Aristotle was one to combat Plato without shame or timidity. He said a lot in his works, but I will focus on a few points and what came up in class. Upon watching the allegory of the cave in a new way, animated in a youtube clip, we experience the same idea as he was explaining. This “explanation” of his allegory is even twice removed from his text, as we have a narrator paraphrasing it, plus a pictorial depiction of it, which makes me wonder, as the prisoners might have wondered, what the real story was like when he told it.
Longinus talks about the sublime, which is a concept we use in such a different way than what I think he meant. When we see something that is beautiful, we easily say it is “sublime.” But what do we really mean? We usually use it in such a casual way, with no rhyme or reason behind the moment other than chance, luck and happenstance. But Longinus advocates that “though nature is on the whole a law unto herself in matters of emotion and elevation, she is not a random force and does not work altogether without method,” so that even the things that are out of our control have some sort of method or reason to their being; their sublimity. Here is an example of an interpretation I would consider four times removed.
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