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7 Explicating 'Creativity' Paisley Livingston Explicating ‘creativity’ 7 Explicating ‘creativity’ Paisley Livingston Given the many ways people use the word, it seems unlikely that ‘creativity’ names a single concept shared by all reasonably well-informed parties. An explication of ‘creativity’ can, however, identify “a good thing to mean” by this term in the context of systematic enquiry.1 Contributing to such an explication is the aim of this chapter. My focus is on creative actions and achievements. What makes such things creative, I propose, is originality in the devising of an effective means to some end. This proposal stands in contrast to value-neutral conceptions of creativity, as well as to vari- ous honorific conceptions according to which the pursuit or realisation of good goals is necessary to creativity. My point of departure is the oft-repeated claim that creativity is a spe- cies of valuable novelty (e.g. Boden 2010: 1; Csikszentmihalyi 1996: 27). As the sense of this claim depends on how its constituent concepts are disambiguated, in the first section I examine different notions associated with the expressions ‘novelty’, ‘originality’, ‘priority’, ‘unprecedented’, and ‘innovative’. In the second section, I turn to the axiological conditions. I discuss some arguments supporting strong conditions as well as counter- examples that challenge their alleged necessity. I consider a value-neutral idea of creativity and propose an instrumental success condition. In the final section, I examine some claims about relations between novelty and value as constituents of creativity. 1 Kinds of novelty Although it is often stated that novelty is a necessary attribute of all crea- tive items, it is not easy to say just what this entails (Hausman 2009: 5). Is novelty only a subjective projection of someone’s surprise or unfa- miliarity, a pseudo-property that may be dispelled by a second look? An alternative to this sort of subjectivism about novelty is to identify it as a real attribute of particular, spatio-temporally located events. Yet, such a notion would appear to be vacuous because every particular event or action is novel in that it has never happened before. Perhaps it would be better to say that an event is novel only if it is the first instance of a kind. Second TNFUK_07_Chapter_7_docbook_indd.indd 108 12/7/2017 6:37:07 PM Explicating ‘creativity’ Explicating ‘creativity’ 109 and subsequent instances of the kind are not novel, at least relative to that kind. There are reasons, however, why this very broad sortal–relative conception of novelty is not an adequate constituent of our explication of ‘creativity’. Consider, for example, the (1970) work of fiction by Erich Segal entitled Love Story, which may come to mind when one searches for examples of hackneyed but lucrative popular fiction. With regard to any number of kinds one might think of, this work was unquestionably first of the kind. For example, it was the first best-seller romance published by a classics professor at Yale University. Given a broad, kind-relative eluci- dation of what ‘novel’ means, this was a novel feature of the work, but it hardly counts for or against its creativity. What needs identifying is the kind or kinds that pick out the sort of novelty that is directly relevant to creativity. Reference to some uncontroversial examples of creative and uncreative achievements can help us with this problem. Consider first the accomplish- ments of the Russian high jumper Valeriy Brumel, who used the familiar straddle technique to set the first of his six world records at the high jump in 1961, being the first to clear the bar at 2.23 metres (Matthews 2012: 42–43). This was a skilled and exceptional performance, but was it crea- tive? It seems perfectly obvious that it was not. If you doubt this, try to say which features of his performance were ‘creative’ or manifested creativity. Consider now another athlete, Richard Fosbury, who abandoned the straddle technique in the early 1960s and came up with a new way of jump- ing by turning his back to the bar just before taking off. Using this effec- tive new technique that he had independently devised, Fosbury won an Olympic gold medal and set an Olympic (but not world) record in 1968 (Matthews 2012: 82). Fosbury’s achievement is widely acclaimed as crea- tive (e.g. Kaufmann and Runco 2009: 156). What is far less well known is that a Canadian athlete, Debbie Brill, independently developed a similar technique some two years after he had done so (Oliver 2014: 39–40). Brill became the Canadian national high jump champion, but never achieved the fame enjoyed by Fosbury, who was her elder by six years, and who was first to use the back-to-the-bar technique in major international competitions. In their contributions to the sport, all three jumpers shared the end of maximising the height at which the bar was crossed in keeping with the rules of the event. The key difference between the achievements of Fosbury and Brill, on the one hand, and Brumel’s, on the other, is that even though Brumel successfully cleared the bar at unprecedented levels, he did not innovate with regard to technique. In contrast, Fosbury was the first to come up with an unprecedented means to the end of excel- ling in high-jump competitions: the “Fosbury flop.” Brill too was no mere copy-cat: she independently developed her own backward jump (‘the Brill bend’) well before Fosbury’s innovation became famous by virtue of his TNFUK_07_Chapter_7_docbook_indd.indd 109 12/7/2017 6:37:07 PM 110 Paisley Livingston televised use of the technique at the 1968 Olympics. These cases suggest that at least one important kind of novelty we are looking for with regard to creativity is novelty in devising a means to some end. Given the goal of their chosen sporting event, Fosbury and Brill were both innovative in precisely this sense, while Brumel was not. Is this result generalizable to uncontroversial examples of creative achievements in other domains? It is easy to find examples in the arts that fit the pattern. Consider the case of Un chien andalou, a short film co- authored by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí in 1929. The filmmakers’ most immediate goals in making this film were to shock or épater a bourgeois audience and to exemplify surrealist attitudes using the cinematic medium (Admowicz 2010: 9). These were not new goals, but given those ends, the making of this film was both an effective and an innovative achieve- ment. Various cinematic devices are used to baffle and annoy any viewer who expects the film to present some kind of commonsensical or familiar sequence of story events. Most famously, early in the film there is a dis- turbing montage sequence in which a man appears to slice a woman’s eye with a razor. A very remote literary antecedent could perhaps be identified in Shakepeare’s line, “Out vile jelly? Where is thy lustre now?” (The Tragedy of King Lear 1917: III, vii, 82), but no such surprising and shocking mon- tage had been included in a film before.2 It is possible to identify many other examples of creative achieve- ments involving the devising of new means for the realisation of ends. To mention a few cases that often come up in the literature on creativity, Goodyear found a new means of preparing rubber in the making of tyres; Jenner found a new technique for preventing disease using vaccinations; Galileo found ways to test, refute, and improve on Aristotle’s claims about motion; and so on. Coming up with unprecedented means to some goal looks to be crucial to the novelty of creative achievements. With this in mind, the relevant explication of ‘novel’ can be stated as follows: (N1) a particular action, α1, performed by A at t1 using means, M, is novel1 just in case it is the first instance in which M was used to perform an action of kind α. Berys Gaut (personal communication) raised the objection that it is also possible to be creative in the generation of ends, in which case the sort of novelty identified above would not be necessary to creativity. For exam- ple, someone could independently recognise or make friendship, beauty, freedom, or the good life a final value; that person could even have been the very first human being in all history to have done so. If that is so, the ‘just in case’ in (N1) is too ambitious and should be replaced by an ‘if ’. TNFUK_07_Chapter_7_docbook_indd.indd 110 12/7/2017 6:37:07 PM Explicating ‘creativity’ 111 I wonder, however, whether these sorts of cases should be identified as creative achievements if the relevant agents devised no new means to the realisation of actual instances of the final value in question. Simply valuing x intrinsically, or acquiring the attitude that some x is a final end, is neither necessary nor sufficient to realising a creative achievement, whereas com- ing up with innovative means to such ends, possibly along with the original discovery or invention of those ends, would be both. There is at least one other potential problem with (N1): only one of the relevant senses of ‘novel’ is identified. I have in mind a distinction that Robert K. Merton (1957) couched in terms of ‘originality’ and ‘priority’. Following Merton’s stipulation, someone who is the very first to make a discovery or invention has priority, and this is the sense of ‘novel’ identi- fied by (N1). ‘Originality’, Merton stipulates, refers to a discovery that is realised independently, but that may or may not have priority.
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