Anthropomorphized Creativity :: Philosophy Philosophical Papers

Anthropomorphized Creativity It starts at 2 o'clock in the morning, a blank sheet in front of your eyes and a blank brain behind. Whether for grades, for money, for for glory, for love, or for self respect, you have to put your thoughts down in a coherent form, but you cannot. You beg for the ability to shift out of neutral and get writing, but it doesn't come. And like any human being since we started carving into bone and shaping clay, you start to put in your mind's eye a face to what you are seeking. It has eyes, brows, a nose, and of course, a slight contemptuous smirk. That same tendency that has lead to the fashioning of idols now comes to you. "The secret of creativeness," (Carl Jung's phrase) like the philosopher's stone, is an abstraction that has tempted many great minds into building theoretical structures that try to explain the creative process, and that fail to do so for a majority of creative artists. Jung calls it a "transcendental problem which the psychologist cannot answer but can only describe." In his essay "The Artist" Jung attempts to describe the creative process using the ideas and metaphors of his eponymous theories. These attempt to replace the artist, a living, breathing human being, with abstractions according to which the artist is an "impersonal creative process." While I recently read through his essay "The Artist," and through Nathaniel Hawthorne's story "The Artist of the Beautiful," what came to my mind were those authors whose own creative processes did not fit Hawthorne's and Jung's notions. I can only chalk this up to my contrarian nature and to my choice of authors. Although more likely, it is because of my own idolatry. The author Harlan Ellison doesn't relish being asked about the secret of creativeness, at least so far as it pertains to himself. Questions about it prompt him to give a brief explanation of how he gets his ideas from a mail order business in Schenectady, New York. (They also cause him to change colors all through the spectrum.) His glib response points to the difficulty of describing the creative process in a way that will carry from one artist over to many. The challenge is compounded by the prejudices we have about the human mind in general. Every idea about the human mind is an abstraction that cannot but repel as many people as it attracts.