| The New Science of Giovanni Battista Vico has been interpreted in a variety of ways based on his alleged role as a modern, pre-modern, or anti-modern thinker. I argue that Vico should be appreciated for his development as a counter-modern alternative, one that more explicitly places him both in the context of early modernism and in his innovative reformulation of seventeenth and eighteenth-century rhetoric, philosophy, and linguistics. I illustrate that Vico responds to the variety of skepticisms and dogmatisms propagated by writers such as Descartes, Gassendi, Spinoza, and Locke by rejecting the bases of early modern epistemology and ethics, that is, a criterion of objectively verifiable truth with which to found science, politics, and ethics. Instead, Vico renovates this problematic by adding his reinterpretation of an old tradition, the Maker's Knowledge Tradition, in which the first humans fabricate the conditions for knowledge: the true is the made. Vico's new science claims that awareness and authority (the certain) is conflated with the true rather than a criterion for it. This fabrication occurs with the beginnings of language usage, mind, and social formations through a process of metaphoric embodiment.; Vico's conflation of language, logic, and context, through a true narration of myth as the beginnings of actual history, lends itself to a new theory and practice of discourse and disciplinarity that is a viable alternative to both modern and postmodern versions, and is worthy of closer inspection. I call this new "science" rhetography, a counter-modern praxis of contextual metadiscourse. For example, instead of the historiography of Hayden White or the discursive practices of Michel Foucault, Vico's counter-modern alternative can be applied to a gap between historical continuity and discontinuity. I have explored the implications of this alternative in our contemporary context in which Vichian discourse includes a redescription of signs, reference, and representation as more than natural or conventional, but as fantastic because metaphorically embodied. Accordingly, there is a renewed look at disciplinarity as more holistic: in short, the modern fragmentation of the developing disciplines was due to a crucial misunderstanding of the conflated nature of their origins in language, particularly for the disciplines of rhetoric, linguistics, literature, philosophy, and history. |
