Aristotle on Art and Nature by M. J. Charlesworth (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 37'i One other difficulty about the book as a whole might be noted. Despit~ the announced aims for the book, there is no discernible underlying acknowledgment of them manifested. The book appears to be more a collection of wholly independent essays gathered together under a nominal heading. One would suppose that the editor's essays, opening and closing the book, would compare, contrast and relate the essays in some relation to the announced aims. Although there are some passages in Ruth Nanda Anshen's essays which suggest this approach, the fact of the matter is that her essays are actually two quite independent contributions to the problem of language, for the most part unrelated to the other essays except in a manner so general as not to be significant or revealing. Despite some reservations of this kind, the book still achieves a· considerable degree of success in showing " what language is, its variability in time and space, its permanence, and its relation to the thought and history of man." Uni·versity of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana. JoHN A. OEsTERLE .Aristotle on .Art and Nature. By M. J. CHARLESWORTH. Auckland University College. Pp. 40. In a short paper published at Auckland University College as part of the Philosophy Series M. J. Charlesworth adds a clear, rational voice to the many voices now attempting clarifications in the field of an Aristotelian or Thomistic Esthetic. His purpose is " to attempt to reconstruct a part of the general theory of art presupposed to Aristotle's Poetics." He indicates the possible sources of such a reconstruction in the other works of the Aristotelian corpus, especially in the Phy~ics and Metaphysics, the Politics, the De .Anima, etc. Using these sources, he sets up an argumentation that begins with the notion of art as a kind of knowledge, or, rather, the virtue that perfects a certain kind of knowledge, the knowledge of how-to-make. Art is a making or the virtue of making: this is his starting-point. He then discusses the metaphysics of making, " the bestowing of a new accidental and non-natural form on some matter which already exists in its own right informed with its natural form." Thisexcellent chapter gives Mr. Charlesworth an opportunity to reprobate several misconceptions deriving from the Romantic school of esthetics: the idea that the work of art is primarily " the expression of the artist's personality "; the notion that the work of art necessarily expresses the "essence of things" or some "ideal type"; the idea that the artist is by definition the sensitive man who " suffers " experiences. He is "primarily a maker," Mr. Charlesworth insists, "all alse is secondary." 378 BOOK REVIEWS Yet this insight, so useful in resisting a Romantic esthetics, so helpful in the work of connecting a general theory of art with the Poetics, is made to dominate the author's treatise in a way that ultimately weakens it. In Chapters IV and V Mr. Charlesworth takes up the matter of Imitation in Art and particularly in the Fine Arts, at the same time calling our attention to the fact that the theory of Imitation is " the heart and soul of Aristotle's philosophy of art." Appealing to his original insight on art-as-making, he maintains that the famous dictum " art imitates nature " should be read in this fashion: " the operation of art imitates the operation of nature." In other words, art imitates nature not in the sense of copying or representing the appearance of natural forms but in the sense of bringing-something-tobe after the manner of nature, i.e., causing matter to assume some form or, more specifically in the case of the Fine Arts, judging that certain natural things or natural occurrences are " matter potential to a certain artistic form." He insists that the theory of Imitation should be purified of its preoccupation with the object, the artifact as representation. " It is not a question of the work of art imitating natural things but of the artist, in his causative power of making, imitating nature in its causative power of bringing things into existence." Yet it is precisely here that a general theory of art...