Unity, Wholeness, and Proportion

This chapter examines conceptions of the unity of literary texts and other artistic products in ancient philosophical aesthetics. It begins with the text as an appropriately organized whole in Plato's Phaedrus, and assesses the Neoplatonist theory that this criterion requires a single “target” (skopos). The discussion of unity in tragedy and epic in Aristotle's Poetics is interpreted in the light of the conceptual analyses of wholeness, unity, and completeness in the Metaphysics. A survey of the widely held view that beauty depends on proportion (summetria), found in Plato, Aristotle, and later Platonists as well as the Stoics, precedes a discussion of Plotinus’ critique of the theory, his argument that beauty is participation in Form, and an apparent response to Plotinus’ critique in Basil of Caesarea.