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Worldly beings becoming human beings: Differentiations and articulations

within our different ways of being

Article  in  Culture & Psychology · June 2015

DOI: 10.1177/1354067X15575797

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DOI: 10.1177/1354067X15575797

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articulations within our

different ways of being
John Shotter
University of New Hampshire, USA

Abstract
These excellent papers by Pablo Rojas and Mariagrazia Grantella, both in their own very
different ways, begin to bring into view aspects of our social psychological functioning
that Descartes’ mechanical–mathematical world view has occluded, i.e., made rationally
invisible to us. They both emphasize the degree to which we have our being within
already flowing, intra-mingling, strands of both physical and social activities that influ-
ence us more than we can influence them. Rojas’ interest is in our coming to feel so ‘‘at
home,’’ so to speak, in moving around on a piano keyboard, that we can come to relate
to it as we relate to our own vocal tracts in singing—skills that we can develop (but not
easily) by rigorous training. Grantella too, in turning to Vico’s notion that the early
people’s ‘‘were almost entirely body, and practically not at all reflection,’’ makes a similar
point: we need to replace our rationalistic interest in abstract entities with an interest in
origins and processes, and to focus on our human ways of being and of living our lives. My
only point of criticism of these two excellent paper is that I think that they still start too
late in the day.

Keywords
Vico, corporeal imagination, imaginative universals, sensory topics, poetic wisdom

Luca Tateo has asked me to comment on some of the articles in this special issue of
Culture & Psychology on Vico and Imagination. I have chosen just two that I see as
connected with each other: Rojas’s (2015) article on becoming one with one’s own
musical instrument, and Grantella’s (2015) article on imaginative universals and

Corresponding author:
John Shotter, 4 Owls Close, Whittlesford CB22 4PL, United Kingdom.
Email: jds12@btinternet.com
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human cognition. I have chosen these because, as I see it, at last, a movement is
again beginning (like the one in the late 1960s early 1970s) expressive of our need to
attend to what the Cartesian view of our human reality has excluded. With
Descartes’ (1968) Discours of 1637, thoughtful human beings encountered for the
first time the notion of a strictly mechanical and mathematical universe, and the
idea that they could make themselves ‘‘master and possessors on nature’’ (p. 78) by
the use of such rationalistic methods— and that urge, to try to exert an almost total
control of the conditions of our own lives, has clearly proven almost irresistible.
But as Cassirer (1960) points out, this view of things is ‘‘a terminus ad quem, not
a terminus a quo—an end, not a beginning’’ (p. 103). As such, it leaves us in
ignorance of the fact that, although the world made us, and not we, we have no
idea of how we have come to develop, not into many different living species, but
into a single living species with so many different ways of being-in-the-world,
with so many different cultures and languages. Neo-Darwinianism has come up
with absolutely nothing by way of an answer to this question of human cultures
(see Ingold & Palsson, 2013, p. 5).
What seems so special about us as human beings, is our still indeterminate,
unfinished nature; the fact that so much of what is of importance to us exists
not only in relation to what else is around it and us but also in our sense that
there is always a something more beyond it. Thus, the nature of our institutions
is, as Vico (1744/1968) puts it, ‘‘nothing more but their coming into being (nasci-
mento) at certain times and in certain guises’’ (para. 147).1 In other words, our
being human does not just happen to us, it is a task that we must turn to afresh in
each new day; nothing in our living worlds is just a mechanical repeat of a
past event. Yet we have, so to speak, inescapably entrapped ourselves within a
whole way of looking at ourselves and our surroundings as consisting only of
‘‘God-created matter,’’ composed of ‘‘different separate parts’’ in motion ‘‘accord-
ing to his established laws’’ (Descartes, 1637/1968, p. 62), i.e., to see everything
always as having had its beginnings in how we see things now.
Indeed, the fact is, this rationalistic view of things—of the world and of our-
selves as consisting only in configurations of self-contained, atomic parts, all
only linked together (if at all) by sets of abstract laws, rules, or principles—is
utterly inadequate to how we in fact live our lives. For we only live as participants
within particular social groups, with their own cultures and language; we owe our
very way of being and surviving in the world to that fact; we are born as it were,
unadapted, adapted only to growing up in this, that, or some other culture as a
result of the flowing, communicative activities within which we are immersed.
Indeed, in being immersed in currents of activity that affect us as much, if not
more, than we can affect them, we can often find movements of feeling occurring
within us which are first undifferentiated as to whether they have their source in
ourselves, in others around us, or in previous generations.
1 Indeed, as Rojas (MS, p. 3) points out with respect to all our skills: ‘‘Every skill
is thus immersed in a tradition and carries a particular style to which the practi-
tioner adheres by re-appropriating these practical and symbolic gestures and
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adapting them to her or his own corporeality’’; and he goes on to make the most
important remark that: ‘‘A musician’s apprenticeship is thus guided by norms
that determine the gravitational centre of collective musical practices hic et nunc’’
(MS, p. 15)2—as if, as practitioners come to dwell more and more fully within a
practice, they come to possess, as it were, a mental plumb line enabling them to
sense their departures from the ‘‘gravitational requirements’’ of the practice, its
telos. Yet, our currently dominant rationalistic attitudes of mind and habits of
thought prevent us from recognizing this fact as, so to speak, a ‘‘landmark
fact,’’3 as a guiding fact along the way in the achievement of an end. For such
‘‘facts’’ can serve no function at all for us as merely rational problem solvers.

The wholly corporeal imagination of the first peoples

Clearly, however, Grantella and Rojas are having none of this. They both want to
go back to beginnings, to those activities at work in our living, bodily relations,
both with each other and with all the othernesses occurring in our surroundings, to
examine what is involved in our coming to ‘‘understandings’’ of those relations that
matter to us, that have a meaning for us in our conduct of living activities. They
both want to ‘‘get inside,’’ so to speak, those activities in which our sense of
‘‘rightness’’ and ‘‘wrongness,’’ of ‘‘fittingness’’ and ‘‘unfittingness,’’ of ‘‘matching
a sought after ideal’’ or ‘‘not,’’ are at work; their task is to articulate first-person
accounts of what it is like4 to recognize a ‘‘lack’’ in one’s life, and also, what
‘‘trying’’ to alleviate that lack is like. They have recognized that we need before-
the-fact, rather than after-the-fact accounts (Shotter, in press).
We cannot articulate such accounts in third-person external observer, objective
terms, we can only do it poetically, because our task is not to say what such tryings
look like as patterns out in the world, but what they feel like within the person
trying so to act. We need to get a feel, both for the nature of their distinct initial
motivations, as well as for the possible directions in which they might go to alleviate
the ‘‘lack,’’ the ‘‘something more’’ they feel they need. This is not, and cannot at all
be, a matter of generalities, a matter of simply doing again what was successful the
time before. For such ‘‘lacks,’’ such ‘‘needs’’ are quite specific to a moment in
history. Thus, the task is to do what has never been done before; unique tryings
involving geographical and temporal particularities are at issue; initially, it is a
matter of making use of whatever availabilities happen to exist at particular
times in particular places.
As Rojas (MS, p. 16) points out, this is where Vico’s account of the imaginative
powers of mythic forms of expression can come to play a crucial role. For, almost
paradoxically, Vico (1744/1968)5 claims that his ‘‘imaginative metaphysics shows
that man becomes all things by not understanding, homo non intelligendo fit omnia.
For when man understands, he extends his mind to comprehend things; but when
he does not understand he makes them out of himself, and by transforming himself,
becomes them’’ (para. 405). In other words, when we understand, we merely elab-
orate what we are already familiar with; whereas, when we do not understand, we
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bring into existence new forms of experience, new movements of feeling; and we
give them expression by relating aspects of ourselves to those movements.
And in doing this, we can make a first move away from being creatures of
impulse to creatures of meanings, to sensings of likeness that can be meant and
understood as one-and-the-same in countless different circumstances. For in relat-
ing aspects of our surroundings to aspects of ourselves, we can gain a possibly
useful orientational or relational sense of how yet-unnamed ‘‘things’’ can be (her-
meneutically)6 given a meaning by being placed in functional relation to the rest of
our body as a whole, i.e., we can act in relation to them in ways similar to how we
might act toward as bodily aspect of ourselves. Vico (1744/1968) gave examples of
‘‘head for the top or beginning; the brow and shoulders of a hill; the eyes of needles
and of potatoes; mouth for any opening; . . . of farmers of Latium [saying]
the fields were thirsty . . . and our rustics [speaking] of plants making love’’
(para. 405) and so on.
In fact, it is worth mentioning—as Rojas is in fact exploring a wholly corporeal
achievement on Sudnow’s (1978) part—that Vico (1744/1968) not only sees the
‘‘the master key’’ of his science as lying in the fact that ‘‘the early gentile people,
by a demonstrated necessity of nature, were poets who spoke in poetic characters’’
(para. 34)7 but also that ‘‘they [the first men of the gentile nations] in their robust
ignorance, did it by virtue of a wholly corporeal imagination. And because it was
quite corporeal, they did it with marvellous sublimity, a sublimity such and so great
that it excessively perturbed the very persons who by imagining did the creating, for
they were called ‘poets’, which is Greek for ‘creators’’’ (para. 376). Thus, what
matters to us at this point (in relation to our concern with the origins of human
cultures and language), is not whether what we say about the ‘‘things’’ in question
here is true or not, but with whether all the others around us can anticipate, at least
partially, our actions, and thus coordinate their activities in with ours (and we in
with theirs). For the important fact about poetic (and musical) forms of expression
is that they can work to produce concerted social activities.
Rojas describes the felt importance of such anticipations to us as individuals, in
organizing the sequential flow of our practical activities (like piano playing) very
nicely, in noting that: ‘‘anticipation also means that at every moment I am
immersed in an already (partially) circumscribed space that provides a support
for subsequent configurations in the perceptual field. Despite its continuous trans-
formational character, the structure of such field supposes an implied coherence
(or a striving toward it). This anticipatory motion belongs to the spontaneous
search for continuity, and outlines a readiness for action that redirects my
course of action/perception’’ (MS, p. 9). But as Rojas (MS, p. 12) also makes
clear, to see our expressive and thus communicative activities in this light, is to
give them a central function in our inquiries into the origins of human cultural ways
of being, an orientational role that is completely ignored in Descartes’ rationalistic
approach.
But to go even further, as we come to be more fully ‘‘at one,’’ so to speak, with
the materials and instruments of our practices, with musical instruments, for
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instance, we can become more and more sensitive to the fact that ‘‘musical gestures
are pregnant with an idiosyncratic physiognomy,’’ for in its expressive movements,
music can be perceived as ‘‘gloomy, cheerful, solemn, obscure, light, menacing,
jazzy, cool, etc., just as timbres are perceived as pointy, round, tight, and so
forth’’ (MS, p. 12). A whole set of felt nuances become available to us as practi-
tioners, just as in our utterances and writings. And to go even further still, we can
also begin to sense a lack. As Rojas notes in relation to a difficulty Sudnow encoun-
tered at one stage in his self-development: ‘‘The difficulty was to successfully
convey where he wanted to go with his hands ‘singingly’. It was as if his ‘handful’
anticipation of the melody did not always match the place he wanted to go’’
(MS, p. 6)—where here, of course, as I mentioned above, Sudnow was sensing
that there was a something more worth aiming at in his practice beyond what he
had achieved so far.8

Deeply memorable events as shared ‘‘rootings’’

But in pursuit of this end, we are still not yet quite home and dry. As I see it,
Rojas’s discussion still begins too late in the day, when we are able to exert a fair
degree of deliberate control over our own activities. The experiences we considered
are still too well differentiated. Earlier, as mere creatures of impulse, as Vico (1744/
1968) realized, ‘‘the minds of the first men of the gentile world took things one at a
time, being in this respect little better than the minds of beasts, for which each
new sensation cancels the last one’’ (para. 703)—it must have been as if they are
living in an undifferentiated now. To develop into creatures of meanings, mythically
and poetically, we still need to consider the world’s actions on us. We need an
account of a beginning event so powerful that can it work to arouse, not only
shared feelings in a shared circumstance but also an event giving rise to a spontan-
eously responsive expression by all involved—and furthermore, an event so memor-
able that people can return to it and find it again within themselves, while
discovering also that others all feel the same way.
In his search for such an event, rather than merely hypothesizing, Vico (1744/
1968) pondered on what he calls ‘‘the civil history’’ of the saying ‘‘From Jove
the muse began’’ (para. 391). And in trying to imagine back to its origins, Vico
imagines, as Grantella points out, ‘‘human beings in the state of nature as enor-
mous beasts (bestioni) with deformed bodies that symbolize the force of the senses
and the penury of the intellect’’ (MS, p. 14), who are suddenly subjected to the
powerful event of thunder.
As we have seen above, in their earliest beginnings, such beings expressed their
understandings of their experiences not only corporeally but also, remarkably,
poetically: In fleeing in fear to their caves to shelter from the thunder, the fear
they experienced, according to Vico, was not just any old generalized fear but, as
we might now say, it was a fear with an intentionality to it, a fear of something.
Although thunder is frightening, as it does not call for any immediate practical
response to it, after a while, they could have adapted to it. But they did not. Their
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corporeally expressed fear seemed, poetically, to be a fear of something beyond the

thunder. Taking the ancient saying that the muse began from Jove seriously, Vico
suggested that fear of thunder could indeed be a paradigm for the first ‘‘sensory
topic’’ (para. 495),9 the first fixed reference point that people can find again within
themselves and know that others feel the same way too.
What the ‘‘inner mechanisms’’ might be making such a realization possible, was
not Vico’s concern here; his concern was with our human ways of being and of
making sense of things, and with how these ways can shape and organize our
subsequent actions and developments. Thus he says, often ‘‘when men are ignorant
of the natural causes producing things, . . . they attribute their own nature to them’’
(para. 180). And in this instance, they attribute their fear to the anger of a being like
themselves but much more powerful; later, he continues: ‘‘Thus it was fear which
created gods in the world; not fear awakened in men by other men, but fear
awakened in men by themselves’’ (para. 382)—a fear expressed in the character
of people’s bodily activities together in shared circumstances. A ‘‘sensory topic’’ is
thus established among them, a common feeling in relation to a common circum-
stance, which is expressed by them acting in the same way in the same
circumstance.
I have spent some time on this issue as it seems to me that Grantella still moves too
rapidly to suggest that Vico’s very important notion of imaginative universals is the
‘‘master key’’ of his new science. As I see it, solely corporeal activities precede their
emergence, and we still do not understand sufficiently what, so to speak, our bodies do
for us, without our having to acquire such capacities and capabilities by our own
deliberate efforts. But to ‘‘enter into’’ such strange and still undifferentiated worlds
of continuously flowing activities, we really do need extreme kinds of imaginative
efforts. So although, as Grantella suggests, the issue with Vico’s new science, is ‘‘to
displace the rationalistic interest in abstract entities with the interest in origins and
processes, and to focus on the human ways of being and living their lives’’ (MS, p.
18)—a program I fully support—prior to a focus on imaginative universals, we need to
try to focus on the even earlier conditions making their emergence possible.
Finally, in this section, I would like to focus for a moment on Grantella’s dis-
cussion of Vico’s notion of ingenium, and on what he has to say about how the
third book of Vico’s new science, Discovery of the True Homer, as an exemplifica-
tion of how Vico’s ‘‘poetic wisdom’’ can be applied in our coming to an under-
standing of what is involved in our creating cultures, each with their own particular
common sense (sensus communis), among ourselves.
As Grantella points out, ‘‘in De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (On the Most
Ancient Wisdom of the Italians) Vico defines it as ‘the faculty that connects dispar-
ate and diverse things’ (Vico 1710/1988, p. 96)’’ (MS, p. 10), and he goes on to
remark that it is a ‘‘native ability [of human beings] to make connections’’ (MS, p.
8). However, he introduces ingenium by suggesting that it is very difficult to trans-
late it into our modern languages. This may be so, but it is not difficult, it seems to
me, to see in it clear similarities to some of our more modern notions, in particular,
what we call hermeneutics.
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The process involved here is well known: It begins with one’s immersion within a
particular to-be-understood whole in its full individuality—known globally to be of
a certain kind (if a text, as a novel, poem, textbook, etc.)—and it then proceeds to
specify or articulate, in a back-and-forth movement, an order adapted to the undis-
torted accommodation of a sequence of fragmentary events as one moves around
within that original mystifying whole. What each part is, is understood by it now
having a part to play, a function, a ‘‘place’’ within the larger order ‘‘created’’ to
accommodate it. And as Grantella emphasizes, to repeat, this seems to be ‘‘an
innate human capacity to grasp similarities or relationships’’ (p. 11). Recognizing
that it is an innate capacity of our bodies to do this, is of the utmost importance.
No wonder that Vico said of this discovery that it ‘‘has cost us the persistent
research of almost all our literary life, because with our civilized natures we mod-
erns cannot at all imagine and can understand only by great toil the poetic nature
of these first men’’ (para. 34). For clearly, it is the prior existence of this capacity,
that in fact makes all our reflective inquiries possible that—in our obsession with
only conducting our thought within single, systematic orders of connectedness—is
totally ignored in all of them. For seemingly, paradoxically, it works to combine
what at first seems to be disparate fragments of expressive movements out in the
world to create within us meaningful wholes, organized expressive movements of
feeling within us. As Gadamer (2000) puts it: ‘‘We accept the fact that the subject
presents different aspects of itself at different times or from different standpoints.
We accept the fact that these, aspects do not simply cancel one another out as
research proceeds, but are like mutually exclusive conditions that exist by them-
selves and combine only in us’’ (p. 284); and all this just happens within us, without
any deliberate efforts on our part causing it to happen.
The creative nature of this hermeneutical process is pervasive. As Grantella notes
(MS, p. 22), Vico (1744/1968) is quite clear that the early peoples, ‘‘which were
almost entirely body, and practically not at all reflection, would all have been vivid
sensation in perceiving particulars, strong imagination in apprehending them and
enlarging them, sharp invention in relating them to their imaginative genera, and
robust memory in retaining them. It is true that these faculties appertain to the
mind, but they have their roots in the body and draw strength from it. Hence
memory is the same as the imagination. . .’’ (para. 819). And clearly, it is in
‘‘mulling over,’’ as it were, one’s memory of such ‘‘striking’’ events as thunder,
that one comes to organize what at first was merely a particular bewildering event,
into an event with its own particular character or physiognomy.
The just happening nature of this hermeneutical-like process within us is crucial.
Originating within us as a result of ingenium, or as sensory topics—or as I am now
suggesting, as particular hermeneutical unities—they provide the ‘‘rootings,’’ the
‘‘anchor points,’’ the ‘‘dynamic stabilities,’’ to which members of a social group can
return to, time and again, in organizing other of their experiences in relation to
them. While Descartes’ rationalistic methods work in terms of axioms, a set of self-
evident truths as starting points for our reasoning within one or another
well-defined logical framework, Vico’s concern is more primary. For as we saw
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above, such stabilities can function as shared ‘‘rootings’’ in people’s efforts at

organizing their social lives together; until they can relate to each other in an
organized fashion, such forms of reasoning would lack all currency.

Conclusion: The importance of our embodied

‘‘background’’ understandings
Thus, to bring this too short a commentary on these two fascinating article to an
end, I want to briefly explore how certain shared understandings, which may or
may not be true, can nonetheless play such an important role in our further human
development? What seems to be crucial, is that they give rise, not only to a shared
structure of anticipations but also to a shared set of ‘‘rootings,’’ ‘‘anchor points,’’
‘‘loci,’’ or ‘‘topics–topoi’’ in relation to which all in a social group can sense both
‘‘where’’ they might be ‘‘placed’’ at any one moment in a joint enterprise, as well as
‘‘where next’’ they might go. They can also seem, it seems, to give rise ‘‘standards,’’
to ‘‘ideals,’’ to a gravitational (Rojas) sense a ‘‘rightness’’ in the doing of some-
thing—for as always unfinished beings, the more we become practised in a par-
ticular activity, the more we can sense that there is ‘‘a still more’’ to be attained if
we are to ‘‘get it right.’’10
Thus, what both Rojas and Grantella succeed in doing in their accounts, is to
show the importance of Vico’s notion of phanthasia and imaginative universals;
without the ‘‘more’’ continually sought by our forebears, from the earliest times,
up to and still in the present moment, we would still be worldly beings of impulse
immersed in a still undifferentiated ‘‘now,’’ rather than human beings living in
meaningful human worlds very largely of our own devising. But what I think
both miss in their accounts, as I have already indicated, is the much needed meta-
phor of a spontaneously occurring hermeneutical-like processes, creating within us,
not generalities, but different, particular, imaginative universals—a process enabling
us to sense similarities and likenesses, as well as differences, in our efforts at trying
to make sense of events occurring to us.
In connecting disparate and diverse things, such particular unities, as Grantella
points out, are quite unlike the abstract concepts formulated in terms of a multi-
plicity of particular things whose features or properties are, in general, common to
a whole set of different circumstances (MS, p. 6). They are each particular unities
formed from a collection of, in fact, unmerged particularities, within which the
particularities are interlinked with each other without losing their particularity.11
To the extent that they consist in people’s expressions, within a particular circum-
stance, they are organized into a unique structure of particular feelings of antici-
pation, which can in fact guide us in our uttering of meaningful talk in relation to
that circumstance. As Rojas puts it, in an intermediate phase of Sudnow’s
development, as he played, he realized he possessed ‘‘a prospective sense of musical
motion’’ (MS, p. 6), Sudnow exerted ‘‘a forward-hearing engagement’’ (MS, p.
6)—a sensing that I would like to compare with what we can all sense as at
work within us as we make the effort to sequence our words in our speakings.
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Such particular unities—universal in the sense of being used, here, there, and
everywhere to characterize likenesses, similarities, and differences, as well as also
being open to our being able to ‘‘partialed out’’ facets of them to serve particular
purposes in particular contexts—clearly form the ‘‘background’’ to all our more
deliberate, socially intelligible activities. Thus, just as we acquire them spontan-
eously and unconsciously, all unawares, in our continual involvements and engage-
ments with all the others and othernesses around us, so they also become available
to us for making sense of events occurring to us in the same way. And it is no
wonder, of course, that we can call upon them in this way in making sense of our
surroundings, because that is just where they came from in the first place. They
provide a common sense [a sensus communis] enabling us, as members of a social
group, to coordinate our activities in with each other. As Vico (1744/1968) puts it:
‘‘Common sense is judgement without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire
people, an entire nation, or the entire human race’’ (para. 142).
What Rojas and Grantella show us, then, is that in trying to bring aspects of
Vico’s work to light in the context of a cultural psychology at this moment in
history, in an after-the-fact vocabulary—in which we expect words to have the
same meaning now as they did at some much earlier time—cannot be done.
Such talk misleads us, not only into trying to explore the past as if people then
were mentally as we are now, only less technologically developed, but also into
treating the present and the future as merely a repetition of the past. Whereas, if it
really is the case that each circumstance we meet is unique, then we need, as Vico
did, to do the labourious, before-the-fact imaginative work required to think our-
selves into what it is like to experience living in a still largely undifferentiated,
flowing, wholistic environment in which everything, every ‘‘thing,’’ comes into
being (nascimento) in different circumstances, in its own particular way. In other
words, although after-the-fact of its occurrence, we might name it as this or that
‘‘thing,’’ its meaning for us in our practice as it is coming into being is quite unique.
Finally, what they also show us is that, although we cannot possibly conduct our
inquiries in terms of the abstract generalities demanded by current, rationalistic
Cartesian methods of thought and investigation, this does not leave us bereft of felt
‘‘rootings,’’ of felt ‘‘landmark events,’’ of felt ‘‘plumb-lines’’ of use to us in the
‘‘gravitational field’’ of a practice—all felt with, as James (1890/1950) puts it, ‘‘an
acutely discriminative sense’’ (p. 253). So although, as Rojas points out, the
‘‘physiognomic qualities [of such experiences] are not deciphered, but felt’’ (MS,
p. 17), this does not mean that they cannot be specified and expressed poetically (in
many different media) in terms of likenesses and similarities, along with differences
and comparisons. Thus, Vico (1709/1990),12 as Grantella (MS, p. 24) states, points
out what we must do: We must not simply fit our unique experiences into one or
another preexisting category, but adjust our expression of them by attempting in
our speech and writing to fit the unfolding temporal contours of our utterances fit
the temporal contours of our experiences as they come into being—with the aim of
enabling recipients of texts and talk, to get oriented, to ‘‘get a sense’’ of a circum-
stance of concern both to them and to us. Our coming to work like this within the
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realms of a cultural psychology is not at all easy, it requires the renunciation of

much that we have held dear, and the undertaking of some very strange imagina-
tive work. But we cannot, surely, for much longer, leave these early, creative,
corporeal processes discovered by Vico, ignored and unstudied.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial,
or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes
1. See also para. 346, in which Vico outlines the task of his new science as that of describ-
ing ‘‘the origins of institutions, divine and human . . . [to] reach those first beginnings
beyond which it is vain curiosity to demand others earlier.’’
2. In short, ‘‘in order to take place, a human activity needs social landmarks that must be
recognised as such by those involved in the activity’’ (op cit, p. 144) (MS, p. 14).
3. The function of a ‘‘landmark fact’’ is in helping us to ‘‘know where we are’’ within a
particular ‘‘landscape of possible places to go’’ in our conduct of a particular practice.
They are only of importance to us, of course, if we accept that we face not one, but two
major difficulties in our lives: Difficulties that we can formulate as problems, which need
solving by the application of rational methods; and difficulties of orientation or ways of
relating, to do with knowing our ‘‘way about’’ (no. 123) and how to ‘‘go on’’ (no. 154)
within a practice (Wittgenstein, 1953).
4. See Nagel (1974): ‘‘ . . . fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and
only if there is something that it is like to be that organism . . . ’’ (p. 436).
5. Both Rojas and Grantella use different translations or editions of Vico’s Scienza Nuova
from myself; I have the 1968 edition.
6. I will have more to say about hermeneutical matters in a moment.
7. Grantella jumps straightaway to staying that it was ‘‘Vico’s discovery of Imaginative
Universals’’ (MS, p. 8) that was the master key; but as we shall see, to get from the first
people’s corporeal poetics expressed in their bodily activities to their later linguistic poetic
expressions, a few further steps are required.
8. As Todes (2001) puts it: ‘‘ . . . we begin as a creature of need rather than desire. A need,
unlike a desire, is originally given as a pure restlessness; as the consciousness of one’s
undirected activity. It begins with the sense of . . . an indeterminate lack of something-or-
other, but nothing-in-particular . . . It begins with a sense of loss of something one has
never had . . . Now the whole sense of our exploration and discovery of the world is
prompted by the sense of having been initially lost in the world’’ (pp. 176–177).
9. ‘‘The first founders of humanity applied themselves to a sensory topics, by which they
brought together those properties or qualities or relations of individuals and species
which were so to speak concrete, and from these created their poetic genera’’ (para. 495).
10. Experientially, as we come to ‘‘dwell in’’ a practice, we find something like an inner
compass, a hinge, a ‘‘something’’ that ‘‘stands fast’’ within it that gives a shared direc-
tion, against which each movement can be ‘‘measured’’ as to whether it is giving some
satisfaction or not, in relation to an overall goal. As Wittgenstein (1969) remarks: ‘‘I do
not explicitly learn the propositions that stand fast for me. I can discover them subse-
quently like the axis around which a body rotates. This axis is not fixed in the sense that
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Shotter 11

anything holds it fast, but the movement around it determines its immobility’’ (no. 152).
Whether these orientational ‘‘landmarks’’ are wholly appropriate or not, is something
that can be investigated later.
11. They are not a mixture, an amalgam, a blending, or an averaging; indeed, in being ‘‘the
power that fashions the images of things . . . at the same time that it originates and
produces new forms . . . it is this that differentiates the forms of things, sometimes
separating them, at other times mixing them together’’ (Vico, 1699/1993, pp. 42–43).
While focusing on one facet of such a whole, we also seem able to move forward or back
to become aware of others, or even sideways, to see its ‘‘placement’’ as a unity within a
larger landscape of other such unities.
12. Aristotle (1955) was clearly Vico’s teacher here; in his Nicomachean Ethics, he argued
against generalities in the exercise of equity in the law: ‘‘This is why equity, although
just, and better than a kind of justice, is not better than absolute justice . . . the
essential nature of equity . . . is a rectification of law in so far as law is defective
on account of its generality . . . An irregular object has a rule of irregular shape, like
the leaden rule of Lesbian architecture: just as this rule is not rigid but is adapted to
the shape of the stone, so the ordinance is framed to fit the circumstances’’
(Aristotle, 1955, p. 200).

References
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Author biography
John Shotter is an Emeritus Professor of Communication in the Department of
Communication, University of New Hampshire; Research Associate, Centre for
Philosophy of Natural & Social Science (CPNSS), London School of Economics,
London, UK; Visiting Professor, Open University Business School, Milton Keynes,
UK, and University of Leeds Business School, Leeds, UK. He is the author of
Social Accountability and Selfhood (Blackwell, 1984), Cultural Politics of Everyday
Life: Social Constructionism, Rhetoric, and Knowing of the Third Kind (Open
University, 1993), Conversational Realities: the Construction of Life through
Language (Sage, 1993), Conversational Realities Revisited; Life, Language, Body,
and World (Taos Publications, 2009), and Getting It: Withness-Thinking and
the Dialogical. . . in Practice (Hampton Press, 2011). His research interests are
communication, language use, developmental and social psychology, psychother-
apy, the mindful body, and the unfolding dynamics of social interaction. Mailing
address: 4 Owls Close, Whittlesford, Cambs CB22 4PL, UK.
Email: jds12@btinternet.com

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