Festschrift for Howard E. Gruber

A Special Issue of the creativity Research Journal

Mark Runco

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780805896084
• eBook ISBN: 9781135065843
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Howard E. Gruber has changed the domain of creative studies in several ways: by making it more realistic with his systems theory, introducing the idea of "a theory of the individual" and developing a method to this ends, and positioning the domain of creative studies where it can build on the domain of morality. He has opened more than a few eyes to a new domain--moral creativity--and this special issue shows Gruber's influence in this regard. As a result, this first Festschrift of Creativity Research Journal provides readers with unique, novel, and creative ideas.

Where Will We Hang All of the Paintings? An Introduction to the Festschrift for Howard E. Gruber

Mark A. Runco
University of Hawaii, Hilo, and California State University, Fullerton

I have visited New York City several times in the last 15 years. Usually I am attending a conference or meeting with a publisher; but whenever I go, I call ahead and try to arrange lunch with Howard Gruber. This gives me something to look forward to, even if the trip is otherwise for business and tightly scheduled. During one such visit (spring 1994, I believe), Gruber and I took a walk while we visited. Near the halfway point of this particular walk, Gruber raised a question that has stuck with me. I believe we were on the fringe of Central Park when he asked me, "Where are we going to hang all the paintings?" As I understand it, his idea was that with population growth and the increased attention being directed to creativity, much more creativity would be expressed and uncovered in the years ahead. With all this creativity, where will we hang all the paintings?

Gruber's perspective about creativity will strike some as an optimistic one. I, too, hold an optimistic-view, yet I am fairly certain that there are more skeptics than optimists. Very likely skepticism, at least in part, reflects a sampling bias: Most of the people I talk to about creativity are interested in using theory and research to solve problems, and with this perspective, you might need to be on the lookout for problems to solve. Another type of sampling bias may occur when writing research reports; authors need to state their purpose and thus justify their work (and its publication). An easy way to justify creativity research is to suggest that originality and imagination are being stifled. I agree that they are very often stifled. Then again, there is a significant difference between loss and growth. There can be an increase, even if the rate of growth isn't what it could be because the support for creativity isn't what it should be (Rubenson & Runco, 1992).

Gruber's optimism about all the paintings may reflect his view of creative studies. His ideas about creativity tend to be extremely useful; he no doubt feels that progress is being made, and without a doubt he is making progress. This is apparent in his work on evolving systems (Gruber, 1988), creativity in the moral domain (Gruber, 1993), and Piaget (Gruber, 1995). It is clearly evidenced by the various articles in this Festschrift.

Creative individuals change the domains in which they work. They often do this by influencing the way others think. Howard Gruber has influenced many, many people in the domain of creative studies. In fact. Gruber has changed this domain in several ways: by making it more realistic with his systems theory; by introducing the idea of "a theory of the individual," and developing a method to this end; and by positioning the domain of creative studies where it can build on the domain of morality, just to name a few. Note that he has opened more than a few eyes to a new domain, that of moral creativity. Several articles in this volume show Gruber's influence in this regard.

One issue of the Creativity Research Journal (CRJ) in 1995 was devoted entirely to creativity in the moral domain. Other special issues of the CRJ have focused on schizophrenia and creativity, contrarianism and creativity, and (most recently) on J. P. Guilford's (1950) famous address to the American Psychological Association. But the current issue may be the most special. It is our first Festschrift, for example. It is in that sense—and several others, which will be apparent when readers peruse the articles herein—that it is unique and novel. No doubt, in addition to this uniqueness and novelty, readers will find ideas in this issue to be creative. In many ways, they have Howard E. Gruber to thank for that.

Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Mark Runco, Department of Child Development, EC 105, California State University-Fullerton, PO Box 6868, Fullerton, CA 92834-6868. E-mail: [email protected]

References

Gruber, Η. E. (1988). The evolving systems approach to creative work. Creativity Research Journal, 1, 27-51.

Gruber, Η. E. (1993). Creativity in the moral domain: Ought implies can implies create. Creativity Research Journal, 6, 3-16.

Gruber, Η. E. (1995, August). Invited address presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, New York.

Guilford, J. P. (1950). Creativity. American Psychologist, 5, 444-454.

Rubenson, D. L., & Runco, M. A. (1992). The psychoeconomic approach to creativity. New Ideas in Psychology, 10, 131-147.

The Changing Structure of Piaget's Thinking: Invariance and Transformations

Jacques Vonèche
University of Geneva

ABSTRACT: This essay attempts to show how Piaget revolutionized psychology durably by introducing three essential elements into it: (a) knowledge continues biological adaptation; (b) every form of knowledge results in the construction of a given formal structure; and (c) every cognitive construction answers an epistemological question asked in the history of science as well as in the ontogeny of human beings, both being formally and dynamically isomorphic.

Foreword

To me there is more than a mere coincidence to the fact that Piaget's centenary occurred at about the same time as Howard Gruber's 75th birthday. Two of my father figures are so united by chronology as well as by my fondness for them. English is not a tongue I can speak, so this essay may fail to convey, with adequate grace and delicacy, my feelings of indebtedness (a debt I will never pay off, even if I live forever), gratitude, and humility to both Piaget and Gruber.

I am in academia today, and I owe this to three men: Jean Piaget, Seymour Papert, and Howard Gruber. Howie was kind enough to invite me to collaborate with him more than 30 years ago, both at Rutgers University and at the University of Geneva.

After talk of many metaphors, irregularly branching trees, and a wealth of images of wide scope; political discussions that brought us closer to the pulsating heart of the world; endless long walks on two continents, many islands, and sometimes, in very unpredictable places, the sharing of memories of beloved ones, both present and departed, we forged our friendship. Our friendship has remained a lake of tranquility, although we both hold our own strong opinions. Cooperation has been the secret here.

Writing this paper on my own makes me feel incomplete because I have become so used to collaborating with Howie. This contribution would have been so much better if Howie had just glanced at it before publication, as the reader will now see.

It is clear that Jean Piaget's contribution to psychology is of the first quality, regardless of the criteria used to measure his impact on the field. A review of citation indexes shows that he ranks first, with only Sigmund Freud as a potential competitor. The same holds true in more qualitative assessments. This impact is all the more remarkable because Piaget, unlike Freud and psychoanalysis, does not reflect an entire, complex outlook on life. Piaget is simply equipped with a modest but powerful epistemology, a position rare among psychologists, so much so that other psychologists have been at odds to explain his tremendous success, as we shall see.

The Mythical Piaget

Success tends to be explained away in mythical terms with or without the help of the mythicized person. Freud is a perfect example. He himself started, consciously or not (it is up to the psychoanalyst to decide these matters), the myth of his persecution and isolation, and Henri Ellenberger's (1970) contribution showed the extent of the manipulation long before others. Freud was a hero just like the poor lonesome cowboy of Western movies. No wonder, then, that John Huston made a film about Freud. He was one of a kind.

In a different manner, indeed, the same heroicization took place with Piaget, starting with his own autobiographies (1950, 1965) and continuing with biographies written by his followers, which amplified Piaget's own statements to the point of distortion.

Piaget, in his autobiographies, stressed a few points. One of them was his precocity. He said that he was a well-known naturalist in his midteens and had been offered a position as an assistant curator at the Geneva Museum of Natural Sciences. One can imagine the amplification this simple remark underwent in the pen of some "autobiographers" of Piaget. For instance, one commentator considers that Piaget's malacological work gave him "a very firm grounding in the principles of scientific method and observation" (Fancher, 1979, p. 342). This is a hyperbolic transformation of the autobiographical glimpse of science and one that is typical of the glorification of the Genevan master by his American epigones. For example, Howard Gardner writes that "Piaget was . . . grateful that his early scientific experience had shored him up against the seductive lures of philosophy" (Gardner, 1974, p. 59). Gardner goes on with an affirmation of this sort:

Piaget began his life work as a biologist and he remains deeply committed to the study of organic life. Like others of his time, he was deeply influenced by Darwinian evolutionary theory, and in fact came close to believing that processes and states should be understood in terms of their development. An experiment convinced Piaget, however, that Darwin's account of natural selection was too simple, (p. 59)

The interesting point here is that Piaget's glorification was one through success and precocity, whereas Freud's was made through isolation and late blooming.

Then came for Piaget what had come for Freud: critical biographers. So far Piaget has had two of this kind: J. J. Ducret (1984), who reduced Piaget to his readings, and F. Vidal (1994), who had the merit to discover a young Piaget who was much more complex and diverse than expected from his standard autobiography (Piaget, 1966-1976) but who failed to underline the unity of Piaget's preoccupations as a young man.

In my opinion, both Ducret and Vidal made the same mistake. As young psychologists deeply impressed by Piaget's oeuvre, both tended to overdo the emotional side of Piaget's genesis. Ducret speaks of a narcissistic blow in the case of the debate between Piaget and Roszkowski on the definition of a species, whereas Vidal rightly shows that the controversy was strictly scientific. Roszkowski was a believer in Mendelian species. Piaget could not embrace this belief because of his training as a neo-Lamarckian naturalist. Then Vidal makes the point that Piaget's interest in psychoanalysis was more related to Piaget's personal adolescent crisis than to intellectual factors. The reader remains with the image that Piaget had various but somewhat disconnected interests—natural history, religion, philosophy, and psychoanalysis—because Vidal fails to demonstrate that all those enterprises (to use Gruber's language about creativity) form a tree, maybe a very irregularly branched one (to borrow Darwin's metaphor about evolution, which in turn was borrowed from Descartes' tree of knowledge), but certainly a network. My feeling is that behind the Bergsonian and Mendelian young Piaget portrayed by Vidal, there is a Haeckelian Piaget too, and this last one brings back unity in Piaget's enterprises at that time.

The influence of Haeckel on Piaget's ideas, although never mentioned by Piaget's autobiographers and critical biographers alike, most probably because Piaget never mentioned it himself, seems to me capital. The notion of form as developed by Piaget from adolescence on is the direct heritage of Haeckel's ideas because a form or a structure is, for Piaget, essentially a variation on an Urgestalt representing as such (i.e., as form) the memory in the organism of former transformations in the species, transformations due, for Piaget (and this is the difference with the Darwinian Haeckel), to the activity of the organism dealing with an environmental perturbation and transmitting its solution of the problem to the next generation via the heredity of acquired characters (later phenocopy). In such a perspective, species become forms left behind in history as fingerprints of the process of evolution.

If one agrees with me about this influence of Haeckel, one comes to better understand that Piaget's interest in psychoanalysis, the symbolization of religious forms, and his increasing interest in problem solving in psychology developed almost together in his mind. I am not denying the role of Piaget's adolescent crisis in his interest for psychoanalysis nor the fact that he was also sent to Paris because he was good at statistics and, consequently, would become useful to Dr. Théodore Simon for the standardization of Cyril Burt's test of intelligence. I am simply saying that, besides all this circumstantial evidence, Piaget was motivated by intellectual pursuits of this sort, too. Had he been reducible to his philosophical and scientific readings, as Ducret described him, he would have become a sort of eclectic French philosopher and not the man he did become. Had he been the young man Vidal represented in his book, he would have become a sort of D'Arcy Thompson and not the man some of us have known. To understand the real Piaget, one has to take into consideration not only what Piaget says about Piaget but also aspects of Piaget's development that are not mentioned by either Piaget or his biographers.

The Real Piaget

Once the Piagetian subject has been reduced, as it is now, to its biological and social components, there is nothing left of Piaget's effort at coherence and understanding in psychology. So this is a good moment to reflect on what Piaget has contributed to psychology in a realistic perspective free of all mythologies that we have observed so far.

What is Piaget's real contribution, and how did he bring it about? Once again, the starting point here is the sort of neo-Haeckelianism mixed with neo-Bergsonism that imprinted Piaget's youth: the science of genera. By science of genera, Bergson meant a reactualization of the Aristotelian category of genus, which indicates there is a natural place for all physical bodies in which these bodies realize their essence. The interesting aspect, for our purpose, is that genera attribute the same individuality to physical bodies as to living organisms. Bergson's contribution to the notion of genus is precisely that, contrary to the ancient philosophers, he separated the vital order (genera) from the mathematical order (law). Vital order is characterized by its élan vital, that is to say, in Piaget's understanding, that a new species is defined by its becoming, its evolutionary tendencies, more than by its actual properties. This explanation in terms of becoming is central to understanding the further reconciliation by Piaget of biology with logic or, in Bergsonian language, between vital and geometric order.

In "Matterand Memory" (1896/1963, pp. 296-301), Bergson examined the formation of categories or general ideas. For him, generalization does not stem from the perception of individuals but starts with an unclear feeling of resemblance, intermediate between "fully conceived generality and perceived individuality" (p. 299). Through the combined action of memory and understanding, human beings rise from the mechanical idea of generality to the general idea of the genus (p. 301). The theory of life and the theory of knowledge are inseparable, once again.

Between biology and epistemology, an intermediate is needed because knowledge is self-conscious to a large extent, and that...

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