Abstract
My title links two abstract nouns that are usually set over against each other, seen as contrasting, if not in opposition. The view that informs this paper is that what can usefully be said about creativity is very little, and rather trite; and that it is co-extensive with the rational element in creativity. There may or may not be other than rational elements in creativity; confronted with them, my inclination would be for the first time to invoke Wittgenstein: “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should be silent.” The little I think can be said about the rationality of creativity will be confined to section five. The preceding sections will offer a general critique of the literature, bringing out its poverty and also its irrationality.
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References
See J.P. Guilford, “Creativity,” American Psychologist 5 (1950): 444–54;
Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (London: Hutchinson, 1964)
P.E. Vernon, Creativity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970)
J.P. Guilford, op. cit.
J.W. Getzels and P.W. Jackson, Creativity and Intelligence (New York: Wiley, 1962)
Anthony Storr, The Dynamics of Creation (New York: Atheneum, 1972)
and the Journal of Creative Behaviour, 1967.
Storr, op. cit.,pp. 6Iff. Jean Cocteau somewhere compares being creative to being pregnant. Salvador Dali expresses similar ideas in The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (New York: Dial Press, 1961 ), as does the brilliant and tormented British painter Francis Bacon. See David Sylvester, Interviews With Francis Bacon ( London: Thames and Hudson, 1975 ).
See J. Agassi, “The Function of Intellectual Rubbish,” Research in the Sociology of Knowledge, Science and Art 2 (1979): 209–27.
Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography (London: The Bodley Head, 1964; Penguin edition, 1966), p. 154. Chaplin was amazed when Mack Sennett said to him, “We have no scenario. We get an idea, then follow the natural sequence of events.” So different from what he describes as the “rigid, non-deviating routine” of the theatre.
Chaplin, op. tit., pp. 175–79.
The most evocative account of Hollywood in the thirties and forties is by Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg, Hollywood in the Forties (London: A. Zwemmer, 1968). The only book I know which attempts seriously to discuss the creative process in movies without reference to individual genius, but rather to collective endeavor, is Lawrence Alloway, Violent America: The Movies 1946–1964 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, distributed by the New York Graphic Society, Greenwich, Conn., 1971).
See Pauline Kael, “On the Future of the Movies,” New Yorker, August 5, 1974, pp. 43–59.
See J. Agassi, “The Role of Corroboration in Popper’s Methodology,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 39 (1961): 82-91, and J. Agassi and I.C. Jarvie, “The Problem of the Rationality of Magic,” British Journal of Sociology 18 (1967): 55–74.
See J. Agassi, “The Role of Corroboration in Popper’s Methodology,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 39 (1961): 82-91, and J. Agassi and I.C. Jarvie, “The Problem of the Rationality of Magic,” British Journal of Sociology 18 (1967): 55–74.
What I have in mind is Gombrich’s notion of art as “making and matching.” See E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London: Phaidon Press, 1960).
Einstein is quoted to this effect in K.R. Popper, Objective Knowledge (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 225 (note).
I.C. Jarvie, “The Objectivity of Criticism of the Arts,” Ratio 9 (1967): 67–83. Tovey comments that Bach’s art was neglected “as old-fashioned and crabbed” by his younger contemporaries. We owe his rediscovery to Mendelssohn and Schumann. (See “Bach, J.S.” in EncyclopediaBritannica, 11th edition.)
K.R. Popper, Objective Knowledge, chaps. 3 and 4.
This may explain my total opposition (not to modern art but) to modernism in art, the philosophy that traditions must be broken with. How someone trained as, or pretending to be, an artist can even think of this is something of a mystery; it is a bit like an English speaker deciding to utter only gibberish.
Albert Einstein, “Isaac Newton,” in his Out of My Later Years ( New York: Philosophical Library, 1950 ), pp. 219–23.
See I.C. Jarvie, Towards a Sociology of the Cinema (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), chaps. 1,2, and 3.
In Bertrand Russell, Portraits from Memory (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1956), pp. 194–97. Storr, op. cit., pp. 42–43 attributes a similar idea to Graham Wallas.
To show that Russell’s cool detachment has nothing to do with his endeavors being logical and cognitive, one could cite the superb American painter Edward Hopper, who not only creates by “painting, scraping off, and repainting,” but also is dominated by the objective logic of creation: “I find, in working, always the distracting intrusion of elements not part of my most interested vision, and the inevitable obliteration and replacement of this vision by the work itself as it proceeds. The struggle to prevent this decay is, I think, the common lot of all painters to whom the invention of arbitrary forms has lesser interest. I believe that the great painters, with their intellect as master have attempted to force this unwitting medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions. I find any digression from this large aim leads me to boredom.” (Quoted in Lloyd Goodrich, Edward Hoppper [New York: H.N. Abrams, 1971], p. 161.)
See the account in Erich Hertzmann, “Mozart’s Creative Process,” in Paul Henry Lang, ed., The Creative World of Mozart ( New York: W.W. Norton, 1963 ), pp. 17–30.
Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1872–1914 ( London: George Allen and Unwin, 1967 ), pp. 152–53.
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, a facsimile and transcript of the original drafts including the annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovieh, 1971 ).
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Jarvie, I.C. (1981). The Rationality of Creativity. In: Dutton, D., Krausz, M. (eds) The Concept of Creativity in Science and Art. Martinus Nijhoff Philosophy Library, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5083-2_6
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