Human creativity

Reprise

I described the outlook of the 18th Century under the following heads:

The universe and its constituents as inert.
The human mind as inert
The universe reduced to shape, size, and motion
'Reason' in the Age of Reason
The Enlightenment placement of Feeling
Determinism in Enlightenment thought

I see the Romantic thought as a reaction to this.

The Romantics sought to insist then on a conception which made the human being the originator of activity, and not simply a node in a causal nexus. "Everyone's actions,' says Herder, 'should arise utterly from himself'. (Herder, quoted in Pascal, p. 135; "The great achievement of English Romanticism was its grasp of the principle of creative autonomy" - Northrop Frye, "Blake after two centuries", in English Romantic Poets, ed. M.H.Abrams, New York, 1960, Galaxy, p. 65.). If human beings have no power to initiate change they are mere 'playthings' of forces impinging upon them, and to be a plaything, as the early Sturm und Drang writer Lenz put it, 'is a dismal, oppressive thought,' amounting to ' an eternal slavery, an artificial .... wretched brutishness.' Instead, we should place the capacity to act at the centre of our conception of the human being: 'action, action, is the soul of the world, not enjoyment, not sentimentality, not ratiocination ... " (Lenz, translated in Roy Pascal The German Sturm und Drang, Manchester, 1953, Manchester University Press, p. 1948,9).

[Note: It is usual to recognise a distinction between the German Sturm und Drang movement on the last quarter of the 18th Century and the Romantic movement which many say came after. It is nevertheless arguable that the two belong together.]

Remember what was happening as the 18th Century gave way to the 19th. Richard Arkwright invented the Water Loom in 1769, and built his first textile mill in Cromford, England, in 1774; and the Luddite Riots, expressing opposition to the machinery that threatened to render workless those it didn't convert into machines, took place between 1811 - 15. A useful timeline is offered by the Victorian Web.

From "Manchester, England, 1851." Oil on canvas. 1851. The Royal Collection, England.

Romanticism rejects the notion that the human mind is passive

A part of this new insistence on the power of human beings to initiate change amounted to a new view of the nature of the human mind. The mind had been a billiard table on which ideas cannoned about: the revolutionary view was that the mind created new ideas from scratch. (The early Modern John Locke had believed that the mind assembled complex ideas from simpler ones - the Romantic thesis was that the mind was capable of creation in the more radical sense.)

The poet Coleridge - the Coleridge we know as a poet, anyway, though he also thought of himself as a philosopher - articulated his distinction between fancy and imagination as a way of making the point. The fancy is little more than a spectator in the theatre of the mind, whereas the imagination, as Coleridge conceives of it, is 'a living Power', creating new forms. Discrete ideas, simply observed by the fancy, or linked loosely together in temporary assemblies, are by the imagination, as Coleridge understands it, melted and cast anew. The imagination is vital - he asserts, meaning that it had that power, often associated with things that were alive, which for example were often thought of as developing mature structures from inchoate beginnings, to form new things out of the formless.

The creative power that is the imagination is central to the human mind, says Coleridge. It is the

'prime Agent of all human Perception'

and thus he understands the mind as essentially creative, in contrast to the picture of the mind he found in Newtonian science,

'a lazy Looker-on on an external World.'

Immanuel Kant, from whom Coleridge derived much his (philosophical) inspiration, broke with Enlightenment thought on this point too: the mind was no mere spectator: it played a part in creating the world as we know it.

Lenz (a member of the Sturm und Drang movement) in his paper On the Nature of our Mind argued that the difficulty we feel in our minds when we attempt to acknowledge that our 'decisions' are determined is a hint that they are not - a hint that instead there is within us a fount of action which is to an extent independent:

'What then, I only a plaything of circumstance? I ---? Whence comes the conviction that 'you did that, you were the cause of that, not nature or the impact of alien forces ' ... Might it not be a hint given by nature to the human soul, that the soul is a substance, though not born independent, but with a movement, an instinct within, to work its way up to independence; to separate itself out, as it were, from this great mass of intertwined creation and to establish itself as a being existing for itself ...'

Lenz, quoted and translated by Pascal, ibid. p. 126.

Compare Leibniz, from whom it is known Goethe drew inspiration: 'We may give the name entelechies to all created simple substances or monads. For they have in themselves a certain perfection; there is a self-sufficiency in them which makes them the sources of their internal actions - incorporeal automata, if I may so put it.' (Leibniz, Monadology, translated by Mary Morris, (London: Dent, 1934), p.6 (§18))

EXERCISE

Identify something in the Modern world which is illuminated by the concept of the internal origination of change.

E.g. health?

The 'unconscious'

This is an extra point, beyond the basic one that the mind becomes thought of as active.

Linked with Wordsworth's articulation of a new attitude towards nature is his attempt to articulate the development and workings of his mind.

The Prelude is subtitled "The growth of a poet's mind". It represents the first attempt by a poet "to examine the human mind from a psychological viewpoint. What he tries to describe, as his subtitle to the poem suggest, is the workings of the subconscious mind." Trying to show, for one thing, "the way that certain events, although unrecognised at the time, connect and link themselves together and gradually build themselves up into a man's inner self." (Drabble, Wordsworth, London, 1966, Evans, p.81,2.)

Drabble points out that in a way Wordsworth's point is made by the 18th Century thinker David Hartley (1705-57): that our moral character is not innate but grows in childhood and youth, but that where Hartley's conception had been rigorously mechanical, Wordsworth's is more complex and subtle, anticipating psychoanalytical ideas rather than echoing earlier ones. (Drabble, Ibid. p. 83.)

Drabble suggests that Wordsworth is one of the earliest thinkers to take seriously the notion of an 'unconscious' - the thing that was made so much of by Freud and psychoanalysis - but I don't see this myself. Here is Leibniz for example:

"I grant to the Cartesians that the soul always actually thinks, but I do not grant that the soul is aware of all of its thoughts. For our great perceptions and our appetites, of which we ourselves are aware, are composed of an infinity of little perceptions [petites perceptions] and small inclinations, of which we cannot be aware."

Leibniz, Letter to Remond, 4th November 1715, translated by Strickland and available here.

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Reason, nature and the human being in the West: Part 4

4.2 Human creativity

Reprise

Romanticism rejects the notion that the human mind is passive

EXERCISE

What do you think?

The 'unconscious'

What do you think?