The philosophical ideas of giambattista vico
Vico’s life and fate provide perhaps the best of all known examples of what is too often dismissed as a romantic fiction – the story of a man of original genius, born before his time, forced to struggle in poverty and illness, misunderstood and largely neglected in his lifetime and (save among a handful of Neapolitan jurists) all but totally forgotten after his death. Finally, when after many years he is at last exhumed and acclaimed by an astonished nation as one of its greatest thinkers, it is only to be widely , misrepresented and misinterpreted, and even today to be accorded less than his due, because the anagnorisis has come too late, and during the century that followed his death ideas similar to his were better expressed by others, while he is best remembered for the least original and valuable of his doctrines. It is true that VICO’s style tends to be baroque, undisciplined and obscure; and the eighteenth century, which came close to taking the view that not to say things clearly is not to sat them at all, buried him in a grave from which not even his devoted Italian commentators have fully succeeded in raising him. Yet his works are of an arresting novelty,