own thoughts in a rationalist manner but presenting them as original ways to see what is already in cultural memory, for those who can share in it with him. This way of the humanist is carried through into Vico’s later works. Vico understands self-knowledge in pedagogical terms, not in the psychological or psychoanalytical terms in which it might be understood today. Selfknowledge for Vico and the humanist tradition is not the modern concern

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with self-reflection, the individual’s reflection on what makes up his individuality, on his own experiences, history, feelings, and motivations. Selfknowledge in the Socratic sense is the individual confronting what is distinctive to human nature. The human rational animal finds its nature writ large in the pursuit of truth, which takes the shapes of the various fields of knowledge. True education of the soul or animus is to grasp the learning of each of these fields separately and then to grasp the whole, the total pursuit of wisdom of which they are a part. The fields of knowledge are an orbis, a circle. Human education is the process of the individual self coming to see itself in this larger cultivated sense of the self. The pursuit of wisdom begins with the pre-Socratic philosophers of nature. Socrates transfers this pursuit of wisdom from nature to human nature. Vico reminds his hearers that Socrates is said to have brought moral philosophy from the heavens, but Vico claims it would be better to say that he raised the human soul up to the heavens (47–48). Vico has in mind Cicero’s statement: ‘‘Socrates was the first to call philosophy down from the heavens and set her in the cities of men and bring her also into their homes and compel her to ask questions about life and morality and things good and evil’’ (Tusc. V.10–11). Vico’s point in this modification is that the human world, including its laws, is not a gift of the gods but a product of the human spirit in its effort to lift itself toward the divine—the divine that is present in its own human nature. Vico does not regard the process of education as morally neutral. Part of the natural inclination toward the acquisition of learning is to promote the ability to ask questions about life and to make judgments concerning good and evil. Wisdom is to be joined not only with eloquence but also with prudence or moral philosophy. The love of wisdom is moral. Socrates has created his philosophy by looking back to the divine commands on the temple of Apollo at Delphi—the first wisdom of the West. Human philosophy comes about through this act of memory. Vico’s Socrates is first and foremost Cicero’s Socrates. When Vico considers the Socrates of the Platonic Dialogues he does not assume the common view, that Socrates is the enemy of rhetoric. In De oratore Cicero says that Socrates ‘‘in his discussions separated the science of wise thinking from that of elegant speaking, though in reality they are closely linked together’’ (III.16.60). Cicero says that it is absurd to sever the tongue from the brain; he maintains that Socrates is in fact the most eloquent of speakers. He asks: ‘‘What of Critias? and Alcibiades? these though not benefactors of their fellow-citizens were undoubtedly learned and eloquent; and did they not owe their training to the discussions of Socrates?’’ (III.34.139; see also III.32.129).

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After urging the young students to pursue the power of the human spirit to its heights under the guidance of the distinguished faculty of the university, Vico concludes his oration by reminding them that ‘‘you too can become part of the administration of the state’’ and that society ‘‘bestows the best positions and responsibility on men of culture’’ (52). In this remark Vico is reflecting a policy that the Spanish government of Naples had begun in 1650, to employ criteria of competence and merit in filling positions of civil service, offering opportunity to persons other than members of the blood aristocracy. Family connections, social class, and political power still were factors, but by Vico’s time this policy had resulted in a developing new intellectual aristocracy, of which Vico was a part. Vico says, in this regard, ‘‘All around you are models for you to emulate in your pursuit of the arts and sciences. Incentives abound!’’ (52). Vico, having just assumed his position through his own merits, was himself perhaps the best example. In his autobiography Vico states the general character of his six inaugural orations: ‘‘The first three treat principally of the ends suitable to human nature, the next two principally of the political ends, the sixth of the Christian end’’ (A 140).≤ There is an ancient principle that to say what a thing is, is to say what it is and what it is not. Having said what wisdom is, in the first oration, in the second Vico says what it is not. The second oration, given the next year, has the argument ‘‘There is no enemy more dangerous and treacherous to its adversary than the fool to himself.’’ The fool (stultus) is the opposite of the lover of wisdom, but the fool is a figure present in every human being. As there is a natural desire for truth and goodness, so there is also an ever-present danger of allowing our mortal body to prevail over our eternal spirit. We pass from wisdom to folly when we allow ourselves to be overcome by our passions. Vico’s line of reasoning is the Platonic and Stoic view of the need for the rational part of the soul to direct the willful part and the appetites. We are all ‘‘Wisdom’s son, folly’s brother’’ (FW 526.15). Once the fool has given himself up to his passions, ‘‘throughout his life he either burns with desire or shivers from fear. He either becomes consumed with pleasure or is overcome by anxiety’’ (65). Like the Platonic world of appearances, ‘‘he is uncommitted. He changes opinion daily, moving from extreme to extreme’’ (65). Vico’s sense of folly here is not as a kind of wisdom that allows one to see the other side of things from the ordinary, as it is in Erasmus’s Praise of Folly. The folly that Vico conceives of is simply negative. It cannot even be the subject of ironic praise. Vico’s folly is closer to that of Sebastian Brandt’s Ship of Fools, the cure for which Brandt connects to Socrates’s sense of prudence and search for self-knowledge. Folly is the opposite of wisdom.

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Vico’s theme is freedom. He portrays at length the evils that can befall societies or individuals in war and civil strife. He says the loss of simple freedom, or even of life, represent evils that are in no way as great an evil as the loss of one’s true human nature when possessed by folly. Vico has a conception of freedom that is close to Hegel’s doctrine of freedom as self-determination. Freedom is not determined by conditions external to the self, which can be either granted or taken away. Freedom is a state of the soul. Vico extends his doctrine of self-knowledge to wisdom as a condition of human freedom. In his autobiography he says that as early as in the second oration he was contemplating the theme he later developed in his Universal Law (A 141). In his autobiography Vico gives 1701 as the year in which he delivered the third oration. This is incorrect. It was delayed until October 18 a year later; in September of 1701 the city of Naples was in confusion and civil unrest, caused by the Conspiracy of Macchia.≥ In his autobiography Vico says this third oration should be regarded as ‘‘a kind of practical appendix to the two preceding ones’’ (A 141). Vico’s argument is: ‘‘If we would study to manifest true, not feigned, and solid, not empty erudition, the Republic of Letters must be rid of every deceit’’ (73). He begins by stressing the uniqueness of man’s freedom among all the other creatures of creation, which he calls ‘‘nature’s slaves’’ (74). Man alone has freedom of choice, a free will. In the first two orations Vico has given his version of man as a rational animal, how man’s rationality entails a doctrine of human knowledge and education and how it is connected to human freedom. In this oration he turns to man as a social animal. He says that ‘‘there is such a great and powerful force inherent in the soul of man which leads him to associate and join together with others, that no person, however wicked or treacherous or wretched, can be found to exist without it’’ (76). The community appropriate to those seeking learning is the Republic of Letters. It must function in the same fundamental way as any society. Vico says: ‘‘For all associations of men this is the intended law: that each member bring with him to share in common either his goods or his talents’’ (77). How does this general principle of sociality apply to the Republic of Letters? There are two false ways in which persons enter into and conduct themselves in this republic, a distinction Vico derives from Epictetus: pretended knowledge and vain knowledge. The person possessing pretended knowledge desires to be seen as learned but actually is not. The vain scholar brings forth his knowledge not for the sake of wisdom but for ostentation and self-promotion. In the Republic of Letters such a scholar pursues his own career apart from any concern with the common good. Vico holds that society is ‘‘founded on mutual good faith.’’ He says, with the ancients, ‘‘Among the good behave

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well’’ (79). Vico presents two dramatic conversations, one on anatomy and one on philosophy, to show the typical falseness in academic exchange. The remedy for empty erudition and deceit in the Republic of Letters is the Socratic principle of ignorance, of freely admitting what one does not know in order to attempt to know. Vico says this principle also separates the educated from the uneducated. ‘‘Neither knows. But the common person claims to know, while the educated knows that he does not know’’ (89). The common person claims to know ‘‘bekase he knowed from his cradle’’ (FW 282.9–10). Vico says that scholars who deceive speak with the voice of the fool (90). Deceit and vanity originate from one’s yielding to the passions, as Vico has claimed in the second oration. Vico understands knowledge as a social process that requires virtue and good faith. Of course, knowledge and the pursuit of truth require the sustained thought and investigations of individuals with trained minds. But the scene of knowledge Vico gives us is not that of the solitary thinker solving problems in his chamber. Vico’s scene of knowledge is social, requiring exchange among thinkers and thinking publicly with evidence in common. Wisdom, the achievement of the rational soul, is a social, not a solitary, affair. Vico’s fourth oration has the argument ‘‘If one wishes to gain the greatest benefits from the study of the liberal arts, and these always conjoined with honor, let him be educated for the good of the republic which is the common good of the citizenry’’ (92).∂ Vico extends his principle, that scholars should act for the common good of their own Republic of Letters, to the exhortation that learning and scholarship should be for the common good of society at large. Learning and the pursuit of truth are not only social in the way they should be conducted; they must be understood to occur within society and to be for the benefit of its citizens. Vico’s point is not that the pursuit of truth is political or that it is to be directed toward political aims. Rather, those who pursue truth and acquire learning are to use what they know to aid the common good, not simply to exact honor from society because of their distinction. Vico bases his argument on the Socratic conception ‘‘utilis honestique,’’ that whatever is utilis (useful, advantageous, expedient) is also honestus (honorable, proper, just) (99–100). Vico is reflecting Socrates’s statement in Alcibiades that ‘‘just things are advantageous’’ (116D) and this distinction as Cicero discusses it in On Duties III. Vico has established that the pursuit of learning and wisdom is not simply theoretical but normative, that wisdom is connected to virtue. Here he takes the further step of claiming that what is virtuous is also useful. He makes clear that this does not mean useful in the sense of acquiring wealth and property, it means useful as a guide in the conduct of life and the civil order of the state.

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The development of character is crucial to the professions and to public life. Vico says the goals worth pursuing in public life are honor and dignity, not honor in the petty sense of pure prominence but honor in the profound sense of promoting the good of the commonwealth. In the fifth oration Vico continues the theme of the relation of the liberal arts to the state.∑ In the previous oration he considered this from the viewpoint of individual character; in this oration he approaches the issue from the standpoint of the state itself. His argument is: ‘‘Nations have been most celebrated in glory for battles and have obtained the greatest political power when they have excelled in letters’’ (108). Vico takes up an old dispute in education, whether the literary or the military arts are the most important to the state. What is needed for the military, the virtue of courage and the will to action, seems opposed to what is required for the study of arts and letters, a dedication to wisdom and a withdrawal from affairs for study and meditation. It is a dispute between Sparta and Athens, and Vico essentially takes the view held in Plato’s Republic that the guardians of the state require a cultural education, whether they are to serve in its administration or in its military defense. Vico argues that the state does not need to make a choice between the primacy of the military or the literary arts; it is not a matter of choosing one to the exclusion of the other. He argues that, in fact, what is taught in the study of letters is required for the successful maintenance of military power. The military leader must not only cultivate the virtues and have a command of dialectic in order to form good judgments, he must also have a knowledge of geometry, arithmetic, and mechanics and the natural sciences in order to carry out his specific duties of fortification, deployment of troops, and so forth. Vico says that moral philosophy aids the military man in knowing the nature and customs of a people, and eloquence gives him the means to persuade and encourage. Vico says it is well known that the key to winning the battle is in the timing of its launching, and that philosophy is crucial for this, as it trains the mind in assessing events and critically evaluating them (121). Vico likely has in mind the sense of kairos—the time when conditions are right for the accomplishment of a particular action. Finally, Vico argues that the practice of both peace and war require wise choices, and these require not only the philosophical knowledge of how things are but also the study of history. The study of great battles and the turning points of past civilizations is the key to any present action, and history, like philosophy, is one of the literary arts. Having made his case to the state for not only the value but also the necessity of literary studies for its survival, Vico says: ‘‘This university of studies is the temple wherein the military disposition may be cultivated. By these stud-

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ies, indeed, the wisdom necessary to the military is nurtured’’ (122). In concluding his case for this political end for the liberal arts, Vico also reminds his hearers of his theme that the various fields of knowledge form a whole. Ten years later, in the Life of Antonio Carafa (1716), Vico appears to have modified his view of the necessity of liberal studies for military success. He may still hold to the views of this oration in principle, but he portrays the success of Marshal Carafa as dependent on his practical grasp of the arts of gaining and holding power. In 1707 Vico delivered his sixth inaugural oration, which added to his doctrine of the university of studies the question of the proper order of studies. In so doing he prepared the way for his major inaugural oration of 1708, which he published as his first book, De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (On the Study Methods of Our Time). In his previous orations Vico had insisted on the principle that the fields of study must be seen as comprising a whole, but he had given no instruction as to how this whole was to be learned, nor of the character of its overall scheme. In his description in his autobiography of the six orations as a set, mentioned above, Vico says that the sixth is directed to the Christian end of education. In developing his views of pedagogy in his orations, Vico has connected education to the fulfillment of human nature, to the needs of the state, and now he connects it to religion by making revealed theology, Christian ethics, and Christian jurisprudence the final stages in an overall pattern of study. Vico’s argument is: ‘‘Knowledge of the corrupt nature of man invites the study of the entire universe of liberal arts and sciences, and sets forth the correct method by which to learn them’’ (125). He begins by addressing the parents of students who would have their offspring study medicine, law, or government in order to secure prominent positions and financial gain. Such a course, when done to the exclusion of the liberal arts, deprives the student of the possibility of a humane education, in which the student’s own human nature is developed. Graduates of such a specialist course of study often find themselves successful in their particular profession, but at the same time they may find themselves to be shallow and uneducated adults. Vico says human beings require a liberal education because they do not possess by nature the things an education brings. Because of the original sin of Adam and Eve, human nature is corrupt. The human person is ‘‘nothing but mind, spirit, and capacity for language’’ (127). We are corrupted with regard to language because of the Tower of Babel (‘‘the turrace of Babbel’’ [FW 199.31]), the multiplicity of languages, and by the fact that the flux of time significantly changes every language, making some incomprehensible to later generations. In mind we are confronted with each person forming different

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opinions and holding them as so many truths. In spirit we are polluted by vices and are wont not to confront them in ourselves, reproaching others for vices we ourselves have. The punishments for corrupted human nature are ‘‘the inadequacy of language, the opinions of the mind, and the passions of the soul’’ (129). Vico says the remedies for these are eloquence, knowledge (scientia), and virtue. All knowledge consists in ‘‘to know with certainty, to act rightly, and to speak with dignity [certo scire, recte agere, digne loqui]’’ (129). Here Vico is glossing the humanist ideals of the interconnections of sapientia, eloquentia, and prudentia (Vico’s list puts prudentia in the middle). These are reflected in Horace’s claim in the Ars poetica that the role of poetry is to instruct, delight, and move (333), which Cicero in Brutus attributes to rhetoric: ‘‘Now there are three things in my opinion which the orator should effect: Instruct his listener, give him pleasure, stir his emotions’’ (Brutus, 185; see also De orat. II.27.115). Vico proceeds to remind his hearers that almost all fields of the arts and sciences have their own written histories (133). This is a point very much in opposition to the rationalist, ahistorical conception of knowledge, which does not regard the history of any form of knowledge as essential to its truth or falsity. Vico realizes that questions of meaning always precede questions of truth. To understand the genesis of the ideas, themes, or principles in a field is the way to establish their meanings. Only then is it possible critically to evaluate their truth. This is expressed as an axiom in the New Science: ‘‘Doctrines must take their beginning from that of the matters of which they treat’’ (axiom 106; par. 314). Vico makes a distinction between esoteric and exoteric forms of knowledge. The esoteric forms must be approached with teachers; the exoteric are those that each of us can learn for ourselves (135). Language, Vico says, can be learned naturally by all in childhood. There is no better age for learning languages. Children are particularly strong in imagination, which as the mind develops must give way to reason. Adolescents can apply themselves to basic mathematics. As the mind advances in maturity physics can be studied, which leads to metaphysics, and metaphysics prepares the ground for the study of theology. This mastery of theoretical learning establishes the groundwork for cultivating wise judgment in human affairs (137). The knowledge of things divine is the basis for distinguishing between good and evil. The distinction between good and evil is the basis of human prudence and the proper conduct of life. This is the problem that confronts our corrupt human nature in the world of affairs. To solve this problem of conduct requires the thorough study of jurisprudence. Vico says that when finally you have been instructed in these studies and achieved judgment in moral and civil

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doctrine, ‘‘you should join with these studies those of eloquence’’ (138). Eloquence is the third thing that must be learned. Vico stresses that all must proceed in the appropriate sequence, and once this is accomplished there is no need to introduce anything else. He adds that, although the principles of the arts and the doctrines of the sciences are esoteric, the histories of these fields are exoteric and can thus be studied on one’s own. In this oration Vico establishes the basic genetic order of studies that he develops more fully in the seventh oration—what studies are appropriate to childhood and what to mature minds. Although sapientia, prudentia, and eloquentia are not separable parts of the totality that is a human education, Vico presents them as a sequence in which eloquence, his own field, is the last, the final achievement that unites all else, which brings the mind full circle, back to language. Language is the first thing to be learned by the human individual, and its mastery as eloquence is finally what is required for all else. Vico closes his sixth oration with the Socratic claim that he is not wise but that he has attempted to follow those who are. He mentions his own corrupt nature as the source of his lack of wisdom. As he does throughout his career, Vico here joins the pagan to the Judeo-Christian—the principle of Socratic ignorance is joined to the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the fall.

The Method of Studies As I mentioned above, Vico’s seventh oration was published as a small volume in 1709, a decade after he delivered his first oration. He gave the oration at the opening of the academic year in 1708, and in the spring of the following year its expanded version was printed at the press of Felice Mosca, in Naples. In 1707, Philip V, king of Spain, lost Naples as a result of the war of Spanish succession that raged in Germany and Northern Italy, thus ending two centuries of intimate connection of Naples with Spain. The Austrian troops entered Naples in July 1707. Vico’s sixth oration was given as usual that fall, but to acknowledge this new, Austrian rule the opening of the university year in 1708 was dedicated to the future King Charles VI and presented before the Venetian Cardinal Vincenzo Grimani, viceroy of Naples. Vico again rose to the occasion. As he states in his autobiography: ‘‘It gave Vico a happy opportunity to devise an argument that should bring some new and profitable discovery to the world of letters,—a desire worthy to be numbered among those of Bacon in his New Organ of the Sciences’’ (A 146). The title of Vico’s little book, De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, is published in English translation as On the Study Methods of Our Time, which

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is misleading because in the Latin title it is ‘‘studies,’’ not ‘‘methods,’’ that is plural. ‘‘Method’’ is the rendering of ratio, which in Latin has multiple meanings, including an account, a list, an order, a system. In today’s educational theory, ‘‘method’’ and ‘‘methods’’ are associated with ‘‘teaching methods,’’ ways in which material is conveyed to students in the classroom or laboratory. Vico does not have this sense of method in mind. His interest is in the system, or total scheme, of the various fields of study and the order in which they are to be introduced to the student, based on the natural phases of mental development. Vico’s title might best be thought of as ‘‘On the System (or Order) of Studies in Our Time.’’∏ Vico’s theme in this work is: ‘‘Which method of studies is the most correct and best, ours or that of the ancients?’’ (5). He says that if he is not mistaken the theme he wishes to treat in this work is new (Res nova est, ni fallor); ‘‘but,’’ he adds, ‘‘the knowledge of it is so important, that I am amazed it has not been treated yet’’ (5). Vico appears to be entering the querelle des anciens et modernes, which took shape in France in the works of Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle and Charles Perrault in the late 1600s, while Vico was at Vatolla. This quarrel had taken its own natural shape with the rise of modern science, a great dividing point being Galileo’s shift from Aristotle’s description of motion and rest, in terms of substance and qualities based upon the subject-predicate structure of language, to the conceptualization of motion and rest in terms of relations and quantities, symbolizable in mathematical notations. Fontenelle and Perrault formulated a version of this quarrel within the tradition of letters, raising the question of whether writers of the modern age were equal or superior to the ancient poets. Vico’s ‘‘quarrel’’ is neither that of modern science nor the French querelle of letters, which had spread beyond France. Vico’s theme is the more fundamental question of the difference between the ancient and modern worlds, the mentality of the ‘‘new’’ of the modern versus the mentality of the humanist, who inherits the freedom of the Renaissance to see knowledge as a palimpsest, as reinscribed upon the tablets of the ancients. Vico’s self-study at Vatolla had prepared him in the great classical and humanist traditions, the ways of thinking and using language upon which civil wisdom and jurisprudence depend. Vico had read in the moderns. When he left Naples for Vatolla Pierre Gassendi’s natural philosophy was in vogue, and Vico followed out its basis in Lucretius and Epicurus. He saw its connection with the empiricism of John Locke. At Vatolla Vico heard of the experimental physics of Robert Boyle, but he found that it ‘‘contributed nothing to the philosophy of man and had to be expounded in barbarous formulas’’ (A 128). Vico affirmed that his principal concern was the study of Roman law and the Latin language. Toward the end

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of his nine years at Vatolla, Vico says, he heard of the physics of Descartes and studied it in the version of Henri Du Roy’s Natural Philosophy (A 128). Vico’s reading of Lucretius had driven him to become a partisan of Platonic metaphysics, and he says his reading of the Cartesian position of Du Roy confirmed him in his Platonism (A 130). What Vico had met with intellectually at Vatolla he met in person on his return to Naples, and this was a shock. The new conception of nature and knowledge dominated discussion in the meetings of the academies. Vico says the metaphysics of the great humanists Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Alessandro Piccolomini, Francesco Patrizi, and others were ‘‘now thought worthy only of being shut up in the cloisters’’ (A 132). Plato was of interest for an occasional passage to be quoted for poetic use, or to show an erudite memory. The philosophy of the Schools, Scholasticism, was no longer an issue. It had been challenged by the literary genius of the Renaissance and the experiments of Galileo, but Descartes’s mathematical model of reasoning had dealt a death-blow to the Scholastic sense of proof, its production of sorites. Vico, as a devotee of the Demosthenean enthymeme and of Cicero, could stand in general with the moderns against the Scholastics. However, Vico found the Cartesian geometrical method of proof rhetorically even more deficient than that of the Scholastics. The standard view of Vico’s intellectual development regards him as a Cartesian throughout the decade of his first six inaugural orations and considers the seventh oration to be Vico’s break with Descartes’s philosophy. Max Fisch, reflecting the view of Croce and Nicolini, states this unequivocally: ‘‘Actually, moreover, Vico became a Cartesian and remained so until his own original doctrine began to emerge; that is, until about the age forty [1708]. Indeed, the greatest critic of Descartes was himself the greatest Cartesian of Italy.’’π A more moderate view is that of Giovanni Gentile, who speaks of Vico’s Cartesianism of 1699 as ‘‘un cartesianismo platonico.’’∫ Gentile’s view of Vico’s ‘‘Platonic Cartesianism’’ seems closer to the truth. In his summaries of the early orations in his autobiography, Vico never mentions any Cartesian elements in them, and he claims that his early study of Descartes drove him to the metaphysics of Plato, as mentioned above. Vico wrote these summaries of his orations in 1725, long after he had developed his anti-Cartesian position. The standard view sees Vico as, in retrospect, simply overlooking his early attachment to Descartes. Vico’s ‘‘Cartesianism’’ depends largely on two passages in the orations. In Oration I, Vico, having established that the Delphic-Socratic dictum ‘‘Know thyself’’ depends upon a connection to the divine, proceeds to paraphrase Descartes’s argument in the Meditations, moving from the certainty of the existence of the finite thinking

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mind to the existence of the infinite mind of God, containing all perfections (45–46). Here, as in the seventh oration, Vico is balancing the ancients against the moderns, connecting the main principle of the founder of ancient philosophy with that of the founder of modern philosophy. In Oration III, Vico includes Descartes in a catalogue of thinkers and views that he recommends the students study carefully. He characterizes the accomplishments of Plautus, Terence, Virgil, Cicero, Livy, Sallust, Ovid, Lucan, Martial, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Democritus, and he counsels the students to find out how Descartes has meditated his metaphysics and how he has applied the method of geometry to the theories of physics. He says his hearers will find Descartes to be a unique philosopher (81). The figures on Vico’s list are all ancients; Descartes is the one modern. Once again Vico is balancing the ancient view of man and nature with Descartes, the prime example of the modern. Vico creates an imaginary conversation in which Descartes’s demonstration of physical phenomena by geometric method is an example of a subject to be critically examined. He concludes: ‘‘Our studies are valuable insofar as we learn that we do not know or we know only a few things’’ (88–89). Vico’s point is that the student should be taught to think for himself, and that those who claim knowledge must be ready to defend it and give evidence for their claims, not simply hide behind their positions. This evidential way of thinking can be taken as an endorsement of the modern doctrine of criticism, but it is also a principle of Socratic thought.Ω ‘‘Let me finger their eurhythmytic. And you’ll see if I’m selfthought. They’re all of them out to please’’ (FW 147.8–9). What is Vico’s view of Descartes during these years? The standard approach would have us believe that the difference between Vico’s six inaugural orations and the seventh is a shift, like that of the standard view of the difference between Kant’s critical and precritical writings. It is difficult to call Vico a Cartesian in these early orations, for the simple reason that throughout them he speaks as a rhetorician, basing his main themes on just those thinkers that Descartes would dismiss. Vico’s constant source is Cicero, joined to Plato and to such humanists as Ficino and Pico. Vico’s conception of the human condition is drawn directly from the ancients, and he compares the modern views of nature with those of the Atomists. If Vico is not truly a Cartesian in these six orations, neither is he completely anti-Cartesian. He arrives at his antiCartesianism through the realization that Descartes’s conception of knowledge has within it a false and disastrous program of human education. It is one thing to recommend to the youths who hear his orations that they study Descartes, while also thinking with the ancients and absorbing their civil wisdom that Latin eloquence can provide, but it is quite another thing to use Descartes as the basis of a doctrine for their method of studies.

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The Cartesian conception of education is the basis of the Port-Royal Logic of Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole’s L’art de penser, published in 1662, which set the standard for the modern view of education by training the critical faculties. Vico’s conception of ratio or metodo di studiare is based on the ars topica as against the ars critica, which is the basis of Descartes’s and the Port-Royalist sense of méthode. Vico’s purpose, in his seventh oration, is not just to counter the modern sense of the critical method of thought with the ancient method of topical thought; his aim is a new ordering of studies that will promote the attainment of wisdom in the face of the modern quest simply for certainty and intelligence. Vico plays on both these senses of ratio— method, which is one of its less usual meanings, and system or ordering of materials. Without this second sense of a natural ordering of studies, his opposition to the Cartesian ideal of truth would be unsuccessful. The fourth part of the Port-Royal Logic distinguishes two kinds of methods of thinking: analysis and synthesis. Method is generally described as ‘‘the art of arranging well a succession of various thoughts, or for discerning the truth when we are ignorant of it, or for proving it to others when we already know it.’’∞≠ Two types of method are then distinguished: ‘‘one for discovering the truth, which is called analysis or method of resolution and that also can be called method of invention; and the other for making it understandable to others when it has been found, that is called synthesis, or method of composition and can also be called method of doctrine.’’∞∞ Vico accuses Arnauld of considering the ars topica to be useless. Yet, as Gianturco points out, Arnauld in the Port-Royal Logic never explicitly attacks the ars topica.∞≤ The attack is more general and more serious. The ars topica is in Vico’s view identified with inventio. ‘‘Topics,’’ Vico says, ‘‘is the art of finding the middle term (what the Scholastics call medium and the Latins call argumentum)’’ (15). To understand this we should recall that in Aristotle there are two ways to consider the syllogism.∞≥ One way is to regard the syllogism as an instrument of demonstration; the other is to regard the syllogism as a means for the generation of ideas. In the first of these the middle term plays the role of stating the class through which the classes or the major and minor terms are connected. The middle term is present only in the premisses, and it disappears in the statement of the conclusion. In the second sense of the syllogism the middle term is all-important because it is the commonplace or topos out of which the other two terms of the syllogism are drawn forth. The second sense looks at the syllogism from the perspective of how arguments are created, how they come into being, not how they are tested for their validity when they are already in hand. The ars topica, understood in this way, requires that the speaker who wishes to assert a connection between two terms must find a third term to act as a middle, a meaning that is held in common

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between the speaker’s intention and the listeners, that is, a commonplace. This can often take the form of a maxim or be formulated within an enthymeme. From such common ground the speaker can then ‘‘draw forth’’ the connection of the terms of the conclusion, bringing the understanding and agreement of the listeners along with him. Lane Cooper states: ‘‘But the sound rhetorician does draw one thing from another. Thus we come to the preposition ek (or ex), which is characteristic of Aristotle’s thought, but often is hard or impossible to translate directly. The speaker is supposed to have resources, from which he draws his arguments and illustrations.’’∞∂ From Vico’s perspective, logical methods of thought, or what he calls ‘‘criticism’’ or ‘‘philosophical criticism,’’ require ars topica as the means to establish the beginning points of their judgments. Although Arnauld does not attack topics, what, in his view, stands in the place of topics in human reasoning? As quoted above, the Port-Royal Logic designates analysis as the method of invention. As Gianturco notes, Vico uses the word analysis in two senses.∞∑ One is the general sense associated with the second step in Descartes’s four-step method of reasoning and truth in the Discourse (pt. 2): ‘‘to divide each of the difficulties I examined into as many parts as possible and as may be required in order to resolve them better.’’ From this position, according to the third step, the reasoner is to ascend little by little from the simplest to the complex. The other sense of ‘‘analysis’’ as used by Vico designates analytic geometry, pioneered by Descartes. Sometimes Vico uses ‘‘analysis’’ to mean both of these senses at once, and rightly so, because the second is in effect derived from the first, and because analytical geometry is essentially the application of the above process to the study of geometrical curves.∞∏ The Geometry was one of the Essais that the Discourse introduced. Why is Vico so much against the idea of analysis? It is the unifying theme of his dissatisfaction with the modern conception of thought and education. The answer, I think, lies in the fact that it stands in the place of the ars topica, the function of which in thought is inventio. In the Port-Royal Logic this power of thought is converted (or the attempt is made to convert it) into analysis as a method. Invention now appears to be open to everyone who possesses the Cartesian bon sens. In the Port-Royal Logic Descartes’s method of the Discourse is turned into a theory of education. Analysis parallels inventio, and synthesis parallels demonstratio. Rhetoric is robbed from the mind by logic, and with it go prudence and eloquence, the two keys to human wisdom. Descartes’s bon sens is characterized by anonymity because anyone who can employ the method can engage in discourse that is independent of the speaker’s subjectivity or sense of place in a particular human community. Each subject should be replaceable in the reasoning process. As members of the

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human community and historical subjects, we are left just with Descartes’s stoical rules of the third part of the Discourse; morals are placed in a permanently provisional state. Against Descartes’s anonymous bon sens is Vico’s sensus communis, which Vico understands as ‘‘communal sense’’ (13) such as might be associated with Aristotle’s principle of the human being as a social animal. Humans exist within a political community under specific recurrent historical conditions. Thus the individual must possess the ability to recognize and assess the situations in which he finds himself. Vico says that ‘‘it is an error to apply to the prudent conduct of life the abstract criterion of reasoning that obtains in the domain of science’’ (35). This faculty for the individual to assess where he stands in a particular situation was called phron¯esis by the Greeks and prudentia by the Romans. Res and verba must be joined in a mode of thought and expression in which the individual does not abstract from the situation, and in which the situation can be portrayed as a whole without losing its particular details. Eloquence is the prime feature of this expression of a situation as a whole. Such speech must be copious—that is, it must be encompassing of all that is there. There is no wisdom for Vico without prudence and eloquence. He asks: ‘‘What is eloquence, in truth, but wisdom speaking ornately and copiously in words appropriate to the common sense of the human race?’’ (78). In the end Vico’s complaint against the modern, Cartesian conception of pedagogy is twofold: that it fragments knowledge, the true object of which is the whole, and that it is unnatural to the development of the human faculties. The mind that could be truly educated by the Cartesian ideal will greet the particular historical situation with a blank stare. With regard to the first point, fragmentation, the modern simply denies the humanistic arts of language and cuts the mind in half, or the modern, while denying the truth to the ars topica of the ancients, employs the ars topica as the basis of his own texts in an act of mauvaise foi. The attempt to deny the truth of the ancients leads to the problem of the second point, that of the unnaturalness of the modern. Here Vico is adamant: ‘‘Just as old age is powerful in reason, so is adolescence in imagination’’ (13). The moderns give us no order of studies at all, but offer a single method that is to be mastered and applied in all areas of study. Education, on Vico’s view, must follow the natural course of the development of the faculties. The young naturally excel in the faculties connected to the knowledge of the ancients—memory, imagination, and ingenuity. Training in these gives the basis for the later powers of intellect required for the analytic and critical thinking of the moderns. Vico says that ‘‘the whole is really the flower of wisdom’’ (77), and his whole is a ratio of studies connected to the natural development of the human. Self-

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knowledge is possible only by the individual following such a course, and as he becomes educated in both the ars topica and the ars analytica, wisdom (sapientia) becomes the power heroically to hold both senses of thinking in mind. Pedagogy in Vico’s view is not the unification of all the fields of study in some centralized ratio. This would, in fact, point in the direction of Descartes. Pedagogy is rightly a kind of ‘‘comprehensive’’ speech offered the student, not by a single person, such as Socrates (who Vico says was a whole university in himself, as ancients often were), but delivered through a system of studies tuned to the natural course of the human faculties in their development. Vico says, ‘‘The most eulogizing epithet that can be given to a speech is that it is ‘comprehensive’: praise is due to the speaker who has left nothing untouched, and has omitted nothing from the argument, nothing which may be missed by his listeners’’ (15). And since pedagogy, in the sense of teaching, is an art of total speaking about a subject done at a particular time and place, no method of analysis or synthesis could itself be its guide, although such method could be a part of what is taught. Vico’s new ‘‘method of studies’’ is not new in the sense of intending to be something novel. It is the attempt to revive something old—the interest of the ancients in self-knowledge and the basis self-knowledge has in the teaching and practice of humane letters. Vico’s objection to the Cartesian view of human education is that it is one-sided, which will ultimately result in a onedimensional understanding of the human self. In the Cartesian view the self is an agent that can understand the object in all of its dimensions by means of a single unified method of thinking. The whole for the Cartesian is reached not as the flower of wisdom but as the ‘‘unity’’ that method will bring to the multiplicity of the sciences. Although the self in the Cartesian view can form the object of thought in many different ways, all thought that will result in truth is subject to the four-step method of Descartes’s Discourse. In this view the sciences offer the thinking I a panorama of its bon sens at work in the world, but such a panorama does not offer the self that thinks a ‘‘science’’ of its own historical and social nature. It is through the ancient arts of language found in rhetorical and poetic speech that the self traditionally has access to its own nature as a social being— to the ways the human self confronts its own nature in the world of its own making. In Vico’s view these arts must be the basis of the child’s education. Only if these arts are absorbed when young can the mature scientific thinker function as a social being and confront his own nature as a distinctively human question. Without acknowledging it the Cartesian method presupposes that there is an actual, historically conditioned self present as thinker. Science is not itself culture but presupposes society and culture as the medium through which

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it can be conducted. To begin with something that is clear and distinct, which the Cartesian method affirms as the proper starting-point of its method, presumes that the self has determined a place for itself in the world and that a society exists within which to think. There can be no actual realm of science that exists solely through method. Method presupposes a social and personal order that is not itself achieved or maintained by method. Vico’s sense of a new ‘‘method of studies’’ is one in which the ancient arts of poetical and rhetorical speech and historical forms of understanding are placed in a balanced relationship with those purely methodological forms of thinking that have caused the growing successes in the sciences of nature. Science is not self-knowledge, and yet science is a part of the self. That ‘‘method’’ or ‘‘order’’ of human studies which mirrors the natural order of development of society itself is the order that should be followed by any system of human education. The child should first be taught those arts that themselves make human community possible and then proceed to the forms of analytic thought and methodology that make the modern sciences possible, which presuppose and at every turn depend upon the power the self has to make a world for itself. To do otherwise, Vico would say, is to forget Aristotle’s dictum that man is a social animal and to believe that science is the beginning and the end of culture.

The Heroic Mind Vico delivered three other university inaugural orations of which there is record. In relating in his autobiography his attempt, at Vatolla, to explore the mathematical method of thought while engaged in his self-study, Vico inserts a portion of an inaugural oration that he delivered about 1713. The full text of the oration is lost. Its general theme was to tell his young listeners ‘‘how to make choice and use of the sciences for eloquence’’ (A 125). It is another version of the importance of the union of eloquence and wisdom. In the passages that Vico quotes he reiterates the point of the danger of ‘‘introducing philosophy to children barely out of grammar school with the so-called logic ‘of Arnauld’ ’’ (A 123), the point he made in the seventh oration. He also draws the contrast between Euclidean geometry and Cartesian analytic geometry that he made in the seventh oration, reiterating his claim that plane geometry depends in its proofs upon a graphic art that is suitable for children, while the algebraic method of analytic geometry takes the young mind into abstraction, such that the imagination goes blind. Vico summarizes another oration, delivered in 1719, the full text of which is also lost. Vico’s argument was: ‘‘All divine and human learning has three

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elements: knowledge, will and power, whose single principle is the mind, with reason for its eye, to which God brings the light of eternal truth’’ (A 156). This oration, as Vico describes it, departs from the others in that it is not first and foremost pedagogical. Vico’s aim is to give a statement of the fundamental principles of human and divine learning, such that, concerning the foundations of anything that has been said or written, ‘‘if it agrees with these principles, is true, if it disagrees is false’’ (A 156). Vico says that some considered his argument superior even to that in Pico della Mirandola’s presentation of ‘‘conclusions concerning all the knowable’’ (A 157). Vico has in mind Pico’s Conclusiones (1484), to which he also refers in the seventh oration as a model of topical thinking (17). Pico’s principles leave out philology—the knowledge of ‘‘religions, languages, laws, customs, property rights, conveyances, sovereign powers, governments, classes, and the like’’ (A 157). The seventh oration begins with Vico referring to Bacon’s De dignitate, in which Bacon, by examining one by one the various branches of knowledge, shows what new fields need to be developed. Vico wishes to consider how the fields of knowledge that already exist can be evaluated and put together as a whole. His focus in this oration is on the interrelationships of the scheme of studies. In his lost oration of 1719 Vico wishes to project a science of the principles of knowledge themselves, that is, what is required for the origination, consistency, and aim of knowledge in any form or subject. With this as his purpose Vico stands at the brink of a new science of the human world formulated in terms of a new doctrine of jurisprudence. He develops this in the three books of his Universal Law.∞π Vico’s last university inaugural oration, ‘‘On the Heroic Mind’’ (De mente heroica), delivered in 1732, returns to the central issues of pedagogy.∞∫ By this time he has published not only his Universal Law but also the first and second versions of the New Science. Elio Gianturco, who translated the seventh oration into English, says ‘‘On the Heroic Mind’’ is the logical prolongation of the seventh oration. He says ‘‘On the Heroic Mind’’ is ‘‘one of the most inspired ‘invitations to learning’ ever penned. . . . The eros of learning has seldom been expressed in more electrifying terms.’’∞Ω Gianturco may have in mind, as perhaps Vico also did, that in Plato’s Cratylus it is claimed ‘‘that the name ‘hero’ (h¯eros) ¯ is only a slightly altered form of the word ‘love’ (eros)—the ¯ very thing from which the heroes sprang.’’ Plato says this may be one reason they were called heroes; another may be because they were clever speech-makers (rh¯etores) and skilled dialectical questioners (erotan) ¯ (Cratylus 398D). There is no record of Vico having delivered any university orations between 1719 and 1732, and there may have been none. During this period the institutional life of the University of Naples had declined. It was revived by the

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wisdom of Monsignor Celestino Galiani, who held the position of cappellano maggiore of the Kingdom of Naples, and whose prefecture included administration of the university. Galiani, a friend and supporter of Vico, wished to restore the university to its earlier position of fame. Part of this restoration was reinstatement of the opening ceremonies of the academic year, and Galiani asked Vico to deliver the oration for 1732. Vico begins ‘‘On the Heroic Mind’’ with a highly personal statement: ‘‘As for myself—I who have carried out the duties of Professor of Eloquence in this very place for over thirty-three years and am almost wasted away by the rigors of intellectual work—I take it to be my task to bring before you a theme which is wholly new’’ (229). This echoes his comment in the autobiography about his exhaustion on completing the second, definitive version of the New Science (1730) (A 191, 198). It also announces that the theme of the oration is a new one. When he was a youth no one could teach Vico anything; he taught himself, by his own methods. As a mature thinker all that he says is new. Although he writes as a humanist and erudito, basing what he says on the wisdom of the ancients and the Renaissance humanists who have gone before him, what he says has not before been realized. For Vico the purpose of education is to achieve a heroic mind. This ideal reasserts two of Vico’s themes: the first is that true education is to study all branches of human knowledge and bring them together as a ‘‘universe of knowledge.’’ Vico says this is why, in Italian culture, a university is called la Sapienza (Wisdom) (233). Knowledge is a circle that the individual must close in his own mind. Although among the ancients a philosopher like Socrates was an entire university unto himself, today knowledge has been divided into branches, which yet exist within one university. Vico’s advice is to attempt the nearly impossible: ‘‘Concentrate solely on collating everything you learn so that the whole may hang together and all be in accord within any one discipline’’ (239). To do this, one must study only the best works and not become totally absorbed in any single pursuit of human knowledge. In other words, one must give attention to both the ancients and the moderns. To be totally absorbed in either or to become a specialist in only one field or another is to be less than educated. In a sense, to do either of these is to become less than human, for the mind is the divine in human nature, and it should realize its total capacities. To accomplish this goal the individual is on his own. Wisdom is a curative to complete the inner man, which suffers from imperfection because of original sin, Vico’s earlier theme. The student is not to swear an oath to any teacher (235). This affirms Vico’s own experience. In the autobiography he reports his relief, on returning to Naples from his self-study at Vatolla, that he had sworn

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an oath to no teacher and so could be free to rely solely upon his own ‘‘good genius’’ (A 133). The oration on heroic mind is in truth Vico’s portrait of himself. Having discovered the New Science (1725/1730), he is heroic mind. To this theme of cultivating the whole, Vico adds the second theme: that the reason to acquire such learning is to promote the good of the human race. This theme goes back to that of his fourth oration of 1705. The acquisition of knowledge by the individual should not be simply a goal in itself—knowledge for the sake of knowledge—nor for whatever personal gain and honor its possession may bring. Vico does not have in mind a particular program of political reform or social improvement. He holds the Platonic-Socratic doctrine that there is a natural connection between true learning and human virtue. To attain piety and virtue is a benefit to the state and to the human race. Those that act from this position cannot help but benefit the civil order. Vico regards his discovery of the New Science not simply as a great theoretical achievement but also as a guide to the course of nations that offers knowledge necessary for prudent action. We in the age of humans, in Vico’s ideal eternal history of the New Science, cannot aspire to the actual agency of the hero—the performance of heroic deeds. The age of heroes is past. Vico says the heroes, according to the poets, saw themselves as having divine lineage from ‘‘all-judging Jove’’ (230). The heroic mind that we can exercise has a divine origin and requires only schooling to develop its powers. According to the philosophers, Vico says, the hero is ‘‘one who seeks ever the sublime’’ (230). The hero’s sublimity consists in his good deeds that surpass the ordinary, that bring him ‘‘glory’’—‘‘the hero generates for himself an immortal name’’ (230). A hero, unlike a god, is not immortal but acquires the immortality of greatness. For Longinus sublimity is a high point of thought: ‘‘A well-timed flash of sublimity scatters everything before it like a bolt of lightning and reveals the full power of the speaker at a single stroke’’ (On the Sublime 1.4). Especially important to Longinus’s conception of sublimity is ‘‘synthesis,’’ which refers to the arrangement of words, putting words together and making a whole of them (8.1–2). Longinus speaks of this synthesis as being like a melody; a sublime composition is a kind of ‘‘melody in words: these words must be a part of man’s nature, that reach not only the ears but the soul’’ (39.3). Vico does not cite Longinus in this oration, but what he says is close to this rhetorical sense of the sublime. Vico concentrates his notion of the sublime on the process of thought itself, saying that to be sublime one must direct thought above nature, to God, and then back to the marvels of nature in general and specifically to the greatness of human nature. In your study, Vico says, ‘‘Make your way in this fashion through all three worlds, of things human, things natural, and

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things eternal’’ (237). The traversing of these three worlds is what Vico claims for his New Science, as depicted in the engraving of its frontispiece (NS 42). The whole of knowledge is to be identified not only with the True and the Good but also with the Beautiful. Vico claims that scientia seems to have been derived from the same root as scitus, ‘‘signifying also ‘beautiful’ [ pulcher]’’ (239).≤≠ What is beautiful depends upon symmetry or proportion. Proportion is the key to making the fields of knowledge come together as a whole. The connection of sublimity with education is a special feature of this oration. The ideal of ‘‘heroic mind’’ for Vico involves three things: all branches of knowledge must be studied and put together; the human mind is divine and in its activity of learning reaches God the creator in an attempt to make itself whole; and the acquisition of knowledge, when rightly practiced, leads the individual toward virtue and the good. These are Platonic or Neoplatonic themes, but even in this late oration formulating the humanist ideal of wisdom Vico has a good word for Descartes, including him in a list of examples of those worth study who have discovered new worlds: ‘‘The towering Descartes observed the trajectory of a stone thrown from a sling, and thought up a new physics’’ (244). Vico’s last oration was his last philosophical, pedagogical statement. Commonly called ‘‘The Academies and the Relation between Philosophy and Eloquence,’’ it was delivered in January 1737 as the annual opening address of the Academy of Oziosi, of which Vico was custode.≤∞ It is a short address in which Vico reaffirms the central theme of his career and of his teaching—the natural bond that should not be broken between wisdom and eloquence—an ideal for which the Academy of Oziosi stood. Vico claims the idea of ‘‘academy’’ has its roots in the public activity of Socrates. Although Vico does not mention it, the term in fact originates from the plot of land that Plato purchased on which to establish his school on the outskirts of Athens, which was dedicated to the minor hero, Hecadamus. Vico claims that Socrates held language and heart together, and that it was the Sophists and other Greek ‘‘philosophizers’’ who divorced them. Vico reverses the view normally attributed to Socrates and endorses the Ciceronian view, mentioned earlier, that Socrates was the most eloquent of speakers. Vico makes a last pronouncement on the ancients and moderns: ‘‘Moreover, if I am not mistaken, I hold the opinion that if eloquence does not regain the luster of the Latins and Greeks in our time, when our sciences have made progress equal to and perhaps even greater than theirs, it will be because the sciences are taught completely stripped of every badge of eloquence’’ (87). Vico uses Horace (Ars poetica, 309–11) to put the whole of his positive doctrine into a paragraph. He says Horace has condensed into three lines all

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the art of using language in prose as well as verse. ‘‘Right thinking’’ is the first precept, because eloquence requires ‘‘truth and dignity.’’ The second precept is that Socratic moral philosophy ‘‘will direct you in the choice of subjects.’’ The choice of subjects must come from a grasp of morals, of the human world, human nature. The third precept asserts that ‘‘when the subject is well conceived, words will follow on spontaneously.’’ This depends upon the natural bond between language and heart. Every idea has a proper voice naturally attached to it. ‘‘Thus,’’ says Vico, ‘‘eloquence is none other than wisdom speaking’’ (89). What Vico has found in Horace is high pedagogy. There is no better advice that can be given to anyone who would put thought into writing. Vico concludes the oration with a remarkable blend of pagan and Christian sentiments. Like the thinkers of the Renaissance, Vico can move between pagan and Christian with an ease unknown to today’s thought. He says that he has drawn on ‘‘Father Augustine under whose protection this Academy stands resigned.’’ Actually, St. Augustine was only one of several protectors of the Academy of Oziosi, but he was Vico’s personal protector.≤≤ Having appealed to the saint of the Church who attempted to reformulate the pagan within the Christian, Vico says: ‘‘I conceived this prayer with these solemn and consecrated words—Hear, humbly I pray you, hear, not fabulous Minerva, but Eternal Wisdom, generated from the divine head of the true Jove, the omnipotent Your Father’’ (90). It is a remarkable prayer, cleverly done. At the age of sixty-eight, Vico need not worry that his youthful religious indiscretions will be held against him. He can safely devise a Christian prayer on the basis of pagan imagery. In the orations we learn Vico’s views on human knowledge and human education, but we do not learn how Vico himself taught. Some insight into this can be gained from the text on the art of rhetoric, Institutiones oratoriae, which Vico wrote and taught from throughout his career until the 1740s, when his son Gennaro began to succeed him.≤≥ Gennaro continued to use this text throughout his long career. Vico taught from it from October to April of each year, occasionally adding to or emending it. It was the official text on rhetoric and was in conformity with the university statutes. Vico dictated a portion of it in Latin during the first half-hour of the class period. The second half-hour was devoted to review and explanation of the dictated material. The students would record the session in their notebooks. In these classes Vico was following the standard practice of the day. The Institutes is a fully written-out course. One might expect this to be as dull as the textbooks of today, which remain dull despite all the packaging techniques that go into them. What the reader encounters in Vico’s text is the

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lively, clever mind of Vico. It is certainly the best text on rhetoric ever written, to be compared in importance only to the Institutes of Quintilian. The dictation the student received was a fully reliable and solid presentation of the parts of the subject. At the same time it was a presentation by an original mind of the first order, putting what was said into a unique perspective. A few sentences may convey how Vico is present in his text and how he must also have been present in classroom explanation: ‘‘There is, in truth, nothing which either Cicero or Demosthenes has said that, after they have said it, even one who is uncultivated or illiterate would think himself able to discover it for himself’’ (19). Having just claimed that ‘‘neither the doctrines of the Epicureans nor the Stoics were useful to eloquence,’’ Vico says: ‘‘Similarly, today neither the Cartesians nor the present day Aristotelians can bring much of advantage to oratorical matters. The Aristotelians are drab and behind the times, and the Cartesians are emaciated, dry and arid’’ (21). Vico is always direct and powerful. In explaining the nature of dignity in speech Vico says: ‘‘The oration should be after the likeness of the matron for whom it is not only fitting that she walk elegantly in beauty, but moreover, that she walk in grace (eleganti et digno ornatu incedere)’’ (135). The analogy gives the student an immediate insight into the principle. Vico addresses the question of how to learn Latin not simply as the grammarians would have it but as an actual language that had a life: ‘‘If one should ask from where this common manner of speaking Latin (vulgaris Latine loquendi ratio) can be learned since the language is now dead and we have only Latin authors remaining to us, I would say—‘From the comics!’ ’’ (120). Vico has in mind his favorites, Terence and Plautus. Vico’s claim, that to grasp Latin properly we must study its common usage, is parallel to his claim, in his early oration ‘‘On the Sumptuous Dinners of the Romans,’’ mentioned in the previous chapter, that the Romans are not to be understood simply in terms of their grand political and military achievements. For a true understanding we must look to their customs of daily life. Vico’s philosophy first takes shape in his early orations, which at the same time advance his conceptions of pedagogy. Vico considered unifying his first seven orations into a treatise on the philosophy of education, under the title De studiorum finibus naturae humanae convenientibus (On the goals of studies in agreement with human nature).≤∂ His concern for pedagogy continued throughout his lifetime as his thought assumed its own form. Vico had but one ideal throughout his career of teaching: to be ‘‘wisdom speaking’’ (la sapienza che parla). In De partitione oratoria, Cicero says: ‘‘Eloquence [eloquentia] is nothing else but wisdom delivering copious utterance’’ (xxiii.79). Vico

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paraphrased this Ciceronian-humanist view in the conclusion to his seventh oration (78) and had stated it as advice to his students in the conclusion to the sixth oration (138). In the conclusion to the 1731 continuation of his autobiography, Vico says that in teaching ‘‘he never discussed matters pertaining to eloquence apart from wisdom, but would say that eloquence is nothing but wisdom speaking’’ (A 199). He says, a little sadly, that he lectured every day ‘‘as if famous men of letters had come from abroad to attend his classes and to hear him’’ (199). Of course, none did. Who heard him were adolescents learning the art of oratory, hoping to become lawyers. Over his lifetime Vico did acquire some disciples, the most notable of whom was the political economist Antonio Genovesi. In his address to the Academy of Oziosi Vico repeats his claim about the importance of wisdom speaking (89). On the first page of his Institutiones oratoriae Vico asserts the natural connection between the study of wisdom and the study of eloquence, saying that when they were separated in ancient thought ‘‘a conflict arose between language and the heart, and the teachers of this art who were deprived of philosophy became merely jugglers of words and attributed to themselves the title of Sophists’’ (3). Teaching, for Vico, is a form of oration. The art of oration is in the classroom before it is in government, the courts, and public ceremonies. At the end of the seventh oration Vico suddenly expresses his greatest fear: ‘‘In my life I have always had the greatest apprehension of being alone in wisdom; this kind of solitude exposes one to the danger of becoming either a god or a fool’’ (80). He follows this with a second fear: ‘‘Though I am afraid of delivering false judgments on all subjects, I am particularly afraid of advancing erroneous views on eloquence, since I profess it’’ (80). Eloquence is the means to the avoidance of being alone in wisdom. When wisdom is joined to eloquence it brings others into it. Wisdom is not solitary but social. Socrates speaks in the agora where all can hear and respond. It is of the greatest importance to grasp correctly the principles of eloquence. If eloquence fails, wisdom fails; wisdom fails to be expressed in a way that others can reach and can test its nature. For Vico teaching is a process in which tongue and heart cannot be separated. Cicero, with the felicity of his copiousness, and Demosthenes, with his invincible enthymeme, are his models, aided by Horace and Quintilian, and he is their embodiment to his students. For Vico their practice and principles of eloquence come together with the Socratic-Platonic ideal of wisdom as the totality of studies that is the basis of self-knowledge.≤∑ Vico’s anti-Cartesian doctrine of child education in his De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (On the Study Methods of Our Time) appears in the classbook section of Finnegans Wake, in connection with Harington’s invention:

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‘‘Past Morningtop’s necessity and Harington’s invention, to the clarience of the childlight in the studiorium upsturts’’ (266.11–13). A few lines down is: ‘‘After sound, light and heat,’’ joined to the Vichian combination of ‘‘memory, will and understanding’’ (266.18–19). Vico’s approach to education through the ars topica bases all learning in the cultivation of memory and proceeds to the ars critica, the logical training of will and understanding. Cartesian education focuses only on the critical faculties and the training of the will to accord with them. Suggested in the children beginning their day, the ‘‘upsturts’’ (who will rise and fall; German Sturz, fall), is Vico’s theme of balancing the successes of the moderns against the achievements of the ancients: ‘‘necessity’’ and ‘‘invention’’ (principles of technology and science: necessity is the mother of invention, in this case, Harington’s indoor privy, or water closet,≤∏ the morning ‘‘necessary’’), and ‘‘sound, light and heat’’ (the things the moderns have explained), against the ancients’ expertise in memory and the education of the soul. In Vico’s ‘‘studiorium’’ of ‘‘upsturts’’ the clarience of the childlight is awakened and becomes the basis for the education of the human spirit as it develops toward self-knowledge. The quest for certainty and clarté makes the student ‘‘a reborn of the cards’’ (304.27–28), in which knowledge is a method to be followed, and ‘‘if she can’t follow suit Renée goes to the pack’’ (269.F2).

4

The Most Ancient Wisdom: Metaphysics

cog it out, here goes a sum. —FW 304.31

The Physics of Equilibrium Vico completed the first phase of his odyssey at the age of forty-one when he published his first major work, the expanded version of his seventh oration, on the method of studies. The following year he announced a complete system of philosophy, under the title De antiquissima Italorum sapientia ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda (On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians Unearthed from the Origins of the Latin Language), and published the first book of it, Liber metaphysicus (1710).∞ Having found a way out of the great cave of Cartesian pedagogy in the seventh oration, Vico arrived quickly on the shore of metaphysics. The Cartesian method is one-eyed, the narrowness of its vision being both its strength and its limitation. Vico discovered the means to save his students from this method by his doctrine of double truth—his principle of balancing the sciences of the moderns with the civil wisdom of the ancients. By giving each its due, Vico could lead his students to perfect their corrupt human nature and complete in themselves the circle of knowledge. They would acquire not just

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the new knowledge that was forming the modern world—they would not only ‘‘newknow’’ but would also ‘‘knowwell’’ the civil wisdom necessary to remain human and live in it (FW 246.24). The second book of Vico’s system was to be on physics, and a third, final book was to be on moral philosophy. The second book was sketched in his De aequilibrio corporis animantis (On the equilibrium of animate bodies) (1711), a work now lost.≤ The third book was only hypothesized. Vico took the general title for his system from Bacon’s De sapientia veterum (Of the Wisdom of the Ancients) (1609). Bacon’s thesis is ‘‘that beneath no small number of the fables of the ancient poets there lay from the very beginning a mystery and an allegory.’’≥ In his Autobiography Vico says that he regards Bacon’s work as ‘‘more ingenious and learned than true,’’ but it incited him to look for the principles of the ancient wisdom even further back than Bacon’s retelling of the fables of the poets (A 148). The means to go further back was suggested to Vico by Plato’s presentation in the Cratylus of the ‘‘correctness of names’’—by finding their original meanings in early Greek. In the Ancient Wisdom Vico purports to do this for the origins of Latin words. His aim was to move beyond the meanings of the fables to the meanings of the words themselves. The Cratylus is one of the most extraordinary and least read of the dialogues in the Platonic corpus. In the dialogue Socrates examines a whole series of names, beginning with the names of gods. In Plato’s day etymology was understood as a way to discover the ultimate truths about things by coming to possess the original meanings of the names of things. The Cratylus is not etymology in the ordinary sense of the grammarians, that is, the establishment of the history of words. Socrates arrives at his meanings by a mixture of historical, associative, and speculative considerations of the words in question. Vico in the Ancient Wisdom, and later in the New Science, employs all three of these ways, as does Joyce in Finnegans Wake. In the Cratylus, Socrates, having proved his expertise in such art, concludes, however, that if we wish to learn about things ‘‘it is far better to investigate them and learn about them through themselves than to do so through their names’’ (439B). Socrates’s conclusion suggests Vico’s procedure, implicit in the Ancient Wisdom, which becomes explicit in the Universal Law and is developed into a fully new way of thinking in the New Science: the need for philosophy to undertake the examination of philology (NS 7). In the Cratylus Socrates does not engage in his investigation into the correctness of names simply in order to dismiss it; he means to show that the nature of things must ultimately be arrived at by rational inquiry. Etymology as undertaken by the grammarians is insufficient; its direction must be set by the speculative, dialectical grasp of the nature of the things

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themselves. The etymology of the grammarians is in no sense an objective science; it depends to a great extent on judgment and opinion. The acquisition of the original meanings of things requires the grasp of the whole, which is the object of wisdom, and which requires philosophical vision. In his autobiography Vico says that an added incentive for him to construct the Ancient Wisdom ‘‘was the feeling he had begun to entertain, that the etymologies of the grammarians were unsatisfactory’’ (A 148). The grammarians could not discover what Vico in some sense already knew through his speculative grasp of the nature of things. As Vico uncovers the original meanings of ancient Latin he discovers there his own metaphysics, based on his knowledge of the ancient cultures of the Ionians and the Etruscans. Vico looks beyond the historical grasp of the meanings of the words to shape what he finds by adding associative and speculative meanings that make the words fit into a total pattern of mind. Vico came to his conception of a system of philosophy through his meditations on the physics of animate bodies. In his autobiography he gives a summary of these views, which must have been the views he developed more fully in the lost text of De aequilibrio (A 148–52). Since the title of Vico’s Ancient Wisdom was the title of all the three planned books of his system, he intended to unearth from the Latin language not only a metaphysics but also a physics and a moral philosophy. The essence of Vico’s pantheistic physics is the wedge. He holds that the wisdom of the Italian school of Pythagoras was transferred to Greece and that Pythagoras may have acquired it from the Egyptians.∂ Vico says: ‘‘From the word coelum, which means both ‘chisel’ [bolino] and the ‘great body of the air’ [gran corpo dell’aria] he conjectured that perhaps the Egyptians, by whom Pythagoras was instructed, had been of the opinion that the instrument with which nature makes everything was the wedge [il cuneo], and that this was what they meant their pyramids to signify’’ (A 148). In Latin, Vico claims coelum (or caelum) has both the meaning of the burin or engraving tool and of the heavens, the sky, the ‘‘air.’’∑ Vico here plays on a phonetic affinity between coelum and xolion (choilon), which signifies ‘‘concave’’ or ‘‘concavity’’ and the tool to incise or hollow out. Having made this associate etymology, Vico goes on to make a speculative connection. He says: ‘‘Now the Latins called nature ingenium, whose principal property is sharpness [l’acutezza]; thus intimating that nature forms and deforms every form with the chisel [il bolino] of air’’ (A 148–49). In Latin natura and ingenium are synonyms. From this Vico concludes that the sense of mental acuity typical of ingenium (ingenuity, wit) is connected to the physical shape of the cuneiform or chisel, the wedge (Latin cuneus, wedge).

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If we look ahead to the New Science, Vico’s principle of reasoning here and generally in the Ancient Wisdom is stated in axiom 15: ‘‘The inseparable properties of human institutions [da’ subbietti] must be due to the modification or guise with which things [le cose] are born. By these properties we may therefore verify that the nature or birth (natura o nascimento) of these things was thus and not otherwise’’ (NS 148). What can be put together by the philosophical comprehension of things will be found to be true of them by the philological investigation of their origin. The nature of a thing is tied to the conditions of its birth. The properties it displays are in some sense there at its beginning. When these properties are found present in its beginning we have a verification that they are truly the thing’s properties. Vico associates air with anima or ‘‘soul’’ as the principle that gives motion and life, and ether, which he says is the instrument of Jove, with animus or ‘‘sensation,’’ ‘‘spirit.’’ He says: ‘‘The soul, that is the air insinuated into the blood, would be the principle of life in man, and the ether insinuated into the nerves would be the principle of sensation’’ (A 149). The anima is acted upon by the mens, ‘‘mind’’ or ‘‘thought.’’ This mens would come into the living human being directly from Jove, who is the mind of the ether. Vico concludes: ‘‘Finally, if all this were so, the operating principle of all things in nature would be corpuscles of pyramidal shape. And certainly ether united [separated off and condensed] is fire’’ (A 149; cf. NS 695–96 and Ancient Wisdom, chs. 5 and 6). Vico sees air as the feminine element that, once impregnated by the masculine element of ether, forms a cosmic chisel or wedge that slowly carves into matter and gives it form. In a microcosmic manner this takes place within the human being. The pyramid is the fundamental structure of nature as well as of the human being. Vico relates a conversation he had with Paolo Mattia Doria (1662–1746) concerning his thesis on fire and how the behavior of fire is similar to what is considered marvelous and distinctive of magnetic phenomena.∏ Magnets attract iron; they communicate their magnetic power to iron and they point to the pole. Vico finds corollaries to each of these in fire, in that heat can beget fire at a distance; in begetting flame, fire communicates light to us; and finally, he argues that a magnetic needle pointing toward the pole rises on its tip toward the zenith, that is, toward the heavens, as does the burning flame. He believes that, if more attention were paid to the variation of the natural elevation of the needle, a way to determine latitude might be devised.π What is the meaning of Vico’s argument? The ether, which will ignite, is divine flame because ether is the instrument of Jove. The flame is wedgeshaped. Magnets, ever since their discovery by the ancients, have been regarded as marvelous because they are a kind of animate matter. They have a

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divine element. As Thales is said to have claimed, magnetic stone ‘‘possesses soul because it moves iron’’ (Aristotle, De. an. 405a). The magnetic needle is wedge-shaped. The needle and fire incline back toward the heavens and thus display their divine nature. Vico says ‘‘Doria was highly pleased by this reasoning, so Vico sought to extend it to the advantage of medicine’’ (A 150). Vico says he had noticed that no physician had made any use of Descartes’s conception of heat and cold as principles of medicine. Descartes claims that the circulation of the blood and its ability to nourish the limbs is due to heat. He says if ‘‘the expansion of the blood which must follow necessarily from the heat (which as everyone recognizes, is greater in the heart than in all the other parts of the body), it will be plain to see that this expansion alone is sufficient to move the heart in the way I have described, and also to change the nature of the blood in the way which observation shows to be the case.’’∫ Vico says that heat and cold are insufficient to account for distempers of the body. Heat is not always positive, and cold is not always negative in relation to bodily states. He says that ‘‘those same Egyptians who represented nature by the pyramid had a distinctive mechanical medicine, that of ‘slack and tight’ [del lasco e dello stretto] which the most learned Prospero Alpino set forth with great learning and erudition [Medicina Aegyptiorum (1591)]’’ (A 150). Vico says that heat and cold alike cause disease in the body; for example, excessive heat (inflammation) as well as excessive cold (severe frostbite) can cause the same condition of gangrene. The arguments Vico gives in these pages of his autobiography are not complete. Presumably this doctrine of medicine was treated more fully in the De aequilibrio (Vico says as much in A 152). His conception of ‘‘slack and tight’’ is not so fanciful as it might seem. Nicolini points out that the later, revolutionary work by John Brown, Elementa medicinae (1780), advances a modern theory of the circulation of the blood involving the principle of ‘‘de laxo et stricto,’’ similar to Vico’s conception.Ω According to the Egyptian mechanical medicine of slack and tight, the air in the veins forms a wedge that blocks blood flow, and its release allows blood flow. When the vessels are clogged the heart lacks the air it needs for healthy motion and finally the blood clots, causing fever. Vico concludes that in Latin all diseases were placed under the genus ruptum, meaning that all illness occurs from the deterioration of solid parts. He says this breakdown leads to corruptum, which would be the rupture of all blood vessels. In the New Science, in his description of poetic physics, Vico says the Latins expressed decay ‘‘in the verb corrumpi, signifying the breaking down of all the parts composing a body. . . . They must accord-

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ingly have thought of disease as bringing on death by corrupting [col guasto] the solids of the body’’ (NS 698). These physical and medical theories, based on the geometric figure of the pyramid, took Vico to his conception of ‘‘metaphysical points’’ that he published in the first book of the Ancient Wisdom. As the wedge is at the basis of the motion of living bodies, so the metaphysical point is at the basis of corporality itself. His doctrine of metaphysical points has been regarded by many commentators as quaint and not the central problem of his Liber metaphysicus. But if his discussion in these passages of his autobiography is considered closely, the doctrine of metaphysical points is the central issue. Vico’s physics is the motivation for his metaphysics. His disagreement with Descartes’s physics led him to attack the metaphysics that supports it and to replace it with a metaphysics of his own. As Vico says in his autobiography, when he returned from Vatolla the new philosophy of Cartesianism had become the basis of all philosophical reasoning (A 132). Less than eighty years separates Vico’s writing the Ancient Wisdom (1710) from Descartes’s publishing the Discourse (1637) and the Meditations (1641). Only somewhat more than fifty years after the publication of the works of Descartes Vico returned from Vatolla to find Cartesianism the dominant mode of philosophy in Naples. This is comparable, in the first instance, to our temporal distance from the publication of Heidegger’s Being and Time, or Dewey’s Experience and Nature, or Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, all of which appeared in the 1920s. The views of these philosophers are still very influential, supplying much of the foundation of contemporary philosophical inquiry. In his dedicatory letter to the Meditations, addressed to the dean and doctors of the Sacred Faculty of Theology at the Sorbonne, Descartes inverts the terms of the medieval conception of ‘‘philosophy as the servant of theology,’’ namely, that our understanding of God and the soul is ultimately a matter of faith, not reason. Descartes says: ‘‘It is of course quite true that we must believe in the existence of God because it is a doctrine of Holy Scripture, and conversely, that we must believe Holy Scripture because it comes from God.’’∞≠ In saying this, Descartes attributes to the theologians what in logic is often given as a classic example of petitio principii. All of theology has produced nothing more for us than reasoning in a circle. Scholastic metaphysics, for all its subtle distinctions, ends in the circle of biblical faith. Descartes says: ‘‘I have always thought that two topics—namely God and the soul—are prime examples of subjects where demonstrative proofs ought to be given with the aid of philosophy rather than theology.’’∞∞ If Descartes is successful in his arguments in the Meditations, theology will now

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become the servant of philosophy, for philosophy will accomplish what theology has been unable to do in its centuries of investigations. Descartes will establish the truths of first philosophy on the basis of reason alone. Furthermore, in the Discourse Descartes has captured, in his doctrine of method, the essence of the mathematical and metaphysical conception of nature that is at the basis of the new sciences. Vico has no desire to resume the Aristotelian-Scholastic physics and metaphysics, but in his pedagogical orations he discovered the high human price that must be paid for full acceptance of the Cartesian position. Vico’s focus is always on the human. Thus he focuses not on the physics of the natural world but on the physics of the living body and on its importance for medicine.∞≤ The passions of the soul, the nature of the human body, and the theory of medicine are also topics of extreme interest for Descartes. Vico believes that there is an original wisdom to be unearthed on these matters, preserved in the original meanings of language. It is only by being able to speak about something that we can know what it is and can convey its nature to others. Theories arrived at by deduction from rational principles will always suffer from abstraction. This tendency to abstraction is not true of wisdom derived directly from human experience. Scholasticism is challenged, through the critique of its ‘‘barbaric’’ rhetoric and language of abstractions, by the new humanists of the Renaissance, such as the philologian Lorenzo Valla, and through the new mathematically based sciences of the earth and the heavens of Galileo. Scholasticism as a philosophical position is dealt its final death blow by Cartesianism. Vico accepts this victory as unproblematic; what he will not accept is that the wisdom of the ancients, revived by the humanists, is to fall at the same time. The counter to Descartes is a new system of philosophy, beginning with a new metaphysics that is derived not from a rational certainty of first principles but from the origins of humanity itself as reflected in the insights of the earliest philosophers and the civilization of the Etruscans. At the beginning of the Ancient Wisdom Vico claims that hitherto no one has attempted to do what he is proposing. What he is attempting is entirely new (39). Vico is led into his metaphysics by his investigations into the equilibrium of living bodies. This principle of equilibrium is another formulation of Vico’s double truth. In the seventh oration Vico’s concern was the pedagogical principle of the balance between the moderns and ancients. In his conception of the living body it is the balance of elements that gives it life and keeps it alive. The pyramidal shape of the anima, animus, and mens is the structure of the two-in-the-one. Any two elements when connected to the third produce the pyramid. This is true of the medicine of the slack and the tight that, when

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functioning in balance, produces the divine state of health. Descartes’s thinking is always one-sided, like the logician. Vico’s thinking is always doublingup, like the lexicographer, who knows that all meanings are ambiguous.

The True Is the Made Vico says that in studying the origins of the Latin language he discovered the presence of many learned words and phrases that could not have come from the culture of the early Romans, who devoted themselves to nothing but farming and war down to the time of Pyrrhus (318–272 b.c.). They must have taken such expressions from another learned nation or nations and employed them without full understanding of their meanings. Vico concluded that the sources of these linguistic phenomena were the Etruscans (the ancient Tuscans) and the Ionians. The cities of Ionian Greece were commercial centers that promoted a philosophic culture, which included the southern Italian school founded at Croton by Pythagoras, who by tradition coined the term philosophos. Vico says that a large part of the language of the early Latins was imported from the Ionians. Etruscan culture was religious and, as Vico says, it excelled in magnificent sacred rites. The Romans derived the rites of their gods, and the sacred phrases and priestly language that accompanied them, from the Etruscans. In his combination of the Etruscans and the Ionians, Vico is thinking of the ancient definition of wisdom, mentioned earlier, that wisdom is a knowledge of things divine and human. It is a double truth. The Etruscans excelled in what in the New Science Vico calls ‘‘scienza in divinità’’ (NS 365), and the Ionians excelled in the conception of friendship, philia, that underlies the principle of marriage and all other human institutions (NS 554). Vico is also employing his distinction between recondite and vulgar wisdom. In the vulgar language of the ancient Romans are the traces of the recondite wisdom of these other two ancient learned cultures. Here is the beginning of Vico’s concept of a common mental language (una lingua mentale comune) from which can be constructed a mental dictionary (un vocabolario o dizionario mentale) (NS 145, 161). In the Ancient Wisdom, Vico, inspired by the Cratylus and by Varro’s De lingua latina, finds there is a learned vocabulary within the communal sense of the ancient Romans (NS 142). The source of this recondite, common, mental language in the case of ancient Latin can be unearthed or disinterred by attention to its double origin— the Ionian and Etruscan cultures. In the first and second versions of the New Science Vico extends this procedure of unearthing to the idea of a common mental language of humanity residing within all languages, ‘‘by whose light

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linguistic scholars will be enabled to construct a mental vocabulary common to all the various articulate languages living and dead’’ (NS 162). This vocabulary or dictionary would formulate the common—that is, communal—sense of the human race (NS 142–43). It would contain those meanings that lie behind ordinary speech as archetypes, in the way that the philosophical and sacred meanings of the Ionians and Etruscans lie behind ancient Latin and provide a recondite wisdom unknown in their full sense by its vulgar users. The sensus communis of the ancient Romans is structured simultaneously by both these sources of wisdom. The phrase Vico first unearthed is ‘‘ ‘verum’ et ‘factum’ reciprocantur’’; ‘‘the true’’ and ‘‘the made’’ are interchangeable; they are convertible (convertuntur). The review of the Ancient Wisdom that appeared in the Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia the year after it was published, questioned Vico’s claim that verum and factum mean the same thing in the Latin language (117). In responding to this criticism Vico reproduced several exchanges between characters in the comedies of Terence and Plautus, in which the speaker affirms the truth of an issue under discussion by saying, ‘‘Factum.’’ Vico says this type of reply could be translated into Italian by the response, ‘‘È vero’’ (‘‘It’s true’’), a phrase one hears often in ordinary Italian conversation. The background for Vico’s reply, crucial to his whole procedure in the Ancient Wisdom, is found in his discussion ‘‘The Ages of the Latin Language’’ in his Institutiones oratoriae. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, Vico claims that we cannot discover from the grammarians how Latin was actually spoken; we must go instead to the writers of comedy because ‘‘they employ a type of speech used especially by the masses.’’∞≥ It is this everyday speech of the masses that most closely preserves the origins of the Latin language. Vico’s etymology is speculative. He is finding in the origins of Latin exactly the principles necessary for the argument of his metaphysics. Verum has the sense of what is ultimately true of something, the expression of its reality. Factum is the opposite of the modern concept of a ‘‘fact’’—something that is simply considered to be there in the world. Factum ( facio, facere) has the sense of something ‘‘done’’ or ‘‘made,’’ ‘‘produced’’ (in Italian, fare, fatto). The true for Vico is something that is made by mind, the principle of human or divine knowledge. Making, for Vico, is combining elements into a whole. The whole may be a word, an idea, or a thing. As legere (to read) is to combine written elements into words, so intelligere (to understand) is to combine in mind all the parts of a thing in order to express the most perfect idea of it. Vico states his connection between true and made in a second phrase, ‘‘Verum esse ipsum factum’’: the true is the very same as the made (self-same).∞∂ This formulation, Vico claims, indicates that what is ultimately true is in God,

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because God is the first maker. To know (scire) is to combine the elements of things. God knows by making and makes by knowing. God knows completely because God’s mind reads and combines all the elements of things in terms of both their inner nature and their outer appearance. The human mind, because it does not make the actual nature of the things it knows, never can understand things fully. What is true for the human mind is made by combining the elements of things in their outward existence. Vico says this distinction between divine knowing and human knowing is analogous to the difference between making a three-dimensional object, a statue, and a two-dimensional object, a painting. Vico could regard perspective in painting as a divine principle because it is the attempt to overcome the two-dimensional limits of the image. He says that ‘‘God makes a solid thing because God comprehends all the elements, man a plane image because he comprehends the outside elements only’’ (46–47). God’s knowing is direct, without perspective; man’s knowledge is always incomplete. Vico says: ‘‘Science is knowledge of the genus or mode by which a thing is made; and by this very knowledge the mind makes the thing, because in knowing it puts together the elements of a thing’’ (46). Vico never departs from this definition of science as a knowledge per causas. It determines his idea of the ‘‘new science,’’ and it is the basis of his criticism of Descartes’s metaphysics, as we shall see. Vico’s epistemology is ‘‘epistlemadethemology’’ (FW 374.17). In concluding his statement of the convertibility and self-sameness of the true and the made, Vico makes a distinction between the divine making of the gods of the gentile philosophers, who determined the wisdom of the ancient sages of Italy, and divine making according to the Christian concept. He says the gentile philosophers held the world to be eternal and thus their god acted always from the outside. The reality out of which the divinely true is made is not itself made by such a god. The Christian God creates in time out of nothing (ex nihilo). The Christian God does not make in the ordinary sense. Creation ex nihilo is not factum convertible with verum. The divine making by Christian doctrine is generation. The things of the world and what is true of them are begotten by God from eternity (ab aeterno item ab eodem gentium est). Vico says this is why in sacred Scripture the wisdom of God is called ‘‘ ‘the Word’ in which the ideas of all things—as well as the elements of all ideas— are contained’’ (47). The verbum is the uniting of the elements and ideas. The ideas are generated from the elements, and the things follow from the action of the unity in the verbum. The world is generated through a divine rhetoric. Much has been made by scholars of Vico’s connection of the principle of verum-factum as the basis of his conception of the New Science. It is true that Vico refers to this in the section on method (NS 349), but what the

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commentators uniformly have missed is the sense in which human making is fully different from divine making. Vico’s verum-factum is quickly formulated as ‘‘man makes history’’; because human institutions are made originally by human beings they can then make a knowledge of what they have made. This convertibility of the true and the made, it is claimed, defines Vico’s conception of science. It is overlooked, in this rush to interpret Vico’s verum-factum principle, that human nature is not made. Man is generated, begotten, by God. The verumfactum principle is not itself made by man. It is simply part of human nature, a nature that desires by its nature to know and to know itself. The principle itself is not a product of the principle. Divine making in the Christian sense is different in kind as well as in object from human making. God generates the objects of the world, including human beings and their reality and truth. When man makes what is true according to the convertibility of the true and the made he imitates the divine, but the imitation is different in kind from actual divine activity. Vico says: ‘‘The mind does not make itself as it gets to know itself, and since it does not make itself, it does not know the genus or the mode by which it knows itself’’ (52). In the Ancient Wisdom Vico’s model for the convertibility of the true and the made is mathematics. In mathematical reasoning the mind sets a criterion for itself. By beginning with abstractions, such as the definitions of points and lines in geometry and numbers in arithmetic, we make what is true in mathematical terms. Mathematical reasoning is closest to divine making. Reasoning in the sciences of nature is less certain, because what is known is not the product of the human mind. In physics the mind confronts an object not of its own creation. But on this view Vico is able to account for the importance of experiment in natural science. In experiments we make something that is similar to nature and by so doing we come as close as is possible to the full conversion of the true and the made. Vico attacks Descartes on two grounds: his cogito ergo sum and the type of doubt by which he arrives at it are not original, and his first principles produce certainty but not what is true, because they do not establish cause. In the first meditation of his Meditations on First Philosophy Descartes considers ‘‘what can be called into doubt.’’ He says whatever we have accepted as true on the basis of the senses can be doubted. In the past we have occasionally experienced deception by our senses; thus at any given moment we cannot know whether our senses may or may not be deluding us. This is true not only of external sensations but also of my sense of my own bodily state. At any given moment I cannot determine whether I am asleep or awake because in the past I have dreamed vividly of being elsewhere when I was in truth asleep in my bed.

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Finally, even truths arrived at rationally by the mind, such as those of mathematics, can be doubted because of the possibility of an all-powerful anti-God or ‘‘malicious demon’’ that could be systematically deceiving me, even in relation to truths arrived at by pure reasoning apart from the senses and the body. Descartes’s hypothetical demon, his ultimate ground for doubt, can be answered by only one principle: the existence of the thinking I. ‘‘I think, therefore I am’’ is indubitable because to deny or doubt it is at the same time to affirm it. The I cannot claim that it does not exist, without affirming that it is the I that is attempting to think its own nonexistence. Descartes’s first principle of the cogito is analogous to the law of noncontradiction in logic. There can be no proof of this law because it is the principle upon which any proof depends. It is not possible to deny the law without employing it as the basis of the denial. Descartes’s cogito is not a proof. It is the first principle necessary to any proof in metaphysics. Descartes calls it his Archimedean point. From it, in the Meditations, he professes to prove the existence of God, and from the fact that God is not a deceiver, to assert the existence of the external world. In Cicero’s Academica there is a description of the same procedure of doubt regarding dreams that Descartes uses, and most specifically, as Vico points out, there is the device of malicious divine power. The question is raised as to whether the deity does not have the power ‘‘to render false presentations probable’’ as well as ‘‘to render probable those which approximate absolutely most closely to the truth.’’ Further, ‘‘it is probable that the mind may also be set in motion in such a manner that not only it cannot distinguish whether the presentations in question are true or false but that there really is no difference at all between them’’ (Acad., II.15, 47–48; see also II.17, 52–54). Descartes, the modern Stoic, has taken his use of the dream as ground for doubt, and his demon, from the ancient Stoics. This may not seem so surprising, for the rhetorical-humanist mind always seeks a precedent, and there is little in history without significant precedent. But Vico turns to Descartes’s cogito and presents a remarkable discovery, one that turns Descartes’s first principle into a joke. Vico calls attention to a passage in Plautus’s comedy Amphitryo. In act I, near the end of scene 1 (441– 47), while Amphitryon, commander and chief of the Theban army, is away at war, he is cuckolded by Jupiter, who has assumed his guise. The guise is so perfect that his wife Alcmena innocently presumes the disguised Jupiter to be her husband. In this comedy of errors Mercury assumes the guise of Sosia, a slave of Amphitryon. Now returned with his master from war, Sosia discovers his double and begins to doubt his own existence when Mercury tells him that he is mistaken about his identity; that in fact he, Mercury, is Sosia, and says:

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‘‘Oh, you can have the name when I don’t want it; I’m Sosia and you’re nameless. Now get out!’’ Sosia then looks into a mirror and develops his ‘‘Cartesian’’ proof, concluding: ‘‘But, when I think, indeed I am certain of this, that I am and have always been’’ (Sed quom cogito, equidem certo sum ac semper fui).∞∑ I have not found this connection that Vico elicits from Plautus to have become a topic of discussion anywhere in the literature on Descartes. What is known to modern Descartes scholars is the precedent of his cogito, ergo sum in Augustine’s formulation: ‘‘Si fallor, sum’’ (De libero arbitrio II.3.7). In a letter from Leiden in November 1640 (to whom is not known), Descartes writes: ‘‘I am obliged to you for calling to my attention the passage of St. Augustine to which my I think, therefore I am has some relation. I have been to read it today in the town library, and I find he does truly use it to prove the certainty of our existence.’’∞∏ Descartes goes on to distinguish from his own purpose Augustine’s use of this in connection with the Trinity, which is to prove that the conscious I is an immortal substance. Descartes concludes: ‘‘And such a thing is of itself so simple and natural to infer—that one is from the fact that one is doubting—that it could have fallen from the pen of anyone; but I am quite pleased to have been in agreement with St. Augustine, if only to close the mouths of those small minds who have tried to quibble about this principle.’’∞π It looks as though Descartes may have cribbed the cogito, ergo sum. As Joyce says: ‘‘Cog it out, here goes a sum’’ (FW 304.31) (in Anglo-Irish, ‘‘you cogged [that is, cribbed] that sum’’). But, as Descartes says, anyone could have produced it as the result of doubt. Vico has proved this, by finding it in a comedy in the vulgar tongue of a slave. In his second response to the review of the Ancient Wisdom in the Giornale, Vico says: ‘‘Descartes used to say, ‘To know Latin is to know no more than Cicero’s servant girl’; and since the same thing is understood to apply to Greek, the cultivation of these two languages has suffered considerable losses. . . .’’ (183). This statement about Cicero’s servant girl is not in Descartes’s published works. It likely was a view commonly attributed to him in Vico’s time.∞∫ It seems connected to Descartes’s comment in the Discourse that it does not matter if one speaks bas breton and has never studied rhetoric (the study of rhetoric being grounded in the mastery of Latin). In tying Descartes’s famous cogito to the vulgar Latin of the slave in Plautus’s comedy (and to Greek, since it is originally a Greek play), Vico has thrown back at Descartes his alleged jibe about the servant girl. Having given a new context to this high first principle, Vico applies his principle of verum-factum to refute directly the basis of Descartes’s metaphysics. This can be followed out from the passage in Cicero’s Academica. The argument under discussion there, in its larger terms, is that it is just as plausible

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that an omnipotent god could cause impressions that are purely phantasmal as it is that they proceed from realities, the parallel being that, for the ancients, dreams were generally held to be the result of divine interventions, and that since the god causes the false impression of the dream, the god could be presumed capable of interfering with the reality of any one of our impressions. Behind this is the Stoic distinction between true and false impressions, defining a true impression as one that allows the mind to seize the object and feel certain that it has been rightly apprehended, which leads to the Stoic definition of the individual ‘‘irresistible impression.’’ In the ancient tradition of skepticism deriving from Pyrrho, Arcesilaus advances the view that arguments for and against the trustworthiness of sense impressions exactly balance each other. Vico does not relate such details in his connection of Descartes’s principle with the Stoics, but they support his criticism, because in essence Vico’s point is that Descartes’s cogito, ergo sum, as a first principle of metaphysics, does not answer skepticism. Vico’s reference to this passage in Cicero implies that he regards Descartes’s principle of the cogito as an attempt to fulfill the original Stoic conception of a true impression by adducing an archetypal example of a clear and distinct idea—the idea or impression that the mind has of itself. Against this model of certainty Vico places his principle that ‘‘the true is the same as the made,’’ verum esse ipsum factum. Descartes’s procedure in metaphysics is suppositional; he supposes the possibility of ultimate doubt, through his device of the demon, in order to arrive at the certainty of the I. But once Descartes has arrived at this certainty the suppositional method can be applied to the nature of the I, and the problem of in what its being consists can become the subject of skeptical doubt. Descartes’s special form of the Stoic ‘‘true impression’’ is entangled in a complex of objections, which is just what historically occurred with Descartes’s announcement of the cogito, resulting in the Cartesian ‘‘objections and replies.’’ Descartes arrives at his cogito ‘‘swarming of himself in his sunnyroom, sated before his comfortumble phullupsuppy’’ (FW 417.14–15). A principle of certainty is not a truth, because it does not tell us the nature of the thing of which we are certain. It does not provide us with its form or cause; that is, it does not make it intelligible for us. Verum here is best understood to mean ‘‘intelligible.’’ Fisch explains verum as follows: ‘‘Vico’s verum means the true, not the truth, and its plural vera means not truths but the trues or intelligibles; that is, the things, other than sentences or propositions, that are true in the transcendental sense of intelligible.’’∞Ω What can be known to be true or what is intelligible to the knower is what the knower makes ( factum), what the knower can convert.

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Vico takes his first principle of metaphysics from God, who is both knower and maker and who makes by knowing. Human knowledge imitates divine knowledge. The model for this is mathematics, as mentioned above. Mathematical truths are true because we make them. The mind can fully know their nature because it is reflecting on what it itself has made. Vico restricts the term science (scientia) to thought in which verum is convertible with factum. This occurs perfectly only in the divine mind, but it is imitated in certain acts of the human mind. Science is distinguished from consciousness, or what Fisch aptly calls the ‘‘witnessing consciousness’’ (conscientia). This conscientia, ‘‘conscience’’ or ‘‘consciousness,’’ is not the self’s or knower’s relation to itself. Conscientia describes the knower’s relation to what is external to the knower, the object as already begotten by God, and of which the knower can become aware. Thus the sciences of nature as we normally conceive them are elaborate and useful means for ‘‘witnessing’’ the world. But our thought in these sciences is in principle closed off from making their objects fully intelligible, because we do not make the object; it is not a factum. The importance of experiment in natural science verifies this, because in experiment we engage in an artificial making of the object. With his distinction between scientia and conscientia, based upon his principle of verum esse ipsum factum, Vico has absorbed Descartes’s certainty into the true and has stood the traditional conception of knowledge and consciousness on its head. He has, in fact, shown the sciences of nature for what they are—forms of consciousness—and has made way for what in his later work becomes a science of history, a science of the civil world, that has ‘‘certainly been made by men.’’

Metaphysical Points Vico’s doctrine of metaphysical points (doctrina de punctis metaphysicis) is a geometry of the real. It is his second major philosophical doctrine embedded in the Latin of the ancient Italians. This doctrine, like that of the true and the made, depends upon the synonymy of two terms: punctum and momentum. Vico claims that for the Latins both point and momentum meant ‘‘an indivisible something.’’ Extension and motion are a single ‘‘indivisible power [virtus]’’ (69). Vico’s term is virtus in its metaphysical, not moral, and physical sense of an active quality or power adequate to the production of a given effect. Vico claims, as I mentioned above, that in establishing the origin, meanings, and connections of these and of all the other terms he discusses, he is not

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following the course of the grammarians, whose concern is to construct etymologies drawn from the Greek language of the inhabitants of the Ionian coast. Rather, he is looking for a whole mentality, an original wisdom present on Italian soil prior to the Greeks. He finds this in the Etruscans and in the Ionian philosophers, most notably Pythagoras, as mentioned earlier. Vico has a special view of the Ionian philosophers, as he claims in his Second Response to the review in the Giornale—that they developed their philosophical ideas within the culture existent in ancient Italy: ‘‘Such terms were taken from Etruria, first to Latium and then later to Magna Graecia’’ (155). Pythagoras did not bring his philosophy in whole from Greece but developed it in Croton, in southern Italy, where he founded his school. Further, Vico claims that ‘‘the Egyptians were the most ancient philosophers of the pagan world; their empire spread out in colonies along the coasts of the Mediterranean’’ (158). About the original meanings of these Latin words, Vico claims they are based on insights into the cultures that preceded the Romans and on those traces that the mentality of these cultures left in the Romans’ language when the Romans succeeded or conquered them. The Latin language as Vico finds it is like a palimpsest—a tablet that has been written over many times and on which the earlier layers of writing have not been totally erased. To discover what remains of these earlier meanings, as I mentioned above, Vico goes to the Latin comedies, which preserve the most vulgar forms of expression. He admits that his claims about the origins and connections of Latin terms cannot be supported by what would be understood as good Latin as Latin is taught (162). Vico’s concern is to show that the metaphysics he is placing against Descartes is uniquely Italian, not simply based on ideas imported from Greece. Vico’s first principles are not first in the Cartesian sense of what cannot be rationally doubted. His principles are first in the sense that they are the very first theoretical thoughts of human culture. They are the first thoughts of humanity as thought becomes theoretical. In the New Science Vico will take these first thoughts back even farther, to their origin in myth or ‘‘poetic wisdom.’’ Against the Cartesians Vico places the Zenonians. The origin of the term Zhnvneioi ´ is in Diogenes (VII.5). Vico grounds his doctrine of metaphysical points in ‘‘Zeno.’’ In introducing his metaphysical points Vico poses the rhetorical question: ‘‘And did this doctrine, like so many others, cross the seas from Italy to Greece, where Zeno later reshaped it? For, to my mind, no one felt more correctly about this indivisible power of extension and motion than the Stoics, who treated it in the hypothesis of the metaphysical point’’ (69). Vico here has made a distinction between the Presocratic Zeno of Elea (fl. 450–d.430? b.c.) and the Stoic Zeno of Citium (336/5–264/3 b.c.). Zeno, the

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founder of Stoicism, was born in Citium, a Phoenician-Greek town on Cyprus, and he came to Athens first to study and then to lecture in the Stoa Pœcilë, beginning about 294. Vico connects his doctrine of metaphysical points to the principle in the cosmology of the early Stoa of lógoi opermatixoí (logoi spermatikoi), which can also be found in Neoplatonism (that is, Plotinus, Enn. 4, 3, 10; 5, 9, 9 [‘‘seminal forming principle’’]; and Ficino, Theol. plat., II, 7). This appears later in Saint Augustine as rationes seminales (see De Gen. ad litt., 6, 5, 8 and De Trinit., 3, 8, 13), although Vico does not cite these latter two as sources. Augustine’s source is likely Plotinus, and Plotinus’s view is an adaptation of the Stoic doctrine. For the Stoics there are two principles of reality, an active and a passive principle, both of which are material. Together they form a whole, a monistic materialism. God, o˘ Lógow, is immanent Reason, the active principle which has within itself all the active forms that are to be. The passive principle is matter devoid of all qualities. The active, material forms are ‘‘seeds’’ (spérma, L. semen = what is sown). Through the activity of these seeds, individual things come into being. The seeds unfold themselves into individual entities as the world comes into being. In his rhetorical question Vico is implying that in some way this Stoic doctrine, developed by Zeno in Athens (and further by Cleanthes and Chrysippus, the successors of Zeno), originates in the southern Italian town of Elea, in the famous paradoxes formulated by the Eleatic Zeno in defense of Parmedian philosophy. This is not a connection that would be made today by historians of ancient philosophy. Croce claims that the conflation of the two Zenos was ‘‘a mistake common in the philosophical literature of the time.’’≤≠ Commentators from Flint to Croce, to Gentile to Fisch to Nicolini have said how much Vico has conflated the two Zenos, making them into a single, imaginary Zeno of his own. This has become the traditional, standard view.≤∞ To what extent does Vico make this mistake? Is it a deliberate fiction or a naiveté, or simply an adaptation of a view common to the time? Vico knew there were two Zenos. In his life of Zeno of Citium, Diogenes Laertius says: ‘‘There have been eight persons of the name of Zeno’’ (VII.35). The first he names is the Eleatic Zeno, the second the Stoic Zeno. The others are less famous (the best-known of these is the Epicurean, Zeno of Sidon). Diogenes has a separate discussion of Zeno of Elea (IX.25–29). Cicero (Vico’s source for so many things) clearly distinguishes between the two Zenos (see De nat. deo., cf. I.36 and III.82, et passim; and Acad., cf. I.35 and II.129, et passim; Tusc., cf. I.19 and II.52, et passim). Vico’s rhetorical question introducing the doctrine of points makes clear that he is aware of both Zenos. But he attacks Aristotle for his treatment of Zeno as if it were the Stoic, not the

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Eleatic, Zeno. In his autobiography Vico says that by means of his treatment of ‘‘the origins of Latin words, he purged Zeno’s points of Aristotle’s garbled reports [alterati rapporti]’’ (A 151). Vico sees Aristotle’s discussion and criticisms of Zeno in the Physics (233a-b, 239b –240a, 263a) and Metaphysics (1001b) as a misrepresentation of Zeno’s doctrine. Vico must confront Aristotle, since Aristotle, along with Simplicius, is the major source for our knowledge of Zeno of Elea’s paradoxes—and the major ancient critic of them. In order to maintain his own doctrine as having its source in ‘‘Zeno’’ Vico must answer Aristotle. Vico says, ‘‘But Zeno remains unmoved by these demonstrations of Aristotle, indeed, he finds in them a confirmation of his own metaphysical points’’ (72). This sentence is seen as the ultimate proof of Vico’s confusion about Zeno’s identity.≤≤ If Vico intends his remark to refer to the Eleatic Zeno, he is wrong. But if he has in mind the Stoic Zeno there is no difficulty in imagining this Zeno confronting Aristotle’s views, as Aristotle died in 322, several years before Zeno arrived to study in Athens, and Zeno died in 264/3 b.c. The confusion is that Aristotle is writing about Zeno of Elea, and Vico is assuming that these are views that Zeno of Citium also accepts. Why would Vico think this? The four arguments on motion of Zeno of Elea fall into pairs. The Dichotomy and Achilles paradoxes assume that space, and also time, are continuous and infinitely divisible. The Arrow and the Moving Rows of the stadium assume, in essence, that time and space are discontinuous, composed of instants and minimal extensions. These two sets form a dilemma. Zeno’s paradoxes in each set reduce its assumption to an absurdity. Since these alternatives are contrary to each other, whichever horn of the dilemma we take—that space and time are a continuum or that they are discontinuous units—we are forced to abandon the assumption that there is such a thing as movement. Zeno’s aim is to verify the truth of Parmenides’s position, that what is, is One without motion, by showing the alternatives each to be subject to a reductio ad absurdum. Zeno was also specifically attacking the Pythagorean point-unit-atom, which he wished to show contains a contradiction, because the Pythagoreans held extension to be both a continuum and infinitely divisible and discontinuous and made of indivisibles. The Pythagoreans did not properly distinguish between the physical and the geometrical. They likely held that motion took place in a series of instantaneous transitions, but supposed there were an infinite number of such transitions in any given motion.≤≥ In the Physics (233a-b) Aristotle attempts to respond to Zeno’s position by holding that there is no actual infinite body or number. No spatial extension is an actual infinite, but it is potentially an infinite. A line is not an actual infinite of points, because a line is a continuum. As a continuum, however, a line is

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infinitely divisible. This infinite divisibility, Aristotle holds, is potential, not actual, because this division can never be fully carried out. The same can be said of time, because it can always be added to in a continuous succession, but its moments never coexist. Time is infinitely divisible, but it differs from extension because it is also infinite by means of addition. These are Aristotle’s general views that combine with his specific discussions of the four paradoxes of motion. Vico does not comment on Aristotle’s treatment of the paradoxes. The perspective Vico has given us, however he has arrived at it, is that of the Stoic Zeno reading Aristotle’s comments on divisibility and motion criticizing the views of the Eleatic Zeno, with Aristotle missing the point about metaphysical points, thus ‘‘garbling’’ the original truth of Zeno’s association of point and momentum. The Eleatic Zeno has in fact spoken on Vico’s theme. He has, in the first two arguments on motion, so to speak, considered momentum without points and in the second two arguments considered momentum with punctum. Divisibility in each case leads to the reductio ad absurdum of an infinite regress. His conclusion is that the real is a continuum without motion or divisibility. Aristotle goes between the horns of the dilemma by a further alternative of extension and temporality as actually finite but potentially infinitely divisible. The Stoic Zeno, from within Vico’s text, surveys Aristotle’s solution and recalls his own solution of the divine active principle of the seeds. Vico says: ‘‘Division is an action of body, whereas the essence of body, as of all other things, consists in its indivisibility. And even Aristotle ought to admit this, for he teaches it. It seems that Aristotle is contending with Zeno about something else, but that he agrees with him on this matter. For Aristotle is talking about act [actus] and Zeno about power [virtus]’’ (73). In his First Response in the Giornale Vico explains this point: ‘‘This is what I meant when I argued that Aristotle differs from Zeno about different things, but agrees with him about the same one: he speaks of the division of body, which is motion and actuality, whereas Zeno speaks of powers [virtù] whereby every tiny corpuscle corresponds to an infinite extension’’ (131–32). Vico claims Aristotle is speaking about an attribute of body, and Zeno about substance. What Vico is seeking is a middle term that lies between motion and the infinite continuum of matter capable of extension. He does not find this in Descartes’s dichotomy of infinite and finite substances or in Aristotle’s distinction of actuality and potentiality. Vico finds this middle term in the Zenonian conception of the seeds, which is materialistic, but which he transposes into the Christian doctrine of creation, capsulized in the idea of metaphysical points. The middle term is a principle of equilibrium that holds the two extremes of divine mind and matter in an active bond. Vico says: ‘‘Between

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God and extended things, there is a mediating thing, unextended certainly, but capable of extension; and this mediation is the metaphysical point’’ (74). As the indivisible power (virtus) of extension underlies unequal extensions, conatus is a power (virtus) of motion that underlies unequal motions. Vico says: ‘‘Conatus is not itself a quid but a cuius, that is, a mode of matter, it had to be created when matter was created’’ (74). Conatus is not a thing, a ‘‘what’’ (quid) but a mode, an ‘‘of what,’’ a ‘‘whose,’’ a ‘‘wherefore.’’ Conatus in general is a natural tendency or impulse. The impulse in Vico’s conatus is toward motion. It has something of the sense of the Spinozistic conception of conatus as the inclination of a thing to persist in its own being. God is the mover of all but remains at rest. Vico says: ‘‘Just as motion is a mode of the body and rest an attribute of God, so conatus is a quality of the metaphysical point’’ (74). Vico’s metaphysical points are not Epicurean or Gassendian atoms existing in the void and governed by chance. They naturally bring to mind Leibniz’s monads. Vico regarded Leibniz and Newton as the foremost minds of his age, as he makes clear in comments in his autobiography and the New Science (A 183; NS 347), but it is uncertain whether Vico knew of the doctrine of monads. He never mentions it. Croce says that the resemblance between Vico’s metaphysical points and Leibniz’s monads ‘‘is very vague, for the metaphysical points are not monads.’’≤∂ In his 1695 article in the Journal des savants, ‘‘New System of the Nature of Substances and Their Communication,’’ Leibniz uses the term metaphysical points. He writes: ‘‘It is only atoms of substance, that is to say real unities absolutely devoid of parts, that can be the sources of actions, and the absolute first principles of the composition of things, and as it were the ultimate elements in the analysis of substances. They might be called metaphysical points [ points métaphysiques]; they have something of the nature of life and a kind of perception, and mathematical points are their point of view for expressing the universe.’’ Leibniz elaborates this conception in terms very close to Vico’s: ‘‘Thus the indivisibility of physical points is only apparent. Mathematical points really are indivisible, but they are only modalities. It is only metaphysical or substantial points (constituted by forms or souls) which are both indivisible and real, and without them there would be nothing real, since without true unities there would be no multiplicity.’’≤∑ Besides the general use of monas in the seventeenth century, the source for Leibniz’s use of monas may have been Euclid’s use of monas as the word for unit in his Elements (bk. VIII, def. I). Vico and Leibniz share this geometric sense of the ultimate metaphysical unit. But Vico does not attribute to his conception of metaphysical points the distinctive features of Leibniz’s monads. Both Vico’s points and Leibniz’s monads are created by God and are active forces in bodies as derived from prime matter, but Vico’s points do not

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have inner states, as do Leibnizian monads. Although the points are dynamic centers of force or power they are not connected to any psychological account, as are monads in their role as active-passive producers of perceptions through appetition. Leibniz’s system of monads has its own internal problem of coherence, including the relation of God as cause to the individual monads and the connection between his physical and psychological accounts of the nature of monads. But it is a fully developed system, at least in the Monadology (1714). Vico’s treatment of metaphysical points is more spare. He does not elaborate on the life of the metaphysical points. His concern is to establish their basic function and the metaphysical necessity of their existence. Vico’s lifelong friend Paolo Mattia Doria, to whom he dedicated the Ancient Wisdom, clearly distinguishes between Zeno of Elea and Zeno of Citium. Vico had an ongoing conversation with Doria. He says Doria was the first with whom he ‘‘could begin to discuss metaphysics’’ (A 138). In an essay discussing Fox Morcillo’s (1526–1560) interpretation of Plato’s Timaeus, Doria refers to Zeno of Elea and, a few pages later, to Zeno of Citium, mentioning Diogenes Laertius’s account of Zeno the Stoic and comparing the Stoic’s claim, that corporeal bodies are generated from substantial points analogous to those of geometry, to Plato’s cosmology.≤∏ Doria throughout his writings discusses the metaphysical doctrine of ‘‘i punti di Zenone’’ from a Neoplatonic perspective, attributing the doctrine to ‘‘Zenone stoico’’ and connecting them to Plato, suggesting they have certain similarities to Plato’s forms.≤π Although Doria accepts this cosmological doctrine of the generation of corporeal bodies from the Stoic Zeno, he, like Vico in his autobiography and elsewhere, criticizes the ethical system of Stoicism.≤∫ The entry for Zeno of Elea in Pierre Bayle’s Dictionary makes clear the difference between the two Zenos, but in so doing it confirms the prevalence of the view merging the two: ‘‘I don’t believe what some affirm of him [Zeno of Elea] that he taught that Matter is composed of Mathematical Points: I should rather think that he asserted that it could not be composed of them.’’ Note G in this part of the entry says it would be more reasonable to ascribe the doctrine of matter as composed of mathematical points to Pythagoras and Plato. In contrast to the moderns, ancients like Diogenes Laertius and Sextus Empiricus ‘‘have avoided the other common mistake; they don’t believe that Zeno who denied Motion, and whose arguments Aristotle examined, was the founder of the Stoicks.’’≤Ω The essence of Vico’s argument of this second, great theme of the Ancient Wisdom is dependent on the first. The identification of point and momentum depends upon the identification or convertibility of the true and the made.

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Vico’s argument is that the power of geometrical demonstration to make trues implies a certain form of metaphysics. In geometry (and arithmetic) the finite human mind imitates the activity of the divine mind that knows by making and makes by knowing. Mathematics is a divine science that all other sciences, such as mechanics or ethics, only approximate. The key to geometry is the point, and with it the line. These are themselves without extension, yet from them we generate extension. Correspondent to these in arithmetic is the numerical unit or point. From number we generate the number series that orders time and motion, but numbers themselves are not temporal or in motion. Vico says: ‘‘For geometry has borrowed from metaphysics the power [virtus] of extension, which because it is a power, is prior to extension—in other words, it is unextended. In like manner, the arithmetician has borrowed from metaphysics the power of number, namely the one, which because it is the power of number is not a number’’ (70). Vico regards his doctrine of metaphysical points as throwing light on the Pythagorean view that the world is made up of numbers. He says: ‘‘Through this Pythagorean dogma I explain the belief of the most ancient philosophers of Italy about points, which Aristotle so radically misunderstood in his treatment of Zeno’’ (155). Pythagoras, as I mentioned above, is the other Greek philosopher who perfected his philosophy on Italian soil. This ability of mind to move from the point and unit, which are unextended and without motion, to the extension and motion of bodies, precisely imitates the activity of the divine mind in creating the world. Vico has in mind the Galilean discovery of the application of mathematics to natural events, such that mathematics is the divine language of nature. Analogous to the geometricalarithmetical point employed by the finite human mind is the metaphysical point employed by the infinite divine mind. Without the real being composed of such points, the point as employed in thought could not be. Vico’s argument is essentially a transcendental argument. That is, it asks the question, How is it possible that we can produce mathematical truths and from them produce a knowledge of bodies in motion? The answer to this is in the way the divine mind originally produces the actual bodies themselves. It is God’s action on the world that the science of metaphysics seeks to comprehend. In what sense, finally, does Vico intend to have the authority of Zeno and the Zenonians behind his doctrine of metaphysical points? In the development of his thought Vico had given philosophy up after attempting it at too early an age, but he returned to it ‘‘under Father Giuseppe Ricci, another Jesuit, a man of penetrating insight, a Scotist by sect but at bottom a Zenonist’’ (A 114). The discovery of Zenonian philosophy cured Vico of his early intellectual depression. In the Second Article of the Giornale Vico’s critic challenged his use of

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Zeno. He wrote: ‘‘That Vico’s claim that the existence of metaphysical points was taught by Zeno and by the Stoics is in need not only of explanation, but even more of proof, because we do not even find the expression among the ancients’’ (139). In his Second Response Vico replies that had he wished to maintain these views on authority alone he would have accepted Aristotle’s distorted reports on Zeno. Had he wished to follow his own judgment alone, he says, he would have neglected all reports. Vico concludes: ‘‘If in the end you do not want to accept this statement as Zeno’s, I am sorry, but I must give it as my own. But I will offer it to you anyway, alone and not supported by great authorities’’ (169). If necessary Vico will let the argument for metaphysical points stand on its own, but he still holds to the importance of Zeno. In so doing Vico is holding to his claim that the principles of his metaphysics are not simply rationally adduced but are grounded in an ancient wisdom that is tied to the origin of theoretical thought itself. This is what ultimately separates him from the Cartesians. His is not just another system, to be tested by doubt and the principles of logic; it is to be derived from the mind itself, as connected to the original condition of humanity. It is a wisdom that has entered even vulgar language use and functions as the background of human life, even if unrecognized by the speakers of the language. Perhaps the most we can say about Vico’s discussion of Zeno is that it is a search for the true Zeno, a foreshadowing of his later search for the true Homer in the New Science and the true Dante, the ‘‘Tuscan Homer,’’ and his search, in his autobiography, for himself as the true Socrates. Vico’s Zeno is the true metaphysician, a figure partly historical and partly an archetype of the imagination. In this sense Zeno is a kind of point from which Vico constructs the true metaphysics, which in the final parts of the Ancient Wisdom he goes on to elaborate into a theory of mind and its faculties around the terms anima, animus, and mens, as well as ingenium. These are terms that relate back to his conception of living bodies and point forward to his fuller treatment of them in the New Science. Vico is led to his Zeno in his effort to counter Cartesianism. Vico has gone deep into human culture and has found the way to counter the dominant philosophy of his day. It sets him on a new course, a new sense of metaphysics, a metaphysics of history. His advice is ‘‘Sink deep or touch not the Cartesian spring!’’ (FW 301.24–25). We must turn over in our minds the most ancient wisdom: ‘‘antiquissimam . . . mentibus revolvamus sapientiam’’ (FW 287.23–25).

5

The Universal Law: Jurisprudence

around their old traditional tables of the law —FW 94.26

Jurisprudence Is Philosophy Although Vico did not write the third part of his system of philosophy that he had intended in the Ancient Wisdom, he did not abandon the subject. The focus of Vico’s later work is, in fact, moral philosophy, that is, moral philosophy in its broadest sense, as a science of law, custom, and history, a science of the human world. The first step in this process is his original conception of jurisprudence, developed in his three books of Universal Law (Il diritto universale), published in the 1720s, which led to the first and second versions of the New Science. To create his conception of jurisprudence as the key to the comprehension of the human world Vico had to discover a way to pass between philosophy and philology—the two great approaches to a knowledge of the human world—and to find a resolution for the fundamental opposition between them. Vico says philosophy considers man as he should be and philology studies man as he is (A 138; NS 131–40). Vico must pass between the sucking whirlpool of Charybdis and the six frightful heads of Scylla, for both philosophy

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and philology are distorting and monstrous in their own way. Philosophy tends to abstraction that will suck thought into the abstraction of the universal, never to return to the concrete world of events. Philology in its manyheaded researches will consume the larger meanings of history, reducing history to the certainty of its scholarly particulars. The strength of this opposition can cause us to lose any hope of arriving at a true knowledge of things human and divine. Vico heroically devises a course between philosophy and philology that avoids the dangers inherent in each. Although the advantages of the pure pursuit of the universal and the particular are lost, Vico puts in their place a new form of thought. From his course between the opposites Vico emerges as neither a philosopher nor a philologist. He becomes a new scientist. This new scientific way of thinking is first found in the Universal Law and comes to fruition in the New Science. By explaining a new way of thinking about jurisprudence Vico discovers a new way of thinking about the human world, a way that gives thought a position of equilibrium between the double truth of philosophical and philological comprehension. In the tree of philosophy Descartes described in the prefatory letter to the French edition of the Principles of Philosophy, he names morals as the third of his three principal branches of knowledge, all having their root in metaphysics (the other two being medicine and mechanics). Descartes says: ‘‘By ‘morals’ [la Morale] I understand the highest and most perfect moral system, which presupposes a complete knowledge of the other sciences and is the ultimate level of wisdom.’’ He says that, just as we gather the fruit from a tree from the ends of its branches, ‘‘so the principal benefit of philosophy depends on those parts of it which can only be learnt last of all.’’∞ This moral system was to be much more than the provisional code of conduct set down in the Discourse (pt. 3). That code was to serve as an interim guide while the use of the method was perfected. The moral system affirmed at the beginning of the Principles would be the fruit of the method produced through the clarté that had grounded the metaphysics of the Meditations. But Descartes was unable to formulate this moral system. His moral ideas are largely to be found in his correspondence with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia (1618–80), to whom he dedicated the Principles and through whose urging he wrote his last book, The Passions of the Soul, which might have served as a groundwork for a study of morals.≤ Descartes could never produce a moral philosophy, because his method is antihuman. It precludes from right reasoning all those manners of discourse that concern common life—authority, probability, and the dialectic of opinion. These are the forms of thought that underlie jurisprudence. Descartes does not include jurisprudence as a branch of his tree. Jurisprudence is the

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wisdom at the basis of the human world. That is why the Digest of the Corpus iuris civilis of Roman law opens with the claim that jurisprudence is philosophy. Once philosophy can be brought down from the heavens by Socrates for the Athenians it can, through the terrestrial writings of Ulpian and the other Roman jurisconsults, be connected to jurisprudence. In July 1720 Vico published several densely written pages in Italian to announce and summarize the major themes of the first two books of his new work. These pages have become known as ‘‘Sinopsi del diritto universale’’ (‘‘Synopsis of universal law’’); they are the source of the general title of the work. The first book, De uno universi iuris principio et fine uno (On the one principle and the one end of universal law) appeared in September 1720; the second book, De constantia iurisprudentis (On the constancy of the jurisprudent) appeared a year later, in August 1721. The second book was divided into two parts, De constantia philosophiae (On the constancy of philosophy) and De constantia philologiae (On the constancy of philology). These were followed by a third volume, Notae in duos libros, which contains notes on the two books and excursuses (Dissertationes). Vico’s Universal Law is his largest surviving work, longer than the final version of the New Science. Its three books are written in Latin, the language of the chair Vico held at the university and of the morning chair of law that he hoped to acquire when the concourse for it would be held. The books of the Universal Law were written to serve as a prime credential for the chair he ultimately failed to win. But the work had a deeper purpose; it was based on Vico’s vision of a new science that would go beyond Pico della Mirandola’s ‘‘conclusions concerning all the knowable’’ (A 157) and Bacon’s scheme of the sciences in De augmentis scientiarum and Novum organon (A 139, 146). Vico presented his metaphysics through analysis of the origins of the Latin language. He presented his conception of human wisdom and the human world through an analysis of the origins and nature of Latin law. He was to abandon this method of presenting original ideas as a commentary on something else when, under the strictures of publication costs, he recast in briefer, positive form the manuscript of the First New Science, which he had originally done in negative form in the now lost Scienza nuova in forma negativa. Vico alerts the reader to his purpose with his epigraph to the De uno, taken from Cicero’s De legibus: ‘‘Atticus.—In your opinion, then, the science of law is to be derived not from the praetor’s edict, as the majority think now, nor from the Twelve Tables, as they used to think, but from the very depths of philosophy?’’ (I, 5.17). Vico intends to show how the philological study of all that depends upon human choice—that is reflected in laws—is philosophically comprehensible. Put in another way, Cicero’s question is the principle of

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the Digest, that jurisprudence is philosophy, namely, that the law correctly comprehended is human wisdom itself. The reply in Cicero’s dialogue, which Vico leaves unquoted, is that the science of law cannot be a manual of the law. The principles of universal law and justice must be comprehended such that civil law is seen as only a corner of them, and the explanation of the nature of justice must be sought in an understanding of the nature of man. Vico’s Universal Law is the fulfillment of the argument of his oration of 1719 (A 156), in which he applied to the sciences generally the theological formula de origine, de circulo, et de constantia. Vico says that ‘‘concerning the knowledge of divine and human things I shall also treat: its origin, circularity, and constancy; and I shall show that the origins of all things proceed from God, that all return to God by a circle, that all have their constancy in God, and that apart from God they are all darkness and error’’ (A 156). He begins his ‘‘Synopsis’’ with this formula and with his claim, expressed in his oration of 1719, that both divine and human learning have three elements—knowledge, will, and power (nosse, velle, posse). Divine nature has these infinitum, and human nature has these finitum. The first book of the Diritto stays fairly close to the interpretation of Roman law, the second book becomes an outline of the New Science, and the third book begins to explore the principles of mythology and the question of the true Homer, both of which became special themes in the New Science. How are we to render ‘‘Il diritto universale’’ in English? English uses the word law in two different senses, which appear as distinct and contrasting terms in the languages of continental Europe. Italian preserves the distinction of Latin between ius and lex as diritto and legge, French as droit and loi, Spanish as derecho and ley, and German as Recht and Gesetz. In discussing the problems of translation in their introduction to the New Science, Bergin and Fisch point out that the first term of each pair (ius, diritto, and so on) denotes law in the sense of the legal order, structure, or system—law understood as a rational whole, law by reason. The second term of each pair (lex, legge, and so forth) denotes law that has been made by some authority, some lawmaking body, at some time and place. It denotes law proclaimed through an act of will. As Bergin and Fisch make clear, ‘‘The distinction is between what is law because it has been so decided, and what is law because it is in itself straight, right, or reasonable. Thus, only the first term, not the second, could be used in translating such English expressions as ‘principles of law’ or ‘philosophy of law.’ ’’≥ The terms right and law are not an English parallel to the above pairs in other languages. Vico’s three-book work is most commonly referred to, in the

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critical literature on Vico in English, by the title Universal Law. One knows immediately this means law in the sense of ius: what is universal, single, and based on reason. ‘‘Right’’ in English is commonly understood in the plural. To translate Vico’s work as Universal Right, rendering ius throughout most of its text simply as ‘‘right,’’ is misleading, if not in fact wrong. I wish to explain this point in order to say why I part company with the current English translation of this work, which renders diritto and ius as ‘‘right.’’∂ To translate Vico’s work in this way is to place it in the French Enlightenment and English rights tradition of social and political philosophy and to associate it with deontological ethics. Vico’s conception of divine and human knowledge as embodied in Roman law is diametrically opposed to these positions. The rights tradition is based on what Vico calls ‘‘the natural law of the philosophers,’’ that is, natural law or right as an abstract rational ideal formulated in terms of what man should be. This Enlightenment ideal stands behind the natural rights of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the social, economic, and political canons of the 1948 United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Anglo-American rights tradition is expressed in the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of the American Declaration of Independence, which goes back to Locke’s conception of natural rights of life, liberty, and property and to such seventeenth- and eighteenth-century conceptions as ‘‘an Englishman’s birthright.’’ In this tradition stands Jeremy Bentham’s treatment of moral rights as correlatives to moral duties, taken up in the twentieth century by J. L. Austin and pursued in philosophy of law by H. L. A. Hart. Ronald Dworkin attempts to rehabilitate rights apart from a utilitarian analysis, claiming that rights can be asserted by individuals against the state even when such assertions do not promote social utility. Vico would not agree with this sense of right, either. The English term right is an unnatural term for Vico. The rationalist-democratic tradition in which it is situated is not part of his mentality, nor of the system of Roman law. In Roman law a plaintiff can have an ‘‘action’’ if there exists a law to which the plaintiff’s case applies. There is no sense of the plaintiff having a ‘‘right’’ or ‘‘rights’’ to which the law is further to respond. Vico’s moral philosophy also has nothing to do with the development of deontological ethics of right that parallels modern social and political rights theory. Vico’s moral philosophy is a virtue ethics based on the Neoplatonic ontology of Christian Good and on Aristotle, whose Nicomachean Ethics, Vico holds, is the product of the greatest of minds.∑ Vico’s conception of heroic wisdom, of piety and fortitude, stands against the modern Kantian and post-

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Enlightenment ethics of rights that leads to the phenomena of rights theory and rights talk of contemporary applied ethics (patients’ rights, children’s rights, victims’ rights, consumers’ rights, airline passengers’ rights, and so forth). None of these connects with Vico’s notions of divine providence and human prudence. Vico’s focus is on Roman law as human wisdom itself, and the focus of Roman law is on the interconnection between private and public law. Roman law gives little attention to ius naturale. Ius naturale is defined and described at the beginning of the Digest (1.1.1.3), but mentioned nowhere else. Classical jurisprudence generally identified ius naturale with ius gentium, although modern jurists would not make such a close connection between them. What the Romans would consider as instances of ius gentium, moderns may see as loose similarities among the legal systems of various nations. The standard English translations of the source books of Roman law render ius as ‘‘law,’’ not as ‘‘right.’’ This can easily be seen from how the titles of the first two parts of book 1 of the standard editions of The Institutes of Justinian (the textbook condensation of the Digest) are translated: ‘‘De iustitia et iure’’ is ‘‘On Justice and Law’’ (1.1); ‘‘De iure naturale, gentium et civili ’’ is ‘‘On Natural Law, the Law of Nations and Civil Law’’ (1.2).∏ Similar renderings are to be found in the translation of The Institutes of Gaius: ‘‘De iure civili et naturali’’ is ‘‘On State and Natural Law’’; ‘‘ius gentium’’ is ‘‘the law of all peoples’’ (1.1).π The same renderings of ius are to be found in lines from the Digest as translated in, for example, Andrew Borkowski’s Textbook on Roman Law: ‘‘ius gentium’’ is ‘‘the law of nations’’ (the discussion of slavery, D.1.5.4.1).∫ Alan Watson, in the English translation of the Digest, correctly notes that ‘‘ius cannot be exactly translated from Latin to English.’’ He retains ius, pairing it in English with ‘‘law,’’ connecting it to ‘‘right’’ only in instances where it applies to specific conditions or individuals.Ω Vico merges ius naturale with ius gentium in the phrase of the New Science ‘‘il diritto naturale delle genti ’’ (‘‘the natural law of the gentes’’), which is at the basis of his ‘‘common nature of the nations.’’ By employing ‘‘universale’’ rather than ‘‘naturale’’ in the title of Il diritto universale Vico takes an original stance. Vico’s title is a unique combination of terms, apparently without precedent in the history of works on jurisprudence.∞≠ He implies that there can be a ‘‘science of law’’ in accordance with his definition of science as the conversion of verum and factum of the Ancient Wisdom. Because human beings make laws, they can make a knowledge of law as a whole. Particular laws and what these are in themselves, law, proceed from human nature as begotten from divine nature.

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Vico says that the difference between science (scientia) and prudence ( prudentia) rests on their approaches to causality. Science is based on the reduction of a multiplicity to a single cause; prudence is the ability to portray the widest number of possible causes of an event and to conjecture which among all of them is the true cause.∞∞ Given this description, scientia and prudentia might appear to be two routes to the same end, or at least to have a common end— the one correct use of something. But their difference is fundamental and depends upon how the cause is established. The way in which the cause is established determines its character. The aim of science in the non-Vichian sense is the dismissal of the particular and the discovery of what is common to a class of particulars, the one universal element they share that makes them what they are. Once the cause is found, science has no interest in the other possibilities present in the particular situation from which the question of cause arose. Science is single-minded in its pursuit of truth as the universal that eliminates all accidental elements of an event or set of events. The cause, when established, is probable. Prudence is also a means to the probable cause of an event, but its consideration of the widest possible number of causes of an event becomes part of the final understanding of the cause that it conjectures to be the true cause of the event. Prudence is a way of thinking and speaking about the particular that preserves as much as possible of what is in the reality of the particular, including those elements that are not truly its cause but, in contrast to the cause, illuminate its meaning. In Vico’s view, we can have a science of the physical world that is based on the kind of partial consciousness of it that we can attain by reducing its particular events to their universal causes. But we cannot have a ‘‘science’’ of the human or civil world that is not based on prudence, that is, on a form of thnking and speaking that brings to bear on the understanding of a single event the totality of its possible causes. The prudence of the human world is ‘‘jurisprudence’’ because law is the cause of the human world. Law is the basis of the human world, and a knowledge of human and divine law is the basis of human wisdom. Vico says that the weakness of modern jurisprudence lies in its separation from philosophy.∞≤ In the sixth oration, he says that the student will find that jurisprudence is derived from a fusion of moral, civil, and theological doctrines of conduct and thought.∞≥ In the New Science Vico, citing Dio Chrysostom (Discourse 76), holds that law begins in natural customs, which are direct expressions of the fact that human nature is sociable. He says: ‘‘The natural law of the gentes is coeval with the customs of the nations, conforming one with another in virtue of a common human sense [un senso comune umano], without any reflection

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and without one nation following the example of another’’ (NS 311). Law is rooted in the senso comune out of which all human society arises. Vico subscribes to Dio’s view that law as custom commands naturally, whereas written law, although derived from custom, commands by force, like a tyrant, a state of law corresponding to the final stages of a nation’s life (NS 308). The natural customs that result are expressions of prudentia, the kind of wisdom through which such basic human actions are taken. What is ‘‘iuris-prudentia’’? In his sketch of the nature of jurisprudence in the seventh oration, Vico insists that there is only one ars prudentiae and that ars is philosophy. When prudentia is connected to ius the idea of prudence is connected to the idea of law as a human institution.∞∂ Prudence as jurisprudence is not a matter of the individual acquiring a wisdom to conduct his own particular affairs. Jurisprudence is a common wisdom, rooted in custom, in common life, that can be codified as law. Law is the system of practical wisdom of a people, but it is also human wisdom itself because it springs from human nature. As human nature has its basis in the divine, so does human wisdom or jurisprudence. In his conclusion to the De uno Vico reaffirms that ‘‘jurisprudence is knowledge of things divine and human’’ (iurisprudentia autem est divinarum et humanarum rerum notitia). These are the words of Ulpian, in the first book of the Digest (1.1.10.2), repeated as the opening of the Institutes of Justinian (1.1.1), where they are used to explain the relation between justice and law.∞∑ Vico claims the Romans defined jurisprudence the same way the Greeks defined wisdom. Cicero’s definition of ‘‘sapientia’’ in his presentation of Greek philosophy in the Tusculum Disputations is a knowledge of the divine and the human (4.26.57; cf. De off. 2.2.5).∞∏ Vico and Roman law simply replace ‘‘sapientia’’ with ‘‘iurisprudentia.’’ In the De uno Vico says: ‘‘Metaphysics is the mother of jurisprudence’’ (ch. 49). To have a knowledge of things human requires a knowledge of the divine as it relates to the human, as it is present in the human world. In the New Science Vico develops a knowledge of the providential actions of God in history, but throughout his works he claims no direct knowledge of God’s being. It is human wisdom, based on its connection to the divine, that is present in jurisprudence. Jurisprudence, for Vico, is true moral philosophy.

The Certain Is Part of the True The title of the first book of Vico’s Universal Law captures the circularity of Vico’s conception of law: De uno universi iuris uno principio et fine uno (On the one principle and the one end of universal law). It implies

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both that universal law has its end in its beginning and that law is a selfcomprehending, self-establishing system. Law begins and ends in the divine because it is a manifestation of human nature. Law imitates divine activity; it makes its own truth in accord with divine truth or reason. The two principal terms of Vico’s title have double meanings that parallel these two senses of circularity: principium (‘‘beginning,’’ ‘‘origin’’ and ‘‘first principles,’’ ‘‘elements’’), and finis (‘‘end,’’ ‘‘finish’’ and ‘‘object,’’ ‘‘aim’’). This circularity appears again in the title of the last chapter of the De uno: ‘‘Demonstration of the Circle of Divine and Human Erudition.’’ Vico concludes that Roman law—which begins before its codification in the Law of the Twelve Tables, passes through its period of rigidity in the popular Republic, and finally arrives at benevolent law under the Principate, under the rule of Augustus—forms a circle that begins with and returns to God. He says that the knowledge of the true God is the beginning and end of every true doctrine. Law as such for Vico is universal, and thus it is part of verum. Law is distinctive to human beings. All societies that are in a human, not bestial state, in all periods of their development, are subject to jurisprudential interpretation. Vico’s interest, in the Universal Law, is to construct a general account of law.∞π This understanding of Roman law as a total system of wisdom becomes a base to which he returns over and over in the New Science. Although law is a universal human phenomenon, Vico does not approach it simply in these terms. If law or jurisprudence is the particular genius of the Roman people, as Vico claims, then to discover in what this genius consists will be to discover what law (ius) itself is. Every system of law must in its essence be ‘‘law.’’ To comprehend properly a system of law such as that of the Romans will yield a knowledge of law as something universal. Nations develop in history, and law is part of their pattern of development. Law is not a universal substance that is the same at all times and places. Nor is law a matter of contract or covenant. Law is a human thing that is tied to the meaning and conditions of all other human things. Vico is seeking a sense of the universality of law, as explained above, that will not dissolve law into the abstract, philosophical ideal of ‘‘natural law’’ or ‘‘natural rights.’’ Vico also does not dissolve law into the politics of particular nations at particular times. For Vico, law understood in this way is not truly law. Indeed, the dissolution of law into legal activity in the sense of making law be whatever we interpret it to be is a sign of what in the New Science Vico calls the ‘‘barbarism of reflection.’’ Law must be connected to the true. In chapter 82 of the De uno Vico asserts that ‘‘the certain is part of the true’’ (‘‘certum est pars veri ’’). In so doing he expresses the principle necessary for his conception of the New Science. Much has been said about the principle

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that ‘‘the true is the made.’’ There is a common impression that Vico proceeded from this to the conception of the New Science. But from the time Vico asserts the verum-factum principle in the Ancient Wisdom in 1710, to the second New Science of 1730, he says nothing of this principle, not even indirectly.∞∫ In the Ancient Wisdom Vico makes only two comments about the certain. He says that in Latin certum means two things: what has been investigated and found to be indubitable and what is peculiar to an individual as opposed to what is common, the common being in principle dubious (cf. NS 321).∞Ω Vico also claims that for the Latins dictum (what is said) was the same as certum, and certum signifies what is determined (determinatum).≤≠ The first meaning of certum, that of the indubitable, corresponds to Descartes’s sense of certainty. This is certainty as established by rational thought, which Vico says cannot be identified with the true because the true requires not simply the indubitability of a thing’s existence but also a knowledge of its cause. In examining jurisprudence Vico has brought forth another conception of the certain that can have an identity with the true. Descartes’s sense of rationally established certainty can never produce a knowledge of the human world. Vico’s jurisprudential sense of certainty is what is needed for him to move fully beyond the Cartesian position. Certum derived from jurisprudence has an affinity to the sense of certum as dictum and determinatum, because jurisprudentially certum is based on authority (auctoritas). Laws are made by legislative authority. They are declared and are thus specific and determined. A given law so declared cannot stand simply on the say of the legislative authority. Legislative authority must depend upon the given law (lex) having an identity with natural law (ius naturale). Vico says that pudor is the custodian of natural law (ch. 51). He explains this by reference to a line in the Institutes regarding inheritance by will trusts. This refers to the procedure of depending upon someone eligible to receive an inheritance to give to another person, who could not directly receive the inheritance, what the testator wished transferred to him or her. These persons of trust ‘‘were called fideicommissa—committed to honor [ fides]—because those so charged were under no legal constraint but only that of their own sense of decency [ pudor]’’ (Inst. 2.23.10). Pudor in this sense is a natural inclination toward justice in human affairs, an inclination to honor, decency, and propriety, and a capacity to feel shame at not acting in accord with them. A given law is instituted by an act of will of the legislator, who depends on pudor for maintenance of the legislator’s authority. But, Vico says, the legislator realizes pudor is not enough (ch. 82). For a law to gain permanent acceptance it is required that the certain be part of the true. We require, says Joyce, ‘‘a certain in true’’ (FW 490.10).

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Ulpian, Vico says, defines civil law as ‘‘that which neither totally departs from natural law nor is totally in consent with it, at times adding to it and at times detracting from it’’ (ch. 77; Vico is glossing Digest 1.1.6). Civil law must have an identity with the true, but it is not absolutely true. The law in itself is reason, and it is through reason that natural law has its authority. A law enacted by the legislator depends upon pudor, but it must also have the authority of reason. Vico says the authority by which laws are made in a society cannot be completely divorced from reason or there would be no laws, only ‘‘monsters of laws’’ (monstra legum) (ch. 83). Authority, Vico claims, like the certain on which it depends, is part of reason (‘‘auctoritas pars rationis’’) (ch. 83). Authority must employ civil reason, which is not the same as natural reason. Civil reason involves utilitas. Its concern is public utility, and in this concern it differs from natural reason. What natural reason dictates is equitable for all people at all times, whereas civil reason is not equitable for some people. The legal pragmatist holds to the certain, determinate disposition of the laws. The legal philosopher holds to the true as present in the laws. Laws that are imperfect in relation to natural law are still to be respected, even though this may be difficult. In making these claims Vico, along with Ulpian, is acknowledging that natural law is not the law of any society, for law is never wholly the work of reason. But a body of civil law made simply on the will of its legislators and held simply through the authority of their power cannot long stand. Honor and decency are virtues, and virtues depend upon passions directed by reason. Without reason they have no stability. Civil law does not require perfect equity, but it must answer to the claim of equity as envisioned in natural law; the certum of civil law must be part of the verum of natural law. Vico says that conscientia is a word of the ‘‘wisest origin’’: ‘‘ ‘Scire’ (‘to know’) is ‘verum noscere’ (‘to know the true’); ‘conscire’ is ‘cum alio verum noscere’ (‘to know the true through participation with others’)’’ (ch. 69). Vico says that the true is that ‘‘which conforms to the order of things’’ (ch. 17 and Prologue, sec. 31). With this we are once again in Vico’s circle, because the order of things is the work of the eternal, divine mind of which the human mind is a creation. Reason (ratio) is the mind’s power to think in conformity with this divine order. Reason is the ultimate authority, for it can declare what is true. Authority as connected to the certain depends upon evidence of our senses and personal experience or on the opinions of others. Vico connects such authority with persuasion (Prologue, sec. 31). The legislator must persuade, but the ultimate persuasion is to show that a law is rational, that it fits with the order of things. Once again we see how the certain is part of the true.

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Vico also characterizes verum and certum as concepts of knowledge that, as he notes in the Prologue to the De uno, relate back to his metaphysics in the Ancient Wisdom (sec. 31). Vico says everyone distinguishes the false ( falsum) from the dubious (dubium). For something to be dubious does not mean it is false, but whatever is false is also dubious, that is, the dubious is part of the false. To raise doubt about something is to involve the standard of the false. The connection between these negative terms parallels the connection between the positive terms, true and certain. To arrive at a certainty about something is not to possess what is true of it, but it is to do so partially. Vico seems to have Descartes in mind. If we attempt to cross these two sets of terms, using the negative to test the positive, we achieve nothing. Vico says many things are dubious for us that are in fact true. Since the certain is part of the true such a thing would be both dubious and certain. He says often false things are held to be certainties. Since the certain is part of the true such a thing would be both false and true. In his definitions of the true and the certain in the Prologue (sec. 30), Vico makes the above points in a very compact and difficult manner. What does he mean by them? It might seem as though Vico is claiming these crossings of negative and positive terms lead to contradictions. This cannot be the case, because there is no contradiction between something being objectively true and subjectively dubious. Vico’s point, likely, is rejection of the method of criticism that attempts—as Descartes does—to arrive at certainty through doubt. This approach to certainty will never allow us to see the way in which the certain is part of the true. We may arrive at a certainty by such a method, but we shall not arrive at the true, nor shall we arrive at the false. If our dubitation fails to produce certainty we are left with skepticism, because doubt does not verify the false but is only part of the false. The relation between ius naturale and ius civile gives Vico the basis philosophically to comprehend the connection between verum and certum. These two senses of law are connected to a third sense of law, central to Roman jurisprudence and central to Vico’s conception of the common nature of nations in the New Science: ius gentium. In the New Science Vico conceives of this as ius gentium naturale, as I mentioned above. He announces this in the subtitle of the First New Science, which claims that it is a new science of the nature of nations, ‘‘by which are found the Principles of Another System of the Natural Law of the Gentes [del diritto naturale delle genti]’’ (cf. NS 31). By ‘‘Another System’’ Vico means a system other than those of the seventeenthcentury natural-law theorists Grotius, Selden, and Pufendorf. A gens (pl. gentes) is a ‘‘clan.’’ The population had been organized from pre-Roman times

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into gentes. A gens was originally a group of families living together, occupying a common territory, worshiping a common ancestor, and having a common surname (nomen gentile). Gens is the basis of the wider term gentile, which came to designate belonging to the nations at large, as opposed to the Hebrews. Thus in the New Science Vico’s doctrine of ‘‘ideal eternal history’’ applies to the gentile nations and not to the ancient Hebrews. Ius gentium is universal law. As Bergin and Fisch state it: ‘‘It was simply that part of the private law of Rome, or of any state, which was also a part of the private law of every other; whereas the civil law of each state was that part of its law which was peculiar to itself.’’≤∞ Classical jurisprudence, as I stated earlier, generally identifies ius naturale with ius gentium (Gaius. 1.1; cf. Inst. 2.1.11). Ius gentium is regarded as dictated by natural reason (Inst. 1.2.1) or by divine providence (Inst. 1.2.11). Ius naturale as such is defined in the Digest (1.1.1.3) and stated in the Institutes (1.2 prin.) as ‘‘that which nature instills in all animals.’’ Ius naturale is shared by all animals, human and nonhuman, and from it comes marriage in humans and the procreation and rearing of offspring that humans share with animals. As I mentioned above, this pure concept of ius naturale is not discussed further in the Digest or Institutes. In the De uno (ch. 100; see also ch. 156), Vico says that ius gentium originates in ‘‘ius violentiae,’’ that is, in the law of force or self-protection, Joyce’s ‘‘law of capture and recapture’’ (FW 82.1–2). This is universal, for any person or people can claim this right. Vico distinguishes ius gentium (‘‘ius naturale gentium’’) from ‘‘ius naturale philosophorum’’ on the grounds that ius gentium is law involving certainty, whereas the natural law of the philosophers is free of certainty (chs. 136 and 156). The natural law of the philosophers is ideal and is based on a conception of reason as separate from the particular conditions of any society. The natural law of the philosophers is a formulation of the definition of ius in the Digest: ‘‘ius est ars boni et aequi ’’ (1.1.1.1). The example usually given of the difference between ius naturale and ius gentium is slavery. Slavery is among the institutions and rights that were thought in Roman law to prevail in all systems of law, others being, for example, contracts, marriage, self-protection. Freedom is a ‘‘natural’’ condition, but as slavery was widely practiced in ancient civilizations it became an institution acknowledged and governed by ius gentium. Ius naturale as elaborated by the Stoics is eternal and immutable, but, as I mentioned above, for Roman jurisprudence ius naturale is merged with ius gentium. Despite the great problems of philosophically elaborating a conception of ius gentium, a body of law common to all nations, it is ius gentium that caught Vico’s imagination. Vico was convinced that if this element of Roman law was

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properly explored it held the key to a new science of the ‘‘law of nations.’’ If jurisprudence is the key to divine and human wisdom, it must contain a way to comprehend systematically what any nation has in common with any other.

A New Science Is Essayed Vico presents the second book of his Universal Law as a reflection on the principles established in the first book. In addition to his specific interpretations of Roman law and his principle that all law begins and ends in the divine, Vico comes to the second book with three things: the definition of jurisprudence as wisdom, the meanings of verum and certum, and his conception of their interconnection. The title of the second book, De constantia iurisprudentis (On the constancy of the jurisprudent), adds the idea of constancy to the conception of jurisprudence as wisdom. To be wise is to be constant—to display judgment that is consistent, steady, firm, and uniform (the basic meanings combined in constantia). The wisdom of the jurisprudent or jurist must have this constant nature. From what does this constancy derive? It requires a grasp both of the true and the certain and the art of showing how the certain is part of the true. In the opening paragraphs of De constantia, Vico says all disciplines reduce to two supreme kinds: those that concern natural necessities and those that concern human choice (sec. 4). Vico says the first is subsumed under philosophy, the principle of which is verum, and the second under philology, the principle of which is certum. Vico says he will show that the constancy or wisdom of the jurisprudent depends upon the jurisprudent’s interpreting the laws by giving proper attention to both their philosophical and philological aspects. The jurisprudent, like the philosopher, must look to the eternal reason of things, and, like the philologist, he must grasp the meanings of the words of the law. As I indicated above, the De constantia is divided into two parts, De constantia philosophiae (On the constancy of philosophy) and De constantia philologiae (On the constancy of philology). The latter takes up the largest part of the total book; it begins with a chapter entitled ‘‘Nova scientia tentatur’’ (‘‘A new science is essayed’’), which is Vico’s first sketch of his New Science. Recall Vico’s claim that his conception of universal law goes beyond the conception of knowledge of Pico della Mirandola, because Pico did not treat of philology, namely, the countless ‘‘matters of religions, languages, laws, customs, property rights, conveyances, sovereign powers, governments, classes and the like’’ (A 157). Philology for Vico is historiography, the love of learning in its widest sense of studying all that is governed by human choice and authority, the certain. Philology concerns not just the languages and literatures of the

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nations but all the things that determine the details of historical life. This emphasis on the importance of philology as a part of philosophy is crucial for Vico. He wishes to correct the error of Greek and, to an extent, Latin philosophy in excluding these ‘‘certains’’ from its speculations on the human. It is in the connection between the philosophical concern with eternal necessity and the philological concern with the things produced by choice and human will that the ‘‘newness’’ of Vico’s new science lies. Vico’s claims in the De constantia are another way to see how he is a philosopher in only a general sense. Vico is in fact a jurisprudent whose subject is ‘‘the jurisprudence of the human race’’ and whose ‘‘constancy’’ includes philosophy. Vico is the jurisprudent first and the philosopher second. Vico’s concern, extending from the Universal Law to the New Science, is to provide a constancy of judgment, not as a means by which we can interpret a given body of law but as a way in which we can interpret the ‘‘law of the nations’’ itself. Constancy is not simply the consistency of making the same judgment over and over. It requires the knowledge and balancing of opposites as they bear on particular human events. ‘‘counsel and constancy. ordination of omen, onus and orbit. distribution of danger, duty and destiny. polar principles’’ (FW 271.R 1–13). The constancy of philosophy is based on a proper comprehension of our own human nature. Vico’s purpose in De constantia philosophiae is to combine Platonic philosophy with Christian doctrine and to distinguish it from the falsity of Stoic and Epicurean philosophy, in terms of both their metaphysical and their moral doctrines. Vico begins his treatment of philosophy by calling attention to the Augustinian distinction of nosse, velle, and posse (knowledge, will, and power) and reminds the reader that these are the basis of all divine and human learning (De con. philos., ch. 1; see also Notae in lib. alt., no. 3). He emphasizes the sense in which these three elements are the basis of the definition of God and are also the principles necessary to the mind for any science, and for virtue. Vico understands these elements as a circle that goes from God to man to God, from the infinite mind to the human mind, in such a way that the human mind is taken back to its dependency on the divine (De uno, conclusio). In the De uno, Vico cites Augustine’s Confessions and this tripartite division as the basis for his definition of God. He says: ‘‘God, as St. Augustine defines in his Confessions, as divine philosophy demonstrates, and as our religion professes, is infinite Power, Knowledge, and Will’’ (ch. 2). In referring to the Confessions for this tripartite division, Vico apparently has in mind that Augustine speaks of some resemblances of the Trinity that exist in man. These are esse, nosse, and velle (xiii.11). Instead of posse, in this list is esse. Augustine

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says that man can look into himself and see that he is, that he knows, and that he wills. Like the Trinity, these three are distinct yet are in one single mind or soul (De uno, ch. 92, and De con. philos., ch. 3). Although we cannot know from these whether they correspond one for one with the Trinity, or whether all three are in each person, or precisely how their relationship can be expressed, from their existence in man we can have an impression of our connection with the divine (Notae in lib. prior. 6). Augustine is in fact the source for Vico’s whole work. In his general introduction to the Universal Law Vico states that it derives from his reading of a passage in the City of God, which caused him to think of a passage in Varro where he propounds that the Roman gods were made according to a formula of nature. From this Vico thought of the idea that natural law is the foundation and idea of truth that demonstrates the true God, infinite, incorporeal, and one (De uno, Prologue, sec. 24). In substituting posse in his list for esse, Vico may intend to reflect the tripartite distinction in the humanist rhetorical tradition of sapientia, eloquentia, and prudentia, which has behind it what Cicero attributes to rhetoric and Horace to poetry: to instruct, delight, and move. The root in human nature of sapientia is nosse, of eloquentia is velle, and of prudentia is posse. Sapientia affects the intelligence, eloquentia affects the passions, which are governed by the will, and prudentia requires the power of the human being to act (cf., in Augustine, the triad memoria, intelligentia, voluntas, De trin. x.ii). Vico in one place directly combines esse with nosse and velle (De uno, ch. 75). Esse is a presupposition of Vico’s three because nosse, velle, and posse are the ways that the human being is; their combination is the being of man. As Augustine does at greater length in the City of God, Vico in De constantia philosophiae determines what in pagan philosophy is in agreement with Christian doctrine. He says that first of all skepticism must be diminished, above all in moral doctrine. Vico does not here present an argument against skepticism. He simply claims that there are notions of the eternally true, possessed universally by the human race. He says that skeptics are dangerous to the civil order because they will prove there is justice in human affairs one day and refute it the next. This would make the skeptics worse than the poets in Plato’s criticism in the Republic. The poets are dangerous to society because they present the gods as involved in both good and bad conduct and have no standard of virtue by which to judge. The poets are naive, but the skeptics, as Vico portrays them, are deliberate in their attempt to show there is no moral standard. Vico’s remedy for skepticism is to have us perceive the common notions of humanity, the chief of which is God as infinite mind. If this is unsuccessful,

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Vico’s remedy is like that of Plato with the poets—to banish the skeptics from society, as he says the Skeptic Carneades was once driven from Rome (De con. philos., ch. 2). In the Ancient Wisdom Vico gives an argument against the skeptics, based on his principle that the true is the made. He claims that the skeptics admit effects and that they admit that effects have their own causes. But they claim to be ignorant of the nature of these causes, denying that they can know the genera or forms by which each thing is made. Vico claims that even the skeptic must admit that we can come to know those things that are made in the human mind by combining postulates. There must be a ground for this activity that contains all forms and causes. To possess all forms and causes requires an infinite mind whose activity is imitated in the making of what is true by the finite mind. The skeptic can argue back at Vico. But, as Vico holds in the Universal Law, skepticism is ultimately not an intellectual matter but a social matter. There cannot be a society of skeptics. Neither could there be what Polybius believes—a society of philosophers (De con. philos., ch. 4; cf. NS 179, 1043, 1110). All societies require religion, and all philosophers require society in which to live. There is no society whose basis is pure reason. Vico’s ultimate answer to skepticism is his conception of ‘‘true heroic wisdom’’ (‘‘vere heroica sapientia’’), which is: ‘‘To know with natural facility the external trues, to act with everyone and in every case with full and open freedom, to speak always truly, and to live with complete delight of the spirit [animus], in a way that conforms to reason’’ (De uno, ch. 19). This conception of ‘‘heroic wisdom’’ foreshadows Vico’s conception of ‘‘heroic mind’’ in his oration of 1732, where it becomes a doctrine of human education. The answer to the skeptic is ultimately the Socratic attempt simply to continue to philosophize. In the additions Vico wrote to the New Science in 1731, he explains skepticism as a symptom of the third age in ‘‘ideal eternal history,’’ when society becomes wholly secular. Skepticism is a corruption of Socrates’s doctrine that he ‘‘knows nothing.’’ In Socrates’s hands it is a heroic principle that motivates the pursuit of truth and virtue; in the hands of the Skeptics it is a principle of the nothingness of thought (see Vico’s ‘‘demonstration by historical fact against skepticism,’’ NS 1363–64). As Vico portrays heroic wisdom in the above passage it is social, a way to thinking that instructs, delights, and moves. The skeptic is unable to attempt heroism of thought. The skeptic suffers from a lack of courage, a timidity of soul, and little can be done about it by way of a cure. Heroic wisdom is connected to piety ( pietas), which is dutifulness not only toward God in Christian doctrine but also, as in Platonic philosophy, toward parents, relatives, and one’s native country or city (De con. philos., ch. 4). Vico’s last words in the

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New Science are that this science is inseparably bound to the study of piety, and ‘‘he who is not pious cannot be truly wise’’ (NS 1112). Wisdom, as Joyce says, requires ‘‘a genuine dash of irrepressible piety’’ (FW 470.30–31) that the skeptic is unable to reach. Vico takes from Plato, but more accurately from the Christian Neo-Platonic tradition, three metaphysical doctrines: ideas as eternal truths, the immortality of the spirit or animus, which is subsumed under the human mind or mens as the seat of the eternal truths, and divine providence, that is, the divine mind that governs the eternal order of things and that is the ground whereby we come to know the eternal truths. Against these three doctrines Vico places the metaphysics of the Stoics and the Epicureans. He rejects the doctrine of fate ( fatum) of the Stoics because it denies free will. He rejects the doctrine of chance (casus) of the Epicureans because it explains everything in terms of void and body, denying the incorporeality of the mind. In his letter to Abbé Esperti on the nature and publication of his First New Science (1726), Vico associates the Stoic idea of fate or ‘‘deaf Necessity’’ (‘‘sorda Necessità’’) with Descartes, as opposed to the chance or ‘‘blind Fortune’’ (‘‘cieca Fortuna’’) of Epicurus.≤≤ Vico also partially identifies chance with Locke.≤≥ He says that today thought fluctuates between these two alternatives, not attempting to regulate Fortune by reason or attempting to moderate Necessity where possible. This is Vico’s fork, and the movements of modern thought are always caught on one tine or the other. Vico says his own doctrine is based on the idea of divine providence. Vico’s metaphysics of providence combines the general necessity of the divine order of things with the contingency of specific acts of free will. Providence is a metaphysical principle of the true and the certain. It is authority as an agency of rational choice that operates within the rational order of the nature of things. The ultimate metaphysical principle that guides the constancy of the jurisprudent is providence. Its analogue in universal law is Vico’s ius gentium naturale, which in the New Science becomes part of Vico’s ‘‘ideal eternal history.’’ Vico rejects the moral philosophy of both the Stoics and the Epicureans. Vico is against the indifference to society of the Stoic ideal of autarkeia and against the ethic of the cultivation of the pleasurable state of mind of Epicurus’s ideal of ataraxia. Vico’s specific criticisms of each moral position reduce to the sense in which each of these positions is self-involved. The Stoic withdraws into the self-sufficient individual, and the Epicurean withdraws the individual into the garden. Vico puts this most succinctly in his autobiography: ‘‘For they are each a moral philosophy of solitaries: the Epicurean, of idlers inclosed in their own little gardens; the Stoic, of contemplatives who

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endeavor to feel no emotion’’ (A 122). Moral philosophy for Vico is part of civil wisdom, which functions in the agora. Moral philosophy has its roots and purpose in the jurisprudential, in the wisdom that governs human affairs, prudentially based in the divine providential order of things. Vico sees the truth in Christian morality as resting on its emphasis on the divinity of the human mind over the claims of the body. Vico calls attention to Plato’s famous dictum, in the Phaedo, that ‘‘those who rightly philosophize are practicing to die’’ (hoi orthos philosophountes apothneskein meletosi) (67E, 3–4). This is repeated farther on in the dialogue where Socrates is describing the soul. He characterizes philosophy when pursued in the right way as ‘‘practice of death’’ (melete thanatou) (81A, 1– 2). Vico calls this statement the true definition of philosophy—‘‘meditatio mortis’’ (De con. philos., ch. 12). He interprets this definition to mean that we should extinguish the senses and the desires of the passions (cupiditas) in order to live more freely in conformity with the true and with reason. This interpretation is of a piece with Vico’s description of the life of heroic wisdom, mentioned earlier. The philosophical point of view from which the jurisprudent is to acquire consistency of judgment about the certain depends upon the proper merger of Christian doctrine and pagan philosophy, in which such philosophy, especially Plato’s, is adjusted to the principles of true religion. In what way is the jurisprudent to approach philology so that it may be combined with philosophy to produce a new science of wisdom? As I indicated above, the usual definition of philology is the study of words. Vico answers the question, ‘‘What is philology?’’ at the beginning of De constantia philologiae with the claim that philology has two parts: the history of words and the history of things (historia verborum et historia rerum) (ch. 1). Behind this distinction is the threefold distinction between ideas, words, and things. Philology, Vico claims, cannot be limited to the study of speech, the stages of language, and the origin of words. Philology is concerned with the meanings of words, but because the ideas of things are connected to specific words, philology must know the history of things. Language is the medium of the human world, and to understand it requires the study of all the civil things that depend on it. Vico’s De constantia philologiae, along with the Dissertationes of the third book, is a draft of what became, with Vico’s loss of the concourse, the New Science. As stated above the title of the first chapter, ‘‘Nova scientia tentatur’’ announces this, but the chapter is confined to a chronological table of ancient kingdoms, beginning with the date of the universal flood (1656 b.c., the biblical date of the creation of the world). This table is reformulated at the beginning of the New Science as the Chronological Table that arranges the materials

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of the nations. Here, as later in the New Science, Vico divides historical time into three ages, which he adopts from Varro: the dark, the fabulous, and the historical (obscurum, fabulosum, and historicum) (ch. 1), and, as in the New Science, he attributes these to the Egyptians (NS 52). Vico says he intends to make philology into a science. His aim must be to show what humanity is—to elicit the principles of humanity and study their function, not simply to amass materials in a learned way. In introducing these principles Vico gives a definition of ‘‘humanity’’ (humanitas) as the feeling that induces human beings to help each other, in other words, ‘‘human kindness’’ (ch. 2). To the extent that Vico sees this feeling as present in the original state of humanity it is close to Rousseau’s la pitié in the Second Discourse and opposite to Hobbes’s war ‘‘of every man against every man’’ (Leviathan, I.13). But further, Vico bases this humanity in rhetoric. He says that this humanity toward others is for the most part done through speech, through giving counsel, admonitions, exhortations, consolations, and reproaches. He says this is why the study of languages is called ‘‘studia humanitatis.’’ Vico claims there are two principles that shape humanity: pudor (as mentioned above)—the ability of human beings to respond to things in terms of shame, to be modest, decent, and honorable, to exercise propriety—and libertas—freedom. From these together we derive liberalitas—‘‘liberality’’ (ch. 2). He says pudor is the form of humanity and libertas is its material. Vico claims that pudor is the inventor of religion. He explains this in terms of Adam’s loss of piety, which resulted in shame, and this shame results in fear of the Lord (ch. 3). This account is different from the origin of religion among the gentiles in the New Science. There the dominant passion is fear of Jove, which results in shame or modesty and causes the giants to retreat to caves, to copulate out of the sight of Jove (NS 374–84). Vico regards pudor as the impetus to acquire virtue. Pudor shapes libertas, which has two parts: dominion and tutelage (tutela = protection) (chs. 5 and 6). Only human beings, Vico says, are free. Liberty and its two parts, dominion and tutelage, are the sources of all laws and civil society (ch. 4; De uno, 74). A human being is born free, and this freedom takes the two basic shapes of the right to property, to ownership of what is necessary and useful to the person’s existence, and the right to protect oneself against transgression. Without these three just powers of humanity there can be no civil society. Vico’s principles of humanity as given here are jurisprudential. In the New Science his principles of humanity remain three in number, but they appear as social institutions rather than rights: religion, marriage, and burial. Vico’s three rights in the Universal Law derive from human nature itself. Vico’s three principles in the New Science are claimed to be customs observed by all nations, whether barbarous or

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civilized (NS 333). Vico conceives of these principles anthropologically: they are what denote a human community as opposed to an animal society. Having said that from pudor and libertas comes liberalitas, Vico does not discuss this further. Associated with the studia humanitatis, which Vico connects to the general meaning of humanitas, is Cicero’s term artes liberales (liberalis, relating to freedom). The liberal arts are the ‘‘humanities.’’ ‘‘Liberality’’ is the quality or state of being free, of kindness, courtesy, or generosity. If we speculatively extend Vico’s mention of liberalitas it suggests that the law, once beyond the enactment and support of rights basic to human nature, contains and promotes a humane wisdom. Law extends the original feeling of common humanity that takes shape in the basic uses of language in human society. This humane wisdom is justice, in the Platonic and humanist sense of proportion or balance in the faculties of the soul, and in the order of society. Vico adds to his principles of humanity two principles of history. He says universal history is the history of things and the history of words (rerum et verborum). Etymology is the history of words, and mythology is the first history of things (ch. 7). This establishes the detailed exposition of Varro’s obscure period of the nations that is reformulated as ‘‘poetic wisdom’’ (sapienza poetica) in the second book of the New Science, its longest book. Etymology, as in the Cratylus, allows us access to the original meanings of the words of languages. But at the end of the Cratylus Socrates turns from words to the things themselves. Mythologies give us the first histories, as Vico explains in the Dissertationes of the third book of the Universal Law. Vico says in the New Science: ‘‘The first science to be learned should be mythology or the interpretation of fables’’ (NS 51). Vico states in the De uno that ‘‘history does not yet have its principles’’ (ch. 104). It will have its principles when ‘‘philosophy undertakes to examine philology’’ (NS 7). Vico has made his first attempt at this union in the De constantia, but in it history does not completely have its principles. Missing from Vico’s account are axioms that he formulates in the New Science. Only when we comprehend these elements do we have a full basis from which to grasp the union between philosophy and philology. It falls to the reader of the New Science to make the science for himself, but in this work Vico has presented the reader with a full philosophy of history with which to do so. In the De constantia it is symptomatic that philosophy and philology are treated in two separate books. Their union is ultimately at the hands of the jurisprudent, who must look to each and then combine them in the process of interpretation of the law. Vico concludes the De constantia with a discussion of the Law of the Twelve Tables. His question is whether it is an indigenous product of Roman genius or

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was brought to Rome from Greece. His aim is to assess how much of this first codification of Roman law is Attic in origin. According to the traditional understanding of the Twelve Tables, they are the result of the demands of the plebeians on the patricians for a publication of the law. It could also have been an act of self-regulation by a patrician elite, as is held by some modern theorists. Whatever the true cause, the result was the enactment of the Twelve Tables, in 451 and 450 b.c. According to Pomponius’s account, capsulized in the Digest, it was decided to appoint a commission of ten men to study the laws of the Greek city-states, even by going to Attica, and to write out the laws on tablets, to be erected in the Forum Romanum for all to see. Once done, they were given the sovereign right, for a year, to correct and amend them. They found the first batch of laws deficient, and added two more tablets to correct the deficiency (D.1.2.2.4). In the First New Science Vico rejects the story of the Twelve Tables and claims there never was a set of such tables put up at one time. Instead he holds that they were a kind of second agrarian law granting the plebeians ownership of land, and that, over time, there were additional laws interpolated in the Twelve Tables, resulting from the conflicts between the plebeians and the patricians (NS [1725], 87, 161–73). In the Ragionamento primo, the short discourse on the Twelve Tables that Vico added to the Second New Science in 1731, he claims that the tables were called ‘‘Twelve’’ simply as a poetic number meaning ‘‘many.’’≤∂ ‘‘Twelve tabular times’’ (FW 167.23).≤∑ In his arguments concerning the Twelve Tables, Vico’s aim is to prove that Roman law is Roman law, not Greek. Vico’s argument that there is little that is of Greek origin in the Twelve Tables is generally supported by modern opinion. It is unlikely that the commission made the dangerous voyage to Greece. The Greek city-states studied were likely those that existed in southern Italy. Vico ultimately wishes to show that the Twelve Tables come about as a development of social and historical conditions and not through rational decision. That law comes about developmentally, as a result of such conditions, is also the point of Vico’s Ragionamento secondo, rejecting the validity of the ‘‘Royal Law of Tribonian.’’≤∏ However the Twelve Tables were established, once established—Vico claims, following Cicero—they were recited as a song (carmen) by the children of Rome (De con. philol., ch. 12; NS 469; Cicero, De legibus, 2.23.59).≤π Vico regards this song as tied to his view that the first humans learned language through singing (NS 461). No attempts have been successful to grasp the Twelve Tables in meter or rhythmic pattern. One way to imagine this claim, however, is as the kind of song or chant that is used with children, to teach them their ABCs.≤∫

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In the First New Science Vico says the ancient Roman law was a ‘‘dramatic serious poem’’ (365). He states: ‘‘All ancient Roman law was a serious poem, represented by the Romans in the forum, and ancient jurisprudence was a severe poetry’’ (NS 1037). Vico says that Justinian acknowledges this in the Institutes, where he speaks of the law as originally transmitted by fables (Prooemium, 3). Ancient Roman law abounds with fictions. Vico writes: ‘‘Ancient civil law is the fable of natural law. Through the certain the true bursts forth. Ancient civil law imitates nature. Ancient jurisprudence is in a sense a poem’’ (De uno, ch. 182). Law is a dramatic poem (as opposed to lyric or epic) because it treats human actions that are in conflict with each other. The court itself is a theater in which the law is acted out. A court case is human drama, with natural ties to the themes of ancient tragedy and comedy. Ancient jurisprudence is ‘‘a severe poetry’’ (‘‘una severa poesia’’) because it does not simply delight or instruct; it has consequences in terms of action. An important part of Vico’s evidence that the Twelve Tables were not Greek is the cruelty of the penalties prescribed, of which only the Romans, Vico claims, were capable. Vico asks: ‘‘Would the Greeks be capable of condoning the hanging of someone who takes another’s crops by night?’’ (table VIII.9), a penalty Vico says Pliny objects to as too harsh, and amounts to treating a thief even worse than a murderer (De con. philol., ch. 36). The same penalty is prescribed for a patron who defrauds a client. ‘‘Patronus si clienti fraudem faxit, sacer esto’’ (‘‘If patron shall have defrauded client, he must be solemnly forfeited’’). This was originally a religious penalty that called for the offender to be sacrificed (‘‘hanged’’), in fact to be crucified on a tree. ‘‘Sacer esto’’ came to designate someone disgraced, outlawed, and deprived of his goods.≤Ω As the twelfth question, in the discourse of twelve questions and answers of the first book of Finnegans Wake, Joyce asks: ‘‘12. Sacer esto?’’ and answers ‘‘Answer: Semus sumus!’’ (168.13–14). Joyce makes the ‘‘sacer esto’’ of table VIII.21 (21 = 12 backwards) an interrogative and an imperative. Sacer can mean both sacred and accursed. His answer, ‘‘Semus sumus!’’ both singular and plural, means ‘‘I am Shem’’ (James) and ‘‘We are the same.’’ The law treats man severely, as he is. Man is capable of both fraud and honesty. Human actions are not always simply motivated by rational ideals.≥≠ The Law of the Twelve Tables contains the vestiges of an ancient common, dramatic, and severe wisdom not developed by rational deliberation. Poetic mentality is rooted in this common wisdom, and it found ways to capture the symbolic power of the original practices out of which the law was born. Before the law is subject to rational form it is poetic, tied to the original musical

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powers of language that nourish the imagination and its fictions. This poetic form of the law is not false. It is the first formulation of its truth, which ‘‘bursts forth’’ from the certains of the heroic actions and practices that originally establish legal order. Jurisprudential thinking interprets the law properly only when it does so in terms of a knowledge of things divine and human, and considers how the connection between the divine and human is enacted in the various ages of the course the nations run. In this way, ‘‘We annew’’ (FW 594.15).

P A R T

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III

6

The New Science: The Life of Nations

Our wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer —FW 614.27

Dame Metaphysic and the Hieroglyphs of Civil Wisdom In the synopsis Vico prefixed to the First New Science (1725), he introduced the first book with a line from the Aeneid: ‘‘We wander ignorant of the men and the places’’ (Aen. 1.332–33; FNS 3). The first book concerns not only the aim of the work but also the difficulty of the means of finding a new science. Vico is both Odysseus and Aeneas, both Greek and Roman, Socrates and Cicero, their heroic wisdom joined to Christian providence. His name means road. His wanderings in pedagogy, metaphysics, and jurisprudence bring him finally into a new country, where everything looks old, even familiar. In the First New Science the means have finally been found. In the Second New Science they have been fixed and perfected. Vico says: ‘‘But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind’’ (NS 331). Vico’s words in the original are Dantean: ‘‘Ma,

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in tal densa notte di tenebre ond’è coverta la prima da noi lontanissima antichità. . . .’’ Within the tonality and poetry of this statement Vico the rhetorician has placed an enthymeme: civil society has been made by men; therefore, its principles are to be found within the human mind.∞ The suppressed minor premiss of the syllogism is the principle that the true is the made. Men can make history; men can know what they make; therefore, men can know history. The topos, the middle term from which the syllogism is made, is factum, the meaning of which has been unearthed from the metaphysical wisdom found in the origins of the Latin language in the Ancient Wisdom. This passage is preceded by Vico’s strange sentence, ‘‘So, for purposes of this inquiry, we must reckon as if there were no books in the world’’ (NS 330; cf. FNS 40). Vico’s declaration is similar to Bacon’s, in Cogitata et visa, which Vico cites elsewhere in the New Science as the right method of philosophizing, ‘‘think and see,’’ and which Vico says he is carrying over from the investigation of nature to the science of civil things (NS 163 [axiom 22], 359), by joining philosophy to philology. It is also an ironic reference to Descartes’s ahistorical method of the Discourse. In an overlooked passage of Vici vindiciae (sec. 6), Vico’s reply to the malicious book notice about the First New Science published in the Leipzig Acta Eruditorum, Vico says just the opposite, concerning books. He says that for twenty years he consulted ‘‘all possible works’’ in order to make a contribution to the jurisprudential doctrine of the ius gentium naturale, and that he ‘‘buried himself completely in a rich and profound library of all the varied and difficult products of human thought.’’ He says these included reading and meditating some of the most ancient writers, that are only today recovered and studied.≤ Vico’s new science is itself a library, made up of everything Vico could find. In the New Science we encounter not Occam’s razor but Vico’s magnet. What Vico in his pedagogical orations attributes to Socrates and the ancients can be attributed to him: he is a complete university. Vico’s line concerning ‘‘no books’’ has a point. It announces that Vico is armed with an invincible enthymene, like the invincible enthymeme of Demosthenes which he admires, that will allow him to comprehend the nature of the world of nations, ‘‘the great city of the human race,’’ in a way that is not dependent upon the help of any book. The syllogism of Vico’s enthymeme is his golden bough, which will allow him to enter the night of history and find his way. Like Joyce’s ‘‘lingerous longerous book of the dark’’ (FW 251.24), Vico’s New Science is also a book of the dark. In explaining the dipintura, the picture that serves as a frontispiece and emblem for the Second New Science, Vico says: ‘‘The whole idea of this work may be summed up as follows. The darkness in the background of the picture is the material of this Science,

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uncertain, unformed, obscure, which is set forth in the Chronological Table and in the Notes upon it’’ (NS 41). Shining in this darkness is the divine light of providence that illuminates the breast of la donna metafisica, Dame Metaphysic. Vico has his divine principle, his enthymeme that will always guide him and direct the vision of his mind’s eye. As I explained earlier, Vico had planned to begin the second version of the New Science with what he called a ‘‘Novella letteraria,’’ printing the correspondence he had with Father Carlo Lodoli to document the problems he encountered in attempting to have the work published in Venice, and stating his reasons for withdrawing it to Naples. But at the last moment, likely because he received a conciliatory letter from Lodoli, he commissioned the dipintura (picture, depiction) as a frontispiece and replaced the pages of the Novella with an explanation of the figures and hieroglyphics it depicts.≥ The dipintura was done by Domenico Antonio Vaccaro (1681–1750), a well-known sculptor, architect, and painter. The engraving was done by a prominent engraver, Antonio Baldi (1692–c. 1773)∂ (fig. 5). The picture is composed in terms of three geometric shapes: the triangle, the circle, and the rectangle. The visual geometry reflects the ‘‘geometric method’’ through which Vico claims the world of the New Science is composed. The divine eye, in the upper-left corner, is placed within an equilateral triangle, and the triangle is enclosed in a circle. This configuration derives from Vico’s doctrine of metaphysical points.∑ The equilateral triangle is the wedge, which Vico finds in Stoic cosmology and which he sees as an original geometric form, connected in its originality to the circle. He says the Stoics posit ‘‘as principle of all corporeal forms the wedge, in the same way that the first composite figure generated in geometry is the triangle, just as the first simple figure is the circle, symbol of God’s perfection’’ (A 152). Vico says ‘‘the seeing eye is God with the aspect of His providence’’ (NS 2). The divine eye emits a ray that is focused directly on a convex jewel on the breast of Dame Metaphysic, which reflects the ray onto the shoulder of the statue of Homer, ‘‘the first gentile author who has come down to us’’ (NS 6). These two rays form two sides of a large equilateral triangle. The form of the circle is repeated in the globe on which Dame Metaphysic is standing. The rectangle is present as the shape of the altar on which the globe is balanced. The dipintura itself is rectangular. The triangle, circle, and rectangle are repeated in various ways among the hieroglyphs of the civil world that occupy the foreground of the picture. Isosceles triangles are formed from the lines of the rudder and plow and are the shape of the sides of the cap of the cinerary urn. The rectangle is reflected as the form of the tablet bearing the alphabet. The circle is repeated in the fragment of the column on which the

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tablet is leaning, in the round bundle of the rods of the fasces, and in the round trays of the balance placed on top of the caduceus. The geometric shapes are set against the organic forms of the clouds, the forest vegetation behind the altar, and the figures of Dame Metaphysic and Homer. Each of these figures contains an equilateral triangle or wedge, one formed by the head and outstretched arm of Dame Metaphysic, whose winged temples also form such a wedge, upside down, and one formed by the head of Homer in relation to the lines of his folded arms. Vaccaro’s dipintura for the 1730 edition of the New Science had to be redone to accommodate the 1744 edition, which was published not by Vico’s lifelong publisher Felice Mosca but by the Stamperia Muziana. The re-engraving of the frontispiece was done by Francesco Sesone at the direction of Vico (fig. 3).∏ Sesone also engraved a bust of Vico, from the portrait by Francesco Solimena, that is printed opposite the dipintura (figs. 1 and 2). Beneath the engraved bust is an inscription by the Jesuit Domenico Lodovico, to the effect: ‘‘Here is Vico; the artist could depict his countenance; Oh that someone could depict his character and genius.’’ On receiving a copy of the 1730 edition of the New Science Lodovico wrote Vico, suggesting that a dwarf should be added beside the alphabet, in the dipintura, like Dante’s mountaineer who is struck dumb with astonishment when he enters the city (Purg. XXVI.67–70), and that beneath the dwarf should be written ‘‘Lodo-Vico’’ (‘‘I praise Vico’’).π It is a strange letter, to say the least. Lodovico has entered Vico’s ‘‘great city of the human race’’ and is astonished at all that is there. The decision to include Lodovico’s couplet beneath Vico’s bust may stem from Lodovico’s status, at the time, as rector of the Collegio Massimo del Gesù Vecchio, the Jesuit school Vico attended in 1680 and 1681.∫ Also included in the 1744 edition is a second emblematic engraving, set in the middle of the title page and known as the impresa (fig. 4).Ω (Neither the impresa nor the engraving of Vico is reproduced in the Bergin and Fisch translation of the 1744 edition.) The impresa and the dipintura are ‘‘before and after’’ pictures of metaphysics. In the impresa Dame Metaphysic is seated on the globe leaning on a base. The globe is on the ground, not raised onto the altar as in the dipintura, and it does not have the zodiacal belt bearing the signs of Leo and Virgo that girds the celestial globe in the dipintura (NS 3).∞≠ Dame Metaphysic is gazing at herself in a mirror and holding an isosceles triangle, the type of triangle that dominates the terrestrial hieroglyphs in the foreground of the dipintura, as opposed to the celestial and celestially inspired equilateral triangles. Dame Metaphysic, gazing at herself in the mirror, is reminiscent of Vico’s characterization, in the Ancient Wisdom, of Descartes’s

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cogito as having its precedent in Plautus’s comedy, Amphitryon, where Sosia gazes at himself in a mirror and concludes that he exists.∞∞ All is terrestrial in the impresa. Instead of divine illumination there is selfreflection. There is no depicted source of divine light. On the column are the words ignota latebat. This inscription means ‘‘She [Metaphysic], unknown, was lying hidden.’’ This is metaphysic before Vico’s new science of metaphysic. All the parts of the dipintura are there, in the impresa, but in a static form. Once the new science is discovered they become dynamic. The circular mirror into which Metaphysic gazes is raised to the heavens and becomes the circle holding the divine eye of providence. The block or plinth bearing the inscription becomes the altar that balances the globe. The isosceles triangle is transformed from an abstract geometric form to a form embodied in the hieroglyphs of the civil world. Missing from the impresa are all the specific hieroglyphics of the civil world, as well as Homer—a dominant part of the dipintura. There is an analogy with Ignota latebat and what Vico says about Homer in his explanation of the dipintura. He says that the cracked base of the statue of Homer symbolizes that in the first New Science (1725) he sensed but did not comprehend the significance of his discovery of the true Homer. In fact, Vico’s attention to the true nature of Homer goes back to his notes on Homer in the third book of the Universal Law. In his explanation of the dipintura Vico says of Homer, ‘‘Unknown until now [non saputosi finora], he has held hidden from us the true institutions [ci ha tenuto nascoste le cose vere] of the fabulous time among the nations’’ (NS 6). Until his discovery of the true identity of Homer—that he is the conscience of the ancient Greek people themselves— Vico could not cast metaphysics in its true form. Vico says that the master key to his science, which cost him almost all of his literary life, was the discovery that the ‘‘origins both of languages and letters lies in the fact that the first gentile peoples, by a demonstrated necessity of nature, were poets who spoke in poetic characters’’ (NS 34). This discovery of an original form of thinking that takes place through poetic characters or ‘‘imaginative universals’’ is the basis of Vico’s conception of ‘‘poetic wisdom’’ (sapienza poetica). This discovery allows Vico to offer a new solution to the Platonic quarrel with the poets, which has set the agenda of Western philosophy as a form of thinking at odds with poetry. Homer’s wisdom, from the point of view of this agenda, is seen as a form of false philosophy that is presented in images of which no consistent sense can be made. It is a form of eikasia masquerading as the form of the highest wisdom—the bottom of the divided line pretending to be the top.

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Vico’s resolution of this ancient quarrel is to take a positive approach to poetry and to deny that it is philosophy. Thus Vico can assign to poetry its own form of wisdom (la sapienza poetica). Once this is done he can portray philosophy arising from poetry. Poetry or myth is seen as the original and true apprehension of the divine as revealed and as the original insight out of which the civil world is founded. The power of the first fathers and founders of families is based on their knowledge of the ways of the divine, through augury. To reconceive the relationship between philosophy and poetry Vico must show that poetry has a positive content. The crucial step in this is Vico’s ‘‘discovery of the true Homer.’’ He shows that Homer is to be regarded not as an early philosopher thinking in confused images but as the thought of the Greek people themselves (NS 875). The texts of Homer then become summations of that poetic wisdom, governed by the poetic universals by which the ancient Greek people organized their world and founded their society, based on their original apprehension of the divine. Within this wisdom there is a poetic metaphysic that becomes the basis of the later, rational, Platonic metaphysics. The negative side to the appearance of philosophy after Homer’s age is that once rational philosophy appears the original poetic apprehension of the divine of religion has been lost. The original formative power of fantasia begins to fade in the philosophical pursuit of purely intellectual forms. At the hands of the moderns, such as Locke and Descartes, an attempt to ground metaphysical knowledge in the purely human powers of the senses or the suppositional powers of reason settles in. As Vico says in one of his additions to the New Science, his ‘‘Reprehension of the Metaphysics of René Descartes, Benedict Spinoza, and John Locke’’: ‘‘If one does not begin from—‘a god who to all men is Jove’—one cannot have any idea either of science or of virtue . . . just as this vulgar [poetic] metaphysic taught men lost in the bestial state to form the first human thought from that of Jove, so the learned must not admit any truth in metaphysic that does not begin from true Being, which is God’’ (NS 1212).∞≤ Vico claims that the true beginning point for metaphysics is the apprehension of the divine that is first accomplished in the creation of poetic metaphysics. Vichian metaphysics begins in poetic metaphysics. Vichian metaphysics is the new science itself: ‘‘This New Science or metaphysics [questa Nuova Scienza, o sia la metafisica]’’ (31). In the lower-left corner of the dipintura, among the hieroglyphics of the civil world, is the winged cap of Hermes or Mercury (Mercurio). In the 1730 edition this cap is leaning against the cracked base of Homer’s statue. In Sesone’s redrawing of 1744 the cap is on the ground in front of the base (cf. figs. 3 and 5). It is not clear why the cap of Mercury has been moved. Since Vico commissioned the 1744 drawing as well as that of 1730, we can presume

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that the change is deliberate and not just a decision of the engraver. (In editions of the New Science done after Vico’s death, the dipintura is redrawn in various, often quite ugly, unintelligent ways.)∞≥ The winged cap is Vico’s cap. He says he had the cap placed against the base of Homer’s statue in the 1730 engraving to signify his realization of the importance of the true Homer for his conception of the new science. The line of the divine ray of providence runs from the eye to Dame Metaphysic and on from Homer to Vico’s cap. In the 1744 engraving the cap is shown as no longer belonging uniquely to Vico. It is offered to the reader. It is now both Vico’s cap and the reader’s cap, in accordance with Vico’s insistence, in his section on method, that the proof of the science is for the reader to make for himself by meditating and narrating it to himself (349). The cap is there for the reader to take up and assume the heroic mind of Mercury. In his discussion of the contents of the dipintura Vico enumerates and comments on each hieroglyph from right to left, but he stops short of mentioning the winged cap of Mercury. His enumeration ends with his explanation of the caduceus of Mercury, that the caduceus is the ‘‘last of the hieroglyphs’’ (NS 30). Because Vico comments so carefully on each thing in the scene it is curious that he says nothing of the cap. The figure of Metaphysic in both the dipintura and the impresa has winged temples, similar to the cap’s wings. Vico introduces his remarks on Dame Metaphysic with reference to the winged temples, but he does not explain their significance. In the New Science proper, independent of his explanation of the dipintura, Vico does comment on the nature of the cap of Mercury. In the section on poetic politics he discusses Mercury as the carrier of the first agrarian law to the mutinous famuli, those of the gentile nations that are dependent on the great families founded by the first fathers. Vico says that Mercury’s rod or caduceus with its two serpents signified the rights of ownership given to the famuli and those retained by the heroes. Vico says: ‘‘There are two wings at the top of the rod (signifying the eminent domain of the [heroic] orders), and the cap worn by Mercury is also winged (to confirm their high and free sovereign constitution, as the cap remained a hieroglyph of [lordly] liberty)’’ (NS 604). At the point when the heroic order of society is threatened with dissolution by the mutiny of the famuli, Mercury is the bringer of a new balanced order that allows the heroic order to continue for a time in a new way. In his interpretation of the Law of the Twelve Tables Vico claims that the agrarian law was put up first and later added to; over time it and these additions were called the ‘‘twelve’’ tables, playing on the symbolic power of the number twelve.∞∂ Vico says: ‘‘In addition, Mercury has wings on his heels (signifying that ownership of the fields resided in the reigning senates)’’ (604). In the impresa the

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seated figure of Metaphysic has bare feet, but Dame Metaphysic of the dipintura, mounted upon the globe, wears sandals. From the engraving it does not appear that they are winged, but they may represent the winged sandals of Mercury. Metaphysic is in a position analogous to Mercury in that, like Mercury as messenger of Zeus or Jove, she brings the message of the divine. The divine eye reflected from the breast of Metaphysic is transferred into the civil world through Homer’s poetic wisdom. Although the ethos of the hero is lost as a basis of social action, it need not be lost as an activity of thought that attempts heroically to recover the sense of the divine and the poetic wisdom that modern metaphysics has lost, as Vico shows in his oration ‘‘On the Heroic Mind.’’ In this sense Vico’s new art of metaphysics, like Mercury the bringer of the new agrarian law, allows for metaphysics to re-found intellectual order in a new way. Since forms of thought are interlocked with forms of social order for Vico, the winged cap of Mercury suggests that Mercury can actually visit in the heroic age of a nation as a social force, but in the modern age of humans Mercury can visit only as a form of metaphysic—the divine can appear only as a form of oratory and literature. Yet metaphysics, like Mercury, is a messenger of the divine wisdom in the civil order. By placing the cap in the dipintura Vico has placed himself in the picture. Vico is the bringer of civil wisdom in his new science of the common nature of nations. Vico says: ‘‘Here it must be added that this Greek Mercury was the Thoth or Mercury who gives laws to the Egyptians’’ (605). Mercury is the thrice-great Hermes, Mercurius Trismegistus. He is the original imaginative universal of civil wisdom. ‘‘Just so the Egyptians reduced to the genus ‘civil sage’ all their inventions useful or necessary to the human race which are particular effects of civil wisdom, and because they could not abstract the intelligible genus ‘civil sage,’ much less the form of civil wisdom in which these Egyptians were sages, they imaged it forth as Thrice-great Hermes’’ (209). The cap of Hermes is Vico’s self-portrait, resting opposite the engraving of his portrait in the 1744 edition. The Greeks placed the image of Hermes at the threshold of doors of houses. He was thought of predominantly as a god who guided travelers on their perilous ways. His image appeared at intersections in towns and at crossroads in the country, a natural extension of his role of conducting the souls of the dead to the underworld (Hermes Psychopompus). Hermes does not just bear the souls of the dead to the underworld; he goes there to find them and bring them back to the land of the living (Aeneid 4.242). Because voyages were most often undertaken for reasons of commerce Hermes is a god of commerce, an activity that involves the ownership of property. Vico says that ‘‘the need for

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certainty of ownership was a large part of the necessity for the invention of characters and names’’ (NS 483). Because of this connection of ownership and language, Vico says, the Thrice-Great Hermes or Mercury of the Egyptians ‘‘was their inventor of laws and letters’’ (NS 483, cf. Plato, Phlb. 18b–d, Phdr. 274c–275b). The art of commerce requires discussion; in order for the merchant to overcome the buyer’s hesitation, persuasive words are required. Thus Hermes became the god of eloquence, of logos (Plato, Crat. 407e–408a). According to Hesiod, Hermes also brings to men’s hearts the sentiments and impressions that Zeus has inspired (Hymn to Hermes, 574–78). Giordano Bruno makes Thrice-Great Hermes the inventor not of letters but of the ‘‘inner writing’’ of the art of the orator, the art of topoi or the memory-places upon which the orator’s speech is based.∞∑ Apollo says that it is Hermes who can best distinguish true philosophers from false (Lucian, Fugitivi, 22). As the messenger bringing the New Science Vico is all these things, the guide to the underworld of history, the discoverer of the origins of laws and letters, the professor of eloquence, the formulator of the wisdom of divine providence, and the orator of the heroic mind. In these roles he is the archetype for his readers. What is the source of Vico’s decision to commission the dipintura and to write a detailed explanation of it as an introduction to the work? The dipintura is part of the Renaissance emblem tradition that persists into the eighteenth century. Rousseau commissioned and commented on the engravings employed as frontispieces to his First and Second Discourses, although not at such length as did Vico. Hobbes’s frontispiece to the Leviathan is an emblematic embodiment of the themes of his work, including the quotation from the Latin Vulgate on the nature of Leviathan from the book of Job and scenes presenting analogies between civil and ecclesiastical power, but Hobbes does not offer a commentary on the symbolism of the engraving. The emblem tradition is part of the art of memory, which Bacon describes in De augmentis: ‘‘The Art of Memory is built upon two intentions; Prenotion and Emblem.’’ He says: ‘‘By Prenotion I mean a kind of cutting off of infinity of search. For when a man desires to recall anything into his memory, if he have no prenotion or perception of that he seeks, he seeks and strives and beats about hither and thither as if in infinite space.’’ Bacon understands prenotion as part of ‘‘artificial memory.’’ In oratory, ‘‘artificial memory’’ is the practice of the orator to employ a series of places or commonplaces with which, in advance of a speech, he associates as mental images the points he wishes to make. The orator can then recall these mental images or topics by recalling the series of places or scenes with which he has associated them in advance. This gives the orator a kind of ‘‘inner writing’’ on which to rely as he delivers the oration.

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Bacon says: ‘‘For in artificial memory we have the places digested and prepared beforehand; the images we make extempore according to the occasion.’’ ‘‘Emblem,’’ says Bacon, ‘‘reduces intellectual conceptions to sensible images; for an object of sense always strikes the memory more forcibly and is more easily impressed upon it than an object of intellect.’’ An emblem is a concept put in sensible form. Prenotion and emblem are the devices for the ‘‘Art of Retaining or Keeping Knowledge.’’∞∏ Vico’s opening lines explaining the dipintura are: ‘‘As Cebes the Theban made of Morals, we here present for view a Tablet of Civil things, which may serve the Reader to conceive [concepire] the Idea of this Work before reading it, and to bring it back most easily to memory [memoria] with such aid as the imagination [ fantasia] may provide him, after having read it’’ (NS 1, my trans.). Vico has combined in his dipintura both facets of Bacon’s art of retaining and keeping knowledge. The reader is supplied with a prenotion of Vico’s work because the dipintura offers in a single finite space the intersections of the three worlds of nations, nature, and God (NS 42), and Vico has supplied these fundamental places as images. These place-images give us in advance a grasp of the work, its central concepts, and also stand as aids to memory to recall it. In this first sentence Vico has inserted the elements of his threefold doctrine of memory that he presents in his ‘‘philosophical proofs for the discovery of the true Homer’’: ‘‘Memory thus has three aspects: memory [memoria] when it remembers things, imagination [ fantasia] when it alters or imitates them, and ingenuity [ingegno] when it gives them a new turn or puts them into proper arrangement and relationship’’ (819). Ingegno is the power required for the mind to form a concept (concepire) because it allows us to bring one thing together with another. What does Vico mean by his analogy of the New Science with the Tablet of Cebes? He says the Tablet of Cebes is a doctrine of moral things and the new science is a doctrine of civil things. The Tablet of Cebes is a moral treatise that portrays the course of human life in the form of a dialogue between a wise old man and a group of pilgrims. The pilgrims ask the senex to explain the meaning of a picture on a tablet that they see inside a temple of Saturn. The picture portrays a crowd of people standing outside a circular wall, within which are smaller concentric enclosures (fig. 8). These circles represent stages of human life. As the figures in the picture pass from one circle to another, choosing between virtue and vice, ignorance and error, the ascent is led toward true education. Most people mistake false education for true; only a few arrive at the ultimate inner circle of happiness. The Tablet is by an anonymous author of the first century a.d., but sixteenth-century humanists believed the author

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to be Cebes (one of Socrates’s interlocutors in the Phaedo), who had learned this doctrine of the via virtutis from Socrates. The Tablet was translated into most European languages, and many representations of the scene described in the text were made.∞π Both Nicolini and Fisch regarded Shaftesbury’s Second Characters as the likely source for Vico’s procedure of using an allegorical engraving with a commentary.∞∫ Shaftesbury spent the last fifteen months of his life in Naples, from November 1711 to February 1713. The year 1712 was one of the most creative periods of his life. His project was his incomplete Second Characters, which was to be a sequel to his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, which he prepared for the press just prior to departing for Italy, where he hoped to find a climate that would offer relief from his asthma. In the Second Characters Shaftesbury develops a method of combining allegorical engravings with a commentary, to produce a moral philosophy based on emblems. His plan was to promote an awareness that would improve men through art; art had an ethical use. On February 12, 1712, he wrote: ‘‘I have a Noble Virtuoso Scheme before me, and design if I get Life this Summer to apply even this great Work (the History Piece bespoke, and now actually working) to Credit & Reputation of Philol.’’∞Ω (Philol. is used by Shaftesbury to refer to philosophy, often specifically to moral philosophy or the study of morals.) Shaftesbury wished to combine the study of the fine arts, or what he called ‘‘virtuosoship,’’ with the study of morals, which would offer a new doctrine of moral philosophy. Shaftesbury had an engraver working in his palazzo on the pictures for his book. In his correspondence Shaftesbury does not mention Vico, but he writes of conversing with Giuseppe Valletta, the owner of the most distinguished collection of books in Naples, which Vico appraised when it was purchased by the Fathers of the Oratory, and with Paolo Mattia Doria, Vico’s lifelong friend to whom he dedicated the Ancient Wisdom. Doria gave Shaftesbury a gift, a tame deer. Shaftesbury helped establish communication between Valletta’s circle and Newton.≤≠ Shaftesbury transmitted to Newton ‘‘some small literary works,’’ which Fisch claims probably included Vico’s published seventh oration on the Study Methods (1709) and his Ancient Wisdom (1710). This perhaps established the precedent that led Vico to send a copy of the first New Science to Newton, which may have reached Newton about a year before his death in 1727.≤∞ It seems likely that Vico would have been included in some of these conversations and that there would have been much discussion in the salons and academies of Naples of Shaftesbury’s project of a ‘‘noble virtuoso scheme’’ of moral philosophy. Included in the Second Characters, as reconstructed by

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Benjamin Rand, is a translation from Greek of ‘‘The Picture of Cebes, Disciple of Socrates,’’ likely dictated by Shaftesbury, showing that he intended to include this in his work along with other depictions and commentary, such as the ‘‘Judgment of Hercules’’ based on the incident in Xenophon’s Memorabilia where Hercules must choose between the two goddesses Virtue and Pleasure (Mem. II.1.21–33).≤≤ Vico, faced with the problem of filling the space left by the deleted pages of the Novella letteraria, may have thought back to Shaftesbury’s procedure of moral philosophy and to the Tablet of Cebes, the archetype of such a procedure of connecting an emblematic picture to a discourse. He sees this as a way to explain the ‘‘Idea of the Work.’’ In the first New Science the ‘‘Idea of the Work’’ consists of a single statement saying it is a work ‘‘in which is meditated a science concerning the nature of the nations, from which arose humanity of itself, that all began with religions and came to pass with the sciences, the disciplines and the arts’’ (FNS 2). The ‘‘Idea of the Work’’ of the second New Science is an elaboration of this statement. Vico makes no further mention of the Tablet of Cebes in the New Science, nor does he discuss it elsewhere. He has expanded moral philosophy into the civil philosophy of the life of nations. There is an aspect to the Tablet of Cebes that Vico would have known well; it involves the sense of the threshold. To enter a book of wisdom is to cross a threshold, and the reader should not take this lightly. As the professor of eloquence Vico is always closely aware of his readers, to whom he gives specific advice in the 1730 edition of the New Science, at the end of his explanation of the idea of the work. In the Tablet of Cebes, when the pilgrims ask the senex to tell them what the picture means, he replies in the language of the ancient sense of the threshold. In what is likely Shaftesbury’s translation, it is as follows: ‘‘Strangers said he, I do not at all grudge you that satisfaction, but this you must understand, that the relation carries something of a danger with it. ‘‘And what is that? said I. ‘‘Why, said he, that if you give attention and understand the things that are told you, you will become wise and happy; but if you do not you will become fools and unhappy, vicious and ignorant, and will pass your days wretchedly. For this relation is like the riddle that the Sphinx used to propose to men. If a man understood it he came off with safety, but if he understood it not he was destroyed by the Sphinx. It is same with this relation, for folly is a sphinx in men.’’≤≥

In the New Science Vico mentions ‘‘the Sphinx who puts riddles to travelers and slays them on their failure to find a solution’’ (648) in making a distinction

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between the heroes who are truly noble and the ‘‘plebeians who, contending with the heroes for a share in the auspices, are vanquished in the attempt and cruelly punished’’ (648). Vico’s New Science is a noble scheme of heroic mind, and there is a danger for the impious reader, that is, the reader who cannot grasp the principle of providence in the world of nations. Vico, like all humanist writers, assumes that his reader knows the texts upon which he draws—that the reader is not ignorant. Vico makes it clear, in the last words of the New Science, ‘‘that this Science carries inseparably with it the study of piety, and that he who is not pious cannot be truly wise’’ (1112). One is reminded of Vico’s second oration, which has as its theme that ‘‘there is no enemy more dangerous and treacherous to its adversary than the fool to himself,’’ which Vico glosses from Plato’s claim in the Laws (766a) concerning the dangers resulting from a misguided upbringing. Vico says that ‘‘the man who is a fool is the most ferocious of all animals.’’≤∂ The new science is a riddle that the reader must unfold. We must ‘‘riddle a rede [German: speech, oration] from the sphinxish pairc [Phoenix Park, adjoining H. C. E.’s pub] while Ede was a guardin’’ (FW 324.6–7). To do so we shall need ‘‘our own sphoenix spark’’ (473.18). We must make our own version of Vico’s oration, raising up the great city of the human race, not from the garden of Eden but from the forest of the giants of the gentile nations, guided by the ray from the providential eye.

The First New Science and Vico’s Etymologicon In his autobiography Vico says that ‘‘he wished only the New Science [1730] to remain to the world’’ (A 191). He says, ‘‘The first edition [1725] was left standing for the sake of three passages with which Vico found himself fully satisfied. It is principally for these three passages that the first edition of the New Science is [still] necessary. . . . Accordingly, when the Second New Science is reprinted, the First should be printed along with it, or at least, in order that they may not be missed, these passages should be printed’’ (A 192–93). He adds that the Universal Law was a sketch for the First New Science and that he considers it ‘‘necessary for two passages only—one on the fable that the Law of the Twelve Tables came from Athens, the other on Tribonian’s fable of the ‘Royal Law’ ’’ (A 193). He points out that he reworked these into two discourses. These became part of the ‘‘Corrections, Meliorations and Additions’’ to the Second New Science.≤∑ The three passages in the First New Science to which Vico refers are book 3, chapters 29–30, 38, and 43.≤∏ Book 3 concerns Vico’s attempt to draw the principles of his science from languages. In his analytic table of contents he

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describes the third book as ‘‘Fas gentium: an expression used by the Latin heralds.—The principles of this science drawn from a language common to all nations’’ (FNS 5). Fas is divine law, as opposed to ius or human law. Vico explains fas in the Universal Law as an immutable natural law or right that derives from the natural order of things, which he says St. Augustine defined as the ‘‘decree and voice of the divine mind. It is that by which God makes his being known to man as the source of eternal justice’’ (De uno, ch. 48). Vico’s purpose in the third book of the First New Science is to complete his science of the principles of the ‘‘natural law of the gentes,’’ the ‘‘jurisprudence of the human race,’’ with a science of language. This science will demonstrate that language, letters, and laws originate together. The three passages Vico singles out concern, first, his discovery of a science of blazonry that reveals the origin and development of coats of arms, military insignia, and imprints on coins as a mute language of the gentile nations; second, his discovery that his analysis of the origin of the Latin language can be used to demonstrate generally that languages and letters originate and develop together; and, third, his idea of a dictionary of mental words (voci mentali) common to all nations by which they, at various times and places, were able to formulate the meanings of the human necessities and utilities common to all of them. Vico refers to each of these three passages in his ‘‘Idea of the Work’’ of the Second New Science, his commentary on the dipintura (NS 28, 33, 35), specifically calling attention to their existence in the First New Science. These passages focus on Vico’s idea of a universal etymologicon. He says, ‘‘Such a lexicon is necessary for learning the language spoken by the ideal eternal history traversed in time by the histories of all nations’’ (NS 35). Why does Vico insist that, because of these short passages, the First New Science is to be reprinted next to the Second New Science? He says this as though the topics these passages treat of are not incorporated into the Second New Science, yet he not only cites them directly in the ‘‘Idea of the Work’’ but also devotes a special chapter to ‘‘the origins of languages and letters; and therein, the origins of hieroglyphics, laws, names, family arms, medals, money; and hence of the first language and literature of the natural law of the gentes’’ as part of his conception of ‘‘poetic logic’’ in his second book on ‘‘poetic wisdom’’ (NS bk. 2, ch. 4, 428–55). Throughout the Second New Science he uses the etymologies of Latin words to demonstrate the origins of customs common to all nations, and at various places he calls attention to his conception of a ‘‘vocabolario mentale comune’’ (32, 162, 355, 482), a ‘‘lingua mentale comune’’ (161–62), and a ‘‘dizionario mentale’’ (145, 445, 527, 542). Vico’s conception of a ‘‘mental dictionary’’ is for his readers and commentators one of the most curious and inexplicit parts of his new science. This is

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because he refers to it in only the abovementioned few places in the Second New Science, and these citations take the form of calling the reader’s attention to something that Vico claims is an example or verification of the mental dictionary. He never presents a discussion of this dictionary as he does of other leading concepts. It seems always there for reference, but Vico never makes clear exactly what it is. Perhaps Vico intended his reader to learn this from his third book of the First New Science, but its discussion even there is brief. Why would Vico not simply repeat these three passages in full in the Second New Science? They are not long. It is an awkward idea—to presume the First New Science should be republished just for these few pages. Vico restated the material on the Law of the Twelve Tables and the Royal Law of Tribonian from the Universal Law as part of his additions to the Second New Science. Why not do the same for the mental dictionary? One reason may be personal. Vico wrote his comment about the importance of these three passages in 1731, in the continuation of his autobiography. Because the Second New Science had appeared in 1730, he may have realized that not enough is said there about his ‘‘mental dictionary’’ and is attempting to solve the issue. A further reason may be that he wishes to keep the reader aware of the development of his thought. The main purpose of Vico’s autobiography, and what makes it stand against the ‘‘feigned’’ autobiography of Descartes’s Discourse, is its genetic method. As Vico says, he wrote his autobiography with the ‘‘candor proper to a historian’’ (A 113, 182). Vico’s attention to the history of his own thought would be reason to mention the importance of the three passages of the First New Science for the Second, but it does not explain the necessity for the First New Science to be reprinted in order to preserve them. The First New Science is a treatise in the manner of treatises of the eighteenth century. The Second New Science is an oration in the manner of the sixteenth-century humanists. A treatise is a systematic account of all parts of a subject. Vico’s First New Science is based on a logical ordering of the two main parts of his science—the philosophical and the philological. Although his science is to be accomplished by the combination of these two modes of thought, he discusses each separately in the First New Science. In his autobiography Vico acknowledges that this separation is the principle error of this work: ‘‘In the First New Science he erred, if not in the matter, then certainly in the arrangement, because he treated the origins of ideas apart from the origins of languages, whereas they were by nature united.’’ Vico says: ‘‘Furthermore he discussed separately the methods of deriving the matters of this Science from these two sources, whereas he ought rather to have derived them from the two together; whence many errors of arrangement came about’’

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(A 194). In keeping the philosophical and the philological separate Vico was continuing the arrangement he employed in the second book of his treatise on universal law, De constantia iurisprudentis, which is presented in two parts, De constantia philosophiae and De constantia philologiae. Book 1 of the First New Science explains that it is not possible to discover the principles of a science of the law of nations either from the philosophers (ch. 9) or from the philologists (ch. 10). To have such a science we must formulate a metaphysics that will allow us to contemplate the common sense of humanity as it arises from human nature and develops in accordance with eternal providence. This requires putting aside the theories of the seventeenthcentury philosophers of natural law—Grotius, Selden, and Pufendorf—and the beliefs about the histories of nations and languages of the philologians— the historians and grammarians—in order to form a new union of these two manners of thought. Book 2 treats of ‘‘the principles of this science drawn from ideas’’ (philosophy based on the principle of providence). Book 3 treats of ‘‘the principles of this science drawn from language’’ (philology based on new principles of mythology and etymology as containing the first histories of the nations). Book 4, which consists of only a few paragraphs, summarizes the proofs that establish this science, and Book 5 explains in detail the sense in which all nations, no matter how diverse, follow a common pattern in their birth, rise, development, and decline. Vico ends the work with a brief ‘‘Conclusion’’ reiterating the Virgilian epigraph of the work, ‘‘A Iove principium Musae’’ (‘‘from Jove the Muses began’’), and adding to this: ‘‘Iovis omnia plena’’ (‘‘all things are full of Jove’’) (FNS 475). Vico means that all knowledge and virtue arise from an original connection to the divine and that the life of nations is governed by its presence. Following this brief conclusion Vico adds an ‘‘Indice’’ (index) consisting of a list of principles which emerge from his work, and which he separates into philological and philosophical. These are similar to some of his axioms of the Second New Science. Vico’s tone in the First New Science is often argumentative and critical. The shadow of the ‘‘New Science in Negative Form,’’ the original draft of the New Science that Vico abandoned, is more evident in the first New Science than in the second. This argumentative approach and proof comes to a head in book 2, where Vico offers ‘‘a practical test’’ of his science by applying it to the question whether the Law of the Twelve Tables came from Athens or not. He introduces this test in the strongest of terms: he says he wishes ‘‘to test the truth and utility of this new Science, in order to decide whether we ought to proceed further with it or abandon it at the outset’’ (FNS 79). This test is reminiscent of

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Descartes’s insistence, at the beginning of the second Meditation, that he will continue with his method of doubt until he is successful in establishing something certain or until he must abandon his quest for certain knowledge by recognizing for certain that there is nothing certain. The First New Science is not a better book than the Second. Vico is right in his assessment of this. But in the First New Science Vico often states a point more succinctly. At the end of book 2, Vico speaks of an ‘‘eternal point of the perfect state of the nations.’’ This state of perfection would come about when all the sciences, disciplines, and arts have been fully directed toward the perfection of man’s nature and have reached a certain axm ¯ h´ (acme) (247; cf. 11). This acme is when all the sciences, disciplines, and arts have grasped their own natures as developed from the religions and laws of humanity and have come, at the same time, to serve them. This perfected state cannot and has not been achieved by the Stoics, Epicureans, or Cynics. They have set themselves apart from the vulgar wisdom of the life of nations that must be integrated with the recondite wisdom of philosophical speculation in order for such a state of perfection to be achieved. This perfected state appears to be a description of what Vico, in his later oration of 1732, calls heroic mind. It describes a moment of possible perfection in a nation. The possibility of this moment of perfection presupposes Vico’s discovery of the role of the hero in the life of nations. He says: ‘‘This heroic nature, which lies halfway between the divine and human institutions of the nations, has hitherto lain unknown, because we have either relied solely on our memory of it or imagined it other than it was’’ (FNS 89). The state of the perfection of the nations is not the heroic age but the recapturing of a golden or heroic moment of the integration of human and divine things in the third age, that of humans, guided by the insights of Vico’s new science. It is what Vico considers in his addition to the Second New Science known as the ‘‘Pratica’’ (1405–11), which at one point Vico intended as a second chapter, to be added to the Conclusion.≤π To solve the problem of the separation of philosophy and philology in the arrangement of the First New Science, Vico moves from the logical sense of presenting his subject in parts, as a treatise, to the rhetorical sense of a speech of the whole, of an oration. The First New Science is not truly eloquent. Vico, as he says in his autobiography, holds highest the humanist ideal, to be ‘‘wisdom speaking.’’ Eloquence requires that the new science be presented as a complete speech. If the whole is the flower of wisdom, then the speech that contains it must be a whole, it must meet the conditions of an eloquent oration. In reformulating the New Science on this basis, Vico has the unique

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problem of constructing an oration that can stand on its own, as a whole speech, and at the same time provide keys internal to it that will guide the reader to make the oration for himself. The proof of his science that Vico offers the reader in the Second New Science rests on the reader being able to meditate (meditare) and narrate (narrare) it to himself (NS 349). Throughout the First New Science and the Second, Vico speaks of ‘‘meditating’’ the principles of the science as well as the points of their application. ‘‘Meditation’’ is a long-standing practice in Christianity, in which the adherent takes up a specific belief or question of doctrine and ponders its meaning through to its base. Vico is playing on this sense, on the one hand, and on the other he is opposing his sense of meditation to Descartes’s use of this term in his Meditations on First Philosophy. For Descartes, to meditate is to employ reason critically in order to establish those principles that are rationally indubitable. For Vico, to meditate is to think topically, to seek out and draw forth those principles that are at the basis of the common life of humanity. Such meditation results not in logical, deductive proof but in narrative proof. It results in the truth of the true story. It is the kind of narration that is sought in evaluating evidence in a legal proceeding or in the diagnosis of a disease. In the humanist tradition, the predecessor to Vico’s oration of the New Science is Pico della Mirandola’s oration the Dignity of Man. Pico’s Conclusiones inspired Vico to develop his idea of a new science by extending Pico’s conception of knowledge to include philology (A 157). But in the Dignity of Man, perhaps the most famous document of the Renaissance, Pico did not have Vico’s special problem of at the same time instructing the reader in how to accomplish a re-oration of its contents. The phases of rhetorical composition that come down to us from Quintilian are: inventio, or the discovery and compilation of materials; dispositio, their structuring and arrangement; elocutio, their formulation in language; memoria, their commitment to memory; and pronuntiatio, their appropriate delivery to an audience (Inst. orat. III.3). The first three of these are required of any composition; the last two are required for oral presentation, traditionally associated with speeches in a forum or the law courts. The Second New Science proper begins with Vico’s ‘‘Chronological Table,’’ in which the materials of the history of the ancient nations are collected (fig. 9). Vico’s table is based on the biblical dates of the years of the world. The First New Science contains no such table, even though it discusses many of the details of the table. The true forerunner of this table is Vico’s original sketch of the new science, the ‘‘Nova scientia tentatur’’ of De constantia philologiae, the second book of the Universal Law. In the Chronological Table of the Second New Science Vico

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has provided the reader with the phase of inventio. This table is followed by Vico’s presentation of his 114 axioms, which he says are needed to give form to the materials set forth in the table (119). These axioms provide the order of the arrangement of the materials as they are developed in the speech of the New Science. The axioms are the basis of Vico’s dispositio and are accompanied by his discussion of the three principles of humanity—religion, marriage, and burial—and his section on method. What appears as the abovementioned Index at the end of the First New Science is expanded by Vico and inverted to become the beginning and foundation of the Second New Science. The second book of the Second New Science continues Vico’s dispositio by beginning with the divisions of the tree of poetic wisdom—whose trunk is poetic metaphysics—from which on one limb issue logic, morals, economics, and politics, and from the other the poetic sciences of physics, cosmography, astronomy, chronology, and geography (367). This second book is the major part of Vico’s entire speech, and it includes a doctrine of the origin of speech itself and the development of language. The second book, on poetic wisdom, is followed by the third book, on the true Homer. Homer is the teacher of speech to the West, the first to practice eloquence. Vico says in his address to the Academy of Oziosi that he sees Horace as the formulator of the principles of proper writing, whether in prose or poetry.≤∫ Like Horace, Vico holds that the poet should take Homer as a model (Ars poet., 73–74). Much of the second book, together with the third book, is Vico’s instruction in elocutio. The fourth book is a series of mnemonics. Vico takes the formula of the three ages of ideal eternal history and repeats it in relation to the various contents of his science: three kinds of natures, customs, natural law, governments, languages, characters, jurisprudence, authority, reason, judgments, and ‘‘sects of times.’’ The reader, going over these eleven sets of threes, can commit the doctrine of the new science to memory, memoria. What remains is the principle of pronuntiatio, which raises the question of audience. The fifth book and the Conclusion concern the recourse of the nations and the current state of modern life. The reader may have mastered the third book’s threefold pattern of the course any nation runs, but the reader, along with Vico, stands within the third age of the recourse of Western history. The reader must make his speech of the New Science as Vico has, within the age of modern barbarism, the barbarism of reflection (1106), in which the original powers of poetic wisdom and custom have faded, and thought is governed by abstract universals and society by written law. In these conditions of modern life the new scientist must attempt the complete speech. Vico says this science is perfect in its idea, and as such it requires

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complete expression. Vico states this principle at the end of the fifth book, through a gloss on Seneca: ‘‘ ‘This world is a paltry thing unless all the world may find [therein] what it seeks’ ’’ (1096). The speech, when remade by the reader, to be eloquent must say all that can be drawn forth from the subject, and the subject in this case is all that there is in the human world and all that there will be for the ages to come. The reader is left, in the Second New Science, not only with an example of a speech that brings together at all points the philosophical and the philological but also with ongoing indications in the text of the means whereby Vico has made his speech. The phases necessary to the rhetoric of his composition are imbedded in what Vico offers to the reader. The reader must keep in mind that Vico employs the central terms of his science rhetorically, not logically, in the course of its presentation. It is a mistake not to realize this, but it is also difficult to keep this fundamental feature of Vico’s work constantly in mind. Most of Vico’s commentators fail to keep it in mind, because they are logical, not rhetorical-poetical thinkers of the kind Vico himself is. Although commentators on the New Science often explain Vico’s various terms, they slip into discussing his work in the single senses of these terms more familiar to them and forget the warning of Vico’s second axiom, which leads to the conceit of scholars. The words of Vico’s terminology have double meanings: the meaning a term has in modern philosophical thought, which takes shape in the epistemologies of the seventeenth century and which today has become its standard sense, and Vico’s meaning, which Vico often derives from his conception of the term’s etymology, or from its sense in Roman jurisprudence. Vico is Joycean in that he is always forcing the reader to comprehend the double meaning or double truth of the words upon which he structures the new science. Joyce does this through puns. Vico does it through ambiguity. Ambiguity is a form of fallacy in ordinary logic, a specific instance of which is equivocation, or using a word in two senses. No argument is valid that changes the meaning of its terms in its course. In the doctrine of the syllogism this is known as the fallacy of four terms. But ambiguity is the key to poetical meaning and to much of oration.≤Ω The orator will play on the various meanings of words to draw forth for his hearers a central point. Consider as a sample ten of Vico’s terms, each of which I explain elsewhere in these pages, but which as a group emphasize Vico’s use of ambiguity. ‘‘Science’’ (scienza) has the modern sense of objective knowledge, something found by the knower to be true. For Vico it is something made by the knower, yet is objective, like something found. ‘‘Consciousness’’ or ‘‘conscience’’ (coscienza) has the sense of a mode of awareness or standard within the knowing subject that constitutes the basis of subjectivity. For Vico coscienza is the type

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of knowing realized in the natural sciences. ‘‘Providence’’ ( provvidenza) is God as the ultimate reality whose ordering powers provide guidance over the matters of human destiny. For Vico providence is connected not with the idea of progress in human affairs but with the corso and ricorso of history, in which the presence of the divine progressively declines and then must be renewed. ‘‘History’’ (storia) is not just the story of each people or nation. It is this, but it is also ‘‘ideal eternal’’ (storia ideale eterna), the story of the commonalities of all nations based on ‘‘the natural law of the gentes’’ (il diritto naturale delle genti). The ‘‘certain’’ (il certo) is the sense of something held to be indubitable, but not as established by reason or claimed as self-evident. What is certain is what is particular, determinate. But such a certainty is also reasonable, in that it is not to be doubted. The ‘‘true’’ (il vero) can be stated in propositional form, but it is something made and thus involves its cause—knowledge per causas. The true, for Vico, has the sense of what is ‘‘intelligible.’’ ‘‘Common sense’’ (il senso comune) is a standard of judgment, as it is for modern empiricism or rationalism, but it is not a free-standing power of mind. For Vico ‘‘common sense’’ is rooted in ‘‘communal sense,’’ the ways of thinking and acting developed in common by a people. ‘‘Fable’’ ( favola) for Vico is not the statement of a literal truth, but it is also not simply a falsehood. A fable is an expansion of a metaphor that is originally generated through the mind’s power of imagination ( fantasia) to order the world. Such original metaphorical formations later make possible literal meanings. ‘‘Poetic characters’’ (caratteri poetici) are mythic or literary figures involved in fables as products of the imagination, but they are more than this. They are actual ways to think, to form universals, ‘‘imaginative universals.’’ ‘‘Nation’’ (nazione) is the political entity in which a people live and organize themselves. But for Vico a nation is more than this; it is a birth (nascere, to be born). A nation is an origin. Vico’s terminology follows the principle of his oration Study Methods: to balance the moderns against the ancients. The reader is asked to have Joyce’s ‘‘two thinks at a time’’ (FW 583.7), to move between the modern and Vico’s meaning. Vico does not simply replace modern meanings with his own original ones. He repeatedly faces the reader with both. The single best example of Vico’s combination of philology and philosophy is his conception of a mental dictionary. It establishes two of his most important claims: the existence of a common sense (senso comune) of humanity and the validity of a new critical art (nuova arte critica). These support his discovery of the world of poetic wisdom, upon which his science depends. In the First New Science Vico describes the idea of a ‘‘universal etymologicon’’ (ch. 42)

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which leads to the idea of a ‘‘dictionary of mental words [voci mentali] common to all nations’’ (ch. 43). These two ideas go back, in the development of Vico’s thought, to his conception of the most ancient wisdom of the Italians ‘‘unearthed from the origins of the Latin language.’’ Vico discovered that the vulgar language of the ancient Romans contained meanings that they, a culture of farmers and soldiers, could not have formed. These meanings, he claims, were imported into ancient Latin from the recondite wisdom of the Ionian philosophers and the Etruscans, who were expert in religious knowledge. Vico establishes a dialectic between his etymology of Latin words and a system of philosophical and religious ideas that are embodied in them;≥≠ ‘‘certain phrases of Etruscan stabletalk and, in short, the learning betrayed at almost every line’s end’’ (FW 120.23–24). Vico’s procedure goes back to Plato’s Cratylus and the ancient grammarians—that a science of the correctness of names can be established by going back to the original meanings of words. These original meanings capture the nature of the things themselves. As this is attempted by Socrates for Greek words in the Cratylus, Vico attempts this for Latin. He is guided by Varro’s De lingua latina, by the researches into the causes of the Latin language made by the Italian humanist Giulio Cesare Scaligero (1484–1558), by the Spanish humanist Francisco Sanchez El Brocense (1523–1600), and by the Dutch scholar Gerard Jan Voss (1577–1649) in his Etymologicon linguae latinae.≥∞ The second passage from the First New Science that Vico says should be preserved concerns the origins of the Latin language. Vico reasons from what can be said of Latin to the idea that the same can be done for all languages and that this would provide the basis for a mental dictionary. In the Second New Science Vico says, ‘‘The aforesaid Dictionary develops in a new way the argument presented by Thomas Hayne’’ (NS 445) in his Linguarum cognatio (1639). Vico cites Hayne’s work as three separate works, referring to its subtitle, ‘‘sen de linguis in genere, et de variorum linguarum harmonia,’’ as two separate additional works. The fact that Vico cites this work in this confused way may mean that he did not know it but was taken by its idea. Hayne’s work contains no concept of a ‘‘mental dictionary’’ but is concerned with the traditional problems of etymology, of tracing words back to their original meanings.≥≤ Vico’s etymologicon is in a sense Adamic, but it is not literally Adamic because the etymologicon holds for gentile, not sacred, history. Gentile history is made from human nature itself, and human nature is a product of divine making. Language is an original human function through which the human world is made. In the Cratylus Socrates, having shown himself to be an expert practioner of the art of etymology, argues that the knowledge of names is in the end unimportant. To know the nature of things and learn the truth we

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must go beyond words, and through philosophy we must grasp the nature of things in themselves, whose meanings do not change, as do the meanings of words. Vico’s conception of the ‘‘idea of a dictionary of mental words common to all nations’’ (ch. 43) is an attempt to take this step of Socrates but not to separate philosophy from rhetoric and philology in so doing. The things to which the original meanings of the words apply are human institutions, which are themselves made and which exhibit a divine providential order. These are the actual human things of the civil world, the order of ideas or ‘‘mental words’’ that apply to them, and the particular words of the languages of the various nations that express them. Vico has taken the elements of the threefold distinction that Plato employs in his quarrel with poets in the Republic and put them into positive relationship. The actual things of the human world, human institutions, correspond to the visible object as made by Plato’s artisan, and the words that reflect it in the speech of the poets are the original meanings reached by etymology. Plato claims that the form or idea of the visible object is likely made by a god. Vico transforms this third element into the mental words of his dictionary, which consists of the forms of human nature that are at the basis of history. Vico gives one full example of the content of his mental dictionary; it is in the First New Science (388–89), and he refers to it in the Second New Science (445). He does this as an enumeration of the properties of the fathers of the first families, which later give rise to cities. These are the forms or the properties in which the fathers participate that make them what they are—the beginners of the gentile world: imagining deities, begetting children in marriages, taking auspices, claiming sovereign dominion over lands, turning their power into law, and so forth. These properties are the mental words or principles in Vico’s dictionary that define the nature of those who begin any nation, and who are called by various names. The original meanings of these names designate these properties. Vico’s etymologicon of the ultimate sources of the words of articulated languages is connected to his discovery of his science of blazonry. Prior to the rise of articulated language there is a mute language of things themselves, which are used as hieroglyphs. This is the first of the three passages that Vico says should be preserved from the First New Science (329–41). This mute language was the first language of the natural law of the gentes, which was a law of force based in the first families’ need to maintain and defend themselves, later extended to the defense of cities and nations by their armies. The forms of this mute language were recorded on a family’s coat of arms, military insignia, heroic heraldry, and, later, coins and medals. The law of force is based on divine law or the fas gentium in that the families base their actions on

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the ability of the first fathers to take the auspices of Jove. Vico says this is why the Latin heralds, in matters of both war and peace, would cry: ‘‘Audi, Jupiter, audi fas’’ (‘‘Hear us, Jupiter, hear us, divine law’’) (FNS 329; see also 177–80). One of Vico’s principal examples of the original mute language in which things are used as words is the reply of Idanthyrsus, king of the Scythians, to Darius the Great when Darius declared war on him. Idanthyrsus sent Darius ‘‘five real words’’: a frog, a mouse, a bird, a ploughshare, and a bow. ‘‘The frog signified that he, Idanthyrsus, was born of the earth of Scythia as frogs are born of the earth in summer rains, so that he was a son of that land. The mouse signified that he, like a mouse, had made his home where he was born; that is, that he had established his nation there. The bird signified that there the auspices were his; that is, that he was subject to none but God. The ploughshare signified that he had reduced those lands to cultivation, and thus tamed and made them his own by force. And finally the bow signified that as supreme commander of the arms of Scythia he had the duty and the might to defend her’’ (NS 435; also FNS 329). Mute language arises through gestures connected to things or through using things themselves as gestures. Articulate language originates in onomatopoeia, in the imitation of the thing itself. Thus Jove is originally named through the cry of pa! pape! that imitates thunder and lightning (NS 448). ‘‘The hundredlettered name again, the last word of perfect language’’ (FW 424.23–24). Law is born along with letters and languages. Vico says: ‘‘Along with this first birth of characters and languages was also born law, which the Latins called ious, and the ancient Greeks diaïon, celestial, from Dios, of Zeus or Jove. (Later, as Plato says in the Cratylus [412e], diaïon became dikaion [just] for the sake of euphony)’’ (NS 473). The need to understand the changes of meaning of legal terms in the law provides Vico with the model for his universal etymologicon. Vico says that, ‘‘just as the Roman jurisconsults, for example, possessed both a science of the languages of the civil law and a history of the times in which the words of the Law of the Twelve Tables had other, different meanings, so the jurisconsults of the natural law of the gentes [i.e., those who practice the new science] should have such a science by means of a universal etymologicon’’ (FNS 385). In the Universal Law Vico claims this same ability to interpret the changing meanings of words to the proper power and constancy of the jurisprudent. The validity of Vico’s conception of the natural law of the gentes upon which his new science depends is produced by the mental dictionary. The mental dictionary contains the ideas or norms through which the natural law of the gentes functions to produce the ages of the ideal eternal history. The mental dictionary is based on the claim that different historical languages

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presuppose interior psychological and structural constants that are common to all peoples. These constants that persist in historical languages are elements from the mentality of the first humans. This first mentality is an original common sense that Vico defines as ‘‘judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire people, an entire nation, or the entire human race’’ (axiom 12, par. 142). Vico says that this axiom will provide ‘‘a new art of criticism concerning the founders of nations’’ (143). ‘‘Common sense’’ (il senso comune) is conceived of by Vico as social. It does not refer to a form of thinking that is proto-scientific or proto-theoretical in the way that ‘‘common sense’’ is understood in modern theory of knowledge. The thought forms of rationality are grounded in the sentiments and sensibilities that arise within each nation and are held in common by it and all other nations. Vico says: ‘‘Uniform ideas originating among entire peoples unknown to each other must have a common ground of truth’’ (axiom 13, par. 144). Criticism requires a standard or criterion by which truth claims can be evaluated and placed in an order of relation to each other. Vico’s new art of criticism is based on the discovery of this new standard of a common sense of humanity, which has not been available to previous philological thought. Vico says that ‘‘this axiom [13] is a great principle which establishes the common sense of the human race as the criterion taught to the nations by divine providence to define what is certain in the natural law of the gentes. And the nations reach this certainty by recognizing the underlying agreements which, despite variations of detail, obtain among them all in respect of this law.’’ Vico says, ‘‘Thence issues the mental dictionary for assigning origins to all the divine articulated languages. It is by means of this dictionary that the ideal eternal history is conceived, which gives us the histories in time of all nations’’ (145). This new art of criticism depends upon the ‘‘Idea of a Mental Dictionary,’’ which allows us to reduce the meanings of all different articulate languages ‘‘to certain unities of ideas in substance, which, considered from various points of view, have come to be expressed by different words in each’’ (445). Fisch says that although Vico speaks several times of a mental dictionary ‘‘the Dictionary itself remains a project barely begun.’’≥≥ In one sense this is true, for Vico offers only some examples of the specific contents of such a dictionary (NS 473–82 and FNS 387–89). In another sense the New Science itself is such a dictionary, for in it we come to a knowledge of the common nature of the nations. Once we have the New Science in the dynamic form of its full statement we do not need the dictionary as a thing in itself. We find ourselves at the beginning, as if there were no books in the world; we find ourselves at ‘‘The abnihilisation of the etym by the grisning of the grosning of

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the grinder of the grunder’’ (FW 353.22–23). We are at the splitting, the annihilation of the atom for the creation of the civil world. This requires a new conception of etymology. Ab nihil (Latin, ‘‘from nothing’’), the etymology of the words begins through ‘‘the grisning of the grosning,’’ the graying sky (French gris, ‘‘gray’’) of the thunderstorm (Russian groza, ‘‘thunderstorm’’) of the Jupiter Tonans that creates the ‘‘grinder of the grunder’’ (German Gründer, ‘‘founder’’), the fathers who grind out families and later cities. It all ‘‘expolodotonates [Italian tuono, ‘‘thunder’’] through Parsuralia [Persse O’Reilly = H. C. E. = Vico]’’ (353.23–24). The fathers hear the thunder and form it as a word that sounds like thunder, and we begin our etymology from here.

Mathematical and Musical Method In describing the course of self-study he undertook during his years of residence at Vatolla, Vico says he moved from the reading of the Latin and Tuscan poets to the philosophical writings of Cicero, Aristotle, and Plato. He says he ‘‘saw how both Plato and Aristotle often employ mathematical proofs to demonstrate what they discuss in philosophy,’’ and he ‘‘realized that he fell short of being able to understand them well, so he decided to apply himself to geometry and to penetrate as far as the fifth proposition of Euclid’’ (A 122– 23). He says that the ‘‘minute truths’’ (minute verità) that can be found in such study are proper to ‘‘minute wits’’ (ingegni minuti) but unsatisfying to a mind familiar with the flexibility of metaphysical thinking. Vico says he was ‘‘accustomed through long study of metaphysics to move freely in the infinite of genera.’’ Because of this and his ‘‘constant reading of orators, historians and poets his intellect took increasing delight in observing between the remotest matters ties that bound them together in some common relation’’ (A 123). He says these ties are the basis of eloquence. Vico sees the study of both metaphysics and poetry as the basis for training the mind in ingenium—the ability to perceive connections between diverse things that give them a new turn or put them into proper arrangement and relationship. The eloquence of ingenium is the opposite of the geometric method. Vico says he ‘‘discovered that the whole secret of the geometric method’’ depends upon defining the relevant terms, settling upon certain common maxims, and agreeing on certain assumptions. These are to be agreed to by ‘‘one’s companion in argument.’’ Once this is done, one proceeds step by step, reasoning from simpler to more complex truths, having first examined each of their component parts (A 125). The ‘‘secret’’ of the geometric method as Vico states it is very close to the fourfold statement of method for right reasoning in the sciences that Descartes gives in the second part of the Discourse.

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Vico presents this method in rhetorical terms, speaking of the need to agree on the starting points with whoever is involved in the argument. Descartes simply claims that the beginning points require judgments that are clear and distinctly true. Vico says that, having mastered his version of the geometric method, ‘‘if he ever had occasion to reason in that manner he would know how.’’ He adds that ‘‘indeed later he [Vico] followed it closely in the work On the One Principle of Universal Law, which in the opinion of Jean Le Clerc ‘is composed by a strict mathematical method’ ’’ (A 126). Vico takes considerable pride in this comment of Le Clerc, repeating it in his summary of Le Clerc’s review of his work and quoting Le Clerc’s explanation of ‘‘mathematical method’’ such that, by using it, Vico ‘‘ ‘from a few principles draws infinite consequences’ ’’ (A 164). Joyce insisted that the structure of Finnegans Wake was mathematical, and he wished C. K. Ogden to comment on it, as a mathematician.≥∑ The contents of the three books of Vico’s Universal Law are not geometrically ordered. In fact, none of Vico’s writings is ‘‘geometric’’ in its appearance, including the First New Science, with one exception—the axioms of the first book of the Second New Science. The prime example of a philosophical work written in the style of a geometry is Spinoza’s Ethics. None of Vico’s works bears a resemblance to its structure, including the Second New Science in its overall arrangement. But geometric terminology does appear throughout the Second New Science. Vico’s 114 axioms of the first book are entitled ‘‘Elements,’’ the same title by which Euclid’s work is known, and Vico speaks of definitions and corollaries in explaining connections among the axioms. Throughout the other books of the New Science, principally the second book, Vico occasionally designates his discussions of various claims as corollaries and designates other discussions as ‘‘proofs.’’ Le Clerc’s claim that Vico employs a ‘‘mathematical method’’ in the Universal Law is a compliment. Although Le Clerc knew that Vico’s work was original and important as a new interpretation of Roman law, Le Clerc’s comments ‘‘betrayed no real understanding’’ of what Vico had done, as Fisch points out.≥∑ It was a compliment because in Vico’s day, to think scientifically was to employ or claim to employ such a method. Yet, if to use a mathematical method is to produce infinite consequences from a few principles, then any work of science or metaphysics since Thales has aimed at such a standard. Vico’s Universal Law and both versions of the New Science have this general aim of reasoning from few principles. But the Second New Science is more specific in its use of a ‘‘mathematical method.’’ Vico’s set of axioms range from such postulates as ‘‘Things do not settle or endure out of their natural state’’ (axiom 8, par. 134), to such maxims of

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common wisdom as ‘‘Wonder is the daughter of ignorance; and the greater the object of wonder, the more the wonder grows’’ (axiom 35, par. 184), to assertions so specific that they appear more to be making a claim of historical fact than stating an axiomatic principle: ‘‘The Phoenicians were the first navigators of the ancient world’’ (axiom 101, par. 302). Vico’s axioms have none of the characteristics of the metaphysical geometry associated with rationalist philosophy; they make no pretense to a rigorous internal order. The axioms are interspersed with discussions of their various implications. Vico often pauses to explain how several of the axioms form a group of interrelated principles. One of Vico’s most important methodological axioms for the new science, ‘‘Doctrines must take their beginning from that of the matters of which they treat’’ (axiom 106, par. 314), falls near the end of the entire set. Vico says it might have been placed in his general axioms at the beginning, but he has placed it here because of its importance for the natural law of the gentes, which is the subject of some of his last axioms. The reader wonders why it should not be placed the other way around, that is, among the general axioms, then cited in one of Vico’s running comments. Vico’s general axioms are numbered 1 through 22; of these, 1 through 4 are a doctrine of criticism that Vico says ‘‘give[s] us the basis for refuting all opinions hitherto held about the principles of humanity.’’ Axioms 5 through 15 ‘‘give us the foundations of the true [il vero],’’ and 16 through 22 ‘‘give us the foundations of the certain [il certo].’’≥∏ Vico says that by using these axioms ‘‘we shall be able to see in fact this world of nations which we have studied in idea, following the best ascertained method of philosophizing’’ (163). This method, says Vico, is that of Bacon’s Cogitata et visa—to ‘‘think and see’’—that connects with Vico’s claim discussed earlier, of reckoning ‘‘as if there were no books in the world’’ (330). These general axioms are guides to pure thought about the world of nations, the verities needed to guide the comprehension of the specifics of this world. These general properties ‘‘are the basis of our Science throughout.’’ Vico says the axioms that follow (axioms 23–114) ‘‘are particular and provide more specific bases for the various matters of which it treats’’ (164). The remaining ninety-two axioms that fall under this heading have no further explicit general divisions. As I said, Vico does no more than associate various of them together in terms of their common themes, whether they concern some aspect of the origin of language, the ideal eternal history, the nature of Roman history, or the natural law of the gentes. But among these axioms of particularity are many very general propositions, such as ‘‘The order of ideas must follow the order of things [cose]’’ (axiom 64, par. 238) and ‘‘Governments must conform to the nature of the men governed’’ (axiom 69, par. 246). Overall, this large set of particular axioms moves from axioms related to the various aspects of Vico’s doctrine of

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poetic wisdom to his doctrine of ideal eternal history as it is connected to the histories of the various ancient nations found in the Chronological Table. One has the sense that Vico wrote his axioms down as he thought of them, that one led to another, and then some point expressed in one caused him to think back to another—and occasionally he thought of a general principle which should have been at the beginning, but which he included at the point that prompted him to think of it. As one concentrates on the axioms, they set up an internal motion in the reader’s mind, going back and forth, connecting one to another. In a sense the axioms, taken as a whole, are sublime: they can produce moments of epiphany. As a set they also seem beyond the mind’s ability to put them together in a logical or static order, to grasp them as a whole. In introducing the axioms Vico says that ‘‘in order to give form to the materials hereinbefore set in order in the Chronological Table’’ he proposes the following assiomi or degnità (i sequenti assiomi o degnità) (119). In the Bergin and Fisch translation these two words are given by the single word ‘‘axioms,’’ which masks Vico’s double terminology. Why does Vico use both these words? Assioma is the Italian spelling of the Latin axioma, which is a transliteration of the Greek ajívma ¯ (axioma). ¯ Axioma ¯ is from axioun, ‘‘to think worthy, think fit.’’ The modern sense of ‘‘axiom’’ as a principle that is assumed as the basis of demonstration derives from the association of ‘‘that which is thought fit’’ with that which is issued by an office holder or official as a ‘‘decree.’’≥π The Italian degnità (dignità) is dignity, rank (Latin dignitas, from dignus, worth, worthiness, merit). It is associated in Italian with the verb degnare, ‘‘to regard as worthy,’’ and with degno, which is attributable to someone or some office deserving honor. Beyond his one initial combination of ‘‘assiomi ’’ and ‘‘degnità’’ Vico refers to his axioms always as degnità, which preserves the original Greek sense of ‘‘a thought worth thinking, a thought that fits.’’ In using the Italian equivalents for both the Latin and the Greek words for axiom, Vico is following a procedure that he employs in his oration on the death of Donna Angela Cimmino (1727), in which he says he wished ‘‘to try how well the delicate sensibility of the Greeks could be united with the grandeur of Latin [Roman] expression, and how much of both the Italian tongue could combine’’ (A 181). Vico’s language in the New Science is connected to the tradition of Tuscanism, which was supported in Naples by Lionardo di Capua, one of the central figures of the Academy of the Investigators, who represented the spirit of the new sciences in Naples and who, Vico said, ‘‘had restored good Tuscan prose, and clothed it with grace and beauty’’ (A 133).≥∫ Vico not only felt himself free to write in Italian rather than Latin; following the loss of the university concourse, he saw Italian, that is, Tuscan, the language of Dante, as the language of the heroic age of the ricorso of Western

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history. As the ‘‘Tuscan Homer,’’ Dante expressed thoughts and images in Tuscan in a manner equal to that of the Romans and Greeks. Vico’s procedure in the New Science is not simply to trace the meanings of words back to their origins in Latin and to the philosophy of the Ionian Greeks, as he did in his metaphysics of the Ancient Wisdom. His aim is to use these etymologies actually to form the language of his metaphysics of the ideal eternal history of the nations. He signals this to the reader with his use of degnità. Dictionaries often cite Vico as the leading user of degnità as the philosophical term for ‘‘axiom,’’ but the first to use degnità in this manner is likely Giambattista Domenico Gelli, a member of the Florentine Academy.≥Ω Gelli pursued etymological studies into the origins of the Florentine (Tuscan) language, claiming Florentine to descend from Etruscan, and it from Aramaic and Syriac. His views were popularized in a dialogue by Pierfrancesco Giambullari, Il Gello (1549). Vico refers to Giambullari in axiom 102, claiming that the view is correct that Etruscan is of Syriac origin, and claiming that this was due to a transmission of the language by the Phoenicians, since they were the first navigators of the ancient world (NS 305). Vico saw Tuscan as a language capable of the richest forms of intellectual expression. He did not need to invent a new terminology for his new science. In Tuscan he had at his disposal a natural language, capable of heroic forms of expression, that reflected meanings found in the ancient Latin, Greek, and Semitic languages. After Vico introduces his term for axiom (degnità), he says ‘‘And just as the blood does in animate bodies, so will these elements course through our Science and animate it in all its reasonings about the common nature of nations’’ (119). We are reminded here of Vico’s interest in the wedge and the doctrine of the slack and tight in the circulation of the blood associated with his lost treatise De aequilibrio corporis animantis.∂≠ As blood is a hidden but vital motion within animate bodies, so these elements will be a hidden but vital circulation behind or within the animate body of history, as revealed by the new science. The two works from which Vico is commonly thought to have derived his title of the Scienza nuova are Bacon’s Novum organum and Galileo’s Dialoghi delle nuove scienze. Fisch points out that Hobbes said of Galileo’s work that it ‘‘first opened to us the gate of natural philosophy universal, which is the knowledge of the nature of motion.’’∂∞ Vico wishes to advance a universal science of the motions of the civil world of nations. The idea of the ‘‘new sciences’’ was in the air. It was the focus of the moderni. Vico takes up this idea as the first part of his title and connects it not to physical nature but to human nature, to ‘‘the common nature of the nations’’ that issues from human nature itself. A likely source of the second part of Vico’s title would seem to be the subtitle of the major work of Vico’s fourth author, Hugo Grotius’s On the

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Law of War and Peace. On the title page of the edition of Grotius’s work of 1646, below the title, there appears: ‘‘Wherein are set forth the law of nature and of nations.’’ Galileo’s new sciences are specific sciences. Vico seems influenced most by the general idea of these, by Galileo’s view that nature is a book that can be read in mathematical characters. The book of the civil world can be read in poetic characters, as they form the common mental dictionary. Bacon’s Novum organum presents a total way of thinking or an instrument for producing a knowledge of any part of nature, based on his list of aphorisms. Vico’s list of axioms provides an instrument for producing a knowledge of any part of the world of nations. Seen from this perspective, Vico’s work, with its focus on the motions of history, contains an analogy with Galileo’s work, with its science of motions in nature, but its title seems more precisely a combination of the work of Vico’s third author, Bacon, with his fourth, Grotius. Vico takes his definition of philosophy and philology from his two ancient authors, Plato (man as he should be) and Tacitus (man as he is), but he takes his title from his two modern authors, whose doctrines he modifies to suit his purposes. Vico does not so much refute Grotius’s work as accept its great vision and reform it in accordance with his new critical art, much in the way he turns the view of the genesis of society in the fifth book of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things to his own purposes. Because Vico entitles his axioms ‘‘Elements’’ we tend to associate them with Euclid. Proclus compares Euclid’s elements, as assertions upon which all that follows them depends, to the letters of the alphabet (Eucl. 1, 72ff.). Elements and letters of the alphabet have the same name in Greek—stoicheia. Plato implies the connection between the two in the Theaetetus (201e). In Aristotle stoicheion is ‘‘the primary component immanent in a thing, and indivisible in kind into other kinds, e.g., the elements of speech are the parts of which speech consists and into which it is ultimately divided. . . . The elements of geometrical proofs, and in general the elements of demonstrations, have a similar character’’ (Meta. 1014a). Vico’s elements are like what Aristotle describes in that they are all-prevailing principles out of which the true knowledge of the world of nations can be made. They are not part of something else; all else is part of them. In Novum organum, the other source for Vico’s axioms, Bacon calls the principles of his new logic for the investigation of nature ‘‘aphorisms’’; Vico enumerates his axioms in a manner similar to Bacon’s aphorisms. In their style and wording many of Vico’s axioms sound like Bacon’s aphorisms. ‘‘Aphorism’’ is from the Greek aphorismos, from aphorizein, to mark off by boundaries, to separate, or define. Such definitions are put in the form of a maxim. Vico’s first four axioms parallel Bacon’s four idols.∂≤ Nothing like these are to

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be found in Euclid’s Elements. Bacon says: ‘‘The doctrine of Idols is to the Interpretation of Nature what the doctrine of the refutation of Sophisms is to common Logic.’’∂≥ Concentration on Bacon’s idols is a way to clear the mind for the proper comprehension of nature. In like manner, Vico’s first four axioms clear the mind for the proper comprehension of nations and are propedeutic to the constructive use of the other axioms.∂∂ Vico’s first axiom asserts that ‘‘man makes himself the measure of all things’’ (120). Hobbes asserts this in Leviathan: ‘‘For men measure, not only other men, but all other things, by themselves’’ (pt. 1, ch. 2). The source for this is Protagoras’s ‘‘Man is the measure of all things,’’ as reported by Plato (Theat. 160d), applied to the doctrine that all knowledge is perception. Vico alters the maxim from man being the measure to man making himself the measure (egli fa sé regola dell’universo). Because man makes the civil world and his knowledge of it, the error enters with the making. The tendency to this form of error is rooted in the fact that we are in a state of ignorance. To relieve this ignorance we make things fit our own measure. Bacon’s idols of the tribe arise when the human senses are taken to be the true standard of things. This tendency is a difficulty common to the tribe of men (human race) because as humans we can experience the world only through our senses. Our senses are ‘‘uneven mirrors’’ that distort the properties of objects; we apprehend the world as having more measure, more regularity than it actually has. Vico says that the first axiom explains two human traits: that rumor grows in the absence of a thing, and that rumor is defeated by its presence. Vico’s advice, then, to overcome the difficulty stated in the first axiom is to examine as closely as possible the actual things of the civil world, to keep from allowing our natural ignorance to influence our judgments. Vico’s following three axioms are in essence variations on the meaning of the first. The second axiom is that ‘‘whenever men can form no idea of distinct and unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar and at hand’’ (122). This makes more specific how the mind tends to resolve its natural ignorance. It is Vico’s principle of ‘‘familiarity,’’ the tendency to familiarize the unknown rather than to attempt to meet it on its own terms. What we want to comprehend may be much stranger than we would wish it to be. Bacon’s idols of the den are those blindnesses of vision common to all men because each is an individual with an orientation toward experience peculiar to himself. This orientation is shaped by such factors as the individual’s disposition, education, intercourse with others, and state of mind at any given moment, and the authorities he admires. These are factors that will cause distortion in the observation of nature, not simply because such observation depends upon

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human senses in general but because such observations must be done by particular individuals. What is to be known can be wrongly made to fit the terms the knower brings to it. Vico’s third and fourth axioms follow from his principle of ‘‘familiarization.’’ They involve two ‘‘conceits’’ or ‘‘arrogances’’ (borie). His third axiom is the conceit of nations (borie delle nazioni), the belief of a nation that ‘‘it before all other nations invented the comforts of human life and that its remembered history goes back to the very beginning of the world’’ (125). Vico says this axiom ‘‘is a great proof of the truth of sacred history’’ (126). It points to the error in the claim the various ancient civilizations invoke, that each is the founder of humanity. No gentile nation is the first nation of history, and none can claim to dominate the historical process of birth, rise, decline, and fall. All nations are arrogant because they do not see themselves as subject to the strictures of ideal eternal history. Bacon’s idols of the marketplace arise from the intercourse between persons in society. The basis of this commerce is language. Language tends to build its own world of meanings, apart from the objects to which the meanings refer. Bacon’s idols of the marketplace and Vico’s conceit of nations are similar because both are fallacies that arise in the social definition of reality. Human beings acting socially develop their own versions of the world and exclude from their sight and thought all that lies outside what they find familiar through their common sentiments and meanings. Vico’s fourth axiom is the ‘‘conceit of scholars’’ (boria de’ dotti), ‘‘who will have it that what they know is as old as the world’’ (127). Vico says this conceit has led us to misread the nature of ancient systems of wisdom. It has caused us to attribute mystic meanings to Egyptian hieroglyphics and to treat Greek fables as though they were allegorical statements of philosophical truths. The conceit of scholars causes us to believe that the minds of the ancients are exactly like our own. Instead of seeing that there is an original, archaic mentality, a ‘‘poetic wisdom’’ from which our forms of rational mentality develop, we act as though the human world has always been the same; then we must invent fantastic theories to explain why the ancients wrote and thought as they did, in hieroglyphs and fables. This is not only the error of historians and philologists, it is also the source of the seventeenth-century natural-law theorists’ conception of society as founded through a rational agreement or covenant. Bacon’s idols of the theater are scholarly dogmas that have crept into men’s minds from various systems of philosophy. Such systems are like large fictions or stage plays of ideas that are not grounded in any empirical understanding of nature, and by transfixing the mind they prevent us from considering experience as it actually is. In Bacon’s conception of scholarly error we are cut off

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from the reality of empirical experience of nature; in Vico’s conception we are cut off from the reality of the past. These first four of Vico’s axioms describe what has prevented us from having a science of the civil world and what must be overcome in order to have such a science, just as Bacon’s idols describe what has prevented us from having an empirically based science of nature and the principles of inductive logic that it requires. If we keep these critical principles and conceits in mind, attempting to avoid the errors they describe, how do we employ the positive axioms that follow? These positive axioms are the elements whereby the oration of the new science is made. Oratio requires both ratio and narratio. The oration of the new science must be a story, a narration, that is true. As Vico says of a myth, an oration must be vera narratio, true narration. The truth of the myth is like the truth of perception; it simply forms what is there. There can be no question of error, because it is immediate. An oration must avoid error; its narratio must have an internal method, a ratio, a consistent structure of thought that governs its eloquence. The ratio of Vico’s speech is supplied by the axioms. The axioms are not logical principles as such, but logical principles embodied in rhetorical form. Like Bacon’s aphorisms, Vico’s axioms are maxims, but they are not maxims simply in the sense of general statements. Aristotle says that a maxim is not just a statement of a general kind; maxims ‘‘are only about questions of practical conduct, courses of conduct to be chosen or avoided. Now an enthymeme is a deduction, dealing with such practical subjects. It is therefore roughly true that the premisses or conclusions of enthymemes, considered apart from the rest of the argument are maxims’’ (Rhet. 1394a, 25–28). Vico’s axioms are maxims in the sense that they state the principles of practical wisdom or phron¯esis whereby the life of nations is conducted. Law and custom, the basis of the life of nations, depend upon human choice. They are the result of authority, auctoritas. Acts of choice governed by authority are the certains (certi) of the human world. But the trues (veri) of the human world are not simply theoretical, because they express what is true in the acts out of which the life of nations is formed. Maxims, as Aristotle says, are either the premisses or conclusions of enthymemes. An enthymeme is a syllogism, one of the propositions of which is given (either its major or minor premiss or its conclusion), the other two propositions being implied. The enthymeme, particularly in the sense of the maxim, is the device of the orator. Demosthenes, the first of the great orators, was known for his ‘‘invincible enthymeme.’’ The enthymeme is forceful because it condenses the power of the full argument into a single statement. Even Vico’s odd axiom, mentioned above, that ‘‘the Phoenicians were the first navigators of the ancient world’’ (axiom 101, par. 302), is an enthymeme.

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It is the conclusion to a syllogism, the major premiss of which is that the Phoenicians lived in Tyre, the oldest maritime city in the East. The minor premiss is that Tyre, the oldest maritime city in the East, was famous for its navigation. Therefore the Phoenicians were the first navigators in the ancient world. Vico says that the original city of Tyre must have been moved from inland to the shore and then to an island in the Phoenician sea more than a thousand years after the flood, and that Tyre was already famous before the Greek heroic age, both for its navigation and for its colonies. He claims that, after their feral wanderings inland, ‘‘the Phoenicians scattered the first nations through the remaining parts of the world’’ (736). The rudder in the dipintura symbolizes the first ‘‘breaking’’ of the oceans for the migration of the peoples, as the plow symbolizes the first breaking of the earth (17). The syllogism implicit in an enthymeme depends upon the art of finding the middle term, as Vico calls it in his seventh oration. He says the art of the middle term is ars topica.∂∑ The middle term is what allows the maker of the syllogism to assert the connection between the major and minor terms of the conclusion. It is the commonplace or topos on which the maker of the syllogism and the audience must agree in the rhetorical use of the syllogism. The middle term contains what the maker of the syllogism and the audience hold in common, the opinion they share. In this case it is the nature and fame of the ancient city of Tyre. For Vico’s purpose—the tenability of his maxim of the Phoenicians being the first navigators of the world—the middle term cannot be simply incidental between a speaker and a specific audience he is trying to convince. Vico’s aim is to convince anyone of his assertion. Thus the middle term must be grounded in a topos, a commonplace of the human mind itself. Aristotle says: ‘‘By an element I mean the same thing as a commonplace; for an element is a commonplace embracing a large number of particular kinds of enthymeme’’ (Rhet. 1403a 17–19). Tyre is a city, and as a city, its origin derives from the clearings made by the founders of the first families in the great forests of the earth. Behind the city is the father. The father, as we have seen above, is an example of Vico’s mental dictionary. The mental dictionary is the repository of mental places or commonplaces that contain the elements of all languages and hence the most fundamental topoi that bind humanity together. The mental dictionary is the collection of topoi from which the enthymeme embodied in any axiom can be drawn forth. The resulting maxims can be used to comprehend any act of human choice, any historical event that occurs in the world of nations. In this way the axioms circulate through the body of history and produce a science of it. The result is a kind of ‘‘rhetorical geometry’’ that no other science of the life of nations has been able to achieve.

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In the section on ‘‘Method’’ at the end of the first book of the New Science, Vico states that the proof of this science is for the reader to make this science for himself: ‘‘Indeed, we make bold to affirm that he who meditates this Science narrates to himself this ideal eternal history so far as he himself makes it for himself by that proof ‘it had, has, and will have to be’ ’’ (349; cf. 348). Vico places this principle in quotation marks, calling attention to it as one that Hesiod attributes to the Muses. Hesiod says: ‘‘Now let us begin with the Olympian Muses who sing for their father Zeus and delight his great soul, telling with harmonious voices of things past and present and to come’’ (Theog. 36–39).∂∏ The method of proof for the new science is musical. Mousik¯e, ‘‘art of the Muses,’’ is present wherever there is melodious, harmonious speech. Once a beginning has been made we depend upon the power of the Muses. Vico says that the method the new science must follow is to begin ‘‘where its subject matter began, as we said in the Axioms [axiom 106, par. 314]’’ (cf. 338; 347). Vico’s history is ‘‘history as her is harped’’ (FW 486.6). Vico says the ‘‘first Muse must have been Urania, who contemplated the heavens to take the auguries’’ (391). The power of the Muses, to sing of past, present, and future, is the power of foretelling that the fathers of the first families practice, by reading the signs Jove has put in the sky. Vico says this divination is the first metaphysics and may be characterized as ‘‘scienza in divinità’’ (365). Once the nations came into being, ‘‘the nations were governed by the certainty of authority; that is, by the same criterion which is used by our metaphysical criticism; namely, the common sense of the human race, on which the consciences of all nations repose’’ (350). Vico says the second Muse must be Clio, because she is the ‘‘narrator of heroic history’’ (533). Urania, as the Muse of astronomy, is closest to Jove. Clio is second because she is closest to the power distinctive of the Muses themselves—the power of foretelling, ordering time. The meditation of this science is not the Cartesian meditation on the principles of first philosophy. It is the meditation on ‘‘a god who to all men is Jove.’’ Without such a beginning, says Vico, ‘‘one cannot have any idea either of science or virtue’’ (1212).∂π From this meditation on the true Jove it is possible, under the influence of Clio, to make the narration of ideal eternal history. This is an art of heroic education. The reader must narrate this to himself—to his own satisfaction. But this satisfaction is governed by the Muses, whose Mother, as Vico says, is Memory (819). Memory is the ordering of time as it occurs in narration. A narration is always the recalling of the past in the occasion of the present against the future, which is governed by the past. In quoting the principle of the Muses Vico alters Hesiod’s ‘‘past, present, and to come’’ into ‘‘it had, has, and will have to be’’ (dovette, deve, dovrà). The

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narration the reader must make is not an ordinary historical narrative. As Joyce says, ‘‘There’s a split in the infinitive from to have to have been to will be’’ (FW 271.21–22). To the idea of historical narrative Vico adds the order of necessity. The addition of necessity makes the narration metaphysical. Metaphysical narration tells of what had, has, and will have to be. It not only tells the story of the ideal eternal history; it offers a knowledge per causas. Vico says that ‘‘the fables in their origin were true and severe narrations’’ (814). Fables originally were both true and severe, because they were the basis of all poetic-heroic science and virtue. The metaphysical narration of the ideal eternal history is both vero and severo. Vico’s connection of the proof of the new science to the Muses indicates that the new science is not only an oration but also a song. It is musical, harmonious speech. Vico’s ‘‘particular protector,’’ St. Augustine, makes this clear. Augustine says we know one thing of time, that it passes. We know this because the mind has three kinds of acts: ‘‘The mind expects, attends and remembers: what it expects passes, by way of what it attends to, into what it remembers (Conf. 9.28). The first form of language is the song. Vico says the founders of the gentile nations ‘‘formed their first languages by singing’’ (230).∂∫ Augustine demonstrates the order of time through his example of a psalm. He says: ‘‘Suppose that I am about to recite a psalm that I know. Before I begin, my expectation is directed to the whole of it; but when I have begun, so much of it as I pluck off and drop away into the past becomes matter for my memory; and the whole energy of the action is divided between my memory, in regard to what I have said, and my expectation, in regard to what I am still to say.’’ Augustine’s recitation divides between what his mind expects and what it remembers; one passes into the other and makes his song possible. Augustine continues: ‘‘But there is a present act of attention, by which what was future passes on its way to becoming past. The further I go in my recitation, the more my expectation is diminished and my memory lengthened, until the whole of my expectation is used up when the action is completed and has passed wholly into my memory’’ (Conf. 9.28). The song is a primal art of memory, the means by which we master time. A song is never sung once; songs achieve their truth by repetition. Songs, like tales, are twice told. The proof of the new science is its power to have the reader retell its tale, to master ‘‘these mouschical umsummables’’ (FW 417.9). When the reader does this, says Vico, ‘‘the reader will experience in his mortal body a divine pleasure as he contemplates in the divine ideas this world of nations in all the extent of its places, times, and varieties’’ (345; cf. 349). To comprehend the New Science in this way, as ordered by a mathematical method of thought but as governed by a musical method of proof, is to say that

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it is a language to be heard, not just seen on the page. It must enter the ear, in the way that the sound of Jove’s thunder enters the ears of the giganti. Vico, the custode of human and divine things, would call out: ‘‘This way to the museyroom. Mind your hats goan in!’’ (FW 8.9). ‘‘This way the museyroom. Mind your boots goan out’’ (10.22–23). In the museum of the New Science we find not only all the ‘‘places, times, and varieties’’ but also ‘‘accidental music providentially arranged’’ and ‘‘melodiotiosities in purefusion by the score.’’ Thus, ‘‘to start with in the beginning, we need hirtly bemark, a community prayer, everyone for himself, and to conclude with us an exodus, we think it well to add, a chorale in canon, good for us all for us all us all all’’ (FW 222.1–6).

Imaginative Universals and Bodily Signs In his explanation of the dipintura, Vico says that the ‘‘master key’’ to his science was the discovery that the first gentile peoples ‘‘were poets who spoke in poetic characters’’ (caratteri poetici) (NS 34). Using logical terminology, he also calls these ‘‘imaginative genera’’ ( generi fantastici) or ‘‘imaginative universals’’ (universali fantastici). The discovery of this master key, Vico says, cost him most of his literary life, a good twenty years. As a logic of universals or concept formation, Vico’s imaginative universals are a primary form of thought, presupposed by the universals of Aristotelian class logic. What Vico calls ‘‘intelligible universals’’ (universali intelligibili) correspond to the universals of class logic, to the ordering of particulars into classes that typifies our common-sense view of the world. Thus we group a number of persons, places, or things into a class and attribute to them a common property. This common property (attribute or quality) is literally or ‘‘univocally’’ predicated of each of them.∂Ω We, for example, can bring together a group of individuals and say that they are wise, meaning that we can literally predicate of each of them the virtue of wisdom. Wisdom is a property abstracted from the particular existence of each individual and from wisdom as a concept, a type of virtue that can be thought of apart from its embodiment in any one individual personality or another. Vico’s doctrine of poetic wisdom depends upon his discovery that this manner of forming class concepts is not the first form of human thought. We feel the world before we make it intelligible in terms of logical classes. The way in which the world is felt is formed by our power of imagination, or fantasia. Fantasia is a primordial faculty for Vico. It is the power through which we originally make the human world. As opposed to imagination (immaginazione), understood as the functioning of the mind to organize perceptions into

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images so that they may become objects of thought, fantasia is a power fully and completely to order the world.∑≠ In accordance with Vico’s principle that ‘‘the true is the made’’ fantasia may be called the ‘‘making imagination.’’ Vico’s conception of the poet plays on the double meaning of the Greek poiein—‘‘to make’’ and ‘‘to compose poetry.’’ The first human poets, from their power of fantasia to form the world as they feel it with their senses and their bodily passions, create the fables of mythology. Because of this, Vico says the ‘‘first science to be learned should be mythology or the interpretation of fables’’ (NS 51). Fables depend upon ‘‘poetic characters,’’ and these poetic characters are the first universals of thought. Vico says: ‘‘ ‘Character’ means ‘idea,’ ‘form,’ ‘model’ [‘idea,’ ‘forma,’ ‘modello’]; and certainly poetic characters came before those of articulate sounds [that is, before alphabetic characters]’’ (NS 429). Poetic characters are particulars that function as universals, that is, for the ages of gods and heroes they accomplish what class concepts accomplish for the third age of purely human or logical thought. Universality of the imagination uses a particular as a universal. To Vico these fables are ‘‘ideal truths’’ that are used as ‘‘certain models or ideal portraits, to reduce all the particular species which resembled them’’ (209). Vico says: ‘‘So that, if we consider the matter well, poetic truth is metaphysical truth, and physical truth which is not in conformity with it should be considered false.’’ He gives the example of Godfrey, the hero in Tasso’s epic poem Jerusalem Delivered: ‘‘The true war chief, for example, is the Godfrey that Torquato Tasso imagines [ finge]; and all the chiefs who do not conform throughout to Godfrey are not true chiefs of war’’ (205). The individuals in question are each in some fundamental sense Godfrey. Their being is literally Godfrey’s being. They are not ‘‘like’’ Godfrey but ‘‘part’’ of Godfrey. They are Godfrey dispersed. Vico’s term for Tasso’s imagining Godfrey is fingere, not fantasticare, because Tasso is not a poet of the age of gods or heroes. Yet the logic by which he forms the hero Godfrey is that of the heroic mind itself. The mentality of the heroic age did not imagine, in the sense of pretending or feigning, but univocally predicated the figure of a particular hero of a class of individuals. Imaginative class concepts ( generi fantastici), says Vico, ‘‘have a univocal signification connoting a quality common to all their species and individuals (as Achilles connotes an idea of valor common to all strong men, or Ulysses an idea of prudence common to all wise men)’’ (403). Thus to the heroic mind, which thinks and acts in the world only in accordance with fantasia, it is entirely natural to say of this, that, and the next

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strong man that each is literally Achilles. Achilles, whom we grasp as a particular figure, not a property or attribute, is univocally predicated of diverse individuals. These individuals are not analogous to Achilles, not ‘‘like’’ Achilles, each of them literally is Achilles. It is just as natural to the heroic mind univocally to predicate Achilles of these individuals as it is natural to our cognitively formed minds univocally to predicate the virtue of ‘‘valor’’ as an attribute equally true of each of the members of the class of strong men. From this original way of forming class concepts through fantasia there develops the power of the mind to abstract ‘‘valor’’ as an intelligible universal from the particularity of the figure of Achilles. Although we can understand this logic of the imaginative universal, and can find what is left of its original presence in poetry in the third age, we cannot truly experience what it would be like to think about the world exclusively in such terms. Three kinds of languages correspond to Vico’s three ages of eternal history, the languages of gods, heroes, and humans. ‘‘The first of these,’’ says Vico, ‘‘was a divine mental language by mute religious acts or divine ceremonies, from which there survived in Roman civil law the actus legitimi which accompanied all their civil transactions’’ (929). Of the three kinds of characters corresponding to the three kinds of languages, Vico states that ‘‘the first were divine, properly called hieroglyphics.’’ He says these hieroglyphics were ‘‘imaginative universals’’ and ‘‘to these poetic universals they [all nations in their beginnings] reduced all the particular species belonging to each genus, as to Jove everything concerning the auspices, to Juno everything touching marriage, and so on’’ (933). Vico says that poetic monsters arose from the necessity of the first human nature to form the world by putting things together. A poetic monster results from putting together a primary form with its contrary (410). Metamorphoses arose through the attempt to distinguish aspects or ideas of a thing (411). Vico claims that his three ages, which are closely tied to his doctrine of language, are those originally held by the Egyptians, as recorded by Varro. He says Varro ‘‘divided the times of the world into three: a dark time, corresponding to the Egyptian age of the gods; a fabulous time, corresponding to their age of the heroes, and a historic time corresponding to their age of men’’ (52). Most of Varro’s corpus is lost. The source for this doctrine in Varro is the littleknown work of the Roman grammarian Censorinus, who attributes it to Varro in De die natali (Natal Day, sec. 21), dedicated to a prominent Roman, Q. Caerellius, on his birthday in a.d. 238. The first part of this work deals with human life and its origins; the second part, in which this view of Varro is mentioned, deals with time and its divisions. Although Censorinus is regarded as a valuable source for the competent

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transmission of Varro’s views, the distinction of these three ages central to Vico’s work hangs by a historical thread. It is ramified by the claim of Herodotus (Hist.ii.36) that the Egyptians had three kinds of writing, which Vico also mentions (52). These were the hieroglyphic, in which the symbols are still recognizable pictures; the hieratic, in which the symbols have mostly become conventional; and the demotic, further developed from the hieratic. The first two were known by the Egyptians as ‘‘the God’s script’’ and the third as ‘‘the book script.’’∑∞ This twofold distinction parallels Vico’s claim that the age of gods and that of heroes employed imaginative universals (hieroglyphics and heroic characters), and that the third age invented vulgar characters which ‘‘are composed of words which are genera’’ (that is, intelligible universals) (933–34). But for Vico’s famous three ages we are indebted to the remark on Varro in the odd little work of Censorinus. How are imaginative universals rooted in the mute divine language of which Vico speaks, and in the heroic blazonings (imprese eroiche) that Vico claims succeed divine language in the stages of ideal eternal history? What is this mute language really like, in which men were all bodies, thinking only through their bodies and their senses? Vico explains the original divine mute language of religious acts and ceremonies not in logical but in legal terms, as that forerunner of the actus legitimi of Roman civil law. He says that from this conception of a divine mute language we can understand ‘‘the true origin of the famous Herculean knot by which clients were said to be nexi, or tied to the lands they had to cultivate for the nobles’’ (558). He says this later became a figurative knot, in the Law of the Twelve Tables. Vico claims that since the first humans were poets they must have imitated the forces that tied them to the necessities of their existence. ‘‘And so,’’ he says, ‘‘they made a fable of natural mancipation and created from it the solemn civil conveyance represented by the handing over of a symbolic knot in imitation of the chain whereby Jove had bound the giants to the first unoccupied lands, and by which they themselves had later bound thereto their clients or famuli. With this symbolic mancipation they consecrated all their civil transactions by actus legitimi which must have been solemn ceremonies of peoples still mute’’ (1030). How did men communicate in these first mute times, before they could articulate thoughts in phonetically ordered speech? For indeed there was a time when life was a mute yet communal affair of feelings, sensings, and expressions. This mute language is a stratum that persists at the very basis of all human community and communication, even in the late barbaric world of reflective life (la barbarie della riflessione) and intelligible universals (universali intelligibili) (1106). This mute level contains the poetry of life, to which

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we moderns naturally return at any moment of joy or grief, any moment of failure or success, any moment of emergency or tranquility. We return to the mute gesture to express shock and puzzlement, to make an insult, or to show happiness. For Vico, the primordial experience is the appearance of Jove. The presence of Jove is not thought but felt. To feel is not simply an internal state of the self. To feel, in this case, is to sense with the whole body. Vico says, ‘‘And human nature, so far as it is like that of animals, carries with it this property, that the senses are its sole way of knowing things’’ (374). To sense is to know. The first men, he remarks, made their world through a wholly bodily imagination (d’una corpolentissima fantasia) (376). Our true knowledge of the other is arrived at not by a process of thought but by our sensing of it, and we sense or feel the other in a specific way—as a benign or malignant force. These contraries underlie all of our experience. Jove is felt in both ways at once. ‘‘Let there be. Due’’ (Italian due, ‘‘two’’) (FW 314.29). The first robust men, says Vico, experienced Jove the thunderer through fear (spavento). They ‘‘were frightened and astonished by the great effect whose cause they did not know, and raised their eyes and became aware of the sky’’ (377). This fear was accompanied by a second response of shame or modesty that generated the first marriages, and thus they distinguished themselves from the animals. Fear, in Vico’s view, is always there at the beginning of anything in human affairs. All true beginnings are derived from this primordial beginning in fear. All true encounters with the other are derived from this encounter. The fear of the first men, as Vico says, is not the ordinary fear of a particular danger, it is a fear of their own being. The fear that the first men experience is ‘‘not fear [timore] awakened in men by other men, but fear awakened in men by themselves’’ (382). The fear of the other is the fear of death. That is why from this fear is born religion, the first principle of humanity, from which come marriage (the act against death and the other, by establishing lineage) and burial (the recognition of the mystery of death in the human community): ‘‘a good clap, a fore marriage, a bad wake, tell hell’s well’’ (FW 117.5–6). Spavento, the fear the giants have of Jove, is intense, sudden timore. To Vico, timore, the fear awakened in men by other men, is a state of the soul. Paura is more ordinary fear, connected to specific conditions, persons, or events. In the mute times the voice was present, but not as a maker of articulate sounds. The voice was an embodiment of the passions. In the recognition of Jove the robust first men ‘‘pictured the sky to themselves as a great animated body’’ (377). Such tendency to animate the other persists in our own times; as Vico says, the vulgar ‘‘make of all nature a vast animate body which feels passions and affections’’ (377). Vico maintains that it is ‘‘beyond our power to

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enter into the vast imagination [vasta immaginativa] of those first men, whose minds were not in the least abstract, refined, or spiritualized, because they were entirely immersed in the senses, buffeted by the passions, buried in the body’’ (378). The first men used their voices as part of their body—to express their bodily state, to shout, to cry out, to grumble. In our own experience, the moment something goes terribly wrong or terribly right, our voices resort to this bodily state, to this reaction to the other. We as moderns live only on the surface of our bodies, rarely going inside them to the depths of our senses. The Cartesian ‘‘I think’’ knows nothing of the body. It regards the body as a tomb in which it hopes to have the passions remain, so as to leave thought free to work its magic of reason—to reflect upon itself and the world. Fear, for Descartes in the Passions of the Soul, is an excess, a disturbance to be avoided. Nothing in human affairs can be generated from it. As he says, ‘‘In the case of fear or terror, I do not see that it can ever be praiseworthy or useful’’ (sec. 176). Because the first men can fear Jove together, they can begin to act together in divine ceremonies. They saw Jove as an ‘‘alter body’’ and, because with their senses they had learned to read the expressions of the other, they could read the states of Jove in his body, the sky. ‘‘Let us auspice it!’’ (FW 112.18). The first men spoke by signs, by calling each other’s attention to actual objects in the world, by showing part of the world to each other, much as we moderns mutely pick a flower, or pick up a rock or an insect and, without speaking, show it to someone for a reaction. A rock can be shown as a benign force to another, as a thing to admire—or it can be displayed as a weapon, a sign of malignant intention. Jove was believed to make signs; Vico says that ‘‘from nuo, to make a sign, came numen, the divine will, by an idea more than sublime and worthy to express the divine majesty. They believed that Jove commanded by signs, that such signs were real words, and that nature was the language of Jove’’ (379). Vico takes the Lucretian claim that religion depends on fear of the gods and turns it from a negative to a positive force out of which human society is generated. The first men learned in the original Jove experience the two forms of sign behavior—the two that we moderns resort to immediately when articulate speech will not function. The first men shook with their whole bodies in fear and thus imitated in the medium of their own large bodies the enormous bodily actions of Jove, who is the sky. The first men are poets of the body. Their ability to imitate what Jove is in their shaking allows them to ‘‘find again’’ in a later sensible state that first moment of fear they had in the presence of Jove the thunderer. In addition to this poetic imitation, the first men run into caves and hide; they copulate out of sight of Jove. This act of fleeing is

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an act of pointing that is accomplished by the whole body. To point is to refer to the other, to set the ‘‘pointer’’ off against the ‘‘pointed to.’’ An act of fleeing is an act of ‘‘pointing out,’’ of showing something to be there as an other. Imitating and indicating are thus present in the bodily actions of the first men in their first experience as men. The sign is our connection with the divine—nuo to numen. When someone does not know the meaning of a word (perhaps a foreigner who understands a language incompletely, or perhaps a child), we naturally resort to the language of ‘‘real words’’ to convey meaning. We go into the powers of our bodies and imitate the thing meant, or we produce the thing itself and show what was meant: we point it out to the senses. This immediate and natural access to the world as an ‘‘alter body’’ is divine speech. For the first men this is not a matter of filling in the gaps of our abstract powers of articulation. The first men are concerned not with communication of discrete meanings but with associating themselves together as new humans and with the power of Jove. This is why the first mute language is that of divine ceremonies—ways of acting out their sense of the whole of life—the rituals of life and death. These are ceremonies of how they feel bound to the world and to each other. The business of practical life is carried on in terms of the ordinary necessities of human existence—food, shelter, warmth. But the divine mute language realizes higher necessities, the necessary bonds that must exist between humans in order that there be society at all. These are the structuring of power and rights among humans, and the ceremonies that form these are what precede the world of law, of actus legitimi. Law is what remains of an original mute and divine language of human actions. These original ceremonies are universal because they concern, above all, religion, marriage, and burial. But in the end these are what law governs—and law that cannot find its way back in some sense to these divine orders of the body is superficial and barbaric—the intellect thinking it can create community from itself. Vico emphasizes, against Polybius, that there could never be a society simply of knowers or philosophers (179). The pursuit of cognitive knowledge presupposes and depends on society. It is not the basis of society. This original, mute, divine language of imagination, which is external to the stage of the language of ‘‘heroic blazonings’’ (930), rests upon ‘‘heroic characters, which were also imaginative universals to which they reduced the various species of heroic things, as to Achilles all the deeds of valiant fighters and to Ulysses all the devices of clever men’’ (934). Vico says that the heroic emblems survived in military discipline and also in family coats of arms, medals, and coins. These often require mottos in later times, and thus do not carry all of their meanings simply in their muteness, ‘‘whereas the natural heroic emblems were such from lack of mottos, and spoke forth in their very muteness’’ (484).

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Natural heroic emblems carried their meanings in themselves. In this case language has moved from its form as divine mute ceremonies to its form as objects that carry specific meanings, such as three ears of grain for three years (484). Emblems became the way of showing ownership or property, hence their use in coats of arms and coins. The best natural heroic emblems were real words or real hieroglyphs, such as were used by Idanthyrsus, king of the Scythians, to answer Darius the Great, as discussed earlier. The five real words of Idanthyrsus are a heroic emblem in action, functioning in human affairs and instructing all around it in its meaning. Something is pointed out to the senses in order to stimulate the imagination. Here what is mute is pointing to something beyond it. But more than an abstract, literal truth is being conveyed by Idanthyrsus, because his five real words convey something of who he really is. Darius is taught who Idanthyrsus is. Vico points out that in the origin of emblematic thought insegna is conected to insegnare, ‘‘to teach,’’ ‘‘to point out’’ (487). Does Vico mean that Ulysses and Achilles could not use articulate speech, that they could not speak as Homer has them speak, and used only a mute language? How are the heroic imaginative universals of Ulysses and Achilles connected to the mute speech of the natural emblem? Ulysses and Achilles, at least as portrayed by Homer (who is writing at the closing of the heroic age of the corso), are like emblems with mottos. But the real truth they convey is in what they are, their actual embodiment of a virtue like cleverness or courage. In their being heroes, the meaning of their heroism is conveyed mutely—they are the real words of civic life. Their truth is not in any words attributed to them but in how they exist, how they confront the other. In this way they bond together all clever men or all courageous men in a fashion analogous to how the original divine ceremonies that precede the actus legitimi bind men together in the fundamental forms of social order. Men who are clever recognize each other, as do men who are courageous. Men of wisdom and piety speak a mute language that no amount of formal speech among them can duplicate or replace. One knows the other by how the other acts, and we grasp this through our sensing of the other. Such communal sensing or sensus communis can never be reached by the language of abstract universals. Ulysses and Achilles are natural emblems of virtues necesary to social life for the nations at war and in peace. The transference to fully articulate language in the age of humans cannot occur without the sublimation of the power of mute language. Although the mute signs and the real words and even the possibility of divine ceremonies persist in the age of articulate speech, they exist only as supplements, as moments of communication when the articulate level experiences gaps and

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disorders—the cry of pain, the gesture for help, the ritualistic motions in times of grief or worship. For the articulate world to appear, the body must be disciplined against the passions. The eros of the body must be sublimated such that the stoicism of modern life may appear. In the infernetto of modern life, Descartes the Stoic is our guide, not Virgil. The golden bough of the universale fantastico rooted in the mute language of the body is now just a matter of memory. For Vico, to articulate the world in speech is to forget the body, to become the reality of the being that thinks apart from the body and whose body conveys nothing of passion to the other, who confronts the other in discourse and does not confront the other as bodily thought, as a passionate animal. As I noted earlier, human nature shares with animals ‘‘that the senses are its sole way of knowing things’’ (374). The use of the voice as an instrument of passion, says Vico, ‘‘began to develop by way of onomatopoeia, through which we still find children happily expressing themselves’’ (447). The onomatopoeic voice first imitated the sizzling sound of lightning and then led to the formation of interjections, ‘‘which are sounds,’’ Vico continues, ‘‘articulated under the impetus of violent passions. In all languages these are monosyllables’’ (448). The first men, like children learning to speak, spoke only in monosyllables, ‘‘for their organs were extremely obdurate, and they had not yet heard a human voice’’ (454; emphasis mine). The human voice is first heard as an imitative sound, and then as an indicative or ‘‘pointing sound.’’ When Jove spoke in the interjection of the thunderbolt, the first men spoke back such that ‘‘these interjections of Jove should give birth to one produced by the human voice: pa!; and that this should then be doubled: pape!’’ (448). From this came Jove’s title as father. Onomatopoeia reproduces in the voice the sound of the thing. An interjection uses the voice to designate a thing as something, an other whose reality is separate. In axiom 60 Vico says, ‘‘Languages must have begun with monosyllables, as in the present abundance of articulated words into which children are now born they begin with monosyllables in spite of the fact that in them the fibers of the organ necessary to articulate speech are very flexible’’ (231). From these two forms of the articulation of passions arise a linguistic community around the pronoun. For, as Vico says, to give vent to a passion is ‘‘a thing which one can do even by oneself, but pronouns serve in sharing our ideas with others concerning things which we cannot name or whose names another may not understand’’ (450). Then arise particles, especially prepositions, then nouns, and finally verbs. Verbs introduce a sense of past, present, and future; they signify motion. That verbs are the last and most fragile aspect of articulate language, Vico maintains, ‘‘may be supported by a medical obser-

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vation. There is a good man living among us who, after a severe apoplectic stroke, utters nouns but has completely forgotten verbs’’ (453). The body is a monosyllable, an emblem, a single expressive presence. As the passionate body commences to articulate itself and the world it does so monosyllabically. The verb introduces time, and things can no longer be what they are; their meanings can no longer just be mute. What is mute has being. It is not transposed in time. The mute meaning is the denial of time. Like the ritual, it takes us to the origin and stops time. The mute gesture is a ritual in brief. We are back where the gods were. Without this ‘‘we wander ignorant of the men and the places’’ (FNS 3) in a world of verbs—the nightmare of history. But the power of the mute always reminds us that we are. Vico says that all three languages begin together and last together within the ages of ideal eternal history (NS 412, 446). His great discovery, which cost him nearly all his literary life, was that fantasia, not reason, is the primordial faculty from which all mentality and society arise. Part of this great discovery was that the original language of fantasia was mute, and how that mute language was more than just the idea that gestures are part of language. Vico’s mute language is a bodily language, and the mute language is always with us, making us what we are and what we can be. We might say that Vico’s New Science is an attempt through articulate language to achieve the monosyllable again—that the New Science is in fact just a word, the utterance of which is its proof and produces the ‘‘divine pleasure’’ (divin piacere) in our bodies of which Vico speaks (349). What is the monosyllable that the New Science expresses? What is its mute sign? As mentioned above, ‘‘We must reckon as if there are no books in the world’’ (NS 330). In a book that is full of all books, the real message is mute. As Joyce says in A Portrait, we must ‘‘pronounce the word science as a monosyllable’’ (P 210). Only then can we begin to make it speak by reinventing its divine truth in our own language. Vico’s science is the ‘‘imaginable itinerary through the particular universal’’ (FW 260.R3–8). ‘‘For if sciencium (what’s what) can mute uns nought, ‘a thought, abought the Great Sommboddy within the Omniboss, perhops an artsaccord (hoot’s hoot) might sing ums’’ (415.15–18). If we can form the new thought of Jove we can make thought musical again and hear the ‘‘Fudder and lighting’’ (415.20).

Providentiality and Ideal Eternal History History begins in the thunderous sky, in Jove’s appearance to the gentile giants. The descendants of Noah, roaming the great trackless forests of the earth for generations after the flood, without language, customs, or cities, without religion, marriage, or burial, suddenly experience the sky full of

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thunder and lightning. They hear and see for the first time a thing of a different order, because until now the atmosphere has not been dry enough for the occurrence of such a ‘‘phonemanon’’ (FW 258.22). This unique experience is not made by these giants. Without their conscious knowledge, it causes them to begin to make themselves. They begin to make a human world through the experience of something other than themselves. Accustomed to do anything, directed by only pleasure or pain, the life of the giants is a life without fear and shame. They are all body and appetites, without internal passions or thoughts. The primal scene of the thunderous sky induces fear and shame. They are not the makers of these two civilizing passions; they suddenly confront them in themselves. When they became aware of the sky ‘‘their nature was that of men all robust bodily strength, who expressed their very violent passions by shouting [urlando] and grumbling [brontolando], they pictured the sky to themselves as a great animated body, which in that aspect they called Jove, the first god of the so-called greater gentes, who meant to tell them something by the hiss of his bolts and clap of his thunder’’ (377). ‘‘For the Clearer of the Air from on high has spoken in tumbuldum tambaldam to his tembledim tombaldoom worrild’’ (FW 258.20– 21). Urlando has the sense both of the howl of an animal and the shout of a human; brontolando has the sense both of grumbling and of the rumbling of thunder. In these two words Vico captures the being of these first humans as both animal and human and as human connected to the divine (thunder, the sign of Jove). From these initial reactions, which place the human between the animal and the divine, these first humans begin to wonder (ammirare) in the way that the vulgar gaze in wonder at an impressive natural phenomenon, such as the effects of a magnet on iron (‘‘ammirano gli stupendi effetti della calamita col ferro’’) (377). Later, as the Jove experience is turned into religion by the fathers who found the first families, this wonder begets piety, which is coupled with wisdom. Wisdom originates in the rites of sacrifice and the taking of auguries (scienza in divinità) by the first fathers. These are Vico’s passions of the soul. Wonder leads first to religion and then to philosophy, and finally, in the new science, it becomes the middle term that joins piety and wisdom (1112). When the giants onomatopoeically form the word Jove by their monosyllabic utterance pa! pape! they cease to live in a world of momentariness, in which, as Vico puts it, ‘‘they regarded every change of facial expression as a new face’’ (700). Once the word Jove is uttered, the ongoing flux of sensations, in which every clap of thunder and every flash of lightning is a momentary event not tied to the next, is interrupted. What was immediate is now medi-

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ated. The giants have entered a world of meaning in which one event of thunder is contained in all the other thunder events. In one sensation the giants can find again the other sensations of the same sort. Once one thing can be named everything can be named. In the age of gods all flora and fauna, all objects of nature, are named as gods, as are all basic human institutions; marriage, for example, is identified with Juno. The appearance of the first name is an act of human memory, in two senses. The transposition of an instance of thunder into Jove allows the mind of the giants to collect all the other occurrences of thunder into a common object. These occurrences can be remembered and held in mind as the god Jove. What is more, this act of memory is itself an act of memory. Because the ancestors of the giants, Noah and his sons, were humans of normal size they had the human property of memory. The species of giants suffered amnesia, as their bodies grew larger over generations, and this sudden shock of the thunderous sky brings back the essence of memory. As Vico says, in the corso that ensues, the giants, who are all body (570), devolve over centuries into humans of normal size with human minds. As the mind develops, memory recovers its three aspects: remembering, imagining, and the power of ingenuity (819). Jove is the first imaginative universal. In it Vico advances a new conception of metaphor. He says that the imaginative universal is the essence of the fable and also that every metaphor is a fable in brief (404). Vico’s conception of the metaphor is metaphysical. The metaphor brings the object in experience into being. In the monosyllable of the first imaginative universal, ‘‘Jove is.’’ Where only immediacy prevails there is now an object. The existence of the object, so to speak, brings into existence the mind that grasps it. The new conception of the metaphor that is present in the imaginative universal is different from that of Aristotle, who defines metaphor as ‘‘giving the thing a name that belongs to something else’’ (Poet. 1457b). Thus Aristotle can hold that there is little difference between metaphor and simile (Rhet. 1406b, 20). The simile makes explicit the ‘‘is like’’ that is implicit in his conception of the metaphor; his conception of the metaphor is essentially epistemological, not metaphysical. The Aristotelian conception of metaphor begins with the two things to be associated as given, such as in a logical proposition where the subject is to be joined to the predicate by the copula. ‘‘Is’’ has both the sense of relation and the sense of being (‘‘to be’’). Vico’s imaginative universal connects metaphor to being. The act of ‘‘carrying over’’ that is the root meaning of metaphor (metapherein) in Vico’s imaginative universal takes place as an initial relation in which the immediate is mediated. In the Aristotelian view the name of something already there for the mind is ‘‘carried over’’ to another. Metaphor is the native act of fantasia, and memory is the same as fantasia. Memory is what

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humanizes and ultimately educates, for the possession of memory is the mark of education and of wisdom. The speech of the whole above all requires memory, in the full sense in which Vico holds it. If Jove is the starting point from which man makes the world of civil things, what is the starting point from which the science of these things can be made? If readers are to make this science for themselves by the principle ‘‘it had, has and will have to be,’’ what is the first act from which such knowledge can be generated? This first act of true scientific knowing must recapitulate in some way the act by which the object to be known, the civil world, came about. Corresponding to Jove as the first imaginative universal is ‘‘ideal eternal history’’ (storia ideale eterna) for all who would remake Vico’s science for themselves in their own speech. ‘‘Ideal eternal history’’ is the master key to Vico’s science itself, once the basis of the science has been unlocked with the master key of the imaginative universal. These two keys are Vico’s double truth that is at the basis of all other truths. Jove is the product of collective fantasia, as described above. Ideal eternal history is the product of recollective fantasia. The New Science is a theater of memory, in which all languages and laws have histories within the great city of the human race. In this way Vico’s New Science is like the memory theater of Giulio Camillo (c. 1480–1544). Camillo constructed a theater populated with mythological images that made up a system of pitture and places, such that the adept, standing before them on the stage, could with proper concentration and study know all there was to know and produce the complete speech of the world.∑≤ Recollective fantasia is activated by a sudden insight, the kind of insight that Longinus describes as sublime, and Joyce describes as epiphany. This is the insight that there is a common nature of all nations, that all nations, like all humans, develop by the same pattern of ages. When this is grasped history as a single body comes into existence. It is the sudden realization that history is something. Recollection in this sense has two aspects. To grasp this sense of history one must recollect the human world as a whole, as what was, is, and is to come. History is memory. What is more, the human mind must bring forth what has receded into the background of its mental life: the presence of the divine. Wisdom is a knowledge of things human and divine (Cicero, Tusc. 4.26.57; De off. 2.2.5). The divine exists in the human as providence. Ideal eternal history is not an idea that the mind truly makes; it is the principle that it suddenly grasps, according to which all knowledge of history can be made. Ideal eternal history is a name for providence. As Jove stands to the beginning of humanity, Providence stands to the beginning of the science of humanity. All in Vico’s science depends upon the complete grasp of the nature of Provi-

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dence in human affairs. ‘‘Providence’’ is Vico’s monosyllable that underlies his monosyllable of the new ‘‘science.’’ Vico’s work is a ‘‘probapossible prolegomena to ideareal history’’ (FW 262.R1–6). Providentiality or ideal eternal history is a melancholy truth. Vico’s corso and ricorso is not the providence of the Enlightenment, which saw providence as the theological idea of progress, the idea of an overall positive direction to history. In the critical literature on Vico it is common to find his conception of history characterized as corsi e ricorsi, implying that he saw history as occurring in cycles, one after another. Another belief one encounters among many readers of Vico is that these cycles must in some way constitute a spiral. This is based on an inclination to attribute to Vico a view that there can be some type of vague progress in history, an upward drift. I find no evidence in Vico’s writings to support either of these views, nor do those who make such assertions argue or provide evidence for them. To refer to Vico’s conception of ideal eternal history as corsi e ricorsi has become a convention. In the New Science Vico speaks of the course the nations run (book 4) and the recourse of the nations (book 5). He never uses these terms in the plural, nor does he ever speak of a spiral. Corso and ricorso is a double truth, a twice-told tale. ‘‘It was corso in cursu on coarser again’’ (FW 89.11). Vico speaks of corso and ricorso in combination. The course the nations run is the three ages that each nation in its course of natural life shares with every other, just as every human being whose life is not cut short lives through a childhood, a maturity, and an old age that it shares with every other member of the human race. The particulars of each life differ, as those of each nation differ from those of other nations. The corso of any nation begins with Jove, although, as Vico says, Jove goes by different names. On reaching the third age, a nation finally declines; its civilization is in fragments. The end of the corso implies a ricorso, an awakening. The ricorso is marked by a return to religion, but it is not a repeat of the Jove experience. The ricorso is built upon the memory of the corso. It develops a heroic age, as Vico finds in the late medieval world of the West, and this gives way, following Dante, the ‘‘Tuscan Homer,’’ to the Renaissance. Dante’s Divine Comedy summarizes the divine and heroic ages of the ricorso in the way that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey bring together the ages of gods and heroes of the corso of Western history. The Renaissance is the second arrival of the philosophers, whose arrival always heralds the beginning of a third age. The Renaissance forms its philosophy by reviving the doctrines of the ancients. It builds its wisdom on the memory of their ideas. Vico lived, as we live, in the later centuries of the ricorso of our own history. What is to come after this ricorso would seem to be not a ri-ricorso but a

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corso, with an intervening deluge or catastrophic return to the forest. A corso requires a true beginning, where memory is collective and not recollective. Vico says this in his conclusion to the New Science, in a passage whose poetry is matched only by that of the ‘‘night of thick darkness,’’ when he speaks of the fate of a people rotting in ‘‘the ultimate civil disease’’—that, when unchecked, providence has its ultimate solution in store—to reduce humanity to the forest again, where life is deprived of the corruptions of luxury and people return to the truth of religion and necessity (1106). Vico thinks in terms of fall and awake and fall and awake. His doctrine of cycles proceeds in pairs. It is a melancholy truth, because the divine lesson is never learned. As Vico states in axiom 66, ‘‘Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance’’ (241; cf. FNS 125). To awake is to find oneself—along with humanity—in a ricorso whose future is a corso. Vico looks at history and never smiles; ‘‘he cursed and recursed’’ (FW 29.9). This melancholy truth is learned in an age of barbarism, the barbarism of reflection—which differs from the barbarism of the first age. The barbarism of the first age is the barbarism of sense (la barbarie del senso), which Vico says is an honest barbarism in which one can protect oneself. It is a physical barbarism, not a barbarism of the soul, as is the second barbarism, ‘‘a distinct advance from savagery to barbarism’’ (FW 114.13). Vico describes the second barbarism in terms similar to Dante’s third and lowest region of the Inferno, which is characterized by sins that destroy the social order: treachery against friends, against guests and hosts, against relatives. To live in such an age requires a doctrine of prudence, of practical wisdom that will allow the individual to survive as a human being. The truth of Vico’s ideal eternal history must be grasped in a single moment, but its comprehension requires the sense in which it is a ‘‘jurisprudence of the human race’’ founded on the transference of the ius gentium naturale onto the process of history. Vico’s criticism of Grotius, Selden, and Pufendorf is that they regard the natural law of the gentes as the result of arrangements made among men, when in fact its cause is providence. God arranges history. Each nation is a birth (nascere, to be born), and each has a nature in the way that all humans have a nature. Although these seventeenth-century natural-law theorists accept a divine cause for the world, and regard natural law as in accordance with God, they fail to understand the role of providence. They fail to understand God’s original presence as the cause of the world of nations. They do not understand Vico’s method of beginning where the subject matter begins. Vico says they

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‘‘should have taken their start from the beginnings of the gentes where their subject matter begins. But all three of them err together in this respect, by beginning in the middle; that is, with the latest times of the civilized nations’’ (394). By beginning in the middle the natural law they develop is the natural law of the philosophers—an ideal based upon reason, not a law by which the nations actually develop the order of their life. Grotius begins the common nature of nations not from God but from the power of human judgment, and from this he asserts its agreement with divine will. He says that the power men have over animals is the power to discriminate and judge what is agreeable or harmful. Thus ‘‘whatever is clearly at variance with such judgment is understood to be contrary also to the law of nature, that is, to the nature of man. To this exercise of judgment belongs moreover the rational allotment to each man, or to each social group, of those things which are properly theirs.’’∑≥ Grotius holds that the source of law is human intelligence: ‘‘This maintenance of the social order, which we have roughly sketched, and which is constant with human intelligence is the source of law properly so called.’’∑∂ He underscores this: ‘‘What we have been saying would have a degree of validity if we should concede that which cannot be conceded without the utmost wickedness, that there is no God, or that the affairs of men are of no concern to Him.’’∑∑ Grotius regards God as a source of law—in addition to its source in human nature or reason. This view is what Vico means by the natural law of the philosophers, who base natural law on reason, but hold that it is also in accord with divine will. Grotius says: ‘‘Herein, then, is another source of law besides the source in nature, that is, the free will of God, to which beyond all cavil our reason tells us we must render obedience. But the law of nature of which we have spoken, comprising alike that which relates to the social life of man and that which is so called in a larger sense, proceeding as it does from the essential traits implanted in man, can nevertheless rightly be attributed to God, because of His having willed that such traits exist in us.’’∑∏ Grotius, however, emphasizes that the law of nature is based on mutual consent: ‘‘So by mutual consent it has become possible that certain laws originate as between all states, or a great many states. . . . And this is what is called the law of nations, whenever we distinguish that term from the law of nature.’’∑π Pufendorf takes the same approach as Grotius, in basing natural law on an analysis of the human condition. He says: ‘‘There seems to us no more fitting and direct way to learn the law of nature than through careful consideration of the nature, condition, and desires of man himself.’’∑∫ Pufendorf sees the origin of human society as lying in the general sociable attitude men share in common. He agrees that mutual good will alone is not sufficient to account for the

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origin of nations, as fear is also a motive that compels men to come together. He claims: ‘‘This method of deducing the natural law, we feel, is not only genuine and clear, but also so sufficient and adequate that there is no precept of the natural law affecting other men, the basis of which is not ultimately sought therein.’’ He claims further that ‘‘if these dictates of reason are to have the force of laws, it is necessary to presuppose the existence of God and His Providence, whereby all things are governed, and primarily mankind.’’∑Ω Pufendorf says he disagrees with Grotius’s claim that such laws would hold even if they were not in accord with divine will. Selden says: ‘‘I cannot fancy to myself what the law of nature means, but the law of God.’’∏≠ He understands natural law to be of divine origin and identical with certain precepts that were communicated by God to Adam and by Adam to Noah. Noah is held to have passed these down to his descendants, and thence to the gentile nations. Vico says that Selden does not comprehend the distinctions God made in the world of nations between the Hebrews and the gentiles, that although Selden ‘‘pretends that the Jews presently taught their natural law to the gentiles, he is entirely unable to prove it’’ (396). Vico claims that on the basis of axiom 105 it is clear that God gave natural law to the Hebrews separate from natural law to the gentile nations: ‘‘The natural law of the gentes is coeval with the customs of the nations, conforming one with another in virtue of a common human sense, without any reflection and without one nation following the example of another’’ (311). The Hebrews have their own natural law, which is different from the natural law of the gentes because Hebrew society does not exist in ideal eternal history. God acts on events directly in sacred history. God as providential force acts within gentile history. The Hebrews are a necessary nation for Vico’s new science because they are a standard or constant against which gentile history develops and comprehends itself. Vico says: ‘‘Thus our treatment of natural law begins with the idea of divine providence, in the same birth with which was born the idea of law.’’ Vico claims that ius ‘‘is a contraction of the ancient Ious (Jove)’’ (398). Vico’s doctrine of the natural law of the gentes begins with not only an act of divine providence but also the first act of comprehension of divine providence, by the gentiles—in the Jove experience. He says: ‘‘Our new Science must therefore be a demonstration, so to speak, of what providence has wrought in history [di fatto istorico della provvedenza]’’ (342). Grotius, Pufendorf, and Selden are unable to make a proper distinction between the natural law of the Hebrews, that of the gentiles, and that of the philosophers because of their faulty conception of providence. They are unable to see that from their common creator the nations are the same in their form of origin, that law is present with language from the beginning. Thus,

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from men already being in the world, the natural-law theorists attempt to see how men came to the idea of law. They are unable to make Vico’s crucial discovery that all nations originally think in terms of poetic characters and that, from this type of unreflective thought, governed by fantasia, there develops reflective thought and the human society that is based on it. As I mentioned earlier, Vico solves Plato’s quarrel with poets by making poetry or myth a first form of thought—that is not confused philosophy, done in images. Thus, as Vico says, Homer is not a philosopher. Vico not only solves this quarrel through his doctrine of poetic wisdom but also overturns the common view, derived from Aristotle and held by Lodovico Castelvetro, the sixteenth-century commentator on Aristotle’s Poetics, that poetry is more philosophical than history because history treats of particulars (Poet. 1451b; see NS 812). Vico accomplishes this by seeing that the poets and the myths they employ were in fact the first histories. He says: ‘‘Inasmuch as the poets come certainly before the vulgar historians, the first history must have been poetic’’ (813). These views are part of Vico’s proofs for the discovery of the true Homer. History and philosophy depend upon poetry, which precedes them in the development of the nations. The world of poetic wisdom is a whole. The internal structure of this whole is Vico’s tree of poetic wisdom, of which metaphysics is the trunk—from which ‘‘there branch out from one limb logic, morals, economics, and politics, all poetic; and from another, physics, the mother of cosmography and astronomy, the latter of which gives their certainty to its two daughters, chronology and geography—all likewise poetic’’ (367). The important fact about these fields within poetic wisdom is that they are ‘‘all poetic.’’ The poetic sciences of the natural world and the poetic sciences of the civil world can all make their forms of knowledge by means of the same device—the imaginative universal. In the quest for intelligibility in the barbarism of reflection of the third age, poetry is lost as the common form of thought and life. Poetry recedes into the background. The barbarism of the third age involves the loss of the whole as the flower of wisdom. The result is what Isaiah Berlin calls the ‘‘divorce between the sciences and the humanities,’’ the pursuit of a single, logical method for all knowledge versus imaginative insight into the unique inner structure of particular things.∏∞ This split is parallel to what Vico knew in his own time as the difference between the moderns and the ancients. Vico’s New Science does not overcome this divorce, but it saves civil wisdom from what Elio Gianturco called the ‘‘Cartesian world, a world of scientific research, technology, and gadgets, which invade and condition our lives.’’∏≤ With the fragmentation of the whole of wisdom, says Vico, comes the fragmentation of society that

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produces the ‘‘ultimate civil disease,’’ in which men live ‘‘in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since each follows his own pleasure or caprice’’ (1106). Vico continues: ‘‘Through long centuries of barbarism, rust will consume the misbegotten subtleties of malicious wits [degl’ingegno maliziosi] that have turned them into beasts made more inhuman by the barbarism of reflection than the first men had been made by the barbarism of sense’’ (1106). In the last stages of a nation’s life ingenuity loses its connection with imagination and the insight that leads to the fable and turns in upon itself. Thought loses its original power of insight and becomes reflection on itself, dwelling on and displaying its powers of abstraction and criticism, the excesses of which parallel the excesses of social life in which modern men throw away their substance. This is Vico’s critique of modernity. Does Vico’s New Science offer us anything apart from the ultimate solution—of providence returning the survivors to the forest, to the ‘‘sheer necessities of life,’’ so that they return to the simplicity of the first world of peoples and ‘‘are again religious, truthful, and faithful’’? In 1731 Vico wrote a second chapter to his conclusion to the New Science, ‘‘Pratica della Scienza Nuova,’’ as I mentioned earlier. Bergin and Fisch translate pratica as ‘‘practic,’’ an obsolete but technical term meaning the opposite of ‘‘theoric.’’∏≥ In this added chapter, Vico says: ‘‘This entire work has so far been treated as a purely contemplative science concerning the common nature of nations. It seems for this reason to promise no help to human prudence toward delaying if not preventing the ruin of nations in decay’’ (1405). He says the only practic that his science can offer is one to be performed in the academies. This practic is to educate the young in the principles of the new science, of how the civil world has been made by humans and can thus be mastered by them. He says that the young should be guided into good politics, and further, they should move into jurisprudence. He reminds the reader that in the dedication of the First New Science, which was addressed to the universities of Europe, he proposed that jurisprudence as connected to the whole of human and divine erudition should be put above all other sciences. Vico writes: ‘‘It is by being prepared in this way that the youths to be taught will learn the practic of this Science founded on the eternal law that providence has established for the world of nations’’ (1411). The tie between two of Vico’s most fundamental concepts, that between ius naturale gentium and storia ideale eterna, can now be seen. The natural law of the gentes is developed in history in accordance with a divine prudence. ‘‘Ideal eternal history’’ is a jurisprudence of history, a judgment or order of history placed upon any nation in the pattern of development it holds in common with every other nation. Each nation manifests a principle of ius gentium in its

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origin, its natural customs of religion, marriage, and burial, and it manifests a similar principle of commonality of law in the pattern of development its institutions undergo as they move from the age of gods to that of heroes to that of humans, and decline, all of which is governed by divine providence. Vico’s New Science as a work that describes this course and recourse of the nations is a work of jurisprudence in the sense of the original meaning that Vico ascribes to the term in the Study Methods—a knowledge of human and divine law that is the basis of wisdom. Vico’s New Science is a book of wisdom in this sense. Vico transforms the traditional conception of natural law by connecting the idea of natural law with the idea of repetition in history and by connecting this with the idea of providence. He overcomes the remoteness natural law seems always to have from concrete human affairs by claiming a version of natural law that makes it a principle of the development of any nation’s historical life. This he calls the ‘‘ideal eternal history’’ of any nation, the notion that any nation’s life is governed by a cycle of rise, maturity, and fall. This pattern, repeated in the life of all nations, Vico regards as the meaning of providence. Providence is God’s existence in history. History is ‘‘ideal’’ in that the stages of any nation’s life, while the same in general as those of any other nation, occur at different rates and have varying contents and particular shapes. History is ‘‘eternal’’ in that all of the civil world is governed by the same divinely ordered repetitions. The sense in which any nation’s history of rise, maturity, and fall makes up a whole, a single course, is the sense in which it has a ‘‘jurisprudence.’’ The full course of the life of any nation, viewed, so to speak, from above, will display a ‘‘justice,’’ a sense of internal order of its stages, a proper proportion or harmony of the beginning, middle, and end of its life. This is also a kind of ‘‘prudence’’ or total economy or eloquence of action that makes the nation what it is, gives it its self-identity. This eloquence is derived from the eternal order in which it participates. ‘‘Four things therefore, saith our herodotary Mammon Lujius in his grand old historiorum’’ (FW 13.20–21). Ideal eternal history is eternal. It is ‘‘cyclewheeling history’’ (FW 186.2). The cycle is in every event. What we might call ‘‘Vico’s paradox’’ is his insistence that, on the one hand, no nation outlives history but rises and falls within it, that there is no escape from Vico’s ‘‘grand old historiorum.’’ But Vico, on the other hand, advocates the practic of the study of providentiality in history in order to try to maintain the state at its acme. For the new scientist the human condition is one lived within the tension of Vico’s paradox. The practic or moral science that follows from Vico’s theoric is yet to be developed. In essence it is the idea that the inner form of every event in the human world is a cycle. Every event, if allowed to take its natural course, has a

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birth, matures to an acme, and declines to its own particular end only to be reawakened as the basis of other events. In the theater of the world the individual actor discovers that prudence is required when the event becomes problematic. To achieve well-being the individual must comprehend the event’s own cycle. Caught up within the course of the event, the individual who would act must look both ways, back to discover the conditions of its birth and forward to the probable end of the course written into the event’s reality, for every event or course of events will reach a natural resolution of some kind. The Florentine historian Francesco Guicciardini states this conception of prudence as: ‘‘All that which has been in the past and is at present will be again in the future. But both the names and the faces of things change, so that he who does not have a good eye will not recognize them. Nor will he know how to grasp a norm of conduct or make a judgment by means of observation.’’∏∂ Prudence is to act guided by virtue in relation to the natural course of events. The art of prudence is the art of human affairs governed by virtue. It is a jurisprudential way of life and accomplishment, ‘‘fortitudo fraught or prudentiaproven’’ (FW 99.23). Each reader meditating and narrating the new science can promote the awareness of the providential order of the human world that can guide individual actions. Such actions, successfully accomplished over and over, produce civil wisdom. The basis of the original prudential or jurisprudential order of human society is providential. Human prudence is possible because it is rooted in divine prudence—the divine wisdom speaking in the order of particular historical events. Providentia and prudentia are not only the same word, they are the same thing.∏∑ To see events in this way is to have a good eye and to guide human conduct in accordance with this power of the senses that corresponds to providentiality. Vico’s New Science takes much from Hobbes’s Leviathan. For Vico, Hobbes is different from the other seventeenth-century natural-law theorists, although he shares their problem of a lack of understanding of the providential origins of natural law. Vico says: ‘‘This [providential] principle of institutions Thomas Hobbes failed to see among his own ‘fierce and violent men.’ ’’ The reason for this, Vico says, is that Hobbes searched for his principles in Greek philosophy, such that he ‘‘fell into error with the ‘chance’ of his Epicurus . . . the result was as unhappy as the effort was noble.’’ He says Hobbes would not ‘‘have conceived this project if the Christian religion had not given him the inspiration for it’’ (179). Hobbes’s Leviathan is inspired by the book of Job. Its frontispiece carries the line from Job warning that there is no power greater than Leviathan. Hobbes’s book is constructed as an analogy with the book of Job. Job, the individual human, is subject to the power of nature that no one can tame. No hook is large enough to catch Leviathan. The book of Job is advice

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to ancient man. Hobbes’s Leviathan is advice to modern man, warning that it is not nature that is to be feared and that cannot be fully mastered—it is the state. The knowledge of the civil world that Hobbes provides is a guide for life in the modern condition. It is a noble effort, although based in error. Vico has corrected Hobbes’s error by a truer perception of providence, and he offers to the individual a new advice, based on a narration of ideal eternal history. The New Science is, in the end, an oration for modern man, an oration on the oldest maxim of Western consciousness—which, as Vico says, was attributed to Solon: ‘‘Know thyself.’’ The New Science is ‘‘a great counsel respecting metaphysical and moral things’’ (416). For the reader ‘‘to decembs within the ephemerides of profane history, all one with Tournay, Yetstoslay and Temorah’’ (FW 87.6–8), Vico’s New Science is required. It is the severe and true narration needed to live with prudence among the moderni of the barbarism of reflection, even if as a stranger in one’s own land.

Postface

Shaun the Post —FW 206.11 Joyce has been a constant companion in this journey through Vico’s life and writings, providing at various points a new perspective from which to view them. What is Joyce’s overall relation to Vico, whose science he did not necessarily believe in, but whose theories, he said, he would use for all they were worth? Joyce called Vico a ‘‘roundhead,’’ the same term he applied to his Italian teacher Ghezzi, ‘‘little roundhead rogue’seye Ghezzi’’ (P 271). Beckett, writing his famous essay on Work in Progress under Joyce’s direction in Our Exagmination, describes Vico as ‘‘a practical roundheaded Neapolitan,’’ the same phrase Joyce used to refer to Vico on one of his walks with Padraic Colum in Paris. Both H. C. E. and Finnegan are referred to in the Wake as ‘‘roundhead’’ (the Indo-European root for round, r¯et-, is ‘‘post,’’ old English rod, ¯ rod). Vico’s Christian name, Giovanni, in English is John; in Irish it is Shaun. Vico shares his name with Joyce’s brother John Stanislaus, Joyce’s personal ‘‘post.’’ Joyce is James, whose name in Irish is Shem. Shem and Shaun are the twin sons of the Earwickers. They are associated with Jim the Penman (James Townshend Saward, the nineteenth-century English barrister and forger), the

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subject of a play with the same name, and Sean (variant spelling) the Post (a low-born hero in a nineteenth-century play written by the Irish actor and playwright Dion Boucicault). Shem and Shaun are twins but also rivals, embodiments of Bruno’s doctrine of opposites, who exchange roles in the classbook, school-day section of Finnegans Wake and remain in those roles for the rest of the book. Vico is ‘‘roundheaded’’ or ‘‘postheaded,’’ the postman, whose Scienza nuova is the trellis on which Finnegans Wake is based. Joyce is the penman, who forges a new version of Vico’s work through his puns: ‘‘to twist the penman’s tale posterwise. The gist is the gist of Shaum but the hand is the hand of Sameas [Sam = Shem]. Shan—Shim—Schung. There is a strong suspicion on counterfeit’’ (FW 483.2–4). Vico is the postman, who makes his rounds on the Vico road of history, with its ‘‘vicous cicles’’ (134.16) that ‘‘meet where terms begin’’ (452.22). In the providential order of Vichian history we see how things occur through ‘‘cavileer grace by roundhered force’’ (465.16–17). Vico, with his theory of the origin of language in his ‘‘poetic logic,’’ derives letter from litter. Joyce is the pen who uses Vico’s letters to make literature. He does this through the pun. ‘‘When men want to write a letters’’ they are ‘‘pen men, pun men’’ and such men are ‘‘fun men, hen men’’ (278.18–22). ‘‘When is a Pun not a Pun?’’ (307.2–3). The answer is, when it’s not fun. ‘‘Lovesoftfun at Finnegan’s Wake’’ (607.16). Lots of puns at Finnegans wake: ‘‘Fin for fun!’’ (297.4), ‘‘patpun fun for all’’ (301.13), ‘‘all the fun I had in that fanagan’s week’’ (351.2), ‘‘logs of fun’’ (512.23), ‘‘Fuddling fun for Fullacan’s sake’’ (531.26). Vico uses the double senses of words, but he is not a pun man: ‘‘Shun the Punman!’’ (93.13). Vico has made the original new science, yet he has given only its outlines. He has not shown how its cycles of ‘‘ideal eternal history’’ are rooted in the life of every individual, how its cycles are in every experience. A penman is one who writes at the dictation of another. Joyce’s Wake is ‘‘letter, carried of Shaun, son of Hek [H. C. E.], written of Shem, brother of Shaun, uttered for Alp, mother of Shem, for Hek, father of Shaun’’ (420.17–19). Shem, like a forger, moves around a lot, but Shaun, like a post, occupies set positions and talks of past and future. Joyce’s new science of awakening in everybody the totality of human consciousness is a forgery of Vico’s new science of history. Joyce ‘‘tossed himself in the vico’’ (417.5–6). His Wake is ‘‘posted ere penned’’ (ere = before) (232.17). As he says, ‘‘Oessoyess! I never dramped of prebeing a postman’’ (488.19). Joyce is ‘‘penparing to hostpost’’ (364.5–6). He does this through jokes, ‘‘Jeems Jokes,’’ as he signed his letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver explaining a draft of the first page of the Wake. Vico is ‘‘Johnny Post’’ (278.13), ‘‘misto

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posto’’ (Italian allo stesso posto, in the same place) (430.10). Vico is a ‘‘good catlick’’ (409.12), unlike Joyce, who is the unbeliever of his childhood religion, although always using it in his forgeries. In Joyce’s ‘‘book of Doublends Jined’’ (20.15–16) we ‘‘behond the shadow of a post!’’ (462.21–22). Vico the custode, ‘‘the doublejoynted janitor’’ (27.2–3), is always there, in the pages of the Wake: ‘‘the postface in that multimirror megaron of returningties, whirled without end to end’’ (582.19–21). Joyce and Vico are rival twins. If, in our time, we search for the true Vico, we are led to the Wake, within which we are whirled from pen to post and back, in Joyce’s ‘‘wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer.’’ As litter becomes letter and letter becomes literature, we hear the thunder of the ‘‘postman’s knock’’ and see in the ‘‘multimirror’’ the ‘‘postface’’ of ‘‘Old Vico Roundpoint.’’

Chronology

1668 June 23d. Giambattista Vico is born in Naples, the sixth of eight children. His father, Antonio, originally from Maddaloni, is a bookseller, proprietor of a tiny shop in the street of San Biagio. Vico was baptized on June 24th at the nearby church of San Gennaro all’Olmo. His name, Giambattista, recalls that of his maternal grandfather, Giambattista Masullo, a carriage maker, and it likely reflects the fact that Vico was born on the eve of the feast day of St. John the Baptist and was baptized on that day. 1675 [Aged 7] Has serious fall, fracturing his skull. 1675–1677 [Aged 7–9] Years of convalescence. 1678–1679 [Aged 10–11] He attends grammar school and, because of the ease with which he learns, is admitted in a short time to the upper class, accomplishing in one scholastic year the course of study of two. 1679 [Aged 11] October. He is admitted to the first level of the ‘‘humanity’’ school. 1680 [Aged 12] October. His father sends him, as a day student, to attend the Jesuit Collegio Massimo al Gesù Vecchio, where his teacher is Antonio Del Balzo. He remains there for a semester. 1681 [Aged 13] April or May. Offended by an arbitrary scholastic injustice, Vico abandons the Collegio Massimo, especially as he realized that in the second semester he would have had to repeat the course of study of the first. Summer. He studies on his own the grammar of Emanuele Alvarez and completes the part of the course of study he did not follow at school. October. Begins to study the Summulae logicales of Peter of Spain and the logic of Paolo Nicoletti of Udine.

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October 1681–Spring 1683 [Aged 13–14] His liveliness of mind made arid by the subtle investigation of logic, Vico becomes a ‘‘deserter of studies.’’ 1683 [Aged 15] October. After having been present at the meeting of a local academy, revives his passion for studies and returns to the Collegio Massimo, where he attends the lectures on philosophy of Giuseppe Ricci for the academic year of 1683–84. Vico is dissatisfied and abandons it, preferring to study on his own the Disputationes metaphysicae of Francesco Suárez, on which he meditates for a year. 1684 [Aged 16] Without officially registering at the university, attends the lectures of Felice Aquadies, holder of the morning chair of canon law. In the same year he is sent by his father to attend the privately given law course of Francesco Verde, but Vico does not remain for more than two months, dissatisfied with the minute, quibbling detail of these practical forensics. 1685–1686 [Aged 17–18] Continues the study of civil and canon law. Because of the interest of Carlo Antonio De Rosa he is invited to develop a grasp of practical forensics under the attorney Fabrizio del Vecchio. 1686 [Three days before his 18th birthday] June 20th. Victoriously presents an address before the Neapolitan Sacro Regio Consiglio in defense of his father in a case brought against him by colleague and rival Bartolomeo Moreschi. In this same period, composes a canzone to a rose, which he read to the poet Giacomo Lubrano, then seventy; the text is lost, perhaps destroyed by Vico, repentant, in his Arcadian period, for having employed in it a baroque style. 1686–1695 [Aged 18–27] As tutor to the children of Don Domenico Rocca, he accompanies the Roccas on their visits to their residences at Vatolla in the Cilento and at Portici. Contrary to what he asserts in his autobiography, Vico never interrupts any of his connections with Neapolitan intellectual circles. At the end of the 1680s he reads and annotates Latin (Cicero, Virgil, Horace) and Italian (Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio) classics. 1689–1692 [Aged 21–24] Matriculated in jurisprudence at the University of Naples. 1692 [Aged 24] Elected to the Academy of Uniti, with the name ‘‘Raccolto.’’ 1693 [Aged 25] Publishes the canzone ‘‘Affetti di un disperato’’ [Feelings of one in despair], written the previous year and dedicated to Don Domenico Rocca while serving as tutor to his children. April. Enters into correspondence with the Florentine scholar Antonio Magliabecchi, sending him a copy of ‘‘Affetti di un disperato.’’ In the spring, between April and May, publishes ‘‘Canzone in morte di Antonio Carafa’’ [Canzone on the death of Antonio Carafa], who died on March 28th of this year. 1694 [Aged 26] In the month of June publishes a pamphlet with three canzoni in praise of Maximilian, duke of Bavaria. To celebrate the marriage of Maximilian and Teresa Cunegonda Sobieski, which took place in this year, Vico writes an epithalamium. November 12th. By this date receives a degree in both civil and canon law (doctor in utroque). 1695 [Aged 27] June. Epithalamium for the marriage of Giulio Cesare Mazzacane and Giulia Rocca, of whom Vico had been tutor since 1686. [Resumes residence at Naples.] 1696 [Aged 28] Between February and March. Writes an oration in honor of the Spanish viceroy Francesco Benavides, count of Santostefano, who was leaving Naples. The text was included in a miscellany of Vari componimenti, published that same year.

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June. Epithalamium for the wedding of Vincenzo Carafa di Bruzzano and Ippolita Cantelmo Stuart. November 4th. Vico is a member of a delegation at the royal palace in Naples to celebrate the recuperation from a serious illness of Charles II of Spain. Vico participates by giving one of the Latin presentations. 1697 [Aged 29] April 26th. Delivers the funeral oration of Caterina d’Aragona. Unsuccessful at securing the position of city clerk of Naples. 1698 [Aged 30] October 25th. Following the death of Giuseppe Toma, holder of the chair of rhetoric at the University of Naples, a competition for the chair is held. Vico competes on this day in the oral examination. 1699 [Aged 31] Declared the winner of the concourse, Vico obtains the appointment, with an annual salary of 100 scudi. Becomes a member of the Academy Palatina, founded at the Neapolitan royal palace on March 20th of the previous year by the viceroy, the duke of Medinaceli. Vico presents his dissertation ‘‘Delle cene sontuose de’ romani’’ [On the sumptuous dinners of the Romans] before this academy. October 18th. As part of his duties as professor of rhetoric, on the occasion of the inauguration of the academic year of the University of Naples, Vico presents his oration ‘‘Suam ipsius cognitionem ad omnem doctrinarum orbem brevi absolvendum maximo cuique esse incitamento’’ [Knowledge of oneself is for everyone the greatest incentive to acquire the universe of learning in the shortest possible time]. December 2d. Marries Teresa Caterina Destito. Eight children are born in the marriage. Moves from his paternal residence over the bookstore in san Biagio dei Librai, 25 to the vicolo dei Giganti in Naples. 1700 [Aged 32] September 17th. The first child, Luisa, is born. October 18th. Second inaugural oration, ‘‘Hostem hosti infensiorem infestioremque quam stultum sibi esse neminem’’ [There is no enemy more dangerous and treacherous to its adversary than the fool to himself ]. 1701 [Aged 33] September. Conspiracy of Macchia, promoted by the Neapolitan aristocracy, to transform the kingdom of Naples from a province subjugated to Spain into an autonomous state governed under the emperor of Austria. [Carlo di Sangro and Giuseppe Capece, leaders of the conspiracy, were executed.] 1702 [Aged 34] May. Published his panegyric in Latin to Philip V, king of Spain, presented to him at the moment of his departure. October 18th. Third inaugural oration, ‘‘A literaria societate omnem malam fraudem abesse oportere, si nos vera non simulata, solida non vana eruditione ornatos esse studeamus’’ [If we would study to manifest true, not feigned, and solid, not empty erudition, the Republic of Letters must be rid of every deceit]. In his autobiography, Vico reports this oration as delivered in 1701, but there was no inaugural oration that year because of the turmoil and repression of the Conspiracy of Macchia. 1703 [Aged 35] It is very probable that the draft of Vico’s history of the Conspiracy of Macchia (Principum neapolitanorum coniurationis anni MDCCI historia) dates from this year, judging it according to the point of view of the Franco-Spanish government of the Bourbons, condemning its Austrian objective. There exists a first version of this

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history, entitled De parthenopea coniuratione [On the Neapolitan conspiracy] (Parthenopean = Neapolitan, from Latin, Parthenope, a siren worshiped in Naples in ancient times). 1704 [Aged 36] December 19th. Vico participates in a celebration in the royal palace in Naples of the birthday of Philip, king of Spain, at which various poetic tributes are proclaimed (published the following year in a collected volume). 1705 [Aged 37] October 18th. Fourth inaugural oration, ‘‘Si quis ex literarum studiis maximas utilitates easque semper cum honestate coniunctas percipere velit, is rei publicae seu communi civium bono erudiatur’’ [If one wishes to gain the greatest benefits from the study of the liberal arts, and these always conjoined with honor, let him be educated for the good of the republic which is the common good of the citizenry]. This oration, written by Vico in 1704, was postponed to the following year because in the two-year period 1703–1704 there were no formal addresses opening the academic year, the body of the faculty being engaged in carrying out university concourses. 1706 [Aged 38] September 2d. Death of Vico’s father, Antonio. October 18th. Fifth inaugural oration, ‘‘Res publicas tum maxime belli gloria inclytas et rerum imperio potentes, quum maxime literis floruerunt’’ [Nations have been most celebrated in glory for battles and have obtained the greatest political power when they have excelled in letters]. Vico places it in 1705 in his autobiography, when instead he presented the fourth. [Son Ignazio born.] 1707 [Aged 39] July 7th. In the course of the war of Spanish succession, the Austrian troops of the future Charles VI of Hapsburg enter Naples, and the Austrian domination succeeds that of the Spanish Bourbons. To mark the disappearance of the danger to the city caused by the eruption of Vesuvius during July and August, the municipal administration of Naples erects a shrine to San Gennaro near the church of Santa Caterina a Formello. Vico writes the inscription for the plaque commemorating the event. October 11th. Philip Lorenz Wierich von Daun, supreme commander of the Austrian Army in Naples, commissions Vico to write the funeral inscriptions and other epidictic display requested to honor the memory of Carlo di Sangro and Giuseppe Capace, the two major artificers of the Conspiracy of Macchia, who were executed by the Spanish during that failed attempt. Vico’s work is collected with other material in Publicum Caroli Sangri et Josephi Capycii, nobilium Neapolitanorum, funus [Public funeral of the noble Neapolitans Carlo di Sangro and Giuseppe Capece], published the following year. October 18th. Sixth inaugural oration, ‘‘Corruptae hominum naturae cognitio ad universum ingenuarum artium scientiarumque orbem absolvendum invitat, ac rectum, facilem ac perpetuum in iis addiscendis ordinem exponit’’ [Knowledge of the corrupt nature of man invites the study of the entire universe of liberal arts and sciences, and sets forth the correct method by which we learn them]. 1708 [Aged 40] October 18th. Inaugural oration ‘‘De nostri temporis studiorum ratione’’ [On the study methods of our time], dedicated to the future Charles VI and read in the presence of the viceroy, Vincenzo Grimani. 1709 [Aged 41] In spring appears On the Study Methods of Our Time, printed by the Neapolitan publisher Felice Mosca. With respect to the version presented at the university, this appears richer and more thorough.

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It is probably in these same months that Vico works at revising for the press the other six orations of the years 1699–1707, without, however, ever arriving at their publication. At the end of the year he perhaps begins to sketch out the Liber physicus (Physics), that was to be a part of On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians. The book on physics, which must not ever have been finished, has been lost. 1710 [Aged 42] June 19th. Becomes a member of the Arcadia, in the Colonia Sebezia of Naples, where he is registered with the name Làufilo Terio. By way of thanks Vico sends to Giovan Mario Crescimbeni, the custode general of the Arcadia, the sonnet ‘‘Donna bella e gentil’’ [Beautiful and gentle lady], which had been published in 1701. In October he publishes the Liber metaphysicus (Metaphysics), dedicated to his friend Paolo Mattia Doria, with whom he had preliminary discussions of the theses of the work. Vico intended that the Liber metaphysicus would be the first of three books, brought together under the comprehensive title On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians Unearthed from the Origins of the Latin Language in Three Books. The second book, Liber physicus, was only sketched, and the third (Morals) was only hypothesized, never written, perhaps because Vico was continuously distracted by academic duties, or perhaps because he was debilitated by a period of illness. October 31st. Sends to Apostolo Zeno a copy of the Liber metaphysicus, asking him to review it for the Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia. 1711 [Aged 43] April 26th. Conclusion of the course on rhetoric given by Vico at the University of Naples begun in October 1710. The text of the lectures of this academic year have the title Institutionum oratoriarum liber unus [Institutes of oratory, book one]. Of the didactic material treated in Vico’s university lectures for a period of forty years, there also remain compilations for the period 1730–1741 [The Art of Rhetoric (Institutiones oratoriae, 1711–1741) ]. May. On the occasion of the funeral of the emperor Joseph I of Austria, who died at Vienna on April 17th, commemorated at Naples in the chapel of the royal palace, Vico, by commission of the viceroy Carlo Borromeo Arese, wrote the funeral inscriptions, now lost. In early autumn an anonymous review of the Ancient Wisdom appears in the Venetian Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia (vol. 5, article 6, pp. 119–30), perhaps by Bernardo Trevisan. September. Vico replies to the critique contained in the abovementioned review, printed by Felice Mosca: Risposta nella quale si sciolgono tre opposizioni fatte da dotto signore contro il Primo Libro ‘‘De antiquissima Italorum sapientia’’ [Response in which are dissolved the three objections made by the learned gentleman against the first book of the ‘‘Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians’’]. October 7th. In his capacity as civil censor, Vico publishes the endorsement for publication of a work of Antonio Galeota in defense of Lucantonio Porzio. The anonymous reviewer replies in Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia (vol. 8, article 10, pp. 309–38) to Vico’s Response. 1712 [Aged 44] June 11th. In a letter to Crescimbeni, Vico advocates the proper position to take in confronting the schism on the part of some dissidents led by Gianvincenzo Gravina that occurred within the Academy of the Arcadia. September. Vico publishes a second, short piece relative to the polemic concerning the Ancient Wisdom. He entitles it Risposta all’articolo X del tomo VIII del ‘‘Giornale de’

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Letterati d’Italia’’ [Response to article X of volume VIII of the ‘‘Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia’’]; it is printed by Felice Mosca. The debate is concluded with a brief editorial statement in the journal (vol. 12, article 13, pp. 417–18), appearing in the same year, expressing satisfaction with Vico’s ‘‘learned and modest’’ second response. September 10th. Civil censor for publication of the volume Tragedie cinque of Gianvincenzo Gravina. Also in this year Vico continues to carry out the duties of an encomiastical poet, composing a Latin epigram for the marriage of Tommaso d’Aquino and Lucrezia Dal Verme and a poem in Latin for the marriage of Arrigo Loffredo and Ginevra Grillo. 1713 [Aged 45] It is possible that at this point Vico finds a use for the draft of the De aequilibrio corporis animantis [On the equilibrium of animate bodies], an independent development of the projected Liber physicus already conceived for the Ancient Wisdom. The work ‘‘of few pages’’ is the result of his meditations following dialogues with Paolo Mattia Doria, Lucantonio Porzio, and Domenico Aulisio (to whom it is dedicated). The precise year of publication is not known; all trace of it was lost in the 1800s, but it was seen at that time by Vincenzo Cuoco. October 18th. It is probable that Vico delivers the oration at the inauguration of this academic year; he furnishes an extract of its beginning, in Italian, in his autobiography [A 123–25]. He begins the biography of Antonio Carafa, on which he works for two years, scrupulously documenting it from the papers of the archive put at his disposal by its commissioner, Adriano Antonio Carafa, nephew of the military leader. 1714 [Aged 46] Troubled by neurological pain in his left arm, Vico occupies almost all the time not spent on his university obligations with arranging the materials on Antonio Carafa. He finds time, however, to write a pair of Latin compositions for the marriages of Gaetano Argento to Costanza Mirelli and of Antonio Caracciolo to Marianna Serra. 1715 [Aged 47] During this year he finishes writing the historical biography of Antonio Carafa. [Son Gennaro born.] 1716 [Aged 48] March. The De rebus gestis Antonii Caraphaei libri quatuor [On the life and deeds of Antonio Carafa, in four books] appears, printed by Mosca. 1717 [Aged 49] January 16th. In a note, Pope Clement XI, after having received a copy of De rebus gestis Antonii Caraphaei, proclaims that the deeds of the military leader are worthy of ‘‘imperituri monumenti letteri.’’ Vico, as usual avid for recognition, holds that this generic expression is an elegy of ‘‘immortal glory’’ attributed specifically to this work of his. But these vanities must not have been pleasing to the Neapolitan intellectuals, as attested by a satirical sonnet by Nicola Capasso. Further Latin verses for the nuptials of notable members of the Neapolitan cultural elite. 1718 [Aged 50] [Becomes a grandfather with the birth of Luisa’s first child.] 1719 [Aged 51] With this date, but without the place of publication, there is an edition of De iure belli ac pacis [On the Law of War and Peace] of Grotius (the original edition also being without publication information) that seems to be edited by Vico and to be that of which he gives an account in his autobiography [A 154–55]. August. On the occasion of the nuptials of his long-standing disciple, Adriano Antonio Carafa, and Teresa Borghese, Vico is sponsor of a poetic miscellany in their honor, to which he contributes the dedication, five sonnets, a lyric poem, and two Latin verses.

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October 18th. Inaugural oration of the new academic year. Several passages are reported in his autobiography [A 156]. 1720 [Aged 52] February. At the death of the empress Eleonora Maddalena of Neuburg, widow of Leopold I, Wolfgang von Schrottenbach, then viceroy of Naples, commissions Vico to compose the funeral inscriptions. It appears that these were not to the liking of the commissioners; thus the charge passed to another pen, perhaps to Matteo Egizio. Vico comments on this in his autobiography [A. 176–77]. From the existence of a manuscript of a ‘‘commiato’’ [a postface in which Vico addresses his readers] to a work of jurisprudence, it can be inferred that Vico is referring to a first sketch (lost, never published) of a preliminary draft of what will shortly become the Universal Law. Funeral elegy of the duchess Virginia Pignatelli, deceased February 24th. The text was published in the Notizie degli Arcadi morti nell’anno 1720. July. To anticipate the content of the Universal Law, then being composed, Vico brings into print an editorial manifesto of four densely written pages. It carries no title, but is usually designated as ‘‘Synopsis of Universal Law.’’ July 14th. Sends the ‘‘Synopsis,’’ accompanied by a letter, to Father Bernardo Maria Giacco, also the recipient of other of Vico’s works. September. Publishes On the One Principle and the One End of Universal Law, the first of the three volumes that come under the comprehensive title of the Universal Law. Also this year, a miscellany of Latin verses are printed to celebrate the elevation to cardinal of the Jesuit Giambattista Salerni, one of the illustrous personages to whom, five years later, Vico will send as a gift a copy of the New Science. 1721 [Aged 53] There appears a long epithalamium, ‘‘Giunone in danza’’ [ Juno in dance], in a miscellany, Vari componimenti per le nozze degli eccellentissimi signori don Giambattista Filomarino principe della Rocca e donna Maria Vittoria Caracciolo dei marchesi di Sant’Eramo. In another celebratory volume there is a sonnet by Vico for the marriage of Antonio Pignatelli and Anna Francesca Pinelli. Between August and September, On the Constancy of the Jurisprudent comes out, the second volume of the Universal Law. 1721–1722 [Aged 53–54] Vico sends copies of the two books of the Universal Law to several intellectuals and ‘‘persons of account,’’ among whom are Father Giacco, Biagio Garofalo, Prince Eugenio di Savoia, and Jean Le Clerc. To these two volumes he attaches a letter dated January 9, 1722. Thus begins an exchange of letters with Jean Le Clerc, who responds to him on September 8. 1722 [Aged 54] August. Notes, the third book of the Universal Law, appears. Vico engages in a deep reading of the Homeric poems, approached in mythological and anthropological terms. December 12th. Following the death of Domenico Campanile, the morning chair of civil law becomes vacant. Vico writes to Prince Eugenio di Savoia, requesting that he recommend him to the administrative commission as a candidate for the chair. 1723 [Aged 55] January 19th. The proclamation appears for the concourse for the morning chair of civil law. April 10th. Vico holds his lecture for the concourse; it concerns the passage De praescriptis verbis of the Digest (XIX, 5, 1). Vico is not supported by anyone in the bosom of the

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administrative commission; thus he is advised by Domenico Caravita to withdraw from the concourse. The text of the lecture, entitled Solemnis praelectio ad legem primam ‘‘Digesti,’’ ‘‘De praescriptis verbis’’ [Solemn lecture on the first law under ‘‘Actions Using Prescribed Words’’ of the Digest ], is distributed the day after the unfortunate examination to those whom Vico holds in high regard. He had thought, in 1728, of sending it for publication to the Venetian Raccolta d’opuscoli scientifici e filologici, where his autobiography was about to come out, but the dissertation never saw the light of print, and is lost. Vico is partially consoled for the misadventure of the concourse by the arrival in Naples of a copy of the Bibliothèque ancienne et moderne (1722, vol. 8, pt. 2) that contains the review by Le Clerc of the first two volumes of the Universal Law. Vico summarizes it in his autobiography and it will be reflected, in part, in the New Science. October 17th. He writes one of his letters of thanks to Le Clerc. October 30th. Anton Francesco Marmi writes a letter from Naples to Muratori, in which he asserts that Vico is working on a book, Dubbi e desideri intorno ai principi della teologia de’ gentili [Doubts and desires concerning the principles of the theology of the gentiles]. Almost certainly it concerns the Scienza nuova in forma negativa [New science in negative form]. He continues the production of verses for nuptials, and encomiums. Notable among these is the canzone ‘‘Origine, progresso e caduta della poesia’’ [‘‘Origin, progress, and fall of poetry’’], dedicated to Maria della Torre and published in this year in a miscellany, Rime di vari illustri poeti napoletani, edited by Aniello Albani. In 1723 Vico terminates his autobiography as commissioned by Giovan Artico di Porcìa, creator of a project, elaborated at the end of 1721, proposing to collect the lives of the major intellectuals of the time. Until now, following Croce and Nicolini, it was always held that the first part of Vico’s autobiography was finished and sent to Porcìa on the date of June 23, 1725. But that the work was sent earlier is proved by a letter of January 5, 1724, in which Porcìa wrote to Antonio Vallisneri ‘‘of having sent to P. Lodoli the life of Vico together with the description of my project, in order to bring them into print together’’ (see the letter in the Concordiana Collection at the Accademia dei Concordi di Rovigo, Conc. 350/69, c. 50, partially published by Dario Generali in the volume he edited on G. A. di Porcìa, Notizie della vita, e degli studi del Kavalier Antonio Vallisneri, Bologna: Pàtron, 1986, p. 23). 1724 [Aged 56] In the first days of the year victoriously defends his son-in-law, Antonio Servillo, in a legal proceeding, sustaining that a document on which the charge was founded had been falsified by the notary. Between the end of 1723 and the first of the following year he writes out the funeral oration for Anna von Aspermont, mother of the viceroy of Naples, deceased on December 13, 1723. The volume containing the commemoration is given on June 3d to Father Giacco. By the end of the year the Scienza nuova in forma negativa is almost completed. Hoping to obtain from Cardinal Corsini the financing of the publication, Vico writes the dedication to him and on November 18th sends it to Monsignor Filippo Maria Monti, requesting that he transmit it to Corsini, lending the strength of his influence. At first Cardinal Corsini accepts this version of the Scienza nuova in forma negativa, implying, in the custom of the time, that he is disposed to cover the costs of the publication of the work.

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December 26th. This known, Vico sends a letter in which he expresses all the appropriate gratitude. 1725 [Aged 57] July 20th. Alleging the excuse of ‘‘exorbitant expenses’’ that he had to sustain in his diocese of Frascati, Corsini writes to Vico of no longer being able to finance the publication of the Scienza nuova in forma negativa, brought to completion in this month. Without the subvention, Vico is not in a position himself to cover the costs of two volumes in quarto. The manuscript, having later migrated first to Venice, then back again to Naples in 1730, is lost. Between the end of June and the first days of September, Vico rewrites rapidly a new, much briefer version of it as Principles of a New Science Concerning the Nature of the Nations, which comes out in October. The costs of publication fall entirely on the shoulders of Vico who, to sustain them, has to sell a diamond ring. September 10th. Civil censor for the printing of the book of Giovanni Giuseppe Gironda, Compendiosa spiegazione dell’impresa di Cesare Michelangelo d’Avalos. Between October and December, diffusion of numerous copies of the New Science. Through Abbé Esperti, Vico provides for its distribution in Rome and Venice. Through Giuseppe Athias the book finally reaches Newton in London, Le Clerc in Amsterdam, and Johann Burckhard Mencken in Leipzig. Among Vico’s sonnets for occasions of this year, two distinguish themselves, done on November 1st, dedicated to the scarcely twenty-year-old Gherardo degli Angioli, the most dear of his pupils. Degli Angioli is the recipient of a letter of December 26th where, to justify the grandness of the poetry of Dante, Vico describes the time in which he lives as the age of ‘‘recoursed barbarism.’’ 1726 [Aged 58] A few months are enough for Vico to steel himself against the indifference and lack of acclaim with which the New Science is met. He expresses his regret about this in a letter of the first days of the year to Abbé Esperti. The disappointment is evident in the letter of January 20th to Father De Vitry, when he draws a desolate picture of academic publishing in southern Italy. June 20th. Giovanni Nicola Bandiera makes a visit to Vico. Bandiera converses with him for three hours and later recalls the talk as forced and by a ‘‘truly dry person.’’ [Appraises Valletta’s library, purchased by the Fathers of the Oratory; see Vico’s letter to de Vitry of January 20, 1726.] 1727 [Aged 59] Among the better known literary works Vico writes as a matter of obligation is the oration ‘‘In morte di donn’Angela Cimmino Marchesa della Petrella’’ [On the death of Lady Angela Cimmino Marchesa della Petrella]. It is included in a miscellany in her memory edited by Vico, in which he also inserts her poetry in Italian and Latin. In the Acta eruditorum lipsiensia, dated August, appears the anonymous, malevolent review of the Scienza nuova prima [First New Science]. December 14th. Count Porcìa communicates to Vico that the printing of his autobiography is immanent. Porcìa notes the interest that has arisen in the New Science at Venice where, if Vico would wish to do so, he could print a second edition. 1728 [Aged 60] January 3d. Antonio Conti invites Vico to prepare a Venetian edition of the New Science. The same request arrives in a letter dated January 15th by Carlo Lodoli, the real promoter of the initiative. Antonio Conti will take up the request again in a letter of March 10th.

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March 10th. Aware that his autobiography is going into print, Vico hurries to bring it up to date, dispatching to Porcìa the part relative to the period 1723–25 concerning the drafting of the Scienza nuova in forma negativa and the New Science. Vico’s Autobiography finally comes out on October 1st in the first volume of the Raccolta d’opuscoli scientifici e filologici, edited by Angelo Calogerà. October 11th. He writes to Angelo Calogerà thanking him for the publication of his Autobiography and asking him to emend an error in the text. December 15th. Civil censor for the printing of the Stanze in lode di Antonio Manuele of Ippolita Cantelmo Stuart. 1729 [Aged 61] January 5th. Civil censor for the printing of the Tragedie cristiane of Annibale Marchese. January 12th. Long letter to Francesco Saverio Estevan that returns obsessively to the cause of the lack of success of the New Science. Vico continues his habitual production of encomiums, for the ordination of preachers, for a promotion to cardinal, for a funeral commemoration. August. The issue of the Acta eruditorum lipsiensia, circulated in Naples only to a few subscribers, appears in the window of a bookseller, and at nearly the same time Vico first sees it. Ill with scurvy, he writes a very strong reply. On second thoughts, with a view toward its printing, he attenuates the tone in the most virulent parts. At the end of November the pamphlet sees the light of print, with the title Notae in ‘‘Acta eruditorum lipsiensia.’’ Usually, however, it is cited as Vici vindiciae [Vindication of Vico], the other title that appears on the title page. Almost all this year Vico is devoted to the drafting of the ‘‘Annotations’’ of the New Science of 1725, with a view to its Venetian edition. The work begun in March of the preceding year is concluded in October. In the same month the manuscript reaches the hands of Father Lodoli. Contemporaneous with drafting the ‘‘Annotations’’ to the New Science, acts as civil censor for the commentary on Dante’s Commedia by Pompeo Venturi. The text is printed at Lucca in 1732. At the end of the year there arises a conflict with the Venetian printer of the New Science, increased in size by the ‘‘Annotations,’’ and Vico, not wishing to appear constrained to publish at all costs his work at Venice, decides to retract the manuscript [according to the account he gives in the autobiography, A 191–92]. December 25, 1729–April 9, 1730 [Aged 61–62] Rendering himself accountable, for the second time, to publish an extremely voluminous book, Vico rewrites the New Science in only 106 days, between Christmas and Easter, reducing it to half with respect to the manuscript sent to Venice. The labor is completed, Vico’s serious case of influenza during the winter notwithstanding. 1730 [Aged 62] Spring. Nominated member of the Academy of Assorditi (Urbino). June 5th. Thanks Ludovico Antonio Muratori for the nomination. For the moment rejects writing the autobiography requested of him as part of membership in the academy for the reason that his autobiography had already appeared in the Raccolta of Cologerà. Summer. The second edition of the New Science is already half printed at the press of Felice Mosca when Vico decides to delete the Novella letteraria at the beginning, in which he had polemically traced the chronicle of the failed publishing venture in Venice. In its place he inserts the explanation of the allegorical engraving especially

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made for the frontispiece of the book. While the book is in the course of being printed he prepares a series of ‘‘Corrections, meliorations, and additions’’ to publish in an appendix. July 13th. Cardinal Lorenzo Corsini ascends the pontifical throne with the name of Clement XII. Vico dedicates a canzone to him. In this year the introduction to the Rime of Gherardo degli Angioli must have been written, published the next year. December. The Second New Science comes out. Several days after the publication, informed by Francesco Spinelli of several errors, Vico writes the ‘‘Second corrections, meliorations, and additions’’ printed in a booklet in January 1731. In the 1730s Vico continues producing verses in Italian and Latin (beyond those in the courses of rhetoric, for which he draws up a manual, ‘‘De chriis’’) [On the rhetorical use of thematic sentences; see Nicolini, Opere (Milan: Ricciardi, 1953), 957–69], and didactic activity, consisting of partial commentaries on Latin authors (Tacitus, Horace). 1731 [Aged 63] Spring. Freed from the fatigue of the New Science reconsiders the invitation of Muratori to furnish the autobiography in qualification for membership of the Academy of Assorditi. Updates the Autobiography of 1728 to 1731, interspersing the earlier events with additional episodes. Yet this autobiographical project falls short, and there remains only a rough draft in its original manuscript. April 6th. Implores Emperor Charles VI to allow his son Gennaro to succeed his father in an academic career and to obtain the concession of a fixed income. Through the office of the viceroy of Naples the request is substantially granted. April 3d–August 27th. ‘‘Third corrections, meliorations, and additions’’ to the New Science, including a discourse on the Law of the Twelve Tables and one on the Law of Tribonian. June. Two Latin inscriptions for the funeral of Gaetano Argento. October. Dedication and preface to the Sifilide of Gerolamo Fracastoro, translated by Pietro Belli. 1732 [Aged 64] March 1st. Writes to Nicola Gaetani, duke of Laurenzano, commenting on and praising his book Avvertimenti intorno alle passioni dell’animo. September 6th. Civil censor for the printing of the Cristiade of Marco Girolamo Vica, translated into Italian by Tommaso Perrone. October 18th. Delivers the inaugural university oration ‘‘On the Heroic Mind,’’ published at the end of the following month with a dedication to the viceroy of Naples. 1733 [Aged 65] July. The arrival of the new viceroy, Giulio Visconti, induces Vico to deliver a Latin elegy in his honor. August 30th. Erudite letter on the significance of ancient masks sent to Giuseppe Pasquale Cirillo. Probably in this year writes a new series of ‘‘Corrections, meliorations, and additions’’ to the New Science, still called ‘‘third’’ because they replace those of 1731. Begins correspondence with Nicola and Daniele Concina, two brothers of Friuli who, admiring the thought of Vico, remain in correspondence with him until at least 1736. 1734 [Aged 66] The Spanish reconquer the Kingdom of Naples. Between May and June Vico dedicates a sonnet in praise of Charles of Bourbon, celebrating the event. In the same period sends to him a request to obtain the position of royal historiographer.

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Translates into Italian the Pro Marcello of Cicero. 1735 [Aged 67] Course of lectures on Terence. July 2d. Accepting Vico’s application, Charles of Bourbon names him royal historiographer. In this period Vico drafts, at various times, three sonnets dedicated to Charles. August 31st. Sonnet in honor of St. Augustine, toward whom Vico nurtures particular devotion, recited at the Neoplatonic Academy of Oziosi. In the preceding year the academy had been officially reconstituted and placed under the protection of St. Augustine. Two sonnets for the marriage of Raimondo di Sangro and Carlotta Gaetani di Laurenzano and another two for the marriage of Antonio Capece Minutolo and Teresa Filangieri. 1735–1736 [Aged 67–68] Drafting of the definitive text of the New Science, which is then given to the printer in 1744. In following years Vico makes annotations, corrections, deletions to this version. 1736 [Aged 68] To honor his appointment as royal historiographer, he projects a history of the reconquest by the Bourbons of the Kingdom of Naples, but it is never carried out. Takes up again De aequilibrio corporis animantis and writes a dedication of the work to Charles of Bourbon. Civil censor for the printing of Cleopatra of Scipione Cigala. [Son Ignazio dies.] 1737 [Aged 69] January 6th. Vico, nominated custode of the renewed Academy of Oziosi, delivers the inaugural oration, concerning the relation between philosophy and eloquence. Commences correspondence with Muzio di Gaeta, archbishop of Bari. November. Civil censor for the printing of the little book of Giuseppe Pasquale Cirillo, Oratio pro solemni studiorum instauratione. Perhaps at the end of this year does stylistic revisions of the first two discourses of his pupil, Nicola Gaetani, duke of Laurenzano, concerning La disciplina del cavalier giovane, published in the following year. Probably this year is the last use of the Institutiones oratoriae in Vico’s teaching. December. Petition to Pope Clement XII and to Clement’s nephew, Cardinal Neri Corsini, to obtain a concession for his oldest son, Filippo. 1738 [Aged 70] April. Prepares the inscription to affix to the temporary altar to San Gennaro, raised on May 3d. May 15th. Civil censor for the printing of an Oratio of Giambattista Spena. May 25th. Civil censor for the printing of the Disciplina del cavalier giovane of Nicola Gaetani, on the manuscript of which Vico had done revisions. In May is the marriage of Charles of Bourbon and Maria Amalia of Walburg. Vico celebrates this event by including in a miscellany done in honor of the couple a Latin oration, some inscriptions, also in Latin, and several sonnets. In his capacity as royal historiographer expresses an opinion on the numerical indication assigned to Charles of Bourbon with regard to his position as king of Naples. There being differing opinions, the sovereign should decide, in order to avoid putting several designations beside his name.

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November 7th. Civil censor for the printing of an Orazione of his friend Giacco. In this year Vico returns to his grammatical, lexical, and stylistic commentaries on the works of Terence, Cicero, Tacitus, Petrarch, and Ariosto. 1739 [Aged 71] Continues encomiastical activity with six extended inscriptions in February for the funeral rites of Baldassame Cattaneo, with another ten in May for the first anniversary of the death of James Fitzjames, and a sonnet for the marriage of Gerolamo Pignatelli to Francesca Pignatelli. 1740 [Aged 72] In the last days of the year, asks Charles of Bourbon why his son Gennaro is not confirmed in the chair of rhetoric that Vico held for a period of forty years and now leaves for reasons of age. 1741 [Aged 73] Succeeded in his professorship by his son Gennaro. 1741–1743 [Aged 73–75] Occasional inscriptions and sonnets (for births, nuptials, deaths). 1742 [Aged 74] Receives the first printed pages of the treatise on the tarantula spider, De phalangio apulo, from its author Francesco Serao. Vico praises them in their general plan, and makes emendations. The ability of Serao is attested to by the fact that ten years before, he had been invited to write an oration in case Vico, because of age and illness, was not able to deliver his ‘‘On the Heroic Mind’’ [1732]. 1743 [Aged 75] In the second half of the year the printing of the third edition of the New Science begins. Its publication will occur posthumously, at the end of July 1744. In December 1743 the printer’s proofs of half the book are available and are reviewed by Vico. 1744 [Aged 75] January 10th. Dictated the dedication of the New Science to Cardinal Troiano Acquaviva, the Hispanic-Neapolitan ambassador at the Holy See, who was willing to sustain, at least in part, the costs of printing. Dies during the night of January 22d and 23d.

Notes

Chapter 1: The Joycean Vico 1. Giordano Bruno, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, trans. Arthur D. Imerti (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1964), 90–91. 2. Nicholas Cusanus, Of Learned Ignorance, trans. Germain Heron (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954). On the influence of Cusa on Bruno, see ‘‘Editor’s Introduction’’ in The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, 35–36, and J. Lewis McIntyre, Giordano Bruno (London: Macmillan, 1903), 140–48. 3. Translated by Gilbert Highet in William York Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 178. 4. Joyce was led to make Dublin, Georgia, the double in the New World of Dublin in the Old through his inquiry of Julien Levy, who found three Dublins in the United States; see Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 583n. From the current Rand McNally Road Atlas and U.S. Postal Zip-Code Directory, I find there are ten Dublins in the United States. In addition to Georgia there are Dublins in California, Indiana, Mississippi, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Virginia. I suspect that many, if not all, of these Dublins existed in the 1920s, at the time of Joyce’s request to Levy. Also, in the first chapter of book 2 of the Wake there is ‘‘dub gulch’’ (254.17). Dublin Gulch is a locality in Silver Bow County, near Butte, Montana. See Louis O. Mink, A Finnegans Wake Gazetteer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 298. 5. Ellmann, 59–60.

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6. Mary and Padraic Colum, Our Friend James Joyce (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1968; 1958), 82. 7. Samuel Beckett, ‘‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,’’ in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (New York: New Directions, 1972; 1929), 4. I am unclear why Joyce and Beckett particularly insist on characterizing Vico as ‘‘roundheaded.’’ His cycles of history are round. Are Cromwellian associations intended? Or, does it simply mean ‘‘hardheaded,’’ empirically minded, dealing only in facts? I note in a fairly recent novel about academic life by the Dublin-born Ruth Dudley Edwards, the comment: ‘‘ ‘You need the whistle-blowers and the people who don’t mind being unpopular and the people with tunnel vision.’ ‘But not too many of them,’ said the Bursar. ‘They’re almost all Roundheads.’ ’’ See Matricide at St. Martha’s (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), 167. See also my remarks in the Postface. 8. Domenico Pietropaolo, ‘‘Vico and Literary History in the Early Joyce,’’ in Vico and Joyce, ed. Donald Phillip Verene (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 102. 9. C. P. Curran, James Joyce Remembered (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 121. 10. ‘‘James Clarence Mangan,’’ in The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 81–83. The editors regard the source of these views as theosophy, coming to Joyce perhaps through Yeats. They may be correct; if so, they are also views shared with Vico. The similarity of these views with those of Vico would not have escaped Joyce, given his reading of Fornaciari and his conversations with Ghezzi. 11. Alessandro Francini Bruni, ‘‘Recollections of Joyce,’’ in Portraits of the Artist in Exile: Recollections of James Joyce by Europeans, ed. Willard Potts (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979), 40. 12. Max Harold Fisch, ‘‘Vico’s Reputation and Influence,’’ in The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, trans. Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990; 1944), 97. Although Fisch gives 1905 as a date of Joyce’s reading and digesting Vico’s Scienza nuova, it may only signify the date of Joyce’s arrival in Trieste, where at some point during his residence he read Vico. Fisch told me when we were in Trieste together in June 1985 that he could not recall what his evidence was for this date of Joyce’s reading Vico. 13. Ellmann, 340. 14. Joyce resided in via Donato Bramante from Sept. 15, 1912, to June 28, 1915 (L II:lvii). 15. Hugh Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 324. 16. Ellmann, 340n. 17. James Joyce, ‘‘Vico (Cornell)’’ in Notes, Criticism, Translations, and Miscellaneous Writings: A Facsimile of Manuscripts and Typescripts, vol. 2, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, The James Joyce Archive (New York: Garland, 1979), 391–93. See also Andrew Treip, ‘‘The Cornell Notes on Vico,’’ La revue des lettres modernes: James Joyce 3, Joyce et l’Italie, ed. Claude Jacquet and Jean-Michel Rabaté (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1994), 217–20. The Archive identifies the typescript as the ‘‘Trieste or Zurich years’’ (1905–20). 18. See Joyce’s comment to Harriet Shaw Weaver on this passage from Quinet (L

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I:295); also, James S. Atherton, The Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking, 1960), 34–35. 19. Ellmann, 664. 20. Colum, 81. 21. Curran, 86–87. The passage Joyce pointed out to Curran combines lines from Michelet’s ‘‘Avant-propos’’ and his introduction, ‘‘Discours sur le système et la vie de Vico,’’ to Oeuvres choisies de Vico (1835). See Jules Michelet, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. Paul Viallaneix (Paris: Flammarion, 1971), 281, 287, 288. 22. Silvio Benco, ‘‘James Joyce in Trieste,’’ in Portraits of the Artist in Exile, 52. Joyce not only knew Italian; as a lingua vita its forms of speech and expression influenced his work. For an analysis of this influence see Corinna del Greco Lobner, James Joyce’s Italian Connection: The Poetics of the Word (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989). For the texts of Joyce’s articles in Il piccolo della sera as well as his other short writings in Italian see James Joyce, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. Kevin Barry, trans. from Italian by Conor Deane (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 23. Benco, 49. Ellmann, 389. 24. The texts of Joyce’s examination essays are in Louis Berrone, James Joyce in Padua (New York: Random House, 1977). See also Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. Barry, 183–90 and 285–88. 25. Francini Bruni, 44, n. 58. 26. Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), xiv–xv; Tindall, 62, 208, 331. 27. Ellmann, 564. 28. The annalists to whom Joyce refers are the Franciscan monks who compiled the Annals of the Four Masters, written between 1632 and 1636, giving the history of Ireland; they appear as figures in Finnegans Wake and can be associated with the Four Evangelists (see FW 256.21). See also Joyce’s letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver of Oct. 12, 1923 (SL 296 and n. 2). 29. Colum, 82. 30. Ellmann, 722. 31. H. P. Adams, The Life and Writings of Giambattista Vico (London: Allen and Unwin, 1935); Robert Flint, Vico (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1884). 32. Jacques Mercanton, ‘‘The Hours of James Joyce,’’ in Portraits of the Artist in Exile, 207. 33. Ellmann, 693. 34. See Donald Phillip Verene, ‘‘Freud’s Consulting Room Archeology and Vico’s Principles of Humanity,’’ British Journal of Psychotherapy 13 (1997): 499–505. 35. Ellmann, 340. 36. Anita Loos, ‘‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’’: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925), 156–58. 37. Ellmann, 126 and note. In the preface to the reprinting of Les lauriers sont coupés (Paris: Messein, 1924), Valery Larbaud compares the ‘‘monologue intérieur’’ of Dujardin’s novel to that of Ulysses (which appeared in 1922). 38. Ellmann, 628.

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39. William Carlos Williams, ‘‘A Point for American Criticism,’’ in Our Exagmination, 182. 40. Carl G. Jung, ‘‘Ulysses—ein Monologue,’’ Europäische Revue 8 (1932): 547– 68. On Jung see Donald Phillip Verene, ‘‘Coincidence, Historical Repetition, and Selfknowledge: Jung, Vico, and Joyce,’’ Journal of Analytical Psychology 47 (2002): 459–78. 41. Ellmann, 693. 42. Patricia Hutchins, James Joyce’s World (London: Methuen, 1957), 212. 43. The Early Joyce: The Book Reviews, 1902–1903, ed. Stanislaus Joyce and Ellsworth Mason (Colorado Springs: Mamalujo Press, 1955), 39 and 40, n. 9. 44. The Critical Writings of James Joyce, 69. 45. Ellmann, 89 and note. Ibsen’s line is: ‘‘At leve er—krig med trolde,’’ see M. C. Bradbrook, Ibsen the Norwegian: A Revaluation (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1966), 16. 46. The work that began the connection of Vico and Ulysses is Ellsworth G. Mason, ‘‘James Joyce’s Ulysses and Vico’s Cycles,’’ Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1948. See also Patrick T. White, ‘‘James Joyce’s Ulysses and Vico’s ‘‘Principles of Humanity,‘’’ Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1963. 47. Ellmann says Joyce ‘‘often agreed with Vico that ‘Imagination is nothing but the working over of what is remembered,’ and said to Frank Budgen, ‘Imagination is memory’ ’’ (Ellmann, 661n.). See also Richard Ellmann, The Consciousness of Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 3, 135. Budgen says: ‘‘I once broached the question of imagination with Joyce. He brushed it aside with the assertion that imagination was memory.’’ See Frank Budgen, Myselves When Young (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 187. Budgen also makes this point in his essay ‘‘Resurrection,’’ in Twelve and a Tilly: Essays on the Occasion of the 25th Anniversary of Finnegans Wake, ed. Jack P. Dalton and Clive Hart (London: Faber and Faber, 1966): ‘‘Memory is a function of mind which Joyce equated with imagination’’ (14). The source for the identification of memory and imagination is Aristotle’s On Memory (450a 21–23). 48. Anthony Burgess, ed., A Shorter Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking, 1968), xiii. 49. Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of Finnegans Wake: An Index of the Characters and Their Roles (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 298. The abridgement Glasheen mentions is The New Science of Giambattista Vico, revised and abridged translation, Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1961); reissued by Cornell University Press, 1970. An exception to Joyceans that have not allowed Vico to affect their interpretations is John Bishop in his discussion of Vico in Joyce’s Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), ch. 7. The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; 1990) has only the slightest mention of Vico. 50. Autobiography, 111. 51. Ellmann, 244–45. 52. Kenner, 321. 53. Stuart Gilbert, ‘‘Prolegomena to Work in Progress,’’ in Our Exagmination, notes the connection of Joyce’s pursuit of language with Vico’s ‘‘mental vocabulary’’ (54). 54. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt

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Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 491. See Donald Phillip Verene, ‘‘Philosophical Laughter: Vichian Remarks on Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose,’’ New Vico Studies 2 (1984): 75– 81. The source for truth conveyed in laughter is Horace (Sat., 1.1.24). Quoted by Montaigne (Essais, bk. 3, ch. 5). Joyce once corrected in vino veritas to in risu veritas. He claimed ‘‘I am only an Irish clown, a great joker at the universe’’ (Ellmann, 703). 55. Mary T. Reynolds, Joyce and Dante: The Shaping Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). 56. Ibid., 322. 57. For this fragment in English, see the translation by Maggie Günsberg in Critical Essays on Dante, ed. Giuseppe Mazzotta (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991), 58–60, or Discussions of the Divine Comedy, ed. Irma Brandeis (Boston: Heath, 1961), 11–12. 58. Anthony Burgess, Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 131. 59. On the identities of Shem and Shaun see Glasheen, 262–63. There are also connections to the Daedalus myth and to Penelope; see Glasheen, 229. See below, Postface. 60. Francesco Mario Pagano, De’ saggi politici: Ristampa anastatica della prima edizione (1783–1785), ed. Fabrizio Lomonaco (Naples: Fridericiana Editrice Universitaria, 2000). 61. Elio Gianturco, ‘‘Joseph de Maistre and Giambattista Vico,’’ Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1937. 62. Fisch, ‘‘Vico’s Reputation and Influence,’’ in Autobiography, 65–66; Enrico De Mas, ‘‘Vico and Italian Thought,’’ in Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Donald Phillip Verene (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 155–60. 63. Fisch, 66 and 75–76. 64. Alain Pons, ‘‘Vico and French Thought,’’ in Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium, 172. 65. Fisch, 79. 66. See Michelet, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, 614–24. 67. Pons, 173; Fisch, 78. 68. Fisch, 79. 69. Giovanni Gentile, Studi vichiani, 3d rev. ed. (Florence: Sansoni, 1968), 51 n. 2. 70. Benedetto Croce, ‘‘An Unknown Page from the Last Months of Hegel’s Life,’’ trans. James W. Hillesheim and Ernesto Caserta, The Personalist 45 (1964): 329–53; see esp. 344–45 and 351. 71. Pietro Piovani, ‘‘Vico without Hegel,’’ in Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium, 107. See Piovani’s collected essays, La filosofia nuova di Vico, ed. Fulvio Tessitore (Naples: Morano, 1990). 72. Giorgio Tagliacozzo, The Arbor Scientiae Reconceived and the History of Vico’s Resurrection (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1993). 73. ‘‘Obituary: Max Harold Fisch, 1900–1995,’’ New Vico Studies 139 (1995): 160– 62. 74. Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (New York: Viking, 1976). The study on Vico originates in Berlin’s lectures delivered at the Italian

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Institute in London in 1957 and 1958 and published in Art and Ideas in EighteenthCentury Italy (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1960). 75. Leon Pompa, Vico: A Study of the ‘‘New Science’’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 76. Nicola Badaloni, Introduzione a G. B. Vico (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961). 77. Gianfranco Cantelli, Mente corpo linguaggio: Saggio sull’interpretazione vichiana del mito (Florence: Sansoni, 1986). 78. Andrea Battistini, La degnità della retorica: Studi su G. B. Vico (Pisa: Pacini, 1975). See also Battistini, ‘‘Contemporary Trends in Vichian Studies,’’ in Vico: Past and Present, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo (Atlantic Highlands, N. J.: Humanities Press, 1981), 1– 42, esp. 2–14. 79. For works in English see Molly Black Verene, Vico: A Bibliography of Works in English from 1884 to 1994 (Bowling Green, Ohio: Philosophy Documentation Center, 1994) and its supplements in New Vico Studies. For works in Italian and other languages, see Benedetto Croce, Bibliografia vichiana, rev. ed., by Fausto Nicolini, 2 vols. (Naples: Ricciardi, 1947–48) and its supplements (see Bibliography). 80. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 272, 298, 335, 349–50, 351, 352. See Jürgen Trabant, ‘‘Parlare scrivendo: Deconstructive Remarks about Derrida’s Reading of Vico,’’ New Vico Studies 7 (1989): 43–58. Derrida told me in a conversation on Sept. 26, 1985, that he had never read Vico’s Scienza nuova, although he said he had it on a list of works to read when he was preparing Of Grammatology. 81. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper, 1972), 158, 180. See Nancy S. Struever, ‘‘Vico, Foucault, and the Strategy of Intimate Investigation,’’ New Vico Studies 2 (1984): 41–57. 82. Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon, 1973), 45–46, 73–74, 75, 79, 126, 242–45. See also Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon, 1971), 148–49. 83. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1992), see esp. 19–30; also 32, 222, 227, 230, 276, 373, 568, 572. See Donald Phillip Verene, ‘‘Gadamer and Vico on Sensus Communis and the Tradition of Humane Knowledge,’’ in the Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, vol. 24 of the Library of Living Philosophers, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago and LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1997), 137–53; for citations to Vico in all Gadamer’s works, see 138 and 150, nn. 13 and 14. 84. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 36, 201. See also his Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 57, 252, and his Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopedia, Geneology, and Tradition (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 22. See Kathy Frashure Coers, ‘‘Vico and MacIntyre,’’ New Vico Studies 4 (1986): 131–33, and John D. Schaeffer, ‘‘Vico and MacIntyre’s Whose Justice? Which Rationality?’’ New Vico Studies 7 (1989): 85–95. Also see Donald Phillip Verene, ‘‘Imaginative Universals and Narrative Truth,’’ and Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘‘Imaginative Universals and Historical Falsification: A Rejoinder to

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Professor Verene,’’ New Vico Studies 6 (1988): 1–30. These are papers from a session on Vico at the American Philosophical Association in December 1987 (participants: Verene, MacIntyre, Richard Bernstein, chair). 85. Max Horkheimer, ‘‘Vico and Mythology,’’ trans. Fred Dallmayr, New Vico Studies 5 (1987): 63–76. See Fred R. Dallmayr, ‘‘Reading Horkheimer Reading Vico: An Introduction,’’ New Vico Studies 5 (1987): 57–62. 86. Karl-Otto Apel, Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis Vico, 2d ed. (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1975), chap. 12. See Fred R. Dallmayr, ‘‘Hermeneutics and Historicism: Reflections on Winch, Apel, and Vico,’’ Review of Politics 39 (1977): 60–81. 87. A. S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance (New York: Random House, 1990), 3–6 (Vico is quoted on 6), 10, 23, 510, 512, 548. The scene involving Vico’s New Science appears in the film version of Possession released in August 2002. 88. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘‘The Immortal,’’ in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964), 105–18. 89. Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1976); Christopher Unborn, trans. A. MacAdam and C. Fuentes (New York: Vintage, 1990), 132 (Vico presented in terms from Finnegans Wake), 255, 278, 461, 463, 519. Terra Nostra employs Vichian conceptions of history, poetry, and memory. One of the central characters, Ludovico, may be a play on Vico’s name, combined with Latin ludo, ‘‘to play’’; also perhaps a play on Lodo-Vico (‘‘I praise Vico’’). In discussing Terra Nostra, Fuentes gives Vico as his source for the need to imagine history: see Jason Weiss, ‘‘An Interview with Carlos Fuentes,’’ Kenyon Review, New Series, 5 (1983): 105–18; see 106. See Lois Parkinson Zamora, ‘‘Magic Realism and Fantastic History: Carlos Fuente’s Terra Nostra and Giambattista Vico’s The New Science,’’ Review of Contemporary Fiction 8 (1988): 249–56. 90. Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet: A Novel (New York: Picador, Henry Holt, 2000), 83. 91. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 531–67. 92. Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History Since Hegel, trans. William H. Woglom and Charles W. Hendel (New York: Yale University Press, 1950), 296; An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944). See Donald Phillip Verene, ‘‘Vico’s Influence on Cassirer,’’ New Vico Studies, 3 (1985): 105–11. 93. A picture of the various academic approaches that can be taken to Vico and Joyce can be gained from the essays in Vico and Joyce, ed. Donald Phillip Verene (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), and the earlier essays by A. Walton Litz, ‘‘Vico and Joyce,’’ in Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium, 245–55, and Stuart Hampshire, ‘‘Joyce and Vico: The Middle Way,’’ in Giambattista Vico’s Science of Humanity, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Donald Phillip Verene (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 321–32. There is also Norman O. Brown’s curious compilation, Closing Time (New York: Random House, 1973), the text of which is a series of

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juxtapositions of quotations from Vico’s New Science and Autobiography and Finnegans Wake. 94. Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, vol. 1 (Berlin: Dietz, 1973), 392–93. See Donald Phillip Verene, ‘‘Vico and Marx on Poetic Wisdom and Barbarism,’’ in Vico and Marx: Affinities and Contrasts, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1983), 251–62. 95. See Gustavo Costa, ‘‘Vico e Michel de La Roche,’’ Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani 2 (1972): 63–65. See also George Whalley, ‘‘Coleridge and Vico,’’ in Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium, 225–44. 96. Joseph Hone, W. B. Yeats, 1865–1939 (New York: Macmillan, 1943), 393. 97. W. B. Yeats, A Vision, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1937; 1st ed. 1926), 261; Introduction to Words upon the Window-Pane, in The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, ed. Russell K. Alspach (London: Macmillan, 1966), 962. Yeats also mentions Vico in his introduction to The Cat and the Moon (1926), ibid., 806–7. Both of these plays and Yeats’s introductions are in W. B. Yeats, Wheels and Butterflies (New York: Macmillan, 1935), see 16–17 and 121; W. B. Yeats, On the Boiler (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1938), 22. 98. See Louis MacNeice’s claim that Vico’s principle of making is prevalent in Yeats’s later poetry, in his The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 126. 99. See Donald Phillip Verene, ‘‘A Note on Vico and Yeats,’’ New Vico Studies 18 (2000): 95–99. 100. Louis Gillet, Claybook for James Joyce, trans. Georges Markow-Totevy (London and New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1958), 66. 101. For example, the Wake is full of fish and fishing, esp. angling or fly-fishing, which has not been noticed by Joyceans and which may provide a partial explanation to why there are so many river names. See Robert H. Boyle, ‘‘You Spigotty Anglease? (Bookend),’’ New York Times Book Review (July 23, 2000), 27. 102. For example, ‘‘the Four Ages of the Viconian Corso-Recorso’’ [sic], Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking, 1961), 15.

Chapter 2: The Life of Vico 1. The first page of Vico’s Autobiography is as follows: ‘‘Signor Giambattista Vico, he was born in Naples in the year 1670 of upright parents, who left behind them a very good reputation. The father was of cheerful humour, the mother of a quite melancholy temper; and both came together in the fair disposition of this little son of theirs. As a boy he was very lively and restless; but at the age of seven he fell head-first from high on a ladder to the floor, and remained a good five hours motionless and senseless, fracturing the right side of the cranium without breaking the skin, hence from the fracture arose a shapeless tumour, and from the many deep lancings of it the child lost a great deal of blood; such that the surgeon, having observed the broken cranium and considering the long state of unconsciousness, made the prediction that either he would die of it or he would survive

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stolid. However, neither of the two parts of the judgement, by the grace of God, came true; but as a result of this illness and recovery he grew up, from then on, with a melancholy and acrid nature which necessarily belongs to ingenious and profound men, who through ingenuity flash like lightning in acuity, through reflection take no pleasure in witticism and falsity.’’ My trans. For a full study of Vico’s autobiography, see Donald Phillip Verene, The New Art of Autobiography: An Essay on the ‘‘Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself’’ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). 2. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften G. W. Leibniz, vol. 3, ed. C. J. Gerhardt (Hildesheim: Olms, 1960; orig. pub. 1887), 567–68. My trans. 3. Francesco Petrarca, Prose, ed. G. Martellotti (Milan: Ricciardi, 1955), 6. 4. Fausto Nicolini, La giovinezza di Giambattista Vico: Saggio biografico (Naples: Accademia Pontaniana, 1932), 16. 5. Fausto Nicolini, ‘‘Il Vico nella vita domestica,’’ in Giambattista Vico, Opere, ed. Fausto Nicolini (Milan: Ricciardi, 1953), 94–106, esp. 95. 6. For a reproduction of the entry of Vico’s baptism in the parish book of San Gennaro all’Omo, see Verene, New Art, 178. 7. Alois Dreizehnter, Die rhetorische Zahl: Quellenkritische Untersuchungen anhand der Zahlen 70 und 700 (Munich: Beck, 1978). 8. See Donald Phillip Verene, ‘‘Vico and Culinary Art: ‘On the Sumptuous Dinners of the Romans’ and the Science of the First Meals,’’ and Giambattista Vico, ‘‘On the Sumptuous Dinners of the Romans,’’ trans. George A. Trone, New Vico Studies 20 (2002). 9. L’autobiografia, il carteggio e le poesie varie, ed. Benedetto Croce and Fausto Nicolini, 2d rev. ed., Opere di G. B. Vico, vol. 5 (Bari: Laterza, 1929), 377. 10. ‘‘A Bernardo Maria Giacco’’ (October 12, 1720), in Epistole con aggiunte le epistole dei suoi correspondenti, ed. Manuela Sanna (Naples: Morano, 1992), 88–90. 11. Giambattista Vico, Opere, 2 vols., ed. Andrea Battistini (Milan: Mondadori, 1990), II: 1295, n. 2. 12. ‘‘A Bernardo Maria Giacco’’ (October 25, 1725), in Epistole, 113–15. 13. On Vico’s use of Tuscan in the New Science, see my ch. 6. Vico likely minimizes his involvement with other languages in order to emphasize his mastery and use of Latin. Because of the years of Spanish rule of Naples and his position in the intellectual life of the city, Vico, like others in the university, would have had a command of Spanish. Having studied Gester’s Rudiments he would have had more than a passing knowledge of Greek, and he would have read French, the language in which Descartes’s Discourse was written (although in 1644 a Latin translation was published in Amsterdam). In the seventh oration Vico discusses the difference between the French and Italian languages, saying that French is suited by nature to abstract ideas whereas Italian constantly evokes images. See On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 39–40. 14. David Hume, ‘‘My Own Life,’’ in An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Charles W. Hendel (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955, 4. 15. Finnegans Wake was maliciously listed in the Irish Times, under books received, as written by Sean O’Casey. O’Casey wrote Joyce that this deliberate ‘‘misprint’’ was a result

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of the dislike that Dublin’s literary clique had for O’Casey, and the hatred they had of Joyce. 16. The animosity between Vico and Giannone likely derived from a treatise against Giannone’s Civil History, written by Vico’s friend Giulio Nicola Torno, who was the ecclesiastical censor for most of Vico’s books. 17. See Gustavo Costa, review of Dalla cronologia alla metafisica della mente, by Cecilia Castellani, New Vico Studies 18 (2000): 105. 18. Zakiya Hanafi, ‘‘Vico’s Monstrous Body,’’ in The Monster in the Machine: Magic, Medicine, and the Marvelous in the Time of the Scientific Revolution (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 135–86. 19. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 3 vols. (London: John C. Nimmo, 1893), II: 4; and L’autobiografia, il categgio e le poesie varie, 2d. rev. ed., Opere di G. B. Vico, ed. B. Croce and F. Nicolini, vol. 5 (Bari: Laterza, 1929), 133. Solimena’s portrait survives only in a copy commissioned by Villarosa; the original was destroyed by fire in 1819. 20. An example of this temperament is Vico’s address to his readers that survives from a lost draft of his Il diritto universale, written in 1720, in which he attacks his potential critics as incapable of truly comprehending his work. See Donald Phillip Verene, ‘‘Vico’s Address to His Readers, from a Lost Manuscript on Jurisprudence: Comment and Translation,’’ New Vico Studies 19 (2001): 161–68. 21. L’autobiografia, ed. Croce and Nicolini, 129. 22. ‘‘A Carlo di Borbone,’’ Epistole, 174–76. 23. The De aequilibrio was originally dedicated to Vico’s friends Paolo Mattia Doria, Lucantonio Porzio, and Domenico Aulisio, but Vico then laid it aside for more than twenty years. It was posthumously published in the Neapolitan journal Scelta miscellanea and read by Vincenzo Cuoco, but no copies of this issue are known to exist. 24. Principium neapolitanorum coniurations anni MDCCI historia. This was probably drafted by Vico in 1703. There exists an earlier draft, De parthenopea coniuratione. For both, see La congiura dei principi napoletani, ed. Claudia Pandolfi (Naples: Morano, 1992). 25. See Vico’s comments in his letter of 1731 to Ludwig von Harrach, viceroy of Naples (Epistole, 162). For a most interesting treatment of the Life of Antonio Carafa as an example of modern biography, see Andrea Battistini, ‘‘Il granito e l’arcobaleno: La biografia vichiana di Antonio Carafa tra verità storica e ragioni epidittiche,’’ in Pensar para el nuevo siglo. Giambattista Vico y la cultura europea, 3 vols., ed. Emilio Hidalgo-Serna, Massimo Marassi, Jose M. Sevilla, and José Villalobos (Naples: La Città del Sole, 2001), I: 57–86. 26. We owe the account of Vico’s burial to Carlo Antonio II, Rosa di Villarosa, who published an edition of Vico’s works in which he provides, in vol. 1, an account of Vico’s last years. Villarosa’s account is flawed, overly dramatic, and romantic at points. It is best read with Croce’s and Nicolini’s corrections (L’autobiografia, ed. Croce and Nicolini, 129–34). See Opuscoli di Giambattista Vico, vol. 1, ed. Villarosa (Naples: Porcelli, 1818), Vita, 1–231. Villarosa’s remarks on Vico’s last years appear in A 200–9. 27. Joyce, with his wife and son, had been residing at the Pension Delphin at the time of his death in a Zurich hospital. On January 15, 1941, his body was carried to Flunten

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cemetary for a graveside service and burial. As the service was concluding, a small, deaf, old man, also a boarder at the Pension Delphin, approached and asked one of the undertaker’s attendants, who was holding the rope that supported the coffin, ‘‘Who is buried here?’’ The undertaker replied, ‘‘Herr Joyce.’’ The old man did not understand and asked again, ‘‘Who is it?’’ The undertaker then shouted, ‘‘Herr Joyce!’’ and at that moment the coffin came to rest at the bottom of the grave. With his principles of cycle and coincidence, derived from Vico and from Bruno, Joyce would have written it just as it happened.

Chapter 3: The New Art of Pedagogy 1. Giambattista Vico, On Humanistic Education (Six Inaugural Orations, 1699– 1707), trans. Giorgio A. Pinton and Arthur W. Shippee (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 35. Citations hereinafter to Vico’s first six orations are to this edition. 2. It is probable that in 1709, when Vico published his seventh oration, De nostri studiorum ratione, he also revised for the press the texts of the first six orations, but this did not result in their publication. The first oration was published by Villarosa in 1823. See Giambattista Vico, Le orazioni inaugurali I–VI, ed. Gian Galeazzo Visconti (Bologna: Mulino, 1982), 23–30. 3. On the Conspiracy of Macchia, see above, ch. 2. In 1701 the university remained closed until November 10 and then opened without an inaugural ceremony. See Giovanni Gentile, Studi vichiani, rev. ed., ed. Vito A. Bellezza (Florence: Sansoni, 1968), 74, n. 2. 4. In his autobiography Vico reports the fourth oration as delivered in 1704. He wrote it in that year, but its presentation was postponed until 1705. During 1703 and 1704 the university was undergoing reform, and there was no formal opening of the academic year. See Gentile, 79 and 98. Vico remarks on this two-year lapse in the ceremony, in the first paragraph of the oration. The precise dates of Vico’s six inaugural orations have been established by Salvatore Monti, Sulla tradizione e sul testo delle orazioni inaugurali di Vico (Naples: Guida, 1977). See also Le orazioni inaugurali, ed. Visconti, 11, n. 10. 5. In the autobiography Vico gives the year of the fifth oration as 1705, when, in fact, he delivered the fourth. The fifth oration occurred in 1706. 6. Giambattista Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), hereinafter cited by the page number. Studiorum in the original title is genitive plural. A reason to render ratio as ‘‘method’’ is Vico’s reference in Italian, in the autobiography, to this oration as concerning ‘‘the method of study’’ (del metodo di studiare) (A 140). 7. Max Harold Fisch, Introduction, A 36. Nicolini speaks of ‘‘il cartesiano Vico delle Orazioni inaugurali,’’ La giovinezza di Giambattista Vico: Saggio biografico (Naples: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici, 1992; orig. pub. 1932), 67. See also H. P. Adams, The Life and Writings of Giambattista Vico (London: Allan and Unwin, 1935), 72–74; 81. 8. Gentile, Studi vichiani, 60. Adams acknowledges Vico’s connection of Neoplatonic and Cartesian thought; see 72. 9. See Gentile’s comments on oration 2, 76–77.

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10. A. Arnauld and P. Nicole, La logique ou l’art de penser: Contenant, outre les règles communes, plusieurs observations nouvelles, propres à former le jugement, crit. ed. by P. Clair and F. Girbal (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), 299. 11. Ibid., 299–300. 12. Study Methods, 17, n. 10. 13. Aristotle, Rhetoric, i. 1–2 and ii. 20–23; Prior Analytics, ii. 27; Topics, i. 1. 14. The Rhetoric of Aristotle, ed. and trans. Lane Cooper (New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts, 1960), xxiii. 15. Study Methods 8, n. 3. 16. Ibid., 26, n. 20. 17. For the importance of this oration to the Universal Law, see ch. 5. 18. Giambattista Vico, ‘‘On the Heroic Mind,’’ trans. Elizabeth Sewell and Anthony C. Sirignano in Vico and Contemporary Thought, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo, Michael Mooney, and Donald Phillip Verene (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979), 228–45. 19. Introduction to Study Methods, xxiii. Nicolini called De mente heroica ‘‘maraviglioso canto del cigno’’ (‘‘marvelous swan song’’). Socrates in the Phaedo identifies himself with the swan, saying that he regards the swan’s song not as a lament but as an act of rejoicing, because he believes the swans belong to Apollo and have prophetic knowledge of the blessings of the underworld (84D–85B). See Giambattista Vico, Varia: Il De mente heroica e gli scritti latini minori, ed. Gian Galeazzo Visconti (Naples: Guida, 1996), 111. With the swan-song image Nicolini likely has in mind that this oration was given two years after the publication of the Second New Science and was Vico’s last inaugural university oration, which Vico begins by mentioning how he is exhausted from his lifetime of work. 20. Vico’s claim about scitus is odd. He likely has in mind its use in a line of Terence, The Lady of Andros, 486. See Andrea Battistini’s comment in Giambattista Vico, Opere, 2 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1990), II: 1460, n. 2. 21. Giambattista Vico, ‘‘The Academies and the Relation between Philosophy and Eloquence,’’ trans. Donald Phillip Verene, in Study Methods, 89. 22. In 1735 Vico recited a sonnet in honor of St. Augustine to the Academy of Oziosi. For this poem, see Giambattista Vico, Autobiografia, sequita da una scelta di lettere, orazioni e rime, ed. Mario Fubini (Turin: Einaudi, 1965), 213. 23. Giambattista Vico, The Art of Rhetoric (Institutiones oratoriae, 1711–1741), trans. Giorgio A. Pinton and Arthur W. Shippee (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 3. 24. Vico outlined this volume between 1709 and 1710. See Le orazioni inaugurali, ed. Visconti, 70–71. 25. For a contemporary restatement of these ideals, see Donald Phillip Verene, The Art of Humane Education (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002). 26. Sir John Harington (1560–1612) designed the modern indoor water closet in A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax, crit. ed. by Elizabeth Story Donno (New York: Columbia University Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962). See the materials list and design, 194–96. ‘‘This is Don A JAX house, of the new fashion,’’ 195 (‘‘jakes,’’ from the French Jacques [ James], ‘‘privy’’). See also FW 338.17 ‘‘Ajaculate!’’ (Ajax, a jakes, ejaculate).

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Chapter 4: The Most Ancient Wisdom 1. Giambattista Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians Unearthed from the Origins of the Latin Language, Including the Disputation with the ‘‘Giornale de’letterati d’Italia,’’ trans. L. M. Palmer (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), hereinafter cited by page number. 2. On the De aequilibrio. See ch. 2, n. 23. 3. The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (New York: Garrett Press, 1968), VI: 696. 4. Vico repeats his point concerning Pythagoras’s contact with Egypt in the New Science (93) and gives the same meanings for coelum in his description of poetic cosmography (712). 5. Cf. Vico’s discussion of coelum in De constantia philologiae, ch. 20. 6. On Doria, see ch. 2 and the discussion of metaphysical points. 7. Nicolini points out that Vico’s suggestion regarding the determination of latitude anticipated the discovery, made by an Englishman in 1808, concerning the power that an iron magnet has, when swimming in mercury, to turn itself on an axis and to indicate longitude and latitude. See Giambattista Vico, Opere, ed. Fausto Nicolini (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1953), 43, n. 4. 8. René Descartes, Description of the Human Body, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–91), I: 318. 9. Nicolini, 44, n. 1. 10. Philosophical Writings of Descartes, II: 3. 11. Ibid. 12. For a picture of the physiological and medical views of the day, especially those of Tommaso Cornelio and Lionardo di Capua, see Max Harold Fisch, ‘‘The Academy of the Investigators,’’ in Science, Medicine, and History: Essays on the Evolution of Scientific Thought and Medical Practice Written in Honour of Charles Singer, ed. E. A. Underwood (London and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1953), I: 521–63. 13. Giambattista Vico, The Art of Rhetoric (Institutiones oratoriae, 1711–1741), trans. Giorgio A. Pinton and Arthur W. Shippee (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 120. 14. ‘‘Verum esse ipsum factum’’ appears to be Vico’s own particular expression. See Rodolfo Mondolfo, Il ‘‘verum-factum’’ prima di Vico (Naples: Guida, 1969), and the exchange between M. Reale and R. Mondolfo in La Cultura 9 (1971): 61–96 and 392– 96. Also, Eugenio Garin, ‘‘Ancora sul ‘verum factum’ prima di Vico,’’ Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani 2 (1971): 59–61. 15. This is the way Vico gives the line, perhaps quoting from memory; the last part of the line, in the original, reads: ‘‘. . . certo idem sum qui semper fui ’’ (Amphitryo, 447). 16. Descartes’s reference is to the City of God, XL. 26; cf. De trinitate, X. 10, and De libero arbitrio, II. 3.7. 17. Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery, 12 vols. (Paris: Cerf, 1897–1910), III: 247–48. 18. Nicolini, 361, n. 2, quotes Francisque Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 3d ed., 2 vols. (Paris: Ch. Delagrave, 1868), II: 537 and n.; Bouillier does not

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find this statement in Descartes but says it is analogous to reports by Sorbière and Baillet. Sorbière, Relations, lettres, et discours de M. de Sorbière sur diverses matières curieuses (Paris, 1660); and Adrien Baillet, La vie de Monsieur Descartes, 2 vols. (Paris, 1691). 19. Fisch, ‘‘Vico and Pragmatism,’’ in Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Hayden V. White (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 408. 20. Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, trans. R. G. Collingwood (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2002; 1913), 140. 21. Robert Flint, Vico (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1884), 115; Giovanni Gentile, Studi vichiani, 3d ed., ed. Vito A. Bellezza (Florence: Sansoni, 1968), 34, n. 1. Fisch quotes Flint, Autobiography, 219, n. 169; Nicolini, Opere (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1953), 45, n. 3. 22. Palmer says of this line, ‘‘Since the Zeno of Plato’s Parmenides was ‘about forty’ when Socrates was young, we must at least grant that Vico was confused about the Eleatic’s dates’’ (Ancient Wisdom, 72, n. 14). 23. H. D. P. Lee, Zeno of Elea: A Text, with Translation and Notes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), see esp. 104–5. 24. Croce, 141. 25. G. W. F. Leibniz, ‘‘New System of the Nature of Substances and Their Communication, and of the Union Which Exists between the Soul and the Body,’’ in Leibniz’s ‘New System’ and Associated Contemporary Texts, trans. and ed. R. S. Woolhouse and Richard Francks (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 16 (sec. 11). See also Flint, 126, n. 1. Antonio Corsano, Giambattista Vico (Bari: Laterza, 1956), 123, notices Leibniz’s use of ‘‘metaphysical points’’ as the predecessor of his monad. 26. Paolo Mattia Doria, ‘‘Commento sù de’ i prolegomeni che Sebastiano Foxio Morzilli fà nel principio del suo commento al timeo della natura,’’ in Manoscritti napoletani di Paolo Mattia Doria, 5 vols. (Galatina [Lecce]: Congedo, 1979–82), II: 13, 17. See Giuseppe Martano, ‘‘Fox Morcillo e Paolo Mattia Doria sul ‘Timeo’ platonico,’’ Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani 12 and 13 (1982–1983): 333–41. On Vico and Doria, see David Lachterman, ‘‘Vico, Doria e la geometria sintetica,’’ Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani 10 (1980): 10–35. 27. On Doria’s comments on metaphysical points, see II: 190, 202–3; III: 307–10, 453, 563; V: 335. 28. On Doria’s criticism of Stoic psychology and ethics (specifically the Stoic doctrine of the animus and anima), see V: 180, 211–16, 218, 238–39. 29. An Historical and Critical Dictionary by Monsieur Bayle, translated into English, with many additions and corrections made by the Author himself, that are not in the French editions, 4 vols. (London: Printed for C. Harper et al., 1710), IV: 3085. This is based on the first and second French editions (1696, 1701).

Chapter 5: The Universal Law 1. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3 vols., trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–91), I: 186.

Notes to Pages 120–124

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2. For example, Descartes’s exchange of letters with Princess Elizabeth concerning Seneca’s conception of happiness (De vita beata); see Philosophical Writings, III: 255–73. 3. Bergin and Fisch, Introduction, NS xxviii. 4. Giambattista Vico, Universal Right, trans. and ed. Giorgio Pinton and Margaret Diehl (Amsterdam: Rodopi [Value Inquiry Book Series no. 104], 2000). Pinton offers no argument for the term ‘‘right’’ other than taking it over from its use in Mark Lilla, G. B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). Lilla says, in commenting on the English translations of Vico’s works: ‘‘Occasionally, however, I have slightly modified the standard translations in order to give a more literal rendering of certain technical terms in Vico’s philosophical vocabulary. For example, the Bergin-Fisch edition of the New Science fails to distinguish legge (law) from diritto (right), translating both as ‘law’ ’’ (xi, n. 1). Lilla offers no discussion of Bergin and Fisch’s point quoted above, nor any comment on the rendering of ius as ‘‘law,’’ as in the standard English translations of the sourcebooks of Roman law. Black’s Law Dictionary, on which Pinton frequently relies, translates ius in ius civile, gentium, and naturale as ‘‘law’’ (see 863, 865, 866). The entry for ius reads: ‘‘[Latin ‘law, right’] 1. Law in the abstract. 2. A system of law. 3. A legal right, power, or principle’’ (863). The entry for lex distinguishes between lex and ius in the same way Bergin and Fisch distinguish them (see above, n. 3): ‘‘Strictly speaking, lex is a statute whereas ius is law in general (as well as a right)’’ (920). The entry for ‘‘right’’ reads: ‘‘1. That which is proper under law, morality, or ethics.’’ The entry indicates that ‘‘right’’ is often used in the plural (1322). See Black’s Law Dictionary, 7th ed., ed. Bryan A. Garner et al. (St. Paul, Minn.: West Group, 1999). Note that ‘‘right’’ in these definitions denotes something specific, not universal or general. I do not mean that in every instance of Vico’s work ius must be rendered as ‘‘law.’’ There are some passages where ‘‘right’’ captures the meaning. These most often concern the law as applied to particular situations and individuals. I have consulted the English translation in relation to the Latin and Italian text of Giambattista Vico, Opere giuridiche: Il diritto universale, ed. Paolo Cristofolini (Florence: Sansoni, 1974). Translations of passages quoted throughout are mine. 5. Giambattista Vico, On Humanistic Education (Six Inaugural Orations, 1699– 1707), trans. Giorgio A. Pinton and Arthur W. Shippee (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 80. 6. The Institutes of Justinian: Text, Translation, and Commentary (with Latin text), J. A. C. Thomas (Cape Town: Juta, 1975). See also Justinian’s Institutes, trans. Peter Birks and Grant McLeod, with the Latin text of Paul Krueger (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984). 7. The Institutes of Gaius, trans. W. M. Gordon and O. F. Robinson, with the Latin text of Seckel and Knebler (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998). See the translators’ discussion of the translation of ius civile, gentium, and naturale, 546. 8. Andrew Borkowski, Textbook on Roman Law, 2d ed. (London: Blackstone, 1994), 87. See also H. F. Jolowicz, Historical Introduction to the Study of Roman Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), and Barry Nicholas, An Introduction to Roman Law (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962). 9. The Digest of Justinian, trans. and ed. Alan Watson, from the Latin text of Theodor Mommsen and Paul Krueger, 4 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985). Watson’s comment is a footnote to 1.1.1.1.

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10. Terminologically close to Vico’s title is Leibniz’s concept of ‘‘universal jurisprudence,’’ which he employs in Opinion on the Principles of Pufendorf (1706). Leibniz’s central idea, that justice is ‘‘the charity of the wise,’’ is not Vico’s, but his use of posse, scire, velle as required by every action of mind divine and human is similar to Vico’s conception of the Augustinian triad of posse, nosse, velle. See Patrick Riley, Leibniz’ Universal Jurisprudence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 16–17. 11. Giambattista Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 34. 12. Ibid., 60. 13. On Humanistic Education, 133. 14. Study Methods, 48. See also ch. 3, above. 15. The line in both the Digest (1.1.10.2) and the Institutes (1.1.1) reads, in full: ‘‘Iuris prudentia est divinarum atque humanarum rerum notitia, iusti atque iniusti scientia.’’ See Corpus iuris civilis, vol. 1, ed. T. Mommsen and P. Krueger (Hildesheim: Weidmann, 1993), 1 and 29. 16. The line in Cicero is ‘‘sapientiam esse rerum divinarum et humanarum scientiam cognitionemque, quae cuiusque rei causa sit’’ (Tusc. 4.26.57). 17. Max H. Fisch, ‘‘Vico on Roman Law,’’ in Essays in Political Theory Presented to George H. Sabine, ed. M. R. Konvitz and A. E. Murphy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1948), 62–88. Reprinted in New Vico Studies 19 (2001): 1–28. 18. Guido Fassò, ‘‘The Problem of Law and the Historical Origin of the New Science,’’ in Giambattista Vico’s Science of Humanity, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Donald Phillip Verene (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 3–14. 19. Ancient Wisdom, 62–63. 20. Ibid., 106. 21. Bergin and Fisch, Introduction, NS xxviii. 22. Giambattista Vico, Epistole con aggiunte le epistole dei suoi corrispondenti, ed. Manuela Sanna (Naples: Morano, 1992), 126–29. English trans.: Giorgio A. Pinton, ‘‘Four Letters of Giambattista Vico on the First New Science (Translated, with Notes and Comments),’’ New Vico Studies 16 (1998): 36–39. Vico makes the same comment on Epicurus and Descartes in A 129. 23. On Locke as an extension of Epicurean philosophy, see Donald Phillip Verene, ‘‘Giambattista Vico’s ‘Reprehension of the Metaphysics of René Descartes, Benedict Spinoza, and John Locke’: An Addition to the New Science (Translation and Commentary),’’ New Vico Studies 8 (1990): 10–12. 24. For an English translation see Giorgio A. Pinton, ‘‘Vico’s Unpublished Writings: Primo and Secondo Ragionamento,’’ New Vico Studies 19 (2001): 98–160. 25. Joyce regarded twelve as a public number: twelve hours on a clock, twelve months in a year, twelve persons on a jury, the twelve customers in Earwicker’s pub, and ‘‘the twelve apostrophes’’ (FW 126.6–7). Vico makes a similar point at the end of the Ragionamento primo. To support his contention that the number twelve means ‘‘many,’’ he cites twelve gods of the Greater Gentes, twelve labors of Hercules, twelve villages out of which Theseus composed Athens, four seasons of the year divided into twelve months, the most ancient alliances of the twelve cities of Ionia, twelve cities of Tuscany, twelve ounces (parts) of the as (a bronze coin of the ancient Roman republic) (1454). 26. In the Second New Science (1007 and 1084) and the Ragionamento secondo Vico

Notes to Pages 140–148

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calls the lex regia a fable invented by Tribonian. He calls Tribonian himself (the chief minister appointed by Justinian to direct the codification of Roman law) a ‘‘Greekling’’ ( grecuzzo), with no knowledge of things Roman (1455). It was commonly thought that there was a royal law passed for each emperor, from Augustus forward, freeing the emperor from the compulsion of all laws. Vico denies this and holds that Roman government passes from a republic to a monarchy out of utility and force, not by rational decision. Such a transition, Vico claims, occurs by ‘‘an eternal natural royal law by which the free power of a state, just because it is free must be actualized’’ (NS 1084). Vico’s ‘‘eternal natural royal law,’’ as opposed to Tribonian’s ‘‘royal law,’’ is based on Vico’s demonstration of the principle of the ‘‘ideal eternal history’’ of the life of nations (cf. De uno, ch. 160). 27. See also The Twelve Tables or The Law of the Twelve Tables in Remains of Old Latin, vol. 3, ed. and trans. E. H. Warmington (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1979), 499. Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan says: ‘‘And in antient time, before letters were in common use, the Lawes were many times put into verse; that the rude people taking pleasure in singing, or reciting them, might the more easily reteine them in memory’’ (II. 26). 28. I thank Professor Giuliano Crifò for suggesting to me the example of the ABCs as a way to imagine how the Twelve Tables might have been recited by children. 29. See Remains of Old Latin, 490–91, n. a and 480–81, n. b. This law of fraud is reflected in the Aeneid: ‘‘fraus innexa clienti ’’ (vi. 609). 30. Another example of the law as dramatic and severe poetry is the ‘‘fable of the ius gentium,’’ in which the original law of force (ius violentiae) claimed by the gentes, on which this law was founded, was transformed into various symbolic actions that reinforced its meaning and power (De uno, ch. 124).

Chapter 6: The New Science 1. Giambattista Vico, Opere, ed. Andrea Battistini, 2 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1990), II: 1544, n. 6. 2. Ibid., n. 5. See also G. B. Vico, Opere, vol. 3, ed. Fausto Nicolini (Bari: Laterza, 1931), 318–19. 3. See above, ch. 2. 4. On the dipintura of the frontispiece see Mario Papini, I geroglifico della storia: Significato e funzione della dipintura nella ‘‘Scienza nuova’’ di G. B. Vico (Bologna: Cappelli, 1984); Margherita Frankel, ‘‘The ‘Dipintura’ and the Structure of Vico’s New Science as a Mirror of the World,’’ in Vico Past and Present, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1981), 43–51; Angus Fletcher, ‘‘On the Syncretic Allegory of the New Science,’’ New Vico Studies 4 (1986): 25–43; and Donald Phillip Verene, ‘‘Vico’s Frontispiece and the Tablet of Cebes,’’ in Man, God, and Nature in the Enlightenment, ed. D. C. Mell, T. E. D. Braun, and L. M. Palmer (East Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues Press, 1988), 3–11. 5. See above, ch. 4. 6. Fausto Nicolini, ‘‘Il Vico nella vita domestica,’’ in Giambattista Vico, Opere, ed. Fausto Nicolini (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1953), 103. 7. ‘‘Di Domenico Lodovico’’ (December 24, 1730), in Epistole con aggiunte le epistole

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dei suoi corrispondenti, ed. Manuela Sanna (Naples: Morano, 1992), 159. There is one other short letter from Lodovico to Vico in 1733, expressing appreciation for Vico’s oration ‘‘On the Heroic Mind’’ (1732). Ibid., 174. 8. Epistole, 304. 9. See Donald Phillip Verene, ‘‘Vico’s ‘IGNOTA LATEBAT,’ ’’ New Vico Studies 5 (1987): 79–98. See also Mario Papini, ‘‘ ‘IGNOTA LATEBAT’: L’impresa negletta della Scienza nuova,’’ Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani 14–15 (1984–85): 179–214; and Andrea Battistini, ‘‘Theoria delle imprese e linguaggio iconico vichiano,’’ Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani 14–15 (1984–85): 149–77. 10. Gregory L. Lucente, ‘‘Vico, Hercules, and the Lion: Figure and Ideology,’’ New Vico Studies 6 (1988): 85–94. 11. See above, ch. 4. 12. Donald Phillip Verene, ‘‘Giambattista Vico’s ‘Reprehension of the Metaphysics of René Descartes, Benedict Spinoza, and John Locke’: An Addition to the New Science (Translation and Commentary),’’ New Vico Studies 8 (1990): 2–18. 13. For example, the dipintura as redrawn in Michelet’s translation. Cf. figs. 6 and 7. 14. See above, ch. 5. 15. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 269. 16. Francis Bacon, Works, vol. 4, new ed., ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (New York: Garrett, 1968; 1870), 436–37 (De augmentis V.5). 17. See Cebes’ Tablet: Facsimiles of the Greek Text, and of Selected Latin, French, English, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, and Polish Translations (New York: Renaissance Society of America, 1979). 18. Max Harold Fisch, Introduction, A 81–82; Fausto Nicolini, Commento storico al seconda Scienza nuova, 2 vols. (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1978), I: 21. 19. Robert Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 1671–1717 (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 390–91. 20. Ibid., 392–94. 21. Fisch, Introduction, A 81–82. 22. Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, Second Characters or the Language of Forms, ed. Benjamin Rand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 64–87. 23. Second Characters, 65. 24. Giambattista Vico, On Humanistic Education (Six Inaugural Orations, 1699– 1707), trans. Giorgio A. Pinton and Arthur W. Shippee (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 70. 25. G. B. Vico, Opere, vol. 4, pt. 2, ed. Fausto Nicolini (Bari: Laterza, 1928), 275–306, paras. 1412–72. See also NS 29. 26. Opere, ed. Nicolini (1953), 86, n. 5; Opere, ed. Battistini, II: 1311, n. 3. 27. See below, the discussion of the ‘‘Pratica.’’ 28. ‘‘The Academies and the Relation between Philosophy and Eloquence,’’ trans. Donald Phillip Verene, in On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 89. 29. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3d ed. (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1953; 1930).

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30. See above, ch. 4. 31. Andrea Battistini, La degnità della retorica: Studi su G. B. Vico (Pisa: Pacini, 1975), 124–52. 32. W. Keith Percival, ‘‘A Note on Thomas Hayne and His Relation to Leibniz and Vico,’’ New Vico Studies 6 (1988): 97–101. 33. Fisch, Introduction, NS xxxvi. 34. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 614. 35. Fisch, Introduction, A 10. Fisch’s remark is directed to the letter of acknowledgment Le Clerc wrote to Vico (A 159), but it holds true also of Le Clerc’s review in the Leipzig Acta. 36. On the true and the certain, see above, ch. 5. 37. James Robert Goetsch Jr., Vico’s Axioms: The Geometry of the Human World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 110–11. 38. Max H. Fisch, ‘‘The Academy of the Investigators,’’ in Science, Medicine, and History: Essays on the Evolution of Scientific Thought and Medical Practice Written in Honour of Charles Singer, ed. E. A. Underwood, vol. 1 (London and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1953), 521–63. 39. Goetsch, 109–10. 40. See above, ch. 4. Vico uses the image of the circulation of the blood to describe how the aim of his doctrine of education relates to the ‘‘entire body of the learning process.’’ Study Methods, 6. 41. Fisch, Introduction, A 20. 42. Bacon, Works, vol. 4, 53–64 (Novum organum, 37–42) and 431–34 (Advancement of Learning, bk. 5, ch. 4). 43. Ibid., 54. 44. See Donald Phillip Verene, Vico’s Science of Imagination (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 128–34. 45. Study Methods, 15. 46. Donald Phillip Verene, ‘‘The New Art of Narration: Vico and the Muses,’’ New Vico Studies 1 (1983): 21–38. 47. Verene, ‘‘Giambattista Vico’s ‘Reprehension,’ ’’ 2. 48. Jürgen Trabant, ‘‘Parlare cantando: Language Singing in Vico and Herder,’’ New Vico Studies 9 (1991): 1–16. 49. For a further discussion of imaginative universals as a form of thought, see Verene, Vico’s Science of Imagination, ch. 3. 50. Albert William Levi, ‘‘The Two Imaginations,’’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 25 (1964): 188–200. 51. See W. W. How and J. Wells, A Commentary on Herodotus, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1936), I: 182. 52. L’idea del theatro dell’eccellen M. Giulio Camillo (Florence: Lorenzo Torrentino, 1550). On Camillo’s theater of memory see Donald Phillip Verene, Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), ch. 4. See also Francis A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), chs. 6–7, and Lina Bolzoni, Il teatro della memoria: Studi su Giulio Camillo (Padua: Livina, 1984).

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53. Hugo Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis, libri tres, vol. 2, trans. Francis W. Kelsey (Oxford: Clarendon; London: Humphrey Milford, 1925). 13. 54. Ibid., 12. 55. Ibid., 13. 56. Ibid., 14. 57. Ibid., 15. 58. Samuel Pufendorf, De jure naturae et gentium, libri octo, vol. 2., trans. C. H. Oldfather and W. A. Oldfather (Oxford: Clarendon; London: Humphrey Milford, 1934), 205. 59. Ibid., 215. 60. The Table Talk of John Selden, ed. Samuel Harvey Reynolds (Oxford: Clarendon, 1892), 101. Selden elaborates this position in De jure naturali, &c., apud Ebraeos. 61. Isaiah Berlin, ‘‘The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities,’’ Salmagundi 27 (1974): 9–39. Originally the Second Tykociner Memorial Lecture at the University of Illinois, 1974. 62. Elio Gianturco, Introduction to Study Methods, xxi. See also Verene, Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge, ch. 1, ‘‘Barbarism of Reflection,’’ and ch. 3, ‘‘Technological Desire.’’ 63. Max H. Fisch, ‘‘Vico’s Pratica,’’ in Giambattista Vico’s Science of Humanity, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Donald Phillip Verene (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 423–30. 64. Francesco Guicciardini, Ricordi (Milan: Rizzoli, 1977), 131. 65. Alain Pons, ‘‘Prudence and Providence: The Pratica della Scienza nuova and the Problem of Theory and Practice in Vico,’’ in Vico’s Science of Humanity, 442.

Bibliography

The first mention of Vico in English occurred during his lifetime. Vico’s De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, published in Naples in the spring of 1709, was summarized in a book notice that appeared in Memoirs of Literature, compiled by Michel de La Roche and published in London in December 1710. The second mention of Vico in English was by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in a paraphrase in Latin of Vico’s De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, probably written by Coleridge in 1816 but published posthumously in his Theory of Life (1848). Coleridge likely took this from Jacobi’s Von den göttlichen Dingen, in which the same Latin paraphrase appears. The first book on Vico, which still stands as an excellent study, is Robert Flint’s Vico, a volume in Blackwood’s series of Philosophical Classics for English Readers, published in Edinburgh in 1884. The long-standing edition of Vico’s works is Opere di G. B. Vico, 8 vols. in 11 (Bari: Laterza, 1911–41), the ‘‘Laterza edition.’’ For a chronology of Vico’s works correlated to the volumes of the Laterza edition, see Michael Mooney, ‘‘Vico’s Writings,’’ in Giambattista Vico’s Science of Humanity, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Donald Phillip Verene. A large single volume containing many of Vico’s writings, with valuable footnotes, is Opere, edited by Fausto Nicolini (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1953). A more recent edition of selected works of Vico is Opere, 2 vols., edited by Andrea Battistini (Milan: Mondadori, 1990). Battistini’s commentary in this edition is indispensable for any scholar working on Vico today. The Centro di Studi Vichiani in Naples publishes new critical and annotated editions of Vico’s works, edited by various scholars, beginning in 1982 with the edition of Vico’s six inaugural orations by Gian Galeazzo Visconti. A turning point in Vico studies occurred in

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Bibliography

the past decade with the publication of facsimile editions of the 1725 and 1744 Scienza nuova (1979 and 1994), followed by concordances to each (1981 and 1997), sponsored by the Lessico Intellettuale Europeo, directed by Tullio Gregory. Bibliographical information on Vico in English, citations to Vico in English-language publications, and translations of Vico’s works into English are to be found in Molly Black Verene, Vico: A Bibliography of Works in English from 1884 to 1994, published by the Philosophy Documentation Center and in the bibliographical supplements that follow it in issues of New Vico Studies. For work on Vico in Spanish, see the issues of Cuadernos sobre Vico (esp. 1991 onward). Bibliographical information in all languages can be found in Benedetto Croce, Bibliografia vichiana, 2 vols., rev. and enlg. by Fausto Nicolini, and the volumes that update it (see below, ‘‘Bibliographies’’). The critical literature on Vico is vast. Most of it is in Italian and English. All of Vico’s principal pedagogical, jurisprudential, and philosophical works have appeared in English translation, as have a significant number of his minor writings.

Vico’s Writings in English Translation 1692/1693 Poem: ‘‘Affetti di un disperato’’ [Feelings of one in despair]: Two translations (both retain the Italian title): (1) H. P. Adams. The Life and Writings of Giambattista Vico. London: Allen and Unwin, 1935, 223–26. (2) Thomas Goddard Bergin. Forum italicum 2 (1968): 305–9. 1693 Poem: ‘‘Canzone in morte di Antonio Carafa’’ [Canzone on the death of Antonio Carafa]: See below, 1716, Carafa. 1699 Oration before the Academy Palatine: ‘‘On the Sumptuous Dinners of the Romans.’’ Translated by George A. Trone. New Vico Studies 20 (2002): 79–89. 1699–1707 Six University inaugural orations: On Humanistic Education (Six Inaugural Orations, 1699–1707). Translated by Giorgio A. Pinton and Arthur W. Shippee, with an introduction by Donald Phillip Verene. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993. 1709 Seventh university inaugural oration (delivered 1708): On the Study Methods of Our Time. Translated with an introduction by Elio Gianturco. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Library of the Liberal Arts, 1965. Reissued, with a preface and a translation of ‘‘The Academies and the Relation between Philosophy and Eloquence,’’ by Donald Phillip Verene. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990. Partial translation: Vico: Selected Writings. Edited and translated by Leon Pompa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, 33–45. 1710 On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians: On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians Unearthed from the Origins of the Latin Language, Including the Disputation with the ‘‘Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia.’’ Translated with an introduction by L. M. Palmer. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988. Partial translation: Vico: Selected Writings, 49–78.

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1711 Textbook of rhetoric: The Art of Rhetoric (Institutiones oratoriae, 1711–1741). Edited and translated by Giorgio A. Pinton and Arthur W. Shippee. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. 1711–1712 Disputation concerning the Most Ancient Wisdom in the Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia: See above, 1710, Ancient Wisdom, 113–87. 1713 University inaugural oration (full text lost, but probably delivered in 1713; partially quoted as a digression in the Autobiography): See below, 1725–1728, Autobiography, 123–25. 1715 Letter to Adriano Carafa [25 September 1715]: See below, 1716, Carafa. 1716 On the life and deeds of Antonio Carafa (De rebus gestis Antonii Caraphaei ): Translated and edited by Giorgio A. Pinton under the title Statecraft: Leopold I of Austria and Antonio Carafa. Includes translations of Vico’s ‘‘Canzone in morte de Antonio Carafa’’ (1693) and his letter to Adriano Carafa (1715). In manuscript. 1719 University inaugural oration (text lost, but its argument is quoted in the Autobiography): See below, 1725–1728, Autobiography, 156. 1720 Postface from a lost manuscript on jurisprudence: ‘‘To the Equable Readers’’ (‘‘Ad lectores aequanimos’’): ‘‘Vico’s Address to His Readers, from a Lost Manuscript on Jurisprudence: Comment and Translation.’’ Donald Phillip Verene. New Vico Studies 19 (2001): 161–68. 1720–1722 Universal Law (‘‘Synopsis’’ and first book, 1720; second book, 1721; third book of notes and excursuses, 1722): Universal Right. Translated and edited by Giorgio Pinton and Margaret Diehl. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. 1720–1725 Correspondence between Vico and Bernardo Maria Giacco and between Vico and Jean Le Clerc (including a letter from Aniello Spagnuolo to Vico): See above, 1720–1722, Universal Right, 714–28. Part of the letter of Jean Le Clerc to Vico (8 Sept. 1711) is quoted by Vico in the autobiography. See below, 1725–1728, Autobiography, 159. 1721 Poem: ‘‘Juno in Dance’’ (Giunone in danza): ‘‘Juno to Apollo’’ (lines 195–299). Translated by Joseph Tusiani. Rivista di studi italiani 1 (1983): 106–9. 1725 First New Science: [The First New Science] The principles of a new science of the nature of nations leading to the discovery of the principles of a new system of the natural law of the gentes. The First New Science. Translated and edited by Leon Pompa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Partial translation: Vico: Selected Writings, 81–156 (superseded by the above). 1725–1729 Correspondence concerning the First New Science: Letter of 25 October 1725 to Fr. Bernardo Maria Giacco. Translated by Max Harold Fisch. See below, 1725–1728, Introduction to Autobiography, 14–16.

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‘‘Four Letters of Giambattista Vico on the First New Science.’’ Translated by Giorgio A. Pinton. New Vico Studies 16 (1998): 31–58. (1) 25 October 1725 to Bernardo Maria Giacco (also see above, the translation of this letter by Fisch); (2) early January 1726 to Luigi Esperti; (3) 20 January 1725 to Edoardo de Vitry; (4) 12 January 1729 to Francesco Saverio Estevan. 1725 Letter on Dante and true poetry: [Letter of 26 December 1725] ‘‘To Gherardo degli Angeli: On Dante and on the Nature of True Poetry.’’ Translated by Maggie Günsberg. In M. Caesar, Dante: The Critical Heritage. London and New York: Routledge, 1989, 348–55. 1725–1728 The autobiography: The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico. Translated by Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1944 (Great Seal Books edition, 1963; Cornell Paperbacks, 1975), 111–73 (portion of the autobiography published during Vico’s lifetime). 1728/1729 Discovery of the true Dante (‘‘Discovery of the True Dante’’ is Nicolini’s title in the Laterza edition of Vico’s works): Three translations: (1) ‘‘Discovery of the True Dante.’’ Translated by Irma Brandeis, in Discussions of the Divine Comedy. Edited by Irma Brandeis. Boston: Heath, 1961, 11–12. (2) ‘‘ ‘The discovery of the true Dante’ or ‘New Principles in Dante criticism.’ Concerning the commentary of an anonymous writer on the Comedy.’’ Translated by Maggie Günsberg. See above, 1725, Dante: The Critical Heritage, 348–55. (3) ‘‘Discovery of the True Dante.’’ Translated by Cristina Mazzoni, in Critical Essays on Dante. Edited by Giuseppe Mazzotta. Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall, 1991: 58–60. 1729 Vici vindiciae (‘‘Vindication of Vico’’: Vico’s reply to the false book notice on the First New Science published in the Leipzig Acta eruditorum): Partial translation: ‘‘A Factual Digression on Human Genius, Sharp, Witty Remarks, and Laughter.’’ Translated by A. Illiano, J. D. Tedder, and P. Treves. Forum italicum 2 (1968): 310–14. 1729 Letter to the Leipzig Academy of Sciences concerning the above false book notice: 19 October 1729 to Johann Burchard Mencken (not sent, but included by Vico in his continuation of the autobiography). See below, 1731: Autobiography, 190. 1730 Vico’s advice to the reader in the second edition of the New Science: ‘‘[The Second New Science, 1730] Giambattista Vico to the Reader.’’ Translated by Leon Pompa. Vico: Selected Writings, 269–70. This passage comes at the end of the ‘‘Idea of the Work’’ in the 1730 edition; it does not appear in the 1744 edition (see Laterza edition, IV-2, paras. 1131–38). 1730 Reply to Spinelli on errors in the New Science: December. Letter to Francesco Spinelli, thanking him for his analysis of several errors in the New Science. Included in the continuation of the autobiography. See below, 1731: Autobiography, 195–97. 1731 Vico’s continuation of the autobiography: ‘‘Continuation by the Author [1731].’’ Translated by Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin. Autobiography, 173–200. 1731 Additions to the 1730 edition of the New Science, which Vico prepared for inclusion in his third edition but which remained in manuscript:

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‘‘Giambattista Vico’s ‘Reprehension of the Metaphysics of René Descartes, Benedict Spinoza, and John Locke’: An Addition to the New Science (Translation and Commentary),’’ by Donald Phillip Verene. New Vico Studies 8 (1990): 2–18 (Laterza edition, IV-2, paras. 1212–17). ‘‘Practic of the New Science.’’ Translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. In Giambattista Vico’s Science of Humanity. Edited by Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Donald Phillip Verene. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976, 451– 54. Reprinted in The New Science of Giambattista Vico (1984), 427–30 (Laterza edition, IV-2, paras. 1405–11). ‘‘Ragionamento primo’’ [concerning whether the Law of Twelve Tables were Roman in origin], and ‘‘Ragionamento secondo’’ [concerning the Royal Law of Tribonian]. Translated by Giorgio A. Pinton, with Notes and Comments. New Vico Studies 19 (2001) (Laterza edition, IV-2, paras. 1412–59): 98–160. 1732 University inaugural oration on the heroic mind: ‘‘On the Heroic Mind.’’ Translated by Elizabeth Sewell and Anthony C. Sirignano. Social Research 43 (1976): 886–903. Reprinted in Vico and Contemporary Thought. Edited by G. Tagliacozzo, M. Mooney, and D. P. Verene. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979: 2: 228–45. 1737 Inaugural oration to the Academy of Oziosi on philosophy and eloquence: ‘‘The Academies and the Relation between Philosophy and Eloquence.’’ Translated by Donald Phillip Verene. See above, 1709, Study Methods, 85–90. 1744 The New Science, third edition: Two translations: (1) The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1948; rev. ed. 1968, 1984. Abridged ed.: Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1961; reprinted, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Paperbacks, Cornell University Press, 1970. (2) New Science: Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations. Translated by David Marsh, with an introduction by Anthony Grafton. London and New York: Penguin, 1999. A principal difference between these two translations of Vico’s major work is the way in which each treats Vico’s terminology. Where possible, Bergin and Fisch translate Vico’s major terms with their English cognates; Marsh generally does not. For example, Bergin and Fisch render Vico’s favola as ‘‘fable,’’ Marsh as ‘‘myth’’; Bergin and Fisch render Vico’s caratteri poetici as ‘‘poetic characters,’’ Marsh variously, as ‘‘poetic symbols’’ or ‘‘archetypes’’; Bergin and Fisch render Vico’s lingua comune mentale as ‘‘common mental language,’’ Marsh as ‘‘conceptual language’’; Bergin and Fisch render Vico’s barbarie della riflessione as ‘‘barbarism of reflection,’’ Marsh as ‘‘barbarism of calculation.’’ For a discussion of these terminological differences, see Donald Phillip Verene, ‘‘On Translating Vico: The Penguin Classics Edition of the New Science,’’ New Vico Studies 17 (1999): 85–107. Some partial translations of the New Science: ‘‘The Third Book of Vico’s Scienza nuova: On the Discovery of the True Homer.’’ Translated by Henry Nelson Coleridge. In Coleridge, Introductions to the Study of the Greek Classic Poets: Designed Principally for the Use of Young Persons at School and College, 2d ed. London: Murray, 1834, 73–98; 3d ed. 1846, 63–84.

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‘‘[Selections from] the Scienza nuova.’’ Translated by E. F. Carritt. In Carritt, Philosophies of Beauty from Socrates to Robert Bridges: Being the Sources of Aesthetic Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931, 73–74. ‘‘[The Third New Science] Principles of a new science concerning the common nature of nations.’’ Translated by Leon Pompa. Vico: Selected Writings, 159–267.

Some Italian Editions of Vico’s Works and Concordances Opere di G. B. Vico. Edited by Fausto Nicolini in collaboration with Giovanni Gentile (vol. 1) and Benedetto Croce (vol. 5). 8 vols. in 11. Bari: Laterza, 1911–1941. Opere. Edited by Fausto Nicolini (one vol. selected ed.). Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1953. Opere filosofiche. Edited by Paolo Cristofolini. Florence: Sansoni, 1971. Opere giuridiche. Edited by Paolo Cristofolini. Florence: Sansoni, 1974. La Scienza nuova. Introduction and notes by Paolo Rossi. Milan: Rizzoli, 1977. Principj di una scienza nuova intorno alla natura delle nazioni, Ristampa anastatica dell’edizione Napoli 1725. Edited by Tullio Gregory. Lessico Intellettuale Europeo XVIII. Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo e Bizzarri, 1979 [Facsimile edition of the First New Science]. Principj di una scienza nuova intorno alla natura delle nazioni. Concordanze e indici di frequenza. Edited by A. Duro. Lessico Intellettuale Europeo XXV. Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1981 [Concordance to accompany the facsimile edition of the First New Science; see above]. Le orazioni inaugurali, I–VI. Edited by Gian Galeazzo Visconti. Opere di Giambattista Vico, I (Centro di Studi Vichiani). Bologna: Mulino, 1982. Institutiones oratoriae. Testo critico versione e commento. Edited by Giuliano Crifò. Naples: Istituto Suor Orsola Benincasa, 1989. Opere. Edited by Andrea Battistini. 2 vols. Milan: Mondadori, 1990. Principj di una scienza nuova d’intorno alla commune natura delle nazioni (1730). Edited by Manuela Sanna and Fulvio Tessitore. Fondazione Pietro Piovani per gli Studi Vichiani. Serie testi, I. Naples: Morano, 1991. Epistole con aggiunte le epistole dei suoi corrispondenti. Edited by Manuela Sanna. Opere di Giambattista Vico, XI (Centro di Studi Vichiani). Naples: Morano, 1992. La congiura dei principi napoletani, 1701 (Prima e seconda stesura). Edited by Claudia Pandolfi. Opere di Giambattista Vico, II/1 (Centro di Studi Vichiani). Naples: Morano, 1992. Principj di scienza nuova d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni. Ristampa anastatica dell’edizione Napoli 1744. Edited by Marco Veneziani. Lessico Intellectuale Europeo LXII. Florence: Olschki, 1994 [Facsimile edition of the third edition of the New Science]. Principj di scienza nuova d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni. Concordanze e indici di frequenza dell’edizione Napoli 1744. Edited by Marco Veneziani. Lessico Intellettuale Europeo, LXXI. Florence: Olschki, 1997 [Concordance to accompany the facsimile edition of the third edition of the New Science; see above]. Indici e concordanze delle ‘‘Orazioni inaugurali’’ di Giambattista Vico. Edited by Marco Veneziani. Lessico Intellettuale Europeo, LV. Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1991.

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Delle cene sontuose de’romani. Edited by Domenico Corradini Broussard. Pisa: ETS, 1993. Varia. Il De mente heroica e gli scritti latini minori. Edited by Gian Galeazzo Visconti. Opere di Giambattista Vico, XII (Centro di Studi Vichiani). Naples: Guida, 1996. Le gesta di Antonio Carafa. Edited by Manuela Sanna. Opere di Giambattista Vico, II/2 (Centro di Studi Vichiani). Naples: Guida, 1997. De nostri temporis studiorum ratione di Giambattista Vico. Prima redazione inedita, Indici e ristampa anastatica dell’edizione Napoli 1709. Edited by Marco Veneziani. Lessico Intellettuale Europeo, XXXII. Florence: Olschki, 2000.

Bibliographies Bibliografia vichiana. Edited by Benedetto Croce. Naples: Tessitore, 1904. Ristampa anastatica with a presentation by Raffaello Franchini. Naples: Morano, 1987. Bibliografia vichiana. Edited by Benedetto Croce. Revised and enlarged by Fausto Nicolini. 2 vols. Naples: Ricciardi, 1947–1948. Mostra bibliografica e documentaria. Catalogo. Edited by Guerriera Guerrieri. Naples: L’arte tipografica, 1968. Contributo alla bibliografia vichiana (1948–1970). Edited by Maria Donzelli. Naples: Guida, 1973. Nuovo contributo alla bibliografia vichiana (1971–1980). Edited by Andrea Battistini. Naples: Guida, 1983. Catalogo vichiano napoletano. Edited by Manuela Sanna. Supplement to Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani 16 (1986): 497–659. Terzo contributo alla bibliografia vichiana (1981–1985). Edited by Roberto Mazzola. Supplement to Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani 17–18 (1987–1988): 387–501. Bibliografia viquiana. Edited by José Manuel Sevilla Fernández. Supplement to Thémata: Revista de filosofia (University of Seville), nos. 5–6 (1988–1989). Contributo al catalogo vichiano nazionale. Edited by Roberto Mazzola and Manuela Sanna. Supplement to Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani 19 (1989): 321–434. Vico: A Bibliography of Works in English from 1884 to 1994. Edited by Molly Black Verene. Bowling Green, Ohio: Philosophy Documentation Center, 1994. Quarto contributo alla bibliografia vichiana (1986–1990). Edited by Alessandro Stile and Daniela Rotoli. Supplement to Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani 24–25 (1994–1995): 415–583. Quinto contributo alla bibliografia vichiana (1991–1995). Edited by Maurizio Martirano. Naples: Guida, 1997. Sesto contributo alla bibliografia vichiana (1996–2000). Edited by Maurizio Martirano. Naples: Guida, 2002. Catalogo vichiano internazionale. Censimento delle prime edizioni di Vico nelle Biblioteche al di fuori d’Italia. Edited by Silvia Caianiello. Naples: Guida, 2000.

Journals Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani, vol. 1 (1971)–. Edited by Giusepppe Cacciatore, Giuseppe Giarrizzo, and Fulvio Tessitore.

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New Vico Studies, vol. 1 (1983)–. Edited by Donald Phillip Verene and Molly Black Verene. Cuadernos sobre Vico, vol. 1 (1991)–. Edited by José Manuel Sevilla Fernández.

Collected Volumes Rivista internazionale di filosofia del diritto 5 (1925). Special issue: Per il secondo centenario della ‘‘Scienza nuova’’ di G. B. Vico (1725–1925). Omaggio a Vico. A. Corsano, Paolo Rossi, et al. Naples: Morano, 1968. Les études philosophiques (July–Dec. 1968). Special issue: Giambattista Vico: Une philosophie non-cartésienne. Forum italicum 2 (1968). Special issue: An Homage to G. B. Vico in the Tercentenary of His Birth. Quaderni contemporanei, vol. 2 (1968). Edited by Fulvio Tessitore. Special issue: Giambattista Vico nel terzo centenario della nascita. De homine 27–28 (1968). Special issue on Vico. Nuovi quaderni del meridione, vol. 6, nos. 21–22 (1968). Special issue on Vico. Notiziario culturale italiano, vol. 10, no. 1 (1969). Papers presented on Vico in November 1968, sponsored by Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Paris. Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium. Edited by Giorgio Tagliacozzo. Coedited by Hayden V. White. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969. Campanella e Vico. Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1969. Giambattista Vico nel terzo centenario della nascità. Edited by Ernesto Pontieri. Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1971. Giambattista Vico’s Science of Humanity. Edited by Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Donald Phillip Verene. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Archives de philosophie, vol. 40, nos. 1 and 2 (1977). Two special issues: Études sur Vico. Vico e l’instaurazione delle scienze: Diritto, linguistica, antropologia. Lecce: Messapica, 1978. Vico and Contemporary Thought. 2 vols. in 1 book. Edited by Giorgio Tagliacozzo, Michael Mooney, and Donald Phillip Verene. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979. Vico oggi. Edited by Andrea Battistini. Rome: Armando, 1979. Vico: Past and Present. Edited by Giorgio Tagliacozzo. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1981. Vico e Venezia. Edited by Cesare De Michelis and Gilberto Pizzamiglio. Florence: Olschki, 1982. Leggere Vico. Edited by Emanuele Riverso. Milan: Spirali, 1982. Vico and Marx: Affinities and Contrasts. Edited by Giorgio Tagliacozzo. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1983. Vera lex 5 (1985). Edited by Virginia Black. Special issue: Vico and Natural Law. Giambattista Vico: Poesia, logica, religione. Edited by Giovanni Santinello. Brescia: Morcelliana, 1986. Vico and Joyce. Edited by Donald Phillip Verene. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. Vico e il pensiero contemporaneo. Edited by Antonio Verri. Lecce: Milella, 1991.

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Metafisica e teologia civile in Giambattista Vico. Edited by A. Lamacchia. Bari: Levante, 1992. The Imaginative Basis of Thought and Culture: Contemporary Perspectives on Giambattista Vico. Edited by Marcel Danesi and Frank Nuessel. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 1994. Retorica e filosofia in Giambattista Vico: Le ‘‘Institutiones oratoriae,’’ un bilancio critico. Edited by Giuliano Crifò. Naples: Guida, 1994. The Personalist Forum 10 (1994). Special issue: Vico and Nietzsche. Edited by Tom E. Heeney. Giambattista Vico and Anglo-American Science: Philosophy and Writing. Edited by Marcel Danesi. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995. Vico und die Zeichen/Vico e i segni. Edited by Jürgen Trabant. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1995. Vico e Gentile. Edited by János Kelemen and József Pál. Soveria Marnelli: Rubbettino, 1995. Vico in Italia e in Germania: Letture e prospettive. Edited by Giuseppe Cacciatore and Giuseppe Cantillo. Naples: Bibliopolis, 1995. Historical Reflections/Reflexions historiques 22 (1996). Special issue: Vico for Historians. Edited by Patrick H. Hutton. L’edizione critica di Vico: Bilanci e prospettive. Edited by Giuseppe Cacciatore. Naples: Guida, 1997. L’art du comprendre 7 (1998). Special issue: ‘‘G. B. Vico et la naissance d l’anthropologie philosophique.’’ Edited by Phillipe Forget. Giambattista Vico nel suo tempo e nel nostro. Edited by Mario Agrimi. Naples: CUEN, 1999. Vico tra l’Italia e la Francia. Edited by Manuela Sanna and Alessandro Stile. Naples: Guida, 2000. Pensar para el nuevo siglo Giambattista Vico y la cultura europea. Edited by Emilio Hidalgo-Serna, Massimo Marassi, José M. Sevilla, and José Villalobos. 3 vols. Naples: La Cittá del Sole, 2001.

Some Works on Vico Essays published in the collected volumes listed above do not appear below. Adams, Henry Packwood. The Life and Writings of Giambattista Vico. London: Allen and Unwin, 1935. Reprinted New York: Russell and Russell, 1970. Agrimi, Mario. Richerche e discussioni vichiane. Rome: Itinerari, 1984. Amerio, Franco. Introduzione allo studio di G. B. Vico. Turin: Società Editrice Internazionale, 1947. Amoroso, Leonardo. Nastri vichiani. Pisa: ETS, 1997. ———. Lettura della Scienza nuova di Vico. Turin: UTET, 1998. Apel, Karl-Otto. Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis Vico, 2d ed. Bonn: Bouvier, Grundmann, 1975. Auerbach, Eric. ‘‘Vico and Aesthetic Historicism.’’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 8 (1948): 110–18. Badaloni, Nicola. Introduzione a G. B. Vico. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961.

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Battistini, Andrea. La degnità della retorica: Studi su G. B. Vico. Pisa: Pacini, 1975. ———. ‘‘Teoria delle imprese e linguaggio iconico vichiano.’’ Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani 14–15 (1984–1985): 149–77. ———. ‘‘Three Essays on Vico. (1) ‘Vico and Rhetoric.’ (2) ‘On the Encyclopedic Structure of the New Science.’ (3) ‘Vico as Agonistic Lector.’ ’’ New Vico Studies 12 (1994): 1– 46. ———. La sapienza retorica di Giambattista Vico. Milan and Naples: Guerini and Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, 1995. ———. ‘‘The Idea of Totality in Vico,’’ trans. George Trone. New Vico Studies 15 (1997): 36–46. Bedani, Gino. Vico Revisited: Orthodoxy, Naturalism, and Science in the Scienza nuova. Oxford: Berg, 1989. Berlin, Isaiah.‘‘The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities.’’ Salmagundi 27 (1974): 9–39. Second Tykociner Memorial Lecture, University of Illinois, 1974. ———. Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas. New York: Viking Press, 1976. Reissued in Three Critics of the Enlightenment, edited by Henry Hardy. London: Pimlico, 2000. Betti, Emilio. ‘‘The Principles of New Science of G. B. Vico and the Theory of Historical Interpretation,’’ trans. Giorgio A. Pinton and Susan Noakes, New Vico Studies 6 (1988): 31–50. Brown, Norman O. Closing Time. New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1973. Burke, Peter. Vico. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Cantelli, Gianfranco. Mente corpo linguaggio: Saggio sull’interpretazione vichiana del mito. Florence: Sansoni, 1986. Caporali, Riccardo. Heroes gentium: Sapienza e politica in Vico. Bologna: Mulino, 1992. Cassirer, Ernst. ‘‘Descartes, Leibniz, and Vico.’’ In Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, 1935–1945. Edited by Donald Phillip Verene. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Castellani, Cecilia. Dalla cronologia alla metafisica della mente: Saggio su Vico. Bologna: Mulino, 1995. Chaix-Ruy, Jules. J.-B. Vico et l’illuminisme athée. Paris: del Duca, Editions Mondiales, 1968. Corsano, Antonio. G. B. Vico. Bari: Laterza, 1956. Costa, Gustavo. ‘‘An Enduring Venetian Accomplishment: The Autobiography of G. B. Vico.’’ Italian Quarterly 21 (1980): 45–54. ———. ‘‘La posizione di Vico nella storia dell’autobiografismo europeo.’’ Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani 10 (1980): 143–46. ———. ‘‘Vico’s ‘Sali Nitri’ and the Origins of Pagan Civilization: The Alchemical Dimension of the New Science.’’ Rivista di studi italiani 10 (1992): 1–11. ———. Vico e l’Europa: Contro la ‘‘boria delle nazioni.’’ Milan and Naples: Guerini and Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, 1996. Cristofolini, Paolo. La ‘‘Scienza nuova’’ di Vico: Introduzione alla letture. Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1995. ———. Vico pagano e barbaro. Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2001. Croce, Benedetto. The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico. Translated by R. G. Collingwood. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2002; 1913.

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Index

Abel, 28 Achilles, 69, 113, 184, 188–89 Adam, 21, 29, 43, 50, 77, 166, 198 Adams, Henry Packwood, 15, 34 Aeneas, 3–5, 7–8, 29, 14 Aesop, 62 Agrippa of Nettesheim, 6 Alcibiades, 7 Alcmena, 107 Alpino, Prospero, 100 Alvarez, Emmanuele, 48 Amphitryon, 107 Anchises, 3–4, 8 Andrea, Gaetano, 51 Angelis, Pietro de, 31 Apel, Karl-Otto, 35 Apollo, 3, 70, 153; Temple of, 18, 72 Aquadia, Felice, 48 Arcadia, Academy of, 59, 62 Arcesilaus, 109 Aristotle, 51, 80, 82, 87, 123, 170; and topics, 83–84; on Zeno’s paradoxes,

112–14, 117–18; on elements, 175; on enthymemes, 178–79; and class logic, 182; on metaphor, 193; on history, 199 Arnauld, Antoine, 82, 84, 87 Ars analytica, 86 Ars critica, 83, 95 Ars topica, 83–84, 95, 179 Assorditi, Academy of, 59 Atomists, 82 Atticus, 121 Auctoritas, 128–29, 178, 180 Augustine, St., 24–25, 57, 92, 112, 158; Vico’s protector, 47; and Descartes, 108; definition of God, 133–34; on memory, 181 Augustus, 127 Austin, John Langshaw, 123 Authority. See Auctoritas Axioms. See Degnità Babel, Tower of, 77 Bacon, Francis, 30; and one of Vico’s

255

256

Index

Bacon, Francis (continued ) ‘‘four authors,’’ 53; conception of knowledge, 79, 88, 121; on ancient wisdom, 97; method of philosophizing, 146, 172; on memory, 153–54; four idols of, 174–77 Badaloni, Nicola, 35 Baldi, Antonio, 147 Ballanche, Pierre Simon, 32 Barbarie della riflessione, 41, 46, 127, 163, 185, 196, 199, 200, 203 Barbarie del senso, 41, 196, 200 Barbarism of reflection. See Barbarie della riflessione Barbarism of sense. See Barbarie del senso Battistini, Andrea, 35, 55 Bayle, Pierre, 116 Beatrice, 5 Beckett, Samuel, 10, 14–15, 21, 204 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 17 Benco, Silvio, 13 Bentham, Jeremy, 123 Bergin, Thomas Goddard, 34, 61, 122, 131, 148, 173, 200 Berlin, Isaiah, 34, 199 Bias, 70 Blasius, St., 60 Bloom, Harold, 35 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 49, 57 Borges, Jorge Luis, 35 Borkowski, Andrew, 124 Borromeo, Carlo, 47 Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne, 32 Boucicault, Dion, 205 Boulanger, Nicolas Antoine, 31 Bourget, Louis, 42 Boyle, Robert, 30, 80 Brandt, Sebastian, 73 Brody, Daniel, 17 Brown, John, 100 Bruno, Giordano, 11, 14, 30, 153; source for Finnegans Wake, 6–7, 10, 13, 15, 19, 22, 28; doctrine of opposites, 7, 19, 28, 38, 47, 205

Budge, E. A. Wallis, 38 Budgen, Frank, 20, 22 Burgess, Anthony, 20, 25 Burial, 8, 186, 188, 191, 201 Byatt, Antonia Susan, 35 Caerellius, 164 Cain, 28 Calogerà, Angelo, 41 Camillo, Giulio, 30, 194 Campanella, Tommaso, 30 Campanile, Domenico, 53 Cantelli, Gianfranco, 35 Capasso, Nicolà, 58 Capece, Giuseppe, 46, 63 Capua, Lionardo di, 30, 173 Carafa, Antonio, 45, 60, 64, 77 Caratteri poetici, 10, 18, 23, 149, 165, 182–83. See also Universali fantastici Caravita, Domenico, 54 Carneades, 135 Cartesians (Cartesianism), 51, 57, 87, 96, 100–101, 118, 199. See also Descartes, René Cassirer, Ernst, 36 Castelvetro, Lodovico, 199 Cebes, 154–56 Censorinus, 184–85 Cerda, Luigi, duke of Medinaceli, 63 Certain. See Certum Certum (il certo), 18, 127–32, 165, 178 Charles of Bourbon, 62 Charles VI, 79 Charybdis, 119 Chilon, 70 Chronos, 40 Chrysippus, 112 Cicero, 49, 75, 81–82, 145, 170; on wisdom, 71, 194; view of Socrates, 72, 91; on rhetoric, 78, 91, 93–94, 134; and Descartes, 107–8; and Zeno, 112; and jurisprudence, 121–22, 126, 139–40 Cimmino, Donna Angela, 173 Cirillo, Nicola, 58

Index Civil law. See Ius civile Cleanthes, 112 Clio, 180 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 36 Collingwood, Robin George, 33, 37 Colum, Padraic, 10, 13–15, 204 Common sense. See Sensus communis Conscientia (coscienza), 18, 110, 164– 66. See also Scientia Conti, Antonio, 41–42, 59 Cooper, Lane, 84 Cornelio, Tommaso, 30 Corsini, Cardinal Lorenzo (Pope Clement XII), 56–57 Corso e ricorso, 8, 22–23, 46, 65, 165, 173, 195–96, 201; as Joyce’s ricorsi storici, 14, 21–22 Cousin, Victor, 12, 31–32, 35 Cristofaro, Giacinto de, 50 Critias, 72 Croce, Benedetto, 10–12, 32–35, 37, 81, 112 Cuoco, Vincenzo, 30–31, 33 Curran, Constantine, 11, 13 Cuzzi, Paolo, 11, 16 Cynics, 161 Daedalus, 3, 18, 29 Dame Metaphysic, 147–49, 151–52 Dante, 14, 24, 35; descent into Inferno, 4–5, 7–8; Joyce’s knowledge of, 10, 13, 23, 29, 38; as ‘‘Tuscan Homer,’’ 37, 65, 118, 195–96; and Vico, 24, 44, 49, 57, 145–46, 173–74 Darius the Great, 168, 189 Daun, Count von, 63 Dedalus, Stephen, 5, 7, 10, 17–18, 25, 37 Degnità, 170–82 passim; defined, 173–74 Democritus, 82 Demosthenes, 81, 93–94, 146, 178 Derrida, Jacques, 35 Descartes, René, 30, 82, 91, 101, 130, 160–61, 187; and Vico’s autobiography, 42, 45, 51, 54–55, 58, 81, 101,

257

159; conception of knowledge, 52, 71, 86–87, 103, 120, 146, 161–62; and education, 83–86; Joyce’s passages on, 95, 118; on circulation of blood, 100, 102; Vico’s criticism of his metaphysics, 106–11, 114, 128, 148–49, 150, 152; as modern Stoic, 136, 190; and Vico’s method, 170–71. See also Cartesians De Tuoni, Dario, 12 Dewey, John, 101 Dido, 4 Dio Chrysostom, 125–26 Diogenes Laertius, 112, 116 Dionysius, 25 Dipintura, 60, 64, 91, 158, 179, 182; description of, 146–57 passim Dispositio, 49, 162–63 Dizionario, mentale, 10, 23, 26, 62, 103– 4, 158–59, 179, 184; as Vico’s universal etymologicon, 165–69 Doria, Paolo Mattia, 58, 99, 116, 155 Dublin (Georgia, U.S.A.), 9 Dublin (Ireland), 6, 9, 10–11, 18, 21, 25–27 Dujardin, Édouard, 16 Duni, Emanuele, 31 Du Roy, Henri, 81 Dworkin, Ronald, 123 Earwicker, 5, 9, 24–29, 204. See also Finnegan; H. C. E. Eco, Umberto, 23 Egyptians, 98, 100, 111, 138, 152, 177, 184–85 El Brocense, Francisco Sanchez, 166 Eleanor of Neuburg, Empress, 47 Elizabeth of Bohemia, Princess, 120 Ellmann, Richard, 16 Elocutio, 49, 162–63 Eloquence. See Eloquentia Eloquentia, 57, 78–79, 84–85, 91–94, 134, 153, 156, 161 Encyclopaedists, 31

258

Index

Enlightenment, 30, 32, 123–24, 195 Epictetus, 74 Epicureans (Epicureanism), 45, 57, 93, 115, 133, 136, 161 Epicurus, 80, 136, 202 Erasmus, Desiderius, 73 Escalona. See Pacheco, Manuel Esperti, Giuseppe Luigi, 56, 136 Etruscans, 98, 102–4, 111, 166 Euclid, 115, 170–71, 175–76 Eve, 21, 29, 43, 77, 198 Famuli, 151, 185 Fantasia, 20, 23, 33, 154, 165, 182–84, 191, 194 Fas gentium, 158, 168 Ferrari, Giuseppe, 12, 31 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 16 Ficino, Marsilio, 71, 81–82 Filangieri, Gaetano, 31 Finetti, Bonifacio, 61 Finnegan, 5, 7, 9–10, 21–24, 29–30, 37, 43, 204–5. See also Earwicker; H. C. E. Finnegan, Tim, 17, 20–23 Fisch, Max Harold, 34, 61, 148, 169, 173, 200; on Vico’s Cartesianism, 81; on Vico’s terminology, 109–10; on Vico’s view of Zeno, 112; on law, 122, 131; on Shaftesbury as source for Vico, 155 Flint, Robert, 15, 34, 112 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de, 80 Fool (folly), 61, 73, 75, 95, 157 Fornaciari, Raffaello, 11 Foscolo, Ugo, 31 Foucault, Michel, 35 Four Masters, 14–15 Francini Bruni, Alessandro, 11 Freud, Sigmund, 16–17 Frontispiece of the New Science. See Dipintura Fuentes, Carlos, 35 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 35 Gaius, 124 Galiani, Celestino, 30, 89

Galiani, Ferdinando, 30 Galileo, 30, 80–81, 102, 117, 174–75 Galizia, Nicola, 50 Gassendi, Pierre, 30, 80, 115 Gelli, Giambattista Domenico, 174 Genovesi, Antonio, 30–31, 94 Gentile, Domenico, 54 Gentile, Giovanni, 33, 35, 37, 81, 112 Ghezzi, Charles, 7, 10, 204 Giacco, Bernardo Maria, 51, 55, 57 Giambullari, Pierfrancesco, 174 Giannelli, Basilio, 50 Giannone, Pietro, 51, 58 Giants. See Giganti Gianturco, Elio, 83–84, 88, 199 Giganti, 5, 8, 21, 24, 41, 182, 185–86, 191–93 Gilbert, Stuart, 14 Gillet, Louis, 37 Gioberti, Vincenzo, 31 Glasheen, Adaline, 20, 38 Godfrey, 183 Greeks, 20, 71, 85, 91, 140–41, 152, 173–74 Grimani, Vincenzo, 79 Grotius, Hugo, 53, 130, 160, 174–75, 196–98 Guicciardini, Francesco, 202 Habermas, Jürgen, 35 Ham, 28 Harington, Sir John, 94–95 Hart, Herbert Lionel Adolphus, 123 Hayne, Thomas, 166 H. C. E., 5, 7, 10, 21–28, 43, 157, 170, 204–5. See also Earwicker; Finnegan Hebrews, 131, 198 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (Hegelianism), 14, 33–35, 74 Heidegger, Martin, 101 Hercules, 64, 156, 185 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 12, 32, 34 Hermes, Thrice-Great (Thoth), 150, 152–53 Herodotus, 49, 185

Index Heroic mind, 55, 65, 69, 71, 161, 183– 84; as theme of Vico’s oration, 90–91, 135, 152 Hesiod, 153, 180 Hieroglyphics, 147, 150–51, 158, 167, 184, 189 Hobbes, Thomas, 30, 138, 153, 176, 202–3 Homer, 20, 65, 148, 163, 189; the ‘‘true Homer,’’ 24, 118, 149–50, 154, 199 Horace, 91, 94, 134, 163 Horkheimer, Max, 35 Hume, David, 57 Humpty-Dumpty, 7, 37, 43 Ibsen, Henrik, 19, 22 Icarus, 18 Idanthyrsus, king of Scythia, 168, 189 Ideal eternal history. See Storia ideale eterna Ignota latebat, 149 Imagination. See Fantasia Imaginative universals. See Universali fantastici Impresa, 148–49, 151 Ingenium (ingegno), 20, 41, 85, 98, 118, 154, 170 Ingenuity. See Ingenium Intelligible universals. See Universali intelligibili Inventio, 49, 83–84, 162–63 Investigators, Academy of, 30, 173 Ionians, 98, 103–4, 111, 166 Ius: defined, 122–24; as derived from Ious, 198 Ius civile: defined, 129–30 Ius gentium (ius gentium naturale), 124, 130–31, 136, 146, 158, 165, 200 Ius naturale: and right, 122–24; defined, 130–31 Ius violentiae: defined, 131 Jim the Penman (James Townshend Saward), 28, 204 Job, 153, 202

259

John the Baptist, St., 6–7, 28, 44 Joseph, emperor of Austria, 47 Jouffrey, Teodoro Simone, 32 Jove, 90, 92, 99, 107, 168, 198; and giants, 8, 24, 150, 185; associated with thunder, 8, 41, 43, 170, 190; and fear, 138, 187; Mercury (Hermes) as messenger, 152–53; and Muses, 160, 180; as imaginative universal, 184, 186–87, 191–95 Joyce, Giorgio, 13, 15 Joyce, James, 5–39 passim, 43, 47, 69, 171, 194; use of puns, 9–10, 164; characterization of Vico as ‘‘roundheaded,’’ 10; first reading of Vico, 11–12; knowledge of Italian language, 11–13; urges friends to read Scienza nuova, 14–16; fear of thunder, 15; on science, 16, 191; conception of the artist, 17– 19; takes ideas from Vico, 20, 22; uses Vico as protagonist of Finnegans Wake, 24–27; parodies Descartes, 108; on Law of Twelve Tables, 141; as Shem, 204–6. Works: —‘‘The Bruno Philosophy,’’ 19 —‘‘The Day of the Rabblement,’’ 11, 19 —Dubliners: ‘‘The Dead,’’ 22 —Finnegans Wake, 5–38 passim, 43, 94, 97, 141, 171, 204–5 —‘‘Ibsen’s New Drama,’’ 22 —‘‘James Clarence Mangan (1902),’’ 11 —A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 7, 12, 14, 17–19, 29, 191 —Stephen Hero, 18 —Ulysses, 5–6, 14–15, 17, 19–20, 27, 29, 37, 69 —‘‘Vico’’(Cornell typescript), 12 —Work in Progress: Finnegans Wake Joyce, John Stanislaus, 28, 204 Joyce, Lucia, 13, 16 Joyce, Nora Barnacle, 11 Judas, 37 Jung, Carl Gustav, 16–17 Juno, 3, 63–64, 184, 193

260

Index

Jupiter. See Jove Justinian, 124, 126, 141 Kant, Immanuel, 33, 36–37, 82, 123 Kristensen, Tom, 16–17 Lavinia, 4 Law. See Ius Le Clerc, Jean, 54, 58, 171 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 42, 115–16 Leo, 148 Leviathan, 153 Livy, 82 Locke, John, 80, 136, 150 Lodoli, Carlo, 41, 59, 147 Lodovico, Domenico, 148 Longinus, 90, 194 Loos, Anita, 16 Lucan, 82 Lucretius, 50, 80–81, 175, 187 Luke, St., 28, 70 Macchia, Conspiracy of, 46, 63, 74 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 35 McIntyre, J. Lewis, 15, 19 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 37 Maistre, Joseph de, 31 Mammalujo (Mamma Lujah), 8, 28, 201 Mangan, James Clarence, 11 Mark, St., 28 Marriage, 8, 103, 186, 188, 191, 201 Martial, 82 Marx, Karl, 36 Mazzini, Giuseppi, 31 Medinaceli. See Cerda, Luigi Medinaceli, Academy of, 58 Memory, 30, 72, 95; Joyce’s view of, 11, 18, 20, 23, 26–27, 29, 38–39; Vico’s view of, 85, 163, 193–94; Bacon on, 153–54; as principle of composition (memoria), 162–63; and Muses, 180– 81 Mental dictionary. See Dizionario mentale

Mercanton, Jacques, 15–17 Mercury, 107 Metaphysical points, 101, 110–18 Michelet, Jules, 12–13, 15, 30–33, 35 Minerva, 92 Minos, king of Crete, 3, 18 Minotaur, 18 Mnemosyne. See Memory Monsters, 129, 184 Montesquieu, Baron de, 31 Morcillo, Fox, 116 Moreschi, Bartolomeo, 44 Moses, 18 Muses, 20, 27, 39, 180 Neoplatonism, 91, 112, 116, 123, 136 New critical art. See Nuova arte critica Newton, Isaac, 30, 58, 115, 155 Nicholas of Cusa, 6 Nicole, Pierre, 83 Nicolini, Fausto, 11, 32–33, 42–43, 49, 51, 100; on Vico’s Cartesianism, 81; on Vico’s view of Zeno, 112; on Shaftesbury as source for Vico, 155 Noah, 41, 191, 193, 198 Nuova arte critica, 20, 165. See also Philosophical-philological method Occam, William of, 146 Oconee (river), 9 Odysseus. See Ulysses Ogden, C. K., 171 O’Reilly, Persse, 9, 25–26, 170. See also H. C. E. Ovid, 82 Oziosi, Academy of, 59, 64, 91–92, 94, 163 Pacheco, Manuel, duke of Escalona, 63 Pagano, Mario, 31 Palatine Academy, 46 Paracelsus (Philippus Aureolus, Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim), 6

Index Parmenides, 113 Pasiphae, 18 Patrizi, Francesco, 81 Perrault, Charles, 80 Peter, St., 5, 29 Petrarch, Francesco, 42, 49, 57 Phaedrus, 61–62 Philip V, king of Spain, 46, 63, 79 Philosophical-philological method, 45– 46, 119–21, 132–33, 139, 146, 159– 61, 164–67, 175; origin in Ancient Wisdom, 97, 99. See also Nuova arte critica Phoenicians, 172, 174, 178–79 Piccolomini, Alessandro, 81 Pico della Mirandola, 71, 81–82, 88, 121, 132, 162 Piovani, Pietro, 33, 35 Plato, 22, 53, 76, 82, 136, 179, 199. Works: —Cratylus, 88, 97, 139, 166 —Laws, 157 —Phaedo, 137 —Republic, 76, 134–35, 167–68 —Theatetus, 175–76 —Timaeus, 116 Plautus, 82, 93, 107–8, 149 Pliny, 141 Plotinus, 112 Plurabelle, Anna Livia (A. L. P.), 27–28, 205 Pluto, 4, 53 Poetic characters. See Caratteri poetici Polybius, 135, 188 Pomodoro, Francesco Saverio, 12 Pompa, Leon, 34 Pomponius, 140 Porcìa, Giovanni Artico, 41–42, 56, 59 Port-Royal Logic, 83–84 Pound, Ezra, 15 Prati, Gioacchino de, 31 Prezioso, Roberto, 13 Proclus, 175 Pronuntiatio, 162–63

261

Protagoras, 176 Providence (providentiality), 136–37, 145, 160, 165, 169; in Joyce, 8–9, 22, 24, 27, 38, 205; in Vico’s life, 41, 45, 48, 56, 60; eye of, 147, 151, 157; and ideal eternal history, 191–203 passim Prudence. See Prudentia Prudentia, 73, 78–79, 84–85, 124–26, 134, 137, 200–202 Pudor, 128, 138 Pufendorf, Samuel, 130, 160, 196–98 Pyrrho, 109 Pyrrhus, 103 Pythagoras (Pythagoreans), 70, 98, 103, 111, 113, 116–17 Quinet, Edgar, 12–13, 28, 32, 35 Quintilian, 93–94, 162 Rand, Benjamin, 156 Religion, 8, 186, 188, 191, 195, 201 Remus, 12 Republic of Letters, 52, 75 Rhetoric, 78, 84, 90, 92, 145, 167 Ricci, Giuseppe, 48, 117 Ricorso. See Corso e ricorso Rocca, Domenico, 49–50 Rocca, Geronimo, 49 Roman law, 53, 80, 123–24, 127, 132, 140–41 Romans, 46, 85, 93, 103–4, 111, 126– 27, 174, 141 Romulus, 4, 12 Rosa di Villarosa, Carlo Antonio, III, 43, 64 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 138, 153 Rubek, 22 Rushdie, Salman, 35 Sallust, 82 Sanctis, Francesco de, 33 Sangro, Carlo di, 46, 63 Sapientia (sapienza), 71, 78–79, 84, 86, 89, 118, 126, 134–35

262

Index

Saturn, 40 Saward, James Townshend. See Jim the Penman Scaligero, Giulio Cesare, 166 Scholastics (Scholasticism), 18, 81, 83, 101–2 Schrottenbach, Wolfgang von, 47 Scientia (scienza), 78, 91, 110, 125, 164. See also Conscientia Scylla, 119 Scythians, 168, 189 Selden, John, 130, 160, 196–98 Seneca, 164 Sensus communis (il senso comune), 35, 84–85, 126, 165, 169, 189 Sesone, Francesco, 148, 150 Sextus Empiricus, 116 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of, 155–56 Shakespeare, William, 38 Shaun, 28, 65, 204–6 Shem, 28, 141, 204–6 Sibyl, 3–5, 18, 29 Simplicius, 113 Skeptics (Skepticism), 52, 109, 134–36 Socrates, 37, 64, 121, 135, 137, 145, 155; Vico compared to, 41, 44, 51, 61– 63, 65; and self-knowledge, 70–75, 81–82, 146; and pedagogy, 86, 89–94; on origins of words, 97, 139, 166 Solimena, Francesco, 60–61, 148 Solla, Nicola, 60 Solon, 203 Sophists, 91, 94 Sosia, 107–8, 149 Spaventa, Bertrando, 33, 35 Spengler, Oswald, 37 Sphinx, 156 Spinoza, Benedict, 51, 115, 150, 171 Staumann, Heinrich, 17 Stephen. See Dedalus, Stephen Stephen, St., 18 Stoics (Stoicism), 73, 82; and Epicureans, 45, 57, 93, 133, 136, 161; Descartes

as, 107, 109, 190; metaphysics of, 112, 147. See also Zeno of Citium Storia ideale eterna, 90, 172–73; Joyce’s use of, 8, 23, 38, 205; pattern of Vico’s life, 45; and ius gentium, 136, 165, 169; and knowledge per causas, 180– 81; derived from Varro, 185; and providentiality, 191–203 passim Suárez, Francisco, 48 Sullivan, John, 13 Swift, Jonathan, 37–38 Tacitus, 53, 55, 64, 175 Tagliacozzo, Giorgio, 34 Tasso, Torquato, 183 Terence, 82, 93 Thales, 70, 100 Thomism, 18, 19 Thunder, 7, 15, 41; Joyce’s imitations of, 7–10, 21, 25, 26, 39, 43, 170, 206; as sign of Jove, 8, 41, 168, 182, 186–87, 190–93 Torno, Giulio, 59 Tribonian, Royal Law of, 62, 140, 157, 159 True and made. See Verum-factum Twelve Tables, Law of, 62, 127, 139–41, 151, 157, 159–60, 168, 185 Ulpian, 121, 126, 129 Ulysses, 20, 37, 69, 145, 188–89 Uniti, Academy of, 58 Universali fantastici, 10, 23, 25, 33, 149, 165, 182–91, 193–94; Stephen Dedalus as example of, 18. See also Caratteri poetici Universali intelligibili, 69, 182, 185 Urania, 180 Vaccaro, Domenico Antonio, 147–48 Valla, Lorenzo, 102 Valletta, Giuseppe, 59, 155 Varro, Marcus Terentius, 71, 103, 134, 138, 166, 184–85

Index Verde, Francesco, 48 Verum-factum, 14, 104–10, 124, 127– 28, 146, 165, 193 Vico, Antonio, 42 Vico, Candida Masullo, 43 Vico, Caterina (wife of Ignazio), 43 Vico, Gennaro, 62, 65, 92 Vico, Giambattista, 40–65 passim; childhood fall, 5, 40–41; and Bruno, 6–7; as protagonist in Finnegans Wake, 24– 27; interpretations of his thought, 30– 39; alteration of birth date, 44–45; loss of concourse, 53–54; temperament, 60–62; appointment as royal historiographer, 62; as Shaun, 204–6. Works: —‘‘Academies and the Relation of Philosophy and Eloquence,’’ 59 —Affetti di un disperato, 46, 50, 54 —Autobiography, 40–65 passim —‘‘Corrections, Meliorations and Additions,’’ 61, 157 —De aequilibrio corporis animantis, 52, 62, 97–98, 100, 174 —De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, 96–118 —De mente heroica, 88–89, 135 —De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, 48, 52, 77, 96, 155, 179; Joyce’s knowledge of, 12, 94–95; nature of, 79–88, 102, 165; and jurisprudence, 126, 201 —De studiorum finibus naturae humanae convenientibus, 93 —Il diritto universale, 74, 119–42, 149, 168, 171; genesis of, 48, 53, 57, 88; relation to Scienza nuova, 61, 97, 119– 20, 137–39, 157, 160, 162 —‘‘Discovery of the True Dante,’’ 24 —Giornale de’letterati d’Italia: Risposte, 104, 108, 111, 114, 117–18 —Giunone in danza, 63 —Inaugural Orations, 73, 81–82; First, 81; Second, 74, 157; Third, 74, 82;

263

Fourth, 75, 90; Fifth, 76; Sixth, 79, 125; of 1713, 87; of 1719, 87–88 —In morte di Donn’Angela Cimmino, 64, 173 —Institutiones oratoriae, 92, 94, 104 —Letters: to Giuseppe Luigi Esperti, 136; to Bernardo Maria Giacco, 51, 55, 57 —Life of Antonio Carafa, 45, 53, 64, 77 —The Neapolitan Conspiracy, 63 —Novella letteraria, 60, 147, 156 —Pratica, 161, 200 —Ragionamenti, 140 —‘‘Reprehension of the Metaphysics of René Descartes, Benedict Spinoza, and John Locke,’’ 150 —Scienza nuova in forma negativa, 56, 59, 60, 121 —Scienza nuova prima: publication of, 55–59; nature of, 157–70 —Scienza nuova seconda: genesis of 1730 edition, 56, 60–62; frontispiece of, 145– 57; connection to first edition, 157–70; method of, 170–82; conception of poetic wisdom in, 182–91; conception of providential history in, 191–203 —‘‘Sumptuous Dinners of the Romans,’’ 46, 59, 93 —Vici vindiciae, 58, 146 Vico, Giuseppe, 52 Vico, Ignazio, 43, 52 Vico, Luisa, 4, 43, 52 Vico, Teresa Caterina Destito, 43, 52 Villarosa. See Rosa di Villarosa Virgil, 3–5, 7, 29, 49, 82, 160, 190 Virgo, 148 Voss, Gerard Jan (Gerardus Johannes Vossius), 166 Watson, Alan, 124 Weaver, Harriet Shaw, 8, 13–17, 20–21, 205 Wedge, theory of the, 98–99, 101, 147– 48, 174

264

Index

West, Rebecca, 17 Williams, William Carlos, 17 Wisdom. See Sapientia Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 101 Xenophon, 156 Yeats, William Butler, 37

Zeno of Citium, 111–12, 114, 116, 118 Zeno of Elea, 111–14, 116–18 Zeno of Sidon, 112 Zenonians, 111, 117 Zeus. See Jove