Nancy du Bois Marcus - Vico and Plato

Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) holds as an axiom of his New Science that the nature of things is nothing but their coming into being at certain times and in certain guises. Like all human things, this study of the kinship of Vico and Plato has specific origins. The importance I attach to Vico's references to Plato and Platonism arises from my conviction that philosophy must begin with Plato. The impetus to read Plato with a modern philosopher arose from my persistent sense of the incompleteness of focusing on Plato alone. My interest in Plato raised the following fundamental question: how can Plato be brought to life in philosophical conversation today?

Before discovering Vico, I immersed myself the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. I thought MacIntyre had found a way to revive the themes of ancient philosophy, especially moral philosophy, while acknowledging the history of ideas between Plato's time and our own. I defended MacIntyre from charges of historicism, but ultimately that defense unravelled. I had to accept that MacIntyre was conceding too much on the nature of truth to the modern epistemological skeptics. At this juncture, I was introduced to Vico. Providentially, MacIntyre and the Vico scholar Donald Phillip Verene had a published debate that clarified for me that Vico's project was exactly what I had sought and could not find in MacIntyre's work. I saw that Vico was the way back to the high road of Platonism for which I had been searching, and the fruit of that discovery is this work on Vico and Plato.

Investigating who Plato is for Vico both illuminates what wisdom is for Vico and provides a context for today's reader of Plato. I discovered the centrality of moderation in metaphysics as well as in moral life by studying Vico in light of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Augustine, and Plato. My approach is grounded in the history of Western philosophy, yet the

philosophical insights which emerged could have been discovered in other guises, as they are timeless human and moral truths. That human beings can find the ideal and eternal in the particulars of history is one of Vico's greatest insights, and his most Platonic.

The references which Vico makes to Plato and Platonism dispel the illusion that Vico is an historicist and reveal a metaphysician and a moral philosopher in the Platonic tradition. In axiom 5, Vico says to be useful to the human race, philosophy must raise and direct weak and fallen man, not rend his nature or abandon him in his corruption. Two conclusions immediately follow; first, he dismisses from the school of our Science the Stoics and Epicureans, and second, he admits to our school the political philosophers, and first of all the Platonists, who agree with all the lawgivers on these three main points: that there is divine providence, that human passions should be moderated and made into human virtues, and that human souls are immortal. Thus from this axiom are derived the three principles of this Science.

The more familiar form of these three principles is the certain form, as religion, marriage, and burial, but each of these is also proven true by the philosophers. Philosophical wisdom grows out of poetic wisdom, metaphysics from poetry, and Vico is telling us that the philosophers he chooses for this task are the Platonists. My claim is that insofar as the Vichian scientist is a philosopher, that philosophy is Platonic, as opposed to Stoic or Epicurean. As Plato's