VICO AND HEGEL

There exist between Vico and Hegel certain similarities which are sufficiently strong to have given rise to a well-supported, if also much-disputed, tradition of interpretation in which Vico's thought is regarded in a very Hegelian light. I believe that this is an incorrect way to look at it, because of certain fundamental differences which I hope to establish by the end of this chapter. It is useful, nevertheless, to take advantage of some of these similarities in commencing this account of Vico's view of the relationship between human nature and history and how he thought the historian should address the problems to which this gave rise. To those who deny the importance of the similarities, to proceed in this manner may seem to run the danger of assimilating Vico's thought to that of a later age and thus to fail to do justice to it in its own terms. Such a danger certainly exists, but it is not inescapable nor, indeed, would it justify paying no attention to the similarities, some of which are quite striking. Both thinkers were very well read in the history of their subjects and it would be a mistake to assume a priori that they might not have seen their work, in part at least, as a response to certain similar problems. It is plausibble, for example, to see much of Hegel's work as an attempt to overcome the stultifying dichotomy between the phenomenal and the noumenal which Kant forced upon himself by his excessive admiration for the natural sciences and which led him to relegate some of the most important features of man – freedom, morality and rational self-determination – to the unknowable world of the noumenal.