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By Root 1022 0

of the potential variety of cultures spread across the world, which for him meant Mediterranean and Asia Minor up to western India, from where his Alexander the Great sent him zoological specimens. So when roughly similar arts being invented in in dependent societies all over world, and this is exactly what he says. Discussing in his Politics the various ways the state has been divided into classes by cultures of the Mediterranean, he remarks of these social arrangements, “Practically everything has been discovered on many occasions—or rather an infinity of occasions—in the course of ages; for necessity may be supposed taught men the inventions which were absolutely required, and when these were provided, it was natural that other things which would adorn and enrich life should grow up by degrees.” Given enough time, then, every people on the face of the earth would, since they are subject the impulses of the same fundamental human nature, discover for themselves storytelling, drama, painting, music, bodily adornment, and the other arts.

Moreover, given a shared human psychology, we might expect the follow similar histories, even in different nations. For example, Aristotle viewed tragedy as developing according to its own intrinsic teleology. the inevitability of placing first one and then two actors onstage, adding chorus, then painted sets, and so forth leads ultimately and inevitably fulfillment of the form: “After going through many changes tragedy ceased to evolve, since it had achieved its own nature” (1449a15), its omega point in the tragedies of Sophocles. (About Sophocles being the ultimate of the evolution of tragedy Aristotle may have been wrong; on other hand, since the supremacy of Sophoclean tragedy was not challenged until Elizabethan England, he was right for a very long time.)

More significant, however, are suggestions Aristotle makes about achievement of organic unity in tragedy, suggestions that do not much involve the in dependent essence of the genre but rather explain genre in terms of the psychology of the audience. Thus, for example, the main topic of tragedy will be the disruption of normal family love relations: a son who kills his father, two brothers who fight death, a mother who murders her children to spite their father. For Aristotle this fascination with stresses and ruptures of families represents a permanent feature of human interest, not merely a local manifestation of Greek cultural concerns, and he would find clear validation today in the continuing story lines of drama, pulp fiction, and soap operas across the world.

Aristotle often speaks as though he were prescribing the formal or physical limits of works of art as in depen dent objects. But his prescriptions are not so much about works of art as they are about the nature minds that understand and enjoy them: the psychological conditions that make possible an intelligible grasp of any aesthetic object. An of this is his discussion of the magnitude of works of art:

Besides, a beautiful object, whether an animal or anything else with a structure of parts, should have not only its parts ordered also an appropriate magnitude: beauty consists in magnitude and order, which is why there could not be a beautiful animal which was either minuscule (as contemplation of it, occurring an almost imperceptible moment, has no distinctness) or gigantic (as contemplation of it has no cohesion, but those who contemplate it lose a sense of unity and wholeness), say, any animal a thousand miles long. So just as with our bodies and with animals beauty requires magnitude, but magnitude that allows coherent perception, likewise plots require length, but length can be coherently remembered.

In order to succeed, a work of art must be above a certain minimum size, this requirement is not about the nature of art so much as about nature of the human perceptive apparatus. Without sufficient size, object can be perceived as having parts that can be arranged in a pattern, perceptible structure. A lion or a shark, therefore, can be beautiful, because their parts