Plato V Aristotle

So Aristotle and Plato set the debate for the last two thousand years in the West as to what life, reality and man might be. As I writer of experimental work, I rather reject Aristotle's linearities of narrative, of beginnings, middles and ends. And I certainly reject his notion of catharsis in art, leaving the audience purged of the emotions the artist has evoked in their art, so that they leave the theatre/library or whatever in perfect, moderate equilibrium, rather than having their passions aroused by the issues of the art work. A fundamentally conservative notion of art's function, rather than allowing it revolutionary possibilities. 

I am more sympathetic to the work of Plato, though not his somewhat elitist politics as expressed in "The Republic". But what I take from him, is his notion that all material things in life are but poor copies or representations of their ideal form. Now I don't believe in the notion of an ideal form for each thing, but I do credit the notion that what we take for reality is an illusion, or a representation or a symbol. Usually a symbol given a name in language, which seems to echo the notion of nominalism, that we class things together in groups by similarity of their features or functions and that these are given a single name (or noun) by which they are all known, whether they are a good match or not. 

But there really is only one way to settle this properly for once and for all and I present it to you below.

Glossary - Ancient Greek

Amanuensis - someone employed to write down the words of others

The Symposium - Plato's treatise on love

Encomium - high praise or eulogy

Helios - Ancient Greek God of the sun

Hemlock - Socrates was sentenced to death by Athens, the method by drinking the poison hemlock

Ontology - the study of the nature of existence / being

Academy - The name of the philosophy school established by Plato

Lyceum - The name of the philosophy school established by Aristotle

Periphrastic - circumlocution

Philosopher Kings - Plato's suggestion as to who should rule societies; the philosopher kinds would be the wisest through their study (which would allow them to approach an understanding of the ideal forms), but they would also be disinterested rulers as they would be forbidden to have money or own property.

Dialectic - formal method of logical deduction, involving thesis, its antithesis and then a synthesis of the two to provide a truth

Pangloss - character invented by Voltaire who is an eternal optimist - therefore Plato uses an anachronism to back up his claim that Aristotle is being anachronistic...

War in the Peloponnese - One of the wars between Athens and Sparta

Hoplite - Greek soldier

Platonic Ideal - Plato's theory of Ideal Forms

Datum of My Senses - Aristotle was an empiricist

Puppet Show/ Shadow - Plato's metaphor or the cave which underlines his entire theory of material reality and ideal forms

Plato's Cave -  see shadow above

Sophist - Plato uses the voices of the Sophists to argue with Socrates, Sophists were intellectually wooly and their arguments ultimately could not hold water

Polis - The Greek city state such as Athens or Sparta

Demos - The population entitled to vote in Athens

Hippocrates - The father of medicine, hence the "Hippocratic Oath"

Catharsis - Aristotle's notion of the drama on stage being such as to purge the audience of the emotions aroused by the play's action by the end of the play, so that they are left in perfect equilibrium rather than worked up. 

Lysistrata - Play by Aristophanes in which the women of Athens withhold sex from their partners in a strike

Techne - The craft of any art

Thespian - Actor

Mimesis - Imitation, hence 'mime', 'mimicry'

Hubris - The fatal character flaw in any hero of tragedy that ultimately brings him to his tragic fate

Hesiod - Greek poet

Wine Casks - Plato's works were all lectures that were written down. Aristotle's were all notes never published, but were rediscovered when a collection of them were found inside an empty wine barrel

Discovered / Anagorisis - Aristotle's term for discovery that was a key component in tragic drama for him. Not just a reveal, but a discovery of past history such as Orestes learning who his true parents are. 

Catachresis - rhetorical device of deliberately misusing words, such as mixed metaphors

Nike - Greek god of victory

Apollo - Greek god of the sun

Glossary - Hip-Hop

Frontin' - putting on a facade

Flexin' - showing off, as in flexing your muscles

Grille - the face

Shill - someone operating under false pretences to spread a message

Trill - a mixture of true and real, therefore more certain than both

Snitch - An informer

Full text:

Yo yo yo Plato/ Socrates’ amanuensis hoe

Frontin’ OG philosophy/ How bout some original thinking P?

It ain’t only hot air/ All wasted there

In your loved-up posse’s Symposium/

That ain’t encomiums, it’s full-on brown nosin’

Your tongue so far up where Helios don’t shine

You can taste the hemlock in the upper intestine 

Move over man/ Gonna get beat down

Your ontology shows you for a clown

Gonna take me your crown

Set that wreath upon my head

Give Athens some relief from constant grief

At generation after generation of war dead

All through having followed what you said

Down at your Academy of agonies

Now they roll up to my Lyceum instead

Word up, something’s buggin little philosophy cousin Aristotle 

White beard of sagacity or bleached from a bottle? 

Audacity to call yourself the father of logic/ So chronic 

You render your audiences catatonic

The flaws in your deduction are so drastic/

Must be why you resort to being periphrastic

You’re the student but I’m the Master/ my epigrams cut deep and flow faster

My busts are hewn from marble /yours cast in mere plaster 

If it ever came to pass/ Your Republic would be a disaster

Statues fall from their plinths amidst quaking laughter

Pie in the sky utopia can’t exist/ And you know that, you two bit hypocrite

You were my teacher/ But now you’re reachin’ 

Preachin’ fascistic Philosopher kings                                    

A most egregious aegis of state power

That would make even war hero you cower

Didn’t you use the fine art of rhetoric/ In representin’ Socratic dialectic/ 

Mainly to slam the poetic/ Arts would be outlawed in the Republic/ As way too hectic/ So your own writing would be banned as heretic

It can’t be fascistic cos/ that’s anachronistic Cuzz/ As you well know Mr Pangloss/ 

In our day tyrant was the regular epithet/ Part’a’ what they do down in Sparta 

Plato went toe to toe with those Martinets/ Not one iota of being a martyr/ 

When were you ever in armour? 

Your trembling knees/ At the thought of war in the Peloponnese

Your dick shrunk to the size of a chipolata/ 

I relished being a hoplite/ 

But you got no stomach for any kind of fight/ Least of all this one right? 

The antithesis of moderation in all things/ Is not extremism 

It’s the ideal form, see reason 

The Platonic Ideal? / Get real

You be tweekin if you’re believin’ in

Things that can’t exist/ What’s that make me Scotch mist? 

I credit the datum of my senses/ The material world just ain’t cast from pretences

Life is just a puppet show?/ We’re substantially more than our shadow

Besides we all know a small phallus/ Represents proportional balance

The triumph of the intellect

Over base desires of a beastly aspect

So your flexing is perplexing

Don’t get up in my grille, shill

You be trippin’ with your trill, still

Truth is not the real/ Only the universal ideal

And with all your senses you don’t get to feel

Only the educated soul can seal that deal

Plato, Bro, you be jiving

Slaves in a cave is no good

Even helots don’t live in a subterranean hood

That lame clique is just a Sophist trick 

Homie, enough with your theoretical baloney

Ya wanna prevent civil strife/ Draw lessons from real life

Scale up the state of wedlock with the wife

Ya get the city-state where unity is rife

Fuck da polis, you ran off to tutor a prince

Pimpin’ to Macedon so Athens took a sackin’

They death rowed Socrates for way less than rattin

Ya got the digits of Hippocrates and some riches?

Cos you know what happens to snitches

…They be gettin’ stitches 

You advocate citizen rule, fool 

You reckon the Demos is above being cruel? 

Word!/ Absurd / Follow the herd

You’ve heard the crowd/ When they’re aroused 

By the fashionable drama of the day on stage

So that epic poetry is no longer all the rage

Each spectacle grabs them by the testicles

Catharsis ain’t even worth a dis, since

Rationing irrational passions? Convinced? Nope

It ain’t dope it’s wack, Jack

What do you know of catharsis? 

Full of vinegar & piss, with no wife, you’ve never been kissed 

You wouldn’t have suffered under The Lysistrata 

Can’t mourn what you never missed

Your stigmata, you don’t know art from farts

Preachin’ you can’t come to wisdom through the thespian

That’s cos your techne got no heart

My Poetics lays out all the dramatic devices

And advises

Mimesis is the state of how things is

Hubris the nemesis of the man who rises 

Above his station, over that of the nation

You get all empirical/ Me I prefer the lyrical

What genius uses scientific method

To parse and study the odes of Hesiod?

No wonder you never lectured

On your specious conjectures

But hid your teachings in wine casks

Only discovered by drunks seeking to refill their flasks

Rooting around in the lees

Is that what you meant by Anagorisis?

I call catachresis!   *

And catharsis, slump back into mindless bliss

The word comes from a root meaning to upchuck

So your whole thesis comes unstuck

You’re the only oracle who manages to be ahistorical

Nike grant me now your laurel of victory

And Apollo, him his lowly sorrow

* Should have been Aristotle's line in the video, but I'd lost the will to live by then... 

What Did The Ancient Greeks Ever Do For Us?

I mean apart from democracy, philosophy, architecture, statuary and theatre, what did the Greeks ever give us? They always come off favourably in comparison with the supposedly more barbarian and plagiarist Romans, but for 'democracy' you also had 'despotism' (read Plato's "The Republic" which shows the way democracy can very easily slide into tyranny through its own lack of true awareness of important values). However it's the philosophy and the theatre which I really want to challenge for the supreme value of their heritage as it has passed down to us. 

I'm not going to say too much about the philosophy, except where it has resonance in art. Plato's phenomenalism is a crucial concept to how we perceive reality, with his famous example of slaves in a cave viewing the shadows thrown on the cave walls by their fire, equating to perceptive reality for these slaves who have never seen the world outside of the cave. He derives this example through his belief that the whole world of appearances which we take for reality, is but a degraded version of true reality and (aesthetic/mathematical) beauty.

For the highest existence of any object is its ideal form and in our world, actual objects never attain such an ideal form. Now this represents an important way of thinking & perceiving even in our modern world. Of course there are no 'ideal' forms of objects, but what there are is linguistic nouns which categorise all sorts of various 'non-ideal' forms of similar things; all breeds of dogs are 'Dogs' is the simplest representation of this. But consider something more debatable - is a flatpack table in Ikea's warehouse still a table before it gets sold and erected? Is a slave or hired prostitute at an orgy, who is ordered to bend over so that food can be served from their naked back, are they a table? Is the ammo box that the soldier utilises while on patrol to quickly scoff down his rations, a table, or is it still only an ammo box containing rocket propelled grenades? 

Phenomenalism and particularly Nominal Phenomenalism, means that the supposed evidence of our senses and particularly the dominant one of sight, actually goes through a pre-filter of language, grouping similar things together as a shorthand that may not in fact do justice to the complexity of 'reality'. And this filter of language is of course the mainstay and dominant tool of us writers. We can use it to not only describe reality, but to challenge its consensus by really examining its linguistic short-cuts. So we could and possibly should be challenging accepted reality and showing how it has been constructed. Those writers and philosophers who study signs and symbols (semiologists) do this on one level, but writers can bring it to the linguistic realm. 

Now let's come to Greek Theatre. It is absolutely entwined with politics in Ancient Greece, that politics being in the main direct participatory democracy (the military oligarchy of Sparta didn't produce much in the way of playwrights). Plays in Athens were performed during religious festivals, the rest of the time the theatres in the small administrative demes were used for political meetings of the whole community entitled to vote. Plays in these festivals were in competition and accordingly were sponsored by patrons, most of whom were professional politicians, else citizens who wanted to wield influence. Many plays debated the issues of recent or contemporary events, while comedies lambasted real prominent citizens to their faces sat there in the audience, to remind them of their place to serve the Polis rather than their own interests. The ancient Greek word for playwright has as its root 'teacher' or trainer, while the word 'Praxis' which Aristotle coined for the dramatic action, also stands for a body of practical political action.  

So Greek plays were not politically neutral and for all their show at having both sides of the debate (much like Plato's dialectic philosophical style), actually there was really only one message either the playwright, or his patron wanted to impart (just like Plato's "Republic", though his other dialectic works were more ambiguous and even handed in their conclusions). Plays were always geared to preaching to their audience and that audience were those with the vote in the democracy (so not women or slaves who were excluded from voting). The plays preached reasoned debate, when in fact they were tilting for a single point of view, with their own constructed democracy as the highest value (not an 'ideal' one in Plato's eyes, far from it as above). Those individualist citizens who weren't team players, or those with a tendency towards demagoguery, were constantly being defeated on stage.

For such men displayed 'hubris', that is the excess of pride in imagining yourself above your station within the society. Any individual citizen who wasn't a team player, was regarded as having hubris and all Tragic dramas in the Greek canon had men brought low by their hubris. Indeed even the word 'hero' which reverberates so powerfully in our own society, initially emerged from Greek theatre, not existing outside of that context beforehand. The dramatic hero is a demiurge, that is a man who sees himself superior to his fellow man, halfway to being a god and of course, such tragic heroes are felled by their hubris. The stage actors had to play both heroes and gods, an act and an appropriation involving of hubris in itself just in case any of them got ideas above their station. Hubris implicitly reinforces a 'know your place' attitude, for to flout it inevitably means personal destruction. 

The clinching point about this propagandist theatre comes from a word the Greek's themselves coined, 'catharsis'. Catharsis means a purging, initially a purification in the religious sense. But when applied to the theatre by Aristotle in "Poetics" it has a more manipulative meaning. Theatre, in line with praxis, is vicarious, the audience experience the play as brought to them by the actors. We don't know whether they were passive in the amphitheatres, or like Shakespeare's 'Pit' rowdy & interactive with the stage. But by the end of a tragedy, having seen Orestes put out his own eyes, or the abasement and cruelty visited upon "The Trojan Women", or the double suicide of the lovers to conclude "Antigone", the audience are purged of their passions through the very extremity of the emotions wrought in them by the action on stage. That is, the playwright has taken them on such a journey, they are useless for anything at the end of the play. Certainly no call to action, only the playwright's sly reinforcement of whatever particular message he was putting across and the audience too played out to resist that message. Wrung out and spent, they go home marvelling at the stagecraft, story and spectacle, confirmed in the moral teaching the playwright conveyed. 

I could go on about how the heritage from the Greeks has further hamstrung us in our modern age. That Greek philosophy's main thrust was seeking to answer the question 'what constitutes a good life?', which for Plato, in the context of a city, was living a 'Just' life. For Aristotle it was living a balanced life, avoiding excess at either end of the spectrum of behaviour. Now this may or may not be a reasonable philosophical question to consider (I would say there are more pressing ones along the line of what is man, why is he here on earth, what is he supposed to achieve in his short life?) But - and you can't necessarily blame the Greeks for this, their inquiry into goodness was hijacked and taken on by the Christian theologian-cum-philosophers, whose answer was of course faith in God and following a set of moral and behavioural commandments. Again, a rigid moral unilateralism that is today in tatters and has led to the evils of slavery, colonialism, subjection of women and our own bodies, which have only furthered the crippling issues we face today. 

So yes, I do declare, what have the Ancient Greeks done for us, except to set up the parameters by which we have navigated to our very troubling modern age? 

Twist and Shout? - The literary twist considered

To stick or twist with your story ending? It's something I've always had strong feelings about, but I was delighted to see a writer friend of mine Mary Papas sticking up for the view contrary to mine. So I thought why not post both sides of the argument? Like me Mary also write flash fiction, so at least we are comparing like with like. Her two collections are "Take Off Your Mask" and "14 Twisted Tales To Enthrall" (shared with Ray Tullett) are both available from Amazon Kindle store.

My con argument is first, followed by Mary's pro-argument.

Is there anything quite as clichéd as a twist (or sting) in the tail (tale)?

Personally I recoil from both writing them and reading them in books. I say recoil, maybe that's a bit strong. Besides, it depends on how exactly you define a 'twist'.

At the level of a dictionary defintion, a twist is an altering in shape, usually through coiling or spiralling. Winding either the two ends of the same thread around one another, or interweaving two discrete strands together.

So either the key element is the altering in shape. That somehow the twist takes a story and contorts it into a whole new shape through its ending; or that two completely separate strands are woven together, that may in fact not bear the weight of being brought together at all so you get distortion.

In both cases, I would make a distinction between a plot twist in the resolution of a story and an undercutting of the preconceptions laid by the rest of the story to take the reader's perception on to a whole new plane. The former, a twist in the plot of the "Phew, it was all a dream" type, or "it wasn't Smith who had died, it was his twin", are the twists that don't really interest me. Expectations may have been confounded, but the story is wholly resolved. All tied up with a bow.

Whereas with the latter, the reader may have to completely go back and reconsider every line in light of the new perspective called upon by the denouement pulling the rug from how the story had been read up until that point. They may even have to read it again in the new perspective. The story keeps resonating with the reader beyond its conclusion, because there are reverberating layers supplied by the mechanism of the ending acting upon the reader's comprehension.

As an example of this, in my new collection of flash stories "Long Stories Short" I have a tale where the narrator is walking behind someone and is fascinatedly describing the ripple in the tights and the contraction of the muscles beneath in the gait of the pedestrian. It definitely has the feel of male gaze voyeurism, but the ending as the identity of the pedestrian is revealed- and which I won't spoil here-  turns the whole set of perceptions and why these motions are being described, utterly on its head. It's not a resolution of plot, but a vertiginous, spiralling into a whole new way of envisioning just such a scene from the perspective of the narrator.

But I would like to go further in this. For me the issue is the very notion of endings, together with beginnings and middles too! I know Aristotle posited that stories required beginnings, middle and ends, but I think the writer's palette is potentially far richer than that.

I write flash fiction stories. Stories of 1000 words or less. There is no space for introductory exposition. You are launched right into the world of the story within line one. And to an extent, this is true of any piece of fiction of any length, since the reader has to find their bearings in the fictional world established by the author. However, in a flash story, there are even fewer words to help convey the reader into the world of the story, since the ending is fast approaching.

Nor is there any room for a saggy middle in flash fiction. The action/character development has to begin with word one and continue apace throughout.

And so on to endings. In the same collection I have a story called "A Series of False Endings", which as its title suggests, instead of a beginning, has a series of end scenarios. When the story reaches its conclusion, there is no twist, but the ending of endings in this story chockful of them. It is the complete finality, because of the context of what has gone before. It is the only ending possible that banishes all the prior endings offered up in the story.

                                          

DNA molecules are helical, that is they twist and spiral around their twin strands. And that's an apt structure for such a metaphor, since endings ought to emerge organically from what precedes them. That doesn't mean you can't veer away in a surprising direction with your denouement, but it must be of a consistency with the rest of the story. That is it must be in proportion to what has gone on before. The transition doesn't have to be seamless, but it must be credible. It must have its roots in what has occurred prior, and not seem to lurch out of left-field.

And this would be my issue with the twist ending. If the structure of the story is conventional beginning, middle and end, then the emphasis is on this fairly rigid structure being faithfully rendered by the story's plot. That is the ending tends to take on more importance in its own right, rather than emerging organically from the story leading up to it. It has to have an ending, that ending probably has to be surprising and unseen. These external demands on the device of the ending I think too often risk dissociating it from the tone and flow of what precedes it. Twists can seem tacked on, or are asked to carry too much weight in taking the whole story in a different direction. If the story is one permeated by love, but ends with a sudden, unexpected murder between two lovers, then the tone radically shifts. Unless there are hints throughout the story of the incipient murderousness between them, I don't think such a twist works - it's too radical and abrupt a shift in tone and mood. Twists can't be abrupt. The story is the ending and the ending is the story, but only if it prompts further reflection after the ending of the story. If the story remains frozen by the ending, twist and all, then it's probably failed to some degree.

The opening story in my collection "Love Net", contains about as traditional a twist as I have ever approached. It's about dating, the search for love and the ending sees this reversed for its polar opposite. But I hope the words throughout are written so as to hold both the romantic motivation, but also on second reading, to suggest a far darker search too. The two strands of language's DNA coiled tightly around one another and informing each other.

In favour of the twist ending - Mary Papas

I am in favor of using twists in flash fiction because:

1) A Twist Makes The Story Memorable

It is hard for readers to remember every single one of the flash fiction stories you have written. However, if your flash fiction stories end with a surprising twist, the chances are higly increased. People tend to remember things that impress them the most and the same goes for readers; a twist at the end that will leave them speechless can help them remember your stories if not forever, at least for a long time. And you, as an author, want your readers to remember the stories, in your books so that they will in turn remember to buy more of your books. It is a tough competition out there and if you don't manage to stand out from the crowd somehow, why should readers pick your books over millions of others? 

2. A Twist Leaves The Readers Wanting More

A twist at the end of your flash fiction story is a great way to trigger enough interest, which is perfect if you write sequels.  In order for readers to want to buy ''Part 2'' they have to be interested enough in ''Part 1''. If ''Part 1'' ends in a way that leaves them wondering what could have happened next, then mission is accomplished. You are ready to launch ''Part 2''. 

3. A Twist Which Is Not Really A Twist

What seems to be a twist, is not always one.  Sometimes what is perceived as a twist is actually a destination in alignment with the character's journey. In such a case, that twist is an opportunity for the readers to re-read the story and look for signs they missed the first time. If the story is written well, the signs are there, discreetly, but they are there. In my book "Take Off Your Mask" the most popular story so far is "Who's The Boss", partly because of the killer twist at the end... the male lead turns out to be gay. It was not really a twist for me, more like a revelation of a dark secret. The readers could have suspected it however, because of the man's total lack of affection towards the woman he he had been  dating for a long while. It's not necessarily the first thing you might think about in such a case, but it is not the last either is it?