A Greek on Art

Extract

‘What follows is ho more than some annotations on the very suggestive phrases towards a theory of art, thrown out almost casually by Aristotle in the course of his Poetics. All of these phrases must be taken together, as each may be seen to imply the other at almost every point: and taken together they help to clarify Aristotle’s position with regard to the nature of the aesthetic experience, its nature as an intellectual experience felt as physical or as a physical experience with strong intellectual overtones.

For the Platonic school the artist was a creator of myths, a pseudothinker who merely mirrored the mutable world of sense which in turn merely mirrored the world of Ideas, so that the poet’s creation was distant from life by two removes. ‘Aesthetic distance ‘for Plato meant deliberate withdrawal from the pressing and fundamental issues of life, the moral issues. We shall examine later how to put an Aristotelian complexion on the term. Aristotle, however, makes art an affair of language, and language whose adequacy can be tested by the closeness of its approximation to an experience, by its vividness in reproducing the experience for us. That is what he implies when he says that art imitates not merely the world of sense, but the world of man’s mind, his character, his emotions, his actions : and this world it presents with an almost physical vividness. He calls this artistic reproduction mimesis : ideas are suggested through physical things, just as mime (in the bodies of Greek maskers or Balinese dancers) reproduces emotion in the language of gesture. The master of mime proportions his gestures to the directives of the emotion he wants us to feel: and the lack of this proportion is evidence that the work of art is not under full artistic control.