Giambattista Vico (1668-1744)

Giambattista Vico, the sixth of eight children born to Antonio di Vico and his wife Candida Masullo of Naples, was born in a room over his father’s bookshop at 31 Via San Biagio dei Librai, Naples, Italy, on June 23, 1668. Son of a poor bookseller, he was raised in an atmosphere of abject poverty. The Vico family home consisted of a single downstairs room, used simultaneously as a bookshop, a living room, a kitchen, and a loft or garret which acted as a bedroom and accessed by ladder. When Vico was seven years of age he fell from the ladder and received a near fatal blow to the head – he remained unconscious for about five hours. So severe was the injury that the prognosis of the doctor who attended the young Italian was that if he should live it was highly probable that he would be permanently brain-damaged. While, as is evident, Vico’s injury healed, in his autobiography he attributes his melancholy and irritable temperament to this ‘mischance’. However, it seems that he considered it a small price to pay for characteristics which are also attributes of ‘men of ingenuity and depth’ Although he attended several schools, including a Jesuit college, Vico considered himself to be self-taught – a claim which has some legitimacy since he spent much of the period following his injury reading the works of Plato, Tacticus, Bacon and Grotius. His erratic early education also included grammar and the Latin classics.

In 1684 Vico began to study for a practising career in law but he abandoned this in 1686 when he accepted a tutoring position in the home of Duca della Rocca at Vatolla, south of Salerno. Whilst there he became secretly infatuated with his own student, Giulia della Rocca. However, the amorous young tutor was to learn that there are certain social barriers to which intelligence and learning are not enough to provide a key, when Giulia, notwithstanding her fondness for Vico, married someone from her own social class, only to die soon afterwards at the age of twenty-two. In 1695, Vico returned to Naples, licked his emotional wounds and, in December 1699, married a poorly educated Neapolitan young woman called Teresa Destito. Although she and Vico produced eight children, the, albeit well intentioned but the semi-literate Teresa, was a poor companion for her more erudite and stern spouse. In the same year (1699) Vico was named professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples. His ambition to hold the principal chair of jurisprudence was never realised, and, up until five years before his death in 1744, he was obliged to supplement his modest earnings in the lesser post by writing ‘Latin inscriptions, official eulogies, and laudatory biographies of important persons’.

In his autobiography, Vico presents his absence from his native city from 1686 to 1695 as a period of isolation from the lively intellectual life of Naples. In fact quite the opposite is the case for, while tutor to the children of the Duca della Rocca, he remained in contact with Neapolitan intellectual events through membership of certain private societies and salons which had arisen to counteract the conservative influence of the Church and university. Through an intensive, self-directed course of study in the library of the Franciscan Convent of Santa Maria della Pietà di Vatolla, he became acquainted with the Neoplatonists, the classical atomists such as Democritus and Lucretius, physicists such as Galileo and Gassendi, English thinkers such as Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Locke and Boyle and the rationalists, Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza and Leibniz. By the end of this period he had acquired an encyclopaedic, if idiosyncratic, understanding of the worlds of ancient and modern learning. While the activities of the Inquisition made it difficult for him to be open about his true philosophical leanings, the fact that many of his friends were suspected of being atheists, together with the poem, ‘Affettidi un disperato’, that he penned in 1692 in homage to the disciple of Epicurus Lucretius (c. 95-c. 54BC), support the view that Vico entertained heretical views that would remain with him for the rest of his life. In 1722 Vico, in anticipation of gaining the as yet unfilled chair of law that had remained vacant since 1717, had printed a publication entitled: Notes by Giambattista Vico on two books, one On the Principle of Universal Law, the other On the Consistency of Jurisprudence. His hopes of gaining the chair were heightened by his belief that ‘the life he had led in his native city, where by the work of his intellect he had honoured all, been of service to many, and harmed none’, together with, what he perceived as, the success of his performance during the lecture he had delivered for the concourse, or competition, for the chair, would not go unrewarded. However, perhaps in his enthusiasm to ensure his promotion, Vico decided to print and distribute copies of his lecture, one of which he delivered to Don Domenico Caravita, one of the people responsible for awarding the chair. On Caravita’s advice, Vico was persuaded to withdraw his application on the grounds that he could be charged with attempting to influence the judge’s decision – a charge which Vico held could more appropriately be levelled at the other candidates for the post.

Following his disappointment over his failure to procure the chair of jurisprudence, Vico turned his attention to the construction of the philosophy for which he is most famous, developing it progressively in the various versions of his New Science. In 1709 his On the Method of the Studies of Our Time, had been published by Mosca, followed in 1710 by On the Oldest Wisdom of the Italians Recoverable from the Origins of the Latin Language, then, in 1720-2, came On the Single Principle of Universal Law and its Single Purpose, culminating in 1725, just three years after the debacle with over the chair, with what Isaiah Berlin calls ‘his crowning masterpiece’, the New Science. Much of our knowledge of his intense intellectual life is derived from the first and second parts of his autobiography, written soon after the production of the first and second editions of the New Science. A third part, going up to his death, was added by the Marquis of Villarosa in 1818. In part three, the Marquis describes how Vico, unable to procure a publisher for his magnum opus, confesses that in order to realise his ambition to see his work in print he was compelled by his poverty to sell his precious diamond ring. Whilst the price received for the ring covered the cost of printing and binding copies of his book, Vico’s sacrifice proved fruitless as the New Science ‘fell almost dead from the press’.

Amongst the private students that Vico was forced to take on in order to supplement his meagre salary were the sons many of the finest gentlemen of Naples. Notwithstanding his lowly academic position, it was believed that Vico would provide them, ‘better than any other professor’, with ‘ …sound instruction along with the best moral training’. While these measures went some way to help, they were still not enough to furnish him with the means to live very far above the poverty line. Endowed with a wife who, while of ‘pure and innocent character’ was sorely lacking in ‘those talents which are required even in a mediocre wife and mother’, Vico was ‘obliged to plan and provide not only for the clothes but whatever else his children might need’. Indeed, so diligent was he in his paternal duties that he, perceiving his eldest daughter, Luisa, to possess talents ‘beyond those necessary in a woman’, instructed her with such care that ‘on reaching maturity, she distinguished herself in poetry’. Sadly, not all Vico’s children gave him such satisfaction, for his son, Ignatio, who from childhood had exhibited slothful ways, became ‘addicted …to all sorts of vices, so that he became a dishonour to the whole family’. Eventually his behaviour became so unseemly that Vico was forced to call on the police to have him incarcerated - which they did. Not before Vico, regretting his action, pleaded with his son to run and save himself. Vico’s attempts to create a sense of domestic harmony under difficult circumstances was further compounded by the added cost of medical expense incurred as a result of the chronic bad health of his other daughter, Angela Teresa. Notwithstanding these grave preoccupations, Vico, Villarosa explains, never diverted ‘from regular attendance at classes’; and ‘endured everything with heroic patience’, only occasionally sharing his troubles with an intimate friend. In time, however, Vico’s nervous system was unable to sustain the continual strain under which he was forced to operate and he began to suffer from lapse of memory. Gradually his condition became so bad that he was forced to give up private lessons and to surrender his position at the university – not before, however, arranging for his son Gennaro to succeed him. Soon he became a virtual recluse. His memory ‘was so far gone that he forgot the nearest objects and the most familiar things’ and despite the best efforts of his medical colleagues to find a remedy for his illness his condition became so acute that he failed even to recognise his own children. On January 22nd, 1744, just three years after he retired from teaching and shortly before the third and final edition of his New Science was published, Giambattista Vico died.