Can Creativity Be Taught?

Creativity is one of those non-spatial things that no one can define or grasp. It isn't something specific, like pottery, and it isn't something general, like sports. It's a category inside a category, where different acts are all defined creative, but those acts are not always creative. A painting could be good, but it could also be a good painting that doesn't do anything creative, either mimicking a style or copying a subject. This brings to question, can creativity be taught?

The skills related to creativity can certainly be taught, but do those skills guarantee creativity? A man may be taught to paint, how to mix colours and use shadows, but this has nothing to do with a creative aspect of the painting. Harold Cohen talks about this in length in his article “A Self-Defining Game for One Player: On the Nature of Creativity and the Possibility of Creative Computer Programs”, where Cohen talks about his painting program AARON. AARON creates original artwork based off its programming, and has been doing so for over thirty years. However, Cohen claims that this is not original, as an original program would “[move] color-use up a notch from what [he] had supplied.” (Cohen, 61, 2002). Essentially, like the man taught to paint, the computer is just using what it has been shown, and no matter how well crafted these paintings are, they are not creative because they don't push any boundary, don't try anything new. This is what Cohen defines as creative, the ability to do something original while at the same time trying something new.

In the article “Analytical Psychology and Literary Criticism” by Marie-Louise von Franz, Franz talks about the creative unconscious, an extension of the unconscious mind that is shared by a group of people or even all of mankind itself. Franz suggests that this is where most creative elements come from, how theme's are unconsciously thrust into works that reflect the current or soon to be current feel running through the world, using Goetz's Das Reich ohne Raum as an example, explaining that “[it was] first published in 1933, [and] the world catastrophe caused by the German mass psychosis is anticipated in all its details”(Franz, 122, 1980). Franz points toward both artists that feel they are being driven by an unknown force and artists that plan everything out, saying that in the former case it is merely the creative unconscious pushing them and in the second case it is simply the artist accepting the force as their own. This brings up an interesting point, that if all of man is tapped into this creative unconscious, why are some of us more creative then others? If it is an issue of being able to express, or tap into this creative unconscious, can people be taught to tap into it? Franz does not talk about this, but it goes beyond the abstract to talk about teaching people to tap into something that does not fundamentally exist, only existing on the same level as creativity itself does.

In the Meno, Socrates and Meno talk about the nature of virtue and whether or not it can be taught. They point toward how everything is taught by finding someone who is skilled in something and them showing you what to do to become skilled. In the end of the discussion, Socrates comes to the conclusion that it virtue is a gift given from the gods and of only their understanding. Of course, what Socrates is actually saying is that he has no idea what virtue is or where it comes from. This just goes to show that until we can clearly define creativity, and a definition beyond the simply pushing boundaries, we have no hopes of truly understanding it to the point of teaching it. The minute a creative act is completed, the repetition of it would not be creative, so as it stands now, creativity cannot be taught, at least in the literal sense.

References

Cohen, H. (2002). A Self-Defining Game for One Player: On the Nature of Creativity and the Possibility of Creative Computer Programs [Electronic Version]. Leonardo, 35, 59-64.

Franz, M. (1980). Analytical Psychology and Literary Criticism [Electronic Version]. New Literary History, 12, 119-126

Plato, Meno.