Claim. Because the human mind has three faculties (intellect, emotion, will) corresponding to three cultural domains (philosophy/science, art, morality/ethics), art is precisely the emotional activity of creating and appreciating beauty for the purpose of creating joy.
Elaboration. Lee uses a faculty-psychology to carve cultural activity into three domains (What is Art?): intellectual activity produces philosophy and science; volitional activity produces morality and ethics; emotional activity produces the diverse fields of art. Art’s definition follows: ‘the emotional activity of creating and appreciating beauty.’ This is not a stipulative definition but a derivation from the structure of the human mind, which itself derives from God’s tripartite Inner Sungsang (intellect, emotion, will).
A second definition layers in the purposive dimension: since the purpose of creation is to obtain joy through loving object partners, art is also ‘the activity of creating joy through creation and appreciation.’ These two definitions are equivalent — beauty just is the value-form by which joy is generated in the emotional register, so creating beauty and creating joy are the same operation under different descriptions.
Lee adduces the British art critic Herbert Read (1892–1968) as confirming: ‘All artists have this same intention, the desire to please; and art is most simply and most usually defined as an attempt to create pleasing forms.’ Read is invoked frequently in this chapter as an independent witness from outside the UT framework whose conclusions converge with Lee’s — a rhetorical strategy of triangulation against the charge of theological provincialism.
The payoff: the definition immediately rules out art-as-revolutionary-instrument (socialist realism), art-as-pure-self-expression (decadent aestheticism), and art-as-mere-craft. If art is essentially emotional and essentially joy-creating, then political instrumentalization (which subordinates emotion to ideology) and self-centered expressivism (which fails to create joy for others) both fail to qualify as true art. Lee will lean on this definitional move repeatedly in the critique of socialist realism in section X. Critics from a 20th-century avant-garde perspective will object that ‘pleasing forms’ is a thin and conservative criterion — much modern art deliberately displeases in order to provoke thought — but Lee’s framework would respond that genuine emotional response (including awe, sorrow, tragic beauty) is still ‘joy’ in the sense of fulfilling the dual desire.
See also. beauty-as-emotional-stimulation-returned-from-object, creation-and-appreciation-as-united-activity, heart-motivates-intellect-emotion-will