The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (review)

There is a danger in writing about Vico: after the immense effort to develop a coherent and lucid understanding of his thought, one may produce the kind of linear, rationalistic reduction or dismembering of his vision that his own style, notoriously elliptic, digressional, episodic, and obscure, aimed to preclude. On the other hand, if one's own book mirrors the obscurity and complexity of Vico's, it is not likely to be illuminating. It is difficult indeed to produce a book about Vico that is both lucid and yet communicates the breathtaking range, subtlety, richness, visionary unity, and evocative power of Vico's own writing. Mazzotta's The New Map of the World meets this challenge.

The author's motivation, though implicit, is clear: he sees in Vico a penetrating diagnosis of what are revealed to be the maladies, constitutional infirmities, and self-mutilations of modernity, as well as the prescription for healing them. Indeed, for him Vico's work is more than a prescription: perhaps the most intriguing passages of Mazzotta's book argue that Vico writes the Scienza nuova as a way of administering the medicine itself. The medicine is nothing less than revealing, and practicing, a new way of seeing, thinking, and writing, as an "alternative version of modernity" (4), a counter-discourse to what is seen as the impoverished, narcissistic, and self-deluding scientific-technological rationalism of the modern age. This approach to Vico conjures, and is in part indebted to, Benedetto Croce's La Filosofia di G. B. Vico of 1911 (Bari: Laterza), as is its ambitious aim to encompass all of Vico's work in a global understanding that integrates all branches of human action and knowledge. Mazzotta's study goes much farther than Croce's, making full use of the century of debate and study inspired by Croce's book, as well as recreating the rich baroque context of Vico's Naples across an array of texts, references, and disciplines; in particular it gives a more nuanced account of the religious dimensions in Vico's thought (in which he is in part indebted to John Milbank's study by that title [Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen Press, 1992]), as well as of the fundamental importance of political thought in Vico's reflections on history and human nature. The risk Mazzotta points out in Croce's book ("Croce's epoch-making interpretation of Vico has come to be viewed as a thinly veiled alibi for and prefiguration of Croce's own immanent theory of history" [ix]) applies in a subtler way to Mazzotta's own, as perhaps it would to any deeply-engaged book on Vico. The effort to develop the best interpretation of a thinker so purposefully oblique, ambiguous, and subtle will result, in the best case, in a book that can be seen either as convincingly showing us what Vico (himself thought he) was up to, or as simply offering the best (the most illuminating, nuanced, and powerful) reading the text will bear. The line between the two is not self-evident, and is perhaps ultimately illusory.

For Mazzotta, the key to Vico, and Vico's medicine to heal the modern world, the medicine that will allow humans to reconstitute a comprehensive vision of reality and thus to know themselves, is poetry. Poetry, from the Greek verb poiéo, "to make," becomes the realm of human activity and making conceived in its totality, which, by Vico's great maxim verum et factum convertuntur ("the true and the made are interchangeable"), is the realm of what humans can know, of how the true manifests itself in the certo, in the particularity of human experience. For Mazzotta's Vico, poetry, in short, is the human, as the human reveals, makes, and knows the world by unfolding its own nature—simultaneously ever-new and ever-old—in the concrete particularity of history; it...