Vico and China by Daniel Canaris

Abstract

Reviewed by: Vico and China by Daniel Canaris Harry Liebersohn Daniel Canaris, Vico and China ( Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 2020). In the series Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment. Pp. 296. £65.00 paper. Seeking the sources of modern scientific thought, Ernst Cassirer in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–29) turned first to theories of language—and, within the history of linguistic theory, he gave special pride of place to the writings of Giambattista Vico as the forerunner of later theories of language. From the relative obscurity of his home in late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Naples, Vico pioneered a philosophy of history that has been cited during the past century by an impressive cluster of commentators, including Cassirer, Benedetto Croce, Edmund Wilson, Isaiah Berlin, Erich Auerbach, Jonathan Israel, and Edward Said—all of whom, in different ways, looked to him as the founder of something leading up to the thought of their own time, possibly the Counter-Enlightenment or radical Enlightenment or a culturally diverse cosmopolitanism. Vico has become a favorite choice for twentieth and twenty-first century genealogies of the present. In his erudite study of Vico and China, Daniel Canaris calls into question such appropriations of Vico for later intellectual movements. Instead he follows up leads that contextualize Vico in his own time and place. Canaris sharply defines his monograph around Vico's changing assessments of China; within this topic his choice of context is Vico's relationship to the theological debates of his time, especially those swirling around the Jesuits and their enemies. Without being wholly dismissive, Canaris's introduction criticizes recent post-colonial studies, as well as scholarship invoking the Enlightenment or Counter-Enlightenment, as having lost sight of dimensions of Vico's thought that emerge when it is taken more seriously on its own terms. Naples, writes Canaris, was a center of transmission of knowledge about China. As such, it could not avoid the polemics surrounding the Jesuits and their approach to Chinese missionary work. Their policy of accommodationism, closely associated with Matteo Ricci, took as point of departure the notion of a shared natural philosophy guiding both pre-Christian thinkers in the West and Confucius; Jesuits also argued for tolerance toward Confucian rites, which they maintained were purely civil and did not interfere with the work of conversion. The arguments for and against these Jesuit positions culminated in "three authoritative papal declarations in 1704, 1715 and 1742" (18–19); they were reinforced by the founding of the Collegio de Cinesi in the late 1720s by an opponent of the Jesuits, Matteo Ripa, in the late 1720s. According to Canaris, Vico had good contacts on both sides of the pro- and anti-Jesuit controversies. His monograph traces how Vico's views on China took shape through his initial attraction to, and later repudiation of, Jesuit writings, a process Canaris relates to a wider campaign to delegitimize Jesuit thought. Canaris's book is organized with close attention to the changes over time in Vico's view of China. Chapters one to three examine the highly favorable view of Chinese civilization in Vico's study of law, the Diritto Universale (Universal Right, 1720–22). As chief sources for his understanding of China, Vico had at his disposal works that included both Ricci's diaries and his dialogue between a Confucian and a European scholar, On the True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (1603). Canaris praises Ricci's writings, and more generally those of the early Jesuit missionaries, for their nuanced portrayal of China, noting Ricci's special admiration for both Confucius as the equal of any Western pagan philosopher and China's political [End Page 742] system, with its meritocratic selection of mandarins. Another source that shaped Vico's understanding of China was a Jesuit response to the order's detractors in the form of a monumental translation of neo-Confucian works, the Confucius Sinarum philosophus (1687). The compilers of this work, according to Canaris, went beyond Ricci and tried to present Confucian texts as part of "a coherent philosophical system" (114). With an impressive body of Jesuit works as guide, how did Vico initially account for the ethical and political excellence of...