The Act of Creation

by Arthur Koestler

  It is the axiomatic belief that the pointers on his dials do not move at random, which makes the readings of his instruments meaningful to the scientist. Though Eddington may have been justified in saying that the dials, in the present state of physics, have no more bearing on reality than telephone numbers, this takes nothing away from the excitement of watching their motions. After all, to the worshipful lover even her telephone number acquires some of the magic attraction of the beloved.

  The sublimation of the self-transcending emotions has transformed 'magic' into 'science'; but there is no hard-and-fast boundary between the two. Unconscious, pre-rational, 'magical' thinking enters both into the creative act and into the beliefs or superstitious of the scientist. As Dubos said, 'the alchemist never entirely ceased to live and function within the academician'. Not only Kepler's astronomy was derived from belief in the Holy Trinity and the Harmony of the Spheres; most of the giants of science were similarly inspired by religious, mystical or transcendental beliefs.

  In Appendix II the reader will find this generalization exemplified by a series of short character-sketches, from Copernicus and Galileo to Franklin, Faraday, Maxwell, Darwin, and Pasteur. I shall close this section with three quotations by men who played decisive parts in shaping the scientific outlook of the twentieth century. The first is Louis Pasteur, who was born a Roman Catholic and remained one throughout his life. At the age of sixty he was elected a member of the Académie Française; the welcoming speech on that ceremonial occasion was made, ironically, by that great and wise agnostic, Ernest Renan. In his reply Pasteur explained that although an inescapable conclusion of thinking, the notion of infinity is incomprehensible to human reason -- indeed more incomprehensible than all the miracles of religion: 'I see everywhere in the world the inevitable expression of the concept of infinity. It establishes in the depths of our hearts a belief in the supernatural. The idea of God is nothing more than one form of the idea of infinity. So long as the mystery of the infinite weighs on the human mind, so long will temples be raised to the cult of the infinite, whether God be called Brahmah, Allah, Jehovah or Jesus. . . . The Greeks understood the mysterious power of the hidden side of things. They bequeathed to us one of the most beautiful words in our language-the word 'enthusiasm' -- en theos -- a god within. The grandeur of human actions is measured by the inspiration from which they spring. Happy is he who bears a god within -- an ideal of beauty and who obeys it, an ideal of art, of science. All are lighted by reflection from the infinite.'

  The second quotation is from Einstein who, when questioned about his own religious views, described them as 'what in ordinary terms one would call pantheistic'. On another occasion he talked of 'cosmic religiousness':

  . . . I maintain that cosmic religiousness is the strongest and most noble driving force of scientific research. Only the man who can conceive the gigantic effort and above all the devotion, without which original scientific thought cannot succeed, can measure the strength of the feeling from which alone such work . . . can grow. What a deep belief in the intelligence of Creation and what longing for understanding, even if only ofa meagre reflection in the revealed intelligence of this world, must have flourished in Kepler and Newton, enabling them as lonely men to unravel over years of work the mechanism of celestial mechanics. . . . Only the man who devotes his life to such goals has a living conception of what inspired these men and gave them strength to remain steadfast in their aims in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religiousness that bestows such strength. A contemporary has said, not unrightly, that the serious research scholar in our generally materialistic age is the only deeply religious human being. [9]

  And lastly here is Bertrand Russell, writing at the age of eighty-nine:

  I must, before I die, find some means of saying the essential thing which is in me, which I have not yet said, a thing which is neither love nor hate nor pity nor scorn but the very breath of life, shining and coming from afar, which will link into human life the immensity, the frightening, wondrous and implacable forces of the non-human. [10]

  From the Pythagoreans onward, through the Renaissance to our times, the oceanic feeling, the sense of participation in the mystery of the infinite, was the principal inspiration of that winged and flat-footed creature, the scientist.

  The Boredom of Science

  We have seen earlier on ( pp. 87-89) that the emotional reaction which follows the act of discovery is a complex one, reflecting the complexity of the motivational drive. There is the sudden explosion of tension, which has become redundant and must somehow be worked off in gestures or shouts of jubilation -- an overflow-reaction continuous with laughter, but of a more individual character because derived from a more sublimated kind of emotion. Concurrent with it, there is pure intellectual delight, the peaceful catharsis of the self-transcending emotions. The first is derived from the fact that 'I' made a discovery -- the second from the fact that a discovery has been made, another glimpse of the truth revealed.

  Let me now turn from the creative person's emotional reactions to those of the audience, to the 'consumer's' point of view. Whether he listens to a joke, or reads a scientific work, or visits an art gallery, he is supposed to participate in the intellectual and emotional experiences of the 'producer' -- to relive or re-create them. The bond between them is the need for social communication. The consumer hopes that by being allowed to share the creator's vision he will gain a deeper and broader view of reality. The producer has an urge to share his own experience with others -- to win accomplices to his malice, partners in understanding, resonance for his emotions. In order to succeed, however, he must use appropriate techniques. In Chapter III (pp. 82-86) I have discussed certain criteria by which to judge the impact of comic inventions -- originality, emphasis, and economy. Are these criteria of any value when applied to scientific discovery?

  The importance of originality is self-evident. Selective emphasis on one particular aspect of reality, with its concommitant exaggerations and simplifications is, as we saw, the essence of model-making, and plays almost as great a part in the changing fashions and 'schools' in science as in art. Economy enters in various ways -- from Occam's razor and the satisfaction derived from an 'elegant' solution to various techniques of enticing the audience in the lecture-room into an imaginative, re-creative effort.

  It is generally supposed that in this respect the creative scientist and his audience are at a disadvantage. In contrast to the artist, the scientist is not supposed to appeal to emotions, and the student of science not to be guided by them. But we have seen that the equation of science with logic and reason, of art with intuition and emotion, is a blatant popular fallacy. No discovery has even been made by logical deduction; no work of art produced without calculating craftsmanship; the emotive games of the unconscious enter into both.

  The aesthetic satisfaction derived from an elegant mathematical demonstration, a cosmological theory, a map of the human brain, or an ingenious chess problem, may equal that of any artistic experience -- given a certain connoisseurship. But connoisseurship is equally required for the true appreciation of any but the most vulgar forms of art; and particularly for ancient, alien, and 'modern' art. However, the absurd division of our society into 'two cultures' produced the paradoxical phenomenon that the average educated person will be reluctant to admit that a work of art is beyond the level of his comprehension; but he will in the same breath and with a certain pride confess his complete ignorance of the principles which make his radio work, the forces which make the stars go round, the factors which determine the heredity of his children, and the location of his own viscera and glands.

  One of the consequences of this attitude is that he utilizes the products of science and technology in a purely possessive, exploitive manner without comprehension or feeling. His relationship to the objects of his daily use, the tap which supplies his bath, the pipes which keep him warm, the switch which turns on the light -- in a word, to the environment in which he lives, is i
mpersonal and possessive -- like the capitalist's attitude to his bank account, not the art collector's to his treasures which he cherishes because he 'understands' them, because he has a participatory relationship to them. Modern man lives isolated in his artificial environment, not because the artificial is evil as such, but because of his lack of comprehension of the forces which make it work -- of the principles which relate his gadgets to the forces of nature, to the universal order. It is not central heating which makes his existence 'unnatural', but his refusal to take an interest in the principles behind it. By being entirely dependent on science, yet closing his mind to it, he leads the life of an urban barbarian.

  The historical causes which led to the split between the two cultures are outside the scope of this book; but I must mention one specific factor which is largely responsible for turning science into a bore, and providing the humanist with an excuse for turning his back on it. It is the academic cant, of relatively recent origin, that a self-respecting scientist must be a bore, that the more dehydrated the style of his writing, and the more technical the jargon he uses, the more respect he will command. I repeat, this is a recent fashion, less than a century old, but its effect is devastating. The pre-Socratics frequently wrote their treatises in verse; the ancient Peruvian language had a single word -- hamavec -- for both poet and inventor. Galileo's Dialogues and polemical writings were literary masterpieces which had a lasting influence on the development of Italian didactic prose; Kepler's New Astronomy is a baroque tale of suspense; Vesalius' Anatomy was illustrated by a pupil of Titian. Even the abstract symbol language of the mathematicians lent itself to works of art. As the great Boltzmann wrote: 'A mathematician will recognize Cauchy, Gauss, Jacobi, or Helmholtz, after reading a few pages, just as musicians recognize, from the first few bars, Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert.' And Jeans compared Maxwell's physics with an enchanted fairyland where no one knew what was coming next.

  I have given samples of Pasteur's and Poincaré's style; Franklin was an accomplished stylist; Maxwell wrote commendably funny,* and Erasmus Darwin unintentionally funny verse; as for William James, I must confess that I find his style far more enjoyable than his brother Henry's. In our present century Eddington, Jeans, Freud, Kretschmer, Whitehead, Russell, Schrödinger, to mention only a few, gave convincing proof that works on science can at the same time be works of literary art. (One could also quote works by literary and art critics as pedantic and desiccated as papers in a technical journal for applied chemistry.) Needless to say, technical communications addressed to specialists must employ technical language; but even here the overloading with jargon, the tortuous and cramped style, are largely a matter of conforming to fashion.

  The same inhuman -- in fact anti-humanistic -- trend pervades the climate in which science is taught, the classrooms and the textbooks. To derive pleasure from the art of discovery, as from the other arts, the consumer -- in this case the student -- must be made to re-live, to some extent, the creative process. In other words, he must be induced, with proper aid and guidance, to make some of the fundamental discoveries of science by himself, to experience in his own mind some of those flashes of insight which have lightened its path. This means that the history of science ought to be made an essential part of the curriculum, that science should be represented in its evolutionary context -- and not as a Minvera born fully armed. It further means that the paradoxes, the 'blocked matrices' which confronted Archimedes, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Harvey, Darwin, Einstein should be reconstructed in their historical setting and presented in the form of riddles -- with appropriate hints -- to eager young minds. The most productive form of learning is problem-solving (Book Two, XIII-XIX). The traditional method of confronting the student not with the problem but with the finished solution, means depriving him of all excitement, to shut off the creative impulse, to reduce the adventure of mankind to a dusty heap of theorems.

  Art is a form of communication which aims at eliciting a re-creative echo. Education should be regarded as an art, and use the appropriate techniques of art to call forth that echo. The novice, who has gone through some of the main stages in the evolution of the race during his prenatal development, and of the evolution from savage to civilized society by the time he reaches adolescence, should then be made to continue his curriculum by re-capitulating some of the decisive episodes, impasses, and turning points on the road to the conquest of knowledge. Our textbooks and methods of teaching reflect a static, pre-evolutionary concept of the world. For man cannot inherit the past; he has to re-create it.

  Summary

  The scientist's motivational drive is a blend of passions in which both the self-asserting and self-transcending tendencies participate -- symbolized by the Mad Professor and the Benevolent Magician of folklore. It is, however, a blend in which both tendencies are sublimated and balance each other. This development is already foreshadowed in the exploratory behaviour of clever animals. When Köhler's chimpanzee Sultan discovered, after many unsuccessful efforts, that he could rake the banana into the cage by fitting two short hollow sticks into each other, his motivation was obviously to get at the banana. But his new discovery 'pleased him so immensely' that he kept repeating the trick and forgot to eat the banana (for similar observations, see Book Two, VIII). If Archimedes was originally motivated by the desire to obtain money or favours from the tyrant of Syracuse, his jubilant shout was certainly not due to anticipation of the reward.

  Ambition, greed, vanity can enter the service of creativity only through indirect channels; and the self-transcending emotions must undergo a similar process of sublimation from mystic immersion in the harmony of the spheres to the scrupulous attention paid to eight minutes arc. The process is reflected in the gradual transformation of magic into science.

  The creative achievements of the scientist lack the 'audience appeal' of the artist's for several reasons briefly mentioned -- technical jargon, antiquated teaching methods, cultural prejudice. The boredom created by these factors has accentuated the artificial frontiers between continuous domains of creativity.

  NOTE

  To page 265: See Appendix II, p. 691.

  PART THREE

  THE ARTIST

  A. THE PARTICIPATORY EMOTIONS

  XII

  THE LOGIC OF THE MOIST EYE

  Laughter and Weeping

  The classic responses to comedy and tragedy are laughter and weeping. Both are overflow channels for the disposal of emotions; luxury reflexes without apparent utility. This much they have in common; in other respects they are direct opposites.

  There is a vast literature on the psychology of laughter, but hardly any on the psychology of weeping.* The theory of the comic which I have proposed, however controversial, can at least be judged in the light of earlier theories on similar or opposite lines; where weeping is concerned we are on virgin territory. This indifference towards the manifestation of emotions in weeping (which is after all neither an uncommon nor a trivial phenomenon) is in itself symptomatic of the contemporary trend in psychology -- about which later.

  Weeping and crying confront us with an even more confusing variety of expressions than laughter. There are variations in intensity; in mood; in spontaneity. The bawling of a spoilt child, the contrived sobs of public or private stagecraft are secondary derivatives which distort the original pattern; cultural restraints and social infection are further superimpositions on it. We must disregard these adventitious elements and concentrate on spontaneous weeping in its pure form, as an automatic 'reflex' (see pp. 28-29).

  The first step is to distinguish between weeping and crying -- it is a peculiarity of the English language to treat them as synonyms. Weeping has two basic reflex-characteristics which are found in all its varieties: the overflow of the tear-glands and a specific form of breathing. These vary in intensity from a mere moistening of the eye and 'catching one's breath' (or feeling 'a lump in the throat') to a profusion of tears accompanied by convulsive sobbing; just as laughter varies in in
tensity from smiling to convulsions. Crying, on the other hand, is the emitting of sounds signalling distress, protest, or some other emotion. It may be combined with, or alternate with, weeping. Frequently when a child, or a depressed patient, is said to be 'crying his head off' his eyes are in fact dry: he is not weeping. On the other hand, when your char-lady has a 'good cry' at the movies, she isn't crying at all but weeping. Crying is a form of communication (even if the audience is only imagined); weeping is not.

  Let me now compare the external manifestations -- bodily changes -- in weeping and in laughter. In weeping, the eyes are 'blinded' by tears: they lose their focus and lustre. The laugher's eyes sparkle, the corners are wrinkled, but brow and cheeks are taut and smooth, which lends the face an expression of radiance; the lips are parted, the corners lifted. In weeping, the features crinkle and crumple; even when weeping for joy or in aesthetic rapture, the transfigured face reflects a serene languidness.

  The breathing pattern in weeping is a series of short, deep, gasping inspirations, i.e. sobs, followed by long, sighing expirations, with the glottis partially closed -- the lump in the throat. This is the exact opposite of the breathing pattern of laughter with its bursts of expiratory puffs -- sobs in reverse, followed by long, deep intakes -- reversed sighs. A prolonged, violent fit of laughter, however, may produce the sobbing type of respiration as an after-effect -- a phenomenon which strengthens the hypothesis (see below) that laughter and crying are mediated by rival branches of the autonomous nervous system -- the first being sympathicotonic, the second vagotonic.