Without freedom of choice there is no creativity. Without creativity there is no life. The Body dies. ~ Gene Roddenberry
creativity is not the monopoly of the Shakespeares and Einsteins of this world. There is a science of intelligent living, an art of being fully human, in which we all can and ought to be creative.
Laura Archera Huxley "Your Imagination is Yours" in You Are Not The Target (1963)
My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. The creative person is, in any case, continually working at it. His mind is shuffling his information at all times, even when he is not conscious of it. The presence of others can only inhibit this process, since creation is embarrassing. For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones, which you naturally do not care to display.
“It’s too easy to get dispirited in this cruel and hazardous world,” he said, looking at you trustfully. “Yet, we must carry on with our lives, and, more than that, we must find the strength to create. As I remind my patients, bitterness, depression, even shattering despair are transfiguring powers that potentially accompany and corrupt every creative endeavour, because creativity is, as the mythologists insist, an intrusion into the inviolable realm of deity—of abstraction—where we with our spastic actuality can never fully go. How dare we grotesque notochords create anything in this frigid and entropic universe? It takes a lot of arrogance, don’t you think? One has to give everything to create anything.”
A. A. Attanasio, The Dark One (originally published in 1994 in Bryan Cholfin (ed.) Crank! #4) and reprinted in Mike Ashley (ed.), The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy (p. 535)
Those who have read the Russian novelists Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn know how effective the debilitation can be which treats free actions as clinical abnormalities . … The possibility that such acts are the intentional projects of conscious men who are at once both demanding and expressing freedom is beyond the pale of conception. Thus are men robbed not only of their freedom but also of their dignity as creative human beings.
Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.
Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead (2012)
This is the eternal origin of art that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through him. Not a figment of his soul but something that appears to the soul and demands the soul’s creative power. What is required is a deed that a man does with his whole being.
Martin Buber, I and Thou, W. Kaufmann, trans. (1970), p. 60
What is underlying Berdyaev's thinking is the fact that the creative impulse must be generated from a dissatisfaction with this world. The creative impulse wishes in its original outburst to see an end to this world; it is the beginning of a different world. In short, creativity is eschatological.
There are two views which present themselves before the creative act. "The first is the end of this world and the beginning of a new; and the second is the process of strengthening and perfecting this world. They are respectively the outlook of revolutionary eschatology and that of evolutionary construction." The former is the way of transcendence, and the latter is the way of objectification. "By way of objectification the creative act is adjusted to the circumstance of this world and does not reach its final state, it is cut off short. By the way of transcendence the creative act breaks through to noumenal reality and sets its bearing upon the final transformation of the world." The way of objectification, however, so occupies our thoughts, cooling down the creative energy, that man loses sight of the way of transcendence; hence little attention is given to the eschatological side of creative activity.
Carnegie Samuel Calian, The Significance of Eschatology in the Thoughts of Nicolas Berdyaev (1965), p. 66
In the best of cases, the philosopher is not simply one who ascends from the cave and perceives the sun. Rather, he is one who out of the depths of his own creativity becomes a new sun for mankind.
Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism, p. 29
I can find Greece and Palestine and Italy and England and the Islands, the genius and creative principle of each and of all eras, in my own mind.
As the world of creativeness finds itself at the outset placed in the midst of opposition and bound at the same time to proceed on its own course, then it becomes clear that this new world when it becomes a whole and governs all cannot remain permanently within the realm of such stubborn opposites: it must, without giving up its independence, yet return to the world which it had left behind and must attempt to penetrate into it; it must do this most of all on account of the fact that its own development is at stake, for only by some such understanding with things outside itself only by means of a struggle with its oppositions can the life of creativeness in man find its way from the great outlines of its ideal-plan to a full and essential development.
Rudolf Eucken, Knowledge and Life 1907, 1913 p. 169-170
Enjoyment of the work consists in participation in the creative state of the artist.
Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, D. F. Krell, trans. (New York: 1991), p. 117
Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.
Herman Hesse, Hermine in Steppenwolf (1927), B. Creighton, trans., (New York: 1990), p. 151
Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
None of you knows what creativity means. To paint a picture, to write a poem? No! To recast one’s whole age, to impose upon it the stamp of one’s will, to fill it with beauty, to overwhelm it, to overpower it with one’s spirit.
… the republic of creative minds: each giant calling to his brother through the desolate intervals of time. And undisturbed by the wanton noises of the dwarfs that creep past beneath them, their high spirit-converse continues.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Marianne Cowan trans., p. 32
A creative life is an energetic life, and this is only possible in one or the other of these two situations: either being the one who rules, or finding oneself placed in a world which is ruled by someone in whom we recognize full right to such a function: either I rule or I obey. By obedience I do not mean mere submission—this is degradation—but on the contrary, respect for the ruler and acceptance of his leadership, solidarity with him, and enthusiastic enrollment under his banner.
Broken symmetry is imperfection, but rich in creativity. The universe is created out of broken symmetry.
Amit Ray, Meditation: Insights and Inspiration (2010) p. 14
Relaxed, playful and harmonious moments are the birth place of creativity.
Amit Ray, Meditation: Insights and Inspiration (2010) p. 58
Creativity is a life-affirming activity. Lack of response to creativity and being condemned to write for the desk drawer is a stifling, destructive experience.
Chava Rosenfarb "A Yiddish Writer Reflects on Translation" (2005) in "Confessions of a Yiddish Writer and Other Essays" (2019) translated from the Yiddish with Goldie Morgentaler
Without freedom of choice there is no creativity. Without creativity there is no life. The Body dies.
I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything.
Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, ed. David Leopold (Cambridge: 1995), p. 7
I do not presuppose myself, because I am every moment just positing or creating myself, and am I only by being not presupposed but posited, and ... only in the moment when I posit myself; that is, I am creator and creature in one.
Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own (1844), S. Byington, trans. (Cambridge: 1995), p. 135
He awakens us to the seriousness of living deeply, working steadily, feeling joy in our labor and self-expression, and being patient—the four cornerstones of a creative life. “Almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious.”
The essence of real creativity is a certain playfulness, a flitting from idea to idea without getting bogged down by fixated demands. Of course, you don't always get what you thought you were asking for.
In men of genius, sterile years precede productive years, these again to be followed by sterility, the barren periods being marked by psychological self-depreciation, by the feeling that they are less than other men; times in which the remembrance of the creative periods is a torment, and when they envy those who go about undisturbed by such penalties. Just as his moments of ecstasy are more poignant, so are the periods of depression of a man of genius more intense than those of other men.
In “The Creative Mind” I set out to show that there exists a single creative activity, which is displayed alike in the arts and in the sciences. It is wrong to think of science as a mechanical record of facts, and it is wrong to think of the arts as remote and private fancies. What makes each human, what makes them universal, is the stamp of the creative mind.
Next to art, or even equal to it, science – that is, producing and testing theories about the world, about reality – seems to me to be the greatest creative enterprise of which men are capable.
