Aristotle is a follower of Plato and he is also quite critical of Plato. For instance, Plato believes that Art should imitate transcendent Forms, hence Art that imitates Particulars is twice removed from Reality. As far as Aristotle is concerned, Art is not an imitation of Forms but a representation of life and characters with their emotions and actions. And a good tragedy must be such as to produce Catharsis “through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions” (“Poetics”).
Being more “down to earth”, Aristotle suggests that we do not have to think of transcendent Forms but of imminent forms since forms are the forms of Particular things. And any Particular is a composite of form and manner (Hylomorphism); it has an inherent Potential that can be Actualized. Natural potential is in everything and what an artist does is not to create but to Discover natural potentials in the physical elements of this world. That is to say, a sculptor does not create sculptures – he Discovers the possibilities of wood or stone (in this sense, Michelangelo in his “David” managed to actualize the potential of the block of marble abandoned by his predecessor), whereas a musician Discovers potential in the physical sounds. “For from the potentially existing the actually existing is always produced by an actually existing thing, e.g. man from man, musician by musician; there is always a first mover, and the mover already exists actually”, – says Aristotle in “Metaphysics”.
Moreover, Plato writes dialogs, tells stories, while Aristotle is more like an objective scientist analyzing and systematizing facts. As we have mentioned before, Plato thought that certain knowledge is innate. Aristotle, on the contrary, says that thinking processes correlate with the nature of reality and mind contributes to knowledge since it brings a capacity to organize, to structure nature and get the unchanging truth of it. For example, in “Metaphysics” he says that “the white is musical and the latter is white, only because both are accidental to man. But Socrates is musical, not in this sense, that both terms are accidental to something else. Since then some predicates are accidental in this and some in that sense, those which are accidental in the latter sense, in which white is accidental to Socrates, cannot form an infinite series in the upward direction; e.g. Socrates the white has not yet another accident; for no unity can be got out of such a sum. Nor again will ‘white’ have another term accidental to it, e.g. ‘musical’. For this is no more accidental to that than that is to this; and at the same time we have drawn the distinction that while some predicates are accidental in this sense, others are so in the sense in which ‘musical’ is accidental to Socrates; and the accident is an accident of an accident not in cases of the latter kind, but only in cases of the other kind, so that not all terms will be accidental”.