Are there any Conditions of creativity?

Richard Allen*

 

What do the following have in common? St Paul’s later epistles, Boethius’ The Consolations of Philosophy, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Sir Walter Raleigh’s The History of the World, and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. If you cannot answer this question, add Solzenitsyn’s Cancer Ward and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. If you are still stuck, what about Mein Kampf?

The answer, of course, is that they were all written or begun when the author was in prison or inspired by his imprisonment. St Paul, Boethius and Raleigh had something else in common: they were awaiting probable or certain execution. So, The History of the World and Mein Kampf apart, here we have some of the most creative and influential theological, philosophical, religious and literary works of European civilisation.

Consider also the compositions of Shostakovich, and the poems of Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova, written under Stalin’s reign of terror and repression. As Mandelstam himself said, ‘Only in Russia is poetry respected, it gets people killed'. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?’ He died in transit to the gulags.

Again, although the picture of the poverty-stricken and unrecognised artist working in his attic and dying before he becomes famous and gains anything from his work, is mostly a Romantic myth, there are some actual examples such as Schubert, Keats and van Gogh, while Mozart, though he received recognition, died in poverty.

Think also of Gregor Mendel, quietly planting and studying his peas and forming his statistical theory of inheritance and postulation of ‘genes’ as the agents of inherited traits, which, when he expounded it in a lecture, none of the audience could understand it. He went back to his researches until he had to give them up when he was appointed Abbot of his monastery and had to devote himself wholly to his new responsibilities. No research grants, no discussions with fellow scientists, no acclamation for his discoveries, yet he founded the science of genetics.

So what do these examples show? That creativity can manifest itself in the most difficult of circumstances: in prison, awaiting execution, under totalitarian repression, without help and recognition, in poverty and illness.

Nevertheless, for the most part we could assume that freedom, peace and prosperity are usually fertile grounds for creativity. Furthermore, there have ‘Golden Periods’ when a nation experiences at least relative freedom, peace and prosperity and with it an outburst of creativity in the arts, invention, exploration, industry and technology, science, statesmanship and other fields of endeavour, as with Spain and England in the 16th C. and Holland in the 17th.

Yet history shows us that there are counter-examples. On the one hand trouble and disaster can be a spur to creativity. Some time ago I came across a suggestion, I think on the wireless in a talk on the apparent lack of interest on the part of historians in the subsequent fate of states defeated in war, that they can be periods of rebirth, renewal and cultural flowering. France after the humiliations of 1870—the defeat at Sedan, the siege and occupation of Paris, was the one example that I remember. Again, think of the achievements of Gothic architecture in mediaeval Europe, when war and plague were frequent.

On the other, freedom, peace and prosperity do not necessary bring forth creativity. There is some truth in the impromptu addition that Orson Welles added to Harry Lime’s speech of specious self-justification in The Third Man, and his contrast of superiority of artistic achievements of Italy under the Borgias compared with those of modern democratic and peaceful Switzerland. (Incidentally, cuckoo clocks are made in Bavaria and the Swiss merely sell them.)

Moreover, do deliberate efforts to promote creativity produce anything really creative? By definition creativity cannot be predicted nor taught. It is the production of something new and valuable in its field. Only what is already known can be taught, and thus only repetition can be result from it. Hence all that art schools, conservatoirs and classes in ‘creative writing’, is to help pupils with talent to master the ‘language’ of their art by teaching them the already known skills such as how to mix paints and produce given effects, such as the sheen of silk or the colour of flesh, the rules of counterpoint, or how to narrate events as the fictional character experiences them rather than merely describe them. But these are ‘craft’, the means to produce predetermined goals, whereas art is the full expression of what is obscurely and inchoately thought and felt. Likewise, scientific discovery is the finding and explication of something radically new, rather than the application of standard methods to further examples of what is now familiar. In craft and technology the practitioner knows what he aims to produce and looks for ways, or uses readily available methods, to achieve it. But in art and discovery the artist or discoverer does not know what he seeks but senses that he has something new to say or that there is something new to be found, and invents a language or radically modifies the language he has mastered in order to express or comprehend it. Thus the Romanian philosopher, and poet, Lucian Blaga distinguished between ‘plastic’ metaphors and ‘revelatory’ metaphors. In the former one familiar object is present in terms of another one, such as ‘the ship ploughed the sea’, in order pointedly to say something about it. They are mere ‘figures of speech’ as deviations from the norm of ‘literal’ meaning, while clichés are hackneyed metaphors of this sort. But in the latter something never previously thought or known is expressed in a radically new use of existing ‘language’ which the artist or discoverer hopes his audience tacitly to grasp what he thinks or has found and for which there is no existing way of expression or terminology. That is living language whereas allegedly ‘literal’ meaning is metaphor so dead than only etymologists know that it was once new and alive. Thus while craft requires talent or flair, art and real discovery require ‘genius’ and ‘inspiration’ for which there are no rules or methods. Polanyi cited How to Solve It by his old school-friend George Polya, in which Polya distinguished the stages of Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification. The first, second and last are deliberate actions, but Illumination also includes a passive moment, that of ‘inspiration’ or seeing the solution or new idea (Personal Knowledge, p. 126). The only condition for this, the actually creative moment, is the unaccountable fact that the artist, inventor or discoverer has the ‘genius’ for seeing or receiving new ideas of that sort. Of the two verses in one of his poems, Housman said that one came to him fully formed and it took much time and effort to compose the other (The Name and Nature of Poetry).

Thus there is only one condition for creativity: the unaccountable and unpredictable capacity for it which in each field of human activity some have and the great majority don’t, and which can be both fostered or spurred, on the one hand, or hindered or suppressed on the other. But we have three options of responding to good fortune: complacency and mere enjoyment of it, enjoyment and care to maintain it, and enjoyment and desire to add to it; and likewise three corresponding responses to ill fortune: despair and inaction, resignation and putting up with it, and determination to overcome it. Thus what would appear to be to favour creativity may not result in anything really creative but just minor variations upon what is already done or known, and likewise what may usually inhibit it may not kill it and even act as the spur for it.

 

In the ensuing Discussion, two modifications or additions were agreed to be needed:

1. What I set out was the fuller forms of creativity, it needed an account of a ‘scales of forms’ from minor and almost routine modifications of or additions to what is already known to more novel and significant ones, and then to the radically new and greatly valuable ones.

2. That there is one condition that I had tacitly presupposed: an existing practice or knowledge within and to which creativity, in all its degrees and forms, adds, modifies or radically changes. Nothing does nor can come completely de novo into existence at human hands.

* A talk at a seminar of the John Macmurray Fellowship