essay on art and creativity

Essay on Art And Creativity

Students are often asked to write an essay on Art And Creativity in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Art And Creativity

Understanding art and creativity.

Art and creativity are like two best friends. They always stay together. Art is a way of expressing feelings, thoughts, and ideas. It can be a drawing, a painting, a song, or a dance. Creativity is the ability to think of new and unique ideas.

The Connection Between Art and Creativity

Art and creativity are deeply connected. To make art, you need creativity. Creativity helps to imagine something new and different. It helps to create art that is unique and special. Without creativity, art would be boring and the same.

The Importance of Art and Creativity

Art and creativity are very important. They help us to express our feelings and thoughts. They also help us to understand the world around us. Art and creativity can make us happy and help us to relax.

Encouraging Art and Creativity

We should encourage art and creativity. We can do this by drawing, painting, singing, or dancing. We can also do this by thinking of new and unique ideas. This will help us to be more creative and make better art.

250 Words Essay on Art And Creativity

Art is a way of expressing feelings, thoughts, and observations. It is a broad field that includes painting, sculpture, dance, music, and many other forms. Creativity, on the other hand, is the ability to make new things or think of new ideas. It is the fuel that drives art.

Art and creativity are closely linked. To create art, you need to use your creativity. You have to think of new ways to express your ideas. This could be through a painting, a dance, or a song. Creativity helps artists to come up with unique and original pieces of art.

Why Art and Creativity Are Important

Art and creativity are important for several reasons. First, they allow us to express ourselves. Through art, we can share our feelings and thoughts with others. Second, art and creativity can make us feel good. When we create something, we feel proud and accomplished. Finally, art and creativity can help us see the world in new and different ways. They encourage us to think outside the box and to be open-minded.

In conclusion, art and creativity are two sides of the same coin. You can’t have art without creativity, and creativity is often expressed through art. They are both important for self-expression, personal satisfaction, and broadening our view of the world. So, let’s embrace art and creativity and see where they take us!

500 Words Essay on Art And Creativity

Art is a way of expressing feelings, ideas, and imaginations. It is a form of human expression that can take many different forms. These forms can be painting, sculpture, music, dance, theatre, and many more. Creativity, on the other hand, is the act of making new connections between old ideas. It’s about thinking outside the box and coming up with new ways to solve problems.

The Connection between Art and Creativity

Art and creativity are closely linked. Art is a product of creative minds. Artists use their creativity to come up with new ideas and to express these ideas in unique ways. For example, a painter might use his or her creativity to decide what colors to use, what shapes to draw, and how to arrange everything on the canvas. This process involves a lot of decision-making and problem-solving, which are key aspects of creativity.

Importance of Art and Creativity

Art and creativity are important for many reasons. First, they allow us to express ourselves and to communicate with others. Through art, we can share our thoughts, feelings, and experiences with the world. This can help us to understand ourselves better and to connect with others on a deeper level.

Creativity is also important because it helps us to think in new ways. It encourages us to be curious, to ask questions, and to explore different possibilities. This can be very useful in many areas of life, including school, work, and personal relationships.

There are many ways to encourage art and creativity. One way is to provide opportunities for creative expression. This could be through art classes, music lessons, or drama clubs. It could also be through less structured activities, like free drawing time or creative writing exercises.

Another way to encourage creativity is to provide a supportive environment. This means giving positive feedback, encouraging new ideas, and being open to different ways of doing things. It also means providing the necessary tools and resources, like art supplies, musical instruments, and books.

In conclusion, art and creativity are closely linked and both are important for personal and societal growth. They allow us to express ourselves, to think in new ways, and to connect with others. By encouraging art and creativity, we can help to foster a more imaginative, innovative, and connected world.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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How Art Makes Us More Human: Why Being Creative is So Important in Life

Art is an important part of life, as it helps us to explore our creativity and express ourselves in unique ways. Art is more than just a form of expression - it’s a way of understanding the world and our place in it. In this blog post, we’ll discuss the psychological, social, and cognitive benefits of creating art and how it can bring joy and purpose to our lives.

What is art?

Art is a form of expression that values creativity and self-expression. It can take many forms, from paintings and sculptures to photography and even digital art. Art has the power to move us, to make us feel something, and to tell stories. Art can be used as a way of connecting with ourselves and with each other, and its power lies in its ability to inspire, create joy, and provoke thought. Art is an expression of the human experience, and its value lies in its ability to bring people together.

The connection between art and emotion

The value of art lies in its ability to evoke emotion. Whether you’re looking at a painting, watching a performance, or listening to music, art allows us to experience a range of emotions from joy to sorrow and everything in between. Art can help us make sense of our own emotions and gain a better understanding of how other people are feeling. It can even bring us closer together as it enables us to feel connected with the artist, even if we have never met them. When we interact with art, it can often spark a dialogue, creating a feeling of understanding and empathy within us.

One way in which art can be especially powerful is when it reflects our personal experiences and values. By connecting with a piece of art that speaks to our values, we can often feel a strong emotional connection with it, enabling us to recognize ourselves in the work and appreciate its beauty and meaning.

The link between art and mental health

Art can be an incredibly powerful tool in helping us to manage our mental health and well-being. Studies have found that art can reduce stress, increase self-esteem, and improve our ability to cope with difficult emotions. Art provides a safe space for us to express our thoughts and feelings, allowing us to connect with ourselves on a deeper level.

One of the main ways that art benefits mental health is through its ability to help us process and make sense of our emotions. Art enables us to externalize our inner struggles, allowing us to make sense of them in a new way. By engaging in creative activities, we can gain insight into our own feelings, giving us the opportunity to recognize patterns and reflect on them in a non-judgmental manner. This can help us to gain a better understanding of our emotions and allow us to find healthier ways of managing them.

Art can also help to decrease symptoms of depression and anxiety. Studies have found that engaging in creative activities such as painting, drawing, or sculpting can reduce symptoms of both depression and anxiety. It also can increase positive moods and overall life satisfaction. In addition, engaging in art can give us a sense of control over our lives, providing us with the opportunity to express ourselves without fear of judgment.

Finally, creating art can provide a sense of purpose and accomplishment, helping us to feel connected to something larger than ourselves. Art gives us a way to channel our energy into something meaningful, allowing us to have a tangible outcome at the end of our creative journey. The act of creation itself can be incredibly empowering, giving us the confidence to take on new challenges and set goals for ourselves.

Overall, engaging in art has been proven to have a positive impact on mental health. Through its ability to help us process emotions, decrease symptoms of depression and anxiety, and provide us with a sense of purpose and accomplishment, art has the power to truly transform our lives.

The benefits of creating art

Creating art can be an immensely rewarding experience that has both psychological and physical benefits. It can provide a sense of purpose, satisfaction, and accomplishment. Art can also help reduce stress, build self-confidence, and improve problem solving skills.

Art can be used to express feelings and emotions, helping to better understand and cope with difficult experiences. It can also be used to relieve anxiety, improve mental health, and enhance positive self-image. Additionally, engaging in creative activities encourages creative thinking, which can foster innovation and creativity in other areas of life.

Creating art can also improve physical well-being. It has been linked to reducing chronic pain and boosting the immune system. It can also help with motor coordination, providing relief for conditions such as carpal tunnel syndrome. Furthermore, it can help with hand-eye coordination, increasing dexterity and making everyday tasks easier.

Finally, creating art is a great way to relax and unwind after a long day. It can provide an outlet for pent-up emotions and help to restore a sense of balance and wellbeing. Even if your work is not immediately appreciated, it’s important to remember that art is subjective and it should be created for yourself, not for the approval of others.

The power of art in storytelling

Storytelling is a powerful tool for communication, and art is an important part of this process. Through art, we can express ourselves in ways that words alone cannot do justice to. Art allows us to show the emotion behind our stories, to add nuance and depth to our tales, and to create visuals that can leave a lasting impression.

Stories told through art have a special power. Whether it's through painting, drawing, sculpture, or even film, art has the potential to bring our stories to life in a way that words simply cannot do. With art, we can bring our characters and stories to life in vivid detail, making them more vivid and alive than if we were to tell the story with just words. We can also add layers of symbolism and meaning to our stories which can make them more meaningful and powerful.

Art has been used as a storytelling device for thousands of years. Ancient cultures used drawings and sculptures to tell their stories, and today, the tradition continues with all forms of visual arts. From street art to museum installations, art is used to tell stories of cultures, histories, beliefs, and emotions. By using art to tell stories, we can move people emotionally and capture their attention in a unique way.

In today's world, where we are bombarded with information from all sides, it can be hard to stand out. Art gives us the chance to do that in a powerful way. By creating art, we can tell stories that resonate with people, inspiring them and showing them something new. The power of storytelling through art is immense and should not be underestimated.

The importance of art in education

Art plays an important role in education, as it encourages creative thinking and provides a platform for students to express their feelings and ideas. It can also be used as a form of communication, allowing students to interpret and create meaning from what they observe. Additionally, the visual representation of art helps children to develop skills such as analyzing information, forming arguments, and making connections.

In the classroom, art can help to introduce new concepts, convey complex topics, and build relationships between students. By incorporating art into lesson plans, teachers are able to engage students in learning and make the material more interesting. Art also helps students to identify patterns and practice critical thinking skills by exploring how elements interact to create a bigger picture.

Furthermore, art allows for students to practice collaboration, problem-solving, and social interaction. Through group projects, students can work together to plan, organize, and execute a project from start to finish. This helps to teach kids essential teamwork skills while also giving them the opportunity to explore their individual strengths and weaknesses.

Overall, art is an integral part of education that helps students develop important skills and encourages creative expression. It is an important tool for teaching and can be used in various ways to make learning more engaging and meaningful.

The role of art in social change

The power of art in creating social change is undeniable. It has been used throughout history as a tool to inspire, educate, and challenge the status quo. Art can be used to bring attention to injustices, advocate for different perspectives, and to create positive cultural shifts.

One example of how art has been used to inspire social change is through protest art. This type of art is often seen at protests and marches, or used to create powerful visuals for political campaigns. Protest art can be anything from signs and banners to sculptures, graffiti, or public installations. It can also take the form of music, film, theater, and literature. By combining art and activism, people are able to communicate their message in an effective way that captures the attention of the public.

Another example of how art can be used to create social change is through digital media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter. These platforms allow anyone with an internet connection to share their creative works and connect with other like-minded individuals. Art has been used on these platforms to raise awareness about important issues, tell stories that inspire change, and even challenge oppressive systems.

Finally, art can be used to help those who are oppressed find strength and resilience. Art provides a platform for those who are marginalized to tell their stories and express their experiences in a safe space. Through art, people are able to connect with each other and find solidarity in the face of adversity.

Art plays an important role in social change and is an invaluable tool for anyone looking to create positive impact in the world. Whether it’s used to create powerful visuals for a protest or to tell stories that inspire action, art has the power to bring people together and spark meaningful conversations about important topics.

Art is essential for all our lives

No matter who you are or where you come from, art plays a vital role in helping us make sense of our lives and the world around us. Art helps us to express our emotions, to communicate our thoughts and feelings, and to explore the depths of our imaginations. By engaging with art, we can discover more about ourselves and the world around us, and cultivate empathy and understanding.

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Hello! I really liked your article! You can be creative not only by making paintings, but you can also lead social networks in any manifestation and be an inspiration to other people. The most important manifestation of your creativity in social networks is to create content. Shoot videos, take photos, etc. To do this, I can recommend this article for the further development of your content and social networks.

Essay on Art

500 words essay on art.

Each morning we see the sunshine outside and relax while some draw it to feel relaxed. Thus, you see that art is everywhere and anywhere if we look closely. In other words, everything in life is artwork. The essay on art will help us go through the importance of art and its meaning for a better understanding.

What is Art?

For as long as humanity has existed, art has been part of our lives. For many years, people have been creating and enjoying art.  It expresses emotions or expression of life. It is one such creation that enables interpretation of any kind.

It is a skill that applies to music, painting, poetry, dance and more. Moreover, nature is no less than art. For instance, if nature creates something unique, it is also art. Artists use their artwork for passing along their feelings.

Thus, art and artists bring value to society and have been doing so throughout history. Art gives us an innovative way to view the world or society around us. Most important thing is that it lets us interpret it on our own individual experiences and associations.

Art is similar to live which has many definitions and examples. What is constant is that art is not perfect or does not revolve around perfection. It is something that continues growing and developing to express emotions, thoughts and human capacities.

Importance of Art

Art comes in many different forms which include audios, visuals and more. Audios comprise songs, music, poems and more whereas visuals include painting, photography, movies and more.

You will notice that we consume a lot of audio art in the form of music, songs and more. It is because they help us to relax our mind. Moreover, it also has the ability to change our mood and brighten it up.

After that, it also motivates us and strengthens our emotions. Poetries are audio arts that help the author express their feelings in writings. We also have music that requires musical instruments to create a piece of art.

Other than that, visual arts help artists communicate with the viewer. It also allows the viewer to interpret the art in their own way. Thus, it invokes a variety of emotions among us. Thus, you see how essential art is for humankind.

Without art, the world would be a dull place. Take the recent pandemic, for example, it was not the sports or news which kept us entertained but the artists. Their work of arts in the form of shows, songs, music and more added meaning to our boring lives.

Therefore, art adds happiness and colours to our lives and save us from the boring monotony of daily life.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Art

All in all, art is universal and can be found everywhere. It is not only for people who exercise work art but for those who consume it. If there were no art, we wouldn’t have been able to see the beauty in things. In other words, art helps us feel relaxed and forget about our problems.

FAQ of Essay on Art

Question 1: How can art help us?

Answer 1: Art can help us in a lot of ways. It can stimulate the release of dopamine in your bodies. This will in turn lower the feelings of depression and increase the feeling of confidence. Moreover, it makes us feel better about ourselves.

Question 2: What is the importance of art?

Answer 2: Art is essential as it covers all the developmental domains in child development. Moreover, it helps in physical development and enhancing gross and motor skills. For example, playing with dough can fine-tune your muscle control in your fingers.

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Bianca Vinther

• Sep 20, 2021

Creativity in art: the ultimate overview

Understanding the foundation of your art and waking up your inner artist.

What does creativity mean to you?

Listen to a short audio version of this blog post here .

Creativity is the driving force of all artistic processes. Understanding what it means to be creative is fundamental to your relationship with yourself and your art-making process . A solid grasp of this multifaceted concept known as creativity in the visual arts can positively impact your work and help you create art that you love.

In this post, I’ll share with you my most essential knowledge of creativity in art, including:

My definition of creativity in general and of artistic creativity in particular,

A short explanation of the relationship between creativity and transformation, and

A set of personal reflections on the role of creativity in art.

I wish you a pleasant reading, and I look forward to hearing from you!

What is creativity in general?

Creativity is a seed , an inborn and imperishable one, which can spread in manifold ways and can grow into extraordinary things. It is like the tree inside the acorn – it makes everything possible. Literally everything.

“ If you cut the acorn open, you won’t see a giant oak tree, but you know it is there .” (Wayne Dyer)

Creativity is your ability to make innovative connections and free associations that others don’t the way you do, and to reinvent reality, each time anew.

Creativity is also a means by which you can co-create reality — you and life itself working in tandem. I say co-create because you’re not alone on planet Earth, but you’re an important member of a global community of artists who are both creators in their own right and co-creators of a different world.

One of the things I like most about creativity is that it challenges conformism and the conventional perception of empirical reality. It is like a versatile lens that enables you to see close up, as well as far beyond appearances and the limits of your physical vision.

Creativity has tremendous power: it can lift you out of contingency and arbitrariness, and propel you towards meaningful action . Consider it a way to make an infinite number of unique contributions to the ever-expanding Universe.

Furthermore, for every visual artist including you, creativity is a wellspring of possibilities that can fuel your artistic fire. Trust it and follow its lead!

Creativity usually works its way forward in small, sometimes imperceptible steps, but it can also occur in spurts or so-called “quantum leaps” on occasion. In any case, there’s no user manual, no blueprint, and no conventional pattern.

“ What mystery pervades a well! ” (Emily Dickinson)

Can creativity be lost and found again?

Once in a while, it feels like your creativity has vanished. Why is that so? Because creativity is a fluctuating capacity of the brain. That is to say, your capacity to create is determined by your physical and mental condition, which is subject to daily influences, such as social, interpersonal, and emotional dynamics, to mention a few. So, yeah, creativity might sometimes feel lost, and you might even hit artist block . This is completely normal and undeniably human.

Without a doubt, you’re not constantly at the peak of your creative potential, nor are you always in a creative mood (nobody is, in fact), but creativity is always there. Creativity is part of everyday existence. It swings, but never goes away. It lies dormant until you act on it . Remember the acorn inside the oak tree?

Creativity has always filled me with a sense of wonder, purpose and adventure. I adore the combination of meaningfulness and surprise, as well as the joyful sense of awe that the gift of creativity awakens in me. I’m simply fascinated by the creative spark that each of us has!

Notice how creativity pulls you out of the ordinary and off the beaten track. Observe how it shakes your fears and breaks past your barriers, enfolding you like a wave or even enveloping you like a tsunami.

Creativity has the power to set you free.

What is creativity in art?

I associate creativity in the visual arts, in short, creativity in art or artistic creativity, with the acquired ability to see like an artist and express oneself differently.

What does it mean to see like an artist?

Seeing like an artist is a way of seeing – an individual and unique one – much like your entire Self. It is seeing the world from a personal angle that only you have. It is also changing ordinary things into extra-ordinary hybrids , exploring new, alternative ways, and transforming empirical reality via close observation and regular practice.

Read more about observation in art here and explore the difference between looking, observing, and seeing like an artist right here .

Seeing like an artist means shifting your vision from conformity to unconventionality. Yet it is also noticing things you’ve never noticed before, or seeing beyond the limitations of your regular vision, like the mouse in Torben Kuhlmann's children's book Armstrong .

Armstrong tells the remarkable story of a little ingenious rodent with enormous imagination and courage (the first living creature to ever land on the Moon prior to the Apollo 11 Mission!). The astute mouse provides ground-breaking evidence to his fellow mice: the moon is a huge stone sphere. A huge sphere made of stone? No way, that can’t be! The mice declare: the moon is one huge slice of cheese!

Who’s right and who’s wrong? The mice see what they have been taught to see, whereas the artist sees something else, in this case, ultimate reality. The view of his fellow mice is confined to their knowledge and daily habits. The artist’s singular vision goes beyond; it pushes the bounds of conventional perspective and explores uncharted territory.

***Find here the secret behind seeing like an artist , and test here 8 highly effective strategies that will help you see like an artist. ***

How to express yourself differently

Unlearn your usual ways of making art (whatever they may be), wander off the beaten road, and explore alternative paths for your art. Observe relentlessly and never give up. And above all, trust your creative Self.

You've always made marks with brushes? Instead, try some wooden sticks. You've always enjoyed painting from nature? Then take a more abstract approach: focus on your marks, think and create without an end in mind, use less materials and tools, and allow yourself to be surprised.

Find out more about how to be a process-oriented artist right here . Have you tried doodle paint before? Here 's my daily practice in 3 steps to unlock your artistic creativity. Are you too much in your head? Then find out here how to create art with your heart in 5 easy steps.

Creativity thrives under constraints, and it doesn’t need a road map. The truth is that no map exists. You must decide to abandon the comfortable, conventional path. Are you terrified of making this choice? Then remind yourself that you can’t live your life without making decisions. Make creativity your best ally, and artist block will no longer bother you.

Creativity and transformation

Every artistic process involves transformation. Nevertheless, there can be no transformation without creativity, which is a prerequisite for any art-making process . The more you train your creativity, the better you'll get at making art, regardless of the path you take from artwork conception to completion (which, by the way, doesn’t always follow a straight line).

Do you believe that regular shifts in perspective will be impossible or unnecessary? Then you're in for a rude awakening: routine kills creativity. Because there's no safe blueprint to which creativity will ever adhere, and no user manual, which transformation will ever follow.

Creativity is unconventional, anti-conformist, anti-canonical, unpredictable, and truly liberating. That's the beauty of it. It is pure energy in motion, dynamic and versatile, intentional and purposeful. It has no limits, although it is not constantly at its peak. Therefore, it requires from you full commitment and a steady practice .

Ask yourself this question: are you all in ? Give yourself an honest answer and then proceed.

What is transformation in art?

Transformation is a reality shift , a process of transition from empirical reality to an individual reality. It is an act of turning the mundane and ordinary into something different.

At this place of mystery and wonders, where empirical and personal reality meet and yet never settle, the threads of creativity and art become entwined, and you can realise your full potential as an artist. It is in this place that you can truly explore the depths of art, and create something unique. Thus, transformation is a powerful process of transfiguration of the commonplace .

Now, think of René Magritte’s Key to Dreams . This painting evokes, essentially, the mystery of transformation and transfiguration of the commonplace: seemingly unrelated objects and words that conjure memories or feelings from the past, are combined in unfamiliar and unexpected ways. A shoe is associated with the word moon, a hat with the word snow, and so on. Immediate reality turns into a personal, one-of-a-kind world and vice versa, becoming one .

In fact, reality is self-expression, and your perception is reality . You can read here more about perception as reality in the visual arts .

What is the role of creativity in art and life?

When life appears to be too complicated, disrupted, or messy, I like to visualise it on two axes: horizontal and vertical. Daily chores, duties, and trivialities, in short, everything I must do , are represented as points with numerical values along the horizontal axis. Contrary to what I must do, I see everything I love doing , which I can’t quantify but can experience qualitatively, on the vertical axis (like art, spirituality, compassion, kindness, and love).

My favourite, as you might assume, is the vertical axis, because it is on this bold, dynamic one that I experience creativity in art and action. To borrow a phrase from the amazing American architect Richard Backminster Fuller,

“ Vertical is to live — horizontal is to die ”.

Creativity may offer your life a sense of verticality because it has the power to lift you above the ordinary and must-do, and to propel you into the love-do , which, you guessed it, is your creative process!

Creativity helps you disrupt conventions, forge new routes, and make free and unique associations between ideas, concepts, emotions, memories, symbols, imaginative forms, objects, and words that can be developed into the most fulfilling and original artworks. At the same time, creativity inspires you to use colours, tools, textures, and materials in unfamiliar ways, to explore their intrinsic qualities, and to express your unique Self in new ways.

Creativity can help you find what Lisa Congdon refers to as "your artistic voice". As long as you use it, you don’t have to constantly search for new ideas and solutions.

Creativity can also help you transform rather than reproduce empirical reality (think exploration, combination, modification). Not least, it can show you how to take your artworks out there, and how to offer them to the world rather than keeping them all to yourself.

Find, transform, gift are the 3 fundamental stages of any art-making process that you can read about in detail here .

Art, creativity, and inspiration

Art and creativity are are inextricably linked. Creativity is an inborn seed that paradoxically contains infinity. Art is a beautiful and one-of-a-kind manifestation of it.

Creativity, like all seeds, needs a little inspiration and a lot of artistic practice to thrive. Creativity must be actively and consciously nourished and increased. It requires training and expects you to use it. The trick is that it doesn't grow on its own, and it isn't an exclusive privilege of a select few, but rather a spark or chance embedded in each of us from birth.

Inspiration, creativity's near relative, is nothing more than your receptive response to a variety of stimuli such as forms, materials, colours, past or current experiences, and much more. One thing is certain: inspiration can be a stroke of genius or a lightning bolt only for people who dabble in art, but never fully commit to it.

If you want to find out the truth about art inspiration, how to find it, and how to stay inspired, read this blog post and listen here to my podcast episode with Susan Hopkinson.

A short recap

Let’s wrap up this rundown of creativity in art.

Creativity is an inborn seed that contains the infinite, paradoxically. It is a gift , just like your entire Self. It is your ability to observe empirical reality differently and express yourself in unique ways, to make original connections and free associations that others don't, and to reinvent reality, each time anew.

Creativity allows you to produce innumerable, one-of-a-kind contributions to the ever-expanding Universe. It takes you out of contingency and arbitrariness, and moves you into meaningful action, giving you, thus, a sense of purpose and adventure .

At the same time, creativity allows you to live your life on the vertical axis since it has the capacity to lift you above trivialities and the must-do into the love-do .

But, like all seeds, creativity requires daily practice . It must be actively and purposefully cared for, nurtured, and developed from a natural potential to actual skill. It must be trained, and you must act on it, because it does not unfurl and flourish on its own; it needs your active contribution .

Creativity in art is magnificently unconventional, anti-conformist, boundless, and free. It is, in fact, a verb . It is e nergy in action , dynamic and versatile. It is intentional and purposeful. But mind you: it lacks a road map, a user manual, a plan, and a standard pattern.

Embrace your inborn creativity, honour its potential, and open up your spirit to all the possibilities that it has to offer! But don’t expect creativity to do the whole job. Observe and practice relentlessly . Because committed and intentional work always pays off. 😊

Thank you for reading till the end.

If you’ve got something to add, please comment on this blog post below, drop me an e-mail , or pm me on Instagram at @the_pointless_artist . I'd love to hear from you!

To stay tuned and never miss a blog post, make sure to sign up for The Pointless Artist’s email list below.

Recognise your pointlessness and keep creating!

From Germany with love,

What to read next: related posts

Want to understand what art inspiration really is, and how to get inspired? Read my blog post "The truth about art inspiration + how to find inspiration and stay inspired as a visual artist" , and listen to my podcast episode with Susan Hopkinson .

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This post was co-authored by Dr. Pablo Tinio , Department of Educational Foundations, Montclair State University.

Despite the vast scholarship in the psychology of art and aesthetics, we are still only starting to learn about the kinds of thoughts, insights, and understandings that people gain from experiencing art. More than a hundred years ago, Wassily Kandinsky described the role of the artist as conveying meaning: “The artist must have something to say, for mastery over form is not his goal, but rather the adapting of form to its inner meaning.” Researchers at the just completed Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association presented, from different perspectives, studies that examine what artists convey to the audience.

The starting point of these studies was a view of art born in philosophy — aesthetic cognitivism . It argues that one of the functions of art is to enhance understanding and cognitive abilities. The question for empirical scientists is how this happens.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania led by Anjan Chatterjee started by conveying an interdisciplinary group of art experts—philosophers, theologians, art historians, neuroscientists, and psychologists of art—and asking them to generate a list of terms that describe the impact of art. The result was a set of 69 cognitive-emotional terms. These terms were used as a starting point to understand the experience of art in the general public. Researchers asked participants to consider each term and list other words or phrases that relate to it in the context of viewing art. For example, if an artwork felt grounded, what else could it feel like (perhaps calm? or humble?)?

As they analyzed people’s associations, the researchers found four categories of impacts of art: (1) profound and immersive effects (feeling interested, contemplative, engaged, enraptured, swept away, or in awe ), (2) positive emotional effects (experiencing pleasure, feeling calm and consoled, experiencing empathy and compassion), (3) unpleasant emotional effects (being challenged, upset, or angry), and (4) transformational effects (finding transcendence, moral edification, gaining broadening of perspective, being inspired).

Taking a different approach, Pablo Tinio and I started with the mirror model of art , which explains how new understandings can be acquired. The mirror model describes processes of art creation and appreciation as reverse images of each other. Whereas artists start with meanings and ideas they aim to convey and transform into something tangible by adding compositional elements and layers to their creations, viewers start their experience by perceiving the final touches and, through continued engagement, can come to access the concepts and meanings the artist aimed to convey.

The question is, what makes those special pieces of art meaningful? In a study at the Whitney Museum of American Art, we examined that fundamental question. We approached visitors and asked them about the most meaningful piece of art they encountered.

After analyzing visitor interviews, five broad themes emerged about what makes art meaningful and what are the lessons—new understandings and insights—that people gain.

• Insights about oneself and one’s life history. When art creates an understanding of ourselves, people draw from it personal meaning and make connections to their lives, identify inspiration and personal transformation, realize a need for intellectual humility, and find emotional stimulation. For example, one visitor described their experience of " Oriental—Synchrony in Blue-Green " by Stanton Macdonal-Wright by contrasting the artist’s way of seeing the world and their own.
• Understandings about others and the world. Meaningful art stimulates understanding of relationships and connections with others, inspires insights about society and history, and spiritual , religious, or insights about the nature of existence. Viewers explicitly describe their experience of art as spiritual. One visitor reflected on their encounter with the " Door to the River" by Willem de Kooning as moving them to look at reality beyond the obvious and deconstructing reality into what is essential. They acknowledged the goal of abstract art as to inspire contemplation of the spiritual and noted that they were transported into such considerations.
• Understandings about the artist and their creative process. People find meaningful insights into artists’ lives, their ideas, intentions, and motivation in their works of art. For example, one viewer identified with the piece entitled " Ojalá nos encontremos en el mar/Hopefully We'll Meet at Sea" by Gabriella Báez, which uses red string to physically connect the child and her father in family photos. As the viewer reflected on their own father, they came to see the piece as an attempt at a reconstruction of a broken relationship by the artist.
• Awareness of the aesthetic narrative. Works of art have a profound effect when viewers search for meaning behind the creation of an aesthetic narrative, and approach the subject in an empathic way. We can viscerally feel the emotion and human connection when a viewer described the woman at the center of " The Subway" by George Tooker as lost and scared, almost as if caged, in a crowd, but clearly apart.
• Insights about art techniques and materials. People can find meaning in discovering the creative process, techniques, and materials that produced the art. For example, one viewer was struck by how " Untitled" by Malcolm Bailey from a distance appears like an illustration of a slave ship, but it actually shows a cotton plant in a blueprint-like manner. At close inspection, they marveled at the technique, noticed deliberately incomplete figures, and wondered about their purpose.

Importantly, the experience of meaningful art is not necessarily described by only one of these categories. In particular, understandings of artists’ lives and ideas tend to be mentioned along with other kinds of insights.

Even as researchers approached the question of the impacts of art from different angles, it is clear that experiences of meaningful art have in common being highly emotional, not in a simple way of liking, but in drawing on fondness and nostalgia , vulnerability, connectedness, and empathy, as well as challenging discomfort. Such deep emotional experiences facilitate a search for meaning and understanding.

Facebook image: Pressmaster/Shutterstock

LinkedIn image: BearFotos/Shutterstock

Christensen, A. P., Cardillo, E. R., & Chatterjee, A. (2023). What kind of impacts can artwork have on viewers? Establishing a taxonomy for aesthetic impacts. British Journal of Psychology , 114 (2), 335-351. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12623

Tinio, P. P. L. (2013). From artistic creation to aesthetic reception: The mirror model of art. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 7 (3), 265–275. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030872

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, Ph.D. is a research scientist at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and studies emotions in creativity, as well as how to teach creativity skills through the arts.

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The Art (and Science) of Creativity

Cover by illustrator, photographer, and video maker Jorge Colombo, finger-painted on an iPhone, using the app Brushes. "Creativity happens in the mind," suggested Colombo about the cover, "but there are so many little tools to keep things going. I treat them as a floral arrangement: each ‘flower' glows and dances and explodes in a different way." A book on Colombo's iPhone finger paintings, entitled New York , will be published in 2011.

About this Issue

How art is made is cloaked in mystery, not just to the audience but also, in many cases, even to the artist. How does creativity work? How do you know when the artwork is finished? What is "productive failure" and how is it important to the creative process? How do you become creative?

Creativity, however, isn't only restricted to making art. In everyday life, we also use creativity in our workplace and our leisure time. Whether playing a video game or sport, solving a complex logistical problem, or trying out a recipe, creativity -- that is, aesthetic and scientific problemsolving -- is at work. In this issue we've asked several practicing artists about their creative process in various art disciplines, from music to theater, from visual arts to folk arts. We're also talking with other creative practitioners -- a scientist, a game designer -- about how creativity relates to learning and thinking creatively in other disciplines.

Included in this Issue

Cartography for the Land of Ideas

Child's Play

Traditionally Innovative

Holding a Mirror to the World

Creativity in Collaboration

No One Can See Like I See

Fertile Ground

Five Things You Should Know About Environmental Artist Lorna Jordan

Drowned in the Arts

Wind Me Up, Chuck!

Dipped in Glass: Breathing Life Back into Vintage Photographs

What is Creativity?

Stay connected to the national endowment for the arts.

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13 Creativity in Art

Philip Alperson, Department of Philosophy, Temple University, Philadelphia

• Published: 02 September 2009
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Perhaps no other concept seems as fundamental to common thinking about the arts as the concept of artistic creativity. This is not because creativity seems to most people to be unique to art. Quite the contrary: we speak freely of creative activity in the sciences, in academic disciplines, in cooking, in sports, and, indeed, in virtually every area of human productive endeavour. Nor is this surprising. Creating and making are closely associated etymologically (from the Latin creare ) and in the popular mind, and it does no violence to common sense to say that what can be made or done can be made or done creatively. Nevertheless, creativity, if not a necessary condition of artistic practice, seems at least a hallmark or a characteristic feature of art generally. And so we think of artists as creating their works, we think of works of art (including physical things, performances, events, and conceptual objects and structures) as artistic creations, and we praise artists, their works, and even entire artistic epochs for their creativity. Many people take artistic creation to be the quintessential human creative activity.

In addition to the general notion that creativity is of central importance to the arts, there is common agreement about three other interrelated aspects of creation in art. First, creativity in the arts is normally taken to be something of positive value. The term ‘creative’, whether applied to an artist or a work, is almost always an honorific, a term of positive appraisal in an appropriate cultural context. Typically, creativity in art is thought to be an important kind or dimension of artistic excellence. Second, ‘true’ creation is taken to be a rare achievement. Of course, as Spinoza says, all excellent things are as difficult as they are rare, and truly distinguished creative achievement would seem to be no exception to Spinoza's general observation. But there is the further point that, in the minds of many, creativity in art seems to call for a special talent or set of talents that distinguish artists from the general run of human beings. Third, we commonly associate creativity with originality, with the production of something that is in some significant sense new or unique. The aesthetic value of originality has been questioned (Vermazen 1991 ; Elster 2000 ), but that is definitely the minority view. We need not demand of creative activity that it be ex nihilo , that it bring something into existence from nothing, in the manner of divine creation. But we do expect that, to the extent that works of art are creative, they add something of interest to the world. That is a chief part of what distinguishes the creative from the routine, the pedestrian, the derivative, and the merely novel. It is often claimed that the appraisal of a truly creative work, as opposed to a merely novel one, is time-dependent, that is, that it can be determined only by the extent to which the work can stand as an exemplar over time. These features of artistic creation—its centrality to the arts, its positive value, its rarity, and its productive originality—are thought to be enshrined in the familiar pantheon of paradigmatic artists, from Homer and Horace through da Vinci and Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, to van Gogh, Picasso, Georgia O'Keefe, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Bill Evans, and so on, before whose works we feel admiration and wonder.

Such ideas about the role and importance of creation in art are common enough. But they raise as many questions as they answer. What exactly is it that makes a person, an action, or a thing creative? How do we assess creative achievement? How, if at all, can creativity in the arts be explained? Are there particular characteristics of creative people or of creative activity? To what extent do social, cultural, economic, institutional, historical, and gendered considerations affect creation in the arts, the identification and evaluation of creative excellence, and our overall assessments of works and artists in virtue of their creativity? What is the relationship between creativity and originality? Can we arrive at an account of artistic creativity that successfully generalizes across the arts, or do we need different accounts of creativity for the various arts or for various aspects of the various arts? Is artistic creativity really such a rare phenomenon? Or is it better understood as a characteristic of human agency in general?

It is only natural that people should reflect on questions such as these, whether they consider artistic creation to be a remote, wondrous, and exceptional form of human activity, or to be continuous with what they know of their own activities and experiences. At the same time, resistance to theorizing about artistic creation arises from at least two directions. First, in part because of a tradition dating back to Plato of regarding poetic creation in particular as an especially mysterious, perhaps irrational, domain, the subject of artistic creation has seemed to be among the more intractable topics in aesthetic theory. In addition, there is a certain ambivalence about discussing the matter among artists themselves, those to whom we might turn for first-hand insight into artistic creativity. There are, to be sure, well-known sayings, statements, and commentaries by artists about the subject, especially concerning the phenomenological character of creative experience (see e.g. Ghiselin 1952 ). But there are also many artists who prefer to avoid the subject entirely, in some cases out of fear of paralysis from analysis. Just how recalcitrant is the subject of creation in art?

1. The Dynamics of Creativity

Since creation in art involves matters of human agency, one might start by asking about the creative process itself. How might it be described? This is a question that presumably rests in part on introspective reports, on psychological descriptions of human behaviour, and on philosophical analysis.

Some have endeavoured to distinguish particular stages of the creative process. Two older but still influential descriptions offered by Graham Wallas ( 1926 ) and Catharine Patrick ( 1937 ) recognize four stages of the creative process: (i) preparation , in which the creator becomes vaguely aware of a problem, perhaps undertaking random efforts to bring the problem to some resolution; (ii) incubation , during which the problem falls from conscious awareness; (iii) inspiration , a period or moment of insight, discovery, or illumination; and (iv) elaboration , during which the creative idea is worked out and developed (see also Ghiselin 1952 ).

Some more recent writers have more or less adopted this scheme, often emphasizing one or another of the stages. Vincent Götz, for example, offers a variation of these categories and, appealing both to etymology and what he takes to be ‘the facts of experience and logic’, argues that creativity is a kind of making marked by deliberative activity issuing in a particular product and that, as such, creativity can properly be predicated only of the last, elaborative stage (‘the process or activity of deliberately concretizing insight’). This stipulation, Gdtz argues, goes some way towards clearing up confusions and ambiguities that dog the ways in which the term is normally used, in particular distinguishing creativity from originality, insight, and communication (Götz 1981 ).

To be sure, creative activity frequently, perhaps typically, involves some deliberative activity. It is wise to be reminded of this and, especially in the case of artistic creativity, of the importance of working with a medium. These insights help to compensate for the easy assumption that creation in the arts is simply a matter of having a ‘eureka’ moment.

There are, however, a number of problems with such a restrictive stipulation such as Götz's. For a start, not all deliberative making is creative making. We normally distinguish between the workmanlike and the worthy on the basis of some evaluative criterion or criteria, such as the extent to which the activity issues in something new or original (Hausman 1984 ; Bailin 1983 ) Attempting to restrict the notion of the creative process to elaborative activity, or focusing on it exclusively, also seems overly fussy: part of what seems remarkable about creative activity is not just the working out of ideas but also their provenance. This is one reason why authors are perennially plagued with the question, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ Furthermore, to the extent that various aspects of creative activity can be identified analytically, one must be cautious about too strict a notion of a particular sequence of stages. As Beardsley ( 1966 ) points out in a well-known essay, which owes much to Dewey ( 1934 ), these activities are typically mixed together, constantly alternating in the ongoing process of artistic creation. Perhaps it would be wisest to think of them as elements rather than as stages of creative activity. Beardsley himself frames the question of the nature of creative activity by asking what goes on in ‘the stretch of mental and physical activity between the incept and the final touch—between the thought “I may be on to something here” and the thought “It is finished”’—which Beardsley takes to be a question about the extent to which the creative process is at least partially controlled.

The question of the extent of deliberative control in artistic creation is an important one. Many artists report that there is at least one fundamental sense in which their creative activity seems not to be purposive or completely under their control: the artist does not completely envisage the final result or proceed according to a preconceived plan. This is one of the paradoxes of creativity, that the artist both knows and does not know what he or she is up to (Maitland 1976 ; Howard 1982 ).

Some philosophers have taken the idea of an activity in which one does not see the end in the beginning to be characteristic of artistic creation. Collingwood ( 1938 ), describing creativity in terms of the expression of emotion and sharply distinguishing expressive activity from craft, offers an influential version of such a view:

When a man is said to express emotion, what is being said about him comes to this. At first, he is conscious of having an emotion, but not conscious of what this emotion is. All he is conscious of is a perturbation of excitement, which he feels going on within him, but of whose nature he is ignorant… Until a man has expressed his emotion, he does not yet know what emotion it is. The act of expressing it is therefore an exploration of his own emotions. He is trying to find out what these emotions are. There is certainly here a directed process: an effort, that is directed upon a certain end; but the end is not something foreseen and preconceived, to which appropriate means can be thought out in the light of our knowledge of its special character. Expression is an activity of which there can be no technique. (Collingwood 1938 : 109–11)

Beardsley, for his part, distinguishes two main theoretical approaches to the matter of creative control: the ‘Propulsive Theory’, according to which ‘the controlling agent is something that exists prior to the creative process’, and the ‘Finalistic Theory’, according to which ‘the controlling agent is the final goal towards which the process aims’. Beardsley dismisses the Finalistic Theory largely on the grounds that the view places too much emphasis on the goal-directed, problem-solving aspect of creative activity. The artist may face both large-scale tasks (‘How can I make a good sculpture of a reclining figure?’) and more or less immediate ones (‘If I use this cool green here I can get this plane to recede’); and, Beardsley acknowledges, it is at least conceivable that an artist might have in mind, for example, a specific regional quality he or she is trying to bring into existence. But, Beardsley asserts, most experience of artists goes against the view that the creative process can be accurately characterized in the main as being controlled by ‘previsioned goals’ or problems to solve.

Beardsley is more sympathetic to the Propulsive Theory, of which he takes Collingwood to be a representative proponent: the artist is impelled by the determination to clarify an emotion that preserves its identity throughout the creative process and largely determines its course. But Beardsley rejects Collingwood's expressionist account on two grounds: (i) the theory lacks a principle of identity according to which an artist would be able to compare the expressed emotion with the (unknown) prior emotion, and (ii) the notion of ‘clarifying’ an emotion is obscure. (For a defence of Collingwood's expression-based theory of creativity, see Anderson and Hausman 1992 .) He instead follows a suggestion by Tomas ( 1958 ) that creation is a self-correcting process and advances what might be called a Generative version of the Propulsion Theory, according to which, after an incept of some sort (a sentence, a theme, a tone, a style, etc.) gets the ball rolling, ‘the crucial controlling power at every point is the particular stage or condition of the unfinished work itself, the possibilities it presents, and the developments it permits’ (again, see Dewey 1934 ).

Beardsley's account of creative control has the virtue of pointing to the ways in which an initial percept, idea, theme, style, and so on can carry with it possibilities for elaboration, possibilities of which the artist might be only dimly aware at the outset of his or her work. Perhaps this is a part of what authors mean when they speak of a story ‘writing itself or of a character carrying the author along. In this sense, artistic creation does seem different from and more complex than a clearly purposive activity such as attempting to hit a bulls-eye on a rifle range, to use Tomas's familiar example.

But Beardsley's view is not completely satisfying, either as a general theory of artistic creativity or as an account of the role of control in the creative process. Beardsley is clear that, on his view, the creative process possesses no universal pattern of stages that occur in a set order. What Beardsley wants to say beyond that, at least from a descriptive point of view, is not so clear. At one point, Beardsley suggests that the four classically delineated activities are mixed together in the creative process; at another he characterizes the creative process as involving two constantly alternating phases, ‘the inventive phase, traditionally called inspiration , in which new ideas are formed in the preconscious and appear in consciousness… [and] the selective phase, which is nothing more than criticism, in which the conscious chooses or rejects the new idea after perceiving its relationships to what has already tentatively been adopted’.

Nor is it clear how serviceable the general distinction is between Propulsive and Finalistic theories. As Khatchadourian ( 1977 ) points out, this is both a conceptual matter—the distinction breaks down, for example, in the case of a sustained conscious finalistic vision or goal that reappears as an unconscious, propulsive creative impulse—and a practical one, since there is a vast spectrum of ways in which artists work. Some works are created with specific and well worked out plans and/or purposes in mind, others are created with scarcely any vision of the completed work. Khatchadourian distinguishes six representative patterns along the gamut but the possibilities seem endless (see also Maitland 1976 ; Bailin 1983 ). These considerations call into question the idea that the creative process can be understood primarily from the standpoint of a generative propulsion theory along the lines that Beardsley suggests.

One takes the point, however, about the limitations of understanding creation in art on the model of problem-solving. The idea that artistic creation might be understood along such lines has special appeal when we consider creative artistic activity in the context of biology and psychology. We find many examples in nature of phenomena, interactions, and changes—the intricate web construction of spiders, the building of birds' nests, the distribution of branches in a tree, in general the adaptation of organisms to natural conditions and constraints—that can be likened to human creative behaviour. Presumably the attribution of creativity to nature in such cases is merely metaphorical: we normally think of human creative activity as involving, among other things, the power of deliberative agency, although some (Godlovitch 1999 ; Arnheim 2001 ) have argued that natural organisms and nature generally are literally creative. In any case, in nature, no less than in a child's gradual construction of order out of chaos, we come across behaviours and activities that arise from the confrontation of problems the solution to which seem to call for ‘creative’ interventions (Perry 1988 ). There is no doubt that there are decisions to be made in most artistic creation and problems that present themselves, either prior to or during the act of creation. The work of psychologists such as Arnheim and Gombrich is rightly valued for its illuminating insights into various aspects of artistic activity, such as pictorial representation, that can be more or less understood along the line of problem solving. The problem-solving model also addresses the intuition that there is some continuity between creation in the arts, even at a very high level, and the activities of human beings generally (see also Baxandall 1985 ; Elster 2000 ).

This is not to say, however, that artistic creation can be understood solely or even primarily as a kind of problem solving. There are several points to be made here. The first is that, as we have noted, artistic creation seems possible in the absence of a sense of an overall guiding problem or set of problems to be solved (Beardsley 1966 ; Khatchadourian 1977 ; Howard 1982 ; Hospers 1985 ). Further, it is not clear what is to be gained by redescribing creative activity as ‘problem solving’; indeed, some things may be lost. In certain cases the issues are methodological: some psychological studies proceed on the assumption that one can legitimately generalize from the ability of experimental subjects to solve relatively low-level riddles or puzzles, activities that may have little in common with the kinds of decisions that figure prominently in the work of creative artists (Leddy 1990 ). Nor does the problem-solving approach seem well equipped to account for what is typically packed into the positive valuation of artistic creative activity, the notion that, whatever problems might have been solved, the final result of creative artistic activity exhibits a significant degree of originality, profundity, insight, or some combination of these. A well solved problem need exhibit none of these qualities. Nor does the redescription of creative activity as problem solving tell us anything necessarily about the social, historical, and cultural context of artistic creativity. Computational theories of creativity that conceptualize creativity on the model of computer programs face the same challenges. Were they to succeed, they would have to come to grips with such elements as surprise, from the point of view of people familiar with the ideas and objects at hand, and value, whether that be construed in terms of utility, pleasure, or some other feature (Boden 1990 ; Novitz 1999 ). Finally, one has to bear in mind the differing challenges that the various arts bring to the table. No doubt there are some things to be said about ‘the’ creative process at a suitably abstract level, but are the ‘problems’ involved in the adjustment of colour in a painting very much like those encountered in choreographing a dance, sculpting a bust, setting a text to music, designing an architectural work, or improvising on a set of chordal changes?

It may be that the idea of a single general descriptive account of the creative process will not be forthcoming and that we shall have to rest content with identifying what seem to be the more salient features of the ways in which artists go about their creative work. One might still wonder, however, whether it is possible to move from questions of description to deeper questions of explanation. In the sense that an explanation makes something intelligible by providing an account of how it occurred, we have already begun the task. But we can also ask questions about why something occurs. We can ask, in particular, whether creative action can be rationalized with other human beliefs, desires, and intentional states such that we could arrive at adequate reasons why something creative was done.

At least three possible general strategies have already been implicitly suggested: that creative activity serves a human desire for gratification through aesthetic delectation, that it eases the mind through its clarifying expression of inchoate emotion, and that it serves a basic cognitive need. These strategies are, of course, not mutually exclusive. There is also an important explanatory route by way of depth psychology, i.e. the appeal to unconscious structures, motives, and mechanisms (see e.g. Ehrenzweig 1967 ). The epistemological difficulties of depthpsychological explanation of human behaviour are well known and there is much that is easily caricatured. At the same time, there is a fascination with and an appeal to the work of psychologists such as Freud, Jung, Rank, Winnicott, and others that persists even in the wake of serious epistemological worries about the explanatory power of these theories. This seems especially so in the case of the artistic creation, if not with respect to the question of creative activity tout court , at least regarding questions about the acquisition of skills and the decisions made by particular artists, where the appeal to deep levels of desire, conflict, concealment, symbolic significance, and play have their allure (Wollheim 1974 ; Spitz 1989 ).

There is a final point to consider about our understanding of the dynamics of creativity, a general issue that poses a challenge to all efforts to explain creation in art. If we grant that something like originality, spontaneity, or unpredictability is a necessary feature of the creative process, then must explanations of creativity necessarily explain creativity away? The point here is not just that creation in art, like all human activity, is psychologically complex, but that the explanation of artistic creative action in particular, as it is normally conceived, carries with it an inherent paradox (Tomas 1958 ; Henze 1966 ; Jarvie 1981 ; Hausman 1984 ).

2. The Creative Product

Philosophical considerations of creation in art need not focus on the nature of the creative process. Some philosophers distinguish questions about the creative process from questions about what makes something a creative work of art and argue that the former are irrelevant to the latter. The distinction has interpretative, ontological, and cultural dimensions.

After devoting pages to philosophical accounts of the creative process, for example, Beardsley ( 1966 ) declares that, however interesting it is to know how the artist's mind works, the value of the artist's work ‘is independent of the manner of production even of whether the work was produced by an animal or by a computer or by a volcano or by a falling slop-bucket’. Beardsley's assessment, of course, is based on his well-known attack on intentionalism, famously presented in his essay, cowritten with William Wimsatt, on the so-called Intentional Fallacy (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1946 ), and on his view that the chief value of art lies in the aesthetic gratification obtained in experience of the formal unity and regional qualities of works of art. ‘The true locus of creativity’, Beardsley argues, ‘is not the genetic process prior to the work but the work itself as it lives in the experience of the beholder.’

Glickman ( 1976 ) argues that creation in art is a matter of product, not process, on somewhat different grounds. The verb ‘create’, he argues, is what Ryle calls an ‘achievement verb’. To praise an artist for being creative is to offer praise not for a specific sort of activity, but for what he or she has accomplished, which is to say the created product. Furthermore, particulars are made; types are created. It is not the particular objects that we value in the case of creative activity in the arts, but the idea or the conception. We thus understand how it is that Duchamp created the (type) artwork Bottlerack even though he did not make the (particular) bottlerack employed. Similarly, Glickman argues, acknowledging a debt to Arthur Danto ( 1981 ), we understand how a natural object such as a piece of driftwood could, in an appropriate cultural or theoretical context, qualify as an artwork.

Clearly, much hangs in these discussions on how we construe the notion of a ‘work’ of art, an exceedingly complicated topic. This much seems clear: any account of the ontology of works must be squared with the intuition that works are created by artists and that it is their creations that interest us; or, if the intuition is denied, an account of the denial is called for.

Consider the case of musical works. What sort of thing is a musical work of art? Let us for the moment concern ourselves with paradigmatically composed works such as a Beethoven quintet. If, as many contemporary philosophers would argue, such a musical work is indeed a type of some sort, instances of which are found in particular token performances of the work, it would seem natural to suppose that it is precisely the type that is created by composer. In developing his account of the musical work as a certain sort of structural type, for example, Levinson ( 1980 ) suggests that ‘creatability’ is, if not a strict requirement, at least a desideratum, of an adequate account of a musical work; that is, that musical works ‘must be such that they do not exist prior to the composer's compositional activity, but are brought into existence by that activity’. This is one reason why, on Levinson's view, a musical work cannot be construed as a sound structure per se . (But for criticism of Levinson's view, see Kivy 1983 .) Minimally, then, a Beethoven quartet is creatable in the sense that it is the sort of thing that is brought into existence by the composer. In addition, Beethoven's quartets, especially the late quartets, are widely admired for their creativity across a range of musical qualities, including their subtle and intricate motivic development, their technical demands, and their expressive depth. A quartet by a lesser figure, say Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, would be creatable in the same sense as a Beethoven quartet, but—presumably—would be judged as less musically creative.

The intimate connection between creation and the ontology of music obtains as well in the case of improvised music. Though the improviser produces a particular sound structure, what typically interests us in the case of improvised music is a particular sort of action: the action of creating a musical work as it is being performed. Improvised music calls into play a different set of listening habits from those associated with the appreciation of composed works, or even the appreciation of performances of composed works. What we are interested in instead is what proves to be possible within the demands and constraints of improvisatory musical activity: the creation of a musical work as it being performed, with all the risks attendant upon the spontaneity and limited correctability of such activity (Alperson 1984 ). In this way, the creation of improvised music has parallels not only with other improvisational arts, such as improvisatory theatre, poetry, dance, and rap music, but also with many aspects of human action generally, including linguistic utterance (Shusterman 2000 : 188–92; Hagberg 2000 ).

In addition, improvised music, like other varieties of music, occurs within a particular musical and historical tradition, and one's appreciation of the creativity of the music will be enhanced by the extent to which one is familiar with the history and the appreciative practices of the tradition in a variety of contexts. Jazz, as a kind of music in which improvisation plays a central role, is a case in point. The saxophone, for example, is a central instrument in improvised jazz. Someone for whom the mere sound of a saxophone is cause for discontent and avoidance is not likely to notice the creative timbral innovations of players such as Coleman Hawkins or John Coltrane, much less to appreciate that the way in which Paul Desmond was able to achieve and manipulate haunting, flute-like tonal qualities on the alto saxophone by opening his throat, adopting a loose embouchure, and using a Meyer hard rubber mouthpiece with an open facing in combination with a high strength reed and a Selmer Mark VI saxophone. Admittedly, that last bit of information is insider knowledge, but the appreciation of creativity in jazz is just as often enhanced by understanding of a less arcane sort. A listener unfamiliar with the history of jazz genres, for example, will likely miss the humour and inventiveness of Mose Allison's improvisations—baroque, sometimes crabbed overlays of bebop and blues melodic and harmonic styles. In many jazz compositions new melodies are superimposed on the harmonic progressions of standard and popular tunes or over chordal substitutions for the standard progressions. Listeners unaware of this tradition may not appreciate the wit or playfulness in an improvised performance of Ornithology that quotes or transforms phrases from How High the Moon , the tune on which Ornithology is based. Ears unaccustomed to or uncomfortable with musical chromaticism and dissonant harmonies may hear the improvisations of Charlie Parker as irruptions of sound rather than as adventurous harmonic explorations and displays of technical skill. A listener unable or unwilling to hear musical works as situated in social and political contexts will be unlikely to hear the freedom from traditional strictures of harmony, rhythm, sound, and musical forms in ‘free jazz’ improvisations of the 1960s and 1970s as manifestations of individual freedom and emblems of the drive towards racial equality. An appreciation of creativity in these various guises requires an understanding of the myriad contexts in which such performances are achieved.

Indeed, it can be argued that artworks, even those embodied in relatively stable physical things such as canvases, buildings, and written texts, present themselves as created works precisely in the sense that they are performances, outcomes or presentations of human creative action (Maitland 1976 ; Wollheim 1980 ; Sparshott 1982 ). If that is so, then the full appreciation and evaluation of created works will inevitably be tied to our appreciation of them as human achievements (see also Currie 1989 ).

These last comments about how we construe the creative work put us in mind of the cultural nature of creation in art and of the importance of understanding creation in art in the context of concrete historical traditions and institutions. There is undoubtedly a strain in some discussions of creation in art that regards artistic creativity as a manner of free, spontaneous, natural, and original activity of an autonomous subject. This tendency is traceable, through a long line of Romantic writers, to Kant's discussion of genius in the Critique of Judgement , the natural talent that ‘gives the rule to art’, the effect of which is to minimize the role and importance of ‘external’ constraints in the artistic creation of exemplary works. This is a rather attenuated notion of creation in art, one that has been the subject of serious criticisms on a number of fronts, especially by feminists and Marxists, who object to the model of subjectivity inherent in such a view and the related eclipse of the role of economic and social conditions and institutional structures that serve as preconditions for creative achievement in the arts. These preconditions affect virtually every aspect of creation in art, including the denomination of artists and works taken to be exemplars of creativity (Nochlin 1971 ; Adorno 1984 ; Battersby 1989 ). A full appreciation of artistic creativity would seem to call for a careful consideration of such matters.

There is also an important sense, as Leddy ( 1994 ) points out, in which the creative artistic product calls for a measure of creativity on the part of its audience. This can occur in a number of ways. Audiences may sometimes participate directly in the creation of works, as members of the artist's circle. Less directly, they may contribute to the creation of works through their interpretations and evaluations of them and their participation in the establishment of the evaluative categories of traditions, styles, periods, and so forth, in the context of which works are created. Last but by no means least, a work may be said to be actualized or realized in so far as it is imaginatively experienced by an appreciator, an activity that calls for creative activity on the part of the appreciator. In all these ways, creativity—for the artist, in the work, and for the audience—is a profoundly cultural affair.

See also : Ontology of Art ; Expression in Art ; Value in Art ; Intention in Art ; Music .

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Essays About Creativity: Top 5 Examples and 7 Prompts

Creativity helps us understand and solve problems in different ways. Discover our top essays about creativity examples and use our prompts for your writing.

Albert Einstein defines creativity as “seeing what others see and thinking what others have not thought.” But what makes it such a popular topic to write about? Every person has a creative view and opinion on something, but not everyone knows how to express it. Writing utilizes ideas and imagination to produce written pieces, such as essays.

Creativity reinforces not only new views but also innovation around the world. Because creativity is a broad topic to write about, you’ll need several resources to help you narrow down what you want to discuss in your essay.

5 Essay Examples

1. way to foster creativity in young children by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 2. phenomenon of creativity and success by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 3. do schools kill creativity: essay on traditional education by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 4. creativity in dreams essay by writer pete, 5. the importance of creativity in higher education by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 1. what is creativity, 2. how creativity affects our daily lives, 3. the impact of creativity on students, 4. the importance of creativity, 5. creativity: a product of perception, 6. types of creativity, 7. art and creativity.

“There are different ways to foster creativity in young children. They include different approaches to the problem of making children more self-reliant, more creative, and more interested in the process of receiving education, obtaining experience, achieving certain results in the sphere of self-study.”

The essay delves into the importance of promoting creativity by teaching music to young students. The author says music’s intention, rhythm, and organizational features help people understand performance, improve their mood, and educate them about the world they live in, unlike noise. Music is an important area of life, so it is important to teach it correctly and inspire children.

Since music and creativity are both vital, the author notes that music teachers must find ways to facilitate ventures to enhance their students’ creativity. The author also believes that teachers must perform their duties appropriately and focus on shaping their students’ behavior, personality, and worldview. You might be interested in these articles about art .

“Over the past few decades, creativity has evolved from a characteristic normally associated with artistic activities into a quality that is found in people of various professions. However, in the 21st century, creativity has become a rather controversial issue.”

The author discusses that while creativity dramatically contributes to the success of individuals and companies, creativity in the 21st-century workplace still has mixed reception. They mention that creativity leads to new ideas and innovations, helps solve complex problems, and makes great leaders. 

However, some still see creative people as irrational, disorganized, and distracting in the workplace. This often results in companies rejecting applicants with this quality. Ultimately, the writer believes creativity is vital in all organizations today. Hiring people with this unique trait is highly beneficial and essential to achieving the company’s goals. For more inspiration, check out these essays about achievement and essays about curiosity .

“… the traditional education system has caused much controversy since the beginning of formal education because traditional education can hurt children’s ability to think creatively, innovate, and develop fascinating minds.”

The essay discusses how school rules and norms affect students’ expression of true individuality. The author mentions that today’s schools focus on students’ test performance, memorization, and compliance more than their aspirations and talents, preventing students from practicing and enhancing their creativity.

The author uses various articles, shows, and situations to elaborate on how schools kill a student’s creativity by forcing them to follow a specific curriculum as a means to succeed in life. It kills the student’s creativity as they become “robots” with the same beliefs, knowledge, and values. According to the writer, killing a child’s creativity leads to a lack of motivation and a wrong career direction.

“Creativity is enhanced whether one chooses to pay attention to it, or not. Each person has the capacity to learn much from their creative dreaming, if they would only think more creatively and openly when awake.”

The essay contains various studies to support claims about people being more creative when asleep. According to the author, the human brain processes more information when dreaming than in the waking state. While the brainstem is inactive, it responds to PGO Waves that trigger the human CMPG, which puts images into the dream to move. The author discusses two main perspectives to discuss how creative dreaming occurs.

First, creativity is enhanced when a person sleeps, not through dreaming but because the mind is free from stress, making the brain more focused on thinking and creating images. The second is that the dreaming mind gathers and processes more information than the human brain unconsciously accumulates daily. The author states that creativity helps express feelings and believes people should not take their creativity in dreams for granted.

“When students have the opportunity to be creative, they’ll have the freedom to express themselves however they want, which satisfies them and drives them to work hard.”

The essay focuses on how the role of creativity is getting slimmer as a student enters higher education. To explain the importance of creativity, the author shares their experience showing how elementary schools focus more on improving and training students’ creativity than higher education. Although rules and restrictions are essential in higher education, students should still practice creativity because it enhances their ability to think and quickly adapt to different situations.

If you want to use the latest grammar software, read our guide to using an AI grammar checker .

7 Prompts for Essays About Creativity

Creativity is an important topic that significantly affects an individual’s development. For this prompt, discuss the meaning of creativity according to experts versus the personal interpretation of creative individuals. Compare these explanations and add your opinion on these similarities and differences. You can even discuss creativity in your life and how you practice creativity in your hobbies, interests, and education.

There are several impacts of creativity in one’s life. It improves mental health, strengthens the immune system, and affects one’s ability to solve problems in school and real life. Sometimes, being creative helps us be more open to various perspectives to reduce our biases. 

Use this prompt to write about a specific situation you experienced where creativity made you more innovative, inventive, or imaginative. Discuss these particular moments by pointing out creativity’s impact on your goal and how things would differ without creativity. You may also be interested in learning about the different types of creativity .

Creativity significantly impacts students’ enthusiasm and feeling of belongingness as they share their passion. Additionally, creativity’s effects stretch to students’ career choices and mental health.

Use this prompt to start a discussion of the pros and cons of creativity with students. Give examples where a student’s creativity leads to their success or failure. You can also share your observations as a guardian or a student.  

Sometimes, when we lose touch with our creative side, our viewpoint becomes shallow. Creativity not only works for art but also broadens everyone’s perspectives in life. 

For this prompt, speak about how creativity matters and prove its importance by providing a situation. Theorize or discuss how creative people and people who fail to increase their creativity respond to the case. 

Perception is an underlying characteristic of creativity. It interprets what we observe, while creativity allows us to make sense of them. Use this prompt to define perception to the readers through the lens of creativity.

List your experience proving creativity is a product of perception. For example, people can have vastly different interpretations of a painting or sound depending on how they perceive it. 

There are several types of creativity, some people believe creativity is a natural talent, but others say it can be cultivated. In this prompt, briefly define creativity and identify each type, such as musical, artistic, or logical. 

Discuss how creativity can be taught and cultivated, and look into how some people are naturally creative. In your essay, use real-life examples; this could be someone you know who has studied a creative subject or a friend who is a naturally creative songwriter.

When people say creativity, they usually think about art because it involves imaginative and expressive actions. Art strongly indicates a person’s ongoing effort and emotional power. 

To write this essay effectively, show how art relates to a person’s creativity. Briefly explain creativity and art and incorporate the factors that link these two. Note that art can be anything from contemporary dance and music to sculptures and paintings. For help with your essay, check our round-up of best essay writing apps .

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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Few things shape the human experience as profoundly or as pervasively as creativity does. And creativity raises a wealth of philosophical issues. Since art is such a salient domain of creativity, you might assume, at first, that the philosophy of creativity is the philosophy of art or aesthetics, or a branch thereof. But creativity invites questions of its own that go beyond the purview of those other fields.

Note that the adjective “creative” can be applied to three kinds of things: a person (“Beyoncé is creative”), a process or activity (“Tell us about your creative process”), or a product , where the latter is taken broadly to include an idea in someone’s mind or an observable performance or artifact (“That’s a creative design”).

Now suppose you are looking at a creative product, like a painting or sculpture. The philosophy of art may ask, “What makes this a work of art?” and aesthetics may ask, “What makes this beautiful?”. By contrast, the philosophy of creativity asks, “What makes this creative? Is it just that it’s new, or must it meet further conditions?” We may ask the same question not just of artworks but of any creative product, whether it be a new scientific theory, a technological invention, a philosophical breakthrough, or a novel solution to a mathematical or logical puzzle. Beyond creative products, we can ask about the creative process : Must it proceed without following rules? Is it conscious, unconscious, or both? Must it be an expression of the creator’s agency, and, if so, must that agency be exercised intentionally? Exactly how does the process manage to produce new things? Can it be explained scientifically? Furthermore, we can ask about creative persons, or more generally, creators. What does it mean for a person to be creative? Is it a virtue to be creative? What capacities and characteristics does a being need to have in order to be creative? Could a computer be creative? These are the kinds of questions animating the literature we’ll survey below.

Some of these questions have an empirical dimension, most obviously those which pertain to how the creative process is actually carried out. Thus, much of the research we’ll canvass falls under the inter-disciplinary umbrella of cognitive science, with contributions not only from philosophers but also from researchers in neighboring fields like psychology, neuroscience, and computer science.

1. The Philosophy of Creativity: Past and Present

2.1 challenges to the value condition, 2.2.1 surprise, 2.2.2 originality, 2.2.3 spontaneity, 2.2.4 agency, 2.3 is creativity a virtue, 3. can creativity be learned, 4. can creativity be explained, 5.1 preparation, 5.2.1 blind variation, 5.2.2 the default-mode network, 5.2.3 imagination, 5.2.4 incubation, 5.3 insight, 5.4 evaluation, 5.5 externalization, 5.6 worries and future directions, 6. creativity and artificial intelligence, 7. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries.

Given the significance creativity has in our lives and the deep philosophical questions it raises, one might expect creativity to be a major topic in philosophy. Curiously, it isn’t.

To be sure, some of the most prominent figures in the history of Western philosophy have been fascinated with creativity—or what we now call “creativity”. According to some scholars, the abstract noun for creativity did not appear until the nineteenth century—but the phenomenon certainly existed and many philosophers took an interest in it (McMahon 2013; Nahm 1956; Murray 1989; Tatarkiewicz 1980: chapter 8).

To name just a few examples: Plato (4 th century BCE) had Socrates say, in certain dialogues, that when poets produce truly great poetry, they do it not through knowledge or mastery, but rather by being divinely “inspired” by the Muses, in a state of possession that exhibits a kind of madness ( Ion and Phaedrus ). Aristotle (3 rd century BCE), in contrast, characterized the work of the poet as a rational, goal-directed activity of making ( poeisis ), in which the poet employs various means (such as sympathetic characters and plots involving twists of fate) to achieve an end (of eliciting various emotions in the audience). Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) and Émilie du Châtelet (1706–1749) championed the creative use of the imagination to pursue freedom, overcome prejudice, and cultivate natural abilities even despite social and political oppression . Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) conceived of artistic genius as an innate capacity to produce original works through the free play of the imagination, a process which does not consist in following rules, can neither be learned nor taught, and is mysterious even to geniuses themselves. Schopenhauer (1788–1860) stressed that the greatest artists are distinguished not only by the technical skill they employ in the production of art, but also by the capacity to “lose themselves” in the experience of what is beautiful and sublime (Schopenhauer 1859: Vol. I: 184–194 and Vol. II: 376–402). Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) argued that the greatest feats of creativity, which he took to be exemplified by the tragic poetry of ancient Greece, was being born out of a rare cooperation between the “Dionysian” spirit of ecstatic intoxication, which imbues the work with vitality and passion, and the “Apollonian” spirit of sober restraint, which tempers chaos with order and form (Nietzsche 1872 [1967]). William James (1842–1910) theorized about creative genius exerts the causal power to change the course of history (Simonton 2018). This is just a glimpse of what each of these philosophers had to say about creativity, and many other figures could be added to their number.

Nevertheless, while some of the topics explored by earlier thinkers have come to occupy a central place in philosophy today—such as freedom, justice, consciousness, and knowledge—creativity is not among them. Indeed, “philosophy of creativity” is still a neologism in most quarters, just as, for example, “philosophy of action” and “philosophy of gender” were not too long ago. However, philosophical work on creativity has been picking up steam over the last two decades (as shown, for example, in a few important collections of essays: B. Gaut & Livingston 2003; Krausz, Dutton, & Bardsley 2009; Paul & Kaufman 2014; B. Gaut & Kieran 2018). We’ll now dive into those contributions, along with earlier work, beginning with what is perhaps the most basic question one can ask in this field.

2. What is Creativity?

As we noted at the outset, the term “creative” can be applied to three kinds of things: a person , a process , or a product (where a product could be an idea, performance, or physical artifact).

Most definitions focus on the product. According to one common approach, persons or processes are creative to the extent that they produce creative products, and a product is creative if it meets two conditions: in addition to being new it must also be valuable . Many theorists argue that novelty is not sufficient, because something can be new but worthless (e.g., a meaningless string of letters), in which case it doesn’t merit the compliment of being called “creative”. Immanuel Kant is often cited as anticipating this definition of creativity in his discussion of (artistic) genius. According to a common interpretation, Kant defines (artistic) genius as the ability to produce works that are not only “original”—since “there can be original nonsense”—but also “exemplary” (Kant 1790: §§43–50 [2000: 182–197]). (Hills & Bird [2018] challenge this reading of Kant.) This definition is so widely accepted among psychologists that it has come to be known as “the standard definition” of creativity in psychology. In practice, “creativity is often not defined” (J.C. Kaufman 2009: 19) in psychological experiments—more on this in §5 below. When psychologists do explicitly adopt a definition, however, they usually say that creative products are not only new, but also valuable in some way, though they variously express the product’s value in terms of its being “useful”, “effective”, “worthwhile”, “fit”, or “appropriate to the task at hand” (Bruner 1962: 18; A. J. Cropley 1967: 67; Jackson & Messick 1965: 313; Kneller 1965: 7; Cattell & Butcher 1968; Heinelt 1974; J.C. Kaufman 2009: 19–20; S.B. Kaufman & Gregoire 2016; Stein 1953; Sternberg & Lubart 1999: 3—for an overview, see Runco & Jaeger 2012). A few psychologists have suggested that the standard definition doesn’t fully capture the concept of creativity (Amabile 1996; Simonton 2012b). As for philosophers, at least one of them defends the standard definition with qualifications (Klausen 2010), but many of them challenge it, as we’ll soon see.

While it is uncontroversial that novelty is required for creativity, philosophers have refined that point. Certain examples may seem, at first, to suggest that novelty isn’t really necessary for creativity. Newton’s discovery of calculus was creative even if, unbeknownst to him at the time, Leibniz got there first—one of many examples of what are called “multiples” in the history of science (Simonton 2004). A beginning student’s idea that freedom is compatible with causal determinism might be creative even if, as she will soon learn, philosophers have been defending such “compatibilist” theories for millennia. However, examples like these do not force us to abandon the novelty requirement, but only to qualify it. Newton’s calculus and the student’s compatibilism were not new in all of history, but they were new to their respective creators, and that is enough for them to count as creative. In the terminology of philosopher Margaret Boden, these ideas are “psychologically creative” (P-creative) even though they are not “historically creative” (H-creative). Notice that P-creativity is more fundamental. Anything that is new in all of history (H-creative) must also be new to its creator (P-creative). Thus, creativity always exhibits psychological novelty, though it doesn’t always exhibit historical novelty.

Again, no one denies that a creative product must be new, at least to its creator. But as we’ll now see, some philosophers depart from the standard definition of creativity by rejecting the value condition ( §2.1 ), or by proposing some further condition(s) ( §2.2 ), or by doing both.

Some theorists have argued that although creative things are valuable, we shouldn’t build value into the definition of creativity, because doing so is not informative or explanatory:

Knowing that something is valuable or to be valued does not by itself reveal why or how that thing is. By analogy, being told that a carburetor is useful provides no explanatory insight into the nature of a carburetor: how it works and what it does. (Stokes 2008: 119; Stokes 2011: 675–76)

Those who maintain that value is required for creativity might reply that it doesn’t need to be informative or explanatory. Being a man is required for being a bachelor even though it’s not informative or explanatory to say that bachelors are men. Stokes notes that “creative” is a term of praise, and uses this point to argue that what is creative must be produced intentionally (since we don’t rightly praise what is unintentional or accidental)—an idea we’ll return to below. But the same point also seems to imply that what is creative must also have value (since we don’t rightly praise what doesn’t have value). And while the concept “carburetor” is value-neutral, as shown by the fact that a carburetor can be worthless or useless (if it’s broken), “creative”, one might argue, is a value-laden concept, like “progress”. Progress necessarily involves novelty or change, but we don’t praise change as progress unless it’s good change. Likewise, defenders of the value condition urge, creativity necessarily involves novelty, but we don’t praise novelty as creative unless it’s good novelty.

Other critics use counterexamples to argue that value isn’t necessary for creativity, the most prominent cases being ones of immoral creativity. (For a collection of essays by psychologists on the phenomenon of immoral or so-called “dark” creativity’, see D. Cropley et al. 2010). Putative cases of immoral creativity include creative accounting to cheat investors or creative testimony to mislead jurors, and the stock example in the literature is creative torture or murder. One can imagine novel and well-designed murders, as Thomas De Quincey once did in a satirical essay:

[S]omething more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed—a knife—a purse—and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature. Mr. Williams has exalted the ideal of murder to all of us […] Like Æschylus or Milton in poetry, like Michael Angelo in painting, he has carried his art to a point of colossal sublimity. (De Quincey 1827; see also discussion in Battin et al. 1989)

Innovative ways of inflicting needless agony and craftily designed murders are not good (they have no value), and yet they can be creative. If this is right, then it seems to follow that creativity doesn’t require value.

One way of trying to save the value condition is by flatly denying that torture methods can be creative, and by denying more generally that creative things can be bad (Novitz 1999). But such denial seems ad hoc and implausible—“evil creativity” is not a contradiction in terms—and some have argued that this denial faces other problems besides (Livingston 2018).

Other theorists revise or qualify the value condition in order to accommodate examples of immoral creativity. Paisley Livingston (2018) proposes that a creative product only needs to be instrumentally valuable or “effective” as means to its intended end, regardless of whether that end is morally good, bad, or indifferent. Berys Gaut (2018) distinguishes between something’s being good (or good, period) versus being good of its kind . In his view, a new way of wielding blades and pulleys may be creative if it’s a good of its kind—good as a method of torture—even though it isn’t good. In order for something to count as creative, Gaut says, it doesn’t need to be good; it just needs to be good of its kind.

Alison Hills and Alexander Bird (2018) are unconvinced by such qualifications. They contemplate an elaborate torture device that ends up killing its victims immediately, “without enough suffering on the way”. The device may still be creative, they hold, even though “as a method of torture, it’s no good” (2018: 98). Indeed, they argue, a creative item needn’t be good in any way at all, not even for its creator. The ineffective torture device just described doesn’t satisfy its creator’s preferences, it doesn’t give him pleasure, it isn’t an achievement, it doesn’t contribute at all to his well-being—and yet, they contend, it may be creative, provided that it’s new and was produced in the right way. Exactly what “the right way” amounts to is the topic we turn to next.

2.2 Other proposed conditions

With or without the value condition, some theorists argue that a product must satisfy one or more further conditions, beyond being new, in order to count as creative. The four most prominent proposals are that the product must be (i) surprising, (ii) original (i.e., not copied), (iii) spontaneous, and/or (iv) agential. Each of these is a condition on the process of creativity. To be clear, we are still concerned with what it means for a product to be creative, but the proposals we’ll now consider say that in order for a product to count as creative, it must be brought about in the right way.

Margaret Boden holds that a creative product must be “ new, surprising, and valuable ” (2004: 1; cf. Boden 2010; 2014). It is perhaps most natural to assume that being surprising—like being new and valuable—is a feature of a product. But while Boden does think of creative products as surprising, her interest is more fundamentally in the underlying generative process, in how a creator manages to make something surprising. In her view, there are “three types of creativity”—combinatorial, exploratory, and transformative—“which elicit different forms of surprise, [and] are defined by the different kinds of psychological processes that generate the new structures” (2010: 1, italics added).

Combinatorial creativity occurs when old ideas are combined in new ways. Obvious examples include fictional hybrid creatures or chimeras: add wings to a horse (Pegasus), add the tail of a fish to a woman’s head and upper-body (a mermaid), add a lion’s body to a woman’s head and torso (Sphinx), and so on. Other combinations are found in analogies, such as when Niels Bohr compared an atom to the solar system. The term “combination” can refer either to the product of things combined or to the process of combining them, but Boden’s focus is on the process here, on the fact that one way to generate new ideas is to begin with old ideas and combine them in new ways.

To explain her other two kinds of creativity, Boden invokes the notion of a “conceptual space”, which is roughly a system comprising a set of basic elements (e.g., basic ideas or representations) as well as rules or “constraints” for manipulating or re-combining those elements. A conceptual space is not a painting, song, or poem, for example; it’s a way of creating a painting, song, poem, or theory. The rules or constraints are “the organizing principles that unify and give structure to a given domain of thinking”. And so a conceptual space is

the generative system that underlies that domain and defines a certain range of possibilities: chess moves, or molecular structures, or jazz melodies. (1994: 79)

We could think of a conceptual space as not just a set of thoughts but also a style of thinking defined by rules for generating new thoughts.

“Within a given conceptual space”, Boden observes, “many thoughts are possible, only some of which may have been actually thought” (2004: 4). Some conceptual spaces contain more possibilities than others. Consider different games. Tic-tac-toe is such a simple game that all of its possible moves have already been made many times over. The same is not true in chess, by contrast, which allows for a mind-boggling number of possible moves. The range of possible ideas is also practically inexhaustible in literature, music, the visual and performing arts, as well as the various domains of theoretical inquiry. And within those pursuits, there are various “structured styles of thought”—genres, paradigms, methodological orientations—which Boden thinks of as conceptual spaces.

Boden argues that the elements as well as the operating rules of a conceptual space can be, and in some cases have been, captured in computer programs. She has used this point not only to argue that computers can be creative (a topic we’ll return to below in §5 ), but also to suggest that we should employ the computational model of the mind in order to explain how humans create.

With her notion of conceptual spaces in hand, Boden says that exploratory creativity occurs within a given conceptual space. The new idea that emerges is one that was already possible within that space, because it was permitted by its rules. “When Dickens described Scrooge as ‘a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner,’” Boden writes, “he was exploring the space of English grammar” in which “the rules of grammar allow us to use any number of adjectives before a noun” (Boden 1994: 79). Dickens’s description may strike us somewhat surprising, unexpected, or improbable, but it doesn’t have an air of impossibility about it.

By contrast, Boden argues, another form of creativity does. In this kind of case, the creative result is so surprising that it prompts observers to marvel, “But how could that possibly happen?” (2004: 6). Boden calls this transformational creativity because it cannot happen within a pre-existing conceptual space; the creator has to transform the conceptual space itself, by altering its constitutive rules or constraints. Schoenberg crafted atonal music, Boden says, “by dropping the home-key constraint”, the rule that a piece of music must begin and end in the same key. Lobachevsky and other mathematicians developed non-Euclidean geometry by dropping Euclid’s fifth axiom. Kekulé discovered the ring-structure of the benzene molecule by negating the constraint that a molecule must follow an open curve (Boden 1994: 81–3). In such cases, Boden is fond of saying that the result was “downright impossible” within the previous conceptual space (Boden 2014: 228).

Boden’s definition of creativity has perhaps been most influential among researchers who share her intertest in computer creativity (e.g., Halina 2021; Miller 2019: ch. 3; du Sautoy 2019). In a variation of Boden’s account, one philosopher proposes that what makes a mental process creative is not that it actually involves “the recombination of old ideas or the transformation of one’s conceptual space”, but rather that the creator experiences the process as having one of those features (Nanay 2014).

Maria Kronfeldner (2009; 2018) argues that the process of making something creative must exhibit originality . As she uses the term “original”, it does not simply mean “new”; instead, it has to do with the kind of causal process the creator must employ. She motivates her view by asking why it’s the case that, as we noted earlier, psychological novelty is required for creativity while historical novelty is not. Why is it, for example, that Newton’s invention of calculus was creative even if Leibniz invented it first? The answer, of course, is that it’s because Newton didn’t copy his calculus from Leibniz. Insofar as Newton came up with calculus independently, on his own, then he exhibited originality in his discovery, even though someone else got there first. This originality, Kronfeldner argues, is essential to creativity.

Kronfeldner (2009; 2018) also argues that spontaneity is required for creativity. An idea occurs spontaneously to the extent that it is produced without foresight or intentional control. If you were to foresee the output of the creative process at the beginning of that process, then you wouldn’t need any further process to come up with it. So if an idea is creative, you cannot have fully seen it coming. To that extent, insight comes as a surprise, hence the common phenomenological observation that creative breakthroughs feel like they come unbidden or out of the blue: “Eureka!”, “Aha!”, a lightbulb turns on.

Gaut (2018: 133–137) agrees that creativity requires spontaneity, and he points out, as Kronfeldner does, that it comes in degrees. He explains that you do something spontaneously to the extent that do it without planning it in advance. If you are going to act creatively, he argues, you cannot set out to follow an “exact plan”—a mechanical procedure, routine, or algorithmic rule—which would give you advance knowledge of exactly what the outcome will be and exactly the means you'll take to achieve it. At the outset of a creative act, you have to be to some extent ignorant of the end, or the means, or both. That ignorance opens up room for spontaneity and creativity.

Some philosophers argue that an item does not count as creative unless it has been produced by an agent. Consider a unique snowflake with an intricate shape, a distinctive sunset with stunning layers of red-orange hues, a novel patterning of dunes across a wind-blown desert. All of these things are aesthetically valuable and new. None of them are creative, however, insofar as they all occurred naturally and were not made by an agent. Gaut uses examples like these to argue that creative things must be created by agents (B. Gaut 2018: 129–30; cf. B. Gaut 2010, and B. Gaut 2014b) and several other philosophers agree (Carruthers 2006, 2011; Kieran 2014a, 2014b; Stokes 2008, 2011, 2014; Paul & Stokes 2018).

Of course, many theists would maintain that everything in nature is the handiwork of an agent—namely, God—and so arguably it would make sense for them to regard a natural phenomenon as creative if it is valuable and new. For theists, the unparalleled beauty of nature is a reason to praise the Creator. But this only supports the conceptual point that creativity, by definition, requires agency. We may coherently regard valuable new things as creative if we attribute them to a creative agent, as the theist does with the natural world; otherwise, we can’t. So again, it seems, creativity requires agency.

This leaves open the question of exactly how a creator’s agency must be exercised in order for the result to count as creative. Some philosophers argue that the agent’s act of creation must be intentional . Suppose you are snowboarding on a powder day and, unbeknownst to you, the tracks from your board result in a pleasing new pattern as viewed from high above. The new pattern has aesthetic value, but it isn’t creative. And that is because you didn’t intend to make it. Underlying this intuition, as well as our intuitions about the natural phenomena above, is the fact that “creative” is a term of praise, and we do not extend praise (or blame) for things that are not done by an agent, or for things that an agent doesn’t do in some sense intentionally.

While a number of philosophers endorse some version of the agency requirement for creativity, many theorists make no mention of it, whether to endorse it or reject it, including all of the psychologists cited above. Further, at least two philosophers are willing to attribute creativity to natural phenomena like trees and evolutionary processes: Arnheim (2001) and, in recent work, Boden (2018). These latter theorists don’t discuss agency as such, but insofar as the natural phenomena they call creative are not the result of agency, their view would imply that agency isn’t required for creativity.

The four proposals we’ve just considered all say that a product must arise from a certain kind of process—a process that exhibits surprise, originality, spontaneity, or agency—in order to count as creative. While there is wide agreement among philosophers that creativity requires some special kind of process, not just a special product, there is no consensus on what is required of the process. Of the four process conditions described here, the agency condition seems to be the one that is explicitly endorsed by the greatest number of philosophers thus far, though even they are still just a handful. And as we’ve seen, the other proposed conditions have serious arguments in their favor as well.

Some philosophers argue that if any process requirement is correct, this has an intriguing corollary for judgements about creativity: Even when we are explicitly judging only that a product is creative, we are implicitly assuming something about the process by which it was made. Suppose, for illustration, that the agency requirement is correct—that being generated through an agential process is built into the very concept of a creative product. Suppose further that you are applying that concept competently. It follows that if you come across a captivating arrangement of stones on the beach and you judge it to be creative, you are at least implicitly assuming that it was created through an agential process. If someone later persuades you that the stones happened to be moved into place by the wind and waves, not by any agent but just by chance, then you may still regard the result as aesthetically interesting but you would have to rescind your judgement that it is creative. So if the agency condition is correct, whenever you point to some item and say, “This is creative”, what you are saying, in part is, “This resulted from a creative process”. Furthermore, on this view, analogous implications follow if any other process condition is correct (Paul & Stokes 2018).

Having considered what is required for something to count as a creative product , and whether it must be produced by a certain kind of process , we now turn to analysis of the creative person .

Some theorists suggest that creativity, as an attribute of persons, is an ability to perform creative acts or produce creative things (Boden 2004). Others argue, however, that creativity isn’t merely an ability. An ability is something you can possess without ever putting it to use. You might have the ability to learn Swahili, for example, without ever making the effort to learn that language, despite having ample opportunities to do so. Creativity is different in this regard. If someone has the ability to be creative but never uses that ability when given numerous chances to do so, we would not call that person creative. Creative people are not merely able to act creatively. They are, moreover, disposed to exercise that ability, such that they do act creatively, at least some of the time, when the occasion arises. On this view creativity is a disposition , also referred to as a trait (Grant 2012; cf. B. Gaut 2014b, 2018).

Philosophers have long distinguished virtues as a special subclass of dispositions or traits. In Western philosophy, the tradition of theorizing about virtues goes back to the ancient Greeks, and over the last half-century it has enjoyed a renaissance in ethics (see entry on virtue ethics ) and, more recently, in epistemology (see entry on virtue epistemology ) and aesthetics (Lopes 2008; Roberts 2018; Hills 2018). Traditional examples of virtues include wisdom, justice, temperance, and courage. Should creativity be added to the list?

The answer depends, of course, on what it means for a trait to be a virtue. At the very least, a virtue is a trait that is good or valuable. So whether creativity counts as a virtue in this minimal sense depends on whether creativity is necessarily valuable, a point which is contested, as we saw in the previous section. In fact, those who contend that creativity isn’t necessarily valuable often do so in order to prove that it isn’t a virtue.

But let’s suppose for the sake of argument that creativity is indeed a valuable trait. Is it also a virtue in some more robust sense? Virtue theorists commonly take their cue from Aristotle’s classic discussion in the Nichomachean Ethics . Citing justice and temperance as paradigm virtues, Aristotle asserts that a trait must meet at least three conditions to count as a virtue:

For actions in accord with the virtues to be done temperately or justly it does not suffice that they themselves have the right qualities. Rather, the agent must also be in the right state when he does them. First, he must know [that he is doing virtuous actions]; second he must decide on them, and decide on them for themselves; and thrid, he must also do them from a firm and unchanging state. ( EN II.4, 1105a28–1105a33)

So, for example, if you return something you’ve borrowed, that act exhibits the virtue of justice if and only if (1) you know that you’re returning what you borrowed, (2) you choose to do so because it is the just thing to do, and for no other reason, and (3) you are disposed to do the just thing across the range of circumstances when the opportunity arises. In addition to justice and temperance, Aristotle enumerates other ethical virtues like prudence, generosity, and courage, as well as the intellectual virtue of theoretical wisdom. In his view, each of these traits requires one to meet the three conditions above. While he does not consider whether creativity is a virtue, we may ask whether creativity also has these three criteria. Does one have to meet these three requirements in order to count as creative?

We’ll begin with the third requirement to set it to one side. Does a person’s act count as creative only “if he does it from a fixed and permanent disposition of character”? Examples suggest otherwise. Consider the poet Arthur Rimbaud, who abandoned poetry at the age of 21 to pursue a life of adventure. The fact that he never produced another poem after that does not count against the fact that he was a creative poet in his youth (B. Gaut 2014b). Unlike the Aristotelian virtues, then, creativity does not have to be a permanent disposition.

Even so, it would still be significant if creativity turned out to be like an Aristotelian virtue in meeting the first two requirements. And arguably, creativity does meet the first requirement. A person doesn’t count as doing something creative unless “he knows what he is doing”. This was already implied by the agency condition for creativity discussed earlier.

Where things get interesting is with Aristotle’s second criterion for virtue. In order for your action to count as virtuous, he says, you have to do it “for its own sake”—i.e., you have to do it because you value virtue as an end itself, and not as a means to some external reward like praise, money, status, fame, or winning a competition. Consider the virtue of generosity, for instance. If you give money to someone in need merely because it will make you look good in the eyes of your friends, then you aren’t really being generous. Your act may outwardly look like generosity, but it’s not the real thing. To exhibit real generosity, you have to pursue generosity as an end in itself; you have to help others just for the sake of helping others. Now contrast being generous with being polite. If you compliment your colleague on the good work she’s done, then even if you’re doing this in order to manipulate her, you are being polite to her. You can have an ulterior motive for being polite. So politeness is not a virtue the way generosity is.

Is creativity a virtue in this respect? That is, does being creative require acting creatively for its own sake? Matthew Kieran’s (2014a, 2014b, 2018) answer is a qualified yes. While he grants that you can be motivated by external rewards to exhibit “minimal creativity” in producing valuable new things, he maintains that “exemplary creativity” requires you to be motivated by the value of creativity itself. Thus, in his view, exemplary creativity is a virtue.

To support this claim, Kieran points to a research program in psychology which purports to show that creativity is driven by “intrinsic motivation” rather than “extrinsic motivation”. A classic experiment in this program is “the magic markers study”, in which kids end up producing less creative drawings when they are offered a prize (Lepper et al. 1973). Many other studies have reported similar results, which lead Teresa Amabile to conclude, at first without qualification, that creativity is enhances by intrinsic motivation and hampered by extrinsic motivation (Amabile 1983: 107).

Further research introduced complications. In some studies, subjects were given “immunization techniques” whereby they were first primed or trained to focus on intrinsically motivating factors like the pleasure or aesthetical value of engaging in artistic activities, and it was found that when they engaged in those activities afterward, external rewards actually enhanced their creativity.

As researchers interpreted these findings, offering reward can support one’s intrinsic motivation, provided that the reward works either to boost one’s sense of agency or to provide useful feedback about what’s working and what isn’t. Intrinsic motivation is still what fuels creativity, on this interpretation; rewards help only indirectly, when they reinforce intrinsic motivation. This lead Amabile to revise her hypothesis as the Intrinsic Motivation Principle (IMP):

Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity; controlling extrinsic motivation is detrimental to creativity, but informational or enabling extrinsic motivation can be conducive, particularly if initial levels of intrinsic motivation are high. (1996: 107)

Kieran takes this as evidence for his claim that creativity, or at least what he calls exemplary creativity, requires intrinsic motivation and is therefore a virtue in that respect.

Objecting to this proposal, Gaut cites evidence that extrinsic motivation is not always detrimental to creativity. In one study, students in an introductory psychology class came up with more creative short story titles if they were offered a financial reward (Eisenberger & Rhodes 2001). In the studies where immunization techniques were used, proponents of IMP argue that rewards enhance creativity only indirectly, by buttressing intrinsic motivation. But in this case no such techniques were used, and so it seems the prospect of a reward enhanced creativity directly.

Further, Gaut argues that this point coheres with the role that rewards seem to play in so many real-world cases of creative achievement. In their quest to discover the structure of the DNA molecule, Watson and Crick were driven “to imitate Linus Pauling and beat him at his own game” (Watson 1968 [1999: 46]). Picasso and Matisse were both spurred on by their rivalry with each other (Flam 2003: 37). Paul McCready says he was driven to invent his award-winning human-powered glider in 1977 because he needed the prize-money to pay off his debts:

I felt that I didn’t have the time to mess with such things, but I had this strong economic motivation to take an interest in man-powered flight, so I charged around trying to figure out a way to solve it. (quoted in Sternberg & Lubart 1995: 242)

One historian argues that in World War II the Poles beat the French in cracking the Germans’ Enigma Code because they were more terrified of German invasion (Singh 1999: ch. 4). Gaut quips: “Fear of death is a more powerful motivator than the intrinsic satisfactions of code breaking” (Gaut 2014b: 196).

Finally, Gaut points out that even if IMP is true, it is only a causal, probabilistic claim: intrinsic motivation is “conducive” to creativity; extrinsic motivation is “detrimental”. But for a trait to be a virtue, intrinsic motivation must be conceptually necessary for the exercise of that trait. If we learn that someone gave to charity just to enhance his reputation, we conclude that he wasn’t really being generous. By contrast, if we discover that someone created gorgeous artwork just for the fame and glory, we may then lose some of our admiration for her creativity, but we do not deny that she was being creative.

Kieran could remind us that, in his view, intrinsic motivation is not required for all creativity, but only for the special form of it that he calls exemplary creativity. Anticipating this reply, Gaut says that to distinguish between two forms of creativity is just to concede his point. There are not two forms of generosity, one that requires intrinsic motivation and another that does not. If your act of giving isn’t motivated by the right kind of reason, then it doesn’t count as an act of generosity at all. Thus, Gaut argues, to grant the possibility of non-exemplary creativity is to grant that, unlike generosity, creativity isn’t a virtue in the traditional Aristotelian sense.

Another way to examine relations between creativity and virtue is through the lens of virtue epistemology. Linda Zagzebksi defines a virtue

as a deep and enduring acquired excellence of a person, involving a characteristic motivation to produce a certain desired end and reliable success in bringing about that end. (1997: 137, italics added)

While there is a lot packed into this definition, what we’ll pinpoint here is the idea that virtue involves reliable success in achieving a desired end, and that the agent who is epistemically virtuous, in particular, is one who is reliably successful in achieving knowledge. Knowledge requires truth, of course, so an epistemic virtue is a trait that is “truth-conducive”. Epistemologists typically regard a process as truth-conducive to the extent that the beliefs it produces are more often true than false. But Zagzebksi proposes that a process or trait may be truth-conducive in a different sense, insofar as it is necessary for advancing knowledge in some area, even if it produces a very small proportion of true beliefs. Creativity, she claims, is truth-conducive in this sense, and thus it qualifies as an epistemic virtue (1997: 182). Also note the emphasis on agency. In contrast to contemporary western epistemology, virtue epistemology identifies the agent (rather than, say her beliefs) as the essential locus of epistemic valence; it is the agent who is epistemically good (or not). This emphasis comports well with the proposal, discussed above, that the creator’s agency is necessary for genuine creative achievement. A virtue-theoretic approach thus illuminates what may (as we will discuss again later) be essential to creativity, namely, a process that non-trivially involves a responsible agent.

We’ve seen that even after we fix a specific referent for the term “creative”—whether it be a person, process, or product—there are lively disagreements about what it means. These debates often seem to presuppose that the term always expresses the same concept, for which we can seek necessary and sufficient conditions. But we’ve also seen that some theorists distinguish between different concepts of creativity, corresponding to different senses of the term “creative”. In future work we may see theorists develop such pluralistic approaches in more detail. The trick, though, will be to give principled reasons for multiplying different concepts of creativity so that the analyses do not simply reduce to saying that anything goes.

There is a long tradition of thinkers who answer no to the question above. Two of the most influential are from the eighteenth century—Edward Young and Immanuel Kant—who were concerned specifically with genius , the capacity for achieving the very highest levels of creativity. In Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), Young says,

An Original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius; it grows , it is not made …. (1759 [1966: 7])

His idea is that originality emerges naturally from something implanted in us by nature, and it can only be hindered by learning. Young seems to think of learning as proceeding either through imitation or through the following of rules, and both, he thinks, are detrimental to originality. Regarding imitation he writes,

Born Originals , how comes it to pass that we die Copies ? That meddling ape Imitation … destroys all mental individuality…. (1759 [1966: 20])

And insofar as learning is “a great lover of rules”, he warns that it “sets rigid bounds to that liberty, to which genius often owes its supreme glory” (1759 [1966: 13]).

Kant makes similar claims in his Critique of Judgment (1790). Like Young, he takes genius to be a natural capacity, though a very rare one:

such a skill cannot be communicated, but is apportioned to each immediately from the hand of nature and dies with him. (1790: §47 5:309 [2000: 188])

It certainly cannot be learned through imitation:

genius is entirely opposed to the spirit of imitation . Now since learning is nothing but imitation, even the greatest aptitude for learning, facility for learning (capacity) as such, still does not count as genius. (1790: §47 5:308 [2000: 187])

Nor can it be learned through rules, Kant holds, for genius is

the talent (natural gift) that gives the rule to art … the inborn predisposition of the mind ( ingenium ) through which nature gives the rule to art. (1790: §46 5:307 [2000: 186])

For Kant, a genius does not follow rules; a genius invents the rules, indirectly, by creating exemplary works from which other artists might extract rules and undertake “a methodical instruction in accordance with rules” (1790: §49 5:318 [2000: 196]).

Young and Kant are concerned with genius, specifically, but if we extend their reasoning to creativity in general, as Berys Gaut (2014a) has noted, we can discern two lines of argument:

The imitation argument All learning is a form of imitation. Imitating someone or something is incompatible with being creative. So, one cannot learn to be creative. The rules argument All learning consists in the following of rules. Following rules is incompatible with being creative. So, one cannot learn to be creative. (2014a: 266)

Gaut points out, first of all, that both arguments are invalid. In both cases, what the premises would entail is that learning cannot be creative, that, in other words, you cannot learn creatively (a claim about how you can learn). But even if that were true, it wouldn’t follow that you cannot learn to be creative (a claim about what you can learn). If you absorb the advice of a creative writing manual then this act of learning may not itself be creative. But if the manual is effective—and we’ll see in a moment how it can be—then what you will learn is how to become more creative.

Gaut also challenges the premises of these arguments. To start with the first premise of the imitation argument, it simply isn’t true that all learning proceeds through imitation, as we learn many things through direct experience, trial and error, and many other means.

The second premise is also suspect. Something superficially close to it is true: mere copying is incompatible with being creative. But to the extent that we learn from others by imitating them, this is not merely a matter of copying them. When a child learns to speak the language of those around her, she doesn’t simply parrot the exact same sentences she hears; she absorbs the vocabulary and underlying grammar in a way that enables her to form new sentences of her own devising.

Now for the rules argument. Contrary to the first premise, it cannot be the case that all learning consists in following rules, Gaut argues, because for any given rule there will be hard cases where it is unclear whether or how the rule applies to them, and so an individual still has to use her own judgment in applying the rule.

The second premise is false too. Recall the distinction from §3 above between two kinds of rules. An algorithm serves as an exact plan, specifying both the outcome and the path for getting to it in exact detail. In contrast, a heuristic is a looser “rule of thumb” that leaves room for an agent to exercise her own judgment, choice, and creativity in determining whether, when, and how to follow the rule. While algorithms, in this sense, may preclude creativity, heuristics do not, which is why, as we’ll see below, the teaching of creativity so often takes the form of heuristics.

There is a sense in which the question at hand can be answered empirically: We can show that creativity can be taught simply by pointing to cases where it has been taught. Gaut himself discusses such examples as they occur in mathematics and fiction writing, which we’ll turn to below. But while such cases may suffice to show that creativity can be taught, Gaut further enriches our understanding by explaining how this is possible . He does so partly by articulating and then debunking the imitation and rules arguments to the contrary. But in addition, he offers the following positive argument to show that creativity can be taught and learned. He calls it “the constitutive argument” because it begins with his view of what constitutes or defines creativity itself.

The constitutive argument

• Creativity is a disposition—involving both the ability and the motivation —to produce things that are new and valuable, and to do so in ways that express one’s agency through “the exercise of choice, evaluation, understanding, and judgment” (Gaut 2014a: 273).
• At least some people can learn to enhance their creative motivation .
• At least some people can learn to enhance their creative abilities .
• So, at least some people can learn to become more creative.

Premise 1 recapitulates the point we’ve already seen Gaut and others defend (in §2.3 above), that creativity is not merely an ability but a disposition or trait, whereby the creative person is disposed or motivated to exercise that ability when given the opportunity.

In support of premise 2, Gaut argues that you can strengthen both your intrinsic motivation to be creative (when you take pleasure in your creative activities), as well as your extrinsic motivation to be creative (when you are rewarded with praise, grades, pay, etc. for your creative efforts).

Defending premise 3, Gaut points out that you can develop your ability to produce valuable new things by practising and strengthening the relevant skills. And this development can be substantially aided by learning certain heuristics.

Heuristics are indeed a staple of education in creative pursuits from mathematics (draw the figure; consider special cases; consider extreme cases; generalize the problem; look for a related problem, etc.—see Pólya 1945; Schoenfeld 1982, 1987a, 1987b) to creative writing (write what you know; be specific and detailed in describing sensory experiences; practice seeing similarities between dissimilar things; show, don’t tell, etc.—see Bell & Magrs 2001; Anderson 2006; Maybury 1967; S. Kaufman & J. Kaufman 2009). Gaut also identifies several heuristics that might be used to foster creativity in philosophy, even among children (cf. M. Gaut 2010; B. Gaut & M. Gaut 2011).

With this last theme, Gaut has a kindred spirit in Alan Hájek (2014, 2016, 2017, 2018), who has independently proposed that by using various heuristics, philosophers can enhance their abilities to make valuable contributions to their field, including ideas that are distinctively creative. It has been said that anyone of average talent can become a strong chess player by learning and internalizing certain chess heuristics: “castle early”, “avoid isolated pawns”, etc. Analogously, Hájek suggests, philosophy has a wealth of heuristics— philosophical heuristics —although they have not been as well documented and studied. Sometimes these take the form of useful heuristics for generating counterexamples, such as “check extreme cases”. Sometimes they suggest ways of generating new arguments out of old ones, as in “arguments involving possibility can often be recast as arguments involving time, or space”. Sometimes they provide templates for positive arguments (e.g., ways of showing that something is possible). Hájek offers a catalogue of such philosophical heuristics to show that, contrary to a common assumption, creativity, even in philosophy, can be compatible with, and enhanced by, following rules.

Upon observing the work of creative people, it is natural to wonder: How do they do that? How do people create? The issue we turn to now is whether we could, at least in principle, answer this question scientifically, using the methods of modern empirical psychology and other cognitive and behavioral sciences. Those who take a negative stance on this matter are not merely saying that, in practice, it would be exceedingly difficult for science to explain creativity. They are saying that it’s altogether impossible that science could ever explain creativity.

Hospers (1985) defends this kind of pessimism based on the variety and complexity of creativity, given that creativity occurs not only in art, but in science, theorizing of any sort, engineering, business, medicine, sport, gaming, and so on. At least two worries may follow. First, given the complexity of any one of these individual domains, one might worry that there are simply too many variables to allow for a clear explanation. Art provides a paradigmatic example. Consider an artwork that you judge to be masterful (a sculpture, a painting, a film). Now imagine attempting to describe or identify all the reasons for which you think it is masterful. Take as much time as you like but, the skeptic will urge, any long description you construct will invariably strike you as woefully incomplete by comparison to the artwork, and the experience thereof. So, if the creative achievements of artists, in all of their complexity, cannot even be adequately described, we have little reason to think that such achievements can be explained.

How can theorists respond to these skeptical worries? Both the complexity and generalizability worries might be partially disarmed by noting analogies between creativity and other phenomena. For instance, consider the range of bodily movement involved in some of the very domains of activities listed above: art, science, engineering, medicine, sport. The kinds of bodily action specific to these domains are complex and vary dramatically: the relevant physical movements of the surgeon are much different from the tennis player. However, it is not plausible that this complexity and variety precludes explanation of bodily action in those domains. It simply implies that some features of the explanation will be context-sensitive, that is, specific to that domain of activity. And further to the analogy: the fact that the long description of, say, the tennis serve is incomplete does not preclude it from being apt and explanatory. If this line of reasoning is sound for bodily action, why not also for creative action?

At this point, one might argue that while complexity and generalizability worries would only show that creativity is difficult to explain in practice, the very nature of creativity implies, more strongly, that it could never be explained, not even in principle. Resources to support this kind of pessimism may be adduced from various past philosophers. We need to tread carefully, however, since most of the figures we are about to consider were writing long before the rise of the relevant sciences, so they could not have made any explicit claim either way as to whether creativity could be explained by those sciences. Nevertheless, some of them did make claims which entail, or seem to entail, that creativity simply isn’t the kind of thing that could be explained through scientific inquiry as we understand it today.

The classic expression of such a view comes from Plato. In his dialogues, Plato features his teacher Socrates as a spokesperson for his own views, and in the Ion he has Socrates argue that poets do not produce poetry through knowledge or skill. When you exercise a skill ( technē ), you apply techniques, rules, or methods to perform a given activity, like charioteering, fishing, or commanding an army. In principle, one could explain these activities by identifying the techniques they involve, and a student or apprentice could learn these activities by applying and practicing those techniques. But poetry is not like that, in Socrates’ view. A poet can only imitate the application of rules or techniques, mimicking the surface appearance of skill. Voicing an idea that was familiar in Ancient Greek culture, Socrates suggests that poetry emerges instead through divine inspiration, whereby a human being is inspired —literally “filled with a spirit”, with a god or goddess, with a muse:

You know, none of the epic [or lyric] poets, if they’re good, are masters of their subject; they are inspired, possessed, and that is how they utter all those beautiful poems. … [They] are not in their right minds when they make those beautiful lyrics, but as soon as they sail into harmony and rhythm they are possessed by Bacchic frenzy. […] For a poet is an airy thing, winged and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his mind and his intellect is no longer in him. As long as a human being has his intellect in his possession he will always lack the power to make poetry or sing prophecy. […] You see, it’s not mastery [ technē ] that enables them to speak those verses, but a divine power. That’s why the god takes their intellect away from them when he uses them as his servants, as he does prophets and godly diviners, so that we who hear should know that they are not the ones who speak those verses that are of such high value, for their intellect is not in them: the god himself is the one who speaks, and he gives voice through them to us. In this more than anything, then, I think, the god is showing us, so that we should be in no doubt about it, that these beautiful poems are not human, not even from human beings, but are divine and from gods; that poets are nothing but representatives of the gods, possessed by whoever possesses them. ( Ion 534a-d)

Socrates repeats this view in the Phaedrus : “Some of the greatest blessings come by way of madness, indeed madness that is heaven-sent” (244a). He adds that while a poet may have some kind of skill, anyone who aspires to make poetry purely by skill, without the madness or the muse, will fail (245a).

It’s important to note that “madness”, for Plato, is a supernatural affair. From the vantage of contemporary behavioral science, we think of madness—or rather, mental illness—as a pathology arising from some combination of genetic and environmental factors, and those factors can be studied scientifically. So even if creativity is linked to mental illness—a highly controversial proposition—it could still be entirely within the scope of science. However, Plato’s talk of “madness” does not refer to any naturally occurring pathology, but rather to the result of divine intervention: the poet is taken over or “possessed” by the muse and that is precisely why he is “out of his mind”. Plato’s poet suffers divine madness.

According to this story, then, the person we call a poet isn’t really a creator of poetry, but is merely the vessel through which a divine being delivers poetry. If it is literally true that the source of poetry is supernatural, then poetic creativity could never be explained by science, which is limited to the investigation of natural causes. (For more on Plato, see Asmis 1992.)

This kind of supernaturalism has enjoyed a long afterlife in Western thought. In ancient Rome, the Latin term “ genius ” referred to a guiding spirit that was thought to accompany each person throughout their lives. The genius of an artist would occasionally deliver art through that person in the manner of Platonic inspiration.

Conceptions of the artist take a new turn when the idea of genius is transformed in the eighteenth century. As we saw above, Immanuel Kant defines genius as a natural capacity that a certain kind of artist possesses innately and which partly constitutes that artist’s identity. So rather than saying that a gifted artist “has a genius”, Kant says that such a person “is a genius”. What distinguishes the genius is fundamentally an imaginative capacity—an ability to engage in a “free play” of imagination to produce artworks of “exemplary originality”. These works are exemplary not only in the sense that they have artistic or aesthetic value, unlike “original nonsense”; they are also exemplary in the more radical sense of providing an exemplar—a new paradigm and precedent—for lesser artists to follow. A work of genius sets a new standard of artistic value, and, looking to that exemplar, lesser artists may then extract techniques or rules for their own craft. The genius therefore “gives the rule to art”. In creating such works, the genius does not follow any rules or methods. Instead the genius creates art through a “free play of imagination”—where the terms “free” and “play” characterize the nature of an activity unconstrained by any pre-established methods or rules:

[G]enius … is a talent for producing that for which no determinate rule can be given, not a predisposition of skill for that which can be learned in accordance with some rule …. (1790: §46 5:307–8; 2000 trans., 186)

Kant thought that genius, so conceived, is limited to the fine arts, poetry being chief among them. Meanwhile, in Kant’s view, there is no room for genius in science, for example, where good theories and hypotheses must emerge from the careful application of scientific method, and so he said that even Isaac Newton, “that great man of science”, was not a genius. We’ll soon consider why this view might seem to entail that creativity is inexplicable, but first it will be helpful to bring another figure, Arthur Schopenhauer, who was deeply influenced both by Kant and by Plato.

Like Kant, Schopenhauer thought of genius as a natural capacity that is limited to the fine arts. He also echoes Plato’s sentiments about madness, famously stating that “genius and madness have a side where they touch and even pass over into each other” ( The World as Will and Representation , 1859, WWV I: 190), and that “Genius lives only one storey above madness” ( Parerga and Paralipomena , SW 2:53, PP 2:49). In a state of madness, Schopenhauer’s genius is like Plato’s poet in experiencing a momentary loss of self, but what displaces the self is not any divine being but rather a pure Idea which seizes the author’s being and becomes the object of both his fascination and his artistic expression:

We lose ourselves entirely in this object, to use a pregnant expression; in other words, we forget our individuality, our will, and continue to exist only as pure subject, as clear mirror of the object, so that it is as though the object alone existed without anyone to perceive it, and thus we are no longer able to separate the perceiver from the perception, but the two have become one, since the entire consciousness is filled and occupied by a single image of perception. ( World WWV I: 178–179, §34).

With their focus on genius construed as a natural capacity, figures like Kant and Schopenhauer abandon the supernaturalism of the Platonic muse. Nevertheless, they retain the idea that creativity—specifically genius-level creativity in the fine arts—is not a matter of exercising a skill or applying given rules, methods, or techniques.

As we noted earlier, these figures did not and could not have explicitly denied that creativity could be explained by the sciences of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but they are commonly taken to represent such a denial (Kronfeldner 2018). Why?

Perhaps figures like Kant and Schopenhauer seem to make creativity, or at least creative genius, inexplicable insofar they suppose it to be innate and as they have no story to tell about how one came to acquire an innate capacity except to say that it was either an accident of chance (which is no explanation at all) or a gift from God (which again is not a scientific explanation). But while these figures seemed to think of artistic genius as being endowed entirely by nature with no contribution from nurture, modern genetic theory rejects that dichotomy. Instead of positing all-or-nothing natural abilities, behavioral scientists today think in terms of genetically inherited predispositions. In order for a genetic predisposition to develop into a trait with an observable phenotype, it needs to be triggered and shaped through a complex interaction between an organism’s genes and certain kinds of stimuli or environmental conditions. There are still open questions about exactly how, and how much, genes and environment feed into the development of any given trait, but it’s misguided to pose the binary nature-versus-nurture question as if the two were mutually exclusive (see Tabery 2014). Many researchers agree that some people have a stronger natural predisposition toward creativity than others, and that genius-level creativity partly stems from such a predisposition. Even so, the predisposition itself can be understood scientifically in terms of genetic heritability. (For a sampling of the relevant studies, see the essays collected in S.B. Kaufman 2013.)

Perhaps creativity seems inexplicable according to these accounts because it doesn’t follow rules or methods. In order to explain how to do something—how to build a boat or lead an army etc.—perhaps I need to be able to identify the rules or methods you should follow in order to practice and apply those skills. How-to explanations are instructions. But scientific explanations needn’t be instructions. A lot of good science explains how something happens—e.g., how heat melts ice or how a bat navigates its environment by echolocation—without explaining how to do it yourself.

Perhaps creativity seems inexplicable according to these accounts because creators themselves do not know how they create. But a scientific explanation needn’t be available through introspection. Most people cannot explain how their own digestive, circulatory, or perceptual systems work, but scientists who study those systems can.

Another line of thought is perhaps implicit in Kant but comes to the fore in Schopenhauer, who says that “the nature of genius consists precisely in the preeminent ability” to

consider things independently of the principle of sufficient reason , in contrast to the way of considering which proceeds in exact accordance with this principle, and is the way of science and experience. ( World WWV: I: 192, §36)

The principle of sufficient reason says that for every fact there is a cause which completely explains that fact. So the defining ability of genius is to see things in a way that transcends the causal order and defies all explanation.

A version of this view is defended more recently by Carl Hausman (1975 [1984], 1979, 1985) who frames it in terms of novelty that creativity involves. Hausman asserts that if a product is creative, it must be metaphysically novel (or in his terms, “genuinely novel”) in the sense that it cannot be predicted from, or explained by, prior events—not even in principle. Creativity is therefore incompatible with causal determination and causal explanation: “A causal view of explanation sets a framework for ways of denying that there is anything new under the sun” (Hausman 1984: ix). If something can be explained by prior causes, it is not metaphysically novel, and is therefore, in Hausman’s view, not truly creative.

Against Hausman’s skeptical charge, Maria Kronfeldner (2009) argues that creativity is compatible with causal determination. First, causal determinism does not preclude novelty or change. Determinism says the emergence of new kinds of things can at least in principle be predicted in advance. Importantly, though, when this prediction becomes true, then something new is added to the world. Of course, not all novelty instantiates creativity. The question is whether the kind of novelty involved in creativity must be metaphysical novelty, which is by definition incompatible with causal determination. This is doubtful. Notice that, by definition, metaphysical novelty defies natural laws. The production of something metaphysically novel would therefore require supernatural powers. Traditional Western religions conceive of God as performing the miracle of creation ex nihilo . But are we positing a miracle every time we describe a human artifact or achievement as creative? Surely not. As noted above, human creativity is manifest in things that are novel relative to the agent producing them or new to human history, but both of those kinds of novelty (psychological and historical) are perfectly compatible with causal determination. As Kronfeldner explains, creativity does not preclude causes in general; it only precludes certain kinds of causes. A creative product, she argues, must be original —which means that it cannot be produced through a process of copying something prior. And it must be spontaneous (not produced through a routine or mechanical procedure)—which means that it is to some extent independent of the agent’s intentional control and previously acquired knowledge. (For more on originality and spontaneity, recall §2.2 above). Intuitively, the causes of something creative cannot simply be a matter of copying or following a routine. But it may have causes nonetheless, and cognitive science can investigate those causes, at least in principle. Indeed, as we’ll see next, it is doing so in practice.

5. The Cognitive Science of Creativity

Although creativity has been relatively understudied by contemporary philosophers, as we noted in §1 , it has been receiving a great deal of attention from psychologists over the past few decades. In 1950, J. P. Guilford gave a presidential address at the American Psychological Association calling for research on the topic, and the field soon took off with waves of research investigating the traits and dispositions of creative personalities; the cognitive and neurological mechanisms at play in creative thought; the motivational determinants of creative achievement; the range of institutional, educational, and environmental factors that enhance or inhibit creativity; and more. Today, the blossoming of this field can be seen in the flurry of popular writing on its results; an official division of the American Psychological Association for the psychology of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts (Division 10); numerous academic conferences; dedicated peer-reviewed journals ( Psychology of Aesthetics , Creativity and the Arts ; Creativity Research Journal ; Journal of Creative Behavior ; International Journal of Creativity and Problem Solving ); special issues of journals ( Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences , Takeuchi & Jung 2019); literature surveys (Hennessey & Amabile 2010; Runco & Albert 2010; Runco 2017; Glaveanu 2014; Williams et al. 2016); textbooks (J.C. Kaufman 2009; Sawyer 2012; R. W. Weisberg 1986, 2006); and a comprehensive encyclopedia (Runco & Pritzker 2020). According to one overview, creativity has been studied by nearly all of the most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century, and “the field can only be described as explosive” (Albert & Runco 1999: 17). There is also a groundswell of new work on creativity in the fields of computer science, artificial intelligence (AI), and robotics.

The present section surveys empirical work in psychology along with some related work in neuroscience, while the next section ( §6 ) covers research in computing, AI, and robotics. Throughout, we’ll see that philosophers are actively in dialogue with these fields under the broad, interdisciplinary umbrella of cognitive science.

The vast body of empirical research of creativity can be seen as addressing a variety of issues, but the central question that concerns us here is the one we identified above as the challenge for explaining creativity: How are people creative? This question is analogous to a number of other questions in cognitive science: How do people perceive through sense modalities such as vision? How do they form concepts? How do they acquire a language? How do they make inferences? Just as psychologists investigate the psychological and neurological processes, systems, and mechanisms at work in these other mental operations, as well as the internal and external factors that either enhance or hinder these operations, they are doing the same for creativity. There is no pretension to achieving a complete explanation which would include each and every causal factor, and provide the basis for perfectly predicting creative outcomes in advance. But to the extent that we identify some of the relevant causal factors involved in creativity we thereby make progress in explaining creativity, just as we do with other features of the mind.

As we noted in §2 , the standard definition of creativity in psychology says that a product (idea or artefact) is creative to the extent that it is both new and valuable (“effective”, “useful” or “appropriate”), and, in turn, people and processes are creative to the extent that they produce new and valuable things. As we also noted, many psychologists do not actually employ this, or any, definition of creativity in conducting their research. In one sampling of studies of creativity published in peer-reviewed psychology journals, only 38% of them included an explicit definition of creativity (Plucker, Beghetto, & Dow 2004), as they rely in one way or another on the assumption that we know it when we see it. For example, many studies use the Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT), whereby experimental subjects produce things that are then rated for how creative they are by a panel of experts in the relevant field; so paintings are rated by professional painters, stories by published authors, etc. Many other research methodologies are used, as we’ll see below.

Empirical research on creativity departs in several ways from the traditional approaches that seemed to place creativity outside the scope of science. For starters, in stark contrast to Plato’s supernaturalism, empirical psychologists take creativity to be a completely natural phenomenon. Creative people may of course be “inspired” in the sense of feeling energized or filled with ideas, but rather than being literally “breathed into” by some god or muse, their thoughts and behaviors are presumed to have causes that are perfectly natural. While it is difficult in practice to identify these causes, they are not in principle beyond the reach of science.

Further, the range of phenomena that contemporary researchers countenance within the ambit of creativity is far broader and more diverse than the traditional focus on poetry and the fine arts, as creativity can be manifest in any kind of art or craft, as well as in the sciences, technology, entrepreneurship, cooking, humor, or indeed in any domain where people come up with ideas or things that are novel and valuable in some way or another. Departing from Kant, genius, the highest echelon of creativity, may be acknowledged in virtually any of these domains, not just in the fine arts. And while a few researchers (e.g., Simonton 1984, 1994, 1997, 2009; Root-Bernstein & Root-Bernstein 1999) venture to examine genius (so-called “Big-C” creativity), most of them focus instead on relatively ordinary creative feats (“little-c” creativity) including the kinds of story-making, drawing, and problem-solving that can be elicited on command from regular people in experimental settings. Some researchers propose that in order to understand how the mind generates new ideas, we should begin with even more rudimentary phenomena. For example, philosopher Jesse Prinz and psychologist Lawrence Barsalou focus on how we form new concepts to categorize the things we perceive, a process which they claim is creative, albeit in a “mundane” rather than “exceptional” way (Prinz & Barsalou 2002; Barsalou & Prinz 1997; cf. Child 2018).

Of course, many feats of human creativity, and the ones that are most interesting, go far beyond the basic formation of concepts. A major step toward explaining those feats is to recognize that what we call “the creative process”, as if it were a single, homogenous phenomenon, is in fact an assembly of multiple stages or operations. The simplest recognition of this fact is the Geneplore model which distinguishes just two stages: generating ideas and exploring ideas (Finke 1996; Smith, Ward, & Finke 1995). This distinction may be seen as echoing one made by philosophers of science in the early twentieth century, between the context of discovery and the context of justification (Popper 1934). Other theorists posit up to eight stages of creativity (for a summary of proposals, see Sawyer 2012: 89). But the most influential stage-theory traces back to Henri Poincaré’s lecture, “Mathematical Creation” (1908 [1913: 383–394]), in which he identifies four phases in his own innovative work as a mathematician:

• conscious hard work or preparation ,
• unconscious incubation ,
• illumination , and
• verification .

In his book, The Art of Thought (1926), the psychologist Graham Wallas endorses Poincaré’s four stages with corroborating evidence from the personal reports of other eminent scientists like Hermann von Helmholtz. Wallas’s scheme, as a development of Poincaré’s, is still the one that is most widely cited, and we employ a version of it here with some slightly different terminology and with two more substantive alterations: instead of “incubation”, we identify the second operation more generally as the “generation” of ideas, which may include unconscious incubation but may also occur in conscious, deliberate thought; and we add “externalization” for a total of five operations:

• Preparation —You invest a great deal of effort learning and practicing in order to acquire the knowledge, skills, and expertise required for work in a given domain.
• Generation —You produce new ideas, whether through conscious reflection or unconscious incubation.
• Insight —You consciously experience the emergence of a new idea, which would strike you with a feeling of surprise: “Aha!”, “Eureka!”
• Evaluation – You assess the idea to determine whether it should be discarded, retained, revised, or amended.
• Externalization —You express your idea in a concrete, observable form.

Artists provide compelling examples (though not the only ones) of each of these five operations. Such examples can be especially illustrative since they come straight from the artists’ mouths, as they reflect upon, and share, their creative process. The twentieth century painter Jacob Lawrence was known for painting in the style of visual narratives. Lawrence developed a system, much like a filmmaker’s storyboard, for the preparation of these paintings. He would lay as many as 60 wood panels on the studio floor, each with individual scenes and sometimes with captions. From these storyboards, Lawrence would generate and evaluate ideas and insights for a visual narrative, culminating in the paintings such as those in his Migration Series (see Whitney Museum, 2002, in Other Internet Resources ). Toni Morrison, the Nobel prize winning novelist, remarks on the labors and sustained effort required at the preparation, generation, evaluation, and externalization stages of a creative writing process. Commenting on her novel Jazz , she says,

I thought of myself as like the jazz musician—someone who practices and practices and practices in order to be able to invent and to make his art look effortless and graceful. I was always conscious of the constructed aspect of the writing process, and that art appears natural and elegant only as a result of constant practice and awareness of its formal structures.

She further notes that insight does not always come in a flash,

[I]t’s a sustained thing I have to play with. I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don’t have any answers to. (T. Morrison 1993)

Writer Ishmael Reed claims that insight can come unexpectedly and in various contexts:

One can find inspiration from many sources. The idea of Japanese by Spring originated in a news item that claimed the endowment to a major university was traced to Japanese mob, the Yakuza. Flight to Canada began as a poem. The Terrible series began when I heard someone at party mention that there was a black figure, Black Peter, in the Dutch Christmas, and by coincidence I was invited to the Netherlands shortly afterwards, where I witnessed the arrival of Saint Nicholas and Peter on a barge that floated into Amsterdam with crowds looking on. I took photos of the ceremony …. (Howell 2020: 91)

And with signature profundity, James Baldwin suggested that all elements of the creative artistic process, from preparation to externalization, require a basic enabling condition: being (and willing to be) alone (Baldwin 1962).

As Wallas recognized (1926: 81), and as the above examples suggest, the “stages” of the creative process are not necessarily discrete steps that follow one another in a tidy sequence. Creative work is messy: over time you have numerous ideas, keeping some and abandoning others in multiple rounds of trial-and-error; you incubate new ideas for one problem while you’re busy externalizing your ideas for another; and your moments of insight, evaluation, and externalization trigger further generative processes that send you cycling through these operations many times over. It’s still important to distinguish these operations, however, because, as researchers are confirming, they are enabled and influenced by different causal factors.

Among the additional stages that researchers have posited, one of the most widely discussed is known as problem-finding. Psychologists often conceptualize creative thought in terms of problem-solving: the ideas generated within the creative process are seen as candidate solutions to a given problem—where “problems” are broadly construed to include any creative aim, like that of producing a particular kind of artwork or proving a particular theorem, etc. (Flavell & Draguns 1957: 201; Newell, Shaw, & Simon 1962). But following some early work by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (1965), many researchers came to appreciate that a lot of creative work is done not just in solving problems but in finding the right problem to begin with (Abdulla et al. 2020; Csikszentmihalyi & Getzels 1970; Getzels 1965; Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi 1975). While we agree that problem-finding often plays a key role in creativity, we have not assigned it to a separate stage, for the following reasons. Consider that you might settle on a problem to work on in either of two ways. On one hand, you might choose a problem to work on from a pre-existing menu of options. In that case, your choice would fall under the evaluation phase; it’s just that the idea you select is a problem that calls for the pursuit of further ideas. If, on the other hand, you develop a new problem, you would thereby be engaging in the generation of a new idea—the new problem—which may emerge in a moment of insight . Einstein and his colleague celebrated the novelty in such problem-finding:

The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science. (Einstein & Infeld 1938: 92)

Either way—whether you “find” a problem by picking a pre-existing one or by coming up with a new one yourself—problem-finding, though important, does not need to be seen as an additional operation beyond the five listed above; it’s just a special case of generation, insight, or evaluation.

The next five sub-sections will respectively examine the five operations of creative work. Notice that three of them—preparation, evaluation, and externalization—are uncontroversially ordinary activities that involve no apparent mystery; it’s a challenge to explain them but no one is tempted to regard them as inexplicable or as violating the laws of nature. As we saw in §4 , traditional skepticism about the possibility of explaining creativity is really focused on the two remaining phenomena: the generation of new ideas ( §5.2 ) and the experience of insight whereby an idea seems to come out of the blue, as if from a god ( §5.3 ).

It’s myth that outsiders are more creative. To put yourself in a position to create anything of value, you have to spend a great deal of time and effort acquiring the relevant knowledge, skills, and expertise. In what has come to be called “the ten-year rule”, Howard Gardner (1993) found that, on average, people spend about 10 years learning and being immersed in a domain before they make any significant creative contribution to it.

Though a certain amount of rote learning is required, gaining mastery in a field is not simply a matter of passively absorbing information. Much of it involves what Anders Ericsson calls deliberate practice, where you focus on tasks which are a little beyond your current abilities, but which you eventually conquer through feedback and repetition. Across a variety of domains—including physics, medicine, programming, dance, and music—Ericsson found that, on average, world-class performance becomes possible for people only after 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in their chosen activity. This finding also converges on the ten-year rule, because if you engage in deliberate practice four hours a day, five days a week, that would add up to 10,000 hours in ten years (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer 1993; Ericsson et al. 2006).

However, there seems to be a point at which too much formal training can dampen creativity. Simonton (1984: 70–73) has reported that the relationship between creativity and education level is an inverted-U, as too much schooling can reinforce familiar, pre-established styles of thought. Even so, the point remains that, before you run into diminishing returns, years of preparatory learning and practice are required for exceptional creativity.

5.2 Generation

In this section we discuss four kinds of mental capacities or processes that researchers have posited for generating new ideas.

Psychologist Donald T. Campbell (1960, 1965) proposed that creative thought proceeds through “blind variation and selective retention (BVSR)”. The “variations” he refers to are the various ideas that might occur to a creator, and the process of generating them is “blind” to the extent that it is not guided or directed by prior knowledge of how valuable or useful they will be: “Real gains must have been the products of explorations going beyond the limits of foresight or prescience , and in this sense blind” (Campbell 1960: 92, emphasis added). Once ideas have been generated, however, there is a subsequent stage where the creator selectively retains some of those ideas while discarding others, and Campbell says this stage is “sighted” rather than blind since it is guided by the creator’s judgments as to which ideas are valuable. While there is little debate that selective retention is sighted in this sense, there has been more controversy over whether the initial production of ideas is, by contrast, blind.

In his prolific body of work, Dean Keith Simonton has extended and refined Campbell’s proposal. His work nicely illustrates the interdisciplinary nature of creativity research as he, like Campbell, is a psychologist who engages with philosophers, some of whom are broadly sympathetic to the BVSR theory (Briskman, 2009; Nickles, 2003), while others are skeptical (Kronfeldner 2010, 2011, 2018). In earlier writings Simonton suggested, in a way Campbell did not, that BVSR is to be understood on the model of Darwinian evolution (Simonton 1999a, 1999b). But Simonton (forthcoming: 2–3) has come to rescind the Darwinian framing of BVSR, conceding that it is misleading. Reprising Campbell’s core idea, he says that a process of generating an idea is blind to the extent that it is not guided by “the creator’s prior knowledge of the variation’s utility” (Simonton forthcoming: 5; cf. Simonton 2011, 2012a, 2012b, 2018). He stresses that blindness is not all-or-nothing; it comes in degrees. An example of a highly sighted process is that of using the quadratic formula to find the roots of a quadratic equation: you know in advance that if you apply the formula correctly, it will yield the correct answer. Examples of relatively blind processes include remote association and mind wandering.

Despite the foregoing criticism of BVSR, recent neuroscientific studies suggest a network of brain activity that may serve the blind variation role. Brain activity doesn’t cease when one is not focusing on a task, when one is at rest, daydreaming, and so on. Following this insight, researchers have used neuroimaging methods to identify what is now called the default mode network (DMN). The precise anatomy of this network is still a matter of investigation, but it is supposed to be less active when one is focused on an external task (say a problem in the real world or in the lab) and more active when one is not so focused (Raichle et al. 2001; Buckner & DiNicola 2019). Notice then, that while this network is not creativity-specific—it is supposed to be active during memory recall, imagining future events, daydreaming, and so on—it does seem especially well-suited for creativity, and particularly for the random idea generation hypothesized by the BVSR (Jung et al. 2013). Creativity researchers in these fields often refer to this more “free” production of ideas as “divergent thinking”, and some argue on the basis of neuroimaging studies that creative thought requires cooperation between this mode of thought as well as that under “executive control”. As one team puts the point,

In general, we contend that the default network influences the generation of candidate ideas, but that the control network can constrain and direct this process to meet task-specific goals via top-down monitoring and executive control.. (Beaty, Benedek, et al. 2016; see also Mayseless, Eran, & Shamay-Tsoory 2015; Beaty, Seli, & Schacter 2019; Chrysikou 2019)

Notice how well this comports with both the Geneplore and the BVSR frameworks, perhaps identifying a way to keep some of the insights of both without commitment to a special creativity mechanism after all.

At least since Kant, theorists have identified an important link between creativity and imagination; indeed, the two are sometimes unfortunately conflated. Construed broadly, imagination can take various forms: sensory imagery, propositional imagination, supposition, free association. Berys Gaut (2003, 2009, 2010) and Stokes (2014, 2016) have both recently argued that, although imagination and creativity are distinct, imagination is especially well-suited to creative thought because of its characteristic flexibility. They both agree that imagination is decoupled from action (Gaut 2003) and “non-truthbound” (Stokes 2014) in the sense that, unlike belief, imagination is not limited by the proper function of accurately representing (some part of) the world. This freedom or playfulness of imagination is crucial to generating new ideas, since it allows one to safely “try out” hypotheses, conceptual combinations, strategies for solutions, and so on, without epistemic or behavioral commitment.

A series of studies illustrates both the need for non-truthbound capacities in creative thought, as well as the difficulty of employing them. When people—children and adults alike—are asked to imagine and draw non-existent houses, people, or animals, they depict things that are strikingly similar to their familiar counterparts in the real world: imagined people, for example, were generally drawn with some version of a head, limbs, eyes, and so forth. (Karmiloff-Smith 1990, 1992: 155–61; Cacciari et. al 1997; Ward 1994, 1995). This suggests that we are highly constrained in our creativity by the concepts we already have. Concepts of existing things are truth-bound: your concept of an animal, for example, has the proper function of accurately representing the range of things that are in fact animals. When you try to envision a new, fictional kind of animal, you begin with a mental image that exemplifies your existing concept of animal, which is why you are constrained by that concept. You then have to manipulate your initial image, varying its features in ways that abandon the aim of accuracy, using a capacity that isn’t truthbound. Generalizing this point yields the cognitive manipulation thesis , according to which creative thought requires cognitive manipulation, which involves thinking in ways that are not bound to the truth (Stokes 2014: 167). Plausibly, imagination is the mental capacity which is best suited to serve in this cognitive manipulation role. In the studies just cited, subjects must use their imagination to manipulate their existing concepts so as to form new ideas.

Recent empirical research on visual imagery seems to corroborate this claim. Various studies have identified positive correlations between creative problem solving and visual image generation, image transformation, and vividness of imagery (Finke 1990, 1996; Zemore 1995; R. Morrison & Wallace 2001; Pérez-Fabello and Campos 2007). A more recent study highlights the importance of image transformation ability—the ability to mentally manipulate a given image—and the ability to achieve high degrees of visual creativity. Further, the results of this study suggest that although vividness negatively correlates with the practicality of images created, vividness positively correlates with novel idea generation (Palmiero et al. 2015). The novelty involved is minimal, but again it appears that imagination, here in the form of imagery, well serves the role of cognitive manipulation.

Stokes observes further that we can voluntarily control imaginative states (in contrast with other non-truthbound states, like desires and wishes). And because imagination connects in important ways with inferential systems, as well as affective systems, the thoughts it produces can often be integrated with knowledge and skills to formulate an innovative strategy or solution to a problem. Finally, this role for imagination in creativity is not exclusive to the rich creativity of artists and scientists, but indeed seems to characterize the minimally creative behavior that we all enjoy. This claim is partly motivated by the empirical research just discussed. Here, as in the more radical cases, instances of novel achievement or learning by subjects requires more than rote memorization; it requires cognitive manipulation of the information in the relevant conceptual space (e.g., combining concepts about houses and persons). This kind of cognitive activity is best done by using the imagination.

Peter Carruthers has argued that imagination is important to creativity on evolutionary grounds (2002, 2006; see also Picciuto & Carruthers 2014). Like the above analyses, he focuses on the playfulness of imagination. Pretend play typically develops early in childhood in humans. And imagination in adults provides the right mechanisms for generating and exploring ideas (just as required by the Geneplore model). Carruthers argues that imagination evolves under adaptive advantage as a kind of practice for adult creativity—and may have been accordingly selected for, aligning with the putative creativity explosion of 40,000 years ago (Mithen 1996, 1998; Harris 2000). This, he argues, is the most parsimonious explanation of both the emergence and the ubiquity of creativity in the human species. See B. Gaut (2009) for a critique of Carruthers’ analysis.

While we may generate ideas consciously in imagination, we may also do so during a period of unconscious incubation, when we are focused on something else. This point is illustrated by any number of famous stories, though some are probably embellished after years of retelling. Isaac Newton witnessed an apple fall from a tree (on some accounts, falling upon Newton’s head) and thereby found the insight for his laws of gravity. August Kekulé is reported to have discovered the structure of the benzene molecule while daydreaming of a serpent circling upon and seizing its own tail. Henri Poincaré alleged that, while boarding a bus, he enjoyed a needed flash of insight that led to his discovery of non-Euclidian geometry. Richard Feynman, the Nobel prize winning physicist, claimed to find inspiration while sipping soda and doodling at adult clubs. And Einstein reported:

I was sitting in a chair in the patent office at Bern when all of a sudden a thought occurred to me. “If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight”. I was startled. This simple thought made a deep impression on me. It impelled me toward a theory of gravitation. (Einstein, “Kyoto Lecture”, translated and quoted in Pais 1982: 179)

In each case, someone is suddenly struck with a flash of insight about one thing while engaged with something else entirely. The empirically-minded theorist rejects the notion that such ideas arise ex nihilo or through divine possession. So how are they explained in terms of natural mental phenomena?

Arthur Koestler, partly inspired by the work of Henri Poincaré (1908 [1913]), hypothesized that during creative thought processing, ideas are combined in novel ways, and this combination is performed largely unconsciously , by what Poincaré called the subliminal self (Koestler 1964: 164–5). For Poincaré there are only two ways we might think of the unconscious. One, we might think of the unconscious in Freudian terms, as a self capable of careful and fine discernment and, importantly, distinctions and combinations that the conscious self fails to make. Alternatively (and this is the option favored by both Poincaré and Koestler), we can think of the unconscious as a sub-personal automaton that mechanically runs through various combinations of ideas. Importantly, this unconscious process (or, if one likes, automaton) generates random conceptual associations and ideas. And these can then be further considered, examined, explored, and revised.

In the context of creativity in particular, there is precedent, or at least overlap, in Colin Martindale’s cortical arousal theory. This theory centers around the nature of focuses of attention (Martindale 1977, 1981, 1995, 1999; Martindale & Armstrong 1974; Martindale & Hines 1975). Martindale proposes a multi-stage model of problem solving, which if the right mechanism is possessed, leads to creative thought. In the initial stages, information is gathered, various approaches are taken to the problem, and there is a high level of cortical arousal with a narrow focus of attention. As information increases and the problem remains unsolved, two kinds of responses may occur. The first kind of response is to keep attempting the same solutions to the problem such that the arousal and attention focus stay high and narrow, respectively. Alternatively, some persons experience a decrease in cortical arousal coupled with a wider range of attention focus. Information then enters what Martindale calls primary processing: a kind of subconscious cognition not under the complete control of the agent. It is this kind of processing, and the arousal mechanisms that enable it, that distinguish creative insight or achievement from non-creative ones. The first kind of response typically results in frustration and failure (fixation), while the second often results in creative insight.

Some early studies on these phenomena centered around a familiar observation. Consider the tip-of the-tongue phenomenon, when you know that you know some bit of information (an actor’s name or the title of a song) but, try as you may, you just can’t recall it. It often helps to give up for a moment and allow the memory to surface without effort. Researchers found that the same approach—forgetting about a problem—works well to overcome fixation on ineffective ideas so as to allow the actual solution to pop up. Smith and Blankenship primed two groups of subjects with inappropriate or misleading solutions to problems. They left one group to continue struggling with the same problem, while they distracted the second group with a distinct but cognitively demanding task. The second group thereby overcame fixation and outperformed the first group when returning attention to the original target problem (Smith & Blankenship 1989, 1991; see also Smith, Ward, & Finke 1995).

These behavioral methods can be combined with contemporary understanding of neural plasticity and the effects of cognitive effort and attention. Neuroscientists have long recognized that the human brain is plastic —stable in genetic material but constantly undergoing functional change and development in neural networking in response to external stimuli, with the work of Donald Hebb in the middle of the twentieth century being one important early precedent. As Hebb put it, neural cells that “fire together, wire together”. Cell assemblies thus form as a result of the synchrony and proximity of the firing of individual cells.

[A]ny two cells or systems of cells that are repeatedly active at the same time will tend to become “associated”, so that activity in one facilitates activity in the other. (Hebb 1949 [2002: 70])

And continued attention to a problem, what some have called cerebral effort , causes changes in the networking of the brain’s cortex (Donald 2001: 175–8). Importantly, these changes can continue to take place, to “reverberate” even after one has removed attention from that problem. This motivates a simple (and somewhat unsurprising) hypothesis: attending to and performing cognitive tasks affects neural networking (Posner et al. 1997; Posner & Raichle 1994; see also Kami et al. 1995), and those changes can involve strengthening of synaptic connectivity (which correlate with conceptual connections and associations). These changes, again, can occur both when one is attending to a task and after one has diverted attention elsewhere. And, finally, the latter goes some way to explain a moment of insight after incubation (the so-called incubation effect): when one returns attention to the target problem, new or newly strengthened neural connectivity (as a result of previous cognitive effort) can give rise to a new idea. And because that neural process is not in any sense done by you, the emergence of the new idea can feel like a burst of insight (see Stokes 2007; Thagard & Stewart 2011; Ritter & Dijksterhuis 2014; and Heilman 2016).

There are also various recent studies on closely related topics: on mindwandering and spontaneous thought (Christoff et al. 2016; Irving & Thompson 2018; Murray et al. forthcoming), on so-called “divergent thinking” (Mekern et al. 2019), and more on the neural basis of insight (Jung-Beeman et al. 2004; Bowden et al. 2005; Limb & Braun 2008; Dietrich & Kanso 2010; Kounios & Beeman 2014).

It should be intuitive that creativity often involves solving problems and doing so in interesting or surprising ways. In exceptional cases, the individual identifies a problem solution that perhaps no one (including the creator) anticipated. But there are countless examples of more mundane instances of problem solving, where the solution may be surprising (or especially interesting) to only a few individuals, perhaps even only to the problem solver. One broad, standard experimental method used by researchers thus focuses on insight in problem solving. Some problems (thankfully!) can be solved by straightforward appeal to memory, or by applying some technique or method of calculation in a mechanical way. Solving the problem may still take time and effort, but the solution will come so long as one executes the appropriate strategy or applies the relevant knowledge from memory. An insight problem, by contrast, typically requires something new on the part of the individual, and one must often “change views” of the structure of the very problem. Predictably, there are a variety of definitions or characterizations of “insight” in the literature. Here are two recent, representative examples. Bowden et al. suggest that insight occurs

when a solver breaks free of unwarranted assumptions, or forms novel, task-related connections between existing concepts or skills. (Bowden et al. 2005: 322)

More recently, Kounios and Beeman write,

we define insight as any sudden comprehension, realization, or problem solution that involves a reorganization of the elements of a person’s mental representation of a stimulus, situation, or event to yield a nonobvious or nondominant interpretation. (2014: 74)

There are at least two, separable components of insight thus understood. First, an insight problem requires non-mechanical or non-algorithmic solution, and this in turn requires some kind of conceptual reorganization. A hackneyed phrase may come to mind here: one has to “think outside the box”.

The second element of insight as understood here is subjective or phenomenological. An insightful problem solution is often described as occurring suddenly and with little or no apparent effort. It is an aha moment, even if less dramatic than the traditionally romanticized Eureka moment. One way researchers have tested for this subjective feature is to ask subjects to report nearness or “warmth” relative to solving a problem. They find that for insight problems, by contrast to non-insight problems, subjects report that as they near solution they experience abrupt changes in the sense of warmth for solving the problem (Metcalfe & Wiebe 1987; see also Dominowski 1995; Laukkonen & Tangen 2018). More recently, researchers have begun to employ neuroimaging techniques to study insight and insightful problem solving (Luo & Niki 2003; Mai et al. 2004).

First, researchers have developed methods for using subjective report, where subjects rate whether they felt that they used insight in solving a designated problem (Bowden et al. 2005). And second, and coupled with those report methods, researchers have developed simple problems that can be solved with insight. One such example is the “Compound remote associates problem” (CRA). Here is an example of a CRA problem:

Each of the three words in (a) and (b) below can form a compound word or two-word phrase with the solution word. The solution word can come before or after any of the problem words. french, car, shoe boot, summer, ground [ 1 ] (Bowden et al. 2005: 324)

Because of their simplicity, these problems can be solved unambiguously and quickly, and with this speed comes better potential for neuroimaging study. In instances where subjects report insight solutions to these kinds of problems,

EEG shows a burst of high-frequency (gamma-band) EEG activity over the right temporal lobe, and fMRI shows a corresponding change in blood flow in the medial aspect of the right anterior superior temporal gyrus (Jung-Beeman et al. 2004). (Kounios & Beeman 2014: 78)

The question for neuroscientists is whether this convergence of evidence is sufficient to establish neural correlates of insight.

A moment of “insight” can be misleading, as what initially strikes you as a promising idea may ultimately turn out to be a dead end. You may have countless ideas in the course of undertaking a complex creative project, while only a few of them will make the final cut. A crucial part of your creative work therefore consists in evaluating your ideas. For any idea that occurs to you, you might have to ask: Will this work? Is it new? How does it fit in with other parts of your project? Do you have the resources and abilities to bring it to fruition? Is it worth the time and effort?

Much of the research on this phase of the creative process is concerned to identify and categorize the range of factors that people take into consider as they evaluate their ideas (Blair & Mumford 2007; Dailey & Mumford, 2006). Unsurprisingly, those factors vary from one domain to another. New culinary dishes are judged by factors like aroma, taste, texture, color, presentation (Horng & Lin 2009), whereas improved musical performances are judged according to their complexity, originality, and technical virtuosity (Eisenberg & Thompson 2003), and so on. Your understanding of the relevant factors is part of your internalized model of the domain (Bink & Marsh, 2000; Csikszentmihalyi & Sawyer 1995). And since you acquired and refined that model through years of preparation, your capacity for evaluation is largely a consequence of your efforts from that initial stage.

Somewhat more surprisingly, there is some evidence that people who are good at evaluating ideas are also good at generating them (Runco 1991; Runco & Dow 2004; Runco & Chand 1994; Runco & Vega 1990).

Other studies support what Sawyer calls Sawyer (2012: 131) calls the productivity theory, which says that the best way to get good ideas is to have lots of ideas and just throw away the bad ones. In historiometric studies, Simonton found that creators who yielded the greatest number of works over their lifetimes were mostly likely to produce works that were significant and stood the test of time. Even more striking, he discovered that, from year to year, the periods when creators were most productive were also the ones in which they were most likely to do exceptional work (Simonton 1988a, 1988b). Linus Pauling, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954 as well as the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962, summed up the productivity theory in a famous remark:

If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away. (quoted by Crick 1995 [time 34:57])

The final operation of the creative process—externalizing ideas—may involve any number of disparate activities, which Keith Sawyer sums up as follows:

Creativity research has tended to focus on the early stages of the eight-stage creative process—particularly on the idea-generating stage. But a lot has to happen to make any idea a reality. Successful creators are skilled at executing their ideas, predicting how others might react to them and being prepared to respond, identifying the necessary resources to make them successful, forming plans for implementing the ideas, and improvising to adjust their plans as new information arrives. These activities are important in all creativity, but are likely to be even more important in practical domains such as technological invention and entrepreneurship (Mumford, 2003; Policastro & Gardner, 1999). (Sawyer 2012: 133–4)

It may be tempting to assume that the real creative work is finished once a new idea emerges in the moment of insight, and that externalization is just the uncreative, mechanical chore of making the idea public. But a closer look at the phenomenon reveals that externalization is often integral to creativity itself.

Vera John-Steiner (1985) interviewed, and examined the notebooks of, over 70 exceptional creators (ranging from author Anaïs Nin to composer Aaron Copland), and consulted the notebook of another 50 eminent historical creators such as Leo Tolstoy and Marie Curie. A recurring theme throughout was that at the beginning of each creative endeavor and continually throughout its development, creators manipulate and build upon their impressions, inklings, and tentative hunches using sketches, outlines, and other external representations.

Perkins (1981) corroborated this finding by analyzing the 61 sketches Picasso made en route to painting his famous work, Guernica , as well as Beethoven’s musical drafts and Darwin’s notebooks. In each case, the artist progressed by engaging with external representations.

Other studies found that people discovered and solved more problem when they used sketches during a task (Verstijnen 1997), and that people come up with better ideas for improving inventions when they work with visual diagrams (Mayer 1989).

One reason externalization is so vital to substantial creative work is because of our limited capacity to consciously hold and manipulate information in our minds. It helps to offload ideas and store them in the form of physical symbols and expressions in order to free up space for the mind to examine those ideas at arm’s length while entertaining new ones. Thus research shows that internal strategies like mental visualization can help with relatively simple tasks, but for more complex projects externalization is key (Finke et al. 1992: 60).

We close our survey of the cognitive science of creativity with a brief discussion of some general worries about current work, and some prescriptions for future research.

Some have worried about the validity of the psychometric measures employed in neuroimaging studies. One such concern regards the confidence that we should have that the tests employed are really tracking creative behavior. This is of course a general problem, partly symptomatic of the challenges that come with defining creativity (like other phenomena) and with the special challenges that attach to features such as insight and incubation. But there are particular challenges that come with using neuroimaging technologies such as fMRI scanning to attempt to study naturally occurring phenomena. Use of this technology is almost invariably ecologically invalid—one cannot run an fMRI in the artist’s studio. And because of the cost and sensitivity of these imaging systems, the correlative behavioral tests are often significantly abbreviated. This may impose constraints on space for occurrence of the target phenomena—novel thinking and insight—during the imaging session. As one researcher worries,

Too often single tests are used—or even single items! This is contrary of psychometric theory in general (where longer tests allow errors to cancel themselves out and are thus more reliable) and true of the research on creativity assessment in particular, where differences among items and even tests are common (Richards, 1976; Runco, Mohamad, & Paek, 2016 [sic should be Runco, Abdulla et al. 2016). Results from any one test will not generalize to other tests. Results from a single item of course have even less generalizability. (Runco 2017: 309–310; see also Abraham 2013)

Another empirical researcher criticizes what he sees as “the wild goose chase” in the neuroscience of creativity. Arne Dietrich (2019) recapitulates the above worries about validity of psychometric measures and their abbreviated and piecemeal application. He further worries about the now dominant emphasis on divergent thinking, and the default mode network (as well as the now mostly abandoned emphasis on notions such as madness, the right brain, and REM sleep). Dietrich’s concern in each case is that the research emphasis is unhelpfully myopic, and that while the imaging methods are sound and state of the art, the characterization of creativity is not. He decries the temptation to identify what may be a feature of creativity with the whole of the phenomenon. Divergent thinking, he suggests, is likely a cluster of various mental phenomena rather than a singular one, and

there is no effort underway to dissect divergent thinking and link it to the kinds of cognitive processes we use to operationalize all other psychological phenomena, such as working memory, cognitive control, semantic memory, perceptual processes, or executive attention. (2019: 37)

Notice, then, that the “wild goose” for Dietrich is to hastily conclude and then center studies around a singular, special creativity mechanism.

Dietrich also offers various prescriptions for remedy. To combat myopia, he suggests (as some have in other disciplines, e.g., Boden 2004) a plurality of types of creativity (and/or features of creativity). He cautions,

Since different types of creativity contain opposing brain mechanisms—focused versus defocused attention, for instance—any all-encompassing claim about creativity in the brain will almost certainly qualify as phrenology. (2019: 39)

He pairs this with a prescription for a more interdisciplinary approach to the topic. Others in the field have made the same prescription, advocating a “systems” approach sensitive both to the multi-faceted nature of creativity and the value of theorizing at multiple levels of explanation (Hennessy & Amabile 2010).

These directives for future research seem hard to resist. At the very least, it would seem advantageous to ensure that the full range of empirical method across the behavioral and brain sciences is communicated across the relevant sub-disciplines. This would ideally lead to better collaboration amongst such researchers. What’s interesting is that a cousin to this prescription is not well heeded by the same researchers advancing it here. However little crossover there is between, say, behavioral psychologists and neuroscientists in studies of creativity, there is comparatively even less crossover (almost none) between the psychological sciences and computational approaches to creativity. The next section thus begins by highlighting this “gap”, and identifying some of the potentially fruitful areas for interdisciplinary work on that front. It then continues with a discussion, generally, of research on creativity in the fields of computing science, artificial intelligence, and robotics.

Just as we find in psychology and neuroscience, there is a rich research literature on creativity in artificial intelligence and computer science, with devoted journals, special issues, and conferences ( The Journal of Artificial Creativity , The Journal of Creative Music Systems , Digital Creativity , Minds and Machines special issue on Computational Creativity [Gervás et al. 2010], The International Conference on Computational Creativity ). The question we focus on here is whether a computer could be creative . As background, it is worth considering how theorists approached the analogous question as to whether a computer could think .

Although theorists of various kinds have asked whether machines can think since at least the early modern period, the most important conceptual innovations on the topic came from Alan Turing, centering around his 1950 paper “Computing machinery and intelligence”. Here Turing provided a number of groundbreaking insights. Perhaps most familiar is Turing’s “imitation game”, now commonly known as “the Turing Test”. In brief, the test involved an unknowing interrogator who could ask an open-ended series of questions of both a human and a computer. If the interrogator could not distinguish computer from human, Turing postulated that this would suffice to illustrate genuine intelligence. There is no shortage of controversy regarding the aptness of the test for intelligence, and arguably no computer has yet passed it. (For more thorough discussion of Turing and the Turing test see entries on Alan Turing , Turing machines , and the Turing test ).

Successful performance in Turing’s game would require remarkable behavioral flexibility. And it is highly operational: specify a threshold for imitation, and then simply allow the interrogator to ask questions, then assess performance. If the behavior is sufficiently flexible to fool the interrogator, Turing claimed, the behavior was intelligent and, therefore, the computer intelligent.

With this background in mind, what are some of the cases in AI research lauded as success cases, and how do they align with some of Turing’s criteria?

Many of the familiar success cases are highly specialized. Deep Blue defeated chess master Garry Kasparov (Kasparov & Greengard 2017); some language processing systems managed to navigate social contexts such as ordering from a menu at a restaurant (Schank & Abelson 1977); AlphaGo more recently defeated the world champion Go player. This specialization is both a virtue and a limitation. On the one hand, achievement in such a specialized domain implies an exceptional amount of detailed memory and skill. On the other hand, this knowledge and skill does not generalize. Neither Deep Blue nor Alpha Go could successfully order from a menu, along with countless other basic human tasks. Put in terms of Turing’s imitation game, these systems would fail miserably to fool a human, or even remotely imitate one (except for their performance in a very narrow domain). What about systems such as IBM’s Watson , which famously won (against humans) on the television game show Jeopardy! This performance is more general, since topics on the show vary widely, and seemed to require both language comprehension and some minimal reasoning skills (see entry on artificial intelligence for extended discussion). Even so, Watson’s capabilities are still quite limited: it cannot make fluid conversation “in real time” and is largely insensitive to temporal and other factors that come with context.

There are many, many more examples of computational systems that display sophisticated behavior, from the highly specialized to the more general. On the language processing front, very recent AI systems such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s LaMDA significantly outperform the systems described above. To be clear, these are remarkable achievements that display substantial complexity and, it appears in some cases, significant flexibility—features Turing highlighted in characteristically human behaviors. But this also underscores a distinction, often invoked by critics of artificial intelligence research. There is a difference between a computer’s displaying or merely imitating an intelligent behavior, and a computer’s instantiating intelligence through such behavior. And the critic will say, even if a computer behaves as if it is intelligent, this is just modeling or simulating intelligence. The greater ambition, though, is “genuine artificial intelligence”, a system that actually thinks. John Searle refers to this as the distinction between “weak AI” and “strong AI”, respectively.

• Weak AI : Could a computer behave as if it thinks?
• Strong AI: Could a computer genuinely think?

The general worry here is that however sophisticated a system’s behavior may appear “from the outside”, for all we know it may just be a “hollow shell” (Haugeland 1981 [1997]; Clark 2001). The worry has then been fleshed out in various ways by specifying what is missing from the shell, as it were. Here are three standard such candidates. And, again, in each case however sophisticated the computer’s behavior may appear it still may be lacking in any or all of the following. First, the computer may lack consciousness . Second, the computer may lack any understanding of the symbols over which it computes (Searle 1980). Finally, the computer may operate without caring about its own behavior or, as John Haugeland colorfully puts it, without “giving a damn”. In each case, any kind of response from the ambitious AI researcher encounters the substantial challenges that come with theorizing mental phenomena such as consciousness, understanding, linguistic competence, and emotion. (Turing 1950, for instance, recognized but largely eschewed these kinds of topics).

It’s one thing to ask whether computers could think, and another to ask whether they could be creative. And just as the prospect of artificial intelligence or thinking divides into two questions—of weak AI and strong AI—we may distinguish two analogous questions about artificial creativity, which we’ll refer to as the questions of “weak AC” and “strong AC”, respectively. To begin with the former:

• Weak AC : Could a computer behave as if it’s creative?

Something behaves as if it’s creative if it produces things which are psychologically new (new to that thing) and valuable . Arguably, a number of computers have already done that.

In the 1970s, Harold Cohen began using computational technologies to produce new drawings and paintings. The work of his computer painter, Aaron, has exhibited at galleries such as the Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. David Cope’s “EMI” (Experiments in Musical Intelligence) has composed musical works in the style of various known composers and styles, even a full-length opera. Some of these works have been recorded and produced by bona fide record labels. Just search “Emily Howell” on Spotify or Apple Music and give it a listen (Cope 1996, 2006). Simon Colton’s The Painting Fool is an ongoing project, involving a software that abstracts phrases, images, and other items from newspaper articles and creates collage-style pieces. It has also produced portraits, based on images of film characters, of the same individual in different emotional states (see Painting Fool in Other Internet Resources ; see Colton 2012 for theoretical discussion). Even more recently, there have been explosive developments in generative art systems like DALL•E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, VQGAN+CLIP. (For discussion see Paul & Stokes 2021). In all of these cases, the relevant outputs of the computer program are new relative to its past productions—so they are psychologically (or behaviorally) novel, which again is all the novelty that creativity requires. And although historical novelty isn’t required for creativity, it’s worth noting that these products appear to be to be new in all of history as well.

What about value? As noted above in §2.1 , some theorists reject the value condition, but even if value is required for creativity, that too is a condition these computer artworks seem to meet. Assessments of value can be controversial, but that is no less true for the outputs of human creativity. The fact that these works are critically acclaimed, showcased in prestigious galleries, and commissioned by selective record labels testifies to their artistic merit, and viewers find them pleasing, interesting, and appealing, even before being apprised of their unusual origin. So it is reasonable to conclude computer programs like the ones just described exhibit at least weak AC insofar as they produce works of valuable novelty, and one could cite many more examples in the same vein.

Some theorists have noted that, whether or not the original Turing test is a good test for intelligence or thinking, we might adopt an analogous test for creativity: If a computer can fool human observers into thinking that it is a human creator, then it is in fact creative (Pease & Colton 2011; see also Chen 2020 for useful discussion of artificial creativity, including many additional examples of particular cases, and so-called Dartmouth-based Turing tests). If we employ this test, we might find ourselves with an unexpected conclusion: computers can be creative; in fact, some of them already are. But one might reasonably worry that the test is inadequate and the conclusion is too quick (Berrar & Schuster 2014; Bringsjord et al. 2001). From the fact that a computer operates as if it’s creative, one might argue, it doesn’t follow that it really is. Which brings us to our next question:

• Strong AC : Could a computer genuinely be creative?

This obviously returns us to the question of what conditions something must meet in order to count as being genuinely creative. And here we need go beyond the outwardly observable product-features of novelty and value to consider the underlying processes of genuine creativity. As we saw in §2.2 , theorists have variously proposed that in order for a process to count as creative, it must be surprising, original, spontaneous, and/or agential. There is no consensus to appeal to here, but if any one of these conditions is indeed required for genuine creativity, then a computer could be genuinely creative only to the extent that it executes processes which satisfy that condition.

The classic statement of skepticism regarding the possibility of computer creativity is due to Lady Ada Lovelace who had this to say while remarking on “the Analytical Engine” designed by her friend Charles Babbage:

It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine. The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. (Lovelace 1843, italics added)

Though Lovelace does not frame her comments in terms of “creativity” as such, she explicitly denied that a computer could satisfy at least one condition that is plausibly required for creativity, namely originality . A computer cannot be the originator, the author, or the creator of anything new, she contends; it can only do what it is programmed to do. We cannot get anything out of a computer that has not already been programmed into it. Further, Lovelace may also be interpreted as expressing or implying doubt about whether a computer could satisfy the three other proposed requirements for genuine creativity. Insofar as a computer’s outputs cannot be original, one might also suspect that they cannot be surprising . The image of a machine strictly following rules invokes precisely the kind of mechanical procedure that is the antithesis of spontaneity . And it may seem that such a machine could not be a genuine agent either. The problem isn’t just that a computer can’t produce anything original; it’s that it deserves no credit for whatever it does produce. Any praise or blame for the outputs of a computer rightly go to the engineers and programmers who made the machine, not to the machine itself. While these points may be intuitive, at least some of them are being challenged by modern technologies, which have come a long way since Babbage’s invention.

Consider AlphaGo again. This is a “deep learning” system, which involves two neural networks: a Policy network and a Value network. Very briefly: The system is trained using a vast number of legitimate moves made in actual games of Go played by professional human players (28.4 million moves from 160,000 games, to be precise; see Silver et al. 2016 and Halina 2021). The network is further trained, again using learning algorithms, by playing many games (some 100 million) against previous versions of itself (in the sense of a differently weighted neural network). The weights of nodes in the network are then adjusted by a learning algorithm that favors moves made in winning games. The value network is trained over a subset of these many games, with node weighting adjustments resulting in reliable probability assignments to moves vis-à-vis their potential to contribute to a win. Finally, the system employs a Monte Carlo search tree (MCT). Generally, this kind of algorithm is designed to simulate a decision process to optimize success given chosen parameters. In this case, the search algorithm selects a given path of moves, then adds some valid moves to this path, and then if this process does not terminate (end in win/loss), the system performs a “rollout”. A rollout essentially plays the game out for both players (using samples of possible moves) to its conclusion. The information that results from the MCT and processing by the value network are then fed back (back propagated) into the system. This entire process (once the system is trained) is rapid and determines how AlphaGo “decides” to move in any given game.

Here are some things to note. AlphaGo’s style of play is surprising . As commentators have noted, it is starkly unconventional relative to standards of human play (Halina cites Baker and Hui 2017 [ Other Internet Resources ]). Indeed, Lee Sodol, the world champion Go player defeated by AlphaGo in 2016, remarked that AlphaGo’s play revealed that much of human play is, contrary to prior common opinion, not creative after all—intimating that at least some of the play of AlphaGo is . Note further that this system is flexible. While there are learning algorithms and rules that adjust network weights, the system is not mechanical or predictable in the same fashion as earlier, classical systems (including Deep Blue , for example). In a recent paper, Marta Halina has made this argument (Halina 2021). She explicitly invokes Boden’s characterization, which requires novelty, value, and surprise of creativity. Again, the novelty and value should be plausibly attributed in this case. Regarding surprise, Halina suggests that it is AlphaGo’s employment of MCT that enables a kind of “insight”, flexibility, and unpredictable results. She writes,

It is the exploration parameter that allows AlphaGo to go beyond its training, encouraging it to simulate moves outside of those recommended by the policy network. As the search tree is constructed, the system starts choosing moves with the highest “action value” to simulate, where the action value indicates how good a move is based on the outcome of rollouts and value-network evaluations. (Halina 2021: 324)

Halina grants that given its domain-specificity, as we have already noted, this system’s particular abilities do not generalize in a way that may be required to properly attribute genuine intelligence. But she suggests that the complex use of the MCT search may amount to “mental scenario building” or, we might say, a kind of imagination. And insofar as this search algorithm technology can be applied to other systems in other domains, and imagination is a general component of intelligence, perhaps here lies space for generalizability. AlphaGo also affords at least some reply to the traditional Lovelace worry.

Artificial systems do not act only according to preprogrammed rules hand-coded by engineers. Moreover, current deep-learning methods are capable of producing systems that are superhuman in their abilities to discover novel and valuable solutions to problems within specific domains. (Halina 2021: 327)

If this is right, then AlphaGo exhibits originality . Finally, the flexibility with which this system operates may also satisfy Kronfeldner’s spontaneity requirement.

Some of these same features are found in a related approach in AI, namely research in evolutionary robotics. These systems also involve various forms of machine learning but in this case the learning is distributed, as it were, across a population of individuals rather than one individual. This approach can be understood, albeit imperfectly, as analogous to natural evolution. One begins, typically in computer simulation, with a population of agents. These agents are typically identified with individual neural networks, the connections and weightings of which are random to start. Relative to some task—for instance, avoiding obstacles, collecting objects, performing photo or phonotaxis—a genetic algorithm assigns a fitness value to each individual agent after a certain period of time or number of trials. Fitter agents are typically favored and used to generate the next population of agents. Also included in this generation are random mutation and genetic crossover (digital breeding!). Although it can take hundreds of generations, this is a discovery approach to engineering or constructing a system that successfully performs a task; it is “gradient descent learning” (Clark 1996). In this bottom-up approach, no single individual, nor even an entire population, are in any strict sense programmed. Rather, successful agents have “learned” as a result of generations of randomness, crossover, and small fitness improvements (and lots and lots of failures). Early success cases evolved robots that can follow trails (Koza 1992), locomote in insect-fashion (Beer & Gallagher 1992), guide themselves visually (Cliff, Husbands, & Harvey 1993), and collect garbage (Nolfi & Floreana 2000). See Bird and Stokes (2006, 2007) and Stokes and Bird (2008) for analysis and study of creativity in the context of evolutionary robotics.

These systems most certainly produce novelty. Later, fit individuals achieve novelty at their aimed task relative to whole generations and populations of previous agents. And this novelty is often surprising to the engineers and programmers that build them, indeed sometimes even unpredictably independent of any relevant task for individuals in the population. There are many examples in the literature. Indeed Lehman and others (2020) catalog a large range of cases where digital evolution surprises its creators, categorizing them in four representative groups: “mis-specified fitness functions”, “unintended debugging”, “exceeded experimenter expectations”, and “convergence with biology”. Here is one now relatively famous example of the first type of case. In early research in artificial life (A-Life), Karl Sims (1994) designed virtual creatures that were supposed to learn to walk (as well as swim and jump) in a simulated environment. The fitness function assessed individual agents on their average ground velocity across 10 seconds. Some of the fittest individuals to evolve were surprising: they grew tall and rigid and when they would fall over they would achieve high ground velocity, thus maximizing fitness given the (mis)specified parameters in unpredicted ways.

This is but one example of how systems like these can evolve in unpredictable or surprising ways. This unpredictability has occurred not just in simulated robotics, but in embodied robotics as well. In using a genetic algorithm to attempt to evolve oscillating sensors, researchers unintentionally evolved a radio antenna (Bird & Layzell 2002). This unexpected result arose from a combination of the particular algorithm used (which was intended) and various physical features of the space such as proximity to a PC monitor (which the researchers had presumably deemed irrelevant but which the evolved system, in a sense, did not). And one might be further inclined to describe some of these achievements as creative (and not just in the trivial sense that they are original instances of robotic success), since they also produce value, at least insofar as they are useful at performing a task, whether it is locomoting or locating a source of light or sensing radio waves.

Some theorists in this domain might argue that these systems achieve spontaneity as well. Given the substantial inclusion of randomness in the system’s development—both at the outset when the individual’s neural networks are randomized and more importantly with random mutation across populations—it is intuitive to describe the system’s as not following a mechanical procedure. Indeed, the way in which systems exploit fitness functions and data patterns further underscores this point. (Again, see the rich catalog of cases offered by Lehman et al. 2020).

On the face of it, then, recent technologies in AI, evolutionary robotics, and artificial life, seem to fulfill many of the conditions proposed for genuine creativity. These systems produce things that are novel and valuable, and do so through computational processes that are plausibly surprising, original, and spontaneous. The one requirement we have yet to address, however, is agency . Recall the suggestion, implicit in Lovelace’s remarks, that whatever a computer produces is to the credit of the programmer, not the computer. Notice that as sophisticated as current technologies in artificial creativity may be, presumably they are still not subject to praise or blame for what they do. If any beings are responsible for the work of these programs, it still seems to be the programmers and engineers who make them, not the programs themselves. The programs themselves do not seem to “give a damn”. So, if the creative process requires agency, arguably we have not yet created, programmed, or evolved a computational system that is really creative, however much they might appear to be. In the pursuit of strong AC, agency might be the final frontier (Paul & Stokes 2021).

It should be clear from the above discussions that there are rich and lively research programs, across a range of scientific disciplines, studying human creativity. These approaches substantiate the view that, contrary to the romantic tradition, creativity can be explained. Psychological functions and neural correlates have been identified, and remarkable advances are being made with computational and robotics technologies. What may be less clear is that, despite these advances, the distinct research programs in question are largely disjoint or siloed.

In a recent paper, Geraint Wiggins and Joydeep Bhattacharya (2014) highlight this “gap” between scientific studies of creativity. Their particular emphasis is on the gaps between research in neuroscience and research in computer science, and they advocate a bridge in the form of a neurocomputational approach. This kind of bridging may be called for even beyond what these authors prescribe, since there are gaps not just between these disciplines, but also between these and behavioral psychology, AI and A-Life research, and philosophical analysis. Creativity is a deeply complex and deeply important phenomenon. Fully understanding it will require us to integrate a variety of theoretical perspectives, and, as this survey reveals, philosophy has a vital role to play in that endeavor.

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• Baker, Lucas and Fan Hui, 2017, “ Innovations of AlphaGo ”, on the DeepMind blog, 10 April 2017. Accessed 9 July 2021.
• Whitney Museum, 2002, The Migration Series: His Painting Method .

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Creativity and the Arts: Traditional and New Media

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There are numerous theories of creativity from different academic fields, but an overarching unifying theory is almost impossible. Such theories may be specific to a particular context, or they attempt to generalize, with differences in particular disciplines. For example, in psychology the focus is on a micro level with the study of individuals; whereas in the field of innovation research it is on a macro level and often disregards the individual by focusing more on the context. Creativity on a micro level is examined through revealing the process of an individual artist. It introduces ‘material thinking’; an intellectual pursuit specific to the making process and reflects on what may be learned from the process of making art. Art can create knowledge that constructs environments and changes lives. This personal knowledge and the work of the hand is sometimes at odds with the technological world, but a study of artistic practices enables us to see and think differently. Artworks have impact beyond the esthetic to influence social, political, and economic spheres.

• Material thinking craftsmanship
• Hylomorphism

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2.1 introduction.

The Encyclopaedia of Creativity (2011) suggests that theories either become domain specific or find a general approach to deal with domain-based differences [ 1 ]. ‘Material thinking’ is an intellectual pursuit particular to the making process described by Carter (2005) [ 2 ] and it asks, “ what can be learnt from making artworks? ” [ 2 ]. It references the work of sociologist Sennett [ 3 ] and anthropologist Ingold [ 4 ],

The paintings of artist/academic Susan Liggett are presented as a case study to illustrate ‘thinking through making’ and ‘knowing from ‘being’ that can look ‘both inside and outside the field of enquiry at the same time’ (ibid). This mode of thinking involves problem finding that is implicit in the making process, that can be more generative than purely focusing on problem solving.

Craft skills and traditional art practices teach us something that enhances understanding that help develop our digital world, without generating nostalgia for obsolete practices. The artist bridges micro and macro creativity to focus both on the individual and the context in which the artwork is made and consumed by audiences. New technology has assisted art practice in challenging its purpose repeatedly over history to make it an important epistemic study.

2.2 Creativity and Its Products

Creativity manifests itself in objects; as Virginia Woolf said, “ Intellectual freedom depends upon material things ” [ 5 ]. Artists and scientists are interested in analyzing materials. Beyond the useful scientific analysis of materials to develop products, there is another form of analysis of the characteristics of matter that are more difficult to measure, such as how the color or form of an object makes us feel. Artifacts and artworks play a key role in how we understand the world.

The academic study of ‘material thinking’ has been critical in helping artists articulate how art practices embody new understandings about individuals and their cultures through the process of making [ 2 ]. The importance of Carter’s work lies in the cognizance that some art forms exist ‘in advance of language’ and thus requires ‘translation’ into language’ (ibid). This is the language of creativity that remains elusive, but is explored through practice based artistic research.

2.3 Creativity, Technology, Craft and Skill

In the technological age there is concern that craft skills are becoming obsolete in a drive for productivity. An ability to learn a craft skill through purposeful practice, such as throwing a pot, is often regarded an inferior form of knowledge compared to learning theories and methods from literature. Contemporary sociologist Sennett [ 3 ] is an advocate for creative thinking, and rather than considering craft skills in opposition to digital technologies, he thinks of the digital as a new form of craftsmanship. He says that the digital era is not one that should put behind it the traditions of craft; observing that computer coders learn through play and repetition in the same way as a musician learning an instrument [ 3 ]. He believes that to make good use of technology, one has to think like a craftsman. In his analysis of what qualities make a good nurse he says

as with Linux programmers, nursing craft negotiates a liminal zone between problem solving and problem finding; listening to old men’s chatter, the nurse can glean clues about their ailments that might escape a diagnostic checklist (ibid).

Against the backdrop of accelerating technology in the 1930s, philosophers Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) had a concern for tradition and hand skills in relation to technology and art. They both acknowledged technology’s great potential, but also that its roles had not been fully explored at the time, and there could be potential negative consequences. They endorsed an alternative to technology in creative thinking through writing about what can be learnt from art [ 6 , 7 ].

2.4 Thinking and Making

Anthropologist Tim Ingold (b.1948) draws the distinctions made between theorists and craftsmen; saying theorists make through thinking while craftsmen think through making. His view is that the way we think of making is wrongheaded; as a project that starts with an idea, finds an appropriate material to work with, then ends when this material has taken on its intended form. When creating artworks there is not always an intended idea, it is a process whereby the maker is waiting to receive ideas through the manipulation of materials, rather than imposing them onto the materials from the outset [ 4 ].

The process of taking materials from nature to make material objects is known as hylomorphism from the Greek hyle (matter) and morphe (form). Ingold considers the makers process to be “ more humble than those implied by the hylomorphic model ” and thinks of making as a different process; one of growth where the maker is an active participant who ‘joins forces’ with materials “ bringing them together or splitting them apart, synthesizing and distilling, in anticipation of what might emerge ” (ibid). Ingold said that.

In the act of making the artisan couples his own movements and gestures – indeed his very life – with the becoming of his materials, joining with and following the forces and flows that brings his work into fruition (ibid, p. 31)

The case study paintings below describe the evolution of a long unstructured process.

Philosopher Gilbert Simondon also questioned hylomorphism. His concept of ‘individuation’ postulates that form is emergent rather than given in the making process; with man inside the world rather than standing on the outside. Theorist and psychoanalysts Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari believed also that hylomorphism fails to acknowledge, “ matter in movement, in flux, in variation ” [ 8 ].

2.5 Case Study Susan Liggett Paintings

Painting as a practice remains relevant in the digital age because of what can be learnt from it as a creative process. Technology can distance us from the innate human need to experiment with materials, whereas painting delights our sense of touch, smell and our sight in a visceral, messy and instinctively human way. It can bring us closer to the experience of being human. Paradoxically, by not relying on technology it can teach us about aspects of experience that technology distances us from.

Liggett describes the process of painting as a ‘psychological resonance’; the metaphoric vibration resulting from an inner dialog between ‘subject’ and object’ [ 9 ]. By this she means that the process connects us with the world in a unique way that is dependent on seeing, playing around with materials, and being fully present in the world.

Liggett, like many contemporary painters, exploits technology without being reliant on it. She turned to incorporating digital photographs into her work after decades of strictly working from direct observation, to question whether if she heightened the illusory quality of the paintings, would they in some way get closer to the lived experience? (Fig.  2.1 ). The busyness of her life at the time meant that she felt like she had missed the experience of her child growing up so she questioned whether the slow reflective process of painting would allow her memory to unfold in a richer more rewarding way? A photograph taken in a fraction of a second is viewed in the same fraction of time, but with a painting the viewer has to look longer to absorb significance and meaning.

Copyright S. Liggett

Liggett, S (2014), Guaro, oil on board, 15 cm × 18 cm.

To her surprise, incorporating the photographic element into the paintings had the opposite effect and distanced her memories, with the photographic images not standing in for her memories as she thought they would. They evoked something quite different; the images were familiar but the emotional attachments within the paintings were quite separate. She then abandoned the photograph and allowed the painterly qualities to bring her closer to the inner experiences of events memorized internally (Fig.  2.2 ). The painterly marks are evidence of her struggles to visualize a memory made more vivid through the physical process of grappling with paint. To quote Henry James in his novel the ‘Real Thing’: “ the unreal is more precious than the real ” [ 10 ].

Liggett, S (2012) Yellow Spanish Cardigan, oil on board, 38 cm × 55.5 cm.

Paintings can only be truly seen from the first-person perspective and we bring both our eyes and our emotions to the way we respond to them. After viewing Vermeer’s paintings, ‘The Love Letter’ (1669/70) and ‘The Music Lesson’, (1662/5) Liggett was inspired to make a series of paintings based around the theme of her Mother and her dementia (Figs. 2.3 and 2.4 ). In the works she wanted to imbue a metaphoric presence of her Mother as she made sense of her struggles with dementia which is represented throught the ghost like arcs that appear incomplete in the image (Figs. 2.3 and 2.4 ).

Liggett, S (2018) Music Lesson, 82 cm × 76 cm, oil on linen.

Liggett, S (2018). Dance of Life, 82 cm × 76 cm, oil on linen.

Another series of paintings the Oneiric Hut Series are inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s concept of the “ oneiric house ” which is a “ house of dream-memory ” [ 11 ] that exists within each one of us. Liggett spends a lot of time repeatedly drawing the same places or objects in an attempt to evoke and to draw out their poetic qualities in order to do as Cezanne said to “ Dream before nature ” [ 12 ]. Trees and the hut are repeatedly drawn from direct observation to test compositions and ideas that culminated in a set of paintings that use this repeated hut motif (Figs. 2.5 and 2.6 ). The objects that Liggett draws in her garden take on new meanings as the creative process transforms the hut that is seen before her eyes into something quite different which evocates otherness.

Liggett, S. (2016) Half Light Hut, egg tempera on gesso board, 25 cm × 30 cm.

Liggett, S. (2017) Furnished Framework, oil on board, 24 cm × 30 cm.

2.6 Creativity and Research

An increased understanding of the unique forms of knowledge that art embodies has led to an increase in artists undertaking research and studying for research degrees. A Ph.D. is now a standard requirement for those teaching in art departments in UK universities [ 13 ]. Making art always starts from the first person perspective of the artist which enables conversations to be enriched and imaginations to be evoked.

Most projects as in Ingold’s account rely on creativity to help to work things out as one goes along, to determine the completion of the work or the ends conceived in advance. There is “ interaction and correspondence between articulate and personal knowledge ” [ 4 ] and it is this knowledge, our lived experience that shapes our objective reality.

2.7 Conclusions

There is a degree of inherent importance in the making process that can get overlooked when processes are replaced by technology. However, the process of making enables us to connect to the world without rejecting technology. This may be seen in the ways painters have adopted and incorporated new technologies into their work. The proliferation of the digital has re-positioned painting in relation to the screen rather than in its visual representations and has facilitated a recording of first-hand experiences of the world. Social media, Facebook, Instagram, etc. can give us a snapshot of our world, but they can sometimes give us a skewed or distorted view, whereas the painted image tells us something more akin to the human condition.

Although it was the photography that taught us the modern idea of the image, it is painting that allows us to internalise it [ 14 ].

Creativity has become a commodity in the market-place with “ ’the creative industries’, ‘the creative economy’ and the ‘creative class’ paradigms of economic growth ” [ 15 ]. ‘Means and ends’ in contemporary society are often associated with technological advancements. Many artists do not rely on centralized resources, digital transformations or financial investments and largely exist outside of ‘markets’ and ‘political spheres’, and often make a living by other means. This can facilitate more independence and greater creativity.

Interest in technology and art is an expanding field and the next chapter explores in more depth how technology is utilized by artists.

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Liggett, S. (2023). Creativity and the Arts: Traditional and New Media. In: Creativity in Art, Design and Technology. Springer Series on Cultural Computing(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24869-6_2

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