Читать книгу Essay on the Creative Imagination - Th. Ribot - Страница 24

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Hitherto we have considered the emotional factor under a single aspect only—the purely emotional—that which is manifested in consciousness under an agreeable or disagreeable or mixed form. But thoughts, feelings, and emotions include elements that are deeper—motor, i.e., impulsive or inhibitory—which we may neglect the less since it is in movements that we seek the origin of the creative imagination. This motor element is what current speech and often even psychological treatises designate under the terms "creative instinct," "inventive instinct;" what we express in another form when we say that creators are guided by instinct and "are pushed like animals toward the accomplishment of certain acts."

If I mistake not, this indicates that the "creative instinct" exists in all men to some extent—feeble in some, perceptible in others, brilliant in the great inventors.

For I do not hesitate to maintain that the creative instinct, taken in this strict meaning, compared to animal instinct, is a mere figure of speech, an "entity" regarded as a reality, an abstraction. There are needs, appetites, tendencies, desires, common to all men, which, in a given individual at a given moment can result in a creative act; but there is no special psychic manifestation that may be the "creative instinct." What, indeed, could it be? Every instinct has its own particular end:—hunger, thirst, sex, the specific instincts of the bee, ant, beaver, consist of a group of movements adapted for a determinate end that is always the same. Now, what would be a creative instinct in general which, by hypothesis, could produce in turn an opera, a machine, a metaphysical theory, a system of finance, a plan of military campaign, and so forth? It is a pure fancy. Inventive genius has not a source, but sources.

Let us consider from our present viewpoint the human duality, the homo duplex:

Suppose man reduced to a state of pure intelligence, that is, capable of perceiving, remembering, associating, dissociating, reasoning, and nothing else. All creative activity is then impossible, because there is nothing to solicit it.

Suppose, again, man reduced to organic manifestations; he is then no more than a bundle of wants, appetites, instincts—that is, of motor activities, blind forces that, lacking a sufficient cerebral organ, will produce nothing.

The coöperation of both these factors is indispensable: without the first, nothing begins; without the second, nothing results. I hold that it is in needs that we must seek for the primary cause of all inventions; it is evident that the motor element alone is insufficient. If the needs are strong, energetic, they may determine a production, or, if the intellectual factor is insufficient, may spoil it. Many want to make discoveries but discover nothing. A want so common as hunger or thirst suggests to one some ingenious method of satisfying it; another remains entirely destitute.

In short, in order that a creative act occur, there is required, first, a need; then, that it arouse a combination of images; and lastly, that it objectify and realize itself in an appropriate form.

We shall try later (in the Conclusion) to answer the question, Why is one imaginative? In passing, let us put the opposite question, Why is one not imaginative? One may possess in the mind an inexhaustible treasure of facts and images and yet produce nothing: great travelers, for example, who have seen and heard much, and who draw from their experiences only a few colorless anecdotes; men who were partakers in great political events or military movements, who leave behind only a few dry and chilly memoirs; prodigies of reading, living encyclopedias, who remain crushed under the load of their erudition. On the other hand, there are people who easily move and act, but are limited, lacking images and ideas. Their intellectual poverty condemns them to unproductiveness; nevertheless, being nearer than the others to the imaginative type, they bring forth childish or chimerical productions. So that we may answer the question asked above: The non-imaginative person is such from lack of materials or through the absence of resourcefulness.

Without contenting ourselves with these theoretical remarks, let us rapidly show that it is thus that these things actually happen. All the work of the creative imagination may be classed under two great heads—esthetic inventions and practical inventions; on the one hand, what man has brought to pass in the domain of art, and on the other hand, all else. Though this division may appear strange, and unjustifiable, it has reason for its being, as we shall see hereafter.

Let us consider first the class of non-esthetic creations. Very different in nature, all the products of this group coincide at one point:—they are of practical utility, they are born of a vital need, of one of the conditions of man's existence. There are first the inventions "practical" in the narrow sense—all that pertains to food, clothing, defense, housing, etc. Every one of these special needs has stimulated inventions adapted to a special end. Inventions in the social and political order answer to the conditions of collective existence; they arise from the necessity of maintaining the coherence of the social aggregate and of defending it against inimical groups. The work of the imagination whence have arisen the myths, religious conceptions, and the first attempts at a scientific explanation may seem at first disinterested and foreign to practical life. This is an erroneous supposition. Man, face to face with the higher powers of nature, the mystery of which he does not penetrate, has a need of acting upon it; he tries to conciliate them, even to turn them to his service by magic rites and operations. His curiosity is not at all theoretic; he does not aim to know for the sake of knowing, but in order to act upon the outside world and to draw profit therefrom. To the numerous questions that necessity puts to him his imagination alone responds, because his reason is shifting and his scientific knowledge nil. Here, then, invention again results from urgent needs.

Indeed, in the course of the nineteenth century and on account of growing civilization all these creations reach a second moment when their origin is hidden. Most of our mechanical, industrial and commercial inventions are not stimulated by the immediate necessity of living, by an urgent need; it is not a question of existence but of better existence. The same holds true of social and political inventions which arise from the increasing complexity and the new requirements of the aggregates forming great states. Lastly, it is certain that primitive curiosity has partially lost its utilitarian character in order to become, in some men at least, the taste for pure research—theoretical, speculative, disinterested. But all this in no way affects our thesis, for it is a well-known elementary psychological law that upon primitive wants are grafted acquired wants fully as imperative. The primitive need is modified, metamorphosed, adapted; there remains of it, nonetheless, the fundamental activity toward creation.

Let us now consider the class of esthetic creations. According to the generally accepted theory which is too well known for me to stop to explain it, art has its beginning in a superfluous, bounding activity, useless as regards the preservation of the individual, which is shown first in the form of play. Then, through transformation and complication, play becomes primitive art, dancing, music, and poetry at the same time, closely united in an apparently indissoluble unity. Although the theory of the absolute inutility of art has met some strong criticism, let us accept it for the present. Aside from the true or false character of inutility, the psychological mechanism remains the same here as in the preceding cases; we shall only say that in place of a vital need it is a need of luxury acting, but it acts only because it is in man.

Nevertheless, the inutility of play is far from proven biologically. Groos, in his two excellent works on the subject,[17] has maintained with much power the opposite view. According to him the theory of Schiller and Spencer, based on the expenditure of superfluous activity and the opposite theory of Lazarus, who reduces play to a relaxation—that is, a recuperation of strength—are but partial explanations. Play has a positive use. In man there exist a great number of instincts that are not yet developed at birth. An incomplete being, he must have education of his capacities, and this is obtained through play, which is the exercise of the natural tendencies of human activities. In man and in the higher animals plays are a preparation, a prelude to the active functions of life. There is no instinct of play in general, but there are special instincts that are manifested under the forms of play. If we admit this explanation, which does not lack potency, the work of the esthetic imagination itself would be reduced to a biological necessity, and there would be no reason for making a separate category of it. Whichever view we may adopt, it still remains established that any invention is reducible, directly or indirectly, to a particular, determinate need, and that to allow man a special instinct, the definite specific character of which should be stimulation to creative activity, is a fantastic notion.

Whence, then, comes this persistent and in some respects seductive idea that creation is an instinctive result? Because a happy invention has characteristics that evidently relate it to instinctive activity in the strict sense of the word. First, precocity, of which we shall later give numerous examples, and which resembles the innateness of instinct. Again, orientation in a single direction: the inventor is, so to speak, polarized; he is the slave of music, of mechanics, of mathematics; often inapt at everything outside his own particular sphere. We know the witticism of Madame du Deffant on Vaucanson, who was so awkward, so insignificant when he ventured outside of mechanics. "One should say that this man had manufactured himself." Finally, the ease with which invention often (not always) manifests itself makes it resemble the work of a pre-established mechanism.

But these and similar characteristics may be lacking. They are necessary for instinct, not for invention. There are great creators who have been neither precocious nor confined in a narrow field, and who have given birth to their inventions painfully, laboriously. Between the mechanism of instinct and that of imaginative creation there are frequently great analogies but not identity of nature. Every tendency of our organization, useful or hurtful, may become the beginning of a creative act. Every invention arises from a particular need of human nature, acting within its own sphere and for its own special end.

If now it should be asked why the creative imagination directs itself preferably in one line rather than in another—toward poetry or physics, trade or mechanics, geometry or painting, strategy or music, etc.—we have nothing in answer. It is a result of the individual organization, the secret of which we do not possess. In ordinary life we meet people visibly borne along toward love or good cheer, toward ambition, riches or good works; we say that they are "so built," that such is their character. At bottom the two questions are identical, and current psychology is not in a position to solve them.