Penn State University Press

Review
Author(s): Donald Phillip Verene
Review by: Donald Phillip Verene
Source: Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Fall, 1980), pp. 279-282
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40237164
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Book Reviews

Die Macht der Phantasie. Zur Geschichte abenländischen

Denkens. Ernesto Grassi. Königstein/Ts.: Athenäum, 1979. Pp.
xix + 267
Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition. Ernesto Grassi.
University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1980. Pp. 122

Readers of this journal will be familiär with the work of Ernesto

Grassi through his articles that have appeared here during the
past few years. Indeed, the first of these (Vol. 9, No. 4, 1976)
presented Professor Grassi's views on rhetoric to an English-
speaking audience for the first time. The above two books bring
together many of Professor Grassi's views of rhetoric and the
humanist tradition developed over his long career of thought.
They are, in fact, treasure houses of an understanding of the
nature of rhetoric and its relationship to philosophy that is absent
in contemporary thought.
Very simply put, Grassi's thesis is that rhetoric is at the basis
of philosophy. Rhetoric is identified with thè power of language
and human speech to generate a basis for human thought. Rhe-
torical speech is not a language of the émotions in the sensé of a
false form of thought that competes with the truth-seeking
speech of philosophy. Rhetoric, in Grassi's view, is also not an
art of persuasion or of communicating truth that is indepen-
dently established by means of logicai and philosophical
thought. Rhetoric is tied to the act wherein the archai of
thought are made to appear in thè word. It is this original,
prophétie sense of thè word, the word that connects the world
to a transcendent order of reality, that is at the basis of rhetoric
in Grassi's view. Grassi contrasts this prophétie sense of the
word to thè logicai sense of language which bases meaning
wholly within the world, speeifieally within its own System of the
world. Because this primordial sense of thè word is the basis of
rhetoric, rhetorical speech is connected with imaginative speech
and with the human power of ingenuity (ingenium).

Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 13, No. 4, Fall 1980. Published by the Pennsylva-
nia State University Press, University Park and London.

279

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280 BOOK REVIEWS

This view of rhetoric and language goes against the modern

tradition in philosophy. This tradition, since Descartes and Locke,
has been built on a séparation of knowledge and the humanistic
arts of rhetoric, poetic, history, and jurisprudence. In Die Macht
der Phantasie. Zur Geschichte abenländischen Denkens {The
Power of the Imagination: On the History of Western Thought)
Grassi attempts to counter this modern tradition of scientific epi-
stemology and logic as the basis of truth with a recovery of sensés
of language and thought that we have lost. The sources for this act
of recovery are certain parts of antiquity and the humanist tradi-
tion of the Italian Renaissance. Grassi brings back to life such
figures as Coluccio Salutati, Cristoforo Landino, Stefano Guazzo,
Giovanni Pellegrini, Brunetto Latini, and the Spanish thinker Bal-
tasar Graciân, to mention only a few. Grassi sees the humanist
tradition and the ancient notions of metaphor, imaginatioh, mem-
ory, and ingenuity as culminating in the thought of Giambattista
Vico. A discussion of Vico as the summation of humanism occu-
pies the last part of his work.
Much of Grassi's thesis can be grasped from the way in which
he begins this work. He discusses a small work of Plutarch,
"Concerning the E in Delphi." This treatise concerns the mean-
ing of a coin showing the temple of Apollo in Delphi with a pair
of columns between which hangs a great letter E. The text of
Plutarch relates various interprétations of the meaning of this
scene based on its piace in the Greek alphabet and Greek parts
of speech. The fourth of the possible meanings Plutarch explains
is a philosophical meaning. This interprétation holds that the E is
connected to the part of speech that means if It signifies the if of
the if-then relation that plays the principle role in the laying out
of prémisses for rational thinking. It is the Greek ei.
The giving of the prémisses of thought is connected with the
power of the Delphic oracle. The prophétie act of speech gives us
the beginning point of thought. It gives us Voraus-Sehen, Vor-
Sehen. In ancient mentality we find the word connected to the
transcendent order of the sacred. Only when we have this pro-
phétie sight of the order that is beyond the world and unseen by
ordinary sight can we formulate prémisses for thought that are
not arbitrary. The prophétie sensé of the word brings forth the

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 BOOK REVIEWS 281

premiss from thè real order. Prémisses are not simply chosen for
reasons of systematic thought. They emerge from a power of thè
word to situate us in thè world over and against a transcendent
sacred order.
Grassi contrasts this sense of thè beginning point of thought to
that of Wittgenstein^ Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Here we
reason from prémisses that are not grounded in thè prophétie
sense of thè word, but which are entirely secular. Once thè sys-
tem of thè Tractatus is set in motion all is self-enclosed. We have
access to reality only in terms of that which is immanent within
thè System. We cannot see beyond thè System and ali meaning is
what is explicit within thè boundaries of thè System. Voraus-
Sehen or Vor-Sehen is impossible. Grassi quotes thè seventh and
last proposition of Wittgenstein^ work: "Wovon man nicht
sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen" (Whereof one can-
not speak, thereof must one be silent).
One can speak only within the given structure. Outside it there
is no speech. The ancient power of thè word to speak with the
gods is gone. Wittgenstein leaves us, Grassi says, with a huis clos,
a no-exit. The sacred order is gone. Thought becomes a terror, a
nightmare of clarity. Outside of this clarity all is Schweigen and
Geheimnisy ail is silence and secret. Grassi finds a parallel to this
model of thought in modem poetry. He calls attention to Mal-
larmé's Le coup de dés in which the metaphorical sense of the
word is seen as unconnected with transcendent reality. AU of
existence becomes a throw of thè dice, a game in which the rules
have no ground.
The point of Grassi's title, Die Macht der Phantasie, is that we
must recover thè power of thè word as connected to and based in
thè creative imagination. Creative imagination means the pro-
phétie power of thè word to ground thought in the real order.
The fundamental power of the word, in Grassi's view, is the
metaphor. The metaphorical power of thè word, understood in
terms of its ability to make a beginning point for thought, is more
fundamental than thè logicai power of the word to determine and
classify. Language seen in this way is not a game, not a self-con-
tained System.
In Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition Grassi

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282 BOOK REVIEWS

présents thè major thèmes of his view of rhetoric as connectée! to

thè power of the imagination. This work does not repeat the
thèmes of the German work; it présents them in a new way. The
title of the English work suggests even more, namely, that rhet-
oric is a phase in the total process of philosophical thought. Rhe-
toric is an activity that philosophy cannot do without. Rhetoric is
the first and primordial form of thought from which philosophy
flows. This work, in fact, makes available to English readers
much of what is developed at length through historical discussion
in the German work.
The question both of thèse works raise is: are we to understand
rhetoric in terms of its ancient and Renaissance connections with
poetic making, the activity of thè poeta, metaphor, memory,
imagination, ingenium, or are we to see rhetoric as based in the
logicai idea, déduction, argumentation, as fundamentally related
to the analytic-conceptual sensé of language? Grassi's thesis asks
us to choose Vico over Descartes, the humanities over science as
our master key to understanding thè power of language. In an âge
in which philosophy is dominated by conceptual analysis Grassi's
view calls us back to remember what has been denied in the mod-
em basing of philosophy and knowledge on logic and not on the
imagination. He brings forth from his account of antiquity, the
Renaissance, and Vico a whole world that has been lost. In this
sensé Grassi's work is séminal. Other thinkers will come to mind
who hâve things in common with his view, but none command his
panoramic vision. Grassi's work raises issues for the relation of
philosophy and rhetoric that it will take a long time to work out.

Donald Phillip Verene

Department of Philosophy
The Pennsylvania State University

G. W. F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge. Translated and edited by

W. Cerf and H. S. Harris. State University of New York:
Albany, 1977. Pp. vii + 206. N.P.
The publication of this volume has significance for three reasons:
philosophical, theological, and philological. The text addresses a

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