musings on creativity & imagination

Painting by Phillipa King

I’ve recently been reading “The Act of Creation“ by Arthur Koestler.

In doing so, I’ve come across some passages that have made me stop and think.  In one section, Koestler talks about the intervention of unconscious processes:

“The temporary relinquishing of conscious controls liberates the mind from certain constraints which are necessary to maintain the disciplined routines of thoughts but may become and impediment to the creative leap; at the same time other types of ideation on more primitive levels of mental organization are brought into activity.”

‘Primitive’ is the key word here.  Koestler describes how instinct, which dawns before conscious reasoning, is the inherent ocean of inspiration necessary for any ‘creative leap’.  Conceptual thought, he goes on, must abdicate in favor of a higher-guiding “semi-consciousness”.

For an example, we look to the great physicist Michael Faraday, who is famous for his work with magnetic fields.  Koestler describes him as a ‘visionary’ not only in the metaphorical but in the literal sense.  He saw the stresses surrounding magnets and electric currents as curves in space, for which he coined the name ‘lines of forces‘, and which, in his imagination, were as real as if they consisted of solid matter. He visualized the universe patterned by these lines–or rather by narrow tubes through which all forms of ‘ray-vibrations’ or energy-radiations are propagated.  This vision of curved tubes which gave birth to the dynamo and the electric motor; it led Faraday to discard the ether, and to postulate that light was electromagnetic radiation.”

Faraday used and trusted his imagination as empirical, scientific evidence:

“Perhaps the most remarkable fact about Faraday is that he lacked any mathematical education or gift, and was ‘ignorant of all but the merest elements of arithmetic’; and mathematics is of course regarded as an indispensable tool of the physicist.”

At his funeral, German physicist Hermann von Hemholtz remarks:

“It is in the highest degree astonishing to see what a large number of general theorems, the methodical deduction of which requires the highest power of mathematical analysis, he found by a kind of intuition, with the security of instinct, without the help of a single mathematical formula.”

This is proof that the imagination holds magnificent powers of reason, logic and calculation.  It is the cornerstone of discovery and its power lies in the fact that it transcends conscious ‘thinking’.  Thoughts are not limited to wordage; in fact surmounting the confines of language is essential to creative action.  In the words of Koestler:  “The inquiry brought conclusive proof that among mathematicians, verbal thinking plays only a subordinate part in the decisive phase of the creative act; and there is a mass of evidence to show that this is also the rule among original thinkers in other branches of science.“