Creative Evolution

Abstract

Up to now I have been dealing with artistic creativity in its formal appearance. That is, I have been treating it from the perspective of esthetics as a normative science in analogy to science as a logic of inquiry. This, of course, is not to say that I have avoided psychological description. Any discussion of thought processes, as Peirce admitted, must involve some element of psychological description. Nevertheless, from within the Peircean architectonic I have been presenting creativity in its normative aspect. Now I shall follow Peirce’s cosmological and phenomenological accounts of creative evolution and then apply these by analogy to human creativity. While this is not presented as a normative account, we should notice that it has an inherent normative aspect. That is, since God is the creator involved, if we hold God to be the highest or in some sense the most ideal being, then His creative process should be the highest or most ideal as well. Therefore, as a regulative ideal, God’s creativity becomes a norm toward which our creativity ought to strive to compare. Indeed, then, while our normative argument involved psychological description, so does our descriptive account involve an inherent normative aspect.

The endless variety in the world has not been created by law. It is not of the nature of uniformity to originate variation, nor of law to beget circumstance. When we gaze upon the multifariousness of nature we are looking straight into the face of a living spontaneity. A day’s ramble in the country ought to bring that home to us (6.553).