United Nations
Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization
UNESCO Education Research and Foresight
Occasional
papers
01
January 2012
The Challenges of
Creativity
Georges Haddad
Director
Education Research and Foresight
UNESCO
Creating and
producing
knowledge
The components of
creativity
Creativity and
dissidence
Managing
creativity?
Concluding remarks
ISSN 2304-7747
Abstract
Creativity is the key to innovation, itself a key international concern for
education and training in an increasingly competitive world. Creativity
– or the urge to explore and to invent without knowing in advance how
useful the outcome may be – cannot be taught, but it must be detected,
recognized and encouraged. While the purpose of education is to
transmit knowledge and to develop the ability to learn how to learn,
creativity requires that we learn how to unlearn, and question established
paradigms. This is a challenge for all forms of learning and all levels of
education. Based on an examination of the nature of creativity and its
diverse constituent components and forms, this paper explores the
challenges of fostering creativity in education in general. The text is the
outcome of a discussion with Professor Jean-Pierre Aubin, whose recent
book La mort du devin, l’émergence du démiurge (“The Death of the Seer
and the Emergence of the Demiurge”), Editions Beauchesne 2010,
develops this issue along with a number of others on the adventure of
the mind.
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C
reativity, the urge to explore and to invent without
knowing in advance how useful it might be, cannot
be taught, but it must be detected, recognized and
encouraged. This is a challenge both for higher
education and, more generally, for all other forms of education
that, broadly speaking, transmit knowledge and procedures.
Is there a place for creativity in research training programmes?
Can academic institutions find the structural and financial means
to encourage its emergence, sustain it and recognize its socioeconomic usefulness, as well as to foster its development and the
teaching of its outcomes? How do we get beyond the paradox of
institutions, created for the purpose of transmitting knowledge,
encouraging the challenging of such knowledge?
Creativity is most likely to emerge in loosely formed structures
that are labile and reticulate rather than hierarchical, structures
such as the networks that are beginning to sprout here and
there, or the more than 700 UNESCO Chairs, a programme
initiated in 1992 and involving a similar number of institutions
distributed among virtually all of the Member States of
UNESCO.
Creativity cannot be programmed, but it is imperative that we
should recognize its potential consequences and exploit them:
this is where innovation comes in. Creativity is recalcitrant to
over-rigid structures, makes light of inertia and is opposed
to conservatism. It does not consist of perfecting knowledge
and technology, but in making them obsolete by creating new
knowledge.
→→ to analyse, in particular, the part played by creativity in the
processes of discovery and invention, then – after persuading
society to accept these discoveries and to recognize the benefits
they will bring – to understand how it develops, perfects and
exploits them, both socially and economically. The borders
between research, innovation and development are blurred and
need to be porous;
Generally speaking, the purpose of education is to transmit
knowledge and the procedures for applying it, to learn how
to learn, teach, collaborate and be independent. Creativity,
however, requires us to learn how to unlearn, to doubt, to
call ourselves into question, to rebel against established
paradigms, to seize opportunities, so that we can clear new
pathways, taking us into uncharted territories. Ironically,
scholarship inhibits creativity.
→→ to restore the relationship between creativity and behaviour,
creativity and skills, and creativity and social trust, to look at new
approaches to problems and solving them with new tools, and
to think about structures that foster creativity in the short and
medium terms;
Creativity is a solitary process, not a collective one, and calls for
a dissenting, even antisocial character that breaks with routine
and rejects consensus and tradition.
Creativity is not a continuous process, filling every instant. On
the contrary, it appears without warning, it is sporadic, revealing
itself only at times of intense activity, which are relatively brief
and psychologically exhausting, when the discovery suddenly
invades consciousness, through the medium of language,
sometimes a formal language (that of mathematics, in
particular), sometimes not. Creativity is more often than not the
culmination of a long process of maturation, a period of latency
and consolidation, during which the process is unconscious.
Creativity appears prior to thought, pushing it towards the
very limits of understanding. For this to happen, we have to
re-orientate ourselves, adopt a new perspective, a new way of
seeing things: we have first to look away before we can look
anew.
Creativity is an opportunist activity, resistant to the kind of
evaluation applied to knowledge, as distinct from cognitive
behaviour. Teaching institutions, including higher education
institutions, are designed to transmit and to endorse knowledge
but not – at the present time and in most cases – to detect and
endorse behaviour that is deviant, exploratory and creative.
For creativity, as understood here, is above all the behaviour of
doubting, of repeatedly challenging and questioning, of having
convictions that run deeper than adherence to the mainstream.
It is therefore necessary:
→→ to seek out what characterizes “creativity”, to better pin
down this polysemous concept, even at the risk of defining it too
narrowly. This is the first step in determining how higher education
and research institutions may promote it;
→→ to examine how the nature of creativity can be transmitted
and to teach how its outcomes can be exploited, how the limits of
this new knowledge are to be evaluated and how such knowledge
must be transcended through the exploration of new possibilities,
by encouraging creativity yet again so that this new knowledge is
itself called into question;
→→ to explore ways of detecting the qualities inherent in creativity
and developing them, including during adolescence, and devising
new assessment methods. For example, one suggestion might be
to add to questions such as: “prove such and such an assertion”
or “recall such and such an assertion” a further question: “What
does such an assertion remind you of? What new possibilities
might it open up? How does it relate to other assertions?”
→→ to determine how the creative process will change in the
twenty-first century, in a context where information can be
transmitted to anywhere in the world at the touch of a button,
its place within the overall picture of knowledge that is growing
exponentially, its compatibility with the fragmentation of
knowledge into increasingly specialized disciplines, its role in
bringing closer together, in unexpected and incongruous ways,
various knowledge domains, the speed of discoveries and how
it impacts on the innovation process.
Creativity
In defining what the concept of creativity covers, one is
tempted to paraphrase what Augustine of Hippo wrote about
time in his Confessions: “If no one asks me, I know what it is. If
I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”
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Creativity is one of those polysemous words that are by their
very nature controversial. There is a good reason for this:
life, a myopic process, indolent but inquisitive, conservative
but opportunistic, apparently aimless and so defying human
understanding, is creative, from the start, even though,
for some, life has not itself been created. This polysemous
character of creativity is the subject of a book by Andrei G.
Aleinikov, Sharon Kackmeister and Ron Koenig called Creating
Creativity: 101 Definitions (what Webster never told you)
(Alden B. Dow Creativity Center, 2000), but in fact, contains
more. A vast body of literature is devoted to this subject, which
would be impossible to summarize, let alone reproduce here.
In what follows, an attempt will be made to find a pathway
through this terrain, using cognitive science as a guide.
> Creating and producing knowledge
One way of conceiving creativity as presented in this study is
to consider it as a behaviour; that is, a form of action on the
environment in order to transform it, with the aim of adapting
to the viability constraints imposed by the environment.1
Consequently, behaviour cannot be reconstituted by observing
its results in isolation, but only by observing perception and
action together. To the extent that different forms of behaviour
can be singled out, they are often seen to belong in pairs, having
contrasting effects. There is no truth without lies, faith without
unbelief or obedience without disobedience. This contrast is as
indispensable for giving life direction as the accelerating and
braking mechanisms of a car are to driving it. Opposing forms of
behaviour cannot be initiated simultaneously, except to create
a state of equilibrium, that is to say a static situation, which
does not change but remains stable. Since life is movement,
opposing types of behaviour are necessary, so that when they
are used in succession, one after the other, the one corrects
the other. This is an idea that originated with Élie Bernard-Weil,
who speaks of “ago-antagonistic regulation”. This is only a
1
Without going into cognitive systems in detail, the facts are that, at the level
of the nervous system, “cognitive processes” transform symbolic perceptions
of inputs from the environment into actions on the environment, producing
outputs, or forms of behaviour. The above definitions are perfectly adequate
for our purposes.
very rudimentary description of biological regulation, which
involves not only opposing forms of behaviour that operate
in pairs, but families of a variety of behaviour types; it makes
successive selections from these to “steer” biological change
at every level.
At birth, every human being is endowed with an enormous
number of behavioural possibilities, which are ways of
responding to one event in order to produce another event.
All innate behaviour is a potentiality, it needs to be maintained
if it is to be preserved. Much like cells, these behaviour forms
change from an omnipotent stage (as evidenced by the
creativity of children), to a specialized, often overspecialized,
stage. Creativity is a kind of cultural “neoteny”, that is to say
a set of cultural behaviour patterns from childhood that have
been retained in adult life.
The idea of “knowledge” – a particularly polysemous term - is
to be understood in this context as the cognitive image that
encodes behaviour. Any form of behaviour is a process that can
only be fully grasped if both the input from the environment and
the output on the environment are known. The environment is
complex, since it has physical, biological, social and – especially
in the present analysis – cultural components.
> The components of creativity
Inventivity and creativity
Well before the French word créativité was invented, the
concept was known as inventivité, which was perhaps too
explicit and not polysemous enough. Its origin goes back to
the 1950s, to the American word creativity, probably modelled
on economic productivity, as a measure of the relation between
profit and effort, broadly speaking. What it actually adds is a
dynamic, evolutionary dimension, involving the notions of time
and change. Mathematicians and physicists would read into it
the concept of speed, or rate of growth. But, unlike economics,
which uses numbers to quantify its concepts, cognitive
processes cannot be “measured”, so that this contribution of
dynamism is not made explicit, remaining beneath the surface,
only subliminally and metaphorically present. Créativité was
adopted as a term in French a little later, making its “official”
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appearance in the Supplement of Paul Robert’s Grand
Dictionnaire Analogique. The concept was fiercely defended
by the famous engineer Louis Armand before the French
Academy, which accepted it only as a synonym for inventivité.
A synonym? Not quite, if it is agreed that the concept of
inventivité is restricted to a capacity and that of créativité to a
(dynamic) process that applies this faculty. Créativité in Chinese
is chuang(4) zao(4) xing(4) (创造性), “found, do, quality”,
clearly expressing the dynamic character of founding a quality,
through the use of “do”.
In what follows, the concept of creativity will be given the
particular meaning of a conceptual and cognitive process
that consists in producing “knowledge” and “concepts”, and,
more generally, new elements in the cultural world constructed
by the human mind. This process, from the unknown to the
known, which adds knowledge to the cultural world, means,
at the very least, that such knowledge is new or original. In
Chinese, originality is denoted by du(2) chuang(4) xing(4) (独创
性), “alone, found, quality”, which differs from the translation
for creativity in that the concept of action (“do”) is replaced by
that of singularity (“alone”), and so of unique or original. It is to
be noted that, in Chinese, the left-hand part of the ideogram
du(2) (独) contains the ideogram for “dog”, since dogs always
live alone and fight if they are with other dogs. “The first man
to compare a woman to a rose was a poet, the second was an
imbecile”, in the words of the poet Gérard de Nerval.
Creativity and innovation
When new knowledge is produced, it is non-useful. Its potential
usefulness is a matter of its appropriation by society, which may
or may not find it useful. In order to reduce its polysemy, it is
proposed that the usefulness of original knowledge should
come under innovation and not be included in the concept of
creativity. There are cases, rare as they may be, where creativity
and innovation are virtually simultaneous, but what has not
gone through the innovation process is consigned to the vast
scrapheap of unused knowledge. The useful often springs from
the previously non-useful. The philosopher Zhuang Zi might
well have been thinking along these lines when he composed
his aphorism: “Each of us knows the usefulness of the useful,
but few understand the usefulness of the non-useful.” This
tribute to innovation explains the challenges it must face in
taking over from creativity.
Creativity and rationality
This is not sufficient to characterize creativity since research
of a logical, rational kind (from the word ratio, a quotient,
implying a mathematical approach) also produces new and
original knowledge. If philosophers and scientists have flashes
of inspiration, similarly to the way in which artists do, they
give priority to the quantitative, technical and factual aspects,
engaging in a critical activity that calls into question, orders,
looks for regularities and how they fit together, and so on.
What distinguishes creativity from rationality is the use
of unconscious cognitive processes. The definition of
consciousness subscribed to here is Julian Jaynes’: “that part
of language used as metaphor to understand a phenomenon
in the environment, whether it is physical, biological, social or
cultural.” Thus, it would appear that creativity operates prior
to language, or rather, “alongside it”, for the following reason:
since the discovery of the lateralization of brain function, as
a result of the sectioning in certain patients of the corpus
callosum – the band of nerve fibres connecting the two halves
of the brain – , it was observed that the left hemisphere,
containing the Wernicke and Broca areas, which are responsible
for language, specialized in analytical processing, while the
right hemisphere specialized in the global (holistic) processing
of information, via mechanisms for shape recognition. This
lateralization of the human brain might induce lateralization
of the process of invention, the left hemisphere specializing
in rational thought, being conscious and using the faculty of
human language, the right hemisphere being responsible
for a creativity inherited through phylogenesis. Just as the
corpus callosum allows constant collaboration between the
two hemispheres, so the production of new knowledge makes
use of cooperation between the processes of creativity and
rationality. One could say, putting it rather picturesquely, that
the right hemisphere, being creative, proposes and that the
left hemisphere, being rational, disposes, by sorting the new
knowledge on a more rational or logical basis. At the cognitive
level, the non-usefulness of the right hemisphere alternates
with the usefulness of the left hemisphere. During this process,
creativity releases the brake of reason to give free rein to its
instinct and to magical thought. There is nothing criminal
about that, so long as the rational brakes are activated in time,
in order to select what is true (in a mathematical sense) or
can be validated (through experiment) among the jumble of
knowledge invented.
Abduction, the mainspring of creativity
Our “understanding” of the perception of a phenomenon
through knowledge consists, in the present context, of
validating a “metaphor” between the phenomenon and the
knowledge. In such cases, we usually say that the knowledge
“recognizes” the phenomenon. The validation process is
ultimately a biological process of satisfaction and pleasure,
gained, for example, by the resolution of a piece of formal,
logical reasoning. This, however, is not always the case.
The “abstraction” of a “phenomenon” is the body of
available knowledge that “recognizes” it through a metaphor,
the “reification” of a body of knowledge being the set of
phenomena recognized by the knowledge in question.
Since a phenomenon is perceived, it is therefore necessary for
this body of knowledge to exist. The creation of knowledge
capable of recognizing it is achieved by a cognitive process
that Charles Peirce has called “abduction”. Within the present
epistemological framework, the mainspring of creativity is
precisely this notion.
Abduction is prior to the process of “deduction”, which it
triggers. Deduction consists in verifying that this phenomenon
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is one of those “reified” by the body of knowledge “abducted”
by the abduction procedure.
“Induction” is the cognitive process that links the reification
of the abstraction of a set of phenomena to that set. The
“extrapolation” of a body of knowledge is the abstraction of
its reification, hence a globalizing and integrating process.
Abduction, deduction, abstraction, reification, induction and
extrapolation are the major stages in the learning process with
regard to knowledge.
Before it can operate, creativity requires a suspension of
judgement, in order to abduct a body of knowledge that
will recognize the perception of a phenomenon. Assembling
perceptions and knowledge already memorized in order to
create maximum redundancy increases the contingent chances
of some of this knowledge recognizing this phenomenon. This
requires an openness of mind bordering on naïvety, since one
runs the risk of proposing or creating knowledge that will fail to
recognize the phenomenon, and which will therefore have to be
discarded. In this sense, creativity is not reductionist, searching
for a cognitive “LUCA” (Last Universal Common Ancestor), but
holistic. This view was also put forward by Jan Smuts, the South
African general renowned for his qualities as a statesman and
military leader, in his book Holism and Evolution, published in
1926. Creativity is synthetic, as opposed to analytic, or rational
approaches. The “pottering about” that François Jacob
describes, with a certain relish, in his book La souris, la mouche
et l’homme (“The Mouse, the Fly and Man”) – the pottering
about found in nature, using whatever is at hand – is not unlike
the process of abduction, hence, of creativity.
In contrast to the deductive process, abduction is a
connectionist, associative process, which roots out relations
and their regularity in time, arranges and combines available
knowledge in an original way, in order to increase redundancy,
and shows a preference for networks over hierarchies. Creativity
looks at the world afresh by reformulating old questions.
Creativity, imagination and emotions
Given that the right hemisphere specializes in recognizing
shapes and images, it is not surprising that the idea of
creativity should be associated with the term imagination
since it produces images, whereas rationality is associated with
the idea of speech. In Chinese, “imagination” uses the three
ideograms xiang(3) xiang(4) li(4) (想像力), “to reflect, shape,
effectiveness”. The ideogram xiang(3) (想) “to reflect”, is itself
formed from xiang(4) (像), “to observe, to look at” and xin(1)
(心), “heart”, to look at with one’s heart, balancing instinct with
the act of looking that perceives a shape, making it productive,
effective. Creativity is sensitive, in the sense that it involves the
senses and privileges immediate perception. Sounds, colours,
poetry (with its fondness for the careful arrangement of words
and their musicality), shapes and gestures - all feature among
the manifestations of creativity. Creativity favours the modes
of communication inherited from phylogenesis: visual, olfactive
and auditory signals, and bodily movements and postures. In
the 1950s, Ray Birdwhistell described the latter two as “kinesic”,
and attempted a scientific analysis of body language, coining
the term “kinemes”, as an analogy with the “phonemes” of
language proper. Language did not replace these modes of
communication but was added to them. We too easily forget
the ethological importance of these modes of communication,
which contribute to the creative process just as language plays
its part in rational processes. Components of creativity such as
inspiration, requires breath (pneuma in Greek) and is one of the
connotations of spiritual activity.
Creativity leaves room for ambiguity, which thrives on
synonymy, the use of several words for the same concept, and
on polysemy, the attribution of several connotations to the
same word; a phenomenon which science relentlessly hunts
down and which mathematics would like to eradicate. Intuition
plays a part in creativity by contributing “ideas”, which may or
may not be true in mathematics or validated by experience,
this being the business of the left hemisphere.
Global cerebral regulation by hormones plays a larger
part in creativity than in rationality, which relies more on
neurotransmitters. As hormones and neurotransmitters are very
similar proteins, they are used as messages from an emitter
to a receiver, albeit with different functions. In the case of
hormones, the receiver is some distance away from the emitter,
and the message travels slowly. The synapses separating a
presynaptic neuron (which sends out the information) from a
postsynaptic neuron (which receives it) allow nerve impulses to
travel along neurons extremely quickly. The predominance of
the role of hormones in the creative process is a contributing
factor to the displays of emotion that accompany creativity.
Creative destruction
Far from being teleological, creativity has no goal; realizing
objectives is not part of its remit and it resists any kind of
planning. Appearing without warning, it disturbs and destroys
the natural order of things, causing creative destruction, to
borrow the term used by Joseph Schumpeter in his book
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942). Schumpeter
proposes a detailed analysis of its manifestation in the
evolution of the production process in economics, where it is a
source of innovation.
An open mind, receptivity to new ideas and naïvety are
prerequisites to creativity. It cannot flourish under the pressure
of deadlines, but requires peace and tranquillity, isolation, and
even solitude. This solitude of creativity – translated by du(2)
(独) in Chinese to highlight its uniqueness and its originality – is
accompanied by the originality of the creator’s solitude.
For creativity to blossom in any society, including a learned
society, that society has to be tolerant, open (in Karl Popper’s
sense) authorizing the break with cultural orders and established
ideologies, while at the same time keeping them in check. In his
plea for tolerance in societies with over-rigid cultural traditions,
Étienne Bebbe-Njoh writes “In an age of cognitive education,
the issue is not to speculate about the congenital weakness of
the intellectual faculties of certain races, but rather to focus on
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the activation of these faculties, whose universality no longer
seems in doubt”.2
and the quest continues. It is this desire which is the origin of
discovery and creativity.
Creativity is the fruit of not knowing “what has to be done”, “what
is impossible”, inadvertently opening up new possibilities.
Why should the unskilled blacksmiths of the late Neolithic
period have heeded the opinion of those luminaries who could
cut stone so expertly, to explore the new pathways they were
clearing? Creativity in such cases is often the prerogative of
the young who are unencumbered by a know-how they do not
possess, which explains the idea held in some quarters that
genius appears early, whereas adults have to learn to unlearn.
This presupposes that they had earlier possessed the ability to
learn to learn and had applied it.
Creativity, if taken as a synonym for inventivity, is quite distinct
from the idea of discovery, the pre-Socratic aletheia of
Parmenides, which literally conveys the idea of undressing or
unveiling, of dis-covering a nature that likes to conceal itself.
The Latin word re-velare, the origin of the French révélation,
means to “remove the veil”, but with a stronger connotation,
since what is “unveiled” or “revealed” is a far more mysterious
message, such as the message of revealed religions. Creativity,
on the other hand, dresses up in new clothes what perception
and its processing have stripped naked.
Learning to unlearn does not mean forgetting, erasing what is
learnt, but turning back the clock, spreading out the map of our
learning history to retrace our journey along the road we have
come. Few white pebbles or markers have been dropped, since
we did not anticipate that we might want to make this return
journey to uncover the decisive turns we had taken. In their
great wisdom, the Malian Sérérés profess this wise precept:
“When we do not know where we are going, we should at least
know whence we have come.” The nervous system is better
suited to moving forward than to backtracking; our brains
have a natural tendency to record “anterograde” sequences
of knowledge, which they “unroll” when these sequences
have been triggered, but find it much more difficult to follow
a “retrograde” route. It is at these special crossroads that we
need to pause in order to assess the paths we have chosen and
where they have led us, and ask ourselves whether it would
not be better to head in a different direction and explore new
territory. This retrograde approach marks the beginning of
humanity’s long march to abstraction. “Abstract notions are
merely ideas formed from what several particular ideas have in
common”, wrote Condillac in his Treatise on Systems.
Opportunist creativity
Creativity and the curiosity to explore
Ever since proteins started to emit other proteins, messages
that yet other proteins received, under the sombre supervision
of nucleic acids, the desire to explore has been a manifestation
of life. We already see emerging at this point the creative
behaviour of proteins, distinct from that of nucleic acids,
which cannot really be called rational. The same curiosity is
found in all living organisms, and particularly in the cognitive
behaviour of human beings. This driving force is named desire,
to highlight its dynamic character, which doesn’t fully come
across in the simpler term “curiosity”. For the Chinese, three
ideograms, Qiu(2) Zhi(1) Yu(4) (求知欲), “to seek, to know,
desire”, are enough to sum up in a concise and beautiful
expression, the desire to seek to know, that of acquiring new
insights. This expression is frequently used to reinforce what is
meant by curiosity, but a curiosity that is always determined but
never satisfied.
Understanding is a desire, and like a desire, once it has been
satisfied, the pleasure it has given fades away, the desire returns
2Bebbe-Njoh, E. (2009). The Booming Knowledge Economy in Sub-Saharan
Africa. COPED Franco-African Symposium, Academy of Sciences, Paris.
To compensate for the uncertainty of events that have no
statistical regularity, taking no account of extreme events,
Charles Peirce proposed the concept of tychastic chance or
uncertainty (in an article with the charming title of Evolutionary
Love, published in 1893). This concept refers to an evolution
that is dependent on “tyche” (Greek for chance, personified
by the goddess Tyche), or on “fortuna” (Latin for chance, with
Tyche becoming the Roman goddess Fortuna), “rizikon” in
Byzantine Greek and “rizq” in Arabic (these last three all having
a positive connotation), and translated into Chinese as ying(4)
bian(4) (应变), “to react, change”.
Creativity is opportunist, seizing on tychastic uncertainty to find
what it was not searching for. This is also knows as serendipity, a
term introduced into the language in 1754 by Horace Walpole,
who was inspired by the title of a Persian tale called The Three
Princes of Serendip (the Persian word for Sri Lanka), in which
the heroes end up rich, when they had set out solely in search
of adventure, without any thought of financial gain.
Creativity consists in making timely decisions, rather than
choosing optimal solutions, the product of deductionist
processes. The time in “timely” is the right time, good timing,
tempismo in Italian, the kairos of classical Greek, which passed
so quickly it had to be “grabbed by the hair” at the opportune
moment. The word “kairos” could denote those instants when
knowledge is about to be modified, which are finite (impulses),
in contrast to time that flows continuously, the time of
reflection. Creativity, then, is instantaneous. It does not consist
of improving or perfecting something that already exists, in
further developing innovations. It causes new knowledge to
well up, to emerge during times of crisis, as described by Henri
Ellenberger in The Discovery of the Unconscious which traces
the creative process back to the origins of shamanism.
Creativity throws caution to the winds and shuns the beaten
track; it contravenes the precautionary principle and obeys the
anticipatory principle; it abhors structures, organizations and
plans, and prefers disorder to order. It is not afraid of criticism
or mockery; it ignores, in the early stages, the possibility that
the new knowledge might not pass the test of deduction
and rationality; it risks being unrealistic, in the sense that the
reality of a phenomenon is defined in the context of a social
group, at a given moment and as the consensus of how it is
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perceived by the members of that social group. The trouble is
that creativity temporarily destroys that consensus by adding
new knowledge, and it is left to innovation to integrate it in a
new consensus, a new reality, providing one accepts, of course,
that reality is social and evolutionary.
We always tend to underestimate the part played by error in
the processes of creativity and innovation, which transform it
into potential progress, as happens in the case of biological
mutations in the story of life. The gnostic Valentinus of
Alexandria attributed to Error, the daughter of God, the role
of accidental creator of an imperfect world, an idea which is
much more profound and modern than it may seem. Errors
– which also generate an increase in the redundancy of
knowledge – give rise to an unintended exploration of the
environment. The history of science is littered with errors which
have enabled the exploration of unimagined evolutions, which
then become possibilities once the reservoir of potentialities
contains enough new knowledge. Not forgetting the part that
has determined the course of gastronomic history!
Art, artists and artisans
The Greeks were sensitive to this, since techne meant both
art and technology; the obverse and the reverse of the same
coin. The term technology was popularized by Jacob Bigelow
in his book Elements of Technology published in 1829; it
had, however, been coined earlier by the physicist Johann
Beckmann. Francis Bacon, the Lord Chancellor of England, had
introduced the idea into his New Atlantis in 1627, advocating a
real “merging” of the arts (techne) and science (logos). We find
the same duality in Latin, with art being practised by both artists
and artisans. It seems that a time span of at least one generation
is needed for an object to lose its utilitarian character and to
acquire an artistic value (with an added monetary value that
increases its worth) on becoming an antique. For each social
group, the consensual notion of non-usefulness establishes the
dividing-line between art and technology. Besides, which of us
could match the supreme artistry of the stonemasons of the
late Paleolithic, who benefited from an age-old tradition that
has disappeared forever? This is a technology that has not left
any apprentices.
> Creativity and dissidence
Consensus
It is assumed that all human brains have the capacity to
believe in and obey social, cultural and linguistic “codes”.
This hypothesis is analogous to the one that presupposes that
every human brain has the ability to learn a language – the
mother tongue, which is a contingent choice the environment
makes for us – or to “do” mathematics, among the many other
cognitive abilities of the human brain, though this is not the
place to list them, nor could such a list be exhaustive. Social
codes can be divided into two main categories: those which
provide a single, coherent set of explanations of the world and
those prescribing rules for behaviour that will guarantee the
viability of the social group.
Having the capacity to believe and to obey, human beings
exhibit a natural tendency to conform to the consensus. In any
case, teachers, the powers that be, etc., the police, if necessary,
all work together to maintain the consensus between
individuals and which shapes the reality of a social group.
But this consensus is called into question by scholars, artists,
protestors and others who rebel against the established order.
If scholars are seen to turn into teachers and revolutionaries into
politicians who impose a new ideology, few take the same road
in the opposite direction. This asymmetry is the sociocultural
version of the second law of thermodynamics.
The purpose of the phatic function of language is to
communicate using only knowledge that is shared by all the
speakers of the same social group, existing in the same place
and at the same time. Such trust is indispensable, since words
and faith go together. We have to believe in the word of others,
even if lies and treachery appear alongside truth and trust in an
endless struggle and a permanent cultural revolution, played
out from generation to generation.
The search for a consensus through verbal exchange requires a
modicum of cooperation, which the American philosopher Paul
Grice calls “implicature”. What Grice means by implicature is the
activity of a listener who deduces from the message he or she
receives consequences that accord with his or her own conceptual
frame of reference, instead of seeking to decode those intended
by the originator of the message. In the perspective, and at this
early stage, implicature is a first sign of creativity, of disobedience
to the meaning of the speaker’s message.
It is pointless, and also dangerous, to maintain the constancy of
sociocultural codes in an environment which is itself evolving.
It is all the more dangerous as change gathers momentum.
This makes creativity - or the exploration which (from genes
and proteins to human brains) is a manifestation of life indispensable. However, it is only accepted at the last moment,
when the viability of the system as a whole is at stake, and
often, when it is far too late.
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Dissidence
Building on these observations, and grossly oversimplifying,
it may be argued that, at both the cognitive (believing) and
the social (obeying) levels, all human brains are also endowed
with the ability to doubt and to disobey and to rebel against
tradition.
This is the level at which we shall place what we understand
by creativity: it is a deviant form of behaviour, operating in
the cognitive and cultural domains, challenging established
ideological orders and proposing alternative ones, including
scientific ideologies, which more or less gracefully accept
being challenged.
In this sense, creativity is asocial, and in certain cases, antisocial,
in that a society can be defined in terms of the set of cultural
codes accepted or shared by its members. What enables it
to function, therefore, is the consensus of its members at the
cognitive level (its myths, for example), and the observance of
laws and rules at the social level (particularly its rituals).
As life evolves, and members of a society are born and die,
the preservation of cultural codes depends on educating
children and their complete assimilation of these codes to
prevent the consensus from breaking down (it is tempting to
say “from preventing the breakdown of law and order”). For
a society to evolve, given that its environment evolves, its
cultural codes must also evolve, and its creative members must
be able to produce new cultural codes, whether in the arts and
technology or in culture and science. Although discoveries and
inventions occur all the time, only a small number are retained
and exploited. For this to happen, the situation must cease
to be viable for forms of behaviour associated with a body of
knowledge. Human beings will then discard this knowledge,
which has become ineffective, and replace it with the new
knowledge produced by creators and mediated by innovators.
Creators and innovators are not one and the same; the true
precursors are the ones that, as Georges Canguilhem said, “we
only find out later that they appeared earlier”, those then, who
were right before their time, “men without lineage”, as Lucien
Febvre put it. It is a mistake to be right too soon. Mnemosyne,
the goddess of memory, arises to sound the trumpet blast of
Fame for those who have arrived on time, at the right moment,
who then spread the good word and adapt it to the minds of
that place and that time.
If it is difficult to define good and evil, it is easier to define
immobility and to distinguish it from change or evolution,
to separate out the static from the dynamic, order from
movement, (stationary) equilibrium from a fleeting, transitory
evolution. To avoid all value judgements, we must steer clear
of identifying the dynamic with progress, given that it also
harbours “regresses”, as defined by Élisée Reclus, for the
concepts of progress and regress require explicit classification
criteria.
As a result, “naturally”, no society welcomes the emergence
of creativity, a germ that is destructive of the consensus on
which it is based; a consensus that must nevertheless evolve,
to ensure that it adapts to an environment that is also evolving.
This is particularly true of education systems which have to find
a way of incorporating creativity.
Creativity and societies
Organizations, institutions, nations, religions, families,
individuals, etc. and, more generally, any group of human
beings, are all built around a body of shared knowledge that
constitutes their “culture” or “identity”, among numerous
other synonyms. Such groups therefore bring together
individuals who subscribe to all aspects of the knowledge of
their culture, accepting this ‘culture’ by consensus, usually
implicitly or unconsciously.
The evolution of an organization, in other words its culture, is a
kind of result of the evolution of its members. Having said this,
the organization’s evolution, in turn, has a retroactive effect on
that of its members, forcing them to anticipate the evolution of
this consensus so that they can adapt to it. Analysis of the joint
evolution of individuals and the group they make up is an area
that requires more research.
It is in the interests of the members of these organizations to
adhere to what could be called a precautionary principle. If
defined in a polysemous manner, the precautionary principle
is behaviour that give rise to as slow a development of the
organization as possible. Ideally, a stationary development or a
non-development is a process of development that preserves
the state of equilibrium.
The best way of preserving the equilibrium of an organization
is to preserve the equilibrium of its individual members, by
refusing to let them develop. Insisting that the members of
an organization remain in a state of equilibrium is certainly a
necessary condition for preserving the equilibrium of the group
as well. While draconian, it is certainly not sufficient. Individuals
are able to evolve without the whole group evolving, so long
as their dynamic actions balance out and thus neutralize one
another. This is probably what Giuseppe Lampedusa meant
in the famous quotation from The Leopard: “Everything must
change for nothing to change.” The “everything” applies to
the individual elements of an organization, the “nothing” to
the organization itself.
It then becomes indispensable to analyse both the inertia of
the organization, as well as that of its members. When the
members of an organization are themselves in equilibrium
or pull in opposite directions, they cause a strong degree of
inertia in the evolution of the organization. On the other hand,
if they all choose to pull in the same direction, this will speed
up the evolution of the organization. However, to the extent
that the directions chosen by the members are independent of
one another, it will readily be appreciated that the bigger the
organization is, the slower its rate of evolution will be.
In fact, the analysis needs to be pursued further, since the
behaviour of each individual depends on a subgroup, or
coalition, to which that individual belongs at any given moment.
The individual contributes, with the rest of the coalition, to its
evolution. It is not only the organization that evolves, but also
the coalitions of individuals in accordance with the dynamic
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behaviour of the individuals themselves, who depend on the
coalitions to which they belong at all times. The dissymmetries
in the inertia of the coalitions, coupled with the different
timescales of evolution these dissymmetries produce, justify
the anticipatory principle, which requires that individuals adapt
to the evolution of their environment, which evolves in line with
their own evolution.
Each of these coalitions constrains the others, which, in
turn, retroact on the coalitions, but with different degrees of
inertia, thereby posing the problem of compatibility between
the different rates of evolution produced by this tangle
of (all the) coalitions – from the “grand coalition” formed
by the organization to the smaller ones consisting only of
the organization’s members – leading, at the level of each
coalition, to the interactions between precaution, anticipation
and adaptation.
Posing the problem of individual creativity in its interaction with
the members of the organization in these terms enables us to
home in on the following question: at the individual level and
depending on the respective degrees of inertia of the different
coalitions, is it more effective to retroact on the evolution of the
coalitions or on the individual’s adaptation to this evolution, in
order to guarantee the evolution of the structure as a whole?
The degree of inertia of individual creativity is very low, but its
repercussions are negligible if its consequences are not taken
up by a sufficient number of individuals for the combined
effect of their actions to be significant enough to cause the
organization to evolve and to require its members to adapt. It
is at this point that innovation takes over, and this explains its
relative sluggishness.
Calculating the effects of the interactions – the actions on
the evolution of the organization, on the one hand, and the
retroactions of the organization on each of its members, on the
other – provides us with a framework of reference for analysing
the relationship between creativity and innovation. Analysing
the transfer of the products of creativity to innovation, and
the stimulus provided by fashion belongs to the field of crowd
psychology, a discipline pioneered by Gustave Le Bon in
his book Psychologie des foules (The Crowd: a study of the
popular mind), published in 1895. Much still needs to be done
in this area.
> Managing creativity?
So much emphasis has been laid in this article on the
unmanageable aspect of creativity that to suggest managing
it is to be guilty of the sin of oxymoron. And yet, there is some
justification in pondering this question from at least two points
of view: collective creativity and artificial creativity.
Brainstorming
This term, which the Quebecois have translated into French
as remue-méninges, was coined in 1935 by the advertising
executive Alex Osborn in his book Applied Imagination. The
method consists in making communally available the right
conditions for individual creativity in order to increase the
redundancy of knowledge produced by a collective process of
abduction. The textbooks and other works on brainstorming
set out a number of conditions to explain individual creativity.
For example, in the standard version, a small number of
participants under a group leader are required to observe
four rules: do not be (over-) critical of other participants’ ideas,
regardless of how absurd they may be, “freewheel”, “hitchhike”
(take on board the ideas expressed) and try to come up with
as many ideas as possible, so as to increase the redundancy
of knowledge through group abduction, using “in parallel”
and interactively the abduction processes of each individual. A
number of variants have been developed and tested since, and
have been given a new impetus by the Internet.
The pooling of each individual’s creativity then leads to a
deductive approach to validate the knowledge collected through
a collective process of abduction. Given that the capacity for
abduction does not just appear, that it is unconscious and that
it yields results at the most unlikely moments, brainstorming has
obvious shortcomings. The creative ideas of individuals cannot
be added together, just as they cannot be measured, there
being no yardstick for creativity available.
Creating creativity
Just as “Artificial Intelligence” and “Artificial Life” have been
developed so that human brains can be helped to perform
particular tasks by computers, “Artificial Creativity”, of a sort,
has not been found wanting in this respect. The difficulties
encountered by the many attempts to formalize and to replicate
the creativity process electronically are of the same nature as
those faced by “expert systems”, digital (computing) tools
devised to replicate the cognitive mechanisms of an expert,
reasoning from known facts and rules in a particular domain.
Computers have succeeded admirably in performing
recursive calculations (that run into billions of steps) thanks
to the discrete, specific and stable nature of electrical signals,
properties that nervous systems lack. Originally designed
as numerical calculators, they proved capable of efficiently
processing alphanumeric symbols and, consequently, texts.
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These capacities for symbolic computation were, in a way, an
unexpected “technological spin-off” from digital computers
that were not foreseen when these were designed by John von
Neumann.
In symmetrical fashion, logical reasoning and arithmetical
problem-solving are faculties of the human brain that probably
did not belong among those advantages relevant to the
survival of the human species at the time of its appearance.
These, too, are probably a kind of unexpected “technological
spin-off” from the human nervous system. Unlike computers,
however, the human brain was not “designed” but is the result
of a long and tortuous phylogenetic evolution.
The upshot is that studies of cognitive processes swing
between two extreme tendencies:
→→ understanding how the nervous system and cognitive
processes work, with the help of mathematical and computing
metaphors;
→→ constructing new types of software and computers
capable of replicating and improving on some intelligent tasks
performed by nervous systems.
Artificial creativity thus gives us the cognitive version of a digital
human with no sight and a neural human with no movement.
Expert systems, which made their appearance in 1965, notably
as a tool for diagnosing diseases, had their moment of glory
in the 1980s, when there were unrealistic expectations that
they could be developed on a massive scale. But they proved
too cumbersome, as soon as they used more than a hundred
or so rules. Neural networks, the competitors of expert
systems, based on a rudimentary mathematical formalization
of biological neural networks, retain from this connectionist
motivation only the efficiency of each artificial “synapse”
between two neurons that are no less efficient. In his book
The Organization of Behaviour, published in 1949, Donald
Hebb suggested measuring this synaptic efficiency as being
proportional to the product of pre-synaptic and post-synaptic
activities.
We have to find out by experiment, and not by (a priori)
programming, the knowledge required for learning about a
category of problems, such as problems of classification or
problems of shape recognition. These would constitute a more
appropriate way of accounting for the abductive processes
behind creativity.
It is, however, impossible to give a satisfactory summary of the
situation, which is so fluid that it would be futile to attempt to
draw up a list of creativity procedures (a list that could in no way
claim to be exhaustive).
> Concluding remarks
Since humankind’s appearance on earth, creativity, in all its
aspects, has represented a challenge that is inseparable from
the human adventure, both in terms of survival and in terms of
the harmonious and sustainable development of humanity in
symbiosis with a world in which we have a stake on condition
that we take responsibility for it.
Many feel it is the job of our schools and universities, our
research centres and laboratories, and our public and private
enterprises to develop this essential human quality and to
encourage by all possible means those who possess this
propensity to a greater degree than others, a propensity born
of a subtle balance between desire and doubt, the mainsprings
of both creativity and its necessary complement, rationality.
But that is another story, for further reflection and discussion.
→→ Translated from the French