Cultural determinants of creative activity: the problem of freedom and determinacy

The main problem of the study is to identify the relationship between the individual and culturally predetermined aspects of creative activity with the subsequent extension of the findings to the modern sociocultural situation. The sources were materials and research results of philosophers and culturologists studying the problem of the sociocultural conditioning of creativity. The authors proceed from a methodological premise that implies that, in the creative sphere, there are mechanisms for the “elaboration” of individual ideas, similar in their principles to the development of paradigms in the meaning that Thomas Kuhn attached to this term. The authors ask themselves the question of what the status of creativity is in modern research thought and determine the general points that are characteristic of almost all philosophical systems when considering creativity. The contradictions inherent in the problem of the cultural conditioning of creativity are analyzed. On the one hand, creativity is conditioned by the influence of culture and its development; on the other, it is the product of the free activity of an individual. The authors argue that a simple explication of culture is impossible, but one cannot reject the presence of direct objective factors that, to one degree or another, affect the creative process. Trying to determine the degree of conditionality of the creative process, the authors turn to the analysis of musical notation as a universal language of music. The conclusion is made about the limited (albeit calculated in huge numbers) options for expressing sound combinations. At the same time, this limitation acts simultaneously as determinacy, the so-called “field for maneuver”. Abstracting from this observation, the authors argue that the novelty of creative activity is not absolute: when faced with its product, we observe “the unknown in the known”. It is this aspect that determines the connection between creative individuals when they are forming cultural heritage. Four variants of creative activity are distinguished according to the criterion of the nature of the meanings expressed and the means used for this. The authors argue that the degree of variability of creative activity largely depends on how much society considers it permissible to introduce something new into the existing. They conclude that at present there are social and technological prerequisites both for the multiple elaboration of already known, mainstream areas and for the formation of semantic structures that are unique in their form and content.