Thread 24505695

If Plato hated and Aristotle loved poetry, why is Plato's works so literary but Aristotle's so bland?

>>24505695 (OP)
You have begun your thread with a fallacy. Plato didn't hate poetry; he thought it was dangerous.

>>24505695 (OP)
1. Plato didn't hate poetry, he had very complicated and sometimes contradictory views on the matter, because the dialogue form does not lay down the law on any matter, but is an evolving, dialectical search for truth. Sometimes he says poets are divinely inspired, sometimes he says they tell lies.

2. We've lost Aristotle's dialogues, which were written like Plato's dialogues, and were his most important works in the ancient world. According to Cicero, they were more beautifully written than Plato's dialogues.

>>24505699
He thought that you should ignore rhetorics, unlike Aristotle, yet their works show otherwise

>>24505702
>2. We've lost Aristotle's dialogues, which were written like Plato's dialogues, and were his most important works in the ancient world. According to Cicero, they were more beautifully written than Plato's dialogues.
Were there any memorable analogies in the ones that survived? (like Plato's cave, chariot, the sun)

>>24505695 (OP)
Plato doesn't hate poetry at all. He has reservations about it (two examples outside the Republic: 1) in the Apology, the lack of understanding that poets contemporary to Socrates had in what they were doing, 2) in the Euthyphro, the tendency to take the myths the poets wrote about as simply true), but the Phaedrus' big central myth is a palinode in the manner of Stesichorus, in the Symposium poetry is held up in the Diotima speech as one of two examples by which mortals may achieve qualified immortality, and even in the midst of the critiques of poetry in the Republic, it's said frequently how beautiful the works of the poets like Homer are. And let's not forget that the Republic readily uses works of poetry to develop its contents--the comedies of Aristophanes (the Birds is a model for developing a new radical city, the Frogs informs the discussions of poetry, the Assemblywomen is used for the first two of the "three waves"), Hesiod's Works & Days (for the noble lie about metal souls and the devolution of regimes), and Sophocles (the tyrant in books 8 & 9 is Sophocles' Oedipus). Now, the critiques of poetry in the Republic surely seem harsh, but they don't stand simply, since *Eros* is also critiqued in the Republic and Eros is treated in the Symposium and Phaedrus as the philosophical passion par excellence.

As for the difference in literary styles between Plato and Aristotle, that's also up for contention, since Aristotle also wrote dialogues that were appreciated in antiquity, but which we only have access to via some quotations, paraphrases, and summaries. The works we have by Aristotle seem to be works meant for within his school, and it may be the case that Aristotle thought it was important to reach his more skilled students by putting the more frank work of his activities before them. Plato was writing in light of Socrates' death, and may have felt it was important to justify philosophy to those who could read in order to secure the activity for future generations. But then, compare something like the Phaedrus with the Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, and Philebus, which come across as his most technical and difficult writings.

Plato was somehow right about poets. You just have to see how videoessayists base like 70% of their argumentation on movie examples like if the fictional setting of a likely midwit director or scriptwriter was a proof of anything by itself. It's not that fiction needs to be banned or censored but I can see the concern.

>>24505741
So your concern is with the quality of the author? Because he's talking about Homer here.

>>24505708
Nta, but what seems to survive in testimony and quotation doesn't seem to really contain such great analogies. They seem to be polished relatively short dialogues.

>>24505760
Were Aristotle's dialogues so beautifully written, you would expect that some of the core ideas, in form of their analogies in Plato's case for example, would survive.

>>24505703
>He thought that you should ignore rhetorics
>IF Plato hated poetry
>if

>>24505769
You really see no connection between his view of poetry and rhetorics in communicating ideas?

>>24505751
Even if the author's quality is excepcional, aesthetics is rather dangerous for philosophy, because persuasion can compensate for lacking logical and factual consistency. But, in my opinion, the worst usage of aesthetics can be found in aesthetical philosophers like Nietzsche rather than in philosophical artists, because aesthetical philosophers try to explicitly grasp universal truths from the anecdotal (and therefore filling the gaps with intuitive ass pulls) while philosophical artists tend to remain in the anecdotal so that their work does not turn into a sacred text or pamphlet. So, for me, the tier list for honest approach to truth would be: Autistic logical philosophy > literature > aesthetical philosophy. All of them can contribute to human knowledge but the likelihood that they become grifters is higher the lower the tier.

>>24505765
There's more to beautiful writing than striking analogies. Cicero's comments are about technical style: the rhythm, choice and appropriateness of diction, how clear sentences are, etc. If you compare passages from, e.g., the first half of Plato's Meno, where Socrates is trying to show Meno how to formulate a definition, Meno's Greek is straightforward, and Socrates' is sometimes contorted and difficult. Cicero's going by the standards developed by the Alexandrine grammarians, who had written on the these technical elements.

>>24505791
>There's more to beautiful writing than striking analogies
Well, imagery is certainly the heart of poetry, which is why I was referring to analogies in relation to the topic of the thread.

>>24505702
>According to Cicero
opinion discarded

>>24505789
Nta, but I think you miss the purposes of "aesthetically oriented" philosophers like Nietzsche. Nietzsche, to use your example, writes with rhetorical purposes in mind, consider some of these "rules for writing" he shared with Lou Salome in a letter:

>1. Of prime necessity is life: a style should live.
>2. Style should be suited to the specific person with whom you wish to communicate. (The law of mutual relation.)
>3. First, one must determine precisely “what-and-what do I wish to say and present,” before you may write. Writing must be mimicry.
>4. Since the writer lacks many of the speaker’s means, he must in general have for his model a very expressive kind of presentation of necessity, the written copy will appear much paler.
>5. The richness of life reveals itself through a richness of gestures. One must learn to feel everything — the length and retarding of sentences, interpunctuations, the choice of words, the pausing, the sequence of arguments — like gestures.
>6. Be careful with periods! Only those people who also have long duration of breath while speaking are entitled to periods. With most people, the period is a matter of affectation.
>7. Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it.
>8. The more abstract a truth which one wishes to teach, the more one must first entice the senses.
>9. Strategy on the part of the good writer of prose consists of choosing his means for stepping close to poetry but never stepping into it.
>10. It is not good manners or clever to deprive one’s reader of the most obvious objections. It is very good manners and very clever to leave it to one’s reader alone to pronounce the ultimate quintessence of our wisdom.

Nietzsche recognizes that not every reader is going to be able to follow an argument or inquiry in its intricacies, hence, you write with some degree of bombast to appeal to some, repel others, and you figure that those actually able to follow something are capable of working it out themselves. And that's true of Plato as well; in the Republic, the "mixed" type of poetry is descriptive of the text of the Republic itself.

>>24505792
That's true in part, yes, but what makes Homer's poetry "poetic" is that it's speech put in lines of certain lengths and rhythms. The Iliad isn't just the similes.

>>24505797
I found it interesting but it is very far from my understanding of philosophy.

>It is not good manners or clever to deprive one’s reader of the most obvious objections. It is very good manners and very clever to leave it to one’s reader alone to pronounce the ultimate quintessence of our wisdom.

What if the reader is too arrogant and becomes fixated on an easy to refute objection to the incomplete argument and they thereafter have a worse opinion about the text? I am used to refute beforehand as many objections as I can, which may look condescending or boring for smarter readers if those are too easy, but the purpose is to widen human knowledge even for less intelligent or arrogant readers, because just for the sole fact that they have started reading they are not fully arrogant nor stupid and deserve to understand as much as possible. I don't understand philosophy as a filter for smart people but as a means to educate.

>>24505855
>What if the reader is too arrogant and becomes fixated on an easy to refute objection to the incomplete argument and they thereafter have a worse opinion about the text? I am used to refute beforehand as many objections as I can, which may look condescending or boring for smarter readers if those are too easy, but the purpose is to widen human knowledge even for less intelligent or arrogant readers, because just for the sole fact that they have started reading they are not fully arrogant nor stupid and deserve to understand as much as possible. I don't understand philosophy as a filter for smart people but as a means to educate.
I imagine all of these sorts of authors are aware of that problem. In Plato's case, "so be it," as long as they don't come out vicious on account of his writing, whereas I think Nietzsche is more indifferent to such a reader, "they're not my preferred audience."

The notion of philosophical writing acting as a filter is pretty old, the Neoplatonist commentators on Aristotle (setting aside whether they sufficiently understand him themselves) account for his general obscurity in writing as a pedagogical filter to make the sufficiently interested work through the difficulties, track terms carefully, infer missing premises, and so on, and those readers not interested or capable of doing so can either be led to be more satisfied with someone like Epictetus, or can drop the whole matter so working teachers don't have to waste their time.

And that's not to say that your approach isn't valuable; I don't think a really great reading of Plato in particular can come only out of nodding one's head uncritically. But the approach has to be mixed with some amount of charity that these writers are aware of the most obvious objections as well as some of the deeper ones (one has to recall that Plato wrote the Parmenides, which criticizes certain positions about the Forms, or the Cleitophon, which criticizes how Socrates seems to endlessly interrogate without coming to fully clear answers, or the Sophist, which seems to take seriously in one definition of sophistry whether Socrates' activity is in fact sophistical, even if different from someone like Hippias or Protagoras). One also has to remember that the modern attitude towards philosophy, as open love of truth shared frankly with all readers, was shaped by the Enlightenment, and that philosophers living in illiberal times under illiberal regimes were aware that they could be open to only such an extent. Most readers will not be philosophers and so need to be handled by a more or less gentle rhetoric (Nietzsche thought his thoughts needed to be expressed with exaggerated bombast and polemics in order to shake certain readers).

>>24505702
>>24505793
In my country, Cicero's name literally means "manboobs guy".

>>24505875
Nietzsche did write to shock in cases, but it's also difficult to assess one thought without having made your way through nearly his whole bibliography. If you go the route that Nietzsche required standards derived from nature then you miss out on the Nietzsche that created his own standards. This was one of the reasons Strauss placed him in the 3rd wave, if you've completed the process then happiness isn't something man intrinsically seeks or knows, the result is basically a creation of a necessary lie that self-perpetuates based on struggle and is pessimistic by default.

Heidegger thought the result if undertaken produced a Zarathustra but Zarathustra can really only speak for the someone inside.

I read Deleuze's treatment on Nietzsche and it was quite good. He viewed Nietzsche as Kant's primary rival and had the power to remove truth from the Kantian system and turn it into interpretation. This attempt to desystematize results in systematization so Nietzsche still gets stuck with his usual dilemma of instead of asking what is truth he gets left with which truth do you want. In order to do this Nietzsche has to remove his claim for transcendence but he doesn't have the criteria to make this arsenal of truths relativistic so he's just left with perspectives.

The gentle rhetoric vs bombast is part of Nietzsche which is why his responses to so many schools of thought work when applied even if they make no sense when you read them. There's always at least 2 Nietzsche's, one wants to know what the other person's ascetic is, the other is the ascetic. Both will go overboard if only to validate but the end result may not be detrimental from Nietzsche's epistemology which creates more paradoxes since his epistemology was existence.

>>24505765
They were well written but they weren’t philosophically sophisticated (with a couple exceptions), they were meant to be popular. The Neoplatonists mostly cared about the autistic, rigorous stuff so those were the works that survived.

>>24506067
That is all very interesting, but I don't have anything to say in response; my point was only to show >>24505855 that it's not simply sufficient to go into an author's works as a belligerent, but that they require some charity, since they're likely aware of a number of objections, and because they write with some awareness of their potential audiences, and accomodate accordingly. Nietzsche's just a great example because he has lots of passages about how to read him well or badly, and comments on his aims in writing, both in the published works and his notebooks.

>/lit/ is for midwits
>check out my style tho
Plato won

>>24506136
I see what you mean, I wasn't necessarily trying to make an encompassing response. In the case of Nietzsche if you make it through his bibliography then whatever intent you may have doesn't matter which was part of your point. In the case of Nietzsche his dilemma still stands and the other anon has a point that has also been validated in the sense you are now part of his dilemma in searching for more perspective.