Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Definition and Explanation of Creativity

"Being, is living creatively"

(Gilles Deleuze)


WHAT IS CREATIVITY?
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Creativity is the ablility to bring something new into existence.  It shows itself in the acts of people. through the creative process taking place in a person or group of persons, creative products are born.  Such products may be quite diverse:  mechanical inventions, new chemical processes, new solutions or new statements of problems in mathematics and science; the composition of a piece of music, or a poem, story or novel; the making of new forms of in painting, sculpture or photography; the forming of a new religion or philosophical system; an innovation in law, a general change in manners, a fresh way of thinking about and solving problems; new medical agents and techniques; even new ways of persuasion and of controlling the minds of others.

Implicit in this diversity is a common core of charisteristic that mark creative products, processes and persons. Creative products are distingusihed be their originality, their aptness, their validity, their usefulness, and very often by a subtle additional property which we may call the "Aesthetic Fit".

For such products we use words such as fresh, novel, ingenious, clever, unusual, divergent.  The ingredients of the creative process are related functionally to the creative forms being produced: seeing things in a new way, making connections, taking risks, being alerted to chance and the opportunities present by the contradictions and complexities, recognizing familiar patterns in the unfamiliar so that new patterns may be formed by transforming old ones, being alert to the contingencies which may arise from such transformations.

In creative people, regardless of their age, sex, ethnic background, nationality or way of life, we find certain personality traits recurring: an ability to think metaphorically or analogically as well as logically, independence of judgement (sometimes manifesting itself as unconventionality, rebellion, revolutionary thinking and acting),a rejection of an insufficent simplicity (or a tendency to premature closure) in favour for a  more complex and satisfying new order or synthesis.

A certain naivete or innocence of vision must be combined with stringent requirements set by judgment and experience.  The act of the verification is a final stage in the creative process, preceded by immersion in the problem, incubation of the process subliminally, and illumination or new vision.


The Birth of Creativity
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The creative aspects of Mind and of Will engaged the attention of the major philsophers-psychologist of the late ninteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Alfred Binet, the famed constructor of intelligence tests, was known first through the pages of L'Annee Psychologique in the 1880's and 1890's as the author of widely ranging emprical studies of creativity (including research by questionnaire and interview of leading French writers) and the originator of dozens of tests of imagination (devised first as games to play with his own children).

The fateful decision to exclude such occasions for imaginative play from his compendium of tasks prototypical of needed scholastic aptitudes has led to much mischief in educational appllication and to continuing confusion about the relationship of intelligence to creativity.  The former as generally measured is important to certain aspects of the latter, but people of equal intelligence have been found to vary widely in creativity; and, alas, some notbaly creative persons have also been found notably lacking in whatevert it takes to get on successfully in school.

Of  the two most famous psychoanalysts, Carl Jung made a greater contribtuion than Freud in this field, developing especially the notions of Intuition and of the Collective Unconscious as the sources of creation.  Henri Bergson (1911 [1907], in Creative Evolution, distinguished intuition from intellect as the main vechicle of the creative proces in-mind-general and in what, in retrospect, is more than mere vitalism he attributedwill as elan vital, the chief motivating force of the creative process in nature. Nearly a century after Bergson's initial formulations, Gregory Bateson (1979) was writing in that same tradition, and his gradueal developments of an "Ecology of Mind"  found expression in his Mind and Nature: A Necessity Unity.