To become a master one must immerse oneself in
the history and literature of one’s field of study. One must understand
how knowledge has built up over the centuries like layers of sedimentary
rock, how the search for knowledge has so often led down blind alleys,
only rarely lurching into fertile pathways. Newton famously attributed
his success to the fact that he “stood on the shoulders of giants.”
It is probably more accurate to say that the true creator stands on the
shoulders of a few giants and a throng of midgets.
If mastery speaks to depth, versatility speaks to breadth. Creation is, almost by definition, the act of seeing an old problem through a new lens, of finding a principle that gives coherence to an otherwise incoherent jumble. Arthur Koestler talks about the “bisociative” powers of creative individuals—that is, their ability to see connections between two previously unconnected ideas. We know precious little about the magical process of making a creative leap. But we do know that, in order to leap across a chasm, one must know what is on both sides of that chasm. Few creators have mastered more than one field, but most have acquired at least a working familiarity with methodologies, assumptions, and ideas drawn from other fields. Charles Darwin, for example, was an avid reader of geology, zoology, botany, embryology, economics, and anthropology. He claimed that his breakthrough insight into the mechanism for natural selection came from his so-called “recreational” reading of Malthus’s “Essay on the Principle of Population.” Ironically, Darwin misread Malthus! But no matter. Darwin was, thank heavens, a biologist, not an economist. An undergraduate education tries to accomplish this objective of breadth through various devices, most significantly its distribution requirements. Because the Reed faculty has just completed a yearlong discussion of distributional requirements, I take my life in my hands talking about this subject. Fortunately the college’s distributional system does assure at least a reasonably high degree of methodological breadth. But I worry that too many students still graduate from this college without ever having grappled seriously with two essential vehicles for liberating the creative process: first, the framing of a hypothesis that can be expressed in mathematical terms and tested through statistical analysis; and second, the act of producing, and submitting to criticism, an original work of literary, artistic, or musical expression. The scientist who has never tried to write haiku or the literary critic who has never tried to estimate a confidence interval has, by that fact alone, constricted her capacity for breakthrough insight.
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