Souvce TIe JouvnaI oJ AeslIelics and Avl Cvilicisn, VoI. 12, No. 2 |Bec., 1953), pp. 228-231 FuIIisIed I WiIe on IeIaIJ oJ TIe Anevican Sociel Jov AeslIelics SlaIIe UBL http://www.jstor.org/stable/426876 . Accessed 02/02/2014 1837 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . Wiley and The American Society for Aesthetics are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 82.13.86.190 on Sun, 2 Feb 2014 18:37:45 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ART AND AESTHETIC IN ARISTOTLE* JOHN S. MARSHALL The results of modem classical scholarship have made it abundantly clear that Aristotle's Poetics does not present us with an aesthetics, but with an analysis of poetic creation. There is a danger in constructing a theory of aesthetics from the Poetics, because the idea of imitation is not the source of Aristotle's philosophy of beauty. Imitation is a method of artistic construction, but it is not the criterion of beauty. It has been very unfortunate that the Poetics has been treated as a manual of aesthetics, that is, as the exposition of a philosophy of poetic beauty. It has been widely held that Aristotle considered beauty to be like truth, and to consist in a correspondence of artistic creations with reality. As truth is a correspondence of our ideas with reality, so beauty is the corre- spondence of our artistic productions with reality. This, however, is not Aristotle's conception of beauty. The Poetics is not a manual of aesthetics; it does not tell us the nature of poetic beauty. It tells us, rather, how a good drama is produced, and the critical methods of ascertaining the literary value of poetic production. The Poetics is, of course, related to aesthetics, and cannot be understood apart from Aristotle's aesthetic doctrine. However, the most general concepts of the Poetics are not the general concepts of Aristotle's aesthetics. To understand the place of the Poetics in Aristotle's general philosophic scheme, and to understand the relation of the Poetics to Aristotle's aesthetics, we must recognize the Aristotelian classifi- cation of the sciences, and then determine the place of poetic production in this scheme. Aristotle divides all knowledge into three kinds. First, there is theory, and it deals with that which is characterized by exact law. Although that character- ized does involve change, the change is itself determined by exact laws. As- tronomy, for example, is a strictly theoretical science. The standard in astronomy is mathematical, and the subject-matter is the eternal. However, biology is also theoretic. The second field of knowledge is the domain of ethical and political matters. This domain of thought is called practical knowledge. Ethics and politics give us general rules; but the rules are not rigid and fixed. Rather, they are subject to variations and exceptions. Today we would call them normative. It is in the field of practical life that we can say de minimis lex non curat, the law is not concerned with negligible and trifling matters. Or we say in the same spirit, "It is the exception that proves the rule." The domain of human practice is an inexact field of thought. A third field of knowledge deals with the making of things, whether houses or poems. This kind of knowledge is concerned with the field of human creativity. This knowledge, like practice in morality, requires a perceptive insight very unlike theoretic cognition. It is a field in which we have a knowledge of how to make things. Aristotle's Poetics is concerned with * The author read this paper before a meeting of the Aesthetics Division of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology. 228 This content downloaded from 82.13.86.190 on Sun, 2 Feb 2014 18:37:45 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ART AND AESTHETIC IN ARISTOTLE 229 this productive knowledge, for it tells us the rules for creating poetry. Does the Poetics, then, have any relation to aesthetics? I believe it does, and that Aristo- telian aesthetics throws light on the Aristotelian conception of artistic produc- tion. However, that is only because theory can be of aid to production. Beauty for Aristotle is a theoretic notion; and for that reason it is defined by him in the Metaphysics. Metaphysics is, for Aristotle, par excellence theoretic. Early in the Fifth Book we are told that "the good and the beautiful are the beginning both of knowledge and the movement of things." In this sense, the good and beautiful are used in much the same sense; and that is because meta- physically they have a common root. The generic idea is that of the appropriate, the seemly, that which has symmetry and proportion. Aristotle's own words are these, "Now since the good and the beautiful are different (for the former always implies conduct as its subject, while the beautiful is found also in motion- less things), those who assert that the mathematical sciences say nothing of the beautiful or the good are in error. For these sciences say and prove a very great deal about them; for if they do not expressly mention them, but prove attributes which are their results or their defining formulae, it is not true to say that they tell us nothing about them. The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree." (Met. 1078a, 32 if.) The clue to all this is to be found in Aristotle's definition of beauty in the Topics, "the beautiful is the appropriate." (102a, 6) Beauty is a theoretic notion, and in its very lofty forms may characterize the eternal. From all indications beauty is a concept which can be applied to the Deity because of the proportion and symmetry of God's life. Beauty shares all the characteristics which are essentially metaphysical and theoretical. In its highest form, it is fixed and eternal. Nature is characterized by the appropriate. In all nature the details work out in such a way as to produce symmetry and proportion; and this is true not only of the heavens but of the sub-lunar world as well. In the world of animate nature the details so work together that they produce final cause or purpose. The highest beauty is to be found in the heavens; but in the sub-lunar world there is a per- fection of beauty seldom found in artificial production. The art of man is, as a whole, inferior in its beauty to the perfected beauty of nature. Nature is the master artist. It is nature which creates beauty par excellee. There is no hint in Aristotle of a conception of nature as degraded and ugly. For him the heavens do declare an eternal glory, and the earth is full of a resplendent beauty. Because of the essential beauty of nature, we learn to create beautiful objects by imitating the beauty of nature. Human beings do like to imitate, and as we have no spontaneous power of creating the beautiful, we learn to create beauty by catching the clue from nature. We are like students who learn to be craftsmen by following the methods of the master craftsman. Nature is the master of the appropriate; and we learn the appropriate by following the guiding hand of our master craftsman. We are now in a position to understand the notion of imitation. As sometimes interpreted, it commits us to the position that the photograph is the most perfect form of art. Aristotle is then interpreted as if he were exclusively preoccupied This content downloaded from 82.13.86.190 on Sun, 2 Feb 2014 18:37:45 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 230 JOHN S. MARSHALL with photograph-like painting. This is not his meaning, as we see when we realize the relation of creative art to beauty. The artist can see beauty concretely realized in nature; and he can learn the trick of creating beautiful objects by taking his clue from nature. Art is primarily productive; and what is required for it to be satisfactory is for it to be characterized by the appropriate. The appropriate is found in its perfected form in nature, and may be learned by the imitation of nature. Thus, it is possible for the artist to create works of beauty without a theoretic insight into the nature of beauty. He learns to create beauty by using the appropriateness of nature as his guide. Therefore, painting of a photographic sort is not Aristotle's norm for artistic creation, and that is proved by his assertion that music is a typical imitative art. (Pol. 1340a, 12 ff.) This assertion has troubled the commentators. But it would not if Aristotle's theory of imitation were properly understood. This theory of imitation rests in a certain conception of artistic production. What must be achieved in an art is the production of the beauty which is like the beauty of nature; and this is not slavish imitation. Rather, it is the production of the appropriate in the artistic medium. Of course, the portrayal of things human is most satisfactory when it expresses that appropriateness which char- acterizes nature; and that is what music does. The glory of music lies in its ability to reproduce the rhythm of actual human desire and purpose. Purpose is desire passing through emotion into action. There is a certain form of the expanding desire, and this expanded desire is what Aristotle thinks of as emotion or passion. Thus, hate, love, fear, ambition, friendliness and curiosity are desires which, as they expand, are also emotions. Each desiderative emotion has a certain rhythmic form of its own, and a certain tonality of its own. It is the rhythm which is most characteristic of the diverse emotions. The philosophers of the school of Aristotle, particularly Aristoxenus, put a great deal of stress on the diversity of rhythm as expressing the different emotions. The full meaning of such musical analysis has been made clear by the work of Rudolph Westphal, and has been summarized by Gevaert and Laloy. The variety of rhythm recognized by the School of Aristotle was very compli- cated and complex; and this complexity was necessary to express the many forms of human emotion. In musical rhythm we have imitation in one of its highest forms. Imitation in music is not slavish reproduction, but the recognition of the complexity of nature as a clue to the legitimate complexities of art. Nature leads us to subtle forms of the appropriate, and art has meaning as it reveals in artistic reproduc- tion similar forms of the appropriate. As nature is more complex than the artist, he learns best by using her as a guide to the appropriate in artistic creations. We are now in a position to understand the meaning of Aristotelian catharsis. The long debate as to the exact significance of this term itself is not of primary importance, since any one of the various meanings given to it by scholars is satisfactory if seen in the context of Aristotle's aesthetics and theory of artistic production. Catharsis can be interpreted in terms of medicine, and then it becomes a kind of psycho-analytical means of curing emotional disturbances. It can be interpreted as a technic of religious excitement used by the mystery This content downloaded from 82.13.86.190 on Sun, 2 Feb 2014 18:37:45 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ART AND AESTHETIC IN ARISTOTLE 231 religions. The important thing is expressed in both of these theories. The re- pressed desires, the fears and sympathies of a man, are released by being re- produced in a dramatic or a musical form. The desire finds an expression; and if the drama or the music is correct, the emotional release takes a form that is harmless instead of harmful. This is a technic used both by psychological medi- cine and by religions both ancient and modern. The explanation of cathartic release lies in the capacity of music and drama to reproduce the emotions. This is done in music by expressing the inward character of the emotion itself. It is now clear that neither imitation nor catharsis is a fundamental aesthetic notion. They belong, rather, to the technic of artistic production, and are there- fore concepts of the sciences of production, rather than those of the sciences of the aesthetic. The science of the aesthetic is, however, related to artistic produc- tion, since the comely or the appropriate is important for artistic production. However, this aesthetic notion of the appropriate transcends artistic production, and is originally an ontological rather than an artistic concept. Beauty is funda- mentally cosmic and metaphysical, and appears in artistic production because the appropriate is a feature of nature which needs to be embodied in human creativity to make the creation satisfactory. The appropriate in nature is prob- ably the most important single aspect in nature; and in order for man to create anything which is really satisfactory, he must try to be an artisan who matches nature in this most fundamental aspect of its creativity. Nature is fundamentally appropriate, and man should be appropriate. Man can produce either the appropriate or the inappropriate. The appropriate alone is satisfactory, and yet humans do become wayward and reject the appropriate for wild and uncontrolled creativity. Imitiation is a help in this process of pro- ducing the appropriate because it keeps the appropriate before us. Once the aesthetic canon of the appropriate is learned, we can use it even when nature fails us. And that is the reason why the human artist may grasp that perfection towards which nature is striving, but which at times she fails to achieve; for not imitation, but the appropriate, is the fundamental aesthetic canon. This content downloaded from 82.13.86.190 on Sun, 2 Feb 2014 18:37:45 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions