Hausman, Carl R. A Discourse on Novelty and Creation. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975.

Abstract

Two fundamental presuppositions underlie the diverse perspectives that have been taken on creativity: creativity may be integral to a world that can be rationally understood, or it may be a mystery in a world that escapes complete understanding. The author explores these presuppositions, so often ignored by those who theorize and speculate about creativity, and he proposes a way of understanding creativity even when interpreted as not perfectly rational. Initially, the outcomes of creative acts are brought into focus in order to characterize creativity without losing sight of the newness which is crucial to the recognition that creativity has occurred. The presence of new (unfamilar and unprecedented) intelligibility in an object distinguishes it as a creation rather than as something unique only as an individual thing. It is argued that this characterization of creation implies that creativity cannot be understood through rational explanations, which require that creations be predictable in principle when correlated with antecedent conditions and laws or repeatable regularities. It is then argued that the view that creativity resists explanation is no more contrary to reason that are alternative interpretations which imply that what appears as newness can be rationally explained. However, the author also proposes that we can understand creativity on a model of understanding suggested by works of art and aesthetic experience, in particular, as these are found in metaphorical expressions and our responses to them. Our responses to metaphorical expressions illustrate the way we may understand creations, and metaphors exemplify the structure of created objects. Further, the way new meanings in metaphors are understood serves as a model of intelligibility that complements the model that requires relating what is to be understood to conceptualizable constants. The discourse concludes with a discussion of the relation of the two models of intelligibility. It is argued that philosophical concerns are aimed at comprehensiveness and include the hope of knowing in accord with a third way of understanding which would embrace the first and second models. For human intelligence a third model is an ideal. But its pursuit is consonant both with acknowledging that there is radical creativity in the world and with the possibility of circumscribing instances of creativity in terms of rational as well as metaphorical understanding.