Janus (23 page)

 

 

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
conscious 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.

 

* To quote Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Györgyi, discoverer of
Vitamin C: 'There is but one safe way to avoid mistakes: to do
nothing or, at least, to avoid doing something new . . . The unknown
lends an insecure foothold and venturing out into it, one can hope
for no more than that the possible failure will be an honourable
one." [9]

 

A virgin by Botticelli, and a mathematical theorem by Poincaré, do not
betray any similarity between the motivations and aspirations of their
respective creators. Yet it was Poincaré himself who wrote that what
guided him in his unconscious gropings towards the 'happy combinations
which yield 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
living English physicist, Paul Dirac, went even further with his famous
pronouncement: 'It is more important to have beauty in one's equations
than to have them fit experiment.' It was a shocking thing to say,
but he got the Nobel Prize nevertheless.

 

 

And vice versa, painters, sculptors and architects have always been guided,
and often obsessed, by scientific or pseudo-scientific theories:
the Golden Section of the Greeks; the geometry of perspective and
foreshortening; Dürer's and Leonardo's 'ultimate laws of perfect
proportion'; Cézanne's doctrine that all natural form can be reduced
to spheres, cylinders and cones, and so forth. The counterpart of
the mathematician's apology which puts beauty before logical method
is Seurat's pronouncement: 'They see poetry in what I have done.
No, I apply my method, and that is all there is to it.'

 

 

Thus both sides recognize the continuity of the triptych: the scientist by
confessing his dependence on intuitive hunches which guide his theorizing,
while the artist values, or overvalues, the abstract theories which impose
discipline on his intuitions. The two factors complement each other;
the relative proportions in which they combine depend foremost on the
medium in which their creative drive finds its expression.

 

 

Similar considerations apply to the rules of harmony and counterpoint,
the theoretical aspects of music; and, of course, to literature.
The novelist, the poet or playwright do not create in a vacuum; their
world-view is influenced -- whether they realize it or not -- by the
philosophical and scientific climate of their time. John Donne was a
mystic, but he instantly realized the significance of Galileo's telescope:

 

Man has weav'd out a net, and this net throwne
Upon the Heavens, and now they are his owne.

 

Newton had a comparable impact; so of course had Darwin, Marx, Frazer
of
The Golden Bough
, Freud or Einstein.

 

 

Keats'
Ode on a Grecian Urn
ends with the famous lines:

 

Beauty is truth, truth beauty -- that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

 

This is certainly a poetic exaggeration, but also a touching profession
of faith in the essential unity of the two cultures, artificially
separated by the quirks in our educational and social system. In the
unprejudiced mind, any original scientific discovery gives rise to
aesthetic satisfaction, because the solution of a vexing problem creates
harmony out of dissonance; and vice versa, the experience of beauty can
only arise if the intellect endorses the validity of the operation --
whatever its nature -- designed to elicit the experience. Intellectual
illumination and emotional catharsis are the twin rewards of the act of
creation, and its re-creative echo in the beholder. The first constitutes
the moment of truth, the Aha reaction, the second provides the Ah . . .
reaction of the aesthetic experience. The two are complementary aspects
of an indivisible process.

 

 

 

9

 

 

One more apparently fundamental difference between the history of science
and the history of art remains to be discussed.

 

 

In Solzhenitsyn's novel
The First Circle
some prisoners are having
an argument about the progress of science. One of them, Gleb Nerzhin,
exclaims in a passionate outburst:

 

'Progress! Who wants progress? That's just what I like about art --
the fact that there can't be any "progress" in it.'

 

He then discusses the tremendous advances in technology during the previous
century and concludes with the taunt: 'But has there been any advance on
Anna Karenina
?'

 

 

The opposite attitude was taken by Sartre in his essay 'What is Literature?',
where he compared novels to bananas which you can enjoy only while they
are fresh.
Anna Karenina
, in this view, must have rotted long ago.

 

 

Solzhenitsyn's hero reflects the traditional view that science progresses
in a cumulative manner, brick upon brick, the way a tower is built,
whereas art is timeless, a playing of fresh variations on eternal
themes. To a limited extent and in a relative sense, this conventional
view is of course justified. In the great discoveries of science, the
bisociation of previously separate contexts (electricity and magnetism,
matter and energy, etc.) results in a new synthesis, which in its turn
will merge with others on a higher, emergent level of the hierarchy.
The evolution of art does not, generally, show this overall pattern.
The frames of perception which enter into the artist's creative process
are chosen for their sensuous qualities and emotive potential; his
bisociative act consists in their
juxtaposition
rather than an
intellectual
fusion
to which, by their very nature, they do not
readily lend themselves.

 

 

But once again, this difference is relative, not absolute. If you accept
Gleb Nerzhin's view