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The Value of Malevolent Creativity

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Notes

  1. See e.g. Richard E. Mayer, “Fifty Years of Creativity Research”, in R. J. Sternberg, ed., Handbook of Creativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 450; N. C. Andreasen, The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius (New York: Dana Press, 2005), p. 17; Berys Gaut, “The Philosophy of Creativity”, Philosophy Compass, Vol. 5, No. 12 (2010): 1034-1046 (p. 1039). For the purposes of this paper, I will be using “novel” and “original” interchangeably. It is worth noting, however, that some theorists draw a sharp conceptual distinction between these two terms (see e.g. Francis Sibley, “Originality and Value”, British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 25, No. 2 [1985]: 169-184).

  2. The creativity of an individual is then a function of the quantity of creative products that he or she generates (Davide Piffer, “Can Creativity be Measured? An Attempt to Clarify the Notion of Creativity and the General Directions for Future Research”, Thinking Skills and Creativity, Vol. 7, No. 3 [2012]: 258-264, p. 259).

  3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. by James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 137.

  4. Arthur J. Cropley, David H. Cropley, and James C. Kaufman, “Malevolent Creativity: A Functional Model of Creativity in Terrorism and Crime”, Creativity Research Journal, Vol. 20, No. 2 (2008): 105-115 (p. 107).

  5. Gaut 2010, op. cit., p. 1039; Alison Hills and Alexander Bird, “Against Creativity”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2018a) (doi: 10.1111/phpr.12511); Paisley Livingston, “Explicating ‘creativity’”, in Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran, eds., Creativity and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2018), p. 115.

  6. Gaut 2010, op. cit, p. 1040.

  7. Cropley et al. 2008, op. cit., p. 107.

  8. For a comprehensive analysis of this dichotomy, see Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen, “Intrinsic and Extrinsic Values”, in Iwao Hirose and Jonas Olson, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Value Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 29-43.

  9. C. I. Lewis, An analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (Illinois: Open Court, 1946), p. 391.

  10. For an extended treatment of inherent value, see Robert Audi, Reasons, Rights and Values (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 47-9.

  11. It should also be noted that inherent value is not peculiar to aesthetic objects. As Audi (op. cit., pp. 48-9) demonstrates, moral behaviour, for example, can also possess inherent value.

  12. Cropley et al. 2008, op. cit., p. 108. See also Arthur J. Cropley, and David H. Cropley, “Engineering Creativity. A Systems Concept of Functional Creativity”, in James. C. Kaufman and J. Baer, eds., Faces of the Muse: How People Think, Work and Act Creatively in Diverse Domains (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005), pp. 169-185. Livingston (op. cit.) also advances a functional notion of the value criterion, though he does not distinguish between functional and aesthetic creativity.

  13. Cropley et al. 2008, op. cit., pp. 105-6.

  14. David Novitz, “Creativity and Constraint”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 77, No. 1 (1999): 67-82 (p. 78). See also David Novitz, “Explanations of Creativity”, in Berys Gaut and Paisley Livingston, eds., The Creation of Art: New Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 186-7.

  15. Gaut 2010, op. cit., p. 1040. Sternberg takes a similar tack, recommending that we “assess and teach for wisdom in conjunction with assessing and teaching for intelligence and creativity”. On his normative definition of creativity, ascribing value to malevolent phenomena betrays a lack of wisdom; he consequently discounts any predication of creativity to such phenomena. Robert J. Sternberg, “The Dark Side of Creativity and How to Combat It”, in David H. Cropley, Arthur J. Cropley James C. Kaufman, and Mark A. Runco, eds., The Dark Side of Creativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 318.

  16. Gaut 2010, op. cit., p. 1040.

  17. Livingston (op cit., pp. 117-8) does not view the fact that failures are often labelled ‘creative’ as substantive counterevidence to the functional model. Livingston claims that creative failures always make some progress towards the instrumental end sought by their creators, even if they ultimately fall short of that end. He cites the example of the failures that plagued the early years of aviation. However, Livingston does not consider Gaut’s counterexample of the failed terrorist plot, which, viewed instrumentally, represents an unmitigated failure, and can nonetheless quite legitimately be described as creative.

  18. Berys Gaut, “The Value of Creativity”, in Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran, eds., Creativity and Philosophy, op. cit., pp. 128-9.

  19. Hills and Bird 2018a, op. cit., p. 9; Alison Hills and Alexander Bird, “Creativity without Value”, in Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran, eds., Creativity and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2018b), pp. 98-9.

  20. Hills and Bird 2018b, op. cit., p. 98.

  21. Hills and Bird 2018a, op. cit., pp. 7-12; Hills and Bird 2018b, op. cit., pp. 96-101.

  22. Hills and Bird 2018a, op. cit., p. 10.

  23. Ibid., p. 18.

  24. Cynthia A. Hoffner, Yuki Fujioka, Jiali Ye, and Amal G. S. Ibrahim, “Why We Watch: Factors Affecting Exposure to Tragic Television News”, Mass Communication and Society, Vol. 12, No. 2 (2009): 193-216 (p. 210).

  25. Quoted in Richard Schechner, Performed Imaginaries (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 57 (emphasis mine).

  26. Quoted in Rebecca Allison, “9/11 wicked but a work of art, says Damien Hirst”, The Guardian, September 11, 2002. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/sep/11/arts.september11 (emphasis mine).

  27. Ian McEwan, “Beyond Belief”, The Guardian, September 12, 2001. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/12/september11.politicsphilosophyandsociety (emphasis mine).

  28. Indeed, the way in which Stockhausen’s comments resonate with notions of the sublime has already been treated in some detail by Christine Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 21.

  29. Friedrich Schiller, “On the Sublime”, in Friedrich Schiller, Naïve and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime, trans. by Julius A. Elias (New York: F. Ungar Publishing Co., 1975), p. 198.

  30. Kant, op. cit., p. 76, p. 99.

  31. Tamworth Reresby, A Miscellany of Ingenious Thoughts and Reflections, in Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, eds., The Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 43-4.

  32. John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, in Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, eds., The Sublime, op. cit., pp. 36-7 (quoted in Battersby, op. cit., pp. 5-6).

  33. Margaret Boden, The Creative Mind. Myths and Mechanisms (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 1.

  34. Gaut 2010, op. cit., p. 1039.

  35. Boden 2004, op. cit., p. 278. See also Margaret Boden, “What is Creativity”, in Margaret Boden, ed., Dimensions of Creativity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 74-117. For a critical analysis of Boden’s position, see Novitz 1999, op. cit.

  36. Nico Frijda, The Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 18. See also Jonathan Haidt, “The Moral Emotions”, in Richard J. Davidson, Klaus Scherer, and H. Hill Goldsmith, eds., Handbook of Affective Sciences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 302.

  37. Boden 2004, op. cit., p. 3, p. 9, p. 41.

  38. Boden 2004, op. cit.

  39. Jonathan Haidt and Dacher Keltner, “Approaching Awe, A Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion”, Cognition and Emotion, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2003): 297-314 (p. 304).

  40. Here is not the place for a comprehensive analysis of the precise epistemic conditions that need to be satisfied in order for a particular perception to transform our “conceptual space” and thereby qualify as saliently original. For more on the nature of the novelty that underpins creative surprise, I refer the reader to Boden’s extensive work on the topic. See esp. Boden 2004, op. cit.; see also Livingston, op. cit.

  41. Jerry Oppenheimer, Madoff with the Money (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), p. 96 (original emphasis).

  42. Boden 2004, op. cit., p. 43.

  43. Livingston, op. cit.

  44. Sibley, op. cit.; Bruce Vermazen, “The Aesthetic Value of Originality”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1991): 266-79.

  45. Sibley, op. cit., p. 175.

  46. See e.g. Gaut 2010, op. cit.; Cropley et al. 2008, op. cit.; Hills and Bird 2018a, op. cit.

  47. See e.g. Kevin Pinkerton and Shuhua Zhou, “Effects of Morbid Curiosity on Perception, Attention, and Reaction to Bad News”, The University of Alabama McNair Journal, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2007): 129-43.

  48. For a comprehensive review of the evolutionary advantages of wonder, see Robert C. Fuller, Wonder: From Emotion to Spirituality (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); and Robert C. Fuller, “From Biology to Spirituality: The Emotional Dynamics”, in Sophia Vasalou, ed., Practices of Wonder: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives, (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2012), pp. 64-87.

  49. William McDougall, Introduction to Social Psychology, 2nd edition (London: Methuen, 1908), p. 49.

  50. Ibid., p. 215.

  51. Carroll Izard and Brian Ackerman, “Motivational, Organizational, and Regulatory Functions of Discrete Emotions”, in Michael Lewis and Jeanette Haviland-Jones, eds., Handbook of Emotions, 2nd edition (New York: The Guilford Press, 2000), p. 257.

  52. Fuller 2006, op. cit., p. 37.

  53. Ibid., pp. 37-8.

  54. Ibid., p. 123.

  55. Schiller, op. cit., p. 207; see also Kant, op. cit., pp. 84-5.

  56. McDougall, op. cit., p. 59.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Eileen John, Bruno Verbeek, Jaanus Sooväli, Mats Volberg and Kadri Simm for their helpful comments on early versions of this article. I am also grateful to the European Regional Development Fund (project MOBJD403) for generously funding this research.

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Pearson, J.S. The Value of Malevolent Creativity. J Value Inquiry 55, 127–144 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-020-09741-6

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