Kindle Notes & Highlights
If genius depends upon some physical handicap Vico was richly endowed.
He read with special fascination Plato, Epicurus, Lucretius, Machiavelli, Francis Bacon, Descartes, and Grotius, with some injury to his catechism.
Principi di una scienza nuova d’intorno alla commune natura delle nazioni (1725)
Vico thought that he could discern three main periods in the history of every people: (1) The age of the gods, in which the Gentiles believed that they lived under divine governments, and that everything was commanded them by [gods through] auspices and oracles. … (2) The age of heroes, when these reigned in aristocratic commonwealths, on account of a certain superiority of nature which they held themselves to have over the plebs. (3) The age of men, in which all recognized themselves as equal in human nature, and therefore established the first popular commonwealths, and then monarchies.
three stages of social development correspond three “natures,” or ways of interpreting the world: the theological, the legendary, the rational.
“monarchies are the final governments … in which nations come to rest.”
Herein two great lights of natural order shine forth: first, that he who cannot govern himself must let himself be governed by another who can; second, that the world is always governed by those who are naturally fittest.
history, like life, is evolution and dissolution in an ineluctible sequence and fatality.
In private notes the French philosopher acknowledged his debt to Vico’s theory of cyclical development and decay; and that debt, unnamed, appears in Montesquieu’s Greatness and Decadence of the Romans (1734). For the rest Vico remained almost unknown in France until Jules Michelet published (1827) an abridged translation of the Scienza nuova. Michelet described Italy as “the second mother and nurse who in my youth suckled me on Virgil, and in my maturity nourished me with Vico.”
history must take its place beside science as the ground and vestibule of philosophy.
“Nature,” he said, “gave me ten fingers, and as my instrument has employment for all, I see no reason why I should not use them.”
Scarlatti literally “played” the harpsichord. “Do not expect,” he said, “any profound learning, but rather an ingenious jesting with art.”
to renew his youth and discipline his Muse.
her amiable decay.
He was a man of great riches and little character, but poverty and courage would not have prevented his tragedy.
faïence.
“Let them deceive you sometimes, rather than thus torment yourself constantly and in vain.”
The power of the Catholic Church rested on the natural supernaturalism of mankind, the recognition and sublimation of sensual impulses and pagan survivals, the encouragement of Catholic fertility, and the inculcation of a theology rich in poetry and hope, and useful to moral discipline and social order.
The movement against the Jesuits was part of a contest of power between the triumphant nationalism of the modern state and the internationalism of a papacy weakened by the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the rise of the business class.
Reform of the law, in both its procedure and its penalties, became a natural part of that humanitarian spirit born from the double parentage of a humanist Enlightenment and a Christian ethic freed from a cruel theology.
The Fists”—vowed to action as well as thought.
Laws should be based upon reason; their basic reason is not to avenge crime but to preserve social order; they should always aim at “the greatest happiness divided among the greatest number” (la massima felicità divisa nel maggior numero );33 here, twenty-five years before Bentham, was the famous principle of utilitarian ethics. Beccaria, with his customary candor, acknowledged the influence of Helvétius, who had offered the same formula in De l’ Esprit (1758). (It had already appeared in Francis Hutcheson’s Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 1725.)
His lectures anticipated several basic ideas of Adam Smith and Malthus on the division of labor, the relation between labor and capital, and between population and the food supply. In him the humanism of the Renaissance was reborn as the Enlightenment in Italy.
Required to read the lives of the saints to the friars as they ate, he substituted for the names of the saints those of Palermo’s most distinguished prostitutes.
At every step in his engaging Memoirs we must beware of his imagination, but he tells his story with such self-damning candor that we may believe him though we know he lies.
En route from Paris to Brussels “I read Helvétius’ De l’Esprit all the way.”44 (He was to offer to conservatives a persuasive example of the libertin [freethinker] becoming a libertine—though the sequence was probably the reverse.)
Your master passion is love of humanity. This love blinds you. Love humanity, but love it as it is. Humanity is not susceptible to the benefits you wish to shower upon it; these would only make it more wretched and perverse. . . .
Now and then he had to fight a duel, but, like a nation in its histories, he never lost.
“I have lived a philosopher, and I die a Christian.”48 He had mistaken sensualism for philosophy, and Pascal’s wager for Christianity.
Rome is, I believe, the high school of the world; and I too have been tried and refined.58
Non tutti francesi sono la-troni, ma Buona Parte—not all Frenchmen are thieves, but a good part of them are.)
“Remember that light and shade never stand still.”73
art is the replacement of chaos with order to reveal significance,
But the conflict between melody and drama went on; Wagner won a battle for drama, Verdi captured new trophies for melody. May neither side win.
“The class in philosophy … was something to send one to sleep standing upright.”
Alfieri was the beginning of the Romantic movement in Italy, a Byron before Byron, preaching the emancipation of minds and states. After him Italy had to be free.
STRICTLY, Austria designates a nation; loosely it may stand for the empire of which Austria was the head.
free trade, like democracy, is a luxury of security and peace.
It costs me great efforts to refrain from telling these gentlemen to their faces how idiotically they act and talk.”
“Elle pleure, mais elle prend” (She weeps, but she takes).
blindness is a leveler, for dignities are half composed of garb.
“Your Majesty lies in a bad position.” She answered, “Yes, but good enough to die in.”
“The monarchy,” said Joseph “is too poor and backward to allow itself the luxury of supporting the idle.”
Vienna began to be one of the most advanced medical centers in the world.
The difficulty of Joseph’s revolutionary enterprise was doubled by the diversity of his realm.
“As a soldier I regret the passing of a great man who has been epoch-making in the art of war. As a citizen I regret that his death has come thirty years too late.”
He lacked the philosopher’s capacity for doubt; he took for granted the wisdom of his means as well as of his ends. He tried to reform too many evils at once, and too hurriedly; the people could not absorb the bewildering multiplicity of his decrees.
He commanded faster than he could convince; he sought to achieve in a decade what required a century of education and economic change.
They preferred their churches, priests, and tithes to his taxes, spies, and wars.
“I hope that when I am dead posterity—more favorable, more impartial, and therefore juster than my contemporaries—will examine my actions and goals before judging me.”
