Grassi's rhetorical thought

Grassi starts by asking whether theoretical speech can be rhetorical. Since theoretical thinking is considered rational, and rhetoric thinking influences feelings, he conludes that feelings "disturb the clarity of rational thought" (p. 18).
Grassi shows that rhetoric is often perceived as secondary to philosophy, as a "technical doctrine of speech". Therefore, the author decides to "delimit the function of rhetoric" in order to find out "whether rhetoric has a purely technical, exterior, and practical aim of persuading, or whether it has an essentially philosophical structure and function" (p.19).
Theoretical speech is "figurative", "imaginative", "metaphorical" or "showing", i. e. "it shows something which has a sense, and this means that to the figure, the speech transfers a signification" (p. 20).
Rhetorical speech cannot have a rational character. "Rhetoric"assumes a fundamentally new significance; it's not and cannot be the art, the technique of an exterior persuasion; it is rather the speech which is the basis of the rational thought.  Following this idea: "we are obliged to say that rhetorical speech comes before every rational speech, i. e. theoretical speech" (p. 20).
"The essence of man is determined both by logical and emotional elements, and as a result speech" has to appeal to both rhetoric and philosophy (p. 27).
I guess that's what we are doing: combining theory and practice/ theoretical texts which give us background knowledge and we read literary texts that demonstrate or illustrate what we learn from the theoretical texts (and thet's what many theoretical texts do by including literary examples to support their statements).
After giving the example of Plato, Grassi concludes that the true philosophy is rhetoric, and the true rhetoric is philosophy (one doesn't precede the other, rather, the two coexist) p. 32.
Metaphor is the basis of both rhetoric and philosophy. Metaphor by iteslf is metaphor since it's derived from a verb that meant "to transfer", which originally describes a concrete activity and now it's a "metaphorical" activity ("transposition of words").
These are some notes and ideas about Rhetoric based on the reading of Grassi.