To decide if the Philosophy of Creativity is going to be useful to you, you really only need to ask yourself one honest question. What is truth?
The Philosophy of Creativity suggests that the standard for obtaining truth is a pretty high bar. Enlightenment thought has conditioned us to think that rational, scientific thinking accesses truth, but I ask you to think about the social systems that we currently have in place and to ask yourself honestly, are these systems perfect? Are these systems producing optimal living conditions for everyone? If the answer is no, then it doesn't make sense to claim that our methods are producing truth, because if they were, wouldn't our social systems be much better?
This isn't a matter of right or wrong. I'm not saying that any particular system is wrong, only that it does not accurately represent truth. There is always more to be learned, and so to claim that we have truth is a form of dogmatism. This was Deleuze's main point in his most famous book, Difference and Repetition. Our common way of thinking produces a dogmatic image of thought.
What does it mean to be dogmatic? It means that you think you have all the answers when you don't. It's an attitude that prevents you from continuing to listen and continuing to learn.
Scientific discovery is highly efficacious, meaning it produces our desired results at a high level. But I ask you to again ask yourself, what is the difference between something that works really well, something that is effective at meeting objectives, and something that is completely right? That's the standard of truth, and my argument is that science and rationality, no matter how effective are merely tools to produce what works. They do not obtain truth.
A common response to that is, "Yes, but they are the best that we have." To that I would say using valid critique to make something better is very different than calling for its outright rejection. Science and rationality have produced remarkable progress, but a desire to explore the gray area there and to understand why it exists is still valuable.
This is the thesis of the Philosophy of Creativity. If we allow ourselves to think dogmatically about our beliefs, then how will we discover what else we can think? In the coming weeks, I will write more about how we access that "something else" and incorporate it into our already functioning rational enterprise to make it better. This is not the inclusion of anything irrational, it's a claim that some aspects of experience are hyperrational and thus difficult to capture via classical methods. Acknowledging what is our common way of thinking, and exploring how we access the areas missed by this common sense, will make our systems better and improve how we might live.
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