Just Getting Warmed Up
"Only he who is free, creates." Nicholas Berdyaev
An exciting start for a blog post, but appropriate! The reason being is due to the reading from this week. I mean that there appears to be a split in the road, a less traveled road, as Peck would say. There are two schools of thought I have discovered, but not surprised at all.
I'll explain. I quoted Berdyaev this time for a good reason. You see, he is the road less traveled. That is, his work on creativity and freedom is the outlier here. At least, that currently appears to be the case.
The current, apparent leader in the free world on the subject is a gentleman named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He has worked hard toward a Ph.D. in psychology and was a former department chair at the University of Chicago. He has published on the subject, studying individuals that would be thought of as creative—having discovered that no systematic studies of living creative persons over a lifetime, he was funded by a reputable foundation and set off for four years collecting data on the best of the creatives in the world—the outliers.
The first thing I noticed in the book's introduction was the talk about humanity's beginnings and the development of gods and angels. The system says we evolved from the smallest cells; you get the point. The excerpt I will quote will give you the flavor of this work. "Creativity is the cultural equivalent of the process of genetic changes that result in biological evolution, where random variations take place in the chemistry of our chromosomes, below the threshold of consciousness." You get the point.
Then, in the other corner, is Nicholas Berdyaev. The Russian fellow I previously mentioned and have quoted twice so far. Berdyaev was born and raised in Russia during the reign of the last Czar of Russia, Nicholas Romanov II, whose family was well connected to the country's banking sector. He was also educated in the best schools and raised Greek Orthodox when a man's faith in God was taken seriously. He was influenced by the world's best minds at the time and wrote many books in his lifetime. By the way, he requested that his books not be published until after his death. I don't know why!
So, there are two very different paradigms on the creativity question at this point. One that appears to be a very "Humanistic" perspective, if you will. And a view from a man that enjoyed the relationship of peers that we have all heard of, Kant, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche.
There is a lot to look at here. It seems there is always a split decision involved in most things. The Reformation and the Renaissance, Republican and Democrat, Creationism and Evolution, Bad and Good, Evil and Goodness, Freedom, and Slavery.
Till next time!
