What is the self? “Not-a-thing-but-a-process,” we are accustomed to answer, if sometimes a bit formulaically, under our Gestalt model. “Only a small factor in the total organism/environment interaction, but it plays the crucial role of finding and making the meanings that we grow by,” say Goodman and Perls. Not the meanings themselves, in other words, but the “finding and making” of them (and possibly not all meanings, but only those “we grow by”). Not the story, that is, but the need and capacity to tell a story, to make some meaningful whole out of the “booming, buzzing confusion” that is the world.

Creativity may be usefully defined as the capacity to generate novel solutions to problems, which includes of course the ability to see the world in problem-solving terms in the first place. Clearly, this creative capacity is the defining characteristic of our species, an extremely young branch of the primate order, which has managed to arise and then spread over the entire planet in the course of only 3000 or so generations, a mere blink of evolutionary time. This capacity, in turn, rests in some way on our biological history: specifically, the remarkably rapid expansion of brain tissue in our ancestral line, in which the neocortex together with its infoldings has multi- plied some fourfold in surface area in the brief evolutionary window of only a couple of million years

The dawn of the twentieth century, as has often been observed, brought the high-water mark of something we may call, particularly in its Anglo/American inflection, the “High Victorian Synthesis.”  This was that optimistic and fiercely self-confident worldview that held that Western European civilization was the vanguard of a new departure in human history, a permanent if sometimes bumpy upward arc of progress marked by the enormous advances of the past few centuries in science and technology, which were themselves now nearly complete.  Along with this came the growth and spread of individual rights and expression.