Session 1 MIT 24.262 Feeling and Imagination in Art, Science, and Technology, Spring 2004

um let me before I ask you to make out the cards let me get into um the kind of introductory presentation that I wanted to make of course is on the nature of creativity but approached philosophically there are books on that list for instance that are psychology of creativity sum psychoanalytic approaches to the nature of creativity um this is philosophical and in being philosophical it I was going to say transcends but really is fully immersed in all of the different kinds of creativity um one of the questions that you'll be hearing about in a minute is how creativity and science differs or resembles creativity in Fine Arts or and and architecture is always been the in between between science and and the Fine Arts uh so that has its own Niche its own entry into it but philosophy tries to talk in a broader way which makes it uh much much more useless until you know how to apply it but and that's what you can do for your own selves better than I can do for you uh so it's merely a course in philosophy let's put it that way uh but I hope it will be of use to you uh and it is relevant to all of my previous previous work um I always start my classes by saying I'm not a teacher um and I give as an illustration of somebody who is a teacher one of my daughters who teaches fourth grade for some reason she loves being in the fourth grade so she NE never gets promoted in um high schools um formerly private schools but then she wanted to have uh a different kind of Cl clientele and so she teaches in the Lexington public school system now and she is a born teacher in a way that I am not what I mean by that is that she has a talent for seeing what's going on in the individual development of her pupils and she knows how to elicit from them responses that are relevant to their stage of development uh that she can very subtly guide them towards so she doesn't really impart a great deal of information though she knows a lot she's happens to be good in mathematics so that is something um she could impart uh but the crucial job as a teacher is to see what the pupil needs to learn by hisself or herself and her ability to Intuit this is a god-given gift to be able to understand other people's minds their thoughts their feelings to Intuit it this is a very special talent I don't have it certainly not in the extent that she does and so what I always say is uh I'm not a real teacher I'm a Performing Artist and the art is the doing of philosophy and I like all artists I do it from my own point of view with my own Vision with my own perspectives and my own limitations because all of art is limited to the personality of the artist and once you learn how to look at the art you see into that uniqueness in the artist and if it's conveyed well and effectively and such that you can communicate because we can't communicate with all living entities uh insects and animal various animals and other people but if you can communicate well then you'll see that Artist as a successful maybe even a great artist but it's always emanating from his his or her egocentric concern about certain methods certain techniques and certain meanings that are being put into that particular system of works of art all right that's what it is to be an artist and a Performing Artist is somebody who does it in uh without without great preparation well it's true of painters too but uh I'm when I speak of think of Performing artists I'm thinking more of another daughter of mine the one that I mentioned to who was at Brown and who who does painting and computer art and all sorts of things and sculpting but nowadays she um uh teaches standup comedy and is a standup comic now to be a standup comic you appear in front of the audience and you put on she previously she was an actor and a stage manager and all is right has been in film and stage and is written screenplays uh none of which she sold as yet um to be that kind of performer you're presenting yourself in the process of communicating ideas now as a matter of fact an actor has to rehearse and has to learn the lines it's not just the actor himself you know here I am but rather a role that he's or she is filling and that's true of standup comedy too so she tries out some of her her things on me uh and she works on them and she teaches how to do this to other people so it's not purely spontaneous the kind the version of that that I think of is relevant to me is that in a sense it is spontaneous I've never thought walk through the words I'm going to be using now they come to me sometimes so fast I can't keep up with them uh the reason they come fast is because of your presence and because I feel comfortable and believe in you and ideas arise in that context in that personal context that often I hadn't thought of and so my notebooks are very often made up of ideas that came to me previously in the class so I learned a great deal from these classes and uh at the same time it's all it's relevant to my way of thinking my uh ideas the many books I've published uh which are themselves continuous it's as if I have to go on to another one because I'm never fully satisfied with the previous one so I when people say why do you keep writing I say it's it's because I've never accomplished anything I've never written a definitive thing like in mathematics where you can uh have a proof of a paragraph that really solves that mathematical problem for me that is utterly impossible uh every I everything I write is a function of what I am at that moment having written it I've already changed and because I'm changing I get older and have all sorts of life experiences and therefore my writing is an attempt to amalgamate and make sense out of that and my teaching and a good deal of My Talking is uh an attempt to work at the ideas spontaneously with whoever whomever I'm talking to now there is a structure to this and that you'll see that very soon when I go through the other topics are the main topics of the course um but it's the structure of a Performing Artist at some universities I used to teach at Michigan and Cornell and other places when I was very young um there were clients who had to be taught uh these were state universities uh they the student body usually divided into three components uh whoever got admitted and without too much preparation uh and they didn't know much of anything so you had to teach them the rudiments the other the second group are the students who have some preparation and they particularly in Michigan but also at Cornell at that time uh they were pretty good um but then there was another segment who I thought were as good as any students I've ever taught I myself have three degrees from Harvard and I was a teaching fellow there and I sort of KN know knew what the har Harvard student body was like and as a teacher and they were very very good but I thought that the top Echelon at Michigan was probably the equal again at that time now at MIT that's what I'm lucky enough to have access to and so I feel I don't have to teach but I have to bring you up to date with what I'm doing and so there are certain things you can learn in that sense but the main idea is for me to be dealing in an original creative way about the nature of creativity with you and for you to pick and choose choose what you want and what you need and get ideas maybe just a few ideas that will help you to go on to teach yourself and to develop artistically as as a a person in whatever field um said I mean creatively as a person whatever field whatever it is that is useful to you and the rest you can forget about on the other hand You' be you may be surprised how interesting some ideas at least will linger with you I'll give you an example um I wrote my undergraduate thesis at Harvard on the philosophy of John Dy do you do you know who he was he was the greatest American philosopher When I Was An undergraduate uh he was called the dean of American philosophers um he was then uh in his late 80s uh he died in his early 90s and had a tremendous influence on on all of American philosophy of American psychology American theory of theories of Education um the whole Progressive Movement came out of his books and his writings and he even he even started progress Progressive schools um when he before he ended up at Columbia which is where he's famous as having been he had previously taught at the University of Chicago and there he created a school along the lines of own thinking all right so I wrote The Thesis on his theory of value and was very familiar with his thought 50 years pass or something I don't know long 35 years many many years and in relation to my class some an idea came to me and I thought that's an interesting idea I should do something about that and it seemed to me very original and I was you know ready to work at it and in a sense willing to work at it whatever whether or not was original but just by chance I came across in a book of Dewey exactly that same idea that I must have read when I was an undergraduate and i' forgotten it but it got lodged it became part of my nervous system part of my you know the food that I was digesting and building up whatever the muscles or whatever tissue would be analogous um and it's there and that that's for me the Touchstone of the educated person the educated person doesn't have to be an educator or a teacher it's somebody who has learned how to assimilate uh what ideas and attitudes and relevant feelings that would have come in this sort of way uh so that so don't worry you know what am I going to get out of it or what am I doing with this or it'll a lot of it will come that way but others will come more immediately and you'll start seeing uh this gives me an idea to do such and such or this helps me understand engineering uh in a way that I didn't previously and I'm sure in uh none of the Departments of engineering do you get a philosophical approach there are programs that attempt that for instance at U of the philosophy of engineering as such um at Princeton they had one but they're very rare and I'm not doing that but I'm you know this may be useful to you in that way and in architecture as well um all right so in order to explain to you why I'm teaching this particular class I have to tell you a little about my literary history I won't pass out a my curriculum V or list of my books but uh I'll touch on the ones that are most relevant uh and I have to go back first to a uh Trilogy that I wrote the last volume of which came out in 1988 uh the trilogy is called the nature of Love um the last F was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times book review and got great many reviews it was it's a thing I seem to be most remembered for though nowadays I look back on that as part of my juvenilia um it um the fundamental idea in that which we may come back to later in the course is to make a distinction between two concepts uh that hello are you in the right room oh that's your colleague yes uh you are a remember from come come closer um just because I won't be able to hear anybody that that distance um I remember you from the first meeting why don't you sit here you might oh you happy there okay if you can hear me um I remember you from the first meeting of philosophy of film last term um um I don't know whether you're interest in philosophy in film but um like the other one that probably will be over subscribed so I hope you will stay in this one which is smaller and I can accommodate your interests we'll talk about that so that uh think see let's think about ways in which we can do philosophy at film in the context of the nature of creativity which the course is about um you've missed a good deal of course um but let me go on and then possibly fill you in uh later what I was doing was trying to position the topics and point of view which are fundamental in this seminar in terms of uh earlier writings of mine uh very briefly the seminar uh will begin with a book of mine that I'll get to but that's only the first four weeks and after that the ideas for the students from their own point of view to be dealing with research topics related to the creativity field feeling and Imagination which I'll be preparing you on that may have very little to do with what I'm doing because it'll be a function of your expertise what is important for you and areas in which creativity of a special sort enters in so that uh it'll be like a graduate seminar and very definitely geared to each individual as an individual so it'll be a kind of almost group tutorial but I'll be happy to see you afterwards and each of you uh on an individual basis okay uh so it's a it's a special kind of course of which in at MIT I don't think there are too many because MIT isn't usually structured that way so let me get back now to the uh books of mine um that I was talking about they're called the nature of Love there a Trilogy came out in 19 the last volume came out in 1988 and the whole 1,400 pages in the trilogy are devoted to a a key sort of fundamental distinction that I make in the first chapter of the first volume between what I call bestow and Appraisal I won't go into it too much depth but you'll be able to see the point very quickly uh by appraisal I mean something very much like the ordinary use of that word so there's a a a house appraiser who goes to a house based on certain training and expertise that only he has and he's asks various empirical questions about the house how big it is uh when was it made what's the state of the plumbing uh how close is it to the schools um things like that where or is it in the city and therefore in walking distance from where people work or do you have to travel on the subway or travel uh commute from the suburbs all of those are empirical questions on the basis of that he evaluates the house in terms of a monetary figure how much it's worth to do that he has to know what the market value would be what the market is paying for houses of that sort um it's not a perfect science but it's a kind of inductive logic inductive science empirical science uh based on his good faith is coming sense and his knowledge of the business now my fundamental idea I mean first of the two fundamental ideas says that in human relations generally we go through this and we do it all the time with everybody we meet and I always illustrate when this comes up in a class you wouldn't be here uh unless you thought you could get something valuable out of me or out of the class it may only be to get course credit or to meet a requirement we are always acting on the basis of appraisals of the world or the part of the world or the people in the world that we're dealing with and this is a little shocking at first because I in a couple of books I say we are Commodities to each other uh now commodity you know like uh pork and beans that uh sold on on the commodity Market in Chicago or no we're not yes that's what I mean by commodity but we're not just Commodities we're more than just Commodities and it's getting beyond the commodi of appraisal that takes us to the second uh part of the distinction in terms of bestow and for this I my first inspiration came when um I read a book by a uh um Protestant Theologian named Anders nigrin um called agape and eras his idea is that God loves the world with Agape it's a term you may have come across um and the world loves back through AOS by but in loving back through AOS the world is trying to get something out of God so you pray to God for favors and even your love is supposed to be a way of returning to God what God has giving you and that you may even be rewarded for this but God's love according to this Protestant Doctrine Lutheran Doctrine he was a Lutheran is God's being is sheer love and the love is pure bestow Divine what's called Divine bestow in which he makes things to be valuable he doesn't get valuable out of them because God is perfect uh just as people are imperfect and they can't create value they can only reflect God's creation but God is the Creator and there are various kinds ofo one creating the universe second um giving people all sorts of good things third forgiving them their sins fourth um taking to Heaven uh all sorts of bestows that come out of the sheer goodness of God now I have no religious belief of that sort or really of any doctrinal uh sort um but I was very much excited by that because I had grown up I mean intellectually grown up not from my parents with the idea that all religion and all metaphysics is a human activity for making sense out of the World by trying to get beyond the world uh the way that religion does to talking about a God but that one has to see it as a human attempt to make sense of the World by means of this concept of God so God always remains part of the human concept but the activity is a human one and this view is called U humanism and I'm a humanist in that sense so the first so my excitement for uh in reading nig's book was it showed me how all I had to do was to turn this upside down to to stand it on its feet or uh I mean to stand it on its head or if I'm right standing on its feet uh and to show how Bol is something that human beings do and that that would be what happens in the human activity or feeling of love so that in love we don't just appraise other people we also bestow value upon them and that is something gratuitous we don't do it merely to get them to love us back that would make it appraisal but without appraisal we'd never know them we couldn't see them they wouldn't exist for us but in order to love them you get Beyond appraisal and bestow value on them all right let me just stop that uh unless somebody wants to make a comment in the course we can develop it further but to get going for me would take me many hours and 14 what's actually now it's more than 2500 Pages remind me first Joan Joan Joan Joan j o a n j o h a n n j oh you're the one who sent me the email I was wondering Johan yes um but subconsciously couldn't you be in a state of appraisal but you think you're like you're theing yes I think I think there's a great deal of self-deception and above all in love anything that important that intimate that powerful we deceive ourselves a great deal um that happens but not if they read my book because I separate them very carefully you know I do it too but the point is the the analysis separates them as different human capacities okay now I can come back later afterwards any way you want um and actually there's a course I given the fall called um philosophy of love in the Western World which go through this exhaustively um the reason I'm mentioning now is because even at the beginning I spoke of um bestow as a kind an act of imagination and as an aesthetic activity and fundamentally I I am an esthetician I'm a philosopher of Art um but uh I extend that to include all of Human Experience so it becomes a kind of moral philosophy as well as an aesthetic philosophy but imagination has always been very important to me and I argue that pisto is a result of imagination that's why um love in literature you find so many love poems and the sort of love seems to be natural for literary and fictional uh purposes also for the the movies it's because imagination is needed for them and Imagination is needed for love I throw that out and develop it a little but not enough um I also throw out the idea that bestow is an act of creativity because you're you're bringing at bringing into being a value that wouldn't exist otherwise again very briefly uh and I talk from man point of view because it's what I am but you can change it all around don't be confused by that uh the man speaks about the young woman as absolutely perfect beautiful more beautiful than anything going you know he responds to her that way uh how does one make sense out of it uh not by thinking that he is duded necessarily that's a common place which I argue against love is isn't necessarily an illusion it's not that he's deluded he would be if he thought that apprais ofely in terms of the eyes of the world or in the beauty contest she would come out number one but he knows that she probably won't she has certain blemishes which he then falls in love with because they're her blemishes uh there are all sorts of imperfections that everybody has and the lover realizes most of them um he may also be deluding himself but not necessarily uh and what's happening what he's doing is creating a new kind of value and bestowing it upon her and that therefore bestow is an a special kind of Act of Creation I say that in book after book and I've never succeeded in analyzing creativity to my satisfaction which is as I was saying what propels me from one book to another because I'm never satisfied and that's what I wanted be doing in this course and it's related to the book on that subject that I am struggling with one of the books that I'm struggling with at the moment so that's the origin of the interest in this course in terms of the trilogy now after that um I um wrote other books um in one of which uh called um the harmony of Nature and spirit I went on to another Trilogy called meaning in life and the third volume of that is called the harmony of Nature and spirit and in that I have a long chapter on the nature of imagination I also have a long chapter on the nature of idealization um or I maybe there are two chapters idealization imagination and idealization and then the next one whatever it's called carries that forward no sooner did I finish that book then um I felt you know something is lacking and I didn't quite know what I what was wrong or why it wasn't it was all right I thought within its limits and I still think it may be my best book but I wasn't satisfied I was invited to um give um a lecture at Oxford and uh as always I come in uh like now without a script or manuscript that I read them word to word but I rather I look at them in the eyes and try to see what they need and what they understand and while I'm always talking about my ideas which are in constant firment and I talked about the ideas of this book that I just finished that it's soon to be published Harmony of Nature and spirit and um as I went on um I was um a little um surprised because usually this method of mine of lecturing well the way I told you I get ideas being with you and talking about these ideas of mine I get a few usually and when I'm abroad I get one or two because I may have been working over it so much to my astonishment I the ideas flooded in I was uh really I was surprised I didn't know where they were coming from now after that uh I took a plane to Madrid where I also gave a public lecture and that was on the philosophy of film same method looking in the audience um and I got the one or two ideas but what stuck with me was this flood of ideas that I had gotten in Oxford talking about the imagination idealization what went into the harmony of Nature and spirit it was in the month of June and I asked the people who my friends who invited me to lecture at the University of Madrid where should I go to be able to go swimming and they said oh it's too cold if you go to uh the Mediterranean um uh the only place is on the Atlantic coast and they gave me the name of a town Hela it is which mean just below Portugal and so I went there and I didn't know what to find when I got to wel I asked people where do you go swimming and they said well you take the bus for an hour you'll end up at the Atlantic Ocean uh and there's a seaside resort um called um Puna uh and I went there and it was a wonderful suicide sort with nobody on the beach nobody there the weather was very warm and you could go swimming and I went to a hotel and there's nobody in the hotel I was walking along Ong the seashore once and I saw there was a youth hostel right on the beach so I went to them and I said look I'm not a youth anymore but could I stay here and they were empty too and they said sure you're welcome so I moved into the youth hustle and uh to go swimming I just walked onto the beach and it was marvelous I that month um I wrote the beginnings of the chapter on imagination all of those ideas in oxra that flooded in went into the chapter and it occurred to me now there's enough if I could keep only keep on going I'll have another book well the book that came out of that is the one that I'm asking you to read feeling and Imagination um the vibrant flux of our of our existence after when I came back home and um I wrote The Chap a chapter in idealization and then having written that I got ideas for uh that were also relevant to all of this previous work of mine on consummation you know why why do people have imagination what do they get out of it uh what do they get out of idealization is it pleasure but that it's too narrow a concept and so out came the idea of consummation and out of that chapter came um other chapters which you'll be reading so that there is this constant development and my feeling I don't ever uh finish anything but but what I want with your help is to go on Beyond feeling and Imagination to deal with that underlying concept of creativity um that I've um never fully come to grips with but I have lots of notes about it and we'll be happy to share them with you um in a sense I guess I'll be dominating the first four meetings and then you take over with your what you really want which Maybe very different and then I'll try to steer you to what you might be able to get out of me given my present state of of thinking um I was just wondering yeah in terms of evolution have you figured out why the human psyche has why why we have creativity well to ask about evolution is to ask a scientific question I I um know very little of science I wouldn't pretend to tell MIT students about science and uh uh though I'm an evolutionist instead of a creationist I don't have any real sophisticated ideas if you do then we can work at them or if anybody else wants to but you see you mustn't expect me to be able to answer all of the questions that are very important um other people at MIT can help in different areas and there there are various various areas in philosophy that I just don't bother with that are very important my colleagues do that you know I say go to my colleague for that but um I'm I'm I'm a humanist with a very special expertise I think I can say now that's developed in terms of myself as a perform as a Performing Artist in my writing as well as in my uh talking my teaching and that's what I offer to you so Evolution itself I'm interested in the evolution of our ability to create I'm interested in thinking of human nature as a tiny tiny SLI Slither or sliver in the course of EV of evolution so that when I talk about human nature or humanhood or what it is to be a person I realize that from the point of view of evolution um this is not the way we were whenever we started in the anderol man or whoever and it's not what will be the the descendants of us in maybe only 5,000 2,000 who knows how many years certainly if our race can exists in a million years I don't think the sun is supposed to destroy the Earth by that time it'll be human have developed much further and I have no no information about that it's just my attempt to make sense out of the world as I experience it the way which is true of every artist I think but I'm a cognitive artist I think that's the point okay um since I've been talking so much we could stop at any point that anybody else want to say anything um all right if not before I give you the class cards that help me to to know you oh no first I ought to hand this on uh this gives you the equivalent of a syllabus except as you see there's no reading on it except for my book for the first for weeks um also we're on open courseware so we're being filmed and therefore you have to um give permission um could you tell me your name I can't remember from last year Michael Michael yeah yes now I do remember uh Michael this is what's needed to give o o Open course Weare permission uh I have to sign too and it looked to me very innocuous I don't think there's any risk uh and um finally there is this partial research list which is not a required reading list but as you develop your own ideas from your own point of view you will find you might find these books helpful and they they're all related to what I'm trying to do in the course so have this on hand all right let me get a hard candy so my voice does not disintegrate where did I put them would anyone else like one it's just as hard to listen to me as it is for me to talk um what I've written out are I think it's 28 topics uh related to the book that I'm trying to write and that I'm hoping you will help me with and that will be the focus of this seminar uh I don't know whether they're in any great order but uh I'll just go from one to the other so number one the idea of creativity being modeled upon romantic artists of the 19th century so we all have an image we've inherited of the creative individual um living in isolation glued to his private inspiration uh inhabiting a Garett perhaps hating everybody around him because they're all inferior to him struggling with the great problems the universe with his hand to his forehead and in general uh being a very bizarre individual it's because he is so creative uh one of the great models for this is ludvic V Beethoven who lived that way and um suffered a great deal partly because he went deaf but because he had such high ideals for himself and for everybody else he he he was also rather neurotic or paranoid uh in the last years of his life in Vienna when he was already very successful he moved in one year uh and I don't know if it happened every year but the record I saw was in one year he moved from apartment to apartment 26 of them just picking up and moving and when he was visited I think by rosini there's a record of that uh the ceiling was had rain coming in uh he was living in squalor he had a servant but he lived his life was a mess but that's because he was creative rosini um who is a much underestimated uh great composer particularly a lyric composer of the human voice um was sort of in he was entranced at being in the presence of the great Beethoven uh he didn't care about all this he was a genius he didn't care about all of these things that people may make fun about um and considered himself to be a worm in comparison to Beethoven uh also when Beethoven said insulting things to him he took it in perfect Grace at one point Beethoven said um I like the U score of The Barber of sevil you know that Opera of rosini that's what you should be writing none of this serious stuff none of you know R was writing masses and very serious operas some of which are great operas ton CR semi ramid um uh but Boven didn't know about them but he didn't want to know about them he said no you don't know anything about that what do you would you know about that just write some more comic operas like bar Seville instead of being insulted by it rosini in his notebooks read wrote yeah he was right how would I who taught me how could I Poss Poss have learned to write the kind of music that Beethoven does uh so Beethoven was a model of the the uh bizarre maybe some mad genius and he wasn't mad but uh uh he is a kind of a genius of that sort now my point is that Geniuses differ very much moart was not like that uh and that's my second point the idea of Genius of creativity not belonging to this isol ated inspired individual like Beethoven but the Boart in the play called amadas do you know that the movie amadas too uh and um in the course of that uh one of the characters said reads U uh a manuscript of mozarts that he just wrote and handed off to be performed and there are no Corrections on it it's all perfect as if and then he says it's as if Mozart was is taking dictation from God and that's the second idea of creativity that we're frail human beings what do we know about creation God especially if you have that religious belief uh God is the Creator God is the model the the only true create creative being in the world and if we do what things that we call Creative they it's like you must be taking creation from God all right now obviously even about moar wasn't exactly right he did make Corrections uh he worked very hard on his music uh he sometimes rewrote the music and other people rewrote tremendously uh they um they went through many drafts now I'm the second kind uh for me everything I write goes through 10 15 drafts and each time I go from draft to draft I say I can't imagine what an idiot I was and why did I say that or uh I get ideas and cor and stylistic changes that I could never have predicted and I put them down and I think isn't that wonderful now I'm got it then I put it aside for a week or many weeks sometimes for years and come back to it and I have to keep on going and going and I usually stop for purely pragmatic Reasons I'm tired I'm bored there's a publisher uh or it's uh like the book of mine that's coming out um this in a month or so um I was with MIT press and they treated me like a member of the family so I was very much involved in the editing the designing all of that and making changes all the time and then he went to the printers and I saw there are other changes I would wanted to make and they very kindly sort of stopped the presses for me at the very last minute I'm and so that it's out of my life now it's printed up uh if I had had it if I were to go back to it in a few years I'll say oh no I've got to change this and change that there's no end to that for me I'm the second kind the idea of taking dictation from God doesn't make sense with my kind of writer now maybe it's because I'm not creative enough maybe it's because I am not as I know I'm not a genius um but it's a different kind of creativity that goes into that kind of writing and some of what I write is all right and I might even say creative in part or limit you know limited creativity but um it's not because I it's the Mozart model of taking dictation from God ber Russell you know that name the uh one of the great 20th 20th century philosophers uh pipia Mathematica you've heard of that maybe well in any event he was one of the great philosophers of the 20th century and one of the founders of what is now called analytical philosophy so that he is a forbearer of what my what I was trained in but don't do what my colleagues all do as technical analytical philosophy at a certain point in his tremendous Pro productivity um he said he taught himself how to go through drafts in his mind and therefore when he wrote a book he just sat down and he wrote it out and then sent it off to be published because he had worked at it so much in his mind there it there it was I've never been able to do that I can't my mind isn't that that sort uh those of you who are chess players mathematicians or with mathematical skill you might be able to do something more like that I mean mathematicians can work in in pure abstraction like that in a way that someone like me cannot uh so I don't fit that model either so there are these different models of the nature of creativity uh number three one of the books that uh I get a great deal out of and we'll be discussing is a book by um a a man who was very influential when he lived uh died maybe in 1970 I'm not sure called Arthur Kesler and a playright wrote various successful plays you've heard of kesin right well he has a book called The Act of Creation you don't know that do you you should look at it uh it's a 700 800 I know very big book which is almost encyclopedic it shows the spret of his mind uh and covers all sorts of questions and has a theory of what he calls bisociation which I want to can get go into uh right now but not in any detail and his idea is that creativity involves taking two Matrix Matrix matrices of thought which are very different from each other and merging them putting them together so that uh let's say a metaphor would be good for that um uh um I don't know Napoleon was um um uh a peacock or something like or Napoleon was a lion now one matrixes Matrix deals with the animal order and the other deals with people who are very different um if you put the in a metaphor you put the two together you say Napoleon was a lion right uh Napoleon was a peacock whatever you want you're putting the two together and that's creative we don't think we ordinarily don't talk that way but except in metaphors but to do so uh is an example of creativity to go even further there is a movie made by the great Russian filmmaker um eisenstein about uh called October about the Russian Revolution 1917 U and there was a provisional government headed by a Social Democrat named kensky whom the bolik got rid of eventually uh and movie was made During the stalinist period so it's a bolik scene from the bolic point of view and in The Winter Palace which where a lot of the action takes place we see kensky walking up marble stairs and uh at at one prominade you see uh Napoleon an image of Napoleon with his hand in his in his blouse in his tunic another a rooster and the idea is that kinsky is another Napoleon you think Napoleonic figure and we have to get rid of them uh just a rooster you know this these are metap visual metaphors but we don't ordinarily think in those terms only a filmmaker does and that's related to kesler's fundamental idea about creativity being a function of bisociation by association bisociation linking yoking together as he calls it of different matrices all now I pick up on that and try to go beyond that uh on my own um the next is uh the role of the unconscious Castle discusses this and in psychoanalysis many people have spoken as creativity being a function of uh the unconscious the Freudian unconscious uh and related to that is the idea that creativity is a function of occurs in dreams that cre dreams are the basis of our creativity because in dreams things happen that are unpredictable that seem very wild and very creative and that that's um uh what a one entry into the nature of creativity now these are two different concepts the unconscious and dreams because though Freud thought that the unconscious shows itself in dreams but uh let me give you uh one classic example about the nature of creativity um Van van oan was not his name the the chist who discovered the Benzene um ring as the nature of the molecular structure of benzine um he had pondered over this without great success and then one night he was sitting in front of the fire and he fell asleep and in the course of this sleep he had a dream and the dream finally ended up with a serpent um or little no world parts of the serpent which then came together to make the figure of a serpent and uh the serpent ended up biting its own tail and uh um the chemist woke up and said that's it that's the solution the Benzene molecular structure is in the form of a ring and that was that later uh uh replicated and found to be a truth about molecular structure and still is nobody is under overturned that that con that idea or generalization whatever you call it that Discovery uh it because he was creative in his dream um I mean in the uncon right creative in his unconscious in a way that he could never have been in Consciousness because he was asleep right all right now Beyond over and above that idea there's the idea of Dreams themselves being creative even if they don't make sense like the like the Benzene ring uh because that's where the unconscious is doing the work that is fundamental in all creativity and that's related Freudian ideas about dreams and also about the unconscious but um um these each of these Concepts have to be examined at this point I can't resist to giving you an example Nom chamski whom my my old friend who is my colleague in linguistics and very famous you all know about no momsky in a book I have at home out of the library um it's a book on the nature of creativity it's on the list that I gave you I forget which one it is it's consists of interviews um with u various people in science primarily but maybe also in in the Arts who are considered to be creative uh asking them pointed question about their creativity It Was Written 35 years ago and so there is a a picture a picture for each of them there's a picture of gome the way he looked 35 years ago very different from now um and one of the questions was how how does dreaming affect your creativity and noome at that point in his life answers um well dreaming is for me just like being awake so if I'm working on a problem and go to sleep and have a dream um what happens is that I work in my dream on the same problem it's just the the two sleeping and being awake conscious and unconscious are continuous in terms of what I really am working hard on at as a problem which is very different from what Kesler said Kesler met mentions that and rejects it as not being true and argues against it my dreams are such that I couldn't have predicted I never have dreams like that but then maybe I'm not sufficiently creative anyhow recently I said to no do you remember this interview you gave and he didn't he didn't remember he didn't know what I was talking about and U he asked me who who was the editor and told him he didn't remember I mean his life is so filled with this sort of thing being interviewed and and he just didn't remember uh and so I told him well in this interview what you say is and I told him what I just told you and I said um is that true is that the way you still work and was it true then and he laughed and said it's certainly not true of me now and um I don't know what I was saying so I don't know what emphasis to put upon this very interesting comment and evidence of a a very creative person um that's one of the things we could explore um next um the um question is how is creativity related to imagination well this is something next week I want to talk with you about once you've read my chapter on imagination uh as you'll see see it's based on the earlier chapter in the earlier book but enough is enough uh if you just read that one chapter in feeling imagination that'll get us going and if you want to go back to the other uh you can find that in the library uh Harmony nature and spirit um you know that's all right um and six is the relationship to idealization uh which is also what you'll read the week afterwards and I can just say one thing now the word idealization is very ambiguous um sometimes when we use the word we mean uh something that's saying something that is false because let's say someone say says to you do you remember um that girlfriend of yours or that boyfriend of yours you knew when you were in High School you might say oh she was terrific she was this she was that and those who knew her uh are little surprised they might say oh you're idealizing your past other words a falsification she really isn't that that's one way to use the word idealization that's not what I mean another way of using it is the Freudian way and the Freud when Freud uses the word idealization and if you're interested I can direct you of things I've written about Freud on idealization but I don't want to go into it too much now uh what he means is um when people are emotionally attached like in love it's part of his philosophy of Love uh they idealize uh in a way that they don't anywhere else in life but by idealizing he explicitly means he uses these words overestimating overvaluing uh rather than underestimating because on the first meaning when you're saying something false you could have she might have ditched you and you might have said oh that one and then you know and then one would say Oh no you're idealizing the situation she wasn't that bad or something but Freud the Freud idea is that you add value you overvalue you overestimate appraisingly because Freud always operates within the model of apprais that's not what I mean when I use the word idealization another meaning of it uh comes out of Plato course Plato's idea is that love is the search for Perfection for the realm of forms in which the good and the Beautiful which are perfect Essences are explain everything in the universe they're the highest stages of value and everything we do is a search for goodness according to Plato and that's the highest good and only the philosopher can get there so for him we're all idealizing a sense of struggling to reach the highest ideal which only very few people philosophers of a of a platonic persuasion are able to reach and that entered into Christianity but I don't have to go into that now for him idealis ation is the search for perfect Perfection and that motivates all all existence and above all all human nature that's not what I mean by idealization either um what I mean by idealization is the human proclivity the human ex habit of making ideals just to make ideals the making of ideals is something that human beings do all the time and we may be the only ones to do it though I want to say uh I in the domestic animals I've had they also idealize it just they don't have as much imagination so imagination comes into this and therefore they don't idealize as well as we do or as much as we do but many people have died out of a love for Country which is an ideal of of Duty Devotion to your to your nation to your people to your feelings of honor to your sense of importance to your manhood to your Womanhood whatever it is these are ideals and human beings create them they don't just come out of the ground uh we create them that's part of what it is to be human being so the study about the nature of human ideals becomes a very or is a very important theme in all of my writing I said becomes because in the first chapter of the first volume of the love Trilogy I have and I mean the first section I have a chapter on idealization and try to explain love as an example of idealization it's one of the great ideals particularly in the Western World which is very sophisticated about it but for all human beings uh to be able to love you know if somebody on his deathbed says you know the truth is I never learned how to love that would be a great tragedy he would a tragedy not only because you think you should people should learn how to love but the tragedy is that this is was for him an ideal and he feels now that his life was meaningless because he didn't live up to that ideal the making of those ideals the living in accordance with them they entering into all of Human Experience is a very important part of our Human Condition that's the way in which I talk about idealization and so that's the basis for that chapter I probably touch on that at the beginning because I don't presuppose that anybody has been devoting his life to reading earlier worthless books by every singer um but this this is something I wanted to prepare you for next um um creativity as one of the sources of consummation uh people don't just create for no reason it's because it's very fulfilling to be a creative person may mean suffering miserably like Beethoven or any other perfectionist would be because you know the more you achieve the more you know how much you haven't achieved and the more you know how much you haven't achieved the more uh you forget how good you are to have' got that far because you're always striving for something more this is built into the N our search for creativity so that is a source not of Happiness it's uh the pain that goes into being creative and maybe without which you can't be creative but nobody would want to nobody would be creative unless at some point the act of creat ity is wonderfully consummatory wonderfully fulfilling a wonderfully joyous maybe the most joyous thing one can do in life and maybe all joy has to be explained as a certain creativity on the part of a person who has it and so people who are miserable throughout their lives and don't ever achieve anything will say what a pity they never learned how to find Joy by becoming creative they never learn the creativity that goes into being joy and the joy that comes out of being creative all right that's why why that chapter exists um all right now let me get beyond the book uh to talk about a n a 20th century philosopher who I'm sure you haven't heard of is h bergson b r GS o n uh and he was French so his first name is always given as h h n r i and Burke bergson's philosophy is a philosophy of creativity his most famous book is a book called creative evolution but it's philosophy it's not science uh and in other books well that one throughout his books particularly one that I'm especially f kind of called the two sources of religion and morality he makes the distinction between two ways of living one of which is through intelligence and the other of which is through intuition so that intelligence breaks the world up into little pieces and all analysis like in science is fundamentally based on that uh the other sees things in a Flash intuitively and in the case of morals uh there are there is what he calls the close society in which there are fixed rules which you learn how to live up to so if you go through the red light you get a ticket and that teaches you uh if you get so mad at somebody who murder him you called that's said to be immoral because there's a rule that you have to love learn which is you you mad as you are you mustn't murder your enemy I mean unless it's in Warfare where there are different rules but this kind of closed Society conveys the nature of Morality In terms of rules that are B related to Intelligence and Analysis but there's another way of living which the saint does which the great ethical hero does and he has a vision he just sees things and he spontaneously intuitively knows what to do um bergson has an Aesthetics which comes out in a book of his called laughter and the artist comes into that too it's on it's on the nature of humor uh but it's really a philosophy of art uh that distinction occurs there too and one other thing about one other topic would be does creativity lend itself to one or another of these bergsonian categories uh a book I published the same year that feeling and Imagination came out 2001 is called Explorations in love and sex and in that I have a long chapter on bergsonian ideas about um uh intuition as a basis for identification how why we identify with other people or what um in the 19th century would have been called sympathetic um um what is it called sympathetic identification that we sympathize with each other so it explains the nature of sympathy compassion how you put yourself in somebody else's position how you can feel what another it is to be another person and how this is the basis of all morality and all creativity that's the 19th century idea but bergon carries it out in his own way and I attack bergon by proposing a different way of dealing with these Concepts um the next idea I don't know how much I'm going to be able to at it's an hour and a half it was at any moment we could take a break so tell me well I'll go on for a few more minutes and then we'll talk more about U time and structure how we want to proceed but I'm only on number nine but it doesn't matter um creativity as a search for Perfection that comes right out of PL that the creative person doesn't put up with second best he wants to have things just right he wants to create and one reason he creates is because he's aware of how imperfect the world is so he uh the artist and the creator of a system of thought scientific or otherwise wants to create something that is perfect in a way that nothing in life is and I think that's very closely related to the nature of mathematical creativity because mathematics is in by Nature abstract uh Michael did I ask you what your field is I think I've forgotten I am a computer science computer science you didn't tell me today did you uh okay so I hadn't forgotten I'm glad um well with all of you you know the nature of mathematics that it's based on pure abstractions well being pure it's not like the world the real world it's a kind of perfection it's what the world real world would be like if it were um immaterial and based on Concepts that a mathematician can manipulate to great in a great in abstraction and with a concern about Perfect Purity and pure perfection so that too becomes a theory about the nature of creativity and my question is is that what the world is like I hadn't thought about this very much until I began working on the book that I told you about that's coming out this next month or so it's called Uh three philosophical filmmakers Hitchcock Wells Orson Wells you all know Hitchcock Orson Wells and Jean renois you probably don't know does anybody know the films of Jean renoa uh whom Orson WS called called the greatest filmmaker uh he was French and he's very well known revered in France uh he um he died some time ago 20 years ago maybe what it was 1979 1980 um but he still remembered as one of their greatest and he um one reason I wanted to write about him besides my loving his work is that he wrote a good deal of film theory in a book it's collected in a book called renoa on renois oh he's the son of the painter not that not um Pierre AUST Renoir but his son Jean Renoir uh and in on renoa renoa and renois he says in one place the big trouble with the modern world and its mediocrity is that everybody is in search of perfection and I was startled well isn't everybody Plato says he is it is the modern idea uh and what's wrong with that are are we supposed to be slip shot and not do the best we can uh and and Renoir has this marvelous discussion which sort of took took the uh the veil off my eyes I suddenly saw things differently and how brilliant and right he is he says if you want to be perfect what you do is you limit yourself to something that lends itself to that and for him that's danger in technology he writes a great deal about the danger to human nature human values of Technology because he say by its very nature technology is always limited to one abstract aspect though it's not purely abstract it's related to material world that we can improve that we can make perfect but the world is not like that human beings are creatures of feelings and emotions and ideas and they're finite uh we are all imperfect the world is imperfect what one has to do is to transcend to search for Perfection and to learn how to live with imperfection uh he is not against technology in fact he says in one place you know why my father was such a great painter uh it's because and why the school of impressionism came into existence when it did in the middle of the 19th century it's because uh technology discovered a way of transporting paints before uh paint was always produced in great big jars and so painter couldn't move them he had to work in the studio then through technology somebody created a way of putting them into the little tubes or a little pots and so a painter could put all the tubes he wanted into a napsack and go off into the country and paint the landscape and out of that came landscape painting and impressionism and that's it's wonderful that's the way to use technology the danger is when technology takes over and fools you into thinking that you're really achieving something because you can do it better than anyone else you can do it to Perfection so that uh you become um a tech um nerd is it but no it's not just there's another pH a tech um anyway you get the idea you become a techie who thinks that the the mission in life for any creative person is to cut down the time for getting you your email uh or get a get a um a system that works faster than any other that's wonderful and you know I too would like to have instantaneous email uh without paying for DSL uh that's marvelous and I love my the technology of my computer the danger is if you do nothing but that then you're missing out on a good deal of what makes life worth living and I began to see this discussion of renoa as a really very important insight into the nature of creativity so that's what's number nine um oh he says you know if you're a painter and you want to be creative you can be like the academic painters the court painters uh the historical painters uh who are so boring who uh give you scenes that show uh armies um in the in the field or some official occasion some official painting because they could make a hand to Perfection they could make uh the end a sword looking just like a sword and wonderfully realistic perfect uh who would question that this this sword is the best that one can make and but then when you have a painting that's just like that does nothing else it's boring it's uninteresting it's not good art but that's what technology makes available to you um the next point is the question of time some people say that inspiration comes in a Flash um it um isn't something that happens over a period of time and I think that's a fundamental mistake I think one in a sense learns to be inspired that one create to be creative one has to learn how to endure with some problem some possibility some idea over a period of time maybe that's related to the fact that I have to go through all those drafts because I change every time I make a draft or think of something I've changed and therefore when I go back to it it doesn't look to me like any anymore to me doesn't look like me anymore and in that process of living in time I learn what it is that I need to do in order to be creative to whatever extent I'm able so that if you're uninspired you can't be creative but you mustn't hope to be inspired in a Flash there may be occasional flashes but they're isolated and the use of them takes time and so one has to learn what the what's has to discover what's the relation with learning through time and having being creative uh uh in terms of whatever it is you're dealing with now when I started talking about this last year in the class um I went on in the way that I do uh and it hurts me what I'm really do dealing with here is the theory of Education this is a philosophy of education so I wrote it all out in my notes and that's just what it is it's a philosophy of education how do we learn oh course that will take time how does time affect our ability to learn and if you know how time affects learning then you will know how it is that one can teach because and what I ended up with is where I started with with those those of you who are here um I'm not a teacher because all I can do is help my students learn for themselves by seeing how I've learned maybe that's my kind of teaching but it's not as if I have a message to part in part in the case of engineering and a great deal of science you have to teach that way not my way if you taught my way the bridge would fall down time and again you've got to learn what has been established uh on the basis of a lot of experience experimentation trial and error by people who are highly trained to be expert in that field and the student inevitably at some point comes in uh as a blank sheet the tabasa and the teacher gives him information that's great that's wonderful um it's a it's a it's a different kind of teaching from anything that I do or is I think most philosophers when they're doing philosophy and it enables you to teach yourself whatever you want to know by seeing learning from the experience of somebody who has gone through this but won't be directly imparting his truths to you but rather the capacity to find your own truths all right um well there's a lot more to be said so we'll come back to it next in the U book I mentioned the harmony of Nature and spirit I have several P chapters on uh happiness nature of Happiness one of which is called um um Beyond The Suffering in life I think it is it's the first of several chapters that end up with a theory of happiness and what I developed there is the idea that um what's fundamental in happiness is the ability to accept ourselves as vegetative creatures not just rational thinking conceptual creatures but as vegetative as sort of walking plants at mobile plants and that um or other plants trees uh are sort of stable um vegetables whereas we're mobile vegetables by that I don't mean there were nothing but that but that is fundamental in us and I always point out at this moment and throughout my life through most of my life there are vegetative processes going on digestive processes going on in me which I'm not at all aware of and without them I wouldn't exist but they are what I am in part it's only a question of whether you accept yourself as vegetative or feel embarrassed by that or or um uh for religious reasons consider that uh an evil or the body that is the basis of vegetation consider it evil or harmful or or less than ideal and to be contrasted with something else that you call spiritual or Soulful and I think that's a fundamental mistake I think you can go beyond the V vegetative but unless you accept yourself as a vegetative being you're not probably going to be very happy in the world so that becomes the basis of those chapters that leads on to a lot of other things on the nature of happiness but the idea that since has occurred to me is what I'm really talking about is the nature of creativity because creativity would require a kind of acceptance of yourself and what is the nature of that acceptance and then that takes me into all sorts of analyses one of which I'll just touch on um which is um neech's idea of for the Superman the Superman is somebody who accepts himself who has a kind of selflove that has often been denigrated it's a great enemy that n attacks all the time is Christianity his father was a pro Protestant Minister and uh this his attack on Christianity was somehow related to his emancipation from parental influence I'm sure but in any event he attacks Christianity because Christianity tells us to think in the spirit uh in terms of our soul is something separate from the body uh whereas n wants to teach people how to enjoy life to enjoy all of life and all of being and that's what he means by the superman above all the Superman as it turns out uh people realize this after he's dead because the fragments that show what he was that going towards hadn't yet been published the Superman is the artist the artist is the person who truly enjoys being alive uh and he is does this because he loves being what he is he selflove then gets to be this um activity that is essential for enjoying life and for being an artist and though nature doesn't develop it and that I haven't got around developing it well enough is that that's what happens in creativity to be creative you have to have enough self assurance confidence self-love that you will then go ahead and do something which the rest will see as being very original very creative but you're really showing yourself forth that's my point and the point there is that this is different from being selfish which is another concept uh but and it isn't guarantee that you're going to be creative but creativity will somehow be related to that and that's what we need to work at when I was coming over I thought of something which is and let me just throw it out and I'll be repeating myself a lot I guess uh Herbert vkaran you know who he is you know who's the great conductor oh you were nodding uh you don't know he he was a great Orchestra conductor the Berlin Berlin philarmonic he died I don't know 10 or 15 years ago um he when at his height he and Leonard Bernstein were considered the two greatest conductors in the world they're very different but van caran was a great very great conductor and uh someone asked him in an interview that I saw on television what when you're conducting aren't you afraid that suddenly the orchestra will fall apart and there were these difficult coordinations that you was the conductor trying to elicit out of them that it won't work somehow all of a sudden isn't it always precarious and he said oh yes it is always precarious who can tell but when I was young uh my father taught me how to ride a horse and here I was this young fellow and I think uh he taught him how to do hurdles how to jump hurdles with a horse and here was this great big animal that I was sitting on top of and he could have run away with me he could have done anything he could have rolled over and killed me or fall anything could have happened but then I learned that at the moment that you want the horse to do something like jump a hurdle all you have to do is to sort of give yourself to the experience you have to accept your involvement in this you have to have faith in the horse and if you have that kind of faith in the horse and faith in yourself as a Horseman then it'll happen he'll he he will jump the hurdle and the same thing is true about the orchestra that I conduct with a great deal of this feeling that I know what I'm doing this self-confidence self-mastery and of of course particularly with the Berlin philarmonic which were very very highly trained uh they were traditionally and up to the present the Exquisite masterful musicians everybody in that Orchestra because they could have done it probably without V caran at the end uh he had trained them so much but in any event um he had this Faith which is based on a self-confidence I think that's what n was talking about for the Superman the Superman shows himself forth he he knows where he belongs to the world and he goes and that's fundamental in creativity and the creativity of anaran I think is related to that um next the idea that creativity is a function of problem solving all of you at MIT live in terms of problem solving a good of analytical philosopher consists in the creation of abstract philosophical problems as as problems and then the philosophies the analysis cons consists in a kind of problem solving so it's sort of a mimicry of what you do as scientists in problems having problem sets and organizing scientific think in terms of the solving of problems my my own feeling is that this gets at the nature of creativity from the wrong angle that problem solving makes it the experience look purely cognitive and out of this arises not just cognitive science which is a great development that MIT is especially part can be proud of because so much of it happened here but as a philosophy and that I think is wrong that the creativity that goes into science even cognitive science is more than just cognitive it's a function of the entire organism uh it's it's not the Mind operating in isolation it's not the mind as direct and a direct expression of the brain the brain exists in a body the body is vegetative motor animal also cognitive uh it's not just simply u a function of what's happening in the brain though the brain is the pilot and very important in many ways uh to one needs a more holistic view of creativity in order to explain it and that is not given if you're thinking only in terms of problem solving as the nature of creativity this doesn't denitrate the importance of problem solving that's one of the ways in which you in the doing of that you can be creative or uncreative but if you are creative it's because you're doing more than just problem solving your whole organism is engaged in that do that make sense well we'll talk about uh 13 uh the expressiveness of of speech um as an element in creativity there is a line of U in a famous poem uh by Thomas Gray in the 18th century about mute in glorious Miltons uh you know that phrase perhaps mutant glorious Miltons Milton was the great uh early 17th century poet Paradise Lost and Gray's point is who knows how many Miltons existed but they never learned how to write or read and so they're mute they didn't learn how to how to act as poets and they're in glorious because you you'll never have heard of them they could be a farm boy or or a p a butcher boy or something like that uh but still they could be Geniuses without us knowing it and so they're mute and glorious Geniuses like Milton well I'm sure there are Geniuses who died too young or never were given a chance to bring out their genius that's the importance of egalitarian uh Universal education and that's that's what I you know believe as my religion the importance of democracy as an acceptance of every human being and it's a slogan that's used now it is No Child Left Behind as a matter of fact doesn't work out that way but being true to that is an for me that's the ideal from being really true to that is for me a religious devotion in which I'm imperfect of course but that means a great deal to me but it doesn't follow from that that um just being mutant and in glorious glorious in glorious will make you into a Milton or explain creativity creativity comes from something else and it itself there may be at least a kind of creativity results in the ability to express so that brings in the aesthetic question relevant in the philosophy of art what is the nature of expression and that's an enormous problem and I really will say only one line about it we talk about um uh music expressing feelings what do we mean by that uh creativity may be a function of expression but then one has to show how and as I say I I shouldn't try to open that cat burs at the moment um we only have a few minutes left so we only have a few minutes left so okay um oh it's almost 4 o' then why do I stop right there that'll give you an idea of some of the topics now my Hope was in instead of My Talking endlessly which I'm perfectly able to do but um shouldn't it would help if each of you took one chapter of my book and read all of you I want I hope will read it you'll find that very the re the writing the style is very very accessible and uh particularly with the preparation I've been giving you and uh the chapters are short so there isn't too much to read but so I I expect each of you to do it each week by week but if one of you could take a special responsibility and really think hard about how to tear it apart how to attack me how to show its inadequacies all of which can be done I assure you and uh my uh I will learn because that's the only way you learn I I say attack to be humorous but I think it's only by being criticized that you really make any advances in life if you're attacked the uh maliciously that's no good but if somebody really can show you where you go wrong or or where you might reconsider that's the way you develop and that's in my own case as I told you I've written all these books and it's only by attacking myself or being criticized by others so that one has to cultivate that capacity uh but it also will help you by you here you have me in front of you uh and showing how one can go beyond me or against me or undermine what I'm saying will help you to develop your own originality I don't want you just to summarize or or agreed agreed too readily or necessarily agree at all so is that acceptable to the class who's going to do the first week uh which is automatic I'll tell you what's in the first week There's the preface there's a chapter called affective attachment um which is related to a very important theme throughout the course that I haven't much turn turned to and that is the relationship between feeling and cognition and the whole cognitive Revolution that we've just been through and my suggesting we take another tack um that's effective attachment and then in comes the philosophy of love some of which you've already learned about uh the second chapter so there's a preface that effective attachment chapter which is either one or introduction or something and then the next chapter which is on imagination uh that that's Pages 1X to 58 on on the syllabus so it's not a lot of pages but I want all of you to think about it of course but one person in particular think hard about it and then we'll all be able to discuss it next time given that preparation in the next four weeks you'll have a basis at least in my way of approaching the nature of creativity uh from any point of view and and also ideas about the different points of view you and after that from your own point of view as an artist a scientist uh an architect which is a kind of um engineer or an engineer um you can go in any direction that you want and we'll work with you each of each of us all all of us collaboratively will work together so that my and I I get some wonderful papers that way and I um feel that I I've been of help and that's what I want to do and also let me just give you one brief example there was um in the course of the later sessions people are bringing in ideas and talking about them as first drafts for their papers or uh sketches that so the paper you know should issue out in a in a pleasant way because we all have been working on it with you um and in the case of one very brilliant uh person I suppose I can say a young woman um I was very much impressed but I said to her you know you're um you're presenting a view but you don't really give enough examples and that would make the reading and the understanding a little more comprehensible and in my own upbringing I mentioned the great mentor of mine at Harvard uh a mentor who well he's also a great man but he was for me a very important person for the rest of my life and very close friend and mentor of mine at the beginning I used to say everything you you have a uh the mind of a cookie cut cookie cutter I was an undergraduate at time and the way you the way you should write is you give you have to give examples so you say you throw out an idea and then you'd say for instance and then you make it concrete don't make it entirely abstract make it conrete and that's always stood stood with me now I handle it my own way uh I don't know if he he died recently I don't know if he would approve but um well he did seem to be very pleased with me at the end um but I mean I haven't I haven't discussed this with him since I was at all ever I never discussed but this affected me for the rest of my life and so I sort of told her about my own experience of that sort and she understood and then she handed in this stupendous marvelous paper that I gave her an A+ for and in it she would say for instance and then out would come in a very marvelous example in physics and then a little later on for instance now we got a Marvel example in chemistry for instance the computer science all of these instances were not only appropriate and developed her ideas made her ideas but they were she had the ability to touch on and with great knowledge on all of these FS that it really was a considerable achievement now I'm not saying holding her up is an ideal that you should feel guilty about everyone's different but I feel proud that you know in this way I was able to help her and we'll all work at the papers and I think you'll find that a considerable amount of help so don't get you can start thinking about that if you want but or think about it as you're reading the uh chapters of my book but is it acceptable we start that way and proceed that way and then the presentations now um who's going to give the first presentation uh I'm getting a pen to write down oh oh no wait a minute I can't let you go we uh that before that we have to discuss how long we're going the I think it's um on the in the catalog it's a three-hour course um we can run it any way we want since it's seminar and in fact um often people wanted to stay three hours and uh sometimes we would go on for 2 and a half through 2 hours and 30 minutes and when you uh take the intervals you know a class at MIT is not for 60 minutes it's it's uh 50 minutes really 1 hour before and 1 hour after the hour uh so if you subtract that it's really two and a half hours so we can be very flexible about that um is that amendable to the schedule of everybody that's why I I wanted to Pardon we have this room from 2: to 5: can you be here from 2: to 5: um next time next today or a week from today a week from today yeah I mean in general it'll be every Tuesday 2: to 5 not necessarily but that we'll have access to that and you'll be here and I'll be here if you want me to be correct we can all do that that's great Michael I have things to do with like you have what I have things to do at 4:30 tell me what kind of things are they really essential well I can probably change around it's a meeting for my resch that you have to do what I have like weekly meetings with my professor for my research can you reschedule it with him possibly okay why don't we work something out but in principal it'll be all right okay um and all right now could um what my schedule says 2 to 4 today it says to no we're leaving it for today no I I don't Taran explain to me is there a problem no no no no the I think I think in the schedule it says 2 to 4 plus third hour but that was what I wanted to arrange with you but if you if it we can keep on going that's best because we don't have to worry about the third hour all right if somebody new comes into the class who says oh it says two to before I can do that but I want another then we'll talk we'll see but as for us at least it'll be that way all right could each of you then um today I'll keep you a little longer uh unless you want a break um I don't know how long but first um why don't we stay in could you please make out the cards in the way that I will tell you you hand them around just um are you want a pen I'm sorry she needs to leave soon why' you sit to here again okay so what would you like a what what were we say oh no I have to leave now like I leave soon you you have to do what she has to leave soon you have to leave soon but in general you can say longer that's fine don't worry about that uh I see you have things for me to sign I'll be happy to sign before you leave but whenever you say you have to leave get get ready and we'll stop um what I would like you to write on the U on the card in fact if you hand that to me while you're writing I can site it for you um is your last name um so Karen that's not this is that Karen is not your official name is it so write your well no write your but your Lee is your last name write Lee comma in other words write your last name first then write your legal first name uh xong is that right yes um and then in par parenthesis how you want to be known so uh parenthesis Karen or whatever it is Mike instead of Michael so on right Joe or Joe that's right uh or that way I'll I'll be addressing you that way but for the records I'll know what to look for under it write the in numbers are you is you're a graduate student the rest are undergraduates under graduate you're a graduate stent okay so if you're a graduate student right G and then the year of graduate school your first year second year or whatever and if you're an undergraduate you don't have to say you just give the number don't say freshman Soph the number 1 2 3 four whatever it or five whatever it is you are at MIT this a course is this a gr dou course um it's in the catalog is an undergraduate but graduate students are admitted and I've The Graduate students I had in architecture didn't seem to have any problem their advisor were happy for them to be taking it I can sign anything certain level of like I might need a certain distribution I might need an H credit as opposed to just H credit for graduate school I don't know what H credit is I have to find out whe it's like either you AG or n well I'll do anything you tell me if the adviser approves okay um and if if there's a problem with advisor talk to me come next time and talk to me under that and in your case right MFA or is it MFA or college it's not College of of mass art it's MFA oh good this is the first you College of Mesa oh it is College of Mesa MFA is program Museum of Fine Arts has a program too oh I see I but then I MFA I was when I was asked where the people could come I thought it was Museum of Fine Arts in previous years people have come from the College of mass art so maybe it isn't the Museum of fire Arts maybe it's the same program that I used to right it doesn't matter okay under that um U maybe you ought to turn over already well why don't under that um write your email address in a way make sure to read it U because I will we deal in email a lot and under that the telephone numbers in order of frequency at which you can be reached if you spend all your time in the lab put that first but then put your home address or or your I mean home phone number or your U or your fraternity or whatever it is right um under that your B local address in Boston um and if it's a fraternity give both the name of the fraternity and the street address um let's see what else under that right anything related to philosophy that you've taken as an undergraduate or a graduate student that will get me to understand your preparation better if you don't have any that doesn't matter there are no prerequisites for this course the way I teach if you call it teaching the way I perform uh is designed to be accessible to any person of the high caliber that you all are so you don't have to come in with any preparation now what else is there that [Music] um addresses address phone number email preparation I think that may be everything if not I'll ask you again next time okay now uh I remember Sharon I um I mean Karen not Sharon Karen Michael uh somehow I think it's Mike no what Nick Nick that's right Nick and Joe and who should I put down as giving next week's presentation where where can I find the book where can I find the book oh the the book unfortunately it's still in hard cover I apologize but it's the only book you'll have to buy is in the MIT bookstore under under this pardon on kandle the coupe the MIT the MIT Coupe under 24262 um if um it's better if you have it and bring it in but if you want to economize I understand I don't care about that uh it's probably it's on reserve in the humanities Reserve library and uh on Amazon or I don't know maybe secondhand copies somewhere I I really want to read it because it's crucial to the course but I want you to feel free to either spend the money or not to spend the money I guess for now I'll volunteer for next week great okay so I'll put it on my list um I don't know with any of you want to volunteer for later the next the next reading is on idealization the first next week is on imagination and the introduction then idealization March 2 it's consummation and March nth it's called the aesthetic which for me is a category in uh the nature of all of this fundamental category and um the concluding chapter which is called um uh what is it called failure and success um that's I didn't tell you about the last chapter is the last chapter I call concluding and success is because I try to explain how people use their imagination their idealization to make contact with other people and um to establish uh loving relationships consummation is why it is that people go to the trouble and the aesthetic is the fundamental category in feeling and Imagination to explain why life is worth living the vibrant flux of our existence um now what we're what you're going to help me to do is to get from there into the book on creation all of which I think is relevant to Creation but which has to be reworked so you'll be you'll be getting that and doing that the last chapter is called um I think it's failure and success and the point is the burden of last chapter is why is it that we're often able to succeed only by failing and what is the relationship with succeeding and and failing and for that you'll we'll be reading about all this and many things come into it but one thing that um led me into this is uh something that Orson Wells says um um or well at um Orson W's whole life illustrates remember he's one of the filmmakers in my new book um he has a movie which comes back in the interview uh called f for fake it's um an essay fiction part of it's fictional but also part is part of it is like a documentary about the nature of fakery forgery which then gets to be a documentary about the nature of creativity so that's one reason it's so interesting if anybody wants to work on that I mean Michael with his interest in philosophy of film that would be a good entry um in the course of it Wells at a point in his life not long before he died when he couldn't get funding for his movies because they the first one citizen Cain was hailed as a masterpiece and since then many people consider the greatest movie ever made but it was disaster at the box office partly because Ralph um Randall Hurst who was mimic parody in it decided to destroy it and and pretty much succeeded the next movie was movie that people said who saw it in the first um runs pre-production I mean pre release said it might have been the greatest movie ever made ever by anybody it was the destroyed by the studio because they thought it was too long and it was too gloomy it would lose money for them so they just cut out 45 minutes of it without letting him know and he destroyed them and there's nothing he could do that that's the Magnificent erson so he's he's somebody who started out with these tremendous successes and he he made the Citizen Kane at the age of 25 uh with the unmatched contract that enabled him to do anything he wanted to be the producer the director the cinemar everything he could do exactly without any interference from anybody out came a masterpiece that was the last time anybody let him do that uh all right in this in EP for fake and in the interview um he's destroyed by the fact that nobody will give him money that he was ostracized from Hollywood would that he had to um do commercials on television to raise monies and take acting needs to leave so pardon no I'm sorry I I'll you have to go all right then I'll quickly and where do I where do I sign approved by no it says advisor oh instructor right should I put MIT under it it says m MCA instructor MIT sorry and the rest you know the subject and the and and the um subject number you know all that right if you have any problems any of you my B my email address is bmit send me tell me your problems if you know anybody else who wants to come in the course have that person email me immediately well you have that Dian you sent me an email um and um I'll see you at 2 o'cl next week right thanks uh the upshot of it was that Orson Wells says uh I began at the top and I've been working my way down ever since and that has always affected me very much but then it occurs to me that sometimes and as in his case he did go on and write very make very important movies failure one succeeds only by failing and that's the logic that I study in the last chapter of the book go go go go now uh have you had enough for one day should we stop um and continue at 2 o' or it'll be easier and we'll parcel the time better uh later on okay all right so I look forward to seeing all of you you will all appear on television oh no oh did you stop at one point you oh I don't know but I didn't mean that's true uh only I do this time but you will later um so give it give hand in the permission fees and not fees the permission um fold uh permission forms and I will see you next time um I don't receive the permission what you didn't receive it oh I'll give it to you now so it's just this part here it's the same oh do you can you tell us where to sign you want me to sign too Mike Michael yeah do you want to sign oh