February 29, 2020/0 Comments/in BLOG, Teachers /by Ian Warwick

Divine lightning versus inventive approaches

It’s all too easy to think of any creative genius as resulting from humanity touched by divine lightning. All too easy, and not really that helpful to any of us as educators or learners. Our interest tends to be far more pragmatic. The life of a polymath such as Leonardo Da Vinci, the very definition of a Renaissance Man, provokes many questions. Disadvantaged in his time by his illegitimacy, his sexuality and his poor education, crippled by the lack of intellectual infrastructure surrounding him, how did he go about actually earning his genius across so many disciplines? What specific techniques did he use to steer himself towards originality? What insights drove his inventive thinking and how can we still use them to improve our own learning exactly 500 years after his death? What can we learn from his notebooks, in endless matters centuries ahead of his contemporaries, that might help learning in and out of the classroom? What we need to hear from him is not some foggy, semi-mystical idea of inspiration, but something far more immediate and urgent. How can we recreate his approaches meaningfully for ourselves in the twenty-first century?

Conscious Ignorance; Developing a beginner’s mind

This initial approach is predicated on a commitment to question what we think we know and believe. Leonardo was never addicted to, or even interested in, consensus, but instead was attentive to the irregular, the odd. The choice of deliberate doubt acts as a prelude to the way we think about the present and our own learning. Leonardo let go of beliefs and attitudes that he acquired at earlier stages of his learning and gave himself the confidence to effectively ‘abandon’ his expertise and to embrace doubt and resist conclusions. It offered him flexibility of thought and a way in to innovation. Yet it does more than encourage new ideas, it also helps set up ‘collisions’ between ideas: in particular the collisions that happen when different fields of expertise converge in some shared physical or intellectual space. Centuries later the physicist James Clerk Maxwell made the point that a thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science. Feynman adds that in order to make progress, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar. These are all useful strategies to try to counter the anaesthetic of our familiarities.

Regaining Wonder; Developing the fuel of enthusiasm

We should be careful to never outgrow our wonder years. They have a mercurial quality without which we risk losing the impetus and desire to learn for ourselves. This approach is about our capacity and capacity to learn scatteringly. The English mathematician, A.N Whitehead called this drive the ‘romance’ of learning. Wonder fuels curiosity, knowledge fuels understanding and as Montaigne said, Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy, inquiry its progress. Leonardo’s literally wonderful notebooks show his doubtful, yet rampant curiosity in action, albeit reined in by dogged investigation and experimentation. His call throughout them is for us to also think for ourselves. It is a call to wonder and to wander beyond the safe limits of what we know and what we believe we know. Crucially, he believed that ‘study without desire spoils the memory and it retains nothing it takes in.’ When we ask our questions, doubt is a requirement. He urges us that our need to know needs to be urgent. His deliberated questioning uncertainties enable us to see how foraging for knowledge and experience might evolve into encounters with unexpected meanings.

Perfecting Attention; Developing a sensory approach

Obsessive noticing and recording of every detail became Leonardo’s hallmark approach. He believed that all of our knowledge has its origin in our perceptions. As such, Leonardo interrogated reality through his senses, marrying the concrete and the abstract, pursuing what Simone WeiI calls, the formation of attention. It is certain that his capacity to see clearly and without fear launched him far beyond either his contemporaries or indeed the intellectual understandings of his time. The truth is that in our own lives, most of the knowledge we are offered is provisional and complicated. It cries out for dialogue, not only as an aid to understanding but to rethink and recreate what we learn. As a painter it was important for Leonardo to understand the structure of the human body, but critically to appreciate the function of what he saw. He was concerned not just with appearances but with the underlying causes of those appearances. He urges us by implication to do the same. Such attention creates a hunger for learning because learning, like hunger, is an appetite. It is up to us to embrace his ideas on attentiveness and precision, and to believe, as a result, that our understanding will be sharpened.

Unnecessary Beauty; Developing the dialogue across disciplines

Leonardo immersed himself in every specialised discipline and direction that he could find, often all at once. These diverse investigations into science, anatomy, geography, mathematics, architecture, optics and music primed the pump of his learning and blended within him to help create his art. He knew that his art required the reality of dissection. His hand therefore became deft with both pen and scalpel. With both instruments he tried to open the gates between the conscious and the unconscious, between art and science and reality and fantasy. Leonardo simply saw art and science as two essential sides of the same narrative coin, developing stories explaining how we might fit into the grand scheme of things. A scientist or an artist goes forward towards truth but never gets there, adopting instead what the Qur’an calls ‘the inquisitive spirit of the searcher.’ As Arthur Koestler pointed out, all decisive events in the history of scientific thought can be described in terms of mental cross fertilisation between different disciplines in a public, connective space where ideas can be aired and argued about by people with diverse interests. No single discipline could ever hold the truth.

Thinking Aside; Developing a metaphoric perspective

Leonardo believed in the laws of continuity, an approach that promoted in him the drive to find patterns, open the doors to hidden analogies and ultimately uncover solutions. He believed that the brain cannot focus on two unconnected subjects without eventually forming some connection between them. Modern scientists make similar points about flashes of insight and explosions of likeness. Leonardo’s intuitive feel for the unity of nature meant that he sensed connections which he then expanded on, letting his mind wander and then theorising through analogies and metaphors. This process exposes us to ‘adjacent possibilities’ – the chance to escape the straitjacket of habit and inert routines by nudging us into noticing that there are other doors to open, hovering around the edges of our subject. Metaphors can act as a mechanism for getting to grips with highly abstract or difficult concepts thereby allowing new saliencies to arise. Metaphors can collide ideas and disorientate, and as a result inspire more imaginative connections and combinations; they fuel creative thought by jarring us, by not going with the flow. Such thinking allows us to shrug off apparent contradictions and to acquire a greater fluidity and versatility, essential for innovative leaps.

Negative Capability; Developing productive frustration

Sfumato was Leonardo’s technique of blurring boundaries and creating elusive edges that he used because he saw painting as a process of searching, in which the artist aims to discover the image in the course of making it. His paintings never close. They take us to the thresholds and edges of our understanding – to the experimental, to dreams and in-between feelings. Like Keats, who believed in accepting frustration without any irritable reaching after fact and reason, his approach strove to straddle not resolve the contradictions he encountered. Much of what we learn is inherently provisional. Leonardo accepted constructive ambiguity and used his work as a means of evolution rather than as a way of telling us what he or we think we know – our work is better seen as a conversation rather than a last word pronouncement. In our world that values proscribed learning, it requires courage to see ambiguity as a desirable intention. We need to encourage questions that ripen, via deferral, into genuine interests. The elegance of meaningful complexity can play a significant role in a more liquid learning process that embraces the complicated tangle and the distractions of learning – and life.

Unfinished Perfection; Developing sustained irresolution

How can perfection be unfinished? Leonardo rarely, if ever, finished what he had started. But why so many works that he could not leave alone or let go? The obsessive layering in Leonardo’s paintings is not just about perfectionism, it is about the realisation that the questions about what things look like, and more importantly, what they mean, never come to an end. Perhaps we need to accept that when it looks as though we have the answer, we may well have frozen the evolution of our understanding into a static order and abandoned the chance of perfection.We need to overcome the psychological barriers that can impede us from looking beyond the existing order. Leonardo would never accept that his work had an ending. There was always more to say, more to discover, more stories to tell. Learning shouldn’t be allowed to solidify into fixed certainties, what Hannah Arendt calls frozen thoughts – thoughtlessness, scripted behaviour. Perhaps all learning ends in a dash, not a full stop. Loose ends need to be seen as new beginnings in our search for what is of interest and importance. There are no last page conclusions to learning.

Summary

Throughout his life, Leonardo took up an extraordinary range of interests and then abandoned almost as many. His was an eclectic brilliance. He was addicted to and driven by what he didn’t know, prying into everything, committed to unravelling the mysteries and urgencies that surrounded him. He was restless, he delayed, he rejected the idea of a default solution, or a standardised notion of excellence. He interrogated the beliefs and conventions of his time, the pervasive frames of reference that governed the way his contemporaries thought and lived, and by doing so broke up their familiarities. As Schopenhauer sagely noted, talent hits a target that no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see. He seemed to process information from nature in an entirely different manner from any of his contemporaries. He wasn’t bound by the rules that others in his world became accustomed to, and his default mode seemed to raise himself imaginatively into an entirely different realm, above the existing doctrines of belief that shaped those around him. It is astonishing to consider the range of fields he dipped his mental brush in. Leonardo understood that learning is not about certainty, but possibility. It is fundamentally about recognising and embracing anomalies and contradictions that reflect the incorrigible plurality of this world.

If you are interested by any of the approaches above you can discover what they look like in far more detail in ‘Learning with Leonardo; Unfinished Perfection’ (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Learning-Leonardo-Unfinished-Perfection-children/dp/1911382977) by Ian Warwick and Ray Speakman.