The double sensation of the symbolic in Scienza nuova

Abstract

This essay deals with the symbolic in Giambattista Vico’s Scienza nuova, according to two interconnected meanings: the hermeneutics of archaic fables and the symbolic character of social practices. Under the first aspect, the myth as «vera narratio» and the centrality of the «master key» of Vico’s work, the theory of fantastic universals, genres of fantasy. Myths do not contain history as chronicle, but material and social relations in their generality. Hence Vico’s attribution to myth of an original, civil meaning, while all other meanings, including the naturalistic one, would be subsequent. Social practices have in Vico a character of reproduction of social life that includes in itself the ideal aspect, which cannot be lost in a purely utilitarian dimension, on pain of the loss of humanity itself, which itself is not a datum but an effect of civil practices.