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  • Rethinking Aristotle’s Poetics: The Pragmatic Aspect of Art and Knowledge
  • Anoop Gupta (bio)

And in general it is a sign of the man who knows and of the man who does not know that the former can teach, and therefore we think art more truly knowledge than experience is; for the artist can teach, and men of experience cannot.

—Aristotle

Introduction

When pragmatism first gained favor in the early twentieth century, some British philosophers like Russell regarded it as evidencing their perception of America’s crude and enterprising spirit.1 The Imperial jab lay in this: that just as business indicates the exchange of products and services to meet basic needs as well as others, for the pragmatist, knowledge is tied to social practices and instrumentality (that is, being able to effect changes in the world). The slight lies in attributing to pragmatists, rightly or wrongly, the view that instrumentality is the ultimate purpose of knowledge.

Thinking that knowledge and art are independent of instrumental ends can be traced back to at least Aristotle’s separation of theory from practice. For Aristotle, knowledge was superior to experience (Metaphysics, 1.1, 982b10) and art to history.2 For him, knowledge and art are not concerned with “individuals” (Metaphysics, 1.1, 981a16), which pertain to external ends related to actions. Knowledge and art yield “universals” (Metaphysics, 1.1, 981a16) that are internal ends in themselves, relating to specific cognitive changes.

Yet for some time, Aristotelians have been attempting to elucidate the ethical, and hence practical, dimensions of art.3 Generally, it is little remarked [End Page 60] upon what elucidating the ethical consequences of art implies for a pragmatic understanding of knowledge.4 I shall argue that (a) art has ethical implications that (b) provide the basis for a pragmatic, and specifically business, aspect of the ground of knowledge.

I first consider Aristotle’s rationale for art, four interpretations of it, and defend the final assessment that art does affect ethical practice. Second, I sample the nonphilosophical literature related to some of the possible usages of art. Finally, I argue that knowledge must be understood in terms of a social practice, of which business is the paradigmatic case.

Scope

By referring to the Poetics, I am only interested in Aristotle’s rationale of art. In building my argument, I rely not just on Aristotle’s Poetics but also draw upon other texts, such as his Metaphysics and Politics. Though Aristotle’s focus in the Poetics is tragedy, I make reference to other forms of the fine arts (for example, music or visual arts) for illustration. My aim, however, is not to defend, for Aristotle, any one ethical implication of art. Rather, I provide an extensive overview of the recent debate about the ethical implications of tragedy in order to both argue that art does have such repercussions and to motivate my pragmatic claims about knowledge. I will not, however, go into any depth about what the ethical consequences of knowledge could be: my purpose is to establish that both art and knowledge, on Aristotelian grounds, require pragmatic consequences, not to detail what they are.

I consider some of the uses to which art has been put, or is hoped to be, to corroborate the Aristotelian contention that it has ethical implications on anthropological grounds. We may wish to note that my illustrations of some of its uses are an appropriation and extension of his thought. Further, though I focus on comprehending the in–principle ethical implications of art, it is assumed that my conclusions can be extended to understanding knowledge in this way. It is assumed that the conclusions relating to the ethical implications of art and the pragmatic aspects of knowledge are interchangeable. In fact, I move from discussing art to knowledge because, for Aristotle, both are required for the fulfillment of the good life. Also, for the purpose of this paper, there is nothing to be gained from distinguishing knowledge from education, since both are inculcated in a single process I seek to articulate. I look to the literature on pedagogy to make connections to pragmatism because of the relationship to knowledge, in my sense.

Finally, we may wonder...

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