Ernesto Grassi

Ernesto Grassi is neither rhetorician nor compositionist; Grassi himself never theorized the internet, much less online education. However, I find that Grassi's notions on metaphor, ingenium, and on rhetoric intersect quite remarkably with the Kenneth Burke's dramatism, as well as providing a way to talk about MOOspace, how we might perceive MOOspace and how it might be used as an educational environment. Grassi seeks to theorize the human imagination using the philosophical precepts of Italian Humanists, such as Vico. He notes that analytic language, privileged since the Cartesian cogito ergo sum, rational, scientific thought grounded in eternal verities, limits and constrains the discipline of philosophy. He points to Heiddeger's pronouncement on the death of philosophy, locating and highlighting 20th century preoccupation with subject/object binaries.

He notes that a grounding in the eternal, fixed platonic Truth provides a poor basis for the intellectual work needed to be done. By returning to the Italian Humanists, Grassi seeks to restore human non-rational, imaginative thought, returning to pre-Socratic? and/or Platonic? notions of metaphor as a basis for humans understanding their world. Furthermore, Grassi seeks to restore the poet and rhetoric as central to an understanding of contextual truths.

Grassi asserts that scientific, rational epistemological paradigms are based on, grounded in, Platonic, fixed, eternal objective reality; by framing theoretical questions in a fixed ontology of "Being," a static, unchanging world world view, one can never contextualize any theoretical problem because one has lost the historicity or the context, the human context.

One of the central problems of Humanism, however, is not man, but the question of original context, the horizon, or "openness" in which man and his world appear (HRH 17).

A philosopher who worked closely with Heidegger for ten years, Grassi came to examine the clash between two philosophical positions which informed his work and studies: German Idealism and Italian Humanism. Foss Foss and Trapp note "Grassi's philosophical and rhetorical contributions have emerged from the tension between Italian Humanism and the scientific tradition that culminated in German Idealism" (CPR 146). His study of the Italian Humanist tradition, and Vico in particular, prompted Grassi to challenge, not only philosophy, but also rhetoric, grounding his own philosophical theory in a contextual field of the imagination through metaphor, privileging rhetoric???? Gotta be a better way to say this.

Grassi explains: "For Vico, it is the imaginative word that gives rise to the world of human "being there." The poetic word is the original and uniquely human attempt to give meaning to the frightful power of being which reveals itself in what is" (HRH 27). Grassi's belief that the poet and the rhetorician form the basis for communal existence challenges Platonic traditions of Descartes and Kant as rational, a priori systems, closed to ontological investigation. Grassi argues for the "theoretical significance and present-day importance of Humanism, especially in connection with Heidegger's thesis of the end of philosophy." Grassi finds the intersections in Heidgger and Vico, noting that he feels Heidegger just didn't quite grasp the importance of the Humanists. Grassi demonstrates how Heidegger's theories on Being-in-the-world shares a basic philosophical stance with Vico's poet-in-the-world.

Traditional metaphysics must today come to an end because it began with the question of the rational foundation of what is. In place of the question of logical truth, Heidegger explains, the much more original problem of unhiddenness must take its place...here a new task for philosophy arises, to uphold the primacy and originality of poetic language over rational language. (HRH 26).

On Ingenium

: In order to situate Grassi in a field outside his own sphere, rhetoric, one must understand his metaphor for thinking and learning,ingenium, a metaphor itself for the learning thinking process. Grassi situates learning and thinking in rhetoric rather than philosophy. Grassi grounds the ability to *see* and understand in rhetoric rather than philosophy, surprising, given that Grassi is a philosopher. In this way, Grassi privileges a dialogic process of learning in ways similar to Burke, Gere, and Rose. The suspension of binary oppositions as the ruling paradigm, indeed, the move away from a Platonic notion of verities toward a more sophistic approach to cognitive metaskills explains why Grassi is useful to the study of computer mediated writing.

The very statement that communities exist and flourish on "virtual words" seems the kind of contradiction of logical terms that Grassi might say is indeed his whole point. The ability we have to *see*, define, or understand ourselves as *being* in a virtual environment can be better understand by looking at what Grassi terms Ingenium. But before I discuss his notions of Ingenium it would be useful to look at his ideas on metaphor, since the very notion of a data base being a virtual space is closely related to what Grassi has to say about metaphor.

On metaphor:

Relate this to Burke???????

In order to be effective, the metaphor must be so constructed that by uncovering relationships, something peculiar and unique...becomes visible. The metaphor uncovers something that has not previously been seen; it leads to light because it stems from the need to see; that which is not obvious...is to be transferred. It permits us, "to see the similarity between what is actually the most widely separated" ...Finally the metaphor is characterized by the fact that it shows us something unusual...something unexpected. 42

Grassi seeks to overturn traditional Cartesian epistemologies by replacing rational "cogito" the basis for modern philosophical thought with poetry and rhetoric as the "ground", stance or attitude one must assume .....

On Folly:

Tie this together with Burke's notions..........

Grassi's work on folly is an extension of this theme; he believes that the notion of folly, rather than being a kind of insanity, is, in fact, an original grounding in the essential human condition--a linguistic capacity to see things as they are and the opposite possibilities simultaneously. This singular human ability allows humans to create the world in which they live by making choices about how to perceive and live in it ().

Rhetoric

For Grassi, rhetoric informs philosophy precisely because rhetoric "is identified with the power of language and human speech to generate a basis for thought."77 (book?) Philosophical truths then arise out of a rhetorical *ingenium*, metaphor, which allows us to *think*, to define our world and how we choose to define ourselves.

Some key terms: Capacities: rational knowledge memory will
Attitudes:
belief
hope
openness

Grassi notes:

a surprising parallel between Heidegger's writings on the primacy of the function of poetry and analogous theses in Italian Humanism

Note 1

Grassi's ideas about rhetoric have not yet had widespread impact on the field of speech communication; he is best know to scholars interested in Vico and in Renaissance Humanism. Of the journals read most frequently by communication scholars, Grassi has published only in Philosophy and Rhetoric, and relatively few critical discussions of his work exist. His four books that have been translated into English have increased his familiarity in the discipline, but to date, no essays elaborating on Grassi's ideas, or using them methodologically, have appeared in the field at large. (CPR 164).