There’s a thread here I’d like to pursue, or at least snarl with elan.

Today in my “Introduction to Literary Studies” class we were discussing Aristotle: the Poetics mostly, with a fillip of the Rhetoric. Our text, the redoubtable Norton Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, had an especially observant introduction to the Aristotle selections, one that contrasted the way Plato “explores paths of thinking” with the way Aristotle focuses on “categorization [and] definition” by means of “propositional statements.” The contrast made me think of the document/data continuum (I almost said dichotomy) that Eric Miller was speaking about yesterday.

I think there’s a strong streak of Aristotelian propositional method in the idea of a data-driven web. Read the Poetics and wonder at Aristotle’s indefatigable defining, analyzing, parsing, specifying. The man never tires, never even hesitates in the face of the enormous task he sets for himself. And even the most breathtaking propositions–his firm assertion about the end [purpose] of life, for example–are just more confident statements in the long march of sureties. Of course he’s right to insist on the need for clarity, specification, definition. Yet even Aristotle has to pause at metaphor, declare it essential, a gift, the peculiar possession of the poet and madman. Even Aristotle stops for genius.

Perhaps I’m simply besotted with the genius of the web of documents, the genius that has given us this astonishing communication medium, this palette, canvas, and never-ending subject. As I told my students today, I certainly wish for an Aristotelian as my surgeon. No time or place for allegory when you’re trying to find and stitch together those delicate, fungible parts.

Yet when I describe my symptoms, and try to communicate what it’s like to be the subject inside this body, with these pains and these hopes and these anxieties, I hope for a Platonist, someone just a little more mad, creative, and patient with the human drive to narrate, to inhabit. Someone who will try not just to classify, but to understand, to be illuminated.

Aristotle is the king of disambiguation. He’s consistent (for the most part), tirelessly logical, clear-headed as the first chill breath of autumn. Plato is all over the place: contemptuous, mystical, enigmatic, condescending, allegorical, itchy for revelation, mad with yearning, consumed by love (in The Symposium, anyway).

I suppose my highest hope is a synthesis of the two. But if I can have only one, give me Plato.