Aesthetics: praxis versus poesis

Dear Prof. Kearney,
In the introduction to your book Poetics of Modernity, you discuss the Greek sense of ποιησις as 'any productive activity having an end or value beyond itself.' Now, as far as Angelus Silesius' famous couplet 'The rose is without why, it blooms because it blooms/It pays no attention to itself, asks not whether it is seen', I've read somewhere that Jorge Luis Borges understood it to be a negation of Aesthetics.
Given your summary of poetry, & extending it to aesthetics at large, it seems that Angelus' 'without why' would disarm the rose/poetry/aesthetics. Poetry can still produce effects, even without a why, just like the rose can still bloom (& be seen, smelt, etc.). But poetry without a why would reject its effects as defining itself as poetry (pace Aristotle). The rose blooms whether or not it's seen, & poetry is poetics whether or not it has effects. It would exist not for its effects, nor even for itself, but just because it is. Is Angelus' couplet legitimately applicable? Can aesthetics/poetics be negated?
Gabe

Dear Gabriel,
This is an excellent question and I don't really know how to answer it as I have never thought it through myself.
I do not know the Borges reference but I suppose he means that if Aristotle is right in the Poetics that poiesis produces something beyond its own activity, a final product that can be seen (theatre) or read and heard (epic/lyric), then Silesius' 'blooming of the rose', as an act in itself, is more praxis (for Aristotle, an act which is its own end) than poiesis. Remember also that God is defined in Aristotelian and later metaphysics as 'pure act subsisting in itself' (actus purus non habens aliquid de potentialitate). So, by the Aristotelian account, divinity is closer to praxis than poiesis. This might explain Silesius’s thinking as that of a Christian mystic.
On this account, the 'without why' of Silesius' rose might be seen as a sort of mystical-divine praxis in and for itself.
On the other hand, you could read the 'without why' in a sense more inclined to poetry than praxis if you interpret according to a fin-de-siecle aesthetics of art for art’s sake (see Oscar Wilde and the symbolists etc). Or even according to Sartre's definition of 'poetry' in What is Literature - namely,  as a form of linguistic self-absorption, self-regard and passivity - indulgent, solipsistic, antipathetic to real social and political action (the task of 'prose'). For Sartre and the social realists, in short, poetry is less than prose because it is an end in itself: without why. Against this, Sartre argues for a politically committed art which uses language as a loaded gun that aims and fires at its target - prose in order words which dismisses poetry as a useless, impractical, mystical (or bourgeois) luxury.
    Hope that helps a bit?
    Best,
    Prof Kearney