II CREATIVITY: DIFFERENT CONNOTATIONS
It is an activity that
engenders something qualitatively new, something that has never existed before.
Any field of endeavor in which something new is created, discovered, or
invented may be a source of creative activity: science, industrial engineering,
the arts, politics, and other fields. Creativity has both psychological and
philosophical aspects.
The
psychology of creativity studies the process, or the psychological mechanism,
of creativity as the subjective act of an individual. Philosophy
considers the essential nature of creativity, which has been viewed differently
in different historical periods.
In ancient Greek and
Roman philosophy, creativity was associated with finite, transitory, and
changeable existence, rather than with the infinite and eternal. The contemplation
of the eternal was placed above any other activity, including creativity.
Artistic creativity was originally viewed as one type of constructive activity
among many others, such as handicrafts. Later, particularly in Plato, a concept
of Eros was developed as a unique, obsessive striving by man to attain a
higher, or rational, awareness of the world; one factor of this awareness was
creativity.
In medieval
philosophy, views on creativity were associated with the concept of god as
an individual freely creating the world. Creativity was thus regarded as an act
of the will, evoking being from nonbeing. St. Augustine as well emphasized the
importance of will in the human personality. He saw human creativity primarily
as the creation of history: it is in history that finite human beings help
fulfill the divine plan for the world. It is not so much reason as the will and
a conscious act of faith that relate man to god. Consequently, individual
actions and decisions become important ways of participating in god’s creation
of the world. Creativity is thus regarded as something unique and unrepeatable.
Moreover, in St. Augustine’s view, the scope of creativity lies primarily
within the areas of history, morality, and religion; artistic and scientific
creativity are of secondary importance.
A spirit of man’s limitless
creative potentialities was prevalent during the Renaissance. Creativity
was now perceived chiefly as artistic creativity, whose essence was considered
to be creative contemplation. A cult of genius as the
bearer of the creative principle originated, as well as an interest in the act
of creativity and in the artist’s personality. This interpretation of the
creative process is characteristic of the modern period. The tendency to regard
history as the product of solely human creativity became more pronounced. The
Italian philosopher G. Vico, for example, was concerned with man as the creator
of language, mores, art, and philosophy, that is, as essentially the creator of
history.
English empirical
philosophy tended to treat
creativity as a successful but largely chance combination of existing elements.
This was the content of the theory of cognition as propounded by F. Bacon and
particularly by T. Hobbes, J. Locke, and D. Hume. Creativity was thus regarded
as akin to invention. A comprehensive conception of creativity was devised in
the 18th century by I. Kant, who analyzed creative activity in his theory of
the productive capacity of the imagination. Kant viewed the imagination as a
link between the diversity of man’s sensory impressions and the concepts of
man’s reason, since the imagination possesses both the graphic clarity of
impressions and the ability to synthesize concepts. The transcendental
imagination is thus the basis of both contemplation and activity. Therefore,
creativity is an essential factor of cognition.
Kant’s theory was developed by F. W. J. von Schelling, who viewed imagination’s
ability to create as a combination of conscious and unconscious a ctivity.
Those persons who possess this ability to the highest degree geniuses create
while in a state of inspiration, unconsciously. The creativity of geniuses is
similar to that of nature, with the difference that this objective
(unconscious) process takes place within man’s subjective state and, consequently,
is modified by his free will. To Schelling and the Jena romantics, creativity,
and especially the creativity of the artist and philosopher, is the highest
form of human activity, bringing man in touch with the absolute. The romantic
cult of creativity and genius reached its height simultaneously with the growth
of interest in cultural history as the product of past creativity (F. von
Schlegel and A. W. von Schlegel).
The idealist philosophy of the late 19th century
and the 20th-century has counterposed creativity to mechanical and technical
activity. Whereas the philosophy of life contrasts technical rationalism and
the creative natural principle, existentialism emphasizes the spiritual and
personal nature of creativity. In the philosophy of life, the most complete
concept of creativity was advanced by H. Bergson (Creative Evolution,
1907; Russian translation, 1909). To Bergson, creativity, or the continuous
birth of the new, is the essence of life and is something taking place
objectively. In nature, it is perfected in the processes of birth, growth, and
maturation; in human consciousness, it occurs as the continuous emergence of
new images and experiences. This view opposes creativity to the subjective
technical activity of construction, which merely combines what is already
known. Even more distinctly than Bergson, L. Klages contrasted the creative
natural principle of the soul to the spiritual and intellectual principle,
which is technically oriented. In their study of the creativity of culture and
history, the proponents of the philosophy of life, including W. Dilthey, G.
Simmel, and J. Ortega y Gasset, emphasized creativity’s uniqueness,
individuality, and unrepeatability.
In existentialism,
the bearer of the creative principle is the personality as existence, that is,
as an irrational principle of freedom, an ecstatic escape from natural
necessity and rational expediency and a going beyond nature, society, and the
world’s objective reality. The creative ecstasy, according to N. A. Berdiaev (The
Meaning of Creativity, Moscow, 1916) and the early M. Heidegger, is the
most satisfying form of existence.
Unlike existentialism
and the philosophy of life, such 20th-century philosophic trends as
pragmatism, instrumentalism, and related variants of neopositivism regard
creativity from a one-sided and pragmatic viewpoint. Creativity is seen
primarily as invention, whose aim is to solve a given problem in a given
situation (J. Dewey, How We Think, 1910). Continuing the tradition of
English empiricism, instrumentalism regarded creativity as a successful
combination of ideas that leads to the solution of a problem. Another variant
of the intellectualist interpretation of creativity is represented in part by
neorealism and in part by phenomenology (S. Alexander, A. N. Whitehead, E.
Husserl, N. Hartmann). In their approach to creativity, most thinkers of this
type were oriented not toward the natural sciences, as Dewey and P. Bridgman
had been, but toward mathematics (Husserl, Whitehead), viewed as a pure science.
The basis of creativity was regarded not as activity, as in instrumentalism,
but as intellectual contemplation. This approach to creativity was thus
converging most closely with that of Platonism.
The Marxist approach to creativity is in contrast to idealist and
metaphysical concepts of creativity. It asserts that creativity is a human
activity that transforms nature and society in accordance with man’s aims and
needs and in conformity to the objective laws of reality. As a constructive
activity, creativity is unrepeatable in terms of performance and results. It is
original and is unique in terms of society and history, not merely in terms of
the individual. What is created does not result from programmed or mechanically
repeated activity; it is a manifestation of the productive activity of man’s
consciousness, a consciousness that,
according to V. I. Lenin, “not only reflects the objective world, but creates
it” (Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 29, p. 194).
Dialectical materialism rejects the viewpoint which asserts that nature also creates.
Nature manifests a process of development, not one of creativity. Creativity
always presupposes the existence and action of a creator—the agent of creative
activity. Evidently, biological forms and prerequisites for creativity exist
among the higher animals as well, but creativity is expressed only by man as a
socially developed being.
Creativity always takes
place under specific social and historical conditions, which profoundly
influence it. Creativity is closely linked with the environment and with
previously created cultural forms, whose complex network includes the agent of
the creativity. Essential conditions for the development of scientific,
scholarly, and artistic creativity are productive discussion, the exchange and
conflict of opinions, and freedom of criticism. For new ideas to develop, it is
necessary to go beyond existing, familiar theories and their methodologies and
to adopt a critical attitude toward tradition. The dogmatization of an attained
level of knowledge retards the development of science. For example, the genius
of Aristotle brought classical scientific culture to a high level, but when his
authority as a thinker became absolute; his theories were dogmatized, thus
hindering the development of a number of branches of knowledge for centuries.
Discoveries in science are most commonly made by persons not bound by the
authority of transient truths.
Lenin wrote that for creativity “greater scope must undoubtedly be
allowed for personal initiative, individual inclination, thought and fantasy” (Poln.
sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 12, p. 101). One of the most important
principles of communism is the assurance of the full development of the
personality as the main prerequisite of creativity. Communism establishes the
conditions for free, creative labor, which, according to Engels, “is the
highest enjoyment known to us” (K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed.,
vol. 2, p. 351). The socialist transformation of society has laid the
foundation for implementing this ideal, as evidenced by the development of
production, science, culture, and education in the USSR and other socialist
countries, as well as the great number of inventions, the movement for the
rationalization of production, and the creative amateur activities of the
toiling masses in the arts.
In addition to objective
factors, subjective factors are of great importance in the creative
process. These include inner motivation and a productive and well-developed
creative imagination, in whose formation art plays an essential role.
In psychology,
creativity is studied primarily in two aspects: as the psychological process of
creating something new, and as the aggregate of personality traits essential
for this process. The first studies of creativity as a process were based on
subjective accounts by artists and scientists, who described their inspiration
and their creative torments. In such accounts, several prominent naturalists,
including H. L. F. von Helmholtz, H. J. Poincaré, and W. B. Cannon,
distinguished several stages in the creative process. These stages proceeded
from the origin of a design to the unpredictable moment when the new idea
emerged in the consciousness. The English scientist J. Wallace (1924) divided
the creative process into four phases: preparation, incubation (of the idea),
illumination, and verification. Since the main phases of this process
(incubation and illumination) are not subject to the conscious volitional
control, Wallace’s view served as an argument in favor of theories maintaining
that subconscious and irrational factors were decisive in creativity. However,
experimental psychology has shown that in the creative process the unconscious
and the conscious, the intuitive and the rational, supplement each other. Since
the individual is engrossed in his goal, he is the person least capable of
self-observation. He has only a vague awareness of the general direction of his
thought: moments of conjecture, discovery, and sudden solution are experienced
as particularly vivid states of consciousness. Such states were initially
described, for the most part, in psychology. They included K. Bühler’s “Aha”
experience (Aha-Erlebnis)—the awareness of a needed solution—and W.
Köhler’s theory of insight as the instantaneous comprehension of a new structure.
However, the study of
productive thinking has revealed that conjecture, illumination, and
unexpected new solutions occur during experiments if special arrangements are
provided for during the creative process (M. Wertheimer, B. M. Teplov, A. N.
Leont’ev). Using D. I. Mendeleev’s periodic law as an example, B. M. Kedrov
demonstrated that analysis of the products and “offal” (unpublished materials)
of creativity reveals the landmarks along the way to a scientific discovery,
regardless of how these landmarks were perceived by the scientist himself. It
is worthy to note that the personal mechanisms of creativity are to be revealed
and described within a specific social and historical context.
The aggregate of
psychological traits typifying the creative personality has been scientifically
studied once special tests were elaborated together with methods for processing
and analyzing their data. The pioneer in this field was the psychologist F.
Galton. Galton’s view on the hereditary nature of the ability to create was
later criticized in psychology by the Swiss scientist A. Candolle; C.
Lombroso’s opinion that genius is related to mental derangement was criticized
as well.
Interest in the
psychological aspects of creativity, particularly scientific creativity, increased
greatly in the mid-20th-century owing to the scientific and technological
revolution. The existing methods for studying personality proved to be
inadequate. This was particularly true of traditional tests, which often gave a
low evaluation of mental ability when the persons tested exhibited originality
and nonconformist thinking. New testing systems have been developed for
determining the distinctive signs of the creative personality. These systems
use factor analysis and other statistical methods. Particular importance is
ascribed to mental agility, divergent thinking, inner motivation, and the
imagination.
Statistical studies conducted by A. C. Lehman and W. Dennis (USA) have examined the
relationships between education and work productivity and between age and the
dynamics of creativity. Among the methods developed to stimulate group
creativity, the most popular in the USA have been brainstorming and synectics.
The theory of brainstorming maintains that the control mechanisms of the
consciousness, which serve to adapt to the environment, hinder the mind’s
creative potential. These barrier mechanisms may be neutralized by dividing the
creative process into two stages: the generation of ideas, and the critical
evaluation of ideas. A group of individuals is requested to produce as many
ideas as possible in relation to a given problem, and then the most original
and promising ideas are selected from among the total number of opinions and
surmises. Synectics endeavors to actualize the intuitive and emotional
components of intellectual activity under conditions of group creativity.
The achievements of
cybernetics, and the computerizing of those intellectual functions that are
amenable to formalization, have increased interest in creative acts and in
those personal abilities that cannot be formalized. Attempts are also being
made to construct a technical model of the process of seeking and finding new
knowledge. Psychology faces the task of clarifying the transformations taking
place in the nature of creativity in the context of the formalization of
knowledge. In studying scientific creativity, the science of science seeks now
to synthesize the approaches to creativity from the standpoint of logic,
sociology, and psychology.
Dr. Gaurav Raj Bhagat
Professor of Management
Barkatullah University
Founder
Renaissance Divine Public School, Bhopal
Swami Vivekananada College of Science & Technology, Bhopal
ADG Intellisol, Bhopal
CRISP, Hoshangabad Road, Bhopal
Consulting Professor
IAS, IPS Probationers RCVP Noronha Academy of Administration
IES Group of Institutions, Bhopal, IPER College
09752523531
