An Evaluation of Averroes’ Paraphrase on Aristotle’s Poetics

AN EVALUATION OF AVERROES' PARAPHRASE ON ARISTOTLE'S POETICS Introduction IT SEEMS THAT Aristotle's Poetics is a work which looms in the consciousness of critics of every age, and notably from the latter half of the sixteenth century onwards/ As critics become better practiced in their profession, they either consult this work or start to discover Aristotle's poetic principles by their own analyses, and notably the principle of poetic coherence, from which they start to deduce that type of logic which should regulate artistic production in this domain. As St. Thomas Aquinas and Averroes have said,2 poetics is the last part of logic. It is not easy, however, to distinguish poetic logic from rhetorical logic, inasmuch as rhetoric uses poetic logic. This is why Aristotle gives poetic imitation as the first principle in the scientific analysis of poetics.3 Although the rhetorician can speak epically, tragically, or comicly, and he can even use the metres of dithyrambic poetry,4 the Stagirite clearly distinguishes the poetic arts from the realm of rhetoric. At the same time, he suggests a hierarchy among the poetic arts-a hierarchy which is readily recognized by anyone who knows that communication through words is better than communication through wordless sounds. Aristotle clarifies this hierarchy in the course of his treatise. As we shall see in the course of this study, Averroes seems to have failed to grasp the clear distinction between the scopes proper to poetics and to rhetoric. Whether his misunderstand1 Namely, from the time of Jules-Cesar Scaliger, whose analysis of the Stagirite's Poetics occasioned the famous disputes of the seventeenth century. 2 Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Proemium in Commentarium Super Analytica Posteriora ; Averroes, Paraphrases in Librum Poeticae Aristotelis, chap. 7. 3 Poetics 1447a 9-ll. 4 Aristotle, Rhetoric, III, 10-12. 38 AVERROES' PARAPHRASE ON ARISTOTLE'S POETICS 39 ing was peculiar to him or common among Arabians is a question which can be resolved satisfactorily only by a complete study of the Arabian tradition in this matter, notably from Avicenna onwards. This study exceeds the scope of our present investigation. However, since the text of the Poetics as used by Averroes is obviously corrupt,5 we should briefly summarize three principles of textual corruption which can be discerned in his treatise, namely, fragmentation, corruption, and correction. By fragmentation we mean that a text is culled from many incomplete sources. For example, after the death of a famous teacher, his students may seek to publish one of his tracts which was never fully typed. In the search for other sources containing the missing parts of this tract, they may come across scraps of paper on which he wrote some of these parts or at least outlines of these portions ; and noting that even these sources do not yield all the missing parts, they may look for notes which various students took down in the course of classroom lectures, as well as for those which other persons culled from other pertinent lectures. If all these sources fail to afford a complete text, the students may decide to use the notes or portions of published texts of the teacher's successor to fill out the text. Many proposed Aristotelian texts have been compiled from fragments as just described and have been expurgated by the removal of extraneous sources. By corruption e we mean that words of a text have been changed accidentally inasmuch as, in copying the text, a scribe has taken a word to be another word because of ignorance concerning the language of the text, weariness, or one of the many other sources of human fallibility. By cor5 This corruption is testified also by Balmes, who made a sixteenth-century translation of Averroes' Paraphrase: "ea quae praeter rationem conficta sunt: similiter pernitiosa Averrois [sic!] non retulit, quare videtur diminutum, vel ut potius corruptum textum videtur habuisse." (Cf. Opera omnia Averrois, Venice: 1560, III, 16Sr.) 6 Obviously the term "corruption" can be taken in two senses, namely, as generally referring to the poor condition of a text, or as specifically referring to the condition we describe here. 40 FRANCIS C. LEHNER reotion we mean that the words of a text...