The Love Affair between Philosophy and Poetry: Aristotle's Poetics and Narrative Identity

In order to grasp the distinctive character of the object imitated in tragedies, Aristotle's Poetics introduces a new notion of action ( praxis ), which does not refer to individual ethical deeds as in the Ethics . Rather, it signifies a whole with a beginning, a middle, and an end, whose constitutive components are events ( pragmata ). This paper argues that the notion of agents undergoes a parallel transformation in the treatise on poetry. It no longer refers exclusively to the authors of ethical deeds, but to the characters who enact the entire dramatic action ( prattontes ). Their nature can be understood in terms of a potential story whose logos (account, articulation) is a muthos (story, narrative). On this ground, the suggestion is made that the Poetics provides the elements of a narrative conception of human identity.