Traditional views in the West and East
It is generally thought that "creativity" in Western culture was originally seen as a matter of
divine inspiration.
[2] In Greek culture, for instance,
Muses were seen as mediating inspiration from the Gods.
[14] Romans and Greeks invoked the concept of an external creative "
daemon" (Greek) or "
genius" (Latin), linked to the sacred or the divine. This probably came closest to describing what the modern age views as creative talent.
[15] In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, creativity was the sole province of God; humans were not considered to have the ability to create something new except as an expression of God's work.
[16]
The traditional Western view of creativity can be contrasted with the traditional Eastern view. For
Hindus,
Confucianists,
Taoists and
Buddhists, creation was at most a kind of discovery or mimicry, and the idea of creation "from nothing" had no place in these philosophies and religions.
[15]
[edit] The Enlightenment and after
In the West, this view of creativity as divinely inspired was dominant until the time of the
renaissance and even later.
[16] However, by the 18th century and the
Age of Enlightenment, mention of creativity (notably in art theory), linked with the concept of
imagination, became more frequent.
[17] In the writing of
Thomas Hobbes, imagination became a key element of human cognition;
[2] William Duff was one of the first to identify imagination as a quality of
genius, typifying the separation being made between talent (productive, but breaking no new ground) and genius.
[14]
As a direct and independent topic of study, creativity effectively received no attention until the 19th century.
[14] Runco and Albert argue that creativity as the subject of proper study began seriously to emerge in the late 19th century with the increased interest in individual differences inspired by the arrival of
Darwinism. In particular they refer to the work of
Francis Galton, who through his
eugenicist outlook took a keen interest in the heritability of intelligence,with creativity taken as an aspect of genius.
[2]
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, leading mathematicians and scientists such as
Hermann von Helmholtz (1896) and
Henri Poincaré (1908) began to reflect on and publicly discuss their creative processes, and these insights were built on in early accounts of the creative process by pioneering theorists such as
Graham Wallas[18] and
Max Wertheimer.
In 1927,
Alfred North Whitehead gave the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, later published as
Process and Reality.[19] He is credited with having coined the term "creativity" to serve as the ultimate category of his metaphysical scheme: "Whitehead actually coined the term – our term, still the preferred currency of exchange among literature, science, and the arts. . . a term that quickly became so popular, so omnipresent, that its invention within living memory, and by Alfred North Whitehead of all people, quickly became occluded”.
[20]
The formal
psychometric measurement of creativity, from the standpoint of orthodox
psychological literature, is usually considered to have begun with
J. P. Guilford's 1950 address to the
American Psychological Association, which helped popularize the topic
[21] and focus attention on a scientific approach to conceptualizing creativity. (It should be noted that the London School of Psychology had instigated psychometric studies of creativity as early as 1927 with the work of H. L. Hargreaves into the Faculty of Imagination,
[22] but it did not have the same impact.) Statistical analysis led to the recognition of creativity(as measured) as a separate aspect of human cognition to
IQ-type intelligence, into which it had previously been subsumed. Guilford's work suggested that above a threshold level of IQ, the relationship between creativity and classically measured intelligence broke down
