​Creativity as the Ultimate Metaphysical Ground

of God and the World - ​Beyond Good and Evil

"Creativity is completely neutral from a moral perspective. Mutual slaughter consists of instances of creativity just as does the composition of a symphony. Also one cannot speak of more or less creativity. Like ultimates in other traditions Creativity is beyond good and evil or any quantification."

- John Cobb, The Whitehead Word Book
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Commentary
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Creativity is not a creator. It is the metaphysical ground of all reality, beyond good and evil. It cannot be quantified and it does not make evaluations. There is as much creativity in the slaughter of innocents as in the composition of a musical sympany, in an explosion as in a calming landscape. There is not “more” or “less” of it, or a "better" or "worse."

Still it is everywhere. All actual entities, in their finite self-creativity, as they prehensively unify the many into one, are expressions of it. And it 'advances' through time. There will be more instances of creativity tomorrow, for good or ill, than there are today.

Creativity is not an eternal object: not a mathematical principle, or a potential for color and shape, or a potential for emotion. It is a notion of sorts, but not a 'form' that can be embodied in the world.

Still it can be experienced in a certain way, It is a metaphysical ground that is intuited when people awaken to the energy of which all things are expressions, including their own self-creative freedom. Creativity is akin to prime matter—the neutral “stuff” of which all things are made—except that it is not passive. It is pure activity, devoid of particular form except as “formed” by the self-creativity of creatures.

One of these creatures is God, a being among beings, albeit inclusive of the whole. God is not Creativity as such but rather a primorial expression of it. God is both a principle of limitation, by which other creatures gain their standpoints and ideal forms of realization, an organ of novelty for the universe, and also a loving presence who cares for the world with tender care, sharing in joys and sufferings. Whereas God is a spirit of goodness at work in the world, Creativity is the pure activity of each creature.
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Creativity goes on forever. God and the world, as they co-create one another and add novelty to one another, are in its grip. In some traditions, philosophers may speak of it as "the Absolute" or as "the God beyond God" or as "Nirguna Brahman" or as "the formless Dao" or as an "Emptiness" that is manifest in its forms. Whiteheads calls is Creativity.

​Above I offer four passages from Whitehead's Process and Reality & one from John Cobb's Whitehead Wordbook to support this view. Whitehead's own descriptions of Creativity evolved through time. In Science and the Modern World he understood it on the analogy of Spinoza's substantial activity of which the world are modes. In Process and Reality he qualifies this, asserting that the ultimate ground is not a a substance or even a generative power of its own, but rather the creativity of each and all.
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