In this article, Brazilian philosopher Olavo de Carvalho exposes an unique interpretation of Aristotle’s works, which has escaped the perception of almost all of his readers and commentators, from Antiquity until today: the Theory of Four Discourses. This theory can be summarized in one sentence: human discourse is a single potency, which is updated into four different modes: poetic, rhetorical, dialectic and analytical (logic). From this new interpretation of Aristotle, culture constitutes an integral expression of logos, by which scientific reason appears as the supreme fruit of a tree that has poetic imagination as its root. Culture, rising from the mythopoetic soil to the heights of scientific knowledge, appears there as the humanized translation of this logos, mirrored in miniature in the philosopher’s self-consciousness.

Olavo de Carvalho

ARISTOTLE: THE FOUR DISCOURSES ¹

Chapter I of Aristotle in New Perspective: Introduction to the Theory of the Four Discourses (Rio, Topbooks, 1997)

There is a central idea in Aristotle’s works, which has escaped the perception of almost all of his readers and commentators, from Antiquity until today. Even those who noticed it — and there were only two, as far as I know, over the millennia — limited themselves to noticing it in passing, without explicitly attributing to it a decisive importance for understanding Aristotle’s philosophy². However, that is the key to his understanding, if by understanding we mean the act of capturing the unity of a man’s thought from his own intentions and values, instead of judging him from the outside; an act which involves carefully respecting the unexpressed and implied, instead of suffocating it in the idolatry of the reified “text”, the tomb of thought.

I call this idea the Theory of the Four Discourses. It can be summarized in one sentence: human discourse is a single potency, which is updated into four different modes: poetic, rhetorical, dialectic and analytical (logic).

Said like that, this idea doesn’t seem very remarkable. But, if it occurs to us that the names of these four modalities of discourse are also names of four sciences, we see that according to this perspective, Poetics, Rhetoric, Dialectic and Logic, studying modalities of a single potency, also constitute variants of a unified science. 

The diversification itself into four subordinate sciences must be based on the unity’s reason of the object they focus on, under penalty of failing the Aristotelian rule of divisions. And this means that the principles of each one presuppose the existence of common principles that subordinate them, in other words, that these principles apply equally to fields as different from each other as scientific demonstration and the construction of the tragic plot in theatrical plays. 

Thus, the idea that I have just attributed to Aristotle already begins to seem strange, surprising, extravagant. And the two questions it immediately suggests to us are: Did Aristotle really think this way? And, if he did, did he think rightly? This question is therefore divided into a historical-philological investigation and a philosophical critique. I will not be able, in the dimensions of this communication, to satisfactorily carry out either one or the other. On the other hand, I can put into question the reasons for this strangeness.

The astonishment that the idea of ​​the Four Discourses provokes at first sight comes from a deep-rooted custom in our culture, of viewing poetic language and logical or scientific language as separate and distant universes, governed by sets of laws that are incommensurable to each other. Ever since a decree by Louis XIV separated “Languages” and “Science” into different buildings³, gap between poetic imagination and mathematical reason has continued to widen, until it has become a kind of constitutive law of the human spirit. Evolving as parallels lines that sometimes attract and sometimes repel each other but never touch, the two cultures, as C.P. Snow called them, solidified themselves into isolated universes, each one incomprehensible to the other. Gaston Bachelard, poet doublé of mathematician, imagined being able to describe these two sets of laws as contents of radically separate spheres, each equally valid within their own limits and in their own terms, between which man passes as from sleep to wokeness, disconnecting from one to enter the other, and vice versa⁴: this language of dreams does not contest that of equations, nor does the latter penetrate in the world of the former. So deep was this separation that some wanted to find an anatomical foundation for it in the theory of the two cerebral hemispheres, one creative and poetic, the other rational and organizing, so believing that there was correspondence between these divisions and the yin-yang pair of Chinese cosmology⁵. Furthermore, they thought they could discover the cause of Western man’s ills in the exclusive predominance of one of these hemispheres. A somewhat mystified vision of Chinese ideographism, disseminated in pedantic circles by Ezra Pound⁶, gave this theory more than enough literary support to compensate for its lack of scientific foundations. The ideology of “New Era” finally consecrated it as one of the pillars of wisdom⁷.

In this picture, the old Aristotle posed, together with the nefarious Descartes, as the very prototype of the rationalist official who, with ruler in hand, kept our inner Chinese under severe repression. The listener imbued with such beliefs can only receive with indignant astonishment the idea that I attribute to Aristotle. This idea presents as an apostle of unity the one whom everyone used to regard as a guardian of schizophrenia. It challenges a stereotypical image that time and almanac culture have consecrated as an acquired truth. It stirs up old wounds, healed by a long sedimentation of prejudices.

Resistance is, therefore, a fait accompli. It remains to confront it, proving, first, that the idea is actually Aristotle’s; second, that it is an excellent idea, worthy of being taken up, with humility, by a civilization that was quick to retire the teachings of its old master before having examined them well. Here I will only be able to indicate briefly the directions in which these two demonstrations should be sought.

Aristotle wrote a Poetics, a Rhetoric, a book on Dialectic (the Topics) and two treatises on Logic (Analytics I and II), in addition of two introductory works on language and thought in general (Categories and On Interpretation). All these works practically disappeared, like the rest of Aristotle, until the 1st century BC., when a certain Andronicus of Rhodes promoted a joint edition, on which our knowledge of Aristotle is based to this day.

Like every posthumous editor, Andronicus had to put some order in the manuscripts. He decided to organize it fundamentally by the criterion of sciences division into introductory (or logical), theoretical, practical and technical (or poietic, as some say). This division had the merit of being Aristotle’s own.⁸ But as Octave Hamelin astutely observed, there is no reason to suppose that the division of a philosopher’s works into volumes should correspond piece by piece with his conception of the divisions of knowledge. Andronicus took this correspondence as a presupposition, and therefore grouped the manuscripts into four divisions. But, lacking other works that could come under the label techniques, he had to include Rhetoric and Poetics, disconnecting them from the other works on the theory of discourse, which were to compose the apparently closed unit of the Organon, a set of logical or introductory.

Added to other circumstances, this editorial accident was full of consequences, which continue to multiply to this day. Firstly, Rhetoric — the name of a science abhorred by philosophers, who saw in it the emblem of their main adversaries, the sophists — has not aroused, since its first edition by Andronicus, the slightest philosophical interest. It was read only in schools of rhetoric, which, to make matters worse, were then entering into an accelerated decline due to the fact that the extinction of democracy, eliminating the need for orators, took away the raison d’être of rhetorical art, enclosing it in the dome of a narcissistic formalism⁹. Soon afterwards, Poetics, in turn, disappeared from circulation, only to reappear in the 16th century¹⁰. These two events seem fortuitous and unimportant. But, taken together, they give as a result nothing less than the following: all Western Aristotelianism, which, initially slowly, but growing in speed from the 11th century onwards, was formed in the period that goes from the eve of the Christian Era to the Renaissance, completely ignored Rhetoric and Poetics. Since our image of Aristotle is still a legacy of that period (once the rediscovery of Poetics in the Renaissance aroused interest only among poets and philologists, without touching the philosophical public), nowadays what we call Aristotle, whether to praise him or to curse him, is not the man of flesh and blood, but a simplified scheme, created during the centuries that ignored two of his works. In particular, our view of Aristotle’s theory of discursive thought is based exclusively on the analytical and the topical, that is, on logic and dialectic, amputated from the basis that Aristotle had built for them in poetics and rhetoric¹¹ .

But the mutilation did not stop there. From the building of discourse theory, only the two upper floors remained — dialectics and logic —, floating without foundations in the air like the poet’s room in Manuel Bandeira’s Última canção do beco (“Alley´s Last Song”). It did not take long before the third floor was also suppressed: dialectics, considered a minor science, as it only dealt with probable demonstration, was passed over in favor of analytical logic, consecrated since the Middle Ages as the very key to Aristotle’s thought. The image of an Aristotle constituted by “formal logic + cognitive sensualism + theology of the First Unmoved Mover” was consolidated as a historical truth never contested.

Even the prodigious advance in biographical and philological studies inaugurated by Werner Jaeger¹² did not change this. Jaeger merely overturned the stereotype of a fixed Aristotle born ready, to replace it with the living image of a thinker who evolves over time towards the maturity of his ideas. But the final product of evolution was not, from the aspect discussed here, very different from the system consecrated by the Middle Ages: above all, dialectics would be a Platonic residue, absorbed in and overcome by analytical logic.

But this view is challenged by some facts. The first, highlighted by Éric Weil, is that the inventor of analytical logic never uses it in his treatises, always preferring to argue dialectically¹³. Secondly, Aristotle himself insists that logic does not bring knowledge, but only serves to facilitate the verification of knowledge already acquired, comparing it with the principles that underlie it, in order to see if it does not contradict it. When we do not have the principles, the only way to search for them is through dialectical investigation, which, by confronting contradictory hypotheses, leads to a kind of intuitive illumination that highlights these principles. Dialectics in Aristotle is, therefore, according to Weil, a logica inventionis, or logic of discovery: the true scientific method, of which formal logic is only complement and means of verification ¹⁴.

But Weil’s timely intervention dispelled the legend of a total hegemony of analytical logic in Aristotle’s system by leaving aside the question of rhetoric. The academic world of the 20th century still subscribes to the opinion of Sir David Ross, who in turn follows Andronicus: Rhetoric has “a purely practical purpose”; “it does not constitute a theoretical work” but rather “a manual for the speaker”¹⁵. But to Poetics, for his part, Ross attributes an effective theoretical value, without noticing that, if Andronicus was wrong in this case, he may also have been mistaken regarding Rhetorics. After all, from the moment it was rediscovered, Poetics was also seen above all as “a practical manual” and was of interest to literati rather than philosophers¹⁶. On the other hand, the Topics book itself could be seen as a “technical manual” or at least “practical” — because in the Academy dialectics functioned exactly as such: it was the set of practical norms of academic debate. Ultimately, Andronicus’s classification, once followed literally, results in endless confusions, which can be resolved all at once by admitting the following hypothesis, however disturbing it may be: as sciences of discourse, Poetics and Rhetoric are part of the Organon, a set of logical or introductory works, and are therefore neither theoretical nor practical nor technical. This is the core of the interpretation I defend. It implies, however, a profound review of traditional and current ideas about the Aristotelian science of discourse. This revision, in turn, risks having far-reaching consequences for our view of language and culture in general. Reclassifying the works of a great philosopher may seem like an innocent undertaking by scholars, but it is like moving the pillars of a building. It may require the demolition of many surrounding buildings.

The reasons I give to justify this change are the following:

1. The four sciences of speech deal with four modes in which man can, through speech, influence another man’s mind (or his own). The four types of speech are characterized by their respective levels of credibility:

(a) Poetic discourse deals with the possible (dunato ¹⁷, dinatos), addressing itself and above all to the imagination, which captures what it presumes itself (eikastiko,  eikástikos , “presumable”; eikasia,  eikasia , “image”, “representation ”).

(b) Rhetorical discourse has as its object the believable (piqano,  pithános ) and as its goal the production of a  firm belief   (pisti, pístis ) which presupposes, beyond mere imaginative presumption, the consent of the  will ; and man influences the will of another man through persuasion (peiqo,  peitho ), which is a psychological action based on common beliefs. If the poetry resulted in an impression, the rhetorical speech must produce a decision, showing that it is the most appropriate or convenient within a given framework of accepted beliefs.

(c) Dialectical discourse is no longer limited to suggesting or imposing a belief, but submits beliefs to test, through rehearsals and attempts to overcome them through objections. It is the thought that comes and goes, through transversal paths, seeking the truth among errors and error among truths (dia, diá = “through” and also indicates duplicity, division). This is why dialectics is also called peirastic, from the root peirá (peira = “proof”, “experience”, from which come peirasmo, peirasmos, “temptation”, and our words empiria, empiricism, experience etc., but also, through from peirate, peirates, “pirate”: the very symbol of an adventurous life, of travel without a predetermined direction). Dialectical discourse finally measures, through trials and errors, the greater or lesser probability of a belief or thesis, not according to its mere agreement with common beliefs, but according to the superior demands of rationality and accurate information.

(d) Logical or analytical discourse, finally, always starting from premises admitted as indisputably certain, arrives, through the syllogistic chain, to the certain demonstration (apodeixi, apodêixis, “indestructible proof”) of the veracity of the conclusions.

It is clear that there is an increasing scale of credibility: from the possible we go up to the credible, from there to the probable and finally to the certain or true. The very words used by Aristotle to characterize the objectives of each discourse highlight this gradation: there is, therefore, between the four discourses, less a difference of nature than of degree.

Possibility ,  verisimilitude ,  reasonable probability  and  apodictic certainty  are, therefore, the key concepts on which the four respective sciences are built: Poetics studies the means by which poetic discourse opens the realm of the possible to the imagination; Rhetoric, the means by which rhetorical speech induces the listener’s will to admit a belief; Dialectics, those through which dialectical discourse ascertains the reasonableness of admitted beliefs, and, finally, Logic or Analytics studies the means of apodictic demonstration, or scientific certainty. Now, the four basic concepts are relative to each other: the plausible cannot be conceived outside of the possible, nor is this possible without comparison with the reasonable, and so on. The consequence of this is so obvious that it is surprising that almost no one has noticed it: the four sciences are inseparable; taken in isolation, they make no sense. What defines and differentiates them are not four isolatable sets of formal characters, but four possible human attitudes towards speech, four human reasons for speaking and listening: man speaks to open his imagination to the immensity of the possible, to make some practical resolution, to critically examine the basis of the beliefs that underpin their resolutions, or to explore the consequences and extensions of judgments already admitted as absolutely true, building with them the edifice of scientific knowledge. A speech is logical or dialectical, poetic or rhetorical, not in itself or because of its mere internal structure, but because of the objective it tends to as a whole, because of the human purpose it aims to achieve. Hence the four are distinguishable, but not isolatable: each of them is only what it is when considered in the context of culture, as an expression of human intentions. The modern idea of ​​delimiting a language that is “poetic in itself” or “logical in itself” would seem to Aristotle to be an absurd substantialization, even worse: an alienating reification¹⁸. He was not yet infected by the schizophrenia that has become the normal state of culture today.

2. But Aristotle goes further: he points out the different psychological dispositions corresponding to the listener of each of the four speeches, and the four dispositions also form, in the most obvious way, a gradation:

(a) The listener of the poetic speech must relax his demand for verisimilitude, admitting that “it is not credible that everything always happens in a believable way”, to capture the universal truth that can be suggested even by an apparently implausible narrative ¹⁹. Aristotle, in short, anticipates the  suspension of disbelief  that Samuel Taylor Coleridge would later speak of. Admitting a more flexible verisimilitude criterion, the reader (or spectator) admits that the tragic hero’s misadventures could have happened to himself or to any other man, that is, they are permanent human possibilities.

(b) In ancient rhetoric, the listener is called  a judge , because a decision, a vote, a sentence is expected from him. Aristotle, and in his wake the entire rhetorical tradition, admits three types of rhetorical speeches: forensic speech  , deliberative speech  and epidectic speech  , or praise and blame (of a character, a work, etc.) ²⁰. In all three cases, the listener is called upon to decide: on the guilt or innocence of a defendant, on the usefulness or harmfulness of a law, a project, etc., on the merits or demerits of someone or something. He is, therefore, consulted as an authority: he has the power to decide. If in the listener of poetic speech it was important that the imagination took the realms of the mind, to take it to the world of the possible in a flight from which no immediate practical consequences were expected to result, here it is the will that listens and judges the  speech  , to, by deciding, create a situation in the realm of facts ²¹.

(c) The listener of dialectical discourse is, at least internally, a participant in the dialectical process. This does not aim at an immediate decision, but at an approximation of the truth, an approach that can be slow, progressive, difficult, tortuous, and does not always lead to satisfactory results. In this listener, the impulse to decide must be postponed indefinitely, even repressed: the dialectician does not wish to persuade, like the rhetorician, but to reach a conclusion that ideally should be admitted as reasonable by both contending parties. To do so, he has to curb his desire to win, humbly willing to change his opinion if his opponent’s arguments are more reasonable. The dialectician does not defend a party, but investigates a hypothesis. Now, this investigation is only possible when both participants in the dialogue know and admit the basic principles on the basis of which the issue will be judged, and when both agree to honestly adhere to the rules of dialectical demonstration. The attitude here is one of exemption and, if necessary, self-critical resignation. Aristotle expressly warns his disciples not to venture into dialectical arguments with anyone who is unfamiliar with the principles of science: it would be exposing themselves to mere rhetorical objections, prostituting philosophy ²².

(d) Finally, at the level of analytical logic, there is no more discussion: there is only the linear demonstration of a conclusion that, starting from premises admitted as absolutely true and proceeding rigorously through syllogistic deduction, cannot fail to be certain. The analytical discourse is the master’s monologue: the disciple is only responsible for receiving and admitting the truth. If the demonstration fails, the matter returns to dialectical discussion ²³ .

From speech to speech, there is a progressive narrowing, a narrowing of what is admissible: from the unlimited openness of the world of possibilities we move to the more restricted sphere of beliefs actually accepted in  collective  praxis ; however, of the mass of beliefs subscribed to by common sense, only a few survive the rigors of dialectical screening; and, of these, even fewer are those that can be admitted by science as absolutely certain and function, in the end, as premises for scientifically valid reasoning. The proper sphere of each of the four sciences is therefore delimited by the contiguity of the antecedent and the subsequent. Arranged in concentric circles, they form the complete mapping of communications between civilized men, the sphere of possible rational knowledge ²⁴.

3. Finally, both scales are required by Aristotle’s theory of knowledge. For Aristotle, knowledge begins with sense data. These are transferred to memory, imagination or fantasy, which groups them into images (eikoi,  eikoi , in Latin  species , speciei ), according to their similarities. It is on these images retained and organized in fantasy, and not directly on the data of the senses, that intelligence exercises the sorting and reorganization on the basis of which it will create eidetic schemes, or abstract concepts of species, with which it can ultimately construct judgments and reasoning. From the senses to abstract reasoning, there is a double bridge to be crossed: fantasy and the so-called  simple apprehension , which captures isolated notions. There is no leap: without the intermediation of fantasy and simple apprehension, one cannot reach the upper stratum of scientific rationality. There is a perfect structural homology between this Aristotelian description of the cognitive process and the Theory of the Four Discourses. It could not even be otherwise: if the human individual does not reach rational knowledge without going through fantasy and simple apprehension, how could the collective — be it the polis or the smaller circle of scholars — reach scientific certainty without the preliminary and successive process of poetic imagination, of the organizing will that is expressed in rhetoric and of the dialectical sorting undertaken by philosophical discussion?

Rhetoric and Poetics, once removed from the “technical” or “poietic” exile in which Andronicus placed them and restored to their status as philosophical sciences, the unity of the sciences of discourse leads us to a surprising verification: there is embedded within them an entire philosophical Aristotelian view of culture as an integral expression of  logos . In this philosophy, scientific reason appears as the supreme fruit of a tree that has poetic imagination as its root, planted in the soil of sensitive nature. And as sensitive nature for Aristotle is not just an irrational and hostile “exteriority”, but the materialized expression of the  divine Logos  , culture, rising from the mythopoetic soil to the heights of scientific knowledge, appears there as the humanized translation of this divine Reason, mirrored in miniature in the philosopher’s self-consciousness. Aristotle compares, in effect, philosophical reflection to the self-cognitive activity of a God who consists, fundamentally, in self-consciousness. The summit of philosophical reflection, which crowns the edifice of culture, is, in effect,  gnosis gnoseos , the knowledge of knowledge. Now, this is accomplished only at the moment when reflection recapitulatively encompasses its complete trajectory, that is, at the moment when, having reached the sphere of scientific reason, it understands the unity of the four discourses through which it progressively rose to this point. There it is prepared to move from science or philosophy to wisdom, to enter Metaphysics, which Aristotle, as Pierre Aubenque rightly emphasized, prepares but does not completely accomplish, since its kingdom is not of this world ²⁵. The Theory of the Four Discourses is,  in this sense, the beginning and end of Aristotle’s philosophy. Beyond it, there is no longer knowledge in the strict sense: there is only the “science that is sought”, the aspiration for supreme knowledge, for the  sophia  whose possession would mark at the same time the achievement and the end of philosophy.

Article originally published in olavodecarvalho.org. Translated by Tiago Barreira

Notes

1. Instead of exactly reproducing the text of the first edition, this chapter follows the slightly corrected version that, under the title “The structure of the Organon and the unity of the sciences of discourse in Aristotle”, that I presented at the V Brazilian Congress of Philosophy, in São Paulo, September 6, 1995 (Logic and Philosophy of Science section). ↩︎
2. These two were Avicenna and St. Thomas Aquinas. Avicenna (Abu ‘Ali el-Hussein ibn Abdallah ibn Sina, 375-428 H. / 985-1036 AD) emphatically affirms, in his work Nadjat (“Salvation”), the unity of the four sciences, under the general concept of “logic”. According to Baron Carra de Vaux, this “shows how vast his idea of art was”, whose object included “the study of all the different degrees of persuasion, from rigorous demonstration to poetic suggestion” (cf. Baron Carra de Vaux, Avicenne, Paris, Alcan, 1900, pp. 160-161). St. Thomas Aquinas also mentions, in the Commentaries on the Second Analytics, I, 1.I, nº 1-6, the four degrees of logic, of which he probably became aware through Avicenna, but attributing to them the unilateral meaning of a descending hierarchy which goes from the most certain (analytical) to the most uncertain (poetic) and implying that, from the Topic “downwards”, we are only dealing with progressive forms of error or at least deficient knowledge. This does not exactly coincide with Avicenna’s conception nor with the one I present in this book, which seems to me to be Aristotle’s own, according to which there is not exactly a hierarchy of value between the four arguments, but rather a difference in functions articulated between themselves and all equally necessary for the perfection of knowledge. On the other hand, it is certain that St. Thomas, like the entire medieval West, did not have direct access to the text of Poetics.  If he had, it would be almost impossible for him to see in the poetic work only the representation of something “as pleasant or repugnant” (cit., nº 6), without meditating more deeply on what Aristotle says regarding the philosophical value of poetry (Poetics, 1451 a). In any case, it is an admirable feat for Aquinas to have perceived the unity of the four logical sciences, reasoning, as he did, from second-hand sources. ↩︎
3. Georges Gusdorf, Les Sciences Humaines et la Pensée Occidentale, t. I, De l’Histoire des Sciences à l’Histoire de la Pensée, Paris, Payot, 1966, pp. 9-41. ↩︎
4. Bachelard’s work, reflecting the methodical dualism of his thought, is divided into two parallel series: on the one hand, works on the philosophy of sciences, such as Le Nouvel Esprit Scientifique, Le Rationalisme Appliqué, etc.; on the other, the series dedicated to the “four elements” — La Psychanalyse du Feu, L’Air et les Songes, etc., where the rationalist on vacation freely exercises what he called “the right to dream”. Bachelard seemed to possess a mental switch that allowed him to pass from one of these worlds to the other, without the slightest temptation to create any bridge between each other than the freedom to activate the switch. ↩︎
5. For a critical examination of this theory, see. Jerre Levy, “Right Brain, Left Brain: Fact and Fiction” (Psychology Today, May 1985, pp. 43ff.).  ↩︎
6. Ezra Pound made a huge confusion about Ernest Fenollosa’s essay, The Chinese Characters as a Medium for Poetry (London, Stanley Nott, 1936), giving the West the impression that the Chinese language constituted a closed world, governed by categories of thought inaccessible to Western understanding except through a true twist of the very concept of language. Chinese symbolism, however, is much more similar to Western symbolism than those who appreciate cultural abysses imagine. A clear similarity that has escaped these people is that between the structure of the I Ching and Aristotle’s syllogistic. ↩︎
7. Belief in the two-hemisphere theory is common to all “New Age” theorists and gurus, such as Marilyn Ferguson, Shirley MacLaine and Fritjof Capra. About the latter, see my book The New Era and the Cultural Revolution. Fritjof Capra & Antonio Gramsci (Rio, Instituto de Artes Liberales & Stella Caymmi Editora, 1994). The most curious thing about this theory is that it aims to overcome the schizophrenia of Western man and begins by giving it an anatomical foundation (fortunately, fictitious). — It is evident, from what will be seen below, that I do not take very seriously the attempts, as meritorious in intention as they are miserable in results, to overcome dualism through the generalized methodological mess that admits rhetorical persuasiveness and imaginative effusion (see, for example, Paul Feyerabend, Against the Method, trans. Octanny S. da Motta and Leônidas Hegenberg, Rio, Francisco Alves, 1977). ↩︎
8. “It is perhaps excessive to demand that an author’s works correspond point by point to the classification of sciences as understood by that author.” (Octave Hamelin, Le Système d’Aristote, published by Léon Robin, 4th edition, Paris, J. Vrin, 1985, p. 82.)  ↩︎
9. I refer to the period of so-called “school rhetoric”. V. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Teodoro Cabral, Rio, INL, 1957, pp. 74 ff.  ↩︎
10. This makes the plot of The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco, even funnier, a deliberately impossible plot that the uninformed spectator takes as credible fiction: because how could a dispute arise over the missing Second Part of Aristotle’s Poetics, at a time when even the First Part was unknown? ↩︎
11. In the medieval context, the phenomenon I describe certainly has some relationship with a social stratification that placed wise men and philosophers, the priestly class, above poets, the class of court servants or fair artists. The  lower status of the poet in relation to the wise men is noticeable both in the social hierarchy (see the decisive role played by the  clerici  vagantes , or goliards, in medieval literary development), and in the hierarchy of the sciences themselves: literary studies were strictly outside the educational system of scholasticism, and the highest philosophical conceptions of the Middle Ages were written in rather crude Latin, without arousing any strangeness at that time, with much less reactions of aesthetic scandal like those that would emerge in the Renaissance. Cf., by the way, Jacques Le Goff, Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, trans. Luísa Quintela, Lisbon, Estudios Cor, 1973, Cap. I § 7. ↩︎
12. Werner Jaeger, Aristotle. Bases para la Historia de su Desarrollo Intelectual his, trans. José Gaos, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1946 (the German original is from 1923). ↩︎
13. This finding in turn gave rise to a dispute between interpreters who consider Aristotle a systematic thinker (who always starts from the same general principles) and those who see him as an aporetic thinker (who attacks problems one by one and moves upward towards the general without really being sure where it is going). This approach suggested in this work has, among others, the ambition of resolving this dispute., below, Chapter VII. ↩︎
14. Éric Weil, “La Place de la Logique dans la Pensée Aristotélicienne”, in Éssais et Conférences, t. I, Philosophie, Paris, Vrin, 1991, pp. 43-80. ↩︎
15. Sir David Ross, Aristotle, trans. Luís Filipe Bragança SS Teixeira, Lisbon, Dom Quixote, 1987, p. 280 (the English original is from 1923). ↩︎
16. Since its first annotated translation (Francesco Robortelli, 1548), the rediscovered Poetics will shape the standards of literary taste for two and a half centuries, at the same time that, in the field of Natural Philosophy, Aristotelianism retreats, banished by the victorious advance of new science of Galileo and Bacon, Newton and Descartes. This shows, on the one hand, the total separation between literary thought and philosophical and scientific evolution (a separation characteristic of the modern West, and which will worsen over the centuries); on the other, the indifference of philosophers towards the rediscovered text. On the Aristotelian roots of the aesthetics of European classicism, see. René Wellek, History of Modern Criticism, trans, Lívio Xavier, São Paulo, Herder. t. I, Chapter I.  ↩︎
17. Due to technical editing difficulties, I omit the accents of the Greek words here.  ↩︎
18. Four facts from the history of contemporary thought highlight the importance of these observations. 1°) All attempts to isolate and define a “poetic language” by its intrinsic characters, differentiating it materially from “logical language” and “everyday language” have completely failed., in this regard, Mary Louise Pratt, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1977. 2°) On the other hand, since Kurt Gödel, the impossibility of extirpating all intuitive residue from logical thought has been generally recognized. 3)° The studies by Chaim Perelman ( Traité de l’Argumentation. La Nouvelle Rhétorique , Bruxelles, Université Libre, 1978), Thomas S. Kuhn ( The Structure of Scientific Revolutions ) and Paul Feyerabend ( cit. ) show, convergently, the impossibility of eradicating all dialectical and even rhetorical elements from scientific-analytical evidence. 4)° At the same time, the existence of something more than a mere parallelism between aesthetic (that is, poetic, in the broad sense) and logical-dialectical principles in the medieval worldview is strongly emphasized by Erwin Panofsky (Architecture Gothique et Pensée Scolastique, trans. Pierre Bourdieu, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1967). These facts and many others in the same sense indicate more than the convenience, the urgency of the integrated study of the four discourses. ↩︎
19. Poetics, 1451 ab. ↩︎
20. About the three modalities in the rhetorical tradition, see. Heinrich Lausberg, Elements of Literary Rhetoric, trans. RM Rosado Fernandes, Lisbon, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2nd ed., 1972. ↩︎
21. Rhetoric , 1358 a — 1360 a. ↩︎
22. Topics , IX 12, 173 to  29 ff. ↩︎
23. Between analytics and dialectics, “the difference is, according to Aristotle, that between the course of teaching given by a teacher and the discussion held in common, or, to put it another way, that between the monologue and the scientific dialogue” (Éric Weil, cit., p. 64). ↩︎
24. It is almost impossible that Aristotle, a natural scientist with a mind full of analogies between the sphere of rational concepts and the facts of the physical order, did not notice the parallelism — direct and inverse — between the four discourses and the four elements, differentiated, they too, by scalarity from the densest to the most subtle, in concentric circles. In a course given at the IAL in 1988, unpublished except in a series of handouts under the general title of “Theory of Four Discourses”, I investigated this parallelism more extensively, which here is only a passing mention.  ↩︎
25. Pierre Aubenque, Le Problème de l’Être chez Aristote. Éssai sur la Problematique Aristotelicienne, Paris, PUF, 1962. ↩︎