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.