The contemporary western definition of Creativity is a psychological definition. Which is to say that it is both (1) exclusively human-centered and (2) understood as an internal (psychological) state. This approach to creativity that coalesced in the mid-twentieth century in the US is very much a product of its immediate history—the Cold War. It can also be traced back to the Classical Greeks and their development of an ideational model of creation as one that involves the gaining access to and copying of ideal forms. We have written extensively about this and term this “the god model.”
This model of anthropocentric creativity puts undue emphasis on the brain and immaterial ideas. Which is a legacy that can be seen in the still current emphasis on “divergent thinking” and “abductive reasoning” as being paramount to creativity.
The problems with this approach are threefold:
(1) All reality is creative. Humans are not uniquely creative. We live in a world of ongoing spontaneous creativity, and our intentional creative practices surf these ongoing processes. In this regard, the development of the complexity sciences has played a significant and transformative role:
“As a result we now have a way of regarding nature as fundamentally creative. Nature allows for, indeed generates, the emergence of novelty, as the co-evolution of systems and environments continually opens new futures in the adjacent possible…” (The Blind Spot).
(2) Thinking—ideation is not something that happens “in” the head. Thinking is very much a “worldly” and engaged practice of making and doing. It is an embodied, interactive, social, embedded, and extended activity. Looking for thinking (never mind creativity) in the head is a category mistake. Here, the work of the Enactive approach to cognition has been transformative in correcting the long-standing computational brain-based approach to thinking.
(3) Ideation in all of its forms is inherently conservative. To ideate, imagine, and speculate fundamentally draws upon the known. The radically new—that which has never existed—by definition exceeds the known and the knowable. These creative processes can only be joined via engaged experimentalism.
We need to reorient our habits and practices away from anthropocentric individualism and immaterial, disengaged ideation. The myths of individualism and the lone genius are just that. Creativity was never the exclusive purview of humans. We, and our creative practices, have always been entangled with the ongoing creative practices of all reality. This is where a new approach to human creativity needs to begin.
