Giambattista Vico: His View on Language and History

지암바티스타 비코의 언어관과 역사관

Is there a pattern in history? How and why does social change occur? Are we to distinguish between the methods to be employed in the study of man and the study of nature? How does linguistic, or 'philological', knowledge contribute to unearthing historical facts? These are the queries that Vico grappled with throughout his life. Vico, however, was an outsider to the intellectual atmosphere of his own day, dismissed as obscure, speculative, and unsound. Only after his death did he begin to inspire enthusiasm among diverse readers, and as long as we remain concerned with the queries mentioned above, Vico's reflections will come alive with contemporary relevance. Actually he has been regarded as the founder--unrecognized by his contemporaries--of the philosophy of history and as a thinker whose ideas anticipated such later intellectual movements as historicism, pragmatism, existentialism, and structuralism. There are many among modern minds who find Vico fascinating for his view of myth as concrete thought and of an age of myth as a necessary age in the intellectual evolution of the human race. James Joyce, for one, was deeply impressed by Vico's view on myth, on metaphor, on Homer, on language, on psychology, and much else besides. 'My imagination grows when I read Vico,' he once confessed, 'as it doesn't when I read Freud or Jung.' Some philosophers, critics, psychologists, social scientists and even geographers would describe themselves as 'Vichians', sharing the view that Vico was a poet and a lawyer, a platonist and a baconian rolled into one. His refusal to be confined within any one discipline, his imaginative effort to understand different cultures, and his insight in dealing with some fundamental problems in the study of humanity all compel admiration and deserve to be emulated in our age--an age when the split between the literary and the scientific approaches to the understanding of society is widening into a chasm. Vico has left some of his most important ideas underdeveloped or even undeveloped, to be excavated and polished by us afier our own fashion. It is surprising that Vico is still a man of obscure name in the academia of our country, Korea.