A hundred and forty-eight discoveries, each made twice.
Creativity
The production of what is both new and valuable - and the question of whether it is a faculty or a process.
- Theme
- Beauty and art
- Tradition
- Modern
- Term fixed
- 1790
In plain terms
Creativity is usually pictured as a quality some people have - a spark, an inner source, a gift.
The evidence points somewhere less flattering and more interesting. Novelty in every field turns out to be strongly conditioned by what was already available: the same discoveries are made independently and simultaneously with remarkable regularity, which is hard to explain if the source is an individual and easy to explain if the field itself was ready.
That does not make the individual irrelevant. Somebody has to do the work, and the person who does it is not interchangeable. But it does suggest that creativity is better described as a relation between a person and a state of a field than as a property someone carries around.
As a philosopher would put it
The standard definition requires two conditions - novelty and value - and usually a third, that the production not be a matter of luck or of following a rule.
Boden's distinction is between psychological and historical creativity: an idea new to the person who had it, and one new to human history. Her further division into combinational, exploratory and transformational creativity separates novel arrangements of existing elements from the exploration of a conceptual space and the alteration of its rules.
Kant's account of genius makes it the capacity to produce exemplary work without following a rule, and it is nature working through the artist rather than a technique anyone could learn - which is where the Romantic picture originates.
Against this stands the sociological and historical tradition. Csikszentmihalyi's systems model makes creativity a relation between individual, domain and field, so that whether something counts is determined by gatekeepers rather than by the object - which parallels the institutional theory of art exactly.
Where you meet it
In 1922 William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas published a list of 148 inventions and discoveries made independently by two or more people at about the same time.
The list includes calculus by Newton and Leibniz, oxygen by Scheele and Priestley, the telephone by Bell and Gray - who filed on the same day - natural selection by Darwin and Wallace, and the telegraph, the thermometer and the steamboat several times over. Merton later argued that multiple discovery is the norm in science rather than the exception, and that singletons are the anomaly requiring explanation.
The pattern is not evidence that individuals do not matter. Darwin and Wallace produced different work, and Leibniz's notation is the one still in use.
What it does show is that novelty arrives when a field is ready for it, and that the picture of an isolated mind producing something from nothing is a poor description of how anything has actually been discovered.
What is actually disputed
Whether creativity is a property of persons.
The individualist account treats it as a trait or capacity, measurable and unevenly distributed, and it underwrites most of what schools and organisations do about it. The systems account treats it as a relation: an idea is creative only if a field recognises it as such, which makes the judgement social and historically contingent.
The second explains multiple discovery, the recognition lag suffered by work later regarded as brilliant, and the fact that whole periods produce far more of it than others. It also makes creativity unassessable at the time of production, which is unhelpful for anyone trying to encourage it.
A further and now pressing question is whether the value condition can be met by a process that understands nothing. If a system can produce work a field recognises as valuable and novel, the systems account says that is creativity, and the individualist account has to say what is missing.
Commonly confused with
- Imagination c. 330 BC Imagination represents what is absent. Creativity produces something, and most imagining produces nothing at all.
- artistic ability Creativity in the philosophical sense covers mathematics, engineering and cooking as much as art.
Defined against
- Mimesis If art imitates what exists, creativity is not what artists do, and the two accounts have been rivals since the Romantics
Philosophers
- Immanuel Kant Genius as producing exemplary work without a rule
- Friedrich Nietzsche Creation as the highest activity, and the revaluation of values
- John Dewey Creativity as continuous with ordinary problem-solving
- Henri-Louis Bergson Real novelty as a feature of duration rather than a human capacity
- Alfred North Whitehead Creativity as a fundamental category of process
Works
- Critique of Pure Reason The critical framework the account of genius belongs to
- Creative Evolution Novelty as real and irreducible
- Experience and Nature Making as continuous with inquiry
- On the Genealogy of Morals Creation of values as the fundamental act
Schools
- German Idealism Where genius is analysed
- Lebensphilosophie Where novelty is a feature of life itself
- Process Philosophy Where creativity is metaphysically fundamental
- Classical Pragmatism Where it is continuous with inquiry
- Nietzscheanism Where creation replaces discovery
Related concepts
Art 1964 · Imagination c. 330 BC · Emergence 1875 · Becoming c. 500 BC · Possibility c. 330 BC
Kant's genius is the talent through which nature gives the rule to art, producing works that are exemplary and cannot be taught; the Romantic idea of the creative individual descends from it, and so does most of what is wrong with popular accounts.