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Vico’s Ring
11
terest lies in grasping Vico’s idiosyncratic approach to the Ho-
meric writings, and in this respect, it will be examined how spe-
cific aspects of Spinoza’s hermeneutics might be related to Vi-
co’s own practice, and be relevant to casting it into more pro-
nounced relief. Thus, the question of Vico’s overt or covert
6
“Spinozism”
7
per se
will essentially be sidestepped in the present
discussion.
No discussion of Vico’s treatment of Homer in Book III can
leave out of consideration the status itself that it occupies and
commands in the entire work. For Vico, the Homeric poems
«provide the supreme testing ground for his theory of poetry
and, consequently, for the entire movement of
Scienza nuova
»
8
.
To call Book III
central
to
Scienza nuova
can be said in two senses,
first in the sense of being fundamental
9
and secondly, by virtue
of being placed precisely midway through the book
10
. It remains
to be seen whether, and how, the contents of the other Books
dialectically relate to Book III, and how Book III radiates back
into the rest of the work.
The recognition of Vico’s deliberate choice of locating the
material on Homer at a particular point in his grand narrative
now cannot but beg the question whether this may just be part
of an overall compositional framework. If there is a “center”, it
follows that there be, at least in a simple formalistic sense, a first
half of the work preceding the center, and a second half follow-
ing it. But, since one is dealing with a literary giant like Vico, one
would be compelled to infer that there are deep connections un-
derlying the order in which the material is organized. A case
could therefore be made that the first order of the day be an ex-
amination of the compositional structure of
Scienza nuova.
We
will make an initial attempt at doing so
11
, and propose to proceed
on the basis of a particular working hypothesis that is (initially)
intuitively inspired by the
centrality
– in the literal sense – of the
Book on Homer. Stated directly, the hypothesis is that
Scienza
nuova
is designed as “ring structure”. Since the exposition of the