Ep. 243: Aristotle’s “Poetics” on Art and Tragedy (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 243 is something like, what is art? Or more narrowly, what makes Greek tragedy work? And we read Aristotle's Poetics, written somewhere around 335 BCE. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer cleansing you with my sweetened speech from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:27 Seth: This is Seth Paskin imitating an object in Austin, Texas.

0:32 Wes: This is Wes Alwan talking to you according to the laws of probability and necessity. From Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:40 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey twitching with tragic recognition in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:45 Mark: All right, we're back to Aristotle eating our vegetables. That's how I think of it. This one was, I guess, more fun than a normal Aristotle. What did you guys think?

0:56 Seth: Way more fun than normal Aristotle.

0:59 Mark: You just reject the premise, Dylan. This is not vegetables to me.

1:04 Dylan: It's like a nice good steak.

1:06 Mark: All right, Wes, had you read this before for anything?

1:10 Wes: No, I don't think so. I mean, I've read plenty of screenwriting and how to write fiction books, which actually really do draw heavily on this. Interestingly enough.

1:21 Dylan: There should be three acts. It should form a whole every action.

1:25 Mark: Yeah, you should have the part before the first song, and then you should have the part.

1:31 Wes: I recently reviewed a book on tragedy for a magazine, and so that's a recently written book that includes a chapter that is a close reading of Aristotle's Poetics. So I had looked at that recently. Unfortunately, it's not a good close reading, but it's also a bad close reading of Plato's Republic. But despite the shortcomings of that book, I got a nice overview of some secondary texts about tragedy and what it is and how it works, what catharsis is and all of those things. It's a subject that is of primary interest to me, given my interest in Shakespeare and the kind of drama and stuff I'm going to be doing with subtext.

2:12 Mark: I think this had come up for me the first time when we were thinking about our first aesthetics episode. And I emailed Jessica Berry, who we've had his guest a couple times, who had taught an aesthetics course, like, what should we read? And she said, well, you could go all the way back to the beginning to the Poetics, but that's kind of really doesn't connect so much. I don't remember exactly what she said, but it's harder to connect with the things that we actually know and love now and would want to judge. Whereas the Arthur Danto that we ended up picking for that episode, she thought was more easy to relate to.

But as you said, Wes, we're still seeing, at least within the area of theater, within the area of plot construction, within the area of thinking about the relationship between characters and plot, people taking very concrete advice from this book that seems to be about a form of theater that is extinct in the form that he was writing about it.

3:07 Wes: Yeah, that's one of the interesting things about this, is it's a how to manual in some ways. So it's a guide for budding tragedians and how to do it Right. It's also trying to answer some very deep theoretical questions, including questions about how is it that we can get so much pleasure from the depiction of things that are painful? And then there's the whole psychology to this, including, as we'll get into pity and fear and catharsis. And then we ask, what do those mean? How do we cash out that sort of psychology? And then, of course, once we've done that, we realize that there are broader implications.

So it's not just about aesthetics in the end, but as you guys, I think, read the introduction to the Seth Benardete translation, where he wants to relate it to ethics and to action as well. So the questions that are asked in this are whether you're interested in tragedy in particular or more generally in art and aesthetics or even more broadly in ethics. I think he kind of skips over them. He gives a little bit of analysis, and then you're on your own. So he mentions catharsis very briefly. Doesn't tell you what it is until you go, think about that.

4:13 Dylan: I think it's a really concise, beautiful example of the combination of trying to understand how something is working and why it works, and then also how it works when it's working at its best. It's a kind of combination of understanding and criticism that also along the way, you learn something about how to do it. To Mark's comment earlier about, well, we're just doing the same thing that Aristotle recommended 2,500 years ago. To me, it means that there's something sort of fundamentally right about the way in which he analyzes how imitative works work on us. And it might not all be right, but there are important things that are right, which is why we keep using them, because they work. It's not like a slavish imitation to it. It's that, well, turns out it works.

5:07 Mark: Seth, did you have an opening take on this.

5:10 Seth: I thought it was super enjoyable. That's not usually an adjective that I use in conjunction with reading Aristotle. At first I was like, oh, here we go. You know, there's three of these and there's no other options. And it's all broken down. You know, it's the taxonomy approach. And then I thought to myself, especially when he first started talking about imitation, I thought about his virtue ethics, and I started wondering about connections there. And then I just sort of thought, like, what would possess a guy who was interested in ontology and metaphysics and ethics and all these things to write about poetry?

And then I thought, well, it wasn't like there was anything like a distinction between literature and philosophy. And he's basically inventing it. Just shows what kind of a polymath he was because he writes on just about everything. But either this kind of a treatment didn't exist, or he thought that it needed to be done and could be done better, or what have you. And I just thought it was fascinating that. And it's not a subject he would take up if he didn't think highly of it, or which we'll get to, I'm sure, talking about its relationship to education and that sort of thing.

But the other thing is it just also puts him in stark contrast with Plato. He's so the anti Plato in so many ways, and that's a cliche, but this work, in a lot of ways, really brings that into stark relief.

6:27 Wes: That's the real precedent here. And of course, we know that Plato was very concerned with the relationship between philosophy and poetry and seemed to think, in, at least in his account in the Republic, that those two things are opponents of each other or in tension with each other. In a way. Even though Aristotle doesn't directly address Plato in this text, he is giving us, by cashing out some of the psychology of the experience of an audience for tragic drama. It does constitute a response to Plato's chief criticism, which involves what poetry, tragic poetry, does to the human soul.

So Plato is going to say something like, it makes you more susceptible to the irrational side of yourself and so less capable of ethical agency. And Aristotle is going to say, actually, if we think about this differently, if you think about a relation of identification or the way in which an audience is responding to what's happening on stage differently, then we might see it as an ethical positive.

7:34 Dylan: This is probably the third or fourth time I've read it. It's been a while since I read it, but I came away feeling like they were on the one hand, coming down at different points, roughly speaking, Plato is very skeptical and concerned about the effects of poetry and that it needs to be regulated. And Aristotle is more positive about the end result of poetry on the human soul. I felt like they had very aligned concerns about the powerful effect of it. If there was one thing they were agreed on, it was that poetry is incredibly powerful in acting on the human soul. And both thought it was powerful enough that it ought to be taken very seriously.

8:19 Seth: Okay, that's fair.

8:20 Mark: I think there are very different experiences one can have with this based on what translation you read. And I guess this has been very, very often translated. So the one that Dylan had picked out first Wes mentioned was this Seth Benardete and Michael Davis one, which is very, very, very footnote heavy and very literal. So it's not that easy to understand what's being said. It's almost like that this is a text about various Greek words and what they mean. There's a certain joy in that. I read that for most of this. I think I was prepared for that because I just did the public domain version through Librivox.

You know, the whole thing is pretty darn short. You know, you can get through it in a few hours. Certainly I knew the contours and read some of the intro stuff before I got into it. Ended up being kind of weary of the incessant Greek. By the end, you switched over to a different one. I in general found the people writing about this like there was not only that intro to that book. And then also Joe Sachs was another one of the translations we had at our disposal. He wrote the Internet Encyclopedia philosophy essay. I really enjoy that, both those things more than actually reading the Aristotle itself because, you know, it's not really that felicitous wording.

And it's hard to see what the line is because a lot of these people, they're of course trying to do exegesis on what Aristotle really means. I don't know, Dylan, you've read this a few times. Was your first take on this? Just the text. I'm not gonna look through it through the lens of anybody insofar as it's possible of the translator. It's gonna be kind of unavoidable. But trying to be as authentic as possible before reading why everybody thinks this is important.

10:06 Dylan: So I'm not very scholarly about these things. So I read a few essays which I found interesting. But it was listening to a couple podcasts that I became familiar with sort of this many hundreds years of influence and Interpretation of poetics in terms of how you understand plays. And I knew about it being influential for theater criticism and stuff like that. But I haven't engaged in that part of the conversation.

10:31 Seth: One of the things that turns me off about reading these type of texts is the English word doesn't translate the meaning of the Greek word. So you need three words. So in this context, I've translated it like this. And in this context, I've translated it like that. And then you read an edition where there's, like, you know, six or seven lines of text. And the rest of the page is footnotes. That's why I chose to read the Penguin edition. Just because, to me, it was readable, especially the way it was formatted and, you know, with sort of, like, bulleted form and all that sort of thing.

That I felt like I could understand the overall meaning and intent. And then if we want to get into the nitpicky, we can. I just don't want to have to live through that when I'm reading the thing. And so I appreciated following up after having read the Penguin, reading the intro to the Benardete Davis edition. Because he does a good job of saying, you know, these are the words he uses, and this is how we've chosen to do it. And just make sure you don't get locked into a very narrow modern conception of the word plot or the word this. And that's my preference when doing these things.

Just because I'm not a scholar. I don't want to try to pretend to be a scholar.

11:39 Mark: It was more that it connected it to the uses of some of these terms in Aristotle's ethical works and his political works. So that just because we're more familiar with that, that if we know that he's talking about. I just remember one of the footnotes being about how the play leads us. So the footnote had this big, long thing of, oh, it's like leading the soul to the afterworld, you know? And that's the way it's kind of used in the literature he's talking about and in his other work. It's definitely adding a layer of interest. But for the most part, I think that with most of these things, it's, what are the important words?

You know, we've got kalos, the beautiful. We've got mimesis, imitations, catharsis that we don't even translate anymore. A handful of others. And if you kind of get what those are, then I feel like that's most of the value. Which maybe we should start Just with poesis, just understanding what that meant as the first footnote on page one kind of unlocked, oh, this is not just about poetry. This is about poesis, means just making more generally.

12:37 Dylan: I think it does. I think, you know, it's the kind of thing that. Acknowledging Seth's sort of irritation about the way in which you can translation of certain words that in Greek. And the translators say, well, you know, there are, you know, lots of different meanings to this Greek word that aren't fully captured in English and stuff like that. I think that the fact is that this is a perfect example that proves that out and that there are decent reasons for diving into individual words, because paying attention to that ends up both enlivening the thing that you're reading, but also generating connections and revealing a sort of a deeper understanding about what's at issue.

And, you know, poesis is a good one, right? Because just like you said, Mark, it refers to making. So if you think about that activity, we think of, you know, poems as being verse or, you know, a kind of creative writing. And there are good reasons for that, but by understanding it as a making, it makes it a much more broad principle of art and of the rendering of thought into the world.

13:46 Mark: Wes, what translation are you going with? Do you want to just read the beginning from whatever you got there?

13:52 Wes: Sure. So I'm using the Butcher.

13:56 Mark: So that's the public domain one, right?

13:58 Wes: It's one of them. So I'm using this translation by a guy named Butcher from more than 100 years ago. But it's very readable. I find it to be the most readable. I looked at every option I could possibly find because it's readable, it's not the most literal. And you will find that when you look at the ancient Greek, as I actually find pleasure in doing, believe it or not, you know, you might be a little worried about some of the poetic license that he takes in his translation, but it's the only way to make it readable. It's the kind of thing that people like Benardete avoid for the sake of accuracy.

But again, I just prefer readability. So the way it begins is I propose to treat of poetry in itself and of its several species, noting the essential quality of each, to inquire into the structure of the plot as requisite to a good poem, into the number and nature of the parts of which each species consists, and similarly into whatever else falls within the same inquiry following then the order of nature. Let us begin with the principles which come first. It only gets More exciting from there.

15:05 Dylan: It's also kind of typical Aristotle beginning. Right, we're going to talk about the parts and the kinds. And the only thing that's different is you can sort of group replace whatever sort of the main noun is in this case poetics, and come up with all of his other books. Right.

15:22 Wes: The speculation is that we're looking at lecture notes. Aristotle supposedly wrote dialogues as well that are lost, and these were never published in his lifetime, I don't think. So if we want to make fun of Aristotle, we just have to remember that this is not what he was hoping to put out there. Exactly. But it's. No, I know, I'm not talking to you particularly.

15:41 Dylan: I'm just sort of acknowledging that plot

15:44 Mark: there, just because this is going to recur a lot, is mythos. Apparently that word. I mean, it sounds like myth. And that's what it is, right. That most of these tragedies. And he also talks about Homer a lot in this text are not just about any old plot. They're about stories having to do with the gods or these noble families, these divine hero types that Benardete says mythos as plot occurs nowhere prior to Aristotle. So Benardete actually they prefer, and Davis prefers story, that it's not necessarily just hooking on to the. Let's draw the line of what happens, the sequence of events, but the story as more the way this is put together, which seems to be how Aristotle's analytic mind is coming to this whole thing.

Just like he wants to talk about the parts of the mind in De Anima or the parts of the organism, the parts of. I don't know what he does in metaphysics. We haven't read it, but yeah, here he's going to do that similar dissection. And so the mythos is going to be. As the sort of. The story point is going to be the most important part of this.

16:47 Dylan: I really like using the word story. The one thing that resonates with a word like plot, especially to us now, is the way in which it really embodies action, probably more so than the word story does for us. And when you read the book, so much of it is about the embodiment of action in general. And thinking about how action, both in the tragedy, how it's acting on us, how it's an embodiment of the possibilities of human action, those kinds of things, it makes me want to keep in mind plot.

17:19 Wes: Yeah, I have no problem with plot. I think since story, what it means for us. Stories have plots, but they also have all the other elements as well. That you would start to think about when you're analyzing it. So I mean what we mean specifically by plot. So you would think about this if you're a writer, in terms of plot points. Stuff happens to push the story forward. You know, you get to the end of the first act, and some big thing happens. And then the protagonist has to make a decision. And they make that decision. And suddenly they're in Act 2. Which often involves being in a different place altogether. So we're thinking about how different actions within the story are structured. And follow each other in such a way as to create suspense and tension and resolution and all of those things.

18:10 Mark: What's the next quote we want to get out here?

18:13 Wes: Let's think about what we mean by mimesis and imitation. This idea that poetry is essentially imitative. And what's being imitated in particular is action.

18:26 Mark: Yeah, that's the second paragraph. Epic poetry and tragedy. Comedy and also dithyrambic poetry. And the music of the flute and the lyre in most of their forms. Are all, in their general conception, modes of imitation. I opened your the Butcher. So just to keep with you, Wes. They differ, however, from one another in three respects. The medium, the objects, the manner and mode of imitation. Yeah. So imitation, mimesis. Why, is like playing the flute, imitative? That seems a little weird.

18:52 Wes: Yeah. Or even dancing, he says. So even dancing can be an imitation. In the sense that it can be expressive of character or emotion. Or it can even used to represent action.

19:03 Seth: He explains that in the next paragraph.

19:05 Mark: Go on, Seth. Read your version.

19:07 Seth: You want to hear the penguin?

19:09 Mark: Sure.

19:10 Seth: Some people use the medium of color and shape. To produce imitations of various objects by making visual images. Others do this by means of the voice. Similarly, in the case of the arts I have mentioned. In all of them, the medium of imitation is rhythm, language, and melody. But these may be employed either separately or in combination. For example, music for pipe or lyre. And any other arts which have similar effects. Use melody and rhythm only. While dance uses rhythm by itself without melody. Since dancers, too, imitate character, emotion and action by means of rhythm expressed in movement.

19:46 Mark: It's certainly not an obvious analogy. People draw pictures of things. And so likewise, when you dance, you're dancing of a thing. You're dancing emotion, action, character, et cetera.

19:59 Wes: We're thinking mainly about people acting on stage. In order to imitate human action. So luckily, we're not in the same problematic realm. Even though music is involved as well for ancient tragedy. But when we think about that, in a way, it's the most straightforward. And I think this idea of imitation of action is meant to. Well, you know, later on, he's going to draw a distinction between tragic drama and narration. The kind of thing you would see in epic poetry and, say, the Iliad and the Odyssey. With drama, you get to see a real, true imitation, in a way, because people are up there doing stuff. And so when I think about this emphasis on mimesis of action, I think about the importance of the fact that actors are actually performing actions up there on the stage. It's not just us reading. Although Aristotle will say, you can read plays later on, too.

20:51 Seth: Sorry, am I being super naive in thinking that Aristotle really thinks of rhythm and melody as being sort of. I hesitate to use the term, but let's say natural. Later on he's going to say, you know, imitation comes naturally from childhood. Like, that's how children learn, is they start to imitate. And when you think about nature, you think about the sounds of the wind in the trees and the birds and the earth and rivers and waterfalls and all these things. And when he talks about rhythm and melody, is he not saying something just quite as simply as that? We imitate the sounds that we hear around us, the rhythms that we hear around us. And that he's talking about these things as being expressions, imitative in that sense. Is that too naive a reading?

21:37 Dylan: I don't think so. I would point out that in understanding all of these art forms as being imitations, that is sort of rendering of something else. It is closing out a different interpretation of some of these activities as being expressions in their own right that are sort of natural activities without a notion of imitation. So something like dance as a movement or even playing music as an expression that is sort of originally sourced rather than an imitation.

22:09 Wes: So I think, Seth, you're getting at this idea that we have this instinctual desire to imitate and we take pleasure in imitation. This is chapter four. And it's the means by which we learn. So that's a really important thing as well. We learn for Aristotle by imitating. And you can think about that in the most sort of rote sort of way. You can think about it more deeply as the way in which we learn by getting into the heads of other people and identifying with them. Imitating, in that sense, sort of imaginary imitation. And that's important because it's part, I think, of the explanation of why we can take pleasure in seeing horrible and terrible things depicted in tragedies.

And Aristotle has a funny way of putting it. I mean, he's going to tell us. It's just, you know, we enjoy learning. So even if it's horrible stuff, when we learn about it, it's pleasurable. I think there's a way to deepen that explanation. And catharsis is part of that. In chapter four, he gives this very basic example of. It's like looking in a painting, I think, and saying, oh, yeah, I know who that is. Or this, they say, is the man. Or it's the pleasure of identifying something that's been representing and saying, oh, yeah, I know what that represents.

23:19 Dylan: This to me, is like one of the most powerful things in the whole book. And he makes the distinction, the twofold distinction, that to imitate itself is natural to us as human beings. And that's distinct from taking pleasure in imitations. We are both imitators, and we are attracted to and like and take pleasure in imitations. And both of those are required for us to be learning. The pleasure is part of what draws us to learning. It's part of what gives us satisfaction in figuring things out. The recognition aspect of it. The fact that we're drawn to the recognition.

And then we're. We have that activity saying, oh, we recognize that guy in that painting. That delight Aristotle's pointing to is completely natural and directly related to our pleasure and imitations. Learning, figuring things out, that we have that capacity to do that imitations and have it sort of fold back upon itself to take pleasure in those imitations and their alignment with the world.

24:26 Wes: It speaks to our ability to get into each other's heads, right? So it speaks to self consciousness and consciousness of other, consciousness as the ability to use language. All of those things have imitativeness at bottom, right? So even something as simple as understanding a word or understanding when someone else is pointing at something to understand that kind of signifier, you're also thinking automatically about the intention of another. And in doing that, you're engaged in a sort of empathetic step which is fundamentally imitative. You're imitating. You're modeling the mind of another within your own mind. And that's what it means to have a human mind. So being imitative is really fundamentally important to what it means to be human.

25:12 Mark: Is there a metaphysical dimension to this, even beyond that? I mean, certainly, if he was Plato, then to be something is to imitate the form of the thing. And I just think it's revealing that when you were trying to describe Wes why dance is imitative, you did a little switch to expression in other Words, dancing. It doesn't seem like it imitates a character, but it can express a character. And what is it to express a character? Well, it's kind of the same thing, you know. So it seems like maybe we have some carryover that even though for Aristotle the forms are in you, right?

So in other words, when you grow in the proper way, you are achieving the predetermined form of what a healthy human being hopefully is. That's at least what you're aiming at. You would get pleasure or happiness. It is your good to reach that. To talk about that expression of a form as something like an imitation. You know, it seems one and the same with. Along the continuum of what we're talking about here.

26:08 Seth: It sounds like what you're talking about there. Mark is. You're distinguishing between expression and like evocation or what he would persuasion, you know, in the sense that it's almost a rhetorical. The possibility of dance, for example, provoking a reaction, provoking an emotion in you as opposed to representing an emotion.

26:27 Wes: The imitation that it calls forth in the audience is intimately related to the imitation that the artist is doing themselves.

26:33 Seth: That's like next level at this point. The point I was trying to make is that Aristotle's interest in imitation as a function is its relation to understanding. Let me just read this pretty amazing and protein packed paragraph from the beginning of the anthropology and History of poetry. It's 46B, I think about 6. Imitation comes naturally to human beings from childhood. And in this they differ from other animals, that is in having a strong propensity to imitation. In learning their earliest lessons through imitation. So does the universal pleasure in imitations.

What happens in practice is evidence of this. We take delight in viewing the most accurate possible images of objects which in themselves cause distress when we see them, for example, the shapes of lowest species of animals and of corpses. The reason for this is that understanding is extremely pleasant. Not just for philosophers, but for others too, in the same way, despite their limited capacity for it. This is the reason why people take delight in seeing images. What happens is that as they view them, they come to understand and work out what each thing is.

So, for example, this is so and so. If one happens not to have seen the thing before, it will not give pleasure as an imitation, but because of its execution or color, or for some other reason, AKA astonishment, I guess. Given then that imitation is natural to us and also melody and rhythm. From the beginning, those who had the strongest natural inclination towards these things generated poetry out of improvised activities. By a process of Gradual innovation. What's remarkable about that passage, he says right there, experiencing a thing directly, perceiving a thing directly that causes distress, like something ugly or grotesque or whatever, when you have a mediated experience of it through imitation, it can actually cause pleasure.

That's mind blowing, right? That's a mind blowing insight.

28:23 Wes: Yeah. And fundamentally important to getting at why we would go to see tragedies in which everything falls apart.

28:32 Dylan: There's a famous exchange in the Republic related to this where they're talking about the inability to look away from corpses, probably not coincidentally, same kind of thing, that you would just be completely drawn to something like that. There's always, to me, the discussion that becomes about how much of it has to do with it being unusual, something that you just don't see all the time, versus its own kind of that it being horrible. So the combination of rarity versus horribleness.

29:03 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think we're going to be given the theoretical apparatus in this text to say a lot more about why tragedy is pleasurable. And so this is a very basic beginning. And Dylan, you're pointing to the possibility of just straight up morbid curiosity and set that what he's saying here in this passage seems just to be that it's kind of almost accidental. Or in other words, we might see a picture of something that's really horrible, but because it generates, it sort of activates some inferential parts of our minds, figuring out what it represents, that it's pleasurable in that sense.

And so I think we have to go beyond that. We have to refine what it is that we're getting to know when we're an audience for a tragedy and why that particular kind of knowledge can give us pleasure. I think it goes beyond simply we're learning a particular type of thing and it gives us a particular type of pleasure and it ends up being a response. Plato was saying, you're learning the wrong things, you being corrupted. And this again will give us a way to give us a deep response to that. Catharsis is on the same track with that. I mean, catharsis is a beginning to explaining what kind of psychological state or associated pleasurable knowledge state we're getting to, even though we're looking at something that's horrible.

30:22 Dylan: I don't disagree, Wes, but I guess what I would say is that we have in that in Aristotle a kind of hierarchy of learning going on and that he would clearly put tragedy at the top of that. In fact, good tragedy. Right. You know, there's bad tragedy as well, but good Tragedy does. The things that you're talking about, the potential, the power that we have, our craving for pleasure and imitation and the fact that we are imitators is just a potential. We can end up in the place of tragedy, and the highest pleasure is there. But it's not like all the other kinds of things aren't real. They're just lower versions, right?

31:04 Wes: So these are just lower versions. The higher versions we're thinking about will end up being imitation, as I said, as a basis for empathy. And empathy, or pity, will play a big role in Aristotle's explanation of what's going on.

31:17 Dylan: Just as an aside, Sachs, at the beginning of his essay, has a great set of examples when he's talking about pity and fear, about the way in which you can have these pleasures but not have them be as powerful and refined and have them be kind of empty if they're not altogether the way in which they are in tragedy.

31:37 Mark: In other words, if it's a tearjerker or a horror story, that these are things he wants to contrast. I think the through line I'm seeing is that Aristotle really is very intellectual about this. He even says, like, the best kind of tragedies, somebody could just tell you the plot and you would feel pity and fear. And he's very down, you know, in his list of things that should be done right about a tragedy. On the spectacle, which seems to be the actual performance of it, that he considers certain things, like, well, that's actually just what the actors are doing.

That's kind of beside the point. I'm talking about the structure of the play itself. I'm talking about sort of the intellectual stuff that's going in there. And so I wonder if, you know, the key to unlocking this for me is the tragedy. As you were saying, Wes gives us knowledge of something, and maybe it's empathic knowledge. It's not that it's devoid of emotion, but it's that the sensation almost seems to be beside the point. You know, we've been talking about perceiving corpses and things. And if Aristotle sees the basis of this as we can see the scary thing, but it's depicted, we're safe.

So it's kind of like we don't have to have our normal emotional response kick in. We can sort of intellectualize it and thereby come to grips with it in a way that we wouldn't. Whereas I think in past episodes here, when we've been talking about why do we like horror movies? Why is HP Lovecraft sort of overwhelming horror as we get to talk about the sublime. We get to talking about the way Burke made this distinction. And Nietzsche in his Birth the Tragedy, has a similar distinction. That the beautiful is something that is, as Aristotle's describing it in here, that, like, you can kind of take in the whole thing in one sitting, in one glance, you can understand it and you can see the wonders of its form.

Whereas the sublime, the reason that we might like the scary stuff is because it's. It's huge, it's unfathomable, it's overwhelming. And so just having. It's completely different experience, according to Burke, for instance, in our episode on the Sublime, on that. Whereas I don't feel like Aristotle has room for that. Like, he explicitly says, if something is too big, we can't appreciate it, we can't break it down. So even for Aristotle, this scary stuff, that for some other, you know, for Nietzsche or for Burke, would be in the area of the sublime.

No, this actually still has to get refined and appreciated as the beautiful, I think, because we're intellectualizing it.

33:59 Wes: Yeah. And I think that's right. Although I would say if you try to connect something to sublimity, you might work on wonder, because the concept of wonder is going to play a big role here as well. What's important about the experience of tragedy is not just that there's pity and fear, but that we are astounded that we are like, whoa. I'd have to think about whether that's connected to the sublime. Exactly. Or how. But yeah, you're right about the whole scale thing. It's got to be something that we're firmly within the realm of beauty as opposed to sublimity. Because within sublime, at least for Schopenhauer, you have to kind of feel like you are in danger.

34:37 Mark: I thought Schopenhauer even carried that through, that it's activating sort of part of the brain. But that you do know you're safe.

34:43 Wes: Exactly. Yeah. You know, you're not really in danger, but at some level you think you are. And that's how you.

34:49 Mark: I guess that's an open question for me, is how wonder fits in with this. Because presumably everybody knew what the plot is before they were going in. Right. These are mostly recycled old stories. He kind of seems to frown on coming up with an original idea because you want something that has verisimilitude. And the best way to do that is to draw on these real stories of the very few families in known history, whether legendary or not, but, you know, established history, that these horrible things happened to so if it was purely informational, then, like, you're not going to go, whoa, when you hear the story of Odysseus, because you've already heard that story, like, before Sophocles.

35:28 Dylan: There was no.

35:29 Wes: You do, though, because it's not informational. And it's the same with Shakespeare, right? He's drawing on rote sources. Everyone knows the story already of King Lear. But I can say my personal experience is always of good tragedy is always of wonder. And it makes no difference that I already know the plot.

35:45 Dylan: Wonder doesn't work by not having any familiarity with it. You can't even recognize it enough to be wondering about it. Wonder comes from knowing something about it. You don't have wonder about something that you engage for the first time and don't know anything about it. It's only after you know something about it that you can wonder about it.

36:04 Mark: I think you might be slipping. I mean, my God, it's full of stars. Like, that's the quintessential version of wonder that I thought Wes was referring to in the Woe. In other words, the end of 2001, where this person's literally had the veil stripped from his eyes and is now perceiving in a way that transcends time and something, you know, and is literally. There's no way that this could have been anticipated.

36:27 Wes: This is the complicated thing, right? It's not about finding out about a plot point, even though it depends on that critically for Aristotle. So it's confusing because you're going to have to have reversal and plotty things are going to have to happen to produce this feeling. But it's not just about saying, oh, man, wow, that's great. That's an amazing development in the plot. That's not what wonder is about. You're discovering something on a different level.

36:49 Seth: It seems like Aristotle really must have loved magicians. He loves the plot twist and astonishment and the wonder, the unexpected. But somewhere around 53, he addresses what you're talking about, Mark, and he says, now, one cannot undo traditional stories. I mean, for example, Clytemnestra's death at the hand of Orestes. But one has to discover for oneself how to use even the traditional stories well. So he's talking about plot not necessarily as just the overall universal. This is what happened, right? Guy goes here, falls in love, person dies, takes revenge, but instead, crafting the plot and using the diction and making the decisions about how to represent the actions specifically.

And he says, let us state more clearly what this involves. It's Possible for the action to come about in the way that the old poets used to do it. With people acting in full knowledge and awareness. This is, in fact, how Euripides portrayed Medea killing her children. It's also possible for the action to be performed. But for the agents to do the terrible deed in ignorance. And only then to recognize the close connection. As in Sophocles, Oedipus. A third possibility besides. Is for someone to be on the verge of performing some irreparable deed through ignorance.

And for the recognition to preempt the act. Besides these. There is no other possibility, of course, necessarily. The agent must either act or not act, either knowingly or in ignorance. What I took him to be saying here is, yeah, you have these old stories, but these old stories. What's significant about them is that we're not really going through the text. But he talked about magnitude, Right. And the importance of having actors who are not good people that bad things happen to. Or bad people that bad things happen to. You know that the ideal person in tragedy, the ideal object or agent in tragedy.

Is somebody who's somewhere in the middle. Like, they're not so perfect that they can't make mistakes. And that you don't want bad things to happen to them. They have to be somebody you can sympathize with. That's where your fear for what happens to them. Right. What's tragic is them taking action. And not that action being completely out of their hands, so to speak. Or, you know, that there has to be some opportunity for the possible. And we've skipped over a lot of stuff. But the point is you can retell the story. And talk about the motivations of the actors.

In different ways. To make the situation more or less tragic.

39:16 Wes: It's in chapter nine and chapter 24 that we'll see more about wonder. Maybe we should back up and talk about some of the setup for that first, including recognition. The chapter six is where it kind of all begins. The classic Aristotle.

39:31 Mark: Yep. The definition. Right. In chapter six, which in the Butcher is what is the definition of tragedy? It's imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude. In other words, that's what I was saying. It can't be too long, it can't be too short. It has to be something you can get your head around in language embellished with the sweetened speech. That was my intro. This is Benardete's version. Yes. With each kind of artistic ornament. The several kinds being found in several parts of the play. In the form of action, not of narrative, through pity and fear, affecting the proper purgation of these emotions. There's a lot of parts to that, and kind of each one of those is more or less a chapter later in this book, Right?

40:10 Wes: Yeah.

40:10 Dylan: And the purgation word is catharsis.

40:14 Mark: Yeah, cleansing.

40:15 Wes: Yeah. You know what he'll talk about more in this chapter is he'll talk a lot about plot.

40:21 Mark: Where's the part that Dylan was referring to of you don't want them to be worse than you, you want them to be better than you? Is that in chapter two? It might even be where he's saying, a good tragedy is about characters that are better than the audience, whereas a comedy is about people that are worse than the audience.

40:39 Dylan: It's here in the definition, Right, that it refers to action of stature. And that's part of what's going on.

40:46 Wes: So it's first mentioned in 4, where it basically says that where comedy is the imitation of meaner persons, this tragedy is going to be the imitation of good men, the noble actions of good men. But, yeah, in 13 we get into more detail.

41:01 Dylan: Yeah, I mean, you get a little bit of allusion to this in five. I mean, before six, where we dive deep into the part on tragedy. And before that, it's sort of poetry in general and different kinds. So in five, you have comedy's imitation of what is inferior to a greater degree. Not, however, with respect to all vice. But the laughable is a proper part of the shameful and the ugly. And as you just said, Wes, the tragic is referring to the higher point. But six is where we. After this part, about the definition, we get taxonomy. Right. Tragedy is broken into six parts. The plot, the character in my translation says story, characters talk, thought.

41:41 Wes: He's really in this chapter, though, talking about the relationship between plot and character. And which is more important.

41:47 Dylan: Exactly, in terms of these parts, the greatest of these is the putting together of events. For tragedy is an imitation not of human beings, but of actions and of life. Both happiness and wretchedness depend on action. And the end is an action, not a quality.

42:02 Wes: He's very concerned about causal relationships here. Right. So he's a good scientist. He's concerned about, you know, you begin, in a way, with character. It's the qualities of your agents that are a first cause, in a sense, and they produce actions, and then that pushes everything forward. But from the standpoint of the poet, the end of all this, just like the end of the agent is action, the end of the poet is the representation of action. And that is the sort of engine of tragedy as well, which is why the action will actually and plot will take priority for Aristotle over the representation of character. You could be representing your characters pretty poorly, you might not be good at that, but if you can get the plot right, you can still achieve the tragic effect.

42:50 Dylan: And in fact, I mean, he says human beings are of a certain sort according to their characters, but happy are the opposite according to their actions. His concern about plot is reflected by his concern about action and activity in general. It's what we do more than what we are. Our lives, our happiness is all about what we do, not what we are.

43:11 Wes: He's gonna say at several places in this text. And this is the type of thing you see in how to screenplay writing guides as well. The only way you know about the character of characters is by the sorts of decisions that they make. You have dialogue and action, but it's only insofar as those things tell you what the character wants and is seeking and actually ends up does seeking that you get at their character. So in other words, your idea of a. The character of a particular protagonist is built up of the action that's going on anyway, or you infer it. And so that's another way of thinking about the fact that action is primary.

43:52 Mark: So I don't want to lose track of this thread, though. In actually, Chapter two is the place where he first talks about the stature of the characters. We've been talking about what makes a good plot. Well, it has to sort of seem if characters act out of character, they that's going to ring false. You're not going to get the effect you want if the logic of the plot falls apart. So this is all about kind of accurate imitation. But in section two here, he's talking about the types of imitation. Since the object of imitations are men in action, these men must be either of a higher or a lower type.

Their moral character. It falls. We must represent men either as better than in real life or as worse or as they are. So it seemed like if you were really trying to be accurate, we should represent people as they are. Right? That's, I think, our modern sensibility. In fact, that seems to be what would make you identify with a character, right. If they are fully fleshed out, if they're three dimensional, if they're somebody that has the same kind of flaws that you have and opposed to that, you might say a comic buffoon like, yeah, Homer Simpson is funny or Borat is funny or whatever, you know, because they're at least a certain kind of humor, it's because they are spelled out as inferior to you, inferior to the audience who is watching them.

It's at least, you know, a different kind of humor. If they're too human, it's a more of a doesn't that ring true? Kind of humor. But in this kind of comedy, it's no, those people are stupid and inferior, and that's why we're laughing at them. So conversely, I think this is something that is disconnect for us, is that for a good tragedy, you actually do want to paint the protagonists. You want to paint the people that these bad things are happening to as better than we are, as of the high class. And that's how we will experience pity and fear.

In other words, that's how we'll identify with them. Not because they're the same as us, but because they are this moral paragon in some way.

45:43 Wes: Yeah, I think that's very well put. And I think the emphasis here on. Because if we say noble or base, that can obscure the fact that the way it is in the ancient Greek and Benardete gets at this in his translation, which is more literal, is it's really comparative. It's about the relative position of the audience and the character. So it's that they'll seem better than the way people today generally seem now, or worse. So, yeah, but Mark, I think that's important. The way tragic consciousness is going to work is it's going to have to have something to do with our empathetic relation to people who seem better than us on some scale more noble, more grand.

46:24 Dylan: It makes me wonder what Aristotle would have thought of Death of a Salesman.

46:28 Seth: Yeah.

46:28 Mark: Is there one thing that's a modern work you feel like matches beat for beat, sensibility for sensibility. What he's talking about here, the kind of tragedy that he's talking about, because the things that come to mind for me is like, you know, Breaking Bad or these kind of anti heroes. None of them fall neatly into these categories for one reason or another.

46:49 Seth: So, Mark, one of the things I would say is maybe not trying to apply his rules, you know, note for note, beat for beat, but this notion of pity and fear, you know, this idea that there's a sense in which you can identify with the protagonist or the characters and actually be concerned, feel bad about the decisions they make. I think that would be the test of whether his proposal or his theories lives through the ages. And that's actually one of the big problems I have with a lot of modern. Just call it television. And this kind of thing where you have antiheroes is like, I don't identify with them, so I don't fear for what's gonna happen to them.

You know, when they make bad decisions, I don't have the experience of feeling bad for them. It's one of the reasons why I really struggle. Conversely, I love opera, so maybe I'm just stuck in a different era. But I think it's a real question you have to ask yourself is like, there's a lot of great drama being made right now, but is it tragic?

47:52 Wes: I think you're right, Seth. It's not. I think most of what. When people use the word loosely, it's a very distinct effect from what you get from an ancient Greek tragedy or from, say, Shakespeare. The tragic effect is actually quite specific. And it's just not something that even if lots of bad things happen to people, it's not something that contemporary entertainment is even attempting to do. It's just not the type of pleasure that people are looking for or getting out of those entertainments. So I just think to explain that, we'll have to get more into the text here.