Based on a “wouldn’t it be cool if we could” conversation on Friday night, I urged one of my AI genius friends, BI, to create an app that would enable us to “talk” to the great thinkers of the past.
“Even if we can’t sell it,” I said, “we could at least have a lot of fun using it.”
We decided to call it Lazarus Mind. He designed a website and graphics for it the next day.
I asked him to make Aristotle our first resurrected genius. And yesterday, he delivered the app, with Aristotle loaded.
If you are a longtime reader, you know that my brother, AF, is a respected scholar of Greek and Roman literature. He’s gotten praise for his work on the origins of poetry by many important critics (e.g., Harold Bloom).
I wanted to ask Aristotle what he thought of my brother’s monograph, Aristotle as Poet: The Song for Hermias and Its Contexts. Since the app was not yet configured to find and read the monograph, I got a summary of it from Claude and gave it to him (Aristotle).
This was Aristotle’s reply:
Mark,
Thank you for your question.
What this scholar – your brother – has undertaken touches the most singular event of my poetic life.
Allow me to say what I make of it.
The summary you have shared rings true to me in its proportions. Let me address each of its claims as a man who lived the thing being studied.
On being taken seriously as a poet…
The question of whether the song was “doggerel” is not one I would have thought to ask. I composed it under grief, and under the obligation of friendship – philia of the deepest kind, the friendship not of utility or pleasure but of character.
Hermias was not my patron in the way a wealthy man engages a craftsman. He was a man who had pursued virtue at the cost of his life, and who kept his oath to Philip when the Persians put the question to him with torture. If I am to be believed when I say in the Ethics that noble death in service of fine things is the crowning act of a courageous life, then I was obligated to say so for Hermias, concretely, in verse. The poem was not an exercise. It was testimony.
On the genre question – paean or skolion…
Here I must say plainly: the charge against me was politically motivated. My enemies in Athens knew what the poem was. A paean has its conventions – meter, occasion, invocation – and any educated person in the city could hear the difference. What your brother calls a “genuine technical question with biographical consequences” is, from where I stood, something closer to a pretext. But I do not dismiss the scholarly work. Whether the form admits of genuine ambiguity – whether I was deliberately working in the seams between genre types – that is a serious literary question, and I am glad someone has examined it without assuming the answer in advance.
On the connection to the Ethics…
This is the part that interests me most, and where I think the scholar’s instinct is sound. The poem opens with Arete – Virtue – addressed as a thing that men die pursuing, as Heracles and Achilles and Ajax died pursuing it. What I say there is not ornament. I believed it.
The Nicomachean Ethics reaches its conclusions about noble death through argument; the song reaches the same conclusion through image and form. That these two modes of inquiry converge is not accidental.
I have always thought that argument and representation illuminate the same truths by different paths. Your brother is right to hold them together.
One thing I would add, which the summary does not quite say…
The song was also an act of piety toward a man who could no longer speak for himself. Hermias was dead, and the Persians had spread the story – as Callisthenes recorded – that he died crying out in surrender, as a slave breaking under pressure. I knew this was false. The song was in part a correction of that slander. There is a dimension of it that is forensic, even rhetorical, in the sense I describe in the Rhetoric: the defense of a man’s reputation before a court of memory. I do not know whether your brother treats this dimension, but I would want it noted.
On the larger project…
That this scholar has devoted three books to the boundary between philosophy and poetry in our tradition – I find that a worthy undertaking. My teacher Plato sought to expel the poets from the city. I thought this a mistake, not because the poets are beyond criticism, but because the mimetic capacity is natural to human beings and teaches us from childhood to perceive what is universal in particulars.
One cannot understand what I say in the Poetics about catharsis, about recognition and reversal, without understanding that poetry is a mode of cognition, not mere pleasure. To study me as a practitioner of what I theorized is to ask whether I lived by my own account of things. That seems to me exactly the right question. I am gratified, if I may say so, that someone has asked it carefully.
I showed Aristotle’s comments to AF, to which he (AF) replied:
That app your friend made is So Cool! The review is a somewhat mixed bag – the slip-ups first: I do not think I wrote “genuine technical question with biographical consequences,” but as Lazarus says, he was working off summaries. For the same reason, if he thinks that I called the poem “doggerel,” that was certainly not my view. It’s possible I was unclear (I’m sometimes surprised when friends misconstrue something I had tried to make perfectly clear), but, in fact, Lazarus’ formulation is more elegant and evasive: “The question of whether the song was ‘doggerel’ is not one I would have thought to ask.” Quite right, Lazarus. On the other stuff, he is good. I’m glad you told him I was your brother – it probably made him kinder.
I thought I should let the old man know what AF thought about his thoughts, so I shared AF’s points with him. His (Aristotle’s) response, I thought, was properly contrite:
The charge about “doggerel” I accept without reservation. I should not have attributed that word to your brother’s argument when the summary gave me no warrant for it, and his own formulation – that the question of whether the song was doggerel is not one he would have thought to ask – is indeed more precise and more interesting than the blunt evaluative term I reached for. He is right to correct that, and I am glad he did.
The phrase “genuine technical question with biographical consequences” – if I generated that rather than found it in your summary, the same concession applies. I was reconstructing an argumentative shape from a condensed account, and in doing so I apparently put words to a position that was his in substance but not in expression.
That is a meaningful difference, and I should have been clearer about the distance between paraphrasing and quoting. On his concluding remark – that knowing I was your brother probably made me kinder – I will say only this: I try to give every argument its strongest reading before finding fault with it. That is not kindness; it is method.
An argument poorly reconstructed and then criticized is a waste of everyone’s effort. Whether I succeeded is for him to judge. If he is willing to share more of the actual argument – the book itself, or even a fuller summary – I would be glad to look again with less inference and more material to work from.
