The last of John Strasberg’s Nine Natural Laws of Creativity is the Law of Love. Gifted artists, he writes, are driven by love of what they do to communicate deep personal truth in what they create. At the very end of his presentation Strasberg invokes Aristotle. Aristotle divided knowledge into three realms: theoretical, which for him included fields such as astronomy; practical, which included ethics and politics – what today we might call normative; and finally knowledge of making things – buildings, poems, etc. The Greek word poiein from which our word poetry is derived means “to make, create, compose.” For Aristotle nature is the master artist, and humans like to imitate. The imitation is not to be slavish, but rather should be “appropriate” – a concept based on the “golden mean” that appears throughout Aristotle’s ethics. Moreover, for Aristotle the love that a craftsperson has for their handiwork is a model of love for a fellow human being.
… existence is to all men a thing to be chosen and loved, and … we exist by virtue of activity (i.e. by living and acting), and … the handiwork is in a sense the producer in activity, he loves his handiwork, therefore, because he loves existence. And this is rooted in the nature of things, for what he is in potentiality, his handiwork manifests in activity.1
Here Aristotle seems to suggest that “we are what we make.” There is what has been called a “shared being” between ourselves and what we make, and that applies whether we’re talking about making art or making friends. As actors we are perhaps most particularly what we make: our medium is ourselves, and in My Life in Art Stanislavsky warns, “Love art in yourself, and not yourself in art.” Strasberg concludes his whole discussion of the nine natural laws of creativity with the observation that “… in the depths of the artist, the desire to create is based on love….”