What is the Creativity Paradox?

Creativity is a process by which something new emerges. Beginning in the 1950’s in the West, creativity has been defined as a process of coming up with new ideas. And it has consequently been focused on internal, individualized thinking. In this approach, we are called upon to “think outside the box” and utilize techniques of “lateral thinking” to “brainstorm” the new. Some researchers even purport to be able to measure a “creativity quotient” (CQ much like IQ) via tests for “divergent thinking."

But if creativity is focused on both producing the radically new and in doing so via first having ideas of what the radically new is, then we run into a problem: the problem is that thinking—ideating—relies on words, concepts and images. And all of these necessarily refer to existing things. But if something is radically and totally new, there will be no image, concept, or word for it. So how could the radically new be first  ideated? It cannot be.

This is the modern creativity paradox: you must ideate the new, but you cannot ideate the radically new, so how do you think the new—that which cannot be thought?

To do this, to cut the Gordonian knot, we need to have very different approaches to creativity than ones that rely on some form of the classical western creativity process of (1) Ideate, (2) Plan, and (3) Make. The problem is that most contemporary approaches to creativity faithfully and unwittingly follow this model.

Put simply, we need a far more engaged, experimental, emergent, and world-involving approach to both creativity and thinking. 

‍Reinventing a creativity that has nothing to do with this paradox involves grasping what thinking is and this takes some radical work, putting aside the dogma of what “thought is” and carefully  following the experience of how thinking is engendered…

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‍See also: Ideation, The God Model, The Creativity Paradox: How Can You Recognize What Has Never Been Seen?