Artistic Creativity as Creative Evolution

Abstract

Within philosophy it is a rarity to find an analogy that argues from God to man. From Hesiod to the present, most arguments have been just the reverse. However, what I propose here is an argument from God to man: man creates like God creates. Yet, my proposal is not as odd as might appear because I am arguing within the context of another philosopher’s system. Indeed, Peirce worked the analogy between God and man in the standard way. He maintained that the anthropomorphizing of God, although (or perhaps because) it led to a vague conception, was indeed the only way we have to talk about God. In a letter to William James in 1905, he said, “To Schiller’s [F.C.S] anthropomorphism I subscribe in the main. And in particular if it implies theism, I am an anthropomorphist” (8.262). Thus, when I make my analogy from God to man within Peirce’s system, I am not arguing that we know God better and therefore can argue backwards to man. Rather, I am arguing that we get a better picture of what Peirce meant by creativity through his discussions of God than we do through his discussions of man. Peirce did not develop the idea of human artistic creativity at any length. Therefore, my analogy is not so much from God to man as it is from Peirce’s God to Peirce’s man, and the distinction is an important one.

As for the ultimate purpose of thought, which must be the purpose of everything, it is beyond human comprehension; but according to the stage of approach which my thought has made to it—with aid from many persons, among whom I may mention Royce (in his World and Individual), Schiller (in his Riddles of the Sphinx) as well, by the way, as the famous poet (in his Aesthetische Briefe), Henry James the elder (in his Substance and Shadow and in his conversations), together with Swedenborg himself—it is by the indefinite replication of self-control upon self-control that the vir is begotten, and by action, through thought, he grows an esthetic ideal, not for the behoof of his own poor noddle merely, but as the share which God permits him to have in the work of creation (5.402, n. 3, 1906).

I look upon creation as going on and I believe such vague idea as we can have of the power of creation is best identified with the idea of theism. So then the ideal would be to be fulfilling our appropriate offices in the work of creation (8.138, n. 4).