To be creative, Chinese philosophy teaches us to abandon ‘originality’
psyche.co
psyche.co
Adherence to a strict form, like a sonnet, breeds creativity because of the constraint. (a little known fact is that e.e. cummings wrote more than a few very good ones)
Much earlier in time, scops and skalds -- the epic oral poets of anglo-saxon and norse cultures -- were renowned not so much for their ability to come up with new things as such, but by how cunningly they could weave together stock phrases and allusions to speak to the current moment.
Parallels to the midrashic traditions should be fairly obvious.
You see it in greek epic poetry too: the opening invocation of The Odyssey ends with "tell the old story / for our modern times".
Its hacking equivalent is demoscene and hand-tuned assembly.
Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it's my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.I did Smalltalk for 20 years, a language that constrained you to think about things in a consistent paradigm. And I felt I was much more creative there than the handful of multi paradigm languages I use today.
I get the impression that adherents of Forth, Lisp, Haskell, also seem to claim creative empowerment with these single paradigm languages.
I'm not sure how one would make this observation less anecdotal. I'm also not sure that I'm not mixing causation with correlation in my observation (e.g. supposing my thesis is valid, it may just be that more creative people are drawn to single/consistent paradigm platforms).
some trivial examples involve roughly every hymn, "god bless the queen"/"my country 'tis of thee", "john brown's body"/"battle hymn of the republic", "to anacreon in heav'n"/"the star spangled banner" ....
The other big case are missals: same words, vastly different settings. You know the lyrics are the Mass, but how they're sung is where you show off.
This parable sounds like it's less concerned with creativity and more with tacit knowledge.
In the Zhuangzi, knowledge is often discussed in terms of the interconnectedness of all things. The story cited in the OP is one example of several anecdotes which describe a skilled craftsman who is instinctively good at what he does but is unable to describe what he's doing in a formulaic manner. (Again, note the contrast to the "Confucian" texts which are very prescriptive about self-cultivation - in other words, they're all about following precise formulae.)
For background, I have undergrad/graduate degrees in Chinese Literature focusing mostly on ancient/early medieval texts.
This is a bit different from my understanding of Daodejing. Do you know which chapter? I quickly checked the original text and only the 65th chapter mentioned along the lines "commoners shouldn't be taught to be cunning instead of honesty, otherwise difficult to rule" <excuse crappy translation>
It sounds like Richard Loewy's MAYA principle, most advanced yet acceptable.
>Go find a couple of kids (or adults!) who haven’t yet learned to ride a bike and see if you can teach them — through the power of your explanations alone!<
I did exactly this with a few navy friends whose parents never had the time to teach them, it worked fine.
>how to cycle without scraping their shins.<
This is a shifted goalpost, most people consider falling and getting back up to be part of learning to ride a bike.
>And if you are successful, be critical with yourself: how much of your success is due to the bike rider figuring it out on their own? And how much of it is due to your verbal instructions?<
This applies just as much to tacit knowledge, the difference is that I can give functional instructions to a large group (especially if paired with video material for physical tasks). Further, most students can learn on their own but won't. The point of the instructor is to be motivational by whatever means are permitted in addition to being informative.
> This explanation bit deserves some attention. In pedagogy, this is known as ‘transmissionism’, and it is regarded amongst serious educators with the same sort of derision you and I might have about flat-earth theories today.<
This is true in the same way that it's true most economists today aren't Keynesian anymore. It's because the parts of the theory that worked have been absorbed into broader teaching theories and practices. Learning styles haven't been strongly been supported by science for awhile but educators still learn the approach because it adds another tool to the box.
None of their broader arguments are necessarily wrong but when the given counterpoints are so weak it's hard to feel like the rest of the explanation is more than coffee talk.
William Morris, one of the father of modern day design and a medievalist despised industrialization, but considered sincere imitation to be authentic. If we consider authenticity to be an essential characteristic of being creative, can you call imitation a creative endeavor? https://www.raghuveer.net/posts/sincere-imitation-can-be-aut...
Chinese, Indian and European art traditions used to flavor integration. You learn to copy the masters. After you master the earlier techniques you are ready to contribute something new to the whole.
Originality for the sake of originality is very modern concept. Modern art takes this into extreme. Artists are trashing around desperately and are doing random things to be original. We end up with works that generate momentary 'heh' moments when the artist is especially clever.
> Imitate, Imitate, Imitate, Innovate
So not just art but also in sports
[0]https://www.cnn.com/style/article/banana-artwork-eaten-scli-...
Prior to the camera re-creating a scene with reasonable realism was a technical challenge.
But now everyone does it on a whim whenever and where ever they want.
So then the question is what can artists contribute that is different.
In other words, learn your craft and the way you express it will be individual to you. There is no need to create a "style" for your work. I think this relates to the topic!
Picasso: https://www.wikiart.org/en/pablo-picasso/artist-s-mother-189...
Mondrian: https://www.wikiart.org/en/piet-mondrian/wood-with-beech-tre...
Kandinsky: https://www.wikiart.org/en/wassily-kandinsky/odessa-port-189...
Miro: https://www.wikiart.org/en/joan-miro/house-with-palm-tree (admittedly abstracted, but very far from his later work)
Oh joy.
Having studied only a few semesters of art at university I realized it wasn't for me. Still, I appreciate that the instructors weren't dogmatic about the craft. They let me explore it from a digital first perspective in the early oughts.
These same people are going to be horrified by style transfer and all of the ML developments coming to upset the art world.
Pretty soon practicing shading and lighting skills will be as obscure as making your own paper and inks. People will still do it, but it won't be necessary.
The problem is that especially beginners are quick to jump to saying it is their "style" when being critiqued even tough what they were doing wasn't intentional or isn't perceived as intentional.
E.g it is easy to play an instrument off-beat, and every now and then it will sound really good by accident. But playing off-beat intentionally, consistently in a appealing fashion in different contexts takes a ton of practice.
But there is also the other extreme. The founder of FZD, a concept art school in Singapore mentioned in one of his videos that he is worried that a lot of young students are way too focused on learning fundamentals and doing tedious muscle memory drills found on Youtube instead of drawing just for fun for hours and hours, experimenting, making mistakes and correcting them.
So I think it is about finding a balance between honing your technique and knowledge and applying your current skill level in different creative ways, that will eventually result in your own style and the development of your style over time.
> In this short vignette, a wheelwright known as Pian (扁) tells a duke that the book of sages’ advice he’s reading is nothing but ‘chaff and dregs’. Angered, the duke demands an explanation. The wheelwright responds that, at least concerning his craft, he can create what he does only because he’s developed a ‘knack’ for it that can’t be wholly conveyed in words. If the blows of his mallet are too gentle, his chisel slides and won’t take hold. If they’re too hard, it bites in and won’t budge.
The above excerpt makes no mention of originality, and a normal person would just read it as promoting practical experience over theory.
This is just the author trying to push her own opinions onto some ancient works, with nobody able to call her out for it because the source materials are in a language the audience can't understand.
> a spontaneous integration between contrasting types such as the hard and the soft, as well as the learned and the spontaneous, the active and the passive, and even the unproductive and the productive – all of which apply in the case of carving wheels, as well as elsewhere. In other words, living well involves creativity.
Even if we examine the story in more depth, it _still_ doesn't make any sense; incredibly strong propositions such as the one below are thrown out all over the place.
> his craft in an integrated manner that can’t be fully captured through an algorithmic list of instructions
Once the subvocalization stops, there is no 'conversation' to spy on, to recite to others by way of explanation. Which may be why I have spotted a number of situations where an advanced student has an easier time explaining things to an intermediate student than the instructor does (and especially an intermediate to a beginner); they are either still narrating, or the recency of that experience of narrating improves their recall (and their empathy).
Very old habits can be hard to break. I can clearly remember as a child pondering my reaction to a situation and weighing the options. Talking myself through it. Now they're automatic, I've already done the thing I'm trying to handle differently before my brain has a chance to comment on it. As far as I'm aware, there's a gap between our understanding of age-related cognitive decline and observed behavior (people have the capacity to adapt but don't use it), and I suspect that this particular phenomenon fills in part of that blank spot.
Industrialization has demonstrated that, at least for wheels, this is untrue.
Dylan initially rose to fame by rewriting old folk songs and gospel hymns, emulating a lot of Beat poetry (Kerouac/Ginsburg), and then doing a similar thing across genres like rock and blues. Picasso also famously drifted between styles. "Lesser artists borrow; great artists steal".
Shakespeare can definitely be considered "original".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare's_influence#Influe...
As luck would have it; Break the ice; Fair play; In a pickle; It's greek to me; What's done is done.
To be fair, the idea of inventing new words isn't very original and not limited to shakespeare. Ordinary people/writers/etc have been coining new words since human speech began.
There is a good post about this over at AskHistorians: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/99oio9/if_wi... (Follow the references if you are interested in the subject)
> Unfortunately, the citations have very frequently been misread: in particular, the ‘first citation’ for a word, or sub-meaning of a word, has mistakenly been taken as being the ‘first use’ – the earliest example of the word the OED readers could find. This is unfortunate, because the OED readers and editors were not making claims about priority: citations are exemplary rather than evidential. (...)
> This means that Shakespeare features as the first citation for a very large number of head words and sub-meanings – and this has mistakenly been taken as evidence that Shakespeare ‘invented’ these words and meanings.
I'm not sure I would call it "creativity," though. I'll have to think about that, too.
This shouldn't be controversial, because it's the difference between making good wheels and inventing the idea of the wheel in the first place.
The work of craftsmen is often denigrated as being unoriginal and indistinguishable, but quite often a craftsman's work bears the distinctive stamp of its creator, and when you look closely you can tell one craftsman's work from another.
Craftspeople also do innovate in technique and coming up with new motifs. The line between craft and art is blurry, and there are good arguments to be made for craft to be considered art.
I am reminded also of the snobbish attitude some people have towards genre fiction and genre films. Work made in a genre is often seen as somehow lesser or not worthy compared to "serious" film and fiction. However, again and again genre films and fiction come out which are widely considered to be masterpieces. I'm thinking of, say, Kubrick's work in science fiction and horror (2001 and The Shining), Philip K Dick's science fiction, and Lovecraft's horror. Many of their works are now considered masterpieces despite working in what were once considered to be backwater genres.
What is considered to be art has also radically changed over the millennia. Many things now considered to be high art (like, say, Duchamp's Fountain[1]) are considered masterpieces of art that broke new ground, but at the same time it could be argued that it's not art at all, and in fact any work of a craftsperson has more of a claim to the term "art" than something like Duchamp's Fountain, which wasn't even made by Duchamp, and is a mere industrial product. But can industrial products be art? Apparently they can, if they're placed in to a gallery and looked at in a certain way.
A master luthier does not invent a brand new type of instrument each time they create a guitar. They may have learnt to make guitars from someone else, and do nothing but follow the process they have mastered. And, many authors are terrible at much of their craft, and yet so creative that their prose is still engaging. While the real world is invariably messier than this, that does not mean that one can conflate craftmanship and creativity as the author does.
TBH, I'm afraid that I'm finding it's hard to see the author's conflation of the two as anything but culturalist.
There's much more craftsmanship (e.g. the cultivation of tacit knowledge) in abstract art than meets the eye. Relative to the entire process, the substantive novelity, such it is, is so miniscule that I would hesitate to say that it's greater than what can be found in the more mundane crafts, at least when comparing people of similar intensity, intelligence, and devotion. And often the reverse may be true, as the constraints in working on well-trodden ground can be challenging and inspiring. That's my $0.02. ;)
TL;DR: I agree.
As I see it this is the main point behind the USA-China "trade war"
I think the USA only defends IP because of the economic implications. I think the Chinese have the better idea regarding "IP".
But I have no doubt that were the roles reversed (China "owns" most IP and USA just manufactures it) the Chinese government would be staunchly defending IP.
Hamilton didn’t just send Americans to Britain in search of the secrets of the industrial revolution. He used patents to lure immigrants with skills and knowledge to move to the United States. George Parkinson, for example, was awarded a patent in 1791 for a textile spinning machine, which was really just a rip-off of a machine he had used in England. The United States also paid his family's expenses to emigrate and re-locate to the US."
https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2018/07/30/ip_thef...
Edit: The history of hollywood is also fitting: https://penntoday.upenn.edu/2012-05-10/research/bumpy-histor...
Sort of like changing culture at a company. It won't work by firing off links to everyone - at least where I work. Will need to sneak it into converations.
For the idea this is more traditional and no need to quote him as he might not agree. Let us say the first book is about totally free from anything and above everything. Conform, constraint ... the whole message is about free from everything.
It is comment inside the book that a guy which can freely fly away to anywhere is not good enough as he still need to wait for the wind.
And if ignore whether it z or not, the problem of just copying and stealing without a culture nurture individuality is the harm to humanity by chinese culture. Not contribution. Not something one should model and sell to the wider public.
We need individuality and original idea. Not another copy or ...
Evolve and beyond, no constraint and free.
The article below talks about a similar concept albeit from a business perspective https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/originality-is-not-t...
Ant/Bee philosophy.