That is a terrific question, and and an important one for getting right Sidney's notions about how and why poetry does its work. Answering it well would mean looking hard at those contemporary sources through which Aristotle's Ethics were mediated for him. You might want to have a look at Joachim Camerarius the Elder's commentaries on the Ethics, posthumously published by Andreas Wechel's press in Frankfurt after Sidney's request to his sons for its publication. Sidney didn't read Aristotle as we do. He read him through the specific lens of a particular brand of reformed humanism that found one of its most learned expressions in Camerarius--also the translator of the Cyropaedia, which is another of Wechel's publications. The commentary has a useful, searchable index both for Greek terms and for Latin. You might have a look there for architectonike and entelecheia, and then compare notes on what Camerarius has to say about energeia--a good Aristotelian term appearing some 600-plus times in the corpus, and of some real interest to Camerarius and to Sidney where concepts of the self and self -knowledge and the work (energon) of becoming or making or knowing a self matter.
I hope the suggestion helps, and apologise for my short-hand notes, but I'm traveling right now and away from my books.
Rob
I'm writing to ask whether anyone knows of a precedent for Sidney's gloss on 'architectonike' as self-knowledge.
It looks like he's putting together two classical passages: Aristotle on the master-science, which he compares to architecture because other forms of techne are controlled by it as workmen are controlled by the architect; and Plato on the Delphic oracle's "know thyself."
What I'm wondering--if this interpretation passes muster--is whether Sidney is making this leap himself, or repeating something fairly commonplace. It doesn't look to me as if Aristotle's 'architectonike' is really about self-knowledge in Aristotle; and Sidney's way of glossing the term ("which stands as I think, in the knowledge of a man's self") seems to imply that he's the one drawing this conclusion.
--
David Lee Miller
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