University Press prompts a reconsideration of this twentieth-century Italian intellectual's contribution to rhetoric and philosophy. The book is a set of closely related essays around the central theme that Italian humanism compliments and enriches the hermeneutic understanding developed by Grassi's mentor, Heidegger. Grassi wishes to retrieve and promote the neglected resources of the ancient rhetorical tradition as they were nurtured and embellished by great and lesser known humanists of the Renaissance. Just as does Hans-Georg Gadamer, Grassi uses the distortions of the dominant Cartesian worldview of apodictic certainty as foil. Against this modern backdrop Grassi offers up an entire tradition of humanist scholarship which locates human understanding in the familiar rhetorical territory of probability, situatedness, and invention. Not the deadened instrumentalist technique that rhetoric was accused of becoming after Aristotle, Grassi reveals a rich treasury of conceptual resources which comport plausibly with the hermeneutics of facticity (early Heidegger) and a poetics of thinking (late Heidegger). Perhaps the most rewarding aspect of Grassi's effort in Rhetoric as Philosophy is that, in support of his argument on behalf of Renaissance humanism and classical Latin culture, he introduces us to an untapped treasure-house of scholarship that includes not only the familiar names of Giambattista Vico, Fabius Quintilian, Juan Luis Vives, and Leonardo Bruno, but a host of lesser known figures such as Angelo Poliziano, Coluccio Salutati, Hugo of St. Victor, Brunetto Latini, and the younger Pico, all of whom make striking contributions to what seems very like a kind of rhetorical-hermeneutic understanding of the world.
In the introduction to Rhetoric as Philosophy, Grassi argues not only that Italian humanism was a forerunner to Heidegger but that it still makes an important and original contribution to hermeneutic thinking. This amounts in part to a defense, since Heidegger was particularly harsh in rejecting Latin thought and culture in favor of the ancient Greeks. What Grassi finds original in humanism is the emphasis on ingenium, which is the faculty of discovering similarities in unlike things. He argues that in fact metaphor underlies the hermeneutic process: "The metaphor is, therefore, the original form of the interpretative act itself, which raises itself from the particular to the general through representation in an image, but, of course, always with regard to its importance for human beings" (p. 7). The disclaimer at the end of the sentence identifies a reciprocity between the inventional capacity and human social need, a dialectic between the creative and the material: "Even the metaphor, that figurative transfer of meaning, stands in the service of satisfying urgent needs" (p. 14). In chapter 2 Grassi develops the priority of rhetorical understanding over the logic of reason. He is not precise in defining rhetoric, and it passes through several formulations--an interpretation of the Phaedrus supports the identification of rhetoric and philosophy (p. 32). At one point rhetoric precedes logic as the invention of archai, the starting points of deduction: "`Rhetoric' is not, nor can it be the art, the technique of an exterior persuasion; it is rather the speech which is the basis of the rational thought" (p. 20). Elsewhere rhetoric is the emotive, as opposed to the rational, word which serves to attest to what is true rather than demonstrate it.
Chapter 3 offers a loose set of guiding concepts in Renaissance humanism that suggest a rhetorical paradigm for knowledge. Grassi suggests, by way of recourse to his Latinate sources, that the traditional rhetorical concepts of invention and topical resources are fundamental epistemological tools for finding the places of meaningful insight into truth. Unlike Vico, he draws a sharply polemical opposition between logos and pathos: "Philosophy in this sense, too, is no longer a rational, deductive process, but an emotive speech guided by insight, which has no rational character and has preeminence" (p. 63). Of particular note is the emphasis on imagination and the image as a guide to understanding. Here Grassi stakes out a position that later hermeneutics moves decisively away from in favor of linguistic understanding.
Grassi suffers from a certain sketchy thinness, which is all the more glaring given the rich storehouse he has tapped into. He offers a number of important theses without doing the deep work of thought that nurtures our own thinking. He is more a scholar than a major thinker, and he is more valuable for the breadth of his scholarship, opening up an entire hidden tradition, and the importance of his guiding idea. He is one of those thinkers who is valuable for having got hold of an important theme, rather than for originality or depth of insight. The importance of situating rhetoric and hermeneutics in a position of reciprocity is something that the German scholars gladly acknowledged but did not adequately develop. To the extent that Grassi stands as the standard bearer for this important idea, he will remain an important figure.
--John Arthos, Denison University.
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Publication: The Review of
Metaphysics
Date: Saturday, September 1
2001
Email arthos@denison.edu
http://www.articlearchives.com/reports-reviews-sections/book/846058-1.html
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Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Cristina Rusu
rucris@alumni.uv.es
Universitat
de Valčncia Press