Freedom and Creativity

             We can exercise freedom only if the possible futures outnumber the eventual outcomes. If there are two choices as when we come to a fork in the road or find ourselves torn between two career paths or two job offers, we have a degree of freedom. But freedom can sometimes be much richer than merely choosing among the given options. We can sometimes view the future as malleable and we can imagine real possibilities that had not previously occurred to us. Such a view greatly expands our freedom. We can, to some degree, shape our reality. Of course reality does not yield to all of our desires and ideas, but it might yield to some. We can see the malleability of reality by looking at the work of creative people from artists and scientists to business founders and nation builders.  We can find the limits of our own creativity only by testing them.

            The creative potential of each human person presents a source of hope and even exhilaration, but also imposes a moral duty. We have the psychological and moral need to take part in meaningful work that carries on the process of creation. Failure to do so constitutes what traditional moral writers called “sloth” or laziness.  More recently, psychiatrist and spiritual writer Scott Peck called laziness the “original sin” because it prevents us from achieving our purpose in life.

            American philosopher Charles S. Peirce (1839 – 1914) described creation as the process by which the world becomes more reasonable, by which he meant more orderly and integrated. He provided an empowering view of the creation of the world and the part that we humans play:

The creation of the universe, which did not take place during a certain busy week in 4004 B. C., but is going on today and never will be done, is this very development of reason…Under this conception, the ideal of conduct will be to exercise our little function in the operation of creation by giving a hand toward rendering the world more reasonable whenever, as the slang is, it is up to us.

This insight of Peirce, on taking a role in creation as the ideal of conduct, presents a leading ethical idea for us.

            Josiah Royce, following Peirce, offers a very fertile ground for creative thinking in the process of interpretation.  Interpretation consists of a mind revealing the meaning of a sign to another mind. A sign can be anything that has meaning, for example, a traffic signal, a spoken or written sentence, a painting, a facial expression, or a cloud formation. We find the prototype and most common expression of interpretation in a language translator. The translator reveals the meaning of, say, a Russian novel to an English speaking reader. The English translation becomes a new sign, which a literature professor interprets for her students. The professor’s lecture becomes a new sign and the process can go on indefinitely. The two minds need not be two separate people. For example, a student of language may be using his new skill and knowledge to interpret a foreign phrase to his old monolingual self.                

            Royce sees interpretation as the key to great world-changing creativity in science, religion, and art. But creativity through interpretation applies not only to the world-changing works of prophets, artists and scientists, but also to the growth and development of each person.

As stated in a previous post, we begin life, not as a unified self, but as a meeting ground of many, often conflicting, drives, desires, and ideas.

             For example, young person may hold a strong sense of self and desire to flourish in her personal and professional life. At the same time, she may have a nagging sense of social responsibility and feel the need to help others. The dichotomy between egoism and altruism looms before her. But the “third idea,” in this case, is loyalty. The loyal person is not selfless but rather has a strong sense of self. The more self she has, the more she can contribute to her cause. Her work in promoting the cause in turn strengthens her personal development. Royce summarizes the relation between our individual and social sense in his answer to the question of whether we have duties to our selves:

“Yes, precisely in so far as I have the duty to be actively loyal at all. For loyalty needs not only a willing, but also an active servant. My duty to myself is, then, the duty to provide my cause with one who is strong enough and skillful enough to be effective according to my own natural powers. 

Royce includes among these powers, the care of health, self-cultivation, self-control, and spiritual power. His exemplar of the loyal person was Ida Lewis, the light-house keeper whose strength and boating skill saved many shipwrecked sailor from drowning.

            The relationship between a strong individual and well-developed sense of social responsibility applies to any man or woman in business, health-care, education, politics, science, art, or any profession.  To cite some examples, you cannot become a better teacher, physical therapist, or home-construction tradesman without enhancing the good of students, clients, or home owners. Persons who are loyal to the purpose of their professions may see them as causes and not merely jobs. The loyal person flourishes personally and contributes to the common good. Becoming a fully integrated person requires the creative act of bringing opposing forces of self-development and social concern into harmony.         

            Human creativity carries several important ethical ramifications, all of which can be enhanced by a clear understanding of interpretation. One of the key aspects of creativity that life presents to all of us is “moral imagination.” Life often presents dilemmas in which we have to choose between two goods or between two evils. Ordinary thought may direct us to choose the greater good or the lesser evil. Or there may be a clear choice between right and wrong, but the “right” choice leads to a lot of harm or sacrifices a lot of good. Sometimes reality limits us to one of two choices. But there are also time when our moral imagination may happily reveal three, four, or many possible paths. Moral imagination should permeate the discussion of every ethical issue. For example, suppose a child commits an infraction of his parents’ rules shortly before an important opportunity, such as a field trip or a summer camp that means a lot to the child. A parent may feel trapped between ignoring the infraction and taking away a good learning opportunity for the child. It might not occur to the distressed parent, caught up in the situation, that there are ways to teach the child that his infraction was a bad decision without taking away a good life experience. A satisfactory study of ethics will encourage each of to look for ways not only to choose the better of two decisions, but also to exercise moral imagination to enhance the good.

             Royce’s notions of interpretation and loyalty provide a way to train moral imagination. Interpretation always involves the mediation of a third term that bridges the gap between two terms, as a translator is the third term who bridges the gap between a language and person who does not know the language. In the example given above, of the offending child and the offended parent, the parent himself can be the mediator between his own offended self and the child. If he is able to step back and take the position of mediator, he will take care to correct the offending behavior in a way that benefits the child and does not damage the parent-child relationship. The same dynamic applies to any relationship between unequal parties such as employer-employee, or teacher-student, or between equal partners such as spouses, friends, or adult siblings. In each case loyalty to the good of the family, the educational process, the workplace, or the friendship enables a person to overcome the dangerous and destructive relationship of two angry or hurt individuals.

Taking the role of mediator both requires and trains moral imagination whether the mediator is one of the two parties stepping back and taking the role of a third person, or an actual third person such as a mutual friend or a counselor. Imagination, which Royce saw as one of the leading teachers of loyalty, enables the third person to see what the relationship could be, a vision that is likely to be blurred if not erased in the heat of the immediate conflict. Closely allied to imagination as a teacher of loyalty is sorrow for the loss of what had been. Remembering the love, the friendship, the good times, can reignite the awareness of what could be. If the loss is irreversible, sorrow can motivate a person to re-configure relationships to avoid or at least minimize future harm.

Loyalty to loyalty evokes the duty to seek mediation in every conflict. An attitude of respect for people with whom we disagree, enhanced by recognition of their loyalty to a cause, enriches our own understanding of the good as teleological harmony. Such respect may enable us to see the good in the other’s cause to which we might have been blind. Increased insight may also awaken us to a weakness in our own perception of reality. For example, the task of ethics involves interpreting the pro-life position on abortion, and euthanasia to a pro-choice person, and the pro-choice position to a pro-life person. A pro-life advocate might be insensitive to the plight of women with unwanted pregnancies, and a pro-choice person can fail to appreciate the reality of pre-natal life. Although the two sides may never agree on the morality of abortion, a softening of positions may lead each to care about the mother and the unborn child in ways that are more conducive to a better life for each.

Other conflicts that interpretation can help to heal are between environmental and industrial interests, and between libertarians and social justice advocates. All of the social divisions that we face on issues such as capital punishment, immigration, the environment, the economy, and health care, can be alleviated through mediation rather than by politicians posturing with winner–take-all stances. Mediation may not solve the problems or end the divisions, but it will move our understanding forward better than the ethical doctrines that see their own side as right and the other as wrong.