More F(!)AQs

Is Generativity a substitute for “Spirituality?”


No one holds “sweats” or goes on “quests” for generativity. It is a concept that is free from sentimentality and the craving for personal release from suffering or for salvation from sin.
But it is not devoid of spirituality-like connotations:  to live in face of generativity we conceive our lives ecologically as part of a multiplicity of living and non-living energies, materials, relations, histories and genealogies. Ethically, it demands a rigorous life of practice and devotion to being open to the Impossible, to choosing what can change us.
But all of this is without the expectation of blissful release or salvation that “spirituality” affords; and without the conceptual certainties that notions such as God afford, or the expectations of riches, even happiness, that offer consolation in the future for suffering now undergone.
To step into generativity means walking bareheaded in the thunderstorm, as the great Breakout Creative poet Holderlin said. The “gods” of realization may appear, but they will also vanish; they may inspire, but they will depress; and these gods are known to no one else.
One cannot look to generativity for spiritual uplift; but the work of generativity may offer unequaled joy for the Breakout Creative.


Are Breakout Creatives all Great Personages?


Yes and no. We cite people of renown as reference points and short cuts for making our ideas clearer and more useful to people sooner.
But none of the Breakout Creatives I know personally are known by the world at large. They are people that make an impression, make a difference and are deeply appreciated by many in their respective communities.
But they are not famous.
What they are is great. And by this I mean these people all live their lives with a commitment to open themselves to the demands and the peculiar joys of creativity. They all choose what can change them, so that they can thrive in their challenging lives.
But, that said, the Breakout Creatives are not “better” people than others. Many are very hard to get along with; some are unreliable in terms of everyday life; some are reclusive and others are bossy. I am not a Breakout Creative, and yet I help these people fulfill their lives by helping them build bridges among their widely dispersing energies, and to see the power and value in what they do (for no money, mostly).
We need teachers, nurses, doctors and firefighters and farmers and pilots and soldiers and executives and computer code writers, I could go on and on, just as much as we need Breakout Creatives. And we need just good, solid, caring, fair-minded and trustworthy people.
But I write about these because they are so hidden or even degraded, in our homogenized, materialist culture. By not being able to embrace and express their peculiar ways of living, these people suffer so. And because they are the progenitors of how the creative spark is initiated and propagated in our human world, they are great treasures walking, with no name, among us. While most have “day jobs,” they know they take great risks in terms of income, stability, recognition and community the more they venture full bore into their driving passion. And yet, they do. And so, yes, they are “great.” But not “better” than many of us.

Generativity and the Breakout Creatives

I look at the project of describing the Breakout Creative as a student of philosophy, working to gain to offer an understanding of their standpoints, actions and ethics. I have sought for a notion that elucidates the vital connections that distinguish the labors of the Breakout Creatives from other kinds of work in our world. Since I am writing to people in the real world, I want to offer my readers one notion that makes their effort worthwhile, that they can use, with some effort, to determine their own and others’ level of participation in the Breakout Creative endeavor.

I have settled on “generativity.”

 I use this word to refer to a state, a general condition in which “bringing into existence” takes place. I have in mind this activity on all levels of the physical (inorganic), the organic/biological, the ecological, human, social, global, symbolic and completely non-material cosmic, transcendental or infinite levels. It carries intimations of ideas such as “spiritual” or productive, but I try to stay away from those terms.

Instead, I see “generativity” as being a notion strongly connected with “health”. A healthy person is active, engaged in the world. A healthy person “loves” easily. Such a person pours out over the bounds of body or person or convention, and enthusiasm radiates from her.

On a larger scale, a healthy ecology grows, changes, and evolves internally, proliferating life forms in a way that both enriches the general ecology and preserves its integral co-development.

Health enables generativity, and so the idea of “generativity” is dependent on “health,” but does not guarantee the occurrence of generativity. Generativity is a possible, but not necessary outgrowth of health.

Generativity links together the multitudinous (but not infinite) ways and means by which health can surpass the repetitive and same old. “Health” results from the coming together of the factors that sustain and nurture a being’s vitality. Generativity issues from this by connecting these factors that exude from and reach out beyond the healthy being. Generativity names a condition of health that allows for, but does not promise the emergence of a completely new possibility.

Let’s think of a child being born in the context of an amorous and welcomed situation as a (regularized and constrained) form of generativity. I can be healthy, and a woman can be healthy. But unless there is the additional energy that brings us together and lifts our spirits to a certain level, the combination of our two healthy lives will not come together and no child will be born.

So generativity also points beyond the specific emergence or overflowing exuberance of healthy participants to the larger environment in which the tentative emergence took place: this new entity takes hold only within a setting, ecology or living being that is itself healthy enough to sustain the addition or change. Even in such healthy environments and with the robust health of the participants, nothing guarantees that the generated novelty will take hold.

The notion of the generative thus cuts: it provides a sharp line between situations in which things, thoughts, actions, influences, materials, foods can take health to the next level and those that don’t.

That means that generativity transforms healthy materials and energies into being something more: they become active agents in the body, ecology, world, cosmos, that foster emergence: growth, diversity, and that bring forth mutation, change and the new. Generativity summarizes the kinds of agents, and includes all the factors – materials, energies, forces, histories, etc. which have a role in this kind of energy—that can result in newness and fresh possibility.

There we have it: generativity names the singular, and maybe strange condition of our universe, one which supports propagation, diversity and health, to the full extent that the energies available and to the full extent that these energies can be incorporated into a healthy situation.

In our work, the Breakout Creatives are those people who make generativity the very core of their lives. These people live in order to usher forward the healthy, generative, creative components in our life, those components, that is, which open new vistas of the possible for themselves, other people, the ecology in which we live, and thus the earth (and beyond).

The Breakout Creatives devote their lives to sensing, shaping, bringing themselves to and expressing the energies of the generative, almost to the exclusion of anything else in their lives.

The Breakout Creatives feel that they cannot live their lives in any semblance of health without being fully engaged in the life of being generative. Meister Eckhart must write and preach his controversial mystical sermons; Paul Celan, the poet, or Georg Cantor, the mathematician, feel they must do their work of reshaping how we see our world; Freud must reshape notion of how we relate to others and ourselves; Lincoln had to lead a nation on a grave path to another way.