Janus: A Summing Up

by Arthur Koestler

  8

  The criteria which determine whether a humorous offering will be judged good, bad or indifferent, are of course partly a matter of period taste and personal preference, partly dependent on the style and technique of the humorist. It would seem that these criteria can be summed up under three main headings: (a) originality, (b) emphasis, (c) economy.

  The merits of originality are self-evident; it provides the essential element of surprise, which cuts across our expectations. But true originality is not very often met either in humour or in other forms of art. One common substitute for it is to increase the tension of the audience by various techniques of suggestive emphasis. The clown's domain is the rich, coarse type of humour; he piles it on; he appeals to sadistic, sexual, scatalogical impulses; one of his favourite tricks is repetition of the same situation, the same key-phrase. This diminishes the effect of surprise, but helps in drawing emotion into the familiar channel -- more and more liquid is being pumped into the punctured pipeline.

  Emphasis on local colour and ethnic peculiarities -- as in Scottish, Jewish, Cockney stories -- is a further means to channel emotion into familiar tracks. The Scotsman or Cockney must of course be caricatures if the comic purpose is to be achieved -- in other words, exaggeration and simplification once more appear as indispensable tools to provide emphasis.

  In the higher forms of humour, however, emphasis tends to yield to the opposite kind of virtue: economy. Economy, in humour and art, does not mean mechanical brevity, but the implicit hint instead of the explicit statement -- the oblique allusion in lieu of the frontal attack. The old-fashioned Punch cartoon featuring the British lion and the Russian bear 'rubs it in'; the New Yorker cartoon poses a riddle which the reader must solve by an imaginative effort in order to 'see the joke'.

  In humour, as in other forms of art, emphasis and economy are complementary techniques. The first forces the offering down the consumer's throat; the second tantalizes, to whet his appetite.

  9

  Earlier theories -- including even Bergson's and Freud's -- have treated humour as an isolated phenomenon, without attempting to throw light on the intimate connections between the comic and the tragic, between laughter and crying, between artistic inspiration, comic inventiveness and scientific discovery. Yet (as we shall see) these three domains of creative activity form a continuum with no sharp boundaries between wit and ingenuity, nor between the art of discovery and the discoveries of art.

  It has been said, for instance, that scientific discovery consists in seeing an analogy which nobody has seen 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 William Harvey perceived in the exposed heart of a fish a messy kind of mechanical pump, he did the same; and when the caricaturist draws a nose like a cucumber, he again does just that. In fact, all the bisociative patterns discussed above, which constitute the 'grammar' of humour, can also enter the service of art or discovery, as the case may be. The pun has its equivalent in the rhyme, but also in the problems which confront the philologist. The clash between incompatible codes of behaviour may yield comedy, tragedy or new psychological insights. The dualism of mind and inert matter is exploited by the practical joker, but also provides one of the eternal themes of literature: man as a marionette on strings, manipulated by gods or chromosomes. The man-beast dichotomy is reflected by Donald Duck, but also in Kafka's Metamorphosis and the psychologist's rat-experiments. The caricature corresponds not only to the artist's character-portrait, but also to the scientist's diagrams and charts, which emphasize the relevant features and leave out the rest.

  The conscious and unconscious processes underlying creativity are essentially combinatorial activities -- the bringing together of previously separate areas of knowledge and experience. The scientist's purpose is to achieve synthesis; the artist aims at a juxtaposition of the familiar and the eternal; the humorist's game is to contrive a collision. And as their motivations differ, so do the emotional responses evoked by each type of creativity: discovery satisfies the 'exploratory drive'; art induces emotional catharsis through the 'oceanic feeling'; humour incites malice and provides a harmless outlet for it. Laughter can be described as the 'Haha reaction'; the discoverer's Eureka cry as the 'Aha! reaction'; and the delight of the aesthetic experience as the 'Ah . . . reaction. But the transitions from one to the other are continuous: witticism blends into epigram, caricature into portrait; and whether one considers architecture, medicine, chess or cookery, there is no clear frontier where the realm of science ends and that of art begins. Comedy and tragedy, laughter and weeping, mark the extremes of a continuous spectrum.

  SUMMARY

  Humour provides a back-door entry to the domain of creativity because it is the only example of a complex intellectual stimulus releasing a simple bodily response -- the laughter reflex.

  To describe the unitary pattern underlying all varieties of humour I have proposed the term 'bisociation' -- perceiving a situation or event in two mutually exclusive associative contexts. The result is an abrupt transfer of the train of consciousness to a different track, governed by a different logic or 'rule of the game. This intellectual jolt deflates our expectations; the emotions they aroused have suddenly become redundant, and are flushed out along channels of least resistance in laughter.

  The emotions thus involved, however complex, always contain a dominant element of the self-assertive, aggressive-defensive tendencies. They are based on the ancient adrenal-sympathetic branch of the nervous system -- the old brain -- and have a much stronger momentum and persistence than the subtle and devious processes of cortical reasoning, with which they are unable to keep step. It is emotion deserted by thought that is discharged, harmlessly, in laughter. But this luxury reflex could only arise in a creature whose reasoning has gained a degree of independence from its biological drives, enabling him to perceive his own emotions as redundant -- to realize that he has been fooled. The person who laughs is the opposite of the fanatic whose reason has been blinded by emotion -- and who fools himself.

  After applying the theory to various types of the comic -- from physical tickling to social satire -- I discussed the criteria of styles and techniques in humour: originality or unexpectedness; emphasis through selection, exaggeration and simplification; and its reverse: economy or implicitness which forces the audience to make a re-creative effort.

  Lastly, the brief cross-references to creativity in science and art at the end of this chapter may serve as an introduction to the sections that follow.

  VII

  THE ART OF DISCOVERY

  1

  Creativity in science could be described as the art of putting two and two together to make five. In other words, it consists in combining previously unrelated mental structures in such a way that you get more out of the emergent whole than you have put in. This apparent bit of magic derives from the fact that the whole is not merely the sum of its parts, but an expression of the relations between its parts; and that each new synthesis leads to the emergence of new patterns of relations -- more complex cognitive holons on higher levels of the mental hierarchy.

  Let me give a few brief examples selected from the numerous case-histories of scientific discoveries described in The Sleepwalkers, The Act of Creation, etc.

  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 flims
y 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 do
mination 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.