Pagina 51 - BCSV, XXXV, 2005

THE 1MAGINATIVE UNIVERSAL 51
tity of predication, the necessity for which he has argued. For what could
the sentence ‘I am become a god’ possibly mean if, for example, the pred­
icate ‘to become a god’ meant something different simply on the basis of
the fact that the subject of the predicate has changed from singular to
plural? But this would be the consequence if we interpreted this in the
light of the suggestion that the predicate was identical with its subject.
Vico’s claim that the first sentences in a world not involving the cancel-
lation of each sensation by its successor would be singular but not plur­
al shows that he has failed to understand that predicates must retain their
identity of meaning over the whole range of the subjects to which they
apply and cannot be confined to singular rather than plural subjects.
A similar difficulty attends Battistini’s other suggestion: that an indi­
viduai is identical with a personified archetype. For this would leave us
both with no conception of that of which the archetype is an archetype
and of any sense in which the archetype is an archetype. Archetypes,
whether they are personified or not, must be capable of being archetypes
for a number of examples if they are to be archetypes, but this would not
be possible if each were identical with one example because each ‘ar­
chetype’ would then be identical with itself104. And, on the other side,
since each individuai must be different, each archetype, insofar as it was
identical with that individuai, would be different on every occasion of
its identification with a different individuai. Accordingly nothing would
be able to function as an archetype. Just as Vico says of the sensations of
primitive man that each would cancel its predecessor, so each archetype
/ instance would cancel its predecessor. To argue in this way, is, of course,
to revert to the notion of a concept that underlies the subject-predicate
distinction of Aristotelian logie. But the problem of how to make intel­
ligible a world in which there are no universal predicates is at the root
of the whole problem. It is difficult, as I have argued, to see how Verene’s
suggestion that the reality of the individuai is identical with that of a type
or some generic character does not involve reference to concepts that are
more appropriate to theworld as understood through the intelligible uni­
versal, in which there is a distinction between individuals and the kinds
or types of generai properties that they possess. Indeed, as I have tried
to show in the foregoing discussion, it is not at all clear what a type - or
k.ind or genus, to use some of Vico’s own more favoured terms - would
104 If ‘A’, thè archetype, were literally identical with ‘a’, i.e. with only one item in the
world, ‘A’ would be logically equivalent to ‘a’, and ‘a’ logically equivalent to ‘A’, producing a
distinction without a difference. Hence the difference between the two would entirely disap-
pear and each, while being identical with the other, would also be identical with itself.