The Secret To Being Creative
April 21, 2020
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15:18Now PlayingThe Secret To Being Creative
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as posted by the channelWhat is creativity? I take a look at the philosophy of creativity to try and find out. Plato said the inspiration is a kind of madness. To the Ancient Greek philosopher, creativity was a kind of divine inspiration – it came from outside the limited understanding of men – a burst of lightening not reducible to human reason.
Almost 2000 years later, he mathematician Henri Ponclaire influentially argued that creativity felt like swarms of ideas combining randomly in his unconscious followed by the conscious selection of one of them according to aesthetic criteria.
To Ponclaire then, unlike Plato, creativity came from inside the person, but was still guided by aesthetic criteria – trends, standards, social norms, histories - on the outside – determined by society.
But how is that aesthetic criteria determined? What makes this a better example of creativity than this?
Almost all psychologists and philosophers agree that creativity must be both original and valuable. This, although contested, is likely the best definition of creativity we have.
I take a look at where value and originality come from, while building a tentative approach to creativity that includes Study and Knowledge, Activity and Industry, Tranquillity and Reflection, Tension and Opposites, and finally, always remember, to add a bit of randomness…
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Sources:
Gaut, B. (2010), The Philosophy of Creativity. Philosophy Compass, 5: 1034-1046. doi:10.1111/j.1747-9991.2010.00351.x
Sebastian Mitchell, James Thomson’s The Castle of Indolence and the Allegory of Selfhood, The Cambridge Quarterly, Volume 35, Issue 4, October 2006, Pages 327344,
Lucy Newlyn, Wordsworth Coleridge and The Castle of Indolence Stanzas
James Thompson, The Castle of Indolence
Bob Stanish, Randomness and Structure: Implications on Creativity
TORRANCE, E.P. The search for satori and creativity
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