Imaginative universals and human cognition in The New Science of Giambattista Vico

Introduction

According to a familiar view, a scientist avoids prejudice by using universal concepts in order to capture the essential features of particular phenomena and to classify them into objective data. A fundamental element in identifying these universals will be their independence from everyday objects; using the language of mathematics, a “true” scientist attempts to define universals as abstract entities, leading from such mental functions as abstracting, categorizing, and predicating. As Galileo Galilei has succinctly puts it:

The universe cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word. (Galileo, [1623] 1957, p. 171)

According to another familiar view, imagination is a subjective component of the human mind, rooted in feelings, emotions, in a kind of impetus free from any rational valuation. However, even this imagination attempts to capture reality in its truth. An essential account of this can be found in a Charles Baudelaire’s claim:

Imagination is the queen of faculties. […] Imagination is an almost divine faculty which perceives immediately and without philosophical method the inner secret relations of things, the correspondences and analogies. (Baudelaire, [1884] 1964, p. 127)

The dichotomy adumbrated in these two quotations is very popular in the Western philosophical tradition. The first seems to have received support from the rigor and the advances of science, while the second has been claimed against the strict rules of an impersonal scientific progress. So, we could see these quotations in terms of an historical duality and we could also conclude that their eventual “reconciliation” could not occur without paradoxical results. Is this conclusion acceptable? Giambattista Vico does not think it is, let us try to see his reasons.

For Vico, the disjunction between the higher functions of human knowledge and the faculty of imagination, carried on faces a major problem—that is, an intellectual split between the science and the life activities which, in fact, makes knowledge possible. Within this kind of perspective, traditional theories of science and human cognition reflect a partiality because those processes that are considered scientific do not have meaningful relationship with significant areas of human phenomena. So, what Vico’s thought presents is the need to discover a new way of seeing the science as whole that is not bought at the expense of narrowing its meaning to a single set of activities, and that does not misplace the remarkable richness and complexity of human imagination. According to the pioneering work of Vico, imagination is the cognitive faculty we need in order to construct our world as meaningful for ourselves. There is a crucial symmetry between human life and imagination, because the latter does not simply provide us with occasional moments of refreshment, but it makes the human condition meaningful. In this light, the central point for my analysis is to insist on the novelty of Vico’s philosophy by reclaiming both the place of imagination as “the master key” of his new science, and the role of such imagination as a method that allows us to rethink human culture. In this sense, the present paper is intended as both an examination of Vico’s science of imagination and a proposal to explore its relevance to cultural psychology.

Before discussing Vico’s intellectual breakthrough, I shall examine the classical way of looking at Universals as abstract entities, independent of individual people and their actual life. The aim of this first section is to determine critically how and why Vico’s discovery of imaginative universals plays a role outside Western philosophical tradition.

Secondly, I consider Vico’s historical context and his rejection of Descartes’ rationalism, which has shaped the modern science. The objective of this second section is to argue that Vico’s conception of a new science cannot be understood apart from the intellectual atmosphere of his time, which looks at the forms of thought such as imagination as potentially dangerous to the individual reason.

Finally, I will take the liberty of suggesting how Vico’s philosophy might look upon cultural psychology. More specifically, I briefly sketch the third book of his The New Science, “The discovery of the true Homer,” viewing it as a case study for researchers in cultural psychology.

The philosophical problem of Universals

We may readily consider Plato’s metaphysics as emblematic of a philosophical system where the fundamental function of knowledge consists of abstracting the features of particular objects in order to grasp their highest reality and, therefore, their true. Especially in his early dialogues, Plato assigns the character of Socrates with the task of defining various universal concepts that can be scientifically valid only if they exist independently of the concreteness of experience as it is perceived and lived. Let us take a quick look at the Euthyphro (Plato 1966). In this dialogue, Socrates encounters Euthyphro on his way to court. There Socrates inquires about his interlocutor’s business there and is told that he is prosecuting his father for the murder of a servant. Socrates expresses his astonishment at the confidence of a man able to take his own father to court on such a serious charge. But Euthyphro overlooks this and states that, if both his father and the rest of his relatives believe that “it is impious for a son to prosecute his father” (Euphr. 4e), his relatives’ attitudes toward piety are, however, plainly wrong (Euphr. 4e). On the contrary, Euthyphro says he has a clear understanding of what is pious and impious, because he has an accurate knowledge of their form in itself. Here, Plato uses the term “idea” to signify a nonmaterial concept that transcends time and space (Euphr. 5a–d). This gives Socrates the opportunity to launch the process that has come to be known the “Socratic elenchus,” and he makes this philosophical request: “Tell me then what this form itself (idea) is, so that I may look upon it, and using it as a model, say that any action of yours or another’s that is of that kind is pious, and if it is not that it is not” (Euphr. 6e). There are quite a few issues here that deserve examination; for our present purposes, however, it suffices to note just two things. (1) Firstly, the aim of Socrates’ investigation. On the one hand, Socrates intends to discover universal concepts about how one ought to live; the direction of thought here is from the concrete to conceptual reason. On the other hand, he wants to test the person who is answering in order to determine if he is living a philosophical life. In this light, universal concepts are understood as a kind of instrument capable of therapeutic attitudes: they do so by determining the abstract conditions under which human life can be tested. However, this position falls into duality, because it supposes a speculative process of abstraction of universal contents from experience, in its both historical and material dimension. (2) Secondly, Socrates’ attempt seems to detect a tendency toward an austere cognitivism that invokes the authority of Reason in order to discover universal concepts that exist as abstract models. More specifically, universal concepts have an epistemic obligation in the philosophical setting, and they seem at odds with certain aspects of human experience that would appear to have problematic implications for a serious philosophical reflection. It is in this spirit that Euthyphro, in order to acquire knowledge of what piety is as universal concept, makes several attempts. Leaving aside, for purposes of this paper, that all these attempts to reach a result fail (thus the dialogue culminates in stalemate). It should be noted, instead, that here the criteria of rational engagement appear to avoid awkward commerce with mental processes whose role in explaining universal concepts may seem misleading, such as imagination. Let me recall the metaphor of the line dividing the soul’s cognitive powers at the end of Book VI of the Republic (Plato 1969, VI, 509d–513e). Plato here explicitly places imagination (eikasia) below the line. The purpose of education is to move the philosopher through the various sections of the line, as far as possible from imagination. OPEN IN VIEWER

Adopting this scheme as a general theory of knowledge, we can say that what has generally drove philosophers to think or speak in terms of a strict rationality is the appreciation of its clarity and precision (as in mathematical science) and, therefore, the refusal of the absurdities and incongruities that can shape our imagination.

In the Western philosophical tradition, the denial of the idea that human imagination may have significant implications in our conceptual lives has taken its lead; this is also true for all sciences aimed at producing universal knowledge. The call for abstract and necessary concepts has thus proliferated beyond the boundaries of various philosophical schools: from Plato to Descartes; from Kant to logical positivism. Anyhow, my recall of Plato’s metaphysics (and his stricture of imagination due to its nonrational character), is here motivated not so much to criticize its decisive influence on the course of Western thought. Rather, the main issue that concerns me is epistemological. We need to focus the process of knowledge construction, which happens through an analytical method, in order to understand how and why Vico gives us another perspective. The point is that for any theory of human knowing, one needs to explain the rapport between men’s knowing activities and the usage by which “true” is predicated of these same activities.

Let us return to Euthyphro’s fatigue with the Socratic elenchus. In order to arrive at “the truth value” of piety, Euthyphro must not imagine; he must not invent images that stand three times removed from both true reality and true knowledge. Rather, he must turn his whole soul away from the psychological status of imaginations—which can falsify his judgment—and he only needs to try to find the intelligible concept of piety, by informatively supplying necessary and sufficient conditions for any action or person to be pious. So, the concept of piety is conceived as a property common to particular things, in purely logical terms.

The difficulty Vico sees in this conception of knowledge and truth lies in what it excludes: if in order to arrive at “the truth value” of universal concepts, one would have recourse only to an abstract reasoning, the construction of meaning would not be part of cognitive functions. The process of knowledge do not generate meaning, but it only abstracts from a multiplicity of particular things those features or properties that are common to them, in order to classify them into specific classes. But it follows a split between those processes that are considered scientific and the human world as a product of meaning-making agents. According to Vico’s approach, the world in the middle of which we live arises from interdependencies of human requirements, hence the necessity of intervening in nature by humanizing it, as well as the necessity of creating accounts of the human ways of constructing the world as meaningful for ourselves. Thus, the classical paradigm of rational thought that Vico forcefully opposed, neglects a fundamental part of what it means both to be human and to manifest our particular nature shaped by our modes of symbolizations, such as: languages, religions, arts, kinds of customs, governments, jurisprudence, authority, etc. In short, we are talking about all those things that are—in Vico’s terms—forms of human imagination, and that constitutes culture not as separate from nature, but harmoniously woven into it. As noted above, what Vico calls imagination is the cognitive faculty we need in order to construct our world as meaningful, and then livable, for ourselves.

It should be noted that the original setting for Vico’s use of the notion of imagination (both through the Latin word imaginatio and the Greek word phanthasia) is the humanistic and rhetorical tradition. In this tradition, imagination is the faculty through which the human mind can take apart and put together different elements of different things in order to produce new forms or contents. As Vico notes in his First Inaugural Oration:

The power that fashions the images of things, which is called phanthasia, at the same time that it originates and produces new forms, reveals and confirms its own divine origin […] It is this that now differentiates the forms of things, sometimes separating them, at other times mixing them together. It is phanthasia that makes present to our eyes lands that are very away, that unites those things that are separated, that overcomes the inaccessible, that discloses what is hidden and builds a road through trackless places. And it does all this with unbelievable swiftness! (Vico, [1699] 1993, pp. 42–43)

Imagination is a kind of divinity in our mind; it gives form to perceptual experience not by abstraction of a single property from empirical reality, but by putting together things that appear completely unrelated, in order to fabricate our own experience of the world. So, while in the classical paradigm of rational thought, this human experience is never acknowledged as scientific questions—because it remains outside the field of the analytical processes of science—according to Vico, the discovery of the constructive role of imagination is the key that allows us to comprehend all human phenomena in terms of their origins and developments. The original point of knowledge is not formed by abstraction from empirical reality, but it comes through the accomplishment of imaginative acts that give form to perceptual experience and put the world into human’s terms. What is striking in this perspective is that the power of imagination is conceived as the original manner of concept formation. Vico does not deny the importance of human’s capacity of abstracting, categorizing, and predicating, but he argues that this capacity is tied to the power of human mind to construct imaginative class of concepts. I will return to this later. Here I wish to emphasize that such assumption represents an Archimedean point for a new science that makes the human condition meaningful because it displaces the rationalistic interest in abstract entities with the interest in origins and processes. Imagination, in fact, is stronger at the beginning, when humans are weak in analytical thought, for example, in children or in the first men who created order in their experience not abstracting the features of particular objects in order to grasp their highest reality—but through the discovery of similarities and differences in perceptual objects in order to create universal images. As Donald Phillip Verene has shown, these “images are not images of something; they are themselves manifestations of an original power of spirit which gives fundamental form to mind and life” (Verene, 1981, p. 33).

In his properly metaphysics work, De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians), Vico explains what “to give form” means and he offers evidence of it through the example of painting.

Divine truth is a solid image like a statue; human truth is a monogram or a surface like a painting. Just as divine truth is what God sets in order and creates in the act of knowing it, so human truth is what man puts together and makes in the act of knowing it. (Vico, [1710] 1988, p. 46)

According to Vico, science is cognition of how something is made; both divine truth and human truth are made, but in different ways. If God knows the world because he puts its various elements together when he created it, as in a three-dimensional sculpture, what humans make are images of the world that, like painting, are two-dimensional representations of what appears to be. In other terms, what humans make is their own experience of the external world in and through their internal products, such as images, memories, passions, sensory perceptions. We create colors in seeing and flavors in tasting, but these are not that which is but that which seems us to be. Here, at the intersection of internal and external processes, like in Möbius strip, we can locate Vico’s discovery of imaginative universals that, as he says, “is the master key of this Science, [which] has cost us the persistent research of almost all our literary life” (Vico, [1744] 1948, § 34).

By fitting together the reasons of science and the forms of human imagination, Vico suggests a new route for the comprehension and the practice of knowledge as a concrete process that cannot be separated from its embodiment in the domains of human experience. This outlook brings Vico to pass beyond the historical duality between science and imagination, and to present his theory of imaginative universals as a transformation of the process of concept formation present in the classical paradigm of rational thought. Particularly, Vico distinguishes two kinds of universal concept: imaginative universals and intelligible ones. Both are described and defined as deeds, mental act done by men. But, unlike the intelligible ones, imaginative universals make possible a science of the origins and developments of the human world as it is fabricate through our own experience of it. As such, these universals are understood as a process, not as an entity. They make possible a model of concept formation where imagining is not simply an alteration of ordinary thought, but it is a different process of thinking in which the reference to concrete human experience is brought together with the need to find concepts both universal and shareable. This is the epistemological principle that allows Vico both to overcome the traditional disjunction of reason and imagination and to occupy some relatively uncharted philosophical territory.

In his Autobiography, Vico speaks about this “philosophical isolation” ² and represents himself as having taken up a position against a philosophical method that has neglected the remarkable richness and complexity of human imagination. Therefore, in order to evaluate the deep significance of Vico’s theory of imaginative universals and its recalls a capacity of mind that has been left behind in Western philosophical tradition, it is necessary to consider Vico’s historical context and his rejection of Descartes’ rationalism.

The special power of the human mind

At the beginning of the 18th century, developments in both metaphysics and the natural sciences abounded as a result of the Cartesian method. As is known, Descartes’ aim is, once and for all, to lay a lasting foundation for knowledge; in order to achieve this, he contends that the standard targets the level of science arising when knowledge is both clear and distinct.

If, however, I simply refrain from making a judgment in cases where I do not perceive the truth with sufficient clarity and distinctness, then it is clear that I am behaving correctly and avoiding error. But if in such cases I either affirm or deny, then I am not using my free will correctly. (Descartes, [1638–1640] 1984, p. 41)

As it is generally presented to us, Descartes’ method—which Vico called “geometrical method”—was rooted in abstraction and verification, the glories of Modern philosophy. It is trivially true that this method promises knowledge of a more tangible sort; thanks to it we may well describe and classify the world, enumerate its laws and understand its mechanisms. But, as Vico goes on to make clear, Descartes’ method has a propensity to usurp its proper role and get out of control. As noted above, for Vico our knowledge of the world is inescapably limited to what we can understand only in human terms—it is limited to our two-dimensional representations. Of what meaning the world has outside our all-too-human perspective, knowledge is impossible. According to Vico, the modern appetite for “clear and distinct” reasoning on the one hand, and the impossibility of reducing the human world to sure and indubitable principles on the other, likewise lead to barbarie della reflessione (barbarism of reflection). ³

Against this barbarism of reflection—more inhuman than barbarism of sense of the first age of ideal eternal history—Vico invests with much philosophical significance exactly what Cartesian philosophy rejects: history, eloquence, poetry, and the human faculties involved in them (memory, sensibility, and imagination). In De Nostri Temporis Studiorum Ratione (On the Study Methods of Our Time), the oration presented at the commencement ceremonies of 1708, Vico denounces what was, according to his interpretation, a selfish philosophy combined with the geometrical method in the education of young people at the time. In Vico’s estimation, the prevalence of a “philosophical criticism” in educational institutions creates young adults whose imagination has been neglected, due to an overemphasis on abstraction at the expense of ingenium.

Our modern advocates of advanced criticism rank the unadulterated essence of “pure”, primary truth before, outside, above the gross semblances of physical bodies. But this study of primal philosophical truths takes place at the same time when young minds are too immature to derive benefit from it. Just as old age is powerful in reason, so is adolescence in imagination. Since imagination has always been esteemed a most favorable omen of future development, it should in no way be dulled. […] Youth’s natural inclination [ingenium] to the arts in which imagination or memory (or a combination of both) is prevalent (such as painting, poetry, oratory, jurisprudence) should by no means be blunted. (Vico, [1709] 1990, pp. 13–14)

It is very difficult to translate the Latin ingenium into our modern languages. In De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians), Vico defines it as “the faculty that connects disparate and diverse things” (Vico, [1710] 1988, p. 96). A logic of discovery and invention characterizes ingenium; it is a productive and creative form of knowledge that combines both the art of finding or inventing arguments and that of judging them. ⁴ Ingenium is also the original and natural faculty of humans. It is original because it is the native ability to make connections—for example, children use ingenium in order to achieve their first knowledge. It is natural because “Ingenium is synonymous with nature—Ingenium is the nature peculiar to man” (Vico, [1710] 1988, p. 96). Thanks to it we can see similarities between disparate things and we can produce images that frame and construct our reality. Ingenium is to us what the power to create is to God. As God easily begets a world of nature, so we ingeniously make discoveries thanks to which we invent and create our human world. Within that perspective, the main issue that concerns Vico can be stated with simplicity: if the geometrical method is Descartes’ effort to mathematically define the world, Vico rejects this approach by saying that it can only give a limited view of human world and human affairs. The development of knowledge does not take place through rational or inferential thought, but rather through ingenium, this innate human capacity to grasp similarities or relationships.

By recognizing the central role of ingenium to the cognitive development, Vico posits a fundamental relation that links ingenium and the faculty of imagining. As judgment is the eye of intellect, so imagination is the eye of ingenium; ⁵ imagination is the special power by which ingenium can realize its ability. Human beings develop their intellectual capacities and make sense of the world around them thanks to their natural imagination; the processes of abstraction arise only in the successive phases of cognitive development. A fundamental passage of The New Science expresses in depth this principle. In this passage, Vico distinguishes two different metaphysical attitudes, or rather, two different ways to understand, comprehend, and discern.

As rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them (homo intelligendo fit omnia), this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them (homo non intelligendo fit omnia); and perhaps the latter proposition is truer than the former, for when man understands he extends his mind and takes in the things, but when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them (Vico, [1744] 1948, § 405).

This passage explains how imagination becomes the fabricator of thought using what it does not know. According to Vico, imaginative knowledge is the effort of moving from the unknown, and which creates through the imagination something known that is concrete and effectively real. On the contrary, rational knowledge is a process that moves from the known to the unknown, by way of abstraction from the sensible data. For Vico, the very possibilities of knowledge depend on the synthesizing power of imagination, because the dynamism involved in the thought processes cannot be reduced to a critical and reflective capacity. In this light, imagination is an anthropogenic resource because it emerges from the actual circumstances in which man live—that is an ignorance of the true nature of things, due to which he makes himself and his vivacious images the measure of the universe. What does it mean that “man becomes all things by not understanding them?” It means that when a man understands, he extends his critical and reflective mind to comprehend things; but when he does not understand, he makes them out of himself and, by transforming himself, becomes them. For Vico, this nature of human thought was well elucidated by Tacitus with a “noble phrase”: men no sooner imagine than they believe—fingunt simul creduntque (Vico, [1744] 1948, § 376). This “eternal property” of human mind adverted to by Tacitus is crucial because it indicates the direction of Vico’s argument. Vico understands all human making to occur under the power of a productive imagination which frames and constructs our images of reality. Without imagination, we would not be able to think reality, because abstraction is an ability that men acquired at the price of continuous imaginative efforts. If so, the facultas imaginandi, far from being a little mental capacity, is related to a structure of thought at whose center lies a sense of the vital, mutually enriching bond between the world and human experience, taken in its wide sense. More specifically, we can say that imagination arises at the juncture of the world and human experience; it is relational, neither purely objective nor subjective. This is why Vico insists that the products of imagination must function as a criterion by which philosophical theories can and must be tested: not only in relation to our personal lives but also to the historical cultural permutations of humanity as a whole.

Vico reaches this conclusion by analyzing the modes of proceeding of the first men, “children as it were of the growing human race” (Vico, [1744] 1948, § 4). Immersed in their body, at the level of sentiments and sensitivity, the primitive men were unable to discern what is corporeal and what is mental, what is sensible, and what is abstract. If our modern mind possesses the capacity of abstraction, the primitive’s mind could not have it; rather, it is an imaginative visionary mind. For Vico, primitive human beings followed a logic based on the relations of sensible similarities; they identified and diversified things in the direct proportion that their imagination recognized similarities and dissimilarities in them. Thus, the cognitive development in the first men’s mind was born through a process of thought totally opposite to the one we are inclined to expect. While our mental operations begin from sensible data and on it, by abstraction, we build our knowledge, primitive human beings possess only the sensorial faculties, but not the intellective ones of our modern mind. If abstraction is an ability that humanity acquired at the price of continuous imaginative efforts, then the imaginative metaphysics is truly not about thought, but about the absence and then the production of thought: homo non intelligendo fit omnia.

At the present it is difficult to interpret the Latin verb intelligere, but fortunately Vico provides this in a passage of The New Science.

Now the mind uses the intellect when, from something it senses, it gathers something which does not fall under the senses; and this is the proper meaning of the Latin verb intelligere. (Vico, [1744] 1948, § 363)

As Vico says in this passage, intelligere could be interpreted as “to gather between,” try to guess at abstract patterns or plucking out a concept from a set of sensible data. This is pretty much what Euthyphro did in order to grasp the highest reality of the concept of pity. But, thanks to the discovery and analysis of the primitive mentality, Vico identifies a form of thought that have no speculative nature and that is constructed on imagination, as well as the ideas that it produces. In this light, the philosophical novelty of his new science becomes more precise: we have no reason to think about imagination as a narrow or fixed reproductive faculty which forms images that beset our rational capacities; we have also no reason to think about imagination as a kind of messenger between sensation and reason (as, for instance, Francis Bacon puts in his Advancement of Learning ⁶ ). What we call imagination is something of central to human cognition, an indispensable function of the human mind without which we would be scarcely conscious of our human life. So, the manifest effort in The New Science is that of penetrating the logic of imagination (that Vico called “poetic logic”) in order to understand how could the passage from absence to presence of thought happens.

Regarded this way, Vico’s deepest concerns are about the origin and the development of thought as a fantastic art, an art that does not convey abstract meanings, but rather images that are true in the way they are felt, experienced, and lived, charged with emotional and sensible connotations. These images that Vico calls imaginative universals are his original discovery and the one that is most difficult to understand. Of course, this should not be that surprising: if these universals were easy to grasp, then it would be hard to fathom that they constitute an entirely new science. In order to set the imaginative universals as the backbone of his new science, Vico inserts in his philosophical system the first scientific myth of the history of philosophy: the myth of orribili bestioni, animal beings not yet human, but becoming humans at their “encounter” with Jupiter, the first imaginative universal.

In this myth, Vico imagines human beings in the state of nature as enormous beasts (bestioni) with deformed bodies that symbolize the force of the senses and the penury of the intellect. These are beings that have no abstractive faculty but only a strong imagination. At this time, in their bestiality, something happened that deranged their life and represented a point of no return: an unusual event, an extraordinary tempest, hit the primordial forests where the bestioni lived. Thus, when the bestioni—fearful of the great natural events—stopped roaming and looked for shelter, they raised their heads at the surprising effects of the sky in tempest and “they imagined the sky as a great living body, and in this manifestation they called the sky Jupiter, the first god of the so-called greater clans, which was trying to speak to them through the whistling of his bolts and the crashing of his thunder” (Vico, [1744] 1948, § 377). Jupiter is the first imaginative universal, produced through the senses and imagination; it is with these faculties (the only ones that our body can activate), that the human being imposed order on a fundamentally disordered nature. For the bestioni, imagination is not a faculty among the other faculties of the mind, but the only available faculty of their mind.

With the scientific myth of orribili bestioni, Vico sees the history of humanity moving the first steps in the moment in which the bestioni, the infant of humankind, began to imagine and through the imaginative universal of Jupiter catapulted themselves beyond the state of nature. If so, imagination is the special power of human mind which is crucial to the ordering and humanizing of the world; in fact, imagination is the way by which the thought was born in the brutish beings and made it human beings.

We are now in a position to expand upon an earlier observation: if imaginative universals become the instrument with which human beings develop their mental activity, structure their experience by assigning meaning to reality, and conferring a specific value to their actions, then imagining is an activity essentially in every case of human learning and understanding, that is so say, in every human experience. This gives to the context of The New Science the status of an intellectual breakthrough that inveighs against the classical tradition, which for centuries has presented the abstract way of knowing as the sole acceptable view of knowledge.

This contrast is expressed with force and vividness by the two pictures that Vico chose to include during the printing of the second version of The New Science, in 1730:⁷ the frontispiece, or Impresa, and the magnificent Dipintura. These two pictures are very useful in order to understand how what Vico proposes is a shocking reversal of the traditional way of looking at science. Moreover, something is new because it contrasts with something that is old, and Vico himself provides a visible proof of this contrast between old and new, opposing the picture called Impresa (Figure 1) that symbolizes the old science—and the picture called Dipintura (Figure 2)—that is an allegorical representation of his new science. OPEN IN VIEWER

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Figure 2.

Dipintura.

The Impresa depicts a female figure seated on a sphere and staring into a mirror; it also bears the inscription “IGNOTA LATEBAT” whose meaning is “She Who Lay Hidden.” Many scholars wrote on the meanings and the role of this picture. For our present purposes, however, it suffices to note just two things. (1) Firstly, the female figure represents the rationalistic metaphysics, as it is understood in the classical paradigm of rational thought; in Vico’s terms, we can define it metaphysics intelligendo. (2) Secondly, the female figure is devoted to a solitary act; his eyes gaze into a mirror to see the reflection of a triangle that symbolizes the divine knowledge. But, according to Vico, this philosophical reflection remains hidden to us because our knowledge is limited to what we can understand only in human terms. As noted above, in Vico’s perspective, science is cognition of how something is made, so we can know only what we make. Now, since we have not made the divine knowledge and his creations, this kind of philosophical reflection remains hidden to us.

The second picture, the Dipintura, shows the same female figure but in a different way. She surmounts a globe representing the world of nature and she appears as a mediator between the divine eye within a triangle and the world of human affairs. In contrast to the Impresa, the Dipintura represents a much more sophisticated philosophical reflection that is not dualistic but triadic. In fact, here we find a new element, a ray of light issuing forth from a divine eye and, passing through the breast of the female figure, it is finally reflected to a statue of Homer, the first known poet of Western tradition. Below Homer, we find various instruments and icons representing the world of civil society. Thus, this Dipintura marks two important transformations from the previous Impresa. (1) Firstly, it distinguishes the divine from the world and, within the world, the natural from the human. (2) Secondly, as the double direction of the ray shows, the framework of these two separations provides the image of a science that is not a philosophical reflection, self-sufficient, engaged in abstractions; rather, it is a science that illuminates the human world in a new way. In this light, the statue of Homer constitutes a fundamental element, because it represents the power of imagination as an active power through which the things of the civil world are first made. Vico explicitly informs the reader about this novelty.

The ray is reflected from the breast of metaphysic onto the statue of Homer, the first gentile author who has come down to us. For metaphysic, directing a history of human ideas from the beginnings of truly human thinking among the gentiles, has enabled us finally to descend into the crude minds of the first founders of the gentile nations, all robust sense and vast imagination. They had only the bare potentiality, and that torpid and stupid, of using the human mind and reason. For that very reason, the beginnings of poetry, not only different from but contrary to those which have been hitherto imagined, are found to lie in the beginnings of poetic wisdom, which have for that same reason been hitherto hidden from us. This poetic wisdom, the knowledge of the theological poets, was unquestionably the first wisdom of the world for the gentiles. The statue of Homer on a cracked base signifies the discovery of the true Homer. […] Unknown until now, he has held hidden from us the true facts of the fabulous period among the nations, and much more so those of the obscure period which all had despaired of knowing, and consequently the first true origins of the things of the historic period (Vico, [1744] 1948, § 6).

In this passage, we find the motive of “poetic wisdom” upon which Vico’s science and his novelty depends. The theory of “poetic wisdom” is a conception of how the development of both the mind’s activity and the human (civil) world, coincided with the beginning of poetry. As noted above, for Vico, the first men created order in their experience not by abstracting from it, but by inventing imaginative universals that tied to the power of human mind to give form to human experience. Within that perspective, the poetry can be conceived not as a colorful embellishment of our life, but as a product that stems from the mind’s power of imagination. By poetry, the world first takes on a shape for the human, and it is because the poetic characters are themselves the conditions of reality for poetic mind. Vico’s means to suggest that poetry, as a product of imagination, should be considered as an expression of a species-specific human way of life. Poetry ritualized everyday activities in such a way that it becomes a “cultural tool” (Valsiner, 2009) or a “symbolic resource” (Zittoun, 2007), that we can use for interpreting the lived actuality of human experience.

Here I have just applied to Vico’s theory of poetic wisdom two expressions used by researchers in cultural psychology. It seems to me that cultural psychology’s need “for a new look at the multitude of signs that organize human lives” (Valsiner, 2009, p. 11), is very close to Vico’s need of a new science that makes the human condition meaningful. On my reading, Vico has engaged in the task of constructing a new science that critically connects the forms of human knowledge with the forms of cultural and historical development. In order to do this, Vico starts from the assumptions of human beings as constant meaning constructors so that speaking about imaginative universals and poetic wisdom means to speak about what humans are singular at producing.

In moving from this discoveries, I suggest that the main issue that concerns Vico’s new science can be stated with simplicity: to displace the rationalistic interest in abstract entities with the interest in origins and processes, and to focus on the human ways of being and living their lives. Thus, Vico’s arguments touch so many fields that are currently cultivated in cultural psychology that it is difficult to resist the temptation to consider his philosophy in the light of this investigation.

The discovery of the True Homer as a case study for cultural psychology

If it is true that imagination is best read as the special power of human mind; if we are correct in interpreting Vico’ science of imagination as a science of man regarded the ordinary world in which he exists and he creates his culture; if what Vico says imagination makes are universal products that shape the human experience, then we have the epistemological basis for viewing the implications of Vico’s thought in the light of cultural psychology. To do this, I shall examine the third book of The New Science, which was entitled “The discovery of the True Home,” and I wish to maintain that one can find in it an interesting case study for researchers in cultural psychology.

In this book, Vico extends his inquiry from the metaphysical investigation to the philological debate over the identity of Homer, the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey and their historicity. If the subject has its roots in classical antiquity, it has flourished among Homeric scholars of the 18th centuries. Despite the general assumption that Homer was only a poet enable to compose the great stories of the Iliad and Odyssey—and despite the traditional dispute between who suggests that the tales would have been dictated by Homer to a scribe late in the poet’s life, and who believes that the histories told in the poems were in fact the composite result of the storytelling of numerous poets—Vico constructs a different solution that can be considered as an example of the application of the principles of his new science. More specifically, Vico was led to discover the fundamental truth that as the first men expressed their thoughts and so interpreted the world poetically and not by abstractions; therefore, the societies of the primitive historical times expressed their worldviews and their ways of life in their tales.

The poetic characters, in which the essence of the fables consists, were born of the need of a nature incapable of abstracting forms and properties from subjects. Consequently they must have been the manner of thinking of entire peoples, who had been placed under this natural necessity in the times of their greatest barbarism. (Vico, [1744] 1948, § 816)

In this paragraph, what Vico calls “natural necessity” is tied to his theory of the existential condition of thought, i.e., the contrast between the abstract entities of intelligible universals with the embodied processes of imaginative universals. As we have seen in in the previous two sections of this paper, Vico regards the development of mind’s activity in terms of process that provides a model of concepts formation, which cannot be pursued apart from our being meaning-making agents. For Vico, the beginning point of knowledge is not formed by abstraction from empirical reality, but it comes about through the accomplishment of imaginative acts that give form to perceptual experience and put the world into human’s terms. It must be borne in mind a famous Vico’s axiom according to which when men are ignorant of anything, they make themselves the measure of it (Vico, [1744] 1948, § 120), that is to say that under primitive conditions, of the kind described by Vico, humans are weak in analytic thought and they possess only an imaginative way of reasoning. On this model, to say that men make themselves the measure of all things is equivalent to saying that men make knowledge employing concrete process that cannot be separated from its embodiment in the human way of feeling and symbolizing the world. In the light of Vico’s philosophy, it must be emphasized not only that human knowledge is primarily anthropomorphic, but especially that this knowledge involves the principles of order that are inherent to the human way of experiencing and making the world. Epistemologically considered, the heart of Vico’s axiom lies not in the contents of the knowledge, but in the total and material motions of structuring it, in order to form universal and shareable concepts. It is in this light that imaginative universals become the backbone of the science of how human beings make themselves civilized. For they can make themselves civilized only by making a civitas, that is a society or structure of shared institutions and concepts.

As Donald Phillip Verene suggests, “In Vico’s work thought and society can be seen as co-determinative structures, wherein a certain type of thought is inconceivable without a certain social structure, and vice versa. The relationship between social conditions and forms of thought are more structural than causal. It is not that social conditions cause ideas, nor that thought causes certain social or political conditions; certain social conditions and certain forms of thought necessarily go together and arise as co-determinative force of history” (Verene, 1981, pp. 72–73). Actually, Vico’s theory of “poetic wisdom” is based on this general idea: poetic characters are the form of thought for the first men and the ones that structure their experience, and then their society.

Taking into account Vico’s ideas about the need of a new science, we are now in a position to move from the realm of Vico’s discoveries (i.e., imaginative universals, poetic wisdom), to the evaluation of the investigative program that brought him to seek a reorientation of the inquiry on human experience and to propound an alternative method. I think that this method is very close to cultural psychology efforts.

I am not a specialist in cultural psychology, but I would like to accept Jaan Valsiner’s invitation. In his book just entitled An Invitation to Cultural Psychology, Valsiner contrasts the innovation of the methodological realm of psychology through the lens of culture, with a number of classic assumptions that have failed to capture the subjectivity of human unique experience.

In fact, that experience has been eliminated from the beginning in the research efforts in most branches of psychology—in favour of translating the complexities of feeling and thinking individuals into “data” that are supposed to reflect the psychological characteristics “objectively”. But the whole nature of human experience is subjective […] We need to come to turns with the uneasy recognition that it is the personally unique subjectivity that is objective in psychology. At first glance, this verdict looks like a contradiction in terms—or denial of science. My goal in this book is to demonstrate that it is neither. Rather, the objective nature of human subjectivity opens the door for charting out a new kind of science—that created general knowledge of the extremely particular subjective experiences. (Valsiner, 2013, p. 13)

It should be noted that this notion of “subjectivity” is not to be understood in a solipsistic sense. In discussing the origins of culture as a process, not a entity, Valsiner notes that the main focus of cultural psychology, as outlined in his book, “is the coordinated—not isomorphic—development of personal (subjective) and social (collective) domains of human experience” (Valsiner, 2013, p. 43). Men make their world, and this world can be understood only when such collective construction and the subjective meaning-making activity are brought together. So globally phrased, Valsiner’s claim, “Culture is within the person, rather than the other way round” (Valsiner, 2013, p. 43), may appear as an axiom, in a very Vico’s sense. Culture is what we ourselves make, while a science of this culture is what we are able to construct because such a science explains the processes of self-constitution. These processes are determined by principles having neither the a-priori character of abstract entities nor the necessary character of physical laws. Although Valsiner does not cite Vico, his invitation to think cultural psychology “in a new key” (Valsiner, 2013, p. 31) seems to me in substantial agreement with Vico’s search of a “master key” (Vico, [1744] 1948, § 34) to open the field of a new science of the human experience. And it is in this framework that Vico’s search of the true Homer provides a “symbolic resource” by which to accomplish a science of cultural processes. Against the tendency of evaluating the third book of The New Science as a piece of literary criticism, we can examine it as an illustration of the character of Vico’s methodology applied to a specific interpretative problem. At the same time, we can consider this book as an interpretation of Vico’s methodology in the light of its practical application. The property of considering Vico’s discovery of the true Homer in this light is confirmed by the same Vico, who specifies the circumstances that led him to the addition of a third book in the second edition of The New Science (in 1730).

Now all these things reasoned out by us or related by others concerning Homer and his poems, without our having intentionally aimed at any such result indeed it had not even entered into our reflections when readers of the first edition of this New Science (which was not worked out on the same method as the present), men of acute minds and excelling in scholarship and learning, suspected that the Homer believed in up to now was not real. (Vico, [1744] 1948, § 873)

The dissolution of the historical identity of Homer has not been premeditated by Vico, rather it is deemed by him to follow the principles of his new science. So, the specific thesis advanced by Vico concerning Homer can be stated with simplicity:

Homer was an idea or a heroic character of Grecian men insofar as they told their history in song. (Vico, [1744] 1948, § 873)

In Vico’s view, Homer’s identity is conceptual, Homer is an “idea” and its philosophical relevance is such that Vico feels obligated to reconsider this identity by examining the society and the cultural practices from which it supposedly results. Vico’s procedure, then, is to show how the theory of “imaginative universals” and “poetic wisdom” would offer the methodological framework for the origins of the Homeric poems, as well as the key to their explanation.

For Vico, the Iliad and the Odyssey in their origin were not mere stories and fables passed on orally as embellishments of actual events or mythical figures, but they were “true and severe narrations” (Vico, [1744] 1948, § 814), belonging to the forms of the cultural life of a particular society. Especially, Homeric poems can be treated as expression of a way of life common to a whole people. They are precisely a kind of tribal encyclopedia ⁸ which expresses the social laws, rituals, customs, and worldview of the society which made them, and which structure its own culture through them. From these considerations, it follows that the contents of the Iliad and the Odyssey are “imaginative class concepts” (Vico, [1744] 1948, § 403), products of peoples naturally led to preserve the memories of the orders and laws that keep them within their societies

Naturally, such histories must have had to have been preserved by memory among the Communities of Peoples […] up to the time of Homer, and for some time after him, common script had not yet been discovered […]. In such like state of human lack, the folk, the which were almost entirely body, and practically not at all reflection, would all have been vivid sense in sensing particulars, strong imagination in apprehending them and enlarging them, sharp invention in relating them to their imaginative genera, and robust memory in holding onto them; the which faculties belong, it is true, to the mind; but they put down their roots in the body, and take their strength from the body. Whence it follows that memory is the same as the imagination. (Vico, [1744] 1948, § 819)

The intellectual poverty of the first men led them to create and remind imaginative genera that were projections of their sense–experience, and then the limits of their conceptual range. We can think about these imaginative projections as a kind of semiosphere within they lived thanks, and through, their meaning-making activities. By entering into the imaginations of these first men, Vico shows the original meanings that myths had beneath their alteration in incredible fables. So, the poetic character that Homer’s poems took is explained by the fact that, being primitive artifacts, they were the product of a strong imagination.

It should be noted that Vico’s discovery of the true Homer offers, in addition, a sketch of the genesis of human culture that, I think, can be interesting for researchers in cultural psychology. “We create culture—and through it—ourselves” (Valsiner, 2013, p. 308). On my reading, Vico’s discovery of the true Homer is in line with this claim that, in turn, is very close to one of the most quoted sentences in The New Science:

But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never-failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. (Vico, [1744] 1948, § 331)

Vico’s night of thick darkness is a reminiscent of Dante’s “dark wood of error,” in which he finds himself at the beginning of his quest in the Divine Comedy, and from which he perceives the illumination of the truth he seeks. Also Vico places himself within a search for a truth that leads him to discover a new science.

As I try to explain, Vico’s point is that the traditional ways in which science creates its knowledge need a constructive overhaul. Its processes are oriented toward an austere rationality that neglects the most important questions: how we became human? What does it mean to be human? The position stemming from the focus on the human meaning-making processes is the key that allows Vico to answer these questions. But Vico’s objection to the classical paradigm of rational thought is not only theoretical, but mostly practical. An overconcentration on abstract knowledge is not a guarantee of science, but rather is the character of a methodology that, neglecting the richness and the meaning of human phenomena, causes the fragmentation of intellectual and cultural experience.

Once again, the problem regarding the meaning of human culture carries with it a review of analytical method and raises new questions. In Vico’s perspective, this is both the result of philosophical reflection and the task of a new science. But it would be the specific task of every science of man not conceived as an abstract and fixed superstructure of a material and transient structure. Any science of man which fails to take up this challenge, threatens to escalate into an alien form of knowledge through which whatever barbarism can be accomplished. This alienation arises out of the fact that man ceases to concern himself with questions that are essential to him.

So, it is in the vast realm of this kind of questions that Vico’s New Science and cultural psychology intersect their ways of looking at human culture, and it is in this perspective that we can explore the relevance of Vico’s science of imagination to cultural psychology.

The present study is inevitably the starting point and not the end point of such an investigation. Much remains to be done. The approach that I used here is to consider Vico’s science of imagination in its entirety from a philosophical point of view, in order to understand it as a method through which forms of knowledge are seen as connected to forms of human cultural life. But according to this interpretation, I tried to show that Vico’s theory of imagination can be seen as a weapon that, mostly in cultural psychology, we can use to hit the glories of an abstract knowledge that has problematic implication for any understanding of human life.

It is therefore impossible to assess human affairs by the inflexible standard of abstract right; we must rather gauge them by the pliant Lesbic rule, which does not conforms bodies to itself, but adjust itself to their contours. (Vico, [1709] 1990, p. 34)

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.