Giambattista Vico · Civilisations
Vico’s cyclical vision of history - the recurring sequence of ages through which all nations pass, rising, flourishing, declining, and beginning again.
At the heart of Vico’s New Science is a grand and haunting vision: that all nations, in all times and places, pass through the same recurring sequence of ages - an ‘ideal eternal history’ (storia ideale eterna) that is traced out, again and again, in the histories of all peoples. Beneath the bewildering variety of particular histories, Vico claimed to discover a common pattern: the same sequence of stages through which all nations rise, develop, flourish, and decline, before the cycle begins again. This pattern - the ideal eternal history common to all nations, the recurring sequence of ages traced out in every people’s history - is Vico’s vision of the deep order underlying the apparent chaos of history, and one of the most influential conceptions of historical pattern ever formulated.
But for Vico, the sequence does not simply end with the rational age of men in a final triumph of civilisation. Rather, the age of men - for all its developed reason and civilisation - tends toward its own decline and dissolution: the very reason and refinement that mark the age of men can decay into excessive individualism, skepticism, corruption, and the dissolution of the social bonds and shared beliefs that hold society together, leading to a decline and fall - a return to a kind of barbarism (the ‘barbarism of reflection,’ worse than the original ‘barbarism of sense’). And from this decline and fall, a new cycle begins: humanity, fallen back into a primitive condition, begins again the ascent through the ages of gods, heroes, and men. This is the ricorso - the recurrence, the turning of the cycle, the beginning-again of the eternal pattern. History, for Vico, is thus cyclical: nations rise through the ages, flourish, decline and fall, and begin the cycle again - the corso and ricorso, the eternal turning of the ages.
One of the most profound features of Vico’s theory is his insight that each age has its own complete and characteristic nature - its own kind of human being, government, law, language, religion, art, and mode of thought - all of which hang together and express the spirit of that age. In the age of gods, everything - the religious mode of thought, the mythic poetry, the divine kingship, the sacred law - expresses the divine-religious nature of that age. In the age of heroes, everything - the aristocratic government, the heroic virtues, the noble law, the heroic poetry - expresses the heroic-aristocratic nature of that age. In the age of men, everything - the rational thought, the popular government, the equal law, the prose of reason - expresses the rational-human nature of that age. Each age is a complete and coherent whole, in which all the aspects of human life and culture hang together and express the characteristic spirit and nature of that age. This insight - that each age has its own complete and coherent nature, that the aspects of a culture hang together and express the spirit of their age - anticipated the modern understanding of cultures and historical periods as coherent wholes, each with its own characteristic spirit and nature.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Vico saw history as a recurring cycle of ages (the corsi e ricorsi) common to all nations. Reconstruct the sequence of ages and the idea of recurrence, in your own words.
Leads to James Joyce.
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