There is something fitting about a philosopher who spent his career exploring why great ideas so often go unrecognized finding his most devoted audience among novelists. Giambattista Vico — the eighteenth-century Neapolitan jurist and speculative historian — was largely ignored by his contemporaries and has never quite commanded the school of disciples that a Kant or a Descartes accumulated. Yet the man has been haunting world literature for two centuries. Joyce read him obsessively. Borges constructed a labyrinth out of his thought. Jünger dressed him up as a character and sent him into a post-apocalyptic fiction. Dostoevsky, freshly released from a Siberian prison, wrote to his brother requesting a copy of the New Science.
In a wide-ranging conversation on Hermitix Podcast, host James Ellis and Dustin Peone — author of Vico and Literature: One Character in Search of an Author — trace the strange, circuitous afterlife of a philosopher who never quite had his day, but whose ideas, it turns out, were too large to stay buried.
A Philosopher Who Came in Through the Back Door
Peone’s own path to Vico was characteristically oblique. As an undergraduate, he took a course on Montesquieu with a professor who had once sat in on Leo Strauss’s lectures on Vico. Vico came up only in passing — but that was enough. Peone tracked down the New Science, read it, and found himself in the presence of ideas he describes as simply enormous. “Are they correct?” he asks, echoing Thornton Wilder’s assessment. “Maybe, maybe not. But they’re big.” He went on to graduate school at Emory University, where the Vico Institute was then housed under the direction of Donald Philip Verene, and has been working in Vico’s shadow ever since — though this is his first book dedicated entirely to the man.
The book itself grew out of a prosaic task: updating the Vico Institute’s bibliography of English-language works touching on Vico. What Peone kept finding, unexpectedly, was that Vico appeared more often and more centrally in literary texts than in philosophical ones. In Marx, he’s a footnote. In Flaubert, Stendhal, Balzac, and Dostoevsky, he’s something else — a living presence, a character in an ongoing conversation about history, myth, and the nature of knowledge.
The New Science in Brief
To understand what drew these writers to Vico, Peone offers a lucid account of the two interlocking projects at the heart of the New Science: a philosophy of history and a philosophy of poetry, which for Vico are really one project.
On the historical side, Vico proposed what he called an “ideal eternal history” — a pattern that all nations follow, cycling through an Age of Gods, an Age of Heroes, and an Age of Men, before collapsing into a second barbarism and beginning again. The circular view of history is, as Peone notes, the least original thing in Vico’s entire work — every ancient civilization had it. What was heterodox was asserting it inside a Christian, progressive worldview, in the same century as Voltaire and Condorcet. Vico called the first pass through history a corso and its recurrence a ricorso — and, crucially, he never claimed the cycle repeats indefinitely. He describes exactly one ricorso, leaving the future deliberately blank. The reasons for that silence, Peone suggests, were as much about the proximity of the Inquisition in Naples as about any philosophical reticence.
On the poetic side, Vico’s contribution is far more original. Vico argued that the earliest human knowledge was not rational but poetic — that myth and metaphor were not primitive science but genuine ways of understanding the world. He proposed that Homer was not a single blind poet but a collective voice, the spirit of Greece singing itself into being across centuries. He traced the origin of institutions back to the thunderclap — the literal noise that first terrified the bestial wanderers of prehistory into consciousness, shame, and the founding of the household. These are ideas that filtered into the nineteenth century through Vico’s successors, seldom with attribution.
Joyce’s Vico: The Thunder and the Fourth Age
The most famous literary engagement with Vico is James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and Peone handles it with both enthusiasm and care, separating what Joyce actually found in Vico from what he added. Joyce read the New Science in the original Italian. He even chose to live on a street called Via Vico in Trieste partly as a symbolic gesture. He told every bewildered reader of Finnegans Wake to start there.
But Joyce’s Vico has four ages, not three. The fourth is what Vico treats as mere backdrop: the return to the forests, the collapse into a pre-human darkness before the next awakening. Joyce makes this the center of his interest. The Wake‘s ten thunderwords — hundred-letter composites of words for thunder in every language, the tenth running to a hundred and one letters like the Arabian Nights — are each a moment of awakening, a new thunderclap jolting consciousness back into being. Peone argues that Joyce almost certainly knew he was departing from Vico here, and did so deliberately. Joyce himself described the New Science as “a trellis” upon which he built his own structure, not a blueprint to duplicate.
The hero of Finnegans Wake, H.C. Earwicker is, Peone notes, the “EarVico,” the one who can hear Vico’s patterns. And yet Earwicker is a spectacular personal failure, undone by his family, condemned by an obscure letter, stripped of authority. That, too, reflects the real Vico, who was never promoted beyond his entry-level chair of Latin eloquence, and whose funeral devolved into a street brawl between rival academic factions over who would lead the procession — ending with everyone leaving and the casket standing alone in the road.
Borges’s Vico: The Nightmare of Immortality
Peone’s chapter on Borges covers territory almost entirely unexplored in the scholarly literature — a point he makes with characteristic dryness, noting that the only prior work connecting Borges to Vico was a short article by Donald Philip Verene, published in Bulgaria, that essentially no one has read.
Borges could read Italian (he taught himself on a city bus, using Dante’s Inferno as his primer), and he encountered the definitive third edition of the New Science directly, unlike other Latin American intellectuals who worked from an older and substantially different Spanish translation. His story “The Immortal” begins with a simple question: what would happen to a person who lived forever? Eventually, Borges concludes, everything would have been done, everything experienced. Time would lose its structure. An immortal companion who seems incapable of speech eventually reveals that he was Homer — and then, so was everyone else, including the narrator, who is also Vico, who is also all the immortals who have all written the Iliad a thousand times over.
Where Joyce found regenerative promise in the Vichian cycle, Borges found something closer to damnation. Circular time, in “The Immortal,” is a nightmare — the immortal city is pure chaos, stairways leading nowhere, an Escher drawing with no exit. The immortals’ deepest desire is to find the river of mortality and drink from it. History, for Borges’s Vico, is not a spiral promising renewal; it is a trap. “History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake” — Peone draws the line between Borges and that famous Joycean formulation, noting that for Borges, regeneration means escaping the cycle entirely, not completing it.
Jünger’s Vico: The Spectator of History
Ernst Jünger’s late novel Eumeswil introduces a character named Vigo — Vico, plainly enough — alongside a character named Bruno, a pairing Peone traces directly to Finnegans Wake, where Bruno and Vico are placed in perpetual dialogue. Vigo teaches the philosophy of nations almost verbatim from the New Science, embedded in a post-apocalyptic city ruled by a strongman called the Condor.
Jünger’s Vico is a fatalist — not apathetic, but detached, watching the spectacle of history the way a philosopher at a festival watches the crowd. Peone reaches for the Pythagorean story: when the tyrant Leon asked Pythagoras what philosophy was, Pythagoras told him that at any festival, some people come to buy, some to sell, some to be entertained — and the philosopher comes only to enjoy the spectacle. That, Peone suggests, is precisely how Jünger reads Vico. And it is also, ultimately, a failure: Vigo’s detachment renders him incapable of acting against the tyranny surrounding him. Bruno, his counterpart, is inhuman in the other direction, reveling in chthonic forces. The anarchist hero Venator, who can act, acts disastrously. None of them get it right, and Peone raises the possibility — which he admits he has not yet thought through — that together they might constitute facets of a single complete human being.
A Strange and Ongoing Recorso
Peone closes by gesturing at the figures he treats in the book but doesn’t linger on in the conversation — Carlos Fuentes, whose Terra Nostra he calls the greatest novel written in world literature in the past fifty years, and Georges Ngal, an African writer deserving of wider attention. He also addresses Yeats, who was not included in the manuscript for space but who absorbed Vico largely through Benedetto Croce’s Hegelian distortion of the New Science, reading the cycles as a warrant for fascist heroism. Gentile made the same mistake with greater consequences, calling Vico the spiritual father of Italian fascism in his final lecture before his assassination.
What connects Joyce, Borges, Jünger, and the others, Peone suggests, is that Vico gives them a way to think about history that is neither optimistic nor despairing — cyclical rather than linear, promising not progress but return. The thunder will come again. Whether that is consolation or damnation depends on who is listening.
Hermetix host James Ellis describes Vico and Literature: One Character in Search of an Author as “one of the most fascinating books I’ve read for a long time.” It is the second volume in The Vico Library, a series launched in honor of the Vico Library of Giorgia Tagliacozzo, that aims to maintain a scholarly home to Vichian studies in the English-speaking world.
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