Aristotle definition of poetry, by robert j. yanal

Aristotle's Definition of PoetryAuthor(s): Robert J. YanalReviewed work(s):Source: Noûs, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Nov., 1982), pp. 499-525Published by: Wiley-BlackwellStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2215204 .Accessed: 23/09/2012 13:44

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Aristotle's Definition of Poetry ROBERT J. YANAL

WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY

I. THE PROBLEM

In Chapter IX of the Poetics, Aristotle proposes this definition of "poetry":

It also follows from what has been said that it is not the poet's business to relate actual events, but such things as might or could happen in accordance with probability or necessity. A poet differs from a historian, not because one writes verse and the other prose (the work of Herodotus could be put into verse, but it would still remain a history, whether in verse or prose), but because the historian relates what happened, the poet what might happen. That is why poetry is more akin to philosophy and is a better thing than history; poetry deals with general truths, history with specific events. The latter are, for example, what Alcibiades did or suffered, while general truths are the kind of thing which a certain type of person would probably or inevitably do or say. (1451a36-51b 10)1

One natural interpretation of this definition is this. The poet, in order to make poetry and not something else, must write about possible, not actual, things. These possible things must be of a sort which could be characterized as types of persons doing things which those types would probably or necessarily do. Non-poetry-history, for example-must deal with actual, not merely possible, things. The historian must relate what actually happened to particular, actual people. This interpretation requires further analysis, but it will do for the moment, since I now want to bring out a feature of the Poetics which casts doubt not only on this natural interpretation but on the consistency of Aristotle's theory as well.

Immediately after writing the above lines, Aristotle admits that the "writers of iambic lampoons" are "concerned with a particular individ-

ual" (1451b14), and says this of the tragedians:

The tragedians cling to the names of historical persons. The reason is that what is possible is convincing, and we are apt to distrust what has not yet happened as not possible, whereas what has happened is obvi-

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ously possible, else it could not have happened.... [Someone] is no less a poet if he happens to tell a true story, for nothing prevents some actual events from being probable or possible, and it is this probability or possibility that makes the (tragic) poet. (1451bl5-32)

Assuming that the lampooner and the tragedian are poets, the immediately preceeding passage suggests that the poet can write poetry about actual specific persons and events. Yet the essential difference between poetry and non-poetry, on the preceeding natural interpretation, seemed to rule this possibility out. The main focus of this essay will be an attempt to resolve this apparent inconsistency. There are, however, other problems which we must raise in order to get a better focus on the main question. I turn to the first, and easiest, of them.

II. LITERARY ARTWORKS

What is Aristotle defining? The translator's answer is "poetry," but this term, a translation of poiesis, is misleading. Aristotle takes pains to disabuse his readers of the view that poiesis must be in a poetic rhythm or meter:

It is true that people join the word poet to the meter and speak of elegiac poets or epic poets, but they give the same name to poets merely because they use the same meter, and not because of the nature of their imitation. The same name is applied even to a work of medicine or physics if written in verse; yet except for their meter, Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common: the first should be called a poet, the second rather a physicist. (1447b 14-20)

More importantly, when Aristotle cites some examples of poiesis he includes certain sorts of texts which are clearly not covered by the English term "poetry":

Now the art which imitates by means of words only, whether prose or verse, whether in one meter or a mixture of meters, this art is without a name to this day. We have no common name which we could apply to the mimes of Sophron or Xenarchus and the Socratic dialogues, and also to any imitations that may be written in iambics, elegiacs, or other such meters. (1447a28-47b 14)

So, Homer could have written poesis in prose, and Plato wrote pozesis note the dig at Book X of the Republic-despite the fact that he wrote the Socratic dialogues in prose. Thus, Aristotle would not have had much trouble accomodating the prose novel and the prose drama, along with poetry in its standard English sense, as polesis; indeed, he might be said to have anticipated them.

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By poiesis Aristotle means "the art which imitates by means of words only," and his complaint that "this art is without a name to this day" is remedied in English. The word he wants is "literature" or more accurately, "literary artwork," for there are senses of "literature" which are non-artistic. "The literature on a given topic" is such a non-artistic use; and there are evaluative senses of "literature," roughly meaning "beautiful writing" or "elegant style," as in "Freud's last books are works of literature." I take it that Aristotle's attempts to prypoiesis loose from its connotations of rhythm and meter are intended to pry it loose from its connotations of beautiful writing or style as well. Aristotle's advice on diction (that it "should be clear without being common," etc. (1458a18)) is addressed to both the poet and the non-poet, and one of his examples of metaphor is drawn from Empedocles ("old age is the sunset of life" (1457b24)). Even if Empedocles wrote beautifully, he is still a physicist and not a poet, and a tragedy written in clumsy prose is still literature and its author a poet.

P. F. Strawson once classified Aristotle as a descriptivist metaphysician. I think he was a descriptivist philosopher of art as well. Tolstoy, the paradigm revisionist philosopher of art, knew his own concept of art was not shared by his contemporaries, and What is Art? is a diatribe against the current concept. In contrast, Aristotle's tone is not hortatory. He expects his contemporaries to share his concept of poiesis, and his definition of this concept was intended to be enlightening not revolutionary. If it is to be acceptable, the suggestion of "literary artwork" as the nearest and best English equivalent of poiesis ought to preserve Aristotle's descriptivist intention. Subsequent argument will make this case.

III. THE OBJECTS OF LITERARY IMITATION

I shall argue that there is a hierarchy of objects of artistic imitation. The most general term used by Aristotle to denote such objects is "men in action," but when Aristotle speaks of tragedies he says that they imitate "plots." I shall argue that the most complex entities, plots, are constituted by men in action (I call these "persons in action"), and that persons in action are constituted by simpler entities which I call "artistic kinds." Aristotle's first statement on the objects of artistic imitation is this:

Since those who make imitations represent men in action, these men must be superior or inferior, either better than those we know in life, or worse, or of the same kind. For character is nearly always derived from these qualities and these only, and all men's characters differ in virtue and vice. (1448a1-5)

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In his definition of literature (quoted at the beginning of this essay) Aristotle tells us that literature deals with "the kind of thing which a certain type of person would probably or inevitably do or say," while history talks of specific persons, e.g., "what Alcibiades did or suffered." From these remarks we can initially make these two points about the objects of literary imitation: they are some sort of moral entity, and they are a type of thing (or person).

One theory familiar to analytic philosophy is to construe fictional entities as possible things individuated by the properties ascribed to them by the author of a work of fiction.2 To set out the bare structure of such a view, we first make the assumption that all the sentences of a work of fiction which describe a fictional entity are reducible to the form "Fa," where "F" denotes some property or relation and "a" is a singular term. It is posited that "a" denotes that possible entity which is individuated by the set of all properties, F1 ... Fn, such that "Fla" . . .

'Fna" are directly written or indirectly implied by the author of the work of literature in which the fictional entity, a, appears as a character.

This theory has it that the sentence "Fa" may actually occur in the text, in which case F is directly ascribed to a. Or, F may be somehow implied by the properties directly ascribed to a, in which case it is indirectly ascribed. Fictional entities are possible individuals which possess all and only the properties directly or indirectly ascribed to them by the author of the text. A variation of this view holds that fictional entities are not possible individuals, but rather sets of properties.3 On this variation, the fictional character named by "a" is not that possible a which has all and only F1 . .. Fn; he (it) is F1 . .. Fn itself. This latter sort of fictional entity lays claim to being a type of person.

I think a case can be made that Aristotle holds a variation on the preceeding variation. That is, he holds that the objects of imitations are types of persons, but that these types are limited to the moral qualities of fictional entities. Let us make a brief excurses into Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics before setting out this interpretation in more detail.

The virtuous act must have a certain quality, namely the familiar "Golden Mean":

So virtue is a purposive disposition, lying in a mean that is relative to us and determined by a rational principle, and by that which a prudent man would use to determine it. (I106b36-1107a2)4

The virtuous man must also have certain qualities:

But virtuous acts are not done in ajust or temperate way merely because they have a certain quality, but only if the agent also acts in a certain state,


viz, (1) if he knows what he is doing, (2) if he chooses it, and chooses it for its own sake, and (3) if he does it from a fixed and permanent disposition. (1 105a26-33)

Let us say that moral character in the narrow sense (I will shortly introduce a broad sense) is constituted by virtues and vices and is describable by the virtue and vice terms, such as "courage" and "cowardice." Someone is virtuous if he acts from the appropriate moral state (one possessing the three qualities Aristotle mentions), and if his action falls on a mean between two extremes; otherwise he is vicious. (One complication I shall mention is that someone can fail to be virtuous without being vicious. A child or amoral adult may be incapable of choosing from a fixed and permanent disposition, but it might be better to withhold the appelation "vicious" from such a person. I shall leave this as a caveat for the discussion which follows.)

Aristotle's remarks on tragedy force us to broaden our conception of moral character:

... [Elor tragedy is an imitation, not of men but of action and life, of happiness and misfortune. These are to be found in action, and the goal of life is a certain kind of activity, not a quality. Men are what they are because of their characters, but it is in action that they find happiness or the reverse. The purpose of action on the stage is not to imitate character, but character is a by-product of the action. (1450a15-21)

Happiness is the virtuous achievement of what we call a life-plan. A life-plan is a set of typically human ends ordered and weighted with respect to one another. Among the ends humans typically try to attain are health, wealth, power, friendship, family life, benevolence, pleasure, and contemplation. Person A, for example, might prefer wealth and power to friendship and family life, while person B might prefer friendship, family life, and benevolence to pleasure, wealth, and power. To be fully happy, Aristotle thinks that one must not only fulfill one's life-plan, one must be virtuous in the pursuit of it. But we must note that describing someone's virtues and vices does not thereby describe his life-plan, and describing someone's life-plan need not describe his moral character in the narrow sense. Thus, we cannot limit moral character, as it relates to the objects of artistic imitation, to virtue and vice. We have to include a person's life-plan in the description of his moral character. I shall call this the broad sense of moral character- "broad" because describing the ends a person seeks is not as closely tied to our concept of the moral as his virtues and vices.

Moral qualities in the narrow sense are describable by such virtue and vice terms as being courageous, being angry in the right way and at the right time, being angry in the wrong way and at the wrong time, being generous,

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etc. Moral qualities in the broad sense are describable by such life-plan terms as maintaining a stablefamily life, pursuing wealth to the exclusion of all else, mixing work and pleasure in equal amounts, etc. As an initial attempt to formulate what the objects of literary imitation are, let us delimit the set, M, which is the set of moral qualities in both the narrow and broad senses it is logically possible for persons to have. I shall introduce the nomenclature "artistic kind" to capture Aristotle's claim that artworks are about these entities:

X is a artistic kind of person - df* X is a consistent sub-set of M-properties such that for every M property P, either P or not-P is a member of X.

Aristotle's insight, as I see it, was to restrict the kinds of properties which constitute an artistic kind to those properties which constitute moral character. Homer, let us say, writes: "Achilles is fleet of foot." Now, beingfleet offoot may well be considered part of the fictional entity denoted by "Achilles," at least on the familiar view from analytical philosophy adumbrated above. If Homer had written, "Achilles ran into battle faster than anyone else," we might say that he indirectly implies that Achilles was fleet of foot, and so beingfleet offoot is part of the fictional entity, Achilles. But being fleet of foot is not prima facie a moral quality, in either the broad or narrow sense, and if the objects of literary imitation are partly constituted by artistic kinds, beingfleet olfoot is not part of the object of imitation of Homer's epic.

This result might strike one as counter-intuitive. After all, if Sher- lock Holmes is anything, he is a detective or contains the property being a detective. Yet being a detective is not prima facie a moral quality, and so cannot count towards constituting the artistic kind named by "Sherlock Holmes." Intuitions are only as good as the insights they offer, and may be remedied by a striking theory. Aristotle's thrust is to direct the reader's attention away from such contigent properties of fictional entities as the color of their hair, their occupations, and their place of residence, towards the more essential properties of their moral character. It is not Holmes' profession that should interest us as much as his tenacity and his indifference to the feelings of others. Persons are essentially moral agents, and Aristotle thinks that the business of art is to represent what is essential to persons.

How does one determine which properties make up an artistic kind of person? One engages in a process we can call moral evaluation of character, which I suggest is similar to moral reasoning in real life. In the Ethics Aristotle tells us:

But this [hitting the mean] is presumably difficult, especially in particular cases; because it is not easy to determine what is the right way to be angry,


and with whom, and on what grounds, and for how long ... [I]t is not easy to define by rule for how long and how much a man may go wrong before he incurs blame ... (1109b14-21)

The difficulty of determining whether Achilles is virtuously angry or viciously angry is similar to determining whether a real person is virtuously or viciously angry. Similarly, determining the end(s) which a literary character seeks will pose many of the same difficulties as determining the ends real life people seek. There will, of course, be differences. Authors of literature usually provide access into both the exterior and interior lives of their characters, access which we do not, except under extraordinary or first-person circumstances, have in real life. But this is an epistemic difference, not a difference in the sort of reasoning involved. Moral evaluation of character is a process which treats the work of literature as so much information about a (fictional) person's doings in order that moral reasoning may be applied. Evalua- tion of character in literature is moral reasoning, not towards an action as in real life, but rather towards the construction of an artistic kind. The question in reading literature is not what shall I, the reader, do about this (since the situation will usually be either past or fictitious), but rather, what shall I, the reader, say about the moral character of this fictional entity. The results of such inquiries will be moral characteristics which will be eventually built into an artistic kind.

We might disagree about the constitution of the kind, Archilles. Some might say he was virtuously angry to leave Agamemnon; some might say he was angry in the wrong way or for the wrong reasons. Such disputes about artistic kinds are resolved, or not, in the way real-life moral disagreements are resolved, or not. The important point is that the properties constituting artistic kinds be moral qualities, that they be the results of moral evaluation. Calling Othello stupid or Lear senile counts as moral evaluation if and only if one is prepared to say of "stupidity" or "senility" that it is a virtue or vice term (and perhaps have a moral theory to back this up).

We have seen that Aristotle has stressed that tragedy is an imitation of an "action," and that his first term for the objects of artistic imitation is "men in action." Now, artistic kinds are not the most appropriate sort of entity to count as actions. An action, even in the somewhat meta- phorical sense Aristotle is using it in the Poetics, must be at least some sort of change. That is, it must have parts which are simultaneously incompatible with one another. The tragic hero, for example, must be happy and then miserable. Artistic kinds seem more like a static photo- graph of someone's moral qualities at a given moment than a motion picture of their action.

There is another element of men in action, as the objects of artistic imitation, which the concept of artistic kinds does not capture, and this

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is that "men in action" must not only signify a change, it must signify a change which happens "in accordance with probability or necessity."

Suppose a fictional character-Lord Jim, say-goes from cowardice to courageousness in the course of a novel. This action cannot be represented as an artistic kind because, although courageousness and cowardice count as moral qualities, both cannot be included in a consistent set of such properties. Also, a mere concatenation of artistic kinds-Lord Jim as cowardly, Lord Jim as courageous-will not possess the sort of inevitability which Aristotle demands for men in action.

I therefore suggest the following definition for the objects Aristo- tle calls "men in action," here called "persons in action," again letting M properties be the moral characteristics, in both the broad and narrow senses, which it is logically possible for persons to have:

X is a person in action = df* X is a set of properties, A, such that

(1) A consists of subsets of M properties, M1 ... Mn; (2) each subset, Mi, of A is a consistent set of M properties

such that for every M property, P, either P or not-P is a member of Mi; and

(3) A is ordered by the rules of probability or inevitability.

Action in literature is more akin to the pastactions of persons than it is to the actings of persons. Action in literature does not take place over time: it exists, all at once, in metaphysical space. Action in literature is, at least, change in the moral qualities of the fictional character, but a change that, so to speak, has already happened. Whatever their tempo- ral settings, stories have the flavor of a world that always was.

Although Aristotle sounds as if he is aiming at one sort of object for all art and in particular all literature to imitate, this, I think, is misleading and for two reasons. First, in Chapter VIII Aristotle says that a story is an imitation of "plot," and the question is whether plot is to be identified with persons in action. Second, intuitions about art-that is, intuitions cast within the Aristotelean framework of the Poetics- suggest that not all art, not even all literature, is an imitation of persons in action; and that a special sense should be assigned to plot to distinguish it from persons in action.

Let me take up the second point. Some kinds of art-painting and sculpture, for example-seem to be best construed as imitations of artistic kinds rather than of persons in action. After the quote that "those who make imitations" represent men "either better than those we know in life, or worse, or of the same kind," Aristotle says, "We can see this in painting." This quote spawned the definition of "artistic kinds," and it seems that the most appropriate Aristotelian sorts of


entities for painting to imitate are artistic kinds. Rembrandt's Lucretia is more a static picture of moral qualities than it is of change. There are dramatic paintings, David's Death of Socrates for example, which might be said to imitate a person in action. But even here I would argue that such works imitate an artistic kind-Socrates' nobel acceptance of death-rather than a person in action.

The same holds true for non-narrative poetry, the lyric for example. Shakespeare's twenty-ninth sonnet ("When in disgrace with For- tune and men's eyes . . . ") is a picture of the acceptance of the comforting power of love. It is not about any change which has to be organized according to the rules of probability or inevitability. In saying what such poems are about we tend to use nominals-the acceptance of love, the acknowledgement of God's grace, and the like- appropriate names for the sort of entity specified by artistic kinds. It is hard to pin Aristotle down on this, for he skips meagerly through his discussion of the non-narrative, non-literary artforms. His main interest is in the tragedy (and, but only to draw contrasts, the epic). Thus, he anticipates himself, and in leading us to narrative or dramatic literautre, where persons in action may appropriately serve as the objects of imitation, he fails to give thorough consideration to whether all art imiates persons in action.

We must advance to a discussion of "plot" for this entity is made to bear the burden of tragic imitation-and, by extension, of other narrative and dramatic literary imitation as well. Aristotle's most sustained remarks on plot take up Chapter VIII of the Poetics, and I shall quote them at length:

A story does not achieve unity ... merely by being about one person. Many things, indeed an infinite number of' things, happen to the same individual, some of' which have no unity at all. In the same way one individual performs many actions which do not combine into one action. ... Now Homer ... seems to have perceived this clearly, whether as conscious artist or by instinct. He did not include in the Odyssey all that happened to Odysseus-f'or example, his being wounded on Parnassus or his feigning madness when the troops were being levied-because no thread of' probability or necessity linked these events. He built his plot around the one action which we call the Odyssey; and the same is true of' the Iliad. As in other kinds of' imitative art each imitation must have one object, so with the plot: since it is the imitation of' an action, this must be one action and the whole of' it; the various incidents must be constructed that, if' any part is displaced or deleted, the whole plot is disturbed and dislocated. For if any part can be inserted or omitted without manifest alteration, it is no true part of' the whole. (1451a17-34)

It is here suggested that plot is the object of imitation for narrative and dramatic literature, though this is not completely clear. It would be most natural to say that works of literature have plots, and it is by virtue of their having plots that they imitate their objects. Aristotle adopts this

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natural mode when he says that "it [plot] is the imitation of an action," as if to say that the Odyssey has a plot and it is by virtue of its plot that it imitates an action. Yet at other points Aristotle comes close to identify- ing plot with the object of imitation. Homer "built his plot around the one action which we call the Odyssey," and this "one action" is under the same constraints which plot is under: "this must be one action ... ; the various incidents must be so constructed that, if any part is displaced or deleted, the whole plot is disturbed and dislocated." "Plot" seems best reserved as a name for the unified sort of action which Aristotle insists that works of literature imitate.

What is wrong with "person in action" to signify this sort of object of imitation? Above, Aristotle claims that being about one person is not sufficient for having a unified plot. Presumably it is not necessary either, for a story can be about more than one person and still have the requisite unity. However, Aristotle does not discuss such cases. His examples are drawn from works of literature-a Heracleid, a Theseid, the Odyssey-which, as a matter of fact, are about one person. Yet how are we to account for the unity of Anna Karenina, with its cast of characters? Anna, Vronsky, Karenin, Levin, Kitty, and the rest seem independent persons in action, though their actions coincide in important ways. Just as LordJim should not be represented as a concatenation of artistic kinds (Lord Jim as cowardly, as courageous), so too, Anna Karenina should not be represented as a concatenation of persons in action, each with its own set of moral qualities changing according to the constraints of probability or inevitability. Such a description is appropriate for a book of sketches-Lillian Hellman's Pentimento, for example-but not for a unified novel.

So, we ought to allow for a still more complex object of imitation for the developed narrative or dramatic literary artwork. I shall call this entity "plot" and shall define it as follows:

X is a plot =df. X is a set of properties, P, such that

(1) P consists of sub-sets of properties, P1 ... Pn; (2) each sub-set, Pi, of P is a person in action; (3) P is ordered by the rules of probability or inevitability;

and (4) P is "whole and complete" (1450b24) or has the requi-

site "unity".

We have preserved Aristotle's insight that the objects of imitation are to be restricted to the moral qualities of fictional characters, and have allowed room for his insistence on the unity of changing moral qualities.


I shall make some brief remarks on the "rules of probability or inevitability" which order persons in action and plots. For all the weight this concept has to bear in the Poetics, Aristotle is vague as to exactly what it is a concept of. However, we can distinguish at least two aspects of probability in literature. Persons in action and plots must be realistic and plausible. The rules of realism are equivalent to the rules which govern the behavior of real-life human beings. Aristotle says that "characters must be appropriate or true to type" (I454a22-23), and that "when the poet is imitating men who are given to anger, indolence, and other faults of character, he should represent them as they are . . . (1454b1 1-13).

The rules of plausibility are those which lead the reader to accept or believe-in whatever appropriate sense there is to believing a story one knows to be fiction-the events in the narrative. "What is impossi- ble [presumably, according to the rules which govern the behavior of human beings] but can be believed should be preferred to what is possible but unconvincing" (146Oa26-27). Aristotle's view, then, seems to be that the poet must follow the rules which govern the behavior of real-life human beings, except when deviation from these rules is required to produce conviction. Genius, we might say, without knowledge of the laws governing the behavior of real-life humans is blind; mere psychology without genius is empty.

On "wholeness and completeness" or "unity" Aristotle is also vague. Homer is praised for leaving out "all that happened to Odys- seus," for example Odysseus's being wounded on Parnassus, and this because "no thread of probability or necessity linked those events." In contrast, the historian "has to expound not one action but one period of time and all that happened within this period to one or more persons, however tenuous the connection between one event and the others" (1459a21-24). Apparently, then, a plot may follow the rules of realism and of plausibility-Odysseus' being wounded could be convincingly and realistically described-but still fail to have the requisite unity. Aristotle gives two "tests" for this unity: if the insertion or omission of an incident causes "manifest alteration" in the plot; and if events follow one another with a "common end in view" (1459a24). Now, any addition or omission will cause, trivially, an alteration in the plot, so Aristo- tle must have in mind some special sort of alteration, but he never tells us which sort. It is possible for Aristotle to specify a "common end" for tragedy-catharsis-but it is unclear what would count as the common end of, say, the novel. A full account of unity remains one of the glaring omissions of thePoetics. It should, however, be noted that unity is not an essential aspect of plot, but only of superior plots. Epic poetry, in Aristotle's estimation, is like history in that it has episodes with no common purpose (see 145lb33-37).

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IV. LITERARY IMITATION

How does literature come to "imitate" persons in action and plots? All art-Aristotle mentions epic poetry, comedy, dithyrambic poetry (i.e., choral odes), music on the flute and lyre, dance, and painting-is said to be "imitative." At the beginning of the Poetics Aristotle embarks on a project of distinguishing artforms according to their means, manner, and object of imitation. Aristotle never defines what "means" and "manner" are. He gives examples. Manner seems peculiar to literature, for one manner of imitation is first-person narration, another is dramatic impersonation and a third is a combination of the first two. These manners seem to have no sensible application to music or painting. What could it mean to paint or play the lyre, sometimes in the first- person, sometimes in the third?

In Chapter I we are told that there are two general means of artistic imitation: "color and shape" and the human voice. The latter has three species: melody, rhythm, and speech. We can assemble the following categorizations from Aristotle's remarks:

(1) Painting imitates (artistic kinds) by means of color and shape.

(2) Music imitates (artistic kinds? plots?) by means of melody and rhythm.

(3) Dance imitates (artistic kinds? plots?) by means of rhythm alone.

(4) Theatre (i.e., either a staged play, or what we would call a dramatic recitation or reading) imitates (plots) by means of melody, rhythm, and speech (in the manner of dramatic impersonation).

But Aristotle has forgotten that there is at least one other general means of artistic imitation, and the problem to confront us here is how to analyze "imitation" in:

(5) Literature imitates (plots) by means of "words alone" (either in the manner of first-person narrative, or dramatic impersonation, or a combination of both).

Aristotle never provides an explicit analysis of what "imitates" means, nor does he say whether the means of imitation modify the sense of "imitates" or whether this relation retains a univocal sense in all of (1) through (5), regardless of what means are employed to do the imitating.

Commentators on the Poetics make Aristotle out to hold an iconic theory of imitation. S. H. Butcher interprets Aristotle to mean, "A work


of art is a likeness or reproduction of an original, not a symbolic representation of it" ([4]: 124), D. W. Lucas concurs: "Mimesis means to make or do something which has as a resemblance to something else" ([ 13]: 53), Grube comments that sense of "imitation" as "resemblance" is used by Aristotle "not as a view that has to be argued, but as one that can be taken for granted" ([10]: xix).

Now, there is a certain plausibility that (1) means:

(1') Painting resembles (artistic kinds) by means of color and shape.

And the same plausibility carries over to (2) through (4). After all, color and shape, and rhythm, melody, and diction are plastic or auditory material objects, and so have some chance of resembling their objects of imitation. There are problems with this, of course. Nelson Goodman ([ 10], chs. 1 and 2) has launched some powerful objections against the idea of a natural resemblance between art and its objects; and Aristotle would have to face some particularly severe problems of how particular, material objects could resemble artistic kinds, persons in action, or plots, which are, among other things, abstract objects. However, whatever plausibility there may be with analyzing (1) through (4) along the lines of (1') vanishes when it comes to (5). In what sense could Emma-a series of words and sentences-be said to resemble the person in action, Emma?

Butcher notes this difficulty:

Poetry unlike the other arts produces its effects (except such as depend on metre) through symbols alone. It cannot directly present form and colour to the eye; it can only employ words to call up images of the objects to be represented; nor need these words be audible; they may be merely written symbols. ([4]: 137)

Here Butcher seems to turn the iconic analysis of imitation into an expression or causal analysis. This, however, seems to be a theory entirely of Butcher's own invention, since nothing in the Poetics suggests it and Aristotle's remarks on catharsis contraindicate it. The spectator of a (good) tragedy is supposed to be filled with pity and fear and to undergo a catharsis of those emotions. That is, a (good) tragedy causes the spectator to have feelings of pity and fear. Yet tragedy is an imitation of a certain plot, not of pity and fear. Moreover, Butcher presents an implausible phenomenology of the act of reading and understanding a literary text. Here is the opening of Jane Austen's Emma:

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable house and happy disposition seemed to unite some of the best blessings

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of existence and had lived twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

I do not form "images of the objects to be represented"-mental pictures of a handsome, clever, rich, undistressed, twenty-one year old woman-when I read this passage. I may imagine the state of affairs described above to be true, but this is a different thing from imaging that state of affairs. For these reasons Butcher's expression- interpretation of literary imitation in the Poetics is to be rejected.

"Words alone" can be said to resemble aspects of their objects of imitation. Gibbon's sentences get longer and longer as he describes provinces further and further away from Rome. Joyce's prose in the "Nighttown" episode of Ulysses becomes disjoint and scattered, just as the incidents he is creating become disjoint and scattered. Joan Did- ion's prose style is as "cold" as the characters she describes (A Book of Common Prayer).

As a complete theory of literary imitation, resemblance can only go so far. Gibbon is describing more than just the distance of the far provinces, Joyce more than disjointness, Didion more than coldness. Even if we take the bare bones of the structure of tragedy as put forth by Aristotle, we can see failures in accounting for this structure by means of resemblance between the words alone and the tragedy. A (good) tragedy is to take a noble hero from happiness to misery via a reversal and discovery. Can the words or sentences be said to be happy or miserable? Can they undergo a reversal, a discovery? In their description of the hero, need the words be noble? The fact is that literary refer to or denote their objects of imitation. Exactly how they do this will be the problem for the next two sections of this essay; and this, indeed, is the crux of the problem of interpreting (away) the inconsistency adumbrated at the beginning of the essay.

Aristotle does not seem to have bothered much with this problem in the Poetics, perhaps because literary artworks were presented as staged-by means of "melody, diction, and rhythm"-and the post- Gutenburg fashion of taking a text itself as the artwork had not been fully anticipated by Aristotle. The modern philosopher has to see whether this lacuna in the Poetics can be successfully and consistently filled in.

V. THE PROBLEM RESTATED

We are in a better position to return to the chapter IX definition and the apparent inconsistency adumbrated at the beginning of this essay. Before setting out this definition and making the inconsistency more than merely apparent, we should make sure Aristotle intends the


chapter IX definition to be the canonical definition of literature, for there seem to be competing definitions in the Poetics and, as we shall see, the chapter IX definition is not a definition but a statement of a necessary condition for a text to be a literary artwork.

To facilitate discussion, I shall say that a person-name is a singular term such that, were it to denote an existent particular, it would denote a person. Person-names are to be distinguished from place-names, animal-names, etc. Animal allegories may appear to contain animal- names, but I would urge that the characters in such stories are persons with non-human shapes.

In chapter VIII, Aristotle strongly implies that the definition of literature is this:

(A) For an text, T, T is a literary artwork if and only if T denotes (or is about) a plot.

To be sure, the highest literary artform for Aristotle, the tragedy, imitates a plot. Yet he admits that some epics lack one of the ingredients he refers to as "unity", and from an inspection of the various genres of what we would acknowledge to be literature, it seems that (A) is too strong. Some epics will lack a plot, and so will the lyric poem.

Moreover, a text will denote a plot only if all of its person-names denote persons in action; and a person-name will denote a person in action only if it denotes an artistic kind. The chapter IX "definition" contrasts the literary artist who writes about a person in action ("the kind of thing which a certain type of person would probably or inevitably do or say") with the historian who writes about particular persons ("what Alcibiades did or suffered"). Here, Aristotle seems to focus on having person-names denote persons in action as a necessary condition for literature; that is:

(B) For an text, T, T is a literary artwork only if T contains person-names and all of the person-names in T denote persons in action.

(B) seems to be the best interpretation of what Aristotle says in chapter IX, but not the best interpretation of the literary artwork in general. (B) leaves out the lyric poem whose person-names-here I count "the dramatic speaker" as a person-name-will denote artistic kinds. A better statement would be:

(B') For any text, T, T is a literary artwork only if T contains person-names and all of the person-names in T denote either persons in action or artistic kinds.

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However, nothing is lost if, in the following discussion, we confine ourselves to the simpler (B). The same problems arise with (B) as they would with (B').

There is another competitor for "the" definition of literature in the Poetics. At the very end of chapter IX, Aristotle says that "it is this probability or possibility that makes the (tragic) poet." This jettisons artistic kinds from literature, for it says that the poet can write about- use person-names which denote-actual, particular persons as long as the poet orders their doings according to the rules of probability and inevitability. What Aristotle seems to be advocating there is:

(C) For any text, T, T is a literary artwork if and only if T contains person-names, and whatever sorts of entities that are denoted by these person-names are ordered according to the rules of probability or inevitability.

I think Aristotle has made a slip of the pen. (C) would make artistic kinds accidental features of some literary artworks, yet the Poetics is permeated with talk of how the artist imitates moral types. Moreover, Aristotle admits that "nothing prevents some actual events from being probable or possible." Accepting (C) would obliterate his distinction between literature and history. Suppose a poet happened to choose a real-life incident which, as a matter of fact, conformed to the rules of realism, plausibility, and unity. How would he be distinguished from the historian who happened to write about the same incident? For these reasons, (C) is to be rejected as Aristotle's canonical defintion of literature.

The inconsistency can now be made more apparent. (B) implies that Oedipus Rex is a literary artwork only if "Oedipus" denotes a person in action. Intuitively, Oedipus Rex is a literary artwork, and so "Oedipus" should denote a person in action. The lampooners, Aristotle tells us, are "concerned with a particular individual," and the tragedians "cling to the names of historical persons." This is an admission that a text can contain person-names which denote actual, particular persons and still be a work of literature. We have a choice of contradictions; either Oedipus Rex is and is not a literary artwork (intuitively, it is, but "Oedipus" is alleged to denote a real person); or "Oedipus" both denotes and does not denote a person in action (it should denote a person in action because Oedipus Rex is a literary artwork, but the fact is alleged to be that "Oedipus" denotes the historical Oedipus). We should not, of course, abandon the intuition that Oedipus Rexis a literary artwork. We will, in due time, abandon (B), but first it behooves us to see whether we can resolve the inconsistency that "Oedipus" does and does not denote a person in action, while holding onto (B).


Some commentators have pointed out that Aristotle uncritically swallows the doubtful view that the great tragedies are about real persons. This may be so, but it doesn't obviate the possibility that the literary artist may write about real persons. For one thing, Aristotle's remark on the lampooners is correct. The lampoon is necessarily about someone real. For another, his reason for such artistic practices in tragedy sounds good: "we are apt to distrust what has not yet happened as not possible, whereas what has happened is obviously possible, else it could not have happened." Writing about real persons and their actual doings is a good rule of plausibility. Renaissance historical drama was defended by one of its contemporaries "with the argument that a plot about a supposedly great king of whom the audience had never heard would be laughed out of the theatre" ([8]: 159). Wouldn't Napoleon's retreat in War and Peace from Moscow into the Russian winter and defeat strike one as implausible or unrealistic-such a blunder from a military genius-if one didn't know that the actual, historical Napoleon really did it?

Some commentators on Aristotle think that the particular is somehow changed into the universal by art. Butcher writes, "Greek tragedies, though 'founded on fact' . . . transmute that fact into imaginative truth" ([4]: 170); and Gerald Else says, "The poet . . . is required to make something for himself, namely that structure of events in which universals may come to expression. . . " ([7]: 320). It is hard to see how facts can become "imaginative truth," or how universals can "come to expression" via the particular. The metaphysical wall separating the two is impenetrable. Perhaps what can happen is that the names in literature shift reference, from denoting some actual particular to denoting a person in action.

There is a twentieth-century tradition which holds that the reference of names in literature is different from the reference of those same names outside literature. Some philosophers have countenanced that names in literature are used in ways that are radically different from their use outside literature. Ogden and Richards ([15]), for example, have claimed that names and terms are used in literature to evoke emotional attitudes. The anti-intentionalists (see Wimsatt and Beardsley [20] and Macdonald [14]) hold that it is an error to go "outside" the work, and that, accordingly, all names in literature must be taken to be purely fictional.

What such views must hold is that there is some property which literature has and which non-literature lacks, a property which somehow prevents an author from making reference to real persons in a work of art. Call this property Q. If a text has Q. then try as he might, an author cannot succeed in making reference to any real person on any occasion of the use of any person-name in that text. Such a view is

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unsupportable. Is there the slightest reason to believe that the reference of "Napoleon" in the sentence "Napoleon marched from Auster- litz to Moscow" must change from the historic Napoleon to a person in action, depending on whether that sentence occurs in A History of the Modern World or in War and Peace? Authors have often used the oppor- tunity to make real reference to real persons in works of literature, whether to edify, establish plausibility, or just to get even, and there is every reason to believe that they have succeeded in making such real reference, which gives us every reason to believe that there is no such property Q.

As a final stab at trying to hold interpretation (B) while dissolving the inconsistency, we might hold that person-names in literature are sometimes systematically ambiguous. While it is usually held to be the essence of proper names that they denote one and only one thing (if they denote anything at all), it might be the case that, at least for art, some person-names are bi-denotative, denoting both a particular and a person in action. I see nothing incoherent about bi-denotative names. If I invite Simone de Beauvoir and Simone Signoret to dinner and want to summon them both to table, I suppose I can use the name "Simone" on this occasion to call both. That is, I intend "Simone" in the sentence, "Simone, a table," to refer to both women. The Simone's may become confused, but this may be because they never thought that a name could be bi-denotative, or that this use of "Simone" is bi-denotative. Similarly, I suppose that it is possible that Sophocles used "Oedipus" to refer both to the historic Oedipus (assuming there was such a person) and to a certain person in action.

The problem here is not with any inherent incoherency in the notion of a bi-denotative person-name, but with using this as a criterion for distinguishing literature from history. Are tragedians known for using names in a bi-denotive fashion, just as I might be known for referring to both Simone's on occasion as "Simone"? This is unlikely. We would have to assume that Sophocles held Aristotle's theory (B) and used "Oedipus" to refer both to the historical Oedipus and to a certain person in action. But Sophocles need not have held Aristotle's views- probably no one did before Aristotle-and he still could write a tragedy which Aristotle ought to be able to account for without second-guessing the dramatist's intentions.

Suppose we have the text of King Lear in front of us, and we don't know whether it is literature or not. Suppose we also know that Shake- speare used "Lear" to refer to that historic king which Holinshed used "Lear" to refer to in his Chronicles. Is there any way to tell whether "Lear" functions in a bi-denotative way in Shakespeare's play, denoting both the historic Lear and a person in action? Suppose a letter of Shakespeare's were produced in which Shakespeare claimed to use


"Lear" to refer to the historic Lear and only to the historic Lear. Would this mean thatKingLear is not literature? Or consider what is most likely the actual case: Shakespeare got the story for King Lear out of Holinshed, but had no intentions one way or the other, either to refer to that historical Lear of Holinshed or to an Aristotelean person in action or to both. Must we assume that "Lear" in Shakespeare's play denotes both a person in action and the historical Lear, but that "Lear" in Holinshed's Chronicles denotes only the historical Lear? Why? Be- cause Shakespear's play is literature and Holinshed's Chronicles are not? Yet, isn't this precisely what we do not know?

This discussion of names traded heavily on a Kripke-like account of denotation as determined by the intentions of the user of the name. Similar quandries would arise with a Fregean sense-determines- denotation theory. The anti-intentionalists would have to claim that the name "Napoleon" changes its sense from its occurrence in A History of the Modern World to its occurrence in War and Peace. Yet, what reason do we have to believe this? The bi-denotative name gambit would have to hold that in certain texts the sense of a name is such that it denotes both a person in action and a real, particular person. But, how could we ever tell?

VI. A SOLUTION

Interpretation (B) founders on an ineluctable fact. Some literary artworks contain person-names which denote real, particular persons just as some works of history do, and no conjuring up of eccentric theories of meaning or denotation for literature can change this. (B) also must compete with a somewhat less ineluctable fact, and that is that the theory of reference of fictional names adumbrated in section III has some plausibility. If Homer writes, "Achilles was fleet of foot," then "Achilles," if it does not denote any historical personage, can be rea- sonably said to denote that possible particular which is fleet of foot and has all the other properties Homer directly or indirectly assigns to Achilles.

(B) takes the literary artwork as a text which makes its appearance as such. I would like to suggest that the literary artwork is almost as much a construction by the reader as it is by the artist. Texts are not, so to speak, ready-made artworks or not. They must be handled with care, nurtured into artworkhood. They must be read in a certain way. I shall suggest that there is a lacuna rather than an inconsistency between Aristotle's definition of poetry and his claims about real denotation in literature, and that this lacuna is to be filled in with a prescriptive aesthetic.

An aesthetic, as I shall use the term, is a theory of spectator

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response to artworks. We can distinguish between a descriptive and a prescriptive aesthetic. A descriptive aesthetic is an empirical theory of what spectators actually experience when confronted with artworks or with artworks of a certain sort. Santayana's account of aesthetic pleasure (in [ 17]) purports to be a general theory of spectator reactions to good artworks; another descriptive aesthetic (Gutheil, [ 11]) purports to describe the emotional reactions of the auditors of various pieces of music. A prescriptive aesthetic is a set of directions on what spectators ought to do when confronted with artworks, or with artworks of a certain sort. Bullough, for example, thought that if the aesthetic properties of art are to "emerge" one had to behold the artwork with the correct amount of "psychical distance," which method his essay [3] describes.

A descriptive aesthetic is of merely anthropological interest. The philosophical question is what spectators should do when confronted with artworks or with artworks of a certain sort. Should spectators try to unpack the cognitive or informative content of artworks as Goodman holds ([9], ch. VI)? Or, should spectators luxuriate in the unity, complexity, and intensity of the essentially non-cognitive aesthetic experience, as Beardsley ([2], chs. I and XI) has urged? The answer must come from a theory of the nature of art. If one believed that art is essentially a cognitive tool, although different in certain ways from science, then one would posit a prescriptive aesthetic which directed the spectator to take certain stances so as to allow art to perform its cognitive task. If, on the other hand, one believed that art was a vehicle to a certain kind of non-cognitive or affective experience, then one would develop a prescriptive aesthetic to help spectators have this sort of experience.

The nature of literature for Aristotle is to bring into sharp focus the moral qualities of humans. Any Aristotelean prescriptive aesthetic with respect to literature must be such as to allow specators to see the nature of literature. I shall expound on this shortly, but what I shall call the Aristotelean prescriptive aesthetic-Aristotelean, not Aristotle's, for I introduce it to solve a puzzle in Aristotle, not as exegesis of some passage or other-has already been set out descriptively in this essay. The Aristotelean prescriptive aesthetic directs the readers of certain texts to ignore any reference to actual, particular persons which some person-names might make; to set about constructing the appropriate artistic kinds, and from these, the appropriate persons in action for each of'the person-names in those texts; and finally to combine these persons in action into a plot.

Twentieth-century aesthetic attitude theories are the most fully developed prescriptive aesthetics available. It will be worthwhile to review their essential structure. The pivotal feature of their


structure-and the feature which has attracted the most criticism (see Dickie [6], chs. 4-6)-is their introduction of a certain mental state, the aesthetic attitude, variously described as "distanced" (Bullough [3]), "disinterested" (Stolnitz [18]), and "prehending" (Aldrich [1]). The reason such mental states are introduced is that the nature of art, which for the aesthetic attitude theorists is the possession of aesthetic properties, is not revealed until the aesthetic attitude is trained on the artwork. This leads to the second feature of the structure of aesthetic attitude theories: that the nature of art, here conceived of as the possession of aesthetic properties, is emergent. What it means for an aesthetic property to be emergent varies from theory to theory. Bullough and Stolnitz seem to hold that aesthetic properties go, so to speak, unnoticed until one assumes the proper amount of distance or becomes sufficiently and correctly disinterested. Aldrich seems to hold that aesthetic properties are created when the mind, in its attitude of prehending (an elaboration of Wittgenstein's "seeing as") perceptually interacts with the artwork. The third feature of aesthetic attitude theories is virtually implied by the first two, and this is that the prescription that the aesthetic attitude should be directed towards artworks, as the correct mode of appreciating them.

Aristotle is not concerned with aesthetic properties, at least as these have been conceived of by aesthetic attitude theorists. The closest he gets to a modern notion of aesthetic properties is in his discussion of diction and metaphor in chs. XIX - XXII of the Poetics. These must be taken as remarks on some of the accidental, albeit interesting, features of literature, for literature may lack the aesthetic qualities of diction and metaphor and still remain literature.

Furthermore, the Aristotelean prescriptive aesthetic I have out- lined does not possess the pivotal feature of aesthetic attitude theories, namely their insistence that there is a unique mental state which is uniquely suitable for permitting the aesthetic properties of art to emerge. The mental state which the Aristotelean prescriptive aesthetic asks the reader to bring to the literary artwork is his capacity to engage in moral reasoning and moral evaluation and his knowledge of the rules of probability and inevitability. There is nothing peculiarly "aesthetic" about this capacity; in fact, I have been at some pains to indicate that it is like real-life moral reasoning.

But the Aristotelean prescriptive aesthetic is a distant ancestor of twentieth-century aesthetic attitude theories, for it shares their insistence that the nature of art is emergent contingent upon some active audience participation, and that this active participation should be engaged in with respect to works of literature as the correct mode of appreciation.

Artistic kinds, persons in action, and plots seem not to be the actual

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semantical properties of texts. They are not implied by the meanings of the sentences in the text. The descriptions of Achilles running into battle do not imply that he was courageous. That he was courageous is a moral evaluation on the part of the reader. In fact, the real semantical properties of literature may not be any different from the real semantical properties of histories. This, I take it, is the final lesson to be drawn from Aristotle's almost causal claim that the tragedians wrote about real persons.

Rather, artistic kinds, persons in action, and plots are emergent semantical properties. An emergent semantical property is a property which is not part of the ordinary sense or reference of a piece of discourse-a name, a term, or a sentence-but which can be constructed in a rule-governed fashion and ascribed to that piece of discourse. These rules are given by the Aristotelean prescriptive aesthetic.

Although we can speak loosely about a person-name as denoting a certain artistic kind or person in action, we would do better (at least when philosophizing) to qualify ourselves and to speak of a person- name as A-denoting (for Aristotle) such and such an artistic kind or person in action, and of the work as A-denoting such and such plot. A person-name, N, A-denotes a artistic kind, K, just in case some reader of the text in which N is embedded correctly follows the Aristotelean prescriptive aesthetic and constructs K by applying his moral reasoning to the fictitious incidents constructed around N. A-denotation for persons in action and plots in similarly defined, with the addition of knowledge about the rules of probability and inevitability and unity.

We have only solved half the problem, however, for in proposing the Aristotelean prescriptive aesthetic as a method for ascribing persons in action and plots to texts I havejettisoned interpretation (B). We are left without an interpretation of Aristotle's definition, and a serious problem. Not every text can turn out to be a literary artwork, for the work of Herodotus, to use Aristotle's illustration, is still history. There is nothing in the Aristotelean prescriptive aesthetic itself that rules against its being trained on the work of Herodotus and transforming that into a work of literature. It has been argued (see, for example, Coleman [5]) that a text is literature or not depending on how it is read. This is not Aristotle's position, for he wants to make some sharp distinction, or as sharp a distinction as can be made, between texts which are works of literature and texts which are not. It initially appeared that this distinction was to be made by examining the semantical properties of texts, but this way is no longer open to us. We want to know what it is about some texts which makes them particularly susceptible to being read according to the Aristotelean prescriptive aesthetic. I shall refer to this susceptibility as the "literary potential" of a text, and shall advance this final interpretation of Aristotle's definition:


(D) A text is a literary artwork just in case that text has a relatively high degree of literary potential, and a text is a work of non-literature just in case it has a relatively low degree of literary potential.

When does a text have a relatively high literary potential? I shall discuss three marks of high literary potential. The first is obvious. For a text to be read as being about persons in action, it must contain person-names. This mark rules out works of economics, physics, math- ematics, most philosophy, geography, chemistry, and the like from being literature. While this is intuitively correct and in line with what Aristotle wants, we are still faced with the problem of separating War and Peace from A History of the Modern World, given that each contains the same person-name, "Napoleon."

On "characterization" Aristotle writes, "Words and action express character ... if they bring out a moral choice, and the character is good if the choice is right" (1454a 17-19). The point here is that words in literature must bring out a moral choice, and I wish to contrast bringing out with stating. We use samples and examples to bring out; we use assertion to state. I can describe to you what an opera is if you have never seen one. Or, I can take you to a performance of an opera. Samples are physical objects which are made to stand for a class of things, and a sample is a sample of those things which it both stands for and shares the relevant properties of. Exarnplesare given in language. They are descriptions of possible or actual cases. It is sometimes simply more expedient to describe a case rather than to produce an actual physical instance of one. Moral philosophy is rife with examples, from Plato's story of the ring of Gyges to Judith Thomson's case of the kidnapped man who wakes up connected with the famous violinist as his life support system. Like physical samples, examples are made to stand for a class of things and to share their relevant properties. Plato's case stands for a class of situations where being immoral apparently makes one happy, and Thomson's for a class of situations in which one finds oneself causally though involuntarily responsible for the life of another. I can state moral principles ("Never treat a person as a mere means"), use these principles in moral arguments (". . . and therefore no one can force you to oblige the violinist"), or express opinions on moral matters ("I think you are not obligated to remain connected with the violinist"). Such pieces of discourse are statings, not examples.

Samples and examples are exercises in abstraction. To see the point of the sample or example-that is, to see what it is a sample or example of-one must form a hypothesis about the members of the class which the sample is supposed to stand for. This hypothesis must be tested against the sample or example for fit, and some of the specific

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features of the sample or example might be ignored in order to fit one hypothesis, or brought in in order to fit another. A red square might be a sample of red things or of squares or of red squares, depending on what specific features of the sample are ignored or not. Understanding a sample or example is an audience participation activity. The hearer or reader of an assertion must exercise his command of the language and bring to bear his previous beliefs in order to understand an assertion, but the process of construction hypothesis about what samples or examples stand for demands a wider range of audience activity. Seeing the sample or understanding the sentences of an example is but a prelude to the process of bringing out the class of things which the sample or example stands for.

Science or philosophy will use both samples and examples, but it will typically tell us what these stand for. It will do our hypothesis constructing for us. The physicist does not only do an experiment, he interprets it, tells us what it shows about a class of things, and which things it shows this about. The anthropologist, sociologist, or psychol- ogist gathers data and interprets them. He doesn't just describe the behavior of this or that group, of this or that kind of man; he tells us what this shows about this group or that kind.

The poet, on the contrary, does not interpret. He shows us a "kind of man" but what kind or what he shows us is left up to the ingenuity of the reader to discover. The poet is like the physicist who performs an experiment in full view of the class, and then leaves it to his students to say what the experiment shows about what; or like Kierkegaard who thought philosophy was best done by letting the reader figure out for himself the point of the parable. Shakespeare does not interpret Othello for us, as Freud would have if Othello had come to his couch. Shakesepare gives a marvously rich example of a kind of man, but leaves it to the reader to say what this kind of man is and what this example shows about this kind.

From these remarks we can see that the second mark of high literary potential is a lack of interpretation in a text: if, that is, that text involves its characters in a series of events but does not tell us the moral significance of those events for that character. A text has high literary potential only if it makes us look for the class which it is giving an example of, only if it "brings out" a moral choice.

This second mark of literary potential suggests a third. For an example to be worth interpreting, it must be of sufficiently rich complexity. An example, like Plato's story of the ring of Gyges, which virtually wears its meaning on its sleeve, would seem to have lower literary potential than Shakespeare's Othello, which is endlessly inter- pretable. If literature is to have an interesting moral function, it must be prepared to introduce us to kinds of persons which we have perhaps


some real-life acquaintance with but which we have not yet considered their moral nature clearly. Examples give us access to situations which we would not ordinarily come across, if only because a literary example gives us so much material that would be inaccessible to us in our ordinary day-to-day dealings with persons. Molly Bloom's final sol- iloquoy from Joyce's Ulysses lets us hear what a woman of a certain sort thinks, feels, and believes about love and sex and men, thoughts which are ordinarily (and in the novel as well) denied even to husbands.

Aristotle suggests that literature has a pedagogic function in his remarks on the origins of poetry in Ch. IV:

... [TIhe sight of'certain things gives us pain, but we enjoy looking at the most exact images of' them, whether the forms of' animals which we greatly despise or of corpses. The reason is that learning things is most enjoyable, not only for philosophers but for others equally, though they have but little experience of it. Hence they enjoy the sight of' images because they learn as they look; they reason what each image is, that there, for example, is that man whom we know. If a man does not know the original, the imitation as such gives him no pleasure; his pleasure is then derived from its worksmanship, its color, or some similiar reason. (1448b 10_19)

There seems to be two distinct explanations of why we take pleasure in imitations of ugly things. The first is that "we reason what each image is" and then find delight in learning something about an actual particular instance of that type. The second is in delight from its "workmanship"-what we might today refer to as its purely aesthetic properties. Someone who took delight in workmanship would not have read the text according to the Aristotelean prescriptive aesthetic, and to that extent would not take delight in the text as a work of literature. The relevant literary delight is from "learning as one looks," and this delight gets explained by deeming it to be a species of the delight which one takes in learning anything.

What does one learn, and how does one learn it? Aristotle, I think, conflates two sorts of answers to the first part of the question by giving one sort of answer to the last. What one can learn, to use the terminol- ogy developed in this essay, is either that such and such person in action is possible (e.g., that such heroism as Odysseus's or such intimate self- acceptance as Molly Bloom's could be); or that such and such person in action has an actual instance: "that man whom we know." By "the original" Aristotle might have meant an actual instance of a person in action, and he might be suggesting that one learns that such and such a person in action is possible by learning that it has an actual instance- that this actual person's heroism is like Odysseus' or that actual person's self-acceptance is like Molly Bloom's.

This may be a happy conflation, for it suggests that literature is not

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the investigation of extreme possibilities of human behavior, but rather that what we learn from reading literature in the correct Aristotelean way is something about real-life poeple. "If a man does not know the original," the imitation as such gives only pleasure "derived from its workmanship," not the pleasure which comes from a learning experience of the possibilities of human moral character, possibilities which are not remote but which are instanced in "that man whom we know." Here Aristotle clearly parts company with Plato, who thought that art would offer too many of the wrong moral possibilities and possibly sway citizens of the Republic away from the straight and narrow. Aristotle is more the empirical observer of behavior, more willing to separate the learning experience associated with the moral evaluation of character from the imperative to act on that moral evaluation.

The learning potential of a text ought to be a mark of its literary potential, and so I shall say that the third mark of literary potential is whether a text offers a person in action or plot of sufficiently rich complexity so that a person who trained the Aristotelean prescriptive aesthetic on it would be rewarded by learning something about human moral character which he did not know before.

I shall say that the three marks of literary potential are individually necessary for a text to have a relatively high degree of literary potential. I do not think them jointly sufficient, for they do not make reference to the sort of unity that Aristotle requires of literature, and on that issue I shall leave us as much in the dark as Aristotle himself does.

The third mark of literary potential may be thought to be too strong, or even un-Aristotelean, since there is a strong descriptivist tendency in Aristotle to make the classification of texts conform to our ordinary ideas of what a work of literary art is. It might be thought, therefore, that even if the ordinary best-seller does not teach anything new about the possibilities for moral behavior-pick any Mickey Spil- lane or Jacqueline Susann at random-still, we should countenance it as literary art, although of a rather impoverished sort. While I agree that Aristotle is relying strongly on our intuitions about what should and should not count as literature, I would urge that our ordinary notion of the literary artwork contains an evaluative element, and that the learning experience which the third mark describes is part of our ordinary concept of literature. As a compromise, I suggest that the three marks are individually necessary for a relatively high degree of literary potential, but that only the first two are individually necessary for some degree of literary potential.

This completes our investigation into Aristotle's definition of poetry. The goal of this essay was to set out an interpretation of the chapter IX definition which avoided the apparent contradiction ad- duced at the beginning. I feel I have produced an interpretation which


avoids this contradiction and has the minimal virtue of being not inconsistent with what Aristotle elsewhere says in the Poetics. Whether it has the higher virtue of eking out what Aristotle "truly meant" no one, I think, can say. Whether it has the highest virtue of a theory, truth in its own right, the correct definition of the literary artwork, I leave as an exercise to the reader.5

REFERENCES

[1] Virgil Aldrich, Philosophy of Art (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963). [2] Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York:

Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1958). [3] Edward Bullough, "'Psychical Distance' as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Princi-

ple," British Journal of Psychology, 5(1912): 87-98. [4] S. H. Butcher, Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art (New York: Dover Publica-

tions, 1951). [5] Francis X. J. Coleman, "A Few Observations on Fictional Discourse," Language and

Aesthetics: Contributions to the Philosophy of Art, ed. Benjamin R. Tilghman (Lawr- ence, Kansas: The University Press of Kansas, 1973).

[6] George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974). [7] Gerald F. Else,Aristotle's Poetics: The Argument (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-

sity Press, 1957). [8] Leon Golden and 0. B. Harrison, Jr., Aristotle's Poetics (Edgewood Cliffs, NJ:

Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968). [9] Nelson Goodman, Language of Art (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1968).

[10] G. M. A. Grube,Aristotle on Poetry and Style (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1968). [11] Emil A. Gutheil, Music and Your Emotions: A Practical Guide to Music Selections

Associated with Desired Emotional Responses(London: Liveright, 1952). [12] David Lewis, "Truth in Fiction,"American Philosophical Quarterly, 15(1978): 37-46. [13] D. W. Lucas, Aristotle: Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). [14] Margaret Macdonald, "The Language of Fiction," Proceedings of the Aristotelean

Society, Supplementary Volume XXVII (1954): 165-84. [15] C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning 8th ed. (New York:

Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1946). [16] Alvin Plantinga, "The Free Will Defense," Philosophy in America, ed. Max Black

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965). [17] George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936). [18] Jerome Stolnitz, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art Criticism (New York: Houghton

Mifflin Co., 1960). [19] J. A. K. Thomson, The Ethics of Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics (New York:

Penguin Books, 1953). [20] William K. Wimsatt,Jr. and Monroe Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy," Philoso-

phy Looks at the Arts, ed. Joseph Margolis (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962).

NOTES

1All translations of the Poetics are by G. M. A. Grube [ 10]. Reference for exact quotes is provided only when the quote is mentioned for the first time. Reference to thoughts or paraphrases of Aristotle is generally given by citing the chapter in Roman numerals.

2Such a view has been held by David Lewis [ 12]. 3This variation is given by Alvin Plantinga [ 16], who puts it to a use other than the

analysis of fictional entities. My formulation of the definitions of "artistic kind," "person in action," and "plot" owes much to Plantinga's article.

4All translations of the Nicomachean Ethics are by J. A. K. Thomson [ 19]. 5I wish to thank the editor and referee of NOUS for taking what I consider extraor-

dinary pains to improve earlier versions of this essay.

Aristotle definition of poetry, by robert j. yanal

Education

charles scribners

cornell university

aesthetic

aesthetic

aristotelean

life human

high literary

prescriptive