The word “creative” is perhaps one of the most misemployed, misconstrued, and widely misappropriated terms in the language. From advertisements to cuisine, from architectural designs to consumer goods, from haircuts to pulp-kitsch, there is hardly a domain of human activity that does not lay claim to being “creative.” The culture industry combats to be branded as creative in some way. Science too struggles with the term, trying to find out what makes certain people more “creative” than others. And yet the word was once used with great restraint to describe divine action. Only the Creator could create; others merely manipulated or transformed that which had already been created. Etymologically, the word derives from PIE root ker, “to grow” and the Sanskrit cognate kratu, “strength or generative force.” Its importance in the present volume can hardly be overstated. To recall, we are exploring the necessity of ontological understanding in making education what it could be and ought to be—a transformative praxis. Understanding creativity, or rather, developing intuitive insight into the process would lie at the core of such an endeavor. For if Being is the Unseen fountainhead, then it is the real source of all creativity. The converse is that, only through insight into creativity can we hope to orient toward Being. In order to develop a rudimentary grasp of the term, as well as the relation between creativity and the question of being, we shall look at the phenomenon from two descriptive ends—science and poetry—that represent two major and often opposing descriptions of experience, and in the process try and link the question with the essence of education.
A Scientific Perspective
The principle of structure as a hierarchy of orders is evidently universal. Thus, the electrons and nuclear particles ordered in a certain way make the atoms. These latter are ordered in various ways to make matter at the microscopic level, whether liquid, solid, or gaseous, crystalline or non-crystalline, etc. etc. This principle goes on up to the planets, the stars, the galaxies, galaxies of galaxies, etc., continuing to be valid as far as man has been able to probe with his scientific instruments. Similarly, protein molecules ordered in a certain way make the living cell. Cells ordered in a certain way make the organs. These are ordered to make the organisms, which in turn are ordered to make the society of organisms, until we cover the whole sphere of life on Earth. It seems clear from the above that the evolutionary process of nature (which includes the development of man and his intelligent perceptions) is at least potentially of an infinite order, in the sense that it is not fully determined by any of its partial orders. … Each order can become the basis of a new higher order, to form a continually evolving hierarchy, leading to new structures that are generally able to order those of a simpler nature (e.g. as the nervous system orders the mechanical movements of the muscle cells). Thus, it can be seen that nature is a creative process, in which not merely new structures, but also new orders of structure are always emerging.1
A part of Newton’s ideas was that the fundamental differences in position were to be thought of as being in an absolute space and taking place in an absolute time. That is to say, he supposed that space and time differences were universally similar, in such a way that different observers would all agree on what was the same interval of time and the same distance in space. Einstein’s really creative insight was to see that the facts available to him (which were such as to put physical theory into a considerable state of confusion) could be clearly understood, if we supposed that observers going at different speeds are actually attributing the property of simultaneity and of being at the same distance to different sets of events. However, he also saw that observers having similar differences of velocity would have similar differences in their ways of choosing the sets of events to which the properties of simultaneity and of being at the same distance were attributed. When expressed in precise mathematical terms, this led to the well-known Lorentz-transformation laws, which were at the foundations of the mathematical theory of relativity. So, it is clear that Einstein’s basic step was to perceive a new set of essential differences, from which there arose a new relationship of similarity, and thus a new order of space and time.2
So to sum up, we may say that quite generally, in a creative act of perception, one first becomes aware (generally non-verbally) of a new set of relevant differences, and one begins to feel out or otherwise to note a new set of similarities, which do not come merely from past knowledge, either in the same field or in a different field. This leads to a new order, which then gives rise to a hierarchy of new orders, that constitutes a set of new kinds of structure. The whole process tends to form harmonious and unified totalities, felt to be beautiful, as well as capable of moving those who understand them in a profoundly stirring way. Evidently, creation of this kind has been fairly rare. In the whole of human history, perhaps only a few people have achieved it. Most of the rest of human action has been relatively mediocre, though it is interlaced with flashes of penetrating insight that help to raise it above the level of mere humdrum routine. The reason is that creative work requires, above all, a creative state of mind. And generally speaking, what we learn as children, from parents, teachers, friends and society in general, is to have a conformative, imitative, mechanical state of mind, that does not present the disturbing danger of ‘upsetting the apple cart’.3
In structural terms, conformity—the general tendency of humans, in the above view—is the propensity to organizationally remain within existing boundaries, or to refuse the awareness of possible new hierarchies between layers of existing patterns of phenomena. However, creativity is not such an exclusive or closed box as one might think. Careful observation of things shows that there is always a gap between the description and the described, and this latent gap is irreducible. In other words, no description of the phenomenal world is ever complete. This necessary incompleteness means that there always remains the possibility of discovering a new structure in that gap, that is, a new description, which, in turn, opens up the possibility of further creative descriptions. What is important pedagogically is to move away from conformity, that is, implicit assumption of the sufficiency or fullness of a particular description of the world and its parts, and instead explore the gaps with a certain amount of doubt and openness. The structural understanding of creativity demystifies and enhances the possibility of creative understanding and appropriation of the phenomenal world.
In the development of special relativity theory, a thought concerning Faraday’s work on the electromagnetic induction played for me a leading role. According to Faraday, when a magnet is in relative motion with respect to a conducting circuit, an electric current is induced in the latter. It is all the same whether the magnet moves or the conductor; only the relative motion counts … However the theoretical interpretation in these two cases is quite different [as established by Maxwell-Lorentz theory] … The thought that one is dealing here with two fundamentally different cases was, for me, unbearable. The difference between these two cases could not be a real difference, but rather, in my conviction, could only be a difference in the choice of reference point. … [This] phenomenon forced me to postulate the special relativity principle. … In the year 1907, I tried to modify Newton’s theory of gravitation in such a way that it would fit into the [relativity] theory. … At that point there came to me the happiest thought of my life, in the following form: Just as in the case where an electric field is produced by electromagnetic induction, the gravitational field similarly has only a relative existence. Thus, for an observer in free fall there exists, during his fall, no gravitational field. The observer is therefore justified in considering his state as one of ‘rest’.4
Although the observer falling from the roof of a house is surely in a state of motion, he is simultaneously in a state of rest; a state of motion and rest exists at the same time. This was Einstein’s observation about a physical circumstance that allowed him to modify Newton’s theory of gravitation so that it would fit into relativity theory … From the formulation that an observer in free fall is both at rest and in motion at the same time, Einstein was able to postulate the relativity of motion in coordinate systems. Thus the crucial step in the development of the general theory of relativity, Einstein’s creative leap, was a formulation of the opposite states operating simultaneously. That Einstein knowingly formulated a condition of simultaneous antithesis is clear from the discussion in context. In ordinary experience, being in motion and being at rest are completely antithetical … [therefore] it was a rather shocking and dramatic breakthrough.5
This must not be mistaken for the Hegelian dialectic, namely, of the form: thesis → antithesis → synthesis. The antitheses in the dialectical process arise from the seeds of self-contradiction within the former state or the thesis, and carries the historical process forward indefinitely. Here, instead, the two theses stand side by side in an antinomian relation rather than in an antithetical one.6 The human mind is not generally used to positing two opposed states simultaneously, such as, for example, the rational and the non-rational, or the secular and the transcendental, and so on. At different historical moments, it prefers to cling to one side, rejecting the other. But the genius overcomes this propensity and is able to posit the truth of opposite states simultaneously, to reveal a new understanding. This creative relation is AND, not OR; this and that, not this or that.
“The Temple of Science,” Einstein begins, “is a multi-faceted building.” In it, many engage in science out of joy in flexing their intellectual muscles, or for utilitarian ends. If only such scientists existed, “the Temple would not have arisen … If there now came an Angel of the Lord to drive these persons out of the Temple,” few scientists would be left in it. But one of them would be [Max] Planck, “and that is why we love him.” Now let us turn to those “who found favor with the Angel.” They are mostly “rather odd, uncommunicative, solitary fellows, who despite these common characteristics resemble one another really less than the host of the banished … What led them into the Temple? The answer is not easy to give, and can certainly not apply uniformly. … One who is more finely tempered is driven to escape from personal existence and to the world of objective observing [Schauen] and understanding. The longing to behold that pre-established harmony is the source of the inexhaustible perseverance and patience with which Planck has given himself over to the most general problems of our science. … I have often heard colleagues trying to trace this attitude to extraordinary will power and discipline—in my opinion, wrongly. The state of feeling [Gefuhlszustand] which makes one capable of such achievements is akin to that of the religious worshipper or of one who is in love; his daily striving arises from no deliberate decision or program, but out of immediate necessity—”7
The repeated references to “Temple,” and “Angel of the Lord” give clear indications as to the realm from which Einstein is drawing his parallels and the framework of comparison, but the most revealing statement comes at the end where he compares the ideal scientist to “the religious worshipper.” The true and authentic religious person does not operate from calculation and intention, but from inner necessity, from telos . There is a much larger cosmic force that draws him to itself by way of the world. It is to this immediate ontological necessity that the scientist, no less than the religious person, responds. No amount of psychobiological or empirical study will reveal the true compulsions behind the intuitive achievements and insights of either. The deeply religious mind of Einstein sought the inner meaning behind phenomena from a very early age8—“the longing to behold that pre-established harmony”—is a statement that is ontological and religious at the same time.
The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be ‘voluntarily’ reproduced and combined. … But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought—before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others. The above-mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will. Max Wertheimer, one of the founders of Gestalt psychology and a friend of Einstein, reports that from 1916 on, in numerous discussions, he had questioned Einstein “in great detail about the concrete events in his thoughts” leading to the theory of relativity. Einstein told him: “These thoughts did not come in any verbal formulation. I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.” And later: “During all those years there was a feeling of direction, of going straight toward something concrete. It is, of course, very hard to express that feeling in words….”9
William James had observed that our total consciousness seemed to be split into parts that mutually ignore each other. The overwhelming wordiness of present-day consciousness in which everything appears as a product of the symbolic, which is apparently backed by nothing other than more symbols, ignores the corporeal, or the enfleshed aspect of reality and the possibility of its direct apprehension. This incredulity toward the other half of reality, the ontological part, is put to rest by none other than Einstein, in “going straight toward something concrete.” We are embarrassed, we try to turn away but cannot, for we are confronted by the totality—a consciousness that does not ignore its various parts that seem antithetical. The creative being, through his efforts, points us toward our own ontological constitution. This is bigger than even the concrete discoveries that the creative being has come upon, which are themselves, to say the least, out of all proportion. Then why do I say bigger? It is not bigger in the sense of the relative measurement of scientific impact etc. It is bigger, or rather deeper, in the sense that it changes the very perception of ourselves, provided of course that we are open to it. The manner in which the creative being comes upon reality reconstructs for us what it means to be, besides giving us the formal means to go beyond the unnecessary and to the essential.
It might bear mention here that in his famed work The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, Jacques Hadamard writes about other great thinkers such as Berkeley and Francis Galton who did not set great store by the word as the sole instrument of thought. Hadamard cites Galton: “It is a serious drawback to me in writing, and still more in explaining myself, that I do not so easily think in words as otherwise. It often happens that after being hard at work, and having arrived at results that are perfectly clear and satisfactory to myself, when I try to express them in language I feel that I must begin by putting myself upon quite another intellectual plane. I have to translate my thoughts into a language that does not run very evenly with them. I therefore waste a vast deal of time in seeking for appropriate words and phrases, and am conscious, when required to speak on a sudden, of being often very obscure through mere verbal maladroitness, and not through want of clearness of perception. That is one of the small annoyances of my life.”10 This again vouches for the position that a kind of non-symbolic illumination (akin to Sphota theory discussed in Chap. 5) precedes the eventual expression in language, bringing to the fore the ontological question in creativity.11
A Poetic Perspective
When Vikramaditya became king, Ujjayini a great capital, and Kalidasa its poet, the age of India’s forest retreats had passed. Then we had taken our stand in the midst of the great concourse of humanity. The Chinese and the Hun, the Scythian and the Persian, the Greek and the Roman, had crowded round us. But, even in that age of pomp and prosperity, the love and reverence with which its poet sang about the hermitage shows what was the dominant ideal that occupied the mind of India; what was the one current of memory that continually flowed through her life. In Kalidasa’s drama, Shakuntala, the hermitage, which dominates the play, overshadowing the king’s palace, has the same idea running through it in the recognition of the kinship of man with conscious and unconscious creation alike … The hermitage shines out, in all our ancient literature, as the place where the chasm between man and the rest of creation has been bridged. In the third canto of Kumara-Sambhava, Madana, the God Eros, enters the forest sanctuary to set free a sudden flood of desire amid the serenity of the ascetics’ meditation. But the boisterous outbreak of passion so caused is shown against a background of universal life. The divine love-thrills of Sati and Shiva found their response in the world-wide immensity of youth, in which animals and trees have their life-throbs. Not only its third canto but the whole of the Kumara-Sambhava poem is painted upon a limitless canvas. It tells of the eternal wedding of love, its wooing and sacrifice, and its fulfilment, for which the gods wait in suspense. Its inner idea is deep and of all time. It answers the one question that humanity asks through all its endeavours: ‘How is the birth of the hero to be brought about, the brave one who can defy and vanquish the evil demon laying waste heaven’s own kingdom?’ It becomes evident that such a problem had become acute in Kalidasa’s time, when the old simplicity of Hindu life had broken up. The Hindu kings, forgetful of their duties, had become self-seeking epicureans, and India was being repeatedly devastated by the Scythians. What answer, then, does the poem give to the question it raises?12
What is the truth of this world? It is not in the masses of substance, not in the number of things, but in their relatedness, which neither can be counted, nor measured, nor abstracted. It is not in the materials which are many, but in the expression which is one. All our knowledge of things is knowing them in their relation to the Universe, in that relation which is truth. A drop of water is not a particular assortment of elements; it is the miracle of a harmonious mutuality, in which the two reveal the One. No amount of analysis can reveal to us this mystery of unity. Matter is an abstraction; we shall never be able to realize what it is, for our world of reality does not acknowledge it. Even the giant forces of the world, centripetal and centrifugal, are kept out of our recognition. They are the day-labourers not admitted into the audience-hall of creation. But light and sound come to us in their gay dresses as troubadours singing serenades before the windows of the senses. What is constantly before us, claiming our attention, is not the kitchen, but the feast; not the anatomy of the world, but its countenance. There is the dancing ring of seasons; the elusive play of lights and shadows, of wind and water; the many-coloured wings of erratic life flitting between births and deaths. The importance of these does not lie in their existence as mere facts, but in their language of harmony, the mother-tongue of our own soul, through which they are communicated to us … Materials are savage; they are solitary; they are ready to hurt one another. They are like our individual impulses seeking the unlimited freedom of wilfulness. Left to themselves they are destructive. But directly an ideal of unity raises its banner in their centre, it brings these rebellious forces under its sway and creation is revealed—the creation which is peace, which is the unity of perfect relationship. Our greed for eating is in itself ugly and selfish, it has no sense of decorum; but when brought under the ideal of social fellowship, it is regulated and made ornamental; it is changed into a daily festivity of life. In human nature sexual passion is fiercely individual, but dominated by the ideal of love, it has been made to flower into a perfection of beauty, becoming in its best expression symbolical of the spiritual truth in man which is his kinship of love with the Infinite. Thus we find it is the One which expresses itself in creation; and the Many, by giving up opposition, make the revelation of unity perfect.14
I remember, when I was a child, that a row of coconut trees by our garden wall, with their branches beckoning the rising sun on the horizon, gave me a companionship as living as I was myself. I know it was my imagination which transmuted the world around me into my own world—the imagination which seeks unity, which deals with it. But we have to consider that this companionship was true; that the universe in which I was born had in it an element profoundly akin to my own imaginative mind, one which wakens in all children’s natures the Creator, whose pleasure is in interweaving the web of creation with His own patterns of many-coloured strands. It is something akin to us, and therefore harmonious to our imagination. When we find some strings vibrating in unison with others, we know that this sympathy carries in it an eternal reality. The fact that the world stirs our imagination in sympathy tells us that this creative imagination is a common truth both in us and in the heart of existence.16
The poet wants to belong to a simpler time, for only in radical simplicity and directness can truth and peace be found. And if the world is too much with us then it draws our attention toward useless detail that is destructive of creative solitude. The poet craves those inspired moments in which there are glimpses of the transcendental that makes life less desolate. And “[that] can only be possible if through our imagination is revealed, behind all appearances, the reality which gives the touch of companionship, that is to say, something which has an affinity to us. An immense amount of our activity is engaged in making images, not for serving any useful purpose or formulating rational propositions, but for giving varied responses to the varied touches of this reality. In this image-making the child creates his own world in answer to the world in which he finds himself. The child in us finds glimpses of his eternal playmate from behind the veil of things, as Proteus rising from the sea, or Triton blowing his wreathed horn. And the playmate is the Reality, that makes it possible for the child to find delight in activities which do not inform or bring assistance but merely express. There is an image-making joy in the infinite, which inspires in us our joy in imagining. The rhythm of cosmic motion produces in our mind the emotion which is creative.”18 It is the cosmic rhythm—something mostly shut out from a highly differentiated consciousness with its peculiar worldly sophistication—that trickles its way onto the pages of a poem or into the melody of a bard.
This “personification” must not be seen as a mere stylistic device or gesture. Seen from the side of sensible objects, all non-objects appear ethereal or as fantasy. But to the translucence of a poetic consciousness, objects are already liquefied and reinserted into their original relational form in which object and condition, or thing and context, are intermixed and in continuous exchange. In other words, the creative consciousness of the poet sees relations where others perceive isolated things. Let us listen to William Watson who sings of April in a similar manner:
The silent form of the ancient urn relieves the mind of chatter, for thought is confronted with the tension between time and timelessness. In the closing lines there is much more than a suggestion that truth reveals itself in beauty. “For if beauty were mere accident, a rent in the eternal fabric of things, then it would hurt, would be defeated by the antagonism of facts. Beauty is no phantasy, it has the everlasting meaning of reality. The facts that cause despondence and gloom are mere mist, and when through the mist beauty breaks out in momentary gleams, we realise that Peace is true and not conflict, Love is true and not hatred; and Truth is the One, not the disjointed multitude. We realize that Creation is the perpetual harmony between the infinite ideal of perfection and the eternal continuity of its realization; that so long as there is no absolute separation between the positive ideal and the material obstacle to its attainment, we need not be afraid of suffering and loss. This is the poet’s religion. Those who are habituated to the rigid framework of sectarian creeds will find such a religion as this too indefinite and elastic. No doubt it is so, but only because its ambition is not to shackle the Infinite and tame it for domestic use; but rather to help our consciousness to emancipate itself from materialism. It is as indefinite as the morning, and yet as luminous; it calls our thoughts, feelings, and actions into freedom, and feeds them with light. In the poet’s religion we find no doctrine or injunction, but rather the attitude of our entire being towards a truth which is ever to be revealed in its own endless creation. In dogmatic religion all questions are definitely answered, all doubts are finally laid to rest. But the poet’s religion is fluid, like the atmosphere round the earth where lights and shadows play hide-and-seek, and the wind like a shepherd boy plays upon its reeds among flocks of clouds. It never undertakes to lead anybody anywhere to any solid conclusion; yet it reveals endless spheres of light, because it has no walls round itself. It acknowledges the facts of evil; it openly admits ‘the weariness, the fever and the fret’ in the world ‘where men sit and hear each other groan’; yet it remembers that in spite of all there is the song of the nightingale, and ‘haply the Queen Moon is on her throne’….”22 The poet’s religion is to light the inner lamp, to stoke the fire of the numina, and not the advocacy of a set of conclusions. The poet has no conclusions to offer; rather his task is to examine by light of the soul the inner labyrinths that impose unworthy conclusions on us. The poetic consciousness observes the play of the forces of malice as well as those of uplift, it listens to the song of the bird as well as to the vexed sounds of men, it is aware of the melancholy of life at the same time as the glimmer of moonbeam. It is poised between the antitheses in creative agony.
The poet writes of his pursuit of departed souls and his attempts to contact ghostly beings in order to learn about the deep mysteries of life, but alas to no avail—no specters answer his call, no apparition presents itself before his pursuit. Dejected, he muses on life’s lot, when all on a sudden, at the wee hours one day, the relentlessness of his yearning opens the door to the Otherness. Grace comes upon him—the shadow of the Spirit falls on him, and he is overcome with ecstasy. It is a moot point as to whether the vision comes from within or without, for mystical transcendence is precisely the elevation from inside/outside distinctions. The sublime vision of the creative Spirit transforms Shelley’s life. Some have perceived in these lines a whisper of Christian imagery—in Shelley, the avowed atheist. But truly creative minds are Janusian, facing two ways at once, as we have seen earlier. Hence, it is not misplaced judgment if one were to hear a faint echo of these lines in the Gospels: The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the Spirit (John 3:8). From the moment of being born again into the Spirit of beauty, Shelley consecrates his life to its service.
Now Shelley wants to share his illumination, his passage to the light of beauty with all those many phantoms who kept watch with him during the long dark night of the soul seeking redemption alongside him from their “voiceless graves.” Shelley is convinced that the awesome (awful) “loveliness”, the Spirit of Beauty alone can relieve the world of its dreariness and melancholy, from its slavery to suffering and gloom. The poet’s creative joy is thus not unlinked from the hope of general emancipation beyond the goal of personal salvation.
After the initial burst of illumination in which there are tumultuous feelings of wonder, joy, and a piercing sense of universal splendor, there comes a serene harmony, like autumn that follows the boisterous summer. The hymn, now almost liturgical in tone, bids the Spirit to flow into the poet uninterrupted, supplying him with the calm energy and power of beauty. But more, he implores the Spirit to envelop all of creation, freeing entities from fear born of wrong perception. “Intellectual Beauty” turns out to be much more than any ordinary conception of the intellect, forcing one to wonder if there was a hidden irony in the employment of the term.
Let us end by reading a few lines from one of Shelley’s letters written in 1811: “I will say, then, that all nature is animated; that microscopic vision, as it has discovered to us millions of animated beings whose pursuits and passions are as eagerly followed as our own, so might it, if extended, find that nature itself was but a mass of organized animation. Perhaps the animative intellect; of all this is in a constant rotation of change: perhaps a future state is no other than a different mode of terrestrial existence to which we have fitted ourselves in this mode.”26 Reference to nature as “organized animation,” that is, as nothing other than movement, invokes the vision of a unified ground of being on the surface of which forms continually transform into one another. All discrete objects are in the end nothing but relations between still other animated relations. Having mobilized his soul through contact with the Spirit, the poetic genius uncovers for us this fundamental existential truth (of universal movement) from the side of the Spirit, which the scientific mind discovers from the side of matter. For education this is unimaginable bounty for it has the potential to unlock what it has always sought to unlock—the deepest inner resources of the pedagogic situation—by going beyond false dichotomies and regarding life as a whole. That is creativity.