Przeżycie wspólnoty w Autobiografii Giambattisty Vica

Abstract

Experience of a commonwealth in Vico’s Autobiography

Narration of Autobiography can be divided into two basic parts. The first describes Vico’s initial studies using a genetic method. Vico pictures himself as a loner, who teaches himself, an autodidact. Its culmination is marked by a nine-year-long „period of solitude” in Vatolla. The second part, starting with ascertaining himself as an outsider in his „native city,” is a story of Vico’s gaining popularity and his entering into a community of learned men. The Republic of Letters, as depicted in Autobiography is a heroic commonwealth, concentrated on paideia and constituted by fame and as such is opposed to solitude hence the critique of Epicureans, Stoics and Descartes. Thus all his efforts, crowned with the publication of New Science, and its recognition by scientific world, are motivated by a need of becoming an acknowlegded scholar. A perfect citizen of the Republic of Letters is a man of „heroic mind.”