Abstract
This article explores how aspects of traditional Chinese thought regarding creativity can influence and enrich contemporary thought about related topics: specifically, how creativity can be construed as an epistemic or intellectual virtue, and the benefits of considering it as such. It proceeds in three parts. First, I review a conception of creativity suggested by aspects of the Zhuangzi that centrally involves forms of spontaneity and adaptivity engendered by embracing you 遊, or “wandering”, contrasting it with more conventional conceptions of creativity that emphasize novelty or originality. Second, I explain how this conception of creativity illuminates how creativity can be an epistemic virtue of a surprising sort: one that concerns a disposition to—borrowing an expression from Chris Fraser—“ride along with things”. This “riding along” is ironically engendered by letting go of what David Wong has characterized as “the obsession with being right”, about which the Zhuangzi expresses concern. I argue that, while this conception of creativity eschews fixed goals, including epistemically-oriented goals like apprehending truth or developing knowledge, there are nevertheless good reasons to count creativity (so understood) as an epistemic virtue. Third, I connect these explorations with current conversations (begun by Matthew Kieran and C. Thi Nguyen) that already treat creativity or, relatedly, play as an epistemic or intellectual virtue, and explore how engaging the Zhuangzi in the manner outlined promises to help extend them.
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Notes
The term “centrally involves” is used to leave it open as to whether the concept of creativity is a definitional concept that includes, as a necessary condition, novelty or originality, for example, or whether the concept of creativity is a non-definitional concept that lacks necessary and sufficient conditions but that includes originality or novelty in some other way (cf. Margolis & Laurence, 2019).
The term “European” is used to replace what other commentators have discussed using the term “Western”, as the supposed distinction between “Western” and “non-Western” or “Eastern” is fraught—although, the supposed distinction between “European” and “non-European” may turn out to be in some ways problematic as well. Further, “European” should be taken to refer to the cultures and traditions of Europe and to those whose cultural origins are most heavily influenced by European cultures or traditions (cf. Niu & Sternberg, 2006).
Note that some instances of “divine” creativity may also have “worldly” origins and vice versa, as these two ways of thinking about sources of creativity are not mutually exclusive. Also, while divine creativity is the focus of much historical European scholarship, contemporary scholars tend to focus on worldly creativity, especially in the social sciences and sciences (cf. Fara, 2002; Niu & Sternberg, 2006).
To this Bruya adds, “If one allows ‘spontaneity’ as a technical term for Daoist self-causation, it would be consistent with the Western etymology of the term, but, of course, both ‘self’ and ‘causation’ mean something quite different in the different cultural contexts.” (Bruya, 2010, 218) One might also add that products, processes, or agents that are creative in this sense involve “productivity” insofar as they facilitate integrative creative processes. For more on this conception of spontaneity, see Bruya (2010).
For more on strategies ad hoc, see Valmisa (2021).
In one paper, Weihua Niu points out that on this understanding “novelty is implied as a feature of everlasting production or context co-created by humans and the prior context.” (Niu, 2012, 280) In this way, one can include novelty or originality as a condition of creativity if one chooses. However, as discussed below, that approach suggests that novelty or originality can be marginal or had “on the cheap”, in the sense that all actions are, or everything we do is, in some sense “novel” or “original” because we haven’t done exactly those things ever before—a position that contemporary commentators on creativity have typically been reluctant to adopt. For this reason, some add an additional constraint: surprise (cf. Gaut, 2010, 1039). That addition can be criticized, however, on the grounds that it’s unclear that creative products, processes, or agents universally involve any surprise or “surprisingness”, especially if we take seriously the possibility, for example, that the wheelwright in the Zhuangzi, or people engaging actively in processes related to grief and bereavement (cf. Chung, 2023) are engaging in creative activities. If all products, processes, or agents trivially exemplify novelty or originality, but creativity needn’t involve any sort of “surprisingness”, it might then be preferable to conceptualize creativity in a way that takes account of the different degrees of spontaneity and adaptivity at work in diverse creative enterprises. My approach suggests that products, processes, or agents exemplify creativity to the extent that they involve spontaneity and adaptivity (with less creative products, processes, or agents involving less, and more creative products, processes, or agents involving more).
A note on translating “天” or “Tian” as “Heaven”: according to Stephen Angle, “[a] quick summary of the career of tian runs something like the following. Early meanings include ‘the sky’ and the name of the Zhou people’s sky deity. During the classical era, many texts continue to imbue tian with what we can loosely call normative and religious significances, though compared to the early Zhou, tian in the classical period is often considerably abstracted or naturalized.” (Angle, 2018) For more on translating “天” or “Tian”, see, e.g., Yang (2008), Huff (2017), and Angle (2018).
As Bryan Van Norden explains, “This crucial philosophical term has five related senses. ‘Dao’ can mean a path or road (as in the modern Chinese compound “dàolù 道路,” roadway). In both Chinese and English, there is a natural metaphorical extension from ‘way’ in the sense of a literal path to ‘way’ in the sense of a way to do something. Closely related to this is ‘Way’ as the linguistic account of a way of doing something. From these senses, ‘Way’ came to refer to the right way to live one’s life and organize society. Eventually the term also came to mean the ultimate metaphysical entity that was responsible for the way the world is and the way that it ought to be…. [However,] [a]lthough it can have any of these five senses, the primary meaning of dao (for most Eastern Zhou [i.e., pre-Qin] thinkers) is the right way to live and organize society” (Van Norden, 2011, 11). The fifth sense of the term, however, is often considered to be in play in so-called “Daoist” texts such as the Zhuangzi. Like many commentators, I’ll use the capitalized Dao to refer to the so-called “Great Dao” 大道, the totality that constitutes the cosmos, with the lowercase dao referring to one or more distinct ways or paths within Dao (cf. Fraser, 2014a 546, fn. 16).
The former way of explicating this view is taken from Niu & Sternberg (2006, 30). However, the latter may be preferable for a number of reasons, including the following, courtesy of an anonymous referee: “There is a sense that human beings are ‘natural’, in the sense of our being embedded agents within the world—among the ‘ten thousand things’, as the Zhuangzi says. But talk of unity is complicated by two further emphases. First, humans have certain distinctive capacities or features, ones which serve to simultaneously distinguish us as certain special kinds of things (most notably, creatures able to apprehend the Way) while also, to a degree, setting us apart from the world—alienating us from it, such that the unity with the world enjoyed by other creatures is all too easily lost. Second, there is the lament across all the Schools that human existence, as it has come to be, encourages alienation from the world—upsetting the more innocent, natural sense of integration with the world enjoyed by other creatures (the Daoists, Zhuangzi and Liezi, are especially good on this). It is unclear, for the Daoists, whether human beings, as they have come to be, could actually attain the desired sort of unity: too much has gone wrong, for too long for that to be an attainable existential possibility.”
For the uninitiated, the Daodejing and the Laozi are two different names for one and the same text.
For more on Dao and its relationship to dao, see fn. 9.
Related to this, Karyn Lai has recently proposed an account of Zhuangzian freedom that incorporates the notion of working with constraints, which fits with these suggestions insofar as agents who embrace you embody a spirit of openness in their undertakings: a spirit of openness that I venture can be engendered by a general skepticism regarding distinctions (cf. Lai, 2022, 15–16).
While Fraser himself discusses you simpliciter, in an attempt to remain neutral between his interpretation and that of commentators like Michael Nylan (2017), according to which you is less an ideal than it is an inescapable feature of life, I’ve elected to use the expression “embracing you” instead, as in Fraser’s terms, you-ing appears to entail embracing you. Relatedly, regarding the matter of translating the title of the first chapter of the Zhuangzi, Nylan comments: “I would not deny that the famous binomial term xiaoyao gains the delicious meaning of ‘free and easy wandering’ during the Six Dynasties period (third–sixth centuries), only that in the sole Han-era reading, xiaoyao indisputably means ‘befuddled’” (Nylan, 2017, 416).
[Embracing] you can, in Fraser’s terms, therefore be interpreted as a “second-order” dao by which we explore the various “first-order” dao open to us—a meta-dao of recognizing and taking up potential paths presented by interactions between agents’ personal capacities and motivations and the circumstances in which they find themselves. Individual instances of de 德, translatable as, for example, “virtuosity” or “potency”, can hence be understood as, in effect, agents’ proficiency by which agents you through [the] Dao (Fraser, 2014a, 555).
Elsewhere I’ve written about how the approach to creativity motivated above can help us to understand why navigating loss—specifically, the type of loss involving the death of loved ones—is a creative activity. There, I explain that we can employ the story of the wheelwright in this connection. For, although there’s an abundance of books dispensing advice on how to do so, ultimately living with death is a deeply personal endeavor that—like carving wheels by hand—can’t be fully captured through a programmatic collection of directions. We must rather respond to precise particularities of our situations (concerning our thoughts, feelings, and overall circumstances) to create what we want to create (such as a sense of peace or lasting appreciation of love of the deceased), something that can’t be accomplished by imposing a plan, even if we work with various provisional and highly malleable strategic approaches on the fly as we go along. Moreover, in working through our thoughts, feelings, and overall circumstances in all their idiosyncrasies, it’s not that we’re doing anything all that different from what many others have already done as they’ve grappled with their own losses, or even what we’ve already done ourselves as we’ve grappled with our own. Nonetheless—again, like carving wheels—this process is creative to the extent that it involves spontaneous and adaptive integrating, combining, or balancing of contrasting aspects such as the mournful and the celebratory, the resentful and the grateful, and the despairing and the joyous. Indeed, even Zhuangzi himself can be understood as engaging in such a creative activity after the death of his own wife in chapter eighteen of the text, the Zhi Le 至樂, translatable as (e.g.) “Perfect Happiness” or “Perfect Joy” (Chung, 2023).
Concerning this, Kieran notes that one might respond that while epistemic creativity admittedly might not yield a high percentage of apprehensions of truths or developments of knowledge, when it does, the apprehensions of truths or developments of knowledge that it does yield are of the most valuable kinds—therefore making it appropriate to consider apprehensions of truth or developments of knowledge to be fundamental goals of epistemic creativity (cf. Zagzebski, 1996, 182). However, as Kieran himself replies, this overlooks the fact that even more fundamentally, epistemic creativity doesn’t aim at apprehensions of truth or developments of knowledge at all, even if ultimately it can yield such achievements. Rather, much of the time what’s aimed at is the development of epistemically promising ways of inquiring into and conceiving of the world. And the range of epistemic goods that this incorporates goes well beyond apprehensions of truth or developments of knowledge, even if such are included.
Admittedly, the way this is written is such that it can sound like I’m describing a couple trying to get pregnant. I’ve therefore left this written as it is intentionally, as our inquiries are very much like this insofar as they’re meant to bear some kind of fruit, even if that fruit isn’t truth or knowledge and may even consist in the process of inquiry itself. This relates to the discussion of epistemic creativity, intellectual playfulness, and autotelicity below.
Note that this needn’t merely be interpreted as expressing skepticism about knowing-what to do, but also skepticism about knowing-how to do whatever it is that one’s doing, as knowing-how, like knowing-that, presupposes that there are applicable standards of assessment—standards of assessment that, like all standards of assessment, can be undermined by skeptical arguments such as those located in the Qi Wu Lun. Moreover, the popular view that the Zhuangzi particularly exalts know-how or skill has been forcefully questioned as it pertains to the inner chapters. (Schwitzgebel, 2019) It’s therefore interesting to note that this argument bears notable similarities to Wittgenstein’s treatment of rule-following: as David Egan writes in this connection, “To understand the force of Wittgenstein’s example […] it’s important to note that everything in the training that the pupil was given is compatible with his going on in this way. Wittgenstein imagines the teacher accounting for the pupil’s departure from the expected procedure by saying ‘[T]his person finds it natural, once given our explanations, to understand our order as we would understand the order ‘Add 2 up to 1000, 4 up to 2000, 6 up to 3000, and so on’ (PI §185). And if, in our training, we had made that point clear, there are infinitely many other ways in which the pupil might have diverged from us. No training can exhaustively dictate how we should extend a practice in every case.” (Egan, 2021, 572–573).
I’m inclined to think this a welcome result, as there’s ample reason to suspect that compilers of the Zhuangzi might’ve been suspicious of inclinations to, in a clear and final, “deeming” fashion, discriminate between these sorts of features.
For more on the difference between the propositional and perspectival doubt, as well as some of their mechanics and purposes, see Chung (2021). Briefly, propositional doubt involves us in doubting the truth of claims, and perspectival doubt involves us in doubting the fittingness of perspectives.
For further discussion regarding this suggestion, see Chung (2022a).
Thanks are due to the inimitable Mike Yuill for this conversation, and, as ever, his friendship.
It’s worth noting in this connection that curious is etymologically connected to Latin cūriōsus used only subjectively “full of care or pains, careful, assiduous, inquisitive” and has been used in the past, though such uses are obsolete, to mean things like “ingenious, skilful, clever, expert.” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2022) Also, none of this is to suggest that only curiosity underlies all of our spontaneous, adaptive activity. Rather, it’s to suggest that it’s an integral component.
As Mercedes Valmisa has suggested to me, these are what Jon Elster has called “by-product states”: states that only come about as the by-product of actions undertaken for other ends and cannot be attained by willful trying. For some of them, the more you try, the less you can achieve them, like trying to go to sleep when you’re insomniac. In these cases, Elster adds, the failures of action can’t be explained by an inadequate choice of means to an end; that is, it’s not a failure by lack of means, but by an excess, as the mere fact of having a willed strategy prevents the state from manifesting.
For additional discussion on poetry writing in this connection, see Chung (2023).
I don’t take myself to have come anywhere near settling the matter of how similar embracing you and play are here, as this issue is complex and controversial; for the purposes of this paper, I want merely to register the possibility that they may be to some degree different. For further discussion on why we might seek to treat these concepts differently, see Levinovitz (2012).
I’m interpreting perspectives, as Elisabeth Camp does (Camp, 2017), in dispositional rather than propositional terms, thereby distinguishing them from sets of beliefs.
As David Egan has suggested to me, there’s plausibly a more general version of this problem that goes beyond being captivated by an old flame: “To the extent that you decide you have a ‘type’, you might be unwilling to consider people who don’t fall into that type when a more open consideration might reveal valuable new possibilities. This is one of the dangers, I think, of online dating, where you’re pretty much encouraged to decide in advance what you’re looking for in a way that limits the possibilities you might discover.”.
Special thanks are due to Masashi Kasaki for inviting me to speak about the topic discussed in this paper as part of a panel on East Asian Philosophy and Virtue Epistemology at the 2020 American Philosophical Association (Pacific Division) conference, as well as audiences at the Gettysburg Workshop on Chinese and Comparative Philosophy: Openness, Contingency, and Change at Gettysburg College for their feedback on this paper delivered as a talk on April 8, 2022. Similar thanks are due also to Mercedes Valmisa, Ryan Tanner, Zachary Gartenberg, and David Egan for generously commenting on previous drafts of this paper, along with Elizabeth Brake and Clair Morrissey for their superb editorial assistance as I endeavored to complete it.
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Chung, J.N. The Zhuangzi, creativity, and epistemic virtue. Philos Stud 180, 815–842 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01917-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01917-z