Journal Article

The Thesis of the Primacy of Metaphor, Defense and Problematization: A Study Based on Vico

Zir, Alessandro

2009

Overview

This paper sustains, on the basis of the work of the modern Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, a thesis which characterizes poetic & metaphorical language as our primary language. Considering the contribution of some up-to-date authors to the subject, we will also take into consideration the contemporaneity of Vico's approach. The view of metaphoric language as our primary social language was formulated by Giambattista Vico in his 1725 work Principii di Scienza Nuova (Principles of New Science). According to him, the language of a community emerges from the contact between everything that is immediately close to its concrete human beings & the things of an external world. The community does not have a conscious knowledge either of the external things or of what is closer to them, such as their own emotions & bodies. The contact between these two loci (internal & external) of things & meanings is then full of fantasy & imagination. The notion of an 'abstract language' & the distinction between what is metaphorical & what is literal arises only later, when the stabilization of meanings in the imaginative production of a specific culture comes to be forgotten & these meanings are presumed to belong to the things themselves, objectively. Adapted from the source document

• Subject: Cognitive Processes / Meaning / Metaphors / Philosophy of Language / Semantic Change / Social Functions of Language