universalinthe particular: for example, what it is like to recognize someone
from the scar on his thigh (as Odysseus’s nurse Euryclea feels it). Though
these are all natural and conceptually informed intelligent human activities,
they are carried out in pursuit of distinct ends.Theoriaaims at knowledge or
understanding (of the general),praxisaims at well-being (eudaimonia) as the
satisfaction of reasonable desires, andpoesisaims at the achievement of a felt
sense or understanding of rational finitude: of what it is like to be an
embodied rational creature, a human being, in this situation or that.
Imitations, Aristotle goes on to argue, then“differ from one another in three
ways, by using for the representation (i) different media, (ii) different objects
[subject matter], or (iii) a manner [point of view] that is different and not the
same.”^3 Of these three differences, the third is important but has received little
notice in the critical literature. Aristotle has in mind first of all the distinction
already noted in Plato’sRepublicbetween narrative and dramatic (impersona-
tive) presentation of an action. That is, one can describe (as either an omniscient
narrator or a distinctly situated, specific first-person narrator) what people do,
or one can simply present them, speaking their own words and doing their own
doings, or one can mix narrative and dramatic presentation.^4 What is often not
noticed, however, is that Aristotle’saccountofmannerof presentation extends
naturally to other media of art. A painting offers to an audience a point of view:
apples on a table or a red patch hovering over a yellow one as seen fromjust here.
Works of sculpture and architecture offer multiple points of view, as one moves
around or through them. One follows a dance from a certain orienting vantage
point toward the dancers’bodies and motions. Even in attending to a work of
purely instrumental music, one must hear from a spatial point in relation to the
sound source, and one must follow the development of statement, departure,
tension, and return from that location. As Paul Woodruff usefully notes, a
successful imitation for Aristotle must have“the power of engaging our atten-
tion and our emotions almost as if it were real.”^5 That an imitation has and
affords a point of view on its subject matter is crucial to its having this power of
engagement. The audience takes up the afforded point of view and so comes to
(^3) Aristotle,Poetics, trans. Richard Janko (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), p. 1; interpol-
ations added.
(^4) Ibid., p. 3.
(^5) Paul Woodruff,“Aristotle on Mimesis,”inEssays on Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. A. Rorty (Prince-
ton University Press, 1992), pp. 73–95 at p. 81.
Representation, imitation, and resemblance 27