In his essay "On the Creation of ART" Monroe Beardsley, probably the best known American philosopher working in the field of aesthetics, is setting himself the task of inquiring into the creative process "between the incept (short for: inceptive element) and the final touch" asking "how the work of art itself comes into existence and takes on its character through the stages or phases of this process." After an interval of more than two decades I would like to offer a few belated comments on Beardsley's ideas, since it seems to me that characteristic differences between American and German thought on this central issue of aesthetics can be shown by this.
ON BEARDSLEY’S VIEW OF THE ARTISTIC PROCESS
In his essay "On the Creation of ART [1] Monroe Beardsley, probably the best known American philosopher working in the field of aesthetics [2], is setting himself the task of inquiring into the creative process "between the incept (short for: inceptive element) and the final touch" asking "how the work of art itself comes into existence and takes on its character through the stages or phases of this process." (p. 386) After an interval of more than two decades I would like to offer a few belated comments on Beardsley's ideas, since it seems to me that characteristic differences between American and German thought on this central issue of aesthetics can be shown by this.
Professor Beardsley assumes - together with many students of art [3] - "that there is such a thing as the process of art creation, that beneath ... differences (in the artist's habits and temperament, his medium etc.) there is ... the normal creative pattern... to be isolated and described." He hopes to be able to deduce it from "the common character of works of art in all media", from "the analogy with aesthetic experience" from "the analogy with other kinds of creative activity", mostly, however, from "direct study of creative processes" (p. 387).
Surprising for the German reader of Professor Beardsley's essay is that, although he mentions in passing differences in temperament of artists that might cause "differences between one creative process and another" (p. 387), he does not seem to lend sufficient importance to them to account for any basic differentiation of creative personalities, processes of creation, and works of art. This, of course, is in conflict with the typological view of these phenomena taken by a substantial number of psychologists, art critics, and philosophers in Germany, at least since Schiller's famous discussion of "naive and sentimental" poets (1795) [4] and persued by theoreticians from various perspectives, like Nietzsche (1871), Wölflin (1886), Dilthey (1897'), Worringer (1907), Nohl (1908) and many others [5]. If Professor Beardsley would have seriously considered investigations into differences of temperament and character in the process of artistic creation, undertaken e.g. by Kretschmer and Jung or Rorschach (all 1921), Krüger (1924), Jaensch (1925), Leinweber (1929), Lamparter (1932), Sander and Wellek (both 1932), Hellpach (1933) or Gehlen (1960), he could not have written "As for the psychologists ... not much is available by way of well-established conclusions about the way the poet's or painter's mind is actually working when he is on the job." (p. 389) The cited research - lacking in modern precision, as it may be - cannot simply be ignored for its sheer mass alone. Besides, it has been tested and verified with experimental methods later in the USA and England. [6]
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- Dr. Wolfgang Ruttkowski (Autor), 1994, On Beardsley's view of the artistic process, Múnich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/82650
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