Cosmological creativity : an aesthetic world perspective

Abstract

This article is based on the recognition of two significant and opposite directions in the history of aesthetics, especially regarding the topic “creativity”: the subjectivist, willing, modern paradigm embodied by the figure of Genius and, in contrast, a mythical, symbolical, and imaginative idea of cosmological creativity. The latter worldview will be deepened via an analysis of Martin Heidegger’s theory of Geviert (Fourfold). Heidegger’s conception will here be taken as a clear and fruitful example of how a more symbolic hermeneutics that aspires to overcome modern dualism can be conceived and in turn renew both aesthetics and hermeneutics. In this light, images—correctly understood as symbols—acquire a “bridging” power: creativity becomes the switch from one level to another, and the artist plays with the world just as the world plays with the artist. This correspondence between artist and creation, subject and object, is therefore described not as a rational adequateness between two static elements, but as a constantly dynamic process in which the connection between microcosm and macrocosm is based on the rhythm of Being.