Ontology and the Art of Tragedy: An Approach to Aristotle's Poetics

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION This study is not a new translation nor primarily a new exegesis of the Poetics but a sustained reflection on the principles and criteria that should guide an approach to this text. It aims at developing a canon for establishment , translation, and exegesis of the text. Since these three aspects of its reception are interconnected rather than neatly sequential, all three must be guided by the same principles and criteria. Such reflections are of course always present, at least implicitly, in scholarly attempts at reception of this as of any other ancient Greek text. For reception is beset by so many difficulties that it cannot be achieved unreflectively. The difficulties are of two kinds. First, the ambiguity of the ancient texts themselves makes reception governed by different principles and criteria defensible. The ambiguity results in large part from the loss of context. For in their own time they stood in a concrete context within which their meaning could be ascertained by recourse to a much richer and denser environment consisting of other Aristotelian texts, of those of other philosophers and schools, of the literary and wider culture around them, of the historical sources, and even of the author and his colleagues and students as also of his rivals and opponents. The second difficulty arises from our own historical situation in the long and varied history of exegesis. The texts have been filtered through different layers of the vagaries of transmission, of translation, and of interpretation in terms of later purposes, conceptual frameworks, and methodological approaches. These later purposes, conceptual frameworks, and methodological approaches are enormously diverse and affect not only our ability to get back to the ancient texts themselves but even our willingness to make the attempt. Aristotle’s Poetics in particular has been appropriated in such diverse ways that access to the text itself has been obscured. In the face of these difficulties, the present study attempts to develop principles and criteria for reception of the text itself. For while its diverse 1 2 ONTOLOGY AND THE ART OF TRAGEDY appropriations may be legitimate and worthwhile within their own parameters , both intellectual honesty and the furtherance of critical scholarly debate would seem to demand that those parameters be delineated in careful reflection, so that they can be assessed both in terms of their power to illumine the text and in their limitations. The here proposed principles and criteria are meant to be a contribution to such reflection and debate. My guiding heuristic principle is von Trendelenburg’s celebrated dictum: Aristoteles ex Aristotele. This can never be more than a guiding principle, since one cannot leave one’s historical situation and magically return to Aristotle’s Lyceum. But it can also never be less, if the attempt to understand the text in and for itself is not to be abandoned. And that attempt, notwithstanding all the difficulties, is worth preserving, not only for the text’s intrinsic interest and value and the preservation of our intellectual heritage, but also as the indispensable precondition of understanding what it is that we are appropriating in terms of diverse purposes , conceptual frameworks, and methodological approaches. At this point it is reasonable to ask why one should concern oneself with developing a canon for the reception of the Poetics in particular rather than for Aristotle’s works as a whole. For surely the Poetics, as a small and incomplete part of that whole, cannot be understood apart from it. This is true, but two considerations mandate the development of principles and criteria for this text in particular. One is the nature of an individual Aristotelian treatise, the other its particular location within the corpus as a whole. An individual treatise has a distinct subject matter of its own, which it elucidates in terms of substantive-methodological archai of its own. This substantive-methodological differentiation is made possible by the flexibility of Aristotle’s technical vocabulary. While certain key concepts apply to all his works and stamp them as Aristotelian, they nevertheless function differently within different subject matters. An. Post. I. 76a37–40 even characterizes the common basic truths of demonstrative science as analogous rather than identical for different sciences. Such differences must be taken into account, if reception of any individual treatise is to be achieved. Secondly, an individual treatise has a particular location within the corpus as a whole in the sense that the network of its relationships with the other treatises is unique. It may need to be read to...