Janus

by Arthur Koestler

  After applying the theory to various types of the comic -- from physical tickling to social satire -- I discussed the criteria of styles and techniques in humour: originality or unexpectedness; emphasis through selection, exaggeration and simplification; and its reverse: economy or implicitness which forces the audience to make a re-creative effort.

  Lastly, the brief cross-references to creativity in science and art at the end of this chapter may serve as an introduction to the sections that follow.

  VII

  THE ART OF DISCOVERY

  1

  Creativity in science could be described as the art of putting two and two together to make five. In other words, it consists in combining previously unrelated mental structures in such a way that you get more out of the emergent whole than you have put in. This apparent bit of magic derives from the fact that the whole is not merely the sum of its parts, but an expression of the relations between its parts; and that each new synthesis leads to the emergence of new patterns of relations -- more complex cognitive holons on higher levels of the mental hierarchy.

  Let me give a few brief examples selected from the numerous case-histories of scientific discoveries described in The Sleepwalkers, The Act of Creation, etc.

  The motions of the tides were known to man from time immemorial. So were the motions of the moon. But the idea to connect the two, the idea that the tides were due to the attraction of the moon, was proclaimed for the first time by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler in the seventeenth century. By putting two and two together, he opened up the infinite vista of modern astronomy.

  Lodestones -- magnets -- were known to the ancient Greeks as a curiosity of nature. In the Middle Ages they were used for two purposes: as mariner's compasses and as a means to attract an estranged wife back to her husband. Also well-known were the curious properties of amber which, when rubbed, acquired the power of attracting flimsy objects. The Greek for amber is elektron, but Greek science was no more interested in the freak phenomena of electricity than modern science is in telepathy. Nor were the Middle Ages. For some two thousand years magnetism and electricity were regarded as separate phenomena, as unrelated to each other as the tides and the moon. In 1820 Hans Christian Oersted discovered that an electric current flowing through a wire deflected a magnetic compass which happened to be lying on the table. At that historic moment the two hitherto separate contexts began to fuse into an emergent synthesis: electromagnetism -- thus creating a kind of chain-reaction which is still continuing. At successive stages of it electricity and magnetism merged with radiant light, chemistry merged with physics, the humble elektron became an orbiting planet within the solar system of the atom, and ultimately energy and matter became unified in Einstein's single, sinister equation, E = mc².

  If we go back to the beginnings of the scientific quest, there is an ancient tradition according to which Pythagoras discovered the secrets of musical harmony while watching some blacksmiths at work on his native island of Samos, and noticing that iron bars of different lengths gave out sounds of different pitch under the strokes of the hammer. This spontaneous amalgamation of arithmetic and music was probably the starting-point of physics.

  From the Pythagoreans, who mathematized the harmony of the spheres, to their modern heirs, who combined space and time into a single continuum, the pattern is always the same: the discoveries of science do not create something out of nothing; they combine, relate and integrate already existing but previously separate ideas, facts, associative contexts -- mental holons. This act of cross-fertilization -- or self-fertilization within a single brain -- appears to be the essence of creativity, and to justify the term 'bisociation'. We have seen how the humorist bisociates mutually incompatible mental structures in order to produce a collision. The scientist, on the other hand, aims at synthesis, at the integration of previously unrelated ideas. The Latin cogito comes from coagitare, to shake together. Bisociation in humour consists of the sudden shaking together of incompatible elements which briefly collide, then separate again. Bisociation in science means combining hitherto unrelated cognitive holons in such a way that a new level is added to the hierarchy of knowledge, which contains the previously separate structures as its members.

  However, we have seen that the two domains are continuous, without a sharp boundary: each subtle witticism is a malicious discovery, and vice versa, many great discoveries of science have been greeted with howls of laughter, precisely because they seemed to represent a marriage of incompatibles -- until the marriage bore fruit and the apparent incompatibility turned out to derive from prejudice. What looked like a collision ended in fusion: witticism is paradox stated, discovery is paradox resolved. Even Galileo treated Kepler's theory of the tides as a bad joke, and one can easily imagine a contemporary caricaturist drawing a fat-faced moon sucking up the earth's oceans through a straw. But the step from the sublime to the ridiculous is reversible: the satires of Swift and Orwell carry deeper lessons than a whole library of works on social science.

  As we travel from the coarse toward the sophisticated types of humour, and then continue across the fluid boundary into the centre panel of the triptych on p. 110, we come across such hybrid cases as brain-twisters, logical paradoxes, mathematical games. The conundrums about Achilles and the Tortoise and about the Cretan Liar have for two millennia tickled philosophers and spurred logicians to creative efforts. The listener's task has been transformed from 'seeing the joke' into 'solving the problem'. And when he succeeds, he no longer roars with laughter as at the clown's antics; in the course of our journey laughter has gradually shaded into an amused, then an admiring smile: the emotional climate has changed from the Haha reaction into the Aha reaction.

  2

  The term 'Aha experience' was coined by Gestalt psychologists to indicate the euphoria which follows the moment of truth, the flash of illumination when the bits of the puzzle click into place -- or, in our terms, when the bisociated contexts fuse in a new synthesis. The emotion exploding in coarse laughter is aggression robbed of its purpose; the tension ebbing away in the Aha reaction after the penny has dropped is mainly derived from a challenge to intellectual curiosity, the urge to explore and understand.

  That urge is not confined to laboratory researchers. In recent years biologists have been led to recognize the existence of a primary instinct, the 'exploratory drive', which is as basic as the instincts of hunger and sex, and can occasionally be even more powerful. Countless experimental zoologists -- starting with Darwin himself* -- have shown that curiosity is an innate drive in rats, birds, dolphins, chimpanzees and men. It is the driving power which makes the laboratory rat find its way through the experimental maze without reward or punishment, and even defy punishment by traversing electrified grids instead of turning back. It makes the child take the new toy to pieces 'to see what's inside', and it is the prime mover behind human exploration and research.

  * See The Act of Creation, Book Two, Ch. VIII.

  The exploratory drive may of course combine with other drives such as hunger or sex. The pure scientist's proverbially 'detached' and 'disinterested' quest -- his self-transcending absorption in the mysteries of nature -- is in fact often combined with ambition, competitiveness, vanity. But these self-assertive tendencies must be restrained and highly sublimated to find fulfilment in the -- mostly meagre -- rewards for his slow and patient labours. There are, after all, more direct methods of asserting one's ego than the study of spiral nebulae.

  But while the exploratory drive may be adulterated by ambition and vanity, in its purest form, the quest is its own reward.

  'Were I to hold the truth in my hand', Emerson wrote, 'I would let it go for the positive joy of seeking.' In a classic experiment, Wolfgang Köhler's chimpanzee, Sultan, discovered after many unsuccessful efforts to rake in a banana placed outside his cage with a stick that was too short, that he could do it by fitting two hollow sticks together. His new discovery 'pleased him so immensely' that he kept repeating the trick and
forgot to eat the banana.

  However, subjective vanity apart, the self-assertive tendencies also enter on a deeper level into the scientist's motivation. 'I am', wrote Freud, 'not really a man of science . .. but a conquistador . . . with the curiosity, the boldness, and the tenacity that belong to that type of person.' The exploratory drive aims at understanding nature, the conquistadorial element at mastering nature (including human nature). Excepting perhaps pure mathematics, every variety of the scientific quest has this dual motivation, although they need not be equally conscious in the individual scientist's mind. Knowledge can beget humility or power. The archetypes of the opposite tendencies are Prometheus and Pythagoras -- one stealing the fire of the gods, the other listening to the harmony of the spheres. Freud's confession can be contrasted with the statements of many scientific geniuses that the only purpose of their labours was to lift a fraction of the veil covering the mysteries of nature, and their only motivation a feeling of awe and wonder. 'Men were first led to the study of natural philosophy,' wrote Aristotle, 'as indeed they are today, by wonder.' Maxwell's earliest memory was 'lying on the grass, looking at the sun, and wondering'. Einstein -- the humblest of all -- struck the same chord when he wrote that whoever is devoid of the capacity to wonder at the cosmic mystery, 'whoever remains unmoved, whoever cannot contemplate, or know the deep shudder of the soul in enchantment, might just as well be dead for he has already closed his eyes on life'. He could not foresee, when he discovered the wondrous equation which unified matter and energy, that it would turn into black magic.

  Thus the ubiquitous polarity of the self-asserting and self-transcending tendencies is strikingly displayed in the domain of scientific creativity. Discovery may be called the emotionally neutral art -- not because the scientist is devoid of emotion, but because his labours require a delicately balanced and sublimated blend of motivations, where the drives to exploration and domination are in equilibrium. For the same reason he is assigned the central panel of the triptych, between the jester who, exercising his wit at the expense of others, is primarily dominated by self-asserting malice, and the artist, whose creative work depends on the self-transcending power of his imagination.

  The symbolic topology of the triptych seems further justified by the nature of the Aha reaction. It combines the explosive discharge of tension, epitomized in the Eureka cry which is akin to the Haha reaction, with the cathartic Ah . . . reaction -- that 'deep shudder of enchantment' of which Einstein speaks, which is closely related to the artist's experience of beauty and the mystic's 'oceanic feeling'. The Eureka cry reflects the conquistadorial, the Ah . . . reaction the mystic element in the hybrid motivation of the scientist's quest.

  We can now continue the journey across the triptych into the third panel, where the emotional climate is dominated by the Ah . . . reaction.

  VIII

  THE DISCOVERIES OF ART

  1

  Laughing and weeping, aroused by comedy and tragedy, mark the two extremes of a continuous spectrum. Both provide channels for the overflow of emotions; both are 'luxury reflexes' without apparent utility. This much they have in common; in every other respect they are direct opposites.

  Although weeping is neither an uncommon nor a trivial phenomenon, academic psychology has almost totally ignored it. There are no theories of weeping comparable to Bergson's or Freud's treatises on laughter; and the theory put forward in The Act of Creation is the only one mentioned in Hilgard and Atkinson's standard textbook of psychology for American college students.*

  * From Hilgard and Atkinson, Introduction to Psychology

  (4th ed., 1967), Ch. 7 'Emotion', sub-section 'Weeping':

  'Laughter and tears are often close together, and although we

  associate laughter with joy and tears with sadness, there are also

  tears of joy. The writer Arthur Koestler has noted the failure in

  text-books of psychology to treat weeping, and he has attempted to

  supply this lack by an analysis of his own. He notes five kinds of

  situations in which weeping accompanies motivated behaviour.'

  The text-book then briefly mentions five such situations -- raptness,

  mourning, relief, sympathy, self-pity -- and concludes: 'These

  illustrations show how emotions provide a kind of commentary on

  ongoing motivated behaviour. The weeping is neither a drive nor an

  incentive, but it is a sign that something motivationally important

  is occurring.'

  And that's all that students of psychology are taught about weeping.

  As a preliminary step, we must make a distinction between weeping and crying: it is a peculiarity of the English language to treat them as synonymous. Weeping has two basic reflex characteristics: the secretion of tears and a specific way of breathing. Crying is the emission of sounds signalling distress or protest. It may be combined with or alternate with weeping, but should not be confused with it. Crying is a form of communication, weeping is a private affair. And we are talking, of course, of spontaneous weeping, not of the contrived sobs of stagecraft, public or private.

  Let us compare the physiological processes involved in laughter and weeping. Laughter is triggered by the adrenal-sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system, weeping by the para-sympathetic branch. The first, as we have seen, serves to energize the body, tensing it for action; the second has the opposite effect: it lowers blood pressure, neutralizes excesses of blood-sugar, facilitates the elimination of body-waste and generally tends towards quietude and catharsis -- literally the 'purging' of tensions.

  This physiological contrast is clearly reflected in the visible manifestations of laughter and weeping. 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 eyes are 'blinded by tears', they lose their focus and lustre; the features seem to crumble; even when weeping for joy or in aesthetic rapture, the transfigured face reflects a serene languidness.

  A similar contrast is noticeable in bodily postures and motions. In laughter the head is thrown back by a vigorous contraction of the muscles in the neck; the person who weeps 'lets the head droop' (into the hands, on the table or on somebody's shoulder). Laughter contracts the muscles and begets agitated movements; in weeping the muscles go flabby, the shoulders slump forward, the whole posture reflects a 'letting go'.

  The pattern of respiration in laughter consists of long, deep intakes of air, followed by bursts of explosive exhalatory puffs -- ha-ha-ha! In weeping the process is reversed: short, gasping inhalations -- sobs -- are followed by long, sighing exhalations -- a-a-h, ah. . . .

  These manifest contrasts between laughter and weeping, and their dependence on two different branches of the autonomic nervous system, are in keeping with their origin in opposite types of emotion. The Haha reaction is triggered by the self-assertive, the Ah . . . reaction by the self-transcending emotions. The first half of this statement should by now be obvious, the second requires some further comment.

  2

  In The Act of Creation I discussed in detail various situations which may lead to an overflow of tears -- mourning, pity, helplessness, awe, religious or aesthetic rapture, etc. Only the last is directly relevant to our subject, but it is worth noting that all eye-moistening emotions have a basic element in common which is altruistic, i.e., self-transcending -- a longing to enter into a quasi-symbiotic communion with a person, living or dead, or some higher entity which may be Nature, or a form of Art, or a mystic experience. These 'participatory' emotions are, as we have seen, subjective manifestations of the integrative tendency, reflecting the human holon's partness -- its dependence on, and commitment to, some more comprehensive unit on a higher level of the hierarchy which transcends the narrow confines of the self. Listening to the organist playing in an empty cathedral, or looking at the stars on a summer night, may cause a welling-up o
f emotions which moisten the eyes, accompanied by an expansion of consciousness, which becomes quasi-depersonalized and -- if the experience is very intense -- leads into 'the oceanic feeling of limitless extension and oneness with the universe'* -- the Ah . . . reaction in its purest form.

  * Romain Rolland describing the character of religious experience in

  a letter to Freud -- who regretfully professed never to have felt

  anything of the sort. [1]

  Ordinary mortals rarely ascend to such mystic heights, but they are at least familiar with the foothills. The self-transcending emotions have an extensive scale of intensity and a wide range of variety; they may be joyous or sad, tragic or lyrical. 'Weeping for joy' and 'weeping in sorrow' reflect the relative nature of the hedonic tone superimposed on all emotions.

  A further contrast between the Haha and the Ah . . . reactions is worth underlining. In laughter, we saw, tension is suddenly exploded; in weeping it is gradually drained away, without debunking expectation, without breaking the continuity of mood; in the Ah . . . reaction emotion and reason remain united. Moreover, the self-transcending emotions do not tend towards bodily action, but towards passive quiescence. Respiration and pulse are slowed down; 'entrancement' is a step towards the trance-like states induced by contemplative mystics; the emotion is of a quality that cannot be consummated by any specific voluntary act. To be 'overwhelmed' by awe and wonder, 'enraptured' by a smile, 'entranced' by beauty -- each of these words expresses passive surrender. The surplus of emotion cannot be worked off by any purposeful muscular activity, it can only be consummated in internal -- visceral and glandular -- processes (cf. above, Chapter III).