Philosophy Now Forum

I will pose a claim here and I hope as many of you as possible will find the time to engage me in discussion. The claim is about a view on creativity that I claim is wrong and a misconception based upon mysticism and not concrete knowledge of the subject matter, the criticism was freshly baked in my mind this morning:

There is no such thing as the "uniqueness" in creativity; that only certain mystically special things are a work of creativeness. Instead, every created thing that can be distinguished from every other thing is a work of creativity; accumulating to anything really, and only the density of creativity makes a difference from great to weak.

However, fitness, something that is both dense in distinguishability and fit into the life of consumers, is still a work of extraordinarity, but it is not the quality of "new" that makes it great, it is not creativity, but a combination of newness and fitness that produce incremental "utility".

Can you unpack what you said more clearly?

A Taste of Popper wrote:Can you unpack what you said more clearly?

It is pretty short and straight to point so difficult, but I might try.

Creativity has been treated by people as being this mystical quality that makes something extraordinary, but only given that it is new (either new in the circumstances or completely unheard of), that is, it distinguishes itself from other things, and that it is made by a human being.

My claim is treating it as mystical or being defined by its "newness" (density of distinguishability) as creative, is misguided, and that it instead is fitness, the way things fit into other things, that causes creativity to be something else than just the manifestation of "newness".

For instance, if I have a problem, the problem could be the mere absence or lack of something... then what I want to solve the situation is a solution. Old solutions might do the trick, but not always, and they might be inefficient. Creativity, this extraordinary thing, comes in when something new is proposed that has a great amount of "fitness", that is, it works for the given situation. For instance, imagine you are designing clothes, and you want to make money, that is your goal. You might go for re-using old ideas that tend to sell well, but that are already quite exhausted as a way of generating sales and revenue. Creativity comes into the picture not only when somebody comes up with a new idea... it's not difficult to make a new idea you just have to think of a colour and pattern that nobody has used before and there are a fantazillion such patterns, however, they do not all look good, therefore, it is the degree of "fitness", the measure of how well it is gonna work, that will produce a work of creativity, or a great work of creativity, and you may capitalize on this and make a lot more revenue and profit. And extraordinary work of newness for its fitness... equals "creativity".

How does this idea work in the case of someone like Van Gogh who was ignored when he produced his paintings but who is now considered a creative genius?
He was not creative when he was alive but later became creative?

I can also think of creative ideas which because of circumstances (poor marketing or lack of funding, for example) are not accepted as 'fit' by consumers.

phyllo wrote:How does this idea work in the case of someone like Van Gogh who was ignored when he produced his paintings but who is now considered a creative genius?

Well first off you don't "consider" people creative, they either are or are not creative. That's an important aspect of my criticism and response. Although the "threshold" might be subjective (in that sense might first sentence response is invalid), the whether or not somebody succeed is objective, so it all ends up on where you put the bar. But to answer your question: Van Gogh is a creative genius for us because for us he fits. For those before they were not sufficiently attracted to his art so his creativity was insufficient at that time, in other words, he wasn't creative, or hadn't been allowed to reap a potential before after his death. In this sense he was also a big failure to himself if not to us here today.

phyllo wrote:He was not creative when he was alive but later became creative?

Indeed, but in those days people wouldn't be able to say he was creative either, so it pretty much fits history. You can't be creative if you're not creative "for somebody" else. Remember Van Gogh is dead, so even speaking of his creativity is a bit difficult, simply because "we" might be the creative people as we "discovered" utility in his works that he was not able to express in his life-time. I'm sure that with enough effort, many things can be made into creative works if one puts ones mind to it and looks to "discover" qualities in it. Philosophize about the work.

There's a reason why people can have paintings of shopping carts in their house, it's because the people have created utility in the work even though the work might to most people be silly and meaningless. And actually it's not such a strange idea, because remember that artists study to become artists often, and get their inspirations from things that people have done before them, and so we often see an artist's own utilizations of previous artworks and not just "his" work when we look at what he's done, and often the best artwork is a lot of resemblance to historical ways of portraying art.

phyllo wrote:I can also think of creative ideas which because of circumstances (poor marketing or lack of funding, for example) are not accepted as 'fit' by consumers.

Well if it is sufficiently reached by a few then those few would be able to determine if it is a great work of art or not, it's not the mere count of people who views it, but how much it is appreciated, and one might suspect it could've reached further if the part reached in those few who watches it is a part known to appeal to many people and not just to narrow interests of the handful.

If the work was never produced, then I'm unsure if you can actually call it "creativity" at all, and not just "imaginative", because many are the later, not many are the former.