The emergence of something qualitatively new is a matter of chance. Hence there is no visual distinction between a maker and a beholder, between an artist and his public. At a reception, the former may st<>nd out in the crowd at best by virtue of his longer hair or sartorial extravagance, but nowadays the reverse may be true as well. In any case, at the completion of the work, a maker may mingle with beholders and even assume their perspective on his work and employ their vocabulary. It is unlikely, however, that upon returning to his study, studio, or, for that matter, lab, he would attempt to rechristen his tools.
One says "I make" rather than "I create." This choice of verb reflects not only humility but the distinction between the guild and the market, for the distinction between making and creating can be made only retroactively, by the beholder. Beholders are essentially consumers, and that's why a sculptor seldom buys another sculptor's works. Any discourse on creativity, no matter how ^alytical it may turn out to be, is therefore a market discourse. One artist's recognition of another's genius is essentially a recognition of the power of chance and perhaps of the
other's industry in producing occasions for chance to invade.
This, I hope, takes care of the "make" part ofWebster's definition. Let's address the "ability" part. The notion of ability comes from experience. Theoretically, the greater one's experience, the more secure one may feel in one's ability. In reality (in art and, I would think, science), experience and the accompanying expertise are the maker's worst enemies.
The more successful you've been, the more uncertain you are, when embarking on a new project, of the result. Say, the greater the masterpiece you just produced, the smaller the likelihood of your repeating the feat tomorrow. In other words: the more questionable your ability becomes. The very notion ofability acquires in your mind a permanent question mark, and gradually one begins to regard one's work as a nonstop effort to erase that mark. This is especially true among those engaged in literature, particularly in poetry, which, unlike other arts, is bound to make detectable sense.
But even adorned with an exclamation mark, ability is not guaranteed to spawn masterpieces each time it is applied. We all know plenty of uniquely endowed artists and scientists who produce little of consequence. Dry spells, writer's blocks, and fallow stretches are the companions ofpractically every known genius, all lamenting about them bitterly, as do much lesser lights. Often a gallery signs up an artist, or an institution a scientist, only to learn how slim the pickings may get.
In other words, ability is not reducible either to skill or to an individual's energy, much less the congeniality ofone's surroundings, one's financial predicament, or one's milieu. Had it been otherwise, we would have had by now a far greater volume of masterpieces on our hands than is the case. In short, the ratio of those engaged throughout just this century in art and science to the appreciable results is such that one is tempted to equate ability with chance.
Well, it looks as if chance inhabits both parts of Webster's definition of creativity rather cozily. It is so much so that it occurs to me that perhaps the term "creativity" denotes not so much an aspect of human agency as the property of the material to which this agency now and then is applied; that perhaps the ugliness of the term is, after all, justified, since it bespeaks the pliable or malleable aspects ofinanimate matter. Perhaps the One who dealt with that matter first is not called the Creator for nothing. Hence, creativity.
Considering Webster's definition, a qualifier is perhaps in order. Denoting a certain unidentified resistance, "the ability to make" perhaps should be accompanied by a sobering "war on chance." A good question is, of course, what comes first—the material or its maker? For all our professed humility, at our end of the galaxy the answer is obvious and resounds with hubris. The other—and a much better question—is, whose chance are we talking about here, the maker's or the material's?
Neither hubris nor humility will be of much help here. Perhaps in trying to answer this question, we have to jettison the notion of virtue altogether. But then we always have been tempted to do just that. So let's seize this opportunity: not for the sake of scientific inquiry so much as for Webster's reputation.
But I am afraid we need a footnote.
II
Because human beings are finite, their system of causality is linear, which is to say, self-referential. The same goes for their notion of chance, since chance is not cause-free; it is but a moment of interference by another system of causality, however aberrant its pattern, in our own. The very existence of the term, not to mention a variety of epithets accompanying it (for instance, "blind"), shows that our concepts of order and chance are both essentially anthropomorphic.
Had the area of human inquiry been limited to the animal kingdom, that would be fine. However, it's manifestly not so; it's much larger and, on top of that, a human being insists on knowing the truth. The notion of truth, in its own right, is also anthropomorphic and presupposes, on the part of the inquiry's subject—i.e., the world—a withholding of the story, if not outright deception.
Hence a variety of scientific disciplines probing the universe in the most minute manner, the intensity of which— especially of their language—could be likened to torture. In any case, if the truth about things has not been attained thus far, we should put this down to the world's extraordinary resilience rather than to a lack of effort. The other explanation, of course, is truth's absence; an absence that we don't accept because of its drastic consequences for our ethics.
Ethics—or, to put it less grandly but perhaps more pointedly, pure and simple eschatology—as the vehicle of science? Perhaps; at any rate, what human inquiry indeed boils down to is the animate interrogating the inanimate. Small wonder that the results are inconclusive; smaller wonder still that the methods and the language we employ in the process more and more resemble the matter at hand itself.
Ideally, perhaps, the animate and the inanimate should swap places. That, of course, would be to the liking of the dispassionate scientist, who places such a premium on objectivity. Alas, this is not likely to happen, as the inanimate doesn't seem to show any interest in the animate: the world is not interested in its humans. Unless, of course, we ascribe to the world divine provenance, which, for several millennia now, we've failed to demonstrate.
If the truth about things indeed exists, then, given our status as the world's latecomers, that truth is bound to be nonhuman. It is bound to cancel out our notions of causality, aberrant or not, as well as those ofchance. The same applies to our surmises as to the world's provenance, be it divine, molecular, or both: the viability of a concept depends on the viability of its carriers.
Which is to say that our inquiry is essentially a highly solipsistic endeavor. For the only opportunity available for the animate to swap places with the inanimate is the former's physical end: when man joins, as it were, matter.
Still, one can stretch matters somewhat by imagining that it is not the inanimate which is under the animate's investigation but the other way around. This rings a certain metaphysical bell, and not so faintly. Of course, it's difficult to build either science or a religion on such a foundation. Still, the possibility shouldn't be ruled out, if only because this option allows our notion of causality to survive intact. Not to mention that of chance.
What sort of interest could the infinite take in the finite? To see how the latter might modify its ethics? But ethics as such contains its opposite. To tax human eschatology further? But the results will be quite predictable. Why would the infinite keep an eye on the finite?