Creativity & Recognition Part I: Creativity
Todd Lubart, in Psychologie de la créativité, suggests a consensual definition for creativity. He does this after having outlined a brief historical evolution of the concept.[1] “Creativity is the capacity to carry out a production that is both new and adapted to the context in which it manifests itself.”[2]
It can be new in the sense of a small alteration in regards of former productions or be a major innovation but it is always original, unexpected and different. It is adapted because it has to meet the “various constrains related to the situations in which the people find themselves.”[3] Moreover, since there are no set norms to judge upon creativity, it has to rely on a social consensus; the latter varying according to the importance set by the individual or the group on novelty or adaptation, technical skill or social need. Finally, the concept of creativity will be different according to culture and epoch.[4]
On the side of the producing individual other factors come into play.[5] “According to Sternberg and Lubart (1995), six types of distinct resources are necessary to creativity. These resources are specific aspects of intelligence, knowledge, cognitive styles, personality, motivation and environmental context that can provide for physical or social stimulations to help the production of ideas and nourish these ideas. Moreover, environment assesses creativity through social judgment.”[6]
“The creative urge can be considered in itself; of course it is essential to the artist who has to do art, but it is also present in everyone of us – baby, child, adolescent, adult or old person – who poses a healthy glance on everything he sees or who voluntarily does something – it being a daub with his faeces or intentionally prolonged weeping to savour the latter musicality. This creative urge emerges in the everyday life of the retarded child who enjoys to breathe as it does in the architect’s inspiration who suddenly knows what he strives to build and then things about the material he will use in order for his creative urge to take shape and feature and so that the world can witness it.”[7]
In The Struggle for Recognition, Honneth underlines Winnicotts insights about how the child succeeds in striking “a balance between symbiosis and self assertion” and fits these views in his reasoning about the first form of mutual recognition drawn from a reflection on the three part division that Hegel and Mead make among forms of recognition.[8] This is what we first will be concerned with: the involvement of creativity in the relation-to-self.
“The beauty of art implies a more complex perception, because the latter not only convenes meanings but also the meaning: the one art gives to humain experience. It is an opportunity for the I to open itself to an infinite world, natural and supernatural, to put one’s personal existence in unity with the whole universe. To these contemplative raptures, actions, relating to the active aspects of the relation between the man and the world have to be added. To accomplish oneself in a task well done is one of them, whether this task is a physical one or a mental one: the production of a work of art illustrates this as well as a cooked dish or as a sand castle by the sea.”[9]
Creativity and what it produces, it being art, an object, speech, a task, an attitude or a new way of thinking enables its creator to assert him or herself in regard to his intimate self but also in the face of the social world.[10] If, moreover, this creator is a “genius” as Mead puts it, his or her creation will affect the surrounding social environment and set new structures in which the others will be able to recognize themselves.[11]
This introduces the second concern of this article: social esteem, its relation to creativity and to a certain extent, when the whole structure of a society is altered through social acceptance of creative ideas, to legal recognition as is the case for example with religion or political systems.[12]
We will reflect and develop on Winnicott’s thesis and subsequently consider the relation of creativity with the other spheres of recognition. We will organize the text in accordance with the three pattern system of recognition as put forward by Hegel and Mead and analysed by Honneth and stress the first and the last one of them: emotional support (love) and social esteem (solidarity).[13]
We will bear in mind and sometimes mention other divisions, such as the different stages and spheres of relation-to-self or the differences between recognition in traditional societies and more complex ones, but, overall, we will stay within the scope of western civilization.[14]
Creativity & recognition Part II: Love.
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References
[1] T. Lubart, Psychologie de la créativité, Paris, Armand Colin, 2003, p. 5-10.
[2] For this primary definition, Lubart, refers to different authors: T. M. Amabile, Creativity in Context, Westview, Boulder, 1996. F. Barron, “Putting creativity to work”, in : The nature of creativity, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1988. T. Lubart, “Creativity”, in : Thinking and problem solving, New York, Academic Press, 1994. D. W. MacKinnon, “The nature and nurture of creative talent”, in : American Psychologist, 17, 1962. R. Ochse, Before the gates of excellence: The determinants of creative genius, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1990. R. J. Sternberg, T. Lubart, Defying the crowds: Cultivating creativity in a culture of conformity, New York, Free Press, 1995. For the quote of Lubart: Ibid. : p. 10.
[3] Loc. cit.
[4] Ibid. : p. 11-12.
[5] Regarding creativity as a process, “one well-known statement of it is that of the psychologist Graham Wallas, who summarized many observations and condensed the multifarious events attending creativity into four simple stages. These stages are: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification (Wallas, 1926).” F. Barron, “All Creation is Collaboration”, in: Social Ceativity, Cresskill, Hampton Press, Inc., vol. 1, 1999, p. 49.
[6] “More recently, Feldman, Csikszentmihalyi and Gardner have developed a systematic approach to creativity. The first system, the individual, allows to extracts information from a domain and transform or broaden it through cognitive processes, personality traits and motivation. The second system, the field, is formed by several people who control or influence a domain, and assess and select new ideas (for example, art critics and gallery owners). The domain, third system, consists of a cultural knowledge that encompass creative productions and can be transmitted from one person to the other. The « individual » system is both influenced by the field and the domain and can trigger changes in these systems.” Ibid. : p. 12-14.
[7] D. W., Winnicott, Jeu et réalité. L’espace potentiel, trans by the author, Paris, Gallimard, 1975, p. 96-97.
[8] A. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition. The Moral Grammar of Social Conflics, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1995, p. 92-107.
[9] T. Todorov, La vie commune. Essai d’anthropologie générale, trans. by the author, Paris, Ed. du Seuil 1995, p. 181-182.
[10] “The most compelling examples of behaviour that are both creative and rule-governed are linguistic. In effect, the generation of ordinary speech involves a kind of crativity in which utterances are novel but at the same time grammatical, conforming to rules that constitute the linguistic competence of the individual.” M. C. Bateson, “Ordinary Creativity”, in : Social Creativity, op. cit., p. 155-156.
[11] However, even the “geniuses” rely on previous states of affairs, on the past, on shared experiences to feed their creation and on recogition to bear the responsibility of them as Frank Barron writes it in his chapter about co-creation and mutuality: “It began most dramatically with the making of the atomic bomb, that awesome, brilliant, yet dark triumph of collective intellect in response to a collective bestiality that was darker still. It requires a recognition of the other, not in a blind coupling nor even in a comforting awareness that someone else is traveling the same path, but in objective realtionship and in voluntary, responsible cooperation.” F. Barron, op. cit., p. 56. For the term “genuis” as used by Mead see: G. H. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist, Chicago – London, The University of Chicago Press, 1934, p. 214-222.
[12] A. Honneth, op. cit., p. 107-129.
[13] Honneth underlines that other authors such as Scheler and Plessner also use this three-part division. Paul Ricoeur uses the same tripartite pattern in his chapter dealing with the readjustment of Hegel’s argument at Jena and underlines his intellectual debts to Honneth for his argument. P. Ricoeur, Parcours de la reconnaissance, trois études, Paris, Stock, 2004, p. 293-339.
[14] In this article, by individual we mean the self-relating, self-asserting, recognizing and recognized person (examples: I, artist, Christine de Pizan), by object we mean the physical or mental object of recognition (examples: language, artifact, the book: Ditié de Jeanne d’Arc), by other we mean the people who give recognition and are recognized by the individual and/or by the society (example: mother, art critic, Karen Green writing about Christine de Pizan), by environment we mean the individuals and the objects directly surrounding the recognizing and recognized person (examples: teddy-bear – mother, artifacts – peers, Christine de Pizan’s memory of her dead husband – the children that she has to raise), by society we mean the conjunction of the individual and the other (example: family, members of an art academy, medieval and contemporary Venice where Christine de Pizan lived) and finally, by world we mean the conjunction of the individual, the object, the other, the environment and society.
