The Act of Creation

by Arthur Koestler

  The 'mechanical encrusted on the living' symbolizes the contrast between man's spiritual aspirations and his all-too-solid flesh subject to the laws of physics and chemistry. The practical joker and the clown specialize in tricks which exploit the mechanical forces of gravity and inertia to deflate his humanity. But Icarus, too, like the dinner guest whose chair collapsed, is the victim of a practical joke -- the gods, instead of breaking the legs of his chair, have melted away his wings. The second appeals to loftier emotions than the first, but the logical structure of the two situations and their message is the same: whatever you fancy yourself to be you are subject to the inverse square law like any other lump of clay. In one case it is a comic, in the other a tragic message. The difference is due to the different character of the emotions involved (malice in the first case, compassionate admiration in the second); but also to the fact that in the first case the two frames of reference collide, exploding the tension, while in the second they remain juxtaposed in a tragic confrontation, and the tension ebbs away in a slow catharsis. The third alternative is the reconciliation and synthesis of the two matrices; its effect is neither laughter, nor tears, but the arousal of curiosity: just how is the mechanical encrusted on the living? How much acceleration can the organism stand, and how does zero gravity effect it?

  According to Bergson, the main sources of the comic are the mechanical attributes of inertia, rigidity, and repetitiveness impinging on life; among his favourite examples are the man-automaton, the puppet on strings, Jack-in-the-Box, etc. However, if rigidity contrasted with organic suppleness were laughable in itself, Egyptian statues and Byzantine mosaics would be the best jokes ever invented. If automatic repetativeness in human behaviour were a necessary and sufficient condition of the comic, there would be no more amusing spectacle thau an epileptic fit; and if we wanted a good laugh we would merely have to feel a person's pulse or listen to his heart-beat, with its monotonous tick-tack. If 'we laugh each time a person gives us the impression of being a thing' [8] there would be nothing more funny than a corpse.

  In fact, every one of Bergson's examples of the comic can be transposed, along a horizontal line as it were, across the triptych, into the panels of science and art. His 'homme-automate', man and artefact at the same time, has its lyric counterpart in Galatea -- the ivory statue which Pygmalion made, Aphrodite brought to life, and Shaw returned to the comic domain. It has its tragic counterpart in the legends of Faust's Homunculus, the Golem of Prague, the monsters of Frankenstein; its origins reach back to Jehovah manufacturing Adam out of 'adamåh', the Hebrew word for earth. The reverse transformation -- life into mechanism -- has equally rich varieties: the pedant whom enslavement to habit has reduced to an automaton is comic because we despise him; the compulsion-neurotic is not, because we are puzzled and try to understand him; the catatonic patient, frozen into a statue, is tragic because we pity him. And so again back to mythology: Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt, Narcissus into a flower, the poor nymph Echo wasting away until nothing is left but her voice, and her bones changed into rocks.

  In the middle panel of the triptych the 'homme-automate' is the focal, or rather bi-focal, concept of all sciences of life. From their inception they treated, as the practical joker does, man as both mind and machine. The Pythagoreans regarded the body as a musical instrument whose soul-strings must have the right tension, and we still unwittingly refer to our mortal frame as a kind of stringed guitar when we speak of 'muscle tone ', or describe John as 'good tempered'. The same bifocal view is reflected in the four Hippocratic 'humours' -- which were both liquids of the body and moods of the spirit; and 'spiritus' itself is, like 'pneuma', ambiguous, meaning also breath. The concept of 'catharsis' applied, and still does, to the purgation of either the mind or the bowels. Yet if I were to speak earnestly of halitosis of the soul, or of laxatives to the mind, or call an outburst of temper a humourrhage, it would sound ludicrous, because I would make the implicit ambiguities explicit for the purpose of maliciously contrasting them; I would tear asunder two frames of reference that our Greek forbears had managed to integrate, however tentatively, into a unified, psychosomatic view which our language still reflects.

  In modern science it has become accepted usage to speak of the 'mechanisms' of digestion, perception, learning, and cognition, etc., and to lay increasing or exclusive stress on the automaton aspect of the 'homme-automate'. The mechanistic trend in physiology reached its symbolic culmination at the beginning of the century in the slogan 'Man a machine' -- the programmatic title of a once famous book by Jacques Loeb; it was taken over by behaviouristic psychology, which has been prominent in the Anglo-Saxon countries for half a century. Even a genial naturalist like Konrad Lorenz, whose King Solomon's Ring has delighted millions, felt impelled to proclaim that to regard Newton and Darwin as automata was the only permissible view for 'the inductive research worker who does not believe in miracles'. [9] It all depends, of course, on what one's definition of a miracle is: Galileo, the ideal of all 'inductive research workers', rejected Kepler's theory that the tides were due to the moon's attraction as an 'occult fancy'. [10] The intellectual climate created by these attitudes has been summed up by Cyril Burt, writing about 'The Concept of Consciousness' (which behaviourists have banned, as another 'occult fancy', from the vocabulary of science): 'The result, as a cynical onlooker might be tempted to say, is that psychology, having first bargained away its soul and then gone out of its mind, seems now, as it faces an untimely end, to have lost all consciousness.' [11]

  I have dwelt at some length on Bergson's favourite example of the comic, because of its relevance to one of the leitmotifs of this book. The man-machine duality has been epitomized in a laconic sentence -- 'man consists of ninety per cent water and ten per cent minerals' -- which one can regard, according to taste, as comic, intellectually challenging, or tragic. In the first case one has only to think of a caricature showing a fat man under the African sun melting away into a puddle; in the second, of the 'inductive research worker' bent over his test-tube; in the third, of a handful of dust.

  Other examples of Bergson's man-automaton need be mentioned only briefly. The puppet play in its naïve Punch and Judy version is comic ; the sophisticated marionette theatre is a traditional form of art ; life-imitating contraptions are used in various branches of science and technology: from the dummy figures of dressmakers to the anatomical models in medical schools; from the artificial limbs of the orthopaedist to robots imitating the working of the nervous system (such as Grey Walter's electronic tortoises). In the metaphorical sense, the puppet on strings is a timeless symbol, either comic or tragic, of man as a plaything of destiny -- whether he is jerked about by the gods or suspended on his own chromosomes and glands. In the neutral zone between Comedy and tragedy, philosophers have been tireless in their efforts to reconcile the two conflicting aspects of the human puppet: his experience of free will and moral responsibility on the one hand; the strings of determinism, religious or scientific, on the other.

  An extreme variant of the puppet motif is Jack-in-the-Box, symbol of the stubborn, mechanical repetitiveness, but also of the indestructibility, of life. Its opposite number is the legendary monster who instantly grows a new tentacle or head when the hero has cut it off; or the old woman in Raskolnikof's dream who, after each stroke of the axe on her skull, turns round and laughs in his face. In the biological sciences, Jack-in-the-Box is a familiar figure, represented in all processes of the trigger-release type -- the muscle-twitch, the epileptic fit, the 'sign-releasers' of the animal kingdom, whose symbolic message activates the springs of hopping mad or tenderly amorous, innate behaviour patterns.

  NOTES

  To p. 28. 'Wit' stems from witan, understanding; whose roots go back (via videre and [EIDO]) to the Sanskrit veda, knowledge. The German Witz means both joke and acumen; it comes from wissen, to know; Wissenschaft -- science, is a close kin to Fürwitz and Aberwitz -- presumption, cheek, and jest. French teaches the same lesson. Spirituel
may either mean witty or spiritually profound; to amuse comes from to muse (à-muser), and a witty remark is a jeu d'esprit -- a playful, mischievous form of discovery.

  The word 'jester', too, has a respectable ancestry. The chansons de geste played a prominent part in medieval literature from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. They were epics centred on heroic events; their name is derived from the Latin gesta: deeds, exploits. With the coming of the Renaissance, satire tended to replace the epics of chivalry, and in the sixteenth century the heroic 'geste' turned into 'jest'.

  To p. 32. A critical discussion of both theories can be found in Appendix I of Insight and Outlook.

  To p. 40. The choice of the term 'matrix' is less easy to explain. In an earlier version I used 'feeld' and 'framework', but 'field' is too vague, and 'frame' too rigid. 'Matrix' is derived from the Latin for womb and is figurative|y used for any pattern or mould in which things are shaped and developed, or type is cast. Thus the exercise of a habit or skill is 'moulded' by its matrix. In mathematics, matrices are rectangular arrays of numbers capable of all sorts of magic; they can be subjected to various transformations without losing their identity -- i.e. they are both 'flexible' and 'stable'. Also, matrices have a constant attached to them, called their 'determinant', which remains unaffected by any of these transformations. But the analogy between 'determinant' and 'code' is extremely loose and in more than one respect misleading.

  To p. 43. Congenitally blind patients, who acquire vision after surgical operations at a mature age, have great difficulties in recognizing patterns and faces, and in orienting themselves in space. Cf. Senden (1932), quoted by Hebb (1949).

  To p. 44. The dual concepts of matrices and codes were designed with one eye on psychology, the other on physiology. Their theoretical implications in this wider context are discussed in Book Two.

  The reader versed in experimental psychology will have been reminded by now of such old friends from the Würzburg School as Aufgabe, Einstellung, Bewußtseinslage; and of their Anglo-Saxon relatives: determining tendency, expectancy, task, schema and set. He will probably also remember that J. J. Gibson in a famous article (quoted by Humphrey, 1951, p. 105) Listed some forty different meanings in which the word set was used. I hope to show that matrices and codes are concepts at the same time more precise, and of more general validity, than Aufgaben or sets.

  II

  LAUGHTER AND EMOTION

  The sudden bisociation of an idea or event with two habitually incompatible matrices will produce a comic effect, provided that the narrative, the semantic pipeline, carries the right kind of emotional tension. When the pipe is punctured, and our expectations are fooled, the now redundant tension gushes out in laughter, or is spilled in the gentler form of the sou-rire.

  Aggression and Identification

  Laughter, as the cliché has it, is 'liberating', i.e. tension-relieving. Relief from stress is always pleasurable, regardless whether it was caused by hunger, sex, anger, or anxiety. Under ordinary circumstances, such relief is obtained by some purposeful activity which is appropriate to the nature of the tension. When we laugh, however, the pleasurable relief does not derive from a consummatory act which satisfies some specific need. On the contrary: laughter prevents the satisfaction of biological drives, it makes a man equally incapable of killing or copulating; it deflates anger, apprehension, and pride. The tension is not consummated -- it is frittered away in an apparently purposeless reflex, in facial grimaces, accompanied by over-exertion of the breathing mechanism and aimless gestures. To put it the other way round: the sole function of this luxury reflex seems to be the disposal of excitations which have become redundant, which cannot be consummated in any purposeful manner.

  But why has the excitation suddenly become 'redundant'; and why is it discharged in laughter and not, say, in weeping -- which is an equally 'purposeless' activity? The answer to the second half of the question seems obvious: the kind of excitation exploded in laughter has a different quality or chemical composition, as it were, from the emotions which overflow in tears. But the very obviousness of this answer is deceptive, for the attempt to define this difference in 'quality and composition' necessitates a new approach to the theory of human emotions.

  At first sight there seehis to be a bewildering variety of moods involved in different types of humour. The practical joke is frankly aggressive; the lavatory jokes of children are scatological; blue jokes are sexual; the Charles Addams type of cartoon and the 'sick' joke play on feelings of horror and disgust; the satirist on righteous indignation. Moreover, the same type of semantic pipeline can be made to carry different types of fluid under varying degrees of pressure: for instance, 'they haven't got a coat to turn' and 'I never aimed as high as that' are both bisociations of metaphorical and direct meaning -- jokes of the same logical pattern but with different emotional colouring. The more sophisticated forms of humour evoke mixed, and sometimes contradictory, feelings; but whatever the mixture, it must contain one ingredient whose presence is indispensable: an impulse, however faint, of aggression or apprehension. It may be manifested in the guise of malice, derision, the veiled cruelty of condescension, or merely as an absence of sympathy with the victim of the joke -- a 'momentary anaesthesia of the heart', as Bergson put it. I propose to call this common ingredient the 'aggressive-defensive' or 'self-asserting' tendency -- the reasons for choosing this clumsy term will be seen later on. In the subtler types of humour this tendency is so faint and discreet that only careful analysis will detect it, like the presence of salt in a well-prepared dish -- which, however, would be tasteless without it.

  It is the aggressive element, the detached malice of the parodist, which turns pathos into bathos, tragedy into comedy. It may be combined with affection, as in friendly teasing; in civilized humour aggression is sublimated and often unconscious. But in jokes which appeal to children and primitives, cruelty and boastful self-assertion are much in evidence, and the same is true of the historically earlier forms and theories of the comic. 'As laughter emerges with man from the mists of antiquity it seems to hold a dagger in its hand. There is enough brutal triumph, enough contempt, enough striking down from superiority in the records of antiquity and its estimates of laughter to presume that original laughter may have been wholly animosity.' [1] In the Old Testament there are (according to Mitchell [2]) twenty-nine references to laughter, out of which thirteen are linked with scorn, derision, mocking, or contempt, and only two are 'born out of a joyful and merry heart'. A survey among America schoolchildren between the ages of eight and fifteen led to the conclusion (which could hardly have surprised anybody) that 'mortification or discomfort or hoaxing of others very readily caused laughter, while a witty or funny remark often passed unnoticed'. [3]

  Among the theories of laughter that have been proposed since the days of Aristotle, the 'theory of degradation' appears as the most persistent. For Aristotle himself laughter was closely related to ugliness and debasement; for Cicero 'the province of the ridiculous . . . lies in a certain baseness and deformity'; for Descartes laughter is a manifestation of joy 'mixed with surprise or hate or sometimes with both'; in Francis Bacon's list of laughable objects, the first place is taken by 'deformity'. The essence of the 'theory of degradation' is defined in Hobbes's Leviathan:

  The passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from a sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.

  Bain, one of the founders of modern psychology, followed on the whole the same theory: 'Not in physical effects alone, but in everything where a man can achieve a stroke of superiority, in surpassing or discomforting a rival, is the disposition of laughter apparent.' [4]

  For Bergson laughter is the corrective punishment inflicted by society upon the unsocial individual: 'In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour.' [5] Max Beerbohm found 'two elements in the public's humour: delight in suf
fering, contempt for the unfamiliar'. McDougall believed that 'laughter has been evolved in the human race as an antidote to sympathy, a protective reaction shielding us from the depressive influence of the shortcomings of our fellow men.' [6]

  Thus on this one point there is agreement among the theorists, ancient and modern; and not only agreement but exaggeration. One has only to think of Aristophanes or Calderon; A Midsummer Night's Dream or Chateaubriand's Maximes et Pensées, to realize that the aggressive charge detonated in laughter need not be gunpowder; a grain of Attic salt is enough to act as a catalyst. Furthermore, we must remember that aggression and self-defence, rage and fear, hostility and apprehension, are as pairs of twins in their psychology and physiology. One of the typical situations in which laughter occurs is the moment of the sudden cessation of danger, real or imaginary; and rarely is the character of laughter as a discharge-mechanism for redundant tensions more strikingly manifested than in the sudden change of expression on the small child's face from anxious apprehension to the happy laugh of relief.