As we all know, there is increasing demand for reform of the curriculum, and one of the skills that appears in everyone’s “must have” list is creativity.
Indeed, even in a future in which ChatGPT and its descendants will play an increasingly significant role, the ability, and confidence, to think for oneself – which is what creativity is fundamentally all about – will become ever-more important.
But as you read those opening words, you might have been thinking, “Thinking for oneself? No! That’s not what creativity is all about! Surely creativity is [this]!”.
That’s important.
For if creativity is to be taught, and assessed, we need to have the same view of “what creativity is all about”, a shared definition. Which is tricky, for there are many definitions, all suggested by distinguished experts, all similar in some respects, slightly different in others.
“I long believed that creativity was the discovery of something new, totally original.”
So let me throw my hat into this already-crowded ring; or rather not my hat, but that of the writer Arthur Koestler:
“The creative act is not an act of creation in the sense of the Old Testament. It does not create something out of nothing; it uncovers, selects, re-shuffles, combines, synthesises already existing facts, ideas, faculties, skills. The more familiar the parts, the more striking the new whole.”
Those words are to be found in his book The Act of Creation, and although I first read them some 30 years ago, I still find them compelling and deeply insightful. They are so much more meaningful than – and different from – definitions of the form “having a new idea” or “inventing something original and valuable”.
The first sentence dispenses with the myths of the “Eureka moment”, and the need to be a “special person”, but it was the second sentence that I found such a surprise, yet – on reflection – so true.
“Mondrian didn’t invent any paints, nor Beethoven any notes.”
For many years, I had believed that creativity was the discovery of something new, totally original – in which case, to be creative, your mind has to make some sort of miraculous leap. But what Koestler is suggesting is something very different, and much more practical: to be creative, you need to take things that already exist, and then combine them together. And although the “components” being combined cannot be new – for, by definition, they already exist – the resulting combination might be.
Can that be true?
I have been thinking about that for 30 years, seeking an example – any example – for which Koestler’s assertion is false. So far, I haven’t found one. If you can spot one, please let me know.
Let me offer some examples of the profound truth of what Koestler is saying.
Firstly, literature. We’ll all agree that Jane Austen was a creative genius. The words in “It is a truth universally acknowledged…”, however, were already in existence, but the combinations she constructed are truly masterful. Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll, in essence, did the same thing, but they also invented new words like “gloomy” and “boojum”: combinations of pre-existing letters, so the principle stands.
The arts too. Mondrian didn’t invent any paints, nor Beethoven any notes. Yet both created the most exquisite patterns.
What about science? Newton’s statement that “If I saw further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” is his acknowledgement of the debt he owed to (among others) Kepler, Galileo, Descartes and Hooke, whose ideas he combined and developed to form his laws of motion, and of gravity.
And Sir Joseph Swan – who invented the incandescent electric light bulb of the form we all used before LEDs – didn’t patent his original design because he realised that all the components from which it was formed were readily available.
“Any ‘new’ idea is necessarily a combination of pre-existing concepts.”
One last example, from business. Amazon. A combination of mail order, using the opportunity offered by the internet, facilitated by a secure payment system using credit cards.
As regards Koestler’s last sentence, take the goal net, invented in 1889 by a football supporter who had witnessed a dispute about whether the ball had gone on the inside of the post, into the goal, or the outside. Catch goals by a net! What an obvious idea! Why didn’t I think of that?
Koestler’s definition demystifies creativity by showing that any “new” idea is necessarily a combination of pre-existing concepts, as can be demonstrated by de-constructing that idea into its component parts.
If that is the case – as I am convinced it is – that must work the other way around too: if I wish to discover a “new” idea, then what I need to do is to identify those components, which are in existence now, and put them together in the right way. That might not be “easy”. But it surely is much more productive than staring into space and hoping that the lightning will strike.