The Act of Creation

by Arthur Koestler

  When Rembrandt had the audacity to paint the carcass of a flayed ox, he taught his public to see and accept behind the repulsive particular object the timeless patterns of light, shadow, and colour. We have seen that the discoveries of art derive from the sudden transfer of attention from one matrix to another with a higher emotive potential. The intellectual aspect of this Eureka process is closely akin to the scientist's -- or the mystic's -- 'spontaneous illumination': the perception of a familiar object or event in a new, significant, light; its emotive aspect is the rapt stillness of oceanic wonder. The two together -- intellectual illumination and emotional catharsis -- are the essence of the aesthetic experience. The first constitutes the moment of truth; the second provides the experience of beauty. The two are complementary aspects of an indivisible process -- that 'earthing' process where 'the infinite is made to blend itself with the finite, to stand visible, as it were, attainable there' (Carlyle).

  Every scientific discovery gives rise, in the connoisseur, to the experience of beauty, because the solution of the problem creates harmony out of dissonance; and vice versa, the experience of beauty can occur only if the intellect endorses the validity of the operation -- whatever its nature -- designed to elicit the experience. A virgin by Botticelli, and a mathematical theorem by Poincaré, do not betray any similarity between the motivations or aspirations of their respective creators; the first seemed to aim at 'beauty', the second at 'truth'. But it was Poincaré who wrote that what guided him in his unconscious gropings towards the 'happy combinations' which field new discoveries was 'the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of number, of forms, of geometric elegance. This is a true aesthetic feeling that all mathematicians know.' The greatest among mathematicians and scientists, from Kepler to Einstein, made similar confessions. 'Beauty is the first test; there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics', wrote G. H. Hardy in his classic, A Mathematician's Apology. Jacques Hadamard, whose pioneer work on the psychology of invention I have quoted, drew the final conclusion: 'The sense of beauty as a "drive" for discovery in our mathematical field, seems to be almost the only one.' And the laconic pronouncement of Dirac, addressed to his fellow-physicists, bears repeating: 'It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment.'

  If we now turn to the opposite camp, we find that painters and sculptors, not to mention architects, have always been guided, and often obsessed, by scientific and pseudo-scientific theories -- the golden section, the secrets of perspective, Dürer's and Leonardo's 'ultimate laws' of proportion,* Cézanne's doctrine 'everything in nature is modelled on the sphere, the cone and the cylinder'; Braque's substitution of cubes for spheres; the elaborate theorizings of the neo-impressionists; Le Corbusier's modulator theory based on the so-called Fibonacci sequence of numbers -- the list could be continued endlessly. The counterpart to A Mathematician's Apology, which puts beauty before rational method, is Seurat's pronouncement (in a letter to a friend): 'They see poetry in what I have done. No, I apply my method, and that is all there is to it.'

  Both sides seem to be leaning over backwards: the artist to rationalize his creative processes, the scientist to irrationalize them, so to speak. But this fact in itself is significant. The scientist feels the urge to confess his indebtedness to unconscious intuitions which guide his theorizing; the artist values, or over-values, the theoretical discipline which controls his intuition. The two factors are complementary; the proportions in which they combine depend -- other things being equal -- foremost on the medium in which the creative drive finds its expression; and they shade into each other like the colours of the rainbow.

  The act of creation itself, as we have seen, is based on essentially the same underlying pattern in all ranges of the continuous rainbow spectrum. But the criteria for judging the finished product differ of course from one medium to another. Though the psychological processes which led to the creation of Poincaré's theorem and of Botticelli's virgin lie not as far apart as commonly assumed, the first can be rigorously verified by logical operations, the second not. There seems to be a crack in Keats's Grecian urn, and its message to sound rather hollow; but if we recall two essential points made earlier on, the crack will heal.

  The first is that verification comes only postfactum, when the creative act is completed; the act itself is always a leap into the dark, a dive into the deeps, and the diver is more likely to come up with a handful of mud than with a coral. False inspirations and freak theories are as abundant in the history of science as bad works of art; yet they command in the victim's mind the same forceful conviction, the same euphoria, catharsis, and experience of beauty as those happy finds which are postfactum proven right. Truth, as Kepler said, is an elusive hussy -- who frequently managed to fool even Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, Pasteur, and Einstein, to mention only a few. In this respect, then, Poincaré is in no better position than Botticelli: while in the throes of the creative process, guidance by truth is as uncertain and subjective as guidance by beauty.

  The second point refers to the verifiability of the product after the act; we have seen that even in this respect the contrast is not absolute, but a matter of degrees (Chapter X). A physical theory is far more open to verification than a work of art; but experiments, even so-called crucial experiments, are subject to interpretation; and the history of science is to a large part a history of controversies, because the interpretation of facts to 'confirm' or 'refute' a theory always contains a subjective factor, dependent on the scientific fashions and prejudices of the period. There were indeed times in the history of most sciences when the interpretations of empirical data assumed a degree of subjectivity and arbitrariness compared to which literary criticism appeared almost to be an 'exact science'.

  I do not wish to exaggerate; there is certainly a cortsiderable difference, in precision and objectivity, between the methods of judging a theorem in physics and a work of art. But I wish to stress once more that there are continuous transitions between the two. The diagram on p. 332 shows one among many such continuous series. Even pure mathematics at the top of the series had its logical foundations shaken by paradoxes like Gödel's theorem; or earlier on by Cantor's theory of infinite aggregates (as a result of which Cantor was barred from promotion in all German universities, and the mathematical journals refused to publish his papers). Thus even in mathematics 'objective truth' and 'logical verifiability' are far from absolute. As we descend to atomic physics, the contradictions and controversial interpretation of data increase rapidly; and as we move further down the slope, through such hybrid domains as psychiatry, historiography, and biography, from the world of Poincaré towards that of Botticelli, the criteria of truth gradually change in character, become more avowedly subjective, more overtly dependent on the fashions of the time, and, above all, less amenable to abstract, verbal formulation. But nevertheless the experience of truth, however subjective, must be present for the experience of beauty to arise; and vice versa, the solution of any of 'nature's riddles', however abstract, makes one exclaim 'how beautiful'.

  Thus, to heal the crack in the Grecian urn and to make it acceptable in this computer age we would have to improve on its wording (as Orwell did on Ecclesiastes): Beauty is a function of truth, truth a function of beauty. They can be separated by analysis, but in the lived experience of the creative act -- and of its re-creative echo in the beholder -- they are inseparable as thought is inseparable front emotion. They signal, one in the language of the brain, the other of the bowels, the moment of the Eureka cry, when 'the infinite is made to blend itself with the finite' -- when eternity is looking through the window of time. Whether it is a medieval stained-glass window or Newton's equation of universal gravity is a matter of upbringing and chance; both are transparent to the unprejudiced eye.

  NOTES

  To p. 329.

  PROPORTIONS OF THE HUMAN FIGURE From the chin to the starting of the hair is a tenth part of the figure. From the chin to the top of the head
is an eighth part. And from the chin to the nostrils is a third part of the face. And the same from the nostrils to the eyebrows, and from the eyebrows to the starting of the hair. If you set your legs so far apart as to take a fourteenth part from your height, and you open and raise your arms until you touch the line of the crown of the head with your middle fingers, you must know that the centre of the circle formed by the extremities of the outstretched limbs will be the navel, and the space between the legs will form an equilateral triangle. The span of a man's outstretched arms is equal to his height. (From Leonardo's Notebooks, quoted by R. Goldwater and M. Treves, eds., 1947, p. 51.)

  XVIII

  INFOLDING

  Let me return once more to the three main criteria of the technical excellence of a comic work: its originality, emphasis, and economy; and let us see ho~ far they are applicable to other forms of art.

  Originality and Emphasis

  From antiquity until well into the Renaissance artists thought, or professed to think, that they were copying nature; even Leonardo wrote into his notebook 'that painting is most praiseworthy which is most like the thing represented'. Of course, they were doing nothing of the sort. They were creating, as Plato had reproached them, 'man-made dreams for those who are awake'. The thing represented had to pass through two distorting lenses: the artist's mind, and his medium of expression, before it emerged as a man-made dream -- the two, of course, being intimately connected and interacting with each other.

  To start with the medium: the space of the painter's canvas is smaller than the landscape to be copied, and his pigment is different from the colours he sees; the writer's ink cannot render a voice nor exhale the smell of a rose. The nature of the medium always excludes direct imitation. Some aspects of experience cannot be reproduced at all; some only by gross oversimplification or distortion; and some only at the price of sacrificing others. The limitations and peculiarities of his medium force the artist at each step to make choices, consciously or unconsciously; to select for representation those features or aspects which he considers to be relevant, and to discard those which he considers irrelevant. Thus we meet again the trinity of selection, exaggeration, and simplification which I have discussed before ( pp. 82-6; 263 f.) Even the most naturalistic picture, chronicle, or novel, whose maker naively hopes to copy reality, contains an unavoidable element of bias, of selective emphasis. Its direction depends on the distorting lenses in the artist's mind -- the perceptual and conceptual matrices which pattern his experience, and determine which aspects of it should be regarded as relevant, which not. This part-automatic, part-conscious processing of the experience, over which the medium exercises a kind of 'feed-back-control', determines to a large extent what we call an artist's individual style.

  Theoretically, the range of choice before him is enormous. In practice, it is narrowed down considerably by the conventions of his period or school. They are imposed on him not only by external pressures -- the public's taste and the critics' censure -- but mainly from inside. The controls of skilled activities function, as we saw, below the level of awareness on which that activity takes place -- whether it consists in riding a bicycle or 'taking in' a landscape. The codes which govern the matrices of perception are hidden persuaders; their influence permeates the whole personality, shapes his pattern of vision, determines which aspects of reality should be considered significant, while others are ignored, like the ticking of one's watch. For centuries painters did not seem to have noticed that shadows have colours, nor the fluidity of contours in hazy air; and if we were to add up those aspects of existence which literature has ignored at one time or another, they would cover practically the whole range of human experience. Conversely, every period over-emphasizes some particular aspects of experience and produces its special brand of 'stylization' and compulsive mannerisms -- obvious to all but itself. For instance, the emphasis on contour in classical painting is still so firmly embedded in our frames of perception that we are unaware of the impossibility of seeing foreground figure and background landscape simultaneously in sharp focus. But we are aware of the absence of shadows in Chinese painting -- or the absence of sex in Victorian fiction.

  The measure of an artist's originality, put into the simplest terms, is the extent to which his selective emphasis deviates from the conventional norm and establishes new standards of relevance. All great innovations, which inaugurate a new era, movement, or school, consist in such sudden shifts of attention and displacements of emphasis onto some previously neglected aspect of experience, some blacked-out range of the existential spectrum. The decisive turning points in the history of every art-form are discoveries which show the characteristic features already discussed: they uncover what has always been there; they are 'revolutionary', that is, destructive and constructive; they compel us to revalue our values and impose a new set of rules on the eternal game.

  Most of the general considerations in the chapter on 'The Evolution of Ideas' equally apply to the evolution of art. In both fields the truly original geniuses are rare compared with the enormous number of talented pnctitioners; the former acting as spearheads, opening up new territories, which the latter will then diligently cultivate. In both fields there are periods of crisis, of 'creative anarchy', leading to a break-through to new frontiers -- followed by decades, or centuries of consolidation, orthodoxy, stagnation, and decadence -- until a new crisis arises, a holy discontent, which starts the cycle again. Other parallels could be drawn: 'multiple discoveries' -- the simultaneous emergence of a new style, for which the time is ripe, independently in several places; 'collective discoveries' originating in a closely knit group, clique, school, or team; 'rediscoveries' -- the periodic revivals of past and forgotten forms of art; lastly 'cross-fertilizations' between seemingly distant provinces of science and art. To quote a single example: the rediscovery of the treatise on conic sections by Apollonius of Perga, dating from the fourth century B.C., gave the ellipse to Kepler who built on it a new astronomy -- and to Guarini, who introduced new vistas into architecture.

  Economy

  Yesterday's discoveries are today's commonplaces; a daringly fresh image soon becomes stale by repetition, degenerates into a cliché, and loses its emotive appeal. The newborn day or the piercing cry are no longer even perceived as metaphorical: the once separate contexts of birth and dawn have merged, there is no juxtaposition -- reverting to jargon, bisociative dynamism has been converted into associative routine.

  The recurrent cycles of stagnation, crisis, and new departure in the arts are to a large extent caused by the gradual saturation which any particular invention or technique produces in artist and audience. A child or a savage, who is taken to the cinema for the first time, derives wonder and delight not so much from the context of the film as from the magic of illusion as such. In the sophisticated theatre-goer's mind, illusion in itself plays a relatively subordinate part -- except when, watching a thriller, he regresses to infancy; the two matrices have become virtually integrated into one, so that he is capable of thinking critically of the quality of the acting and of appreciating at the same time the merits of the play. But to recapture the erstwhile magic, in all its freshness, he must turn to something new: experimental theatre, avant-garde films, or Japanese Kabuki, perhaps; novel experiences which compel him to strain his imagination, in order to make sense of the seemingly absurd -- to participate, and re-create.

  When the styles and techniques of an art have become conventionalized and stagnant, the audience is exempted from the necessity to exert its intelligence and imagination -- and deprived of its reward. The 'consumer' reads the conventional novel, looks at the conventional landscape, and watches the conventional play with perfect ease and self-assurance -- and a complete absence of awe and wonder. He prefers the familiar to the unfamiliar, because it presents no challenge and demands no creative effort. Art becomes a mildly pleasant pastime and loses its emotive impact, its transcendental appeal and cathartic effect. The artist, in growing frustration, se
nses that the conventional techniques have become 'stale', that they have lost their power over the audience, and become inadequate as means of communication and self-expression. Of course the technique itself cannot become 'stale': blank verse has the same rhythmic qualities today as it had three centuries ago; Fragonard's nymphs and shepherds are as delightful as ever, but they dance no more. We have become immunized against their emotional appeal -- at least for the time being. We may again become susceptible to them at the next romantic revival, at some future turn of the spiral.

  The history of art could be written in terms of the artist's struggle against the deadening cumulative effect of saturation. The way out of the cul-de-sac is either a revolutionary departure towards new horizons, or the rediscovery of past techniques, or a combination of both. (Egyptian art went through a revival of archaic styles under the twenty-sixth dynasty, in the seventh century B.C.; Rome had a Renaissance of sorts in the second century A.D. when Hadrian built his Athenaeum; and so on to the pre-Raphaelites and the relatively recent rediscovery of primitive art.)