What is Creativity?
The nature of human creativity has always been a mystery.
Human beings appear to be able to come up with completely new thoughts and ideas without the need for previous prompting or stimuli. It is as if our thoughts come from nothing. This is as yet unexplainable in material terms. You could likely devise a machine that could spit out random thoughts by combining new words in new ways, but they wouldn’t also be appropriate for new contexts in the same way that the sentences made by human beings are. For this reason, the philosopher Descartes and his contemporaries in the 17th century posited that there was something separate from the body that allowed for creativity and which he called the mind.
Dualism is less well regarded today, but philosophers and other thinkers have still been unable to explain human creativity in reductive terms. The human mind does not work like a machine. It introduces new terms and new ideas almost every moment of its existence. Creativity is at the heart of how human beings function in their day to day life.
Creativity isn’t something reserved for great artists but is something that comes along for the ride with being a human being. In order to better tap into your own creativity it will help to find out what it is in yourself that is truly different. We all have our own personality and no person is exactly like any other person. Creativity is about discovering what is at the essence of who you are. If everything else in your life could fall away what would be left that would still make you who you are?
The psychologist Carl Jung became popular among artists by proposing the existence of a universal unconscious. According to Jung, when we engage in creative acts we are also tapping into unconscious archetypes that we all share and desire to express to one another. Archetypes are very general images and ideas that underlie the more specific ones that we create ourselves. For instance, Jung would say that every person has an archetype of the mother figure and so artworks that explore motherhood are really tapping into this general universal archetype.
Of course, not everyone agrees with Jung about the existence of a universal unconscious, but his ideas have proven useful as a way of understanding and tapping into human creativity. Jung also came to emphasize the process of individuation as a part of creativity. According to this understanding, creativity is really about expressing our truest selves. Each person has their own self that lies undiscovered until they engage in creative acts that reveal their true character. The more creativity that you take part in the more of yourself that will be revealed to you.
The poet Walt Whitman came to a similar conclusion in his own work. “Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am” Whitman wrote in 1865, in his first major poem Song of Myself. “Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next, / both in and out of the game.” Whitman saw his real self as something that he had to aim at but that he would likely never reach. In his poem “As I Ebb’d With The Ocean of Life,” Walt Whitman wrote about the struggle to understand who he really was through his art. “Before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet / untouched, untold, altogether unreached.” “Aware now that amid all the blab whose echoes recoil upon me I / have not once had the least idea who or what I am.”
The creative process never ends because there is always more about yourself to discover. Creativity is the attempt to uncover who you really are apart from the mere circumstances of your life. Often when an artist gets into a positive place while making his art it can seem like it’s coming from another person. For this reason the ancient Greeks thought that there must be something like a god called the Muse who gave artists the gifts of their creativity.
The Muse is still invoked by many writers and artists today to describe the process of their creativity. Creativity involves tapping into something that you aren’t even wholly aware of and exploring what that something means. When artists look back at work that they’ve already made they’re often surprised to find messages and meanings that they weren’t aware of when it was being made. For this reason the writer Norman Mailer described his novel writing as a “spooky art.”
There is no one best way to reach into your creativity. Creativity is a process of trial and error as much as anything else. In order to gain the best results and the most inspiration for your work you often have to learn to let go of any attempt to try. Experiment, use what works. Set apart a certain amount of time each day to be creative. If you feel a particular attraction to any particular medium like writing or painting focus on that.
Don’t worry about whether what you are doing is any good at first. Great art often grows out of many abortive first attempts and weak beginnings. It’s vital that you don’t judge what you create while you’re creating it. The fear of failure is one of the first obstacles that has to be overcome when being creative. Focus on your end goal and accept that in reaching it you’ll likely create many things that displease you and don’t live up to it. Creativity is about tapping into your true self. The first step is establishing the communication.
Whether you are tapping into something universal, a Muse, or something inside yourself, creativity involves bringing something new into the world. There’s nothing exceptional about doing this for a human being. Almost every sentence that a person ever uses involves making new combinations of words to create new meaning. Creativity is very enjoyable and provides our lives with additional meaning. Human beings are more than just machines and by seeking to tap into your creativity you’ll be exploring this added dimension of yourself at its most direct source.