Rhetoric, for Aristotle, is a topic-neutral discipline that studies the
possible means of persuasion. In advising orators on how to exploit the moods
of their audience, Aristotle undertakes a systematic and often insightful
treatment of human emotion, dealing in turn with anger, hatred, fear, shame,
pity, indignation, envy, and jealousy—in each case offering a definition of the
emotion and a list of its objects and causes.
The Poetics is much better known than the Rhetoric, though only the
first book of the former, a treatment of epic and tragic poetry, survives. The
book aims, among other things, to answer Plato’s criticisms of representative
art. According to the theory of Forms, material objects are imperfect copies of
original, real, Forms; artistic representations of material objects are
therefore only copies of copies, at two removes from reality. Moreover, drama
has a specially corrupting effect, because it stimulates unworthy emotions in
its audience. In response, Aristotle insists that imitation, so far from being
the degrading activity that Plato describes, is something natural to humans
from childhood and is one of the characteristics that makes humans superior to
animals, since it vastly increases the scope of what they may learn.
In order to answer Plato’s complaint that playwrights are only imitators
of everyday life, which is itself only an imitation of the real world of Forms,
Aristotle draws a contrast between poetry and history. The poet’s job is to
describe not something that has actually happened but something that might well
happen—that is to say, something that is possible because it is necessary or
likely. For this reason, poetry is more philosophical and more important than
history, for poetry speaks of the universal, history of only the particular.
Much of what happens to people in everyday life is a matter of sheer accident;
only in fiction can one witness character and action work themselves out to
their natural consequences.
Far from debasing the emotions, as Plato thought, drama has a beneficial
effect on them. Tragedy, Aristotle says, must contain episodes arousing pity
and fear so as to achieve a “purification” of these emotions. No one is quite
sure exactly what Aristotle meant by katharsis, or purification. But perhaps
what he meant was that watching tragedy helps people to put their own sorrows
and worries in perspective, because in it they observe how catastrophe can
overtake even people who are vastly their superiors.
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