Universal Virtues
Creativity
Find another workable way to serve a worthwhile purpose.
In an imagined packing session, a teapot’s spout touches the corner of its box. Two padding folds leave the same awkward gap. The packer turns an offcut diagonally across the corner and checks the new cradle against the spout. A change in arrangement gives the familiar material a useful new job.
Understanding Creativity
Creativity brings an unfamiliar possibility into view: a different arrangement, question or use for something ordinary. Its value here lies in making a worthwhile purpose more reachable. Novelty supplies possibilities; judgment asks which deserve to become real. A clever deception can be creative without being admirable.
Read this collection’s historical contextCreativity: finding the balance
The teapot needs a protective parcel.
Too little of the fitting response
First idea only
The packer forces the spout toward the box corner and ignores the mismatch.
A fitting response
Purposeful invention
A folded offcut cushions the spout; the packer checks that the lid closes.
A distortion of the purpose
Novelty taking over
The packer keeps changing the shape without checking whether the spout is protected.
A creative possibility earns its place by what it enables, not by how unusual it looks.
Creativity gives…
Trying more than one arrangement can release a task from its first mistaken assumption. Other people gain room to contribute when a proposal is offered as a possibility rather than the inventor’s identity. A discarded trial can still tell the next attempt something useful.
What Creativity makes possible
Creative effort makes room for revision: a first design can be provisional, a familiar material can have another use, and an apparently awkward constraint can become part of the solution. The purpose supplies direction. A container that protects the teapot matters more than the number of ingenious folds it displays.
Creativity in ordinary life
- When an agreed meeting format excludes someone, suggest another format and ask whether it actually helps.
- For a modest repair, sketch two arrangements before choosing one within your competence.
- In a shared project, credit the person whose small adjustment makes the whole design usable.
Nearby virtues, different work
Curiosity discovers what the problem contains. Prudence considers consequences. Perseverance returns after a trial fails. Creativity proposes another way; those neighboring strengths keep the invention answerable to its purpose.
Creativity and its counterfeits
Novelty without a purpose is a counterfeit of Creativity: the packer alters the shape repeatedly without checking the spout. Genuine creative work tests whether an invention helps. Taking someone else’s idea and concealing its origin is another counterfeit; novelty claims do not excuse misrepresentation.
How to cultivate Creativity
Separate generating an idea from defending it. Name the purpose, vary one assumption, and try a reversible version. Keep a short mental account of what changed and why. Ask another person what the design still makes difficult; revision is part of authorship.
Try it today
Choose an ordinary reversible task. Think of two ways to carry it out, then test the less familiar one on a small scale. Keep the version that serves the purpose better, even if it is less impressive.
Keep the practice proportionate
Use harmless materials and tasks within your competence. Do not experiment with another person’s consent, essential resources or safety. There is no obligation to produce a novel idea on demand.
A question worth returning to
What did the rejected attempt teach me, and whose contribution made the next one better?
Quotations and further reading
These historical passages offer different philosophical and literary perspectives. Each note identifies its setting, point of comparison and relevant limits; none supplies an official definition of this strength.
Secondly, there must be novelty in an ideal,—novelty at least for him whom the ideal grasps.
William James · Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals
III. WHAT MAKES A LIFE SIGNIFICANT
James describes novelty in an ideal as novelty for the person whose life it enters. Newness need not be a world-first invention.
Flowers in masses are mighty strong colour, and if not used with a great deal of caution are very destructive to pleasure in gardening.
William Morris · Hopes and Fears for Art
p. 114MAKING THE BEST OF IT [114]
Morris warns that strong masses of flower colour can overwhelm a garden. The advice concerns proportion in design, not abstention from colour.
All literature, from Job and Omar Khayam to Thomas Carlyle or Walt Whitman, is but an attempt to look upon the human state with such largeness of view as shall enable us to rise from the consideration of living to the Definition of Life.
Robert Louis Stevenson · Virginibus Puerisque, and Other Papers
ÆS TRIPLEX
Stevenson sees literature as an effort to widen the view through which human life is understood. The passage does not settle what that definition must be.
We make a mighty business of the invention of artillery and printing, which other men at the other end of the world, in China, had a thousand years ago.
CHAPTER VI——OF COACHES · Charles Cotton translation, William Carew Hazlitt edition, 1877
Montaigne challenges provincial claims to invention by recalling Chinese precedents. His historical dating is not adopted as a verified chronology; the useful question is whose making we notice.
By theory I mean training, and by practice working at one's craft.
Plutarch · Morals: Ethical Essays
ON EDUCATION. · A. R. Shilleto, 1898
Plutarch distinguishes training from working at a craft. An arrangement becomes a practical invention through making and testing it.
In like manner the more we comprehend the harmony in the physical world the more our life shares the gladness of creation, and our expression of beauty in art becomes more truly catholic.
Rabindranath Tagore · Sadhana: The Realisation of Life
THE REALISATION OF BEAUTY · Linked 1916 Macmillan text; first publication 1913. Chapter VI translated by Surendra Nath Tagore; other English translation contributions acknowledged in the preface.
Tagore connects understanding relationships in the physical world with expression in art. Here catholic means broad or inclusive; it is his aesthetic and spiritual outlook.
Now let us end the talk about those qualities of invention and imagination with a word of memory and of thanks to the designers of time past.
William Morris · Hopes and Fears for Art
p. 114MAKING THE BEST OF IT [114] · ,
Morris closes his discussion of invention by thanking past designers. Making can learn from predecessors without claiming that every useful arrangement is unprecedented.
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