We live in a Vichian age.
As Elio Gianturco already wrote in 1965 – presenting his translation of De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (1709) – the evolution of cybernetic insights from the 1950s would soon renew the conviction that we live in an entirely ‘mathematized’ and ‘quantified’ world. Today, the ambition that belonged to Galileo and Descartes at the dawn of the first scientific revolution is carried forward by AI predictive algorithms, by the reduction of the knowable to an assembly of data, and by the advantage that STEM subjects seem to have over the humanities in universities. It is as if, in these last few years of technological acceleration, the scientism lamented by Edmund Husserl in The Crisis of European Sciences (1936) has been fully realized: knowledge – our way of producing it, transmitting it, teaching it – appears to have no further connection with our life-world, with the nature we still inhabit despite everything, with the interpersonal ties we nonetheless still need.
However, precisely to avoid this kind of pessimism, Giambattista Vico reminded us in the 18th century – and reminds us today – that in times of intense techno-scientific development, a non-rearguard defense of humanism is not only possible but inevitable. For the impulse of the scientific enterprise is rhetorical – indeed, metaphorical – intersecting and bringing into dialogue forms of knowledge and techniques that are often profoundly different.
In the early cybernetic years, mathematicians (Norbert Wiener), neurophysiologists (Warren S. McCulloch), information theorists (Claude Shannon) and psychiatrists (William R. Ashby) could work together – despite today’s “fragmentation of knowledge” (Donald P. Verene) – because, even without knowing it, they were making their own the Vichian notion of metaphor, expressed in The Study Method of Our Times and in The New Science (1725, 1730, 1744).
Meta-phereinmeans transferring, moving, projecting meanings from one domain to another – from the nervous system to numbers and equations, from the brain to information, from neural networks to microchips – not by virtue of an arbitrary whim (the risks of which were highlighted by the so-called “Sokal hoax” of 1998), but by reason of what Vico called the middle term of a relationship. In this relationship, the extremes – the human mind and the machine, AI and the brain of a living being – can certainly communicate with each other, but that does not mean they are structurally the same thing (as the transhumanism of Ray Kurzweil and the more apocalyptic fringes of Silicon Valley would have us believe).
The feedback mechanism – i.e., the self-correction capability that characterizes mechanical systems at the dawn of AI, the most advanced digital systems today, and living organisms – is the Vichian middle term, which makes comparative scientific research across different fields possible. Yet – and this is the central point, highlighted by Vico’s theory of the corporeal origin oflanguage– for a human being, hitting or protecting a target with an AI-guided drone is not the same thing, whereas it is for the drone left to its own devices. A human being has a body that can be wounded and die; the drone is a device that can break. Human language expresses – from the depths of the bíos – surprise, terror, dreams; the language of ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Claude simulates all this without being embodied in it.
To recognize the metaphorical nature – corporeal and comparative – of AI therefore means bringing AI back into the discretionary sphere of a life that requires protection, not into that of a technological determinism that dispenses with facing the ethical nexus of innovation and responsibility – i.e., the normative problem posed by AI.
From many points of view, including normativity, AI asks – indeed demands – from human beings a surplus of creativity, of fantasia – Vico would say. This is the ability to uncover unexpected connections between distant disciplinary fields – an inclination towards metaphor that today’s universities ought to encourage in students, nurturing their original curiosity, instead of digging the compartmental (‘departmental’) moat between cultural studies and the sciences.
After all, what is Artificial Intelligence – christened by John McCarthy at the 1956 Dartmouth Conference – if not a fascinating adynaton, a rhetorical figure of impossibility, of the desire to make human intelligence – irreducibly biological, embodied – coincide with the artifice of a machine, a program, a binary code?
What Vico teaches us today is a discipline of the gaze. Thanks to him, we can look at the most unsettling products of technology precisely as ‘products’: verum ipsum factum. Precisely because AI is, strictly speaking, impossible, it speaks to us – continues to speak to us – of us, of us humans, of our fantasia (including linguistic-metaphorical fantasia) and of our aspirations.
In this sense, as some of the more ‘humanistic’ sectors of neuroscience also warn (for example, Vittorio Gallese), rather than providing a pretext for ‘mechanizing’ the human, AI provides an opportunity to understand the virtual – the shadow – in the light of the body that generates it, and to bring back data, information bits, the prompts of our solitary conversations, to that excess of life in action and imagination that produces and sustains them.
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