152. INSPIRED PHILOSOPHY - Where Do Ideas Come From?
I’ll be honest - nothing has inspired my philosophical juices this week. Two weeks spent in Florida over the Easter break left me basking in the glow of mindless vacation fun and the return to the UK, to temperatures 20° lower than the US, to a broken boiler (again!), and to work, have meant this week has just been a blur of trying to survive and get over jet lag rather than a fertile crucible for big ideas.
I sat here wondering if I had thought of anything of worth while visiting family in Delray Beach, exploring the swamps of the Everglades, the drag shows of Key West, and the restaurants and beaches of Miami? While lots of topics came to me (the nature of family given that the “family” I visited are not related by blood but perhaps closer to me than many who are; how quickly one manages to overcome fear and trepidation towards alligators and become completely jaded to their presence given enough time and exposure; how insane the attack on drag shows and drag story hours is in America and why people are irrational to fear drag queens reading books to their children; and why I don’t get people who like spending all their time at the beach) they all seemed like a bit of a stretch. Trying to squeeze some semblance of philosophy out of events where, honestly, I hadn’t been thinking philosophically at all.
One unforgettable night in Key West, we came back to our hotel room to find it infested with termites and ended up having to spend a night sleeping in the lobby. For one mad moment I considered writing a Philosophy Unleashed post about untameable nature and moral responsibility (should the hotel be held accountable for our unpleasant night despite them having no control over where termites might choose to swarm?), but then the hotel refunded us the night without complaint and the answer to that particular question seemed settled. We had to turn back from a national park after paying the $30 entrance fee only to drive into flash floods and a storm…but, again, the next day we just went back in on the same entrance fee and had a lovely day walking the trails in the sun. It wasn’t morally wrong for them to have charged us entry the day before because the storm clouds were obvious and it was our choice to take the gamble against nature.
As the week back home progressed, I didn’t worry about it. Inspiration has always come in the past and I was sure it would again…even if Hume tells me such thinking (assuming the future will resemble the past) is foolhardy. But as Friday came and I felt the relief of reaching the finish line of this tough, long first week back in school, finally feeling re-acclimatised to the five hours time difference, workload, and chilly UK weather (and the boiler being fixed at last), I realised that inspiration had yet to join me. The deadline was looming and I still had nothing to write!
I reviewed the conversations I’d had with my students this week for fodder. Was there anything interesting there which could be mined for content? I’d had some good discussions with Year 10 about whether there was anything meaningfully wrong about AI-generated plagiarism (we know it is institutionally wrong, and conventionally considered wrong, but ought it be?) but there is so much talk about AI right now, in a week where an AI-generated photograph won a photography competition and a purported song by Drake and The Weeknd turned out to be merely AI, that even I was bored by the prospect of another think-piece about artificial intelligence. Besides - I’d already sort of done one before. A Year 8 lesson on Hinduism and Year 9 lessons on Buddhism offered little beyond the core ideas of each faith. Tedious revision sessions with exam groups led me to want to go on my usual tirade against exams, but - being my usual tirade - I’ve already done those posts on here before and no-one needed to hear them again. Defeated, I sat and stared at my laptop, hoping again for elusive inspiration…
And then it hit me: inspiration! What is it and why is it? That could be the topic!
As someone who has written stuff for most of his life and who makes music frequently, and as someone with years of experience performing improv comedy, I have lots of experience with being creatively inspired. In improv, especially, there is literally no concrete plan except to get on the stage and hope for inspiration to strike. And, miraculously, I’ve never done a show where ideas - and good ideas too! - weren’t generated on the spot, inspired completely from scratch.
Inspiration in the context of improv, and in the context of something like this blog (a regular writing assignment with a regular deadline) needs to be dependable, yet famously inspiration is not something one is supposed to be able to demand to order. We hear of poets, artists, etc. waiting around for inspiration to strike - sometimes for years. And we hear of writer’s block and the need for muses and other catalysts to inspire those with constipated creativity. At the same time, we also know that many formalised creative endeavours somehow manage to get inspiration on demand all the time in order to meet arbitrary but enforced deadlines. Think of the latest season of your favourite TV show. Somehow they managed to be inspired enough to write exactly the number of new episodes that were ordered by the distributer. And they do it season after season, year after year. Or the band you love who seem to release a brand new album every year, like clockwork. They always seem to be inspired once the studio is booked and the tour dates loom. Stand up comics regularly burn through material in their recorded specials and think they’ll never get another new hour again, and then suddenly they do. And the artform that always amazes me the most - professional wrestling - somehow always seems to find unlimited new ideas of how to put on an exciting and inspired wrestling match from the same basic premise of X wants to beat Y every single week.
When I sat down to write this post I was uninspired, yet now I have no doubt that I will, yet again, meet my self-imposed deadline and have a new Philosophy Unleashed post completed exactly when it is needed. Inspiration was there all along. I just had to find it.
But what is inspiration? How can it be both elusive and non-dependable and reliable and always there when you need it?
The great improv pioneer, Keith Johnstone, who died recently, used to call it “The Great Moose”. You stood on stage, blank minded, but The Great Moose would provide. Divine intervention. Some spark of creative revelation. Some new way of seeing things that were already there which made you know exactly what to do or say next.
I use improv as an example because, as anyone who has ever studied improv knows, improv is all about cheating inspiration by fine-tuning, through practice and repetition, certain skills that make it easy for you to be inspired by anything. Short-cuts, such as saying “yes, and…” to everything means you are more likely to be able to use absolutely anything as a jumping off point than someone not adept at heightening and exploring any audience suggestion which is thrown at them. Practice helps a lot here. Failing lots and getting comfortable with failing. Not all improv scenes can be winners, and so too of all other creative pursuits. So improvisers, and other creative people, practice frequently so they get used to the inconsistency of inspiration and know how to bounce back from their inevitable and equally frequent failures.
Compared to a brilliant one-off article written in a flash of inspiration but painstakingly crafted ad edited until it is ready for public consumption, a weekly blog or column will not be equally brilliant every week anymore than a baseball batter will hit every pitch that’s thrown at them. But so long as the hits outweigh the misses overall you still have a pretty good hit-rate, and so long as the better posts outweigh the bad ones, you’re doing ok. Improv training - inspiration training - is partly about recognising this and knowing that there is no shame in trying and failing. Sometimes you have to fail a lot to find the thing that succeeds.
Why do philosophers teach classes and present papers, using these various platforms to share their ideas and put them up for discussion? Because we know that most of our ideas will be flawed. That the thing we thought was genius yesterday will likely be proven fragile by someone else’s keen insight today. And that this is ok. This is part of the process of thinking philosophically. To chase after the inspiration you had which made you see something you think no one else has in a particular idea and kick it about and try it out for a bit to see if anything is there. Often, there isn’t. It’s a tired thought. Someone else said it better. Or it rests on a mistake or assumption you hadn’t considered. But sometimes - sometimes - that initial burst of inspiration leads us to something truly interesting and we have a new philosophical argument to contribute to the debate.
The what, therefore, of inspiration is closely entwined with the why. If I need inspiration to meet a deadline or to perform on demand, what qualifies as inspiration will be far more open than someone who also needs their inspiration to be motivating as well as simply interesting. I am already motivated to write a post on this blog, or perform some improv in my show, and am just looking for something to propel me forward in that endeavour. Anything will do. Even stuff that maybe, on reflection, shouldn’t have. Whereas for something to snap me out of inaction and move me to pick up a pen or a guitar in the first place, the demands are far higher. Anything I encountered in Florida had the potential to be inspirational, but at the time I had no need to be inspired. Now that I do, I can find inspiration wherever I look, including the places I had been looking at before and noticed nothing about.
Those of us who practice finding inspiration regularly manage to find it more frequently than others because we learn pretty quickly that inspiration is an invention, not a tangible thing in the world there to be found or not found. It is an attitude towards the way we experience the world. We’re not looking for perfection. We’re not looking for the right inspiration. We’re just looking for some inspiration. For a jumping off point. And anything we can get a foothold on will do. We find inspiration where others don’t simply because we have opened up our definition of what inspiration is. Like so much in philosophy what seems like something ontological - a question of existence - ends up being something linguistic - a question of language. Think inspiration is elusive? Just look again. Redefine what it is you think you’re looking for. All those thoughts you just dismissed were inspiring as hell if you only trusted in The Great Moose for once and took a leap with one of them.
(If you want to test this hypothesis, feel free to leave a topic for a future Philosophy Unleashed in the comments of this post which you think it will be impossible for me to write something philosophical about. I shall do my best to do one for every suggestion offered whenever my own inspiration next fails).
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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