Vico, Genealogist of Modernity

Robert C. Miner

Description

In this lucid and probing study, Robert C. Miner argues that Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) was the architect of a subversive, genealogical approach to modernity. Miner documents the genesis of Vico's stance toward modernity in the first phase of his thought. Through close examination of his early writings, centering on Vico's critique of Descartes and his elaboration of the 'verum-factum' principle, Vico, Genealogist of Modernity reveals that Vico strives to acknowledge the technical advances of modernity while unmasking its origins in human pride.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Individual Philosophers
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Descartes
• Reference
• Giovanni Battista
• Catholic
• Christianity
• Augustine of Hippo
• Aristotle
• Plato
• Augustine
• Jean-Baptiste
• René Descartes

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 24 juillet 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268159849
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

VICO
Genealogist of Modernity
VICO
Genealogist of Modernity
ROBERT C. MINER
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
Copyright 2002 by
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
http://www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
A record of the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-268-03468-9
ISBN 9780268159849
This book was printed on acid-free paper .
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] .
For
HEATHER
They don t recognize that humanity, developing by a historical living process, will become at last a normal society, but they believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organize all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant, quicker than any living process! That s why they instinctively dislike history, nothing but ugliness and stupidity in it, and they explain it all as stupidity!
- Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
CONTENTS
Note on Texts
Preface
Part 1 Humbling Modern Pride: Genealogy in the Early Vico
1 Ancients and Moderns
2 Eloquence and Prudence
3 Critique of Descartes
4 The Roots of Mathematics
5 Verum-Factum
Part 2 The Development of Modern Historical Consciousness in the Diritto universale
6 The Intention and Form of the Diritto universale
7 Justice and Equity
8 Natural Law
9 Verum-Certum
10 Constantia and Christian Jurisprudence
Part 3 The Moral Genealogy of the Scienza nuova
11 Vico, Genealogy, History
12 Unmasking the Philosophers and Philologists
13 Knowledge as Archaeology
14 Pagan Consciousness in the Age of Gods
15 The Hebrew Difference
16 From Achilles to Socrates
17 Modern Nihilism and the Barbarism of Reflection
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
NOTE ON TEXTS
Citations to Vico in the notes furnish a short title, chapter or paragraph number, name of editor, volume number or abbreviated edition title, and page number. In citations to the various works of the Diritto universale , a paragraph number immediately follows the page number, if the chapter cited has more than one paragraph.
Full information about the editions I have used may be found in the bibliography. Since the newer editions of Vico are generally more accessible and better organized, I have not cited the Laterza edition of Croce, Gentile, and Nicolini-once regarded as standard-except when referring to correspondence, occasional pieces, or suppressed parts of the Scienza nuova not printed in the editions of Cristofolini or Battistini. Additionally, comparisons of the present work with recent Italian scholarship will be facilitated, since the latter increasingly prefers the newer editions to that of Laterza.
Except where indicated, I have made my own translations. Although I have often departed from their renderings, I have found the Bergin and Fisch translations very helpful. The short titles below refer to the corresponding texts:
Orazioni
Le orazioni inaugurali (1699-1707)
De ratione
De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (1709)
De antiquissima
De antiquissima Italorum sapientia ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda. Liber primus sive Metaphysicus (1710)
Prima risposta
Risposta del signor Giambattista Vico nella quale si sciolgono tre opposizioni fatte da dotto signore contro il primo libro De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (1711)
Seconda risposta
Riposta di Giambattista Vico all articolo X del tomo VIII del Giornale de letterati d Italia (1712)
Sinopsi
Sinopsi del diritto universale (1720)
De uno
Liber unus: De uno universi iuris principio et fine uno (1720)
De constantia
Liber alter: De constantia iurisprudentis (1721)
Notae
Notae in duos libros (1722)
Scienza nuova prima
Principi di una scienza nuova intorno alla natura delle nazioni per la quale si ritrouvano i principi di altro sistema del diritto naturale delle genti (1725)
Vita
Vita di Giambattista Vico scritta da se medesimo (1725-28, 1731)
Vici vindiciae
Vici vindiciae. Notae in acta erudiotrum lipsienza (1729)
Scienza nuova seconda
Principi di scienza nuova d intorno alla comune natura delle nazione (1730)
De mente heroica
De mente heroica (1732)
Scienza nuova
Princ pi di scienza nuova d intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni, in questa terza impressione dal medesimo autore in un gran numero di luoghi corretta, schiarita, e notabilmente accresciuta (1744)
PREFACE
This is a book about genealogy. It is also a book about Vico, or more precisely, Vico as a practitioner of genealogy. But what is genealogy? Rather than attempt a preliminary definition of genealogy at the outset, it seems more advisable to proceed in operationalist fashion. If physics is whatever physicists do, and life science whatever life-scientists do, then genealogy is whatever genealogists do. If anyone is a genealogist, the author of On the Genealogy of Morals is. Hence we may begin with Nietzsche.
Whom does Nietzsche recognize as a genealogist? First, himself. Nietzsche regards his own historical practice as exemplary, as a model for other genealogists to follow. Nietzsche acknowledges, however, that he did not invent genealogy. In the preface of On the Genealogy of Morals , Nietzsche speaks of the English genealogists that precede him. Nietzsche identifies the English genealogists as authors of books about morality that have historical pretensions. Their books attempt to illuminate the content of concepts like good and evil by tracing the meanings of these words to their origins. The single example Nietzsche gives of such a book is Paul R e s The Origin of Moral Sensations (1877). 1 If some initial approximation of genealogy is required, one might say the following: genealogy is a species of historical explanation that privileges linguistic and etymological evidence.
Although R e and the English historians whom he follows are genealogists, they are not its most adept practitioners. They put forward an upside-down and perverse species of genealogical hypothesis. 2 It is not that they are wrong to seek insight through historical inquiry. It is rather that their actual procedure is radically unhistorical, to such a degree that the historical spirit itself is lacking in them. 3 In holding, for example, that the term good was originally used to indicate the approval of unselfish actions by their recipients, the English genealogists impose their own prejudices about the value of utility and benevolence onto the origins they claim to investigate. Nietzsche regards this anachronistic projection of contemporary values as not only an intellectual error, but also a sign of conceit. This pride has to be humbled, he declares. 4
Is Vico a genealogist in Nietzsche s sense of the term? If what defines a genealogist is simply a commitment to explaining cultural phenomena by adverting to their genesis, then it is obviously the case that Vico is a genealogist. What else would one say about a writer who takes it as a methodological principle that doctrines must begin from where the matters they treat begin, on the ground that the nature of things is nothing but their coming into being at certain times and in certain guises ? 5 If R e and the English historians of morality, as upside-down and perverse as they might be, count as genealogists, then Vico would also qualify. In the minimal sense of the concept, as understood by Nietzsche, Vico is a genealogist.
Nietzsche rightly views his own history of morality as superior to that of the unnamed English genealogists. Their lack of an authentic historical sense, due in part to their lack of philological acumen, ensures their inability to be equal rivals to Nietzsche. Should Vico-who, like Nietzsche, comes from philology-be regarded as a genealogist in a more exalted sense of the term? The thesis of the following pages is that Vico s texts exemplify a genealogical approach to modernity. Far from resembling the upside-down, backwards genealogy of the English, Vico s genealogy is comparable to Nietzsche s. That Vico cannot be conflated with the historians mocked by Nietzsche is suggested by the fact that Vico already exposes the very error that Nietzsche ascribes to the English genealogists. Far from being used to describe altruistic, unselfish action, the term good originally meant the same as strong, and was used by aristocracy in reference to itself. More than a century and a half before Nietzsche, Vico makes this claim in the Scienza nuova . 6 Like Nietzsche, Vico condemns academic perspectives that project current prejudices onto past origins. They are infected by the pride that he calls the conceit of scholars. Possessing the historical spirit in abundant degree, Vico does not hesitate to use it polemically against philosophers and philologists who lack it. The question that Nietzsche poses to some future academy- What light does linguistics, and especially the study of etymology, throw on the history of the evolution of moral concepts? 7 -is a question that Vico has already asked. It is a question that drives the Scienza nuova , a text whose approach to the history of ideas and institutions is informed by the presupposition that ideas and languages accelerated at the same rate. 8
An intellectually honest Nietzschean cannot write Vico off as an historian in the English mode, a bungler who would utterly fail to qualify as a serious rival. Such a Nietzschean might instead dismiss Vico on the slightly more charitable ground that what he offers is an anticipation-brilliant in some respects and defective in others-of the genealogy that Nietzsche develops more fully and rigorously. If this were the case, then Vico s perspective would not constitute a genuine rival to that of