Author

Dr. Reynolds

Eros

Prologue: Apollodorus to a companion (unclear who it is):

Tells a story about being hailed by Aristademus. Aristedemus wants to know about a banquet Appollodorus attended.

Imitation and Aesthetic Judgment

Speeches in honor of Eros.

  • Phaedrus

  • Pausinias

  • Eryximachus

  • Aristophanes

  • Agathon

  • Socrates

  • Alcibiades

Phaedrus

Eros is a god without parents and gives the greatest goods

  • The greatest good is a worthy lover and a beloved

  • Because the beloved makes the lover ambitious.

  • A beautiful life is only characterized by what the beloved provides to the lover.

Pausinias

  • Eros is two because without Aphrodite, there is no Eros.

  • Vulgar and Sanctified Eros

  • Because all actions are neither beautiful or ugly

What is Aristotle’s response to Plato’s various critiques?

  • Religious

  • Moralistic

  • Psychological

  • Political

Understanding Greek Poetry

Understanding Art

  • Observing paintings, novels, plays, stories, films, etc.

  • What are they made of,

  • how do they work

  • what purposes do they serve

  • what are the means by which they serve these purposes

  • how do people understand and appreciate them

  • What roles do they play in our collective historical and collective histories?

  • Through a technical analysis, we see other questions begin to emerge.

  • Their metaphysical constituents, theories of language, and knowledge.

1. Definitions

Defining poetry as a general category of representational arts, or mimesis. This category includes visual arts, poetry, music, and dancing.

We begin with three categories of inquiry.

2. Historical Precedent

The second recognition by Aristotle, is that Poetry has a history.

  • A part of that history includes literary criticism, and literary history for instance.

  • He views this history in the contexts of other cultural evolutionary markers such as the cultural evolution of tragedy and comedy.

  • Mimesis, is an approach to art criticism which did not begin with Aristotle.

3. Establishing Genre Boundaries

The third element of this work includes the establishment and employment of genre.

  • For Aristotle, genre is a scheme of enquiry that seeks to provide conditions through which mimetic concepts such as media, mimetic objects, and modes are delimited. In other words, he develops:

  • Conditions for categorizing this class of object

  • Concepts that relate to this class of object

  • Modes of inquiry in which to explore items in this class of object

asserts the significance of formal design and unity for both the composition and the appreciation of literary works, and to offer a conception of artistic form which relates it to the organic forms crucial to his understanding of nature. [(hall95?), 10; 50b34-51a6]

  • Although we might call this approach ‘formalist’, a question arises about the necessity of genre concepts inferred in a particular mimetic example.

    • For instance, he references Plato’s analysis of mimetic modes in Ch. III of this work.

    • However, for Aristotle, mimesis is an attempt to understand the broader world, by reference to the human propensity to represent human experiences through fictive representation, and imaginative reenactment.

    • In this way, Aristotle likely hopes to connect art to human nature as a capacity for human desire to understand universal concepts whether moral, religious, ethical, or relational.

Mimesis, imitation

The way we begin to look at Aristotle’s project, is by first understanding who his audience is and what they know.

There are several points here. First, his audience will likely be familiar with Plato. They will know something about his forms, his disdain for the artists, etc.

Next, they will likely be familiar with the artistic examples that Plato condemns. Perhaps however, they, much like us may have questions as to what his critique of these art forms actually were.

And as such, this is where we begin.

Poetry as a subject

Epic, Tragedy, Comedy, Dithyrambic, flute and lyre playing

Ilyliad, Odyssey, Metamorphosis, apparently “the mime of Sophron or Xenarchus”. The works of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Empedocles. They would also have been familiar with Plato’s works such as the Phaedrus and the Symposium for instance.

First difference: Rhythm, language, harmony.

Harmony and rhythm by themselves correlate with flute and lyre playing. But imagine the lyre or flute without harmony or rhythm, e.g., imitative piping. It would seem that here, there is a difference in the object of representation, the object that is being represented. The way in which the object is represented, and the means through which it is represented.

There are three different possibilities with respect to imitation.

Means, Manner, and Object

Means of Imitation

Consider some categories:

Rhythm but without harmony, drum and dance for instance.

Language without rhythm or harmony, speech and rhetoric. Or language with rhythm but not harmony.

Even if a theory of medicine or physical philosophy be put forth in a metrical form, it is usual to describe the writer in this way;

There are, lastly, certain other arts, which combine all the means enumerated, rhythm, melody, and verse, e.g. Dithyrambic and Gnomic (verses of short characteristically wise sayings) poetry, Tragedy and Comedy;

Form vs. Content

How do we accurately depict life? What is the best way to tell a story?

This leads to the second difference . . .

Actions with respect to characters, good or bad.

The objects the imitator represents are actions, with agents who are necessarily either good men or bad – the diversities of human char acter being nearly always derivative from this primary distinction, since the line between virtue and vice is one dividing the whole of mankind. (1448a)

  • What are the appropriate objects of representation

  • Appropriate ways we should represent these objects?

  • The actions of good and bad men

  • Attributing character to the actions of men

The manner in which it is represented.

Narrative vs character, choose one, or represent dramatically.

The three differences are means, objects, and manner.

Imitation as Telos

Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals beings this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world.

He also delights in works of imitation.

  • realistic representations, even if they go against our desires.

Types

Epic poetry, tragedy, comedy, dithyrambic poetry, flute playing, lyre playing = modes of imitation

The three main differences

Each type of poetry (art) differ from the other in three ways

  1. Means of imitation

  2. Objects of representation

  3. Manner of their imitations

Is epic poetry denoted by 1, and 2, but not 3?

A brief

A combination of harmony and rhythm alone is the means in flute-playing and lyre-playing, and any other arts there may be of the same description, e.g. imitative piping. Rhythm alone, without harmony, is the means in the dancer’s imitations; for even he, by the rhythms of his attitudes, may represent men’s characters, as well as what they do and suffer.

Species of Imitation

Harmony Rhythm Language
Imitative Piping Dance Speech, Rhetoric
Harmony Imitative Piping flute-playing
Rhythm Dance
Language Speech, Rhetoric