PAR 380: Philosophy of Drama

QUOTE

Week of August 28, 2012

I am hoping that the reader will not let the word creativity get lost in the successful or acclaimed creation but keep it to the meaning that refers to a coloring of the whole attitude toward external reality.

It is creative apperception more than anything else that makes the individual feel that life is worth living. Contrasted to this is a relationship to external reality which is one of compliance, the world and its details being recognized but only as something to be fitted in with or demanding adaptation. Compliance carries with it a sense of futility for the individual and is associated with the idea that nothing matters and that life is not worth living. In a tantalizing way many individuals have experienced just enough of creative living to recognize that for most of their time they are living uncreatively, as if caught up in the creativity of someone else, or of a machine.

                D. W. Winnicott, "Creativity and Its Origins," Playing and Reality (1971).

Week of September 3, 2012

In playing, and perhaps only in playing, the individual child or adult is free to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self. It is a frequent experience to meet with persons who are trying to find themselves in the products of their creative experiences. But such a search is doomed to be essentially unsuccessful...The self is not really to be found in products of the body or mind [but in creative apperception]...*

                D. W. Winnicott, "Creative Activity and the Search for the Self," Playing and Reality (1971).

*compare Socratic-Platonic theory that eudaimonia [self-transcending fulfillment] is found in erotic object-and-person relationships, Symposium.