Ontological determinant of the phenomenon of creativity in the conceptual space of non-classical philosophy

Kachay Il'ya Sergeevich Senior Lecturer, Department of Philosophy, Siberian Federal University 660041, Russia, Krasnoyarskii krai, g. Krasnoyarsk, pr. Svobodnyi, 82A, aud. 428 monaco-24-Ilya@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction

If, in the context of the classical tradition of philosophizing, the ontological determinacy of creativity is revealed in the concepts of a single transcendental subject, the Absolute Self or the Absolute (Spirit) as sources of the generation of a new being (while the creativity of the subject is interpreted in an epistemological way – as an act of cognition of existence), the non–classical philosophical thought of the XIX-XX centuries recognizes man as the general mover of creativity to a much greater extent in the context of his immediate existence. Indeed, creativity in the ontological dimension, as R.V. Gumerova notes, is also revealed as a personal property of a person, as a way of his being, as a "conscious choice of his own path and freedom from conventions", as "the establishment of his laws that express the highest integration of the spirit" ^{[7, p. 63]}. Speaking about the ontological nature of creativity, it should be noted that the latter, in any of its manifestations, is revealed as an experience of the ontological unity of the subject and being. In addition, the ontological orientation of the creative act unfolds in the context of semantic transformation, where a unique meaning is the result of a creative encounter between a person and the world.

According to S.N. Semenov, the ontological nature of meaning is determined by "both the real interaction of the components of a certain fragment of being, and the objective position of a person included in this being" ^{[22, p. 125]}. In this regard, the semantic field of creativity, according to the researcher, includes such an ontological triad of determinants of the creative act as the individual activity of the subject (revealing personal meaning), the creative potential of objective being (forming a socio-cultural meaning), and, finally, the realization of existential potencies (revealing universal meaning). It is not for nothing that V. Frankl, who understands by creativity the ability of a person to win meaning from life and interprets the subject as being asked and forced to answer existential questions, believes that a person's lack of vital meaning generates an existential vacuum: "Meaning is not subjective, a person does not invent it, but finds it in the world, in objective reality, that is why he acts for a person as an imperative that requires its implementation" ^[25]. Thus, this kind of life creativity allows a person to transcend beyond his existential-personal being and at the same time deepen and fill it by discovering new meanings.

Ontological rootedness of creativity: a brief historical and philosophical section

Making a brief excursion into the historical and philosophical reflection on the problem of creativity, it should be noted that the existential rootedness of creativity can be traced already in ancient philosophy, mainly in the works of Plato. Indeed, in the dialogue "Feast" one can find the definition of creativity as an extremely broad category, denoting "the transition from non-existence into being, the creation of any works of art and craft" ^{[17, p. 115]}. At the same time, as a genuine art, the Sophist dialogue postulates "every ability that is the cause of what did not exist before" ^{[18, pp. 340-341]}. The ontological background in understanding the phenomenon of creativity is also present in the conceptual space of medieval philosophy, where creativity is justified primarily as a divine creationist act, as a demiurgic generation of being from non-existence and, in general, is considered as the central principle of being. At the same time, if St. Augustine understands creativity as an irrational-volitional divine act of generating being, the knowledge of which is the limit of the creative intentions of the subject, then Thomas Aquinas interprets creativity as a conscious institution of God's perfect being, fundamentally inaccessible to human cognition.

The ontological tradition of interpreting creativity as "actualization of potencies inherent in the universe (being, cosmos, nature, life itself)" ^{[14, p. 6]}, originating in ancient and medieval philosophical concepts, is most fully developed in non-classical European philosophy in the works of A. Schopenhauer, A. Bergson, J.-P. Sartre, by A. Camus and M. Heidegger. However, here the ontological emphasis in the understanding of creativity shifts from the generation of objective being to the creation of a person's own existential-personal space. In other words, creativity in its ontological hypostasis in the context of Western European philosophical thought is revealed as an act of self-creation, self-actualization and self-transcending and appears as a fundamental meaning-forming existential of human existence. In this respect, the creation and transformation of external reality is a consequence of a creative change by a person in the ontological space of his own subjectivity. Thus, the non–classical philosophy of the XIX-XX centuries overcomes the absolutization of the epistemological nature of creativity by classical philosophy, which largely shackles the creative process with epistemological frameworks, and focuses on the existential–ontological basis of creativity, understood as "the complexity of inner life, "diversity" - what "does" Being, “manifests” Being as plural for man himself" ^{[6, p. 106]}.

The ontology of creativity in A. Schopenhauer: expression and denial of the Will to live

Thus, the founder of the philosophy of life A. Schopenhauer justifies the ontological unity of the world and man not through the cognitive capabilities of the subject, but proceeding "from the unity of the bodily and spiritual organization of a person corresponding to the world whole, the mover of which is the will" ^{[1, p. 25]}. In this regard, creativity is one of the most important ways to overcome the dictates of an irrational Will to live by nature. The ontological nature of creativity, according to Schopenhauer's concept, is most fully expressed in poetry, in particular, in tragedy, which reflects the highest level of objectification of the Will to live and captures the most vivid existential human states, such as grief and sorrow, illustrating the nature of being as a whole. It is not for nothing that the philosopher claims that in his work the poet "is guided by a clear consciousness of the essence of humanity in the form that it appears to him in his own inner world" ^{[29, p. 351]}. Musical creativity, from Schopenhauer's point of view, also has an ontological character, since it expresses the diverse movement of the Will to live through melodic lines, the inexhaustibility of which corresponds to the inexhaustible diversity of human individuals. According to Schopenhauer, music is a universal language and expresses the quintessence of human existence, because "the composer reveals the inner essence of the world and expresses the deepest wisdom in a language that his mind does not understand" ^{[28, p. 226]}.

According to Schopenhauer, creativity is most fully manifested in the crisis periods of human life, when the time of unjustified hopes dominates over fate – it is at these moments that a person wonders about the essence of the world: "The painter writes his answer on the canvas, the poet expresses it with words, the musician depicts the deepest essence of the world in sounds" ^{[30, p. 125]}. At the same time, the thinker emphasizes the unconscious, instinctive, irrational nature of creativity, thereby largely anticipating the Freudian doctrine of the unconscious. An equally important merit of the philosopher is the recognition of the ontological rootedness of the creative act, in a certain sense opposed to the epistemological model of creativity that dominates classical philosophy. Indeed, due to the fact that the Will to live has an irrational and unconscious nature, rational cognition gives way to intuitive comprehension and experience of the world. Therefore, for Schopenhauer, as E.Y. Krivykh states, "the highest kind of knowledge is not science, but art, since it is based on intuition and is able to express the objective essence of things" ^{[13, p. 152]}. Thus, A. Schopenhauer, disappointed in the ideals of progress and freedom based on the rational principle, postulates an irrational Will to live as an ontological source of creativity, generating and conditioning absolutely all world processes and phenomena. Creativity itself appears in the philosopher's concept, on the one hand, as an exponent of the stages of objectification of the Will to live, and on the other hand, as a way for a person to reject its universal dictate.

A. Bergson's Ontology of Creativity: pure Duration and Creative Evolution

The rejection of the predominance of the epistemological aspect of creativity in favor of recognizing its ontological nature can also be traced in A. Bergson, who postulates the era of classical rationalism as unable to reveal the dynamism of life and disavowing the unique world of human – empirical, not abstract – subjectivity, which is by no means reduced only to intellectual actions. Indeed, being the foundation of the creative evolution of being, pure duration, thanks to which not only reality, but also its possibility is continuously being created, cannot be known with the help of intellectual forces designed to comprehend physical reality. Pure duration is closely related to intuition, which, unlike intelligence, is an active creative effort and is capable of comprehending the Life impulse as a source of creative evolution of existence. According to Bergson's views, intuition, comprehending pure duration, "perceives in it an indissoluble continuity of unforeseen novelty; it sees, it knows that the spirit extracts more from itself than it has, that this is what spirituality consists of and that the reality imbued with the spirit is creativity" ^{[4, p. 103]}. In this sense, intuition allows a person to go beyond their limits, thereby contributing to the implementation of a single process of creative evolution.

So, a dynamic and creative being by its nature is on the other side of conceptual intelligence, designed only to carry out repetitions and compare the same causes and effects: "Precisely because the intellect is always trying to reconstruct reality, and moreover, using these elements, it does not grasp what is new at every moment of any history" ^{[5, p. 181]}. In a certain sense, intelligence levels creativity, because, being fixated only on the present, it is unable to look into the future, concealing a new being. In addition, intellectual cognition can be directed to the realization of selfish interests, while intuitive comprehension of being allows you to present it in its true completeness. It is no coincidence that Bergson writes that "the poet's word and image, the artist's form and color, the musician's rhythm and harmony spontaneously adapt to the idea they should express, as if attracted by the charm of the highest ideality" ^{[4, p. 211]}. It is spontaneity, which is the essence of different types of creativity, that contributes to the deployment of various ontological tessitures. It should be noted that the philosopher also appeals to the emotional component of the creative act, asserting it as the general need of creativity: "A work of genius... it comes from a unique emotion, which was considered inexpressible and which wanted to express itself" ^{[3, p. 48]}.

The ontological nature of the creative process is also manifested in the theological searches of Bergson, who considers God as the primary source of creative effort, expressed in the creation of both material nature and spiritual life and culminating in man as the highest stage of creative evolution. At the same time, both the spiritual impulse of Life by its nature and the unformed matter appear as various aspects of a single process of creative formation, where the first acts as a conditional subject, and the second as a conditional object of creativity. In other words, being itself in A. Bergson's concept appears as a process of free creative formation of an organically whole, as a fountain of unpredictable and intellectually irreducible novelty. Thus, the ontological determinism of creativity in the concept of A. Bergson is manifested in the justification of creativity as an evolutionary process of dynamic formation of a whole being, constantly going beyond the boundaries of the existing ontological registers. Due to the fact that the creative process takes place in a pure time duration, aimed at the horizons of the future and aimed at the constant emergence of the new, the changeable reality is comprehended not by the mind operating with ready-made categories, but directly with the help of intuition.

Ontology of creativity in J.-P. Sartre: imaginative consciousness and free self-creation

  In his concept of imagining consciousness, which plays an important role in understanding the ontological nature of creativity, J.-P. Sartre justifies the image not as an immanent structure of consciousness determined from the outside by real objects, but only as a process of synthetic acts of consciousness, having an independent genesis and devoid of direct connection with reality. It is for this reason that the creative subject experiences a permanent emotion of anxiety, because he realizes that his own creativity, intending to create being, occurs on the other side of his direct participation. In other words, through creativity, a person "constantly escapes from himself, goes beyond his boundaries, being caught off guard by some always unexpected wealth" ^{[21, p. 117]}, since the imagining consciousness is a reality that inevitably and constantly outstrips the creative subject himself. In this respect, the world of art and the objective world are divorced from each other on different sides of the ontological barricades, since they never directly touch. As L.I. Filippov notes, the gap between perceiving, or realizing, and imagining, or unrealizing attitudes means that the "aesthetic project" turns out to be a means of creating the antithesis of reality" ^{[24, p. 260]}. Moreover, the imaginative consciousness of the creative subject in a certain sense destroys reality, while going into the unreal existence of fantasy, because, as S.G. Afanasyev emphasizes, the image of a work of creativity "never"meets" with its prototype, since "imagining consciousness" arises only if a person is disconnected from the state of contemplation of a real object" ^{[2, p. 159]}.

It should be emphasized that imaginative consciousness, which is free by its nature, not only disavows the existing being, but also ontologically surpasses it due to artistic images belonging to the unreal being of fantasy, constructed in the process of creativity, which is designed to embody these artistic images in physical reality, which leads to the establishment of works of art. In this respect, the unreal being generated by the creative imagination assumes an anti-world, or nothing, which appears as an inexhaustible source for new creative acts of creating a new existence out of nothing. Thus, the Sartrian attitude towards creativity from nothing really leads to a gap between creativity and reality, between the future and the present. At the same time, the transformation of the individual mental image of the creator, inaccessible to other people, into an artistic image understandable to the general public, depending on one or another type of creativity, is carried out in different ways: "For fine art, the material analogue becomes unreal... For literature, the word will be unreal. In the theater, the unreal is revealed through words, gestures, emotions… A person listens to music and uses his imagination to translate it into the unreal" ^{[16, pp. 176-177]}. However, for Sartre himself, as for Schopenhauer, poetic creativity remains the most preferable: "In various forms of consciousness... the nuances of the creative process vary, but it always remains a process of poetic creativity" ^{[21, p. 108]}.

The ontological determinant of creativity through the prism of J.-P. Sartre's conceptual constructions is also revealed in the statement that "imagination produces more and more new features and features of the object created by it, and those that were sometimes not known even to those who invent and fantasize until the moment of their occurrence" ^{[20, p. 39]}. This kind of postulation of creation through the imagination of a previously non-existent being from nothing continues the ontological tradition of the interpretation of creativity by ancient and medieval thinkers. At the same time, Sartre declares that imaginative consciousness provides a breakthrough by the creative subject of the boundaries of existence, as a result of which creativity is closely connected by the thinker with the concept of freedom: "At the moment of creativity, the creator, overcoming the limitations of his individuality, soars into the clear sky of freedom" ^{[19, p. 29]}. In this sense, both creativity and freedom in Sartrian philosophy appear as the leading ontological forces contributing to the generation of the new from the emptiness of non-existence. It is no coincidence that in his dichotomy of inauthentic and authentic existence, Sartre defines the latter as independent and independent of external circumstances, and, therefore, as a free, creative being. The ontological unity of genuine human existence and creativity can also be traced in the thinker's postulation of spontaneity, randomness and absurdity as the founding ontological principles of both creativity and human existence.

Being an immutable characteristic of creativity and human existence, freedom is impossible without responsibility, which is the reverse side of freedom. Indeed, Sartre postulates the actual impossibility of shifting responsibility for one's own actions (as well as for the results of one's creativity) to another person, since a person is doomed to be free in the exercise of his choice. It follows from this that a person is doomed to the independence of creative sense-setting as the only way of genuine existence. In this regard, I.T. Kasavin notes that in the philosophy of J.-P. Sartre, a person through creativity "overcomes, surpasses himself, creates himself anew," in connection with which creativity appears as "overcoming cultural isolation, entering other spaces and times of culture," where "the meaning and purpose of creativity is to increase the objective sphere of diversity and the subjective sphere of problematization of reality" ^{[11, p. 12]}. Thus, the ontological essence of creativity in the context of Sartrian philosophy is revealed through the prism of the existential-personal existence of a person who freely and responsibly creates himself at every moment of time. At the same time, the thinker postulates only a temporary ontological unity of the creative subject and being in the context of the creation process, since after the end of the creative act, an ontological gap inevitably arises between the infinite and inexhaustible creative spirit as a source of creativity and finite and transitory matter as a result of human creative activity. Therefore, the creative subject, according to Sartre, is often in an anxious state of alienation, which increases with the realization that the creative process is de facto carried out in another world, assuming non-existence. Through creativity, a person plunges into total spontaneous loneliness, since the imaginative consciousness of the creator destroys existence, completely surrendering to the unreal existence of fantasy, which, in turn, appears as an inexhaustible source for new creative acts of generating being from nothing.

The ontology of creativity in A. Camus: a revolt against the absurdity of being

The ontological nature of creativity in the space of philosophical searches by A. Camus is revealed in the thinker's assertion of creativity as a way of realizing the absurdity of being and the possibility of making one's own existence more meaningful. In other words, creativity throws an existential challenge to a person and gives him the opportunity to "overcome his obsessions and get a little closer to the naked reality" ^{[8, p. 95]}. At the same time, creativity, interpreted by Camus as a revolt against the absurdity of being and one's own fate, inevitably bears the imprint of this absurdity, and therefore is unable to fully protect a person from it: "To work and create "for nothing", to sculpt from dust, to know that what you have created has no future, to see how one day one day it will be destroyed, and at the same time realize that, in essence, it is just as unimportant as building for centuries" ^{[8, p. 95]}. However, by means of an absurd in its futility and fruitless in its absurdity creative rebellion, a person is still able to outline the contours of the form of his own existence and partially establish his own existential orders.

At the same time, creativity, according to Camus, is an ontologically dual structure, because, on the one hand, it is characterized by a desire for the unity of the world, and on the other hand, it tends to a rebellious denial of being. In other words, the creative subject denies existence by means of its own creative transformation imposed by him on this reality in the process of rebellion against the world's absurdity, but at the same time he is forced to agree with one or another fragment of absurd reality: "Creativity, denying one thing, thereby asserts something else and pays tribute to that at the same time pathetic and magnificent life which is our being" ^{[10, p. 198]}. Indeed, true creativity, from the point of view of a thinker, occupies a niche between the extremes of destructive irrational denial and blind adherence to a deterministic ideology: "If a rebel must simultaneously abandon the frantic desire for non-existence and reconciliation with totality, then the artist must avoid both formalistic antics and the totalitarian aesthetics of realism" ^{[9, p. 341]}. Thus, the ontological orientation of creativity in the context of the philosophical views of A. Camus is revealed in the postulation of the absurd and rebellious nature of creativity: absurd – because man creates new creations that will eventually sink into oblivion; rebellious – because through creativity man nihilates the existing being and asserts his own existential laws, which, however, will also inevitably turn into nothing.

M. Heidegger's Ontology of Creativity: the Promotion of truth and the Way out of Inauthenticity

The existential rootedness of creativity through the prism of M. Heidegger's philosophy is manifested in the thinker's recognition of creation as something through which existence can be revealed and peep out of existence as truth, which is an essential characteristic of the authenticity of human existence, which has openness and the ability to reveal itself due to the presentiment of its existence. As N.P. Koptseva notes, "the truth, considered by Heidegger from within human existence, appears as a unity of two internal states of a person – authenticity and inauthenticity" ^{[12, p. 92]}. Moreover, the truth is revealed as a process of infinite formation and unfolding of the meanings of existence, while the creative process acts as a way of advancing the truth, which, in particular, R.H. Lukmanova points out: "Creation, being "openness" ... makes it possible to realize the "discovery" ... of truth, which is not so much "discovery" of some objective knowledge, how much is a person's discovery of himself as being" ^{[15, p. 148]}. In this respect, creativity constitutes not only the works created by man, but also the man himself. However, creativity, which consists in the generation of new meanings and alternative reality by man, the latter of which in a certain sense neutralize the already existing meanings and being, does not guarantee the openness of the truth, because the potency of the new truth contributes to the disavowal of the existing one.

Philosophy itself, according to Heidegger's ideas, has a creative character in the aspect of the importance of freedom as a prerequisite and condition for any creativity and philosophizing, which, nevertheless, does not negate the burden of these creative processes: "As a creative, essential action of human existence, philosophy is in a fundamental mood of sadness" ^{[27, p. 285]}, which, as a form, outlines the meaningful boundaries of philosophizing. One way or another, from Heidegger's point of view, "creative thought and ideological and moral efforts should fuse together to create a philosophy" ^{[26, p. 335]}. In this respect, philosophy is very similar to the favorite Heideggerian kind of creativity – poetic, because "both the philosopher and the poet in their works strive to create a world, except that the philosopher is turned to the knowledge of our Universe, the poet creates his own Universe, in which knowledge about this world, truth is only one of the stages, boundaries, which the poet overcomes in a creative impulse" ^{[23, p. 19]}. Thus, M. Heidegger justifies creativity as a process of artistic creation, i.e. the phenomenon and disclosure of truth as a correlate of the authenticity of human existence from the abyss of being-outside-the-truth, correlated with the state of a person's abandonment into this world. In other words, the creation of truth is understood by the thinker not as the generation of new knowledge, but as a person's exit from the state of inauthenticity and the discovery of the personality of himself as being.

Conclusion

The ontological determinant of creativity in the conceptual field of non-classical philosophy is deployed in two ways both in the establishment of a new and transformation of the existing being, and in the formation and transformation of the existential-personal space of the creative subject. In the first case, creativity is revealed as the process of generating previously non-existent objects, meanings and values based on the structural transformation of the existing socio-cultural reality. In the second case, the process of self-creation, self-transcending and self-actualization of the subject is emphasized, which allows him to freely find ways to implement his own life intentions. At the same time, the establishment and transformation of external reality appears to be the result of creative changes in the internal ontological space of the subject. Thus, the ontological synthesis of the existential-personal meaning realized through the creativity of the subject and the cultural meaning discovered by the subject in objective reality leads to the creative actualization of existential potentials that generate universal meaning. In this regard, Western European philosophy, which has turned its face to man, postulates the ontological unity of the creative subject and the world and recognizes the importance of such spiritual and personal determinants of the creative act as breakthrough, intuition, imagination, fantasy, freedom and spontaneity, which allow a person not only to constitute a new being, but also to carry out free and responsible self-creation, which bases existentially-the personal ontological space of the creative subject and the one who breaks him out of the shackles of inauthentic existence.