Artistic Creation

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There is no act which is entirely devoid of an element of creativity. If there were such an act one would be able to repeat it endlessly. But a mere mechanical repetition is only a fancy, achieved by ignoring the particularities which distinguish an outcome at one moment and in one situation from that of another. Nor is there an act which is entirely devoid of organization. One without any structure would be completely chaotic; its components would stand in the way of one another's expression, thereby precluding the occurrence of any activity at all. A supposed totally unorganized act is just one whose structure is unexpected, undesired or unnoted.

Both when we reason and when we make we exhibit structure and creativity. If we ignore the structure we will be unable to predict or see the necessity for the outcome of our acts. The structure is a relation connecting our beginning with the kind of terminus with which we, in creating along the lines of the structure, must in fact end. By itself the structure enables us to predict what is to be, not in its concreteness, as it will in fact appear at some place and time, but abstractly as a merely formal, necessitated consequence. If, on the other hand, we ignore the process of creativity and the difference this makes to the structure, we will fail to understand how the result could be what it concretely is. The result is made to be what it concretely is, only by being achieved at the end of a creative process which adds to and realizes the structure and its necessitated outcome.

Every outcome, in its full concreteness, is both unpredictable and avoidable from the standpoint either of the structure or of the creative process by which it is achieved. But every outcome is deducible, even inevitable, given the structure and the creative process. In the realm of thought, though, it is usual to emphasize rules more than processes. There is a tendency to ignore the particular, unduplicable course of inference in which the rules of reasoning are exhibited. Inference is a mystery for logicians. In the realm of action, there is instead a tendency to stress process rather than structure, and to suppose therefore that the outcome must be inexplicable, basically irrational. Reason is a mystery for productive men. There are of course radically creative thinkers who pay little or no attention to any rules; there are artists who belong to schools and use similar techniques to produce designs which almost bide the creative element in their work. These exceptions but show bow wrong it would be to deny there is creativity in thought or rules in art.

Logicians use rules which have been worked out in the past, thereby minimizing the novelty of the particular outcomes to which men in fact infer. If reasoning is primarily concerned with avoiding the derivation of falsehoods from given truths such a stress is desirable. An analogous use of rules can be made in art. This is done when one attempts to understand or to produce works of art according to a formula, such as the golden section, the serpentine line, the ellipse, major and minor chords, modules, paradox, and the like. It is good to emphasize and follow such rules so far as one is concerned with avoiding ugliness in the course of an effort to produce the excellent. Reasoning and production at their best, though, are adventurous, beyond the control of any preestablished rules. They risk error and ugliness to get to fresh truths and beauties.

Inference is a creative act. As Brouwer so long ago saw, this is unmistakably the case in a field where many think creativity to be absent--mathematics. It is a rare productive mathematician who attends to logicians. He, too, wants to obtain nothing but truths, but he gets them by carving them out of an indeterminate realm, proceeding by little steps to avoid signal error. The artist takes greater risks, adventures in a thicker medium, so that he fails more often--but also makes more signal advances when in fact he does succeed.

The reasoner tends to focus on some particular item and tries to derive from that starting point another similarly demarcated item, to be characterized as acceptable for a certain purpose. Artists do not start with such well-defined items, and they proceed not by inference, by moving from one item to the other, but by filling out, by making present, vivid, and concrete a vaguely apprehended prospect. We know when we reason well because we already have an accepted truth which defines what kind of result is acceptable. We know when we have produced well when what we in fact create embodies a vaguely apprehended prospect.

Though every activity has some degree of creativity, the term is peculiarly appropriate to the activity of the artist. His creativity differs from that of others both in degree and in kind. His combines in a better way a greater degree of spontaneity, inventiveness, urgency, persistence, and emotionality than other activities do. Other activities may exhibit a greater degree of any one of these than the artist's does, but none has them all together in such a heightened, desirable form. More important, perhaps, is the fact that the artist's creativity is directed towards the production of excellence in a sensuous form. This is not the concern of any other activity.

An action is spontaneous when it arises from within in independence of any external cause or pressure and without acknowledgment of or control by any known rule. It is most evident in play, where energy is expended without regard to circumstances and without regard to established conventions. The artist's spontaneity is less than the child's in part because his habits are more intrenched, because he is constrained by his knowledge, because he gives a place to other aspects of the creative act, and because he realizes a desirable prospect. His is a spontaneity controlled and directed.

The artist's creativity is inventive. It makes use of contrivances, chance occurrences, available material in ingenious ways, trying to take advantage of every opportunity in order to bring about a more desirable result. But the craftsman may at times be more inventive than the artist, precisely because he is so immersed in the means, and does not restrain himself in the light of the need to make a selfsufficient, revelatory substance.

The artistic act is an urgent insistent one. Like lust and avarice it is deep rooted and hard to gainsay. Artists create not so much because they wish as because they must. One might conceivably feel a greater urgency to loveor hate than to make, but this urgency is partly triggered from without and inadequately constrained by a control of the material which the act will transform. The artist urgently acts, but not without a sensitive regard for the capacities of his materials and the demands of his prospect.

The artist stands out, with other masters of disciplines, as one who persists in working at his task until an excellent outcome is achieved. There are men who are more persistent; they have single, fixed ideas to which everything else is made to give way, or who work more constantly at some given task. The persistence of the artist is a consequence of an insistence that the excellent be achieved. Much of his time may be spent in preliminary work, in preparation and training. The fact that a work is produced quickly and without apparent effort shows not that it is an idle, easy outcome of forces, unknown and undirected, but rather that the actual production of a work may be but a climax of an activity part of which took place some time before and perhaps subconsciously.

Most important, the artist puts his emotions to work. He is emotionally stimulated, emotionally guided, and emotionally satisfied. Because his emotions are so involved in his portrayal of what is real, it is best to reserve a detailed consideration of the emotions until the next chapter. But it is important now to note that the emotions can be expressed more vividly and effectively outside art than in it. The artist's emotions, though, are purer, being purged and controlled by what he in fact is producing through their agency.

Spontaneity, inventiveness, urgency, persistence, and emotionality yield no art, even when intertwined in the beat possible way, unless they are caught within the effort to produce excellence in a sensuous form. (This important fact receives extensive treatment in Chapter VIII.) The artist is one who seeks something which cannot be found in daily life. As other men do, he of course begins with common-sense objects. But he soon finds that these do not do justice to the promise of the qualities thought to reside in those objects, or to his own need to complete himself by mastering what lies beyond him. Since sensed qualities exist only when and as they are sensed, it would seem that qualities cannot reside in unperceived objects, unless those objects are able to perceive those qualities too. But no stone or tree, no cat or cloud senses the qualities which are commonly said to characterize them. Berkeley thought that such qualities could be objective, have a being apart from a perceiver, only if they were resident in or sustained by some external mind, such as that possessed by God. This conclusion is not warranted. Qualities can be freed from their dependence on sensing to become objective qualities in mindless substances which occupy space, exist in time, and come to be and pass away. But first they must be purged of the impurities they have when sensed and be interlocked with structures, on-goings and values also resident in the substances. Naive perception is faced with the impure and dulled; scientific formulae are conceptual products; mere activity is dictated in part by accident and by compulsions alien to a substance's needs or rhythms; what is unreflectingly taken to be important is largely a matter of prejudgment and preconditioning. To know what qualities, events, structures or values are like in substances, we must dislocate them from their common-sense settings, purge them of their accrued irrelevancies, and locate them in known, reconstructed beings.

An object in an abstract strand is distinct in nature and function from itself as part of a common-sense object or a known reconstructed substance. To understand it, we must free it from the accretions imposed on it by common-sense experience and know what happens to it when it is integrated with and affected by objects from other strands which, with it, constitute a known substance. We produce a known substance when, after we purify the abstractions which resulted from a conditioning of common-sense objects by the senses, by scientific attitudes, by an immersion in mere activity, or by an evaluation, we solidify all into a single being. Berkeley overlooked the fact that the senses, instead of confronting what is concrete, terminate in abstractions which have to be reassessed and integrated with other abstractions before we can refer to beings having an objective status.

The counterparts of the substances we know through construction are but common-sense objects purified and given focus; they are no less real, external to us, perceptible, intelligible, dynamic, and valuable than those common-sense objects. An artist is not primarily interested in such substances. He does not purify strands in order to understand what focussed and purged common-sense objects are like. Instead he seeks to make a new type of substance, one which is self-sufficient and therefore truly satisfying. Even when, in architecture, music, sculpture, theatre and dance, he uses the very same items which are embedded in common-sense objects, he subjects them to the special conditions of an act of creation. A street sound in a musical piece is a tone which has been torn away from common experience and allowed to exhibit new relations to other tones inside a substance which is then and there being produced.

The artist, then, makes strands into elements, not of reconstructed common-sense objects, but of substances which have new natures and careers. To do this he does not attend to purified strands or to the objects in them, but to altered versions of both. He does not use perceived qualities; he uses sensuous content. He does not use the formal mesh which science isolates, but modifications of this in the shape of helpful rules. He does not attend to pure events; he infects events with his emotions to produce a new spatial, temporal or dynamic content. And instead of acknowledging the conventionally important, he is occupied with making a substance which will have overwhelming importance. This last consideration overrides all the others. To see this we must first see how the artist fits inside the cosmos.

An artist is an actual, substantial being. Taken merely as a being, in abstraction from his individuality, his membership in a society, or his status as a man, he is, together with all other actualities, directed towards a single Ideal, part of which he and they, in the course of their careers, will make concrete and determinate. That Ideal is an irreducible, cosmic mode of being which the artist, qua man, faces in the guise of an obligating Good. The artist is, of course, more than a mere man; he is also a member of a culture or society. As such he, together with all other members, faces the Good, not as a single and unitary objective, but as creased, subdivided in ways which reflect the basic concerns of the culture. As a distinct individual with ideas of his own, finally, the artist deals with a specific delimited form of one or more of these divisions of the Good.