Creativity, Imagination, Logic

Meditations for the Eleventh Hour

Horace M. Kallen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367420482
• eBook ISBN: 9781000737059
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

Originally published in 1973. This final collection of thought by founder of the New School for Social Research in New York, Horace M. Kallen, touches on topics from language to death and from freedom to value. The author's treatise explores his understanding of logic and existence.

BOOK I

Section 1

Ex Nihilo

FRIENDS MEETING soon or late ask each other, “What’s new?”—Strangers, being strangers, don’t. They are instant news to one another, attractive or repellant. Our hunger for news is as original as our hunger for food or love. and as demanding. Boredom is starvation. It starts going uncountable deviations from established ways of personal habit and interpersonal folkways and mores. To escape it the individual sets off in new directions, toward different and unknown goals. Curiosity about first beginnings and subsequent mutations keeps infiltrating and subverting a nature overwhelmingly repetitive and reproductive, alike as man’s arts and crafts and sciences and techniques. The first editions, the unrepeatable and unreproduceable, the original and unique firstnesses which alone can be one and only one, gain a scarcity-value which establishes them so incomparably more precious than the repetitions of their identities, by whatever means. Those to whom the firsts of any kind are believed to be due are esteemed as creators, as inventors, as discoverers. They are believed to be specially endowed, to be originators, first causes, innovators who bring news into the same old world ever repeating itself. They are seen as a different kind from the producers, the manufacturers and all other makers—the kind whose ne plus ultra the theologians would tell us is God.

So television companies make a distinction in the “credits” they give for a play or a spectacle. They announce that it was “created by” so-and-so, and “produced” by such and such. If they describe a show as a “production” the difference gets blurred. At some point in preparing a “creation” for the public performance it gets absorbed by the “production.” If no replica of the original survives, then to discover what it had been before it was absorbed, to discover how production changed it and to make clear its identity within the producer’s product, becomes tantamount to an adventure in detection. In Academia this is called research, be it authentic or inauthentic. The creator’s creation has been taken by the producer for a stuff to remold, to use, to use up. In the process of production, it has served as his matter and means, not as his design and mold. And his use of it may, on occasion, qualify him as more truly a creator than its creator. Nevertheless, “created by” is an honorable mention, “produced by” is not. Our culture holds “creator” and “creation” in higher regard than “producer” and “production” or “product”. Even at its most sophisticated—with all the disillusion of psychoanalysis and the other new psychologies to draw on—the critical spirit is disposed to esteem the “creator” an inspired man of genius, one of nature’s originals, whom an elder generation might count like unto God, and the true, the necessary cause of the producer’s productions. At best productions can be imitations only, distorting reproductions of the creator’s creations. The latter are the design to which the former gives body, the spirit which it merely incarnates, making it flesh and setting it to walk upon the stage. At best, production is only materialization.

Not uncommonly, materializations disclose themselves to be, instead of a fitting of the matter to the spirit, a fitting of the spirit to the matter—a fitting which changes the spirit’s intent and remolds its form. But this does not detract from the esteem in which the creator is held. On occasion, such an inversion may even enlarge and heighten esteem—the more so, perhaps, since the creator identified by “created by” is not the director, nor the actor, nor the scene painter, nor the photographers, nor any other of the assembly of engineers, craftsmen and practitioners of diverse arts who together participate in the making of the television. “Created by” refers only to thinkers and writers. Since the Renaissance the practice has spread of including practitioners of the graphic, the plastic and the musical arts among the creators, and the trend is growing to join men of science to men of art. But the first to be assigned this likeness to the gods were the poets—the men who make with words, words they chant, words they speak, words they write. In the beginning was the Word: and it was with the power of the word that the poet could bring news—visions of things without precedent, things which, regardless of what relations they might have to things already there, could not be attributed to those as effects of which these are the cause. The poet’s words disclose ineffable newcomers among the old things. The primary cause of the words is the poet himself. His material is the creation of his own psyche; he creates it ex nihilo.

It was, I believe, the eighteenth century poet and critic, John Dryden, who made fashionable the notion that an authentic poet’s ways with words were the ways of a creator, that he create poetry ex nihilo. There had been suggestions of the same sort before Dryden’s day, and they have come in various contexts since. But until Dryden, and for many generations after his, the poetic art was conceived as the Greek paidea had conceived it—not purely creation, not creation ex nihilo, but re-creation, that is, mimesis, primary and original insofar as man re-presents nature, but derivative, only secondary, when he imitates the words and works of man. Pure creativity, the power to originate utterly, to create matter and medium as well as form, to create ex nihilo, was a notion that had become alien to Greek life and thought even as the notion of power belonging to God alone had become alien to their thinking. Aeschylos happens to ascribe such power to Zeus in The Suppliants: “He speaks and it is done. He hastens to execute whatever his counselling mind conceives.” But the ascription is only poetry to classical antiquity. All art, all thought was mimesis: art and thought imitate either the creator’s uncreated self by the creation of his not-self; by the creation of the moving things which he, the forever unmoved mover, moves; or they imitate the creature of the creator, re-presenting or re-producing other creatures.

The god who can command that there be news even in heaven is no god in the Graeco-Roman pantheon. Nor is he, at first, the one and only God, the Jehovah of the Israelites. The divine makers of the Hellenic cosmos and the Hebraic universe are first, alike workers on a material without beginning and without end. The Hebrew words for it are Tehom, Tohu-Bohu. They signify formless void, darkness, waters over which, Genesis tells, the breath of the Lord blows or his spirit hovers and speaks the words with which he causes the world we know as nature to exist.^1* God says, and light pierces the darkness, the formless shapes into the forms we experience and explore, the void is changed into a diversified fullness. Then God says: let us make man in our image, after our likeness. He molds Adam, a figure of earth, breathes his own spirit into his handiwork and gives it dominion over the earth and all that dwell thereon including Eve, the female shaped from Adam’s rib. It is not clear that for Jehovah, the creator in Genesis, chaos is not the coeval Other, no less eternal than himself. But it is clear that the Word is not coeval, that it comes into existence only when and as God speaks it, that it is the mold and instrument with which he informs the uncreated formlessness and creates the world which the Old Testament purports to account for. And Adam, being a man like God, bestows upon the animal inhabitants of Eden, with words of his own that name them, the identities which transform their anonymity.

The Word would seem to have had similar importance among the Greeks, although the word’s role in creation seems a much later attribution. The tale is Hesiod’s. Of the nine daughters of the Titan Mnemosyne (Memory): one is the Muse of eloquence, three preside over poetry, one over tragedy, one over comedy, one over history, one over the dance, and one over astronomy. The nine signalize the religio-cultural configuration of the Hellenic heritage. Perhaps there is no Muse of music because music accompanies the verbal arts and comes broadly as the diversified form of verbal utterance. Songs without words appear late in the history of music, as do songs without actions.

* Numbered notes are collected at the end of each section.

It is not easy to decide which came first—the idea that the word is function of the act or the thing, or that thing and act are functions of the word. Deaf-mutes also make sounds as they carry on the struggles to keep on struggling which is man’s existence. Hearing and speaking mankind regularly take the sounds they make, of which speech is but a part, for both power over and signs and symbols of the succession of experience in which they figure—for revelations of the struggle, of its events, its occasions and its conditions. Like the animals, we make them the meanings of one another unaware that we do so. When writing happens to supplement chanting and speaking and preserves their meanings in less perishable forms, its shapes and modes figure in their turn as events and things and occasions, to be in their turn signified with still other signs and symbols that thus serve us as the meanings of the meanings—as meanings thereby thrice removed from the struggles which initiated them. Next, we find ourselves requiring meanings for those meanings, then for the meanings of the meanings; and we set them up, meaning after meaning after meaning. We keep assembling dictionaries of meanings until the feeling which Aristotle called ananké steinai stops us for the nonce. We call the stoppages universals, that is, meanings of meanings of meanings always and everywhere the same. Then, soon or late, we resume again, dictionary after dictionary, multiplying and diversifying meanings.²

But there is no principle which ordains when or whereat we should experience this will-to-stop which arrests the unlimited formation of meanings, arrests it as the struggler’s decisions regarding the survival-value of the process in struggling. For the long run, the stops figure as only way-stations, not terminals. The record of the ways of our minds with meanings is one of ongoing passage from a meaning to a meaning of a meaning of a meaning, each more spiritual, more sheerly the Word. We not only contain experience with language; we thin experience with language. And then we thin language with grammar, grammar with logic, logic with mathematics, mathematics with symbolic logic. Like Pythagoras, like Plato, we labor to prove that the last is the creative in the first. But from first to last, there works the Word. And the more we envisage the Word as power and as substance the more its relevance to the immediate and concrete gets thinned into signifying, like mana, everything in general and nothing in particular. This ultimate abstraction is felt to guarantee the success of our struggles to keep on struggling; it insures the survival of our values as the value of our survival. It lifts the Word to omnipotence.

We articulate the omnipotence as the unchanging laws of nature which the scientists are purported to seek and the eternal revelations of God which theologians are used to proclaim. As items of the successions of meanings they figure as arrests of activity and movement, as compenetrative identifications of centrifugal heterogeneities. Some words for the arrests are Being, Eternity, Unity, Universality, Absolute—all signalizing, each in its mode, a collapse of manifold concrete heterogeneous processes into a single, unaltering instancy. This collapse is presented as the consummation of meaning, the meaning ne plus ultra, at which we stop because to us there no longer is, there cannot be, any meaning “beyond.” As the terminal meaning it is the only one imperishably “real”; thus the meaning is the meaning which all other meanings willy-nilly mean. In the light of it, our existence of struggle and the changes and chances which engender our meanings are merely appearances. Those of us who have won to this ultimacy are thereby freed to live on like our terminal meaning, unchangingly at peace, always and everywhere the same.

Alas, that mankind’s histories do not record one and only one ultimate meaning of meaning! Alas, that the record is of a multitude of ultimates; that it tells how the true believers of each ultimate creed struggle with one another over which alone shall be taken for the true one, while still others come up with new ones. The record discloses no meaning that comes to ultimacy, unless it happens that men’s struggles to keep on struggling, which created the meanings men struggle over, are their own ultimates. Ultimacy is no less a temporary stop in the succession of meanings than any other. It differs from the others; it differs in that the minds, which attribute their stopping at this ultimacy not to themselves but to it, crave to prolong their stop. They would cling to the Word which they feel is their salvation and resist separating from it. Straining to preserve it unchanged, they change its function in their struggles for survival; they would keep it the instrument it naturally is, but they make of it an idol as well. They apothesize their instrument. Like Bertrand Russell avowing his Pythagoreanism, they join the generations of Platonizers who keep remaking the words of struggling man into the laws of an unchanging nature or the Word of an unstruggling God—usually the last Word is said to have been “in the beginning,” to have been with God, and to have become flesh and to be walking on earth.

The survival-value of the Word is its relation to beginning; that is to the coming or making of the new. The human function of the Always-and-Everywhere-Same is to provide safety and certainty regarding the comings and goings and enjoyment of the Different. The values of actually ultimate concerns are the new and the means to bring the new.

Unlike the Hebrews, the Greeks did not begin their tales of creation with this commitment to the Word as power. Although their philosophers were the first to propose the idea, to develop and elaborate it by abstracting grammar from language, logic from grammar and by reifying logic’s functions as “laws of thought,” they were later than the Hebrews in identifying the Word with creativity and still later in conceiving creativity as absolute, as the sheer act of peopling non-being with all sorts and conditions of beings. Plato maybe hints at some such miracle in the Timaeus; but even his aficionados among the cognoscenti are unsure that this is what he meant. So far as I am aware creatio ex nihilo as a philosophic conception is a residue from Judean Philo’s endeavor to reconcile Plato and the Hebrew prophets. Much later, Aristotlelianizing theologians like Thomas Aquinas held that the God-Creator could be only a revelation to faith; as Paul averred in his Epistle to the Hebrews: “that the worlds have been created by the Word of God so that what is seen hath not been made out of things which do appear.” For the God-eternal, reason required an equally uncreated Universe.

The poets who have left us the earliest Greek stories of creation no more intend sheer creativity than the Hebrew ones. They describe creation as a making over of a material already at hand—if without form, creation informs it; if with form, creation transforms it, much as Jehovah transformed the dust of the earth when he created Adam. It is believed that Hesiod’s Theogony identified for the Greeks their own equivalent of the Hebrews’ Tohu-Bohu—that which John Milton elaborated as “vast immeasurable abyss, all dark and waste and wild and outrageous as the sea.” The Greek word for it is Chaos. Within Chaos—Aristophanes tells this—Love, hatched from a “wind-born” egg, without rhyme or reason created Light and the day which is a function of Light. Love also caused Earth and Heaven to be—Earth, the goddess Gaea; Heaven, the god Ouranos. Gaea and Ouranos become the parents of the Titans, among them Chronos and Rhea, brother and sister. Zeus, the sixth son of Chronos and Rhea, rebels and with the help of another Titan, Prometheus, overcomes his father. But Zeus in his turn must face Titanic rebellion after Titanic rebellion. With his thunderbolts he conquers even Typhon, even the Giants. And now the undisputed reign of Zeus begins—undisputed but not everlasting. For Zeus, too, is doomed to overthrow. Prometheus knows when and by whom, but refuses to tell. He had been the heavenly father’s ally and champion. But with the aid of his brother Epimethus he had brought his creature a torch alight with the living fire of the sun of heaven, and launched it on its career of Homo sap.³

Or, alternatively, the Olympians themselves made man, molding his figure in various metals, from gold to bronze, and so establishing the sorts and conditions of their creations. But not the female of the species. It was Zeus alone who created her—and not, like Jehovah, from a concern for the male’s loneliness, but from anger at Prometheus’ care for man. Jove’s creation was that evil loveliness, Pandora. The Olympians presented her with a locked box and warned her that it was not to be opened. But like Eve she was eager to know. As Eve’s disobedience brought “death into the world and all our woe,” Pandora’s brought God’s punishment for disobedience. Pandora opened the forbidden box and let loose all the ills that flesh is heir to. Like Eve, she brought news, bad news, newly liberated, not newly created.

NOTES

1. In the Brahmin-Vedic tradition, matter, void or chaos do not seem to figure. The consequential center seems to be the experiences of breathing—the breath rather than the blood is the life, and its exercise and control, ultimately Yoga, is the rite and rote leading to ultimate insight, the identification with Brahma. In the mythology, the triune godhead consists of Brahma, the creator, Vishnu the preserver, Siva the destroyer, the three personifications of the phases of Becoming which pervade all our existence. Significantly, Sanskrit philologists suggest that Brahma is a variation on the root brih, bahr, which is translatable as mighty, great, thick, and also breath. The ultimate Brahma is the controller of breath—the jnana yogin who has come to shape his breath in mantrams. Mantrams are vocalizations of breath which serve the true believer as tools. Their purest, simplest/formation is the sacred syllable Om, Aum or Hum—the passing information of the breath whose own still creativity gives and takes the life of all things and is different from everything.

2. A man’s voice is at once the accompaniment and expression of his experience, and as definitive of his identity as his thumb-print. It utters the ups and downs of his days and nights—bespeaks his health, his sickness, his depressions, his exaltations, his hopes, his fears, his certainties, his agressions, his submissions. A man’s voice tells all his changes of mood and stance in his life-long struggle with the world around him. The changes generate or evoke the words which impattern the voice’s altering pitch and tempo, and the words endow the man’s experience with the meanings which the dictionaries preserve. Giving voice, the man discloses a condition an attitude and an action which we signify by such sounds as shout, whisper, whine, scream, murmur, mutter, sing, hum, coo, sigh, sob, shrill, cry, laugh, and so on. Sounds, alike as sheer noise and as word-forms, endow sights with a real presence, an inward dynamic they otherwise lack; they add force to the word-forms. As shaped into words, as language, sounds incarnate most of what the word “spirit” denotes: They signify the human difference, the humanity of mankind. All animals produce soun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Foreword as Afterthought
• Contents
• Book I
• Book II Reprise: Creativity, Imagination, Logic and the Society of Free Men