Философское

Now, as regards creativity. Creativity is a certain state of culture, a state which carries an intensified human, i.e. life-asserting sense. Culture is a term covering everything that Man has added to Nature: creativity is that which lends a genuinely human, i.e. life-asserting sense to the act and fact of addition, to the act and fact of man's penetration into Nature, to the act and fact of its transformation; for man is a being that aspires to remain in existence in despite of the laws of Nature. Culture is a result which retains significance even without any connection with man. A bomb created by man is also culture, but, created by man, the bomb already exists outside him and will exist after him and, what is more, — the bomb can change Nature without man's participation, i.e. it can change something not created by man. Creativity presupposes a living contact with Nature. A scientist comes to certain ultimate conclusions; these conclusions imply man's inevitable mortality; these conclusions are culture, they are knowledge, co-knowledge, i.e. death (as Byron said, knowledge means despondency, and the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life). But a scientist's creativity is life; while the scientist is in the process of creativity, the non-conscious is activated within him, owing to which the «ultimate content of his work on the problem of one's inevitable mortality, his own mortality included, is „not apprehended“ by him. The work of this scientist is not so much his conclusions concerning mortality, as establishing contacts with Nature, penetration into Nature, into that which is immortal. Israel Zangwill said that reason spells darkness rather than light; and in the above sense it is true. Reason offers an alienated knowledge of Nature, but the process of creation overcomes this deadly alienation. The process of creation is that which permits man to overcome the comprehension of his own finiteness, which makes man be „as God“, i.e. gives him an inner, insurmountably powerful sense of being an organic part of a whole oneness, of the whole-oneness of the Universe, a sense beyond the control of consciousness and generated by non-consciousness, — a sense of his own immortality, i.e., oblivion of the end.

This is, incidentally, the origin of the idea of eternal life in the beyond. We should like to emphasize here that it is not work, but the process of creation which is responsible for this effect. Work belongs to the sphere of the conscious, of the rational. The power of creation belongs, also, to the sphere of non-consciousness. It is Pathos that constitutes the essential principle of non-consciousness, a conventionally singled out sphere.

3

If there is a church, it is invisible to those who are inside it.

Leo Tolstoy

In what way are non-consciousness and creativity linked with the cardinal problem of existence? What are the general and concrete „issues“ of the theme we have selected? The answer le suggested in the schema of which we present a concise outline below.

As is known, the agonizing „truth“ about the inevitable end was discovered by human consciousness. This tragic discovery is connected with the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The serpent, or consciousness, led Adam and Eve to leave Eden of their own free will, Eden which embodied harmonious oneness, the oneness of man and the Universe. Eden preserved man from the knowledge of death and, consequently, from death itself. If it had not been for the fruit the serpent beguiled Eve with, if it had not been for consciousness, there would not have finally emerged the tower of Babel of homo-centrism, that tremendous self-deception.