"Creativity is a key idea in all facets of emergentism." Something new and unexpected occurs.
Out of chaos comes order and out of order comes life, and out of life come the "ten thousand things".
Karl Popper speaks of creativity as the greatest riddle of cosmology, "that the universe is in a sense creative."
Creativity, the word, first appeared in English in 1875. Now it is a fashion: everything has to do with creativity. On the one hand it is associated with accelerating changes in science and business competition and in responding to challenges. On the other hand it is criticized by the left as being elitist and imperialist. Philosopher Roger Scruton called it "a fad for self-indulgent exhibitionism".
But Clarke wants to connect the interest in creativity with the relevance of emergentism.
In the old days, only God could be creative, and to talk about humans as creative was to trespass upon God's work. But then Spinoza suggested that maybe nature could be a "self-activating agent," and Coleridge proposed that nature was "one connected whole... a living being rather than a collection of parts... with creative powers within itself."
This ties in with Kant, who wrote about each part of an organism producing the other parts, "so that it will be both an organized and self-organized being. And in his Critique of Pure Reason he "painted a picture of human knowledge in which the mind actively constructs the world" with the rational mind involved "in the shaping of knowledge." Thus, also, the artist in not "primarily an imitator, but a creator." Thus Wackeroder who portrayed "the artist as a priest who cooperates in the divine creative act"; Schelling pronouncing art as "a holy, creative, elemental power of the world." Then Fichte and the idea of self-creation: "I am wholly my own creation."
Thinkers in the 19th century developed the notion of self-creation. Marx argued that we create history with our labor; John Stuart Mill wrote that we are like a tree that grows and develops itself. Even Samuel Smiles that "self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual." Then there is Nietzsche: we "must take upon ourselves the task of self-creation" as man "become a work of art." Thus the physicist M. Mitchell Waldrop who sees us opening ourselves to "a kind of deep, inner creativity that is woven into the very fabric of nature."
In the 20th century thinkers have zeroed in on the idea that language is the agent of creation. Thus Noam Chomsky wrote that "The normal use of language is... a creative activity." Thus Freud and later psychologists looked at the potential for understanding "irrational forces locked up in the unconscious" through the talking cure. Or Jung proposing "transformation of the self" through the "creative dialogue" that leads to individuation. We can alter our states of mind by working on the brain, So, with Fromm, man's existence is "a problem he has to solve." Or Foucault considering that "one's life become a work of art." And this is experienced by some as a "democratization of the spirit" with people creating their own spiritual goals and methods. Thus the ex-Dominican priest Matthew Fox who moves theology towards the "cultivation of the sacredness of creation." And the celebration of the creative work of women down the ages, "whether as mothers, workers, or artists."
The idea of creativity moves from individual minds into movements. Thus Toynbee saw a civilization as "a dynamic, self-organizing entity" and revolutionary movements took the ideas of Marx and attempted "the creation of a new kind of humanity. The counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s sought to create a new kind of consciousness, "to wake up and discover, even to create, our new selves." The point is that they experience creativity as not just for God or a "few privileged individuals" but something in which everyone can participate.
Natural science is experienced as "one of the great cooperative creations of modern times" and in Thomas Kuhn as revolutions when a prevailing paradigm is transformed by "a new set of assumptions and terminologies." In Karl Popper the paradigm notion becomes the social interaction of evaluation and the possibility of the "falsifiability" of a theory by others.
The postmodern movement has a different take on creativity, reacting perhaps against a "totalizing" notion of the creative individual as a "transcendental subject." One way to approach creativity differently is to experience creativity as "play," and out of play come stories and narratives, "not as a mirror of the world but as something extra and unpredictable emerging from it," as Derrida puts it. So, "meaning is never closed but always deferred." And this is allied to the notion of reality as socially constructed that goes back to Kant. Thus creativity is a "conversation of mankind" rather than the brilliant "all-embracing world view."
Of course, some thinkers want to "depreciate the idea of creativity." But at least emergentism allows for the creation of new ideas without "divine mysteries" and other authoritarian structures.
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