Ovi Magazine Issue #26: WWI - 100 years - Published: 2014-07-28

Were we to apply this philosophy to the our ongoing modern era, Vico would most
probably locate it in his third era of extreme rationality, but please remember that the
three eras are cyclical, hence 2014, the year we are presently in, could be the very end of
the third cycle but at the same time it could be the very beginning of the recurring first
cycle when the gods return; that is to say, it could be an age of disastrous extremes and
decadence coming to an end and one of great promise, a renaissance of Humanism. For
the moment the two are not clearly distinguishable. But, in as much as man remains free
to choose his destiny, he remains free to choose to continue on the disastrous course on
which he has embarked since Descartes, that is to say, the path of extreme rationalism
and scientific positivism parading as philosophy, (as already thoroughly explained in my
articles on Vico and also explained by Ernesto Paolozzi in his Crocean elucidations on
modern Positivism), or recover his origins rooted in the poetical and begin a new era. That
is to say, he may decide to continue on the path of absurdity and dissolution or he may
welcome the return of the gods: a return to the poetical (hence the importance of Vico and
Croce’s aesthetics based on poetry and the intuitive) and begin a novel Humanism and
Renaissance. History will of course render the final verdict on this crucial question but
meanwhile we can read the tea-leaves so to speak, in an attempt to get a glimpse of the
cross-roads we are on.
A renowned scholar who thinks along the same Vichian lines is the British Marxist
historian Eric Hobsbawm, who in 1994 wrote a book with the intriguing title of The
Age of Extremes: The Short 20 th Century, 1914-1991, which he contrasted to the long
19 th century, from 1789 to 1914. In the US the book was published with the subtitle:
A History of the World: 1914-1989. He had previously written The Age of Revolution:
Europe, 1789-1848; The Age of Capital, 1848-1875; The Age of Empire: 1875-1914. In
other words, Hobsbaum thought that centuries are not to be measure and judged in strictly
chronological term via neat dates of one hundred years apart, a rather arbitrary operation,
but rather they are to be located in certain eras or cycles rationally and even poetically
conceived. This, in my opinion, is Vichian cyclical thinking at its best.
Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012)
But let’s look at the book a bit more closely. In it Hobsbawm talks at length on the
disastrous failures of state communism in Russia, which he sees as a betrayal of Marxian
socialistic ideals. Socialism, as per Marx, socialism which was supposed to come about