Vico, Giambattista

Vico was born in Naples on June 23, 1668 in the family of a librarian. After finishing school, he begins to master the philosophy ^[2] .

At the invitation of one nobleman, he works as a tutor in the castle of Cilento, where he studies the works of Aristotle , Plato , Aurelius Augustine in the castle's library. In 1695 he returned to Naples ^[2] . In 1697, he succeeds in becoming a professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples .

From 1699 to 1708, Vico delivers initiation speeches at academic meetings, criticizing the theoretical positions of the so-called new scientists in these speeches ^[2] .

In order to publish his main work, The Foundations of a New Science on the General Nature of Nations ( 1725 ), Vico was forced to sell heirlooms, after having reduced the manus three times. The second edition was published in 1730 and the third in 1744.

"New Science"

The main book of Vico is “ The Foundations of a New Science on the General Nature of Nations ”.

The book begins with a compromise between Christian teaching and historical knowledge. Well created by God, endowed with free will, mankind became sinful because of its own fault, it was punished by the flood and almost destroyed. The survivors were divided into the chosen people , the Jews, who received the revelation of God and started the liberation movement of life under the guidance of God, and the forefathers of the pagan peoples who plunged into an almost animal state and slowly selected from it fantastically depicted “giants” (in the picture of primitive times see the influence of the poem Lucretius "On the nature of things"). Religion, even if it is dark, generated by the most primitive mentality, the fear of the highest power manifested in lightning, becomes a means of humanizing the giants, the gradual emergence of social institutions and, finally, communities of peoples. “Only religion makes the nations perform valiant deeds under the influence of the senses,” Vico says in conclusion.

The divine, heroic, and human epochs now follow each other separately for each nation. The Divine or Golden Age is understood here not as a golden age in the old idealizing sense, but as an era in which grain was first sown — the first gold of the world and, according to primitive people, the gods wandered around the Earth. All nations, except the Jews, committed, like an individual, the same advancement from the most primitive existence to the maturity of rational humanity, which is the true nature of man. The most significant idea was that it was precisely the different mental organization of people, at first almost animal, and then gradually humanized, that gave rise to its mores, social and state institutions at every level - from the stateless separation of giants to the people's republic and absolute monarchy . The power of creative fantasy is waning, its place is taken by reflection and abstraction. Justice and natural equality make their way, the rational nature of people, "which is only human nature." But human weakness does not make it possible to fully achieve perfection or to keep it. A people approaching perfection is a victim of internal moral decay, returns to the old barbarism and begins the same way of life.

Divine Providence

Vico was adamantly convinced that God rules the world in accordance with his designs and with his will determines the history of nations, but rejected the anthropopathic idea that the punishing anger or mercy of God could be directly felt as happiness or unhappiness of nations. He forced God to manifest himself in history only through the human nature created by him. It is natural for man’s nature to think only of his personal benefit. The divine spirit gives her passions the possibility of free play, since he gave her free will, but at the same time He forces her to think and wisely lead this free game so that she can develop a civilian system, gradually overcoming barbarism and, eventually, humanity. As Vico says, He "set their limited goals to serve their higher goals in order to preserve the human race on this Earth." Here is the source of Hegel's words about the cunning of the mind and the teachings of Wundt about the heterogeneity of goals .

Myth and Language

The thinking and the word of a person at an early historical stage was completely poetic, engendered by fantasy. Myths were for Vico nothing more than the poetically told story with the help of fantastic generic concepts accessible to understanding thanks to the enormous imagination of people, so that, for example, Hercules , not being a genuine historical person, reflected for him real life as “the heroic character of the founders of nations from the point view of their efforts. " Myths and languages, the most authentic relics of that time, became for Vico a real source of historical knowledge, and the reports of historians and philosophers of a later time, distorted by the prejudices of their time, lost their value.

Fighting classes

Vico was aware of the peculiar connection of formalistic rigidity with primitive color, inherent in the legal concepts of antiquity, the significance of the class struggle between patricians and plebeians , the transforming state, and thus the significance of the class struggle in general. Karl Marx appreciated with Vico the idea of ​​the primordial and ineradicable hostility of social classes .

Vico stood apart from the spiritual life of the eighteenth century. Montesquieu had a book by Vico, but he does not mention it in a word.

In addition to Marx and Spengler, such thinkers as Goethe , Herder , Hegel , Cousin , Michelet highly valued Vico's work, his ideas influenced the philosophy of time and mythology in Ulysses Joyce .

• The foundations of the new science of the general nature of nations

• The foundations of the new science of the general nature of nations. M. , Kiev, 1994. - 628 p. - ISBN 5-7707-6098-2 , ISBN 5-87983-017-9 .

• Kissel M. A. Jambattista Vico
• Lifshits M. Jambattista Vico
• Isaiah Berlin. Giambattista Vico and the history of culture.