Keywords

4.1 The “Primary Sociality”

As the book draws to a close, it seems appropriate to offer a final personal reflection on the socio-anthropological premises from which I started: talking about creativity today means, indirectly, touching on a topic that delves into the depth of the person and in the construction of their identity. Here I would like to propose a synthetic relational framework, as a key to interpreting the issues dealt with during this investigation of creativity.

To do this, it is useful to establish a hermeneutic starting point that lies at the root of every investigative approach focused on social relationships: the concept of “emergence” is fundamental to adequately understand relationality. With its roots in nineteenth-century organicism, emergence can be defined as the theory “that the organism is different from the sum of its parts and that it depends on the structural arrangement of the parts” (Sawyer 2003, p. 14). From this perspective, every innovation, every change is the result of an organism-environment interaction: in a certain sense, therefore, “all creativity is an emerging process that involves a social group of individuals engaged in complex, unpredictable interactions” (ibid., p. 19).

Starting from this general premise, it can therefore be stated that creative action is, at all times, relational. In fact, there is no form of human creativity that is not based on direct, mediated, or implicit social interactions or exchanges and even when we work in solitude we interact with the opinions, knowledge, and expectations of others: therefore, “the lifelong development of creativity cannot be conceived outside of self-other relations” (Glăveanu et al. 2019, p. 742). To document this “choice of field,” I will borrow reflections from three of the many authors cited in this book whose thought seems to me can adequately explain the basic choices that scholars have to face.

I will start with Richard Florida, a world-renowned economist, author of a widely known and substantial volume, The rise of the creative class : his broad analysis impeccably illustrates the characteristics, conditions, and properties of creativity that we could define as “winning,” effective, characteristic of the rising class, which once was the prerogative of Western Europe (primarily Italy) and which in the last century has been monopolized by American culture thanks to the three Ts (Technology, Talent, Tolerance). More or less explicitly, his conception breathes a framing of creativity as the essence of individual realization, as fuel and process of the journey that leads to personal “happiness.”

From this perspective, the “relational” dimension of creativity consequently comes to be assigned to a secondary position, a sort of obligatory acceptance and all-in-all instrumental (the “creative community”). The optimal social ecology for the development of creative potential is consequently identified in operational contexts as far away as possible from the “dense human fabric” of the neighborhoods of the past: the communities most suited to favor creative expressiveness are, on the contrary, those characterized “by the precariousness of relationships and by ‘loose’ ties, which allow us to live the almost anonymous existence that we like and not those imposed by others” (Florida 2002, It. trans. 2003, p. 37).

As can be imagined, this is essentially an attitude of “defense” against relationships that are too solid, “cumbersome” relationships, which are demonstratively considered as obstacles to the full development of creativity. This approach brings out the heart of the underlying option, which presents itself to anyone who wants to face the dynamics related to “ultimate concerns” (as Margaret Archer would define them) that are at the root of any human action: should creativity be considered an “ultimate value” or is it itself justified by a goal that hierarchically precedes it? These are questions that, clearly, cannot be dissected with analytical methodologies, but that, perhaps for this reason, presuppose a choice of field, explicit or implicit as it may be (the same goes for other strongly connotative terms, such as “freedom,” “justice,” “good,” etc.).

More or less consciously or explicitly, many researchers today are trying to clarify the ways in which individual and social factors combine in the creative process. What inevitably emerges, in this case, is a methodological question: if both the individual and social dimensions are involved, “what is the nature of the relationships and causal connections between these levels?” (Sawyer 2003, p. 50). Florida’s frame is certainly diametrically opposed to that of Pierpaolo Donati: it is possible to build a situation and even a social system in which everyone gets their own result precisely because of “loose” ties, but all this could happen “at the expense of human relationships and with them we forfeit happiness” (Donati and Solci 2011, p. 210).

I will now move on to a second author I have frequently cited, Alfred Schütz, who, by identifying the keystone of every cultural and anthropological process in the “bond,” proposes a fundamentally alternative perspective to that of Florida, starting precisely from the mother relationship of creative action and, therefore, of its purposes. Creativity, for Schütz is a process that finds its original impetus in what he defines as “orientation to the Other”: all the experience of social reality is based on the fundamental axiom “that postulates the existence of other beings ‘like me,’ whose constitution is directly based on the orientation to you” (Schütz and Luckmann 1973, p. 61). Such orientation, it should be clarified, is conceived not as a spontaneous feeling or a moral inclination, but rather as a structural element, anthropological: “As long as man is born of woman, intersubjectivity and the we-relationship will be the foundation of all other categories of human existence […]. Precisely for this reason, everything in human life is founded on the primal experience of the we-relationship […], since all other categories of human existence are founded on the primal experience of being born […], the fundamental ontological category of human existence in the world and therefore of all philosophical anthropology” (Schütz 1966, p. 82).

In his essay, Scheler’s theory of intersubjectivity and the general thesis of the alter ego, Schütz emphasized that there is a presupposition taken for granted that no one, not even the most skeptical, doubts even for a moment: “We are simply born into a world of Others. As long as human beings are not concocted like homunculi in retorts but are born and brought by mothers, the sphere of ‘We’ will be naively presupposed” (Schütz 1962, p. 168). What we all start from for the great leap toward alterity (intersubjectivity, communication) is the “naively presupposed” (therefore also unconscious) fact that we are born, and “born of woman” (a radicality that probably draws from Schütz’s Jewish culture and the centrality of the matriarchal line as the source of identity/belonging).

More recently Hans Joas arrives at similar “presuppositions” by another route: the starting point of his analysis draws from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, which considers the relationship of the subject with others in a pre-linguistic sense, in the stage of infant development. At the base of every experience, there would not only be corporeality, but the interrelation between the experience of our body and the experience of the bodies of others, the “intercorporeity.” By different paths, the thought of the French philosopher also goes to the care that the mother reserves for the newborn through position, gesture, and voice, “for it is this which enables the infant to advance from his original state of indifferentiation and to relate to the world as a separate ego” (Joas 1996, p. 181).

The observations of Richard Zaner (who studied under Schütz) also draw from the filial relationship to highlight the relational dimensions of creativity: it is the primary experience of being born that makes all of us in some way “debtors” for our being to the Other (mother above all), and therefore responsible, on the one hand, for the recognition of our state and, on the other, for the great enterprise of “becoming ourselves,” “which is itself always a task and chore, and even when not always accomplished, done within the nexus of our growing old together” (Zaner 2002, pp. 15 and 17). Yet, strangely, “philosophers have written and chatted, at times incessantly, about death, and have said almost nothing about birth. Why is this?” (ibid., p. 12).

In sociological reflection (which to date, as I have had to acknowledge, has not yet produced a fully mature and satisfactory heuristic model)Footnote 1, the “social” dimension of creativity often fails to go beyond a model of external influence, it fails to “see” how creativity occurs within relationships, in the interdependence between Ego and Alter: there is no clash between the two and, even more, “these two ‘segments’ are not isolated but elements that co-constitute each other” (Glăveanu 2010, p. 84).

Creativity, from this perspective, can only be conceived as a “penultimate good,” whose goal is to restore an original and no longer guaranteed relationality (as stated in many of the reflections reported here), to manifest the “primary sociality of all human capacity for action” (Joas 1996, p. 148). Joas, like Schütz, speaks of a “tacit presupposition,” so tacit and so presupposed that it would be inscribed even in the very body of humans, a primary sociality not generated by conscious intentionality, but rather precedes it, “a structure of common action which initially consists solely of our interaction with other bodies” (ibid., p. 184).

The third and last author is the philosopher/sociologist Martin Buber, who offers a worthy “creative” conclusion to this academic journey, a transcendental vision, an appropriate synthesis of an educational responsibility, and a deep yet difficult aspiration of the human spirit:

The instinct of creativity, left to itself, does not lead, cannot lead to two formations indispensable for the construction of a true human life: to participate in a cause and to access reciprocity. Single work and collective work are two very different things. Building something is a pride of being mortal, but being conditioned to a common work, the unconscious humility of being part, of taking part and of having a part is the authentic nourishment of earthly immortality […]. An education based only on the formation of the instinct of creativity would prepare a new, very painful solitude of man. This is something greater than what the supporters of libido believe: it is desire that the world becomes a person who makes herself present to us, who approaches us as we do her, who chooses us and recognizes us as we do towards her, that she finds confirmation in us as we do in her (Buber 1926, It. trans. 1993, pp. 165 and 166).

The prophetic tone of this German philosopher could at least induce consideration of the theoretical possibility of an analytical frame of creativity that differs from those that dominate today in the sectors of scientific and applicative research: “As long as psychologists find creativity instrumental for our adaptability, self-expression and health, it will continue to attract the interest of both theorists and researchers. But we should remember that creativity also exists beyond psychology” (Glăveanu 2010, p. 91).

Instrumentality is not the final word and not even the most appropriate term with which to describe an energy that inexorably tends to overflow its narrow limits.

4.2 Reflections and Developments

Together we have traveled an articulated, fascinating journey, full of cues and just as many risks: creative capacity, like all things that attract with lures and promises, is capable of defending itself from the attacks of those who would “own” it. It is a youthful energy that seems to indulge those who are young (in defiance of biographical data). It is the energy that allows us to change the world so that it becomes more aligned with the irreducible drive that takes us yonder, beyond the fence of the already done, the already experienced. It is the energy that attests, more than any other, to the inexhaustible human need to overcome the limits of its own nature, of the status quo. And at the same time, it is the synthetic energy that affirms itself by resting its feet on what “has been,” without which we could not imagine “what will be.” Human existence is a river flowing between the solid banks of stability (within which we are born) and innovation (toward which we are going). Should one of these two banks subside, the river will become a swamp.

Creativity can only be adequately studied through a collaboration of different disciplines: it is a multifaceted energy that has a history, a psychophysical dynamism, a motivational dimension, various developmental practices, various goals, and endless social and cultural conditions. Nowadays, the study of creativity implies a certain willingness to make a “leap,” not in a romantic sense, but in a methodological sense: those who do not want to “get their hands dirty” with other perspectives risk seeing their own impoverished as well. And so, even in the specifics of university disciplines, the study of creativity invites the scholar to imagine himself in the original position, that which involves risking the old (always valuable) in the impact with the new (always risky), rebalancing the shoes of the teacher with those of the student, feeling “ignorant” again, while knowing so much. Creativity, which fortunately is more widespread today, with its opportunities and also with its (sometimes pathological) risks, imparts a speed to modern life such as has never recorded before: the current challenges generated by technology impose on research the courage, and also the humility, to find new avenues of inquiry, capable of overcoming the narrowness of disciplines without losing their richness and also utility. Today, a “synthetic” look is not only desirable but essential and can be postponed no longer.

Sociology must do—and is doing, with a partly excusable delay—its part. It could be said that its most significant contribution at the present is “containment”: it calls upon aesthetics, psychology, pedagogy, anthropology, philosophy, cognitive sciences, humanistic, and literary studies to come to terms with that “relational” dimension to which I have frequently referred. Everything new is born on the ground of what we have received, there is nothing subjective that is not an “emergent” result of what we have encountered. For if human life takes shape in the social context, this condition carries with it the law of everyday existence: neither totally free nor totally bound. Sociology is a step or two behind: it needs to regain ground. Above all, it must field its ability (and responsibility) to “see” the relationship within human action, something the man in the street forgets to do (and often scientists forget as well): and it must do so by employing its own weapons, which are reflexivity and empirical inquiry (that to date have not been used nearly enough on this issue).

And sociology needs “to become a child again,” not in the childish or naïve sense which would not befit a university discipline, but in the sense of not being afraid to intermingle with other disciplines so they will all be to some extent fertilely “contaminated.”