On the origin of creativity and species

Jenny Filipetti
Aug 26, 2017 · 4 min read

While eclipsed by its ubiquity today, the word “creativity” is of surprisingly recent invention:

Google n-gram for “creativity,” 1760–2008. Interactive version here.

So why the sudden surge of interest in creativity in the mid-20th century? Who originally coined the term, and what ideas did it replace?

Certain aspects of the history of these ideas are ancient, as it has been since ancient times that humans have produced tools, objects, buildings, and even art. Yet for much of written history, such activities were not considered creation but various forms of discovery, craft, and imitation. Creation was associated with divine province alone.¹

Dr. Camilla Nelson of the University of Notre Dame Australia provides a brief and illuminating survey of several centuries of cultural history around the notions of creativity and imagination in her paper “The Invention of Creativity: The Emergence of a Discourse.” Here I would like to focus solely on the specific period she identifies as critical to engendering our common use of the term today. After the word creativity entered common American discourse in the period of 1926–1953 as, novelly, “[not] the preserve of genius but […] located in all kinds of people and human endeavours,” Nelson notes that it was in the years 1950 to 1965 that creativity became understood as a mental faculty which should be actively fostered, as evidenced through a burgeoning of research and institutions dedicated to its study.²

There are several possible triggers for the rise in literature during this time. In 1950, JP Guilford famously addressed the American Psychological Association in a talk titled simply, “Creativity,” ushering in an era of scientific study of the field.

Tellingly, however, Nelson observes that many of these studies were funded “by [US] military and defense concerns,” a fact that Guilford himself has also been known to emphasize.² Nelson highlights remarks from the time, such as US Navy Admiral Hyman Rickover’s charge for “a future dependent on creative brains” and “sworn enemies of routine and the status quo” as reflecting widespread national fears of intellectual inferiority during the Space Race, and America’s need to differentiate itself with a new kind of ability. In contrast to Soviet totalitarianism, this new American talent, creativity, was doggedly individualistic and non-conformist.³

Seen through this lens, there is a markedly politicized dimension to creativity as we currently understand it. And I’d argue that it’s time for a change.

Even if we broaden our range of focus out to encompass the entire century and a half since the word’s first written documentation in 1859,⁴ Nelson suggests that it is no accident that creativity — as word, as faculty, as objective — arose not strictly out of the Enlightenment, but rather more definitively at the turn of the century, as Enlightenment ideals gave way to “the Romantic myth of the unbounded autonomy of the infinite self,” and the “a new arrangement of knowledge that created man as the central subject and object of reality” which such a shift entails.²

Nature as creative force

What does this history mean for my proposal that we stop talking about creativity, and start talking about alternative (and non-human) creativities?

Our collective amnesia surrounding the origins of creativity as concept is especially striking given that, at least with the benefit of hindsight, it was Charles Darwin who is arguably most responsible for liberating an understanding of creativity to exist outside the exclusive domain of the divine. Darwin’s work on evolution stands among the first scientific conjectures claiming that creation could happen ex nihilo by forces solely and materially within the world, through the random generation of variability upon which natural selective forces might then act.

On the Origin of Species was also critical more broadly to the unpinning of teleology as a central organizing principle to history, and to contextualizing the period’s anthropocentric view of the world by subsuming mankind within the theory of common descent.⁵

There is much more that can be elaborated upon in each of these legacies. For now, it will suffice to reflect that if we consider Darwin the secularizer of the province of creativity, then in fact it is nature, not man, that was first seen as capable of creativity in the means formerly granted only to deity. While the US sociopolitical climate of the mid-20th century demanded a distinctly human and individualistic reinterpretation of creativity for its own ends, it is this non-anthropocentric foundation for understanding creativity for which I now advocate a (re)turn.

This article continues my exploration of why we should replace the notion of creativity (singular) with that of alternative creativities (both human and non-human). Read the initial provocation.

References

[1] “Creativity” in the New World Encylopedia

[2] Nelson, Camilla. “The Invention of Creativity: the Emergence of a Discourse.” Cultural Studies Review 16, no. 2, (Sept 2010): 43–68.

[3] Nelson, Camilla. “Discourses of Creativity,” in Handbook of Language and Creativity, ed. Rodney Jones (New York: Routledge, 2015), 170–189.

[4] “Creativity” in the Online Etymology Dictionary

[5] Mayr, Ernst. “Darwin’s Influence on Modern Thought.” Scientific American, November 24, 2009.

Cover photo: A color plate illustrating Ascidiacea from Ernst Haeckel’s ‘’Kunstformen der Natur’’ (1899). Public domain in the United States and its country of origin.

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Jenny Filipetti

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Electronic media artist + technology educator. Stay in touch @jennyfilipetti on Twitter and Medium.

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