Vico e la crisi della modernità

Abstract

This article examines Giambattista Vico’s reflection on the crisis of modernity, tracing its roots in the complex cultural and political environment of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Naples and, in particular, in his confrontation with Cartesianism and the new forms of scientific knowledge disseminated through the Neapolitan academies. It argues that Vico’s criticism is not directed against modern science as such, but against the claim that knowledge can be grounded in intuitive evidence, abstraction, and the separation of cognitive faculties. Against the Cartesian paradigm, Vico develops a conception of knowledge based on the verum-factum, inventio, and the cooperation of memory, imagination, and ingenuity. From this perspective, myth, language, symbols, and technology constitute original and creative forms through which human beings construct the civil world. Particular attention is devoted to the relationship between imagination and technology: the instrumenta that enable the transition from savagery to civilization are products of human ingenuity, yet they may become sources of impoverishment when homo faber is reduced to a mere homo technicus. Vico’s critique of modernity thus emerges as an internal critique of modernity itself, one that recognizes its scientific and inventive drive while preserving the historical, symbolic, and social dimensions of knowledge. Keywords: Giambattista Vico; crisis of modernity; verum-factum; imagination; technology.