What Does Imagination Have to Do with Creativity?

With these understandings of creativity and the imagination, it seems unlikely that creativity absolutely requires the imagination. This is also made clear by the two different types of creativity: passive and active. The former takes place when we are unaware of the creative process, when something creative is arrived at without much thought. For example, Russell claimed that when writing Principia Mathematica he would frequently go to bed not knowing the answer to a particularly troublesome problem, but would wake up the next morning able to solve it. By comparison, active imagination occurs when we attempt to find various works of creativity and consciously arrive at one. While this type of creative act requires the imagination, passive creativity proves that the imagination it not a necessity to creativity.

On the same level, many philosophers do not believe that every imagining absolutely requires creativity. If imagination is taken to mean a false belief, for example, then creativity is not a necessity; I can imagine that my car is going to be clamped in ten minutes, but by the stated conditions of creativity this imagining is neither original nor valuable enough to be “creative.” Similarly, fantasising is a kind of imagining, but many of us have the same fantasies, so they also lack the conditions to earn the label “creative.”

Thus, it is Gaut’s view that there are only two ways in which we can credibly link the imagination to creativity. He named the first way the “display model,” which maintains that my unconscious generates a creative idea to me through my imagination. This model appears to be present in passive creativity, for the imagination doesn’t have a necessary role, but a display function. It can be compared to the monitor of a computer, which has the peripheral role of displaying the creative results of a computer, but does not aid the creation of the software. The second way, the “search model,” is more apparent in active creativity, as it holds that the imagination has a central position in the creative procedure. Gaut states that, “according to this model, when one comes up with a new idea or invents a new object, one can be thought of as having worked through various possibilities ordered in a logical space.” In other words, the imagination is used to visualise several different outcomes before selecting and settling on the most relevant one. In this way, it is clear that Gaut believes that the imagination is suitable to be the vehicle of active creativity.

It is clear that associating the imagination with creativity is correct. However, our misuse of the term “imagination” in our everyday language has meant that the specific association has been construed. Because it is used as a near-synonym for creativity, they are frequently confused to mean the same thing; people equate having a vivid imagination with being extremely creative. In reality, the two cannot be equivalent, for as we have seen with the above example of Russell, it is possible to be exceptionally creative without using the imagination at all. Similarly, confusion has arisen from our understanding of the use of the imagination in active creativity; rather than being the source of creativity as it is often perceived to be from such an understanding, the imagination is in fact the vehicle for active creativity. Finally, because of our misuse of the term “imagination,” it is always supposed that the imagination should have a central role in creativity, yet from Gaut’s “display model” it is clear that in fact it can have a peripheral role. That there is a link between the imagination and creativity cannot be disputed; it is the traditional view equating the two with which I disagree.