The Creativity Paradox: Multidisciplinary Perspectives

In this special issue we aim to integrate cognition, social sciences and humanities perspectives on the concept of creativity, the first aimed at understanding creativity as a process of the brain and a socio-psychological process respectively, the second at unraveling creativity as materialized in cultural practices and artifacts. The common ground between these two perspectives is a shared realization that creative processes and artifacts are always already culturally mediated. Moving away from a disembodied and decontextualized take on creativity as cognitive activity, an interdisciplinary approach to creativity that is informed by the social sciences and humanities will start from a historically and culturally specific perspective. Such a perspective typically zooms in on the interdependence between creators, creations, and their social and material world—on cognitive activity as an inherently social and material interactivity. This interdisciplinary perspective allows for a layered conception of creativity: as being not an isolated cognitive process or practice, but saturated with norms and beliefs about art, innovation and novelty in a society.

In this issue we start from this integrated perspective to reconsider the structure of creative processes. Since Paul Guilford’s classic distinction between convergent and divergent thinking, creative thinking and creative experience has been tied almost exclusively to divergent thinking (the ability to generate new ideas, or offer many different solutions to a complex problem) and ‘open’ modes of experience that are typically undirected, nonlinear, associative, or diffuse (such as daydreaming). Alternatively, convergent thinking is allegedly directed, revolving as it does around solving a problem in one preset way, following instructions, or learning facts. Presented as two contrastive modes of thinking, convergent and divergent thinking are often presented as two poles that are mutually exclusive: the first is essentially about opening up different options, the other is about making decisions.

However, already in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Thomas Kuhn argued that innovation in physical science hinged precisely on convergent thinking: convergent research leads to divergent results. More recently, Arthur Cropley in “In Praise of Convergent Thinking” (2006) has indicated the relevance of convergent thinking to innovation, and has indeed argued that divergence and convergence co-exist in creative thinking. At the other end of the spectrum, Anton Ehrenzweig speculated in The Hidden Order of Art (1967) how the apparent state of distraction during the creative process in fact held within it a very sharp, albeit unconscious, kind of focus and decision-making that he termed unconscious scanning. Philosophers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard have likewise addressed the intersection of an open or diffuse and a closed or directed kind of thinking in affective, creative processes and experiences. Lately, cultural psychologists Zittoun and Gillespie (2014) have researched the paradoxical combination of immersion and detachment in imaginative thinking. Similarly, Shelley Carson’s (2003, 2012) psychological research on productive daydreaming, and the way in which students are able to take in and process information more effectively precisely while being distracted, forces us to rethink dichotomies between distraction and concentration: the latter is present within the former.
The reversals (divergence and convergence) and paradoxes (convergence within divergence and vice versa) mentioned above not only problematize divergence’s exclusive claim to creativity, but also any assumed binary between convergence and divergence, immersion and detachment in creative work. Are the two perhaps not so much mutually exclusive as inextricably intertwined? Is there an irresolvable paradox at the heart of creativity? Is the creative process about a constant negotiation between binding and unbinding, rule and invention, focus and distraction, rather than unbounded digression? How can we make use of philosophical thought on the paradoxes of bounded digression, or digressive binding, in psychological research and educational sciences where creativity is at stake? That is, how will the creativity paradox affect notions of learning and cognizing?

This special issue answers these questions from different disciplines, while focusing on a central set of dichotomies that have, until now, framed our Western conception of creativity: distant-immediate, convergent-divergent, controlled-free, concentrated-distracted, improvised-studied. Each author zooms in on a specific set of concepts and assumptions that have been traditionally set in opposition to each other. In this way, we aim to unveil the infinite complexity of creative processes and experiences.