Giambattista Vico and the psychological imagination

Abstract

This special issue originates from an international workshop on ''Vico and imagination,'' that took place at Aalborg University in 2014, within a research project on Giambattista Vico and the epistemology of psychology. Imagination has inexplicably been relegated to the background in contemporary psychology, despite the fact that imaginative processes are involved in even the most mundane activities. In this editorial, I first present the rationale and the content of the articles and commentaries. Then I outline a brief history of the concept of imagination before Vico, drawing some consequences for contemporary psychology. Finally, I provide the proposal for a new research program on imagination as a higher psychological function that enables us to manipulate complex meanings of both linguistic and iconic forms in the process of experiencing.

Just an Illusion? Imagination as Higher Mental Function

“…All the types of apparently irrational actions, like killing or being killed for an idea or a flag are still puzzling psychology. The fatherland, Santa Claus, the invisible hand of the market, Paradise and Hell, are all entities that we and our fellow humans firmly believe without requiring further proof [1].…”

“…Despite its pervasive presence in everyday life, imagination has been often considered a secondary feature of human mind, somewhat midway between sense and intellect, subordinated to the process of rational and logical thinking [1,5,6]. The study of imagination has traditionally been based on Aristotle's idea of imagination as a faculty which produces, stores, and recalls images in a variety of cognitive activities, including memory and those which motivate and guide action: "The soul never thinks without a mental image [phantasma]" (De Anima).…”

“…The study of imagination has traditionally been based on Aristotle's idea of imagination as a faculty which produces, stores, and recalls images in a variety of cognitive activities, including memory and those which motivate and guide action: "The soul never thinks without a mental image [phantasma]" (De Anima). Since that, many scholars have extensively investigated the role of imagination (e.g., Augustine, Vico, Descartes, Kant, Goethe, Dilthey, Freud, Sartre, Husserl, just to mention few, for a discussion of their ideas on imagination [1,5]), often overlapping it with fantasy. Moreover, the link to other mental processes has been long discussed: remembering has been taken to be an 'imaginative reconstruction' [7] and imagination has been often considered as "springing up of reminiscences. "…”

“…In one of my previous theoretical works, I defined imagination as "a fundamental higher psychological function that is devoted to the manipulation of complex wholes of iconic and linguistic signs" [1]. Meaning-making processes elaborate complexes of signs always in both linguistic and iconic modes.…”

“…This fundamental twofold nature of signs' complexes allows the complementary construction, and elaboration of ideation and reification, internalization and externalization, abstraction and concretization. In this sense, the relationship between psychological phenomena and material phenomena is to be considered neither an opposition nor a representation, rather "through imagination, we build things acting as they were abstractions, and build abstractions acting as they were real things" [1].…”