One of the kind of projects, or rather sets of projects that I've been working on probably a good portion of this last year, and I'll be continuing to do it this coming year, is you might say finishing up things that I started. And by that, I mean video series, which then will turn into podcast series down the line, core concept videos primarily.
And I'm thinking about this in particular right now because I am finishing up a series that I'll be releasing pretty soon about Aristotle's poetics, which is a really great, I would say, underrated text, well worth reading if you're interested in Aristotle's philosophy, not just for literary criticism or his remarks on tragedy, but also for thinking about ethics and a bunch of other topics.
Now, coming back to what I was saying originally, so why am I shooting videos, actually a set of seven, on Aristotle's Poetics? Well, because earlier on, I want to say last year, I shot a whole series on Aristotle's Poetics, but only covered the portions of the text that my students enrolled in an Introduction to Humanities class actually wrote. at the time.
One of the required texts for that class, which I teach every so often, is Sophocles' play Antigone, which is really a great, great play. And Aristotle is one of the classic theorists who talks about the nature of tragedy. We talk about him in class. I have them read the Poetics, or at least selections of it that are relevant to Sophocles' tragedy. And so I thought it might be a nice resource for my students to have me going over and delving into all of the discussions that bear directly on tragedy.
But what we find, if you look at Aristotle's Poetics, that is, I think, what most people go to it to read about. But he's also going to talk about the nature of mimesis and that is imitation, which is going to lead into all the different art forms that we engage in, including the dramatic arts, but other types of poetry as well. He's going to talk a good bit about epic poetry, particularly that of Homer. He'll tell you a little bit about comedy. Unfortunately, as many of you know, we have lost the second book of it in which he is reputed to have talked about comedy at great length.
But he also tells us about a number of other interesting things,some of which connect up with matters that are discussed elsewhere, like the nature of diction or lexis or style in the rhetoric. Also, the importance of emotions, another topic discussed in both the rhetoric and the two Ethics, and I would say even in the Politics, the nature of character and choices and motivations, very much a matter of the Ethics but also found in the Rhetoric, and then metaphor.
So I wanted to go back and finish up the series so I could say, here you go. If you want to study this text, you can check out all of these videos. Later on, I'll convert them into podcast episodes. And now you've got these resources. And then I could actually take them and turn them into an online course that people could use for their own edification and self-directed education as well.
And as it turns out, there are a lot of texts where I've done precisely this over the years. I would start creating content to cover what I thought was the most productive pressing needs.
So let's talk about this stuff and then we'll come back to it later on sometime in the future. Things I would almost like triage, figuring out what the most immediate needs of my students were and dealing with those by producing content on that. And then down the line, I think to myself, well, wouldn't it be nice to have the completed set?
So I've done this with a number of other works. You know, I've shot videos on the entirety of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. At one point, there were videos on various Platonic dialogues where I shot some of them first and then shot the rest of them first. Later, there's a number of Stoic texts where I've produced content on some of the text, but not the entirety of it and need to go back and produce more. And, you know, this goes on and on and on.
So I've got plans down the line to shoot some content on John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, which I've got quite a few videos on, but not covering all of the text. Or St. Augustine's Confessions. Again, similar thing. I produced a number of videos on it, but not all of them that I should have or would like to have. Friedrich Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals is another example. And so I'll probably be doing that.
You know, I said for the next year, but I'll probably be doing that if we're honest about it for at least a couple of years to come, because I think it's important to complete these matters. Now, why is that the case? Well, is it just that we have a tendency to like things brought to their fruition, to be finished, we could say?
And, you know, this goes back to Aristotle and ancient Greek. They have this term telos that you've probably heard of, which we translate as end or goal, and that gets turned into a all sorts of other constructions a verb that is used for completing but also translated as perfecting bringing to fruition adjectives that are derived from that verb all of which trace back to this original conception of like reaching the end reaching the goal bringing things to the point where you can say “ah, that's it, I have actually done enough.”
And I will point out this, when you see that term translated as perfection, I think that in our modern mindset and language, we often interpret that in too maximal of a way. We think that something is perfect if every single thing has been totally fixed, there are no mistakes, nothing possibly wrong or unfinished with it.
And that's not exactly what they meant at the time in using this term. They were not perfectionists, so to speak. But they thought that it was important to work things through, to get them to a point where you can stand back and say, “yeah, that's good. That is good enough.”
And you might think about it in terms of like writing a book. So I've got some experience with that. And I can tell you that whether it's writing a short thing like a blog post or a newspaper article or writing something longer and more involved and rigorous like an academic article or actually writing an entire book, there are always going to be flaws.
There are always going to be some mistakes. There are always going to be errors that you hope somebody would have caught but somehow sneak through. And it doesn't mean that the work isn't finished. or that it hasn't been brought to its fruition, or that in an older sense of it, it hasn't been perfected. It's just not perfect in its entirety.
And now shifting back to Aristotle's Poetics as I wrap this up, one of the things that I'll probably talk about a bit more later on that I think is really interesting about this work, particularly as I'm rereading it and thinking about it more, is that it has been interpreted by people in the past, particularly in the 17th century, when Aristotle's Poetics was, you might say, interpreted in a very rigid way by playwrights and critics and philosophers, particularly in France, as if he was providing us with not a set of guidelines, but a set of strict rules for how tragedies have to be written.
And now, if you know anything about that time period, you know that it was a time of great, fruitful, French playwriting, the 17th and 18th centuries, I think you can say. And you can take Aristotle's remarks about what makes for a good tragedy and what makes tragedy particularly effective as a kind of canon, a kind of set of guidelines for how you ought to carry out this art form that we call tragedy.
That's certainly an option you can do it that way but you don't have to and it kind of goes against Aristotle's own way of looking at things he clearly thinks that tragedy has developed and improved and figured things out kind of by experimentation or trial and error in which the audience is involved and critics are involved.
And critics and audience are not something radically distinct from each other. Krites means judge and the audience does judge things. And Aristotle's trying to figure out what makes some tragedies really work well and what makes some not so good. Also epics and comedies and other poetic forms as well. And so when he's saying that, you know, this is the way a tragedy ought to go.
He's not laying down some rule for all time that applies to every single thing that you want to call tragedy. He's saying this is actually what works well. This is what gets you closer to the end, to the fruition. And so we got an interesting little dovetailing here of what it is that Aristotle's doing in this work and what it is that I'm trying to do with my own thinking, research, video production, having to do with series that I started at one point and then didn't get all the way through as I was trying to provide helpful commentary on philosophical or other works.
So that's a good place, now that we've brought these together, to wrap up these reflections, and I'll probably talk a little bit more about this notion of Aristotle as a rigid rulemaker versus the Aristotle that I see revealed in this text, and how you can, as you're reading the text, get in touch with one of them, namely the author, one who's a bit more flexible and realistic, and divest yourself of an imaginary Aristotle conjured up by all of these interpreters who made him into a rather doctrinaire disciplinarian of drama.
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