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Email required Address never made public. Name required. Follow Following. Richard Smith's non-medical blogs Join other followers. On which three grounds did Plato objected to poetry? Educational, philosophical and moral. Sexuality, morality and philosophical. Educational, obscenity and sexuality. Falsehood and mother. Truth and mother. Falsehood and sister. According to Plato, poetry is better than philosophy.
True b. False c. Cannot say. Aristotle removed that confusion and created the study of aesthetics. Plato was a great poet, a mystic and a philosopher.
Aristotle — the most distinguished disciple of Plato was a critic, scholar, logician and practical philosopher. The master was an inspired genius every way greater than the disciple except in logic, analysis and common sense.
He is known for his critical treatise: i The Poetics and ii The Rhetoric, dealing with art of poetry and art of speaking, resp. For centuries during Roman age in Europe and after renaissance, Aristotle was honoured as a law-giver and legislator. Even today his critical theories remain largely relevant, and for this he certainly deserves our admiration and esteem.
But he was never a law-giver in literature and is no longer held as such in our times. The Poetics is not merely commentary or judgement on the poetic art.
Its conclusion is firmly rooted in the Greek literature and is actually illustrated form it. He was a codifier; he derived and discussed the principles of literature as manifest in the plays and poetry existing in his own day. His main concern appears to be tragedy, which in his day was considered to be the most developed form of poetry.
Another part of poetics deals with comedy, but it is unfortunately lost. In his observations on the nature and function of poetry, he has replied the charges of Plato against poetry, where in he partly agrees and partly disagrees with his teacher. Aristotle replied to the charges made by his Guru Plato against Poetry in particular and art in general. He replied to them one by one in defense of poetry. Plato says that art being the imitation of the actual is removed from truth.
It only gives the likeness of a thing in concrete, and the likeness is always less than real. But Plato fails to understand that art also give something more which is absent in the actual. The artist does not simply reflect the real in the manner of a mirror. Art is not slavish imitation of reality. Literature is not the photographic reproduction of life in all its totality.
He even exalts, idealizes and imaginatively recreates a world which has its own meaning and beauty. These elements, present in art, are absent in the raw and rough real. He puts an idea into it. He put his perception into it. He gives us his intuition of certain distinctive and essential qualities. Artistic creation cannot be fairly criticized on the ground that it is not the creation in concrete terms of things and beings. Thus considered it does not take us away form the Truth, but leads us to the essential reality of life.
Plato again says that art is bad because it does not inspire virtue, does not teach morality. But is teaching the function of the art? Is it the aim of the artist? The function of art is to provide aesthetic delight, communicate experience, express emotions and represent life. It should ever be confused with the function of ethics which is simply to teach morality. If an artist succeeds in pleasing us in aesthetic sense, he is a good artist. If he fails in doing so, he is a bad artist.
There is no other criterion to judge his worth. Art does not attempt to teach. It merely asserts it is thus or thus that life is perceived to be. That is my bit of reality, says the artist. Take it or leave it — draw any lessons you like from it — that is my account of things as they are — if it has any value to you as evidence or teaching, use it, but that is not my business: I have given you my rendering, my account, my vision, my dream, my illusion — call it what you will.
If there is any lesson in it, it is yours to draw, not mine to preach. This charge is defended by Aristotle in his Theory of Catharsis. Plato judges poetry now from the educational standpoint, now from the philosophical one and then from the ethical one. But he does not care to consider it from its own unique standpoint.
He does not define its aims. He forgets that every thing should be judged in terms of its own aims and objective its own criteria of merit and demerit. We cannot fairly maintain that music is bad because it does not paint, or that painting is bad because it does not sing. Similarly, we cannot say that poetry is bad because it does not teach philosophy of ethics. If poetry, philosophy and ethics had identical function, how could they be different subjects? To denounce poetry because it is not philosophy or ideal is clearly absurd.
Aristotle agrees with Plato in calling the poet an imitator and creative art, imitation. In other words, he imitates what is past or present, what is commonly believed and what is ideal.
Aristotle believes that there is natural pleasure in imitation which is in-born instinct in men. It is this pleasure in imitation that enables the child to learn his earliest lessons in speech and conduct from those around him, because there is a pleasure in doing so.
In a grown up child — a poet, there is another instinct, helping him to make him a poet — the instinct for harmony and rhythm. To prove his point he compares poetry with history. Poetry, therefore, is more philosophical and a higher thing the history, which expresses the particular, while poetry tends to express the universal. Therefore, the picture of poetry pleases all and at all times.
For him, catharsis is ennobling and humbles human being. So far as moral nature of poetry is concerned, Aristotle believed that the end of poetry is to please; however, teaching may be given. Such pleasing is superior to the other pleasure because it teaches civic morality. So all good literature gives pleasure, which is not divorced from moral lessons.
Poetics and Rhetoric. Poetry and drama. Tragedy and epic. David Daiches. Aesthetics and morals. Morals and aesthetics. Aristotle did not agree with Plato in calling the poet an imitator and creative art, imitation. In this 1. From his classification of all fine arts, he leads us into the discussion of tragedy. First, let us see how he classifies various fine arts.
Even scientific and medical treatises may be written in verses. Verse will not make them poetry. Aristotle classifies various forms of art with the help of object, medium and manner of their imitation of life:. Life of great people or mean people is imitated? Colours, words, music? That makes tragedy different from other fine arts as well as comedy also The types of literature, says Aristotle, can, again, be distinguished according to the medium of representation.
The difference of medium between a poet and a painter is clear; one uses words with their denotative, connotative, rhythmic and musical aspects; the other uses forms and colours. Likewise tragedy writer may make use of one kind of metre, and the comedy writer of another.
How the serious aspect of life is imitated? By action or by narration? Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in the language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation-catharsis of these and similar emotions.
The definition is compact. Every word of it is pregnant with meaning. Each word from it can be elaborated into a separate essay. All art is representation imitation of life, but none can represent life in its totality.
Therefore, an artist has to be selective in representation. He must aim at representing or imitating an aspect of life or a fragment of life. Action comprises of all human activities including deeds, thoughts and feelings. The tragic section presented on the stage in a drama should be complete or self contained with a beginning, middle and an end. A beginning is that before which the audience or the reader does not need to be told anything to understand the story. If something more is required to understand the story than the beginning gives, it is unsatisfactory.
From it follow the middle. In their turn the events from the middle lead to the end. It must not leave the impression that even after the end the action continues, or that before the action starts certain things remain to be known. It must have close-knit unit with nothing that is superfluous or unnecessary. It must give the impression of wholeness at the end. The play must have, then, a definite magnitude, a proper size or a reasonable length such as the mind may comprehend fully.
That is to say that it must have only necessary duration, not longer than about three hours, or shorter than that. Longer duration may tire our patience and shorter one make effective representation impossible. The reasonable duration enables the spectator to view the drama as a whole, to remember its various episodes and to maintain interest.
The language employed here should be duly embellished and beautified with various artistic ornaments rhythm, harmony, song and figures of speech. According to need, the writer makes use of songs, poetry, poetic dialogue, simple conversation etc is various parts of the play. Its manner of imitation should be action, not narration as in epic, for it is meant to be a dramatic representation, not a mere story-telling.
The emotions of pity and fear find a full and free out-let in tragedy. Their excess is purged and we are lifted out of our selves and emerged nobler than before.
Tragedy is an imitation of … a. Which of the following lines of the definition of tragedy deals with the function of tragedy? Words, colours and music.
Serious, comic and real aspect of life. Object, medium and manner. Action, narration and recitation. As discussed in the explanation of the definition of tragedy 1. His theory of Catharsis consists in the purgation or purification of the excessive emotions of pity and fear.
Witnessing the tragedy and suffering of the protagonist on the stage, such emotions and feelings of the audience is purged. The purgation of such emotions and feelings make them relieved and they emerge better human beings than they were.
But for the exact meaning and concept of catharsis, there has been a lot of controversy among scholars and critics down the centuries. The critics on catharsis by prolonged debated has succeeded only in creating confusion, not in clarifying the concept. Yet since Aristotle is vague in the usage of this word, critics have to interpret it on his behalf.
Certain broad understanding of the term is necessary, though the attempts at deriving the doctrines regarding the functions of the tragedy from this are absurd and ridiculous.
The questions are:. The meaning of Catharsis: Let us quote F. It is bad to be selfishly sentimental, timid, and querulous; but it is good to pity Othello or to fear for Hamlet.
Our selfish emotion has been sublimated. All this is most edifying; but it does not appear to be what Aristotle intended. Aristotle was the son of a Physician. Inevitably we think of purgatives and complete evacuations of water products; and then outraged critics ask why our emotions should be so ill-treated.
The theory is as old as the school of Hippocrates that on a due balance … of these humours depend the health of body and mind alike. Lucas To translate Catharsis as purgation today is misleading owing to the change of meaning which the word has undergone.
The theory of humours is outdated in the medical science. It is no longer what Aristotle has in mind. But such translation, as F. The passions to be moderated are these of pity and fear. The pity and fear to be moderated are, again, of specific kind.
There can never be an excess in the pity that results into a useful action. But there can be too much of pity as an intense and helpless feeling, and there can be also too much of self-pity which is not a praise-worthy virtue. The Catharsis or moderation of such pity ought to be achieved in the theatre or otherwise when possible, for such moderation keeps the mind in a healthy state of balance. Similarly, only specific kinds of fear are to be moderated.
Lucas There are besides fear and pity the allied impulses which also are to be moderated. By contrast, Socrates argues, a simple narration preserves distance between narrator and narrated. Before passing onto critiques of music and gymnastic, Socrates concludes this section of his critique of poetry with the stipulation that a poet who imitates all things both good and bad in all styles cannot be admitted into the good polis. This critique of mimetic poetry has struck not a few readers as a bit strange and obtuse, even putting aside the question of the legitimacy of censorship of the arts.
It seems not to distinguish between the poet, the reciter of the poem, and the audience; no spectatorial distance is allowed to the audience; and the author is allowed little distance from the characters he is representing. In book II the critique of poetry focused on mimesis understood as representation; the fundamental point was that poets misrepresent the nature of the subjects about which they write e.
They do not produce a true likeness of their topics. The renewed criticism leads up to the famous statement that there exists an ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. Socrates posits that there are Forms or Ideas of beds and tables, the maker of which is a god; there are imitations thereof, namely beds and tables, produced by craftsmen such as carpenters who behold the Forms as though they were looking at blueprints ; thirdly, there are imitators of the products of the craftsmen, who, like painters, create a kind of image of these objects in the world of becoming.
The tripartite schema presents the interpreter with many problems. Let us focus on one of the implications of this schema, about which Socrates is quite specific. Even putting aside all of the matters relating to arts and crafts technai such as medicine , and focusing on the greatest and most important things—above all, the governance of societies and the education of a human being—Homer simply does not stand up to examination ce. And what, apart from their own ignorance of the truth, governs their very partial perspective on the world of becoming?
Socrates implies that they pander to their audience, to the hoi polloi b3—4. This links them to the rhetoricians as Socrates describes them in the Gorgias. At the same time, they take advantage of that part in us the hoi polloi are governed by; here Socrates attempts to bring his discussion of psychology, presented since book III, to bear. The ensuing discussion is remarkable in the way in which it elaborates on these theses.
How would a decent person respond to such a calamity? This may be a sketch of Socrates himself, whose imitation Plato has produced.
By contrast, the tragic imitators excel at portraying the psychic conflicts of people who are suffering and who do not even attempt to respond philosophically. Since their audience consists of people whose own selves are in that sort of condition too, imitators and audience are locked into a sort of mutually reinforcing picture of the human condition.
Both are captured by that part of themselves given to the non-rational or irrational; both are most interested in the condition of internal conflict. So the danger posed by poetry is great, for it appeals to something to which even the best—the most philosophical—are liable, and induces a dream-like, uncritical state in which we lose ourselves in the emotions in question above all, in sorrow, grief, anger, resentment.
That is why poetry, with its throbbing rhythms and beating of breasts, appeals equally to the nondescript mob in the theater and to the best among us. But if poetry goes straight to the lower part of the psyche, that is where it must come from. He does not separate knowledge of beauty and knowledge of good. It is as though the pleasure we take in the representation of sorrow on the stage will—because it is pleasure in that which the representation represents and not just a representation on the stage or in a poem —transmute into pleasure in the expression of sorrow in life.
And that is not only an ethical effect, but a bad one, for Plato. These are ingredients of his disagreements on the subject with Aristotle, as well as with myriad thinkers since then. The poets help enslave even the best of us to the lower parts of our soul; and just insofar as they do so, they must be kept out of any community that wishes to be free and virtuous.
Famously, or notoriously, Plato refuses to countenance a firm separation between the private and the public, between the virtue of the one and the regulation of the other. What goes on in the theater, in your home, in your fantasy life, are connected.
Poetry unregulated by philosophy is a danger to soul and community. That is, the poets are rhetoricians who are, as it were, selling their products to as large a market as possible, in the hope of gaining repute and influence. The tripartite schema of Idea, artifact, and imitator is as much about making as it is about imitation. Making is a continual thread through all three levels of the schema. The Ideas too are said to be made , even though that is entirely inconsistent with the doctrine of Ideas as eternal expressed earlier in the Republic itself and in all the other Platonic dialogues.
Their effort has to do with discovery rather than making. Forms, images vs. Socrates implicitly denies the soundness of that claim here. Given his conception of the divine as Idea, such a claim could not be true, since the Ideas do not speak, let alone speak the things which Homer, Hesiod, and their followers recount. Does the critique of poetry in the Republic extend beyond the project of founding the just city in speech?
I have already suggested an affirmative answer when discussing book II. The concerns about poetry expressed in books III and X would also extend beyond the immediate project of the dialogue, if they carry any water at all, even though the targets Plato names are of course taken from his own times. It has been argued that the authority to speak truth that poets claim is shared by many widely esteemed poets since then.
Controversies about, say, the effects of graphic depictions of violence, of the degradation of women, and of sex, echo the Platonic worries about the ethical and social effects of art. In these respects it goes beyond even the Protagoras , a dialogue that depicts a hostile confrontation between Socrates and the renowned sophist by the same name. What is the fight about? Socrates asks Gorgias to define what it is that he does, that is, to define rhetoric.
And he asks him to do it in a way that helps to distinguish rhetorical from philosophical discourse: the former produces speeches of praise and blame, the latter answers questions through the give and take of discussion dialegesthai , d10 in an effort to arrive at a concise definition, and more broadly, with the intent to understand the subject.
Gorgias is forced by successive challenges to move from the view that rhetoric is concerned with words speeches to the view that its activity and effectiveness happen only in and through words unlike the manual arts to the view that its object is the greatest of human concerns, namely freedom.
But persuasion about what exactly? But surely there are two kinds of persuasion, one that instills beliefs merely, and another that produces knowledge; it is the former only with which rhetoric is concerned. The analogy of this argument to the critique of poetry is already clear; in both cases, Socrates wants to argue that the speaker is not a truth speaker, and does not convey knowledge to his audience.
As already noted, Socrates classifies poetry dithyrambic and tragic poetry are named as a species of rhetoric. Its goal is to gratify and please the spectator, or differently put, it is just a kind of flattery. Strip away the rhythm and meter, and you have plain prose directed at the mob. The rhetorician is a maker of beliefs in the souls of his auditors a3—4.
And without that skill—here Gorgias begins to wax at length and eloquently—other arts such as medicine cannot do their work effectively b ff. Rhetoric is a comprehensive art.
But Gorgias offers a crucial qualification that turns out to contribute to his downfall: rhetoric should not be used against any and everybody, any more than skill in boxing should be. Although the rhetorician teaches others to use the skill justly, it is always possible for the student to misuse it.
This is followed by another damaging admission: the rhetorician knows what justice, injustice, and other moral qualities are, and teaches them to the student if the student is ignorant of them a. But Gorgias is not a philosopher and does not in fact know—cannot give an account of—the moral qualities in question. So his art is all about appearing, in the eyes of the ignorant, to know about these topics, and then persuading them as is expedient cf. But this is not something Gorgias wishes to admit; indeed, he allows himself to agree that since the rhetorician knows what justice is, he must be a just man and therefore acts justly b-c.
He is caught in a contradiction: he claimed that a student who had acquired the art of rhetoric could use it unjustly, but now claims that the rhetorician could not commit injustice. A new point emerges that is consistent with the claim that rhetoricians do not know or convey knowledge, viz.
Socrates adds that its object is to produce gratification. To develop the point, Socrates produces a striking schema distinguishing between care of the body and care of the soul. Medicine and gymnastics truly care for the body, cookery and cosmetics pretend to but do not. Politics is the art that cares for the soul; justice and legislation are its branches, and the imitations of each are rhetoric and sophistry.
As medicine stands to cookery, so justice to rhetoric; as gymnastics to cosmetics, so legislation to sophistry. The true forms of caring are arts technai aiming at the good; the false, knacks aiming at pleasure bd. Let us note that sophistry and rhetoric are very closely allied here; Socrates notes that they are distinct but closely related and therefore often confused by people c.
The nub of the matter concerns the relation between power and justice. For Polus, the person who has power and wields it successfully is happy. For Socrates, a person is happy only if he or she is morally good, and an unjust or evil person is wretched—all the more so, indeed, if they escape punishment for their misdeeds.
And if these hold, what use is there in rhetoric? For someone who wishes to avoid doing himself and others harm, Socrates concludes, rhetoric is altogether useless. Tied into logical knots, Polus succumbs. All this is just too much for yet another interlocutor in the dialogue, Callicles. The rhetoric of the Gorgias reaches its most bitter stage.
Callicles presents himself as a no-holds-barred, bare-knuckled, clear-headed advocate of Realpolitik , as we would now call it. Conventional talk of justice, fairness, not taking more than is your share, not pursuing your individual best interest—these are simply ways by which the weak seek to enslave the strong.
The art of rhetoric is all about empowering those who are strong by nature to master the weak by nature. His example is none other than Socrates; philosophy will he says prophetically render Socrates helpless should he be indicted.
Helplessness in the face of the stupidity of the hoi polloi is disgraceful and pathetic a-c. By contrast, what would it mean to have power? Callicles is quite explicit: power is the ability to fulfill whatever desire you have. Power is freedom, freedom is license a-c.
The capacity to do what one wants is fulfillment in the sense of the realization of pleasure. Rhetoric is a means to that end. The quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy, thus understood, ultimately addresses a range of fundamental issues. Its quarrel with philosophy is comprehensive, and bears on the nature of nature; the existence of objective moral norms; the connection if any between happiness and virtue; the nature and limits of reason; the value of reason understood as the rational pursuit of objective purpose in a human life; the nature of the soul or self; and the question as to whether there is a difference between true and false pleasure, i.
Socrates too starts to speak at length, sounds rhetorical at times, and ends the discussion with a myth. Callicles advances a substantive position grounded in a version of the distinction between nature and convention and defends it. Readers of the dialogue will differ as to whether or not the arguments there offered decide the matter. Is all of rhetoric bad?
Are we to avoid—indeed, can we avoid—rhetoric altogether? Even in the Gorgias , as we have seen, there is a distinction between rhetoric that instills belief, and rhetoric that instills knowledge, and later in the dialogue a form of noble rhetoric is mentioned, though no examples of its practitioners can be found a-b. The Phaedrus offers a more detailed explanation of this distinction. Readers of the Phaedrus have often wondered how the dialogue hangs together.
A slightly closer look reveals that any such simple characterization is misleading, because the first half is also about rhetoric, in several different ways. The other two are rhetorical as well, and presented as efforts to persuade a young beloved. All three are justly viewed as rhetorical masterstrokes by Plato, but for different reasons. The first is a brilliantly executed parody of the style of Lysias an orator and speech writer of significant repute.
The themes of poetry and rhetoric, then, are intertwined in the Phaedrus. It looks initially as though both rhetoric and poetry have gained significant stature, at least relative to their status in the Ion , Republic , and Gorgias. I will begin by focusing primarily on rhetoric, and then turn to the question of poetry, even though the two themes are closely connected in this dialogue.
The answer to this crucial question constitutes one of the most famous contributions to the topic. In essence, Socrates argues that someone who is going to speak well and nobly must know the truth about the subject he is going to discuss. The sort of theory Polus and Callicles maintained in the Gorgias is false see Phaedrus e4—a4. How to show that it is an art after all? Quite a number of claimants to rhetoric are named and reviewed, and readers who have an interest in the history of Greek rhetoric rightly find these passages invaluable.
Many rhetoricians have artfully and effectively misled their audiences, and Socrates argues—somewhat implausibly perhaps—that in order to mislead one cannot oneself be misled. It will not only be coherent, but structured in a way that mirrors the way the subject itself is naturally organized. At this point we might want to ask about the audience ; after all, the rhetorician is trying to persuade someone of something. Might not the speaker know the truth of the matter, and know how to embody it artfully in a composition, but fail to persuade anyone of it?
Would not a failure to persuade indicate that the speaker lacks the complete art of rhetoric? Just as an expert physician must understand both the human body and the body of medical knowledge—these being inseparable—so too the expert speaker must understand both the human soul and what is known about the soul.
The consequence of this approach to rhetoric has now become clear: to possess that art, one must be a philosopher. True rhetoric is philosophical discourse.
But what happened to the question about the audience? This last demand is a matter of practice and of the ability to size up the audience on the spot, as it were.
The reader will find them summarized at b5—c6. If the audience is philosophical, or includes philosophers, how would the true, artful, philosophical dialectician address it? This question is not faced head-on in the Phaedrus , but we are given a number of clues. Dialectical speech is accompanied by knowledge, can defend itself when questioned, and is productive of knowledge in its audience e4—a4. Popular rhetoric is not an art, but a knack for persuasion.
Artful rhetoric requires philosophy; but does philosophy require rhetoric? The Phaedrus points to the interesting thought that all discourse is rhetorical, even when the speaker is simply trying to communicate the truth—indeed, true rhetoric is the art of communicating the truth notice the broad sweep of the discussion of discourse at e5—b4.
Rhetoric is present wherever and whenever people speak d10—e4 and context. Even when one is not sure what the truth is, and even when one is thinking through something by oneself—carrying on an inner dialogue, as it were—discourse and persuasion are present. The bottom line is that there is no escaping from persuasion, and so none from rhetoric—including of course from the very problem of distinguishing between warranted and unwarranted persuasion.
Self-deception is an ever-present possibility as Socrates implies here, and notes at Cratylus d. That is a problem about which the philosopher above all worries about.
The speech is quite explicitly a retraction of an outlook that does not espouse these views; ordinary rhetoric moves in a very different moral, metaphysical, psychological, and epistemic world. It is an interesting fact that Plato deploys certain elements of poetry such as myth, allegory, simile, image in drawing the contrast between these outlooks. That poetry is itself a kind of persuasive discourse or rhetoric has already been mentioned.
But what about the rationale that the poets and rhapsodes are inspired? Inspiration comes up numerous times in the Phaedrus. These references are uniformly playful, even at times joking.
The case is first made by noting that three species of madness are already accepted: that of the prophets, that of certain purifying or cathartic religious rites, and the third that inspiration granted by the Muses that moves its possessor to poetry ba. As noted, it begins to look as though a certain kind of poetry the inspired is being rehabilitated.
And yet when Socrates comes to classify kinds of lives a bit further on, the poets along with those who have anything to do with mimesis rank a low sixth out of nine, after the likes of household managers, financiers, doctors, and prophets e1—2! The poet is just ahead of the manual laborer, sophist, and tyrant. The philosopher comes in first, as the criterion for the ranking concerns the level of knowledge of truth about the Ideas or Forms of which the soul in question is capable.
This hierarchy of lives could scarcely be said to rehabilitate the poet. The Phaedrus quietly sustains the critique of poetry, as well as much less quietly of rhetoric. Does the critique apply to the dialogues themselves? Scholars dispute the answers to these well-known questions. There is general agreement that Plato perfected—perhaps even invented—a new form of discourse.
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