Defining Creativity, Part 7: Creativity as Experimentation in the Enlightenment

Posted on August 4, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Every day, for a week,  I’m writing about the definitions of Creativity thinkers have offered throughout history and why each one cannot be the final definition. Yesterday I wrote about Cultural Suppression of Creativity.

Sitting under an apple tree, Isaac Newton discovered gravity. A falling apple answered for him all questions regarding the mechanics of the Universe.  So goes the legend you read in 6th grade Science.

Yes, Newton did formulate the Universal Law of Gravitation and an apple tree may have helped fine-tune his ideas about gravitational pull and power.  But, Newton’s influence directs Western Science farther and wider than gravity itself, including ideas regarding Creativity.

Newton sought to separate natural philosophy from objective observation-based science. The Scientific Method, generally divorced from pre-conceived spiritual or magical interpretations, led  to the dichotomy between science and religion.

Enlightenment ideas of High Creativity ignored the inspiration portion of Creation, because it could not be explained via the Scientific Method.  Creativity, defined by long hours and experimentation, think Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, had little to do with magic or the unexplained.

Still, some Creators had sparkle enough to cause suspicion that a final, workable definition of Creativity had not yet arrived.

Filed under: Creativity: Historical Perspective, Defining Creativity, General Theory of Creativity, Ideas, What is Creativity | Tagged: , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Defining Creativity, Part 5: Renaissance Women with Self-Control and True Believers

Posted on July 31, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Every day, for a week,  I’m writing about the definitions of Creativity thinkers have offered throughout history and why each one cannot be the final definition. Yesterday I wrote about Fighting Entropy in the Renaissance.

While Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo perspired, inspired, someone paid for the bread they ate and the shoes they walked in. Most 16th Century men with families to support and trade to conduct made no time for domain-alteration in Creative endeavors. The wealthiest men, patronized inspired, intellectual, hard-working men. Still, theoretically, all men could indulge in creative pursuit, even if only on the side.

But the woman who made salads for Da Vinci or washed Michelangelo’s bed-sheets could not, at least theoretically. A women painting heart-stopping biblical violence in oil or discovering mathematical theorems was as likely as a wild dog chanting prayers in a monastery.

Yet, a handful of women in the Renaissance did alter their domains.

Artemisia Gentileschi, member of the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence, spent 10,000 hours as a child in her father’s busy studio. In her father’s shadow, and under his loving direction, she lived and breathed all things Caravaggio and was able to say,

As long as I live I will have control over my being.

Self-control, not a woman’s privilege in the Renaissance, is a must-have  of Creativity. Gentileschi knew this and presented her Creative gift wrapped in the cloak of womanhood.

My illustrious lordship,

Gentileschi said,

I’ll show you what a woman can do.

By age 7, Elena Piscopia spent her days with her father, among books: Latin and Greek, grammar and music before lunch, then Hebrew, Spanish, French, and Arabic.

She tackled mathematics and astronomy,  philosophy and theology. Awed by her progress, Elena’s father insisted she attend the University of Padua, whose motto was Universal Freedom, to continue her studies. In 1678, she graduated, the first woman to receive a university diploma ever — Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, who earned the Doctor of Philosophy and Mathematics.  She stayed on as a professor to lecture behind a curtain to prevent other University attendants from seeing her face to face.

Both ladies worked long and hard, both were inspired initially by their fathers and both were highly intellectual, and they also had self-control and someone who truly believed they were capable, both gifts in their time, yet ultimately indispensable to Creation.

Filed under: Creativity: Historical Perspective, Defining Creativity, Must Haves of Creativity, What is Creativity | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Defining Creativity, Part 4: Fighting Entropy in the Reinassance

Posted on July 29, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Every day, for a week,  I’m writing about the definitions of Creativity thinkers have offered throughout history and why each one cannot be the final definition. Yesterday I wrote about Inspired Poets and Creating Dieties.

The path of Human Creativity, paved with sweat, sore muscles and lots of thinking, shone first for artists and writers of the Renaissance. Inspiration came from Heaven, as a gift to mimic divine perfection, but with enough strings attached to make it a burden, an imperative to act. The artist Michelangelo and polymath Leonardo Da Vinci embodied the best of the Renaissance and wrote about the Creative process.

In the Renaissance, the artist, attempted  to reveal God, for himself and others. Michelangelo said,

Every beauty which is seen here by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all are come.

The revelation of God’s Creation through art began with the human form itself. Again, Michelangelo:

What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?

So great a task could not be mere rule-following or craft, but firmly founded on intellect. Michelangelo:

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

Human intellect and Heavenly inspiration set the boundaries for decades of exhausting work.  Leonardo Da Vinci said,

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.

Michelangelo:

There is no greater harm than that of time wasted.

If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.

Such work, bathed in meaning and purpose quieted the soul on good days.  Da Vinci said,

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

Or, opened the door to the cellars of self-doubt.  Again, Da Vinci:

I have offended God and mankind because my work didn’t reach the quality it should have.

Highly Creatives of the Renaissance fought entropy with heart and soul. Michelangelo:

The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.

Many believe – and I believe – that I have been designated for this work by God. In spite of my old age, I do not want to give it up; I work out of love for God and I put all my hope in Him.

Today we carry many of these beliefs to define Creativity.  But inspiration, intellect and a lifetime commitment to hard work do not guarantee Creation, nor do they tell the entire story of what Creativity is.

Filed under: Creativity: Historical Perspective, Defining Creativity, Imitating/Borrowing, Passion, What is Creativity | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

Defining Creativity, Part 3: Inspired Poets and Creating Dieties

Posted on July 27, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Every day, for a week,  I’m writing about the definitions of Creativity thinkers have offered throughout history and why each one cannot be the final definition. Yesterday I wrote about Semitic Slaves and the Brain-Altering Invention.

For centuries, inventive humans made stuff, but never Created.

Creativity,originating from the Latin term creō “to create, make”, described only the work of deities. These Creative gods and muses first placed ideas in receptive human minds, to inspire written language.

Homer’s  The Odyssey, the grandest result of such inspiration lives on today as a favorite of children, but was a  bible for the Ancient Greeks.

In Classical Greece and Rome, nine goddesses inspired through the memorization and improvisation of music, plays, poetry and dance.

In Judeo-Christian circles “creatio“  also referred only to the God’s work, Ex nihilo, “creating from nothing.” Humans received inspiration from God to write, speak and predict the future. Inspired prophets and kings were but scribes to reveal the mind of God.

Jesuit poet Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski, first applied Creativity to a human endeavor, writing poetry. But such blasphemy stuck tenuously for fear of stepping on God’s toes.  Spanish writer, Baltasar Gracian, also a Jesuit, tried to explain human Creativity as an extension of Heavenly inspiration. Gracian wrote,

Art is the completion of nature, as if it were a second Creator.

And so today, High Creativity is still seen as contribution to grander work, and inspiration, though nor necessarily miraculous or from Heaven, is certainly part of the Creative Process.


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Defining Creativity, Part 2: Semitic Slaves and the Brain-Altering Invention

Posted on July 26, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Every day, for a week,  I’m writing about the definitions of Creativity thinkers have offered throughout history and why each one cannot be the final definition. Yesterday I wrote about Ancient Greek Artists Following the Rules.

The first pure alphabet, created by Semitic slaves to track the work of underlings, stirred little sand and much less awe from anyone in Ancient Egypt.

Egyptian dawns came only after a daily war between gods.  Gods controlled rains and winds, births and deaths.  Creativity, as an idea, did not yet exist, but creating of any kind proved the realm of gods. Not humans.

The god/Pharaoh built stuff, not with hands, but with grand ideas of how things should be and subject humans to execute his will.  The architecture  of pharaohs endures to wow the most jaded 21st century tourists and is certainly Creative.  But the first alphabet, known as abjads could reasonably trump material wonders as a precious seed for centuries of global-scale human communication and the spread of knowledge. The alphabet allowed humans to absorb language through vision.

Neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene says,

We delight in reading Nabokov and Shakespeare using a primate brain originally designed for life in the African savanna.

Even so, Dehaene says,

Brain imaging demonstrates that the adult brain contains fixed circuitry exquisitely attuned to reading.

Creators, even if not recognized as such for 3,800 years, come as lowly as the diligent worker/slaves with just enough knowledge to alter the human brain. A General Theory of Creativity must somehow encompass grand, if unknown, future effects of Creation.

Filed under: Creativity: Historical Perspective, Defining Creativity, General Theory of Creativity, What is Creativity | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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