Giambattista Vico · Civilisations
How an obscure, impoverished professor in Naples invented, almost single-handedly, the philosophy of history - a science of the development of human societies and civilisations.
In early eighteenth-century Naples, an impoverished, obscure, and largely ignored professor of rhetoric named Giambattista Vico laboured, almost alone and unrecognised, on a work of staggering originality: the New Science (Scienza Nuova). In it, Vico attempted nothing less than to create a wholly new science - a science of human society and history, of how civilisations arise, develop, flourish, decline, and recur, of the common patterns underlying the histories of all nations. He sought to discover the principles governing the development of human societies, to make the study of history and civilisation a true science. With this work, Vico founded - almost single-handedly, and decades or centuries ahead of his time - the philosophy of history and, in important respects, the modern human and social sciences.
At the foundation of Vico’s New Science lies one of the most profound ideas in the philosophy of history: that the world of human society and history is something made by human beings, and can therefore be understood by human beings in a way that the natural world cannot. In his most famous passage, Vico declares that amid the darkness of remote antiquity there shines one indubitable truth: that the ‘world of civil society’ - the world of human institutions, societies, and history - ‘has certainly been made by men,’ and that therefore its principles can be found ‘within the modifications of our own human mind.’ Because we humans made the world of society and history, we can understand it from within, by understanding the human mind and nature that made it. This - that history is humanly made and therefore humanly knowable - is the founding principle of Vico’s whole science, and one of the deepest ideas in the philosophy of history.
Vico is now recognised as the founder, or one of the great founders, of the philosophy of history - the systematic philosophical study of the nature, development, patterns, and meaning of human history - and as a profound anticipator of the modern human and social sciences. His New Science anticipated, often by a century or more, ideas that would become central to modern thought: the philosophy of history (the systematic study of historical development), historical sociology and anthropology (the study of the development of human societies and cultures), the historical understanding of human nature and culture (the recognition that human nature and culture develop and vary through history), the understanding of early humanity through its myths and poetry, and the recognition of patterns in the development of civilisations. Though ignored in his own time, Vico’s New Science is now recognised as a foundational work in the philosophy of history and the human sciences - the lonely, original achievement of a neglected genius who, far ahead of his time, founded the systematic study of the development of human societies and civilisations.
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’s New Science founded the philosophy of history - a science of the development of human societies. Explain what was new and revolutionary about it, in your own words.
Leads to G. W. F. Hegel.
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