Creativity and Aesthetic Theory [1 ed.] 1527586782, 9781527586789

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Creativity and Aesthetic Theory

Creativity and Aesthetic Theory By

Michael H. Mitias

Creativity and Aesthetic Theory By Michael H. Mitias This book first published 2022 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2022 by Michael H. Mitias All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-8678-2 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-8678-9

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One ................................................................................................ 1 Introduction Chapter Two ............................................................................................... 7 Task of Aesthetic Theory Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 32 Relevance of Creativity to Aesthetic Theory Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 45 Concept of Creativity in Art Chapter Five ............................................................................................. 69 Creativity and the Artwork Chapter Six ............................................................................................... 91 Creativity and the Aesthetic Experience Chapter Seven......................................................................................... 124 Creativity and Aesthetic Judgment Chapter Eight .......................................................................................... 153 Creativity and Teaching Art: Can Creativity be Taught? References and Suggested Bibliography ................................................ 166

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION

The thesis I elucidate and defend in this book is that an understanding of the creative act is a necessary condition for an adequate explanation of the source, structure, and mode of existence of (a) the artistic dimension of the artwork and (b) the conditions under which this dimension is transformed into a world of meaning in the aesthetic experience. If this proposition is reasonable, and I think it is, it should follow that an answer to the question of the source and nature of the creative act by which the artwork comes into being is a primary task of aesthetic theory. This thesis is based on the assumption that the basic function of aesthetic theory is to explain, that is, to shed a light of understanding on, the source and the factor which make an artifact art and an experience aesthetic. As I shall discuss in detail in the following pages, the artistic dimension of the work is not given to ordinary perception as a ready-made reality, regardless of whether it is sensuous or mental; put differently, the artistic dimension is not given as an integral element of the work the artist produces during the creative process, and yet it exists as an integral part of the work, indeed as its essence as a work of art: How does it come into being? Does it befall the work under certain conditions or by some invisible force? Does it come into being by a pronouncement of the art world? If so, how? Suppose this kind of world judges a natural or artifactual object as art; does the art quality or aspect exist in the object itself or in the mind of some art authority? If the quality belongs to the work—and it must, for otherwise it would not be called a work of art—how does it belong to it? Again, under what perceptual conditions does the quality come to life in the aesthetic experience? What is the difference between ordinary and aesthetic perception? The object of ordinary perception is given to our senses as a ready-made reality, but the artistic dimension of the artwork is not given in that way either to our senses

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or to our minds. How does it emerge in the aesthetic experience? Is this emergence fortuitous, or by inference? Can it emerge without a creative act of perception? Can it be otherwise if it is not given as a sensuous reality or as a ready-made object? However, if creative perception is a necessary condition of its emergence, in what sense is this perception creative? Now, if the basic function of aesthetic theory is explanatory in nature, it should follow that an analysis of creativity in art, of how the artistic dimension comes into being and how it is realized in the aesthetic experience, is a primary function of aesthetic theory. This makes sense because if the artist is the creator of the artistic as such, if the creative act takes place in her mind, then an understanding of how she transforms her intuition into a symbolic form of expression and how this form is transformed into a reality in the aesthetic experience should be a primary task of aesthetic theory. How can we explain the nature of the artistic dimension, and consequently that of the aesthetic experience, if we do not know what the artist creates? Again, how can we provide a basis for aesthetic evaluation or for art evaluation, art appreciation, and art teaching if we do not know the nature of the artistic dimension? The thesis I propose to discuss in this book may seem bold to some aestheticians, and it may seem irrelevant to aesthetic discourse to others because, as the majority of aestheticians argued in the second half of the last century, it is possible to advance an adequate account of the artistic and the aesthetic without reference to the experience of the artist or the aesthetic perceiver. This is why the central question in the realm of aesthetic discourse during that period was, what makes an artifact art? How can we define art? Is a concept of art possible? Can art be defined? But, on the other hand, can we really explain the nature of the artistic without reference to the experience of the artist and the aesthetic perceiver? The point I should here emphasize is that the question I am raising is not definitional or analytical but ontological in character: it is a request for an analysis of the nature of the kind of reality the artist creates, the aesthetic perceiver experiences, the art teacher teaches, and the art critic criticizes. If the artistic dimension, which is the substance of the artwork, is not given to ordinary perception as a ready-made reality, the aesthetician should ask, how does it come into being? How does it exist in the artwork? Can we identify a work

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as art if we do not know what it means for something to be art? And, how can we answer this question by an analysis not only of the creative act but also of the aesthetic experience? These questions acquire a greater measure of importance if we consider the cognitive status of the artwork. Are artworks cognitive? If they are—and a large number of aestheticians answer this question affirmatively—how? Can we answer this question affirmatively if we cannot explain the genesis, nature, and mode of existence of the artistic dimension of artwork? But, alas, what kind of knowledge does the artwork communicate? More importantly, how does the aesthetic perceiver comprehend it? Next, I tend to think that since the artistic dimension is not given as a readymade reality in the artwork, it is reasonable to hypothesize that we explain its mode of existence in the work and the aesthetic experience. Any nonexistent reality, whether in nature or in human life, comes into being by a creative act regardless of whether the agent that performs this act is a human being or the hand of nature. But, as I shall discuss in detail, this hypothesis is plausible because, as I shall argue, what the artist creates is a world of meaning. Such a world may come into being only by a creative act of a particular human being. The unfolding of my discussion in the following chapters will be the unfolding of the structure of the arguments in support of the thesis I presented in the preceding paragraphs. A summary of the chapters will give an idea of the structure of the discussion. The second chapter begins with an account of the explanatory function of aesthetic theory and then advances a new interpretation of its functions. This interpretation revolves around three questions. First, what is the source, structure, and mode of existence of the artistic dimension of the artwork? I here emphasize that this dimension is not given as a ready-made reality in the work the artist produces, but as a potentiality inherent in the formal organization of the work. The fabric of this dimension is human meaning. Second, how is the artistic dimension transformed into an aesthetic reality in the aesthetic experience? The unfolding of the aesthetic process of aesthetic perception is the unfolding of the aesthetic experience. The

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meaning that is realized in the aesthetic experience and constitutes its fabric is realized value. Third, what is the nature of the creative act? I argue that an understanding of the ontological structure of this act is a necessary condition for an adequate explanation of the genesis, structure, and mode of existence of the artistic dimension. This is based on the assumption that this dimension is created ex nihilo. How? Though briefly, I try to justify the possibility of inquiring into the nature of experience in general and of the creative act in particular. The third chapter is devoted to an analysis and evaluation of the view that the concept of creativity is irrelevant to our understanding of the nature of the artistic and the aesthetic. I consider the arguments in support of this view and, although the creative act is a subjective event, I try to show that an understanding of its source, structure, and mode of existence is relevant, indeed indispensable to our understanding of the artistic and aesthetic. I also argue that it is possible to inquire into the nature of experience and consequently into the creative act. My discussion is based on two assumptions: first, we know the nature of a reality by an inquiry into its source; second, the method employed in this inquiry is not the naive version of the classical method of empirical science, but an advanced version of the phenomenological method. I argue in this and the following chapters that the artistic dimension is a reality. However, if it is a reality, it should be understood by an examination of its source, structure, and mode of existence in the artwork and in the aesthetic experience. Accordingly, the analysis of the creative act is ontological, not linguistic, in character. The fourth chapter is devoted to a constructive analysis of the phenomenon of creativity. If an understanding of the creative act is a necessary condition for an adequate conception of the artistic and the aesthetic, then we can, and should, ask: what are the basic features, or differentiae, of the creative act? We can say that, first, creativity is power. This kind of power is inherent in the nature of the facts that make up the scheme of nature. It is derived from the Ultimate that is the source of the universe qua Creativity. It is the basis of change, and change is implied in any kind of creative activity. Second, the creative act in art is a generative power in the sense that its creation is ex nihilo. Otherwise, it cannot be genuine creation. What the artist creates is sui generis. Third, creativity in art is creation of human meaning. The

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datum of creation is human meaning as infinite possibility of realization. Accordingly, the fabric of the artistic dimension as potentiality is meaning. It should follow that the substance of the aesthetic experience is also meaning: a world of meaning. The fifth chapter is devoted to a detailed analysis of the creative act in which the artistic dimension comes into being. Here I argue that, as a creative mind, the artist creates ex nihilo: the artist is a human Jove. But what she creates is not a ready-made reality; she creates a reality that can be realized in countless numbers and ways of realization. We should accordingly ask: What does it mean for a reality to exists as a potentiality? How can a world of meaning exist as a potentiality in the formal organization of the artwork? However, if the reality the artist creates is a slice of human meaning, the question necessarily arises: how does this meaning exist as an artistic dimension? I have tried to avoid words such as aesthetic quality, aspect, or feature only because the concept of artistic dimension conveys more effectively the idea of a “world of meaning.” A world is a dimension of being. What kind of world does the artist create? The sixth chapter proposes a serious, and I think valiant, attempt to present a conception of the aesthetic: how does the artistic dimension of the artwork, which exists as a potentiality in its formal organization, become an aesthetic reality in the experience of the perceiver? An experience is aesthetic inasmuch as it is a realization of the artistic reality the artist creates. But, then, under what conditions is this realization possible? This concluding chapter is devoted to an analysis of these conditions: assumption of an aesthetic attitude, some knowledge of the symbolic language of the arts, possession of an aesthetic sense, and possession of a measure of creative versatility. Aesthetic experience is a creative activity par excellence. After I present a detailed discussion of these conditions, I illustrate their dynamics through a detailed discussion of Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters with emphasis on the sense in which it is a world of meaning. The seventh chapter advances an analysis of the basis, structure, and source of the aesthetic judgment and the conditions under which it is constructed. The proposition I defend is that the basis of this kind of judgment is the aesthetic experience and more concretely the artistic dimension of the

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artwork as a significant, meaningful form. This dimension unfolds as a world of meaning in the aesthetic experience; it is essentially a creative process. Accordingly, if the aesthetic judgment is founded in this process, if this process is essentially a creative activity, it should follow that the judgment that is founded in it should also be a creative made judgment. This claim is based on the fact that the judgment is inconceivable apart from a creative perception of the artistic dimension of the artwork. The eighth chapter is a brief analysis of the conditions under which artistic creativity can be taught. As an activity, creativity cannot be taught, but the conditions under which can be taught. In addition to the cultivation of the student’s intellectual, emotional, and cultural knowledge, the teacher should cultivate in the student two types of dialogue, the first is between the student and herself and the second is between the student and her medium. This is based on the assumption that the student should master her understanding and command of the content of meaning she aims to communicate or express and the formation possibilities of her medium.

CHAPTER TWO TASK OF AESTHETIC THEORY

The task of a theory in any area of human knowledge is to shed a light of understanding on the source, essential structure, and mode of existence of a human or natural phenomenon. The phenomenon the aesthetician seeks to explain is art. What about art does the aesthetician seek to explain? The proposition I elucidate and defend in this chapter is that, as a principle of explanation, the primary task of aesthetic theory is to answer three basic questions. First, what makes an artifact, or object, art? Second, what makes an experience aesthetic? Third, under what conditions does the artistic dimension of the artwork come to life in the aesthetic experience? How does this dimension come into being? I shall begin my discussion with the first question.

The First Question: What Makes an Artifact a Work of Art? What is the nature of the activity in which an artwork, or an object, acquires its artistic identity? Or, under what conditions can an object, regardless of whether it is natural or artifactual, acquire its status as art? Again, what does the term art refer to or signify when we classify an object as an artwork? Not all the artifacts that populate the human world, or even the art world, are fine art. Some are works of art and some are not. What is the nature of the aspect, quality, or phenomenon whose presence in an artifact makes it art? How does this reality come into being, and how does it exist in the artwork? Regardless of the kind of reality it is or how it belongs to the artwork, this reality does not exist as an element of the physical reality of the work the way physical objects and their qualities do. For example, when I stand before Cezanne’s Self-Portrait (1879-1885, Pushkin Museum, Moscow) and look at it with my ordinary eyes, (a) my eyes do not see a

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human face and (b) they do not see the painting as a work of art. All they see is a patch of lines and colors organized in a certain way. Seeing it as a human face is an act of interpretation. The basis of this interpretation is resemblance. We know what it means for a certain representation to signify a human face: this representation looks like a human face, therefore, it is a human face. We see the representation in terms of the idea we have of a human face. Put differently, we project our idea of a human face onto the representation on the basis of resemblance: we see the representation as a human face not because we recognize a certain human face in it, but because what we see corresponds to our idea of a human face. The point that merits special emphasis here is that although “being a human face” does not exist as a perceptual element of the given representation, there must be something about the representation, or in its formal structure, that justifies the assertion that it is a human face. This something is, as I have just indicated, a resemblance of certain elements in the face we see to those that make up our concept of a human face. The judgment that Self-Portrait is a human face is based on its similarity to our concept of a human face. But this type of interpretation is not possible in the case of identifying SelfPortrait as a work of art because it is not a general work of art the way a human face is; it is a particular, and I can say a relatively unique, work of art. A general work of art does not exist the way a general human face exists as a general idea. What exists is a physical object, i.e., a painting or conceptual object such as a novel, but not the aspect we normally call art. Self-Portrait is art because it instantiates the aspect that makes an artifact art. We may say, as I shall argue, that possession of aesthetic qualities or a significant form is what makes an artifact art, or that these qualities or form constitute its artistic dimension. But a work that possesses general aesthetic qualities, or a general significant form, does not and cannot exist because these qualities are always particular aspects or realities or because this significant form is always a particular significant form. When I pay a visit to a museum, I do not find myself in a room containing general artworks, that is, works that express a general feature, aspect, or reality called “art,” nor do I see it as a part of the different representations that hang on the wall. On the contrary, every room I visit contains individual, particular works of art, that is, works that express individual, particular significant forms.

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Accordingly, resemblance cannot be the basis of identifying the artistic identity of artworks because we do not possess a general concept of art in terms of which we can make this kind of identification. The essential function of the concept of significant form is that it serves a principle of artistic distinction: an artifact is art by virtue of the significant form it possesses. I use significant form and aesthetic qualities interchangeably because, as I shall presently explain in detail, significant form refers to the unity of the aesthetic qualities that constitute its artistic dimension. But this form is not given to our sensibility as a ready made reality: we do not perceive it by the mind or the senses when we approach the artwork with the intention of perceiving it aesthetically, and yet, it exists in the work. How does it exist in the work? The proposition I shall elucidate in the following chapters is that it inheres as a potentiality in the form the artist produces during the process of artistic creation. Most, if not all, the aestheticians have correctly assumed that significant form, i.e., its possession by the artwork, is the principle of artistic distinction, but they have failed to explain how this kind of form belongs to the artwork. An inquiry into its mode of existence is indispensable to our understanding of the artistic as such—"art” as a phenomenon or as a type of reality. What are artistic, or aesthetic, qualities? Do they exist in the artwork the way secondary qualities exist in the physical object? But, if they are not given as ready-made realities, how can they exist in the artwork the way secondary qualities exist in the physical object? Alas! Can we answer this question if we do not proceed in our answer from an adequate understanding of the structure of aesthetic quality? Does it have a structure? Is it skindeep? Is it a depth? If it is a depth, and I think it is, how can this kind of depth exist as a potentiality in the formal organization of the artwork? Again, what do we mean when we characterize the artistic dimension of the artwork as a depth? I tend to think that the primary task of aesthetic theory is to provide an adequate explanation of the genesis, structure, and mode of existence of the artistic dimension—significant form or aesthetic qualities—of the artwork. This explanation is important for the following reasons.

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First, art is a fertile, profound source of our understanding of the meaning of existence in general and of human existence and destiny in particular. We contemplate artworks in the sphere of music, painting, dance, architecture, photography, theater, literature, film, and sculpture because these types of works produce a special kind of experience. This type of experience is significant not only because it is pleasant, satisfying, or in some way gratifying but also because it promotes human perfection, happiness, growth, and development. Like the philosopher who seeks the meaning of the facts that make up the structure of nature and human life, the artist seeks to promote our understanding of this very meaning, but in a different way. While the philosopher communicates her knowledge conceptually and discursively and tries to establish its truth or significance by means of argument, demonstration, explanation, analysis, or clarification, the artist presents it, and the means of its presentation is image: portrayal, depiction, delineation, or representation. The philosopher invites you to think, which is the medium of communicating understanding. The artist invites you to see, feel, and understand by means of the image she presents; the essence of this kind of image is revelation or disclosure of the truth the artist seeks to communicate. The artistic image is a luminous presence. Whether it is small or large, complex or simple, the artwork qua image is a world of meaning, of something that matters to us as human beings. This world exists as a potentiality in the artistic dimension of the artwork. This potentiality steps into the realm of reality in the process of experiencing the artwork aesthetically. When we delve deep into artworks such as Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, Raphael’s School of Athens, Picasso’s Guernica, or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, we delve deep into a human world, a world of joy, love, tragedy, creation, sin, hope, ugliness, power, death, time, beauty, the sublime, happiness, misery, aspiration, and absurdity, to mention a few realities, values, questions, and problems that matter to human beings. For example, who can experience Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in the fullness of its aesthetic depth and not emerge with a feeling of puzzlement, enlightenment, irony, or loneliness; without becoming aware of the overpowering presence of time and the infinite; and without encountering the question of the meaning of existence and

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especially the existence of humanity in this infinite cosmic process? Who can read Wuthering Heights aesthetically and not gain an understanding of mystery, glory, grandeur, joy, tragedy, and the constructive and destructive powers of love? Who can contemplate Rodin’s The Thinker aesthetically without considering the depth of the human mind—of the riddle of human existence and its meaning, the challenge of infinity, the mystery of human nature, or what it means to be a philosopher, a scientist, or an artist? Who can read Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot aesthetically without having an existential encounter with the human condition—time, waiting, absurdity, loneliness, happiness, reason, injustice, the irrational, death? Who can read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis without emerging from her reading with a shudder, a slap on the face, a feeling of guilt, or an awareness of the frailty, fickleness, and perhaps frivolity of humanity? Who can watch Shakespeare’s Hamlet on stage aesthetically without newly comprehending the ultimate question of human life, viz., what it means “to be” and “not to be” as a human being, or without an encounter with the triumph and tragedy of moral conscience? The artistic dimension of the artwork is not an accidental quality, and it is not skin-deep; it is a depth, a human depth; as such, it is a world of meaning. This world is, as I shall argue, cognitive in nature. The kind of knowledge it communicates is not less important or useful than the kind of knowledge advanced by the scientist or the philosopher. Second, if the artwork is a depth, if it is a human depth and as such reflects the artist’s understanding of the values, questions, and problems of human life, and if knowledge of the content of this depth is essential for the perfection of human life, then an explanation of how the artistic dimension exists as a potentiality in the artwork should be a primary task of aesthetic theory. The more we understand the dynamics of this dimension, the more we shall successfully explore the conditions under which we can realize this potentiality in the aesthetic experience. Moreover, knowledge of these dynamics and conditions is indispensable for art education and appreciation, as I shall explain in detail in the last chapter. How can an art teacher, or a teacher of appreciation of any art form, teach a student what it means for a work to be art if she does not possess an adequate idea of the mode of existence of the artistic dimension of the artwork and how it can be

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appreciated or created? For example, how can a student look at Mona Lisa and identify its artistic dimension or perceive it aesthetically? When the student looks at the painting, she certainly sees the representation of a woman seated against a natural background, looking into space. How can the teacher show the student how to move from what her ordinary eyes see to what her mind should see? How can she teach the student how to recognize that a human depth permeates the representation of this painting, one that buzzes with enigma, with a confrontation with infinity, time, life, death, and the meaning of human life? Put differently, how can the teacher seduce the eyes of her student to move into this human depth? How can she entice her to enjoy what she sees? Again, having played a musical piece to her teacher, the student (frequently) receives the following response: “You have played all the notes correctly. Bravo! I commend you for this important achievement, but where is the music, my dear?” Playing the notes is not enough. The music the teacher is looking for in this kind of situation is the artistic depth of the piece the student played. But how can the teacher explain to her student the difference between playing the notes and playing the music if she does not know how this element of the musical piece exists in the notes and how it can be identified or felt? An adequate understanding of the artistic dimension of the artwork and its mode of existence is, I submit, a necessary condition for art education and for teaching art appreciation. Third, this type of understanding is, moreover, a necessary condition for the possibility of aesthetic criticism and evaluation. If I am to express this point succinctly, I can ask how we can say, e.g., that Mona Lisa is great, elegant, profound—in short, aesthetically beautiful—if our judgment is not based on an adequate comprehension of the artistic dimension of this artwork, that is, on the dimension of human values, questions and problems it communicates, and that inhere in its formal organization, and not merely on its technical, ideological, political, religious, or monetary value, or on a factor external to its artistic dimension? This question is founded in the assumption that artistic refers to this dimension. The artwork may exhibit unusual, innovative, admirable artistic skill, and it may be artistically seductive and important as a means of propaganda, religious worship, education, or psychological therapy, but no one of these or similar factors is directly

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relevant to the aesthetic criticism and evaluation of the artwork; but if they are, it is because they contribute to the enhancement of its artistic expression. A keen observer of the history of art, one who is enamored by the artistic as such, would, I think, readily admit that a large number of the aesthetic judgments made about the multitude of the artworks that make up the structure of the art world are based more on technical, religious, ideological, monetary, or psychological rather than purely artistic factors or reasons. I do not underestimate the importance and sometimes relevance of the non-artistic factors or purposes, but I think the aesthetic judgment as such should be based on the artistic dimension of the artwork. If this is the case, and I believe it is, then an aesthetic judgment would be sound inasmuch as it is based on the artistic dimension of the artwork. But how can we make such a judgment if we do not know the nature and mode of existence of this kind of dimension?

The Second Question: What Makes an Experience Aesthetic? The aesthetic experience is a logical counterpart to the artistic dimension of the artwork, just as the artistic dimension is a counterpart to the aesthetic experience. We can express this relation differently: the artistic dimension exists for the sake of the aesthetic experience, and the aesthetic experience exists as a response to the existence of the artistic dimension. Put differently, the artwork exists for the sake of the aesthetic experience. This is based on the assumption that the artwork is valuable, that is, an object we need and desire. The aesthetic experience is the destiny of the artwork. Broadly speaking, the kind of experience we usually have of the artwork qua art is called aesthetic experience. The artistic phenomenon (dimension) by virtue of which an artifact is called art is transformed into an aesthetic phenomenon in the process of the aesthetic experience. Inasmuch as the aesthetic qualities exist in the artwork as a potentiality, or as a significant form, they are the basis of artistic distinction, and inasmuch as they are realized in the aesthetic experience as meaning, they are the principle of aesthetic distinction. I say “transformed” because the artistic dimension that exists as a potentiality in the work undergoes a change of identity in the aesthetic experience in three ways. First, what was potential becomes actual

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in the experience; second, the potential, which exists in the work as an indeterminate being, becomes determinate in the aesthetic experience; and, third, what becomes determined is, in turn, the potential for numerous possible realizations. The perceiver of the work translates the artistic dimension of the work according to her intellectual, affective, cultural, and perceptive versatility and her social endowments. A different perceiver with different endowments and perceptive versatility would translate the same dimension differently. We should always remember that human beings are individuals. They respond to their environment and to themselves differently. What matters for the sake of my discussion is that the aesthetic phenomenon comes into being in the process of experiencing the artwork aesthetically. This process is a gradual development of the aesthetic experience. I emphasize this point because the artistic dimension, which undergoes a change of identity in this process, becomes, or emerges as, the aesthetic experience; in other words, the artistic dimension of the work, including its physical dimension, are transformed into a new reality, and this reality is the totality of the event we usually call aesthetic experience. It is crucial to underline this fact because, as I shall explain in detail, the artistic dimension that exists in the artwork as a potentiality is a human world of meaning. Yes, what comes to life in the aesthetic experience is a human world. Accordingly, aesthetic is not a feature that qualifies an experience the way heat or cold qualifies a physical object. On the contrary, the aesthetic experience is a type of experience by virtue of the fact it is a human world, one realized or, as I shall argue, created, in the event of perceiving the artwork aesthetically. But a critic might remark: “The philosophical, scientific, and phantasmagorial world of people in ordinary life is a human world. What makes the human world of the artist aesthetic in contradistinction to these types of worlds? Or what justifies the characterization of the human world of the artist as aesthetic?” This characterization is justifiable for three reasons. First, the human world in art is a perceived world; it comes into being in the medium of perception. The word aesthetic comes from the Greek word aisthanesthai (“to perceive”). The artistic dimension of the artwork, which inheres in it as a potentiality, (a) comes into being by an act of perception and (b) exists in the medium of perception. This is why Hegel and the

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phenomenologists have in general argued that the artwork is spiritualized in the process of the aesthetic experience. The spiritual as such does not exist as a fact in the realm of nature. Its home is human experience. I would venture to add that value experience is the essence of the spiritual as such in human life; put differently, value constitutes the fabric of the spiritual. When I speak of value in this context, I mean the values of goodness, beauty, holiness, and truth. Second, the aesthetic experience is a lived experience. Unlike the scientific or philosophical experience, which is conceptual or intellectual in character, the aesthetic experience is a living experience, one that engages not only the intellectual but also the affective and imaginative faculties. Its content is not abstract ideas; on the contrary, it involves the whole being of the perceiver. It is not an event in which we hope, desire, or aspire. It is a drop of human life. This drop exists in the medium of perception. Third, the aesthetic experience is not merely enjoyed, or had as a gift, and it is not something that befalls us. It is, as I shall presently explain, a personal creation; as such, it is real, and it is a personal possession. How can it be otherwise if it comes into being and lingers for a while in the medium of personal perception? However, when I say it is a lived experience, I do not mean it is an experience that belongs to me or exists to me, or for me, as a significant element of my life, although it can be viewed this way, in retrospect. No, I mean it is a slice—a stretch—of my life: I am the experience that endures during this stretch, and the experience is the “I” that is identical with it and presides over it. I become one with the world I experience during the process of aesthetic perception. This necessarily implies that my existence becomes one with its existence. The time that unfolds in this process becomes my time; but I am my time. Accordingly, the life I live, which is the life potential in the artistic dimension of the artwork, is my life: I am my life during that stretch of time. Would it be strange, then, if I say that during this stretch, I not only communicate but also commune with the artist? When we contemplate a painting, a sculpture, a dance; when we watch a dramatic performance on stage; or when we read a novel, do we not at once become participants in and authors of the world of the work? Do we not take a break from the stream of ordinary life and surrender ourselves voluntarily to this new world?

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Oh, how many people stand for no more than a few seconds before the paintings and sculptures they see in museums; walk around architectural works as voyeurs; or listen to music because it is soothing, exciting, or therapeutic, or to inform the social world around them that they are culturally sophisticated! How many people read novels in the evening because it helps them to sleep peacefully! How many people go to opera performances more to show off their beautiful clothes and to engage in social encounters than to have aesthetic experiences! It is difficult to say that such people have genuine aesthetic experiences when they attend aesthetic occasions or encounter works of art. Again, how many people who read literary works, listen to serious music, contemplate paintings, or attend dramatic performances are spiritually moved, feel guilty, or elated? How many experience a shiver in the heart, feel a jolt of consciousness, or undergo inner growth when they emerge from a serious encounter with such works? Who can remain silent or the same person after they penetrate the world of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Shakespeare’s King Lear, or Melville’s Moby Dick? The aesthetic experience is not an island in the stream of our lives; it is a living experience in which we grow in the power of understanding, feeling, willing, desiring—of the spark that makes us human. It is a moment in which we celebrate the rite of human living, in which we witness the unfolding of our destiny as human individuals. Unlike the philosophical, the scientific, or the ordinary experiences in which the contents of the experiences are demands, obligations, or tasks into which we drift, or that happen to us, the aesthetic experience originates from us.

Experience as a Principle of Explanation A concept, a theory, or a conception in any area of human knowledge functions as a principle of explanation inasmuch as it sheds adequate light on a problem, enigma, recalcitrant question, or dimension of human or natural reality. The performance of this function consists of analyzing, clarifying, evaluating, revealing the significance of, and spotlighting the causes, structure, and implications of the elements of the problem, enigma, question, or dimension of reality in a way that enables us to comprehend it in the fullness of its being and truth. For example, what is the nature of

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physical reality? What is the stuff out of which it is made? The concept of matter has been used as a principle of explaining the nature of physical reality. But what is matter? An understanding of the concept of matter in its various manifestations is tantamount to an understanding of physical reality. Ever since Democritus, scientists have been analyzing matter by breaking it down into its elements: atoms, sub-atomic particles, and the fabric of these sub-atomic particles. It has been assumed that if we acquire a clear and adequate comprehension of these microscopic particles and the causal relations between them, we shall understand the nature of physical reality regardless of whether it is living organisms, lifeless matter, or human consciousness. Similarly, a concept of experience functions as a principle of explanation inasmuch as it enables us to adequately understand the different types of experiences we undergo in the various spheres of our lives—social, religious, metaphysical, moral, aesthetic, political, or intellectual. In the present context, the questions we need to answer are: What makes an artifact a work of art? What makes an experience aesthetic—especially, how does the artistic dimension of the artwork come to life in the aesthetic experience? Our quest in our attempt to answer these questions is a quest for the art-making factor: How does the artistic dimension come into being? What is its mode of existence in the artwork and in the aesthetic experience? Can our concept of experience provide a basis for answering these two questions adequately? My response to this final question is yes, as I shall momentarily explain. It is important for me to discuss this whole issue because the concept of experience as a principle of explanation has been the subject of contentious debate among aestheticians for almost a century now. But although this debate has not abated, the proponents’ and opponents’ positions regarding the possibility of experience being a principle that explains the genesis, structure, and mode of existence of the artistic dimension of the artwork are, to a reasonable extent, defined and articulated. However, a brief comment on the logic of this debate is in order, primarily because awareness of this logic will shed ample light on why I use “experience” as a principle of explanation.

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Concept of Experience My response to the first and second questions is based on two types of experience: artistic and aesthetic. The first results in the creation of the artistic dimension of the artwork, and the second results in the creation of the aesthetic dimension of the aesthetic experience. The artwork qua art exists for the sake of the aesthetic experience. But regardless of whether it is artistic or aesthetic, an experience is a subjective event; as such, it is a private happening. It takes place within the domain of a particular human mind, which is a center of thinking, feeling, willing, and acting. This domain is private. It is mutually exclusive of other minds. As a mind, I can reveal some of my thoughts, feelings, emotions, or desires by means of verbal or bodily language or gesture, but no one except me can know what takes place within my mind because no one can take a peek or pay a visit to my mind. Metaphorically speaking, the human mind is a kind of windowless box, as Leibnitz said. This feature is the basis of the concept of the privacy of the human mind. But in fact, the mind is not a kind of mental or metaphysical box because it is not a physical reality; nevertheless, it is real, and it is no less real than the objects that make up the scheme of nature. Phenomenologically speaking, it is the essence of our humanity. It is more appropriate to say that it is a kernel, or a center, of power that gives rise to the intellectual and affective activities we perform in the course of our theoretical and practical lives. It is, as Plato and philosophers such as Hegel, Husserl, and Whitehead suggested some time ago, the seat of consciousness— of all the activities we perform daily, even in our dreams. As a power, this seat is an inexhaustible source of thought, feeling, willing, and acting. It is, moreover, dynamic and capable of constant growth and development. It is constantly interacting with its social, physical, cultural, religious, and political environment in countless ways. Whether consciously or unconsciously, rationally or emotionally, these interactions also produce in the mind countless diverse impressions. In recognizing the ideas and insights of the pioneers of modern psychology, Freud and Jung, not to mention the major philosophers, I can say the human mind is a maze of mental states. An experience is an event that takes place in the mind in which it responds to an internal or external stimulus, one that produces an intellective or

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affective response, that is, a rational or an affective state. However, I shall restrict myself in this discussion to conscious experience, the kind that people perform knowingly, purposefully, voluntarily, deliberately. I shall not concern myself with the physical, environmental, or unconscious factors that may influence the decision-making process that actuates the experience. I shall suppose that an experience is a deliberate act in any of the different spheres of human life. Broadly speaking, philosophers have this concept in mind when they discourse about experience, and I shall do the same when I talk about experience in this book.

Experience as a Principle of Explanation At the turn of the last century, it became clear to philosophers and scientists alike that knowledge of nature, which was viewed until then as the aim of the philosopher, is the task of the natural scientist. Not only had physics, chemistry, geology, and biology already abandoned the generally established method of philosophical inquiry, but the social sciences, viz., sociology, psychology, economics, and even history, began to follow suit. Philosophers could not stop this trend; they acknowledged it. The transfer of this task from the hand of the philosopher to that of the scientist was prompted by the success of the empirical sciences, namely, observation and experimentation and the use of instruments and mathematics. According to this method, the meaning of a statement is determined by the method of its verification, and the method of its verification is the empirical method. Implicit in this view is that the only facts that exist are empirically verifiable facts. Broadly, these are the facts that make up the fabric of nature. Accordingly, the realm of nature is the true realm of reality and knowledge. It follows from this conclusion that any discourse about objects that are not empirically verifiable is meaningless, in the sense that it does not communicate knowledge. The source and basis of knowledge is empirical verification. There is no need for me to discuss in any detail the immediate response of the philosophers to this remarkable development or to its impact on theology, art, and philosophy because it is commonplace among philosophers and because it is not relevant to this discussion. Suffice it to say that this development was revolutionary. It called into question the basic principles

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of explanation in the major areas of the theory of values—ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of human nature. One of these principles was the concept of experience. It was used, until then, as a principle of explanation in aesthetics. Like many metaphysical concepts, it was banned from the realm of aesthetic discourse because the mind was treated as a metaphysical category: it is not a natural fact. It and its experiences are subjective; they are not empirically verifiable. A principle of explanation should be founded in knowledge, but knowledge of the mind is not possible; therefore, it cannot be used as a principle of explanation in any area of human experience, whether religious, moral, aesthetic, social, or political. But, as I have just emphasized, neither the concept of the mind nor the concept of experience is amenable to empirical observation or verification. Most of the aestheticians who accepted the consequences of that revolutionary development of science opposed any attempt to use “experience” as a principle of explanation in their attempt to explain (a) the nature of art and (b) the nature of aesthetic experience. First, they embraced the new scientific principle of verification as the criterion by which we establish the true meaning of propositions. How can any concept function as a principle of explanation if it is not valid, and how can it be valid if it does not stand the test of verification? For example, how can we claim that the genesis of the artistic dimension of the artwork is the mind of the artist if her experience is subjective and if this type of experience is not amenable to empirical verification? Again, how can we say that expression or communication of feelings or emotions, or any type of subjective experience, is the defining feature of art if we cannot empirically verify this claim? Furthermore, how can we say the artistic dimension of the artwork comes to life as a world of meaning in the aesthetic experience if this experience is subjective? First, was it an accident that the first casualty in aesthetics, after that remarkable development, was the theory of expression? Instead of seeking an understanding of the artistic as such, of how it comes into being in the mind of the artist, most aestheticians endeavored to examine the concept of art: What does art mean? What does it mean to say that a certain object is a work of art? What makes it art, of course without recourse to the artist? The task of the aesthetician was no longer to explore

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the genesis of the artistic, or art as a phenomenon, but an analysis of the concept of art. This entailed a radical change of the method of analyzing the basis or tasks of teaching art, criticizing art, and enjoying art. Second, was it an accident that in their attempt to explain the nature of art, aestheticians moved their attention from the artist to the artwork? Again, was it an accident that, in their attempt to explain the nature of aesthetic perception, they moved their attention from the aesthetic experience as an analyzable event to the subjective experience of the perceiver? The assumption that underlay this shift in our attempt to understand the artistic and the aesthetic is that the ontic locus of these two phenomena is not the artist; absence of this locus implied a denial of the possibility of an objective aesthetic judgment. Accordingly, instead of the attempt to seek or explore the distinctive feature of the aesthetic experience in the process of perceiving the artwork, many aestheticians tried to ban any reference to “aesthetic attitude,” “aesthetic experience,” and “aesthetic perception” as a special type of perception. They argued that any type of object is a possible candidate for being an art object. This twofold tendency undermined the possibility of an objective basis for defining artwork or aesthetic experience. Some of the aestheticians who recognized this necessary but understandable consequence of banning “expression” and “aesthetic experience” from the realm of aesthetic discourse introduced the concept of the “art world” as a basis to explain the nature of the artistic and the aesthetic. But this concept did not fare well. But the question that was forging its way into the sphere of aesthetic theorizing in the second half of the twentieth century was on target: Is the empirical method of inquiry even appropriate for investigating the nature of the artwork and the aesthetic experience? What kind of reality does the artist investigate? Or, what is the stuff that constitutes the artistic dimension of the artwork? Philosophers and artists would readily assert that the datum of inquiry and contemplation in the sphere of art is human values, or meaning. The realm of values is as essential, as real, as the realm of nature. This realm is not physical; it is human in character. Could it be that there is, or should be, another method for inquiring into the nature of the artistic and the aesthetic? This question, which was explored critically and constructively by Husserl in the first part of the twentieth century, and by his successors

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Heidegger, Ingarden, and Dufrenne in the second half of the same century, became the central focus in the examination of the nature of art and the aesthetic. The method these philosophers introduced is generally known as the phenomenological method of inquiry. It neither rejects nor undervalues the empirical method of inquiry. It simply raises the concept of experience, and the subjective in general, to a higher level of interpretation. Experience is not viewed merely as an empirical concept, but assimilates and transcends the empirical to a human level that makes the sensuous possible, that is, it rises to the source of the sensuous. Consciousness is the domain that entertains both the sensuous and the spiritual object. Both types of objects justify their existence in this domain, first as phenomena and then as particular types of objects, regardless of whether they are physical or mental. The empirical concept of experience as the paradigm of experience is, to my mind, naive and one-sided. It fails to account for all the genuine experiences people undergo as human beings in the course of their theoretical and practical lives. I shall assume the phenomenological concept of experience in the following analysis of the fundamental questions of aesthetic theory. My responses to the central questions of aesthetic theory are based on two concepts of experience as a principle of explanation: artistic and aesthetic. The first is involved in the creation of the artistic dimension of the artwork, and the second is involved in the experience of the work. The ontic locus of the first is the artist, and the ontic locus of the second is the aesthetic perceiver. However, when I say that the concept of experience functions as a principle of explanation, I mean that the logical and conceptual analysis, clarification, demonstration, and verification, which constitute the structure of explanation as an intellectual activity, take place in terms of a specific concept of experience. The concept of experience functions as a basis of the activity of explanation. Implied in this assertion is the assumption that, as a principle of explanation, the nature and truth of the artistic and aesthetic can be revealed in the fullness of their being within, or in terms of, these two concepts. Accordingly, the questions that will engage my attention in the first part of this book are, first, since the artistic dimension of the artwork is not given as a perceptible part of the work, how does it come into being, or how does it emerge in the process of artistic creation? What kind of reality

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is it? Next, what is its mode of existence? What is its structure, if it has one? Second, since the aesthetic experience is real, and since its reality is not physical in nature, how does it come into being? In what sense is this kind of experience real? An experience in general, or in itself, does not exist, and yet it is an experience. What makes it aesthetic? I shall discuss the genesis of the artistic and the aesthetic in the last two chapters of this book. In this section, I shall focus my attention on the essential nature of the artistic and the aesthetic. Ever since the publication of Clive Bell’s provocative, cogent, and insightful book Art in 1910, aestheticians have, directly or indirectly, argued that significant form, which is the unity of the aesthetic qualities in the artwork, is the principle of artistic distinction. That is, the presence of this kind of form in the work is what makes it art. Some aestheticians who shied away from the concept of significant form have nevertheless maintained that possession of aesthetic qualities is what makes an artifact art. Whether it is conceived as a significant form or simply as aesthetic quality, the realization of the significant form or the quality in the aesthetic experience is a realization of a dimension or aspect of human meaning. The artwork is the kind of work that embodies human meaning. The medium of this embodiment is its significant form, or aesthetic qualities. Ontologically speaking, this form is the source and basis of the aesthetic experience. It is the artist’s main contribution to the medium she works with. As I shall explain shortly, she does not create her medium; she simply forms it in a certain way. This “certain way” is the locus of her creative act. We do not perceive the content, viz., the meaning, the artist communicates by its means; we intuit it when we contemplate it under certain perceptual conditions. In this intuition the imagination moves from contemplating the given form to its signification. Again, the artistic activity in which the form comes into being is generally characterized in terms of expression, communication, or representation. The artist speaks, so to say, in and through the kind of form she creates. But if this form is essentially expressive, if it is expressive by virtue of communicating meaning, if the meaning inheres in it, then it is reasonable to say that the artwork is an expressive object and that it speaks the way the artist speaks. The expressiveness of the artwork is the basis of characterizing the activity, of

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perceiving it as “aesthetic”: the perception of the meaning inherent in the form of the artwork is what distinguishes ordinary from aesthetic perception. Notwithstanding this brief characterization of the generally accepted understanding of artwork and aesthetic perception, it is critical to explain in some detail the implications of the first question I presented in the first part of this chapter: What kind of reality does the artist create, express, or communicate? Is it a feeling, an experience, an emotion, a certain mental state? Is this activity one of “transferring” a particular content of meaning from the mind to the medium she is forming? How? Is it something that moves to the mind of the perceiver as a feeling, as momentary experience passively, as something that befalls the mind? Is it something that moves into my mind the way the color of the paper I am writing on moves into my mind when I look at it? How can that which exists in or is intended by the mind of the artist move into the mind of the perceiver? But can we answer this question if we do not proceed in our answer from an adequate understanding of the structure of the significant form that is the locus of the meaning the artist seeks to communicate, and if this form is the means of communicating it? We can cast this question in a different way: What is the fabric of the significant form? How does it exist in the artwork? Certainly, it does not exist in it the way whiteness exists in this sheet of paper. The whiteness I now perceive exists in the paper as a given, or ready-made, reality; this reality produces an impression of whiteness when I look at the paper. The relation between the quality of whiteness of the paper and my mind is interactive, a stimulus-response relation. But this is not the kind of relation that exists between the artistic aspect of the artwork and its perceiver, primarily because this aspect is neither sensuous nor given as a ready-made reality. The relation between them is interactive but it is not a stimulus-response relation because, as I shall argue in detail in the following chapters, the artistic aspect of the artwork is not merely a feeling, an emotion, or a certain mental state, but a dimension, or a domain, of being— an artistic dimension or domain. In creating her work, the artist proceeds from a vision. This vision is a potential world of meaning. This meaning revolves around a question, a problem, an interest, or a slice of human reality that matters to human beings: justice, friendship, love, hate, life,

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death, violence, loneliness, fear, joy, time, God, evil, beauty, despair, alienation, or tragedy. The artist is not a technician skilled in producing particular types of stimuli; she is a world creator; she creates dimensions of human being. This kind of dimension does not exist in the work as a readymade reality, the way secondary qualities exist in physical objects, but as a potentiality that inheres in the form she creates in the artistic process. This form is significant by virtue of the artistic dimension it embodies. A detailed analysis of the mode of existence of the significant form will occupy my attention in chapter 4. This analysis will provide a basis for a discussion of the aesthetic experience. Inasmuch as it is a dimension, the aesthetic experience is a world, and inasmuch as it a dimension of meaning, it is a world of meaning. The aesthetic experience is not “an experience” to which the quality “aesthetic” is added; in other words, aesthetic is not a quality that qualifies the experience; it is a particular kind of world. It is aesthetic because its very structure consists of a domain of human meaning. This domain exists in the artwork as a potentiality and comes to life in the process of aesthetic perception.

The Third Question: What Is Creativity? Let us, first, grant for the sake of discussion that “art” does not signify a kind of stimulus, quality, or aspect that in some way belongs to the artwork, acts upon our affective faculty in a certain manner, and consequently initiates a certain response, viz., a feeling of pleasure, wonderment, sadness, enlightenment, gratification, elation, guilt, or confusion, which we appreciate aesthetically or for religious, political, social, ideological, or personal reasons. On the contrary, it signifies a dimension of being that permeates the formal organization of the artwork and exists in it as a potentiality, so that the experience of this dimension becomes the source and basis of the aesthetic experience. Let us, second, grant that it is a mistake to reduce the aesthetic experience to a particular affective state, regardless of the extent to which it may be enjoyable or desirable; it is essentially an aesthetic dimension of being, a kind of potential world that constitutes the structure of the aesthetic experience, that is not merely affective in character but involves all the powers of the human mind: intellectual, affective, and vital powers. Finally, it is a human or spiritual experience par excellence—first,

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how does the artistic dimension come into being? In raising this question, I assume that this dimension is novel, sui generis; that the artist is its source; that this source is an activity of the imagination; and that it is essentially creative in nature. Should we not wonder about the act in which the artistic dimension comes into being or how the artist suffuses the form she creates with human meaning? Second, how does the artistic dimension, which exists as a potentiality in the formal organization of the artwork, change into an aesthetic experience that is, strictly speaking, also sui generis? I here, first, assume that the ontic source of this experience is the artistic dimension, which exists as a potentiality, and that the person who contemplates the artwork aesthetically transforms this potentiality into an actuality. Second, this transformation is practically the process of the aesthetic experience as a unique event because the person who contemplates the artwork generates the activity of transformation ex nihilo, as I shall explain in chapter 5. One may undergo an aesthetic experience of the same artwork more than once. Every such experience is a new experience. The aesthetic ceases to exist when the experiences cease to exist. Implied in the preceding questions is that the artistic dimension and the aesthetic experience are produced by a creative act of the imagination. Let me illustrate the significance of this claim by some examples. I am in the theater, watching a performance of Oedipus the King. The Oedipus I see on the stage is a character, a representation of the man Sophocles created when he wrote this play. He embodies the character Sophocles created; accordingly, what I see on stage is this character and no one else. Next, I do not see an idea moving about and speaking in different ways with different persons in different social situations. On the contrary, what I see on stage is a real human being, and this human being is called Oedipus. In short, the man I see on stage is Oedipus the king. But this very Oedipus I see on stage happens to be my drama professor in real life, the same man who delivers three lectures every week of the semester, the same one who has been answering my questions. However, when I watch Oedipus the king on stage, do I see my professor? Do I react to him as my professor? No, I do not react to the man on stage the way I react to the man who is my professor. I do not leave my seat, rush to the stage, and say to Oedipus the actor, “You are making a mistake. You should

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make a different decision. Listen to Tiresias, or, you are causing your own doom!” In short, the man I see on stage is not the man who is my professor in real life, and yet the actor on stage is a real, living event. How does my professor undergo a change of personal identity from being my professor to being Oedipus the king on stage? How does my professor cease to be my professor and become a different human character? Is this transformation of identity accidental, artificial? Of course not! It is an act of creation. The Oedipus I see on stage did not exist before the performance began, and my professor, who was frantically trying to get dressed in a royal gown, was my real professor. Oedipus the king comes into being on stage and I begin to see him as Oedipus the king the moment he appears on stage. At that moment I cease to see him as my professor; I can only see him as the Oedipus whom Sophocles created when he wrote the play. How did my professor, who is concrete identity in real life, become a different, yet real, identity on stage? How can I see my professor as Oedipus the King? What does it take my imagination to move in its perception from seeing him as my professor to seeing him as Oedipus the king? As I have just pointed out, this act does not happen fortuitously or inadvertently; on the contrary, it is conscious and purposeful. But it is also, and more importantly, an act of creation: the character in action who was my professor is now Oedipus the king, the same Oedipus who exists in Sophocles’s play. Is it possible for my professor to become Oedipus the king on stage simply by wearing, or putting on, the character of Oedipus the way the priest wears or puts on his priestly robe and headpiece in public or the way he puts on his glittering robe when he celebrates liturgy? Second, I am standing before a painting titled Mona Lisa in the Louvre. What do my eyes see when they look at it? As I explained earlier, all my ordinary eyes can see is a patch of lines and colors presented or organized in a certain way. But as cultivated eyes, they see the representation of a woman seated in a certain way and gazing into space. How can my eyes see this representation, which is an appearance, as a human being? What does it mean to say that we see a human being in this context? But, alas, do I see a human being? Does a human being, even a woman, in itself, as such, exist? No. What I see is a particular human being. Its particularity arises from the kind of features it exhibits: I see the upper part of a woman in a

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contemplative mood. This mood is not abstract; it is concrete. It expresses an abundance of human feelings and emotions in a certain way. These feelings and emotions suggest concern about certain questions, desires, worries, fears, and anxieties. In short, I see a living human being; in seeing, I take a peek into her soul. Standing before this painting, how can I experience the picture I see as a living human being, a being with a soul? Does she jump out of the painting, stand before me, and express the same human look, the same contemplative, wondering, worrying, questioning, puzzled, and thoughtful look, all of which in unison express a human depth? As I have already indicated, this human being exists as a potentiality in the painting. How does this potentiality become a living reality in my experience? It does not simply happen, and it does not occupy the totality of my consciousness by a magical wand. It emerges by a creative act of my imagination. But why do I emphasize the question of creativity and stress that an answer to this question is a primary task of aesthetic theory? I shall advance a detailed answer to this question in the following chapter, but let me here state that an answer to this question has far-reaching, revolutionary consequences for any serious examination of the artistic and the aesthetic. My quest in raising this question is a quest for the source, i.e., the birthplace, of these two phenomena. It is founded in the principle of causation: knowledge of the cause of a phenomenon illuminates its structure or nature. Did the journey of the philosophical mind not begin with Thales, who sought to discover the arche, the principle or stuff out of which not only particular objects but also the universe as a whole came into being? In raising this question, he assumed that if we know the initial stuff out of which the universe came into being, we would understand the nature of the world, namely, what things are and why they act the way they do. Does any mysterious phenomenon not lose its mysterious character when we know its cause? What were Plato’s quest for the Good, Aristotle’s for the Prime Mover, Spinoza’s for God, Hegel’s for the Absolute, Schopenhauer’s for the Will, and Bergson’s for Elan Vitale, but quests for the Cause, the source of all being? So far, I have argued that the presence of aesthetic qualities in an artifact is what makes it art, that the unity of these qualities in the work constitutes its

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significant form or artistic dimension, and that this dimension inheres as a potentiality in its formal organization. I have also argued that the artistic dimension is the basis of the aesthetic experience. In this event it is transformed into an aesthetic reality. This reality is a world of meaning. Most aestheticians would, I think, agree with my position, at least in general; but the question that remains unanswered and stares us in the face is, how does the artistic dimension exist in the artwork as a potentiality? How is a world of meaning, which the artist lives in during the process of artistic creation, transformed into a potential kind of reality that inheres in the physicality of the work? I understand someone when she says that that dry wood is a potential fire: dry wood possesses the capacity to be fire, but I do not readily understand her when she tells me that a world of meaning exists as a potentiality in a particular formal organization. Again, how can this world, which exists in the mode of potentiality, emerge as a living reality in the aesthetic experience? An understanding of the creative act, of what it means to create, would, I submit, shed light on the nature of the artistic dimension, its mode of existence, and the dynamics of its genesis as a kind of language that communicates human meaning and how this meaning can inhabit a material form. It will also shed ample light on the conditions under which this communication takes place. This is based on the assumption that the creative act as an arche is a primary source. This source is, ontologically speaking, a cause; it is also the stuff out of which human meaning is weaved into a form. This is a main reason why I shall begin my analysis of the artistic and the aesthetic with a conception of creativity.

Subsidiary Tasks of Aesthetic Theory Providing answers to the preceding three questions I have elaborated in this chapter does not, and should not, imply that they are the only primary tasks of aesthetic theory. Answers to two other questions are equally primary: What is the role of art in the different institutions of the state, viz., religion, government, school, culture, and ordinary life? What is the standard of evaluation and appreciation in art? Or, how can we assess the value of the artwork and the role it should play in human progress? First, whether in its form as painting, drama, sculpture, music, film, literature, architecture, music, or theater, art was the first means of human

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expression and communication in all the major civilizations. It preceded the rise of philosophy and science; indeed, it inspired both the philosopher and the scientist to reflect on nature and human life. It is not an exaggeration to say that art was and remains the most important means of communicating the values that promote human happiness and progress. We exist in nature and appropriate it for our survival, but we live in the built environment we create. The realm of human values is the realm of artistic contemplation and inspiration. Pursuit of values is the foundation of human life. Accordingly, would it be awkward to say that the substance of the artwork is a slice of human values? What if we wipe out, by the wand of an evil genius, the whole phenomenon of art from the face of the earth, yes, what if human beings live merely by the intellectual vision and teaching of the philosopher and the scientist? What would our lives be like? The human being is not only an intellect that reasons; she is also a heart that feels. The concept of the heart is wider than the concept of intellect as a reasoning faculty. We can, to a large extent, reason without feeling, but we cannot feel without reasoning. Ontologically, feeling precedes reasoning. The concept of the human heart consists of the unity of reasoning, feeling, willing, and acting. It is a function of the person as a human individual. Feeling, as Hegel argued in the smaller Logic, is the basal stratum of the human mind. Reason and sense grow out of this stratum. The basic language of the human heart is the language of art. The artwork does not address a particular faculty of the mind, but the whole mind. This is why art is central to religion, education, ordinary life, history, politics, and the other practical spheres of human life. But if it is central to human life, can the philosopher afford to neglect a serious, and I should say adequate, analysis of the kind of role it can, and should, play in the cultivation of human character and human progress? Not all the paintings, sculptures, photographs, and tapestries that inhabit the various museums, official buildings, universities, and galleries are art; not all the dance, dramatic, and musical performances in art centers are art; and not all the artworks that are art are good or great works of art. Some are, and some are not. The art we should aspire to create and appreciate should be great, or at least good, art. But how do we distinguish mediocre, good, and great artworks? This question has been the subject of controversy during the past few centuries, and I doubt it will abate in the near or even distant future

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because art and human knowledge in the different areas of human life are constantly changing culturally, economically, religiously, politically, and artistically. But this change notwithstanding, it is imperative that we articulate standards to evaluate the worth of the artworks that make up the mosaic of the art world. I tend to think the articulation of such standards is important not only for creating the conditions of meaningful aesthetic experiences but also for art education and appreciation. I am aware that there are no universal criteria for evaluating the worth of artworks. The absence of such criteria may in certain cases be healthy. But regardless of the presence or absence of such criteria, we should aver that artistic masterpieces or timeless artworks do exist. Such works adorn the history of civilization. They remain bright stars in the night of the human spirit. They not only give us profound human satisfaction, but also illuminate the landscape of human civilization. I did not include the preceding two questions in this chapter only because they are derivative, in the sense that an analysis of the artistic and aesthetic, which presupposes an adequate understanding of the creative act, is a necessary condition for a cogent interpretation and discussion of aesthetic criticism and the role artworks play in human life. How can we assess the value of an artwork if we do not proceed into this activity from an adequate conception of the artistic and the aesthetic as such? The judgment we make of the artwork will, after all, be based on our understanding of these two dimensions. Is there not a radical difference between a judgment based on the view that the artistic is a dimension and one based on the view that the artistic is a quality, an aspect, or a kind of stimulus that belongs to the artwork? Is there not a radical difference between a judgment based on the view that the aesthetic is a world of meaning and one based on the view that the aesthetic is a feeling or an experience of pleasure? Similarly, can we determine the role of art in human life if our evaluation is not based on an adequate understanding of the essential nature of the artistic and the aesthetic?

CHAPTER THREE RELEVANCE OF CREATIVITY TO AESTHETIC THEORY

The main question I shall discuss in this chapter is whether the question of creativity, viz., the activity in which the work comes into being, is relevant to aesthetic theorizing. I raise this question mainly because the majority of aestheticians have, until recently, argued that such a study is not relevant to our understanding of the nature of the artwork qua art and the aesthetic experience as a kind of human experience. This argument is based on the assumption that the artwork must be approached, perceived, and evaluated as a given, accomplished fact without reference to any factor or object outside it: the work must stand on its own feet, so to say; it must speak for itself. Accordingly, inasmuch as “creativity” applies to the artwork, it cannot be a psychological or even metaphysical concept, but an aesthetic or philosophical concept. The word creativity, and consequently words such as graceful, imaginative or inspired, apply only to the artwork, not to the mental or imaginative activity of the artist who has produced the work or to the person who has experienced it; in other words, we cannot judge whether the work was creatively produced or the activity in which it is appreciated was creatively performed by any reference to the mind or imagination of the artist, or to a so-called creative process or act. Indeed, an artist should be judged creative if, and only if, her product, viz., the artwork, exhibits the aspect of creativity. Put succinctly, the artwork and not the artist is the locus of creativity. Thus, the artist should not be considered creative because she feels or thinks that she has created her artwork or because she has undertaken a special experience during the process of “making” or “producing” the artwork; on the contrary, creative applies to the work, and we know it is creative by a critical, analytical, and evaluative aesthetic perception of the work. One has to prove she is creative, and the proof lies

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in her ability to produce a creative work: “By their works shall ye know them” (see Hospers 1954–55, p. 229). In what follows I shall present a brief analysis of the main arguments that are advanced in support of this view and then evaluate them critically. In this evaluation I shall stress that an understanding of creativity is essential to our understanding of the artwork qua art, especially to what it means for an artifact to be classified as a work of art. Artistic activity, in which the artwork is fashioned, is the birthplace of the artistic as such. Hence, if the aesthetician seeks an understanding of the artwork qua art and the experience of the work as an aesthetic object, she should explore not only the genesis of the artistic dimension of the artwork but also the mode of existence of this dimension: How can we know what makes an experience aesthetic if we do not possess an adequate understanding of the identity and structure of this dimension? How can we say an artifact is art if we do not know the source of “art” and the way it exists in the artwork? Again, how can we look for the creative aspect of the artwork in the work if we do not know what creative means? If we say that creative applies to the work and not the artist by virtue of her creative act, we use this word honorifically, not ontologically, but the present discourse is ontological in its method. Indeed, the idea of creativity is derived from the idea of an agent who is creative! If we apply the concept of creativity to the artwork without reference to the artist, we commit a category mistake. This line of reasoning is based on the assumption, which I shall discuss in detail in the following chapter, that knowledge of the cause of an object is indispensable for an adequate knowledge of both natural and human phenomena. This kind of understanding will shed light on the principles of art criticism and art education.

Is Creativity Relevant to Aesthetic Theory? A pioneer philosopher who tried to show that an adequate conception of the creative act in art is irrelevant to the analysis of the phenomenon of the artistic and the aesthetic, and consequently to our understanding of the artwork and the aesthetic experience, was John Hospers. In his insightful study “The Concept of Artistic Expression,” he evaluates the CroceCollingwood view, according to which art is essentially expression. It is

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here assumed that expression is a mental, imaginative activity in or during which the artist at first feels pregnant, for reasons of her own, with some emotional content; she then feels an urge, a perturbation, or an excitement to do something about the internal pressure which this pregnancy generates. She is not, to begin with, clear about the nature, end, or thrust of this feeling but becomes clear about it when she works in the medium and imposes on it a certain form. The outcome of this activity is a work of art, a work that embodies or expresses the emotion or feeling she sought to clarify for herself during the process of artistic creation. “Expression of feeling or emotion,” Hospers reminds us, “is to be distinguished sharply from the deliberate arousing of it” (Hospers 1954–55, p. 222). That is, in creating a work of art, the artist does not aim at arousing certain feelings in her audience; she is primarily interested in exploring, clarifying, and understanding her own feelings to herself, and this by producing an object with a particular form. Arousing feelings in one’s audience implies that the artist knows ahead of time the sort of feeling she wants to express; but if a person knows or is clear about the feelings she wishes to convey or express, she should not try to create artworks or even to be an artist. In fact, a person who produces an aesthetic object mainly to arouse feelings in her audience may be considered “a clever craftsman or a trained technician” but not a real artist. Thus “unless a man has expressed his emotion, he does not yet know what emotion it is. The act of expressing is therefore an exploration of his own emotions. He is trying to find out what these emotions are” (223). But this activity of finding out, exploring, or clarifying is essentially the imaginative process that the artist somehow expresses during the creative process. This process is, in other words, the artistic process, the locus and being of the artistic aspect of the artwork. The main advocates of the theory of expression, Croce and Collingwood, Hospers writes, “tend to view the artist’s actual manipulation of a physical medium outside himself as an accident or an afterthought” (Ibid. Thus, since the finished product is secondary or simply a vehicle for objectifying the imaginary object that the artist sought to express, and since the latter, viz., the imaginary object, is the real work of art, it should follow that whatever aspect, e.g., beautiful or elegant, characterizes the physical work has owed its being to the imaginative experience that produced it. It should also follow

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that any judgment or reference to the imaginary object is, strictly speaking, a judgment or reference to the imaginary object of which the physical object is perhaps a pale copy. One may raise, with Hospers, questions like the following: What do we mean by “artistic expression” of feelings in contrast to other types of expression? Does the artist, every time she produces an artwork, express her feelings? Is it the case that artists are not the sort of people who make it their vocation in life to express their feelings? Does any skillful activity of feelings produce artworks? One may also raise questions about the psychological or mechanical aspects of the creative process or about whether or not scientists, artists, or philosophers can give us reasonable accounts of it; but our concern in this study is philosophical, not psychological. We would like to explore the relation between the so-called creative process and the work which results from this process, namely, “Can anything at all relating to the artistic process be validly used as a criterion for evaluating artistic products? If all the artists did in fact go through the process described by the expression theorists, and even if nobody but artists did this, would it be true to say that that the artwork is good or beautiful because the artist, in creating it, went through this or that series of experiences in plying his medium?” (Hospers 1954–55, p. 226). Hospers answers this question in the negative, and this on the assumption “that the merits of the work of art must be judged by what we can find in the work, quite regardless of the conditions under which the work of art came into being. Its genesis is strictly irrelevant; what we must judge is the work before us, not the process of the artist who created it” (Ibid.). Accordingly, who creates the work, or whether the artist was inspired, creative, sincere, or genius, or whether she did or did not live the feelings or emotions she expressed in her product—all these and similar aspects or factors are irrelevant to our appreciation and evaluation of the work, mainly because if this appreciation or evaluation is of the work, then, logically speaking, it should be based on what the work possesses or has to offer. One cannot simply appreciate or criticize an artwork on the basis of what it implies or entails; and if such appreciation or criticism is possible, then our judgment does not apply to the work but to something external to it. Thus if the artistic, creative, or aesthetic aspect of an artwork belongs to the work and is perceived, known, in and through the work, it should follow

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that any attempt, philosophical or otherwise, to understand works of art should exclude, or be indifferent to, their genesis or the conditions under which they are created. It was this line of reasoning that led a number of aestheticians in the past several decades to shy away from any serious critical analysis of creative activity in our attempt to explain the nature of art in general and the work of art in particular. But should we not make a distinction between the question of explaining the nature of art, or what makes an artifact a work of art, and the question of the basis of the judgment we make of the aesthetic value of artworks? Could it be, as I shall discuss in the following chapters, that an understanding of the nature of art is essential to the question of the basis of aesthetic evaluation or to formulating criteria for such evaluation? The term art is meant to apply, or perhaps should apply, mainly to objects indexed, pronounced, baptized, or considered, according to some criteria, as artworks (see Margolis 1978; Kennick 1979; Hospers 1982). The tendency to ban any reference to the subjective experience of the artist or the aesthetic perceiver underlies the attempt to redefine aesthetics mainly as the study of aesthetic evaluation or criticism. For example, Monroe Beardsley writes: “As a field of knowledge, aesthetics consists of those principles that are required for clarifying and confirming critical statements. Aesthetics can be thought of, then, as the philosophy of criticism, or metacriticism” (see Beardsley 1958, pp. 3–4). The move to dismiss creativity as a phenomenon or concept from the field of aesthetics is, I think, hasty and shows some vagueness and confusion, not only about the concept of creativity but also about the concepts of art and the aesthetic experience. In what follows, I shall advance arguments in support of this claim. My aim in these arguments is not to prove or disprove a particular view in a final way, but hopefully to show the need to reexamine the role of creativity in aesthetics or perhaps to show the aporetic character of this concept.

Critical Evaluation We should grant at the outset that assessing the aesthetic merit, or worth, of an artwork is an evaluative activity logically independent of who has created

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the work or the conditions under which it was created. That is, the aesthetic judgment should be based on certain qualities or relations that belong to the artwork itself without any implied or explicit reference to anything external to the work itself, for example, the creative process in which the work was created. Thus, when I read Anna Karenina, enjoy it, and say, “It is a beautiful novel,” my judgment refers to and is based on definite characters, themes, events or ideas, or the novel as an artistic unity, aspects that I experienced in the work and enjoyed when I was reading the novel. This is based on the general assumption that in making an evaluative judgment, one attributes or asserts an aesthetic aspect or an aesthetic content to an artwork. It would therefore be logically unintelligible to make such a judgment if the object to which the judgment refers or applies does not in some way have the said aspect or content. But the artwork is not an ordinary or natural object. Its artistic dimension or the aesthetic qualities, for example, elegant, beautiful, profound, sublime or grand are neither simple nor simply given. As I shall argue, their perception differs from the perception of secondary qualities such as color or temperature. I readily see the whiteness of the paper on which I am writing these words, but I do not readily see the beauty or enigma of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. However, from the fact that aesthetic judgment should be based on, and refer to, the artwork, it does not necessarily follow that insofar as it applies to the artwork, “creative” or “creativity” is not a psychological concept, or that an understanding of the being and dynamics of this phenomenon is not essential to our understanding of the meaning and being of the artwork qua art, the same work that comes to life in the process of aesthetic perception as an aesthetic object. Nor does it follow that if the artwork is a creatively made object, then an understanding of creativity does not shed an urgently needed light on what it means for an artifact to be art or what it means for an experience to be aesthetic. The task of the critic consists of evaluating the aesthetic worth of the artwork, but the task of the philosopher consists of establishing justifiable criteria for this kind of evaluation. But how can we establish such criteria if we do not proceed in undertaking this task from an adequate conception of the artistic and the aesthetic? We should accordingly ask, can we know what it means for an artifact to be an artwork

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and, consequently, what it means for an experience of this work to be an aesthetic experience without reference to the activity in which such work is produced? Is the artistic dimension of the artwork a given or creatively made reality? If this reality is given, that is, as a ready-made reality, the question of creativity would not, I think, arise; but it is not, and if it is not, where or how does it exist? Where can we look for it except in the artwork? And, how can we find it in the work but by experiencing it as art? But again, how does it come to life in this kind of experience? What kind of reality comes to life in this type of experience? It would be hasty to think theorizing about the nature of the artistic and the aesthetic is either adequate or comprehensive by focusing our attention on what we take to be artworks simpliciter without first understanding the conditions under which they were created. Why? The concept of creativity and along with it the concept of the artwork is not, as aestheticians such as Weitz, Kennick, or Sparshott have maintained, merely an aesthetic concept. It is possible to infer, and this on the basis of ordinary, intelligent experience, that an object is an artifact, but it is not possible, not even in principle, to infer that an object is creatively made merely by perceiving or perhaps comparing the given object to other objects. Why? For example, what do we mean when we say Mona Lisa is a “creative” work of art? The aspect of creativity is not given to ordinary perception the way the lines, colors, and representation of the painting are given; we do not, in other words, directly perceive the aspect of creativity; we simply infer it, and the inference is usually made on the basis of criteria or conditions that define creative or creativity. This only raises the question, can we characterize an artwork as creative unless we know ahead of time what it means for something to be creative or how to use creative or creativity? Can we not ask, what is the ground or source of these terms? What gives them their meaning? Moreover, is it meaningful to characterize an artwork as creative? No. It is intelligible to apply predicates such as elegant, graceful, or plain where the qualities that correspond to these qualities evoke in us certain emotions, moods, or mental states. But what emotion, mood, or mental state does the aspect of creativity evoke in us? Creativity is not an exhibited property, not even a property in the proper sense of the word; it is a concept, and as such it applies to an activity or operation of some kind. Some animals, like the bee, the beaver, the

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nightingale, or the wasp make, construct, or build, and what they build or construct may be interesting or pleasant, but they hardly create the way artists create. Their activity of making or constructing is mechanical and follows certain patterns which are beyond their consciousness or even control. But the artwork is an object, a thing, not an activity. At best we can say it is a creatively made object. This way of characterizing it is, I think, consistent with ordinary language. In ordinary life we do not say of great works of art that they are creative, but that they are creatively made, and when we or some critics say a given work is creative, we really mean that it was creatively made or that the artist who made it was a creative artist. Broadly speaking, creative applies to human beings, and in the area of art it applies to artists, not to their products. The aim of the artist is to produce aesthetically beautiful or aesthetically satisfying objects, not creative objects. Thus when, or if, we characterize an artwork as creative, we indirectly imply or refer to the way, activity, or process in which the work was made. We mean that the person who produced it performed a special type of activity or underwent a special type of experience in producing it. We also mean that works that are creatively produced are not accidents or imitations but uniquely, deliberately, purposefully made objects (see Tomas 1964). This kind of inference is warranted not only phenomenologically but also on the basis of our conception or understanding of the meaning and being of art. Let me explicate this point. The term art does not refer only to “artwork” but, as aestheticians like Dewey, Stolnitz, Croce, and Collingwood have stressed, also to the activity in which the artwork is produced. First, it is normal to refer to the person who produces artwork as an artist—why would such a person be called an artist? Briefly put, such a person is called an artist because she makes, i.e., creates, objects we call art. Unlike other objects, the sort of objects she creates are art mainly because she produces them in a certain way or because she does something special in such a way that once they are produced, these objects possess and exhibit certain qualities that other types of objects do not. What she does or the sort of activities she performs in producing them is, as I shall discuss in detail in chapter 5, different from the sort of activity in which we produce ordinary, practical, or useful objects. What is special

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about this activity? I need not discuss this question here, for it will occupy my attention in the following chapters, but I should emphasize that the imaginative-technical activity she performs is what we usually designate as “creative.” Thus, because she has this power, we feel justified in calling her an artist. We should here grant that an artist is judged creative or proves herself creative only insofar as her product, viz., the artwork, is creative in the sense of being a “creatively made object”: “by their works shall ye know them.” Yes, but we should not at all forget that the work is what it is, that it is creatively produced, only because its author is creative. The creativity of the artwork is founded in, indeed derived from, the creative act of the artist. In other words, the work testifies to the creative powers of its maker, and if this maker is not creative, the product would be neither attractive nor characterized as “creative.” Second, the term artwork itself suggests that it is an object produced with a special kind of skill, viz., artistic skill. It is, to begin with, a work, something made, but made artistically. Its being a work logically implies that it was produced by someone or by an agent other than itself. Therefore, what it is, namely, its nature, being, or identity, is determined by a being other than itself. Accordingly, its artistic identity is something made or achieved. Thus, in order to have an adequate understanding of this identity, we would do well to dwell upon the way or the conditions under which it was produced. I focused my attention on artistic activity in the preceding paragraphs only to emphasize that the concept of creativity, or createdness, is a function of the activity in which the artwork is fashioned: the being of createdness is founded in the activity of art-making. The locus of creativity is the activity in which the artwork is produced. It is the creative, making activity that gives the outcome of the activity the character of being a work of art; that is, the workly character of the artwork qua art, as Heidegger says, reflects the structure and content of artistic activity in which the work is produced (see Heidegger 1971). What makes this character artistic is the fact that the work is a “world” of human meaning or truth, as I shall explain in detail in chapter 6. This is what we usually mean when we say artworks express, embody, or represent truth or manning. As a work, then, the artwork is not a dead or inert object but a living structure; this very aspect is what makes us refer to it as a work or as art and not merely as an art object. But we

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cannot know or perceive the artwork as work unless we already know what it means for something to be created or made. And how can we grasp the meaning and being of this phenomenon? We can intuit its meaning and being, as Heidegger stressed, “only in terms of the process of creation. Thus, contained by the facts, we must consent, after all, to go into the activity of the artist to arrive at the origin of the work of art. The attempt to define the work-being of the work purely in terms of the work itself proves to be unfeasible” (58). Thus if the artistic aspect of a work is an intentional, i.e., purposefully structured, reality, in other words if artistic creativity is a necessary condition for an object’s being a work of art, it should follow that an understanding of creative activity or the conditions under which artworks are produced is essential to our understanding of the concept of art and of what it means for something to be an artwork.

The Study of Creativity as Indispensable to Aesthetic Discourse Let us grant for the sake of argument that creativity is not a psychological concept; that we arrive at our knowledge of it by examining and comparing artworks; and that what actually happens in the mind, soul, or imagination of the artist is irrelevant to our appreciation, evaluation, and understanding of the artwork—can we dismiss the study of artistic creativity from our analysis of art in general and the artwork in particular? Two main reasons are usually advanced by aestheticians for why the concept of creativity is irrelevant to aesthetic discourse. First, aesthetic enjoyment is based on definite qualities or relations which belong to the work. Second, aesthetic evaluation or criticism is of the work; of the sort of value, qualities, or worth it possesses in relation to other works; or of certain accepted standards of excellence. Hence, since artworks are given as accomplished facts, and since they are acknowledged and appreciated for what they are, that is, as art, it should follow that in appreciating and understanding what they are or the standards according to which we should evaluate them, any reference to the intention of the artist or how she produced the work, or to the conditions under which it was created, should be ignored as irrelevant. This line of reasoning, as I indicated earlier, is hasty, indeed simplistic. Why?

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First, as I argued in the preceding section, the proposition “X is a work of art” does logically entail a proposition about the mode of genesis of X, or its origin. To reiterate: the concept of work means, as well as logically entails, an activity—a conscious, thoughtful, and purposeful activity—in which the work is produced. To say of something that it is a “work” of art implies that someone has made it in a certain way; otherwise, the so-called work would be viewed as a given object even though it may be interesting, pleasant, or attractive. Again, If we grant that there are artists, or that someone is an artist, we imply that such an artist produces objects that have artistic character. Otherwise, what she produces cannot be characterized as art. But the question that merits emphasis is, what do we mean when we say “X is a work of art” entails a proposition about X’s mode of genesis and necessarily about the artist’s state of mind? When we speak of X’s mode of genesis, we are not interested in the richness of the emotions, aspirations, intentions, moods, feelings, or frustrations of the artist, but in the way, the sort of activity, or the power—technical, imaginative, genius power—that is responsible for the production of X. A psychologist is certainly interested in the form as well as the content of this activity. The philosopher is, or should be, interested in it because she is concerned with its structure just as much as she should be concerned with the conditions under which thinking or conception or ideation takes place; she should, in other words, be concerned with what it means for the artist to create an image and translate this image into a sensuous form—why? Because the artist does not produce or manufacture an object; she creates an artwork—an image, a world of meaning. The workly and artistic dimensions of the work are not simply given to ordinary perception. Thus, to perceive it aesthetically, that is, to perceive the work as art, means to penetrate the artistic dimension’s potential in the form of the physical object; it means to create or, better, to recreate, the artistic dimension in the aesthetic experience. In this activity, the perceiver brings to life the meaning inherent in the artistic dimension in the fullness of its being, at least in principle. But, alas, how can one achieve this goal if one cannot, or does not, know what it means to create or how the artistic dimension exists in the physical work? Again, how can we proceed in aesthetic or artistic education if this procession is not based on the principle that aesthetic perception is an activity of creation?

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For example, we are told by Kennick that “we tell whether a work of art is creative by looking at the work and by comparing it with previously produced works of art in the same or in the nearest comparable medium of genre” (Ibid., p. 180). But we are not told how this looking and comparing should take place. I should think that mere looking, or simply staring, does not tell or instruct us about the creative character of the work mainly because the createdness is grounded in the workly aspect of the work, which means in order for one to perceive or comprehend the createdness of the work, she should experience the workly-ness of the work, that is, she should intuit the structure or form of the work in the aesthetic process. Experiencing the createdness of the work is experiencing a unique and meaningful structure; it is experiencing a new world of meaning, regardless of the duration, richness, or profundity of this world. It should be clear from the preceding discussion that in creating an artwork, the artist produces an artistic dimension or reality. The presence of this dimension in the work is what makes it art; it is also the ontic source and basis of the aesthetic experience. The artistic dimension undergoes a change of ontic identity and becomes aesthetic in the aesthetic experience. The fabric of this kind of experience is human meaning. Chapter 6 will be devoted to a detailed analysis of this assertion. But if the being of the artistic activity constitutes the being of the aesthetic experience, can we not speak, as Croce did, of an organic relationship between the artwork and the content of the artistic creation? Again, in enjoying or evaluating the artwork, do we not in fact enjoy and evaluate what the artist created in the activity of producing the work? It is here important to spotlight the concept of the origin, or genesis, of the artwork: what do we have in mind when we emphasize or speak of this origin? This origin refers to the source that gives rise to an essence, or a nature—in this case, this essence is the artistic dimension. The genesis of an artwork signifies the creation, emergence, or coming together of a novel nature. This is why inasmuch as the work remains itself, it remains close to its origin. Holderlin’s words have captured this aspect of the being of the artwork: Schwer Verlasst Was nahe dem Ursprung wohnet den Ort.

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Strictly speaking, the artwork never leaves its point of origin, for it carries with it the truth and beauty which acquires a sensuous form in the hands of the artist and with the seal of her approval. Does the artist not linger in her work? Do we not feel the world of her soul pulsate in the work? The tendency to understand, enjoy, and evaluate artworks as if they exist independently, discretely, is a clear example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, for, like a philosophical work or a legal code, the artwork, e.g., The Pompidou Center, reflects the spiritual or cultural temper of its age. How can we grasp the full meaning of an artwork if we do not feel, or at least appreciate, the value orientation, the heartbeat, or the disposition of the art world that underlies the very being of the artwork? Can we appreciate the full impact or the meaning the work embodies if we do not presuppose some understanding of, at least a feeling for, the values that constitute the fabric of the culture from and within which the work originated? For example, what person would grasp the significance of Dante’s Divine Comedy, of the Egyptian temple Karnak, without a genuine understanding of or feeling for the cultural fabric of the times? It is not my purpose to belabor the point, but only to stress that aesthetic perception is not only a creative, constructive activity but also a very complex activity embedded in the culture in which the work is produced. Perhaps the ultimate origin, the phusis, of great works of art is the living spirit of their culture. If this is the case, and I think it is, we can say with a measure of certainty that art is great inasmuch as it expresses the living spirit of human culture.

CHAPTER FOUR CONCEPT OF CREATIVITY IN ART

The proposition I tried to elucidate and defend in the preceding chapter is that an understanding of the dynamics of artistic creativity is a necessary condition for an adequate understanding of the artistic dimension of the artwork. My defense was based on two assumptions: first, an understanding of the genesis of an object illuminates the nature of the object; second, unlike natural objects, artworks are by their very nature human creations. We intuit the artifactual nature of the work, that it is a human creation, when we contemplate its form. Regardless of their kind, artifacts are purposeful objects; they express human purpose or value. The human mind intuits this purposefulness in the artifacts primarily because their form signifies human purpose. Do archaeologists not readily recognize artifacts when they explore the ruins of ancient civilizations? Do we not recognize a gold ring on the ground of a parking lot after a shopping spree in the mall? But unlike the form of ordinary or functional artifacts, artistic form is, as I already indicated, significant in a special way; it is the kind of form that announces, or signifies, not only its artifactual but also its creative aspect by the kind of signification it expresses. Its structure points, as Heidegger argued, to its origin, viz., the activity in which it was created. But this activity is not only one of making, it is also an activity of creation. Can we intuit it in the fullness of its being? For example, can we say whether it is a quality or a dimension if we do not know what the artist creates or objectifies in the form of her work? Can we have a genuine experience of the artwork if we do not know the mode of existence of the texture of the artistic being of the work? Is the process of perceiving or experiencing the artwork qua art not a creative process, as I argued in the preceding chapter? I shall elaborate this proposition in some detail in chapter 5.

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Differentiae of Creativity Creativity as Power Creativity is a generic, non-exclusive concept. It cannot be defined or understood in terms of more general concepts or conceptual categories. We derive our knowledge of it by a primordial type of intuition. This intuition is the source of our conception of the elements or features that define its essential nature. Only a direct comprehension of these elements or features of creativity as a phenomenon can be the basis of our knowledge or reference to it. This phenomenon is, as Whitehead argued in Process and Reality, an ultimate in two ways. First, it is the source of the cosmic process and permeates it and, second, it is the moving force of this process. Nothing exists if it is not a manifestation of this source. It transcends the cosmic process and it is immanent in it. As transcendent, it is an infinite wealth of being; but although transcendent, it reveals itself by virtue of its immanence in the cosmos it creates. Again, as transcendent, it envisions the design and direction of the cosmic process; as immanent, it is the realization of this vision. Its being qua power is immanent in every element of this process. This is why every object, human or natural, has the capacity, i.e., the power, to act and be acted on or to change in a certain way according to its nature. Did Plato not argue in the Timaeus that the Good is a creative power and that God (the Good) created the universe because he is good? Did the majority of the metaphysicians, such as Leibnitz, Spinoza, Hegel, and Bergson, to mention a few names, not follow in the footsteps of Plato? Again, did God not reveal himself as creator in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam by saying, “Let there be light?” God would not be God if he were not the first and foremost active power of creation. Would God be God if he were not the creator of the universe and if he were not the power that energizes the cosmic process? What if the act of creating light did not exist—would there be God? If I say yes, who will know of his existence? Him? How do you know? Were you with him before the act of creation? There is no need to belabor this point. I mention it briefly only to emphasize the primacy of creation in any attempt to explain the emergence of human and natural objects.

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But the claim that creativity is a kind of power is based on the generally recognized principle, which was first articulated by Heraclitus, that change is the essential nature of reality. Change is a necessary condition for the possibility of any kind of activity, natural or human. It is extremely difficult, and I think impossible, to imagine a static world. Indeed, a world whose constituent elements do not change cannot be characterized as a world. Can the tree, the lion, or the human body grow if it does not change and if the capacity to change is not inherent in it, i.e., in each constituent particle of its being? Can we, as human beings, perform any kind of activity if we are not capable of change? Change is a dynamic process. Metaphorically speaking, it is the receptacle within which human and natural phenomena come into being, endure for a while, and then pass out of being. Every existing thing is a trajectory of change. To be a reality, regardless of whether it is natural or human, is to be a reality in process. This process proceeds in two ways: composition and decomposition, synthesis and separation. Synthesis consists of joining two or more elements into a unity that gives rise to a new object. Separation consists of dividing an object into its constituent parts. But the question that merits our critical attention is, how can two objects be composed or decomposed if they do not possess the capacity to be composed and decomposed? I have made this short excursus into change only to spotlight the concept of capacity. No physical or mental object can change if it does not possess the capacity to change. Thus, since composition and decomposition are processes of change, the elements that undergo change must inherently be capable of change. The possibility of this process implies the idea of capacity: “the ability to contain, absorb, or receive or hold . . . the ability or qualification (for or to do) something” (WBNCD 2004). The defining feature of ability is power, dynamis. To be a part of the scheme of reality is to be an object that possesses the power to do something—to act and be acted upon. It is, I think, important to recognize this aspect of the objects that make up the order of nature because composition and decomposition and, consequently, growth and development, are impossible if we do not assume that these objects are inherently capable, i.e., have the power, of composition and decomposition. Indeed, neither composition nor

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decomposition is possible if we do not assume this possibility is inherent in the texture of real things. However, as I shall presently explain, the claim that power is inherent in the general order of natural and human reality is indispensable to adequately account for the possibility of creativity in art, primarily because regardless of whether in nature or human life, the essence of the creative act is the capacity to compose and decompose elements in a certain way. Is the activity of forming the artwork not an activity of composing and decomposing the elements out of which the significant form emerges? But how can this form emerge in the process of artistic creation if these elements are not capable of composition and decomposition, that is, of uniting and separating according to the vision that steers the creative act? How can the significant form be expressive if it is not capable of communicating meaning? The concept of creativity logically implies the concept of power, for how can any kind of agent create if it does not have the power of producing some kind of object? This second question leads me directly to the second differentia of creativity. It is extremely difficult to conceive of the possibility of composition and decomposition if we do not assume that the objects that make up the fabric of nature are capable of composition and decomposition. But the capability of composition and decomposition is not restricted to natural objects; it includes mental objects, i.e., ideas, emotions, images, feelings, moods, and the relations that exist between them. Ideas can be as powerful, if not more powerful, than physical objects and living organisms. Ideas are not abstract, passive mental entities; therefore, they are not impotent. On the contrary, an idea is a drop, and sometimes a world, of meaning, of a living truth, of life. This kind of drop can be transformative in character. Do we not, at least sometimes, change the way we live when we discover that our former way was wrong? Do we not abandon a friend when we discover that she is fake? Do we not mistrust our teacher when we discover that she is a cheat? Did Oedipus the king not pluck his eyes out of their sockets when he discovered the truth? Do we not invent trains when we discover the laws of nature? Do we not defeat an enemy when we discover her points of weakness?

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But how can ideas influence the way we think, feel, and make decisions if they are not drops of power? Again, how can they be magical in their effect if they are not capable of communicating the kind of meaning that illuminates the human mind and seduces it to change the way it thinks, feels, and act? Alas, by what kind of magic can the poet create poems that lift the human mind to a higher level of seeing the truth or enjoying the beautiful? Can the poet write a poem if she does not compose and decompose certain words, ideas, emotions, images, insights, or moods?

Creativity as Generative Power Most, if not all, of the analyses of creativity in art in the fields of philosophy and psychology during the past five decades are primarily descriptive in nature. They are attempts to explore the psychological and environmental conditions under which the creative act takes place, viz., what happens in the mind of the creator during this kind of act. In this exploration they rely on the confessions of artists and existing studies of the concept of creativity. Some psychoanalysts have also observed the behavior of some creative people before, during, and after they have completed a creatively conceived work. It is a generally recognized fact that artists are not the best authorities on the nature of creativity nor on the kind of experience they undergo when they are in the heat of the creative act. Most of them describe their experiences metaphorically, vaguely, mystically, cryptically, but neither philosophically nor scientifically. How can they be critically or analytically aware of the kind of experience they are having when they are focused on the intuition, articulation, and expression of their aim or when they are in the heat of the creative act? The only thing they can be conscious of is this very aim. Besides, can this type of experience be a direct object of examination, at least easily? They cannot perform a creative act for the sake of studying the nature of this act! Nonetheless, I tend to think the creative person is the most reliable source of our knowledge of the creative act, mainly because this type of act takes place in her mind. Although most artists are not philosophically articulate, and although their reports are frequently sketchy, it is possible to see through these reports and glean a reasonably adequate understanding of the basis, structure, and logic of the

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creative act. How or why this type of act is prompted is not my concern in this chapter. My principal aim is to shed light on the phenomenon of creativity as a power. In my endeavor to realize this aim, I shall avail myself of the insights of the philosopher, the psychologist, and the artist as well as of my own experience as a novelist. My analysis will be ontological in character. This is why, first, I referred to creativity as a phenomenon, as a type of reality that exists to the human mind, and, second, I shall move the discourse about this phenomenon from a description of the process of creation to an analysis of the type of reality that makes this process possible. Finally, it is why I have not, so far, spoken of creation but of creativity and the creative act and referred to them as a power inherent in the structure of reality as a whole and as a manifestation of this power respectively. But creativity is not merely a power; more importantly, it is an originative power. It is the kind of power that brings a particular reality into existence sui generis. We may characterize this act as generation ex nihilo. This implies that the reality generated by this power is novel, unique. It steps into the reality of the first time. But in what sense is creativity an originative power? Is newness its defining feature? Is the capacity of the human mind to introduce a new reality into the world the defining feature of creativity? No, because all the objects that make up the structure of reality are constantly new, i.e., in the process of becoming new. This assertion is implied by the concept and reality of change: reality is constantly changing, therefore it is constantly new. Heraclitus said we cannot step in the same river twice. But we may add that we cannot think twice, feel twice, or act twice—in short, experience twice. It is questionable, indeed ironic, to characterize the continual emergence of new realities in the realm of nature as “creation” because this type of emergence is necessary. It just so happens that, whether at the macroscopic or microscopic level, every emergent is new in the sense that it did not exist prior to its emergence. However, its emergence is governed by the laws of nature. But although the human mind may be viewed as an emergent from the natural process, it does not always work, or function (ergon), according to the laws of nature but according to the laws that originate from its creative

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vision in the different areas of human experience, especially in philosophy, science, art, and religion. The kind of creativity that will occupy my attention in the following pages is human creativity. Its locus is the human mind. But, although we tend to speak of the human mind as creative, although it is a constructive, constitutive power, it does not necessarily follow that all its activities are performed creatively. As I shall now discuss, three conditions should be fulfilled in order for the mind to act creatively. First, the act should be purposeful; second, it should result in a new reality; and, third, it should communicate or express a content or dimension of human meaning. These conditions apply to the creative act in science philosophy, art, and practical life. I shall restrict myself to the creative act in art. The proposition I shall analyze and defend is that the artistic and the aesthetic come into being by a creative act of the human mind. We may attribute the creation, or emergence, of material objects to a cosmic force, for example, God or accident, or to a metaphysical principle such as prime mover, absolute, élan vital, or will. Further, we may say that the natural process is teleological or dysteleological. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that the outcome of creativity in nature is physical objects such as mountains, rivers, lions, apple trees, seas, and human beings, while creativity in the realm of human life is not physical in character. The human mind does not create physical objects; it uses them. Accordingly, the artist does not create the physical medium in and through which she creates the artwork. The datum she creates is form in the Aristotelian sense of the word form. The creative act consists of “ingressing,” or impressing, a novel form on her medium. I use ingress as a verb because it reveals the nature of the creative act in art adequately. It comes from the Latin ingressus, which is derived from ingradi (“to step into” or “to enter into”). The form the artists ingresses into her medium is a constitutive element of the artwork: the form inheres in it as an essential part of its structure. For example, a poet creates a poem. As a creatively made object, the poem is novel. The words out of which it is made are given. The poet does not create them, but uses them: she forms them, that is, she ingresses or imposes a certain form on them. The poem is novel by virtue of this created form. When I read it, I do not read the words simply; they are not the object of my reading. I comprehend the meaning implicit in their unity. The meaning results from

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the way the words are organized or synthesized. If I happen to hear a recitation of the poem by the poet or by a skilled reciter, the phonetic stratum of the recited poem becomes an integral part of the poem I hear. The way it is read is a part of its meaning. Similarly, when I contemplate Vermeer’s Kitchen Maid aesthetically, and as my experience of the painting unfolds as a world of meaning, the sensuous dimension of the form, which is the basis of my aesthetic contemplation, becomes, as I shall argue in chapter 6, a constitutive element of my aesthetic experience. The form the artist created is expressed, i.e., ingressed, into his physical medium in the activity of the creative act. The logic that underlies the creative act is the same logic that underlies the emergence of all the natural objects in the universe. For example, a wrinkled apple fruit grows on the shaded side of an apple tree. Like all the other apples on the same tree, it is a new reality. This apple did not exist before on this tree or anywhere in the universe. It is a novel and, to some extent, a unique reality. It is novel by virtue of its form, not by virtue of the stuff out of which it is made. The ingredients that nourished it are the same ingredients that nourished all the other apples. Its individual form, which is distinguished from the other apples, emerged from the way the different elements—soil, water, sunlight, fertilizer, heat, cold, and shade, as well as its position on the tree—interacted, composed, or formed. These elements are given; they are the same elements that gave rise to all the other apples on the same tree. We may say that the form of this apple, which is the basis of its individuality, was created by the hand of nature, which works through its laws. I here assume that the growth of the tree is a moment in the cosmic process and that this process is teleological in character. But, regardless of whether it is natural or human, the creative act is an activity of separating and uniting, of synthesizing and de-synthesizing the elements of the medium in and through which the creative act takes place. The kind of form that emerges from this activity depends on the way these elements are organized or unified into a certain form. Now, as a generative power, the creative act is neither fortuitous nor spontaneous, neither abstract nor pure activity; it is always a concrete, identifiable event. The concept of creativity is a general or abstract idea, but not the creative act. Creativity is always a particular event, and it is always

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a purposeful act. As a phenomenon it reveals its nature in the work of the scientist, the philosopher and the artist. How does any one of these types of minds initiate the creative act? An answer to this question should, I think, begin with an examination of its source because an act is an event. An event begins at a certain moment in time, endures for a short or long time, and then ceases to exist. If it is a purposeful event, and it is, the starting point of our examination should be a consideration of its origin. The starting point of the creative act is what I can call the creative vision of the artist. The content of this vision is an idea, an intuition, or a cognitive feeling that originates from a serious concern for something that matters to the artist. This kind of idea, intuition, or feeling originates from an existential encounter between the artist and the situation or problem that matters to the artist. It is appropriate to say that this concern is the reason for being, or the final cause, of the creative act. Regardless of its kind, it does not at first exist in the mind as a clear idea, image, or feeling; otherwise, it would not need clarification, articulation, or expression. It simply exists at the pre-reflective level of cognition, that is, as an intuition and as a possibility for expression or communication in a certain symbolic form. This intuition contains within its folds not only the structure of the creative act but also the logic of its development. Given a certain idea or problem as the basis of the creative act, and given a certain medium at the disposal of the artist, a particular logic of how the creative act will take place emerges from the core of this pre-reflective intuition. In a way, this logic dictates, by virtue of its compelling power qua logic, the structure and direction of the creative act, that is, the way the artist relates or composes and decomposes the elements of her medium in the process of creating the appropriate form. How many times have we heard novelists say that once the idea of the novel or the poem matures in their minds, the novel or the poem practically writes itself? The voice of logic is compelling because it reveals the truth and because it is the source of the coherence of the form. Coherence is a necessary condition for the possibility of comprehending any type of symbolic expression. For example, did Michelangelo not see David potentially existing in the slab of marble when he first cast a contemplative look at it? I emphasize this point because respecting the logic that underlies the creative act endows the emergent form with honesty, genius, and

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aesthetic beauty. The extent to which the artwork exhibits these qualities depends on the significance and profundity of the aim of the creative act and the extent to which the artist is skilled in subjugating her medium to the aesthetic demands of the creative vision that gives rise to the activity of artistic creation. But the presence of a significant aim or purpose as the initiator of the creative act is not enough. Broadly speaking, the performance of any significant act, or the attainment of any significant achievement, implies the fulfillment of three necessary conditions: purpose (aim), a method for achieving the purpose, and a will to achieve it. The fulfillment of these conditions applies to the performance of the creative act. If any of these conditions cannot be fulfilled, the intuitive idea will remain in the mind of its author as a wish or dream. However, these three conditions are, I submit, necessary but not sufficient for the transformation of the artist’s idea or creative vision into a work of art. An artist may envision the possibility of a work that is worthy of creation, she may possess a viable method for realization in a symbolic form, she may have the will to create it, and yet the work may not be created for material, political, religious, ideological, or social reasons. Many artists abandoned a worthwhile art project for such reasons. The essence of will is desire, but desires can frequently be frustrated, especially in a restrictive society. I will not be too much amiss if I suggest a fourth condition for the realization of the creative act: passion. Yes, passion. Let me elucidate and justify this claim. I shall begin with a remark about passion. This idea is used in religion, philosophy, politics, art, science, and practical life with different shades of connotation and emphasis; but although different in some respects, these uses express a common core: extreme, forceful, compelling, and frequently irresistible emotional intensity. We encounter this type of intensity in moments or situations such as love, hate, ambition, fear, joy, devastation, grief, or rage. For example, who can fail to feel this kind of emotion when they read Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, listen to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or watch Sophocles’s Oedipus the King on stage. Who does not emerge from experiencing such a work with a cathartic state of mind? Do patriotic soldiers not charge into the front line on the battlefield, without fear of death, when they know the enemy is about to overrun them? Why

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was a man like Giordano Bruno willing to be burned at the stake for the sake of the truth he believed in? A passionate person is a driven person, and she is driven by an aim, a mission, a commitment, a cause, or an ideal she deems supremely important and indispensable for her being. Such a person devotes much of her time and her intellectual and emotional energies, and she is willing to deny herself many, if not all, the pleasures, glories, and fame of the world for the sake of her aim. Did Marie Curie not endanger her life, and even die, in her endeavor to discover radium and polonium? Was Socrates not willing to die for the sake of truth? Passion is not merely an emotion; it is often a committed devotion to a rational, studied, honest, and worthwhile aim. The passionate person truly believes in the absolute value of the aim she pursues. How many faithful, during the early years of Christianity, were willing to die at the hands of the Romans because they believed in Christ and his way of life? How many social reformers have died for the sake of social justice? The point that deserves special emphasis here is that although passion is essentially emotional in nature, a kind of driving force, it is not usually blind, irrational, or unjustified. It is a mistake to think, as some philosophers and psychologists have argued, that this type of emotion or emotional state is independent of reason or human value. Whether intellectual or practical, any action we pursue in the course of daily living is a blend of the intellectual and affective activities of the human mind. An emotion is a quantum of energy; it is a drop of impelling or driving force. It underlies any meaningful, or meaningless, activity we perform in the different situations of our lives. For example, a person rapes my sister. I hate him and have a strong desire to retaliate for the injury inflicted on my sister. One day I see him walking in the mall. The mere sight of this man arouses in me an emotion of anger permeated by feelings of disgust, hate, and revenge. This kind of situation propels me to rush toward him, confront him, and make him pay for the crime he committed against my sister. Could the desire to retaliate for my sister have arisen in me if I did not believe in the validity of justice, familial love, and the dignity of humanity and if I were not certain this rapist deserved to be punished? Again, is the passion to explore Mars at all possible without a belief that this exploration would be truly valuable?

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The greater the aim or the cause, the greater the passion. A person’s passion for success in her work is different from the passion of the medical student to earn her doctorate degree, different from the passion of the legislator to pass a law that would help the poor or the sick, different from the passion of the politician who aspires to become president of the United States of America, and still different from the passion of Alexander the Great to conquer North Africa, the East, and Europe. The dynamics of passion of the persons in these different situations are similar to the dynamic of the passion of the artist in her endeavor to create aesthetic beauty. For example, the passion that underlies the creation of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel paintings is different from the passion that underlies the creation of Dickens’s David Copperfield and from the passion that underlies Brancusi’s Bird in Flight. But regardless of its intensity, passion is an essential and, I think, a decisive condition of the creative act for the following reasons. First, this kind of act requires substantial intellectual, emotional, professional, and technical effort primarily because it is an activity in which the artist creates reality ex nihilo, something from nothing. Was it an accident that Plato invoked inspiration by the gods as a source of the creative act, in which the artist does not know how her creation came into being? Is it an accident that some people view it as an act of magic or of genius, one that transcends the power of rational comprehension? Is it an accident that the creative person is always treated with respect, fear, and admiration on the grounds that she possesses supernatural, uncommon powers? There may be some truth to these and similar views of the mystery of the creative act, but I think it is possible to throw light on it if we reflect on the logical and cognitive conditions under which it takes place. If, as I argued earlier, the artist does not create the medium she uses in the activity of artistic creation but only the form she ingresses into this medium; if this form is expressive, communicative in character; and accordingly, if it is a kind of language, then it should follow that its structure, logic, and the meaning it communicates should originate from the cultural world that thrives in her mind—from her political, social, artistic, scientific, philosophical, religious, and cultural views, in short her worldview or Weltanschauung. This view may be small, large, or great, and it may be simple or complex.

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Nevertheless, it is the soil that nourishes the mind of the artist as a human individual. The kind and depth of the artwork she creates always reflects the kind of beliefs and values that make up the structure of her worldview. How can it be otherwise if her mind is nourished by the soil of her culture? No matter the kind of people we are—scientists, philosophers, artists, or engineers—can we overstep the boundaries of our culture? Do we not try to discover the soul of a civilization by studying its philosophy, art, science, technology, and way of life? Is this not what we do when we study ancient Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Middle Eastern, Greek, Roman, and Persian civilizations? Not only the artist, but also her work is a child of the culture that throbs in her mind, heart, and soul. This assertion certainly implies that her work reflects, directly or indirectly, the image of her culture. Whether in the ancient, modern, or contemporary world, the artist’s work reflects a concern for and frequently a response to the main questions, problems, crises, upheavals, catastrophes, value crises, and ideas that directly affect the lives of the people. Were the artists silent during and after the First and Second World Wars? Were they silent when Freud and Jung revolutionized our understanding of human nature? Were they silent when the first human being walked on the moon? It is no exaggeration to say that the stuff of the artwork originates from the bosom of the culture that pulsates in the artist’s mind, soul, and heart. I spotlight this fact only to underline the ultimate source of the artwork. I have already emphasized that the birthplace and the initial starting point of artistic creation is the formation of the artistic vision in the artist’s mind and that the centerpiece of this vision is a particular idea: a question, problem, dimension of meaning, or something that is valuable to human beings. At first this idea exists as a pre-reflective, intuitive content. It is not simply an intuition. It is not a pure feeling; on the contrary, it is a cognitive feeling, the kind that is amenable to articulation in different symbolic forms of expression. The reflection on this feeling or intuition is the source of the symbolic form the artist chooses as a means of expression. The creative aspect of the creative act originates from this very reflection. In addition to the artist’s ability to envision a content of human meaning and to choose the appropriate form for its articulation or expression is the essence of the

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creative act. The form acquires its uniqueness, or novelty, not only from the fact that she is able to choose one from a diverse possibility of forms but especially from her ability to choose the most appropriate form without reference to any existing form in any other artwork. Accordingly, this choice is not random or fortuitous; it originates from the depth of the artist’s logical acuity, wisdom, artistic skill, knowledge of human nature, and sense of value. This kind of choice is baptized by her artistic soul. The possibility of this baptism is the basis of her style as an artist. Do I exaggerate if I say that the style of an artist is an image of her soul? Do we not see, feel, and converse with Melville when we read Moby Dick or Bartleby the Scrivener, with Da Vinci when we contemplate The Last Supper, or with Beethoven when we hear the Fifth Symphony? Implied in this view of creativity is the claim that the power of creativity does not fall from heaven nor come from an external source, but originates from the mind of the artist as a cultural being.

What Does the Artist Create? No conception of creativity in art is adequate if it does not provide a satisfactory account of the primary content of the creative act: What does the artist reflect on? What does she create? Does she create pleasant pictures, movies, sculptures, dances, or stories? Does she create works that are interesting politically, historically, religiously, or culturally? In the preceding section, I argued that the artwork originates from an artistic vision; that the centerpiece of this vision is an idea; that the idea may be a question, a problem, or a dimension of human meaning; and that the artist articulates this idea in a symbolic form of expression. This form can be musical, pictorial, dynamic, literary, photographic, cinematic, or sculptural. “I understand your line of reasoning,” a critic would now ask, “but, first, what is the subject, or datum, of the intuitive act? How does the artwork originate from this datum? Second, you emphasized that it is cognitive in nature. How can an undifferentiated, pre-reflective intuition be cognitive? Can we say it is cognitive if it is undifferentiated, i.e., unformed?” These are reasonable questions. I shall begin with the first question and then move to the second.

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Let me at once state that the datum of artistic reflection is human meaning. The realm of meaning is the realm of human values. Meaning is realized value. Value exists as an ideal. It comes to life when an individual undergoes a value experience—a moral, religious, political, metaphysical, personal, philosophical, romantic, or physical experience. When I speak of value in this context, I mean importance. Importance is a generic concept. It cannot be defined, but defines the things we deem important. Broadly speaking, important refers to what matters to us as human beings socially and individually. We usually place value or worth on things, ideas, aims, laws, policies, projects, and desires that are essential to us as human beings at the social and individual levels. Accordingly, a life conducted according to human values is a meaningful life. We may classify values into three main categories: truth, beauty, and goodness. Each one of these values gives rise to a large number of derivative values. For example, truth gives rise to values such as wisdom, erudition, or prudence; beauty gives rise to values such as elegance, grandeur, grace, or loveliness; and goodness gives rise to values such as justice, friendship, love, or courage. Ontologically speaking, values exist as ideals; as such, they are schemas, plans for action. Each value defines the essential nature of a type of action. For example, we may interpret the essential nature of justice in terms of equality and equality in terms of fairness, but the translation of fairness into a particular judgment or action depends on an evaluation of the facts that make up the structure of the situation: we evaluate the facts in terms of our conception of justice. We live in two realms: the realm of nature and the realm of human values. As bodies, we live in nature and according to its laws, but as human beings we live in the realm of human values and according to the demands they entail. This realm is the foundation of a meaningful life. Accordingly, a life is meaningful inasmuch as it is a realization of the values that reflect the basic needs of human nature. We may enjoy eating, resting, drinking, having sex, and walking; in short, we may enjoy the physical activities we perform in the course of daily living, but the activities that give us the satisfaction we seek as human beings, the kind of satisfaction that makes us happy or fulfilled as human individuals, is derived from acting, or living, according to human values. Do we not feel truly satisfied when we love and

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are loved, when we are treated justly, or when we know we have true friends? Do we not feel truly satisfied when we undergo aesthetic experiences or live in a beautiful environment? Do we not feel at home with ourselves when we grow in knowledge or in understanding nature, ourselves, and the history of human civilization? Do we not feel deeply satisfied when we know that we are free and can act freely? Is a life of slavery, ignorance, or loneliness not a miserable life? We may enjoy good food, good health, good sex, and a strong body—are these enough? I do not mean to imply that these are not significant or human values; they are. I tend to think they are necessary conditions for human happiness or a human way of life. We do not exist in order to vegetate; we vegetate in order to exist as human beings. Human nature does not exist as a separate nature; it is inherent in the very structure of our physical being. Human survival and happiness are as essential as our physical survival. It is, I think, appropriate to say that the essential fabric of human life consists of realized, or lived, human values. The datum of the creative act is the kind of values that make a life worth living. The assertion that the dimension of meaning is the datum of artistic reflection was generally recognized by artists and philosophers at the turn of the last century, when it became clear that knowledge of the facts of nature was the task of the scientist and knowledge of the meaning of these facts was the task of the philosopher and the artist. By facts of nature, I here understand material facts such rocks, mountains, rivers, lions, cows, bugs, apple trees, flowers, and potatoes, and by meaning I understand the realm of realized values—truth, good, and beauty and their derivatives. While the value of truth refers to our knowledge of all the facts that comprise the scheme of mature and human experience, the value of beauty and goodness refer to our knowledge of people qua human beings and the kinds of experiences they undergo. Unlike the facts of nature, humanity is not given to us as a ready-made reality. We are not born as fully developed human individuals, but as potentialities to become fully developed individuals. As I have just indicated, humanity exists as a potentiality in our physical nature. Its realization takes place in the process of social living in the different institutions of society: family, school, workplace, religion, neighborhood, books, law, and personal experiences. Its kind and depth depend on the

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extent to which one grows intellectual, morally, aesthetically, religiously, socially, politically, and personally. Implied in this view is that humanity is an achievement. The substance of this kind of achievement is attainment of value: the more we grow in this kind of achievement, the more we become the human individuals we can be. This statement calls for the following explanation. If human nature is not given as a ready-made reality, if it inheres in the physical constitution of human beings as a potentiality, what kind of reality is it prior to and after its realization? As a potentiality inherent in the physical constitution of the human being, it exists as basic urges. An urge signifies lack of something we do not have but need; it aims at what it lacks. For example, hunger signifies a lack; it aims at what it lacks, and what it lacks is food; therefore, it aims at food. Viewed collectively, the basic human urges constitute the fabric of human nature as a potentiality. Moreover, a need signifies lack; I need what I do not have. I need X because I do not have it. The lack may be essential or secondary. The more essential it is, the stronger is the urge it creates. The needs that make up the fabric of human nature are basic, essential. What are these needs? They are, I think, familiar to ordinary people, and to philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists. I have mentioned them informally in the preceding pages, but I can now sum them as biological, intellectual, emotional, religious, social, aesthetic, political, and individual needs. Some philosophers, like Aristotle, characterized them as natural drives in the sense that they exist as a part of our nature as human beings. What matters in the present context is that they constitute the essential structure of our humanity qua potentiality and their realization constitutes the human dimension of the individual. The point that merits special emphasis here is that these needs are the fountain and basis of human values. We prize them mainly because they produce deep-seated satisfaction in us when we meet them. Every one of these needs signifies a value and its fulfillment is deemed valuable. A value functions as a standard for the evaluation of value situations. This standard embodies the worthwhileness of the fulfillment of these basic needs. For example, we desire or need justice in our personal and social lives. Fine! But how? As a standard or ideal, the value of justice states the conditions

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for the appropriate realization of justice in the life of the individual or society. These conditions define the general concept of justice as an ideal. This applies to the basic values that arise from or are responses to the needs that define human values. Accordingly, the realm of meaning is as vast, as complex, as rich as the vastness, complexity, and richness of human life. But if this realm is the datum of the vision of the artist during the creative act, it should follow that the aim of the artist is not merely to create a pleasant experience, to express a certain type of popular or faddish beauty, to express a certain feeling, or to promote a certain religious, philosophical, political, or cultural ideology, but to communicate her understanding or vision of one or more dimensions of human meaning, or values, which always appear in the form of a question, a problem, a mystery, or a phenomenon that matters to us as human beings. I tend to think the task of the artist is no less serious than the task of the philosopher or the scientist. Is the exploration of the nature of matter more important than the exploration of the values whose attainment makes human life worth living? Should we not seek knowledge of matter in order to expand our understanding of these values? We are not created to know, although knowledge is essential to our happiness; we know in order to live—to live better, always better. I shall now respond to the critic’s questions. Let us first grant, at least for the sake of discussion, that meaning is the datum of reflection in the creative act. Second, let us grant that the aim of this act is communication of the meaning the artist intuits in the fullness of its truth. And third, let us grant that this intuition exists to the reflective imagination of the artist as a cognitive content. In what sense is this intuition cognitive? Put differently, if the intuition is undifferentiated, formless, how can it be cognitive? Again, can it be cognitive if it is not in some way formed? Is form not the basis of any kind of cognition? The thrust of the critic’s question is at the identity of the intuition from which the artwork originates and the conditions under which this origination takes place. I readily acknowledge that this intuition is an undifferentiated, i.e., unformed, content, and that although it is unformed, it is cognitive. However, when I characterize it as affective, I mean it is a mental state; but

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mental states do not exist generally, abstractly, or as such. I do not encounter mere or naked mental states in an act of introspection. They always exist as particular mental states, for example, as identifiable images, moods, emotions, or ideas, at least in principle. But the stuff out of which these states are made is feeling or emotion. The appearance of a mental state in the mind marks the initial response to a kind of internal or external stimulus. The etymological root of affect is affectus (“state of mind or body”), which is derived from afficere (“to influence, attack”). Affect is an original, primary impression produced by the stimulus. This impression arrives in the sphere of consciousness as a mental or bodily state without a recognizable cognitive identity. This is why it exists to the pre-reflective faculty as an intuition and as a response to a particular stimulus. The stuff of this intuition is emotion or feeling. Indeed, as I pointed out earlier, this kind of stuff is the basal, original stuff out of which the different types of mental states originate. But since it is a particular intuition, one that is produced by a particular object or situation, it cannot be abstract or general but should contain the type of identity it is as a potentiality. The effect derives its basic nature from its cause. Accordingly, a particular type of stimulus will produce a similar type of response or impression. This kind of impression, or intuition, is a possibility for articulation in a certain symbolic form of expression. For example, the intuition can be a possibility for a symbolic expression of sadness. As a possibility, it can be expressed musically, pictorially, photographically, or dynamically. How frequently do we hear a person say, “I know it—it is on the tip of my tongue, but I cannot say it”? A philosopher like Croce would say to a person who makes this kind of remark that she does not know it, otherwise, she would have said it. But is Croce right? Let me illustrate this whole point by a brief analysis of Brancusi’s Bird in Space, which is familiar to sculpture lovers and aestheticians. What do we see with our ordinary eyes when we cast a contemplative look at this sculpture? It is titled Bird in Flight, but do we see a bird in flight? First, do we see a bird? If it is not a bird, in what sense is it a bird, and in what sense is it a flying bird? How can it fly if it does not have wings? And yet, in creating this piece, Brancusi created a bird in flight. This question was the subject of intense legal and artistic debate when Bird in Space and

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a number of its variations paid a visit to New York in 1926. The customs official tried to tax these sculptures on the grounds that they were ordinary commercial objects and therefore not art; and they were not art because, according to the official definition of art recognized by the US, an artwork is a representational object. Bird in Space was not a representational object, for it did not look like a bird in flight, therefore it was not art. Brancusi had to pay the prescribed tax. But for him, it was art. So, he sued the US government, won the case, and obliged the government to change its definition of art. In his attempt to defend his view that Bird in Space was a work of art, Brancusi argued that his sculpture was realistic and that the representation of reality was his ambition as an artist. But what is real or reality? Is it the passing show of nature, or rather, the essence that underlies this show and makes it possible? More concretely, what is the essence of reality in all its manifestations? If we abstract the passing show of the things that make up the structure of reality and focus our attention on their essence, on what makes them real, we discover that it is transcendence. The essential thrust of reality, not only of the bird that soars into the heights of space but of every object, is a thrust into transcendence, into the infinite in quest of the Source—the source of everything that exists. Unlike the philosopher, who is limited in her quest for this source by the limits of her conceptual framework of thinking, the artist can, by means of her symbolic form, transcend the limits of the conceptual and the sensuous and soar into the depth of the infinite. She can do this because she can liberate the artwork from representation, from any direct reference to the finite, and lure its essence into an abstract form, one that stands independently of spatial and temporal representations, even of the material medium in which the artwork is anchored. Bird in Space captures the essence of flight, viz., ascension, which the bird more than any other being examples in its flight. The form I see with my imagination is the reality of the bird in flight. The upward thrust it expresses is not an ordinary thrust: it is a seductive, transformative thrust. What is the basis of this thrust? What makes it seductive? First, it originates from a small base that sits on a pedestal. It is connected to the base by a point, which suggests infinity, from which the flight begins. In a way, this point is

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an origin—the origin of the flight. But the bulge of the body of the sculpture, which suggest the body of the bird without representing it, culminates in an equally fine, indefinable point, one that transports your aesthetic vision from the visible to the invisible, from the sensuous to the spiritual, from the finite to the infinite. In the movement of our aesthetic perception from the point of origin to the point of culmination, from the point where we are tethered to the world of space and time to the point where we are liberated from this world, we cannot help but find ourselves in the world of infinity. Alas! Is our inmost desire, indeed craving, for the infinite, a craving for the Source that “holds up” the infinite? Do we not take a peek, a small peek into the infinite that embraces the finite as a final horizon? But, goodness, is this kind of flight into the boundary of the infinite not the essence of the metaphysical or religious experience? In Brancusi’s words, “Throughout my life . . . I sought only one thing—the essence of flight. Flight is happiness of sorts. . .. Flight is an equivalent of happiness because it symbolizes ascension and transcendence and freedom. Ascension denotes a transition to a different mode of existence, the annulation of the system of determinants, a freedom from alter situation. The symbol of flight expresses a fissure which reveals itself in the world of everyday life. A double interaction of this fissure is clear: flight is tantamount to the annulation of weight and it is the otologic polemic of man” (quoted by Kuczynska in Mitias 2020). Perceived by our ordinary eyes, Bird in Space is a simple sculpture, but it is an eloquent, attractive, graceful, and beautifully made sculpture. This very beauty is, I think, an enticing introduction to the world of the meaning that inheres in its form. Brancusi made it with his hands, but it was baptized by his artistic vision, and his artistic vision originated from the depth of his creative imagination. Although beautiful as a sculpture, and although this quality bestows on it an aura of charm, Bird in Space is first and foremost a world of meaning. This world is its raison d’être. The value question that figures prominently in this world is the Ultimate: the Source, the Absolute, God, or the Transcendent. Knowledge of this ultimate is one of the primary needs of human nature. It reflects one of the most important values embodied in this sculpture, which expresses the meaning and dynamism of

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ascension as such, of the desire of the human spirit to transcend the limitations of space and time and reach out for its source. Intuitions have a life of their own. They linger in the mind for a short period and sometimes they develop and change their extent, depth, even essential identity, but regardless of how, or how fast, they change or grow, they exist in the mind as a particular content with a particular identity. They derive their identity from the identity of the stimulus that produces them. Intuitions do not simply pop up in the mind without a cause. Nothing happens without a cause. Let me illustrate this point by a discussion of two examples, the first from ordinary experience and the second from art. First, I wake up in the middle of the night by the sound of a loud bang in my bathroom. My immediate consciousness when this bang wakes me up is one of fear: who or what is the cause of this bang? At first, I do not know its cause, but I have an intuition that it was caused by something or someone in the bathroom. If it is a “who,” what kind of person might he or she be? If it is not a human being, what kind of object caused it? At this initial point I have a general intuition, but this intuition is not merely general or completely cognitive, nor is it without identity, because I experience a feeling of fear. But what kind of fear is it? How can I know its identity unless I know its cause? I may remain in my bed without the slightest budge. But my mind cannot sit still. It entertains several hypotheses about the identity of the cause of the bang. I may or may not reach the conclusion that the sprayer in the shower room fell off of its fastener. But whatever hypothesis I entertain arises as a possibility from my intuition, and regardless of which hypothesis is correct, it arises in my mind because its possibility originates from the kind of being it is. Can I conjure up a viable hypothesis if, though vaguely, my intuition is not cognitive in character? In fact, the whole intuition is a cognitive response to the conditions under which the bang occurred. Neither the intuition nor the hypothesis occurred in a cognitive vacuum. The hypothesis that it might be a robber, the collapse of the sprayer, or something else arises from a cognitive intuition, and the intuition is a response to the bang in the bathroom. Second, suppose a wife loves her husband dearly and always tries her best to express her love to him in a genuine and constructive way, and suppose she conducts her life on the firm belief that her husband loves her genuinely

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and constructively the way she loves him. This wife is a teacher and a novelist. Her love for her husband, and his for her, is a source of inspiration in her teaching and writing. Her identity as a person is determined by this supposed loving relationship. To her shock, one day, and by a freak accident, she discovers that the husband she loves is having an affair with another woman. She is shocked, and the shock is devastating. At first she cannot believe that her husband is having an affair with another woman. Changing a firm, established belief means changing one’s attitude toward oneself and life in general; it means changing one’s character. This is not easy. But gradually it becomes clear to her that her husband has betrayed her as a wife, as a friend, and as a human being. The structure of this short story consists of two basic facts. The first is knowledge of the husband’s betrayal, and the second is the wife’s feeling of devastation. Here the feeling is caused by the knowledge of the husband’s betrayal. How would you feel if your wife, husband, priest, or dearest friend betrayed you? Broadly, I can say the magnitude of the feeling of betrayal is commensurate to the magnitude of the feeling of love we have for the person who commits the crime of betrayal. But, then, the wife in this story is an artist and a teacher. In the midst of her devastation and urgent desire to understand why her husband betrayed her and how she should react to him or even interact with him, she feels haunted by the question, what is betrayal? How should one act in a state of betrayal? This question hovers in the sky of her mind for several weeks. During this period an intuition of what betrayal is emerges in her mind, but this intuition resists conceptualization, not because she is poor in the art of expressing her experiences, feelings, or emotions conceptually, but because the intuition she has is intricate, deep, and rich and involves a multitude of emotions, feelings, and ideas that resist conceptualization. In short, the intuition she has is a human depth. This depth overwhelms her intellectual powers, else how can it be devastating? It is important to remark that her intuition is provoked by a particular situation: betrayal. It is not the result of an idle, accidental, or spontaneous consciousness but a conscious, voluntary, and thoughtful response to a concrete situation of betrayal. The wife is desirous to know its essential identity, which exists in her mind as a potential, as an indeterminate intuition. How can she seduce the essence of her intuition into

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symbolic form? Luckily, this betrayed wife is a novelist. So, she decides to write a novel in which she can express the essence of betrayal in the fullness of its depth and truth. What is the means of this kind of expression? Image— depictive image. The image she creates is a possible, but not the only possible, image. The one she chooses originates from the kind of mind she is as a novelist and as an individual, in other words, from the kind of worldview she is. It originates exactly the way Durer created an image of Melancholia disclosing the knowledge that existed in his mind as a potentiality and stood before his cognitive faculty as a pre-reflective intuition. It should be clear from my discussion of this and the preceding example that the intuition from which the artwork originates is essentially cognitive because it arises from a particular force, stimulus, or situation. The identity of this force, stimulus, or situation, which we in principle know, is the source of the cognitive nature of the intuition. If I am to highlight the propositional structure of my discussion in this chapter, I would say it includes the following propositions: First, the artist has the ability to create her artistic vision, which is the source of the artwork, ex nihilo. Second, the vehicle of the creative act, viz., its form, is a novel, unique reality. Third, the creative vision determines the structure and direction of the creative act. Fourth, the form the artist creates exists as a possibility in the creative vision. Fifth, this form is novel because it is derived from the fact that the creative act is a voluntary and possible reality and that the artist can choose the most appropriate form for communicating the content implicit in her creative vision. Sixth, the datum of the creative act is human meaning. Seventh, this meaning, which inheres in the artwork as a significant form, is amenable for articulation in different symbolic forms of expression. Eighth, this form is cognitive primarily because it reveals a novel content of human meaning.

CHAPTER FIVE CREATIVITY AND THE ARTWORK

Introduction After crossing a river, the Roman goddess Cura, Care or Love, was playing with lump of clayish mud and then thoughtfully fashioned a mold. While Cura was reflecting on what she had created, Jove showed up. She asked him to give her creation spiritus—spirit, life, breath. He did. Then she asked whether she could give it her name, and Jove forbade it; instead, he asked her to give the new creation his name. She hesitated. In the meantime, the goddess Tellus, Earth, appeared and said that the mold should receive her name because she gave it its body. While the three gods were debating the question, Saturn arrived at the scene. He was asked to be the judge. He accepted. Since Jove gave the new creation its spirit, he said, he could have it back when the new creation dies; since Tellus gave its body, she could have it back at the moment of its death; since Cura fashioned it, she could possess it during its lifetime; and since there was a debate about its name, the new creation should be called homo, man, because it was made of humus. The artist is a magician—a god, indeed a Jove! She is the kind of being who can suffuse her material medium with human spiritus the way Jove suffused the mold Cura fashioned out of clay with the divine spiritus. Who can perform this kind of magical act but a god like Jove? Who can create something out of nothing? By what supernatural power can this type of creation happen? Whether in the realm of nature or the realm of humanity, this type of creation defies ordinary logic because it is difficult, and I think impossible, for spirit, whose essence is quite different from the essence of matter, to interact, much less unite, with matter and form a new being, one that did not exist prior to this unity. We can conceive of a material object

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interacting with another material object, for example, salt and water, or an idea interacting with another idea, for example, the idea of the past interacting with the idea of the future, creating the idea of the present. However, we cannot logically conceive of an idea interacting with a material object. Can my faith in a personal God, really not metaphorically, move a mountain, even a dust particle? And yet, just as Jove, the chief Roman deity, was able to suffuse a material object with spiritus, with life, thereby transforming it into a living, rational reality, the artist can imbue her material medium with life and a rational spirit, thereby transforming it into a living world of human meaning. Let me elaborate this claim in some detail, not only because it sheds another ray of light on the dynamics of creativity in art, but also because an understanding of the miraculous nature of the creative act is indispensable for an adequate analysis of the artistic dimension of the artwork. I have already elucidated the proposition that possession of aesthetic qualities is the basis of artistic distinction and that the unity of these qualities constitutes what is generally known as significant form. This basis functions as a principle of explanation in aesthetic theory because it explains the source and basis of the artistic identity of the artwork or the artistic as such. This means any discussion of any question concerning art—its nature, value, or role in the life of society or the individual, art education and appreciation, the aesthetic value of an artwork—should be based on our conception of the nature and mode of existence of the artistic dimension of the artwork, on what it means for something to be art. Accordingly, if this dimension inheres in the significant form of the artwork, it should follow that the primary concern of the aesthetician, the historian of art, the art teacher, the art appreciation teacher, the art critic, even the art salesperson, should be the nature and mode of existence of this dimension. But how does the significant form exist in the artwork? By what creative act does this form become a spiritual reality such as a world of meaning? I here assume that “significant form” is not an ordinary form but that it signifies, i.e., expresses or communicates, meaning. The idea of the chair on which I am now sitting corresponds to the idea I have when I perceive it; put differently, I know what it means for this object to be a chair by perceiving it with my eyes and touching it with my hands. In this perception my mind does not move its

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attention to any other object or domain of meaning. The idea I have of a chair correspond to the form of the chair; I perceive the chair in terms of the idea I have in my mind. But when I look at Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters, I do not merely perceive an object that depicts a scene of five people eating their evening meal; I also perceive another content that is not directly given to my faculty of sensuous perception. The intuition of this meaning is implied by the word signify or signification; it points to something beyond what is given to my sense perception. In a way, the representation I see in this painting is simply a symbol that points beyond itself. The symbol does not exist as an end in itself but as a means to something, i.e., a meaning, beyond itself. This is why I characterize this kind of symbol as a vehicle or carrier of a content of meaning that is not contained in the given representation qua form. For example, if someone asks me to move the chair on which I am now sitting to the opposite side of the desk, I understand her without hesitation because I know what it means for this object to be a chair. But can this person ask me to move into the room and drink a cup of coffee with the people represented in this painting? Are they alive? Can they be alive? If they can, how? What kind of life do I experience when they come to life in my aesthetic experience? But aestheticians have not paid critical, analytical, yet urgently needed attention to the relation that exists in the form the artist creates and the meaning it embodies: how does significant form exist in the artwork? In what sense does it signify meaning? For example, in his analysis of the structure of the literary work of art, Ingarden argued that the phonetic or written element of the word is a kind of shell that contains its meaning, that a significant formation of words contains a higher level of meaning, and that a paragraph or a text contains a still higher level of meaning (see Ingarden 1973). I may write chair, and I may speak it. But the question I am spotlighting is, how does this shell contain the meaning it signifies? Aestheticians have correctly assumed that what makes an artifact art is possession of aesthetic qualities, which exist in the work. But they did not examine the conditions under which these qualities come into being, how they exist in the artist’s mind as a cognitive intuition, and how this intuition is articulated into a significant form. The question that glares at us and justifiably demands an answer is, how does the meaning the artist creates

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and articulates in the heat of the creative act exist in the physical form she creates? An answer to this question is inescapable because meaning is not a physical content and does not literally exist in the created form. In numerous articles and books, I have argued that significant form exists as a potentiality in the formal organization of the artwork. This is an interesting, neat, and, I can add, shrewd way of avoiding a comprehensive and adequate explanation of the dynamics of the relation between the meaning and the significant form that embodies it. But how does a content of meaning, which is essentially spiritual in nature, inhere as a potentiality in a sensuous form? It somehow inheres in it. In fact, most aestheticians subscribe to the claim that aesthetic qualities inhere in the given artwork because the work should be the basis of aesthetic enjoyment and evaluation, but it is by no means clear how this potentiality inheres in the form. When I assert that Mona Lisa is enigmatic, I mean that this quality somehow exists in the work, not in the perceiver, and that I experience the enigma in the representation I perceive with my eyes and contemplate with my mind. But what is this “somehow”?

A Concept of Potentiality The etymological root of potentiality is the Latin word potentia (“to be able”). That which is potential has ability or capacity; its defining feature is power. In ordinary language, potentiality means “the state or quality of being potential; a possibility of becoming, developing.” Regardless of whether it is mental or physical, the potential is potent. To be potent is to possess a certain type of power; it is power-full. Accordingly, when we say that X exists as a potentiality in Y, we mean it exists as a power in Y. Essential to this type of power is possibility. A power-full object has the power to do Y, which implies that it does not always do it, but it is possible for it to do it when the right conditions are fulfilled. For example, “James is a courageous person” implies that James has the capacity, or power, to act courageously. Courage exists in him as a potentiality. This implies that, when the right situation arises, he acts courageously because he has the capacity or power to act courageously. All the human qualities, such as moral, religious, or aesthetic qualities, exist in us as capacities. Each one of them exists as a disposition, i.e., as a potentiality.

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A potentiality does not exist in the object as a defined essence or structure but as a possibility of being a certain essence or structure. This implies that the object possessing the potentiality must necessarily be a power-full reality, for otherwise it cannot possess the capacity to do something or become something else when the right conditions are fulfilled. But potentiality can also be defined as latency, which is derived from the Latin latere (“to be hidden”). This term means “to be present but invisibly, or inactively; lying hidden and undeveloped within a person or a thing as a quality or power” (WNCD, 2004). Thus, the defining quality of potentiality as a concept is power. When we say that X exists in Y as a potentiality, we mean that X exists in Y as a power, as a dynamic, a viable possibility, not as a concrete, defined reality or essence, but as a possibility for becoming or developing into such a reality or essence. We also mean that this power is not an abstract quantum of power, for power is always a particular type of power, such as kinetic, electric, or intellectual power, in the sense that it is always manifested as an individual, concrete reality. For example, a boy is a potential man. When he is a boy, he is not a man because the capacity to become a man is latent, i.e., potential, in the constitution of the boy as a kind of being. This type of being is not a potential for becoming a cat or a lion. Broadly speaking, objects are bundles of potentialities. These potentialities are built in, or exist, as possibilities in their structure as kinds of being. This claim is based on the metaphysical assumption, which dates back to Leibniz and Hegel, and more recently to process philosophers, that whether mental or physical, reality is essentially dynamic, i.e., power. Otherwise, how can we be justified in saying that the boy is a potential man or that anything that exits can become other than what it is? Again, is change, which permeates the scheme of nature and humanity, at all possible if we do not assume with Leibniz and Hegel that the essential differentia of reality is power? But, then, what is the mode of existence of a given power in an object? In the case of the capacity of the boy to become a man, we can say this power exists as an element of the essential constitution of the boy’s being: the boy is constituted in such a way that he can become a man. If we provide the boy the essential conditions of his growth to become a man, that is, the essential needs of survival as a human being—physical, social, psychological,

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intellectual, and cultural needs—the boy will develop into a man. For example, he can expand the range of his physical, intellectual, social, and cultural capacities. These capacities are in turn a possibility for development qualitatively and quantitively. His capacities as a man are limitless. But these capacities do not exist in the nature of the human being as discrete or distinguishable elements; they inhere in the dynamic unity of the capacities that make up the structure of human nature as it is manifested in the being of the human individual. This is why we may characterize their mode of existence as intrinsic. The existence of any element of reality is intrinsic inasmuch as it belongs to, or is a part of, the essential structure of the reality in which it exists. The mode of existence of the boy’s potentiality to become a man is only an instance of the mode of existence of the potentialities of the objects that make up the scheme of nature. For example, the trunk of a tree is a potentiality for becoming beams, sculptures, sticks, fire, or chairs, and a slab of marble is a potentiality for becoming a column, statue, building block, or weapon. No matter its kind, every object that exists as a part of nature is a composite of potentialities for becoming or developing in diverse ways. These potentialities inhere as qualities in the essential structure of the given object. A boy cannot become a man if the potentiality to become a man does not inhere in his essence as a boy. The point that merits special emphasis is that a potentiality does not exist in the object as an accidental or secondary quality but as a primary quality. It exists as an element of the organic unity that makes up the structure of the object. The boy as a whole, not his arm, leg, stomach, or ear, is a potentiality for becoming a man. “I understand what you mean when you say the mode of existence of potentiality in natural objects is intrinsic to the essential structure of the object. But in what sense does potentiality exist in a work of art?” my critic would now ask. “As an artifact, the artwork is a physical object like any natural object. Its artistic dimension does not inhere in it the way potentiality inheres in natural objects. Otherwise, it would not be a creation by a human being. The artist does not create her medium; she creates a content of meaning, as you argued earlier, and yet, what she creates exists as a potentiality in the formal organization of the medium she uses as a means of communication. Let me ask the way you did earlier: How can a spiritual

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content such as a human world of meaning exist as a potentiality in a sensuous form? You seem to imply that it inheres in the way it is formed: a form is significant by virtue of the way it is formed or the way it signifies meaning. But how do we know that it signifies, or what do we mean by way in this context? How can we move from perceiving Mona Lisa as the representation of a woman to the world of meaning potential in it by contemplating the way Da Vinci created this painting? When contemplating it, why do most people fail to see or experience a world of meaning in it, or why does this world remain latent or hidden from them? Is the relation between the representation and the world it hides necessary, in the sense that the particular world potential in it is causal? If it is not, how can we say the artist suffuses her sensuous form with a world or a slice of meaning? Is the artist a real Jove?” The artist is a Jove, but not a supernatural human being. She is a human Jove, but nevertheless a Jove. Let me defend this proposition. I shall begin by answering my critic’s question with a general remark. The focus of the critic’s question is the type of reality, viz., human meaning, the artist intuits and fashions into a type of symbolic form because this form is indispensable to the activity of expression or communication. I can communicate a content of meaning conceptually, but I cannot communicate the datum of intuition that gives rise to the content. The intuition is the source and basis of symbolic expression, regardless of its kind. I here make a distinction between intuition as the datum the artist reflects on, which contains the meaning she seeks to comprehend, and the activity of intuiting this datum. This datum is intuitive in character because it exists to the mind as an indeterminate content, while the activity of articulating it into a symbolic form is intuitive in character because it is an unmediated activity, an act of transforming an indeterminate content of meaning into a determinate or articulated symbolic form. The faculty of mind that undertakes this kind of transformation is the faculty of reflection. This faculty is contemplative and constructive by nature; it is the power by which the mind forms ideas and images. Unlike the philosopher or scientist, who articulates a content of meaning conceptually, the artist communicates it imagistically—by creating images that enable us to see, feel, and understand a slice of human meaning in the medium of a particular image: a literary

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image, for example, is the luminous presence of a content of meaning. I do not think an image, although thinking may be an element in the act of comprehending it; I see it with the eyes of my mind. What I comprehend does not exist for me as another, although it is an object of my comprehending mind, because, as I shall explain in the following chapter, the image is present to me by a creative act of my mind: I see and intuit it directly without the mediation of any ideas, feelings, emotions, or images. In science and philosophy, concept is the means of communicating meaning; in art, this means is image. It is important to point out that the texture of image is, like all affective states, emotive in nature. This is why we do not see only the meaning in the fullness of its truth but also feel it, and this is why we comprehend it concretely in the fullness of its being. The image I see, feel, and understand does not have an interior and an exterior; on the contrary, its interior and exterior are one and the same reality. I comprehend it as a luminous whole. But there are types of images appropriate to the different types of artistic expression, e.g., musical, pictorial, dynamic, or theatrical expression. As a carrier of meaning, an image derives its being from the kind of means by which the meaning is intuited and formed: sound, words, movement, action, or space. As a medium of communicating meaning, each one of these types of images is a type of language in the way science or philosophy is a type of language. Now, how does the artist create a particular type of image, for example, a sad image? The image can be poetic, musical, or pictorial. In each one of these possibilities, the image exists to my mind as a living flare of sadness. How can this sadness appear in poetic, musical, and pictorial images? How can the same content of meaning be communicated by means of three different languages, so to say? Here I feel the sadness in the image and the image in the sadness I feel. The sadness does not merely exist in the image because it unfolds with the unfolding of the feeling of sadness in my experience of the artwork, which is the image. Put differently, I do not see or feel the presence of an image that contains sadness, as if the image is a receptacle that contains something. I feel the two in one presence. This presence exists in the medium of a poem, a piece of music, and in a painting. How does the same kind of meaning-content exist in these types of mediums? The answer to this question lies in an examination of Plato’s

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concept of eidos: form, shape, what is seen, of course with the eye of the mind. And, what is seen is an essence in the fullness of its being. In Plato’s conception of reality, eidos refers to that which the mind apprehends, or intuits, when it reflects on the nature of a type of reality. It intuits this essence, which appears as a particular form to the mind. I say “intuit” because this act is not mediated by any idea or feeling but exists in its wholeness as a particular essence. The idea I would like to spotlight in this context is form, shape, or figure. Unlike the philosopher who thinks conceptually, the artist thinks eidetically, that is, in terms of figure, shape, form—in short, in terms of pure image or pure essence, the kind of noetic reality that is not yet articulated into a kind of concrete form. This kind of thinking is not, and cannot be, abstract; it is always particular, concrete. This means the medium of artistic thinking is pure image, not merely the image of this or that particular physical or conceptual object, but the essential form of a type of reality. Accordingly, eidetic thinking is noetic thinking; it is amenable to articulation in different concrete forms. For example, in her attempt to express a feeling of sadness, the artist begins at the pre-reflective level of intuition—in this context, of sadness. At this level the sadness exists as a potentiality for realization, or formation, in a possible form; it is neither clear nor definite, and it is not any particular form in any kind of medium. But how does it become clear and definite, or how may this potentiality be articulated in a certain form, of course in a certain material medium? The artist does not reflect on the possibility of forming it conceptually, but eidetically. That is, she does not engage in an activity of analysis, explanation, logical reasoning, verification, or demonstration. No, she thinks eidetically, i.e., in terms of a particular medium—acoustically, dynamically, pictorially, or spatially. In this type of reflection, she considers the most appropriate poetic, pictorial, musical, or architectural form one that captures her feeling or intuition eidetically. This type of reflection takes place in terms of sounds, lines and colors, space, or figures of speech. Her creative vision moves between two poles: the first is the content of meaning, which is indeterminate and which is in need of articulation into an expressive form, and the second is the possibility of a form that has not yet met her aesthetic approval. The attempt of the artist to create the conditions for creating the most appropriate expression of the

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content of meaning in that creative posture is the supreme challenge of the creative act, and it is such a challenge because the movement between these two poles of the creative act is dialogical in character: how can the artist transition into a vision of a determinate intuition that engages her imagination at that moment, on the one hand, and create the kind of form that welcomes the indeterminate content of meaning into a particular form, on the other? The relation between these two poles is dialogical in the sense that the meaning is willing (capable of articulation) to be articulated in that form and the artist is willing to create the kind of form that welcomes that content of meaning as it is—in its depth, complexity, and exuberance. What is at issue here is the extent to which the artist’s imagination can exercise the privilege of creating a form ex nihilo, one that can accommodate the chosen particular content of meaning. It is important to recognize that this kind of dialogue is not possible if we do not assume that both the meaning and form are dynamic modes of being and that the essence that enters into an engagement with the form is a kind of human depth, mainly because by its very nature meaning is an infinite possibility of realization in different ways and forms. “But this characterization of the creative act,” my critic would now point out, “is at best metaphorical and tends to evade a direct reference to my question: How can the content of meaning, which is spiritual in nature, engage in a dialogue with a material medium such as sound, rock, or paint? Or, how does the artist lure meaning to inhabit a sensuous form? Again, does the Jovian mind of the artist enable this kind of dialogue to take place?” It can, and it does. First, whether it is human or natural, every object speaks, and the language it speaks is its form, not merely its shape or secondary qualities, but, as Aristotle argued long ago, its form as a particular essence. An object declares its essential identity by its form. We usually distinguish, or recognize, the identity of objects by distinguishing their form—how else can we identify the lion, the mountain, the apple tree, the rock, or the sea? We may be mistaken in identifying the identity of a certain object, but we usually change our judgment the moment we discover the properties that constitute the essence of its form. Do we not change our judgment of a supposedly honest person the moment we discover that deception is an essential quality of his character? Do we not change our judgment of a vine

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that looks like a grapevine when we discover that its fruits are poisonous berries? But regardless of whether we are correct or incorrect in our judgment, we identify an object on the basis of its form. I would not be mistaken in saying that natural objects speak and that their form is the means of their speech. But the “language” the artist creates when she creates “art objects” is not the language of natural forms, although they exist as a potentiality in the medium of natural forms. The natural form in which the artwork inheres is what I called in the preceding three chapters “significant form.” The artist changes the form of its natural medium, which exists in nature as a type of form, into a significant form. The way of changing it is what trans-forms it into a significant form. In this activity of transformation, the artist qua Jove suffuses the transformed medium with significance, i.e., meaning. Here my critic would wonder: “Does this human Jove transfer a content of meaning from her mind into the transformed medium? You have stated more than once that it exists as a potentiality in the sensuous medium, which undergoes a process of transformation in the hands of the artist. It is the task of the aesthetician to explain the logical and ontological structure of this process.” Form is the universal language by which the various types of objects speak. The form of natural objects is practically given; it exhibits the essential qualities of the object. I recognize the essence, i.e., identity, of the object by reading the qualities it exhibits. I intuit the essence in these qualities, and I intuit its form when I experience the totality of its qualities. I see the apple in its form—e.g., when I feel it, bite it, taste it, chew it, eat it, and so forth. But unlike natural objects, whose essential structure is relatively stable because they endure in time, the type of form the artist creates is not directly given, and it is not given in the fullness of its being. It is the kind of form we do not encounter in the natural world. We encounter certain rivers, mountains, trees, cows, stars, rocks, and daffodils, but we do not encounter the objects we see in a museum or hear in concert halls, nor do we encounter buildings, bridges, or roads the way we find trees or rivers. Natural objects exist as necessary elements of the natural process; artworks exist as the result of voluntary activity. The first reflects the purpose, if there is one, of the cosmic process, while the second reflects the purpose of the artist, which in turn reflects the essential needs of human nature. The meaning of the

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natural object is in the object; the meaning of the artwork transcends the given artwork as a given object. The work exists for the sake of the art content that transcends it. Although sensuous, or mental as in literature, the form the artist creates speaks the way the natural object speaks; but unlike the natural object, whose language reflects its essential structure, the form of the artist speaks a much more complex, refined, and exuberant language. The object of this language is the whole realm of meaning implied in the wide spectrum of human values, each one of which is a possibility of infinite realizations. It would be a grave mistake to view or treat artistic form the way we view or treat the form of natural objects. When I look at the physical object, I remain within its sensuous domain, but when I look at the artwork, of course aesthetically, I transcend its sensuous domain only because its real, artistic form, the form the artist creates, lies hidden, latent in its sensuous form. Its uniqueness or type of form is the door that leads to the domain of this form. I say “domain” because it is a world of meaning. It is the nature of the signification of artistic form to transcend the given sensuous form in which it inheres because, unlike the sphere of being of the physical object, the sensuous form the artist creates is an integral part of the natural environment. It derives its being from the artist’s reflection on a dimension of the realm of human meaning. By its very essence, this meaning exists as a possibility of infinite realization. Consider for a moment the domain of a value such as beauty. An investigative look at the ocean of beauty in nature, art, and human life will, I think, readily show that beauty is an infinite possibility of realization. The same applies to the values of truth and goodness. Every value we seek and enjoy as human beings is a depth. The artist endeavors to capture a dimension of this depth and present it in her work as a depth. In this attempt she does not reduce it to a particular finite form, the way natural objects are given as finite forms, but on the contrary she tries to embody this depth qua depth in the sensuous form she creates. This depth is itself a possibility of infinite realizations. This is mainly why this kind of form is called “significant.” Who does not move into such depth when she reads Wuthering Heights, hears Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, reads Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or contemplates Da Vinci’s Last Supper?

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The artist does not copy nature; she creates a nature. The nature she creates is a human depth, a world of meaning, and the world she creates is different from anything we encounter in the universe. Her ability to create such a world is, in my opinion, a truly Jovian act. The elements of her creation are derived from her reflection on nature and human nature inasmuch as they are revealed in the vast world of human civilization, but she does not copy or represent anything in nature or human life. Her creation is an image of her soul—the soul that represents the essential needs and aspirations of human nature as she understands them. But if the artist creates a world, no matter the magnitude of its depth, can we treat artistic form the way we treat the form of natural objects? No. However, if we cannot, then we should ask as my critic did, how does the world the artist creates exist in the sensuous form she creates? I characterized the mode of existence of this creation in the preceding chapters as a potentiality inherent in the sensuous form. In the case of the natural object, my critic would argue, the form of the object is in the object and exists in it as a ready-made reality. But in the case of the artwork, the given form of the work signifies a reality beyond itself, and it is not clear how this signification inheres in the work or how it points to the reality because the signification is not given as a ready-made reality. Broadly speaking, the signification inherent as a potentiality in the artwork exists in the work the way the form of natural objects exists in the objects because the work is its ontic locus and because the world of human meaning it embodies is its world. However, the world of the natural is confined to the form of the given object as it is given to our senses, but the world of the artwork both includes and transcends the form of the given work. When I approach Mona Lisa in an attempt to perceive it aesthetically, I contemplate the representation painted on the canvas. I do not leave it; I remain within the depth my eyes penetrate. The more I advance in my aesthetic experience, the deeper I delve into its aesthetic world. The point that merits special focus here is that the representation, which exists to my eyes as a sensuous content, undergoes a process of transformation of ontic identity. It ceases to be a sensuous representation and gradually becomes a spiritual world of meaning. When I grasp the given form, penetrate it, and begin to rise to the aesthetic meaning implicit in it, my imagination transforms, by a Jovian

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wand, the sensuous into a spiritual world of meaning primarily because the representation is the kind of form that has the power to lure the human imagination into that kind of world. Do I leave the novel the author composed when I penetrate its human world? Do I leave the world Da Vinci created when he painted Mona Lisa? Do I leave Valse Triste when I become one with the world of sadness that comes to life in my experience? It is a mistake to think a spiritual content qua metaphysical essence inheres in a sensuous form, in the sense of ontically existing in it. The world of meaning that opens up in my experience, as I shall explain in the following chapter, comes to life in my experience by a creative act of the imagination. When I say a human world inheres in a significant form as a potentiality, I mean it is the kind of form that has the power to reveal a depth of meaning that transcends the given sensuous form. The Jovian vision of the artist can create a form that embodies a human depth. The more perceptive, creative, and deep the vision of the artist, the more it can create a form that embraces a greater depth of meaning. The datum of inquiry of the physicist is matter; accordingly, the sphere of meaning she aims at is restricted to her knowledge of matter. Similarly, the datum of inquiry the philosopher aims at is the realm of meaning. Although this realm, unlike the realm of nature, is infinite in its being, the philosopher is limited in her intuition and expression of a dimension of meaning by the expressive power of the concept. But the artist is not, because her ability to create significant form is limitless! We should always remember that every type of human expression or communication is symbolic in character. For example, in science, philosophy, or ordinary language, the word, which is the building block of language, i.e., sentence, paragraph, and text, is symbolic in nature. Whether written or spoken, the word or the sentence is a vehicle of meaning. Practically, every word is a unit of meaning; consequently, sentences or texts are complexes of meaning. But in general, a sentence is the primary vehicle of meaning. The genius of the artist lies in the fact that she is versatile in two types of language: form and culture. First, when I speak of a language of form, I mean the kind of form that is a type of language. For example, pictorial form is an expressive, communicative

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form. The question that provokes the painter’s imagination in the heat of the creative moment is, how can I create a form that captures the essence of this or that dimension, question, or aspect of human meaning in the most appropriate or expressive form? Let us ask five artists to capture the mystery, irony, and tragedy that underlie human existence. Let us suppose that these five artists are highly creative; let us also suppose that they accept our challenge and that when they complete their project, we exhibit their work in the Modern Museum of Art in New York—would we see the same artistic form in these five paintings? No. Why? There is no reason to focus our attention merely on their cultural, intellectual, social, or academic endowments or on the type of life they have led, or especially on their creative genius—on their skill in creating significant forms and their ability to comprehend the infinite possibilities of the realm of meaning. Not only would the forms they create be different, but, if pressed, every one of them would, I think, create a multiplicity of forms that can reveal the mystery, irony, and tragedy of human existence. This is due to the fact that the possibility of formation is infinite. Do we not encounter almost the same values, questions, problems, and interests in all the arts? Do the same value themes not continually recur, not only in the different arts but frequently in the art of a single artist? The question is not how a spiritual content may suffuse a sensuous form, but how expressive the form the artist creates is, that is, how versatile it is. Ordinary, even philosophical or scientific, language is given because it is constructed according to syntactical rules, conventions, and practices. The meaning the concept denotes is to a large extent stable, but artistic language is to a large extent neither given nor stable. It is created and it always holds a possibility for further development and realization. We may predict natural and human events with some success, but we cannot predict the outcome of the creative act. Even the artist cannot predict—not precisely—the outcome of her creative act. This is the privilege, the mystery, and the glory of the creative act.

The Artistic Dimension as a World of Meaning With some hesitation, and with a fluttering blink in her eyes, my critic would now wonder about the nature of the aesthetic artistic dimension or the art-

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making factor, in short, the significant form whose presence in the work makes it art: what type of reality is this form? This is an ontological question, for it not only spotlights what the artist creates but also what kind of reality this form is. Although I considered it briefly in the preceding chapter, a detailed discussion of this point is crucial for an adequate understanding of the dynamics of art appreciation, art education, art history, and art criticism. As a concept, “world” refers to a whole composed of parts. The whole can be a spatial-temporal extension, a psychological space, or a spiritual dimension, and the parts can be loosely or closely related, simple or complex, while the whole can be small or big, enormous or humble in its richness or value. For example, we speak of a world of ideas, music, painting, science, philosophy, biology, civilization, culture, agriculture, technology, or sculpture; we speak of an ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary world; we speak of the world of humanity, living organisms, and matter; and we speak of worldviews. The concept of world is the concept of a definable dimension, of a slice of reality regardless of whether it is human, natural, or divine in nature. Sometimes the concept is used metaphorically, mainly to emphasize multiplicity, diversity, or a distinctive type of human activity or achievement, and sometimes it is used ontologically, mainly to emphasize a realm of being. In the present discussion, I use world as a dimension of being and, more concretely, as a dimension of human being—the being of the human as such. This dimension is populated by human beings—by human activities, achievements, values, ideas, beliefs, aspirations, desires, needs, goals, or projects. It is, as Shakespeare characterized it, a kind of stage on which people act or perform certain roles for a while and then leave it. We may also characterize it as a realm in which everything that happens matters to human beings. Human values are its foundation and as ideals they are its aspiration. As bodies, human beings live in the realm of nature, but as human beings, they live in the realm of values. I can add that meeting their physical needs is a necessary condition for leading a human way of life. Human fulfillment is their destiny. Whether at the individual or social level, the ultimate basis of what we do or seek, how we feel or think, and how we pursue our happiness is human values. The good, the true, and the beautiful are the substance of

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human living. Is the fundamental impulse in human nature not an impulse to life, not only biological but also human life? Is the quest for justice, freedom, love, friendship, beauty, and knowledge not the source and justification for the establishment of the institutions that make up the basic structure of social and political life? What is the preeminent concern of people in their practical life but a concern for happiness, and what is the basis of happiness but love, justice, prosperity, friendship, knowledge, and the enjoyment of the beautiful in art, nature, and human beings? What is the purpose of going schools but to fulfill the desire to know ourselves, nature, and the author of the universe? What is the purpose of seeking a democratic system of government but to live under the conditions of peace, justice, and human progress? There is no need for me to lengthen this list of questions, but suffice it to say that the primary questions that dominate our concerns are the following: How should we live? How should we love? How should we die? Most of the time, we do not confront them directly. Nonetheless, they exist in our minds as tendencies, as moving forces, and sometimes as urgencies. But how can we answer them without seriously considering the values that originate as basic needs of human nature? The point of spotlighting this question is not merely how to live, love, and die, but how to live, love, and die as human beings: what does it mean to live, to love, and to die as a human being? Unlike everything else that exists on the face of this planet, people are not given to the world as ready-made human beings but as potentialities to become human beings. When I said a moment ago that human fulfillment is our destiny, I meant that the realization of the capacities that make us mature human beings should be our destiny. But how? We can say, as I emphasized more than once, that living according to the values of goodness, truth, and beauty is the royal road to human fulfillment; but again, how? A reflective glance at the way human beings have been living ever since the dawn of human civilization will show that there is no clear or final way to become fulfilled human beings. Would it be an exaggeration to say that how to be human is the central question people face in the course of their daily living? We may justifiably say that human fulfillment or happiness does not wait for us at a certain juncture of our lives and that it is not a gift or a benefaction. On the contrary, its possibility is

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immanent in the very process of daily human living, of meeting the basic needs that reflect the essential demands of our humanity, viz., goodness, truth, and beauty. But how can we realize this possibility in an indifferent nature and a frequently merciless, brutal society, one that does not seem to place human fulfillment at the top, but often at the bottom, of its priorities? This last question may reflect a pessimistic bent of mind, but it may also reflect a realistic bent of mind. I do not deny that the history of human civilization, albeit slow and sometimes tortuous, is an advance toward a higher level of being; but regardless of whether it is pessimistic or realistic, this has been, and still is, the historical condition of civilization. The three questions I raised in the preceding paragraphs capture the centrality of the basic values that motivate people in pursuing their ends. Consider the first question for a moment: how should I live? We can phrase this question differently: what kind of human individual should I be? Can I answer this question if I do not know what it means for someone to be human? I do not live alone on an island. I live in the different institutions of society: family, law, school, workplace, religion, neighborhood, and the different organizations that augment social life. Under what moral, political, social, personal, religious, and professional conditions can I flourish in these institutions and organizations as a human individual? I can ignore this question, I can drift in the social life of my culture, or I can thrive as a parasite on the favor of the established institutions or the fruits of other citizens, but then, can I be a genuine human being? Will my life be worth living? Will I be fulfilling my destiny as a human being? Was Shakespeare naive when he enabled Hamlet to say the real question is whether to be or not to be? But again, how can I live, or be, as a human individual if my life is not founded in the human values I discussed repeatedly in the preceding pages? How can every one of the major actions I perform be a living monument to human values such as justice, love, friendship, courage, or appreciation of beauty? How can my action be a moment in human growth and development? Consider now the second question: how should I love? At first look, this may seem a simple, innocent, clear, or easy question, but a critical examination of the phenomenon of love in theory and practice, in the past and the present,

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and in the different cultures of the world will, I think, show that it is one of the most difficult challenges people face in the different contexts of their lives. And yet the impulse of love, which was recognized by the sages of the ancient, medieval, and modern periods and in the East and West, is one of the strongest impulses of human nature. We may speak of human, romantic, family, social, or religious love, and we may distinguish some of its differentiae, e.g., care, union, giving, sharing, and respect. We may theorize about its nature and the conditions under which it can or may be achieved, as philosophers and now psychologists have being doing since the days of Plato and Aristotle, but it remains hard to understand and harder still to achieve in the homes, alleys, ships, temples, and gardens of human life. Regardless of how people respond to this human need, since it is a basic impulse that demands satisfaction, whether they can or cannot achieve it to at least some extent, it remains a challenge. Focus your attention on friendship as a relation of human love. People feel that it is an essential need and they desire it with all their hearts; but what kind of love constitutes this relation? People are willing to open their minds and hearts to a possible true friend, but if we take the authority of philosophers such as Socrates and Aristotle and if we listen to the voice of experience on this question, we hear one general answer: true friendship is rare. Pleasure and fair-weather friendships are common, but they are not founded in human love. They are founded in personal advantage. But why is true friendship rare, even frequently between family members and even among religious, professional, and academic communities? We encounter the same difficulty in trying to understand and practice the other types of love. Now, let us consider the third question: how should I die? Unlike the first two questions, this question is more perplexing, more serious, and more confounding than all the serious questions of human life. First, life is good; it is precious, more precious than any human possession. Second, we are not the authors of our lives; we discover that we exist when we begin to mature rationally. Third, we also discover that we exist and we shall leave the world without our knowledge or consent: we come into the world without our will and we leave it without our will. The irony of our existence lies in the fact that we are not designed to live for a long time! But, then, why were we created, that is, why were we chosen to exist? Were we chosen? Did we

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show up on the stage of life by accident? If we were chosen to participate in the rite of human living, why? Why us? Is the power that created us a prankster? Why would this power make us taste the beauty and goodness of human living and then dismiss us from this banquet the moment we learn how to enjoy and appreciate it? Again, if a power invited us to this banquet, why does it not reveal itself to us? I am willing to give away all my possessions, all my achievements, and all my glories, if I have any, and I am willing to continue the process of growth and development until the end of time, if it has an end. But I am not willing, and I cannot surrender myself or my life to the world of oblivion. But what baffles my mind is the tendency of most people to cover up the fact of death and to live as if they will not die. Although this cover began to be lifted by some philosophers and artists during the past century, it is still viewed as a kind of taboo—at least as an undesirable, unpleasant, or in some way disagreeable subject. What is even more baffling is that people know, especially when they grow older, that they will die, but refrain from trying to understand it or even prepare themselves for it. They write wills and frequently make sure all their debts are paid, mainly to avoid shaming or scandalous talk, but they approach this event with fear and trepidation, solemn tears during the night, or, in moments of solitude, regret or misery. What if most of the people who tend cover up the facticity of death, not to mention its importance, discover that this fact is not as frightful, as devastating, as earth-shaking as it is presented to be by society in general? What if they discover that it is a part of the cosmic process? And what if they understand that their death as human beings is the real death, and that if they understood the difference between physical and human death, they would rise to the call of their humanity and lead a life worth living so that the knowledge of their imminent death would not be as bad as the way the invisible, inaudible “they” portray it? I do not wish to belabor the importance of the three questions I have just presented. Although briefly, I raised them only to draw attention to their essential relevance to an adequate analysis of the creative act in art. It should be clear that this subject matter is the whole realm of human values, regardless of whether the work envisioned by the artist is small, big, or

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monumental. It is not, as some people tend to think, personal feeling, emotion, fancy, or experience that happens to create an itch in her imagination and propel her to release this this feeling, emotion, or experience by creating an artwork, nor is it a response to a general creative urge, for such an urge does not exist. The urge that underlies the creative act of the artist is the urge of human love, if by “love” we mean caring, giving, sharing, and promoting the good of the human other. The artist is a human lover par excellence. What is the creative act, the act that communicates a new creation, but an act of giving? What is this type of giving but the giving of truth, beauty, and goodness? “Is the aim, content, or underlying motive of the creative act,” my critic would ask, “always a dimension or aspect of the realm of human values? If this realm is the subject matter of the creative act in art, it follows that the creation of beauty, truth, and goodness should be one of its essential differentiae.” This remark implies that the creation of a novel reality is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the possibility of the creative act because the novel reality can be evil. Some of the most creative minds in life are evil minds. How many a ruler obliterated masses of human beings, cities, libraries, and monuments of beauty? How many an oligarch, feudal lord, or greedy capitalist trampled on social justice and the dignity of their fellow citizens during the past five thousand years? Creativity is not genuine if it is not conducive to human progress. Evil entails the destruction or degradation of the human as such. Artists portray it not to glorify but to reveal its destructive power, and certainly not to encourage it or because they view it as good. The vocation of art is a vocation of the Good! This is how metaphysicians from Plato to Whitehead viewed it. Did Plato not argue that God created the universe because it is good? But God is the Good? Did philosophers such as Leibniz, Spinoza, and Hegel not view God, the creator of the universe, as good? Again, did Whitehead not define the Ultimate, viz., God, as Creativity? I am inclined to think that the source, inspiration, and datum of the creative act in art have always been the true, the good, and the beautiful: the realm of human values. If we examine the subject of the masterworks in the different art forms, we can readily see that they deal with the values

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questions that have mattered most to human beings—love, life, death, tragedy, beauty, freedom, power, immortality, justice, hate, evil, grandeur, vengeance, time, and change, to mention some of the important ones. The depictions in various ways and media of these and other human problems are depictions of slices of life, regardless of whether they belong to the past, present, or future and regardless of whether they are small, complex, simple, or mysterious. We should never lose sight of the fact that the fabric of human life is always realized value. Whether they are social, religious, political, personal, professional, or intellectual, our actions are realization aims, each one of which is founded in a value. The artwork is a luminous presence of these values—of their meaning, the way people understand them, and how they realize them. These values inhere in the significant form of the artwork. The articulation of this kind of form is the ultimate goal of the creative act. What is the dance of the creative act but a dance around this form? What is the labor of the creative vision of the artist but a labor of love? Love is miraculous. Would Jove have been able to impart spiritus to the new creation called man had it not been fashioned by the hands of Cura—Care?

CHAPTER SIX CREATIVITY AND THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

Introduction If the basis of the artistic dimension of the artwork is its significant form; if this form exists as a potentiality in the artwork the artist creates; accordingly, if it is not directly perceptible by the intellect or the senses; and, finally, if it does not inhere in the artwork as a ready-made reality, it should follow that creativity is a necessary condition for its realization in the experience of the perceiver. The difficulty we face in our attempt to explain the possibility of its realization is in understanding how the potential can become actual, or how the imperceptible can become perceptible. Does the activity of giving it a concrete structure, a particular identity, and a life of its own require a Jovian power similar to the one Jove blew into the clay the goddess Cura was forming? When I stand before DaVinci’s Mona Lisa or read Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, do I readily see a bright beam of enigma emanating from the painting into my mind or a warm beam of love flowing from the novel into my heart? Or, do I find myself conversing with a woman about space, time, eternity, infinity, God, the mystery that permeates the scheme of nature, and the meaning of human life? Do I find myself watching a figure of love living in a world of mediocrity—of selfishness, deception, ignorance, stupidity, hypocrisy, and crass materialism? If the answer to these questions is no, and it is no, how can I enter the world of Mona Lisa or that of The Idiot? How can I transform Prince Mishkin into a Christlike figure or Mona Lisa into a worldly enigma? But, again, how do I recognize that these worlds exist as a potentiality in a story or as a significant form in a pictorial representation? Can I recognize them as art if I cannot peek through the sensuous or conceptual dimension of the artwork and discern, albeit dimly or vaguely at first, that a world of meaning is lying in wait for

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me if I proceed in my perceptual process? But how can I make this transition? How can the sensuous content I perceive with my eyes or conceive with my intellect lure me to take this peek? Is this possible without a creative act of the imagination, one in which I can penetrate the visible into the invisible, the sensuous into the spiritual, the finite into the infinite world of meaning that throbs quietly in the heart of the sensuous form? Next, what is the constitution of the creative act in which I can undertake this penetration? What makes these questions hard to answer is that the potentiality that inheres in the sensuous form is not given to perception as a finally structured reality. Unlike the meaning that is communicated by the scientist or the philosopher, which is conceptual and clearly defined, the meaning communicated by the artist is symbolic and there is always a possibility of further realization. What I comprehend when I hear my teacher state the laws of motion or the law of causation is clearly articulated and communicated. The statement of the laws is composed of concepts that are clearly defined. But what I experience when I watch Hamlet agonizing on the stage over the question of “to be or not to be” may be different from what you experience or from what I experience at an older age, although the structures of these and other possible experiences may be similar but not necessarily identical.

Conditions of Aesthetic Perception A large number of aestheticians, and I am one of them, have argued that assuming an aesthetic attitude is a necessary condition for transforming the artistic dimension of the artwork, which exists as a potentiality in the sensuous form of the work, into a world of meaning. This world unfolds in the course of the aesthetic experience (see Dufrenne 1973; Ingarden 1973; Mitias 1987). The unfolding of this world is the unfolding of the aesthetic experience. The logic of this condition is implicit in the assumption I considered in the preceding paragraph, that the artistic dimension of the artwork is not given as a ready-made reality but as a potentiality in the formal structure of the artwork qua significant form. I do not apprehend the meaning implicit in this form by any one of my five senses, and if it is a literary work, I do not apprehend it by my intellect. I perceive the sensuous being of the painting with my eyes and the sensuous being of the musical

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work with my ears, but I apprehend its aesthetic being or meaning with my mind. Assuming an aesthetic attitude when I stand before an artwork with the intention of perceiving it aesthetically enables me to move from the mode of sensuous perception to the mode of aesthetic perception. How is this move possible? The challenge of this move is familiar to the art critic, the art teacher, the aesthetician, or the archaeologist who frequently uncovers artistic treasures of ancient cultures, or to the art dealer who aims to sell artworks at a high price. This challenge increased in its complexity in the second half of the last century, when avant-garde art movements such as minimal art, conceptual art, kitsch art, or ready-made art found their way into the world of art. The question “What is art?” was one of the prominent questions aestheticians asked during that period. The purport of this question was to articulate an adequate definition or a set of criteria by which art can be defined. This kind of definition is, moreover, important to any attempt to experience artworks aesthetically: how can we move from the artistic to the aesthetic if we do not know what it means for something to be artistic or aesthetic? The artistic or aesthetic does not befall the mind or the senses of the perceiver in an encounter with an artwork. If it exists as a potentiality, it stands to reason that it should come into being by a creative act. Let us suppose for the sake of discussion that assuming an aesthetic attitude is effective in creating the conditions for moving from the artistic to the aesthetic—what is this kind of attitude? What are the dynamics that enable the perceiver to make a dent or perhaps to take a peek through the wall of the artistic being of the artwork? I shall begin my answer to this question with a brief analysis of the concept of aesthetic attitude. By “attitude” I mean a mental disposition, a state of mind, or a mental posture, a kind of mental framework in terms of which we perceive, analyze, or seek to understand an object or a situation, a problem, or some kind of spectacle. An attitude is usually accompanied by an affective content, viz., a feeling or emotion, e.g., fear, respect, awe, love, hate, anger, hope, desire, or boredom. For example, when the teacher enters the lecture room, the students adhere to silence. They immediately stop their gossip, chatter, or conversation out of respect for the teacher. The kind of attitude assumed in this kind of situation is one of respect. This attitude was instilled in them

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during their childhood. Again, the moment a soldier on the battlefield hears a strange sound coming from a nearby bush, he gives the totality of his attention to the bush. He immediately assumes an attitude of caution. This attitude was instilled in him when he was training as a soldier. In this, as in the preceding example, the object of the experience, viz., the sudden appearance of the teacher or the sudden hearing of the strange noise, triggers a change in the existing mental posture. The new mental state is actuated by the nature of the object that triggers the change in the existing state of mind. The suddenness of the noise and the sudden entrance of the teacher changed the focus of the students’ and the soldier’s attention. It marked the change of their attitude. This change was made possible by the change of the object of their attention: the nature of the object determines the nature of the attitude we assume. This is based on the assumption that the relation between the object and the attitude is causal. The soldier in the preceding example assumed a cautious state of mind, or a state of readiness, when he suddenly heard the strange noise, and the students assumed an intellectual or serious state of mind when the teacher suddenly entered. This applies to what is generally known as “indifferent attitude,” in which a person does not, for some reason, have a particular feeling or emotion toward the sudden appearance of an object in the sphere of her attention. This object may or may not concern her or be of interest to her, or she may not be able to give it her full attention. But regardless of whether one assumes this kind of indifference, it is extremely difficult to have an attitude in general because an object in general, or nothing, does not exist. “Attitude” is an essentially intentional concept: an attitude is always a mental posture toward a particular object. The object may or may not be seriously important or interesting to us, nonetheless, it prompts a change of attitude. If when I am rambling with my beloved in the garden my phone rings, and if the message I read says my father has just had a heart attack, my attitude will immediately change from romantic to fearful or anxious even though my beloved is standing next to me. Broadly speaking, attention is a state of “mental concentration or readiness for such concentration” (WNCD 2004). In this kind of state, the object engages the mind in an event of thinking, feeling, wiling, imagining, or acting. We would not exaggerate if we said this kind of engagement is

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dialogical in character because the object submits itself, and this by selfdisclosure, to the mind and the mind responds to this submission by comprehending what is revealed to it. The essential nature of the object is incorporated in the thinking, conceiving, and judging mechanism of the mind, on the one hand, and the mind assents to the truth revealed to it in the activity of comprehending the nature of the object on the other hand. The object gains the attention of the perceiver, and the perceiver gains knowledge of the object. An attitude is a response not only to a particular object but also to types of objects. The object may be philosophical, scientific, religious social, political, romantic, cultural, artistic, or professional. Some attitudes are acquired by cultivation, experience, education, imitation, instinct, and some by personal experience. For example, we learn how to assume a religious attitude at home and in the religious institution by practice, imitation, or instruction; we learn how to assume an attitude of caution toward wild animals by instinct; we learn how to assume an attitude of respect for our superiors in the different spheres of our lives by imitation or experience. Once we learn or discover how to respond to different types of objects, we develop skill in responding or reacting to such objects. If I meet the governor of my state or the leader of my religious community, I do not stop for a moment, reflect on the identity of the governor or leader, and then say to myself, “This is the governor, or this is the priest. She deserves or expects respect, therefore I should assume an attitude of respect toward her.” On the contrary, I spontaneously react to these leaders from an established attitude of respect. The kind of individuals they are immediately arouses an attitude of respect. Do I need to stop and reason when I spot a lion approaching me with the intention of devouring my body? Although a general attitude toward certain kinds of objects is instilled in us, we respond to objects within the same kind or class differently. For example, I assume an attitude of respect toward teachers in general. But the kind of respect I show toward this teacher may differ from the kind of respect I show to other teachers. However, in all situations of attitudinal responses, the attitude functions as an implicit directive, not only in responding to the object in a certain way but also in inclining me to assume a particular attitude toward the object because doing so implies that we

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perceive, interpret, or understand the object or class of objects in terms of the attitude toward the class as a whole. The attitude may be favorable or unfavorable, deep or shallow, critical or simplistic. The point I would like to emphasize is that the attitude we have toward a class of objects sets the parameters in terms of which we respect or experience the object. For example, if I have a negative attitude toward atheists, I may denigrate or trivialize them or their way of life. But if I am an atheist, I may show a special kind of respect toward atheists and may even seek their friendship. This kind of orientation is common in the different spheres of human life. Moreover, instilled attitudes are not permanent fixtures in the mind because they are psychological orientations and such orientations are, like all psychological orientations, in principle changeable. For example, I may be taught to respect the class of priests and I may have an established attitude of respect toward them; but if I discover later in my life that all the priests I encountered in my community are corrupt or if I feel they are not performing their duties as priests adequately, I may feel disappointed and change my attitude toward the priests in my community. However, even though I cease to respect this group of priests in my community, the consciousness of what it means to respect priests, even the inclination to respect them, lingers in my mind. Again, if I happen to become an atheist in a later period of my life, I may change my attitude toward the religious establishment, including its places of worship. But if I happen to pay a visit to an aesthetically beautiful church, if this beauty radiates religiosity, if I am moved by this radiance to the core, and if it is overpowering, I may become a momentary believer although I am not one, because I know what it means to assume a religious attitude toward a genuinely religious object. Although it is useful to examine the philosophical and psychological basis and value dynamics of the different types of attitudes people assume in the course of their theoretical and practical lives, this kind of examination falls outside the scope of this book. However, I shall now focus my attention on one kind of attitude, the aesthetic attitude, since it is critical to my discussion of creativity as an essential condition of the possibility of the aesthetic experience.

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The Aesthetic Attitude What does it mean to transform the artistic dimension of the artwork into a world of meaning, or what does it take to move from the mode of ordinary perception to the mode of aesthetic perception? This question is significant because, as I argued earlier, the significant form, or the unity of the aesthetic qualities that constitutes the artistic dimension of the artwork, is not a given element of the artwork. However, raising this question does not imply that people do not in fact move from the artistic to the sensuous dimension of the artwork or that they do not have aesthetic experiences of such works. They do. But the question that challenges the philosopher is, how? This question is a request for an explanation; it is a request to explain rationally how Jove transformed Cura’s clay into a human being. Even though in what follows I shall endeavor to provide such an explanation, one may still wonder whether my explanation or any other will be final, because the mystery of the creative remains shrouded with a veil of mystery. Is it an accident that artists frequently fail to give an adequate account of the creative moment in the process of creating their work? Is it an accident that they typically use mystical, cryptic, vague, even metaphorical language when they talk about the source of their creative vision or activity? But although an adequate explanation of the dynamics of moving from the artistic to the aesthetic, one that attracts the approval of all aestheticians, is not forthcoming in the near or distant future, shedding a light of understanding on this creative power of the human mind is both worthwhile and urgently needed. This is what I shall do in the remainder of this chapter. The first condition for moving from the mode of ordinary perception to the mode of aesthetic perception is assuming an aesthetic attitude. What do I mean when I speak of “aesthetic attitude”? In what sense is an attitude aesthetic? Or, what makes an attitude aesthetic? Broadly speaking, by aesthetic attitude I mean a disinterested, contemplative, and critical posture of mind. This characterization at once rules out the widely held view that aesthetic attitude is the principle of aesthetic distinction, that is, the basis of defining the aesthetic as such, regardless of whether it is in the form of aesthetic perception, aesthetic judgment, aesthetic evaluation, aesthetic quality, aesthetic object, aesthetic beauty, or aesthetic experience (see Mitias 1986, 1988). On the contrary, the view I have been elucidating and

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developing in this book is that aesthetic signifies a particular type of reality that exists in the artwork as a potentiality qua significant form and comes to life as aesthetic in the aesthetic experience as a world of meaning. This reality, I submit, is the basis of any discourse on or reference to the aesthetic in any mode of its existence. Assuming an aesthetic attitude should be treated as a condition of moving from the ordinary mode of perceiving the sensuous dimension qua significant form to the aesthetic mode of perceiving it, not as a basis, and certainly not as a source, of the aesthetic. Accordingly, the basis of the aesthetic is not how we perceive the artwork but what we perceive in the artwork. It is not something about the work but something that inheres in it, in the way it is formed or in the way it signifies. Assuming an aesthetic attitude helps the perceiver to move into a creative state of mind. “But,” my critic might query, “what is the point of characterizing an attitude as aesthetic if you are in quest of the aesthetic? Do you not assume knowledge of what you are seeking to discover or explain?” Not at all, because by characterizing the attitude as aesthetic, as I shall presently analyze, I mean it is the kind of attitude that enables the perceiver to move into a creative posture of mind, one that is appropriate for an exploration of the artistic dimension of the artwork, for unlocking the door that hides it. The conditions under which the creative act in science takes place are different from those in philosophy or in the practical domains of human life. The aesthetic attitude is an attitude that aims at the apprehension of the aesthetic, at infusing life into the potential existence of the aesthetic. The three differentiae of the aesthetic attitude are, as I have just indicated, disinterestedness, contemplation, and criticalness. First, by “disinterestedness” I mean an attitude that approaches the artwork objectively, i.e., without the influence of our personal biases, feelings, desires, interests, or beliefs—in short, personal idiosyncrasies. In this type of attitude, the focus is exclusively on the object of perception or reflection, and not on anything external to it. I can express this point differently by saying that assuming an aesthetic attitude is actively bracketing out one’s beliefs, desires, feelings, habits, or way of viewing or evaluating objects and events. I do not perceive, think, interpret, or understand the object in terms of my personal beliefs, feelings, emotions, or desires but in terms of what it is or what it has to offer.

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However, I cannot do this unless I concentrate, unless I attend to the multitude of details that make up the fabric of the object, unless I comprehend it in the fullness of its being, as it is in itself. “But,” my critic would not hesitate to object, “can one bracket out one’s beliefs, feelings, emotions, or idiosyncrasies? Suppose we bracket them out; what will be left? Would my mind remain a mind?” Bracketing them out does not necessarily mean, or imply, that we literally remove them from our minds; it only means we can distinguish between our beliefs, feelings, inclinations, values, or idiosyncrasies and others’ beliefs, feelings, inclinations, idiosyncrasies, or values. Suppose I am an atheist; can I not listen to the arguments of a believer and follow her line of reasoning? Is it not possible for me to understand her arguments and even believe their logical implications? I can, at least in principle, harness my beliefs, values, or every mental state of “mine” and think in terms of the beliefs, values, and/or mental states of others. Suppose I dislike or disagree with Marx’s view of history, economics, human nature, and the best form of government; can I not agree with it? Again, how can states fight or negotiate with their enemies if they do not understand them? How can they do this if they do not put aside their own beliefs, feelings, and values? The ability to harness our beliefs, feelings, or values is a function of the power of reason. This power is a power of transcendence. It enables the mind to transcend any one of its states, regardless of whether it is affective or intellectual, reflect on it, and discern its nature or truth as it is in itself. Can science make any progress if the scientist does not assume an objective attitude in her research? Whether in moments of tragedy, distress, or failure, or in moments of elation, joy, or success, do we not transcend the present moment of consciousness into a higher, reflective moment? In such situations, do we not harness the present moment of consciousness and submit it to the transcending moment of consciousness? But the point of assuming a disinterested attitude is not only to be objective but also to focus our attention on the object of reflection to see what it is in itself. Second, aesthetic perception is contemplative in nature. It is not casual, habitual, apathetic, or superficial; on the contrary, it is focused, deliberate, and meditative. It aims at the constitutive structure of the object individually and as a totality; it seeks to understand it in terms of its cause, the elements

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that make it up, and its effects. Moreover, it aims to grasp the object in terms of its internal and external relations. The contemplative activity we perform when we assume an aesthetic attitude aims to embrace, in an act of apprehension, not only the structure of its object in the fullness of its existentially given being but also the possibilities inherent in it. In this kind of activity, the perceiver “owns” the object because she incorporates the fullness of its being in the store of her mind and because this incorporation expands the horizon of her cognitive power. In it, the essence of the perceived object moves into the mind. The object ceases to be an “other”; it becomes an integral part of the cognitive faculty of the mind. In the course of our daily lives, we know, albeit in general, our social and physical environment and we can identify the objects that make it up—but do we? Do we really perceive, or cognize, these objects? For example, when I enter my office, I go directly to sit in my chair that is located next to my desk, place my files on the right side of the desk, pick up the handset of my phone, and call the dean about a certain report. In this whole event, I seem to have perceived the door of my office, the chair, the desk, and the telephone, not to mention the whole room as a background of my perception, but have I actually perceived all these objects, including the room as a perspective? Again, have I actually perceived the chair on which I sat or the desk on which I placed my files? I was able to identify them, which implies that I interacted with them. I can, for example, say that this is my chair, this is my phone, and this is my desk, but how does one identify or know their chair, desk, or phone if asked? Consider one of these objects for a moment—the chair. In response to your question, I can cast a look at it and say it is my chair. But in performing this act, have I actually examined it perceptually in terms of its place in the room and come to the conclusion that it is my chair? No. I know it is my chair because I have a general idea of a chair in my mind and because I have another particular idea of the chair, which happens to be navy blue, I sit on whenever I am in my office. I remember that this is my chair because I know what it means for an object to be a chair and because the second idea, this navy-blue chair, the color of my chair, corresponds to the general idea of a chair that exists in my mind. I think of my idea of my chair in terms of the general idea of a chair. Put differently, I perceive the chair and know it to be mine in terms of the general idea of a chair. This is how we identify all the objects in our environment. I pass by

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a tree on the boulevard. I know it is a tree without examining it perceptually because its general form corresponds to the form of the idea of a tree that exists in my mind. I identify the tree in terms of the general idea that I know to be a tree or because I already know what it means for an object to be a tree. But when I stand before a painting that is a work of art, how do I know it is a work of art? I can say the object is a painting because its form corresponds to the general idea of a painting that already exists in my mind, but can I say, simply by looking at it, that it is a work of art? No, because my eyes cannot, no matter how much I try, see what we usually call art. I do not possess a general idea of art in terms of which I can perceive the painting as a work of art because such an idea does not, and cannot, exist. Again, I do not perceive “a work” of art in general when I visit a museum. I do not listen to “a symphony” when I go to the art center, and I do not read “a literary novel” when I am in the mood to read one. Whether it is a painting, a sculpture, a musical piece, or a novel, the work I perceive or experience is a particular work of art. The artistic qualities or dimension that make this object a work of art are quite different from the qualities or dimension that makes every other work of artwork art. “Art” is always a concrete, particular phenomenon; it is always embodied in a particular artifact and it is always unrepeatable. This is a main reason we cannot identify a painting that happens to be an artwork as art by any one or a combination of the five senses. Only when I am able to penetrate the sensuous form of the artwork and perceive its hidden artistic qualities or dimension can I say, “This painting is a work of art.” Assuming an aesthetic attitude is a necessary condition for the possibility of aesthetic perception. Third, aesthetic perception is critical in character. By “critical” in this context I mean analytical, logical, and investigative in orientation. The thrust of this characterization is a thrust toward objective judgment. Aesthetic contemplation is not a passive, steady, or vacant look, a kind of cow-stare look, but an inquiring, analytical look that examines the elements constituting the fabric of its objects as well as their possible effects. Its initial focus, or object of attention, is the logic implicit in the creative vision from which the form of the artwork originates. A grasp of this logic is a necessary condition for examining the manner of organization of the

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sensuous form of the artwork. If this form is unique, and it usually is, it follows that an intuition of its signification, or the meaning potential in it, will elude the apprehending mind if we do not discern the logic that gives it its coherence. Can we grasp the meaning of a proposition, paragraph, or text if it is illogical or if it is not conceptually coherent? Can we intuit the meaning of a statement if it is contradictory? We are familiar with the rules of logic that underlie the types of communication we encounter in science, philosophy, and ordinary life, but such rules do not apply in the sphere of art because every artwork emanates from the logic implicit in the artistic vision that gives rise to it, and this logic is individual, unique. When I speak of logic here, I mean the principle according to which the various elements of the sensuous form derive their coherence. This coherence is a necessary condition for possible (a) artistic expression and (b) apprehension of the meaning the work embodies. The elements of the artwork may sometimes seem randomly organized and may repel the vision of some perceivers, but a close, critical, and, as I shall presently explain, discriminating perception will reveal that they are not randomly organized but are organized according to a different, or higher, logic. The ability of the perceiver to grasp the structure of this logic will disclose the meaning potential in this mode of organization. One may wonder why I qualify the aesthetic attitude with criticalness. I do so because criticalness is investigative in character. If the artistic dimension of the artwork exists as a potentiality in the sensuous dimension of the artwork, in other words, if it is not given as a visible, audible, thinkable, or ready-made reality, the question of luring it into the realm of reality, of giving it being and life, will certainly glare us in the face: can we penetrate the sensuous form of the artwork without an analytical, investigative examination of this form, that is, of the way it embodies a world of meaning? By itself, meaning does not float or hover over the sensuous form. We have to penetrate the sensuous form and feel the meaning potential in it. I emphasize feeling because we apprehend meaning by the power of feeling, not by the power of concept. When we converse with a deceiver, do we not feel her deception in the way she looks, speaks, and acts? When we converse with an honest person, do we not feel that she is honest in the way she looks, speaks, or acts? Feeling can be as critical, as analytical, as logical

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thinking. The point of aesthetic perception is to focus attention on the way the artwork is formed, to apprehend this way, and to see if we can feel the meaning it embodies, for, as I shall explain, this form is not silent but active: it speaks, and we have to understand its language.

Aesthetic Sense Assuming an aesthetic attitude is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the possibility of aesthetic perception, for one can fulfill the conditions of objectivity, contemplation, and criticalness without necessarily being able to perceive the artwork aesthetically. These conditions are formal, not existential or practical in character. They do not imply any reference to the nature of the object of perception; they are general and apply to any activity of perception, regardless of whether it is scientific, philosophical, or practical. They ensure the possibility of perceiving the object in the fullness of its being and truth. But the objects of human experience are diverse. They are sociological, psychological, physical, political, metaphysical, ordinary, and religious objects. Accordingly, the way we assume a disinterested, contemplative, and critical attitude toward a physical object, such as a rock, is different from the way we assume a similar attitude toward a non-physical object, such as an aesthetic metaphysical object. The physical object is given directly to our senses, but the ultimate or aesthetic object is not. The physical object exists to our intellect and is known by means of concepts. But the artwork qua art is not given directly to our senses; it exists to the imagination and is known or enjoyed intuitively in the medium of feeling. Unlike the physical object, the artistic dimension of the artwork is not given as a ready-made reality; it is a creatively constructed object. The aesthetic attitude we assume in this case is toward an object that embodies the artistic domain of the artwork. Its substance is not matter but meaning. Equally important, the medium of knowing the artwork qua art is, as I have just emphasized, feeling. This implies that aesthetic perception is an activity of feeling. The question that calls for an answer here is, how can we perceive the artwork qua art affectively, that is, in the medium of feeling? Although the artistic dimension is a non-sensuous reality but perceived in the sensuous medium of the artwork, the sensuous medium becomes incorporated as an

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essential element of the aesthetic experience primarily because the sensuous embodies the non-sensuous being of the artwork as meaning. It cannot be an object of the intellect; therefore, it cannot be conceived the way physical objects are conceived. We perceive and apprehend it in the medium of feeling. Under what conditions can we feel its presence in the artwork? Its fabric is, as I argued earlier, meaning. At the pre-reflective level, this type of reality, regardless of how it is later articulated, is an object of intuition— a cognitive feeling, not in the sense of being associated with an idea but in the sense of being a noetic object, as an apprehensible object, one we can intuit as a pure essence that shines with its being. This kind of object and this kind of intuition are not a monopoly of philosophical or scientific thinking but can be expressed and intuited in any symbolic form of expression. Now, first, if the artistic dimension of the artwork is the basis of aesthetic perception and aesthetic experience; second, if it is not an object of the intellect; and finally, if it exists in the medium of feeling, how can we identify it? How do we detect it? It cannot be identified conceptually because it is not a physical object or a ready-made reality. If it exists in the medium of feeling, then it can be detected, identified, and later articulated as a world of meaning by an affective act of the mind. This implies that intuition is not only the means by which we detect the presence of the artistic dimension of the artwork but also the means of actualizing it. But the intriguing question we necessarily face is, how can the intuitive faculty of the mind detect the artistic dimension if it does not have the capacity to discriminate between the artistic and the non-artistic? It would seem possession of this kind of capacity is a necessary condition for detecting or identifying the artistic dimension inherent in the artwork as a significant form. But if possession of this capacity is a necessary condition for identifying the artistic as such, the second question that calls for an adequate answer is, what does it mean to possess this capacity? What kind of capacity is it? It cannot, as I have just pointed out, be intellectual or conceptual but must be intuitive in character. Moreover, it cannot be a general or mere capacity, for such a capacity does not exist. It must be a particular kind of capacity. Its kind and particularity must be determined by the object of perception,

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namely, the artistic dimension of the artwork, which exists as a potentiality in the work. Accordingly, since the aesthetic experience consists of the realization of this potentiality, I think it would be appropriate to say that the capacity by which we detect or identify the artistic dimension of the artwork is aesthetic sense. This capacity enables us to detect the artistic dimension of the artwork. Metaphorically speaking, it is the power, or hand, that unlocks the door of this dimension. This implies that we identify the artistic dimension by means of this sense. Can we know the object of an aim we are seeking if we do not know the identity of the object we are seeking? But the object we seek when we approach the artwork with the intention of knowing its identity, or of experiencing it aesthetically, is a particular object, one we have not experienced before. I grant this fact. What is at issue is not merely the identity of this or that artwork, but what it means for something to be art or artistic, that is, what it means for an artifact or a physical object to embody a dimension, or content, of human meaning. How can I say a certain artifact is art if I do not possess an aesthetic sense or if I do not know what it means for an object to be art? Only when the artifact provokes, arouses, or quickens my aesthetic sense, and this under certain perceptual conditions, that is, when my imagination responds to this provocation and gleans at least a ray of the luminous presence of meaning that permeates the significant form of the artwork, can I identify the work as art. Let me shed more light on this point by another look at the conditions of the identity of the chair as a chair I discussed earlier. It is important to remember that this kind of identification takes place at the level of intuition, of feeling, not at the level of conception. Now, how do we acquire our aesthetic sense? Broadly speaking, we acquire it the way we acquire the different types of sense that constitute the foundation of value-experience, for example, moral sense, religious sense, social sense, political sense, historical sense, or logical sense. Let us consider moral value for a moment. We acquire the sense of justice in the process of social growth by imitation—by imitating how our parents, wise people, teachers, or peers judge or act justly and by undergoing personal experiences of justice. The same applies to the acquisition of the other types of value sense. I here assume that there are two types of knowledge:

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theoretical and practical. The first arises from reflection and the second from action. The first is general and the second is particular. Frequently the particular is a concretization of the general, at least implicitly. The sense of justice I develop in the course of my life is a concretization of a general conception or rule of justice, one that society, reason, or the sage recommended for practice. This is why I am able to recognize and react to the different situations of justice in terms of my sense of justice. How can I react to them if I do not possess a sense of justice or know what it means for a situation, person, law, policy, or rule to be just? Again, how people react to a situation of justice depends on how they have acquired their sense of justice. A person in India or Saudi Arabia or Mongolia may react differently to the same situation primarily because the sense of justice they possess is different. A human being, e.g., a person who is mentally deranged or one who comes from a distant planet, would not be able to recognize or identify a situation of justice if she does not possess a sense, or a notion, of justice. This is based on the fundamental assumption that values are not natural facts. We do not encounter them in the world the way we encounter trees, animals, or rivers. Values are human creations. We acquire them by enculturation. This is why the cultivation of a sense of the different types of value is a necessary condition for detecting or identifying the objects that embody them. But the artistic dimension of the artwork that makes it art is not given the way the objects of the other values are given. I can directly intuit the justice or injustice of a law by directly reflecting on its nature and the conditions under which it is enacted, and I can do this because I have a sense of justice in terms of which I can make my judgment. However, I cannot immediately intuit the enigma of Mona Lisa when I cast a look at it. In principle, this applies to all works of art. I am aware of the fact that some works are easier to experience aesthetically than others, and some are more difficult to comprehend in the fullness of their aesthetic being than others. For example, I may discern after contemplating Mona Lisa for a few minutes that it is a genuine work of art, but can I comprehend the depth of its aesthetic world in contemplating it for a few minutes? I can feel the fire of the aesthetic dimension of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, but can I comprehend the depth of its being in one, two, or several hearings? Do we not delve deeper

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and deeper into the master works of art when we grow older and hopefully wiser? The idea I would like to emphasize at this point in my discussion is that possessing an aesthetic sense is a necessary condition for initiating the process of aesthetic perception, although it is not a sufficient condition for comprehending the depth of the world of meaning it embodies. My critic, who has been following my train of thought until this stage of my discussion, would now ask: “Let us suppose a perceiver meets the conditions that are necessary for having an aesthetic experience of an artwork. In what sense is having this kind of experience creative in nature? Or, in what respect does the perceiver exercise her creative function?”

Constitution of the Creative Act Let me begin by stating that creativity is not only a primary condition but also the constitution of the act in which the aesthetic experience takes place. If, as I asserted repeatedly in this and the previous chapters, the artistic dimension does not exist as a ready-made reality in the artwork, if what the artist creates is a possibility that exists as a potentiality, creativity should be the primary condition for realizing this potentiality, that is, for bringing it from the mode of potentiality to the mode of reality. As a potential, it does not exist actually; but if it does not exist actually, its realization is necessarily an act of creation ex nihilo. Is Jove the kind of being who performs this kind of creation? Maybe! Who said that every cultivated mind is not a possible Jove? I shall not bicker about or dispute this claim, but I can say with a great measure of certainty that the activity of bringing the potential existence of the artistic dimension into actual existence is a creative act par excellence for the following reasons. First, the outcome of the artistic act is a genuine reality. Its substance is human meaning, which is as real as the reality of natural objects. In its original state, meaning exists as an ideal, a schema, that is, an indeterminate being that can be articulated in any symbolic form of expression— musically, pictorially, dynamically, sculpturally, or architecturally. Each one of these forms is a kind of language. The language the philosopher or

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scientist uses is discursive, and the means of articulating and communicating meaning is concept: a concept is an articulation or formation of a content of meaning. This happens to be the dominant type of articulating and communicating meaning in science, philosophy, and practical life, but it is not the only form, primarily because the realm of meaning is infinitely diverse and because it is an inexhaustible possibility of realization. Second, by its very essence, meaning is amenable for articulation in different ways and different symbolic forms of expression. Every type of form is, as I have just indicated, a type of language. The kind used in art is eidetic. The artist does not communicate her artistic vision conceptually, although she can sometimes use concepts as an element of her creative act or as an element of her medium, as we see in literature, but in terms of the possible medium of expression and perception, e.g., sound, lines and colors, marble, or movement. As a philosopher, I can articulate an aspect of sadness conceptually, but as a musician or dancer I can articulate the same aspect by means of sound or movement. This implies that, as a phenomenon, meaning can be contained in any medium of perception. But (a) if artistic creation consists of apprehending a content of meaning and then articulating it in a particular form, which means moving it from the realm of indeterminateness to the realm of determinateness, i.e., of formed beings, which is the realm of reality; (b) if the articulation is made in terms of a perceptual medium such as sound or movement; and (c) if this articulation takes place according to the established rules and conventions of expression in the different arts, which is a common practice, it would follow that a necessary condition for aesthetic perception is versatility, at least to a modest degree, in eidetic perception, that is, in the ability to read a certain artistic language. This claim is based on the assumption that the artist’s creation of her significant form is not fortuitous or idiosyncratic but deliberate and purposeful, and that not only her vision but also the manner of articulating it or giving it form takes place in an invisible world of art—of an established way of creating, appreciating, and evaluating artworks that populate this world. Do we not assume this general view of artistic creation when we try to teach the young as well as adults how to appreciate artworks? For example, does the art teacher in an art appreciation class not point to certain aspects, details, lines, colors, or representations and explain their signification or the role they play

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in contemplating a certain painting? Does she not try in different ways to lead the attention of the students from what they see to what is hidden between or within what they see? For example, when she says to them, “This line or color means so and so,” does she not try to teach them how to think and read eidetically? For otherwise, how can they read or apprehend the meaning potential in the artwork they are studying? Broadly speaking, do we not think or hear eidetically when we listen to Valse Triste and say it is sad, look at Mona Lisa and say it is enigmatic, or watch Oedipus the King on stage and say it is tragic? When I say the artistic being of the artwork inheres as a potentiality in its significant form, I mean that, as a phenomenon and a mode of being, the potentiality inheres in the way-ness of the significant form. This way-ness is an artistic language in two ways. First, it is created according to the general rules, conventions, and practices of creating artworks in general, which students of art learn in the early period of their art education. Second, and on the basis of this type of language, it is created according to the logic of the vision that steers the creative act. The continuity between these two types of formation is important to the ability of the perceiver to move from the perceptible features of the significant form to the hidden or potential features. The point that calls for special attention is that once we master the rudiments of the eidetic language relevant to the artwork we seek to enjoy aesthetically, we learn to read the general language of that art form; we learn how to penetrate its surface meaning to access the deeper meaning inherent in it. The more we experience works within an art form, the more versatile we become in reading the richer meaning potential in the significant form of the works that constitute the realm of that art form.

Creation Ex Nihilo In chapter 4, I argued that the artistic dimension of the artwork, viz., its significant form, comes into being ex nihilo. Implied in this proposition is that this form is sui generis; it exists in the artwork as a potentiality and steps into the realm of reality in the aesthetic experience. The act in which it steps into reality is a creative act. This clearly implies that it has two nodes of existence: potential and real. Insofar as it is a potentiality, it does not actually exist, and yet it is a possibility for actual existence. However, real

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existence is the existence of a real object, regardless of whether it is psychological or physical. One of the central questions this book has been trying to answer is, how can the significant form that is not real come into being? And my answer is that it comes into being by a creative act of imagination and that this creation is ex nihilo. In what follows, I shall explain and defend this proposition. The activity in which the artistic dimension of the artwork comes into being is creative for the following reasons. First, the act in which any object that did not exist but comes into existence is a creative act par excellence. “To create” means “to cause to come into existence or to come into being.” The artwork comes into being qua art, that is, it emerges from its mode of potentiality into the mode of reality, or existence, in the aesthetic experience. The agent who undertakes this process is the aesthetic perceiver. We should here recognize that existence in the mode of potentiality is not real existence. This kind of existence is ideal, but ideals are not elements of reality. It takes a special act of creation to cause it to exist as an ideal, and it takes another act of creation to cause it to exist as something real for at least two reasons. First, the artistic dimension of the artwork did not exist as a reality in the world before its emergence in the experience of the perceiver. Its coming into existence is, therefore, a creative act. Second, as a potentiality, the artistic dimension does not exist as a ready-made reality but as a potentiality; as such, it is formless, structureless, and therefore indeterminate. What the perceiver does during the creative activity of aesthetic perception is to give it form the way the goddess Cura gave form to the clay in the process of creating man (humus). This form does not exist fortuitously. It comes into being when the perceiver assumes an aesthetic attitude, that is, when she perceives the artwork disinterestedly, contemplatively, critically, and investigatively. The object she contemplates is the pure potentiality of a dimension of meaning similar to the potentiality of infinite possible forms. But then, how can the perceiver contemplate the realm of potentiality created by the artist and then envision, or create, a form that captures the meaning intended by the creative vision of the artist, at least in general? However, the artist does not create a finally structured form but the possibility of a form. Her genius lies in the fact that her formless form

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remains a possibility for many and deeper realizations. How many different yet meaningful realizations of Romeo and Juliet, Waiting for Godot, David Copperfield, Wuthering Heights, Anna Karenina, and similar works have been enacted on stage and in movies during the past decades, even centuries? Do we read or experience the same artwork twice? Are we not always changing and growing physically, psychologically, intellectually, and culturally? I readily aver that the realization of the artistic dimension of an artwork may be shallow, mediocre, reasonable, or profound. This aspect of aesthetic creation is not a point of contention here. What is at issue is the logic involved in aesthetic creation: what is the logical structure of the act that initiates the process of aesthetic perception? The thesis I am spotlighting is that this act is an instance of creativity in art primarily because it arises from the perceiver’s vision of the artistic dimension of the artwork that is given to the perceiver as a potentiality. But can the perceiver give, or create, out of the potentiality any meaning or form when she contemplates this potentiality? No. The creation of the appropriate form, and this from the standpoint of the perceiver, depends on two factors. First, it depends on the theme the artist seeks to communicate and the general form she creates for its communication. This means the perceiver is expected to contemplate the kind of meaning that is potential in the given potential form. Otherwise, her response to the artwork would be a digression, at least arbitrary. In a few art forms, for example, minimal art, the perceiver is given a wide range of freedom to interpret the meaning potential in the artistic dimension, but this is not the case in the majority of the works that make up the art world. The artwork may be profound or shallow. If it is profound, its profundity will enable the perceiver to envision and realize an emotionally and intellectually deep experience. The deeper she penetrates into the depth of the potential, the deeper her aesthetic experience will be. If the work happens to be shallow, the possibility of envisioning and realizing a deep experience will be limited. But in either case, the creative act will be focused. Second, the creation of the appropriate form in the course of aesthetic perception is determined by the kind of perceiver who seeks an aesthetic experience of the work. Here we can ask: To what extent is the perceiver skilled in assuming an aesthetic attitude, versatile in thinking eidetically,

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and cultivated culturally, historically, socially, politically, and scientifically? Is she a social or political ideologue? What if she is an aesthetic hypocrite? I raise these questions because the signification of the creative activity of perception, indeed its mere possibility, depends not only on the contemplation of the potential existence of the artistic dimension of the artwork but also on the ability of the perceiver to “ex-press,” i.e., press out, a measure of the meaning inherent in this dimension. “But,” my critic would now ask, “these two factors seem to be conditions; they do not constitute an explanation of the creative act in aesthetic perception. The question in need of an adequate answer is, in what sense is the apprehension of a content of a potential meaning not only envisioned in terms of a certain form, but also brought into being—real being?” The creative act is complex. It begins with the perception of the artwork as it is given by the artist. This kind of perception is distinguished by two factors: (a) it is eidetic and (b) it is an activity of reading the sensuous form the artist created with the purpose of spotting or identifying the significant form that is inherent in it and then contemplating it critically, analytically, and investigatively. The perception of this form marks the beginning of the aesthetic process. But the apprehension of this form is an apprehension of the kind of meaning that makes up its structure; it is, in effect and to some extent, a restructuring of the content of meaning the artist sought to communicate in the process of artistic creation. One may wonder why the perceiver chooses the form she does rather than another form. If I am to avoid any reference to a Jovian kind of power or to a mystical force, I can say the source of the choice is the aesthetic wisdom of the perceiver, of which I have already spoken. I tend to think the activity of perceiving the artwork aesthetically is not less creative than the activity of creating the work because, first, before its creation by the artist, the artwork does not exist, and, second, before its experience by the perceiver, the artwork does not exist. It comes into being by a creative act of imagination and it steps into reality by another act of creative imagination. It is a mistake to think the author is the sole author of the artwork; the perceiver is its co-author. Suppose an artist creates a great work of art and no one perceives it—would it exist as a work of art? The created work may exist somewhere on the face of the earth, but would it

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exist as art? Creative activity is the womb in which the artwork comes into being and from which it steps into the world of light.

The Artist as World Maker If the quintessential feature of the creative act is creation of meaning ex nihilo, creation of a human world, a world of meaning, is its shining glory. We see its luminous presence in the radiance of this sheen. Characterizing the human being as homo creator is not an accident mainly because creativity is an essential capacity of human nature. We do not exaggerate in saying it is a necessary condition not only of human survival, but also of human progress at the social and individual levels. It is, moreover, the spark that ignites the pursuit of any meaningful purpose, especially human happiness. The novel, no matter the area of human experience, populates the human world. The novel makes life interesting, worth living. A life that does not indulge in the creation of the novel, one that does not shine with meaning, is most of the time dull, and it is dull to live with. Do we not laugh when we hear a novel joke, when we see a novel spectacle, or when we watch a child discovering a novel method to trick her parents or to meet one of her desires? Do we not admire inventors, entrepreneurs, and engineers who create machines that make our lives more comfortable? Do we not applaud politicians who design policies that promote freedom, justice, social harmony, and prosperity? Do we not appreciate religious leaders who defy, dare, or rebel against their corrupt leadership, and who do not desist until transparency, efficiency, and truth are served? Do we not honor a teacher who devises novel ways to motivate her students to learn? The answer to these and many similar rhetorical questions is, I think, yes. It is not an overstatement to say that not only the cosmic process but also the process of human history is a creative advance into the future, nor is it an overstatement to add that the power, whether cosmic or human, that underlies this twofold advance is reason. This power sits at the base of the human mind and energizes all its activities. It is the power that enables us to transcend the present into the past and the future; to distinguish the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, the true, the false, and every other value and disvalue in our lives; and to deliberate and make choices. In short, it is the source of our humanity, the same power that Jove instilled in Cura’s clay

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that gave humanity being. Moreover, it is the power that enables us to shape our future in terms of our ideals and past experiences, and it is the power that enables us to see the possible and the real. Vision of the possible, of what does not exist but can exist, of what is better or worse, and of choosing the better is the secret that underlies the creative act. What would human life be like without this kind of vision? What would the state of agriculture, industry, architecture, transportation, computer technology, or education be like without this kind of vision? What would the state of science, technology, and philosophy be like without this kind of vision? Any serious advance in any sphere of human existence is a child of the creative impulse in human nature, and any advance in any area of human life is a child of reason. The capacity to envision the possible is one of the deepest mysteries of creativity. The Jove, the Zeus, the An, or the Namu of antiquity and their offspring, yes, those gods people worshipped in the past who continue to be worshipped in the present under the banner of genius, hero, or sage, were creations of reason and they were created in the image of human reason. They were creations of the possible and the vision of the possible. The artist is a creator of the possible, and she creates the possible from the bosom of the actual. How else can the possible be actual? How else can the possible be a transformative power of the actual? How else can we even grasp the nature and meaning of the actual? The soul of the artist is baptized with the water and sanctity of the actual and by the tender hands of the actual. The eyes of the artist see the actual in the fullness of its being, and she sees the possible that is immanent in it. No possible is a possibility if it does not arise from the womb of the actual, otherwise, it would be irrelevant to it. The essential quest of the artist is a quest for the possible, and the highest mode of the possible is the being of the truth—the truth of the actual. Her eyes were designed to seek and recognize this kind of truth. The realm of human values is a realm of the possible. This realm is a realm of ideals. Ideals arise from the bosom of the actual in order to become actual. They are visions of the possibility of the essence of the good, the true, and the beautiful. The eye, heart, and mind of the artist gravitate toward the realm of ideals, not to dwell among them, not to delight in their splendor, and not to run away from the actual, but to lure them to shine in the land of the actual, to illuminate it, to enable human beings to navigate through the

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sinuous labyrinth of human life with dignity. The medium in and through which she performs this miracle is the artwork. The artwork is not a mere representation of a slice of the actual, it is not an idle work of the imagination, and it is not an escape from the hardships of the actual. The artist is a lover of the actual, and therefore of the possible. She loves humanity in the fullness of its imperfections. She believes the good, the true, and the beautiful are viable possibilities. Like the philosopher and the scientist, she aims at the actual in human life, not to languish in it but to disclose its truth. This disclosure is a necessary condition, and we can add a step to a vision of the possible, the kind that lifts human life to a higher level of being. But how can she do this if she has not delved deep into the essence of human values? An investigative look into the artworks that have stood the test of time, the works that have been a fountain of insight, inspiration, courage, hope, and faith in the possibilities of the human spirit, will, I think, show that the artist is a world maker. The works she creates are worlds of meaning, not in the sense of creating meaningful worlds, although they are, but in the sense that their building blocks, or the stuff out of which they are built, are units of human meaning. If the realm of values is the realm of meaning, if meaning is realized value, it should follow that the substance of the artwork qua art is the fundamental value concepts, questions, and problems that constitute the fabric of human life. You may agree with me, dear reader, if I say the main questions that are dear to the human heart and mind are as follows: How do I live? How do I love? How do I die? I think you will also agree with me if I add that these questions arise from and revolve around the values of goodness, truth, and beauty and their derivatives, which I considered in the preceding chapters. Although we know true love in its different forms is almost rare, do we not delight in artworks that reveal its nobility, beauty, and loftiness? Do we not yearn for it in the secret chamber of our minds? Although we know that we are mortal and that we are passing moments in the cosmic process, do we not delight in artworks that reveal the nature of eternal happiness, life, and goodness? Although true justice remains an aspiration, a distant goal, do we not enjoy artworks that show the triumph of justice over injustice? Do we

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not cringe when we see justice aborted? Although we know that true friends are rare, do we not delight in artworks that show the glory of true friendship? There is no need for me to lengthen this list of rhetorical questions. Suffice it to say that the artist loves the world and values human life passionately in its pains and pleasures—the tragic and the comic, the austere and the tender, the divine and the earthly, the noble and the ignoble, in short, the good and the evil, the true and the false, and the beautiful and the ugly, yes, life as it is and as it can be. She wills, as Nietzsche recommended, that it recurs eternally in all its pleasures and pains. Why should we delve into the wails and glories of human life if it is not an object of love and desire, if it cannot be improved, and how can it be improved if we do not see it as it is, and how can we see it as it is if we do not comprehend it as it is, but how can we comprehend it as it is if we do not live and feel its pulse? The artwork is this life, this pulse! How can I stop my heart from beating, happily or sadly, or prevent these beats from trembling when I read Shakespeare’s King Lear, Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or Melville’s Moby Dick or when I contemplate Picasso’s Guernica or DaVinci’s Last Supper? As a world of meaning, the artwork is not a kind of mosaic or tapestry of a multitude of value questions or problems that constitute the basis of human life, for this is the task of the philosopher; it is a real world, a threedimensional world with a life of its own. When I move into the world of the artwork, I leave or take a break from the quotidian life. I dwell in the world that unfolds before my mind, heart, and soul. I become a participant in its action even though I am its creator. The enigma Mona feels in Mona Lisa becomes my enigma. Her bewilderment, fright, wonder, and desire to comprehend the infinite, the ultimate, or the meaning of existence becomes my bewilderment, fright, wonder, or desire to comprehend the infinite, the ultimate, and the meaning of existence. How can it be otherwise if I am creating the world I am contemplating? In this kind of experience, I live in the world of the painting and the world of the painting comes to life in me. I am not a one-dimensional being; I am a multidimensional being. Is the mind locked up in a spatiotemporal location? Does it have or know any limits?

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As an ideal, value is lifeless; it becomes a viable possibility by the creative act of the artist. The same value that exists as a potentiality in the significant form of the artwork acquires being and life by the creative act of the perceiver. The artist does not create a ready-made reality but the possibility of a ready-made reality. The Hamlet Shakespeare created is a possibility for a multitude of interpretations and enactments. The Mona Lisa DaVinci created is a possibility for a multitude of interpretations and experiences. In creating a significant form, the artist, unlike the scientist or the philosopher, creates a wealth of possible aesthetic experiences, of appreciation, of knowledge. But if the artist creates by designing a form that is significant in a certain way, a form that is a viable possibility for realization, we can, by the same logic, say that the aesthetic perceiver also creates by penetrating the depth of this form and transforming it into a living world in her experience. Every advance in the aesthetic experience is an advance of the creative process of perception. Does my aesthetic world not expand as I continue to listen to the musical piece, read the novel, or watch Hamlet unfold on the stage? Do I not advance in my perception from what my ears hear or see to what they signify by a creative act of the imagination? Again, do the dead words that fill the pages of Far from the Madding Crowd rise to the world of the living in my reading of the novel? How is this possible if it were not for the creative act of the perceiver? What kind of act is this creative act? I have already discussed the conditions under which it takes place. Now I can add that this act is essentially a dialogue between the perceiver and the artwork. But if it is dialogical in nature, then it is reasonable to characterize the artwork as a quasi-subject (see Dufrenne 1973). Just as the aesthetic perceiver becomes a subject when she undergoes an aesthetic experience, so the artwork becomes a quasisubject when it actuates this kind of experience. It is characterized as a quasi-subject because it is not a human being. First, the aesthetic perceiver is a cultural language, in the sense that she is, as I explained earlier, versatile in the language of the art form in which the artwork is created. She knows its artistic idioms, conventions, practices, and symbols. She experiences the work in terms of this language. She understands the meaning of its speech. The given form of the artwork is its speech; the signification of this language is its meaning. Second, the perceiver will not be able to penetrate the world

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if the work remains a closed book, that is, if it does not open itself to the perceiver or if it is not apprehensible. Although it exists in the womb of potentiality, its form has the power of seduction. Something about this form lures the perceiver to move into its depth. Do prospective lovers not speak more by the way they smile, move, and look at each other? Every gesture they make expresses the kind of tenderness that captivates the human heart. But the real dialogue between the artwork and the perceiver actually happens when the perceiver probes the depth of the work. The more she is skilled in the art of aesthetic perception, the deeper she can move into that depth and the more the artwork reveals its inner depth. But this is not possible if the perceiver is not willing to experience the artwork on its own terms, as I indicated in the first part of this chapter. Let me illustrate the insight that underlies my discussion of this chapter by an analysis of Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters.

An Aesthetic Experience: The Potato Eaters Please, dear reader, let us pay a short visit to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and let us proceed together to the room that houses The Potato Eaters. The potato eaters? What is so significant about such a theme? What kind of meaning can we discover in it, much less enjoy it or expect to learn something earth-shaking from it? Is there not a more challenging artwork or a more worthwhile theme? A secret ear, one that spies on the inner thoughts, feelings, and motivations of museum visitors, especially tourists, would at least once in a while hear remarks like the preceding ones. We should always remember that we live in the twenty-first century, in the age of affluence and hedonism, not in the age of human love or human fulfillment, and certainly not in the age in which the eyes of the philosopher, the scientist, the artist, and the ordinary person sit under the tree of immortal humanity, eat from its fruits, and derive their life inspiration from its intellectual and aesthetic abundance. We should, moreover, remember that a large number of tourists visit museums and art centers in general not because they are art lovers but mostly because they are cultural voyeurs. They do not wish to be saddened or discouraged by the sight of potato eaters.

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I shall not defend the choice of this painting in my attempt to illustrate what it means for an artwork to be a world of human meaning, for, as I shall presently point out, the theme of this painting, which may strike one as depressing or discouraging, is noble, uplifting, and profoundly human. However, regardless of whether it is saddening or uplifting, the human as such glitters with a charming warmth and, to my mind, divine warmth. As a part of the conditions of aesthetic perception I discussed in the first part of this chapter, we shall bracket out this secret ear and do our best to assume an aesthetic attitude and treat our encounter with this painting as an aesthetic adventure. Let us, then, begin by casting a focused, contemplative, investigative look at The Potato Eaters that hangs on the wall before us as a speechless, lifeless picture. We cannot even say it is a painting in the artistic sense of the word, for referring to it as a painting implies that it is a work of art, but we are not justified in referring to it as art because we have not yet perceived it as art. This kind of reference will certainly prejudice our attempt to have an aesthetic adventure with it. Accordingly, we should approach The Potato Eaters as art, not because we have experienced it as art but as a possible work of art or as a candidate for acquiring the status of art, since it is kept in a place where real artworks are preserved. Let us first state what ordinary perception reports when we begin our aesthetic perception of this painting. By “ordinary perception” I mean the way we are taught to see, know, and feel when we encounter the objects that make up the structure of our environment. For example, we learn how to identify rocks, rivers, dogs, or clouds; we also learn how to identify types of attitudes and actions and to decipher the meaning of many types of symbols. For example, I can say the object that is approaching us is a man. He is sad because the expression I perceive on his face is the kind of expression we normally characterize as sad. Someone dear to him must have died because he is wearing a black suit and a black tie, his eyes are droopy, and a frown wrinkles his forehead. This type of behavior normally signifies sadness over the death of a dear person. Broadly speaking, we learn how to identify the meaning of objects and events, regardless of whether they are social, physical, religious, political, or psychological, in the process of social and intellectual growth.

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Now, what do we perceive with our socially educated eyes when we contemplate The Potato Eaters? We see four adults and a young woman seated around a table, eating what seems to be a potato meal. A flood of bright light illuminates the room, with a special focus on the table and especially on the faces of the four adults. We do not see the face of the young person. But although the light is bright, it is counteracted by the blackness of its surroundings. Indeed, except for the lighted dining table the totality of the background is dark, dim. Even the faces and hands of the adults are pale brown. The adults seem to be two married couples. The meal they are having is modest, very modest. Though it is modest, they are drinking coffee and they seem to enjoy it. Given the plainness of the room and the meagerness of the meal, we can infer that these people are poor. I say “infer” because this is a generally acceptable inference. Next, not only do we see five people seated around a dining table, but we also see them alive at the human level; we see them in action. The woman on the right is pouring coffee in some cups; her husband is holding an empty cup, perhaps expecting a second helping. The woman on the left is helping herself to some food and at the same time gazing at her husband, who is helping himself to some food while gazing at the young woman, who must be their daughter. We cannot say much about the young woman because her front side is hidden from us. A camera would not report all the information I have just stated, e.g., the couples are husbands and wives, the meal is scanty, or the people are poor, only because they are ordinary and, in a way, socially educated inferences. But this description is given uncritically to ordinary perception. How do we move from this kind of perception to aesthetic perception? How do we even recognize that this painting is a work of art? Is there something about it that instigates this kind of move or recognition? Yes, because, in addition to disinterestedness, an essential element of assuming an aesthetic attitude is attention that is contemplative, analytical, and critical in character. We should also add versatility in reading artworks aesthetically. Accordingly, suppose we assume such an attitude. What about this painting prompts us to move from perceiving it as an ordinary object to perceiving it aesthetically? One possible factor that enables us to make this move is to focus our attention on some obvious features, for example, the gaze of the woman on

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the left that tenders her husband, who is contemplating their daughter with a gaze of parental love. Treating the look as a gaze is an interpretive act, and treating the gaze as romantic or parental is another interpretive act. This kind of look is meaning-full, a realization of romantic or familial love. It is a gaze of love—of devotion, affection, and unadulterated passion: is the daughter an embodiment, or objectification, of this kind of love? Notice, please—the moment I entertain the possibility of this interpretive contemplation, I begin to move deeper into the world of meaning inherent in this painting because these three figures cease to be silent, lifeless forms. They acquire life in the medium of my perception, and this life pulsates in my mind. I become one with the content of my perception. How can I experience the woman as a wife if it is not life in my mind? How can I feel her romantic gaze if it is not a pulse of life in my mind? Who quickened this life in my mind? I do not anymore see the painting the way I saw it a little while ago. I shift my attention to the quiet but dynamic dialogue of love that is going on between the man and the woman on the right side of the table. I say quiet but dynamic because the gaze of the man that embraces his wife lovingly eludes her attention. He loves her even when she is not aware of the way he feels about her. But, alas, is she not responding in kind? Is she not pouring coffee in four cups and about to fill a fifth cup—his cup? The apprehension of these flares of love between the two husbands and wives is illuminated, enlivened, by the brilliant light that falls upon them. This light is holy! Could it be that the love these couples are living is divine love? Could it be that the modest potato meal they are having is a sacramental meal and their gathering a human communion? Is it possible for people who are the beneficiaries of this kind of love to be unhappy, in the human sense of happiness? This very question forces itself into our mind at that moment of contemplation, especially because we see these flares of love in the midst of a dark surrounding. Every aspect of the room in which this ritual of love is taking place is pale, dark, practically somber. Nevertheless, the light that seems to bless them is a divine light. It is a generally recognized metaphor that the divine reveals itself in the medium of color—in pure light, as light! Were the rays of light that were flowing from the lamp blessing their love? How can that be?

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How can those people thrive on potatoes? The new aesthetic consciousness of this question and its moral implications open up a new dimension of the aesthetic being of the painting: poverty. Alas! What does it mean to live in poverty? Can I prevent myself from seeing this painting in a new way, from seeing its parts individually to seeing it as a whole? The people in this painting are potato eaters. Every one of the details of the painting reflects the essence of being a potato eater in all the aspects of their lives: What does it mean to be a potato eater? Tilling the field, planting the potatoes, fertilizing the soil, reaping the crop, moving it to the marketplace—these activities and much more in spite of the hardships inflicted upon them by the elements of nature and social life, not to mention their fragile, poor lives! Yes, all these and much more are reflected in the way the painting is conceived and executed. The extreme modesty of the life of these potato eaters is expressed in the aura the painting radiates. Their life is intertwined with the life of the potatoes they are growing and eating, to the extent that they live for them, from them, by them, and to the extent that they have become extensions of the potatoes they are growing. Please, focus your attention on the shapes of their noses, hands, knuckles, cheeks, eyes, and lips and also on the potatoes they are eating, their coffee cups, in short, every part of the painting. The painting oozes potato-ness! In one of his letters to his brother, when he was working on this painting, Van Gogh said: “I am plowing on my canvas the way they are plowing their fields.” This painting was not created on the basis of hearsay, fancy, or demand but on the basis of immersion in the life of the potato eaters. It grew out his feeling of their toil, values, beliefs, and reverence for life and the power of love that infused their hearts with the courage to be despite the overpowering adversities that usually faced farmers in their condition. “I have tried to bring out the idea,” he said in one of his letters, “that these people eating potatoes by the light of their lamp have dug the earth with the self-same hands they are putting into the dish.” The aesthetic world of The Potato Eaters expands in depth, exuberance, and possibilities of realizations as we move from one aesthetic consciousness to another. Not only the first perceptual move I made, which opened up the artistic dimension of the painting to my aesthetic perception, but also every succeeding perceptual move was a creative act because, as I argued earlier,

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it is a realization of a potential meaning inherent in its significant form. I would not be too much amiss if I said the world of meaning that unfolds before my mind as I proceed in my experience of this painting, which requires more than one viewing, is a world of human values: love, justice, humility, reverence for life, courage, friendship, truth, to mention just a few prominent values. It is the world of potato eaters—not only this group of potato eaters, but all the potato eaters in the world and all the poor peoples of the world. It is the world of people who suffer and endure under the crushing burden of injustice in the light of love. But this painting is a human world par excellence because we can reasonably view it as a microcosm of the larger world of the society that Van Gogh sought with all his moral, religious, emotional, and intellectual might to change for the better in and through his paintings. Is revealing the truth of an aspect of the human condition not a viable way of speaking out, of shouting loudly, that people should receive the true worth of their labor? Should the rich enjoy the comfort and luxuries of social life simply because they happen to be rich? Have they earned their riches from the sweat of their brow? How can the poor live in a society that does not honor justice and human dignity? What is the role of religion in this kind situation? Is it, as Karl Marx said, the opium of the people? Is human love a tranquilizer of the wretched soul? I do not wish to expand the range of these questions. I have raised them only to emphasize that the artwork is an inexhaustible fund of possible realizations of human meaning.

CHAPTER SEVEN CREATIVITY AND AESTHETIC JUDGMENT

Introduction If aesthetic qualities are the basis of artistic distinction, if these qualities in an artwork exist as significant form, i.e., if they exist as a potentiality in the way form is organized, if this form comes to life in the experience of the artwork, and if it unfolds as a world of meaning in this experience, then it should follow that this world is not only the aim of the creative act and the aesthetic perceiver, but should also be the aim of the art critic. Why? First, if the expression or communication of human meaning is not the aim of artistic creation, the artwork would lose its significance as fine art. It will, first, necessarily be reduced to a means of subjective, commercial, ideological, political, or some expedient means of communication; second, it will cease to be a medium of expressing human meaning; and, third, as “fine art”, it will be relegated to the class of “techne” or technology because artistic activity will be reduced to technical activity. Moreover, possession of aesthetic sense and assuming an aesthetic attitude would lose their importance as conditions of aesthetic perception and evaluation; indeed, the category of “the aesthetic” would be undermined. In short, the artwork as a work of fine art would become an artifact without a human soul. Second, artistic criticism, as we have known it during the past two centuries, will become superfluous activity, for the meaning of the artwork will not anymore be a symbolic expression or creation of a world of meaning but of communicating a somewhat clearly defined message. The perceiver will be able or will learn how to read the message of the artwork the way she reads, or learns, how to read conceptual or depictive works, for example, a poster, a story, or a family picture. If needed, critics will not be evaluators but interpreters the way philosophers, scientists, and theologians interpret

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difficult or technical texts. Third, if the communication of human meaning is not the aim and substance of artistic creation, there will not be a need for art teachers or appreciation primarily because the message the artwork communicates would be the work as an image. This statement is based on the generally accepted belief that “the message is in the image.” Accordingly, the task of the art teacher would be to teach her student the technique of transforming her medium, e. e., sound, bronze, or words into functional or interesting forms and the task of the art appreciation teacher would be to teach her student the language of the technique. But it is a generally recognized fact that the artwork is a creatively made object, that the aesthetic experience is an activity of creative construction, and that the content of the artwork as well as the aesthetic experience is human meaning. Accordingly, if the aesthetic experience is a creative construction, as my discussion in the last two chapters clearly shows, we should ask, what is this kind of experience? Or, what makes it creative? Again, can the art critic be a critic, that is, can she make an evaluative, critical judgment if her evaluation is not critical activity or if it is not creatively made? For example, how can I say that DaVinci’s Mona Lisa is enigmatic or Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters is religious if the judgment is not an articulation of the quality of enigma or the quality of religiosity that exists in the work. But how can I articulate such judgments if the articulation is not a creative activity of if it is not founded in this kind of activity? The proposition I shall discuss in this chapter is that, regardless of whether it is weak or strong, true or false, reasonable or unreasonable, naïve or sophisticated, aesthetic judgment is a creatively made judgment. The basis of judgments we make of the objects of ordinary experience is the qualities we perceive in them by means of ordinary perception or on the basis of the function they perform in our life. For example, when I say “This sheet of paper is white”, my judgment is based on the color I perceive in it by means of my eyes. The quality is given to my perception as an object of direct perception; it can be corroborated by repeated acts of perception or by other people. Here we assume that the whiteness of the paper is in it and exists in the paper as a quality we perceive by our eyes. But when I say that Mona Lisa is enigmatic my judgment is not directly based on a certain quality I perceive in the representation when I look at it with my eyes. This quality

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is not part of the painting yet belongs to it. It is not a part of the painting the way whiteness is a part of the paper. The question that necessarily arises is, how do, or can, I articulate, or arrive, at my judgment that the painting is enigmatic? We can argue, as I did in the preceding pages, that my judgment is based on my aesthetic experience of the painting. But, first, how does this kind of experience come into being? Second, how does my judgment articulate, or capture, the quality of enigma as belonging to it and not to my subjective feeling? It is important to emphasize that not only the experience of enigma in Mona Lisa is creatively constructed but also the judgment that it is enigmatic is also creatively articulated. I shall now proceed to a detailed analysis of this twofold proposition. I here assume that an understanding of the creative aspect of the aesthetic judgment presupposes an understanding of the creative aspect of the aesthetic experience.

Creative Aspect of the Aesthetic Experience What makes the aesthetic perception, or experience, of an artwork creative activity? What may justifiably enable us to say that this kind of perception is creative in character? I raise these questions because, as I have just indicated, it would be difficult if not impossible, to say that aesthetic judgment is creative articulation if it is not founded in an experience that is creatively constructed specially because the aesthetic dimension of the artwork is not given to our perception as a ready made reality, as I argued in detail in the last chapter. If the judgment asserts an aspect of good or bad, beautiful or tragic, cheerful or horrible in the art object, this very assertion should come into being in the process of constructing the aesthetic experience—in the active advance of this process. This process of construction is the birthplace of the aesthetic judgment.

Essential Features of the Aesthetic Experience Perception as Creative Activity. Like the scientific, philosophical, artistic, or religious experience, the aesthetic experience happens, or takes place, in the medium of sensuous or conceptual perception. For example, the scientist explores the nature of the atom, life, or light by an examination of the

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physical phenomenon of the atom, life, or light in the medium of observation of these and similar phenomena by means of the senses or their extensions such as microscopes, experiments, or computers. The philosopher explores the nature of mind by an examination of the anatomical structure of the brain, different accounts of introspection, observation of human behavior, or a study of the reports of subjective experiences of human beings. The religious person, or the mystic, contemplates God or the Infinite by reflecting on the mystery or existence of the universe or the cosmic process. The literary scholar examines the artistic dimension of the artwork by an examination of the conceptual structure within which this dimension inheres. We may have mental experiences that are philosophical, psychological, or scientific in moments of reverie or in conscious reflection on a conceptual framework or a dimension of nature. Moreover, we may have dreams, and we may construct stories, and yes, we undergo many types of experience, but the medium in which they happen or take place is either sensuous or mental perception. One can possibly argue, as Locke did, that the fundamental source of all and any content of the mind is some kind of sensuous perception primarily because “perception”, or “experience”, is essentially an intentional concept. Regardless of whether the object is given directly or the outcome of a reverie, a meditation, or reflection on a mental construct in any area of human life, concepts, ideas or mental states in general are always tethered to or can be traced to an original sensuous perception or experience. We are not born with a ready made ideas or images, mental dispositions, moods, or desires. Sensuous perception of an element or aspects of nature is the ultimate source of any content of the human mind. The medium in which this content is formed is generally called perception. Whether in science, philosophy, or ordinary life, perception is an event of encounter between a mind and an object in which the mind recognizes the object as a particular object and identifies it or in some way “cognizes” or for forms an idea of the objects or of certain features of its form. The object may be physical or mental. Physical objects are given to one or a combination of the five senses. Mental objects are intellectual or imaginary constructs, i.e., ideas, images, feelings, moods, dispositions, or emotions; but although they are mental, they are constructs; they come into being in

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the medium of mental perception. I feel the sadness, I apprehend the idea, and I reflect on the image. In these and similar cases the feeling, the idea, or the image exists to the mind as an object. For example, the feeling of sadness I am now having may have been caused by the death of a dear person or by a mishap; the idea of God, which is not a direct object of perception, is formed in the activity of reflecting on an aspect or dimension of the universe and human life; the scientific theory I analyze or criticize is the result of thoughtful examination of this or that sphere of human experience. Again, the elements that make up the world of a novel, which is an imaginary object, are derived from the life-experience of the author or reader. I will not be mistaken if I say that perception is the most primary mode of human experience or encounter with the physical or mental world and that it is the ultimate source of ideas, intuitions, insights, images, theories, reveries, in short, any type or form of human knowledge. What is the structure of perception? What are the dynamics of this structure? “This is a general, if not exceedingly ambitious question,” my critic would point out, “mainly because there are many types of experience each one of which is the basis of a type of perception; consequently, every type of perception is determined by the kind of object one experiences.” I agree. I have raised this question for two reasons, first, because the actual perception of any object, as I shall presently explain, is essentially creative and, second, because I plan to spotlight the conceptual and logical framework within which we can examine one type of object, namely, the artwork and the aesthetic object it embodies. The perception of this kind of object, which is two objects in one, involves both ordinary and aesthetic perception. The experience of the artwork begins with ordinary perception, because it is given as a physical or conceptual object and culminates in aesthetic perception in which the perceiver moves to the aesthetic dimension that exists as a potentiality in the artwork qua significant form. The proposition I shall now elucidate and defend is that this twofold type of perception is essentially creative activity. Ordinary Perception as Creative Activity. I begin my discussion with this kind of perception because it is the basic structure of the aesthetic experience, consequently, of the perceptual framework within which this experience takes place. Let us cast a look at an object of ordinary perception

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such as the blue book that sits on my desk as I am writing these words. You approach me and ask, “May I borrow this book?” “Of course, you may!” How did I understand this question? How did I know that this object is a book, much less my book, when I heard the question? In fact, I did not actually perceive the book with my eyes, hands, ears, nor did I try to taste or smell it. In short, I did not engage my mind with the book in a comprehensive sensuous experience of all the features which make it the object it is, and yet, I answered the question on the basis of the knowledge that it is a book and that it is my book. Alas! Did I actually perceive the book or that it is my book? No, still, I reacted to it as a book and as my book. Let me suggest that I know it is a book and I know it is my book because I possess in my mind an idea “book”, which applies to all the books in the world, and another idea that this book is mine, that is, the idea of book, which is general, corresponds to all the objects that possess the features this object possess. The general idea of book in my mind functions as a label, prompter, or token that signifies the general form or features of the sort of object that we usually call “book”. I can refer to the object or identify it as a book on the basis, or by means, of this idea qua prompter. We learn how to make this kind of reference or identification by experience. The meaning of the words that make up the fabric of ordinary language is determined by the way words are used. We begin to use words when we are young. For example, a mother says to her child, “This is apple”, “This is chair”, “This is shirt”, and so forth. In time the child learns to coordinate to signification of the words her mother had taught her to the objects that correspond to them. Neither the mother nor people in society identify the objects of their experience on the basis of direct perception of all the qualities that make up the essential form or structure of the object. It is one thing to identify, classify, or name these objects but something else to perceive them with the intention of exploring or comprehending the elements that make them up. Again, having an idea of “chair” in general is one thing but having an idea of this particular chair is something else. The general idea can never be an adequate substitute of the particular object which is an instantiation of the general idea. I may know what it means for an object to be a book, but the idea does not entail knowledge of this particular book.

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But even the general idea of book which exists in my mind, and which I learned how to use by experience, does not in principle correspond to the book that sits on my desk or any other book that exists in the world. Although I know it is a book because the idea of book that exists in my mind and refers to objects ordinarily called “book”, it does not inform me about its structure or essential form: there is no real correspondence between the two. The book is a spatiotemporal object; it occupies a certain space and endures for a stretch of time. The idea of the book is neither spatial nr temporal. The book is colored; the idea is not colored. The book is a sensuous object and I grasp it in a sensuous experience; the idea is a mental object and I grasp it in mental perception. I perceive book with my senses; I perceive the idea of the book with y mind. The book and the idea of the book belong to two different ontological realms which are generically different from each other. In short, there is not a conceptual or sensuous basis for any comparison between them. The idea, or meaning, which exists in a word as a “shell”, or “vehicle”, is a symbolic representation. As a symbol, the word signifies, the way all words signify, a type of meaning. The content of the word is meaning. This content is not in the symbol but signified by it. Symbols are constructed by human beings according to certain rules, conventions, and practices. They are constructed by artists, philosophers, scientists, and ordinary people in the context of human experience in the different societies of the word. Once formed and recognized, the mention, or thought, of a symbol conjures up in the mind of the hearer or reader the associated content of meaning which is usually indeterminate but becomes determinate by the mind who thinks it. For example, when you utter “mountain”, which is a symbolic representation, I immediately think a content of meaning that signifies the idea of mountain. Words, sentences, paragraphs, or texts do not copy, or mirror, real objects; they signify meanings we intuit, attribute, or associate with them. It is, however, important to point out that this intuition, attribution, or association is neither arbitrary nor accidental, nor is it subjective, but based on articulation of essential aspects or features of the object of knowledge or perception, although what people actually intuit is not most of the time complete, adequate, or true. Regardless of its kind, an idea is always a possibility for deeper, richer realizations. For example, what I understand

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when you utter “mountain” is different from what the geologist, the physicist, or the philosopher understands when you utter this word in their presence. Although ordinary people do not articulate, or construct, the words they use when they talk about the human and natural world but acquire them in the process of social growth, these words, which are used generally, are derived from direct experience of natural or mental objects. For example, there was a time when books did not exist. But when people felt a need to create them, and consequently when the phenomenon of book came into being, the idea of book came into being. Those who invented this type of object also constructed the idea “book” on the basis of the essential the features which make up the constitution of this type of object. Is this not how this idea came into being in ancient China, India, and the Near East? Again, consider the idea of the atom. This idea was first introduced by the ancient Greek philosopher, Democritus, in the fifth century, B.C. Like the philosophers who preceded him and those who were contemporary to him, he was in quest of the arche of the universe—the stuff out of which the universe was created-- but unlike them, he argued that the arche is atom, “atomos”. He arrived at this idea by reasoning that the objects which make up the scheme of nature are divisible into an infinite number of particles which he called atoms. These particles are very small, solid, simple, material, and indivisible. This idea was used as a principle of explanation in science and philosophy until the end of the nineteenth century. The contemporary theory of the atom notwithstanding, when ordinary people use the word atom, they generally mean an infinitely small, solid, indivisible, and indestructible particle. Democritus did not encounter, or discover, this idea floating in some mental space or roaming in the forest. He arrived at it by a thoughtful, reflective, and critical examination of physical objects as well as of the different theories of the arche. It is, I think, reasonable to say that the ideas people use in the sphere of science, philosophy, art, religion, and ordinary life are acquired; but although acquired, they are not formed, or articulated, in vacuum. On the contrary, they are articulated in the medium of some concrete experience of the human or natural world. Now we are in a position to focus our attention on the central question of this section: if the general ideas we use to make sentences, describe the

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world, or to express our emotions, feelings, desires, and our experiences in general are not isomorphic or homomorphic copies of the object to which they refer, in the sense that there is no structural correspondence between them and that they are symbolic representations of such objects, how do these ideas come into being? How are they formed? An idea is an intellectual construct. By what kind of process or under what conditions is this kind of construct formed? Though indirectly, I am raising the question of symbol-making. This is a very big and multifaceted question because there are many types of symbols some of which are natural and some are human. My focus in this context is on ordinary words as symbolic representations: how are these words constructed? I here assume that they, or most of them, are the basic ingredients of scientific, philosophical, and ordinary sentences. The proposition I shall now clarify and defend is that the process in which they come into being is creative in character. It is creative not only because this process involves the production of an idea ex nihilo but especially because it is originative in nature, in the sense that it consists of the generation of a valuable reality. A reasonable, and I think effective, way of answering our question is by advancing an analysis of the process in which an idea, one that did not exist, comes into being. Let us analyze the process by which Democritus could have arrived at the idea of the atom. I say “could have” only because we cannot have a conversation with Democritus about his actual line of reasoning in his endeavor to speculate on the nature of the arche or on the reasons that led him to state that the arche is atom, for he lived twenty-five hundred centuries ago. But although we cannot have such a conversation, we can construct it on the basis of the logical line reasoning that underlies it. This line is implicit in his worldview; it is indeed implicit in the very logic of materialism as a philosophical outlook. Accordingly, given the proposition that atom is the essence of the material objects that make up the structure of nature, that these objects exist in space as a receptacle, and that matter is solid, it should, I think, be reasonable to glean the kind of logic Democritus employed in arriving at the concept of the atom. This assumption is a basic tenet of all the materialist philosophical systems in the history of philosophy all of which derived their basic insight from Democritus’ conception of material objects.

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We should first recognize that Democritus was in quest of the arche of the universe, that is, the stuff out of which everything that exists is made. In this quest he assumed that, the way philosophers from Thales to Anaxagoras and Anaximander did, that this stuff is unitary: although natural objects are diverse in their form or constitution, they are made from one stuff. This assertion implies that whether it is water, air, fire, plant, rock, or animal flesh, their essence is one and the same. For example, if we hold that the arche is water, the way Thales did, then it would follow that the essence of the tree, the rock, or the animal flesh would be water. Similarly, if we hold, the way Democritus did, that the arche is atom, then it would follow that the essence of all material, or natural, objects would be would be atoms. According to Democritus, a material object is sensible, that is, sensuously perceivable object. This claim implies that an object that is not sensuously perceptible does not, and cannot, exist. In order for anything to exist, it must occupy a certain space and endure for a stretch of time, regardless of whether the stretch is one second, day, year, or millennium. Spatial extendedness is a necessary condition for existence. How can we say that X exists if we do not perceive it, and how can we perceive it if it does not occupy a spatial location and endures for some time, and how can it endure for some time if it is not solid? Thus, material objects are necessarily solid. Democritus assumed, as all subsequent materialists did, that solidity is a necessary condition for materiality. As I have just emphasized, an object that is not solid does not endure in time. But material objects endure in time, as ordinary experience shows, therefore, they must be solid. This is why he argued that atoms are indestructible. But if material objects are necessarily extended, solid, simple, and endure in time, it should follow that they are divisible. Divisibility is a perceptible feature of all material objects. In his quest for the stuff out of which all material objects are made, Democritus assumed that the stuff is material and constitutes the being of the material object in all its features and dimensions: everything about or in the object must be reducible to the stuff. But how do we verify that the object is made of the stuff? The most reasonable way to answer this question is to analyze the object into its minutest elements by dividing every divisible element until we reach a part that is not anymore divisible. Suppose we undertake this process. Physically, we can divide every perceptible element

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of any physical object until we reach the point at which we cannot divide the element any further only because it would be very small and so resists perception; but they must be divisible because they are real, solid, simple and extended. In this case refined instruments would be needed, but Democritus or any of the philosophers in his days did not have such instruments. It would seem that the process of division must proceed until we reach the basic stuff we are looking for. This implies that the process of division should stop when we reach that basal element, otherwise, the process of division would proceed to infinity, but it cannot proceed to infinity because if it proceeds to infinity, we shall not be able to perceive or verify the existence of the basic stuff out of which material objects are made. Thus, we should posit, Democritus reasoned, the existence of basic, original, simple, solid, infinitely small elements which he called atoms as the stuff out of which all material objects are made. One may wonder whether Democritus was justified in positing the existence of these atoms which no one until the twentieth century could in principle perceive. Some philosophers, even during the time of Democritus, argued that the jump from the existence of perceptible to non-perceptible elements is in need of justification, not to mention the generally accepted belief that we cannot assert the existence of an object we cannot perceive. Neither materialist philosophers nor scientists subscribe to Democritus’ conception of the nature matter. But the question under consideration is not the question of the validity or invalidity of his concept of matter but the process, which is cognitive par excellence, by which he articulated the word or idea atom. Let me first state that this idea is not simple but complex and the process by which it was articulated was equally complex. If it were simple, the question of creativity would not arise. But the idea and the process it entails are complex. Thus, we should focus our attention on the dynamics of this process, on the components that constitute the idea. What are these components? We can briefly say that they are Physical elements; they are extended, solid, simplicity, indestructible indivisible, enduring. It is not perceptible to our five senses, and yet, it exists. Now, how did Democritus form or could have formed this concept of the atom? By what intellectual process did he arrive at it? This idea did not exist

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before he formed it. Nevertheless, “atom” is a significant word in science, philosophy, and ordinary life. The medium in which the idea was formed is sense perception. Accordingly, the components of the idea of the atom must be derived from perception. For example, material objects are extended, solid at least to some extent as in plants and animals, and enduring. They are divisible because they are extended, solid, and enduring and because we can actually divide them into smaller components. Accordingly, they must be divisible into infinitesimals because we can, as much as possible, divide every perceivable element into smaller parts. But if every perceptible part is divisible, then it should follow that every newly formed, smaller must necessarily be divisible. However, according to Democritus, the process cannot, as we say earlier, proceed to infinity, for otherwise we shall not be able to reach the basic stuff of matter, which is impossible-- thus the palpability of positing infinitesimals that are extended, solid, simple, divisible, and enduring. The question we should now consider more concretely is, how did Democritus construct out of these elements the idea of the atom? First, these features were recognizable by all the philosophers of the day as well as by those who reflected on the nature of the arche in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C. What prompted, suggested, or inspired Democritus to be the one to “see” these features the way he did? What intrigues the curious mind is that the construction of these features into an idea, or word, is not logical not only because the jump from the existence of the perceptible to the existence of an imperceptible reality that underlies them is not justifiable, at least not finally justifiable, but especially because the relation between them is not logically necessary, otherwise, the idea of the atom would not have eluded the perception of the other philosophers as well as ordinary people. Implied in this assertion is that Democritus’ idea of the atom is not an intellectual construction. If it were, it would have been logically constructed, but it was not. It must be an imaginative construction, a construction performed by an act of the imagination. It takes a higher, deeper, contemplative act of reflection to synthesize the features Democritus attributed to the atom and unified them into a whole. This act, I submit, is a creative act par excellence. It is neither whimsical, arbitrary, nor subjective; on the contrary, it is based on a purely contemplative vision of

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what it means for material objects to be divisible into infinitely small particles. This vision is essentially significant; it functioned as a principle of explanation in philosophy and science for twenty-five centuries. Even the illustrious physicist, Newton, endorsed it. But my critic would now object: “one may accept your argument that the construction of Democritus’ idea of the atom is a creative act of the imagination, but it fails to show that the idea of the blue book that sits on your desk is creatively formed because the features which make up the idea of the book are logically consistent. The movement from the features to the construction of the idea is a logical movement. Every feature we attribute to it can be perceived as an element in the object.” I admit the validity of this critical comment, but it does not necessarily imply that the idea of the book is not creatively formed. The basis of this response is not only the relations which exists between the features of the book but also the activity of perceiving the book. This activity, I propose, is basically creative in nature. If, as I argued earlier, the ideas we have of the ordinary objects of experience are not isomorphic reproductions of the structure of these objects, or if they do not mirror them, but are symbolic representations of the objects, the question we should spotlight is, how are these symbolic representations constructed? If I am to heed the most of the recent findings of the theory of perception in psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and philosophy, I can say that the perception of physical objects is an unusually complex activity, or process. The elements formed in this activity are diverse, manifold, and variable in the way they originate and the way they act on the sense that perceives and then articulates them into a symbolic representation. The question that neither philosophers nor scientists have been able to answer is how these elements that are physical, manifold, multitudinous, and psychological in character are transformed into a non-physical, nonpsychological ideas or contents of meaning. This epistemological jump remains a mystery that still eludes the contemporary theory of perception. I refer to this aspect of sensuous perception only to emphasize that the formation of an idea, which involves intellectual activity, is not an activity of copying the basic structure or features of the perceptual object of perception but an activity of symbol-making, which usually takes place according to established linguistic and epistemological rules and

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conventions. An investigative look at the mosaic of the theories that punctuate the history of science and philosophy will, I think, readily show that the articulation of the ideas that make up the structure of these theories is more an act of imagination than an act of the intellect. If such ideas were simply copies of the objects of knowledge in science and philosophy, this history would not be a stream of inadequate theories constantly succeeded by more adequate ones. Did Einstein perceive with his senses, or even instruments, that light rays do not travels in a straight line and that they bend when they encounter a mass or a field of energy? How did Plato arrive at his idea of the Good, Spinoza at his idea of Nature, Schopenhauer at his idea of Will, or Whitehead at his idea of Creativity but by an act of imaginative leap from reflection on the scheme of nature? Did these and many similar ideas not function as meaningful principles of explanation, at least to some extent, and frequently agreeably? The point which deserves serious attention is that the articulation of the essential ideas people use in science, philosophy, ordinary life are not derived from the activity of sensuous or mental perception but from the creative interaction or vision of the reality that underlies them. Perception of the Artwork as Creative Activity. Whether mental or physical, the given artwork is composed of two strata, physical or conceptual, and aesthetic—physical as in the plastic and temporal arts, e.g., painting sculpture, theater, or photography and conceptual, as in literature. The perception of the physical stratum, i.e., The Potato Eaters, which hangs on the wall of a room in the Van Gogh Museum, Valse Triste, which I shall hear in the concert hall this evening, or Far From the Madding Crowd, which I read last month qua story before working on this manuscript, is similar in kind to the ordinary objects to the perception of ordinary objects that populate the human and natural world. The perception refers to the given work and the judgment I make of it is based on this perception. But the perception of the work qua art is a generically different type of perception primarily because, as I argued in the preceding chapters, I perceive it as art, that is, because the artistic dimension of the work is not given to sense perception as a ready made reality the way the sensuous features are given or the way the literary work is given as a conceptual

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structure to our intellect. I here assume that when I read the novel as a story, the object I read is a conceptual structure. We usually characterize the perception of the artwork qua art as aesthetic mainly because the artistic dimension of the work comes to life in the medium of perceiving this dimension aesthetically. Whether small or large, simple or complex, significant or mediocre, this dimension comes to life in the medium of this kind of perception. The object I perceive in this perception is a quasi-object and the world that unfolds in it is a quasi-world, as I argued in the last chapter. In this kind of perception, we make a transition from the sensuous to the aesthetic, from the potential to the actual, from the material to the spiritual, from the ordinary world to the spiritual world. How does this world come into being? Well, it comes into being in the process of perceiving it. It comes into being and ceases to exist in this process. But how can we perceive it if it is not given as a ready made reality? Or if it exists in the womb of the artwork as a potentiality? If it comes into being in the process of perception, and it does because it cannot come into being anywhere else, then I submit that aesthetic perception is essentially an activity of aesthetic creation—of creating the aesthetic object as a world of meaning. I shall now turn my attention to the analysis of this kind of perception. I shall assume that this kind of process is creative for two main reasons, first, it is an activity of creating an object ex nihilo and, second, the perceiver creates this reality according to her vision of the potentiality she realizes qua potentiality. In this activity she forms, or re-forms, what the artist created according to her understanding, interpretation, or intuition of the meaning that constitutes the structure of the potentiality. The creative act grows in depth, the more she penetrates the depth of this structure. Put differently, the dimension of the world of the aesthetic object expands, the more the perception expands. Now, what is the structure within which this world expands in depth? If aesthetic perception is perception of the artistic dimension of the artwork, if this dimension comes to life as a world of meaning, then it should follow that an analysis of the creative aspect of artistic perception should be explored in the activity of having an aesthetic experience primarily because the experience emerges in the very domain of perceiving it. Aesthetic perception is inconceivable outside the domain of the aesthetic experience,

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and the aesthetic experience is also inconceivable outside the domain of perception. Some aestheticians have used the two terms, aesthetic perception and aesthetic experience, interchangeably, but they are distinct. Perception is an activity of observing, of becoming aware of, of “taking hold”, of a certain object or a feature or an aspect of an object; put differently, it is the activity in which the object occupies the sphere of our attention during a stretch of time. Although objects sometimes act on our senses, or on our mind, involuntarily and may leave certain impressions on them, scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic and much of the time ordinary perception, is purposeful, intentional. It is always directed at a certain object. This directedness is usually focused. This is why it consists of “taking hold” of the object, and this is why it is essentially dynamic. This feature is expressed clearly in the definition of “perception” in Webster New College Dictionary: “to grasp mentally, take note of; observe.” But the object, or any of its features, is not given to our senses atomistically, discretely, or in total isolation but enmeshed in a web internal and external relations. We cannot perceive it apart from this interrelatedness. Perceiving a color, e.g., a shade of red, on a plain sheet of paper may affect us in a certain way, but perceiving the same shade as a part of an oriental rug, a bouquet of flowers, or a in a painting by Matisse will certainly affect us in a completely different way. Perceiving the eyes on the face of a human being may affect us as beautiful, but perceiving the same eyes plucked out of their sockets bleeding on the ground will most likely affect us horrible, frightful, or repulsive. The point I should here emphasize is that the perception of an object is a dynamic activity; it is always interactive, responsive, constructive, and apprehending in character. We do not perceive the object simply as an object, for all the objects of our perception are concrete and with a particular identity. Mere objects do not exist. Real objects are always this or that type of object, and this or that particular identity. Thus, implied in the assertion that “perception” signifies “taking note” or hold of an object is an implicit recognition of the identity of the object. This recognition may or may not be correct, but despite this possibility, which is frequent in all the areas of experience, we respond to real objects as particular identities.

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However, this recognition does not entail a knowledge of the object because first, as I explained a little earlier, I may know that this blue object that sits on my desk is a book, I do not necessarily know the essential qualities that constitute its essence as this particular book because I can identify it as a book in terms of the general idea of book which exists in my mind—which means I perceive my idea of the book which corresponds to the appearance of the book in the book. This idea applies to all the books that exist anywhere in the world without reference to any one as this or that particular book. Knowledge of this book, as knowledge of any other particular book, is derived from a particular activity of perception based on, first, a direct comprehension of its features and, more concretely, and the relations that exists between them, second, the process in which it was constructed, which is complex, and, third, the function the book performs. I cannot be said to know what it means for this blue object to be a book, in the cognitive sense of “know”, until I move from the level of ordinary perception to the level of investigative, constructive activity. In the case of aesthetic perception, the movement from the first to the second level marks the beginning of the creation of the aesthetic object as a world of meaning. However, the focus in this movement is not the sensuous or conceptual medium in which the artistic dimension of the artwork inheres as a potentiality but on the perception of this very potentiality. When I contemplate Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters the activity of contemplation is not on the colors and lines that make up the structure of the representation, viz., the material stuff out of which the painting was made or out of which the representation is weaved, but on the signification of this representation. How can I move from the perception of this given representation to the perception of the signification implicit in it? If the signification inheres in it, then the representation must necessarily be an element of the aesthetic perception of the painting. How can this movement take place? Let us recall the analysis I presented of this painting in the last chapter. In this new visit I am interested in explaining the dynamics of aesthetic perception as creative activity. Suppose I know that this painting is an artwork, at least because it hangs on the wall of an art museum or because an art critic declared that it is an artistic masterpiece, and suppose I approach this painting with the intention of experiencing it as work of art. First, I

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encounter it as a physical object the way I encounter the wall on which it hangs. What I encounter is a picture of five people sitting around a table eating what seems to be a potato meal. The picture is a rich mosaic of details, but let us focus our attention on the five people-- People, or identifiable human beings? How do I perceive them as human beings, as living beings endowed with humanity, a feature that does not literally exist in the given representation? How do I perceive them as human being? Again, how do I make a transition from their being patches of colors to their being human beings? By the association of the idea of human being that is already in my mind and the representation on the canvas? But I do not see general human beings on the canvas; I see particular individual human beings sitting, eating potatoes, drinking coffee, and communicating. Next, I do not see them as semblances but as living human beings, and I see them as interacting with each other in a certain way. How can I experience life and humanity in a representation? I do not attempt to move into the room and greet them or offer them a bag of fruits or a cooked chicken. I do not hear what they are saying to each other, and yet, I see them as human beings the way I see human beings in real life. Moreover, I do not react to them the way I react to rocks, plants, or animals, nor do I react to them as illusions; on the contrary, I understand what they are doing and I feel their presence as human beings. This understanding and feeling is not general but concrete. We cannot say that in this mode of perception I merely interpret the representation of the figures I perceive as human beings the way a philosopher, a scientist, or a biologist interprets a theory, a concept, or a form, the way an archaeologist interprets certain symbols, or the way a theologian interprets an ancient religious text because I undergo a living experience of the human dimension of the figures I perceive. How can I make a move from the conceptual or perceptual to the affective, living experience of this dimension? Is it possible to make this kind of move accidentally or arbitrarily? No. it is a creative act of the imagination. What are the dynamics of this act? Next, I do not perceive the human figures in the painting atomistically, as if the painting suddenly rose into being from the realm of non-being. I see them as a part of a world—the human world. I see human beings-in-action; I see them eating, drinking, gazing at each other, communicating. I see a slice of human life. This is a main reason why my perception of these figures generated in me an experience of concrete

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feelings, of human presence. The capacity of the artist to endow this interaction with life is what enabled me to move from perceiving this whole scene passively to perceiving it dynamically. How can I perceive it as humanity-in-action if this capacity does not come to life in the activity of perception and if I cannot, by a creative act of the imagination, awaken in the scene the life potential in it? But my ability to see the figures as human beings in The Potato Eaters as a living presence is not restricted to the perception of the five figures as human beings-in-action, it includes the other elements of the painting. As an example, consider the light that illuminates the room and especially the space that unites the five human beings as a human community around the dining table. Alas! How can I see a sheet of white color, no matter its varying shades, as light? If I do not see this color as light, I cannot see the represented figures as human beings—can I? I see them as human beings because I see the white color as light. And how can I see it as light? But how can I see it as light if I do not see it as light-in-action, that is, dynamically? I see it in action not only because I interpret the concentration of the white color as light emanating from the lamp that hangs from the ceiling of the room as lamp and as light emanating from it because the. How can I move from perceiving a sheet of white color as light if the color is not formed in a way that entices my ability to penetrate the wall of the potentiality inherent in the representation as a whole, of perceiving it as light, and how can I perform this act if I cannot rise, by a creative act of imagination, to the content of this potentiality? We should not forget that the idea of the light I have in my mind does not isomorphically corresponds to the light I perceive in the painting. Such an idea is not formed by a strike of magic or some magical spirit. It is based on and arises from and in the process of perception I have of the painting. My judgment that the white color I perceive in this representation is light is a symbolic articulation that takes place in the activity of perceiving the representation creatively. I began my discussion of the creative aspect of the aesthetic perception of The Potato Eaters with the preceding analysis of the perception of the basic elements we immediately perceive when we cast a look at it only to stress that the creative perception of these elements, i.e., experiencing them as living realities, are realizations of the artistic dimension inherent in the

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painting as a significant form, because their unity is the mental framework within which the aesthetic object unfolds qua world of meaning. We can now proceed to an analysis of the creative aspect of the perceptual process in which the aesthetic object unfolds as a world of meaning. The focus in this analysis is on the way this world comes to life by an act of the creative the creative vision of the perceiver: how does the perceiver knock the door of this potentiality? More concretely, how does sensuous perception open up this world, which I have already discussed? I shall not anymore refer to the five people in the painting as ‘people’ but as human beings because I began the aesthetic perception of the painting by perceiving them as living human beings, not merely as painted figures. I underscore this point because they are depicted as human beings-in-action and because I perceive them as acting in a certain way. What they do is an expression of human of human meaning, and what they do is a complex human event, or presence. The emergence of this world does not take place suddenly but as a gradual process. It is a constructive, accumulative process. It may begin with the perception of any main element of the painting by one or a combination of the five senses—the light, the food, the noses, the hands, the eyes, the faces, or the general atmosphere of the painting. This depends on the aesthetic interest, knowledge, aesthetic refinement of the perceiver. What matters is that something about the painting prompts or lures the perceiver to a ray of the meaning that may seep out, shine, or intrigue her or to dwell on or contemplate this “something”. This provocative, and frequently delicious, type of contemplation may be viewed as a first act that opens up the world of meaning that lurks in the painting as a significant form. I here assume that the perceiver is endowed with a discriminating aesthetic sense, that she assumes an aesthetic attitude in her attempt to perceive the painting aesthetically, and that she is skilled in the ways of aesthetic perception. Some artworks are readily welcoming, inviting, friendly, seductive, others are not. For example, while Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, Bizet’s Carmen, or Picasso’s Guernica are welcoming, inviting, listening to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, or Rembrandt’s The Sacrifice of Isaac is not as welcoming or inviting.

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Although the most obvious, captivating aspect of The Potato Eaters is the fourfold dialogue taking place between the five human beings under the light of that lamp, for the painting comes to life in the dialogue that takes place under that light of that lamp, I shall begin with the bright light emanating from the lamp because it is the source of the light that enlivens their faces and along with it the dialogue they are having. Indeed, the whole painting comes to life under this light. Every aspect of the painting directs our attention involuntarily toward the light. Whether in religious, mystical, artistic, or ordinary life, light is attractive, seductive, desirable. Does it have this effect on us because it is the source of everything that exists? Do we not sink into the abyss of darkness when light dims or vanishes? But we feel attracted to this lamp because it is radiant and because radiance is by its very essence attractive. The city comes to life when the sun rises from behind the horizon, the room comes to life when we turn on the light, the universe comes into being when God says, “Let the be light!” Do we not come to life when we open our eyes to the world in the morning? When I cast a contemplative look at The Potato Eaters, when my eyes are attracted to the bright light emanating from the lamp in the middle of the room, and when I see this light as light and necessarily as a source of being, I recognize by an intuitive act of the imagination that I am embarking on an aesthetic adventure. Let me hasten to remark that moving from seeing the white color on the canvas as color to seeing it as light, and then seeing the lamp as a source, and as a source of the light, is a constructive activity because I do not see the white color as light and as a source with my ordinary eyes but with my mind in its capacity as imagination. The imagination is the power by which I move from ordinary to aesthetic perception, from perceiving the sensuous qualities to perceiving them as meaning. The community of the five human beings in dialogue as they are eating heir potato dinner, and especially their radiant faces, come to life in the medium of the light that streams from the lamp. Perceiving their faces as human faces, as faces oozing human life and expression, and perceiving these faces-in-dialogue transforms the dinner into a living human event or encounter. I move from my position as spectator to being a participant in this human ritual. How can it be otherwise if I am the author of this

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experience? Again, how can I remain a spectator if the painting ceases to be a painting and if it becomes a living human occasion? But my perception, which moves from the level of ordinary to aesthetic perception, does not stop at perceiving these human beings in the mode of a living dialogue; it also dwells on the multitude of symbolic significations in the representation. Whether it is their knuckles, their eyes, noses, heads, lips, or whether it is the objects that make up the furniture of the room, not to mention the objects that cover the dining table—yes, every aspect of these human beings suggests “potato-ness”. We should not be surprised at this statement if we recognize that they till the ground, plant the potatoes, nurture them, reap them, prepare them for the market, and eat them as the source of their life. But Goodness! How can one thrive on potatoes? As I discussed in the last chapter, the more I penetrate the aesthetic depth of this painting, the more the world of meaning potential in its significant form expands in depth and richness. The activity involved in this penetration is constructive, creative in character.

Aesthetic Judgment as Creative Activity Characterizing aesthetic, critical, or evaluative Judgment as creative may seem to some critics, even to some aestheticians, a bit strange, perhaps misleading, if not honorific mainly because judgment in general, and this includes to aesthetic judgment, is viewed as an act. This view is based on the assumption that a judgment is an assertion, and as an assertion, it asserts a quality, a feature, or aspect of a physical or mental phenomenon, e.g., the president of the U.S. is wis, this apple is sweet, or God is just. In these and similar cases I state positively that wisdom is a quality of the president of the U.S., sweetness is a quality of the apple, and Justice is a quality of God. Accordingly, if I examine these objects, analytically and critically, I should perceive these qualities in these objects. This assertion implies that it is inconceivable to perceive them without perceiving these qualities; that is, these qualities belong to the objects. The assertion may be true or false. This is a secondary, or different, concern. Many of the assertions we make in science, philosophy, art, religion, and ordinary life are mistaken or false; but regardless of whether a judgment is true or false, an assertion is a claim. It

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states that a certain quality exists in, or belongs to, a certain object. This view of the idea of judgment implies that an objectively given object is the basis of the judgment. By its very nature, a judgment refers to an object. We cannot judge or qualify nothing. But not all objects are given to our sensuous or mental experience directly but indirectly, e.g., the idea of God or mind or the universe. We can construct the idea of God or mind on the basis of serious contemplation of the structure of the world or the different types of experience that are uniquely human and we can construct the idea of universe on the basis of our contemplation. We can then assert that a certain quality or aspect of the universe or human experience belongs to them. We make similar assertions on the objects or ordinary experience.For example, I may discover as I am driving on the highway a dead body lying in the middle of the road. I notice that blood is flowing from a hole in the left side of the chest. I look around to see the cause of the death of the person. There is not a moving object around or in the vicinity of the body. In a situation like this I infer the existence of a human being as the killer of this dead person. My inference is probable but logical. I here assume that the dead person was shot by a human being and that the shooter used a gun to kill the dead person. Such inference and the assertion about the basis of the inference are prevalent in the different areas of human experience. Now, how can we make assertions of objects we do not directly perceive? I would think that we should make them on the basis of a careful, analytical, and rational examination of the situation in which we make the assertion of the object, otherwise, the assertion would not really be of the object. The type of assertion I should spotlight in this context is, how do we move from an examination of the details of the situation in which I perceive the object to the assertion I make of the object? Suppose I say that the killer of the person I saw bleeding on the road is a criminal. This assertion is an attribution of the quality of criminality to the killer. How do we make this kind of assertion? How do we move from reflection on the details of the situation to the articulation of my assertion or judgment that he is a criminal? I readily aver that judgment is an assertion of a quality, feature, or aspect of an object. The kind of judgment we make depends on the kind of object we experience and how we experience it. The object may be simple or complex, microscopic or macroscopic, living or non-living, mental of physical, and it

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may be given to our perceptual faculty directly or indirectly, as the example of the dead human being we encounter on the road shows. The judgment is always a particular assertion of a quality of the object. But the question which calls for an urgent answer is, how do we articulate or arrive at the judgment? Or, by what kind of activity do we make it? I raise this question because the artwork qua art is not only given indirectly the way the killer of the human being on the road is given but also because it is given as a potentiality inherent in the form of the work. The way we arrive at the identity of the killer of the human being is generically different from the way we arrive at the aesthetic object as a world of meaning. Again, the killer is to some extent a ready made object; the aesthetic object is not given as a ready made object but, as I argued in the preceding chapters and in this chapter, a constructed object. Unlike the killer who is treated as a possible object of perception, the aesthetic object is given as an object of subjective perception and direct examination. The process of construction begins with the perception of the representation of The Potato Eaters on canvas and culminates in the unfolding of the final phase of the world of meaning potential in in the representation as a significant form. We should not either neglect or underestimate the creative, constructive activity of perception of the representation as a sensuous content. The aesthetic perception of this content is a necessary condition for penetrating the wall of the aesthetic object qua potentiality. How can I perceive the given form, as a form, that embodies a world of meaning? And how can I perceive this form as significant if the lines and colors that make up the representation are not signifying lines and colors? They must reveal their expressive, signifying power in order for the perceiver to move into the aesthetic depth they signify. Now if the aesthetic object comes to life I the medium of constructive, creative activity, put differently, if the aesthetic object is a potential world of meaning, and if it exists as a dynamic reality, next, if this reality is the basis of the aesthetic judgment, i.e., of any aesthetic assertion I make of the artwork, it should follow that the judgment I make must necessarily be a creatively formed assertion. Let me elucidate this fundamental proposition in some detail.

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As an assertion, the judgment is essentially cognitive. For example, when I say that this book is blue, I communicate an idea which you may or may not know about, viz., the book is blue, for it can be red or yellow, or, when I say John Doe is wise, I communicate an idea that John Doe is wise, which you may or may not know about John Doe. Similarly, when I say that God does not exist or that this play is painfully tragic, I communicate an idea which you may or may not know. A judgement that does not communicate some new idea is either redundant or sense-less. All cognitive statements are synthetic in character; they are composed of two basic ideas, the idea that functions as a subject and the idea that functions as a predicate, which qualifies the subject in a certain way. The “is” that connects the two ideas is not merely grammatical, although it performs a grammatical function, it is an ontological “is”, an “is” of being, of existence or non-existence. But the question we should raise is, how can we make or construct such judgments? That is, by what activity do we synthesize the idea of “John Doe” and the idea of “wise” or “wisdom”? Can I undertake this activity if I do not grasp the meaning of both ideas? But, how do I grasp their meaning? But then, can I have an idea of John Doe if I do not experience, philosophically or scientifically, John Doe as a particular individual or as a unique human being? Arriving at an idea of John Doe as a particular individual is a multidimensional, rich, and complex activity, one that requires expertise, time and effort. Even an educated human being cannot know himself or herself adequately. I cannot be said to have a genuine idea of John Doe if this idea is not the result of a creative construction of the multitude of the details, I form in the process of experiencing him. The judgment that John Doe is wise is based on this kind of experience. How many a book is written about the character of Socrates, Shakespeare, or Van Gogh? Accordingly, when I assert that John Doe is wise my assertion should originate as a creative activity from the bosom of this kind of experience. In what sense, how does it originate? It does not originate from one act of perception, observation, or encounter but as an articulation of a quality or a feature, or an aspect from the intuition of the multitude details of his moral, psychological, intellectual, social, religious, and professional dimensions of his being and life. When I say “articulate” I mean “form”, “construct”, “synthesize”, or extrapolate the judgment in terms of the richness of my

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intuition of John Doe as a living being. As a quality, wisdom is not given directly as an element of this rich content but is implicit in it; every element of this content points to, and in some cases directly signifies, or implies, this quality. This is a main reason why we can say that this quality exists as a potentiality in the unity of this content. But who is the author of the judgment that John Doe is wise? I, the one who encountered and experienced this human being, and no one else. A different person is qualified to make this judgement only if she encounters and experiences him the way I did. She may experience him as a foolish human being, but we cannot make this kind of judgment unless we experience him and feel the quality of folly in John Doe. But the judgment of the who have not experienced John Doe as wise but say that he is wise is borrowed, or quoted, judgment. Much of the knowledge in ordinary, scientific, and philosophical discourses is based on what we read or hear. This kind of knowledge is not tested and it is not authoritative. I may understand what you mean when you say that John Doe is wise, or what it means for someone to be wise, but I do not actually know that John Doe is wise. My understanding of the judgment is one thing and making a judgment on the basis of a genuine experience of the object experienced is something else. This kind of understanding is based on the knowledge of the general meaning of the ideas that make up the judgment but not on an a real experienced of the object. The act of knowledge is an intellectual experience in which we intuit, or see, the meaning of the judgment immanent in the richness of the experience of the object of the judgment. The judgment one makes implies, and is founded in, this experience. When I listen to a lecturer discussing the concept of human evil, I can say that she is an insightful human being; other listeners may make a different judgment. But the judgment I make, which is personal and subjective, is founded in my grasp of the multitude of the ideas, arguments, explanations, anecdotes lecturer makes. The way I comprehend this multitude may be different from the way other listeners comprehend it. Whether it is mine or theirs, the judgment I make is an articulation of the meaning implicit in the lecture as a whole. This articulation is creative activity par excellence.

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Now, suppose I state “The Potato Eaters is a religious painting”. “A religious painting?” My critic might wonder with an obvious surprise in her eyes, if not disbelief in her mind. “Nothing indicates, represents, or shows the quality of religiosity in this painting.” At first look, this doubtful reaction may seem correct or justifiable because in fact there is not an obvious religious feature or aspect in the representation. All we see with the ordinary eyes is a group of people eating their dinner in a distinctively bright light and in a small room. But a careful aesthetic analysis of the painting, one based on a comprehensive perception of the world of meaning that unfolds in the aesthetic experience, will reveal that this painting is religious, as I discussed in the last chapter. Let me highlight the basic elements of that discussion. First, the two men and women are husbands and wives. The young person, who remains incognito to us because all we see is her back, belongs to them. Second, the two married couples are in love with each other. Their love is genuine, warm. Third, these two families are poor. This feature radiates from the way they look, the way they are dressed, the kind of room they are in, which is almost vacant, the kind of meal they are eating, which is mainly potato, and the kind of drink they are having, which is coffee rather than wine. Fourth, the gathering of these human beings around the dining room table is not merely an assembly but a human community; they are united by the bond of community by the meal they are eating, the way they interact with each other, and specially the way they gaze at each other. Fifth, the bright light emanating from the lamp that hangs over their heads can, as I explained earlier, be perceived as divine light. This light reveals the innocence, modesty, love, and contentment which the faces of both husbands and wives reveal. It transforms the meal they are eating into a communion in the religious sense of the word. Love is the essence of religiosity. One is not religious because she goes to church, reads the Bible, or because she is baptized. The defining feature of religiosity is love of the other human being—love in action. The divine dwells in this kind of love. The more we contemplate The Potato Eaters, the more we discern, the more we feel, the more we relish the aura of the love that flows softly from the living humanity of these human beings.

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Now, when I say that The Potato Eaters is a religious painting, I assert the quality of religiosity in the painting. The “is” in this assertion is an ontological “is” because it asserts the existence of religiosity as a quality in the painting. Cognitively, I cannot make this assertion if I do not experience this quality in the painting. Accordingly, “The Potato Eaters is a religious painting” is based on my experience of the quality of religiosity in the painting. My assertion may be true or false, adequate or inadequate inasmuch as my perception of the quality in the painting is true or false, adequate or inadequate. But how do I arrive at this assertion, or judgment? What is the structure of this judgment? What does it signify? It signifies what “religiosity” signifies, or means. What is the content of this signification? Well, this content is derived by intuition from the wealth of the details I experience in the process of perceiving The Potato Eaters aesthetically. As I explained in my aesthetic analysis of this painting, no one is privy to this experience but me, therefore, I am its sole author. If I happen to be an art critic or an art appreciation teacher, you may trust my judgment and treat the painting as a religious work of art. In this case, you are not the author of the judgment. This claim is based on the assumption that, no matter its kind, the experience of the human individual is not transferrable; thus, the judgments art critics make on artworks may be treated as recommendations, as invitations to experience this or that work of art in a certain way and to enjoy a type of human meaning when you experience them. “But”, my critic would now ask, “If the aesthetic experience is private, if this experience is not transferrable, and if it cannot be examined publicly the way we examine physical objects, does it necessarily follow that the judgments art critics make are subjective?” No. If the judgment is correctly made on the basis of the existence of a quality of the artwork, it should in principle be objective. But from the fact that it is objective, it does not follow that it is final primarily because aesthetic qualities are inexhaustible possibilities for deeper, richer, more profundo realizations, as the history of art criticism and the aesthetic experiences of ordinary people shows. It should be clear from my preceding discussion in its entirety that if the aesthetic experience is a constructive, creative process, if the aesthetic qualities which make up the aesthetic world of the artwork emerge in this

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process, if the aesthetic judgment is based on the world of meaning that emerges in this process, if the judgment is an articulation of the meaning inherent in this process, it should follow that the aesthetic judgment we make of the artwork must necessarily be constructive, creative activity.

CHAPTER EIGHT CREATIVITY AND TEACHING ART: CAN CREATIVITY BE TAUGHT?

Introduction The music teacher says to her student, “You have played the score quite well, better than any student I have so far taught, and I commend you for this significant achievement. But, my dear, where is the music? I did not either hear or feel it in the piece you played. I am looking for the music.” “But I have played the piece the way you taught me to play it, and the piece I played is music. Even my mother enjoyed the way I played it.” “No, what you have played is the written composition. You have translated the written composition into an audible string of sounds—wonderful! But you have not lured out the music from the string of sounds you have played.” “What do you mean when you speak of “music”? Haven’t I played the piece the way you taught me to play it?” “By ‘music’ I mean that which makes the composition you play beautiful, magical, transportive, uplifting, that which lifts you from where you are now sitting to a different world, one that makes you joy-ful, one that sends an arrow of thrill into your heart, one that make you a different person. The piece you played is supposed to lift your audience from the ground to this kind of world.” “What do you mean by ‘that’? Isn’t it in the written composition? I was true to the written composition.” “You were true to the composition, but the element, the ‘that’, to which I referred is not in the composition, not as a written part of it but awaits your

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magical fingers to entice it, to seduce it, to let it shine through the way you play the piece exactly the way the Pied Piper charmed the rats with the music which drove them and magically drove them into the river; but, unlike the Pied Piper, I want you to fly your audience on the wings of your music to the highest heaven of transport, of delight.” This conversation can in principle take place between any art teacher and her student in any area of the fine arts—painting, dance, theater, sculpture, photography, architecture, or film. As we saw in the preceding chapters, the “that” which the teacher demanded or expected from her student, and which the student desired to now, is not given to them or to anyone as a ready made reality, one we can point to, identify, or define. But if it is not given as a ready made reality, if it cannot be defined, at least not directly or readily, if it is the feature which makes any artifact “art”, can “art” be taught? If it can be enjoyed, and if it can be created, it should be possible to teach it. But how? How can that which is not given as an object of experience or perception be taught? In what follows, I shall explain the conditions under which it can be taught. I say “conditions” because it is obvious that it is not given directly as an object of experience. We know the nature of the artistic as such by feeling it. Whether it is the creator, the aesthetic perceiver, or the aspiring art student, this experience is the context in which the artist creates, the student learns how to be an artist, and the aesthetic perceiver enjoys the artwork.

What Does the Art Teacher Teach? I shall begin my discussion of this question with a reminder of the analysis presented in chapter three, in which I elucidated the following propositions. First, the substance of the artwork as art is human meaning. Second, the presence of aesthetic qualities in an artifact is what makes it art and that the unity of these qualities constitutes the artistic dimension of the artwork. The realm of meaning is the realm of human values, viz., truth, beauty, and goodness and their derivatives. These values exist in the human world as ideals each one of which is an infinite possibility of realizations. These values are not a part of the realm of nature but exist as general ideas, i.e., as schemas or plans for possible realization. Third, human meaning is the ultimate object of artistic creation, appreciation, and evaluation; consequently,

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it is the content, or datum, of the process of artistic creation, aesthetic experience, and artistic evaluation. The ontological locus of meaning is human experience—the experience of the artist in the process of artistic creation, the perceiver in the process of aesthetic perception, and arti criticism in the process of evaluating the artwork, otherwise, it exists as a value, that is, as a possibility for realization in the process of experience. Accordingly, the quest for and the realization of human meaning entails two modes of existence, the first is possible and the second is actual. As possible, it exists as a value, as an ideal, but as actual, it exists as realized value, i.e., meaning. If value is actual, it cannot exist as meaning, for it already exists, since meaning is always realized value in an experience. For example, the chair on which I am now sitting is actual; but it was a possibility for creation before it was created. Before it became actual, it existed in the mind of a carpenter as an idea, or as a schema, and as a schema, it existed as an indeterminate kind of existence because the carpenter could have created in one of an unusually large number of possible chairs. But once she chooses one possibility, the idea qua schema becomes determinate, i.e., a particular actuality. However, the question which merits special emphasis here is, how did the idea, which is general or indeterminate, come into being? We can say that, given the anatomy of the human body, especially the anatomical structure of the legs, and given the fact that under certain conditions the human body gets tired and so needs rest, one way of meeting this need is to envision a device, or form, that enables human beings to rest when they are tired. The possibility of how, or in what form, such form can be envisioned is open-ended. The carpenter who created the first chair must have envisioned the basic structure of the class of objects we call “chair”. But a general idea is by its very nature indeterminate; as such, it is a possibility for the “envisionment” of numberless forms of “chair”. For example, if I happen to be a king, I may ask the carpenter of the court to create a chair appropriate for the position of king. In this case, the carpenter will envision a truly regal chair, but regardless of how exquisite, how magnificent it might be, or the kind of chair he creates, its structure would be an instantiation of the essential structure of the first or original chair. A chair may be simple or complex, wooden or golden, plain or ornamented, but in general, regardless of its given form, , having the basic structure of

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“chair” is a necessary condition for calling it a chair. Similarly, as far as we know, the first house human beings created, whether in China, India, the Middle East, or Africa, was composed of a basic structure. This structure was composed of four pillars and a cover generating a roof, four corners, four walls, and an enclosure. Regardless of the nature or material of the walls or roof, whether they are simple or complex or whether the roof is supported by columns, mud, stones, or wood, concrete, all houses are made, or modelled, according to the original structure. This structure is the essence of the general idea of “house”. We may view this structure as a kind of skeleton that may be constructed in a multitude of ways or forms. Now we can ask, what is the content, subject, or datum of the creative process in art? This content is composed of two basic elements, (a) material medium, for example, words, canvas, marble, action, motion, or image and (b) a design, according to which the medium is formed in a certain way. I say “in a certain way” for two reasons, first, because the design is general, formless, therefore, it can be formed in numberless ways or patterns and, second, because the process of forming it is purposeful. In the case of the chair, the carpenter designs her chair for the purpose of creating an object that enables the human body to rest when it is tired or when the person who sits on it can perform a certain function, e.g., conversation. This is a practical, utilitarian function. But in the case of creating an artwork, the purpose is not practical or utilitarian, although it can be as in architecture or therapeutic music: the artist forms her medium in order to communicate a content, or a slice, of human meaning, or a dimension of human values— beauty, truth, or goodness such as elegance, knowledge of the moon, or love. As we saw before, she does not create this slice merely as an object of intuition or comprehension qua concept but as a content to be felt and enjoyed for its own sake, that is, because it is enjoyable. Do I expect a material gain when I listen to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or contemplate Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters? The ultimate purpose of the artist is to enable you to see, to feel, to enjoy, and to understand the slice of meaning she communicates. Her primary objective is to form her medium in a way that communicates this slice of meaning in the most appropriate form. The activity of choosing the kind of form that commutates this content is usually called “embodiment”, expression”, or “symbolic representation”, in which

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the artist transfers the content of meaning, which exists in her imagination as a possibility for formation, and by a Jovian strike of creativity, to the form she chooses, thereby enabling this form to speak, communicate, or express the intended content of meaning. This account is based on the assumption that the form she chooses is not arbitrary, whimsical, or in some way subjective but, although Jovian, it is made according to generally accepted rules, conventions, and practices in the realm of the artform in which the artwork is being created. As I discussed in detail in chapter four, meaning is what the artist aims at in the process of artistic creation, the aesthetic perceiver in the process of aesthetic perception, the art critic in the process artistic evaluation, and the art teacher in the process of teaching her student how to be an artist—but how? Can the music teacher teach her student how to create if she is not an appreciator, a creator of music, or at least if she does not know what it means to create musical works, or, to show her student how to move from transforming the written composition to music and the music to musical creation—to art? Yes, under the following conditions. First, will to create. The student should have a will to create a meaningful reality ex nihilo. Without a serious desire, or will, learning how to create, how to become a Jove, may seem difficult, if not impossible. You can take the horse to the river, but you cannot make it drink. Will is a power that does not only incline a person to pursue, and hopefully to realize an aim, it also enables her to focus her attention on the pursuit of this aim. It summons, and we can say enliven, the affective and intellectual powers of the mind in the pursuit of the aim. Parents as well as teachers know that generating interest and desire in the student is a necessary condition for growing intellectually, emotionally, socially, and politically. When the student listens to her teacher explain a point, verbally or by means of demonstration, she does not only hear or see with her ordinary eyes, hears with her ordinary ears, or touches the piano keys with her ordinary fingers but also with her eidetic eyes, ears, and fingers. She understands what she sees, hears, and touches eidetically. How else can she understand what it means for a certain reality to be human meaning or to experience meaning qua meaning? The capacity to sense, think, and understand eidetically is a condition for artistic creation. This condition for learning artistic creation implies possession of

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aesthetic sense. It is difficult to think eidetically or to identify a content of human meaning if one does not possess aesthetic sense. Again, aesthetic sense is the medium in which meaning comes to life; it is also the medium in which it is apprehended and formed. I here assume that aesthetic sense is not passive, the way sensation is, but an active, intuitive, cognitive comprehending power by which we know an object or an event by means of feeling it, by intuiting its essence in the activity of feeling it. This fact, which was recognized in the early decades of the nineteenth century, is now generally endorsed by the majority of psychologists, epistemologists, and aestheticians. A mind endowed with aesthetic sense is an essentially discriminating mind. Second, Technical Versatility. An essential condition for being a Jove or creation of meaning ex nihilo is technical versatility. By “technical versatility” I mean the capacity to know the ways and means of the medium- the possibilities of its formation, the different qualities it possesses, and its capacity to produce new or different qualities. Moreover, it is important to point out that artistic creation is dialogical activity—a dialogue between the artist and her medium. Both artist and medium should be friendly, trustful, and open to each other. The medium should inform the artist of its formation possibilities and the artist should be willing and able to realize these possibilities. The medium should submit itself to the artist and the artist should submit her will to the promise of these possibilities. The primary aim of the artist is to subjugate the medium to her will and the primary aim of the medium is to reveal its formation possibilities in the fullness of their effectiveness, of their glory, to the artist. How many an hour does the painter spend on mixing her paint in order to discover the appropriate shade of color that is most appropriate for the expression of a certain feeling, emotion, mood, or for creating a particular state of mind; how many an hour does the poet or novelist spend in choosing the right words that are most appropriate for creating the image she intends to create; or how many an hour does the sculptor spend on carving or polishing her slab of marble to form the statue she intends to create? But the ability to subjugate the medium to the artist’s will is only a necessary but not sufficient condition for creating ex nihilo because one may sculpt a most interesting statue, paint

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a most impressive picture, compose a most interesting musical composition, write a most titillating story that is not a work of art. Third, imaginative Depth. By “imaginative Depth” I understand a cultivated imagination, one that is able to contemplate the realm of human values, or human meaning, and delve deep into its possibilities of realization. It is impossible, no matter how much one is skilled in artistic composition or construction, to seduce the material or conceptual medium to embody a slice of meaning if one does not comprehend the essence of the meaning or value she contemplates and if the medium is not amenable to the embodiment of the meaning. Put differently, the artist cannot embody a slice of meaning if she does not master the language of the medium she is forming and the language of the meaning she intends to communicate. Was Van Gogh able to endow The Potato Eaters with the power to speak, or express, the values of love, justice, perseverance, modesty, and human dignity if he did not live the depth of these values? How could he embody them in the painting if these values did not flow from his soul into the form he was trying to create? Again, consider Wuthering Heights. The primary aim of this novel is to reveal the depth, power, glory, magic, tragedy, agony, joy, and beauty of love. How did Emily Bronte achieve this aim? What are the dynamics of achieving it? The axis of a novel is its plot, which is a chain of events, and the characters that are its pillars. The question Bronte faced was, what kind of plot and characters, or what kind of form, was capable of embodying this kind of love in the fulness of its richness, depth, and glory? I need not comment on Bronte’s success in achieving her aim, for the popularity of the novel during the past two centuries, not to mention the large number of studies devoted to it and the movies that depicted it should be enough to verify the validity of this judgment. The point which merits a special emphasis is that an adequate knowledge of a human value or a slice of meaning is a necessary condition for artistic creation. “But then,” my critic would now wonder, “by what Jovian strike of the imagination can the student learn how to transmit the depth of the meaning she feels and seeks to communicate to the form she creates? This form, which includes the material dimension of the artwork, for it is an integral part of the form and in terms of which she chooses the form, is the bearer of the meaning. But it does not bear, or embody, the meaning, the way I carry

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my knapsack on my back or the way this white sheet of paper embodies the white color but by signifying it, as you explained in chapter four. The form functions as a symbol; as such, it is a kind of language. The different types of symbols in the different realms of art and the different areas of human experience are different languages. We learn them the way we learn ordinary language in the process of social growth. When a number or lexical words are organized in a certain way an idea or an image is constructed. The special way of the organization of the words, which usually happens according to established rules, convention, and practices, functions as one or more symbolic representation that expresses certain meaning. Let me illustrate this point by an example. After he had a fight with his younger brother, my oldest sone, who was eight years old, sat on the edge of his bed where the fight took place. I slowly approached him with a large sheet of drawing paper in my hand. He was still fuming because he believed that his brother started the fight. His lips were pursed and his eyes were afire with anger. He was silent but reluctantly. I sat next to him and hugged him warmly. He understood the meaning of my hug. In itself, the hug is a physical movement of my arms and the whole of my body. But my son translated this movement as an expression of love and support. Although he did not think the way an artist, an art critic, or a philosopher thinks, he interpreted the hug as an expression of love and support and he felt my love and support for him. The signification of my hug was not literally in the hug, but he felt it as I was hugging him. Nevertheless, he felt the love and support in the hug. In this and myriad similar cases we learn the language of the different symbols or symbolic formations, regardless of whether they are human or natural, as we grow in a particular social context. But not all symbolic formations are given the way a hug is given. Some of them are creations, and some of these are artistic in nature. These creations are individual and to a reasonable extent unique, and yet, they function as languages the way other established symbols function as languages, that is, as modes of expression of human meaning. I have already explained how the artist embodies human meaning in a material or conceptual medium.

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Now suppose instead of hugging my son when I sat next to him, I handed him the sheet of drawing paper I was holding in my hand, and asked him to draw how he felt at that moment, and suppose, being his father, he complied with my request. Moreover, suppose within a s stretch of time he produced a dense jumble of colors and lines most of which are broken and twisted. And suppose he said when he was finished, “This is how I feel, Dad!” This drawing is creation ex nihilo. It did not exist before my son drew it. To him it was meaningful. His experience in creating and appreciating it is subjective. We can say that this is how he felt under the ax of injustice. As a work, of art the drawing is silly, uninteresting, in short, aesthetically shallow. The question is not whether it is a mediocre or profound work of art but whether it is art or whether it meets the conditions of the features which make an artifact art. I doubt whether other people would find my son’s drawing meaningful. However, if some people happen to find it meaningful, it would be a candidate for inclusion in the class of art. But instead of a jumble of broken and twisted lines, my son drew a bomb exploding in mid-air, and suppose he painted this exploding bomb with wild red color and titled it “Anger”. This work is not anymore subjective but an objective representation because it is based on an analogy. My son has transformed the image of the bomb into a symbolic representation, one based on an analogy. As a strong emotion, anger is a kind of eruption, or burst, that shakes the being of the person who feels it. An exploding bomb is to some extent similar to the burst of strong anger. The difference between them is that the first is physical and the second is psychological. The exploding bomb suggests the kind of emotion he was experiencing during and after his fight with his brother, viz. what it means to fume when you are under the ax of injustice. When, as a father, I look at the representation I can see what my son tried to say by drawing this kind of representation. I do not only feel with him, I also understand how he feels. Yes, there are no established rules, or a method, for teaching art, not only because producing artworks is not a skill, not only because it is not merely creation ex nihilo, but primarily because it is an activity of creating and communicating human meaning ex nihilo and because this meaning exists as a potentiality in the artwork. I do not feel the presence of the carpenter of

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the chair on which I am now sitting. The chair is silent when I sit on it or when I move it from place to place. But I experience a special kind of feeling when I contemplate The Potato Eaters. Now, let us grant that the art student meets the conditions I discussed in the preceding section, which is not an easy task, let us also grant that her imagination swells with a rich, warm slice of human meaning that dances in her mind as a cluster of value questions. Although with some hesitation, but with a strong, educated hunch, I propose that a student, or any artist, who meets the conditions I have just discussed, one endowed with aesthetic sense, a feeling for form, an urge to communicate an important slice of feeling, and skill in mastering her medium will have the Jovian power to seduce a possible kind of form that expresses the meaning she seeks to communicate adequately, luminously. When I was an art appreciation and later on a literature student most of my teachers distinguished between the form and content of the artwork. Even aestheticians such as Bell treated the form of the artwork as the principle of artistic distinction, as if form can be conceived or can exist apart from the content. But the more I immersed myself in the realms of literature and the other arts, the more I discerned that this distinction is abstract and misleading because it is impossible to conceive the form of any artwork apart from its content; the medium is always an integral part of its form, and it is always immanent in the work. The meaning of the work is immanent in its form, but the form emerges from the bosom of the intuitive comprehension of the meaning. Its emergence is, as I explained earlier, dialogical activity--between the aesthetic perceiver and the artwork. It cannot be copied, borrowed, or given as a gift. Unfortunately, imitation litters the world of art. Is it an accident that only the masterpieces stand the test of time? The art teacher can show the student the creative aspects of the artwork by pointing to this or that feature or to this or that detail or technique but she cannot either explain or show her how the artist created this unique form primarily the creative act is a subjective act: subjective experience is neither transferrable nor observable publicly! What happens in the mind of the artist

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during the creative process eludes even the artist most of the time. Accordingly, we should always remember that the ontic locus of creativity is the mind of the artist. Even if the teacher is an artist, and frequently she is, or even if she knows what it means to create a work of art, she cannot enter the mind of her student and guide its activity in a certain way My critic who has been following my line of reasoning critically but also sympathetically would now wonder: “If the art teacher cannot teach her student how to be creative, at least not directly, in what sense is she an art teacher? Is she an art teacher? If she is, what role can she play in teaching her student to be an artist?” Let me at once state that she is an art teacher and the method she uses, or should use, is preparing her student to be an artist is the Socratic method of dialogue: raising, inspiring, or provoking questions in the mind of her student and expecting an answer to them is the essence of this method; its aim is to enable the student to think from within—from her mind, heart, and will. However, the focus of dialogue in teaching art is not philosophical or intellectual cultivation or enlightenment, although this is the general content or medium of the dialogue, but the cultivation of the skill of dialogue (a) between the student and her inner self and (b) the student and her medium. The aim of the first is selfunderstanding—that is, understanding her inner feelings, emotions, intellectual powers, desires, beliefs, and especially values as a domain of human meaning: what does it mean to comprehend value or a slice of meaning? How can one identify it, grasp it, and express it? What is the scope and possibility of realizing a value? For example, a content of meaning can be expressed conceptually, musically, theatrically, or sculpturally. How can one penetrate the fabric of this content or form in a certain way? But how can the student undertake this kind of activity if she is not committed to an artistic way of life and if she does not know herself as a human individual? Moreover, she should know that the expression of meaning is not simply an expression of her own feeling but that her feeling is the medium of expressing a slice of human meaning, the kind that matters to all human beings. But no one can envision or pursue this aim if she does not immerse her mind in human knowledge, if she does not baptize her soul and heart with the kind of experiences that are essential to human beings: how can she create if she does not know what it means to love, to give freely? Is the act

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of creation not an act of giving of one’s true self to human beings freely? Show me an artist who is not a lover of humanity, who does not create from a feeling of love, and I show you a mediocre artist! Mediocre art populates the offices of doctors, bankers, lawyers, government offices, hospitals, and the homes of the affluent section of society. I am not opposed to this kind of art; on the contrary, I applaud it, for it is an important expression of the human spirit and because it serves a serious educational purpose, not to mention the fact that it delights many a human soul. But I would hope that students should aim at the kind art that enlivens the deepest and noblest yearning in human beings for truth, justice, freedom, love, beauty, friendship, and divinity, for the finest vision of the human as such. The second aim of the process of teaching art is to cultivate the skill of dialogue between the student and her medium. The central question the artist faces in the activity of artistic creation, which I have already emphasized, is subjugating the medium to her artistic will. How can this mass of words, this assortment of paints, this slab of marble, this story, these sounds, these images be organized into a form that embodies a slice of meaning she intends to communicate? For example, how can this mass of words in the artist’s mind in the heat of the creative act be transformed into a work such as Hamlet, The Idiot, or Wuthering Heights? How can this slab of marble be transformed into a David, a Winged Victory, or a Venus? But how can the artist create such a work if she does not possess adequate knowledge of the depth of meaning she intends to communicate and the different possibilities of formation inherent in her medium? This kind of knowledge, I submit, is possible in an informed eidetic dialogue between the artist and herself, on the one hand, and her medium, on the other. I tend to think that a teacher becomes an art teacher, a teacher of artistic creation, by virtue of cultivating in her student a skill in conducting this kind of dialogue. It is like taking a stubborn horse, one who is reluctant to drink the water of the river, and seducing him to drink the way Jove seduced spiritus to dwell in the clay Cura fashioned into a human body. Students differ, and sometimes radically, in their affective, intellectual, and perceptual endowments and in their scholastic, social, and cultural levels of developments. They can be a Mozart, a Shakespeare, a Rembrandt, or a Durer, or they can be ordinary or mediocre artists—the logic of the activity

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in which they become creators is one and the same. The power of creation surges into the domain of the human imagination when the teacher creates the conditions for the creative power to surge, burst, or shine in the heat of the creative act.

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beardsley, Monroe. 1981. Aesthetics. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. Budd, Malcom. 2001. “The Pure Judgment of Taste as an Aesthetic reflective Judgment,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 41(3), 247-260. Bell, Clive. 1958. Art. New York: Capricorn Books. Burke, Edmund. 1998. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. New York: Penguin. Collingwood, Robin George. 1938 The Principles of Art. Oxfordshire, UK: Oxford University Press. Dewey, John. 1958. Art as Experience. New York: Capricorn Books. Davidson, Donald. 1970, “Mental Events,” in Experience and Theory, Lawrence Foster and J.W. Swenson (eds). Amherst: University Of Massachusetts Press. Dufrenne, Mikel. 1973. Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Focillon, Henri. 1942. The Life of Forms. Translated by C. B. Hogan and G. Kybles. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gaut, Berys, and Dominic MacIver Lopes. 2000. The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. New York: Routledge. Goldblatt, David, and Lee B. Brown. 2005. Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Goldman, Alan. 1995. Aesthetic Value. Boulder: Westview Gombridge, Ernst H. 1959. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Londion: Phaidan. Hanslick, Eduard. 1986. On The Musically Beautiful, tr. By Henry Payzant. Indianapolis: Hackett. Hagberg, Gary. 2021. Reflection in Fictional World. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Heidegger, Martin. 1993. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings: Martin Heidegger. Translated by John Sallis and Albert Hofstadter. New York: Routledge.

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Hume, David. 1985. “On the Standard of Taste”. In Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary. Indianapolis: Liberty. Hospers, Jon. 1964. Meaning and Truth. Hamden, CT: Archon Books. Hospers, Jon. 1954. “The Concept of Artistic Expression,” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series 55: 313–44. Hospers, Jon. 1982. Understanding the Arts. New York: Prentice Hall. Kant, Immanuel. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Tr. By Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ingarden, Roman. 1973. The Literary Work of Art. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Kennick, William. 1978. Art and Philosophy. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kierman, Matthew. 2006. Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell. Kreitman, Norman. 2020. The Roots of Metaphor: A Multidisciplinary Study in Aesthetics. New York: Routledge. Levine, Donald. 2006. Powers of the Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Margolis, Joseph. 1978. Philosophy Looks at the Arts. Temple University Press. McCloskey, Mary. 1987. Kant’s Aesthetics. New York: SUNY University Press. Mitias, Michael. 1978. “The Institutional Theory of Artistic Creativity.” British Journal of Aesthetics 18, no. 4(Autumn): 330–41. Mitias, Michael. 1987. What Makes an Experience Aesthetic? Amsterdam: Rodopi (Brill). Mitias, Michael, ed. 1987. The Possibility of Aesthetic Experience. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Mitias, Michael. 1988. Aesthetic Qualities and Aesthetic Experience. Amsterdam: Rodopi (Brill). Mitias, Michael. 1982. “Aesthetics and Artistic Creation,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 16, no. 1 (Spring): 99–103. Mitrovic, Branko. 2013. Visuality for Architects: Architectural Creativity and Modern Theories of Perception and Imagination. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Mothersil, Mary. 1984. Beauty Restored. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Neil, Alex, and Aaron Ridley. 1995. The Philosophy of Art. New York: McGraw Hill. Piitro, Jane. 2004. Understanding Creativity. Scottsdale, AZ: Potential Press. Sibley, Frank. 1959. “Aesthetic Concepts.” Philosophical Review, 68 (4), 421-450. Sternberg, Robert. 1999. Handbook of Creativity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Tolstoy, Leo. 1995. What is Art? Translated by Aylmer Maude. New York: Penguin. Tomas, Vincent. 1964. “Creativity in Art,” in Creativity in the Arts, Lars Agaard-Morgensen, ed. Culture and Art, New York: AtlanticHeights1976. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Young, James. 2001. Art and Knowledge. London: Routledge. Weitz, Morris. 1970. Problems in Aesthetics. New York: Macmillan. Weitz, Morris. 1956. “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15, no. 1 (September): 27–35. Zangwill, Nick. 2007. Aesthetic Creation. Oxfordshire, UK: Oxford University Press. Zangwill. 2001. The Metaphysics of Beauty. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.