Since this is not meant to be for an academic audience, forgive the lack of detailed argumentation. I have said all that is essential, the rest is wholly intuitive. Feel free to contact me if you have any objections or questions.
Vico describes in his Scienza Nuova the principles of the universal history of nations in which are foundational the institutions of religion, burial, and marriage. History to Vico takes place in cycles, moving through the ages of Gods, Heroes, and Men as the Ancient Egyptians describe it. Through these ages nations develop in their corso and fall in their ricorso.
The corso of the first nations whose history we have begins after the universal flood. Of the period between the universal flood and the first thunder from which came the first word – Jove, there came the giganti.
In Chapter III of the second book of the New Science we are acquainted with their origin: “Mothers abandoned their children”, he says, “who had to wallow in their own filth”, these children would absorb the nitrous salts from their filth, and “without that fear of gods, fathers, and teachers which chills and benumbs even the most exuberant in childhood. They must therefore have grown robust, vigorous, excessively big in brawn and bone, to the point of becoming giants.” (NS 369).
Vico’s giants seem absolutely absurd to any serious ‘scientific’ inquiry, but we must note that the new science is wholly poetic, operating in the imaginative genera, universal class concepts that “with our civilized natures we [moderns] cannot at all imagine and can understand only by great toil”, to the imaginative genera Vico says the first men reduced “all the particulars appertaining to each genus; exactly as the fables of human times…reasoned out by moral philosophy” (NS 34, 412-427).
I now attempt an interpretation of the poetic wisdom which speaks of gigantic as describing a particular aspect of the current state of our nations.
If we are to look at our history, we will see that we cannot at all be in a corso. We are certainly moving towards a barbaric age. The age of Gods is characterized by the first word, Jove. The ricorso of civilization then must be identifiable by a forgetting of Jove, losing the primordial fear that gave birth to ‘reason’. Second, a ricorso will mark the loss of the foundational institutions.
Nietzsche describes in his work how we have moved past the need for God, or more appropriately, why God has died. Zarathustra remarks “Could it be possible! This old saint has not heard in his forest that God is dead!”.
The three institutions have as consequence begun to fade.
Let me not waste more time, and move to describing why we are returning to these Giganti.
The mothers who have abandoned us are those who have let us roam free within our own thoughts in the forest. The forest that we speak of is the internet, where like the primordial forest we live like beasts, free to pursue our passions in whatever bestial manner we choose to.
In this primordial forest, we see our filth- those ideas of ours that stem from our passions. Without the fear of God, we are left alone in the forest with these passions and like the excrement that those abandoned babies absorbed nitrous salts from, we absorb the same deranged ideas.
The idea that it is their own excrement that the babies absorb until they grow until they have become giants, can be understood only through analogy.
Without Jove, we left alone in the forest absorb our own excrement- social media algorithms which show you only more of that which you look at in a never ending cycle where your darkest appetites are constantly reinforced in a feedback loop- until eventually you become one of the giants like Nimrod (a giant) who in the 1856th year of the world – 200 years after the universal flood in the year 1656 of the world built a tower towards Jove which brought about the confusion of languages.
Hyder Husain Arastu 