Giambattista Vico: His Philosophy of History Explained

Who was Giambattista Vico

Giambattista Vico was born and died in Naples, between 1668 and 1744. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he taught rhetoric at the University of Naples for most of his professional life, a chair Treccani dates to 1699 and which he won by competition rather than direct appointment. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy reports that he held the post until 1741.

The pre-Socratic philosophers searched for the arché, the principle behind natural things (Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Summary of the Search for the Arché). Vico turned the same kind of question toward the history of nations: what makes a civilization rise, grow and decline. That question runs through every page of his main work.

The New Science: a work written three times

The New Science, the text in which Vico laid out his view of history, was first published in Naples in October 1725, at his own expense, according to Treccani. A second, heavily rewritten edition appeared between December 1729 and April 1730, and a third came out posthumously in June 1744, shortly after Vico’s death, which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy places between January 22 and 23 of that year.

Naples, in the middle of the Baroque period, remained a center of learning that traced back to the Renaissance, where rhetoric, law and philosophy were closely intertwined.

The three ages of history

Vico describes the history of every nation, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, as a path marked by three ages that follow one another in a constant order of causes and effects: the age of gods, the age of heroes and the age of men.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy adds a detail the three-part scheme alone does not capture: within each cycle, people move in sequence from need to utility, to comfort, to pleasure, and finally to indulgence in luxury and ruin.

Practical example: picture a community that forms around a shared religious authority, what Vico calls the age of gods. Over time a warrior nobility emerges that claims power and clashes with those demanding the same rights, the age of heroes. Eventually the idea prevails that all people are equal by nature and capable of reasoning scientifically, the age of men. For Vico, once even this stage reaches its breaking point, the community finds itself back in conditions comparable to the first age, though on different grounds than before.

Cycles of history: what it actually means

This is the mechanism usually summed up as cycles of history, or recurrence; Treccani summarizes it this way: the history of nations unfolds in courses and recurrences, not as a repeat of identical events, but as a return of similar historical forms. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy adds that, for Vico, society tends toward an ideal progress without ever reaching perfection, because the path is interrupted by a recurrence, a return to a relatively more primitive condition.

One point the sources themselves do not fully agree on: the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that it remains an open question among Vico scholars whether his historical course should be pictured as a circle closing in on itself or as a spiral that returns to similar forms while still standing further ahead than before.

Vico against Descartes

One of the differences between Vico and his contemporaries concerned the method for reaching truth. Descartes, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, grounded truth in clear and distinct ideas; Vico rejected that principle and set a different standard against it, verum ipsum factum, truth coincides with what is made, meaning we truly know only what we have produced. Treccani notes that this polemical stance against Descartes grew sharper over the course of his career, up to a rejection of the cogito as the foundation of science. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, this same standard underlay Vico’s defense of rhetoric and the topical art, disciplines rooted in classical Greek philosophy and the debate between Aristotle and Plato, which he considered useful even for developing children’s imagination, against the geometric method Descartes applied to every field of knowledge.

Vico died in 1744, nearly half a century before the French Revolution helped spread a notion of linear, irreversible progress among European philosophers.

Vico’s legacy

Vico’s thought did not find a large audience right away. His ideas, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, reached a wider readership only from the nineteenth century onward, eventually becoming a common reference point in the humanities and social sciences. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy lists among the authors influenced by his writings names such as Herder, Marx, Coleridge, Joyce, Croce, Collingwood and Horkheimer.