How Creative Are You?

Art was a knowledge of the rules for making things. Art belonged to the realm of making, not of doing. Art regulates those operations whose purpose is to beget an end product—operations on physical materials such as sculpture or upon metal materials. Art aimed to produce a goodness of the work. The important thing for the craftsman was that he should make a good sword, for example, and it was not his concern, whether it was used for good or evil purposes. Art was the science of constructing objects according to their own laws. Art was not expression, but construction an operation aiming at a certain result.

It means construction, whether it was of a ship or of a building, a painter or a hammer. Art was a concept with a broad extension, applying to what we think of nowadays as technology and artistry. Man was an artist because he possessed so little: he was born naked, without tusks or claws, unable to run fast, with no shell or natural armor. However, he could observe the works of nature, and imitate them. He saw how water runs down the side of a hill without sinking in and invented a roof for his house. Every work is either the work of an artificer imitating nature.   However, if art imitates nature, this does not mean a servile copying of natural objects. It is inventive and requires ingenuity... Art joins together what is separated and what is joined; it prolongs the operations of nature; it is productive just as nature is productive and continues its creative labors. The medieval art is interesting precisely for this season, that it was a theory of the formative energies of human technology and of the relation between this and the formative energies of nature.

Nature, or its pat, encourages the mind's genius for perceiving and memorizing objects, for examining or systematizing them. Art and nature encourage one another mutually in this continual process of growth. My concept of art is something bound up with the energies of nature, came to be curtailed.

At best, art could produce beautiful images, arrangements of the material which were superficial only. However, it had to preserve a kind of ontological humility before the primacy of nature. The objects produced by art did not introduce a new order, but remained within the limits of their substance. They were simply reductions to images by  measurements. They existed by virtue of the material which sustained them, whereas natural objects existed by virtue of divine participation.

Art does not produce true forms like nature. Rather, it must go on its knees before nature (like a beggar, poor in learning but desirous to imitate her) and ask her to teach him how to capture reality in his images. However, even when imitating the works of nature, art cannot create living things. We should not think of this as a sensibility blind to the true nature and value of art. Poetics, Grammar and Rhetoric were superior arts, under the common name of Eloquence. The mechanical arts were lower in kind. It was generally believed, in fact, that the servile arts were compromised by tier material character and physical labor involved.

It was true that the liberal arts did not have the productive character of art as it was defined in abstract, but they were arts, even so, because of a certain analogy. Art arose when the reason became interested in making something; the more it made the more was there an art. And yet, the more it was involved in making, the essence of art, the more servile it became and the more the art was a minor one.