Thoughts on Vico & Giants
Our thoughts summarised, following our podcast called The Philosopher who Believed in Giants.. .
Giambattista Vico
Giambattista Vico was an Italian Enlightenment philosopher and historian who, for some reason, believed in giants. Born in Naples in 1668, he described himself as a ‘stranger’ and ‘quite unknown’ in his native city since his work remained obscure. He was poorly for a lot of his early life and had a bit of home-schooling and there's a little theme of tragedy that characterises his whole life, career and health-wise.
Empirical observations and deductive reasoning were beginning to replace religious texts asthe main source of understanding. Decorates, for instance, wanted to use the reasoning of maths to underpin science ("I think therefore I am") and prove science to correspond to reality from the beyond all doubt. We know now that his answer wasn't great and left more questions unresolved. Though Vico lives in this time he's not really a rationalist. He's almost an anti-rationalist writing in response to the march of reason. He's more aptly described as a kind of romantic Christian Humanist and rhetorician. He valued logic and reason in fields like law and other arguments but thought that people like Descartes were too abstract in their thinking and, as a political philosopher and jurist he was more interested in history, jurisprudence and society.
He's a big fan of Socrates and ancient Greece in general and advocated oral philosophy and common sense over geometric methods. Though he's still interested in scepticism, reason, knowledge and questioning narratives he's still not a scientist. Vico returned to Naples from Vatolla to find "the physics of Descartes at the height of its renown among the established men of letters." And he thinks science is fine for determining how the natural world functions but won’t help us understand human behaviour. That is, civic life is not maths which is about logical certainty.
Verum Factum
In 1725, he wrote a book called the New Science. It tries to collect all the humanities subjects and use them to record and explain why societies rise and fall. It’s a mixture of anthropology and sociology but also its about knowledge itself and is categorically difficult to understand from a modern perspective.
Epistemologically Vico is a constructivist and seems to believe that knowledge is not objective. He came up with the phrase "What is true is precisely what is made". The mind may perceive itself but does not create itself and so only that which creates our minds can truly understand them through reason (ie. God). The natural world, created by God is fundamentally unknowable but human cycles of behaviour, created by us are eternal and we can get to know them very well.
This led Vico to begin working on a philosophy of history to solve the errors of all previous historians and tackle where their biases had led them astray. This greatly influenced thinkers like Edward Siad (who argued that the West had projected their own ideas onto the East) and Karl Marx (who was very interested in human behaviour and societal cycles).
The first part of the is the Conceit of Nations. The human mind is naturally both ignorant and arrogant, so will fabricate facts and all the previous historians before Vico were mistaken because they didn't realise this. True understanding of this principle yields the idea that history comes in cycles and every society think they are the true first to invent certain ideas or comforts and overestimate their importance. National prejudices then distort the truth after reading ancient texts and this has always happened so the same truths are reiterated over and over again without knowing. The nature of rumours, spreading worldwide plays a large part. Every civilisation thinks that it was the first and their beginnings were grandiose affairs. So English reading of Greek texts will be biased and moreover not realise that even the Greek texts contain the same kind of biases!
The Conceit of Scholars is very similar. Its more about a kind of moral or intellectual anachronism by the historian rather than the way in which texts are studied. He suggests looking at mythology instead of traditional sources to examine primitive cultures on their own level. For Vico, myth reflects a social reality so myth tells us something logic can't; that there's something true in the pagan myths of the first men. He writes that "(a) property of the human mind is that, when people can form no idea of distant and unfamiliar things, they judge them by what is present and familiar." He explores these fundamental truths by getting in the mindset of past people, removing himself from his culture and context… and theorises three ages...
The first is the Age of Gods - (This is where giants come in)
He writes "We must begin our discussion at the point when these creatures began to think humanly…Yet as I sought to discover the manner in which the first human thought arose in the pagan world, I met with arduous difficulties which have cost me a full twenty years of research to overcome. For I had to descend from today’s civilized human nature to the savage and monstrous nature of these early people, which we can by no means imagine and can conceive only with great effort." He believes that ancient pagan men "were stupid, insensate, and horrid beasts, that is, giants in the proper sense". He means this literally and offers no explanation for it - this is what fascinated Bertie and I.
The metaphysics of the giants springs from their senses and imagination. Rather than reason they used poetry and were awed by everything they saw… and because wonder is apparently always the work of God, everything was divine for them. This speaks to a blurring between what we now separate as different concepts. In a way, everything was an allegory for everything else. Speech, myth, nature, communication were all one and the world was personified. We've written a lot about how religious claims are often allegorical or functional and this is a more extreme version of this. Vico thinks that the giants possessed only robust physical strength and expressed their violent passions by shouting and grunting so they imagined the heavens as a great living body. They imagined that Jupiter was trying to speak to them through the whistling of his bolts and the crashing of his thunder.
Age of Heroes - The second age is a story of how moral virtue begins from conscious effort and this the seeds of civilisation are sown. He argues that the natural law of nations arose separately among various peoples who knew nothing about each other. In this way, there's a transcendent truth across all human societies. Because all societies develop rules, laws and customs that’s an argument to adhere to them - the alternative is to be brutish. Basically, its all an argument for civility because we can't be like those giants.
"Chained under the mountains by their frightful religion of thunderbolts", the giants reversed their customs, stopped walking around Earth's Great Forest and settled down with a lifelong mate in a cave. Strong giants protected the weak from the violent and that's how property began. Crudely, commonwealths formed from these fiefdoms as families rebelled against their leaders. So the strong men or heroes had to unite under the idea of kingship and have an heir and rule over the more animalistic plebs. The heroes believed they were closer to Gods because of their qualities. Newly descended from giants, the heroes were extremely grotesque and savage, possessing limited intelligence, but endowed with vast imaginations and violent passions. He makes a few references to people like Achilles.
Finally, the Age of Men furthers his moral argument. This one interested Marx the most. Like Marx he said religion performed a function. For Vico, "man has free volition to turn his passions into virtues. But since his will is weak, he must be aided by God." It’s a bit like AA; the idea that a higher power is needed as a catalyst. This is a common motif when talking about religion.
He describes a volatile state of affairs - that plebs always want to change rulership and nobles to maintain the status quo. Rulers need the plebs to maintain cities so give them powers which are their undoing and gives way to the truly human or civilized nature, which is intelligent, and hence moderate, benign, and reasonable. Everyone is more or less equal compared to the brutal age of heroes.
Reading relative unknowns or obscure thinkers is always useful for a philosophy student. In this case, Vico's insights show us the danger of historical biases and the spectrum of thought that existed during the enlightenment. It also shows us that giants were commonly thought to have existed and Vico isn’t the only one to assume this…
Giant Myths
In legends, they are nearly always brutish and directly antagonistic. Even in Roal Dahl's fairly modern stories they are generally evil. However, in antiquity they are not usually any more cruel than nature itself. This is more a reflection of the violent times of when the myths were created than a commentary on the creatures.
They are usually a relic of an older age (part of Jain cosmology, legendary Native American tribes were described as giants and the Aztec Quinametzin apparently created cities in a previous age). Anglo Saxons even believed that giants created many Roman structures. These creation myths usually mean that giants are apparently long gone and used more as a tool to inform a people or place. So they're part explanation and part reverence for some great feat, usually sort of tying into nature, civilisation or time itself because of their more primitive status. They're in the Bible (whole tribes and goliath is probably the most famous example) and Arabian mythology too. They are often metaphorical for nature itself, like a golem. As Bertie points out, they become less literal and more synonymous with rivers and mountains like many other mythical beings.
Categorising them is a hard task for folklorists too… Are they a mythological type of human or do non-human beings like trolls and ogres count? Ogres are more fantastical and used in purely fictional stories (or used retroactively to describe creatures like Grendel and cyclops at later dates). Ogres usually are more in line with orcs in that they are malevolent by nature, often tragically so like in Puss in Boots.
The cyclops shows us that myth often has a function (in this case it is the Greek fear of foreign people and lands). Fossils could be one explanation of their existence also. Proboscideans (big giant elephants and such) didn't live in the Mediterranean during this era of storytelling and hadn’t done for while. Some had downward pointing tusks and they were twice as big as an African elephant and sometimes the skull looks like a human head with a big nasal cavity in the middle that could be mistaken for an eye. Deinotherium and mammoths used to walk about in part of the world millions of years ago though. That would explain why France and Turkey also have the myth. Most of the fossils are in Spain and Turkey. Plus there's evidence of small ones in caves on Sicily and Cypress.
In Greek myths Hesiod said they were the offspring of Gaia (the natural world itself) and born from the violence of the gods. The motif of nature repeats as they're linked to things like volcanoes and earthquakes. The difficulty is that they are often confused with the titans!
English and Celtic myths often overlap due to the mixture of cultures and their interaction in the British Isles. Bendegedvran (or Brân the Blessed) is one of a few civilized examples of a giant, even ruling ancient Britain and fighting for his daughter's honour.This and the legends around Stonehenge offer a more nuanced view of their nature but generally until you get to Arthurian legends and they're total villains.
Norse myths are relatively interesting too. Jotuns or frost giants are beings from Jotunheim, influencing the white walkers in Game of Thrones. Its ambiguous as to what they were - big, small, ugly or beautiful. Essentially, they're just another type of being as are fire and stone giants.
Modern video games are all that is left of these legends and they largely lose their responsibility for creation and are presented as oafish creatures, enemies or primitive people. This is probably because they no longer work as a metaphor or explanation and thus are never depicted as scary or smart, losing much of their importance and soul.