Creativity in Art and Science
In our fifth meeting, we had a lively discussion on the nature of creativity in science and in the arts.
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 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.
Many 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 later 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 kit-built 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?
In his poem "Figures of Thought", Howard Nemerov echoes of this notion of unity in variety, and finds in it a link between science and art:
... how privilegedOne of Bronowski's examples of unexpected unities in art is his discussion of Da Vinci's Lady with a Stoat (image shown in class—the stoat is a member of the mink family), in which Da Vinci seems to be drawing a likeness, both visually and in the nature of their lives, between a woman, a consort of a prominent man of the time, and her pet stoat.
One feels to find the same necessity
Ciphered in forms diverse and otherwise
Without kinship –– that is the beautiful
In Nature as in art, ...
In our discussions, several people mentioned the role of imagination in art and science, and we found reasons to consider the possibility that both art and science put constraints on the imagination—imagined models in science constrained by established knowledge and by experimental results, and imagination in art constrained in ways that are 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". 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 when someone refers to such art as "creative", it is harder to apply Bronowski's definition of creativity.
When a work of art draws you over for a closer look, and it takes your breath away, what's going on?
