Customer Reviews

The Creativity Question

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This collection of essays brings psychiatric and philosophical authority to the discussion of an important topic - creativity. From a psychiatric perspective creativity is essential to understand for mental and health reasons. The ability of individuals to function normally in a society is a creative endeavor and hence of interest to psychologists. Philosophers value creativity for its own sake as only they can do, but also "in order to identify and nurture creative talent. The problem is that "the task of gaining knowledge about creativity is very difficult .... Creativity is quite complex" (p. 5).

The first selection of essays characterizes creativity. Some define creativity as the possession of geniuses; others say everyone is practically creative. Still others would say creativity is time-variant and God's gift bestowed upon the chosen few. With such diversity, there is bound to be a good deal of general disagreement and contradiction" (p. ). The selection outlines these disagreements and contradictions, and is followed by four other chapters of varying lengths. Each chapter has a separate introduction of it own. Specifically Chapter 1 focuses on the works that have had a profound "influence on the entire intellectual tradition of Western civilization" (p. 27). These include among others Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Galton, and Freud. These authors did not develop theories of creativity, but everyone of them had something important to say. As an example, for Plato creativity is inspiration; for Aristotle it is the art of making things happen; and creativity is inherited ingenuity for Galton.

Chapter 2 of the book describes aspects of the creative process. The authors of these selections are VIPs of the literary world: Edgar Poe, Graham Wallace, Kath Patrick, Abe Maslow, and their likes. Their descriptions "document and define the phases and qualities of the creative process or the characteristics of creative persons" (p. 55). There is strong unanimity that the creator is just as importance to the process as the creation.

The role of science after all is to clarify. What the creator does, and whether or not his or her creation is important is ultimately meaningful to the consumer if and only if it can be explained or if and only if it predicts something of essence. Chapter 3 is about the forms and scopes of explanations, and what these suggest about creativity. The individual selections in this chapter are very contentious.

The fourth chapter looks at explanations with a microscopic view. Except for B.F. Skinner and Bill Gordon, the authors of the selections in Chapter 4 are unfamiliar to me - but this only shows my ignorance. The essays by Ravenna Helson (gender and creativity) and Herbert Crovitz (computers and creativity) are superb.

The last chapter presents "alternative approaches to creativity". Almost all the essays in the chapter "reject (sic) the assumption that creativity can be fully subjected to deterministic explanations, tacit or explicit. According to them, creative activity eludes both regularities ... and any unbroken complex of necessary connections" (p. 280). This is the challenge each writer responds to. Again the topics range from rejection of deterministic creativity, creativity as a rational activity, to creativity as an expressed intuition and conscious attention to activities like art.

The book clearly puts in the reader's hands an enormous amount of seminal works on creativity. For some of us this book may not have substitutes. Individual papers are all classics. However, I could not help the feeling that the strength of the book was log-normally distributed - rising rapidly through Chapter 2, peaking round Chapter 3, and falling at a decreasing rate thereafter. Even so, I still recommend the book.

Amavilah, Author
Modeling Determinants of Income in Embedded Economies
ISBN: 1600210465