Janus (22 page)

serendipity
-- play a conspicuous part in the history of scientific discoveries.

 

 

On a higher level of the triptych, however, the pattern undergoes a subtle
change. The comedy of situations yields to the comedy of manners, which
no longer relies for its effects on coincidence, but on the clash of
incompatible codes
of reasoning or conduct, as a result of which the
hypocrisy or absurdity of one or both rule-books is exploded. Modern
drama shows a similar change; destiny no longer acts from the outside,
but from inside the personae; they are no longer marionettes on strings,
manipulated by the gods, but victims of their own foolish and conflicting
passions: 'the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves'.

 

 

Drama thrives on
conflict
, and so does the novel. The nature of the
conflict may be explicitly stated or merely implied; but an element of
it must be present, otherwise the characters would be gliding though
a frictionless universe. The conflict may be fought out in the divided
heart of a single character; or between two or more persons; or between
man and his fate. Conflict between personalities may be due to a contrast
in ideas or temperaments, systems of values or codes of conduct --
as in the comedy. But while in the comedy the collision results in
malicious debunking, conflict can attain the dignity of tragedy, if the
audience is led to accept the attitudes of both antagonists as valid,
each within its own frame of reference. If the author succeeds in this,
the conflict will be projected into the spectator's -- or reader's --
mind and experienced as a clash between two simultaneous and incompatible
identifications. 'We make out of our quarrels with others rhetoric, but
out of our quarrels with ourselves poetry,' wrote Yeats. The comedian
makes us laugh at the expense of the victim; the tragedian makes us
suffer as his accomplice; the former appeals to the self-assertive,
the latter to the self-transcending emotions. In between the two, in
the emotionally 'neutral' zone, the psychologist, anthropologist and
sociologist are engaged in
resolving
the conflicts by analysing the
factors which gave rise to it.

 

 

 

5

 

 

One basic bisociation remains to be briefly discussed: the confrontation
between the tragic and the trivial.

 

 

With due respect to Shakespeare's 'All the world's a stage', one might
say that the ordinary mortal's life is played on two alternating stages,
situated on two different levels -- let us call them the trivial plane
and the tragic plane of existence. Most of the time we bustle about
on the trivial plane; but on some special occasions, when confronted
with death or engulfed in the oceanic feeling, we seem to fall through
a stage-trap or man-hole and are transferred to the tragic or absolute
plane. Then all at once our daily routines appear as shallow, trifling
vanities. But once safely back on the trivial plane we dismiss the
experiences of the other as phantasms of overstrung nerves.

 

 

The highest form of human creativity is the endeavour to bridge the gap
between the two planes. Both the artist and the scientist are gifted
-- or cursed -- with the faculty of perceiving the trivial events of
everyday experience
sub specie aeternitatis
, in the light of eternity;
and conversely to express the absolute in human terms, to reflect it in
a concrete image. Our ordinary mortal has neither the intellectual nor
the emotional equipment to live for more than brief transition periods
on the tragic plane. The Infinite is too inhuman and elusive to cope
with unless it is made to blend itself with the tangible world of the
finite. The existentialist's Absolute becomes emotionally effective
only if it is bisociated with something concrete -- dovetailed into the
familiar. This is what both scientist and artist are aiming at, though not
always consciously. By bridging the gap between the two planes, the cosmic
mystery becomes humanized, drawn into the orbit of man, while his humdrum
experiences are transformed, surrounded by a halo of mystery and wonder.

 

 

Needless to say, not all novels are 'problem novels', subjecting the
reader to a sustained barrage of existential conundrums. But indirectly
and implicitly every great work of art has some bearing on man's ultimate
problems. Even a humble daisy has a root, and a work of art, however
lighthearted or serene, is ultimately nourished through its delicate
capillaries by the archetypal sub-strata of experience.

 

 

By living on both planes at once, the creative artist ot scientist is able
to catch an occasional glimpse of eternity looking through the window of
time. Whether it is a mediaeval stained-glass window or Newton's formula
of universal gravity, is a matter of temperament and taste.

 

 

 

6

 

 

In the previous sections I discussed the continuity of the domains of
humour, discovery and art; the emotional climate in each of the three
domains and its derivation from the basic polarity of emotions; lastly the
'horizontal lines' across the triptych-model, indicating the structural
affinities between the bisociative patterns of creative activity in the
three domains. We must now have a closer look at the psychology of the
creative act itself.

 

 

All coherent thinking and acting is governed by 'rules of the game',
although we are mostly unaware of being controlled by them. In the
artificial conditions of the psychological laboratory the rules are
explicitly spelt out by the experimenter; for instance: 'name opposites'.
Then the experimenter says 'dark' and the subject promptly answers 'light'.
But if the rule is 'synonyms', the subject will respond with 'black' or
'night' or 'shadow'. Note that though the rule is fixed, it leaves the
subject a choice of several answers, even in this simple game. To talk, as
behaviourists do, of stimuli and responses forming a chain in a vacuum is
meaningless: what response a particular stimulus will evoke depends (a) on
the fixed rules of the game and (b) on the flexible strategies which the
rules permit, guided by past experience, temperament and other factors.

 

 

But the games we play in everyday life are more complex than those in
the laboratory, where the rules are laid down by explicit order. In the
normal routines of thinking and talking the rules exercise their control
implicitly, from way below the level of conscious awareness. Not only the
codes of grammar and syntax operate hidden in the gaps between the words,
but also the codes of commonsense logic and of those more complex mental
structures which we call 'frames of perception or associative contexts',
and which include our built-in, axiomatic prejudices and emotional
inclinations. Even if consciously bent on defining the rules which
govern our thinking, we find it extremely difficult to do so and have to
enlist the help of specialists -- linguists, semanticists, psychiatrists,
and so forth. We play the games of life, obeying rule-books written in
invisible ink or a secret code. But there are problem-situations where
playing the game is not enough, and only creative originality points
the way out of the trap.

 

 

In
The Act of Creation
I proposed the term 'matrix' as a unifying
formula to refer to these cognitive structures -- that is, to all mental
habits, routines and skills governed by an invariant code (which may be
explicit or implicit), but capable of varied strategies in attacking a
problem or task. In other words, 'matrices' are mental holons and display
all the characteristics of holons discussed in previous chapters. They
are controlled by canonical rules, but guided by feedbacks from the
outer and inner environment; they range from pedantic rigidity to
flexible adaptability -- within the limits permitted by the code; they
are ordered into 'vertical', abstractive hierarchies which interlace in
'horizontal' associative networks and cross-references (cf. 'arborization
and reticulation',
Chapter I
).

 

 

When life confronts us with a problem or task, it will be dealt with
according to the same set of rules which enabled us to deal with similar
situations in our past experience. It would be foolish to belittle the
value of such law-abiding routines. They lend coherence and stability to
behaviour, and structured order to reasoning. But when the difficulty
or novelty of the task exceeds a critical limit, these routines are
no longer adequate to cope with it. The world is on the move, and new
situations arise, posing questions and offering challenges which cannot
be met within the conventional frames of reference, the established
rule-books. In science, such situations arise under the impact of new
data which shake the foundations of well-established theories. The
challenge is often self-imposed by the insatiable exploratory drive,
which prompts the original mind to ask questions which nobody has asked
before and to feel frustrated by dusty answers. In the artist's case, the
challenge is a more or less permanent one, arising out of the limitations
of his medium of expression, his urge to escape from the constraints and
distortions imposed by the conventional styles and techniques of his time,
his ever-hopeful struggle to express the inexpressible.

 

 

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

 

* Cf. Sir Karl Popper: 'in order that a new theory should constitute
a discovery or a step forward it should conflict with its
predecessor; that is to say, it should lead to at least some
conflicting results. But this means, from a logical point of view,
that it should contradict its predecessor: it should overthrow it.
In this sense, progress in science -- or at least striking progress
-- is always revolutionary. [6]

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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