K I E N E B R IL L E N B U R G W U R T H

Special Issue:
The Creativity Paradox—Multidisciplinary Perspectives

The Creativity Paradox: An Introductory Essay

ABSTRACT
In this introductory article to the special issue, I explore the trope of paradox to think through the idea
of creativity. Traditionally, metaphor has been the favored trope to conceptualize creativity: the combination
of two existing elements into something different, something new. In this special issue, we focus on the
trope of paradox as a trope defined by juxtaposition and an apparently irresolvable conflict to delineate cre-
ativity. Glossing the usefulness of paradox for artistic as well as scientific creativity, I show how the idea of
Janusian thinking or being in two minds holds great potential to bridge creativity research in the humanities
and social sciences. This issue starts building that bridge with multidisciplinary perspectives on creativity
that, first, deconstruct apparent dichotomies in creativity research and, second, approach creativity as a situ-
ated, distributed concept.
Keywords: paradox, Janusian thinking, aesthetics, multidisciplinarity, situated, distributed creativity.

Maurits Cornelis Escher was a Dutch graphic artist and composer who—among others—was a forger of
visual paradoxes or paradox illusions. Paradox illusions are generated by impossible objects, such as Escher’s
Waterfall (1961) with its apparently impossible upward direction of the water flow, and its structure of Pen-
rose triangles with their beams meeting in a configuration that seems to contradict itself. Impossible objects
are objects that defy visual perception and interpretation—but only within the constraints of a three-dimen-
sional perspective. Apparently, our visual schema work in such a way as to automatically accommodate a
leap from two- to three-dimensional interpretation, so that we cannot remain on the flat plane, and see such
a flat plane as a deep object. In actual fact, then, impossible objects are not impossible at all—they only
seem to be such. The configuration that they embody can exist in actual fact and the internal contradiction
was just an illusion. Thus, the Penrose triangle becomes a possible object once we see it in a mirror, or
cover one-third of it with our hand to uncover a broken-limb model that generates no paradox illusion
whatsoever. What is, then, peculiar to visual paradoxes is that they are only apparently impossible and
therefore only apparently irresolvable, merely misperceived. What is also peculiar to visual paradoxes is that
they require a reality check—a check outside our habitual frame of reference that is, we have seen, three-
dimensional in nature.
The philosopher of history Frank Ankersmit has often referred to paradox as a special trope for historio-
graphic discourse because of such a reality check—because paradoxes make us aware of a strain or tension in a
representation that subsequently leads to a shattering of that representation (Ankersmit, 1995, p. 143-151).
Writing about paradox as a linguistic trope, Ankersmit asserts that it can be recognized when “language resists
[a] conjunction of concepts” (p. 150). And what paradox then does is that it “requires us to look at. . .reality
itself in order to find that both halves of the paradoxical assertion are true” (just as, we have seen, visual

This article is part of a special issue, guest edited by Kiene Brillenburg Wurth and Vlad Glaveanu.
Authors were invited to contribute to this special issue and the articles were reviewed by the guest editors
and other contributors to the special issue.

The Journal of Creative Behavior, Vol. 53, Iss. 2, pp. 127–132 © 2018 by the Creative Education Foundation, Inc. Ó DOI: 10.1002/jocb.231 127
The Creativity Paradox—Multidisciplinary Perspectives

paradoxes materialized as possible rather than impossible objects) (p. 150). He contrasts paradox to metaphor
in this respect, in so far as metaphor does not require such a reality check. It rather precisely takes us away from
it in a “movement of redoubling” (p. 151). That is to say, metaphor may constitute conflicts through the mate-
rialization of strange or surprising combinations, yet these combinations are always already resolvable and,
indeed, meaningful. Paradox is the more intriguing trope, and we have taken this trope as the starting point of
our enquiry into creativity and multidisciplinarity in this special issue.
Tropes are figures of speech that interrupt the literal flow of language. Familiarly, metaphor has been the
trope to conceptualize creativity or—more precisely phrased—creative thinking in philosophical thought
and psychological research. Indeed, metaphor can be seen as the bridge linking research into creativity in
the humanities and social sciences so far. The normative way to look upon creative thinking in the social
sciences is the ability to generate innovative and useful ideas or products out of a combination of what is
already available. Creativity is not creation, understood as the generation of something out of nothing, but
the ability to render the new through a blending of ideas or objects apparently unrelated or hitherto thought
to be unrelatable. As literary and linguistic scholars know, this is, essentially, a description of metaphor: a
combination of two notions from different planes (as in: the king is a lion, or: my love is a rose). Todd
Lubart shows in this special issue that creative thinking in science typically exemplifies such a metaphorical
logic: in discoveries of science there is a fusion of methods or notions of disparate fields and the mode of
thinking belonging to it may be more convergent than divergent—more of an integrative than of a digres-
sive nature; more in the manner of an innovative synthesis.
However, creative thinking need not be limited to a metaphorical logic. Arthur Koestler’s notion of biso-
ciation (from The Act of Creation, 1964), for example, allows for different kinds of logic in creative pro-
cesses. While he likewise considers the synthetic mode for scientific discoveries, he points out that in art the
bisociative act—that is: the act of merging ideas, thoughts, methods, matter, figures from two different
matrices—may have the nature of a juxtaposition instead of a fusion. The difference between the two is a
subtle one and it indicates a transition from the logic of metaphor to paradox: there is no linear progression
in art, but rather a constant rearrangement of different patterns of sensory experience that may continue to
be felt and presented as strange and unresolvable. We might now propose that this paradoxical logic is typi-
cal to art because usefulness may here have an entirely different dimension than in science. However, we
would be severely mistaken in making such a rash and strict distinction between science and the arts. Albert
Rothenberg’s notion of Janusian thinking, developed in 1971, illustrates the point.
Janus was a Roman God who represented beginnings (the month January commemorates his name), gates,
transitions, passages, and duality, and was represented as looking to the future and the past at once: a God of
departure and return. What we now call Janus-faced experiences are those in which one experiences the past
and the present at once, as in the instance of the so called historical experience that is precisely enabled through
a moment of heightened, creative sensitivity in the present (Ankersmit, 2005). Likewise, Janus-faced thinking
involves thinking two apparent opposites in one, not in a synthetic gesture but in a paradoxical mode that
leaves opposites to be thought as such. Rothenberg defined it specifically as “the capacity to conceive and utilize
two or more opposite or contradictory ideas, concepts, or images simultaneously” (1971, 195). As Rothenberg
explains, it is this paradoxical mode that allows for original insights. Thus, he has pointed to Einstein being able
to think objects in motion and rest at the same time, which led him to the general theory of relativity. Louis
Pasteur discovered the principle of immunology through the insight that chickens who had previously been
infected by a disease had, precisely through that disease, built up a defens mechanism: diseased and not-dis-
eased simultaneously. On the basis of such examples, and stressing the centrality of paradox to Aristotelian
poetics and other formative Western thinkers on art and the mind, Rothenberg tried to establish the centrality
of the trope of paradox to creative thinking: of being in two minds.
Being in two minds can have many different manifestations, from Pasteur’s observation of infected
chicken and needing to make the apparent exception the rule (or the principle he was looking for), to fugal
structures in music, to children daydreaming in class, attending and not-attending at once. In modern Wes-
tern aesthetics, Janusian thinking underlies much of the 18th- and 19th-century debates on the ideas of the
beautiful and sublime, aesthetic judgment, and aesthetic ideas—debates that precede present-day investiga-
tions into creativity. Paradigmatic, in these debates, is Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft (1795). I
briefly pause to explain the main argument of the analytic of the beautiful and sublime here, as it holds
great potential to change the way in which present-day creativity researchers have familiarly tended to con-
sider Western aesthetic theory as a proverbial man of straw in their quest to liberate the notion of creativity
from the exclusive field of the arts.

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Kant explains what it means for objects, events, or sceneries to appear beautiful (regarding form) or sub-
lime (regarding apparent formlessness) through aesthetic judgments. As he shows in the third Kritik, such
judgments are typically paradoxical in nature. Thus, the judgment of the beautiful is defined by the para-
doxical logic of purposiveness without a purpose—a logic that communicates a being in two minds in so
far as the judgment of the beautiful revolves around a unique and playful, free interaction between the fac-
ulties of imagination and understanding. Normally, in Kant’s critical philosophy, imagination passes the
schemata of visual information on to the understanding, which, by means of concepts then enables cogni-
tion. However, in the judgment of the beautiful there is—momentarily—an absence of hierarchy and cogni-
tive ends. The pleasurable feeling this freedom engenders is the feeling we absentmindedly and incorrectly
attribute to objects we encounter. What we ultimately judge is a free relation between two mental faculties
that is defined by what Kant paradoxically calls a purposiveness without a purpose. That is to say, judg-
ments of the beautiful do not serve the purpose of cognition, of willing, or of any obligation: in such judg-
ments we are distracted from such purposes. Yet there is a purposiveness to such judgments because they
make us aware of the conditions of possibility of cognition—that is to say: of a free play between imagina-
tion and understanding that, ultimately, enables cognition. “The mind is open, not-yet engaged with definite
concepts—the paradox only involved an apparent contradiction” (Kant, 2006).
The idea of such a suspended judgment is still central to psychological research into creativity today.
Purposeful daydreaming, divergent thinking, explorative thinking, and issues in creative mindfulness are all
connected to the Kantian paradox of purposiveness without a purpose. This paradox, we argue, also unveils
a false opposition that has been maintained since the 1950s between present-day psychological research into
creativity and 18th- and 19th-century aesthetics: that the latter is only concerned with issues of genius and
exceptionality, while the former is concerned with creativity as a general cognitive ability that can be devel-
oped by all (cf. Runco & Pritzker, 2011). For Kant, however, the judgment of the beautiful ultimately
expresses a free play between imagination and understanding that is potentially common to all, as it is posed
as a condition of possibility of cognition. Thus, the commonness of free, creative thinking was already ger-
minally present in 18th-century aesthetics that are now—retrospectively and erroneously—projected as lim-
ited and elitist.
The experience of the sublime in Kantian philosophy likewise revolves around the paradox of being in
two minds. This is a paradox of wonder, of what Sophia Vasalou calls “a sudden experience of an extraordi-
nary object that causes delight”, and which Vlad Glaveanu further explores in this special issue (Vasalou,
2015, p. 5). What happens in the experience of the sublime is a felt gap between the faculties of reason (pro-
ducing supersensible ideas) and imagination (bounded by the senses), a felt awareness that the former can
think ideas of the infinite that the latter is never able to represent in forms. When, Kant argues, we think
we are in awe before objects or sceneries that exceed comprehension, we are in fact in awe before the infi-
nite expanse of the faculty of reason that exceeds even the grandest prospects in nature. Here, the paradox
of being in two minds refers to the simultaneous and contradicting positions of the faculties of reason (as a
supersensible capacity) and imagination (as a sensible capacity), the latter making the former aware of its
limits, but also to a conflicting mix of affects: pain and pleasure, frustration and joyful revelation at once in
view of the limit felt on the level of imagination and an awareness of limitlessness from the perspective of
reason. The gap between these faculties is the nexus of the sublime.
As a rhetorical concept that was already developed in the 1st century AD, the sublime has had a long
and troublesome connection to genius, originality, and the kind of awe and wonder experienced by those
witnessing strokes of such genius and originality in oratory and poetry (Guyer, 1993; Lyotard, 1988; Brillen-
burg Wurth, 2009; Vandenabeele, 2015; Doran 2018). However, like the idea of the beautiful, if in a differ-
ent manner, the idea of the sublime—especially in its more contemporary conceptualizations through the
work of Jean-Francßois Lyotard and Ginette Verstraete (1998)—in modern aesthetics revolves around a reve-
lation of freedom. That is to say, the sublime in modern aesthetics is not about art per se but about nature
and human nature, and how the latter experiences itself to the former. Concepts like the beautiful and sub-
lime could therefore be open to exploration in creativity research today as they offer great potential to
unpack meaningful, novel, and surprising engagements with the world, ranging from the everyday to the
domains of art and science. In a recent article on Kant and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michela Summa has in
fact already indicated how precisely aesthetics is instrumental in the demystification of creativity (2016). If
we follow this path, the contradiction between new and old creativity research, between the social sciences
in the 20th century and the humanities in the 18th–20th centuries, could turn out to be merely an apparent
one that, like all paradoxes, can be solved after all.

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This special issue on the paradoxes of creativity is therefore also aimed at bridging the gap between the
social sciences and humanities: between empirical and interpretive, conceptual approaches to creativity, imagi-
nation, and wonder. It is a special issue that is in two minds in so far as it stands between these two disciplines.
How, this issue explores, can we reframe creative thinking on the basis of insights generated by the two disci-
plines—not to merge them into one, but to juxtapose them and thus to generate original insights?
Roughly said, creativity research in the social sciences is typically aimed at understanding creativity as a
process of the brain and a socio-psychological process respectively, while in the humanities creativity is seen
as materialized in cultural practices and artifacts. The common ground between these two perspectives is a
shared realization that creative processes and artifacts are always already culturally mediated. Moving away
from a disembodied and decontextualized take on creativity as cognitive activity, an interdisciplinary
approach to creativity that is informed by the social sciences and humanities will start from a historically
and culturally specific perspective. Such a perspective typically zooms in on the interdependence between
creators, creations, and their social and material world—on cognitive activity as an inherently social and ma-
terial interactivity. This interdisciplinary perspective allows for a layered or distributed (Glaveanu, 2014)
conception of creativity: as being not an isolated cognitive process or practice, but saturated with norms
and beliefs about art, innovation and novelty in a society.
In this issue, we start from this integrated perspective to reconsider the structure of creative processes.
Since Paul Guilford’s classic distinction between convergent and divergent thinking, creative thinking and
creative experience has been tied almost exclusively to divergent thinking (the ability to generate new ideas,
or offer many different solutions to a complex problem) and to ‘open’ modes of experience that are typi-
cally undirected, nonlinear, associative, or diffuse (such as daydreaming). Alternatively, convergent thinking
is allegedly directed, revolving as it does around solving a problem in one pre-set way, following instruc-
tions, or learning facts. Presented as two contrastive modes of thinking, convergent and divergent thinking
are often discussed as two poles that are mutually exclusive: the first is essentially about opening up different
options, the other is about making decisions.
However, already in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Thomas Kuhn argued that innovation
in physical science hinged precisely on convergent thinking: convergent research leads to divergent results.
More recently, Arthur Cropley in “In Praise of Convergent Thinking” (1997) has indicated the relevance of
convergent thinking to innovation, and has indeed argued that divergence and convergence coexist in cre-
ative thinking. At the other end of the spectrum, Anton Ehrenzweig argued in The Hidden Order of Art
(1967) that the apparent state of distraction during the creative process in fact held within it a very sharp,
albeit unconscious, kind of focus and decision-making that he termed unconscious scanning. Philosophers
like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-Francßois Lyotard have likewise addressed the intersec-
tion of an open or diffuse and a closed or directed kind of thinking in affective, creative processes and expe-
riences. Lately, cultural psychologists Zittoun and Gillespie (2015) have researched the paradoxical
combination of immersion and detachment in imaginative thinking. Similarly, Shelley Carson’s (2010) psy-
chological research on productive daydreaming, and the way in which students are able to take in and pro-
cess information more effectively precisely while being distracted, forces us to rethink dichotomies between
distraction and concentration: the latter is present within the former.
The reversals (divergence and convergence) and paradoxes (convergence within divergence and vice
versa) mentioned above not only problematize divergence’s exclusive claim to creativity, but also any
assumed binary between convergence and divergence, immersion and detachment in creative work. Are the
two perhaps not so much mutually exclusive as inextricably intertwined? Is there an irresolvable paradox at
the heart of creativity? Is the creative process about a constant negotiation between binding and unbinding,
rule and invention, focus and distraction, rather than unbounded digression? How can we make use of
philosophical thought on the paradoxes of bounded digression, or digressive binding, in psychological
research and educational sciences where creativity is at stake? That is, how will the creativity paradox affect
notions of learning and cognizing?
This special issue answers these questions from different disciplines, while focusing on a central set of
dichotomies that have, until now, framed our Western conception of creativity: distant-immediate, conver-
gent-divergent, controlled-free, concentrated-distracted, improvised-studied. Each author zooms in on a
specific set of concepts and assumptions that have been traditionally set in opposition to each other. In this
way, we aim to unveil the infinite complexity of creative processes and experiences.
Our issue opens with “Creativity and Wonder,” which offers a new conceptual model to theoretically
expand the reflections around the possibilities of the experience of wonder and its primary role within creative

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thinking. Beyond philosophy, and in particular epistemology and aesthetics, the experience of wonder has also
been studied within the social sciences. Several scholars in the field of psychology have studied the relation
between wonder and curiosity and between wonder and awe. Yet, these previous conceptualizations are incom-
plete, as they do not take into account its relation with the idea of possible. Relocating the experience of wonder
in the gap between the actual and the possible, Vlad Glaveanu in “Creativity and Wonder” describes a concep-
tual model that integrates the experience of wonder and that of creativity through the space of the possible. Gla-
veanu uses his perspectival model of creativity that holds that creativity emerges out of “difference,” which is
the multiplicity of perspectives implied by the same reality (Glaveanu 2015). According to Glaveanu, to wonder
means to productively engage with the possible by occupying a “meta-position”, which defines the capacity “to
entertain more than one perspective on reality but, mainly, to view that multiple perspectives are indeed possi-
ble.” Such a meta-position enables creativity and, in this way, the creation of novelty.
“Creative Reading in the Information Age” makes new use of the concepts of attention and distraction
within the context of reader research and literary studies in the humanities. Inge van de Ven uses perspec-
tives from creativity research to reconsider the dichotomy between close (focused) and distant (disparate)
reading, and to explain the paradox of how apparent opposites of attention and distraction, convergence
and divergence in fact closely intertwine in the act of both close and distant reading. Van de Ven then pro-
poses a new, scale-based model to teach students how to read in the information age.
What does it mean to have an idea? Do ideas come out of the blue or are they always already embedded
and contextualized, and how does having an idea relate to creative processes? “Paradoxes of Having an Idea”
explores the birth of ideas through the notion of play and reconsiders the creative process from a socioma-
terial and cultural perspective. Philosophers have long pondered the issue of having an idea—Kant’s notion
of the aesthetic idea in the third Kritik is a case in point—but the authors here use insights from relational
process ontology to reconsider the creative process as occurring (though not necessarily) within sociomate-
rial entanglements. This perspective opens fascinating and promising possibilities to join perspectives from
the humanities and social sciences, since it advocates an approach to creativity as a process in-between per-
sons, things, and contexts.
“The Influence of Bilingualism on Creativity” likewise starts from an interrelational outlook on creativity.
The article provides a new perspective for future research, which, according to Van Dijk, will have to be
more focused on the relationship between children’s growth in different environments. Here, a cognitive
approach is used to trace the difference in creative thinking between bilinguals and monolinguals, and the
argument is proposed that bilinguals outperform monolinguals in specific tasks: The cognitive performances
of bilinguals are more used to “play” with the possibilities that a given environment offers.
“Difficult Differences: A Sociocultural Analysis of How Diversity Can Enable and Inhibit Creativity”
analyses how diversity can enable and inhibit creativity. It employs a sociological methodology to further
investigate the already established connection between diversity and creativity. The analysis is based on an
experiment conducted with a group of participants performing a brainstorming task, followed by an inter-
view with a researcher. The article analyzes diversity as a “diversity of perspectives,” which “should be
advantageous for collaborative creativity.” However, the article also makes clear that the benefits of diversity
are often offset by adverse social processes. The authors suggest that perspective taking could be beneficial
in overcoming these negative effects. They propose the faculty of imagination as crucial to perspective taking
and, hence, to creativity.
“Scientific Creativity” presents a case study providing insights concerning the impact of both convergent
and divergent thinking on scientific creativity within children’s intellectual development. The article focusses
on a compelling problem that elementary teachers do not encourage scientific creativity—perhaps out of
sheer ignorance of the term. In a careful analysis of the idea of scientific creativity, Todd Lubart shows that
creative thinking partakes both of divergent and convergent thinking. Indeed, he expands Guilford’s defini-
tion of convergent thinking, which should be reconsidered as a process leading to idiosyncratic synthesis: in
other words, convergent thinking is described as the ability to integrate several elements in order to produce
an original result—and, thus, generating novelty. While existing research on scientifc creativity has been
adult-oriented, Lubart makes an original contribution to the research on scientific creativity by focusing on
children, also taking in the impact of convergent and divergent thinking in relation to the migration back-
ground of some of the primary school students. The article answers the need for a more complete theoreti-
cal frame around the potentialities of scientific creativity, and this need appears to be particularly
compelling in our multicultural society, which is defined by the presence of an increasingly wide spectrum
of cultural, social, and linguistic factors.

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Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, full professor of Literature and Comparative Media, University of Utrecht, Head of Humanities,
University College Utrecht.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Voltaire Hall (D), Campuslaan 25, Kamer
HUM HEAD, 3584 ED UTRECHT. E-mail: K.Wurth@uu.nl

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