Vice and virtue (An essai on Aristotle’s Poetics, chapter 2)

[superversive]

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

Comments

[sollersuk]

You've picked up on so many points on which I am in strong agreement that I may have to come back to this later. Firstly, I would very much love to reclaim "man" for "human being" but unfortunately I think it's a lost cause.

Secondly, it's some decades since I read the "Ethics" but I have a recollection of Aristotle getting into a terrible tangle - as far as he could make out, a good thief is a thief who is good at stealing, and if he was a good thief he was a good man.

I'll fish out the precise wording later, but in their introduction the translators of the Penguin edition of Aesop's Fables draw attention to the total alienness of both Greek and Roman morality, and it compels one to realise how much modern attitudes are the heirs of Judaeo-Christian views, even in people who think they are rejecting them.

H'm, time to go to work (luckily this just involves walking upstairs), so more later when I've read the whole thing in detail.

[marycatelli]

The word "good" has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.
--G.K. Chesterton

[superversive]

I think that, in the end, that is approximately the conclusion Aristotle (or Nicomachus) reached. However, that may have crept in from my reading of Mortimer Adler’s commentary on the Ethics.

[marycatelli]

Everyone knows that "man" means "a human being, regardless of condition." When I explain that "wer-wolf" means "man-wolf" -- and yes, that is the male variant, everyone always expresses surprise, because they had assumed it was the other.

[marycatelli]

To be just, there were Greeks who thought that slavery vs. freedom was merely a legal invention reflecting nothing in reality. We know this because after Aristotle drew a distinction between the natural slave and the natural master -- a natural slave is a person lacking in the deliberative faculty, which even children and (the uneducated, purdah-bound) women (of his time) have, and so mentally defective -- he observed that anyone can see, any day, that there are slaves with the bodies of freemen, and freemen with the bodies of slave, and so the legal-invention people did have a good case.

[superversive]

It’s unfortunate that very few of the people who were actually kept as slaves in Classical Greece were actually ‘natural slaves’ in the Aristotelian sense. The greatest part of them, as I have mentioned, were captives in war, and only distinguishable from freemen because they had been on the losing side.

[joetexx]

Belongs in essays on bondwine.

[marycatelli]

He often gives them field runs online before turning them into essays there.

[superversive]

In fact, I always do. Every one of the essays on Bondwine was first released either here, or on my former blog, Shiny Happy Gulag.

[superversive]

Thank you. If I carry out my present intention, which is to go through the whole Poetics chapter by chapter, I may instead release the whole lot as a very cheap ebook. As I go on, I shall sound out my 3.6 Loyal Readers about whether anyone would buy this stuff for a buck.

However, there are 26 chapters in the Poetics, so it’s a bit early to worry about that just yet.

[houseboatonstyx]

"The essential thing about representation (as St. Augustine would remind us) is that the representation is not the thing represented; or as Magritte put it, ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe.’ "

Reading at this hour, I almost went looking for the Simenon novel.

[sartorias]

Good thinkie stuff.