Crisis and Creativity: Selected Examples of Theoretical Approaches

Abstract

François Jullien returns to the understanding of artistic creativity as a situation of existential crisis. We propose a comparison of the concept of de-coincidence with other notions linking crisis with artistic creativity. In traditional terminology, the notion of crisis was expressed through the category of decisive moment describing an intense change (kairos). The kairotic leap appears to be a term that still aptly describes the situation of cognitive disorientation accompanying creation, the brief loss of personal identity and the complete transfer of attention to the artwork. A more recent approach is the psychological theory of positive disintegration proposed by Kazimierz Dąbrowski in the early 1960s. The article attempts to compare various ways of conceptualizing creativity as a crisis based on selected examples.