Revelation and Reductionism
Auden and Poincaré on creativity
Here are two views on creativity—let’s call them, following Pirsig, the romantic view and the classic view. 1
The story many of us believe about creativity has largely been set by the romantics, the people we most associate with creative endeavors. This is the idea that inspiration is waited for instead of seized, more a blessing than the result of action. It’s the romantic who cringes most from the notion of introducing control to creativity, unwilling to assign predictability to what they see as a sacred source of talent, from which they draw and transmit a sense of meaning.
Take W. H. Auden for instance, a (rightly) famous poet from the 20th century, and a quintessential romantic. In his essay “Concerning the Unpredictable”, he writes:
“…the serious part of prayer begins when we have got our begging over with and listen for the Voice of what I would call the Holy Spirit, though if others prefer to say the Voice of Oz or the Dreamer or Conscience, I shan't quarrel, so long as they don't call it the Voice of the Super-Ego, for that "entity" can only tell us what we know already, whereas the Voice I am talking about always says something new and unpredictable—an unexpected demand, obedience to which involves a change of self, however painful.”
As he explains earlier in his essay, prayer for Auden is best considered a special form of listening; the usual petitionary kind of prayer he regards as involuntary wish-making, the same as the longing for counterfactuals when life doesn’t go our way. But of far greater value, he says, once we get “our begging over with”, is when we seriously listen to the inner Voice, a holy whisper in us but not of us, which tells us things we’ve never heard before.
Something about Auden’s general tenor here may leap out to the unsympathetic mind. It would seem romantics prefer to conceive of their creativity in a needlessly vague and mysterious sort of way, which makes discussing inspiration difficult and replicating it a miracle. Such a cynic (not I!) may even venture that this is done as a last advantage to poor artists in need of some basis to distinguish their more serious art from the casual productions of amateurs.
So maybe we should stop interrogating the chickens on how they lay their eggs, and instead ask the farmers. Perhaps a chicken believes its egg-laying to be a divine, spontaneous act. But since my interest here is to get to the bottom of — or reverse engineer—the process of creativity (I’m really showing my cards here), we’ll need to zoom out a bit, and use our critical faculties. Luckily or not, the classic thinker is relentlessly critical.
Enter our classical representative, the mathematician Henri Poincaré.2 Following the usual classical MO, he breaks creativity down into steps, and deals with each separately. As Marvin Minsky relays in The Emotion Machine, Poincaré looked back from a particularly creative episode to try and figure out what most contributed to it. He identified four steps:
Preparation: Activate [mental] resources to deal with this particular type of problem.
Incubation: Generate many potential solutions.
Revelation: Recognize a promising one.
Evaluation: Verify that it actually works.
(Importantly, Preparation and Evaluation are conscious processes, while the middle two are unconscious.)
It’s a hopeful thought that if we rely on this list, we can find some bottleneck in our creative process that, once resolved, will make us more creative. Maybe so. But an important difference between Poincare's and Auden’s views is that even though particular steps may hold intact for both classic and romantic minds, the order of the steps may get jumbled up.
How does the order of the steps change for a romantic? I’ll suggest that the default state of a romantic is Incubation, and Preparation accelerates only once a starting point is Revealed. A romantic is always Prepared, if only subliminally. Resources are always being activated, and not necessarily on the basis of a specific problem, but on the basis of some Revelation. Many thoughts are generated, all the time.
So instead of a specific goal that draws one forward, Revelation bothers the romantic, galvanizing them towards something unseen and unknown. And because the final product is something that emerges instead of being directly sought after, Evaluation may barely be a distinct step for the romantic, reliably frustrating the classic thinker.
Most of the time ideas will only bounce off each other over the course of Incubating. Accordingly, we can think of Revelation as the perception of two or more ideas sticking together through the maelstrom of memetic competition continually waged during Incubation. This may explain the feeling that we often mark the quality of a new creative idea, a new combination, based on the degree of its mental persistence.
For the romantic whose mind constantly scrubs their imagination for a creative connection, Revelation resonates that much more powerfully. The romantic is ever-watchful for these instances of memetic clumping, a vigilance which, we often think, is the hallmark of a great artist.
But not so fast—since romantics start Preparing from a moment of Revelation, their thinking has the hallmarks of what stands out to classically-minded thinkers as motivated reasoning; all their work essentially justifies and expands on what they “received” through Revelation. Because romantics tend not to have clear goal states before they start working, or if they do have a goal, it’s allowed to remain nebulous, they have no choice but to keep on the inspired path hoping for it all to come together. This uncertainty is baked into the entire romantic creative process.3 Whether this is a feature or a bug for the romantic is determined afresh by the success or failure of every new creative undertaking.
To return to that barnyard metaphor, if a chicken simply expresses its nature when it reproduces, a farmer has a quota of eggs they need to bring to market. If the romantic tends to be more instinctive about their creative ability, the classically minded are somewhat more systematic. The farmers (the classically-minded) are beset by problems for which a solution must be found.
So a unique aspect of the classical mind is their clearly defined goal, which motivates one to evaluate the final product for quality assurance. Because of the direction goals provide, the classical mind is more skeptical of Revelation. Poincaré again:
“I have spoken of the feeling of absolute certitude accompanying the inspiration... but often this feeling deceives us without being any the less vivid, and we only find it out when we seek to put on foot the demonstrations. I have especially noticed this fact in regard to ideas coming to me in the morning or evening in bed while in a self-hypnagogic state.”
In the climb for truth, sudden Revelation can startle us with its salience, like the sudden discovery of a hold by grasping hands. But for the classically-minded Revelation must be verified—the hold should be tested by hanging on it. And it’s a sad fact that many ideas we thought worked well together turn out not to survive criticism’s harsh pull. But those ideas that do survive tend to last.
I think Auden and most professional romantics would likely agree that some degree of evaluation is required for artistic quality. At Art’s most classical extreme, there used to be Renaissance artists who frequently used geometry in their paintings, for whom not satisfying intended formalisms would lower the quality of the finished product. But the average romantic today and in the past century seems set in their opinions on the “sterilizing” last step. Evaluation and criticism are clamps on creativity, they can be heard to argue, it’s the artist’s task to let their unconscious loose, to throw off the shackles of restraint. The classically-minded shudder.
Can there ever be accord between romantics and the classically minded? Perhaps both might agree that if creativity can be seized, it’s seized in the same way one grabs the reins of a horse (I promise I’m done with the animal metaphors), a harnessed animal receptive to subtle direction. Issues arise when one grasps the reins too tightly—a goal state too well-defined from the start is harder to reach, yet more useful if achieved (i.e. like a well-trained horse). But if we grasp the reins too loosely, we may never get anywhere at all. Even though our leanings to either the classic or romantic temperament may well be inborn, which mode we take in our thinking isn’t entirely out of our hands.
Broadly speaking, a romantic perceives immediate appearances, and prefers art and experience, while a classic thinker seeks underlying reality, and leans toward science and mechanisms. Pirsig sees this difference between a person who rides a motorcycle “for the vibes” and someone who likes taking it apart. These orientations toward the world often taken to be mutually exclusive, but they don’t have to be. (paraphrased from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance).
As one of the most famous contributors to chaos theory, Poincaré is deeply familiar with unpredictability, albeit in a different sense than Auden.
So if we try to understand why it is that most romantics want to make creativity mysterious, it may be because romantics, unlike their classical counterparts, are closer to the Sea of the Unconscious, so to speak. Floating in those turbulent waters is enough to make any swimmer disbelieve in the value of restraint.