Welcome to The PATH — a weekly reflection with three timeless insights into daily life. This week’s reflection searches for ancient lessons on the existential need for creativity in life — Creativity, Meaning, and Possibility.
1. Creativity
We don’t often think of creativity when it comes to human needs. Do you see creativity as inherent to crafting your life? One can reasonably view life as the ultimate creative pursuit.
In the short book Being and Becoming, author Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei explains,
In order to embrace our lives as our very own, to shake free from the inherited expectations, the pressures of the crowd, or mere habit, we may need to exercise invention. Only creatively can we envision new paths or interpret familiar aspects of life in new ways, as existential philosophy tends to invite.
The philosopher Albert Camus believed the artist acknowledges and responds to the uncertainty of existence. The artist does not lock down an answer but engages in diverse explorations and open-ended practice of freedom.
Existential thinking encourages living life as a work of art. As Nietzsche wrote, creativity may be required to become who we are or who we may want to be.
2. Meaning
Have you ever felt stuck or experienced a lack of meaning in your life? According to Kierkegaard, the most common form of despair is not being who you are. But, how does one actually begin to become who they are?
The poet Goethe suggested,
Everyone holds his fortune in their own hands, like a sculptor the raw material he will fashion into a figure. But it’s the same with that type of artistic activity as with all others: We are merely born with the capability to do it. The skill to mold the material into what we want must be learned and attentively cultivated.
Similarly, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in Existentialism Is a Humanism that not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence. “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism.”
Even the great saints and mystics stressed the importance of creativity and meaning. The Italian friar St. Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) described an artist this way, “He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands, head, and heart is an artist.”
When we embrace our life as a work of art (or creative endeavor), we begin taking steps toward aligning our lives and seeing what is possible.
3. Possibility
The value of art is not so much in the objects it produces, writes Gosetti-Ferencei, or the messages it communicates but in maintaining our relationship to possibility. Nietzsche famously argued that life is only justified by a work of art. We need art to be able to cope with the truth.
Gosetti-Ferencei suggests in Being and Becoming:
The fullness of life embraces the whole range of possibility from joy to despair…. Beyond the making of art, what might we say about existential creativity in the project of life? Nietzsche did not only praise great artworks. He also thought of the task of becoming oneself as an artistic process.
To become oneself, to come into one’s own, requires stepping out of the ordinary and exercising freedom. Life as a work of art is about seeing what is possible and crafting the type of life you want to lead. To quote the late artist Henry Moore,
“To be an artist is to believe in life.”
The philosopher Gabriel Marcel (author of The Philosophy of Existence) described the creative person this way,
A really alive person is not merely someone who has a taste for life, but somebody who spreads that taste, showering it, as it were, around him; and a person who is really alive in this way has, quite apart from any tangible achievements of his, something essentially creative about him.
“As soon as there is creation,” observed Marcel, “we are in the realm of being. There is no sense using the word ‘being’ except where creation is in view.”
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Until next time, be wise and be well,
JW
P.S. Feel free to leave a comment or question below!