115 / 298
Vico’s Ring
115
211
For instance, Axiom LXIX (§ 246): «Governments must conform to
the nature of the men governed»; Axiom XCII (§ 283): «The weak want laws;
the powerful withhold them; the ambitious […] advocate them; princes […]
protect them»; Axiom XCIV (§ 290): «Natural liberty is fiercer in proportion
as property attaches more closely to the persons of its owners […]».
212
Cfr. a reconstruction of Vico’s «theory of humanization» in A. Blasi,
Vico, Developmental Psychology, and Human Nature,
in
Vico and Contemporary
Thought
, cit., Part 2, pp. 14-39, pp. 22-24.
213
We are echoing Vico’s concerns, in a different context, expressed in
De
antiquissima
: «But the same thing comes to pass in this anatomy of things as
does in the ordinary anatomy of the human body: in the latter, even the more
keen-sighted physicists wonder about the condition, structure and function of
the parts of the body, wonder whether because of death […] both the condi-
tion and structure of the living body have perished so that it is impossible to
determine what the function of these parts is» (Chapter 1, § 1; as quoted from
On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians,
cit., p. 21). And we must at least in
passing give recognition that in Vico’s seemingly convoluted style of exposi-
tion, a heroic effort – “heroic” in the usual sense of the word, not in the tech-
nical Vichian sense, either of the age of the “heroes”, or of the lecture
De men-
te eroica
(
On the heroic mind
) – is evident of mimicking performatively the no less
convoluted epistemic process(es); it is an heroic attempt as no degree of liter-
ary ingenuity can ever hope to attain to the level of gnoseological ingenuity
that is involved.
214
Original Italian terms found in
La Scienza nuova. Le tre edizioni,
cit., p.
860
215
§ 7, p. 6 of the Bergin/Fisch translation. The original Italian is from
La
Scienza nuova. Le tre edizioni
, cit., p. 789, where «Scienza» is highlighted typo-
graphically by both italics and capital initial.
216
According to P. Giraud, in forms of the verb «ridurre», in §§ 3, 4, 14,
17, 248, 486, 539, 734. See Id.,
La difficulté de la philologie dans la pensée de Vico
, in
Vico nella storia della filologia
, cit., pp. 117-138, p. 138, footnote 57. As Girard
points out, it refers there to (the arduous work of) turning wilderness into cul-
tivated land; the idea is not of making something less quantitively or qualita-
tively, but of mastery. If mastery is understood in a broad, even metaphorical
sense, it might also be applicable to the two contexts of the verb in § 734 that
are non-agricultural: (1) «thus give some certainty to the chronology of poetic
history (
da redurvi a certezza de’ tempi la Storia Poetica
)»; (2) «reduces them [the
plebs] to obedience (
reduce in ufizio
)» (For the original Italian, see
La
Sc
ienza
nuova. Le tre edizioni
, cit., pp. 1115, 1116). In both instances, «reducing» in-
volves types of mastery, be they intellectual or spiritual, in bringing about a