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.
In earlier books [8] I have ventured some guesses as to how this unconscious guidance works -- how a temporary regression to less sophisticated mental levels can produce the happy combination of ideas, the focal bisociation, which produces the solution of the problem. It is a common experience on awaking from sleep to try to hang on to the remembrance of a dream which is running away, like sand through a sieve, out of conscious reach. One may call this phenomenon 'oneirolysis' -- from oneiros, dream, plus lysis, dissolution. The dream itself, while it lasts (and to some extent also the drowsy daydream) drifts effortlessly from one scenario to another, in a freewheeling manner, indifferent to the rules of logic and the conventional limitations of space, time or cause; it establishes bizarre connections and churns out analogies between cabbages and kings which disintegrate when the sleeper awakes and which he cannot describe in precise verbal terms -- except by saying that something reminded him of something, but he no longer knows what or why. Now in the throes of the creative obsession, when all levels of the mental hierarchy, including the unconscious strata, are saturated with the problem, the familiar phenomenon of oneirolysis may be reversed into a kind of oneirosynthesis, in which those vaguely sensed connections form a nascent analogy. It may be a hazy, tentative affair, like Einstein's 'images of a visual or muscular type', or Faraday's 'lines of force' surrounding magnets which he saw in vivid hallucinations; and its shape may be changing from camel to weasel like Hamlet's cloud. The unconscious reaches of fertile minds must be teeming with such nascent analogies, hidden affinities, and the cloudy 'forms of things unknown'. But we must also remember that clouds form and dissolve again; and cloudbursts are rare events.
7
The French have an expression for which I can find no English equivalent: reculer pour mieux sauter -- draw back to take a running jump. The process I have been discussing follows a similar pattern: a temporary regression to more primitive and uninhibited levels of ideation, followed by the creative forward leap. Disintegration and reintegration, dissociation and bisociation reflect the same pattern. Cogitation in the creative sense is co-agitation, the shaking together of the previously separate; but the fully conscious, rational mind is not the best cocktail shaker. It is invaluable in our daily routines, but the revolutionary breakthroughs in science and art always represent some variation of recuier pour mieux sauter.
We might call it an archetypal pattern, for it has its close equivalents in other fields. Thus psychotherapy, from shamanism to our day, has always relied on that particular kind of undoing-redoing process which Ernst Kris called 'regression in the service of the ego'. The neurotic, with his compulsions, phobias and elaborate defence mechanisms, is governed by eccentric but rigid 'rules of the game'. The therapist's aim is to induce a temporary regression, to make him retrace his steps to the point where things went wrong, and to come up metamorphosed, reborn.
The same pattern is reflected in the death and resurrection (or 'withdrawal and return') motif in mythology. Joseph is thrown into a well, Jonah is reborn out of the belly of the whale, Jesus is resurrected from the tomb.
Lastly, as we shall see later, reculer pour mieux sauter, draw-back-to-leap, plays a crucial part not only in mental creativity, but also in the creative evolution of higher life-forms. We shall see that biological evolution may be described as a series of escapes from the blind alleys of stagnation, over-specialization and maladjustment, by an undoing and re-forming process which is basically analogous to the phenomena of mental evolution and in some respects foreshadows them. But before moving on towards those wider vistas, there are still some loose ends to be tied up relating to creativity in science and art.
8
In the previous sections I have been at pains to stress that the artist and scientist do not inhabit separate universes, merely different regions of a continuous spectrum -- a rainbow stretching from the infra-red of poetry to the ultra-violet of physics, with many intermediate ranges -- such hybrid vocations as architecture, photography, chess-playing, cooking, psychiatry, science fiction or the potter's craft. But to avoid over-simplification, after emphasizing the affinities, I must briefly discuss the differences -- some apparent, some real -- between the opposite ends of the continuum.
The most obvious difference seems to lie in the nature of the criteria by which we judge scientific and artistic achievement. One of the imaginary barriers between the two is the popular belief that the scientist, unlike the artist, is in a position to attain to 'objective truth' by submitting theories to experimental tests. In fact, experimental evidence can confirm certain expectations based on a theory, but it cannot confirm the theory itself. The same set of experimental data can often be interpreted in more than one way -- which is why the history of science echoes with as many venomous controversies as the history of literary criticism. Thus we again have a series of continuous gradations from the relatively objective methods of testing a scientific theory by experiment to the relatively subjective criteria of aesthetic value; but the emphasis is on 'relative'. In fact the progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life. The history of art shows equally agonizing reappraisals of accepted values, criteria of relevance, styles of representation. In the course of the last two centuries, European literature went through the rise and fall of classicism; romanticism; naturalism; surrealism; and Dada; the socially c
onscious novel; existentialism; the nouveau roman. In the history of painting, the changes were even more drastic. But the same zig-zag course characterizes the progression of science, whether you turn to the history of physiology and medicine (not to mention psychology) ; or evolutionary biology; or the abrupt changes of outlook in the 'hard-core' science of physics from the Aristotelian to the Newtonian to the Einsteinian conception of the universe. The data may be 'hard', like the contours of a Rorschach blot, but what you read into them is another matter. There is of course a considerable difference in the degree of precision and objectivity, between the methods of judging a theorem in physics and a work of art. But, to say it once more, the difference is a matter of degrees, and there are continuous transitions between them.
We must also remember that the testing and judging of a discovery comes after the act; whereas the decisive moment in the creative act itself is for the scientist, as it is for the artist, a leap into the dark, into the twilight zones of consciousness, where both are equally dependent on their fallible intuitions. False inspirations and crank 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, as the happy finds which are post factum proven right.* In this respect the scientist is in no better position than the artist: while in the throes of the creative process, guidance by truth is as uncertain and subjective as guidance by beauty. And some of the greatest scientists have confessed that at the crucial moment when taking the plunge, they were not guided by logic, but by a sense of beauty that they were unable to define.