VICO AND SPINOZA: ON THE VICISSITUDE OF LANGUAGES

Abstract

Notwithstanding Giambattista Vico's criticisms of Espinosa's thought, it is possible to establish a close relationship between both of them. If criticism distances the philosophers from each other, historical-philological interest approaches them. In fact, for the establishment of a certain convergence between the philosophical purposes of the two authors, the following presuppositions are made: i) on Vico’s New Science, as on Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, philology is not only textual knowledge of languages, but access to the history of a people, for it keeps the temporal changes of civil life and the memory of the world of sense in which it is born; ii) language is not a creation of the rigor of the understanding, that is, it is not the creation of the philosophers, but of the imagination, therefore, of the vulgate. Thus, all access to the knowledge of the past inevitably passes through the power of fantasy-imagination: a question adressed by Espinosa in the ‘history of the Hebrews’ and by Vico in ‘the common nature of the nations’.