-
Chapter 7: Aristotle: Poetry and the Proper
- Fordham University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
208 Aristotle: Poetry and the Proper 7 1. Aristotle: Rhetoric and Poetics In the Gorgias, Plato proposed that sophistry be purged from rhetoric, which could then be fashioned into a dialectical instrument (499A ff) that would incorporate the monstrative and persuasive potentials of metaphor and mythos.1 In the Republic (510B), however, he eliminated appeals to sense and its images in the “upward” movement of the dialectic for the sake of an eidetic intuition; on the other hand, we propose to enlist him in the countermovement of deictic metaphor, which discloses form in the fact rather than in an abstract and imageless thinking.2 This strange disclosive power is never more apparent than in Saint Denys’s statement that scripture has “the audacity” to use the passions, angers, and curses “to represent God, projecting outward and multiplying the visible appearance of the mystery, dividing the unique and indivisible, figuring in multiple forms what has neither form nor figure, so that one who could see the beauty hidden in their interior would find them entirely mystical, consistent with God, and full of a great theological light”(St. Denys, DN, 1105b). Plato’s dialogues within which metaphor’s resources were fully in play gave way in Aristotle to a theory about transporting terms (Rhet., 1404b 30). When his logic replaced dialectic, he had to find other homes for metaphor in the Rhetoric, De Poetica, and Topics. In the Topics, dialectical arguments are said to begin with “reasonable opinions 07_chap_Bigger.qxd 04/02/2005 7:17 pm Page 208 about certain subjects” (100a 21) and not “true and primitive premises” (27). His distrust of dialectic led him to think of metaphor as persuading us “to accept reasonable opinions” even though it “sets things more intimately before our eyes” (Rhet., 1405b 12) by transporting meaning from genus to species, species to genus, species to species, or on the grounds of analogy (De Poet., 1457b 6–9).3 These restrictions rule out such heterogeneous carryovers as acceleration or Faraday’s “electricity flows.”4 The reducibility of some metaphors to an equality of ratios (analogia , proportion) obscures the fact that the discerned identities are often “created” by the metaphor. Poe’s “window of the soul” creates and persuades us to see functional identities between windows/rooms and eyes/souls. Analogy is never more creative than when it generates and then finds identities between lines and infinite sets of numbers by Dedekind cuts that stand in no ratio to their enabling empirical conditions. Aristotle seems unaware of the import of the theory of ratios and proportions, which made possible a theory of infinite magnitudes.5 He correctly assumed there was no ratio between the finite and infinite magnitudes, and his analogies were therefore finitistic, unlike those possible with the definitions of Euclid V.3 and 5 (which permits a ratio between the relative magnitudes of incommensurables) and that of Euclid X.5 (which says that incommensurable magnitudes can have to one another the same ratio that a number has to a number). Though Aristotle understood time as “the measure of motion” and so as a quantity, he did not think it could stand in a ratio to any other species of quantity, as it must in acceleration and dynamics. The justifiable piety inspired by Aristotle often worked against inquiry, and it was not until the Oxford calculators and Descartes’s precursor, Nicholas Oresme, that these restrictions on metaphor were abandoned and new developments made possible. Reading nature geometrically , even with the assistance of Brawardine and the Merton school, would never reveal the secrets of kinetics to Galileo. Alexander Koyré noted that until he abandoned geometrization and let his imagination play with time, he could not deal with velocity: “He saw the line, the space traversed, as the argument of the function , velocity, rather than time.”6 Doubtless these difficulties are irrelevant to the place of metaphor in metaphysics, as in pros hen predications (Meta., 1003a 32ff); but then the critique offered by the Ontological Difference comes into its own. Because of a misunderstanding that posits predication as an alternative to participation, Aristotle: Poetry and the Proper ■ 209 07_chap_Bigger.qxd 04/02/2005 7:17 pm Page 209 [52.91.84.219] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:29 GMT) metaphysical metaphors conceal rather than disclose Being. Philosophical metaphor may have less to do with establishing a linguistic community between highest being and other beings—and in that process losing sight of Being—than with persuading the imagination...