Pagina 48 - BCSV, XXXV, 2005

48 LEON POMPA
acter exhibited by or in the ideal portrait. It is the identification of the
being of the true war chief with the being or reality of the generic char­
acter of the ideal portrait - that of Godfrey - that creates the difficulty.
Perhaps it is a mistake to take the reference to a portrait here too liter-
ally, since Godfrey is a product of Tasso’s imagination and not a repre-
sentation of something else. Tasso’s Godfrey is, as Vico says, an ideal por­
trait. But even if we accept that, Verene’s suggestion is not that this ide­
al portrait represents a standard but that it is a reai generic character.
There are two points here. The first is the identification of the being of
the true chief of war with the ideal portrait of Godfrey. The second is the
characterisation of the ideal portrait of Godfrey as a reai generic charac­
ter. There are difficulties in both points.
To take first the literal identification of the true chief of war with God­
frey, this could mean that when poetic man wants to refer to some indi­
viduai as a true chief of war, he would simply refer to him, in whatever
was the appropriate way, as ‘Godfrey’. But, given that there may be a
number of different chiefs of war, this would mean identifying a num-
ber of different individuals, sayJohn, Harry and Godfrey, as one and the
same. Since this would plainly lead to a loss of personal identity, this can­
not be what is envisaged. To make this coherent, each individuai must
retain his personal identity apart from his identification with Godfrey.
So, again in whatever is the most appropriate way, some forms of ex-
pression with the meaning of ‘John is Godfrey’ and ‘Harry is Godfrey’
must be available, to indicate that two numerically different individuals
are identical in being in so far as they are identical with the being of God­
frey. In other words, they are identical with the being of a true chief of
war, hence identical with each other in this respect, but not identical with
each other or with Godfrey in other respects. But this seems to intro­
duce a whole host of conceptual distinctions, involving the notions of
being identical in some respects but not in others", that should not be
available in the circumstances.
If we now turn to the second point, that the ideal portrait constitutes
the generic character in question, this seems equally difficult. The ideal
portrait is, as Verene points out, «the description of a particular reality».
So the move to a form of non-conceptual thought is achieved by identi­
fying a particular reality with a generic character. But it is impossible to
99 Possibly in being men rather than women, but being born of different rather than the
same parents. The fact that different individuals may share many points of identity while al­
so differing in many ways, introduces a series of complications that are difficult to resolve on
this view.