Claim. Artistic creation is rooted in the human purpose for the whole (giving joy to others), while artistic appreciation is rooted in the human purpose for the individual (obtaining joy for oneself), making the two activities derivative of God’s dual purpose of creation.
Elaboration. Lee establishes that human beings have a dual purpose for being created: the purpose for the whole (giving joy to humankind, nation, tribe) and the purpose for the individual (obtaining joy from others and from the whole) (I. Divine Principle Foundation for the Theory of Art). God endowed humans with desire as the driving force to fulfill both. When these are projected onto artistic activity, the result is a clean bifurcation: ‘The activity of creation starts with the purpose for the whole, that is, it starts with an intention to please others. The activity of appreciation… starts with the purpose for the individual, that is, it starts with the intention of obtaining joy for oneself.’
This is then deepened in section III (III. Dual Purposes of Artistic Activity: Creation and Appreciation) as the ‘dual desires’: the desire to realize value drives creation; the desire to seek value drives appreciation. Both desires are described as latent in the subconscious such that ‘everyone, consciously or subconsciously, strives to live a life of truth, to do good deeds, to create beauty, to serve humankind, and to please God.’ This is a strong anthropological claim — that aesthetic activity is universal because it is built into human ontology, not socially constructed.
The payoff is that creation and appreciation are not separate accidents of art history but the two structurally necessary modes by which God’s purpose of creation expresses itself in the human aesthetic register. It also lets Lee critique ‘self-centered art’ as a deviation: when artists pursue creation merely for their own joy (collapsing the purpose-for-the-whole into the purpose-for-the-individual), they invert the original ordering. Critics from a Kantian or art-for-art’s-sake tradition will press back that artists frequently create for their own expressive needs without intending to please others, and Lee’s framework would have to read such cases as fallen or incomplete — which it explicitly does in section VIII on Oscar Wilde and aestheticism.
See also. creation-and-appreciation-as-united-activity, ut-connected-being-dual-purposes, subjective-action-as-empathy-creative-appreciation