Creativity as a cultural phenomenon

The article deals with the sacral nature of creativity, which for many centuries has been correlated with the divine instance (in contrast to craftsmanship available to man). The theoretical category of creativity is considered in the diachrony of its comprehension and cultivation. The key role in the history of artistic creativity belongs to philosophical aesthetics (A. Baumgarten, I. Kant, F. Schelling, etc.), which made the discovery of the creative nature of ‘high’ art. On the basis of this discovery classical artistry was formed in the sphere of artistic writing, categorically separated from entertaining fiction and illustrative-imaginative journalism. The historical crisis of the culture-forming (since the era of Goethe and the Romantics) egocentric mentality at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries manifests itself, in particular, as disillusionment with the creative virtuality of imaginary worlds, as a crisis of aesthetic creativity entering a period of devaluation and degradation. The article points out two branches of the loss of the creative aspect of artistic writing: socialist realism and avant-gardism, growing into postmodernism. However, if we consider creativity not as a gambling game in search of luck (a bestseller), but as one of the forms of human existence, one of the noospheres of personal self-realisation along with labour, cognition, morality it should be recognised that creativity existed in culture long before its discovery by aesthetics (including pre-reflective creativity, the products of which were primitive myths) and continues to exist in our time, although it has lost its correct theoretical understanding.