Freedom and Creativity

H. Paul Zeiger Ph.D.

Introduction

Why grapple with such broad notions as freedom and creativity, approaching them from a Descriptive Psychology point of view? The answer goes back to the reasons that led to the creation of Descriptive in the first place: Pete G. Ossorio found the existing language and conceptual structures of science both impoverished, by the lack of needed concepts relevant to behavior, and biased, in the direction of a reductionist or clockwork model of the universe. He therefore expanded the linguistic and conceptual scope, using resources from everyday language, but with more precise semantics than are available for everyday language. The result is a conceptual structure in which it is possible to say more, and to say it without a reductionist bias, than is otherwise possible. I find it interesting, and productive of new insights, to look at freedom and creativity through these new lenses.

Although many sources from the literature of Descriptive have been helpful to me in this exploration, two merit special mention. The first is the introductory portion of Worlds and World Reconstruction, by Mary Kathleen Roberts, in Advances in Descriptive Psychology, Volume 4, Eds Davis and Mitchell, JAI press 1985. In this work, Ms. Roberts outlines clearly the basic logic of world construction and reconstruction. I hope here to harmoniously expand upon her work. The second source is Out of Nowhere: Thoughts and Thinking and World Reconstruction, a presentation given by Peter G. Ossorio at the 1998 conference of the Society for Descriptive Psychology. I hope that what I have written here will fit neatly into the section of his talk that Dr. Ossorio shortened in the interests of time.

Relevant Resources from Descriptive Psychology

The main resources from Descriptive relevant to this task are: Actor-Observer-Critic (AOC), World, the Dramaturgical Model, the Significance Series, Embodiment, and the Relationship Change Formula. A brief review of each follows.

The following (very slightly abridged) summary of the notion of Actor-Observer-Critic comes from "Place", by Peter G. Ossorio, pp104-105, notes on Maxim G3.

G3. A person has a status in the world as an Actor, as an Observer, and as a Critic.

a. For the Actor, the World is essentially an arena for action, and he treats it accordingly by incorporating it into his actions. Acting as Actor has several distinctive features.

1. His behavior is spontaneous; he does what comes naturally. (What he does is an expression of his character and is not directly problematic.) 2. His behavior is creative rather than reflective. His behavior and its products are a significant expression of himself and not merely a common or conventional response to a situation, though it may be that, too. 3. His behavior is value-giving rather than value-finding. Creating the behavior involves creating a framework of interrelated statuses (and their corresponding values) of which mundane particulars are embodiments. 4. His behavior is a before-the-fact phenomenon, since he creates it (he is not finding out what behavior he is engaged in—he is doing it).

b. For the Observer/Describer, the world is something to be recognized as being this way rather than some other way. Archetypally, the Observer/Describer acts as "one of us", since recognizing the world as X rather than Y paraphrases into "That’s what we call ‘X’."

c. For the Appraiser, or Critic, the world is either satisfactory or unsatisfactory in a given respect. If it is satisfactory it is satisfying. If it is unsatisfactory, it warrants a diagnostic recognition of its being unsatisfactory in this way rather than that way and a prescription for trying to improve matters by acting this way rather than that.

This picture of the statuses available to a person lays out her basic freedoms and opportunities for creation, in particular, item a.3 reminds us that whatever the mundane particulars, the significance, the places of these particulars in the drama, is in large measure the creation of the actor. We will return to this point.

A person’s world comprises all the states of affairs that person is prepared to act on. A person requires a world in order to have the possibility of engaging in any behavior at all. Any community to which a person belongs is based on the shared world that characterizes that community. A person’s world is subject to reformulation. This may happen in a small way by acquiring a new fact or in a sweeping way as in a religious conversion. A shared world is also subject to reformulation, but only with the consensus of the entire community.

A person is an individual whose history is, paradigmatically, a history of deliberate action in a dramaturgical pattern. "Deliberate" means that she knows what she is doing, "dramaturgical" means that the series of deliberate actions has a continuity and coherence like we expect of a story, "paradigmatically" means that a given person’s history may fall short of these requirements, but if so the shortfall calls for explanation, perhaps in terms of pathology. An important way in which one’s world may be reformulated is in the casting of the characters in it. Casting is subject to reality constraints: you may attempt to cast yourself as the future president of the United States, but the casting doesn’t stick unless you actually manage to get elected.

The significance of a behavior is typically given by the answer to the question: "What are you doing by doing that?" For example, by eating lunch I might be satisfying my hunger, by satisfying my hunger I might be keeping my body functioning well, by keeping my body functioning well I might be preparing it for service in some cause, and so on. Thus associated with any action we can generate a significance series of descriptions, in which you move up the series by asking "What are you doing by doing that?", and down the series by asking "How?" Any time one embarks upon a course of action, the action taken includes the entire significance series—if the significance of my eating lunch were different, it would be a different action. Understanding someone’s behavior, whether in a story or a play or in real life, typically includes being able to elaborate the significance series of the behavior some steps in either direction.

A person’s embodiment is simply his physical body. Characterizing the body as a feature of the person leaves open the possibility that there is a lot more to the person than just the body. For a detailed discussion of the issues raised by this observation, see Ossorio, What There Is, How Things Are, Advances in Descriptive Psychology Vol 7, pp 7-32, Eds Jeffrey and Bergner, Descriptive Psychology Press 1998.

The Relationship Change Formula is stated: Relationships follow behavior. That is, if a person C, has a relationship, R, to Z, and if C’s behavior with respect to Z is such that it violates R and expresses RR, then C’s relationship to Z will change in the direction of RR. (Ossorio, Place, p68)

Freedom and Creativity

What place do freedom and creativity have in this conceptual structure? Note that right from the beginning, in AOC, freedom of action and creation of one’s behavior are the baseline. They do not call for explanation. What does call for explanation are the constraints on one’s freedom of action and on one’s ability to create his behavior, and with it his world.

More of that shortly, but first a historical note. Some years ago, Lucy Suchman, of Xerox PARC, started a revolution in the design of user interfaces to computer software by observing that knowledge workers engaged in mundane tasks used a lot more creativity in the execution of those tasks than had previously been recognized. As a result of her observations, user interfaces have moved away from leading their users through a predetermined sequence of steps and toward presenting an on-screen state of affairs that can be worked with in a variety of ways, with only the essential protection against doing things that are crazy or dangerous.

Note that the original mistake that Suchman was reacting against could have been due to a bias in the then-popular scientific conceptual structure against freedom of action and in favor of deterministic models. Indeed, among the reality constraints facing us as persons, the physical ones, coming at us through the body, tend to be the most hard-edged. We do not get to change the outside air temperature. We do get to choose how to deal with the outside air temperature given the activities we are considering undertaking. The constant presence of constraints from the physical world limiting our actions has so dominated our thinking (especially in the West) that some special effort is necessary to get the physical world into its proper place. We will attempt that effort as part of the subsequent discussion.

Where do the real constraints lie? How much of the world we live in do we get to choose, and how much is a given? For starters there is the physical world. Human beings cannot flap their arms and fly to the moon. Our planet, as lovely as it is, is racked with storms, fires, earthquakes, and plagues; human bodies are frequently crippled or destroyed by these natural events. We are stuck, as a race, with all the ills the flesh is heir to. The second great source of real constraints is the social world. Each actor has a certain status, consisting of a certain set of eligibilities. Actions attempted without the requisite eligibilities ("I now pronounce you husband and wife") are ineffective. The physical and social limitations are, in the sort run, inescapable.

Over time, though, both are subject to change, albeit perhaps slowly, through a variety of mechanisms. Some physical constraints can be removed over time. Mountaineers can condition themselves to breath more effectively at high altitude, persons with aging bodies can undertake hatha yoga to preserve and enhance flexibility, many disabilities can be countered with prosthetics such as glasses and hearing aids. Social constraints can often be removed through application of the relationship change formula: a person can work her way up through a business organization, one can earn the respect and trust of another, people can learn new competences and thereby qualify for new eligibilities. Note that the relationship change formula applies even to my way of seeing things: my relationship to spiders or snakes, for example, might be changed by desensitization. This example reveals the possibility of changing an emotional reaction, fear—the automatic appraisal of something as dangerous. Other automatic behaviors are also susceptible to change. I am indebted to Tom Mitchell for the following analysis of how to change an automatic behavior:

The tendency to carry out an unsatisfactory inappropriate automatic behavior can be changed to the tendency to carry out more satisfactory behavior by substitution of other, more satisfactory behavior(s) in the class of situations in which the automatic behavior has heretofore been carried out.

a. This substitution will generally have to be conscious for some period of time until the tendency to carry out the action is well established.

b. The practice of conscious attention to situations in which the behavior is ordinarily carried out is involved in the conscious substitution of other behaviors.

c. The conscious attention will no longer be needed when the tendency to carry out the more satisfactory behavior automatically has been well established.

The practice of changing an automatic behavior by substituting other behaviors can be seen as an instance of the application of the relationship change formula.

Even without using any of these change mechanisms, though, the significance of physical and social constraints and events is open to creative reformulation. The assignment of significance, although a skill learned in our communities, is still an individual action, and each such assignment is open to creativity on the part of the actor. Example: In the funeral oration for Julius Caesar, Marc Antony did not attempt to change any of the events surrounding Caesar’s death. He did, however, create his own view of the significance of those events, and successfully sold this view to the crowd. Although the physical particulars of an event are subject to public scrutiny and scientific verification, even the first step up in significance is a matter of choice, the actor’s and others, and as we proceed higher in significance it becomes more and more of a private matter. (That is why, in the popular literature, "inner" often equates to "higher significance".)

Speaking more generally, Reality is the totality of constraints on intentional action. Persons have embodiments. Some of the reality constraints on a person’s actions arise from characteristics of the body. These characteristics are accessible to elucidation in terms of the physical world. A person’s real world comprises all the facts that he is prepared to act upon. Some, but far from all, of these facts come from the physical world. Some of these (physical) facts are about the limitations of his embodiment. The significance of these facts, and indeed of the embodiment itself, in the person’s real world is in no way determined by the physical world, but is open to creative authorship by the person himself, constrained by what he can successfully get away with in those communities in which he participates.

Examples of persons confronted by very severe limitations arising from the physical world, and nevertheless creating worlds in which opportunities for meaningful and satisfying behavior exist, can be found in the many success stories of paraplegics and others with serious disabilities. Similar examples at the level of communities can be found in those cultures created in the presence of daunting physical environments: the Sahara desert, the highlands of Tibet, Patagonia, the Aleutian islands, and northern Greenland. Indeed, if you are born into one of those cultures and imbibe the normal social practices and values of that culture, your physical environment, hostile to others, becomes friendly to you.

The above constitute examples of the observation: "People construct and maintain worlds that give them behavior potential, and routinely try to reconstruct those world in ways that give them more potential": Mary Kathleen Roberts, Worlds and World Reconstruction, Advances in Descriptive Psychology, Vol. IV pp50-51. I would like here to put forward a variation on Robert’s observation:

Individuals and communities create worlds (including behaviors, social practices, and significances) in which meaningful and satisfying lives are possible, given the reality constraints faced by those individuals and communities.

Further example: The human race inhabits a planet that features volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, fires, and epidemics. Sudden death and injury from these events has always been a possibility. Our communities have therefore created worlds, including practices and significances, with which the community can embrace these disasters and go on. Similarly, we as individuals are confronted with the physical constraint of our own death, and are called upon to create our real worlds in such a way that eventual death does not negate the significance of what we are doing day to day. Certain cases of depression can productively be viewed as perceived failures at this creative task (as pointed out by Ray Bergner in his presentation Therapeutic Approaches to problems of Meaninglessness at the 1996 conference of the Society for Descriptive Psychology).

How about the social, in contrast with the physical, constraints on intentional action? Many of the same principles apply. There is always the possibility of creating a meaningful and satisfying life in which a given social constraint is not an impediment. For example, since I am neither a minister or a justice of the peace, I am not eligible to marry people. Fortunately, my aspirations for my life do not include any need or desire marry people, so this constraint is not significant to me. On a different note, I always have the option of creating, and attempting to share, something new in my world, as in the example of Marc Antony above.

In addition to all the above, there are changes to a person’s world that can happen instantaneously: an insight, realization, or shock (not to mention falling in love) can make such a sudden change. The full implications of such changes evolve over years, as new behavior patterns are laid down, but the significance of some event (even one that happened in the past), and with it the direction in which one is moving, can change overnight. These fast changes occur more commonly in those states of affairs that appear at high levels in a significance series, while the states of affairs that occur at low levels of a significance series are typically tied to the slowly-changing physical world.

So, a level or two up in significance, all the world’s a stage (Peter G. Ossorio, Place, Maxim H5): the physical limitations are the boards and the props, changeable, but usually slowly; the social limitations are the character’s roles, changeable somewhat more quickly. The meaning and significance to the actor of the action in the play is changeable rapidly, through creative authorship. Such a change may trigger a change in the casting of the drama through the relationship change formula. For example, whatever physical or social calamity may befall the actor, its significance in the drama is not inherent in the calamity itself: that significance gets assigned by the actor, perhaps with the help of one or more of her communities.

The higher up in significance you look, the more latitude you have for creativity and with it, the opportunity for something new and different in your world. This latitude is still bounded by whether you can, in some community, get away with treating the world in the new way.

This is good news. For example, it provides at least a logical antidote for someone "stuck in victim". Whatever the past physical or social calamity, it is grist for a drama that is still being written, and subject to assignment, ex post facto, of a significance that is newly created.

In Closing

Recall an earlier quote from Ossorio on the functioning of the person as actor:

"His behavior is value-giving rather than value-finding. Creating the behavior involves creating a framework of interrelated statuses (and their corresponding values) of which mundane particulars are embodiments."

An interesting feature of this value-giving, significance-giving, and thereby creating your own story is that, just as you cannot not act, you cannot not do them either. Whatever you refuse to do is itself a choice, involves values and assignment of significance, and contributes to your personal story. As Yogi Berra might put it:

"You can’t get away from freedom."

I am indebted to Jim Holmes for the following, very poetic, perspective on this last principle:

Jose Ortega Y Gasset coined the phrase "compulsory freedom". What he said went something like this: Every moment of every day (waking moment?) you must choose what it is that you are to do. There is no way out of choosing since even choosing to stand still is to choose what it is you are to do. You have to choose to stand up, get a drink, scratch an itch, ride a bike, make love, argue a point, and so forth. The compulsory part is that you must choose. The freedom part is that there is nothing that says what that choice has to be. One may choose death before dishonor. In that freedom, lies the creativity of persons in how they construct their histories. And in that freedom lies the ultimate, terrifying and yet awesome responsibility that persons have for their lives. It is also out of that freedom that persons can change their histories.

I hope that in this paper I have elucidated some of the logic behind Ortega Y Gasset’s insight.