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Word Gems

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Creativity

 Sheldrake and Vernon dialogues

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Hello, I'm Rupert Sheldrake, and this is another of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, and I'm here with Mark Vernon.

Hi there, Rupert. Lovely to join you once again. I think like the 98th conversation we've had now. Wonderful.

Well, Mark, anyone who's looking at you now will see beside you a picture of the cover of your book, Awake. And indeed, I've got a copy right here. And the subtitle, William Blake and the Power of the Imagination. I'd love to talk about the imagination because this was a hugely important part of Blake's work.

And it's something you dwell on in the book. And what Blake means by the imagination is not just a kind of fantasy, it's something much deeper and more interesting. So I wonder if first you could say something about that and Blake's view of the imagination.

Yeah, well, look, thanks for picking that up. And I thought we'd be delighted to talk about it. And it's very relevant, actually, to some of our most recent conversations where we've been thinking about principles in nature.

And whilst, as you say, many people might assume that nowadays imagination is a kind of private capacity that individuals have, perhaps related somehow to the idea that consciousness is a byproduct of the activity of the brain - so, a very kind of contracted notion of the imagination.

William Blake very much resisted that understanding. It was born in his time, in fact, figures like John Locke, Adam Smith, David Hume, they were all contracting the notion of the imagination into,
you know, more or less, a widespread assumption, now anyway maybe the dominant one, that somehow consciousness imagination all that kind of psychic activity springs from somewhere within the skull perhaps related to the body in some way. Anyway, Blake and others at his time immediately resist that.

And it's related to nature, too, because one of Blake's sort of favorite utterances on the imagination is when he says nature is imagination itself.

And to Blake, when he looked out into the natural world, he saw nature, myriad manifestations of a divine imaginative activity that was part and parcel of the same divine imaginative activity going on in his own creativity, not just with his poetry and his painting and so on, the obvious signs of that. But he said that even the way we perceive the world is is a product of the imaginative, I don't know, sort of spectrum, you might say, that we bring to that.

And his great criticism of post-Newtonian science, Newton was the figure that he used to capture this sense of a contracted imagination. Yeah. His critique of it wasn't that there was no imagination in modern science. I mean, that clearly is not the case. There's huge imagination in even a materialist science...

And what Blake and others, particularly figures like Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But then, especially, I think, in Germany, figures like Goethe, who's more or less contemporary with Blake.
This romantic tradition, you might say, of science is born at the same time.

And one of the key elements within that is that when we engage with the wider world, the reason why we can do it, the reason why we can say and describe anything about the wider world, be that in a scientific context or any other, is because we're participating in the wider world, that our imagination is part of the divine and imagination of the world, that our intelligence fits the the intelligence of the wider world...

One question that comes to my mind is how this differs from a more traditional view, like in Platonism or Neoplatonism. You know, Plato has a world of ideas, which is in a kind of realm, a conscious intellectual realm beyond nature, a transcendent realm.

And then this world of ideas is reflected in the natural world,
everything in nature reflects what's in the world of forms or ideas.

And then in someone like Aquinas in the Middle Ages, the idea that our minds can understand nature because they come from a common source, namely divine consciousness, is the source both of our minds and of nature, and therefore there's a kind of relationship between them because they have a common origin and common patterns.

Now, in the sense that Blake's ideas seem to lie in that tradition, but by using the word imagination rather than forms or ideas, it sounds more dynamic, it sounds more moving and alive, whereas the world of Platonic forms or ideas, transcendent forms and ideas, perhaps wrongly, but it suggests the idea of something more static. So what would you say to that?

Yeah, I mean, I think actually this is part of the criticism that's required for how Platonism has come to be viewed myself... Because words like intellect, for example, before the modern period, implied a dynamism.

The intellectus in Latin was very different from the ratio in Latin. The ratio was much more like our modern understanding of intellect, as if it's really based on fixed patterns, logical connections, that kind of approach. Whereas the intellectus was this living dynamism.

It's much more like the sort of practical wisdom, you might say. If I know how to ride a bike, you could say that I have a kind of wisdom about riding the bike. This is much felt in my body and is responsive and adaptive to the continually changing conditions of the road.

And so phrenesis, for example, in Greek means much more that responsive engagement, that participative sharing.

And so the idea that things are either transcendent or imminent doesn't really exist in Plato. It even gets lost in translation.

So one of Plato's famous myths to describe a kind of awakening sense of things is the myth of a cave. And this then also gets described with... It's sometimes even called Diotima's Ladder of Ascent in the Symposium.

But the word ladder is not actually in Diotima. It's as much a going into as it's a going above. And I think it's the same in the myth of the cave too, because whilst the Socratic figure in the story sort of leaves the cave, they then also return and see then the truth of the life in the cave.

The Republic, where that's described, famously begins with the words, as I went down. And Plato's dialogues, always the opening phrase, is really the key dynamic that Plato's trying to get across.

And so it's by going in that you discover the transcendent, as much as by standing back or going above.

And this is very explicit in Blake as well. One of his best known phrases is to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower.

And that's precisely by saying that imminence and transcendence come together. And I think that what was the medieval and then even the Greek notion of idea or intellectus, he uses the word imagination precisely to re-stress this dynamic participative quality that, you're right, does get lost in the modern way that the word form or idea is used.

I mean, this again is... I think you can trace it directly to Francis Bacon. And like Newton, Bacon is also one of Blake's key kind of bête noires. I mean, both Newton and Bacon are actually more complicated figures. I think we've even talked before about Bacon's vitalism.

He felt that matter has a kind of interiority that can move itself. But nonetheless, this idea that ideas are laws... is a move that Bacon makes. And it becomes very powerful because it becomes tractable. So you can turn... the dynamism of Leitcher, at least a certain aspect of it, into mathematical equations that then mean you can build abstractions based on the equations, which we call technology, as a way you can control the variables to make things that have huge power determined by human will.

And that's the world we live in now. And part of what Blake was pushing against too was precisely that, the idea that... the world is a kind of great machine that if human beings are clever enough they can manipulate more and more fully

rather than a much more relational dynamic unfolding which human beings have a huge part to play in.

I mean I think Blake thought there was even an exceptional role that human beings have to play in that unfolding. It's still very much an active part we have to play, but it's co-creative rather than purely manipulative.

So that's the direction of travel that Blake wants to have us go in as well, if that makes any sense to you.

Yes, well, it does. It's a more alive view of a Platonic or Neoplatonic tradition, made more alive by using this language and also stressing creativity. Because after all, Newtonian physics doesn't stress creativity.

As you say, it says, you know, the fixed laws were all fixed there at the very beginning, and they've been the same ever since.

And the only thing that gives change, there is energy, which is sort of movement or momentum and things like that. It's not within the laws. The laws don't change.

And of course, Blake was, as you point out in your book, writing before [about] the theory of evolution. So he wasn't an evolutionary thinker.

Although I was fascinated that he did the illustrations for Erasmus Darwin's book, The Botanic Garden, Darwin's grandfather, who was in fact a precursor of the idea of evolution, who had this evolutionary vision.

But then when it comes to human creativity, this is a long-standing debate as to how it happens.

Is everything that can possibly happen already there in the divine imagination?

An idea that Bergson was fighting against, the idea that creativity is nothing but a dusting off of some pre-existing archetype that's always been there and always will be there, and it's just manifested when the time is ripe, which means that creativity isn't really creativity at all.

Editor's note: Wikipedia:

Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was one of the most famous and influential French philosophers of the late 19th century-early 20th century… Deleuze realized that Bergson’s most enduring contribution to philosophical thinking is his concept of multiplicity [which] attempts to unify in a consistent way two contradictory features: heterogeneity and continuity.

(Henri Bergson's concept of heterogeneity refers to the idea that time and consciousness are not uniform or quantifiable but consist of a continuous flow of unique experiences. This notion contrasts with the traditional view of time as a series of discrete, measurable moments, emphasizing the qualitative aspects of inner life and the complexity of human experience.)

Many philosophers today think that this concept of multiplicity, despite its difficulty, is revolutionary.... because it opens the way to a reconception of community...

Creative Evolution appeared in 1907 and was not only the source of the “Bergson legend,” as well as of numerous, lively academic and public controversies centering on his philosophy and his role as an intellectual. The beginning of the next decade is the apex of the “Bergsonian cult”... Bertrand Russell (who publishes an article entitled “The Philosophy in Bergson” in The Monist in 1912) objected that Bergson wants to turn us into bees with the notion of intuition. Russell also noted that any attempt at classifying Bergson would fail, as his philosophy cuts across all divisions, whether empiricist, realist or idealist …  Bergson’s lectures at the Collège de France were filled to capacity… with a whole generation of philosophy students (Étienne Gilson and Jean Wahl among others) and poets such as T.S. Eliot.

It's simply the manifestation of something that's always been there or beyond time. As opposed to Bergson's emphasis on the evolution [which] involves creativity, making things up as it goes along.

There's a kind of creative response to what's happening. It's a much more active principle.