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- Sep 21, 2007In a message dated 15/09/07 1:14:26 PM Mountain Daylight Time, pluviosilla@... writes:
> ARISTOTLE: Now, from memory experience is produced in men; for several memories of the same thing produce, finally, the capacity for a single experience. (AND...) Now art arizes when from many notions gained by experience one universal judgment about a class of objects is produced...
QUESTION: Would Aristotle say that (irrational) animals are capable of art?
ANSWER:
He clearly said the opposite. But men live by art and reasoning as well, whereas animals live by memory and sense. He probably didn't say "irrational" animals, since it is a Latin derivative. He might have said something more like "non-rational" in his language. He also clearly said that non-human animals seem to have something like practical wisdom, when they demonstrate apparent "foresight" in providing for their life sustaining needs.
Thus birds build nests to rear their off-spring away from predators. Wolves, foxes and badgers dig dens. Ants build ant-hills and store food for the winter, whereas "foolish" grasshoppers don't [cw. Aesop's fables]. Aquinas noted such non-human animal behaviours, calling them instinctual intentions. And any biologist can see such intentions in the hexagonal structures of wasp's nests, done with "chewed wood", or in the hexagonal wax structures built by bees.
So, non-human animals are obviously intelligent (purposeful). But they are not intellectual animals, for if they were, bees could learn from the wasps how to make their hives out of wood, and wasps could learn how to make their nests out of wax. But such things simply do not happen, with bees and wasps. If such animals could actually learn from their mistakes, then no bee would sting anyone, because they would know that the "barb" on their stinger doesn't pull out from the stinged-object. Instead it pulls out the back-end of the poor bee who stings an "adversary". But bees never learn that lesson, because they can't, while wasps don't need the lesson because their stingers are not "barbed". They can sting with impugnity.
Ergo:- Instinctual builders/defenders, but non-artists. Some are fine artisans, workers and defenders; But, Not artists, because they lack a rational principle in their behaviour, which, instead, conforms to instinctual behaviour.
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