ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly considers two examples of creativity that are not typically viewed by most scholars and others as involving a creative capacity, namely, admiration and generosity. A few everyday examples of creative testimony will help illuminate Marcel's innovative notion of creativity as it applies to the ethical realm. For Marcel, creativity, especially in what Levinas calls the ethical realm, emanates from, and is intimately involved in, cultural beliefs and values. The chapter suggests a few ways that emotional creativity, the spiritualising of the passions, as Nietzsche called it, is an important precursor if not psychological prerequisite for the experience of Marcellian-conceived transcendence. Creativity is associated with "novelty, freshness, revelation", as Gallagher has aptly summarised it. The experience of creativity is a curative act of uplifting restoration. Creative testimony, says Marcel, is a "witness to the spiritual", it is "the fundamental vocation of man".
