## 1. *On Poets*: How to Judge Poetry?



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 *mimesis* (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
*mimesis* has both a static, or "pictorial"
aspect, and a "dynamic", or "theatrical"
aspect. According to its "pictorial" aspect,
*mimesis* 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 *mimesis*, which may range from the mimicking of
noises or gestures to theater enactment. In Latin,
*mimesis* 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: "*mimesis*
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 (*kritike*)" (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 *techne* and
*episteme poietike*, or simply
*poietike*). In writing a "Treatise on poetic
composition" (*Peri poietikes*), 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).


## 2. *Homeric Problems*: How to Defend Poetry?



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 (*enteles*) 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"
(*kalliste tragogia*) 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*. 


### 3.1 What is poetry as such?



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.


### 3.2. Tragedy



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 *poiesis* 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 (*pathe*),
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"
> (*thoinao*). (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 *katharos* 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 mimeseos*)", 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]



### 3.3 Comedy



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 (*euschemosune*). (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]


## 4. Music and the Value of Art



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"
(*schole*) 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 (*phronesis*)" (*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 *phronesis*), 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"
(*demiourgesasa 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 (*demiourgesasa
> techne*), 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*).