The Creative Complexity. Education for a Musical Creation Process

Abstract

This article starts from Straus' dichotomous thinking, characterising its gnostic (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 carry out 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 formulated the hypothesis that feeling, the pathic moment, constitutes what we nowadays call embodied knowledge
or enaction. This point of view allowed us to build 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 Straus' two moments was thus defined, but not the raison d'être, the fuel that sets this dynamic of passage in motion. 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 B.C. It is about the embodiment of materials and situations experienced by the subject when immersion occurs, and his or her separation/objectification when mimetic immersion is absent.