The beautiful mind within the shell

IT IS of exceptionally interest that the characteristics in the art of children, especially those between four and six and a half years old, are also prominent in the art of the neolithic period. To most students of the history of art, the transition from the paleolithic to the neolithic period has every appearance of a catastrophic decline. Instead of the accurate depiction of animals in drawings of great variety, we find geometrical designs which tend to degenerate into dull repetitive patterns; instead of a vital naturalism, a deadly monotony of abstraction. However, abstraction represents a tremendous mental advance, a prerequisite for the progress made by neolithic man in relation to the paleolithic. No longer was he a hunter of wild beasts. Instead he became an agriculturist, he domesticated animals, he made pottery, and he even became interested in astronomy. It is no wonder that the New Stone Age is considered the cradle of the ancient great civilizations.
Abstraction or schematization requires imagination, inasmuch as it is a transformation of reality. But this imagination does not rely on images as images. If images are used, it is in order to abstract a schema from them. A linear symbol now replaces the image, but obviously this linear symbol is now related to the image. It need retain only the essential components of the image, thus transforming the image into a schema. These primitive schemata are very distant from the eidetic imagery that reproduces reality almost photographically. Yet inasmuch as schemata are common in children's art, and in the art of the mentally ill, we must recognize that they are the work of relatively primitive processes of the mind. They are perhaps the most archaic forms of the secondary process. But it is on this archaic structure that more advanced mechanisms are based.
According to Read(1955), it is in the neolithic period that form itself originated. I assume by form he means a formal entity, an abstraction from practical life. As suggested by Raphael (1947), the neolithic form achieves a synthesis. It indicates a disposition or determination to
create a unity of several elements: simplicity, the desire to build a complex structure from few elements; formal necessity, since it implies a determination to represent some content and conceal others; detachment, as the artist is determined to rise above the content of his product; definiteness, embodied in the self-evidence of the form;energy, often expressed in the will to transcend the physical powers of life; and connection of content and meaning. Read believes that adoption by neolithic men of this schematic style did not signify the abandonment of the previous vital style. The two coexisted.

Labels: creativity, schema

Posted by . at 1:27 PM | Permalink | Comments

Einstein sometimes referred to the source of his ideas as "playing" with "images." When he described the process in his own words, the childlike approach and the interplay of the two hemispheres seems clearly evident.

"The worlds or the language, as they are written or spoke, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs (symbols) and more or less clear images which can be "voluntarily" reproduced and combined.
There is, of course, a certain connection between those elements and relevant logical concepts. It is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above mentioned elements. But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought - before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others.
The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will."

Labels: creativity, Einstein

Posted by . at 1:13 PM | Permalink | Comments

If genius is removed from art at the same time as the artist is denied the claim to be a genius, art and indeed all culture, ceases to be transcendental and can be assessed only in this-worldly terms. Culture without genius might therefor be understood simply as entertainment. For a repudiation of the aspirations expressed in the ideology of genius might suggest that the most honest, the most satisfactory culture wold be a purely instrumental culture designed to supply various convenient gratifications.
So badly functional a culture would shun all else in order the more effectively to ease man's passage from cradle to grave. After all, given human self-consciousness, there is a problem of how to occupy the mind between inception and extinction.
Yet culture so situated could be allowed another role, close to that of religious culture in religious society. For religious culture, though transcendental in the sense that it turned men's eyes to heaven and to God, was profoundly this-worldly in the sense that it served to maintain a religious cult which took place, and religious doctrine taught and held, here on earth.
Secular culture lacks even the secular equivalent of this second function of religious culture; has remained absolutely committed to the secular transcendental; and has failed (except in philistine perversions) to sustain secular society's procedures, principles, and norms. On the contrary, it ever criticizes those procedures, principles and norms. But once and if secular culture could modify its loyalties to the transcendental, it should be free to sustain secular society and its values more thoroughly than religious culture once sustained a religious cult and its values.
Secular culture's failure to sustain society's fundamental values arises both from its presumption that society is alienated, and from the conviction that this alienated order could and would be transcended. Culture without genius denies that the alienated order can be transcended; and it might also assert the this-worldly order is neither alienated nor alienating. But that assertion would merely substitute for doctrinaire absolute criticism an equally doctrinaire acceptance of the present order, worthy of philistinism at its worst.

Walter Kaufmann's recent essay, 'The Inevitability of Alienation', states that he believes that "alienation is a central feature of human existence", and that "as freedom, education, and self-consciousness increase, alienation grows too." Kaufmann even argues - presumably because he finds alienation inseparable from freedom, education, and self-consciousness - that "Life without estrangement is scarcely worth living". But he admits that this situation raises problems and agrees that "what matters is to increase men's capacity to cope with alienation."
Kaufmann's views resemble those of certain romantics who attribute alienation to man's real and necessary development from the unalienated, naive state; who interpret the contemporary human condition not merely as we advance on, but also as a decline from, the past; and who hope that the future men will preserve and indeed continue their development while transcending their alienation.
Since Kaufmann holds alienation to be inevitable, he excludes the transcendental. But he agrees with the romantics that alienation is both good and evil. Alienation is a good, Kaufmann and the romantics argue, insofar as it represents, or at least is inseparable from, the development of mankind. Alienation is an evil, according to the romantics because it constitutes a degradation that must be transcended; and according to Kaufmann because it forms a disability that must be coped with.

Whitman's words,

Labels: genius, Whitman

Posted by . at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments