“Writing as Complete Gesture: A Pragmatist View of Creativity”

J.R.R. Tolkien used to say that the entire saga of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings was born from writing the sentence “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”, without knowing what a hobbit should have been (Carpenter 1995, letter 163). Euler maintained the same when he said that the entire power of his mathematics lived in his pencil (Vailati 2003: 87). Peirce’s and Wittgenstein’s notes on “doing mathematics” as foundation of mathematics are not far away from these statements (Chauviré 2008: 191-195). Many contemporary mathematicians seem to hold a similar perspective, accepting that the creative part of mathematics is made by “gestures” (Zalamea 2012). Relying on Peirce’s semiotic and on the example of Vasilij Grossman as author, this paper will show why and how writing is a synthetic tool of knowledge that we can call “gesture” and that explains creativity in a pragmatist pattern (I). It will then explains why and how this gesture, when it is a “complete”, fosters knowledge much more of any analysis, included author’s analytic knowledge of his creativity (II).