I had an interesting misunderstanding with a friend, Jo, this
week about the creativity involved in writing philosophy. I think it may have begun
with some confusion on my part stemming from momentarily forgetting that ‘creative
writing’ is a proper name for a genre as well as being an adjectival qualification
of an activity. It might also have been influenced by Jo’s background in advertising,
a business that seems to me to mythologise creativity in its absolute distinction
between ‘creatives’ and everyone else.
We were discussing - at a funeral - the common intuition that a flourishing life requires, as one component, some exercises of creativity and I mentioned writing philosophy.
Jo was surprised, suggesting that it surely wasn’t creative.
Of course, philosophy isn’t Creative Writing: the activity
taught in masters courses at some UK universities. One might stipulate that forms of short story, novel
and poetry writing just are what one means by that name and also any homophonic phrase. But there is surely no general intuition
that flourishing requires Creative Writing in that sense.
Jo’s reasonable objection to my assumption that philosophy
is, or at least can be, creative was that it is descriptive. It’s guided by the
norm of truth in a way that fiction isn’t, whether or not there is a kind of truth in
fiction. But even if descriptive accuracy is the goal, little philosophical writing
looks like a description. To win through to a description involves the usual philosophical methods
of argument, of deriving consequences of views, of thinking up counter-examples, perhaps even occasional thought experiments. There
seems something right in Wittgenstein’s poetic suggestion that ‘philosophy is a
battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language’ [1953 §109] which points to the difficulty in achieving a clear description
even if that is the aim. It simply hadn’t occurred to me to think such an activity
anything other than creative.
Having said that, as an aide memoire for me rather than anything
else, here’s a bit of housekeeping with respect to my own rather pedestrian efforts.
The following are now forthcoming (I think).
Thornton, T. (forthcoming) ‘Bootstrapping conceptual normativity?’
for Foundations of Science
Thornton, T. (forthcoming) ‘John McDowell’ for Pritchard, D. (ed) Oxford Bibliographies in Philosophy New York:
Oxford University Press
Under review
‘Psychiatric classification, vagueness and tacit knowledge’
for Keil, G., Kutschenko, L., Hauswald, R. (eds) Gradualist Approaches to Mental
Health and Disease Oxford: Oxford
University Press
‘Naturalism and dysfunction’ for Forest, D. and Faucher, L.
(eds) Defining Mental Disorders: Jerome Wakefield
and his Critics Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
‘Nursing knowledge: its nature and generation’ for Chambers,
M. (ed) Psychiatric & Mental Health Nursing: the craft of caring Abingdon: CRC Press (I have some doubts about
this one actually making it through. If anyone else wants a fine 6-10,000 word chapter
on knowledge underpinning nursing practice, let me know.)
‘Transcultural psychiatry’ for White, R. (ed) The Palgrave
Handbook of Global Mental Health: Sociocultural Perspectives London: Palgrave
In preparation
‘Phenomenological
implication as transcendental argument’ for van Staden, W. and Pickering, N. (eds)
Wittgenstein and mental health, Oxford: Oxford University Press
‘The normativity
of meaning and the constitutive ideal of rationality’ for Verheggen, C. (ed) Wittgenstein
and Davidson on Thought, Language, and Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press
‘Philosophical understandings
of mental health’ for Wright, K. and McKeown, M. (eds) Essentials of Mental Health Nursing,
London: Sage
