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This chapter begins by illustrating V. Gordon Childe's role in shifting the subject of archaeology from artifacts to people. In his book Society and Knowledge, Childe presents a theory of progress based on the observation that human societies increase their mastery of the environment by creating new technologies. The book's central theme is human creativity, which Childe used as framework for interpreting archaeological records as a historical narrative. The archaeological record of the first 40,000 years of the modern mind is referred to as the Upper Paleolithic. The chapter reviews how Upper Paleolithic history recognizes the accumulation of knowledge as the essence of the historical process. By the later stages of the period, humans came to understand more about biology, chemistry, and physics, while artifacts have progressed over time—all of which provide a record of how knowledge was developed during the Upper Paleolithic.

This chapter describes another aspect of human uniqueness—the links between consciousness, creativity, and imagination. Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky believed that human consciousness is transformed by social interactions, particularly through language, in a similar fashion to how tools have allowed us to transform the natural world. Vygotsky saw imagination as no less influenced by this social input than other aspects of consciousness. To deal with a changing environment, he argued that the human brain ‘combines and creatively reworks elements of this past experience and uses them to generate new propositions and new behaviour [making] the human being a creature oriented toward the future, creating the future and thus altering his own present’. Vygotsky thought that imagination was particularly stimulated in the developing child through the process of play. Some aspects of adult human culture have attributes in common with play, including the link with imagination.

This chapter presents an account of temporal phronesis that reflects a somewhat more chastened view of human creativity, drawing on Alfred North Whitehead's original and productive understanding of natural process, time, and creativity. This new temporal phronesis would be a major contribution to habits of thought, and indeed practice, which would not merely transcend the mechanical but move to another level the creative engagement with the environment that Whitehead calls for. To be out of touch, to fail to be attuned to the complexity of time is not just a cognitive but an ethical failure, where the ethical is to be understood not deontologically or instrumentally but in relation to ethos, or dwelling. Such a phronesis would capture both the temporal complexity of the real, and of people's engagement with it, and is central to the ecological imagination. It is only by articulating and enacting such complexity that people can achieve the attunement required for an environmentally sustainable ethos. This attunement is itself a creative accomplishment of the human organism, even as it sets limits to an unbridled sense of the transformability of nature.

This chapter cites some observations about the reality of the global financial crisis. First, all the major economies of the world are scrambling to stem the damages of the financial crisis. Second, there is a continued failure of national and global leadership to seize the opportunity for radical transformation of economies and organizations toward sustainable, creative, and reliable development. Third, some economies, such as India and Canada, have been more resilient than others in dealing with the financial crisis. Fourth, there has been a lack of focus and use of human creativity and potential in past economic regimes. Many of the book's chapters expose false assumptions of traditional finance and management theories and practices, opening up alternative visions of how the postcrisis recovery might unfold. This chapter closes with an account of how the editors are personally navigating the post-financial crisis situation in their own work and networks.

This chapter focuses on Georges Bataille's notion of chance. This notion made its first appearances in Bataille's essays of the 1930s, most notably in The Sorcerer's Apprentice, an important document from 1937 that deals with questions of politics, the fragmentation of the human being, the limits of action, and the aleatory experience of freedom. The essay suggests that chance is the potentiality for politics, structuring the field of relations between individuals and groups. It also reiterates that with love, and the world created by lovers, “what determines the election of the loved one—so that the possibility of another choice represented logically, inspires horror—is in fact reducible to a series of chances.” Thus, this chance-element in the experience of love gives force to human creativity and will to exist.