Giambattista Vico and the Aesthetic Education of the Modern Reader of Philosophy: Geometry, Ingenuity, and Imagination

Abstract

In La filosofia di Giambattista Vico, Benedetto Croce famously stated that the founding text of modern aesthetics is not Kant’s Critique of Judgment but Giambattista Vico’s Scienza nuova, a text that, Croce said, contains the entire nineteenth century in germe. Yet, Croce maintained that the obscurity of Vico’s style and the convoluted structure of his argument spoiled the potential revolutionary effect that the Scienza nuova could have had on the history of mainstream philosophy. In this paper, I argue that the obscurity of Vico’s writing is rooted in a general project of reformation of the modern reader of philosophy. Vico develops an ideal trajectory of an aesthetic education of his reader through a web of self-reflexive metaphors that underscore his writings from the early works to the final edition of the Scienza nuova in 1744. I focus on the metaphors used by Vico to describe the relationship of the reader’s subjectivity with geometry on one hand and with poetic ingenuity on the other. I analyze how these metaphors work as screens for the development of a new aesthetic identity of the modern subject of philosophy.