Poetry and Equity: Aristotle's Defense of Fiction

Abstract

Reading the Poetics in light of Aristotle's most complete statements of equity in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Rhetoric, this essay undertakes to demonstrate how and why Aristotle develops an art of poetry within the context of a science of ethics. It seeks to show, that is, how in direct response to Plato's epistemological and ethical objections to tragedy, Aristotle's argument for the preservation of the literary arts follows from a fundamental conviction that poetry shares not only its object of inquiry but also its method of inquiry with the ethical and legal sciences. Like moral philosophy or ethics, tragedy investigates human action. To this end, it relies on the mechanism of ‘fiction’ (πoíησις), which clearly emerges in the course of the Poetics as the literary counterpart to ‘equity’ in the disciplines of ethics and law. As logical constructs, both fiction and equity are designed to qualify ethical action by negotiating between universal propositions — the general ethical presuppositions of the poet's audience or the advocate's legal code — and particular circumstances — the details of the plot or the events of the individual legal case.