Creativity as artificial evolution

Dirk Baecker

pp. 61-66

in: Stephan A. Jansen, Eckhard Schröter, Nico Stehr (eds), Rationalität der Kreativität?, Wiesbaden, Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2009

Abstract

Who is right: Alfred North Whitehead or almost everybody else nowadays engaged in thinking about creativity? As he is only prepared to compare it to the categories of the "one" and the "many", Whitehead takes "creativity" to be "the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact" (Whitehead 1979: 21). That means it must to be found just about everywhere, as indeed it is, if you take it, as Whitehead does, as "that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively" (ibid.). No synthesis whatsoever arises without creativity being involved. Since any thing, any being, any entity is the product of some synthesis, creativity indeed must be everywhere.

Cited authors

Whitehead Alfred North