Abstract
The once obscure Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) enjoyed a rebirth of scholarly interest in the 20th century. In Anglophone scholarship especially, his appeal was strengthened by the perception that his intercultural sensibility anticipated modern attempts to valorise cultural alterity outside of the rationalist framework of Enlightenment discourse. In this dissertation, Vico’s representation of and engagement with China is used as a case study to illustrate the limitations of this secular reading of Vico’s intercultural sensibility. In the final 1744 edition of Vico’s magnum opus the Scienza nuova China is generally portrayed as an enduring relic of cultural primitivism. While praise is accorded to the humanity of the Chinese Emperor, China’s artistic and philosophic achievements are seemingly dismissed as uncouth compared to European sophistication. The rejection of an aesthetic or pluralistic approach to cultural alterity in Vico’s thought does not, however, leave us with Eurocentric monism. Rather, Vico’s intercultural sensibility is best understood within the Providential framework of the teologia civile ragionata. Till now, the theological significance of the teologia civile ragionata as a Providential valorisation of non-Christian religions has never been fully appreciated by Vichian scholarship. For the first time, Vico’s representation of China is examined against the backdrop of the Jesuit accommodation of Confucianism pioneered by Alessandro Valignano and Matteo Ricci at the end of the 16th century. Although the few scholars who have examined Vico’s Sinological interests have summarily dismissed the importance of Jesuit accommodationism in his thought, his engagement with China is not only deeply indebted to the rich 17th century Jesuit literature on China but also responds to some of its key theological concerns. While Vico does not take an explicit position on the Chinese Rites Controversy, he shares the Jesuits’ concern for how Chinese religion is to be integrated into and relates to the Judaeo-Christian Providential metanarrative. Through a comprehensive examination of the role of Divine Providence in the Diritto universale (1720–1722), it is shown that Vico’s first substantive engagement with China idiosyncratically builds upon the conceptual categories developed by the Jesuits in the 17th century to accommodate Confucianism to Christianity as a monotheistic natural philosophy. In the 1730/1744 editions of the Scienza nuova, however, the theoretical and philological underpinnings of Jesuit accommodationism are radically rejected as a egregious misreading of the Confucian corpus akin to the anachronistic interpolations imposed by Renaissance scholars on ancient myth. Yet, just as Vico’s rejection of Renaissance Hermeticism serves as the foundation of his radical rehabilitation of myth, his reconfiguration of Confucianism as una rozza e goffa filosofia should not be seen as belittling but the hermeneutic basis for his radical valorisation of Confucianism irrespective of the reconciliability of its theological claims with Christian monotheism.