Read The Act of Creation Online
Authors: Arthur Koestler
The Act of Creation (4 page)
Let us return to reasoning skills. Mathematical reasoning is governed
by specific rules of the game -- multiplication, differentiation,
integration, etc. Verbal reasoning, too, is subject to a variety of
specific codes: we can discuss Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo 'in terms
of' (a) historic significance, (b) military strategy, (c) the condition
of his liver, (d) the constellation of the planets. We can call these
'frames of reference' or 'universes of discourse' or 'associative
contexts' -- expressions which I shall frequently use to avoid monotonous
repetitions of the word 'matrix'. The jokes in the previous section can
all be described as universes of discourse colliding, frames getting
entangled, or contexts getting confused. But we must remember that each
of these expressions refers to specific patterns of activity which,
though flexible, are governed by sets of fixed rules.
A chess player looking at an empty board with a single bishop on it does
not see the board as a uniform mosaic of black and white squares, but
as a kind of magnetic field with lines of force indicating the bishops'
possible moves: the board has become patterned, as in Fig. 4a; Fig. 4b
shows the pattern of the rook.
When one thinks of 'matrices' and 'codes' it is sometimes helpful to
bear these figures in mind. The "matrix" is the pattern before you,
representing the ensemble of permissible moves. The "code" which governs
the matrix can be put into simple mathematical equations which contain
the essence of the pattern in a compressed, 'coded' form; or it can be
expressed by the word 'diagonals'. The code is the fixed, invariable
factor in a skill or habit; the matrix its variable aspect. The two words
do not refer to different entities, they refer to different "aspects" of
the same activity. When you sit in front of the chessboard your "code"
is the rule of the game determining which moves are permitted, your
"matrix" is the total of possible choices before you. Lastly, the choice
of the actual move among the variety of permissible moves is a matter of
"strategy," guided by the lie of the land -- the 'environment' of other
chessmen on the board. We have seen that comic effects are produced
by the sudden clash of incompatible matrices: to the experienced chess
player a rook moving bishopwise is decidedly 'funny'.
Consider a pianist playing a set-piece which he has learned by heart.
He has incomparably more scope for 'strategy' (tempo, rhythm, phrasing)
than the spider spinning its web. A musician transposing a tune into
a different key, or improvising variations of it, enjoys even greater
freedom; but he too is still bound by the codes of the diatonic or
chromatic scale. Matrices vary in flexibility from reflexes and more
or less automatized routines which allow but a few strategic choices,
to skills of almost unlimited variety; but all coherent thinking and
behaviour is subject to some specifiable code of rules to which its
character of coherence is due -- even though the code functions partly
or entirely on umconscious levels of the mind, as it generally does. A
bar-pianist can perform in his sleep or while conversing with the barmaid;
he has handed over control to the automatic pilot, as it were.
Hidden Persuaders
Everybody can ride a bicycle, but nobody knows how it is done. Not even
engineers and bicycle manufacturers know the formula for the correct
method of counteracting the tendency to fall by turning the handlebars
so that 'for a given angle of unbalance the curvature of each winding is
inversely proportional to the square of the speed at which the cyclist is
proceeding'. [6] The cyclist obeys a code of rules which is specifiable,
but which he cannot specify; he could write on his number-plate Pascal's
motto:
Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.
Or, to put it in a more abstract way:
but also to the skill of perceiving the world around us in a coherent
and meaningful manner. Hold your left hand six inches, the other twelve
inches, away from your eyes; they will look about the same size, although
the retinal image of the left is twice the size of the right. Trace
the contours of your face with a soapy finger on the bathroom mirror
(it is easily done by closing one eye). There is a shock waiting: the
image which looked life-size has shrunk to half-size, like a headhunter's
trophy. A person walking away does not seem to become a dwarf -- as he
should; a black glove looks just as black in the sunlight as in shadow
-- though it should not; when a coin is held before the eyes in a tilted
position its retinal projection will be a more or less flattened ellipse;
yet we see it as a circle, because we
know
it to be a circle; and it
takes some effort to see it actually as a squashed oval shape. Seeing is
believing, as the saying goes, but the reverse is also true: knowing is
seeing. 'Even the most elementary perceptions', wrote Bartlett, [7] 'have
the character of inferential constructions.' But the inferential process,
which controls perception, again works unconsciously. Seeing is a skill,
part innate, part acquired in early infancy.* The selective codes in this
case operate on the input, not on the output. The stimuli impinging on the
senses provide only the raw material of our conscious experience -- the
'blooming, buzzing confusion' of William James; before reaching awareness
the input is filtered, processed, distorted, interpreted, and reorganized
in a series of relay stations at various levels of the nervous system;
but the processing itself is not experienced by the person, and the
rules of the game according to which the controls work are unknown to him.
The examples I mentioned refer to the so-called 'visual constancies'
which enable us to recognize that the size, brightness, shape of objects
remain the same even though their retinal image changes all the time;
and to 'make sense' out of our sensations. They are shared by all people
with normal vision, and provide the basic structure on which more personal
'frames of perception' can be built. An apple looks different to Picasso
and to the greengrocer because their visual matrices are different.
Let me return once more to verbal thinking. When a person discusses,
say, the problem of capital punishment he may do so 'in terms of'
social utility or religious morality or psychopathology. Each of these
universes of discourse is governed by a complex set of rules, some of
which operate on conscious, others on unconscious levels. The latter are
axiomatic beliefs and prejudices which are taken for granted and implied
in the code. Further implied, hidden in the space between the words, are
the rules of grammar and syntax. These have mostly been learned not from
textbooks but 'by ear', as a young gypsy learns to fiddle without knowing
musical notation. Thus when one is engaged in ordinary conversation, not
only do the codes of grammar and syntax, of courtesy and common-or-garden
logic function unconsciously, but even if consciously bent on doing so
we would find it extremely difficult to define these rules which define
our thinking. For doing that we need the services of specialists -- the
semanticists and logicians of language. In other words, there is less
difference between the routines of thinking and bicycle-riding than our
self-esteem would make us believe. Both are governed by implicit codes
of which we are only dimly aware, and which we are unable to specify.*
Habit and Originality
Without these indispensable codes we would fall off the bicycle, and
thought would lose its coherence -- as it does when the codes of normal
reasoning are suspended while we dream. On the other hand, thinking which
remains confined to a single matrix has its obvious limitations. It is
the exercise of a more or less flexible skill, which can perform tasks
only of a kind already encountered in past experience; it is not capable
of original, creative achievement.
We learn by assimilating experiences and grouping them into ordered
schemata, into stable patterns of unity in variety. They enable us to cope
with events and situations by applying the rules of the game appropriate
to them. The matrices which pattern our perceptions, thoughts, and
activities are condensations of learning into habit. The process starts
in infancy and continues to senility; the hierarchy of flexible matrices
with fixed codes -- from those which govern the breathing of his cells,
to those which determine the pattern of his signature, constitute that
creature of many-layered habits whom we call John Brown. When the Duke
of Wellington was asked whether he agreed that habit was man's second
nature he exclaimed: 'Second nature? It's ten times nature!'
Habits have varying degrees of flexibility; if often repeated under
unchanging conditions, in a monotonous environment, they tend to
become rigid and automarized. But even an elastic strait-jacket is
still a strait-jacket if the patient has no possibility of getting out
of it. Behaviourism, the dominant school in contemporary psychology, is
inclined to take a view of man which reduces him to the station of that
patient, and the human condition to that of a conditioned automaton. I
believe that view to be depressingly true up to a point. The argument
of this book starts at the point where, I believe, it ceases to be true.
There are two ways of escaping our more or less automatized routines
of thinking and behaving. The first, of course, is the plunge into
dreaming or dream-like states, when the codes of rational thinking are
suspended. The other way is also an escape -- from boredom, stagnation,
intellectual predicaments, and emotional frustration -- but an escape
in the opposite direction; it is signalled by the spontaneous flash of
insight which shows a familiar situation or event in a new light, and
elicits a new response to it. The bisociative act connects previously
unconnected matrices of experience; it makes us 'understand what it is to
be awake, to be living on several planes at once' (to quote T. S. Eliot,
somewhat out of context).
The first way of escape is a regression to earlier, more primitive levels
of ideation, exemplified in the language of the dream; the second an
ascent to a new, more complex level of mental evolution. Though seemingly
opposed, the two processes will turn out to he intimately related.
Man and Machine
When two independent matrices of perception or reasoning interact
with each other the result (as I hope to show) is either a
collision
ending in laughter, or their
fusion
in a new intellectual synthesis,
or their
confrontation
in an aesthetic experience. The bisociative
patterns found in any domain of creative activity are tri-valent:
that is to say, the same pair of matrices can produce comic, tragic,
or intellectually challenging effects.
Let me take as a first example 'man' and 'machine'. A favourite trick of
the coarser type of humour is to exploit the contrast between these two
frames of reference (or between the related pair 'mind' and 'matter'). The
dignified schoolmaster lowering himself into a rickety chair and crashing
to the floor is perceived simultaneously in two incompatible contexts:
authority is debunked by gravity. The savage, wistfully addressing the
carved totem figure -- 'Don't be so proud, I know you from a plum-tree' --
expresses the same idea: hubris of mind, earthy materiality of body. The
variations on this theme are inexhaustible: the person slipping on a
banana skin; the sergeant-major attacked by diarrhoea; Hamlet getting
the hiccoughs; soldiers marching like automata; the pedant behaving
like a mechanical robot; the absent-minded don boiling his watch while
clutching the egg, like a machine obeying the wrong switch. Fate keeps
playing practical jokes to deflate the victim's dignity, intellect, or
conceit by demonstrating his dependence on coarse bodily functions and
physical laws -- by degrading him to an automaton. The same purpose is
served by the reverse technique of making artefacts behave like humans:
Punch and Judy, Jack-in-the-Box, gadgets playing tricks on their masters,
hats in a gust of wind escaping the pursuer as if with calculated malice.
In Henri Bergson's book on the problem of laughter, this dualism of
subtle mind and inert matter ('the mechanical encrusted on the living')
is made to serve as an explanation of
all
forms of the comic; whereas
in the present theory it applies to only one variant of it among many
others. Surprisingly, Bergson failed to see that each of the examples
just mentioned can be convened from a comic into a tragic or purely
intellectual experience, based on the same logical pattern -- i.e. on
the same pair of bisociated matrices -- by a simple change of emotional
climate. The fat man slipping and crashing on the icy pavement will be
either a comic or a tragic figure according to whether the spectator's
attitude is dominated by malice or pity: a callous schoolboy will laugh
at the spectade, a sentimental old lady may be inclined to weep. But
in between these two there is the emotionally balanced attitude of the
physician who happens to pass the scene of the mishap, who may feel both
amusement and compassion, but whose primary concern is to find out the
nature of the injury. Thus the victim of the crash may be seated in any
of the three panels of the triptych. Don Quixote gradually changes from
a comic into a puzzling figure if, instead of relishing his delusions
with arrogant condescension, I become interested in their psychological
causes; and he changes into a tragic figure as detached curiosity turns
into sympathetic identification -- as I recognize in the sad knight my
brother-in-arms in the fight against windmills. The stock characters
in the farce -- the cuckold, the miser, the stutterer, the hunchback,
the foreigner -- appear as comic, intellectually challenging, or tragic
figures according to the different emotional attitudes which they arouse
in spectators of different mental age, culture, or mood.
The 'mechanical encrusted on the living' symbolizes the contrast between
man's spiritual aspirations and his all-too-solid flesh subject to
the laws of physics and chemistry. The practical joker and the clown
specialize in tricks which exploit the mechanical forces of gravity
and inertia to deflate his humanity. But Icarus, too, like the dinner
guest whose chair collapsed, is the victim of a practical joke -- the
gods, instead of breaking the legs of his chair, have melted away his
wings. The second appeals to loftier emotions than the first, but the
logical structure of the two situations and their message is the same:
whatever you fancy yourself to be you are subject to the inverse square
law like any other lump of clay. In one case it is a comic, in the other
a tragic message. The difference is due to the different character of the
emotions involved (malice in the first case, compassionate admiration
in the second); but also to the fact that in the first case the two
frames of reference collide, exploding the tension, while in the second
they remain juxtaposed in a tragic confrontation, and the tension ebbs
away in a slow catharsis. The third alternative is the reconciliation
and synthesis of the two matrices; its effect is neither laughter,
nor tears, but the arousal of curiosity: just
how
is the mechanical
encrusted on the living? How much acceleration can the organism stand,
and how does zero gravity effect it?
According to Bergson, the main sources of the comic are the mechanical
attributes of inertia, rigidity, and repetitiveness impinging on life;
among his favourite examples are the man-automaton, the puppet on strings,
Jack-in-the-Box, etc. However, if rigidity contrasted with organic
suppleness were laughable in itself, Egyptian statues and Byzantine
mosaics would be the best jokes ever invented. If automatic repetativeness
in human behaviour were a necessary and sufficient condition of the
comic, there would be no more amusing spectacle thau an epileptic fit;
and if we wanted a good laugh we would merely have to feel a person's
pulse or listen to his heart-beat, with its monotonous tick-tack. If
'we laugh each time a person gives us the impression of being a thing'
[8] there would be nothing more funny than a corpse.
In fact, every one of Bergson's examples of the comic can be transposed,
along a horizontal line as it were, across the triptych, into the
panels of science and art. His 'homme-automate', man and artefact at
the same time, has its lyric counterpart in Galatea -- the ivory statue
which Pygmalion made, Aphrodite brought to life, and Shaw returned
to the comic domain. It has its tragic counterpart in the legends of
Faust's Homunculus, the Golem of Prague, the monsters of Frankenstein;
its origins reach back to Jehovah manufacturing Adam out of 'adamåh',
the Hebrew word for earth. The reverse transformation -- life into
mechanism -- has equally rich varieties: the pedant whom enslavement to
habit has reduced to an automaton is comic because we despise him; the
compulsion-neurotic is not, because we are puzzled and try to understand
him; the catatonic patient, frozen into a statue, is tragic because we
pity him. And so again back to mythology: Lot's wife turned into a pillar
of salt, Narcissus into a flower, the poor nymph Echo wasting away until
nothing is left but her voice, and her bones changed into rocks.
In the middle panel of the triptych the 'homme-automate' is the
focal, or rather bi-focal, concept of all sciences of life. From their
inception they treated, as the practical joker does, man as both mind
and machine. The Pythagoreans regarded the body as a musical instrument
whose soul-strings must have the right tension, and we still unwittingly
refer to our mortal frame as a kind of stringed guitar when we speak of
'muscle
tone
', or describe John as 'good tempered'. The same bifocal
view is reflected in the four Hippocratic 'humours' -- which were both
liquids of the body and moods of the spirit; and 'spiritus' itself is,
like 'pneuma', ambiguous, meaning also breath. The concept of 'catharsis'
applied, and still does, to the purgation of either the mind or the
bowels. Yet if I were to speak earnestly of halitosis of the soul, or
of laxatives to the mind, or call an outburst of temper a humourrhage,
it would sound ludicrous, because I would make the implicit ambiguities
explicit for the purpose of maliciously contrasting them; I would tear
asunder two frames of reference that our Greek forbears had managed to
integrate, however tentatively, into a unified, psychosomatic view which
our language still reflects.
In modern science it has become accepted usage to speak of the
'mechanisms' of digestion, perception, learning, and cognition, etc.,
and to lay increasing or exclusive stress on the automaton aspect of the
'homme-automate'. The mechanistic trend in physiology reached its symbolic
culmination at the beginning of the century in the slogan 'Man a machine'
-- the programmatic title of a once famous book by Jacques Loeb; it was
taken over by behaviouristic psychology, which has been prominent in
the Anglo-Saxon countries for half a century. Even a genial naturalist
like Konrad Lorenz, whose
King Solomon's Ring
has delighted millions,
felt impelled to proclaim that to regard Newton and Darwin as automata
was the only permissible view for 'the inductive research worker who
does not believe in miracles'. [9] It all depends, of course, on what
one's definition of a miracle is: Galileo, the ideal of all 'inductive
research workers', rejected Kepler's theory that the tides were due to
the moon's attraction as an 'occult fancy'. [10] The intellectual climate
created by these attitudes has been summed up by Cyril Burt, writing
about 'The Concept of Consciousness' (which behaviourists have banned,
as another 'occult fancy', from the vocabulary of science): 'The result,
as a cynical onlooker might be tempted to say, is that psychology, having
first bargained away its soul and then gone out of its mind, seems now,
as it faces an untimely end, to have lost all consciousness.' [11]
I have dwelt at some length on Bergson's favourite example of the comic,
because of its relevance to one of the leitmotifs of this book. The
man-machine duality has been epitomized in a laconic sentence -- 'man
consists of ninety per cent water and ten per cent minerals' -- which one
can regard, according to taste, as comic, intellectually challenging, or
tragic. In the first case one has only to think of a caricature showing a
fat man under the African sun melting away into a puddle; in the second,
of the 'inductive research worker' bent over his test-tube; in the third,
of a handful of dust.
Other examples of Bergson's man-automaton need be mentioned only
briefly. The puppet play in its naïve Punch and Judy version is
comic
;
the sophisticated marionette theatre is a traditional form of
art
;
life-imitating contraptions are used in various branches of
science
and technology: from the dummy figures of dressmakers to the anatomical
models in medical schools; from the artificial limbs of the orthopaedist
to robots imitating the working of the nervous system (such as Grey
Walter's electronic tortoises). In the
metaphorical
sense, the
puppet on strings is a timeless symbol, either comic or tragic, of man
as a plaything of destiny -- whether he is jerked about by the gods
or suspended on his own chromosomes and glands. In the neutral zone
between Comedy and tragedy, philosophers have been tireless in their
efforts to reconcile the two conflicting aspects of the human puppet:
his experience of free will and moral responsibility on the one hand;
the strings of determinism, religious or scientific, on the other.
by specific rules of the game -- multiplication, differentiation,
integration, etc. Verbal reasoning, too, is subject to a variety of
specific codes: we can discuss Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo 'in terms
of' (a) historic significance, (b) military strategy, (c) the condition
of his liver, (d) the constellation of the planets. We can call these
'frames of reference' or 'universes of discourse' or 'associative
contexts' -- expressions which I shall frequently use to avoid monotonous
repetitions of the word 'matrix'. The jokes in the previous section can
all be described as universes of discourse colliding, frames getting
entangled, or contexts getting confused. But we must remember that each
of these expressions refers to specific patterns of activity which,
though flexible, are governed by sets of fixed rules.
A chess player looking at an empty board with a single bishop on it does
not see the board as a uniform mosaic of black and white squares, but
as a kind of magnetic field with lines of force indicating the bishops'
possible moves: the board has become patterned, as in Fig. 4a; Fig. 4b
shows the pattern of the rook.
bear these figures in mind. The "matrix" is the pattern before you,
representing the ensemble of permissible moves. The "code" which governs
the matrix can be put into simple mathematical equations which contain
the essence of the pattern in a compressed, 'coded' form; or it can be
expressed by the word 'diagonals'. The code is the fixed, invariable
factor in a skill or habit; the matrix its variable aspect. The two words
do not refer to different entities, they refer to different "aspects" of
the same activity. When you sit in front of the chessboard your "code"
is the rule of the game determining which moves are permitted, your
"matrix" is the total of possible choices before you. Lastly, the choice
of the actual move among the variety of permissible moves is a matter of
"strategy," guided by the lie of the land -- the 'environment' of other
chessmen on the board. We have seen that comic effects are produced
by the sudden clash of incompatible matrices: to the experienced chess
player a rook moving bishopwise is decidedly 'funny'.
Consider a pianist playing a set-piece which he has learned by heart.
He has incomparably more scope for 'strategy' (tempo, rhythm, phrasing)
than the spider spinning its web. A musician transposing a tune into
a different key, or improvising variations of it, enjoys even greater
freedom; but he too is still bound by the codes of the diatonic or
chromatic scale. Matrices vary in flexibility from reflexes and more
or less automatized routines which allow but a few strategic choices,
to skills of almost unlimited variety; but all coherent thinking and
behaviour is subject to some specifiable code of rules to which its
character of coherence is due -- even though the code functions partly
or entirely on umconscious levels of the mind, as it generally does. A
bar-pianist can perform in his sleep or while conversing with the barmaid;
he has handed over control to the automatic pilot, as it were.
Hidden Persuaders
Everybody can ride a bicycle, but nobody knows how it is done. Not even
engineers and bicycle manufacturers know the formula for the correct
method of counteracting the tendency to fall by turning the handlebars
so that 'for a given angle of unbalance the curvature of each winding is
inversely proportional to the square of the speed at which the cyclist is
proceeding'. [6] The cyclist obeys a code of rules which is specifiable,
but which he cannot specify; he could write on his number-plate Pascal's
motto:
Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.
Or, to put it in a more abstract way:
The controls of a skilled activity generally function below the levelThis applies not only to our visceral activities and muscular skills,
of consciousness on which that activity takes place. The code is a
hidden persuader.
but also to the skill of perceiving the world around us in a coherent
and meaningful manner. Hold your left hand six inches, the other twelve
inches, away from your eyes; they will look about the same size, although
the retinal image of the left is twice the size of the right. Trace
the contours of your face with a soapy finger on the bathroom mirror
(it is easily done by closing one eye). There is a shock waiting: the
image which looked life-size has shrunk to half-size, like a headhunter's
trophy. A person walking away does not seem to become a dwarf -- as he
should; a black glove looks just as black in the sunlight as in shadow
-- though it should not; when a coin is held before the eyes in a tilted
position its retinal projection will be a more or less flattened ellipse;
yet we see it as a circle, because we
know
it to be a circle; and it
takes some effort to see it actually as a squashed oval shape. Seeing is
believing, as the saying goes, but the reverse is also true: knowing is
seeing. 'Even the most elementary perceptions', wrote Bartlett, [7] 'have
the character of inferential constructions.' But the inferential process,
which controls perception, again works unconsciously. Seeing is a skill,
part innate, part acquired in early infancy.* The selective codes in this
case operate on the input, not on the output. The stimuli impinging on the
senses provide only the raw material of our conscious experience -- the
'blooming, buzzing confusion' of William James; before reaching awareness
the input is filtered, processed, distorted, interpreted, and reorganized
in a series of relay stations at various levels of the nervous system;
but the processing itself is not experienced by the person, and the
rules of the game according to which the controls work are unknown to him.
The examples I mentioned refer to the so-called 'visual constancies'
which enable us to recognize that the size, brightness, shape of objects
remain the same even though their retinal image changes all the time;
and to 'make sense' out of our sensations. They are shared by all people
with normal vision, and provide the basic structure on which more personal
'frames of perception' can be built. An apple looks different to Picasso
and to the greengrocer because their visual matrices are different.
Let me return once more to verbal thinking. When a person discusses,
say, the problem of capital punishment he may do so 'in terms of'
social utility or religious morality or psychopathology. Each of these
universes of discourse is governed by a complex set of rules, some of
which operate on conscious, others on unconscious levels. The latter are
axiomatic beliefs and prejudices which are taken for granted and implied
in the code. Further implied, hidden in the space between the words, are
the rules of grammar and syntax. These have mostly been learned not from
textbooks but 'by ear', as a young gypsy learns to fiddle without knowing
musical notation. Thus when one is engaged in ordinary conversation, not
only do the codes of grammar and syntax, of courtesy and common-or-garden
logic function unconsciously, but even if consciously bent on doing so
we would find it extremely difficult to define these rules which define
our thinking. For doing that we need the services of specialists -- the
semanticists and logicians of language. In other words, there is less
difference between the routines of thinking and bicycle-riding than our
self-esteem would make us believe. Both are governed by implicit codes
of which we are only dimly aware, and which we are unable to specify.*
Habit and Originality
Without these indispensable codes we would fall off the bicycle, and
thought would lose its coherence -- as it does when the codes of normal
reasoning are suspended while we dream. On the other hand, thinking which
remains confined to a single matrix has its obvious limitations. It is
the exercise of a more or less flexible skill, which can perform tasks
only of a kind already encountered in past experience; it is not capable
of original, creative achievement.
We learn by assimilating experiences and grouping them into ordered
schemata, into stable patterns of unity in variety. They enable us to cope
with events and situations by applying the rules of the game appropriate
to them. The matrices which pattern our perceptions, thoughts, and
activities are condensations of learning into habit. The process starts
in infancy and continues to senility; the hierarchy of flexible matrices
with fixed codes -- from those which govern the breathing of his cells,
to those which determine the pattern of his signature, constitute that
creature of many-layered habits whom we call John Brown. When the Duke
of Wellington was asked whether he agreed that habit was man's second
nature he exclaimed: 'Second nature? It's ten times nature!'
Habits have varying degrees of flexibility; if often repeated under
unchanging conditions, in a monotonous environment, they tend to
become rigid and automarized. But even an elastic strait-jacket is
still a strait-jacket if the patient has no possibility of getting out
of it. Behaviourism, the dominant school in contemporary psychology, is
inclined to take a view of man which reduces him to the station of that
patient, and the human condition to that of a conditioned automaton. I
believe that view to be depressingly true up to a point. The argument
of this book starts at the point where, I believe, it ceases to be true.
There are two ways of escaping our more or less automatized routines
of thinking and behaving. The first, of course, is the plunge into
dreaming or dream-like states, when the codes of rational thinking are
suspended. The other way is also an escape -- from boredom, stagnation,
intellectual predicaments, and emotional frustration -- but an escape
in the opposite direction; it is signalled by the spontaneous flash of
insight which shows a familiar situation or event in a new light, and
elicits a new response to it. The bisociative act connects previously
unconnected matrices of experience; it makes us 'understand what it is to
be awake, to be living on several planes at once' (to quote T. S. Eliot,
somewhat out of context).
The first way of escape is a regression to earlier, more primitive levels
of ideation, exemplified in the language of the dream; the second an
ascent to a new, more complex level of mental evolution. Though seemingly
opposed, the two processes will turn out to he intimately related.
Man and Machine
When two independent matrices of perception or reasoning interact
with each other the result (as I hope to show) is either a
collision
ending in laughter, or their
fusion
in a new intellectual synthesis,
or their
confrontation
in an aesthetic experience. The bisociative
patterns found in any domain of creative activity are tri-valent:
that is to say, the same pair of matrices can produce comic, tragic,
or intellectually challenging effects.
Let me take as a first example 'man' and 'machine'. A favourite trick of
the coarser type of humour is to exploit the contrast between these two
frames of reference (or between the related pair 'mind' and 'matter'). The
dignified schoolmaster lowering himself into a rickety chair and crashing
to the floor is perceived simultaneously in two incompatible contexts:
authority is debunked by gravity. The savage, wistfully addressing the
carved totem figure -- 'Don't be so proud, I know you from a plum-tree' --
expresses the same idea: hubris of mind, earthy materiality of body. The
variations on this theme are inexhaustible: the person slipping on a
banana skin; the sergeant-major attacked by diarrhoea; Hamlet getting
the hiccoughs; soldiers marching like automata; the pedant behaving
like a mechanical robot; the absent-minded don boiling his watch while
clutching the egg, like a machine obeying the wrong switch. Fate keeps
playing practical jokes to deflate the victim's dignity, intellect, or
conceit by demonstrating his dependence on coarse bodily functions and
physical laws -- by degrading him to an automaton. The same purpose is
served by the reverse technique of making artefacts behave like humans:
Punch and Judy, Jack-in-the-Box, gadgets playing tricks on their masters,
hats in a gust of wind escaping the pursuer as if with calculated malice.
In Henri Bergson's book on the problem of laughter, this dualism of
subtle mind and inert matter ('the mechanical encrusted on the living')
is made to serve as an explanation of
all
forms of the comic; whereas
in the present theory it applies to only one variant of it among many
others. Surprisingly, Bergson failed to see that each of the examples
just mentioned can be convened from a comic into a tragic or purely
intellectual experience, based on the same logical pattern -- i.e. on
the same pair of bisociated matrices -- by a simple change of emotional
climate. The fat man slipping and crashing on the icy pavement will be
either a comic or a tragic figure according to whether the spectator's
attitude is dominated by malice or pity: a callous schoolboy will laugh
at the spectade, a sentimental old lady may be inclined to weep. But
in between these two there is the emotionally balanced attitude of the
physician who happens to pass the scene of the mishap, who may feel both
amusement and compassion, but whose primary concern is to find out the
nature of the injury. Thus the victim of the crash may be seated in any
of the three panels of the triptych. Don Quixote gradually changes from
a comic into a puzzling figure if, instead of relishing his delusions
with arrogant condescension, I become interested in their psychological
causes; and he changes into a tragic figure as detached curiosity turns
into sympathetic identification -- as I recognize in the sad knight my
brother-in-arms in the fight against windmills. The stock characters
in the farce -- the cuckold, the miser, the stutterer, the hunchback,
the foreigner -- appear as comic, intellectually challenging, or tragic
figures according to the different emotional attitudes which they arouse
in spectators of different mental age, culture, or mood.
The 'mechanical encrusted on the living' symbolizes the contrast between
man's spiritual aspirations and his all-too-solid flesh subject to
the laws of physics and chemistry. The practical joker and the clown
specialize in tricks which exploit the mechanical forces of gravity
and inertia to deflate his humanity. But Icarus, too, like the dinner
guest whose chair collapsed, is the victim of a practical joke -- the
gods, instead of breaking the legs of his chair, have melted away his
wings. The second appeals to loftier emotions than the first, but the
logical structure of the two situations and their message is the same:
whatever you fancy yourself to be you are subject to the inverse square
law like any other lump of clay. In one case it is a comic, in the other
a tragic message. The difference is due to the different character of the
emotions involved (malice in the first case, compassionate admiration
in the second); but also to the fact that in the first case the two
frames of reference collide, exploding the tension, while in the second
they remain juxtaposed in a tragic confrontation, and the tension ebbs
away in a slow catharsis. The third alternative is the reconciliation
and synthesis of the two matrices; its effect is neither laughter,
nor tears, but the arousal of curiosity: just
how
is the mechanical
encrusted on the living? How much acceleration can the organism stand,
and how does zero gravity effect it?
According to Bergson, the main sources of the comic are the mechanical
attributes of inertia, rigidity, and repetitiveness impinging on life;
among his favourite examples are the man-automaton, the puppet on strings,
Jack-in-the-Box, etc. However, if rigidity contrasted with organic
suppleness were laughable in itself, Egyptian statues and Byzantine
mosaics would be the best jokes ever invented. If automatic repetativeness
in human behaviour were a necessary and sufficient condition of the
comic, there would be no more amusing spectacle thau an epileptic fit;
and if we wanted a good laugh we would merely have to feel a person's
pulse or listen to his heart-beat, with its monotonous tick-tack. If
'we laugh each time a person gives us the impression of being a thing'
[8] there would be nothing more funny than a corpse.
In fact, every one of Bergson's examples of the comic can be transposed,
along a horizontal line as it were, across the triptych, into the
panels of science and art. His 'homme-automate', man and artefact at
the same time, has its lyric counterpart in Galatea -- the ivory statue
which Pygmalion made, Aphrodite brought to life, and Shaw returned
to the comic domain. It has its tragic counterpart in the legends of
Faust's Homunculus, the Golem of Prague, the monsters of Frankenstein;
its origins reach back to Jehovah manufacturing Adam out of 'adamåh',
the Hebrew word for earth. The reverse transformation -- life into
mechanism -- has equally rich varieties: the pedant whom enslavement to
habit has reduced to an automaton is comic because we despise him; the
compulsion-neurotic is not, because we are puzzled and try to understand
him; the catatonic patient, frozen into a statue, is tragic because we
pity him. And so again back to mythology: Lot's wife turned into a pillar
of salt, Narcissus into a flower, the poor nymph Echo wasting away until
nothing is left but her voice, and her bones changed into rocks.
In the middle panel of the triptych the 'homme-automate' is the
focal, or rather bi-focal, concept of all sciences of life. From their
inception they treated, as the practical joker does, man as both mind
and machine. The Pythagoreans regarded the body as a musical instrument
whose soul-strings must have the right tension, and we still unwittingly
refer to our mortal frame as a kind of stringed guitar when we speak of
'muscle
tone
', or describe John as 'good tempered'. The same bifocal
view is reflected in the four Hippocratic 'humours' -- which were both
liquids of the body and moods of the spirit; and 'spiritus' itself is,
like 'pneuma', ambiguous, meaning also breath. The concept of 'catharsis'
applied, and still does, to the purgation of either the mind or the
bowels. Yet if I were to speak earnestly of halitosis of the soul, or
of laxatives to the mind, or call an outburst of temper a humourrhage,
it would sound ludicrous, because I would make the implicit ambiguities
explicit for the purpose of maliciously contrasting them; I would tear
asunder two frames of reference that our Greek forbears had managed to
integrate, however tentatively, into a unified, psychosomatic view which
our language still reflects.
In modern science it has become accepted usage to speak of the
'mechanisms' of digestion, perception, learning, and cognition, etc.,
and to lay increasing or exclusive stress on the automaton aspect of the
'homme-automate'. The mechanistic trend in physiology reached its symbolic
culmination at the beginning of the century in the slogan 'Man a machine'
-- the programmatic title of a once famous book by Jacques Loeb; it was
taken over by behaviouristic psychology, which has been prominent in
the Anglo-Saxon countries for half a century. Even a genial naturalist
like Konrad Lorenz, whose
King Solomon's Ring
has delighted millions,
felt impelled to proclaim that to regard Newton and Darwin as automata
was the only permissible view for 'the inductive research worker who
does not believe in miracles'. [9] It all depends, of course, on what
one's definition of a miracle is: Galileo, the ideal of all 'inductive
research workers', rejected Kepler's theory that the tides were due to
the moon's attraction as an 'occult fancy'. [10] The intellectual climate
created by these attitudes has been summed up by Cyril Burt, writing
about 'The Concept of Consciousness' (which behaviourists have banned,
as another 'occult fancy', from the vocabulary of science): 'The result,
as a cynical onlooker might be tempted to say, is that psychology, having
first bargained away its soul and then gone out of its mind, seems now,
as it faces an untimely end, to have lost all consciousness.' [11]
I have dwelt at some length on Bergson's favourite example of the comic,
because of its relevance to one of the leitmotifs of this book. The
man-machine duality has been epitomized in a laconic sentence -- 'man
consists of ninety per cent water and ten per cent minerals' -- which one
can regard, according to taste, as comic, intellectually challenging, or
tragic. In the first case one has only to think of a caricature showing a
fat man under the African sun melting away into a puddle; in the second,
of the 'inductive research worker' bent over his test-tube; in the third,
of a handful of dust.
Other examples of Bergson's man-automaton need be mentioned only
briefly. The puppet play in its naïve Punch and Judy version is
comic
;
the sophisticated marionette theatre is a traditional form of
art
;
life-imitating contraptions are used in various branches of
science
and technology: from the dummy figures of dressmakers to the anatomical
models in medical schools; from the artificial limbs of the orthopaedist
to robots imitating the working of the nervous system (such as Grey
Walter's electronic tortoises). In the
metaphorical
sense, the
puppet on strings is a timeless symbol, either comic or tragic, of man
as a plaything of destiny -- whether he is jerked about by the gods
or suspended on his own chromosomes and glands. In the neutral zone
between Comedy and tragedy, philosophers have been tireless in their
efforts to reconcile the two conflicting aspects of the human puppet:
his experience of free will and moral responsibility on the one hand;
the strings of determinism, religious or scientific, on the other.
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