Metaphor as method: G. B. Vico in the 21st century

Abstract

Is a non-rearguard defense of the humanities possible in the age of artificial intelligence? This article answers in the affirmative by proposing metaphor as method, rather than as ornament or as a totalizing substitute for reference, through a dialogue between Giambattista Vico's humanistic pedagogy and contemporary debates on AI, cognition, and ecology. Starting from De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (1709), the essay reconstructs a Vichian model in which metaphor functions as a regulated epistemic device: a means of connecting heterogeneous domains without collapsing their differences. The argument unfolds along three main axes. First, it revisits the debate in historiography between Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit, showing how Vico offers an intermediate path between the total rhetorization of reality and the extra-discursive irruption of the sublime. Second, it examines the productive role of metaphor in eco-linguistics, translation studies, cognitive science, and early cybernetics, focusing on figures such as the “leaky organ” and the “rainforest” of cognition. These metaphors do not negate computation or formalization; rather, they situate them within an ecological and embodied horizon of meaning. Third, the essay argues that Vico's “ratio studiorum” anticipates contemporary 4EA approaches to mind and translation, grounding scientific abstraction in imagination, affect, and the “Lebenswelt”. Against both transhumanist homologies and purely rhetorical constructivism, the article defends metaphor as a discipline of distance: a method that enables “translation” boundaries between life and machine, nature and calculation, without erasing their mutual. In this sense, Vico's thought provides a timely framework for rethinking humanistic knowledge in the era of algorithms, environmental crisis, and AI – affirming an epistemological collaboration between calculation and imagination as the condition for a renewed, responsible humanism.