PD Smith

Times Lit­er­ary Sup­ple­ment, April 6, 2001

Gram­mars of Cre­ation, by George Stein­er (Faber and Faber)

By PD Smith

For George Stein­er, the “prod­ucts of inven­tion” do not share in the gram­mars of cre­ation. Sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy, unlike lit­er­a­ture, art, music and phi­los­o­phy, do not attain the con­di­tion of time­less­ness: “A nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry steam engine is now a his­tor­i­cal curio. A nov­el by Dos­to­evsky is not.”

The arts offer inti­ma­tions of eter­ni­ty, glimpses of a dis­tant hori­zon beyond the time-bound, law­ful hyle that deter­mines our being. Poiesis “autho­rizes the unrea­son of hope”:

“In that immense­ly sig­nif­i­cant sense, the arts are more indis­pens­able to men and women than even the best of sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy (innu­mer­able soci­eties have long endured with­out these). Cre­ativ­i­ty in the arts and in philo­soph­ic pro­pos­al is, in respect of the sur­vival of con­scious­ness, of anoth­er order than is inven­tion in the sci­ences. We are an ani­mal whose life-breath is that of spo­ken, paint­ed, sculp­tured, sung dream­s…. Truth is, indeed, with the equa­tion and axiom; but it is a less­er truth.”

The progress of sci­en­tif­ic and tech­ni­cal knowl­edge is cumu­la­tive, argues Stein­er. But in art, lit­er­a­ture and music, ear­li­er work is nev­er super­seded: “major art is not rel­e­gat­ed to anti­quar­i­an sta­tus; Chartres does not date”. Fur­ther­more, tech­ni­cal inno­va­tion is always par­al­leled by the “reborn pres­ence of the dis­tant arche­type”. The devel­op­ment of the arts is not lin­ear; rather its motion is that of a “spi­ral, of a helix in which ascent and descent are equiv­a­lent”. The result is a “para­dox of time­less­ness with­in the con­text of his­tor­i­cal time”. For Stein­er, this aspect of the gram­mars of cre­ation has “under­writ­ten west­ern edu­ca­tion and taste”.

Steiner’s account of artis­tic cre­ation in Gram­mars of Cre­ation, a book which has its ori­gins in the author’s Gif­ford Lec­tures in 1990, is deeply felt and pow­er­ful. The descrip­tion of how writ­ers cre­ate char­ac­ters by breath­ing “a dynam­ic, intru­sive and unfor­get­table élan vital into a con­stel­la­tion of words in action” is one among many mem­o­rable insights. His per­cep­tive read­ings of Dante and the Shoah poet, Paul Celan, are typ­i­cal of a work in which the author’s eru­di­tion is matched only by his elo­quence. Yet Steiner’s argu­ment is less con­vinc­ing when it comes to the achieve­ment of sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy; per­haps because sci­ence is cast as the vil­lain of the piece.

In Steiner’s remark­able odyssey through West­ern cul­ture, “Dante is our merid­i­an”. His works con­tain an “unbro­ken med­i­ta­tion on cre­ation”, an expres­sion of won­der at the divine­ly cre­at­ed world, but also a “sense of the incom­men­su­ra­bil­i­ty” of exis­tence, a need to seek expla­na­tions beyond human rea­son. Unique­ly, this is the pre­serve of the arts; Stein­er para­phras­es Wittgen­stein: “the facts of the world are not, will nev­er be, ‘the end of the mat­ter’”. Poet­ry embod­ies this thirst for tran­scen­dent knowl­edge that exceeds fac­tic­i­ty: “the wing-beat of the unknown has been at the heart of poiesis”. It is only in the aes­thet­ic modal­i­ty that Homo sapi­ens over­comes the bio­log­i­cal and his­tor­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions of his or her being. The artist is Janus-head­ed, cre­at­ing visions of the future from the cul­tur­al lega­cy of ur-mem­o­ries, from the myths of the divine cre­ator and the Prime Mover.

Sec­u­lar­iza­tion her­ald­ed a par­a­digm shift in the gram­mars of cre­ation. In the post-Carte­sian, post-Galilean world, aes­thet­ic-philo­soph­ic cre­ation was cut adrift from the the­o­log­i­cal nar­ra­tive of “cos­mic orig­i­na­tion”. All that remains are metaphors and images, “a bright ghost­li­ness”. But still we priv­i­lege the cre­ator over the inven­tor; we can no more say “God invent­ed the uni­verse” than we can call Edi­son the “cre­ator” of the light bulb.

Cre­ation implies the divine act of orig­i­na­tion, cre­ation from noth­ing; inven­tion sug­gests a mere assem­bling of avail­able mate­ri­als. Yet cre­ation is a word that seems strange­ly out of place in the mod­ern world. The rep­re­sen­ta­tive artist now is Mar­cel Duchamp who gave us the objet trou­vé — is that cre­ation or inven­tion, or nei­ther? (The same ques­tion applies to the strik­ing cov­er image of Jean Tinguely’s scrap-met­al con­struct Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger, Philoso­pher.) Duchamp saw tech­nol­o­gy as the “act of poiesis”, but Stein­er sounds unen­thu­si­as­tic: “one sens­es that in the arts this will be the next chap­ter”.

Stein­er con­cludes with a bleak view of mod­ern cul­ture, char­ac­ter­ized by vir­tu­al real­i­ty, cyber­space, and com­mu­ni­ca­tion over­load: “like a crazed locust, the cel­lu­lar phone eats up what is left of silence”. The lack of soli­tude and per­son­al space in which to con­front the real­i­ty of indi­vid­ual mor­tal­i­ty is the death-knell of cre­ation, at least in the sense defined by Stein­er: “Can there, will there be major phi­los­o­phy, lit­er­a­ture, music and art of an athe­ist prove­nance?” The “lim­it­less­ness” of sci­en­tif­ic progress has now replaced the infi­nite that char­ac­ter­ized the God of Aquinas and Descartes. In the cen­tu­ry of Sprachkri­tik, the truth of the world is revealed by the “codes of math­e­mat­ics” not the the­o­log­i­cal­ly under­writ­ten Logos.

Although math­e­mat­ics is a “less­er truth” for Stein­er, he grants that it is “prob­a­bly the crown­ing enig­ma of our so often dubi­ous pres­ence in this world”. He admits hon­est­ly to being a “math­e­mat­i­cal illit­er­ate”: “If, as Galileo ruled, nature speaks math­e­mat­ics, far too many of us remain deaf.” The cen­tral ques­tion for Stein­er is whether math­e­mat­ics describes an already exist­ing world, or does the “act of math­e­mat­i­cal imag­in­ing” calls into being what it dis­cov­ers. It is an epis­te­mo­log­i­cal conun­drum that even Stein­er does not claim to resolve. Indeed, he sees this uncer­tain­ty as evi­dence of a “deep-lying con­gru­ence between the math­e­mat­i­cal and the aes­thet­ic” that goes far beyond Keats’s notion of the equiv­a­lence of truth and beau­ty.

For Paul Erdös, like many math­e­mati­cians, a proof could be strik­ing­ly beau­ti­ful, some­thing he was unable to explain: “It’s like ask­ing why Beethoven’s Ninth Sym­pho­ny is beau­ti­ful. If you don’t see why, some­one can’t tell you. I know num­bers are beau­ti­ful. If they aren’t beau­ti­ful noth­ing is.”

Sure­ly like beau­ty, cre­ation is a con­cept whose pres­ence is felt in many fields. For Stein­er the dif­fer­ence between the out­dat­ed steam engine and Dostoevsky’s time­less nov­el is “obvi­ous”. But for any­one inter­est­ed in the sci­ences the steam engine is cer­tain­ly more than a mere “his­tor­i­cal curio”. Can one not see in it a time­less nar­ra­tive of humankind’s trou­bled rela­tion­ship to cre­ation and the mate­r­i­al realm? The sci­en­tist and writer Pri­mo Levi saw in the sim­ple car­bon atom an evoca­tive sym­bol of the eter­nal cycle of life and told the sto­ry in The Peri­od­ic Table. And for the math­e­mat­i­cal­ly-mind­ed soci­ety in Yevge­ny Zamyatin’s We the Time-Tables of All the Rail­roads was “the great­est of all the mon­u­ments of ancient lit­er­a­ture”. Proust, too, was an avid read­er of time-tables. Per­haps we should all be learn­ing to read the gram­mars of cre­ation in the lan­guages of sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy.

[nb. this may dif­fer slight­ly from the pub­lished ver­sion]