Cognitive Semiotics 2017; 10(1): 1–18 Amadeu Viana* Vico, Peirce, and the issue of complexity in human sciences The natura-artificium question DOI 10.1515/cogsem-2017-0001 Abstract: This paper deals with some trends in complexity issues related to the connections between natural and social sciences. More precisely, it explores the possible correspondences between physical and phenomenological accounts by arguing that natura and artificium are not far from one another given that human nature is actually incomplete without signs and signs are essentially embodied and enacted. The paper draws upon the work developed by Giambattista Vico in the eighteenth century and Charles S. Peirce in the twentieth century as well as their respective implications and effects in contemporary cognitive and semiotic research. Accordingly, it also explores the prevailing role of objects and artifacts in cognition, claiming that things shape the mind and that we should thus be wary of their constitutive effects in the course of human history. Keywords: biosemiotics, symbolic origins, embodiment, extensionalism, material engagement Nature and Art are too great to be directed to ends, and neither they need them, because there are returns everywhere and returns are life. –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1 Introduction: incomplete nature and extensionalism Complexity issues are usually related to the overcoming of classical, Newtonian approaches in science. They are associated with new paradigms like self-organiza- tion, networking, and the holistic perspective, recalling that the whole is more than the aggregation of its parts (Massip-Bonet and Bastardas-Boada 2013). Some trends in complexity research may also be identified by the surmounting of the Cartesian *Corresponding author: Amadeu Viana, Facultat de Lletres, Universitat de Lleida, Catalonia, Spain, E-mail: [email protected] 2 Amadeu Viana dualistic stance, namely those concerning the connections between natural and human sciences. In this paper, I will explore some contemporary avenues that strive conjointly towards a better understanding of the inveterate gulf between naturalis- tic, third person approaches to knowledge and mind and, as Jung (2009) put it, human-centered, first person approaches. The explanatory gap (both conceptual and epistemological) between physical and phenomenological accounts (Thompson 2007) will be considered here through the discussion of the double-faced, comple- mentary dimensions of natura and artificium, i. e., the idea that we humans develop asortofincomplete nature, as Deacon (2011) has recently put it, and the comple- mentary issue of extensionalist investigations (Malafouris and Renfrew 2010). My first contention is that history plays a determinant role in any explana- tion that tries to mediate between natural and social human accounts. One of the first critical opponents to Cartesian rationalism was the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1744). He firmly believed that the human mind was a product of historical conditions; so, he maintained that we would be able to trace back its origins and certificate its stages through the history of signs. Vico was also one of the first contenders of the stance that human languages were a historical outcome of mental and social precursory provisions, arguing against the received idea of their divine origin. In front of the Cartesian position of an autonomous reason, disembodied and independent of historical roots (however interesting this argument may be for science), Vico insisted on the idea that the human mind realizes and manifests itself in human facts and history, and knowledge builds itself in action, challenging the Platonic priority of pure ideas in an abstract realm. Among the contemporary discussions, the work of Charles S. Peirce is some- how recurrent in addressing substantial critiques both to the Platonic priority of abstract knowledge and Cartesian dualistic approaches. Peirce’s proposal to con- sider logic (abstract, context independent knowledge) in terms of semiotics (and thus embodied and enacted signs) was developed after the spread of European positivism and idealized Hegelian historicism and has probably to be taken as a reaction against both. The pragmatist program, to which I should add here the early work of Vico, has been invoked in different contexts in fruitful connection with complexity issues.1 Both authors, Vico and Peirce, have become qualitative starting points in contemporary studies about the development of language (Noble and Davidson 1996; Deacon 1997; Trabant and Ward 2001; Schilhab et al. 2012). In those researches, it is commonly assumed that “the mind recognizes its existence 1 I would mention Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok (1991), Merrell (1991, 1995, 1998), Hoffmeyer (1996), Bax et al. (2004), Doll et al. (2005), and, more recently, Barrena and Nubiola (2013) and Viola (2014). Vico, Peirce, and the issue of complexity 3 through its expression,” being substantially embodied and embedded in action (cf. Viola 2014: 92–95). A comprehensive paradigm wishing to deal both with naturalistic research and social and human issues has to confront our regular endeavor to interpret the world and the sort of actions we usually are engaged in. In this respect, taking into account how society contributes to the mind is a substantial piece in this inquiry (Tomasello 2014). The human mind, through signs and language, has been from the very beginning a collective enterprise. History here plays its precious role as the particular, human way to participate in the world. In the following, I sketch Vico’s position about our incomplete nature and Peirce’s approach to embodied and enacted signs, moving to the complemen- tary natura – artificium distinction. 2 Vico on language and fantasy Combining received knowledge about rhetoric and history, the Italian philoso- pher Giambattista Vico put forward in his Scienza Nuova (Vico 1744/1948) the hypothesis that imaginative thinking paved the way for articulated signs and logical thinking. According to him, and in agreement with the historical emer- gence of signs and myths, creative imagination was the true basis of the human mind and it keeps its import and substance in modern societies. Vico conceives fantasy as a natural process and a rudimentary form of language (in fact, inner language, lingua mentale), and he explains its origin in terms of the projection in nature of human properties as they were readily noticed: emotions, corporeal attributes, power, movements, or actions. Fantasy comes from Greek phanta- zesthai, “to picture to one self,” a cognate of phainesthai, “to appear, have visions,” a word also related with phantasm, having the same ground that German Geist (compare with English ghost) and French esprit – all of them words that explain these original properties of the mind, the conflation of inner and outer experience. Terms like anima (“soul”) and animus (“spirit, vitality”), which were the basis of the Aristotelian reflexion upon the mind, reveal the same trend, grounded on the projection of bodily experience (Onians 1987). In the same vein, it is useful to note that fiction comes from Latin fingere, “imitate,” the original action supposed by Vico to be the primitive way to confront the world. In Vico’s account, humanity emerges from this original, figurative activity through material and corporeal signs (semata, body paints, ornaments, emblems), going down the road to modern, articulated languages, “the vulgar genera, both of words and letters,” through which “the minds of the peoples grew quicker and developed powers of abstraction,” as he said (Vico 1744/1948: § 460). 4 Amadeu Viana The striking fact that there cannot be human languages without the property of creative imagination accompanying them invites us to search for their natural basis. Vico called the imaginative prototypes of the human mind to embody knowledge fantastic universals (as opposed to late, philosophical logical univer- sals). As he saw it, these fantastic universals constituted the patterns upon which modern, articulated languages and associations were formed. Then, the human mind did not emerge itself with its full properties (logical abstraction, adaptive flexibility, and so on) all at once. Articulated languages are an inven- tion of the late Paleolithic period, as Nietzsche has rightly pointed out, and carry with them the remnants of their imperfect origin. Mind started from sheer ignorance, phenomenological indefinition and figurativeness. Let me quote the Vichian formulation at length: It is noteworthy that in all languages the greater part of the expressions relating to inanimate things are formed by metaphor from the human body and its parts and from human senses and passions. Thus, head for top or beginning; the brow and shoulders of a hill; the eyes for the looped heads of screws and for windows letting light into houses; mouth for any opening; lip for the rim of a vase or of anything else; the tooth of a plow, a rake, a saw, a comb […]. All of which is a consequence of our axiom that man in his ignorance makes himself the rule of the universe, for in the examples cited he has made of himself an entire world. So that, 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 under- stands 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. (ibid.: § 405) As contemporary research has showed (Ortony 1979; Danesi 1992; Trim 2007), figurative thinking has been shaping human languages and we know that metaphors keep their cognitive value in ordinary domains as well as in special, more creative experiences. The German anthropological philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century (Jung 2009) paid particular attention to building arguments in order to bridge the explanatory gap between mind and matter, consciousness and nature.