Prophetic Utterance from Giambattista Vico

Vico, The New Science ^ | 1774 | Giambattista Vico

[ConservativeDude]

But if the peoples are rotting in that ultimate civil disease and cannot agree on a monarch from within, and are not conquered and preserved by better nations from without, then providence for their extreme ill has its extreme remedy at hand....

[ConservativeDude]

I have no comment. But this passage has always just awed me as it seems relevant continually to our contemporary world.....read the entire section to get his fully statement

[metmom]

Interesting.

When was it written?

The use of English indicates some time ago.

[goldstategop]

Tom Calen’s The Pandemic Sequence Trilogy now seems relevant.

[Hieronymus]

Worth the time to read.

It sounds to me like the major prophets, esp. Isaiah and Jeremiah, meet the Deists.

I’m guessing written in 1774 (given the date you posted) in Italian with the English translation being made at some point before 1870.

Can you give a thumbnail sketch of who the writer is for people too lazy to google?

[Weirdad]

That’s amazing, especially if you read more around it, nit just the quote.

There are quite a few pages to read there in the usual google books scanned-appearing format, obviously a genius. Not something that can be quickly absorbed.

I can see why you are thinking about this type of thing now.

[Larry Lucido]

Does he complete the sentence, or just trail off into ellipses?

Or is that you?

[ConservativeDude]

Yes.

Give me a few minutes.

[ConservativeDude]

no that’s the excerpt function....click on the link and go to google books and read the rest of the section :)

it will give you chills

[aquila48]

"Giambattista Vico (born Giovan Battista Vico /ˈviːkoʊ/; Italian: [ˈviko]; 23 June 1668 – 23 January 1744) was an Italian political philosopher and rhetorician, historian and jurist, of the Age of Enlightenment. He criticized the expansion and development of modern rationalism, was an apologist for Classical Antiquity, a precursor of systematic and complex thought, in opposition to Cartesian analysis and other types of reductionism, and was the first expositor of the fundamentals of social science and of semiotics."

[Lazamataz]

The ‘civil disease’ about which he writes is clearly not an actual ‘disease’ but is meant to represent one of many possible political follies.

[ConservativeDude]

And cultural

[ConservativeDude]

it seems the pace at which we are moving towards whatever can be included in Vico’s severe cyclical remedy has increased from when I posted this two months ago

[ConservativeDude]

if Vico be right....I guess when “all of this” (whatever that is) is said and done, those that remain will return to a simpler world where piety, faith and truth will be reborn.