Plato and Aristotle

Plato and Aristotle

Plato and Aristotle have two distinct views on wellness. However, each man’s opinion on wellness is directly tied in to his respective opinions on the idea of imitation as a form of knowledge. Their appreciation or lack thereof for tragedy is in fact directly correlated to their own perspective on wellness and emotion. Firstly, it is important to consider each man’s view of wellness—that is how does each man go about addressing emotional stability. One important consideration is the approach Plato takes in relation to Aristotle. It is this approach that we will see actually mirroring between how they treat emotional well-being and their tolerance for imitation.

In order to understand this hypothesis that each thinker’s handling of wellness is representative of how they handle imitation (and thus, representation), we need to step back and examine how in fact each gentleman approaches the question of emotional stability and happiness. For Plato, as defined in the “Republic”, emotion is to be suppressed. Speaking of poetry, he says: “We’d be right, then to delete the lamentations of famous men” (63). The idea of deletion is exactly what he is after. Taking something quite real, very much a part of the present moment, and with the swipe of an eraser, dimissing it as gone. In poetry, it is called deletion, and the words are no longer on the page. In psychology, it is called repression, and the concepts suggested for deletion are instead relegated to swell in the caverns of one’s mind. Plato speaks of emotion in poetry at other times as something we should “expunge” (61). Again, entrenched in his linguistics is a conscious hat tip to repression, to keeping emotion—be that joy, sadness, despair—out of highe...

... middle of paper ...

...fact directly linked to his understanding of wellness, and the need to have an emotional release as a part of that wellness.

What can then be steeped out of these observations? It becomes apparent that Plato and Aristotle do in fact have different views on how to reconcile wellness and these different views are directly linked to their approach to imitation. For Plato, who believes in ‘deleting’ and suppressing emotion, imitation is a device much too emotional for his support. The Aristotelian view that emotion is in fact a natural part of life, knowledge, and our own wellness translates in to his acceptance (if not always full embrace) of imitation. While different, the two men reconcile the problems of wellness in terms of the knowledge they deem acceptable.

Works Cited

Plato. Republic. Translated by Grube, G.M.A. Hackett. Second Ed. Indianapolis, 1992.