Capable of Either Being or Not Being
All art is concerned with coming into being, i.e. with contriving and considering how something may come into being which is capable of either being or not being, and whose origin is in the maker and not in the thing made; for art is concerned neither with things that are, or come into being, by necessity, nor with things that do so in accordance with nature (since these have their origin in themselves). Making and acting being different, art must be a matter of making, not of acting. And in a sense chance and art are concerned with the same objects; as Agathon says, 'art loves chance and chance loves art.' Art, then, as has been said, is a state concerned with making, involving a true course of reasoning.
, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, Chapter 4 (trans. W.D. Ross) (c. 340 BCE)
There is a phrase here that, twenty-three centuries after it was written, suddenly feels like it describes something we’re trying to name. Art, Aristotle says, concerns itself with things “capable of either being or not being.” Not the necessary, not the natural, not what would have happened anyway. Art occupies the space of contingency, the space where something comes into existence only because someone chose to bring it there. A sunrise is necessary. A stone rolling downhill is natural. A poem is neither. It could have not existed, and the fact that it does tells us something about the person who made it.
This is what Aristotle means when he locates the origin of art “in the maker and not in the thing made.” He is distinguishing craft from nature, making from happening. A tree grows from its own internal principle. A bowl does not. The bowl’s origin is in the potter’s reasoning, the potter’s hands, the specific series of decisions that could have gone differently at every turn. We might ask ourselves what it means that generated work also “could have been otherwise,” that a different prompt or a different random seed would yield a different result. Is that the same contingency Aristotle describes? Or does his idea require something more: not just variability, but a reasoning person standing at the origin, navigating each choice?
And then there is that lovely aside, borrowed from the poet Agathon: “art loves chance and chance loves art.” Aristotle, so often associated with rigor and classification, makes room here for accident, for the happy collision between intention and surprise. Anyone who has made something knows this feeling. The brush slips and the painting improves. The sentence breaks in the wrong place and becomes more true. This love affair between plan and accident may be one of the things hardest to replicate or simulate, because it requires a maker who can recognize the gift of the unplanned, who can say yes, that in the middle of working toward something else entirely. The question worth sitting with is whether that recognition, that responsive presence at the center of the act, is what Aristotle quietly insists on when he calls art a state “involving a true course of reasoning.”