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Affinity to Vico
Tuesday, 3 June 2025 at 22:03
Giambattista Vico
Affinity to Vico
When Coleridge first read the Autobiography and Scienza Nuovaby Giovanni Battista Vico (1668–1744) his response was quick, hospitable and incisive. In a letter dated 16th may 1825, he wrote:
I am more and more delighted with G. B. Vico and if I had (which thank God’s good grace I have not) the least drop of Author’s blood in my veins, I should twenty times successively in the perusal of the first volume (I have not yet begun the second) have exclaimed ‘Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixere’. (‘May they perish, who said first what we were going to say.’)
Coleridge was referring to Vico’s masterpiece La Scienza Nuova,which he read in Italian, using the edition published in Milan in 1816.Vico’s central principle was the idea that human nature is not ever the same: static and unalterable, with a central kernel. Rather, Vico’s motto was - ‘humanity is its own creation’. This central principle led him to a new type of aesthetics, not based on universal norms, but on the uniqueness of each individual culture or civilisation. To the traditional types of knowledge, a priori, deductive, a posteriori, empirical, the products of sense-perception and revelation, there had tobe added that of the reconstructive imagination. Even if Coleridge discovered Vico too late for him to be a defining influence upon his own work, he did feel an affinity to Vico’s emphasis upon the creative imagination and the notion of humanity being active in ‘its own creation’.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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