7
FEELING BETTER
“Being creative is not only about thinking: it is about feeling.”
I USED TO SUPERVISE DOCTORAL PROGRAMS in the humanities. The university had set a maximum length for doctoral dissertations of 80,000 words. This was necessary because candidates had to be stopped. I once interviewed a candidate who had a PhD from another university. I asked if there was a maximum length for the dissertation. He was startled and said of course not. They were as long they needed to be. I asked him how long his dissertation needed to be. He said 370,000 words. That’s roughly the length of the Old Testament. I asked him the title. It was called Further Education in Dombey: Some Issues. Dombey1 is a regional city in England with a population at the time of about 220,000 people. That’s a little short of 1.5 words each. What he discovered there that took over a third of a million words to explain, I don’t know, but according to his subtitle this wasn’t even a comprehensive study, merely a promissory note for a fuller work yet to be composed.
I once asked a professor of mathematics how he assessed PhDs in pure mathematics. My first question was, “How long are they?” He said, “They’re as long as they need to be.” I asked how long they are typically. He’d reviewed one recently which was 26 pages. That’s page after page after page of math with an equals sign at the end. I asked him how he assessed these dissertations. I assumed they were “right.” You’d be depressed if you’d spent four years completing a PhD in pure math and it was marked “wrong.” “No,” he said, “They’re normally right.” Normally. “So how do you assess one?” I asked. “Originality is a key factor,” he told me. “Like all PhDs, they have to break new ground and tell us something we didn’t know before.” In other words, one criterion is how creative the work is. Another, he said, is aesthetic. It is the elegance of the proof, the beauty of the argument.
I asked him why that is such an important consideration in math. He said that mathematicians believe that mathematics is one of the purest ways we have of understanding the truths of nature. Since nature is inherently beautiful there’s an assumption that the more elegant the proof, the more likely it is to correspond to the beauty of nature and to be true. He could have been discussing a sonata, or a poem or a dance, and in a way he was. Aesthetics is a powerful force in all forms of creative work: for scientists and mathematicians as it is for musicians, poets, dancers and designers. It’s one of the ways in which being creative is not only about thinking: it is about feeling.
“Aesthetics is a powerful force in all forms of creative work: for scientists and mathematicians just as for musicians, poets, dancers and designers.”
THE EXILE OF FEELING
The leading figures of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism saw clear water between intellect and emotion. The Rationalists distrusted feelings; the Romantics trusted little else. In their different ways, they saw intellect and feelings as separate from each other. The consequences of this division are still felt to this day.2
Rationalist philosophers wanted to dispel the illusions of myth and superstition. In the natural sciences, feelings, intuition, values and beliefs were seen as dangerous distractions: the froth of undisciplined minds. David Hume put it bluntly: “If we take in hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matters of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”3 This meant, for example, that the biological sciences should make no metaphysical assumptions about the origins and functions of life, which should be explained in material terms. If there is a force beyond logic and evidence that is responsible for life on earth, science should make no presumptions about it and take no interest in it.
In the human sciences, there was a similar rejection of religious ideas and of all forms of transcendentalism. Pioneering psychologists, including Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), J.B. Watson (1878–1958) and B.F. Skinner (1904–90), set out to examine human behavior in ways that set aside all ideas about immaterial spirits or souls. They looked at human behavior as learned responses to the practical needs of survival. B.F. Skinner developed his theory of behaviorism in the 1920s. He showed that people could be conditioned into particular forms of behavior. Pavlov’s experiment with dogs came to a similar conclusion. When he gave food to the dogs in his laboratory, Pavlov rang a bell. Soon the dogs salivated at the sound of the bell alone. Pavlov argued that human beings have conditioned responses too.
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) conceived of the mind as a mental apparatus for engaging the individual with the outside world. He distinguished between the id: the basic instinctual drives of human behavior, which operate on the pleasure principle; the ego: the conscious mind, which operates on the reality principle and manages our executive functions and relationships in the world; and the super ego: which is the seat of moral values, spirituality and conscience. According to Freud, the ego is in a constant state of tension as it strives to manage the primitive impulses of the id, the moral tendencies of the super ego and the competing demands of the external world. Being rational depends on controlling these complex psychological drives. Freudian psychology sees emotions as potential sources of disturbance to a balanced personality.
Despite the influence of these ideas in the human sciences and in popular culture, by the mid-twentieth century growing numbers of academics and therapists alike were questioning these mechanistic approaches to human behavior. In 1960, Jerome Bruner and Frank Miller established the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard University, to move beyond the behaviorist paradigm and explore the intrinsic nature of mind and consciousness. Jean Piaget had long argued for more qualitative approaches to understanding how children and adults learn and experience the world.
Other psychologists and therapists objected to what they saw as negative conceptions of feelings and emotions that came from the rationalist and behaviorist traditions; what R.D. Laing called “the negative psychology of affect.” Some, like Laing, saw rationalist models of psychology as symptoms of a larger problem: “that our civilization represses not only the instincts, not only sexuality, but any form of transcendence.” From the beginning of the twentieth century there had been alternative theories of human well-being. William James (1842–1910), Viktor Frankl (1905–97), Carl Jung (1875–1961) Abraham Maslow (1908–70), Carl Rogers (1902–87) and many others had argued in their own ways for more harmonious conceptions of feelings, spirituality, mind and body. Some, like Alan Watts (1915–73) and Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), drew on ancient Eastern teachings where the divisions between mind, body and spirit had not been so sharply drawn in the first place. By the 1960s, a complicated cultural reaction against rationalism was beginning to gather pace, a reaction that manifested in far-reaching changes in what the cultural historian, Raymond Williams, would have called the “structure of feeling” of the time.
THE PERSONAL GROWTH MOVEMENT
The personal growth movement began in the 1940s and mushroomed during the 1960s, first in America and then in Europe. “Personal growth” refers to various sorts of group encounter activities that aim to explore the relationships between people and increase their knowledge of themselves and each other. Encounter or T-groups encouraged members to see the world through the eyes of others and to rethink their own perceptions of themselves. These encounters often made use of role-play techniques, of art and other “creative” activities; they drew on the alternative theories of psychoanalysts such as Jung and Rogers; and often integrated Eastern techniques of meditation and of physical relaxation including yoga. The principles and practices of the personal growth movement are now the basis of coaching, mentoring and publishing programs around the world.
The two touchstones of personal growth are individuality and authenticity. An individual desiring a personal growth experience “may consider himself less emotionally, physically, or sensually spontaneous than he would like. He may be lonely and find it difficult to communicate honestly with another. The values of sensitivity training and group encounter are honesty and the presentation of the authentic self.”4 Group encounters attracted large numbers of paying customers to the search for more authentic relationships. The personal growth movement is also impelled by a hunger that many people feel to connect with their own natural strengths and with their own creativity.5
“The two touchstones of personal growth are individuality and authenticity.”
According to Carl Rogers, the burgeoning of personal growth was stimulated by the decline of organized religious beliefs and the need to find alternative sources of meaning in existence. Victor Frankl believed that unknown numbers of people were suffering from what he called the “existential vacuum”: the loss of an ultimate meaning to existence that would make life worthwhile. As Frankl saw it, “the consequent void, the state of emptiness is at present one of the major challenges to psychiatry.”6 Carl Jung agreed. During his long professional practice as a psychoanalyst, he was consulted by people “from all the civilized countries of the earth.” Among all his patients in the second half of life, “that is to say over 35, there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not one of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.”7
Holistic therapists argued for systems of analysis that addressed a person’s total being in the world, including the expression of personal feelings. The implicit ethic is to live in the here and now. Rather than being wholly existentialist, the counter-culture, as it came to be known, was rooted as much in metaphysical interests. Rethinking materialist values and the search for transcendence, especially through alternative religions, were at the heart of these movements. As traditional religious structures have been eroded, esoteric beliefs, fundamentalist religions and cults of all sorts have proliferated. So too has interest in the so-called para-sciences, in extrasensory perception and in alternative states of consciousness.
EMOTIONAL DISTURBANCE
Despite the best efforts of the counter-culture, the mainstream culture of mental health continues to focus on emotional disturbance, to the delight of the pharmaceutical industries. For over a hundred years, the complex edifice of mental healthcare has been built on the concept of emotional illness. Counselors, therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists of every sort are kept afloat on a rising tide of people needing help with problems of purpose, self-image, relationships or trauma across a scale from short-term depression to complete breakdown. These problems are not the confine of the clinically disturbed. Multitudes of people who otherwise seem to be on top of their lives have trouble handling their feelings and relationships.
SOFT SKILLS
There is a growing movement in “positive psychology” – the study of happiness and well-being. Daniel Goleman is one of the leaders of this movement. He argues that the dominant emphasis on IQ should be tempered by an equal emphasis on EQ: emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence means being able to understand and express personal feelings; being able to get along with other people, to communicate clearly and with empathy for the listener; and responding positively and with sensitivity to new situations. These “soft skills” are now seen as crucial in productive relationships at home, in the workplace and in leadership.
Business leaders often say that people entering the workforce seem weaker in these areas than earlier generations. The “exile of feeling” may be more pronounced than ever. Goleman reports on a survey of pupils and teachers that shows “a worldwide trend for the present generation of children to be more troubled emotionally than the last: more lonely and depressed, more angry and unruly, more nervous and prone to worry, more impulsive and aggressive.”8 People around the world, he says, are facing the same kind of problems.
There are many reasons. In the developed economies especially, the nuclear family is disappearing. Fewer people are getting married and among those that do, divorce rates are at historically high levels. Adults are spending longer hours at work, and have less time with their children. Young people often spend more time bonding with computers than physically playing with other children. Parents’ fear of crime means that fewer children are allowed outside to play unless accompanied by an adult. According to Goleman, they miss out on the games that used to be commonplace in residential streets “that furnished children with all sorts of life skills such as an ability to control anger and settle disputes.”9
The fact that we are embodied beings and not just beings in bodies was made clear to me when our son James was 12 and preparing for end-of-year examinations at school. A few weeks before they were due to take place, he asked whether, if he did well in the examinations, he could have a games computer. We said no. He asked what his incentive would be in that case, and we said that we’d be very pleased with him. He wasn’t impressed. As it happens, he did well and a few weeks later he asked about the computer again. This time we relented, mainly because I wanted one too. We bought the computer and a set of games and I spent an hour setting it all up and left him to try it out.
Downstairs, our daughter Kate, who was 8, was standing with a length of old rope she had found in the garden shed. She asked if I would make her a swing. I found some wood for a seat and wrapped the rope around the bough of an apple tree and left her swinging happily backwards and forwards. A couple of hours later, James saw her on the swing and dashed out to join her. They spent the rest of the day, the whole of the next day and virtually the entire summer on the swing. They invented games, new moves, tricks, circus routines and fantasy situations, all of which revolved around that swing. They laughed, argued, made up and carried on, and gouged a trench in the ground beneath it. Playing outdoors opened their imaginations and gave them more pleasure than the hundreds of dollars worth of computer that was left upstairs. Mind you, I doubt that James would have been particularly motivated, if I’d said to him a few weeks earlier, that if he did really well in his examinations he could have the piece of old rope that was in the shed.
Students now spend more hours on desk study than on physical activities and engaging face-to-face with their peers. Many school systems have cut back on practical programs in the arts and the opportunities they offer for engaging with feelings. There have been severe cuts, too, in physical education programs and all that they offer in connecting physical and mental energies.
Not all of this is new. The cultivation of feeling has long been marginalized by academic education. In the 1970s, Dr Anthony Storr, a lecturer in psychotherapy at Oxford University, saw many examples of what he called “the Oxford neurosis,” which he described as “intellectual precocity combined with emotional immaturity.”10 While it would be rash to attribute all forms of emotional disturbances to academic education, there is no question that it has played a part. The conventional academic curriculum largely ignores the “soft skills.” This is not an oversight. It is a structural feature of academicism.
TWO TRADITIONS
For the past 250 years, there has been a tension between the worldviews of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism. A common theme of both is a commitment to individualism but they offer different views of what a true individual is and what it takes to become one. I distinguish them as the “rational” and the “natural” individual. Both views tend to compound the division of intellect and emotion.
The rational individual
In the rationalist worldview, the individual possesses certain qualities of mind, and these are what education should promote. The rationalist ideology has given rise to many different theories within philosophy and science. For all their differences they have common characteristics: logic and deduction are the hallmarks of independent thought; these powers are the only reliable source of knowledge of oneself and of the material world; true knowledge is objective and independent of cultural values and personal feelings. Approaches to education based on rational individualism make common assumptions:
- Education should focus on the powers of logico-deductive reason.
- A rational mind is developed by exercising these powers and by absorbing the various bodies of knowledge that they have generated.
- The main role of teachers is to transmit these bodies of knowledge. In this sense, education is a form of initiation.
The natural individual
Natural individualism makes completely different assumptions. In this view, every child is, by nature, a unique individual with innate talents and sensibilities. Education should draw out these qualities rather than suppress them with the values and ideas of the adult world. Education should not be knowledge-based but child-centered. Naturalist models of education make the following assumptions:
- Education should develop the whole child and not just their academic abilities. It should engage their feelings, physical development, moral education and creativity.
- Knowledge of the self is as important as knowledge of the external world. Exploring personal feelings and values is essential and so are opportunities to exercise imagination and self-expression.
- One of the main roles of teachers is to draw out the individual in every child. In this sense, education is a process of self-realization.11
Like those of rational individualism, the roots of natural individualism run deep. At the center of eighteenth-century Romanticism was the idea of the natural world. In 1780, Jacques Rousseau published Emile, in which he argued for a new approach to education that was based on play, games and pleasure. Rousseau wanted forms of education that cherished childhood and did not impose adult values on young minds. Over the next 200 years, many other pioneers of “child-centered” education argued, from different perspectives, for the importance of play and creativity. Some developed their own proprietary systems to promote it. They included: Johann Pestalozzi (1746–1847), Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852), Maria Montessori (1870–1952), Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), Carl Orff (1895–1982) and John Dewey (1859–1952).
For all of them, the essential role of education is to develop children’s natural abilities and personalities. Children should be allowed to follow a natural pattern of development rather than a standard course of instruction. Like a sculptor, the teacher should follow the unique grain of each child’s personality, slowly revealing the individual within. Above all, naturalists wanted to address the whole child: mind, body and spirit.
The value of physical and imaginative play has been recognized by philosophers back to Plato and Aristotle. The nineteenth century brought a new perspective. Darwin’s theories of evolution made human development a subject of scientific study. All behavior was assumed to relate somehow to the survival of the species. As babies and children spend so much time playing, play was assumed to have some biological function. In the 1920s and 1930s, developments in the psychology of play combined with “progressive” theories of education to influence mainstream education policy. Throughout the last 100 years there has been a continuous line of people pressing for more creative approaches to education.
In the USA, John Dewey developed new methods of teaching at his Laboratory School. At the Dalton School in New York and the Porter School in Missouri, teachers encouraged “learning by doing.” These ideas were part of a broader movement in the 1930s to encourage creativity and self-expression in schools. While John Dewey and others were promoting more liberal approaches to education, A.S. Makarenko (1888–1939) was developing his own system in Russia. The revolution had left millions of children orphaned and homeless. Makarenko devised a system of education based on practical work and collective responsibility. Recognizing the appalling emotional suffering of the children, he found tremendous value for them in creative activities, beauty and pleasure and organized an influential program of music groups, and productions of plays and dance.
A report on elementary school education in the UK in 1931 said that education had to look to the whole child. It emphasized the importance of play, self-expression and creative activities, which “if the psychologists are right are so closely associated with the development of perceptions and feelings.”12 The dominant tendency to see the school curriculum as a jigsaw of separate subjects had to be questioned and so too did presenting work to children simply as lessons to be mastered. Education had to start from the experience, curiosity and the awakening powers of children themselves.
Naturalist attitudes gained ground in education during the 1950s and 1960s, partly because they were seen as representing a more egalitarian approach to education. Naturalists argued that academic education marginalized feelings, intuition, aesthetic sensibility and creativity – the very qualities that make human beings human. In the 1960s and 1970s, the argument for self-expression and creativity in education was rooted in a concern to promote the life of feeling. This concern connected with far-reaching cultural developments in the personal growth movement outside formal education.
EDUCATING THE EMOTIONS
The various pioneers of naturalist approaches in education did not share a single philosophy or promote common practices, any more than all proponents of rationalist philosophies had a single point of view. Each had their own conceptions of human development and their own methods of teaching and learning. As their approaches filtered into public education, the general ideals of rational and natural individualism came to represent two distinct options: a choice between a traditional, subject-based, academic education and progressive, child-centered education. In their extremes, they seem to have little in common; but in two respects at least, they do share common ground.
Both promote the idea of the individual breaking free from the constraints of culture. For the rationalists, the individual becomes independent of cultural influences by the power of rational, objective thought. Since objective knowledge is assumed to exist independently of people and culture, the rational individual is free of bias and sees the world just as it is. For the naturalist, the aim is to liberate the individual spirit from the pressures of culture and reveal the authentic self. Since every person is unique, the authentic self will emerge like the butterfly from the chrysalis provided there’s enough creative space in which to grow. In this respect, both of these ideals are a-cultural.
Both reinforce the division between intellect and emotion. Personal growth and natural individualism were reactions against objectivism: against treating knowledge as impersonal. I’ll come back to this idea later. The danger lies in moving too far the other way, towards subjectivism: to thinking of individual consciousness as completely independent from the world of others.
Laing describes as schizoid the person who experiences a rent in her relationship with the world and with herself. The schizoid is unable to experience herself together with the world but rather in despairing isolation from it. If this exaggerates the dangers of subjectivism, the underlying principle still applies: that if a person does not exist objectively as well as subjectively but only as a subjective identity, “he cannot be real.” In other words, there has to be a positive relationship between our knowledge of the external world and our knowledge of ourselves. So what is the relationship between knowing and feeling and what does it mean for being creative?
“Feelings are a constant dimension of human consciousness. To be is to feel.”
KNOWING AND FEELING
Descartes said, “I think therefore I am.” As Robert Witkin points out, an equally powerful starting point would be, “I feel therefore I am.”13 To be is to feel. Feelings are a constant dimension of human consciousness. From calm intuitions to raging furies, feelings are forms of perception. How we feel about something is an expression of our relationship with it. Feelings are evaluations: for example, grief at a death, elation at a birth, pleasure at success, depression at a failure, disappointment at unfulfillment.14 Fear differs from anger because seeing something as threatening differs from seeing it as thwarting. These perceptions have different consequences both physiologically and in the behaviors that result.
Emotions are intense states of feeling, which can involve strong physiological responses. Two people falling into a canal may experience very different emotions. A good swimmer may feel angry or frustrated. Someone who cannot swim may panic. In both cases, they experience an emotional arousal. These are related to, but different from, emotional attitudes.
In fear or anger, the release of adrenaline primes you for vigorous action. Blood flow is diverted from the digestive system to the muscles, the heartbeat quickens, sugar is released by the liver, the sweat glands are stimulated, and so on. The floods of hormonal changes are not conscious decisions but ancient instincts that are born out of the need for survival. They prepare us for action, literally without thinking: to either “fight” or “take flight.” If the physical action doesn’t happen, or is suppressed, we’re left with a feeling of pent-up energy. The increased hormonal levels in the body, which would have been used up by those actions, slowly disperse as our systems calm down. Emotional arousals subside as the situation changes and our physical condition settles; the pent-up feeling will persist until this is over. If the incidents that provoked the arousal are repeated often enough – if you are continually bitten by dogs or frequently fall in canals – you may develop an emotional attitude towards dogs or canals, which can flare up when they’re nearby or brought to mind.
The seat of many of our emotional responses is deep within the parts of the brain that were among the first to evolve. This area of the “old” brain includes the amygdalae: almond-shaped groups of nuclei in the medial temporal lobes of the brain that are part of what is sometimes called the limbic system. The older regions of the brain have roles in regulating the bodily functions that sustain life, including breathing and the metabolism of other organs. Rational, abstract thought developed much later in the evolution of the brain and is associated with the neo-cortex, the convoluted folds lying across the surface of the two cerebral hemispheres, and the development of the frontal lobes.
The old brain does not think in the usual sense. As Goleman notes, it is more a set of pre-programmed regulators that keep the body running and reacting to ensure survival. This does not mean that feeling and reason are insulated from each other. All areas in the brain are connected through intricate neural circuitry. There is a “continual dance between intellect and emotions, feeling and reason, which is essential to the proper functioning and maintenance of both.” In a sense, we do have two different ways of knowing the world and interacting with it: the rational and the emotional. This distinction roughly approximates to the folk distinction between heart and head: “knowing something is right in your heart is a different order of conviction, somehow a deeper kind of certainty, than thinking so with your rational mind.” The more intense the feeling, the more dominant the emotional mind becomes and the more ineffectual the rational. This arrangement seems to stem from “the eons of evolutionary advantage to having emotions and intuitions guide our instantaneous response in situations where our lives are in peril, and where pausing to think over what to do could cost us our lives.”
As we mature, the balance between reason and emotion changes, or should do. Newborn babies are convulsed by feelings of hunger, distress or contentment. They express them through noises, facial expressions and movement. Toddlerhood and adolescence are famously times of turbulent emotions and mood swings. As the adult emerges from the child, there is normally a growing control of emotions. We’re alarmed if adults act like infants, howling in meetings or crying in frustration at not getting their own way; and we are right to be disturbed by adults whose emotions are out of control.
Becoming mature is not about suppressing feelings, or discounting their importance. In the intricate ecology of consciousness, “the emotional faculty guides our moment-to-moment decisions, working hand in hand with the rational mind, enabling or disabling thought itself.”15 Likewise, the thinking brain plays an executive role in our emotions, except in those moments when emotions surge out of control and the emotional brain runs rampant. The intellect cannot work at its best without emotional intelligence. Maintaining a balance between them is essential to a balanced personality. The relationships of thinking and feeling are at the heart of the creative process in all fields, including the arts and the sciences.
“The relationships of thinking and feeling are at the heart of the creative process in all fields, including the arts and the sciences.”
ARTISTS AND SCIENTISTS
Among the legacies of the Enlightenment and Romanticism are many common-sense but mistaken assumptions about the arts and sciences. The sciences are thought to be about knowledge, facts and objectivity; the arts about emotions, self-expression, being and subjectivity. The sciences apparently lead to pure knowledge, the arts to personal introspection: the sciences are useful, the arts dispensable.16 Scientists are pictured as methodical, clinical and objective; artists as expressive, impassioned and creative. In reality, there are much closer connections between the arts and sciences than is commonly thought. Both have objective and subjective elements; both draw on knowledge and feelings, intuition and non-logical elements.
Creativity in any field is not a strictly logical business. It draws on feelings and intuitions as well as on existing ideas; playfulness, as well as on knowledge and practical skills. Our most original ideas sometimes come to mind without our thinking consciously about them at all. If we can’t work something out, it is often better to sleep on it or put it to the “back of our minds” where our subconscious mulls it over and may deliver a solution to us unbidden. Feelings, hunches and intuitions play a part in all creative work. So too does a sense of aesthetics, of elegance and of beauty. This is true in all fields, from dance to calculus.
The sciences and the arts both involve personal passions and both can be highly creative. Science as well as the arts can have considerable influence on how we feel about the world and on the world we have feelings about. These features of arts and sciences have implications for how we should think about creative processes and for how they should be provided for in education and training.
Discussing the arts and sciences opens up complex issues of definition. Science covers an enormous range of disciplines and fields of interest, from the natural sciences to the physical, to the study of human personality and social systems. The arts, too, cover a wide range of practices, styles and traditions both historically and in different cultures: from the fine arts, to craft and design, to traditional folk arts. For the sake of this discussion, let me compare the extremes of each spectrum: the physical sciences, which are concerned with the inanimate world, and the fine arts, which are concerned with human sensibilities.
The work of the sciences
The main process of science is explanation. Scientists are concerned with understanding how the world works in terms of itself. Science aims to produce systematic explanations of events, which can be verified by evidence. In the natural sciences, at least, the assumption is that it is possible to develop “a theory of everything” and that individual scientists are contributing to a collaborative mosaic of explanatory ideas. Scientists aim to stand outside the events they are investigating and to produce knowledge that is independent of them and would be validated by whoever repeated their observations. The dominant mode of scientific understanding is logico-deductive reasoning and the production of propositional knowledge.
As I mentioned earlier, about the impact of intelligence tests, it’s sometimes assumed that the sciences are “above reproach, beyond social influence, conceived in the rarefied atmosphere of purely scientific inquiry by some process of immaculate conception.”17 The reality is rather different. Science is the work of living, breathing human beings. The apparently impersonal process of scientific inquiry involves a personal commitment by the scientist in four ways: the choice of problems; the methods of scientific inquiry; personal judgment; and standards of objectivity.
Whose problem is this?
One of the scientist’s first moves is to identify an area of inquiry, a set of problems which engages his or her interest. This decision may be wrapped in a web of personal interests and motivations. Michael Polanyi talks of the intellectual passions of science. Passions are expressions of value. Positive passions mean that something is important to us. People who have achieved great things in a given field are generally driven by a love for it, a passion for the nature of the processes involved. The term “flow” has been used to describe times when we are immersed in something that completely engages our creative capabilities and draws equally from our knowledge, feelings and intuitive powers. The excitement of the scientist making a discovery “is an intellectual passion telling us that something is precious and more particularly that it is precious to science.”18 This excitement is not a by-product of scientific investigation but part of the personal commitment to the issues being investigated.
The scientific method
Scientists, like everyone else, are rational only to the extent that the conceptions to which they are committed are true. Descartes wanted to see through common-sense assumptions about the world to achieve a more rational sense of reality. His method was to substitute one set of assumptions with another, in this case the principles of deductive reasoning of mathematics and geometry. He wrote in his Discourse on Method: “The long chains of simple and easy reasoning by which geometers are accustomed to reach their conclusions of their most difficult demonstrations lead me to imagine that all things to the knowledge of which man is competent are mutually connected in the same way.”19 Scientists accept the legitimacy of certain methods and modes of procedure. They identify themselves with particular frameworks of interpretation and rely on their reliability. The astronomer “presupposes the validity of mathematics, the mathematician, the validity of logic and so on.”20 The whole framework of scientific inquiry would collapse if these structures were proved faulty. This does happen. The great paradigm shifts in scientific understanding described by Thomas Kuhn (see Chapter 4) have come about precisely when the existing, dominant structures of thought have proved inadequate.
Personal judgment
These frameworks don’t determine the course of any particular scientific inquiry. Scientists need to frame hypotheses and design experiments. In doing so, they exercise considerable personal judgment. When all the statistics have been coded and calculated, the columns and data carefully set out on the computer screen, there is still a need to analyze and interpret them – to give them meaning. At the heart of all scientific undertakings there is an element of personal judgment, which cannot be eradicated; nor should it be. The capacity for personal judgment is probably the most sensitive instrument a scientist has.
Scientists depend on, but do not limit themselves to, logical analysis. Logic is one of the methods that scientists use. There are others that are not logical at all. Intuition can be equally important to scientific investigation. Discovery in science often results from unexpected leaps of imagination: the sudden jumping of a logical gap, in which the solution to a problem is illuminated by a new insight, a new association of ideas or a vision of unforeseen possibilities. Many of the great discoveries were made intuitively. Scientists may sense a solution or discovery before an experiment has been done and then design tests to see if the hypothesis can be confirmed or proved wrong. Every attempt is made to be as methodical as possible. Although rational analysis plays the principal part, it is only part of science.
Successive approximations
Objectivity is no guarantee of truth. Scientific arguments may be objective; they are not necessarily true. In the Middle Ages, scientists and the general population believed that the sun moved round the earth. They saw it happen every day. Their conclusion was perfectly objective and completely wrong. Objective meanings are those that are tested using criteria that are agreed by particular communities. This doesn’t mean that objective meanings are impersonal; nor can they be. They are inter-personal. This doesn’t guarantee that they correspond with the way things are. The reason is that “the world of objective knowledge is man-made.”21 Scientific knowledge is subject to revision as new evidence comes to light or new ideas emerge. The essential process of science is argument and debate, of challenging or building on existing knowledge in the light of new ideas or evidence. It is concerned not only with facts but also with what count as facts; not only with observation but also with explanation and meaning. In all of these respects, creativity is at the heart of science.
The work of the arts
The main process of art is description. Artists describe and evoke the qualities of experience. The artist is not concerned with systematic explanation but with producing unique forms of expression that capture the qualities of his or her personal insights and experience. The poet writing of love or melancholy is trying to articulate a state of personal being: a mood or sensibility. A composer may try to capture a feeling in music and to invoke it in the listener. Artists are concerned with understanding the world in terms of their own perceptions of it: with expressing feelings, with imagining alternatives and with making objects that express those ideas.
At the heart of the arts is the artifact. Artists make objects and events as objects of contemplation. Composers make music, painters make images, dancers make dances, and writers produce books, plays, novels and poems. In its materials, sensuous and aesthetic qualities, the form of the work embodies the meaning.
Artists deal with ideas on any topic that interests them. These may be social or political ideas. They may be interested in formal ideas about their own disciplines. This was one of the driving concerns of modernism in music, theater, literature and in painting. Formalism, conceptualism and cubism, and all the rest, were concerned with exploring the nature and limits of art forms themselves. There is a difference between expressing feelings through the arts and giving vent to them. Artists are not just expressing feelings but ideas about feelings; not just ideas but feelings about ideas. In doing this, they can draw from all areas of their being.
The writer E.M. Forster said that in the creative state, we are taken out of normal ways of thinking: we let down a bucket into our subconscious and may draw up something that is beyond the reach of our conscious minds. An artist, says Forster, “mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art. The creative process employs much technical ingenuity and worldly knowledge; it may profit by critical standards, but mixed up with it is this stuff from the bucket, which is not procurable on demand.”22 The process of the arts is to give shape, coherence and meaning to the life of feeling.
“It is not what interests artists or scientists that distinguishes them from each other, but how it interests them.”
Artists do not generally spend their days in states of emotional ferment. Watch a dance company in rehearsal or a musician practicing an instrument. Writing novels and composing poems is as much a diligent craft as a process of inspiration. Creativity in the arts, as in the sciences, requires control of materials and ideas and great discipline in honing exact forms of expression.
Meaning and interpretation
Responding to works of art and trying to make sense of them for ourselves is also creative. In watching a drama, the audience is not faced with something that it can read systematically, like a computer printout or set of instructions. A play is open to interpretation on two levels: what is expressed in the play and what is expressed by the play. We interpret what is being expressed in the play as it unfolds before us, by following piecemeal the actions of the characters. It is only when the play is over that we can make our sense of the play as a whole.
I say our sense because what the play means for us may be different from its meaning for the actors, the dramatist or the director. The world that the dramatist seeks to invoke exists on the page in an abstract form from which it is impossible to derive the performance itself by purely logical means. Giving the world of the drama a living form involves the director and actors in a sustained effort of interpretation, which draws on intuition, skill and cultural knowledge. A written play suggests a performance; it does not determine it. Jerzy Grotowski (1933–99) observed that all great texts represent a sort of deep gulf for us: “Take Hamlet. Professors will tell us that they have each discovered an objective Hamlet. They suggest to us revolutionary Hamlets, rebel and impotent Hamlets, Hamlet the outsider etc. There is no objective Hamlet. The strength of each great work really exists in its catalytic effect. It opens doors.”23 It is for this reason that memorable performances are indelibly stamped not only with the original creative work of the dramatist but with that of the actors who bring it to life: Gielgud’s Hamlet, Branagh’s Hamlet and so on.
There are often deep disagreements over the judgments people make about works of art, according to personal tastes and cultural values. The significance of a work of art can’t be measured with a slide rule. This doesn’t mean that it can’t be judged at all. There is a difference between unsubstantiated personal opinion and reasoned judgments. Objectivity means that judgments are being made according to criteria that are publicly available and with reference to evidence in the work itself. In this sense, it is as legitimate to talk about the objective processes of making and understanding art as it is about anything. To assume that artistic judgments are simply personal opinion is as mistaken as assuming that all scientific opinion is undisputed fact. Meaning and interpretation are at the heart of all creative work.
Although discoveries are often associated with particular scientists, they’re not unique to them in the way that paintings are to the artists who produced them. In 1959, Watson and Crick discovered DNA and described its structure as the building blocks of life. Although they were the first to discover DNA, they were not responsible for it being there in the first place. Any scientist who follows the same route of inquiry as another will reach the same conclusions. If not, there’d be concern about the evidence or procedures. The same is not true of the arts. Two or more artists would almost certainly produce different outcomes from the same starting point. Mathematicians or scientists may be the first to produce particular intellectual work; painters, poets and dancers are the only ones to produce the work. It is always unique to them. Artistic work is personal in a sense that is not true of equations and calculations in mathematics, where the ability to replicate results is inherent in the validity of the work. It is because artists’ works are unique to them that biographical enquiries are so interesting to academics.
A work of art can be about anything at all that interests an artist; just as a scientific experiment or theory can be about anything that interests a scientist. Artists and scientists can be interested in the same subject: painters and geographers may share the same passion for the physical landscape; novelists and psychologists for human relationships; poets and biologists for the nature of consciousness. It is not what interests artists or scientists that distinguishes them from each other, but how it interests them. The difference lies in the types of understanding they are searching for, and in the modes of understanding they employ.
The recognition of commonalities between the arts and the sciences has led to a wide range of collaborative projects and to the early dawning of what may prove, in our own times, to be a new Renaissance. It is a Renaissance based on a more holistic understanding of human consciousness; of the relationships between knowing and feeling; and of how all that we think and feel is part of the creative process of making sense of the world around us and of the worlds within us.
CONCLUSION
A world without feelings would be literally inhuman. Yet our education systems do too little to address this human dimension of our personalities. Louis Arnaud Reid puts it this way: “The neglect of the study of feeling and of its place in the whole economy of the mind has been disastrous, both in philosophy and in education. Sensitiveness plays far more part in understanding of many kinds than is generally understood and acknowledged.”24 Being sensitive to oneself and to others is a vital element in the development of the personal qualities that are now urgently needed, in business, in the community and in personal life. It’s through feelings as well as through reason that we find our real creative power. Its through both that we connect with each other and create the complex, shifting worlds of human culture.
“It is through feelings as well as through reason that we find our real creative power. It is through both that we connect with each other and create the complex, shifting worlds of human culture.”