Lyric Philosophy

Abstract

With the great merit of Aristotle’s Poetics, the scientific study of poetic utterance and thinking progressively assumed an unquestioned status of privilege, especially in periods such as the European Renaissance. Aristotle, in polemic with Plato, viewed the poetological as being endowed with an important cognito-epistemological dimension. The poet differed from the historian, for example, since while the latter was concerned with relating past events, the former’s vocation rested on excogitating what could happen (Poetics 9, 1). Aristotle concluded that poetry is both more philosophical and elevated an activity than history in that its work is more general and it is concerned with the probable and with necessity. Of equal importance is the fact that poetry’s significance is not a result of being linked to the mythological tradition or its making use of the verse form (Poetics 9, 2ff ). We are reminded by Franco Rella (who has dedicated a lifetime contemplating the qualities of poetic logic) that with Aristotle the poetic becomes a “theoretical activity which has a philosophical nature” and it is “‘more philosophical’ than the pure representation of existence.”1 In our own time, however, while Aristotle’s elevated position in the history of Western Ideas has resisted the savage assault of change and mutation, the scientific respectability of a poetic logic has been greatly demoted on the ontological scale.