1. Aristotle's Definition of Poetry
Author(s): Robert J. Yanal
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Noûs, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Nov., 1982), pp. 499-525
Published by: Wiley-Blackwell
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2215204 .
Accessed: 23/09/2012 13:44
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
.
Wiley-Blackwell is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Noûs.
http://www.jstor.org

2. Aristotle'sDefinition of Poetry
ROBERT J. YANAL
WAYNESTATEUNIVERSITY
I. THE PROBLEM
In Chapter IX of the Poetics, Aristotle proposes this definition of
"poetry":
It also follows from what has been said that it is not the poet's
business to relate actual events, but such things as might or could happen
in accordance with probability or necessity. A poet differs from a histo-
rian, not because one writes verse and the other prose (the work of
Herodotus could be put into verse, but it would still remain a history,
whether in verse or prose), but because the historian relates what hap-
pened, the poet what might happen. That is why poetry is more akin to
philosophy and is a better thing than history; poetry deals with general
truths, history with specific events. The latter are, for example, what
Alcibiades did or suffered, while general truths are the kind of thing
which a certain type of person would probably or inevitably do or say.
(1451a36-51b 10)1
One natural interpretation of this definition is this. The poet, in order
to make poetry and not something else, must write about possible, not
actual, things. These possible things must be of a sort which could be
characterized as types of persons doing things which those types would
probably or necessarily do. Non-poetry-history, for example-must
deal with actual, not merely possible, things. The historian must relate
what actually happened to particular, actual people. This interpreta-
tion requires further analysis, but it will do for the moment, since I now
want to bring out a feature of the Poetics which casts doubt not only on
this natural interpretation but on the consistency of Aristotle's theory
as well.
Immediately after writing the above lines, Aristotle admits that the
"writers of iambic lampoons" are "concerned with a particular individ-
ual" (1451b14), and says this of the tragedians:
The tragedians cling to the names of historical persons. The reason
is that what is possible is convincing, and we are apt to distrust what has
not yet happened as not possible, whereas what has happened is obvi-
499

3. 500 NOUS
ously possible, else it could not have happened.... [Someone] is no less a
poet if he happens to tell a true story, for nothing prevents some actual
events from being probable or possible, and it is this probability or
possibility that makes the (tragic) poet. (1451bl5-32)
Assuming that the lampooner and the tragedian are poets, the im-
mediately preceeding passage suggests that the poet can write poetry
about actual specific persons and events. Yet the essential difference
between poetry and non-poetry, on the preceeding natural interpreta-
tion, seemed to rule this possibility out. The main focus of this essay will
be an attempt to resolve this apparent inconsistency. There are, how-
ever, other problems which we must raise in order to get a better focus
on the main question. I turn to the first, and easiest, of them.
II. LITERARY ARTWORKS
What is Aristotle defining? The translator's answer is "poetry," but this
term, a translation of poiesis, is misleading. Aristotle takes pains to
disabuse his readers of the view that poiesis must be in a poetic rhythm
or meter:
It is true that people join the word poet to the meter and speak of elegiac
poets or epic poets, but they give the same name to poets merely because
they use the same meter, and not because of the nature of their imitation.
The same name is applied even to a work of medicine or physics if written
in verse; yet except for their meter, Homer and Empedocles have noth-
ing in common: the first should be called a poet, the second rather a
physicist. (1447b 14-20)
More importantly, when Aristotle cites some examples of poiesis he
includes certain sorts of texts which are clearly not covered by the
English term "poetry":
Now the art which imitates by means of words only, whether prose or
verse, whether in one meter or a mixture of meters, this art is without a
name to this day. We have no common name which we could apply to the
mimes of Sophron or Xenarchus and the Socratic dialogues, and also to
any imitations that may be written in iambics, elegiacs, or other such
meters. (1447a28-47b 14)
So, Homer could have written poesis in prose, and Plato wrote pozesis
note the dig at Book X of the Republic-despite the fact that he wrote
the Socratic dialogues in prose. Thus, Aristotle would not have had
much trouble accomodating the prose novel and the prose drama,
along with poetry in its standard English sense, as polesis; indeed, he
might be said to have anticipated them.

4. ARISTOTLE'S DEFINITION OF POETRY 501
By poiesis Aristotle means "the art which imitates by means of
words only," and his complaint that "this art is without a name to this
day" is remedied in English. The word he wants is "literature" or more
accurately, "literary artwork," for there are senses of "literature" which
are non-artistic. "The literature on a given topic" is such a non-artistic
use; and there are evaluative senses of "literature," roughly meaning
"beautiful writing" or "elegant style," as in "Freud's last books are
works of literature." I take it that Aristotle's attempts to prypoiesis loose
from its connotations of rhythm and meter are intended to pry it loose
from its connotations of beautiful writing or style as well. Aristotle's
advice on diction (that it "should be clear without being common," etc.
(1458a18)) is addressed to both the poet and the non-poet, and one of
his examples of metaphor is drawn from Empedocles ("old age is the
sunset of life" (1457b24)). Even if Empedocles wrote beautifully, he is
still a physicist and not a poet, and a tragedy written in clumsy prose is
still literature and its author a poet.
P. F. Strawson once classified Aristotle as a descriptivist
metaphysician. I think he was a descriptivist philosopher of art as well.
Tolstoy, the paradigm revisionist philosopher of art, knew his own
concept of art was not shared by his contemporaries, and Whatis Art? is
a diatribe against the current concept. In contrast, Aristotle's tone is not
hortatory. He expects his contemporaries to share his concept of poiesis,
and his definition of this concept was intended to be enlightening not
revolutionary. If it is to be acceptable, the suggestion of "literary
artwork" as the nearest and best English equivalent of poiesis ought to
preserve Aristotle's descriptivist intention. Subsequent argument will
make this case.
III. THE OBJECTS OF LITERARY IMITATION
I shall argue that there is a hierarchy of objects of artistic imitation. The
most general term used by Aristotle to denote such objects is "men in
action," but when Aristotle speaks of tragedies he says that they imitate
"plots." I shall argue that the most complex entities, plots, are consti-
tuted by men in action (I call these "persons in action"), and that
persons in action are constituted by simpler entities which I call "artistic
kinds." Aristotle's first statement on the objects of artistic imitation is
this:
Since those who make imitations represent men in action, these men
must be superior or inferior, either better than those we know in life, or
worse, or of the same kind. For character is nearly always derived from
these qualities and these only, and all men's characters differ in virtue
and vice. (1448a1-5)

5. 502 NOOS
In his definition of literature (quoted at the beginning of this essay)
Aristotle tells us that literature deals with "the kind of thing which a
certain type of person would probably or inevitably do or say," while
history talks of specific persons, e.g., "what Alcibiades did or suffered."
From these remarks we can initially make these two points about the
objects of literary imitation: they are some sort of moral entity, and they
are a type of thing (or person).
One theory familiar to analytic philosophy is to construe fictional
entities as possible things individuated by the properties ascribed to
them by the author of a work of fiction.2 To set out the bare structure of
such a view, we first make the assumption that all the sentences of a
work of fiction which describe a fictional entity are reducible to the
form "Fa," where "F" denotes some property or relation and "a" is a
singular term. It is posited that "a" denotes that possible entity which is
individuated by the set of all properties, F1 ... Fn, such that "Fla" . . .
'Fna" are directly written or indirectly implied by the author of the
work of literature in which the fictional entity, a, appears as a char-
acter.
This theory has it that the sentence "Fa" may actually occur in the
text, in which case F is directly ascribed to a. Or, F may be somehow
implied by the properties directly ascribed to a, in which case it is
indirectly ascribed. Fictional entities are possible individuals which pos-
sess all and only the properties directly or indirectly ascribed to them by
the author of the text. A variation of this view holds that fictional
entities are not possible individuals, but rather sets of properties.3 On
this variation, the fictional character named by "a" is not that possible a
which has all and only F1 . .. Fn;he (it) is F1 . .. Fn itself. This latter sort
of fictional entity lays claim to being a type of person.
I think a case can be made that Aristotle holds a variation on the
preceeding variation. That is, he holds that the objects of imitations are
types of persons, but that these types are limited to the moral qualities
of fictional entities. Let us make a brief excurses into Aristotle's
Nicomachean Ethics before setting out this interpretation in more detail.
The virtuous act must have a certain quality, namely the familiar
"Golden Mean":
So virtue is a purposive disposition,lying in a mean that is relativeto us
and determinedby a rationalprinciple,and by that whicha prudent man
would use to determine it. (I106b36-1107a2)4
The virtuous man must also have certain qualities:
But virtuousacts are not done in ajust or temperateway merelybecause
theyhave a certainquality,but only if the agent also acts in a certainstate,

6. ARISTOTLE'S DEFINITION OF POETRY 503
viz, (1) if he knowswhathe is doing, (2) if he chooses it, and chooses it for
its own sake,and (3) if he does it from a fixed and permanentdisposition.
(1 105a26-33)
Let us say that moral character in the narrow sense (I will shortly
introduce a broad sense) is constituted by virtues and vices and is
describable by the virtue and vice terms, such as "courage" and "cow-
ardice." Someone is virtuous if he acts from the appropriate moral state
(one possessing the three qualities Aristotle mentions), and if his action
falls on a mean between two extremes; otherwise he is vicious. (One
complication I shall mention is that someone can fail to be virtuous
without being vicious. A child or amoral adult may be incapable of
choosing from a fixed and permanent disposition, but it might be
better to withhold the appelation "vicious" from such a person. I shall
leave this as a caveat for the discussion which follows.)
Aristotle's remarks on tragedy force us to broaden our conception
of moral character:
... [Elor tragedy is an imitation, not of men but of action and life, of
happinessand misfortune.These are to be found in action, and the goal
of life is a certain kind of activity,not a quality. Men are what they are
because of their characters,but it is in action that they find happinessor
the reverse.The purpose of actionon the stageis not to imitatecharacter,
but characteris a by-productof the action. (1450a15-21)
Happiness is the virtuous achievement of what we call a life-plan. A
life-plan is a set of typically human ends ordered and weighted with
respect to one another. Among the ends humans typically try to attain
are health, wealth, power, friendship, family life, benevolence, plea-
sure, and contemplation. Person A, for example, might prefer wealth
and power to friendship and family life, while person B might prefer
friendship, family life, and benevolence to pleasure, wealth, and
power. To be fully happy, Aristotle thinks that one must not only fulfill
one's life-plan, one must be virtuous in the pursuit of it. But we must
note that describing someone's virtues and vices does not thereby
describe his life-plan, and describing someone's life-plan need not
describe his moral character in the narrow sense. Thus, we cannot limit
moral character, as it relates to the objects of artistic imitation, to virtue
and vice. We have to include a person's life-plan in the description of
his moral character. I shall call this the broadsense of moral character-
"broad" because describing the ends a person seeks is not as closely tied
to our concept of the moral as his virtues and vices.
Moral qualities in the narrow sense are describable by such virtue
and vice terms as being courageous,being angry in the right way and at the
righttime,beingangry in the wrongwayand at thewrongtime,beinggenerous,

7. 504 NOOS
etc. Moral qualities in the broad sense are describable by such life-plan
terms as maintaininga stablefamilylife, pursuing wealthto theexclusionof all
else, mixing workand pleasurein equalamounts,etc. As an initial attempt to
formulate what the objects of literary imitation are, let us delimit the
set, M, which is the set of moral qualities in both the narrow and broad
senses it is logically possible for persons to have. I shall introduce the
nomenclature "artistic kind" to capture Aristotle's claim that artworks
are about these entities:
X is a artistic kind of person - df* X is a consistent sub-set of
M-properties such that for every M property P, either P or not-P is
a member of X.
Aristotle's insight, as I see it, was to restrict the kinds of properties
which constitute an artistic kind to those properties which constitute
moral character. Homer, let us say, writes: "Achilles is fleet of foot."
Now, beingfleet offoot may well be considered part of the fictional entity
denoted by "Achilles," at least on the familiar view from analytical
philosophy adumbrated above. If Homer had written, "Achilles ran
into battle faster than anyone else," we might say that he indirectly
implies that Achilles was fleet of foot, and so beingfleet offoot is part of
the fictional entity, Achilles. But beingfleet of foot is not primafacie a
moral quality, in either the broad or narrow sense, and if the objects of
literary imitation are partly constituted by artistic kinds, beingfleetolfoot
is not part of the object of imitation of Homer's epic.
This result might strike one as counter-intuitive. After all, if Sher-
lock Holmes is anything, he is a detective or contains the property being
a detective.Yet being a detectiveis not primafacie a moral quality, and so
cannot count towards constituting the artistic kind named by "Sherlock
Holmes." Intuitions are only as good as the insights they offer, and may
be remedied by a striking theory. Aristotle's thrust is to direct the
reader's attention away from such contigent properties of fictional
entities as the color of their hair, their occupations, and their place of
residence, towards the more essential properties of their moral char-
acter. It is not Holmes' profession that should interest us as much as his
tenacity and his indifference to the feelings of others. Persons are
essentially moral agents, and Aristotle thinks that the business of art is
to represent what is essential to persons.
How does one determine which properties make up an artistic
kind of person? One engages in a process we can call moral evaluation
of character, which I suggest is similar to moral reasoning in real life. In
the Ethics Aristotle tells us:
But this[hittingthe mean]is presumablydifficult,especiallyin particular
cases;becauseit is not easy to determinewhatis the right wayto be angry,

8. ARISTOTLE'S DEFINITION OF POETRY 505
and withwhom, and on whatgrounds, and for how long ... [I]t is not easy
to define by rule for how long and how much a man maygo wrongbefore
he incurs blame ... (1109b14-21)
The difficulty of determining whether Achilles is virtuously angry or
viciously angry is similar to determining whether a real person is
virtuously or viciously angry. Similarly, determining the end(s) which a
literary character seeks will pose many of the same difficulties as
determining the ends real life people seek. There will, of course, be
differences. Authors of literature usually provide access into both the
exterior and interior lives of their characters, access which we do not,
except under extraordinary or first-person circumstances, have in real
life. But this is an epistemic difference, not a difference in the sort of
reasoning involved. Moral evaluation of character is a process which
treats the work of literature as so much information about a (fictional)
person's doings in order that moral reasoning may be applied. Evalua-
tion of character in literature is moral reasoning, not towards an action
as in real life, but rather towards the construction of an artistic kind.
The question in reading literature is not what shall I, the reader, do
about this (since the situation will usually be either past or fictitious),
but rather, what shall I, the reader, say about the moral character of this
fictional entity. The results of such inquiries will be moral characteris-
tics which will be eventually built into an artistic kind.
We might disagree about the constitution of the kind, Archilles.
Some might say he was virtuously angry to leave Agamemnon; some
might say he was angry in the wrong way or for the wrong reasons.
Such disputes about artistic kinds are resolved, or not, in the way
real-life moral disagreements are resolved, or not. The important
point is that the properties constituting artistic kinds be moral qualities,
that they be the results of moral evaluation. Calling Othello stupid or
Lear senile counts as moral evaluation if and only if one is prepared to
say of "stupidity" or "senility" that it is a virtue or vice term (and
perhaps have a moral theory to back this up).
We have seen that Aristotle has stressed that tragedy is an imitation
of an "action," and that his first term for the objects of artistic imitation
is "men in action." Now, artistic kinds are not the most appropriate sort
of entity to count as actions. An action, even in the somewhat meta-
phorical sense Aristotle is using it in the Poetics, must be at least some
sort of change. That is, it must have parts which are simultaneously
incompatible with one another. The tragic hero, for example, must be
happy and then miserable. Artistic kinds seem more like a static photo-
graph of someone's moral qualities at a given moment than a motion
picture of their action.
There is another element of men in action, as the objects of artistic
imitation, which the concept of artistic kinds does not capture, and this

9. 506 NODS
is that "men in action" must not only signify a change, it must signify a
change which happens "in accordance with probability or necessity."
Suppose a fictional character-Lord Jim, say-goes from cowar-
dice to courageousness in the course of a novel. This action cannot be
represented as an artistic kind because, although courageousness and
cowardice count as moral qualities, both cannot be included in a consist-
ent set of such properties. Also, a mere concatenation of artistic
kinds-Lord Jim as cowardly, Lord Jim as courageous-will not pos-
sess the sort of inevitability which Aristotle demands for men in action.
I therefore suggest the following definition for the objects Aristo-
tle calls "men in action," here called "persons in action," again letting M
properties be the moral characteristics, in both the broad and narrow
senses, which it is logically possible for persons to have:
X is a person in action = df* X is a set of properties, A, such that
(1) A consists of subsets of M properties, M1 ... Mn;
(2) each subset, Mi, of A is a consistent set of M properties
such that for every M property, P, either P or not-P is a
member of Mi; and
(3) A is ordered by the rules of probability or inevitability.
Action in literature is more akin to the pastactions of persons than it is to
the actings of persons. Action in literature does not take place over time:
it exists, all at once, in metaphysical space. Action in literature is, at
least, change in the moral qualities of the fictional character, but a
change that, so to speak, has already happened. Whatever their tempo-
ral settings, stories have the flavor of a world that always was.
Although Aristotle sounds as if he is aiming at one sort of object for
all art and in particular all literature to imitate, this, I think, is mislead-
ing and for two reasons. First, in Chapter VIII Aristotle says that a story
is an imitation of "plot," and the question is whether plot is to be
identified with persons in action. Second, intuitions about art-that is,
intuitions cast within the Aristotelean framework of the Poetics-
suggest that not all art, not even all literature, is an imitation of persons
in action; and that a special sense should be assigned to plot to distin-
guish it from persons in action.
Let me take up the second point. Some kinds of art-painting and
sculpture, for example-seem to be best construed as imitations of
artistic kinds rather than of persons in action. After the quote that
"those who make imitations" represent men "either better than those
we know in life, or worse, or of the same kind," Aristotle says, "We can
see this in painting." This quote spawned the definition of "artistic
kinds," and it seems that the most appropriate Aristotelian sorts of

10. ARISTOTLE'S DEFINITION OF POETRY 507
entities for painting to imitate are artistic kinds. Rembrandt's Lucretiais
more a static picture of moral qualities than it is of change. There are
dramatic paintings, David's Death of Socratesfor example, which might
be said to imitate a person in action. But even here I would argue that
such works imitate an artistic kind-Socrates' nobel acceptance of
death-rather than a person in action.
The same holds true for non-narrative poetry, the lyric for exam-
ple. Shakespeare's twenty-ninth sonnet ("When in disgrace with For-
tune and men's eyes . . . ") is a picture of the acceptance of the
comforting power of love. It is not about any change which has to be
organized according to the rules of probability or inevitability. In
saying what such poems are about we tend to use nominals-the ac-
ceptance of love, the acknowledgement of God's grace, and the like-
appropriate names for the sort of entity specified by artistic kinds. It is
hard to pin Aristotle down on this, for he skips meagerly through his
discussion of the non-narrative, non-literary artforms. His main inter-
est is in the tragedy (and, but only to draw contrasts, the epic). Thus, he
anticipates himself, and in leading us to narrative or dramatic
literautre, where persons in action may appropriately serve as the
objects of imitation, he fails to give thorough consideration to whether
all art imiates persons in action.
We must advance to a discussion of "plot" for this entity is made to
bear the burden of tragic imitation-and, by extension, of other narra-
tive and dramatic literary imitation as well. Aristotle's most sustained
remarks on plot take up Chapter VIII of the Poetics, and I shall quote
them at length:
A story does not achieve unity ... merely by being about one person.
Many things, indeed an infinite number of' things, happen to the same
individual, some of' which have no unity at all. In the same way one
individual performs many actions which do not combine into one action.
... Now Homer ... seems to have perceived this clearly, whether as
conscious artist or by instinct. He did not include in the Odysseyall that
happened to Odysseus-f'or example, his being wounded on Parnassus
or his feigning madness when the troops were being levied-because no
thread of' probability or necessity linked these events. He built his plot
around the one action which we call the Odyssey;and the same is true of'
the Iliad. As in other kinds of' imitative art each imitation must have one
object, so with the plot: since it is the imitation of' an action, this must be
one action and the whole of' it; the various incidents must be constructed
that, if' any part is displaced or deleted, the whole plot is disturbed and
dislocated. For if any part can be inserted or omitted without manifest
alteration, it is no true part of' the whole. (1451a17-34)
It is here suggested that plot is the object of imitation for narrative
and dramatic literature, though this is not completely clear. It would be
most natural to say that works of literature have plots, and it is by virtue
of their having plots that they imitate their objects. Aristotle adopts this

11. 508 NOOS
natural mode when he says that "it [plot] is the imitation of an action,"
as if to say that the Odysseyhas a plot and it is by virtue of its plot that it
imitates an action. Yet at other points Aristotle comes close to identify-
ing plot with the object of imitation. Homer "built his plot around the
one action which we call the Odyssey," and this "one action" is under the
same constraints which plot is under: "this must be one action ... ; the
various incidents must be so constructed that, if any part is displaced or
deleted, the whole plot is disturbed and dislocated." "Plot" seems best
reserved as a name for the unified sort of action which Aristotle insists
that works of literature imitate.
What is wrong with "person in action" to signify this sort of object
of imitation? Above, Aristotle claims that being about one person is not
sufficient for having a unified plot. Presumably it is not necessary
either, for a story can be about more than one person and still have the
requisite unity. However, Aristotle does not discuss such cases. His
examples are drawn from works of literature-a Heracleid, a Theseid,
the Odyssey-which, as a matter of fact, are about one person. Yet how
are we to account for the unity of Anna Karenina, with its cast of
characters? Anna, Vronsky, Karenin, Levin, Kitty, and the rest seem
independent persons in action, though their actions coincide in impor-
tant ways. Just as LordJimshould not be represented as a concatenation
of artistic kinds (Lord Jim as cowardly, as courageous), so too, Anna
Karenina should not be represented as a concatenation of persons in
action, each with its own set of moral qualities changing according to
the constraints of probability or inevitability. Such a description is
appropriate for a book of sketches-Lillian Hellman's Pentimento, for
example-but not for a unified novel.
So, we ought to allow for a still more complex object of imitation
for the developed narrative or dramatic literary artwork. I shall call this
entity "plot" and shall define it as follows:
X is a plot =df. X is a set of properties, P, such that
(1) P consists of sub-sets of properties, P1 ... Pn;
(2) each sub-set, Pi, of P is a person in action;
(3) P is ordered by the rules of probability or inevitability;
and
(4) P is "whole and complete" (1450b24) or has the requi-
site "unity".
We have preserved Aristotle's insight that the objects of imitation are to
be restricted to the moral qualities of fictional characters, and have
allowed room for his insistence on the unity of changing moral qual-
ities.

12. ARISTOTLE'S DEFINITION OF POETRY 509
I shall make some brief remarks on the "rules of probability or
inevitability" which order persons in action and plots. For all the weight
this concept has to bear in the Poetics, Aristotle is vague as to exactly
what it is a concept of. However, we can distinguish at least two aspects
of probability in literature. Persons in action and plots must be realistic
and plausible. The rules of realism are equivalent to the rules which
govern the behavior of real-life human beings. Aristotle says that
"characters must be appropriate or true to type" (I454a22-23), and that
"when the poet is imitating men who are given to anger, indolence, and
other faults of character, he should represent them as they are . . .
(1454b1 1-13).
The rules of plausibility are those which lead the reader to accept
or believe-in whatever appropriate sense there is to believing a story
one knows to be fiction-the events in the narrative. "What is impossi-
ble [presumably, according to the rules which govern the behavior of
human beings] but can be believed should be preferred to what is
possible but unconvincing" (146Oa26-27). Aristotle's view, then, seems
to be that the poet must follow the rules which govern the behavior of
real-life human beings, except when deviation from these rules is
required to produce conviction. Genius, we might say, without knowl-
edge of the laws governing the behavior of real-life humans is blind;
mere psychology without genius is empty.
On "wholeness and completeness" or "unity" Aristotle is also
vague. Homer is praised for leaving out "all that happened to Odys-
seus," for example Odysseus's being wounded on Parnassus, and this
because "no thread of probability or necessity linked those events." In
contrast, the historian "has to expound not one action but one period of
time and all that happened within this period to one or more persons,
however tenuous the connection between one event and the others"
(1459a21-24). Apparently, then, a plot may follow the rules of realism
and of plausibility-Odysseus' being wounded could be convincingly
and realistically described-but still fail to have the requisite unity.
Aristotle gives two "tests" for this unity: if the insertion or omission of
an incident causes "manifest alteration" in the plot; and if events follow
one another with a "common end in view" (1459a24). Now, any addi-
tion or omission will cause, trivially, an alteration in the plot, so Aristo-
tle must have in mind some special sort of alteration, but he never tells
us which sort. It is possible for Aristotle to specify a "common end" for
tragedy-catharsis-but it is unclear what would count as the common
end of, say, the novel. A full account of unity remains one of the glaring
omissions of thePoetics. It should, however, be noted that unity is not an
essential aspect of plot, but only of superior plots. Epic poetry, in
Aristotle's estimation, is like history in that it has episodes with no
common purpose (see 145lb33-37).

13. 510 NOuS
IV. LITERARY IMITATION
How does literature come to "imitate" persons in action and plots? All
art-Aristotle mentions epic poetry, comedy, dithyrambic poetry (i.e.,
choral odes), music on the flute and lyre, dance, and painting-is said
to be "imitative." At the beginning of the Poetics Aristotle embarks on a
project of distinguishing artforms according to their means, manner,
and object of imitation. Aristotle never defines what "means" and
"manner" are. He gives examples. Manner seems peculiar to literature,
for one manner of imitation is first-person narration, another is dra-
matic impersonation and a third is a combination of the first two. These
manners seem to have no sensible application to music or painting.
What could it mean to paint or play the lyre, sometimes in the first-
person, sometimes in the third?
In Chapter I we are told that there are two general means of
artistic imitation: "color and shape" and the human voice. The latter
has three species: melody, rhythm, and speech. We can assemble the
following categorizations from Aristotle's remarks:
(1) Painting imitates (artistic kinds) by means of color and
shape.
(2) Music imitates (artistic kinds? plots?) by means of mel-
ody and rhythm.
(3) Dance imitates (artistic kinds? plots?) by means of
rhythm alone.
(4) Theatre (i.e., either a staged play, or what we would call
a dramatic recitation or reading) imitates (plots) by
means of melody, rhythm, and speech (in the manner
of dramatic impersonation).
But Aristotle has forgotten that there is at least one other general
means of artistic imitation, and the problem to confront us here is how
to analyze "imitation" in:
(5) Literature imitates (plots) by means of "words alone"
(either in the manner of first-person narrative, or
dramatic impersonation, or a combination of both).
Aristotle never provides an explicit analysis of what "imitates" means,
nor does he say whether the means of imitation modify the sense of
"imitates" or whether this relation retains a univocal sense in all of (1)
through (5), regardless of what means are employed to do the imitat-
ing.
Commentators on the Poetics make Aristotle out to hold an iconic
theory of imitation. S. H. Butcher interprets Aristotle to mean, "A work

14. ARISTOTLE'S DEFINITION OF POETRY 511
of art is a likeness or reproduction of an original, not a symbolic
representation of it" ([4]: 124), D. W. Lucas concurs: "Mimesismeans to
make or do something which has as a resemblance to something else"
([ 13]: 53), Grube comments that sense of "imitation" as "resemblance"
is used by Aristotle "not as a view that has to be argued, but as one that
can be taken for granted" ([10]: xix).
Now, there is a certain plausibility that (1) means:
(1') Painting resembles (artistic kinds) by means of color
and shape.
And the same plausibility carries over to (2) through (4). After all, color
and shape, and rhythm, melody, and diction are plastic or auditory
material objects, and so have some chance of resembling their objects of
imitation. There are problems with this, of course. Nelson Goodman
([ 10], chs. 1 and 2) has launched some powerful objections against the
idea of a natural resemblance between art and its objects; and Aristotle
would have to face some particularly severe problems of how particu-
lar, material objects could resemble artistic kinds, persons in action, or
plots, which are, among other things, abstract objects. However, what-
ever plausibility there may be with analyzing (1) through (4) along the
lines of (1') vanishes when it comes to (5). In what sense could Emma-a
series of words and sentences-be said to resemble person in action,
the
Emma?
Butcher notes this difficulty:
Poetry unlike the other arts produces its effects (except such as
depend on metre) through symbols alone. It cannot directly present
form and colour to the eye; it can only employ wordsto call up imagesof
the objectsto be represented;nor need these wordsbe audible;they may
be merely written symbols. ([4]: 137)
Here Butcher seems to turn the iconic analysis of imitation into an
expression or causal analysis. This, however, seems to be a theory
entirely of Butcher's own invention, since nothing in the Poetics sug-
gests it and Aristotle's remarks on catharsiscontraindicate it. The spec-
tator of a (good) tragedy is supposed to be filled with pity and fear and
to undergo a catharsis of those emotions. That is, a (good) tragedy
causes the spectator to have feelings of pity and fear. Yet tragedy is an
imitation of a certain plot, not of pity and fear. Moreover, Butcher
presents an implausible phenomenology of the act of reading and
understanding a literary text. Here is the opening of Jane Austen's
Emma:
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable
house and happy disposition seemed to unite some of the best blessings

15. 512 NOOS
of existence and had lived twenty-oneyearsin the worldwithverylittleto
distress or vex her.
I do not form "images of the objects to be represented"-mental
pictures of a handsome, clever, rich, undistressed, twenty-one year old
woman-when I read this passage. I may imagine the state of affairs
described above to be true, but this is a different thing from imaging
that state of affairs. For these reasons Butcher's expression-
interpretation of literary imitation in the Poetics is to be rejected.
"Words alone" can be said to resemble aspects of their objects of
imitation. Gibbon's sentences get longer and longer as he describes
provinces further and further away from Rome. Joyce's prose in the
"Nighttown" episode of Ulyssesbecomes disjoint and scattered, just as
the incidents he is creating become disjoint and scattered. Joan Did-
ion's prose style is as "cold" as the characters she describes (A Book of
CommonPrayer).
As a complete theory of literary imitation, resemblance can only go
so far. Gibbon is describing more than just the distance of the far
provinces, Joyce more than disjointness, Didion more than coldness.
Even if we take the bare bones of the structure of tragedy as put forth
by Aristotle, we can see failures in accounting for this structure by
means of resemblance between the words alone and the tragedy. A
(good) tragedy is to take a noble hero from happiness to misery via a
reversal and discovery. Can the words or sentences be said to be happy
or miserable? Can they undergo a reversal, a discovery? In their de-
scription of the hero, need the words be noble? The fact is that literary
refer to or denote their objects of imitation. Exactly how they do this will
be the problem for the next two sections of this essay; and this, indeed,
is the crux of the problem of interpreting (away) the inconsistency
adumbrated at the beginning of the essay.
Aristotle does not seem to have bothered much with this problem
in the Poetics, perhaps because literary artworks were presented as
staged-by means of "melody, diction, and rhythm"-and the post-
Gutenburg fashion of taking a text itself as the artwork had not been
fully anticipated by Aristotle. The modern philosopher has to see
whether this lacuna in the Poetics can be successfully and consistently
filled in.
V. THE PROBLEM RESTATED
We are in a better position to return to the chapter IX definition and
the apparent inconsistency adumbrated at the beginning of this essay.
Before setting out this definition and making the inconsistency more
than merely apparent, we should make sure Aristotle intends the

16. ARISTOTLE'S DEFINITION OF POETRY 513
chapter IX definition to be the canonical definition of literature, for
there seem to be competing definitions in the Poetics and, as we shall
see, the chapter IX definition is not a definition but a statement of a
necessary condition for a text to be a literary artwork.
To facilitate discussion, I shall say that a person-nameis a singular
term such that, were it to denote an existent particular, it would denote
a person. Person-names are to be distinguished from place-names,
animal-names, etc. Animal allegories may appear to contain animal-
names, but I would urge that the characters in such stories are persons
with non-human shapes.
In chapter VIII, Aristotle strongly implies that the definition of
literature is this:
(A) For an text, T, T is a literary artwork if and only if T
denotes (or is about) a plot.
To be sure, the highest literary artform for Aristotle, the tragedy,
imitates a plot. Yet he admits that some epics lack one of the ingredients
he refers to as "unity", and from an inspection of the various genres of
what we would acknowledge to be literature, it seems that (A) is too
strong. Some epics will lack a plot, and so will the lyric poem.
Moreover, a text will denote a plot only if all of its person-names
denote persons in action; and a person-name will denote a person in
action only if it denotes an artistic kind. The chapter IX "definition"
contrasts the literary artist who writes about a person in action ("the
kind of thing which a certain type of person would probably or inevit-
ably do or say") with the historian who writes about particular persons
("what Alcibiades did or suffered"). Here, Aristotle seems to focus on
having person-names denote persons in action as a necessary condition
for literature; that is:
(B) For an text, T, T is a literary artwork only if T contains
person-names and all of the person-names in T denote
persons in action.
(B) seems to be the best interpretation of what Aristotle says in chapter
IX, but not the best interpretation of the literary artwork in general. (B)
leaves out the lyric poem whose person-names-here I count "the
dramatic speaker" as a person-name-will denote artistic kinds. A
better statement would be:
(B') For any text, T, T is a literary artwork only if T con-
tains person-names and all of the person-names in T
denote either persons in action or artistic kinds.

17. 514 NOOS
However, nothing is lost if, in the following discussion, we confine
ourselves to the simpler (B). The same problems arise with (B) as they
would with (B').
There is another competitor for "the" definition of literature in
the Poetics. At the very end of chapter IX, Aristotle says that "it is this
probability or possibility that makes the (tragic) poet." This jettisons
artistic kinds from literature, for it says that the poet can write about-
use person-names which denote-actual, particular persons as long as
the poet orders their doings according to the rules of probability and
inevitability. What Aristotle seems to be advocating there is:
(C) For any text, T, T is a literary artwork if and only if T
contains person-names, and whatever sorts of entities
that are denoted by these person-names are ordered
according to the rules of probability or inevitability.
I think Aristotle has made a slip of the pen. (C) would make artistic
kinds accidental features of some literary artworks, yet the Poetics is
permeated with talk of how the artist imitates moral types. Moreover,
Aristotle admits that "nothing prevents some actual events from being
probable or possible." Accepting (C) would obliterate his distinction
between literature and history. Suppose a poet happened to choose a
real-life incident which, as a matter of fact, conformed to the rules of
realism, plausibility, and unity. How would he be distinguished from
the historian who happened to write about the same incident? For these
reasons, (C) is to be rejected as Aristotle's canonical defintion of litera-
ture.
The inconsistency can now be made more apparent. (B) implies
that OedipusRex is a literary artwork only if "Oedipus" denotes a person
in action. Intuitively, OedipusRex is a literary artwork, and so "Oedipus"
should denote a person in action. The lampooners, Aristotle tells us,
are "concerned with a particular individual," and the tragedians "cling
to the names of historical persons." This is an admission that a text can
contain person-names which denote actual, particular persons and still
be a work of literature. We have a choice of contradictions; either
Oedipus Rex is and is not a literary artwork (intuitively, it is, but
"Oedipus" is alleged to denote a real person); or "Oedipus" both
denotes and does not denote a person in action (it should denote a
person in action because OedipusRex is a literary artwork, but the fact is
alleged to be that "Oedipus" denotes the historical Oedipus). We
should not, of course, abandon the intuition that OedipusRexis a literary
artwork. We will, in due time, abandon (B), but first it behooves us to
see whether we can resolve the inconsistency that "Oedipus" does and
does not denote a person in action, while holding onto (B).

18. ARISTOTLE'S DEFINITION OF POETRY 515
Some commentators have pointed out that Aristotle uncritically
swallows the doubtful view that the great tragedies are about real
persons. This may be so, but it doesn't obviate the possibilitythat the
literary artist may write about real persons. For one thing, Aristotle's
remark on the lampooners is correct. The lampoon is necessarily about
someone real. For another, his reason for such artistic practices in
tragedy sounds good: "we are apt to distrust what has not yet happened
as not possible, whereas what has happened is obviously possible, else it
could not have happened." Writing about real persons and their actual
doings is a good rule of plausibility. Renaissance historical drama was
defended by one of its contemporaries "with the argument that a plot
about a supposedly great king of whom the audience had never heard
would be laughed out of the theatre" ([8]: 159). Wouldn't Napoleon's
retreat in War and Peace from Moscow into the Russian winter and
defeat strike one as implausible or unrealistic-such a blunder from a
military genius-if one didn't know that the actual, historical Napoleon
really did it?
Some commentators on Aristotle think that the particular is some-
how changed into the universal by art. Butcher writes, "Greek
tragedies, though 'founded on fact' . . . transmute that fact into im-
aginative truth" ([4]: 170); and Gerald Else says, "The poet . . . is
required to make something for himself, namely that structure of
events in which universals may come to expression. . . " ([7]: 320). It is
hard to see how facts can become "imaginative truth," or how univer-
sals can "come to expression" via the particular. The metaphysical wall
separating the two is impenetrable. Perhaps what can happen is that
the names in literature shift reference,from denoting some actual par-
ticular to denoting a person in action.
There is a twentieth-century tradition which holds that the refer-
ence of names in literature is different from the reference of those
same names outside literature. Some philosophers have countenanced
that names in literature are used in ways that are radically different
from their use outside literature. Ogden and Richards ([15]), for
example, have claimed that names and terms are used in literature to
evoke emotional attitudes. The anti-intentionalists (see Wimsatt and
Beardsley [20] and Macdonald [14]) hold that it is an error to go
"outside" the work, and that, accordingly, all names in literature must
be taken to be purely fictional.
What such views must hold is that there is some property which
literature has and which non-literature lacks, a property which some-
how prevents an author from making reference to real persons in a
work of art. Call this property Q. If a text has Q. then try as he might, an
author cannot succeed in making reference to any real person on any
occasion of the use of any person-name in that text. Such a view is

19. 516 NOUS
unsupportable. Is there the slightest reason to believe that the refer-
ence of "Napoleon" in the sentence "Napoleon marched from Auster-
litz to Moscow" must change from the historic Napoleon to a person in
action, depending on whether that sentence occurs in A History of the
Modern Worldor in War and Peace? Authors have often used the oppor-
tunity to make real reference to real persons in works of literature,
whether to edify, establish plausibility, or just to get even, and there is
every reason to believe that they have succeeded in making such real
reference, which gives us every reason to believe that there is no such
property Q.
As a final stab at trying to hold interpretation (B) while dissolving
the inconsistency, we might hold that person-names in literature are
sometimes systematically ambiguous. While it is usually held to be the
essence of proper names that they denote one and only one thing (if
they denote anything at all), it might be the case that, at least for art,
some person-names are bi-denotative, denoting botha particular and a
person in action. I see nothing incoherent about bi-denotative names.
If I invite Simone de Beauvoir and Simone Signoret to dinner and want
to summon them both to table, I suppose I can use the name "Simone"
on this occasion to call both. That is, I intend "Simone" in the sentence,
"Simone, a table," to refer to both women. The Simone's may become
confused, but this may be because they never thought that a name
could be bi-denotative, or that this use of "Simone" is bi-denotative.
Similarly, I suppose that it is possible that Sophocles used "Oedipus" to
refer both to the historic Oedipus (assuming there was such a person)
and to a certain person in action.
The problem here is not with any inherent incoherency in the
notion of a bi-denotative person-name, but with using this as a criterion
for distinguishing literature from history. Are tragedians known for
using names in a bi-denotive fashion, just as I might be known for
referring to both Simone's on occasion as "Simone"? This is unlikely.
We would have to assume that Sophocles held Aristotle's theory (B) and
used "Oedipus" to refer both to the historical Oedipus and to a certain
person in action. But Sophocles need not have held Aristotle's views-
probably no one did before Aristotle-and he still could write a tragedy
which Aristotle ought to be able to account for without second-guessing
the dramatist's intentions.
Suppose we have the text of King Lear in front of us, and we don't
know whether it is literature or not. Suppose we also know that Shake-
speare used "Lear" to refer to that historic king which Holinshed used
"Lear" to refer to in his Chronicles. Is there any way to tell whether
"Lear" functions in a bi-denotative way in Shakespeare's play, denoting
both the historic Lear and a person in action? Suppose a letter of
Shakespeare's were produced in which Shakespeare claimed to use

20. ARISTOTLE'S DEFINITION OF POETRY 517
"Lear" to refer to the historic Lear and only to the historic Lear. Would
this mean thatKingLear is not literature? Or consider what is most likely
the actual case: Shakespeare got the story for King Lear out of
Holinshed, but had no intentions one way or the other, either to refer
to that historical Lear of Holinshed or to an Aristotelean person in
action or to both. Must we assume that "Lear" in Shakespeare's play
denotes both a person in action and the historical Lear, but that "Lear"
in Holinshed's Chroniclesdenotes only the historical Lear? Why? Be-
cause Shakespear's play is literature and Holinshed's Chroniclesare not?
Yet, isn't this precisely what we do not know?
This discussion of names traded heavily on a Kripke-like account
of denotation as determined by the intentions of the user of the name.
Similar quandries would arise with a Fregean sense-determines-
denotation theory. The anti-intentionalists would have to claim that the
name "Napoleon" changes its sense from its occurrence in A Historyof
theModern Worldto its occurrence in Warand Peace. Yet, what reason do
we have to believe this? The bi-denotative name gambit would have to
hold that in certain texts the sense of a name is such that it denotes both
a person in action and a real, particular person. But, how could we ever
tell?
VI. A SOLUTION
Interpretation (B) founders on an ineluctable fact. Some literary
artworks contain person-names which denote real, particular persons
just as some works of history do, and no conjuring up of eccentric
theories of meaning or denotation for literature can change this. (B)
also must compete with a somewhat less ineluctable fact, and that is that
the theory of reference of fictional names adumbrated in section III
has some plausibility. If Homer writes, "Achilles was fleet of foot," then
"Achilles," if it does not denote any historical personage, can be rea-
sonably said to denote that possible particular which is fleet of foot and
has all the other properties Homer directly or indirectly assigns to
Achilles.
(B) takes the literary artworkas a text which makes its appearance as
such. I would like to suggest that the literary artwork is almost as much
a construction by the reader as it is by the artist. Texts are not, so to
speak, ready-made artworks or not. They must be handled with care,
nurtured into artworkhood. They must be read in a certain way. I shall
suggest that there is a lacuna rather than an inconsistency between
Aristotle's definition of poetry and his claims about real denotation in
literature, and that this lacuna is to be filled in with a prescriptive
aesthetic.
An aesthetic, as I shall use the term, is a theory of spectator

21. 518 NOCS
response to artworks. We can distinguish between a descriptive and a
prescriptive aesthetic. A descriptive aesthetic is an empirical theory of
what spectators actually experience when confronted with artworks or
with artworks of a certain sort. Santayana's account of aesthetic plea-
sure (in [ 17]) purports to be a general theory of spectator reactions to
good artworks; another descriptive aesthetic (Gutheil, [ 11]) purports to
describe the emotional reactions of the auditors of various pieces of
music. A prescriptive aesthetic is a set of directions on what spectators
ought to do when confronted with artworks, or with artworks of a
certain sort. Bullough, for example, thought that if the aesthetic prop-
erties of art are to "emerge" one had to behold the artwork with the
correct amount of "psychical distance," which method his essay [3]
describes.
A descriptive aesthetic is of merely anthropological interest. The
philosophical question is what spectators should do when confronted
with artworks or with artworks of a certain sort. Should spectators try to
unpack the cognitive or informative content of artworks as Goodman
holds ([9], ch. VI)? Or, should spectators luxuriate in the unity, com-
plexity, and intensity of the essentially non-cognitive aesthetic experi-
ence, as Beardsley ([2], chs. I and XI) has urged? The answer must
come from a theory of the nature of art. If one believed that art is
essentially a cognitive tool, although different in certain ways from
science, then one would posit a prescriptive aesthetic which directed
the spectator to take certain stances so as to allow art to perform its
cognitive task. If, on the other hand, one believed that art was a vehicle
to a certain kind of non-cognitive or affective experience, then one
would develop a prescriptive aesthetic to help spectators have this sort
of experience.
The nature of literature for Aristotle is to bring into sharp focus
the moral qualities of humans. Any Aristotelean prescriptive aesthetic
with respect to literature must be such as to allow specators to see the
nature of literature. I shall expound on this shortly, but what I shall call
the Aristotelean prescriptive aesthetic-Aristotelean, not Aristotle's,
for I introduce it to solve a puzzle in Aristotle, not as exegesis of some
passage or other-has already been set out descriptively in this essay.
The Aristotelean prescriptive aesthetic directs the readers of certain
texts to ignore any reference to actual, particular persons which some
person-names might make; to set about constructing the appropriate
artistic kinds, and from these, the appropriate persons in action for
each of'the person-names in those texts; and finally to combine these
persons in action into a plot.
Twentieth-century aesthetic attitude theories are the most fully
developed prescriptive aesthetics available. It will be worthwhile to
review their essential structure. The pivotal feature of their

22. ARISTOTLE'S DEFINITION OF POETRY 519
structure-and the feature which has attracted the most criticism (see
Dickie [6], chs. 4-6)-is their introduction of a certain mental state, the
aesthetic attitude, variously described as "distanced" (Bullough [3]),
"disinterested" (Stolnitz [18]), and "prehending" (Aldrich [1]). The
reason such mental states are introduced is that the nature of art, which
for the aesthetic attitude theorists is the possession of aesthetic proper-
ties, is not revealed until the aesthetic attitude is trained on the artwork.
This leads to the second feature of the structure of aesthetic attitude
theories: that the nature of art, here conceived of as the possession of
aesthetic properties, is emergent. What it means for an aesthetic prop-
erty to be emergent varies from theory to theory. Bullough and Stolnitz
seem to hold that aesthetic properties go, so to speak, unnoticed until
one assumes the proper amount of distance or becomes sufficiently
and correctly disinterested. Aldrich seems to hold that aesthetic prop-
erties are created when the mind, in its attitude of prehending (an
elaboration of Wittgenstein's "seeing as") perceptually interacts with
the artwork. The third feature of aesthetic attitude theories is virtually
implied by the first two, and this is that the prescription that the
aesthetic attitude should be directed towards artworks, as the correct
mode of appreciating them.
Aristotle is not concerned with aesthetic properties, at least as
these have been conceived of by aesthetic attitude theorists. The closest
he gets to a modern notion of aesthetic properties is in his discussion of
diction and metaphor in chs. XIX - XXII of the Poetics. These must be
taken as remarks on some of the accidental, albeit interesting, features
of literature, for literature may lack the aesthetic qualities of diction
and metaphor and still remain literature.
Furthermore, the Aristotelean prescriptive aesthetic I have out-
lined does not possess the pivotal feature of aesthetic attitude theories,
namely their insistence that there is a unique mental state which is
uniquely suitable for permitting the aesthetic properties of art to
emerge. The mental state which the Aristotelean prescriptive aesthetic
asks the reader to bring to the literary artwork is his capacity to engage
in moral reasoning and moral evaluation and his knowledge of the
rules of probability and inevitability. There is nothing peculiarly "aes-
thetic" about this capacity; in fact, I have been at some pains to indicate
that it is like real-life moral reasoning.
But the Aristotelean prescriptive aesthetic is a distant ancestor of
twentieth-century aesthetic attitude theories, for it shares their insist-
ence that the nature of art is emergent contingent upon some active
audience participation, and that this active participation should be
engaged in with respect to works of literature as the correct mode of
appreciation.
Artistic kinds, persons in action, and plots seem not to be the actual

23. 520 NOUS
semantical properties of texts. They are not implied by the meanings of
the sentences in the text. The descriptions of Achilles running into
battle do not imply that he was courageous. That he was courageous is a
moral evaluation on the part of the reader. In fact, the real semantical
properties of literature may not be any different from the real semanti-
cal properties of histories. This, I take it, is the final lesson to be drawn
from Aristotle's almost causal claim that the tragedians wrote about
real persons.
Rather, artistic kinds, persons in action, and plots are emergent
semantical properties. An emergent semantical property is a property
which is not part of the ordinary sense or reference of a piece of
discourse-a name, a term, or a sentence-but which can be con-
structed in a rule-governed fashion and ascribed to that piece of dis-
course. These rules are given by the Aristotelean prescriptive aesthetic.
Although we can speak loosely about a person-name as denoting a
certain artistic kind or person in action, we would do better (at least
when philosophizing) to qualify ourselves and to speak of a person-
name as A-denoting (for Aristotle) such and such an artistic kind or
person in action, and of the work as A-denoting such and such plot. A
person-name, N, A-denotes a artistic kind, K, just in case some reader
of the text in which N is embedded correctly follows the Aristotelean
prescriptive aesthetic and constructs K by applying his moral reasoning
to the fictitious incidents constructed around N. A-denotation for
persons in action and plots in similarly defined, with the addition of
knowledge about the rules of probability and inevitability and unity.
We have only solved half the problem, however, for in proposing
the Aristotelean prescriptive aesthetic as a method for ascribing per-
sons in action and plots to texts I havejettisoned interpretation (B). We
are left without an interpretation of Aristotle's definition, and a serious
problem. Not every text can turn out to be a literary artwork, for the
work of Herodotus, to use Aristotle's illustration, is still history. There
is nothing in the Aristotelean prescriptive aesthetic itself that rules
against its being trained on the work of Herodotus and transforming
that into a work of literature. It has been argued (see, for example,
Coleman [5]) that a text is literature or not depending on how it is read.
This is not Aristotle's position, for he wants to make some sharp
distinction, or as sharp a distinction as can be made, between texts which
are works of literature and texts which are not. It initially appeared that
this distinction was to be made by examining the semantical properties
of texts, but this way is no longer open to us. We want to know what it is
about some texts which makes them particularly susceptible to being
read according to the Aristotelean prescriptive aesthetic. I shall refer to
this susceptibility as the "literary potential" of a text, and shall advance
this final interpretation of Aristotle's definition:

24. ARISTOTLE'S DEFINITION OF POETRY 521
(D) A text is a literary artwork just in case that text has a
relatively high degree of literary potential, and a text is
a work of non-literature just in case it has a relatively
low degree of literary potential.
When does a text have a relatively high literary potential? I shall
discuss three marks of high literary potential. The first is obvious. For a
text to be read as being about persons in action, it must contain
person-names. This mark rules out works of economics, physics, math-
ematics, most philosophy, geography, chemistry, and the like from
being literature. While this is intuitively correct and in line with what
Aristotle wants, we are still faced with the problem of separating War
and Peace from A History of the Modern World, given that each contains
the same person-name, "Napoleon."
On "characterization" Aristotle writes, "Words and action express
character ... if they bringout a moral choice, and the character is good if
the choice is right" (1454a 17-19). The point here is that words in
literature must bring out a moral choice, and I wish to contrast bringing
out with stating. We use samples and examples to bring out; we use
assertion to state. I can describe to you what an opera is if you have
never seen one. Or, I can take you to a performance of an opera.
Samples are physical objects which are made to stand for a class of
things, and a sample is a sample of those things which it both stands for
and shares the relevant properties of. Exarnplesaregiven in language.
They are descriptions of possible or actual cases. It is sometimes simply
more expedient to describe a case rather than to produce an actual
physical instance of one. Moral philosophy is rife with examples, from
Plato's story of the ring of Gyges to Judith Thomson's case of the
kidnapped man who wakes up connected with the famous violinist as
his life support system. Like physical samples, examples are made to
stand for a class of things and to share their relevant properties. Plato's
case stands for a class of situations where being immoral apparently
makes one happy, and Thomson's for a class of situations in which one
finds oneself causally though involuntarily responsible for the life of
another. I can state moral principles ("Never treat a person as a mere
means"), use these principles in moral arguments (". . . and therefore
no one can force you to oblige the violinist"), or express opinions on
moral matters ("I think you are not obligated to remain connected with
the violinist"). Such pieces of discourse are statings, not examples.
Samples and examples are exercises in abstraction. To see the
point of the sample or example-that is, to see what it is a sample or
example of-one must form a hypothesis about the members of the
class which the sample is supposed to stand for. This hypothesis must
be tested against the sample or example for fit, and some of the specific

25. 522 NOOS
features of the sample or example might be ignored in order to fit one
hypothesis, or brought in in order to fit another. A red square might be
a sample of red things or of squares or of red squares, depending on
what specific features of the sample are ignored or not. Understanding
a sample or example is an audience participation activity. The hearer
or reader of an assertion must exercise his command of the language
and bring to bear his previous beliefs in order to understand an
assertion, but the process of construction hypothesis about what sam-
ples or examples stand for demands a wider range of audience activity.
Seeing the sample or understanding the sentences of an example is but
a prelude to the process of bringing out the class of things which the
sample or example stands for.
Science or philosophy will use both samples and examples, but it
will typically tell us what these stand for. It will do our hypothesis
constructing for us. The physicist does not only do an experiment, he
interprets it, tells us what it shows about a class of things, and which
things it shows this about. The anthropologist, sociologist, or psychol-
ogist gathers data and interprets them. He doesn't just describe the
behavior of this or that group, of this or that kind of man; he tells us
what this shows about this group or that kind.
The poet, on the contrary, does not interpret. He shows us a "kind
of man" but what kind or what he shows us is left up to the ingenuity of
the reader to discover. The poet is like the physicist who performs an
experiment in full view of the class, and then leaves it to his students to
say what the experiment shows about what; or like Kierkegaard who
thought philosophy was best done by letting the reader figure out for
himself the point of the parable. Shakespeare does not interpret
Othello for us, as Freud would have if Othello had come to his couch.
Shakesepare gives a marvously rich example of a kind of man, but
leaves it to the reader to say what this kind of man is and what this
example shows about this kind.
From these remarks we can see that the second mark of high
literary potential is a lack of interpretation in a text: if, that is, that text
involves its characters in a series of events but does not tell us the moral
significance of those events for that character. A text has high literary
potential only if it makes us look for the class which it is giving an
example of, only if it "brings out" a moral choice.
This second mark of literary potential suggests a third. For an
example to be worth interpreting, it must be of sufficiently rich com-
plexity. An example, like Plato's story of the ring of Gyges, which
virtually wears its meaning on its sleeve, would seem to have lower
literary potential than Shakespeare's Othello, which is endlessly inter-
pretable. If literature is to have an interesting moral function, it must
be prepared to introduce us to kinds of persons which we have perhaps

26. ARISTOTLE'S DEFINITION OF POETRY 523
some real-life acquaintance with but which we have not yet considered
their moral nature clearly. Examples give us access to situations which
we would not ordinarily come across, if only because a literary example
gives us so much material that would be inaccessible to us in our
ordinary day-to-day dealings with persons. Molly Bloom's final sol-
iloquoy from Joyce's Ulysseslets us hear what a woman of a certain sort
thinks, feels, and believes about love and sex and men, thoughts which
are ordinarily (and in the novel as well) denied even to husbands.
Aristotle suggests that literature has a pedagogic function in his
remarks on the origins of poetry in Ch. IV:
... [TIhe sight of'certainthings gives us pain, but we enjoy looking at the
most exact images of' them, whether the forms of' animals which we
greatly despise or of corpses. The reason is that learning things is most
enjoyable,not only for philosophersbut for others equally,though they
have but little experience of it. Hence they enjoy the sight of' images
because they learn as they look; they reason what each image is, that
there, for example, is that man whom we know. If a man does not know
the original, the imitationas such gives him no pleasure; his pleasure is
then derived from its worksmanship,its color, or some similiarreason.
(1448b 10_19)
There seems to be two distinct explanations of why we take pleasure in
imitations of ugly things. The first is that "we reason what each image is"
and then find delight in learning something about an actual particular
instance of that type. The second is in delight from its
"workmanship"-what we might today refer to as its purely aesthetic
properties. Someone who took delight in workmanship would not have
read the text according to the Aristotelean prescriptive aesthetic, and
to that extent would not take delight in the text as a work of literature.
The relevant literary delight is from "learning as one looks," and this
delight gets explained by deeming it to be a species of the delight which
one takes in learning anything.
What does one learn, and how does one learn it? Aristotle, I think,
conflates two sorts of answers to the first part of the question by giving
one sort of answer to the last. What one can learn, to use the terminol-
ogy developed in this essay, is either that such and such person in action
is possible (e.g., that such heroism as Odysseus's or such intimate self-
acceptance as Molly Bloom's could be); or that such and such person in
action has an actual instance: "that man whom we know." By "the
original" Aristotle might have meant an actual instance of a person in
action, and he might be suggesting that one learns that such and such a
person in action is possible by learning that it has an actual instance-
that this actual person's heroism is like Odysseus' or that actual person's
self-acceptance is like Molly Bloom's.
This may be a happy conflation, for it suggests that literature is not

27. 524 NOCS
the investigation of extreme possibilities of human behavior, but rather
that what we learn from reading literature in the correct Aristotelean
way is something about real-life poeple. "If a man does not know the
original," the imitation as such gives only pleasure "derived from its
workmanship," not the pleasure which comes from a learning experi-
ence of the possibilities of human moral character, possibilities which
are not remote but which are instanced in "that man whom we know."
Here Aristotle clearly parts company with Plato, who thought that art
would offer too many of the wrong moral possibilities and possibly
sway citizens of the Republic away from the straight and narrow.
Aristotle is more the empirical observer of behavior, more willing to
separate the learning experience associated with the moral evaluation
of character from the imperative to act on that moral evaluation.
The learning potential of a text ought to be a mark of its literary
potential, and so I shall say that the third mark of literary potential is
whether a text offers a person in action or plot of sufficiently rich
complexity so that a person who trained the Aristotelean prescriptive
aesthetic on it would be rewarded by learning something about human
moral character which he did not know before.
I shall say that the three marks of literary potential are individually
necessary for a text to have a relatively high degree of literary potential.
I do not think them jointly sufficient, for they do not make reference to
the sort of unity that Aristotle requires of literature, and on that issue I
shall leave us as much in the dark as Aristotle himself does.
The third mark of literary potential may be thought to be too
strong, or even un-Aristotelean, since there is a strong descriptivist
tendency in Aristotle to make the classification of texts conform to our
ordinary ideas of what a work of literary art is. It might be thought,
therefore, that even if the ordinary best-seller does not teach anything
new about the possibilities for moral behavior-pick any Mickey Spil-
lane or Jacqueline Susann at random-still, we should countenance it
as literary art, although of a rather impoverished sort. While I agree
that Aristotle is relying strongly on our intuitions about what should
and should not count as literature, I would urge that our ordinary
notion of the literary artwork contains an evaluative element, and that
the learning experience which the third mark describes is part of our
ordinary concept of literature. As a compromise, I suggest that the
three marks are individually necessary for a relatively high degree of
literary potential, but that only the first two are individually necessary
for some degree of literary potential.
This completes our investigation into Aristotle's definition of po-
etry. The goal of this essay was to set out an interpretation of the
chapter IX definition which avoided the apparent contradiction ad-
duced at the beginning. I feel I have produced an interpretation which

28. ARISTOTLE'S DEFINITION OF POETRY 525
avoids this contradiction and has the minimal virtue of being not
inconsistent with what Aristotle elsewhere says in the Poetics. Whether it
has the higher virtue of eking out what Aristotle "truly meant" no one, I
think, can say. Whether it has the highest virtue of a theory, truth in its
own right, the correct definition of the literary artwork, I leave as an
exercise to the reader.5
REFERENCES
[1] Virgil Aldrich, Philosophyof Art (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963).
[2] Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics:Problemsin the Philosophyof Criticism(New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1958).
[3] Edward Bullough, "'Psychical Distance' as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Princi-
ple," BritishJournal of Psychology, 5(1912): 87-98.
[4] S. H. Butcher, Aristotle'sTheoryof Poetry and Fine Art (New York: Dover Publica-
tions, 1951).
[5] Francis X. J. Coleman, "A Few Observations on Fictional Discourse," Language and
Aesthetics:Contributionsto the Philosophyof Art, ed. Benjamin R. Tilghman (Lawr-
ence, Kansas: The University Press of Kansas, 1973).
[6] George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974).
[7] Gerald F. Else,Aristotle'sPoetics: The Argument(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1957).
[8] Leon Golden and 0. B. Harrison, Jr., Aristotle'sPoetics (Edgewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968).
[9] Nelson Goodman, Language of Art (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1968).
[10] G. M. A. Grube,Aristotle on Poetryand Style (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1968).
[11] Emil A. Gutheil, Music and Your Emotions: A Practical Guide to Music Selections
Associatedwith DesiredEmotional Responses(London: Liveright, 1952).
[12] David Lewis, "Truth in Fiction,"AmericanPhilosophicalQuarterly, 15(1978): 37-46.
[13] D. W. Lucas, Aristotle:Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968).
[14] Margaret Macdonald, "The Language of Fiction," Proceedings of the Aristotelean
Society, Supplementary Volume XXVII (1954): 165-84.
[15] C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning 8th ed. (New York:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1946).
[16] Alvin Plantinga, "The Free Will Defense," Philosophyin America, ed. Max Black
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965).
[17] George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936).
[18] Jerome Stolnitz, Aesthetics and the Philosophyof Art Criticism(New York: Houghton
Mifflin Co., 1960).
[19] J. A. K. Thomson, The Ethics of Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics (New York:
Penguin Books, 1953).
[20] William K. Wimsatt,Jr. and Monroe Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy,"Philoso-
phyLooksat theArts, ed. Joseph Margolis (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962).
NOTES
1All translations of the Poetics are by G. M. A. Grube [ 10]. Reference for exact quotes
is provided only when the quote is mentioned for the first time. Reference to thoughts or
paraphrases of Aristotle is generally given by citing the chapter in Roman numerals.
2Such a view has been held by David Lewis [ 12].
3This variation is given by Alvin Plantinga [ 16], who puts it to a use other than the
analysis of fictional entities. My formulation of the definitions of "artistic kind," "person
in action," and "plot" owes much to Plantinga's article.
4All translations of the NicomacheanEthics are by J. A. K. Thomson [ 19].
5I wish to thank the editor and referee of NOUS for taking what I consider extraor-
dinary pains to improve earlier versions of this essay.