ABSTRACT
Did you know that cities have dominant colours? London, for example, is mostly gold and red. Lisbon is light yellow and turquoise and Madrid is amber and terracotta. Is it possible to compose music by looking at someone’s face? Have you ever heard someone say that attending a music concert is a colourful experience, or that one can hear paintings? Imagine what a Picasso would sound like! In his TED Talk ‘The Human Eyeborg,’ cyborg artist Neil Harbisson reveals that he has these eccentric colourful experiences. So in order to understand why he named one of his paintings Mozart, we need to look beyond ordinary sensory abilities towards a particular type of self-enhancement. If Neil is to be believed, when he looks at the colour combinations in his painting his device (an antenna implanted in his skull that transforms colour frequencies into tone frequencies) enables him to experience a transcendent soundscape comparable to listening to the classical music of Mozart.
In this chapter, the author will draw on Harbisson’s enhanced creativity, as reflected in his painting Mozart, to argue against dualistic distinctions in analytical psychology. In his Structure and the Dynamics of the Psyche (CW. 8), Jung (1969) sets forth his fog argument. This argument has triggered a debate among Jungian scholars about whether or not to understand it as exemplary for a mind-body dualism in which psychological life is encapsulated within the head. However, even if Jung’s fog argument cannot be read as straightforwardly in favour of substance dualism, the author will argue that Jungian psychology still displays a value dualism regarding technology in which technology is downplayed in favour of nature. When we look at the meeting of sound and colour that Neil experiences through his device, it becomes clear that creativity can no longer be considered as detached from the body and from technology. The author will show that the philosophical anthropology of the German biologist, sociologist and philosopher Helmuth Plessner not only offers a useful framework for reconsidering Neil’s creativity in a more embodied way, but that it also shows that the deepest roots of creativity move beyond a psychological understanding, such as a Jungian reading of creativity, and call for an ontic foundation. Plessner provides this foundation in his philosophy of borders, relating creativity to human’s eccentric position and his constitutive homelessness.
