Discussing "The New Science" By Giambattista Vico – Part II

In this episode of Canonball we continue discussing "The New Science," which was written by Giambattista Vico and first published in 1725, before being republished in a revised edition in 1730, and a final edition in 1744. See also Part I for more on Vico. 

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction, Letters, Poetic Characters, And Three Types Of Language
• 4:44 Vico And Spengler's Tables, Permitting And Honoring Harlots, And Mythology
• 7:38 Herodotus Describing Three Ages Of Egyptian History
• 8:24 Axioms Of Vico's New Science
• 11:32 Natural Law Emerging Independently In Each Nation
• 12:13 The Emergence And Possible Social Function Of Religion
• 14:15 Vico And The Bruner-Postman Playing Card Experiment
• 17:33 Ethnogenesis
• 18:43 Connecting Vico To The Wars In Iraq And Afghanistan
• 21:31 The First Family Founders And Agriculture; Customs And Natural Law
• 25:37 Religion, Marriage, And Burial
• 30:33 Theological Poetry As The Origin Of All Fields Of Knowledge
• 36:09 How One Might Approach Reading Vico

Transcript

Hello and welcome back. Last week, we started looking at the new science by Giambattista Vico and this week We're going to pick up right where we left off So if you haven't yet you can go and check out last week's episode There may be some background in it that will be useful to understanding this We talked a little bit about his thesis and about his position in history and now we will be getting a little bit more into the details of what he talks about and along with his Three stages of history that nations go through he talks about three stages of early language The first one is an early stage and he describes it as a mute language of signs and objects Which have a natural correspondence to the ideas which they are meant to signify and he talks later about hieroglyphics The second one he said was spoken through heroic devices similes analogies images metaphors and natural Descriptions and then the third is the human language that's spoken through words agreed upon by peoples and this is the language of monarchies and republics and he says that these stages of language can be seen among the languages of the Chaldeans the Scythians the Egyptians and the Germans and in talking about hieroglyphics He says that they continued longer among Egyptians Egyptians continued to use Hieroglyphics after other nations stopped using them because the Egyptians were Isolated somehow and that even at the time he was writing the Chinese were still using a kind of hieroglyphic Language system a system in which each individual word has a symbol and as we mentioned last week one of the tools that he uses for doing what he's trying to do is Etymology and we also just recently read the dialogue of Plato called Cratylus Which is all about etymology and the conclusion that Plato comes to there is that you can't access ultimate truth through etymology because early words were developed by people the same way that Modern words are and all that you'll find in an old word is the ignorance of the person who developed that word But Vico here is mostly using etymology as a path not to absolute truth But to history and we might get into some examples of that But it's worth making that distinction if you're trying to learn about the bedrock of what is true Then etymology might not be able to help you because all you're going to learn about is the way that older people thought but if you're trying to learn about older people's etymology might be able to help you there and Vico has this concept of poetic characters and when it first comes up the editors give a very nice footnote about it but basically, it's the notion that in ancient poetry a particular person a character doesn't refer to an individual but a fusion of Traits or a type of person and looking at old poetry this way can open it up a lot to interpretation talking about poetry like the Iliad or the epic of Gilgamesh because whereas in Modern thinking and writing a person might say this type of person might succeed in this way But fail in that way in an ancient poem the writer will convey that message Less directly through the character and the events of the story Achilles is this type of person? These are the things that happened to him as a result and looked at in this way This invites a reader to be much more active in interpreting this kind of very old literature which sometimes can seem a little alien because the characters may be act in a way that we wouldn't normally act or they have values that We don't necessarily always share and at one point Vico says, I think I have a note of it here somewhere maybe we'll get to it something like that his science the new science that he's talking about is Essentially a science of criticism meaning of literary criticism that it's interpreting these stories and drawing knowledge from them That might be going a little bit too far but I remember reading a sentence like that and being a bit surprised by it, but we might be here getting a bit of an example of this relationship between literary criticism and the interpretation of history or trying to access Deep history of which there are not very many records and one tool for that is this notion of poetic characters? And he says that the three types of language thereby give rise to three types of governance and jurisprudence each one corresponding to one of the three stages that he talks about and he Says at one point quote the false religions begin to fade away with the advent of letters Which is the beginning of philosophy and quote and throughout much of the book as here He's talking about the pre-christian pagan religions But he says with the emergence of letters those religions start to fade and philosophy starts to emerge and last week we mentioned some similarities between Vico and Spengler and another minor one to point out here is that they both make use of Tables Spengler at the end of volume one of decline of the West Vico relatively early in his book They both have these very similar tablesthat across the top list various nations and then going vertically describe different time periods where various things were going on. And that shows how both were trying to develop a schema into which to fit the various events and what they perceived as patterns of world history. And at one point talking about the morality of the inland Egyptians, the Egyptians who were far from the sea or I guess the Nile, he says, quote, their morals were dissolute. They not only tolerated, that is permitted harlots, but even made them honorable, end quote. And that line made me feel very distinctly how these things can change in history. So Vico is writing in the early 18th century in Italy, a time when harlots to use his word were not even permitted really in polite society, much less made honorable. So for him looking at this social order of the inland Egyptians, as he saw it somewhere, this was very surprising. But for us in the 21st century, you could argue that Hollywood or the music industry or other institutions of modern life do just that. They make harlots honorable. And not only to pick on women, they also make honorable the male equivalent of a harlot, something that also wouldn't have been permitted or honorable, or at least as openly acknowledged in 18th century Italy. So it's possible that in that very specific way, we are closer to the inland Egyptians in the time period that Vico is talking about than we are to enlightenment era Italy. And to get another angle on Vico's method here, he says, quote, the first science that ought to be learned is mythology. That is the interpretation of myths, because as we will see, all of the Gentile histories have mythical beginnings and because myths were the earliest histories of the Gentile nations. And it is with a method of this sort that we must recover the beginnings of both the nations and the sciences which emerged from these nations and from nowhere else, as will be demonstrated throughout this entire work. It is in the public necessities or advantages of peoples that the sciences had to have their starting points. And it is only later by particular men of acuity applying reflection to them that the sciences were perfected. And from here must start the universal history, which all the learned say is lacking in its proper beginnings, end quote. So again, he's using mythology to get at the origins of nations and not only the history of those peoples, but the history of their sciences, which he says originally came from the necessities of those peoples, what they needed on a day-to-day basis and that they were then later perfected and advanced by other people. And he mentions at one point that Herodotus describes three ages of history and three languages of the Egyptians. And it's been a long time since I read Herodotus, so I don't remember that, but I believe it. And he somewhere else also focuses specifically on that Egyptian. It's toward the end somewhere. He says these three stages that the Egyptians describe in their own history as having already been experienced by them, we can apply to other contexts, something like that. He says later that the initial laws, the first laws were established by custom. And again, to reiterate the point, his effort, he says later, is to bring the beginnings of the humanity of the nations to the principles of a science. He's trying to develop a science by which to study the beginnings of the humanity of the nations. And he later starts listing axioms of this science. And there are 114 of them, but it might be a little bit bold to call them axioms. They're not axioms the way that Euclid would use the term, for example. But we might think of them as fundamental principles that Vico asserts and that he views as foundational to what he is setting up. For example, the first one is, quote, man on account of the indefinite nature of the human mind, whenever that mind is overthrown by ignorance, makes himself the measure of all things, end quote. And there's a little reference there to Protagoras, who said that man is the measure of all things. And Vico's criticism of that statement is interesting that man thinks that when he is overthrown by ignorance, and I'm inclined to agree with that statement, but I have a hard time calling it an axiom. The second one is, quote, it is a second property of the human mind that whenever men are unable to make out some idea of things that are distant and unknown, they evaluate them relative to things that are known and present, end quote. And so here we have Vico trying to get at how ancient peoples were thinking about things. And he's trying to do that by establishing some basic descriptions of the way that people think he's trying to get at the subjectivity of those ancient peoples so that he can interpret their myths and their laws. His eighth axiom is, quote, things outside their natural state do not adapt or persist there, end quote. And the ninth one is, quote, men who do not know the truth of things take care to hold fast to the certain.For if the intellect cannot be satisfied with knowledge, sienza, the will, at least, can repose in consciousness, cosienza." And the translators included the Italian, because I guess the words for knowledge and consciousness in Italian are very similar, sienza and cosienza. And that one caught my attention because he's making a distinction between truth and certainty, that what you're certain of is not necessarily what's true. And so if people can't get at what's true, they'll be satisfied with what's certain. And elaborating on that a little bit, the 10th axiom is, quote, philosophy contemplates reason. Whence comes science about the true? Philology observes authority in human choice. Whence comes consciousness of the certain? End quote. And later he gives a definition of common sense. He writes, quote, the common sense is a judgment without reflection, sensed in common by a whole order, a whole people, a whole nation, or the whole of humankind. End quote. And it's interesting that he says it's a judgment without reflection, sensed in common. It's something on which they don't reflect, but they sense it. And a whole group of people senses it. Again, this is important for Vico trying to imagine past times and how people were thinking. You need this notion of common sense for that. Because what was common sense in Egypt in 1000 BC might not necessarily be common sense in 18th century Italy or in the 21st century. And later he writes, quote, this will be the first of the continuous labors to be made in these books, to demonstrate that the natural law of the Gentile peoples came into being privately for each people without one knowing anything of the others. And that later, by the occasion of wars, embassies, alliances, and commerce, it was recognized as common to all of humankind. End quote. So what he calls the natural law, he says, emerged in each people independently. It didn't spread as a meme. It occurred naturally because of the circumstances of early human life. And then as the different nations came into contact with each other, they realized that they shared this in common. And later he says, quote, whenever peoples have become so savage because of arms that human laws no longer have a place among them, the only means powerful enough to reduce them is religion. End quote. And that's one interesting explanation of the emergence of religion that in this pre-history that Hobbes and Rousseau and Vico talk about, that Vico says also was very violent. He says that religion is the only means of subjugating that violence. Now notice that's a different claim from saying that people cannot be peaceful without religion. Vico might think that also, but he's not saying that in that sentence. He's saying that if people have become so savage because of arms that human laws no longer have a place among them, then religion is the only way to walk that back. It's the only way to get things under control again. Later he writes, quote, here begins that refutation of the false statement of Polybius that had philosophers arisen in the world, there would have been no need for religions. For if republics had not arisen in the world, republics which could not have come into being without religion, there would not have been philosophers in the world. End quote. So Vico is answering Polybius. Polybius says this thing that had there been philosophers, there would have been no need for religions. And Vico says that that's impossible because there could not have been philosophers without republics, and there could not have been republics without religion. So there's no scenario in which, according to Vico, you could have philosophers before religion. Philosophy comes later, religion comes much earlier. And these are still from his axioms, by the way, but another one of them is, quote, men ignorant about the natural causes of things, when they cannot explain them, even by similar things, give these things their own nature. So for example, the common run say that the magnet is in love with the iron, end quote. So this one is pointing at the human tendency to anthropomorphize things that we don't understand, to make them like us or like humans in general. Later he gives an interesting short description of how we process or acknowledge new information. Vico writes, quote, at first, men sense without noticing, then they notice with a troubled and agitated spirit. Finally, they reflect with a clear mind, end quote. And this reminded me of a psychology experiment done by Jerome Bruner and Leo Postman, in which they used a device called a tachistoscope. Now they would just use a computer, but it was done in 1949. They used this device to show the subjects of the experiment playing cards for very short durations. It would show a card for a tenth of a second or something like that. And initially they showed the subjects of the test.playing cards and ask them to identify them. But then they slowly started to show them cards that don't exist in a regular deck. And I don't remember exactly how they did it but I think it was something like they showed a card that was a spade except it was red whereas you would normally expect it to be black. And since you only see it for a second and the subject is expecting to see certain suits in certain colors, when they would see these made-up cards they would first misidentify them. They would identify them as a card that is real, a card that they know. And then in the description of the experiment I remember reading that the subjects would sometimes get a little bit stressed because they can't understand what they saw and they weren't expecting the people setting up the experiment to be playing this kind of a trick on them. And I don't remember what the original intention of this experiment was but people have used it to show how in science when people are first studying some subject, if something new begins to appear, people can fail to identify it and then they can miscategorize it and then they can be distressed by it or something. And then they'll gradually be able to accommodate it in a scientific explanation because they'll be able to both see it and comprehend it more clearly. And all of that is encapsulated very nicely in this description that Vico gives in the early to middle of the 18th century. He says once again, quote, at first men sense without noticing, then they notice with a troubled and agitated spirit, finally they reflect with a clear mind. Later still talking about how man relates to surroundings and how he tries to comprehend them, Vico writes, quote, men confronted by things which are doubtful or obscure but pertinent to them naturally interpret them in keeping with their own natures and consequently in keeping with the resultant passions and customs, end quote. And this is related to some of those earlier points except that he specifically mentions passions and customs here. And this is part of how Vico is making the case that it's valid to use mythology, for example, as a way to interpret old peoples because he asserts if people can't understand something or if a person can't understand something but it's important then they will interpret it according to their own passions and their customs. And so the interpretation of something that people can't understand, for example, astronomy, will include a reflection of the passions and customs of the people doing the interpreting. So you can kind of reverse engineer some of the knowledge about those peoples. And along the same lines he says, quote, the myths of the earliest wild and crude human beings are found completely strict, a quality well suited to the founding of nations emerging out of a savage bestial liberty. Afterwards, with the passage of many years and changes to customs, these myths were distorted from their proper meaning or form, were altered or were darkened during times that were dissolute and corrupt, end quote. And there and in general we're here talking about ethnogenesis or the process by which nations form or are formed. And later he says that things progress such that first there are forests, then lodges, then villages, then cities, then academies. And reiterating his whole point, he's talking about these axioms that he's laying out as describing, quote, the first part of the principles pertaining to the ideal eternal history upon which all nations run their temporal course in their springing forth progress, maturity, decadence, and end, end quote. So again, he's very clearly trying to lay out this arc of the way that a nation has a life in which you can identify different periods. And axiom 69 is, quote, governments must conform to the nature of the men governed, end quote. And on the one hand this is again justifying his use of laws or information about government structures to get at something essential about the people being governed, that the government must reflect the people in some way. But it's hard when you read a line like that not to think of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and this modern dogma that everyone must have democracy or everyone would benefit the most from democracy, however you want to phrase it. And obviously a lot of very complicated stuff is included in both the causes and the effects of those wars. So what I'm about to say is not the only reason why neither war resulted in those countries resembling Denmark. And probably the main reason for that is that since the United States invaded them, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003, those countries essentially became the battlegrounds for various external powers. And it might be impossible for a democracy to form under those conditions. But another significant factor is that whatever the conditions, the formation of a democracy seems to take a long time. And people like to say that English democracy, for example, began in 1217 with the Magna Carta and people usethis to demonstrate how these processes take time and you can't expect them to happen over the course of a decade or two. But I would say that's actually going not anywhere near far enough and you might instead find the origins of English democracy actually in Athens in the 5th century BC. Though this region is a little foggy because on the one hand while there was definitely a revival of interest in classical texts in Latin, in Greek, in the Middle Ages, as we've talked about many times, there were also processes forming in places like Iceland and in Northern Europe that could be thought of as proto-parliamentary. As we saw in Nihal's saga, there were annual gatherings of powerful people to organize and discuss what was going on and I think it's safe to say that those guys did not begin doing that because they read Aristotle and were inspired by it. They did it for some other reason. So you can't only attribute this to a revived interest in classical thinkers. And also the American Wars in the Middle East involve some other things that are big and complicated and I don't want to get into them. But it's enough to say that while it would be wrong to essentialize the people of Iraq or Afghanistan and say the reason why they don't have a Danish style democracy is because they don't want one or it's not suitable for them. By the way, there is some level of democracy in Iraq. There isn't in Afghanistan anymore. So the two cases are not the same. But it would be wrong to simplify it in that way. But at the same time, I do think there is some truth in what Vico asserts here, quote, governments must conform to the nature of the men governed, end quote. Vico writes later, quote, in the profane state of a lawless world, only a very few at first, those who were more vigorous, retreated to form the families by which and for which the fields were brought under cultivation. And many others, in a much later age, afterwards retreated, taking refuge in the lands cultivated by these fathers, end quote. So now he's imagining how this process of agriculture started and how it related to the formation of the first families. And it seems there that he says the family came first, that first some guys, he says, the more vigorous, retreated to form families by which and for which the fields were brought under cultivation. And then after that, he says, much later, other people started to take refuge in those, we might call them farming families, that had already been set up. But it wasn't that everybody started doing this at the same time. Some people started, they did it for a while, and then other people later had a reason to go and seek refuge in them. And later he gets into the relationship between customs and law. And he sets up these two parallels, where on the one hand he has the king governing by custom in accordance with natural reason, and he says that tyrants govern by law against natural reason. And expanding on that a little bit, Vico writes, quote, for grant that the natural law of the Gentile peoples amounts to orders instituted by means of what is customary, which Dio says gives decrees like a king through what is pleasing, and not orders instituted by laws, which Dio says gives decrees like a tyrant through force. Grant that this is first, because the natural law coming to be from those human customs comes from the common nature of the nations, a subject to which the science is equal, and second, because that law preserves human society. For there is not one thing more natural, because there is not one thing more pleasing, than giving observance to natural customs. Granting all this, human nature, from which such customs come, is sociable, end quote. So he says the natural law of these ancient peoples came out of custom, and those customs came from the common nature of nations, which is the whole topic of the book, and that this is why it's pleasing to carry out customs, to carry out traditions, Vico says, because they are anchored in human nature. And he also has this idea that comes up a few times, which is that up to the time that he's writing, people have studied the natural world, but they haven't studied the civic world nearly as extensively, and the natural world was made by God, Vico says, only he can have knowledge of it, or science of it, whereas the civil world is made by men, so it's possible for men to have knowledge of it. Now the irony is that coming up on 300 years in the future, we still have much better, more usable knowledge of the natural world than we do of the civil world, it seems. And maybe that's because the people who are trying to study the civil world have been going about it in all the wrong ways, and we just need some smarter people to approach the problem. Or it may be because the civil world involves the study of the human mind, the thing of which we theoretically should have the most immediate knowledge. The whole rest of the world might only be sensation, and we can only access that secondhand through our senses, but we should have immediate knowledge of our minds, or the most immediate knowledge possible.that it's exactly the presence of this object that makes studying civil life so difficult. It's not only the study of one mind, as psychology is, it's the study of how many minds interact with each other and take action based on the actions of each other. So Vico sets that up in a way that's maybe encouraging for people to study more of what we would later come to call sociology or political science. But it seems that for now, at least, we are still better at developing explanations about the natural world than the civil world, despite this reasoning that he puts forth about why it should be easier to have the reverse. He mentions later that all nations, whether they're barbarous or humane, do three things. They have religion, they contract solemn marriages, and they bury their dead. And he takes these as the three first principles of the science that he's laying out. And he later expands on that idea by connecting these practices to three ideas he talks about, quote, divine providence, the moderation of the passions in connection with marriage, and the immortality of the human soul in connection with burial, end quote. And again, Vico was himself a religious guy, but he's not saying here that you have to believe in divine providence or the immortality of the soul. He's saying these are somehow foundational to this ideal history that he's laying out. And we're using ideal here not in the way that it's used in everyday life to mean the best or the best possible, but to mean an abstract history, a history that somehow includes the essentials of all histories. And upon reading that again, I noticed that those are three things that the atheist worldview, to which I subscribe, does not address very well. Obviously, it doesn't accept divine providence. It, for the most part, doesn't accept the immortality of the human soul. And while there are atheists who can believe in the moderation of the passions, specifically in connection with marriage, it seems that if you take the public, the masses, the hoi polloi, the ordinary people, the middle of the bell curve, I'm always grasping at a good word for that concept because in Turkish, this language I learned in my 20s, there is a very specific word for it that's only used to describe that. It's only used to describe ordinary people in a maybe less educated sense, or maybe not less educated, but less thoughtful. Somebody can be very educated and not thoughtful and very thoughtful and not very educated. And probably the relevant metric here is the number of hours spent in contemplation, in reflection on oneself and one's world and one's own behavior and that of the people around them of abstractions like good and bad and beautiful and ugly, rather than hours spent in a classroom. But anyway, we don't have to figure out right now exactly what we mean when we refer to these people. But it's useful to be able to talk about ordinary people who don't spend very much time thinking about this kind of thing, who perhaps lead the unexamined life, because there are many people like that. And anyway, in Turkish, there's a very nice word that immediately pulls up all of that. And in English, when you say the public or the people, it's not quite as specific. That's why in my desperation, I bring in colloquialisms like the hoi polloi, but that doesn't really get it either. But anyway, you can be an atheist and also have a concern for these other things about moderating your passions or controlling your appetites or whatever phraseology you want to use. But it seems that in the late 20th and early 21st century, the results are in the masses when they get a basically atheistic worldview. They don't care about any of that stuff. And this is a challenge, I think, for the atheist position that it needs to address. There might be logical problems with arguing for God and it might be that the atheist position is stronger there. But it might be the case that religion is a significant organizing force for a society. And when you remove that, the clock is ticking and it may take some time, but it's going to dissolve. I'm not sure if that's what I think, but if you grant that women who are not very connected to a religion are more likely to become pregnant outside of marriage, which is probably a safe assumption. It won't be true in every case, but I'm willing to bet that it will be true in the aggregate. And then if you notice the statistics that I'm sure we've talked about, that since the 1970s, the rate of children born to unwed mothers has been steadily increasing, and now it's at an all-time high. And then if you look at the stats related to children who grow up without fathers and their rates of criminality or having difficulty in school or various forms of antisocial behavior, and that's not their fault, but children need a father. And then if you imagine that this trend will continue to increase, because so far it hasn't stopped, though that doesn't mean it won't necessarily, but it may well be that we are running on the fumes of a tradition of marriage. And the only reason things haven't totally fallen apart yet is because there is still that cultural weight of some kind.of expectation that you get married before you have children and many people or most people still follow that but if it's steadily increasing it's possible that in 100 years we won't even have that anymore and so there you have a pretty straight line between the removal of religion and the spreading of these anti-social behaviors of what we now call criminality and this is a real thing that people who imagine the future of society being without religion have to acknowledge and grapple with and this isn't a reason why we should all go back to church it's just something i think about sometimes and i'm not sure what to do about it later in a line that's not really about his main argument but it's a nice description of something that's sort of hard to get at so i like to collect sentences like this he writes quote the mind uses the intellect when from a thing that it senses it gathers some other thing that is not contained under the senses and that's brushing up against kant and the peripatetic axiom of thomas aquinas so it's not exactly a tremendously original idea but it's a another phrasing of something that's not always easy to get at and he says at various times that the earliest wise men were theological poets this is the phrase that he uses and in a passage of a couple paragraphs that i want to read in full he he lays out a lot of what he's going to talk about later that we're not going to be able to get to but it gives you a glimpse of some of his ideas but this is talking about how everything grows out of an initial poetic theology as he calls it vigo writes quote because metaphysics is a sublime science which partitions into their certain subjects all the sciences which are called subaltern and because the wisdom of the ancients was that of theological poets who arguably were the first wise men of gentile antiquity as was established in the axioms and because the origins of all things must by nature be rude we must on account of all this allow that poetic wisdom started from a rude metaphysics that from this metaphysics as from a trunk spread through one branch a logic a morals and economics and a politics all of which were poetic and through a second branch likewise poetic spread a physics which was the mother of a cosmography and consequently an astronomy rendered more certain by its two children chronology and geography and we will make it possible to see in each of these clear and distinct fashions how the founders of gentile humanity by their natural theology that is their metaphysics imagined the gods how by their logic they discovered languages how by their morality they generated the heroes how by their economics they founded families by their politics cities we will show how by their physics they established principles for all the divine things how by a physics particular to man they in a certain mode generated their very selves how by their cosmography they devised an entire universe of gods how by their astronomy they brought the planets and the constellations from earth to the heavens how by their chronology they offered a beginning to historical times and by with their geography the greeks for the sake of example described the world within greece itself in such a manner this science comes to be in one breath a history of the ideas customs and deeds of humankind and from all three histories will come the principles of the history of human nature these being the principles of a universal history which seems to have been lacking its own principles end quote and this may in part be why way earlier vico said that the first thing to study is mythology not that mythology is necessarily the theological poetry that he's talking about but if it's not that it's something older to which we don't have access anymore because it's lost we're talking about what the wise men might have been saying 20 000 years ago and i have always been interested in greek and roman and european mythology but it's always felt a little alien sometimes it's kind of strange why are the gods fighting why is this goddess turning into a tree why is that god eating his children and that's probably because if you read them like a news report as an account of events then they don't make any sense and they seem useless but if you look at them in this way that vico is talking about they suddenly become very important not because they symbolize this or that thing i'm a little bit interested in that kind of symbology but i think you have to be careful with it because you can read anything into anything but actually by looking at it in reverse not by saying there's all this wisdom in this ancient stuff but rather that whether we like it or not if we accept what vico is talking about in those paragraphs a lot of our thinking about a lot of topics maybe all of it emerged from the initial parameters that were set by that primordial theological poetry and who knows it's possible that we could identify ways in which modern physics isstill constrained in certain ways by the worldview that's laid out in Hesiod. So looked at in that way, it's not necessarily that we ought to study this mythology in order to derive wisdom from it, but just the opposite. We might be able to better understand ways in which very old assumptions about the basics of the universe may still be affecting our thinking today. And maybe there's nothing like that, but I think it's worth being cautious about and looking into the possibility, because it's possible that our entire worldview, as Vico says, our economics, our history, our cosmography, our sense of ourselves, our politics, our morals, our logic, grows out of that initial trunk, as he puts it. And maybe it does, and it turns out that that's fine, and there's nothing that needs to be corrected in it. And in fact, this is a very wholesome and natural way of looking at the world, and we should adhere to it. Maybe it turns out that that's the case, but coming to either conclusion requires a familiarity with this material, which is maybe part of why Vico was, as we said, a counter enlightenment figure who was emphasizing the humanities at a time when some people were moving in a different direction. And in these two episodes, I've only gotten through five of my ten pages of notes, but I think we can leave it there because hopefully this gave you a general idea of some of what Vico talks about. If you are interested in this topic, in historiography, in ancient history, in the parabolas of nations, then this really is required reading. It's certainly not an easy read, and you will probably get as much out of it as you are familiar with texts and the mythology that he's talking about. So if you were going to approach a book like this, and you don't feel confident that you have some amount of the background needed to approach it, I expect most of my good listeners have much more than I do. But in case you're not sure that you do, one way to approach it might be to listen to that list of names that I read off in the previous episode of all of the different writers and thinkers that he cites the most, and pick out the however many that you want from that list, five or ten maybe, names about which you've always been curious but feel like you don't know well enough, and read some of their stuff first, and then come and read this. And all of that won't only be preparation for reading Vico, it will also be tremendously valuable for its own sake, but it will have the added benefit of setting you up to get more joy and knowledge from reading this. Because often when we're talking about a book, as you know, I'm cautious to not spoil it. If we're looking at fiction for example, I want to talk about it in a way that's interesting, that reflects some of my thinking about the book in a way that you can enjoy, but that if you want to go and read it, I won't have ruined the experience for you. And with a book like this, I think the reverse is true. You are hopefully a little bit better prepared to read it if you want to, just after having listened to these two episodes. Not because I've summarized it in a very brilliant way or anything like that, far from it, but just having a little bit of orientation about what Vico is going to be talking about. Of course I slanted these towards what caught my attention, I emphasized certain things, I skipped over all kinds of stuff, but going in knowing a little bit about what to expect will definitely help you get more out of this book. I'm certain that if I now read it again, I would get a lot more out of it the second time, even though I got so much material that we couldn't get anywhere near all of it. Because Vico is so erudite and he uses so many references, it's useful to know a little bit in advance about the kind of arguments that he's going to be making, about how he's going to use the material that he presents to make those arguments, so that you can see them coming and understand them a little bit better. Because I definitely often found myself going, why is he talking about Percy as a shield now, and I'd have to go back and figure out what he was using the shield or whatever else the reference might be to demonstrate. But we can leave it there for now. Farewell until next time, take care, and happy reading.