‘’It's not the answer that enlightens but the question"- Eugene Ionesco

For centuries, ever since mankind has started contemplating the nature of reality from various fields and situations in life be it at the level of natural, social, or management science, the utmost importance has been predicated by the scholars or philosophers of these domains to the creativity and critical thinking of a human being not only to stack up discoveries and pedagogy and methodology of knowledge in one’s field of interest but also to understand the layers and details of the world around us and link and chain everything together.

Philosophers have tried to devise various definitions of the terms “creativity" and “critical thinking" with some commonly accepted layman’s definition being, “doing something out of the box” or “a person generally occupied in the field of fine arts”.

But it pervades not just the commonly accepted beliefs regarding creativity but also all aspects of our lives from every day to our careers, to our personal as well as social. To expound upon the quote mentioned in the introduction of the essay by Eugene Ionesco, one of the most crucial aspects of acquiring a creative and critical mind is to question the nature of the domains we associate ourselves with. For a scientist like Isaac Newton, it was asking why the apple fell to the ground when he was sitting under an apple tree, for a literary icon like T.S.Eliot it was combing the elements of Anthropology, sociology, and Sanskrit literature in the events following World War 2 and pen his seminal work or magnum opus “The Wasteland" and question the nature of modern society following a catastrophic event that shook the core of modern civilization and the entire world, or maybe the father of Modern Linguistics, Noam Chomsky, who came up with the theory of Universal Grammar after questioning and critiquing B.F.Skinner's Verbal Behaviour dealt with the acquisition of language in children. In this way, one commences, his or her journey towards questioning, critiquing, and acquiring the nature of reality at any level in any manner around them. Not to readily accept any concept or theory presented in front of them but to challenge them on their grounds.

But to facilitate the functioning of creativity, be it in natural or social sciences one needs to have a firm association as well as dissociation with the culture around them. One often undertakes this creative journey in any field to attain a transformation in a practical and theoretical sense and reveal the truth about life either from a scientific standpoint or a social standpoint. But what necessarily happens when one notices a substantial scientific transformation, in a substantial scientific transformation, one might observe that not only do old ideas or paradoxes disappear and fade away but they also give rise to new theories or ideas or transformations that appear as the maxims or truths of life that have already been existing but might have been concealed due to an individual or community’s belief in old myths, hoaxes or ancient beliefs. A great scientific transformation or revelation happens like layers of the Earth, where you’ve got your lithosphere, but then one might add cement and tar to smooth out uneven terrain, and then lay tiles while the lithosphere is still there but the tiles have given rise to the new and substantial foundation.

This could be described when a child growing up is disconnected from his or her surroundings be it in terms of rituals, mother tongue, beliefs, and festivals, and when it comes to formulating a formula for life in this sense, not the life that one is sustaining and living every day but the one that is connected with social and scientific temperament. When the child, who might have grown up, and wants to discover a reality of life, but is unable to due to the disconnection causing inhibitions and obstacles in his mind when the mind is meant to acquire the truth and reality. Disconnection from mother tongue, rituals beliefs, and culture might lead to a distorting perception of reality in the mind and confusion, chaos, and agony about one’s place and identity in the world. But when a child has grown up and understood these qualities about culture, he or she might also be at a crossroads and might talk at cross purposes because of the inability to put the limitations of his surroundings and ideals thus blinding him or her to the reality that he or she is meant to acquire.

One might argue that the core level of humanity is to express creativity and that some creative geniuses in various fields have somehow been planted with a “creative gifted language" that allows them to ace their respective fields and express their ideas and notions of creativity to the best of their abilities.

But for the masses, that doesn’t appear to be the situation and it could debated and discussed that this could be associated with the power of the prevalent institutions at play. For example when a state decides, that the educational policy would discredit or disregard the creative and critical output of the students then, for the select few geniuses for whom creativity is not something for which they have to work hard, is not an issue but for the rest of the lot, they might just succumb under the traditions and conventions and might not be able to produce a novel idea in the field of their choice. Or when the capitalist government or economy decides through their marketing campaigns, that for an individual it would be better to indulge in entertainment under which their inventive or creative potential succumbs or this phenomenon is described among the masses much more succinctly as “herd or sheep me laity”.

But one could only hope and predict that the creative and human urge which happens to be one of the most central and crucial acts in the behavior of human nature will manifest itself in whichever ways it can.

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