Viewing Vico within German Idealism. On Jacobi’s Comparison of Vico with Kant and with Schelling’s System of Identity

Although it generally holds that Giambattista Vico was almost never mentioned in Germany during the heyday of German idealism, there is an important exception to this general statement. As he happened to be acquainted with Vico’s early work De antiquissima Italorum sapientia ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda (1710), Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi made interesting use of a passage from this book in his Von den göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung (1811), which is famous for its polemical tone towards Schelling’s system. He here indicates that Kant’s central insight that we concieve an object only insofar as we are able to construct it in our thoughts (as is the case in geometry as opposed to metaphysics) had been formulated in Italy “long before Kant” in Vico’s work, as well as in France in the work of Pascal. The paper will examine this curious comparison between Vico and Kant and the role it might have played in its original context.