EVOLVING SYSTEMS APPROACH

This approach is predicated on the uniqueness of each creative person as he or she moves through a series of commitments, problems, solutions, and trans­formations. These aspects of the creative process are not fixed, and they are not universal.

Our task is to describe how a given creator actually works. It is not our task to measure the amount of creativity or to find factors that apply in the same way to all creators. What is necessary for one creative person confronting a problem may be unnecessary or even ill-advised for another.

The creative individual described here, interested in creativity in the moral domain, is only a first approximation. People who take responsibility want to make something happen. For this, they need allies, who must be persuaded, recruited, trained, and supported. Moreover, a full expression of morality would bring together moral thought, moral feeling, and moral action. Beyond these components, there must be creative integration. Although this last is rarely dis­cussed, Donna Chirico has made an interesting effort in her integrative article, “Where Is the Wisdom? The Challenge of Moral Creativity at the Millennium” (forthcoming). And of course, Erich Fromm’s whole oeuvre is a reflection on such a synthesis. (See Fromm, 1962, for example.)

In her case study of Niebuhr, Chirico shows how the quest for integration of thought, feeling, and action can lead to surprising results, can even go astray. She shows how Niebuhr achieved such an integration, but at a price. As he grew in influence, he gained new opportunities to move to the plane of moral action.

Chirico stresses the difficulty, the need for the hard and steady work required, if we want to contribute to social transformation. She writes, “In a postmodern world where all is relative anyway, it is easier to accept inequity in the guise of personal or cultural differences than to take a moral stand... without moral creativity there can be no attempt. This involves self-sacrifice so that a com­munity of concerned selves can come together and provoke change. It starts with taking a moral stand.”

Each creative case presents different aspects for study. These evolving oppor­tunities may be grouped under three major headings: knowledge, purpose, and affect. All of them apply in the first instance to the creative individual at work. In addition, there are aspects that apply to the creator as a social being: social origins and development; relations with colleagues, mentorships, and so on.

Since each creative person is unique, if collaboration is needed it must be collaboration among people who differ (in style, background, ability profile, and the like). Collaboration and similar relationships may take many forms: work­ing together on a shared project where both members of a pair do work that is essentially the same (as Picasso and Braque did in inventing cubism); working together in a teamlike setting where participants complement each other (as in the production of a film, an opera, or a ballet); and sharing ideas either face-to- face or in written correspondence (as Vincent van Gogh and his brother, Theo, did through the medium of thousands of letters mostly about Vincent’s actual work, his plans for future work, and his sensuous experiences).

Networks of Enterprise

It is well established that creative work evolves over long periods of time.

If creative work takes so long, we must have an approach to motivation that recognizes the time it takes. I have found that one important aspect of creative work is the way each creator organizes a life so that diverse projects do not become obstacles to each other. I use the term enterprise to make room for the typical situation in which a person who completes one project does not aban­don the line of work it entailed but picks up another that is part of the same set of concerns. I use the term network to accommodate the finding that creators are often simultaneously involved in several projects and enterprises linked to each other in complex ways.

Time and Irreality. One of the most persistent myths about creative work is the allegation that novelty comes about through lightninglike flashes of insight. On the contrary, serious studies reveal accounts in which the time taken is on the order of years and decades. Even when a moment of sudden transformation occurs, it is the hard-won result of a long developmental process.

Engagement and commitment for such long periods of steady work require appropriate organization of the task space. One the one hand, the creator must fashion a network of enterprise that can withstand the challenges of distraction, fatigue, and failure. On the other hand, one of the chief instruments of creative persistence is a well-developed fantasy life: what cannot be done (yet) on the plane of reality is attainable in the world of dreams, fantasy, half-baked note­books (Darwin) and private discussions (Einstein). Play becomes the midwife of creative change.

Play Ethic. We teach and preach the work ethic, but from time to time the play ethic rears its head, especially among creators.

Once we take account of this constructive, collective, perdurably patient char­acter of creative work, it follows that some of the miasmal mystery surround­ing thought about creativity can evaporate. To work together, people must communicate. For this they must share a common language, which sometimes means that one must teach others the language to be shared. A striking example of this process is how the physicist Freeman Dyson deliberately set about work­ing with Richard Feynman, bent on learning to understand “Feynman diagrams” so that he could teach the wider community of physicists to do likewise. (See Schweber, 1994.)

Extraordinary Moral Responsibility and Creativity in the Moral Domain

These are closely linked ideas. For the most part, research on moral develop­ment has been limited to the plane of judgment. When all that is required of the subject is to make a moral judgment, he or she is free to choose any posi­tion, from the mundane to the fanciful, from the craven to the courageous. But if morally guided conduct must follow from judgment, many if not most sub­jects disappear into the cracks. Indeed, these judgmental interstices are seen as normal and necessary for maintaining an orderly society. “Who will bell the cat?” is experienced as a threatening question.

The expression:

Ought → Can → Create

is shorthand for a somewhat complex idea, to wit, that one “ought” to do some particular thing, or that there “ought to be a law” only makes sense if the pred­icated “ought” is possible. So “ought” implies “can.” But situations occur in which it is urgent to make the passage from “cannot” to “can” and where this can only be done by discovering and taking some new, unexplored path. This is when creative work becomes the moral imperative.