Horst Steinke
224
with his epistemic system no less so than his interpretative strat-
egy of Scripture
533
.
Our inquiry into Spinoza’s hermeneutics was occasioned by
both Spinoza and Vico studies that argue for closeness of their
hermeneutical strategies, with respect to the Bible, for the for-
mer, and Homer’s works, for the latter, if not for a high degree
of conceptual indebtedness of the latter to the former. The fol-
lowing sections will be devoted to certain aspects of Vico’s in-
terpretative turn as they bear on this question, primarily as a heu-
ristic means of bringing Vico’s views into sharper focus.
Notes to Chapter 9
409
L. Amoroso, for example, likely is speaking for many Vico (and Spino-
za) scholars when he stated: «Spinoza, ancora, argomenta che la tradizionale
attribuzione del
Pentateuco
a Mosè è insostenible. […] Questa tesi spinoziana
ha tanti elementi di analogia con la «discoverta del vero Omero» da parte di
Vico da far supporre addirittura che quest’ultima sia stata in parte ispirata da
quella (Spinoza, then, argues that the traditional attribution of the
Pentateuch
to
Moses is untenable. […] This Spinozan thesis has so many analogies with the
«discovery of the true Homer» on Vico’s part to make it compelling to even
assume that the latter was inspired in part by it)» (Id.,
Mosè fu un poeta teologo?,
in
Il sapere poetico e gli universali fantastici
, cit., pp. 211-225, p. 213).
Outside specialized Vico studies, the historian J. I. Israel is also fairly rep-
resentative with the following view: «The parallel between Spinoza’s claim that
the Pentateuch is not divine revelation but was written many centuries after
Moses, […] and Vico’s argument […] that Homer’s epics are an accumulation
of collective primitive poetic wisdom, […] has often been noted. […] Moreo-
ver, Vico not only embraces Spinoza’s epistemology along with the method-
ology of his Bible criticism and view on the origin and social functions of reli-
gion, but he is clearly a radical thinker» (Id.,
Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and
the Making of Modernity. 1650-1750
, Oxford-New York, Oxford University
Press, 2001, pp. 668-669). An even stronger thesis is advanced by J. S. Preus:
«[…] that Vico extended Spinoza’s critical principles of historical textual in-
terpretation so as to make them universal in their applicability; that Vico’s
doctrine of the imagination, especially of imaginative universals as the first
stage of the development of reason in time, was adapted from Spinoza as
well» (Id.,
Spinoza, Vico, and the Imagination of Religion
, in «Journal of the History