Beauty and Creativity

The Kantian analysis of Aesthetic experience entails both an unreflective and a reflective phase. The former is the pleasurable stimulation of the experiencer's imagination by the artwork, while the latter includes the cognition of the form of the artwork, the interpretation of the artwork as part of a Purposive sequence, and the judgement that the artwork either is or is not 'Beautiful'. Now, the inessentiality to the experience of the involvement of Purposiveness has already been discussed. Likewise unnecessarily superimposing are the Platonisms of abstracting the form of the artwork from its content, and of the criterion of judgement, determinate and invariant Beauty. Non-Kantian theories, such as Santayana's, Alexander's, and Langer's, despite their differences, are similarly Platonistic. Instead, absent the Teleological and Platonistic superimpositions, the essence of the Aesthetic experience is the stimulation of imagination, by the interplay of Form and Matter in the artwork. But that interplay is what Creativity is, so, the sole substance of Aesthetic experience is Creativity, the relation of Beauty to which can perhaps be best gleaned from the role that Beauty plays in biological Creativity, i. e. as a stimulus to procreation. Thus freed of the oversimplification dictated by the monolithic criterion of 'Beauty', Aesthetic judgement expressed in comparative terms, e. g. less or more Creative, suffices.