Horst Steinke
268
arguing the existence of either of the other two “Homers”
594
.
The “strategy” of this interpretation consists of changing the
scope and application of «
per metà
» from the function of picking
out one half of a pair of disjunctive alternatives, to a judgment of
the (relative) quality/qualification of the single notion of «Homer
as a poetic character», in other words, arguing that it meant that
“Homer” was “part fiction, part reality”. As a result, «
per metà
»,
semantically, is assimilated to a different term used by Vico for
“half” of something: «[…] the Greek poets, profoundly steeped
in that doctrine (as was Menander, for example, in comparison
with whom Terence was called even by the Latins “half a Me-
nander (
Menandro dimezzato
)”, could create certain luminous ex-
amples of ideal human types […]» (§ 808). By this interpretive
move, the domain to which Vico’s «
affermarlo per la metà»
belongs,
namely, the domain of thinking, logic, and (discrete) truth-values,
is replaced by a domain of the non-logical notion of variations in
degree (a species of metric space, when endowed with additional
structure), which is grounded in the primitive relation of “more
or less”
595
. Text-immanent exegesis in this case, therefore, cannot
be divorced from questions of underlying ontology.
Against the horizon of the proposed interpretation of Vico’s
understanding of the genesis and development of the Homeric
poems, the putative parallel with Spinoza’s critique of Moses’ au-
thorship of the Pentateuch can now be (re)considered. As will be
recalled, Spinoza’s main contention and result was that the Pen-
tateuch (as well as several other Bible “books” immediately fol-
lowing it in the Old Testament canon as we have it today, up to,
and including,
First
and
Second Kings
) were written by the Persian
Era Ezra (albeit using older material)
596
; however, Ezra’s work
included relatively small portions of text directly attributed to
Moses, including, most importantly, the part called “the Book of
the Law of God”
597
. And, most significantly, Spinoza argues for
Ezra’s authorship on the basis of «a fixed aim in view», «the unity
of theme of all these books, their interconnections»
598
.