Editorial: Dialogue and Creativity

Culture and Dialogue 7.1 focuses on “Dialogue and Creativity.” Publishing an issue on a theme that pertains to “creativity” may, for some, appear to be simply a rehash of all-too-familiar debates. It is perhaps less common to understand creativity within the dynamics of the dialogue and from different angles, whether in the sciences or the arts, whether in terms of its forms or its dynamics, its temporality or instrumentality, its metaphysical or ethical dimensions, or, simply, in terms of its historical condition or renewing nature. Creativity may be exemplary of a rule that cannot be formulated, or, to put it in a less morally-loaded fashion, creativity may just be the renewing of worlds that do make sense to us. Creativity, therefore, is not in-nihilo. Of course not. Nor is it destructive. Or else, we should use another word. It may be destructive of the world it inexorably leaves behind, but this would already be a shift in interpretative focus. Perhaps it would be truer to say that creativity is an emptying movement that departs from the already-known, the self as we know it, the recognisable world with its laws and order; creativity leaves behind the very traditions and cultural values of all kinds that make it possible. Not only is history a necessary component of creativity, but for anyone to envisage its possibility one needs to make oneself available to the past and what has already been established. Creativity cannot therefore be ex-nihilo. Neither ex-nihilo nor in-nihilo. Creativity thus involves a double emptying movement, which – as one can easily anticipate – characterises the very nature of the dialogue: an availability to the formed world that metamorphoses into an availability to the world in formation. Creativity is therefore in essence ethical, and creative non-sense is no creativity at all. The genius artist or, rather, to avoid using a word this time as historically loaded as controversial in contemporary Western thought, the creative artist is the one who manages to almost encapsulate these two emptying movements with their respective temporal orientations into a single brush-stroke, word-stroke, sound-stroke, or body-stroke. Creativity in art becomes almost a-temporal and therefore eternal. It is the unfolding of the worldly scroll; the breath whose ethical essence owes to its nearing eternity; a virtually non-dual energy that conflates the emptying movements towards two poles, those of the formed world and the world to be formed. In this sense, creativity is not phenomenal but kinetic. Or, rather, as soon as one thinks of