Abstract

If writers had at their fingertips a mechanism that would produce insight, that would contribute to their self-realization, and that would enable both them and their readers to step toward understanding, would they choose to use it?1 A strategy that discovers presence and penetrates the unknown is available to us as thinkers, as writers . . . ingenium, something old is new again. This essay deliberately refuses to give a simple definition of ingenium, for it cannot be defined in a few neat sentences. Instead, ingenium unfolds with recursive definitions. The first-ingenium, an innovative cognitive power, is a human way of knowing that includes the actual in a particular context and the extraordinary with the concrete. It combines sense perceptions with the imagination to open up and reveal the world. The second definition is from Grassi-the human capacity that enables words or senses or ideas to have adaptability, acumen, and 'instantaneousness' (Heidegger 20). The third layer is a cognitive activity that links a person perceptually with others and with the natural world. A person who uncovers a space for ingenium may generate new ways of inventing or interpreting discourse, problems, or ideas. This essay briefly traces aspects of ingenium as practiced by early Greek sophists and later by humanists. Next, ingenium is conceptualized as an inventional process that has four attributes: generating multiple ideas that may situate themselves in one's hand or ear or eye, opening the senses to the phenomenal world, finding the similar, and transferring meaning through fantasy. Through ingenium we may participate in a process that mirrors our complex world. Sophist and humanist practices touch and complement each other through ingenium. Ingenium as a discovery process subverts and surprises; it actively enriches the usual either-or model perpetuated by the Western objectivist tradition. Although sophists did not call the process ingenium, it was practiced in many ways as Gorgias's Encomium of Helen (c. 414 BCE) illustrates. Years later, humanist thinkers such as Vico, Gracian, and Vives promoted ingenium's philosophic importance as a means of enlarging the possibilities for communication. From the first sophists to contemporary thinkers, philosophers recognize the power of openness in language that breaks down boundaries of binary