Flight from Wonder —— An Investigation of Scientific Creativity

A must for anyone interested in creativity

A difficult read with too much psycho babble for me; but buried under the burden of documentation are valid insights into what brings the ceative mind to create

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I respect the American psychiatrist Albert Rothenberg’s work on human creativity. In Dr. Rothenberg’s 2015 book Flight from Wonder: An Investigation of Scientific Creativity (Oxford University Press), he notes that we in contemporary Western culture tend to value creativity strongly (see esp. pages xi and 7).Dr. Rothenberg also operationally defines and explains carefully the three key terms he works with in his 2015 book about scientific creativity:(1) janusian process (see esp. pages xvii, 28, and 36-37);(2) homospatial process (see esp. pages xvii and 41);3) separation-connection articulation process (see esp. pages xvii, 49, and 117).Now, despite Dr. Rothenberg’s characteristic meticulous precision in expressing himself throughout his 2015 book, I want to call attention to something he says on page 179: “Scientific discovery is, as Einstein said, ‘a continual flight from wonder,’ satisfying our deepest curiosity and providing us [in the Western world] with advances in the necessities and comforts of living. Scientific discovery may justifiably be considered the builder of our [Western] modern world” (also see page 12 for the Einstein quotation; see page 7 for Dr. Rothenberg’s stipulation that he is studying the Western world).If we see the Western modern world as emerging after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s, we may indeed see scientific discovery as contributing significantly to building the Western modern world, including, of course, our contemporary Western modern world.But what about the Western pre-modern world – in ancient and medieval times, before the Gutenberg printing press emerged in in the mid-1450s in Europe and became a significant part of what is known as the Renaissance? What role(s?), if any, did (1) janusian process, (2) homospatial process, and (3) separation-connection articulation process play in the Western pre-modern world?And what about the non-Western pre-modern world and the non-Western modern world after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s?It strikes me that the activation of human potentialities in Western modern scientific creativity of (1) janusian process, (2) homospatial process, and (3) separation-connection articulation process, taken together, represent collectively a certain cultural permutation in Western modern culture – a certain permutation that was not yet fully activated in the Western pre-modern world in ancient and medieval times.Now, the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) did his massively researched doctoral dissertation about the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572) in the history of the formal study of logic and rhetoric from ancient times up to and beyond Ramus’ time.Perhaps we can liken the research that Ong had amassed to chaos, figuratively speaking. Then Ong, who was stationed in Paris for three years in the early 1950s, encountered what turned out to be, for him, a breakthrough “discerning and profound treatment of the visual-aural opposition on which the present discussion [of the aural-to-visual shift in Ramus] turns” in the French philosopher Louis Lavelle’s 1942 book La parole et l’ecriture, as Ong himself explicitly acknowledges in his massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press, page 338, note 54; for specific page references to the aural-to-visual shift, see the “Index” [page 396]; hereafter Ong’s massively researched 1958 book is referred to as RMDD).Eureka! In Dr. Rothenberg’s terminology, Ong’s creative insight enabled him to engage in the separation-connection articulation process in the course of writing his doctoral dissertation that was subsequently published, slightly revised in two volumes by Harvard University Press in 1958, the second of which, Ramus and Talon Inventory, is a briefly annotated bibliography of more than 750 volumes by Ramus, his allies, and his critics that Ong tracked down in over 100 libraries in the British Isles and Continental Europe.Now, because Dr. Rothenberg’s 2015 book about scientific creativity is my point of departure here for discussing Ong’s massively researched 1958 RMDD, I need to note here that in it Ong devotes a chapter to “The Distant Background: Scholasticism and the Quantification of Thought” (pages 53-91).Subsequently, after further reflection, Ong published the following sweeping claim about the quantification of thought in medieval logic:“In this historical perspective, medieval scholastic logic appears as a kind of pre-mathematics, a subtle and unwitting preparation for the large-scale operations in quantitative modes of thinking which will characterize the modern world. In assessing the meaning of [medieval] scholasticism, one must keep in mind an important and astounding fact: in the whole history of the human mind, mathematics and mathematical physics come into their own, in a way which has changed the face of the earth and promises or threatens to change it even more, at only one place and time, that is, in Western Europe immediately after the [medieval] scholastic experience [in short, in print culture]. Elsewhere, no matter how advanced the culture on other scores, and even along mathematical lines, as in the case of the Babylonian, nothing like a real mathematical transformation of thinking takes place – not among the ancient Egyptians or Assyrians or Greeks or Romans, not among the peoples of India nor the Chinese nor the Japanese, not among the Aztecs or Mayas, not in Islam despite the promising beginnings there, any more than among the Tartars or the Avars or the Turks. These people can all now share the common scientific knowledge, but the scientific tradition itself which they share is not a merging of various parallel discoveries made by their various civilizations. It represents a new state of mind. However great contributions other civilizations may hereafter make to the tradition, our scientific world traces its origins back always to seventeenth and sixteenth century Europe [in short, to Copernicus and Galileo], to the place where for some three centuries and more the [medieval] arts course taught in universities and para-university schools had pounded into the heads of youth a study program consisting almost exclusively of a highly quantified logic and a companion physics, both taught on a scale and with an enthusiasm never approximated or even dreamt of in ancient academies” (boldface emphasis here added by me; page 72 of Ong’s essay collection titled The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies [New York: Macmillan, 1962]).Now, Ong’s massively researched 1958 book RMDD is a pioneering study of the print culture that emerged after the emergence of the Gutenberg printing press in the mid-1450s. Other pioneering studies of print culture include the following books:In addition to Ong’s 1958 book, I would identify the following four books as other pioneering studies of print culture:(1) Richard D. Altick’s book The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900 (University of Chicago Press, 1957);(2) Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s book The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800, translated by David Gerard; edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and David Wootton (London and Brooklyn: Verso, 2010; orig. French ed., 1958);(3) Jurgen Habermas’ book The Structural Transformation of the Public Square: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (MIT Press, 1989; orig. German ed., 1962).(4) Marshall McLuhan’s book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press); in it, McLuhan draws significantly from some of Ong’s publications up to that time.Subsequently, a small army of scholars produced further studies of print culture. Today there are far too many scholarly studies of print culture to be enumerated here.Now, it remained for Ong to eventually explicitly stated the thesis that he worked with implicitly in his massively researched 1958 book RMDD. When he did, he also explicitly characterized his thesis as relationist in spirit – which strikes me as accentuating what Dr. Rothenberg refers to as connection in his discussion of the separation-connection articulation process in his 2015 book about scientific creativity.Now, in Ong’s “Preface” to his 1977 book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Cornell University Press, pages 9-13), he says the following in the first sentence: “The present volume carries forward work in two earlier volumes by the same author, The Presence of the Word (1967) and Rhetoric Romance, and Technology (1971).” He then discusses these two earlier volumes.Then Ong says, “The thesis of these two earlier works is sweeping, but it is not reductionist, as reviewers and commentators, so far as I know, have all generously recognized: the works do not maintain that the evolution from primary orality through writing and print to an electronic culture, which produces secondary orality, causes or explain everything in human culture and consciousness. Rather, the thesis is relationist: major developments, and very likely even all major developments, in culture and consciousness are related, often in unexpected intimacy, to the evolution of the word from primary orality to its present state. But the relationships are varied and complex, with cause and effect often difficult to distinguish” (pages 9-10).Thus, Ong himself claims (1) that his thesis is “sweeping” but (2) that the shifts do not “cause or explain everything in human culture and consciousness” and (3) that the shifts are related to “major developments, and very likely even all major developments, in culture and consciousness.”Major cultural developments include the rise of modern science, the rise of modern capitalism, the rise of representative democracy, the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of the Romantic Movement in philosophy, literature, and the arts.As noted, Ong implicitly works with this thesis in his massively researched 1958 book RMDD.Next in Ong’s 1977 “Preface,” he explains certain lines of investigation that he further develops in Interfaces of the Word. Then he says, “At a few points, I refer in passing to the work of French and other European structuralists – variously psychoanalytic, phenomenological, linguistic, or anthropological in cast” (page 10).Ong liked to characterize his own thought as phenomenological and personalist in cast.Now, as I like to say, Ong is not everybody’s cup of tea, figuratively speaking. Consider, for example, Ong’s own modesty in the subtitle of his book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press, 1967), the expanded published version of Ong’s 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University. His wording “Some Prolegomena” clearly acknowledges that he does not explicitly claim that his thesis as he formulated it in his 1977 “Preface” does “explain everything in human culture and consciousness” – or every cause -- but that the shifts he points out are “sweeping.”Now, please note just how careful and cagey Ong’s wording is when he says that his account of the evolution of certain changes does not “explain everything in human culture and consciousness” – or every cause.On the one hand, Ong’s terminology about primary oral culture (and primary orality, for short; and his earlier terminology about primarily oral culture) is sweeping inasmuch as it refers to all of our pre-historic human ancestors.On the other hand, his cagey remark about sorting out cause and effect does not automatically rule out the possibility that certain changes somehow contributed to the eventual historical development of writing systems and specifically phonetic alphabetic writing (= literacy) as well as to the historical development of human settlement in agriculture (or agrarian) societies and economies.Finally, because Dr. Rothenberg’s 2015 book is about scientific creativity, I should also mention here Ong’s 1982 plenary address to the American Catholic Philosophical Association titled “The Agonistic Base of Scientifically Abstract Thought: Issues in [Ong’s 1981 Book] Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness” that is reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002, pages 479-495).Ong’s 1981 book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Cornell University Press) is the published version of his 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University.

Este libro lo compré para un regalo y llegó en perfectas condiciones; no es fácil de conseguir en librerías regulares así que poder pedirlo con Amazon es una gran ventaja y comodidad.