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From: gerryg@il.us.swissbank.com (Gerald Gleason)
Subject: Re: Creativity
Message-ID: <1995Feb6.205230.28261@il.us.swissbank.com>
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Date: Mon, 6 Feb 1995 20:52:30 GMT
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Oliver Sparrow writes
> How an individual and a team engage in creativity is quite different;
> and so do are the processes by which "routine" creativity - yet more
> copy, yet another car - are differentiated from creative saltation, in
> which the structural nature of the enterprise is re-thought or otherwise
> re-made.  The romantic view is that creativity is a hermetic activity,
> evoked when  individuals marked with a secret sign engage in inner and
> dark wrestlings with inchoate reality. This may catch something of a
> fleeting minority of important events; but the economy and life is
> driven forward by sweat applied to the gears of thought. Emolient
> inspiration is distilled from the fossil sludge of worn experience, dead
> mistakes and forgotten analogies; and not at all from the list - "logic,
> ethics, epistemology..." - with which you began.
  
> Bah. Humbug.

An interesting post, but I'm not sure which point you are saying is  
"humbug".  You seem to be pointing to the idea that there are qualitative  
level of creativity, but then dispariging it, or is it something else?

The only thing I see wrong with what you label "the romantic view" is the  
idea that there is "a secret sign" marking those who engage in reality  
shifting creativity.  A lot of creativity is what Hofstatter calls  
"variations on a theme", but sometimes creativity can go beyond this and  
actually add new elements to the game.  Only a very few people develop  
their ability to percieve any possibilities beyond the game as it is, and  
therefore they are marked by this capacity to percieve deeply.  However, I  
don't like the idea that this group of people are marked "by fate", but  
rather by choice.

>   Oliver Sparrow
>   ohgs@chatham.demon.co.uk

Gerry Gleason
