Morality and Creativity

The traditional subordination of human Creativity to Morality implies the thesis of a distinction between them that has been strongly influenced by that drawn by Aristotle--between Making and Doing. That is, for him, Ethics pertains primarily to conduct, i. e. to what one does, of which making something is a special case. However, what one does, according to him, is an expression of character, and character is constituted by one's 'habits', the Greek for which is the root of the word 'Ethics'. Hence, the cultivation of character by habit-formation is a process of character-building. But, character-building is a species of Making. In other words, the Aristotelian concept of Ethics, as a project of character-building, not only collapses his proposed distinction between Making and Doing, it inverts it. As such, Morality is transformed into a species of Creativity, i. e. Self-Creativity.