The Meaning of Artistic Creation for Kant and Heidegger and its Comparison with Ricoeur's Understanding of Narration

Artistic creation is normally understood as subjective work of a genius; consequently an independentholy creation. Such an understanding is mainly due to Kant’s conception of aesthetic experience. In his point of view, artistic creation is equal to “synthesis” of productive imagination. Perceptions of intuition are schematized and synthesized by imagination to be categorized in understanding. Heideggerian conception of artistic creation is related to cultural (lifestyle) functions of art. In fact, artistic creation means manifesting, articulating, and reconfiguring lifestyle. Ricoeur equals creation with innovation in meaning that happens in two main ways: metaphor and narrative. Metaphor establishes new connections between ideas or things and through these new associations redefines the world. In seemingly the same process, emplotment (in the same action as Kant’s synthesis) gives order to set of actions or events in a specific causal relations and specific temporality in order to make a whole which is called story. Ricoeur believes that configurational mode of thinking is one of the main modes of conception that is responsible for gathering together or configuring actions or events. Therefore, story is not only an artistic genre but it is a mode of thinking that is related to artistic creation. Reviewing Kant and Heidegger on artistic creation and comparing their approach with Ricoeur we come to the conclusion that the latter’s theory of artistic creation seems to be more comprehensive, connecting the artistic creation with narrative.