The Act of Creation (45 page)

 

 

 

On Truth and Beauty

 

 

However, the reduction of the uncanny and vexing to the orderly and
familiar, of the rustling of leaves in the dark forest to the whisper of
fairies or the vibrations of compressed air -- both equally reassuring
-- is merely the negative aspect of the power of explanation: relief
from anxiety. Its positive aspect is epitomized in the Pythagorean
belief that musical harmonies govern the motion of the stars. The myth
of creation appeals not only to man's abhorrence of chaos, but also to
his sense of wonder at the cosmic order: light is more than the absence
of darkness, and law more than the absence of disorder. I have spoken
repeatedly of that sense of 'oceanic wonder' -- the most sublimated
expression of the self-transcending emotions -- which is at the root of
the scientist's quest for ultimate causes, and the artist's quest for the
ultimate realities of experience. The sensation of 'marvellous clarity'
which enraptured Kepler when he discovered his second law is shared by
every artist when a strophe suddenly falls into what seems to be its
predestined pattern, or when the felicitous image unfolds in the mind --
the only one which can 'explain' by symbols the rationally unexplainable
-- and express the inexpressible.

 

 

Experiences of this kind, when something previously turbid becomes
suddenly transparent and permeated by light, are always accompanied by
the sudden expansion and subsequent catharsis of the self-transcending
emotions. I have called this the 'earthing' of emotion, on the analogy
of earthing (or 'grounding') an electrically charged body, so that
its tensions are drained by the immense current-absorbing capacity of
'mother earth'. The scientist attains catharsis through the reduction
of phenomena to their primary causes; a disturbing particular problem is
mentally 'earthed' into the universal order. The same description applies
to the artist, except that his 'primary causes' and 'laws of order' are
differently constituted. They derive from mythology and magic, from the
compulsive powers of rhythm and form, from archetypal symbols which arouse
unconscious resonances. But their 'explanatory power', though not of a
rational order, is emotionally as satisfying as that of the scientist's
explanations; both mediate the 'earthing' of particular experiences into
a universal frame; and the catharsis which follows scientific discovery
or artistic "trouvaille" has the same 'oceanic' quality. The melancholy
charm of the golden lads who come to dust because that is the condition of
man, is due to the 'earthing' of our personal predicaments in a universal
predicament. Art, like religion, is a school of self-transcendence; it
expands individual awareness into cosmic awareness, as science teaches
us to reduce any particular puzzle to the great universal puzzle.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

If we now turn to the opposite camp, we find that painters and sculptors,
not to mention architects, have always been guided, and often obsessed,
by scientific and pseudo-scientific theories -- the golden section,
the secrets of perspective, Dürer's and Leonardo's 'ultimate laws' of
proportion,* Cézanne's doctrine 'everything in nature is modelled on
the sphere, the cone and the cylinder'; Braque's substitution of cubes
for spheres; the elaborate theorizings of the neo-impressionists; Le
Corbusier's modulator theory based on the so-called Fibonacci sequence of
numbers -- the list could be continued endlessly. The counterpart to
A
Mathematician's Apology
, which puts beauty before rational method,
is Seurat's pronouncement (in a letter to a friend): 'They see poetry in
what I have done. No, I apply my method, and that is all there is to it.'
Both sides seem to be leaning over backwards: the artist to rationalize
his creative processes, the scientist to irrationalize them, so to
speak. But this fact in itself is significant. The scientist feels the
urge to confess his indebtedness to unconscious intuitions which guide his
theorizing; the artist values, or over-values, the theoretical discipline
which controls his intuition. The two factors are complementary; the
proportions in which they combine depend -- other things being equal
-- foremost on the
medium
in which the creative drive finds
its expression; and they shade into each other like the colours of
the rainbow.
The act of creation itself, as we have seen, is based on essentially
the same underlying pattern in all ranges of the continuous rainbow
spectrum. But the criteria for judging the finished product differ of
course from one medium to another. Though the psychological processes
which led to the creation of Poincaré's theorem and of Botticelli's
virgin lie not as far apart as commonly assumed, the first can be
rigorously verified by logical operations, the second not. There seems
to be a crack in Keats's Grecian urn, and its message to sound rather
hollow; but if we recall two essential points made earlier on, the crack
will heal.
The first is that verification comes only postfactum, when the creative
act is completed; the act itself is always a leap into the dark, a dive
into the deeps, and the diver is more likely to come up with a handful
of mud than with a coral. False inspirations and freak theories are as
abundant in the history of science as bad works of art; yet they command
in the victim's mind the same forceful conviction, the same euphoria,
catharsis, and experience of beauty as those happy finds which are
postfactum proven right. Truth, as Kepler said, is an elusive hussy --
who frequently managed to fool even Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, Pasteur,
and Einstein, to mention only a few. In this respect, then, Poincaré
is in no better position than Botticelli: while in the throes of the
creative process, guidance by truth is as uncertain and subjective as
guidance by beauty.
The second point refers to the verifiability of the product after the act;
we have seen that even in this respect the contrast is not absolute, but
a matter of degrees (
Chapter X
). A physical theory
is far more open to verification than a work of art; but experiments,
even so-called crucial experiments, are subject to interpretation; and
the history of science is to a large part a history of controversies,
because the interpretation of facts to 'confirm' or 'refute' a theory
always contains a subjective factor, dependent on the scientific fashions
and prejudices of the period. There were indeed times in the history
of most sciences when the interpretations of empirical data assumed
a degree of subjectivity and arbitrariness compared to which literary
criticism appeared almost to be an 'exact science'.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

 

NOTES

 

 

To
p. 329
.

 

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

 

XVIII
INFOLDING
Let me return once more to the three main criteria of the technical
excellence of a comic work: its originality, emphasis, and economy;
and let us see ho~ far they are applicable to other forms of art.
Originality and Emphasis
From antiquity until well into the Renaissance artists thought, or
professed to think, that they were copying nature; even Leonardo wrote
into his notebook 'that painting is most praiseworthy which is most
like the thing represented'. Of course, they were doing nothing of the
sort. They were creating, as Plato had reproached them, 'man-made dreams
for those who are awake'. The thing represented had to pass through two
distorting lenses: the artist's mind, and his medium of expression,
before it emerged as a man-made dream -- the two, of course, being
intimately connected and interacting with each other.
To start with the medium: the space of the painter's canvas is smaller
than the landscape to be copied, and his pigment is different from
the colours he sees; the writer's ink cannot render a voice nor exhale
the smell of a rose. The nature of the medium always excludes direct
imitation. Some aspects of experience cannot be reproduced at all;
some only by gross oversimplification or distortion; and some only at
the price of sacrificing others. The limitations and peculiarities of
his medium force the artist at each step to make choices, consciously
or unconsciously; to select for representation those features or aspects
which he considers to be relevant, and to discard those which he considers
irrelevant. Thus we meet again the trinity of
selection, exaggeration,
and simplification
which I have discussed before (