Saturday 17 August 2013

Thinking about thinking creatively

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Creativity is about abstraction of function from the social situation - this is a necessary preliminary to being creative about something.

The basic situation, then, is for a human to be embedded in the social context - being sensitive to the nature of the social context, sensitive and responsive to the feelings and wishes of others.

The basic situation is that humans are set-up to be embedded in this context - with various aims: keeping other people happy, aiming to have high status within the context, hoping for power over others and so on...

Creativity entails detachment from this whole social context - and instead focusing upon 'the problem', the function, the goal. That is the basic situation.

This is the basic set-up of creativity. Creativity is a basic set-up in which the creative person is intrinsically detached from social context - and whose interests are external to himself; where the self is bound-up with objective, non-social externals.

So creativity is a disposition, a way of approaching the world, a focus, an emotional concern with the non-social doings of the world.

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