Aristotelian Poetics:the Interpretation Of Being

The role of poetics in Aristotle’s philosophy system has always been a bone of contention. Related researches are more about the relationship between poetry and Aristotle’s ethical or political philosophy. They do not demonstrate the significance of poetry to human beings from the center issue of Aristotle’s philosophy:Being. Current studies on Aristotelian poetics mainly concern from three aspects:textual translation, research, commentaries on Poetics to illustrate the intension of Aristotle’s tragic theory; crossover studies with Aristotle’s ethics, politics or rhetoric, to illustrate the function of poetry in those situations; application on specific text, especially tragedies, by using Poetics as the theory of analysis. Most of these studies are based on the book Poetics, and don’t figure out the relation between poetry and philosophy of Aristotle directly and eventually. Therefore, the thesis tries to illustrate Aristotelian poetics from the perspective of Aristotle’s philosophy, and its essential concept:Being. After an introduction on Aristotle’s definition and interpretation of the concept "being", the thesis brings up the research questions:How does Aristotelian poetics interpreter being as category; how does Aristotelian poetics interpreter being as potentiality and actuality; how does Aristotelian poetics represent the telos of being? According to the three questions, the thesis is consisting of three chapters. In chapter one, the thesis analyzes the essential elements of being as category, namely the matter and form of poetry and the substance of poetry. These elements are included within poetic mimesis to distinguish poetry from other art by the medium, the method and the object of mimesis. Language and muthos, as the medium and method of poetic mimesis, are the matter and form of poetic substance. The object of poetic mimesis which is presented as character and thought in poetry, and as the action poetry imitating, constructs the substance of being as category. In chapter two, the thesis demonstrates the potentiality and actuality as being in Aristotelian poetics, and the distance between them in poetry and reality. The potentiality of poetry firstly comes from instinct of human mimesis, and then is represented as the possibility and necessity in muthos. The rational and irrational potentialities in human soul directly have effect on potentiality and actuality of poetry. The rational potentiality requires poetic muthos must happen by possibility and necessity, thus the effect of catharsis would realize on the actuality of human beings in reality. But the irrational part of soul leading to an inevitable distance between potentiality and actuality, means that entelechy, full actuality is reachless. In chapter three, the thesis mainly discusses about the telos of being in Aristotelian poetics, and how poetry effects on the being of human and the world. The telos of being in Aristotelian poetics is to construct the being of human by the potentiality of poetry and to represent truth through the categorical feature of poetry. At last, the thesis concludes that, Aristotelian poetics is not only an illustration of the basic being as category of poetry, but also shows the potentiality of being and its actuality on human beings. The substance of poetry, mimesis to human action, decides there are potentiality of human beings in the poetry, and can realize the actuality on human beings through catharsis. In this process, Aristotelian poetics presents the inner relationship between being of poetry and being of human. Thus, poetry is a way of cognition of truth for human beings, and Aristotelian poetics is an interpretation on being:both the being of poetry and the being of human.