THE CRISIS OF GREEK POETICS: A RE-INTERPRETATION

MICHAEL MURRAY

We are familiar enough with the notion that in the time of Plato and Aristotle a crisis in the Greek understanding of poetry takes place. In this paper I shall argue that the traditional picture of the nature of this crisis is a mis-interpretation and offer a better interpretation in its place. Beginning with Plato's dialogue Ion, I shall examine the relations between art and knowledge, the human and the divine, poetry and philosophy. This serves to re-o,rient the interpretation of Platonic poetics and allows us to look more freely at the other works. I shall argue that, commonplaces not with- standing, Plato's theory of art is a non-mimetic view of art, and that while Aristotle's view is a mimetic theory, the real crisis of Greek poetics lies much less in Plato's critique of poetry than in Aristotle's radical transvalua- tion. Far from being an insensitive repudiation of poetry, Plato gives us a most sophisticated and impassioned presentation of poetry honoring its traditional importance and channeling it in new directions. Plato thus re- mains more continuous with the ancient Greek feeling for poetry than does Aristotle who, under the guise of a distillation of empirical data, engages in a systematic devaluation of Greek poetry and deals it a serious blow.

1 The Stone o[ Heraclea: Plato's Ion

A widespread assumption held by literary critics and by many philos- ophers of art is that classical theory only seriously begins with Aristotle's Poetics. Essential to this view is a negative appraisal of Plato's significance for the theory of art.1 The standard image of Plato holds full sway among

1 For sample illustrations of the conventional view of Plato and of the eontrastive pairing with Aristotle, see William Wimsatt, "Aristotle's Answer" (i.e. to Plato), Ch. 2 of Literary Criticism: A Short History (1959), and John Jones, On Aristotleand Greek Tragedy (1962), who writes: "Plato is here the revolutionary, directing his polemic against the immemorial paedeutic role of poetry; whereas Aristotle, in the Poetics, expounds and defends a refined traditionalism" (p. 52; ep. pp. 21-24). These stereo- typed interpretations sometime derive support from Plato translators as in H. D. Lee's version of The Republic (1953), p. 370 (notes) and are accepted almost as a matter of course by historians of philosophy, for example by W. T. Jones, A History of Western Philosophy, 2nd edition (1969), vol. I, pp. 192-195 and by Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy (Image Edition, 1962), vol. I, part II, p. 101. For more of the same see Theodore M. Greene, The Arts and the Art of Criticism (1940), p. 234; F. S. C. Northrup, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities (1947) (Meridian Edition, 1959), pp. 182-184; in his passing allusion to Aristotle, "Implied Truths in Literature," John Hospers, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (1960), vol.

174 The Journal of Value Inquiry

contemporary critics - including W. K. Wimsatt, Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Ren6 Wellek, Austin Warren, and Murray Krieger - as a passage from the Brooks-Wimsatt history o~ criticism illus- trates: "The student of poetry need not be really much concerned to enlist Plato on the side of poetry, nor much discomfitted to believe that on the whole Plato disapproves of poetry. Plato may conveniently be taken as the representative of an impressive and fairly coherent system of anti-poetic."

Although the Ion does not manifest Plato's sole thinking on the nature of poetry, and could not since that issue involves his entire philosophy, this dialogue is capable of opening up a proper understanding of the more no- torious judgments voiced in the Republic, the Phaedo, and the Laws. One can recognize in the Ion the germ of the heightened, much-vaunted difficulty of modem poetics and poetry. Yet the Ion is a dramatic dialogue rather than a treatise or journalistic report, and if we are to speak legitimately of a Pla- tonic theory of art, we must enter into its movement of thought. Perhaps the most important restraint which the interpreter must exercise is that o~ not identifying the author's meaning with that of his extraordinary leading char- acter, Socrates, any more than one can identify Shakespeare in Hamlet. The ostensible theme of Plato's dialogical thinking in the case before us is the person and work of one of the earliest interpreters in the Western world.

19, p. 37; and Paul Weiss, Nine Basic Arts (1961) where the traditional mis-represen- tation is expressed with clarity: "Art [according to P la to ] . . . deserves to be criticized by anyone who takes truth and politics seriously. But it is questionable whether art distorts rather than presents truth, and it is questionable whether one ought to take politics so seriously that whatever conflicts with it must be censored or rejected" (p. 32). The stereotype is evident in the well-known anthology Philosophies of Art and Beauty (1964), ed. with notes by Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns, pp. xv, 4, 78-79, or another by Peyton Richter, Perspectives in Aesthetics (1967), pp. 3-4, 7, 27-29, 54, 57.

2 Literary Criticism: A Short History (1959), p. 9. The Plato chapter is primarily by Wimsatt. For the view that Plato abhorred a poetry of contrast and conflict, see Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon (1965), p. 274, an assertion based on disregard of context in which dialectic, as the supreme art, is in essence contrast, conflict, and dynamic harmony. Ransom and Tote join in attacking Platonism as the destroyer of poetry. Krieger implies the standard image when he states that those interested in the de- fense rather than abolition of poetry may safely ignore the critical side of Platonic theory (The New Apologists (1963), p. 177); as also do Ren6 Wellek and Austin War- ren, Theory o] Literature (1949), p. 23. He further claims that Plato finds poetry lacking in capacity to yield "propositional truth" (p. 170), yet later he correctly redescribes the indictment as one "ascribed to the Plato of The Republic" (p. 182). But the ambivalence that Krieger in a footnote acknowledges does not reflect anything so crude as Plato the rationalist versus Plato the mystic (p. 175). He is sensitive to Wim- satt's exaggeration of Aristotle's beneficent protection of the poetic word (The Play and Place of Criticism (1967), p. 187). These critics are merely echoing a literary and philosophical commonplace in interpretations of Plato. Krieger maintains that he and Wimsatt use Platonist in the same sense - as "a defender of doctrine in poetry" (Ibid., p. 214). For the same general view of Plato see M. H. Abrams, "Theories of Poetry," Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1965), p. 640.

The Crisis of Greek Poetics 175

Ion specializes in Homer, that singularly important poet for Plato and the Greek world, and thus an author of major hnportance. In addition he claims to be without equal in his field; excluding all possible competitors, Ion de- clares that no one "who ever lived had so many reflections, or such fine ones, to present on Homer as I have" (530d). When queried whether his skill extends to other poets as well, he replies, "No, only in regard to Homer, that seems enough to me." Socrates had not asked to what Department of Comparative Literature he belonged but only about other Greek poets at hand. But other poets, says Ion, make him drowsy (532c). The dull edge of Socrates' question we immediately note is matched by a hidden and sharper edge. This cutting edge is the fact that Plato is jockeying for Homer's position as the poet's poet and the educator of the Greeks, just as Socrates wants to supplant Achilles, their greatest hero (Apol. 28). It is essential to take Socrates seriously as a dramatic character if we are to see how Plato exposes the foundations of poetics.

Socrates adduces, gently, examples from other critics of painting, sculp- ture and flute-playing, which show that their attitudes or skills differ from Ion's. They do not fall asleep when they hear a new work, and their re- flections extend quite naturally to many comparative judgments. Noteworthy is that Socrates believes there do exist such critics; that in fact such men of judgment are as common as can be expected. As a solution to this puzzle Socrates suggests that Ion must achieve his excellence by some means other than art and knowledge. Each time he repeats this conjecture, Socrates chooses the expression "art and knowledge" (techn~ kai epist~m~) (432c; 541e; 536c), or at other times he contrasts Ion's capacity with art or tech- n~ alone (533e; 534c) in which cases knowledge is implied. At this stage, in any case, it is clear that art and knowledge, whatever may divide them, complement and in some sense arise from a common ground.

In the Platonic dialogues generally, art denotes the central order of human activity, not only for the poet, painter, and musician, but also for the car- penter, politician, farmer, doctor, hunter, fisherman, warrior (Phil. 56; Statesm. 304e; Soph. 219-221; Gorg. 464a); the work of the critical inter- preter is also counted among the arts (Ion 531c). Art is not defined for Plato as something over and opposed to some other fundamental mode of ac- tivity, as it is for Aristotle in his scheme of the sciences. If art, then, is the supreme genus of human activity, then poetry, interpretation, and philosophy share a common dimension. Let us term this the horizontal dimension. In some ways philosophy is like interpretation because it is comprehensive; it tries to explain and search the full range of phenomena. With of course the important exception of Ion, the interpreter, too, scans the horizon of the extant works. To understand Ion's case properly, we must note two things; first, that as interpreter of Homer, a universal poet, he interprets the full range of being revealed by Homer. Though Homer occupies a privileged place, poetry itself has no specific subject matter or region as its special purview, but is characterized by comprehensiveness. The second fact about Ion that we must recognize is that the dialogue is primarily oriented toward

176 The Journal of Value Inquiry

disclosing not the horizontal but the vertical dimension. In speaking of art as a human activity (as we do) we omit something. We need to think about the sense in which poetry and interpreting are not arts, to see the tension and even opposition between art (techn~) and the poetic or vertical dimen- sion (poi~sis). Socrates thus suggests a new perspective: what Ion does is neither true art nor true knowledge; we have tried to comprehend Ionic skill on the wrong basis (human). Rather some divine power is at work controlling him like a magnet or the so-called "Stone of Heraclea" (533d), At this point Socrates himself uses the magnet as a conceit by which he controls the whole discussion. The figure consists in a chain (not linked in the usual way) of three iron rings, each suspended through the force of the other, ultimately contingent on the lodestone for its source of power (533e). Power radiates from the divine, and the names of Orpheus and Musaeus are mentioned, although the exact relation between the divine and these par- ticular gods is left ambiguous. The poets of the first ring are those mortals directly possessed; the second ring includes Ion and all those who are possessed directly by the poet and indirectly by the god. Finally the re- mainder of men, the public who rely on the rhapsode to interpret the poet for them dramatically and exegetically, form the third ring. The poet himself is accordingly the interpreter of the gods. It should not escape attention that in offering this conceit Socrates, too, interprets the gods.

The next important event is the famous metaphor used to convey the particular activity undergone by the god's interpreter. The poet, like the bee, is "a light and winged and holy thing, never able to compose until he has become inspired and is beside himself, and reason is no. longer in him" (534b). Both metaphors reveal the inadequacy of viewing art solely in terms of a technical aspect interposed between poetry on the one side, and "art and knowledge" on the other. Poetry communicates the divine but abandons human ways and means; art is knowledge but only human know- ledge. The vertical dimension - "inspiration" - refers to the origin and ground of poetic art. Yet this result by no means points to the meaning of the dialogue as a whole. A passage occurs that is easily overlooked because it is interwoven among superficial agreements which Socrates ostensibly aims at eliciting from Ion. Yet here the main themes intersect. Socrates asks: "Each art, then, has had assigned to it by the deity the power of knowing a particular occupation? I take it that what we know by the pilot's art we do not know in the art of medicine" (537c; italics added). Socrates has disguised the real issue with a semblance of dialectical progress, even though in doing so another kind is made possible. Nowhere in the dialogue was it established that the powers of "artistic" knowing are assigned by a deity or that it concerns deity, nor may it be legitimately inferred or presupposed. In fact, the reader so far has been led to think that this is a contradiction; poetry was distinguished from art or science inasmuch as it was uniquely related to the d/vine, and through it the hierarchy of hangers-on: dramatic interpreter and listener. Socrates offers a question, not a proposition, and yet permits no answer because he immediately interjects his statement about

The Crisis of Greek Poetics 177

piloting and medicine (arts of great metaphorical sense for Plato). With this statement Ion concurs, but he is quite unaware_of the twist in the discourse. The statement resembles a justification for an affirmative answer to the question; but as such it is non sequitur and only illustrative. This fact is cer- tainly recognized by Socrates; a few lines later as though to give the respon- dent a second chance, he repeats the point about knowing different things by different arts. Then he asks what he correctly terms "a prior question": "You admit that there are differences among arts?" (537d). He receives an admis- sion, but the ground of these differences is left unquestioned.

The remaining third of the dialogue, marked by the above noted turn, shows Socrates filling out the implications of his ostensible goal. Yet if our clue is correct, they run tangential to a deeper stratum in which fie hidden the related natures of poetry, philosophy, and interpretation. The pervasive irony of the dialogue is the absence os any reference to the philosopher. Ac- cording to Socrates three qualities characterize Ion: he works by lot divine; he knows nothing; and yet he ranges o~er all the Homeric fife-questions, that is, he has no one "subject matter" (541e-542). But note that to a real extent each of these characteristics could be applied to Socrates himself. He has his daimonic as well as erotic dimension in that he is accompanied by a god and directs his life in accordance with an oracular saying. Socrates, too, claims to know nothing, except the meaning of his own ignorance; Ion knows nothing but is confused about the nature of this fact. At the same time Socrates has no one subject matter or field; he is a gadfly, a ceaseless talker who ranges in and through fields. Elsewhere Socrates calls philosophy an art, and not only in the sense of a craft but even more the musical or poe- tic arts (mousik~); indeed he arrogates to philosophy the role of "the noblest and best of music" (Phaedo 61a). 8 On his deathbed Socrates distinguishes genuine or "imaginative poetry" (poiein mythos) from mere versifying and sets down poems (poiesanta poiemata) to a god.

The investigation of poetic possession (mania), far from diverting the discussion into a wholly new field, leads us toward the fulfillment of techn~. The highest inclination o~ art (techn~) is actualized in poetry (poi~sis) as an original disclosure of truth. Art, it is suggested in the Ion, can be well-or- dered and grounded only where it implies reference to a fundamental frame- work. Poetic work reveals things for the first time or alters our grasp of the familiar, and as a work "gives" us the world in a new way. Every kind of techn~ does this to some extent, viz., brings into being what was not before and thus reflects the meaning of poietik~ (Symp. 205; Soph. 265). Poetry in the narrower and strict sense is the establishment through language of the ground and structure of the fundamental framework. The crafts, as with other human activities, presuppose poetry as that which creates the open-

a This art is closely related to if not identical with one described in the Republic as "an art of the speediest and most effective shifting or conversation of the soul" (518d), or with what Kant says about the sehematism as "an art concealed in the depth of the human soul" (Critique of Pure Reason, A 141/B 180).

178 The Journal of Value lnquiry

ness in which anything like a craft can operate. The utilitarian purposes can be clear only if the meaning of life is already clarified, which is the function of the poet. 4

1l The Role of Mimesis in a Non-mimetic Theory

Usually discussions of Plato's philosophy of art begin with a consideration of "imitation" (mimesis) in the Tenth Book of the Republic; and then pro- ceed to say that Plato used "imitation" as a term of derision or invidious comparison, while Aristotle transformed the concept and gave it positive sig- nificance. 5 The usual rendering of Plato's use of mimesis, however, loses sight of what is most essential; first because it reduces the question of the essence of art to this quite different question, and secondly because it falls to encounter the dramatic purpose and context of the work in which the theory occurs. Once this is done, and the proper meaning of "imitation" is viewed in the broad context of Platonic thought, then it becomes obvious that Plato's theory of art is not a mimetic theory at all. The broader context to which we refer is the essence of art as poetry, knowledge of the fundamen- tal framework of life inaugurated by a work. The real significance of the mimetic theory lies in serving three interconnected ends: first it provides a weapon with which to attack the artists and poets of his time; 0 secondly it underscores the need to separate authentic from inauthentic poetry, and thirdly it p,resents a treatment of poetry and philosophy on a common ground, without c onflating them, because their commonness is essential. Still this is not by any means an adequate way of construing their commonality; the commonness of creating (poi~sis) a new poem or a new p,olis is equally important. The reason is that there must be a plan, a poetic production which clears the situation before anything like a relation of imitating can take place. Cognizing must be attained prior to the re-cognizing embodied

4 Allan Bloom, The Republic of Plato. An Interpretive Essay (1968): "The poets are taken most seriously as the makers of the horizon which constitutes the limit of men's desire and aspiration; they form the various kinds of men, who make nations various" (p. 351); see also p. 404.

5 A representative statement is found in The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953) by M. H. Abrams in the section on "Mi- metic Theories" (pp. 8-11).

Apollodorus and Zeuxis among painters bent toward extreme and literalistic realism. Cf. Paul Friedl~tnder, Plato: An Introduction, I, p. 119. Nietzsche decries the same development in the tragic drama, exemplified by the psychological realism of Euripides. As William C. Greene points out, it is the imitation of the untrue and unworthy that is disparaged. In Book Ten Socrates favors the "exclusion of poetry so far as it is imitation" (595a) ("The Greek Criticism of Poetry: A Reconsideration," in Perspectives of Criticism (1950), pp. 26-28). Plato's hostility and deep regard for poetry both stem from the love of truth; yet traditionally only the former has been emphasized with the result that in detachment rather than tension its significance, too, is hidden.

The Crisis of Greek Poetics 179

in the imitation./f we think - the hypothetical is crucial - that the meaning of art lies through mimesis, then the poets, even the great ones, come out third best. But notice that this conclusion turns on the very work in which it is articulated. The Republic, regarded as a philosophical-mimetic poem, is itself at third remove from reality, and the theory o~ art proposed in it must be weighed in this context. But the context is hypothetical, and while the hypothesis illumines certain problems it fails to recognize the meaning of creativity and the highest poetry. In the spiritual hierarchy, enumerated in the Phaedrus, a striking contrast is drawn between the mimetic artist and the true poet (248). The poet, as the erotic and music seeker of beauty, is paired with the philosopher in the first of nine ranks, whereas the mimetic artist stands in the sixth position - beneath religious prophets and athletes, higher only than the technician, sophist, and tyrant. The imitation always falls short of what is imitated, but even more serious the artwork becomes superfluous and lacks necessity for its being. Quickly it takes on the signi- ficance, alien to the Platonic theory, of the merely decorative and entertain- ing.

The critique of Homer as Hellenic educator is leveled by Plato the educa- tor, who completed through Socrates a vision of the polis as the authentic educational organ. The conflict between them is rooted in the common ground of education to truth, beauty, and justice. "Thus it is even more clear than before that [Plato] claimed for himself the very place he asked the tragic poets to vacate." 7 The dialogues themselves are a poi~sis of language and the republic a poetic construct. Consistent with this fact, too, is the exemption from banishment of three types of poetry, though ones of second order creati- vity: hymns to the gods, praises of the noble soul, and communal songs which promote the good of the polls (war hymns, ceremonial songs). Through- out the Platonic dialogues we see the "ancient quarrel" between poetry and philosophy being carried out. Yet we must not lose sight, as Socrates re- minds us, that for his part this is a quarrel o.f lovers: "We too are inspired by the love of poetry which the education of noble politics has inbred in us, and therefore would have her appear at her best and truest" (608). Echoing yet altering these words is the more balanced speech of the Athenian in Book Seven o~ the Laws: "We are ourselves authors of a tragedy.. , what we hold to be in truth the most real o~ tragedies. Thus you are poets, and we also are poets in the same style, rival artists and rival actors" (817a-b). The relationship between rival poetries of the spirit must, though it have orien- tation and direction, be left open-ended, and in this respect as in others the world of the Laws differs from the world of the Republic which has closure. The creators and proprietors of the laws must therefore say to the visiting poets: "First exhibit your minstrelry to the magistrates for com- parison with our own. Then, if your sentiments prove to be the same as

7 Plato I, p. 121.

180 The Journal of Value Inquiry

ours, or even better, we will grant you a chorus, but if not, I fear, my friends, we never can" (817d). s

1H The Aristotelian Transvaluation of Poetry

When Aristotle takes over the task of poetic theory one of his first acts is to detach it from any connection with inspiration or the vertical dimen- sion of art. Consequently when Aristotle speaks of mimetic construction he means in its most important sense the representation of human action. Only the science of nature and metaphysics enjoy access to the fundamental frame- work, to true Being, and science by nature is contemplative rather than constructive and productive. Speculative contemplation of first principles now becomes knowing in the highest and proper sense. Poetry as a result is cut off from the vertical or speculative dimension of knowledge and becomes instead the producing of a lower faculty. The thing made is submitted to us as an object of delight and a valve for particular emotions. Platonic poetics is often interpreted as a precursor of this rum of thought, although such an interpretation can be sustained only if the attempt to demarcate pseudo- poetry is tom apart from its role in the search for authentic poetry. When the fundamental framework has been established, there can only be room for second order creativity, a poetry which is merely "pleasant" or "delight- ful," or "useful." Whereas these characteristics already suggest "aesthetics" in the modern sense, the aesthetic interpretation of art presupposes the ap- pearance of a new concept of knowledge. With Aristotle the emergence of this new model of knowing, which in part makes aesthetics possible, occurs in a decisive way. The Greek word aisth~sis means sense perception, and sensible facts or perceived things (aisth~ta) must be carefully distinguished from the objects of thought (no~ta). To be sure Aristotle does not yet wholly conceive the artwork in "aesthetic" terms but rather in "practical" and "pro- ductive" terms. Yet Aristotle does contribute to the release of the aesthetic conception through his bifurcation of art and knowledge, of techn~ and epist~m~ which the Greeks up through Plato had thought of as a vital unity. Techn~ is on its way, though it has a long way to go and the Christian con- tribution has not been mentioned, toward becoming technique in the modern sense.

Because both the Greek and the Christian aspects intersect in medieval Aristotelianism it provides a useful focal point for discussion. Medieval Aristotelianism did not know the Poetics and hence for a theory of art it had to turn elsewhere, principally to the MetaphysicsP Paradoxically for that

s In the Laws there is developed an image comparable to the magnetic chain of the Ion, namely the golden cord tied to the divine by which the soul orients itself (643e- 645e).

9 Curtius, Ernst Robert, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, p. 221. In Art and Scholasticism (1962) and Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (1959), Jacques Maritain attempts to work out a theory on these combined principles, but

The Crisis o f Greek Poetics 181

reason, it probably divined a clearer insight into Aristotle's interpretation than had it read the Poetics where so much theoretical elucidation is taken for granted. Thomas Aquinas in particular draws out the basic tendencies of the Aristotefian account and coordinates them with new problems creat- ed by biblical hermeneutics. Three closely connected themes must be con- sidered: (1) the division of the sciences; (2) the relation between art and beauty; and (3) the relation between truth and art.

I. Division of the sciences

According to Thomas and Aristotle sciences are diversified according to their knowable object (S. Th. I. Q. 1, art. 1). On the other hand the sciences point us toward the kinds of being which there are, and on the other they correspond to the division of the capacities within man as knower. Aristotle grouped the types of knowledge in a threefold manner, namely as specula- five, practical and productive, and precisely in that hierarchical order (Met. E, 1, 1025b 25; K, 7, 1064a, 15f). At other times, however, he provides only the two-fold division into the practical and speculative (De Anima, III, 10, 433a, 15). 1'0 Aristotle explains the difference between practical and theore- fical in these words: "For the end of theoretical knowledge is truth, while that of practical knowledge is action (for even if they consider how things are, practical men do not study the eternal, but what is relative and in the present)" (Met. A, 1, 933b, 20). 1~ Theoretical knowledge is the only knowl- edge that can become a science, and it is divine because it treats the most universal and highest cause of things. Speculative thought constitutes the sole authentic access to the "divine." This "divine" facet of the discussion is important because from the traditional Platonic view, true poetry is an ars divina. According to the Aristotelian view, art belongs to the productive sphere of the practical order and remains as such remote from the springs of true knowledge.

Aristotle does make some attempts to mediate or mollify the bifurcations he has introduced. One of these might be based on his discussion in the first chapter of the Metaphysics, where art and science, bound in close kinship,

assigns key importance to poetry as mousik~ in the Platonic sense, which is alien to these principles.

10 Speculative philosophy subdivides into three parts according to the kinds of known substances: physics or natural philosophy, mathematics, and metaphysics or natural theology. These deal with respectively the sensibJes (mobile, material being), the mathematicals (immobile, semi-material being), and the intelligibles (immobile, immaterial being). (Met. E, 1, 1026a, 18f; K, 7, 1064b, 1-5) Thomas adheres to the same model. See Questions V and VI of his Commentary on Boethius' De Trinitate, translated as Divisions and Methods of the Sciences. Maritain describes making and doing as subdivisions within the practical order: Art and Scholasticism, p. 7. Wimsatt alludes to the same division at the beginning and close o~ his history, Literary Criticism, pp. 24 and 754.

11 Cp. Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, p. 5, and S. Th. I, 14, 18; but see modifi- cations in S. Th. I, Q. 14, art. 16, and Degrees of Knowledge, pp. 311,314f.

182 The Journal of Value Inquiry

promote wisdom and form a natural alliance. This text, however, is a very early writing of Aristotle, apparently based on the lost dialogue On Philos- ophy and the recently reconstructed Protrepticus, which most interpreters readily place among Aristotle's most Platonic articulations. Concerning this text, it should also be remarked that it explicitly states - evidence perhaps of its being a later insertion - that it was not the business at that point to differentiate between science and art, since that was handled elsewhere, in Nicomachean Ethics VI, Chapters 3 to 7. And if we turn to that discussion, we get a very clear affirmation of the view that may be called characteristic- ally Aristotelian.

Perhaps the most renowned instance of an attempted mediation occurs in the observation of the Poetics: "Poetry is more philosophical . . , than history" (1451b 5-6). By this Aristotle means that poetry, above all tragedy, treats not discrete particulars or unique individuals but rather the universal features of human action. But those fond of quoting this sentence never bother to ask what is more philosophical than poetry, to which the obvious answer is philosophy itself. Complementary to the theme of the sense in which universals are present in poetry stands Aristotle's other assertion that art "completes" the work of nature (Physics, II, 8, 199a, 15). It completes the object imitated in presenting a more perfect or idealized image than what is given. But this modification Aristotle never satisfactorily explains; indeed it compounds difficulties inherent in the imitation principle itself. An imitation always lags behind what is imitated and can never catch up in principle; but not only can it never catch up, such a catching-up would be contradictory and pointless since then the difference would disappear. If successful it does away with its reason for being. Apart from its potentiality to delight, the imitation can play no original cognitive function; ~e indeed it presupposes such a function or otherwise we could not experience the imi- tation as an imitation. Cognitively, then, imitative work is superfluous, and so far as it gives us what transcends nature, the artwork is not an imitation at all. The theoretical adjustment suggested by the concept of "completing Nature" points in the direction of Platonic poetics; but more than an ad- justment of Aristotle's theory is needed to solve its problems.

2. Art and beauty as "that which when seen pleases" (id quod visum placet)

The chief components of Thomas' definition of the beautiful are found in three places in the Summa Theologica. The beautiful must possess whole- ness (integritas), due proportion (debita proportio or consonantia), and cla- rity or brilliance (elaritas). 13 While these have often been taken as guiding principles of aesthetics, it should immediately be noted that they fail to name

1~ Aristotle states as much in the Poetics - "if one has not seen the thing before one's pleasure will not be in the picture as an imitation of it, but will be due to the execution or coloring" (1448b, 18-19), and again in the Politics, V/II, 1340a, 20-30.

18 I, 5, 4, ad 1; I, 39, 8; I-II, 27, 1 ad 3m: compare with Poetics 1450b, 23-24, 34; 145ta, 15.

The Cris& of Greek Poetics 183

of nature and to the being of God. Moreover they do not determine a differ- ence between the mechanical and the fine arts: a Faust or a socket wrench might lay equal claim to being art. As a contemporary exponent of this aes- thetics, Maritain quite consistently asserts that we recognize poetry equally "when looking at any ordinary thing of cardboard cutout, 'silly pictures, panel-friezes, showman's curtains, sign-boards' as when contemplating a masterpiece." a4 But even though these three marks do not tell us what uniquely concerns the artwork, do they perhaps tell us something important about it? Does a consideration that begins with the artwork lead us neces- sarily into the question of beauty? Aristotle draws almost no connection whatever between these two questions; in Thomas' thought they are different as well. The proof is that if we begin with an analysis of beauty, we get one kind of aesthetics; if we begin with an analysis of art (ars) we get quite an- other kind. For Thomas the concept of beauty is mainly bound up with the determination of the divine nature; for beauty per se is a theological rather than an artistic concept and could have a bearing on art only if art were a disclosure of the divine. Although Thomas' discussion of beauty derives from Neo-Platonic sources (Dionysius), his theory of art remains Aristotelian and fundamentally lacks the poetic dimension in which truth and meaning are set to work. Techn~ becomes translated into ars and art means recta ratio factibilium, right reasoning about the thing to be made. On the other hand, philosophy, as the realm of intellect, concerns itself with logos or verbum that reflects the very structure of the divine mind or ultimate real- ity:5

Art considered within this interpretation becomes the object of a being pleased, and this being pleased is the result of a perception (aisth~sis), a viewing rather than a knowing. Poetry and the fine arts, according to Aris- totle, aim at pleasure rather than utility or knowledge, as But similarly with his related view on the purgation of pity and fear, these are topics belong- ing to the subject-matter of ethics and to rhetoric, the art of persuasion, by which in the Aristotelian tradition poetics gets gradually assimilated (as do poets to rhetoricians). Pleasure pertains to the natural state of human being but that it is a response unique to poetic experience is not cogently argued. While pleasure has not yet become utterly subjective in the Kantian sense, as an affective state of the organism it is inducible without reference to any artwork, indeed through drugs or self-titillation, without anything beyond the subject. By comparison Plato has not abandoned the idea of a poetics intimately involved in the problematic access to truth, and yet as the Philebus

14 Ar t and Scholasticism, p. 129. 15 Ibid., p. 89. 16 Met . 981b, 16-21; Poetics 1448b, 13, 18; 1460a, 17; 1462a, 16b, 1; N. Ethics,

1104b, 34-35. 1113a, 33-1113b, 2; 1152b, 16. See the discussions of Ross, Aristotle, p. 274, and Greene, " T h e Greek Criticism of Poetry," p. 36. Greene's account never- theless contains the polemical rather than factual remark that the Poetics is the earliest Art of Poetry and earliest "Defense" or "Apology" for poetry (p. 35).

184 The Journal of Value Inquiry

testifies, a new organization of pleasures becomes possible in the context of the dialectic art. The relation to pleasure in the Platonic presentation cannot undergo the subjectivist reductio ad absurdum to which the Aristotelian position is vulnerable. Despite every subsequent effort in Baumgarten, Kant, and lesser lights, to spiritualize the notion of pIacet, it remains more com- monly defined by negatives, for it is essentially non-cognitive (or at the very best, re-cognitive), non-transitive, and non-objective. Pleasure lacks the tran- sitive and synthetic character of authentic knowledge,

3. Truth and art as "'a de[icieney of truth" (de[ectum veritatis).

The formalism of the Aristotelian and Thomist aesthetic becomes parti- cularly evident when we raise the question about truth and art, even though an answer may already be gleaned from the divisions of knowledge. Con- ceming the relations between poetry and metaphysics, Maritain has expres- sed the distinction clearly: "Metaphysics too pursues a spiritual prey, but in a very different manner, and with a very different formal object. Whereas metaphysics stands in a line of knowledge and of contemplation of truth, poetry stands in the line of making and the delight procured by beauty." 17 The aesthetic conception of art rests on an alienation of art from truth, a bifurcation of logos and techn~, a loss of the dimension of inaugural disclo- sure. "The more real than reality which both seek, metaphysics must attain in the nature of things [logos], while it suffices to poetry to touch it in any sign whatsoever . . , in any flash of existence glittering by the way [teeh- n~]." is The equivocation of Maritain's formulations consists in imputing a cognitive end to art by inserting it within a scheme of the sciences and then by denying its status as knowledge.

If there is less equivocation in Thomas' statements, it is because the problem of art was both less important and less troublesome than to a modem. The Angelic Doctor did expressly consider poetry, the art of lan- guage, to be a form of knowledge and hence definable in relation to truth, as he explains in a crucial passage:

Poetic knowledge (scientia) concerns matters which through a deficiency in their truth (propter defectum veritatis) cannot be laid hold of by the reason; hence the reason has to be beguiled by means of certain similitudes. Theology, on the other hand, deals with matters which are above reason. So the symbolic mode is eommon to both types of discourse (modus symbolicus utrique communis est); neither type is suited to reasoning. 10

Due to its poverty of truth, poetic knowledge is the lowest possible kind, that is to say, sub-rational. Truth if spoken of in the practical sphere means "conformity with right appetite" and not conformity to what is, to what is incidental and contingent, and hOe the necessary (S. Th. I-I, Q.19, 3 obj. 2;

17 Art and Scholasticism, p. 128. Italics added; see also Creative Intuition, p. 29. 18 Ibid., p. 129. Italics and terms in brackets added. a9 Commentum in Primum Librum Sentlarium Magistri Petri Lombardi, prolog. 2,

1 a 5 ad 3m. This contradicts the basic premise of Art and Scholasticism, p. 129.

The Crisis of Greek Poetics 185

art. 5). e0 The fact that Thomas concedes, amid their differences, a type of discourse (modus symbolicus) common to poetry and theological reflection is noteworthy; especially since in the Summa Theologica he abandons this notion.

There is a dimension to Thomas' thought which makes a peculiarly Chris- tian contribution to what we have called the bifurcation of techn~ and logos, work and meaning, appearance and truth. This other dimension is created by the emergence of a science of Scripture and the revealed theology upon which it is based. For a time as the passage cited above indicates, he re- cognized a community of metaphor in poetry and theology, even if they are at opposite poles. But at last the Christian theologian forbids levels and modes of spiritual meaning to words other than those o,f God (S. Th. I, O. 1, art. 10 ad 3m), namely the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical which Dante explicitly appropriated (Letter to Can Grande, par. 7). Human effort to know cannot transcend the literal, but in the case of Scripture the Holy Spirit is the author and man the instrument (Quaestiones Quodlibe- tales, VII, Q.6 & 16). What role, then, does metaphor play in poetry? The answer corresponds exactly with the distinction between accidental and essential being: "Poetry uses metaphors for the sake of lively descriptions. � 9 But sacred doctrine uses metaphors for the sake of necessity and utility" (S. Th. prol. Q.1).

Some of the disputes that lead to the breakdown of creativity in the me- dieval period, particularly in the thirteenth century, have been traced. ~1 Constant reference to the providential harmony between Dante and Thomas tends to obscure the significant contrast in their views of poetry. Dante ex- plicitly claimed a cognitive function (i.e., the tri-levels of meaning) for his art in Le Familiari and in the Letter to Can Grande. Indeed, the three great Italian poets, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccacio made similar claims and thus followed the earlier Platonic line of Mussato. Relevant is the fact that around 1225, when logic became the predominant subject at the University of Paris,

s0 Some Thomists implicitly unhappy with the status of art in their system have tried unsuccessfully to rectify the situation. Callahan says that "art while it need not necessarily be a representation of truth, must be a truthful representation." To illuminate his statement he cites a passage from Maurice Denis (also quoted by Maritain): " ' A painting (and works or other arts) is conformed with its truth, with Truth itself, when it says well what it has to say and fulfills its ornamental ro le . ' " A Theory of Esthetic according to the Principles of St. Thomas Aquinas, p. 104 (italics added). Another Thomist, Victor Harem puts it: "The poem is a work of art rather than science, it is techn~ rather than logos. The truth the poet is primarily concerned w i t h . . , i s . . . its conformity to his artistic intention." Language, Truth, and Poetry, p. 67. McKeon rightly declares, so far as intentional truth and imitation can be asso- ciated in the Poetics, that this view would be "meaningless in the context of the Aristotelian system." "The Concept of Imitation in Antiquity," Critics and Criticism, p. 131.

~i European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, pp. 224-227.

186 The Journal of Value Inquiry

literature took a steep decline. 2:~ If Thomas' rather than Dante's was the "true" Christian view of theological language, then it can easily be seen to accord with an extension of the Aristotelian theory of science which was instrumental in the trivialization of poetry, and is the presupposition of modern aesthetics.

Conclusion

The central thrust of Platonic poetics - for Plato had no aesthetics - is not the outright abolition of poetry, nor merely a relocation of it in view of recent acquisitions in the scientific knowledge of the day. Rather it is the quest for an authentic poetry and for ways of differentiating true from false poetry. The experience of transcendence through poetic symbols - of insight into ultimate reality - cannot be explained on the basis of the mimetic theory. The world as a totality, its origin, the gods in the heavens, the shades and shadows of Hades, the tragic Destiny of the dramatist, and their inter- play: these are crucial to the Greek experience of reality as voiced by the poet, but for none of them is there any possible model in the visible world, natural or craff-produced3Z Consequently these can never be imitated, and thus too the traditional vocation of the poet as the namer of the holy is pre- cisely what gets eliminated in the last book of the Republic, and in Aristotle's refurbishment of mimesis.

Plato takes poetry seriously both for the polis and in the polis because it poses a serious danger. Poetry threatens "the safety of the city which is with- in us" (Rep. 608). Yet with H6lderlin he could agree that "Where there is danger there also lies salvation," and so recognize the veridicousness of poetry, its truth-bearing power. At the basis of every life-form, every political order, there lies a poetic projection. The work of philosophical criticism and dissent can therefore not but enter into the quarrel with poetry. For Aristotle on the other hand, poetry, its meaning transvaluated, has been removed from the precinct of conflict. To, put the point dramatically: one could never imagine Aristotle expelling the poets from any state, real or ideal. That would be a category-mistake since the worst that poetry can do is to turn into a catharsis interruptus.

Although we have no unmediated experience of Being, the theory of inspiration points in such a direction. Yet even for the poet, it must be stres- sed, poetic inspiration must not be torn from the process of its self-realizing production or techn& Nor is the Heraclean metaphor fully adequate to critical interpretation, for it emphasizes sensitive conformance to the word at the expense of the distance required for proper engagement. The missing dimension is hinted at in the interrogative approach of Socrates, in his concern for the discovery and preservation of truth. Poetic inspiration, but also poetic interpretation, will not be poetic unless it is, as Heidegger

~ Ibid., p. 483. 2a See Allan Bloom, op. cit., pp. 428-429.

The Crisis of Greek Poetics 187

says, a coming-to-work, whether that means a work of art or work of thought. Poetic inspiration must be an eventuation of truth in the work; as distinguished from mystical inspiration, it seeks embodiment and mediation. In other terms, for there to be an artwork both the vertical dimension and the horizontal dimension of craft must intersect. The eventuation of truth in flae work must be fitting, due and opportune; the intersection must have its proper measure (summetria, Phil. 643). This alone constitutes the ge- nuine necessity of the work, and only when this character prevails can the eventuation of truth take place.

Vassar College