Aristotle On Poetry
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The great British philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead once commented that all philosophy is but a footnote to Plato. A similar point can be made regarding Greek literature as a whole. It may be an exaggeration, but the ancient Greeks created masterpieces that have inspired, influenced, and challenged readers to the present day. Their brilliance is especially evident in the two quarrelsome fields of poetry and philosophy, where we see world of thought of Plato and Aristotle so far-ranging that there is scarcely an idea discussed about poetry today that these two ancient philosophers did not debate.
Plato and Aristotle take apposing attitudes towards poetry in general, and tragedy in particular. In the Republic, Plato condemns poetry and abolishes it form his ideal city. On the other hand, Aristotle dedicates his Poetics to challenges his teachers condemnation of poetry, and concludes with elevating tragedy above all other poetic types.
Plato uses Socrates and his dialogues with his friends to try to infer logically what would constitute the most just state. The debates on “what is just?” is eventually linked to “What is good?”. Therefore, Plato raises the fundamental question of whether the pleasure produced by poetry is good enough for the well being of his state. He came to the conclusion that it is not, because poetry has the tendency to corrupt the youth of his state.
For one thing, poets such as Homer and Hesiod make a “bad representation of what gods and heroes are like” (Plato, 55). Their misrepresentation persuade the youth of the city that “gods produce evil and that heroes are no better than human beings” (Plato, 69). Thus, Plato believes that poets should be compelled to fallow a certain model of representation where “god is not the cause of all things but the good” (Plato, 58) and where heroes do not convey inadequate emotions in public.
Plato also asserts that poets are incapable of conveying the truth since they are thrice removed form it. According to Plato, imitation is far form the truth even when something as simple as a couch is the subject of imitation. He explains that there are three kinds of couches, the god produced couch, the carpenter produced couch, and the poet produced couch. The poet imitates the carpenters couch, which is itself a copy of the ideal couch of god. This is also applied to the imitations of characters in tragedy for example. Thus, the great characters in the tragedies are “naturally third from the truth” (Plato, 55), which makes them only appearances of the real.
This distance form the truth helps the poet produce everything, because, according to Plato, the poet “lays hold of a certain small part of each thing, and that part is in itself only a phantom” (Plato, 281). He singles out tragedy and its leader Homer to further convey this notion. Plato believes that writers of tragedies deceive peoples in believing they know about virtue and vice, when in fact they only imitate what appears to be good and bad. He challenges Homer, whom he thinks is “third from the truth about virtue” (Plato, 282) to give an example of the good his tragedies has offered to society. By this he wants to prove that poets have an understanding of nothing that they represent.
Plato also asserts that admitting poetry to his city will only lead to a “bad regime in the soul of each private manÐby gratifying the souls foolish part”(Plato, 289). Thus, poetry is dangerous to the soul, since it produces the wrong emotions, and interferes with the striving towards pure reason that is the proper conduct of the good soul.
Plato is intolerance towards poetry, especially tragedy, and thus he tosses it out of his Republic. He