Whitehead and Creativity

In reading Sawyer’s Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation (Oxford University Press, 2006), I grew frustrated with his unwillingness to explore the very term ‘creativity’ around which his whole text was structured. It just so happened that the copy of Sawyer’s text I was reading was cut off at the right margin of one of the pages. This allowed me to make a transversal intervention into the text, to insert my own critiques/complaints in between his lines. I used one particular sentence of his (in red, below) that was broken up in order to write a couple paragraphs. My hopes were to transform an ultimately humanist and narrow scope into an open-ended one:

Any s…

Erious discussion of creativity must be speculative, ongoing, transformative. Creativity is that capacity by which things change. Why scientifically study it? Science (or pseudoscience) is that by which things are categorized, defined, stabilized. Creativity is always looking at the possible and unknown, the domain called future. It’s always finding a way out, ways to exceed what its already begun.

To claim creativity as a human capacity (let alone a psychological one) is to misunderstand it entirely. Whitehead was the one to coin the term in the early 20^th century (yes, it’s less than 100 years old). His project differed from recent scholarship in that the

…study of creativity in the early years of the 21^st century must explain th…

eoretically: creativity in connection with human disciplines and concerns, such as artistic creations or technological developments. I believe that in this context its application to/inclusion of scientific practice was perceived as a liberal and progressive development. However, creativity was originally formulated as a metaphysical principle to explain the mechanisms by which novelty enters the Universe and was hardly limited to concerns of our species. It this sense, Whitehead was a posthumanist scholar. He used creativity as a method of affording ‘things’ (in a general sense including objects, ideas, values, etc.) an agency and life of their own--as ‘things’ oriented toward an openness to process and evolution. We must not forget this capacity of the term ‘creativity’ when it’s so commonly and narrowly applied to the comparatively tiny

…range of human innovation.

The following diagram helped me to formulate a notion of what creativity is, how it operates: