The Act of Creation

by Arthur Koestler

  Similar considerations apply -- and will be discussed in Part III -- to rhythm, metre, alliteration, assonance, rhyme. The rhythmic beat, echoing the shaman's tom-tom, awakens archaic resonances and 'lulls the mind into a waking trance' (Yeats). The rhyme appeals to the tendency to vocal repetition in the language of primitives and children (kala-kala, ma-ma), and to the equally deep-rooted tendency to associate by sound -- punning. To conclude this anticipatory excursion: the creative activity of the artist involves momentary regressions to earlier stages in mental evolution, bringing forms of mentation into play which otherwise manifest themselves only in the dream or dreamlike states.

  The Word and the Vision

  Let us return from poets to scientists, and to the question what guidance the latter could possibly derive from the intervention of unconscious processes. The answer which, by analogy, now suggests itself is that the temporary relinquishing of conscious controls liberates the mind from certain constraints which are necessary to maintain the disciplined routines of thoughts but may become an impediment to the creative leap; at the same time other types of ideation on more primitive levels of mental organization are brought into activity . The first part of this sentence indicates an act of abdication, the second an act of promotion. It will be useful to remember this dual aspect of the Eureka act; it will be seen, later on, to correspond to the destructive-constructive character of all great revolution in the history of thought.

  The scientific counterpart of the Coleridge episode is the Kekul´ episode ( p. 118). But the vision of the serpent biting its tail was only the last one in a series, which extended over a period of seven or eight years. This is how Kekulé described one of the early but decisive quasi-hallucinations, which led to his theory of molecular constitution -- he was then living in London:

  'One fine summer evening,' he relates, 'I was returning by the last omnibus, outside as usual, through the deserted streets of the metropolis, which are at other times so full of life. I fell into a reverie, and lo! the atoms were gambolling before my eyes. Whenever, hitherto, these diminutive beings had appeared to me, they had always been in motion; but up to that time, I had never been able to discern the nature of their motion. Now, however, I saw how, frequently, two smaller atoms united to form a pair; how a larger one embraced two smaller ones; how still larger ones kept hold of three or even four of the smaller; whilst the whole kept whirling in a giddy dance. I saw how the larger ones formed a chain . . . I spent part of the night putting on paper at least sketches of these dream forms. [23]

  The whirling, giddy vision reminds one of the hallucinations of schizophrenics, as painted or described by them. Kekulé's case is rather exceptional, but nevertheless characteristic in one respect: the sudden abdication of conceptual thought in favour of semi-conscious visual conceits.

  Another example is Michael Faraday, one of the greatest physicists of all time, who also was a 'visionary' not only in the metaphorical but in the literal sense. He saw the stresses surrounding magnets and electric currents as curves in space, for which he coined the name 'lines of forces', and which, in his imagination, were as real as if they consisted of solid matter. He visualized the universe patterned by these lines -- or rather by narrow tubes through which all forms of 'ray-vibrations' or energy-radiations are propagated. This vision of curved tubes which 'rose up before him like things' proved of almost incredible fertility: it gave birth to the dynamo and the electric motor; it led Faraday to discard the ether, and to postulate that light was electro-magnetic radiation. Perhaps the most remarkable fact about Fanday is that he lacked any mathematical education or gift, and was 'ignorant of all but the merest elements of arithmetic'; and mathematics is of course regarded as an indispensable tool of the physicist. In his Faraday memorial lecture in 1881, von Helmholz -- himself one of the greatest mathematical physicists of the century -- remarked:

  It is in the highest degree astonishing to see what a large number of general theorems, the methodical deduction of which requires the highest powers of mathematical analysis, he found by a kind of intuition, with the security of instinct, without the help of a single mathematical formula. [24]

  Kekulé's visions resemble hallucinatory flights; Faraday's, the stable delusional systems of paranoia. Kekulé's serpent reminds one of paintings by Blake; the curves of force which crowd Faraday's universe recall the vortices in Van Gogh's skies.

  Around fifty -- like Newton, and at the same age -- Faraday had a nervous breakdown. He had always hated writing letters and had stopped lecturing; now he seemed to have developed an abhorrence of language itself: 'This is to declare in the present instance, when I say I am not able to bear much talking, it means really, and without any mistake, or equivocation or oblique meaning, or implication, or subterfuge, or omission, that I am not able, being at present rather weak in the head and able to work no more.' [25] Distrust of words is a trait often found among those who create with their eyes.

  Let us leave the borderlands of pathology. Nobody could have been further removed from it than the mild, sober, and saintly Einstein. Yet we find in him the same distrust of conscious conceptual thought, and the same reliance on visual imagery. In 1945 an inquiry was organized among eminent mathematicians in America to find out their working methods. In reply to the questionnaire which was sent to him, Einstein wrote:

  The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be 'voluntarily' reproduced and combined. . . . . . . Taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought -- before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others. The above-mentioned elements are, in any case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will. According to what has been said, the play with the mentioned elements is aimed to be analogous to certain logical connections one is searching for. In a stage when words intervene at all, they are, in my case, purely auditive, but they interfere only in a secondary stage as already mentioned. [26]

  The inquiry was organized by Jacques Hadamard, whom I have repeatedly quoted, since he is to my knowledge the only mathematician who has made a systematic research into the psychology of mathematical creation. Of himself he said:

  I distinctly belong to the auditory type; and precisely on that account my mental pictures are exclusively visual. The reason for that is quite clear to me: such visual pictures are more naturally vague, as we have seen it to be necessary in order to lead me without misleading me.

  He summed up the results of the inquiry as follows:

  Among the mathematicians born or resident in America . . . phenomena are mostly analogous to those which I have noticed in my own case. Practically all of them . . . avoid not only the use of mental words but also, just as I do, the mental use of algebraic or any other precise signs; also as in my case, they use vague images. . . . * The mental pictures . . . are most frequently visual, but they may also be of another kind, for instance, kinetic. There can also be auditive ones, but even these . . . quite generally keep their vague character. [27]

  It rather sounds as if mathematical discoveries were born out of the airy nothings of A Midsummer Night's Dream:

  . . . as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.

  The inquiry brought conclusive proof that among mathematicians, verbal thinking plays only a subordinate part in the decisive phase of the creative act; and there is a mass of evidence to show that this is also the rule among original thinkers in other branches of science.

  This is a rather startling discovery in view of the fact
that language is the proudest possession of homo sapiens, and the very foundation on which mental evolution could build. 'Logic' derives from logos, which originally meant 'language', 'thought', and 'reason', all in one. Thinking in concepts emerged out of thinking in images through the slow development of the powers of abstraction and symbolization, as the phonetic script emerged by similar processes out of pictorial symbols and hieroglyphs. Most of us were brought up in the belief that 'thinking' is synonymous with verbal thinking, and philosophers from Athens to Oxford have kept reasserting this belief. The early Behaviourists went even further, asserting not only that words are indispensable to thought, but also that thinking is nothing more than the subliminal movements of the vocal chords, an inaudible whispering to oneself. Yet if all thinking were verbal thinking Einstein would not qualify as a thinker. In fact, the whole evidence points in the opposite direction, summed up in a single sentence in Woodworth's classic textbook of experimental psychology: 'Often we have to get away from speech in order to think clearly.' And we heard one testimony after another from great scientists, which show that in order to create they had to regress at times from the word to the picture-strip, from verbal symbolism to visual symbolism -- some, like Einstein, even to the kinesthetic sensation of muscle-motions. The word 'regression' is appropriate, because the high aesthetic value which we put on visual imagery should not obscure the fact that as vehicles of thought, pictorial and other non-verbal representations are indeed earlier, both phylogenetically and ontogenetically older forms of ideation, than verbal thinking. Kekulé's 'Let us dream, gentlemen', is an invitation to regression and retreat -- but a regression which prepares the forward leap, a reculer pour mieux sauter.

  The Snares of Language

  The necessity for this retreat derives from the fact that words are a blessing which can turn into a curse. They crystallize thought; they give articulation and precision to vague images and hazy intuitions. But a crystal is no longer a fluid. 'Language is not only the foundation for the whole faculty of thinking, but the central point also from which proceed the misunderstandings of reason by herself.' [28] This was written by Hamman, a Geman philosopher of the eighteenth century, who had a great influence on Goethe. Roman Jakobson, a contemporary linguist -- to quote one among many -- voices the same ancient doubt:

  Signs are a necessary support of thought. For socialized thought (stage of communication) and for the thought which is being socialized (stage of formulation), the most usual system of signs is language properly called; but internal thought especially when creative, willingly uses other systems of signs which are more flexible, less standardized than language and leave more liberty, more dynamism to creative thought. [29]

  The vital importance of language as a thought-crystallizer was perfectly described by little Alice who, on being admonished to think carefully before she spoke, indignantly exclaimed:. 'How can I know what I think till I see what I say?' For it is, of course, undeniable that in some forms of intellectual activity language is not only an indispensable tool, but that the stream of language actually carries the thought, so that the processes of ideation and verbal formulation become indistinguishable. The same applies to certain phases in the poet's and writer's work; but only to certain phases. The counterpart to the little girl's predicament is the little boy's who said: 'I see what I mean but I don't know how to say it.'

  Not only scientists, painters, and musicians find it often difficult to convert their ideas into verbal currency, but writers too. Even H. G. Wells lamented: 'The forceps of our minds are clumsy things and crush the truth a little in the course of taking hold of it.' The novelist suffers -- among other things -- from the poverty of his vocabulary when he tries to describe what his characters feel (as distinct from what they think or do). He can write streams of what goes on in the cranial cavity, but if it is a pain in the abdominal cavity, all he can say is, 'it hurts' -- or use some equally insipid synonym. Suffering is 'dumb'; the glandular and visceral processes which colour emotion do not lend themselves to verbal articulation.

  The scientist's trouble with language is of a different nature. He suffers not from the poverty of his verbal tools but rather from their over-precision, and the hidden snares in them.

  Take, for example, the deceptively simple words 'Space' and 'Time'. Before the dawn of the scientific revolution, medieval man lived in a closed universe with firm boundaries in space and time -- a few million miles in diameter, and a few thousand years of duration. Space taken in itself, as an abstract concept, did not exist; it was merely an attribute of material bodies -- their length, width, and depth; empty space was unthinkable, a contradiction in terms; and infinite space even more so. Time, similarly, was simply the duration of an event. Nobody in his senses would have said that things move through space or in time -- how can a thing move in or through an attribute of itself?

  The over-precise meaning which these words carried had ensnared scientific thought from Aristotle to the Renaissance. Even Galileo still believed that a heavenly body, left to itself, would for ever continue to move in a circular path, because a straight line would carry it towards infinity -- which was unthinkable. And when he noticed that two polished marble slabs stuck to each other with astonishing strength, he ascribed this to nature's horror of empty space which would be created at the moment of their separation -- and thus failed to discover the phenomenon of surface-adherence.

  The first thaw of these frozen word-crystals occurred in 1277, when a council of theologians in Paris condemned the Aristotelian doctrine that even God could not create empty or infinite space. Thus both empty space and infinite space became at least thinkable -- which previously they had not been. A few unorthodox thinkers did in fact speculate about them; yet it took another four centuries until Space and Time acquired a new meaning in the Newtonian universe.

  For the next two hundred years after Newton Space meant the rigid three-dimensional frame of the universe, which remained at rest; so that the motion of a boat sailing up a river was relative measured against the water or coast, but absolute motion measured against the frame of Space. Time had an equally absolute nature; and that is what to most of us the words Space and Time still mean -- except in our dreams, when the rigid, Newtonian framework breaks down.

  Einstein could never have transformed man's view of the universe, had he accepted those two words as ready-made tools. 'When I asked myself', he confided to a friend, 'how it happened that I in particular discovered the Relativity Theory, it seemed to lie in the following circumstance. The normal adult never bothers his head about space-time problems. Everything there is to be thought about, in his opinion, has already been done in early childhood. I, on the contrary, developed so slowly that I only began to wonder about space and time when I was already grown up. In consequence I probed deeper into the problem than an ordinary child would have done.' [30] Modesty can hardly be carried further; nor insight put into simpler terms.

  'For me [the Relativity Theory] came as a tremendous surprise', said Minkovsky, who had been one of Einstein's teachers, 'for in his student days Einstein had been a lazy dog. He never bothered about mathematics at all. . . . From now on space in itself and time in itself must sink into the shade and only a union of the two will preserve independence. [31]

  The spelling of the two words had remained the same, but they now signified something quite different from what they had signified before.

  Words are essential tools for formulating and communicating thoughts, and also for putting them into the storage of memory; but words can also become snares, decoys, or strait-jackets. A great number of the basic verbal concepts of science have turned out at various times to be both tools and traps: for instance, 'time', 'space', 'mass', 'force', 'weight', 'ether', 'corpuscle', 'wave', in the physical sciences; ' purpose', ' will', ' sensation', 'consciousness', ' conditioning', in psychology; 'limit', 'continuity', 'countability', 'divisibility', in mathematics. For these were not simple verbal tags, as names attached to particular p
ersons or objects are; they were artificial constructs which behind an innocent facade hid the traces of the particular kind of logic which went into their making. As Sidney Hook has put it: 'When Aristotle drew up his table of categories which to him represented the grammar of existence, he was really projecting the grammar of the Greek language on the cosmos.' [32] That grammar has kept us to this day ensnared in its paradoxes: it made the grandeur and misery of two millennia of European thought. If Western philosophy, to quote Popper, consisted in a series of footnotes to Plato, Western science took a full two thousand years to liberate itself from the hypnotic effect of Aristotle, whose encyclopaedic philosophy penetrated the very structure of our language. It determined not only what was 'science' but also what was 'common sense'. Each of the major break-throughs in scientific thought had to be achieved not only in the teeth of Aristotelian, Platonic, and Christian dogma, but also in the teeth of what appeared to be self-evident and commonsensical -- the implied rules of the code. Each revolution had to make a hole in the established fabric of conceptual thought. Kepler destroyed the 'self-evident' doctrine of uniform circular motion; Galileo the equally commonsense notion that any moving body must have a 'mover' which pulls or pushes it along. Newton, to his horror, had to go against the obvious experience that action is only possible by contact; Rutherford had to commit the contradiction in terms of asserting the divisibility of the atom, which in Greek means 'indivisible'. Einstein destroyed our belief that clocks move at the same rate anywhere in the universe; quantum physics has made the traditional meaning of words like matter, energy, cause and effect, evaporate into thin air.