From the pen of Sarah Dimento

First, cover art for my next collection of essais, Style is the Rocket:

Featuring the title piece and a Bunch of Other Cool Stuff.

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The second way of knowing

Sensation is, after digestion, the Second Way of knowing. When we eat something, we incorporate the matter without preserving the form. When we sense something, we incorporate the form without preserving the matter. Otherwise, when we stop to smell the roses, tiny little roses would grow in our brains and the thorns would give us headaches.

—Michael Flynn

Read all about the Animal Soul on Mr. Flynn’s blog:

In Psearch of Psyche: Man the Animal

C. S. L. on slavery

Fifty years and a couple of days after he departed from the Shadowlands.

Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

—C. S. Lewis, ‘Equality’ (collected in Present Concerns)

Tragedy, comedy, and agon

An essai on chapter 4 of Aristotle’s Poetics.


 

It is clear that the general origin of poetry was due to two causes, each of them part of human nature. Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation. And it is also natural for all to delight in imitation.

—Aristotle, Poetics

Along with imitation, Aristotle lists harmony and rhythm as natural human faculties that cause us to enjoy poetry and drama; and we should add (though the philosopher omits it) the faculty of language itself. None of us were born speaking Greek, and a few of us here and there have not got the hang of it even yet. But everybody speaks some language, unless prevented by some bodily defect. And every language I know of has some form of poetry.

In the fourth chapter of the Poetics, however, language is a side issue. Aristotle here is concerned with two things: first, to show how and why poetry develops as an imitative art, and second, to briefly trace the history of Greek poetry down to the full development of tragedy. [Read more…]

Medium and genre

An essai on chapter 3 of Aristotle’s Poetics.


A third difference in these arts is the manner in which each kind of object is represented. Given both the same means and the same kind of object or imitation, one may either (1) speak at one moment in narrative and at another in assumed character, as Homer does; or (2) one may remain the same throughout, without any such change; or (3) the imitators may represent the whole story dramatically, as though they were actually doing the things described.

—Aristotle, Poetics

Here Aristotle arrives at the fundamental distinction of genre, in the older sense of the word. In the Greek system of classification (which he here describes), all poesis is divisible into three genres: drama, dithyramb, and epic. The dithyramb is pure narrative, without any direct dialogue; it is very rare in modern fiction, though it sometimes occurs in popular songs. As writers, we are likely to use this mode mostly for writing synopses or outlines; and then we will use prose narrative, rather than the dithyramb proper (which is a particular verse form, in one of those Greek metres I mentioned earlier, which will not go into English).
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Vice and virtue

An essai on chapter 2 of Aristotle’s Poetics.


 

The objects the imitator represents are actions, with agents who are necessarily either good men or bad — the diversities of human character being nearly always derivative from this primary distinction, since the line between virtue and vice is one dividing the whole of mankind. It follows, therefore, that the agents represented must be either above our own level of goodness, or beneath it, or just such as we are.

—Aristotle, Poetics

The second chapter of the Poetics is one of the shortest in the book; but it is here that we come to a pons asinorum, an obstacle that many would-be critics never get across, and I am not entirely sure that Aristotle himself had crossed it when he wrote this particular book. But as writers we must get across, because the entire business of character and its depiction in poesis lies on the other side. [Read more…]

Poesis

An essai on Chapter 1 of Aristotle’s Poetics.


 

Our subject being Poetry, I propose to speak not only of the art in general but also of its species and their respective capacities; of the structure of plot required for a good poem; of the number and nature of the constituent parts of a poem; and likewise of any other matters in the same line of inquiry.

—Aristotle, Poetics (tr. Ingram Bywater)

The Greek word ποιητής meant originally ‘maker’, and was applied by the Greeks to everything from potters and carpenters to God himself. Most European languages have borrowed this word, either directly or through the Latin poeta, to mean specifically a maker of verse. It often happens that when we borrow a word from Greek, we use it only in a restricted or technical sense, and so lose a wealth of interesting meanings and associations that went with the word in the original language. So it is here. [Read more…]

Animal rationale

Aristotle (and, later, the Schoolmen) defined man as a rational animal: i.e., the only animal capable of reason. Neither he nor anyone else claimed that men are always rational.

Reason is a technique that we learn; it is no more innate to us than riding a bicycle. If I say that one can get from John o’ Groats to Land’s End by bicycle, the truth of that statement is not altered by the fact that some people will fall off the bicycle on the way, or take a wrong turning; or that some have never learnt to ride at all. Mutatis mutandis, the capacity of reason, as a method, to reach valid consequents given valid premises, is in no way vitiated or impugned by the fact that humans make errors in employing it. Indeed, it is only by the correct application of reason that such faults can even be identified as errors.

More shortly put, it isn’t the hammer’s fault if the carpenter hits his thumb.

Aristotle on tyrants

In 1925, as a protest against the new and virulent strains of dictatorship then beginning to infect the world, Pope Pius XI instituted the Solemnity of Christ the King, which is now celebrated in the Novus Ordo Missae, and by many Protestant churches, on the last Sunday of the liturgical year, viz. today. This quotation caught my eye as appropriate to the occasion:

[T]he greatest crimes are caused by excess and not by necessity. Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold; and hence great is the honour bestowed, not on him who kills a thief, but on him who kills a tyrant.

—Aristotle, Politics