Studying Aristotle’s “Poetics” — Introduction: The Nature and Purpose of the Arts

As I’ve been interviewing screenwriters, I typically ask what some of their influences are. One book title comes up over and over again: Aristotle’s “Poetics.” I confess I’ve never read the entire thing, only bits and pieces. So I thought, why not do a weekly series with a post each Sunday to provide a structure to compel me to go through it. That way, we’d all benefit from the process.

For background on Aristotle, you can go here to see an article on him in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

To download “Poetics,” you can go here.

As for me, I went to the library and checked out a translation by Kenneth McLeish, who has been called by the Independent, “the most widely respected and prolific translator of drama in Britain.”

Today I am reproducing an excerpt from McLeish’s introduction. If you love movies, trust me, you will want to read this entire piece because it appears that “Poetics” is directly relevant to the current state of cinema and storytelling.

Introduction: The Nature and Purpose of the Arts

In the last book of his Republic, produced some forty years before Poetics, Plato brought to a conclusion a series of meditations on the nature and purpose of the arts, meditations which had preoccupied him for half a century. In summary, he said that if you believe that the prime human objectives are to discover what ‘virtue’ is and then aspire to it, you should deal only in truth, in actuality. Since the arts, by definition, are confected, they are distracting at best and at worst destructive. God creates the ideal — for example the ideal of a table or the ideal of ‘virtue’; human beings create practical examples of that ideal — a functional table or a life ‘virtuously’ lived; art creates merely a simulacrum of such examples — a picture of a table or a ‘virtuous’ dramatic character. Furthermore, the arts encourage emotional response, far from the rational and considered stance of the genuine seeker after truth.

In Poetics, briefly and bluntly, Aristotle challenges this view. The pleasure offered by the arts — something Plato deplored — is, for him, a moral and didactic force. We see imitations of reality and compare them with reality; this is both pleasurable in itself and also morally instructive. From infancy human beings learn by imitation, and the process does not stop with maturity, but is ironically layered and enhanced by it. The pleasure, and the learning, are similar whether what is imitated is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ — discrimination in the beholder is the deciding factor. The chief duty of artists is to provide imitations technically as perfect as they can make them, and in Poetics Aristotle offers hints and suggestions for how this should be done, at least in literature. The starting-point may be moral or aesthetic philosophy, but Poetics is for the most part a discussion of ‘best practice’ in the literary artforms. Aristotle rates highest, of those he discusses, tragedy and epic.

The moral implications of all this must have been even sharper for Aristotle’s audiences than they are for us today. By his time, in his opinion at least, theatrical writing had become jaded and degenerate, falling far short of the aims and achievements of the previous century. The work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and others, so far from being a goal to which other writers aspired, had come to be regarded as out of tune with the sensibilities and style of the new generation; spectacle had begun to take the place of substance. In part, this process reflected a change — felt by many thinkers as a decline — in the moral status of the Athenian population itself. The people of today were not the equals of their parents, grandparents, and especially the great-great-grandparents who had defeated the Persians and ushered in the era of Pericles, the Parthenon, Thucydides, Pheidias and Socrates. Plato’s attack on the arts, in part, was for fostering and abetting this perceived decline; Aristotle in Poetics seems persistently to imply, without ever saying explicitly, that if more writers of the present followed the routes taken by geniuses of the past — routes he sets out in detail — both drama and its spectators would be far healthier.

Let me just say, I want to try to keep the discussion in this series grounded in what we can learn about the craft of screenwriting specifically and writing generally. That said, what we have here in comparing Plato and Aristotle is broadly speaking two very different ways of approaching the dualistic reality of the Ideal and the Material. Plato argues that Rationality is the path most closely aligned with the Ideal and the Arts can only offer pale imitations of the Ideal, even worse “encourage emotional response” which presumably steers one away from the realm of the Ideal.

Aristotle disagrees. The Arts in creating imitations, whether ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ are “morally instructive.” Moreover we learn through imitation and that experience is itself pleasurable. And with that simple assertion, Aristotle opens the door to the wonderful world of metaphor, which is key to all storytelling.

But it is the last paragraph of this introductory excerpt that has shocking relevance. For our purposes, let’s consider the decade of the 70s to be the greatest era of American cinema. That represents the apex of narrative storytelling in movies at least in terms of domestic releases, those filmmakers our symbolic equivalent of “great-great-grandparents” — Scorcese, Coppola, Forman, Polanski, Lucas, De Palma, Spielberg, Cassavetes, Pakula, Ashby, Friedkin, and of course all the screenwriters, actors, producers, and crew with whom they worked.

Look at the current state of American cinema and compare now to then. Do you think this would be a fair assessment: “Theatrical writing has become jaded and degenerate, falling far short of the aims and achievements of [the 70s].”

Would this be a relevant observation about movies today compared to films from four decades ago: “Spectacle has taken the place of substance.”

Now imagine Aristotle as a screenwriting guru, speaking at a weekend seminar, and one of his key points is this: “If more writers of the present followed the routes taken by geniuses of the past — routes I will set out in detail — both drama and its spectators would be far healthier.”

Moreover, what if these “routes” of which Aristotle speaks represent narrative dynamics that are universal in nature, transcending time and culture? Wouldn’t we want to know and understand them regardless of what we thought of 70s movies versus contemporary fare, no matter what type of genre we write, whatever our audience is?

I bet he’d give McKee a run for his money.

And so I invite you to join me here every Sunday at 2PM Eastern for the next several months as we work our way through Aristotle’s “Poetics”.

Who’s with me? Let me know in comments. While you’re there, please share whether you’ve read “Poetics” before or not?

And by the way, Plato’s claim that rationality offers more truth than emotional experience? I humbly call bull shit. Human beings are comprised of multiple layers of being, some of it head, some of it heart, some of it in between, and we cannot separate truth from any of it.

Which means for our purposes, a screenplay must work on all levels, not just rational, but emotional. Psychological. Spiritual. Symbolic. And so on.

To think otherwise is to minimize the power and potential of Story.

So the next time, fair writer, you are in a grocery store line or a singles bar, and the inevitable question arises, “Are you a Platonist or an Aristotelian,” I think you know what your answer should be!

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For the entire series on Aristotle’s “Poetics,” go here.