Creative Complexity Shedding Light on Creative Musical Processes

This work completes the content of a recent publication^[1] by insisting on and deepening essential aspects of the creative process that had been left in abeyance. In this paper we start analysing Erwin Straus’ dichotomous thinking, characterising his “gnosic” (knowing) and “pathic” (feeling) moments and determining their differences: feeling is rooted in the movement of attraction or repulsion that the creator experiences with his whole being, while knowing is the result of a conceptual elaboration mediated by language. Nowhere in his work does Straus determine the existence of a passage between these two moments, which allows us to formulate the hypothesis that, for him, we are dealing with two irreducible categories. The latter being impossible to understand for an artist, who normally works on both levels to realise his work, we set out in search of this passage between knowing and feeling by interpreting Straus’ thought in the light of phenomenology and neuroscience; we hypothesised that feeling, the pathic moment, constitutes what we nowadays call embodied knowledge or enaction. This point of view allowed us to draw on Merleau-Ponty’s and Varela’s conception of circularity between embodied knowledge and conceptual knowledge, which brought us very close to the question of the passage between feeling and knowing. But an additional problem was apparent in the representation of this circularity: according to Straus, feeling and knowing would be in two different ontological categories, since one is rooted in movement and action – in intentionality, Husserl would say – and the other is not. This made it impossible to imagine a mere circular movement between the two, since, if this were the case, for feeling and knowing to communicate they would have to be located on the same ontological level. This is where we articulate Deleuze’s topological representation, allowing circularity and at the same time making it possible for feeling and knowing to keep their specific differences; separate categories, but at the same time united, the Möbius strip allows us to visualise the present virtuality of knowing (feeling), and, vice versa, the present virtuality of feeling (knowing).

The dynamic between the two moments of Straus was thus defined, but not the raison d’être, the fuel that puts this dynamic of passage into operation. Our hypothesis is that the circularity of knowing/feeling is produced by what Jean-Marie Schaeffer calls mimetic immersion, a term that updates a discovery made by Plato in The Republic three centuries before Christ. It is the embodiment of materials and situations experienced by the subject when immersion occurs, and their separation/ objectification when mimetic immersion is absent.

  Keywords: Aesthetics, Psychology, Heuristics, Complexity, Musical Creation