Creation

Abstract

[Extract] One of the continuing challenges for any theory of creativity is to define its relation to the Romantic view of creation. There is no doubting the power, attraction, and the success of the Romantic concept of creation, just as there is no denying its deep flaws. Early Romantic theories of spontaneous creation spawned an array of related concepts-ranging from national self determination to moral autonomy to self-organizing societies to the autopoiesis of nature. In each case, whether it was applied to events in nature or to deeds in society, creation meant self-formation. The Romantic idea of immanent determination assumed that agency of any kind, conscious or not, was the cause of its own consequences. External determination was a sign of a lesser or in many cases a morally unpalatable form of determination. A cluster of popular nineteenth-century ideas, from the liberal concept of the self to the Darwinian conception of social and biological evolution, supposed that everything from human choice to social development to natural history was the result of agents acting on themselves, becoming something different in the process. The media of such change might be conscious choice, intent or will. It might be unconscious mutation, adaptation and development. But conscious or unconscious, in each case the outcome of change was an 'organism' with a higher level of Complexity, internal differentiation or maturity.