There is in the works of Aristotle a medullary idea, which escaped the perception of almost all his readers and commentators, from Antiquity until today. Even those who perceived it — and there were only two, as far as I know, over the millennia — limited themselves to writing it down in passing, without explicitly attributing it a decisive importance for the understanding of Aristotle’s philosophy. However, it is the very key to this understanding, if by understanding we understand the act of capturing the unity of a man’s thought from his own intentions and values, instead of judging him from the outside; an act that implies carefully respecting the unexpressed and the implied, instead of suffocating it in the idolatry of the reified “text”, the grave of thought.

I call this idea Theory of the Four Discourses. It can be summed up in one sentence: human discourse is a unique potency, updated in four different ways: poetics, rhetoric, dialectics and analytics (logic).
Said thus, the idea does not seem very remarkable. But, if it occurs to us that the names of these four types of discourse are also names of four sciences, we see that according to this perspective, Poetics, Rhetoric, Dialectics and Logic, studying modalities of a single potency, also constitute variants of a unique science. The very diversification in four subordinate sciences has to be based on the reason for the unity of the object they focus on, under penalty of failing the Aristotelian rule of divisions. And this means that the principles of each of them presuppose the existence of common principles that subordinate them, that is, that apply equally to fields as different from each other as the scientific demonstration and the construction of the tragic plot in the plays. So the idea that I just attributed to Aristotle is already starting to seem strange, surprising and extravagant to us. And the two questions that it immediately suggests to us are: Did Aristotle really think that way? And, if he thought, did he think right? The question is therefore divided into a historical-philological investigation and a philosophical criticism. In the dimensions of the present communication, I will not be able to do either one or the other satisfactorily. In return, I can inquire the reasons for the strangeness.

The astonishment that the idea of ​​the Four Discourses provokes to a first contact comes from an ingrained custom of our culture, of facing the poetic language and the logical or scientific language as separate and distant universes, governed by sets of laws immeasurable among themselves. Since a decree of Louis XIV separated “Letters” and “Sciences” in different buildings, the gap between poetic imagination and mathematical reason has continued to widen, until it became a kind of constitutive law of the human spirit. Evolving as parallels that sometimes attract and sometimes repel but never touch, the two cultures, as C. P. Snow called them, consolidated into watertight universes, each incomprehensible to the other. Gaston Bachelard, a doublé poet of mathematician, imagined that he could describe these two sets of laws as contents of radically separate spheres, each equally valid within its limits and in its own terms, among which man transits as from sleep to wakefulness, disconnecting from one to enter the other, and vice versa: the language of dreams does not dispute that of equations, nor does this one penetrate the world of that. So deep was the separation, that some wished to find for it an anatomical basis in the theory of the two cerebral hemispheres, one creative and poetic, the other rational and ordering, and believed to see a correspondence between these divisions and the double yin-yang of Chinese cosmology. Furthermore, they thought they discovered in the exclusive predominance of one of these hemispheres the cause of the evils of Western man. A somewhat mystified view of Chinese ideography, disseminated in pedantic circles by Ezra Pound, (who gave this theory more than enough literary support to compensate for its lack of scientific foundations), the “New Age” ideology finally enshrined it as one of the pillars of wisdom.

In this picture, old Aristotle posed, together with the evil Descartes, as the very prototype of the rationalist bedel who, with his ruler in hand, kept our inner Chinese under severe repression. The listener imbued with such beliefs can only receive with indignation the idea that I attribute to Aristotle. It presents as an apostle of unity the one that everyone used to see as a guardian of schizophrenia. It disputes a stereotyped image that time and almanac culture have enshrined as an acquired truth. It scrapes old wounds, healed by a long sediment of prejudices.

Resistance is therefore a fait accompli. It remains to face it, proving, first, that the idea is effectively Aristotle’s; second, that it is an excellent idea, worthy to be taken up, with humility, by a civilization that hurried to retire the teachings of its old master before having examined them well. I will not be able to indicate here but the directions in which these two demonstrations should be sought.
Aristotle wrote a Poetics, a Rhetoric, a book on Dialectics (the Topics) and two treatises on Logic (Analytical I and II), as well as two introductory works on language and thought in general (Categories and Interpretation). All these works were practically disappeared, like the others of Aristotle, until the first century BC, when a certain Andronicus of Rhodes promoted a joint edition, on which our knowledge of Aristotle is still based.

Like any posthumous editor, Andronicus had to put some order in the manuscripts. He decided to take as a basis for this order the criterion of dividing the sciences into introductory (or logical), theoretical, practical and technical (or poiesis, as some say). This division had the merit of being of Aristotle himself. But, as Octave Hamelin pointed out with acuity, there is no reason to suppose that the division of a philosopher’s works into volumes must correspond exactly to his conception of the divisions of knowledge. Andronicus took this correspondence for granted, and grouped the manuscripts, therefore, in the four divisions. But, lacking other works that could come under the technical label, he had to put Rhetoric and Poetics there, disconnecting them from the other works on the theory of discourse, which were part of Organon’s apparently closed unit, set of logical works or introductory.

In addition to other circumstances, this editorial casualty was lavish in consequences, which are still multiplying today. In the first place, Rhetoric — the name of a science abhorred by philosophers, who saw it as the emblem of even their main opponents, the sophists — did not raise, since its first edition by Andronicus, the least philosophical interest. It was read only in schools of rhetoric, which, to make matters worse, then entered an accelerated decay due to the fact that the extinction of democracy, suppressing the need for speakers, removed the raison d’être from rhetorical art, enclosing it in the dome of a narcissistic formalism. Soon thereafter, Poetics, in turn, disappeared from circulation, only to reappear in the 16th century. These two events seem fortuitous and unimportant. But, added together, they result in nothing less than the following: all Western Aristotelianism, which, at first slowly, but growing in speed since the 11th century, was forming in the period from the eve of the Christian Era until the Renaissance, completely ignored Rhetoric and Poetics. As our image of Aristotle is still a legacy from that period (since the rediscovery of Poetics in the Renaissance aroused no interest other than poets and philologists, without touching the philosophical public), until today what we call Aristotle, to praise or curse him, it is not the man of flesh and blood, but a simplified scheme, set up over the centuries that ignored two of his works. In particular, our view of Aristotelian theory of discursive thought is based exclusively on analytic and topical, that is, logic and dialectic, amputated from the basis that Aristotle had built for them in poetics and rhetoric.

But the mutilation did not stop there. From the discourse theory building, only the top two floors — dialectic and logic — were left, floating without foundations in the air like the poet’s room in Manuel Bandeira’s “Last Song of the Alley”. It was not long before the third floor was also suppressed: dialectics, considered a minor science, since it only dealt with probable demonstration, was passed over in favor of analytical logic, consecrated since the Middle Ages as the very key of Aristotle’s thought. The image of an Aristotle constituted of “formal logic + cognitive sensualism + theology of the First Motor Immobile” has consolidated itself as an historical truth never contested.

Even the prodigious advance of biographical and philological studies inaugurated by Werner Jaeger has not changed that. Jaeger just overturned the stereotype of a fixed and born Aristotle, ready to replace him with the living image of a thinker who evolves in time towards the maturity of his ideas. But the final product of evolution was not, under the aspect discussed here, very different from the system enshrined in the Middle Ages: above all, dialectics would be a platonic residue, absorbed and overcome in analytical logic.

But this view is contested by some facts. The first, highlighted by Éric Weil, is that the inventor of analytical logic never uses it in his treatises, always preferring to argue dialectically. Second, Aristotle himself insists that logic does not bring knowledge, but only serves to facilitate the verification of knowledge already acquired, confronting them with the principles that underlie them, to see if they do not contradict them. When we do not have the principles, the only way to look for them is the dialectical investigation that, by confronting contradictory hypotheses, leads to a kind of intuitive illumination that highlights these principles. Aristotle’s dialectic is, therefore, according to Weil, a logica inventionis, or logic of discovery: the true scientific method, of which formal logic is only a complement and a means of verification.

But Weil’s timely intervention, dispelled the legend of a total hegemony of analytical logic in Aristotle’s system, but left aside the question of rhetoric. The academic world of the twentieth century still subscribes to the opinion of Sir David Ross, who in turn follows Andronicus: Rhetoric has “a purely practical purpose”; “does not constitute a theoretical work” but “a manual for the speaker”. But to Poetics, on the other hand, Ross attributes an effective theoretical value, without noticing that, if Andronicus was wrong in this case, he may also have been mistaken about Rhetoric. After all, since the moment it was rediscovered, Poetics was also seen mainly as “a practical manual” and was of interest to literary people rather than to philosophers. On the other hand, the Topics book itself could be seen as a “technical manual” or at least “practical” — because in the Academy, dialectics worked exactly as such: it was the set of practical norms of academic debate. Finally, Andronicus’ classification, once followed to the letter, results in endless confusions, which can be resolved all at once by admitting the following hypothesis, however disturbing it may be: as sciences of discourse, Poetics and Rhetoric is part of Organon, a set of logical or introductory works, and is therefore neither theoretical nor practical nor technical. This is the core of the interpretation I advocate. It does, however, imply a thorough review of traditional and current ideas about Aristotelian science of discourse. This review, in turn, risks having major consequences for our view of language and culture in general. Reclassifying the works of a great philosopher may seem like an innocent enterprise by scholars, but it is like moving the pillars of a building. It may require the demolition of many buildings around it.
The reasons I claim to justify this change are as follows:

l. The four sciences of discourse deal with four ways in which man can, by word, influence another man’s mind (or his own). The four types of discourse are characterized by their respective levels of credibility:

(a) The poetic discourse is about the possible (dínatos), addressing above all the imagination, which captures what it presupposes (eikástikos, “presumable”; eikasia, “image”, “representation”).

(b) Rhetorical discourse has as its object the likelihood (pithános) and the goal of producing a firm belief (pistis) that supposes, in addition to mere imaginative presumption, the consent of the will; and man influences another man’s will through persuasion (peitho), which is a psychological action based on common beliefs. If poetry resulted in an impression, rhetoric must produce a decision, showing that it is the most appropriate or convenient within a given framework of accepted beliefs.

(c) Dialectical discourse is no longer limited to suggesting or imposing a belief, but it puts the beliefs to the test, by means of trials and attempts to pierce them with objections. It is the thinking that comes and goes, in transversal ways, searching for the truth between the errors and the error between the truths (dia = “through” and also indicates duplicity, division). For this reason the dialectic is also called peirástica, from the root peirá (peira = “proof”, “experience”, from where peirasmos, “temptation” come, and our words empiry, empiricism, experience etc., but also, through peirates, “pirate”: the very symbol of adventurous life, the trip without a predetermined course). Dialectical discourse finally measures, through trials and errors, the greater or lesser probability of a belief or thesis, not according to its mere agreement with common beliefs, but according to the superior requirements of rationality and accurate information.

(d) The logical or analytical discourse, finally, always starting from premises admitted as indisputably certain, arrives, through the syllogistic chain, to the right demonstration (apodêixis, “indestructible proof”) of the veracity of the conclusions.
It is visible that there is a growing scale of credibility: from the possible we rise to the credible, from this to the probable and finally to the right or true. The very words used by Aristotle to characterize the objectives of each discourse show this gradation: there is, therefore, between the four discourses, less a difference in nature than in degree.

Possibility, verisimilitude, reasonable probability and apodictic certainty are, therefore, the key concepts on which the four respective sciences are built: Poetics studies the means by which poetic discourse opens up the realm of the possible to the imagination; Rhetoric, the means by which rhetoric induces the listener’s will to admit a belief; Dialectics, those by which dialectical discourse ascertains the reasonableness of admitted beliefs, and, finally, Logic or Analytic studies the means of apodictic demonstration, or scientific certainty. Now, there the four basic concepts are relative to each other: the credible is not conceived beyond the possible, nor this without confrontation with the reasonable, and so on. The consequence of this is so obvious that it is astonishing that almost no one has noticed it: the four sciences are inseparable; taken in isolation, they make no sense. What defines and differentiates them are not four isolable sets of formal characters, but four possible human attitudes towards speech, four human reasons for speaking and listening: man speaks to open his imagination to the immensity of the possible, to make some practical resolution, to critically examine the basis of the beliefs that underlie its resolutions, or to explore the consequences and extensions of judgments already admitted as absolutely true, building with them the building of scientific knowledge. A discourse is logical or dialectical, poetic or rhetorical, not in itself and for its mere internal structure, but for the purpose to which it tends as a whole, for the human purpose it aims to achieve. That is why the four are distinguishable, but not isolable: each one is only what it is when considered in the context of culture, as an expression of human intentions. The modern idea of ​​delimiting a language “poetic in itself” or “logic in itself” would seem to Aristotle to be an absurd substantiation, even worse: an alienating objectification. He was not yet infected with the schizophrenia that today has become the normal state of culture.

II. But Aristotle goes further: he points out the different psychological disposition corresponding to the listener of each of the four discourses, and the four dispositions also form, in the most obvious way, a gradation:

(a) It is up to the listener of the poetic discourse to loosen his demand for verisimilitude, admitting that “it is not credible that everything always happens in a credible way”, to capture the universal truth that may be suggested even by an apparently improbable narrative. In short, Aristotle anticipates the suspension of disbelief of which Samuel Taylor Coleridge would later speak. Admitting a more flexible likelihood criterion, the reader (or spectator) admits that the tragic hero’s misfortunes could have happened to himself or to any other man, that is, they are permanent human possibilities.

(b) In ancient rhetoric, the listener is called a judge, because a decision, a vote, a sentence is expected of him. Aristotle, and in his wake the whole rhetorical tradition, admits three types of rhetorical speeches: forensic speech, deliberative speech and epictic speech, or praise and censorship (to a character, to a work, etc). In all three cases, the listener is called upon to decide: on the guilt or innocence of a defendant, on the usefulness or harmfulness of a law, on a project, etc., on the merits or demerits of someone or something. He is therefore consulted as an authority: he has the power to decide. If in the listener of the poetic discourse it was important that the imagination took the reins of the mind, to take it to the world of the possible in a flight from which no immediate practical consequences were expected to happen, here is the will that hears and judges the discourse, to decide to create a situation in the realm of facts.

(c) The listener of the dialectical discourse is, at least internally, a participant in the dialectical process. This one does not aim at an immediate decision, but at an approximation to the truth, an approach that can be slow, progressive, difficult, tortuous, and that does not always arrive at satisfactory results. In this listener, the impulse to decide must be postponed indefinitely, even repressed: the dialectician does not wish to persuade, like the rhetorician, but to arrive at a conclusion that ideally should be admitted as reasonable by both contending parties. To do so, he must restrain the desire to win, humbly willing to change his mind if the opponent’s arguments are more reasonable. The dialectician does not defend a party, but investigates a hypothesis. Now, this investigation is only possible when both participants in the dialogue know and admit the basic principles on which the question will be judged, and when both agree to stick honestly to the rules of dialectical demonstration. The attitude here is one of exemption and, if necessary, self-critical resignation. Aristotle expressly warns the disciples not to venture into dialectical arguments with anyone who does not know the principles of science: it would be to expose themselves to objections of mere rhetoric, prostituting philosophy.

(d) Finally, at the level of analytical logic, there is no more discussion: there is only a linear demonstration of a conclusion that, starting from premises admitted as absolutely true and proceeding rigorously by syllogistic deduction, cannot fail to be certain. The analytical discourse is the master’s monologue: the disciple is only to receive and admit the truth. If the demonstration fails, the matter
returns to the dialectical discussion.

From speech to speech, there is a progressive bottleneck, a narrowing of the admissible: from the unlimited opening of the world of possibilities, we move on to the more restricted sphere of beliefs really accepted in collective praxis; however, from the mass of beliefs subscribed to by common sense, only a few survive the rigors of dialectical screening; and, of these, even fewer are those that can be admitted by science as absolutely certain and function, in the end, as premises of scientifically valid reasoning. The sphere proper to each of the four sciences is therefore delimited by the contiguity of the preceding and the subsequent. Arranged in concentric circles, they form the complete mapping of communications between civilized men, the sphere of possible rational knowledge.

III. Finally, both scales are required by the Aristotelian theory of knowledge. For Aristotle, knowledge begins with the data of the senses. These are transferred to memory, imagination or fantasy, which groups them into images (eikoi, in Latin species, speciei), according to their similarities. It is on these images retained and organized in the fantasy, and not directly on the data of the senses, that intelligence exercises the sorting and reorganization based on which it will create the eidetic schemes, or abstract concepts of the species, with which it can finally construct the judgments and reasoning. From the senses to the abstract reasoning, there is a double bridge to be crossed: fantasy and the so-called simple apprehension, which captures isolated notions. There is no leap: without the intermediation of fantasy and simple apprehension, the upper stratum of scientific rationality cannot be reached. There is a perfect structural homology between this Aristotelian description of the cognitive process and the Four Discourse Theory. It could not be otherwise: if the human individual does not reach rational knowledge without going through fantasy and simple apprehension, how could the collectivity — be it the polis or the smallest circle of scholars — reach scientific certainty without preliminary and successive concourse of the poetic imagination, of the organizing will that is expressed in the rhetoric and of the dialectical sorting undertaken by the philosophical discussion?

Rhetoric and Poetics, once removed from the “technical” or “poiesis” exile in which Andronicus had placed them and restored to their condition as philosophical sciences, the unity of the sciences of
discourse leads us to a surprising verification: there is an entire Aristotelian philosophy of culture embedded in it as an integral expression of Logos. In this philosophy, scientific reason appears as the supreme fruit of a tree that is rooted in poetic imagination, planted in the soil of sensitive nature. And as the sensitive nature is not for Aristotle just an irrational and hostile “exteriority”, but the materialized expression of the divine Logos, culture, rising from the mythopoetic soil to the summits of scientific knowledge, appears as the humanized translation of this Divine Reason, mirrored in miniature in the philosopher’s self-awareness. Aristotle, in effect, compares philosophical reflection to the self-cognitive activity of a God who consists, fundamentally, in self-awareness. The peak of philosophical reflection, which crowns the building of culture, is, in effect, gnosis gnoseos, the knowledge of knowledge. Now, this is done only at the moment when reflection recapitulates its complete trajectory, that is, at the moment when, having reached the sphere of scientific reason, it understands the unity of the four discourses through which it progressively rose up to that point. There she is prepared to move from science or philosophy to wisdom, to enter Metaphysics, which Aristotle, as Pierre Aubenque pointed out, prepares but does not fully accomplish, since her kingdom is not of this world. The Four Discourse Theory is, in this sense, the beginning and the end of Aristotle’s philosophy. Beyond it, there is no longer knowledge itself: there is only the “science that is sought”, the aspiration of supreme knowledge, of sophia whose possession would signal both the achievement and the end of philosophy.

If I learned anything by studying Aristotle’s Organon, it was that every discourse has at least four levels of meaning — poetic, rhetorical, dialectical and logical-analytical — and is only understood when you apprehend in it the more or less perfect unity of these four levels. A speech is, above all, a symbolic form, an artistic construction; second, it is taking a position on some public issue (current or potential); third, it is an explicit or implicit confrontation of hypotheses; fourth, it is an attempt, even if in germ, to prove something. These four levels are present in a Mallarmé sonnet as in Summa Theologica or in a mathematical demonstration. The four discourses are distinguished only by the formal hierarchical center of the set (the dominant intention of the text), but, materially, they are always present. That is why I say that the theory of the four discourses is also a pedagogical technique that should guide all higher education. A man of culture is one who reads simultaneously on these four levels.

[Translated from here]