The question that forms the title of this Reflection might prompt you immediately to think of art, or music, or literature. Did it trigger any thoughts of science or mathematics?
I am willing to bet that, for most of you, the answer is "no". Why? Why do we think of creativity as the driving force of the humanities, but tend to think that the best science entails discovery of things deeply hidden, but not as invention?
In his books, Science and Human Values and The Identity of Man (1) Jacob Bronowski argued that creativity is an essential element in science, and that the nature of creativity in science is much the same as it is in the arts. Regardless of the subject, creativity is a slippery subject, and a precise definition of it is elusive, in part because creativity often breaks the rules of its discipline, and it can just as easily break most rules about the nature of creativity.
I know what art is, but I don't know what I like
Creativity seems to be something we think we can recognize, but defining it is harder. This situation is not unusual. What about defining art? Can you define life? These concepts seem so fundamental, and we speak of them with ease, but it is as if they are buildings whose upper floors are easily navigable, but whose basements are dark and mysterious.
In Science and Human Values, Jacob Bronowski argued that creativity does not refer to the production of something wholly new and completely unconnected to what went before. In fact, it is the connection of the new to the known that often strikes us as creative. If the new is completely unconnected, we often simply don't know what to think of it. When we see the unity, and we have to catch our breath, we are recreating the author's or artist's creation in our own minds. As a mundane analogy, it is sort of like "getting" a joke.
In Bronowski's argument, instances of creativity can be seen as finding a likeness between things previously thought to be unrelated. Coleridge had said that beauty is unity in variety, and Bronowski then argued that creativity is the discovery of such unity. Newton did this with his concept of gravity, which for the first time linked falling objects with the moon orbiting the earth, and with planets orbiting the sun. Both the behavior of falling objects and the shapes of planetary orbits were familiar and widely studied, but the connection between them was new, and it was a deep connection, one that explained many things outside of both realms. It even told, long before anyone could do it, how hard you would have to propel an object for it to escape the earth and go into orbit or on into outer space. Almost 300 years later, listening to a Heathkit crystal radio while dozing off in my childhood bed, I learned that Russia had put an object, a satellite named Sputnik, into orbit. Was this the first real confirmation that Newton was right about how to get an object off the earth to stay?
But how can Newton's insight be creative? Did he not simply discover a truth in nature, a truth which was there for anyone to find? Was his discovery qualitatively different from merely turning up a stone and seeing what was underneath? For me, there is a clear indication that Newton's insight was his free creation: he was wrong! Newton's model of gravitation was close, but no cigar. Soon after his law of gravity became widely known, it was recognized that the motion of the planet Mercury did not quite fit the law. Not until Einstein formulated a more complete model of gravity was this motion explained. If Newton was, in the end, wrong, how could he have found his notion under a proverbial rock? It was not really there in nature to be found. Einstein's model is likely to be incomplete as well, and thus also a creative invention rather than a discovery, as evidenced by scientists' inability to reconcile or unify it with laws of more powerful forces such as electromagnetism and atomic forces.
In his poem "Figures of Thought", Howard Nemerov (2) echoes this notion of unity in variety, and finds in it a link between science and art:
... how privilegedBronowski also believed that this definition of creativity applies in the arts as well. In his books, he discussed both literary and artistic examples. In art, he explored the unexpected unities in art Da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine, in which Da Vinci seems to be drawing a likeness, both visually and in the nature of their lives, between a woman and her pet ermine, or stoat. The viewer gradually realizes that their faces, expressions, and postures are almost congruent, and the fact that the lady who was the subject of this painting was also commonly known to be the consort—or pet, more or less—of Leonardo's employer might have made the parallel even more striking in its time.
One feels to find the same necessity
Ciphered in forms diverse and otherwise
Without kinship –– that is the beautiful
In Nature as in art, ...
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| Lady with an Ermine Leonardo Davinci (3) |
Is art not thus constrained? Is art pure, unconstrained imagination? Perhaps it is also constrained, but by different bonds, certainly harder to define, but one of which is the desire, in certain kinds of art and literature, for the result to be "true to life", which means for characters and situations to be sufficiently believable to draw us into their lives and make us identify with them or care about them.
What about abstraction?
In purely abstract art, such as the work of Jackson Pollock, most people find it much harder to connect the work to anything specific in their experience, and thus to see it as unifying seemingly unlike ideas or concepts. When someone refers to such art as "creative", it might be harder to apply Bronowski's definition of creativity. Or is it? What do you think?
What engages you in art?
When a work of art in a museum draws you over for a closer look, and it takes your breath away, what's going on? Do you think there are parallels when we recognize how well a new scientific theory fits the evidence?
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(1) Science and Human Values, Harper and Row, Publishers, 1956, p. 119; J. Bronowski, The Identity of Man, Garden City, NY: The Natural History Press, 1971, p. 68.
(2) Read the poem HERE.
(3) Image from Wikipedia Commons. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_with_an_Ermine
