Creativity Exam

Jonathon Gingerich's Spontaneous Freedom

What is Spontaneous Freedom?

is a veridical (real) experience of activity that feels and is unplanned, unscripted, nonobligatory, and non-alienated (one’s own).

What Are the Three Aspects Needed For Spontaneity?

(1) Openness: sense of possibility, uncertainty; unplanned and unscripted
- Is habitual action open in this way?
(2) Nonalienation: Peter “does not experience his activity as having its source in something alien to him ... he experiences it as his own”
(3) Nonobligatoriness: activity isn’t dictated by what others, law, or morality demand.

What Are The Other 2 Features That Are Typical but Not Necessary?

Approach orientation:
- Spontaneous freedom can be spurred by positive or negative emotions
- Peter’s “exquisite delight”
- Bored with middle-class life, Mona becomes a vagabond, exchanging “the drudgery of work” for “the ennui of not knowing what she will do next” (in film, Vagabond).
- Either way, agent has an approach orientation. What’s that? (47)
Scalarity: these experiences vary in
- Scope (afternoon plans vs. life decisions)
- Intensity (utter vs. tepid freedom)
- Duration (minutes vs. months)

Spontaneous Freedom in Context; What Does It Need?

Spontaneous freedom depends on both internal (psychological) and external
(social, material) conditions.

What are the internal factors?

- promoted by openness, self-examination, receptivity
- hindered by rigid goals, moral perfectionism

External factors?

1) Poverty

2) Oppressive social norms

3) Alienating Objectification

4) Labour market constraints

- The contrast between Peter Walsh and Mohammad Ashraf raises questions about class. Can someone in poverty have "genuine" spontaneous freedom? What policies would promote - —

- What policies would promote more equitable access to spontaneous freedom?
- How could institutions cultivate spontaneity without anarchy?

Spontaneous Freedom, Consolation, and Creativity; What values does Spont. recognize?

1. Enabling Artistic Creativity:
- Compare Kant: genius requires originality "entirely opposed to the spirit of imitation." Artists must take themselves not to be following a plan. "What is exciting when Keith Richards plays a riff on his guitar 'is the immediacy—the spontaneity and adventure—of playing without an
antecedently fixed end.'" (56)

2. Realizing Capacity for Novelty:
Spontaneous freedom realizes "what Hannah Arendt calls 'the capacity of beginning something anew.'" Acting without plans confirms "that we are not
trapped by our own personal histories or the human past, that each of us is a source of freshness and novelty." (57)

3. Providing Relief:
- Like Nietzsche's account of tragedy allowing dissolution of selfhood,
spontaneous freedom provides "a feeling of relief at finding that we are not
exhausted by our individual, rational, deliberative, reflective natures." (57)
- Is spontaneous freedom always good? Can you think of cases where it isn’t?
- Are there moral limits to valuing spontaneity (e.g., recklessness)?

Spontaneous Freedom vs Free Will?

- Compatibilists say freedom – understood as self-control – is compatible
with determinism.
- Some libertarians reject compatibilism because true freedom requires
bringing forth "something that is not implicit in the past." Compatibilist
freedom would "lack the sparkle of 'freshness, novelty, [and] genuine
creation.'" (58)
Gingerich:
- Spontaneous freedom is not captured in self-control – so compatibilists
are missing something.
- But SF is compatible with determinism – so we don’t need
libertarianism.
Why spontaneous freedom should satisfy libertarians:
- It lets us feel we are "sources of novelty and freshness"
- It requires freedom from our own prior plans and the manipulation of
others
- It can exist even if determinism is true, because it requires being
unplanned, not uncaused

Pereboom's manipulation cases (adapted for spontaneous freedom):
C1: Neuroscientists directly manipulate Peter's brain to cause his walk
C2: Neuroscientists programmed Peter as an infant

C3: "Training practices of his community" determine Peter's walk
C4: Laws of nature + history determine Peter's walk
- Does Peter have spontaneous freedom in C1? What about C4?
- Where does Gingerich draw the line, and why? Is his distinction principled, or ad hoc?
- Can creativity concerns be separated from responsibility concerns in free will debates?

Creativity and the Value of Unplanned Activity

Why plans (not causes) undermine reality:

Acting from opaque sources:
- Recall: Audre Lorde writes of "deep places" of possibility, "dark because they are ancient and hidden," holding "an incredible reserve of creativity and power." (68)
- When activity arises from such sources, "what we do can feel new and surprising from our own individual standpoint, as well as from the standpoint of humanity, even if not sub specie
aeternitatis." (68)
Understanding possibilities for human life:
- "The reason that Peter's activity lacks creativity in C1 and C2 is not that his activity is causally determined but that his relationship to the human past in these cases is one of rote
repetition or enactment. Peter's activity in these cases would add nothing new to our collective understanding of what human life should or could be like, since his activity is already understood and planned by the neuroscientists." (68)