Dear Learners and Lurkers alike, this is longish...
[Host's Note: Sorry... The previous LO msg LO24416 is the continuation of
this one. Sorry, I processed them out of order. ..Rick]
Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Albert Einstein
Carl Rogers wrote some years ago, "I wish to propose as a self-evident
truth that there is desperate and accelerating need for creative
'behaviour' and 'creative individuals and groups' in society and
'community' life."
Racism, drug dependency, alcoholism, 'personal debt', social
fragmentation, a loss of truly sustaining 'spiritual' values, marital
breakdowns, mental breakdown, stress related disorders, lack of feeling
for a true and 'fundamental' value or self worth. These are just a few of
the maladies besetting the people working for, with and around us. Of
course, probably none would apply to you or me;-) And yet strangely we
know it can apply to us all. It is a bleak picture indeed and one you may
not easily wish to recognise. But, when we scratch the surface there it
is? It is a fundamental dilemma.
How do we 'realise' that our policemen who, after all were once our
children and are now parents and who are empowered to protect us can also
beat us up and signally fail to uphold the rights of all the citizens? Or
that our politicians are corrupt and inept; or that those paid to nurture,
lead and 'design' our futures at work don't have a coherent or even
incoherent vision of where or what the world will be like in three years
time?
According to Carl Rogers this is the mainly the result of thirty years of
formal and informal 'education' that has valued stereotypy and conformity
to produce "completed" educational products (described as 'chunks of
being') rather than freely creative individuals and original thinkers
(described as 'streams of becoming').
Those few 'creative' individuals, whether through more liberal 'regimes'
of creative education or just sheer nature/nurture 'chance' have driven a
capitalistic and liberal economy to greater economic wealth but at a
cost/price that is it seems relatively greater social and ideological
inequality.
Camus wrote "-to be original and creative today is to open oneself to
great danger in an age that forgives nothing; so many priests- so little
spirituality." With our popular press and mass culture it is easy to
empathise with his prescient wisdom. Indeed to be 'original' or
'different' has always been, to some extent dangerous.
Our age has produced few if any 'valuable' and sustaining, life affirming
moral philosophies, no giants of education. We have been reduced to the
socio-pathology of 'behavioural sciences' and in the workplace the talk is
reduced by 'measure based interventions' for profit, and to acronyms like
JIT, and TQM or dubious quasi-mechanical names. Devoid of meaning by, at
and through work, learning ossifies and people lose all inner self esteem
and self confidence, often even unable to freely articulate most
especially their most basic needs. They learn to devalue the products of
their imaginations and emotions. In 'extremis' they can even deny their
core 'unconscious' or imaginative faculties and strivings. They can be
living as half a human 'being'. Their sense of 'becoming' is dormant.
Rigidity and the 'frozen personality' characterised by Peter Senge are a
'walking and talking' conforming but deforming reality in just about every
developed culture, community and organisation today.
Carl Rogers writes with great insight and foresight in the 1950s that
"-unless individuals, groups and even nations can imagine, construct and
creatively revise new ways of relating to the complex changes (of the
modern world) the lights will go out." The 'net' we have sewn so tight
becomes a noose "-Not only individual maladjustment and group tensions,
but international annihilation will be the price we pay for a lack of
creativity."
The 'creative individual' is often a natural leader. But he leads first
into and only then out of himself (his inner strivings) before anything or
anyone else.
Often more fully aligned and congruent to the 'total world of his
experience' he can appear as a 'sounding board'. Creative people often
reflect, like mirrors and echo like walls, the tensions they are among.
'If I am with confused people I myself become confused, if I am with rigid
people I myself struggle with rigidity.' Cartier Bresson, the great
photographer said, "being creative is to align head, eye and heart."
Sigmund Freud once famously said, "Everywhere I turn in my 'discoveries' I
find poets and artists have been there before me."
Artists can become quickly unaligned or unconsciously 'misalign'
themselves in the interactive company of those who are 'felt' or intuited
to be in that state of disconnection from their inner strivings and needs.
This is one reason why powerfully driven artists and creative types of
personality tend to work alone. It might be the most commonly understood
pre-condition of the 'dynamic tension' that usually exists between society
and the creative personality. A reflection perhaps of a social aspect of
the 'creative tension' Senge describes, in his 'personal mastery' paradigm
If people are to become genuinely creative it will require some
understanding of what it is to become creative. To state the obvious then,
knitting per se is not creative, but knitting a garment without a pattern
and so to create in the process an original pattern/design is creative.
This has complex implications, but is common sensible enough to establish
a platform to launch out from and to state more about what creativity is
or may help us become.
For Rogers and others people all have fantasies or ideas floating around
in the mind, but this does not make them creative. It simply means they
have a mind and imagination. Therefore, to be creative implies some action
in the world with an outcome of that process which would normally be a
product, a utensil, a design, a painting a LO contribution of sorts or a
poem. So the translation of ideas, the fashioning (working) in, for
example the writing process is the creative act that ought to lead to an
objective or substantial 'change' in the world. If the culture of
communication style is oral; as it is in some cultures then the medium
simply becomes the talking or singing, whichever way the product lives
through the fashioning agent of human inter-action.
>Making >< Giving >< Receiving<
'Novelty' is an important signal that creativity has happened. Novelty
grows or stems from the unique interaction of the individual's experience
of the world. The artist Paul Klee wrote authoritatively on this whole
area in his Notebooks, which became an important standard text for the
pedagogy of creative visual process in the twentieth century.
The products of the creative person then, are to live and exist as a
bifurcation point between (as creative tension) the unique individual and the
shared common materials of the world.
In fact, it partakes of the meeting place between the two.
Creative products need have no 'particular' content. Though they often, like
emergent learning contain an element of surprise. This is a useful point to
make because it enables us to move away from the notion of 'leading' you
toward a concept that creativity either has or ought to lead us to some
pre-given acceptable artistic creations per se i.e. as aesthetically good or
pleasing objects of beauty or precision or some other functionality.
"-It is simply that which emerges in action of a novel relational product,
growing out of the uniqueness of the individual on one hand, and the
materials, events, people and circumstances of his life on the other."
Klee
So, there is no distinction between 'good' and 'bad'. (This is so
important to get over to people because they are often so 'frozen' at
opportunities to commence creativity -a process- for fear of abject
failure to produce something - a product- worthy or obviously valued).
Avoiding the judgements good and bad can in relation to the subject of
creativity avoids problems like literally burning 'geniuses' like Galileo.
In the 'systems' view, God's view if you like, sub specie aeternitatis,
(under the aspect of eternity) all things are equally true. That qualities
such as hot and cold exist need not invite one to judge one is truer than
the other is, it is just that at certain times in certain circumstances
one is more useful than the other. A torrential rainstorm is great news if
your house is on fire. Fire is great news if you are cold and wet.
It is also not necessary for creativity to be judged dependent on group
approbation or judgements of any kind. Many 'products of creativity' never
got seen by more than one or two people. Rembrandt's paintings went unseen
for hundreds of years.
There is also very little point in comparing one person's creative capacity
against another's. Order is not important.
What might be the motivating force toward creativity?
Carl Rogers said it simply enough. "-Man's tendency to actualise himself,
to become his potentialities."
This small sentence contains awesome potentiality. Could almost be saying,
become his essentialities At?
It is the same force that binds and connects us to all nature, of which
after all we are just a tiny particle of the whole.
"The urge to expand, extend, develop, mature, the tendency to express and
activate all the capacities of the organism, of the self."
Senge speaks of 'holism and connectedness' as being the two essentials for
LO, openness, emergence, connectedness, love of truth, generative learning
and a host of 'interconnected values' permeates his beautiful systems
dynamical architecture or paradigm. He puts great emphasis upon art,
practice and creativity.
It would be good for you to seek as an exercise in learning for yourself,
the linkages between creativity as per psychology, aesthetics and
'systems' and holistic thinking. Let's, just for this paragraph pursue the
image of 'growing', since Peter Senge and others speak so much of 'fields'
and link it, as we might best be able, to our creative potential -that
like a seed may await germination within anyone. Senge says we must,
"-attend to all the conditions for growth." He is right, and in this link
or connection I invite you to consider the role of the 'unconscious' in
the facilitation of a truly 'generative' and creative states acting as the
'field', container, womb, safe space, and substrate within which we can
make dreams unfolding realities.
The tendency toward creative process is implicit an implicate for and
within everyone. What too often conceal it are the encrusted layers of our
formal and informal education and socialisation. (Bad teaching).
Psychological defences, elaborate facades deny its existence.
How do we, by adopting the non-judgmental posture toward ourselves and
others in relation to creative process, guard against the production of
negative products, called by de Lange 'immergent' learning, which are
objects or behaviours that can lead us to psychologically or even
physically destructive processes and outcomes? If the very quality of the
product (outcome) sought is novelty, then surely it is impossible to make
a judgement that is sound in this regard? (How shall we recognise the
intrinsic value in the new?)
The historical and contemporary data shows those emergently creative
products, from ideas in philosophy to gene manipulation are, - "invariably
judged erroneous, bad or foolish, or evil." The conclusion is that, "-no
mortal can define and evaluate the creative product at the time of its
formation."
Nor it seems is social purposing a guide. Most creations and discoveries
that have eventually proven to have great social value were designed and
motivated much more by personal interest than social value. Paradoxically,
those systems and outcomes that sought substantially to remedy 'social
problems' and bring 'social value' have a very sad history of outcome,
('Prohibition' in America and some organised religion are two examples).
So, the substrate of creative process is best understood as being
primarily due to the need of an individual to 'self actualise', to 'grow'
and we get nowhere by differentiating "good" and "bad" purpose behind the
act. Perhaps in this we move closer to nature.
I can sense your despondency. You picture a factory or 'organisation' full
of madly and emergently creative 'geniuses' now designing instruments of
torture and 'ill will' with which to humiliate and 'do down' the
executives and the HR personnel...¦
Just when the sky was becoming dark, or as Shakespeare brilliantly put it,
"the milky light slowly thickens." I will bring try to bring out the Sun.
To be continued...
Andrew Campbell
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