Historical courses and appeals to build a future for the new generations with a better world

  Admin | June 5, 2024

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A Neapolitan philosopher, historian and jurist named Giambattista Vico developed the theory of "historical courses and recurrences", according to which precisely specified events and situations (perhaps manifested only in forms and by characters with different profiles) are periodically re-presented over time. In summary, history always repeats itself, and Giambattista Vico Docet.

Docet [dò-cet] form used as the third person singular of the present indicative of a non-existent verb in the Italian language, built on the Latin docet 'teaches'; refers to something or someone who is authoritative, who has something to teach, who in exceptional cases has value as an example: caution is needed with nuclear power - Chernobyl Docet.

Vico asserted that some events were repeated in the same way, even after a long time and this happened not by pure chance but on the basis of a precise plan drawn up by divine providence.

Throughout history we have always contemplated situations that have reminded us of periods that have already passed, albeit in different forms, with different tools and new characters suited to the current period, unconsciously we have found ourselves faced with political, economic and cultural manifestations and situations that they remembered the past. Today we are witnessing situations, tumults, reactions on the part of the world's people in the face of a period that perhaps (as some experts say) has "tightened too much" for many "categories" of people and the Coronavirus has further given voice and It's still making you think.

The lack of what is to be considered basic for the simple living of the human being, the lack and trampling of values ​​such as respect for others, human rights, the search for truth, the need to no longer perceive living as to survive, have increasingly led beings to a frustrating feeling of oppression at all levels and to the need to react. Vico called the three cycles Divine, Heroic and Human.

In the Divine stage he argued that society was dominated by the senses and imagination.

In the Heroic stage, society was dominated by the "aristoi", i.e. aristocracy of the strongest.

The third stage, the Human one, was considered by Giambattista Vico to be the most advanced, in which society would be dominated by reason with consequent equality between men, for which the true divine providence is man.

Giambattista Vico (23 June 1668 – 23 January 1744) was an Italian philosopher, rhetorician, historian and jurist of the Italian Enlightenment and in 1734, he was appointed royal historiographer, by Charles III, king of Naples. His intellectual magnum opus is the book Scienza Nuova (1725), where he attempts a systematic organization of the humanities as a single science that records and illustrates the historical cycles through which societies rise and fall.

His influences over time up to the present day:

1867 in Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx's mention of Vico indicates their parallel perspectives on history, the role of historical actors, and a historical method of narration. Marx and Vico saw class warfare as the means by which men achieve the goal of equal rights; Vico called that era the "Age of Men". Marx concluded that such a state of affairs is the optimal goal of social change in a society, but Vico thought that such complete equality of rights would lead to socio-political chaos and the subsequent collapse of society. In this sense, Vico then proposed a social need for religion, for a sort of supernatural divine providence to maintain order in human society.

1978 in Orientalism, Edward Said recognizes the debt of his study towards Vico, whose "ideas anticipate and then infiltrate the line of German thinkers, such as: Herder and Wolff then Goethe - Humboldt - Dilthey - Nietzsche - Gadamer and finally in great fictional philologists of the 20th century Erich Auerbach - Leo Spitzer and Ernst Robert Curtius." As a humanist and early philologist, Vico represented "a different and alternative model that was extremely important, because it differed precisely from the dominant "standardization" that came with modernity . That the interdependence between human history and culture facilitates the task of scholars to «take seriously Vico's great observation that men make their own history, that what they can know is what they have done, and extend it to geography. Because cultural entities, not to mention historical entities, places, and geographic areas such as “South” “North” “East” and “West” are created by man.

1974 in Knowledge and Social Structure, Peter Hamilton identified Vico as the "sleeping companion" of the Age of Enlightenment. Despite being relatively unknown in his time in the 18th century, and read only in his native Naples, Vico's ideas are predecessors of the ideas of the intellectuals of the Enlightenment. Furthermore, recognition of Vico's intellectual influence began in the 19th century, when French Romantic historians used his works as models and methodological guides.

So Giambattista Vico "Docet" with his "historical courses and recurrences" has given us the opportunity to spread his vision everywhere, also creating an international chamber of commerce and social support starting just yesterday with the solidarity doctrine of Etienne Clémente to bring us to the present day with the equal solidarity doctrine of Isabella Pulpan, because society must be able to improve, unfortunately also from possible errors, to build the future for the new generations with a better world.