Responsa Clamata in Deserto:
Reply to Berezin on the Struggle for Creativity in AcademiaLand, and a
Reply to Robertson on the Struggle for Creativity in ChaoLand,
and a
Reply from Protagoras Concerning Creativity in LogosLand
By &
© Frederick David Abraham
July, 1996, for Dialogue (This is the original unabridged version; an
editorially abridged version appears as Commentary: On Alexander A. Berezin's "Interdisciplinarity
Challenges the Myth of 'experts,'" in: Dialogue, 1966, vol. 1,
(3&4), 14. Thanks to LS for a nice job.)
The issue Berezin poses (1996) is the extent to which
communal-cultural conservatism (his focus is on the academic community) stifles
creativity (his focus is on scientific creativity). In chaos theory, we are
engaged in our own struggle as a linguistic community (Abraham, 1995; Gilgen, 1995; Goldstein, 1995; Leibniz-Abraham,
1666-1695/1995; Robertson, 1996; Tryon, 1995). Chaos theory was borne into
contemporary science as a free spirit, a sea on which to surf in creativity and
freedom. But as our enterprise matures, it is beginning to rigidify as it tries
to justify itself to its academic critics. Part of our struggle revolves around
a false schism between the more metaphoric and imaginative uses of chaos
concepts as applied to art, culture, literature, and therapy (occasionally
without much familiarity with the fundamental concepts of dynamics), and the
more technical scientific enterprise (occasionally without much imagination
with regards to the cultural embodiments of that knowledge). (My parenthetical
caveats are not meant to detract from the positive contributions of these
approaches.) Thus there is a similar struggle for creativity within our own
community. The issue Berezin raises is not trivial,
not just a matter of our survival in an academic/funding community (for those
of us still wandering its hallowed halls), but is a matter of the discovery and
creation of knowledge and reality. These are things precious to many of us.
Foucault (1970) called them "The will to knowledge" and "The
will to truth".
My own definition of creativity
(1996), "Creativity is self-organizational bifurcation to novel attractors
of being", by context, emphasizes chaos also, which brings it close to the
intention of the Gardnerian-Csikzentmihalyan-Gruberian-Feldmanian
systems approach to creativity, a requirement for which is what Gardner (1993)
calls "fruitful asynchrony", a condition often quashed by the
academic conditions indicted by Berezin (see Abraham,
1995; Zausner, 1996). A chaotic mixing of existential
angst (convergent forces) and joy (divergent forces), so requisite to
creativity, might appreciate some of the hardships of the academic marketplace,
but who could deny that the excesses Berezin
highlights exceed and negate those useful to creativity. When Nachmanovich (1990) talks of "unblocking the obstacles
to its [creativity's] natural flow", he is talking about the inner
landscape, but this inner landscape is inextricably interactive with the
external landscape.
I consider hermeneutics and
post-modernism a sort of yin-yang dual-perspective dyad. Hermeneutics seeks the
creation of truth through interpretation and understanding, emphasized in the
famous hermeneutic circle. The hermeneutic circle of understanding the
relationships between whole and parts rests on Humboldt's "vorgängige Grundlage
des Begreifens" a "prexisting
basis of understanding", a rapport or wholeness between the interpreter
and subject of investigation. Humboldt thus anticipated Droysen,
Dilthey, Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer
(Mueller-Vollmer, 1992, p. 15).
Post-modernism has often been
criticized as nihilistic, on the dark side, especially in the French
deconstructionism of the post-structuralists such as
Derrida (1967), and the reductio's of the Frankfurt
school, such as in Horkheimer and Adorno's
critique of the Enlightenment (1947/1973). But I interpret nihilistic extremes
by Nietzsche's observation (1883), "I love those that that know not how to
live except as down-goers, for they are the over-goers. I love the despisers,
because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other
shore." I see the Judaic "peeling of the onion" as a
deconstruction aimed at unpeeling and hermeneutically reconstructing and
creating the truth. Greeley (1995) has found this also in her search for
meaning in the pauses and silent moments in dialogue. Greeley is similar to Zausner in seeing the dynamics of creativity in the
"void" of the "bifurcation transformation" (also emphasized
by Abraham, 1996, and Paar, 1992).
The struggle between enlightment and social forces of repression are far from
new. As an example of an early stuggle of this
nature, I recently received a letter from Protagoras, in response to my inquiry
concerning his difficulties. It was delivered to me during an address at the
recent Conference of our Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and Life
Sciences, and read to those assembled for Robertson's address on the struggles
for meaning within our society.
Protagoras
Athens,
June CDXV, BCE
Dear Fred,
You ask for advice about the
search for wisdom. I am not sure that I am the best person to answer that. We certainly
tried out best to pursue sophia,
which means wisdom and skill, to learn and understand. But there are those who
have taken advantage of some ambiguity there, and have given our efforts a
pejorative connotation of deception by skillful false reasoning. So our efforts
to provide a path to the pursuit of truth may not have been entirely
successful. We applied reasoning and humanitarian concerns as an alternative
path to enlightenment to that offered by the mythic-poetic-theistic traditions
which were beginning to give way in our culture. Our efforts were honorably
received in our day, but have been tainted in time, largely due to the efforts
of that rascal, Plato, who felt that our professionalization of these skills in
the pursuit of truth in everyday social life emphasized the skill as a path to
success over the search for truth. In teaching rhetoric and law using the
adversarial technique of having students argue both sides of an issue, we
sought to place the search for truth above all else, not the pretense to truth
by a better argument at the expense of truth.
It is a pity that only fragments
of my writing remain. When Diogenes Laertes (9.51) quoted me fairly accurately
in the two-logoi fragment as saying:
kai prwtos efh duo logouz einai peri
pantos pragmatos antikeimenouz allhloiz
I was following the lead of
Heraclitus who made much of oppositions as you well know. And in fact, the
interpretations of this fragment have been either Heraclitan
or subjective. Subjective ones consider this fragment to mean such things as
"On every issue there are two arguments opposed to each other"
(O'Brien, 1969) or reduce my statement to the absurd 'proposition that a debate
is possible on any topic' (paraphrase of Schiappa,
1991). This subjective interpretation is founded on a misunderstanding to the
term logoi as an artifice created by the
adversarial agents, as only rhetoric (Plato's term, not mine), not by the
aspects of truth inherent in the phenomena being debated.
Heraclitean
interpretations are more like Untersteiner's
(1949/1954) "In every experience there are two logoi
in opposition to each other" or Kerford's (1981)
"There are two logoi concerning
everything, these being opposed to each other". Both, in leaving logoi untranslated,
emphasized the closeness of my logos to the realities sought by
Heraclitus, and to a true understanding of the term pragmata, things, the real nature
of things and experience. I was concerned with all things, from `reality and
divinity, to political, social, and ethical life and their theoretical and
practical' aspects (paraphrase Schiappa, 1991, as is
most of my letter, for I speak not your language).
As Robinson (1979) notes, I
considered pragma to mean `reality'
in a general sense. That would include what you would now recognize as
subjectively or Hermeneutically created (as Greeley,
1991, points out in her chaoanalysis of the early
Socratic Dialogs after my time) as well as the objectively created. Thus you
can see that `pragma, reality, is such that there are two opposing ways, logoi, to describe, account for, or explain any
given experience.
Thus my two-logoi
fragment was meant be an extension of Heraclitus' theory of flux and Unity-of-Opposites doctrines. Many of you have taken these theories
to heart, literally in the case of Sabelli who has
written a book on the Union of Opposites,
and has applied it to study of the heart and psychology (Sabelli,
1989, 1995). It could also be observed from the time of the early preSocratics like Anaximander, Anaximenes,
Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras (a favorite of Rössler's),
Empedocles, Alcmaeon, and Melissus,
all of whom used concepts of opposition and all of whom were rationalizing
mythic and theistic interpretations, that the history of the development of
these ideas followed bifurcation sequences into greater and more explicit
theorizing that you modern chaoticians would find
fascinating.
So were sophists pursuing the truth. One can say the same of the chaostitians.
And, as you can see, Chaos Theory is
not the first arena of discourse to have difficulty in finding its
philosophical foundations, or to suffer discredit for attempts to promote and
professionalize its program. We sophists who built on the foundations
established by the earlier Presocratics and who
revolutionized the teaching and practice of reasoning and understanding had
similar difficulties. I particularly was motivated by a preference for a
humanistic logos over traditional mythoi, or mytho-poetic
traditions, in trying to understand logos. My teaching was transitional
between written prose and oratorical aphorism, and the fragments left in your
day need careful study to know our way, and to use it in your work. It may be
that the attempt to institutionalize any house of wonder and awe will suffer
the same self-organized demise without vigorous attempts to keep it vital. You
should thank Robin, Michael, Bill, Hector, Sally, Allan, Rick, Tobi, Lillian,
the late Tom Gentry, Marianne, Louise, and the rest of the Society for keeping
it so. And thanks to Alexander for pointing to the dangers in academia. Thank
you all for keeping our traditions alive.
Your sophistic instructor,
Protagoras
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