Janus

by Arthur Koestler

  When the mind is at the end of its tether it can -- on rare occasions -- show itself capable of surprisingly original, quasi-acrobatic feats, which lead to revolutionary breakthroughs in science or art and open new vistas, a radically changed outlook. But every revolution has a destructive as well as a constructive aspect. When we speak of a 'revolutionary' discovery in science or of revolutionary changes in artistic style, we imply the de- structive aspect.* The destruction is wrought by jettisoning previously sacrosanct doctrines and seemingly self-evident axioms of thought, cemented into our mental habits. This is what enables us to distinguish between creative originality and diligent routine. A problem solved or a task accomplished in accordance with established rules of the game leaves the matrix of the skill intact -- unharmed and possibly even enriched by the experience. Creative originality, on the other hand, always involves un-learning and re-learning, undoing and redoing. It involves the breaking up of petrified mental structures, discarding matrices which have outlived their usefulness, and reassembling others in a new synthesis -- in other words, it is a complex operation of dissociation and bisociation, involving several levels of the mental holarchy.

  * Cf. Sir Karl Popper: 'in order that a new theory should constitute

  a discovery or a step forward it should conflict with its

  predecessor; that is to say, it should lead to at least some

  conflicting results. But this means, from a logical point of view,

  that it should contradict its predecessor: it should overthrow it.

  In this sense, progress in science -- or at least striking progress

  -- is always revolutionary. [6]

  All the biographical evidence [4] indicates that such a radical re-shuffling operation requires the intervention of mental processes beneath the surface of conscious reasoning, in the twilight zones of awareness. In the decisive phase of the creative process the rational controls are relaxed and the creative person's mind seems to regress from disciplined thinking to less specialized, more fluid ways of mentation. A frequent form of this is the retreat from articulate verbal thinking to vague, visual imagery. There is a naive popular belief that scientists arrive at their discoveries by reasoning in strictly rational, precise, verbal terms. The evidence mentioned indicates that they do nothing of the sort. In 1945, Jacques Hadamard's famous inquiry [5] among American mathematicians to find out their working methods produced the striking conclusion that nearly all of them (with only two exceptions) tackled their problems neither in verbal terms nor by algebraic symbols, but relied on visual imagery of a vague, hazy nature. Einstein was among them; he wrote: 'The words of the language as they are written or spoken do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought . . . which relies on more or less clear images of a visual and some of a muscular type . . . It also seems to me that what you call full consciousness is a limit-case which can never be fully accomplished because consciousness is a narrow thing.' [7]

  Most of the creative scientists, who have described their working methods, seem to have been visualizers who shared Woodworth's opinion: 'Often we have to get away from speech to think clearly.' Verbal reasoning occupies the latest and highest level in the mental hierarchy, but it can degenerate into pedantic rigidity which erects a screen between the thinker and reality. Creativity often starts where language ends, that is, by regressing to pre-verbal and seemingly pre-rational levels of mental activity, which may in some respects be comparable to the dream, but closer perhaps to the transitory states between sleep and full wakefulness.

  Such regression implies a temporary suspension of the 'rules of the game' which control our reasoning routines; the mind in labour is momentarily liberated from the tyranny of rigid, over-precise schemata, their built-in prejudices and hidden axioms; it is led to un-learn and acquire a new innocence of the eye and fluidity of thought, which enable it to discover hidden analogies and reckless combinations of ideas which would be unacceptable in the sober, wide-awake state. The biographies of great scientists provide countless examples of this phenomenon; their virtually unanimous emphasis on spontaneous intuitions and hunches of unknown origin suggests that there always are large chunks of irrationality embedded in the creative process -- not only in art, where we take it for granted, but in the exact sciences as well.

  In earlier books [8] I have ventured some guesses as to how this unconscious guidance works -- how a temporary regression to less sophisticated mental levels can produce the happy combination of ideas, the focal bisociation, which produces the solution of the problem. It is a common experience on awaking from sleep to try to hang on to the remembrance of a dream which is running away, like sand through a sieve, out of conscious reach. One may call this phenomenon 'oneirolysis' -- from oneiros, dream, plus lysis, dissolution. The dream itself, while it lasts (and to some extent also the drowsy daydream) drifts effortlessly from one scenario to another, in a freewheeling manner, indifferent to the rules of logic and the conventional limitations of space, time or cause; it establishes bizarre connections and churns out analogies between cabbages and kings which disintegrate when the sleeper awakes and which he cannot describe in precise verbal terms -- except by saying that something reminded him of something, but he no longer knows what or why. Now in the throes of the creative obsession, when all levels of the mental hierarchy, including the unconscious strata, are saturated with the problem, the familiar phenomenon of oneirolysis may be reversed into a kind of oneirosynthesis, in which those vaguely sensed connections form a nascent analogy. It may be a hazy, tentative affair, like Einstein's 'images of a visual or muscular type', or Faraday's 'lines of force' surrounding magnets which he saw in vivid hallucinations; and its shape may be changing from camel to weasel like Hamlet's cloud. The unconscious reaches of fertile minds must be teeming with such nascent analogies, hidden affinities, and the cloudy 'forms of things unknown'. But we must also remember that clouds form and dissolve again; and cloudbursts are rare events.

  7

  The French have an expression for which I can find no English equivalent: reculer pour mieux sauter -- draw back to take a running jump. The process I have been discussing follows a similar pattern: a temporary regression to more primitive and uninhibited levels of ideation, followed by the creative forward leap. Disintegration and reintegration, dissociation and bisociation reflect the same pattern. Cogitation in the creative sense is co-agitation, the shaking together of the previously separate; but the fully conscious, rational mind is not the best cocktail shaker. It is invaluable in our daily routines, but the revolutionary breakthroughs in science and art always represent some variation of recuier pour mieux sauter.

  We might call it an archetypal pattern, for it has its close equivalents in other fields. Thus psychotherapy, from shamanism to our day, has always relied on that particular kind of undoing-redoing process which Ernst Kris called 'regression in the service of the ego'. The neurotic, with his compulsions, phobias and elaborate defence mechanisms, is governed by eccentric but rigid 'rules of the game'. The therapist's aim is to induce a temporary regression, to make him retrace his steps to the point where things went wrong, and to come up metamorphosed, reborn.

  The same pattern is reflected in the death and resurrection (or 'withdrawal and return') motif in mythology. Joseph is thrown into a well, Jonah is reborn out of the belly of the whale, Jesus is resurrected from the tomb.

  Lastly, as we shall see later, reculer pour mieux sauter, draw-back-to-leap, plays a crucial part not only in mental creativity, but also in the creative evolution of higher life-forms. We shall see that biological evolution may be described as a series of escapes from the blind alleys of stagnation, over-specialization and maladjustment, by an undoing and re-forming process which is basically analogous to the phenomena of mental evolution and in some respects foreshadows them. But before moving on towards those wider vistas, there are still some loose ends to be tied up relating to creativity in science and art.

  8

  In the prev
ious sections I have been at pains to stress that the artist and scientist do not inhabit separate universes, merely different regions of a continuous spectrum -- a rainbow stretching from the infra-red of poetry to the ultra-violet of physics, with many intermediate ranges -- such hybrid vocations as architecture, photography, chess-playing, cooking, psychiatry, science fiction or the potter's craft. But to avoid over-simplification, after emphasizing the affinities, I must briefly discuss the differences -- some apparent, some real -- between the opposite ends of the continuum.

  The most obvious difference seems to lie in the nature of the criteria by which we judge scientific and artistic achievement. One of the imaginary barriers between the two is the popular belief that the scientist, unlike the artist, is in a position to attain to 'objective truth' by submitting theories to experimental tests. In fact, experimental evidence can confirm certain expectations based on a theory, but it cannot confirm the theory itself. The same set of experimental data can often be interpreted in more than one way -- which is why the history of science echoes with as many venomous controversies as the history of literary criticism. Thus we again have a series of continuous gradations from the relatively objective methods of testing a scientific theory by experiment to the relatively subjective criteria of aesthetic value; but the emphasis is on 'relative'. In fact the progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life. The history of art shows equally agonizing reappraisals of accepted values, criteria of relevance, styles of representation. In the course of the last two centuries, European literature went through the rise and fall of classicism; romanticism; naturalism; surrealism; and Dada; the socially conscious novel; existentialism; the nouveau roman. In the history of painting, the changes were even more drastic. But the same zig-zag course characterizes the progression of science, whether you turn to the history of physiology and medicine (not to mention psychology) ; or evolutionary biology; or the abrupt changes of outlook in the 'hard-core' science of physics from the Aristotelian to the Newtonian to the Einsteinian conception of the universe. The data may be 'hard', like the contours of a Rorschach blot, but what you read into them is another matter. There is of course a considerable difference in the degree of precision and objectivity, between the methods of judging a theorem in physics and a work of art. But, to say it once more, the difference is a matter of degrees, and there are continuous transitions between them.

  We must also remember that the testing and judging of a discovery comes after the act; whereas the decisive moment in the creative act itself is for the scientist, as it is for the artist, a leap into the dark, into the twilight zones of consciousness, where both are equally dependent on their fallible intuitions. False inspirations and crank 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, as the happy finds which are post factum proven right.* In this respect the scientist is in no better position than the artist: while in the throes of the creative process, guidance by truth is as uncertain and subjective as guidance by beauty. And some of the greatest scientists have confessed that at the crucial moment when taking the plunge, they were not guided by logic, but by a sense of beauty that they were unable to define.

  * To quote Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Györgyi, discoverer of

  Vitamin C: 'There is but one safe way to avoid mistakes: to do

  nothing or, at least, to avoid doing something new . . . The unknown

  lends an insecure foothold and venturing out into it, one can hope

  for no more than that the possible failure will be an honourable

  one." [9]

  A virgin by Botticelli, and a mathematical theorem by Poincaré, do not betray any similarity between the motivations and aspirations of their respective creators. Yet it was Poincaré himself who wrote that what guided him in his unconscious gropings towards the 'happy combinations which yield 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 living English physicist, Paul Dirac, went even further with his famous pronouncement: 'It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment.' It was a shocking thing to say, but he got the Nobel Prize nevertheless.

  And vice versa, painters, sculptors and architects have always been guided, and often obsessed, by scientific or pseudo-scientific theories: the Golden Section of the Greeks; the geometry of perspective and foreshortening; Dürer's and Leonardo's 'ultimate laws of perfect proportion'; Cézanne's doctrine that all natural form can be reduced to spheres, cylinders and cones, and so forth. The counterpart of the mathematician's apology which puts beauty before logical method is Seurat's pronouncement: 'They see poetry in what I have done. No, I apply my method, and that is all there is to it.'

  Thus both sides recognize the continuity of the triptych: the scientist by confessing his dependence on intuitive hunches which guide his theorizing, while the artist values, or overvalues, the abstract theories which impose discipline on his intuitions. The two factors complement each other; the relative proportions in which they combine depend foremost on the medium in which their creative drive finds its expression.

  Similar considerations apply to the rules of harmony and counterpoint, the theoretical aspects of music; and, of course, to literature. The novelist, the poet or playwright do not create in a vacuum; their world-view is influenced -- whether they realize it or not -- by the philosophical and scientific climate of their time. John Donne was a mystic, but he instantly realized the significance of Galileo's telescope:

  Man has weav'd out a net, and this net throwne

  Upon the Heavens, and now they are his owne.

  Newton had a comparable impact; so of course had Darwin, Marx, Frazer of The Golden Bough, Freud or Einstein.

  Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn ends with the famous lines:

  Beauty is truth, truth beauty -- that is all

  Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

  This is certainly a poetic exaggeration, but also a touching profession of faith in the essential unity of the two cultures, artificially separated by the quirks in our educational and social system. In the unprejudiced mind, any original scientific discovery gives rise to aesthetic satisfaction, because the solution of a vexing problem creates harmony out of dissonance; and vice versa, the experience of beauty can only arise if the intellect endorses the validity of the operation -- whatever its nature -- designed to elicit the experience. Intellectual illumination and emotional catharsis are the twin rewards of the act of creation, and its re-creative echo in the beholder. The first constitutes the moment of truth, the Aha reaction, the second provides the Ah . . . reaction of the aesthetic experience. The two are complementary aspects of an indivisible process.

  9

  One more apparently fundamental difference between the history of science and the history of art remains to be discussed.

  In Solzhenitsyn's novel The First Circle some prisoners are having an argument about the progress of science. One of them, Gleb Nerzhin, exclaims in a passionate outburst:

  'Progress! Who wants progress? That's just what I like about art --

  the fact that there can't be any "progress" in it.'

  He then discusses the tremendous advances in technology during the previous century and concludes with the taunt: 'But has there been any advance on Anna Karenina?'

  The opposite attitude was taken by Sartre in his essay 'What is Literature?', where he compared novels to bananas which you can enjoy only while they are fresh. Anna Karenina, in this view, must have rotted long ago.

  Solzhenitsyn's hero reflects the traditional view that science progresses in a cumulative manner, brick upon brick, the way a tower is built, whereas art is timeless, a playing of fresh variations on eternal themes. To a limited extent and
in a relative sense, this conventional view is of course justified. In the great discoveries of science, the bisociation of previously separate contexts (electricity and magnetism, matter and energy, etc.) results in a new synthesis, which in its turn will merge with others on a higher, emergent level of the hierarchy. The evolution of art does not, generally, show this overall pattern. The frames of perception which enter into the artist's creative process are chosen for their sensuous qualities and emotive potential; his bisociative act consists in their juxtaposition rather than an intellectual fusion to which, by their very nature, they do not readily lend themselves.

  But once again, this difference is relative, not absolute. If you accept Gleb Nerzhin's view in toto, then it is pointless to search for objective criteria of 'progress' in literature, painting or music; art, then, does not evolve, it merely formulates and reformulates the same archetypal experiences in the costumes and styles of the period; and although the vocabulary is subject to changes -- including the visual vocabulary of the painter -- the statement contained in a great work of art remains valid and unmarked by time's arrow, untouched by the vulgar march of progress.