'The awkward fact', said L. L. Whyte, 'that reason, as we know it, is never aware of its hidden assumptions -- has been too much for some philosophers, and even many scientists to admit.' [33] One of the philosophers who saw this clearly was Wittgenstein: 'Propositions cannot represent the logical form: this mirrors itself in the propositions. That which mirrors itself in language, language cannot represent. That which expresses itself in language, we cannot represent.' [34]
The prejudices and impurities which have become incorporated into the verbal concepts of a given 'universe of discourse' cannot be undone by any amount of discourse within the frame of reference of that universe. The rules of the game, however absurd, cannot be altered by playing that game. Among all forms of mentation, verbal thinking is the most articulate, the most complex, and the most vulnerable to infectious diseases. It is liable to absorb whispered suggestions, and to incorporate them as hidden persuaders into the code. Language can become a screen which stands between the thinker and reality. This is the reason why true creativity often starts where language ends.
NOTES
To p. 157. Zen philosophy, in the form in which it is taught by its contemporary propounders (foremost among them Prof. D. T. Suzuki and his Western disciples), is a welter of confusions, derived from the failure to discriminate between automatized skills and creative originality -- between the 'downward' and the 'upward' traffic to and from the unconscious. The former results in getting the 'knack' of a skill; the latter in the sudden flash of a new insight (the 'It'). The practitioner of the various applied Zen arts was trained to act 'spontaneously, unthinkingly' -- and this led to the added confusion between the pseudo-spontaneity displayed by the responses of a well-oiled automaton, and the genuine spontaneity of original inspiration. (Cf. 'The It and the Knack', pp. 260 seq., in my The Lotus and the Robot, 1960).
To p. 166. Less understandable is the case of Spearman, who wrote a book on the Creative Mind (1930) with only passing mention of unconscious processes, the main reference being a sneer at Freud's preoccupation with 'subconscious bestiality'. This was written when Spearman was Professor of Psychology at the University of London.
To p. 172. The exceptions were G. D. Birkhoff, Norbert Wiener (who said that 'he happens to think with or without words'), and G. Polya.
VIII
UNDERGROUND GAMES
The Importance of Dreaming
To recapitulate: ordered, disciplined thought is a skill governed by set rules of the game, some of which are explicitly stated, others implied and hidden in the code. The creative act, in so far as it depends on unconscious resources, presupposes a relaxing of the controls and a regression to modes of ideation which are indifferent to the rules of verbal logic, unperturbed by contradiction, untouched by the dogmas and taboos of so-called common sense. At the decisive stage of discovery the codes of disciplined reasoning are suspended -- as they are in the dream, the reverie, the manic flight of thought, when the stream of ideation is free to drift, by its own emotional gravity, as it were, in an apparently 'lawless' fashion.
The laws of disciplined thinking demand that we should stick to a given frame of reference and not shift from one universe of discourse to another. When I am arguing about Richard III and somebody quotes 'my kingdom for a horse' I am not supposed to shift my attention to my chances of drawing a winner in the Grand National, however tempting it may be. The strain of concentrating on an abstract subject derives mainly from the effort to inhibit emotionally more tempting associations outside of its field. But when concentration flags and primitive motivations take over, thought will shift from one matrix to another, like a ball bouncing down a mountain stream, each time an idea (like 'horse' in the above example) provides a link to a more attractive context.
We might say that while dreaming we constantly bisociate in a passive way -- by drift as it were; but we are, of course, unaware of it because the coherence of the logical matrices is weakened, and the codes which govern them are dormant. Hence, while dreaming, we do not realize their incompatability; there is no simultaneous juxtaposition of matrices, no awareness of conflict and incongruity; that comes only on awakening. To put it in another way: the dream associates by methods which are impermissible in the waking state -- such as affinities of sound detached from meaning, and similarities of form regardless of function. It makes use of 'links' which, while awake we 'would not dream' of using -- except where dream-logic intrudes into humour, discovery, and art.
It is not surprising, then, that we find all the bisociative patterns that I have discussed prominently displayed in the dream: the pun: two strings of thought tied together by a purely accoustic knot; the optical pun: one visual form bisociated with two functional contexts; the phenomenon of displacement or shift of attention to a previously unnoticed feature; the concretization of abstract and general ideas in a particular image; and vice versa, the use of concrete images as symbols for nascent, unverbalized concepts; the condensation in the same link-idea of several associative contexts; the unearthing of hidden analogies; impersonation and double identity -- being oneself and something else at the same time, where the 'something else' might belong to the animal, vegetable, or mineral kingdom. The ensemble of these and related operations constitutes the grammar and logic of dream-cognition. To go on with the list would be tedious, the more so as the categories overlap; but one more trick ought to be added to the repertory: the occasional reversal of causal sequences. This, however, is putting the phenomenon into over-concrete terms, since 'causality' (together with space, time, matter, identity, etc.) appear in the dream in a semi-fluid shape like a half-melted snowman; yet even a snowman may be standing on his head. Lastly, I must mention the obvious fact of the dreamer's extreme gullibility. Hamlet's cloud merely resembles a camel, weasel, or whale; to the dreamer the cloud actually becomes a camel, a weasel, or whale -- without his turning a hair.
A child, watching a television thriller with flushed face and palpitating heart, praying that the hero should realize in time the deadly trap set for him, is at the same time aware that the hero is a shadow on the screen. A day-dreamer -- like Thurber's Walter Mitty -- is aware of the fantasies which he creates for his own benefit; but also aware, though less intensely so, of the fact that he is creating them. He lives, like the spectator in front of the screen, on two different levels, simultaneously or in quick alternations -- by mental quantum-jumps, as it were. If he settles for a single level then either the illusion ceases to function -- or it grows into hallucinatory delusion.
The dream occupies a privileged position among these ambiguous mental states; privileged, in that it is included in the normal daily cycle in spite of -- or because of -- its pronounced hallucinatory, 'abnormal' character. Dreaming is distinguished from other delusionary states by being transitory, easily interrupted, and by being confined to the 'inner landscape', by a more or less complete shuttering of the senses (whereas in pathological states the senses may continue to function, but perception may be perverted). On the other hand, dreaming is distinguished from day-dreaming in that the dreamer is aware of the fantasies which he creates, but unaware of the fact that he is creating them. He is the spectator passively watching the sequence of images on one level, which he actively produces on another; he is the cinema operator who works the projection machine, and the audience at the same time. But while the spectacle on the screen is visible, the operator is not. He operates in complete darkness, and there is a good reason for it: the production is frequently childish, obscene, confusing, an affront to logic and common sense.
There is no need to emphasize, in this century of Freud and Jung, that the logic of the dream is not the logic of Aristotle; that it derives from the magic type of causation found in primitive societies and the fantasies of childhood; that it is indifferent to the laws of identity and contradiction; that the dream's reasoning is guided by emotion, its morality blush-making, its symbolism pre-verbal and archaic. If these ancient codes which govern the games of the dreamer were
allowed to operate in the waking state they would play havoc with civilized adult behaviour; they must be kept underground.
But these underground, in normal states subconscious, levels or planes in the hierarchy of mental functions must not be confused with the linear scale of awareness ( pp. 154-7). The latter forms a continuous gradient from focal awareness, through peripheral awareness to unawareness of a given event; whereas the levels of the mental hierarchy form quasi-parallel (or concentric) layers, which are discontinuous, and are under normal conditions kept separate, as waking is from dreaming. The codes which govern organic activities, automatized habits, and routine skills, function unawares because they are either inborn or have been mastered by practice; the 'underground' codes function underground because they have been superseded by the codes of rational thinking. In the first case we see the working of mental economy; in the second, of mental evolution. Automatized codes serve the maintenance of normal functioning; underground codes disrupt routine in a creative or destructive sense. We are concerned with the creative aspect only; but I should mention in passing that the underground layers of the mental hierarchy must not be confused with 'repressed complexes'. The latter form a special category within the much broader realm of subconscious phenomena. Complexes originate in traumatic experiences; the underground games of the mind reflect the facts of mental evolution.
The levels of mental organization have been compared to the archaeological strata of ancient and prehistoric civilizations, buried, but not irretrievably, under our contemporary towns. The analogy is Freud's [1] but I would like to carry it one step further. Imagine for a moment that all important written records and monuments pre-dating the Industrial Revolution have been destroyed by some catastrophe like the burning down of the library in Alexandria; and that knowledge of the past could be obtained only by archaeological excavations. Without digging into the undergound strata, modern society, ignorant of the culture of the Renaissance, of Antiquity, Prehistory, and the Age of the Dinosaurs, would be reduced to an unimaginably superficial, two-dimensional existence: a species without a past and probably -- for lack of comparative values -- without much future. An individual deprived of his dreams, of irrational impulses, of any form of ideation except articulate verbal thought, would be in much the same position. Dreaming, in the literal and metaphorical sense, seems to be an essential part of psychic metabolism -- as essential as its counterpart, the formation and automatization of habits. Without this daily dip into the ancient sources of mental life we would probably all become desiccated automata. And without the more spectacular exploratory dives of the creative individual, there would be no science and no art.
To sum up, there is a two-way traffic between conscious and unconscious. One traffic stream continually moves in a downward direction: we concentrate on new experiences, arrange them into patterns, develop new observational skills, muscular dexterities, verbal aptitudes; and when these have been mastered by continued practice, the controls are handed over to a kind of automation, and the whole assembly is dispatched, along the gradients of awareness, out of sight. The upward traffic stream moves in the small fluctuating pulses from the unconscious which sustain the dynamic balance of the mind -- and in the rare, sudden surges of creativity, which may lead to a re-structuring of the whole mental landscape.
I have illustrated this upward traffic by a number of examples. In each case the creative act consisted in a new synthesis of previously unconnected matrices of thought; a synthesis arrived at by 'thinking aside', a temporary relinquishing of the rational controls in favour of the codes which govern the underground games of the mind. We have seen that the dream operates with a type of logic which is inadmissible in the waking state, and which, for precisely that reason, proved useful in critical situations where the matrices of conscious thought are blocked. Thus the illogicality and apparent naïveté of visual associations, or the indifference of the dreaming mind to convention and common sense, turned out to be of great value in forging new combinations out of seemingly incompatible contexts. All the bisociative mechanisms of the comic we found in the dream freewheeling as it were, without being harnessed to any obvious rational purpose. But when the whole personality, on all its levels, becomes saturated with the problem in hand during the period of incubation, then the freewheeling machinery too is 'engaged' in its service and goes into action -- not necessarily in the dream, but mostly on some intermediary, part-conscious level.
The examples in previous chapters had been meant to illustrate various aspects of unconscious discovery. In the sections which follow I shall try to show, a little more systematically, how the peculiarities of subconscious ideation, reflected in the dream, facilitate the bisociative click.
Concretization and Symbolization
The sleeper producing a Freudian dream, in which a broomstick represents a phallus, has made an optical pun : he has connected a single visual form with two different functional contexts. The same technique is employed by the caricaturist who equates a nose with a cucumber, the discoverer who sees a molecule as a snake, the poet who compares a lip to a coral. When Jean Cocteau underwent a drug-withdrawal cure, he drew human figures constructed out of the long, thin stalks of opium pipes. William Harvey, watching the exposed heart-valve at work in a living fish, suddenly visualized it as a pump -- but the analogy between the gory mess he actually saw and the neat metallic gadget existed in his mind's eye only.
These, however, are rather dramatic examples. As a rule, visual imagery does not work in such precise fashion. The visualizer rather feels his way around a problem and strokes it with his eye, as it were, trying to fit it into some convincing or elegant shape; he plays around with his vague forms like the couturier with his fabrics, draping and undraping them on the model. Let me call on Einstein once more. We remember that he described the 'physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thoughts' in terms of 'signs and more or less clear images of visual, and some of muscular type'. On another occasion, he described how the basic insight into the relativity of Time, to wit, 'the knowledge that the events which are simultaneous for one observer are not necessarily simultaneous for another', came to him early one morning just as he got out of bed. But that sudden moment of truth had been preceded 'by ten years of contemplation, of considering a paradox which had struck me at the age of sixteen: if I pursue a ray of light with the speed c -- the speed of light in a vacuum' -- I must accept such a ray of light as a stationary, spatially oscillating electro-magnetic field'. [2] In other words, if you travel with the speed of light, you will see no light -- you will be, roughly speaking, in the position of the surf-rider in whose eyes the waves around him form a stationary pattern. Yet -- 'intuitively it seemed clear to me that, judged by such an observer, everything should follow the same laws as for a stationary observer'. [3] In other words, the traveller ought to see the world just as the person sees it who remained at home on earth.
It is of course, not enough to visualize oneself as a passenger riding on a ray of light; and the ride lasted ten years, even for Einstein. But visual thinking enabled him to escape the snares of verbal thought, and to brave the apparent logical contradiction that 'at the same time' for A may mean 'at different times' for B. This apparent contradiction derived from the axiom of absolute time, which had been built into the codes of 'rational' -- meaning post-Newtonian -- thinking about the physical world. In the pre-rational codes of the dream, time is discontinuous, and the sequence of events can be reversed -- as in a film. Needless to say, the relativity of psychological time has nothing to do with the relativity of time in physics. I merely wished to point out that to the visual thinker 'time' loses the awesome, cast-iron character which it automatically assumes in verbal thought. The Theory of Relativity was an affront to conceptualized thinking, but not to visualized thinking.
Let me take a more trivial example: a famous brain-teaser:
One morning, exactly at sunrise, a Buddhist monk began to climb a tall mountain. The narrow path, no mo
re than a foot or two wide, spiralled around the mountain to a glittering temple at the summit. The monk ascended the path at varying rates of speed, stopping many times along the way to rest and to eat the dried fruit he carried with him. He reached the temple shortly before sunset. After several days of fasting and meditation he began his journey back along the same path, starting at sunrise and again walking at variable speeds with many pauses along the way. His average speed descending was, of course, greater than his average climbing speed. Prove that there is a spot along the path that the monk will occupy on both trips at precisely the same time of day. [4]
I used to amuse myself putting this to various friends -- scientists and others. Some chose a mathematical approach; others tried to 'reason it out' -- and came to the conclusion that it would be a most unlikely coincidence for the monk to find himself at the same time of day, on the same spot on the two different occasions. But others -- who evidently belonged to the category of visualizers -- saw the solution in a manner for which the following description of a young woman without any scientitic training is typical:
I tried this and that, until I got fed up with the whole thing, but the image of that monk in his saffron robe walking up the hill kept persisting in my mind. Then a moment came when, super-imposed on this image, I saw another, more transparent one, of the monk walking down the hill, and I realized in a flash that the two figures must meet at some point some time -- regardless at what speed they walk and how often each of them stops. Then I reasoned out what I already knew: whether the monk descends two days or three days later comes to the same; so I was quite justified in letting him descend on the same day, in duplicate so to speak.
The Act of Creation Page 20