Aristotle Tragedy
PART NINE
Aristotle Tragedy
Review Questions
1. Aristotle says, “Tragedy is the imitation of an action; and an action implies personal agents, who necessarily possess certain distinctive qualities . . . for it is by these that we qualify actions themselves, and these, thought and character, are the two natural causes from which actions spring, and on actions again all success or failure depends.” Do you agree with Aristotle? Explain your answer.
2. Explain what Aristotle means when he tells us that “the plot is the imitation of the action; by ‘plot,’ I here mean the arrangement of the incidents.”
3. For Aristotle, “that in virtue of which we ascribe certain qualities to the agents” is called character. According to Aristotle, what role does character play in tragedy? Do you agree with Aristotle?
4. According to Aristotle, “A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it.” Explain why Aristotle thinks that this is important to tragedy.
5. Aristotle says, “Unity of plot does not, as some persons think, consist in the unity of the hero. For infinitely various are the incidents in one man's life which cannot be reduced to unity; and so, too, there are many actions of one man out of which we cannot make one action.” Do you agree with Aristotle? Explain your answer.
Henri Bergson An Animal Which Laughs, and Is Laughed At
Review Questions
1. Explain what Bergson means when he says, “The first point to which attention should be called is that the comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human. A landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly; it will never be laughable.”
2. Explain what Bergson means when he says, “The victim, then, of a practical joke is in a position similar to that of a runner who falls—he is comical for the same reason. The laughable element in both cases consists of a certain mechanical inelasticity, just where one would expect to find the wide awake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being.”
3. Explain what Bergson means when he says, “Absentmindedness, indeed, is not perhaps the actual fountain-head of the comical, but surely it is contiguous to a certain stream of facts and fancies which flows straight from the fountain-head. It is situated, so to say, on one of the great natural watersheds of laughter.”
4. Explain what Bergson means when he says, “Here, too, it is really a kind of automatism that makes us laugh—an automatism, as we have already remarked, closely akin to mere absentmindedness. To realize this more fully, it need only be noted that a comic character is generally comical in proportion to his ignorance of himself. The comical person is unconscious. As though wearing the Ring of Gyges with reverse effect, he becomes invisible to himself while remaining visible to all the world.”
5. Bergson says, “Several have defined man as ‘an animal which laughs.’ They might equally well have defined him as an animal which is laughed at; for if any other animal, or some lifeless object, produces the same effect, it is always because of some resemblance to man, of the stamp he gives it or the use he puts it to.” Do you agree with Bergson? Explain your answer.
George Santayana A Pledge of the Possible
Review Questions
1. Explain what Santayana means when he says, “Psychology attempts what is perhaps impossible, namely, the anatomy of life.” Do you agree with Santayana? Explain your answer.
2. Explain what Santayana means when he says, “Feelings are recognized by their outer expression, and when we try to recall an emotion, we must do so by recalling the circumstances in which it occurred.” Do you agree with Santayana? Explain your answer.
3. Explain what Santayana means when he says that we can “distinguish the material of things from the various forms it may successively assume; we can distinguish, also, the earlier and the later impressions made by the same object; and we can ascertain the coexistence of one impression with another, or with the memory of others. But aesthetic feeling itself has no parts, and this physiology of its causes is not a description of its proper nature.” Do you agree with Santayana? Explain your answer.
4. Explain what Santayana means when he says, “Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what it means can never be said.” Do you think that beauty can be described? Explain your answer.
5. Explain what Santayana means when he says, “Beauty exists for the same reason that the object which is beautiful exists, or the world in which that object lies, or we that look upon both. It is an experience: there is nothing more to say about it.” Do you agree with Santayana? Explain your answer.
Arthur Schopenhauer Art Takes Away the Mist
Review Questions
1. Explain what Schopenhauer means when he says, “Now to desire to communicate such a conception by means of a work of art is a very useless circumlocution, indeed belongs to that playing with the means of art without knowledge of its end which has just been condemned. Therefore a work of art which has proceeded from mere distinct conceptions is always ungenuine.”
2. Explain what Schopenhauer means when he says, “Certainly the artist ought to think in the arranging of his work; but only that thought which was perceived before it was thought has afterwards, in its communication, the power of animating or rousing, and thereby becomes imperishable.”
3. Explain what Schopenhauer means when he says, “all such works, except the perfect masterpieces of the very greatest masters (as, for example, ‘Hamlet,’ ‘Faust,’ the opera of ‘Don Juan’), inevitably contain a mixture of something insipid and wearisome, which in some measure hinders the enjoyment of them. Proofs of this are the ‘Messiah,’ ‘Paradise Lost,’ and the ‘Aeneid.’ But that this is the case is the consequence of the limitation of human powers in general.”
4. Explain what Schopenhauer means when he says, “all the arts speak only the naive and childish language of perception, not the abstract and serious language of reflection; their answer is therefore a fleeting image: not permanent and general knowledge.”
5. Explain what Schopenhauer means when he says, “Thus all the other arts hold up to the questioner a perceptible image, and say, ‘Look here, this is life.’ Their answer, however correct it may be, will yet always afford merely a temporary, not a complete and final, satisfaction. For they always give merely a fragment, an example instead of the rule, not the whole, which can only be given in the universality of the conception.”
Amie L. Thomasson Ontological Innovation in Art
Review Questions
1. Explain what Thomasson means when she says, “As I shall understand it here, the ontological status of a work of art is fundamentally fixed by its existence, identity, and persistence conditions; these fix what category of object it is.”
2. Thomasson says that “the purpose of this paper is to discuss an interesting consequence . . . namely, that there is no set answer to the question of the ontological status of a work of art.” Do you agree with Thomasson? Explain your answer.
3. Explain what Thomasson means when she tells us that “Showing how works of art of ontologically new kinds can be introduced is itself revealing, as it once again will give support to the general idea that such facts as there are about the ontological status of works of art are, at bottom, determined by human intentions and practices.”
4. Explain what Thomasson means when she says, “I have argued elsewhere that the ontological status of paintings, sculptures, symphonies and other familiar kinds of art is at bottom established stipulatively by the beliefs and practices of those who ground and reground the reference of the relevant sortal terms.”
5. Explain what Thomasson means when she says, “It seems that the generic term ‘art’ or ‘work of art’ is like ‘gift’ in this regard: ‘work of art’ appears not to be category-specifying, since it is applied indifferently to physical individuals, processes, performances, abstract works of music, and so on.”
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