Samuel Rubinstein’s fine memorial for Hans Aarsleff, the Danish-born historian of linguistics who died recently at 100, celebrates a scholar unafraid of the word “error”—one who insisted that intellectual historians must sometimes judge past ideas rather than merely steelman them. Rubinstein rightly foregrounds Aarsleff’s clash with Chomsky over “Cartesian linguistics.” But a single line sent me back to something I had half-forgotten: his 1981 quarrel with Isaiah Berlin over Vico.
Rereading “Vico and Berlin” in the London Review of Books is bracing. Berlin had cast Vico as a lonely genius who “virtually invented” historical understanding—the man-made nature of language, linguistic relativism, etymology as the key to the human mind. Aarsleff answered that not one of these ideas was original to Vico. The seventeenth century had done the work already: Mersenne, Wilkins, Locke on the limits of knowledge; Locke and Condillac on language as the mirror of a nation’s mind. Vico, he argued, was a latecomer to illumination that was already streaming. Berlin, unmoved, closed with Whitehead’s jab about scholars “who know so much and understand so little.”
To me, however, Aarsleff seems to conflate two different things: influence and originality. Showing that others said similar things before Vico establishes little about his influence, and less still about whether his synthesis was his own. With respect to the verum-factum principle, for example, he cites examples of others who found limits to what we can understand of the physical world, but fails to show a single example of someone claiming that ‘making’ is a primary method of understanding.
That vaguely similar ideas can be found scattered across the seventeenth century does not prove that Vico borrowed them. Instead, it demonstrates that Vico existed within an intellectual milieu grappling with a set of similar questions, with access to a similar set of tools.
Donald Phillip Verene, writing that same year as the debate, took the sharper, more honest, and more productive line: Vico had, in fact, almost no demonstrable influence at all—but this neither diminishes his originality nor limits what his thought might yet contribute today.
That is where the debate still matters. What Aarsleff called “the dilemma of Vico studies”—vast claims of originality set against scant traceable influence—dissolves once we stop treating the two as one question. To locate Vico honestly within his (and our) intellectual world, rather than crowning or dethroning him, is the task that still awaits us.
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