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3 The Creative Process

Thus far I have been focusing on very dramatic, even melodra- matic, events that sometimes occur in creative experience. This characteristic is evident in Archimedes’ exclamatory utterance, and in the fact that he ran naked through the streets in his impassioned haste to proclaim his success. Though not irrele- vant to the nature of creativity, that kind of explosive outburst need not accompany other authentic instances of creativity. The Eureka effect is just the tip of a creative iceberg. Or better yet, it is a mountain peak on which some intrepid climber puts up his nation’s flag as explicit proof of what he has accomplished. The achievement itself appears in the prolonged and often arduous process that has already occurred and may then go on to even higher peaks for which it also strives.

Even if creativity is spontaneous in its enthusiastic mani- festation of whatever pervades the immediacy in our personal experience, creative success does not exist apart from the temporality in which we live. On the contrary, creativity both engenders it and depends upon it. When I earlier discussed Bertrand Russell’s claim that the unconscious solves prob- lems at his command, I raised doubts about that as a creative mechanism. Here I want to call attention to his saying that the

Singer, Irving. Modes of Creativity : Philosophical Perspectives, MIT Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/michstate-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3339583. Created from michstate-ebooks on 2018-07-17 05:37:18.

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solutions arose some weeks or months after he ordered that the job be done. The mere passage of time is a factor within any creative process, as it is in the growth of plants.

In The Harmony of Nature and Spirit I delineated the vegeta- tive element in our species as a fundamental source of human desire and well-being. Once we accept and even revel in the fact that our creativity operates through principles of time- dependent vitality that are comparable to those in trees and shrubs and “lower organisms,” as we call them, we facilitate the attainment of what we value. Much more is needed, of course, but nothing would flourish in any such quest without the continuity of organic processes that develop over a period of time and finally reach some optimal condition of satis faction. Though creativity is not the same as happiness, for instance, this much is true of both.

On Russell’s model, creativity arises from a rational act of problem solving, a person of intellect like himself giving instructions to the unconscious to take over the job. Russell never explains how this communication could occur. What in this quasi-cognitive exchange enables the unconscious to com- prehend the task it is being told to accomplish? Presumably it is not rational in itself, any more than a stone or thunderstorm is. The image of Russell ordaining a task for it to do is reminis- cent of Xerxes commanding the Hellespont to let his troops pass safely over its waters. In dealing with recalcitrant nature we all would like to have such verbal powers, but no one does.

In the view I have been outlining and will elucidate in further chapters, reason plays a different role entirely. It arises out of our vegetative being as the rose issues from the soil in which it is implanted, and its blossoms from the stalks that hold them up in the world aboveground. The mere existence

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of rationality is a great achievement of human nature. It certainly participates in the quest for creativity. But it can func- tion creatively only as a tool or submissive agency within nonrational processes that manage to benefit from it.

Creative Reason and Learning

Reason plays many roles in life: most obviously in the reach- ing of valid conclusions, the making of practical decisions, and the fabrication of formal structures as in logic or mathematics. Most philosophers, especially those who belong to one or another school of Rationalism, have devoted themselves to the furthering of such advances of the mind. Thinkers of that sort often show massive and highly commendable talent in the pursuits I have named; and being devoted to their work, they naturally idealize the importance of rationality itself. To understand how reason contributes to creativity, however, one has to see each in relation to the human capacity to learn. In part at least, this entails cognitive aptitude while also illustrat- ing the extent to which both that and the ability to learn are rooted in our temporality as well as a gamut of developmental feelings that are not themselves rational. Nothing is learned instantaneously or in an emotional vacuum.

Even learning how to ride a bicycle takes time. Some people need very little preparation before jumping on and keeping their balance. In a flash they seem to learn what is required to ride securely. But facility in doing so, which takes others much effort, comes swiftly to the rapid learners because they have already acquired through similar activities the knack or know-how needed to stay on a bike without fall- ing off or crashing. It is through our learning capacity that

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creativity occurs and continues within some durational period that is integral to it.

As a result of the harmonious adjustment between learn- ing and creativity, the vegetative in our being can burgeon through motives that instigate the constant search for new and greater goals. When innovation exists in its proper context, the outcome in art or science or practical life embodies capabilities that come into existence because they are requisite for the desired creative process. This too can be illustrated by the example of learning how to ride a bike. Mastery in doing it involves various things—attaining an idea of how to distribute your weight, knowing where to put your feet and how to turn the handlebars without falling forward, as well as habitu- ation to this type of locomotion, so different from walking. All that takes time in which you must become increasingly aware of your changing posture from moment to moment. Success or failure is contingent upon the individual’s physical strength, sensory alertness (visual, for example), degree of self- confidence or courage, and comprehensive faith in oneself as both a mental and material entity engaged in this activity. Those who have been well equipped through prior experience and learning need less time, but the general pattern is alike, though different in everyone. Something similar is true of the creative process as a whole.

Creativity is not the same as imagination or the acquisition of knowledge. The creative process is a way of using them. Through imagination we conceive of possibilities that may or may not be actualized. Those possibilities may often be com- monplace and routine without altering very much in our life, or even our strength of mind. Likewise, much of the knowl- edge we collect is extraneous to the growth of creativity. When

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Dr. Watson tells Sherlock Holmes the distance between the earth and the moon, Holmes replies that he will instantly exclude that bit of information from his memory. It can’t help him in his work as a detective, he says, and it may easily become part of the detritus of mere factuality that may someday blunt his productive acuity. At the same time, noth- ing can be creative without having emanated from a store of knowledge and imagination, each of which provides a foundation for any innovative thrusts that can go beyond them both.

As a faculty that is distinct from imagination and knowl- edge, learning may illuminate more of the creative process than these do. But what is involved in our capacity to learn? How does one learn to be creative in one field or another? And how can we learn to have a life that is itself creative? Does learning of any special sort make it possible to live creatively?

Before the days of “progressive education,” which mainly emerged from the writings of John Dewey, learning was rarely considered to be the cultivating of creativity. Young students in particular were expected to learn by rote. They were treated as malleable recipients of amassed data dealing with accu- mulated discoveries and methodologies, and, above all, the established values embodied in their older and wiser instruc- tors. In the course of the twentieth century that belief about the nature of education was widely contested. In primary schools nowadays, and frequently at higher levels of learning, one or another mode of creativity serves as the principal tool for supremacy in most and possibly all subjects. The principle is that students who are creative will garner for themselves the means of developing skills and techniques that can enable them to learn whatever they wish.

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I think this is a healthy development in the field of educa- tion. In the context of Dewey’s moral and aesthetic philosophy, his emphasis upon the bond between learning and creativity, and their joint operation through a passage of time, derives from his theories about the continuum of means and ends. That—to which I will be returning hereafter—underlies Dewey’s basic idea that ethics as well as the evolution of human values as a whole is an agency by which our species learns how to adapt creatively to its environment. One may nevertheless ask how the creativity essential for learning to function at its best arises in the first place. Must creativity itself be learned as a prior acquisition, and if so, can it be taught by another person? Is creativity at all teachable? Some things are not.

For instance, you cannot teach anyone to have absolute pitch any more than you can teach color-blind people how to see the colors that most of us perceive just by opening our eyes. No amount of creativity or learning would further develop the having of such experience. You can, however, help individuals be creative in accepting their actual limitations in this regard. They can be helped to learn how to cope with their situation. At this point, the problem becomes the same as with learning in every other area. Ultimately the question is: How does one teach anyone anything? After answering that, we may be able to understand the role creativity plays in employ- ing learning and all that goes with it.

I suggest that creative learning, which includes the learning of how to be creative, depends upon one’s facility in learning by and for oneself. To do that, one must get from a teacher, or similar authority figure, the ability to learn that this person has and then imparts to us in whatever manner. He or she may do

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so unawares, just in being a model whose talents we emulate in some fashion. The teacher teaches by reinforcing the pupil’s desire to appropriate the teacher’s own capacity to learn. Hav- ing been suitably inspired and encouraged, the pupil develops the instruments needed to teach him- or herself. The creativity of this results from the inherent novelty, uniqueness, and authentic individuality of the pupil as well as the teacher. The creative teacher devises imaginative ways of eliciting a pupil’s creative response. Pupils who are creative have learned how to learn accordingly and in keeping with their own aptitude and interests.

Education that is not creative is static and generic, a form of indoctrination that descends mechanically upon everyone subjected to it, initially the teacher but finally the pupils whose differences of mentality and potential growth are systemati- cally thwarted or neglected. In contrast, effective learning is basically creative; and the creativity we revere may itself be thought of as an extension and application of the learning process.

Teachers learn how to teach by teaching themselves how to learn, partly from the mere contact with students or other beneficiaries of their expertise. In one place Orson Welles expresses his admiration for the French phrase assister à (to be present at) in relation to the aesthetic experience of a theatrical audience. He interprets the phrase as emphasizing how greatly the audience reaction contributes to, assists, the quality of what is happening on stage. This creative role exists, to one degree or another, simply by being present and reacting to what is presented to us.

In a similar fashion, creative teaching issues out of the teacher’s ability to learn from the moment-by-moment

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experience of teaching others to teach themselves. He or she learns not only how to reach the minds and personalities of the educational recipients, but also how to evoke new ideas in oneself through an interpersonal ricochet with the diverse and often unpredictable responses of those who are attending to what is being communicated to them. By inference we can say the same about most, or virtually all, of life in society, insofar as it is indeed creative.

The Creative Process in Shakespeare and Mozart

This line of thought also reinforces what I was saying previously about time as connected to creativity. Learning to be creative, and certainly learning how to live creatively, takes time and inevitably reveals the causal momentum of time. Though discovery and inventiveness can occur spontaneously and seemingly out of nowhere, creativity is normally a pro- gressive, even evolutionary, culmination of much that has been going on through the days and weeks and years of our life. In youth this can often happen with remarkable speed. But though everything appears to become slower with age, older people can often realize, and appreciate, how much lived duration the mind requires to produce a truly valid outcome for some personal situation or vital problem. In maturity one also learns the virtue of extending in time, not pushing too fast, an enterprise that one hopes will be creative. What occurs without significant preparation is often half-baked and unfinished.

Shakespeare partly meant this when his weary but world- experienced Hamlet says near the end: “The readiness is all.” It takes perseverance through a temporal span to become

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capable of dealing with life’s vicissitudes, and so attain an all-important readiness. The same applies especially to the creative work of an author or other artist. In my own case, I frequently resist the excitement of a bright idea that has suddenly dawned in me. Instead of snaring it on the wing and expressing it in a fervor of composition, I keep returning to it a little at a time over sessions of incipient writing. What I end up with, after ten or fifteen or twenty drafts, is frequently something I could never have foreseen.

In relation to the creativity of Shakespeare’s mind, or rather a cinematic representation of it, consider the scenes in the film Shakespeare in Love that portray his hectic life as he rushes through London, burdened with a contracted project he feels he cannot fulfill. It is an early version of what will later become Romeo and Juliet. While hastily walking through the streets concentrating upon the difficulties of his literary task and oblivious to the noise about him, he passes an evangelical cleric on a platform who is haranguing a small crowd he has gathered. In his ferocious diatribe the preacher shrieks his venom upon two opposing factions that he condemns. “A curse on both their houses!” he shouts. Shakespeare hurries by, his head down as he ruminates on his personal problems, and apparently hearing nothing the preacher has said. We in the audience, however, recognize the line as something in what will eventually become Mercutio’s final speech in Romeo and Juliet.

I mention this witty sequence because it truthfully shows how an artist collects material from his surroundings as they haphazardly impinge upon him, unexpectedly and without his perceiving them overtly. In the movie, Shakespeare’s ears have picked up the preacher’s words, although he has not

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listened to them or in any way thought of putting them in his writing. But once they have been lodged within the sensorium of his creative memory, they become available for aesthetic employment. The imagination of a Shakespeare is filled with such meager bric-a-brac, which it stores automatically. If something like the line that Mercutio will utter pops up, it appears in the right place in the play because of the author’s regular acceptance of everything he has encountered as possible fodder for some inventive use he may want to bestow upon it within his art. He is, in effect, a pack rat of creative possibilities made available to him by his sheer retention of vivid fragments amassed throughout the immediate flow of his personal life.

As an alternate example I will mention something here that I discussed in another setting in my book Cinematic Myth- making. In Amadeus, Milos Forman’s film about Mozart, there is a scene in which the composer’s mother-in-law viciously berates him. The anguished, haglike sounds she utters are shocking and unpleasant. Throughout her tirade Mozart sits silently, looking at her face in a kind of passive trance. But the camera has other things in mind. While the ugly creature car- ries on incessantly, she is morphed into the Queen of the Night singing her second aria in The Magic Flute, with its tormented assault upon the guiltless Sorastro. Instead of suffering under his mother-in-law’s hideous attack, as we naively thought, Mozart was seeing past it, transforming it into a coloratura expression of what the evil woman in his opera might sing as a fictional character. For Mozart as for Shakespeare, his cre- ative talent arises from his being open to such transformations, assimilating for artistic use rich and fertile material that in

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others would never get beyond the level of ordinary details in a familial situation.

Being astute about this phenomenon, creative people like Mozart and Shakespeare have learned how to profit from gra- tuities of this sort that the world throws at them from time to time and without any assurance that their artistic ventures will always, or ever, be able to benefit from such serendipities. But to the creative process that does not matter. The ripeness and the readiness are what counts.

Michelangelo’s The Slave and Our Craving for Creativity

In musing over these ideas, I often see in my mind’s eye the famous statue by Michelangelo called The Slave. Generally considered unfinished, it shows a human form half buried in the rough, unpolished marble that surrounds it. I think of it as more than just work abandoned in an early stage of creation. I perceive it as a sculptural statement about the permanent and always incomplete striving of human nature, seeking to emerge from the limitations of matter even while its restraints are present within some art or other flowering of the spirit that aspires to transcend them. This applies supremely to the pro- cess of creativity as a whole.

Being dependent upon the duration of time and the ongo- ing acts of learning, imaginative ideas that mysteriously issue forth in us are indicative of creativity not only because they seem wondrous in their unknown origin, but more essentially because they stem from forces within ourselves that are often crude or rudimentary, and always partly hidden. The machin- ery of creation shows itself only slightly and is never perfect in

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its operation. As even the most creative people will attest, there isn’t any one “act of creation” (the title of Koestler’s book). The relevant process is usually more of an endless enslavement to inevitable difficulties rather than a single or all-resolving Eureka-like termination. Perhaps that is why so many theorists have associated it with dreams. Those are not completions of anything, and they frequently contain a sense of desperate search for some evanescent meaning beyond themselves.

The Intuitiveness of Creative People

Because dreams predominantly arise out of the vegetative in a way that is different from conscious experience, they elude the kind of learning that occurs within our waking life. This alone is further reason to doubt theories that ascribe creativity to a dream someone has had. Similarly we should be suspicious of views that identify creativity with what is called “intuition.” That term has a variety of meanings that I do not need to go into here. Instead I want to remark that the intuitive powers creative people may be said to possess do not signify an ability on their part to circumvent the time-related dimensions of cre- ativity. On the contrary, the productive learning on which creativity relies can happen so rapidly that we fail to recognize its presence. There is no reason to believe that those who are creative avail themselves of a special and profoundly mystical faculty that less fortunate or less talented persons do not have.

The remarkable rapidity that creative insight sometimes displays, together with the emotion of delight that success unleashes, does bespeak an intellectual refinement and pene-

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tration of thought that most people lack. One might even describe it as a congenital gift that others can never match. For example, idiot savants in mathematics are able to reach astounding and instantaneous solutions to extremely difficult problems in multiplication or addition that are posed to them. We have no idea of why they can do so. But such persons should not be taken as paradigmatic of those whom we consider creative, or imaginative, or even intuitive. They have brains and minds of a different sort.

The intuitiveness of creative men and women is some- times adduced to their ability to imagine and to do inven- tive things without the recourse to trial and error that even very intelligent people require. To use a visual metaphor, they can detect clearly and directly something others have to squint at in order to see what is right there before their eyes. But though the sensations and perceptions of us all are usually intertwined with various interpretations and classifications, they too appear in consciousness with a mini- mum of deliberation or tentative surmise. We just open our eyes and there’s an image of some object, an image that is so stable and convincing that without any noticeable reflection we just accept it as our reality.

To some epistemologists that alone is evidence of the creativity in virtually everyone. They may be right, and I will argue for that possibility later on, but even if they are not, the lack of similarity between commonplace awareness and the high-speed mentality of those who are truly creative suggests something else. Though creative individuals are indeed like those for whom learning occurs through time as a variable pre- requisite, the former have acquired the capacity to accelerate

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this part of the process to a degree that most human beings cannot understand or approximate.

Regardless of how we define intuition in people who either are or are not said to be creative, the relevant feelings and ideas sprout in each of them as if by magic. The conclusions that come forth are eruptions out of the animal and vegetative faculties that the rational part of us cannot fathom, and need not. For these manifestations to have creative utility, we must formulate them in accordance with the technical devices of some art or practice. If they are musical ideas, they have to be fitted and transformed into recognizable sonic patterns. If they are thoughts or literary possibilities, they reverberate as the words and phrases, and often prefabricated sentences, that convey their meaningfulness. Living with the linguistic mate- rials that occupy his or her mentality, an imaginative author turns them over in the constant reshaping that comprises the creativity of one’s writing style. Without the transformational techniques for doing this, ideas of every kind are too often insubstantial, inactive, and of little value.

Education consists in harnessing the ability to apply these techniques that we will have learned from others but must now revive within ourselves, while also employing additional notions that arise in us freely on their own. Either they come or they don’t come, as we may say about experience itself and its serendipitous occurrence. Once we have learned how to make ourselves receptive to creative life enhancement and available for its reawakening, we can then enjoy whatever con- tributes to suitable advances in this procedure. They alone will make us feel more confident about further achievements of which we may be capable.

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Further Thoughts about Dreaming and Daydreaming

Since neither dreaming nor daydreaming has much place in what I have just described, I feel reinforced in my assertion that these components in our life are not major determinants of human creativity. At the same time, both dreaming and daydreaming do contain creative elements of their own. In being abstractions from selective bits of conscious experience, they have a peculiar though unquestionable aesthetic quality. Like other types of representation, they transform the fluidity of daily experience into contrived vignettes that may be hard to comprehend because they are so different from events in normal wakefulness but that follow each other with an un- relenting boldness that convinces the viewer that it must all make sense. The dreamer sees him- or herself in one place and then some other, in one guise and then suddenly a different one, usually without any noticeable transition between them. He or she senses nevertheless a pervasive continuity as being indeed awake. The dreamer does not reflect on his or her con- dition, however, and the mobility of dreaming is so fast that the images just skirt along, confusedly though still appearing to have some quasi reality in them. Sometimes this is pleasant, and sometimes not.

If we think of dreams in this fashion, as creative vehicles without there being an explicit creator of which we are aware, we may categorize them as usually very primitive works of abstract and expressionistic art, mainly visual, occasionally vocal as well. Not in their content or ability to induce creativity, but rather in their overall character, they are the forerunners of motion pictures. Because it is plausible to assume that men

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and women have had dreams since the beginnings of the species, we can say that throughout all history people have wanted to realize this potency within themselves by turning it into an art form that is somewhat dreamlike but also more grandiose and inclusive as a combination of the other art forms humankind has produced. The invention of photography, and then silent movies, served as a prelude to films as they now exist insofar as each is an apotheosis of the presentations that we all create in our heads while we are asleep.

Without the movies, Michelangelo’s slave would still be twisting hopelessly in his effort to free himself from his mind- less immersion in the stone. Cinema, and the visual media kindred to it, have now given him a greater opportunity to cope with that ancestral state.

Renoir’s Methodology Contra Platonic and Romantic Ideology

As a testament to the fact that the type of process I have been describing matters more in creativity than either dreams or any mystical and romanticized event, I relish Jean Renoir’s account of how he made the films for which he is renowned: “You discover the content of a film as you’re shooting it. You obviously start with guiding principles that are as firm as pos- sible, but when the subject is worthwhile, each step is a discov- ery, and this discovery brings others, and so a subject.”1 Renoir does not tell us much about these “guiding principles.” Where do they come from? Are they always the outcome of some momentous experience without which the creative process could not originate? Even if this were true, however, Renoir clearly means that the creativity of his filmmaking is mainly

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fabricated by the ongoing process itself. Amplifying the state- ment I have quoted, he says that movies have become so im- portant in the history of civilization because “the film medium carries technical obstacles that make it a slow means of expres- sion (you can’t shoot a film quickly), and this battle with technical obstacles forces you—more than in any other medium—to discover and to rediscover. You benefit from forced pauses that a writer would be obliged to impose on himself. The halts, the delays, are very good for the quality of a film.”2

What we can derive from this, as from the example of Michelangelo’s slave, is an explanation of creativity that runs absolutely contrary to the one that Plato enunciated. As we will see more thoroughly in chapter 5, Plato thought that all works of art worthy of the name begin with a vision of the formal abstractions—what he called the Eidos, the Forms— that reveal the underlying being of reality. With particular forms in mind, he says, an artist represents or even duplicates them as best he can within the limitations of his art. According to Plato, their perfection as what they are, whatever that might be, is a literal and essential prerequisite for attaining both truthfulness and beauty.

The trouble with Plato’s theory is that, beautiful as it may be, it is not truthful itself. Artists do not proceed by copying an a priori model that guides them at every step. Whatever has inspired them at the beginning becomes submerged in the creative process. Aesthetic validity occurs in relation to possibilities—as embodied in an artist’s imagination—that issue out of the act of production rather than being caused by some image of prior perfection.

In romanticism as it developed throughout the nine- teenth century, the rationalistic bases of Plato’s doctrine were

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superseded by the belief that creativity arises not from any contemplation of the Forms, or other abstract ideas, but rather from some previous feeling. Creative artists were thought to have the quasi-magical ability to reproduce in their works the actual sentiments of real men and women who did or might exist in the world. Yet that too, persuasive as it might seem, cannot elucidate the creative process. The Romantic approach implies that the feelings or emotions are preestablished nuggets that can be inserted into a work of art, for example, and that creativity entails the making of this insertion with ac- curacy and concomitant beauty in view of what real people are like.

That way of thinking misconstrues both creativity and the nature of feeling. Try as we might, we can never be wholly certain about what we feel at some moment in which we are having an affective response. Only our following or concomi- tant behavior can disclose what we really felt. A creative artist may be able to depict, and even mimic, this situation. But his or her creativity must show itself in the aesthetic transforma- tions effected by and throughout a particular medium. These transformations are not produced by mere reliance upon unprocessed feelings as they existed before the work itself. Since we discover what we actually felt through the sub- sequent acts that reveal our individual affect as well as its motivation, the Romantic perspective is pointed in the wrong direction.

Theories that give greatest importance to the unadorned experience of creativity, or to a glittering outlook that is either Platonistic or Romantic, can rightly claim one significant virtue. They captivate us with their imaginative depiction of the sheer wonderment of human creativity. To this extent, the

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theories are creative in themselves, and that is fine. But a more precise conception would have to make insightful reference to the routine and pragmatic, frequently laborious, aspects of creativity. Whether or not Mozart took dictation from God, he put in many hours of work each day in order to compose the music that supported his family. He accepted commissions of almost every type, even writing music for garden parties at which the guests idly walked about and talked to each other while scarcely taking any notice of the marvelous sounds that had been created for their musical enjoyment.

Mozart’s lifelong concern about the money he would receive was not just an external motive. It was for him, as for many creative people, a part of the creative process: it stimulated the phagocytes (as a doctor in George Bernard Shaw’s play The Doctor’s Dilemma says about his invigorating medicine) and mobilized the imagination even before its fruits could begin to appear. The earthy soil of everyday life matters, however crude it may be, and however little we like to think of its sustaining role in our existence.

As another example from my own experience, I can cite the evolution of my book Three Philosophical Filmmakers. It be- gan because I was asked to give a talk to a group toward which I felt a sense of obligation. I thought that some of my off-the- cuff ideas about the movies of Hitchcock might be of interest. Afterwards I wrote out my notes in a short essay, which ex- panded into many drafts of what could eventually be a lengthy chapter. I later gave a similar talk to the same group about Orson Welles, and that also developed into a possible and growing chapter. I wondered whether there might be a little book in the making, but the parts still seemed too insubstan- tial even when put together.

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74 Modes of Creativity

Having always loved the work of Jean Renoir, and already written about his masterpiece The Rules of the Game, I did some research to find whether there were any theoretical writings of his that would fit into the general design of the two other segments. To my surprise, I discovered his book from which I have quoted here. It was exactly what I needed, and I contrived to write a new chapter on Renoir that would serve as a companion piece with those on Hitchcock and Welles. I nevertheless felt that something was still wanting, and I added a brief introduction and then a long comparison of the three filmmakers at the end to unify the disparate pieces.

I present this process of mine, familiar as it is to almost all authors, as a personal example of how the mind works, what- ever its level of creativity may be. At no time, or in any of its many details, did I know beforehand what would emerge as the contents of that book. One might say my whole life went into it, but that only reinforces my suggestion that whatever is creative in the finished product issues primarily from the act of working toward it over a period of time and in many imper- fect but continuous efforts. As the French proverb tells us: L’appétit vient en mangeant (The appetite comes from the eating). Something of the sort applies to everything else I have written, including the book you are now reading.

A Problem in Epistemology

If we approach creativity as the process I have been portraying in this chapter, we may find that some of the problems in epis- temology and linguistics become a little easier to resolve. In this place, I mention briefly an answer to a query in the phi- losophy of language as Stanley Cavell poses it. He entitles an essay of his, as well as the book to which it belongs, “Must We

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The Creative Process 75

Mean What We Say?” The issue Cavell addresses is the rela- tionship between meaning something and verbal discourse that may or may not be an expression of our intention.

As I see this circumstance, the problem occurs because language is capable of existing in alienation from the human communication for which it is designed. What we say (or ges- ture or depict in a painting or a chart or even a mathematical formula) can have a meaning only because the form of life by which people convey sentiments and ideas is meaningful to others who can actively respond to it with some degree of comprehension. All meaning in what one says or feels or thinks reflects an individual’s reactions to relevant stimuli produced through one’s vegetative and animal faculties as well as one’s intellect.

In the creative process these responses are honed to a point where they cooperate massively, or at least with great efficacy. Within this organic totality the separation between meaning and saying may often be intentional, as a type of lying or deception for instance, but that does not constitute a philo- sophical quandary about the nature of language. In being creative, people mean what they say because they have learned how to use verbal, and other, types of communication to articulate what they really do mean. For them there is no problem. If one exists, it does so only for those who cannot communicate successfully and with a sufficient amount of authentic creativity. The creative process is linked to acts that are communicative through what we do and make as well as what we say. As we shall see further in this book, different modes of creativity will entail meaningful communications that are different from each other, but not because of any in- eluctible conflict between what we mean and what we say.

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