AMERICAN CREATIVITY ASSOCIATION – AUSTIN GLOBAL “Building a more creative society” Creativity Today - Monday, July 8, 2013 Kierkegaard and May on Anxiety’s Role in Creativity Maria Popova in Brain Pickings has an interesting piece on Soren Kirkegaard’s observations and ruminations about how anxiety can be a force in propelling – or retarding -- creativity. She goes on to show how these insights aided existentialist psychologist Rollo May in forming some of his crucial thoughts on the relationship between anxiety and creativity. Here is the core insight from Kirkegaard about the “aha” moment of creative inspiration: “… [A}nxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs to dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. “ May summarizes what Kirkegaard has taught him thusly: “Because it is possible to create — creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self, as well as creating in all the innumerable daily activities (and these are two phases of the same process) — one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever. Now creating, actualizing one’s possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living. If one does not do this, one is refusing to grow, refusing to avail himself of his possibilities; one is shirking his responsibility to himself. Hence refusal to actualize one’s possibilities brings guilt toward one’s self. But creating also means destroying the status quo of one’s environment, breaking the old forms; it means producing something new and original in human relations as well as in cultural forms (e.g., the creativity of the artist). Thus every experience of creativity has its potentiality of aggression or denial toward other persons in one’s environment or established patterns within one’s self.” I believe many people prefer to regard creativity as a fun activity that is almost effortless and costless. But by citing Kirkegaard and May, Popova reminds us that there are indeed great costs (and potentially great, but uncertain, benefits) to creative effort. Maybe this is one reason (maybe THE reason) most people shy away from exercising much of their creativity. But as Popova advocates, there is much to be learned by reading these two great intellects on how anxiety propels (and sometimes derails) creativity. Then the choice is up to us. Quote of the Day: “To put the matter figuratively, in every experience of creativity something in the past is killed that something new in the present may be born. “ – Rollo May brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/19/kierkegaard-on-anxiety-and-creativity/
Posted on: Mon, 08 Jul 2013 22:59:52 +0000
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