275 / 298
Vico’s Ring
275
terdependent, organically linked parts. For Vico, however, the context is not a
given, an abstract preestablished totality within which particulars are fitted and
become intelligible» (Id.,
The New Map of the World
, cit., p. 149).
According to Walther, Spinoza’s emphasis on historical context is rooted
in philosophical commitments: «Daß der Rationalismus-Vorwurf gegenüber
Spinoza nicht darin besteht, daß dieser die Empirie ignoriere […], sondern
darin, daß er mit einem rationalistischen Apriori an die Bibel herantrete, das
dieser von vornherein die Intention auf Wahrheitserkenntnis abspricht und sie
deshalb zum Gegenstand kontextueller Kausalanalyse machen kann and ma-
chen muss […] (The criticism of Spinoza as being rationalist did not mean to
say that he ignored empirical reality […], but that he approached the Bible
with a rationalist a priori, which denied it, in principle, its claim or intention of
conveying knowledge of truth, and thus, it [the rationalist a priori] could, and
had to, make it a subject of contextualized study of its origins and develop-
ment)» (Id.,
Biblische Hermeneutik und historische Erklärung
, cit., p. 283).
555
Vico describes his project explicitly as “historiography” by statements
such as: «Inasmuch as the poets came certainly before the vulgar historians,
the first history must have been poetic (§ 813); […] poetic allegories […] must
necessarily contain historical significations referring only to the earliest times
of Greece (§ 818); the poets must therefore have been the first historians of
the nations (§ 820); all ancient profane histories have fabulous beginnings (§
840); it was the poets who began to write Roman history (§ 842); we were
obliged […] to restore to the fables their original historical meanings (§ 846);
the history of the peoples of Greece was all written by their poets (§ 847) the
cyclic poets […] preserved all the fabulous history of Greece from the origins
of their gods down to the return of Ulysses to Ithaca (§ 856)».
556
See E. Nuzzo,
Tra ordine della storia e storicità. Saggi sui saperi della storia in
Vico
, Rome, Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2001, pp. 1-108.
557
See the more detailed assessment of prevailing ancient attitudes in L.
Kim,
Homer between History and Fiction in Imperial Greek Literature
, Cambridge-
New York, Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 22-46, on which our com-
ments are based, summarized as follows: «[…] a vision of Homeric poetry as
an accurate mimetic reflection of historical reality – Homer as a painter of he-
roic life – was common throughout antiquity» (
ibid.
, p. 27).
558
According to Kim, «Thucydides is thus caught in the same bind as He-
rodotus, engaged as they both are in a struggle for historiographical authority
with an illustrious predecessor. […] they have to concede that Homer did
know the truth and that he was interested in conveying some of that truth in
his poetry. In other words, they question Homer’s devotion to historical accu-