Vico and the moral objection addressed to Francis Bacon in De ratione

Abstract

The laudatory reference to Francis Bacon in the opening lines of Vico’s De ratione (1709) has overshadowed the censorship addressed to him by Vico in this work. I argue that, unlike the recent controversy surrounding Bacon's work, the vexatio naturae stigmatized by Vico is not motivated on the grounds of an objection to the violence exerted on nature. Instead, it aims to refute the plausibility of Bacon's desiderata and to invalidate the project of regnum hominis by recurring to specific expressions and wordings drawn from Bacon’s works. No other echo of this criticism addressed to Francis Bacon is to be found in Vico’s later works. On the contrary, in De mente heroica (1732), Vico will fully subscribe to the Baconian exaltation of the heroic notion of knowledge, considered in this text to be beyond criticism.