THE STRATEGY OF CREATIVITY
Creativity, Passion & Strategy
By Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
Saturday, July 30, 2011
In any competent attempt to deal with the actual principles of modern warfare, it is essential that the measure associated with a mistaken, sense-certainty-based notion of a proper standard of measure, must be discarded. That must be done in favor of what I shall restate here, as a truly Riemannian notion of the transcendental, as this is to be reconsidered from the vantage-point of V.I. Vernadsky's presentation of the universal physical principle of the Noösphere.
I had provided an illustration of this notion in a recent treatment of the notion of the higher principle associated with such Classical cases such as the subject of World War II, as such are to be strictly contrasted with the folly of affairs such as the prolonged U.S. Indo-China War.
So, for example, the passion of warfare, rather than the merely reductionist varieties of expressions of the geometry of conflict, expresses the quality of passion essential to the principle of the flank. That latter case is aptly illustrated by the most famous battle of Prussia's Frederick the Great.
So, I recall World War II. Although my personal role in Southeast Asia's northern Burma was of minuscule significance within that war, my experience, later, in a 1945 India still under the heel of a British imperial tyranny of the Raj, contained all of the essentially principled features of warfare which might have been found under the later conditions of Indo-China warfare in post-World War II Southeast Asia. As I said on a recent occasion, varieties of passion of mortal conflicts, are the key word for the varieties of such connections.
So, Frederick the Great, leading a weaker force, routed a well-trained, and ostensibly superior, Austrian force, by outflanking the Austrians' Classical plot, twice on the same day of battle. It was only later, after that particular victory, that Frederick viewed what had been his role in the Seven Years' War with a proper sense of irony. Great passion, as in warfare, does not necessarily contain the justification of the cause it had been called up to serve.
So, Passion lifts the principle of action to that qualitatively higher level of intensity which might be mistakenly presumed by many, as representing a weaker force, but, one which, nonetheless, is directed by a superior quality of passion. By "passion," signify the category of notions otherwise associated with "energy-flux density," or, the same thing, in effect: a higher order of ostensibly metaphorical forces. The proper measure of passion in such matters, is to be recognized, and that uniquely, in the uniqueness of the qualities of the human mind.
Foreword:
The Principle of Mind
The approach to strategy which I have just indicated above, requires bringing into play conceptions which are not definable as in accord with conventional, reductionist's notions of a physical science. Nonetheless, it is that conception which is actually at play in such cases as this one being introduced here.
For example, as my associate Sky Shields, would also emphasize, generally practiced science is still stuck, customarily, to the present day, in such follies as a functionally futile, Laplacean notion of a simple progression, a progression which is mistakenly viewed as "physical time."
Therefore, whereas, "biological time" must encompass developments which are to be located in terms of changes of state which must appear to have occurred as a consequence of an action which occurred, ostensibly, in the past, or in the future, depending on the sequence chosen to be considered.
Human time, as distinct from that of other expressions of life, carries our attention far beyond the mere experience of life, even human life. The creative consciousness of the human life itself, can not be measured against other expressions of living processes; it is a dimension which exists only in human life itself, as Academician V.I. Vernadsky presented this.
To narrow the view of that principle of human time, it is most useful to limit the discussion of a physical principle of time, to a focus of attention on the domain of that reign of living processes which is to be located approximately within the domain of the human species on Earth and its nearby, planetary space.
This view of the uniquely special role of human life, can be made clear from appropriate consideration of modern human culture. A science-driven progress of a modern human culture, is the most powerful, and therefore dominant agent of the reigning quality of change known to us; man's own utilization of a level of technology known as "man-controlled nuclear fission" is sufficient to illustrate that point. All life is creative, but, only mankind is known to us as capable of voluntary creative initiative.
However, the principle is clearer from the vantage-point of situating human life's place and role in more than a billion years of the evolution of life on Earth, as within not only life on Earth generally, but, also, within the galaxy which contains our Solar system.
`What Is Human Creativity?'
For years past, I have enjoyed what has been a uniquely distinct notion of "human creativity." That with good, practical reasons for doing so.
Nonetheless, what I have recognized in this way, does not presume that mine is the only expression of true human creativity; but, it, my own, is the one specific to my experience of the subject-matter. I could qualify that statement by stating my agreement with the notion, that the essential quality of human creativity, is located best in the conception of Classical poetic metaphor as adopted by such as the Pythagoreans, Archytas, and Plato, the metaphor which identifies that agreement. Nonetheless, my own conception happens to have been originally unique to my experience, a view of mine which can not be separated from certain implications specific to that experience which has been my own.
The importance of emphasizing my own definition, lies in the effect of the way I have drawn certain specific kinds of practical consequences, consequences which are located, specifically, in the way my choice of application of this notion came into being, as I stated that relevance in remarks to an assembled body of the "basement team," this past Friday noontime and afternoon, as I had summarized the same in my presentation to Saturday's midday National Executive Committee report.
I explain that as follows. Consider the following argument as an illustration of that distinction of my own view, as now follows.
The relevant precursor of my notion of human creativity, came to me, according to my best secured memory of that experience, about the age of 14, an experience prompted by a specific quality of experience with repeated visits to the Charlestown, Massachusetts U.S. Navy Yard. It was, fortunately, an experience which preceded my experience with my first encounter with "Euclidean Plane Geometry." I have never accepted, fortunately, any expression of Euclidean geometry, or, of kindred ways of thinking, since that time. I was correct in doing so; the evidence was, for me, crucial and conclusive; and, I was in the right in drawing that conclusion.
Simply, to illustrate the point, as I have summarized my relevant experience in remarks distributed over the years: the stimulus was my fascination with the manner in which structural steel was employed in constructions reaching higher than the iron-framed brick structures of the Boston area. The crucial issue was the ability of the construction employing the supporting role of structural steel to support both its own weight and that of the height of the completed structure, too. As I put the point in one secondary school class-room, the crucial evidence was the "holes" built into the structural steel support. That became, as if instantly, my notion expressing a physical principle of construction "of a weighty and weight-bearing structure."
Once I had enjoyed that experience of discovery, I could never accept Euclidean method or its likeness, not since that time. I had, then, already escaped the lurking trap of the classroom textbook in the virtual "nick of time." Aristotle, as I came to know him, received similar treatment from me, that for kindred reasons.
That, and subsequent, related sorts of experience, created, for me, a recognizable category of conceptions which belong to the powers of imagination of the human mind, expressed by the awareness of the powers of judgment specific to the human mind. The result of that turn in outlook was an experience like that of steel filings drawn "as if fatally" to a fascination with the experience of ontological paradox inherent in poetic metaphor, as, notably, from Shakespeare, Keats, and Shelley. My notion of metaphor was thus bred into me in that specific way. This prepared me for the experience of becoming an admirer of Bernhard Riemann, that done by the time of the early months of 1953.
This ironical turn from elementary physical experiment to Classical poetry, was not really exceptional in and of itself. The principle of metaphor is the most natural consequence of a maturing entry of the young along the pathway associated with the certain coincidence between the musician-scientists Max Planck and Albert Einstein (for example), exactly as Johannes Kepler became, in this way, the only known original and competent discoverer of the universal law of gravitation, a discovery which is to be attributed in its roots to the De Docta Ignorantia of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa.
The root of science is to be located in the Classical artistic imagination. Why not? Where, otherwise, could we expect to find truth within what was the ante-room filled with precursors of that which is yet to be imagined? Metaphor is, thus, the most typical route taken to discover the truth which is yet to become yet to be known: just as I discovered a physical principle of geometry among the pillars of construction at the Boston U.S. Navy Yard.
Discovery leads, thus, to what is imagined; the experiment which verifies the imagination, is properly to be called "physical science."
As Percy Bysshe Shelley writes in the concluding paragraph of his A Defence of Poetry, it is the intimation of truth in this manner, which is the precursor of experimental discoveries of truthful principles. Thus, Classical poetry, and its expression as that and other Classical arts, are the expression of that power of the Classical scientific imagination which precedes physical science itself.
Such is the principle of the human mind
I. What Is Your Mind?
In commonplace opinion, even still today, the discovery of the notion of the human mind begins with the study of the effects attributed to what has been celebrated as the allegedly "original five senses." However, once the notion of sense-perception has been established as a virtual platform for further explorations, this naive view of matters comes under pressures of a notion of change.
The most profitable of the putative original approaches to examining that class of facts, is to be found in the practice of astronomy by ancient, trans-oceanic navigators, such as, at a relatively later time, the great Eratosthenes who had measured the size of the Earth by the relevant set of shadows cast by the Sun's light. These kinds of discoveries by great mariners and their like, had already defined, at least implicitly, the notion of a finite but unbounded universe, a universe to be recognized as a principle by the worthy trans-oceanic mariner.
So, Nicholas of Cusa had pointed out the implications of this, as in the advice which was passed to Christopher Columbus from Cusa's own assignment to future mariners. It was Cusa's influence on Christopher Columbus's decision to cross the Atlantic to lands beyond.
The use of the relevant instruments of navigation was already the expression of the use of instruments by means of which the mind of mankind was uplifted from the bounds of the human senses to what would become, later, the effect of the concluding, third section of Bernhard Riemann's 1854 habilitation dissertation: the image of what was in fact, Albert Einstein's reading of the uniquely original discovery of the principle of gravitation developed, uniquely, by Johannes Kepler, and understood by Albert Einstein as the image of a finite, but unbounded universe.
This had been shown by the reading of the actually physical principle adumbrated as so-called Abelian functions by Niels Abel, as redefined from the physical-scientific standpoints of both Lejeune Dirichlet and Bernhard Riemann. Thus, in the closing section of Riemann's habilitation dissertation, Riemann warned, that in a systemic manner, that science must depart the domain of mere mathematics, if it were to show us the meaning of an actually physical universe.
Since the appearance of that concluding section of Riemann's 1854 habilitation dissertation, modern science had achieved the effect of great leaps of progress which are to be recognized now as the effects of discoveries which have had the effect of redefining the universe through the superseding, in a systematic way, of the notion of the array of what is, in effect, an expanding repertoire of "physical dimensions" of the universe, reaching now a set of rapidly expanding dimensions, far beyond the realm of an "original," mere five, crude biological notions of sense-perceptions.
Thus, the accrued collection of principles, such as those of sense-perceptual categories, represents an expanding array of physical dimensions, proceeding from the notion of "an original five," to an indefinitely expanding array. The initial set of "buds" represented as categories of physical-sense-certainty, prompts our view of our universe to open and display its inner self in the fashion of a great flowering of the petals of the sensory imagination.
This defines a pattern with a decided effect which is expressed in the form of an essentially changing identity of the nature of the human individual which is affected by such transformations.
The Principle of the Change
The changes now to be considered here, have the effect of ordered changes in the characteristics of successively higher orders of the physical changes which occur as a consequence of changes in the matrix of both the mind of the human individual, and the consequent, physically ontological transformations in the physically inherent characteristics of the personal identity.
Construct an hypothesis which charts the changes in the human personality which are the effect, initially, of a change from the mind of the person who "knows only" the experience of the raw sense-perceptions which had been, so to speak, "born" in the naive human infant. The limitation defines a categorical "class" of the relevant human individuals.
Now add "new physical dimensions" to that original repertoire.
The general result implied by such a configuration, is the image of the qualitative changes in the personality of the individual who has slipped from one configuration, to larger, or smaller essential sorts of "dimensions."
First of all, the sense of the identity of the human individual's place in the physical universe implicitly defined by the relevant array of "factors," emerges to appear as a human identity which undergoes successive, elementary changes in functional characteristics of behavioral traits. The succession of such changes, locates the changing sense of identity as if moving from one place in physical space-time functions, to higher or lower, but decidedly different "places" in the human behavioral spectrum.
Thus, the powers of qualitative such development define a qualitative change in virtual species, yet without any other change in the characteristics of virtually each and all biological types of the human species defined in terms of such parameters as these.
This view of the matter suggests two, alternative interpretations.
Either the human personality must be ordered in its changes by its biological type per se, or the relevant, qualitative change in qualitative type must have occurred without the requirement of any physical change in the biology of the human individual. In the latter case, the effect of a change in the apparent biological-physical type of human individual, must be essentially "intellectual," rather than "physical."
In the latter case, human beings must be defined as having a potential of being a certain type of super-species, a species in which the essential principle of "evolutionary change" defines a potentially immortal "super-species," a virtually immortal type of species at its base, but also as creating a series of a certain set of types of "outer husk" as the context for sheltering its existence.
On the latter account, we are impelled to project the existence of a type which is immediately still categorically "mortal," but also a species which is implicitly immortal as an existing species.
The latter option is buttressed by the evidence that the existence of known types of living processes within our galaxy is subjected to an ordering of the survival of species according to a required rise in the order of "energy-flux density" required as representing the precondition for a set of species which embody a qualitatively higher order of energy-flux density. This would require that that species fulfill the requirement for an immortal species in terms of that frame of reference.
On such accounts, the evidence is that mankind is the only immortal species presently known to us, that on the condition that the requirement of progress in the order of the level of advancement in terms of "energy-flux density" is satisfied.
Such an immortal species would be of a type consistent with the free advancement in the energy-density of the culture, per capita, and according to the implications otherwise. It would an immortal species in type, an immortal species in that sense.
