Poetics
One of the first books written on what is now called aesthetics. Although parts are lost (e.g., comedy), it has been very influential in western thought, such as the part on tragedy.
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6recommend
34mentions
25people
2009–2026years
24% recommend74% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
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- I prescribe Plato - Republic, book X, specifically. How can one set of shadows on the wall be better than another, as they’re just shadows, degraded representations of the real?
Or perhaps Aristotle’s Poetics - pop culture has value because it is mimetic, and AI generated pop culture is no less a mirror, just one which produces reflections of every moment, all the time - but rather than the grand catharsis we might experience in a work of literature with well wrought characters with whom we empathise, we find the void staring into us as we do into it. Hollow art for hollow men.
Like it or not, the void is culture, and has value because it reflects us, albeit through a glass, darkly.
- A few more that young developers need to read:
Computer Lib by Ted Nelson. This used to be the, "Bible" before Nelson fell into relative obscurity. Ted Nelson was the first to coin the term, "Hypertext" in the 1960s after reading a famous article by Vannevar Bush
https://worrydream.com/refs/Nelson_T_1974_-_Computer_Lib,_Dr...
Mindstorms by Seymour Papert. Introduction to, "interfaces as pedagogy." This lays a foundation for, "what computer interfaces look like when you can use human intuition to work through them."
https://worrydream.com/refs/Papert_1980_-_Mindstorms,_1st_ed...
Jef Raskin was the original head of the Macintosh team. This treatise on humane design is invaluable and has been largely ignored. Any person that takes these ideas and makes them work will be a proverbial father of, "the next generation of computing."
https://archive.org/details/humaneinterfacen00rask
Douglas Engelbart who is often regard as, "the inventor of the mouse" founded his working philosophy by describing an operation paradigm for continued exponential improvement in groups. In some sense it's a masterwork in, "computer ethics."
https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/papers/scanned/Doug_Engel...
Early article describing Hyperlinking and aspects of the Internet some of which haven't been or have been under-realized. Imagine what, "social histories for extending research" would look like if taken seriously.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...
Computers As Theatre by Brenda Laurel; "think of the computer not as a tool but a medium." Brenda is an actress that applied Aristotle's Poetics to computer design. An absolute foundational classic.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~social/reading/Laurel-ComputersAsThe...
Worthy mention: Alan Kay's Quora. This is a literal goldmine of insights into the history of programming languages and computing paradigms. He'll answer your question if it's meaningful.
https://www.quora.com/profile/Alan-Kay-11
Remember: computer paradigms have changed every few decades. We started with pontifications by philosophers about the foundations of mathematics to mechanical machines to vacuum tube machines to (skipping some things) huge mainframes to mini-computers to linked personal computers (Engelbart) to the Xerox Alto. We now live in a world of castrated, linked post-Altos and a failed realization of portable computers in the form of b̶r̶a̶i̶n̶w̶a̶s̶h̶i̶n̶g̶-̶o̶u̶t̶r̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶c̶h̶i̶n̶e̶s̶ smartphones. Ask yourself-- what comes next? How can we significantly improve computers for human beings?
- I'm a compulsive note taker. I find that most practical style books can be shortened into a 10th of the size.
However, some books end up with much longer notes than the books themselves. One of my favorites was actually Aristotle's Poetics. A lot of the classic non-fiction are like that; the article versions are longer.
But what I've learned is avoid most practical books; things that tell you what to do. I think the problem is that the advice is generally weak, and the extra "fluff" is just finding support for this weak advice. An exception is the Pomodoro Technique which works perfectly fine when you don't read the book.
Instead go for the books that study the phenomenon, like The Power of Habit instead of Atomic Habits. Something like 33 Strategies of War is written as a historic book. The summaries tend to be much weaker than the book. Those are the kinds of books you should be reading.
Poetics was actually recommended by a lot of screenwriters, who basically called the rulebook. So you can also go from articles to books when the same books are emerging in multiple sources.
- Aristotle's Poetics. Yes, it was published before 2021.
A lot of writers try to set their own rules, but according to the best, you need limitations to be creative. Just like you would play sports with rules. That rulebook is Poetics.
It's the kind of book that's so information dense that you have to read it slowly. Summaries are often as long as the book itself.
There's some aging in there. Notably the concept of hamartia has changed from "mistake" to "sin" over a few hundred years. Good stories were all tragedy back then, where a noble person makes a mistake. And the audience is fearful because if this superior person can make mistakes, what about me?
Since Christianity, the philosophy has been that everyone makes mistakes, but repenting for it saves you from tragedy. And more popular now is a reversal. Some tries to slay a monster, but the monster is too perfect. But eventually the monster suffers from hamartia (missing the mark, making human sins) and the hero exploits that to win.
Besides drama, the book also covers actual poetry and music, both of which have their own limitations, but that part was all Greek to me.
- I was introduced to Aristotle's 'Poetics' in college and it transformed the trajectory of my life. The Poetics, as you may or may not know, is the foundation for nearly every western-oriented tragedy: novels, plays, films, etc. dating back centuries. It's THE text upon which western drama is founded in so many respects (though not all).
However, I was also told Aristotle also wrote/dictated a (now lost to us) rendition of "Comedy." And for the better part of a decade I've been trying to do two things: - Take modern comedy and dilute it toward logical precepts which could be echoed/reverse engineered to represent what Aristotle may have conceived for that lost treatise - Find some sliver of Aristotle's lost "Comedy"
I realize this isn't the typical fair for YC, but I've asked this question over the years to so many people, across multiple forums, and in person or emails to professors of Greek lit, and I'm as lost as I was when I first learned the "Comedy" was lost...
If you have any books you can recommend, people to contact/interview, or just general context on this issue I'd be grateful to hear them.
Thank you
- Parent here.
Art != Communication
And art is not a form of communication ether.
There is no shortage of literature on this topic but good place to start is Aristotle’s Poetics, essentially the first art theory ever written and it dives head first into the issue. In it, Aristotle laments on the corruption of communication at the hands of poetry.
