Under the perspective that I'm proposing, both prose and poetry could be equally philosophical; however, poetry also incorporates some sort of aesthetic features such as a rhyme scheme, a pattern of syllables, rhythm of stressed syllables, etc. Therefore, poetry would be "art" in the sense that I am talking about but prose would not be.
However, I that this example brings up some interesting points:
- One of the problems that I think underlies these discussions is that many people think that something must be "art" in order to be profound/valuable/important/expressive. However, I'd argue that things like prose philosophy and oral storytelling can be equally profound/valuable/important/expressive.
- Like I said before, there are definitely gray areas. I just argued that poetry was art but prose is not due to poetry's use of aesthetic features. However, it can't a story incorporate significant aesthetic features both in the form of techniques like metaphor and in the use of sumptuous descriptions?
- I think the previous point might suggest that there can be different degrees to which or different senses in which something is art. For example, we might say that poetry is art relative to a prose novel but that the novel is art relative to a science paper. Or we might say that a beautifully engraved beer stein is not art in the sense that it does not have any philosophical meaning but it is art in the sense that it goes beyond the simply utilitarian to incorporate the aesthetic.