The Act of Creation (24 page)
Read The Act of Creation Online
Authors: Arthur Koestler
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:
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:
and to be walking up the mountain and down the mountain at one and
the same time. But in the visual image he does; and it is precisely
this indifference to logical contradiction, the irrational, dream-like
telescoping of the two images into one, which leads to the solution.
We could call the double image of the monk, or Einstein's traveller
riding on any of light, a
concretization
of abstract problems as it
sometimes occurs in dreams; and we could equally well call Kekulé's
serpent which seizes its own tail 'to whirl mockingly before his eyes',
the symbolization of a nascent, unformulated theory; these categories
overlap. The following example illustrates both; it refers to an incident
which has recently come to my knowledge:
growth of a 'brain-child' from infancy to 'full development'. The seminal
idea had been Y's; but it was X who had done the work and brought it to
maturation; every scientist knows that it is quite a different matter to
throw out a casual suggestion which might or might not lead somewhere --
and to follow it up by months of hard work in the laboratory. The dream
made him see the situation in its proper perspective; now all he had to
do was to tell Y the simple facts of the matter, and to give due credit
in his paper to Y's paternity.
On one level of his mind X had, of course, known all this; discovery in
this case, as in many others, consisted in uncovering what had always
been there. But his knowledge had been buried under the rigid crust
of a conventional matrix, which made his conscious thoughts turn in a
vicious circle.
Punning for Profit
Charles Lamb once remarked in a letter that he wished 'to draw his
last breath through a pipe and exhale it in a pun'.
The benefits which the humorist and the poet derive from two meanings
linked together by one sound are evident; in the natural sciences
they are non-existent, for the simple reason that verbal formulation,
the choice of the particular words in which a theory is expressed,
is to a large extent irrelevant to its content. But in the sciences
concerned with language and meaning, the relations between sense and
sound play an important part. Homonyms and homophones, sound affinities
and transformations, are essential pointers in etymology and comparative
philology, in the study of the structure and development of language. I
have mentioned the 'divine pun' by which adåm, man, was created
out of adamåh, earth. Eve's Hebrew name is Havvåh, life;
while ahavvah is love; esh, a synonym for man, has the same root as ish,
fire; and milkhamåh, war, is derived from lekhêm, bread;
so is the village of Beth-lehem: the House of Bread.
Afffinities of sound provide the threads which lead from contemporary
words and concepts back to the Greek and Sanskrit womb. The deciphering
of the scripts of ancient languages is often aided by clues such as the
frequency with which a certain sign occurs, and other 'links' between
sign, symbol, sound, and sense. Thus the links which, in 1821, enabled
Champollion to break into the secret of hieroglyphics, were the proper
names Ptolemy, Cleopatra, and Alexander, which appeared on the Rosetta
Stone (and on various other documents) bearing parallel inscriptions in
Greek and in two different Egyptian scripts. The three names, inscribed
in conspicuous cartouches, provided Champollion with altogether fourteen
alphabetic signs of ascertained value -- certainly the greatest service
which any Cleopatra has rendered to history.
In the infantile and primitive imagination, the ties between sound
and meaning are still very intimate; name and object form an almost
indivisible unity, shown in the universal practices of word magic,
incantations, and verbal spells. Related to this is the belief that the
letters contained in a word form secret connections according to certain
hermeneutical rules -- a belief, shared by Judaism, several other Oriental
religions, and adopted by the Christian Fathers. It was thought, for
instance, that to extract their hidden meaning, certain texts in Hebrew
Scriptures should be arranged in vertical colunms and read downwards; or
that the first and last letter in each word should be used to form new
words; or that the letters should be reduced to their numerical value,
and the sums so obtained should then be manipulated according to the
rules of mystic numberlore. Here we have the archaic origins of the pun,
the crossword puzzle, the acrostic, anagram, and cryptogram, which have
always exerted such a curious fascination in the most varied cultures --
from Pythagoras and Lao-Tse to Champollion and Freud. The humorist's joke,
the linguist's discovery, the poet's euphony, all derive from that source.
The Benefits of Impersonation
'As far as my observations go', wrote C. G. Jung, 'I have not discovered
in the unconscious anything like a personality comparable to the
conscious ego. But . . . there are at least traces of personalities in the
manifestations of the unconscious. A simple example is the dream, in which
a variety of real and imaginery people enact the dream thoughts. . . .
The unconscious
personates
. [5]
The boundaries of the self are fluid or blurred in the dream. I may watch
an execution, and the next moment become the penon to be executed. The
actors on the stage are interchangeable; their cards of identity are
often reshuffled.
To be oneself and somebody else at the same time is an experience shared
by the dreamer, the Shaman impersonating the rain-god, the patient
possessed by demons. The same projective faculty is made use of by the
actor, to create the illusion in the audience that he is both himself and
Prince Hamlet; by the priest offering the eucharist in Holy Communion;
by the healer, who projects himself into the patient's place, and at
the same time acts as a father-figure.
The fluid boundaries of the self as represented in the unconscious mind,
confer on it the gift of empathy -- Einfuehlung --o f entering into a
kind of mental symbiosis with other selves. Empathy is a nicely sober,
noncommittal term for designating the rather mysterious processes which
enable one to transcend his boundaries, to step our of his skin as it
were, and put himself into the place of another. One reads the mood of the
other from such scant and crude pointers as the lifting or lowering of
the corners of the lips, or almost imperceptible changes in the muscles
which control the eyes; but the interpretation of these signs is not a
conscious act. It belongs to the repertory of underground games.
Empathy is at the source of our understanding how others think and feel;
it is the starting point of the art of medical diagnosis and of the
science of psychology. The medicine man, ancient and modern, has a twofold
relationship with the patient: he is trying to feel what the patient
feels, and he is, at the same time, acting a part: the exorcizer of evil
spirits himself endowed with divine powers; magician, witch, saint, sage,
hypnotist, faith-healer, confessor, father. The roles have changed, but
the principle has remained the same: to induce the patient to an act of
faith, to submission, worship, transference, catharsis. Psychotherapy in
its modern form expresses in explicit terms the principle of ab-reaction,
of the mental purge, which has always been implied in the ancient
cathartic techniques from the Dionysian and Orphic mystery-cults to the
rites of baptism and the confessional. The psychoanalyst induces his
patients to relive their conflicts in an illusionary drama, where he
himself impersonates the central figure -- halfway between comedian and
tragedian. The tragedian creates illusion, the comedian debunks illusion;
the therapist does both. In the dreams of patients under Jungian therapy,
supposed aspects of their underground-personality -- anima, animus and
'shadow' -- keep appearing under various disguises, like actors on a
stage. Finally, the technique of impersonation is used deliberately and
explicitly in the form of group-therapy known as 'psycho-drama'.
Some eminent psychiatrists -- among them Charcot, Freud, Jung, and Theodor
Reik -- have expressed, or hinted at their belief that not only empathy,
but something akin to telepathy operates between doctor and patient
in the hothouse atmosphere of the analytical session. But there is no
need to go that far in order to realize that some of the basic insights
of medicine and psychology are derived from the underground games which
permit us to transcend the limits of personal identity while we dream --
or stare into the footlights of the stage.
Displacement
We have seen that the sudden shift of attention to a seemingly irrelevant
aspect of a phenomenon -- which was previously ignored or taken for
granted -- plays a vital part in humour, art, and discovery. In the comic
story, the abrupt displacement of emphasis ('What am I supposed to do
at 4 a.m. in
Grimsby
?') has the same effect as the matador's
nonchalant side-stepping while the bull charges at his muleta. In
discovery, it makes a familiar thing or idea appear under a new angle,
in an unexpected light. In the art of photography a shift in the direction
and focus of the lens may turn a trivial object into a thing of wonder.
In the waking state, 'side-stepping', 'shift of emphasis', and related
expressions signify a change-over from one frame of reference to
another. But while we dream, the coherence of these frames is so much
loosened that the change is not experienced as such, and side-stepping
becomes almost the normal way of the dream's progress. It is by virtue of
its freedom from restraint that the 'dreamy' way of thinking can benefit
the creative person -- whether he is Archimedes relaxing in his bath,
or the chimpanzee gazing absent-mindedly at a tree.
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 tallI used to amuse myself putting this to various friends -- scientists and
mountain. The narrow path, no more 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]
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, butNow it is, of course, quite impossible for the monk to duplicate himself,
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.
and to be walking up the mountain and down the mountain at one and
the same time. But in the visual image he does; and it is precisely
this indifference to logical contradiction, the irrational, dream-like
telescoping of the two images into one, which leads to the solution.
We could call the double image of the monk, or Einstein's traveller
riding on any of light, a
concretization
of abstract problems as it
sometimes occurs in dreams; and we could equally well call Kekulé's
serpent which seizes its own tail 'to whirl mockingly before his eyes',
the symbolization of a nascent, unformulated theory; these categories
overlap. The following example illustrates both; it refers to an incident
which has recently come to my knowledge:
Dr. X, a biologist, dreamed that as he was walking home from hisThe dream solved his dilemma by producing a biological analogy for the
laboratory he was joined by the wife and two children of his colleague
Dr. Y --, one a boy, the other an enchanting little girl. The
little girl seemed to take an immediate liking to X; she insisted
on his picking her up, and gave him a kiss, or rather a peck, on the
cheek. They all walked on with a feeling of friendly elation, but on
arriving at the house where X lived -- it had, unaccountably, become
a big railway-station hotel -- the girl declared peremptorily that she
would be staying with him; and as he looked at her he discovered that
she was no longer a child but an adolescent, 'almost fully developed',
with a provocative glint in her eye. Dr. Y's wife gave him a glance
which showed irony but no surprise; and the girl said to him mockingly:
'Don't worry, I am all brains.' He felt both tempted and terribly
embarrassed; at which he woke up.
The first thought that flashed through his mind was: 'She is Y's
brain-child'; and immediately the message of the dream was clear to
him. Some time earlier on Y had, in conversation, thrown out an idea,
which had taken root in X's mind, and had eventually set him off on
a line of research. The peck on his cheek had been 'the kiss of the
muse'; but by now the idea was 'almost fully developed' -- in fact,
the day before the dream, he had started drafting a paper on the
preliminary results of his research. But he had postponed telling Y
about it until he had something positive to show; and now he could
neither face owning up to Y that he had taken up his brain-child,
nor could he face stealing it (by omitting to give Y due credit in
the paper). The conversion of X's house into a railway hotel indicated
that this state of mind could not be a lasting one.
growth of a 'brain-child' from infancy to 'full development'. The seminal
idea had been Y's; but it was X who had done the work and brought it to
maturation; every scientist knows that it is quite a different matter to
throw out a casual suggestion which might or might not lead somewhere --
and to follow it up by months of hard work in the laboratory. The dream
made him see the situation in its proper perspective; now all he had to
do was to tell Y the simple facts of the matter, and to give due credit
in his paper to Y's paternity.
On one level of his mind X had, of course, known all this; discovery in
this case, as in many others, consisted in uncovering what had always
been there. But his knowledge had been buried under the rigid crust
of a conventional matrix, which made his conscious thoughts turn in a
vicious circle.
Punning for Profit
Charles Lamb once remarked in a letter that he wished 'to draw his
last breath through a pipe and exhale it in a pun'.
The benefits which the humorist and the poet derive from two meanings
linked together by one sound are evident; in the natural sciences
they are non-existent, for the simple reason that verbal formulation,
the choice of the particular words in which a theory is expressed,
is to a large extent irrelevant to its content. But in the sciences
concerned with language and meaning, the relations between sense and
sound play an important part. Homonyms and homophones, sound affinities
and transformations, are essential pointers in etymology and comparative
philology, in the study of the structure and development of language. I
have mentioned the 'divine pun' by which adåm, man, was created
out of adamåh, earth. Eve's Hebrew name is Havvåh, life;
while ahavvah is love; esh, a synonym for man, has the same root as ish,
fire; and milkhamåh, war, is derived from lekhêm, bread;
so is the village of Beth-lehem: the House of Bread.
Afffinities of sound provide the threads which lead from contemporary
words and concepts back to the Greek and Sanskrit womb. The deciphering
of the scripts of ancient languages is often aided by clues such as the
frequency with which a certain sign occurs, and other 'links' between
sign, symbol, sound, and sense. Thus the links which, in 1821, enabled
Champollion to break into the secret of hieroglyphics, were the proper
names Ptolemy, Cleopatra, and Alexander, which appeared on the Rosetta
Stone (and on various other documents) bearing parallel inscriptions in
Greek and in two different Egyptian scripts. The three names, inscribed
in conspicuous cartouches, provided Champollion with altogether fourteen
alphabetic signs of ascertained value -- certainly the greatest service
which any Cleopatra has rendered to history.
In the infantile and primitive imagination, the ties between sound
and meaning are still very intimate; name and object form an almost
indivisible unity, shown in the universal practices of word magic,
incantations, and verbal spells. Related to this is the belief that the
letters contained in a word form secret connections according to certain
hermeneutical rules -- a belief, shared by Judaism, several other Oriental
religions, and adopted by the Christian Fathers. It was thought, for
instance, that to extract their hidden meaning, certain texts in Hebrew
Scriptures should be arranged in vertical colunms and read downwards; or
that the first and last letter in each word should be used to form new
words; or that the letters should be reduced to their numerical value,
and the sums so obtained should then be manipulated according to the
rules of mystic numberlore. Here we have the archaic origins of the pun,
the crossword puzzle, the acrostic, anagram, and cryptogram, which have
always exerted such a curious fascination in the most varied cultures --
from Pythagoras and Lao-Tse to Champollion and Freud. The humorist's joke,
the linguist's discovery, the poet's euphony, all derive from that source.
The Benefits of Impersonation
'As far as my observations go', wrote C. G. Jung, 'I have not discovered
in the unconscious anything like a personality comparable to the
conscious ego. But . . . there are at least traces of personalities in the
manifestations of the unconscious. A simple example is the dream, in which
a variety of real and imaginery people enact the dream thoughts. . . .
The unconscious
personates
. [5]
The boundaries of the self are fluid or blurred in the dream. I may watch
an execution, and the next moment become the penon to be executed. The
actors on the stage are interchangeable; their cards of identity are
often reshuffled.
To be oneself and somebody else at the same time is an experience shared
by the dreamer, the Shaman impersonating the rain-god, the patient
possessed by demons. The same projective faculty is made use of by the
actor, to create the illusion in the audience that he is both himself and
Prince Hamlet; by the priest offering the eucharist in Holy Communion;
by the healer, who projects himself into the patient's place, and at
the same time acts as a father-figure.
The fluid boundaries of the self as represented in the unconscious mind,
confer on it the gift of empathy -- Einfuehlung --o f entering into a
kind of mental symbiosis with other selves. Empathy is a nicely sober,
noncommittal term for designating the rather mysterious processes which
enable one to transcend his boundaries, to step our of his skin as it
were, and put himself into the place of another. One reads the mood of the
other from such scant and crude pointers as the lifting or lowering of
the corners of the lips, or almost imperceptible changes in the muscles
which control the eyes; but the interpretation of these signs is not a
conscious act. It belongs to the repertory of underground games.
Empathy is at the source of our understanding how others think and feel;
it is the starting point of the art of medical diagnosis and of the
science of psychology. The medicine man, ancient and modern, has a twofold
relationship with the patient: he is trying to feel what the patient
feels, and he is, at the same time, acting a part: the exorcizer of evil
spirits himself endowed with divine powers; magician, witch, saint, sage,
hypnotist, faith-healer, confessor, father. The roles have changed, but
the principle has remained the same: to induce the patient to an act of
faith, to submission, worship, transference, catharsis. Psychotherapy in
its modern form expresses in explicit terms the principle of ab-reaction,
of the mental purge, which has always been implied in the ancient
cathartic techniques from the Dionysian and Orphic mystery-cults to the
rites of baptism and the confessional. The psychoanalyst induces his
patients to relive their conflicts in an illusionary drama, where he
himself impersonates the central figure -- halfway between comedian and
tragedian. The tragedian creates illusion, the comedian debunks illusion;
the therapist does both. In the dreams of patients under Jungian therapy,
supposed aspects of their underground-personality -- anima, animus and
'shadow' -- keep appearing under various disguises, like actors on a
stage. Finally, the technique of impersonation is used deliberately and
explicitly in the form of group-therapy known as 'psycho-drama'.
Some eminent psychiatrists -- among them Charcot, Freud, Jung, and Theodor
Reik -- have expressed, or hinted at their belief that not only empathy,
but something akin to telepathy operates between doctor and patient
in the hothouse atmosphere of the analytical session. But there is no
need to go that far in order to realize that some of the basic insights
of medicine and psychology are derived from the underground games which
permit us to transcend the limits of personal identity while we dream --
or stare into the footlights of the stage.
Displacement
We have seen that the sudden shift of attention to a seemingly irrelevant
aspect of a phenomenon -- which was previously ignored or taken for
granted -- plays a vital part in humour, art, and discovery. In the comic
story, the abrupt displacement of emphasis ('What am I supposed to do
at 4 a.m. in
Grimsby
?') has the same effect as the matador's
nonchalant side-stepping while the bull charges at his muleta. In
discovery, it makes a familiar thing or idea appear under a new angle,
in an unexpected light. In the art of photography a shift in the direction
and focus of the lens may turn a trivial object into a thing of wonder.
In the waking state, 'side-stepping', 'shift of emphasis', and related
expressions signify a change-over from one frame of reference to
another. But while we dream, the coherence of these frames is so much
loosened that the change is not experienced as such, and side-stepping
becomes almost the normal way of the dream's progress. It is by virtue of
its freedom from restraint that the 'dreamy' way of thinking can benefit
the creative person -- whether he is Archimedes relaxing in his bath,
or the chimpanzee gazing absent-mindedly at a tree.
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