Janus (20 page)

 

The motions of the tides were known to man from time immemorial. So were
the motions of the moon. But the idea to connect the two, the idea that
the tides were due to the attraction of the moon, was proclaimed for the
first time by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler in the seventeenth
century. By putting two and two together, he opened up the infinite
vista of modern astronomy.

 

 

Lodestones -- magnets -- were known to the ancient Greeks as a curiosity
of nature. In the Middle Ages they were used for two purposes:
as mariner's compasses and as a means to attract an estranged wife
back to her husband. Also well-known were the curious properties of
amber which, when rubbed, acquired the power of attracting flimsy
objects. The Greek for amber is
elektron
, but Greek science was
no more interested in the freak phenomena of electricity than modern
science is in telepathy. Nor were the Middle Ages. For some two thousand
years magnetism and electricity were regarded as separate phenomena,
as unrelated to each other as the tides and the moon. In 1820 Hans
Christian Oersted discovered that an electric current flowing through
a wire deflected a magnetic compass which happened to be lying on the
table. At that historic moment the two hitherto separate contexts began
to fuse into an emergent synthesis: electromagnetism -- thus creating a
kind of chain-reaction which is still continuing. At successive stages
of it electricity and magnetism merged with radiant light, chemistry
merged with physics, the humble
elektron
became an orbiting planet
within the solar system of the atom, and ultimately energy and matter
became unified in Einstein's single, sinister equation, E = mc².

 

 

If we go back to the beginnings of the scientific quest, there is an ancient
tradition according to which Pythagoras discovered the secrets of musical
harmony while watching some blacksmiths at work on his native island of
Samos, and noticing that iron bars of different lengths gave out sounds
of different pitch under the strokes of the hammer. This spontaneous
amalgamation of arithmetic and music was probably the starting-point
of physics.

 

 

From the Pythagoreans, who mathematized the harmony of the spheres,
to their modern heirs, who combined space and time into a single continuum,
the pattern is always the same: the discoveries of science do not create
something out of nothing; they combine, relate and integrate already
existing but previously separate ideas, facts, associative contexts --
mental holons. This act of cross-fertilization -- or self-fertilization
within a single brain -- appears to be the essence of creativity,
and to justify the term 'bisociation'. We have seen how the humorist
bisociates mutually incompatible mental structures in order to produce a
collision
. The scientist, on the other hand, aims at synthesis,
at the
integration
of previously unrelated ideas. The Latin
cogito
comes from
coagitare
, to shake together. Bisociation
in humour consists of the sudden shaking together of incompatible
elements which briefly collide, then separate again. Bisociation in
science means combining hitherto unrelated cognitive holons in such a way
that a new level is added to the hierarchy of knowledge, which contains
the previously separate structures as its members.

 

 

However, we have seen that the two domains are continuous, without a sharp
boundary: each subtle witticism is a malicious discovery, and vice versa,
many great discoveries of science have been greeted with howls of laughter,
precisely because they seemed to represent a marriage of incompatibles --
until the marriage bore fruit and the apparent incompatibility turned out
to derive from prejudice. What looked like a collision ended in fusion:
witticism is paradox stated, discovery is paradox resolved. Even Galileo
treated Kepler's theory of the tides as a bad joke, and one can easily
imagine a contemporary caricaturist drawing a fat-faced moon sucking up
the earth's oceans through a straw. But the step from the sublime to the
ridiculous is reversible: the satires of Swift and Orwell carry deeper
lessons than a whole library of works on social science.

 

 

As we travel from the coarse toward the sophisticated types of humour,
and then continue across the fluid boundary into the centre panel of the
triptych on
p. 110
, we come across such hybrid
cases as brain-twisters, logical paradoxes, mathematical games. The
conundrums about Achilles and the Tortoise and about the Cretan Liar have
for two millennia tickled philosophers and spurred logicians to creative
efforts. The listener's task has been transformed from 'seeing the joke'
into 'solving the problem'. And when he succeeds, he no longer roars with
laughter as at the clown's antics; in the course of our journey laughter
has gradually shaded into an amused, then an admiring smile: the emotional
climate has changed from the Haha reaction into the Aha reaction.

 

 

 

2

 

 

The term 'Aha experience' was coined by Gestalt psychologists to indicate
the euphoria which follows the moment of truth, the flash of illumination
when the bits of the puzzle click into place -- or, in our terms, when
the bisociated contexts fuse in a new synthesis. The emotion exploding
in coarse laughter is aggression robbed of its purpose; the tension
ebbing away in the Aha reaction after the penny has dropped is mainly
derived from a challenge to intellectual curiosity, the urge to explore
and understand.

 

 

That urge is not confined to laboratory researchers. In recent years
biologists have been led to recognize the existence of a primary instinct,
the 'exploratory drive', which is as basic as the instincts of hunger and
sex, and can occasionally be even more powerful. Countless experimental
zoologists -- starting with Darwin himself* -- have shown that curiosity
is an innate drive in rats, birds, dolphins, chimpanzees and men. It is
the driving power which makes the laboratory rat find its way through the
experimental maze without reward or punishment, and even defy punishment
by traversing electrified grids instead of turning back. It makes the
child take the new toy to pieces 'to see what's inside', and it is the
prime mover behind human exploration and research.

 

* See The Act of Creation, Book Two, Ch. VIII.

 

The exploratory drive may of course combine with other drives such as hunger
or sex. The pure scientist's proverbially 'detached' and 'disinterested'
quest -- his self-transcending absorption in the mysteries of nature --
is in fact often combined with ambition, competitiveness, vanity. But
these self-assertive tendencies must be restrained and highly sublimated
to find fulfilment in the -- mostly meagre -- rewards for his slow and
patient labours. There are, after all, more direct methods of asserting
one's ego than the study of spiral nebulae.

 

 

But while the exploratory drive may be adulterated by ambition and vanity,
in its purest form, the quest is its own reward.

 

 

'Were I to hold the truth in my hand', Emerson wrote, 'I would let it go
for the positive joy of seeking.' In a classic experiment, Wolfgang Köhler's
chimpanzee, Sultan, discovered after many unsuccessful efforts to rake in
a banana placed outside his cage with a stick that was too short, that
he could do it by fitting two hollow sticks together. His new discovery
'pleased him so immensely' that he kept repeating the trick and forgot
to eat the banana.

 

 

However, subjective vanity apart, the self-assertive tendencies also
enter on a deeper level into the scientist's motivation. 'I am', wrote
Freud, 'not really a man of science . .. but a
conquistador
. . . with the curiosity, the boldness, and the tenacity that belong
to that type of person.' The exploratory drive aims at understanding
nature, the conquistadorial element at mastering nature (including
human nature). Excepting perhaps pure mathematics, every variety of
the scientific quest has this dual motivation, although they need not
be equally conscious in the individual scientist's mind. Knowledge
can beget humility or power. The archetypes of the opposite tendencies
are Prometheus and Pythagoras -- one stealing the fire of the gods, the
other listening to the harmony of the spheres. Freud's confession can be
contrasted with the statements of many scientific geniuses that the only
purpose of their labours was to lift a fraction of the veil covering
the mysteries of nature, and their only motivation a feeling of awe
and wonder. 'Men were first led to the study of natural philosophy,'
wrote Aristotle, 'as indeed they are today, by wonder.' Maxwell's
earliest memory was 'lying on the grass, looking at the sun, and
wondering
'. Einstein -- the humblest of all -- struck the same
chord when he wrote that whoever is devoid of the capacity to wonder at
the cosmic mystery, 'whoever remains unmoved, whoever cannot contemplate,
or know the deep shudder of the soul in enchantment, might just as well
be dead for he has already closed his eyes on life'. He could not foresee,
when he discovered the wondrous equation which unified matter and energy,
that it would turn into black magic.

 

 

Thus the ubiquitous polarity of the self-asserting and self-transcending
tendencies is strikingly displayed in the domain of scientific creativity.
Discovery may be called the emotionally neutral art -- not because the
scientist is devoid of emotion, but because his labours require a delicately
balanced and sublimated blend of motivations, where the drives to exploration
and domination are in equilibrium. For the same reason he is assigned the
central panel of the triptych, between the jester who, exercising his wit
at the expense of others, is primarily dominated by self-asserting malice,
and the artist, whose creative work depends on the self-transcending
power of his imagination.

 

 

The symbolic topology of the triptych seems further justified by the nature
of the Aha reaction. It combines the explosive discharge of tension,
epitomized in the Eureka cry which is akin to the Haha reaction, with
the cathartic Ah . . . reaction -- that 'deep shudder of enchantment'
of which Einstein speaks, which is closely related to the artist's
experience of beauty and the mystic's 'oceanic feeling'. The Eureka cry
reflects the conquistadorial, the Ah . . . reaction the mystic element
in the hybrid motivation of the scientist's quest.

 

 

We can now continue the journey across the triptych into the third panel,
where the emotional climate is dominated by the Ah . . . reaction.

 

 

 

 

 

VIII

 

 

THE DISCOVERIES OF ART

 

 

 

1

 

 

Laughing and weeping, aroused by comedy and tragedy, mark the two extremes
of a continuous spectrum. Both provide channels for the overflow of emotions;
both are 'luxury reflexes' without apparent utility. This much they have
in common; in every other respect they are direct opposites.

 

 

Although weeping is neither an uncommon nor a trivial phenomenon,
academic psychology has almost totally ignored it. There are no theories
of weeping comparable to Bergson's or Freud's treatises on laughter;
and the theory put forward in
The Act of Creation
is the only one
mentioned in Hilgard and Atkinson's standard textbook of psychology for
American college students.*

 

* From Hilgard and Atkinson, Introduction to Psychology
(4th ed., 1967), Ch. 7 'Emotion', sub-section 'Weeping':
'Laughter and tears are often close together, and although we
associate laughter with joy and tears with sadness, there are also
tears of joy. The writer Arthur Koestler has noted the failure in
text-books of psychology to treat weeping, and he has attempted to
supply this lack by an analysis of his own. He notes five kinds of
situations in which weeping accompanies motivated behaviour.'
The text-book then briefly mentions five such situations -- raptness,
mourning, relief, sympathy, self-pity -- and concludes: 'These
illustrations show how emotions provide a kind of commentary on
ongoing motivated behaviour. The weeping is neither a drive nor an
incentive, but it is a sign that something motivationally important
is occurring.'
And that's all that students of psychology are taught about weeping.

 

As a preliminary step, we must make a distinction between weeping
and crying: it is a peculiarity of the English language to treat them
as synonymous.
Weeping
has two basic reflex characteristics:
the secretion of tears and a specific way of breathing.
Crying
is the emission of sounds signalling distress or protest. It may be
combined with or alternate with weeping, but should not be confused with
it. Crying is a form of communication, weeping is a private affair. And
we are talking, of course, of
spontaneous
weeping, not of the contrived
sobs of stagecraft, public or private.

 

 

Let us compare the physiological processes involved in laughter and weeping.
Laughter is triggered by the adrenal-sympathetic branch of the autonomic
nervous system, weeping by the para-sympathetic branch. The first, as we
have seen, serves to energize the body, tensing it for action; the second
has the opposite effect: it lowers blood pressure, neutralizes excesses of
blood-sugar, facilitates the elimination of body-waste and generally tends
towards quietude and catharsis -- literally the 'purging' of tensions.

 

 

This physiological contrast is clearly reflected in the visible
manifestations of laughter and weeping. The laugher's eyes sparkle,
the corners are wrinkled, but brow and cheeks are taut and smooth, which
lends the face an expression of radiance; the lips are parted, the corners
lifted. In weeping, the eyes are 'blinded by tears', they lose their focus
and lustre; the features seem to crumble; even when weeping for joy or in
aesthetic rapture, the transfigured face reflects a serene languidness.