Combinatory literature

13th Century Combinatory literature first emerged with the work of 13th century writer and philosopher Ramon Llull, who attempted to combine philosophical and religious reasoning with a mechanical device known as a zairja. Eighteen core questions of morality were considered, accompanied by both religious and philosophical responses. The user was then guided by visual aids and charts leading from each of these questions to a response, with the intention of definitively answering any question or doubt regarding morality that the user might encounter. Llull combined writings with logical argumentation derived from an algorithmic process to create a tool for converting Muslims to Christianity. He believed the user would arrive at true knowledge. The approach of combining different fields of thought, in that case mathematics with writing, whilst unsuccessful for Llull, would resurface in the 17th century and encourage philosophers toward a similarly cross-discipline approach to addressing problems and inspiring creativity. 17th Century In the 17th century, philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote De Corpore, which covers his work on logic and reasoning. He concluded that the process of reasoning was natural computing. This computing involved the subconscious summation of one's experience, followed by the systematic elimination of irrelevant information of this experience until an appropriate conclusion was derived. This provided important framework, identifying brain function as not limited to a singular discipline or focus, and in arguing that knowledge is the combination of thought processes. This concept of battling internal processes would later become widely accepted as the philosophical basis for combinatory play in general, and later argued that the same approach applies to creativity and creative writing. At the same time as Hobbes, philosophers Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Philipp von Zesen and Justus Georg Schottelius of the Baroque Period were the first to identify the inherent lack of creativity within the structure of words, and how limiting that came to be for the writer. They suggested the first naturally occurring constraint to producing literature of any kind was the type, structure and formation of words themselves. Thus the creativity and imagination of the writer was limited by the words they could use. In particular, Harsdörffer suggested that there was nothing that the writer could devise "the likes of which had not been already". Leibniz demonstrates the existence of God with a series of numbered postulations and corollary hypotheses that cancel out one another or rely on, and build on, one another in order to reach a conclusion. The logical construction of approaching a mathematical problem is borrowed, and applied to a philosophical dilemma. Writing for The Public Domain Review (2011), Jonathan Gray compares Leibniz's work to Llull's earlier attempt, noting that Leibniz had desired to build on from Llull's previous work. 19th & 20th Century In the 19th century, the notion of combinatory play became widely accepted through the advocacy of intellects and academics, such as Albert Einstein and T.S. Eliot. Einstein claimed that "combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought". This is because Einstein famously came up with important scientific theories while taking violin breaks, and believed the secondary discipline of music helped connect the different processes in his brain, allowing him to think more broadly about a subject. Similarly, T.S. Eliot believed that the way one thinks or approaches creativity was largely impacted by the life experience unique to that individual. The end product of the thought process was then specific to that person. This is an extension of Hobbes' theory of reasoning, mentioned earlier. The culmination of ones experience impacts the way one naturally attempts to approach creativity. 21st Century It was not until the 1960s that the combinatory literature movement rose to popularity through the French literary group the Oulipo. The Oulipo took the ideas presented by predecessors Leibniz and Harsdörffer to recognize that writing is always naturally constrained, be it by language as Harsdörffer suggested or some other constraint. Instead of being restricted by these constraints, the Oulipian's developed an approach that not only identified but embraced the constraints, purposefully placing themselves under both small and immense constraints in their approach to writing. These constraints are intentionally taken from other disciplines. They believe that the new constraints they apply to literature focus not on what literature is, but "attempt to uncover what it could be, either in theory or practice". ==Theory==