Philosophy can be divided into branches which focus upon its most essential questions.  While there are many sub-categories, the five commonly accepted primary branches of philosophy are:

Aesthetics – the study of beauty

Epistemology – the study of knowledge

Ethics – the study of morality

Logic – the study of reasoning

Metaphysics – the study of reality and existence

I believe there is a major branch missing from this Pantheon, and a blind-spot that is not addressed equally within this larger view of philosophy.  We have yet to seriously study human creativity and the impact of our creations upon the future.  Poietics is this missing branch of philosophy.

Poietics

[poy-EE-tiks]

Etymology: from the Greek word “poiesis”, meaning “to create”.

Definition: the study of creativity; how humans create things and how these creations shape our future.

Questions of Poietics:

What is creativity?  How do we tap into human creativity?

How can creativity be used to solve problems?

How can we anticipate the future affects of a given creation?

What kind of futures do we want to create, and how might we attempt to shape them?

As with all primary branches of philosophy, Poietics touches all other branches.  Like a spiderweb on a summer morning, the whole is reflected in a single drop of dew.  

Technology

Albert Einstein claimed that his role in developing the atomic bomb was “one great mistake in my life”.  Here poietics touches ethics, and the moral weight of creation is ever-present in our thinking about technology.  From war machines, computers, and AI to the polio vaccine and other developments in medicine, technological advances expand future potentials in ways that are challenging to predict.  Who could have guessed that Steve Jobs’s invention of scrolling on the smartphone would lead to billions of human hours wasted each year scrolling through mindless brain rot?  Poietics sheds a light on this aspect of human creation, and asks us how we can harness our creativity to develop technologies that are more likely to bring about good futures than bad ones.

Architecture

In a similar light, the creation of built spaces for human inhabitance touches the branches of aesthetics and metaphysics.  The spaces we build for ourselves should be pleasing to live in, and they should be places that nurture our human existence within the world.  Poietically, architecture is created to affect the lives of people and to shape our futures.  The use, atmosphere, and tectonics of a space afford us various actions and activities, cause us to feel a certain way in a space, and situate us within the physical world.  The elements of architecture influence our thoughts, feelings, and actions in profound ways that ripple forward in time.

Language, Knowledge, and Concept

Linguistics, epistemology, and the creation of ideas can also be viewed through the lens of poietics.  How we speak, how we think, the concepts we develop, and the ways these become shared ideas; all of these directly affect our actions in the world and impact our futures.  Wittgenstein famously said, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”, and in a sense he is correct.  How we see the world necessarily shapes our actions within it.  We create concepts, and these concepts drive the future forward in new directions.  Art and culture flow out of our conceptual frameworks, and even the lowest-brow forms of entertainment are shaped by our prevailing concepts and in turn shape our future.  

The Human Mind

The contemporary fields of cognitive science and psychology are integral to the philosophical branch of poietics.  We must understand how our minds are affected by the things around us in order to create things that shape our minds in desirable directions.  These cognitive sciences are emerging fields, and no doubt within the next several decades we will understand more about how our brains are affected by external stimuli.  As poietics continues to develop, it will be further informed by cognitive science and psychology in such ways that we will better learn how to create things and ideas catered to the intricacies of the human mind.

Futurology

We have created the concepts of time and future, and these ideas have irrevocably altered the forward projection of humanity.  Futurology is the study of how we conceptualize and bring about the future; it is a creative discipline that falls below the larger branch of poietics.  The future is unpredictable, but it follows patterns, and we can create tolerances that allow flexibility in areas that are often open to chance.  Poietics seeks to categorize and explicate how we should conceptualize the future, and where leverage points exist that we can focus on to affect change. 

Meta-Philosophy

Philosophy isn’t always about getting to the truth, it is also about shaping the ways we think.  Poietics philosophizes about philosophy, and it questions not only how we come up with ideas, but how these ways of thinking affect the world.  When a philosophical idea catches on, it can spread like wildfire and change everything it touches.  An idea does not need to be generated through philosophy to profoundly impact the world; all ideas are capable of engendering sweeping change.  But shouldn’t the creation of potentially world-changing ideas be intentional and considered?  Poietics is the intentional consideration of how we philosophize and how we create philosophical concepts.

Creativity and Ideas

Creativity is not about what things are, but about what they have the potential to do.  We can harness creativity by considering things in new ways, by learning new things, and by connecting ideas not previously connected.  This is not epistemology, where knowledge is static, nor metaphysics, where there are singular truths of the world, but poietics, a philosophy built on the application and impact of ideas rather than on their initial discovery.  

The history of philosophy has been largely devoted to gathering knowledge, but now science has uncovered much, and we must turn our attention to what we create, and the ways our ideas shape the world.  To re-balance and reinvigorate philosophy, this new branch of poietics brings practicality and utility to our thinking.  Poietics does not focus on the past or the known, it looks to the future and the possible.  Creativity is the way we change our future through the introduction of new ideas.

[Poietics will be further studied in subsequent posts that explore how creativity works and how we can harness it to affect our futures.]