Tetsunori Koizumi, Director
Words, words, words: “Apt words have power to suage/ The tumors of a troubled mind.” So writes John Milton (1608-1674) in his Paradise Regained (1671). While people no longer believe that spirits reside in words, words do possess power, when aptly employed, to sooth a troubled mind, to give encouragement to a depressed friend, and to win over your skeptical colleagues in an academic debate.
While the world around us is saturated with words, some words tend to attract people’s attention more than other words for the reason that they are believed to carry special messages. Words such as “beauty”, “love”, and “wisdom” come easily to our mind as examples of words that attract people’s attention and encourage their usage for the message they convey.
Among words that attract people’s attention, there are those words that encourage people to engage in certain kinds of action. Some examples of these words are specific as to what action is to be taken such as “breathe”, “walk”, and “run”. On the other hands, there are words that do not refer to specific types of action to be taken. The word “creation” is a typical example that belongs to this category of words.
The meaning of the word “creation”: What is the meaning of the word “creation”, then? The Cambridge English Dictionary defines the word “creation” as: “the act of creating something, or the thing that is created”. The first thing to be noted about this definition is that the word “creation” refers to the act of creating as well as to the outcome of the act of creating. As for what is created by the act of creating, the word “creation” does not refer to any specific thing but to “something”. What is “something”, then? It can indeed be “anything”, meaning that all kinds of things can be created by the act of creating that takes place in all kinds of contexts.
The multiplicity of the things the word “creation” refers to and the contexts in which it is employed can be a blessing as well as a curse. It is a blessing for artists in that their act of creating something is turned into wonderful works of art—songs, poems, paintings, and sculptures—that give comfort and pleasure to art lovers around the world. On the other hand, that same multiplicity becomes a curse when something that is created brings harm and misery to people such as harmful drugs, hazardous wastes, and weapons of mass destruction.
The context in which the act of creating takes place is also important, including who is dong the act of creating. The creation of new jobs by a manufacturing firm is good news for workers in an economy undergoing hard times. On the other hand, the creation of new drugs by a pharmaceutical company needs to be carefully monitored until they are confirmed to be safe and not harmful to human health even during a pandemic when the world is desperately looking for an effective remedy.
Creation as myth, doctrine, and theory: The word “Creation” with capital C appears as mythological explanations of Creation by the Egyptians and Babylonians. In their cosmology, all aspects of the universe are the works of gods who had created their worlds before they came into existence. The Aristotelian cosmology brings in the notion of God as the Prime Mover. At Creation, God set the celestial spheres in motion, with the sun and the stars circling around the earth in perfect circles.
The Christian doctrine of Creation goes furthest in granting God the supreme power of creation in that it asserts that the world and everything in it are God’s creations. The scientific exploration into the world was, in a way, a natural extension of the Christian doctrine of Creation. As Francis Bacon (1561-1626) stated, “Whatever deserves to exist, deserves also to be known.”
In science, “something” in the act of creating is a theory that proposes to explain a natural, or a social, phenomenon. What starts out as an intuitive idea in the scientist’s mind goes though the process of incubation and gestation until a theory is formulated that can be empirically tested for its validity. And a new theory is created, which forms the basis of our knowledge, when it passes the test of empirical verification.
From the act of creation to the outcome of creation: Defining “creation” as “the act of creating something” turns out to be quite useful in explaining all kinds of human endeavors. This is so because “the act of creating something” implies the freedom of choice as to what that something is, thus opening up for the free exercise of such human traits as imagination, inventiveness, and originality, which are often captured by a single word: “creativity”.
Indeed, all kinds of things have been, and are being, created by “the act of creating something”. Artists are a group of individuals who take full advantage of their “creativity” in creating their works of art. Business enterprises rely the “creativity” of their engineers in creating new gadgets and products to beat out their rivals in fiercely competitive markets.
“The act of creating something” extends to the area of social life as well. Though their imagination, inventiveness, and originality may not quite match those of artists and engineers, lawmakers in democratic societies are known for their propensity to create new laws and regulations to impress the people that they are working hard as public servants. While young people are said to be always looking around to create new relationships for companionship and fun, people in the older generations tend to look around to create new volunteer groups to serve their local communities.
Creation in the world of change and transformation: There is something exhilarating and inspiring about the word “creation”, for “the act of creating something” can produce all kinds of things in all kinds of contexts. However, simply to talk about “creation” as “the act of creating something” is one-sided, for “destruction” always goes with “creation” in reality. As Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) said, “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.” In other words, “destruction” is the complementary side of “creation” in all activities in the human world and all matters in the natural world.
Consider, for example, the law of conservation of energy in the natural world. Here we have an extreme form of complementarity between creation and destruction in that energy in a closed system is neither created nor destroyed, only transformed. The same can also be said about the social process in capitalist economies where what Joseph A. Schumpeter (1883-1950) termed “creative destruction” in his Theorie der Wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung (1911) captures the process in which new products replace old products and new ways of doing things replace old ways.
Constant process of change and transformation is indeed the only reality in the natural as well as the social world. If that is the case, the word “creation” must be said to be a misnomer, for it is at best a misguided representation of reality, not a true representation of how things are in the world. When do we wake up to the true reality of the world around us, and stop using the word “creation” as something exhilarating and inspiring? Could it be that our fascination with the word “creation” is an example of the Idols of the Mind Francis Bacon talked about? What we need to watch out for is what Francis Bacon called the Idols of the Marketplace, in which, as he put it, “the ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding.”