What is “creativity”? This word
is passed back and forth often in our culture, usually referring to a quality a
person has in which they act in original and interesting ways. This form is both highly valued as a positive
attribute someone can have, and yet often undervalued, especially when being
creative could lead to financial or social risks. The obvious realm that this concept is used
in is when discussing art. A child may
be seen as creative if they create a unique drawing or painting, for example,
or a filmmaker or musician may appear creative if the works they produce are
somehow unique from other artists in their field. But this term can also be applied to people
of other lines of work, such as scientists or engineers who are innovative in
their methods and the things they create.
But what is “creativity”
really? When a musician writes a song,
where does that uniqueness in his or her material actually arise from? Are they really producing anything totally
new or are they simply borrowing elements from music they’ve heard in the past
and rearranging them in new ways? Or as
singer-songwriter Danny Dolinger bluntly put it, “any songwriter who doesn’t admit
to being a thief is also a liar”
(Auxier 118). This certainly seems true
when listening to much of the music that is popular today, which often displays
a mix of influences from a variety of genres from the past half century. Music serves as a good example to pose this
question, but the same thing can be asked of any type of thing created by
people.
To answer these
questions it is helpful to expand our definition of “creativity”. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary gives
as broad a definition as you’ll ever need: “the ability to make new things or
think of new ideas” (Merriam-Webster).
If we think of creativity as simply being able to “make new things”, or,
in other words, the ability to create,
we can really think of any action or event in the universe as having
creativity. Because every action always
creates something, right? Well, again the
question comes up, and this time in a broader sense – is there such thing as
actual “creation”? Does anything truly
new in the universe ever actually arise, or are things simply rearranged into
different combinations? This problem has
been debated by thinkers throughout history, including Kant who described the
two possibilities of occasionalism and pre-established harmony. To explain these positions simply,
occasionalism implies that the universe is subject to real change at any point
in time, such as incited by an all powerful being such as God, and
pre-established harmony holds that that the universe changes through time, but
these changes are simply part of a long chain of events established at the beginning
of time with no real freedom for new possibilities to arise (Kant 309).
The rational answer to
this problem falls largely in line with the latter position. If we think of the universe as ruled by cause
and effect interactions, it makes sense that nothing should be able to arise
without a previous element coming before it and an already set outcome in
place. Thus, nothing new is actually created, just a
different arrangement of things with in a set system. This is similar to the belief taught by Parmenides
that “something which is, comes from being” (Mcdermott 60). It seems obvious, but if everything comes
from what already exists, then creation and creativity cannot exist – at least
not in the truest sense.
To bring things back
to more practical terms, it’s true that a musician can never create something
entirely new. Even if they are not
directly copying from another musician, the music they create is still largely
a combination of all the influences they’ve been exposed throughout their lives. But this doesn’t mean that creativity can’t
have importance in our lives. That’s
because creation in the sense of reordering still means that something entirely
unique is produced. Yes, it a combination of already existing
parts, but the specific combination is one that has never existed before and
never will exist again. This is why
music and nature and everything else in our lives has the ability to
continually surprise and delight us. And
in this sense the individual quality of creativity, as in the commonly used
definition, is plenty real and something to be encouraged. Though we can’t produce anything truly new, the reordering of existing
elements and cultivation of influences is what drives innovation and how great
art is produced. The problem is when we
rely too much on obvious combinations of elements. This we should avoid at all costs.
References
Auxier, Randall. "Magic Pages and Mythic
Plants." Led Zeppelin and Philosophy All Will Be Revealed. Ed. Scott
Calef. Chicago: Open Court, 2009. Print.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique
of Judgement. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987. Print.
McDermott, John J. A Cultural Introduction to Philosophy.
New York: Knopf, 1985. Print.
Merriam-Webster.
Merriam-Webster. Web. 6 Nov. 2015.
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