How a symbol is born: Vico and Warburg

Abstract

The article concerns the notion of symbol in Giambattista Vico’s thought. The symbol in Vico is not found by investigating a supposed “nature of things” behind the mind, nor can it be understood as a product that arises in the human mind as if the mind could already exist in its purity apart from the symbolic dynamic. Rather, the symbol makes the mind and at the same time the mind makes the symbol: the mind is revealed in Vico as an originally symbolic faculty, capable of connecting, of holding together a lot of things, telling fables – as it is illustrated in the case of Homer. From this point of view, a comparison can be drawn between the dynamics of the symbol in Vico and the Umfangsbestimmung which characterises the notion of symbol in Warburg.