MLLL5063Notes2006

The history of Western criticism begins with a quarrel over the word imitatio (mimesis).

The history of philosophy and of literary thought can be divided into four major phases:

He was a student of Socrates and founder of the Academy in Athens. He is the major figure in the history of Western philosophy. He is the earliest of thinkers to discuss poetry at length. He writes dialogues in dramatic form. He bequeaths to literary criticism the theory of imitation or mimesis, dominant in literary criticism until well into the 18th century. Plato has Socrates locate reality in what he calls the ideas or forms rather than in the world of appearances or phenomena experienced through the senses. Objects we perceive are merely copies of their ideas. It is only by means of our rational power exercised in dialectical search than can advance us toward truth. In the Phaedrus he states there is the divine madness of the poet, who becomes inspired when he imitates appearances (thusly being twice removed from reality). The poet is to be exiled from the Republic, although he can redeem himself by singing the praises of the gods and famous statesmen. Rhetoricians and sophists are sinister creatures because they deliberately delude and gain illicit power over their listeners.

Besides imitation (as connected with the theory of forms), imitation in a technical sense is in the Republic (composed in 373 BC):

Plato is the founder of moralistic and didactic criticism. He separates content from form, privileging content.

The Cratylus (from Plato’s Middle Period) treats the elusiveness of language.

ION (390 BC, an early dialogue): Socrates and Ion (dialogists).
Socrates assumes Ion, as a rhapsode, knows Homer’s works well and, hence, is able to interpret him. But Ion claims he only knows Homer well, not others. Socrates claims Ion knows Homer’s works without art or knowledge then, for as a rhapsode he would know the rules of art. Ion says he loves to hear wise men talk (11). Socrates says poets are wise; men like Socrates only speak the truth. Socrates says Ion is divinely inspired; he lacks art. The Muse inspires men. Good poets compose not by art but by divine inspiration and possession. Poets are not in their right minds when they compose. There is no invention in poets until they are divinely inspired. If Ion could speak about all poets then he would have learned art by rules, but since he only claims to know Homer he must be divinely inspired. God (like Bacchus) uses him as he would a diviner or prophet. Socrates says that the spectator is the last of the rings which receive the power of the original magnet from one another (12). The rhapsode and the actor are intermediate links. The poet is the first of them (the birth of reception theory). Socrates says that he who has no knowledge of a particular art will have no judgment of the sayings and doings of that art (hence, a carpenter, a general, a charioteer, a medic, would know Homer’s art better than the rhapsode). Socrates calls Ion a deceiver (15) for claiming he knows Homer’s works. He is like Proteus and takes many shapes. He has no knowledge. He is only a simulacrum (Baudrillard). Either he is dishonest or divinely inspired. Ion chooses the latter.

REPUBLIC (373 BC): A disquisition on justice, which is either a) what is to the advantage of the powerful [Thrasymachus] or b) [Socrates] related to the good, and the ideal statem the Republic.
     BOOK TWO: Socrates & Adeimantus: A disquisition on the education of the heroes: 1) gymnastics for the body and 2) music (poetry/literature) for the soul. Literature (for children) must be good, not bad. Therefore, censors should accept the former and reject the latter (16). There are two types of lie: 1) the good lie (on behalf of the preservation of the state [apology of propaganda]) and 2) the bad lie (which constitutes an erroneous representation of the nature of gods and heroes). Stories of pity and lamentation, of quarrels, or of the nasty doings of the gods, should be excised or passed over in silence. Even if we attribute an allegorical meaning to them (17), they should not be admitted into the State, for a young person cannot judge what is allegorical and what is literal. The tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts (17).
     God is always to be represented as he truly is (truly good). Evil should not be attributed to God (17). God cannot change (he cannot take other forms). Mothers should not tell scary stories to children, for fear of making them into cowards (19). A good lie is a form of medicine (19), not harmful but healthy. The superhuman and divine is absolutely incapable of falsehood. God is perfectly simple and good in word and deed. He does not deceive by sign, word, dream, or vision (19). The gods are not magicians who deceive mankind by transforming themselves. The teachers and guardians of the young must be true worshippers of the gods themselves (they must be moral themselves) [20].
     BOOK THREE: Socrates, Adeimantus, Glaucon: Such (above) are the principles of theology: some tales are to be told, others not, so that youth honor the gods and their parents.
     Also, the tales about the miseries of the dead must be expunged so that soldiers will not fear death and would choose death in battle rather than defeat and slavery. These stories must be excised not because they are unpoetic or unattractive but because the more poetic and charming they are the less they are meant to be for young boys and men who are raised to be free rather than slaves. They should not fear death. It’s not that those passages don’t have a use of some kind, but there is the danger that the nerves of the guardians would be rendered too excitable and effeminate by them.   The weeping and wailing of famous men should also be excised, for the good man will not consider death terrible. This stuff is meant for (some) women and baser men.
     Men should be raised to feel shame and self-control (22); they should not whine and lament. Guardians should not laugh excessively either. Nor should the gods be shown as capable of great laughter. Truth should be highly valued instead. Only the guardians of the state should have the privilege of lying for the sake of the public good.   Youths should be temperate, that is, obey their commanders and exercise self-control in sensual pleasures (22). Youth should hear tales of endurance by famous men.   They should not be raised to be receivers of gifts or have them love money (23). Hero worship (24). Tales of cowardice or vice engender laxity of morals. Poets must not tell youth that the wicked are happy and the good miserable, or that injustice is profitable when undetected (socialist realism?).
     The above constituted the subject (content) of poetry. Now the style (24). All mythology and poetry is a narration of events, either past, present, or future. There is simply narration (drama) or a union of the two (epic). When the poet is the only speaker, that is the dithyramb. The combination of both (the poet speaks, then the characters) is the epic (25). Should tragedy and comedy be admitted in the state? Youth should imitate early on only those characters who are courageous, temperate, holy, and free; they should avoid illiberality or baseness, for fear they would become that way, for imitation grows into habits and become a second nature, affecting body, voice, and mind (a theory of education and morality here) [26]. Good men should not imitate women or sickness, love, or labor. They should not represent slaves, male or female. They should not represent bad men, or cowards, or the mad, or the bad. They should not imitate artificers or other workers. They should not imitate the neighing of horses, the barking of dogs, or other animals. They should not copy the actions or speech of madmen. He should use the same style and keep within the limits of a single harmony and make use of nearly the same rhythm (26).
     Music (27) has three parts: words, melody, and rhythm. Notes of sorrow should be elided and not allowed to the youth, even to women of character. Sensuous harmonies, and ones suggesting softness, drunkenness, and indolence, are unbecoming of our guardians. Military music is fine (27). Simple (harp, lyre = Apollo) music; no flutes (Marsyas). Keep melody simple. Rhythms should be simple and suggest courage and harmony; adapt the music to words of the same spirit (not the words to the melody) [Wagner’s music]. Eliminate rhythms expressive of meanness, insolence, fury, or other unworthiness. Good rhythm and harmony are regulated by the words (not the words by them). Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity (28). [The beautiful for Socrates is what is mathematically proportionate]. Ugliness and discord and inharmonious motion are allied to ill words and ill nature, as grace and harmony are the twin sisters of goodness and virtue (29).
     The above rules affect other arts like architecture and sculpture. Mora deformity should be excised. It corrupts. Our youth should dwell in the land of health, amid fair sights and sounds, and receive the good in everything, and beauty, that should flow into the eye and ear, and draw the soul into likeness and sympathy with the beauty of reason. Musical training is essential, for it imparts grace and predisposes the soul to the good and the beautiful. Youth must learn to hate the bad (the ugly, the infirm) early on. A musical education is essential (29).
     BOOK X: Socrates, Glaucon: The rule about poetry (30). Theory of imitation (what things have in common with an innate idea). Artificers do not make ideas; they copy them. There are three objects of imitation (a bed): the idea of bed made by God, the work of a carpenter, and the work of a painter (a semblance of existence). God made one real (not particular) bed in nature out of choice or necessity. The artifice makes a particular bed. The painter makes a semblance only. The artist (poet) is therefore thrice removed from the truth. The poet cannot compose well unless he knows his subject. He deals with appearances only and not realities (31). The poet is like a painter: he can only copy images of virtue but can never reach the truth.
     There are three arts concerned with all things: a) one which uses, b) one which makes, and c) one which imitates. Imitation is only a kind of play or sport. The poet does not appeal to reason but to the senses and passions (what is easily imitated) [35]. His creations have an inferior degree of truth. He impairs reason (trompe l’oeil). It stirs the emotions instead of controlling them. Poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up. Homer is great but we should only admit in the state hymns to the gods and praises of famous men. Law and reason must reign, not pleasure and pain (35). We are aware of poetry charms, but we should not betray truth (36). Poetry has no use, only delight. Justice and virtue might suffer on account of the delight of poetry.

PHAEDRUS: Socrates and Phaedrus. There are two types of madness: 1) One produced by human infirmity and 2) A divine release of the soul from yoke of custom and convention: a) prophetic (inspired by Apollo), b) initiatory (Dionysus), c) poetic (the Muses), and d) erotic (Aphrodite and Venus), the best kind of madness (36). Poetic madness gives not truth but the semblance of truth (37). Writing is like painting. Once something is painted or written, it remains silent.

SOPHIST: Theaetetus & Socrates. The sophist (rhetorician) has a sort of conjectural or apparent knowledge only of all things, which is not the truth (38). He is a magician and mimic (39). There are two divisions to the imitative art: 1) the icastic (the art of likeness-making) and 2) the phantastic (the art of making things that do not exist). Phantastic art produces an appearance and not an image (i.e., a statue that is placed atop a building and must be designed disproportionately to be seen proportionately by those below). Neither of them has being, though.

CRATYLUS: Socrates, Hermogenes, Cratylus. Does the correct name indicate the nature of the thing? Names are given in order to instruct. Naming is an art. The legislators make the names (41). The right assignment of names is truth; the wrong assignment, falsehood (42). But is there a right or wrong assignment of verbs and sentences? Do appropriate letters and syllables produce a god image, a name? Would the subtraction or addition of letters or syllables make up a good or bad name? Is the legislator, like other artists, then good and bad? Can one name be correctly and another incorrectly given? But if so, shouldn’t names correspond to the objects represented by them? Maybe only the general character of the thing described should be retained? So the, a name is not the expression of a thing in letters or syllables? Is a name a representation of a thing? Are nouns primitive or derived? Are primitive nouns first nouns and representations of things? Is Hermogenes correct when he says that names are conventional and have no meaning to those who have agreed about them? Is convention the only principle? (43). Is representation by likeness sufficient? Do some words express motion, hardness, smoothness, softness, and the like (onomatopoeia). Do we understand words by custom only? Is custom convention? So then the correctness of a name turns out to be merely a convention (i.e., not truth)? [44]. Is the signification of words given by custom and not by likeness? Custom and convention are supposed to contribute to the indication of our thoughts? It would be wonderful to use likeness to justify the appropriateness of language, but it seems custom rules [44]. The first legislator named things according to his conception of things. But could he have been wrong in his conception of things? (Ontological crisis here). Custom could then be based on an error (not truth). All things seem to be in motion (Heraclitus). If not static, how can word define them? (i.e., words must change too). The first givers of names had to have been legislators. Did they know the things that they named? (a computer mouse) [45]. Are things to be known by names only? (46). Were there legislators before names? A power more than human must have given things their first name (God?). But can the gods contradict themselves and give erroneous names? How could things be known without names? [Derrida: there is no source or origin, only infinite regress and “difference”] {46}. Socrates claims real existence is beyond comprehension (beyond the dialectical method, beyond ontology). The knowledge of things is not to be derived from names. But then, can there be any absolute beauty or good? Especially if things are in flux? How can a real thing be in s state of transition? If everything is in a state of flux, can there be real knowledge? Socrates asks Cratylus to think like a man and when he has found the truth to come back to tell it to him.

ARISTOTLE (384-322 B.C):
Aristotle was a student of Plato’s during Philip II of Macedon’s reign (Philip was the father of Alexander the Great), founder of the Lyceum (or Peripatetic School [Aristotle walked while he taught] of philosophy). Aristotle’s Poetics is the most influential treatise on poetry in the Western world. It was lost and became available again to Europe during the Renaissance. His Poetics is a treatise on the art of making (while his Rhetoric is a practical art). Aristotle differs with Plato with respect to the latter’s theory of (immutable) forms. He denies the being of ideas apart from things. Things have a purpose (telos) in an ever changing universe. Reality is the process in which a form is manifested from matter by nature. The poet is an imitator and maker. In imitation the poet discovers the ultimate form of an action. Literary art is an improvement on nature, for the poet brings about to completion what nature, operating with its own principles, is still developing.

PHYSICS: Book 2, Chapter 8:
Nature acts for the sake of something (it has a purpose). The same is true with the parts of nature (our teeth come out of necessity, etc.). Art completes what nature cannot bring to a finish and partly imitates her. Artificial and natural products are for the sake of an end. Nature means two things: 1) the matter and 2) the form; the form is the end of matter. The form, therefore, must be the cause. When an event takes place, it is not incidental or by chance. Purpose is always present in art or nature, even if we do not observe it.

METAPHYSICS: Book A (1), Chapters 1-2:
All men by nature desire to know. We delight in what we take in with our senses, especially sight. By nature animals are born with the faculty of sensation, and from sensation memory is produced. Animals live by appearances and memories, but man also by art and reasoning. Memory produces experience. Science and art come to men through experience. Experience made art (inexperience luck). Art arises when from many notions gained by experience one universal judgment about a class of objects is produced. Experience is knowledge of individuals, art of universals. Artists can teach (because they have theory and know the why of things), while men of experience cannot (they know the know-how, but not the why). When at leisure, man produces knowledge (especially not of a useful kind [theoretical knowledge, not practical]). Wisdom deals with first causes and the principles of things.

POETICS (330 BC):
     The 1) means, the 2) difference in the objects, and the 3) manner of their imitation (of epic poetry, tragedy, comedy, dithyrambic poetry, and other modes of imitation). The means are rhythm, language, and harmony. The objects the imitator represents are actions, with agents who are either good or bad. Manner, as when one narrates or dramatizes.
     Drama comes from “dran” (to act), comae is hamlets (where first performed).
The origin of poetry: imitation is natural to man from childhood. He is the most imitative creature in the world and learns first by imitation. It is also natural for all to delight in works of imitation. We delight even in the painful and the grotesque because we learn something from it. To be learning something (gathering the meaning of things) is the greatest of all pleasures. Imitation, a sense of harmony, and rhythm, are natural to us.
     Poetry broke into two kinds: Tragedy (for the grave and noble) and Comedy (for the mean and ignoble). They began in improvisations (of dithyrambs for the former; phallic songs for the latter). Aeschylus increased the number of actors to two. Sophocles added a third actor. Tragedy requires magnitude, a tone of dignity, an iambic (not trochaic [associated with satyr plays and dancing]) meter, and a plurality of episodes or acts.
     Comedy deals with imitations of men worse than the average; the Ridiculous is a species of the Ugly [not productive of pain or harm], e.g., a mask, and, at one time, invective.
Epic is narrative, action without a fixed limit of time. Tragedy should keep as far as possible within a single circuit of the sun [alleged unity of time].
Definition of Tragedy: A tragedy is the imitation of an action that is serious and has magnitude, complete in itself, in language with pleasurable accessories (with rhythm and harmony of song), in a dramatic (not narrative) form, with incidents arousing pity and fear, to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.
     Melody and Diction are the means. The subject represented is an action, and the action requires agents (Character and Thought [what agents say]). The action is represented in the play by the Fable or Plot.
     There are six parts to every tragedy: 1) Fable or Plot, 2) Characters, 3) Diction, 4) Thought, 5) Spectacle, and 6) Melody.
     The most important element of the six is the incidents of the story (Plot). Tragedy is an imitation not of persons but of action and life, of happiness and misery. All human happiness or misery takes the form of action. Character gives us qualities, but it is in our actions (in what we do) that we are happy. The Fable or Plot is the end and purpose of the tragedy. A tragedy is impossible without action. The tragedies of most of the moderns are characterless. The most powerful elements of attraction in Tragedy, the Peripeties (peripeteia) and Discoveries (anagnorisis), are parts of the Plot. Characters come second (after Plot). Third is Thought (the speeches, the province of Politics and Rhetoric).    Character in a play is that which reveals the moral purpose of the agents. The fourth element is the Diction (the expression of their thoughts in words). The Melody is the greatest of the pleasurable accessories of Tragedy. The Spectacle, though an attraction, is the least artistic (a matter for the customier). “The tragic effect is quite possible without a public performance and actors” [apparently, for Aristotle, the play-text, not the performance-text, is what matters].
     A story or plot must be of some length but of a length to be taken in by the memory [alleged unity of action], a length which allows of the hero passing by a series of possible or necessary stages from misfortune to happiness, or from happiness to misfortune.
     The poet’s function is to describe not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e., what is possible as being probable or necessary. That is the difference between a poet and a historian. The historian describes the thing that has been, the poet a kind of thing that might be. Hence, poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals whereas those of history are singulars. By a universal statement is meant one as to what such or such a kind of man will probably or necessarily say or do. Tragedy adheres to historic names, for what convinces is the possible. Comedy uses common names. But one must not aim at a rigid adherence to the traditional stories of tragedy.
     Plots may be simple or episodic. The episodic are the worst (improbable and unnecessary). Tragedy is an imitation of a complete action and of incidents arousing pity and fear. When they occur unexpectedly and in conjunction, they are most effective (the marvelous [the appearance of a design and not merely of chance] is at work). Plots are either simple of complex. A plot is simple if it lacks a Peripety or a Discovery; complex if it involves one or the other or both. A Peripety is a change from one state to its opposite. A Discovery is a change from ignorance to knowledge. The finest form of Discovery is one attended by Peripeties. A Discovery with a Peripety will arouse pity and fear and it will serve to bring about the happy or unhappy ending. The Plot, hence, consists of five parts: Peripety, Discovery, Suffering, Pity, and Fear.
     A Tragedy has the following parts:

RHETORIC:
Book I: Rhetoric is the art of persuasion and may be divided into political (deliberative), forensic (legal), and epideictic (ceremonial). Wondering implies the desire for learning, so that the object of wonder is an object of desire, while in learning one is brought into one’s natural condition. Since learning and wondering are pleasant, acts of imitation must be pleasant, even if the object imitated is not itself pleasant; for it is not the object itself which here gives delight. The spectator draws inferences and thus learns something fresh. Dramatic turns of fortune and hairbreadth escapes from perils are pleasant, because we feel all such things are wonderful. It is pleasant to complete what is defective, for the whole thing thereupon becomes our own work. It is pleasant to be thought wise, for wisdom secures us power over others, and most of us are ambitious. Amusements and relaxation are pleasant activities, and ludicrous things. Unpleasant things are the opposite of the pleasant.
Book III: In making a speech, one must study three points:

MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO (106-43 BC): (Trajan)
Cicero was a politician, an orator, and the greatest of Latin prose stylists in the Roman Golden Age (the Republican period). Philosophically he was a Stoic (moderation in all things). He supported Pompey (vs. Julius Caesar, Dictator Perpetuus of Rome) and was present at Julius Caesar’s assassination (in 44 BC). Cicero was subsequently persecuted and assassinated by Marc Antony. His important rhetorical works are: De Oratore (On the Orator) [55 BC], Brutus (46 BC), and Orator (46 BC). For Cicero, the orator is a philosopher. Cicero’s style was highly ornate, unlike that of the Attic group, who preferred plainness and lucidity.

BRUTUS (46 BC):
The orator who is approved by the multitude must inevitably be approved by the expert. An orator should effect three things:

QUINTUS HORATIUS FLACCUS (HORACE) [65-8 BC]:
Horace, son of a freedman, was a Roman poet during the period subsequent to Julius Caesar’s death. He served in the army and was later amnestied by Augustus (first emperor of Rome). He is famous for his Odes (ode 1.11 containes the famous line “carpe diem,” [“seize the day”]), epodes (his second epode contains the famous line “Beatus ille” [“Fortunate he . . .”]), and his letter in verse to the Piso family, the Ars poetica (Art of Poetry > Epistle to the Pisos). Therein he explains that a poem is like a painting, “ut pictura poesis” (it may be viewed from many angles, as one does a painting) and should delight as well as instruct.

ART OF POETRY (20 BC):
A work of art should have 1) simplicity and 2) unity. It should say only what is necessary and the material should be well arranged. Foreign words should be used sparingly. The form of poetry should be adjusted to the speaker. Hence, kings should express themselves in dactylic hexameters (the heroic verse). Verses of unequal length are good for elegies. Anger should be expressed in iambs (although tragedy and comedy have adopted this meter, the iambic, for dialogue). “Let each style keep the place to which it belongs.” [theory of decorum]. Thyestes’s banquet (of his sons) [Seneca’s Thyestes] cannot be expressed in ordinary language. Comedy cannot be expressed tragically (i.e., by using dactylic hexameters). Poems should be beautiful but also affecting. If the words of a speaker are inappropriate to a situation, Romans of all classes (popular and aristocratic) will simply laugh. Follow tradition (theory of imitation) or, if you invent, be consistent. Present what is fitting to the various natures and ages. Events are either acted upon the stage or narrated (styles: dramatic and epic). Use a deus ex machina figure sparingly (only when strictly necessary). Tragedy scorns any temptation to babble light verses. Study the Greek masterpieces day and night (theory of imitation > as influence), but also draw experiences from life. Wisdom is the source and fountain of all good writing.
The aim of the poet is to 1) inform or 2) delight (dulce et utile) or to combine together pleasure and applicability to life. When instructing, be brief in what you say so that your readers may grasp it quickly and retain it faithfully. Fiction invented in order to please should remain close to reality. Faults in a predominantly beautiful poem must be forgiven. It’s a case of carelessness or human frailty.
Poetry is like a painting (ut pictura poesis) and pleases from the angle you view it.
When you write something, show it to Maecius (a strict critic) first and then keep it in a closet for 9 years.
A praiseworthy poem is the product of Nature and conscious Art, for the value of study without native ability (or genius without training) is useless: they depend on each other.

STRABO (64-63 BC-after 21 AD):
Strabo was born in Anatolia (Turkey), a province of the Roman Empire (Caesar Augustus reigned at that time). He was a Stoic and a defender of Roman imperialism. He studied geography and philosophy in Rome. He traveled to Egypt and Ethiopia. In Strabo’s Geography (Geographica) he contradicts Eratosthenes, who regarded poets merely as entertainers, by claiming poets were wise teachers. Poetry delights and teaches. Strabo sees Homer as an authority on geography, although not in all sciences necessarily. Homer on purpose mixed fact with fiction to delight and instruct better. Myths provide insight into the emotional nature of the reasoning animal.

GEOGRAPHY (7-20 AD):
     Eratostheness contends that the aim of every poet is to entertain, not to instruct. The ancients assert, on the contrary, that poetry is a kind of elementary philosophy. The wise man alone is a poet. That is why in Greece children are educated by means of poetry from the beginning (for the sake of moral discipline, not for the sake of entertainment). These studies discipline and correct the character. Poets are disciplinarians in morality.
     Homer was an expert in geography and other sciences, although he might not have been an expert in all things. Rhetoric is wisdom applied to discourse. In order to be a good poet one has to be a good man (and have life experiences).
     Poetry is the source and origin of style (ornate, rhetorical style), for when poetry was recited it employed the assistance of song. The fact that non-metrical discourse is termed “pedestrian” suggests its descent from a height to the ground. Homer does not deal wholly in marvels, but for our instruction he also uses allegory or revises myths.
Man is eager to learn, and his fondness for tales is a prelude to this quality. Fondness for tales grabs our attention. Myth is a new language that tells one of things not as they are but of a different set of things. And what is new is pleasing, and so is what one did not know before. This is what makes men eager to learn. If you then add the marvelous and the portentous, you increase the pleasure, and pleasure acts like a charm to incite to learning. Philosophy is for the few, but poetry is more useful to the people at large and can draw full houses.

PUBLIUS CORNELIUS TACITUS (c. AD 55-c. 117):
Tacitus was born in Gallia Narborensis or Hispania and was probably of aristocratic descent. He is one of the most important historians of the Roman Silver Age. He is known for his Annals (the history of Rome from the death of Augustus to that of Nero: 14-68 AD), his Histories (from the death of Nero to the death of Domitian: 68-96 AD), and his Germania. He also composed a Dialogue on Oratory (De oratoribus) [c. 77-100 AD], where he defends poetry and the older rhetoric.

DIALOGUE ON ORATORY (c. AD 77-100):
Aper dialogues with Maternus and states that there is something sacred and august about every department of literary expression. However, Aper wants Maternus to leave the lecture-hall and get to the forum and “to the real contests of actions-at-law” (concern for utility. Maternus replies that he owes his fame to his poetry, not his speeches (poetry, not rhetoric: the superfluous arts, not the useful ones). He prefers peace, bliss, the quiet life, seclusion, serenity, the groves, and the woods of the poet; not the bustle of the city, numerous clients, accused persons waiting in line, shabbily dressed and with tearful faces, and the unrest, fear, and anxiety of the orator’s (rhetor’s) career. Poetry is the language of the oracles; rhetoric the product of a depraved condition of society. The Golden Age knew nothing of accusations or accusers. He prefers to praise those who do well (a poetic activity) than to defend evil-doers (the province of forensic rhetoric) [Cf. Horace’s “Beatus ille . . .” & Kant’s purposelessness of art].

PSEUDO-LONGINUS (First Century AD):
The author of On the Sublime (Peri hupsos) is unknown; however, it was long attributed to Dionysius Cassius Longinus, a third century AD Greek philosopher. “Pseudo-Longinus” poses the issue of how poetic inspiration is best expressed. He uses the rhetorical devices, but not for gain (to persuade) but demonstrate how the sublime is reached in expression, in part by intuition, in part by imitation and emulation of great writers (theory of imitation, as influence). The sublime has the power to transport us. Five elements help to create elevated language, the first two being innate (poetic, inspired), the last three acquired (artistic, rhetorical, studied, imitated):

PLUTARCH (c. AD 46-c.120):
Plutarch’s most famous work is his Parallel Lives, in which he compares the lives of the noble Greeks and Romans. His Moralia is a collection of 78 essays that deal with education, ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy. He admired Plato and was influenced by Aristotle. He attacked the Epicureans [hedonists] and the Stoics [impassive people]. For Plutarch, poetry, which contains the good and the bad, is part of a youth’s ethical training and a good preparation for future philosophical studies. Youths should discern the good from the bad and not be gullible. Plutarch distinguishes between imitating something beautiful (or ugly) and imitating something beautifully (Formalism).

MORALIA: “How the Young Man Should Study Poetry”:
In the art of poetry there is much that is pleasant and nourishing for the mind of a youth, and much that is disturbing and misleading. Their judgment should be guarded so that they are not carried away by pleasure. Philosophy should be introduced and blended with poetry (e.g., myths and fables). Learning will then be light and agreeable for the young. Hence, poetry should not be avoided by those intending to pursue philosophy. Poetry should serve as an introductory exercise in philosophy. Poetry that contains nothing profitable should be combated. Poets tell many lies intentionally to give pleasure and gratify the ear. It shuns truth if it is disagreeable or painful. But truth does not deviate from its course (i.e., it does not hide its painful aspects by means of pretty language). The art of poetry is not concerned with the truth. A youth must distinguish between the subject of imitation (content) and the way it is imitated (form). When poetic art is divorced from truth, it employs variety and diversity. One should cherish the belief that poetry is an imitation of character and lives, and of men who are not perfect or spotless, but who change their ways to the better. One must not admire anything (one reads); otherwise one would become gullible. The combination of philosophical content in artistic form can train a youth to later accept harsh philosophical truth without fear or suspicion. They will be less confused and disquieted upon hearing at the lectures of the philosophers that “Death is nothing to us.” “The young man has need of good pilotage in the manner of reading.” Familiarity with philosophical themes at an early age will prepare him to deal with philosophy at a later age [cf. old and modern cartoons or fairy tales].

FLAVIUS PHILOSTRATUS (c. 170-c. 245):
Philostratus came from the island of Lemnos (near Athens), entered the Syrian court presided then by Empress Julia Domna [wife of Roman emperor Septimius Severus], and later lived in Athens, where he composed the Lives of the Sophists (230-238). He held Roman citizenship. Sophists were influential as educators. Philosophers seek knowledge (arrived at dialectically); Sophists proceed from assumed knowledge and, in the “Second Sophistic” period use rhetoric, oratory, and improvisation to deal with any topic (not just philosophical topics, the province of the older rhetors). In his Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Philostratus suggests that the mind of someone looking at an object produces an imitation. Hence, any theory of art must take into consideration the activity of the beholder (Reception Aesthetics).

LIVES OF THE SOPHISTS (230-238):
Book I: The ancient sophistic art was philosophic rhetoric. The sophist of the old school assumes knowledge of that whereof he speaks. The method of the philosophers resembles the prophetic art of the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, and the Indians. The sophistic method resembles the prophetic art of soothsayers and oracles. The ancient sophistic propounded philosophical themes like justice, courage, etc. The new or Second sophistic sketched the types of the poor man and the rich, the princes and tyrants, and handled arguments that are concerned with definite and special themes. Gorgias founded the art of extempore oratory. He would discuss any theme and claim omniscience. The Athenians shut them out of the law-courts, afraid they could defeat a just argument by an unjust, since sophists used their power to warp men’s judgments. Even the word “sophist” became suspect in the eyes of the jury. The men of former days applied the name “sophist” not only to orators whose surpassing eloquence won them a brilliant reputation, but also to philosophers who expounded their theories with ease and fluency.

PLOTINUS (205-c. 262):
The philosopher Plotinus was a native of Egypt and was probably of Roman descent. He studied philosophy in Alexandria at age 28. In the year 244, in Rome, he founded a school of Neo-Platonism. His Enneads (6 sets of 9 essays each) were edited and arranged by his pupil Porphyry, who wrote a biography of him. For Plotinus, the world is an “emanation” from the ultimate idea or One (also called the First), and everything seeks to return to It. The One expresses itself in a Triad: 1) the Intellectual Principle or Being (the realm of Ouranus [the sky god, son and husband of Gaia, earth; hides his children in Tartaros]]), 2) The Reason-Principle or the higher reasoning soul (the realm of Kronos [a Titan, later king of the gods; he castrates Ouranos on his mother Gaia’s suggestion]; he likes to eat his children [Saturn]), and 3) the Vegetal Lower-Acting Soul, or Third (the realm of Zeus [dethrones Kronos with mother Rheia’s help and fights the Titans for supremacy; he establishes Olympus with his brothers and sisters]). The more beautiful a thing is the closer it is to the One, identified with pure light. The further away from the One, the more it is embedded in darkness and matter. Art (as in the case of sculpture), is the freeing of form or idea from matter, a bringing of the Idea to some degree of light. The beauty of the work of art is not in the material or the object but in the Idea or form that the artist imposes on his materials. The Idea comes from or through the artist’s mind and is derived from intellect and ultimately from connection with the One. The Idea is imposed on the mass of exterior matter. In this process the indivisible One is exhibited in diversity. Hence, the artist for Plotinus is a creator of valuable spiritual insight by virtue of his attention to form. Art for Plotinus, however, is never a perfect incarnation of beauty, which never fully appears, for art always remains to some extent material.

ENNEADS (written in 260, ordered, edited, and published by Porphyry in 300-305):
     BEAUTY: Beauty addresses itself to 1) sight, although there is a beauty in 2) sounds (words, music, melodies, cadencies) and a beauty 2) above the realm of sense. There must be One Principle from which all take their grace. Beauty (as sight) appeals to symmetry of parts towards a whole; what is symmetrical and patterned is beautiful. Beauty is a compound, but composed of beautiful details. Symmetry owes its beauty to a remoter principle. This Principle bestows beauty on material things. The Soul recognizes it, its knowledge, welcomes it, and comes into unison with it (like a mystic union of the finite and the infinite).
     The Soul, by its nature and affiliation to the noblest Existents in the hierarchy of Being, thrills when it sees anything of that kin (anything beautiful, patterned, symmetrical). All the loveliness in the world comes by communion in Ideal-Form. All shapelessness, as long as it remains outside Reason and Idea, is ugly and separated from the Divine-Thought. This is the Absolute-Ugly. What is ugly has not been mastered by pattern, by Reason. Matter has not yielded to Ideal-Form.
     When Ideal-Form enters matter, it maintains a co-operation of the diversity of parts into the creation of a (patterned) whole. This is harmonious coherence. The material thing becomes beautiful by communicating in the thought (Reason, Logos) that flows from the Divine. Fragments are gathered into unity and presented to the Idea-Principle to become beautiful (patterned, “whole”).
     Lovers are those who feel the keener wound and feel love outside of sense (that is, they apprehend the pattern of Ideal-Form). Souls under the spell of love want to free themselves from the material world and fly upward, as in a Dionysian frenzy. One admires loftiness of spirit, righteousness of life, disciplined purity, courage, gravity, modesty, and god-like Intellection. On the other hand, the ugly Soul is dissolute and unrighteous, lustful, torn by internal discord, envious and cowardly, thinking only of the perishable and the base, perverse in all its impulses, living a life of abandonment to bodily sensation and delighting in its deformity. It seeks the outer, the lower, the dark; it is sunk in manifest death. It is occupied only in Matter (it cannot transcend to Spirit). A Soul becomes ugly through a fall, a descent into body, into Matter, in the same way that gold is degraded when it is mixed with earthly particles. One needs moral discipline, purification, disdain of the material, to become intellectual.
     Intellection is the Soul’s beauty (what one strives for).When the Soul becomes a good and beautiful thing it becomes like God, for from the Divine comes all the Beauty and all the Good in beings. Beauty is the Authentic-Existents; Ugly is primal evil.
     Beauty is the Good. The Good must be posed as the First. Directly deriving from this First is the Intellectual-Principle, which is pre-eminently the manifestation of Beauty. We must ascend towards the Good, the Apart, the Unmingled, the Pure, that from Which all things depend: the Source of Life and the Intellection and of Being.
     The graceful shapes of the body are merely copies. To commune with those shadows would be tantamount to Narcissus falling unto death in pursuit of his own reflected image. One must transcend form to reach the Fatherland, which is There (not Here).
     The Soul must be trained to appreciate noble pursuits, works of beauty, and the souls of those who have shaped these beautiful forms. One must withdraw into oneself and look for this inner beauty. “Never cease chiseling your statue” (p. 132) until you see the perfect goodness. A Soul tainted with vice has diminished vision of the Beautiful. One must become god-like to see God and Beauty. The Soul then “ascends” first to the Intellectual-Principle, the Intellectual-Cosmos, where one becomes cognizant of forms, ideas, beauty. Divine contemplation.
     ON THE INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY: Beauty exists not in matter but in the art of the artist, where the Form truly is. Hence, matter only participates in Beauty but cannot ever be Beauty itself (Pheidias’ statue of Zeus). Every primal cause is more powerful than its effects. Beauty lies in the wisdom of the maker of a beautiful object (is it a “gift” or does one discipline oneself to achieve this artistry?).

Saint Augustine is a Doctor of the Church (one of 33 in all), a Saint, and a figure respected even among the Reformed religions (by Lutherans and Calvinists). He was born in Africa, in present day Algeria, the son of a catholic mother, Saint Monica, and Patricius, a pagan father. He also wrote The Confessions, known as the first Western autobiography, as well as The City of God, written after the Vandals sacked Christian Rome, and wherein St. Augustine makes a case for Christianity being not of this world (spiritual instead of earthly). He also elaborated a theory of signs and allegory to interpret Scripture that was later followed by St. Thomas Aquinas and secular writers like Dante. For St. Augustine, signs are things used to signify something (like the Cross would be a sign for the Resurrection) and words serve to signify (the word “cross” signifies the Cross). A sign is important because it points to something else (ultimately the Trinity for St. Augustine). The sign is thus not valuable as pleasurable in itself but only in its movement of signification towards God (in the same way that matter for the Platonic pagans is not valuable or pleasurable in itself, even when it takes a definite form [the statue of Zeus, for instance]; what matters is the Form it points out to [or God, for Christians]). Allegory in the Middle Ages hides, then yields, a depth of intellectual beauty. Also, what is discovered with difficulty gives pleasure, according to St. Augustine. St. Augustine’s distinction between the natural and the conventional sign leads in language theory to the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign (as in Saussure).

ON CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE (396-426):
     BOOK ONE: Things are learned by signs. A thing is that which is not used to signify something else, like wood, stone, cattle, etc. But some things are used as signs of other things (like the beast that Abraham sacrificed instead of his son Isaac, which is a pre-figuration of Christ [the “lamb” of God]). There are other signs whose whole use is in signifying, like words, for no one uses words except for the purpose of signifying something. Signs are things used to signify something. Thus, every sign is also a thing (for what is not a thing is nothing at all); but not every thing is also a sign.
     Some things are to be enjoyed; others to be used. The things to be enjoyed are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (the Trinity). In the Father is unity, in the Son equality, and in the Holy Spirit a concord of unity and equality; and these three qualities are all one because of the Father, all equal because of the Son, and all united because of the Holy Spirit. One may fail to understand Scripture and thus be deceived, although Scripture does not lie. All knowledge and prophecy struggle for three things: a) Faith, b) Hope, and c) Charity (the theological Gifts of the Holy Spirit). Between temporal and eternal things there is a difference: 1) a temporal thing is loved more before one has it, and it begins to grow worthless when one gains it, for it does not satisfy the soul; 2) eternal things are more ardently loved when acquired than when merely desired.
     BOOK TWO: Things signify nothing beyond themselves. Signs have value beyond themselves since they signify something else. A sign is a thing that causes us to think of something beyond the impression the thing itself makes upon the senses (e.g., a cross, a six-pointed star, and a crescent are things that stand as signs of the three Semitic and monotheistic religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam). Among signs, some are 1) natural, others 2) conventional. A sign is natural when it unwillingly or unintentionally signifies something else (like smoke, which signifies fire).   Conventional signs are those which living creatures show to one another for the purpose of conveying something. In this way, the person who makes the sign conveys to another the action of the mind of the first person (the maker of the sign). Signs given by God and contained in Scripture are of this type also (for by them God purposefully means to convey His mind to others).
     Among the signs by means of which we express our meaning to others, some pertain to sight, others to hearing, and very few to the other senses. Some signify many things through the motions of their hands. Banners and military standards visibly indicate the will of the captains. More signs pertain to the ears, and most of these consists of words (NB: in the Middle Ages, and practically up to the nineteenth and early twentieth century, even books were read aloud in public, since few people could read). But because vibrations in the air pass away and remain no longer than they sound, signs of words have been constructed by means of letters. Thus words are shown to the eyes, not in themselves but through certain signs which stand for them.
     Many and varied obscurities and ambiguities deceive those who read casually, understanding one thing instead of another. This situation was provided by God to conquer pride by work and to combat disdain in our minds (for what is facile is deemed worthless). St. Augustine expresses greater pleasure in deciphering metaphors (as in the Song of Songs) than in understanding plain language. Things are perceived more readily through similitudes and that which is sought with difficulty is discovered with more pleasure. Holy Scripture is at times difficult to entice to hunger (of understanding) and to deter a disdainful attitude (by the presentation of obscure passages which require additional effort to decipher). This was done on purpose.
     There are two reasons why things written are not understood: they are obscured either by unknown or by ambiguous sings (for signs are either literal or figurative). The sign bos (“ox”) is literal, for it refers to the animal of a herd. Figurative signs occur when that thing which we designate by a literal sign is used to signify something else (when the sign “ox” refers not to the [literal] animal but to one of the four evangelists [St. Luke]). [NB: St. Matthew <a man >, St. Mark <a lion>, St. John <an eagle>].

ANICUS MANLIUS SEVERINUS BOETHIUS (ca. 480-524 or 525):
Boethius was a Roman statesman and philosopher, as well as the author of a treatise, De Trinitate. He wrote the Consolation of Philosophy in prison under sentence of death on the grounds of treason (disloyalty against the Ostrogothic ruler) and sacrilege (for his practice of astrology). He was a philosopher and Roman statesman under King Theoderic, an Ostrogoth and an Arian Christian, but fell out of favor and was savagely executed. His book became very popular in the Middle Ages and was translated into English by Geoffrey Chaucer. Boethius regarded poetry as dangerous because it fed the passions. Moreover, the Muses were pagan and the arts catered to sensual and earthly interests. From a Christian ascetic tradition, the arts would be considered trivial when compared to theological pursuits. Boethius’ attack here is one of the best known after Plato. He makes no mention in this book of Christianity.

THE CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY (ca. 523): Philosophy, in the form of a woman whose countenance is full of majesty, approaches a pondering and sickly Boethius. Her attire contains the Greek letters Pi (P) and Theta (Th), which stand for Practical and Theoretical philosophy. She rebukes the Muses, who are consoling Boethius, calling them sirens and seductive mummers, and the poor gals leave sadly and ashamed. The Muse of Poetry (Calliope) was giving Boethius words to his lamenting. However, Philosophy rebukes her because Poetry can offer no remedy but only poisonous sweets. Poetry stifles reason with passion. Poetry seduces to perdition. Poetry does not free man from disease but accustoms him thereto. Besides, Boethius has been nurtured in the lore of the Eleatics (a Pre-Socratic school that maintained that pure being alone is real; the information of the senses is illusory) and Academics (Platonists). He needs the Muses Philosophy has to offer to care for him and heal him.

NB: The nine muses, born of Zeus and Mnemosyne (goddess of memory and time) are inspiring goddesses (of the arts, poetry, and science) who live in Olympus: 1) Calliope (epic poetry), 2) Clio (history), 3) Euterpe (lyrical poetry), 4) Thalia (bucolic poetry and comedy), 5) Melpomene (tragedy), 6) Terpsichore (dance), 7) Erato (erotic poetry), 8) Polyhymnia (sacred song), and 9) Urania (astronomy). See Hesiod's Theogony.

Clio	Thalia	Erato	Euterpe	Polyhymnia	Calliope	Terpsichore	Urania	Melpomene
History	Comedy, Bucolic Poetry	Erotic Poetry	Lyrical Poetry	Sacred Song	Epic Poetry	Dance	Astronomy	Tragedy
Scroll	Comic mask, ivy wreath, shepherd's staff	Maller lyre	Double flute	Veiled and pensive	Wax tablet	Lyre	Celestial globe	Tragic mask, ivy wreath

SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS (1225-1274):
     St. Thomas Aquinas, the “Angelic Doctor,” studied in Paris and is the greatest of the Scholastic Philosophers. He is also one of the Doctors of the Church. The system of his Summa Theologica was declared the official philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church in 1879, under Pope Leo XIII. St. Thomas’s work was Aristotelian rather than Platonic. He sought the marriage of reason and faith. Scholasticism lasted between 1100 and 1500, with revivals in Spain and Austria (Neo-Scholasticism) as late as the early 1800s and early 1900s. St Thomas, in the selection below, presents a theory of allegorical interpretation of Scripture that developed early in the Christian era. Allegorical interpretation of Homer can be found as early as the sixth century BC and was still being practiced in the third century AD by Porphyry (a Phoenician [Lebanese] neo-Platonist, student of Plotinus). Christian interpretation probably began with the methods of Philo Judaeus, an Egyptian philosopher (a Hellenized Jew) of the first century AD who tried to fuse Greek philosophy and Judaism by means of allegory, and by the churchmen Origen, Clement, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory [all but Clement Fathers of the Church]. The system that St. Tomas sets forth was probably first worked out in the fifth century.   It reflects the fundamental idea that world is itself a symbol subject to interpretation as the work of God. According to Hermes Trismegistus, things below copy things above. St. Thomas is interested only in Scripture. St. Thomas argues that spiritual truths are properly and naturally taught by figures taken from corporeal things; these veiled truths are the cause of beneficial exercise of the mind (and, therefore, not harmful or dissimulative). He has a twofold system of interpretation:
1) The Literal (wherein the Parabolic is contained) under which he subsumes
    a) The Historical,
    b) The Etiological (causes), and
    c) The Analogical (comparative) ; and
2) The Spiritual, under which he subsumes
    a) The Allegorical or Typological (prophetic)
    b) The Tropological or Moral, and
    c) The Anagogical (foreshadowing, prefiguration).

SUMMA THEOLOGICA (1256-1272):
“The Nature and Domain of Sacred Doctrine”:
     NINTH ARTICLE: “Whether Holy Scripture Should Use Metaphors?: To proceed by the aid of various similitudes and figures is the proper domain of the poetic science (science being a true branch of learning that proceeds by rational principles). To put forward anything by means of similitudes is to use metaphors. Scripture uses metaphors. It befits Holy Scripture to put forward divine and spiritual truths by means of comparisons with material things. It is natural to man to attain to intellectual truths through sensible things because all our knowledge originates from sense. Hence, in Holy Scripture, spiritual truths are fittingly taught under the likeness of material things. Thereby, even the simple that are unable to grasp intellectual things may be able to understand. Sacred doctrine makes use of metaphors as both necessary and useful. The very hiding of truth in figures is useful for the exercise of thoughtful minds, and as a defense against the ridicule of the unbelievers. Divine truths are (by metaphor) better hidden from the unworthy.
     TENTH ARTICLE: Whether in Holy Scripture a Word May Have Several Senses?: Objection 1: In Scripture, a word cannot have several senses: 1) Historical or Literal, 2) Allegorical, 3) Tropological or Moral, and 4) Anagogical. Objection 2: St. Augustine says that the Old Testament has a fourfold division according to 1) History, 2) Etiology (cause), 3) Analogy (comparison), and 4) Allegory. Objection 3: There is also the Parabolic (later seen as part of the Literal sense). On the contrary, Gregory says that Scripture describes a fact and reveals a mystery simultaneously. Hence, the Holy Scripture was authored by God to signify His meaning, not by words only but also by things themselves. In other sciences, things are signified by words, but in Scripture, the things signified by the words have themselves also a signification. The first signification, whereby words signify things, belongs to the first sense, I. The Historical or Literal. That signification whereby things signified by words have themselves also a signification is called II. The Spiritual sense, which is based on the literal, and presupposes it. This Spiritual sense has a threefold division: A. The Allegorical (Typological [prophetic]) sense (so far as things of the Old Law signify things of the New Law [and hence preserve the Bible’s historical nature]); B. The Moral sense (things done in Christ are signs of what we ought to do); and C: The Anagogical sense (things signify what relates to eternal glory [foreshadowing]).
     Reply Obj. 1: The multiplicity of these senses does not produce equivocation, for all the senses are founded on one, the Literal. Reply Obj. 2: History (what is simply related), Etiology (when its cause is assigned), and Analogy (whenever the truth of one text of Scripture is shown not to contradict the truth of another [comparisons]) are grouped under the Literal sense. Allegory alone stands for the three Spiritual senses. Hugh of St. Victor (a mystic philosopher) includes the Anagogical (foreshadowing) under the Allegorical sense, hence, having only three senses: the Historical, the Allegorical, and the Tropological (Moral). Reply Obj. 3: The Parabolic sense is contained in the Literal.

DANTE ALIGHIERI (1265-1321):
Florentine Dante is the author of the Commedia (an otherworldly epic poem) and De monarchia (a treatise on the need for monarchical rule in secular affairs). He was politically allied with the Guelfs, a pro-Pope group opposed to the Ghibellines, a pro-emperor group. He developed a two- actually fourfold scheme of interpretation in his letter to the tyrant Can Francesco Grande della Scala, the Ghibelline Lord (imperial Vicar) of Verona, and in Il Convivio. The world in the Middle Ages was seen as an allegory full of symbolic meaning. For Dante, the work of art was like the world, an allegory. He applied a hermeneutic system meant for Scripture to secular writings.

THE BANQUET (Il Convivio) [1304-1308]: Writings can be expounded chiefly in four senses: I. The Literal (the [historical] sense that does not go beyond the limits of the letter); II. The Allegorical (by means of which a truth is hidden under a beautiful fiction); III. The Moral (by means of which teachers go through writings to watch for their own [moral] profit and that of their hearers); and IV. The Anagogic (what is above the senses, that is, the spiritual sense by which even in the literal sense the things signified give an intimation of higher [eternal] matters).

LETTER TO CAN GRANDE DELLA SCALA (1318): There are six things that must be inquired into at the beginning of any work of instruction: 1) The Subject (at the literal level, “the state of souls after death”; at the allegorical level, how human agents, by exercising free will, become liable to reward or punishment) 2) The Agent (e.g., Dante Alighieri), 3) The Form (I. Of the treatise: A) Parts: 1. Inferno, 2. Purgatorio, 3. Paradiso. B) Cantos, and C) poetic lines. II. Of the Treatment: A. Poetic, fictive, descriptive, digressive, transumptive; B. Proceeding by definition, division, proof, refutation, and setting forth of examples), 4) The End (to remove those living in this life from the state of misery and lead them to the state of felicity). 5) The Title of the Work (e.g., the Commedia), and 6) The branch of Philosophy it concerns (5. Aesthetics <art, life> [the other branches would be: 1. Metaphysics <existence> [Theology would fit here], 2. Epistemology <knowledge>, 3. Ethics <action>, Politics <force> [Politics may be a subdivision of Ethics], Axiology <value judgments [subsumed under ethics and aesthetics]>, and 4. Logic <reasoning>]) [NB: The main branch of philosophy is Metaphysics. Closely related to it would be Epistemology. Ethics is dependent on Epistemology. Politics is a subdivision of Ethics. Aesthetics depends on Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Ethics].
The sense of the Commedia is not simple but varied (of more senses than one), or polysemous, for it is 1) one sense (the Literal) that we get through the letter, and 2) another which we get through the thing the letter signifies (the Allegorical or Mystical sense). Allegory derives from Greek alleon (Latin alienum or diversum).

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO (1313-1375):
Boccaccio, a Florentine humanist and a bastard, author of The Decameron, uses the interpretative methods that St. Thomas Aquinas uses for Scripture and Dante Alighieri for scriptures for secular purposes. Poetry makes fictions, while theology always tells the truth directly. Boccaccio defends poetry by stating it does not lie but tells allegorical (hidden) truths. Meaning acquired by toil should ultimately be of more pleasure and better retained. The truth of poetry often comes in the form of a generalization about life and manners expressed in a fiction. Boccaccio defends the pagan poets by saying they clothe many physical and moral truths in their inventions. Boccaccio, like other medieval theorists and Renaissance critics, insisted that a hidden moral meaning redeemed poetry’s “lies.”

LIFE OF DANTE (Vita di Dante) [1364, pub. 1477]:
     Ch. 9: “Digression Concerning Poetry”: The ancient poets, by a certain revelation of the Holy Spirit, “under a veil” or “beneath a mask” of certain fictions, revealed to future generations their highest secrets or truths. The two forms of writing (the literal and the allegorical) discipline the wise and strengthen the foolish. Children and the wise may be nourished by the same waters.
     Ch. 10: “On the Difference Between Poetry and Theology”: Holy Scripture (theology), under the form of history, designs to reveal to us the high mystery of the Incarnation. In like manner, poets in their works (poetry), under fictions of various gods, reveal to us the causes of things, the effects of virtues and vices, what we ought to flee and what follows, to attain by virtuous actions the end (deferred in their case until the coming of Christ), our salvation. Hence, Saturn (Kronos in Greek) devouring his children is a cloak for the concept of the passing of time, etc. Their Elysian Fields and City of Dis correspond to our concepts of Heaven and Hell. Hence, theology and poetry agree in their method of treatment. In their subject matter they differ, for the subject of theology is divine truth, while that of ancient poetry is the men and gods of the pagans. Theology presupposes nothing unless it be true; while poetry puts forth certain things as true that are surely false, misleading, and contrary to the Christian religion.
     Anything acquired by labor has more sweetness than that which comes without effort. What is acquired by labor is retained better and pleases more than what is grasped quickly. The ancient chose fables to draw with their beauty those not easily persuaded even by philosophical demonstrations. The ancient poets were people of profound understanding.
     Theology is the poetry of God, for God uses poetic fictions (allegories) to refer to Christ as a lion, a lamb, a serpent, a dragon, a rock. Poetry here is theology, in the same way that theology is here poetry. Aristotle affirmed that poets were the first theologians (Metaphysics 3.4).

GENEALOGY OF THE GENTILE GODS (De Genealogiis) [1366]:
     Book 14. Ch. 7. “The Definition of Poetry, Its Origin, and Function.” Poetry is a fervid and exquisite invention, with fervid expression, in speech or writing, of that which the mind has invented. Its originator is God. Few have received the gift of poetry. Poetry is sublime in its effects. It impels the soul to utterance. It brings forth strange creations of the mind. It arranges mediations in a fixed order. It adorns compositions with unusual words and thoughts. It veils truth in a fair and fitting garment of fiction. It can arm kings to war. It can serve to praise great men (a Platonic echo). The poetic impulse, however, needs the guidance of grammar and rhetoric, as well as knowledge of the other liberal arts to possess a strong and abundant vocabulary. One must memorize the history, monuments, and geography of other nations too. One must also have peace of mind and desire for worldly glory, and be of the ardent age (young). Poetry is a practical art. It is composed “as under a veil” and thus is exquisitely wrought.
     Ch. 9. “It Is Rather Useful than Damnable to Compose Stories.” The word “fable” (fabula) derives from for, faris, “conversation” (confabulatio), “talking together” (collocutio). If it is a sin to compose stories, then it is a sin to converse. Nature has not granted us the power of speech unless for purposes of conversation and the exchange of ideas. Fiction is a form of discourse, which under the guise of invention illustrates or proves an idea, and as its superficial aspect is removed, the meaning of the author is clear. There are four kinds of fictions: I. The first superficially lacks all appearance of truth (as in Aesop’s fables, where brutes or inanimate things converse; but also Judges 9.8-15: the conference of the trees in order to choose a king). II. The second kind at times superficially mingles fiction with truth, clothing in fiction divine and human matters alike (as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and also most of the Old Testament, which is a pre-figuration of the New). III. The third kind is more like history than fiction (as in Virgil’s Aeneid or Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey), and in their heroic verse there lies a hidden meaning (Ulysses is bound to the mast to escape the lure of the Sirens’ song [e.g., one must be “restrained” to avoid temptation]). Even in the comedies of Plautus and Terence there is a portrayal of the sundry varieties of human nature and some sort of teaching as to what to avoid (e.g., cupidity). Also, Christ used parables and exempla to teach. IV. The fourth kind contains no truth, either superficially or hidden (old wives’ tales).
     Fiction has been the means of quelling minds aroused to rage, and of subduing them to gentleness. By fiction, men have been strengthened and given valor. Fiction furnishes consolation. “Through fiction, it is well known, the mind that is slipping into inactivity is recalled to a state of better and more vigorous fruition” [162]. Fiction pleases the unlearned by its external appearance, and exercises the minds of the learned with its hidden truth; and thus both are edified and delighted with one and the same perusal.
     Ch. 13. “Poets Are Not Liars.” Poetic fiction has nothing in common with any variety of falsehood, for it is not a poet’s purpose to deceive anybody with his inventions. A poet, however he may sacrifice the literal truth in invention, is not a liar, since his function is not to deceive, but only by way of convention. They use figures.
     Poets do say there are many gods instead of One, but they should not be charged with falsehood since they neither believe nor assert this as a fact, but only as a myth or fiction. The multitude of other gods they look upon as members or functions of the Divinity on account of their veneration for the particular function. Pagan poets had an imperfect sense of the true God.
     There are two kinds of liars: 1) those who knowingly and willingly lie, and 2) those who have told a falsehood without knowing. Such was the case with the pagan poets, who with all their knowledge of the liberal arts, poetry, and philosophy, could not know the truth of Christianity. Only the Israelites were granted the true knowledge of God. But they never shared this knowledge with anyone else or admitted the Gentiles at their doors. Hence, the pagan poets could not write the entire truth concerning God; thusly, their ignorance is to be excused and they should not be called liars.
     Poets are not like historians, who start their account at some convenient beginning (ab ovo [the term comes from Horace’s Ars Poetica]) and describe events in the unbroken order of their occurrence to the end. Poets, by a far nobler device, begin their proposed narrative in the midst of the events (in medias res [the term comes from Horace’s Ars Poetica]), or sometimes even near the end (in extremas res), and thus they find excuses to tell preceding events which seem to have been omitted. Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid start near the end. Virgil is not a liar in his rendition of the Dido story (which is anachronistic with respect to the Aeneid), for he wished to demonstrate the consequences of concupiscence (Dido’s), to extol Aeneas (founder of Latium), and to glorify the name of Rome (who would later fight the Carthaginians).
     Ch. 17. “That Poets Are Merely Apes of the Philosophers.” The destination of both poets and philosophers is the same. Yet, they do not arrive there by the same road. I. The philosopher, by the process of syllogizing, disproves what he considers false. And in this fashion proves his theory, and does this as obviously as he can. Also, he does not embellish language, which would be distracting. He also uses prose. He disputes in the lecture room (the forum, the academy, the university). II. The poet conceives his thought by contemplation and without the help of syllogisms he veils it as subtly and skillfully as he can under the outward semblance of his invention. The poet uses meter (poetry), writes with scrupulous care, and in a style of exquisite charm. The poet sings in solitude. Being so different one from the other, it would be inappropriate to call the poet the ape of the philosopher.
     Book 15. Ch. 8. “The Pagan Poets of Mythology Are Theologians.” The pagan poets are theologians. St. Augustine, quoting Varro [a learned Roman scholar] (City of God 6.5), holds that theology is threefold in its divisions: a) Mythical [“Fabulous”] Theology (from the Greek mythicon, a “myth.” This form of literature is obscene [cf. the sequestration of Proserpina by Hades, a myth that explains Winter and the change of the seasons; or that of Ganymede by Zeus, to show the soul’s ascent to the Divine]), b) Physical [“Natural”] Theology (this is natural, moral, and useful, for the poets clothe many physical and moral truths in their inventions), and c) Civil or Political Theology (the theology of state worship [cf. the deification of emperors in imperial Rome]).   Boccaccio and Augustine lean towards the second kind of theology only. The old theology can sometimes be employed in the service of the Catholic Church (an example of Physical or Natural Theology is the fable of the trees choosing a king, in Judges 9.8-15).

JULIUS CAESAR SCALIGER (Giulio Cesare Della Scala) [1484-1558]:
Scaliger was an Italian philologist, physician, and natural scientist, and a very arrogant man. In his Poetics (Poetices) [1561], written originally in Latin, he meant to make a defense of the Roman poets Virgil (epic) [whom he considered superior to Homer] and Seneca (drama) [whom he considered superior to the Greek dramatists]. His commentary on Aristotle had an impact on neo-classical authors. He was influenced by Horace, Cicero and Quintilian. Scaliger attempted to fuse poetics and rhetoric, with rhetoric being the dominant partner. Hence, he maintains that poetry delights and teaches, but he stresses persuasion and moral purpose. He also seems to equate poetry with verse. He likes classifications, at times for their own end.

POETICS (Poetices) [1561]:
      Everything pertaining to mankind is necessary, useful, or pleasure-given. Man’s development depends on learning. Early speech (speech acts) was necessary to give commands, get things done, make prohibitions. Later speech added rules of language (grammar), embellishment and harmony, and a figurative sense. Necessity demanded a certain kind of language for philosophers to search for truth, utility demanded the language of statesmanship, and pleasure demanded the language of the theater. Hence, 1) Philosophical language [the language of necessity], aiming at truth, is exact, logical, rational, and concise. 2) The language of statesmen (oratory) [the language of utility], used in the forum or the camp, is less precise and governed by the subject, the place, the time, and the audience (the court of law, the assembly of the realm). 3) The third kind of language (speech) [the language of pleasure] employs narration and uses much embellishment: a) one kind records the fixed truth and employs a simpler (prose) style of composition (history); b) another kind (poetry) adds a fictitious element to the truth or imitates the truth by fiction, using greater elaboration (and verse, usually). The basis of all Poetry (Making) is imitation.
     The end of poetry is to give instruction [notice the priority] in pleasurable form, for poetry teaches and does not simply amuse. It seems that it amuses because originally poetry was sung. Poetry imitates that it may teach. The merit of the poet, according to Aristophanes’ Euripides (in Frogs), is to impress adroitly upon citizens the need of being better men. Assuredly,1) philosophy, 2) oratory, and 3) drama have one thing in common: persuasion [notice the emphasis placed on rhetoric]. Whenever language is used it expresses a fact or the opinion of the speaker. The end of learning is knowledge. Persuasion means that the hearer accepts the words of the speaker. The soul of persuasion is truth. Its end (of persuasion) is to convince (of the truth). Hence, eloquent speech is not the end of oratory (it is a means); persuasion is. If a man does not persuade, it is due to no fault of the art but of the issue (which might be beyond the power of the orator to control), the orator (who might be a defective speaker), or the cause he espouses (which may be unjust).
     There are two kinds of art: a) Practical arts that attain the ends in and of themselves (shoemaking, carpentry) and b) Conjectural arts (since they proceed by conjecture, not by fixed principles), like oratory, medicine, or navigation. The orator speaks 1) in the forum so that good men are meted to good men, and punishment to evil men (forensic or legal oratory relying on the past actions of men), hence, his aim is justice; 2) in assemblies and councils to advice (in the future) on public affairs (deliberative or political oratory), hence his aim is utility; and 3) elsewhere (in the present) to praise or censure men (epideictic oratory), hence, its aim is honesty. All speeches (judicial, civic, or encomiastic) are of a hortatory nature since they attempt to persuade an audience of the truth (of a legal case, of a deliberation, or of the honesty of someone’s praise or condemnation).
     The Poet is a Maker and almost a second deity. Poets may be classified according to I) Poetical inspiration (A. Those inspired by the Muses, like Homer and Hesiod, or by B. Wine, like Horace, Aristophanes, and Aeschylus), II) Age (A. The coarse age of Apollo, B. The venerable period of religion and the mysteries [Orpheus, Musaeus], and C. The [Heroic?] age of Homer and Hesiod), or III) Subject matter (A. The religious poets [Orpheus], B. The philosophical poets: 1. Natural [Empedocles, Lucretius] and 2. Moral [Solon, Hesiod, Pythagoras]).
     Comedy and Tragedy are of the same genus and share in common the name drama (“action”). Comedy is a dramatic poem filled with intrigue, full of action, happy in outcome, and written in a popular style (it also contains danger situations [although the outcome is tame] and violence). Tragedy is the imitation of the adversity of a distinguished man: it employs the form of action, presents a disastrous dénoument, and is expressed in impressive metrical language (but not every subject produces purgation).
     The early orators had only one end in view, to persuade and move their hearers (hence, their language was necessarily rude). The poets sought only to please by means of alluring songs. Eventually the orator and the poet secured from each other what they lacked respectively (Isocrates). Poetry (drama) moved from the country to the city and provided plots to furnish warning examples and sometimes to furnish precepts.
     Horace was right when he said that the useful and the pleasing are the two ends of poetry. Poems must 1) be deeply conceived (by having insight and foresight, or prudentia), 2) have variety (varietas), 3) have vividness (efficacia: a certain potency and force in thought and language which compels one to be a vivid listener), and 4) have winsomeness (suavitas) [charm], to temper the harshness of vividness. These are the supreme poetic qualities.
     For objects of every kind, there exists one perfect original. In poetry, the standard is heroic poetry (the epic). The precepts for a good heroic poem are as follows: 1) Start in medias res (not ab ovo) [to stimulate interest from the beginning]; 2) Do not repeat incidents, hence becoming tedious [NB: epics tend to repeat battles]; 3) Hold your hearer captive by means of suspense (the principal theme should not be placed at the beginning [although there should be wondrous interruptions]), and 4) Divide the book in chapters (as in Virgil’s Aeneid), each to its proper place, in imitation of nature, which subdivides into parts of parts, all so related that they constitute an organic body [is this an ontological or an epistemological observation?]. The best model of imitation (for its arrangement of parts [starting in medias res and holding one in suspense]), according to Scaliger, is Heliodorus’ Aethiopica (a 4th century AD Greek/Byzantine romance [translated as An Ethiopian Romance] in 10 books).
     Aristotle claims that poetry is comparable to that civic institution that leads us to happiness or perfect action (ethics > politics). Greek Ethos is an inclination to a certain course of action. The poet teaches mental disposition through action, so that we embrace the good and imitate it in our conduct, and reject the evil and abstain from that [NB: notice how Scaliger in the end positions poetry in the realm of Ethics; this is an inevitable movement if one mixes poetics with rhetoric, as he does from the beginning].

LUDOVICO CASTELVETRO (1505-1571):
Castelvetro wrote a commentary on Aristotle that was most influential until the end of the eighteenth century. He translated Protestant texts (Melanchthon in particular), was declared a heretic in 1557, and subsequently lived in exiled (in Switzerland). He frequently distorts or hardens Aristotle. He also casts a moralistic meaning over Aristotle’s notion of catharsis. He works to fix the Aristotelian alleged “unities” of action and time. Tragedy and epic should be based on historical events (but not comedy). The poem should delight and teach. Catharsis (in tragedy) is an oblique pleasure connected with our own self-love. Utility and delight are interrelated. Poetry is of particular use because it offers significant events rather than dry abstract persuasion. He emphasizes the relationship of the parts to the whole.

THE POETICS OF ARISTOTLE TRANSLATED AND EXPLAINED (Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata et sposta [1570, rev. 1576]):
     Poetry is a likeness of or resemblance to history. History and Poetry are divided into 1) subject matter and 2) words. But history is provided to the historian by the course of worldly events or Providence. The words are provided by the historian but they are the sort used in reasoning. The subject matter of poetry is discovered and imagined by the talent of the poet in words (in verse) not used in reasoning.
     A poet deals with marvelous resemblances of the truth (but not with truth [otherwise he would not be a poet]) to provide delight and recreation to an audience consisting of common (not specialized) people (who would be able to understand this resemblance). The first poets were deemed divinely inspired because of the admiration felt by the common people upon hearing them. The imitation of others is natural to men and instilled from childhood; by this means one acquires knowledge and learns by the example of others. Imitation is not mere copying but finding (by struggle) an accident in human behavior delightful and marvelous to hear.
     Plato believed tragedy would debase the character of subjects by the representation of emotive elements. But Aristotle noticed that by example and frequent representation spectators become magnanimous. Tragedy, by means of a catharsis of the passions of fear and pity expels those same passions from the hearts of men. Hence, men become morally stronger in spirit. In drama, a fable should consist of a single action of one character, since one is restricted by a particular place and limited to a definite time period (12 hours at most) [NB: Notice how Castelvetro elaborates the “unities” of action, space, and time in sect. 8].
     The plot of tragedy and the epic should include action not simply human but also magnificent and regal. Action should have occurred (regal events must have taken place). We cannot attribute to regal events or known kings actions that have never occurred or attributes that they never had, since known kings and notable events are well known and would hence, if shown in a different light, contradict (the [true] spirit of) history (and this would be a sin against truth). But the poet must not copy history either, for then he would not be dealing poetically (in a verisimilar manner) with the material at hand and would, hence, not be a poet (but a [bad if he does not use reasoning but only embellished language] historian).   The poet must discover (“invent” < Lat. in venire) the ways and particular means by which these incidents have had their fulfillment.
     In comedy, the poet by his skill finds universal and particular incidents. Since they are invented by the poet, history does not play a role here and the names of the characters are invented by the poet and not taken directly from history. He would have to deal with private persons (not known kings). However, the comic poet must use verisimilitude and not invent new cities or laws that would alter the course of nature.
     Since tragedy is a form of poetry, and delight is its aim, tragedy’s delight must be oblique. The pleasure is derived from the purgation and expulsion of fear and pity from the human soul. This is also a form of utility, for by a catharsis one achieves health of mind through bitter medicine [NB: notice the medical imagery]. Since we love ourselves, we recognize, when we view tragedy, that we are good [and just], for we regret the suffering others experience (on the stage). We also learn from what happens to others, and their tribulation may serve as a warning to us (again, self-love). We learn better through example (than through a teacher). Hence, it is better (more profitable) “to go to the house of mourning than to the house of banqueting” [cf. Eccl. 7.4].
     He who knows how to transform himself into an impassioned person is also skilled at representing such a character. Only a gifted person can know this.   Hence, poets are gifted persons (not madmen, as Plato thought [“jokingly,” according to Castelvetro]). The mad cannot assume various passions or be a careful observer of what impassioned men say or do.
     Aristotle said there were two dimensions to tragedy: 1) one accessible to the senses and external and measurable by the clock (whose duration, hence, cannot last longer than one revolution of the sun over the earth) [NB: notice the “unity” of time implied herein and attributed by Castelvetro to Aristotle], and another one 2) accessible to the intellect, internal, and measurable by the mind and which comprises the movement from misery to happiness or from happiness to misery (NB: notice the implied distinction made here between (physical, measured) time <chronos> and duration <kairos> (metaphysical, psychological time).

GIORDANO BRUNO (1548-1600):
Giordano Bruno was a Dominican friar, an Italian philosopher, an astrologer, and an occultist who was influenced greatly by the Neo-Platonist Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499). He believed that the universe is infinite and animate. Believing in Copernicus, he adhered to the theory of heliocentrism. God is not located spatially (e.g., in the Coelum Empyreum) but is intellectually present in all things. He is anti-mechanistic in his (Pantheistic) conception of nature and a forerunner of Naturphilosophie. He was burnt at the stake for Docetism, the (heretical) belief that Christ was all spirit and, hence, had no body (his body was an illusion).

CONCERNING THE CAUSE, THE PRINCIPLE, AND THE ONE (De la causa, principio et uno) [1584]:
     A dialogue between Dixon and Theoplilus. Theophilus claims it is extremely difficult to recognize the traces of an ultimate (first) case and creative principle. In artistic representations, he who sees Apelles’ portrait of Helen does not see its creator (Apelles) but only the result of the work which comes from the merit and genius of Apelles [NB: change the referents Apelles to “God” and Helen to “man” and you can see how problematic this asseveration is]. The divine substance is infinite and extremely remote from its effects. We do not see perfectly this universe whose substance and principle are so difficult of comprehension. With far less ground can one know the first principle and cause through its effect (since the effect is a mere reflection of the Divine Power).
     Not everything that comes first and is of more value the cause of what comes later and is of lesser value. Not everything that is a principle is a cause.
     The universal physical efficient cause is the Universal Intellect. The Universal Intellect is the [extrinsic] effective [causing] part of the World-soul or moving spirit and propelling power of the universe. The Intellect, restful and motionless in itself, produces all things. This Intellect is called the inner artificer. There are three kinds of intelligence: 1) the Divine (which is all things), 2) the mundane (which makes all things), and 3) the other kinds of spirits which become everything. There are also extrinsic and intrinsic causes. Extrinsic causes are efficient [causative of other things] but do not form [substantively] part of the things produced. Intrinsic causes of things are so with respect to the actuality of their own workings.
     The world with all its members is animate. The Universe and all its spheres are in some way animated. They are also souls. Even parts of things have souls and are animated. Everything has a portion of spiritual substance. Spirit is found in all things. Even those creatures not living are vitalized. Spirit, mind, and life is found in all things.

GIACOPO MAZZONI (1548-1598):
On the Defense of the Comedy of Dante is the second of two (the first [Discorso in difeso della del divino poeta Dante] from 1572 being against Ridolfo Castravilla’s attack on the same), this time against Belisario Bulgarini’s response to the first. Bulgarini called in Dante for absolute verisimilitude, probability, and unity in poetry. Mazzoni, a university professor (Rome, Paris), in order to defend Dante, proposed a threefold definition of poetry wherein he characterized poetry not by its subject matter or object imitated but by the mode of its treatment of the object. An art can be treated in more than one way, depending on one’s perspective. In the 1) first perspective, poetry is simply imitation in its creation of an idol, with no other end in its artifice than to represent and resemble. Here, the idol is to be judged for being credible and verisimilar, but not necessarily true. In the 2) second perspective, the poem is seen as a provider of delight, either free or, in a third perspective, 3) civically restrained to provide social value.

ON THE DEFENSE OF THE COMEDY OF DANTE (Della difesa della Commedia di Dante) [1587]:
     INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY:
     The same thing may be treated by different sciences according to different modes of knowing and consideration. One may view a work 1) through the perspective of Moral Philosophy to see how it concerns human happiness; 2) through the perspective of the Poetics to see how it is imitated; and 3) through the perspective of the Rhetoric to see how persuasive it is. Sciences are concerned by their objects, not insofar as they are things, but insofar as they are knowable; the arts likewise, are interested in things not as objects but as how artificiable they are.
     There are three types of objects (1. Idea, 2. Work, and 3. Idol) and three different modes of knowing them. 1) The Idea is the object of the ruling (the governing arts); 2) The Work is the object of the fabricating arts; 3) The Idol is the object of the imitative arts. The modes of the objects of the arts are three: 1. The Observable [the Ruling arts that provide the idea], 2) The Fabricable [the ones that make the object], and 3) The Imitable [that deal with the object [as idol, simulacrum, image, ghost] as imitable]. The arts that have the Idol as object have an object that has no other end in its artifice but to represent and resemble; hence they are called Imitative. The Imitative arts have as objects things that are good for no other end or use than to represent or resemble. But imitation may be Icastic (cf. Plato’s Sophist) [as they are] or Phantastic (made according to the caprice of the artist).
     The false is not always necessarily the subject of poetry. Poetry, as an imitative art, deals with the possible and the credible (more than with the true or false). Since poetry deals with the credible more than with the true, it falls within the rational faculty called “sophistic.” The poetic art has two modes: 1) Poetics [the ruling art which uses the Idol and is part of the civil faculty] and 2) Poetry [the art that forms and fabricates the Idol and is a species of the rational faculty]. It should be included under sophistic since it does not care about the true.
     Only true philosophy directs the intellect by means of the true and the will by means of the good. 1) Sophistic is contrary to true philosophy since it misdirects the intellect by means of the false and the will by means of evil and injustice. For this reason it was condemned by the Athenians. 2) The second species of sophistic (the Old or Ancient Sophistic) sets feigned [but noble] things before the intellect [for a legitimate end <cf. Plato’s magistrates in the Republic>] but does not mislead the will. This is OK. Phantastic poetry regulated by the proper laws belongs to the Ancient Sophistic. 3) The third sophistic (Second Sophistic) does not employ feigned names and events but rather, true names and real actions on which are based discussions appropriate to the rules of justice. Icastic poetry belongs to this third kind of (Second) Sophistic, for it represents true actions and persons but always in a credible way. Poetry is a rational faculty that examines the credible (not the true [hence, it is sophistic]). Poetry is a sophistic art that through imitation (its genus) deals with the credible (its subject) to produce delight (its end).
     The credible is the subject of poetry, but also of rhetoric (since rhetoric studies the plausible, the “what if?”). The credible as credible is the province of rhetoric; the credible as marvelous is the subject of poetry (the credible marvelous). The efficient (causing) cause of poetry is the human intellect. The art that discovers the use of poetry (final cause: purpose) is the civil (ethical < political) faculty. All the arts born of human reason are usually directed to contrary objects (e.g., medicine deals with health and medicine, but also with disease and poisons). In a civil society, the absence (cessation) of (serious) work, in its contrariety, would be a pleasant (ludic) activity that restores the spirits fatigued by the more important function of (serious) work. The civil (ethical) faculty considers the rightness of an activity. Amusements, games, pleasures, belong to the civil faculty and moral philosophy (Ethics, the branch of philosophy that studies right living). Poetry is a pleasant game (i.e., ludic, not related to work). Games are for Aristotle (Politics 7) imitations of those things one does seriously [NB: fox-hunting, chess, and sports [fencing, football, bullfights] are games or sports of strategy that prepare one for war, the serious work of any society that needs to protect itself from an enemy or rival]. The civil faculty ought to be divided into 1) Politics (the laws of activites) and 2) Poetics (the laws of cessation of activities: of recreation). Mazzoni believes the Poetics of Aristotle constitutes the ninth book of his Politics.
     Poetics, thus, is part of the civil faculty (NB: Notice how Mazzoni has subtly subsumed Aesthetics into Ethics). It prescribes the standards, the rules, and the laws of the Idol in poetry (NB: cf. Socialist Realism). Poetics deals with the idea of the Idol; poetry with the making of it. In its genus, poetry is the fabricating art, the maker of the idol, which is then to be used by poetics and by the civil faculty. No mode of imitation can be found (Aristotle, Ethics) that does not at the same time bring both delight and pleasure. This delight may be a) free and independent of any law (inordinately passionate and damaging to civil life) or b) regulated by the civil faculty (and therefore rational and geared toward the useful in society).
     Plato wanted his Republic composed of artisans, soldiers, and magistrates. There are three principal types of poetry. Heroic poetry (the epic) would be fitting to the soldier, who needs virtuous models of conduct to engage in war and disdain death. Tragedy looks to the utility and benefit of princes by keeping them under the justice of the laws. Comedy (a happy ending) is a consolation to the artisan, the lowest estate [NB: Note the sociological aspects of poetry here]. Comedy serves to keep the minds of humble subjects subservient to their superiors by keeping them content with their condition (shown as happy, fortunate, and capable of infinite solace). The more powerful would find tragedy useful to tame their insolence and pride (which [as hubris] might cause their downfall). Comedy and tragedy serve to extinguish sedition and rebellion and to preserve peace in the realm. The epic serves as military education to the soldiers, with its celebration of heroes and virtuous [warrior] deeds and disdainful attitude towards death, necessary for soldiers to sacrifice themselves, if necessary, for the sake of the country.
     Poetry may be viewed as 1) imitation (solely), as a 2) game (delightful), or as a 3) game modified by the civil faculty (useful).
     BOOK 1:
     The power that generates poetic verisimilitude is the phantasy (the imagination), which is free. The intellect is not free, for it produces concepts in accordance with the nature of objects. Poetry is composed of feigned and imagined things, because it is based in the phantasy.

TORQUATO TASSO (1544-1595):
He is one of the great poets and critics of the Italian Renaissance and, allegedly, a very paranoid man (he was scared of being unorthodox). The Discorsi del poema eroica was published in Naples in 1594, after his Jerusalem Delivered (Gerusalemme liberata) [written in 1575, published in 1581] and before the Jerusalem Conquered (Gerusalemme conquistata [1593]). He defines the epic. The purpose of poetry for Tasso is to help men by the example of human deeds, to provide pleasure, and to provide usefulness for a virtuous life. If tragedy has as its goal purgation, the epic’s goal is to move the reader to wonder (the marvelous) and virtue. Wonder is at the service of human improvement. Tragedy gives less delight.

DISCOURSE ON THE HEROIC POEM (Discorsi del poema eroica) [1594]:
     BOOK 1:
     In all things one must consider the end (Aristotle, Topics).
     Poetry has many species: 1) Epic, 2) Tragedy, 3) Comedy, 4) Songs. They are all alike in that they imitate. Poetry is an imitation in verse of human and divine actions. Every definition should look to the best. The purpose in (epic) poetry is to help men by the example of human deeds. Poetry is an imitation of human actions, fashioned to teach us how to live, providing pleasure directed to usefulness. Poetry deters us from many crimes. Poets left us instructions for life. The statesman should consider what poetry and what delight to forbid so that pleasure will not affect us like deadly poison or keep our minds idle. Poetry’s aim, hence, is usefulness (not delight), or enjoyment directed to virtue and happiness in a civil society. Poetry is a first kind of philosophy that instructs us in moral habits, since only the poet is wise. “Poetry is an imitation of human actions with the purpose of being useful by pleasing.” Poetry considers the beautiful; philosophy the good. Poetry strives to reveal beauty through 1) narration or 2) representation.
     The heroic poem is an imitation of an action noble, great, perfect, narrated in the loftiest verse, with the aim of giving profit through delight, so that the delight may get us to read more willingly and thus not lose the profit. All poetry profits by delighting (even tragedy and comedy). The effect of tragedy is to purge the soul by terror and compassion. The end of comedy is to move laughter at base things. As we laugh at the baseness we see in others, we grow ashamed to commit similar baseness. The end of the epic or heroic poem is to move one to wonder (and thus being useful).
     The epic poem has four qualitative components: 1) The Fable (the action performed by agents), 2) The Moral Habit of the Persons introduced in the fable, 3) Thought, and 4) Diction. The quantitative parts may also be four in number: 1) Prologue (the First Part) [The Introduction]: here the poet proposes, narrates, declares the present state of things, and supplies information about the past (as in Homer’s Odyssey); 2) The Second Part (The Perturbation): here things become disturbed; 3) The Third Part (The Reversal): things begin to unravel; 4) The Fourth Part (The Conclusion): things reach their end, their completion. There is no fixed number of episodes in the heroic poem.
     The parts of the fable are three: 1) The Reversal (peripeteia) or change from good to bad fortune, although in the epic, there is a double change, for some characters pass from prosperity to adversity, and others from adversity to prosperity. Still, in the epic, the change should always be for the better, because the happier ending is more suitable to this kind of poem. 2) Recognition, or passing from ignorance to knowledge of persons once known. This recognition should cause either happiness or misery. 3) Pathos, that is, a grievous perturbation full of anxieties, such as deaths, wounds, and lamentations and complaints which can move pity (as seen at the end of the Iliad).
     Poets are the most ancient of writers; historians began writing centuries later. The poet considers the verisimilar only as it is universal. Imitation is by its nature linked not with truth but with verisimilitude.

PIERRE CORNEILLE (1604-1684):
Pierre Corneille is the founder of French tragedy. He was trained by Jesuits. He also wrote Le Cid, his greatest work, a tragicomedy based on Spanish playwright Guillén de Castro’s Las mocedades del Cid. He is also, along with Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (Molière) [1622-1673] and Jean Racine (1639-1699), one of the three great playwrights of the French Baroque. In France and England, during the 17th and 18th centuries, Aristotle was read more as a prescriptive than as a descriptive author. This is true with respect to the alleged dramatic unities of action, time, and place, which were worked out by Castelvetro and Corneille. However, Corneille suspected Aristotle did not discuss the unity of space. In all fairness to the Philosopher, he only discussed the unity of action. However, the nature of Greek drama was such that one would easily imagine that actions had to take place in a specific place and during a limited time.

OF THE THREE UNITIES OF ACTION, TIME, AND PLACE (1660):
     In comedy, unity of action consists in the unity of plot; in tragedy, unity of action consists in the unity of peril. By unity of action is meant an action that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Within each part there may be subordinate (imperfect [incomplete], so as to keep the spectator in suspense) actions, although only one complete action to leave the mind of the spectator serene (which is the aim of a catharsis [in his Aesthetics, Hegel’s catharsis is achieved by attaining a sense of “ethical tranquility”]). Actions, of course, must be chosen for the beauty of the spectacle or the violence of the passions they produce. Other actions should occur behind the scenes while informing the spectator of them by narration. They must all be closely connected and have their source in the protasis that ought to conclude the first act. [The term protasis, to refer to the first part or act of a play, was coined by a Roman grammarian named Aelius Donatus <late 4th c. AD>, who wrote an Ars grammatica; the other parts of any play, according to Donatus, would be epitasis <the second part of a play, where the action began>, the catastasis <the third part, where the climax occurs>, and the catastrophe <the resolution, “turn,” or conclusion of a play>]. Everything that happens in tragedy must arise necessarily or probably from what has gone before.
     Scenes (3 for the ancients in each “act,” 9-10 for the moderns) must be linked to produce the effect of dramatic continuity. Scenes are linked by 1) sound (no), 2) sight (partial), and 3) presence and speech combined (good). Mute characters do not link scenes well, unless they are shown hiding to collect information.
     In order to have unity, an action must have 1) a complication (what has happened offstage before the beginning of the action and also what happens onstage) and 2) a resolution (what happens after the change of fortune or peripety). The complication is invented by the poet according to the precepts of probability or necessity. Use as little narration as possible of remote events (it annoys and burdens an audience). Descriptions of scenes behind the scene are better, for the audience awaits them with curiosity and are part of the action. Ab ovo beginnings demand an extraordinary attention on the part of the spectator [hence, begin in medias res].
     In the resolution, avoid a) the mere change of intention and b) machines (deus ex machina figures [as in Euripides’s Orestes).
     Each act of the action ought to contain a portion of it (the action). In the first act, one depicts the moral nature of the characters and marks off how far they have got in the story which is to be presented. [There are no acts in Greek drama {only ca. 3 episodes and 3-4 choral interventions}; the Romans subdivided their actions into 5 parts, a practice followed by the French and the English in the Renaissance and Baroque; the Spaniards and Italians chose 4 and 3 act plays]. Corneille prefers to have musical (orchestral) interludes between the acts of the ancients than the Greek practice of the chorus among the Ancients, which introduced new material in sung form, without allowing resting places for the audience [NB: Corneille would not have liked Brecht]. It is good to use stage notes and asides for the directors and actors. Greek drama lacks them and one does not know whether the actors left or stayed onstage when the chorus sang. At the end of the fifth act (third for Spaniards), all the actors are shown on stage in a comedy (that ends happily) [NB: this is logical, since in tragedy lots of people die, including, often, the main character].
     The unity of time. In one journal of the sun, or not much beyond, according to Aristotle. Corneille discusses whether this is meant to be a real day of 24 hours or an artificial day of 12. He seems inclined to compress a 2 hour play (in real time) into no more than 30 hours and claims than an author is nevertheless hampered by this tyrannical constraint.   Corneille also states that “I should like to leave the matter of duration to the imagination of the spectators.” (249). Time should be accelerated in the fifth act, for spectators are by now impatient to see the play end. Additional time (even years in the narrative parts) can take place between acts. Corneille admits he has written only 4 plays like this (observing the constraint of the unity of time).
     The unity of place. Corneille finds no rule for it in either Aristotle or Horace. Corneille says he has followed this unity only in three of his plays. For Corneille, two or three particular places within a whole city constitute unity of place.

JOHN LOCKE (1632-1704):
John Locke was an influential English philosopher, a political writer, a statesman (a Whig), and an empirical epistemologist (like the other great English empirical epistemologists David Hume [1711-1776] and [Irish] Bishop George Berkeley [1685-1753]). He starts with simple sense perceptions (single ideas) and combines them into complex abstract ideas. Primary qualities of existence are measurable; secondary qualities of experience (color, smell, sound, etc.) are produced as a result of the impact of the primary qualities on the passively perceiving subject. Unlike rationalists like Descartes, empiricists like Locke believe that subjects are born without innate ideas, as a tabula rasa or blank slate [NB: this idea would contradict Plato’s theory of innate cognition, the result of metempsychosis <in one’s current life one merely recalls what one already knew before {in another life}>], upon which natural experiences are inscribed. In his Two Treatises on Civil Government (1690), he expounds on the division of powers in a monarchy. In book 3 of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke claims that words are signs of ideas (simple ideas of perception). The relation of words to these ideas is arbitrary, although with use they seem natural. Except for proper nouns, words are general and do not refer to specific actions. Rather, they signify abstract ideas built up from combinations of simple ones. These ideas are nominal (this sounds Aristotelian) essences of genera and species, which are real essences hidden and unknown to us (this sounds Platonic). Locke proposes that ideas are prior to words (this is strange). Hence, words are already imperfect (arbitrary) signs for them. Figurative language would by necessity be purposefully ambiguous and deceitful. Mathematics is the only trustworthy language. Truth is located in the abstractions we make in the empirical world (from sense perception); Plato would locate truth in the realm of pure ideas or forms. Hence, they are diametrically opposed.

AN ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING (London, 1690):
     CHAPTER 2: “Of the Significance of Words.” Words are sensible signs necessary for communication. Words are external sensible sounds used to communicate ideas to others. The signs of these ideas are arbitrary. Words serve to record one’s thoughts (ideas). They are used to make oneself understood. They are also voluntary signs imposed on things known. By constant use, sounds (of words) connect (stand for) ideas. Their signification, however, is purely arbitrary (hence, prone to not be understood, or understood only in part by others).
     CHAPTER 3: “Of General Terms.” It is impossible for every particular thing to have a name. It is beyond a person’s capacity to retain distinct ideas of all the particular things we meet with. It would also be useless (it would impede communication). Only persons, countries, cities, rivers, and mountains have proper (peculiar) names. Out of many similar ideas (of perception), one eventually, through observation, creates a distinct name (category) of, e.g., Man, based on common agreements of shape and other qualities. In subsequent fashion, one advances to more general names and notions. Hence, general natures are merely abstract ideas (e.g., Mortals [vivens], to refer to Anthropoids [genera], Human Beings [species], Men [differentia], etc.). Definitions serve to make others understand by means of words what idea the term used stands for. A definition is the explaining of one word by several others to make the meaning of the idea it stands for certainly known.
     General and universal concepts are inventions or creatures of the understanding and do not belong to the real existence of things. They are merely (arbitrary) signs (words) of ideas (abstractions). Abstract ideas are the essences of the genera (i.e., Homo) and species (e.g., sapiens). However, although they are the work of the understanding, they have their foundation on the similitude of things. Every distinct abstract idea is a distinct essence, and the names that stand for such distinct ideas are the names of things essentially different (circle/oval, sheep/goat, water/earth).
     Essences (the being of anything) are either 1) Real (unknown essence) or 2) nominal essences (state of being). The essence of a thing rests safe and entire even if the constitution of a species perishes [NB: the dodo bird may exist no more, but its essence (conceptual and abstract idea) can never perish]. In this idea (by establishing abstract categories), communication is possible, even if one talks about non-existing entities (like dodo birds).
     CHAPTER 9: “Of the Imperfection of Words.” Words are used for recording and communicating thoughts. Sounds are voluntary and indifferent signs of any ideas. A man may use what words he pleases to signify his own ideas to himself. In civil life, common conversation, or philosophical language, words are used to convey the precise nature of things in the search for true knowledge. Sounds have no natural connection with our ideas, but have all their signification from the arbitrary imposition of men. Sounds that stand for ideas, hence, must be learned and retained by those who would exchange thoughts and hold intelligent discourse with others. But this is hard when       1) the ideas are very complex (e.g., moral ideas); 2) have no connection with nature;      3) when the meaning of a word refers to an unknown standard (especially moral words, which are highly abstract, e.g., what constitutes “sacrilege,” “honor,” or “moral turpitude”?); 4) when the signification of the word and the real essence of the thing is not exactly the same [man/anthropos].
     One example of an ambiguous term: gold (whose signification depends on whether one refers to its color, weight, solubility, fusibility, ductility, fixedness, etc.). Locke asseverates that the greatest parts of disputes are more about the signification of words than about real differences in the conception of things (292).
     The names of simple ideas are the least doubtful because they stand for a simple perception (sweet, bitter, figures [circle, triangle], numbers [1, 2, 3]). Complex ideas or mixed modes (those that involve collections of [multiple] perceptions) are much harder to grasp intellectually (modesty, frugality). This is especially true of ancient authors (whose words mean other things) or when discussing religion, law, and morality.
     CHAPTER 10: “Of the Abuse of Words.” The ends of language in our discourse with others are: 1) to make known one man’s thoughts or ideas to another; 2) to do it easily and quickly, and 3) to convey the knowledge of things. Language is abused or deficient when it fails in any of these three.

JOSEPH ADDISON (1672-1719):
Joseph Addison was an English essayist, poet, and statesman who, along with Irish friend, essayist, and playwright Sir Richard Steele (1672–1729), founded The Spectator magazine (1711-1712). They were both Whigs (liberals > supporters of a constitutional monarchy; unlike the Tories > conservatives, supporters at one time of an absolute monarchy). Addison is concerned with the effect of the work of art on the reader. There is to the imagination a primary and a secondary pleasure. The primary pleasures arise from our immediate experience or “ideas” of objects. The secondary pleasures arise from our experience of ideas of such objects when the objects are not actually present to perception but are represented to us. Pleasures of the imagination are not as refined as those of the understanding, since the imagination does not inquire into causes, but they are more obvious and easier to acquire. Disagreeable aspects of life may be presented agreeably by description because we are safe from their danger and hence have a sort of aesthetic distance. Art improves on nature and direct experience. The imagination compares ideas previously derived from direct experience with ideas derived from art. We obtain pleasure from these comparisons. The poet goes beyond nature by perfecting it.

“ON THE PLEASURE OF THE IMAGINATION.” THE SPECTATOR, No. 411 (21 June 1712):   Sight is the most perfect and delightful of our senses because it fills the mind with the largest variety of ideas. The sense of feeling gives us a notion of extension but is confined in its operations to the number, bulk, and distance of its particular objects. Sight is a more diffusive kind of touch that spreads itself over an infinite multitude of bodies. Sight furnishes the imagination with its ideas. The pleasure of the imagination arises from visible objects. We cannot visualize anything we have not seen before. We have the power to retain, alter, and compound those images. A man in a dungeon is capable of entertaining himself with scenes more beautiful than can be found in the compass of nature.
     The pleasure of the imagination arises from (“objective”?) sight. There is a second pleasure of the imagination when we recall from our memory (“subjective”?) objects no longer before our eyes. The pleasures of the imagination are not so gross as those of sense, nor so refined as those of the understanding. The pleasures of the imagination have the advantage over those of the understanding in that the former are more obvious and easier to acquire. All we need is to open our eyes to allow the scene to enter. We are struck with the symmetry of anything we see and immediately assent to the beauty of an object, without inquiring into the particular causes and occasions of it. The pleasures of the imagination are more conducive to health than those of the understanding, which are worked out by dint of thinking and attended with too violent a labor of the brain. Delightful scenes, whether in nature, painting, or poetry, have a kindly influence on the body, as well as the mind, and serve to clear and brighten the imagination and to disperse grief and melancholy, and set the animal spirits in pleasing and agreeable motions. Pursue studies that fill the mind with splendid and illustrious objects, as histories, fables, and contemplations of nature.
     THE SPECTATOR No. 416 (27 June 1712):   On the secondary pleasures of the imagination: When we see places, persons, or actions in general that bear a resemblance or analogy with which we first found represented. With our imaginations we can enlarge, compound, or vary particular ideas at our pleasure (simple & compound ideas). Statuary is the most natural kind of representation. Then comes painting. Then description. Writing must have come later than painting. Then comes music (as in a tone poem). The secondary pleasure of the imagination proceeds from an action of the mind, which compares ideas arising from the original objects, with the ideas we receive from the statue, picture, description, or sound that represents them. This gives much pleasure.
     Words that describe something can be even more pleasing, if well chosen, than the original object being described (ekphrasis). Speech can give a description more vigorous touches, heighten its beauty, and enliven the whole piece. In other words, the poet can give us more ideas than the ones we might have seen once with our own eyes (sight).
     THE SPECTATOR No. 418 (30 June 1712): The pleasures of these secondary views of the imagination are of a wider and more universal nature than those it has when joined with sight. A new pleasure arises when we compare the ideas that arise from words with the ideas that arise from the objects themselves. Perhaps this is related to the pleasure of the understanding (since we appreciate the aptness [truth] of the description of the perceived object).
     There is a pleasure in observing beautiful objects in a passionate or violent context, for herein the pleasure becomes more universal (example: a beautiful face in a painting with an air of melancholy or sorrow). Two leading passions (as in a catharsis: terror and pity). We are pleased when we see hideous objects and situations because we are aesthetically removed from them and feel therefore safe. We feel fortunate. Art perfects nature when something is described poetically, for more beauties are added than those we might see in a specific reality. We demand perfection from nature, which nature itself might not be able to provide us with. Art perfects nature, provided the artist does not reform her too much or make it absurd in his endeavor to excel.

GIAMBATTISTA VICO (1668-1774):
Giambattista Vico was a Neapolitan philosopher, historian, and jurist. For Vico in his New Science, mythology is the first science, for it researches into the real source and meaning of myths. After the Flood, humanity was divided into 2 groups: Hebrews and Gentiles. The Gentes spread all over the world and, having lost their original language, invented their own. They were giants. Language and myth were simultaneously created. Their first word and myth had to do with the sky God. Languages originally were mute signs (mental images). Their first language was poetic (metaphorical). Aristotle’s concept of the “credible impossibility” reflects primitive wonder and imaginative power. Homer and Hesiod were creators of culture. The philosophers, who came later, built their systems of abstract thought from the poets’ imaginative creations. Abstract thought emerges from iconic expression of mythical thinking. Tropes are the first and necessary modes of expression.

THE NEW SCIENCE (Principi d’una scienza nuova) [1725]:
     The first people of the world were the Hebrews. It follows that the first science to be learned should be mythology or the interpretation of fables, for all the histories of the Gentiles have their beginnings in fables, which were the first histories of the Gentile nations. The first sages were the theological poets. God founded the true religion of the Hebrews. The Gentiles began their wisdom with the Muse (knowledge of good and evil), later called divination. That is why the Latins called the judicial astrologers “professors of wisdom.” Wisdom was later attributed to men renowned for useful counsels, later to statesmen, later still to philosophers.
     Varro distinguished between three kinds of theology: a) Poetic (civil) theology, b) Natural theology, and 3) Christian theology (Civil and natural combined). All three united in the contemplation of divine Providence.
     The beginning of creative wisdom is crude metaphysics (the sublime [primary] science that distributes subject matters to subaltern sciences), which has two branches, both poetic: 1.1. logic (by means of which men invented languages), 1.2. morals (created heroes), 1.3. economics (founded families), and 1.4. politics (established cities); 2.1. physics (established the beginning of things as all divine), 2.2. cosmography (fashioned for themselves a universe entirely of gods), 2.3. astronomy (carried the planets and constellations from earth to heaven), 2.4. chronology (gave a beginning to measured times), and 2.5. geography (described the whole world).
     Ignorance is the mother of wonder. It is through the senses only that we gain knowledge. The Gentiles created things according to their own ideas. They were called poets or creators. The three-fold labor of great poetry is a) to invent sublime fables suited to the popular understanding, 2) to perturb to excess, with a view to the end proposed, and 3) to teach the vulgar to act virtuously. The giants expressed their violent passions through shouting and grumbling and pictured the sky as an animated body. They called the sky god Jove. They thought he was trying to tell them something with thunder. The curious savage/ignorant man gave birth to wonder. The first science was divination, to try to figure out what Jove was telling them. Jove became fortissimus, bonus, maximus, soter (savior), and stator (establisher). Every Gentile nation had its own Jove. Jove was born naturally in poetry as a divine character or imaginative universal. The science of the Gentiles was called Muse, or divination (knowledge of good and evil [what to do, what not to]). The mystae were the interpreters of the gods. Sibyls and oracles are the most ancient institutions of the Gentile world. The Gentiles created their gods out of terror of present power. For this reason, poetry deals with the credible impossibility. Poets founded religion among the gentiles. It was deficiency of human reasoning power that gave rise to poetry. The wisdom of the ancients was the wisdom of the lawgivers who founded the human race, not the esoteric wisdom of great and rare philosophers.
     Logic comes from logos, meaning fabula, “fable,” (favella), speech. In Greek, the logos was also called mythos, “myth,” whence comes the Latin mutus, “mute.” For speech was born in mute times as mental (or sign) language, which Strabo says existed before vocal or articulate language, whence logos means both “word” and “idea.” Logos or word also meant “deed” to the Hebrews and “thing” to the Greeks. Mythos came to be defined as vera narratio or “true speech.” Poets first apprehended the sky, the earth, and the sea as Jove, Cybele, and Neptune. Then came Flora (flowers), Pomona (fruits). The theological poets attributed senses and passions to bodies as vast as the sky, earth, and sea. As abstraction grew, metonymy drew a cloak of learning over the prevailing ignorance of these origins of human institutions. Jove becomes so small that he is flown by an eagle, Neptune rides a chariot, Cybele a lion. Allegory develops. The first tropes are corollaries of this poetic logic. The main one is metaphor (a fable in brief). All metaphors convey likenesses. Expressions related to inanimate thing are formed by the human body (mouth for “opening,” heart for “center,” etc.). Man in his ignorance makes himself the rule of the universe.
     The first poets had to give names to things from the most particular and the most sensible ideas (hence, synecdoche and metonymy). Metonymy of agent for act; subject for form; cause for effect (“ugly Poverty,” “sad Old Age,” “pale Death”). Synecdoche developed into metaphor as particulars were elevated to universals or parts united with the other parts together with which they make up their wholes (“head” for person, etc.). Irony could not have begun until the period of reflection, because it is fashioned of falsehood by dint of a reflection which wears the mask of truth. Since the first men of the Gentile world had the simplicity of children, who are truthful by nature, the first fables must have been true narrations. All tropes (reduced to the four named already) were at first necessary modes of expression. These expressions of the first nations later became figurative when, with the further development of the human mind, words were invented which signified abstract forms. Hence, first came verse (improper, figurative speech), then prose (proper, “natural”).
     Monsters and metamorphoses reflect the inability to abstract forms or properties from subjects. The ancients had to put subjects together in order to form their forms together, or to destroy a subject to separate its primary form from the contrary form that had been imposed upon it.

DAVID HUME (1711-1776):
David Hume was a Scottish (skeptical) philosopher, economist, and historian. Hume was rigorously empirical. Of the Standard of Taste is very critical of subjective relativism. There are principles of art based on the experience of what has pleased, not on what is true or false. The critic must have recourse to the “common sentiments of human nature.” A reader’s sentiments are affected by time, place, and situation. A critic must have a perfect serenity of mind, a recollection of thought, a due attention to the object, a delicacy of imagination, lack of prejudice, and freedom from slavish love of current or local fashion. To exercise judgment in this state of mind requires practice. Hasty judgments are likely to be wrong or superficial. Terence and Virgil have stood the test of time. Human beings are collectively more capable of consistent exercise of taste than of reason.

“OF THE STANDARD OF TASTE,” FOUR DISSERTATIONS (1757):
     Every voice is united in applauding elegance, propriety, simplicity, spirit in writing; and in blaming fustian (bombastic) discourse, affectation, coldness, and a false brilliancy. Writers of all nations and all ages concur in applauding justice, humanity, magnanimity, prudence, veracity; and in blaming the opposite qualities. The word virtue implies praise [NB: Lat. vir > manliness], as vice blame.
     A standard of taste. All sentiment is right, for sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is always real. But all determinations of the understanding are not right; because they have a reference to something beyond themselves. Among a thousand different opinions, only one is right and true. A thousand different sentiments about the same object are right, because no sentiment represents what is really in the object. It is natural to extend bodily to mental taste, and thus common sense, which is often at variance with philosophy. Many of the beauties of poetry are founded on falsehood and fiction. But though poetry can never submit to exact truth, it must be confined by rules of art, discovered to the author either by genius or observation. Lodovico Ariosto (1474-1533) pleases in spite of his hyperbolic adventures in Orlando furioso because of his charm, variety, and pictures of the passions.
     For a standard of taste the following conditions must be present: 1) a perfect serenity of mind (a sound state); 2) a recollection of thought; and 3) a due attention to the object; 4) a delicacy of imagination [or of taste] (to distinguish all the delicate nuances of specific “flavors,” as in Sancho Panza’s story [in Cervantes’s Don Quixote 2.13] of his relatives, the two wine connoisseurs) [appeal to known models and principles established by the universal consent and experience of all nations and ages]; 5) practice in judgment (to gain experience and expertise); 6) the ability to make comparisons to be able to rank beauties appropriately; 7) the need to preserve the (critic’s) mind free from all prejudice and allow nothing to enter into his consideration but the very object which is submitted to his examination (focus); 8) the necessity to avoid prejudice or the obligations of friendship, which might be destructive of sound judgment and pervert all operations of the intellectual faculties.
     In all the noble productions of genius, there is a mutual relation and correspondence of parts. Every work of art has also a certain end or purpose for which it is calculated. The object of eloquence is to persuade; of history to instruct; of poetry to please by means of the passions and the imagination: these ends we must carry constantly in our view. Every kind of composition is a chain of propositions and reasonings, not always the most just and most exact, but still plausible and specious.
     The principles of taste are universal and the same in all men, yet, few are the critics with taste. A critic with no delicacy judges without distinction and notices only the grossest qualities of the object, failing to notice the finer ones. When he has had no practice, his judgment is attended with confusion and hesitation. When no comparison has been employed, the most frivolous beauties are the objects of his admiration. When he is prejudiced, all his natural sentiments are perverted. If he lacks good sense, he cannot discern beauty, design, or reasoning. Hence, a true judge is a rare character who must have a strong sense, united to a delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice.
     Just expressions of passion and nature gain and maintain public applause forever. Hence, Terence and Virgil maintain a universal empire over the minds of men. People may err in their choice of philosophers, but not in their choice of poets. However, there are different humors to all men, and particular manners and opinions of our age and country. Vicious morality can disfigure a poem [NB by ARL: No, this is the province of ethics, not aesthetics]. Catholics must be shown to hate heretics, etc. Religious principles are a blemish in any polite composition when they rise up to superstition and intrude themselves into every sentiment.

GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM LESSING (1729-1781):
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was a German writer, philosopher, and art critic, and a very important Enlightenment figure. According to Lessing, the poet must recognize certain restraints on expression. Sculpture and painting have no temporal dimension; whereas poetry can present actions in time. Sculpture and painting can imitate actions by means of bodies. Poetry can paint bodies through the means of actions. In poetry there is frugality in the description of objects. Plastic and pictorial artists find execution and the representation of the invisible more difficult. Poets find invention more difficult. The act of reading makes impossible the synthesis of a description in words where illusion is the aim because words must be read in a temporal order. Lessing’s analysis implies that art is fundamentally mimetic; moreover, each medium has particular limitations and possibilities.

LAOCOÖN: AN ESSAY ON THE LIMITS OF PAINTING AND POETRY (Laokoon oder Über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie) [1766]:
     CHAPTER 16: Signs which are successive (as in poetry) can only express objects which are in succession, or the parts of which succeed one another in time. Objects which coexist, or the parts of which coexist, are termed bodies. Bodies with their visible properties are the proper objects of painting. Objects which succeed, or the parts of which succeed to each other, are called generally actions. Actions are the proper object of poetry.
     But all bodies do not exist only in space, but also in time. Each of these momentary appearances and relations is the effect of a preceding and the cause of a subsequent action. Painting can imitate actions, but only by way of indication and through the means of bodies.
     Actions cannot subsist by themselves but must be dependent on certain beings. Poetry also paints bodies, but only by way of indication and through the means of actions.
     Painting can only avail itself of one moment of action, and must therefore choose that which is the most pregnant, and by which what has gone before and what is to follow will be most intelligible.
     And even thus, poetry in her progressive imitations can only make use of a single property of bodies. Homer paints only progressive actions, and paints all bodies and individual things only on account of their relation to these actions, and generally with a single trait. A ship is to him at one time a dark ship, at another a hollow ship, then a swift ship, or a well-rowed ship. He goes no farther in the painting of a ship but the navigation, the departure, the arrival of the ship; out of these he makes a detailed picture.
     In another instance, instead of a description he gives us the story of a scepter.
     We see the gradual formation by the poet of that which we can only see in a completed form in the work of the painter.

DENIS DIDEROT (1713-1784):
Denis Diderot was a French philosopher and writer and one of the great figures of the Enlightenment, famous for the 28 volume Encyclopedia, published in collaboration with Jean d’Alembert. In his Paradoxe sur le comédien (1770), he criticizes the notion of sentiment as sincerely conveyed by an actor. The actor must be disinterested in his task to move an audience. The audience ought to feel, not the actor. Imitation is artifice. The actor joins action, diction, face, voice, movement, and gesture to an ideal type invented by the poet and frequently enhanced by the player.

THE PARADOX OF ACTING (Paradoxe sur le comédien) [1770, 1778, 1830]: Nature bestows natural gifts, but art, the study of great models, and experience perfects Nature’s gifts. Nothing happens on the stage as it happens in Nature. Also, a dramatic poem is fixed according to a fixed system of principles. Words are merely symbols that indicate thoughts, feelings, and ideas and that require action, gesture, intonation, expression, and a context to give them full significance (embodiment). Two speakers may use the same words to express entirely different thoughts and matters.
     A good actor must have a great deal of judgment and have in himself an unmoved and disinterested onlooker. He must have penetration, not sensibility. He must also have the same aptitude (to mimic) for every sort of character and part. He must also be a good observer of human nature. He must engage in constant imitation of an ideal type and play from thought, not the heart. He must be invariable. The actor is not himself when he plays a role. He has a double personality. Cool reflection is needed. Self-control.
     Great poets, great actors, great copyists of Nature, beings gifted with fine imagination, broad judgment, exquisite tact, a sure touch of taste, are the least sensitive of creatures. They are too busy observing, considering, studying, reproducing. It is we who feel. Sensibility is not the distinguishing mark of a great genius. The actors are madmen.
     The actor has rehearsed every line to catch the spectator in his trap. He has studied every move he has to make. He knows the right moment to shed a tear. It’s all mimicry. But the deception is all on the side of the spectator. The actor knows he is not that person. The player’s tears come from his brain. He is like a courtesan who has no heart and abandons herself into your arms.
     Dramatic characters (Cleopatra, Agrippina, etc.) are phantoms created by the poet’s special fantasy. In real life they would be strange or laughable. They are tolerated on the stage because of stage convention. What is truth for stage purposes? The conforming of action, diction, face, voice, movement, and gesture, to an ideal type invented by the poet and frequently enhanced by the player. A work of art is planned and composed, built up by degrees, unlike nature. Rehearsals are necessary to strike the right balance between all characters. The great actor has to mature and work from the head. He is like a good wine that grows generous with age.
     Feelings (sorrow, pity, etc.) must be over by the time one starts to write about them. A certain distance is necessary. A great actor studies the sensible man and his passions, reflects on what he sees, and then adds or cuts away what he must. Sometimes the poet feels more deeply than the actor. Sometimes the actor’s conception is strongest than the poet’s. At times the poet engenders a monster but the actor makes it roar.
     Sensibility accompanies organic weakness and is associated with a delicacy of nerves that inclines one to deep emotions, tears, loss of self-control, even madness. A great actor is a most ingenious puppet and the strings are held by the poet. Always agreeable people are frivolous; those without character excel in playing all roles.
     Actors are polished, caustic, cold, proud, light of behavior, spendthrifts, self-interested, masters of themselves, isolated, vagabonds, with little conduct, no friends, capable at times of laughter, but never of tears. They become actors out of a lack of education, poverty, or because of a libertine spirit.. An actor never becomes an actor out of virtue, or to be useful to the world, or to serve his country or family. Actors have no character. They become as false as a doctor, surgeon or butcher become hardened. They are fit to play all characters because they have none. [NB: How true!]

IMMANUEL KANT (1724-1804):
Immanuel Kant was the last major philosopher of the Enlightenment. He was born in Königsberg, in the former Kingdom of Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia [a chunk of land north of Poland and south of Lithuania]). Kant is interested in a priori knowledge in his Critiques of Pure Reason (1787) and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788). In his Critique of Judgment (1790) he proposes the existence of the “manifold of sensations,” which is processed through the creative power of the sensibility. We can never know directly things in themselves; only appearances. Later we categorize them intellectually. In the case of discovery, reflection, or invention, there are no a priori concepts. These (aesthetic) objects, hence, have a purposiveness (an “initselfness” or a form) without a purpose (an end outside itself). Aesthetic judgments deal with the beautiful and the sublime, which are neither objective nor logical. They are both subjective. But a true aesthetic judgment has subjective universality. Feelings of sheer pleasure and pain are subjective and individual, but aesthetic judgments, although subjective, are universal and disinterested, unconnected with feelings of personal pleasure or pain, prejudice or personal interest. A beautiful object lacks an a priori concept or standard as to its use. The pleasure in the object comes a posteriori. Each aesthetic judgment is therefore singular. Historical accuracy or truth is foreign to aesthetic judgments. The work’s internal purpose is what matters. The sublime differs from the beautiful and may be either mathematical (size matters) or dynamic (power matters). The beautiful implies form and boundary; the sublime infinite size or overwhelming power. For us, the sublime object is formless and beyond cognition. The sublime does not lead to disinterested contemplation but fear and depth of feeling. And yet, our ability to surpass all sense gives us pleasure when experiencing the sublime, as well as a certain distance. The Critique of Judgment is the most influential work on aesthetic theory ever written. The New Critics were influenced by it.

CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT (Kritik der Urteilsfraft) [1790]:
     INTRODUCTION: A judgment is produced by the faculty of thinking the particular as contained under the universal. If the universal (precept, principle, law) is given, the judgment that subsumes the particular under it is determinant (since the judgment is made a priori). But if only the particular is given for which the universal is to be found, the judgment is merely reflective (and, subsequently, a posteriori). The judgment must be internal (never external, outside the object in question) since there is no a priori category to which to allude (to determine the object’s judgment). Hence, the concept of the object is the purpose (the purposiveness of the form).
     FIRST BOOK: ANALYTIC OF THE BEAUTIFUL: One determines if something is beautiful not by the understanding but the imagination of the subject who then feels pleasure or pain. The judgment of taste is not cognitive or logical but aesthetic, hence, subjective. The subject experiences a feeling which the representation of the object effects.
     One experiences satisfaction (interest) when perceiving the representation of an object. Satisfaction has a reference to the faulty of desire. We judge by mere observation (intuition or reflection). This judgment is disinterested. What pleases in itself (the aesthetic object) is good in itself (beautiful). If it pleases by means of reason, it is good (for this we need an a priori concept to which to refer). If it pleases as a means it is useful. The satisfaction in the beautiful depends on the reflection upon the object, leading to any concept (however indefinite); it is distinguished from the pleasant, which rests entirely on sensation. [the pleasant and the good are related to desire]
     The judgment of taste is contemplative. But this contemplation is not directed to concepts, for the judgment of taste is not a cognitive judgment and thus is not based on concepts, nor has its concepts as its purpose.
     The a) pleasant, the b) beautiful and the c) good: a) that which gratifies a man is called pleasant; b) that which merely pleases him is beautiful; c) that which is esteemed or approved by him is good (what has an objective worth). Pleasantness concerns irrational animals also, but beauty concerns only man. Of these three kinds of satisfaction, only that of taste in the beautiful alone is a disinterested and free satisfaction, for there is no interest of sense or reason to force our assent. The others incline, [favor], or respect; but only taste is related to favor as the only free satisfaction. All interest presupposes or generates a want, and a judgment about such objects is no longer free (NB: We need food and justice, so we are inclined to the former and have a sense of respect for the latter <only when one is satiated can one “choose” one or another dish or speculate about various forms of equity>; but beauty only finds favor in the beholder).
     The beautiful in an object is of an entirely disinterested satisfaction. Since the feeling is not forced or relies on necessity, it cannot be personal (as a want would be) but universal (it is presupposed that everybody else who is free would also find favor in it). Since this universal satisfaction is not based on a concept, it is subjective.
     The pleasant is a private feeling limited to a single individual (who, e.g., likes Canary wine). As regards the pleasant, everybody has his own taste. But all would find favor in the beautiful. In the judgment of taste there is first the taste of sense (a merely private judgment), the second the taste of reflection (a public [but not practical] judgment), whose representation is connected with pleasure and pain. This universality does not rest on concepts of objects since it is not logical but aesthetical. It involves not objective quantity of the judgment but only that which is subjective. All judgments of taste are singular judgments. The judgment of taste does not postulate the agreement of everybody; it only imputes this agreement to everyone (general assent, not mathematical confirmation). This universal agreement is based on common sense (not common understanding). This doesn’t mean that everybody must agree with a subjective judgment, but that everybody ought to agree. Beauty is separated from the pleasant and the good to find favor.
     The pleasure in the given object cannot precede it. It is the grounds of pleasure. Every purpose carries with it an interest about the object of pleasure. The judgment of taste cannot be determined by an objective purpose or a concept of the good, since it is an aesthetic (based on sensation, reflection), not a cognitive (based on thought, [a priori] concepts) judgment. The feeling of pleasure is involved in the determination of an object as beautiful [NB: I wonder if Kant means “wonder” or “awe” [admiratio] instead of “pleasure”]. There is a subjective purposiveness in the representation of a object without any (ethical, moral) purpose (either objective or subjective), a purposiveness in the representation by which an object is given to us, without an a priori concept.
     Every interest spoils the judgment of taste. Beauty should only be concerned with form. Charm and emotion should have no influence in its appreciation of it. When we judge a beautiful object merely by the purposiveness of the form we are making a pure judgment of taste. Judgments of sense are related to pleasantness or unpleasantness; judgments of beauty are formal and purely aesthetical.
     Beauty is attributed to the object on account of its form. In painting, sculpture, architecture, and horticulture, the delineation is the essential thing. Colors may light up and add charm to the object, but they are extraneous to the real beauty of the object (the delineation, in this case). Every object of sense is either figure or play. (pantomime, dancing). In these cases, the composition is the proper object of taste. Ornaments (parerga) add nothing to the object. Emotion (which belongs to the sublime) does not belong to beauty at all (neither charm [sensuous] nor emotion [ethical]). Also, the purposiveness without purpose of a beautiful object of art is independent of the concept of good [ethical <objective purposiveness: a) external: utility or b) internal: perfect {even though this comes nearer to the predicate of beauty}>]. Perfection is a form of objective purposiveness (that presupposes an a priori concept). The formal element in the representation of a thing, or the agreement of the manifold with a unity (it being undetermined what this ought to be) gives to cognition no objective purposiveness whatever. The object is not here conceived by means of the concept of a purpose.
     The judgment of taste is an aesthetic judgment. It rests on subjective grounds, the determining ground of which cannot be a concept, and consequently cannot be the concept of a definite purpose. Beauty is a formal subjective purposiveness (if it were objective, it would have a definite [a priori <conceptual>] purpose). An aesthetic judgment gives no cognition of the object. It can only refer back to the determination of the representation (a feeling [not a concept] of internal sense or harmony) of the object. The faculty of concepts is the understanding, and although the understanding makes all concepts, including aesthetic judgments, it must do so without referring to cognition but only to feeling, to make an authentically pure aesthetic judgment.
     There are two kinds of beauty: a) free beauty (pulchritudo vaga) or b) merely dependent beauty (pulchritudo adhaerens). The first presupposes no concept of what the object ought to be; the second presupposes such a concept. The first is self-subsistent beauty; the second, depending on a concept, is conditional beauty, and is ascribed to objects which come under the concept of a particular purpose. When judging a free beauty (roses), such judgment of taste is pure, since there is no presupposed concept of any purpose. Human beauty is adherent beauty since it presupposes a concept of perfection and purpose (?). Its purity is injured if we include the concept of the good. Examples: a building could be beautiful provided it is not a church (good); tattoos might be beautiful provided they are not used for warriors (purpose). It is true that taste gains by combining aesthetics with intellectual satisfaction, but this would no longer be a rule of taste but of the unification of taste with reason (the beautiful and the good), by which the former becomes available as an instrument of design in respect of the latter.
     A judgment of taste with respect to an object with a definite internal purpose is pure if the person judging it has no (a priori) concept of this purpose. If he does, he makes an applied judgment of taste.
     There can be no objective rule of taste which shall determine by means of concepts what is beautiful. For every judgment from this source is aesthetic, i.e., the feeling of the subject, and not a concept of the object, is the determining ground. The universal communicability of sensation (satisfaction or dissatisfaction) without the aid of a concept, or the agreement of all times and peoples is the empirical criterion. The imagination (not reason) is the faculty of presentation (of an object). The only being that has the purpose of its existence is man. Judgments based on ideal (or rational) standards of beauty (which would be a priori) would not be a judgment of taste.
     SECOND BOOK: ANALYTIC OF THE SUBLIME: The beautiful and the sublime both please in themselves. Both presuppose a judgment of reflection (and neither of sense or logic). Both judgments are singular and yet universal. The beautiful is connected with the form of the beautiful, which has definite boundaries. The sublime is to found in a formless object, by boundlessness. The representation of the one is based on quality; in the other, quantity. The feeling of the sublime arises only indirectly. It seems to be regarded as emotion, not play. It is incomparable with physical charm. The mind is not attracted by the object but repelled away from it. The pleasure here is not positive but negative. We are repelled but we also admire and respect the sublime. The sublime excites and moves us (the beautiful enthralls us makes us reflect). No object (of nature) is sublime. It cannot be contained and has no boundaries. It only causes the sublime in us (it’s an epistemological matter) [NB: Cf. Schopenhauer’s „Din an Sich“]. Nature is chaotic, wild, disorderly, irregular, and desolate. We perceive only size and might. We must seek a ground external to ourselves for the beautiful in nature; but seek it for the sublime merely in ourselves.
     The sublime is perceived as mathematically (quantitas) or dynamically (magnitude) sublime. It moves the mind (unlike beauty, which makes the mind reflect in restful contemplation). The sublime is not to be sought in the things of nature, but only in our ideas. (NB: again, it is an epistemological matter). “The sublime is that in comparison with which everything else is small.” The sublime in nature gives us a sense of infinity. The sublime is to be sought in the mind of the perceiver, not in nature (“shapeless mountain masses” [436]). The feeling of an incapacity to attain to an idea which is a law for us is respect. It produces pain. It moves us (it makes us vibrate), attracts us, and repels us from the same object. But our judgment is always aesthetical because we can’t have a determinate (a priori) concept of it; it merely shows a subjective play of the mental powers in contrast to serenity (as with the beautiful). The imagination AND understanding serve to judge the beautiful; the imagination AND reason the sublime (by conflict). The sublime shows us we have a self-subsistent reason or a faculty for the estimation of magnitude, whose superiority can be made intuitively evident.
     Might is what is superior to great hindrances. It is dominion if it is superior to any form of resistance. Nature as might without dominion over us is dynamically sublime. As such, nature instills fear. But we may experience fear without being afraid. He who fears can form no judgment about the sublime (as he who is seduced by inclination or appetite can form no judgment of the beautiful). We need to feel secure to judge the dynamically sublime in all its fury, for only then are we capable of judging it. It moves us to courage. The sublime elevates the imagination. Sublimity resides in the mind and makes us conscious that we are superior to nature.
     Spirit in an aesthetic sense is the name given to the animating principle of mind. The imagination (a faculty of cognition) creates another nature out of the material that actual nature gives us. We entertain ourselves with it when experience becomes commonplace. Representations of the imagination are called ideas (that are more complete than those found in nature). The imagination brings the faculty of intellectual ideas (reason) into movement. Language then binds up spirit too.
     Poetry owes its origin to genius and is not guided by precept or example. It expands the mind by setting the imagination at liberty. It strengthens the mind by making it feel its faculty, free, spontaneous, and independent of natural determination. It plays with illusions, which it produces at pleasure, but without deceiving by it, for it declares its exercise as mere play. Rhetoric moves one to one side to form a judgment and deprive one of freedom by ensnaring the understanding. It is a treacherous art (Dutch tulips).

JOHANN CHRISTOPH FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER (1759-1805):
Friedrich Schiller was a German poet, dramatist, philosopher, and historian, as well as a friend of Goethe. Sense/intellect/play = the Sensuous Drive or Energy (Stofftrieb: “life” [its object], sensation, feeling, temporality, time, movement, change, the sensuous), the Formal Drive or Energy (Formtrieb: “form” (death?) [its object], thought, rationality, abstraction, law, truth, eternity, changelessness, the rational), the Play Drive or Energy (Spieltrieb: “living form, beauty” [its object], play as an aesthetic experience, freedom, to bring unity to human nature, to set man free physically and morally).

LETTERS ON THE AESTHETIC EDUCATION OF MAN (from the Briefe über die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen [1795]):
     21ST LETTER: Beauty produces no particular result, either for the understanding or the will. It accomplishes no moral or intellectual purpose. It discovers no individual truth. It helps us to perform no individual duty. It provides no firm basis for character as to enlighten the understanding.
     22ND LETTER: The excellence of a work of art can never consist in anything more than a high approximation to that ideal of aesthetic beauty. In a truly successful work of art, the contents should effect nothing, the form everything. It is only through form that true aesthetic freedom can be looked at. Content has a limiting effect. Arts that affect the passions are not entirely free arts since they are in the service of a particular air (pathos). The unfailing effect of beauty is freedom from passion. Art does not teach (didactic) or improve (moral). Art is not a sermon (purpose?) or an intoxicating drink (utility?).
     25TH LETTER: Man is a match to nature’s horrors once he knows how to give it form and convert it into an object of his contemplation. Once he asserts his independence in the face of nature as phenomenon, he asserts his dignity and freedom (from it).
     Beauty is the work of free contemplation. Beauty is form because we contemplate it.

FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL (1772-1829):
He was the leading theorist of German Romanticism. He and his brother August Wilhelm Schlegel published the periodical Athenaeum (1798-1800). The fragments in the Lyceum der schonen Kunste (1797) were written entirely by Friedrich and were regarded as the initial expression of Romanticism.

GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL (1770-1831):
Hegel is, like Kant, a German Idealist (who prioritize ideas over matter; unlike Materialists [like Karl Marx], who prioritize matter over idea) and the first philosopher to introduce history into philosophy. Schopenhauer despised him for this and called him a pseudo-philosopher. He was taken seriously by Marxists, who used his historical dialectical method for their own scientific ends. He introduces the “Other” in his Phenomenology of Mind (Phänomenologie des Geistes [1807]). Absolute spirit (pure consciousness in art, religion, and philosophy [in that ascending order]). Every part is dependent on and definable in terms of every other part and of the whole itself. In his Phenomenology of Mind he uses a dialectical method by why a thesis is negated and sublated (aufheben [transcended <but preserved as well>]) into a synthesis. In the Philosophy of Fine Art, Hegel claims that art is a mode, like religion and philosophy, through which the idea is made available to consciousness. It is one mode by which Absolute Spirit comes into consciousness of itself. Art represents its matter in sensuous form. The beautiful in art is the idea carried into concrete form. There are three kinds of art: symbolic, classical, and romantic. Symbolic art is allegorical and is related to architecture and the East. Here, objects represented have arbitrary meanings. In classical art (Greek), there is a more appropriate relationship between idea and embodiment (the god), as in sculpture, where form and content are merged. Romantic art (Christian art, but also post-Greek, i.e., Roman and Roman-like or European art [Hegel is thinking specifically of Shakespeare, Calderón, and Goethe]) spiritualizes matter in painting, music [tone poems?], and poetry (in that ascending order). Poetry is the greatest of arts because is totally free from form; its sensuousness is created with the mind. But art is only a lesser manifestation of Idea, since it relies on materiality. It cannot be as satisfactory as religion (with depends on the good) or philosophy (which depends on conceptual truth). In his Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel deals (in the fragment on “Lordship and Bondage”) with consciousness (the “Master”) becoming aware of itself through the recognition of another (the “Slave”).

THE PHILOSOPHY OF FINE ART (1820, 1823, 1826, 1829, pub. 1835):
     INTRODUCTION: Hegel proposes to examine art as free in its aim and means, and not as a pastime in the service of pleasure and entertainment. Fine art is not true art until it is also free. It is a mode, like philosophy or religion, by which consciousness is expressed through matter. In the arts, nations deposit their richest intuitions and ideas. Fine arts also supply a key of interpretation to the wisdom and religion of peoples.
The content of art is the idea, and the form of its display the configuration of the sensuous or plastic image. It is the function of art to present the idea in a sensuous shape (as in sculpture [but not as pure abstraction for Hegel]) and not in the form of thought (as in philosophy) or pure spirituality (as in religion). The material object of art possesses potentially the idea for its inward soul of significance, in the same mind that mind and spirit do. The idea is carried into concrete form and enters into immediate and adequate unity with it. There are, moreover, several types of art or manifestations of idea into three modes and five forms:
     I. SYMBOLIC MODE (with its type 1. ARCHITECTURE): Idea expresses itself in architectural form in an indeterminate and still abstract manner (and not as individuality, as in [Greek] sculpture). This original art form is a mere search after plastic configuration. The medium of this first of the fine arts, Architecture, is the external object, a heavy mass. It provides the Temple, as it were, where the divine will later manifest itself in concrete (not symbolic) form (as architecture). In this material the ideal is incapable of realization as concrete spirit. Spirit enters the dense mass only to establish an abstract relation. It is in consequence of this that the fundamental type of art of building is that of symbolism. It is a SYMBOLIC type of art. The abstract idea is trying to manifest itself into concrete form, but only in a defective and one-sided and contingent manner. The idea is still indeterminate and inadaptable. This is the primitive pantheistic character of the East (Asia). Here, idea is compelled to do violence to matter and hence one gets bizarre and grotesque configurations. Symbolic art is yearning here, in its mystery, for full (classical [Greek]) manifestation. The natural life on earth in its finitude is expressed in this Symbolic mode (in a pantheistic manner, as in Indian [Hindu] architecture, which is highly symbolic).
     II. CLASSICAL MODE (with its type 2. SCULPTURE): In the classical art of sculpture, the defect (unidimensionality) of symbolic (Asian) art is annulled (cancelled, negated, sublated, and transcended [aufheben]).   Classical art is the free and adequate embodiment of the idea in the (material) shape. The boundary of sculpture lies precisely in that it retains the spiritual as an inward being. The external and the inorganic world is purified by architecture. It is coordinated under symmetrical laws. In sculpture, God enters in the lighting flash of individuality. What sculpture does is to make the presence of spirit stand before us in its bodily shape and in immediate union therewith lies at rest and in blessedness. Sculpture is the image of the divine in concrete (individualized) form. The idea is able to unite in a free and completely assonant concord with the object (sculpture). Classical [Greek] art creates a vision of the complete ideal. The perfect ideal is the human form; it alone is the visible phenomenon adequate to the expression of intelligence. The human bodily form is the natural shape appropriate to mind [NB: I suppose this makes sense, since only human beings think]. Here, human consciousness accepts God for its object.
     III. ROMANTIC MODE (with its types: 1. PAINTING, 2. MUSIC, and 3. POETRY): The Romantic (post-Classical [post-Greek], Roman-esque, Christian) mode annuls (cancels, negates, sublates, and transcends [aufheben]) the completed union of the idea and its reality. Mind is the infinite subjectivity of the idea, which as absolute inwardness, is not capable of freely expanding in its entire independence so long as it remains within the mod of the bodily shape. The Greek god (i.e., its sculpture) is the object of naïve intuition and sensuous imagination. His shape is therefore the bodily form of man. The sphere of his power and his being is individual and individually limited (NB: the Greek gods being particularized and limited in their spheres of power). The reality of this content is no longer the sensuous and the physical body of man, but the self-aware inner life of soul itself. It is Christianity that presents to mind God as spirit., which steps back from the sensuousness of imagination into the inward life of reason, and makes this rather than bodily form the medium and determinate existence of its content. Romantic art must be regarded as art transcending itself within the boundary of its own province and in the form (materiality) of art itself (not philosophy or religion). This Romantic art seeks the intimacy of soul, the emotional life, the inward life. In its expression, it reincorporates the sensuous externality of the Symbolic mode and incorporates the subjective finite spirit with all its idiosyncrasies and caprices, even crime itself. But in its representation of externality it displays spirit and the soul is manifested in a complete fashion. The three modes of art (Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic) aspire after the attainment and transcendence of the ideal, viewed as the true concrete notion of beauty. Also, each general type (mode) discovers its determinate character in one determinate external material or medium (type). Here we go from God to the devotion of the community, or to God as present to the subjective consciousness (as multiform). In the Romantic mode, the community of the faithful confronts the god with particularization in varied shapes and qualities. Here, the multiplicity of particular souls seeks unity in ideality. Here, God reveals himself as spirit revealed in his community. Here we have an expression of the totality of the arts (of the community of the faithful).
     1. PAINTING: Painting liberates art from the objective totality of spatial condition (i.e., from [symbolic] architecture and [classical] sculpture) by being limited to a plane surface (less bulk?).
     2. MUSIC: The medium of music is still sensuous (how? [perhaps only in “descriptive” music, as in Richard Strauss’ tone poems [?] <Leopold Mozart’s Toy Symphony, a closer model to Hegel’s time, comes to mind>) but proceeds into still profounder subjectivity and particularization. Here, the ideality of matter no longer appears under the form of space, but as temporal ideality is sound or tone. Its abstract visibility has been converted into audibility. Sound liberates the ideal content from its fetters in the material substance. In its range of feelings and passions music forms the center of the romantic arts. [Music transcends (aufheben) painting (it sublates materiality)].
     3. POETRY: It brings into vassalage of the mind and its conceptions the sensuous element from which music and painting began to liberate art. Here, sound, the only external material retained by poetry, is in it no longer the feeling of the sonorous itself, but is a mere sign without independent significance. It is a sign of idea which has become essentially concrete, and not merely of indefinite feeling. Sound now develops into the word as essentially articulate voice, whose intention is to indicate ideas and thoughts. Poetry is the universal art of the mind which has become essentially free and which is not fettered in its realization to an externally sensuous material, but which is creatively active in the space and time belonging to the inner world of ideas and emotion. In this highest phase art terminates by transcending itself, passing from the poetry of imaginative idea into the prose of thought. [NB: In other words, art for Hegel is a steppingstone for what really matters: not sensuous imagination but rational, conceptual, philosophical thought].
     The content of the artistic world is the beautiful, and the true beautiful is spiritual being in concrete form, the ideal, or apprehended with still more intimacy, it is the absolute mind and truth itself.
     NOTA BENE: Hegel’s Philosophy of Fine Art is a compendium of notes edited by his students and published after his death.

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND: “Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage” (1807): Self-consciousness exists for another self-consciousness; that is, it is only by being acknowledged or recognized. Self-consciousness has before it another self-consciousness; it has come outside itself. As self-consciousness, each is indeed certain of its own self, but not of the other, and hence its own certainty of itself is still without truth. For its truth would be merely that its own individual existence for itself would be shown to it to be an independent object. But by the notion of recognition this is not possible. Each in its self through its own action and through the action of the other achieves this pure abstraction of existence for self. In so far as it is the other’s action, each aims at the destruction and death of the other. They prove themselves and each other through a life-and-death struggle. It is only by risking life that freedom is obtained. The one is independent and its essential nature is to be for itself; the other is dependent, and it essence is life or existence for another. The former is the Master, or Lord, the latter the Bondsman. The master is the consciousness that exists for itself. The truth of the independent consciousness is accordingly the consciousness of the bondsman. Bondage, being a consciousness repressed within itself. The sovereign master imparts the fear of death. Fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom. In the master, the bondsman feels self-existence to be something external. For self-reflection to exist, fear and service are necessary. Without the discipline of service and obedience, fear remains formal and does not spread over the whole known reality of existence.
Nota Bene: This little jewel has been read politically even though it is a purely epistemology rendition of consciousness becoming aware of itself through the perception of the other (that’s all). It has nothing to do with politics or, for that matter, with aesthetics.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE (1821-1867):
For Baudelaire, one of the great 19th century (Decadent) French poets, the imagination is the queen of the faculties and a truly creative power. Nature is merely a dictionary used to construct our experiences. The imagination must shape what nature makes available to us. Nature is a manifold of sensation. Copying nature is at best a trivial undertaking. One must breathe one’s own life into one’s experience and one’s art. Baudelaire was a French Symbolist.

THE SALON OF 1859 (Salon de 1859 [1859]):
PART III: “THE QUEEN OF THE FACULTIES”: The question is posed: “Should an artist copy nature?” An imaginative person would reply that copying nature is useless and tiresome because nothing that exists can be entirely satisfactory; or that nature is ugly and that one prefers the monsters of one’s imagination to the triteness of actuality. Also, can one be entirely certain of the existence of external nature?
The imagination is a mysterious faculty. It affects and rouses all the other faculties, sending them into battle, as it were. A person not stirred by the imagination is cursed (dry, dull [like the fig tree in the Gospel]). It is analysis, synthesis, and sensitivity; it teaches one the meaning of color, of outline, of sound, and of perfume; it uses analogy and metaphor; it decomposes the world and recreates it (creates a new world). A warrior without imagination may be an excellent soldier but make no conquests; a diplomat without it may know all former treatises and alliances but be incapable of sensing new ones that will evolve in the future; a scholar without imagination may be learned (about what s/he has read) but will not discover new laws that have not yet been conceived. None of the faculties can do without imagination. Imagination often guesses, boldly and simply, what the secondary faculties seek and find only after successive trials. Even morality and virtue require imagination. Virtue without imagination is tantamount to virtue without pity: it is something hard, cruel, sterilizing; a form of bigotry, or Protestantism. [STORY OF ARCHBISHOP GUERRA HERE <VICERREGAL NEW SPAIN>, or St. Martin of Tours, or St. Anthony of the Desert]
PART IV: “THE RULE OF THE IMAGINATION”: Since imagination has created the world, it governs it. Imagination is not fancy but constructive imagination, similar to that of God, who created the world. Nature is only a dictionary. The artist uses what he can out of nature and by adapting its elements with a certain art gives it a new physiognomy. Those who lack imagination copy the dictionary. Through too much looking, they forget to feel and to think. Systems of rhetoric and prosody are not arbitrarily invented tyrannies, but rather a collection of rules required by the very nature of the spiritual being. They aid in the development of originality (GOOD!). The entire visible universe is a storehouse of images and signs to which imagination will give a relative place and value. It is a kind of food which the imagination must digest and transform. All the powers of the human soul must be subordinated to the imagination. A universal imagination includes the understanding of all means of expression and the desire to master them.

WALTER PATER (1839-1894):
He was an English essayist and critic, considered the father of aestheticism. He set out the principles of impressionistic criticism in his Studies in the History of the Renaissance. For Pater, all aesthetic judgments must be referred to the reader’s receptivity and taste. The critic’s worth depends on the refinement of his temperament, since objective standards of aesthetic judgment are abstract and useless. For Pater, criticism itself becomes a work of art. Pater rejects materialists and those who are into rational understanding. He emphasizes the fleeting temporality of all experience.

STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF THE RENAISSANCE (1873):
     PREFACE: There have been many attempts to define beauty in the abstract to find a universal formula for it. But beauty is useless and any universal formula used to try to define it would be useless. A student of aesthetics must define beauty in the most concrete manner possible and find the formula that would most adequately express a special manifestation of the beautiful in the particular object of art. To see the object as in itself it really is is the aim of all true criticism. One must know one’s own impression as it really is. What effect does it produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? If so, what sort of degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence and under its influence? These are the aesthetic questions one should ask, and not pose abstract definitions of beauty or relate the object to truth or experience, which are unprofitable metaphysical questions.
     The aesthetic critic regards all objects of art as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar and unique kind. This influence he feels and wishes to explain, analyzing it, and reducing it to its elements. What is important is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects. He will remember always that beauty exists in many forms. To him, all periods, types, schools of taste, are in themselves equal. The ages are all equal.
     CONCLUSION: In analysis, the impressions of the individual are in perpetual flight. The service of philosophy, religion, and culture is to startle the human spirit into a sharp and eager observation. Not the fruit of experience but experience itself is the end. One should maintain a sense of ecstasy to achieve success in life. The spirit must set itself free for a moment.    High passions give one the quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, political or religious enthusiasm. There is wisdom in the poetic passion, the desire for beauty, the love of art for art’s sake, for art gives one the highest quality to the moments, as they pass (and only for those fleeting moments).

     In the modern era, literary criticism as an academic specialty emerges. This was the culmination of the apologetic tradition that tried to defend poetry from its detractors, starting with Plato. No apology of poetry can be final, since new attacks will emerge. The tactic used to defend poetry has been argument (if the attacker only knew what poetry is and why it matters, the case would be closed). Yet no argument has been decisive. The immediate response has been apologetic and defensive (to define).
     Poems are not objects like ships or trees, that can be easily recognized. They can only be recognized when they are read and interpreted. Poems are deliberate constructions that are intelligible and readable. They also address us, frequently in immediate and practical ways.
     In the 20th century, criticism on poetry has become a discursive practice that seeks to situate literary works and other cultural products and artifacts within the social field. Poetry is examined in a political and moralistic way. Also, literary criticism does not seem to have a definite object of study (a text is any object that can be talked about). It is also an analysis of [objects and of] questions relating to cultural history and systems of value (social justice and topics like race, gender, and class). Ironically, there are now counter apologetic forms of discourse that attack poetry for its complicity in the politics of privilege. Hence, politicized rhetoric has replaced formal logic.
     Poetry is a paradigmatic product of human intelligence and imagination. It has little to do with theory, if we see theory as a set of rules (as in the sciences) that serve to formulate and verify principles of explanation or prediction. Poetry is not pure and it speaks from and to a human world where all realities are multifaceted.
     Literary study has exploded since the 1950s with the remarkable institutional consolidation of the Anglo-American New Criticism, and later, with a larger international advocacy for Structuralism. After 1965 there were waves of postmodernist, post-formalist, post-structural critiques that threatened to make crisis a permanent state of affairs. There has been a proliferation of orientations, practices, and approaches to the study of literature that defy any obvious or cogent taxonomy. Some of the new orientations are as follows: deconstruction, feminism, postcolonial studies, studies of race, class, and ethnicity, new historicism and cultural studies, queer studies, and science studies. This proliferation of orientations suggests a new epoch no longer well served by models that have shaped prior practice. No conventional idea of theory (since Plato) has had much success with imaginative and creative thinking in any form. Literature simply refuses to conform to the conventional political or philosophical wisdom of the moment. We are desperate for a conclusion, any conclusion. But Paul de Man indicated that the only truth about language is that it always lies, or that the only truth about poetry is that it cannot be read [NIETZSCHE’S QUOTE ABOUT THE TRUTH OF POETRY HERE].
     A dominant 20th century reply to Plato’s challenge about poetry has not been to give a definitive argument but to revise the college catalogue (the canon). In an earlier tradition, there was a desire to place poetry in terms of its intellectual, moral, and social purpose (to transfer to the classroom, as the New Critics in the 1950s attempted to do. Speculative critics like René Wellek, Roman Jakobson, Roland Barthes, and Northrop Frye explored the form, language, and structure of poetry as a systematic cultural project of imagining a human world that could be studied with methodological precision and sophistication (as a physicist might study nature).
     In the 18th and 19th centuries, the invention of literary history gave an idealized vision of literature as a profoundly civilizing instrument that glorified specific nations (national literatures). Canons are formed in this fashion (national, local). We still don’t have many departments of literature, but of English, Spanish, French, etc. The language was also stressed (the literature serving as examples of it). Seeking distinction by means of an art is a colonial or imperialistic enterprise [NB: the study of languages or even the invention of grammars to study certain languages has always been the consequence of imperialism <the languages of the imperial powers are the ones we normally study: English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, {Latin} Italian, German, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese>]. Cultural studies then attack the privileging of certain national masterpieces at the expense of displaced narratives.
     Poetry places itself in the middle of an exacting linguistic mediation that demands of us a reflective and speculative response.
     The markers of literary periodization are drawn from historical events like the ascension or death of monarchs, the starting or concluding of wars, etc. [A materialist base <Marx, Taine>].
     There was a shattering of a formalist/structuralist paradigm in the 1960s. There was worldwide concern for issues of social justice and civil rights as proper to literary criticism. The link between literary studies and social/scientific questions at times results in absurdities, like claiming that highly verified and established scientific principles are the results of the governing classes’ social constructions. The apologetic tradition of literary criticism is dialectic (question/answer) and hence untheoretical (since dialectics always arrives at future, unforeseen, and at times ambiguous or inconclusive conclusions). Even Plato’s theory of anamnesis (metempsychosis) [past lives recollection] is not sufficient to arrive at conclusions (since the process of metempsychosis never ends [hence, one would always be limited to the knowledge of the past]).
     Literature and philosophy share common ground.
     For Derrida, signification is an infinite chain of differences with no definitive termination.
     For New Critics, knowledge was gained by the nuanced use of metaphor (interpretation).
     Anglo-American speculative criticism lacks a cogent philosophical support. Why? Because US and UK philosophy is tied up with scientific theory and is interested mainly in clarification of terms, logic, language, and concepts (language issues). Aesthetics (like Ethics), were relegated to second-tier philosophers or graduate students not up to par in logical analysis or the philosophy of science. Only statements that could be confirmed by empirical reference had cognitive content. Statements in poetry and metaphysics were expressive and meaningless (i.e., unscientific).
     The relation of science to criticism has been more or less systematically distorted.
     The reason why imaginative literature has been problematic in Western philosophy lies in a dominant theory of reason that has proved systematically prone to contradictions and paradoxes, especially in the effort to explain dynamic, changing systems. This is the fault of metaphysics and any binary conception of reality. Literature should not be viewed as an object about which to reason, but as a primary form of reasoning in its own right, a system of civilizing mediation by which commonplace opinion makes its first genuine moves toward self-conscious reflective thought.
     A fixation on linguistics (Saussure) has been seen in critics and philosophers like Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, and de Man. And yet, any attempt to formulate a theory of language that leaves the poetic out of account is fundamentally flawed by that fact alone.
     Any coherent theory of poetry would require other theories of language, etc., not found in linguistics, psychology, anthropology, history, or philosophy, since they are undergoing their own linguistic crisis (based on treating the word as a picture of a thing [or fact or state of affairs]). What is required is a much subtler theory of mediation, not the [Derridean] pseudoscience of looking at language and finding, gleefully, paradox and aporias (gaps [a Derridean term]) everywhere. One needs a genuinely philosophical poetics (which would depend on changing our notions of philosophy and poetics).
     Metaphor is not an aberration but an indispensable instrument of all thought, all predication, without which even the elementary principle of symbolic substitution in mathematics would be unthinkable. Also, hypotheses shape mental experience, to the point that they become necessary to establish a fact; hence, a prejudice against the “false” vision of literature (hence, untrue) is simply naïve and wrong. Theories of reasoning have always neglected the subtle complexities of imagination as a fundamental power of the mind (hence, imaginative fiction is no mere pastime or recreational activity).
     Literature has always dealt with and addressed questions of justice, identity, politics, and power. One must figure out how imagination and reason can be allies.
     Imagination is a primary form of reasoning.
     The role of imagination in questions of (cultural studies) social justice is that it (the imagination) recognizes the fragility of such ideas as justice, and the intimate negotiations by which ideas take hold, person by person, in the concrete exploration of human consequences that can be seen perhaps only in the imagination. Any departure from engagement with imaginative texts puts at risk the very values that animate criticism by threatening to turn those values into dogmatic formulas.
     When colleagues represent each other as enemies, everyone loses.

HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE (1828-1893):
Taine was a French critic and historian. During the latter half of the 19th century, there was an attempt to relate scientific method to literary creation and criticism. This originated with Bacon and was developed in Zola’s Experimental Novel. An application of the scientific method of medicine was brought into literary criticism with Taine’s History of English Literature. In this work, Taine treats literature as a document for the analysis of an age and a people. Taine’s view was materialistic and deterministic: “Vice and virtue are products, like vitriol and sugar.” Taine views literature less as a force acting on thought and society than as the result of natural and social factors: 1) race, 2) surroundings, and 3) epoch. For Taine, literature offers us the psychology of a soul, frequently of an age, now and then of a race. This is a form of historical criticism.

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE (Histoire de la littérature anglaise) [1863-1867; trans. 1871]:
     A work of literature is not a mere play of the imagination or a solitary caprice of a heated brain, but a transcript of contemporary manners. One might retrace, from the monuments of literature, the style of man’s feelings and thoughts for centuries back. Behind any document stands a man. It is a mistake to study a document in isolation. Behind each dogma stands a man, a people. 20 select phrases from Plato and Aristophanes will teach one more than a multitude of dissertations and commentaries. Travel abroad and see how people live (instead of reading documents about them). An inner man is concealed beneath the outer man. Study his customs. The search for causes must come after the collection of facts. There are causes for ambition, etc., as there are for digestion, etc.
     The study of race is indispensable to understand the psychology of a people.
     Three different sources contribute to produce an elemental moral state: 1) The Race, 2) The Surroundings, and 3) The Epoch.
     The 1) Race consists of innate (internal) and hereditary dispositions which man brings with him to the light, and which are united with the marked differences in the temperament and structure of the body. A race, like that of the Aryans, scattered from the Ganges (river in India) to the Hebrides (islands near Scotland), settled in every clime, spread over every grade of civilization, transformed by 30 centuries of revolutions, and yet they retained their community of blood and intellect. This is the interior structure of a race.
     The 2) Surroundings constitute the (external) nature that surrounds a man or race. Physical or social circumstances disturb or confirm the character (of race).
     The 3) Epoch with its forces within and without have an effect on a race as well. This is an acquired momentum. Through generations of men, certain ideas dominate in certain periods and acquire momentum.
     The three main works of human intelligence are religion, art, and philosophy. Philosophy is a conception of nature and its primordial causes, under the form of abstractions and formularies. Religion is a conception of nature and its primordial causes under the form of symbols and personages which are thought to exist. Art is a conception of nature and its primordial causes under the form of symbols and personages which are not thought to exist. Art is a kind of philosophy made sensible. Religion is a poem taken for true. Philosophy is an art and a religion dried up and reduced to simple ideas.
     Literary works are instructive because they are beautiful and useful in that they furnish documents and talk about sentiments that make one understand a people better. “It is then by the study of literatures that one may construct a moral history, and advance toward the knowledge of psychological laws, from which events spring.”

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844-1900):
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a Prussian philologist and philosopher, among other things. He was university professor at Basel. He is considered now one of the first deconstructionists. In Truth and Falsity in an Ultramoral Sense, Nietzsche questions the relation of language to truth. Nietzsche observed that language tends toward abstraction and away from the individual and the real, and later still into rational fixity. Things in themselves cannot be known as such. Language produces abstract illusions (Platonic ideas, generalizations) that hide the truth of things. By questioning language, Nietzsche questions reason. He also distinguishes between the primitive and the rational (the Dionysian [ecstasy] and the Apollonian [form and repose, fixity and the abstraction of language]). Music attempts to give form to the world of spirit and hence strives toward symbolic expression of the Dionysian (creative, mythmaking) wisdom characteristic of tragedy, but in modern life the tragic view has been suppressed by scientific optimism.

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY FROM THE SPIRIT OF MUSIC (Die Geburt der Tragödie) [1872]:
     Art owes its continuous evolution to the Apollonian-Dionysiac duality. Apollo is the god of the plastic arts; Dionysus is the god of music. Together they begot Attic (Greek) tragedy.
     It was in dreams that the gods first manifested themselves to man. The fair illusion of the dream sphere is a pre-condition to the plastic arts and even poetry. Our innermost being experiences dreams with deep delight and a sense of real necessity. Apollo is the god of dreams, and the soothsayer god. The arts make life possible and worth living. Apollo is the lucent god, the god of fair illusion and the inner world of fantasy. Principium individuationis (undivided, ultimate principle).
     The tremendous awe that seizes man when he suddenly begins to doubt the cognitive modes of existence is the product of Dionysian rapture, whose closest analogy is furnished by physical intoxication. Dionysus is associated with spring and narcotics, and the Bacchic choruses of the Greeks. IN Dionysian rituals, the slave becomes free, the rigid walls of necessity and despotism are shattered. Each individual becomes reconciled to his fellowmen (and loses his principium individuationis). Man now expresses himself through song and dance. No longer the artist, he is now a work of art.
     These two forces (Apollonian-Dionysian) arise directly from nature without the mediation of the human artist. Artistic urges manifest themselves in dreams or through an ecstatic reality. Every artist must appear as imitator either as the Apollonian dream artist or the Dionysian ecstatic artist, or, as in Greek tragedy, as dream and ecstatic artist in one. The dreaming Greek is Homer. Doric (simple) art is Apollonian. Dionysian dithyramb incites man to sink back to the oneness of nature (NB: Nietzsche correctly identifies music with the emotions).
     There will always be an eternal struggle between the theoretical and the tragic world view. When science is forced to renounce its universal validity, tragedy will be reborn. Science destroys myth and displaces poetry from its native soil. Music has the power to revive myth (NB: Wagner’s Rheingold starts in E flat. When it was first performed, women fainted and men cried). Socrates, Euripides, and the new dithyramb music (imitative music) are symbols of a degenerate culture among the Greeks (NB: for Nietzsche, Plato and Aristotle constitute Late Greek developments [he had a keen interest in the Pre-Socratic philosophers like Heraclitus, Democritus, etc.]). Truly Dionysian music offers us a universal mirror of the world will. (Why does Nietzsche hate late Greek thought? Because, as with the new music, it stops the imagination [mimetic music], which now deals with superficial imitations. It takes away from music its ability to suggest a mythopoetic quality. Music became a slave to appearances [it becomes a mere ornament]). Character portrayal (from Sophocles onward) and psychological subtlety are also anti-Dionysian (pro-Apollonian [principium individuationis]). In this kind of new art, the spectator ceases to be aware of myth and focuses instead on the individual on stage and the powers of imitation. Here one has the victory of the particular over the general in this kind of anatomical drawing. Characters lose their universality the more particularized they become. Sophocles still paints whole characters. Euripides concentrates on single character traits. Attic comedy deals with single expressions (types). And music becomes tonal (as in a tone poem or painting). Greek serenity: a senescent and unproductive affirmation of life (not a marvelous naiveté of the older Greeks). Greek (Alexandrine) cheerfulness is next (science), its hero being the man of theory (Socrates) [instead of the man of action <e.g., Alcibiades>]. The world here is guided and “corrected” by knowledge and science.
     Myth, being a concentrated image of the world, cannot dispense with the miracle. Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural, healthy creativity. Myth and religion are the foundations of culture and the commonwealth. The present age is the result of the Socratic bent on the extermination of myth. Man today is hungry for myth and roots (in the past).
     TRUTH AND FALSITY IN AN ULTRAMORAL SENSE (Über Wahrheit und Luge in aussermoralischen Sinne) [1873]:
     There were eternities during which the intellect did not exist in Nature. The intellectual engages in dissimulation for his preservation, for, unlike more robust beings, he has no horns or sharp teeth. Dissimulation deals with deception, flattery, falsehood, fraud, slander, display, pretentiousness, disguise, cloaking convention, and acting to others and to himself. Intellectuals are immersed in illusions; their eyes glance only over the surface of things an see “forms” (vs. Plato). Their sensation nowhere leads to truth. At night, man allows his dreams to lie to him. Even his body hides the convolutions of the intestines, etc. He uses the intellect to preserve himself in Nature. He dissimulates.
     A word is the expression of a nerve stimulus in sounds. We divide things according to genders and call a tree masculine and a plant feminine. What arbitrary metaphors! We call a serpent a serpent because of its sinuosity, even though that characteristic could equally be applied to a worm (more metaphors here). We use arbitrary demarcations. The different languages placed side by side show that with words truth or adequate expression matters little: for otherwise there would not be so many languages. A nerve stimulus first transformed into a percept (something perceived by the senses). First metaphor! The percept again copies into a sound! Second metaphor! And each time he leaps completely out of one sphere right into the midst of an entirely different one. When we talk about trees, colors, snow, flowers, etc., we believe we know something about the things themselves, and yet we only possess metaphors of the things, and these metaphors do not in the least correspond to the original essentials. The genesis of language did not proceed on logical lines. Good luck to the philosopher, who works and builds not from the essence of things. We know nothing about essential qualities (Platonic forms, ideas). We also do not differentiate accurately (many leaves are seen as leaves because of common patterns, forgetting their many other particularities).
     Only when we disregard the individual and real do we invent an idea, even though nature knows of no forms or ideas. What, therefore, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: truths and illusions that one has forgotten that they are just that: worn out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses. By forgetting all this we arrive at truth and abstraction. And yet, every metaphor will be particular and evade classification. Truth is just a catalogue, a clasification, a sequence, a ranking. There is not “truth-in-itselfness” but only metaphors (of man as measure of all things). When man forgets that the original metaphors of perception are metaphors, he takes them for the things themselves. It is untrue that the essence of things appears in the empiric world. Dreams eternally repeated are judged as real, that is all.
     Language has worked originally at the construction of ideas; in later times it is science. Art demolishes theories, etc., by constantly recreating the world (inventing new metaphors). Man has an invincible tendency to let himself be deceived (by art). In art he is deceived without injury.

ÉMILE ZOLA (1840-1902):
Zola was the most important naturalist novelist of 19th century France and Europe. Zola’s Experimental Novel is a reaction against Romanticism and philosophical Idealism. Here, Zola sees the artist adopting the experimental method recommended by Claude Bernard (1813-1878) in his Introduction à l’étude de la médecine experimentale (1865). Zola argues that the experimental novelist is neither a mere copyist of nature nor a photographer. The idea of experiment carries with it the idea of modification. Literature here becomes material for the social scientist. Zola invents the naturalistic novel. Zola accepted Positivism and the notion of material progress. Past literature (being unscientific) has archaic beauty only. Physiological man has replaced metaphysical man.

THE EXPERIMENTAL NOVEL (Le Roman expérimentale) [1880]:
     Zola would like to see a literature governed by science; a literature that goes back to nature (hence, “naturalistic”). The experimental method has been established by Claude Bernard in his Introduction à l’étude de la medicine experimentale (1865). This method was first used to study inanimate bodies in chemistry and physics. Zola wants to apply it to the study of animate objects by means of physiology and medicine. If the Bernard method can lead to knowledge of physical life, it should also be used to study the passionate and intellectual life. Chemistry by degrees leads to physiology, and from physiology to anthropology, and from anthropology to sociology. Between observation and experimentation, the only difference would be that an experiment is provoked to observe what happens. All experimental reasoning is based on doubt, for the experimentalist has no preconceived ideas in the face of nature. He simply accepts the phenomena which are produced, when they are proved. There is an absolute determinism in the existing conditions of natural phenomena. Determinism is the cause that determines the appearance of phenomena. This consists in finding the relations which unite a phenomenon of any kind to its nearest cause; determining the conditions necessary for the manifestation of this phenomenon. Experimental science is not concerned with the why of things; only with the how.
     An observer observes what nature has to offer. An experimentalist modifies natural phenomena to see what happens under different circumstances and conditions than are otherwise presented in nature. Astronomy is a science of observation; chemistry is an experimental science. The experimentalist novelist starts out in search of a truth. He is not a mere observer or photographer. He interferes to place his characters in certain conditions. The problem is to know what such a passion, acting in such a surrounding and under such circumstances, would produce from the point of view of an individual and of society. An experimental novel is the report of such an experiment.
     The idea of experimental carries with it the idea of modification. We start from the true facts but then produce and direct the phenomena (this is the “invention” of the novelist). We modify, without departing from nature. “Observation indicates and experiment teaches.”
     Physics and chemistry are free from the irrational and supernatural. Men discover that there are fixed laws, thanks to analysis, and make themselves masters of phenomena. Determinism dominates everything. The experimental novel combats the hypotheses of the idealists and replaces purely imaginary novels by novels of observation and experiment. There is an absolute determinism for all human phenomena.
     The question of heredity has a great influence in the intellectual and passionate manifestations of man. The surroundings, also, aver very important. Allusion to Darwin’s theories. Social conditions are important in the study of families since man is not alone; he lives in society. The social condition modifies the phenomena. We study the natural man governed by physical and chemical laws, and modified by the influences of his surroundings, not abstract or metaphysical man. This is the literature of the scientific age. It aims to make oneself master of life in order to direct it to the better (like a doctor), to justice and freedom. We are experimental moralists. We are looking to possess different laws. We can modify the conditions of the individual to create a better social condition. A practical sociology. Our work will help the political and economic sciences. We will become masters of good and evil, be able to regulate life, society, and solve in time all the problems of socialism, to give justice a solid foundation, by solving criminality. We are moral workers in the human workshop.
     Naturalists are determinists, but not fatalists. The moment we act to change the surroundings and better humanity we cease being fatalists. The experimental novelist has a moral purpose. Our great aim is to conquer nature. The idealist novelists deal with the irrational and the supernatural. They are stuck in some sort of metaphysical chaos. We possess strength and morality. To arrive at the truth one must study the natural laws and submit one’s ideas to his reason, to experiment, to the criterion of facts.
     The experimental method knows of no authority except that of facts. It frees itself of personal authority. One must modify theory by adapting it to nature. The scientific method proclaims the liberty of thought. It discards philosophy (metaphysics) and theology. It even does away with scientific personal authority. There are no innovators or leaders in naturalism. There are simply workmen, some more skillful than others.
     Philosophy represents the eternal desire of the human reason after knowledge of the unknown. Philosophers strengthen the mind, developing it by an intellectual gymnastics. Their hypotheses are pure poetry, though. Like musicians, philosophers sing forever without discovering a single truth (NB: Zola is talking about metaphysics).
     Rhetoric (style) has no place in the experimental novel. Sundry literary styles are reflections of the temperaments of the writers. Today an exaggerated importance is given to form (Romantics). He who writes best is the one guided by truth. Excellence of style depends on logic and clearness (no embellishments or murky lyricism). We msut accept facts and not attempt to risk our own personal sentiments. The experimental novelist accepts proven facts. Science is mistress. No personal sentiments, please, except the phenomena whose determinism is not yet settled. Science will take over the stage (yes, Ibsen) and poetry (!), as it has taken over history and criticism. The metaphysical man is dead; long live the physiological man. We have become experimentalists instead of philosophers. Metaphysics until now has given us only irrational and supernatural explanations.

OSCAR WILDE (1854-1900):
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish playwright (one of the most successful in Victorian England), novelist (The Picture of Dorian Gray), poet, short story writer, and Freemason. The Decay of Lying and the Critic as Artist are Oscar Wilde’s most famous critical works. Wilde says that life and nature imitate art more than art imitates life and nature. The fine (and the popular) arts help to build the sense of a complex and intense world. Much in modern philosophy, psychology, and sociology reflects this Wildean idea. Vivian, one of the fictional critics in The Decay of Lying, argues against usefulness as an element of the art object (cf. Kant). “Truth” (lies, that is) in art is a matter only of style. Wilde, through Vivian, is combating the dominant scientific and discursive modes of structuring reality of the time. If naturalism and science bring truth, then art brings lies, and Vivian chooses lies. Like Plato, Wilde uses the dialogue form for his exposition.

THE DECAY OF LYING (1889):
     [NB: Cyril and Vivian, the characters of the dialogue, were the names of Oscar Wilde’s two children with wife Constance (a.k.a. Cyril and Vyvyan Holland after 1885 {Merlin Holland, Oscar Wilde’s living grandson, is Vyvyan’s son})].
     The more we study art the less we care for nature. Art reveals nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. Nature has good intentions, of course, but she cannot carry them out. Art is our spirited protest to teach nature her proper place. Nature is also uncomfortable. Grass is hard, lumpy, and damp, full of dreadful black insects. If nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture. Egotism, so important for human dignity, is the result of indoor life (I suppose because in nature one would be an insect). Nature is indifferent, unappreciative. She hates mind.
     The true liar is frank, makes fearless statements, is superbly irresponsible, disdains proof of any kind. A fine lie is its own evidence. If a man is sufficiently unimaginative to produce evidence in support of a lie, he might as well tell the truth at once. Vivian, however, is pleading for lying in art. He is writing his article, The Decay of Lying, for the Retrospective Review.
     Ancient historians give delightful lies in the form of fact. Modern (naturalist) novelists present dull facts under the guise of fiction. The modern novelist gets his information from the washerwoman. And yet, lying and poetry are arts, and, according to Plato, not unconnected with each other. They both require study and devotion. They have their techniques, like painting and sculpture. One can tell the liar by his rhythmic utterances, the object not of fact but inspiration. Practice must precede perfection. But lying has fallen into disrepute. Many a young man starts with a gift for exaggeration, which, if nurtured, might grow into something really great and wonderful (NB: Ariel Dorfman at the MLA). But if he falls into the careless habit of accuracy or frequents the society of the aged and the well-informed, his imagination suffers. He develops a morbid habit of truth-telling. He begins to verify every statement. He contradicts people. He ends up writing novels that are so like life that no one can possibly believe in their probability. In this manner, art becomes sterile and beauty passes away from the land.
     Zola’s Germinal is wrong not on the grounds of morals, but on the grounds of art.
     Art deals with distinction, charm, beauty, and imaginative power. We don’t want to be disgusted with an account of the doings of the lower orders. The only real people are the people that never existed. If a novelist is base enough to go to life for his characters, he should at least pretend they are his creations and not boast of them as copies. Otherwise the novel is not a work of art. What is interesting about people in good society is the mask that each of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask.
     Modernity of form is somewhat vulgarizing. The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary, it is outside the proper sphere of art (cf. Kant). We are a degraded race who has sold our birthright (with Apollo and the Muses) for a mess of facts (like Zola or Dickens).
     On nature: people discover in her only what they bring to her.
     Art begins 1) with abstract decorations (cf. Hegel) and purely imaginative and pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and nonexistent. 2) Then life becomes fascinated with this new wonder. Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it into new forms, indifferent to fact. Then, 3) life gets the upper hand and drives art out into the wilderness: this is the true decadence of the modern period.
     An example: drama. The early monks made abstract drama (mystery plays). Then a new race of beings was created (classical drama?). But even in Shakespeare one seeds the beginning of the end when he switches to prose and emphasizes characterization. He goes directly to life at times. The Tempest is the most perfect of palinodes (his retraction). In the modern English melodrama (under the influence of Naturalism) the characters talk on the stage exactly as they talk in real life. They are vulgar to the last detail. As a method, realism is a complete failure.
     Orientalism (Islamic art) is nice because it is not mimetic. Whenever we return to life we become vulgar, common, uninteresting. Wilde hates decorative rugs or glass.
     Herodotus is the Father of Lies (for his lovely and fantastic historical descriptions). Carlyle’s French Revolution is a wonderful historical novel for keeping facts to a minimum. Now facts dominate and serve to vulgarize mankind.
     The true founder of civilization was the Liar, he who first exaggerated the chase without ever having gone hunting. He is the founder of social intercourse. The air of the liar is to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society. Without him, even a dinner party at the abodes of the great would be dull.
     Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, not a mirror. She has flowers that no forest knows; birds that no woodland possesses. She can work miracles and call monsters from the sea.
     Also, life imitates art. A great artist invents a type, and life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher.
     We try to improve the conditions of the race by means of good air, free sunlight, wholesome water. But these things merely produce good health, not beauty. For this, art is required. The imagination is essentially creative and always seeks for a new form.
     Literature always anticipates life. The nineteenth century was invented by Balzac.
     Life imitates art far more than art imitates life. Scientifically speaking, the basis (energy) of life is simply the desire for expression, and art always presents several ways to do that. Young men in love commit suicide because of Goethe’s Werther. Think of those who imitate Christ.
     Nature even follows the landscape painter. After all, Nature is our creation. We have invented her. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the arts that have influenced us (cf. my experience in Oslo after viewing Edvard Munch’s The Scream). To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Only then it comes into existence.
     Does art express the temper of its age, the spirit of its time, the moral and social conditions that surround it, and under whose influences it is produced? No. Art never expresses anything but itself. The more imitative an art is, the less it represents to us the spirit of its age. The more abstract, the more ideal an art is, the more it revels to us the temper of its age. If we wish to understand a nation by means of its art, let us look at its architecture or its music. The imitative arts give us merely the various styles of particular artists, of certain schools of artists. No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.
     It is a mistake to try to figure out, e.g., the Japanese, by visiting Japan. One would be disappointed and find out they are probably very much like us. When one reads Aristophanes one finds out that those Greeks were just like us too. The fact is that we look back on the ages entirely through the medium of art, and art, very fortunately, has never once told us the truth.
     The only portraits we take seriously are those that reflect very little of the sitter and a great deal of the artist (NB: This is so true of Renaissance portraits!). It is the style that makes us believe in a thing.
     Our century (the 19th) is the dullest and most prosaic ever. Even sleep has played us false. The dreams of the middle classes are dull, commonplace, and tedious. Not even a good nightmare. Even religion . . . .
     We must revive the old art of lying. Lying with a moral purpose. We lie for the improvement of the young, and that is commendable. Workers lie to improve their salaries, and that is good. But we must cultivate lying for its own sake (Kant). Lying in art.
     Wilde’s New Aesthetics (in three doctrines):