Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Aristotle and the Poetics by Curran Angela;

Author:Curran, Angela;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4016023
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

POETRY AS A FORM OF KNOWLEDGE

What is the point of Aristotle’s comparison between history, poetry, and philosophy? The answer to this question is not obvious. At the least, Aristotle seems to want to commend poetry for achieving a degree of seriousness (spoudaios, also translated as “noble”) that history lacks. The reason for the greater degree of nobility in poetry than in the reports of the typical historian has to do with the fact that poetry deals with the possible and the universal. This brings its concerns closer in line with those of the philosopher and scientist who are interested in articulating the universal causes of things, for the sake of understanding, for its own sake.

We see in Poetics 4 that the pleasure we take in a work as an imitation is the pleasure in learning.28 Yet, there is no evidence either in Poetics 4 or in related passages in Parts of Animals 1.5.645a5–25 or Rhetoric 1.11.1371b4–12 that Aristotle is associating the understanding available from mimetic works with the study and learning that philosophers seek.29 Things seem to be different, however, when we consider Poetics 9. Aristotle does not say that poetry does the work of philosophy; but in saying that poetry is “more philosophical” (philosophōteron) he is at least saying that poetry is more like philosophy than history, and the reason for this is linked to the nature of the universals that are embedded into the structure of the well-formed poetic plot.

There are several pressing questions about this comparison between poetry and philosophy that need to be addressed. First, what is the point of poetry embedding these universals into the plot? Second, what is the more exact nature of the universals in plots? Do they approximate to the universal generalizations concerning human life and action that it is said in Nicomachean Ethics 10 are what the philosopher seeks to comprehend and contemplate?

First, why are the universals embedded in the plot? There are several reasons. First, through a plot that is unified by necessary and probable connections, the audience is able to take pleasure in the recognition that the action has been constructed into a well-formed whole. As Amélie Rorty explains “Because it represents a story that is complete in itself, uninterrupted by the irrelevant flotsam and jetsam accidents of everyday life, drama brings the pleasure of the sense of closure.”30 The sense that one is admiring something that has been well structured and unified is a pleasure taken in the work’s form and structure, and it is made possible by the internal coherence of the plot.31

Second, this appreciation of the action as structured into a complete whole also makes possible an intellectual or cognitive pleasure. Pleasure for Aristotle occurs when there is the perception that one is settling down into one’s natural state.32 All human beings, Aristotle says, naturally take delight in learning and understanding.33 This pleasure in seeing the larger causal pattern in which an action occurs makes possible an intellectual pleasure that is seldom available in everyday life,

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