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105 pages

English

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Many are fascinated by the phenomenon of genius and search for an understanding of its nature. Modern research is not especially helpful in elucidating the inner process or its relation to ordinary thought. The present work comes from clinical studies of focal brain injuries that dissect unconscious cognition to reveal sub-surface lines of processing. The outcome is a process (microgenetic) theory of the mental state that differs markedly from mainstream (cognitive) psychology, but with the potential to clarify many features of thought and imagery, normal and exceptional. Creativity is not an isolated problem but touches many central issues in philosophical psychology.

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Philosophie et théologie

Philosophy of mind

Cognitivism

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	08 mai 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781845409388
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0550€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Metapsychology of the Creative Process
Continuous Novelty as the Ground of Creative Advance
Jason W. Brown
imprint-academic.com

2017 digital version converted and published by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © Jason W. Brown, 2017
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.
Imprint Academic, PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK

God guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks in the marrow-bone.
- W.B. Yeats, 1935, A Prayer for Old Age

Preface
Many are fascinated by the phenomenon of genius and search for an understanding of its nature, a frustrating endeavor since the inability to “get inside the head” of a creative individual, and the mystery, at times fragility, of the process, even to those most gifted, as well as their common reluctance to describe it, even if they could, leaves one to focus on extrinsic conditions associated with giftedness, such as life experience, IQ, genetic endowment, heritance, neurotic disorder or temperament, alcoholism, birth order and so on, all of interest but none that shed light on the inner process of the creative imagination. Researchers are like the proverbial blind men describing an elephant. Such factors influence the creative but are not especially helpful in elucidating the inner process or its relation to ordinary thought.
Psychoanalysis is perhaps the only theory that has addressed specific aspects of personality development and the structure of the unconscious, which is the undoubted source of the creative imagination, but psychoanalysis is a theory of deviation with a tendency to apply formulaic and not widely credible interpretations to the behavior of all individuals without a clear path from normalcy and deviance to giftedness. The present work also comes from clinical studies, but of focal brain injuries that dissect unconscious cognition to reveal sub-surface lines of processing. The outcome is a process (microgenetic) theory of the mental state that differs markedly from the substantialist and externalist foundations of mainstream (cognitive) psychology, but with the potential to clarify many features of thought and imagery, normal and exceptional. A summary of the main lines of the theory is included as an addendum to this book.
Creativity is not an isolated problem but touches many central issues in philosophical psychology. The creative is juxtaposed to the habitual as a departure from convention and routine, to the causal as an original construct that is not explained by necessity, to complexity, contingency and probability by order and coherence, and to machine theory by the centrality of feeling (in art) and the intrinsic relation of the emotive and the conceptual, all topics that constitute a metapsychology of thought. [1]
The principle aim of this book is to explore the continuum from novelty in nature and the evolutionary process to the highest forms of creativity in human experience, with a focus on the subjectivity of intra-psychic process in relation to the adaptive constraints of sensibility. The truly creative is sub-surface cognition parsed by necessity to a meaningful outcome in the world. Microgenetic theory has the capacity to illuminate some of the obscurities in the transmutation of objects of fantasy and imagination, the elicitation of conscious material from unconscious categories, and the conveyance of feeling to others. I would point out that I have departed from the process-theoretical account of Creativity as a universal or absolute, and novelty as an occasion of change, conceiving uniform novelty as a feature of change in dissolution or advance that is tapped to a varying degree in the creative imagination.
I would be remiss not to mention the invaluable commentaries on my work by David Bradford and the years of friendship with Marcel Kinsbourne, two highly creative spirits in neuropsychology, the assistance of Maria Pachalaska in editing the manuscript, the encouragement of John Cobb, the contact with, and writings of, the late Timothy Sprigge, but most of all the beauty and tranquility of my home in Provence, the site of annual conferences in process thought (to be collected shortly by Michel Weber), and an idyllic locale for a writer, all owing to my darling wife, Carine, my loving companion and spiritual guide over these many years.

1 Preliminary efforts to explore this topic are in Brown (1997; 1999; 2008). A recent account of the process model with citations is Brown (2015).

1. Introduction
Who would study and describe the living starts,
By driving the spirit out of its parts. [1]
- Goethe, Faust, Part 1
Historically, there are two paths into the topic of creativity, each quite independent of the other. One approach concerns novelty in acts and ideas, ranging from the activities of everyday life to the products of artistic and scientific thought, the other, metaphysics. Ordinarily, these two ways of thinking about creativity, one psychological, the other philosophical, do not share a common ground but are conceived as distinct problems. The aim of this work is to demonstrate that a process psychology of mind offers a different way of conceptualizing both approaches as a step toward their unification, bringing into relation the continuum of passage in nature to a transition from repetition to innovation to genius. The theory that governs this inquiry, the process-model of the mind/brain state (Brown, 2015, for review), described in relation to normal and pathological cognition, as well as to aesthetic, moral and religious thought, and compatible arguments in process philosophy, serves as an organizing principle for diverse manifestations of creative process beginning with individual mind and the correlated brain state, with an inferred continuum from process underlying thought and behavior to process in material nature, of which human creativity is, so far as we know, the highest, most refined exemplification.
Many have the idea that high levels of creativity, or successive grades of genius, are inaccessible and beyond the comprehension of scholars, opaque even to the gifted themselves who often describe their own work in terms of a relation to ordinary cognition. For Rousseau, every individual has the potential for genius. Darwin wrote that he was quite ordinary in most respects, even slower than his friends. Edison’s 99% perspiration is another example. The relation to ordinary cognition is seen indirectly in creativity during intoxication and transitional or trance-states such as Wagner’s dream (described in Mein Leben ) of the inspired music of the Prelude to Das Rheingold or the opiate trance in which Coleridge composed Kublai Khan (examples in Koestler, 1964). I recall an interview with a celebrated composer who, when asked the impolitic question of why so much of his work was trivial, replied that it was necessary to produce a few works of lasting value. The attribution of creativity to an extrinsic muse or inspiration, or a mysterious intrinsic source in the unconscious, implies that even the gifted are unaware of the origin of their endowment. Many are anxious that they will lose a creative ability that seems to come from nowhere, endures blocks and dry spells, and cannot be facilitated by effort. Another factor pointing to a relation to ordinary thought is the high level of preparedness required, which is devoted to one domain of cognition, and charged by happenstance. This agrees with the observation that most people are extraordinarily creative in dream - Goethe’s “pool of the creative unconscious” - but in only a few does this carry over into wakefulness.
To the extent that creativity in human affairs has been a topic for philosophical reflection, it has been conceived as imaginative play, mental activity that is divinely or otherwise inspired (e.g. Plato), a complex interplay of ecstatic intoxication with sober restraint (Nietzsche), imagination modulated by real world constraints, unconscious constructs channeled through conscious rationality (Freud) or, more generally, reason and adaptive values applied to the products of fantasy. Clearly, philosophical analysis is burdened by the prominence of affect, individuality and the import of personal experience, as well as the non-rationality of artistic thought. There is also the role of intuition in mathematical discovery (Poincaré) as in other modes of thought, of visual imagery (Einstein) and, more generally, by the paradox of something appearing from nothing, and the conflict of novelty with causation. Various methods of study include personality profiles, psychometric testing, genetic, familial and cultural influences. Genius is often a guide to lesser modes of originality or, in the case of Darwin, as a model for the creative process (Simonton, 1999 [2] ). The life-history and behavioral patterns of gifted individuals are of great importance, as documented in the essay on “Jocasta Mothering” by Besdine (1971). [3]
Speculation also tends to focus on the distinction of creativity from adjacent concepts (originality, innovation, etc.), and the relation of intuition and spontaneity to reason and deliberation. What is most pronounced in the subjectivity of art differs from the objectivity of science, for example, the resolution in art of individuality and taste compared to, in science, collaboration and consensus, or in the latter, the difference of theory and experiment, or competence (technique, skill) and performance. One must also resolve those ideas that are sudden and felt as inspired with those that are