Art and Nature: Creative vs. Constitutive Perception

Abstract

The stage is set for the systematic exploration of the great issues. Human creativity lies at the juncture of all the great philosophical issues. To begin with, when we bring up the question of creativity, then ever since the imitation-theory of Plato and his division between the fluctuating, changeable world of appearances, on the one hand, and the perduring, lasting forms of ideas, on the other hand, we point to the issues of the relation between Art and the “reality” of life — or better, Art and Nature. It is also in this perspective of the distinction between Art and Nature that Pradines, in his classical work, raises the question of the origin of Art, approaching it from the psychologico-genetic point of view.¹ His perspective might be one-sided; nevertheless, his penetrating intuitions go beyond the narrow framework of psychology and meet ours in setting the issue at hand, which makes his thought particularly pertinent to the introduction of our main point.