The papers appearing here and those which are to follow in a second special issue of Social Research were originally presented at the conference on "Vico and Contemporary Thought" held in New York City on January 27-31, 1976, in celebration of the 250th anniversary of Giambattista Vico's New Science. The conference was sponsored by the Institute for Vico Studies, 69 Fifth Avenue, Suite 17A, New York, N.Y. 10003, in association with the Casa Italiana of Columbia University and the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. The conference was aided by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

A number of the papers and commentaries were revised after the conference and appear here in longer form. The papers in this first volume focus on the historical and philosophical significance of Vico's thought; those in the issue to follow will focus on its social-scientific and pedagogic significance.

Introductory Remarks

It is for me not merely an honor, but a source of deep personal satisfaction, to be able to welcome you to this conference on Vico and contemporary thought. For it is a conference of an unusual and perhaps unprecedented type. Why this is so, and why the meeting has such significance, I shall try to make clear in a moment. But first I should explain how this meeting came about and how it relates to the Institute for Vico Studies.

Institute and Centro

The Institute for Vico Studies was founded in 1974. Its founding was an outgrowth of my long-standing fascination with Vico and of my growing conviction that among seminal thinkers in the history of Western thought he has a special significance for today. The Institute has for its purpose to further not only the study of Vico but also the development of new ideas and perspectives in the spirit of his thought. As part of this purpose, it aims to be an agency through which scholars both within and beyond the United States can be brought together either because of their interest in Vico himself or because their own thought embodies ideas analogous to those of Vico.

In this sense, the Institute is a counterpart of the Centro di Studi Vichiani in Naples, whose representative, Professor Gustavo Costa, we are pleased to have with us for this meeting. As the Centro in Naples is the guiding force for editing Vico's texts and studying the historical context of his thought, so it is the aim of our Institute to promote the study of Vico for contemporary scholarly endeavors. Hence it is fitting, I believe, that Vico, the philosopher of humanness and the creator of a "science of humanity," should also find a home outside his native land, and that this home should be New York. New York is in many ways the cultural capital of the world, the crossroad of cultural differences and competing ideologies, the embodiment of cosmopolitanism. This conference, then, as the first of the formal endeavors of the Institute, brings Vico to New York in a special way and initiates what I hope will be an ongoing effort to assess the importance of his thought for contemporary work in the humanities and social sciences.

It also seems fitting that two of New York's great centers of learning should sponsor the two parts of this conference: the Casa Italiana of Columbia University, long eminent as an American center of Italian humanistic studies, is the sponsor of the humanities portion of our meeting; and the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, known widely for its tradition of hospitality to foreign scholars and its openness to new ideas of all origins, is the sponsor of the social science portion. I wish to thank these distinguished institutions for their splendid cooperation in helping to organize this meeting and to express my personal hope that the Institute may continue its collaboration with them.

A Pioneer of Things to Come

In several ways this conference is an unprecedented event. It is the first meeting of such a nature and scope to be held on Vico's thought on the American continent. Indeed, it is one of the very few meetings of size to be held anywhere on his thought. No previous conference has brought together so many scholars from so many fields of knowledge to examine Vico's ideas. The very breadth of disciplines represented here is indicative of the universal character of his thought and suggests that it may well have the power to integrate many areas of contemporary investigation. For few figures in the history of thought could such a claim be made. The question may be raised, in fact, whether any other single thinker could, in our day and age, attract representatives of so many disciplines and provide a basis for their interaction.

What accounts for this power of attraction? The simplest answer is that Vico was a man of wide interests and broad learning--one of the last great polymaths before the knowledge explosion and subsequent specialization of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Another is that he was a scholar of limited but significant influence--a half-forgotten giant of the Enlightenment. More likely, and certainly more frequently heard, is that he was a powerful forerunner--a precursor of great ideas and modes of thought that would arise only in the nineteenth century or in our own.

Now, there is doubtlessly truth in all these claims, and I expect that we will find each supported in many fascinating ways in the course of this meeting. As we set about our work, however, I wish to offer a suggestion--call it a warning, if you like--about the way in which we should speak of Vico and to advance a somewhat immodest thesis as to his significance for contemporary scholarship. My concerns can be stated in three propositions: (1) that Vico should only with great caution, and perhaps not at all, be called a "forerunner" of later thinkers and their ideas; (2) that the "true" Vico has been practically without influence until the present; and (3) that Vico's importance is rather that of a pioneer of things to come, of what the humanities and social sciences in our age and the next can and should accomplish. Let me explain.

Although there are obvious parallels between certain of Vico's ideas and those worked out in the disciplines of our day, it is misleading--and possibly unfair--to speak of Vico in such instances as a forerunner, as though his achievement was to have expressed in protoform ideas that acquired full stature in a later day. Many resemblances, first of all, are purely coincidental. But even those ideas that are properly related are most frequently terms of a false comparison: for what in later thinkers are products of a professional specialty, the accomplishment of a lifetime devoted to a single problem--I am thinking, for example, of the linguistics of Wilhelm von Humboldt or the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget--such ideas in Vico are but corollaries of a seamless philosophical system, mere spokes extending from a philosophical "hub" related to many other spokes and to the wheel as a whole. In being hailed as a forerunner, therefore, Vico is in fact disadvantaged--and doubly so. Not only is he faulted, by implication, for not having developed an idea more fully than he did, but the very novelty of a suggestion is frequently missed because it is dislodged from his total vision and treated in isolation from other equally essential ideas. Is it not possible that the aggregate of his ideas--his total vision--is more important than any or all of his discoveries taken separately? Similarly, is it not possible that the fully developed ideas of later authors, however brilliant, are caught up in some philosophical limbo, denied a greater glory because they are deprived of a philosophical fullness that Vico's thought enjoys?

The question becomes more insistent when we reflect that Vico left no intellectual progeny, inspired no truly Vichian school. Indeed, a number of highly original thinkers in the last century and our own--most notably Croce--have claimed him as an ancestor. But we now recognize that most of those who have sought to appropriate his thought have actually disemboweled it, so as to invoke his authority to support their side in an ideological battle. On the other hand, we are beginning to assemble evidence that, to a degree greater than we had suspected, his contemporaries throughout the Continent and in England were influenced, though usually indirectly, by many of his ideas. It was all to no avail, however. Borrowed piecemeal from his works and passed about like playthings from author to author, the ideas were frequently misunderstood and almost always misapplied. One is reminded of the children's game "Telephone," in which a message is whispered from child to child only to reach the last ear in the most grotesque of forms.

The Value of the Imagination

Our situation, then, is this: We know, and continue to discover, how much Vico used and transformed ancient traditions of thought reaching back even to the pre-Socratics. We know, and continue to discover, how much more influential, directly and indirectly, his thought was in the England, France, and Germany of his day than we had previously realized. We know of, and continue to discover, striking resemblances--true or apparent--between his ideas and countless developments in various disciplines of our day. The time has come, I believe, for us to ask whether the thought of Vico as a whole--as an integral philosophical system with its sundry corollaries--has relevance for what we are doing today.

Let me be blunt: However impressive the many ideas our age has brought forth on the nature and development of man and society, are they not in the end a chaos of rootless, isolated, incomplete, at times conflicting pieces, needing correction, direction, and a basic philosophical unity? Until not long ago--deep in our own century, in fact--the problem of philosophical coherence seemed solved: a tradition of thought arising with Descartes and Locke, continuing in new dress during the Enlightenment, and leading in our day to logical positivism and much of linguistic analysis, appeared to have settled the question of the human mind and its powers and to have marked off a course--the only course, in fact--for the progress of knowledge. In our own day, however, due in large measure to a number of advances made independently in various humanistic and social-scientific disciplines, this approach to the human spirit and its endeavors has been seriously challenged. However indispensable it may be for the illumination of the logical faculties of man, it is unable to satisfy our renewed concern for understanding particularly the noncognitive--the imagination, the will, the sensuous, the creative, the aesthetic. We feel the need today to see such forms of human spirituality not simply as support systems for our cognitive activity but as elements as fundamental to our nature as reason itself and as equally constitutive of our social and cultural life. We know that Cartesianism and its many variants cannot afford the integration we require; and yet we are without a synthesis.

Is it possible that the thought of Giambattista Vico, taken as an integral whole, can furnish a new start for the humanities and the social sciences by providing a philosophically sound framework in which to order their many advances of the last one hundred years? This is a bold suggestion, I know, but one I consider defensible. By asserting the value of the imagination, Vico begins with an insight into the noncognitive faculties of man. The multiple activities which imagination generates are not taken to be secondary or protoforrns of the rational. On Vico's terms, the mind can be understood in all its complexity and can be seen as the basis for a truly genetic understanding of the human world. Vico can account for the unity of knowledge and culture because he returns to the origins of the human world and finds in its original state the principles that unify the mind and its life. There are, of course, a host of contemporary thinkers concerned to understand mind, society, and culture in such categories of wholeness and development and to this extent they share Vico's perspective: one cannot read the works of such figures as Freud, Husserl, Cassirer, Piaget, or Levi-Strauss without noticing how many ideas forged in response to contemporary problems in various fields of inquiry have affinities with those formulated by Vico in his New Science. Almost instinctively one thinks of such thinkers as extensions of the various spokes within Vico's wheel.

But this same image makes clear to us a choice we must make: either we can continue marveling at the separate spokes and carry on with our praise of Vico as a great precursor; or we can come to see the spokes as scattered and dispersed, as unassembled parts of a hubless wheel, and begin to consider Vico as the pioneer of a bold and still viable, if not fully accomplished, integrating vision of man and his culture. A precursor can be acknowledged, then forgotten. An influence can be thanked, then passed by. But a pioneer must be continually reckoned with as the holder of an original vision. His thought is a veritable fountainhead, a source to which one must return again and again and contend with anew. My hope, of course, is that we will choose to think of Vico in this latter way and that in doing so we will in some small way begin to revitalize humanistic and social-scientific studies. I consider this hope anything but groundless, for the need so widely felt today to recast much of social thinking in humanistic terms and the need of humanistic thought for a comprehensive theory of man are, to my mind, variations on themes already present in the New Science. It is this work, of course, first published by Vico in 1725, that our conference specifically celebrates.

This is the hope that has motivated me in bringing us together. I expressed this hope in the applications I made to our funding agencies--the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies. It is an indication at least of their common realization of a need for some unity in our knowledge, if not necessarily of their confidence in Vico's ability to provide it, that they should have so readily given their support. In each case it has been a form of support that has gone beyond the level of mere funding to the more subtle reaches of personal encouragement and genuine excitement. While I can now express my own thanks to the officers of these invaluable agencies, a far richer gratitude, I know, will be embodied in the stimulating presentations at this meeting and in the train of events which the conference should set in motion.