Emotion and Creativity
Dr. Mike Radford
Principal Lecturer,
Canterbury Christ Church University College,
Canterbury, Kent,
CT1 1QU
Creativity and Emotion March 2002
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Abstract
Creativity is seen as a complex process of information processing within a defined
cognitive realm, or ‘conceptual space’. This ‘ space’ defines the possibilities in terms
of sensible judgements. Creative acts are such that they a) consist of novel
reorganisations and combinations of information within that space and b) challenge
the boundaries of sense as defined by the space. Creativity is a process of explorative
articulation within and at the parameters of this space.
Because of their position in relation to the ‘sense making’ system, creative acts
particularly those of b), involve the risk of falling into nonsense. How do people come
to make novel articulations within the conceptual space that defines the activity and
what guides them when they ‘sensibly’ challenge the boundaries of that space ?
Information is not emotionally neutral. In the intelligent selection and processing of
information we are guided by subconsciously assimilated emotional markers that are
a result of acculturation. They define both the subjectivity of the individual but also
represent commonly held cultural perceptions to which the creative articulation of the
individual is objectively attuned. Where the creative act challenges the boundaries of
sense created by the conceptual space within which the act takes place, a higher level
of emotional consonance kicks in. This is the tension felt, to a greater or lesser extent,
by reflectively self conscious intelligences between the subjective, unitary, and
temporary self and the objective, multiplex and timeless universe of which each is a
part.
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Introduction
Creativity may be seen as a complex process of informational processing within a
given framework or, as Margaret Boden (1) has termed it, ‘conceptual space’
(DoC,79). It is in the context of such frameworks that the process of managing
information makes sense. The framework offers the possibilities within which
information can be combined and separated, grouped and re grouped, and may be
seen to define the boundaries of that which makes sense both within the space and at
its parameters. Boden suggests that we can, by playing around with the variables
within a ‘conceptual space’, be creative. We can generate multiple possibilities in
terms of meaningful articulations.
We can also aspire to a more fundamental level of creative thought or action by
engaging in the high risk process of challenging the very rules that support the
coherence of the space itself. In other words we can think, hypothesise or ‘play’ at
the boundaries of sense and the consequences of such explorations might be to change
those boundaries, to transform the conceptual space. Sometimes such changes might
be minor but at other times can be dramatic, constituting major transitions in human
thought and expression. This account is made particularly plausible by the way in
which it seems to explain both the gradual process of creative development in the arts
and sciences as well as the dramatic transformations that we observe in the history of
intellectual and cultural development. Some conceptual spaces may be clearly defined
with relatively closely controlled parameters. Others might be more open, more
accommodating both within and at their boundaries
A number of questions arise in the context, two of which are of particular interest to
this analysis. The first is that of how novel combinations or reorganisations of
information within the conceptual space come to be made, how they are recognised as
sensible and of value within the system. The second more fundamental question is
that of how we come to construct new and original articulations that stand at the
parameters or boundaries of the sense making system. How are we guided when we
seek to make sense at its very boundaries ? It may be that few are called to such
profound levels of creative articulation but for the rest of us, how do we recognise
these creative articulations when they are made ? How do we make sense of an
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activity, a new scientific theory or work of art, or whatever, when it challenges the
very principles that govern its sense in the first place ?
It is important in the context of this analysis to give full cognisance to the complexity
of the information processing task that is being performed and it is highly doubtful if
all elements, all items of information and the relationships between them, are before
the conscious mind of the individual creative intelligence at any one time. There may
be a sense of consonance or harmony within this system that enables us to recognise
its sense or coherence. In this way much of the information contained within it is
simply not noticed. Only when some item of information or process is out of place,
dissonant with the organisation do, we perceive difficulties. All systems contain
dissonances either obviously or manufactured. In science for example there are items
of evidence that do not fit within the theoretical frameworks or the paradigms that it
has to offer. There are also substantial areas of human experience that might seem to
fall outside the paradigm altogether. For many years scientists have been able to
predict the exact day and time and the locality within which we may observe an
eclipse of the sun. What they have been unable to do, even within a few hours of the
event, is predict whether the weather conditions will be such that we can actually
observe it. In time it may be that there is the development of a new paradigm that
promises accuracy in weather predictions or newly discovered evidence that warrants
a review of particular theories within a paradigm.
Sometimes it may seem that there is a perversity in human intelligence, particularly in
the arts, that seeks out or deliberately manufactures such dissonances in order to
challenge us in the way that we are thinking, to shake complacency or to deliberately
ferment change, a kind of intellectual or artistic anarchism. It is the tensions of such
dissonances that are the impetus to creative development, either in the development of
new scientific theories or forms of artistic expression.
This brings our attention to the nature of emotional feeling as an element in this
process. Tension is a form of emotional discomfort that arises in various
circumstances and may affect us more or less significantly.
Conversely, the
reconciliations of such tensions is an emotionally satisfying experience. The aesthetic
rationale of much music is centred on the creation and reconciliation of emotional
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tensions. The sense that we perceive within a conceptual space, the information that
is identified as appropriate and the particular relationships between items of
information, is held together by feelings of appropriateness, by an emotional
reflexivity that supersedes the need for continuous internal justifications. We do not
find ourselves having to re-rehearse every informational connection as we develop an
argument or theory in relation to a particular body of evidence, every element of
artistic expression as we construct a new work. We rely on our intuitive sense of the
harmony, of the consonances and dissonances implicit in the whole. This sense of
harmony might be perceived as both a positive and negative factor in the development
of understanding and expression.
In instances of insecurity this sense of harmony may lead us to be resistant to change.
On the other hand it is the dissonances within the system, to which some are more
sensitive than others, that are the factors in the development of new insights. It is one
of the elements of intelligence that enables us to perceive sense in a new and
insightful explanation when the structures of the conceptual space, within which the
explanation is being offered, are challenged. The emotions provide us with a reflexive
guidance system as we move beyond the boundaries of sense.
It is the objective of this paper to offer a critical development of this perspective and a
brief consideration of any implications it may have for creativity in education. The
current trend towards clearly defined targets, measurable outcomes and the
development of basic skills in schools, it might be argued, is not hopeful for the
cultivation of creativity among pupils.
Such systems represent relatively closed
conceptual spaces. It may be seen as important to help pupils to be comfortable and
secure in the context of risk and to develop a sensitivity to information that helps
them to break out of the linear, techno / rationalist conceptualisations of learning that
may be seen as implicit in current trends.
Creativity and ‘Conceptual Spaces’
The concept of creativity, and indeed the phenomenon itself, has always presented us
with a both conceptual challenge as well as an empirical one. The various conceptual
paradigms of philosophy have caused practitioners to struggle with the ‘problem’ of
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creativity and psychological empirical approaches such as when artists are asked to
reflect and explain their own creative efforts, have been similarly unhelpful. Plato in
his dialogue ‘Ion’ (2) recognises the conceptual difficulty of explaining human
creativity within the parameters of thought. In order to explain creativity he has to
‘pass the buck’ as it were, arguing that the poets cannot be responsible for their
creations but are rather vehicles for the Gods of the Muses who breathe the creative
ideas into their mind (hence the concept of the creative process as ‘inspirational’)
(Ion, 9). This does not explain the phenomenon of creativity but simply passes the
buck rather in the same way as the doctrine of recollection does not really explain the
genesis of knowledge but simply sends us into in infinite regress (3)(EGU,39).
Robert Wilkinson(4) describes a number of accounts given by artists of creative
inspiration as something that occurs as a mystery, as something that perhaps takes
over the artist’s actions (AEE, 221) and David Best(5) reports that Picasso, when
asked to account for his creativity as unhelpfully (and perhaps perversely) saying ‘I
don’t know and if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.’ (FRA,76).
Tony Godfrey (6) identifies one of the central characteristics of conceptual art as a
preoccupation with the nature of art itself, with the limits of the boundaries of the
creative and artistic act. One of the problems of conceptual art is that it sets itself an
almost boundless conceptual space and as such it is difficult to distinguish that which
makes sense from that which is nonsense. It may be that some works of conceptual
art are simply centred on challenging boundaries, at setting up dissonances. Godfrey
describes how one of the founding fathers of the movement, Marcel Duchamp, sought
to do this with his submission of a urinal entitled ‘Fountain’ for exhibition in New
York in 1917 (CA,28). In order to be creative it may be argued that it is insufficient
to draw attention to a dissonance or controversy, but rather the artist must offer a way
of addressing it. Jerome Bruner (7) has talked of one of the conditions of the creative
act as that of bringing about a ‘shock of recognition’, a sense that the act tells us
something that we feel that we already half knew (OK,18). It may be that it serves to
reconcile some tension of which we were only half aware and in doing so creates a
sense of surprise in us.
This notion of tension and reconciliation, and of the creative act as speaking to
something ‘within us’, a sense of telling us or revealing to us something about
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ourselves may be significant and we will return to it in the next section of this paper.
In the meantime it might be helpful to turn our attention to the nature of sense in
terms of what makes sense to us and conversely what qualifies as nonsense. Nonsense
may well play a part in the artistic creative process, though less so in the creativity
called upon in scientific or other forms of investigation. Even in art, nonsense is
parasitic for its place in the work on the elements of the work that make sense and
sense is derived from what Margaret Boden has referred to as the ‘conceptual space’
within which the work is set (DOC, 79).
Ernst Gombrich in Art and Illusion (8) provided a what some may regard as a classic
analysis upon which Margaret Boden has built. He addressed the question of why it is
that the history of art is one of discernible styles rather than of unclassifiable, random
quirks. A style, he suggests is a manifestation of a mental set which governs the
perception of the artist. A set is extremely difficult to invent and generally develops
over a period of time on the basis of the work of a number of artists each making their
individual contributions. The intellectual and cultural grip of the set is powerful and to
change the set calls upon creative intelligence of a high order. Radical changes to the
set are made at the risk to intelligibility that the set provides.
Whereas Gombrich may be broadly be seen as presenting an account that is based in
historical and psychological observations, Margaret Boden reformulates this position
as a logical one. The concept of the ‘mental set’ becomes one of a ‘conceptual space’.
Boden is interested in an explanation of creativity that embraces all arenas of
expression including that of science and mathematics as well as that in the arts and
language. For Boden the concepts and their relationships between each other are an
agreed formal system within which intelligible propositions are generated. Language
is a prime example where original and novel statements are continuously being
generated by language users. Chomsky (9) describes this as representative of the
‘creative capacity’ of human intelligence (LAM,100). We might be reluctant to agree
with Chomsky. The mere capacity to generate new combinations from a given set of
rules within a rule driven system is easily within the capacity of a simple computer or
may be achieved indeterminately on the throw of a dice. Furthermore, conceptual
spaces might be more or less open. The conceptual space that defines the game of
chess is a relatively closed system whereas that which contains the various
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articulations of the conceptual artists over the past century has been fairly open
(perhaps too open and thus too prone to the encouragement of nonsense).
In order to be creative, the original and novel outcomes of generation within the
system must be perceived to be of some value. It is quite possible for individuals to
generate new perspectives, new combinations of elements within a system and
produce something that is attractive or interesting to a particular group. In art lessons,
pupils are given a range of colours, brushes and paper surfaces on which to work and
are invited to explore a particular theme. These conditions are such to create certain
possibilities in terms of visual outcomes. The theme and the tools used to explore it
create a ‘conceptual space’ within which such outcomes might be produced. The
various offerings of the pupils might be more or less skilfully articulated, more or less
identifiable within the range of possibilities that the theme sets out. It may be that
pupils will need to explain how their work is intended to communicate something in
relation to the theme. This might be because they lack the artistic skill to produce a
‘sensible’ visual image or that their thought processes are convoluted, unclear, vague
or ambiguous. Some might adopt quite original ways of representing elements
embodied in the theme although it is unlikely that what is produced will be so original
that the teacher has never seen anything like it before. The images that the pupils
develop will be taken from their limited visual experiences and although these might
be excitingly new for them and their peers, they will be less so for the teacher. Good
teachers may seek to share the excitement and enthusiasm of the moment but for them
it is probably easier to get excited at the processes at work, rather than at the product
itself.
The novel and original ideas developed by the pupils help to expand their conceptual
grasp of the elements of the theme set. In this context the arts offer a kind of
conceptual exploration that enriches and extends pupils’ consciousness and as such is
a powerful dimension in their learning experience. The creative outcome is, given the
psychological parameters, the collective experiences and understandings that they
bring to the task, creative for them. Margaret Boden refers to this as ‘psychological’
or ‘P creativity’ (DOC,76). To use a colloquial expression this is creativity that
comes about while ‘thinking within the box’, the construction of new combinations of
existing ideas that make sense within the context of the conceptual space, the rules
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and parameters.
It is the shared meanings and understandings that make such
articulations possible in the first place and that make them sensible to others, in other
words the creative act derives its sense from the conceptual space within which it is
set.
Margaret Boden’s characterisation of this form of ‘P creativity’ is to distinguish it
from a more powerful and transformational kind of intellectual or artistic creativity
that might represent, again to use the colloquial term, ‘thinking outside the box’, that
is achieving sense while at the same time challenging the very rules, conventions or
agreements that were the conditions for sense in the first place, that defined the
conceptual space.
This kind of creativity yields a product, an image, idea or
perspective that could not have been generated within the existing structures of
thought made possible by, but also confined within the conceptual space. The result
is to transform the conceptual space itself, to create new possibilities for making
sense, for the generation of a whole new line of P creative solutions. This she terms
‘historical’ or ‘H creativity’ since it changes the history of the conceptual space.
How are articulations generated within the system, recognised as creatively valuable,
and how do articulations, generated within and thus dependent upon the conceptual
space for their sense, continue to make sense when they run contrary to its
conventions and rules ? There is a sense defining principle at work within the
conceptual space. If statements that break out of the space, are to also make sense
there must be some kind of transcendent principle for sense, some sort of ‘higher
order’ principle that enables us to realise the sense of the articulation. How does the
creative thinker, and indeed the audience for the creative act realise this principle ?
Explanations from creative thinkers in terms of inspiration, or moments of epiphany,
explain nothing at all. Even if they describe the move as a lucky accident, we still
needed to explain how they recognised and articulated the results as significant.
It may be that the conceptual space is not as clearly bounded as Boden suggests, that
sense and non sense merge into each other and that there is a grey area between the
two a kind of ‘no man’s land’ into which the creatively intelligent individual might
venture. Of course such venturings entail risk and for every successful creative
venture there may be others fall into nonsense. It may also be that the boundaries
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between P and H creativity are similarly blurred. Boden’s illustrations for her analysis
tend to highlight the dramatic breakthroughs of creative genius but it may be that the
conceptual space is undergoing much more modest and continuous changes at a
number of levels from the infant classroom to the leading artist’s studio or the
research laboratory. For the infant it might be that her creative efforts are radically
restructuring the conceptual space within which she and her peers are operating.
The crucial question, however, is that of sense. How did the creative intelligent person
know that she was making sense, how did she recognise her transformative act as
significant in terms of its relationship to the existing space ? Boden’s central interest
is in creative intelligence at the level of genius, a the great transforming insights of the
century, the scientific creativity of Kekule or the artistic creativity of Martha Graham.
Others are interested in the possibility of creativity on a much more modest and local
scale, the creativity that is within the reach of pupils in schools
Malcolm Ross et
al,(10) following a model originating with Rom Harre describes the creative process
in four stages (AAA,50). The first two, that are termed ‘conventionalisation’ and
‘appropriation’ coincide with the process of initiation of the individual into the
‘conceptual space’ the rules, conventions, information, skills, etc. that define the
activity and his ability to become P creative within them. The third stage is labelled
‘transformation’ and is the one that brings us to Boden’s H creativity. At this stage
the individual challenges the structures of the conceptual space as defined by the
conventions, generating outcomes that are such as to lead us to rethink the
conventions within which they were produced. The question that is implicit in Ross
et al’s analysis is that of how we know we have made sense at this stage. How do we
know that our transformations have not found us degenerating into nonsense ? Ross et
al’s solution arrives in the fourth stage, that of ‘publication’ and ‘validation’. The
question of whether the work makes sense lies in its communicability to others. The
objective sense of the work is the publicly shared intersubjectivity of the audience.
The question remains of how the work makes sense to the public. What is the
validating principle that explains the success of the work on publication ?
Information, emotion and the eternal question
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The hypothesis to be developed in this section is centred on two elements. The first
concerns the way in which we might understand how we process information, the
second, the relationship between that process and what I have referred to in the sub
title above as the eternal question, that is the question of the nature of the relationship
between ourselves as subjective self conscious beings and objective reality. In
summary the argument is that;
a) insofar as the creative act involves mastery within a particular conceptual space, it
may be seen as one of complex information processing. The effective execution of
this processing depends on the deployment of emotional markers on certain items of
information or certain lines of connection within the informational complex. These
enable us to short cut, to eliminate certain elements of the complex and that draw us
to others, information that has an intuitive attractiveness to us. This is a kind of
emotional reflexivity is culturally acquired and is embedded in the processing of
information. As such it happens without reflective thought and is a process of which
we are barely conscious.
b) our ability to navigate ourselves in the region between sense and nonsense also
depends on the culturally acquired pattern of emotional markers identified above. We
cannot explain how we came to a particular conclusion, articulation, or judgement,
just that when we did we were excited, euphoric or whatever. We got a ‘buzz’ not just
because we had solved a particular problem, but integral to the way in which we had
solved it, the process that the creative insight engaged. Similarly with regards to the
recognition of creative acts that transcend the conceptual space from which they
emerge. The ‘transcendent principle’ that enables us to make sense of creative acts
that go beyond the sense making framework of the conceptual space, is the pattern of
emotional markers of which we are only semi conscious, hence we may experience a
feeling of ‘effective surprise’ or even ‘shock’ as this transcendent principle is made
explicit in the creative act.
c) the creative act works to release or reconcile a tension of which I may have been
more or less aware. There is a sudden sense of how things ‘fit together’, a sense of
wholeness and containment. This psychological tendency may be based on a more
fundamental sense of anxiety of which different individuals are more or less aware,
Creativity and Emotion March 2002
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concerning the relationship between the individual’s sense of self as a limited
subjective centre of consciousness as set against the relatively unlimited and objective
reality of which we find ourselves a part.
Antonio Damasio in his book Descartes’ Error (11)has provided a psychological
model that seeks to explain the processes described in a) above, that takes the form of
his ‘somatic marker hypothesis’. Damasio comes from a pragmatic tradition in
arguing that human intelligence is ‘consumed by using the past to plan the future.. a
ceaseless process of creation which is what reasoning and deciding are all about.’
(DE,180)
This
consists of a continuing process of construction of multiple
representations of reality, of the processing of these representations, conceiving of
possibilities, and selecting data, all of which form the basis for acting.
This
characterisation shares much with Bruner’s (12) earlier account of intelligent
behaviour as primarily centred on the ways in which we act upon the world
(AMPW,109). The information or knowledge (insofar as this represents not just items
of information but the conceptual structures within which it is subsumed) suggests
Damasio, ‘exists in memory under a dispositional representational form and can be
made accessible to consciousness in both language and non language versions
virtually simultaneously’ (Ibid; 166).
The central mechanism for the processing of information in the mind has a self
regulatory character. The mechanism of this self regulation is acquired in the process
of learning and works unconsciously in the mind of the individual. Damasio illustrates
this with the example of how we react to falling objects. Faced with the situation in
which something is falling towards us we have the option of ducking or not. In order
to select our response we are unlikely to use a conscious reasoning strategy. The
knowledge that falling objects landing upon us might cause pain and injury and that
by avoiding them we can avoid these consequences, may once have been made
conscious to us but now we simply exercise a reflex action and duck. This reflexive
action is not like an unconscious physical reflex for example, it might be over ruled if
one was carrying an infant child and the act of ducking was likely to cause injury to
the child. We might try to offer a detailed articulation of information processing that
could have taken place as the individual made a decision as to whether to duck or not.
There would have to have been a full evaluation of the circumstances, hypotheses will
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have to have been constructed about the direction and speed of the falling object and
the ways in which it might strike my body, the nature of the injuries that might ensue
and the possible advantages and disadvantages of taking different forms of evasive
action, etc. In reality no such processes occur, the mind acts under an intelligent self
regulating system enabling one to short cut the full evaluative processes and make an
immediate judgement represented in an immediate action.
Decisions in other aspects of life are considerably more complex and engaging in
terms of our knowledge and understandings, than that of whether to duck or not to
avoid a falling object. Outcomes might be both complex, multiplex and uncertain.
They also might be distantly removed from the immediate vicinity of action. They
might employ multiple representations with hypothetical thinking that generates even
more possibilities. A traditional view, in Damasio’s account, is one in which we see
the intelligent agent processing substantial amounts of information and carefully
weighing up the advantages and disadvantages of particular hypothesised courses of
action. He refers to this as the ‘high reason’ view in which information is seen as
methodically ordered and rationally processed in linear patterns of thought and each
fresh problem is approached with a clear, dispassionate and unprejudiced frame of
mind.
The mind is ‘replete with a diverse repertoire of images (and expected
connections, judgemental dispositions, etc), generated to the tune of the situation one
is facing, entering and exiting consciousness in a show that is too rich to be fully
encompassed.’ (DE, 170)
This ‘high reason’ view of the intelligent agent as carefully balancing the pros and
cons of each element within the complex information handling process, of weighing
up costs and benefits, he argues, just simply cannot account for the speed and
effectiveness with which judgements are made. This kind of methodical ‘high
reasoning’ approach, Damasio associates with people who as a result of neurological
surgery are emotionally impaired. Such individuals are often noted to be mentally
paralysed, unable to reach any decision or judgement, by the enormity of the
information processing task in which they are engaged particularly where such
judgements entail some degree of risk.
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Damasio’s response to this problem is to argue for the case that we are emotionally
conditioned or attuned within the context of our culture and previous experience in
such a way as to construct certain kinds of internal representations. These
representations are such that they enable to make selections in the information
handling process, to immediately and unconsciously reject certain courses of action
and to focus upon others. These representations are marked by emotional responses
and can manifest themselves physiologically as ‘gut feelings’ or simply as automated
triggers within the psychological system. There is still a basis for the rational
weighing and balancing of alternatives but only after the marking system has
drastically reduced the number of options.
This internal marking system takes the
form of what he refers to as ‘somatic markers’.
These representational packages that have established associations between emotion
and information, put emotional feelings at the heart of intelligent action. They
influence the way in which we select and process that information, account for the
differences that we experience in different people’s perceptions and interpretations of
reality. They are at the heart of individual subjectivity. At the same time, having been
acquired through our acculturation, it might be suggested that they are also shared.
While they are in one sense at the roots of individual subjectivity, they are also part of
the objective public response, a shared propensity to seeing things in a similar way.
Creative activity, it is suggested, might be a result of the realisation of consonance
between such representations, that the creative act of one person ‘speaks’ to the
emotional / informational representations of others. In this way we feel what Bruner
has described as ‘effective surprise’ or more powerfully, a ‘shock of recognition’
(Bruner OK,018) as we recognise the representations that lie in our own semi or sub
consciousness. More significantly creative acts might forge new representations that
are more or less consonant with existing ones, that fall into the middle ground of
sense identified above when the ‘conceptual space’ of the particular sphere of activity
is transcended.
The sense of excitement, of the ‘rightness’ of a particular expression of judgement,
the way in which the creative act enables everything to just fall into place might be
seen to address a basic emotional tension that, it has been suggested, is embedded in
the psychology of human beings. This tension takes the form of an impulse towards
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self understanding and understanding of one’s relationship with the external world.
Thomas Nagel (13) accounts for this tension in terms of the awareness of the self
reflective consciousness of its own subjective, temporary and localised nature, as
against the vast, objective and relatively permanent reality that is the universe (Nagel
VFN, 209 ). This ‘tension’ is described by Paul Tillich as a sense of ‘estrangement’,
of “existential separation” from something to which one essentially belongs (14)
(RARE,35). This sense of estrangement is often associated with times of emotional or
physical suffering, but may simply arise from the sense of awful puzzlement at our
own being. Nagel suggests that some people are more susceptible to this state of mind
than others and that even when it does grip people, it can be more or less powerful in
its effect (VFN,214). This tension lies at the heart of our desire to understand the
nature of reality or to impose our own constructions upon that reality, to understand
and to control the objective reality that stands in contrast to our own subjective
awareness. Our capacities for creative activity either in terms of the construction of
new hypotheses in explanations or a realisation in the context of our aesthetic
experience of the world is, it is argued, a response to this tension.
Conclusion
The argument of this paper rests on the juxtaposition of two broad theoretical
standpoints, that of Margaret Boden in relation to the nature of creativity in human
thought and action and that of Antonio Damasio in relation to the emotional
mechanisms of thought in relation to the immense informational processing tasks in
which the human mind is call upon to engage. Clearly there is an association of
emotion with creativity in all its areas of manifestation. Genuinely creative efforts are
accompanied by intense feelings of emotional commitment and great excitement on
their realisation, but the argument goes further than this.
The actual guidance
mechanisms that lead us to choose one path against another, that nudge us into the
realisation of a particular theoretical explanation or an inspirational artistic
construction are informed by non rational, emotional markers, a taste for some
particular informational items or lines of connection over others. We are, it is argued,
in a non reflective sense, ‘guided by our feelings’.
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An important point of emphasis in this paper lies in the idea that these internalised
emotional guidance systems are not entirely private subjective states, but are learned
within a cultural context which accounts for the ability of one individual to construct
an insight, an intelligent event, that is recognised and appreciated by others, outside or
at the borders, that is, of the conceptual space or framework within which all might
have been previously thinking.
Creative outcomes have a resonance with our
feelings, which is based upon a common degree of cultural attunement.
This paper opened with a reference to the importance of creativity within the
educational context and I would like to close with some observations on the
implications of this analysis for education. Clearly there is a central task of education
in the initiation of pupils into the kinds of articulation that define the various
conceptual spaces that are in turn identified within the various forms of knowledge.
This is as relevant in science, mathematics and the humanities as well as the
traditionally regarded bases for creative activities, the arts and literature. In managing
this process of initiation we must not appear to be presenting such spaces as closed
systems but rather as containing a degree of flexibility both within and at their
borders. If we are to encourage creative intelligence, pupils need to be given the
opportunity to generate new explanations, new constructions, new ideas and forms
for expression, to engage their ‘P creative’ capacities. They need to be given the
opportunities to think, hypothesise and ‘play’ at the boundaries of sense. They need to
develop a sense of security in an open and tolerant social environment.
It is a debatable point as to how far the dynamic that leads them towards to realisation
and appreciation of the significance of the ‘H’ creative event is a sense of the tensions
implicit in the reconciliation of the subjective self with objective reality or whether
the very act of realisation of ‘H’ creativity draws attention to this tension. Bruner has
talked of the ‘effective surprise’ of the creative act, as if the act told us something that
we already felt that we subconsciously know. The creative act reveals the emotionally
reflexive dimensions to our intelligent consciousnesses. It is doubtful that we can
consciously cultivate this emotional reflexivity. It may simply be implicit in the
learning and choices that the child makes from infancy onwards. What we do need to
recognise that there is an emotional dimension to knowing, that knowing and thinking
intelligently requires emotional dispositions to certain kinds of knowledge and
Creativity and Emotion March 2002
16
construction and that the creative individual has got to feel the sense of quest, the
desire to reconcile unknown elements within the informational system.
Bibliography
1. M.Boden,(ed) Dimensions of Creativity (Cambridge, Mass.;MIT 1994)
2. Plato Five Dialogues; Ion trans Percy Bysshe Shelley (London; J.M.Dent and Sons
1938)
3 Ibid.,9
4. D. W. Hamlyn, Experience and the Growth of Understanding (Boston; Routledge
Kegan Paul 1978),39
5. R. Wilkinson Art, Emotion and Expression in Hanfling, Philosophical Aesthetics;
An Introduction (Oxford; Blackwell 1992), 221
6. D. Best, Feeling and Reason in the Arts (London; George Allen and Unwin
1985),76
7. T. Godfrey, Conceptual Art (London; Phaidon Press 1998)
8. Ibid, 28
9. Jerome Bruner, On Knowing; Essays for the Left Hand ( Boston; Harvard Univ.
Press 1979),18.
10. Boden, Dimensions of Creativity, 79.
11. Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London; Phaidon 1960)
12. R. Wilkinson Art, Emotion and Expression in Hanfling, Philosophical Aesthetics;
An Introduction (Oxford; Blackwell 1992), 224
13. Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind (New York; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
1972),100.
14. Boden, ed. Dimensions of Creativity, 76.
Malcolm Ross,et al Assessing Achievement in the Arts (Buckingham:Open Univ.
1993)
11. Antonio Damasio Descartes Error; Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain,
(London Macmillan 1996)
Creativity and Emotion March 2002
17
12. Jerome Bruner Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Boston; Harvard Univ. Press
1986)
13. Thomas Nagel The View from Nowhere (Oxford University Press 1986)
14. John Richmond, Reconsidering Aesthetic and Religious Experience: A
Companion View Journal of Aesthetic Education Vol.33 No.4 Winter 1999
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