20th WCP: Philosophic Principles of Creativity

1. Nowadays the promotion of a new world outlook paradigm of global creativity has a place.

The understanding of the nature of creation in the history of philosophy has always been connected with the explanation of the substance and of the mechanisms of creative activity. If asked - how creation in general is possible, what are its necessary premises and impulses - the answer was given aut of the trinity: God /Plato, G.W.F.Hegel, N.Berdyaev/, Nature /Epicurus, B.Spinoza, H.Bergson/, Human Being /C.A.Helvetius, K.Marx, J.P.Sartre/. Such abilities of the human beeng as intuition, imagination and fantasy have been united in the mechanisms of creation. Some thinkers have been explaining them through perceiving using "the eyes of mind" of evidently clear true ideas /R.Descartes, I.Kant, E.Husserl/, some others - just vice versa - opposed those concepts of mind and logic, finding in them the way to some instant perceiving of the essence of things - a sign of divine revelation and beneficy /St. Augustine, A.Shopenhauer, E.H.Gilson/.

The principal difference in the idea of global creativity consists in the admission of the ontological status of creative processes, of their quality of being primary as some maximum totality. The attention is drawn to the subject's purpose - considering activity considered as a certain stage /link/ in the global teleological processes of the universal. Considering the metaphysical point of view, creation is a fundamental process of spontaneous transcendence of potentials and virtualities, of permanent development in the field of universal posibilities. All of the existing material, semiotic and ideal structures expose themselves as certain products /events/ of creative processes. Their former, actual and future existance finally depends on the different direction and on the forms of realisation of the potentials of creativity.

2. The new world outlook paradigm of global creativity correlates harmoniously with the fundamental principles of modern natural science.

It is worth mentioning that the understanding of physical reality as a set of different assemblies of events and relations, having as a result, the appearance of separated substantial material objects /N.Bohr, K.Hubner/. An important methodological role in modern cosmology is played by the so called antropic principle. According to that principle the significance of the universal physical constants - and that means all the outlook of the Universe known to us - is the only one possible for the appearance and existence of the human being in it /S.W.Hawking, B.Carter/, and that means, from the point of view of a line of explorers, "the deep expediency and harmony of physical laws" /I.L.Rosental, Y.B.Linnick/. The synergetical exploration that is developing intensively now is also expressing in a concrete-scientific aspect the idea of global creativity. Synergy introduces a new understanding of time as a universal constructive beginning of all opened dynamical systems. The universal mechanism of creativity shows itself in the evolution disparate structures passing the points of bifurcation where the "selection" has place - that is the objectivisation of one of the possible direction of development towards the growth of the degree of systems' self-organization /I.Prigojine, H.Haken/.

3. The processes of self-organization and evolution display themselves as the premises of a subject's creative activity connected with the setting of new aims and with the permanent challenge for the ways of reaching them.

Philosophical reflection fixes the idea of global creativity as a link in the chain of world outlook paradigmal settings of past times: fixism-mobilism-cyclism /Ancient time/, creationism /Dark ages/, evolutionism /New time/, creativism /Postmodern/.

The first three settings were tightly connected to the idea of geocentrism and of a stable closed universe where changes, if they had taken place, were strictly ordered and finite in time. The idea of cyclicity in different variations /"eternal coming back" after F.Nietzche/ also influences the modern world outlook.

The creationistic program considers creation only as divine creation being preceded by the absolutely free will of a higher transcendental force. So, considering that man, and that is the difference with God, cannot create something out of nothing, because man's creation is considered either as an imitation derivating from divine creation or is simply negated as creation.

The most significant influence on the development of concrete-scientific considerations of creation mechanisms is that of the modern evolutionistic program. Though the idea of evolution of the living organism can be repeatedly met in the history of philosophy and science /Empedocles, D.Diderot, J.-B.Lamarck/ the multilateral consideration of evolutionary processes begins with Darwin's theory of natural selection.

During the last decades there has been formed a new evolutionistic interdisciplinary program for the investigation of the genesis mechanisms and of the development of knowledge - evolutionary epistemology /K.Popper, K.Lorentz, D.T.Campbell, G.Vollmer, U.Quine, J.Piajet/, that is - even considering all the difference of certain ways of approach - united by the idea of knowledge as a function of life and, consequently, of "building-in" of the mechanisms of cognition in its evolution.

4. Nowadays the limited character of the methodological principles of evolutionism in the understanding either of nature and of the mechanisms of scientific development or of structure-semantic characteristics of the subject's practical activity, has become evident.

Considering the epistemological aspect we should say that the transfer of the biological mechanism of slow spontaneous changes /trials/ and of natural selection to the sphere of philosophic methodology looks improper. The so called Campbell's algorithm /BVSR/ leaves out of the analysis the logics of conscious research and selection of the problems for consideration by scientists.

Philosophers' arguments about the scientific method, also look like an anachronism. Verificationism or falsificationism, induction or deduction. Once upon a time philosophers were the only ones who tried to explain nature. Afterwards they continued doing that in parallel with scientists, often depending on the deep essence of their definitions /just consider the "wellknown" definition of warmth given by Hegel/. At present, if they discuss natural metaphysics, it is always underlined, that a principally different comparison with scientific aspects of research is in discussion here.

The situation of the scientific method is the same. Once upon a time philosophers revealed and reflected some common methods of science as a specific type of human activity. But as science developed in the frames of the system of independent disciplines, the discovery and perfecting of effective real methods of research became the inner affair of each scientific discipline. That is the real difference between them. That is why the methodologists' discussions on the scientific method as it is looks like an exotic luxury for a practicing naturalists. More over, new overall scientific methods are now born in the frames of certain branches of science and after that they are transferred by scientists themselves to some other disciplines /system-structural analysis, calculative experiment/.

Considering the subject's practical motivational-aimed activity, in science too, the evolutionists mostly ignore its research putting the emphasis on the so called inner logics of scientific development. Epistemology without a cognitive subject worked out by K.Popper is here an expressive example of it.

It is not accidentally that those who are opposed to evolutionists - institutionalists /T.Kuhn/ and cognitive sociologists /K.D.Knorr-Cetina, D.Bloor, M.Mulkay/ declare a sociological turn in the philosophy of science. So the attention is directed towards the personal relations among scientists, on social-psychological aspects of public discussions and on lobby "tratatives" in elaborating the truth understood as the consensus of scientific community for other scientific problem.

Modern sociologists of science are proud that they take on the problem of "scientific ethos" as put forward by R.K.Merton and some how make science equal with other social institutions. But there is an important contra-argument against such an approach - that in the modern epoch science became the most important sphere of social activity, the leading force of development of the civilisational process.

Thanks to science new "axial time" /K.Jaspers/ appears, and the unity of the historical process becomes obvious. That is why such a "taking off" becomes a kind of freedom for scientists from some additional weight of moral responsibility for the results of the practical use of their recearch.

5. The principle of the universal significance of the creative processes leads towards the exposing of their structural-formal and motivational-purpose aspects.

In the first group they consider the presentations on the specifics of different spheres of creative activity /science, technics, art, politics etc/. Nowadays technical creation is the leader amongst all the spheres of creative activity.

Technical creation gives birth, let's call it so, to a product of direct action that cardinally changes the reality just in the sight of contemporaries. Here the question appears: if really everything that is possible from the technical point of view has to be created.

The principle of the ecology of creation covers the conscious administration of the creative processes in different spheres of activity in order to maintain all the system of creation in a dynamic balance. And if there was some possibility of maintaining man's "noncaptured state" by technology then the solution is expected only by way of the fast-progressing understanding of the prohibition of large-scaled technical "luxuries" and of selflimiting in the comfort of life by use of technical devices on the basis of reasonable sufficiency.

The universal potential of creativity - and it is worth affirming it - can be incarnated as well as in the ways of creation as in those of destruction. There are practically no such modern technical devices that could not be harmful for man though many of them have been worked out - as it seemed - only for his blessing. But the main thing is that there appear more and more, not simply technical devices that show their ambivalence only in case of somebody's bad will but devices that are designed for destruction from the very beginning.

During the epoch of the Renaissance there was a turn in Western civilization towards enlightenment, development of arts, science and technology mainly thanks to the philosophers' criticism of medieval traditions and values. So were the philosophers wrong and the modern crisis in fact just a more large-scale yet postponed realization of O.Spengler's prophesy? Or is humanity standing again at the border of cardinal changes of ideals and values of creative activity? In both cases the choice of further ways of development and of minimization at the risk of the civilization creation is again mainly dependent upon philosophy and philosophers.

SUMMARY

1. Nowadays the promotion of a new world outlook paradigm of global creativity has a place. The principal peculiarity of the idea of global creativity is the admition of the ontological status of creative processes.

2.The new world outlook paradigm of global creativity correlates harmoniously with the fundamental principles of modern natural science.

3.The processes of self-organization and evolution display themselves as the premises of a subject's creative activity connected with the setting of new aims and with the permanent challenge for the ways of reaching them.

5. The principle of the universal significance of the creative processes leads towards the exposing of their structural-formal and motivational-purpose aspects.