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  • Introduction
  • Steven Meyer (bio)

I. The Invention of Creativity

The creativity of the world is the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into a new transcendent fact. It is the flying dart of which Lucretius speaks, hurled beyond the bounds of the world.

Alfred North Whitehead1

As Isabelle Stengers has observed, for Whitehead creativity is not identical with novelty or innovation—not even with "relevant novelty," or originality.2 This is what she presumes, for instance, in remarking of his "ontological principle" ("there is nothing which floats into the world from nowhere"3 ) that it "prohibits any easy appeal to creativity as explaining novelty."4 Such an appeal would provide the sort of "natural ad hoc explanation" that Whitehead resists: for example, the just-so stories favored by much contemporary evolutionary psychology. "The question of originality," Stengers explains, is instead "generalised" by Whitehead into an inquiry concerning [End Page 1] what is "taken for granted or explained away by [such] explanations."5 This he terms "creativity"; and if creativity is not innovation, they are certainly related, as Whitehead's own term provocatively demonstrates.

In characterizing creativity this way, as Whitehead's term, I imply something that I found surprisingly difficult to grasp when I became aware of it several years ago, namely, that Whitehead actually coined the term—our term, still the preferred currency of exchange among literature, science, and the arts.6 Whitehead is notorious for the arcane quality of his terminology (concrescence, prehension, ingression, [End Page 2] transmutation, etc.), an opacity compounded by his resistance to the dictionary model of meaning: he will not let his terms alone, refusing to permit their meanings to congeal. Yet none of these technical terms are words he invented—the way, say, his fellow logician Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) invented "galumph" or, rather more momentously, "chortle." Whitehead did invent "creativity," however, 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.

Two caveats: first, there is nothing new to any of this. In a 1987 essay on "Creativity in a Future Key," Lewis Ford starts off as follows: "Alfred North Whitehead introduced the term 'creativity' to designate that activity whereby actualities (conceived as individual instances of self-creation) come into being. Creativity is Whitehead's word for that generic activity intrinsic to every instance of becoming." Ford then adds: "He appears to have coined this neologism, which has been adopted into common parlance."7 Nor did Ford start the ball rolling, for he cites an essay on "'Creativity' and 'Tradition'" by the intellectual historian Paul Oskar Kristeller, which appeared four years before his own. "Although I am not an 'ordinary language' philosopher," Kristeller happily admits in his opening paragraph, "I am often inclined to start from a definition supplied from a standard dictionary. When I tried to do that in this case, I was greatly surprised to discover that the word 'creativity' does not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary [neither the 1933 corrected reissue nor the 1971 Compact edition that Kristeller consulted] or in the fifth edition of Webster's Collegiate Dictionary," based on the 1934 New International Dictionary. To his relief, he eventually did locate the word in the Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, which derives in its turn from the Third New International Dictionary, of 1961. Here is Kristeller's careful conclusion:

we are led to infer that the word became an accepted part of the standard English vocabulary only between 1934 and 1961. We may even go back a few more years. The great philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead used "creativity" in his Religion in the Making (1927 [sic!]) and in his major work, Process and Reality (1929), and in view of the great influence of this last work, we may very well conjecture that he either coined the term or at least gave it wide currency.8 [End Page 3]

Incidentally, it was another philosopher, Paul Kurtz, who directed Kristeller to Whitehead. So, originality is rather hard to fix here. In fact, as Ford points out, two of the relevant passages in Religion in the Making are already cited in the...

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