In his work Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Gregory Bateson introduces the issue of order and disorder publishing the dialogue with his daughter Cathy, where she is concerned about “order” and “disorder” in the world. As she says: “Dad, why do people always mess up things of the other people?”, he answers: “well, it is not as easy as it may seem. At first what does “disorder” mean?” and then the Metalogue goes on facing a long series of questions and answers, concerning crucial issues that reveal the importance of mentality and its cultural references in approaching any kind of problem. What is now important for us is exactly this: what is order and disorder? We may say that creativity has as a first outcome that of breaking the rules and repetitiveness of tradition, this first break-in of an apparently dis-ordered way of thinking, acting and responding to the common shared social action. As a second consideration, we should say that the dialectic of creativity is between a given order, a following disorder where creative factors act as change motor, and a new phase where a new kind of order is restored, until the next innovative and creative factor emerges again to change the “evolution” into a “revolution” of factors. At this point we may remember T. Kuhn´s “Structure of scientific revolutions”, where the innovation factors are represented by these creative factors breaking the repetitive flux of science, as well as traditions and knowledge in general.

In the case of creativity, change is not given as a mere adaptation to new events, as we can also experience nowadays with immigration, but, on an individual level, this experience of surprise calls for a creative re-elaboration of the individual experience itself in a wider and more general, I would say a universal, kind of experience, thus transforming surprise into a real “other”. Creativity is a way of thinking, which may otherwise be called “divergent thinking”, but not only: creativity is an act which brings something into being, which was not there before (Popitz 2000: 98). In other words, creativity has to do with fantasy but is more than that: it is the capacity that only human beings have to “das Seiende au?erhalb seiner selbst als ein Anderssein, als eigenartiges So-Sein zu erfassen” (Popitz 2000: 98-99). From this point of view we have to consider two different levels of interpreting creativity: on one side the social level and on the other an individual behaviour. Holding on to this distinction metaphors used in artcrafts are essential transformations where empirical data are turned into universal meanings, like a work of translation from one world of meanings to another.

If we accept that creativity is some sort of order, but a different kind of order concerning emotional reactions and feelings translated into intellectual comprehension (Read 1962: 204) we may start a dialogue about the function of creativity in our organized and “totally bureaucratised” society, speaking in Horkheimer’s terms (For a critical appraisal of this concept in Horkheimer’s work see the introduction of F. Ferrarotti to the italian edition (ed. Utet, 1976) of M. Horkheimer “Studien über Autorität und Familie. Forschungberichte aus dem Institut für Sozialforschung”).

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