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VICO'S VIEW OFHISTORY' Roger D. Henderson, For a long time Giambattista VICO (1668-1744), was known to many outsi­ de of his native Italy, only through a footnote in Das Kapital.t More recent­ ly Vico's thought has drawn much scholarly attention in connection with the question: 'Was Vico the first historicist?' - historicism, being taken here as the view that history is a continuous sequence of concrete events constituting social-cultural reality as such) In this article I will try to answer this question by looking at a problem which guided Vico's many years of study and writing, namely the problem of origins; and by considering some specific elements of Ancient (Greek), Medieval, and Modern thought which are uniquely combined in Vico's conception of history. Vico's writing shows a tenacious and insatiable desire to discover origins, for example the origin of law, of civil society, of language, of human histo­ ry itself. This desire has its background in the different lines of thought and influences which are combined in Vico's complicated conception of history. Hence, if we want to understand and evaluate this conception we will first need to consider this background. If Vico was the first historicist it was primarily the question of origins and its unique background which led him to become that.. Apart from the obviously classical or archetypal nature of this desire to go back to 'the beginning' of things, Vico's interest in origins was aroused by his early study of law, for he was trained as a lawyer, and specifically by the debate between Grotius (1583-1645), Hobbes (1588-1679), Pufendorf (1632-1694), and Selden (1584-1654), so crucial to the modern age, con­ cerning the origin of civil society and law. This interest in origins can also be traced back to Vico's early exposure to Plato(nism). For was Plato not asking about the origin of beauty or justi­ ce when he asked what all the beautiful or just things had in common? Or again, Vico's famous dictum about the true and the made being converti­ ble, verum etfactum . .. conoertuntur, did it not concern the common be­ ginning which all things had in once being made? Furthermore, Vico was an avid student of etymology and philology (and had taken a professorship in rhetoric at the University of Naples for want of one in law). He believed that discovering the origin of words and language would disclose how civil society and law had first arisen. This in turn, he thought, would enable him to understand how the work of divine providence was active behind or 97 within the whole genesis process of the first civilized man - that is, the his­ torical process itself. Let us turn first to Vico's relation to Plato(nism) to see how his thought and his view of history was contributed to by it. I 'Platonism' Vico's view of history was partly the outcome of a modification of platonic philosophy. For Plato was one of his favorite authors all the way from his early student days up until the third (and last) version of his New Science, of 1744.4 Vico often refers to him as 'the divine Plato',5 sometimes as 'the prince of Greek wisdorn',« And in a most remarkable passage Vico expres­ ses his great esteem for Plato by saying that he (and Pythagoras) 'by virtue of a most sublime human science, had exalted themselves to some extent to the knowledge of the divine truths which the Hebrews had been taught by the true God' (NS3 95). In his autobiography, dating from 1728, Vico shows his admiration for platonic philosophy by explaining that he had tried 'to bring the best philosophy, that of Plato subordinated to the Christi­ an faith, into harmony with a philosophy exhibiting scientific necessity in both its branches, that is, in the two histories, that of language and that of things' (Auto p. 155).7 This description appears to be accurate, for as we shall see, Vico tried to combine this 'subordinated' platonism,s in which the forms had been exchanged for eternal ideas or the word of God, with a conception of the workings of history and construct of them a new scien­ ce. In his De Antiquissimas Vico refers to 'eternal ideas' as having been made from eternity in God's mind and used by him to create in time. 'With truly divine elegance, the scriptures have called God's wisdom, which con­ tains within itself the ideas of all things and accordingly the elements of all ideas, Verbum' (DA p. 52). While claiming to 'acknowledge that the world was created from nothing, in time' Vico accepts the common (neo)platonic interpretation that 'God is being; created things partake of being' (DA p. 52). Yet he speaks little of this partaking or (as he rarely says) participation, for ultimately he is more interested in the way things come about or are made than in their 'being'. In his early writings he expresses clearly his be­ lief that God created things by using patterns or ideas, much like the plato­ nic forms. His modification of the platonic conception of forms is shown, however, when he replaces (and later merely supplements) the terms 'ideal state' and 'ideal justice' with the terms 'eternal state' and 'eternal justice' in the following quotation: 'instead of meditating upon that eternal state, and those laws of eternal jus­ tice, in accordance with which providence ordered the world of nations and governs it through the needs of mankind he (Plato) meditated upon an ideal state and purely ideal justice' (NSI 90). This modification was important for the way Vico comes to conceive of history; for he eventually develops and defends the notion of an 'ideal eter­ nal history traversed in time by the history of all nations' (NSI 90). This ideal eternal (or as he also says 'universal') history always repeats itself in 98.
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