The Lost Second Book of Aristotle's "Poetics"

294 Pages·2012·1.69 MB·English

by  Walter Watson

WALTER WATSON is professor emeritus of philosophy at Stony Brook University, State University of
New York. His previous book was The Architectonics of Meaning: Foundations of the New Pluralism.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2012 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved.
Published 2012.
Printed in the United States of America 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-87508-8 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-226-87508-3 (cloth)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Watson, Walter, 1925– The lost second book of
Aristotle’s Poetics/Walter Watson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-87508-8 (hardcover : alkaline paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-87508-3 (hardcover : alkaline
paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-87510-1 (ebook) 1. Aristotle. Poetics. 2. Poetry—History and criticism. I. Title.
PN1040.A753W38 2012
808.2—dc23
2011034675
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO
Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).
The LOST SECOND BOOK of
ARISTOTLE’S POETICS
WALTER WATSON
The UNIVERSITY of CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO and LONDON
IN MEMORY OF
Richard McKeon,
WITH ENDURING GRATITUDE
FOR HIS HAVING TAUGHT ME
SO MUCH THAT I COULD NEVER
HAVE LEARNED BUT FOR THE
GREAT GOOD FORTUNE OF
FINDING SUCH A MENTOR.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Lost Second Book of Aristotle’s Poetics
2. Aims of the Present Book
3. Method to Be Followed
4. Prospective Readers
PART I. GROUNDWORK
Chapter 1. ARISTOTLE’S ARTS AND SCIENCES
1. The Organon
2. Preface to the Theoretical Sciences
3. Mathematics
4. The Physical Sciences
5. The Biological Sciences
6. First Philosophy
7. The Order of the Arts and Sciences
8. The Practical Sciences
9. The Productive Sciences: Poetics
10. Rhetoric
11. Scientific Rationality as a Guiding Idea
Chapter 2. CAUSES
PART II. THE SYMBOLON ARGUMENT
Chapter 3. CAUSES IN THE POETICS
Chapter 4. POETIC IMITATION
1. The Analysis of Poetic Imitation
2. The Scope of Poetic Imitation
3. The Evolution of Poetic Imitation
Chapter 5. EXPECTATIONS OF POETICS II
Chapter 6. THE EPITOME OF POETICS II
Chapter 7. COMPARISON OF THE EPITOME WITH OUR EXPECTATIONS
PART III. THE KINDS OF POETRY
Chapter 8. IMITATIVE POETRY
1. The Autonomy of Imitative Poetry
2. The Autonomy of Aristotelian Disciplines
3. Autonomy of Art in the Aristotelian Tradition
Chapter 9. HISTORICAL, EDUCATIONAL, AND IMITATIVE POETRY
Chapter 10. HISTORICAL POETRY
1. History of the Problem
2. Historical Poetry and History
3. Historical Poetry and Imitative Poetry
4. Historical Poetry and Rhetoric
Chapter 11. EDUCATIONAL POETRY
1. Poetry and Philosophy
2. Poetry and Education
Chapter 12. TRANSITION TO THE SPECIFIC ENDS OF IMITATIVE POETRY
PART IV. THE END OF TRAGEDY
Chapter 13. THE END OF TRAGEDY AS CATHARSIS
Chapter 14. THE FEARFUL EMOTIONS
Chapter 15. THE REMOVAL OF EMOTIONS BY EMOTIONS
Chapter 16. THE AIM OF TRAGEDY: SYMMETRY
Chapter 17. THE MOTHER OF TRAGEDY: PAIN
Chapter 18. POETRY AND THE PRACTICAL SCIENCES
1. Poetic and Therapeutic Catharsis
2. Is Catharsis in the Poem or in the Audience?
3. Is Catharsis Educative?
4. The Practical Ends of Poetry
PART V. COMEDY
Chapter 19. THE DEFINITION OF COMEDY
Chapter 20. THE MOTHER OF COMEDY: LAUGHTER
Chapter 21. THE LAUGHABLE
1. The Definition of the Laughable
2. Accounts of the Laughable
3. The Causes of the Laughable
4. Laughter from the Diction
5. Laughter from the Incidents
6. Cicero’s Account of Laughter
7. The Science of the Laughable
Chapter 22. THE EMBODIMENT OF THE LAUGHABLE IN COMEDY
1. The Matter and Parts of Comedy
2. Old, New, and Middle Comedy
Conclusion
Appendix: The Order and Provenance of the Aristotelian Corpus
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Without Richard Janko’s book Aristotle on Comedy, the present book would not
have been written. Seeing his text of the so-called Tractatus Coislinianus, with
what appeared to be four-cause analyses of both catharsis and the laughable, I
thought, “We know the lion by his paw,” as Johann Bernoulli is said to have
remarked of Newton’s anonymous solution to the brachistochrone problem
Bernoulli had proposed. I have since consulted Janko’s book a thousand times,
but I am grateful to him for more than his book. He encouraged my work at an
early stage and read a later draft of the entire manuscript. His many corrections
have saved me from embarrassing errors, and his many suggestions have greatly
improved the book.
Many of my Stony Brook colleagues have also read the manuscript of the
book, or portions of it, at various stages of completion, and have provided
valuable comments. They include Bruce Bashford, Homer Goldberg, and the late
Richard Levin of the Department of English; and Robert Crease and David
Dilworth of the Department of Philosophy. Richard Levin in particular I
consulted many times on questions relating to Shakespeare and to poetic theory,
and his understanding of the Poetics enabled him to express unqualified
agreement with the key point of the book, the interpretation of the distinction
between imitative and nonimitative poetry, long before the full argument was
worked out. Robert Watson of the UCLA Department of English, Richard
Brooks of the Vermont Law School, and the late Richard Wynne contributed
helpful comments at an early stage.
I am indebted to Eugene Gendlin not only for specific suggestions, but for
many enlightening and enjoyable e-mail exchanges on problems of Aristotelian
interpretation and for the magnificent example of his Line by Line Commentary
on Aristotle’s “De Anima.” I am grateful to my Stony Brook friend and
colleague Bill Godfrey for teaching me Latin and for being a never-failing
source of jokes and of information on all recondite subjects. The late Kenneth
Telford was my friend from graduate school days, and we were colleagues for a
while at the New School during the 1960s. I am grateful to him for the
discussions that we had on his translation and interpretation of the Poetics as
well as on countless other matters. The encouragement and steadfast support of
my work by Douglas Mitchell of the University of Chicago Press has been
invaluable to me. Finally, I am grateful to my wife, Norma, formerly a
professional editor, for securing for me uninterrupted mornings in which to work
and for her unfailing willingness to interrupt her many civic and musical
activities to provide editorial and scholarly assistance.
INTRODUCTION
1. THE LOST SECOND BOOK OF ARISTOTLE’S POETICS
The surviving manuscripts of Aristotle’s Poetics consist of a single book. In this
book, Aristotle says that he will speak of comedy, but this he does not do in the
surviving book. This book concludes with the problem of whether tragedy or
epic is more achieving of their common end, but this problem is left unresolved.
In the Politics, when Aristotle uses the word “catharsis,” he says that he will say
more clearly what the word means when he comes to speak of it in the Poetics,
but this he does not do in the surviving book. These things give us reason to
think that there was a second book in which the expectations they raise were
met.
There is also evidence that a second book actually existed. In the Rhetoric,
Aristotle says that he has distinguished the forms of the laughable in the Poetics,
and has said what homonyms and synonyms are, neither of which is done in the
surviving book. A lexicographer of the second or third century CE known as the
Anti-Atticist lists as used in Aristotle’s Poetics the word kuntotaton (an
alteration of kuntaton, “most doglike” or “most shameless”), and this word is not
in the surviving book. Simplicius in the sixth century quotes Porphyry in the
third as quoting a definition of synonymy from the Poetics that is not in the
surviving book (Janko 1984, 172). A two-book Poetics is listed among
Aristotle’s works by Diogenes Laertius in the third century, by Ptolemy al garíb
(the unknown) in the fourth century, and by Hesychius of Miletus in the middle
of the sixth century (ibid., 65). After this, we have no references to a second
book as existing.
The Poetics was the final work in the series of manuscripts that, as published
by Andronicus of Rhodes in the first century , constitute what has come to be
BCE
known as the Aristotelian corpus. The second book of the Poetics would have
been the last scroll in the corpus or the last pages of a manuscript volume and in
either case would have been particularly vulnerable to loss. It is reasonable to
conclude that there was in fact a second book, and that it probably became lost
sometime after the middle of the sixth century.
In 1839, three manuscript pages that appeared to be an abstract or epitome of
the missing book came to light. They were discovered by J. A. Cramer in the De
Coislin collection in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. They have been called
the “Tractatus Coislinianus” from the collection in which they were found. The
earliest known location of the manuscript is the monastery of the Great Lavra on