* For a more recent treatment of this subject, see E.G. Schachtel's important work Metamorphosis (1963).
It is also at the origin of the sympathetic magic practised by all primitive and not so primitive people. When the medicine man disguises himself as the rain-god, he produces rain. Drawing a picture of a slain bison guarantees a successful hunt. This is the ancient unitary source out of which the ritual dance and song, the mystery plays of the Acheans and the calendars of the Babylonian priest-astronomers were derived. The shadows in Plato's cave are symbols of man's loneliness; the paintings in the Altamira caves are symbols of his magic powers.
We have travelled a long way from Altamira and Lascaux, but the artist's inspirations and the scientist's intuitions are still fed by that same unitary source -- though by now we should rather call it an underground river. Wishes do not displace mountains, but in our dreams they still do. Symbiotic consciousness is never completely defeated, merely relegated underground to those primitive levels in the mental hierarchy where the boundaries of the ego are still fluid and blurred -- as blurred as the distinction between the actor and the hero whom he impersonates -- and with whom the spectator identifies. The actor on the stage is himself and somebody else at the same time -- he is both the dancer and the rain-god. Dramatic illusion is the coexistence in the spectator's mind of two universes which are logically incompatible; his awareness, suspended between the two planes, exemplifies the bisociative process in its most striking form. All the more striking because he produces physical symptoms -- palpitations, sweating or tears -- in response to the perils of a Desdemona whom he knows to exist merely as a shadow on the TV screen.
The Creative Trinity
But let Othello get the hiccoughs -- and instead of co-existence between the two planes juxtaposed in the spectator's mind, you get collision between them. Comic impersonation produces the HAHA reaction because the parodist arouses aggression and malice; whereas tragic impersonation achieves the suspension of disbelief, the co-existence of incompatible planes, because the tragedian induces the spectator to identify. It excites the self-transcending and inhibits or neutralises the self-assertive emotions. Even when fear and anger are aroused in the spectator, these are vicarious emotions, derived from his identification with the hero -- which in itself is a self-transcending act. The vicarious emotions aroused in this manner carry a dominant element of sympathy, which facilitates catharsis in conformity with the Aristotelian definition: 'Through incidents arousing horror and pity to accomplish the purgation of such emotions.' Art is a school of self-transcendence.
We thus arrive at a further generalisation. The HAHA reaction signals the collision of bisociated contexts, the AHA reaction signals their fusion, the AH reaction their juxtaposition.* When you read a poem, two frames of reference interact in your mind: one governed by meaning, the other by rhythmic patterns of sound. Moreover, these two matrices operate on two different levels of awareness -- the first in broad daylight, the other much deeper down, on those archaic levels of the mental hierarchy which reverberate to the shaman's tom-tom, and which make us particularly receptive to, and suggestible by, messages which arrive in a rhythmic pattern or accompanied by such a pattern.**
* This difference is reflected in the quasi-cumulative progression of science through a series of successive mergers, compared to the quasi-timeless character of art, its continuous restatement of basic patterns of experience in changing idioms. But I said twice 'quasi' because the difference is a matter of degrees; because the progress of science is not cumulative in the strict sense it is moving in a zigzag course rather than in a straight line; and on the other hand, the development of a given art form over a period of time often displays a cumulative progression. ** 'In the rhyme', wrote Proust, 'the superimposition of two systems, one intellectual, the other metric . . . is a primary element of ordered complexity, that is to say, of beauty.'
Routine thinking involves a single matrix, artistic experience always involves more than one. Rhythm and metre, rhyme and euphony, are not artificial ornaments of language, but combinations of contemporary, sophisticated frames of reference with archaic and emotionally more powerful games of the mind. The same is true of poetic imagery: visual thinking is an earlier form of mental activity than thinking in verbal concepts; we dream mostly in pictures. In other words, creative activity always implies a temporary regression to these archaic levels, while a simultaneous process goes on in parallel on the highest, most articulate and critical level: the poet is like a skin-diver with a breathing tube.
It has been said that scientific discovery consists in seeing an analogy where nobody has seen one before. When, in the Song of Songs, Solomon compared the Shulamite's neck to a tower of ivory, he saw an analogy which nobody had seen before; when Harvey compared the heart of a fish to a mechanical pump, he did the same; and when the caricaturist draws a nose like a cucumber, he again does just that. In fact, all combinatorial, bisociative patterns are trivalent -- they can enter the service of humour, discovery or art, as the case may be.
Man has always looked at Nature by superimposing a second frame on the retinal image -- mythological, anthropomorphic, scientific frames. The artist imposes his style by emphasising contours or surfaces, stability or motion, curves or cubes. So, of course, does the caricaturist; only his motives, and his criteria of relevance, are different. And so does the scientist. A geographical map has the same relation to a landscape as a character-sketch to a face; every diagram or model, every schematic or symbolic representation of physical or mental processes is an unemotional caricature -- or stylised portrait -- of reality.
In the language of the Behaviourist, we would have to say that Cézanne, glancing at a landscape, receives a stimulus, to which he responds by putting a dab of paint on the canvas -- and that is all there is to it. But in fact the two activities take place on two different planes. The stimulus comes from one environment, the distant landscape. The response acts on a different environment, a rectangular surface of ten inches by fifteen. The two environments obey two different sets of laws. An isolated brush-stroke does not represent an isolated detail in the landscape. There are no point-to-point correspondences between the two planes; each obeys a different rule of the game. The artist's vision is bi-focal, just as the poet's voice is bi-vocal, as he bisociates sound and meaning.
Summary
What I have been trying to suggest in this chapter is that all creative activity -- the conscious and unconscious processes underlying the three domains of artistic inspiration, scientific discovery and comic inventiveness -- have a basic pattern in common: the co-agitation or shaking together of already existing but previously separate areas of knowledge, frames of perception or universes of discourse. But conscious rational thinking is not always the best cocktail shaker. It is invaluable so long as the challenge does not exceed a certain limit; when that is the case, it can only be met by an undoing and re-forming of the mental hierarchy, a temporary regression culminating in the bisociative act which adds a new level to the open-ended structure. It is the highest form of mental self-repair, of escape from the blind alleys of stagnation, over-specialisation and maladjustment; but it is already foreshadowed by analogous phenomena on lower levels of the evolutionary scale, discussed in previous chapters.
The three domains of creativity form a continuum. The boundaries between science and art, between the AH reaction and the AHA reaction, are fluid, whether we consider architecture or cooking or psychiatry or the writing of history. There is nowhere a sharp break where witticism changes into wit, or where science stops and art begins. The emotional climate in the three domains shows equally continuous transitions. At one end of the spectrum the coarse practical joker is motivated by self-assertive malice; the artist at the opposite extreme, by the craving for self-transcendence. The motivation of the scientist operating in the middle region of the continuum is a well-balanced combination of the two: ambition and competitiveness neutralised by self-transcending devotion to hi
s task. Science is the neutral art.
Science, the hoary cliché goes, aims at truth, art at beauty. However, the criteria of truth, such as verification by experiment, are not as hard and clean as we tend to believe. The same experimental data can often be interpreted in more than one way -- and that is why the history of science echoes with as many impassioned controversies as the history of literary criticism. Moreover, the verification of a discovery comes after the act; the creative act itself is for the scientist, as for the artist, a leap into the dark, where both are equally dependent on their fallible intuitions. And the greatest mathematicians and physicists have confessed that at those decisive moments, when taking the plunge, they were guided not by logic, but by a sense of beauty which they were unable to define. Vice versa, painters and sculptors, not to mention architects, have always been guided, and often obsessed, by scientific or pseudo-scientific theories and criteria of truth -- the golden section, the laws of perspective, Dürer's and Leonardo's laws of proportion in representing the human body, Cézanne's doctrine that everything in nature is modelled on the cylinder and sphere, Braque's alternative theory that cubes should be substituted for spheres. And the same is true, of course, for literature, from the formal laws imposed on Greek tragedy to various recent schools, and equally for the rules of harmony and counterpoint in music. In other words, the experience of truth, however subjective, must be present for the experience of beauty to arise; and vice versa: an 'elegant' solution of a problem gives rise in the connoisseur to the experience of beauty. Intellectual illumination and emotional catharsis are complementary aspects of an indivisible process.
I have been trying in this chapter to give an outline of a theory of creativity which I have developed in earlier work; and to carry it a step further. An outline must necessarily be sketchy; all I can do is to refer the interested reader to the original -- and to apologise for having cribbed a few passages from it.
XIV
THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE
The great questions are those an intelligent child asks and, getting no answers, stops asking. George Wald
Having travelled this far, the reader may protest that it is sacrilegious to call the creation of a Brahms symphony or Newton's discovery of the laws of motion an act of self-repair, and to compare it to the mutation of a sea-squirt larva, the regeneration of a salamander limb, or the rehabilitation of patients by psychotherapy. On the contrary, I believe that this overall view of biological and mental evolution reveals the working of creative forces all along the line towards an optimal realisation of the potentials of living matter and living minds -- a universal tendency towards 'spontaneously developing states of greater heterogeneity and complexity' (Herrick [1]). These sober words of a great physiologist point to one of the basic facts of life which science had long lost from sight, and is still slow in re-discovering.
The 'Second Law'
The gospel of flat-earth science was Clausius' famous Second Law of Thermodynamics. It asserted that the universe is running down like a clockwork affected by metal fatigue, because its energy is being steadily, inexorably degraded, dissipated into heat, until it will finally dissolve into a single, shapeless, homogeneous bubble of gas of uniform temperature just above absolute zero, inert and motionless -- the cosmic Wärmetod. Only in recent times did science begin to recover from the hypnotic effect of this nightmare, and to realise that the Second Law applies only in the special case of so-called 'closed systems' (such as a gas enclosed in a perfectly isolated container). But no such closed systems exist even in inanimate nature, and whether or not the universe as a whole is a closed system in this sense is anybody's guess. All living organisms, however, are 'open systems', that is to say, they maintain their complex form and functions through continuous exchanges of energies and material with their environment.* Instead of 'running down' like a mechanical clock that dissipates its energies through friction, the living organism is constantly 'building up' more complex substances from the substances it feeds on, more complex forms of energies from the energies it absorbs, and more complex patterns of information -- perceptions, feelings, thoughts -- from the input of its receptor organs.
* The term 'open system' in this technical sense is of course quite unrelated to the concept of infinite regress in open-ended hierarchies.
'Hierarchical organisation on the one hand, and the characteristics of open systems on the other, are fundamental principles of living nature, and the advancement of theoretical biology will depend mainly on the development of a theory of these two fundamentals.' [2] This was written many years ago by von Bertalanffy, one of the pioneers of the new orientation in biology, but it was not greeted with much enthusiasm. The idea that organisms, in contrast to machines, were primarily active instead of being merely reactive, that instead of passively adapting to their environment they were 'creative in the sense that new patterns of structure and behaviour are constantly fabricated' (Herrick [3]), was profoundly distasteful to the Zeitgeist. These 'open systems' which were capable of maintaining themselves indefinitely in a state of dynamic equilibrium sounded suspiciously like perpetual-motion machines -- ruled out forever by that implacable Second Law. That this Law did not apply to living matter, and was in a sense reversed in living matter, was indeed hard to accept by an orthodoxy still convinced that all phenomena of life could ultimately be reduced to the laws of physics. It was in fact a physicist, not a biologist, the Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger, who summed up the position in his celebrated paradox: 'What an organism feeds on is negative entropy.' [4] Now entropy ('transformed energy') is the name for degraded energy which has been dissipated by friction and other wasteful processes into the random motion of molecules, and which cannot be retrieved. In other words, entropy is a measure of energy waste, of order degraded into disorder. Clausius' Second Law can be expressed by saying that the entropy of a closed system always tends to increase towards a maximum, when all order will have vanished as in the chaotic motion of gas molecules;* so if the universe is a closed system, it must eventually 'unwind' itself from cosmos into chaos.
* The word 'gas' was actually derived from the Greek chaos.
Thus entropy became a key-concept of mechanistically orientated science -- its alias for Thanatos, the God of Death. 'Negative entropy', then, is a typically perverse way of referring to the power of life to 'build up' complex systems out of simpler elements, structured patterns out of shapelessness, order out of disorder. Equally characteristic is the fact that Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics (see p. 98f) defined information as 'essentially a negative entropy'. [5] In modern communication theory, entropy is equated with 'noise' which causes a waste of information (it may be acoustic noise, like a hum on the radio receiver, or 'visual noise', like the flickering of the TV image). Our perceptions, then, become 'negative noises', knowledge becomes negative ignorance, amusement the absence of boredom, and cosmos the absence of chaos. But whatever the terminology, the fact remains that living organisms have the power to build up ordered, coherent perceptions and complex systems of knowledge out of the chaos of sensations impinging on them; life sucks information from the environment as it feeds on its substances and synthesises its energies. The same irrepressible 'building-up' tendency is manifested in phylogenesis, in the phenomena of evolution by initiative, the slow progress towards more complex forms and functions, the emergence of new levels in the organismic hierarchy and of new methods of co-ordination, resulting in greater independence from, and mastery of, the environment.
We need not be unduly upset about the use of negatives to describe these palpably positive processes, because it merely reflects the scientist's unconscious dread of falling into the heresy of vitalism, of reverting to Aristotle's entelechies, Leibnitz' monads, or Bergson's élan vital. There would indeed be nothing to be gained by a romantic revival of concepts which suffer from what Whitehead once called 'misplaced concreteness'. It seems wiser to stick to the more cautious and non-committal formulations of that élan by har
d-boiled empiricists, who would nevertheless refuse to believe that the earth is flat and that evolution from randomness to order is the work of random events. Let me add to the list of those whom I have already quoted, Herbert Spencer's Law of Evolution as 'an integration of matter . . . from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity, to a definite, coherent heterogeneity'. [6] The German biologist Woltereck coined the term 'anamorphosis' for the primary and ubiquitous trend in Nature towards the emergence of more complex forms; L.L. Whyte called it 'the fundamental principle of the development of pattern';* Einstein rejected the concept of randomness by his 'refusal to believe that God plays dice with the world'; Schrödinger was led to postulate the existence of an ego which ultimately 'controls the motions of the atoms'. [6b] Lastly, to quote von Bertalanffy again: 'According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the general direction of physical events is towards decrease of order and organisation. In contrast to this, a direction towards increasing order seems to be present in evolution.' [7]
* 'Two major contrasted tendencies are evident in natural processes, towards local order and towards uniformity of general disorder. The first is displayed in all processes where a region of order tends to differentiate itself from a less ordered environment. This is seen in crystallisation, in chemical combination, and in most organic processes. The second tendency is displayed in the processes of radiation and diffusion, and leads towards a uniformity of thermal disorder. The two tendencies normally work in opposed directions, the first producing regions of differentiated order and the second dispersing them' (Whyte [6a]).