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III. Aristotle
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III ARISTOTLE Meanings of the Term Art T in the introduction to locating fine art in the broader scheme of things human was basically Aristotelian. Let us review it at this point. I took an inventory of the uses of the term art in ordinary experience, ranging them in a hierarchy of broadest to narrowest usage and setting them in a system of contrasts. At the broadest level art is contrasted to nature. Aristotle expands on that by providing an insight into the nature of a nature: a nature (phusis) is a principle of motion and rest, of development and completion, that is intrinsic to a thing.¹ Natures head in their own directions or tend to endure in states toward which they have tended. A nature so conceived provides the frame within which art occurs. Art is that which depends on choice.² Everything distinctively human has its origin in art in this broadest sense. Human nature is part of the frame of nature, since it involves a givenness that does not depend on human choice for its form, and that givenness involves structural features corresponding to tendencies to act along certain lines. Human nature involves a tension between two given factors: a biological-sensory factor and a factor of transcendence or of initially empty reference toward the whole of being. As Aristotle put it, “the human soul is, in a way, all things.”³ The biological factor is comprised of basic vegetative processes, processes of anabolism and catabolism, of growth and sustenance, and of reproductive tendency.⁴ Over and beyond that, it involves the level of sensory wakefulness and thus of the sensory manifestness of things. That manifestness takes place within the Now of the perspectives set up by our bodily position, by the limited thresholds of our perceptual organs, and by our organic needs. For Aristotle the sensa are the activations of the perceptibility of things in relation to the activation of the perceptual powers of the perceiver—indeed, in a relation of “intentional identity.” (“The sensible in act is the sense [power] in act.”)⁵ As the horizon of vision and the perspective appearance of a material thing within that horizon are not absolute features of “the world outside,” but conditions of manifestness relative to a biologically based percipient, so also with the sensa that appear within such perspectives. Such appearance is locked into the flowing Now but anchors all our wakefulness. Our knowledge of the factor of transcendence has its root in the fact that we judge whatever we confront in that sensory field in terms of meanings that refer to all actual or possible instances of those meanings, whenever in time and wherever in space they might occur, even in such elementary sensorily focused experiences as seeing this page “as white.” The whole of space and time is marginally pregiven as a term of reference for our judgments. But the judgments center on the employment of the notion of being whose reference is absolutely unrestricted. The judgment that something “is” such and such involves a reference to the wholeness of what is judged and to the encompassing whole that includes it, the one judging, and everything else as well. The way the human soul is all things is, initially, by way of empty reference. But it is precisely the emptiness of that reference that makes it necessary to choose how we are to work at uncovering that whole and how we are to arrange our lives so as to come to terms with the tasks imposed by our nature and the conditions of past choices, both our own and those of the tradition that bears us. Human nature is precisely that nature that has to choose to create culture. And since cultures are choices based on a necessary partiality in the manifestness of what-is and of all the parameters of our own being, they are necessarily plural and, alas, probably necessarily or at least contingently antagonistic. There is then an art of producing culture in general. We might say that distinctively human nature is culture-producing nature, nature that operates by art, nature that produces forms. That includes the art of creating institutions—social, political, economic, educational, religious—that form a way of life. The art of producing culture also includes bringing theoretical knowledge (theoria) into being, the aim of which is the contemplaPlacing Aesthetics [3.87.209.162] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:24 GMT) tion of the invariable, the frame of nature within which decisions...