Pagina 50 - BCSV, XXXV, 2005

50 LEON POMPA
cate, at least as normally understood, is to enable us to bring out a fea-
ture of, or draw attention to, or to say, thè same thing about a number
of different subjects101. The suggestion that a predicate should coincide
with its subject, however, would amount to obliterating any distinction
between subject and predicate and, hence, of thè ability to assert predi-
cates in generai. In fact, if, per impossibile, thè predicate could coincide
with its subject, then, since all individuai subjects are different, every
predicate would be different upon each occasion of its use. The identi­
ty of thè predicate would thus be lost and it would become impossible
to say or think thè same thing about anything. Hence this would rob
thought of its capacity to create or identify, depending upon what view
is taken of thè metaphysical nature of predicates, any systematic set of
relationships in thè world. If this were Vico’s view, then it would again
illustrate a serious failure to appreciate thè nature of predication.
Unfortunately, apart from thè fact that he is talking of a mode of
thought in which poetic man is unable to separate subjects from their
properties, there is additional evidence of such a failure. In a passage to
which I have already referred, in which he is describing ‘heroic sen-
tences’, he writes:
Now, since thèminds of thè first men of thè first gentileworld took things
one at a time, being in this respect little better than thè minds of beasts, for
which each sensation cancels thè last one (which is thè cause of their being
unable to compare and reason discursively), therefore their sentences must
all have been formed in thè singular by those who felt them102.
He then proceeds, in thè same paragraph, to suggest that poetic man
overcomes thè difficulty constituted by such cancellation by having an
ability to think about things in such singular sentences as ‘I am become
a god’. But while his description of thè difficulty involved in a brutish
world in which each sensation cancels thè last one shows that Vico was
aware of thè problem that thè contents of sensation must be related in
such a way that something recognisably thè same carries through thè se-
quence103, thè suggestion that this can be resolved by thè creation of a
mode of language in which singular but not plural sentences can be ex-
pressed, again shows a misunderstanding of what is involved in thè iden-
101 Thcrc are, of course, many things that predicates can assert of subjects, but one which
would be particularly relevant in thè context of Vico’s discussion, would be that of asserting
that a property belongs to a subject.
102 Sn44, §703.
103 Although, as I mentioned earlier, he seems somewhat unfair to animals and bestioni
in this matter.