Human Creativity and Spirit

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Human Creativity and Spirit

ABSTRACT: Values provide evidence of spirit in human life. Spirit is a creative mental force for realizing values, a force which shows signs of a superindividual growth and decline, a life of its own. This paper documents the historic rise and decline of several waves of human creativity. I also consider possible factors that would account for the rise and fall: the presence of new material, social encouragement and/or patronage, temperamental egotism on the part of creators, the attraction of pioneering talent, or a collective or superindividual spirit.

Evidence for the life and character of spirit is furnished by the historical rise and fall of waves of human creativity. Examples of such waves are classical music, the Italian Renaissance, the German Renaissance, Greek philosophy, Christianity, modern science.

The concept of spirit is meaningful. Our experience of value requires it. What are the sources of value? What gives them their authority? Reason, social conditioning, biological drives based on natural selection have all been proposed as sources. There is a great deal of truth in these proposals. However, reflection convinces us that none of these sources is alone sufficient, and even the three working together are not enough to account for all the values that motivate us. We shall support this conviction by argument in due course. Spirit is a hypothesis, as yet in early stages of definition, which provides a ground for otherwise unaccountable value phenomena.

What is spirit? Negatively defined, spirit is a susceptibility to values that motivate us through our minds but need no rational foundation, outstrip and overpower socialization, and have no findable relation to species survival. Positively defined, spirit is a creative mental force for realizing values, a force which lives in us as individuals and which shows signs of a super-individual growth and decline, a life of its own.

In this paper I search for the nature of spirit and its values in a wide-optic synthesis of waves of creation. As this synoptic view must range over many specialties, it is bound to raise doubts and objections in the minds of specialists. One cannot be a specialist in all the fields I shall discuss; as the same time, someone must take an overall view. Nothing is more obvious than that unrelieved specialization leads to loss of coordination and direction; the community of scholars is replaced by a collection of quarrelsome property owners. I ask specialists to take my communication as something to focus and correct, and I hope it will serve them as a stimulus to panoptic thinking.

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