Spring 2010 - Interpretation

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I n t e r p r e t a t i o n
a case were he to invoke the “mythical origins” of verbal structures—were
it not for Vico’s arguing that the true nature of myths or fables is civil. The
providential, “good” interpretation of fables points to a mental, non-mythical/
poetic, true origin of the verbal structures peculiar to civil society (ibid., Bk.
I.72; Bk. II.1, last par.; Bk. II.4, par. 1; Bk. III.1.iv; and Bk. IV.10.iv, last par.).
The true upshot of Vico’s arguments is that language is irreducible to myth,
just as civil society is irreducible to human contrivances and expectations.
It follows that Frye’s subsequent contention that according
to Vico private property is rooted in a myth, is also falsely attributed. Vico
firmly rejects the poetic “Epicurean” reading of civil society that does not
recognize a principle of civility in nature (compare SN44, Bk. II.7.ii, par. 1;
and “Of the Elements,” VIII). One of the cardinal aims, not to say the cardinal
aim, of the Scienza Nuova is to demonstrate “right in nature” (diritto in
natura), entailing the recognition that private property is grounded in natural
differentiations—first and foremost, the superiority of the strong of mind
over the mentally weak (compare “Idea of the Work,” par. 12 in both SN44
and SN30).
Vico’s “History”
Frye’s contention that Vico believed that history is cyclical,
or that it moves in a “cyclical rotation,” fares no better than his contention
that Vico retraces language to myth. The problem with this attribution concerning
“history” is that, as Paolo Cristofolini has aptly put it, there simply
is no “history without adjectives” in Vico. At the most, Vico notes that men
make the “civil world” (and then, only with respect to their deluded or bodily
certainty); “Vico never said that man makes history” (Cristofolini 2001, 15).
What is more, Vico’s civil world is not “cyclical” in the sense intended by
Frye, when he complains thus: “Well, I don’t like cycles; I think the cycle
is simply a failed spiral. I think that when we come to the end of a cycle we
ought to move up to another level and proceed accordingly” (Frye 2000, 29).
Frye is reading “cycles” into Vico. With Vico we find no “cycles” in the plural.
In Cristofolini’s words: “the corsi and ricorsi, neither do these have textual
correspondence in Vico, who always speaks in the singular, of the ‘course
that nations make’ [corso che fanno le nazioni], and of the ‘re-course of human
things’ [ricorso delle cose umane]” (ibid.). Not only is the “course” Vico speaks
of simply the physical or imaginary life of nations that accordingly “run” (corrono,
akin to corso) in time, but the living course of civil things partakes,
not in any chronologically or geographically extended universal or transnational
“history,” but in the law or perpetual will of “mind” (mente): neither