Creativity,transcendence,and social constellations

When we think of the subject of creativity, we automatically think of the creative spirit individualized in a person, that is, in figures ‘bearers of specific gifts of body and spirit esteemed as supernatural’ (Weber, 1978: 848), extraordinary, out of the ordinary. However, we must keep in mind that these ‘great figures’ always creatively articulate a collectively prefigured meaning (Sánchez-Capdequí, 2017). These figures are the individual bearers of creativity, but this creativity does not have a single dimension – individual – but is also expressed in diverse cultural forms, in images of the world, in classificatory schemes, in collective representations, in values, in forms of power, in law, in morals, in technology, in cinema, in literature, in fashion, and almost all of them present in every society. From the scribes and copyists of the Torah, passing through the creative authors (creative minorities), both of Western ethical prophecy and of Eastern exemplary prophecy, until reaching a ‘public use of reason’ in modernity that makes possible a discursive relationship between the innovator and the collective, where the aura of romantic creation abandons its redoubts of minority excellence, where creativity is no longer a monopoly of artists, where it is no longer the patrimony of a minority, in all these figures a metamorphosis of creativity and its bearer figures is evident. Creativity supposes a surpassing of the given, a going ‘beyond’ the present past by means of a present future. It supposes an emergence of ‘formless’ potentiality to the point of acquiring certain cultural, political, economic, artistic, and sporting forms. Creativity implies a struggle against chaos, a struggle against the indeterminate and against nothingness, until it succeeds in creating certain constellations of meaning. We are not so much interested in describing the emergence of the cosmos from an indeterminate origin such as the illuminated world emerging from chaos, as a growth or as a sprout, in physical images such as the separation of the elements – visualized in the division of the waters and the earth or the sky and the earth – or from the manufacture of a product created by God – ‘the world created out of nothing’ in Genesis – but rather in linking these (and other) mythological narratives with the performativity of the action of the individual acting within human groups. Creativity is the destiny of man, of every man, from the first Australopithecus to the group of the creatives of our time, passing through the Renaissance man and the Romanticism. Whether we know it or not, we are born with the DNA of plasticity to create new forms as something that conditions the human imprint in the natural and in the properly social fact. It is not an attribute of an exalted minority (artists) or the predeterminism of an evolutionary advance culminated in late-modern society. Its competition operates and is operative in the actions of the social actor, inoculating surprise and accidentality in the bulk of his behavior since man has been man. In every action there is a ‘leap’ (in Jaspers’ terms) that illustrates the passage from one condition or state to another, however minor this transit may be, and without ever prejudging the ethical component of the same (it is not in vain that Greek democracy is as much a creation as the dreadful Shoah). The human being is creative, not because it is so ordered by society, but because it is imposed by the designs of nature. It is not a sociocultural decision, it is the brute fact of a being in-fault that seeks to fill his incomplete circumstance imaginatively. Imagination transcends the limits it draws for itself (Simmel, 2000).

Hans Joas (2000, 2013) has drawn the sociological outlines of a theory of the creativity of action reinterpreting from neopragmatism Weber’s theory of charisma, the theory of collective effervescence of the late Durkheim, the symbolic-vitalist sociology of the late Simmel, Marx’s concept of ‘revolution’, and Nietzsche’s concept of ‘will to power’, underlining the creative character of human action as opposed to rationally oriented action and normatively oriented action. Joas endorses John Dewey’s view of pragmatism according to which

the function of the mind is to project new and more complex ends, to free experience from routine and caprice. It is not the use of thought to achieve purposes that are already given, in the mechanism of the body or in the already existing state of society, but to use intelligence to liberate and liberalize action. (Dewey, 1917: 63 in Joas, 2013: 189)

It all begins with the experience of self-transcendence (Joas, 2017: 81, 87, 127), with the creation of segments of reality ‘beyond’ oneself and one’s own world of everyday facticity, as occurs, in the world of fantasy, in dreams, in ecstasy, in the attitude of deep theoretical reflection, and in religious ritual. New classificatory schemes, new ideals are the result of creative processes of idealization of contingent possibilities (Joas, 2020: 182). It is the tensions that occur within problematic situations that serve as fields of struggle around ways of thinking, perceiving, and doing that generate new ways of thinking, perceiving, and acting (Alexander, 2019; Wagner-Pacifici, 2017).

But, talking about the forms of creativity inescapably leads us to ask about the conditions of possibility that make it real. Georg Simmel in a work published in 1918 outlines a sociological version of the concept of transcendence that acts as the conditioning factor of social creativity. According to Simmel (2000: 299, 304–305, 309–312), the reference to limits somehow highlights the possibility of transcending them, which in fact happens sooner or later. It is a fact that we transcend the world of sensible reality, the world of everyday experience, in thought, in fantasy, in dreams, in religion, to the point of considering its limits ‘from outside’. The limit, as such, participates in the here and the beyond the here, so that the unified act of life includes both moments, that of the limited being and that of the transcendence of the limit. ‘It is essential for man, in the deepest sense, the fact that he sets himself a border, but with freedom, that is, in such a way that he can also overcome this border again, place himself beyond it’ (G. Simmel, 1986: 31), because ‘we are at every instant those who separate the bound or bind the separated’ (G. Simmel, 1986: 29). We are border beings without any border (G. Simmel, 1986: 34). Indeed, the condition of possibility of creativity is transcendence. Man lives in a constant openness that, despite his moments of concealment throughout numerous periods of history, incites him to create, intervene, and alter the fact in which he finds himself. It is the animal quarens, an animal that searches and interrogates (Torrance, 2006: 50–57). Therefore, human action always contains the seed of rupture and creative and reintegrating disintegration. It eliminates some limits in order to elaborate others. When he acts and unleashes something new, the actor transcends the given. Each time he does so, he stretches the symbolic and institutional limits he inhabits in order to inhabit others. He challenges them while feeling challenged by their apparent consistency. Tragedy grows in the depths of the human adventure. His being is always not-being at all what (he) is, or being something else potential besides what he is de facto. Its vital circumstance has more of exile than of stable accommodation in the natural fact. Already the linguistic root of ‘to exist’ refers to the Latin form exsistere, that is, to live outwardly without having any firm interior. Simmel offers us a socio-anthropological version of the creativity-transcendence binomial that goes beyond its insertion in the religious-theological narrative, but we do not find in it a social genesis of the different types of the binomial over time. As happens in the very notion of social creativity that presents itself objectified in different figures over time, in the same way the types of transcendence change over time. We are going to analyze four socio-historical constellations of the creativity-transcendence binomial: The first of them is the one represented by a myth-ritual structure embodied by Homo sapiens in primitive cultures; the second of them is the one that arises 500 BC ago with the ‘axial revolution’ in China, India, Iran, Palestine, and Greece supported by new carriers of creative action; the third of them is configured at the beginning of modernity in the 18th century, with the Protestant Reformation and immediately afterwards with the Enlightenment and Romanticism, supported by new carriers of creative action; the fourth constellation of creativity-transcendence emerges today with the convergence of technologies – nanotechnology, biotechnology, Big Data, and Artificial Intelligence – where the sense of human nature as a vector within a hybrid cognitive collectivity made up of humans and things is altered.

A. The transition from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens (approximately 250,000 years ago) marks a new evolutionary stage, the one represented by mythical culture, characterized by the emergence of the speech system, as a new modeling of the universe of human existence as well as by the emergence of metaphor and narrative. This transition from a purely mimetic form of culture to spoken language, to narrative, and to a fully developed oral-mythic culture is a revolutionary development that precipitates a transition in representation from slow-moving mimetic customs to group narrative capacity. This adaptation introduces a new layer of culture with the consequence that both human cognition and associated cultural forms become more complex and diversified. The public expression of this new narrative ability manifests itself in a liberated imagination that empowers human beings to rearrange more complex events in the imagination or even to invent fictitious events, as occurs in narrative and fantasy, in mythologies, thus allowing the emergence of limitless variations in how group reality might be constructed (Donald, 1991: 201–269). The innovation would be substantiated not so much in the communication articulated through the mimesis of gestures and signs that we have observed in Homo erectus, that is, in the imitative ability to performatively reenact events but in the reciprocal use of symbols that mean the same thing to the members of the group. The evolutionary achievement is evident in the generation of an intersubjective space of shared contents (Habermas, 2019: Vol. 1, 227). In primitive societies, mythical narratives encompass the unity of world interpretation and are expressed through a cultic praxis. Both aspects are manifestations of social creativity. Myth-ritual is seen in genetic perspective as the oldest form of symbolic representation (Burkert, 2013). The means of dance and communal chants are accompanied by rhythmic movements accompanied by music, pantomime and mime, and painted bodies adorned with jewelry, along with the use of cultic objects (such as the use of masks, emblems, weapons, ornaments, etc.) that allow the creation of an iconic representation. Durkheim situates ritual practice as that appropriating event that produces a different kind of reality, the ‘collective effervescence’, the ‘collective ecstasy’, the ‘emotional energy’, is that condition of possibility through which people experience a different and deeper reality through an immanent magical transcendence. The myth-ritual has a main ‘dynamogenic (function), it gives the individual the forces that allow him to go beyond himself, to rise above his nature and dominate it’ (Durkheim, 1969: 706), in other words, once such a state of exaltation is reached, man loses self-consciousness. Feeling himself dominated, dragged along, by a kind of external force that makes him think and act differently than he normally does, he naturally has the impression that he has ceased to be himself. It seems to him that he has become a new being:

the finery with which he dresses, the sort of masks with which he covers his face, are material representations of this transformation, . . . . And since, at the same time, all his companions feel transfigured in the same way and externalize their feeling in their cries, gestures and attitudes, everything unfolds as if he were really transported into a special (sacred-extraordinary) world, completely different from that in which he lives from profane-ordinary, into a space populated entirely by exceptionally intense forces, which invade and metamorphose him. (Durkheim, 1982: 205; Joas, 2017: 111–165)

No one has expressed better, in condensed form, than Jane Ellen Harrison (1927) the intrinsic meaning of myth: ‘myth is the plot of the dromenon (the ritual)’ (p. 331). Myth is the prototypical, integrative mental tool that attempts to bring together a variety of events within a temporal and causal framework. The pre-eminence of myth in early human society is testimony that humans used language as an evolutionary universal for an entirely new integrative way of thinking (Cassirer, 2017: 49–101; Donald, 1991: 215, 201–269; Habermas, 2019: Vol. 1, 246–272). The more general content of myth entails the understanding of reality, the concept of the world, which supplies the interpretative framework in which both isolated episodes as well as experiences acquire meaning for all encounters and all concrete situations in which man is involved (Angehr, 1996: 44). The symbol is the stuff of which myth is made,

it is an apresentational reference of a higher order in which the apresenting member of the pair is an object, fact or event, within the reality of our lifeworld, while the other apresenting member of the pair alludes to an idea that transcends our (immanent) experience of the lifeworld. (Schütz, 1974: 295)

In this way, linguistic symbols free human cognition from the immediate perceptual situation not simply by allowing reference to things outside this situation (‘displacement’), but rather by allowing multiple simultaneous representations of each and every possible perceptual situation, indeed, thereby making possible especially powerful forms of social-collaborative creativity and inventiveness, that is, processes of sociogenesis in which multiple individuals create something together that no individual could have created alone (Tomasello, 1999: 6 and 9). (Habermas 2019: Vol. 2, 118 and 193) has called this evolutionary universal ‘linguistification of the sacred’ (Versprachlichung des Sakralen) understanding as such the oral-mythical expression of the sacred myth-ritual described that with the cognitive change brought about by the cosmovisional rationalization represented by the ‘axial revolution’ affecting universal religions will be expressed in a language that is not only oral but also written and increasingly theoretical.

B. In the regions of origin where the ‘axial revolution’ (Jaspers, 1949: 14 ff.) takes place, within the different worldviews, similar transitional conditions are shown, leading from the early archaic cultures to the universal religions, not only in the face of their emergence but also in relation to their diverse dynamics of development. In China, Confucius and Laotze, both literati, set the conditions for the development of a new public philosophy. In India, Buddha will develop the teachings of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. In Iran, Zarathustra will shape the image of the world between Good and Evil. In Palestine, the prophets (mainly Isaiah and Jeremiah) will develop the ethical revolution. In Greece, writers such as Homer, philosophers such as Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle, tragedians such as Sophocles, historians such as Thucydides, will lay the foundations for a revolution in the ways of thinking with the unfolding of thought about thought itself. The sacred complex of the previous social model, that of the early archaic cultures–which includes the religious systems of Africa, Polynesia, some areas of the New World as well as the societies of the Near East, India and China – represented a link with new bureaucratic state structures in charge of the organization of authority. These societies were much more extensive than the preceding primitive segmented societies. To achieve their stability they had to develop forms of solidarity that were based not so much on the ritual performativity of the tribe nor on the strength of the warrior but on a conception of kinship and divinity that went beyond the old ideas linked to classified lineages and supernatural beings. The characteristic note of this archaic religion is the emergence of a true cult structured around a complex of gods, priests, worship, sacrifice, and in some cases divine or priestly kinship. It seems that the passage from tribal societies to archaic societies only becomes possible when a man monopolizes so much attention on himself (Weber, 1978: 848–849) that he is in a position to claim that he and he alone is not only capable of ruling but also of maintaining the relationship (mediating) between society and the gods (Bellah, 2011: 262 et seq.; Moin and Strathern, 2022). Approximately 5000 years ago, divinities associated with certain sacrificial ritual practices arise, in fact, the word of life and death is a divine word, and it is not surprising that the one who pronounced it was considered a God. He was a God who was also considered a man, he represented humans before gods, as well as gods before humans. Mythical traditions pave their legitimization needs through a sacralization of the figure of the ruler-king (Erkens, 2013: 15–33) who embodies in himself political power and sacred power expressed in ‘rites of state’ in which he functions as vicarii dei in temporalibus (Weber, 1978: 868, 875, 891–893). His arbitrary power and oppression against the people over whom he ruled represents an exceptional break with tribal egalitarianism and a return to a particularly violent form of despotism, made possible by the increasing size of the social unit with the consequent loss of face-to-face communal relationship, by the increase in surplus value due to the intensification of agriculture (moving from hunter-gatherer to farmer groups), and by the rise of militarism now that resources had been created to fight over (Bellah, 2011: 208–209). The socio-cognitive pressure exerted by the emerging new forms of knowledge, within a disenchanted lifeworld, on the priestly caste and the political caste will originate important tensions that will become manifest with the ‘axial revolution’.

These tensions are expressed in the epistemic critique of a new stratum of intellectuals (both in the form of ethical prophecy and in the form of exemplary prophecy) that arises in Israel as well as in China, India, and Greece and that establishes the conditions for the possibility of overcoming magical thinking and above all implies a sublimation of the mythical narratives transforming them into a dualistic vision of absolute transcendence of the sacred world embodied in creative divinities or cosmological orders separated from the immanence of the world. Religious value no longer resides in the alliance-exchange-gift and its symbolic expression in the magical potentiality of the daimon-mana, but begins to take the form of a differentiation between the transcendent world and the immanent world (Eisentadt, 1986: 1–29; Schwartz, 1975: 2, 3–4; Weber, 1978: 412). This cognitive impulse leads to a dedaimonization-disenchantment of the world, which explains both the redefinition of magical thinking and the abolition of the sacrificial victim as well as the desacralization of domination. The powers of salvation and evil, present in mythical narratives, retreat to the transcendence of a divine sphere or to the immanence of a disenchanted world and are sublimated in the unifying figure of a personal God or in the foundation of an anonymous world. With this background telos, the origin and goal of the ontic construction of the world are connected to a soteriological power, which gives the collectivity and its members a purpose that transcends the contingencies of human existence. The multiplicity of mythical powers has found its expression in the basic concepts of ‘Yahweh’, ‘Dharma’, ‘Tao’, or ‘Ontos on’, in a singular in which the ontic aspects of the creation of the world or of the essence of the world merge with the normative-evaluative aspects of salvation, liberation, and the just realization of the human being. The creative mutation in world images is accompanied by a new form of ‘reflexive religious transcendence’ (Joas, 2017: 279–353). Concretely, what does ‘transcendence’ mean in these new religious constellations? This term implies that a distinct quasi-spatial separation between the intra-mundane and the divine emerges in these religions and philosophies, and that new ideas have been developed from the existence of a supramundane, transcendent realm, absolutely, not from an ‘immanent magical transcendence’ as was the case in the totemic religion studied by Durkheim. Whereas, previously, in pre-axial religiosity, the divine was in the world and was part of the world, that is, while there was no separation between the divine and the mundane and when, therefore, spirits and gods could be directly influenced and manipulated by the fact of being part of the world. With the emergence of the new religions of redemption and the philosophies of the Axial Age, a hiatus is created between the two spheres. The guiding idea is that the divine is the actual, true, and irrefutable Other and the mundane, in comparison, can only be inferior. This tension between the mundane and the transcendent will have important consequences. For example, the notion of a divine ruler (Wittrock, 2012: 118), as was the case in Babylonian religiosity, in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican religiosity or in the dynasties of ancient Egypt, is no longer compatible with such a differentiation. It can no longer be in the image of God, because the gods ‘occupy’ another realm, the realm of the transcendent (‘the absolutely Other’ in Rudolph Otto’s terms). The ruler might even be obliged to justify himself before the divine commandments. In the view of Bellah and Elkana, what really acted as an epistemic condition of possibility (Bellah, 2005: 78; Elkana, 1986: 40–64) ¹ for the emergence of the idea of transcendence was the second order thought, the theoretical culture, the theory, the Logos, which, just for the societies that emerged from the Preaxial Era, meant the advance of a new form of thought on the religious-political premises of society itself, which came to redefine the place occupied by the symbolic-metaphorical structure of the myth. The metaphysics that takes shape in Greece from Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Plato creates a directive distinction of marked ontological accent between the perfect, immutable, true, good, and beautiful being and the nothingness deprived of attributes. Associated with this ontological distinction of reality is a theory of knowledge that distinguishes between various stages of being. Only Buddhism has developed such a theory of knowledge. The theoretical exploration of the world of ideas retains its religious meaning as a way of salvation. A life dedicated to theory involves freeing the rational part of the soul from dependence on the organic substratum and the body, as well as from the painful dictates of suffering. The moralization of the sacred will be realized within a virtuous life managed through the immortal soul.

No less relevant is the moral critique that nests within the ‘axial revolution’. The new movements that emerge in the axial period manifest a soteriological structure that stands in stark contrast to the relatively simple world-acceptance of pre-axial religion. This acceptance of the world is widely explained as the only possible response to the reality that invades the self in such a way that the symbolization of self and world are hardly separable. However, in axial religions the self begins to differentiate itself from the environment and to be aware of its own possibilities. The basic ethical problem nesting in axial religions stems from the need to seek a religious explanation for suffering that is perceived as unjust. But for personal misfortune to be perceived as unjust, there has to be a change in the valuation of suffering derived from a contingency situation, since in tribal societies suffering was considered as the symptom of a secret guilt. Religious value no longer resides in total identification with the group, in Durkheim’s terms, but begins to take the form of a personal openness to transcendence. Considering that the new religious messages of the Axial Age were addressed to individuals as such, rather than to cells of a social organism, such messages were universal in their scope. As Robert N. Bellah (1970) states,

From the point of view of (axial religion), a man is no longer defined in terms of the tribe or clan from which he comes or in terms of the particular God he serves but as a being capable of salvation. That is, it becomes possible, for the first time, to conceive of the human being as a human being. (p. 33)

Axial worldviews transform the sacred into a power that promises saving justice by linking the achievement of salvation to an ethically demanding path of salvation, that is, by making salvation from earthly distress explicitly dependent on the observance of a universalistic ethos (Habermas, 2019: Vol. 1, 306). Without the very unique promises of the great unknown writer of the time of exile who penned the prophetic theodicy of suffering (Is. 40–55), especially the doctrine of the Servant of Yahweh who teaches and who, free from guilt, suffers and dies voluntarily as an expiatory victim, it would not have been conceivable – despite the later exotericism of the Son of Man – the later development of the Christian doctrine of the sacrificial death of the divine savior, as a singular doctrine in the face of other mysterical doctrines of analogous appearance (Weber, 1987: 21), which prefigures the emergence of moral equalitarian universalism of the neighbor (next) as a brother. The problem of Job would be inscribed in this same narrative line of alienation, struggle, and redemption. However, the tragedies of Antigone and Oedipus, in posing the problem of evil and its overcoming, project the idea of destiny, Moira, Fortune, Tyché, which envelops the accidents of existence in a certain spiral of suffering as a naturalized fact, as occurs in the mythical narratives prior to the ‘axial revolution’. This transformation in the model of transcendence and the new universalistic transcendent norms promoted by the new religious and intellectual elites bring a new level of tension and the possibility of a normatively legitimized change against the traditional ‘sacred’ structures.

Also the ‘axial revolution’ entails a political critique of pre-axial tradition in the form of a desacralization of the ruler-king (Casanova, 2019: 8–9). Every axial breakthrough entails some kind of redesign of the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, which can be interpreted as a kind of semantic relocation of the sacred, and may involve simultaneous processes of desacralization of some aspects of reality, such as the sacred king or cultic sacrifice, and the potential resacralization of other aspects. In the case of ancient Israel, the ‘Mosaic distinction’ implies first a radical monolatrous exclusive sacralization of Yahweh as God of the Covenant and eventually in the prophetic era his elevation to the only Holy God, creator of heaven and earth, universal legislator, God of History and Lord of all peoples. Such a sacralization of transcendence entails, in effect, a radical desacralization of all creatures and of all cosmic and natural forces and, above all, the degradation of all gods and supernatural beings into ‘false’ idols and demonic forces. But, while the desacralization of government in the Near and Far East is a consequence of the revolution of worldviews, in the Greek urban settlements that thrived on the Aegean seafaring trade a self-indulgent political dynamic seems to have developed which, in turn, fostered the cognitive advance toward political idealism. In any case, religious and metaphysical worldviews play an ambivalent role; they constitute intellectual resources for subversion and resistance as well as for stabilizing existing regimes (Habermas, 2019: Vol. 1, 469).

The conflict over the authentic God and the correct interpretation of the divine commandments makes its appearance, precisely because of the emergence of a reflexive class of specialists, intellectuals, priests, prophets, philosophers, literati, shanga, ulemas, as opposed to magicians, shamans, rhapsodes and thaumaturges (Weber, 1978: 345–347, 356–364). With the hermeneutic appropriation of the texts, since a written culture already exists, the main role passes from the ‘scribes’ and doxographers to a figure who innovates, who interprets the tradition and introduces a creative ‘author’ bias, proceeding to a de-canonization of the religious canons. In the face of gatekeepers (priests) who try to fix the dogma, new pioneers (prophets and intellectuals) will always emerge who bet on landscaping new forms of knowledge and experience, thus establishing the text as a ‘conflict of interpretations’ where orthodoxy fights against heterodoxy (Bauman, 1987; Zerubavel, 1991).

Intermediate reflections: We usually think that the mimetic phase of our development is surpassed by the symbolic phase, where we construct images and symbolic representations of reality, and that this phase is surpassed in the conceptual-theoretical phase where abstract thought makes a tabula rasa of all that has gone before, but this does not happen, a new stage supposes rather a reconfiguration of old and new possibilities, instead of a surpassing and disappearance of the previous stages. The interesting thing about Merlin Donald’s (1991) model, as opposed to any historicism or enlightened teleology, is that it allows us to understand the evolutionary phases without a finalistic bias in which theoretical culture would have eradicated the mimetic and mythical developments. Human culture is ‘a hybrid structure’ (p. 4) in which the latest cultural advances and developments integrate and include the previous ones. His contribution consists in thinking human creativity from the unity of consciousness. There is no subtraction or diminution in human evolution; what there is an addition and superimposition of evolutionary levels in which the primary ones make possible and are integrated into the more developed one. ‘Nothing is ever lost’ in the cultural history of the species (Bellah, 2011: 262). The non-evolutionary evolutionist view of authors such as Donald and Bellah does not think of inexorable ruptures and the definitive loss of core episodes of human culture but of the integration of the more concrete into the more general. Each new stage of evolution forms a new constellation of relations between the old and the new, the sacred and the profane, magic and science, but not a finalistic passage from one type to the other.

C. The new constellation of creativity and transcendence that emerges in modernity entails what we can call a ‘second axial revolution’ that rests on two conditioning factors of great importance: first, on an internal differentiation of the concept of the world (on the one hand, the social world of life and on the other hand the physical world) as well as on differentiations within the social world itself (the differentiation between belief and knowledge and the differentiation between politics and religion) and, second, on a secularization of transcendence that pave the way toward a new ‘secular immanent framework’ (Taylor, 2007: 3). Before analyzing this new constellation, let us see what these two conditioning factors mean.

In mythical worldviews, the world represents the totality of events since it links all instances of the real. All the spheres that makeup reality are related. There is no ontological superiority that highlights one sphere over the rest (Hénaff, 2010: 164 et seq.). Men, supernatural powers and the forces of nature are structured through a network of interactions where, within magical actions, communicative understanding and instrumental influence intermingle. The first axial revolution produced, as we have seen, a differentiation between the transcendent sacred world where the gods are located completely separate from the immanent world that groups the social world and nature. Contrary to modern ideas of the separation of church and state, the church in the year 1000 was not conceived as a visible, corporate and legal structure vis-à-vis the political authority, but the church, the ecclesia, was conceived as the Christian people, populus christianus which was governed by both clerical rulers and priests (regnum et sacerdotium) (Berman, 1983: 91). This situation changes as a consequence of two related and coextensive processes: On the one hand, the functional differentiation of political power (regnum) and religious power (sacerdotium). From the moment that religious freedom becomes a Right of Man, instituted after the democratic revolutions of the 18th century, the possibility of adhering to one’s own religion or the option of not having a religion is implicit and will depend on the will of the individual. And, on the other hand, the decoupling between belief and knowledge (Habermas, 2019: 189–213). As Max Weber had grasped, modernity begins its voyage at the moment when the unquestioned legitimacy of a divinely preordained social order begins its transformation, then, the way is opened for religious beliefs to be transformed as a result of the emergence of alternative interpretations about the meaning of life, which in principle can no longer be integrated within a religious worldview. Niklas Luhmann (2000) states, in this sense, that ‘religion is no longer a necessary instance of mediation that relates all social activities by providing them with a unitary meaning’ (p. 125). In this new situation, one is not obliged to set aside one’s Christian beliefs, only to recognize that some of the things one stands for do not necessarily depend on such beliefs (Joas, 2008: 17–29). Self-awareness of living in a secular Age can only emerge from empirical evidence that ‘belief in God is no longer axiomatic, (that) there are alternatives’ (Taylor, 2007: 3). We have gone from a society where it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, or at least not to have the axiom of belief in God as the cardinal axis of common sense (because it was socially prescribed to believe and proscribed not to believe, in a massively believing context), to one where faith, even for the most radical of believers, is one human possibility among others. Charles Taylor, picking up Hugo Grotius’ formula, states that this crucial sociological fact will produce a new pattern of meaning according to which we act within a ‘secular immanent framework’ under the premise: etsi Deus non daretur (Taylor, 1998: 34 and 36) (‘as if God did not exist’), even if God did not exist, the principles emanating from such a ‘secular immanent world’ are binding. Habermas (2019) has called this stage: ‘post-metaphysical thinking’ (p. Vol. 1, 110–136). Arguably, a new directive distinction emerges within the saeculum, one that differentiates between an ‘us’ (the post-religious subjects who are governed according to rational claims to validity) and the ‘them’ (religious believers guided by their faith). Between the two poles of the religious-secular binomial, tensions will be generated that will feed a good part of the agenda of the recursive culture wars from the 20th century and also of the 21st century.

Already in the 17th century, the world as the totality of all representable objects confronts the subject of representation. The development of science shares with metaphysics the fiction of considering the world in its totality as something observed from a completely transcendent point of view. This point of view of a divine observer must allow the human spirit – regardless of its organic incorporation and symbolic structuring, its social location and the historical situation of its ‘being-in-the-world’ – a ‘look from nowhere’, an abstract, theoretical, aseptic, third-person look. Before an ontology of more ordered contingent events stands the task of the cognizing subjective spirit that must forge the concepts for itself to explain the facts of nature as well as to interpret the meanings within the social world. The process of de-daimonization initiated in the first axial revolution consolidates a process of objectification of the world based on an objective knowledge of nature that describes the transition from theology to philosophy and from philosophy to science. The revolution of the modern subject, as understood by Kant, does not seek to access itself as the first person from the objectifying perspective of a third party observing itself, as the subjective philosophers before him did, but from the reflexive perspective of a person who experiences itself as active and understands the realization of its own actions and experiences (Habermas, 2019: Vol. 2, 208, 576). The intersubjective relation of communicatively socialized subjects to each other, who are embedded in the formative contexts of their lifeworld and at the same time nourished by its resources, shape the ‘public use of reason’. The conviction is imposed that intersubjectivity is the challenge to be resolved on the basis of strictly discursive agreements and arguments relying on a type of secular reflexive transcendence. It is a product of reason alone. At the beginning of modernity, human life re-specify her contact with the Otherwordly sphere and the work of theoretical reflection is conceived as a discursive task that embraces that dimension of universality defined in procedural terms. Institutions become the result of social initiatives regulated by the discursive use of reason. The plenipotentiary protagonism of a single actor, the King-God, endowed with two bodies (Kantorowiz, 1985), is replaced by collective agreements and decisions by virtue of a juridical codification that gradually tends toward universalization and that, in its first phase, is more formal than real. What is at stake is the challenge of the autonomy of the human condition based on the clearly defined contours of the deliberative dimension. The aura of romantic creation abandons its redoubts of minority excellence and makes its way throughout the secular immanence of late modernity. The social spheres – art, religion, economics, politics, and science – incorporate into their dynamics the narrative of creativity. Creativity is no longer the monopoly of artists (Zilsel, 2008), nor is it confined exclusively to museums. It is a faculty available to every individual and its management can be carried out at any level of social routines. If until recently creativity survived in a minority, potential and marginal substratum, today it is experiencing planetary democratization, institutional updating, and discursive and narrative standardization. Although the figure of the romantic artist continues to evoke the privileged connection with evocative transcendence, the royal road of collegial argumentation based on the propagation of information backed by the comparison with facts is privileged, and creativity falls on the political cooperation of individuals embodied in democratic deliberation. Creativity is revealed at the behest of these self-reflective figures such as scientists, academics, researchers, celebrities, entrepreneurs, around whom the potential of society to self-organize without any other support and impulse than its own decisions becomes visible, configuring a sort of new ‘reflexive class’.

D. Indeed, in the late modern stage, a neoinmanentism, a scientistic materialism, a powerful constellation of creativity and transcendence that takes up the tendencies of objectification of nature and technology as a second nature already present since the 17th century, predominates in the late modern stage. Unlike previous industrial revolutions, the fourth industrial revolution (Schwab, 2016) is already evolving at an exponential rather than a linear pace. The digital revolution combines multiple technologies that influence the economy, business, society, and people. It changes complex systems between (and within) countries, businesses, industries and society itself as a whole. There is an increase in systemic complexity (Luhmann, 1980), an increase in the connectivity of the different elements within systems and of the systems themselves with each other. Not only do the ‘what’ and ‘how’ to do things change, but the ‘who we are’ has really changed. The classical human subject (from Descartes onwards) is de-subjectivized, de-centered, becoming, to a large extent, another element in the midst of the convergence of integrated systems in the acronym NBIC: nanotechnology (nano), biotechnology (bio), Big Data (Info) and Artificial Intelligence (cogno) (NBIC) (Brynjolfsson and Mcaffe, 2014: 88–95; Roco and Bainbridge, 2003: 227–232) that form ‘hybrid trans-human cognitive collectivities’ (Donald, 1991: 355–360) in dynamic association and interaction (Ikegami, 2011: 1155–1184; Latour, 2005: 1–21). According to this, the science of the social would be a mapping of associations. Here the social would not mean one thing among others, like a black sheep among white sheep, but a kind of connection between things of which not all of them are social (Latour, 2005: 5). The development of NBIC technologies is based on the idea that the mastery of matter at the nanometer scale would make it possible to unify the disciplines at stake and to realize a ‘material unity’, so that at this scale the living and the non-living would not be very different realities and could be integrated at a new level. Thus, thanks to the integration of technologies, human capacities could be redefined, generating tensions between biotechnoconservatives and biotechnoprogressives that are evident in the current culture wars.

However, the role of the bearers of creativity appears redefined in relation to the creative minorities of the Renaissance or Romanticism. We live in a society of singularities (Reckwitz, 2017), that is to say, in late modernity a social structural change is taking place in which the social logic of the general is losing its predominance to the social logic of the particular. This new constellation of creativity manifests itself, on the one hand, in the subjective desire for creativity, one wishes to be creative, each individual, by the fact of being so (as was the case in the great message of universal religions), hears the secularized call to be creative, to leave his personal imprint on society in some way and, on the other hand, society prescribes the institutional imperative to be creative, one must be creative (Reckwitz, 2012: 10). In this society of singularities, as in previous constellations of creativity and transcendence, tensions manifest themselves between different groups that in this case are situated between the winners of the fourth industrial revolution, of the convergence of biotechnology, nanotechnology, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence and that configure the ‘new reflexive class’ (Bell, 1980: 144–165; Gouldner, 1979; Reckwitz, 2017: 7–27) and, on the other hand, the losers who seek in tradition a justification to deny the tradition of others-immigrants, poor, women, African Americans, etc.

In the initial paper of the monograph, Professors Javier Gil-Gimeno and Maya Aguiluz delimit a sociological perspective from which the concept of social creativity is comprehensible. J. W. Goethe, when asked about the origin of everything -and to which the answer has been given by affirming that at the beginning is the verb, the Light, God- affirms that at the beginning is ACTION. Weber distinguishes between different types of action in which the subjects, the available means, the ends, the values, the affections, the customs are involved, but the social creativity inscribed in its bearers – individuals and collectives – and in their creations is missing. The authors are not so much interested in creativity as an adjective, that is, as a set of extraordinary abilities of which creative personalities are bearers, but as a substantive that projects reality as social creativity. In this sense, in the works of Georg Simmel and Hans Joas, we find the wickerwork to build the interpretative warp that allows us to establish this constitutive dimension of the social. In this process of theoretical construction, the question that interrogates the conditions of possibility is fundamental since it alludes to transcendence and its diverse forms, both religious and secular. Explaining social creativity also implies situating it in time and space, that is, we must unveil the set of social constellations that allow us to visualize the social genesis of social creativity objectified in a series of vehicle-figures, such as play, myth, reason. In this task, they have relied on the works of Merlin Donald and Robert N. Bellah. Finally, with the concept of ‘variable geometries of transcendence’ that comes from Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, they intend to offer, on the one hand, a ‘secularized’ concept of transcendence and, on the other hand, to have a conceptual tool to explain the current cultural tensions as tensions between different types of transcendence.

The work of Professor José Ángel Bergua offers a look at indeterminacy (apeiron) as a condition of the possibility of the creative process in any of its expressions. After reviewing the meaning of creativity throughout different periods of human history, the author defines creativity as the social capacity to dissolve the instituted and generate a social rebirth under a novel form. The agency that makes it visible is, among other options, the communitas studied by authors such as A. Van Gennep and V. Turner. These anthropologists saw in this concept the most accurate expression of the indeterminate social and, by the same token, of the social open to dynamism and heterogeneity that re-found the institution. Creativity consists not only in a process of dissolution of the social fact in the original indeterminacy but also in a symbolic rebirth in which society transcends itself from that generating indeterminacy.

Professors Juan Antonio Roche and Enrique Carretero investigate social creativity from one of the most outstanding cultural landmarks of contemporary American life: the skyscrapers of cities such as Chicago and New York. In the symbolism of buildings such as the Tribune Tower in Chicago and Rockefeller Center in New York, these researchers detect the presence of the Calvinist religious imaginary that is at the base of American culture. The verticality, gigantism and elevation of these buildings correspond to ascetic individualism and its model of neutral, distant, and abstract consciousness. The authors conclude that precisely this evanescent symbolism provokes the dissolution of this subjectivity and the transformation of the city into an unconnected series of islands in which the actors lose vital horizon and capacity for action.

Todd Madigan’s article analyses the role of creativity in the configuration of narrative plots in modern society. The core of the reflection is found in the expression eudaemonic paths. With it, the author intends to offer an explanatory resource in the social sciences that allows the elaboration of narrative models in which the global construct describes the complete movement of the protagonist throughout his or her different moments and biographical episodes. Far from emphasizing the decontextualized, isolated and unexpected nature of the events narrated (e.g. the 11 September 2001 attack on the Twin Towers in New York by Al Queda), Madigan defends the insertion of the story in the description of the events without prioritizing the liberating and victorious ending of the protagonist (e.g. adding in the explanation of that event the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the attack on the US embassy in Kenya and Tanzania by Al Queda in both cases).

For her part, Professor Janaina Zito Losada analyzes the changes in contemporary social awareness of man’s relationship with the rest of the animal world. The author focuses on the creation of a new type of moral guideline, speciesism, which expresses social criticism of the right of one species, the human species, over the rights of other animal species. For example, whales are a clear exponent of this transformation in human consciousness. Although their deaths continue to be caused by the polluting presence of plastic and other harmful substances in the oceans, in addition to the ancestral practice of hunting cetaceans, groups and social movements have recently appeared that advocate for the protection of the species. Their narrative defends the rights of animal life. In this case, the animal abolitionist movement recognizes man’s predatory instinct as a ‘new slavery’.

Felisa Zhang’s contribution studies creativity from the intellectual realm of tragedy and, by extension, from the cultural and social studies promoted, among others, by Raymond Williams. This researcher sees in tragedy the capacity for mobilization of emotions by political powers that seek to transform social narratives. It is the symbolic ignition that lubricates the imaginary of a collective under construction. This is the case of the Chinese opera White-Hired Girl (Bai Mao Nv) in which the Chinese Communist Party finds the symbolic resources necessary to mobilize the traditional peasant layers in their aspiration for a modern and fair social model. His contribution was of enormous relevance to portray in the public universe the old patterns of behavior, already in disuse, and the new ones, in clear social ascent. The creativity present in the tragedy consists of an emotional disposition in a process of change that is in tune with a reorganization of the institutional environment.