Giambattista Vico

Early life and career

Vico was the son of a poor bookseller. In his family’s home everyone was miserably huddled together in a mud-floored, ground-level room used simultaneously as a bookshop, living room, and kitchen. When he was scarcely seven, Vico injured his head falling from the ladder that led to the small second-floor attic that served as the sleeping room. The injury appeared so serious that the doctor predicted that it would lead to death or imbecility. Although the injury healed, he became stern and melancholy in nature. Vico later acknowledged this in his autobiography and observed: “such a nature do men with profound and active spirits possess.”

He attended various schools, including a Jesuit college, for short periods but was largely self-taught. He had to study by candlelight in a miserable room crowded with a large family. He often skipped his classes, because his mediocre teachers could offer him nothing more than an arid Scholasticism, the system of Western Christian philosophy that flourished from the 11th to the 15th century but had declined greatly by the time of Vico. Despite his life of poverty, he was able to escape occasionally to the countryside; these excursions opened immense horizons beyond his limited early environment. In fact, personal experience, rather than reading, was the primary source of Vico’s unique genius, although his reading was extensive, varied, and always distinguished by a personal interpretation.

In the course of his reading Vico encountered his first master, the Greek philosopher Plato. A critical spirit quickly intervened, and he turned to Tacitus, a Roman historian, and to Machiavelli, an Italian statesman and political philosopher, who portrayed men not as they should be but as they unfortunately are. Thus, contrasts soon became an important element in his thought: between nature and spirit; between the body, as “this sombre prison,” and the soul; between the high aspirations of the imprisoned soul and the fall that awaits it when it yields to the desires of the senses.

Vico’s thought became increasingly independent, and he preferred to meditate in solitude; but, at the same time, he frequented the fashionable salons, where he met several scholars of the time, such as Thomas Corneille, a French dramatist, and Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni, a literary historian, with whom he debated. Gradually, this circle of scholars became attracted by the ideas of René Descartes, Benedict de Spinoza, and John Locke, which were penetrating Naples at the end of the 17th century. Although Vico was distantly involved in the controversies, he continued to depend more upon the course of his own self-instruction.

Following an attack of typhus, Vico left Naples and accepted a tutoring position in the home of the Duca della Rocca at Vatolla, south of Salerno, where he wrote his most authentic, and most despondent, poetry. There, secretly infatuated with his pupil, the young Giulia della Rocca, he discovered the pain of “social barriers”—barriers that were insuperable, because they were the vestige of entrenched ancient structures. Giulia, who admired Vico, died at the age of 22, shortly after her marriage to a young man “of her sphere.” Although Vico always had a longing for a peaceful world, he felt that the discord that governs the individual spreads and that history itself only partially obeys the designs of Providence.

After his return to Naples, Vico found the next few years less difficult. He recovered from his ill-fated passion and in December 1699 married a childhood friend, Teresa Destito, who was well intentioned but almost illiterate and incapable of understanding him. In the same year, he obtained a chair of rhetoric at the University of Naples. One of the duties of the professor of rhetoric was to open the academic year with a Latin oration, and Vico carried out this responsibility by giving the introductory lectures between 1699 and 1708. The last one, printed in 1709 under the title De Nostri Temporis Studiorum Ratione (“On the Method of the Studies of Our Time”), is rich with his reflections about pedagogical methods. This work was followed almost immediately by the publication of Vico’s great metaphysical essay De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia (“On the Ancient Wisdom of the Italians”), which was a refutation of the Rationalistic system of Descartes.

This tranquil interval, during which he brought his aging father to live with him, did not last. Three of his eight children died at an early age, and another, Ignazio, caused his parents grave anxiety and was even imprisoned for his debts. Vico was also disappointed in his own career, which had initially appeared promising. He failed to obtain the more prestigious and better paid chair of law that he actively sought. When a notice contemptuous of his work appeared in one of the scholarly publications, his fiery temper was sparked, and he wrote his pamphlet “Vici Vindiciae” (“The Vindications of Vico”) in reply. It was distressing for him to see so many mediocre thinkers favoured and to be unable to ensure publication of his most important work.