Janus: A Summing Up

by Arthur Koestler

  * 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 in toto, then it is pointless to search for objective criteria of 'progress' in literature, painting or music; art, then, does not evolve, it merely formulates and reformulates the same archetypal experiences in the costumes and styles of the period; and although the vocabulary is subject to changes -- including the visual vocabulary of the painter -- the statement contained in a great work of art remains valid and unmarked by time's arrow, untouched by the vulgar march of progress.

  But at a closer look this view turns out to be historically untenable. For one thing, there are periods in which a given art-form shows a definite, cumulative evolution, comparable to scientific progress. To quote our leading art historian, Sir Ernst Gombrich:

  In antiquity the discussion of painting and sculpture inevitably centred on [the] imitation [of nature] -- mimesis. Indeed it may be said that the progress of art towards that goal was to the ancient what the progress of technology is to the modern: the model of progress as such. Thus Pliny told the history of sculpture and painting as the history of inventions, assigning definite achievements in the rendering of nature to individual artists: the painter Polygnotus was the first to represent people with open mouth and with teeth, the sculptor Pythagoras was the first to render nerves and veins, the painter Nikias was concerned with light and shade. The history of these years [ca. 550 to 350 B.C.] as it is reflected in Pliny or Quintilian was handed down like an epic of conquest, a story of inventions . . . In the Renaissance it was Vasari who applied this technique to the history of the arts of Italy from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. Vasari never fails to pay tribute to those artists of the past who made a distinct contribution, as he saw it, to the mastery of representation. 'Art rose from humble beginnings to the summit of perfection' [Vasari says] because such natural geniuses as Giotto blazed the trail and others were thus enabled to build on their achievements. [10]

  'If I could see further than others,' said Newton, 'it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants.' Leonardo said much the same. 'It is a wretched pupil', he wrote, 'who does not surpass his master.' Dürer and others expressed similar opinions. What they evidently meant was that during the period of explosive development which started with Giotto around the year 1300, each successive generation of painters had discovered new tricks and techniques -- foreshortening, perspective, the treatment of light, colour and texture, the capture of movement and facial expression -- inventions which the pupil could take over from the master and use as his baseline for new departures.

  As for literature, it need hardly be emphasized that the various schools and fashions of the past were not static, but evolved during their limited life-span toward greater refinement and technical perfection -- or decadence. We take it for granted that today's physicists know more about the
atom than Democritus; but then Joyce's Ulysses also knows more about human nature than Homer's Odysseus. On a shorter time-scale, even films no more than twenty years old appear now -- exceptions always granted -- surprisingly dated: obvious, over-acted, over-explicit. There is hardly a writer, past or present, who did not or does not sincerely believe his style and technique of writing to be closer to reality, intellectually and emotionally, than those of the past. Let us face it: our reverence for Homer or Goethe is sweetened by a dash of condescension not unlike our attitude to infant prodigies: how clever they were for their age!

  Thus we can safely reject as a gross over-simplification Gleb Nerzhin's view that science is cumulative like a brick-layer's work, while art is timeless, a dance of coloured balls on the jets of a fountain. The history of art, too, shows cumulative progress -- in certain periods, though not in others. In the history of European painting, for instance, there are two outstanding periods in which we find rapid, sustained, cumulative progress in representing Nature, almost as tangible as the progress in engineering. The first stretches roughly from the middle of the sixth to the middle of the fourth century B.C., the second from the beginning of the fourteenth to the middle of the sixteenth century. Each lasted for about six to eight generations, in the course of which each giant did indeed stand on the shoulders of his predecessors, and could take in a wider view. It would of course be silly to say that these were the only periods of cumulative progress. But it is nevertheless true that in between these periods of rapid evolution there are much longer stretches of stagnation or decline. Besides, there are the lone giants, who seem to appear from nowhere and cannot be fitted into any neat pyramid of acrobats balancing on each other's shoulders.

  The conclusion seems to be obvious. Our museums and libraries demonstrate that there is a cumulative progression in every art-form -- in a limited sense, in a limited direction, during limited periods. But these short, luminous trails sooner or later peter out in twilight and confusion, and the search for a new departure in a new direction is on.

  However, contrary to popular belief, the evolution of science does not show a more coherent picture. Only during the last three hundred years has its advance been continuous and cumulative; but those unfamiliar with the history of science -- and they include the majority of scientists -- tend to fall into the mistaken belief that the acquisition of knowledge has always been a neat and tidy ascent on a straight path towards the ultimate peak.

  In fact, neither science nor art has evolved in a continuous way. Whitehead once remarked that Europe in the year 1500 knew less than Archimedes who died in 212 B.C. In retrospect there was only one step separating Archimedes from Galileo, Aristarchus of Samos (who fathered the heliocentric system) from Copernicus. But that step took nearly two thousand years to be made. During that long period, science was hibernating. After the three short glorious centuries of Greek science, roughly coinciding with the cumulative period of Greek art, comes a period of suspended animation about six times as long; then a new furious awakening, so far only about ten generations old.

  Progress, then, in science as in art, is neither steady nor absolute, but -- to say it again -- a progression in a limited sense during limited periods in limited directions; not along a steady curve, but in a jagged, jerky, zigzag line.

  A Chinese proverb says that there is a time for fishing and a time for drying the nets. If you take a kind of bird's-eye view of the history of any branch of science, you will find a rhythmic alternation between long periods of relatively peaceful evolution and shorter bursts of revolutionary change. Only in the peaceful periods which follow after a major breakthrough is the progress of science continuous and cumulative in the strict sense. It is a period of consolidating the newly conquered frontiers, of verifying, assimilating, elaborating and extending the new synthesis: a time for drying the nets. It may last a few years or several generations; but sooner or later the emergence of new empirical data, or a change in the philosophical climate, leads to stagnation, a hardening of the matrix into a closed system, the rise of a new orthodoxy. This produces a crisis, a period of fertile anarchy in which rival theories proliferate -- until the new synthesis is achieved and the cycle starts again; but this time aiming in a different direction, along different parameters, asking a different kind of question.

  It is thus possible to detect a recurrent pattern in the evolution of both science and art. As a rule the cycle starts with a passionate rebellion against and rejection of the previously dominant school or style with a subsequent breakthrough towards new frontiers: call this phase one. The second phase in the cycle has a climate of optimism and euphoria; on the footsteps of the giants who spearheaded the advance, their more pedestrian followers and imitators move into the newly opened territories to explore and exploit its rich potentials. This, as said before, is the phase par excellence of cumulative progress in elaborating and perfecting new insights and techniques in research, and new styles in art. The third phase brings saturation, followed by frustration and deadlock. The fourth and last phase is a time of crisis and doubt -- epitomized in John Donne's complaint on the fall of Aristotelian cosmology: 'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.' But it is also a time of wild experimentation (Fauvism and Dada and its equivalents in science) and of creative anarchy -- reculer pour mieux sauter -- which prepares and incubates the next revolution, initiating a new departure -- and so the cycle starts again.

  This recurrent pattern is in some respects analogous to the successive stages in the process of individual discovery, according to the schema proposed by Helmholtz and Graham Wallas: conscious preparation -- unconscious incubation -- illumination -- verification and consolidation. But while the individual's process of discovery is concluded at the last of these stages, on the historical scale the last stage of one cycle shades into the first stage of the next.

  A more recent theory which has strong affinities with the conception of historic cycles first developed in The Act of Creation and summarized above is Thomas Kuhn's much-quoted essay The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn calls the cumulative phases of the cycle 'normal science' and refers to the revolutionary breakthroughs as 'paradigm changes'. In spite of the different terminology, there are some striking similarities between Kuhn's schema and the one proposed in The Act of Creation, though they were developed independently from each other. Both represent radical departures from George Sarton's venerable theory which asserts that the history of science is the only history which displays cumulative progress, and that, accordingly, the progress of science is the only yardstick by which we can measure the progress of mankind.

  In fact, however, as we have seen, the progress of science on the charts of history does not appear as a continuously ascending curve, but as a zigzag line, not unlike the history of art. This does not mean, of course, that there is no advance; only that both are advancing on an unpredictable, often erratic course.

  In the course of the last hundred years, history has accelerated like a rocket taking off, and has produced new discoveries at a breath-taking rate -- but also more crises, about-turns and undoing-redoings than ever before. This is in evidence in all branches of science and art -- in painting and literature, physics and brain-research, genetics and cosmology. In every field the demolition squads were as feverishly active as the construction workers, but we see only what the latter built and tend to forget the once proud citadels of orthodoxy that were destroyed. No doubt in the next few decades we shall witness even more spectacular feats of undoing-redoing. Some speculative hunches on this subject will be found in later chapters.

  PART THREE

  Creative Evolution

  IX

  CRUMBLING CITADELS

  1

  One of the crumbling citadels of orthodoxy mentioned at the end of the previous chapter is the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution (which also goes by the name of 'synthetic theory'). The situation was summed up by Professor W. H. Thorpe when he wrote of 'an undercurrent of thought in the minds of
perhaps hundreds of biologists over the last twenty-five years' who reject the neo-Darwinian dogma.* The contradictions and tautologies of the synthetic theory have actually been known even longer, as a kind of open secret, and yet the dogma has been and still is strenuously defended by the academic community, with the penalty of discreet but effective ostracism for heretics. The reason for this paradox seems to be twofold: firstly, commitment to a scientific theory can be as charged with emotion as a religious credo -- a subject much in evidence throughout the history of science; secondly, the absence of a coherent alternative to neo-Darwinism makes many biologists feel that a bad theory is better than no theory at all. Whether this is to be regarded as good scientific strategy is a matter of opinion.

  * It was this remark of Thorpe's which sparked off the 'Beyond Reductionism' symposium (cf. Ch. I).

  The essence of the theory is perhaps easiest to convey by drawing a parallel between neo-Darwinism in biology and behaviourism in psychology. Both derived their inspiration from the same Zeitgeist of reductionist philosophy which prevailed during the first half of our century. Behaviourism was founded by John Broadus Watson just before the First World War, and made its sensational impact mainly by proclaiming that 'consciousness' and 'mind' are empty words with no basis in reality. Half a century later, Professor Skinner of Harvard University -- probably the most influential academic psychologist of our time -- continued to proclaim the same views in even more extreme form. In Skinner's standard textbook Science and Human Behaviour, the hopeful student of psychology is told from the very outset that 'mind', 'ideas', etc., are non-existent entities, 'invented to provide spurious explanations. . . . Since mental or psychic events are asserted to lack the dimensions of physical science, we have an additional reason for rejecting them." (By the same logic, we may reject the reality of radio waves, because they consist of vibrations in a vacuum devoid of any physical properties.)