As we learn how to master technology and walk the human paths once again, old books can come in handy. Books at least fifty years old and preferably older were written in an age outside ours. Every era has its share of problems, of course. But when it comes to advice for living, it makes sense to turn back to those who have lived it before us to see how they did it. And when it comes to technology, older is actually better than newer. That may seem like a backwards view, but it makes sense: if technology is leading us astray or dehumanizing us, we can go back to people who lived life before that happened to help us remember what being human is all about.
One of the thinkers I have most enjoyed discovering on my journey studying technology is the Russian philosopher Nicolai Berdyaev. I plan to further explore his philosophy of creativity and how it can help us live in the Age of AI in coming posts. Thanks to Berdyaev, the nature of human creativity has been on my mind as of late. So in my ongoing search for mostly old books that address how to be human in a technological age, a 1959 book called Creativity and Its Cultivation caught my attention. Edited by professor of psychology Harold H. Anderson, the volume brings together 15 distinguished writers who offer encouraging evidence for creative power in their fields as well as suggestions on how the quality may be developed in people today.
One of the 15 contributors is German psychologist Erich Fromm. I read Fromm’s entry, “The Creative Attitude.” While Berdyaev helps us with a theology of creativity by showing us how we can be co-creators with God through the harnessing of limitless creative power, Fromm gives us something more basic: a review of the necessary conditions for creativity; or, how to develop a creative attitude from which creative action can flow. Raised in a Jewish family and knowledgeable in the Hebrew Scriptures, Fromm eventually became an influential humanist psychologist. As such, he did not champion Christianity as Berdyaev did. He called his position “non-theistic mysticism.” In any case, Fromm considered human freedom and creativity to be essential aspects of existence worth pursuing and defending, and in that sense, his thinking complements Berdyaev’s nicely.
Seeing Creatively
Fromm begins his essay by describing two kinds of creativity. There’s the sense of creating something new, such as a poem, painting, or dance. Then there’s the creative attitude, or creativity as a character trait. All of us, says Fromm, can achieve a creative attitude. It does not depend on certain skills or talents. It starts with the ability to see and respond to reality. Responding to people and things in the world is, after all, part of why we create. But a realistic response to someone or something goes beyond marginal details or superficial consideration. Seeing creatively is seeing wholly and objectively, says Fromm, without the projection and distortion that often comes through us. Similar to philosopher Martin Buber’s I-Thou idea, it’s a coming together, seer and seen, observer and observed. That’s the creative attitude for Fromm. Having established that, he then lays out four conditions that will help anyone achieve a creative attitude. Let’s try them on for size.
The Capacity to be Puzzled
This, says Fromm, is what we lose when we leave childhood behind. The penchant for wonder, surprise, and curiosity, and the willingness to be puzzled.
The capacity to be puzzled is indeed the premise of all creation, be it in art or science.
He quotes French mathematician Henri Poincaré: “Scientific genius is the capacity to be surprised.” When people are surprised or puzzled, they respond creatively. It’s our built-in problem-solving superpower. Being surprised, and the puzzling that follows, is the beginning of discovery. But if we give up on surprise and puzzling — if we reach for the Google search or the AI chatbot too quickly — we cede that superpower to a machine, and the creative attitude goes begging.
One way to promote this capacity is to make wonder part of your daily routine. Make room to speak out loud — to yourself, your kids, or your friends — about what inspires wonder in you. Words have power, and naming the wonder helps us dwell in it. Couple that with a habit of asking questions. Puzzling over the nature of things will promote creative responses in you and those you influence.
The Ability to Concentrate
Fromm calls this a rare ability in our Western culture:
We are always busy, but without concentration. When we do one thing, we are already thinking of the next thing…We eat breakfast, listen to the radio, and read the newspaper, and perhaps at the same time we carry on a conversation with our wife and children. We do five things at the same time, and we do nothing.
The technology of our age makes finding an “attitude of full commitment” much more difficult than it used to be. Alerts and notifications on our devices make it hard to get in the zone for long, and a never-ending menu of entertainment options vies for our concentration time.
In fact, we have trouble just thinking without distraction these days. A 2022 study suggested that we try to avoid the activity of just thinking because we think it will be boring or unproductive. But when participants were given the chance to do it, they reported more enjoyment, more engagement, more interest, and less boredom than they predicted.
Give yourself some time to concentrate fully on an activity. Turn off your phone and put it in the next room. Set a timer for 30 or 45 minutes and practice concentrating on one thing with little or no interruption. As Fromm puts it:
If I talk to someone, if I read something, if I walk — whatever it is, if I do it in a concentrated fashion, there is nothing more important that what I am doing in the here and now.
A Strong Sense of Self
We use the word “I” glibly as adults, says Fromm. I this and I that. But are we really in tune with our self as the true originator of our acts? We often follow others in our thoughts, words, and actions. We jump on bandwagons, get caught up in trends, keep up with the Joneses. But creativity comes from originality, which Fromm argues is not necessarily discovering something new but experiencing it in a way that “the experience originates in me.”
A strong sense of self doesn’t have to make us egocentric or narcissistic. Fromm notes that our experience of self comes in the process of relatedness to others:
If I am isolated and unrelated, I am so full of anxiety that I can not possibly have a sense of identity and of self.
Isolation makes us prisoners, argues Fromm, frightened and unhappy. To be an agent of creative experience, we have to break out of isolation and develop our sense of self in community with other human beings.
But that’s getting harder to do today. We’re in the midst of a loneliness epidemic, with higher depression and anxiety rates, especially among the young. And the introduction of AI chatbots attempting to simulate relationship only compounds the problem. Tech companies think we can supplement our dwindling friends list and our loneliness with AI companionship. But that only makes us dependent on machines and more isolated. AI relationships make us ever more forgetful of the benefits of the real thing.
To get to know yourself more, carve out time to think without distraction. Mind wandering, brainstorming, daydreaming, and even nostalgic thinking have benefits. And since, as Berdyaev argues, we bear the image of God, thinking about our relationship with the original Creator will open up the creative attitude in us and allow us to draw out our own creative responses.
Harnessing Tension and Conflict
Fromm offers one more condition to help us cultivate a creative attitude: the ability to accept conflict and tension resulting from polarity.
This idea is very much in contrast to the current climate of opinion, in which one attempts to avoid conflict as much as possible…Everything is made easy, everyone is tolerant…There is a general superstition that conflicts are harmful, and that hence they should be avoided.
But conflict, Fromm writes, is the source of wondering and one of the ways we build character. Without it, he says, one becomes “a smoothly running machine” where desires become automatic and feelings are flattened out. In our day, we’ve got parallel developments: conflict seems to be more common, more open, and more toxic, and to cope, we are getting drawn more deeply into our individual virtual worlds.
Conflict is inevitable, but experiencing it with a creative attitude can turn unpleasant or unfortunate situations into a space for creative activity. Says Fromm:
To be aware of these conflicts, to experience them deeply, to accept them not just intelligently but in feeling, is one of the conditions for creativity.
Courage and Faith
Fromm closes his essay by reminding readers that the creative attitude takes courage and faith:
Courage to let go of certainties, courage to be different and to stand isolation; courage, as the Bible puts it in the story of Abraham, to leave one’s own land and family and to go to a land yet unknown.
He argues that courage is only possible in faith. He references the Old Testament meaning of faith (emunah), which means certainty:
…to be certain of one’s own experience in thought and in feeling, to be able to trust it, to rely on it, this is faith. Without courage and faith, creativity is impossible…
The good news for all of us is that the creative attitude is possible this very day. Not after years of developing a skill. Not only for those who seem to have been born with inherent talent. Not only if we quit our day jobs. All of us can begin cultivating the creative attitude today, and soon, that practice will allow us to draw forth new creative activity that will heal, inspire, and enrich ourselves and others.
Cross-posted from The Human Adventure.