Poetics, Rhetoric, and Logic (review)

334 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY remarks about technai in the Phaedrus. More significant still is the omission of Plato's remarks about the concept of techne in his last dialogue, the Laws, a work that we must assume represents Plato's final views. (Indeed, the Phaedrus and the Laws are not even mentioned in the index!) Nevertheless, there is much of importance to be learned by the student of Plato's political philosophy about the conceptual underpinnings of the Platonic notion of the art of ruling. THOMASC. BRICKHOUSE Lynchburg College Wilbur Samuel Howell. Poetics, Rhetoric, and Logic. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975. Pp. 267. $16.50. Poetics, Rhetoric, and Logic is a collection of previously published essays whose subjects range historically from Aristotle to Kenneth Burke. They are fit to be published together, Professor Howell says in an introduction written for this volume, because each article "was written to examine a particular set of circumstances within which poetics, rhetoric, and logic figure together or separately as essential components of literary theory" (p. 22). Howell claims that the proper relation between poetics, rhetoric, and logic was formulated by Aristotle and that his system was adopted by the Romans and by right-thinking moderns; thus HoweU's version of Aristotle becomes the measure of other literary theories. In that sense, the value of the whole book depends on the value of his reading of Aristotle; therefore, in this review I shall concentrate on the presentation of Aristotle. The briefest way of displaying Howell's reading of Aristotle is by making it into a set of propositions that represent Howell's development of the relations of poetics, rhetoric, and logic. 1 shall examine each in turn in the light of Howell's evidence for it. 1. Linguistic structuresform a genus called literature. This first proposition sounds innocent enough, but it is in fact the source of all the troubles that follow. The absurd conclusions that follow from it are enough to refute it, in addition, this proposition is so fundamental that Howell never makes it explicit and ne~'er argues for it. There is in fact no such genus in Aristotle . Things that move, things that are done, and things that are made are genera and the objects of knowledge; and literary objects can be studied in psychology as an indication of the psychological powers of men, in ethics as a kind of activity that is part of the good life, in politics as a means of education, and in the Poetics as a made object, an imitation. But for Aristotle, to call tragedies and orations linguistic structures is to name something by an accident and not by its essence; matter is never the principle by which genera are identified. 2. The genus of literature is divided into two kinds of works, poetic and rhetorical or rhetorical and dialectical. Howell makes this point several times; one exposition of it is: "To Aristotle , the two main families of discourse embrace on the one hand scientific writing, historical writing, and oratory, and on the other drama, epic poetry, and lyric poetry" (p. 214). A list something like the latter trio occurs early in the Poetics (1447a13), but that science, history, and oratory are a kind of letters must be inferred, since no such claim exists in Aristotle. (The justification for this classification will be discussed with proposition 4.) Howell collects and names the two trios: "Aristotle was the earlier major [!] critic to recognize that two literatures do in fact exist. His own way of calling attention to the essential differences between them involved his celebrated distinction between imitative and nonimitative art and his attendant illustrative definition of the respective provinces of poetry and history" (p. 239). The distinction between imitative and nonimitativeart may be celebrated in the history of criticism, but I cannot find anything in Aristotle that would even suggest it, and Howell's footnote to the first two pages of the Modern Library edition of the Poetics is no substitute for documentation. BOOK REVIEWS 335 Perhaps the distinction is to be found elsewhere in Aristotle; Howell seems to suggest this when he says that "Aristotle dwells upon this distinction at considerable length in the...