History and Conditions for Creativity

Abstract

The complex relationship between history, evolution, and creativity is approached from a plurality of perspectives. Creative and totalitarian approaches to social organization are compared, with a specific focus on the importance of diversity.

KEYWORDS:

• Civilization
• creativity
• diversity
• evolution
• history
• myth
• totalitarianism

Notes

¹Paul D. MacLean considered the great parts of the brain from the point of view of phylogenetic heredity and formulated the model of the tri-partite brain: the paleocephal (heredity of the reptilian brain), the mesocephal (heredity of the ancient mammals), and the cortex (see MacLean 1970).

²Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) was a philosopher and Dominican friar. He re-interpreted Copernicus's heliocentric theory, influenced by the ideas of Nicolò Cusano, thereby eliminating the motionless sphere of fixed stars, the basis of the Aristotelian system, and hypothesized that the stars are infinite in number, themselves dependent on infinite planets. Elaborating such a theory, which presupposed the idea of an infinite universe, led to Bruno being burned at the stake for heresy, after a trial by the Inquisition lasting years (see Bruno 2014).

³Zygmunt Bauman (1925) is a Polish philosopher and sociologist (see Bauman 1999, 2001, 2005).

⁴Marija Gimbutas (1921–1994) was a Lithuanian archaeologist and lingquist. She studied the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of ancient Europe. She introduced her “Kurgan hypothesis,” which combined the study of the Kurgan culture with linguistics to give an explanation for the origins of European civilization (see Gimbutas 1989a, 1989b).

⁵Riane Eisler (1931) is an American anthropologist, historian, and essayist. Analyzing the “androcracies” (male-dominated societies) of the Indo-European peoples (the Kurgan peoples of Marija Gimbutas) and other societies, she formulated the idea of a Gylanic social model, namely, a society without the dominion of one sex over the other (see Eisler 1987).

⁶Richard J. Bernstein (1932) is an American philosopher. His work most relevant to our discussion is Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (1983).

⁷Antonio Machado (1875–1939) was a Spanish poet and writer. One of the major writers of the twentieth century, influenced first by modernism and surrealism, his evolution took him ever closer to philosophy, for which he acknowledged a deep interest.

⁸Ultra-Darwinism is one of the evolutionist currents, emphasizing the role of natural selection. By applying small changes at a genetic level, natural selection enabled adaptation. Exponents of ultra-Darwinism include George Williams, who proposed Phyletic Gradualism in the 1970s to indicate that evolutionary change was the result of slow, gradual accumulation of small fixed modifications, and Richard Dawkins, who identified the gene, rather than the individual organism, as the main object of natural selection, driving the evolutionary process via a “constant struggle between genes.” For more information see Dawkins (1976).

⁹See Adorno et al. (1982) reference. This was a complex and important study, started in 1944 and ended in 1949, by researchers of the Frankfurt School. Triggered by the atrocities of WW2, the work collects the results of an inter-disciplinary study into the psychology of social discrimination, especially anti-semitism. After some initial success, the work fell out of favour, although there is now a resurgence of interest.

¹⁰Erich Pinchas Fromm (1900–1980) was a German psychoanalyst and sociologist (see Fromm 1955, 1983).

¹¹Samuel Huntington (1927–2008) was a political scientist. Huntington argues that in order to understand the motives behind conflicts between civilisations one should examine, first of all, the cultural differences, unlike the conflicts that characterised the 20th century and Cold War, which were due to ideological and political differences (see Huntington 1993, 1998).

¹²Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) was a German philosopher, considered one of the major exponents of hermeneutic philosophy thanks to his most influential work, published in German in1960 (see Gadamer 1975 for the English translation).

¹³Michel Serres (1930) is a French philospher and writer. Serres is interested in the growth of a philosophy of science that is not based on a meta-language, where a single scientific discipline is favored and defined, but on the concept of exchange and overlapping between disciplines (see Serres 1969–1980, 1992, 1997). For this discussion see Serres (1997).