Plato or Aristotle?
form and textuality
pp. 335-347
in: Martin Middeke, Christoph Reinfandt (eds), Theory matters, Berlin, Springer, 2016Abstract
Plato saw the reality of an object as inhering in an ideal form—as it were, beyond or behind its material manifestations. Aristotle saw the reality as inherent in those manifestations and only deducible from them in conceptual terms. For the former, the universal is truly absolute; for the latter it is, in a manner of speaking, contingent.These differing concepts of form have crucial implications for our concept of the text and for editorial practice. Do we attune our study of multiple versions of a text, or even a single (necessarily imperfect) one, to the notion of an ideal source? Or do we see each version as a unique point in an unfolding, theoretically endless operation? Do we conceive of a text as structure or as process?The issue is germane to the choice of linear versus radial stemmatics. But this impersonal, technical question masks the tracking of the creative process, the interplay between the mind that generates the text and the text as an autonomous linguistic entity. More fundamentally still, it addresses the relation between the process of text-formation and the wider operation of language, the impulse to build a consistent structure of select linguistic resources and the impulse to extend and complicate it by varying those resources. It is a contrast analogous to that between langue and parole.Finally, the Plato–Aristotle duality needs radical rethinking with respect to electronic texts. Are the traditional premises of textual production overturned in texts generated on a computer?
