Freedom and Necessity of the Creative Act: The Cosmological Aspect of Kandinsky's Principle of Inner Necessity

Abstract

AbstractThis article argues that freedom in the divine creative act is better understood as a freedom of consent rather than freedom of will. However, even if some conundrums are thus avoided, one has to face the apparent antinomy between both God's creative act from His very nature and God's absolute freedom. Freedom of consent, as defined in David Burrell's works, finds a resonance with the French spiritualist philosopher, Henri Bergson, who resolves the apparent antinomy by showing that the necessity of the action springs from the nature of the self in a way that does not contradict the free perpetual auto‐creation of the consciousness. Notwithstanding its defects, the artisan model found in Genesis allows one to draw a parallelism between the divine creative act and artistic creation. Kandinsky faced precisely such an antinomy, for his principle of inner necessity combines both the absolute free creative power of the artist and the necessity emerging from the different levels of the cosmic order. To exemplify Kandinsky's solution, this article offers an original reading of Painting with White Border, based on Kandinsky's analysis in Reminiscences.