Architect and poet Paolo Belardi traces the many conditions and situations that have inspired extraordinary ideas across the arts and sciences.
While discussing the problem of how ideas arise in his “Science of Logic,” Hegel stated that “the beginning must be an absolute, or what is synonymous here, an abstract beginning.” Therefore, a new beginning “may not suppose anything, must not be mediated by anything,” but “must be purely and simply an immediacy, or rather merely immediacy itself.” In other words, Hegel declares the utter necessity of intuition, renouncing the control of the rational mind in favor of unconscious foresight. This is perhaps motivated by the fact that self-censoring doesn’t exist in the unconscious or in ideas, which are free to combine in improbable and ever-mixing associations.
There are many paradigms of the inventive act, but Graham Wallas’s 1926 theory outlining the creative process is still particularly interesting today. Wallas, though aware of the fluidity of the creative process, subdivided it into four phases. The first phase, preparation, consists of focusing on the problem, realizing that it can be solved, and collecting and organizing the required information. The second phase, incubation, concerns the manipulation of the collected material not only via sequential reasoning but also through mental feedback circuits. These two phases together are called “maturation,” which might last for years. The third phase, illumination, is concentrated on the epiphany of the solution, and ignores all hierarchies in activating all possible thinking modes: deduction, induction, and abduction. The fourth and final phase, verification, focuses on the logical structure of what has been elaborated so as to make the idea comprehensible, communicable, and feasible. As a result, there is a significant difference between the third phase and the others in terms of both time and intellectual importance, exemplified by Thomas Edison’s belief that “genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”
Wallas underrated two crucial aspects, though. First, he didn’t give enough importance to the role of the cultural context, which is particularly relevant for the initial point of departure. From Pericles’ Athens to Federico da Montefeltro’s Urbino to Maria Theresa’s Vienna: Imagine how important it was to be born and educated in those precise historical periods, rather than in a nomad camp or the Siberian steppe. Most critically, though, Wallas didn’t investigate the methods of enlightenment enough, omitting a critical analysis of the always-present conditions of inventive genesis. Although it’s not my intention to reduce creativity to an algorithm, let’s try to list these conditions that are always present, documenting them with examples.
Ideas arise from fortuitous circumstances. According to legend, Charles Didelot, maître de ballet and choreographer at London’s King’s Theater, was the first to experiment with the use of en pointe (tiptoe) ballet
