“Poetics, Self-Knowledge, and Education” - Dr. John Finley

On October 2, Dr. John Finley concluded our retreat on Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Aristotles’s Poetics with this lecture on the nature of Greek tragedy according to Aristotle. In its depiction of noble human actions, Greek tragedy uses the natural desire for imitation to educate its audience about proper human action.

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Transcript

Yeah, what I what I what I like to do here, I mean the the title I gave this talk is Poetics, Self-Knowledge and Education. So essentially three parts to this. I want to say a few things about tragedy in particular, especially as thinking about the way air Aristotle means it versus how we inheritors of uh Shakespeare and Christianity might think about it. Um and then all s and then secondly, turn to turn back to some of the opening chapters of the Poetics and look at a kind of structure that's there in terms of what Aristotle says regarding poetry and tragedy. And with an emphasis on learning. And then third and finally, um to take set to consider more in a more focused way. A sense in which self-knowledge and education are kind of hovering right beneath the surface, I think, of what uh Aristotle is talking about here.

Okay, so um a couple notes to start with on tragedy for Aristotle. As we mentioned the first day that um really this this art form comes about and exists as a a refined form of poetics for only a handful of decades in the relatively small town of Athens, 400 years before Christ. Um it's something done on stage by typically only a few actors. It tended to take place on a fairly simple stage set. Um and usually The idea was to cover events that would take place more or less in the course of a single day. It was expected that the great tragedians would come up with a trio of these tragedies for a festival uh typically to Dionysus and his honor, and then they would be followed up with a a laughable comedy.

The tragedies dealt with serious things in human affairs. Dealt with human beings that were in some way worth paying attention to and noble, whereas comedy dealt with the non-serious things, the trivial, mundane things. And the humans that in some way were inferior or laughable. Which is to say that tragedy did not necessarily mean a story that was simply dark. and had some kind of terrible ending, nor did comedy mean something along the lines of the way we might think of it of say Shakespearean comedy. So another way to put this is to say that um there are comedies that Shakespeare writes that the Greeks might well have considered more tragic or at least heavily tragic. You might think of The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, which are Consider comedies, but they concern at least some noble or great human beings, as well as some ridiculous human beings. Um, and they also Imitate actions which occur that are extremely serious, that put human beings to the test, such that if those actions fell out one way rather than another. It could result in a terribly sad ending to the work as a whole. And it'd be worth our thinking and talking a bit more about what's involved In that that re uh um re-articulation of what a comedy is.

So when it comes to the the technical and artistic Components of Athenian tragedy, the play is quite limited to particular events taking place over the course of a day, small stage production, and so on. But in terms of what the art form is meant to represent of human affairs, tragedy is maybe a much broader notion than what we tend to think of as simply something negative.

Now, if we look back at the opening chapters of the Poetics, I'd just like to suggest a kind of structure here. That is something familiar to us from other works of Aristotle. And what I have in mind in particular are his articulation of the four causes. So Aristotle tells us in his work The Physics that whenever we inquire into something in our world and the world around us, we can think of four Four ways in which a thing uh is what it is, four ways in which a thing comes to be as the kind of thing it is. And he gives an example from the realm of the arts, um, like a statue. So first and foremost, we have the material out of which the statue is made, out of which it comes to be, like marble, the material cause. And then we have what he calls the formal cause, which is that that literally form or shape into which the marble is cast, right? So Apollo, right, is Is the formal element of this marble statue. And then there's the agent cause, which will be the sculptor himself, who's actually caused the material to be informed in a particular manner. And then lastly, what Aristotle calls the final cause, that is to say the goal for which the sculptor does what he does. the first place. Well, he wants to uh imitate the god Apollo in some particular manner, right? And hopefully some sort of wondrous or pleasing manner.

So with the four causes in mind, we can look at the opening passages from the poetics and see that Aristotle Begins by talking about, as he puts it, that in which the imitation occurs. We refer to these as the media, right? So So you've got song or speech. Poetics more broadly speaking, you have wood, marble, dance, and so on. The artistic medium is something like the material cause. And that's typically where an artist is going to find himself or herself first, right? Like what kind of artist are we you is to answer the answer to that question is what medium are you working with? What's your material cause here? And we, maybe more than Aristotle, have a tremendous variety of these media. in the in our in our civilization. Though even Aristotle goes beyond some of the standard ones we might think of, like theater or canvas, and he talks about fund Fundamental dimensions of matter, even such as color, figure, shape, rhythm, meter, and speech. These are foundational examples because they're a way in which he's pointed to a way in which those sorts of media end up artistically constituting the more robust forms of media. that we might have thought of initially.

Something else that's interesting about that to me is that it suggests a way in which even for Aristotle, there may well have been forms of what we would call abstract art that that were being practiced, right? So far as what you're trying to do is work with, say, simply color as much as possible or figure that might might be representative of something something very kind of tangible in the world around you, but it wouldn't have to be to the extent that that figure is also something abstract.

Now, it's important for us to realize that even sticking at the level of the material cause, these media Um there's already to think back to the Aquinas reading, there's already a rationality and an order present in them. Right? Would. Timber, the stuff of a tree, that has an immense rationality and order built into it just because of what it is. And so this points to another way in which the artist's genius is a kind of derivative one. It piggybacks off of the genius that's already present in the medium. itself. And the artist's rationality has to discern the order that's present in the medium and then work with it, perhaps even bring it to into a kind of actuality that it doesn't possess on its own.

And that's to move us then to the second type of cause, the formal cause. So Aristotle describes this as what is being imitated, the object of the imitation. And in the You might say that in the particular case of an artistic action, it's the formal cause that's being attended to first and foremost. So what kind of artist are you? Well, I deal with this medium What are you doing right now? I'm going to attend to what it is I'm imitating. All right, well, I'm writing a story about this, or I'm writing a story about that. It's in thinking through the formal cause, what is being imitated, that Aristotle's discussion moves into the realm of action. Um, and that's to move us into the realm primarily of what you might call the moving arts. After all, he ends up wanting to talk about tragedy. most.

Now, the dramatic arts, the moving arts, are typically imitative of human life and action And at this point, I think we can raise a question as to whether one could say that all art is in some way imitative of human life and action. Obviously, there's a sense in which literally that that claim is not true. There are so many art pieces that imitate items in the non-human natural world, for example. But still we could say two things to slightly qualify this. First is that uh certain forms of media seem particularly disposed to imitating the human things and the human things alone. So again, drama um maybe song Aristotle suggests the arts that them the media themselves that tend to have to do more with motion versus the platform Plastic arts. But even in the realm of the plastic arts, or these art forms that literally don't imitate something human, the very fact that there's an imitation going on imports a human difference into the thing being imitated. So even when you have something like a still life, for example, in a painting, The intentionality that's present in such an imitation is a necessary ingredient or element of the art piece. So what's on display in art As a whole is not simply the thing imitated, but the thing imitated as always pointing in some implicit way to the human, the human difference. the kind of take on reality that the artist is able to bring.

And this indicates something we were saying Yesterday, with a slightly different spin, namely that um Aquinas tells us that the both philosophy and poetry are concerned with the marvelous, with what is wondrous, but but they do so in these different ways, namely that philosophy considers what a thing is. Poetry wants to suggest a kind of meaningfulness that a thing has. So even when a still life or a a tree is being portrayed in a painting There's a an implicit meaningfulness that the tree has to the artist that the artist is trying to in some way convey. But not by telling us, uh rather by by showing.

Um so more or less explicitly Poetry does, it seems to me, imitate human beings and human actions. Tragedy in particular wants to imitate those who are in some way greater than us. who command the screen if we're going to use a contemporary phrase. And this right here points to something important about tragedy and its significance for human life. affairs, namely that we get an insight into what human greatness can look like, and we realize as a result that we in our actions can participate in that sort of greatness. I think Aristotle and our discussions of the poetics typically tend to emphasize the the other side of that coin, the way in which this the central figure needs To be a bit beyond us. We're not kings. But the converse is also true, that insofar as the character is human and lifelike, to use that third characteristic, It's important that we realize that something about our lives shares in the kind of greatness and the kind of action that we read in these tracts.

Now Aristotle also offers as a reason that action in particular is imitated, uh the fact that he The human goal, happiness, or its opposite misery, is at stake here. And this harkens right back to uh Aristotle. Ethics, where at the very beginning, in book one, he's saying that what he's doing is conducting a search into what the human good is, into what human happiness would be. but as connected with human action in particular. So when you read the opening of the poetics and the opening of the ethics, you're very much reminded the one of the other. They both have to do with with human action. In the ethics, Aristotle's point is that happiness is not something something which just accompanies a passive state like relaxation, but rather it involves us being at work in some eminently excellent way. That's what virtue is.

So here when we're discussing tragedy, we're dealing with a serious story because we're We're ultimately interested in what the end result will be for this character. What was the fate of humanity going to be as expressed in this story? In both ethics and art, we're interested in what of human happiness or misery depends on human action, human thought. Choices and the events that are put into place by means of human action. And as we discussed today, the action of the tragic character involves a great error or mistake of some kind Here again, the ethics talks about this kind of error or mistake. And Aristotle refers to it as something that's chosen. but forgivable because it's not chosen in a completely knowing way. That's just like Oedipus killing the one who in fact is his father. This kind of failure on the part of the tragic figure results from his actions, but is unf And out of proportion to the actions themselves.

But at this point, the symmetry between the poetics and the ethics stops. Because what Aristotle tells us at the beginning of the ethics is that there's human happiness also depends, aside from human action, depends to a great deal on an element of chance, fortune, what's going to happen to us. And in the ethics, Aristotle says, well, we're we're pursuing a moral inquiry here, so we're going to just sort of Pretend that side of things doesn't exist. Let's focus on virtue and vice. But he's aware that he's leaving that to the side. And so it's in the poetic. That this whole realm, this vast realm comes back with a force, right? Because it's precisely this realm, the realm of the external. of fate or fortune, if you want to put it that way, that causes the tremendous fall, which is out of proportion to the error of the tragedy. figure.

Okay. So that that was that all had to do with what Aristotle refers to as You might say the formal cause of poetics, namely that which is being imitated and why. Then quite briefly, he brings up the agent cause um of tragedy and here he's talking about the way in which the imitation is occurring. He doesn't spend much time on it. Remember it has to do with the difference between narrative versus acting when we're talking about tragedy. If you were talking about art in general, he'd surely spend a lot more time on it and bring us to other distinctions. But we're just talking about tragedy here, so he does not.

But the fourth cause, the final cause of tragedy, is one that he spends the most So this has to do with the centrality of imitation in human life. Aristotle says that imitation is more Natural to us than to the other animals, and it's also more pleasant to us. And he gives a quick defense of these two claims. Characterizes our learning. Especially as we talked about, we see this in young children who are so imitative when they're very young. And yet, we see ways in which this persists through to the end of our lives. We can think of all sorts of ways in which we learn to do things or come to be in a certain way. out of imitating those around us, but especially those whom we admire in some way. So you could think of the people that we tend to imitate imitate as kind of miniature tragic figures, just in that sense, right? That in some way we we we perceive them as like us, but But even beyond, and something that in some way one could aspire to.

But second imitation is most pleasant, Aristotle says. And the brief defense he gives of this claim is that we take pleasure in seeing well-crafted artistic representations of anything, from the lowest life form to even corpses on a battlefield He's focusing on the fact that there are artistic depictions of terrible things in human life which we would never want to behold and yet which we could uh Um see in a museum and appreciate for ours. It's not because we have some sort of uh sadistic delight in what's horrible. It's rather because the delight that we take in imitation of real reality is so great that even if what the thing being imitated is itself a horrible thing, it undergoes a kind of transformation by way of being imitated excellently. And it's this that we love. So what we're loving is as much the human action of the artist. as the reality being imitated. Even though the human action of the artist is in some way it it's it's hidden Right? Now the love and the delight that we take in such an art piece is not a matter of smiling or feeling happy, but of being moved and stirred toward um the mystery of our of our existence and and of what what is

It's very important, I think, that Aristotle points us to the conjunction of learning and pleasure here at this point in the text. That for poetics, the pleasure and the learning are inseparable. There's a complete human experience involved here because it involves our Coming to know, but also an appropriate and desired emotional effect, an emotional exercise in the context of Reason you might say. The learning wouldn't be what it is without the emotional response, and vice versa. That's just a kind of really fascinating thing to learn. think about that there are certain forms of learning which simply wouldn't be complete without the appropriate emotional response and the same is true the other in the other direction.

We love to learn through imitation, Aristotle continues, because we love figuring things out. We love being able to make connections between things. And this is right. Back to Aquinas' opening statement: that reason perceives order. When something is represented, we consider the representation and connect that up with something we are aware of already. It could be as simple as simple as a color spectra found in nature being imitated or something as profound. as the life of Christ. Anything in reality is in principle subject to imitation.

Importantly, the word Aristotle uses here in Greek Greek is the same word that he uses for syllogism in his logical works. So when we think of logic and math, these eminently syllogists, logistic forms of argumentation and reasoning, we're typically not thinking of art and creativity. And yet Aristotle uses the exact same word To describe the pleasure we take in both, that there's a syllogizing that's occurring here. So the syllogism is this incredibly important form of discourse. That Aristotle wants to look at as a kind of pinnacle of human reasoning. So this has us in that second of the four realms of order that Aquinas talked about, right? It's not the one we behold in nature. It's the one that we see as occurring in the very movements of our reason itself. And so it's fascinating that Aristotle spells that out both in logic, but also in something like poetics. It's a marvelous way to see the unity of human reasoning across otherwise very disparate forms of activity.

So, an extremely simple example of a syllogism A favorite example for for Aristotle. All men are mortal. Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. It's an almost trivially simple example, but it gets at the heart of what he wants to direct our attention to in the poetics, namely putting two things together to come up with a new realization. You have the two premises. Premises, neither of which by themselves gives you the conclusion, but it's somehow the seeing the two together that gives you the new conclusion. And so Aristotle's saying that when we encounter Some imitation, we're seeing it as connected to the thing being imitated. And that somehow there's There's a a result of that, which is new to us. And that's what he's he's really articulating when he gets into to tragedy and the cathartic effect.

One of the amazing gifts that a great poet is blessed with is the ability to conceive the natures of things and represent present them, imitate them in such a way as to make them in some manner more graspable by us. The nature of that learning is striking because it occurs in and through representations of particulars along with affective responses. So another way to look at this is to say that tragedy in this case is a kind of intense high-level whole person model of what goes on whenever we learn anything. So you think about even as very young kids reaching the age of reason, there's always some pre-knowledge that's present in us. at the uh for the for the seven-year-old that pre-knowledge is merely sensory information and maybe a bunch of sounds that he or she has heard which we call words. But then what happens is we learn to identify those elements of sensory information with what are in fact universal Natures of things. Something like that, but at a very high pitch and in a very humanly impactful way is what's going on and tragedy.

We follow along with the story. We're clinging to it because one item in the plot necessarily leads to the other. But then something falls out from that, something occurs as a result of it, which is not a wrench thrown into the works, but something the works themselves entailed, but that we didn't see coming. Concretely, Aristotle says that the pivotal moment, so the what what the the the the moment of drawing the conclusion, which he says is the moment of recognition and reversal and the tragedy, that this occurs for the character and the audience at the same time. Time as we mentioned.

What's marvelous about this is that it means that we as the audience are given almost as close as you get to a truly omniscient view of the event. Because by virtue of knowing the character and resonating with him and feeling with and for him, we experience the thing vicariously from the inside. as though it were happening to us, and yet on the other hand, because we're just the audience and privy to the events as a whole, We see it from the outside. So you get the exterior, big picture, detached view of things, but also a very up-close and personal view all at the same time. That is extraordinary, right? Because it's it's we're we're being put into two different places at once, so to speak, and we're transcending ourselves As a result of our pity, our fellow feeling with the character kind of from the inside.

This is another way then in which poetic works accomplish something uh extraordinary for us. Typically, when something very impactful happens in our lives, We're so caught up in the moment. There's a kind of un-self-consciousness to our involvement and our reactions to it. And it tends to be only after time that we have space for reflection. and we can get the broader view on things. Conversely, if we're considering things at the 30,000-foot view, often through conversation, Or reading history or philosophy, we get the big picture, but without the immediacy and the emotional resonance that we have when we're vicariously experiencing the character himself

That leads us directly into the the final part of what I wanted to say, which has to do with education and self-knowledge. Aristotle's politics is the sequel to his ethics. And you could think of the politics, the ethics, and the poetics as kind of his trilogy of works dealing with the specifically human things. The politics ends with art. It ends with music and poetry as especially crucial for education. And in particular for moral education, personal formation, if you want to put it that way.

One way to see the importance of art and moral formation is to recognize a kind of paradox in Aristotle's Ethics when it comes to the very first virtue he discusses, which is courage. The paradigm of courage for Aristotle is the warrior who proactively seeks out a situation in which a noble death can occur for the sake of something great on behalf of his city, his people. The problem is Um the act of courage is never complete for such a warrior precisely because he dies. And he can't, in hindsight, even have the satisfaction of reflecting on his great act Action for the same reason. So somehow he has to be able to see that action beforehand. The action is inside of him, though in an inchoate and not fully actual manner. It's poetics that can make such an action real for us, visible, and powerful. We can the fact that we can contemplate our deaths is what makes it possible for us to try and shape our lives as wholes. But we never end up experiencing our lives as wholes. And so this contemplation of what our lives could be like is itself a kind of fiction. Poetic. It has to be.

Indeed, it's true of all human action that it's poetic in a broad sense because our actions are first in us, in our minds and then acted. Right? We we think to ourselves, okay, we've got this good here, maybe This good that's on offer. Should I choose it? Yes, I think I'm gonna choose it. It's gonna involve this, but hopefully I'll get that as a result. Yeah that and then we do it and our doing of it is a kind of imitation. of what's our of what's in here. You could say that our actions are imitations of our imagined actions. Actions. And here we see how even primary the imitation is over and above what's imitated. Right? In human affairs, in the moral life, the imitation really is the all-important thing, not just what we're conceiving. So this itself makes poetics intimately related to self-knowledge

It's also the case that human action is simultaneously always both conscious and unconscious. the same time. Whenever we're doing something, we're doing it because we've chosen to. That's the conscious part. We're aware of what we're doing. Otherwise Otherwise, we couldn't be praised or blamed for it. But there's an element of unself-consciousness there too, right? It's quite literally impossible for us to be fully conscious of everything we're doing in entirely. And so for that reason we always recognize it as kind of stilted when we're continually trying to be self-conscious. Conscious in the course of normal human affairs. We end up not being able to do either of them very well. So human action is always conscious and unconscious together, and this too is made thematic. In drama, right? Because the actors are just acting on the one hand, and yet what they do is in some way as powerful as uh what real life actions can be.

Recognition and reversal also indicate how learning is so closely tied to poetic imagination Because reversal forces the audience to reflect on what we thought we knew before. Because we've seen now that what we thought we knew wasn't really what it was because it led to this thing that was entirely unexpected. That's like the Socratic moment. Yeah. Recognition does this for the character, forces the character to reflect on the same sequences of events. And as Aristotle has reminded us, ideally both of those reflections, those moments of reflection happen simultaneously. And so there's something like a kind of friendship, something analogous to friendship, you could say, between us and the character. because we are undergoing the same thing that the character is at the same time in this context of a pity, like a kinship

Looked at in this light, we can see a new centrality that the chorus has, by the way, in tragedy, because they both participate in the reversal. Like we do, right? Seeing, oh, there's been a fall here. But they also share in the recognition with the character. Um, so the chorus in this way is kind of like the unifying feature of tragedy like in between us and and Oedipus and and we really got at that I think really nicely the first day or the second day where we were talking about the scene in particular. where Oedipus joins in with the chorus.

Okay, so um it seems to me by way of conclusion then that uh there's a number of ramifications here for the work of education. education itself, right? That we can we've seen these um modes in which poetics and the poetic act itself has everything to do with our learning, with our coming to awareness. And so it should cause us to reflect on, well, how can we think about advantage education imitatively. And um at least a couple suggestions would be that um education at its best imitates the ways in which we ourselves have come to learn. This is something that Aquinas really builds on as a in a kind of indebted way from Aristotle. He says that It's the job of the teacher to think seriously about the way in which the teacher came to learn something and then to try and imitate that through words or whatever. whatever your medium is for the student.

At the same time, we're we're trying to imitate the being of things in our teaching. That's what we're trying to be true to is the the subject matter, the reality under consideration. So we don't want The student to learn us primarily. We want the student to learn the subject. And so we've got to be At the same time one at the same time, very attentive to our own paths of learning, so we can imitate those for the student, but very attentive to the things themselves. as well as to the student. There's a way in which the student, the particular student or group of students is something like a the medium. This is who we're working with. This is what we're working with, not to depersonify. And so we need to come to know the medium. We've got to know our students as best we can and appreciate them for the kinds of learners they are, see what patterns of order and reason are already in them. And and work with that or in light of it, maybe sometimes against it. Um So education at its best, you could say, incorporates the seriousness of tragedy, the recognition of a world greater Than us, but leading to a decidedly non-tragic catharsis, something more like friendship with the students.