Pagina 53 - BCSV, XXXV, 2005

THE 1MAGINATIVE UNIVERSAL 53
would arise universally in all nations. Thus every nation worshipped thè
gods, practised marriage and buried their dead. Similarly every nation
had its Jove, its Juno, its Hercules and all thè other gods and, later, its
Achilles, its Ulysses and all thè other heroes. Again, power and authori-
ty in every nation developed through thè same sequence of beliefs and
so on. The reason why these ideas and customs are universal is simply
that they arise naturally or from naturai features of human nature, i.e.
from thè metaphysical essence of human nature. But this means, as Jiir-
gen Trabant has emphasised106, that they must have a common core, thè
linguistic part of which is invoked in Vico’s «idea of an etymologicon
common to all native languages»107, and thè mental or ideational part of
which is illustrated in his «idea of a dictionary of mental words common
to all nations»108.
But, as we saw earlier, thè universality constituted by being present
in all nations is not what is required to make thè imaginative universal
communicable. The universality constituted by something’s being pre­
sent in all nations is simply extensional, whereas that which is required
by thè imaginative universal is intensional, i.e. identity of meaning. It is,
in fact, thè ‘identity of predication’ thè necessity of which Vico has recog-
nised but which he has so far failed to explain. What is required of thè
language of thè imaginative universal, thè ‘common core’109, is a capac­
ity to express or communicate a feature which is identical in all instances
of that universal. Thus thè extensional universality of empirical discov-
ery presupposes intensional universality110. We can meaningfully assert
that every nation had its Jove only if thè idea of thè Jove of each nation
is identical in meaning with those in all other nations. But that, of course,
is precisely what is provided by thè identity of predication that consti-
tutes thè essence of thè intelligible or abstract universal. It is because thè
universal of, for example, prudence, is abstract, in thè sense that thè iden­
tity of its meaning is unaffected by thè various contexts in which it ap-
pears, that it can be predicated ‘univocally’, as Vico would put it, of all
its instances. The prudence that we can identify in a prudent act must
be identical in meaning with thè prudence identified in a prudent per-
son or in a prudent pian, wherever and whenever it is correctly predi­
cated. This means that thè concept of prudence involves thè predication
106 T r a b a n t , op. cit., pp. 30-31.
107 Sn25, §§381-382.
108 Ibid., §§ 387-389.
109 Here I depart from thè explanation given by Trabant.
110 This may be what Vico means when he says that thè identity required is not «of pro-
portion [...] but of predicability» (Sn44, § 403).