Vico in his 350th anniversary
2018 marks the 350th anniversary of the birth of Giambattista Vico (Naples 1668-1744), a thinker who still has something significant to say today and who can still help us to interpret the world in which we live. Many of the themes his works deal with can still capture the interest of the contemporary reader. The idea of phantasy certainly plays a paramount role: Vico hypothesises the presence of a specific knowledge of the human body, flanked by the activity of memory, which for him is not primarily a conservative faculty but rather a creative and inventive capacity, thanks to the use of ingenium. And certainly it is important that Vico develops a very original concept of common sense, which applies to all people, in any place and at any time: for Vico human nature is not only the nature of the world of men, but precisely, as a human nature, the nature common to all men. Thus Vico succeeds in inserting himself into the debate with the culture of his time, proposing an eccentric and extraordinary concept such as the one of poetic wisdom. In the New Science he tells the story of the way in which man becomes man, proceeding from bestial beginnings, where everything was body, to the formation of a reflexive mind, which, at the same time, does never deny its strong emotive and emotional components.
The first “bestioni” were totally immersed in their body, they felt only with body and through it they acquired knowledge, and their knowledge was an ingenious form of creation: that is, they possessed a true form of knowledge managed by the body, a kind of knowledge in which mental level and physical level are called to cooperate; with this complex operation they realized a form of knowledge which is the knowledge of common sense, which is valid not only for themself, but at the same time for all mankind. A variegated story of man and of his forms of knowledge, which are distinct from divine ones and are characterized by doing as the only form of knowledge accessible to man because created by himself: the history of human and civil things in which man is equal to a god precisely because he is creator in his own sphere of action and knowledge.
Vico has the merit of bringing to the fore a knowledge whose peculiarity is that of being “inclusive”: the conquest of truth is not possible for a mind detached from the body and the mind is always totally immersed in the senses. Vico’s hermeneutic charm - still in force - is also in proposing a concept of subject’s self-certainty that never repudiates passions, feelings, emotions; the same evolutionary pattern of the beasts that reach humanity does not free itself a sensibus, but integrates senses into the cognitive process. The power of the mind does nothing more than working on the materials provided by sense and experience and playing with them by uniting them, shifting them, increasing or thinning them; whenever an object presents itself to the memory or the senses, the imagination immediately conceives the object with which it is generally joined, and this operation is accompanied by a sensation or a feeling that has nothing to do with the products of the fantasy. A man is built, able to feel emotion in connection with the object that has aroused it, able to feel the link between external object and emotional state of the body: the “mind-body problem”, in other words, so much discussed by neuroscience at present time. And to which Vico seems to give an answer precisely in the idea of a knowledge of the body, a poetic wisdom.
On the occasion of this anniversary, the Institute for the History of Philosophy and Science in Modern Age (ISPF) of the National Research Council, whose main mission has been to attend, since the ’70s, to the critical edition of Vico’s opera omnia, promoted a diversified scientific program.
First of all, it gathered around itself the most authoritative Neapolitan institutions interested in the historical-philosophical reconstruction of Vico’s thought, namely the Academy of Fine Arts, the Pontaniana Academy, the National Library of Naples “Vittorio Emanuele III”, the “Biblioteca B. Croce” Foundation, the “P. Piovani” Foundation for Vico Studies, the Italian Institute for Historical Studies, the Campania Region, the National Society of Sciences, Literature and Arts, the University “Federico II”, the University “S. Orsola Benincasa”, together with the University of Basilicata and the University of Salerno, under the patronage of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers and with the support of the City of Naples, which will dedicate to Giambattista Vico the city event of the May of Monuments 2018.
Together with them, it has designed a large number of events, including the launch of an important digitization project, starting with the Vichiana collections of the “Biblioteca Benedetto Croce” the “P. Piovani” Foundations and with an electronic edition of the Vico Bibliography by Croce and Nicolini, in agreement with the Italian Institute for Historical Studies; the realization of the critical edition of the Universal Law (edited by M. Veneziani) and of the De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (edited by V. Placella), as well as the beginning of that of the New Science 1725 (edited by E. Nuzzo); an iconographic and documentary exhibition about Vico and Leopardi at the National Library “V. Emanuele II”; the commemorative issues of the journals “Bollettino del Centro di studi vichiani”, “ISPF-LAB” (in which works of younger Vico scholars will be collected, in order to monitor the new research lines about the Neapolitan philosopher), “Rocinante”, “Estetica”; the publication of a Catalog of the XVIIIth century specimens owned by the ISPF and by the Piovani Foundation; as well as lectures, seminars and conferences dedicated to particular aspects of Vico’s thought.
An ideal continuation of the important three hundredth anniversary of 1968 which, “at the end of a period of renewal and recollection, has testified with significant confirmation the active presence of a wide interest in Vico throughout the world, beyond geographical and ideological barriers” (P. Piovani, Il Centro di studi vichiani, in «Bollettino del Centro di studi vichiani», I, 1971, p. 7), we hope that this symbolic event will fall on the path of a line of continuity, but at the same time that it will describe changes and movements which are vital for all philosophical reflections and critical investigations.
Manuela Sanna