The Rhizome and the Root

This article argues against a foundational assumption in contemporary philosophy of creativity: that the rhizomatic — horizontal, decentred, resistant to hierarchy — is the natural home of creative thought, and that the arborescent — rooted, structured, traditional — is its obstacle. Drawing on the Zero Spaces framework developed in Collet (2014, 2026a), it proposes instead that the root is not the enemy of creative emergence but its necessary condition: a generative ground that is as dynamic, as open, and as productive as the rhizome itself, and without which the rhizome has nothing to grow from, nothing to work against, and no material from which genuine novelty can arise. This argument is developed across three converging domains. In philosophy, Vico's concept of the universale fantastico and Deleuze and Guattari's own account of the milieu are shown to require a theory of the generative ground that their anti-arborescent rhetoric obscures. In physics, the quantum vacuum state — the ground state of maximum potential from which all determinate forms arise through fluctuation — offers a precise structural analogue for what the Zero Spaces framework calls the Classical Ground. In neuroscience and epigenetics, the default mode network and epigenetic inheritance demonstrate that the root is not a fixed biological code but a living, environmentally responsive system that is continuously rewritten by encounter and relation. Together, these three domains converge on a single proposition: that being itself has a root structure that is generative rather than merely foundational — that the imaginary, in Vico's sense, is not a supplement to reality but its most fundamental mode — and that any philosophy of collaborative creativity that abandons the root in favour of the rhizome has abandoned the very ground from which creative emergence is possible.