Poetic destroyers

First Draft of the Chapter: Poetic destroyers: Vico, Emerson and the poetic logic Author: Luca Tateo, Aalborg University, Denmark, [email protected]

To appear in the Volume: POETRY AND IMAGINED WORLDS: Creativity through cultural realities Edited by Lehmann Oliveros, Chaudhary, Bastos and Abbey, Palgrave Publishers Abstract: The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, at the beginning of 18th century, developed the concept of “poetic logic”, that is a specific mode of thought typical of the early stages of every civilization. Poetic logic is the first form of collective elaboration of the data of experience, a way of creating universals concepts based on a sensory, affective sense-making and religious thinking. Vico tried to demonstrate how the poetic logic was the cornerstone for the elaboration of whole systems of collective knowledge (poetic economy, science, geography, history, law, etc.) that were crystallized in myths. He claimed that poetic logic, based on imaginative function was a proper epistemological stance that was overcome by rationality at a later stage of civilization, but wasn’t disappearing thought playing an important function in keeping alive the ethical dimensions of collective life against the “barbarism of reflection”. Two centuries later, the American writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the fathers of Pragmatism, tried to develop an idea of poetic and imagination as forms of knowledge. He sometimes echoes Vico’s ideas, but at the same time presents a view expressing the aggressiveness of Modernity. I will try to sketch the psychological aspects of the two forms of poetic logic and imaginative processes and argue how they contribute to understand the nature of human experiencing. Keywords: poetic logic, Giambattista Vico, subjunctive mode of thought, epistemology, imagination

Author bio and contact information: Luca Tateo is Associate Professor in Epistemology and History of Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University. His research interest are the study of imagination as higher psychological function, the epistemology and history of psychological sciences in order to reflect upon the future trends of psychological research and related methodological issues.

Luca Tateo, room 4.225, Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Kroghstræde 3, 9220 Aalborg, Denmark. E-mail: [email protected]

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Poetic destroyers: Vico, Emerson and the poetic logic Luca Tateo, Centre for Cultural Psychology, Aalborg University, Denmark, [email protected]

Introduction Human beings are poetic destroyers. Through acting with a similar sense of aesthetic intensity, they can create moments of sublime beauty and sublime despicableness. The aesthetic nature of painful and fearful experiences was already known and discussed through the concept of “sublime” (Burke, 1767/1998). Some special experiences “are capable of producing delight; not pleasure, but a fort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror” (Burke, 1767/1998, p. 129). What is relevant here is that the experience of sublime can also be vicarious, as “many ideas have never been at all presented to the senses of any men but by words, as God, angels, devils, heaven and hell, all of which have however a great influence over the passions” (Burke, 1767/1998, p. 181). Through words, images and other signs, human beings can create a vicarious experience of sublimity by evoking things that can seldom occur in reality, like famine, war, etc. this seems to suggest that on the one hand, human beings are able to produce signs under conditions of experiencing the sublime and, on the other hand, they can experience the sublime under the conditions of sign production (Tateo, 2016). This self-regulatory aspect of the relationship between experience and sign is extremely relevant for the rest of my argumentation. It means that humans can turn something poetic through signs and something can produce poetic signs (figure 1).

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Figure 1: a hut on the beach of Recife, Brazil, can be turned into a "Smile bar"

During an early morning walk on the beach near Recife, in Brazil, I took a photo of a hut made of discarded materials, that was turned by “Nado”, probably the owner, into a “Smile bar” (“Bar do Sorriso” in Portuguese) and eventually into his own shelter. How one can transform through sings a “hut” into a “bar”? Why one should feel the need to produce an aesthetic meaningful action on such an object? I will try to account for this in the rest of the paper. My point is that human beings can experience an aesthetic dimension of creative and disruptive actions, can produce a poetic act both in giving birth or killing, in loving or hating. In the same vein, there seems to be an aesthetic dimension even in the most heinous crime that a human being can

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perpetrate (figure 2).

Figure 2: killing with symmetry at Birkenau extermination camp

When visiting the infamous extermination camp of Birkenau near the town of Oświęcim (Auschwitz in German language), one can find an unexpected care for symmetry and order, even in a structure that was built with the purpose of serving the scope of mass extermination for a limited amount of time. In fact, while the first smaller concentration camp of Auschwitz was formed by former army barracks of red bricks, then turned into a prison, Birkenau camp was mostly made of wood barracks and few brick shacks. Visiting the two camps, it very clearly appears that Birkenau was not built to last. It was built to serve as a slaughterhouse for the highest number of people in a limited time and then to be burned down to ground in order to delete any trace of the misfits. Nevertheless, the constructions are built according to a provide a sense of symmetry and order mixed with the cold practicality of mass killing. The aesthetic dimension of human action can also participate into the acts that create extermination. Yet such an aesthetic dimension of human action is also the arena and the battlefield of a semiotic struggle. To say that human beings are poetic destroyers means that the creative and destructive action is always related to the aesthetic dimension of experiencing. Thus, if there is the aesthetic production of a sign on a destructive device as Birkenau, there can be the aesthetic production of a counter-sign that provides the destructive device with a different meaning (figure 3).

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Figure 3: prisoners' drawings on the wall of a lavatory in Auschwitz camp

Visiting the first Auschwitz camp, one can find some drawings on the wall of the prisoners’ rooms, lavatories, etc. Some of the prisoners were artists and artisans that tried to humanize those places through small artworks. It is an aesthetic act of simple humanity that turns the place of death into a space for poetry. But when I mention humanity, I shall explain that both signs are expression of humanity and its fundamental aesthetic dimension. The paradox is that both the perpetrators who built extermination camps with a care for symmetry and the prisoners who decorated the walls, are examples of humanity, in the sense of expressing the human condition: poetic destroyers precisely.

Overcoming beauty The aesthetic dimension of human action is often understood in terms of sublimation, rather than sublime. There should be some poetic nature of humans that leads us to make poetry out of both happy and sad experiences. Through poetry we can make our lives better. Unfortunately, human

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history is filled with examples of poetic evil, in which is not sublimation that characterizes human aesthetic action, but is rather the sense of sublime, that is the sense of overwhelming feeling that produces a special process of meaning-making (figure 4).

Figure 4: Black Square, by Kazimir Malevich (1915), Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31011870

A nice example of how aesthetic experience is related to the sublime is Malevich’s painting “Black Square” (1915). This painting is often referred as the zero point of painting and the starting of modern art, within the current of Suprematism. The author meant to represent the absolute freedom of creative act that stems from the emptiness, through the liberation from the constraints of the form and the non-objectiveness. I can see a deep ambivalence in this work. The wrinkled black surface of the canvas represents the emptiness right before creation stems, but its feeling is ambiguous. The very same emptiness is at the same time emerging from the canvas into a presemiotic form (Tateo, 2014) and dragging the spectator through the abyss. The tension generated between a centripetal and centrifugal movement is creating the condition for an overwhelming vertigo as experience of the sublime.

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A similar process is described by Burke (1767/1998) through an example from Milton’s “Paradise Lost”: “where he describes the travels of the fallen angels through their final habitation. O’er many a dark and dreary vale They pass'd, and many a region dolorous. O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp. Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens and shades of death. A universe of death. Here is displayed the force of union in Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens and shades; which yet would lose the greatest part of their effect, if they were not the Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens and shades —of death. This idea or affection caused by a word, which nothing but a word could annex to the others, raises a very great degree of the sublime; and it is raised yet higher by what follows, a “universe of death". Here are again two ideas not presentible but by language; and an union of them great and amazing beyond conception” (Burke, 1767/1998, p. 181-182). According to Burke, the sublime emerges from the tension between the familiar and circumscribed images of natural scenario and the production of a sign (“of death”) that creates an overwhelming feeling. So far, we have already two elements which could help us to elaborate on the aesthetic dimension of psychological experience. First, beauty and good are not exclusive attributes of poetic action. Second, the aesthetic dimension of experience is related to a kind of tension generated by overwhelming signs (figure 5).

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Figure 5: centripetal and centrifugal forces emerging from emptiness

Depending on which direction becomes salient to the spectator in a specific moment, the emerging feeling will be differentiated into a pleasant or unpleasant. Yet the tension and the ambivalence is the condition for the potential production of the experience. Let me know address the issue of the production of these kind of signs, drawing on the theories of Giambattista Vico and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The po(i)etic action: Giambattista Vico The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) was the first thinker of pre-modernity to develop a general theory of human historical development that was based on the idea that the realm of culture is the specificity of human beings. He first understood that culture is the human nature. Vico’s philosophical anthropology is based on the idea that humans are essentially “makers” (homo faber), that is they construct and reconstruct their own social world in order to master the uncertainty of life (Tateo, 2015; 2017). “Human beings are not mechanically obeying to the laws of nature, they are rather likely to violate them, for the good or for the bad” (Tateo, 2015, p. 31). According to Vico, civilization is the solution that human beings have philogenetically developed to cope with the fear and overwhelming feeling of the power and inscrutability of nature

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(Vico 1744/1984). Primitive men were governed only by the senses and by the bodily experience, through which they experienced the world as a series of fearful or pleasant events. Nevertheless, says Vico, there were some overwhelming experiences that could not be accounted only in a sensorial basis. Phenomena like natural powers (e.g. thunders) or like death were so overwhelming that humans had to develop a different kind of explanation. But Divine Providence gave those men just few resources: a body and an excitable inventive capability. Thus, those primitive humans started to develop a way of understanding the world based on embodied forms of meaning making. They started to imagine something that was at the same time different and similar to themselves. The human mind is naturally inclined by the senses to see itself externally in the body, and only with great difficulty does it come to attend to itself by means of reflection. This axiom gives us the universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. (Vico, 1744/1984, p. 70) The experience of sublime and the stem of thinking, according to Vico, seem to develop together. As human being is naturally a “maker” (a poet, from the ancient Greek poiein, to make), he tailored on himself a model of explanation for overwhelming natural phenomena: he invented the divinity. This was the first real cultural product, as it started to organize and regulate individual and collective conducts (e.g. we behave in a certain way to please or not disappoint some being up there). Vico maintains that sublime, imagination and meaning-making are the foundations of humanity. And since naturally the discovery or invention of things comes before criticism of them, it was fitting that the infancy of the world should concern itself with the first operation of the human mind, for the world then had need of all inventions for the necessities and utilities of life, all of which had been provided before the philosophers appeared (Vico 1744/1984, p. 236). This ancestral act of human creation was the specimen for a way of explaining other phenomena, like death, birth, famine, violence, etc. And the necessity of naming this new inventions led to development of languages from the first available material: the human body again. According to Vico, human beings are thus characterized by a differentiation from the pure realm of nature: “a progressive distancing from the senses through the creation of images that allows the construction of abstract concepts” (Tateo, 2015, p. 34). Imagination, with its creative and poetic power, then becomes the first form of human knowing. Through imagination, human beings 9

distanced the realm of artificial and natural, and at the same time created the premises for the process of cultural mediation: they became homo imaginans (Lapoujade, 2014). What is important here is that according to Vico, imagination is the most powerful tool through which human beings broke the continuity with nature and reconstructed the relationship (with both nature and fellow humans) on a symbolic basis. I want now to discuss the perspective of another thinker who addressed the role of imagination in the relationship between human beings and nature as different realms: Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Nature as object: Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was a very influential American intellectual and leader of the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. I refer to him as one of the most relevant ancestors of American Pragmatism, with a deep influence on scholars like William James. The interest of a “imagined” dialogue between Vico and Emerson resides in their being intellectual points of reference for different approaches to human and social sciences. On the one hand, Giambattista Vico can be considered a forerunner of the historical cultural approaches (Tateo, 2015), while Emerson introduced in the American context the cultural premises that informed American social sciences with the ideology of individualism, meliorism and empiricism (Koopman, 2006). Apparently, Emerson and Vico share some important concepts. They both explore the role of imagination as distinctiveness of human beings and both refer to the relationship between humans and nature as a form of symbolic elaboration (Ross Meehan, 2013). They both claim that poetic knowledge is a special form of relationship between humans and nature. The first form of knowing is poetic and anthropomorphic, human make themselves the measure of all things, especially of the unknown: The world is thoroughly anthropomorphized, as if it had passed through the body and mind of man, and taken his mould and form. Indeed, good poetry is always personification, and heightens every species of force in nature by giving it a human volition (Emerson, 1968, p. 6). But while Vico starts from a clear distinction between fact and artifact, natural and human sciences, Emerson seems to look for a common principle, a fundamental energy of nature that would be analogous to the energy of the mind (Ross Meehan, 2013). In other words, Emerson works exactly in the opposite direction of Vico, that is reconciling the symbolic and the empirical.

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There is one animal, one plant, one matter, and one force. The laws of light and of heat trans-late each other ; - so do the laws of sound and of color ; and so galvanism, electricity, and magnetism are varied forms of the selfsame energy. While the student ponders this immense unity, he observes that all things in nature, the animals, the mountain, the river, the seasons, wood, iron, stone, vapor, - have a mysterious relation to his thoughts and his life ; their growths, decays, quality, and use so curiously resemble himself, in parts and in wholes, that he is compelled to speak by means of them. His words and his thoughts are framed by their help (Emerson, 1968, p. 2). This way of thinking actually echoes Goethe’s philosophy of organicism, even though in Emerson this becomes a way of claiming the dominant position of human being over nature (Ross Meehan, 2013). There is a correspondence between mind and nature, they are participate of the same energy. But while in the case of Vico, humans produce a form of knowledge by creating poetic images that are the stems concept of thinking, in Emerson: The world is an immense picture-book of every passage in human life. Every object he beholds is the mask of a man. (…) Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty. He was himself conscious of its help, which made him a prophet among the doctors. From this vision he gave brave hints to. the zoologist, the botanist, and the optician (Emerson, 1968, p. 3). The meaning of the po(i)etic capability of human beings is thus radically different in Vico and Emerson. For the Italian philosopher, it means the capability of humans to arti-facere, that is to create something that belongs to the real of the homo faber (Tateo, 2017). For Emerson, poetic is a transfer of energy from mind to matter, is the mind informing the nature by recognizing herself in the forms of a three, a thunder, a rock. While for Vico poetry is a form of knowledge through imaginative creation of poetic universals (Tateo, 2015) that dwell only in the realm of social life, for Emerson poetry is an action upon the nature. In the former case, poetry is empathic, while in the second poetry is despotic. Of course, this difference can be explained by the diversity of historical and social contexts. Vico was writing at the edge of Enlightenment, when in Europe the realms of Religion, of Nature and of History were moving the first steps as autonomous spheres. Emerson is already an author of Modernity, he “conceives of a natural history or natural method of mind in organic, biological relation to matter, a conception informed by changing views of both matter and mind found in the nineteenth-century natural science” (Ross Meehan, 2013, 302). It means that poetry is “making” in a very prosaic sense:

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The test or measure of poetic genius is the power to read the poetry of affairs, - to fuse the circumstance of to-day; not to use Scott's antique superstitions, or Shakespeare’s, but to convert those of the nineteenth century, and of the existing nations, into universal symbols (…) but to point out where the same creative force is now working in our own houses and public assemblies, to convert the vivid energies acting at this hour, in New York and Chicago and San Francisco, into universal symbols, requires a subtle and commanding thought. (Emerson, 1968, p. 10). This kind of progressive ideology applied to all the branches of human activity, including poetry, becomes a dominant and aggressive way of understanding the “making”, oriented to the satisfaction of needs at all costs. This is exactly what Vico condemned as the vicious circle of civilizations: when the quest for satisfaction of egoistic pleasures overrules the common sense ethics of humanity, then a civilization decays. In all these origins one can trace the eternal plan of commonwealths, on which states, though acquired by violence and fraud, must take their stand in order to survive, as on the other hand those acquired by way of these virtuous origins afterwards fall to ruin through fraud and violence. This plan of commonwealths is founded on the two eternal principles of this world of nations, namely the mind and the body of the men who compose it (Vico 1744/1984, p. 11). Vico and Emerson are two examples of the different ways to understand the role of the aesthetic dimension in human experiencing. In Vico, the imaginative activity is a way of developing an autonomous sphere of meaning and to gain knowledge starting from the senses, humans are makers of humanity. In Emerson, imaginative activity is instead a form of penetrating and informing the realm of facts by the power of human mind, and humans are lords: “We cannot look at works of art but they teach us how near man is to creating” (Emerson, 1968, p. 11). While in Vico humans are po(i)etic creators and destroyers of themselves and their social life, in Emerson, humans are eventually po(i)etic creators and destroyers of everything. It is true that Emerson is one of the first modern authors that reflects upon the aesthetic relationship between the human beings and their environment in terms of homology (humans participate of the same original energy of nature) in a way that will anticipate the ecological movements (Ross Meehan, 2013). On the other hand, Emerson develops an aesthetic of the idealistic pragmatism that turns the homo faber into the dominator of “nature”. In this sense, though, Emerson risks to eliminate the conditions for the experiencing of the sublime, which is characterized by an overwhelming tension.

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To exemplify my last statement, I will use as an example a 1840 English painting by J. M. W. Turner: “Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying - Typhoon coming on”, also known as the “Slave Ship” (figure 6).

Figure 6: Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying — Typhoon coming on ("The Slave Ship"), 1840, William Turner - Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2816953

Just like Emerson, Turner was active in the abolitionist movement and was extremely impressed by a terrible episode in 1781, when the captain of the slave ship Zong had ordered 133 ill slaves to be thrown overboard so that insurance payments could be collected. Although Turner was a renowned painter, when he first exhibited this work accompanied by some descriptive verses, the reception was terrible. From the point of view of the style at that time, it was considered a messy and indiscernible melt of colors. Yet I find this painting an incredibly powerful example of the poetic of sublime. The first element that captures attention is an enormous deep-red sunset over a stormy sea, by the approaching typhoon. Then one can discern that the painting is divided into three different sections. Looking closer, one can identify a ship sailing off into the distance on the left side of the canvas. In the lower right part, defined by the light of the sunset, one can see a number of slaves’

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bodies floating in the water, probably thrown overboard from the ship. The waters are full of fish and sea monsters approaching like to eat the slaves, and sea gulls circling overhead above the chaos. The figures are blurred and almost melting in the powerful tones from the yellow of the sun to the deep-red, almost bloody of the sea. How can an artist render the deep horror of such a slaughter? How can poetry intervene in describing such an enormous act of inhumanity? This is the question that almost all artists from the 20th Century on and the horrors of the World Wars, extermination camps and atomic bombs had to answer. Although Turner was a contemporary of Emerson, his way of expressing the aesthetic dimension of horror is based on a different poetic (figure 7). Turner’s overwhelming astonishment to such violence cannot be expressed but producing an intense emotional expression through color. What matters in the painting is not the precision of the lines defining the different objects, but the different expressive power of the dominant colors.

Figure 7: Figure 5: centripetal and centrifugal forces emerging from astonishment The bright yellow of the sunlight, that splits the painting in two sub-sections, is contrasted with the blood-red of the ocean, an ocean of blood, in which seems to drown any hope of humanity. Slavery is a sea of blood, Turner seems to suggest, and there is no rationality, no linearity in such an abjection. As in the Malevich’s “Square”, there is a tension between centrifugal and centripetal forces (figure 7). On the one hand, the painting is divided horizontally, by the horizon between light and darkness, yellow and red-brown, the sun and the sea. In Turner’s painting, the nature (as in

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Milton’s poem mentioned by Burke) is indifferent to the human vicissitudes, and the feeling of sublime emerges with an specific sign produced in combination with the natural elements: the floating and desperate bodies of the slaves, which correspond to the sign “of death” that Burkes identifies in Milton’s verses. Another division is vertical, from left to right. On the left, the ship is fading away with its masts of a intense red, which merge with the color of the sky, but at the same time recall the blood. It seems to be completely indifferent and alien to the suffering of the human beings floating in the right side of the canvas. There are at least three different aesthetics experiences of the sublime here. First, there is the overwhelming grandiosity of the sun and the coming storm, secondly, there is the crude expressivity of the slaves condemned to death, and, finally, there is the overall feeling of the observer to be helpless spectator of such an unbelievable act of inhumanity. The spectator could in fact experience the ambivalence between the feeling emerging from the signs (color and shapes) that direct the affect towards the center (the sun) and those signs directing the affect in a centrifugal direction, towards the complete alterity between the victims and the perpetrators. The two direction generate together the aesthetic experience of sublimity that allows the spectator to empathize with the scene. It is worth noticing that such an intense poetic experience is hardly achievable through the kind of images that we are accustomed to watch on media. It would deserve more attention the role of media in inhibiting such experience of the sublime, creating the conditions for “an-aesthetic” rather than “aesthetic” dimension of experiencing (Lapoujade, 2014), when we watch the images of the modern slaves shipped on precarious means of transport risking to drown at every moment.

Precarious conclusions Let me now try to draw some initial reflections about the ambivalent nature of human aesthetic experience I have presented so far. First, human action always implies an aesthetic dimension. No matter if human beings are acting to build a work of art, to kill or to pollute nature, there is always a po(i)etic aspects, as far as humans are producers of meaningful actions oriented towards a future condition (Tateo, 2017) yet to be realized. Nothing consolatory or ethic, nothing inherently good or bad in poetry, as it is a necessary condition of experiencing of the homo imaginans. I have tried to discuss the ideas of Burke, Vico and Emerson in order to reflect upon the nature of the aesthetic dimension of every meaningful human action upon the world. The po(i)etic nature of human action implies that, according to Vico, every form of human experience is “artifact” (Tateo, 2017). From Burke, we learn that some combinations of signs produced in the encounter with the world can

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become so overwhelming to produce the experience of sublime. Finally, from Emerson we learn that such po(i)etic action is always an act of domination and violence (figure 8).

Figure 8: beauty as a product of a meaningful violent po(i)etic action on beauty itself: the cityscape of Salvador Da Bahia, Brazil

Human beings create special places to dwell, like the skyscrapers on the shore of beautiful Brazilian towns, from which special and privileged people can benefit of the invention of the “seascape”. According to Emerson, this is one of the greatest achievements of mankind: Now at this rare elevation above his usual sphere, he has come into new circulations, the marrow of the world is in his bones, the opulence of forms begins to pour into his intellect, and he is permitted to dip his brush into the old paint-pot with which birds, flowers, the human cheek, the living rock, the broad landscape, the ocean, and the eternal sky were painted (Emerson, 1968, p. 12). Yet this act that sounds so “poetic” is actually rooted in an ignominious act of violence and abuse. The construction of a “seascape” for the sake of the aesthetic amusement of the few implies an act of poetic destruction. The invention of the “seascape” implied the exclusion of those who live behind the skyscrapers. Besides, the creation of the “seascape” is made through the meaningful modification of the previous condition of the shore. The “seascape” is an act of poetic destruction through the production of a meaningful set of signs over the existing “natural” shore. After that, some people under some specific conditions, can experience it as “beautiful”, to the extent that 16

they are in the position of powerful spectators. An overwhelming beauty can thus be experienced on top of an extreme violence. In terms of meaning-making, the example of the hut I mentioned at the beginning and the skyscrapers belong to the same process. Po(i)etic action implies the production of signs over/against that turn the object of experience into a meaningful artifact. This action is always an aesthetic action, apart from the fact that its outcome is constructive or destructive. Actually, it is destructive and constructive at the same time. Under some specific conditions, the meaning-making can emerge into an overwhelming experience of the sublime. Bringing back the concept of poetic action into the realm of everyday life has the consequence of making us aware that poetry, as any feature of human beings, is highly ambivalent, as it concerns both the highest peaks of human aspirations and the darkest abyss of human abjection.

References Burke, E. (1767/1998). A philosophical enquiry into the sublime and beautiful. London: Penguin. Emerson, R. W. (1968). Poetry and Imagination. In E. W. Emerson (Ed), The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Centenary Edition Volume VIII: Letters and Social Aims. New York: AMS Koopman, C. (2006). Pragmatism as a philosophy of hope: Emerson, James, Dewey, Rorty. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 20(2), 106-116. Lapoujade, M. N. (2014). Homo Imaginans. Itinerarios de la imaginación, Vol I de los Ensayos Completos. Mexico City: BUAP. Ross Meehan, S. (2013). Ecology and Imagination: Emerson, Thoreau, and the Nature of Metonymy. Criticism, 55 (2), 299–329. Tateo, L. (2014). Beyond the self and the environment: The psychological horizon. In K. R. Cabell & J. Valsiner (Eds), The Catalyzing Mind (pp. 223-237). New York: Springer. Tateo, L. (2015). The providence of associated minds: Agency in the thought of Giambattista Vico and the origins of social and cultural psychology. In C. W. Gruber, M. G. Clark, S. H. Klempe and J. Valsiner (Eds), Constraints of Agency. Explorations of Theory in Everyday Life (pp. 31-43). Cham, Heidelberg, New York, Dordrecht, London: Springer International Publishing. Tateo, L. (2016). Fear. In V. P. Glăveanu, L. Tanggaard & C. Wegener (Eds), Creativity. A New Vocabulary (pp. 43-51). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Tateo, L. (2017). Toward a New (Psychological) Science. In L. Tateo (Ed), Giambattista Vico and the new psychological science (pp. 205-217). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Vico, G. (1744/1984). The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Revised Translation of the Third Edition, by T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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