In a previous episode where I was talking about my work completing a video series on what we possess of Aristotle's Poetics, I had brought up the fact that there were rather rigid interpretations and applications of Aristotle's text to dramas, particularly in the 17th century, where Aristotle was interpreted as providing us with definitive rules for how a tragedy has to be written in order to be a good tragedy, in order to be a proper representative of that genre.
And I promised that I would come back to the topic, so that is what I'm going to do here, but I want to broaden it a little bit. So it's interesting, if you go and you look at what people have to say about it, the most common way that people talk about it in the present seems to be telling us about Aristotle's theory of tragedy.
And it's kind of a funny term to use, given that Aristotle does in fact use the Greek verb that we end up getting theory from, theorein, which means essentially to contemplate. And it's particularly used for the spectators at a tragedy, or we would call them today, the audience, the people literally looking at or watching the drama being depicted, the mimesis that Aristotle is particularly interested in.
And a lot of people will write about this in ways that reflect a kind of rigidification of Aristotle's text. You might even, if we want to use another term, say ossification. And this comes from the word os, from bone. It's making Aristotle very bony. It's giving you something like a skeleton that doesn't have the mobility of Aristotle's thought as we actually see it right there in the text.
So when you see somebody telling you about the theory of a particular philosopher, I'm not saying that every time that happens, alarm bells should go off or a red flag should go up in your head, but you might want to be a bit suspicious, particularly if the philosopher, him or herself, didn't say, “this is my theory”, right?
If they didn't present it in that way, because what you're always getting there is a sort of reconstruction, and it could be a reconstruction that is also, we could say, a not only rigidification, but a reduction, making it less than it actually is.
And when you think about these great authors and classic texts, why do we read them? Not because we're looking for a cookie cutter or recipe or schema that we can cram everything into. We're looking for thought that remains alive, that can provoke our own reflection and meditation and widening our own range of thinking and and even perception when it comes to these matters.
So when you read through Aristotle's poetics, you can't apply it very easily to every single genre of drama that we have in the present, whether it's literary, whether it's presented on a stage, whether it is in a streaming television show or movie, but it should help you at least see some things in a different and deeper light.mThat's the power of Aristotle's text.
And sometimes it's going to help you see it, not so much by saying, aha, I know exactly what's going on, but by helping you to better be puzzled, better be astounded, better be challenged, and better ask questions or muse upon things. That's the function of classic texts like Aristotle's Poetics.
And so I want to say another thing as well to widen the scope here and take us to some of Aristotle's other works. So you'll often see people saying things like Aristotle's doctrine of this or that. So for example, Aristotle's doctrine of the unity of the virtues, this would be in book six of the Nicomachean Ethics. Or sometimes you'll even see argument being used as well, like Aristotle's function argument.
And I'm not going to say that all of that should be automatically rejected. I mean, if it helps you to wrap your head around what is going on in Aristotle's admittedly ambiguous at times argument, difficult at times, tricky, and sometimes confusing text, that's great. Just don't mistake, as we often say, the map for the territory, where the territory is Aristotle's actual text and the thought lying behind it, and the map, or tiny little portion of the map, maybe just a route, is what it is that the commentator or even just website has to say about what Aristotle's really doing.
Because you're not getting the fullness of what Aristotle's doing when somebody talks about the function argument or Aristotle's theory of tragedy or anything along those lines. His thought is more complex, more richly interconnected, more ambiguous in its language, and more, you could say, questing. Aristotle is often showing us his process of thinking about things, and that's part of why it is so messy when we try to reconstruct it.
And maybe we need to get out of the habit of thinking that everything should be made nice and easy and quick to apply, set in bullet point form. Maybe that's a habit of mind that we actually need to break, to identify within ourselves, and then to slowly disentangle from our approach to things.
So coming back to Aristotle, coming back especially to the Poetics, I will say that Aristotle does provide us with an effective definition of tragedy as a particular artistic memetic medium, a kind of poesis, a kind of poetry and production. But there's much more to the picture. And I'm just going to give you one example to drive this home.
So everybody who knows anything about tragedy knows that it involves, according to Aristotle, purification of two emotions in particular, fear and pain. Well, that's true. Aristotle does actually say that in his definition, and he does talk about that. But are those really the only emotions that we would possibly want to focus on?
He also mentions anger in the Poetics and I think that we could quite easily, using our brains and applying them somewhat to this, say perhaps sometimes if there is catharsis (purification is often how we translate that), if there is catharsis of emotion why couldn't it also be that of anger. He also talks about another interesting emotional state within there that often doesn't get remarked upon that we could translate as human feeling, philanthropia, a term that gets used a lot in later authors, but which Aristotle is using there.
We might think about other emotions as well, like that of sadness, which he doesn't actually mention in this work, but does talk about in other places, certainly under the aspect of grief, which he mentions in the Nicomachean Ethics. So when we look at it that way, when we don't simply say, well, as we all know, Aristotle only thinks, because Aristotle only talks about two emotions there, that catharsis in good tragedy involves purification of the audience's feeling of fear and pity, or we might say sympathy or compassion, as a translation of Greek, by the way in which we read it and the assumptions that we bring to it.
Sometimes, unfortunately, and this has often been the case for me as a younger person, the book that we're reading is not as great a book as other people are encountering. And maybe we have to mature a bit. Maybe we have to learn to not simply rely upon secondhand interpretations and go into the text ourselves and linger with, really spend time with it if we want to get entirely what is available to us as readers, as thinkers, as collaborators in the thought, if we want that to become available to us.
So those are a few musings that hopefully discharge the obligation I incurred by promising to talk more about Aristotle's poetics. I'll probably return to it later on down the line because there's plenty of other interesting aspects of this text to talk about, but that's enough for right now.
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