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Horst Steinke
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highly imaginative language as for the other two, more “articu-
late”, non-metaphorical – up to intellectual-philosophical – lan-
guages
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. But how can it be rightly said that the first language,
and the people that spoke it, with their predilection for «imagina-
tive characters of animate and mute substances» (§ 431) already
contained latent elements or seeds of the more sophisticated lan-
guages suited to new cultural, social and political realities? Vico’s
“classic” example is the imaginative character of Jove, who the
archaic «first founders of gentile humanity» associated with fear-
inspiring thunder and lightning (§§ 377-380). It should not go
unnoticed, however, that here we already have before us an exer-
cise of fundamental principles of logic, associated most closely
with the third age/language, namely “cross-identification” of en-
tities across “possible worlds”, in this instance, the “worlds” of
human bodies and psyches, on the one hand, and the “world” of
natural phenomena, on the other hand
387
.
These crosscurrents in the three languages do not negate,
nonetheless, the stark differences across them, witness the seem-
ingly unbridgeable chasm between the sacral and imaginative au-
ra of the first language and the predominantly critical, intellectual
tendency (if often only self-styled as such) of the third language.
We will cite this state of affairs as evidence for Vico’s view of
language as calculus
388
rather than universal medium: in the
course of time, humans employed language in drastically, even
radically disparate ways, showing themselves to be masters over
language rather than its slaves, not to say prisoners, and employ-
ing it unrestrictedly over a range of cognitive and communicative
categories. For Vico, language was the “playing field” not just in
the ages of “gods” and “heroes”, but also of “men”, at a time of
engagement in intellectual reflection at the highest level(s), which
precisely is the area that Spinoza precluded in his theory of
knowledge. As has been discussed above, Vico, like Spinoza,
modelled key parts of his exposition after Euclid, but with a fun-
damental and radical difference: whereas Spinoza invested all his