Poets Over Professors: Why Giambattista Vico Thought Rationalism Was a Joke

By Francesco Solimena – http://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/S182531/VICO_G.htm, Public Domain,

Giambattista Vico was a man out of time, like a misfit poet thrown into a world obsessed with calculators.

While everyone else was busy building castles of logic, he was scribbling wild theories in the margins, reminding humanity that life isn’t an equation; it’s a chaotic, messy poem.

Rationalism? To Vico, it was like trying to capture a storm in a spreadsheet. You can’t, and if you try, you miss the point entirely.

In The New Science, his mad, brilliant manifesto, Vico painted a picture of humanity that wasn’t clean or linear but cyclical and raw.

He didn’t just laugh at rationalism; he saw it as a kind of tragic comedy—a failed attempt to turn the roaring poetry of human history into a dull lecture.

Vico’s Big Idea: Life Is a Spiral, Not a Straight Line

Rationalists like to think humanity is on some grand upward climb.

Start with mud huts, end with moon landings. Simple, right? Not to Vico.

He saw history as a drunken loop, a spiral we stumble through over and over again.

Vico’s spiral works like this:

  1. The Age of Gods – Back when humans were terrified of thunder and thought Zeus was bowling in the sky. Life was symbolic, ritualistic, and deeply imaginative.
  2. The Age of Heroes – This is when we got cocky. Kings and warriors strutted around like they owned the place, and myths became the foundation of societies.
  3. The Age of Men – Rationalism’s time to shine. Laws replace myths, logic crushes poetry, and everything becomes unbearably serious.

Just when we think we’ve nailed it with our “Age of Men” logic, the spiral flips, and we tumble back into chaos.

The gods laugh, and we’re back to square one, trying to figure out why the world doesn’t make sense.

Table 1: The Spiral of History

StageDominant ForceHuman Focus
Age of GodsMyth and imaginationSymbols and rituals
Age of HeroesPower and hierarchyGlory and legend
Age of MenRationality and logicSystems and structure
Back to ChaosCollapse and confusionSurvival and renewal

The Problem With Rationalism: Killing the Magic

Rationalism is like that smug guy at a party who insists on explaining every joke.

Sure, he’s technically right, but he’s also sucking the life out of the room.

To Vico, rationalism wasn’t just boring; it was dangerous. It reduced humanity’s wild, poetic nature to a checklist.

Vico didn’t hate logic—he wasn’t some drunk railing against science. He just thought that by putting logic on a pedestal, we lost something vital: the ability to dream, to see the world through symbols, to feel awe.

Rationalism killed the gods and replaced them with bureaucrats.

Explaining It to a Kid: Myth vs. Math

“Imagine you’re on a deserted island,” I say, looking at my apprentice, who’s maybe 12 and already smarter than me. “You see lightning strike a tree. What do you think?”

“I’d probably be scared,” they say.

“Exactly,” I reply. “But then you’d start to wonder—what caused it? Ancient people thought it was the gods, like Zeus hurling thunderbolts. That’s where myths come from. They’re our first attempt to explain the world.”

“But isn’t it better to know the science?” they ask.

“Sure, science tells us how it happens,” I say, “but myths tell us why it matters. Vico believed that without stories, we lose a piece of our humanity.

Rationalism is great for building machines, but it’s useless for understanding the soul.”

The Science: How Stories Shape Us

Vico had it right, damn it—myths weren’t just bedtime stories to pacify children or old drunks by the fire. They were the blood and bones of society, the scaffolding that kept everything from crumbling into dust.

Neuroscience agrees, not that it matters. Stories don’t just tap you on the shoulder; they grab you by the throat. They light up parts of the brain that facts and logic can’t even dream of reaching.

A 2006 study—by some white coats in a sterile lab—proved it: narratives pump out oxytocin, the stuff that makes you feel less alone in this cold, brutal world. They’re why you cry at movies and not Excel spreadsheets.

And then there’s rationalism, poor, sad rationalism, clinging to its flowcharts and diagrams like a drunk hugging an empty bottle.

It strokes the prefrontal cortex, the bean-counter of the brain, cool and detached, as warm as a morgue slab.

Useful? Maybe. But good luck building a culture with nothing but cold numbers and logic.

You might as well try to paint a sunset with a ledger or write a love song with tax forms.

Societies built on that alone crumble fast, leaving nothing behind but gray dust and forgotten names.

The Critics: Why Some Say Vico Was Full of It

Not everyone’s buying what Vico’s selling. Take Steven Pinker, for instance. He’s the guy who argues that rationalism and Enlightenment thinking have made the world safer, smarter, and better.

In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker lays out graphs and stats that show how logic has reduced violence and improved human life.

Then there’s Karl Popper, who called historicism (the idea of predictable patterns in history) a slippery slope to totalitarianism.

To him, Vico’s cyclical view of history was not just wrong—it was dangerous.

But here’s the thing: neither Pinker nor Popper could explain why, despite all our progress, the world still feels so empty.

Analyzing Key Quotes of Giambattista Vico

Below are a few quotes from the master explained simply:

“Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance.”

Explanation – First, you’re cold, hungry, desperate—a beast scraping for survival. Then you figure out fire, tools, shelter. Things get easier, so you pad the edges, make them softer.

One day you’re fat on indulgence, chasing cheap thrills because what else is left?

Luxury kills your grit, and before you know it, you’re drowning in silk, choking on your own excess, lost in the madness of abundance. The curve is inevitable, like a man building his own gallows.


“One truly understands only what one can create.”

Explanation – You can talk about it all you want, read about it, fantasize about it, but until your hands are in the dirt—until you’ve made something, failed at it, and made it again—you don’t know squat.

Creation is the crucible where understanding gets burned into you. The rest is just noise.


“The straight line cannot proceed through the torturous twists of life.”

Explanation – Life’s not a goddamn highway; it’s a back alley full of broken glass and dead ends. If you think you’re going to march forward without getting derailed, you’re deluded.

The twists make you. They’re the scars you wear, the proof you lived. A straight line’s just a shortcut to a boring grave.


“The nature of peoples is first crude, then severe, then benign, then delicate, finally dissolute.”

Explanation – Civilization starts with grunts and fists, raw survival. Then it finds rules, strict and unforgiving. Eventually, we learn kindness, soften the edges, and refine the art of being human.

But refinement is a slippery slope to decadence. Give it time, and everything goes to hell. Progress eats its own tail.

“Common sense is judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire nation, or the entire human race.”

Explanation – Common sense isn’t wisdom; it’s the lazy herd instinct. A collective gut reaction that needs no thinking, no questioning.

It’s the reason empires rise and fall, why everyone loves the same lies. It’s comforting, sure, but it’s a shallow pool to swim in. Don’t mistake it for depth.


“People first feel things without noticing them, then notice them with inner distress and disturbance, and finally reflect on them with a clear mind.”

Explanation – At first, life hits you like a whisper—soft, unnoticed. Then it’s a scream, a burning knot in your chest. The pain or joy is raw, unprocessed.

Eventually, you sit with it, pick it apart, turn it into something you can understand. Clarity always comes last, after the storm.

Conclusion: The Joke’s on Us

Vico’s laugh at rationalism wasn’t just a joke—it was a warning. Rationalism promises clarity but delivers sterility. It builds systems so perfect, so efficient, that they forget the chaotic, irrational beauty of being human.

And here we are, stuck in the Age of Men, scrolling through identical feeds, trapped in systems we barely understand.

But Vico’s spiral isn’t all bad news. After collapse comes renewal. Maybe we’ll rediscover our poetic roots. Maybe we’ll break free of the algorithms and find new myths to live by.

Or maybe we won’t. Maybe we’ll keep spiraling into the void, trading our souls for convenience. But the choice is ours, and that’s the most poetic thing of all.

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