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1.1 Story of a Great Return

Creativity is back on the agenda! Widely discussed and debated once again, it has indisputably returned to being à la page, and its language has spread “from the narrow world of specialists to the everyday life of ordinary people” (Melucci 1994a, p. 12).

The unequivocal proof of this return can be seen in the increase in the number of creative consulting agencies and in-house creativity departments, the surge in “how-to” books (see Jaussi and Dionne 2003), the expansion of research, the creation of institutes, and applications in the organizational field. This is mainly because economists are definitely looking at creativity as a form of capital, but also and above all “as an engine of economic growth and social dynamism” (McWilliam and Dawson 2008, p. 635).

In short, being creative today pays off. It is in the world of big business, in fact, that cultural models in which creativity is perceived as a value of high social desirability are elaborated; “the new mantra is ‘be creative’; change and the new are values and we must continually adapt to them” (Finney Botti 1994, p. 101).

The big companies themselves are the trailblazers of change and renewal: the capitalists who command today are no longer the owners of “hard” structures, of mines, ports, steel plants, or car factories. Zygmunt Bauman observed that in the current list of the richest Americans, only a very low percentage are industrialists; the rest are financiers, lawyers, doctors, scientists, architects, programmers, designers, and all sorts of celebrities from the worlds of entertainment, television, and sports. The largest fortunes are found in invention, communication, marketing gimmicks, and in entertainment; in other words, in new ideas. It is the people with brilliant ideas “who nowadays inhabit the rooms of the upper floors. The main resources of which capital is made […] are knowledge, inventiveness, imagination, the ability to think and the courage to think differently—qualities that universities were invited to create, disseminate and instill” (Bauman 2012, p. 57).

In the light of the above, it has been observed that this phenomenon has upset the classic analytical categories of sociology, a process that has recently led to the emergence of a new class, the “creative class.” Its members are identified as “producers of creativity,” and as this is the real driving element behind economic development, “in our society they have become, in terms of influence, the dominant class” (Florida 2002, It. trans. 2003, p. 3). Result: “In the past few decades, creativity has become rather like money: everyone seems to want more of it” (Briskman 2009, p. 17).

That said, it is still true that the value of the creative attitude, once again now held in esteem and sought after, goes well beyond the immediate utility of its instrumental applications. Creativity, as we will see, is a dynamism that has to do with the very expression of human action, identity, values, and social and civil achievements: it is therefore now considered “fundamental for our survival” (Richards 2007) and “necessary for our process of consciousness” (Lindqvist 2003).

It is perhaps due to these insights that recent studies dedicated to this topic have progressively expanded to various sectors of human expressiveness and work, where the positive contribution of creativity to academic performance, violence prevention, and overall success in life is increasingly evident. This interest is based on the assumption that creativity is an indispensable skill in an increasingly complex, uncertain, and changing world: this could be the reason that an increasing number of countries have emphasized the “developing students’ creative potential in education policies” (Hernández-Torrano and Ibrayeva 2020, p. 1) and that “even the lowest workers are nowadays pressed to display creativity and originality” (Reuter 2015, p. 18).

Although the phenomenon can be investigated scientifically, such studies nonetheless come up against an impasse: we, too, in our investigation of creativity, will have to face this aspect that eludes analytical strategies and will be obliged to define creativity as a “mysterious continent of the spirit,” a kind of “disconcerting tension” that we carry within us and that always “pushes us to adjust nature with culture, so that the world we leave our children will be different to the world we inherited from our fathers” (De Masi 2003, p. 15).

1.2 Creativity as a “Subject of Study”

Generally speaking, creativity has received relatively little academic attention compared to the broader mental faculty referred to as “intelligence”: this may be partly due to cultural reasons and partly to the difficulty in understanding what exactly the object of the study is and especially “in defining and measuring the creativity dependent variable” (Batey et al. 2010, p. 532).

Things started to change in the middle of the last century: sector studies were very few and far between until Joy Paul Guilford (1950), then president of the American Psychological Association, pointed out in a now historic speech that there was “little research on creativity relative to the importance of such research to the field of psychology” (Sternberg 2005, p. 370) and the little that there was, was pitiful.

We will now delve into the evolution of the human sciences: in order to have a clearer understanding of the uncertainty that plagued the methodology of the time, it is useful to try to clarify the ancestral “cultural motivations.” First of all, it must not be forgotten that the semantic root of the term creativity refers to an action that, in the millennial religious tradition, was the exclusive prerogative of God: only the divine, in fact, is capable of “bringing into being” from nothing, or, in other words, “creating.” Man, even at the peak of his expressiveness, can merely transform reality, “perfecting” what already exists; indeed, until a few centuries ago, the concept that man could be creative in thought and action was considered blasphemous. In the narrative of the Old Testament, creation took place over six days: a process, therefore, in time. However, tradition offers us the conception of a static, finished, complete, and closed creation: and so, men “were not given the idea that Creation could be perpetually open” (Anderson 1959, It. trans. 1972, p. 12), constantly available for change, for a new creative gesture.

Things were no different in the culture of ancient Greece, as the myths remind us: the story of Prometheus is a warning to “creative spirits” about the possible consequences of their actions. When Prometheus stole fire—a metaphor for the creative spark—from the gods to give it to the people, “he enraged Zeus and received his punishment” (Glăveanu 2018, p. 26).

Precisely because of its mysterious analogy with the divine, in Western cultural tradition the “creative” quality was attributed exclusively to certain individuals: the prophet, the haruspex, the seer, the creative genius as the artist. In other words, it was assigned to those roles that were socially charged with penetrating the deep mysteries of reality. Only a few were allowed to intuit and transcendentally manifest the real, the beautiful, Nature, or the “spirit.”

A synthesis of a systematic reflection by Vlad Glăveanu, a psychologist at the University of Dublin, may help in the onerous task of analyzing the development of the concept of creativity. Glăveanu proposes an effective three-phase paradigm that can be integrated with the contributions of other international researchers. As he himself specifies, the historical progression implicit in his reconstruction does not exclude that “instances” of these paradigms coexist at different times and are certainly interwoven in today’s scientific landscape.

1.2.1 The “He” Paradigm

This is the so-called phase of genius, more precisely, of the lone genius. The emphasis (common, after all, both to the Renaissance and the Romantic conception) is on the exceptionality of individuals who are capable of the act of creation and on the consequent and frequent “disconnection” from the rest of their environment: only a few are chosen to be creative and those who are must stand out from the masses. Consequently, the creator detaches himself from the community “and, by this, ends up building a pathological image of him/her” (Glăveanu 2010, p. 80).

This vision (which, often arrogantly, we tend to define as “romantic” and therefore obsolete, outdated) has represented not a few obstacles to the affirmation of a “modern” concept of creativity and continues to leave residues in unexpected places: even today, a good number of scientists believe that creativity “is not subject to rules or methods,” and therefore one cannot learn to be creative. In reality, as some important case studies have shown, innovative discoveries result from highly structured rational processes: the fact that sometimes even great scientists invoke sudden flashes of intuition to explain their creative work is not in itself a decisive factor, since “many scientists adhere to the romantic view of creativity themselves, and hence, their recollections are colored through that view” (Meheus and Nickles 2000, p. 234). On the other hand, it should be kept in mind that the high levels of technicality and specialist knowledge, required for scientific discovery and the extreme complexity of the processes involved, make it difficult even for creative scientists themselves to explain their achievements rationally and describe the path used to attain them.

While in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries discovery was seen as an integral part of a methodology (it was believed that there was a “logic of discovery,” a set of rules that when properly applied led to new and interesting discoveries), things changed significantly in the romantic era. Creative products could derive from genius, from the illuminations of intuition, or chance, from a “leap,” a “breakthrough,” but not from the simple application of method.

However, these two different conceptions converge on the common ground of “exceptionality.” Then again, it should be noted that “genius,” in the strict sense of the term, is a phenomenon that is still difficult to explain today and it cannot be excluded that genetic differences are involved: certainly, great geniuses (especially in certain fields, such as music or mathematics) “seem to be born with talents that cannot be explained solely by learning or the environment alone” (Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi 2003, p. 190).

At a certain point, however, a number of factors intervened to promote the urgent need of new investigative paradigms for the analysis of creativity. We shall examine three of these in detail.

The first was an increasing awareness of the fact that individual creative ability is certainly a result of personality-related factors (cognitive style and skills) but that, more properly, it should be considered as a complex emergence of “relevant task domain expertise, motivation and social and contextual influences” (Shalley and Gilson 2004, p. 36). Contextual factors, therefore, interact with individual characteristics and influence creative performance.

The second factor was the advent of the concept of “motion,” characteristic of Darwinian theory, based on the idea of something that was not absolute, definitively stabilized, “of something that could emerge, evolve and yet have infinity as its goal” (Anderson 1959, It. trans. 1972, p. 13). Then, with the process of “disenchantment” (to use a Weberian category), a paradigm was established in which “the ability to solve problems and arouse emotions” (Federici 2006, p. 18) seems to prevail as an essential element: from heaven to earth.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a large group of researchers shifted their focus from personality to process given the acquired awareness that “the social processes concerning creativity have rarely been studied” (Schepers van der Berg 2007, p. 408); such processes, they claimed, could clarify the dynamics underlying creativity more effectively than the research conducted so far on its so-called individual predictors (such as personality traits).

This shift from a focus on personality and individual differences to those mental processes that underlie “not only exceptional abilities, but also everyday problem-solving and decision-making skills” (Sawyer 2003, p. 5) led to the third factor that definitively took over the field of subsequent scientific research: creativity as the ability of the “man in the street,” as daily energy and strategy in dealing with routine matters.

This led to the emergence of a new paradigm.

1.2.2 The “I” Paradigm

The paradigm of “I,” the self, replaces the genius with the “normal” person. This can be defined as the “democratization” of creativity: everyone is capable of creativity since “it is no longer a capacity of the few chosen by God, biology or unique psychological features” (Glăveanu 2010, p. 81).

It was Joy Paul Guilford who first drew the attention of psychologists to the topic of the creative personality, so giving rise to a new perspective of investigation, a perspective thanks to which creative acts can be expected (regardless of their scope or frequency), “from almost all individuals” (Guilford 1950, p. 446).

It is perhaps no coincidence that during this period, in Italy the term “creative” acquired a new significance, indicative of a society undergoing a significant transformation: the new connotations of “productive,” “inventive,” “imaginative” became common usage in Italian. The transformation of the adjective “creativo” (creative) into a noun “indicating a specific professional activity completed this semantic mutation (the term was included in the prestigious dictionary Zingarelli for the first time in 1970, defined as ‘a person who creates advertising’)” (Melucci 1994a, p. 11).

This semantic trajectory had its counterpart in the change that simultaneously affected those involved in creativity; generally speaking, attention shifted progressively from the genius to the “man in the street,” from wide-eyed admiration for the transcendental intuitions of the former to the satisfied and instrumental recognition of the effective problem-solving strategies of the latter. In parallel, the amazement that previously accompanied that which was creative, as observed through religious imagination or aesthetic research, was gradually replaced by investigation.

An exemplary formulation of this second paradigm is offered by Margaret Boden, a well-known English researcher who specialized in cognitive sciences. She effectively describes the object of our study in these terms: “Creativity draws crucially on our ordinary abilities. Noticing, remembering, seen, speaking, hearing, understanding language and recognizing analogies: all these talents of Everyman are important. […] [Creatives] are in a sense more free than us, for they can generate possibilities that we cannot imagine. Yet, they respect constraints more than we do, not less” (Boden 1990, p. 245 and p. 254).

There are several points that will require further study during the course of our investigation. First of all, creativity is a human potential, therefore “of everyone,” structured in the dynamics of our species: the topic of creativity has often been confined to aesthetics, “even though the creative process is immensely important for any sort of inquiry” (Maddalena 2015, p. 85). It has to do with our ability to establish a relationship with the daily reality that surrounds us, a relationship, we might add, capable of generating the “sense” of everyday life. The philosopher Helmut Plessner surmised that “the mystery of creativity, of the brilliant idea, consists in the successful move, in the encounter between man and things” (Plessner 1928, It. trans. 2006, p. 345). In the same period, the prominent American scholar, philosopher, and educational reformer, John Dewey, came to the same conclusions in an attempt to derive strategies to enhance this precious energy. If, on the one hand, it is understandable that the creative mind be associated with rare and unique individuals (the geniuses), this must be tempered with the observation that every individual is, in his own way, “unique”: each individual experiences life from a different perspective, and consequently “has something distinctive to give to others if he can transform his experiences into ideas and transmit them to others” (Dewey 1930, p. 3).

Returning to Boden, there is one final aspect incorporating some very significant developments to be emphasized: creativity has to do with the ability to generate “analogies,” to create “connections,” “more possibilities.” This is an ability that has not been identified, at these levels, in any other living species. Creativity makes us “freer,” precisely because it finds more solutions than a simple mechanical recording of data would be able to do. Yet, and this is a conclusion that heralds both theoretical and practical consequences, creativity does not coincide with fantasy of which it makes abundant use: creativity finds its peak and its raison d’être precisely in the “constrained” condition of our daily living.

It is a structural ability: a mandatory path tracing the roots of such extraordinary potential is written into the very structure of our being in the world. What emerges is that the more we investigate that which is taken for granted, the everyday, the mundane, the more we find ourselves inevitably (regardless of our awareness) identifying the need to leap beyond that “here and now,” to exert that exclusive ability and urgency to “transcend” the space and time of our action, even the most common, distracted, and identify an unavoidable re-leap “from earth to heaven”: therefore, if creative innovation is one of the characteristics of human action, the constant openness to new possibilities “shows the dimension of transcendence inherent in individual and collective action and is directly connected to the reflexivity of self-consciousness” (Crespi 2010, p. IX).

In this conceptual framework, creativity, in all its different wavelengths, is fundamental for our survival: by using creativity “we find a lost child, […] we procure the necessary food and make our way in a new place and in a new culture […], whether it’s about raising our child, advising a friend, arranging our house or planning a fundraising event” (Ruth 2007, p. 26).

Certainly, in recent decades the rapid processes of change that have affected the production systems sector have also contributed to upsetting classical and romantic conceptions (which, it must be remembered, have never disappeared): the idea of a good society “made up of a few geniuses capable of designing and programming the executive work of ‘the great unwashed’” (De Masi 2003, p. 445) pushed scholars to focus their attention on the “peaks”: with the advent of modernity, “the idea begins to prevail that every human being has a creative spark and that it needs to be nurtured for the benefit of all” (ibidem).

Recently, in an attempt to reorganize a synthetic framework of an increasingly rich and varied approach, an effort has been made to identify semantic and operational categories to “cage” an energy that is in itself constitutively uncontainable while still preserving the previous concepts. This is perhaps the root of recent theoretical efforts that have led to the creation of various frameworks and conceptualizations: the so-called model Four-C of creativity, for example, shows how it “can range from more subjective creative experiences (mini-c level of creativity) to creative processes and products recognized by others as making creative contributions in everyday (little-c), professional (Pro-c) and historical context (Big-C)” (van der Zandena et al. 2020, p. 2).Footnote 1

Another useful concept is that which distinguishes whether a new idea is original in absolute terms or only in a particular context. A “creative arbitrage” has been hypothesized, drawing a comparison with the economic phenomenon of so-called financial arbitrage, which involves buying in one market and selling in another. While “generative” creativity occurs when someone comes up with a new idea, creative arbitrage occurs “when someone exports an idea from a context in which the idea is already known to a context in which it is not” (Fleming et al. 2007, p. 467).

As can be imagined, the difficulty in creating a satisfactory framework for the definition and analysis of the creative act is linked to the fact that while, on the one hand, it is recognized globally as a process, as a form of behavior, as an outcome, as a desirable ability, on the other, “the meanings, the behaviors, the outcomes are culture-specific” (Reuter 2015, p. 54).

Moreover, despite the undeniable progress made in the theoretical field, in recent decades new problems and a certain dissatisfaction at methodological “level” have come to light: in particular, the “I” paradigm ended up generating partial theoretical models that investigate human activity “in a social vacuum and conceptualize creativity as a quality of the lone individual” (Glăveanu 2010, p. 82). Hence the urgency of finding a new, further paradigm.

1.2.3 The “We” Paradigm

The objective of the “we” paradigm is to fill this theoretical and practical gap in the observation of concrete creative dynamics: in this context, creativity is considered not simply and exclusively as an expression of the individual but also, and mainly, as a result of human interaction and collaboration. Glăveanu, entering into a veiled controversy with the previous tradition of investigation, intends to propose his “social psychology of creativity” in explicit terms; while it is true that in the early 1980s the American psychologist Teresa Amabile began proposing a specific social psychology of creativity, it must be admitted that much of the work done in that sphere “still endorses a vision of the social that corresponds more to individualistic paradigms than to a truly social perspective” (Glăveanu 2010, p. 83).

Having clarified this, we can now proceed to the topics inherent to the area of our study and, with all due caution, we can agree with the statement that “sociology is the ideal domain to investigate creativity” (Reuter 2015, p. 42), especially in its two main aspects of investigation: (a) the influence exerted by the social context on creative persons and creativity and (b) creativity expressed “not by individuals but by groups” (De Masi 2003, p. 433). Sociology is becoming increasingly interested in processes by which individual genius can be, and indeed is, combined with the collective genius of organized groups.

In adopting this perspective, however, we believe an attempt must be made to trace the deep roots of the relational dimension of the creative impulse, an impulse that a number of scholars consider represents a “congenital” factor of the very structure of the human being.

1.3 Creativity and/Is Transcendence

“While the life of the animal is centric, the life of man, who cannot break the centration and at the same time is projected beyond it, is eccentric” (Plessner 1928, It. trans. 2006, p. 315). The German philosopher and sociologist Helmuth Plessner has provided us with this imaginative description of the human condition and its uniqueness in the framework of living beings: it is an attempt to metaphorically explain the strange situation in which we human beings find ourselves, forced as we are to transcend the “here and now” of everyday life. While all animals have to do is to remain in the circle of their reactivity, this dynamic, although it is a condition in the development of human existence, turns out to be dramatically and confusingly insufficient: we are bound by a “centration” that we are constantly called to overcome, to question, to “transcend.”

Philosophy, but also art, has repeatedly tried to focus on this point of irreducible distinction between human beings and animals. Perhaps however it is best illustrated by the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi in his “Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd of Asia”Footnote 2: his shepherd ponders the strange phenomenon whereby, while his flock of sheep is contented to sit in the shade on the grass, even if he follows their example he cannot achieve the same tranquility. For him, sitting there does not bring serenity, there is a “weight” on his mind, “a sense of weariness” eternally robbing him of “rest and place.”

However, this is a dynamism that tends to reach the limit, in the unmanageable need to surpass it: it is, according to the American psychologist Rollo May, that primordial move, that tendency evident in all organic and human life that fuels an imperative need to expand, stretch, develop, mature, the inclination to express and activate all the organism’s capacities to the limit. The primary motivation for creativity would be precisely this tendency, “since the organism establishes new relationships with the environment in the incessant attempt to become as much completely possible itself” (May 1959, It. trans. 1972, p. 99). From this perspective, it is understandable how we can come to identify precisely in the creative impulse “the attribute that distinguishes us from other species” (Florida 2002, It. trans. 2003, p. 21), to fix its feeding source exactly in the ability to think and live beyond the simple given: our actions are always bound, but never completely determined. The fact that “we are not trapped in our perceptual here-and-now is both an indicator of creativity and of its great success” (Glăveanu 2018, p. 156).

Psychology has tried to cast this structural tendency into the concrete of everyday existence by identifying its drive even in the most elementary stimuli that characterize the human genre: the now classic “theory of basic needs” by Abraham Maslow seems to frame the universal dynamics of self-realization in the desire to become more and more what one is, “to become everything that one is capable of becoming” (see Goble 1970).

On the philosophical side, the Austrian philosopher Martin Buber indicated this primary motivation with the appropriate expression “instinct of creativity,” describing it as the will to “do things.” It is not simply about the pleasure of seeing a form arise from matter that was previously formless: what the child (that is, the creative being) wants is to participate in this “becoming of the thing”; he wants to be the subject of this production process. What is important is that through his own action “something is born that just a moment before, did not exist” (Buber 1926, It. trans. 1993, p. 163). The deep root of the creative instinct would therefore be sought in the ancestral desire to “participate” in the continuous flow of the incessant creation of reality.

It is not, therefore (as might be thought), a particular attitude reserved for those who develop a certain ability or intellectual, reflective, or religious inclination: on the contrary, “life, at every moment, tends to transcend the state of present things” (Jedlowski 2012, p. 3) and for this singular evidence (which is the basis of all our action and our peculiar “anxiety”) “we do not know where we are going, but we are sure we must go beyond what is already given” (Melucci 1994b p. 247). And, in venturing into this uncertain enterprise, we nourish ourselves with curiosity and hope “to mobilize the individual towards the overcoming of the given, […], towards the search for meaning” (Fabbrini 1994, p. 129).

I have hinted at the issue of “meaning” (to which I will necessarily have to return and expand). Now, here it could be established that what moves man is the drive for the search for meaning (not just philosophical or logical, but existential) of what he does: with this term we express what the Italian sociologist Franco Crespi describes as a given reality, not dependent on the subject, but an integral part of the biological and relational structure of the human being, without the possibility of definitively determining its origin. Meaning is a “direction,” both confused and irreducible: “It is existence itself that, in giving itself, gives meaning: for the simple fact that something is given, it necessarily gives meaning. The giving of something causes a difference that determines a direction, a meaning” (Crespi 2005, p. 26).

Meaning, therefore, is a directionality that, however confused and uncertain, forces us to set ourselves in motion, “regardless,” we might almost say: regardless of clarity, regardless of success, regardless of desire, and regardless of culture. Crespi defines it as pre-cultural. As will be seen later, Hans Joas describes this drive as inherent in the body itself, as “something the body does” at a pre-conscious level. Taking up some key concepts of Merleau-Ponty such as “pre-reflective” or “pre-predicative,” the German sociologist uses them to refer to “the givenness of the world prior to all act of reflection or predication” (Joas 1996, p. 179).

This “meaning,” which makes reality perceived as “also something” (Plessner 1928, It. trans. 2006, p. 313), which sets human action in motion, has as its peculiar dynamism the ability to transcend limits through its most effective weapon in this unstoppable and always imperfect enterprise: the imaginary.

Michael Polanyi defined it as the set of “all thoughts of things that are not present, or that are not yet present—perhaps never be present—acts of the imagination” (Polanyi 2009, p. 155). When we raise an arm, we give body to an intention that is an act of imagination (not visual but muscular): therefore, an athlete preparing to jump is engaged in an intense act of “muscular imagination.”

Before delving into the characteristics of this extravagant human ability, however, I would follow the path set and unresolved by a marveling Émile Durkheim in front of this strange phenomenon: “Only man has the ability to conceive the ideal and add it to the real. Where does this singular privilege come from?” (Durkheim 1912, It. trans. 1973, p. 485). I will try to answer this eccentric, almost impertinent question. Where does this “singular privilege” come from?

There is an interesting psychoanalytic perspective to be considered that attempts to find the roots of creativity in an original trauma. On our arrival in the world, a trauma occurs in our unconscious life, i.e., the detachment from the maternal figure, a loss of the object of love that lies at the base of our subsequent feelings of aggression and guilt. In this dimension straddling awareness and unconsciousness, “the desire to repair guilt is expressed in the attempt to recreate the bond that has been broken” (Melucci 1994a, p. 16). Using other investigative tools, the well-known Polish composer Frédéric Chopin had reached a similar insight, similarly and metaphorically dealing with the bond of fatherhood and therefore of sonship: “The only misfortune is that we are the work of a famous luthier, of a Stradivari sui generis, who is no longer here to repair us. We do not know how to emit new sounds under inept hands and we choke inside; for lack of a luthier no one will know how to draw [sounds] from us anymore” (letter to Julian Fontana, August 18, 1848). Creativity, therefore, would be the expression of this “reparative instance” that faces “a very primitive and very deep experience of rupture and destruction” (Melucci 1994a, p. 16).

Freud expended much energy in attempting to unravel the mysterious knot of genius, especially the initial spring that drives creativity, concluding that fantastical worlds are created by both the child and the artist from the same motivating impulse: the desire to satisfy an unfulfilled desire (see Freud 1907/1989).

Assuming this is the “why” of the creative drive, I will try, symmetrically, to identify the “how”: it is obvious that ordinary expressiveness cannot aspire to solve problems of this magnitude; it serves much simpler and instrumental dynamics and procedures. In the face of transcendental shortcomings, however, man “continually believes he needs extraordinary means for his satisfaction” (Plessner 1928, It. trans. 2006, p. 362). These “extraordinary means” (to resume the Durkheimian line of thought) coincide with the imaginative capacity, with the imaginary, with the possibility of seeing things as “also something.” Hence the dizzying connection between self-realization drive and creative attitude: “Learning and creativity are essential for self-actualization” (Burleson 2005, p. 437).

Biology has also intervened with its own contribution in trying to define the operational framework of human creative energy: Edmund Sinnott, an American botanist, identifies the imagination as the most distinctive human characteristic of all, precisely because it makes creativity possible. He observes that the astonishing acceleration made on the road to progress could not be adequately explained by the human craving to achieve goals, to satisfy a scheme of desires. None of the innovations made would have been possible if there had not been someone capable of “imagining” a situation never experienced before, capable of mentally picturing something that had never seen before: “The problem of creativity is reduced, in the end, to the problem of how these new ideas originate” (Sinnott 1959, It. trans. 1972, p. 43).

I repeat: it is not just about the faculty of fantasizing, which is an expressive form typical of childhood, but about a way of looking at how certain things “connect” with others. We could hazard that in this (and probably “only” in this) man is truly a “creator”: in generating connections that are only present in reality through his “symbolic” actions.

The state of lack that qualifies our being in the world (of whatever type it may be) is what drives us and forces us to use our ability to establish connections between what is here and now and what is not here but can be evoked, projecting us beyond the concrete objectivity of things: “If our substance were really given to us, and we had it at hand, we would undoubtedly not project ourselves beyond what limits us. But we are insufficient to ourselves” (Duvignaud 1967, It. trans. 1969, p. 134).

Psychology helps us again by identifying a possible demarcation point in the realm of the biological, between the animal and the being-of-culture, capable of “figuring absence.” Dreaming, predicting, anticipating, projecting, inventing, overcoming of the sensible given, “certainly represent the highest expression of man’s power and responsibility towards the world; they constitute the most sophisticated processes of his contact with the environment” (Fabbrini 1994, p. 128).

These are very “slippery” investigative areas for scientific research methodologies, areas where the discourse tends to become vague and mysterious, to be confined so far in the numbers of uncertain knowledge: “Biologists, like all serious scientists, have hesitated to venture into a speculative field that touches on that of metaphysics, since both enjoy today a reputation not excessively flattering in scientific circles” (Sinnott 1959, It. trans. 1972, pp. 45 and 49).

It can be agreed that this “overcoming of the sensible data” has been expressed, in the history of humanity, through forms of investigation more or less explicitly dedicated to this great enterprise, such as philosophical reflection, religious experience, and aesthetic production. We can therefore agree with Adorno, who believes that only the latter “allows men to grasp in authentic artistic configurations, the possibility that there is something more than the mere existence they lead, something more than the arrangements of the world to which they are irremediably bound” (Adorno 1956, It. trans. 1990, p. 131).

The “high” creativity, what we normally define as “artistic” (big-C), would therefore have the ponderous task of helping man in this immense effort to reconstruct the “ultimate” senses of existence: in this perspective, art would document the attempt to express a sense ungraspable by other forms of knowledge and representation. The peculiarity of the artistic product is therefore revealed in the fact that it would be “an objectification whose function is to show the unobjectifiable, or the proper limit of every form of determination” (Crespi 2010, p. X). This is why artists and creative scientists “transcend themselves” in a certain sense as bearers of tradition, “they have not only gone beyond it, they have gone beyond themselves; they have transcended their Selves” (Briskman 2009, p. 41).

Nevertheless, if the observations made so far hold true, we are forced to investigate also, and primarily, more routine, more daily expressiveness (little-c), because perhaps in those we will be able to verify the potential of the imaginary and creativity as a hallmark of properly human action, regardless of the “level” of its expressive products.

I should mention here the well-known path of critical reflexivity carried out by the Austrian sociologist Alfred Schütz, unfortunately left incomplete due to his sudden death: through his work, we are led to recognize that the ability to create connections (expression with which we have defined creativity) is at the origin of every elementary dynamic of knowledge and construction of meaning. For Schütz, the “world of life,” our daily existence, is not flat, horizontal, without fractures: we should rather represent it as the result of numerous “stratifications” because “the life-world embraces still more than everyday reality […]. Man relinquishes the everyday natural attitude in order to lapse into fictive world, into fantasies” (Schütz and Luckmann 1973, p. 21).

If therefore the daily round is made up of many “finite provinces of meaning” (i.e., “meaning-compatible experiences” p. 23), the real problem turns out to be that of being able to hold together a series of experiences that are not “naturally” connected to each other: they are, on the contrary, “provinces of reality with finite structure of meaning” that do not have an automatic ability to dialogue with each other and that instead have boundaries that cannot be crossed without resorting to “transcendent” dynamics.

The only way to reconnect what is not connected by nature is the great invention of “symbolic relations,” that we are about to explore: in this perspective, creativity can therefore be considered “the ability to ‘move an idea from one state to another’” (McWilliam and Dawson 2008, p. 635), whether it is instrumental, ordinary connections or, on the contrary, of high expressive level, that depth that even tries to restore and restore “the bond with the lost object of love” (Melucci 1994a, p. 17).

1.4 The Revolution of “Symbolic Combinations”

I could establish, in this framework, that the primordial creative move (that very particular way of approaching things that constitutes the insurmountable leap between the human species and all other living beings) was exactly the ability to “organically connect” the infinite and multiform details of existence: it is like saying that human creativity (unique and never repeated in other living beings) began as an urgency and strategy to overcome the “here and now.” From fire to wheel, from stilt house to stone house, from hammer to satellite, man has been able to look at things “transcending” them, stepping out of the here and now to fish from the past what can be decisive for the future, whatever latitude they belong to. The reflection on experience, the ability to treasure what was previously experienced for an improvement of future existence (ability to “project”), is at the basis of creativity and is expressed as ability to discover (“invent?”) links between things that in themselves (in “nature”) are disconnected.

Sociological reflection should pay more attention to the insights of the Italian polymath, Vilfredo Pareto in this specific field of investigation: perhaps the very different framework of investigation makes it difficult to establish links between his thought and that of Alfred Schütz, a relationship that here we can only hypothesize based on convergences of insights and research perspectives. It is interesting to note (and here I will limit myself to this) the many consonances between what has been said so far and what the Pareto affirms in relation to the so-called instinct of combinations, which, being part of the “non-logical” actions, constitutes, in a certain way, a trait d’union between the “residues” (the instincts, the passions, the emotions) and the “derivations” (reasonings and behaviors through which actions are justified).

It is important to dwell on this aspect because Pareto uses it to offer an interesting perspective capable of effectively framing the roots of human creative abilities. Indeed, the definition of creativity that has been attributed to him, which today can be found on many communication agency and Human Resources websites (Finding new links between known things), is not expressed in so many words in his Treatise on general sociology. It is however significant for at least three reasons: (a) it is very effective; (b) it can be “derived” from his thoughts; (c) it attests how much the “fever of creativity” today seeks scientific foundations to justify its pervasive development in every aspect of advanced societies.

What Pareto says, interested as he is in this particular aspect of human action, is that the ability to “combine” is what brings innovation: “The contrast between the tendency to combinations, which innovates, and the tendency to the permanence of aggregates of sensations, which conserves, could put us on the way to explain many facts of human societies” (Pareto 1916, ed. 1988, p. 154). In practice, this “instinct” defines that strange disposition of man to innovate, invent, and produce new facts and links, through imagination and non-logical action: the instinct of combinations “is considered particularly strong in man, probably being at the origin of the development of human civilization” (Padua 2017, p. 11).

Whether it is a question of expressiveness, art, technology, discovery, or invention, the dynamics are always the same, the “connection of points,” as Steve Jobs explained referring to his well-known creative enterprise, Connecting Dots. On the other hand and similarly, the discovery of previously unknown relationships is a central goal of scientific research: theoretical models like geographical maps, for example, show connections between previously unknown events. Like the geographical maps of unknown regions, “theories present white spaces to indicate connections not yet known” (Elias 1978, It. trans. 1990, p. 189).

Creativity, therefore, is based on technologies that are already available in existing institutions and a creative idea can be defined in a certain sense as “a reformulation of existing ideas” (Rogoff 1990, p. 198) or (with a very creative expression) as the set of “extraordinary products of ordinary cognitive operations combined in unordinary ways” (Dasgupta 2019, p. VIII).Footnote 3 Equally useful for its development in this investigation is the definition for which being creative means using old ideas “in a new guise called analogy” (Markman and Wood 2009). Perhaps this was the intuition on which Charles Sanders Peirce based his powerful aphorism that states if an idea is completely new it will almost certainly be stupid: creative novelty makes it possible to “propose, increase, or foster new ways of old habits or new habits, as far as we can call something ‘new’ (absolute novelty is impossible)” (Maddalena 2015, p. 81). For this reason, our creative gestures always “present only slight differences from contexts, habits, and gestures that precede them. Creation is never ‘out of the blue’” (ibid., p. 97).

It can be said, therefore, that it is the ability (or necessity) to find new connections that plumbs the most ancestral areas of the human being, eager to find a meaning where it does not appear or does not seem possible.

In extreme synthesis, it could be affirmed that the first form of human creativity was the “invention of sense”: “Is creativity not a perennial characteristic of every kind of sign? Sure enough, to a certain degree any semiosis is creative” (Maddalena 2015, p. 89).

This is a prerogative of our species that has developed to unthinkable levels thanks to a competence we assume is present only in the human being: the “symbolic” ability. Even if we consider the instinctive actions typical of animals as elementary forms of sense construction (which man also continues to use, among other things), the dynamics are still of a different nature and far from the simple ability to conceive that 1 + 1 = 2 (logical-symbolic sequence attributable equally to apples, slaps, kisses, or dreams).

I must therefore pursue my investigations into this strange and revolutionary ability because man “is able to transcend everydayness by means of symbols” (Schütz and Luckmann 1973, p. 21). For the Austrian sociologist the harmony and compatibility of our real experiences are limited, as we have seen, to a “certain province of meaning.” What makes this situation extremely awkward is the fact that it is not possible to reduce a finite province of meaning to another with the help of a “conversion formula”: in practice, I cannot connect a flower to a feeling for a young lady whose glance “struck” me. There is not, that is, a kind of “genetic mutation” that can connect a flower to a woman, except through the creation of a “symbolic” connection: a bunch of flowers becomes a symbol of a feeling, transcending itself and, together, the finiteness of the provinces [flower] [woman] [emotion] [project]. The transition from one province of meaning to another “can only be accomplished by means of a ‘leap’ (in Kierkegaard’s sense) […]. In the course of a day, indeed of an hour, we can, through the modifications of the tension of consciousness, traverse a whole series of such provinces” (ibid., p. 24).

In support of this observation, Schütz offers a series of “daily” examples of leaps perceived as “natural,” which in reality are not natural at all: cutting off a daydream to get to work, stumbling while staring at a picture, “entering the scene,” starting to “play,” being assailed by hunger or by any stimulus during scientific, aesthetic, religious contemplation, etc. Only when we experience a specific shock that for a moment breaks through the limits of what is “Real” for us (finite province of meaning), we must “transfer (or ‘wish’ to) the accent of reality to another province of meaning” (ibid., p. 25).

This inevitable dynamism, continues Schütz, leads us, in daily life, to confer “the accent of reality” to a single specific province of meaning, in such a way that the other provinces of meaning can only appear as “quasi-realities”: therefore, “among the various levels of reality there is however only one that is thematic at any given time, while the others appear subordinate, ‘ancillary’” (Gattamorta 2005, p. 83). For this reason, paradoxically, looking at life from a scientific or a religious perspective, “the everyday life-world can be seen as a quasi-reality” (Schütz and Luckmann 1973, p. 25).

From this point of view, the three different types of transcendences, small, medium, large, have in common the fact of overcoming the “here and now of the world” at hand. For the purpose of this book, it is sufficient to consider specifically the third type, in which transcendence surpasses the limits of everyday life through “symbols”: the transcendences with which the symbolic significant references come to terms belong to finite provinces of meaning “that surpass the boundaries of daily reality (they are the world of scientific theory, religion, politics, art, play, but also of imagination and dream)” ( Gattamorta 2005, p. 71).

I am now approaching the most promising field of application for this investigation, which provides the most suitable tools to “create connections” between realities that would not “naturally” connect. Schütz uses an interesting neologism to indicate this particular power to establish links between non-communicating elements, overcoming “finiteness” through symbolic dynamics; for him, the symbol, in fact, does not “represent,” it “presents,” in other words, it “makes present”: transcending the limits of time and space, it is able to “bring America into the living room” simply by using linguistic sounds, letters, icons. Schütz’s thesis is that representative references have the function of “overcoming the transcendences that belong to the reality of everyday life” (ibid., p. 79): through this peculiar ability (symbolization) “man tries to learn these transcendent phenomena in a way similar to our perceptible world” (Schütz 1955, It. trans. 1979, p. 300).

More precisely, the symbol is defined by Schütz as a representative reference of a higher order, in which one representing member of the pair is an object, a fact, or an event within the reality of our everyday life, while the other “refers to an idea that transcends our experience of everyday life” (ibid., p. 303).

It must be admitted that these reflections are not simple, but their relevance to the specific content of this investigation (creativity as the ability to generate connections) is highlighted by a publication with a strongly different approach that appeared a few years after these insights. Arthur Koestler’s successful essay The Act of Creation was published in New York in 1964: in it, the Hungarian born writer, journalist, essayist, philosopher, and latterly parapsychologist identified the decisive phase of creativity as capacity “to perceive … a situation or event in two habitually incompatible associative contexts” (Koestler 1964, p. 95). He also argued, in that very successful booklet, that we reach our maximum level of creative ability “when rational thought is suspended—for example, in dreams and trance-like states. Then the mind is capable of receiving inspiration and insight” (ibid.).

As can be imagined, this juggling of the worlds of things and their meaning, but also of their concrete instrumental uses, continues to move along dreamy frontiers, with a romantic flavor.

1.5 Intelligences

Another approach to the issues addressed here, very promising for expanding the depth of the investigation, is that linked to the relatively recent and much debated interdisciplinary reflection on intelligence: some pioneering studies in the field of human sciences (especially of a psychological, psychoanalytic, sociological, and pedagogical nature) have begun to analyze their specific and multifaceted fields of application (with the related different knowledge methodologies), helping in part to overcome that incommunicability between the world of reason and calculation and that of sensations, emotions, intuitions.

I would mention here as an example of a reflection of great originality that which linked the sudden development of man’s intellectual abilities, from the origin of every “significant action,” with the appearance of the “opposable thumb,” decisive for the structuring of the prehensile hand, enabling it to “grasp” objects: “At this point man began to produce thoughts on the nature of the object he had in hand” (Sennett 2008, It. trans. 2009, p. 149). Many residual expressions still exist in today’s parlance, metaphorically indicating this revolution of reflexivity: “Having a good grip on the subject,” “Grasping a problem,” are nothing more than “figurative ways of speaking that reflect the evolutionary dialogue that took place between the hand and the brain” (ibid.).

In this way, the process of “learning” is brought back to its semantic (and probably evolutionary) origin of “stretching out a hand and tightening it on an object,” asking for its meaning, possible usefulness. From these premises, the next (almost natural) step was to reconsider intelligence as the vast and varied human ability to face existence as a “problem to solve,” as the revolutionary tool not only to respond to the “pro-vocations” of the “centric” reality (which, as has been seen, man shares with animals) but also to try to solve more complex, transcendent, “eccentric” problems.

These considerations are at the basis of the so-called Theory of multiple intelligences of the American psychologist Howard Gardner whose fundamental thesis (subject to various objections) is that there are specific intellectual abilities for different fields and that each individual is tuned, depending on the type of prevailing intelligence, to certain cognitive possibilities rather than others: in this way it is possible to explain, paradoxically, how it can happen that “geniuses” are unable to solve “elementary” problems. The various types of intelligence, in fact (linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily kinesthetic, personal, relational) are not necessarily interconnected nor mechanically developed individually and measurable as the famous intelligence quotient (IQ).

It is important to follow these developments in research because they introduce an element that has been underestimated or left to “chance” for centuries,” the dimension of the “context” in which creativity can find the fertile ground of its development. If it is true that every individual has a predisposition toward specific intellectual abilities, creativity will be the result of the encounter between their particular type of prevailing intelligence and the external conditions that facilitate its use. The context (literally erased in romantic culture unless as an occasional “prompt” for the genius) begins to be considered a k ingredient of creative expressiveness. Therefore, applying the theory of multiple intelligences to creativity leads us to recognize that it manifests “when the individual endowed with a certain type of intelligence encounters cultural and social conditions that allow him to develop that capacity to the maximum, rather than inhibit it or divert it towards other fields where it is destined to fail” (Melucci 1994a, p. 19). In this way, intelligence (and, consequently, creativity) can no longer be considered in an abstract manner, detached from the context in which they are realized and evaluated.

Two very effective anecdotes by the American psychologists Robert Sternberg and Louise Spear-Swerling render immediately comprehensible the polemical force of this approach compared to traditional unitary theories of IQ.

Two boys with vastly different IQs venture into a forest when suddenly a huge, hungry grizzly bear appears and stares at them: the first boy (the one who performs better academically) calculates that the grizzly will reach them in exactly 17.3 s and panics. Frozen with terror, he looks at the second boy who, with absolute calm, “takes off his hiking boots and puts on his jogging shoes. The first boy says to the second: You’re crazy. It’s impossible to run faster than that grizzly! The second boy replies: That’s true. But I just need to run faster than you!” (Sternberg and Spear-Swerling 1996, It. trans. 2002, p. 17).

In the second episode reported by the two authors, young Jack considers Irvin to be the dumbest in the class, so he likes to tease him and publicly demonstrate his inferiority. Together with a friend, he offers Irvin two coins, a nickel and a dime, telling him he can choose which of the two he wants. Irvin chooses the larger one, the nickel, and leaves. An adult who was watching the exchange from afar approaches Irvin and kindly explains that the dime is worth more than the nickel, even though it’s smaller, and therefore he lost five cents. “Oh, I know, ‘Irvin replies,’ but if I had taken the dime, Jack would no longer have asked me to choose between the two coins; this way he will continue to ask me. I’ve already taken more than a dollar from him, and all I have to do is choose the nickel” (ibid., p. 13).

The transition from “multiple intelligence” to “multiple creativity” is in a sense automatic: “Gardner applied the theory of multiple intelligences to understand creativity. He suggested that great creative minds often have relied on different intelligences to manifest their creativity” (Sternberg 2005, p. 374).

Now to draw the conclusions of this first chapter of investigation: the connection between the concept of “intelligences” and creativity allows us to hypothesize a broader framework, in which the different “powers” of the human mind can proceed independently, but (an aspect extraordinarily rich in cognitive consequences) can also “influence” each other in diverse ways: “Creativity is multidimensional and manifests itself in many forms, each of which strengthens the other” (Florida 2002, It. trans. 2003, p. 24). The dialogue between these multifaceted potentials is perhaps one of the most promising fields of investigation and experimentation of our times: the various forms of creativity that we normally consider different from each other (technology, economy, arts) are potentially correlated since they not only use similar mental processes, “but they reinforce each other through processes of cross-fertilization and the exchange of stimuli” (ibid., p. 58).

As with any respectable theory of human science, of course, also in this case “some theorists reject the idea of multiple-domain creativities” (Sternberg 2005, p. 374) and “the question of whether creativity is domain specific or domain general still remains one of the main unresolved issues in the field of creativity” (Qiana et al. 2019, p. 2). Due to this state of affairs, “perhaps the most popular position today is that creativity has both domain-specific and domain-general aspects” (Sternberg 2005, p. 375).

However that may be, there is in any case the necessity and usefulness of “contextualizing” these processes, removing them from the frequent and ineffective “scholastic” reductionism through a shift in attention toward the cultural and relational conditions “that allow or hinder the maximum possibility of expansion of the individual’s creative abilities” (Melucci 1994a, p. 21).