Aristotle’s argument goes like this. All art, he says, is imitation, and we delight in a work of art that imitates well—that is, presents to our view the similitude of real things, which in their originals may not be pleasing to our senses but, as imitated, produce pleasure for our minds. A tragedy, Aristotle goes on to say, is “the imitation of an action, complete and entire of itself, having a beginning, middle, and end, and dealing with an event or series of events of a certain seriousness and import.”
An action sufficiently important and serious that is well imitated in a play that is well written, according to rules of art that Aristotle lays down, has a profound effect on its viewers, making them share and participate in the great emotions presented on the stage and eventually—when the play is over—exorcising or driving out those troublesome emotions from their souls. The result, Aristotle concludes, is a kind of catharsis of harmful passions, leaving the spectator, as he (or she) departs from the theater and for some time afterward, purified and cleansed, more able to deal with his worldly tasks.
Whether Aristotle is a good psychologist has often been debated, but the question is really irrelevant to our appreciation of the Poetics today. The work is not only the first but also perhaps the finest—the most thorough, the most insightful, the most accurate—critique of drama ever written. It remains the basis of all dramatic criticism.
The Poetics contains some difficult passages. It is advisable, therefore, to read it more than once. Your reward comes when you begin to think about Aristotle’s discussion of types of plays and why some are better than others. Apply these critical guidelines to the next stage play you see; also to films, television shows, and other entertainments. All will become more intelligible and thus more enjoyable.
The surviving texts of Aristotle’s works offer an interesting puzzle for scholars. Despite centuries of study and speculation, no one is certain what kind of texts they are. Are they essays or treatises direct from Aristotle’s hand? If so, he must have been a careless writer, because the texts are full of contradictions, non sequiturs, and other rhetorical defects. Contrarily, do the texts consist of notes taken down by students from Aristotle’s lectures? Or are they Aristotle’s own notes, for spoken or for written works? Are the texts collections of various original sources, slapped together by a careless or ignorant editor some years, or centuries, after Aristotle’s death? Or are the texts, especially of the political treatises, the result of brutal censorship at some period between Aristotle’s death and the fifteenth century, when the texts as we have them were codified and fixed?
No one knows the answers, but there is no doubt that the form of Aristotle’s works makes them hard to read. However, not all the works are equally difficult, and compared to most, the Nicomachean Ethics is a complete and carefully written book. For this reason, among others, it has often been held to be Aristotle’s greatest work.
The Ethics is a book about virtue—about good and bad people, and about good and bad actions. “Virtue” is not a popular word today, but the idea it names, and the problems to which it points, are inescapable. We simply cannot avoid asking ourselves whether, in this situation or in that, we are doing the right or the wrong thing. And however blind we may be to ourselves, we are all prone to judge others and to declare that an individual is either a good or bad person. We recognize, too, a combination of good and bad in most people and ask ourselves how we can increase the good and decrease the bad in ourselves.
Aristotle is a great help to us, primarily for the reason that the Nicomachean Ethics is such a valuable book. He begins by saying, simply—and sensibly—that virtue is a habit: an habitual disposition, as he calls it, to choose right rather than wrong. The good and the bad, the right and the wrong among actions, of course, not things; one can be an excellent judge of wines or investments and still be a thoroughly bad person. A good person, Aristotle says, is a person who does good things not just once or twice but at least most of the time.
How to become virtuous, if we are not so already? Well, there are rules, to which Aristotle devotes many pages. Mostly they have to do with choosing the mean between two extremes of action. Courage, for example, is a virtue; to lack courage is to be cowardly, and that is one extreme; but to have too much courage, to be rash, is also a mistake, and the habitually rash person is not admired (although he is probably more admired than a coward). Similarly with prudence and temperance: there are extremes of each, and virtue lies in the middle way.
In another sense, Aristotle reminds us, there is no such thing as being too prudent, too temperate, too courageous. When those great virtues are properly understood, we begin to see that courage is a complex thing, not a simple one, involving our knowledge of consequences, control of our bodies and wills, and the recognition that often there is no completely safe choice among evils. When we realize that to be courageous is to choose—habitually, not just once or twice—as a courageous person chooses, and that is never rashly or in a cowardly way, then we comprehend that we cannot be too courageous, although we may be less than we would like to be. And so it is with all the other moral virtues.
But therein lies a great problem, as Aristotle points out. Moral choices are not made in a vacuum. Every situation is almost infinitely complicated, with consequences that reach out to touch the lives of many other persons, now and in the future. So complex, indeed, is every choice we face that we must almost conclude that each choice is unique. Rules are useful but they go only so far; when it comes right down to it, we are on our own, making the best choices we can but never being absolutely certain we are correct. When things are hardest we often ask ourselves: What would so-and-so (a good person whom we admire) do in this situation? And that is quite appropriate, says Aristotle, for good actions are, on the whole, the kind that are performed by good people. The argument is circular, Aristotle admits: although it is true that good actions are ones that are performed by good people, it is equally true that good people are those who perform good actions. So it was in Athens twenty-five hundred years ago. So it is today.
There is a useful aspect of this dilemma, as Aristotle also brings us to understand. If to be virtuous is to habitually choose rightly, then to have that habit is perhaps the most comforting of possessions. To be virtuous is to have a will we can trust. A good person can be happy in doing what he wants, because what he wants is good, not just for others but also for himself. Followers of Aristotle have seen this point and expressed it in their own way. “The greatest and most beautiful thing in the world,” says Dante, “is a righteous will.” The motto of Rabelais’s idealized Abbey of Theleme is “Do As Thou Wilt.” Dante and Rabelais mean the same thing. Indeed, we can wish no greater good to anyone than that they have such a well-formed will that when they desire something they can do it in the confidence that that thing is not only desirable but also good.
The last book of the Ethics (there are ten in all) is concerned with happiness—what it is, and how to achieve it. Regarding happiness Aristotle says many things that are surprising, but none that, on reflection, do not seem to be true. So it is throughout this book. Perhaps no book ever written has so much to say to us that is really useful.