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Hermits and Creativity

Grand Panjandrum of the Pointless

22:29 / 24.08.03

I just had an interesting discussion with a psychologist about some of the ideas raised over in the ‘Is racism Innate’ thread. He agreed with the idea that certain inbuilt prejudice reactions are set in the way described there, to the point that people actually perceive the same scene totally differently because their prejudices foreground/background different items. Also that there are stable patterns of prejudice inherent in different cultures/levels of society.
He went on to say that this idea could explain why people seek to isolate themselves in order to create, and why such people tend to be regarded as either extremely original or extremely mad: living apart from others enables them to decondition these reflexes to some extent.

So I was wondering was whether any ‘lithers have had experiences that back up or contradict this idea. Or have anything interesting to say about it generally.

unheimlich manoeuvre

10:29 / 25.08.03

GPotP - that's a difficult question to answer. i definitely found living out of a car while travelling around Oz stimulated the mind easier than living here in London with so many distractions around me.

Some questions that come to mind. do you mean actually removing yourself like say a buddhist on retreat, or would alienation suffice? have you read the Outsider by Colin Wilson?

Grand Panjandrum of the Pointless

12:17 / 25.08.03

I think the point is that you have to be cut off from all contact with the rest of the world. I was originally thinking of solitaries, but I guess alienation might work just as well. I'd be interested to hear from people who have had either experience

I haven't read The Outsider. It looks v. interesting tho'- shall probably give it a look some time.

19:14 / 25.08.03

He went on to say that this idea could explain why people seek to isolate themselves in order to create, and why such people tend to be regarded as either extremely original or extremely mad

That sounds a little unexamined to me, or was he working from research on that? Just because it seems to buy into the idea of eccentric/creative isolation - you know, the eccentric genius living in a hermitage covered with filth/the William Beckford-esque grand style of literary eccentric. Whereas I would guess that it is just as likely that writers and artists isolate themselves not necessarily to decondition themselves but to remove external stimuli which are very distracting.

I don't really see why isloating oneself would necessarily decondition such reflexes anyway; isn't it just as likely that, by removing the writer/artist/whatever from situations which provoke those reflexes, isolation also removes the possibility of receiving contradictory stimuli which undermine such prejudices?

Grand Panjandrum of the Pointless

10:37 / 26.08.03

He wasn't speaking from experimental evidence, so far as I was aware-we were just playing around with ideas, rather clumsily, it seems. I think your points about distraction and the absence of contradictory stimuli are right. So the idea needs to be reformulated a little.
Instead of claiming that the adult artist somehow resets their prejudices every time they pay a visit to the boondocks, we might say that the odd prejudice settings come from isolation early on in life- maybe through teenage alienation or weird families, or living somewhere remote. It doesn't have to be thought of as a purely negative thing, either- the odd perceptive prejudices might be the result of being brought up in the company of some unorthodox subset of the population, mathematicians or musicians for example. It might be thought debatable whether this last really counts as isolation- tho' I'd argue it does, insofar as the child is kept apart from normal people. It is admittedly a weakening of the notion though. The strong version might still hold for some people- writers perhaps.

Was Beckford a creative hermit anyway? I thought he was just ostracized for being caught in bed with a boy.

14:12 / 26.08.03

Well, he was eccentric and he wrote Vathek - that's all I was really thinking of, I suppose. The extravagantly eccentric writer rather than the quiet stereotype. I actually don't know whether he isolated himself when he wrote...

I wonder how many artists and other creative people actually had wildly abnormal childhoods in terms of isolation or peculiar contact with other people. Perhaps it would be a matter of the child isolating him or herself in order to nurture their creative impulses (and then I seem to be approaching nature vs nurture, o joy).

I suppose I am really instinctively reacting against the idea that artists/creative people are wildly different from everyone else, I suppose - I have no idea whether it's a valid notion or not (though there is probably a thread about it somewhere). We could probably legitimately propose that writers and artists from particular societies and particular strat within those societies would exhibit similar prejudices to their peers, but that's a much less interesting supposition...