Defining Art

2. Defining Art • Like Plato, Aristotle thought that art involved imitation (mimesis), though on this point as on many others he was flexible and allowed for exceptions. • He also thought harder than Plato about what art imitated.

3. For example, he says that Tragedy is an imitation "not of persons but of action and life, of happiness and misery" (Poetics 1451b). • Thus he leans toward the "art as imitation of the ideal" theory

4. Art is defined by Aristotle as the realization in external form of a true idea, and is traced back to that natural love of imitation which characterizes humans, and to the pleasure which we feel in recognizing likenesses. • Art however is not limited to mere copying.

5. It idealizes nature and completes its deficiencies: it seeks to grasp the universal type in the individual phenomenon. • The distinction therefore between poetic art and history is not that the one uses meter, and the other does not.

6. The distinction is that while history is limited to what has actually happened, poetry depicts things in their universal character. • And, therefore, “poetry is more philosophical and more elevated than history.” • Such imitation may represent people either as better or as worse than people usually are, or it may neither go beyond nor fall below the average standard.

7. One famous element of Aristotle’s aesthetics is his theory of the katharsis, or purging of the emotions "through pity and fear", that is accomplished by a tragedy. • While he does not develop this theory at any length (it occurs in only a few lines of the Poetics), it has had a lot of influence.

8. Aristotle does seem to have believed that this emotional katharsis was a good thing, and thus he seems to have embraced an aspect of the arts that Plato rejected.