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09-11-2013, 09:11 AM

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مراقب عام سابقا

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تابع what is a genius?

Simonton’s approach to distinguishing science and art brings to mind the famous idea Isaiah Berlin borrowed from Archilochus. The one big thing the hedgehog-scientist discovers is in the end what makes him a genius and gives him the Nobel prize; what led up to his discovery belongs to the so-called context of discovery and has no intrinsic interest. Artists are expected in the nature of things to be foxes: they produce many things, and pace Simonton’s Guernica story, an unlimited number of these products can have great value as masterworks. Leaving aside Simonton’s disputable suggestion that Guernica is Picasso’s greatest painting (granted it is his most famous painting), it would be nonsense to claim that his other work prior to it were trial runs for it — any more than Il Trovatore was an experiment toward Falstaff, that Crime and Punishment was a dry run for The Brothers Karamazov, and so forth. The astonishing thing about acts of artistic genius is that a tiny minority of the human race possesses the extraordinary ability to achieve them over and over and over again within a single creative life.
I began reading Origins of Genius sympathetic and willing to be convinced by an analysis that made plain from the outset that it would play on the shared features of scientiﬁc and artistic genius. I ﬁnished the book more convinced than ever that scientiﬁc genius and artistic genius are fundamentally different. It is true that great scientists and artists share high intelligence, free-and-easy openness about new ideas, unusual imaginative abilities, and tremendous capacities for hard work. But creative scientiﬁc thought produces something purely abstract; if it is elegant or beautiful, it is because nature itself is both elegant and beautiful. What leads up to the transparent truth, the false starts and discarded errors along the way, is ultimately irrelevant to the value of the scientiﬁc discovery.
With artists, the end product of creative work is categorically different. Artists are making complex wholes — poems, paintings, operas, plays, novels, sonatas, movies — that, roughly, must arrest and hold attention, and in the end must yield some kind of overall intense and uniﬁed experience. Simonton’s comparison of sketches for Guernica with false starts and wild experiments of scientists is wrong: the proper comparison for the mélange of scientiﬁc bull-sessions, worthless hunches, and bad experiments which might yet lead up to a true scientiﬁc theory would not be the sketches for a painting, it would be the paint left smeared on the artist’s palette or dripped on to the studio ﬂoor. The sketches, far from being irrelevant, are independent works in their own right, and it would be ludicrous even to judge them according to whether they contributed to the ﬁnal Guernica. (Some of the sketches might even be better than the ﬁnal product they were putatively aimed toward.) Simonton attempts to solidify his view on this with mention of Einstein, who worked for years on a uniﬁed ﬁeld theory, which was to be his magnum opus, only to fail in the end. If Picasso had failed for some reason to paint Guernica, the sketches would still be independently valuable. But if Einstein’s notes toward the uniﬁed ﬁeld theory ﬁnally do not contribute toward it — or toward some other future revelation of scientiﬁc truth, perhaps discovered by a successor who takes up where Einstein left off — then they are biographical detritus, no more intrinsically signiﬁcant as science than his love letters or shopping lists.
Meditating on the many illuminating connections between scientiﬁc and artistic creativity Simonton makes in Origins of Genius, but also on the disanalogies he ignores, brings into relief an important quality of artistic creativity that is not often noticed. The creativity of the most profound contributors to the history of literature, music, and art is not generally puzzle-oriented in the way scientiﬁc creativity is. Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein all focused on speciﬁc questions, problems, paradoxes. Nothing like this can be seen with Shakespeare, Austen, or Stravinsky. The problems artists face are either exclusively ones they make for themselves — how to develop a theme, resolve a plot, end a stanza — or they are always the very same problem: how can I excite and hold the interest of my audience? Their creativity does not issue in a ﬁnite number of transparent truths, but shows itself in the continuous output of a whole creative life. This is why the personal character of a body of art is essential to it in a way that the character of scientiﬁc writing is not (who reads the Crick and Watson paper announcing the double helix in search of a moving personal style?). There is an ever-present personal style in, for example, the elegant clarity of Jane Austen’s characters and situations, the richness and depth of Brahms’s modulations, the heart-breaking inevitability of Chekhov’s story-lines. When I say that science is transparent, I mean both that it must be clear, imparting the same understanding to all, and also that we look through a scientiﬁc theory to see the nature of the world. Art is opaque: it is its own world. This is not a fashionable thought in the current intellectual climate, which prefers mushy pronouncements of the unity of science and art.
However right or wrong Dean Keith Simonton may be about creative genius in science and art, I’m grateful to him for having engaged me in so much fruitful thinking on issues fundamental to our understanding of human potential.

University of Canterbury, New Zealand

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