Once my professor of Italian literature told me that one of the most forgotten Italian intellectuals is Giambattista Vico, born on June 23 1668, exactly 350 years ago, in Naples.
The cultural collocation of Vico is still controversial: some claim he was an enlightened, and other claim the opposite.
In the XVIII century he was the most important intellectual in Southern Italy, he was a philosopher, a historian, jurist and a philology scholar.
We discuss extensively historicism and philosophy of history my mentioning Hegel and Marx as main founders, but the truth is that philosophy of history has been introduced by Vico: he thought that history could be studied and analysed in a scientific way in order to look for laws and recurring facts.
The main book where he discussed this was the New Science (La Scienza Nuova), where Vico divides the history of humans in 3 ages which he called Age of the Gods, Age of the Heroes and Age of be Men.
In the first age, people live in nature, they are like wild beasts, with no civilisation and where the main mean of knowledge is sense: in the nature human beings create religion and god worship and from this they generate civilisation through laws and the establishment of family and then they abandon the barbaric Age and they arrive to the Age of Heroes.
Here, the main mean of knowledge becomes fantasy (the mythology begins in order to justify power) and politically we have aristocratic republics, where there is no equality, and the moment people rise up against this system we enter the age of reason, which is the Age of Men.
In the Age of Men we have popular republics which, in case of conflict, can degenerate and become monarchies (preferred by Vico): these two systems are the political systems of the Age of Men.
Like the greatest Roman historian Polibius, Vico believed in the historian cycles, therefore that things repeat in time, but he justified this by claiming that human nature is always the same and therefore can make the same mistakes.
A moment where society degenerates is when reason is abused, and Vico defined this “barbarity of reflection”.
Vico’s historicism is based on providence: every philosophy of history is to some extent providential, even when it’s secular and in spite of this, for Vico, it’s always individuals which make history.
Its historicism is based both on the idea of progress and the idea of cycle and the motor of change is conflict, such as that between aristocrats and people, and this makes Vico a precursor of the dialectics which will belong to Hegel and Marx.
Vico’s inquiry on history is above all an inquiry on political history: yes, it is really hard to understand if he belonged to enlightenment or not as he looks like he has reactionary aspects and his criticism of the abuse of reason is in advance of 100 years at least, when after Positivism, the new philosophies will affirm that reason can become dangerous when it is used as a mean to control the world, enslave others and use science to create destruction and war.
This is the best expression of the Barbary of the reflection which he talks about.
Vico understanding of history is above all a study of human nature, and when he affirms that history can repeat itself he is just saying that human nature is the same in history and sadly, things happen again because human beings are the same.
If we want to avoid the past to come back, we must understand how people are and act on this and in this period Vico is more current than ever, because we living in a new age of Barbary.
– Riccardo Grisanti
The Window on the World 