When we remember things we picture the event in our minds eye recalling sounds, sights,smells,feelings etc…So when we Imagine something that we have never experienced how do we do that with nothing to guide us?
Hume touched on this; i rather like his idea.
Say we have never seen a particular shade of red, say we are presented with a chart of colors gradually fading from one color into the next, would we see a blank where the shade we havent experianced yet is or would we recognize its similarity to the other shades and call it red too?
also,he said that anything we imagine is a complex or composite of prior experiances(or impressions as he called them). ie we can imagine a gold mountain because we have experianced the impression of both a mountain(or im sure a big hill would suffice) and the color gold; so imagining a mountin which is gold, we just superimpose the color gold on our idea of a mountain.
He also said that our ideas can’t approach the vibrance or vividness of our original experiances to such a degree as to make the idea indestinguishable from the impression.
We have everything we’ve ever experienced guiding us!
This all comes down to creativity. Psychology sees it as a combining proses; you add things you know to curtain structures you know, etc. (For example: an idea for a novel = things you know about + novel structures you know about. Kind of a plain example, but it works.)
Many artists, however, do not approve of this. It sort of kills the mystical side of creating something.
As a writer myself, I fully behind this theory. Surely everyone agrees that you can’t write about something you don’t know ANYTHING about. Right?
Mark Twain, in his great book “What is man?”, explains his views on how people don’t make up anything. They just add stuff they know together and, not totally unlike a machine, produce the thing we call an idea. This works in all great inventions as well, even if a person has to combine hundreds of little ideas.
We create.
What gives us the capacity for creativity?
Can someone create something new?
Even if an artist paints an figure which is completely unique, he uses real colors. So, are we just reorginizing natural elements to give the illusion of creativity, or do we have the ability to create from scratch?
in other words, can we develop an idea of something that is completely unique and represent this idea through art/invention/account?
How does one invent the internet or a flying machine for the 1st time?
How can one create an image of something that hasn’t existed before unless one aims to produce the sense of chaos?
It’s merely putting concepts together. But there’s indeed an inspiration: an aeroplane imitates a bird, for instance.
You can’t get things from air. Creativity consists only of (and copyrights protect that only btw) the way ideas are expressed, illustrated and/or organised, not the ideas themselves.
Shakespeare didn’t invent the words “to”, “be”, “or” and “not”, but he took and arranged them in a way original and clever. That’s his inventiveness. Even the words he - allegedly- created came from something: Greek/Latin roots, new uses or categories (e.g. “control” as a noun), combinations (“bat-like”)…
The same happens with music: many guitar techniques, for instance, have been created in order to imitate other sounds (e.g. engines), or other instruments (e.g. violins, human voice…).