The concepts of art in Aristotle's "Nicomachean ethics" : from "mimesis" to communication

Abstract

In his Friedrich Nietzsche lectures, Martin Heidegger's attempt to define art with terms such as technical knowledge, care, carefulness of concern, poetry, seems to be directly inspired by Aristotle's "Nicomachean ethics". Apparently Heidegger's desire was to reconsider art after modernism and think of it in a new and non fundamentalist way which was all too common in aesthetics until his time. First, I follow, analyse and extend Heidegger's original gesture of going back to Aristotle in order to solve the extremely modern problems of art in his time. Then, I assemble the different concepts of art in Aristotle's "Nicomachean ethics" and the different tasks these concepts perform in the contexts in which they appear and question the prevalence of mimesis in understanding art. Finally, my aim is to propose an alternative to [the] mimesis concept of art as a communicative practice in which terms such as influence, experience and communication play a strategic role, in order to bring to the fore neglected issues in the Aristotelean text like artistic truth, prudence and wisdom.