Creativity: Scruton and Coleridge on artistic imagination
In exploring the materials of a medium in relation to subject matter and
attitude, makers of art will typically have a conception of the kind of thing
they are making: a sonata, a sonnet, a novel, apas de deux, a performance
piece, a movie, a still life, and so forth. To some extent this conception will be
drawn from a common background practice, and to some extent it will
guide the shaping of the material. Yet exploring the material–the forms,
motives, shapes, movements, words, and so on that are in the process of
arrangement–freely and imaginatively remains crucial to artistic making.
The wordimaginationcan be used to describe both a faculty of mind and a
process.The wordsexpressionandcreationcan be usedtodescribe eithera process
or a product. It is difficult to say exactly what sort of explorative process
involving imagination, expression, and creation is involved in artistic making.
If the creative process could be broken down into parts or stages themselves
governed by a law of succession in production or a rule for correctness, then the
process would be mechanical or algorithmic, not free. As a result, it seems
plausible to regard the product senses of“expression” and“creation”as
primary. An expressive or creative process is deemed to have taken place when
the product strikes us as freely formed and original; we donotdetermine free
formation and originality by independently inspecting the process.
Although the process of free making cannot be characterized mechanic-
ally or algorithmically in such a way that imagination, creation, and expres-
sion are explained, it is possible nonetheless to say something about which
aspects of the materials of art creative imagination and free making focus on.
In discussing the aesthetics of music, Roger Scruton has offered a useful
characterization of the focus of imaginative attention both in artistic making
and in the apprehending of art. Works of music, he argues, are composed of
tones, that is, sounds heard as leading away from and toward one another, not
simply of pitches (of measurable wave length) experienced as discrete. Tones
are part of an arrangement or order that we hear as a developing motive (or
as one that fails to develop). They exist in and for hearing not one by one, but
ratheraselements of a developing musical order of which they are essentially
a part. In being essentially elementsofa developing arrangement or order,
tones are what Scruton callstertiary qualities. Primary qualities are observer-
independent, in principle objectively measurable, qualities of objects, such as
mass and chemical composition. Secondary qualities are qualities possessed
Originality and imagination 135