The Creative Power of Human Reason

What is creativity? In its highest expression, cognition is a creative process. It may be said, in a sense, that no creativity is possible with­out cognition and, contrariwise, creativity is always cognition, too. There are constructive elements in any cognitive act, ranging from everyday moments at the individual level to socially significant ones on a historical scale. The truly creative power of reason is man's pri­vilege, it is the necessity for his existence, an essence-related charac­teristic.

Creativity is a practical activity of the mind whose result is the cre­ation of original and unique cultural and socially significant values, the establishment of new facts, the discovery of new properties and laws, as well as of methods for the study and transformation of the world. Creative activity takes various forms in different spheres of material and non-material culture —in science, technology, produc­tion, art, and politics.

The productive power of imagination. The process of cognition and creativity, which demands the mobilization of all of man's in­tellectual and spiritual strength, is impossible without imagin­ation—an ability to transform the immediately given in concrete-imaginal forms, creating unusual combinations out of ordinary im­pressions. Imagination is a specific form of the subject's activity in cognition and creativity which is connected with reproduction of past experiences (reproductive imagination) and constructive crea­tive shaping of a new visual-conceptual image of the desired fu­ture (productive imagination). Imagination depends to a consider­able extent on impressions which may be either linked with the present moment or come from memory, or both.

The power of productive imagination, its level and effectiveness are determined above all by the degree in which imagination takes into account the measure beyond which it may lose its meaning and the objective significance of its productiveness, and also by the de­gree of novelty and true originality of the results of this productive­ness. If imagination does not satisfy these conditions, it turns into a creatively barren fantasy.

The essence of creative imagination is generalization, but it is not abstracting generalization: the type of generalization we refer to here is close to the concrete which it transforms and continues to live in. We know that living contemplation and visually graphic thinking form a stage that leads to conceptual thinking

Imagination is thus closely connected with thought, amplifying its productive power and permitting it to push apart the limits of being, freely soaring in the space of quest which it creates by itself.

Intuition. The process of thought is not always realized in an un­folded and logically demonstrable form. There are cases in which an individual assesses a very complex situation very quickly, almost in­stantaneously, and finds a correct solution. At times, images striking in their power of insight flood the intimate recesses of the soul, far outstripping systematized thought. The capacity for grasping the truth through direct apprehension of it without any grounds in rea­soning is called intuition. Intuition is divided into two varieties, sen­suous and intellectual.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 1257