trópojRIVISTA DI ERMENEUTICA E CRITICA FILOSOFICADiretta da GIANNI VATTIMO e GAETANO CHIURAZZI
Anno IV – Numero 2 – 2011
Rethinking CreativityBetween Art and Philosophy
Edited by Alessandro Bertinetto and Alberto Martinengo
Direttore responsabileGianni Vattimo
DirettoreGaetano Chiurazzi
RedazioneRoberto Salizzoni (segretario)
Alessandro Bertinetto, Guido Brivio, Piero Cresto-Dina, Jean-Claude LévêqueAlberto Martinengo, Roberto Mastroianni, Eleonora Missana, Luca Savarino
Comitato scientificoLuca Bagetto (Università di Pavia) – Mauricio Beuchot (UNAM, Città del Messico) – Franca D’A-gostini (Politecnico di Torino) – Jean Grondin (Università di Montréal) – Federico Luisetti (Univer-sità del North Carolina) – Jeff Malpas (Università della Tasmania) – Teresa Oñate (UNED, Madrid) – Ugo Maria Ugazio (Università di Torino) – Robert Valgenti (Lebanon Valley College) – Federico
Vercellone (Università di Torino) – Santiago Zabala (Università di Potsdam)
Trópos. Rivista di ermeneutica e critica filosofica sottopone a procedura di referaggio anonimo gli articoli che rispondono a Call for papers e i contributi inviati liberamente dagli autori. La valutazione avviene di norma nell’arco di 3-6 mesi, da parte di almeno due referees. L’elenco dei
valutatori è pubblicato ogni due anni nel numero di dicembre della rivista.
IndirizzoGaetano Chiurazzi
Dipartimento di Filosofia e Scienze dell’Educazione – Università di Torinovia Sant’Ottavio, 2010124 Torino (Italia)
EditoreARACNE editrice S.r.l.
via Raffaele Garofalo, 133/A–B00173 Roma
Stampa«ERMES. Servizi Editoriali Integrati S.r.l.»
00040 Ariccia (RM) – via Quarto Negroni, 15Finito di stampare nel mese di aprile del 2012
isbn 978-88-548-4716-3issn 2036-542X-11002
Registrazione del Tribunale di Torino n. 19 del 25 febbraio 2008.Volume pubblicato con il contributo del Dipartimento di Filosofia e Scienze dell’Educazione
dell’Università di Torino.
trópojRIVISTA DI ERMENEUTICA E CRITICA FILOSOFICA
Alessandro Bertinetto, Creativity between Art and Philosophy .................. 5
Rethinking Creativity: Between Art and Philosophy ................. 9
Judith Siegmund, Is There a Quintessential Meaning for the Concept of Creativity? ................................................................................. 11
Gianluca Consoli, Naturalizzare la creatività. Prospettive (attuali) e limiti (futuri) ..................................................................... 29
Christopher Dowling, The Value of Ingenuity ........................................ 47
Erkki Huovinen, On Attributing Artistic Creativity ............................. 65
Cesare Natoli, Improvvisazione musicale e complessità .............................. 87
Enrico Terrone, Questa è arte, quella non è arte. Le conseguenze ontologiche della creatività ............................................................. 103
Jerrold Levinson, Indication, Abstraction, and Individuation ...................... 121
Saggi ................................................................................................ 133
Simona Bertolini, Quale struttura del mondo? Una chiave di lettura dell’ontologia cosmologica di Eugen Fink ......................................... 135
Maurizio D’Alessandro, Ermeneutica e �loso�a pratica. La phrónesis tra prassi e comprensione ............................................................... 153
Giacomo Pezzano, Comunità, immunità, alterità: una biopolitica a�ermativa e oltre-umana? ............................................................ 167
Note sugli autori ............................................................................ 185
Indice
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Creativity between Art and Philosophy
Alessandro BertinettoUniversità di Udine/Freie Universität Berlin
The idea that art is related to a process of creation is a modern one. Through a complex history in the 20th century, which is not without con-tradictions, the connection between art and creativity was debated in di�er-ent elds – psychology, epistemology, cognitive science, etc. – and became the target of attacks from marxism and (post-)structuralism. Still, the notion of creativity seems to have conserved its force not only in everyday practices but also in media discourses. In diverse areas – from art theory to epistemol-ogy, from action theory to economics, from computer science to psychol-ogy (to give only a few examples) – it has regained the attention of scholars as well, as is made clear by the number of recent publications on the topic. However, questions remain as to whether and how the notion of creativity can be used and what kind of conceptual work it can do.
These are dicult, yet important, philosophical matters, considering that, from theology to art, the notion of creativity has already undergone a series of profound transformations during modernity; most notably it ceased to mean a production ex nihilo and began to indicate a kind of making, which entails novelty, originality and exemplarity. From a philosophical point of view, this evolution concerns the very meaning of the creative act. A genetic approach, reducing creativity to a set of determined causes and grounds, nds a corrective in those thinkers who stress its normative signicance and its performative dimension. The terms of this debate see the issue of creativ-ity as involving general questions about our ways of acting and understand-ing or about exclusively, or particularly, or at least characteristically, some elds of human experience, such as the arts, and not others.
Trópos dedicated a call for papers to this topic. Selected papers are pub-lished in two special issues. The present one includes essays o�ering theoret-ical investigations on creativity. They do this under di�erent, even contrast-ing, perspectives, with di�erent aims and with di�erent outcomes. Yet, the light they throw on the question at issue provides readers with important,
ISBN 978-88-548-4716-3 – ISSN 2036-542X-11002DOI 10.4399/97888548471631 – pp. 5-8
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often creative, insights. Through them, readers are invited to think creatively, as well as critically, on creativity and its connections with the arts and aes-thetics.
In the opening essay, Judith Siegmund discusses and criticizes di�erent explanations of creativity in order to nd ways to answer to the key ques-tion, Is There a Quintessential Meaning for the Concept of Creativity? She con-trasts theories that consider creativity as a general feature of human action, theories that regard creativity as compatible with rationality and art crea-tivity as exemplary of creativity as such, and other views that criticize the very concept of ‘creativity’ as an ideological notion: a notion used in our capitalistic society as a means of promoting eciency in terms of increasing prot and adapting individual taste to mass culture. According to those con-ceptions, the notion of creativity, detached from the connotations of genius and inspiration and absorbed into the economic system, is ‘domesticated’ to the extent that it covers every human activity. This is, Siegmund argues, one of the reasons why artists nowadays reject both creativity as a paradigm for art and art as a paradigm for creativity.
In his paper Naturalizzare la creatività (Naturalizing Creativity), Gianluca Consoli suggests another way of avoiding the risk of an ideological use of the concept of creativity: its naturalization. ‘Naturalization’ does not simply seek to explain away the concept; it hopes instead to understand the mental processes at stake in creative actions. Hence, Consoli explores the notions of insight and of aesthetic pleasure. They should be combined in order to get a proper view of creativity under the perspective both of its production as well as of its reception. Nonetheless, Consoli argues, this naturalization must be integrated by a more comprehensive hermeneutical understanding that takes into account the historical dimension of creativity.
One may also be tempted to distinguish various kinds of creativity that should be explained di�erently. Following this path, Chris Dowling (The Value of Ingenuity) focuses his attention on a subclass of creative problem solving: ingenuity. If a ‘creative’ resolution to a problem is the combination of ideas “in a way that is original, valuable, and skilful,” ingenuity is, accord-ing to Dowling, the capacity to recognize problems, whose creative solution is frugal as well as riskier, quicker and more economical than the solutions to other problems in the same “conceptual space,” “but whose payo� is of sucient value to warrant creatively engaging with this problem” (p. 61). An investigation of ingenuity can provide important insights about a kind of creativity that seems to be particularly relevant in our competitive world.
A di�erent, yet related, issue concerns artistic creativity. Erkki Huovinen (On Attributing Artistic Creativity) maintains that the artistic medium is key
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for understanding artistic creativity, which cannot be viewed solely in terms of conceptual restructuring or as problem-solving. For reducing artistic cre-ativity to “a cognitive process that is wholly under the artist’s control” means “to overlook the constitutive role of the medium both in shaping the crea-tive products and in giving impulses to the artists that fundamentally ground our attributions of creativity to them and their works” (p. 79). The medium is hardly to be considered as a transparent tool. Rather, artists experience tensions and surprises in response to their own works. Hence, Huovinen argues, the uncontrollability of the medium, “far from being a defect in the artist’s competence, is actually at the heart of what is expected of artistic creativity” (p. 68).
The fact that authentic, personal artists experienced “tensions, surprises, and revelations” in response to their works, seems to give artistic creativ-ity an improvisational touch. This is one of the reasons why it is interesting to investigate creativity in relation to improvisation. Cesare Natoli’s paper Improvvisazione musicale e complessità (Musical Improvisation and Complexity) is devoted to this task and explores some of the features of collective im-provisation. In a collective improvisation, order and disorder, planning and chaos are inseparable. In this sense, according to Natoli, it can be framed analogously to biologically and physically complex systems, where the con-text is continuously transformed and re-created, and the self-regulating bal-ance between order and chaos is achieved through the mutual relation of the parts. The epistemology of complexity provides aesthetic investigations with an understanding of the importance of the unforeseen as well as an understanding of how to bridge the divide between science and artistic production.
Still, what are the implications of creativity for the ontology of artworks and for their denition? In his paper Questa è arte, quella non è arte. Le con-seguenze ontologiche della creatività (This is Art, that is not Art: Ontological Con-sequences of Creativity), Enrico Terrone argues that creativity is primarily as-cribed to acts and events, not to things or objects. Against structuralism and contextualism, Terrone defends performativism, and he maintains that artworks are acts in which the artist plays a crucial role, although he/she ex-ercises no absolute control over them. Moreover, the evaluation of artworks depends very much on their creative achievements. At the end of the paper, this view is exemplied by considering the special case of lms.
Yet, there could also be good reasons for defending some improved ver-sions of contextualism. According to Jerrold Levinson (Indication, Abstraction, and Individuation), contextualism holds true, if some of its weaknesses are overcome. The view of artworks as types, embraced by Levinson himself
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in the past, must be abandoned, because works of art have aesthetic and artistic properties “that they could not have were they pure structures exist-ing atemporally” (p. 122). So, according to Levinson, artworks are not pure abstract structures: they are rather impure, individual structures, which are created by the artist, who, by ‘indicating’ artworks, provides them with aes-thetic, expressive and semantic properties. Hence, the idea of artworks as ‘indicated structures’ can be defended by understanding artistic indications as singular psychological acts that christen artworks in denite historical contexts.
The papers that have been summarized offer multifaceted theoretical ac-counts of creativity. The next issue of Trópos will tackle the topic from a dif-ferent perspective by exploring the history for creativity and examining the ways in which individual philosophers and artists have approached the topic.
