Pagina 27 - BCSV, XXXV, 2005

THE IMAGINATIVE UNIVERSA!. 27
is a world in which it would be possible to live. This is a question that
must now be addressed.
Cantelli’s lack of interest in this question comes out in his view that
Vico is offering a theory not merely of how certain forms of meaning
arise, though he is also doing that, but, much more importantly, how
meaning as such arises and must arise. The claim is that there can be no
meaning, nothing recognisably human, before thè giants have created
Jove, a god who is capable of communicating with them and whose Com­
munications require interpretation. The giants creation of Jove is there-
fore not simply their way of explaining what they cannot understand -
thunder, lightning, storms and so on, i.e. events that are enormous, fright-
ening and awe-inspiring - but thè creation of meaning itself through a
particular way of conceiving thè world37. In support of this Cantelli cites
a passage from thè first New Science38 where Vico uses thè verb ‘con­
cepire’ rather than ‘spiegare’. The reason that he gives why this particu­
lar way of conceiving thè world is co-terminous with thè creation of
meaning itself is that thè Jove who is created through this idea is taken
to be thè cause not of thunder and lightning as naturai events but of sig­
nificant signs which require interpretation rather than explanation39.
From here, Cantelli goes on to claim that only in a world that is struc-
tured by myth, i.e. in one in which there is mutuai communication be-
tween man and thè gods, can meaning and language arise.
But this reading seems to go well beyond Vico’s own account of thè
origins of meaning and, at thè same time, to ignore certain serious diffi-
culties. Cantelli’s centrai point is that only through thè need to interpret
thè signs - cenni - sent by Jove, can meaning and language arise. Thus
he presents Jove as thè necessary founding fiction upon which meaning
itself depends40. But this is far from clear. It is true that Vico says that
thè giants took thunder and lightning to be ‘cenni di Jove’, that they be-
lieved that Jove commanded with such ‘cenni’, i.e. that these signs were
reai words, and that nature was Jove’s ‘language’41; and that, conse-
quently, they needed to be in communication with him. But although this
shows that thè creation of thè idea of Jove is thè necessary founding fic­
tion of thè particular cultural contents of thè divine world, it does not
show that it is thè necessary founding fiction of meaning as such. For if,
37 Id., Gestualità c mito, cit., p. 111. Cantelli is careful to emphasise that here ‘to conceive’
means ‘to create an idea’, hence, obviously, not to create a concept.
38 Sn25, § 254.
39 G. C a n telli, Gestualità e mito, cit., pp. 111-112.
40 Ibid., p. 86.
41 Sn44, § 379.