Creativity

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1

Creativity

“I put down the cup and examine my own mind. It alone can discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exists, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.” “Remembrance of Things Past”

Where can one find more courage and creativity than in the wagon train crossing the Mississippi and driving West to the Pacific coast to create a new life in what is presently a wilderness? Or perhaps in the ships crossing the Atlantic with a small group determined to start a new life on a continent presently free of any such life as intended.

Can you think of anything that would be more creative than starting a new civilization?

2

Yes.

To create a better order out of what exists now, that functions improperly and to deficit.

3

I look to the left of my computer and see a pen and a piece of paper. I could draw a picture and potentially, could be more creative.
Point being, I don’t think starting a new civilization is that creative. It’s human instinct. Over time, we’ve realized it is logically easier to survive in groups.

4

Nice topic.

I’ve been thinking about this from a different perspective.

I am interested in defining what constitutes philosophy, because I believe it relates back to some of the things I’m interested in concerning institutionalization and individuality and the human condition, in general.

That is, what differentiates the philosopher, the mind involved in philosophy, from that of historical redefinition and translation?
How can we tell the philosopher from the academic or are they one and the same?

It is undeniable that creativity in any area is affected and guided by past events.
Nobody can be completely unique. We all draw from a common pool to create our individual ideas and creations.
The mind creates something new when it takes the products of the past and unites them in new ways, creating something else.

From what little philosophy I’ve read I’ve noticed that the good ones most often invent their own terms to explain the concepts they wish to convey.
They either create a new word (Dasein) or they combine many words (thing-in-itself, Theyness) or they take an old word and redefine it in their own way (Will, Nothingness).

What they are doing is taking the experiential effects that have participated in their thinking and made them their own, by referring them back to themselves and their own experiences.
It is like when one grafts the tame bud of an olive-tree upon a wild olive-tree branch – as I’ve watched my father do many times in the past.
The graft represents the past (genetic or otherwise) which is transplanted upon a new raw being and the old branches cut off to create something new – to help the new bud grow.
In that instant the new bud takes on an identity that, governed by its genetic past (it’s knowledge) is guided to grow in similar manners, using similar ways as those of the branch the graft was taken from, but twisting and turning in unique ways so as to create an individual, new thing, a new branch and then a new tree.

Many have come to believe that to philosophize is to refer back to that genetic past, that pool of knowledge, and then follow its patterns precisely and in imitation.

They find pleasure and purpose and pride in being able to follow the twists and turns of someone else’s reasoning and are reassured by how precise and well they’ve kept to the original.
In this way they shape their thoughts and beliefs by how they appreciate the thoughts and beliefs of another and choose, from amongst the many, the one that represents their ideal form to imitate and approximate.

In fact philosophy should be a creative act.
It is the practice of referring back to oneself, as it relates to the environment and the world, to create something universal, rather than to refer to someone else, to repeat the universal.
It is true that even imitation demands a certain talent and eye for detail and nobody will deny that even the academic possesses the tools of perspicuity and mental flexibility necessary to follow another’s reasoning, but they are not philosophers – no more than an artist who plagiarizes a work is an artist.

Someone once said that a philosopher is a combination of scientist and poet. Then we can assume that it is the poetic aspect of philosophy that makes creativity possible within it.

5

Satyr

I have been studying “Philosophy in The Flesh”, which is to become, I think, cognitive science’s first paradigm. In this book the authors offer as a paradigm for cognitive science the ‘conceptual metaphor’ and in their efforts to convince the doubtful they try to show how this ‘conceptual metaphor’ can account for many things and especially how it can account for the particular ‘philosophical theories’ given by various philosophers. They refer to “Folk Theories” to do this. Please read this essay I have written about this and if it does not touch upon your particular area of interest don’t give up on me but perhaps clarify how I am missing the point because I am interested in what you are trying to do.

When written history began five thousand years ago humans had already developed a great deal of knowledge. Much of that knowledge was of a very practical nature such as how to use animal skins for clothing, how to weave wool, how to hunt and fish etc. A large part of human knowledge was directed toward how to kill and torture fellow humans. I guess things never really change all that much.

In several parts of the world civilizations developed wherein people learned to create laws and to rule vast numbers of people. Some measure of peace and stability developed but there was yet no means for securing the people from their rulers. I guess things never really change all that much

Almost everywhere priests joined rulers in attempts to control the population. Despite these continual wars both of external and internal nature the human population managed to flourish. Egypt was probably one of the first long lasting and stable civilizations to grow up along the large rivers. Egypt survived almost unchanged for three thousand years. This success is attributed to its geographical location that gave it freedom from competition and fertile lands that were constantly replenished by the river overflowing its banks and thus depositing new fertile soil for farming.

Western philosophy emerged in the sixth century BC along the Ionian coast. A small group of scientist-philosophers began writing about their attempts to develop “rational” accounts regarding human experience. These early Pre-Socratic thinkers thought that they were dealing with fundamental elements of nature.

It is natural for humans to seek knowledge. In the “Metaphysics” Aristotle wrote “All men by nature desire to know”.

The attempt to seek knowledge presupposes that the world unfolds in a systematic pattern and that we can gain knowledge of that unfolding. Cognitive science identifies several ideas that seem to come naturally to us and labels such ideas as “Folk Theories”.

The Folk Theory of the Intelligibility of the World
The world makes systematic sense, and we can gain knowledge of it.

The Folk Theory of General Kinds
Every particular thing is a kind of thing.

The Folk Theory of Essences
Every entity has an “essence” or “nature,” that is, a collection of properties that makes it the kind of thing it is and that is the causal source of its natural behavior.

The consequences of the two theories of kinds and essences is:

The Foundational Assumption of Metaphysics
Kinds exist and are defined by essences.

We may not want our friends to know this fact but we are all metaphysicians. We, in fact, assume that things have a nature thereby we are led by the metaphysical impulse to seek knowledge at various levels of reality.

Cognitive science has uncovered these ideas they have labeled as Folk Theories. Such theories when compared to sophisticated philosophical theories are like comparing mountain music with classical music. Such theories seem to come naturally to human consciousness.

The information comes primarily from “Philosophy in the Flesh” and wku.edu/~jan.garrett/302/folkmeta.htm

6

Interesting.

Perhaps this refers us back to Jung’s “collective unconscious” or to the simplicity of the Mandelbrot set which produces infinitely complicated patterns.

I have noticed it myself how invention, like art, often imitates nature.
It isn’t accidental that human highway systems, when looked from above, resemble the cardiovascular system or why the computer approximates the same principles the brain uses.
Are we copying nature, even when we think we are inventing and creating something unique?
What is unique?

One could say that we are merely following the paths that work and in inventing things that resemble natural phenomena we are simply tapping into a natural discovery of efficiency – following the path of least resistance, so to speak.

The same can be said for human thought patterns.
Many of these famous philosophers follow common themes, but the good ones manage to lead us into another direction by combining two or more elements into something different and so open up new vistas of perspective to our eyes, even if they root this difference in common pools of ideas.
I see this as creativity/ingenuity.

Most of what goes for philosophy these days is repetition and reflection and interpretation.
Most are content to just function as interpreters of dead others and believe it is philosophy to only take positions on positions, as I’ve already said in an earlier post.
Do we not know of individuals who never tire of talking about this or that philosopher’s opinions, debating about who has understood him the best?
Are we not all guilty of this, to some extent?

The element missing is that individual reference to personal experiences or that creative combination of multiple sources into something new, something different.
This requires effort and imagination. Effort we would like to avoid and imagination some of us lack.
This act also requires courage because it entails an exposure of honest thought and the possibility for error.
It is easy to follow worn down paths knowing you will not stumble upon them because others have flattened it with their feet before you - the path is smooth and easy and all one needsis the time and stamina to run down it as far as possible.
It is difficult to cut through a new path or take the “road less taken”.

The good artist or the good philosopher is exposing himself to us.
He’s standing in front of us bear and sincere and he accepts our judgments of him, whereas the bad philosopher, the pseudo-philosopher, the pseudo-artist, merely wears the garments of others, speaks using another’s words, is diligent in remaining precise and accurate in his recitations and escapes personal responsibility and effort and exposure by hiding behind another’s opinions or methods.

He takes no definite position and masks his doubt and reluctance by remaining ambiguous, by complicating the concepts so that only few can follow along.

He appears wise using another’s words or by dazzling us with information. His intellectual prowess resting on memory rather than insight.
This is called “stringent philosophy”, as keeping to scripture might be called stringent spirituality.

The metaphor of the creative artist versus the imitator is an apt one.
The first combines different influences, learns from the past, absorbs the lessons (understands them), and then combines them into his own unique perspective as it is shaped by circumstances. We might perceive the different influences participating in his works but cannot but we cannot deny the overall unique effect.
The second simply return back to the past and follows the same paths religiously. His talent rests in being or trying to become a replica of his mentors, his pride coming from how well he can repeat their style.

Is it better to be a bad artist than a good copier? In this world, where one is judged by how (s)he mirrors his/her neighbor the copier is worshiped. There’s a sense of Baudrillardian looping occurring, as art ceases to imitate life and life imitates art.
One of the consequences of industrialization and civilization is that our primary area of experience does not come directly from a natural environment but is filtered through a social one – in effect filtered through human experience and so our primary area of experience is other human beings.

I believe this is also the difference between a philosopher and an academic and is part of what I was referring to in my piece about Institutionalization.
We can admit that an academic has a vast amount of philosophical information, he can recite the past positions, enumerate the schools of thought, explain the relationships between this thinker and that one, use the correct terminology in the way the original intended it, but is he a philosopher?
Does any thinker require all this information to comment on life and reality?

It participates in the web of concepts involved in social indoctrination and the search for the position of the individual within the whole or what is called “normal” and “abnormal” or healthy and ill or functional and dysfunctional.

7

the bad philosopher you were describing seemed to be quite similar to the idea of the sophist as related by the visitor in plato’s “sophist”. as someone who is an expert debater but usually has little insight of his own to add to the discussion. in proving that anothers view is conflicted he appears more knowledgeable but in reality he is only a manipulator of words. or playing games

8

Yes.

I would not say that a sophist necessarily has “nothing new to add”, but that he is afraid of adding it, as to not appear foolish or as to not fall into error, and chooses to appear wise and knowledgeable by repeating what is considered established fact.

It is the deferment of the one to the many, where one’s quality is in how he can manipulate and affect the others using what they already believe to his advantage.

It is the individual hiding behind the masses.

It isn’t accidental that the sophist in our time is represented by the academician, an authority figure at the heart of established knowledge and conformity, the educational system.
He is an “expert”, in that he can accurately recite and present what is acceptable fact or holy scripture.