Keywords

3.1 The Creative Attitude

To define the creative attitude, I have taken a number of passages of great descriptive and communicative effectiveness from the intervention of the well-known psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, a member of the Frankfurt School, at the American conference of 1959. He proposed a creative answer to the question: “What are the necessary conditions in the creative attitude?” His reply: “First of all, the ability to be ‘perplexed’ is indispensable. Children still retain this ability to feel perplexed. All their strenuous activity consists in trying to orient themselves in a new world, to grasp the meaning of the perennially new things they learn through experience. They are perplexed, surprised, capable of marveling and it is precisely for this reason that their reaction is creative” (Fromm 1959, It. trans. p. 72).

This “childlike perplexity” allows children a second great opportunity: that of being able to live a less “knowledgeable,” “cultural,” “mediated” relationship with reality, which is “more” unknown to them than to adults: they live in the world of nature rather than in that of concepts, abstractions, beliefs, and stereotypes, a condition that can be effectively defined as “openness to experience” (May 1959, It. trans. 1972, p. 114). This openness, which underlies the creative attitude, provides the opportunity, in other words, of somehow resizing, or rather of restoring—without in any way casting a veil of suspicion on its fundamental importance—the absoluteness of symbolic mediation to its place in learning processes.

Albeit by different paths, similar conclusions had been reached by the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty when he stated that man is naturally inclined to forget “his dimension of being,” thus clarifying the critical point related to the concrete operations that we perform starting from perception. As acutely observed, we build theories by virtue of experience, but then we “forget” the operations we have performed and confuse theories with the original reality from which we started to build them. Merleau-Ponty strives to bring the sciences back to the original operations that we tend to forget, highlighting the urgency “to rediscover these operations and to follow their structure to understand their characteristics and internal dynamics” (Paci 2004, p. 11).

This demanding process of “rediscovery,” typical of the adult, seems to be the only antidote to the loss of creativity that accompanies the increase in knowledge: the “dimension of being” from which the theories we learned at home or at school desks are born is all in the fact that they were originally practices that were creatively born in the face of concrete problems of existence. Only this backward journey (implicit or explicit) can make theories effective by avoiding their deadly action against our creativity: we tend to lose this ability to be amazed, once we enter the educational process. The idea of having to know everything about a certain field of knowledge leads to considering surprise or perplexity as a sign of ignorance: in this way reality is no longer a world full of wonders and tends to be progressively simply accepted as it is. But in reality “the ability to feel perplexed is the premise of any creation, whether in the artistic or scientific field” (Fromm 1959, It. trans. p. 72).

Freud, on the other hand, thought that the artist was like a child who plays and “creates a world of his own, or rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way that pleases him” (Freud 1907/1989, p. 437).

Therefore, this “return to childhood” of evangelical memory (already then considered impracticable) turns out to be a complex operation, Yet, although challenging, “adult” creativity can find its reason for being, as another American psychoanalyst illustrated through the case histories of some of his patients: “Almost all children are able to perceive more freely, without a priori expectations of what should be, or what must be, or what has always been. If it is true that children are naive, then I could say that my subjects had arrived at a ‘second naivety,’ to use Santayana’s expression. Their ‘innocence’ of perception and expressiveness was accompanied by intelligence” (May 1959, It. trans. 1972, p. 114). A “second naivety,” adult, capable of being amazed “despite” its knowledge, combining “innocence” with “intelligence.”

For artists, this arduous and often painful ascent to the state of initial purity is an onerous task, as Picasso pointed out with some well-known aphorisms: “All children are born artists; the difficult thing is to remain so as adults.” “At twelve I painted like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to paint like a child.”

It should be noted that there are critical positions regarding this naïve perspective of creativity,Footnote 1 especially in relation to the concrete, social context in which creative abilities are used (on this we have already expressed a position using the expression of “unresolved gesture”).

To conclude, returning to Fromm, there is a second premise for the creative attitude: it is the ability to “concentrate,” now a rare skill in our daily round at least here in the West, where we are constantly busy with no possibility of focusing on something exclusively. While we are doing one thing, we are already thinking about what we will do next and as soon as we can we do several things simultaneously: “We consume breakfast, listen to the radio, read the newspaper and perhaps we also manage to converse with the wife and children. We do five things all at once and we do nothing” (Fromm 1959, It. trans. p. 72). And it must be remembered that Fromm was writing before the development (technological, but consequently anthropological and perceptive) of modern multitasking as a daily dynamic of every activity of contemporary man. In this case too, we need to find, urgently, a reconciliation between the technology available and the development and constraints of individual consciousness: today as then, “for those who really concentrate, the thing they are doing at a given moment is the most important in life” (ibid., p. 73).

Finally, also the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget was interested in the mechanisms through which the child constructs new cognitive schemes: he believed that these schemes were not simply continuous accumulations of new knowledge but represented a reorganization of thought. In summary, his unresolved problem was “trying to explain how novelties are possible and how they form” (Piaget 1971, p. 194): some hypotheses have come from the research of other scholars, which I will now analyze.

However, at this point I feel the necessity of elaborating (albeit necessarily synthetically) on the general and specific definitions of creativity, given the conviction that it becomes effective only when it becomes a “gesture.” It is therefore necessary to establish some points of reference in order to be able to identify the properties of the “creative gesture.”§

3.2 The “Creative Gesture”

I will start with a definition proposed by the Italian philosopher Giovanni Maddalena (quoted here on several occasions), and then follow its implications and developments: “We call ‘gesture’ every action with a beginning and an end that carries a meaning. Gesture, in fact, derives from the Latin gero, to carry” (Maddalena 2021, p. 35). I would emphasize two initial aspects or dimensions of “gesture”: it takes place in time (a beginning, T1, and an end, T2) and so is therefore a “process,” in which change takes place. The second aspect is the occurrence of a “meaning,” which takes place between T1 and T2. Let us first dwell on this second aspect and then return to the first: knowledge of things seems to have a structural connection with “action” rather than with “definition”: generally speaking, in fact, “we can say we clarify something when we transform our vague, familiar comprehension into a habit of action, not when we have a good definition” (Maddalena 2015, p. 70).

Gesture, therefore, is always in some way, and according to different levels of awareness, “motivated”: it reveals an internal tendency toward a goal, a telos, and “the telos is the embodied meaning itself. Indeed, this complex structure is teleologically oriented from initial vagueness to meaningful generality through a singular event” (ibid. 2015, p. 73).

The transition from vagueness to knowledge therefore does not only, or even primarily, take place through concepts. Gestures are “particular habits of action” that realize a profound rationality “that allows them to enter into a relationship with the reality of which they are a part by modifying it and learning as they carry out the action itself” (Maddalena 2021, p. 93).

Let us now return to the first aspect: the gesture takes place in time. Therefore, as a process, it is realized through its own specific form of “narration”: however brief, the gesture must be situated in a narrative movement, “a story, without which any notion is synthetically incomprehensible” (ibid., p. 49). Any notion, and even the perception and understanding of ourselves, passes through a narrative. The philosophy of gesture allows us to better understand the absolute centrality of storytelling in cognitive and identity processes: synthetic knowledge is the only strategy that allows us to “recognize identity in a change. It is only by accompanying this change through a gesture that one can know that reality which otherwise remains vague” (ibid., p. 50). Therefore, “when we repeat gestures we incorporate meanings“ (ibid., p. 61).

At this point we come to a third aspect implied in the proposed definition: our gestures bear witness to the fact that “we also need our bodies and our actions to communicate and, above all, to think” (ibid., p. 9).

Let us now see how our body is able to generate meanings (i.e., is capable of creativity) and communicate them at the same time: two processes that, as far as we are concerned, could be considered part of a unitary dynamism. As George Herbert Mead observes, we “are” a body, but we also “have” a body so that we can refer to our body “as an ‘I’ and as a ‘physical thing’” (Mead 1934, It. trans. 1966, p. 199). In everyday life, we use our body in a distracted manner, without having to commit too much cognitive energy to regulating its functioning: yet, on occasion we can consider it as an object on which we can intervene and produce modifications, on which we can “reflect.” The body thus becomes a “cultural object,” capable of displaying cultural and communicative symbols and meanings.

French anthropologist Marcel Mauss was one of the first scholars to intuit that the way people walk contains social and cultural meanings related to socialization, status, and social role: for example, even walking slowly or quickly contains a conscious or unconscious communicative message for the observer. Desmond Morris, an internationally renowned zoologist, analyzing the common and specific attitudes of each animal race (including The Human Animal) documented the great variety of gestures in the world and defined their characteristics: the scholar therefore considers “gesture” any action or behavior consisting of a bodily movement capable of generating meaning, specifying (and this is a further very important element for us) that such meaning is generable only within its “cultural context.” Based on this last aspect, Morris then proceeded to research the areas in which the gesture is used (see Morris 1994, It. transl. 1995, pp. 9–10).

Interestingly, the correlation between gesture and environment that we are establishing carries with it the corresponding body-society relationship: our body moves and communicates according to the social rules that it has “absorbed” from the earliest years of the socialization process. This correlation carries with it a further assumption: many types of nonverbal behavior involve a socially shared vocabulary, not unlike verbal language. Therefore, gestures can be further defined as more or less intentional acts constructed according to codes and rules known and used with a certain continuity by members of a social community: like verbal language, therefore, “nonverbal behaviors can also have multiple meanings and require an interpretative activity on the part of the acting subjects that is inscribed within the horizon of meaning of that community” (Gili and Colombo 2012, p. 245).

We come to a further inflection in our investigation of the nature and function of gestures: speech, though normally considered a non-gesture, can also be a gesture. First, because it is a process (it takes place in time); second, because it requires the use of the body in both production and reception; third, because its objective is to generate meanings; finally, it can take the conformation of a real “act” capable of changing the environment within which it is uttered. The “Theory of Linguistic Acts” (Speech Acts), formulated by English philosopher John Austin and refined by his American colleague John R. Searle, states succinctly that every word produces effects on those who utter it and those who hear it, whereby “saying is doing,” speaking is acting, and therefore one can “do things with words”: “The act of uttering the sentence constitutes the execution, or is part of the execution, of an action” (Austin 1962, It. transl. 1987, p. 10).

All this suggests that uttering a sentence represents more than simply saying something: the “verbal gesture” contains the possibility of understanding the exact intention/finality of the utterance, which, however, depends (last important passage) “on the relations between the subjects and the context in which the linguistic act is uttered” (Gili and Colombo 2012, p. 230). With this last passage, we are defining the essentially “relational” character of the communicative gesture: certain acts are closely related to certain institutional roles and functions so that, for example, “only a priest or a civil servant can marry two people, only a magistrate can convict or acquit with legal effect, only a university professor can confer a degree. This also requires that the act take place in a specific institutional context” (ibid., p. 232).

What has been said about verbal gestures is also applicable, indeed even more so, to nonverbal gestures, which are usually used mainly to communicate relational meanings.Footnote 2

Before moving on to analyze the different creative processes in greater depth we should conclude this brief excursus on gesture by returning to the starting definition and completing it, attempting to sketch out a relationship between “gesture” and creativity. If it is true that “when we ‘create’ something we are always performing a determinate action” (Maddalena 2015, p. 88), we can begin our analysis of creative processes from this new synthetic definition: creativity is the particular way of knowing things, that is, of moving from state A to state B (process) through paths, gestures, that are “unconventional.” “Divergent thinking” is one such gesture.

3.3 The “Divergent Thinking”

After considering some basic characteristics of what I have defined as a “creative attitude,” I will now reflect on the ways in which this attitude can concretely operate.

One of the dynamics inherent in creative activity is linked, according to many authors, to a particular way of “thinking”: “So it was that at six years old I gave up what could have been my glorious career as a painter. The failure of my drawing number one and my drawing number two had discouraged me. Adults never understand anything by themselves, and children get tired of explaining everything every time. So, I chose another profession and learned to fly airplanes” (Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince, 1943). This is an emblematic representation of a particular way of “thinking,” typical of childhood; where adults would only see a banal hat, children have no difficulty in accepting that the “hat” is a boa constrictor after eating an elephant. This is perhaps the most successful description of how when the rust that settles on this ability of “divergent” interpretation, “adults by themselves never understand anything” (ibid.).

It is now common, but also scientific, usage to identify this innovative logic with an expression created in 1964 by Arthur Koestler in his very successful book The Act of Creation, in which he examines what he defines as “bisociative thinking,” or what we know as “divergent thinking.” This is clearly a popular scientific publication, sharp and pragmatic: it is important as a testimony of an increasingly widespread (ultimately instrumental) interest in the topic and especially for some of its basic intuitions, among which the idea that there is a leap, a creative “jump” made by the mind that gives rise to new and extraordinary perceptions and glimpses of reality through “divergence.” In cognitive terms, succinctly, “bisociation is the fusion of two or more apparently distinct and unrelated schemas into a new meaningful schema” (Dasgupta 2019, p. 162).

This typically human potential can be defined as the ability to produce a series of possible alternative solutions, especially when faced with problems that do not foresee a single correct solution (hence the frequent identification, sometimes disastrous, with the so-called problem solving). This approach has taken root in many disciplines belonging to the human sciences, particularly in psychology and especially in experimental pedagogy. Through these different perspectives, more or less favorable formative habits have been identified for the stabilization of divergent thinking in the life habits of the younger generations. In particular, a very common tendency has been identified in schools that hinders the development of creative abilities, a tendency that has been defined as “premature convergence.”

“It seems that students want to simplify complicated things” (Hubscher-Younger and Narayanan 2003, p. 321). This is a reductive inclination, in which only one path (or a very small number selected from those that could be feasible) “is recognized or considered, thus limiting understanding” (Feltovich et al. 1996, p. 36). By uncritically pursuing this inclination, students often risk adopting a single representation and applying it even when it is not appropriate to the context. Result: narrow perspectives hinder learning. For this reason, “premature convergence” should be fought as being chosen only for convenience, neglecting unresolved or contradictory details that are revealed by others or by reality.

The ability to sustain contradiction until it is convincingly resolved is, on the other hand, one of the fundamental characteristics of the creative attitude: one of the necessary conditions for creativity is the ability to accept “conflict” and the tension that results from polarity, rather than avoiding them. Fromm notes that current opinion suggests avoiding conflicts as much as possible: pedagogical schools agree to spare the child the experience of conflict, so everything is made easy. For example, ethical norms are leveled in such a way that opportunities to experience the conflict between desire and regulation are rare, in the belief that conflicts are harmful. The opposite is true, according to the German psychoanalyst: conflicts generate wonder. Therefore, those who avoid conflict become a machine that runs smoothly, in which every emotion is blunted and flattened, “all desires become automatic and all feelings are crushed” (Fromm 1959, It. trans. p. 75).

Just a few years earlier, the German-British sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf had expressed a similar opinion, focusing more on the “political” value of this creative conflictuality: creativity, innovation, and evolution in the life of the individual and society are to be considered as a consequence of conflicts between groups, individuals, and emotions within the same individual. All this is enough to “justify the value judgment that conflict is essentially desirable and constitutes a good” (Dahrendorf 1957, It. trans. 1963, p. 363).

Fromm, it could be said, focuses more on the anthropological framework of this positive conflictuality, even plumbing the depths of its characteristics that distinguish it from any other living being: as well as conflicts of personal and accidental nature, there are others deeply rooted in human existence. Among these, of particular interest to this research, is the conflict of our relationship with the animal kingdom: on the one hand, we are tied to it by our body, its needs and its final destruction and, on the other, by the fact that “at the same time we transcend the animal kingdom and nature thanks to the awareness of our self, to imagination and creativity” (Fromm 1959, It. trans. p. 75). As can be seen, we return to what we have identified as the original and ancestral aspect of the creative move: “we are insufficient to ourselves.”

Divergent thinking, therefore, is the way of thinking that is not satisfied with what is already known, especially in the face of problems still unresolved or partially resolved: this involves, as a basic attitude, a certain degree of tolerance for ambiguity, that is, a willingness to accept some uncertainty in conclusions and decisions and a tendency to avoid thinking in terms of rigid categories. Divergent thinking is “that type of thinking in which there is a considerable search and which is willing to accept a quantity of answers” (Guilford 1959, p. 187). In this conceptual framework, while the original person tends to trust more and have a greater tolerance of ambiguity and shows particular attention to aesthetic expressiveness, the person lacking originality tends to be more meticulous and to feel the need for discipline: according to some studies, young people who show a high degree of divergence tend to specialize in artistic rather than in scientific disciplines, while, in general, schools tend to encourage and evaluate only convergent thinking, as I will show in the next paragraph.

Given the importance of this concept of divergent thinking, there was a need to be able to measure it, to quantify it, according to the winning Anglo-Saxon approach of omnivorous quantitative evaluation: one of the most popular ways of doing this is the so-called Unusual Uses Task, a methodology in which participants are asked to suggest the greatest possible number of potential uses for common and everyday objects (a brick, a paperclip, a box, and so on). Indeed, there are many tests of creativity and imagination today “that either partially or fully examine divergent thinking” (Glăveanu 2018, p. 27).

It should be noted that as happens in all aspects related to educational relationships, divergent thinking is transmitted largely by osmosis and given this it is necessary to accept that, unfortunately, teachers often want to “simplify complicated things”: divergent thinking represents an additional variable to manage in the already complex class system. For this reason, when teachers have to choose between a “creative” student profile and a “good” student profile, “teachers often prefer the latter, because the good student is more obedient” (ibid., p. 26).

Today, however, a more realistic and comprehensive methodology seems to be emerging: studies that have analyzed the effect of training in divergent thinking in creative problem solving show, in fact, that “training in both convergent and divergent thinking is most effective” (Reiter-Palmon and Illies 2004, p. 67). Finally, I would like to touch on a somewhat peripheral application, which however is also very important in the field of divergent thinking: the interpretation of creative texts of whatever type, i.e., music, paintings, narrative, poetry, architecture, advertising, etc., requires a creative (divergent) attitude on the part of the reader. It is a type of interpretation that creates while interpreting, and therefore constitutes an understanding of the text in a new and valuable way: there is a clear distinction between an interpretation that is simply “correct” and one that brings the text to life by connecting it to experience. Each interpretation “actualizes a potential presented by the text, the potential changing over time” (Leddy 2009, p. 295).

In the field of semiotic research, this type of reading has been further investigated and clarified in the so-called Reception Theory which could be summarized with an aphorism by Jean Paul Sartre, according to which, the “text is a strange top that exists when it is in motion. To bring it to life requires a concrete act called reading, and it lasts as long as reading can last” (Sartre 1947, It. trans. 1995, p. 33). The meaning, therefore, is not that rigidly and indisputably fixed by its author, “but it ‘concretizes’ each time in relation to its interpreter” (Borio and Garda 1989, p. 3).

3.4 The Construction of the Problem

It may seem strange, but creativity does not begin “in front of” the problem: it is (necessarily) activated in the phase in which we realize that “there is a problem.” The construction of the problem or its definition “is the first step of the creative process” (Reiter-Palmon and Illies 2004, p. 57). It seems trivial, but if we reflect on our school habits (the place designated to solve problems) we realize that the proposed problems are always “already” structured in a school-like manner. It will rightly be said that to some extent this is inevitable: this does not detract from the fact that familiarity in “creating” problems is a rare and valuable skill. It is therefore necessary to recognize that “students need help to recognize problems, not just to solve them” (Sternberg and Spear-Swerling 1996, It. trans. 2009, p. 107).

As can be guessed, the terminology used leads us to relate (and often to reduce) creative action to the now well-known problem solving. In fact, many application models identify them together to the extent that some experts claim that creativity is a special case of problem solving. Others, on the other hand, take the opposite view and agree that the key processes required for creative problem solving “are the identification and construction of the problem” (Reiter-Palmon and Illies 2004, p. 57).

I will try in this case to free creativity from the cage of its operational fallout in facing problems (almost exclusively of a productive nature); however, it must be recognized that educating for creativity implies first of all helping the person to perceive that existence itself is a problem, that is, literally, “something thrown in the face” (from the semantic root of the Greek verb pro-ballo) without having in itself its own resolution. Therefore, I find myself in agreement with the statement according to which “the creative problem solver must first construct the problem that needs to be solved” (ibid) because the way in which the problem is constructed will have a significant impact on creative production and on the generation of solutions.

An effective example of this fundamental dynamic for the development of the creative attitude is that offered by the well-known American psychologist Robert Sternberg. He points out how in many cases it is not enough just to identify the relevant information necessary to solve a problem; it is essential to understand how to “put it together.” Considering the intuition of the “selective combination” by which Darwin arrived at the formulation of the theory of evolution, Sternberg observes that the information on which Darwin formulated this theory had been available for a long time. What had escaped him, and his contemporaries, was how this information could be combined in a way that accounted for the changes observed in the species he was studying. In the end, it was only Darwin who saw “how to combine the available information, and thus was born his theory of natural selection” (Sternberg 2005, p. 372).

Cognitive psychology has for some time insisted on the importance of reflecting on the problem of the “quality” of problems (especially in the programming of training courses): the school, as we have seen, tends to “propose” problems, not to face them. There is nothing wrong with this, if we are aware that these are orders of very different problems: “It is primarily the ability to solve poorly structured problems that will prepare us for the difficulties we will most often face” (Sternberg and Spear-Swerling 1996, It. trans. 2009, p. 109). The category of “poorly structured” problems is very interesting for the implications it can have in identifying appropriate methodologies for the development of creativity: but what is it about? Perhaps for reasons of evaluative fairness, the school usually proposes problems that have a single solution, the “right” one, and other solutions, however plausible they may seem, are false: but, outside the classroom, problems—fortunately or unfortunately—rarely fall into this category. Poorly defined or poorly structured problems are characterized by multiple possible answers and different ways of solution: it is this structural “ambiguity” “that allows the emergence of creative solutions” (Reiter-Palmon and Illies 2004, p. 57).

Furthermore (extremely important from a sociological perspective) unlike the problems presented in school, real-world problems are inserted in various contexts. Solving real-world problems therefore requires “sensitivity to context. Indeed, it often constitutes a part of the problem itself” (Sternberg and Spear-Swerling 1996, It. trans. 2009, p. 110).

To summarize, a formative context, favors the creative attitude and does not fear “conflict” where problems do not admit of or do not allow a single answer (to put it strongly, environments that tolerate or favor “ambiguity”) and that will stimulate young people to face a constant confrontation with concrete reality, the reality that lies beyond the school walls and almost never presents well-structured problems. Therefore, if the question is how to encourage people to opt for creativity, the path is largely “a matter of fomenting a certain attitude toward problem solving and even toward life” (Sternberg 2003, p. 118).

One last observation to conclude this topic: given the above, it is evident how important it is to spend time on the “problem construction” phase: spending more time formulating and constructing a problem often leads to solutions of higher quality and originality. Experts “spend a considerable amount of time structuring the problem construction process” (Reiter-Palmon and Illies 2004, p. 59).

3.5 Interdisciplinarity

Just a few words to highlight the existing link between creativity and a perspective as much proclaimed as an urgency in school and university programs (interdisciplinarity) as it is disregarded for lack of awareness and more simply to avoid “professional discomfort.” A few examples are enough to enhance the great opportunity of an interdisciplinary approach in supporting and strengthening the creative attitude where it would not find sufficient reasons to face the effort that “the new” always entails.

A dear friend of mine who teaches cookery in a catering institute had been berated several times by his chemistry colleague because one of their classes was showing a decided preference for their cooking lessons to the detriment of their chemistry course. One day, my friend invited his colleague to participate in the cookery lesson and told the students to put oil in a pan and observe what happened when the flame was kept high: “Now, watch closely: when the smoke starts to rise, this is called the ‘smoke point,’ it means that the oil is losing its organoleptic qualities and is no longer good for cooking. Do you know why? No? Now my colleague here will explain it to you.” Clearly, that lesson, both interdisciplinary and creative, remained impressed in the minds of the students and chemistry regained its raison d’être. I have seen the same thing happen with students attending professional institutes who were not very interested in studying physics until Ducati opened a workshop in Bologna for high schools, titled “Physics in Motion,” in which the concepts of grip, centrifugal and centripetal force, and angle of inclination gained a completely different “grip” on the students through the viewing of exciting films of Moto GP trials and races, and research laboratory demonstrations.

Interdisciplinarity allows us to grasp an object through different perspectives, overcoming objections or a dislike for certain subjects by linking them with others. In this way, creativity is also expressed in discovering new connections between different perspectives, in the call to action, that is, of all the skills that the young person has acquired during their multiple personal experiences, including those outside of school.

At this point, it is necessary to make a terminological clarification that clarifies the difference between different denominations, to understand their meaning and also, in some way, the challenge. To simplify this with a metaphor, we can think of multidisciplinarity as a dinner where everyone brings their specialty; at an interdisciplinary dinner, instead, there is an established menu and everyone brings what is established by the menu. On a further level of interaction, we find the transdisciplinarity dinner, “where not only the ingredients are shared, but everyone cooks together” (Gil and Gili 2022, p. 10).Footnote 3

As many scholars have pointed out, the most successful creative thinkers tend to use a set of “transdisciplinary” cognitive skills. Hence the need to identify a set of skills as the structure of innovative teaching, starting from the consideration that, although specific disciplinary knowledge is important, there are also general approaches that can promote creativity and discovery: the interdisciplinary approach confirms that thinking creatively in one discipline opens the door to creativity in other disciplines, suggesting that certain cognitive structures require a higher order, creative collaborative thinking, which inevitably transcends the boundaries of the discipline. These approaches “are usually predicated on a team model of working, rather than an individual’s process of thinking” (Henriksen 2016, p. 213).

The so-called seven transdisciplinary skills are identified as the ability to “observe,” to “schematize,” to “abstract,” to practice “embodied thinking” (the “sensory” reflexivity), to “model,” to “play” (doing something “for the sake of doing it”) and to “synthesize.” The optimization of these abilities, through an appropriate educational experience, can generate an individual capable of expressing themselves fully, of fulfilling their cognitive and operational abilities through the valorization of all their intellectual and sensory potential: when, in fact, the individual fully understands something, the feelings, senses, knowledge, and experiences come together in a multiform and organic way. A person “feels what they know and knows what they feel. Experts across disciplines describe the creative process as the joining of the five senses and emotions into a holistic, aesthetic and intellectual experience” (ibid., p. 215).

All of this ultimately happens particularly in situations of collaborative learning or group activities: realistically, today this “meeting of disciplines” is considered possible (when perceived as necessary or useful) through discussions among experts, hence emerges “specialization” (an irreversible phenomenon that Durkheim already posited more than a century ago).

Other scholars, however, would have this structure of research (and mental habits) placed into stagnant compartments through the enhancement of the subject’s synthesis abilities, as the goal and challenge of future training. A multidisciplinary mind does not “flit” from one field to another and does not overlap different cultures in separate chambers of the mind: rather, it must strive toward the realization of a powerful, organic, and interactive cognitive style. The ideal of the “Renaissance man” is certainly anachronistic today: the mastery of multiple knowledge is so rare that when we meet such a person, we want to understand how their mind works, “to know how it achieves creativity across disciplines” (Dasgupta 2003, p. 683).

Even more explicit are Edgar Morin’s recommendations (or “visions”); according to him it is now necessary to promote knowledge capable of grasping global and fundamental problems and of uniting partial and local knowledge in a unitary vision: the supremacy of a knowledge fragmented into different disciplines often renders us incapable of making connections between the parts and the whole, of grasping objects in their contexts, in their complexes, in their entirety. It is necessary to develop, according to the French sociologist, the natural attitude of the human mind to gather all the information in a unitary context. Therefore, it is more than ever urgent to identify methods that allow us to grasp the relationships and mutual influences between the parts and the whole. Starting from the assumption that the human being is simultaneously physical, biological, cultural, social, and historical, we must avoid disintegrating this unity in disciplinary teaching. We must make the decision to aim for the main objective of educational paths, that is the human, which today is impossible: on the contrary, we should be helped to resist this alienating process, to become aware of both the complex nature of our own identity and the identity we share with all other humans. The human condition “should, thus, be the essential object of all teaching” (Morin 2001, p. 12).

We may be nearing the end of the rationalist division between disciplines, “particularly between the scientific, the humanities, and the social sciences. Interconnectedness unravels and disciplines move away from each other when studied analytically but draw closer together when pursued and realized synthetically” (Maddalena 2021, p. 44).

Perhaps the time has come to rethink our system of research and university teaching, favoring not just a return to unrealizable aspirations of universal knowledge but rather to the creation of “transdisciplinary disciplines,” to the training of experts “between” disciplines, capable of making Schütz’s intuition operational, as it is at the basis of creative dynamics: a “symbolic” attitude capable of formulating transcendences between finite provinces of fossilized meanings that are incapable of understanding complexity. It is, once again, about inventing connections, bridges that allow a transfer of knowledge enclosed in ivory towers, that allow a new and necessary form of “scientific and operational hybridization.”

3.6 Randomness

I will now tackle a very much discussed and debated topic, that of the “random” component of creativity: basically, it is argued that, just as happens in all human events, creativity also relies—but in a much more significant measure—on dynamics that are not dependent on human control, random, indeed. There are dissenting voices: “Another common misinterpretation was that randomness or caprice is the source of creativity” (Maruyama 2003, p. 610); “Neither mechanism, nor pure randomness, nor teleology will ever be able to satisfactorily account for the emergence of such products, and so explain how creativity is possible” (Briskman 2009, p. 40).

But it is best to proceed step by step. Theories of randomness are based, in reality, on empirical observations and are only relatively “random”: they are based not only on the many revolutionary discoveries made in the course of history exactly in this way but also on the assumption that at the bottom of the creative attitude there is the inevitable encounter (random) with and between elements of “diversity.” Considering the interaction with others as a necessary precondition for creative performance, the so-called value of diversity hypothesis has been formalized: some theorists argue that group diversity increases a problem solving creative due to the different perspectives available. It has thus been highlighted that “ethnically diverse groups produced higher-quality ideas […], heterogeneous groups generated more alternatives” (Shalley and Gilson 2004, p. 43).

The creativity of the individual, therefore, would draw much more from the randomness of the available relationships than from their particular inventive abilities. Therefore, if you find yourself in a context that is not able to offer you the tools (cultural, technological, relational, etc.) necessary for the expression of your talents, they will remain unexpressed: it is necessary to have access to individuals with different skills to obtain the information necessary to produce new things. The development and implementation of creative ideas, therefore, “oftentimes requires input and support from multiple individuals or groups” (ibid., p. 39).

There is, it should be noted, a motivation that seeks to go deeper than this observation (which remains somewhat superficial) and I think it can be identified in an original dynamic of the ability to create “connections” (as we have defined the creative action): if we go back to Pareto, we find the idea that “non-logical” action (which also includes creative action) follows, precisely, dynamics that cannot be “justified” completely in terms of rational actions with respect to the purpose (to use a Weberian category). In the framework of the “instincts of combinations,” the “irrational impulse” in non-logical action represents that force of which the origins are unknown, which leads to making “combinations even of an absolutely random nature” (Padua 2017, p. 11).

Whatever the perspective of justification of this “unmanageable” dynamism,” in fact, reflection (but above all productive practice) has tried, paradoxically, to manage this element in different ways, intuiting its effectiveness in concrete cases of problem solving: brainstorming is one of these dynamics that is frequently applied in various sectors. The technique consists in a rapid generation of random ideas from a base of already acquired knowledge. Encouraging random generation of a large number of problem-solving moves can be an effective problem-solving tool when looking for creative solutions: brainstorming works “because it maximizes use of the randomness as genesis principle to generate novel moves” (Sweller 2009, p. 17).

This method began to spread in the late 1950s, in conjunction with the publication of a book by an advertising executive, Alex Faickney Osborn, Applied Imagination: it originally consisted of a simple procedure without any theoretical basis and in creative group exercises to generate effective ideas for solving a problem. The innovative perspective was in focusing on the production of a large quantity of new ideas generated by a group rather than by an individual. The validity of the ideas, naturally, was subject to the verification of their effectiveness: the selection took place downstream, not upstream. This produced a huge number of ideas from which to select those suitable for the purpose. From a purely statistical point of view, the reasoning works: numerous studies have indicated that despite the lack of a theoretical basis, the technique is able to significantly increase the number of valid ideas. It remains to be seen whether this is creativity in the full sense of the term or simply “preliminary” activities aimed at obtaining a greater quantity of raw material.

At the basis of the subsequent attempts to find the methodological and scientific foundations of this process, the characteristic (rather eccentric compared to the entire investigation carried out so far) of the so-called goal free effect, the first cognitive outcome linked to brainstorming on which various discussions have arisen, was individuated at the basis of the subsequent attempts to find the methodological and scientific foundations of this process. It is indeed characteristic of the process, though rather eccentric compared to the entire investigation carried out so far. In synthesis, the participants are asked to solve a problem without a specific goal. Many experiments have shown that by reducing the specificity of the goal, learning and practical skills are increased compared to when conventional problems with specific goals are presented. “Goal free” problem solving allows the identification of “many more variables in much less time than if they are presented with conventional problems” (Sweller 2009, p. 17). In practice: “if you have no goals, you generate more.”

It is worthwhile trying to justify perplexity about these theoretical conclusions, which, on a practical level, are indisputably productive: the question is fundamental, linked to the fact that pure randomness (even at a cognitive and even imaginative level) is practically impossible for a healthy human mind. Even so-called aleatory artistic expressions, derived from the randomness of the “alea,” the dice numbers (think of the musical compositions of John Cage, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, or Jackson Pollock’s action painting) actually inevitably respond to a project. The human mind is incapable of autonomy from a purpose, even if it is the purpose of denying the need for a purpose. As we have seen, gestures involve a narrative that is always “finalized”: “In philosophy we speak of teleology (from telos = end). The symbolic nature, implicit in complete gestures, always leads them toward an end” (Maddalena 2021, p. 50). Even more specifically, “meaning is in any part of the gesture, and it is the telos of any part as well as of the entire gesture” (Maddalena 2015, p. 81).

Similarly, the human mind is incapable of a totally random “form” in its operational processes, even in its unconscious movements: “Since randomness is not creative, it is necessary to recognize an organizing factor in the activity that takes place in the unconscious” (Sinnott 1959, It. trans. 1972, p. 46).

Some cognitive models have tried to put order into this intuition by hypothesizing that we first internalize mental elements—facts, theories, images, and information from the creative domain—and then store them in the brain: during a subconscious creative process, these mental elements would combine in random configurations, causing the subjective sensation of having an intuition. According to this view, no new substance is created, only combinations of elements in complex systems. The creative process would therefore begin with a period of conscious work, which should then be followed by a period of rest in which the mind is focused on other activities. It is during this rest period that the “appearance of a sudden illumination” is received: this illumination “is the result of long, unconscious prior work that was taking place during the rest period” (Sawyer 2003, p. 22).

Thought in general therefore seems to require a mix of conscious and unconscious processing: creative thinking, in particular, would be found to wander freely through the “border” between the two. This, on the one hand, imposes further limits on our ability to explain creativity, on the other hand, it opens up new perspectives for investigation on the “attention” and “awareness” factors mentioned above by Fromm: “Attention (hence consciousness) can only attend to one thing at a time. […] In contrast unconscious processing can proceed without attention” (Dasgupta 2019, p. 121).

There has also been, for some time, a valuable psychoanalytic reflection on these uncontrolled movements of the mind, which suggest that even involuntary moves (among which many creative intuitions must be included) respect an organizational factor that inevitably comes to be built in the cognitive system: even unconscious intuitions or solutions that seem to appear in a completely random, unforeseen way, in fact do not appear randomly, but exclusively in those existential situations in which the individual has intensely committed himself in his conscious life. If it is true that intuition can occur in moments of relaxation or even drowsiness, the fact remains that it triggers precisely in those spheres in which the individual has worked hard during his conscious experience. Therefore, the “purpose,” the “goal,” is a complex phenomenon that encompasses all levels of experience: “We cannot ‘want’ to have insights, we cannot ‘want’ creativity, but we can want to surrender to the encounter with complete dedication and commitment. The deepest aspects of awareness are activated in direct proportion to the commitment that the individual puts into the encounter” (May 1959, It. trans. 1972, p. 87).

Retaining some significant terms from this quote and applying them to what has been said so far, it follows that the instinct of combinations (creativity) is part of non-logical action: we are not creative by following the path of consequentiality forced from one concept to another. This non-logic therefore involves a leap, a “jump” toward the new, the unexpected, in which chance plays a particularly important role. But this leap (the energies for which come from the unconscious) happens and can only happen within the framework of an “intense commitment to conscious life,” which is built around an inevitable “purpose” that “encompasses all levels of experience”: all this is activated at the moment of an “encounter,” a fantastic snapshot of the moment when the varied and always mysterious human vital impulse comes across “something” (reality) that could provide it with important information for the problems that life presents us with. Creative gestures, therefore, always stem from circumstances “that can appear trivial to many but are significant to the person who accepts them knowingly as a chance for meaning or as a responsibility. It is not a coincidence that ‘responsibility’ comes from ‘respondeo’ meaning ‘to answer.’ Creativity is our answer to the appeal of experience” (Maddalena 2015, p. 97).

We can therefore conclude that the main motivation behind the creative experience is the need to relate to the surrounding world “through an experience that consists mainly in openness during the encounter” (De Masi 2003, p. 447).

Creativity is the sharpest tool with which nature equips us to face the adventure of these endless encounters, in the passionate attempt to reconstruct an order, cosmos: it is therefore the “ability to transform randomness and disparity into an organized structure” (Arieti 1976, It. trans. 1979, p. 439).

3.7 Ai-Da: Synthetic Creativity

The end of this journey through creativity is now in sight, and the time has come to deal with a very current topic that forces us to take a position on a problem that until recently could only have been imagined within the framework of cinema or science fiction novels: does “algorithmic” creativity exist? After discussing the topic of randomness, there is another phenomenon (technological progress) somehow linked to it to be discussed; it is invading our daily life and no longer simply proposes to lighten the burdensome tasks of existence (as did the washing machine, the car, etc.) but interacts with the deepest areas of the human being, with thought, affectivity, morality. In short, the question is whether it is possible to recognize a certain “creative” ability in AI, artificial intelligence.

Here a premise is needed, in order not to trivialize this attempt at investigation and avoid getting caught up in merely terminological issues: from a certain point of view, if creativity is the ability to intuit and practice new connections, it must be considered present not only in machines but also in animals. The question is, instead, whether it is possible to identify “a certain type of creativity” (for which it would probably be necessary to invent a new term) that is a full expression of what today, with difficulty, is defined as human nature. From this point of view, as can be easily understood, there are at least two existential levels that could hardly be shared with our “creative relatives”: the level of the “sense” of innovation (and therefore its value, its importance, its quality) and the “relational” level that innovation is always destined to promote, invent, hinder, prevent.

Let me start with a recent cultural event, the presentation of Ai-Da, “the World’s First Ultra-Realistic AI Robot Artist,” as “she” self-defines in a TedXFootnote 4 meeting.

Being a performance artist, Ai-Da created a series of artworks that were displayed in the “Unsecured Futures” exhibition held between May and June 2019 at St John’s College in Oxford and which received (it is only fair to say) great commercial appreciation. The robot draws “using cameras in my eyes and AI algorithms” and that takes its name (with strong symbolic value) from Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), an English mathematician, daughter of Lord Byron, considered the first computer programmer in the world, the first to predict the ability of machines to go beyond mere numerical calculation.

“Going beyond”: this is an expression I have already used. How far can an intelligence capable of “calculating quickly” go? Can an algorithmic procedure transform a numerical calculation into something constitutively different (an aesthetic experience, a sensation, an affection, or even a morality) precisely because of its “speed”? The creator of Ai-Da, the art director Aidan Meller, owner of the homonymous Gallery in Oxford, has shown himself to be very well-informed about the “cultural” issues related to this unstable boundary of “competences” between the human and non-human and to be able to stimulate debate on and attention to his product: while fully recognizing Ai-Da’s “machine state” and the necessary human-machine collaboration for producing the artworks, at the same time he claims a personality for “her” and recognition of “her” artistry, as a mirror of contemporary currents and behaviors. Transhumanism raises increasingly urgent and potentially dangerous problems: since all technological advances bring good, evil, and the banal, if Ai-Da were important for one aspect, it would be that of making us consider the “confusion of human/machine relationships.”

However, things are even more complex and open up issues that go far beyond the apologetic words of Ai-Da’s “father”: symptomatic, in this regard, is the thought “expressed” by Ai-Da herself on occasion of the lecture she gave at the TedX. Her choice of citing Margaret Boden, that authoritative author I quoted early on in this book, is very apt and perspicacious: “How can a robot be an artist? Art and artists have many definitions. In regard to creativity, using academic professor Margaret Boden’s criteria, I am creative, because my work is new, surprising and has value, as it is stimulating debate and interest.” There are many opinions about creativity: if we adhere to that of Boden, Ai-Da tells us, anything can be creative when it produces something “new,” “surprising,” “of value,” and “capable of stimulating debate and interest.”

The peak of the robot’s critical awareness is however in the next sentence, where she recounts a confrontation (that actually took place in front of the cameras) with Tim Marlow, then Artistic Director of the Royal Academy: “He feels the purpose of art is to express the experience of being fully human.” A very radical statement, that of the artistic director, which seems to denote little “sensitivity” toward the machine-artist: “The purpose of art is to express the experience of being fully human.” Ai-Da, on her part, rather more polite, candidly admits to having reflected on that definition that would radically cut her out of the game (I pondered on this) and acknowledges that there is a substantial difference: “I am different to humans. I am a machine. I do not have consciousness or a subjective experience of the world. But as an artistic persona, this allows me to see you a step removed. One thing I see is that animals are just like you in the way I am not. Because they also are conscious, with subjective experiences.”

There are many highly problematic and current aspects: the machine has no consciousness (while animals do!) but is still an artistic persona: not therefore people, not person, not subject, but persona, standing for “public image,” “character,” very similar to the Latin meaning of “mask.” What connection runs between the mask and the person behind it? Are they synonyms? Or rather, leaving the simply linguistic level, are they perceived as “sensorially equivalent”? To the extent that, in this case the machine seems to claim a privilege because it can look at humans a step removed, at a distance, and therefore can perhaps say a truth that humans are not able to see.

It is clear that we are faced with an issue that, while still in its initial stages, proposes problems that go well beyond the objectives of an investigation into the social components of creativity. However, I think that even our limited perspective can help to highlight aspects that can make a specific contribution to identifying critical points to resolve in dealing with the problem of Artificial Intelligence in the future.

There is a very perfunctory option open to solving the problem of “artificial creativity,” simply deny the existence of creativity itself: “When asked if a computer can be creative, MinskyFootnote 5 answered: I plan to answer ‘no’ by showing that there is no such thing as ‘creativity.’ His argument is that creativity is no different from other forms of thought and can therefore be achieved by computers” (Burleson 2005, p. 443).

If, on the contrary, we want to continue to defend “a thing called creativity” and to identify its hypothetical human specificity, I would say that essentially the nodes to be addressed are those that revolve around the secular and ever-changing definition of “person” and, second, the “relationships” that constitute it and that it is able to generate: in particular, the construction of clones that are increasingly similar to human beings and increasingly better performing can favor a certain, new confusion on four aspects regarding identification.

The first aspect concerns the specimen of personality that can easily be identified today in the mind, its ability to reduce all existence to thought. The second aspect (paradoxically) is a tendentially contrasting identification that identifies the person with feeling, the set of psychophysical sensations (therefore inevitably linked to sensoriality). The third aspect (and this a purely social field) is the consequent reduction (if not elimination) of “otherness,” and therefore, ultimately, of the relational structure of the human being. The fourth criticality is, finally, the tracing of the criteria of “evaluability” of what aspires to be recognized as creative.

I shall now analyze these four critical nodes related to the creativity of artificial intelligence, clearly keeping in mind its implications with what has been said about man’s creative capacity.

3.7.1 Mind-Man

Here I refer to a recent article by Pierpaolo Donati that helps us understand the new cultural framework in which we find ourselves reconsidering the unique qualities of human action in the hyper-technological era: the starting consideration is that the digital revolution brings with it the idea of a “mind society.” This theory essentially identifies the individual and his various “social” aggregations as the result of simple cognitive processes, potentially free from any material conditioning (a materiality lately superfluous for the definition of the subject and its relations). It is a theory that has recently become a sort of interpretive paradigm not only of the mental processes of the individual but also of the entire society understood in its sociological sense, as a society of human beings.

In summary, the invasiveness of digital practices as the foundation and often as the content of our daily actions (mediatization of existence) is leading to the affirmation of what the author defines as Digital Matrix (DM), a matrix capable of pervasively changing our way of considering things, their value, their consistency: it is the symbolic code of the “onlife society,” the society of online life that functionalizes all other symbols (life, death, morality, justice, honesty, values, etc.). It “promotes a culture devoid of any teleology or teleonomy as it operates as a substitute for any rival moral or theological matrix” (Donati 2019, p. 70).

It is evident, in this interpretive framework, that creativity cannot but be in some way integrated into this plan of radical “reform” of the perception of reality and its evaluation. The Ai-Da case is perfectly integrable into this new semantic frame: the reinterpretation of Margaret Boden’s statements, while formally respecting a (confused) distinction between man and machine, in the end does not find its true substance except in the more or less uncertain presence of a self-consciousness, exclusive heritage of “animals.” For this reason, as a persona (neither man, nor animal) Ai-Da can algorithmically (mentally) define itself as a performance artist.

To this self-definition of the machine (behind which, it should be remembered, hides a human mind that speaks on behalf of the machine itself, leaving it the discretion to choose through calculations), it must be objected that the mind emerges “from the interactions between the brain and the factors that stimulate it from within and outside the human body” (ibid., p. 68).

Having had a free hand with “definitions” (a great power, among other things, as documented from the first pages of the biblical meta-narration), we humans should take advantage of it in times of need and come to distinguish, at least linguistically, “combinative” creativity from “existential” creativity, including in this second type exclusively those innovative associations that arise from the impact of a “conscious body” with everything around it, a conscious body that has the ability to freely identify what is (humanly) important from what is not, what makes (human) sense and what does not.

Clarifying this difference is the objective of one of the assumptions of the recent Manifesto promoted by Vlad Glăveanu, drafted together with many colleagues from different scientific sectors, in which it is stated that physical existence will necessarily have to coexist with multiple forms of artificial intelligence and “creativity will become a necessity for the dignity and survival of the human species” (Glăveanu et al. 2019, p. 742). As already noted, we also need our bodies and our actions to communicate and to think (Maddalena 2021).

The centrality of the “body” in learning processes has been, on the other hand, a conquest of cognitive psychology starting from almost a century and a half ago: we want to resume this line of investigation and its most recent reinterpretations to affirm that what applies to learning processes can be easily transferred to creative processes.

Back in 1884, an article by the psychologist William James titled “What is an Emotion?” appeared in Mind, a philosophy journal: starting from a naive question (“Why do we feel fear in front of a bear?”) James laid the foundations for a real revolution, not only in the field of emotional perception but also in that of learning processes. In fact, contrary to what we would still answer today (“because it is dangerous and therefore we run away”), James stated that the opposite is true: it is precisely because our body pushes us to run away that the emotion of fear emerges. In other terms, sensoriality precedes any possible translation and symbolic, reflective, moral processing and represents the original impetus: this leads us to consequently also change the order of the cognitive process, so our body reacts and from that reaction we understand that the bear is dangerous. Therefore, a mental state is not induced by another mental state, because between the one and the other there necessarily intervene bodily manifestations: the most correct statement, therefore (as he clarified in his subsequent monumental work, The Principles of Psychology), is that “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble” (James 1890, p. 449).

In the following years, these theses were strongly criticized, and not always without foundation: it is evident, for example, that, in this interpretative framework, mental activity as a source of emotion is paradoxically excluded. It is common experience that we get emotional “also” because what we feel interacts with what we know, with the awareness that the “cognitive deposit” is built and corrected throughout a lifetime. However, the basic structure still holds today if it is true that current psychology (not only theoretical, but also therapeutic) agrees in stating that the mind is “embodied” in the fullest sense of the term: “As I studied the disorders of memory, language and reason, present in numerous human beings affected by brain lesions, the idea that mental activity […] requires both the brain and the rest of the body was increasingly imposed on me” (Damasio 1995, pp. 60 and 61). Even more evocatively, “the soul breathes through the body, and suffering, whether it moves from the skin or from a mental image, occurs in the flesh” (ibid., p. 176).

Everything we have reported confirms the centrality of the so-called visceral system as the origin of the human process of emotional relationship, therefore cognitive, with the external world: the mind is far from separable from the body, even in its most abstract processes.

From this point of view, if we move on to the neurological plane, the recent and fundamental discovery by a group of Italian researchers of the so-called mirror neurons, contributes decisively to recognizing the supremacy of action and the involvement of the body in understanding. The ability to understand and even share (also emotionally, in humans) the gesture of a similar being establishes a priority of practice over logic: we are therefore capable of a more immediate and involving understanding provided by the body, even before the great machination of complex symbolic relations intervenes.

Let me attempt to enhance the connection between everything written so far and the heart of this research, providing an answer to this question: if the sensory dimension (the body) has such a central influence in cognitive processes, is it possible, by transitivity, to find the same dynamic in creative processes? Although the idea that cognitive processes are embodied has been shared for almost half a century, studies on how and to what extent the body and the environment might influence creative thinking “represent a relatively recent scientific endeavor” (Stanciu 2015, p. 312); therefore, at the moment, “few studies have addressed creative thinking from the perspective of an embodied cognition” (Andolfi et al. 2017, p. 20). It is for this reason that specific research is still in an embryonic state (especially from the point of view of empirical observations): however, something can already be stated with certainty, even in the sometimes eccentric if not extravagant panorama of the investigation strategies adopted.

It is appropriate to comment here on the results of a recent study by Jérôme Guegan and colleagues, more significant for its theoretical perspective than for the objectives it actually achieved. As we know, the virtual world (at the moment) does not foresee any action of the body, if not as its translation into digital codes: to make up for this poverty of identity, there are various stratagems to “represent” it. These researchers tried to demonstrate how avatars (described as virtual representations of the self) “may be a medium for stimulating creativity” (Guegan et al. 2016, p. 165). The representations we build to give a face to our profile on the various virtual platforms we inhabit are “projections of the users, a ‘tangible embodiment of their identity’” (ibid., p. 166). It is interesting to note (I repeat, regardless of the scope of the results achieved) how physicality, or even corporeality are perceived as an urgency of expressiveness, so much so as to go and build it where it is not allowed: “In the same way as Ku Klux Klan avatars lead users to imagine more negative stories, a ‘creative’ avatar could arouse more creative behaviors which would lead to more innovative ideas” (ibid., p. 167).

More promising is another recent line of empirical investigations aimed at identifying links not only between gestures and movements and creative thinking (interaction is now taken for granted) but also between “postures” of the body and generation of new ideas: in other words, some “body states” are associated with creative thinking. Through experiments that we can define, in turn, as certainly “creative,” it has been observed that people who contracted the frontal muscle, compared to the contraction of the corrugator, generated more original ideas when asked to think about the possible uses of a pair of scissors; that heat stimuli led to more creative ideas and drawings and when thinking about possible gifts; walking generates new ideas more than sitting; the same can be said of the flexed arm compared to the extended one. In summary, if openness to experience is correlated with creative thinking, in parallel “the closed posture is detrimental to creativity” (Andolfi et al. 2017, p. 26).

To conclude this overview regarding the link between sensory experience and cognitive and creative processes, a recent discovery in the field of neuroscience that earned the Nobel Prize for the Edvard and May-Britt Moser (Norwegian neuroscientists) in 2014 is worthy of mention: the two scholars identified a type of cell in the brain important for positioning, known as grid cells and also GPS neurons. Through these devices, the brain interacts with the physical space in which the body moves, recording it and finally builds an autobiographical memory around these “lived places”: in other words, we “are,” in some way, the places where we have lived. Well, it seems that online platforms, as realistic as they are (even with the use of 3D or even 4D technology) are not able to activate these neurons: a significant shortcoming for those who aspire to replace (or, at least, to confuse) the real with the virtual.

I will conclude referring to a reflection that deserves more thought: its author, Hans Joas, defined it as “Theory of the creativity of action.” The German sociologist suggests that conceiving perception and cognition do not precede action but are a phase of the action itself: hence objectives are not defined by an act of the intellect that precedes action, but by aspirations and tendencies that are pre-reflective (see Crespi cited earlier) and always operative without us being actively aware of it. But where exactly are these aspirations? Joas’ answer is very definite: “They are located in our bodies. It is the body’s capabilities, habits and ways of relating to the environment which form the background to all conscious goal-setting, in other words, to our intentionality” (Joas 1996, p. 158).

Observation of our daily activities confirms that, even if plans have been developed, the actual course of action must be determined from situation to situation and is open to continuous revisions; the plan is never the only center of orientation of our action. For this reason, “no creative action would be possible without the bedrock of pre-reflective aspirations. […] Thus, the corporeality shows itself as the constitutive precondition of creativity not only in perception, but also in the action itself” (ibid., p. 163).

Sociological theories, the author observes, limit themselves to stating that the body is the factual basis of action, but they do not pay attention to it, as if out of an excess of theoretical caution: “Any investigation on the role of the body in action has been confined to the margins of sociology” (ibid., p. 167).

In light of the documentation reported, it can be synthetically affirmed that “creativity is, at once, a psychological, social and material (physical and embodied) phenomenon. This multidimensionality is important because we create not as isolated minds but as embodied beings who participate in a socio-material world” (Glăveanu et al. 2019, p. 742). So, starting from a specific point, all in all limited in its scope (a creative mind “without a body”), we have arrived at a much broader issue, that of the “identity” of Artificial Intelligence, a problem that carries with it a huge number of unresolved issues, also from a moral and legal point of view.Footnote 6

3.7.2 Homo sentiens: The Man of Feeling

Proceeding to the second critical aspect, feeling, the terrain is in a certain sense less elaborate from an intellectual point of view, but more widespread and appreciated in daily life. The general fact is that these two fields are no longer able to dialogue with each other, to find points of contact or organic interpretative keys. On the contrary, when trying to link the finite provinces of meaning related to the mind with those related to sensations, we always end up, given the premises, with dangerous situations, if not monstrous misrepresentations: “It all started when children met the seductive Tamagotchis and Furbies, the first computers that asked for love” (Turkle 2011, It. trans. 2012, p. 40).

A quarter of a century ago, when the advance of technology was far slower than it is today, Franco Ferrarotti hypothesized a new type of human as a consequence of the man’s interaction with the machine. According to the Italian sociologist, with television broadcast and enjoyed on a planetary scale, the era of the Homo sapiens ended and that of Homo sentiens began—the era of a certain type of reasoning, which he (Ferrarotti) defines as “syllogistic,” that proceeds from premises and through intermediate propositions, finally arriving “at the conclusive ‘therefore’ to triumphantly seal the whole story” (Ferrarotti 1995, p. 40).

According to Ferrarotti, the centrality assumed by “feeling,” i.e., the predominant role of the sensory apparatus as a specimen of human consciousness, had brought a new protagonist to the scene, a subject capable of “standing up” and acting based on a principle different from the classic one of logical procedure: this new direction was (is) still uncertain in its consequences and can result in the production of a “weak ego,” all structured on feelings at the expense of reflection, defined as Homo sentiens in contrast to the Socratic Homo sapiens. In this potentially destructive process, the hope is that instead we will achieve a definition of a new “integrated” man, “in whom hopefully, passions and reason, heart and intelligence will be reconciled” (ibid., p. 87).

Decades later, this reconciliation seems far from coming. Indeed, if possible, the polarities seem to have moved further apart and Reasoning travels fragile paths while trying to provide solid ground to Sensation, which enjoys an indisputably more attractive appeal: there is no shortage of scientists who argue that machines will teach us to be better friends and lovers because we can practice with them, they will provide substitutes where human beings fail: no betrayals, no broken hearts. In these arguments, a simple criterion is asserted for judging the value of technology, even in the most intimate situations: “Does being with a robot make you feel better? […]. Feeling good is not the measure of all things: one can feel good for the wrong reasons” (Turkle 2011, It. trans. 2012, pp. 8 and 9).

Sherry Turkle ultimately asks whether it is possible to consider on the same level two questions that we must ask ourselves in the face of the progressive replacing of people with machines in the performance of some “vital” functions: can machines “be good for us? Or, as I asked, could they be good only in the sense that they ‘make us feel good’?” (ibid., p. 141). It is not possible to be superficial about certain nuances because the consequences, individual and social, of this naivety could lead to a change (for the worse) of our earthly existence: not by chance, technology attracts us more where we are most vulnerable (passions, feelings, interests, etc.); by developing new technologies, we are inevitably changing the most fundamental of human principles: the conception we have of ourselves, “our relationships with others and our understanding and practice of love and death” (Donati 2019, p. 76).

The advent of “thinking” machines, which have then become “affective/affectionate,” presents us with the great problem of the “sincerity” vis-à-vis what our psychophysical structure really asks for: among other things, sincerity, being in turn connected to freedom, is anything but “transparent,” and is therefore another experience that no machine can synthesize: if we ask ourselves what can “interest” machines, we must accept their total, irreducible indifference. Yet, a (mechanical) hand that seeks ours says: “I need you. Take care of me. Look after me. And then, maybe, I will look after you because I want to.” Once again, argues Sherry Turkle, what robots offer strikes our human weaknesses. We can interact with robots knowing their limits perfectly well, settling for what we know to be an inevitably unrequited love. We know that the robot cannot feel anything, it cannot experience empathy. “Do we care? Or is the representation of feelings sufficient today?” (Turkle 2011, It. trans. 2012, pp. 173 and 353).

Since time immemorial, armed with increasingly more sophisticated tools, man has always tried to establish a comforting link between “representation” and “well-being,” comforting but, alas, inconclusive. Over half a century ago Philip Rieff, an American sociologist who rather “fell from grace” wrote that modernity is marked by the overcoming of the “old deceptions” of evil and good, cunningly specializing in techniques he called “therapeutic,” aimed at a single goal: to produce “a bit of well-being.” Therapeutics, defined as the “non-religion of our time,” the “mother science,” is, more than a theory, an invasive practice of life that prevents modern men from even imagining an action that is not to the advantage of the one who performs it: it announces, in doing so, that a fundamental change occurred in the very essence of our culture, a change “that pushes us towards a human condition in which there will be nothing more to say with the old terms of despair and hope” (Rieff 1966, It. trans. 1972, pp. 27, 82 and 308).

The question is: given the premises made in the first chapter about the “nature” and “sources” of creativity, is it possible to hypothesize a creative (human) gesture that has nothing to do with the old terms of despair and hope?

Perhaps the anthropological change (hoped for by some) in the development of the human (and therefore of the social) being will succeed: an AI expert argues that humans “as a species” must learn to deal with “synthetic emotions,” “an expression that indicates the representations of emotion coming from the objects we have created” (Turkle 2011, It. trans. 2012, p. 161). Perhaps it may happen: it will consist, precisely, in the cancelation of the principle of “otherness” as the essential foundation of “personality” and, in our case, of creativity.

Even in this case the corollary problems connected to this process of “emotionalization” of existence are of great concern: just think about the issue of the “managerial power” of these emotions, to whom it might belong, with what criteria, with what effects, etc.Footnote 7 Indeed, the issues discussed here go to the roots of those underlying the recent explosion of the Post-Truth phenomenon.

3.7.3 Otherness

I am convinced, as can be inferred from what has been said so far, that creativity is a drive toward the other and toward the Other (as the endpoint of that inexhaustible dynamic of progressive transcendence): I am convinced, therefore, that both drives cannot be traced back and reduced to an “enhanced replica of oneself,” which remains a replica. If you take a “companion” as a machine, the first thing that is missing is otherness: “the ability to see the world through the eyes of another. Without it there can be no empathy” (Turkle 2011, It. trans. 2012, p. 75). Turkle recalls, in this regard, that the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut had long identified the existence of a personality disorder, narcissism, characterized by a distorted sense of self: in narcissists, the stability of their self-awareness is still built (inevitably) on their relationship with others, but this dynamic is overturned through a sort of projection of themselves onto others, thus the narcissists transform these others into simple “self-objects,” who therefore perform a purely instrumental and manipulative function insofar as they simply represent the perfect harmony with the narcissists’ own fragile inner state, confirming it even in disappointing outcomes. Similarly, “if they can give the impression of being alive, without disappointing, relational artifacts like social robots open ‘new’ possibilities for narcissistic experience” (ibid.).

Similarly, the creative gesture: when human beings create, they create for someone and with someone, there are refero and religo, there is an emerging effect, which the robot cannot produce or even recognize.

I will try to provide a clarifying element for this essential relational dynamic for all-round creative expressiveness. Take, for example, one of the most common daily practices (regardless of voluntariness) in our modern life: the musical experience. To take up a Pareto category, it is certainly a “non-logical action” that for this reason (but not only) could hardly fall within the algorithmic logic (although “synthetic” musical products of high elaborative quality have been made, as they have in the field of painting): music, some scholars note, helps the transition and recovery of a non-linear, non-sequential, non-logical, and analytical sense, “but in the logical sense (deeper) of the logic of the living, of the internal listening” (Ferrarotti 1995, p. 5).

Venturing into this dark “logic of the living” of internal listening, we can rely on an author that has been cited previously regarding the symbolic dynamics typical of the human being: Alfred Schütz was a great connoisseur and practitioner of the music and tried to bring out its relational dynamics in his well-known essay, “Making Music Together. A Study in Social Relationship.” It is interesting to note that this particular form of nonverbal communication allows Schütz to identify a certain type of relational dynamism that is at the base of any other form of interaction between human subjects. The Austrian sociologist asks whether the communicative process is “really the foundation of all possible social relationships,” or if, on the contrary, every communication presupposes the existence “of some kind of social interaction.” With this expression he intends to hypothesize particular forms of social relationships “which necessarily precede” (Schütz 1951, p. 78) all communication.

Proceeding along this path of investigation, one would come to identify a particular social relationship between composer and listener: although separated by hundreds of years, the latter participates almost simultaneously in the flow of consciousness of the former, performing with him step by step the ongoing articulation of his musical thought. The composer and the listener are thus “tuned” to each other, they live together through the same flow. With a single expression, they are growing older together while the musical process lasts. This “aging together” is the premise, the condition for any other type of communicative interaction between humans, a particular ability to tune that is alien and impossible toward other provinces of meaning of a different nature. This “mutual tuning-in relationship” coincides with the pre-communicative social relationship on which only every communication is based: “It is precisely this mutual tuning-in relationship by which the ‘I’ and the ‘Thou’ are experienced by both participants as a ‘We’” (ibid., p. 79).

This can be compared with what Dasgupta calls “creative encounter”: he describes this dynamic as a sort of “identification” between the creator and consumer, through which the latter perceives that his inner experience comes to coincide with that of the former. The creativity of the creator therefore lies “in her capacity to evoke in a consumer such a response state; one in which the latter identifies with the former” (Dasgupta 2019, p. 50). It is therefore specified that, “for a creative encounter to occur, the consumer has also to give some effort” (ibid., p. 53).

It is also interesting to note, finally, how even 70 years ago the intuition of a possible technological “intrusion” in this We-relation was not perceived as decisive or obstructive: Schütz did not consider it of great importance whether the performer and the listener shared the aesthetic experience “in a face-to-face relationship or whether through the interposition of mechanical devices, such as records” (Schütz 1951, p. 93).

It is clear that, from the gramophone to the mp3, from the telephone to the 24h connection, vast progress has been made, especially in the direction of representing this premise of the We-relation as increasingly spurious and therefore not necessary. Today, perhaps precisely in the gaps and defective remnants of machines, it can still peek out: “Robots,” he said, “do everything right”; people “do the best they can.” But according to Bruce, “[I]t was human imperfection that created stronger bonds” (Turkle 2011, It. trans. 2012, p. 68). Creativity is perhaps one of the few remaining weapons to rebuild this real sociality, but also to destroy it: it can be (or return to be) the primary process through which we open ourselves to others, to their positions and perspectives, in ways that require us to change. Creating, therefore, “necessarily involves a plethora of ethical issues and a shared responsibility for oneself, for others and for society” (Glăveanu 2018, p. 157).

It is in these few remaining plots that a human relationality not entirely defined by “instrumentality” can consolidate, a mode of interaction suitable for describing and regulating the relationship of man with things but not with his peers: the search for “relational goods” implies relationships between human beings who, “unlike algorithms, generate meta-reflective solutions to the problems of human relationships” (Donati 2019, p. 86).

Transhumanism, as defined by the “father” of Ai-da, tends to blur the boundaries between human and non-human to favor hybrids: this (inevitable?) form of hybridization must be governed by something more comprehensive than algorithmic dynamics, sensory/emotional, or (ultimately) economic: the valorization of human beings through digital technologies obliges us to evaluate “whether, how and when these technologies promote the flourishing or, conversely, the alienation of humanity” (ibid., p. 91), whether they are instrumentally used (as is their destiny) to support the human construction of “relational goods” or if they will be religiously obeyed as “self-objects” destined, by contrast, to dominate the logics of world governance.

3.7.4 Evaluation of Innovations

Having already extensively discussed this topic in the second chapter of this book, here I will simply discuss it in relation to algorithmic creativity.

For this, I will rely on the assistance of a scholar I quoted at the beginning this book, whose definitions Ai-Da herself relies on to attest her creative abilities, Margaret Boden, who in one of her articles specifically dedicated to the existing relationships between Artificial Intelligence and creativity, highlights an unresolved problem (as indeed were the first three we have highlighted): the irreducible difference between “novelty” and “value.” Even where something new happened the resulting structures could have no interest or value and so such ideas would certainly be new, but not creative.

In principle, she says, future artificial intelligence models could also incorporate evaluation criteria powerful enough to allow the production of Big-C products: yet this operation would soon be inadequate given the “fickle” nature of taste and human urgencies, constantly influenced by ever-changing, concrete social relations. Just observing the phenomenon of changing tastes and the speed of such processes, together with the underlying and collective logic that underlies them, is sufficient to harbor strong doubts that all this can continue through a delegation to imitative randomness and algorithmic calculation (except at the price of a definitive subservience of men to the machines they created). Of this relational complexity machines are not (will they ever be?) capable: even now it is quite difficult to identify, define, and analyze the criteria we use in our evaluations. Justifying, or even explaining (causally), our reliance on those criteria is even more difficult, because the reason why we like or dislike something often has a great deal to do with motivational and emotional factors, “considerations about which the current AI has almost nothing to say” (Boden 1998, p. 354).

Computers, therefore, which are objectively much faster and more prolific than the human mind, will be able to achieve great creative solutions, but this can only happen if they are connected “to a domain that provides questions interesting to humans, and to a field that can evaluate the computers’ conclusions” (Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi 2003, p. 190).

Future scenarios are clearly well beyond our wildest imagination: for now we can still think that algorithmic creativity will prove its legitimacy when it realizes a program capable of generating new ideas that initially leave us puzzled or even reject us, but are “able to persuade us that they were indeed valuable. We are very long way from that” (Boden 1998, p. 355).

3.8 Talent or Training?

Now for the final question: given the need for an original attitude, random elements, unconscious activities and innate talents, is it possible to “learn” creativity?

For many the answer is no: here, a central role has been played by a certain cultural setting that has exalted “genius” as the only accomplished dimension of creativity. The corollary consequences of this from the point of view of educational practice are clearly considerable: referring to a romantic vision, many young people believe that creativity is innate, that it is a gift or a talent, that it cannot be learned. As a result, “most of them will never develop into creative individuals, no matter how skilled they are” (Meheus and Nickles 2000, p. 235).

The twentieth century intervened to overturn the situation, driven by the realization that creativity, even that hidden in the daily activities of “normal” people, is convenient and a source of improvement of economic, social, relational life. This results in a logical availability to program its development through different techniques (as we have seen): insisting on the detachment of creativity from artistry and individual genius, it has become less mystical and has been “engaged intentionally and systematically as a product of learning” (McWilliam and Dawson 2008, p. 637).

Certainly, in this operation of “democratic” recovery of creative competence, there was no lack of “naturalistic” derivations of reappropriation. A repercussion of Freudian thought and the general educational concept of the 1920s was that emphasis was placed on creativity as something natural to childhood, with the belief that it was enough to give it freedom for it to flourish in works of great beauty: young children were handed crayons and colors and “when they produced what for them were creative acts, the enthusiastic adults welcomed them defining them as works of art” (Mead 1959, It. trans. 1972, p. 272).

What is important to retain in all these (sometimes clumsy) attempts to put the creative dimension back at the center of educational interest and reflection is that there is a vital link between the development of the person and the development of their creativity and that the meeting between the two maturation processes can be somehow favored from the outside: creativity and learning are correlated in various ways and creative thinking can contribute to a learning process as a process of knowledge construction. On the other hand, learning actively involves the construction of a network of related ideas: “Discovering or rediscovering concepts and principles, is itself a creative act at the personal level” (Lubart 2008, p. 361). And this is a value that must be carefully preserved in every educational relationship regardless of the “level” at which the subject will be able to express their creative ability: “Individual differences in creativity are large” (ibid.).

There are currently no effective manuals or DIY handbooks that teach methods to strengthen creative abilities: it is however paradoxically clear that there are methods that weaken them or make them impracticable. And then, if we are not yet entirely sure how it is possible to support creativity, it is instead very simple to define practices that discourage it, even irreparably: any attitude that punishes people for providing novelty and surprise will hinder their creativity. When someone proposes an unexpected or surprising answer to a question, it is enough to dismiss it as a “mistake” or “stupid,” to make it “much less likely to offer new answers (or perhaps any answers) in the future” (Boden 2009, p. 247). The aspects that can be pursued in the field of transmitting this ability are several,Footnote 8 although none are decisive, as creativity is still a “free” activity, an activity that does not foresee vicarious interventions.

It is important to consider, for example, the fundamental role of knowledge as a decisive tool for personal creativity: an extensive knowledge base, teachable and learnable, is the first “tool of the trade” of creativity. Such a knowledge base is necessary and it is rare to find people who “demonstrate creativity without first spending long periods of time developing an appropriate knowledge base” (Sweller 2009, p. 16).

This theme opens a topic too vast to be addressed as it merits: we can only set up the major issues that have characterized it from time immemorial. Talking about knowledge means talking about tradition and school: the two terms are so loaded with epistemological, cultural, and social issues as to discourage a comprehensive approach. However, at least a general methodological outline of their relationship with creative education can be sketched.

First of all, creative thinking springs from a knowledge base and is therefore, by definition, part of a cultural tradition—even when it breaks with tradition. The shared reflection in various studies is that creativity does not emerge from ignorance, from a memory that is a tabula rasa, a “blank sheet.” The creator and the user are heirs to a shared creative tradition and draw on this tradition as a source of ideas and insights: “This shared creative tradition is founded on a shared cultural space” (Dasgupta 2019, p. 83). This explains why it is not possible to hope to go beyond the existing state of knowledge if one does not know “what” that state is. You can have creative ideas about yourself (as has been seen) but not about the field of activity in which others may have already had the same ideas. Those who have a broader knowledge base “can be creative in ways that those who are still learning about the basics of the field cannot be” (Sternberg 2003, p. 121). “Going beyond the state of existing knowledge”: it can also be said, in other terms, that an object is creative to the extent that it “transcends” previous products: creative scientific or artistic products “are transcendent products: they transcend the tradition out of which they sprang” (Briskman 2009, p. 35). But, evidently, “to break away from the past, one must know the past” (Dasgupta 2019, p. 85): for this reason, “there is no creativity without the assumption of a tradition” (Maddalena 2015, p. 97).

All these observations lead to the second general theme of reflection: the “field” in which knowledge is transmitted is mainly the school. Now, the relationship between the school as an institution and creative development is not always fluid and cooperative, perhaps due to structurally incompatible elements: schools are not very well equipped to support or foster creativity, because they are institutions deliberately designed to transmit the results of past creative achievements that have become part of the culture. Therefore their task is not to increase creativity, but to fortify its cultural foundations, providing the necessary information to live in a given culture or, possibly, to creatively change it. Therefore, schools “are primarily conservative, and they should be so, even if in being so they frustrate many young people who are potentially creative” (Csikszentmihalyi 2003, p. 220).

This is the great risk: knowledge (primarily, that of school), in addition to being “raw material” for creative expression, can become an obstacle: often, in fact, those who acquire a high level of knowledge can experience “tunnel vision,” narrow thinking and entrenchment. Experts “can become so stuck in a way of thinking that they become unable to extricate themselves from it” (Sternberg 2003, p. 121). In addition to knowledge, equally important for the development of a creative attitude is exposure to a “variety of experiences,” of points of view, which stimulates experimentation and divergent thinking, making individuals be “more likely to use multiple and diverse perspectives and more complicated schemas” (Shalley and Gilson 2004, p. 36): the “socialization agencies,” especially in the stages of primary education, play, as we have seen, a decisive role in putting the learner in a position to exercise such multiple perspectives.

An observation must be made regarding the dimensions of the “fields” of reference and their speed of transformation: in a globalized context, doing something that no one else has done so far is more challenging than before. The field of comparison and the speed with which information arrives from one end of the globe to the other no longer allows anyone to invent things “already invented”: competition is on a planetary level. This, instead of mortifying the creative drive in relation to an increasingly unattainable goal (being really an “innovator”), should make us understand, on the contrary, the importance of a widespread culture of creativity in everyday life, the true sociocultural humus that will also allow the emergence of Big C or Historical C products. The fertile ground of creativity is an attitude of openness, regardless of the scope of its results.

I will conclude with a final aspect related to the theme of the development of creative ability, a recent reflection that draws from the past and that is based on the simple observation that when we see behavior in action, we emulate: creativity can be learned with greater success from observation and interaction with “other creatives” than from the possession of an innate ability. According to the “theory of social learning,” “to elicit more creativity in followers, followers need to see creativity being exemplified” (Jaussi and Dionne 2003, p. 477), this is because “children develop creativity not when they are told to, but when they are shown how” (Sternberg 2003, p. 126). Gestures are probably the most effective learning tools capable of synthesis, “and can only be learned by participating, imitating, retracing the steps of someone performing them in front of us. Even in traditional analytical teaching this is clear: exercises in logic and mathematics are greatly facilitated by their being learned with a teacher and by social interactions” (Maddalena 2021, p. 58).

This “creative introduction” to reality (through what used to be called a teacher) is perhaps still the most effective dynamic (and at the same time the most disarmed and disarming) to avoid blunting the weapon of knowledge that we still need so much.