Giambattista Vico

Giambattista Vico appears in Edward Said’s account not as a biographical subject but as a methodological presence: his insight that people make their own history allows Said to treat geography, cultural identity, and Orientalism as human productions rather than timeless facts. Vico’s importance lies in the reach of that principle. Extended from history to geography, it reveals how imagined boundaries can harden into objective-seeming distinctions and how the making of knowledge can be bound to power.

A precursor to comparative literature

Said places Vico at the beginning of an intellectual lineage that helps explain his own formation as a literary humanist. Trained in comparative literature, Said traces the field’s leading ideas to Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but identifies Vico, the Neapolitan philosopher and philologist, as a supremely creative precursor. Vico’s ideas anticipate and later enter the thought of Herder and Wolf, and the wider sequence Said names extends through Goethe, Humboldt, Dilthey, Nietzsche, and Gadamer to the twentieth-century Romance philologists Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, and Ernst Robert Curtius. Vico’s place in this genealogy is therefore not simply chronological: he supplies an early intellectual impulse that informs a tradition devoted to interpreting human cultures and their works.

That lineage also makes Vico relevant to Said’s defense of philology. Against the image of philology as musty antiquarianism, Said calls it the most basic and creative of the interpretive arts. His account of Goethe’s interest in Islam and Hafiz, and of the resulting West-Ostlicher Diwan and idea of Weltliteratur, describes a mode of comparison that can apprehend world literature as a whole without erasing the individuality of its works. Vico’s antecedent position situates him within this broad humanist project: knowledge is made through historical and interpretive labor, not received as an unchanging inventory of facts.

From human history to made geography

Said makes Vico’s principle explicit in his account of the Orient and Occident. Vico observes that people make their own history and that what they can know is what they have made. Said extends this proposition to geography: regions such as the Orient and the Occident are human-made as geographical, cultural, and historical entities. The claim does not make these places unreal. It directs attention to the histories, traditions of thought, images, and vocabularies through which the Orient acquired reality and presence in and for the West. The two regions, in Said’s formulation, support and to some extent reflect each other.

Said carefully distinguishes this construction from the claim that the Orient exists only as an idea. Cultures and nations located in the East possess lives, histories, and customs whose material reality exceeds anything said about them in the West. His study of Orientalism is not an exhaustive account of those societies; it focuses instead on the internal consistency of Western ideas about the Orient, whether or not those ideas correspond to the realities they claim to describe. Vico’s principle helps clarify the distinction: the fact that a category is made does not mean that the people assigned to it are fictitious. It means that the category’s apparent authority must itself be studied historically.

Classification, boundaries, and identity

Said’s discussion of classification develops the same insight through the idea of a “science of the concrete,” associated with Claude Levi-Strauss. Minds impose order by assigning things places, functions, and meanings, yet the rules of classification are not necessarily universal or predictably rational. A fern may signify grace in one society and be considered harmful in another; fashions such as wigs, lace collars, and high buckled shoes appear and disappear over decades. If historical things are made by people, then objects, places, and periods can acquire meanings that seem objectively valid only after those meanings have been assigned. Said singles out foreigners and people judged abnormal as especially susceptible to such imposed meanings.

The geographical boundary between a familiar space called ours and an unfamiliar space called theirs shows how classification becomes a structure of identity. A group may mark off its land from the territory beyond and call the latter the land of barbarians. The people across the boundary need not accept the distinction: it is enough for those drawing it to establish the division in their own minds. They then designate the others’ territory and mentality as different from their own. Said notes that a fifth-century Athenian could understand himself as nonbarbarian as well as positively Athenian. Identity is thus made both through belonging and through contrast, while suppositions and fictions gather in the space imagined beyond one’s own territory. Vico’s proposition that people make what they can know gives this process a historical logic: boundaries and their meanings are human acts, not neutral discoveries.

Vico’s principle and Orientalism’s power

For Said, however, showing that the Orient is constructed is not enough. To treat Orientalization as a mere necessity of imagination would conceal the power that makes representations consequential. The relationship between Occident and Orient is one of domination and complex hegemony; the Orient was not only described as Oriental according to commonplace European assumptions but could also be made Oriental through the exercise of power. Said therefore uses a Vichian method without reducing Orientalism to a free-floating invention. The historical production of categories must be examined together with the unequal relations that enable them to govern how other peoples are understood.

This connection explains why Vico matters to the book’s account of cultural domination. Said presents Orientalism as a historically coherent body of ideas that can persist beyond its correspondence with the societies it represents, while also insisting that those societies have realities irreducible to Western representation. Vico’s account of making history helps hold these claims together: representations are human creations, but their effects are real. The Orient and Occident become mutually supporting concepts, classification makes difference appear self-evident, and power gives some classifications greater authority than others. Vico’s importance, finally, is methodological: his principle enables Said to historicize the map of cultural difference without denying either the lived reality of the people mapped or the force of the structures that name them.