Are you creative? A Critical Analysis of Creativity

21 April 2015 Jarom Madsen 0 Comments

The question of whether you are creative is self-defeating. Being creative is more than just a black and white, boolean trait. You’d think that given the nature of the term that people would be more generous to apply all sorts of shades and hues of color to the spectrum rather than such cold extremes. But yes, as it is with pretty much anything else in the world, we all have some creativity in us, perhaps some more than others but that quickly becomes irrelevant when all is said and done. Every healthy human being is creative whether they try to be or not.

Let us look at the definition of the term before we venture further. Creativity is how we measure the amount of something that is being produced, generally in regards to ideas as everything we do beyond that is founded on the ideas it came from.  A house cannot be built without plans, a computer cannot perform tasks without first receiving instructions and neither would those tasks be considered actual tasks without some purpose or idea in the first place. So to be able to measure how creative someone is, we first have to understand the idea of an idea.

We often think of an idea as something that is created, never before existing in the order, time, and place of it’s conceiving. I’d argue that since nothing else in our reality can be created or destroyed that neither can ideas. Just like if I found a bucket in the woods, I did not create that bucket. Yes, it is new to me, and while I might claim that bucket as my own and go show everyone my bucket telling them of this wonderful new thing of mine and everyone would have perceived that I indeed had produced a bucket, that bucket would have still existed had I not stumbled upon it. Such it is with ideas. Our universe and reality exist as one cohesive idea which can be broken down into infinitesimal parts. We can stumble upon these ideas much like we can a bucket in the woods but they are hardly created. So on a universal level, no, ideas are not created. However, on an individual level, the idea is most certainly new, and since the structuring of the idea all took place inside our brain, our most personal organ, we will claim that idea as our own creation.