Creativity

Creativity is the capacity to solve problems. It isn’t a rare gift for a few “geniuses”; it’s a basic human capacity used every day. Whenever we combine words in a new way, improvise a game, patch together a fix, or reframe a difficulty, we’re being creative. Children show this most clearly: the freedom to think, make, speak and play is a core human trait.

For centuries, “creation” in the strong sense was reserved for God, and humans were said to make or imitate, not create. The verb to create enters English from Latin creāre (“bring forth, beget, cause to grow”), but the noun “creativity” only really spreads in the 19th century. In the same long period, Western culture builds the figure of the creative genius. Renaissance writers such as Vasari already single out artists like Michelangelo as almost “divine” exceptions. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Goethe is cast as the model of the original, self-forming genius in German letters, and Shakespeare, through 18th-century bardolatry and early 19th-century biography and criticism, is transformed into the English national genius. Romantic aesthetics then hardens this into the myth of the isolated, world-making creator, which tends to obscure the everyday creativity of ordinary lives.

Etymologically, creativity means the quality of being creative, from create < Latin creāre. That root implies not just making, but bringing something latent into form. In that light, creativity is a widespread human capacity to recombine existing elements in novel, fitting ways, so that a loose field of possibilities becomes a specific, workable response—whether in a child’s invented game, a new turn of phrase, or a major work of art.