UC Berkeley

This dissertation traces the history and theory of creativity from its theological origins to its modern apotheosis as a defining trait of human being and flourishing. Reclaimed from early modern creation theology, creativity was recast as an immanent mode of making dependent upon environmental context and historical circumstance. It became a natural capacity of humans reconceived as not just (or no longer) God’s “creatures” but creators in their own right—even creatures of their own making. The creature (literally “a product of creative action”) was turned into a model of artful making through empowering reciprocity. Insisting that the cultivation of creativity depended on recognizing humanity’s creaturely condition—its temporal and earthly finitude, material and social interdependence, and affinity with other living forms—writers from Mary Shelley to W. E. B. Du Bois recast the human as a “creature of” formative process and context: a creature of art. In so doing, they remind us that the creature is the missing protagonist in the history of creativity as a form of human making. The nineteenth-century conception of creativity moved away from ideals of autonomy and originality. Against the transcendence and timelessness attached to Romantic notions of creative genius, a creaturely creativity was grounded in the period’s fascination with the nitty-gritty of technology, the minutiae of technical know-how, and practical arts—simply, with making. I argue that the nineteenth century found in the creature a way of thinking about humans as products not of god’s eternal law but of the earthly laws of creativity: the operative conditions of creation that obtain in our lived environments. The effort to understand these laws left thinkers in the nineteenth century with a new conception of creativity as a mode of artful making enabled by the contexts and circumstances that make us who we are. Recovering this effort prompts us helps us see that our current fascination with making is part of a deeper and richer history than has been supposed.