Aristotle’s Poetics

Man with wax tablet. Vase painting
by Douris, c.500 BCE.

Aristotle (his actual name was Aristoteles) rivals his tutor Plato as one of the most important philosophers of antiquity. After studying with Plato at the Academy in Athens for twenty years, he spent a few years teaching the young Alexander the Great, then returned to Athens where he founded the Lyceum. His many surviving works cover a vast range of knowledge, from zoology to rhetoric, and include a major contribution to the theory of beauty and of art which can be found in his Politics, Rhetoric, and above all the Poetics.

The Poetics, thought to be a later work written perhaps between 350-330 BCE, is the first proper work of Western literary criticism. Criticism pre-Aristotle, such as the remarks by Xenophon and Heraclitus on Homer, survives only in scraps. Literary judgements appear in the comic playwrights, especially the satire of Aristophanes, and Plato makes a number of important statements on art and artists in his dialogues. However none of these are a consistent critical analysis.

Although it never mentions him by name, the Poetics is often interpreted as Aristotle’s response to Plato, and with good reason. Aristotle knew he was diverging from his teacher’s views when he said poetry could have cognitive value, and that its provocation of emotion could be good for the soul. However the Poetics is more than that. Aristotle spent his career trying to understand the world by systematically breaking it down into categories and systems. In literary criticism, as in so many other areas of knowledge, he effectively created an entire discipline and vocabulary, to the benefit of all who came after him.

The Poetics is very short – about fifty pages – and its sketchiness has led many scholars to think the text is not a polished treatise but a set of lecture notes, either Aristotle’s own or a student’s. There is evidence that the original work contained more material and included a companion volume on comedy. For example, there are a few references by later writers to things absent from the surviving text. Aristotle himself says in the Poetics, chapter 6, ‘I shall speak later... about comedy’ but no discussion follows; and he refers in the Rhetoric to a discussion of the ridiculous, and in the Politics to a discussion of catharsis, that don’t exist in our version¹. The ancient biographer Diogenes Laertius, amongst others, mentioned a Poetics in two volumes. Our last reference is from the middle of the 6th century – at some point after that, the second volume disappears.² In 1839 a medieval manuscript was discovered, known as the Tractatus Coislinianus, which seems to be a summary of the Poetics based on a more complete text than our own, and including an analysis of humour.³

Ancient texts were not written according to modern norms of publication and scholarship, and their messy history suffers many uncertainties: the circumstances of their writing, what interpolations or edits were made later, who copied the manuscript and how accurately, precisely what editions or parts of editions were known to later scholars and how they were catalogued, and so on.

Despite its fragmented history, the Poetics is a hugely important contribution to literary theory and lays out a fairly complete analysis. Aristotle gave us some of our basic concepts of poetics and story-making, such as the beginning, middle and end; reversals, recognitions and denouements; advising against the deus ex machina⁴; and that plot events should lead inevitably into one another. He also unwittingly founded a couple of concepts that have been misrepresented by later commentators: the ‘three unities’ and the ‘fatal flaw’.

I am referring to the 1965 English translation of T.S. Dorsch, available in Penguin Classics. Translations available free online include S.H. Butcher’s at the Internet Classics Archive, or W.H. Fyfe’s at Perseus Digital Library. I can’t comment on the merits of translations but the latter has the advantage of line references and explanatory footnotes.

My goal below is simply to outline the contents of the Poetics, with just a few comments. In my next post I will take a more detailed look at some of the issues it raises and at Aristotle’s aesthetics in general.

Synopsis

The Poetics is normally divided into 26 chapters. The references are to Bekker numbers, the standard method of citation for the works of Aristotle. Sometimes words are translated differently so I’ve tried to indicate variants when it seems important.

Introduction and Chapters 1-3: Poetic imitation

• Poetry and music ‘can be all be described in general terms as forms of imitation or representation.’
• They differ from one another in three ways: 1) different media 2) representing different things 3) representing things in different ways. These are often discussed as medium, object and mode.
1. Medium. Each art has its own medium of imitation. ‘Some artists, whether by theoretical knowledge or by long practice, can represent things by imitating their shapes and colours, and others do so by the use of the voice... imitation is produced by means of rhythm, language, and music, these being used either separately or in combination.’
2. Object. Artists represent people in action who are of good or bad character: they will be 1) better than us, 2) the same, or 3) worse than us. Thence the distinction between comedy (portrays people as worse) and tragedy (portrays people as better).
3. Mode. Subjects can be presented in various ways within the same medium. E.g. using narration, the first person, the third person, or a mixture.

Aristotle seems to think poetry must take human actions as its subject (as opposed to Nature, for example). Poetry, as a human production, has to appeal on some level to human experience.

Chapters 4-5: The origins of poetry

• Poetry has two causes, both rooted in human nature. 1) The instinct for imitation 2) The enjoyment of imitation.
1. The instinct for imitation is inherent, uniquely human, and we learn our earliest lessons through it.
2. Enjoyment: ‘we enjoy looking at the most accurate representations of things which in themselves we find painful to see’ e.g. low animals and corpses. ‘The reason for this is that learning is a very great pleasure... [People] enjoy seeing likenesses because in doing so they acquire information (they reason out what each represents, and discover, for instance, that “this is a picture of so and so”.’
• Starting from these natural aptitudes – also music and rhythm and therefore metre – people improvised on them, until by gradual improvement they created poetry. 
• Poetry soon branched into two, based upon the poets’ temperaments.
1. The serious-minded represented noble persons and actions (hymns and panegyrics, heroic verse). This later emerged as tragedy.
2. The more trivial wrote about meaner/inferior people (invectives, lampoons). This later emerged as tragedy.
• The two branches went through their own process of development until acquiring their present form.

Chapter 5: Comedy, tragedy and epic

• Comedy represents ‘the worse types of men’ but in the sense that they are ridiculous rather than evil, and cause no pain.
• The distinction between epic poetry and tragedy: both are ‘a representation, in dignified verse, of serious actions.’ They share parts: ‘Anyone who can discriminate between what is good and what is bad in tragedy can do the same with epic.’ But whereas all the elements of epic are in tragedy, not all elements of tragedy are in epic. And:
1. Epic keeps to one metre and narrative form and has no time contraints. 
2. Tragedy ‘tries as far as possible to keep within a single revolution of the sun, or only slightly to exceed it’. 

Note that when Aristotle talks of ‘tragedy’ he means tragic plays, such as Sophocles’ Oedipus The King. He gives no justification for why a tragedy should keep within one day.

Chapter 6: What is tragedy?

• Tragedy is ‘a representation of an action that is worth serious attention, complete in itself, and of some amplitude; in language enriched by a variety of artistic devices appropriate to the several parts of the play; presented in the form of action, not narration; by means of pity and fear bringing about the purgation of such emotions.’ Aristotle assumes the inclusion of music and song.
• ‘The representation is carried out by men performing the actions.’
• Essential parts of tragedy: 1) spectacle 2) the medium of representation: song and diction.
• Tragedy imitates action. Action is done by agents with certain qualities of character and thought. Thought and character therefore are two causes of actions; ‘it is on them that all men depend for success or failure’. 
• The action gives us the plot: ‘the ordered arrangement of incidents’.
• Character is the participants, whose thought comes out in what they say.
• Every tragedy has six parts. All playwrights use these elements. Two of these (diction and song) represent the medium, one (spectacle) involves manner of representation, three (plot, character, thought) represent the object. In order of importance:
1. Plot. This is the most important, tragedy’s ‘life-blood’. Tragedy is ‘a representation, not of men, but of action and life, of happiness and unhappiness.’ Our character makes us what we are, but it is our actions that make us happy or unhappy. Plot includes important devices like ‘reversals’ and ‘recognitions’.
2. Character. Persons are involved for the sake of the action, but character takes second place to plot. Character is revealed by a person’s choices.
3. Thought. ‘The ability to say what is possible and appropriate in any given circumstances’. Revealed when something is being discussed or an opinion is expressed.
4. Diction. The expressive use of words. Has the same force in both prose and verse. 
5. Song. A pleasurable addition to the play.
6. Spectacle. An attraction, but of least importance to craft of tragedy.

As a non-Greek speaker I’m not sure if the gender-specific ‘men’ is Aristotle’s word-choice or the translator’s. But in Greek theatre only men were allowed to perform, even in the female roles.

Chapters 7-11: Plot (mythos)

• Tragedy is ‘the representation of an action that is complete and whole and of a certain amplitude.’
• ‘A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle and an end.’ A well-constructed plot will fit this logic. 
• A beautiful thing, made of various parts, must have its parts properly ordered and of appropriate size. Aristotle likens plot to ‘living creatures and organisms’. 
• Plots must be of reasonable length, so ‘they may be easily held in the memory’. The proper time limit is ‘a length which, as a matter either of probability or of necessity, allows of a change of misery to happiness’ or vice versa. 
• Basing a plot on one person does not necessarily give it unity. It should not relate every incident that happens in their life but a single action, presented as a unified whole. The incidents must be arranged so that if any are taken away, the whole suffers. If removing an incident makes no difference, it should not be there. 
• The difference between poetry and history:
• History tells of what has happened.
• Poetry tells of what might happen (because probable or necessary).
• ‘For this reason poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history; for while poetry is concerned with universal truths, history treats of particular facts.’
• Universal truths: ‘the kinds of thing a certain type of person will probably or necessarily say or do in a given situation.’
• However, poets may write about things that have happened, since they are possible and probable.
• Comic poets do not write about real people. Tragedians keep to the names of real people as ‘what is possible is credible’, but need not keep to the traditional stories. 
• The poet is a poet ‘by virtue of his representation, and what he represents is actions.’
• Plots should not be a series of episodes that are neither probable or necessary. However ‘tragedy is the representation not only of a complete action, but also of incidents that awake fear and pity, and effects of this kind are heightened when things happen unexpectedly as well as logically, for then they will be more remarkable than if they seem merely mechanical or accidental.’
• Plots are simple or complex by virtue of their content. 
• Simple = single and continuous, in which a change of fortune comes about. 
• Complex = one in which the change is accompanied by a discovery or reversal or both. 
• Both kinds of plot should develop inevitably/probably from what has come before. ‘There is a big difference between what happens as a result of something else [propter hoc, because of it] and what merely happens after it [post hoc, after it].’
• Three components of a complex plot: reversal (peripeteia), discovery/recognition (anagnorisis) and calamity/pathos (pathos).
• Reversal. ‘A change from one state of affairs to its opposite’, unexpected but conforming to probability or necessity. E.g. a person’s identity is revealed to another.
• Discovery/Recognition. ‘A change from ignorance to knowledge... it leads directly to love or to hatred between persons destined for good or for ill-fortune.’ Most famously when Oedipus discovers he has murdered his father and slept with his mother. Should be related to the plot. In combination with a reversal, creates pity and fear – as befits tragedy.
• Calamity/pathos. ‘An action of a destructive or painful nature, such as death openly represented, excessively suffering, wounding and the like.’

Observations like ‘a plot needs a beginning, middle and end’ may seem obvious to us today, but sometimes things aren’t obvious until someone points them out – Aristotle was the first to do so.

When he asserts that comic poets don’t write about actual people, Aristotle is not referring to older writers like Aristophanes, who did include real people like Socrates and Euripides in his plays, but to newer comic writers.

The ‘three-act structure’ popular with screenwriters is sometimes attributed to Aristotle, but he says only that a plot should have a beginning, a middle and an end, which is not the same thing. Later in chapter 18 the division into ‘complication’ and ‘denouement’ makes two parts, not three (though this still does not approximate to an act structure).

Chapter 12: The parts of tragedy

• Aristotle lists six constituent parts of tragedy particular to Greek theatre.

Chapters 13-14: Pity and fear

• At its best, tragedy should be complex, not simple, and represent actions that awake fear and pity. How to do this?
• Good men passing from prosperity to misery, or evil men passing from misery to prosperity, do not awaken fear and pity but disgust. These plots do not ‘appeal to our humanity’.
• A worthless man falling from prosperity into misery might ‘play on our human feelings’ but also awakens no pity or fear.
• Pity is awakened by ‘undeserved misfortune’; fear by recognising that the same thing could happen to ourselves. 
• Tragedy should look between these extremes for a character we can identify with: a man who is not purely virtuous but whose fall is not thanks to depravity but to a terrible error (hamartia).
• The well-conceived plot must have:
1. a single interest
2. a change in fortune from prosperity to misery
3. caused in a man of prosperity and high reputation not by depravity but by a great error.
• Tragedy should end in misfortune. Aristotle defends Euripides on these grounds. 
• The next best kind of plot has a double interest, ending in opposite ways for the good and bad characters. Audiences like this but it belongs to comedy not tragedy. 
• The best way to awaken pity and fear is through the action. Aristotle is dismissive of mere spectacle. The most effective incidents are injuries inflicted on those who are near and dear. Aristotle considers four possibilities:
1. The character inflicts an injury in full knowledge of what they are doing (e.g. the murder of Clytemnestra by Orestes).
2. The character inflicts an injury without knowing what they are doing (e.g. Oedipus).
3. The character is about to inflict an injury in ignorance but discovers the truth before doing it.
4. The character is about to knowingly inflict an injury but fails to do so. This option is not tragic, since no suffering results.
• If the deed is done, it works better if the character only finds out what they have done afterwards. This outrages our feelings and gives us a surprise. However option #4 is the best. 
• Poets like to keep to a few families (e.g. the house of Oedipus) that are famous for their suffering.

Chapter 15: Characters

• There are four goals in characterisation.
1. Characters should be morally good. Goodness comes out in people’s actions. The social attitudes of Aristotle’s time show in his remark on women and slaves.
2. The portrayal should be appropriate to the sort of person, according to rank, sex, etc
3. The characters should be lifelike.
4. They should be consistent. Even if a person behaves inconsistently, they should be consistent in their inconsistency.
• As in the plot, it should be necessary and probable that a character speaks and acts in a certain way. 
• The unravelling/denouement of the plot should arise naturally. A deus ex machina should be avoided except in a few acceptable instances. 
• The poet should heighten the characters’ personality defects but still show them to be good people.

The deus ex machina is a Latin phrase derived directly from the Greek, meaning ‘god from the machine’. It refers to a stage crane that would literally allow a god to descend from the top of the stage and sort out the drama’s problems.

Chapter 16: Kinds of discovery/recognition

• Aristotle discusses five kinds of discovery/recognition (see chapter 11). 
1. The least artistic kind is discovery by visible signs or tokens: congenital marks, necklaces etc.
2. Another inartistic kind is contrived discoveries, such as when a character is made to simply say something instead of it being revealed by the plot. 
3. Memory. An experience reawakens a character’s memory, e.g. when a minstrel’s harp reminds Odysseus of the past.
4. Reasoning. The second-best kind of discovery. A character works out a plot point, such as someone’s identity, by logical reasoning. ‘Someone who is like me has come; no one is like me except Orestes; therefore it is Orestes who has come’. Of course, the character’s reasoning might be false.
5. The best kind is discovery brought about the plot: ‘when the startling disclosure results from events that are probable’.

Chapters 17-18: Some advice for the tragic poet

• To avoid inconsistencies, poets should as far as possible try to visualise the scenes they are writing, as if witnessing the events themselves.
• They should also imitate their characters’ gestures and speech to better imitate how they will behave. 
• Poets should plan their story in outline first and then work out the individual incidents, making sure they are appropriate.
• The length of a work is determined by the working out of its episodes – plays tend to be shorter than epic poetry. Even a rich plot like The Odyssey can be summarised in a few sentences. 
• Every tragedy has a complication and denouement. 
• The complication: from the beginning to just before the change of fortune (peripeteia and/or anagnorisis).
• The denouement: from the change of fortune to the end.
• There are four kinds of tragedy. The poet should try to include all four.
• Complex tragedy: depends on reversal and discovery.
• Tragedy of suffering. Plots of calamity or pathos.
• Tragedy of character.
• Tragedy of spectacle. 
• A tragedy should not have many stories, like an epic, as it does not have the space.
• In a note specific to Greek theatre, Aristotle says the chorus should be part of a whole, like an actor in its own right, not just be tacked on haphazardly.

Chapter 19: Thought and diction

• Aristotle refers readers to his Rhetoric. ‘Thought’ means the effects wrought by language, subject to probability, and without being explained by the characters. He lists: 
• proof and refutation
• awakening emotions (pity, fear, anger, etc)
• exaggeration and depreciation.
• Diction refers to the art of expressive language. Poets are not judged by their grasp of the art of elocution.

Chapters 20-22: Parts of speech

• Aristotle describes various parts of speech: what is a noun, and so on. Many scholars think some of this has been added to the Poetics by someone else. 
• Diction should be clear but not commonplace. Unfamiliar words – loan-words, metaphors, ornamental terms and so on – give dignity and raise the poet’s language above the commonplace, but too much can cause confusion. Good diction mixes common words with unfamiliar ones. 
• Moderation is advised. Tricks should not be over-used. 
• The most important trope is use of metaphor. This cannot be learnt, and is a mark of natural talent.

Chapter 23-24: Epic poetry

• In narrative verse plots should be constructed like in tragedies.
• Centre on single, whole, complete action, with a beginning, middle and end, like a single organism.
• Not a string of episodes like in histories. Homer rightly did not try to include every aspect of the Trojan War in the Iliad.
• Epic poetry shares the same parts as tragedy except for song and spectacle.
• Epic poetry can be much longer, showing many episodes, even simultaneous events. The metre should keep to heroic hexameter.
• Again, Homer is the model. The poet should speak not in his/her own voice but through the characters. 
• Homer knows how to tell lies: when Odysseus runs aground and is lifted to shore without ever waking, we accept the improbable incident because Homer charms us with his talent. Stories should prefer ‘probable impossibilities’ to ‘improbable possibilities’. There should be no irrational incidents/inexplicable details.

Chapter 25: Literary criticism

• Aristotle offers advice on the criticism of poetry. The poet aims at the representation of reality:
• Either things as they were or are, or as they are said to be or seem to be.
• His medium is language, mixed with unfamiliar terms and ornaments.
• Important: ‘There are not the same standards of correctness in poetry as in the political theory or any other art’ (1460b).
• Faults in poetry are of two kinds. 
1. Essential: the poet tries to represent something but fails through lack of skill.
2. Incidental: an error of fact but not of artistic skill (e.g. not knowing a female deer has no antlers).
• Faults are forgiveable if they help the work achieve its goal. Aristotle outlines five grounds for objection but calls for caution:
1. Impossibility. Poets should try to keep to what is possible, but may break this rule if it 1) helps the work achieve its goals 2) tries to improve on reality 3) fits accepted tradition.
2. Irrationality. Objectionable when it adds nothing. But improbable things do happen.
3. Immorality. We should not judge a speech or act as good or bad without considering the whole: ‘the persons by whom and to whom it was said or done, the occasion, the means and the reason.’
4. Contradiction/inconsistency. Critics should take care that they have read the poet’s intentions correctly before leaping to judgement.
5. Poor technique. Again, take care that alleged mistakes in language are not metaphors, intentionally ambiguous etc, i.e. that you aren’t misinterpreting the poet.

Aristotle wants to establish a fair framework for criticism. He wants to seek out mistakes and shortcomings, while allowing poets licence to bend the rules for their artistic purposes. Poetry should not be held to the same standard of factual correctness as other disciplines.

At the end of the chapter, Aristotle mentions ‘twelve criteria’ of criticism which may not be immediately obvious. A footnote in the Perseus edition ennumerates them thus:

Any expression that is criticised should be considered with reference to (1) things as they were; (2) things as they are; (3) things as they are said to be; (4) things as they seem to be; (5) things as they ought to be. Further, we should consider whether (6) a rare word or (7) a metaphor is used; what is the right (8) accent and (9) punctuation; also where there may be (10) ambiguity and what is (11) the habitual use of the phrase; also we may refer to (12) the proper standard of correctness in poetry as distinct from other arts.

Chapter 26: Epic and tragedy compared

• Which is better, epic poetry or tragedy? Epic is said to be better because cultivated readers don’t need spectacle; tragedy is spoilt by the vulgar behaviour of the performers. 
• Aristotle disagrees:
• That is a criticism of acting, not of poetry. Reciters of epic may also exaggerate their gestures.
• We should not object to all performance per se, only that of meaner/inferior types of people. 
• We may discern the quality of a tragedy without actors by reading it instead. So it does not necessarily have to appeal to meaner/inferior minds.
• On the contrary, tragedy is better:
• It has everything that epic has.
• It has scenic effects and music, a source of pleasure.
• It creates its effects over a shorter time span. 
• It is more single and has greater unity. Epic has lots of episodes (enough for several tragedies). Aristotle excludes the Iliad and Odyssey as they are so well-made and show a single action.
• Therefore tragedy is the superior art form. It gives pleasure, Aristotle seems to say, not through a long, diverting series of episodes as in epic, but through ‘the kinds I have described’, i.e. when a representation in art creates pity and fear leading to catharsis.

The fate and impact of the Poetics

For the first few hundred years after it was written, there is little evidence that the Poetics had much influence: there are hardly any references to it in surviving ancient texts, even in significant critical works like Horace’s Ars Poetica and Longinus’ On the Sublime. In the 8th century it was translated into Syriac, and from that into Arabic. The Spanish Muslim scholar Ibn Rushd, or Averroes, wrote a commentary on the Poetics in the 12th century that stressed the political use of language.

Aristotle’s treatise did not really arrive on the European intellectual scene until 1498, when the first Latin translation appeared. It had an immediate influence. Renaissance humanist scholars, interested in the revival of ancient culture, started a process of debate that led to the Poetics becoming the most influential work in Western critical theory. For example, when in 1595 Philip Sydney published his splendid Apology for Poetry (or Defence of Poetry), Aristotle, along with Horace and Cicero, was one of his main references, and he borrows his ideas freely. The Apology then exerted its own influence, on the Neo-Classicists and beyond.

The Renaissance commentators were as keen to turn the Poetics to their own ends as to understand what Aristotle wanted to say. Another important stage in the book’s history was Lodovico Castelvetro’s treatise The Poetics of Aristotle in the Vulgar Language (1570). Castelvetro claims to be faithful to Aristotle, but in fact used the Poetics as a vehicle for developing his own views on drama. Perhaps his most notable contribution was to formulate the so-called ‘three unities’, which don’t really appear in Aristotle as such, but match Castelvetro’s own idiosyncratic theories. This interpretation become influential in criticism and drama. In 17th century France, the playwrights Racine and Corneille took ideas like the three unities very seriously – the concept didn’t lose its eminence until the 19th century – and in turn spread Neoclassical dramatic theory throughout Enlightenment Europe.

Today the Poetics continues to be of more than academic interest. Many of its insights into drama are as relevant today as ever, and the work regularly features in screenwriting courses. Critical theory has come a long way since Aristotle, and the Poetics has not survived the test of time in many respects, but there is no denying its stature as the first major work of literary criticism in the Western tradition.

Notes

There is a discussion of Aristotle’s Poetics on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

1. For example Rhetoric, 1371b: ‘The ridiculous has been discussed separately in the Poetics.’ In fact, Chapter 5 of the Poetics offers only a definition: ‘The ridiculous consists in some form of error or ugliness that is not painful or injurious’ (1449a), which falls short of a ‘discussion’. The reference in the Politics is: ‘the term purgation we use for the present without explanation, but we will return to discuss the meaning that we give to it more explicitly in our treatise on poetry’ (1341b). Again, the Poetics mentions the purging of pity and fear in passing but contains no discussion.
2. There is a summary of this evidence in the introduction to Walter Watson’s The Lost Second Book of Aristotle’s Poetics (2012).
3. The manuscript is controversial. The possible contents of a second volume of the Poetics have been discussed by Walter Watson (ibid.) and by Richard Janko in Aristotle on Comedy: Towards a Reconstruction of Poetics II (1984).
4. Aristotle wrote, of course, in ancient Greek, but because his work was for extant for centuries in Latin translation we often use the Latin versions of his terminology.

Introduction to Aristotle

Aristotle. Roman copy after a Greek
original by Lysippos, c.330 BC

Aristotle was arguably the world’s most important philosopher for over a thousand years. After the fall of the Roman Empire, his ideas were kept alive first by Muslim scholars and then by Latin Western Europe. Medieval European philosophy inherited from him some of its most basic conceptions, such as his physics and Earth-centred cosmology. His ideas finally began to be challenged by the likes of Galileo during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, but he is a persistent presence in philosophy to this day. Entire disciplines – such as metaphysics, biology, zoology, ethics, epistemology – owe their name to Aristotle, and he invented logic and the scientific taxonomy of species.

Aristotle had the fortune to live through one of the most creative periods in history. The 6th-4th centuries BCE in Greece were the age of Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus and Aristophanes in the theatre; Pheidias, Polykleitos and Praxiteles in sculpture; Apelles, Polygnotus and Zeuxis in painting. This is to name only a few, and Aristotle refers to some of them in his works.

As with so many ancient writers, a lot of Aristotle’s work – a prodigious corpus of perhaps as many as 200 titles – is missing. We know he wrote a set of so-called ‘exoteric’ writings published for the wider public, which seem to have been polished and admired dialogues in the tradition of Plato. All of these are lost except for a few fragments, giving us no opportunity to judge him as a stylist. The 31 titles¹ that have come down to us are often regarded as teaching notes rather than his best writing, though their roughness is overstated. 

Among these, the works of particular interest to aestheticians are the Poetics and to a lesser extent the Rhetoric, though neither text is entirely reliable. There are also relevant observations in the Ethics, Politics, Physics and Metaphysics. Aristotle did not seem quite to share Plato’s fascination with the arts, but ancient sources list several treatises and dialogues on the topic: On Poets (a dialogue not to be confused with the Poetics), Homeric Questions, On Beauty, On Music and Questions Concerning Poetics.² Like his surviving observations, these works probably only looked at particular questions; the project of creating a systematic theory of the arts in general does not seem to have occurred to philosophers before the 18th century. However, we can construct a general theory from the surviving work. Aristotle inherited a great deal from his age and from Plato, but was also original, and he was the first to approach artistic questions so systematically. Every major philosopher may be assumed to have read him, and he therefore influenced aesthetics as well as other disciplines. For these reasons we should have some acquaintance with his philosophy.

Raphael: Plato (left) & Aristotle (right)
(detail from The School of Athens, 1509-11)

The contrast between Aristotle and his mentor Plato was famously summed up by Raphael’s depiction of the pair in his painting The School of Athens (detail right), in which Plato points to the sky, but Aristotle turns his palm to the earth. Although it is an oversimplification, we might say that Plato was an idealist who thought the world we see is an inferior version of an Ideal outside our own experience, whereas Aristotle was a realist who thought the world we see is primary. Aristotle did not reject Plato’s philosophy entirely – indeed Plato partly owed an ongoing influence to him – but he made major corrections. His approach was more empirical, systematic and encyclopaedic: he seems to have wanted to catalogue everything there was to know. Whereas Plato loved mathematics, Aristotle inclined more to biology, and he used to dissect animals to see how they worked. This mirrors his approach to areas of knowledge: to examine and categorise the parts to help us understand the whole.

In this post I will keep to a few issues relevant to art theory. I will look at his major contribution, the Poetics, separately.

Knowledge

Several times in his works, Aristotle divides the sciences (epistemai, literally ‘knowledges’) into three kinds:

1. Theoretical (episteme) – Universal learning for its own sake. Includes ‘first philosophy’ and natural philosophy, which we call metaphysics and physics respectively.
2. Practical (phronesis) – Knowledge of how to think about the world and how we should act for good in it. Includes ethics and politics. Traditionally often translated as ‘prudence’ but better as ‘practical wisdom’.
3. Productive (techne) – Knowledge of how to make things, learnt through practice. ‘The productive sciences include, among others, ship-building, agriculture, and medicine, but also the arts of music, theatre, and dance. Another form of productive science is rhetoric’ (SEP). Only human beings engage in the creation of products.

The subject of beauty falls into the theoretical category; Aristotle’s treatises on Rhetoric and Poetics would fall into the third.

When we find episteme translated as ‘science’, Aristotle does not have in mind our modern scientific method of confirming hypotheses through experiment: his conception is more eternal and contemplative. When he discusses what English translators call ‘art’, the term he is using is techne (plural technai), a broad term which for Aristotle refers to both production and to a person’s ability to produce. Techne is the basis for our words technique, technology and other derivative terms. The ancient Greeks had no separate concept of ‘fine arts’, and included painters, musicians, poets, sculptors etc into a broad category alongside shipbuilders, shoe-makers and so on. All were considered craftspeople or manufacturers, with no separate identity for ‘fine artists’. It follows that techne was functional – there was no ‘art for art’s sake’ for the Greeks.

For further definition we may turn to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. This book, a study of how humans can live a good life and find happiness, includes a useful discussion in Book 6 of reason and action. Aristotle defines five qualities of the rational part of the soul by which we attain excellence or virtue (arete) of thought. We have seen some of the terms already: techne (art, skill), episteme (science, demonstrable knowledge), phronesis (practical wisdom), sophia (theoretical wisdom), and nous (intelligence) (1139b). Let’s concentrate on his discussion of episteme and techne.

First he defines episteme. The objects of scientific knowledge, e.g. geometry, exist out of necessity and are therefore eternal. Science happens when we can demonstrate our knowledge through a conviction based upon first principles.

Then Aristotle discusses techne. If science is about eternal necessary truths, craft exists among changing everyday contingencies. He argues a distinction between making something (poieton) and action (praktikon).

The rational quality concerned with doing is different from the rational quality concerned with making; nor is one of them a part of the other, for doing is not a form of making, nor making a form of doing. Now architectural skill, for instance, is an art [techne], and it is also a rational quality concerned with making; nor is there any art which is not a rational quality concerned with making, nor any such quality which is not an art. It follows that an art is the same thing as a rational quality, concerned with making, that reasons truly. All art deals with bringing some thing into existence; and to pursue an art means to study how to bring into existence a thing which may either exist or not, and the efficient cause of which lies in the maker and not in the thing made; for art does not deal with things that exist or come into existence of necessity, or according to nature, since these have their efficient cause in themselves. But as doing and making are distinct, it follows that art, being concerned with making, is not concerned with doing. (1140a)

Aristotle wants to make a distinction between doing (praxis) and making (poiesis). Techne is a means for producing something via reason: bringing something into existence through a principle known by the maker. The principle behind things that exist in Nature, by contrast, is in the things themselves.

In the opening lines of the Ethics, Aristotle observed that every human undertaking aims at some good:

In some cases the activity of practising the art is itself the end, whereas in others the end is some product over and above the mere exercise of the art; and in the arts whose ends are certain things beside the practice of the arts themselves, these products are essentially superior in value to the activities. (1094a)

The aim of techne is a product, and the value is in the product itself. The end product is distinct from the act of making it, and from the maker. Thus the aim of medicine is the health of the patient; the aim of a sculptor is a statue. But the end of praxis is the activity itself: as in the playing of a musical instrument, or living a good life, as in ethical or political actions.

We will return to the question of production later. First I should mention another set of distinctions Aristotle makes. Elsewhere in his work³ he divides the basic human activities, again into three:

1. Thinking (theoria) – contemplative life
2. Doing (praxis) – practical, public life
3. Making (poiesis) – productive creative life.

These correspond to the three intellectual divisions: theoria to episteme, praxis to phronesis, poiesis to techne. The end goal of thinking is truth, as in philosophy; the end goal of making is a product, e.g. the painting of a portrait; the end goal of doing is the action itself.

We are used to the distinction between theoria and praxis through the familiar dichotomy of ‘theory and practice’, and though the ancient Greeks did not all use these sorts of terms in the same way, Aristotle is perhaps the closest to our modern reading.⁴

Aristotle does not use such distinctions exactly and consistently. For example, in its dependence upon reason and a body of knowledge, techne actually overlaps with episteme. One of the standards for knowledge is that one knows it thoroughly enough to teach it – if a painter truly knows his craft he can teach it to another person, just as a biologist might teach taxonomy.

Matter and form

Plato thought properties like beauty were universal and existed independently of physical objects. There was a higher reality of Forms and an everyday reality of visible things that partook in them. He described these in the Timaeus (27d-28a) as the world of being and the world of becoming.

Aristotle attacks Plato’s conception of Forms on various excellent grounds, which include:

1. Eternal, unchangeable Forms cannot explain a reality that is constantly changing.
2. Forms do not explain how we can have knowledge of things, because they are independent of the thing we are examining.
3. Universal Forms cannot explain the existence of particular objects. How do the Form and object interact? How do you separate them?

Aristotle argued that we did not need Plato’s two realms to account for objective knowledge. Instead, he thought it was the visible objects around us that were the most real. In the Categories, he lists ten ‘categories’ which describe things that exist. Some properties are more fundamental than others: for example, in order to have colour, an object must first have a physical body that can take that colour on. In Aristotle’s view the most basic unit of existence is substance (ousia), because it is predicated upon no other category.

If these last did not exist, it would be impossible for anything else to exist. (Categories, 2b)

While things exist in many different ways, all properties can be predicated upon substance.

Where Plato divided the world into being and becoming, Aristotle divided it into form and matter. These were the two constituents of every substance.

Matter: the stuff things are made of.
Form: how that stuff is arranged into objects. It is not a thing, like a Platonic Form, or just a shape, but the organisation of a thing.

Thus we might start with a set of Lego bricks, then arrange these bricks to form a house, or a tree, or a dog. It is the form – of a house, of a tree, of a dog – that determines what the object is. Matter (the bricks) persists even through substantial changes (form). A substance is generated/destroyed by having matter take on/lose form.

For Aristotle, forms were properties of objects, while the stuff that takes on those properties is matter. When a carpenter makes a chair, he/she takes the matter (wood) and imposes the form of a chair on it, after which the chair persists in being a chair. Forms therefore are not distant and abstract; they are in the things themselves, as part of their substance. To the raw matter, the form brings the substantial or necessary attributes that make a thing what it is. Every physical object is thus a combination of matter and form (a view known as hylomorphism).

A Form for Aristotle is a thing’s essence: defining what it means to be that thing as both structure and function, and driving its development e.g. a seed becoming a flower. You could mould a lump of clay into the shape of a dog, but of course that would not enable the clay to behave like a dog, such as running, eating, panting and so on: those functions belong to the dog’s essence.

Take a painter: the material stuff she’s made out of – skin, bones, organs – cannot explain why she is able to paint, since animals have skin, bones and organs too, but cannot paint. She can paint because of the sort of thing she is: her form as a human being. In the composite of matter and form that comprises a particular substance, it is form that makes the substance what it is. Matter is a substratum. Form is the actuality, of which matter is the potentiality. But this doesn’t make Aristotle a Platonist, because for him form and matter are inseparable.

This brings us to two important notions, which Aristotle recognised in the Categories:
Universals: properties objects have in common by which we may classify them.
Particulars: the individual instances from which we identify universals.

Plato gave universals primacy over particulars: for him, a beautiful object is only beautiful because it partakes of a perfect universal or Form of beauty. Aristotle flips this on its head. Universals exist, but we build a conception of beauty by observing beautiful objects, i.e. we can only know universals through their particular instances. The only perfect and indivisible Form was the ‘unmoved mover’ that set the cosmos into motion (Book 12, Metaphysics).

Matter and form have different roles in relation to universals and particulars. Form gives us the universal: matter arranged into a ‘house’ rather than a ‘tree’ or a ‘dog’. When we look closer at the house, we notice that every individual house is a bit different. X’s house is made from this particular set of bricks, rather than that other set of bricks making Y’s house next door, though both are houses. Thus matter gives us the individual instances (the particulars).

Aristotle called matter without form ‘prime matter’, and form without matter he called God. But normally, neither matter nor form is found without the other.

There are debates about how precisely to interpret Aristotle on substance, matter and form. Nonetheless, his empirical approach is a tremendous improvement on Plato’s mysticism, and lays the foundations for the scientific method. Unlike Plato, Aristotle does not see our human objects, such as works of art, as poor imitations of another, truer reality. He sees them as things that become real in this world through a process of making governed by human knowledge and action.

Change

Early in the Physics Aristotle observes that we ‘must take for granted that the things that exist by nature are, either all or some of them, in motion’ (Physics I.2, 185a). His conception of matter and form allowed him to explain how things change: it is because matter can take on new arrangements. We can also explain the continuity of objects. For example, when we paint a door a different colour, it remains a door. There must be an essential form of a door that persists even when less essential aspects of it are rearranged.

To answer a range of problems to do with how things come into being, Aristotle introduced potentiality and actuality. ‘Potentiality’ (Greek δυναμις, dynamis) refers to a thing’s possibility to be changed or, for living beings, to impose change. Actuality (Greek ενεργεια, energeia) is when a potentiality is fulfilled and becomes real.

Aristotle was partly replying to his predecessor Heraclitus. Heraclitus would say that change represents a contradiction. To use a popular example, when we strike a match, it is the same thing (a bit of wood with an igniteable coated head) but at the same time not the same thing (it now has a flaming tip). Aristotle would say the substance of the match has simply undergone a change of form – it has changed from something to something else by an intelligible process – and thus iron out the contradiction. (I would say there is nothing wrong with contradictions, but that’s another story.) For Aristotle, the world is always changing and does so in intelligible ways.

When something changes, the potentiality of a substance is made actual by the agency of another thing that is already actual. Every thing created is made from something, by an agency, and changed into something (Metaphysics 1032a). There can be no creation from nothing.

Production

In the Physics and the Metaphysics there are discussions about how things become actual – how change happens. Everything that is made has the same elements, which Aristotle describes in his so-called Theory of Causes. By ‘causes’ he did not mean the cause-and-effect of events as popularised by David Hume. For Aristotle, a cause (aition, plural aitia) was an explanation of how and why a thing or substance was the way it was, and how it underwent change.

There were four of these explanations⁵:

1. Material: The stuff the object is made of, often later referred to via Latin as the ‘material substratum’. This stuff persists even when it undergoes a change.
2. Formal: The form of the object, how its stuff is put together. This gives the object the essential properties it must have to be that object.
3. Efficient: What brings it about, what brought the material and form together to make the object what it is.
4. Final: The purpose of the object. What does it do in the world? This end is conceptually separate from the formal cause but is presupposed by it: it is the object’s form that allows it to fulfil this purpose.

Aristotle accepted that not everything has all four causes: there is no efficient cause or agent making a seed grow into a flower. Broadly however we may say that every thing has to be formed from something, by an agency, into something, for something. How a thing that is eternal can come into being, for example the universe, is a thorny question; to answer it he conceived of a ‘prime mover’ or God.

Aristotle’s philosophy was teleological (from the Greek τελος, telos, ‘end, goal’), and he insisted that even natural objects have final causes, such as the sharp tooth whose purpose is to tear meat.⁶ The end purpose of a thing was important to Aristotle. All things, whether alive or not-alive, have an essential form that makes them what they are, and an end or purpose they are striving towards. A thing is good when it fulfils its function or becomes what it is meant to be.

Works of art come about through human action – specifically, human production. Back to the Ethics:

All art [techne] deals with bringing some thing into existence; and to pursue an art means to study how to bring into existence a thing which may either exist or not, and the efficient cause of which lies in the maker and not in the thing made. (Nicomachean Ethics 1140a)

Let us take a work of art as an example, namely (in homage to one of Aristotle’s own examples) a bronze statue of an Olympian athlete:

1. Its material cause is bronze. This is the stuff that undergoes a change, and gives the statue a certain appearance, feel, and other properties.
2. Its formal cause is the athletic human shape into which the bronze has been cast.
3. Its efficient cause is the sculptor and his assistants, or more precisely their practice of the art or knowledge of bronze-casting/sculpting
4. Its final cause is its purpose as a work of art, such as aggrandising the site at Olympia, or commemorating a famous athlete. This is what prompts the sculptor to make it.

Thus the sculptor and assistants with their skills (efficient cause) impose the representation of the athlete (formal cause) on the bronze (material cause) in order to have a statue (final cause).

We can see that some causes are more important than others. The bronze is necessary, as without it there would be no statue. But left to itself it is just metal lying around. The sculptor and assistants can come along too, but if all they do is sit around drinking wine, there will still be no statue. What is needed is the final cause, to prompt the artisans to impose a form on the bronze – only then do we get a statue. Even then it has to be an appropriate form... otherwise we might end up with a goat instead of an athlete.

There are many ways of causation, and even within causes there are different ways, some more important than others. So the form could to an extent be different – e.g. the athlete might be shown at a slightly different stage of a running motion, or be made by sculptor X instead of by sculptor Y – while still fulfilling its purpose. Once the work is done, the sculptor can walk away or go to his grave but the statue will persist as a statue... until a new change is imposed on the object, such as a barbarian who melts it down a few centuries later to use the bronze for weapons. (So it goes.)

We can see that Aristotle’s view is more dynamic than Plato’s: a great network of causes impacting on one another. We can also see the influence of the four causes (though he does not mention them) in the Poetics, in his discussion of how poems are put together, and what is their purpose. The treatise also underlines his respect for the cognitive value of poetry and the laws particular to poetry. 

The artist as maker

Interestingly, Aristotle believes that the art of sculpting is prior to the artisan as the efficient cause of the statue. In this passage he uses the example of a builder:

In investigating the cause of each thing it is always necessary to seek what is most precise (as also in other things): thus man builds because he is a builder, and a builder builds in virtue of his art of building. This last cause then is prior: and so generally. (Physics 195b)

The actions of the sculptor are based on a specific body of knowledge that is more important as a cause than the person putting it into action.

If the techne of sculpture is the ‘most precise’ cause of a statue, that doesn’t mean the sculptor’s individual qualities are irrelevant. Aristotle goes on:

Further, generic effects should be assigned to generic causes, particular effects to particular causes, e.g. statue to sculptor, this statue to this sculptor.

Causes are multiple and themselves have causes, e.g. the bronze is made of both copper and tin, and each of those metals has its own structure, and so on down to the subatomic particles. We begin with the general causes and may proceed to the more particular in order to better understand the object. So, every bronze statue is made by a sculptor; but a particular bronze statue may owe particular aspects of its being to the idiosyncratic talent of a particular sculptor.

To bring into existence a work of art requires study – knowledge of how to create an artwork, as opposed to an object that is not an artwork. It requires the appropriate knowledge of the rules of the craft, acquired through practice. Early in the Metaphysics, Aristotle observes:

Art is produced when from many notions of experience a single universal judgement is formed with regard to like objects. (981a)

He goes on:

We consider that knowledge and proficiency belong to art rather than to experience, and we assume that artists are wiser than men of mere experience (which implies that in all cases wisdom depends rather upon knowledge); and this is because the former know the cause, whereas the latter do not. For the experienced know the fact, but not the wherefore; but the artists know the wherefore and the cause.

Like Plato, Aristotle places importance on self-awareness. Not only must you be able to apply your craft, you should be conscious of its rules and able to explain them to someone else. This ability to make art is as important to Aristotle as the product. He makes a distinction between art and science. They each have their own character: ‘art in the world of process, and science in the world of facts’ (Posterior Analytics, 100a).

In techne, the form of the product is in the soul of the person producing it (Metaphysics, 1032b); in other words the art-making process originates in the mind of the artist. Aristotle says something similar in On the Generation of Animals when he talks of ‘the shape and the form’ of worked wood ‘passing from the carpenter’. In the carpenter’s soul is the form and the knowledge that create the movements that make objects:

It is his knowledge of his art, and his soul, in which is the form, that moves his hands. (730b)

This seems to identify artists themselves, specifically their souls, as the source of the form. This distances Aristotle from Plato’s theory in Ion that good critics and poets are divinely inspired.

Notes

• Aristotle’s Physics is not in the Perseus Digital Library but you can try: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/physics/ or http://www.logicmuseum.com/wiki/Authors/Aristotle/physics. The latter has the advantage of Bekker references.

• Metaphysics can be found in the Perseus Digital Library: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0052.

• There are discussions on the SEP of Aristotle on substance, form and matter: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/form-matter/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-metaphysics/#SubsEsse


1. The numbers here come from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://www.iep.utm.edu/aristotl/
2. This list is from Władysław Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, Volume 1 (1970). Aristotle had little to say about the visual arts.
3. See Metaphysics, Book 6 (1025b), or Topics Book 6 Chapter 6.
4. See opening section of https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/episteme-techne/: ‘It is in Aristotle that we find the basis for something like the modern opposition between episteme as pure theory and techne as practice.’ Even Aristotle, however, did not use the terms consistently across his work.
5. See Physics, Book 2 Chapter 3 (194b-195a) and Metaphysics, Book 5 Chapter 2. For a discussion of causality in Aristotle, try https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-causality/. NB: the labels ‘material’, ‘formal’ etc are not Aristotle’s.
6. Aristotle defends final causes in nature in chapter 8, where we get glimpses of an evolutionary theory.