Art and Aesthetic in Aristotle

Author(s): John S. Marshall

Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , Dec., 1953, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Dec.,
1953), pp. 228-231
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/426876

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 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

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 ART AND AESTHETIC IN ARISTOTLE 229

this productive knowledge, for it tells us the rules

Poetics, then, have any relation to aesthetics? I bel
telian aesthetics throws light on the Aristotelian
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

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 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

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 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.

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