aristotle theory of tragedy essay

Agamemnon, The Choephori, and The Eumenides
Literature Notes
Aristotle on Tragedy
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About Agamemnon, The Choephori, and The Eumenides
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The Oresteia: Introductory Note
Agamemnon: Prologue (Lines 1-39)
Agamemnon: Parodos (Lines 40-82)
Agamemnon: First Stasimon (Lines 83-269)
Agamemnon: First Episode (Lines 270-366)
Agamemnon: Second Stasimon (Lines 367-480)
Agamemnon: Second Episode (Lines 481-685)
Agamemnon: Third Stasimon (Lines 686-773)
Agamemnon: Third Episode (Lines 774-965)
Agamemnon: Fourth Stasimon (Lines 966-1018)
Agamemnon: Fourth Episode (Lines 1019-1410)
Agamemnon: Exodos (Lines 1411-1673)
The Choephori, or The Libation Bearers: Prologue (Lines 1-21)
The Choephori, or The Libation Bearers: Parodos (Lines 22-82)
The Choephori, or The Libation Bearers: First Episode (Lines 83-304)
The Choephori, or The Libation Bearers: First Stasimon (Lines 305-476)
The Choephori, or The Libation Bearers: Second Episode (Lines 477-582)
The Choephori, or The Libation Bearers: Second Stasimon (Lines 583-648)
The Choephori, or The Libation Bearers: Third Episode (Lines 649-778)
The Choephori, or The Libation Bearers: Third Stasimon (Lines 779-836)
The Choephori, or The Libation Bearers: Fourth Episode (Lines 837-933)
The Choephori, or The Libation Bearers: Fourth Stasimon (Lines 934-970)
The Choephori, or The Libation Bearers: Exodos (Lines 971-1074)
The Eumenides: Prologue (Lines 1-63)
The Eumenides: First Episode (Lines 64-142)
The Eumenides: First Stasimon (Lines 143-178)
The Eumenides: Second Episode (Lines 179-243)
The Eumenides: Parodos (Lines 244-275)
The Eumenides: Second Episode, Continued (Lines 276-306)
The Eumenides: Second Stasimon (Lines 307-395)
The Eumenides: Third Episode (Lines 396-489)
The Eumenides: Third Stasimon (Lines 490-565)
The Eumenides: Fourth Episode (Lines 566-776)
The Eumenides: Fourth Stasimon (Lines 777-792)
The Eumenides: Fifth Episode and Exodos (Lines 793-1047)
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Critical Essay Aristotle on Tragedy

In the Poetics , Aristotle's famous study of Greek dramatic art, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) compares tragedy to such other metrical forms as comedy and epic. He determines that tragedy, like all poetry, is a kind of imitation ( mimesis ), but adds that it has a serious purpose and uses direct action rather than narrative to achieve its ends. He says that poetic mimesis is imitation of things as they could be, not as they are — for example, of universals and ideals — thus poetry is a more philosophical and exalted medium than history, which merely records what has actually happened.

The aim of tragedy, Aristotle writes, is to bring about a "catharsis" of the spectators — to arouse in them sensations of pity and fear, and to purge them of these emotions so that they leave the theater feeling cleansed and uplifted, with a heightened understanding of the ways of gods and men. This catharsis is brought about by witnessing some disastrous and moving change in the fortunes of the drama's protagonist (Aristotle recognized that the change might not be disastrous, but felt this was the kind shown in the best tragedies — Oedipus at Colonus, for example, was considered a tragedy by the Greeks but does not have an unhappy ending).

According to Aristotle, tragedy has six main elements: plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle (scenic effect), and song (music), of which the first two are primary. Most of the Poetics is devoted to analysis of the scope and proper use of these elements, with illustrative examples selected from many tragic dramas, especially those of Sophocles, although Aeschylus, Euripides, and some playwrights whose works no longer survive are also cited.

Several of Aristotle's main points are of great value for an understanding of Greek tragic drama. Particularly significant is his statement that the plot is the most important element of tragedy:

Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of action and life, of happiness and misery. And life consists of action, and its end is a mode of activity, not a quality. Now character determines men's qualities, but it is their action that makes them happy or wretched. The purpose of action in the tragedy, therefore, is not the representation of character: character comes in as contributing to the action. Hence the incidents and the plot are the end of the tragedy; and the end is the chief thing of all. Without action there cannot be a tragedy; there may be one without character. . . . The plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy: character holds the second place.

Aristotle goes on to discuss the structure of the ideal tragic plot and spends several chapters on its requirements. He says that the plot must be a complete whole — with a definite beginning, middle, and end — and its length should be such that the spectators can comprehend without difficulty both its separate parts and its overall unity. Moreover, the plot requires a single central theme in which all the elements are logically related to demonstrate the change in the protagonist's fortunes, with emphasis on the dramatic causation and probability of the events.

Aristotle has relatively less to say about the tragic hero because the incidents of tragedy are often beyond the hero's control or not closely related to his personality. The plot is intended to illustrate matters of cosmic rather than individual significance, and the protagonist is viewed primarily as the character who experiences the changes that take place. This stress placed by the Greek tragedians on the development of plot and action at the expense of character, and their general lack of interest in exploring psychological motivation, is one of the major differences between ancient and modern drama.

Since the aim of a tragedy is to arouse pity and fear through an alteration in the status of the central character, he must be a figure with whom the audience can identify and whose fate can trigger these emotions. Aristotle says that "pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves." He surveys various possible types of characters on the basis of these premises, then defines the ideal protagonist as

. . . a man who is highly renowned and prosperous, but one who is not pre-eminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice or depravity but by some error of judgment or frailty; a personage like Oedipus.

In addition, the hero should not offend the moral sensibilities of the spectators, and as a character he must be true to type, true to life, and consistent.

The hero's error or frailty ( harmartia ) is often misleadingly explained as his "tragic flaw," in the sense of that personal quality which inevitably causes his downfall or subjects him to retribution. However, overemphasis on a search for the decisive flaw in the protagonist as the key factor for understanding the tragedy can lead to superficial or false interpretations. It gives more attention to personality than the dramatists intended and ignores the broader philosophical implications of the typical plot's denouement. It is true that the hero frequently takes a step that initiates the events of the tragedy and, owing to his own ignorance or poor judgment, acts in such a way as to bring about his own downfall. In a more sophisticated philosophical sense though, the hero's fate, despite its immediate cause in his finite act, comes about because of the nature of the cosmic moral order and the role played by chance or destiny in human affairs. Unless the conclusions of most tragedies are interpreted on this level, the reader is forced to credit the Greeks with the most primitive of moral systems.

It is worth noting that some scholars believe the "flaw" was intended by Aristotle as a necessary corollary of his requirement that the hero should not be a completely admirable man. Harmartia would thus be the factor that delimits the protagonist's imperfection and keeps him on a human plane, making it possible for the audience to sympathize with him. This view tends to give the "flaw" an ethical definition but relates it only to the spectators' reactions to the hero and does not increase its importance for interpreting the tragedies.

The remainder of the Poetics is given over to examination of the other elements of tragedy and to discussion of various techniques, devices, and stylistic principles. Aristotle mentions two features of the plot, both of which are related to the concept of harmartia, as crucial components of any well-made tragedy. These are "reversal" ( peripeteia ), where the opposite of what was planned or hoped for by the protagonist takes place, as when Oedipus' investigation of the murder of Laius leads to a catastrophic and unexpected conclusion; and "recognition" ( anagnorisis ), the point when the protagonist recognizes the truth of a situation, discovers another character's identity, or comes to a realization about himself. This sudden acquisition of knowledge or insight by the hero arouses the desired intense emotional reaction in the spectators, as when Oedipus finds out his true parentage and realizes what crimes he has been responsible for.

Aristotle wrote the Poetics nearly a century after the greatest Greek tragedians had already died, in a period when there had been radical transformations in nearly all aspects of Athenian society and culture. The tragic drama of his day was not the same as that of the fifth century, and to a certain extent his work must be construed as a historical study of a genre that no longer existed rather than as a description of a living art form.

In the Poetics, Aristotle used the same analytical methods that he had successfully applied in studies of politics, ethics, and the natural sciences in order to determine tragedy's fundamental principles of composition and content. This approach is not completely suited to a literary study and is sometimes too artificial or formula-prone in its conclusions.

Nonetheless, the Poetics is the only critical study of Greek drama to have been made by a near-contemporary. It contains much valuable information about the origins, methods, and purposes of tragedy, and to a degree shows us how the Greeks themselves reacted to their theater. In addition, Aristotle's work had an overwhelming influence on the development of drama long after it was compiled. The ideas and principles of the Poetics are reflected in the drama of the Roman Empire and dominated the composition of tragedy in western Europe during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

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Introduction
Aeschylus: the first great tragedian
Sophocles: the purest artist
Euripides: the dark tragedian
Later Greek drama
The long hiatus
Marlowe and the first Christian tragedy
Shakespearean tragedy
From comedy to tragedy
Shakespeare’s tragic art
Decline in 17th-century England
Corneille and Racine
The English “heroic play”
The eclipse of tragedy
Dostoyevsky’s tragic view
The American tragic novel
Tragic themes in Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov
American tragic dramatists
Other serious drama
Absence of tragedy in Asian drama
Loss of viability in the West

Classical theories

Elizabethan approaches
Neoclassical theory
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
Tragedy in music
Critical theory in the 20th century and beyond

What did Sophocles do?
What is Sophocles known for?
How many plays did Sophocles write?
Who was Voltaire?
What did Voltaire write?

Theory of tragedy

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Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Tragedy
Oregon State University - College of Liberal Arts - What is Tragedy? || Definition and Examples
Theatre Database - The Origin of Tragedy
Humanities LibreTexts - The Importance of Tragedy
Literary Devices - Definition and Examples of Literary Terms - Definition of Tragedy
Table Of Contents

As the great period of Athenian drama drew to an end at the beginning of the 4th century bce , Athenian philosophers began to analyze its content and formulate its structure. In the thought of Plato (c. 427–347 bce ), the history of the criticism of tragedy began with speculation on the role of censorship . To Plato (in the dialogue on the Laws ) the state was the noblest work of art, a representation ( mimēsis ) of the fairest and best life. He feared the tragedians’ command of the expressive resources of language, which might be used to the detriment of worthwhile institutions. He feared, too, the emotive effect of poetry, the Dionysian element that is at the very basis of tragedy. Therefore, he recommended that the tragedians submit their works to the rulers, for approval, without which they could not be performed. It is clear that tragedy, by nature exploratory, critical, independent, could not live under such a regimen .

Plato is answered , in effect and perhaps intentionally, by Aristotle ’s Poetics . Aristotle defends the purgative power of tragedy and, in direct contradiction to Plato, makes moral ambiguity the essence of tragedy. The tragic hero must be neither a villain nor a virtuous man but a “character between these two extremes,…a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty [ hamartia ].” The effect on the audience will be similarly ambiguous . A perfect tragedy, he says, should imitate actions that excite “pity and fear.” He uses Sophocles ’ Oedipus the King as a paradigm . Near the beginning of the play, Oedipus asks how his stricken city (the counterpart of Plato’s state) may cleanse itself, and the word he uses for the purifying action is a form of the word catharsis . The concept of catharsis provides Aristotle with his reconciliation with Plato, a means by which to satisfy the claims of both ethics and art. “Tragedy,” says Aristotle , “is an imitation [ mimēsis ] of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude…through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation [catharsis] of these emotions.” Ambiguous means may be employed, Aristotle maintains in contrast to Plato, to a virtuous and purifying end.

To establish the basis for a reconciliation between ethical and artistic demands, Aristotle insists that the principal element in the structure of tragedy is not character but plot . Since the erring protagonist is always in at least partial opposition to the state, the importance of tragedy lies not in the character but in the enlightening event. “Most important of all,” Aristotle said, “is the structure of the incidents. For tragedy is an imitation not of men but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality.” Aristotle considered the plot to be the soul of a tragedy, with character in second place. The goal of tragedy is not suffering but the knowledge that issues from it, as the denouement issues from a plot. The most powerful elements of emotional interest in tragedy, according to Aristotle, are reversal of intention or situation ( peripeteia ) and recognition scenes ( anagnōrisis ), and each is most effective when it is coincident with the other. In Oedipus , for example, the messenger who brings Oedipus news of his real parentage, intending to allay his fears, brings about a sudden reversal of his fortune, from happiness to misery, by compelling him to recognize that his wife is also his mother.

Later critics found justification for their own predilections in the authority of Greek drama and Aristotle. For example, the Roman poet Horace , in his Ars poetica ( Art of Poetry ), elaborated the Greek tradition of extensively narrating offstage events into a dictum on decorum forbidding events such as Medea’s butchering of her sons from being performed on stage. And where Aristotle had discussed tragedy as a separate genre , superior to epic poetry , Horace discussed it as a genre with a separate style, again with considerations of decorum foremost. A theme for comedy may not be set forth in verses of tragedy; each style must keep to the place allotted it.

On the basis of this kind of stylistic distinction, the Aeneid , the epic poem of Virgil, Horace’s contemporary, is called a tragedy by the fictional Virgil in Dante ’s Divine Comedy , on the grounds that the Aeneid treats only of lofty things. Dante calls his own poem a comedy partly because he includes “low” subjects in it. He makes this distinction in his De vulgari eloquentia (1304–05; “Of Eloquence in the Vulgar”) in which he also declares the subjects fit for the high, tragic style to be salvation, love, and virtue. Despite the presence of these subjects in this poem, he calls it a comedy because his style of language is “careless and humble” and because it is in the vernacular tongue rather than Latin . Dante makes a further distinction:

Comedy…differs from tragedy in its subject matter, in this way, that tragedy in its beginning is admirable and quiet, in its ending or catastrophe fouled and horrible…. From this it is evident why the present work is called a comedy.

Dante’s emphasis on the outcome of the struggle rather than on the nature of the struggle is repeated by Chaucer and for the same reason: their belief in the providential nature of human destiny. Like Dante, he was under the influence of De consolatione philosophiae ( Consolation of Philosophy ), the work of the 6th-century Roman philosopher Boethius that he translated into English . Chaucer considered Fortune to be beyond the influence of the human will. In his Canterbury Tales , he introduces “ The Monk’s Tale ” by defining tragedy as “a certeyn storie… / of him that stood in greet prosperitee, / And is y-fallen out of heigh degree / Into miserie, and endeth wrecchedly.” Again, he calls his Troilus and Criseyde a tragedy because, in the words of Troilus, “all that comth, comth by necessitee… / That forsight of divine purveyaunce / Hath seyn alwey me to forgon Criseyde.”

Aristotle’s concept of tragedy | Aristotle’s Poetics

Tragedy is the main concern of Aristotle in Poetic s and it is the utmost argued and debated subject. According to Plato, tragedy has a damaging and detrimental result on the soul in that it caters to the feelings and passions that ruin its logical side.

On the other hand, according to Aristotle, feelings, and passions evoked by tragedy have a purgative result on the soul. While Plato regarded tragedy as unimportant, for Aristotle, it was of utmost importance and the most admissible.

Aristotle’s definition of tragedy:

Aristotle states, “Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complex, and of a certain magnitude, in embellished language…arousing pity and fear…its catharsis of such emotion.” (Poetics, Aristotle).

Read More: Aristotle’s concept of imitation and catharsis

In his definition of tragedy, Aristotle points out some of the important characteristics of tragedy :

a) Aristotle states that the poet doesn’t merely imitate the external world, instead represents reality itself and provides meaning to that world. So for Aristotle, imitation is not just copying but recreation.

b) Secondly, Aristotle states that tragedy should include actions that are thoughtful and serious . By serious, he means that actions that are morally, psychologically, and socially serious and which can evoke emotions like pity and terror.

c) Thirdly, Aristotle points out that a tragedy should have “a certain magnitude” and be coherent. According to Aristotle, a tragedy should not be just a sequence of incidents but should have a proper beginning, middle, and end. The concept of imitation is crucial at this moment: the poet doesn’t only blindly imitate everything linked to action but chooses only those facets which provide a form to eternal truth.

d) The fourth point is embellishment . By embellishment, Aristotle denotes songs and verses. Verses are employed for the dialogues particularly in monologues and soliloquies. Songs are used for Chorus. These provide refinement and adornment to tragedy.

e) The fifth point is “ act not narration ”. Aristotle prefers tragedy over epic by stating that tragedy depends on the staging, and performance not on description or “ narrative ”.

f) The last point is “catharsis” : Aristotle expounds that tragedy arouses the feelings like pity and terror in the audience and then purges them.

Read more: Renaissance in English Literature

As Aristotle stated in Poetics, there are six factors in a tragedy that decides its standard:

1. Plot : Aristotle describes the plot as “the arrangement of incidents” . According to Aristotle, there should be wholeness and coherence in a plot and a proper start, middle, and conclusion. The plot needs to be constitutionally self-sufficient and complete, with the actions united by inner necessity, all actions directing naturally or automatically to the next with no external intervention. The plot should have a certain “magnitude” . By “magnitude” , Aristotle means that the plot of a tragedy should have a certain length and at the same time it should also have seriousness. Aristotle also points out that plots should not be too short; the more actions and subjects that the playwright can join together, the higher the aesthetic value and grandness of the tragedy.

Conclusion:

So, in the end, we can say that in a perfect tragedy, all the characters should unite the plot with their speeches, dictions, thoughts, actions, and Chorus to evoke the ultimate result of tragedy i.e. pity and terror in the audience.

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Aristotle’s Aesthetics

The term “aesthetics”, though deriving from the Greek ( aisthetikos meaning “related to sense experience”), is a modern one, forged by Baumgarten as the title of his main book ( Aesthetica , 1750). Only later did it come to name an entire field of philosophical research. Aristotle does not use that term. But after Plato, he does use the word mimêtikê (that is, literally, the art of producing a mimesis ), and since he considers mimesis to be the most general term (or the genus) of all instances (or species) that we consider “art”, like painting, sculpture, music, poetry, or dance, such a word would probably have been well suited to such an inquiry into (what we call) “works of art”. But the fact is that he did not write any such book as a “Treatise on mimêtikê ”. Instead, the main treatise he wrote bears the name of Poêtikê , that is, literally, “the art of composing poetry” which mainly focuses on tragedy in its first “book” which we can still read, and on comedy, in its second, which is now lost. [ 1 ] Nowadays known as the Poetics , this treatise was never published or properly edited by Aristotle himself (and may have mainly consisted of “teaching notes”); like the other treatises that have come down to us, it remained inside his philosophical school, the Lyceum (among, that is, his so-called “esoteric” works). But Aristotle also published, as “exoteric works” (that is, writings that were circulating outside of the Lyceum), various books on poetry, notably a book entitled “On Poets”, and another “Homeric Problems” (both of which we can still read a few fragments of) and even a (now entirely lost) catalogue of the tragedies and comedies that were put on stage in Athenian festivals, recording those which won which prize. Thus, poetry, and especially dramatic poetry and theater, rather than art in general, were apparently Aristotle’s chief concern.

It is probably the case that Aristotle considered tragedy and comedy to be paradigmatic works of art, which constituted the most attractive and exciting parts of the civic and religious festivals that were such important events in the lives of most Athenians and, more generally, of the people of Greek cities. But he also dedicated almost an entire book to music (book VIII of the Politics ), and it is to be noted that his followers did likewise: in addition to his own books on poetry and comedy, Theophrastus wrote a work on music in three books (all lost, except for a few fragments), and Aristoxenus is the author of important treatises on music that we still (partly) have. On the other hand, before Aristotle Plato had expressed quite strong views on art generally speaking, and not only on poetry or music; in book X of the Republic , Socrates embarks on a critical review of mimesis as a whole, where mimetic art quite generally is at stake. Since it is difficult not to take Aristotle as responding to Plato’s critique of the arts in one way or another, it is quite natural to suppose that he also had some views on art in general, and not only on poetry or music.

But perhaps the main reason why one should seriously consider Aristotle as having general aesthetic views comes from an extraordinary passage which is too rarely quoted in Aristotelian scholarship. In one passage of the Eudemian Ethics ( EE ), Aristotle insists that the pleasurable experience ( paschein ) of contemplating a statue or listening to music has nothing to do with the pleasure that is at stake in the lack of self-control ( akrasia, or what we usually call “weakness of will”):

no one would be considered to be unself-controlled for gazing at a beautiful statue or a beautiful horse or human, or listening to someone singing, without any desire to eat or drink or have sex, but just to gaze at beautiful objects or listen to the singing—any more than those who were spellbound by the Sirens would. ( EE III 2.1230b25–35)

When people look at beautiful statues or persons, or listen to music without any other desire than the desire for such gazing or listening, they enjoy all these things “for their intrinsic qualities” and not “for their incidental associations” (or “accidentally”, kata symbebêkos ). Only humans can enjoy such experiences, not animals; a lion can enjoy seeing a gazelle only as a potential meal and never for its beauty ( Nicomachean Ethics ( NE ) III 13.1118a22–23). And the same goes for the sense of smell, Aristotle adds, quoting a witty saying by the musician Stratonicos: while a meal “smells delicious”, a flagrant flower “smells beautiful” ( EE III 2.1231a11–12).

It can hardly be denied that this passage points to what we nowadays call an “aesthetic disinterestedness”, which implies the idea of a pleasurable experience that is typically human, one which pays attention to the object itself and its intrinsic qualities. And, one may add, it also points to the idea of judging the quality of the thing that is gazed at or listened to. And indeed, in another passage from the Nicomachean Ethics , Aristotle clearly implies this:

A virtuous person, as a virtuous person, takes pleasure in [others’] actions that express moral virtues, and is upset by actions caused by moral vices, just as a musician enjoys beautiful songs but finds bad ones painful. ( NE IX 9.1170a8–11)

The virtuous person rejoices in someone else’s performing a morally good act thanks to her knowledge of what virtue consists in. The pleasurable experience a musician gets from music is primarily a sensory one linked to her faculty of hearing, to be sure, but also derives, as in the case of morality, from her musical knowledge. In other words, having experience and knowledge of music, or any kind of art, allows one to be a good judge of music, or any kind of art —that is to say what we would call a person of “aesthetic” taste. The goal of building and transmitting such knowledge in order to help his readers to become good judges could be considered the main reason why Aristotle wrote about art.

The following presentation reviews some of the most central topics we find in the works Aristotle dedicated to (what we call) art. The Poetics is of course our main entry into this, but his published works were actually the only works that were available outside his school throughout antiquity; most probably, non-Aristotelian philosophers from Philodemus to the late neo-Platonists only had access to those works, and not to the Poetics . In modern scholarship, those works are usually marginalized if not dismissed, on the grounds that they do not seem to reflect any deep philosophical insight. And, indeed, they were addressed to a general public. But (as we shall see), nothing indicates that the philosophically less elaborated views of On Poets would have been totally different from those in the Poetics , and in the latter work Aristotle does not hesitate to refer to the former. And the same goes for the Homeric Problems : chapter 25 of the Poetics seems to reformulate in a more abstract way the principles from which Aristotle discussed numerous examples of interpretive problems in that work. It is therefore a plausible hypothesis that Aristotle wanted to provide a broader public an echo of what he was teaching his philosophy students. Aristotle often recommends that we begin with more evident, concrete views before aiming at more sophisticated, deeper insights. Let us follow this methodological recommendation, and begin with the two published works.

Caveat lector . Before we get into the heart of our topic, a warning. The Poetics is one of the works from the ancient world that has elicited the most controversies, and it still does. As everybody knows, the word katharsis has more than any other made the greatest quantity of ink flow from the Renaissance onwards (when the treatise was rediscovered). But it is no exaggeration to say that almost every page, if not every sentence, of the Poetics has been interpreted in different ways, and so have many more general themes as well, such as the problem of who the treatise is addressed to, its general aim or, quite simply, its overall significance. The Greek text has not only been rather poorly transmitted (and it is still subject to many philological disputes among specialists), but it is also extremely dense and convoluted, and many terms are actually rather vague or ambiguous, and therefore subject to various possible interpretations (and translations). The reader of this general presentation should thus be warned that, like any other presentation of the Poetics , it is based on a (hopefully coherent) series of interpretive choices; some of the other main interpretive choices will be briefly described, or flagged in the notes. [ 2 ]

1. On Poets : How to Judge Poetry?

2. homeric problems : how to defend poetry, 3.1 what is poetry as such, 3.2. tragedy, 4. music and the value of art, a. selected texts, translations, commentaries, b. selected secondary literature, other internet resources, related entries.

This work, a dialogue in three books, was apparently quite widely read in the ancient world. While the Poetics seems to have received no echo in antiquity, On Poets seems to have acquired the status of a reference work on Aristotle’s aesthetics; the fragments that we have come from a wide array of sources, including Philodemus, Ps-Plutarch, Athenaeus, Diogenes Laertius, Macrobius, and Proclus. Many fragments deal with entertaining stories such as the birth and death of Homer, or the presentation of the rivalries between the poets. However, it would be a mistake to draw the conclusion that the whole work would have consisted of such stories without any theoretical background. Actually, two topics that are crucial in the Poetics seem to have been central in On Poets as well: mimesis and the shortcomings of poets.

When opening the Poetics , the reader is struck by the repetition of the word mimêsis (and the verb mimeisthai ), to the point that it defines what is (what we call) a work of art. Very roughly, one might say that the word mimêsis has both a static, or “pictorial” aspect, and a “dynamic”, or “theatrical” aspect. According to its “pictorial” aspect, mimêsis designates the fact that in such and such mimetic work, the receiver recognizes a resemblance. In the Poetics , Aristotle gives us a very telling example in evoking a painting or a sculpture in front of which the beholder recognizes, about a character represented, that “such and such a character is so-and-so” (4, 1448b17). According to its “dynamic” aspect, it is rather the behavior of the one who makes a mimêsis , which may range from the mimicking of noises or gestures to theater enactment. In Latin, mimêsis was rendered as imitatio , which indeed could include both meanings; but the English “imitation” hardly works, and perhaps the best solution after all is to keep the Greek term, transliterated as “mimesis” (“representation”, or “depiction”, works for the first connotation, but hardly for the second). Of course, often the use of the word, especially in poetry, includes both connotations: a play is a mimesis both in the sense of an enactment of some actions that are made by the characters of the play, and we can also recognize them as being the actions of such-and-such characters. Traditionally, a poetic work was defined in its opposition to prose, by versification (see, e.g., Gorgias’ definition of poetry: “I consider and call poetry every speech that possesses meter”, Helen 8). Aristotle opposes that idea, on the grounds that it does not allow us to understand the specificity of a poetic work, by giving the example of Empedocles “who has nothing in common with Homer except for the metric form” ( Poetics 1, 1447b17–18): we do not infer from the fact that Empedocles writes in the same kind of verses as Homer that his work is epic poetry! What distinguishes Homer from Empedocles is that the former wrote a mimetic work, whereas Empedocles is a “philosopher of nature” ( phusiologos , b19), who did not compose a mimesis . This concern is also to be found in On Poets , where Aristotle asks this question:

Are we not going to say that even though not in verse, the so-called mimes of Sophron are works in prose and works of representation, and that the same goes for the dialogues of Alexameneus of Teos, which were written before the Socratic dialogues? (Janko 2011, F44a)

Since such written dialogues are meant to be a mimesis of dialogues that did, or rather might have taken place, they too must be considered as a kind of poetry (or what we would call literature). Athenaeus, who quotes that question, interprets this as an attack against Plato:

While in the Republic Plato expelled Homer and mimetic poetry, he himself wrote his dialogues in mimetic form, and he is not even the inventor of that genre: before him, Alexamenus of Teos and Sotion invented that type of work in prose. (Janko 2011, F44a)

We cannot say whether Aristotle also intended this to be an attack against Plato; and it is important to note that we do not find anything like an explicit rebuttal of Plato’s views in the fragments we have, but it is difficult not to see in the quoted question at least a certain irony against Plato’s critique of mimesis .

The first century BC Epicurean philosopher Philodemus wrote a treatise also called On Poetry in which he seems to offer quotations or perhaps summaries of some passages of On Poets . What Aristotle seemed to have focused on is the nature of poetry, and the importance of mimesis (Janko 2011, F4: “ mimêsis has been posited as essential to the art of poetry”). And he seems to have clearly stated that mimesis, at least in the case of poetry, involves people in action (Janko 2011, F6a: Poets “depict the actions of people acting…”), and that this action must be complete (Janko 2011, F45: “The poet is a representer of a complete action”), all of which will be elaborated upon in the Poetics .

The second theme that seems to have been central to this dialogue is that of the shortcomings of poets. It is on this theme that Aristotle refers to his dialogue in the Poetics , where he analyzed, Aristotle puts it, the “many mistakes” that poets can make

with regard to what affects the reactions of the public which are necessarily connected to the art of poetic composition. (15, 1454b15–18)

This sentence has often seemed cryptic. But we find an example of such a mistake in one of our fragments. It is a passage from the later Roman author Macrobius, who quotes an excerpt in Greek assuming that he is quoting Aristotle’s words ( ipsa Aristotelis verba ), and where we see Aristotle denouncing an error of Euripides, who in one of his plays states that Aetolian warriors fought without sandals on their left foot. It is an error because those warriors habitually fought without sandals on their right foot. As benign as it may seem from a historical point of view, it is a deep flaw if one considers the impact on spectators. Imagine that spectators realize the error in a theater setting: the scene would no longer be tragic, and the error would become comical and provoke laughter.

This topic is not at all marginal. On the contrary, pointing out the mistakes that poets, even the best ones, commit should help us readers tell the difference between good and bad poetry (or at least good and bad passages or scenes in a poem or play), that is, to make us “critical” readers of poetry, or watchers of theater plays. It is the first century AD rhetorician Dio Chrysostom who reports a tradition according to which Aristotle was “at the origin of literary criticism ( kritikê )” (Janko 2011, T4). By that, he surely meant primarily the work of scholars such as Aristarchus of Samothrace, which consisted in commenting on Homer’s epics, or of those who commented on Aristophanes; but such kinds of works made sense only if one supposes that discriminating or judging (which is the core meaning of the verb krinein ) the qualities and defects of such and such a literary work is what is at stake. And that activity, as we can see from On Poets , was not a domain reserved to the academic happy few. Rather, every educated person could be expected to engage in such critical assessment. In his Protagoras , Plato makes the famous sophist state:

In my opinion, the most important part of a man’s education consists in being proficient in poetry, that is, in being able to understand, in the productions of poets, those that are correctly made and those that are not, in knowing how to distinguish between them, and in knowing how to give an account of these judgments, if asked. (338e–339a)

Plato certainly mocks such a claim, just as, in the Ion , he mocks the rhapsode who believes he possesses a “science of poetry” or a “technique of poetic composition” (in 532c, Plato equivalently uses the words technê and epistêmê poiêtikê , or simply poiêtikê ). In writing a “Treatise on poetic composition” ( Peri poiêtikês ), we can hypothesize that, unlike Plato, Aristotle followed the path indicated by Protagoras. And in publishing a more accessible work such as On Poets , Aristotle seems to take it for granted that every person should be offered the opportunity to become a good judge of poetry so that she can better appreciate the value of the poetry she reads or the plays she regularly goes to see in the theater. [ 3 ] (Note that in Aristotle’s time, many tragic and comic authors were still writing numerous plays, and that several of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides were available in book form, and were also regularly staged in Athens and elsewhere in the Greek world).

Literary criticism is at the very core of the other major published work dealing with poetry, the so-called Homeric Problems . One cannot overestimate the role and importance of Homer in ancient Greek culture: he is commonly called “the poet”, and every educated Greek person knows many passages by heart. And yet, Homer had also been harshly criticized from very early on, notably by Xenophanes and Heraclitus, who reproached Homer for giving wrong images of the gods. This is in part because both read Homer literally, as if Homer were describing the real world of the gods. Plato famously follows suit: he too addresses the way people usually read Homeric epics as a sort of moral description and prescription of right and wrong behaviors; and since gods and heroes are to be taken as our moral paradigms, we must condemn (and withdraw or perhaps rewrite) the numerous passages where those gods and heroes commit wrongdoings. In turn, those critiques provoked equally strong reactions aimed at defending the poet. Some simply defended the Iliad and the Odyssey as offering right ethical models: after all, according to Homer, Achilles is the paradigmatic example of courage, and Odysseus of practical intelligence and resilience. This seems to be why the Socratic philosopher Antisthenes took Odysseus as one of his philosophical heroes, as a man whose endurance may be seen as paradigmatic of the endurance required for a virtuous life. A rather different way of defending Homer was to read his poems in an allegorical manner, as, notably, did the philosopher Metrodorus of Lampsacus (a contemporary of Socrates), who interpreted many Homeric passages in the light of the cosmology of Anaxagoras.

Aristotle’s Homeric Problems offers yet another manner of defense. As one can see from the fragments that we have, Aristotle never tries to exonerate Homer’s apparent shortcomings by arguing from an ethical or allegorical perspective. What he instead proposes is to respond to criticisms made against Homer from an art-centered perspective. He sought to determine, that is, how such and such a passage or verse should be judged by reference to the aim or function of the art of poetry, considered as art and in no other way. As he clearly states in the Poetics , which seems to recap how he presented his material in the Homeric Problems :

It is not the same criterion of correctness that applies in poetry and in politics, nor in poetry and in any other art. (25, 1460b13–15)

Judging poetry from the perspective of another domain, such as politics, biology or psychology, would be a methodological mistake, since their respective aim or function is not the same. In response to ethical condemnations faulting Homer for depicting the gods in a morally bad fashion, Aristotle calmly answers:

It is quite possible that the poets speak about them neither by idealizing them nor in a true way, and that things are as indeed as Xenophanes states: but in any case, it is how people speak of them. (1460b36–61a1)

Aristotle seems to agree with Xenophanes that it is wrong to believe that the gods look like human beings and share our bad behaviors; but the poets must take into account how people generally imagine them to be if they want to have them intervening in their plots. For representing the gods as morally good beings would actually make Homer’s epics rather odd to the people they were addressed to, which would have disturbed their involvement in the plot, and spoilt their pleasure. Another example comes from the scene in which Achilles pursues Hector: the way Achilles prevents the army from taking up arms against him and lets him go by a simple nod of the head is, from a psychological point of view, totally implausible (1460a14–16; Iliad 22, 205–206). But this is not an error we have to blame Homer for, Aristotle replies, since this adds to the effect of wonder, which is part of our pleasure: even if it is a mistake from a psychological perspective,

it is right if it achieves poetry’s aim […], if that way an even more striking effect is produced in that part of the poem or at a later stage. (1460b24–26)

In Homeric Problems , Aristotle presumably only dealt with Homer. But in Poetics 25, he wants to extend his approach to tragedy. One example concerns Menelaus in Euripides’ Orestes . There Aristotle agrees (presumably with other critics) that Euripides made a mistake in representing him as a coward (15, 1454a28–29; 25, 1461b19–21)—but not for ethical reasons. The offense is purely “poetical” or “artistic”: since pity and fear require that we admire the heroes on stage, having a base character must jeopardize the audience’s emotional reaction; if, on the other hand, the plot requires having such a hero (which is not the case in that play), that would not be a fault. One will also notice that Aristotle takes for granted that we can extend such views to the other domains of art. Another example is that of the painting of a horse “with two right legs stretched out towards the front” (1460b18–18). Aristotle believes (wrongly, as it happens) that this is physically impossible. Still, he avers that we must not judge the quality of the painting from a biological point of view. On the contrary, if the horse’s galloping in such a way effects a stronger emotional reaction in the viewer, that is the right way to represent it!

3. The Poetics : How to Understand Poetry ?

In these two published works, Aristotle’s primary goal was to offer instruction for becoming a sophisticated reader or spectator of poetic works. There is no reason why this general aim might have been different in the Poetics . This text has often been held, since its rediscovery in the Renaissance, as a manual for a would-be poet. And indeed, Aristotle’s tone is often very prescriptive: this “Treatise on the art of composing poetry” seems to lay down the rules that one must follow if one wants to write a successful play. But Aristotle also says, emphatically, that “the art of poetic composition belongs to a naturally gifted man” (17, 1455a32–33), and that making good metaphors, which is the prerogative of a good poet, is “something that cannot be learnt from someone else, but is the sign of natural talent” (22, 1459a4–6). It is thus unlikely that Aristotle had the ambition of training poets. Surely, what Aristotle proposes is to reconstruct what he takes the best set of composition rules, which in his view had helped, or would help, poets write good tragedies. But the exposition of these rules (which the poets may or may not be aware of: 8, 1451a23–24) is meant to show what good poetry should be like, such that his readers could appreciate the quality of a piece. And indeed, this is what the conclusion of the Poetics states:

This is all there is to say about tragedy versus epic … about the reasons why some are good and others not so good…. (26, 1462b16–18)

What the readers of the Poetics are offered are the reasons or causes why such and such feature of a play is to be considered good or poor. Armed with such knowledge, they should be better able to judge the quality of the tragedies they read or see in the theater.

As Aristotle posits, notably in the first book of the Metaphysics , searching for causes defines philosophical inquiry; knowing the cause of x allows you to understand what x consists in. And, crucially in Aristotle’s eyes, the final cause is what matters the most: when one knows the final cause of x , one can truly understand not only what x consists in, but should consist in if it is to be the x it is supposed to be. More precisely, the end of x amounts to the ergon , literally, the “work” or the “activity”, or what we more usually call the “function” that x performs; thus, for an eye, its aim or end amounts to its function, or “functioning” (or “working”, energeia ) which is, of course, its seeing. Similarly, in the case of a hand: its function is grasping things, and when we talk of the hand of a dead body, we use the name “hand” only homonymously —a dead, non-functioning hand is no longer what it is to be a hand, or a “real” hand. And when an eye is seeing well, this is what Aristotle calls its entelecheia , that is when it performs its telos in a perfect ( entelês ) way. It is true that in the Poetics , we don’t find the typically Aristotelian technical words energeia and entelecheia. But presumably one may take the phrase “the best tragedy” ( kallistê tragôgia ) which is emphatically used in Poetics 13 as the equivalent, in common parlance, to a tragedy in entelecheia , that is a tragedy that performs its function, or its telos , in the best possible way. This phrase does not refer to any particular outstanding tragedy (say, Sophocles’ Oedipus-Rex , which Aristotle seems to like very much), or to an ideal tragedy that a poet should try to emulate, but rather to any tragedy that would or does indeed fulfill its function properly.

This very rough characterization of what the aim and the method of the Poetics consist in is in fact announced from its very first sentence:

This treatise is about how to compose poetry: what is poetry as such? What are the poetic genres? What power ( dunamis ) does each of them have? How should plots be constructed so as to end up with a successful work of poetry? How many components should there be, and what should these components be like? (1, 1447a8–11)

This gives us a clear plan of the Poetics , which divides into two parts: a first part is devoted to poetry “as such” (ch. 1–5), which can be considered as a kind of general introduction to what poetry is; and a second part, actually the bulk of it, is dedicated to its genres, that is, mainly tragedy and comedy, where the plot is treated as the main “component”. But perhaps most crucially, it also introduces the question of the “power” of each of the poetic genres. The word used is dunamis , which is here to be taken in the sense of “the ability to put something into movement”, that is, in our case, the power it exercises on the poetry’s recipient, or the “effect” it has on its consumer. It is, one may say, the “subjective” counterpart to the more “objective” side of the same thing, that is the function or work(ing) (the ergon or energeia ) itself. So, the function of each genre of poetry, or its power or effect, is really what is of central importance in this inquiry. And (for reasons we are going to see), plot is seen by Aristotle as the best tool for implementing that effect. Now, it is not to be denied that a successful poet is the one who concentrates on plot when writing his plays. But this is not Aristotle’s main point of focus. His dominant agenda is to warn his readers right at the beginning of his treatise that they must focus on how the plot is constructed if they want to judge the extent to which such and such work of poetry succeeds, i.e., how well it performs its function.

Now, what concretely is the aim or the function of poetry? Homer has already told us very explicitly, notably in the famous episode of the Sirens ( Odyssey 12. 39–54; 154–200), that the aim of his poetry is pleasure. Listening to the Sirens who are singing poetry, presumably Homer’s own Iliad (as they sing everything that took place under the walls of Troy), is something Odysseus, and actually every man, strongly desires, so strongly, as this episode amply illustrates, that he might even forget the very goal of his journey, namely the goal of returning home and being reunited with his family. Aristotle does not hesitate in mentioning that episode when, in the passage from the Eudemian Ethics already quoted, he describes what gazing at beautiful statues or listening to beautiful songs, or poetry, should amount to. In the Poetics , this is what he takes for granted: he assumes, as Homer does, that providing pleasure is the aim a poet must seek. A piece of poetry is successful when it provides pleasure to its consumers. But what precisely is this pleasure that poetry is meant to provide? How shall poetry accomplish that function? These are the questions that underlie the Poetics .

Two major themes run through the first part of the Poetics on “poetry as such”: the naturalness of poetry and the division of poetry into serious and comic poetry.

The first sentence of Poetics 4 is famous for stating that two causes presided over the birth of poetry, and that those two causes are natural: the instinct that all men have for mimesis and the pleasure they take in the objects of mimesis (1448b4–5). A few lines further down, Aristotle adds to the instinct for mimesis, the instinct for melody and rhythm (1448b20–21). What he means exactly by these two causes is disputed. It might seem more natural to opt for mimetic instinct and pleasure, taking the musical instinct as part of the mimetic instinct (music also being a mimesis for Aristotle). But it should be noted on the one hand that this instinct for rhythm explains the versification (which in Greek is based on the rhythmic alternation of long and short syllables), which can hardly be qualified as mimesis. And on the other hand, that the pleasure is not only the one we take in the works resulting from the mimesis, but also in the mimesis itself. It seems that Aristotle apparently wants to speak not only about the two causes which preside over the poetic creation, but also about the causes which make for our attraction to poetic works, the two perspectives being intimately linked. Both poetic creation and our attraction to poetic works have as their causes our mimetic instinct and our musical instinct, as well as the pleasure that accompanies the expression of these two instincts. Here again, Aristotle has a totally different vision from Plato’s. Poets are not divinely inspired people: they are people who are naturally more gifted than most other humans (1448b22). And unlike Socrates who in the Republic seems to advocate a “natural city” which would not contain the mimetic arts, Aristotle takes them as part of human nature which a “natural” city must take into account. (One will remember the vivid response of Glaucon against Socrates’ proposal: “But this is a city for pigs!” [ Rep. II 372d], meaning that such a city would be deprived of everything that makes for a properly human city. Aristotle would have applauded)

It is from this insistence on the naturalness of poetry and the centrality of pleasure that one should understand the division that Aristotle operates within poetry, between “laudative” and “serious” poetry, and “denigrating” and “funny” poetry, whose points of arrival are the genres of comedy and tragedy. At first sight, when Aristotle introduces the history of this division, he seems to rely on an ethical or social distinction:

Poetry branched into two, according to each poet’s character: the more serious-minded poets represented admirable actions, that is to say the actions carried out by that kind of person, whereas the more trivial poets depicted the actions of base people. ( Poetics 4, 1448b24–26)

Presumably, Aristotle takes it that the first poems to date must have been what we call “lyric poetry”, with on the one hand the poetry of praise (such as those that Pindar would later write) and on the other hand satirical poems (predating those of Archilochus), and which are the latest ancestors of the tragic and comic plays. However, Aristotle himself qualifies such a presentation, adding that between those first lyrical poems and these two much later genres, stands Homer, who is the author of poems depicting admirable actions in his Iliad and Odyssey , and ridiculous ones in the Margites (a comic epic poem Aristotle takes to be Homeric). Insofar as Homer cannot be both below and above average, we must conclude that this distinction refers rather to what we would call “fictional” possibilities. A good poet is the one who, like a good actor, knows how to put himself in the shoes of his characters, whoever they may be (17, 1455a32–33), and Homer was particularly good at that (24, 1460a5–11). Moreover, there is no evidence that Aristotle held comedy as inferior to tragedy, nor is there any reason to believe that he held the spectators or readers of satires, the Margites or theater comedies to be “inferior” people. To say that “superior” or “inferior” people invented serious and comic poetry is in fact to say that they were particularly good at impersonating those types of characters. And the reason why the characters themselves must be represented either as “superior” or “inferior” is due to the aims of these poetic genres. In the case of tragedy, only “superior” characters can elicit our fear and pity: the more we admire someone, the more we pity him or her when they don’t merit their fate. Conversely, in comedy characters must be represented as “inferior” to elicit our mockery and laughter.

Aristotle supposes a temporal and essential filiation between these poetic genres: lyric poetry, both laudative and satiric (which, Aristotle oddly supposes, must have begun before Homer); serious and comic epic; and the genres of tragedy and comedy. The key moment is Homer. It is in Homer that “tragedy and comedy loomed out” (4, 1449a2–3), that is to say that poets saw in Homer’s poems the promises of comedy and tragedy; it is from there that they gave birth to these new genres and developed them (Aeschylus and Sophocles are named for being such developers). But above all, Aristotle adds that once these genres were discovered from Homer, all the poets abandoned lyric and epic poetry, and wrote in these two genres, “because these new genres had more prestige and value than the older ones” (1449a5–6). That is to say, the poets realized that by writing comedies or tragedies instead of epics, they could gain more prestige, and it is because of their value that people immediately became attached to these new genres. But why? Because these genres were entirely dramatic, and involved a fully enactive mimesis and used music (while epics were recited without music, at least in Aristotle’s time), they fully implement our natural instincts for both mimesis and music, and so they were more pleasant. If pleasure is the aim of poetry, it is only reasonable to focus on the most pleasurable genres, tragedy and comedy. (It is true that Aristotle goes back to epic after his treatment of tragedy, in Poetics 23–26, but it is essentially to help better understand tragedy, and to oppose other critics who took epics to be the most paradigmatic genre of poetry).

It is now time to ask ourselves what this pleasure of poetry might exactly amount to. In Poetics 4, Aristotle notoriously introduces the paradoxical example of an abject animal: while seeing such an animal provokes disgust and pain in the real world, seeing a picture of it produces pleasure. He explains why:

Seeing a likeness is pleasurable, because in contemplating it, people come to understand ( manthanein ) through inference, what each of its details are: for example, that the man there is so-and-so. (1448b15–17)

This sentence has often been taken as a commitment to what we might roughly label a cognitivist approach to aesthetic pleasure. The pleasure a work of art, be it a picture or a tragedy, affords would come from the understanding, or actually the “learning” (the verb manthanein can mean both), it allows; and the example of the man depicted in the picture would point to the idea that gazing at it, we could learn something new and fresh about that man. [ 4 ] (Some interpreters have even gone so far as to read the phrase “the man is so-and-so” as referring to his essence or a certain essential quality that the picture would allow us to grasp [Gallop 1990]). And since this is the pleasure that a mimesis generally speaking seems to afford, it is tempting to conclude that the pleasure that a tragedy or a comedy provides must be one species of such cognitive pleasure. But as others have replied (notably Lear 1988, and Ferrari 1999), such an interpretation is based on an over-reading of the text, especially if one fully takes into account what Aristotle immediately adds:

In case you never saw the man before, you will not derive any pleasure from his likeness qua representation. But you will get pleasure from the brilliant execution or the colours, or for some other such reason. (1448b17–19)

In other words, the “understanding” here barely amounts to the recognition of the man you already knew as so and so, like Socrates in the portrait of him in front of you.

To be sure, there may be cases where a more complex cognitive process takes place, such as in the case of a god which you recognize as being such and such, because you infer from, e.g., the statue having a thunderbolt in his hand, that it is intended to be Zeus. But in all such cases, there is no new learning involved. This reading of the text, however natural, may seem rather unappealing. But one should remember that here Aristotle is only giving a description of the general cause of our being attracted to mimesis: and indeed, were you not able to recognize what the object of the mimesis is, be it the voice of such and such a person, or the identity of the person depicted in this portrait, you wouldn’t be able to enjoy it qua mimesis. In tragedy and comedy, we do enjoy such pleasures as well; it is certainly pleasant to recognize the characters and their features when they intervene in the play, and that recognition is indeed a sine qua non of your following a plot, and enjoying the whole play; and the same goes, more basically, in cases where someone, in the real world or on stage, mimics the voice or the accent of a certain person: this affords you with the pleasure of recognizing who is meant. But all these pleasures are common to all sorts of mimesis. This is perhaps the most important point. As we have seen from the very first sentence of the Poetics , what Aristotle is interested in is inquiring into each of the poetic genres, and the power each has. And indeed, what Aristotle repeatedly emphasizes throughout the Poetics is that the poet must seek to produce the pleasure that is proper to such or such poetic genre: “one should not seek any kind of pleasure from tragedy but only the appropriate kind” (14, 1453b10–11). As for tragedy, Aristotle leaves no doubt: “What the tragic poet must produce is the pleasure derived from pity and fear through mimesis” (1453b11–13). Since book 2 is lost, we no longer have the formulation that Aristotle must have made in the case of comedy, but it is fairly obvious that he would have mentioned the pleasure associated with the amusement provoked by the comic plot’s jokes and gags. We do have something of an echo of such a statement in Poetics 13, which mentions the “pleasure proper to comedy”, and gives the example of a comedy where Orestes would make friends with Aegisthes instead of killing him: this parodic treatment of the tragic end of Sophocles’ or Euripides’ corresponding play, Electra , is what creates our amusement, that is our comic pleasure (1453a35–39).

Thus, the pleasure that is the aim of tragedy is an emotional pleasure, and the same goes for comedy. In the latter case, amusement (of which laughter is the physical expression) is certainly not an emotion strictly speaking, but is rather the experience of a state of mind, which, like an emotion, is an affect or what early modern philosophers will call a “passion”. (Here we may note that in the quoted passage from the Eudemian Ethics , Aristotle does not shy away from using the word paschein , i.e., undergoing a pathos , to describe the experience of gazing at a beautiful thing or listening to a fine tune.) As Plato had said, when we watch tragic heroes suffering on stage,

we take pleasure and, surrendering ourselves, we follow and share the hero’s sufferings and earnestly praise as a good poet whoever most affects us in this way; ( Rep. X 605d)

and the same goes for comedy, which offers the opportunity of “taking great pleasure” (606c) in letting us “give in violent laughter”, and even “be overcome by laughter” (III 388e-89a). To be sure, for Plato, this is a surrender to the irrational part of our soul, which may have some deleterious consequences. Aristotle does not seem to be worried by that, at least not in the case of adults. In one passage of the Politics , he warns that letting children go to the theater and watch comedies where people insult one another or make obscene jokes can be damaging, and he does not hesitate to prohibit them from going to the theater. But once “their education has rendered them immune to the harm such things can do” (VII 17.1336b22–23), there is no reason why adults should be prohibited, or even discouraged, from enjoying comic theater. In fact, a similar point can be made in the case of tragic poetry as well: if in the theater (or in an epic recital), we do take pleasure when, as Plato vividly depicts it,

we hear Homer or any other tragic poet representing one of the heroes in a state of grief and making a long speech of lamentation or even chanting and beating his breast, ( Rep. X 605c-d)

it would be a shameful thing to do so in the real world (where men at least were not allowed to express their grief aloud). Aristotle seems to take it as evident that the world of the theater is a fictive world that obeys other rules than the real world, and provided we have received a good ethical education, certain “politically incorrect” features, such as laughing at incongruous insults or “sharing the hero’s sufferings” and his “state of grief” in a boisterous manner should not cause any harm. Quite to the contrary, Aristotle seems to take tragic emotions and amusement as typical human propensities, which give us lots of pleasures when they are experienced in the theater.

The best tragedy, as we have seen, is the one that can best produce the power typical of a tragedy, i.e., producing pity and fear, and therefore can best achieve its function or aim, which is the pleasure that comes from the experience of these emotions. What Aristotle proposes in his analysis of tragedy is highlighting the means by which the poet can implement this function, which in turn should provide theater goers with the right understanding they need to have in order to be able to judge the quality of such and such a play they may attend, or read. As Aristotle announced right at the beginning, the plot is to be considered the most important means and indeed it is given the most expansive treatment, while the other “elements” of the tragedy, such as the depiction of the characters and their expression (or what we more commonly call the style, in which their dialogues are written), come next. This focus imposes itself from the perspective of the aim or function of poetry. A tragedy typically depicts the change of fortune which includes reversal of circumstances and sufferings, and rightly so: this is of course how fear and pity for the main heroes can be produced. Thus, the actions of the heroes that lead to such an outcome must be what a tragedy should mainly depict, or represent, as well as other features that are part and parcel of that outcome. The way plots are constructed or assembled from the various deeds and words of the characters (or what Aristotle calls the “events”, pragmata ) should be what constitutes “the aim” of the poet ( Poetics 6, 1450a22–23). This is the aim a poet must seek if he wants to end up with a tragedy that can fulfill its aim or function properly.

If a poet were to string together tirades describing characters, however perfectly composed in terms of expression and reasoning they might be, he will not be able to achieve what we have said is the function of tragedy: (1450a29–31)

presumably he might well provide a certain pleasure to his public (if only for the beauty of his style), but he would not obtain the proper aim or function of tragedy.

There are two series of requirements for a plot to be a good plot. One series involves the qualities of the plots, which includes totality, unity and generality (or: universality); the second one involves the turning points of the plot, which include the reversal of circumstances, the recognition, and the sufferings. But both series are based on what a proper consumption of tragedy requires: the first series is about our being involved in a plot; the second series, about what creates the emotions of pity and fear. Producing the pleasure that comes from the emotions of pity and fear is the aim of tragedy, but in order to achieve this, the poet must create a plot the hearers can immerse themselves in; as we would say, a theater audience must “believe” in the story that is unfolding and in the characters who make up the story. Otherwise, they would just lose attention and interest, which would prevent any strong emotional involvement. One such requirement is that of “the fitting size”. In the case of gazing at a beautiful animal, whether in reality or in a picture, our admirative enjoyment cannot hold if the animal or the picture is so big that it cannot be grasped in one glimpse, or if it is too minute to be seen at our ease. The case of a tragic plot is similar: a proper size is needed to make the whole play “easy to remember” (6, 1450b34–51a6). One must be able to remember the important features and events the full time we watch it, which is a sine qua non condition for our being unflaggingly attentive and attracted to the plot.

Another such sine qua non requirement is what one may call the “law of likelihood”, or “plausibility”. Aristotle strongly insists on this: all events must offer the appearance of causality, and follow not one after the other, but from each other (10, 1452a20–21). Faced with an event that is totally unexpected in being disconnected from any normal causal sequence would just be incredible, and, in worst cases, hearers would laugh instead of feeling pity or fear. Of course, unexpectedness can be an efficient tool for evoking strong reactions. For example,

when the statue of Mitys in Argos killed the person responsible for the death of Mitys himself by falling on him as he was staring at it, (9, 1452a7–9)

it must have created a big surprise, and putting such an event into a plot might be very powerful. But even if the event happened by pure coincidence, the poet must suppose that his audience will, even if subconsciously, admit a certain divine vengeful intention behind the event, so it appears to them as having a certain plausible cause. The poet has full license for inventing whatever events he wants, but they must appear “plausible” in one way or another. Or as Aristotle summarizes,

the function of the poet is not to speak of what has happened but of things such as they might happen, that is to say, to tell us of possible outcomes in all likelihood or out of necessity. (1451a36–38)

The weight is not so much on the fictionality of events, since the poet can also draw his material from events that actually occurred, but in the way he presents them: whether they actually happened or not, and whether they are physically possible, he must describe them in the way we would think they might happen. It is to be noted that “in all likelihood or out of necessity” is a rephrasing of the well-known “for the most part or out of necessity” motto in the Physics , where “for the most part” describes what actually happens to physical things which obey causal necessity, barring a few exceptions. In the case of poetry, or any other mimetic genre, the only causality we need is “subjective” causality, or plausibility. Aristotle even goes so far as to say: “What is impossible but plausible must be preferred to what is possible but not credible” (24, 1460a27): an event that has taken place, and so is physically possible, but which would not be presented in a plausible way would not succeed in gripping hearers.

It is in this context that Aristotle makes a comparison with history: while history must report hard facts as they actually happened, poetry must tell them as they might happen according to the law of plausibility. It is in this context where we find one of the most famous, and famously contentious, sentences of the Poetics :

This is the very reason why writing poetry is more philosophical and more worthy than writing history. For poetry tends towards a general picture ( katholou ), whereas history tells us of particular case studies. (9, 1451b5–7)

It is very tempting to interpret this as if Aristotle were proposing that poetry dealt with “universals” in the usual sense of the term, and thus conveyed “universal truths”. Many philosopher readers have assigned Aristotle a grandiose view of poetry, while historians have blamed him for undermining the importance of history. Both are probably overreactions. Aristotle does not say that history is not philosophical, but that poetry is “more philosophical” than history. Since philosophy is the search for causal understanding, we may suppose that “philosophical” means, in effect: “that which sees things under the perspective of causality”. Of course, history, as Herodotus claims in the very first sentence of his Histories , is also a search for the causes of the events he reports; but his main focus must be to report and explain those events as they actually happened, for example “what Alcibiades did or what happened to him” (1451b11). What the poet does is to take whatever event he may want to introduce into his plot and turn it into a plausible one—even the most factually impossible events!

For nothing prevents what really happened to be turned into things such as they might happen in all likelihood or be possible—it is this which makes him the poet of these. (1451b30–32)

This makes poetry, in the active sense of the term “making poetry” (the word poiêsis allows for both meanings), a “more philosophical” craft. And this involves “universals” in a non-technical sense, as Aristotle explains:

A general picture is this: the kind of thing a certain type of person would say or do in all likelihood or out of necessity. (1451b8–9)

“General”, or “universal”, does not describe here a specific item, but the way how one may expect someone will say or do things given the person she is. And that goes not only for tragedy, but also for comedy where (contrary to most tragedies which draw their plot from well known myths) particular names of the characters are up to the poet’s choice and added after the plot is written (1451b11–14): thus, here too, the crucial thing is to create a plausible plot where all the deeds and words done or uttered by the play’s characters seem to be causally related; this is what makes them plausible to an audience.

The second type of requirement involves the content of the plot. Generally speaking, a plot is constituted by all the events making up, as we say, the “dramatic action”. But what counts primarily among such events are three features. First, the reversal of circumstances which “is a volte-face change in the sequence of events” (11, 1452a22–23). This must happen “in all likelihood or out of necessity” as Aristotle insists, otherwise they would not achieve their aim, which is to provoke strong emotional reactions in the public. Emotional reaction is also created by recognitions: after, or just before, something important happens to a character, he or she is recognized as having such and such relation towards his or her protagonist (1452a36–b3). And, last but not least: audience members respond to sufferings ( pathê ), or rather what Aristotle determines as “an action conducive either to death or great pain” (1452b11–12), thus an act of violence that causes great suffering. This action is best conducted when it involves kin: it is much more powerful, emotionally speaking, to watch a scene in which, e.g., a mother is going to kill her son, or a daughter her father (14, 1453b19–22). In such tragic scenes, involving unexpected yet plausible changes of fortune, startling recognitions, and acts of violence, managing them in the right way is absolutely key if one wants to elicit the tragic emotions. These are pity and fear, which are the two moments, or aspects, of the same emotional experience, where fear concerns primarily the moment when a character is about to commit the irreparable towards his kin, while pity comes about at the sufferings and deep misfortunes of the involved parties.

If plot is at tragedy’s core, that is not to say that the play’s other features are of no importance. That is especially the case for how the characters are depicted, and how they speak. Both are a significant factor in rendering a plot successful. In a word, characters must be credible : when we see a character doing or saying such and such, we must believe in them. Characters must be normally virtuous, for otherwise we couldn’t admire them, and pity requires that we think that their misfortune is unmerited. Conversely, a woman shouldn’t be presented as talking like a philosopher (such as Menalippe in one of Euripides’ play), because no ancient Greek spectator would ever expect to see a woman speaking like a male philosopher (15, 1454a16–32). Building characters that correspond to an audience’s expectations is key if one wants to immerse them in a tragic play. As to the “expression”, or the style, characters must speak in a relatively clear and common way, so the spectators can easily follow the plot. But figures of style such as rare words or metaphors must be added at the right times, especially when what a character says may add to the scene’s emotional impact. Aristotle compares two ways of saying the same thing:

In his Philoctetes , Aeschylus had written: “The ulcer which eats the sole of my foot”, whereas Euripides replaced “eats” by “feasts on” ( thoinaô ). (22, 1458b19–24)

The rare, poetic verb that Euripides used produces an unusual impression, and for that very fact strikes the spectators, which is of course a means of still further increasing the pity they feel for this character whose foot is affected by a painful gangrene.

By reconstructing how tragedies can best implement their function, Aristotle intended to help his readers to become better judges and appreciators of the tragedies they could read or attend in the theater. But for any modern reader, there remain two perplexing questions. Whereas pity and fear are normally painful emotions, how are we to conceive of them as pleasurable? And what about the most enigmatic word of the Poetics , katharsis , which also seems to be presented as the aim of tragedy?

Since the Renaissance, the theme of katharsis , which appears in the definition of tragedy (tragedy is “a mimesis of a momentous action”, which “by stirring up pity and fear, brings about a katharsis of such emotions”—6,1449b25–28), has been the subject of endless debates, as Aristotle himself never explains himself about it. The interpretive conundrum is basically this. Normally, the word itself refers to the action of rendering something “pure” ( katharos ), with all the possible senses or connotations of “pure”: purification in a religious context (such as Orestes who undergoes a katharsis when digging in the sea to be “purified” of the murder of his mother, which Aristotle refers to at Poetics 17, 1455b15), purgation in a medical context, or cleaning in the case of an object that is dirty. It might mean either in principle, but we might expect the word to get its meaning from its context of use. But what is the context supposed to be in the case of tragedy? Aristotle does not tell us. In Politics VIII, he briefly mentions a kind of music, the so-called “enthusiastic music”, which provides a medical cure that consists in a katharsis for those who are especially prone to “enthusiasm” (or what we would call “frenzy”, or “agitation”). And then he adds:

The same thing, then, must be experienced by those who are especially prone to pity and fear and in general by those who are suffering from their emotions ( pathetikoi ) on the one hand, and by any other person to the extant as she shares in those emotions on the other hand: they all undergo a certain katharsis and get a pleasant feeling of relief. ( Pol. VIII 7, 1342a11–15)

At least for the pathetikoi , the context seems to be medical. But is it the case for “each other person to the extent that she shares in those emotions”, i.e., notably the spectators of tragedy? When Aristotle refers to “a certain katharsis ” ( tina katharsin ), he may mean either that all these people, the pathetikoi as well as anyone else, undergo the same sort of medical katharsis , or that they each undergo a different sort of katharsis .

The best known scholar forcefully endorsing the first interpretation remains Jakob Bernays (whose nephew by marriage, Freud, adapted the views to psychoanalysis): Aristotle, a doctor’s son, would have defended tragedy against Plato’s rejection by conceiving of it as sort of beneficial cure for all theater spectators (Bernays 1858). That interpretation (which has known several refinements, especially in German scholarship; collected in Luserke 1991) has been fiercely criticised for reducing tragedy to being a medical cure. Whereas Bernays was actually reacting against the strong ethical views of the German writer and philosopher Lessing, many contemporary scholars have proposed coming back to such views. According to one reading, defended by Richard Janko, the tragic katharsis should be conceived of as the purgation of the excessive emotions so as to obtain the right measure of pity and fear, which nicely matches Aristotle’s conception of virtue (see especially Janko 1992). But Aristotle seems adamant in the text of Politics VIII that music for katharsis is to be differentiated from music for moral education (7, 1341a21–24; 1341b38). And in the Poetics , Aristotle takes it as evident that emotions must be strongly experienced; aiming at the right, moderated measure of pity would actually spoil the typical pleasure that a good tragedy provides! Others, notably Martha Nussbaum, have suggested that in the case of people who go to the theater to enjoy the emotions of fear and pity, katharsis might mean “clarification” (i.e., the removal of obscurities; in his logical works, Aristotle does use the adverb katharôs in the sense of “clearly”); the tragic theater would then aim at providing spectators with a clarification of the pitiful, indeed tragic, human condition. [ 5 ] As philosophically engaging as that reading may be, there is no textual proof that Aristotle would have adopted such a grandiose view; and contrary to Nussbaum’s own views on ethics, where pity is considered a central ethical emotion, pity only plays a very marginal role in Aristotle’s ethics. Yet another kind of reading, relying on the idea that pity presupposes that the object must primarily be the spectator him- or herself, has insisted on the relief that such an emotional releasing might offer, consisting in a “consolation”: as Jonathan Lear states,

In tragedy, we are able to put ourselves imaginatively in a position in which there is nothing further to fear. There is consolation in realizing that one has experienced the worst, there is nothing further to fear, and yet the world remains a rational, meaningful place in which a person can conduct himself with dignity. (1988: 326; A reading of a similar kind has been offered by Munteanu 2012: 131–136)

Again, this is a fascinating approach of the ultimate meaning of tragedy, but it does not seem that Aristotle himself ever expressed such an idea of “consolation”.

It seems, therefore, that a much more minimalist reading might better suit Aristotle’s texts. One such reading, advocated by John Ferrari, is to take the word katharsis as a way to describe the process of relieving the tension created by the stimulation of the tragic emotions (Ferrari 1999, 2019). The great advantage of this interpretation is that it does not presuppose anything beyond the context of the Poetics , and it does not seem to contradict any other explicit statement of Aristotle’s; but one may wonder if it really explains the phrase, the “ katharsis of such emotions”, where the idea of “tension”, or “suspense”, does not seem to be present. Another such reading might look like the following. In his biological works, Aristotle regularly uses the word katharsis to refer to the menstrual blood or bleeding as well as to the male ejaculation: in those cases, katharsis means the flowing itself (or by metonymy, the blood); and the fluid is nothing deleterious (interestingly enough, against Hippocratic views, Aristotle does not take menstrual blood to be “impure”). He holds rather only that keeping such fluid inside the body without discharge can be unhealthy, and so a discharge is needed from time to time. As Aristotle knew very well, ancient theater audiences showed their emotional reactions in a very physical way by screaming and weeping loudly. So, the katharsis of the emotions of pity and fear could be meant to name that sort of physical expression or outlet of such emotions. This last reading might perhaps not appear worthy of Aristotle’s philosophical genius. But it would fit the aim Aristotle has himself proposed: to explain how a tragedy accomplishes its function, which is to produce the emotions of pity and fear, and the pleasure accompanying them. Saying that a tragedy is a mimesis which “by stirring up pity and fear, brings about a katharsis of such emotions” might simply mean that tragedy should indeed aim to allowing spectators to express and unleash their emotions in the theater. [ 6 ]

The second perplexing question involves what modern aestheticians call the “paradoxical pleasure of negative emotions”. How is it that we can enjoy emotions such as pity and fear that are normally painful? It is quite often assumed that katharsis can do just that, transform the pain of those emotions into pleasure, through the feeling of relief that accompanies it. But it would be very counter-intuitive to reduce the pleasure any audience gets from a play to just that pleasure, which follows or is the consequence of a katharsis . For one would then have to suppose that a theater audience would suffer all through the play to finally undergo a katharsis , and get their pleasure at the play’s end, on leaving the theater! As Aristotle surely noticed himself, an audience that has felt great fear for heroes on the verge of grave suffering and has wept and cried during a two hour show, will normally leave the theater with a physical sense of relief. But when he says that the poet must “produce the pleasure from pity and fear through mimesis ( dia mimêseôs )”, Aristotle probably wanted to allude to the fact that mimesis is what makes those emotions a source of pleasure. How are we understand this more precisely? Relying on Kendall Walton’s theory of “make-believe”, one might be tempted to take mimesis here as what would allow spectators to pretend to have those emotions. But nothing indicates that Aristotle would have shared such a conception; on the contrary, describing what even the simple reading of such a powerful plot as Sophocles’ Oedipus-Rex would produce, he speaks of shuddering or getting goosebumps ( phrittein ), which seems to indicate that we actually experience strong emotional reaction (14, 1453b3–6). (And the same would hold for pity which produces tears). Thus, insofar as we immerse ourselves in a tragic plot and “believe” in its characters, it is probably in some way a painful emotional experience. But we also know that a story experienced in this way takes place in an imaginative world, where there is no real object to be feared. Thus mimesis, one might say, allows us to experience fear for itself (and as Aristotle says in a passage from De Anima , imagining fearful objects is “up to us”, while seeing them in the real world is not: 427b14–21), which is pleasurable. This is not to say, though, that this would annihilate the painfulness of the experience. As Plato explicitly said (and there is no reason to think Aristotle would have disapproved), this is precisely what makes tragic pleasures so paradoxically attractive: they are a kind of mixture of pain and pleasure ( Philebus 48a). [ 7 ]

Many if not most scholars seem to consider tragedy to be the best possible kind of poetry in Aristotle’s eyes. But Aristotle never suggests that; on the contrary, he insists that tragedy and comedy, each constituting a fully enactive mimesis , are the most perfect genres of poetry, each one corresponding to our natural inclinations for tears and laughter. Whereas the tragic poet must produce strong emotions in order to enjoy a tragic play, the comic poet must produce amusement, which finds its physical expression in laughter. (Also, as a few lines from the neo-platonists Iamblichus and Proclus forcefully suggest, it might well be the case that Aristotle thought there was a katharsis in comedy as well, which would perfectly fit the last proposed interpretation: a comic katharsis would just amount to the expression or the outlet of laughter.) [ 8 ]

In chapter 5 of our Poetics , Aristotle presents comedy with these terse words:

Comedy, as we have already said, is the representation of men of lesser value, but not in a sense that would imply all defects: ridicule is only a part of what is shameful. What makes people laugh is indeed a form of error or physical ugliness which does not cause suffering or death, as is immediately seen from a comedy mask: it is something ugly and deformed, but which does not express any suffering. (1449a32–37)

Scholars have often drawn on the idea that aggressiveness or, as Bergson would say, “malice”, would be at the heart of comedy as Aristotle sees it. And indeed, this is already what Plato defends in a famous passage of the Philebus (47d-50b): it would be phthonos (an emotion that is often translated as “malice” or “ill will”, but that designates above all “envy”) that would be the hidden cause of our laughter (Imagine your neighbor, whose new Ferrari you envy, inadvertently crashing it into his garage door: the strength of your laughter would be proportional to your envy!). [ 9 ]

But let us return to the example of the comedy he mentions in Poetics 13, where spectators see Orestes ending up being reconciled with Aegisthes. What makes them laugh at that ending? Undoubtedly, the ancient spectators must have felt a sense of indignation: not avenging one’s father by killing his murderer is a moral fault. But it cannot be indignation that causes them to laugh (if anything, indignation provokes anger, not amusement). What makes them laugh, rather, is the complete oddity of such a reconciliation, its sheer incongruity. So more generally, one may suppose, what makes one laugh is the incongruity of the blunders of the characters on stage, perhaps coupled with their ugliness (which is moreover accentuated by the mask the actors wear). That these characters must be “inferior” is a psychological requirement that is the opposite of that of tragedy: if we can only feel fear and pity towards a hero who does not deserve his fate, we readily laugh at a man full of himself who slips on a banana peel. Similarly, Aristotle’s insists that a character’s blunders must not cause him to suffer, and that therefore a comedy cannot end with the characters’ misfortune or death. That would not be funny: a comedy in which the arrogant character killed himself on a banana peel would end our amusement (provided we are average, morally good people). And this also implies that our negative feelings towards such characters, made up of a certain contempt and perhaps a feeling of superiority (as Hobbes would say), is really just a kind of game: we do not feel any real animosity or condescension towards comedy characters. If we really felt indignation when attending that comedy of Orestes, we would not be able to laugh.

In the third book of the Rhetoric, dedicated to the figures of speech, Aristotle recalls that in his Poetics , presumably in its second book on comedy, he spoke of different “types of jokes” (III 18, 1419b6–7). There is perhaps a difference of emphasis on this point between comedy and tragedy. If a comedy must also have a good plot, having good jokes is essential:

It is especially in regard to these [funny comparisons] that poets fail with the public if they do not make them well, and if they do make them well, that they are popular. (11, 1413a10–11)

It is impossible to reconstruct what exactly those “types of jokes” would have been. But in his treatment there of the figures of speech, Aristotle evokes those that the comic poet uses. The central idea that emerges is that of incongruity. Aristotle argues that a serious speech that wants to persuade its listeners must use a “suitable”, or “appropriate” style, where the words chosen are “in proportion” ( to analogon ) to the things they signify. If there is disproportion, or what we call “incongruity”, that speech’s style will be “like that of comedy”. And to exemplify what he seriously states, Aristotle makes a joke at the expenses of a tragedy writer, a certain Cleophon, whose style was (at least in Aristotle’s eyes) rather like a comedy writer’s: “Some of his expressions were like saying: august fig tree” (III 7, 1408a10–16). This expression is funny (and not at all appropriate to the tragic style), because there is a total incongruity between this adjective which is normally reserved for a goddess or a queen, and that tree which, in ancient Greece, was considered of little value.

In the case of tragedy, Aristotle’s aim is to reconstruct for his readers what the art of poetic composition should be, in order to enable them to distinguish a good tragedy from a bad one and to explain why. There is no reason to think that this should not also have been his goal in writing on comedy. We have no direct echo of this in our Poetics , but a passage from the Nicomachean Ethics provides a clue worth following. It comes from the chapter devoted to the virtue of “sense of humor” ( eutrapelia ), which consists in being able to make good jokes among friends as well as in being able to take mockery against oneself with good grace. It is in this context that we read this statement:

The amusement of the free man is very different from that of the slave, that of the educated man from that of an uneducated man. This can be seen also in the ancient and recent comedies: in the former, what makes one laugh is obscene language, in the latter, it is rather the innuendos ( huponoia ), and this difference is not small in view of elegance ( euschêmosunê ). (IV 8, 1128a20–25)

To be sure, this is an analogy that is intended to make clear what kind of jokes decent citizens should make or hear in the real world. But this analogy also reveals the normative judgment that Aristotle suggests when it comes to theater: good comedy, that which is intended for educated audiences, should use innuendo and allusion, not obscene language. This is not an ethical normativity, but a normativity intrinsic to the art of making people laugh. Jokes that use crude and obscene language are what might be called “easy jokes”, which require no originality and inventiveness on the part of the jokester. On the contrary, good jokes must be “refined”, or “elegant”, which show a good, truly incongruous and sophisticated use of the figures of speech. [ 10 ]

What is the value of poetry, or art more generally? Neither in the Poetics nor in the published works on poetry does Aristotle seem to be bothered by that question. But since this is yet another perplexing question for us, many scholars have been tempted to supply an ethical answer. Interpreting the katharsis clause in this way has been one major way of satisfying the urge to answer this question. But even without relying on that admittedly controversial phrase, other ethically tinged answers have been offered. For example, why can’t we read tragedies as providing us an attractive way to develop a typically “emotional understanding” of important ethical features, such as the importance of being moved by other people’s misfortunes (Halliwell 1986, 2002)? Or, more specifically, shouldn’t tragedies allow for imagining ethical situations that would help spectators illuminate issues linked to their use of practical wisdom (Frede 1992; Belfiore 1992; Donini 2004)? [ 11 ] There is certainly much to say in favor of such readings, especially if one focuses on, say, Antigone or Philoctetes . But when Aristotle mentions these plays, he does not at all give the impression that he takes them to be paradigmatic of the genre (In the Poetics , he mentions the former in the framework of a critique of the quite untragic way Sophocles has depicted Haemon, who did not dare to kill his father Creon: 14, 1454a1–2; as to the latter, one verse of Euripides’ lost play is quoted for the appropriate use of a rare verb: Poetics 22, 1458b22–24). Instead, the two plays that he seems to take as paradigmatic (and to which he refers the most) are Sophocles’ Oedipus-Rex and Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris . Certainly, Oedipus-Rex can easily be read as providing a kind of insight into the deep miseries a human being can be subjected to; but one may fairly doubt that it might really help people in their use of practical wisdom. As to Iphigenia in Tauris , it would require a tremendous battery of arguments to persuade modern readers that they should read it in a either such way—and it is no surprise that no scholar has attempted to do so!

More generally, there are at least two main rebuttals to be made against such ethical readings of the Poetics (and presumably Aristotle’s aesthetics in general). [ 12 ] First, what then about comedy? When he mentions a possible positive use of comedy, Plato proposes that virtuous citizens watch them for a better grasp of what vices look like: “We must learn to recognizes buffoonery in order to avoid doing or saying anything ridiculous out of ignorance” ( Laws VII 816e). It is telling that Aristotle never mentions such an odd suggestion: how can we possibly learn about vice while we are enjoying the jokes and gaffes that pepper comedic plots? A second reply comes from what Aristotle says about music in Politics VIII. There, he begins by repeating faithfully what Plato had proposed: since music can represent virtues like courage, children must learn to play it and it is through enjoying singing and playing such music that they will subconsciously come to enjoy those virtues. But then, in a second instance, Aristotle vigorously, if implicitly, opposes Plato. In the Laws , Plato very much insists that adult citizens of Magnesia must continue singing and dancing in order to bolster their virtues (II 664d). Aristotle is no less insistent that once adults, the citizens of his ideal city stop singing and playing music and instead hire professional musicians and enjoy listening to them during their “free time” (VIII 6, 1340b35–39).

“Free time” or “leisure” ( scholê ) is a key concept (on this, see Too 1998; Heath 2014; and Ferrari 2019). It does not mean the pause or the rest one takes from work; it is a time, or a mode of life, where activities are enjoyed for themselves. In the Nicomachean Ethics , it is at the core of the argument for the primacy of theoretical activity: while contemplation is typically a leisured activity, political activities constitute the non-leisured life, one which is meant to achieve practical goals (X 8, 1177b4–24). And in Politics VII-VIII, when defending his own proposal as how organize a perfect city, Aristotle goes as far as saying: “To be able to enjoy leisure rightly is the principle of everything” (VIII 3, 1337b31–32). In the case of music, Aristotle makes it clear that if music can be listened to for the practical purpose of relaxation (a little bit like our ambient music), or fostering virtue (as children must do), music can also be listened to for its own sake, just for the sake of enjoying it. Here Aristotle seems to be repeating what he says in the passage of the Eudemian Ethics already quoted, but he adds something we do not find there: music “for the sake of leisure” is characterized as a music “for the sake of intelligence ( phronêsis )” ( VIII 5, 1339a14–26).

Unfortunately, Aristotle does not spell out what exactly he means by that, and the phrase has been variously interpreted. Again, some scholars have proposed an ethical reading: the intelligence involved would amount to the practical intelligence, or wisdom (which is typically called phronêsis ), that is required in any moral action. Thus, by listening to music that depicts, or “represents”, say, courage, one may better understand what courage is. Despite its seeming natural, this reading contradicts what Aristotle repeats in those same pages: moral, or political, action is fundamentally a non-leisured activity ( ascholia ). It would be odd then if Aristotle were recommending such a leisured use of music while aiming to describe how to manage non-leisured moral life! Another theme that is also repeated in those pages should give us a better clue: the final aim of learning how to sing and play an instrument is to help these future citizens become “good judges” of music (VIII 6, 1340b35–39). In the Laws , Plato also used that phrase, and meant by it that adult citizens should be able to recognize morally good from morally bad songs, and thus enable them to decide which songs must be sung in Magnesia (II 669a-670c). There is no reason to believe Aristotle would have endorsed such a strong ethical-cum-political agenda. Instead, it is very likely that by “judging”, Aristotle just means that by having the first-hand experience of playing music, citizens will be able to judge and appreciate the good quality of music. And, as all musical connoisseurs know, such an appreciation is both perceptual (as we do enjoy listening to sounds and rhythm) and also somehow intellectual: a connoisseur, that is, equally enjoys how well or inventively a piece of music is constructed. [ 13 ]

Admittedly, all of this is absent from the Poetics , where the word “leisure” does not even appear. But when in the Politics , he presents his conception of a music that should be listened to and appreciated for its own sake, it is surprising that Aristotle gives as justification the example of Homer, and cites several verses from the Odyssey : besides music for relaxation and moral education, there is

music for a life spent in leisure, which is the very reason why people bring it in. They give it a place among the leisure time that they think befits free people. That is why Homer wrote these verses: […] “They invite the bard who charms them all”. And elsewhere, Odysseus says that the best way to spend one’s life is in view when men are rejoicing: “the guests sit in a row in the room to listen to the bard”. (VIII 3, 1338a21–30)

Of course, Aristotle must have been aware that the bard is the one who sings poetry, whether lyric or epic, with the accompaniment of the lyre. This argument therefore implies that it is actually the listening and appreciation of performed poetry that must constitute such a leisured activity. And since in the Poetics , tragedy and comedy are presented as poetic forms that are more valuable than epic or lyric poetry, Aristotle must also have considered attending tragic and comic plays as part of these leisured activities, or more generally of what he calls in that passage of the Politics , a “free life”, that is a life of free citizens (not of slaves), but also a life that in which time is spent enjoying music or poetry for their own sake.

In the case of music, Aristotle strongly recommends that children learn how to play an instrument (actually, the lyre) so that once adults they will be able to fully enjoy beautiful songs since they will have become able to “judge the beautiful songs” and therefore “enjoy them for themselves” ( Pol. VIII 6, 1340b38–39). This is also the case for visual arts: children, Aristotle proposes, should learn how to draw images in order to be able “to contemplate the beauty of bodies” (1338a40–b2). In both cases, their pleasure can be taken along the lines in which Aristotle defines pleasure in his Nicomachean Ethics : it is the unimpeded activity, or “activation”, of their natural capacity, or faculty, of hearing and seeing respectively. But Aristotle importantly adds: “when it comes to the best possible object” to be heard or seen ( NE 10.4, 1174b14–23). We therefore need to learn how to judge how good the objects of our listening or seeing are. And once we have learned this, we can fully enjoy pieces of music and paintings or sculptures that we know are those that best suit our respective faculties.

Aristotle never makes such a suggestion in the case of poetry; and indeed, if one holds that poetry is a matter of exceptional natural gift, as Aristotle does, it would be odd to propose that every child should practice composing poetry. One might then perhaps take his writings on poetry offered as a sort of late education on such artworks. Through their reading of either the Poetics (if they get the chance of enrolling in the Lyceum) or Aristotle’s published works, people can become such connoisseurs of poetry, and enjoy it fully too.

It is often claimed that the ancients did not value artworks in the ways we moderns do. Ancient Greek theater, which includes poetry, scene painting and music, the argument goes, is only one moment of religious festivals where a whole city came to unite in shared activities and values. And despite all his critiques of the theater, for which he coined the despising word “theatrocracy” ( Laws III 701a), Plato nevertheless emphasized that the right sorts of poetry and music should play a crucial role in the moral education of youth. But Aristotle seems very much unconcerned about the religious and political context of theater performances; and it is telling that he doesn’t say anything worth noticing about the role of the gods in the tragedies. (Actually, these elements are even a matter of reproach that classicists often make against him! [ 14 ] ) And he vividly opposes a complete subjection of art to any other useful objective: “To search everywhere for what is useful is totally inappropriate for those who are great in soul and free” ( Pol. VIII 3, 1338b2–4). In other words, if indeed it may be useful to listen to some sorts of music for educational or therapeutic purposes, music can, and should, also be enjoyed for itself, and the same goes for painting and poetry. To be sure, by themselves, the objects of mimesis may not be worthy. But even the lowest animals, as Aristotle states in the preface of his Parts of Animals , do offer “extraordinary pleasures to those who are able to know their causes and are naturally gifted for philosophical understanding” (I 5, 645a9–10). In the case of animals and plants, we admire the way “artistic nature” ( dêmiourgêsasa phusis ) has built them. In the case of artworks,

we enjoy gazing at likenesses of animals because we are at the same time contemplating how artistic craft ( dêmiourgêsasa technê ), whether painting or sculpture, has produced them; (645a11–12)

that is, when we are connoisseurs of art. True, as Aristotle also says in that preface, divine beings such as celestial bodies and unmoved gods are much more worthy objects to contemplate (mostly because they are eternal). And indeed, as he repeats in his Nicomachean Ethics and Politics , philosophical contemplation, which culminates in exercising our intellect towards such divine objects, is the highest activity one can attain. But such philosophical contemplation, whether it comes to these divine entities or to the causes of the animals and plants, is deemed to remain for the “naturally gifted for philosophical understanding” which are few, as Aristotle seems to admit with regret. By contrast, provided one gets the right artistic education leading to connoisseurship, contemplating art can be part and parcel of everyone’s happiness (or typically human flourishing: eudaimonia ).

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The Philosophy of Tragedy

The Philosophy of Tragedy

From plato to žižek.

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Julian Young , Wake Forest University, North Carolina
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This book is a full survey of the philosophy of tragedy from antiquity to the present. From Aristotle to Žižek the focal question has been: why, in spite of its distressing content, do we value tragic drama? What is the nature of the 'tragic effect'? Some philosophers point to a certain kind of pleasure that results from tragedy. Others, while not excluding pleasure, emphasize the knowledge we gain from tragedy - of psychology, ethics, freedom or immortality. Through a critical engagement with these and other philosophers, the book concludes by suggesting an answer to the question of what it is that constitutes tragedy 'in its highest vocation'. This book will be of equal interest to students of philosophy and of literature.

'… a model of clear philosophical prose … keen philosophical insights … Some people read books to gain understanding; I suspect Young wrote this book to gain understanding. For philosophers or anyone else interested in tragedy, we should all be glad that he did.'

Source: The British Journal of Aesthetics

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Frontmatter pp i-vi

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Contents pp vii-x

Acknowledgements pp xi-xii, abbreviations of frequently cited works pp xiii-xiv, introduction pp 1-2, 1 - plato pp 3-20, 2 - aristotle pp 21-40, 3 - after aristotle pp 41-57, 4 - hume pp 58-67, 5 - schelling pp 68-94, 6 - hölderlin pp 95-109, 7 - hegel pp 110-138, 8 - kierkegaard pp 139-151, 9 - schopenhauer pp 152-168, 10 - nietzsche pp 169-187, 11 - benjamin and schmitt pp 188-206, 12 - heidegger pp 207-234, 13 - camus pp 235-245, 14 - arthur miller pp 246-253, 15 - žižek pp 254-262, 16 - conclusions pp 263-270, bibliography pp 271-276, index pp 277-279, full text views.

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Othello: A Tragic Hero Through the Prism of Aristotle’s Definition Essay

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As the name suggests, the tragedy of Othello has been a point of discussion by most literature scholars. The point of contention is on whether the piece of Shakespeare’s artistic work meets the basic requirements to be classified as a tragedy. In my essay, I present the argument as to why Othello is a perfect example of a tragedy.

Tragedies are characterized by the presence of a tragic hero. The hero bears a serious a flaw that contributes immensely to his or her downfall. In most cases, such kind of a flaw referred to as a tragic flaw. The flaw is inherent to the person and can be used to give information about his or her background. According to Aristotle, a tragic flaw characterizes a tragic hero and the flaw is manifested throughout the play. In the tragedy of Othello , Othello portrays a perfect example of a tragic hero basing on Aristotle’s definition. This character exhibits two major flaws in his character, which include gullibility and jealousy. His eventual downfall bears a direct linkage to the previously mentioned flaws.

Basing on Aristotle’s definition of tragedy, there are a number of factors that have to be taken into consideration before classifying a play as a tragedy or not. According to him, the prerequisite of a tragedy revolves around the plot of the play. Events are best portrayed as tragic if they happen unexpectedly, and occasioned with the occurrence of one another. Furthermore, Aristotle asserts that for the essence of tragedy to be effective, the hero must be faced with an option that is unavoidable. The presence of a tragic hero is an indispensable factor in so far as classifying a play as tragedy or not is concerned. The main character must bear the qualities of nobility, or rather high stature than other members in that particular setting. Despite this, the main character must portray elements of flaws in his or her character, which will eventually lead to his or her downfall. It is worth noting that the main character ends up destroying himself in most tragedies. This cannot be blamed on others, bad luck, or depravity.

In reference to Aristotelian criterion discussed above, Othello meets the definition to be regarded as a tragedy. Othello, who is the main character, is a perfect example of a tragic hero. Having been a soldier in most part of his life, he commanded the respect and honor from the society. This is the reason as to why he was referred to as governor-general. He is confident even as he defends his marriage to Desdemona, a daughter of Venetian senator. He possesses a soldiery outlook and commands much respect from people of Venice.

As already stated earlier, Othello is a tragic hero who exhibits two serious tragic flaws. These are gullibility and jealousy. He trusts Iago so much simply because he is a military man who they have served together for long time. His gullibility makes him to fail to trust Desdemona who spoke the truth throughout the play. Later on, Othello finds himself torn between his character and the love of his heart. A tragic catastrophe happens when he destroys Desdemona at the expense of misleading information he receives from Iado. This action brings him to his ultimate tragic fall. Therefore, in conclusion, Othello stands out to be a tragedy.

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IvyPanda . 2022. "Othello: A Tragic Hero Through the Prism of Aristotle’s Definition." January 23, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/othello-a-tragic-hero-through-the-prism-of-aristotles-definition/.

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The Psychology of Aristotelian Tragedy

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James Kachere

Stephen Halliwell

This paper reexamines some neglected implications of the famous and highly influential conception of poetic unity set out in Chapters 7-8 of the Poetics. My argument addresses the paradox that while Aristotle describes tragedy in Chapter 6 as 'mimesis of life', in Chapter 8 he sharply contrasts the conditions of unity required of a (tragic) plot-structure with the supposedly inescapable disunity of any individual's life. How can tragedy (or any other mimetic art) be a representation of 'life' and yet differ so sharply from life in what I call its 'narrative conditions'? Poetic form, on Aristotle's view, depends on the causal intelligibility of life yet involves a kind of coherence which life itself lacks. I argue that this tension in the Poetics' relationship between 'art' and 'life' cannot be wholly resolved: in an important sense, the meaning of 'life' is changed by its organisation into 'plot'. I also explore the further question of why Aristotle imposes the most stringent demands of poetic unity on a genre which is centrally concerned with the dislocation and destruction of life: I consider whether this is a symptom of Aristotelian resistance to tragic pessimism. Finally, I illustrate the different kinds of criticism to which Aristotle's paradigm of poetic unity has been subjected since the Romantic era, employing some of the views of Milan Kundera to show that this paradigm remains a resilient presence in the dialectic of modern aesthetics.

Research Scholar

Ujjaval Pandit

When we think about the etymological aspects of how mankind should be differentiated from other species, the radical changes and divergence we find is knack to express oneself in an explicit manner. Especially various human moods with their feature of being ephemeral is quite evident yet the perennial and innate propensity is unmitigated particularly when we evaluate the sensitive aspect. While doing the same thing the outcome we get is not full of affectation, unreal or exaggerated. Instead we witness the grim realities which we would not have preferred to see ever. Pursuing the same notion, the sensible readers have acknowledged the genre introduced by the constellation of eminent writers. This paper provides an outlook to the historical etymology of the term ‘Tragedy’ with all its connotations, vivid interpretations with illustrations, analytical facts. It also aims at how tragic aspects may occur in anyone’s life irrespective of any incidental, situational, dispositional circumstances. We have ample examples of how tragic aspects vary with different perspectives and while describing various protagonists as well as antagonists the tragic elements have been clearly propounded by the writer.

chapter in the book: PATHE: THE LANGUAGE AND PHILOSOPHY OF EMOTIONS, ed. by Ljiljana Radenović, Dragana Dimitrijević and Il Akkad

Irina Deretic

In this paper, I will endeavor to point out that according to Aristotle tragedies are beneficial for a soul to a great degree. In the first section of the paper, I will elucidate his central thoughts on emotion in general, and pity and fear in particular. Subsequently, I will critically discuss, compare and contrast both ordinary and tragic fear and pity, as well as their interrelations as the defining features of the tragic genre. Additionally, I will argue that the fundamental cognitive components of pity and fear have an important impact on both Aristotle's understanding of tragic experience in general, and on one of his most controversial concepts, that of katharsis in particular. By discussing the various interpretative models in understanding katharsis, I will attempt to demonstrate why a kind of ethical perspective, which includes both emotions and cognition, is the best standpoint in accounting for tragic experience.

International philosophical quarterly

A survey of commentaries on Aristotle's Poetics over the past century reflect a long-standing assumption that pleasure, rather than understanding, is to be seen as the real aim of tragedy, despite questionable textual evidence to this end. This paper seeks to rehabilitate the role of understanding in tragedy's effect, as Aristotle sees it, to an equal status with that of its affective counterpart. Through an analysis of the essential inducement of wonder on the part of the viewer and its connection with the organic unity of the plot - what Aristotle calls the "soul" of tragedy - I argue that the telos of tragedy in the Poetics is intended to accommodate both pleasure and incipient philosophical activity without necessarily privileging either.

Helen Horgan

Action is central to our concept of drama. It is action that initiates the unfolding events of a plot, in a way that engages our minds and involves us also physically. In this way action initiates the movement of plot, played out through its chosen characters. Plot and character, character and plot are intricately and equally employed in instancing the motion of the act or action. In the following paper I would like to talk about Aristotle’s notion of the ‘act’ in the Poetics with particular emphasis on the dramatic art of Tragedy. I would like at the same time to consider the ‘act’ in relation to the broader concept of Praxis that is is action which is purposeful and goal-directed alongside Aristotles teleological philosophy; that is that objects of nature bear an inherent function and their development is a lifelong process of proceeding towards this end. The telos, singular in its goal, signifies for Aristotle the essential form and function of each living thing.

Alison Stone

Untying Aristotle's Poetics for Storytellers

Rune Myrland

Several of the concepts describing the plot in Aristotle's Poetics is ambiguous, and several contradictions are unresolved in current popular interpretations. This is an attempt to solve these problems, by finding an interpretation where the parts fit together, that resolve the contradiction and make sense in the real world. This paper has become a chapter in the ebook Untying Aristotle's Poetics for Storytellers, available here: http://a.co/eUgTyjM

Interpretation

Jacob Howland

The Interiors

Raj Gaurav Verma

Tragedy is the least noticed and talked about in contemporary literature. Tragedy was born as a genre when Aristotle constructed the theoretical premises upon which Tragedy is based. Perhaps, as argued by some, the rise of novel marked the death of tragedy. However, it is found that tragedy did not die rather was re-born (Steiner, 45; Brockmann, 23) to suit the modern life. The paper traces the growth of the poetics of Tragedy from Plato to the contemporary period, and postulates that from Renaissance to the present day, the literature in English has shifted piecemeal and ultimately revolted against Aristotle's definition of tragedy.

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JSmol Viewer

Whoever i am: on the quality of life.

1. That This

I must interrupt to say that ‘X’ is what exists inside me. ‘X’—I bathe in that this [ esse isto ]. It’s unpronounceable. All I do not know is in ‘X’ … Always independent, but it only happens to whatever has a body. Though immaterial, it needs our body and the body of the thing. –Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva

The structure of the question is implicit in all experience. –Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method

Life is a series of experiences which need innumerable forms. –Meher Baba

2. Everyone First!

3. is a bone, 4. facing the face, 5. who am i, 6. ellipsis, institutional review board statement, informed consent statement, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

1	) Not that Sorokin was against quantification per se, which is unthinkable given that “ultimate reality is infinite quantitatively and qualitatively” ( ).
2	, (accessed on 5 June 2024)). On the self-tracking movement, see ( ).
3	).
4	( ) and Ghislain Deslandes, “Life is Not a Quantity: Philosophical Fragments Concerning Governance by Numbers”, in ( ).
5	… is counting, or more exactly, the counting-off, of some number of things. These things, however different they may be, are taken as uniform when counted as ‘objects.’ Insofar as these things underlie the counting process they are understood as of the same kind. That word which is pronounced last in counting off or numbering, gives the ‘counting-number,’ the arithmos of the things involved … In the process of counting, in the actus exercitus (to use scholastic terminology), it is only the multiplicity of the counted things which is the object of attention. Only that can be ‘counted’ which is not one, which is before us in a certain number: neither an object of sense nor one ‘pure’ unit is a number of things or units. The ‘unit’ as such is no arithmos” ( ).
6	). “The ONE is one complete whole and simultaneously a series of ones within the ONE” ( ). As a metaphysical principle, seriality is present for Aristotle both in the ordering of the categories and in the refuted, ‘bad tragedy’ view of nature as “a series of episodes” ( , Metaphysics, 1090b20–1), though his argument for the priority of substance, by entertaining the serial view hypothetically, expresses a certain ambivalence, or play, in the totality of things: “The subject of our inquiry is substance; for the principles and the causes we are seeking are those of substances. For if the universe [to pan] is of the nature of a whole [holon], substance is its first part; and if it coheres merely by virtue of serial succession [ephexes], on this view also substance is first, and is succeeded by quality, and then by quantity” ( , Metaphysics, 1069a19–22). Aquinas articulates such whole/serial ambivalence as a question of perspective, in considering the nature of angelic knowledge: “Now it happens that several things may be taken as several or as one; like the parts of a continuous whole. For if each of the parts be considered severally they are many: consequently neither by sense nor by intellect are they grasped by one operation, nor all at once. In another way they are taken as forming one in the whole; and so they are grasped both by sense and intellect all at once and by one operation; as long as the entire continuous whole is considered” (Thomas Aquinas ( ), Summa Theologica, Ia.58.2, (accessed on 5 June 2024)). So, for Proclus, seriality is a universal principle manifesting the neither-one-nor-many nature of the One: “A series [seirá] or order is a unity … but that which is cause of the series as a unity must be prior to them all … Thus there are henads consequent upon the primal One, intelligences consequent on the primal Intelligence, souls consequent on the primal Soul, and a plurality of natures consequent on the universal Nature” ( ).
7	). On the sorites paradox, see ( ).
8	this or that without properly considering that we are dealing with seriality, no less objectively than subjectively. As many forms of relation and non-relation fall within the general idea of seriality, so do thoughts follow upon each other in all sorts of related and unrelated ways, such that the two are always becoming entangled. Whenever we are perceiving a series, however seemingly random or formally defined, there remains an unshakeable sense of its inseparability from the seriality of experience itself, as if the unity or individuality of one’s own being cannot but mark itself indexically across serially salient points of awareness, and, vice versa, as if our integrity, the unity of oneself, were somehow inseparable from this indicating of unities, one after another. Thus, in the case of the random or coincidental series, say a sequence of stars, there remains, despite the evident dependency upon seeing them as a series, the fact of their seriality being objectively or phenomenally there to notice. And in the case of the most irrefutable, observation-independent series, say, the set of natural numbers, there always remains, despite the awareness of their formal independence from one’s observing or counting them, the fact that one must imaginatively ‘fill them in’, projecting the integers to infinity, in order to grasp the set. The former, a presence of seriality where no regular series is there, pertains to the quantity of quality, in the positive sense of a ‘surplus’ magnitude of integrity, the intensive presence of much and of many qualities which make for more seriality than there are series. The latter, an inherent absence of seriality where a regular series is there, in the negative sense of a seriality’s lack of itself or auto-ellipsis, pertains to the quality of quantity, in the sense of a ‘deficient’ kind of integrity, the absence of the substantiality proper to its magnitude and number as abstractions which ‘never arrive’ or always fail to capture what they measure. Accordingly, we have, on the one hand, the putative ‘law of the series’, the theory put forth by Paul Kammerer, according to which reoccurring forms and events typically labelled as ‘coincidences’ are thought to be expressions of a deeper underlying force of attraction or affinity, “something like a transcendental precondition of all forms of regularity and coherence” ( ). And on the other hand, we have Wittgenstein’s ‘rule-following paradox’, according to which all signs, however clearly they appear to demonstrate that something follows, are suspiciously in need of one’s following or deciding them ( ). Whether we are dealing with a haphazard series of points connected ‘only’ by our connecting them or a series of unmistakable signs making ‘total’ sense, there remains the intriguing synthetic phenomenon of seriality, the being-serial of oneself and the thing, as if everything were held together by an endless spark leaping across the omnipresent gap between the two. Correlatively, we may say that between any two elements of a series, between this and that, there is not only nothing, but everything, just as in all perception, “Synaesthetic perception is the rule [la règle]” ( ).
9	( ) translation modified to express literal sense of the verb. On the being-question, see ( ; ).
10	).
11	as such—being that is one with non-being—thus coincides completely with quality—non-being that is one with being; there is no sharp difference between them. Dasein, therefore, is not to be thought of as the ‘subject’ that ‘has’ qualities but is distinct from them; on the contrary, Dasein is one with—indeed, identical to—quality itself: as Hegel puts it in the Encyclopaedia Logic, “quality is, in general, the determinacy that is immediate, identical with being” (EL 146/195 [ § 90 A]). Being is determinate, therefore, insofar as it is qualitative; or, to put it another way, quality is what makes being determinate” ( ).
12	( ).
13	, 124.
14	II, d.3, n.251, quoted in ( )).
15	; individuality is not dissolved but established at the highest level; all things as individuals participate immediately in divinity, in a way that transcends the hierarchical levels of being” ( ). Cf. “When the soul comes out of the ego-shell and enters into the infinite life of God, its limited individuality is replaced by unlimited individuality. The soul knows that it is God-conscious and thus preserves its individuality. The important point is that individuality is not entirely extinguished, but it is retained in the spiritualised form” ( ).
16	, 1001A, in The Complete Works ( ).
17	, II.3. Fraser comments: “the serial entities [i.e., the various grades of soul] do not share any community of essence—they are not synonyms. What is common between the prior and the posterior entities is just their position relative to one another in the series; they cannot, therefore, be regarded as equal and co-ordinate species of a common genus” ( ). For Young, to embrace the “collective otherness of serialized existence”, in which “a person not only experiences others but also himself as an Other, that is, as an anonymous someone”, is crucial, as it “allows us to see women as a collective without identifying common attributes that all women have or implying that all women have a common identity” ( ). While seriality in Sartre’s view seems to constitute a deficient and superficial form of sociality, its own serial relation to group formation reveals the fundamentality of the series as the process of “constant incarnations” governing the arising and dissolution of social forms: “groups are born of series and often end up by serializing themselves in turn … [what] matters to us is to display the transition from series to groups and from groups to series as constant incarnations of our practical multiplicity” ( ). Kathleen M. Gough ( ) emphasizes the open, relational, and educational dynamic of seriality: “Thinking in a series is always about thinking in multiples. You are never solo, never alone, you are always in relation” (p. 13). Seriality is thus the more authentically democratic form, that which saves individuality from the pressurized collective ego of the political group: “Once of the growth of the party becomes a criterion of goodness, it follows inevitably that the party will exert a collective pressure upon people’s minds … Political parties are organizations that are publicly and officially designed for the purpose of killing in all souls the sense of truth and justice” ( ). Cf. “What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging” ( ).
18
19	, 30.
20	, 697A, in Complete Works, 73.
21	, 86.
22	( ).
23	). “In truth, the very notion of the ‘aims’ of public policy is shaped in a deep way by the dictates of quantification. We don’t quantify because we are utilitarians. We are utilitarians because we quantify” ( ). “The ‘in order to’ has become the content of the ‘for the sake of’; in other words, utility established as meaning generates meaninglessness” ( ). “The weakness of humanism’s claim consists in dogmatically imagining not only that man can hold himself up as his own measure and end (so that man is enough for man), but above all that he can do this because he comprehends what man is, when on the contrary nothing threatens man more than any such alleged comprehension of his humanity. For every de-finition imposes on the human being a finite essence, following from which it always becomes possible to delimit what deserves to remain human from what no longer does” (Marion, “Mihi magna quaestio factus sum”, 14).
24	). On individuation and/as stupidity, see ( ; ).
25	).
26	). In other words, mathematics is haunted to infinity by its own indifference toward actual entities: “Mathematics, like dialectics, is an organ of the inner higher intelligence; in practice it is an art, like oratory. Nothing is of value to them both except form: content is a matter of indifference. Mathematics may be calculating pennies or guineas, rhetoric defending truth or falsehood, it’s all the same to both of them” (#605). Henri Bortoft ( ) explains how Goethe’s approach relates to the distinction between primary (quantifiable) and secondary (non-quantifiable) qualities: “Goethe gives attention to the phenomena … so that he begins to experience their belonging together … and thereby to see how they mutually explain each other. Such a holistic explanation is an intrinsic explanation, in contrast to the extrinsic explanation whereby phenomena are explained in terms of something other than themselves—which is conceived to be ‘beyond’ or ‘behind’ the phenomena, i.e., separate from the phenomena in some way. Extrinsic explanation is the mode of explanation typical of theory-based science. But through attention to the concrete, i.e., to the phenomena as such, we begin to encounter the qualities of the phenomena without any concern for their supposed ontological status as dictated by a theory (i.e., whether they are secondary qualities). Attention to the phenomena brings us into contact with quality, not quantity. The latter is in fact reached by abstracting from the phenomena, which entails standing back from the phenomena to produce a head-orientated science (to use Goethe’s phrase) instead of participating in the phenomena through the senses” (p. 214).
27	). He describes the relation between rationalism, materialism, and descent into uniformity as follows: “As soon as it has lost all effective communication with the supra-individual intellect, reason cannot but tend more and more toward the lowest level, toward the inferior pole of existence, plunging ever more deeply into ‘materiality’; as this tendency grows, it gradually loses hold of the very idea of truth, and arrives at the point of seeking no goal other than that of making things as easy as possible for its own limited comprehension, and in this it finds an immediate satisfaction in the very fact that its own downward tendency leads it in the direction of the simplification and uniformization of all things; it submits all the more readily and speedily to this tendency because the results of this submission conform to its desires, and its ever more rapid descent cannot fail to lead at last to what has been called the ‘reign of quantity’” (94–95).
28	) “Kula concludes that in the preindustrial world, the qualitative was always dominant over the quantitative. The regime of discretion and negotiation clearly favored local interests over central powers, as was universally recognized. The privileging of judgment over objectivity in measures was only the tip of the iceberg. Every region, sometimes every village, had its own measures” ( ).
29	( ).
30	, 122.
31
32	).
33	, I.171, italics altered. Taurek’s controversial answer to the trolley problem (give all individuals an equal chance at survival by flipping a coin), regardless of its practicality, exposes the truth of this paradox: “I cannot see how or why the mere addition of numbers should change anything … The numbers, in themselves, simply do not count for me. I think they should not count for any of us” ( ).
34	).
35	world in the sense of a single total sum of all things to be an ironic shadow of homo numerans: “the postulated domain of unified total overall reality corresponds to the idea of unrestricted quantification” ( ). The sense of this irony needs clarification. Given that everything as it appears to us is precisely not a totality, but more of an unbounded and open-ended experiential expanse involving endless individualized co-witnesses with no-less-weird inner and outer worlds, our sense of there being a world, a single totality, is absurd. Now irony, as explained by Kierkegaard, represents the negative, self-suspending freedom of a subject absolutely isolated or alienated from objective reality: “It is not this or that phenomenon but the totality of existence that it contemplates sub specie ironiae [under the aspect of irony]. To this extent we see the correctness of Hegel’s view of irony as infinite absolute negativity … In irony, the subject continually wants to get outside the object, and he achieves this by realizing at every moment that the object has no reality” ( ). Per Kierkegaard’s pun, irony is a kind of bad eternity, comparable to Hegel’s bad infinity, which never stops counting itself. So, irony contemplates negatively what unrestricted quantification contemplates positively (i.e., everything as a sum), exploding the additive mass of all things into an endlessly revisable space of possibilities: “In irony, the subject is negatively free … and as such is suspended, because there is nothing that holds him. But this very freedom, this suspension, gives the ironist a certain enthusiasm, because he becomes intoxicated, so to speak, in the infinity of possibilities, and if he needs any consolation for everything that is destroyed, he can have recourse to the enormous reserve fund of possibility” ( ). Correlatively, unrestricted quantification, that which adds everything up into the totality of a world, may be grasped as a kind of anti-irony which produces for the subject not negative freedom but positive imprisonment, a pseudo-sense of being securely confined in a countable whole. I say ‘pseudo’ both because the whole is never really countable and because the aim of adding it all up is also a way of existing or standing outside the count, discounting the presence of the counter, being virtually beyond the totality, such that quantification’s anti-irony is also itself ironic, a type of negative (or even nihilistic) freedom—there is a world and I have counted it. Consider, for example, how, even at the physical level, the radically unknown is included in our calculation of a universe composed of 95% dark matter, as if we could actually, from some vantage point, see and tally the totality, the 100% beneath, above, and inside our feet. Of course, neither irony’s suspension nor quantification’s fixity suffices the infinite flow of a heart’s desire, which wants both the unlimited play of positive freedom and the absolute safety of negative imprisonment, the ‘prisonless prison’ of eternal security, in the sense of the absence of an outside, which music, neither inside nor outside the world, gives an experience of. What we want, then, is a kind of paradisical, neo-medieval irony, in the sense of a humble, unnihilistic, non-isolating self-suspension harmonizable with subjectivity/objectivity, recalling that “medieval irony stemmed from man’s recognition of his place in creation; it was not at all a challenge to God but rather an acceptance of man’s own inadequacy, bearing out Kenneth Burke’s point that ‘humility is the proper partner of irony’” ( ). In other words, it would be some decent species of sincere irony, a homely double suspension of self and totality that unveils truth. For neither imposing our image upon nor forever hiding from reality are happy or actual options.
36	, dir. Louis van Gasteren (1997), . (accessed on 5 June 2024).
37	, dir. Shaunak Sen (2022), which explores interconnectedness in relation to the meaning of breath: “Life itself is kinship. We are all a community of air. One shouldn’t differentiate between all that breathes”. Cf., “The ordinary man never loses faith. He is as one who climbs up a mountain a certain distance and, experiencing cold and difficulty of breathing, returns to the foot of the mountain. But the scientific mind goes on up the mountain until its heart freezes and dies” (Meher Baba, Everything and the Nothing, 55–6, my emphasis). We may say that breath is literally symbolic of spirit, a confluence of air and life that always speaks to the openness of beings to each other via a shared embodiment belonging to the extra-materiality of nature, its causal non-closure: “Nature goes beyond the universe. It is that which we attempt to know through measurement, but whose complexity always makes it more than we think we know at any time” ( ). Correlatively, Allen argues for the need to think breath in political ecology: “Attending to breath brings previously considered immaterialities (elements, lungs, dust, emotions, affects, atmospheres and breath itself) into sharp focus with implications for how environmental subjectivities and politics come into being and how embodiment figures through these encounters” ( ). Similarly, Gaard argues for the critical importance of ‘airstories’ in the contemporary world: “In an era of anthropogenic climate change, extinctions, migrations, pandemics, refugees and smog, recuperating, and sharing airstories offers a timely approach toward illuminating the interbeing and intra-action of all vital matter, and the life that is continuous, coexistent, and present in every breath” ( ). To consider the spiritual and environmental nature of breath promises a path beyond the overheated “global civilization greenhouse” wherein human beings, haunted by the scientistic worldview of humankind as “towered above on all side by monstrous exteriorities that breathe on it with stellar coldness and extra-human complexity”, are “driven to limit themselves to small, malicious arithmetic units”, a way into a more livable, breathable sphere or “immune-systemically effective space” for “ecstatic beings that are operated upon by the outside” ( ).
38	, 77.
39	).
40	). As Aquinas explains, pleasure perfects operation both as end and as agent, as an as-it-were extra end, a supplementary good added to the good of the action, and as an as-it-were extra agent, an instrumental helper in the action’s completion—‘as-it-were’ because the distinction is essentially logical rather than actual. “Pleasure perfects operation in two ways. First, as an end: not indeed according as an end is that on ‘account of which a thing is’; but according as every good which is added to a thing and completes it, can be called its end. And in this sense the Philosopher says (Ethic. x, 4) that ‘pleasure perfects operation … as some end added to it’: that is to say, inasmuch as to this good, which is operation, there is added another good, which is pleasure, denoting the repose of the appetite in a good that is presupposed. Secondly, as agent; not indeed directly, for the Philosopher says (Ethic. x, 4) that ‘pleasure perfects operation, not as a physician makes a man healthy, but as health does: but it does so indirectly; inasmuch as the agent, through taking pleasure in his action, is more eagerly intent on it, and carries it out with greater care. And in this sense it is said in Ethic. x, 5 that ‘pleasures increase their appropriate activities, and hinder those that are not appropriate” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-1.33.4, (accessed on 5 June 2024)). The question of pleasure’s activity and activity’s pleasure is existential, connected to a deferrable ambivalence at the core of life’s movement, or, further, to the present moment as displacement of the ambivalent ordering of life and pleasure: “But whether we choose life for the sake of pleasure or pleasure for the sake of life is a question we may dismiss for the present” (Aristotle, Ethics, 10.4). This is clarified by Coomaraswamy, drawing on Bonaventure, in relation to the beauty of the opportune: “What is true of factibilia [things to be made] is true in the same way of agibilia [actions to be done]; a man does not perform a particular good deed for the sake of its beauty, for any good deed will be beautiful in effect, but he does precisely that good deed which the occasion requires, in relation to which occasion some other good deed would be inappropriate (ineptum), and therefore awkward or ugly. In the same way the work of art is always occasional, and if not opportune, is superfluous” ( ).
41	]” (De Musica, I.2, (accessed on 5 June 2024)).
42	—an apodictic denial of the reality of the intelligible realm, the specious and at times dangerous conclusions reached by those who held an exclusively quantitative worldview—for example, the proclivity to deracinate the process of intellectual intuition in metaphysics and the results thereby achieved from the ‘respectable and relevant’ academic milieu. Quantity, in the Traditional view, is a complement to quality, not an irreconcilable antithesis; under the right conditions the complexio oppositorum becomes a coincidentia oppositorum” ( ).
43	, 46).
44	).
45	, III.55.
46	, II.92.
47	knowledge, fashioning it as knowledge about an object, as we say, ‘to gather the facts about’ something. This occludes the appreciative dimension of knowing, as hermeneutic appreciation of the thing itself, attending to it with understanding as an inherent reality, a being saturated with its own necessity. As Nietzsche ways, “I want to learn more and more how to see what is necessary in things as what is beautiful in them—thus I will be one of those who make things beautiful” ( ). Fundamentally, this imperative is about insisting on a science which unites rather than separates subjects. Cf. “In non-duality there is … knowledge and appreciation of things as they are” ( ).
48	(1984), in which the paradox of acting inside the tomb of histrio-cinematic observation is investigated. Where the real is confounded with a screenic world-picture and oneself a character, there would seem to be no space for movement and no one who can know.
49	).
50	).
51	colonial land relations” ( ). As Liboiron explains, “the methodological question is: how do I get to a place where these relations are properly scientific, rather than questions that fall outside of science, the same way ethics sections are tacked on at the end of a science textbook? How do I, as a scientist, make alterlives and good Land relations integral to dominant scientific practice?” (20).
52	).
53	( ). Gagné locates this development at the confluence of war and pandemic—specifically mustering and memorial practices—and the emergence of the modern fact, an epistemological unit the peculiar self-effacing emergence of which “was central to creating, then sustaining, the illusion that numbers are somehow epistemologically different from figurative language, that the former are somehow value-free whereas the excesses of the latter disqualify it from all but the most recreational or idealist knowledge-producing projects” ( ). Coupled with the rise of printed news bulletin and the addition of numbers to war monuments after 1500, “the meaning of numbers” was carried “beyond the instrumentality of quantification”, becoming, as Gagné states in an apt mercantile metaphor, “carriers of commemorative freight in extending a cult of memory” (794).
54	).
55	is sitting in the chair, but in fact it is the body which is sitting in the chair. The belief that the soul is sitting in the chair is due to identification with the physical body. In the same way a man believes that he is thinking, but in fact it is the mind which is thinking. The belief that the soul is thinking is due to identification with the mind. It is the mind which thinks and the body which sits. The soul is neither engaged in thinking nor in any other physical actions” ( ). This is equivalent to saying that the spontaneous, uncaused cause of action does not itself act, just the ceaseless present, as the standing now (nunc stans), does not move. Priest writes, “the soul is an initiator. It causes actions but is not caused to cause those actions. At the unconditioned level it is disclosed both that the soul is the cause of its own actions and that there is always the possibility of not acting, or acting otherwise, which is to say the soul has free will” ( ). That one does not fully realize and enjoy this spontaneous freedom is due to the mind’s being conditioned by the impressions (sanskaras) of experience: “The mind is capable of genuine freedom and spontaneity of action only when it is completely free from sanskaric ties and interests” ( ).
56	, 14.
57	).
58	, 189.
59	, 94).
60	. The mind has a place in practical life, but its role begins after the heart has had its say” ( ). Cf., “the natural sciences are unsuitable for ascertaining moral facts using measuring procedures or mathematical theorizing. This in no way means that there are no moral facts, simply that there is a great deal that cannot be scientifically explored or technologically controlled” ( ).
61	( ). Levine diagnoses qualophobia as fear of “disrespect for the authority and objectivity of science” and a “rush to solve the mind-body problem”, which causes qualophobes “to deny the undeniable” (125). Similarly, fear of either the face of reality or God may be seen as the simultaneous fear of seeing oneself, fear of seeing others, and fear of the faceless: “Each face, then, that can look upon Thy face beholdeth naught other or differing from itself, because it beholdeth its own true type … In like manner, if a lion were to attribute a face unto Thee, he would think of it as a lion’s; an ox, as an ox’s, and an eagle, as an eagle’s … In all faces is seen the Face of faces, veiled, and in a riddle; howbeit unveiled it is not seen until …“. ( ).
62
63	) of use and exchange; rather, they open to us the original place solely from which the experience of measurable external space becomes possible. They are therefore held and comprehended from the outset in the topos outopos (placeless place, no-place place) in which our experience of being-in-the-world is situated. The question ’where is the thing?’ is inseparable from the question ’where is the human?’” ( ).
64	, 179.
65	, 86.
66	) Cf. “Every being questions. Just as we question every being, every being questions us. Every questioning is being questioned. In other words, nothing lies beyond questioning. The questioning of questioning is the questioning of all questioning. It is the mother of questioning. It is a generating process, the process of bring forth into the open, and at the same time a process of conserving the bringing forth into the open” ( ). On mysticism as “a pure science of the question, not irrational experience, but the superrational experience of experience, the conscious being of question itself, the question that one is”, see ( ).
67	( ).
68	).
69	). As conscience stands above the judgment of others, questioning stands apart from opinion: “Plato shows in an unforgettable way where the difficulty lies in knowing what one does not know. It is the power of opinion against which it is so hard to obtain an admission of ignorance. It is opinion that suppresses questions. Opinion has a curious tendency to propagate itself. It would always like to be the general opinion, just as the word that the Greeks have for opinion, doxa, also means the decision made by the majority in the council assembly” ( ).
70	( ), italics altered, quoting, ( ).
71	, 2133).
72	, 25.
73	).
74	, I.57.
75	determinateness, is quality—something totally simple, immediate. Determinateness in general is the more universal which, further determined, can be something quantitative as well. On account of this simplicity, there is nothing further to say about quality as such” ( ).
76	, II.192.
77	). For an attempt to think how digital networks might be better tuned to the nature of learning, see ( ). Given that “something is clearly wrong in the technical world that we have built for ourselves” and that “our abstractions have increased the gap between the way nature works and the way people think” (39), the authors argue for the possibility of improving digital networks by restoring network theory to “the micro-foundations of networks in cellular dynamics” (40). While they do not consider the place of questioning in life process as such, the argument does hinge on bio-hermeneutic analogies between cell function and learning, specifically the way cells develop via anticipatory self-modelling and how holes or zero totalities operate in biological processes, both of which are definitive of the nature of questioning (47).
78	).
79	).
80	, I.169–70.
81	, 20, my italics.
82	, I.35.
83	, I.171.
84	). See also Elisabeth Roudinesco’s critique of identity politics which proposes “a possible world in which everyone can adhere to the principle according to which ‘I am myself, that’s all there is to it,’ without denying the diversity of human communities or essentializing either universality or difference. ‘Neither too close nor too far apart,’ as Claude Lévi-Strauss was wont to say” ( ). The connection between totality and the affective or heart-centric core of thinking (and therefore authentic identity) is articulated by Han in contradistinction to so-called artificial intelligence: “Thinking sets out from a totality that precedes concepts, ideas and information. It moves in a ‘field of experience’ before it turns toward the individual objects and facts in that field. Being in its totality, which is the concern of thinking, is disclosed first of all in an affective medium … the world as a totality is pre-reflexively disclosed to humans … Artificial intelligence may compute very quickly, but it lacks spirit … Artificial intelligence is without heart. Heartfelt thinking measures and feels spaces before it works on concepts” ( ).

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Masciandaro, N. Whoever I Am: On the Quality of Life. Religions 2024 , 15 , 735. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15060735

Masciandaro N. Whoever I Am: On the Quality of Life. Religions . 2024; 15(6):735. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15060735

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Aristotle on Tragedy
In the Poetics, Aristotle's famous study of Greek dramatic art, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) compares tragedy to such other metrical forms as comedy and epic.He determines that tragedy, like all poetry, is a kind of imitation (mimesis), but adds that it has a serious purpose and uses direct action rather than narrative to achieve its ends.He says that poetic mimesis is imitation of things as they ...
Tragedy
Tragedy - Theory, Catharsis, Aristotle: As the great period of Athenian drama drew to an end at the beginning of the 4th century bce, Athenian philosophers began to analyze its content and formulate its structure. In the thought of Plato (c. 427-347 bce), the history of the criticism of tragedy began with speculation on the role of censorship. To Plato (in the dialogue on the Laws) the state ...
Aristotle's concept of tragedy
Aristotle's definition of tragedy: Aristotle states, "Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complex, and of a certain magnitude, in embellished language…arousing pity and fear…its catharsis of such emotion." (Poetics, Aristotle). Read More: Aristotle's concept of imitation and catharsis. In his definition of tragedy ...
(PDF) Aristotle's Theory of Tragedy
The theory of the tragic plot For all practical purposes, Aristotle's theory of tragedy is a theory of the tragic plot. For Aristotle, the plot is the first principle (archē) of tragedy and, as it were, its soul (6.1450a37-8). Consistently identified as the arrangement of events (systasis, or synthesis, tōn pragmatōn: 6, 1450a4-5, 15 ...
5
Aristotle regards tragedy as a biological 'organism' (Poetics xxiii.1), and the way to study an organism is to see how its different bodily parts interrelate. In recent years, film theorists have continued to study and admire the Poetics , because of the emphasis which Aristotle gives to narrative, described as the invisible 'soul' of the ...
The Aristotelian Concept of the Tragic Hero
tragedy, I shall attempt to show that this interpretation accords with Aristotle's theory of tragedy as a whole. It is necessary to review the passages which embody the con-cept we are seeking. First, brief references to it (1448a 1-5, 16-18, b 24-27) in the early part of the Poetics introduce us in a general way to Aristotle's thought on the ...
Aristotle: Poetics
Aristotle: Poetics. The Poetics of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) is a much-disdained book. So unpoetic a soul as Aristotle's has no business speaking about such a topic, much less telling poets how to go about their business. He reduces the drama to its language, people say, and the language itself to its least poetic element, the story, and ...
How does Aristotle's theory of tragedy apply to Shakespeare's Macbeth
According to Aristotle, there are three elements that make a story a tragedy. The three elements (from the Greek) are hamartia, peripeteia, and anagnorisis, and all are present in Shakespeare's ...
Aristotle's elements of tragedy: plot, character and thought
Aristotle's Poetics is the earliest surviving work of dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory. This brief treatise does not deserve attention only for its pioneering qualities or its incisive comments about ancient epic and drama; it has also had a profound effect on the way we read and analyse ...
Aristotle's 'Poetics': The Origins of Tragedy and the Tragedy of Origins
Here, Aristotle expounds his theory of Fine Art which in cludes, apart from Poetry strictu sensu, Music and Dance. The main emphasis however is on tragedy. The nature of the work is prescriptive rather than descriptive: Aristotle enunciates a number of desiderata for the "best sort of trag edy" (1452b31), and what he has in mind here as the ideal
THE ART OF TRAGEDY
Extract. In this essay, I want to provide an introduction to Aristotle's theory of the Greek Tragedy, which he outlines in his book, the Poetics. Many philosophers since Aristotle, including Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin, have analysed tragic art and developed their own theories of how it works and what it is for.
(PDF) Why is Tragedy Good for the Soul? Aristotle on the Tragic
Tragedy engenders pity and fear and it can even induce the fellow-feeling (φιλανθρωπία), which not only widens the meaning of tragic pity, but also has an impact on Aristotle's overall theory of tragedy and its aims. Nevertheless, 27 Cf. Poet.1452b30-1453a12. 28 Cf. Ath. 16, 2ff.
Aristotle
1. Aristotle's Life. Born in 384 B.C.E. in the Macedonian region of northeastern Greece in the small city of Stagira (whence the moniker 'the Stagirite', which one still occasionally encounters in Aristotelian scholarship), Aristotle was sent to Athens at about the age of seventeen to study in Plato's Academy, then a pre-eminent place of learning in the Greek world.
Aristotle's Aesthetics
Aristotle's Aesthetics. First published Fri Dec 3, 2021. The term "aesthetics", though deriving from the Greek ( aisthetikos meaning "related to sense experience"), is a modern one, forged by Baumgarten as the title of his main book ( Aesthetica, 1750). Only later did it come to name an entire field of philosophical research.
Aristotle's Poetics and the Problem of Tragic Conflict
Hegel's theory of tragedy is elaborated in Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, vol. 14 of Glockner (n.6 above). References to Aristotle are found throughout the discussion. ... The nature of στάσις in Aristotle's Politics is treated in several essays collected in Articles on Aristotle, Vol. 2: Ethics and Politics, ed. Barnes, ...
(PDF) An Analysis of Hamlet from the Perspective of Aristotle's Tragedy
This study intend s to analyze how Aristo tle's theories of cre ating a tragedy. is used by Shakespeare in his writing of Hamlet. 2. The "Fear and Pity"Excited by the Sufferings of Good Man ...
(PDF) Aristotle ideas of Tragedy
A catharsis is a purging, or cleansing of th e emotions --a release o f tension. In a trage dy, this is often a moment o f revelation w hen the tragic hero "falls flat on his face," and the audience can finally "explode." Aristotle's Elements of Tragedy Aristotle said that tragedy has six main eleme nts: 1. Plot; 4. Diction; 2 ...
PDF in Arthur Miller's Concept of Tragedy
Both agree that a tragedy, in its broadest definition, is a form of drama that depicts a complete serious story about human suffering that evokes from the audience powerful emotions such as pity and fear. SPOUDAIOS. The first concept that Miller challenges in Aristotle's theory is tragic nobility.
How is Romeo and Juliet an Aristotelian tragedy?
Expert Answers. Romeo and Juliet is an Aristotelian tragedy because the action revolves around the story, not the characters. In other words, they are more or less at the mercy of the story rather ...
Essay on Aristotle's Concept of Tragedy Applied to Hamlet
Once more meeting the expectations of Aristotle's theory of tragedy. Every Aristolian tragedy must contain "a protagonist of high estate who falls from prosperity to misery through a series of reversals and discoveries as a result of a tragic flaw" (McManus). Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, is born into nobility.
The Philosophy of Tragedy
Others, while not excluding pleasure, emphasize the knowledge we gain from tragedy - of psychology, ethics, freedom or immortality. Through a critical engagement with these and other philosophers, the book concludes by suggesting an answer to the question of what it is that constitutes tragedy 'in its highest vocation'.
Othello: A Tragic Hero in Aristotle's Definition
In the tragedy of Othello, Othello portrays a perfect example of a tragic hero basing on Aristotle's definition. This character exhibits two major flaws in his character, which include gullibility and jealousy. His eventual downfall bears a direct linkage to the previously mentioned flaws. Basing on Aristotle's definition of tragedy, there ...
(PDF) The Psychology of Aristotelian Tragedy
See also Mary Blundell, "Ethos and Dianoia." in Essays on Aristotle's Poetics, edited by A. 0. Rorty (Princeton, forthcoming) for a detailed account of the relations among thought, character. and action. 13. ... Hegel is not primarily interested in developing a theory of tragedy as such, but in using Greek tragedy to present an analysis ...
Religions
As a metaphysical principle, seriality is present for Aristotle both in the ordering of the categories and in the refuted, 'bad tragedy' view of nature as "a series of episodes" (Aristotle 1941, Metaphysics, 1090b20-1), though his argument for the priority of substance, by entertaining the serial view hypothetically, expresses a ...

Critical Essay Aristotle on Tragedy

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Theory of tragedy

Aristotle’s concept of tragedy | Aristotle’s Poetics

Aristotle’s definition of tragedy:

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Aristotle’s Aesthetics

1. On Poets : How to Judge Poetry?

3. The Poetics : How to Understand Poetry ?

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The Philosophy of Tragedy

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Frontmatter pp i-vi

Contents pp vii-x

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Othello: A Tragic Hero Through the Prism of Aristotle’s Definition Essay

The Psychology of Aristotelian Tragedy

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