In this brief chapter Quintilian categorizes arts as 1) those concerted with knowledge, theoretikē, or contemplative arts, the primary goals of which is study; his example: astronomy; 2) The active arts, praktikē, those arts that are more concerned with the immediate experience than producing something, such as dance or theater; 3) and the productive arts, poetikē, such as painting, which are concerned with the creation of an object that exists after the creative moment.
We immediately recognize that each art may have attributes of the other. Quintilian did as well, claiming that rhetoric had attributes of all three:
"for the subject of it may sometimes be restricted to contemplation,
since there will be oratory in an orator even though he be silent . . . There is some enjoyment, and perhaps the greatest of all enjoyments, in
retired meditation, and the pleasure derived from knowledge is pure when
it is withdrawn from action . . . But oratory will also effect
something similar to a productive art in written speeches and
historical compositions . . . Yet if it must be classed as one of the three sorts
of arts which I have mentioned, let it, as its performance consists
chiefly in the mere act and as it is most frequently exhibited in act,
be called an active or a practical art, for the one term is of the same
signification as the other."
http://rhetoric.eserver.org/quintilian/2/chapter18.html
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