Since thinking creates no beings but at the most only knows them, and since to know means first of all to let them be, it is often claimed that thinking is not creative and cannot be viewed as such. Thus to attribute creative properties to thinking would be a step towards idealism. It is true that thinking does contribute to the formation and growth of technology, but technology creates nothing that is essentially new; it is but an ingenuous application of what has already been created.

There are, however, contrary opinions. It is claimed that we are capable of truly knowing only what we ourselves have created. Even if thinking creates no being, it creates the sense of being and it is only the sense of being that we envisage. Being would be nothing without the knowledge of it. Thus, while one approach denies any creative abilities of the mind, the other acknowledges them.

Between these two extremes there are various intermediate positions. Using different arguments they point to what may be viewed as two aspects of thinking: the active and the passive. Thinking does not create, but it constructs out of the existing material. The active aspect of thinking is revealed by the acts of abstraction, questioning and synthesizing. Its passive aspect is revealed by the starting point for abstraction, questioning, and synthesizing, namely, the sense data, the incoherent structure of an object and the elementary parts disclosed by analysis. In this connection it is argued that, though thinking does not create the real world, it determines man's attitude to the world and thus educates him. Since education is in some respects a creative art, thinking is, therefore, a kind of creativity.

What are the relations between thinking and creativity? Looking for an answer to this question we must attempt to gain some insight into the essence of the phenomenon of thinking and thereby reach a conclusion. Putting aside a semantic discussion of the concepts of thinking and creating, we shall attempt then a phenomenological analysis of the data from the direct experience of thinking. The necessary brevity of this article forces us to restrict our considerations to a most general outline.

THINKING AND EXPERIENCE

There is one distinction in the question of thinking which, for all the efforts made to refute it, stands firm and seems undeniable, namely, that between thinking and experience. Regardless of everything that has been said about what comes within the span of thinking and what within the span of experience, it is impossible to reduce the one to the other. Thinking is always "enveloped" in experience, which rouses thinking out of dormancy and supplies the material for thought. It is through of the inner experience that the process of thinking itself becomes manifest to us. To think we must have something to think of; we must have the experiential awareness that we are thinking. It is experience that makes us think, that supplies the matter for thinking. But is this the case with every experience; do not that experiences make us think more than do others?

Hegel maintained that the life of the spirit is not the kind of life that would be afraid of death, that would shrink from destruction in the desire to remain unblemished. It is rather the kind of life that is able to withstand death and to persist in it. The spirit could discover its truth only if, having been torn apart, it discovers itself. Thinking is the proposition brought about by the situation of being torn apart; it is a situation which threatens us with blemish, destruction or death. According to Hegel to think is to look straight into the eyes of negativity and to stop there. The most penetrating threat becomes the strongest incentive to thinking.

The pivot of the system of Paul Ricoeur is the principle: "it is a symbol that makes us think." But the ones which make us think are, first of all, those that describe the nature of good and evil, their conflict in human life, and the means of liberating man from the oppression of evil. These are the outstanding symbols in the great mythologies of mankind. To Martin Heidegger it is the "truth of beingness" revealed in the context of the experience of what is both terrifying and liberating that is really worthy of being thought. It seems highly significant that in all the instances mentioned here what makes us think is not the experience of things as things, of an object as an object, of energies, events or facts, but the experience of what may be seen as the tragic dimension of human existence.

Where are we to seek the experiences which make us think in this special way; are they to be found in intimate relations with past history, myths, or great works of art? Without rejecting other possibilities the answer seems to be that more than anywhere else we find them in the intercourse with a person we love. The source of the experience of the tragic dimension of human existence is the intercourse with other persons; nothing makes us think more than a human being whom we meet.

Here we may well refer to Plato. It is not accidental that his thoughts are in the form of the dialogue. In the dialogue there is always the other partner who is given in direct experience so that his or her existence is beyond all question. Moreover, the dialogue becomes possible only when the existential situation of the partner is, at least to some extent, manifest. Without this there would be no common platform for the dialogue. We may even say that the more extensive and deep the manifestness of a situation, the more important is the dialogue. Philosophical dialogue necessitates the overt manifestness of existence, what, according to Plato, is the characteristic trait of the existential situation of the partner in the dialogue? Regardless of the name given to this or that participating person, he is always an inhabitant of the famous cave of the Republic. The partner in the dialogue is someone deprived of his original freedom, who has turned away from actual reality and carries in his heart a feeling of incomprehensible guilt. Man's existential situation is tragic, and it is in the awareness of the tragedy of one's situation that the most profound interhuman dialogue, that of the philosophers, has its source. There is no other being whose fate is as tragic as that of man. It makes us think; it opens the radical dialogue on truth and illusion, on good and evil, on love and hatred. Though Plato never said it explicitly, his whole philosophy shows that at its source lies the experience of another person, the meeting with human tragedy.

How does the primitive act of thinking, initiated by the meeting with another's man's existential tragedy, manifest itself externally? It is an act of questioning, in which we ask, "How is it possible"? We see someone with his back turned on the truth of reality, fettered and unable to change his position, suffering for an unknown sin. We see Prometheus chained to his rock, condemned for his charitable deed to eternally dying. We see King Oedipus running from his fate only to become its prey. Always the same question recurs in the same act of thinking : "How is it possible?"

Is there anything creative in this question? Thinking has two aspects: the objective and the subjective. Does the first question of radical thinking create anything in the thinking subject or does it create something in what is submitted to thought?

THE THINKING SUBJECT

Nothing can give us as much to think of as a meeting with another's existential tragedy. But to have something to think of is by no means equivalent to being forced to think. Thinking is not a forced response, but a choice from among many possibilities. Thoughtlessness may take the form of fear and manifest itself in turning away from the tragic and escape into forgetfulness, dissipation and self deception. It may also manifest itself in acquiescence to defeat, a resignation in the face of brute force, as a sacrifice of oneself without any hope of victory. But thinking is neither one nor the other, for to think is again to look straight into the eyes of negativity and to stop there. To think is to ask, and to ask is to see the problem of that which itself is problematic in human existence. To ask questions in a situation that leaves open various possible courses is equivalent to assuming one's own freedom. Thus, thinking is instituting freedom in the face of the tragic. Thinking attains freedom, and does so simply by assuming it.

Is this assumption of freedom in the fulfillment of the act of thinking creative? If so, then what is being created? Is it freedom that creates thinking or does thinking create its own freedom? Can the instituting of freedom through thinking be called creation?

Satisfactory answers to these questions would necessitate detailed and comprehensive investigation. Unfortunately, impossible here. We must pass over the wholeness of reasoning and stop only at the conclusions. It seems that in the assumption of freedom in the act of radical thinking we have an instance of authentic inner creativity. Through this act the thinking subject creates his or her own freedom in the face of the tragedy of life, and by creating freedom also creates oneself as a thinking person. This is authentic creation: man is not free because of some general freedom or abstract freedom in abstract situations; his freedom is that which he has managed to create for himself by thinking in the face of the tragic. Thinking is a form of transcending the tragic, but to surmount the tragic is tantamount to constituting, that is, raising or creating within oneself the self that is free of the tragic dimension and somehow Promethean. This self may bear different names: it may be the rebellious self of A. Camus, the transcendental Ego of E. Husserl, the determined self of M. Heidegger, or the axiological self of which I spoke elsewhere.⁽³⁶⁾ At any rate, it is always the same self that sees as a problem anything that makes it a problem, and creates its own freedom in a concrete situation. Of such freedom we may indeed say that it is a work of art, the art of asking questions.

Is not the concept of creation an exaggeration in this context? I do not think so provided we do not interpret it in the radical sense of creation without any raw material or out of nothing. Freedom is never created out of nothing; there are always some raw materials to create it with: the external situation, undefined inner conditions, the act of thinking. Up to a certain point creation appears to be nothing more than transformation, but at a certain level transformation ends and something new is born. The concrete shape of freedom is, as H. Bergson so aptly remarked, unpredictable. Freedom surpasses its raw materials as well as its motives. The same oppression imposed by the domination of one and the same master becomes the starting point for the different kinds of concrete freedom; it can breed the freedom of slaves, the freedom of stoics or skeptics, the liberty of the knight errant, civil liberties and many others. Every form of freedom whatsoever is like the work of all art; from it springs all thinking and artistic creativity. Thus, if we can speak of the different forms of artistic activities as creative, with all the more reason may we call creative that concrete freedom which institutes the independence of man in the face of the tragic.

The course of creation is, however, beyond predictability. This is why Hegel thought the course of history could be understood ex post facto but was unpredictable in advance. Indeed it is impossible to predict the different ways some concrete freedom is created in the midst of the tragic, for predictability is incompatible with true creativity. K. Marx believed that this was not the case, that the course of history could be predicted. For Marx, however, the history of humanity is the history, not of freedom, but of the drive to dominate man and the forces of nature. In the place of freedom he substituted domination whose forms can be predicted and controlled according to plan. But planned freedom has nothing in common with creation or creativity.

THE SENSE OF QUESTIONING

Though the immanently creative nature of thinking is usually accepted without dispute, the same is not true of its transcendent nature. Does thinking create its own object and if so is it legitimate to assert that thinking is cognitive? If not, we must conclude that its proper place is only immanent. The radical thinking we are dealing with here depends on the question, "How is it possible"? Does this question change anything in the object to which it refers? Will the man in chains, turned away from the truth and suffering for unknown sins, be released from his shackles only because when meeting him we ask, "How is it possible to be in such a situation"?

At first there seems to be nothing creative in this question. Indeed, the question can change nothing in the situation, nor should it do so. Its aim is to prepare an attitude of seeking and interpreting. This implies that both the search and the interpretation be faithful, but what does a faithful search and interpretation mean?

In the question "How is it possible?" we have two important words: "it" and "possible." Let us take a close look at both.

The "it" seems essential inasmuch as it points to a phenomenon or experience, a question or datum. In a way, it may be regarded as being, the answer to an earlier "what?" that could have been, but never was asked. The question "what"? refers to the essence of things, according to Husserl for whom the first meaning of "essence" is that which in the proper being of an individual can be identified as the individual's own "what". However, if the "it" points to an essence, what then is the meaning of "essence". At present we are concerned with the essence, not of things, but of the situation in which the person we have met, our partner in the dialogue, stands. Thus, it is simultaneously a question about truth. When is facing another human being we ask about essence, we actually ask, "What is the truth about man's existential situation"? The essence is then the truth of the situation, while its truth is also its essence.

We speak of "truth," but in what sense do we use that word? The idea of truth has, as we know, two opposites, namely false judgment and illusory experience, neither of which is reducible to the other. Error of judgment appears at the predicative level and is in fact an inconsistency of the judgment with that to which it refers. The illusion appears at an earlier stage and is an inconsistency with a phenomena. Which of these concepts of truth are we concerned with in our question; is it the one opposed to false judgment or the one that is opposed to illusion?

The answer seems quite simple; we are concerned with the truth of the phenomenon, its manifestation, which truth as the opposite of illusion. When asking "How is it possible"? we seek to distinguish between an illusion about the situation and the truth of the situation. Not all the inhabitants of the cave know their true position. This is the reason why thinking is of crucial importance; its task is to free people of illusions about themselves and their existential situation. We seek the authentic: to distinguish the authentically tragic from the illusory, the hero from the actor, the face from the grimace of a mask.

The criteria of this discrimination may differ. For some the mark of authenticity is in the constancy of being, for others in its force or in its indubtability The inability to reach an agreement on the criteria of authenticity is itself a part of the human tragedy and as such is something that, in its own way, "makes us think."

The thinking that thus seeks the truth of the essence has no awareness that something new is being created. On the contrary, it is deeply convinced that this form of activity is subservient. Even the formulation of questions is seen not as something creative, but solely as a search. To search is the negative of finding; to question is the negative of the answer. Indeed, the idea of the truth of the essence is no more than something negative; it is something that of necessity we substitute for the absent "true reality." The thinking that remains true to the question steers clear of any creation. Its only ambition is humility in watching, listening, and perceiving.

Our question has, however, still another component, the word "possible." We ask, "How is it possible?" but what is possibility?

Let us look once again into Plato's cave. There comes a moment when light disperses the prevailing darkness. The role of light is crucial. It does not create the world in which man lives, but without some light there is no world for him. Light is not equivalent to a knowledge of the world; without experience it is like pure space without points, figures, straight or curved lines. Nevertheless, it is only because of light that cognition is possible, that the world of the person wait its astonished wonder, and his questioning are possible. What is the significance or role of light? Its role consists in constituting before the person an alterative or another possibility. The shackles are a fact that cannot be denied; but they are only one of the many possibilities.

When asking "How is it possible"? we put what we are asking about within the perspective of other possible beings, facts or situations. In this way the thinking that asks questions establishes a horizon. Strictly speaking, however, the horizon is not something given, but is connected with acting; the concept of constituting extends beyond the sphere of acting or non-acting. To constitute is to "synthesize," but the synthesis is "passive." Essentially, constituting sense differs from the creation of sense, for it belongs to a different world than that of being as such. I accept Husserl's point of view and consider his argument to be conclusive. I do so all the more readily because his theory of the sense that is constituted allows us to lay down the basis for judging any action at the level of being, for judging every act of creation as a sensible or nonsensical course of action.

Indeed, to create is not the only thing that is important for the person. Those in shackles are also capable of creating and there have been creators whose thoughtlessness made them dangerous. Some things are more fundamental than creating. By forming the space of thought, the space of hope, we open the course for the progress of concrete human freedom.

1. Swiat ludzkiej nadziei (Krakow: Znak, 1976).