Interpreting Giambattista Vico for a new psychological science: Towards a semiotic imaginative approach

Context – Cultural psychology, semiotics and Vico

I will argue in this article that what makes Vico useful and accessible for psychological thought is today’s cultural psychology’s move towards an inherently semiotic approach. Eminent cultural psychologists have repeatedly demonstrated the need to integrate semiotic concepts into psychology (see Innis, 2016a, 2016b; Valsiner, 2005, 2016). Jaan Valsiner states that ‘in the work of the human psyche the centrality of semiotic mediation is the starting point for our investigation’ (Valsiner, 2016, p. 4) – in other words, the world of humans is semiotically mediated and this fact needs to be acknowledged before any further investigations into the human psyche can be made. Valsiner calls for a new general psychological science:

The beginning of such general psychological science can be found in the return to the study of processes of human being – making meaning in the flow of irreversible time with all of the uniqueness of the present moment in its full affective coloring. It is precisely in this flow of unique experiences that universal principles of the human psyche make the experience possible in its subjective meaningfulness. It is not the intuition, but forward-oriented semiosis, that constitutes the universal core of the infinite variability in the human ways of feeling. (Valsiner, 2016, p. 25)

The latest extensive monograph on Vico in English is Jürgen Trabant’s ‘Vico’s new science of ancient signs: a study of sematology’ (2004) where the author seeks to clarify Vico’s concept of image and language. He speaks about ‘Vico’s semiotic turn’ that ‘synthesizes thought and language (semiosis) and, by equating mythos and logos, views the beginnings of language-thought as wild creations of the imagination’ (Trabant, 2004, p. 46). ¹ Trabant’s understanding of Vico is interesting, but strongly tied to the tradition of a purely philosophical investigation.

The semiotic approach to Vico in general has remained somewhat ungrounded and theoretical. It needs to get closer to the very stuff of life – the everyday struggles of a human being – and this is, I believe, where bringing it together with cultural psychology may help.

How to approach?

The most recent extensive publication on Vico – ‘Giambattista Vico and the new psychological science’ (Tateo, 2017b) is situated within the field of cultural psychology. In the current article, I will set out to make explicit the semiotic perspective underlying this collaborative interpretation of Vico – hopefully to the benefit of both semiotics and cultural psychology.

I will, however, need to start with Vico himself, or rather the semiotic leap required to approach him. Vico is not an easy author to read. Partly because his way of expressing his ideas is foreign to the 21st century, partly because what he says is often refreshingly radical. For example, Vico places the human body with its senses and affects at the core of human sensemaking. As John Shotter aptly puts it: ‘this is what made, and still makes, Vico’s views so radical – “the certain began in mute times with the body” (para. 1045)’ (2017, 115). In our usual world of verbal language and rational concepts, understanding and accepting an 18th century thinker who offers a view of primary human sense-making that is speechless and relies on bodily feelings, may indeed call for some explanations.

Using Giambattista Vico’s ideas and methodology for innovation in human and social sciences always seems to raise the need for at least some justification. I would call this matter the why-Vico-problem. The editor’s preface of the volume I am basing my discussion on is titled ‘Why Social Sciences Need Vico’ (Tateo, 2017). In addition, most of the articles in the book contain a kind of apology – explaining why Vico is still relevant in today’s research. For a reader already familiar with Vico’s work and its reception, this question may become somewhat repetitious. It is as if Vico always needs to be justified, because he was not a philosopher of clear rational concepts. Looking at him from the perspective of the history of Western philosophy may be an alienating experience. However, the more we look at his work from the perspective of cultural psychology and semiotics the less out of place it seems.

Any scholar needs to have some of the ability to grasp alterity that Vico himself calls for. To achieve any understanding of the ancient imaginative thinking, we have to, according to Vico ‘descend from these human and refined natures of ours to those quite wild and savage natures, which we cannot at all imagine and can apprehend only with great effort’ (Vico 1984, §338). This need to overcome our habitual way of thinking, to make an effort to see the other from a perspective even a little bit closer to his or her vantage point, is absolutely valid in today’s research. And it is not an easy task. John Shotter draws attention to this when he discusses Vico’s ‘conceit of the nations’ and ‘conceit of the scholars’ – two fallacies ‘that can so easily (mis)lead us into believing that we can in fact capture the reality within which we live within the concepts readily available to us now, in our current forms of rational thought’ (Shotter, 2017, p. 124). Vico’s ideas offer a great impulse to become more aware of otherness – the effort that one has to make to grasp different sign systems.

Psychology strives to understand the human psyche – it is a question of translating the inner workings of an individual, a group, a society into a more or less generally understandable academic language. Those inner workings are inevitably semiotic – so the solution to the methodological problems within psychology must also semiotic. The only way to make sense of the unknown is to bring it into our own semiosphere through translation (Lotman, 2009, pp. 5–6). In the case of translating something into the metalanguage of an academic discipline, one needs to strive for an awareness of the semiotic nature of the process. Nothing can be understood first-hand, everything is mediated by different sign systems, but paying attention to this fact itself and the peculiarities of each sign system involved one can hope to reach a truly new understanding of the other.

‘Giambattista Vico and the new psychological science’ certainly leads the reader towards a new understanding of the psyche. It holds a perspective that acknowledges otherness that is different modes of semiosis.

Before going into details on the semiotic perspective in the volume, I will however offer a short overview of all the contributions, to provide the reader with a proper context.

A brief summary of ‘Giambattista Vico and The new psychological science’

‘Giambattista Vico and the new psychological science’ contains contributions from researchers working in different fields within or bordering psychology and semiotics. The editor of this volume, Luca Tateo states as general frame for the ideas expressed in the book that:

People anticipate, invent, and pre-adapt through culturally suggested imaginative, narrative, and creative processes that lead to the production of meaningful actions and artifacts. These processes are not just intrapsychological or psychophysiological. They are also socioculturally embedded in everyday historically situated contexts of activity, following dialogical, imaginative, and narrative logics. (Tateo, 2017a: xiii)

The following offers an analysis of a selection of Vico’s notions most promising for further research from the perspective of a semiotically aware cultural psychology – adhering to the ideas and arguments presented in ‘Giambattista Vico and the new psychological science’.

Imagination

When relating Vico’s work to today’s psychology, Marcel Danesi focuses on the Vichian understanding of imagination (fantasia) as the basis for poetic thinking. The latter is a primordial anthroposemiotic process that is observable in the form of metaphors (2017, pp. 33–36). Danesi states that a Vichian research agenda should include the following components:

The essence of mind is the fantasia. Access to this feature can be gained by studying the products of the mind’s poetic structure.

Danesi is an eminent semiotician – here standing, so to say, amongst psychologists – he stresses once more that Vico offers us a way to access ‘the essence of the mind’ – fantasia. Human semiotic activity takes places on multiple planes simultaneously – many of which we are unaware of as individuals (e.g. most of the biosemiotic processes of our body, unconscious thought). So what to concentrate on, when trying to understand the human psyche – rational thought, problem-solving, sense perception, emotions, information processing, empathy, social interaction? Vico offers an unequivocal answer – to understand anything human we must start by looking at imagination. The whole anthroposemiotic sphere is permeated by imaginative processes – from the most basic fears and unconscious desires to logical reasoning and intellectual discoveries.

Fantasia and intuitio: In search of the highest mental process

Carlos Cornejo connects Vico’s notion fantasia to the scholastic tradition, claiming that the Vichian notion assimilated some of the meaning of their intuitio. In the works of the scholastic Nicholas of Cusa the highest mental faculty is intellect. It is disembodied and deals with form itself (other faculties – senses, imagination, reason – deal with images of forms). But somewhat paradoxically inside this pure and disembodied intellect there is also the capacity of intuitio. It is an ability to grasp holistic knowledge that operates without dividing knowledge into parts, and according to Nicholas of Cusa, it is the only way to approach absolute truth (Cornejo, 2017, p. 195). Intuitio refers to a process, where knowledge is revealed, and not arrived at by rational thinking. Cornejo proposes that in some respect Vico’s understanding of certain knowledge resembles the earlier concept of knowledge as revelation.

Vico used fantasia to give new life to the old notion of knowing by nonrational. The Latin imaginatio hardly could be considered for this function, for it had come to be extensively considered a minor intellectual faculty, deceitful because of the bodily interference implied in its operation. Thus the epistemic function that Nicholas of Cusa ascribed to the intuitio – that ‘understanding beyond words toward a delightful softness’ – is similarly assigned by Vico to fantasia: ‘Hence poetic wisdom, the first wisdom of the gentile world, must have begun with a metaphysic not rational and abstract like that of learned men now, but felt and imagined as that of these first men must have been, who, without power of ratiocination, were all robust sense and vigorous imagination’ (Vico 1744/1984, §375). (Cornejo, 2017, pp. 197–198)

So once again we are left with the conclusion that fantasia permeates all sense-making processes – from the most raw and bodily feelings to the contemplation of holistic knowledge of the world. There is a possible venue of further investigation here – the links fantasia may have to Peircean abduction. As Queiroz and Merrell put it:

/…/suffice it to observe that abduction, or some feeling that gives rise to an informed guess by the prepared mind in tune with nature’s symphony, precedes perception, conception, and purposive action. In other words, if induction and deduction are matters of logically hypothesizing by conception and confirmation through perception of particular cases in the physical world, then abduction is what makes it all possible in the first place. (Queiroz & Merrell, 2005, p. 3)

Peirce discusses abduction as the process of formulating a truly new hypothesis: ‘It is true that the different elements of the hypothesis were in our minds before; but it is the idea of putting them together what we had never before dreamed of putting together which flashes the new suggestion before our contemplation’ (Peirce, 1931–1966, CP 5.181).

A full analysis of Vichian fantasia’s creative force in parallel to Peircean abduction remains out of the scope of this article. However, I can conclude that Vico, with his idea of fantasia, touched upon fundamental semiotic understanding of the creative counterpart to rational thought.

The metaphoric process

Augusto Ponzio’s article in ‘Giambattista Vico and the new psychological science’ is close in its aims to current article. Ponzio sets out to define in the context of modern semiotics the type of reasoning Vico describes – the poetic or metaphorical reasoning. He draws parallels to Bakhtin and Voloshinov, C. S. Peirce (touching very briefly also upon the concept of abduction), Victoria Welby and Thomas Sebeok (play of musement, preverbal modelling). At the centre of Ponzio’s discussion is the argument that it is essential to understand that language and verbal language are not the same thing – specifically human preverbal modelling (i.e. language) appears in evolution before verbal speech (2017, p. 162). This statement leads to the discussion of the nature of such a modelling capacity – according to Ponzio’s own terminology it is best to describe it as writing (2017, pp. 164–166). With the notion of writing, Ponzio offers a good example of an actual new usable term that is developed starting from Vico’s principles.

Discussing the Vichian theory of mind, Ponzio states that: ‘Both the concept and the metaphor are constructed by association on the basis of likeness’ (Ponzio, 2017, p. 167). Here, he clearly goes against Donald P. Verene’s well-established interpretation of the Vichian metaphor, which states clearly that for Vico the primordial metaphors were based on identity not similarity or likeness (Verene, 1987, 83). ² Ponzio bases his approach on Barthes’s (2002) critique of concept and an intriguing understanding of two forms of likeness (assemblative and attraction-based). According to this view, concepts are based on the more commonly understood assemblative likeness, metaphors are based on affinity or attraction (2017, pp. 167–169). Ponzio sees, with Barthes, concept as a reductive force that obliterates otherness. Hence, human creativity should be directed instead by metaphor and respectively affinity. The latter is described in the following way:

This is a question of likeness where the terms are not indifferent to each other, where differences are not cancelled, as in the case of the indifference of assemblative likeness, which identifies, homologates, equals. On the contrary, likeness by attraction is characterized by a relation of un-different difference with the other: likeness by otherness contrasts with likeness by identity. (Ponzio, 2017, p. 168)

Common sense

The Vichian principles are also applicable on the level of society, through Vico’s conception of senso commune. As Ivana Marková justly notes (2017), for Vico senso comune is inherently social – it is tied to language, culture, shared experience and action – ‘judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire people, an entire nation, or the whole human race’ (Vico 1984, §142). Markova argues that for Vico, common sense is possible because of shared common experiences. It is not an innate cognitive ability, but arises from the fact that we live – act and perceive – in a common human way:

this perspective of Vico fundamentally changes the meaning of common sense: although perception still plays role in common sense, common sense is an action: it serves human ‘needs or utilities’ and the ways of doing so are transmitted from generation to generation. (Markova, 2017, p. 178)

Common sense arises as human beings get on with the business of staying alive in the world together. John Shotter accordingly draws attention to the role of common sense as an active and social capacity, describing it as ‘an aspect of what we have already made in our everyday, practical social lives together without our being aware of it’ (2017, p. 125).

It is interesting to note here that in the same volume, Augusto Ponzio points to the Vichian notion of ‘common sense’ as a weakness. Ponzio refers to Semerari (1969) when describing common sense ‘as a system of judgments of nonhuman and divine origin’ (Ponzio, 2017, p. 170). Apparently Ponzio does not recognise the profoundly social and human experience related nature of common sense. Ponzio seems to take the more rationalist point of view here, being unable to accept the ‘judgement without reflection’ as a usable term to be explored for human sciences. Regretfully in his critique Ponzio states his dissatisfaction with the term, but leaves his exact reasoning behind it implicit. As hopefully demonstrated above the Vichian notion of common sense is far too fruitful a term to be disregarded so easily. Markova concludes aptly that: ‘it is Vico’s holistic approach to humanity that has an important contemporary value. It incorporates agency, language, social knowledge, cultural history, imagination, and ethics into a comprehensive framework of common sense thinking, knowing, and acting’ (Markova, 2017, p. 189). Put differently, a semiotic process can only be understood in the context of the sign systems that it is embedded in. This principle that underlies Vico’s own work can and should be used for innovating the methodological principles of human and social sciences.

A new understanding of being human

In his contribution to ‘Giambattista Vico and the new psychological science’ John Shotter proposes an incentive for formulating a new understanding of being human and he defines the rest of his paper as orienting remarks for developing such an understanding – drawing from Vico. So in place of a conclusion, I will instead take up the incentive and add a semiotic perspective to Shotter’s proposed new understanding. The incentive declares that:

if we are really to take seriously the need to work in terms of meanings rather than (ideal) forms then, rather than beginning with an analysis of a supposed object of study, we need a synthetic, hermeneutical account of what is troubling us; instead of seeking regularities and patterns out in the world, we need to work in terms of feelings and sensings occurring within our meetings with the others and othernesses around us. (Shotter, 2017, p. 120)

In semiotic terms, this approach to human experience – if it was to lead to a new psychological science – would be one where we take into account the nature of the human Umwelt; where we acknowledge the existence of different semiotic systems within (and also outside) the human realm – and in striving to understand them work consciously to preserve their otherness in the necessary process of translating them into our own sign system; where all sign systems themselves are seen as emerging and transient domains of semiotic processes – with their social history and ties to bodily existence; where rational thought is always seen in the context of imagination.