Inhabiting Time and History. Vincenzo Vitiello, Interpreter of Vico: Vincenzo Vitiello interprete di Vico

Abstract

This article traces the main stages of Vincenzo Vitiello's Vichian interpretation: an initial intriguing exploration concerning the extension of mathesis universalis to history, and thus the evocation of the language of origins, the ensemble of voice and gesture, the language that precedes precisely the scission of the word from the thing. An inescapable knot of connection between the first phase of the investigations converging in Vico. Storia, linguaggio, natura, and the subsequent studies, and the volume L’ethos della topología, which outlines the fabric of a most subtle philosophical hermeneutics. The most recent work, L’ora e l’attimo, refers to the particular way, suggested by Vico, of “inhabiting time and history”. It is the scholar's conviction that, behind the theory of historical resources and the description of the “happy” resource, there lies a strong moral sentiment, which concerns the deepening of the “terrestrial dimension of the human”. In short, the problem of the scission between eternity and time, a crucial problem of modernity, reproposes at another level the question of the ingens sylva as the unconscious of history, the Hegelian “power that recoils in horror from the light”, “the ever uncertain time of men”.