Aristotle: The Artful in Nature and the Natural in Art

Abstract

Aristotle’s Metaphysics opens with the words, “All men by nature desire to know.” It is as natural for men to want to know as it is for them to want to see. For Aristotle, as for Plato, knowing may be likened to a kind of seeing. One kind of “seeing” takes place when men try to come to know the “primary immediate premises,” the “principles,” the “archai,” which, when found, will stand as the logical starting points of the sciences. Aristotle says that we are enabled to know these premises through our possession of a capacity of some sort, which is suggested to him by that characteristic of all animals, “a congenital discriminative capacity which is called sense-perception.” Aristotle continues his description of this way of knowing as follows:

But though sense-perception is innate in all animals, in some the sense-impression comes to persist, in others it does not. So animals in which this persistence does not come to be have either no knowledge at all outside the act of perceiving, or no knowledge of objects of which no impression persists; animals in which it does come into being have perception and continue to retain the sense impression in the soul; and when such persistence is frequently repeated a further distinction at once arises between those which out of the persistence of such sense-impressions develop a power of systematizing them and those which do not. So out of sense-perception comes to be what we call memory, and out of frequently repeated memories of the same thing develops experience; for a number of memories constitute a single experience. From experience again — i.e. from the universal now stabilized in its entirety within the soul, the one beside the many which is a single identity within them all — originate the skill of the craftsman and the knowledge of the man of science, skill in the sphere of coming to be and science in the sphere of being.¹