## 1. Vico's Life and Influence



Giovanni Battista Vico was born in Naples, Italy, June 23 1668, to a
bookseller and daughter of a carriage maker. He received his formal
education at local grammar schools, from various Jesuit tutors, and at
the University of Naples from which he graduated in 1694 as Doctor of
Civil and Canon Law. As he reports in his autobiography (*Vita di
Giambattista Vico*), however, Vico considered himself as
"teacher of
 himself,"[1]
 a habit he developed under the direction of his father, after a fall
at the age of 7 caused a three year absence from school. Vico reports
that "as a result of this mischance he grew up with a melancholy
and irritable temperament such as belongs to men of ingenuity and
depth" (Vita, 111). Vico left Naples in 1686 for Vatolla where,
with occasional returns to his home city, he remained for the next
nine years as tutor to the sons of Domenico Rocca. Vico returned to
Naples in 1695 and four years later married Teresa Caterina Destito
with whom he had eight children. Of his surviving children (three of
them died), his younger son Gennaro was a favorite and went on to an
academic career; his daughter Lusia achieved success as a singer and
minor poet, and Ignazio is known to have been a source of
disappointment to him. Of the others (Angela Teresa and Filippo)
little is known. Vico was never rich, though he made a living, and the
legend of his poverty derives from Villarosa's embellishment of
the autobiography. He did, however, suffer bouts of ill-health, and
failed in his life-long ambition of succeeding to the chair of
Jurisprudence at the University of Naples, having to settle instead
for a lower and poorly paid professorship in Rhetoric. He retained
this position until 1741 at which time he was succeeded by his son
Gennaro. Vico died in Naples on January 22-23, 1744, aged
75.



In his own time Vico's work was largely neglected and generally
misunderstood-he describes himself living as a "stranger"
and "quite unknown" in his native city (Vita, 134)-and it
was not until the nineteenth century that his thought began to make a
significant impression on the philosophical world. However,
Vico's thought never suffered from complete obscurity and its
influence can be discerned in various traditions of European thought
from the mid-eighteenth century
 onwards.[2]
 In Italy, Vico's impact on aesthetic and literary criticism is
evident in the writings of Francesco De Sanctis and Benedetto Croce,
and in jurisprudence, economics, and political theory, his influence
can be traced from Antonio Genovesi (one of Vico's own pupils),
Ferdinando Galiani, and Gaetano Filangieri. In Germany, Vico's
ideas were known to Johann-George Hamman and, via his disciple J.G.
von Herder, to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Heinrich
Jacobi. Vico's ideas were sufficiently familiar to Friedrich
August Wolf to inspire his article "G.B. Vico on Homer."
In France, Vico's thought was likely known to Charles de
Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and some
have seen his influence in the writings of Denis Diderot, Etienne
Bonnot, abbe de Condillac, and Joseph Marie, comte de Maistre.
In Great Britain, although Vichian themes are intimated in the
philosophical writings of the Empiricists and thinkers of the Scottish
Enlightenment, there is no direct evidence that they knew of his
writings. The earliest known disseminator of Vico's views in the
English-speaking world is Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was responsible
for much of the interest in Vico in the second half of the nineteenth
century.



Vico's ideas reached a wider audience with a German translation
of *The New Science* by W.E. Weber which appeared in 1822, and,
more significantly, through a French version by Jules Michelet in
1824, which was reissued in 1835. Michelet's translation was
widely read and was responsible for a new appreciation of Vico's
work in France. Subsequently, Vico's views impacted the work of
Wilhelm Dilthey, Karl Marx, R.G. Collingwood, and James Joyce, who
used *The New Science* to structure *Finnegans Wake*.
Twentieth century scholarship has established illuminating comparisons
with the tradition of Hegelian idealism, and taken up the relationship
between Vico's thought and that of philosophers in the western
tradition and beyond, including Plato, Aristotle, Ibn Khaldun, Thomas
Hobbes, Benedict de Spinoza, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich
Nietzsche. Comparisons and connections have also been drawn between
Vichean themes and the work of various modern and contemporary
thinkers, *inter alia* W.B. Yeats, Friedrich Froebel, Max
Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer,
Jurgen Habermas, Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and
Alisdair MacIntyre. As a review of recent and current literature
demonstrates, an appreciation of Vico's thought has spread far
beyond philosophy, and his ideas have been taken up by scholars within
a range of contemporary disciplines, including anthropology, cultural
theory, education, hermeneutics, history, literary criticism,
psychology, and sociology. Thus despite obscure beginnings, Vico is
now widely regarded as a highly original thinker who anticipated
central currents in later philosophy and the human sciences.
  




## 2. Vico's Early Works



Vico's earliest publications were in poetry rather than
philosophy-the Lucretian poem "Affetti di un disperato"
("The Feelings of One in Despair") (composed in 1692) and
"Canzone in morte di Antonio Carafa" ("Ode on the
Death of Antonio Carafa") both published in 1693. After his
appointment to Professor of Rhetoric in 1699, Vico began to address
philosophical themes in the first of six *Orazioni Inaugurali*
(*Inaugural Orations*). In 1707 Vico gave a seventh
oration-intended as an augmentation of the philosophy of Bacon that he
subsequently revised and published in 1709 under the title *De
nostri temporis studiorum ratione* (*On the Study Methods of
Our Time*). Two years later his projected but uncompleted
statement on metaphysics appeared, *De antiquissima Italorum
sapientia ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda libri tres*
(*On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians Unearthed from the
Origins of the Latin Language*). The years that followed saw the
publication of various works, including two replies to critical
reviews of *De antiquissima* (1711 and 1712), a work of royal
historiography-*De rebus gestis Antonii Caraphaei libri
quattuor* (*The Life of Antonio Caraffa*) (1716)-*Il
diritto universale* (*Universal Right*) (1720-22),
and in 1725 and 1731 the two parts of his autobiography which together
compose the *Vita di Giambattista Vico scritta da se medesimo*
(*Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself*). Over the
course of his professional career, Vico also composed and delivered
lectures on rhetoric to students preparing to enter into the study of
jurisprudence. These survive as student transcriptions or copies of
the original lectures, and are collected under the title
*Institutiones Oratoriae* (1711-1741) (translated as
*The Art of Rhetoric*) in which Vico's develops his views
on rhetoric or eloquence, "the faculty of speaking appropriate
to the purpose of persuading" through which the orator aims to
"bend the spirit by his
 speech."[3]



Although these early writings are increasingly studied as significant
works in their right, they have generally been regarded as important
for tracing the development of various themes and ideas which Vico
came to refine and express fully in his major and influential work,
*The New Science*. In *De nostri temporis studiorum
ratione*, for example, Vico takes up the theme of modernity and
raises the question of "which study method is finer or better,
ours or the Ancients?" and illustrates "by examples the
advantages and drawbacks of the respective
 methods."[4]
 Vico observes that the Moderns are equipped with the
"instruments" of "philosophical
'critique'" and "analytic geometry"
(especially in the form of Cartesian logic) (DN, 7-9), and that
these open realms of natural scientific inquiry (chemistry,
pharmacology, astronomy, geographical exploration, and mechanics) and
artistic production (realism in poetry, oratory, and sculpture) which
were unknown and unavailable to the Ancients (DN, 11-12).
Although these bring significant benefits, Vico argues, modern
education suffers unnecessarily from ignoring the *ars topica*
(art of topics) which encourage the use of imagination and memory in
organizing speech into eloquent persuasion. The result, Vico argues,
is an undue attention to the "geometrical method" modeled
on the discipline of physics (DN, 21ff.), and an emphasis on abstract
philosophical criticism over poetry. This undermines the importance of
exposition, persuasion, and pleasure in learning; it
"benumbs...[the] imagination and stupefies...[the] memory"
(DN, 42), both of which are central to learning, complex reasoning,
and the discovery of truth. Combining the methods of both Ancients and
Moderns, Vico argues that education should aim ideally at cultivating
the "total life of the body politic" (DN, 36): students
"should be taught the totality of the sciences and arts, and
their intellectual powers should be developed to the full" so
that they "would become exact in science, clever in practical
matters, fluent in eloquence, imaginative in understanding poetry or
painting, and strong in memorizing what they have learned in their
legal studies" (DN, 19).



This defense of humanistic education is expanded in the
*Orations*, directed "to the flower and stock of
well-born young
 manhood,"[5]
 where Vico makes a case for modern humanistic education and focuses
on a certain kind of "practical wisdom" or
*prudentia* which the human mind, with the appropriate
discipline and diligence, is able to attain. This theme is continued
in *De Antiquissima*, where Vico traces the consequences of his
insight that language can be treated as a source of historical
knowledge. Many words of the Latin language, Vico observes, appear to
be "derived from some inward learning rather than from the
vernacular usage of the
 people."[6]
 Treated as a repository of the past, Latin might be investigated as a
way of "seek[ing] out the ancient wisdom of the Italians from
the very wisdom of their words."(DA, 40).



In the course of pursuing this task, Vico also develops two central
themes of his mature philosophy: the outlines of a philosophical
system in contrast to the then dominant philosophy of Descartes
already criticized in *De nostri temporis studiorum ratione*,
and his statement of the principle that *verum et factum
convertuntur*, that "the true and the made
are...convertible," or that "the true is precisely what is
made" (*verum esse ipsum factum*). Vico emphasizes that
science should be conceived as the "genus or mode by which a
thing is made" so that human science in general is a matter of
dissecting the "anatomy of nature's works" (DA, 48),
albeit through the "vice" of human beings that they are
limited to "abstraction" as opposed to the power of
"construction" which is found in God alone (DA,
50-52). Given that "the norm of the truth is to have made
it" (DA, 52), Vico reasons, Descartes' famous first
principle that clear and distinct ideas are the source of truth must
be rejected: "For the mind does not make itself as it gets to
know itself," Vico observes, "and since it does not make
itself, it does not know the genus or mode by which it makes
itself" (DA, 52). Thus the truths of morality, natural science,
and mathematics do not require "metaphysical
justification" as the Cartesians held, but demand an analysis of
the causes-the "activity"-through which things are made
(DA, 64).



Vico's *Vita di Giambattista Vico* is of particular
interest, not only as a source of insight into the influences on his
intellectual development, but as one of the earliest and most
sophisticated examples of philosophical autobiography. Vico composed
the work in response (and indeed the only response) to a proposal
published by Count Gian Artico di Porcia to Italian scholars to
write their biographies for the edification of students. Referring to
himself in the third person, Vico records the course of his life and
the influence of various thinkers which led him to develop the
concepts central to his mature work. Vico reports on the importance of
reading Plato, Aristotle, the Hellenics, Scotus, Suarez, and the
Classical poets, and traces his growing interest in jurisprudence and
the Latin language (Vita, 116ff. passim). Vico describes how he came
to "meditate a principle of the natural law, which should be apt
for the explanation of the origins of Roman law and every other
gentile civil law in respect of history" (Vita, 119) and how he
discovered that "an ideal eternal law...should be observed in a
universal city after the idea or design of providence" (Vita,
122). According to Vico's own account, his studies culminated in
a distinction between ideas and languages. The first, he says,
"discovers new historical principles of geography and
chronology, the two ideas of history, and thence the principles of
universal history lacking hitherto" (Vita, 167), while the
latter "discovers new principles of poetry, both of song and
verse, and shows that both it and they sprang up by the same natural
necessity in all the first nations" (Vita, 168). Taken together,
these form the central doctrine of *The New Science*, namely,
that there is a "philosophy and philology of the human
race" which produces "an ideal eternal history based on
the idea of...providence...[and] traversed in time by all the
particular histories of the nations, each with its rise, development,
acme, decline and fall" (Vita, 169).


## 3. The New Science



Many themes of these early works-language, wisdom, history, truth,
causality, philology, rhetoric, philosophy, poetry, and the relative
strengths and weaknesses of ancient and modern learning-are
incorporated into and receive their fullest treatment in Vico's
major work, *The New Science*, first published in 1725 (an
edition subsequently known as the *Scienza Nuova Prima* or
*First New Science*) and again in a second and largely
rewritten version five years later. Vico published a third edition in
1744, which was later edited by Fausto Nicolini and appeared in 1928.
Nicoloni is responsible for updating Vico's punctuation and
breaking the work up into its current structure of chapters, sections,
and numbered paragraphs (1112 in all), not originally supplied by Vico
himself, which have been reproduced in many though not all subsequent
editions. Nicolini referred to his edition as the *Scienza Nuova
seconda*-*Second New Science* (or simply *The New
Science*), under which title the definitive version is known
today. 



The text consists of an overview ("Idea of the Work")
couched as an explication of a frontispiece depicting a female figure
(Metaphysics), standing on a globe of the Earth and contemplating a
luminous triangle containing the eye of God, or Providence. Below
stands a statue of Homer representing the origins of human society in
"poetic wisdom." This is followed by five Books and a
Conclusion, the first of which ("Establishment of
Principles") establishes the method upon which Vico constructs a
history of civil society from its earliest beginnings in the state of
nature (*stato di natura*) to its contemporary manifestation in
seventeenth century Europe.



In the work, Vico consciously develops his notion of *scienza*
(science or knowledge) in opposition to the then dominant philosophy
of Descartes with its emphasis on clear and distinct ideas, the most
simple elements of thought from which all knowledge, the Cartesians
held, could be derived a priori by way of deductive rules. As Vico had
already argued, one consequence and drawback of this
hypothetico-deductive method is that it renders phenomena which cannot
be expressed logically or mathematically as illusions of one sort or
another. This applies not only most obviously to the data of sense and
psychological experience, but also to the non-quantifiable evidence
that makes up the human sciences. Drawing on the *verum factum*
principle first described in *De Antiquissima*, Vico argues
against Cartesian philosophy that full knowledge of any thing involves
discovering *how* it came to be what it is as a product of
human action and the "principal property" of human beings,
viz., "of being social" ("Idea of the Work,"
SS2,
 p.3).[7]
 The reduction of all facts to the ostensibly paradigmatic form of
mathematical knowledge is a form of "conceit," Vico
maintains, which arises from the fact that "man makes himself
the measure of all things" (Element I, SS120, p.60) and that
"whenever men can form no idea of distant and unknown things,
they judge them by what is familiar and at hand" (Element II,
SS122, p.60). Recognizing this limitation, Vico argues, is at once
to grasp that phenomena can only be known via their origins, or per
caussas (through causes). For "Doctrines must take their
beginning from that of the matters of which they treat" (Element
CVI, SS314, p.92), he says, and it is one "great labor
of...Science to recover...[the] grounds of truth-truth which, with the
passage of years and the changes in language and customs, has come
down to us enveloped in falsehood" (Element XVI, SS150,
pp.64-5). Unveiling this falsehood leads to
"wisdom," which is "nothing but the science of
making such use of things as their nature dictates" (Element
CXIV, SS326, p.94). Given that *verum ipsum
factum*-"the true is the made," or something is true
*because* it is made-*scienzia* both sets knowledge per
caussas as its task and as the method for attaining it; or, expressed
in other terms, the content of *scienza* is identical with the
development of that *scienza* itself.



The challenge, however, is to develop this science in such a way as to
understand the facts of the human world without either reducing them
to mere contingency or explaining their order by way of speculative
principles of the sort generated by traditional metaphysics. They must
be rendered intelligible, that is, without reducing them, as did the
Cartesians, to the status of ephemera. Vico satisfies this demand by
distinguishing at the outset of *The New Science* between
*il vero* and *il certo*, "the true" and
"the certain." The former is the object of knowledge
(*scienza*) since it is universal and eternal, whereas the
latter, related as it is to human consciousness (*coscienza*),
is particular and individuated. This produces two pairs of
terms-*il vero*/*scienza* and *il
certo*/*coscienza*-which constitute, in turn, the
explananda of philosophy and philology ("history" broadly
conceived), respectively. As Vico says, "philosophy contemplates
reason, whence comes knowledge of the true; philology observes that of
which human choice is author, whence comes consciousness of the
certain" (Element X, SS138, p.63). These two disciplines
combine in a method or "new critical art"
(*nuova'arte critica*) where philosophy aims at
articulating the universal forms of intelligibility common to all
experience, while philology adumbrates the empirical phenomena of the
world which arise from human choice: the languages, customs, and
actions of people which make up civil society. Understood as mutually
exclusive disciplines-a tendency evident, according to Vico, in the
history of philosophy up to his time-philosophy and philology appear
as empty and abstract (as in the rational certainty of Cartesian
metaphysics) and merely empirical and contingent, respectively. Once
combined, however, they form a doctrine which yields a full knowledge
of facts where "knowledge" in the Vichean sense means to
have grasped both the necessity of human affairs (manifest in the
causal connections between otherwise random events) and the
contingency of the events which form the content of the causal chains.
Philosophy yields the universally true and philology the individually
certain.



The text of *The New Science* then constitutes Vico's
attempt to develop a method which itself comes to be in the course of
applying it to human experience, and this takes the form of a history
of civil society and its development through the progress of war and
peace, law, social order, commerce, and government. "Thus our
Science," Vico says near the beginning of the work, "comes
to be at once a history of the ideas, the customs, the deeds of
mankind. From these three we shall derive the principles of the
history of human nature, which we shall show to be the principles of
universal history, which principles it seems hitherto to have
lacked" ("Poetic Wisdom," SS368, p.112).
Accomplishing this task involves tracing human society back to its
origins in order to reveal a common human nature and a genetic,
universal pattern through which all nations run. Vico sees this common
nature reflected in language, conceived as a store-house of customs,
in which the wisdom of successive ages accumulates and is presupposed
in the form of a *sensus communis* or "mental
dictionary" by subsequent generations. Vico defines this common
sense as "judgment without reflection, shared by an entire
class, an entire people, and entire nation, or the entire human
race" (Element XII, SS145, pp.63-4). It is also
available to the philosopher who, by deciphering and thus recovering
its content, can discover an "ideal eternal history traversed in
time by the histories of all nations" (Proposition XLII,
SS114, p.57).



The result of this, in Vico's view, is to appreciate history as
at once "ideal"-since it is never perfectly actualized-and
"eternal," because it reflects the presence of a divine
order or Providence guiding the development of human institutions.
Nations need not develop at the same pace-less developed ones can and
do coexist with those in a more advanced phase-but they all pass
through the same distinct stages (*corsi*): the ages of gods,
heroes, and men. Nations "develop in conformity to this
division," Vico says, "by a constant and uninterrupted
order of causes and effects present in every nation" ("The
Course the Nations Run," SS915, p.335). Each stage, and thus
the history of any nation, is characterized by the manifestation of
natural law peculiar to it, and the distinct languages (signs,
metaphors, and words), governments (divine, aristocratic
commonwealths, and popular commonwealths and monarchies), as well as
systems of jurisprudence (mystic theology, heroic jurisprudence, and
the natural equity of free commonwealths) that define them.



In addition to specifying the distinct stages through which social,
civil, and political order develops, Vico draws on his earlier
writings to trace the origin of nations back to two distinct features
of human nature: the ages of gods and heroes result from memory and
creative acts of "imagination" (*fantasia*), while
the age of men stems from the faculty of "reflection"
(*riflessione*). Vico thus claims to have discovered two kinds
of wisdom-"poetic" and
"philosophical"-corresponding to the dual nature of human
beings (sense and intellect), represented in the creations of
theological poets and philosophers, respectively ("Poetic
Wisdom," SS779, p.297). Institutions arise first from the
immediacy of sense-experience, pure feeling, curiosity, wonder, fear,
superstition, and the child-like capacity of human beings to imitate
and anthropomorphize the world around them. Since "in the
world's childhood men were by nature sublime poets"
(Element XXXVII, SS187, p.71), Vico reasons, nations must be
"poetic in their beginnings" (Element XLIV, SS200,
p.73), so that their origin and course can be discovered by recreating
or remembering the "poetic" or "metaphysical
truth" which underlies them (Element XLVII, SS205, p.74).
This is manifest primarily in fable, myth, the structure of early
languages, and the formations of polytheistic religion. The belief
systems of early societies are thus characterized by "poetic
metaphysics" which "seeks its proofs not in the external
world but within the modifications of the mind of him who meditates
it" ("Poetic Wisdom," SS374, p.116), and
"poetic logic," through which the creations of this
metaphysics are signified. Metaphysics of this sort is "not
rational and abstract like that of learned men now," Vico
emphasizes, "but felt and imagined [by men] without power of
ratiocination...This metaphysics was their poetry, a faculty born with
them...born of their ignorance of causes, for ignorance, the mother of
wonder, made everything wonderful to men who were ignorant of
everything" ("Poetic Wisdom," SS375, p.116).
Incapable of forming "intelligible class concepts of
things"-a feature of human mind realized only in the age of
men-people "had a natural need to create poetic characters; that
is, imaginative class concepts or universals, to which, as to certain
models or ideal portraits, to reduce all the particular species which
resembled them" (Element XLIX, SS209, p.74).



From this genus of poetic metaphysics, Vico then extrapolates the
various species of wisdom born of it. "Poetic morals" have
their source in piety and shame ("Poetic Wisdom,"
SS502, p.170), he argues, while "poetic economy"
arises from the feral equality of human beings and the family
relationships into which they were forced by need ("Poetic
Wisdom," SS523, p.180). Similarly, "poetic
cosmography" grows from the seeing "the world as composed
of gods of the sky, of the underworld...and gods intermediate between
earth and sky" ("Poetic Wisdom," SS710, p.269),
"poetic astronomy" from raising the gods "to the
planets and [assigning] the heroes to the constellations"
("Poetic Wisdom," SS728, p.277), "poetic
chronology" out of the cycles of harvest and the seasons
("Poetic Wisdom," SS732, p.279), and "poetic
geography" from naming the natural world through "the
semblances of things known or near at hand" ("Poetic
Wisdom," SS741, p.285). As the faculty of reason develops
and grows, however, the power of imagination from which the earliest
forms of human society grew weakens and gives way finally to the power
of reflection; the cognitive powers of human beings gain ascendance
over their creative capacity, and reason replaces poetry as the
primary way of understanding the world. This defines the age of men
which makes philosophy, Vico reasons, a relatively recent development
in history, appearing as it did "some two thousand years after
the gentile nations were founded" (Element CV, SS313,
p.92).



Since history itself, in Vico's view, is the manifestation of
Providence in the world, the transition from one stage to the next and
the steady ascendance of reason over imagination represent a gradual
progress of civilization, a qualitative improvement from simpler to
more complex forms of social organization. Vico characterizes this
movement as a "necessity of nature" ("Idea of the
Work," SS34, p.21) which means that, with the passage of
time, human beings and societies tend increasingly towards realizing
their full potential. From rude beginnings undirected passion is
transformed into virtue, the bestial state of early society is
subordinated to the rule of law, and philosophy replaces sentiments of
religion. "Out of ferocity, avarice, and ambition, the three
vices which run throughout the human race," Vico says,
"legislation creates the military, merchant, and governing
classes, and thus the strength, riches, and wisdom of commonwealths.
Out of these three great vices, which could certainly destroy all
mankind on the face of the earth, it makes civil happiness"
(Element VII, SS132, p.62). In addition, the transition from
poetic to rational consciousness enables reflective individuals-the
philosopher, that is, in the shape of Vico-to recover the body of
universal history from the particularity of apparently random events.
This is a fact attested to by the form and content of *The New
Science* itself.



Although from a general point of view history reveals a progress of
civilization through actualizing the potential of human nature, Vico
also emphasizes the cyclical feature of historical development.
Society progresses towards perfection, but without reaching it (thus
history is "ideal"), interrupted as it is by a break or
return (*ricorso*) to a relatively more primitive condition.
Out of this reversal, history begins its course anew, albeit from the
irreversibly higher point to which it has already attained. Vico
observes that in the latter part of the age of men (manifest in the
institutions and customs of medieval feudalism) the
"barbarism" which marks the first stages of civil society
returns as a "civil disease" to corrupt the body politic
from within. This development is marked by the decline of popular
commonwealths into bureaucratic monarchies, and, by the force of
unrestrained passions, the return of corrupt manners which had
characterized the earlier societies of gods and heroes. Out of this
"second barbarism," however, either through the appearance
of wise legislators, the rise of the fittest, or a the last vestiges
of civilization, society returns to the "primitive simplicity of
the first world of peoples," and individuals are again
"religious, truthful, and faithful" ("Conclusion of
the Work," SS1104-1106, pp.423-4). From this
begins a new *corso* which Vico saw manifest in his own time as
the "second age of men" characterized by the
"true" Christian religion and the monarchical government
of seventeenth century Europe.



In addition to his account of the origins and history of civil society
developed in *The New Science*, Vico also advances a highly
original thesis about the origin and character of Homeric poetry,
which he refers to as "The Discovery of the New Homer."
Vico observes that the "vulgar feelings and vulgar customs
provide the poets with their proper materials" ("Discovery
of the True Homer," SS781, p.301), and, given that in the
age of heroes these customs constituted a "savage" and
"unreasonable" state of human nature, the poetry of Homer
cannot be the esoteric wisdom or creative act of a single individual,
as scholars have assumed, but represents the imaginative universals of
the Greek people themselves. Homeric poetry thus contains the
"models or ideal portraits" which form the mental
dictionary of the Ancients, and explains the place Vico assigns to
Homer in the frontispiece where his statue represents the origins of
human society in poetic wisdom. Vico thus applies his doctrine of the
imaginative universal to the case of Homer and concludes that though
it "marks a famous epoch in history it never in the world took
place." The historical Homer was "quite simply a man of
the people" ("Discovery of the True Homer, SS806,
p.308) and quite distinct from the ostensible author of the Odyssey
and Iliad who was actually a "purely ideal poet who never
existed in the world of nature...but was an idea or a heroic character
of Grecian men insofar as they told their histories in song"
("Discovery of the True Homer, SS873, p.323).