Gary Shaprio raised the issue of the relationship between Nietzsche and Vico in the comment thread of my recent post on Vico (comments 2 and 5), and that is a topic well worth exploring a bit further. I've looked at it in the past in my personal blog, but too far back to bring in thoughts I've had in the last year, which has included some intense study of both Vico's New Science and Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. I won't get into the exact lines of possible influence, because that really is deep and complicated work on the detail of intellectual history, though also it must be said if not carried out in the right spirit it carries the danger of ignoring the elements of diffusion, convergence, and relayed unconscious influence in the history of philosophy. Or maybe that is just my justification for making big comparisons and not working so much on the details of intellectual transmission.
The most obvious point to start on is the use of Homer, which plays a part for Nietzsche in the Birth of Tragedy, but is more obviously at the forefront of the Genealogy. In the Birth of Tragedy, Homer is the Apolline dreamer who represents one pole of Ancient Greek culture. In Genealogy I, it is Homer who provides the main source of the morality of the masters. Reading of Homer, particularly the Iliad, in the light of some familiarity with the Genealogy promotes a strong feeling of recognition, well it certainly did for me.
The passage where Homer puts down a rather ugly misshapen looking soldier (presumably not to be counted as one the Heroes) for daring to challenge the godly King Agamemnon, seems highly relevant to Nietzsche, for example. Readers of Genealogy I will certainly remember the idea of the Homeric Greek heroes who think of themselves as beautiful and good, and define the lower orders as ugly and bad, by way of comparison.
Vico also has much to say about the contempt of the Homeric heroes for the lower orders, the plebeians, or whatever word they have to describe the ordinary people who lack their connection with the gods. Vico has a stange bit of historical speculation in order to back this up, which is that humans emerged from the forests as giants, because that is what the forest conditions do, apparently.
The founders of cities, the nobles, emerged from the forests before offering refuge to later refugees from the danger and isolation of the dark woods, and have already shrunk in comparison. This is how Vico explains the idea of the ugliness of the lower orders in the poetry of the heroic era. Homer is at the centre of the New Science as a way both of understanding the heroic-barbaric age of heroes and the direction of history from pre-urban pre-heroic communites to the human age of democracies and monarchs who administer law to the advantage of all.
The heroes of Vico's barbaric-Homeric age are quite like Nietzsche's masters in their violence against the lower orders and assumption of the difference between them as between beasts and gods. The violence of Odysseus agaisnt the suitors when he makes it back to Ithaca in the Odyssey fits into that Viconain pattern which assumes violence between plebeians and patricians in antique states, and as in Nietzsche there is a kind of slave revolt for Vico in which the plebeians take over the city, though that is not something Nietzsche addresses in relation to pre-Imperial Rome.
Also as in Nietzsche, Vico masters are at the origins of priesthood thought not so much as in Nietzsche as the result of the role of ritual purity and asceticism, but because of the belief of the heroes, as the aristocrats define themselves, that they are in touch with and descended from the gods. The origin of this goes back to the thunderstorms experienced on emerging into high places above the forest, which produce a verbal reaction, which is the name of the king of the pagan gods.
Though Nietzsche has a different account of the origin of religion, the philological historical explanation in Vİco is in line with Nietzsche's application of philology to the philosophical, social, anthropological, and political issues of antiquity, and both mix detailed learning with sweeping speculation.
What unites Vico and Nietzsche as much as anything is philology, though for Nietzsche it apparently comes from an engagement with Greek texts, while for Vico who was not as comfortable in Greek as Nietzsche was, it comes from early modern political thought and the ways it engages with history, even if Vico thinks the great figures like Bodin, Grotius, and Hobbes, confused law as they knew it with an archaic natural right.
In practice Nietzsche was also absorbing philological, hermeneutic and aesthetic ideas as they emerged in Germany from the late eighteenth century, and Vico's thought was embedded in the development of the study of rhetoric
Though Vico is on the face of it more favourable to a lower class take over than Nietzsche, he sees it as something that leads to inevitable breakdown, because the the plebeians cannot adjust to the universality of law, as opposed to the the variable wishes of citizens at any one moment. Vico sees the answer as coming from a human kind of monarchy in which the king, the main example being the Roman Emperors, unify and stabilise law, but make judgements specific to each case, unlike the rigidity of law in aristocratic times.
Vico sees law as a progressive reduction and containment of the violence which institute it, and underpins it. In this, he does anticipate some elements of Nietzsche's thought, most obviously in Genealogy II, where Nietzsche suggests that law has its roots in the most intense violence with regard to the enforcement of contracts, and the creation of social status differences, which becomes lessened over time, a process which Nietzsche seems to endorse in suggesting that the strongest society does not need to punish at all and can ignore its parasites.
This is not Vico's endlessly prudential and particularising monarch-judge, but it is another form of that ideal, the wish to find a way out of law as organised to make particular relations and obligations seem part of an absolute legal order.
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