Cross-Cultural Inspiration

Ask any school kid …motivation is an offering of incentive to accomplish a task. He or she can be motivated, either with a carrot or a stick, to finish a paper or do extra work for extra credit.  Ask an office worker or an executive …he or she can be motivated by a bonus to perform more or different tasks or to accomplish given results.

Unlike “motivation,” “inspiration” is a force which moves us to act in unpredictable and extraordinary ways, generally on our own. In Pathways to Bliss, Joseph Campbell makes an observation about Abraham Maslow’s psychological hierarchy of needs, commenting that the values represented by the model — survival, security, personal relationship, prestige and self-actualization — are exactly the values that mythology transcends. Inspiration is a calling to become intrinsically better than we are with no apparent personal objective reward.

The implication of this statement is that while the values of Maslow’s psychological hierarchy might motivate our normal daily activity, we are inspired by something else. In Campbell’s view that something else is a mythology, or a story that creates a context of meaning.

Even the referents of the two words are different. “Motivation’s” definitions include words like “prompt,” “spur” and “induce.” These terms indicate an urging by another, using an outside identifiable and objective stimulus, a characteristic consistent with our general understanding of the term.

“Inspiration,” however, has a much more complex set of referents; there are at least three distinct etymological foundations. The Latin derivation is ispiratio, (to blow into or upon, to breathe into). A second tracing is from the Greek spiriing or spiration, meaning “God-breathed,” the product of the creative breath of God, also close to the meaning that Dante referred to in the early fourteenth century — inspirazione — referring to suggestion, or prompting, but specifically by god. Again, these referents comply with our general experience of the term.

The word “inspiration” can be used to describe any part of the chain that results in an uncommon occurrence or an action taken that is beyond the pale of ordinary motivation. It can apply to the object that the subject encounters—a piece of art or an action taken. It can apply to the individual who is the author or stimulator, or it can apply to the reaction itself.

In January of 2007, we sponsored a Forum on Cross-Cultural Inspiration in San Francisco, and advertised for papers for six months before the convening. There were few, only one on point, and this by a professor of design at the University of Dubai. Still, the Forum was attended by all invitees from the worlds of business and academe. The dialogue was vital and interesting.

The variety in etymological references, the limited academic response to the Forum’s call for research and the substantive level of interest point to something about the nature of both the word and the experience of inspiration. Inspiration has a mystical quality, not yielding to the parlance of any given field of objective study. In Plato’s world, inspiration was sourced in the Gods or the muses; to Jung, Freud and other depth psychologists it is an outpouring of the unconscious mind; to brain scientists, a biological occurrence and to mythologists it is borne of the very story of our existence and survival.  We feel it; we don’t need a contract or incentive to prompt action.

Just what is Inspiration anyway?

[1] Campbell, Joseph. Pathways to Bliss. Novato, CA: New World, 2004 pp. 89.

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