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| Aristotle. Roman copy after a Greek original by Lysippos, c.330 BC |
Aristotle had the fortune to live through one of the most creative periods in history. The 6th-4th centuries BCE in Greece were the age of Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus and Aristophanes in the theatre; Pheidias, Polykleitos and Praxiteles in sculpture; Apelles, Polygnotus and Zeuxis in painting. This is to name only a few, and Aristotle refers to some of them in his works.
As with so many ancient writers, a lot of Aristotle’s work – a prodigious corpus of perhaps as many as 200 titles – is missing. We know he wrote a set of so-called ‘exoteric’ writings published for the wider public, which seem to have been polished and admired dialogues in the tradition of Plato. All of these are lost except for a few fragments, giving us no opportunity to judge him as a stylist. The 31 titles1 that have come down to us are often regarded as teaching notes rather than his best writing, though their roughness is overstated.
Among these, the works of particular interest to aestheticians are the Poetics and to a lesser extent the Rhetoric, though neither text is entirely reliable. There are also relevant observations in the Ethics, Politics, Physics and Metaphysics. Aristotle did not seem quite to share Plato’s fascination with the arts, but ancient sources list several treatises and dialogues on the topic: On Poets (a dialogue not to be confused with the Poetics), Homeric Questions, On Beauty, On Music and Questions Concerning Poetics.2 Like his surviving observations, these works probably only looked at particular questions; the project of creating a systematic theory of the arts in general does not seem to have occurred to philosophers before the 18th century. However, we can construct a general theory from the surviving work. Aristotle inherited a great deal from his age and from Plato, but was also original, and he was the first to approach artistic questions so systematically. Every major philosopher may be assumed to have read him, and he therefore influenced aesthetics as well as other disciplines. For these reasons we should have some acquaintance with his philosophy.
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| Raphael: Plato (left) & Aristotle (right) (detail from The School of Athens, 1509-11) |
In this post I will keep to a few issues relevant to art theory. I will look at his major contribution, the Poetics, separately.
Knowledge
Several times in his works, Aristotle divides the sciences (epistemai, literally ‘knowledges’) into three kinds:
1. Theoretical (episteme) – Universal learning for its own sake. Includes ‘first philosophy’ and natural philosophy, which we call metaphysics and physics respectively.
2. Practical (phronesis) – Knowledge of how to think about the world and how we should act for good in it. Includes ethics and politics. Traditionally often translated as ‘prudence’ but better as ‘practical wisdom’.
3. Productive (techne) – Knowledge of how to make things, learnt through practice. ‘The productive sciences include, among others, ship-building, agriculture, and medicine, but also the arts of music, theatre, and dance. Another form of productive science is rhetoric’ (SEP). Only human beings engage in the creation of products.
The subject of beauty falls into the theoretical category; Aristotle’s treatises on Rhetoric and Poetics would fall into the third.
When we find episteme translated as ‘science’, Aristotle does not have in mind our modern scientific method of confirming hypotheses through experiment: his conception is more eternal and contemplative. When he discusses what English translators call ‘art’, the term he is using is techne (plural technai), a broad term which for Aristotle refers to both production and to a person’s ability to produce. Techne is the basis for our words technique, technology and other derivative terms. The ancient Greeks had no separate concept of ‘fine arts’, and included painters, musicians, poets, sculptors etc into a broad category alongside shipbuilders, shoe-makers and so on. All were considered craftspeople or manufacturers, with no separate identity for ‘fine artists’. It follows that techne was functional – there was no ‘art for art’s sake’ for the Greeks.
For further definition we may turn to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. This book, a study of how humans can live a good life and find happiness, includes a useful discussion in Book 6 of reason and action. Aristotle defines five qualities of the rational part of the soul by which we attain excellence or virtue (arete) of thought. We have seen some of the terms already: techne (art, skill), episteme (science, demonstrable knowledge), phronesis (practical wisdom), sophia (theoretical wisdom), and nous (intelligence) (1139b). Let’s concentrate on his discussion of episteme and techne.
First he defines episteme. The objects of scientific knowledge, e.g. geometry, exist out of necessity and are therefore eternal. Science happens when we can demonstrate our knowledge through a conviction based upon first principles.
Then Aristotle discusses techne. If science is about eternal necessary truths, craft exists among changing everyday contingencies. He argues a distinction between making something (poieton) and action (praktikon).
The rational quality concerned with doing is different from the rational quality concerned with making; nor is one of them a part of the other, for doing is not a form of making, nor making a form of doing. Now architectural skill, for instance, is an art [techne], and it is also a rational quality concerned with making; nor is there any art which is not a rational quality concerned with making, nor any such quality which is not an art. It follows that an art is the same thing as a rational quality, concerned with making, that reasons truly. All art deals with bringing some thing into existence; and to pursue an art means to study how to bring into existence a thing which may either exist or not, and the efficient cause of which lies in the maker and not in the thing made; for art does not deal with things that exist or come into existence of necessity, or according to nature, since these have their efficient cause in themselves. But as doing and making are distinct, it follows that art, being concerned with making, is not concerned with doing. (1140a)
Aristotle wants to make a distinction between doing (praxis) and making (poiesis). Techne is a means for producing something via reason: bringing something into existence through a principle known by the maker. The principle behind things that exist in Nature, by contrast, is in the things themselves.
In the opening lines of the Ethics, Aristotle observed that every human undertaking aims at some good:
In some cases the activity of practising the art is itself the end, whereas in others the end is some product over and above the mere exercise of the art; and in the arts whose ends are certain things beside the practice of the arts themselves, these products are essentially superior in value to the activities. (1094a)
The aim of techne is a product, and the value is in the product itself. The end product is distinct from the act of making it, and from the maker. Thus the aim of medicine is the health of the patient; the aim of a sculptor is a statue. But the end of praxis is the activity itself: as in the playing of a musical instrument, or living a good life, as in ethical or political actions.
We will return to the question of production later. First I should mention another set of distinctions Aristotle makes. Elsewhere in his work3 he divides the basic human activities, again into three:
1. Thinking (theoria) – contemplative life
2. Doing (praxis) – practical, public life
3. Making (poiesis) – productive creative life.
These correspond to the three intellectual divisions: theoria to episteme, praxis to phronesis, poiesis to techne. The end goal of thinking is truth, as in philosophy; the end goal of making is a product, e.g. the painting of a portrait; the end goal of doing is the action itself.
We are used to the distinction between theoria and praxis through the familiar dichotomy of ‘theory and practice’, and though the ancient Greeks did not all use these sorts of terms in the same way, Aristotle is perhaps the closest to our modern reading.4
Aristotle does not use such distinctions exactly and consistently. For example, in its dependence upon reason and a body of knowledge, techne actually overlaps with episteme. One of the standards for knowledge is that one knows it thoroughly enough to teach it – if a painter truly knows his craft he can teach it to another person, just as a biologist might teach taxonomy.
Matter and form
Plato thought properties like beauty were universal and existed independently of physical objects. There was a higher reality of Forms and an everyday reality of visible things that partook in them. He described these in the Timaeus (27d-28a) as the world of being and the world of becoming.
Aristotle attacks Plato’s conception of Forms on various excellent grounds, which include:
1. Eternal, unchangeable Forms cannot explain a reality that is constantly changing.
2. Forms do not explain how we can have knowledge of things, because they are independent of the thing we are examining.
3. Universal Forms cannot explain the existence of particular objects. How do the Form and object interact? How do you separate them?
Aristotle argued that we did not need Plato’s two realms to account for objective knowledge. Instead, he thought it was the visible objects around us that were the most real. In the Categories, he lists ten ‘categories’ which describe things that exist. Some properties are more fundamental than others: for example, in order to have colour, an object must first have a physical body that can take that colour on. In Aristotle’s view the most basic unit of existence is substance (ousia), because it is predicated upon no other category.
If these last did not exist, it would be impossible for anything else to exist. (Categories, 2b)
While things exist in many different ways, all properties can be predicated upon substance.
Where Plato divided the world into being and becoming, Aristotle divided it into form and matter. These were the two constituents of every substance.
Matter: the stuff things are made of.
Form: how that stuff is arranged into objects. It is not a thing, like a Platonic Form, or just a shape, but the organisation of a thing.
Thus we might start with a set of Lego bricks, then arrange these bricks to form a house, or a tree, or a dog. It is the form – of a house, of a tree, of a dog – that determines what the object is. Matter (the bricks) persists even through substantial changes (form). A substance is generated/destroyed by having matter take on/lose form.
For Aristotle, forms were properties of objects, while the stuff that takes on those properties is matter. When a carpenter makes a chair, he/she takes the matter (wood) and imposes the form of a chair on it, after which the chair persists in being a chair. Forms therefore are not distant and abstract; they are in the things themselves, as part of their substance. To the raw matter, the form brings the substantial or necessary attributes that make a thing what it is. Every physical object is thus a combination of matter and form (a view known as hylomorphism).
A Form for Aristotle is a thing’s essence: defining what it means to be that thing as both structure and function, and driving its development e.g. a seed becoming a flower. You could mould a lump of clay into the shape of a dog, but of course that would not enable the clay to behave like a dog, such as running, eating, panting and so on: those functions belong to the dog’s essence.
Take a painter: the material stuff she’s made out of – skin, bones, organs – cannot explain why she is able to paint, since animals have skin, bones and organs too, but cannot paint. She can paint because of the sort of thing she is: her form as a human being. In the composite of matter and form that comprises a particular substance, it is form that makes the substance what it is. Matter is a substratum. Form is the actuality, of which matter is the potentiality. But this doesn’t make Aristotle a Platonist, because for him form and matter are inseparable.
This brings us to two important notions, which Aristotle recognised in the Categories:
Universals: properties objects have in common by which we may classify them.
Particulars: the individual instances from which we identify universals.
Plato gave universals primacy over particulars: for him, a beautiful object is only beautiful because it partakes of a perfect universal or Form of beauty. Aristotle flips this on its head. Universals exist, but we build a conception of beauty by observing beautiful objects, i.e. we can only know universals through their particular instances. The only perfect and indivisible Form was the ‘unmoved mover’ that set the cosmos into motion (Book 12, Metaphysics).
Matter and form have different roles in relation to universals and particulars. Form gives us the universal: matter arranged into a ‘house’ rather than a ‘tree’ or a ‘dog’. When we look closer at the house, we notice that every individual house is a bit different. X’s house is made from this particular set of bricks, rather than that other set of bricks making Y’s house next door, though both are houses. Thus matter gives us the individual instances (the particulars).
Aristotle called matter without form ‘prime matter’, and form without matter he called God. But normally, neither matter nor form is found without the other.
There are debates about how precisely to interpret Aristotle on substance, matter and form. Nonetheless, his empirical approach is a tremendous improvement on Plato’s mysticism, and lays the foundations for the scientific method. Unlike Plato, Aristotle does not see our human objects, such as works of art, as poor imitations of another, truer reality. He sees them as things that become real in this world through a process of making governed by human knowledge and action.
Change
Early in the Physics Aristotle observes that we ‘must take for granted that the things that exist by nature are, either all or some of them, in motion’ (Physics I.2, 185a). His conception of matter and form allowed him to explain how things change: it is because matter can take on new arrangements. We can also explain the continuity of objects. For example, when we paint a door a different colour, it remains a door. There must be an essential form of a door that persists even when less essential aspects of it are rearranged.
To answer a range of problems to do with how things come into being, Aristotle introduced potentiality and actuality. ‘Potentiality’ (Greek δυναμις, dynamis) refers to a thing’s possibility to be changed or, for living beings, to impose change. Actuality (Greek ενεργεια, energeia) is when a potentiality is fulfilled and becomes real.
Aristotle was partly replying to his predecessor Heraclitus. Heraclitus would say that change represents a contradiction. To use a popular example, when we strike a match, it is the same thing (a bit of wood with an igniteable coated head) but at the same time not the same thing (it now has a flaming tip). Aristotle would say the substance of the match has simply undergone a change of form – it has changed from something to something else by an intelligible process – and thus iron out the contradiction. (I would say there is nothing wrong with contradictions, but that’s another story.) For Aristotle, the world is always changing and does so in intelligible ways.
When something changes, the potentiality of a substance is made actual by the agency of another thing that is already actual. Every thing created is made from something, by an agency, and changed into something (Metaphysics 1032a). There can be no creation from nothing.
Production
In the Physics and the Metaphysics there are discussions about how things become actual – how change happens. Everything that is made has the same elements, which Aristotle describes in his so-called Theory of Causes. By ‘causes’ he did not mean the cause-and-effect of events as popularised by David Hume. For Aristotle, a cause (aition, plural aitia) was an explanation of how and why a thing or substance was the way it was, and how it underwent change.
There were four of these explanations5:
1. Material: The stuff the object is made of, often later referred to via Latin as the ‘material substratum’. This stuff persists even when it undergoes a change.
2. Formal: The form of the object, how its stuff is put together. This gives the object the essential properties it must have to be that object.
3. Efficient: What brings it about, what brought the material and form together to make the object what it is.
4. Final: The purpose of the object. What does it do in the world? This end is conceptually separate from the formal cause but is presupposed by it: it is the object’s form that allows it to fulfil this purpose.
Aristotle accepted that not everything has all four causes: there is no efficient cause or agent making a seed grow into a flower. Broadly however we may say that every thing has to be formed from something, by an agency, into something, for something. How a thing that is eternal can come into being, for example the universe, is a thorny question; to answer it he conceived of a ‘prime mover’ or God.
Aristotle’s philosophy was teleological (from the Greek τελος, telos, ‘end, goal’), and he insisted that even natural objects have final causes, such as the sharp tooth whose purpose is to tear meat.6 The end purpose of a thing was important to Aristotle. All things, whether alive or not-alive, have an essential form that makes them what they are, and an end or purpose they are striving towards. A thing is good when it fulfils its function or becomes what it is meant to be.
Works of art come about through human action – specifically, human production. Back to the Ethics:
All art [techne] deals with bringing some thing into existence; and to pursue an art means to study how to bring into existence a thing which may either exist or not, and the efficient cause of which lies in the maker and not in the thing made. (Nicomachean Ethics 1140a)
Let us take a work of art as an example, namely (in homage to one of Aristotle’s own examples) a bronze statue of an Olympian athlete:
1. Its material cause is bronze. This is the stuff that undergoes a change, and gives the statue a certain appearance, feel, and other properties.
2. Its formal cause is the athletic human shape into which the bronze has been cast.
3. Its efficient cause is the sculptor and his assistants, or more precisely their practice of the art or knowledge of bronze-casting/sculpting
4. Its final cause is its purpose as a work of art, such as aggrandising the site at Olympia, or commemorating a famous athlete. This is what prompts the sculptor to make it.
Thus the sculptor and assistants with their skills (efficient cause) impose the representation of the athlete (formal cause) on the bronze (material cause) in order to have a statue (final cause).
We can see that some causes are more important than others. The bronze is necessary, as without it there would be no statue. But left to itself it is just metal lying around. The sculptor and assistants can come along too, but if all they do is sit around drinking wine, there will still be no statue. What is needed is the final cause, to prompt the artisans to impose a form on the bronze – only then do we get a statue. Even then it has to be an appropriate form... otherwise we might end up with a goat instead of an athlete.
There are many ways of causation, and even within causes there are different ways, some more important than others. So the form could to an extent be different – e.g. the athlete might be shown at a slightly different stage of a running motion, or be made by sculptor X instead of by sculptor Y – while still fulfilling its purpose. Once the work is done, the sculptor can walk away or go to his grave but the statue will persist as a statue... until a new change is imposed on the object, such as a barbarian who melts it down a few centuries later to use the bronze for weapons. (So it goes.)
We can see that Aristotle’s view is more dynamic than Plato’s: a great network of causes impacting on one another. We can also see the influence of the four causes (though he does not mention them) in the Poetics, in his discussion of how poems are put together, and what is their purpose. The treatise also underlines his respect for the cognitive value of poetry and the laws particular to poetry.
The artist as maker
Interestingly, Aristotle believes that the art of sculpting is prior to the artisan as the efficient cause of the statue. In this passage he uses the example of a builder:
In investigating the cause of each thing it is always necessary to seek what is most precise (as also in other things): thus man builds because he is a builder, and a builder builds in virtue of his art of building. This last cause then is prior: and so generally. (Physics 195b)
The actions of the sculptor are based on a specific body of knowledge that is more important as a cause than the person putting it into action.
If the techne of sculpture is the ‘most precise’ cause of a statue, that doesn’t mean the sculptor’s individual qualities are irrelevant. Aristotle goes on:
Further, generic effects should be assigned to generic causes, particular effects to particular causes, e.g. statue to sculptor, this statue to this sculptor.
Causes are multiple and themselves have causes, e.g. the bronze is made of both copper and tin, and each of those metals has its own structure, and so on down to the subatomic particles. We begin with the general causes and may proceed to the more particular in order to better understand the object. So, every bronze statue is made by a sculptor; but a particular bronze statue may owe particular aspects of its being to the idiosyncratic talent of a particular sculptor.
To bring into existence a work of art requires study – knowledge of how to create an artwork, as opposed to an object that is not an artwork. It requires the appropriate knowledge of the rules of the craft, acquired through practice. Early in the Metaphysics, Aristotle observes:
Art is produced when from many notions of experience a single universal judgement is formed with regard to like objects. (981a)
He goes on:
We consider that knowledge and proficiency belong to art rather than to experience, and we assume that artists are wiser than men of mere experience (which implies that in all cases wisdom depends rather upon knowledge); and this is because the former know the cause, whereas the latter do not. For the experienced know the fact, but not the wherefore; but the artists know the wherefore and the cause.
Like Plato, Aristotle places importance on self-awareness. Not only must you be able to apply your craft, you should be conscious of its rules and able to explain them to someone else. This ability to make art is as important to Aristotle as the product. He makes a distinction between art and science. They each have their own character: ‘art in the world of process, and science in the world of facts’ (Posterior Analytics, 100a).
In techne, the form of the product is in the soul of the person producing it (Metaphysics, 1032b); in other words the art-making process originates in the mind of the artist. Aristotle says something similar in On the Generation of Animals when he talks of ‘the shape and the form’ of worked wood ‘passing from the carpenter’. In the carpenter’s soul is the form and the knowledge that create the movements that make objects:
It is his knowledge of his art, and his soul, in which is the form, that moves his hands. (730b)
This seems to identify artists themselves, specifically their souls, as the source of the form. This distances Aristotle from Plato’s theory in Ion that good critics and poets are divinely inspired.
Notes
• Aristotle’s Physics is not in the Perseus Digital Library but you can try: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/physics/ or http://www.logicmuseum.com/wiki/Authors/Aristotle/physics. The latter has the advantage of Bekker references.
• Metaphysics can be found in the Perseus Digital Library: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0052.
• There are discussions on the SEP of Aristotle on substance, form and matter: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/form-matter/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-metaphysics/#SubsEsse
1. The numbers here come from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://www.iep.utm.edu/aristotl/
2. This list is from Władysław Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, Volume 1 (1970). Aristotle had little to say about the visual arts.
3. See Metaphysics, Book 6 (1025b), or Topics Book 6 Chapter 6.
4. See opening section of https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/episteme-techne/: ‘It is in Aristotle that we find the basis for something like the modern opposition between episteme as pure theory and techne as practice.’ Even Aristotle, however, did not use the terms consistently across his work.
5. See Physics, Book 2 Chapter 3 (194b-195a) and Metaphysics, Book 5 Chapter 2. For a discussion of causality in Aristotle, try https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-causality/. NB: the labels ‘material’, ‘formal’ etc are not Aristotle’s.
6. Aristotle defends final causes in nature in chapter 8, where we get glimpses of an evolutionary theory.
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