The Creative Process

1. Since I am a mathematician most of what I write will, in the nature of things, be concerned with the problems of creative thought in science. Nevertheless, I want at least to glance at creation in the arts also: that is, at problems in the realm of aesthetics. I should therefore begin by saying that I do not regard aesthetics as a remoteand abstract interest. My approach to aesthetics as much as to scientific thought is not contemplative but active. I do not ask, “What is beauty?” or even “How do we judge what is beautiful?” I ask as simply as I can, “What prompts men to make something which seems beautiful, to them or to others’!’’ This is a rational question and it deserves a rational answer. We must not retreat from it into vague intuitions, or side-step it with hymns of praise to the mystical nature of beauty. I am not talking about mystics: I am talking about human beings who make things to use and to see. A rational aesthetic must start from the conviction that art (and science too) is a normal activity of human life. All the way back to the cave paintings and the invention of the first stone tools, what moved men either to paint or to invent was an everyday impulse. But it was an impulse in the everyday of men, not of animals. Whether we search for the beginnings either of art or of science, we have to go to those faculties which are human and not animal faculties. Something happens on the tree of evolution beeween the big apes and ourselves which is bound up with the development of personality; and once our branch has sprungout, Raphael and Humphry Davy lie furled in the human beginning like the leaves in the bud. What the painter and the inventor were doing,right back in the cave, was unfolding the gift of intelligent action. If 1am to ask you to study this gift, I must point to some distinction between animal behavior and human behavior. From J. Bronowski. A Sense of the Future. @ 1977 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published by the MITPress,Cambridge, MA, U.S.A.Reprintedby permission. Pergamon Press Ltd. Printed in Great Britain. 0024-094X185$3.W+O.W Jacob Bronowski The Creative Process LEONARDO, Vol. 18, NO.4, pp. 245-248,1985 One characteristic of animal behavior is that it is dominated by the physical presence of what the animal wants or fears. The mouse is dominated by the cat, the rabbit by the stoat; and equally, the hungry animal is dominated by the sight and smell of food, or of a mate, which make him blind to everything else present. A mastiff with food just outside his cage cannot tear himself away from the bars; the food fixes him, physically, by its closeness. Move the food a few feet away from the cage, and he feels released; he remembers that there is a door at the back of the cage,and now that he can take his eyes off the food, away he races through the door and around to the front. This and many other experiments make plain the compulsions which hold an animal. Even outside the clockwork of his instinctive actions, his needs fix,and drive him so that he has no room for maneuver. A main handicap in this,, of‘ course, is that the animal lacks any apparatus, such as human speech, by which he can bring to mind what is not present. Without speech, without a familiar symbolism, how can the mastiffs mind attend to the door behind him? His attention is free, his intelligence can maneuver, only within the few feet in which the food is not too close to the cage and is yet within range of sight or smell. Man has freed himself from this dominance in two steps. First, he can remember what is out of sight. The apparatus of speech allows him to recall what is absent, and to put it beside what is present; his field of action is larger because his mind holds more choices side by side. And second, the practice of speech...