Abstract
Might traditional Chinese thought regarding creativity not just influence, but also enrich, contemporary European thought about the same? Moreover, is it possible that traditional Chinese thought regarding creativity might enrich contemporary thought both in a more broad, holistic sense, and more specifically regarding the nature and role of creativity as it pertains to scientific inquiry? In this paper, I elucidate why the answer to these questions is: yes. I explain in detail a classical Chinese conception of creativity rooted in Zhuangist philosophy and which centrally involves spontaneity engendered by embracing yóu遊, or “wandering”, rather than novelty or originality (even if processes or products that issue from such spontaneity very often are, or strike us as, novel or original). I then illustrate how this conception of creativity can be used to enrich contemporary thought regarding the nature and role of creativity both in general and as it pertains to scientific inquiry in particular, as well as how to engender creativity, by arguing that it might allow us to: i) more easily remove what is frequently an obstacle to creativity (viz., that of striving for novelty or originality, or even creativity itself, whatever it is taken to involve), and; ii) better understand creative agents as being more intimately connected with, and as processes within and products of, their environments (and thus better promote both extraordinary and ordinary creativity). Finally, I conclude by briefly remarking on how exploring various cultural perspectives on creativity promises to help us to better comprehend and promote creativity, by encouraging us to become more creative about creativity itself.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
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; or, whether the concept of creativity is a non-definitional concept that lacks necessary and sufficient conditions but that includes novelty or originality 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)
As Adrian Currie and Marta Halina argue, the developing consensus in analytic philosophy of creativity—based largely on so-called “conceptual analysis”, and relying on philosophical “intuitions” or “judgments”—is that a product is creative only if it is original, valuable, and due to the right kind of agency being exercised. (Currie & Halina, 2019, 8) I return to the issue of whether conceptual analysis is the best strategy for determining the nature and role of creativity in the conclusion of this paper.
What spontaneity consists in is discussed further in section 2.2; for more on this conception of spontaneity, see, e.g., Bruya (2010). For more on how spontaneity can come apart from novelty or originality, see en. 17. Also, this of course is not to deny that spontaneity is sometimes taken to play a role in European accounts of creativity. (For a recent account see, e.g., Kronfeldner, 2018, which includes originality and spontaneity as core aspects of creativity.) Rather, the crucial point is not that spontaneity does not play an important role in some European accounts of creativity; rather it is that they tend to nonetheless include originality as a necessary condition for creativity. (In this connection see, e.g., Currie, 2019.) The view explored here denies that necessity.
A note on translating “天” or “Tiān” 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, 169) For more on translating “天” or “Tiān”, 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 Zhuāngzǐ. Like many commentators, I use the capitalized Dào to refer to the so-called “Great Dào” 大道, the totality of [e.g.] objects, events, and processes that constitute the cosmos, with the lowercase dào referring to one or more distinct ways or paths within Dào. (Cf. Fraser, 2014a 546, fn. 16)
For more detail see, e.g., Niu & Sternberg (2006).
Roughly, “extraordinary” creativity is creativity that is taken to be “rare” and “ordinary” creativity is creativity that is taken to be common or “everyday”. (Cf. Currie & Halina, 2019, 5–6)
The former way of explicating this view is taken from Niu and Sternberg (2006, 30). However, the latter may be preferable for a number of reasons, including the following, due to 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 Dàodéjīng and the Làozǐ are two different names for one and the same text.
For more on Dào and its relationship to dào, see en. 7.
Ziporyn (2020, 11). Ziporyn notes in his 2009 translation that in translating the title of this chapter this way, an attempt is made to preserve its ambiguity, as it can be parsed either as 2–1 or as 1–2, thus meaning either “Assessments that Equalize Things” or “Equalizing the Assessments Made by All Things and, by Extension, All Things So Assessed.” (Ziporyn, 2009, 9, fn. 1)
Yóu can, in Fraser’s terms, therefore be interpreted as a “second-order” dào by which we explore the various “first-order” dào open to us—a meta-dào 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 dé 德, translatable as, e.g., “virtuosity” or “potency”, can hence be understood as, in effect, agents’ proficiency by which they yóu through [the] Dào. (Fraser, 2014a, 555) While Fraser himself discusses yóu simpliciter, in an attempt to remain neutral between his interpretation and that of commentators like Michael Nylan (according to which yóu is less an ideal than it is an inescapable feature of life), I’ve elected to use the expression “embracing yóu” instead, as in Fraser’s terms, yóu-ing appears to entail embracing yóu. (Cf. Nylan, 2017, 416)
Regarding the matter of translating the title of the first chapter of the Zhuāngzǐ, Michael Nylan writes: “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)
Thank you to Ian James Kidd for suggesting this way of putting the point.
Note that the wheelwright is not doing anything novel or original (in any way) unless it is held, say, that novelty or originality can be had “on the cheap”, such that all actions are, or everything we do is, considered to be in some sense “novel” or “original” because we have not done exactly those things ever before—something that contemporary commentators on creativity do not typically appear to want to commit themselves to. For this reason, however, some add an additional constraint: surprise. (Cf. Gaut, 2010, 1039) Here too, however, surprise appears to be absent.
Many commentators distinguish between creative agents, products, and processes. The focus of this paper is creative agents; however, as will be returned to in section 3.3, on a Zhuangist approach, creative agents can perhaps be better seen as aspects or products of creative processes.
Thank you to an anonymous referee for encouraging me to emphasize this.
Thank you to an anonymous referee for suggesting that these aspects of this story be discussed.
As players explore the problem space, a danger arises of mistaking a local maximum for a global maximum and ceasing exploration too early. At base, then, problem-solving can be conceived of as trade-offs between exploring the problem space, aiming to maximize the information gained (at the cost of trying out bad solutions) and employing information to play efficiently, aiming to optimize good outcomes (at the cost of potentially landing on a local maximum). Often when it comes to AI, getting the right mix between exploration and employment is based on getting the right system of rewards. If the rewards for workable solutions are too high, the agent is more likely to fixate on a local maximum rather than searching out better solutions in the space. (Currie & Halina, 2019, 9) My suggestion is thus that when it comes to human endeavors, often the rewards for novel or original solutions (as opposed to those that are spontaneously integrated) are too high, thereby preventing people from searching out better solutions in the space—and hence, ironically, from discovering a variety of novel or original solutions.
Thank you to an anonymous referee for registering these concerns and encouraging me to address them.
Thank you to an anonymous referee for both posing these questions and pressing me to respond to them.
I would like to thank Paul Roth for suggesting this example. See also, e.g., https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/sports/baseball/061700bba-yanks-mind.html
Thank you to an anonymous referee for this suggestion.
As Currie and Halina note, Patricia Fara explores how modern Western notions of “creative genius” emerged in light of the myths built around Isaac Newton. The notion of creativity, originally associated with divinity (as discussed in the introduction to this paper), according to Fara was attached to literary inspiration before becoming secularized and associated with rational scientific discovery, most paradigmatically associated with Newton. (Currie & Halina, 2019, 42) For more on this, see Fara (2002). It is interesting to note as well that, like the notion that creativity centrally involves novelty or originality, the positive notion of a lone, exceptional, Godlike “creative genius” is also not universally shared; in one study, Korean students were reported to be more likely to characterize such a figure negatively as a loner rather than a leader. (Niu & Sternberg, 2002)
For more on Chien-Shiung Wu in this connection, see, e.g., https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/channeling-ada-lovelace-chien-shiung-wu-courageous-hero-of-physics/
For recent discussions of cross-cultural conceptual engineering, see, e.g., Vaidya (2020).
For other recent discussions of conceptual engineering, see, e.g., Cappelen (2018), Jackman (2020), and Chalmers (forthcoming).
References
Angle, S. (2018). Tian as Cosmos in Zhu Xi's neo-Confucianism. Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, 17(2), 169–185.
Baker, M. (2016). Is there a reproducibility crisis? Nature, 533, 452–454.
Browne, E. J. (2003). Charles Darwin: The power of place (Vol. 2). Princeton University Press.
Bruya, B. (2010). The rehabilitation of spontaneity: A new approach in philosophy of action. Philosophy East and West, 60(2), 207–250.
Cappelen, H. (2018). Fixing language: An essay on conceptual engineering. Oxford University Press.
Chalmers, D. (forthcoming). What is conceptual engineering and what should it be? Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
Chung, J. (2020). Faith, reason, and the paradox of Wu-wei. In S. Sikka & A. Peetush (Eds.), Asian philosophies and the idea of religion (pp. 125–146). Routledge.
Crasnow, S. Feminist perspectives on science. E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Winter 2020 Edition).
Currie, A. (2019). Existential risk, creativity, and well-adapted science. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 76, 39–48.
Currie, A. and M. Halina. 2019. “Generating creativity.”
Fara, P. (2002). Newton: The making of genius. Columbia University Press.
Feyerabend, P. (1999). In B. Terpstra (Ed.), Conquest of abundance: A tale of abstraction versus the richness of being. University of Chicago Press.
Fraser, C. (2014a). Wandering the way: A Eudaimonistic approach to the Zhuangzi. Dao, 13(4), 541–565.
Fraser, C. (2014b). Heart-Fasting, Forgetting, and Using the Heart Like a Mirror: Applied Emptiness in the Zhuangzi. In J. Liu & D. Berger (Eds.), Nothingness in Asian Philosophy (pp. 197–212). Routledge.
Gaut, B. (2010). The philosophy of creativity. Philosophy Compass, 5(12), 1034–1046.
Graham, A. C. (2001). Chuang-Tzŭ: The inner chapters (UK ed.). Hackett.
Huff, B. (2017). Servants of heaven: The place of virtue in the Confucian Cosmos. International Communication of Chinese Culture, 4(2), 271–298.
Ivanhoe, P. J. (2010). The values of spontaneity. In Y. Kampor, J. Tao, & P. J. Ivanhoe (Eds.), Taking confucian ethics seriously. State University of New York Press.
Jackman, H. (2020). Conceptual engineering without conceptual change. Inquiry, 63(9–10), 909–918.
Katsafanas, P. (2018). Constitutivism about practical reasons. In D. Star (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of reasons and normativity (pp. 367–394). Oxford University Press.
Kronfeldner, M. (2018). Explaining creativity. In B. Gaut & M. Kieran (Eds.), Creativity and philosophy. Taylor and Francis.
Machery, E. (2017). Philosophy within its proper bounds. Oxford University Press.
Margolis, E., & Laurence, S. (2019). Concepts. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concepts/. Accessed 2 Mar 2022.
Mattice, S. (2017). Daoist aesthetics of the everyday and the fantastical. In K. H. S. Maira & S. Sikka (Eds.), Artistic visions and the promise of beauty. Sophia studies in cross-cultural philosophy of traditions and cultures (Vol. 16, pp. 251–265). Springer.
Niu, W., & Sternberg, R. (2002). Contemporary studies on the concept of creativity: The east and the west. Journal of Creative Behavior, 36, 269–288.
Niu, W., & Sternberg, R. (2006). The philosophical roots of Western and eastern conceptions of creativity. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 26(1–2), 18–38.
Nylan, M. (2017). Zhuangzi: Closet Confucian? European Journal of Political Theory, 16(4), 411–429.
Rumelhart, D., Smolensky, P., McClelland, J., & Hinton, G. (1986). Schemata and sequential thought processes in PDP models. In D. E. Rumelhart, J. L. Mcclelland & the PDP Research Group (Eds.), Parallel distributed processing. MIT Press.
Schwitzgebel, E. (2017). A theory of jerks and other philosophical misadventures. MIT Press.
Slingerland, E. (2003). Effortless action: Wu-Wei as conceptual metaphor and spiritual ideal in early China. Oxford University Press.
Toon, A. (2015). Where is the understanding? Synthese, 192(12), 3859–3875.
Vaidya, A. (2020). Twelve Arthâpatti: An Anglo-Indo-Analytic Attempt at Cross-Cultural Conceptual Engineering. In M. Keating (Ed.), Controversial Reasoning in Indian Philosophy: Major Texts and Arguments on Arthâpatti (pp. 311–332). Bloomsbury.
Van Norden, B. W. (2011). Introduction to classical Chinese philosophy. Hackett.
Velleman, D. (2009). How we get along. Cambridge University Press.
Wingate, R. (2011). Thinking about evolution: Combinatorial play as a strategy for exercising scientific creativity. Journal of Biological Education, 45(1), 50–53.
Yang, X. (2008). Some issues in Chinese philosophy of religion. Philosophy Compass, 3(3), 551–569.
Ziporyn, B. (2009). Zhuangzi: The essential writings. Hackett.
Ziporyn, B. (2020). Zhuangzi: The complete writings. Hackett.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Adrian Currie and Anton Killin for inviting me to contribute this paper for this special issue, as well as for reading previous drafts of it and providing invaluable commentary. I would also like to thank two anonymous referees as well as audiences at the CFI Creativity Workshop for their extremely helpful feedback, without which my work on this and related topics would not be developing as nearly as well as it is.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This article belongs to the Topical Collection: Creativity in Art, Science & Mind
Guest Editors: Adrian Currie, Anton Killin
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Chung, J. Creativity and Yóu: the Zhuāngzǐ and scientific inquiry. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 12, 25 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-022-00448-y
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-022-00448-y