The discourse of artistic inspiration shifted from metaphor to physiology

Evidence

Johann Sulzer, a theorist of the fine arts, wrote in more general terms: “All artists of any genius claim that from time to time they experience a state of extraordinary psychic intensity which makes work unusually easy, images arising without great effort and the best ideas flowing in such profusion as if they were the gift of some higher power. This is without doubt what is called inspiration. If an artist experiences this condition, his object appears to him in an unusual light; his genius, as if guided by a divine power, invents without effort, shaping his invention in the most suitable form without strain; the finest ideas and images occur unbidden in floods to the inspired poet; the orator judges with the greatest acumen, feels with the greatest intensity, and the strongest and most vividly expressive words rise to his tongue.” Such statements, Flaherty argues, are strongly reminiscent of accounts of shamanism—in this case of a shaman described not skeptically but in wonderment. They employ the idea of inspiration metaphorically—as control of an “instrument” from outside the person, or as a “gift” from a “higher power.” But these remain metaphors, covering an inability to explain a this-worldly phenomenon in natural terms. … But when the physician Melchior Weickard locates his explanation entirely in terms of human physiology, a genuine change in the language has taken place: “A Genius, a human being with exalted imaginative powers, must have more excitable brain fibers than other human beings,” he speculates, “Those fibers must be set into motion quicker and more easily, so that lively and frequent images arise.” — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 250

Categorization

• DEFINE: Tracks how ‘inspiration’ moved from a shamanic/metaphorical divine gift into a natural-physiological phenomenon as secular sensibility emerged.