The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of "Practic of the New Science" 9781501702990

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THE NEW SCIENCE OF GIAMBA TTISTA VICO

THE NEW SCIENCE

OF

GIAMBATTISTA VICO Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition

( i 744)

with the addition of "Practic of the New Science"

THOMAS GODDARD BERGIN AND

MAX

H AROLD

FISCH

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

To the Memory of FAUSTO NICOLINI

i879-1965

Copyright 1948 by Cornell University. Revised and abridged edition copyright © 1961 by Thomas Goodard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. Revised unabridged edition copy­ right © 1968 by Cornell University. Translation of "Practic of the New Science" copyright© 1976 by The Johns Hopkins University Press.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Revised, unabridged edition first published 1968 by Cornell University Press. Cornell Paperbacks edition, unabridged, including "Practic of the New Science," first published 1984.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-9265-5 (pbk.: alk. paper) Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 68-16393 Printed in the United States of America Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at

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Paperback printing

10

PREFACE

This translation of Giambattista Vico's Scienza nuova is based on the text of the third edition (Naples, 1 744) as edited by Fausto Nicolini in Volume 1 12 and in the first 1 66 pages of Volume 1 1 3 of the Scrittori d'Italia (Bari, Laterza, 1 928 ) . Nicolini used Vico's manuscript to correct the text, broke up long paragraphs and sentences, put curved brackets around parenthetical remarks, modernized the punctuation in other ways, numbered the sections and chapters, supplied titles for sections that lacked them, and numbered the paragraphs for convenience of reference. (In later printings and in his commentary and bibliography, Nicolini used the phrase "the second New Science" for the third edition plus those passages in the second and in numerous manuscript revisions of it that were "suppressed or substantially altered" in the third. Such passages occupy pages 169-309 of Volume 113 in the printinb of 1 928; other additions were made by Nicolini in subsequent printings. ) Our translation, begun in 1939 at Naples and on Capri in consultation with Nicolini and Croce, was interrupted by World War II, completed after the war, and first published by Cornell University Press in 1 948. In 1961, we revised and abridged it for an Anchor Books edition. The entire translation has now undergone a further revision; the changes of course are more frequent and extensive in the parts that had not been included in the abridgment. Vico's edition of 1 744 had neither index nor footnotes. The text itself had therefore to be heavily larded with references of three kinds: ( 1 ) forward and backward references to other parts of the text; (2 ) citations of primary sources of evidence; and ( 3 ) references to the learned literature of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries. There are numerous defects in all three kinds of references. Vico quotes inexactly from memory; his references are vague; his memory is often not of the original source but of a quotation from it in some secondary work; he ascribes to one author what is said by another, or to one work what is said in another by the same author; he makes historical v

VJ

PREFACE

assertions for which his evidence has so far not been found; his promises of subsequent discussion are sometimes unfulfilled; and his backward refer­ ences are sometimes to nonexistent passages. The New Science, we are sometimes tempted to say, is a great vision; the backward and forward references connect the parts of the vision, and only secondarily and imperfectly the parts of the book; and the vision, though loosely tied here and there to historical facts, floats free of them elsewhere, if it does not fly in their face, and yet is true to them in its fashion. Nicolini's genial, erudite, and indispensable Commento storico exposes Vico's "philological" [paragraph 1 39] errors and deficiencies with chasten­ ing love, corrects and supplies most of them, and leaves it to lesser scholars to discover supporting evidence where he found none, or stronger evidence where what he found was weak, and thus to show that Vico's scholarship was not quite so erratic, at this point or at that, as Nicolini sadly concluded it was. But alas, there are errors even in il gran comento, both typographi­ cal and substantive, that are detectable only by pursuing the references; these errors have already been many times repeated from it by editors, translators, and commentators who shirked the pursuit; and it may take a generation or two to slough them off. An English commentary, making full use of Nicolini's but accepting nothing on its authority, and bringing to bear the resources of the social sciences and of modern historical scholarship, is certainly a desideratum, and the time is nearly ripe for it, but it is beyond our competence. In the present edition, however, we have gone much farther than in that of 1948 toward completing and correcting Vico's references, and a word is in order as to our treatment of each of the three kinds mentioned above. ( 1) The numbering of the paragraphs has permitted us to substitute paragraph numbers in square brackets for phrases like "as we have laid down in the Axioms," "as we have already demonstrated," "which we have several times quoted," "as we shall shortly see," "as will later be shown in full detail." ( Sometimes we keep the phrase and add the number. ) By the same device, we have added hundreds of other cross references. In cases involving proper names, the index will enable the reader to supply still others. ( 2 ) Vico often refers to his primary sources by the name of the author only, and almost never adds more than the name of the particular work. In most cases we have supplied more exact references in square brackets. For Greek and Latin works included in the Loeb Classical Library, we use the English titles and the numbered divisions of those editions: books, chap­ ters, sections, pages, columns, lines, as the case may be. See "Abbreviations and Signs" below (page xvii ) .

PREFACE

vii

( 3 ) Since the learned literature to which Vico refers has largely been forgotten, since ample references are supplied in Nicolini's commentary, and since any library that has the literature will have the commentary, we have in most cases contented ourselves with giving the author's name in the language he spoke, and the title of his work in the language in which it was written, or in English. English readers who do not have a research library at hand, or who lack the leisure to use it for the purpose, but who nevertheless wish help in placing Vico in relation to what was for him the recent and contemporary scholarly literature of his subjects, will find such help in two recent works by Frank E . Manuel: The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods and Isaac Newton Historian (Harvard University Press, 1959 and 1963 ) . As Manuel remarks (on page 43 of the latter book) , Vico sent Newton a copy of the first edition of the New Science, but "if Newton ever received it he would not have remotely comprehended its meaning." Vico refers also to two previous works of his own: his Universal Law ( 1 720-22 ) and the first edition of the New Science ( 172 5 ) . The para­ graphs in which such references occur are listed in the index under Vico's name. With slight changes, the introduction to our abridged edition is re­ printed here. A long historical introduction, which serves as a more general guide, was published in 1944 with our translation of Vico's Autobiography. The present Introduction is expository and interpretive, not critical. It aims only to explain, as far as possible from within the work itself, the nature, scope, and claims of that historico-systematic science of human society that Vico called his "new science concerning the common nature of nations." It is cast in the form of an explanation of the full title as it appeared in the third edition. By using letters for the sections of the Introduction and numbers for the paragraphs, we have been able to in­ clude it in our scheme of square-bracketed references and thus to permit it to fill a small part of the place of the commentary that we have not attempted. The dozen footnotes we have allowed ourselves are but samples of a kind of annotation that would be needed throughout to constitute the most meager sort of commentary. Since we do not undertake even that, but only to correct and sharpen Vico's own references, as with leisure and clerical help he might have done, we have done it by square-bracketed insertions in the text, where he would have put them, and have spared ourselves the temptation to expand that nearly every footnote would have presented (those to paragraphs 3 59 and 1084 for example) . The problems and policies of the translation itself are illustrated at

viii

PREFACE

length in the Introduction, but a few further remarks are appended here. We have carried the breaking up of sentences much farther than Nicolini did. Otherwise, though we translate quite freely some difficult passages which would be opaque in a literal rendering, and though we now and then recast an entire paragraph, we have tried on the whole to keep as close to Vico's style and idiom as English will permit. At the expense of occasional awkwardness, we have also tried to respect his technical and quasi-technical terms. Certo and its cognates, for example, are with rare exceptions trans­ lated "certain" and the like, even when it is not certain that Vico is using them in the technical sense explained in paragraph 321 . Umano and its cognates, which we were often tempted to render "humane" or "civilized," are usually allowed to stand as "human" and the like, in order to preserve a possible reference either (a) to the age of men as distinguished from the age of gods and the age of heroes, or (b) to the ages of heroes and men together as distinguished from the age of gods, as in paragraph 629 [C7, J5] . Tempi are nearly always "times," not ages (etci) or periods or epochs, to preserve a possible allusion to Vico's chronology or "doctrine of times." And-may the reader forgive us-"tre sette di tempi" [ 975) are "three sects of times" or time-sects to preserve the ambiguity of "sect" as division and as following. A time-sect is a cut of time such that there are sectarian differences between one time-sect and another. Each time-sect is characterized by a following of usages, customs, and institutions peculiar to itself, and by a Zeitgeist or time-mind-the cut and fashion of a time [979] rather than of a place, a class, or a party. In this ambiguous sense of "sect," Vico's ideal eternal history [393] is a tri-sect history. A few terms for which there are no exact English equivalents are represented by the half-naturalized Latin forms of the same words: connu­ bio by connubium [ 1 10, 598] , famoli by famuli [555ff], conato and conati by conatus [340, 388, 504, 689, 696, 1098], for examples. Repubblica, on the other hand, is uniformly rendered "commonwealth" to avoid the misleading associations of "republic" in English. Dominio (Latin dominium) we have usually translated "ownership," but sometimes "do­ minion" or (particularly in the phrase dominio eminente) "domain" [25, 266] . And lastly, principio we have sometimes rendered "principle" and sometimes "beginning" [ 736] . As a quasi-technical term with Vico, it means both at once, and it may fairly be said that the ambivalence of this term is one of the keys to Vico's thought [A3, I · 1 -1 4]. Yale University University of Illinois September 1¢7

T.G.B. M.H.F.

CONTENTS Preface Bibliographical Note Abbreviations and Signs Introduction

v xv XV!l XIX

PRINCIPLES OF NEW SCIENCE OF GIAMBATTISTA VICO CONCERNING THE COMMON NATURE OF THE NATIONS

IDEA OF THE WORK Frontispiece

.2

Explanation of the Picture Placed as Frontispiece to Serve as Introduction to the Work

3

BOOK ONE : ESTABLISHMENT OF PRINCIPLES Chronological Table

28

Section I . Notes on the Chronological Table, in Which the Materials Are Set in Order Section II. Elements Section III. Principles Section IV. Method

6o

29 96 loo

BOOK TWO : POETIC WISDOM Prolegomena 10