The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744)

"Of all the philosophers I’ve chosen, Vico would be the most foreign to a British reader, I think. He feels like a man from a different place and era because his historicism is so alien to the British mindset. He was a Neapolitan. By the way, I have just realised he’s the only one of my five philosophers who never spent any time in prison. Gramsci spent years in prison. Machiavelli spent quite a bit of time in prison and was tortured quite badly—as was Gramsci probably. But Vico managed to avoid prison. He had quite a distinguished career in Naples. His great book is The New Science , which has some similarity in style to Machiavelli. He starts with a deep engagement with the classics. He’s obsessed with Tacitus and Thucydides and the first part of the book is all on the classics. And then, at the end of the book, he sets out his theory, which he says is based on those classics, of three cycles of history. He says all nations go through these three cycles. There is the divine era, the heroic era and the human era. And when one is over, the other starts, like on a wheel. Each of these cycles comes with distinctive laws, with distinctive temperaments and institutions. Art will also be different. Everything will be different in each of these eras. But that – Vico says – is the natural course of history, that is the eternal history, as he calls it. So there is this sense of fatalism, which as I said before, is perhaps somewhat Catholic, but it’s a particular type of Neapolitan, perhaps still a bit pagan, Catholicism that has at its heart this sort of historicism that is so deterministic, so inescapable. I mean a theory of history that is, to some extent, deterministic. Marxism is a form of historicism in that sense, too, but it is a different kind of determinism to Vico’s. Yes, he would say it derives from the observation of history and mainly classical history. So, he says, you go through this first phase (the divine one), and you see giant statues; you have laws guarded by priests and still part of theology; you have the Mosaic law for the Jews or the Twelve Tables of the law for the Romans. You’ve got this sense of the law as God-given. The people who are in charge of the laws are priests, effectively. After the divine era, you move to the heroic phase or cycle. This is the era of Achilles; of the celebration of war and conquest; of the poetry of poets like Pindar, celebrating the achievements of the human body. Heroic societies are not as dominated by God. They are more concerned with human achievement, but a particular type of human achievement: that of heroes. “Had I thought of Augustine as an Italian philosopher though, then he would have very much topped my list” The third cycle is the more properly humanistic one. Here, the laws become a much more rational, bureaucratic creation; judges are professionals; art and literature become – as the French would put it – more intimiste . There is room for all types of humans, not just heroes. At some point, however, humanist societies will revert back to a divine, or to a heroic phase. Vico would probably say that in our society today we are at the end of the humanistic phase. And if the divine and heroic cycles feel so distant, just look at how we are now imagining the future – look at works of science fiction. The interesting thing about science fiction – films or books – is that nobody seems to imagine a future that is still humanistic as our present is. The future that we imagine is much closer to a society of heroes or to a divine society of a more pagan kind, perhaps. But most science fiction, interestingly, doesn’t imagine a hyper-humanistic future; rather, it imagines a sense of going back to more ancient times but, of course, with futuristic technology. That’s the sort of insight that Vico would provide, his instincts about where we are heading as a society. He would say, ‘we’ve had quite a long time of this sort of rational, super-humanistic phase, but I can already begin to see that there are new mythologies and new trends that are beginning to emerge that will mean human societies and nations moving back to something quite different.’ Yes, in a way! He was mainly looking at the past, actually. He comments a lot on Grotius’s work, but he lived a century later than Grotius. Grotius was from the 17th century, but Vico is an 18th century character. But Vico is quite unusual as a figure of the Enlightenment because, although he’s part of the Enlightenment and indeed one of the central figures of the Neapolitan Enlightenment, his is an Enlightenment that has a very different feel from the French Enlightenment, precisely because of this extraordinarily deterministic – suffocatingly deterministic – view of history that leaves one wondering, ‘Well, what can I do? How can I really improve the society in which I live, if we are just bound to repeat the same errors and to go back to what we’ve seen before?’ It was influential, especially in Neapolitan circles, and for quite a long time. Croce wrote extensively on Vico, and so did Gramsci. Gramsci mentions Vico and Machiavelli quite a lot in the notebooks. It was one of the formative books that an Italian man or woman of ideas would have had to read. And, and at some point, I think, any Italian thinker engagé in politics has to confront this very Italian sense of history as being a bit of a trap, inescapable in its outcomes. Yes! Exactly. And it may be that the big difference is the Protestant Reformation. It may be that that’s what unleashed in Northern Europe these ideas of possibility, and that was the exit strategy from a more deterministic way of thinking about one’s position in the world. But this way of thinking about history obviously comes with an enormous burden and limits one’s mind. Of course, Vico would have said, ‘No, it doesn’t, it just helps you conform to reality as it is, and you won’t cultivate dreams and absurd utopias. At least you’ll know what you’re dealing with.’ But it does, I think, have great consequences for the type of politics that one can imagine, and that one could put into effect. In fact, it was Karl Popper who in his book, The Poverty of Historicism, took aim at this kind of historicism. Popper didn’t like Vico. It is difficult to see how one can be a liberal, if you think of history in these terms. Or, if you’re a liberal, you’re the most pessimistic, depressed, hopeless, kind of liberal. By the way, there is something Viconian in the works of grand human history by scientists that have become so popular recently – by people like Yuval Noah Harari, Jared Diamond and especially Peter Turchin. They too claim to have uncovered eternal laws and predictable recurrence."