Essays on Aristotle's "Poetics", and: Aristotle's "'Poetics": The Poetry of Philosophy (review)

Abstract

992 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 32:2 APRIL 1994 surely miss their particular hobbyhorses. However, a lacuna perhaps worth pointing out is that the basic "meta-questions" of the methodology of our Plato interpretation, which will have to be fundamentally reconsidered sooner or later, are not really discussed in this book. Probably we are not yet ready to envisage this complex within the frame of a single dialogue (as can be seen, for instance, in the section on "Relative Chronology"). Taken together, the contributions may seem to illustrate the chaotic flux of present-day Platonic studies. However, as an attempt to bring together parts of a very dissonant chorus, to make scholars listen to what others have to say and, perhaps, to start a discussion on a much larger scale than before, the initiative of Livio Rossetti and his Advisory Committee (Julia Annas, Giuseppe Cambiano, Thomas A. Szlez;tk) deserves much praise. The book is well and solidly produced, thanks to the efforts of the Academia Verlag and the first editors of this new series (L. Brisson, L. Rossetti, C. J. Rowe). HOLGER THESLEFF University of Helsinki Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, editor. Essays on Aristotle's "Poetics." Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Pp. xii + 435. Cloth, $69.50. Paper, $19.95. Michael Davis. Aristotle's "'Poetics": The Poetry of Philosophy. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 199~. Pp. xviii + 183. Cloth, $55.00. Paper, $19.95. What can Aristotle's Poetics teach us about the relationship between the beauty of Greek tragedy, its philosophical significance, and its ethical and political relevance? The great virtue of the two books under review here (with the exception of a few essays in the Rorty collection) is that they insist upon treating this as an open question. As a result, they challenge the scholarly consensus that Aristotle failed, for one reason or another, to do justice to the complexity of tragic drama. Michael Davis's deeply imaginative commentary begins with a presupposition that is familiar in Plato studies but is all too rarely applied to Aristotelian texts, namely, that Aristotle's works are like tragic dramas or musical compositions in that their parts are unintelligible in separation from the whole. Approached in this way, he believes, the Poetics reveals itself to be self-consciously concerned with clarifying the nature of interpretation in general. Davis's thesis is that the Poetics is at bottom an inquiry into the fundamental structure of human action and the nature of reason. This inquiry is embedded in a discussion of poetry because it turns out that action and thought share the form of poetic mimesis (imitation or representation). When we act, we first represent to ourselves our action as completed. "All action is therefore imitation of [imagined ] action; it is poetic" (9)- But if action is mimetic, so too is thinking. Our human urge "to see past the surface of things" (3) finds satisfaction in mimesis, which involves "learn[ing] and reason[ing] about [sullogidzesthai] what each thing is" (Poet. 1448ba617 ). Mimesis has the foi'm of thought, for sullogidzesthai, putting "this" together with "that" so as to see this as that, is the essence of thinking. Alternadvely, thinking is nOOK REVI~.WS ~93 fundamentally mimetic: "to say 'this is that' one must first think this as independent from that." This initial process of "framing objects in the world--setting them apart from what surrounds them" is nothing other than poetic representation, which amounts to "separating something from other things so as to give it a certain wholeness " (~7). Finally, poetry, thinking, and doing or acting all necessarily unfold in time. This means that poetic m/mzs/s and thinking operate under the same constraint: poetry, like any logos or account, "must present the parts of things as independent of one another even when it means to demonstrate their necessary connection" (x5). The preceding insights allow for a compelling account of the major elements of tragedy, including beauty (to kabn), katharsis, and tragic error (hamart/a). Beauty is an idealized distillation of reality that sometimes results when, in an attempt to see this as that, we cut something out of the complex continuum of experience by placing artificial boundaries...