This paper sustains, on the basis of the work of the modern Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, a thesis which characterizes poetic and 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 work Principii di Scienza Nuova. According to him, the language of a community emerges from the contact between everything that is immediately close to its concrete human beings and 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 and bodies. The contact between these two loci (internal and external) of things and meanings is then full of fantasy and imagination. The notion of an 'abstract language' and the distinction between what is metaphorical and what is literal arises only later, when the stabilization of meanings in the imaginative production of a specific culture comes to be forgotten and these meanings are presumed to belong to the things themselves, objectively.
Knowledge; language; metaphor; rhetoric; meaning