The Incipient Phase of the Creative Process

Abstract

The mystery of human creativity has always been centered on the sources of its incipient phase, often identified with a most complex psychic phenomenon called “inspiration.” But what is most puzzling in it is really its prompting spontaneity and its resources. “Inspiration” involves: (a) a deep stirring of our entire beingness; (b) a detachment from our familiar ground by a swing of imagination carrying us into boundless realms; (c) a nostalgia for something “new”; (d) an innermost propulsion to “make something” new ourselves. Why at a certain instant in time and space does such an imperative “impulse” to create something surge within us? Its resourcefulness seems to come from our “depth,” the unfathomable depth of the human being. Being seemingly incalculable, unaccountable, it might easily be attributed to some source external to the human being of which the human agent would merely be a receiver. In contrast, to have pursued the trajectory of the hence ensuing creative process back and forth, we come to identify this decisive factor of human endeavor as the initial spontaneity which springs forth at the borderline of the vital forces of life’s self-individualization and the setting forth of the Human Condition.