Abstract
The subject of this chapter is the relationship between marriage and equality in Giambattista Vico. In his writings Vico gives the notion of marriage a unique importance, not framed on any oversized notion of nature or natural law, but on the political fight for the right to marry (a quest for full citizenship status). The right to marry is linked with complex dynamics of human equality, and to a notion of human nature shaped by belief-dependent institutions. Such institutions revolve around shared beliefs, they too just falsis debentur, as Cardano would have put it, and can be therefore challenged from within. While such truth and such institutions are not challenged, however, efficacy phenomena will keep a given group in a painfully vulnerable position. Vico’s “heroic” age is a world of its own, and it implies a specific, and quite painful, vulnerability in its very structure.
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Notes
- 1.
Vico [1744] (1990), pp. 422, 488, 542, 544, 564, 645, 648–649, 660–661, 689, 708, 741–743, 896–897, 962.
- 2.
Vico [1744] (1999), p. 237.
- 3.
Vico (1999), p. 429.
- 4.
Vico (1999), p. 208, 212.
- 5.
Vico (1999), p. 69.
- 6.
Waldron (2002), pp. 1–3: “So the distinction between basic equality and equality as an aim is fundamental to Dworkin’s work. Yet Dworkin has said next to nothing about the nature and grounding of the principle of equal respect.” See above, Introduction, II.
- 7.
See, e.g., Nisbett (2009).
- 8.
On this intriguing theme, see Harrison (1992).
- 9.
Vico (1990), p. 426.
- 10.
Vico (1999), p. 465.
- 11.
Vico (1999), p. 24.
- 12.
Vico (1999), p. 90.
- 13.
Vico (1999), p. 145.
- 14.
Vico (1999), p. 91.
- 15.
Vico (1999), p. 225.
- 16.
- 17.
Vico (1999), p. 245, 163.
- 18.
On this subject, I have found useful the lecture by Hayden White at the International Conference Il sapere poetico e gli universali fantastici. La riflessione di Vico nella riflessione filosofica contemporanea (Naples, May 23–25 (2002): namely White (2002). White correctly stresses that one of the lessons of Vico’s New Science is that what is perceived as natural is often in fact quite artificial.
- 19.
Vico (1999), p. 166, 225.
- 20.
Vico (1999), p. 297.
- 21.
Costa (1996), p. 114.
- 22.
Vico (1990), p. 80. See in this volume, From Giovanni Della Casa to Giovanni Nevizzano: Efficacy in the Italian Tradition, section 5.
- 23.
Vico [1744] (1999), p. 476, italics mine.
- 24.
Vico (1999), p. 94.
- 25.
- 26.
Vico was a caring, loving father, and a family man. Only from democracies on, however, (former) plebeians can feel “affection for their own blood,” tenerezza del sangue. Before democracies, in the heroic times, “plebeian mothers [. . .] must have hated rather than loved children” (Vico (1999), pp. 433–434). Vico does not link a mother’s love to nature; nature itself, the “natural” feelings related to “the blood” (sangue), is explained with an eye to civil and political factors.
References
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Zanetti, G. (2023). Paradoxes of Equality: Giambattista Vico. In: Equality and Vulnerability in the Context of Italian Political Philosophy. Studies in the History of Law and Justice, vol 26. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35553-0_6
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