Claim. Creation and appreciation are not separable activities performed by different agents (artists vs. public), but two inseparable aspects of artistic dominion: artists appreciate while they create, and appreciators creatively add their subjective action to what they appreciate.
Elaboration. Lee resists the common-sense division of labor in which the artist creates and the public passively appreciates. In Unification Thought, both creation and appreciation are ‘essential modes of the activity of dominion’ over the creation (Unity of Creation and Appreciation). Dominion requires the correlative aspects of cognition and practice; in the artistic register, cognition centered on emotion is appreciation, and practice centered on emotion is creation. Since there is no practice without cognition and no cognition without practice, there can be no creation without appreciation and no appreciation without creation.
Concretely: while artists create, they continually appreciate their own work in progress, adjusting toward a felt accord between conception and execution. While appreciators appreciate, they engage in additional creative activity through ‘subjective action’ — the appreciator adds his or her own subjective elements to the object, enhancing its value beyond what the artist originally created, and enjoys the enhanced value (III. Dual Purposes of Artistic Activity: Creation and Appreciation).
The philosophical pedigree is named: subjective action ‘corresponds to the notion of empathy as defined by Theodore Lipps.’ The play/movie example illustrates — an actor breaks down in tears, the audience weeps along, projecting their feelings onto the actor and judging the object subjectively. Through subjective action, the appreciator becomes more closely united with the artwork and obtains deeper joy.
The unity claim does theoretical work. It rescues appreciators from passivity (they are co-creators, not consumers); it locates the artist’s process within an ongoing aesthetic loop rather than as one-shot output; and it explains why the same artwork yields different aesthetic experiences for different appreciators (their subjective action varies). It also pre-empts the modernist objection that the artist’s intention should authoritatively fix the work’s meaning — Lee allows the appreciator real creative agency without dissolving the artist’s primary role. Worth a thread: this position aligns surprisingly well with reception aesthetics (Iser, Jauss) and reader-response theory, though Lee grounds it in subject-object give-and-take rather than in hermeneutic phenomenology.
See also. purpose-for-whole-and-individual-ground-creation-and-appreciation, subjective-action-as-empathy-creative-appreciation, art-defined-as-emotional-activity-creating-and-appreciating-beauty