Human creative genius has left its mark on our world.

It has advanced civilization by improving human

living conditions. Think about the creative inventions that have drastically altered and improved our
lives: airplanes, cars, light bulbs, telephones and television, just to name a very few. Man is virtually
defined by creativity—in manufacturing, art, literature, music, humor, and virtually every other field of
activity.()

Fidelity -

“the quality of being faithful; faithfulness, loyalty, unswerving allegiance to a person, party, bond, etc.” It
comes from the French word fidélité, which is an adaptation of the Latin fidelitatem, itself a construction
of the words fidelis, meaning “faithful,” and fides, meaning “faith.” In more recent use, fidelity is defined
as “strict conformity to truth or fact” in terms “of a description, translation, etc.: correspondence with
the original; exactness.” This definition of fidelity, then, implies a relation between two objects, the
second serving as a translation or copy of an original, which is the true object or idea. In being exact, the
copy intends to be immediate, to be indistinguishable from the original, yet it cannot, by its very nature
as second. That the original is synonymous with truth in this definition recalls the Platonic idea or form in
his allegory of the cave, whereby those in the dark den see mere shadows and it is only through their
ascension into the light that they may see the sun, “

As I have already indicated, Chomsky's account of true human

creativity, as it might be manifested, for instance, in science and the

arts, is coherent with and could in fact be inferred from his speculations

about linguistic productivity and the Cartesian creativity of ordinary

language use. Of course, Chomsky distinguishes what he calls (1974: p.

152) "the problem of normal creativity", as it might be manifested in

the Cartesian creativity of ordinary language use, from what he refers

to (1966a: p. 16) as "the general problem of true creativity, in the full

sense of this term". Thus, Chomsky points out (1966a: p. 84, n. 30) that

one "would not refer to an act as 'creative' simply on the basis of its

novelty and independence of identifiable drives or stimuli". According

to Chomsky (1966a: p. 27), "true 'creativity' in a higher sense

... implies value as well as novelty." Nevertheless, Chomsky clearly

sees a relation between the phenomenon of true creativity and that of

normal (Cartesian) creativity. True creativity, like normal creativity, is

taken to involve novelty, appropriateness to context, and unpredic-

tability in terms of external stimuli. Moreover, Chomsky claims (1976:

p. 133) that true creativity, like the Cartesian creativity of ordinary

language use, "is predicated on", but not of course exhaustively

explainable in terms of, "a system of rules and forms, in part determined
by intrinsic human capacities"

Humanity begins to create imaginatively

Only gradually and fitfully did a specifically human sense of agency creep into the

meaning of ‘create’. But even then human powers of creation tended to be tinged – or

tainted – with a divine aura. This is the point of the jibe in Shakespeare’s The Comedy of

Errors (III.2.39; c. 1594): ‘Are you a God? Would you create me new?’ In fact, through-

out the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, purely human ‘creation’ was commonly

viewed with suspicion, as something delusive and potentially harmful. Thus Macbeth

fears for his sanity at seeing ‘A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from

the heat-oppressed Brain’ (Macbeth II.1.38–9; 1606); and Gertrude expresses anxiety

about her son Hamlet’s apparent madness in similar terms: ‘This is the very coinage of

your brain: / This bodiless Creation extasie / Is very cunning in’ (Hamlet III.4.128–30;

c. 1600). Basically, ‘creating’ was something that could only properly be done by people
with divine support and otherwise had better not be done at all.

By the eighteenth century, however, there was a much more positive link being

forged between the power of the human ‘Mind’ and the capacity to ‘create’ produc-

tive mental images (i.e. Imagination). Thus Mallet (1728, cit. Williams 1983: 83) can

speak in the same breath of ‘the Muse, Creative Power, Imagination.’ And by the

close of the eighteenth century there is a growing sense that when humans ‘create’

this entails the fashioning of something new or novel in contradistinction to the ‘imi-

tation’ of something old. The distinction between Imitation that is derivative (‘a mere

copy’) and Imagination that is creative and ‘original’ is central to Edward Young’s

Conjectures on Original Composition (1759; see below p. 57). This is the sense that is

carried forward in William Wordsworth’s insistence, prompted by Coleridge and

through him Kant, that ‘every great and original writer [. . .] must himself create the

taste by which he is to be relished’ (letter to Lady Beaumont, 1804). But even those
instances where the verb ‘create’ seems to have an unambiguously human agent can

be more complicated than they first appear. ‘I must Create a System, or be enslav’d

by another man’s; / I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create’,

affirms William Blake with resounding independence. But even here there is more

than a tinge of Christianity, albeit a highly idiosyncratic and dynamic version in

Blake’s case. The poem from which these lines come is Blake’s Jerusalem (1804–20:

plate 10, 20–1) and its speaker, Los, is a rebelliously resistant life-force or spirit. Polit-

ically and poetically charged as this is, it is still partly humanity in the image of divine

creator – what Blake elsewhere calls ‘the Human Face Divine’. Samuel Coleridge,

too, celebrates ‘the primary Imagination’ as ‘the living power and prime agent of all

human perception’; but this is still couched in highly metaphysical, quasi-religious

terms: ‘a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I

AM’ (Biographia Literaria, 1817, Chapter 13).

A particularly famous instance of a politically radical but still divinely licensed

sense of ‘created’ is to be found in the American Declaration of Independence (4 July

1776): ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that

they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . .’. Thus,

notwithstanding the supposedly rational self-evidence of these truths, they are still

underwritten by a broadly religious and, in context, specifically Christian view of a

‘Creator’. (Interestingly, the latter figure was absent from an early draft, which read

‘that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they

derive rights inherent and inalienable’.) Characteristically, too, as with the earlier

royal ‘creation’ of knights and dukes, this appeal to the divine creation/Creator under-

writes a programme of privilege as well as rights. For in the event, the ‘unalienable

Rights’ did not extend to women and black slaves, who thus remained substantially
alienated from the political process. Evidently, in practice if not in theory, some were

‘created’ more ‘equal’ than others.