Art and the Four Causes

Abstract

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Imagination, reason and traditional African poetry

“…First, a literary text as an intentional human creation is sometimes considered to be something real in the sense that it is an object that arose from an actual human author whose author dies after its creation because their life has no bearing on the direction of the meanings and interplays that the text may command (Barthes, 1977;Akwanya, 2005, p. 143).This is not a historical work for it does not reference anything traceable to a specific point(s) in time and space -any such connection is purely speculative and happens within the purview of the possible. But this viewpoint is rejected by Stallknecht (1934). Second, a literary work is also thought of as something whose existence is simply literary (Foucault, as cited in Akwanya, 2005, pp.…”

“…But this is not the case for the illusionist; for, like the human originator of a literary work, the illusion is their brainchild (not an orphan), an intentional imaginative construct notwithstanding its purpose to mislead their clients into believing that the illusory act is the case. Stallknecht (1934), in "Arts and the Four Causes," while defending poetry as essentially about world representationunlike Akwanya (2005), who argues that only the formal cause is relevant to the definition of literature (pp. 157, 160)observes that though Aristotle began from mimesis (imitation), a proper human characteristic in the imaginative, for him, poetry in its best expression was not lacking in, nor did it recoil from, logic and morality (pp.…”