We find ourselves, at this moment in history, in the liminal stage of a new age, the Creativity Age. A liminal stage is a time of transition from one space or mindset to another – it's a time of uncertainty but also one of immense opportunity.
Today, the use of the word 'creativity' is ubiquitous. But few realized that this word was only recently coined – first used by the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. He originally penned it for a lecture he gave in 1926 and it first appeared in print a year later.
These were heady days for the scientific world. While Albert Einstein was creating new models of the universe, Niels Bohr was transforming our understanding of the very nature of matter.
These ideas were upending our understanding of reality itself, one that had been shaped by Descartes, Newton, and others who believed that reality was defined by universal truths, or laws, that could be understood by our rational intelligence.
This paradigm seemed to work until we began to peer inside the inner workings of atoms, the subatomic particles, and then all hell broke loose in our scientific models.
As Bohr and others began to explore these particles, they recognized that they behaved in ways that were profoundly mysterious.
These subatomic particles appeared not only to interact with each other in a non-linear way, but they also interacted in a way that profoundly defied both space and time. They discovered that these particles, the foundation of all matter, were somehow universally entangled in a way that was, perhaps, beyond our capacity to ever understand, emerging from a state of formless energy in moments of realization, quantum moments.
Alfred North Whitehead walked into this mystery and sought to create a new philosophical approach, a 'speculative philosophy', that might help us define it. Whitehead's work as a mathematician was well known, having written with Bertrand Russell, _Principia Mathematica_, one of the most important books in mathematics of the 20th century.
In the latter part of his career, Whitehead sought to imagine a new way of thinking to explore these emerging quantum mysteries, one that cast off the linear logic that underpinned the Cartesian Mindset. To do so, he began to invent a new language of reality – an ontology – to help us into this unknown. It was in this aspiration he coined the term 'creativity'.
For Whitehead embraced the mystery, that which was eternally unformed and unknowable, calling it the _Absolute_. He understood that there is a manifestation of that which could be knowable, calling that the _World_. Then he added the third primal element, _Creativity_, that which mysteriously emerges from the unknowable to become momentarily knowable, believing that all three elements were in an essential, interdependent dance.
Next: Whitehead's Impact
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