September  2002

Let us glance in turn at a philosophical statement of the theory. Benedetto Croce urges that “expression is free inspiration.” ¹  At the particular point at which this proposition is presented, Croce has been analyzing “the search for the end of art,” a search which he calls “ridiculous”: “To fix an end,” he writes, “is to choose… A selection among impressions and sensations implies that these are already expressions… To choose is to will: to will this and not to will that: and this and that must be before us, expressed.  Practice follows, it does not precede theory; expression is free inspiration.”

Croce undercuts the problem of free will or determinism of will for aesthetic by asserting the logical priority of intuition to willing, by identifying intuition, art, and expression, and by associating practice and making.  The artist is freed in this fashion both from the limitations placed upon his will and from those imposed upon art by the requirements of material and end.  In a sense, too, the artist is freed from causal laws, because Croce never considers them to be applicable at the level of expression, but only within the scope of technique and its products.  It is no less significant that on this hypothesis the artist is not only free but is free to produce novelty, i.e., to intuit individuals and to express “the individual expressive fact”. ²  The mode of attack permits Croce to hold that “individual expressive facts are so many individuals, not one of which is interchangeable with another,” ³ to assert that every impression or “content differs from every other content,” ⁴ and to regard “expression” as “a species which cannot function in its turn as a genus.” ⁵

I believe that Croce is in error, for reasons which I have put forward elsewhere, and with consequences to which I shall later allude.  It is true, nonetheless, that he has delineated a fundamental problem for aesthetic in his efforts to provide freedom for the artist and to establish the work of art’s unique individuality.  What has occurred is clear: Croce has inherited the spirit of a tradition but has doffed the trappings.  The poet-philosopher, Coleridge, in suggesting that poetry is “a dim analogue to creation,” is wholly within that tradition.  Moreover, it is only within the tradition that we may discern plainly the full implications of the key word, “creation.”  Coleridge, in fact, echoes Athanasius ⁶ - probably through Schelling:

A glance at that historical conflict will suffice to make explicit much that is merely implicit in present day assertions concerning the artist as creator.  The classical theory is found in Plato’s Timaeus, ⁸ where, in Shorey’s words, ⁹ “A demiurgos or supreme artisan does not precisely create the universe out of nothing but reduces a vaguely visioned pre-existent chaos to a cosmos.”  This demiurgos, which Cornford identifies with the World-Soul, ¹⁰ imposes

upon uncreated matter the eternally existing “forms,” to make after their model the structure of the universe.  The theory put forward in Timaeus is one of making, not of creation.  The demiurge works upon already existent material, which, in turn, provides necessity and limitation, and serves as the principium individuationis. ¹¹

Concerning the latter point, Constantin Ritter remarks ¹² that “whatever appears as extended is in space (the various positions in space are all different) and as such an object appears only once, as something individual.”  However sound may be this interpretation of Plato’s place, space or receptacle, it still is true that no one of the many problems implicit in Plato’s account of the making of the world has exercised history more than that which concerns the adequacy of the account of the means of individuating.  Nor need we search far for the reason, since what we are here primarily concerned with is the possibility, validity, and process of the emergence of novelty.  Plato, no doubt, held that the essence is archetypal, and his search for a canon of beauty, his praise for the conservatism of Egyptian art, and his dislike of artistic novelty in art appear to be aesthetic consequences of this fundamental doctrine.  Still, I believe that Ritter is correct in interpreting the Platonic theory to mean ¹³ that “Each Idea indicates the essence of the individual appearance in so far as that is knowable.”  Implicit in Platonic and Aristotelian theories of universals, however, is the interpretation developed by the realists of the Middle Ages, who urged that universals ¹⁴ “are the more Real in.proportion as they are the more universal.”  We need not here trace the significant view which endows matter with greater self-subsistency and reality.  It is necessary only to mention the Stoic, Hebrew, and Christian interest in the personality and individuality of man to suggest the difficulties inherent in any view that subordinates the value of the individual to that of the form, or which interprets the significance of the individual substance in terms only of its capacity to manifest the type.

conception of unique individuals endowed with personality and granted individual immortality.  The issue is the more complex because the problem of personality is integral, in the western tradition, to that of human freedom. ¹⁵  To those, therefore, who have followed the course of the controversy concerning creating or making, it is not strange that, as Erich Frank points out, ¹⁶ St. Augustine, in contrast to Plato, maintains that “the world was created by God out of nothing and this creation was due to God’s absolute free will, not to any logical or other necessity, or to any Idea outside himself.” ¹⁷  This notion of St. Augustine’s is true “creation,” not only because specifically it is the bringing into being of something from nothing, but also and more significantly for a general reason implicit in the Alexandrian philosophy intermediate between Plato and the Church Father.  In a brilliant paper, ¹⁸ Professor Wolfson, writing upon Philo ‘s conception of free will, calls attention to the fundamental difference between Plato’s and Philo ‘s evaluation of God’s power over the “laws of nature.”  Both believe that these laws “were implanted by God in the universe as an act of good will.”  Plato held, however, that once implanted, they could “never be upset,” while Philo thought that “God may change the order of natural events when it serves some good purpose.”

The reason for this historical divergence in the evaluation of God’s power to change “the order of natural events” is of crucial importance for any consideration of creation, cosmological or artistic.  As Professor Wolfson points out, ¹⁹ “There is no room for miracles in the philosophy of Plato.”  Although Philo ‘s God “is philosophically the Demiurge of Plato,” there is room in the Alexandrian’s system of thought “for miracles.”  Philo’s God retains “the essential characteristics of the miracle-working Jehovah of the

This moment in Alexandrian speculation is crucial for the unfolding theory of creation throughout later centuries.  It was then that the aura of the miraculous emanated, and first re-formed and later largely supplanted the classical theory of making.  And it is this aura of the miraculous which, in my estimation, has enveloped the thought of the West upon the subject of artistic creation.  Moreover, here at its beginning is that conjunction of the miracle of creation and of limitless freedom which makes of human freedom one function of the creative power.  The crucial point is that both Plato and Philo regard man as a microcosm of the macrocosm.  Plato maintains, however, that man makes under the laws of nature and by necessity, while Philo, whose God “has reserved for himself the power of freedom to upset the laws of nature which He established in the world at the time of its creation,” has “endowed man with similar power of freedom to upset the laws of nature to which he is subject.” ²⁰  Acts of the will are “absolutely of man’s free choice,” determined neither by God nor “by any of the natural causes” by means of which His purpose is effected in the universe. ²¹

I have labored this historical distinction between creating and making because in the emergence and evolution of the theory that man possesses miraculous powers to transcend the laws of nature we discover as well the prototype and sustaining source for much in contemporary thinking concerning the artist’s powers.  Moreover, precisely as one of theology’s miracles is the existence of unique and individual souls, free and endowed with personality, so the aesthetic miracle is the production of unique and individual works of art, created by an artist liberated from the technique of making.  Again this is manifest in Croce ‘s theory: ²² “The true artist, in fact, finds himself big with his theme, he knows not how; he feels the moment of birth draw near, but he cannot will it or not will it… The impossibility of choice of content completes the theorem of the independence of art.”  The analogy, in turn, is complete: one recalls that this “independence of art” completes the theorem of the uniqueness and individuality of all impressions. ²³

What compulsion leads to the maintenance of a theory that disregards the inclusion of making within acting, and leaves aesthetic theory in a state comparable to that of the classical atomic hypothesis, once Epicurus had succumbed to the urgent demand that the human will be endowed with unlimited freedom in a world of atoms and the void, for which Leucippus had stated the law: “Nothing occurs at random, but everything for a reason and by necessity”. ²⁴  Here is a factor far less abstract than the distinction between making and acting.  The will is a mysterious and imperceptible entity.  The process of making is thoroughly concrete.  Cornford remarks ²⁵ of Plato ‘s account in Timaeus that “the image of the craftsman is employed as the most simple and vivid means of making us realize that the world was not a chance product born of aimless natural powers but exhibits evidences of rational design, like a product of human art.”  If we think, not of the abstract phrase, ex nihilo, but of the image in Genesis, we have ample evidence of tremendous imaginative powers and extraordinary poetic gifts.  Small wonder, indeed, that Philo treats the story of creation ²⁶ “as in a class by itself throughout the history of the philosophic interpretation of Scripture.”

The fact of the matter is that man ‘s control of nature is, for the imagination, far less a function of abstract rational powers than of rational powers in process of making or constructing something.  It is in fact a function of the power Bergson regards ²⁷ as distinguishing “the two main lines of evolution of animal life… the Arthropods and the Vertebrates.”  For while instinct and intelligence “have each as their essential object the utilization

Speak to an age out of an eternity. ²⁸

For the theory of creativity, stated on the analogy of God’s miraculous powers, presents the most formidable problems for an intelligible account of the structure either of fine art or of aesthetic experience.  The work of art is an instrument by which the artist communicates something to the aesthetic percipient, and the task of the fine artist is fulfilled only if the maker expresses a communicable datum and if we, the perceivers, make that potentially communicable datum one that actually communicates.  But if the theory of creation is carried to its logical conclusion in the philosophy of art - as it has been by Croce - we discover that the postulation of “free inspiration” for the artist results, first, in the purchase of individuality and uniqueness at the expense of intelligibility; for, as Croce ²⁹ argues, “expressions considered directly or positively are not divisible into classes,” and “likenesses such as are observed among individuals… can never be rendered with abstract determinations.” ³⁰  But this is to deny the relevance to fine art of the theory of classes or types, a theory which Plato’s philosophy of making correctly presupposes - if only because one must know what kind of thing a thing or event is before we know whether or not it is good or bad of its kind - and which on the theory of generic symbols makes the individual an intelligible member of a class.  And, secondly, the theory of creation leads to nominalism, since, to quote again Croce, ³¹ “the sublime (or comic, tragic, humorous, etc.) is everything that is or shall be so called by those who… shall employ these words.”  The consequence, it appears to me, is that the theory of the artist as creator would entail not one but two events which pass the bounds of rational explanation, the first, that the artist could effect the work of art, the second, that we, the aesthetic percipients, could make it intelligible and re-effect it.

The alternative, I suggest, is a sound theory of artistic productivity which will account for the emergence of novelty through the reconciliation of the Greek theory of making, concerned as it is with the typical and the necessary, with the Hebraic-Christian doctrine of creating, concerned as it is with the individual and the free. ³²  A reconciliation of the two traditions in art is a task of formidable proportions, impossible on such simple grounds as the identification of the two theories in question.  For no sensible man will maintain that such a reconciliation occurs in writings like George Putten-

ham’s The Arte of English Poesie ,³³ where we are told in successive paragraphs that “the very Poet makes” like God “who without any trauell to his diuine imagination, made the world out of nought, nor also by any patterne or mould”; and that “a Poet may in some sort be said a follower or imitator, because he can expresse the true and liuely of euerything is set before him, and which he taketh in hand to describe: and so in that respect is both a maker and a counterfaitor.”  The reconciliation I have in mind is possible if to it is brought knowledge of technical processes, of iconology, and of materials.  From the perspective of such a reconciliation, the value of the theory of unlimited and unrestricted creative power with which we have been concerned may be discerned.  As philosophic issues, the ideas of pure creativity, the unique individual, and absolute freedom are for the artist and for the aesthetic percipient limiting conceptions.  By using them in this way, man may at once measure his present achievement in terms of perfection and give himself a goal of value, definable, unattainable, but progressively approachable without limit.  By means of such limiting conceptions, the artist adjusts the infinitely variable and flexible instruments of art to the artistic structure and to the aesthetic end.  In so doing, he is at once creative and free, as the discerning eye of the poet ³⁴ perceives, because