Qu'est-ce que la philosophie antique?

Abstract

entails, as an important component of the pleasure the audience takes in tragic drama, the pleasure of moral understanding (Chapter 6, passim). My objections to this type of interpretation are already on record ('Aristotle's Literary Aesthetics', Phronesis 44/3 [1999], 181-98). H. continues to hold that tragedy's transformation and integration of the painful emotions of pity and fear into aesthetic pleasure (p. 203) is parallel to the case described in Poetics Chapter 4 of viewing with pleasure a painting of something we would find unpleasant to view in reality-a parallel that would support his cognitivist interpretation of Aristotle's aesthetics. In the Phronesis piece I pointed out a problematic consequence of this belief: Aristotle in Chapter 4 would be making the plainly false claim that the pleasure we take in the painted image of something disgusting derivesfrom the disgust, rather than despite it. It is no objection to this point to complain as H. does (p. 180 n. 10) that I should not have imported the term 'disgusting' back from the moral context of Chapter 13 to the non-moral one of Chapter 4, but should instead have spoken only of the 'perceptually disagreeable'. My argument took aim at a structural correspondence. To substitute 'perceptually disagreeable' for 'disgusting' leaves the argument no less effective against finding in Chapter 4 the implied grounds of an Aristotelian theory of mimesis. For all that, H.'s Aristotle is an attractive intellectual figure. I could even wish that his Aristotle rather than mine had written the Poetics.

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