The Future of Jobs Series, Part 3 - Creativity.

The World Economic Forum has ranked creativity as one of the highest skill for future work. Business leaders have stressed its importance as well and yet very few businesses succeed to embed creative skills across their organisation effectively. Why is this? Throughout history creativity has been associated with the mystical.

For the Ancient Greeks, creativity came from the muses, nine divine sisters who received and answered the prayers of ancient writers, musicians, and even engineers. The muses were the bearers of creativity’s divine spark. They were the source of inspiration. Over time, the Greek influence on the Western world ensured that the legend of the muses continued on.

Socrates says, in certain dialogues, that when poets produce truly great poetry, they do it not through knowledge or mastery, but rather by being divinely “inspired”—literally, breathed into— by the Muses, in a state of possession that exhibits a kind of madness.

Aristotle, in contrast, characterised the work of the poet as a rational, goal-directed activity of making (poeisis), in which the poet employs various means, such as sympathetic characters and plots involving twists of fate, to achieve an end of eliciting emotions in the audience. 

Kant conceived of artistic genius as an innate capacity to produce works of “exemplary originality” through the free play of the imagination, a process which does not consist in following rules, can neither be learned nor taught, and is mysterious even to geniuses themselves. 

Schopenhauer stressed that the greatest artists are distinguished not only by the technical skill they employ in the production of art, but also by the capacity to “lose themselves” in the experience of what is beautiful and sublime. 

Nietzsche saw the greatest feats of creativity, exemplified in the tragic poetry of ancient Greece, as being born out of a rare cooperation between the “Dionysian” spirit of ecstatic intoxication, which imbues the work with vitality and passion, and the “Apollonian” spirit of sober restraint, which tempers chaos with order and form.

While the influence of the Greeks’ mythology on creativity can still be seen today, modern scientific research has helped us move away from a belief in the muses. But very few have accepted that evidence.