- PR, Process and Reality
- SMW, Science in the Modern World
- MT, Modes of Thought
- AI, Adventures of Ideas
- AE, The Aims of Education
- SmB, Symbolism, its Meaning and Effect
- RM, Religion in the Making
- ESP, Essays in Science and Philosophy
"Creativity" is another abstract metaphysical principle used by Whitehead in his philosophy. It must not be confused with the concrete creative activity which is existence itself; it is merely another one of the abstract notions which Whitehead uses to explain this concrete reality 1.
The special significance of the notion of "creativity" for this paper is that it "corrects" the emphasis given to Whitehead's discussion by that other abstract notion, "eternal objects". Creativity attempts to explain just those aspects of creative process which the utterly passive eternal objects do not explain.
Creativity is the abstraction of the notion of activity itself. Since Whitehead is trying to get at the notion of bare activity in isolation from its concrete setting, he attempts to grasp this notion without appealing to the notion of eternal objects. But since eternal objects account for all definite character, creativity must then be the notion of a "characterless activity".
There is something anomalous, if not downright self-contradictory, about the notion of a characterless anything. It is rather like the grin of the Cheshire cat left behind after the cat disappeared. In some sense, certainly, creativity must have a "character" even though it does not have the "definite" character which eternal objects give to concrete actualities. Activity must always be the exercise of some sort of function; it is not just an aimless knocking about. Whitehead's universe is closer to that of Aristotle than to that of Democritus. Of course, this "character" can only be described by adjectives and so on (words which generally are assumed to refer to eternal objects), but this difficulty must, I suppose, be understood as due to the limitations of man's intellect and his tools of expression. 2 The activity of creativity is what it does. And what creativity does is to account for just those aspects of actuality which cannot be accounted for by eternal objects.
The most common qualification put upon creativity by Whitehead is to refer to it as "substantial activity". Whitehead rejects the notion of "substance" as a non-appearing, inert substrate postulated to connect and support the appearances. For Whitehead the appearances are the reality, but it is necessary to postulate an immanent activity within them which makes them and holds them together, and this is the substantial activity. Perhaps it is not so different from the old notion of "substance" after all. It certainly has relations to the old notion of "matter". Concrete things are something "unget-roundable", hard, resistant. Whiitehead merely explains this character in terms of activity rather than of passivity. Each concrete thing is pursuing its own course, active and acting on its own. Resistance means that a foreign activity has been encountered.
When Whitehead explains creativity as substantial activity, he usually associates it with Aristotle's "prime matter", or with Spinoza's "one substance". He says,
'Creativity' is another rendering of Aristotle's 'matter' and of the modern 'neutral stuff'. But it is divested of the notion of passive receptivity, either of 'form' or of external relations; it is the pure notion of the activity conditioned by the objective immortality of the actual world &endash; a world which is never the same twice, though always with the stable element of divine ordering. Creativity is without a character of its own in exactly the same sense in which the Aristotelian 'matter' is without a character of its own. It is that ultimate notion of the highest generality at the base of actuality. It cannot be characterized because all characters are more special than itself 3.
Thus the characterlessness of this activity is explained as referring to that which has or takes on character. The similarity to Aristotle, of course, is not complete, because Aristotle referred to matter as potentiality, whereas Whitehead calls his forms potential.
As for the association of creativity with Spinoza's one substance, Whitehead says,
In analogy with Spinoza, his one substance is for me the one underlying activity of realization individuating itself in an interlocked plurality of modes. Thus, concrete fact is process. Its primary analysis is into underlying activity of prehension, and into realized prehensive events. Each event is an individual matter of fact issuing from an individualization of the substrate activity. But individualization does not mean substantial independence. 4
The importance of this association, then, is to make creativity emphasize not the characterlessness of the common substrate of all actual things, but the fact that there really is an important unity among all of the diverse and conflicting actualities, a unity which is not one of order or pattern. The pluralism of Whitehead has been greatly exaggerated by some of his interpreters 5. Creativity is not a purely negative concept. It expresses something common to all actualities. They all exist concretely as activities. It is this activity which makes them real. The substantiality of each actuality is due to its participation in the one fundamental, reality-making activity. Certainly the use of the word 'creativity" rather than merely the word 'activity' is meant to convey something positive and important.
So I must show how Whitehead "characterizes" this "characterless activity". 6 In the introductory chapter to Process and Reality he says,
In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents. It is only when capable of characterization through its actual embodiments, and apart from these accidents is devoid of actuality. In the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed 'creativity'... 7
A little later, however, in his formulation of his own "Category of the Ultimate", it seems as though he does try to go "behind the accidents" to characterize creativity. "'Creativity', 'many', 'one', are the ultimate notions involved of the synonymous terms 'thing', 'being', 'entity' 8." "Many" and "one", he tells us, are used in special senses here. They presuppose each other. But they do mean something, and I take it that they "characterize" creativity. So creativity is the substantial activity, and this substantial activity consists in making a "one out of a "many", and also, it seems, accounts for there being a "many".
In reverse order, I shall discuss these "characteristics" of creativity as (1) individuation, and (2) synthesis. Then I will be able (3) to identify the role of creativity in concrete creative process.
As principle of individuation, creativity is the notion of an activity producing concrete individual facts. This notion does not conflict with Whitehead's idea that eternal objects are completely specific, accounting for every nuance of definiteness in each actuality, because, as I have shown in Chapter Three, the whole infinity of eternal objects has to be brought into concrete togetherness in order to produce any definite character. So creativity does not generate the ultimate elements of concrete individual character, but it nevertheless generates concrete individual character by the way in which it brings these elements together.
Secondly, though Whitehead's notion of creativity as a principle of pure activity has some similarity to Bergson's élan vitale, it differs from the latter in that it works in and through its creatures, not above or below them as does Bergson's principle. For Bergson the creatures are cast off by creative activity, but then abandons them and pursues its course independently of them. 9 The creatures for Bergson are only frozen fragments, samples of what the creative urge contains, but not, as individuated, sharing any longer in the creative process. Indeed, the counter principle of "spatialization" may be the principle of individuation for Bergson. For Whitehead, however, the creative process works and through the creatures. Thus it is condemed to operating in multiple modes. It seizes always on some particular set of conditions, some particular possibility, and exploits it. And through its activity it creates new conditions, calling for new and different operations of itself.
This final cause is an inherent element in the feeling, constituting the unity of that feeling. An actual entity feels as it does feel in order to be the actual entity which it is. In this way an actual entity satisfies Spinoza's notion of substance: it is causa sui. The creativity Is not an external agency with its own ulterior purposes. All actual entities share with God this characteristic of self-causati.on. For this reason every actual entity also shares with God the characteristic of transcending all other actual entities, including God. The universe is thus a creative advance into novelty. The alternative to this doctrine is a static morphological universe 10."
Creativity animates every bit of actuality, the data, the objective immortality of the past,, as well as the occasion in process of formation. 11 So, as immanent in every bit of actuality, creativity, rather than having no character, may be said to have an extremely variable, "protean" character. 12
Creativity is a principle of synthesis. It seeks to unify each situation with which it identIfies itself It seeks to organize a world from each possible poInt of view.
It [creativity] is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the univere disjunctively, become the one actual occasion which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity. 13
Since creativity to an immanent activity in actual things, this synthesis, this "fusion" of the multiple actual and possible entities of the universe takes place here, in the creature, not in some transcendent realm. 14 Creativity is the self-differentiating and self-integrating activity in each individual occasion.
And, as the principle of synthesis, creativity is both immanent in each occasion, as already asserted, and also transcendent to it. It is the ultimate principle of "transition", ever going beyond the unity which it has achieved to achieve new unity. Since all of its achievements are essentially finite, it must drive on ceaselessly to ever new finite achievement. "The creativity of the world is the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into a new transcendent fact 15.
Still, while complete and adequate unity, giving full expression to all of the elements of the universe, is never achieved,, cesativity itself does contribute an aspect of unity to the world. It functions in the creation and continued existence of every item of the actual world, and in each item it is a striving towards unity with the others. This unity is never "achieved"; that is, there is no attained overall pattern, form or order. But there is a continuous process of unification. "The process of creation is the form of the unity of the universe." 16
Though immanent in each actual occasion and in each actual component of each occasion, creativity also transcends each occasion. It is the bond that relates actualities, all to each, and.it is a continuous process which must qualify the extreme "monadic" interpretation of Whitehead's actual occasions.
The unity of all actual occasions forbids the analysis of substantial activities into individual entities. Each individual activity is nothing but the mode in which the general activity is individualized by the imposed conditions. The general activity is not an entity in the sense in which occasions or eternal objects are entities. It is a general metaphysical character which underlies all occasions, in a particular mode for each occasion. There is nothing with which to compare it: It is Spinoza's one infinite substance. Its attributes are its character of individuation into a multiplicity of modes, and the realm of eternal objects which are variously synthesized in these modes. Thus eternal possibility and modal differentiation into individual multiplicity are the attributes of the one substance. In fact each general element of the metaphysical situation in an attribute of the substantial activity 17.
But the last quotation goes, porhaps, a little too far. It threatens to engulf all aspects of actuality in creativity. Creativity would then be, as Spinoza's "substance" was accused of being by Hegel the night in which all cows are black. Not abstract general creativity but concrete individual actual occasions, each, it is true, a creative process, are the center of Whitehead's metaphysics.
Is there anything also in Whitehead's philosophy with which this vast and amorphous concept of creativity can be closely associated? I think that there is, though Whitehead fails to say so explicitly. After all, creativity is rather like "feeling". Both creativity and feeling bring entities together and hold entities together in concrete actuality. Creativity seems to be an abstract view of feeling. Feeling designates a more concrete entity, the act and its object - the feeling of something and the thing felt. Creativity designates the act of feeling without its object. Also, the notion of creativity supplements the notion of feeling. Feeling, even for Wthitehead,, emphasizes the personal and private side of activity for the entities concerned (though he insists that the term has wider meaning 18. Creativity emphasizes the significance of actual process for the universe at large, as making, preserving ard transmitting reality.
Footnotes for Chapter Four, Section A (1-18):
1 Whitehead himself apologizes for the apparent superfluity of abstract notions which he feels he must introduce and explains that they must be understood as "correcting" each other (AI., p. 303).
2 See above, ch. 1, Sect. C, of this paper.
3 PR., p. 47.
4. SMW., p. 102.
5 See above, ch. 2, Sect. D (4) (b) and ch. 3, Sect. C, in which I argue that feelings endure beyond the actual occasions of their origin and that some feelings are common to many occasions.
6 Whitehead doesn't make the task any easier when in addition to calling creativity "characterless" he says that it is the most "general character of all activity" and "the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact" (PR., p. 31).
7 PR., p. 11
8 PR., p. 31.
9 Creative Evolution
10 PR., p. 349.
11 AI., p. 230. This assertion is to be expected from the conclusions respecting the nature of accomplished actuality presented in Sect. D(4) of ch. 2 and Sect. C of ch. 3 of this paper.
12 RM., p. 91.
13 PR., pp. 31-2.
14 This is the meaning of the doctrine of "emergent evolution" for Whitehead. He says in SMW (p. 157), "But the whole point of the modern doctrine is the evolution of' the complex organisms from antecedent states of less complex organisms. The doctrine thus cries aloud for a conception of organism as fundamental for nature. It also requires an underlying activity &endash; a substantial activity - expressing itself in individual embodiments, and evolving in achievements of organism. The organism is a unit of emergent value, a real fusion of the charasters of eternal objects, emerging for its own sake."
15. AI., p. 227.
16 AI., p., 230.
17 SMW., p. 255.
18. See below, ch. 2, Sect. C(2) of this paper.
Move to Chapter Four Section B