Catherine Rowett Literary genres and judgements of taste: some remarks on Aristotle’s remarks about the poetry of Empedocles A number of passages from extant works of Aristotle, and also from his lost dialogue On Poets, suggest that Aristotle was wont to mention Empedocles fairly frequently in his discussions of poetic style and content. Clearly he took Empedocles as a paradigmatic example of a certain kind of philosophical poetry. But did Aristotle think highly of Empedocles as a poet? Did he think much of Empedocles as a philosopher? It has sometimes been thought that he did not, either because the poetry was bad, or because the philosophy was bad, or both. And this supposed testimony to Empedocles’ worthlessness, from Aristotle, the great authority on poetics, has sometimes been taken to show that we too should not regard Empedocles (or the rest of the Presocratics who wrote in verse) as part of the literary canon, or as a poet worthy of the name. Rather, it has been supposed, they would have done better to write such thoughts as they had in plain prose.1 In this paper I shall review Aristotle’s remarks about Empedocles’ writing style, and argue that (contrary to the above popular judgements) Aristotle admires Empedocles for his literary qualities, although he does not entirely approve of the effects that such literary devices have on clarity of communication, which he takes to be a primary virtue in philosophical writing. Furthermore, I shall suggest that one of the passages, in Aristotle’s Poetics, needs to be understood as a comment about what we might call ‚genre‘, or the ‚field‘ or ‚discipline‘ into which a work falls, rather than about poetic value – or philosophical value, for that matter. I shall consider four passages of text that provide relevant evidence for what Aristotle had to say about Empedocles as a poet. In the first passage, Diogenes Laertius quotes from and mentions some works of Aristotle, including the lost dialogue On Poets. The remaining passages are from extant works of Aristotle, the Rhetoric, Metaphysics and the Poetics. || 1 Cf Barnes, (1982), 155 (recently quoted by Gemelli Marciano, (2008), 21). 306 | Catherine Rowett Passage 1 Our first passage is from Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers 8,57: Ἀριστοτέλης δ’ ἐν τῷ Σοφιστῇ φησι πρῶτον Ἐμπεδοκλέα ῥητορικὴν εὑρεῖν, Ζήνωνα δὲ διαλεκτικήν. ἐν δὲ τῷ Περὶ ποιητῶν φησιν ὅτι καὶ Ὁμηρικὸς ὁ Ἐμπεδοκλῆς καὶ δεινὸς περὶ τὴν φράσιν γέγονεν, μεταφορητικός τε ὢν καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις τοῖς περὶ ποιητικὴν ἐπιτεύγμασι χρώμενος.2 This passage, taken at face value, seems to say that Aristotle was an admirer of the literary qualities of Empedocles’ work. Diogenes mentions not only the dialogue On Poets, but also another lost work by Aristotle, The Sophist. In the latter, Diogenes says, Aristotle described Empedocles as the first to discover rhetoric (ῥητορικὴν εὑρεῖν). In the former, he described Empedocles as ‚Homeric‘ (Ὁμηρικός), clever at using linguistic expression (δεινὸς περὶ τὴν φράσιν), and ‚metaphorical‘, using the full range of literary devices of a poet. Diogenes goes on to mention that Aristotle alluded to a range of ‚other‘ poems by Empedocles (including a poem about the diabasis of Xerxes, and a prologue to Apollo), as well as tragedies and political texts. This implies that the earlier comments about style were intended as comments about Empedocles’ philosophical poem, which had been mentioned earlier (D.L. 8,54) under the title Katharmoi.3 Taken at face value, these comments seem to express an admiration for Empedocles, both for his pioneering use of techniques of rhetorical discourse (assuming that that is what is meant by the idea that he ‚invented‘ or ‚discovered‘ rhetoric), and for his literary style and the ingenuity of his use of language. Is this genuinely Aristotle’s view? Aristotle’s work On Poets was a dialogue but Diogenes does not indicate which character in the dialogue is uttering these positive evaluations of Empedocles as a poet. Since dialogues can include characters who present opinions that are to be rejected or debated, and other characters who react against those views, we cannot simply assume that Aristo- || 2 „In his Sophist, Aristotle says that Empedocles was the first to invent rhetoric, and Zeno the first to invent dialectic. In his On Poets he says that Empedocles is Homeric in his style and skilled in his use of language, being metaphorical and using the other devices of poetry.“ The second sentence (Fr. 70 Rose) is fragment 10 of Janko’s collection of the fragments of On Poets in Janko, (1987). See Janko’s note at p.193. Also discussion in Trépanier, (2004) 20f.. 3 This need not mean the Katharmoi as distinct from the Physics: the two may be the same thing. On Diogenes’ use of the titles Καθαρμοί and Περὶ φύσεως see Osborne, (1987) and Trépanier, (2004), 1‒30. Literary genres and judgements of taste | 307 tle himself was unambiguously endorsing the judgements that Diogenes is quoting, or commending in his own voice the quality of Empedocles’ writing style. Still, we can perhaps lay that worry aside. At the very least Aristotle is imagining a character, in his On Poets, who is prepared to speak in favour of the Homeric quality of Empedocles’ verse style and of his use of metaphor and other poetic devices. Such a view must be supposed to be plausible. Arguably Diogenes knew that it was what Aristotle himself meant to assert. Passage 2 Our second passage is from Aristotle’s Rhetoric 3,1,1404a24‒29. After considering some other aspects of constructing a fine speech, such as the structure of the speech, and the use of rhetorical devices to win over the audience, in the third book Aristotle turns to the language itself and the essence of good style in writing or speaking Greek. He tells us that when speaking in public (he is thinking primarily of addressing the jury in a democratic court of law) one should use appropriate words that are not ambiguous or vacuous.4 He cites Empedocles as an example of someone who does not do what the orator is being advised to do, but rather speaks in an oracular fashion using vague and mystical terminology. Soothsayers and oracles, Aristotle explains, use a certain kind of generic and imprecise mode of discourse, which is what enables them to predict events and always be right, because whatever the event, it will turn out to fit the prediction, as in the famous case of the ambiguous oracle that predicted the demise of a great empire for Croesus.5 Aristotle does not recommend that the orator should use this kind of ambiguity in his speech, unless, of course, that effect is what he is after. Such discourse belongs, he says, to those who have nothing to say but wish to appear to be saying something. This might seem, on the surface, to imply a negative judgement about Empedocles’ oracular style. It might look as if it conflicts with the approving claims we found in passage 1, about Empedocles’ place as the founder of rhetoric. But here we should take account of the context. Aristotle is lecturing on Rhetoric. Evidently he disapproves of using poetic and oracular vagueness in prose oratory, which is intended to communicate a precise and important message about what actually happened and so on, but it does not follow that such discourse is || 4 Arist. Rh. 3,5,1407a31f. 5 Arist. Rh. 3,5,1407a37f. 308 | Catherine Rowett a bad thing in poetry. Earlier, in the first chapter of this book, Aristotle suggested that the poets were the first to develop the art of verbal communication, before professional oratory got going, and as a result the earliest oratory had initially inherited a somewhat poetic style. ἐπεὶ δ᾽ οἱ ποιηταί, λέγοντες εὐήθη, διὰ τὴν λέξιν ἐδόκουν πορίσασθαι τὴν δόξαν, διὰ τοῦτο ποιητικὴ πρώτη ἐγένετο λέξις, οἷον ἡ Γοργίου, καὶ νῦν ἔτι οἱ πολλοὶ τῶν ἀπαιδεύτων τοὺς τοιούτους οἴονται διαλέγεσθαι κάλλιστα. τοῦτο δ᾽ οὐκ ἔστιν, ἀλλ᾽ ἑτέρα λόγου καὶ ποιήσεως λέξις ἐστίν.6 Aristotle cites Gorgias as an instance of this phenomenon.7 He then explains that uneducated people tend to suppose that good rhetoric should always be like that, and that a poetic style is best in oratory. But no, says Aristotle.8 Style in poetry (ποίησις) is different from good style in oratory (λόγος). So when Aristotle expresses disapproval of poetic style in oratory, he is not talking about good style in general.9 His arguments do not apply to good style in poetry, or even in tragedy.10 Since his comments apply only to his current topic of study, namely oratory, we cannot infer that he disapproves in any way of Empedocles’ poetic style, given that Empedocles is in fact a poet.11 So is Aristotle offering any kind of criticism of Empedocles when he says that Empedocles is inclined to use vague and mystical terminology in his poetry (Rh. 3,1,1407a32‒37)? Could this be considered a fault? Or is Aristotle just observing that Empedocles is engaged in the writing of poetry, not prose dialectic, and assuming that such a mode of expression might be perfectly fine in poetry. „It works,“ he says, „because the immense amount of circumlocution mystifies the listeners so that they are affected in the way crowds listening to soothsayers are affected.”12 || 6 Arist. Rh. 3,1,1404a24‒29: „But since the poets seemed to acquire a reputation on the basis of style, even when what they uttered was banal, for this reason, rhetorical style was at first poetic (e.g. that of Gorgias). And even now the ignorant οἱ πολλοί consider that people who speak like that are the most stylish speakers. But that’s not actually so, but the style of oratory is different from the style of poetry.“ 7 Arist. Rh. 3,1,1404a20‒26. 8 Arist. Rh. 3,1,1404a28. 9 Arist. Rh. 3,1,1404a29. 10 Aristotle argues that tragedians too have moved in the direction of a more prosaic style in their dramatic dialogue, assimilating the discourse for tragedy to that of dialectic (Rh. 3,1,1404a29f.). 11 Arist. Rh. 3,1,1404a37f. 12 Arist. Rh. 1407a35‒37. Literary genres and judgements of taste | 309 Is this a good thing? It certainly seems to imply that Empedocles’ oracular style gives a false impression of meaning more than it does really mean, and that it has a powerful and slightly irrational effect on the listeners. Is it inappropriate for a poet to have or desire to have such an effect? Aristotle does not say so. He does say that it is inappropriate in oratory, but he seems to think that it is fairly widespread in poetic discourse of a particular kind, of which Empedocles is simply Aristotle’s favourite example, and there is no suggestion that it is poor style in that kind of mystical poetry, where it belongs. Indeed, Aristotle probably means to say that Empedocles is rather good at it, in so far as that is what he is trying to do. It seems, then, that Aristotle thinks that Empedocles writes poetry in a mystical or prophetic style and that he does it rather well and achieves the desired effect. What works in that case is all very well, if mantic is your genre. What about philosophy, then? Does Aristotle advise the philosopher to use the oracular and poetic style of writing? Probably not, I think. But here, again, we need to make a distinction. Aristotle could consistently hold both that Empedocles is an excellent poet, who is extremely good at the techniques required for mystical psychagogia, and also that his style is not one that is recommended for communicating philosophical opinions. One could in theory be a good poet, and also a good philosopher, yet it might not be advisable to use poetic discourse to communicate one’s philosophical views. This, I think, is Aristotle’s view on Empedocles. Passage 3 This view seems to be compatible with what we find in our third passage, from the first book of the Metaphysics: ἐπεὶ δὲ καὶ τἀναντία τοῖς ἀγαθοῖς ἐνόντα ἐφαίνετο ἐν τῇ φύσει, καὶ οὐ μόνον τάξις καὶ τὸ καλὸν ἀλλὰ καὶ ἀταξία καὶ τὸ αἰσχρόν, καὶ πλείω τὰ κακὰ τῶν ἀγαθῶν καὶ τὰ φαῦλα τῶν καλῶν, οὕτως ἄλλος τις φιλίαν εἰσήνεγκε καὶ νεῖκος, ἑκάτερον ἑκατέρων αἴτιον τούτων. εἰ γάρ τις ἀκολουθοίη καὶ λαμβάνοι πρὸς τὴν διάνοιαν καὶ μὴ πρὸς ἃ ψελλίζεται λέγων Ἐμπεδοκλῆς, εὑρήσει τὴν μὲν φιλίαν αἰτίαν οὖσαν τῶν ἀγαθῶν τὸ δὲ νεῖκος τῶν κακῶν· ὥστ’ εἴ τις φαίη τρόπον τινὰ καὶ λέγειν καὶ πρῶτον λέγειν τὸ κακὸν καὶ τὸ ἀγαθὸν ἀρχὰς 310 | Catherine Rowett Ἐμπεδοκλέα, τάχ’ ἂν λέγοι καλῶς, εἴπερ τὸ τῶν ἀγαθῶν ἁπάντων αἴτιον αὐτὸ τἀγαθόν ἐστι [καὶ τῶν κακῶν τὸ κακόν].13 Here Aristotle is not really discussing or evaluating poetic style. He is tracing the origin of the idea that there are two opposed principles that explain the world. His remarks about Empedocles’ style, in this case, are an aside, an expression of mild frustration, due to the fact that Empedocles does not straightforwardly say what Aristotle would like him to say straight out, namely that there are two ἀρχαί, and they are the source of good and evil respectively. That is what Empedocles really meant, Aristotle thinks, and that is what qualifies him as a pioneer in philosophy, being the first to identify a pair of opposed principles and explain the duality of nature and of value that way, as a struggle between two opposing tendencies. If that was what Empedocles meant, then why didn’t he just say so? The confusing metaphors, such as Love and Strife, are, for Aristotle, just a kind of lisping baby-talk (ψελλίζεται) which leaves us to do the work in order to get clarity about what was really intended – the philosophical point that Empedocles was trying to get across, only he didn’t have the vocabulary to express it properly. We might think this reductive attitude is somewhat philistine, and perhaps a little blind. Aristotle is alarmingly confident that we’ve got the real point of it all if we just delete all the imagery and reformulate it in Aristotle’s language of ‚principles of good and evil‘. Whether that is the right way to read Empedocles remains controversial to this day. Even now there are some who would rationalise Empedocles as Aristotle does, finding there a cosmological theory, while others take the mystical and religious content as fundamental and not to be demythologised away as just so much poetic frippery. But that debate is not my current concern. Whether Aristotle was right or wrong to think that Empedocles’ message could be expressed more accurately using technical terminology in place of the || 13 Arist. Metaph. A,4,984b32‒985a10: „But since there seemed to be, in nature, things opposed to the good things, and there seemed to be disorder and ugliness, not just order and beauty, and there seemed to be more of the bad things than of the good, and more of the base than of the noble, for this reason someone else introduced love and strife to be severally the explanation of these things. For if you follow what Empedocles actually meant, and not just his lisping baby-talk, you find that love is the explanation of the good things and strife of the bad. So that if we said that (in a way) Empedocles said (and was the first to say) that evil and good were principles we’d probably be right – if, that is, the explanation of all good things is itself good (and so on).“ For the verb ψελλίζεσθαι (lisping baby talk) used of philosophy in its infancy cf. Arist. Metaph. A,10,993a15ff. Literary genres and judgements of taste | 311 mysticism, and that it would lose nothing of importance if the poetic language was removed, this passage (Metaph. A,4,984b32‒985a10) says nothing whatever about how good the poetic style is, as such. Aristotle is not saying that the language and style that Empedocles used was undesirable as poetry. All he is saying is that philosophy is a lot clearer if it is not written like that. So we are still allowed to think that Empedocles was a great mystic and a great poet. Passage 4 Our fourth passage is also compatible with this thought. In the opening pages of the Poetics Aristotle argues for a new and more appropriate way of dividing the range of literary and performance arts. He wants to mark off the subset of these arts that is to be the subject of his treatise on ‚poetics‘. In order to explain what he is talking about, he needs first to carve up the performing arts in a different way from the way that has been customary. Indeed modern readers are also often confused for a different reason, because Aristotle is carving them up the genres in a way that is quite different from our current accustomed divisions, and does not respect our conventions of terminology. So the work that he is doing, to draw a boundary round what he is going to call ποίησις, is not the boundary that we would draw around what we would call ‚poetry‘. The passage that concerns us now is the section in which Aristotle is trying to explain that whether something qualifies as ποίησις (in Aristotle’s new and unfamiliar sense of that term), should not depend upon whether it uses words or melody or rhythm, nor whether it is written in metre, nor which metre it is written in. What matters, for Aristotle, is whether it dramatises or portrays something – whether it is miming something, we might say. Since one can mime and dramatise things without words, and equally one can write works that are in verse and metrical but not miming anything, the boundary that Aristotle is drawing does not coincide with the limits of metrical or verse writing. Indeed it includes things that are not writing or the spoken word at all. Hence things that we might happily call poetry – such as didactic poetry, hymns, metrical psalms and so on – do not interest Aristotle here, because his interest is in the miming type, for the purposes of this treatise. Those other verse compositions might be fine examples of what they are, and they might be of interest in some other subject of study, and in ordinary life they might be called ‚poetry‘, but they are not the topic of the Poetics. 312 | Catherine Rowett πλὴν οἱ ἄνθρωποί γε συνάπτοντες τῷ μέτρῳ τὸ ποιεῖν ἐλεγειοποιοὺς τοὺς δὲ ἐποποιοὺς ὀνομάζουσιν, οὐχ ὡς κατὰ τὴν μίμησιν ποιητὰς ἀλλὰ κοινῇ κατὰ τὸ μέτρον προσαγορεύοντες· καὶ γὰρ ἂν ἰατρικὸν ἢ φυσικόν τι διὰ τῶν μέτρων ἐκφέρωσιν, οὕτω καλεῖν εἰώθασιν· οὐδὲν δὲ κοινόν ἐστιν Ὁμήρῳ καὶ Ἐμπεδοκλεῖ πλὴν τὸ μέτρον, διὸ τὸν μὲν ποιητὴν δίκαιον καλεῖν, τὸν δὲ φυσιολόγον μᾶλλον ἢ ποιητήν.14 Here Aristotle gives an example of a genre of metrical writing that does not fit his new category of ποίησις. His example is the philosophical work of Empedocles.15 Although we would habitually call that a poem, it cannot be included in the Poetics, not because of its metre (for it is in the same metre as Homer, who does count), nor because it is lacking in style or Homeric language or literary devices, but simply because it doesn’t mime or dramatise anything. Empedocles writes about nature, and his mode of presentation is not by imitation or dramatisation of the events and processes. So Empedocles is a φυσιολόγος rather than a dramatist. Aristotle is revising the earlier practice of classification by metre, which would lump Homer and Empedocles together. Aristotle wants to take them apart, because of the difference in content and delivery which he considers more important than content. Homer’s is dramatic writing and Empedocles’ is not. The fact that they use the same metre is, Aristotle thinks, no reason at all for insisting that they must both be called ‚poet‘.16 We might have hoped that Aristotle would be less dogmatic. Should he not have stopped to ask some deeper questions about Empedocles. For instance, we might ask whether it is really the case that Empedocles does not ‚dramatise‘ the natural and creative processes that are the subject of his poem, or use his poetic || 14 Arist. Po. 1,1447b13‒20: „Notwithstanding people have fastened upon naming in accordance with the metre: they say one lot ‚writes elegiacs‘ and others are ‚epic poets‘, not calling them ‚poets‘ on the basis of the fact that they engage in dramatic creativity, but classifying them and designating them in terms of their metre. For even if what they publish by way of their metre is some medical topic or some bit of natural science people still habitually describe them according to the metre. Yet other than the metre, there is nothing at all in common between (sc. say) Homer and Empedocles. So it’s correct to call Homer a ‚poet‘, but it would be better to call Empedocles a ‚science writer‘ rather than a ‚poet‘.“ 15 Aristotle gives no indication here of any familiarity with more than one work of Empedocles, although Diogenes seems to imply that in On Poets Aristotle also mentioned a historical poem and a hymn to Apollo by Empedocles (D.L. 8,57, passage 1 above). Here he is surely alluding to what we know as the Physics. 16 Similar moves are made by Menander Rhetor (1 ,p. 333,12‒15 Spengel), who lists Empedocles along with Parmenides along with most Orphic poetry, as physikoi, in a classification of hymn writers; Lactantius (inst. 2,12,4) who lists Empedocles along with Lucretius and Varro, and Quintilian (inst. 1,4,4), again listing Empedocles, Lucretius and Varro. See also the Scholium to Dionysius Thrax p. 168,8‒13 Hilgard (Testimonium DK 31A 25). Janko, (1987), 70 (ad locum) confirms the interpretation offered here. See also Lucas (1968), 60f. Literary genres and judgements of taste | 313 skills to mimic or imitate the things that are portrayed there.17 So Empedocles would count as a poet, even if we define poet as one who creates dramatic representations in verse or other art forms. Perhaps Aristotle is being a little too firm in excluding scientific verse writing from the class of dramatic literature, or at least that Empedocles is not the best example to choose if you are looking for someone who lacks any kind of dramatic μίμησις in their poetry. Still, I should repeat, this passage of the Poetics is not intended to be any kind of criticism Empedocles’ written style.18 Aristotle is simply redefining the word poetry, so that poetry in the strict sense is defined by dramatic method, not by metre or verse style. This places Empedocles outside the canon of poets, when ‚poet‘ is used in that new sense, but it does not suggest that the quality of the verse or its literary merits were any the less for that. It is a genre distinction, rather than an evaluative one. It is clear that we still do not exactly have a proper term for the genre that Aristotle is trying to define (we certainly don’t use ‚poet‘ for it). Perhaps performance art is the best we can do. Perhaps it is easier to devise a recognisable term for the genre in which Empedocles was working, which Aristotle seems to call ‚physiology‘. We might say didactic or scientific verse. In any case, what Aristotle is saying is not that he was not good at what he was doing, but that the genre in which Empedocles was working is not what he means by his restricted use of the word ποίησις. What of the earlier remarks in passages 2 and 3 about Empedocles’ oracular style and lisping vocabulary? Here too we might complain that Aristotle was a little philistine in his lack of appreciation for the imagery and metaphors. Maybe Empedocles is more of a poet than he allows, and dramatising the natural process as a kind of love story in the heavens is a contribution to understanding and explaining why things are thus and so. We might think that Empedocles is not giving a misleading impression of having said more about why it all happened than he really has, and that he has not just given the illusion of saying something when he mentions love and bloodshed and punishment. We might think that those motifs are in some ways more informative and explanatory than the language of ‚principles of good and evil‘ that Aristotle prefers to find in scientific and philosophical writing. || 17 See Osborne, (1997), 32 18 To be fair, most scholars of Empedocles, and of Aristotle, appear to understand Aristotle correctly here, and see no denigration of Empedocles’s literary style. The only representative of the erroneous view that I have been able to find in print is Wright, (1997), 3‒5. 314 | Catherine Rowett Conclusion Why have literary critics and classicists been so ready to dismiss Empedocles from the canon of great poets of antiquity? One possibility is that we have for a long time followed a hasty misreading of Aristotle, and dismissed Empedocles as a bad poet because we thought that Aristotle was saying that he was a bad poet. Another possibility is that we too, like Aristotle, operate with a certain paradigm of what it is to be a poet – not Aristotle’s criterion of dramatic mimesis, but a different one –, so that we somehow suppose that philosophy or science or religion is not really what a poet should be writing, and that mere stylistic brilliance is not enough to make a person a great poet? Perhaps we too hold that great literature should typically present a great story, and create a vivid world of the imagination in words. And perhaps there is some truth in that, for is it not correct that the mere fact that you write your philosophy in verse does not make you a great poet, however nicely it is done? But then Empedocles is surely not just writing philosophy in verse. Does he not spin a good story? Does he not create a world peopled by mythical figures and tragic events, a vivid world that captures the imagination? Is he not, perhaps, after all a creator poet, in that paradigmatic sense of poet, too? Bibliography Barnes (1982): Jonathan Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers, London. Gemelli Marciano (2008): M. Laura Gemelli Marciano, „Images and Experience: at the roots of Parmenides’ Aletheia“, Ancient Philosophy 28, 21‒48. Janko (1987): Richard Janko, Aristotle Poetics with the Tractatus Coislinianus, A Hypothetical Reconstruction of Poetics II and the Fragments of On Poets, Indianapolis. Lucas (1968): Aristotle: Poetics. Introd., Comm. and Appendixes by Donald W. Lucas, Oxford. Osborne (1987): Catherine Osborne, „Empedocles Recycled“, Classical Quarterly 37, 24‒50. Osborne (1997): Catherine Osborne, „Was verse the default form for Presocratic Philosophy?“, in: Catherine Atherton (ed.), Form and Content in Didactic Poetry, Bari, 23‒35. Trépanier (2004): Simon Trépanier, Empedocles: an interpretation, London/New York. Wright (1997): Maureen R. Wright, „Philosopher poets: Parmenides and Empedocles“, in: Catherine Atherton (ed.), Form and Content in Didactic Poetry, Bari, 1‒22.