Note 176 — Chapter X

It is very hard to understand why, when Athens was producing some of the greatest art of the world and the profoundest philosophic thought, the attempt to develop a philosophy of the arts should not have succeeded better than it did. Plato felt instinctively that he had entangled himself in a chain of false logic, and he appeals to Art to vindicate its truth, if it can. He would yield himself to its “enchantment” only too gladly were it not “a sin to betray what seems to us the cause of truth.” But it never occurs to him that what the painter is really copying is not the carpenter’s bed, but the heavenly. Aristotle, on the other hand, well knew that there is something creative about art. Witness his famous saying that “Poetry is both a more philosophic and a higher thing than History, since Poetry looks at things in a universal, History only in a particular aspect” (Poetics, IX, 3). He was, however, still too much under the control of the popular view of Art as Imitation to be able to see the full scope of his own principle. Thus, he excluded Architecture from the realm of Art because it did not imitate anything in nature.