[Editor's note/excuse/statement of victory: I haven't used this blog for personal storytelling--if you want to know what's going on day-to-day, try Facebook--but recently I've been distracted by training for, running, and recovering from the Houston Marathon. I thought about writing about it here, but I decided to spare you the treacly life-is-like-my-sport routine and point you to the official photos instead. I'll leave up the 'marathonous' widget for a few more days to give you all one more chance to admire me.
End note. On with the post.]
A few months ago, W. W. Norton published the so-called "Red Book" by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. Jung worked closely with Sigmund Freud in the early 20th century, but disagreements eventually led Jung to establish his own school of psychology. Shortly after his break with Freud, Jung began to suffer from major psychoses--voices, hallucinations, and the like--causing Jung to worry that he was going insane. Rather than shunning his episodes or trying to 'cure' them, however, he embraced and even tried to induce them. He viewed his hallucinations as valuable opportunities to become acquainted with his unconscious self, which was necessary to maintain (or recover) his mental health. For sixteen years he kept a detailed record of his hallucinations, transcribing notes and images into a red leather book. After his death, his family kept the book hidden until finally agreeing in 2007 to publish it.
(I promise I'm going somewhere with this. Please hang on.)
Colored by these experiences, Jung developed an unusual theory of psychology. He saw modern man as a victim of too much rational, logical thinking--too much 'consciousness'--which prevented him from realizing his true self. By tapping into the unconscious, letting it rule over the rational mind, a person's true self was realized. In contrast to Freud's 'rational' psychoanalysis, Jung saw psychology as a 'spiritual' (it's not clear--to me, at least--whether or not Jung meant this in a religious sense, or if it was merely figurative) endeavor, and his theories are characterized by a focus on the mystical and metaphysical. So, while Jung made several contributions to modern psychology, his theories are often marginalized as pseudoscientific.
However, the very qualities that render Jungian psychology unscientific simultaneously render it fascinating. The most notable of Jung's theories, for example, is the collective unconscious, the idea that all of humanity shares a common psychic structure that governs our primordial thoughts. To Jung, the commonality of our myths, folklore, and archetypes is due to a deeply-intrenched, genetically heritable psychological framework. In other words, the orphan hero and the wise old sage resonate with us not because George Lucas is a genius (because let's be honest, he isn't! [Cue angry comments.]), but because these characters have been stamped over millennia into our deepest, most immutable subconsciousness.
(Here's where I get to my point!)
Jung may be discredited among psychologists, his ideas useful only as fodder for works of science fiction genius, but I don't care; I'm more interested in the practical aspects of his ideas. While Jung argued that the unconscious mind should rule over the conscious, most of our success comes by doing the opposite. Whenever we overcome a fear, change our habits, or learn a skill, we make a conscious, deliberate effort to alter our unconscious, instinctive selves. This is particularly true for educational efforts: our we consciously struggle with complex ideas until we successfully embed them into our natural intuition.
With that last point comes a dilemma. As my education progresses, my capacity for precise, disciplined, hyperconscious thought improves tremendously. But I feel my creative, impulsive, illogical brain grinding slowly away--not rusting shut with disuse, but being crushed by the weight of ever-present rationality. I love graduate school, don't get me wrong, but as I sharpen my talent for proofmaking and paper writing--in other words, as I expand my rational self--I crowd out vital elements of my mind. I've argued elsewhere that science is not a mechanical process, but one that demands passion and creativity, in which the most valuable ideas spring from the irrational and are then honed under the care of the rational. So I am left with an important question. How do I expand the capacity of my rational mind without squashing the sparks of creativity? How do I go forward in training without neutering the very neuroticism that nurtures the innovation necessary for successful research?
6 comments:
Alright, I'll take the angry comment bait. You've taken shots at Nintendo, LofTR, why not Star Wars? That's a signficant portion of what I (and many others) thought was magical in my childhood. If the trend continues, I would guess that you are going to bad-mouth Barbies or "Kick the Can" at some point, but those both seem too easy.
I will respond quickly to the George Lucas bit by saying that even Shakespeare did not invent the fundamental characters that he wrote about. How he portrayed them and his ability to make them seem new and compelling again to a modern audience is why he is considered a genius.
I do relate to how the intensity of grad school can make you feel one-sided because you spend all of your time creating and expressing yourself in the same way, I just object to some of the terminology that you've chosen.
Specifically, I disagree with your assessment that "the most valuable ideas spring from the irrational and are then honed under the care of the rational."
I am a patent attorney, and as such I spend most of my day with some creative works that are not only "honed" in the rational world, but also born there. I have no idea what you or Jung would consider "most valuable" but most of the innovation and technology that drives our world's economy was born because of pragmatic necessity and meticulous problem solving, not out of whimsy or impulse.
I think that coupling creativity with the illogical and impulsive is overly simplistic and does a disservice to both scientists and artists alike. Great scientists are not people who are able to take their logical brains and shelve them for a period while they go slumming into the land of the impulstive and illogical in order to steal some creativity to bring back to the lab, and great artists do not necessary set aside logic in order to find inspiration.
If I agree with any of Jung's philosophy, I believe that all men are born with the innate desire to create and to express themselves. Personally, I believe that this desire is tied to the divine nature of our souls -the power of creation being godly, but I don't believe that the desire or inspiration to create is necessarily irrational and I don't think that creativity need manifest itself in the rational in order to be meaningful.
Heather, I knew I could count on you.
For the record, I haven't make any digs at Nintendo. The 8-bit NES was a foundational part of my childhood, as I think I mentioned a few posts ago.
Also for the record, I'm a reasonably big SW fan. I love the original films, and in fact right now I'm re-reading the Timothy Zahn trilogy as a break from Tolkien. But I maintaing the the prequels show conclusively that Lucas is no genius and that probably he never was.
It's hard to account for the discrepancy between the two trilogies. The original was full of warm, classic storytelling goodness--the writing and acting were a little rough around the edges, yes, but its essence was good, and so we overlook the flaws in execution. The prequels were the worst of both worlds: the acting and writing were still shaky, maybe even worse (with a notable exception or two), and the story and characters were hollow and one-dimensional.
It's possible that in the time between trilogies Lucas simply let success get to his head, and unchecked hubris supplanted his creative genius. But that's a tough sell for me. I speculate (SPECULATE) that the critical differences between the trilogies were (a) budget constraints, and (b) creative control by Lucas. Basically, Lucas couldn't do whatever he wanted with the original trilogy because he didn't have the money and he had to compromise artistically with other people. Lucas surely had great raw material (for example, I don't think it's a flaw that he created archetypal characters; it just means that he's not necessarily a genius in creating them), but having to modulate those ideas against other people's likely had a positive impact on the films. In the prequels, he had a much larger budget and nearly unlimited creative control. Unlike the originals, he wrote and directed all three prequels, and by some accounts he resisted contrary advice from others involved in making the films. The result of his complete control was tragically, laughably bad. That is not the hallmark of genius.
Regarding Jung and the irrational, I think that in part we simply disagree, and in part you misunderstand my meaning.
Disagree first: I don't mean to pull rank, but I am an active research engineer who, by profession, creates ideas that have made their way into patents pending. And I unapologetically assert that the ideas that solve difficult, meaningful problems are typically born out of unfocused, non-meticulous thinking. Yes, problems themselves are motivated by practical concerns, and of course inspiration can only strike a mind prepared by all sorts of conscious, logical investigation, but I maintain that if you find a solution by bloodlessly crunching through a problem, your solution is neither novel nor non-obvious. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but creativity is the one delivering the baby.
Misunderstand next: I'm not trying to partition scientific inquiry--or artistic creation--into neat containers of rational and irrational thought; indeed, it's the irreducible interplay between the two that makes science and art so interesting. There's all sorts of logical structure and analysis built into music, film, and art, and--just as with science--great artists are analytically adept as well as creative. But both art and science require an influx of raw, novel ideas to move forward, and creativity by definition is unpredictable, unmeasurable, and almost metaphysical--a product of the irrational mind.
I don't know if I believe in any of Jung's ideas--psychologists probably have discarded him for a reason--but I do know that it's possible to drown creativity in a stifling sea of rationality, and perhaps cultivating my impulsive, irrational side is a way of preventing that from happening.
Matt,
There is no reason for us to debate about Lucas - I agree with you about the prequels. I hate them and in my head they are not considered "Star Wars." "Clone Wars" was an intellectual assault. That being said, I guess I just don't believe that consistency is necessary to establish genius.
And I thought you knew this - but I was a mathematician and engineer before I went to law school - the technical background is a necessary condition to sit for the patent bar, so I do know a bit about how ideas are born. Rank aside- the legal definitions of "nonobviousness" and "novel" are defined in terms of originality, not creativity, specifically because creativity is too difficult to quantify.
Originality is less picky that creativity. It does not care how an idea came to be- even if it is the mindless result of mechanical slogging- just that it is the first of its kind. No imagination required.
Actually, I think this philosophical difference is a common thread to our discussions - I am a pragmatist, so I tend to give a lot of artists and authors the benefit of the doubt for simply being the first to do something - for simply being the origin of something great, while I think you are more idealistic and require something inherently great that will continue to be so for a longer period of time.
Also, just to put out a different school of thought - I just finished Ayn Rand's two famous books, so I have objectivism, which says that human knowledge is all derived from the nature of reality, fresh on the brain. She seems to believe that humans create, not because they want to bring the metaphysical into reality, but because they need a way to internalize and give personal meaning to their physical surroundings. So I guess she would say that creation starts with the rational and ends in the metaphysical.
I won't lie--I was surprised to see your somewhat vehement response to my George Lucas comment. I thought I had made it clear that my ridicule was confined to the prequels, and I've met few SW fans who give them any credit. So I'm happy to have misunderstood your complaint. But, allow me a parting shot: I agree that consistency isn't a necessary condition for genius, but the two correlate nicely.
I knew that you had a mathematics degree (I didn't know about the engineering background, but the distinction gets fuzzy the further you go, anyways): you studied differential equations; I study electricity. That's why I didn't want to pull rank. But on the other hand, I didn't really appreciate the creative side of my field until I was well-entrenched in graduate research, and I simply didn't know how much experience you had with that side of things before you went to law school. My apologies for selling you short.
Philosophical differences aside (although we may get a chance to debate objectivism when I write about Cartesian doubt later this week), I suspect that our disagreement has semantical roots. We've thrown around three words--'originality', 'novelty', and 'creativity'--that I consider functionally equivalent in the context of this discussion. If we focus on 'novelty', I define it simply as the quality of "newness", with the added connotation that the newness is somehow meaningful or significant and not simply random.
With that definition, I argue that it is nearly impossible to generate something novel via a mechanical process. Almost by definition, a mechanical process simply reprocesses what already exists and does not create anything new. (Perhaps you could make a Hegelian sort of argument against this, but even the Hegelian dialectic requires synthesis, which requires a new idea.) I consider novelty metaphysical because it defies logical description. You can't teach someone to generate new ideas, you can't diagram the process, and deliberate efforts to induce new ideas are unreliable (but occasionally useful) surrogates for genuine insight. I'm sure it's possible to find counterexamples; but on the whole, inasmuch as an idea is mechanical, it is not new.
a good question. not sure how to answer it. i think this book might have some relevance:
http://www.amazon.com/Serpents-Gift-Gnostic-Reflections-Religion/dp/0226453812
or not.
about jung, when i read around a bit in his (auto-)biography, i thought it was interesting that he said his wife and kids were what kept him from totally losing touch with this world, unlike some other visionaries, like this guy:
http://www.summum.us/about/firstencounter.shtml
g: You know, I get why people want to believe in extraterrestrial stuffs, and sometimes I feel the same the way. But for some reason I am unpersuaded by the Summum way.
Your anectode on Jung reinforces my respect for him: despite his eccentricity and possible borderline insanity, he found strength and solace in ordinary human goodness.
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