“Poetic requirements make a plausible impossibility preferable to an implausible possibility” (Aristotle in The Poetics)

The first philosopher to attempt a definition of art is Plato. In The Republic via Socrates and his interlocutor Glaucon he defines it as imitation, or better, as representation. Despite the fact that his own writing style at times approaches the poetical, he remains deeply suspicious of the arts in general because, in his view, they appeal to the emotions rather than to the intellect, they are an imitation of things which themselves are imitation of the Forms, hence three times removed from the real.

Aristotle, on the other hand, while sharing his teacher’s conception of art as representation, remains well disposed toward the arts and toward tragic drama in particular. In his The Poetics Aristotle defines art as a cognitive human enterprise, what much later will be branded as the aesthetic sensibility by Immanuel Kant. Rather than competing with philosophy in the business of truth telling, art works in tandem with it. A well constructed tragedy is as suited to convey truths about human nature as is a philosophical treatise. The bulk of The Poetics, in fact, is a sustained and thorough examination of tragic drama, one of ancient Greece’s most highly developed art forms. 

Unfortunately, Aristotle’s writing lack Plato’s mastery of literary forms; at times they appear incomplete as if derived from notebooks and lecture notes. Nevertheless, even today any study of Aesthetics will usually begin with Plato and Aristotle’s definition of the Arts and their conception of what is Beauty. They have exerted an enormous influence on the art world and they continue to do so.

As already mentioned, Aristotle sees all art, including music, dance, literature, painting, and sculpture as representational. However, what poetry represents, is not the actual world as it is but things as they might be or could be. This conception takes us into the realm of the ethical and the freedom which is integral part of being human. For Aristotle the possible is the domain of art and marks an important characteristic of his aesthetic theory, one that contributes to his positive assessment of the value of art.

Aristotle claims that we find art pleasurable in virtue of its representational character. Because we learn from artistic representation, we can enjoy an artwork whose content would repel us if it were real. Think, for example, of Oedipus returning to the stage after having gauged out his eyes for real. Although we would be repulsed by such a sight were it real, when we experience it in Sophocles’ masterpiece we learn from the dramatic representation of Oedipus’s fate and take pleasure in it. It is this emphasis on art’s ability to teach that makes Aristotle’s theory of art a cognitive one.

This tendency, evident everywhere in Aristotle’s philosophy, to classify related phenomena as species of a single genus reflects his training as a biologist. This accounts for his stress in The Poetics on how the arts differ according to their media, objects, and manner or representation. It is these that differentiate types of art from one another.

The form analyzed in greatest detail by Aristotle is tragic drama. For Aristotle, tragedy represents serious action in dramatic form. Its purpose is to bring about a catharsis, a purging of the emotions, through the experience of fear and pity. Aristotle duly expands on each element of this definition. He ranks certain types of tragedy above others because they more fully instantiate tragedy’s essence. For example, he argues that it is better for a tragedy to concern someone with whom we can identify, thus neither markedly better nor markedly worse than most of us, who makes a mistake and suffers for it. Such tragedies best realize the art form’s function or essence, for a protagonist of that kind is more likely to induce emotional catharsis.

Finally, it ought to be mentioned that the form of philosophical argument Aristotle uses in his The Poetics is the teleological one. In ancient Greek, telos is the word for goal or purpose. A philosophic account is teleological if it points to some goal or purpose and then shows how the relevant phenomena achieves it. Thus, Aristotle’s conception of tragedy is teleological because he derives various claims about what tragedies should be like from his understanding of the art’s goal or purpose. In fact, one can say that most of the discussion of tragedy in The Poetics is a teleological assessment of classic Greek drama.

In many ancient amphitheaters in Greece and Southern Italy (the ancient Magna Graecia) ancient Greek drama is still being performed today. I have a nephew who is passionate about Greek drama; he travels around directing and staging it such a setting. He tells me that it is always enthusiastically received. Indeed, there must be some powerful reason why Greek drama has survived for two thousand years. Aristotle’s Poetics can enlighten those who wish to explore that reason. The cultural philistine who feels that the ancients have nothing to teach us children of the Enlightenment, will, on the other hand, consider Aristotle and Greek drama passé. Pity that the Enlightenment, in some of its aspects, has still to enlighten itself.