Aristotle and Poetics from “Classical Antiquity”

Aristotle and Poeticsfrom “Classical Antiquity” English III Hrs/AP/IB Troy High School Mrs. Snipes

Aristotle (384 B.C. – 322 B.C) was born in Stagira, Macedonia, the son of a court physician. • He is considered to be one of the greatest figures in the history of human thought. • While still a youth, he became a student of Plato at Athens. • After teaching in Asia Minor and studying in Lesbos, he was asked by King Philip of Macedon to serve as a tutor to the young Alexander (342- 336 B.C.) • Afterwards, Aristotle returned to Athens, where he founded the famous Perpatetic School and lectured on subjects covering widely diverse fields, including physics, zoology, politics, ethics, metaphysics, logic, rhetoric, and poetry.

Aristotle’s Poetics is not only the most important critical work of classical antiquity. It is also perhaps the most influential work in the entire history of criticism. • The unique value of the Poetics may be expressed in at least three ways, not to mention others:

1. It marks the beginning of literary criticism. The beginning of critical analysis and the discovery of principles by which analysis can proceed are obviously larger and more essential steps than any one later elaboration or development of these principles.

2. Throughout some periods, particularly the Renaissance and the early 18th century, the Poetics served as a starting point and sometimes as guide for literary criticism.

3. The Poetics is the best key to the temper and aims of Greek art generally. Aristotle did not try to deduce a theory of literature from an abstract theory of esthetics. He looked at literature directly, almost as a naturalist would regard it. He scrutinized it as a province of knowledge with a concrete body of material of its own; and this body of material was Greek literature itself.

More than any other critical statement of antiquity, Poetics offers, however briefly and incompletely, the approach to literature of one of the most gifted peoples in history—a people, indeed, which virtually created the premises and values of Western civilization. • Many of the issues it raises have a perennial importance—an importance that results from the range and penetration of Aristotle’s own mind, and also from the remarkable success, and fertile creativity of the Greek approach to art upon which the Poetics rests.

In so far as it is an answer to Plato, Aristotle’s Poetics justifies poetry on two grounds: the truth and validity of poetry as an imitation of nature—or as a form of knowledge—and secondly, the morally desirable effect of this awareness upon the human mind. • Whereas Plato regarded the ultimate reality as consisting of pure “Ideas,” divorced from the concrete, material world, Aristotle conceived of reality or nature as a process of becoming or developing: a process in which form manifests itself through concrete material, and in which the concrete takes on form and meaning, working in accordance with persisting, ordered principles.

Poetry, then, although it imitates concrete nature, as Plato charged, does not imitate just the concrete. In fact, its focal point of interest—the process of which it is trying to offer a duplicate or counterpoint—is form shaping, guiding, and developing the concrete into a unified meaning and completeness.

The word form here should be interpreted broadly, and not as a synonym for mere “technique” in art. It applies to the direction which something would take if it were permitted to carry itself out to its final culmination. • The term “form” also applies to the value of that object or event—to its full meaning and character, and hence to its worth and importance.

In a drama, the plot does not include every incident that might happen to us in ordinary life. • Hence Aristotle’s remark that poetry can be “a more philosophical and higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.” • That is, history concentrates on specific details as they happened, regardless of the ultimate form (the “universal”) that things would take if allowed to carry themselves out ti their logical conclusion. • The dramatist, however, is selective: he omits the irrelevant, and draws out from the potential form or pattern of an event as a complete unit.

Aristotle applied this principle not only to what poetry should seek to disclose, or “imitate,” but also to the way (the harmonia) in which this imitation is made and presented as a unified thing in itself. • For this reason his emphasis was on plot rather than particular characters; indeed, for Aristotle, the plot was the “soul” or proper form of the drama. • The drama imitates actions; otherwise, it is not a drama, but something else. • In imitating actions, therefore, the drama should appropriately be an activity itself; and this activity if the plot; hence, Aristotle’s emphasis on unity of interconnection and on a rounded completeness in this activity that comprises plot.

The plot must contain within itself the conditions that lead to its culmination rather than rely on mere chance or some external deus ex machina who suddenly resolves all the difficulties artificially. • And if tragedy occupied most of Aristotle’s attention, it is because, more than any other type, it can best fulfill the general aim of poetry: to present a heightened and harmonious imitation of nature, and, in particular, those aspects of nature that touch most closely upon human life.

The plot must possess what Aristotle called a “unity of action.” • It must have a beginning, middle, and end. • Nothing in our experience, of course, is really a beginning or an end: related events or causes always exist before anyone point, and further results always follow. • What is meant is simply a beginning that does not need preceding action on the stage in order to explain it; a development (or “middle”); and an end that generally concludes this development so that more action is not needed to complete the total sequence.

Aristotle’s emphasis on the probability of dramatic structure, and on the ordered self-sufficiency of the plot, also led him to suggest another desirable principle: that the main character of tragedy should have a “tragic flaw.” • To allow the character to be simply the victim of unpredictable and undeserved calamities would violate the complete, self-contained unity of action. • Moreover, if the calamity that befalls a virtuous man is completely undeserved, our sense of shock may be so violent that it prevents or obstructs other emotional reactions: the emotional and imaginative elevation, for example, that comes in witnessing the working out of a pattern of events to their culmination, and seeing the total significance emerge into universal applicability.

On the other hand, the character should have standing and capacity; he must certainly be above average, whether in rank, mind, or capacity to feel. • Moreover, the tragic fall is much greater to the degree that the character has more “multiplicity of consciousness.” • The tragic hero must have a place from which to fall. And the loftier his position is, the more disastrous his fall.

Aristotle’s belief in the formative and morally desirable effect of art is implicit in many of his writings. This attitude is quite in accord with Greek thought generally; and it was Plato who took a novel an atypical position by voicing the misgivings he did. He would doubtless have regarded a detailed defense as unnecessary. He did state, however, more or less in answer to Plato, that tragedy produces a healthful effect on the human character through what he called a katharsis, “through pity and fear effecting a proper purgation of emotions.”

A successful tragedy, then, exploits and appeals at the start of two basic emotions. • One is fear—the painful sense, as Aristotle elsewhere describes it, “of impending evil which is destructive…” • Tragedy, in other words, deals with the element of evil, with what we least want and most fear to face, with what is destructive to human life and values; it is this concern that makes the theme of the play tragic.

In addition, tragedy exploits our sense of “pity”: it draws out our ability to sympathize with others, so that, in our identification with the tragic character, we ourselves feel something of the impact and extent of the evil befalling him. • There are a few general implications of this view of tragedy and catharsis as applied to poetry. • To begin with, the katharsis that tragedy offers is not merely an outlet or escape for emotion. It is not simply that men go about full of pent-up emotions, and that the sight of a dramatic tragedy every once in awhile serves as a safety valve, so to speak, by which they let off steam.

More than this, tragedy first of all deliberately excites in the spectator the emotions of pity and fear which are then to undergo the “proper purgation.” • Whereas Plato, in the Republic, had adversely criticized poetry because it “feeds and waters passions instead of starving them,” Aristotle—both psychologically more sophisticated and also more typically Greek—took for granted that it is undesirable to “starve” the emotions; and assumed feeling—though he believed it should be directed and controlled by intelligence—to be a necessary aspect of human life.

Katharsis, as Aristotle employed the term, may be described as the use, control, and purification of emotion. Something desirable happens to emotion when it is aroused and managed by poetic tragedy: the personally disturbing and morbid is purged or shed off, and the emotion, after undergoing this “purgation,” has been purified and lifted, as it were to a harmonious serenity. This enlarging of the soul through sympathy, this lifting of one above the egocentric, is itself desirable and operates to the advantage of one’s psychological and moral health: it joins emotion to awareness, directing it outward to what is being conceived. But in addition to this, there is a further effect on the emotion of the observer.

Tragic drama not only arouses our sympathetic identification through presenting an “imitation” of human actions; but, by appealing to our instinct for harmonia as well as for mimesis (imitation), it also presents an ordered and proportioned regularity of structure, interrelated through “the law of probability and necessity.” • Accordingly, the emotion of the spectator, after being drawn out and identified with the “imitation” before him, is then carried along and made part of the harmonious development and working out of the particular drama.

And the intellectual realization of what has happened, emerging through the ordered structure and body of the drama, is therefore also emerging through the spectator’s own feelings; in so emerging, the intellectual realization lifts our feelings to a state of harmonized serenity and tranquility. It has “purged” them of the subjective and self-centered. It has enlarged and extended them through sympathy. Above all, it has joined feeling to insight, conditioning our habitual emotion ti that awareness if the essential import of human actions which poetry, through “imitation,” is capable of offering.

For beneath the theory of katharsis lies the general Greek premise that art, in presenting a heightened and harmonious “imitation” of reality, is formative; that, in enlarging, exercising, and refining one’s feelings, and in leading them outward, art possesses a unique power to form the “total man,” in whom emotion has been reconciled to intelligence and harmoniously integrated with it.

Aristotle and Poetics from “Classical Antiquity”