In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

35 Chapter 3 LEVELS WITHIN THE POETICS My approach to the Poetics has been a gradual narrowing down from the corpus as a whole to its own subject matter and location. This, I believe, accords with Aristotle’s normal procedure. But the narrowing down must not be understood merely quantitatively. Each level of generality contains features that pertain to the being of a tragedy. That being can be understood fully and clearly only when each feature is traced to its proper level. I now recapitulate these levels briefly. The most general level is that of being, the unrestricted extension of being (panta ta onta), which comprises whatever is. Aristotle conceptualizes it as being, so that his entire corpus is philosophy of being, whose systematic or doctrinal content consists of the following pervasive substantive -methodological conceptual constants: the concept of being, the categories of being, the categorial priority of ousia, immanent causal formmatter constitution in the category of ousia, and the ontological and cognitive priority of the object. These constitute his distinctive understanding of being. The next general level is that of craft (techne), which comprises all products of human making in all categories (poiesis in the most general sense) and relates them to the products of nature (physis) in terms of structural or constitutive imitation (mimesis 1). The next is that of artistic craft or art, which comprises all products of human artistic making in the category of ousia (poiesis in a narrower sense) and relates them to the 36 ONTOLOGY AND THE ART OF TRAGEDY products of nature in terms of representational imitation (mimesis 2). Next is poetical art which comprises all products of verbal art (the poietikes technes of the title of the Poetics), and finally tragic poetry which comprises all products of the tragic playwright’s art (tragike mimesis; Poetics 26.1461b26). The full understanding of a tragedy is therefore as follows: it is a being, it is a product of human craft, it is a product of artistic craft or art, it is a product of verbal art or poetry, it is a product of tragic poetry. Each level below the most general (panta ta onta) conceptualizes a tragedy as a product of human making, and each specifies it more and more precisely, until it reaches the tragic (to tragikon) as the specific nature (the eidos) of this product. Chapters 1 and 2 have presented this approach, based on explicit evidence in texts other than the Poetics. Chapter 3 will test it against the Poetics itself. Some of the above levels are explicitly present in it, some only implicitly. Chapter 3 will therefore use two kinds of textual evidence , direct and indirect. Direct evidence is explicit statement, indirect evidence is of two kinds, namely, absence of any indication that the features that pertain to a level are not relevant, and use of these features. 3.1 The First Level: Being The features pertaining to this level are not explicitly present in the Poetics, which contains no statements to the effect that a tragedy is one of the things that are and that it is to be conceptualized in terms of Aristotle’s distinctive understanding of being. That is not surprising, since this short text has a definite subject matter of its own. The textual evidence for the implicit presence of the features of the first level is therefore indirect, consisting both of the absence of any textual indication that they are not relevant and of indications of their use. The absence of any textual indication is an argument from silence, never conclusive in itself but carrying some weight in conjunction with other evidence. For there is a reasonable prima facie presumption that Aristotle’s distinctive understanding of being, as delineated in completely general statements, applies to any individual treatise, especially one that shows indications of the use of its features. Anyone arguing that it does not would need to point to some textual support. What would count as such support? Something that would, in Owen’s phrase, “make any reader of the Metaphysics or of the Nicomachean Ethics rub his eyes.”1 He found something like this in E.E. I. 8, where Aristotle fell into aporia concerning the possibility of a general episteme of the good or of being, an aporia he resolved in terms of his distinctive understanding of being in the Metaphysics and the Nicomachean Ethics. Since the presence of that very under- [3.138.113.188] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 14...

Share