Creative Thinking - Quareness Series 142nd "Lecture".
Creativity is a quare thing given to magically emerging from the subconscious as unpredictable inspiration. More often than not it heralds unexpected content breaking through the standard routines of traditional thinking. Creative thinking is hardly for the faint of heart when delivering new perspectives distinct from common practices and drawing people out of their comfort zones. Taking on board Oscar Wilde's insight that "a writer is someone who has taught the mind to misbehave" can get many an innovator into trouble and/or leave them open to public ridicule. And this "downside" has a long history in human affairs as we can glean from what happened to yer man Socrates back in Ancient Greece when having questioned people in public through dialogues and failed to acknowledge those gods worshipped by Athens, he was accused of corrupting the local youth and executed. Nowadays "awkward" individuals such as he would likely at least be cancelled/silenced on social media.
Other examples of this anti-creative impulse abound both in science and the arts...
here's a few:
- The revolutionary theory of continental drift advanced by the German meteorologist and geophysicist Alfred Wegener in 1912, was rejected by mainstream geologists for four decades and only became popular after the mechanism of plate tectonics was recognised.
- In 1933 the Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky inferred the existence of large quantities of invisible mass in the Coma Galaxy cluster, which he labelled “dark matter,” but it took four decades for this notion to gain traction within the astronomy community.
- In biology, the rules of genetic heredity formulated by Gregor Mendel (Austrian biologist, mathematician, meteorologist) in 1866 were ignored by the scientific community, rediscovered by two botanists/geneticists - Hugo de Vries (Dutch) and Carl Correns (German) - three decades later, and eventually explained by the molecular chemistry of DNA almost a century after Mendel’s work.
- The artist Vincent van Gogh was considered a madman and a failure throughout his life, but his reputation changed to that of a misunderstood genius when elements of his painting style were incorporated by expressionists several decades after his suicide in 1890.
- The writer Samuel Beckett did not get his first novel published, and so he shelved it. The novel was eventually published in 1992, three years after Beckett’s death, and twenty three years after he was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature.
As the bould Oscar also pointed out...“an idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”
Here's another quare thing...ideas drive progress and they spring from a worldview which apparently cannot create ideas outside its assumptions. In fact no worldview can explain everything? If we don't really know where the universe came from or where our thoughts come from, we have to question the reliability of our explanations of reality. In doing so we might get to discern how much persuasive stories and unexamined assumptions riddle our current worldviews. It seems full reality cannot be squeezed into any such framework. Materialism (that most lauded worldview today) for example is more likely just a plausible story rather than a viable way to explain all in the world around us or the world within us where the mind operates.
While the arts and sciences may adopt different tools to shape their message, they do constitute complementary ways of viewing some reality. Scientific innovation tends to give rise to new technology (e.g. global positioning systems for navigation based on Einstein's theory of relativity) and artistic innovation incubates new cultural assets (e.g. Picasso's cubism sparking related movements in architecture, literature and music). Although in many (most?) cases the products of the creative process may be initially surprising, what may count as ingenuity at first sight can in retrospect come to be considered as inevitable. Accepted reality of course can be said to exist before new discovery but as Michelangelo noted..."The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material."
Both arts and sciences advance through open-minded iterations. The alternative of staying within traditional boundaries suppresses the exploration of new territories. Here again Oscar "hit the nail on the head" with his view that “consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” Indeed creativity establishes a sorely needed backdrop for human existence with the content it invents giving meaning (as well as pleasure) to our lives. And the really good news is that all of us can benefit from and participate in the creative process through following our Mr. Wilde's wise advice to "be yourself, everyone else is taken."
When you were born a new song entered the world.
You're on this Earth to do what only you can do.
You are the greatest gift you have to give.
Don't die with your song still inside you
And not being grateful for all of it.
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
June, 2021.