Method
Deus ex machina
Overview
Deus ex machina ( DAY-əs ex-MA(H)K-in-ə; Latin: [ˈdɛ.ʊs ɛks ˈmaːkʰɪnaː]; plural: dei ex machina; 'God from the machine') is a plot device, a type of denouement in which a seemingly unsolvable problem in a story is suddenly or abruptly resolved by an unexpected and unlikely occurrence. Its function is generally to resolve an otherwise irresolvable plot situation, to surprise the audience, to bring the tale to a happy ending, or act as a comedic device.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Well, as a matter of fact, every actual feeling DOES show us, quite as flagrantly as the gun, which q it points to; and practically in concrete cases the matter is decided by an element we have hitherto left out. Let us pass from abstractions to possible instances, and ask our obliging deus ex machina to frame for us a richer world. Let him send me, for example, a dream of the death of a certain man, and let him…
William James, The Meaning of Truth
Names Deus ex machina.
So long as the spectator has to divine the meaning of this or that person, or the presuppositions of this or that conflict of inclinations and intentions, his complete absorption in the doings and sufferings of the chief persons is impossible, as is likewise breathless fellow-feeling and fellow-fearing. The Æschyleo-Sophoclean tragedy employed the most ingenious devices in the first scenes to place in the hands of…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
The author is tied to Deus ex machina in the knowledge graph.
It seems as though the reproachful description _'Deus ex machina'_ should be reserved for more arbitrary expedients than Aristotle's or Leibniz's, say for the occasionalist theory. Occasionalism appeared to introduce God that he might make physical matter do what it had no natural tendency to do, viz. to obey the volitions of finite mind.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil
Opens on Deus ex machina; names Deus ex machina.
Philosophers who discussed Deus ex machina
Related ideas
- Aristophanes
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Ars Poetica (Horace)
- Heracles
- J. R. R. Tolkien
- Medicine
- Aeschylus
- Judea
- Cratylus (dialogue)
- Plato
- Socrates
- Sophocles
- The Lord of the Rings
- Aristotle
- Poetics (Aristotle)
- Genre
- Apollonian and Dionysian
- Charles Dickens
- Helios
- Euripides
Place in the tradition
Part of Naturalism (philosophy).