Creative Philosophy

I could try to call this ”philosophy” but I avoid using the word whenever possible. There are too many meanings I don’t want to associate with.

First, professional philosophers would resent it or otherwise complain that I’m not qualified, or that what I do doesn’t fit the norms and standards of their discipline. Second, thanks largely to publishers and booksellers, philosophy is sometimes taken to mean “philosophy and spirituality,” bringing all kinds of new age connotations along with it. Third, the word “philosophy” has been appropriated by the popular lexicon to refer to any explicit principles or ideals, such as a football team’s “defensive philosophy” or a company’s ”management philosophy.”

The second meaning is a nuisance but I respect the first and second. I wouldn’t dare argue that what academic philosophers do isn’t actually “philosophy” — though I’ve seen such arguments made elsewhere and I don’t exactly disagree, at least in some cases – and talking about a “management philosophy” isn’t any more wrong than talking about a “philosophy of science.” But problems start when people get used to talking about “philosophies” only as things rather than doing philosophy as an activity.

So instead of “philosophy,” when I talk about the philosophical attitude or philosophers’ way of life, I’ll call it “love of learning” (which I prefer to ”love of wisdom”) or “general creativity,” and when I talk about the practice or discipline I’ll call it “conceptual development” or “conceptual accounting.” If I’m forced to talk about ”what I am,” I’d say I’m a “creative philosopher” with a “creative philosophy.”

Now the word “creative” is even more abused and ambiguous than “philosophy.” Creation used to refer to acts of God — or more grandly to projects of God — as in “creation of the world.” Now we say children are creative when they scribble on the kitchen floor, I’m being creative when I cut holes in my jeans. When we talk about a “creative person” we usually have in mind a bohemian-type artist. And now the business community has adopted it, turning it into a massive buzzwords for recruiters and educators.

Here’s a story to demonstrate why this can be bad. Last year I posted my resume on a monster.ca and signed up to receive email notifications of jobs I might be qualified for. Most of what they sent wasn’t  really relevant, but one particular email really stood out as unsuited. It listed three jobs I might be interested in based on my profile: Senior Auditor at Nortel Networks, Cook in the Canadian Armed Forces, and Seasonal Marketing Rep (i.e. handing out fliers and doing demos in the mall) for Telus Mobility. You’d be hard-pressed to come up with three more different jobs. What could they possibly have in common? I looked at the descriptions and saw right away… “creativity” — and my profile was laced with the word as well. When it’s used for everything, it’s meaningless.

As with my treatment of “philosophy,” I’m not going to pick a fight with “creativity.” Instead I think it’s better to conceive it in a way makes the common usage more meaningful and effective.

I began to address this last October (and it has taken me this long to take it up again?@!) in an essay on creative genius. I don’t think that “creativity” ought to be reserved for geniuses and bohemians, but at the same time I think it’s necessary to distinguish different aspects of creativity, and we should also try to conceive a creative scale. I’ll start with psychologist Teresa Amabile’s “conceptual definition of creativity” (from Creativity in Context, pg. 35):

A product or response will be judged as creative to the extent that (a) it is both a novel and appropriate, useful, correct, or valuable response to the task at hand, and (b) the task is heuristic rather than algorithmic.

“Heuristic rather than algorithmic” means that rather than following set rules and methods towards a clearly identified goal, “the path to solution is not completely straightforward.” Doing something heuristically roughly means having to take a few steps before subsequent options are even apparent, and so forth.

So yes, there are elements of this in a senior auditor’s job, as well as the job of military cook, and even doing product demos at the mall, but for the most part they are not creative, and while creativeness might add value to those jobs, it is quite possible to do them without ever doing anything creative. Having said that, those organizations work at a higher level of creativity — Nortel, the Canadian Armed Forces, and Telus are constantly innovating and progressing heuristically, the organizations are creative – so in a sense, any task or person contributing to those aggregately creative enterprises is being creative insofar as they’re integrated into the whole, even though they might not have any direct, specific, intentional, or even conscious relation aspects of the orgnaization that are actually creative.

It is in this sense that science is one of the most creative endeavours, even when the overwhelming majority of scientific work is methodical, boring, formulaic, and decidedly uncreative if we look at it without reference to eventual and inderect creative results. By extension, the aggregate of life is creative in the sense that it constantly evolves and grows heuristically: life is constantly creating itself, and all of our actions and decisions affect this even when they are not specifically creative in themselves. This is how I reconcile the original sense of “God’s Creation” with the more mundane notion of common creativity.

So if everything is creative in a sense, what’s the point of actually calling something ”creative”? Where “creative” is used to qualify or differentiate a specific class, it should refer to the higher reaches of the creative scale that involves greater openness, randomness, complexity, and ambiguity.

Creative philosophy is a mode of philosophy with the focus on the future — moving towards new discoveries and creations, generating accidents and opportunities to adapt on the fly rather than primarily adhering to prior methods and principles. It’s all about heuristically moving forward, generating and managing limitless novelty.

It isn’t a outright rejection of discipline, it’s sort of a “discipline of developing new disciplines.” Think of it as the difference between the ability to navigate through a well-developed city, following streets and signs, versus the ability to orient oneself in the wilderness, prospecting for new discoveries and surveying an unfamiliar landscape. The landscapes are unfamiliar, but the feeling of being somewhere unfamiliar is not. I don’t have an explanation for this, but some of us just seem to ”feel at home” in these unknown places — like the proverbial cowboy on the range. 

Sometimes what I do doesn’t resemble philosophy at all. Sometimes it’s more like experimental literature or conceptual art, or very amateurish science, or entrepreneurship, or social entrepreneurship, or conceptual activism. And sometimes it just looks like an attempt to live a good, meaningful, and interesting life.

You can’t draw a line around creative philosophy. Creative philosophy is what we draw the lines with – in pencil.

More From the Archives:

• 07-12-2010 -- My New Favourite Phrase
• 12-27-2009 -- Thinking in the 21st Century: Progress Report
• 12-09-2009 -- Notes on Creative Philosophy
• 12-06-2009 -- Object Bias
• 07-19-2009 -- Designing Ideas for Democracy

Tagged as: competence, creative philosophy, creativity, discipline, general creativity, heuristics, philosophy