Read The Act of Creation Online
Authors: Arthur Koestler
The Act of Creation (12 page)
NOTES
To
p. 90
. This, of course, equally applies to
pictures. The same Rubens nude will call forth different responses from
a schoolboy, an art critic, and a nun. In the National Gallery in Vienna
there was once to be seen an admirable Leda of the Venetian school, which
bore the inscription:
Nackend Weib von böser Gans Gebissen
(Naked Wench Bitten by Angry
Goose).
To. p. 96. As this book was nearing completion, Professor Burt kindly
brought to my attention a paper he wrote on 'The Psychology of Laughter'
for a seminar of his post-graduate students, in which he had come to
somewhat similar conclusions:
THE SAGE
V
MOMENTS OF TRUTH
The Chimpanzee and the Stick
That animals can display originality and inventiveness has been asserted
since Aesop, but experimentally demonstrated for the first time by
the German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler. In 1918 Köhler
published
The Mentality of Apes
, an account of his experiments
with chimpanzees on Teneriffe, which has since become a classic. Here is
a characteristic description of an animal discovering the use of tools
(my italics):
conditioning, or trial and error. Her behaviour from the moment when
her eyes fell on the stick was, in Köhler's words, 'unwaveringly
purposeful': she seized the stick, carried it without hesitation to
the bars, stretched it out of the cage, and placed it behind the banana
-- a smooth, integrated sequence of actions, quite different from the
erratic, hit-and-miss behaviour of rats trying to find their way through
a maze, or cats trying to get out of a puzzle-box. It was an original,
self-taught accomplishment, which had no precedent in the chimpanzee's
past. The process which led to her discovery can be described as a
synthesis of two previously unconnected skills, acquired in earlier
life. In the first place, Nueva had learned to get at bananas outside
her cage by squeezing an arm or foot through the bars; the ensemble of
variations of this simple skill constitutes matrix number one. She had
also acquired the habit -- matrix number two -- of scraping the earth
with a stick and of pushing objects about with it. But in this playful
activity the stick was never used for any utilitarian purpose; to throw,
push, or roll things about is a habit common to a variety of young
animals. Nueva's discovery consisted in applying this playful habit as
an auxiliary matrix to get at the banana. The moment of truth occurred
when Nueva's glance fell on the stick while her attention was set on
the banana. At that moment the two previously separate matrices fused
into one, and the 'stick to play with' became a 'rake to reach with' --
an implement for obtaining otherwise unobtainable objects.
Like many other discoveries, Nueva's seems a simple and obvious one
-- but only after the fact. A dog, for instance, will carry a stick
between his teeth, but he will never learn to use it as a rake. Moreover,
chimpanzees are not the only species which finds it difficult to apply
a 'playful' technique to a utilitarian purpose with which it had not
been connected in previous experience; a number of discoveries in the
history of human science consisted in just that. Galileo astonished the
world when he turned the telescopic toys, invented by Dutch opticians,
to astronomic use; the invention of the steam engine as a mechanical
toy by Hero of Alexandria in the second century B.C. had to wait two
thousand years before it was put to practical use; the geometry of conic
sections which Apollonius of Perga had studied in the fourth century
B.C. just for the fun of it, gave Kepler, again two thousand years
later, his elliptical orbits of the planets; the passion for dice of
the Chevalier de Méré made him approach Pascal for advice
on a safe gambling system, and thus was the theory of probability born,
that indispensable tool of modern physics and biology, not to mention the
insurance business. 'It is remarkable', wrote Laplace, 'that a science
which began with considerations of play has risen to the most important
objects of human knowledge.' Thus at the very start of our inquiry we hit
on a pattern -- the discovery that a playful or
l'art pour l'art
technique provides an unexpected clue to problems in a quite different
field -- which is one of the leitmotifs in the history of science.
Nueva's discovery was the use of tools; the next one to be described is
the making of tools. Its hero is Sultan, the genius among Köhler's
chimpanzees:
Köhler comments:
had seen before. Solomon discovered the analogy between the Shulamite's
neck and a tower of ivory. Sultan discovered that a twisted branch on a
tree with leaves on it had something in common with a straight, lifeless
bamboo-pole lying on the ground. What they had in common was very little:
let us say that both looked 'hardish' and 'longish', but that is all. The
branch, which previously was part and parcel of the tree, was wrenched
out of its visual context -- both figuratively and literally speaking --
and made into a part of another, functional, context.
The now familiar shift of awareness to the previously unimportant
'pole-like' aspect of the branch was very prettily demonstrated by
another of Köhler's chimpanzees, Koko. It took Koko much longer to
make the same discovery as Sultan; and when at last he had broken off a
branch from the tree to use it as a stick, and marched with it towards
the banana outside the cage, he:
a moment when he perceived it as a member
of both matrices at the same
time
-- still a part of the tree but already a detached tool. Thus
one could say that Sultan had seen a
visual pun
: a single form
(the branch) attached to two different functions.
The act of discovery has a disruptive and a constructive aspect. It
must disrupt rigid patterns of mental organization to achieve the new
synthesis. Sultan's habitual way of looking at the tree as a coherent,
visual whole had to be shattered. Once he had discovered that branches
can be made into tools he never again forgot it, and we may assume
that a tree never again looked the same to him as before. He had lost
the innocence of his vision, but from this loss he derived an immense
gain: the perception of 'branches' and the manipulation of 'tools' were
now combined into a single, sensory-motor skill; and when two matrices
have become integrated they cannot again be torn asunder. This is why
the discoveries of yesterday are the commonplaces of today, and why we
always marvel how stupid we were not to see what post factum appears to
be so obvious.
Archimedes
Let me illustrate the last point by a human discovery which has much
in common with Sultan's: the Principle of Archimedes. I must tell the
story in a somewhat simplified form.
reverts to erratic and repetitive, random attempts; in Archimedes's case
we can imagine his thoughts moving round in circles within the frame
of his geometrical knowledge; and finding all approaches to the target
blocked, returning again and again to the starting point. This frustrating
situation, familiar to everybody trying to solve a difficult problem,
may be schematized as in the following diagram, where 'S' represents
the starting point, the loops are trains of thought within the blocked
matrix, and 'T' represents the target (that is: 'a method of measuring
the volume of the crown') -- which, unfortunately, is located outside
the plane of the matrix.
Once more, as in the case of the chimpanzee, the matter is childishly
simple after the fact -- but let us try to put ourselves in Archimedes's
place. He was in the habit of taking a daily bath, but the experiences and
ideas associated with it moved along habit-beaten tracks: the sensations
of hot and cold, of fatigue and relaxation, and a pretty slave-girl
to massage his limbs. Neither to Archimedes nor to anybody else before
him had it ever occurred to connect the sensuous and trivial occupation
of taking a hot bath with the scholarly pursuit of the measurement of
solids. No doubt he had observed many times that the level of the water
rose whenever he got into it; but this fact, and the distance between
the two levels, was totally irrelevant to him -- until it suddenly became
bisociated with his problem. At that instant he realized that the amount
of rise of the water-level was a simple measure of the volume of his
own complicated body.
To
p. 90
. This, of course, equally applies to
pictures. The same Rubens nude will call forth different responses from
a schoolboy, an art critic, and a nun. In the National Gallery in Vienna
there was once to be seen an admirable Leda of the Venetian school, which
bore the inscription:
Nackend Weib von böser Gans Gebissen
(Naked Wench Bitten by Angry
Goose).
To. p. 96. As this book was nearing completion, Professor Burt kindly
brought to my attention a paper he wrote on 'The Psychology of Laughter'
for a seminar of his post-graduate students, in which he had come to
somewhat similar conclusions:
Laughter may be regarded as providing a safety-valve for the overflowPART TWO
of emotional energy, instinctively excited by the perception of
some specific situation which automatically tends to stimulate the
instinct, but which on closer examination is seen not to require
energetic action. . . . Every stimulus to laughter thus involves a
double-entendre: there is first the superficial or manifest meaning
which tends to arouse an emotion appropriate to some serious situation
(and thus momentarily disturbing equilibrium), and secondly the
deeper or latent meaning (which contradicts the first impression);
and the outlet of laughter is provided to give immediate relief to
the superfluous emotional excitement. . . .
(Burt, 1945).
THE SAGE
V
MOMENTS OF TRUTH
The Chimpanzee and the Stick
That animals can display originality and inventiveness has been asserted
since Aesop, but experimentally demonstrated for the first time by
the German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler. In 1918 Köhler
published
The Mentality of Apes
, an account of his experiments
with chimpanzees on Teneriffe, which has since become a classic. Here is
a characteristic description of an animal discovering the use of tools
(my italics):
Nueva, a young female chimpanzee, was tested 3 days after her arrivalIt is obvious that Nueva was not led to her discovery by any process of
(11th March, 1914). She had not yet made the acquaintance of the other
animals but remained isolated in a cage. A little stick is introduced
into her cage; she scrapes the ground with it, pushes the banana skins
together in a heap, and then carelessly drops the stick at a distance
of about three-quarters of a metre from the bars. Ten minutes later,
fruit is placed outside the cage beyond her reach. She grasps at it,
vainly of course, and then begins the characteristic complaint of the
chimpanzee: she thrusts both lips -- especially the lower -- forward,
for a couple of inches, gazes imploringly at the observer, utters
whimpering sounds, and finally flings herself on to the ground on her
back -- a gesture most eloquent of despair, which may be observed on
other occasions as well. Thus, between lamentations and entreaties,
some time passes, until -- about seven minutes after the fruit has
been exhibited to her -- she suddenly casts a look at the stick,
ceases her moaning, seizes the stick, stretches it out of the cage, and
succeeds, though somewhat clumsily, in drawing the bananas within arm's
length. Moreover, Nueva at once puts the end of her stick behind
and beyond her objective. The test is repeated after an hour's
interval; on this second occasion, the animal has recourse to the stick
much sooner, and uses it with more skill; and at a third repetition,
the stick is used immediately, as on all subsequent occasions. [1]
conditioning, or trial and error. Her behaviour from the moment when
her eyes fell on the stick was, in Köhler's words, 'unwaveringly
purposeful': she seized the stick, carried it without hesitation to
the bars, stretched it out of the cage, and placed it behind the banana
-- a smooth, integrated sequence of actions, quite different from the
erratic, hit-and-miss behaviour of rats trying to find their way through
a maze, or cats trying to get out of a puzzle-box. It was an original,
self-taught accomplishment, which had no precedent in the chimpanzee's
past. The process which led to her discovery can be described as a
synthesis of two previously unconnected skills, acquired in earlier
life. In the first place, Nueva had learned to get at bananas outside
her cage by squeezing an arm or foot through the bars; the ensemble of
variations of this simple skill constitutes matrix number one. She had
also acquired the habit -- matrix number two -- of scraping the earth
with a stick and of pushing objects about with it. But in this playful
activity the stick was never used for any utilitarian purpose; to throw,
push, or roll things about is a habit common to a variety of young
animals. Nueva's discovery consisted in applying this playful habit as
an auxiliary matrix to get at the banana. The moment of truth occurred
when Nueva's glance fell on the stick while her attention was set on
the banana. At that moment the two previously separate matrices fused
into one, and the 'stick to play with' became a 'rake to reach with' --
an implement for obtaining otherwise unobtainable objects.
Like many other discoveries, Nueva's seems a simple and obvious one
-- but only after the fact. A dog, for instance, will carry a stick
between his teeth, but he will never learn to use it as a rake. Moreover,
chimpanzees are not the only species which finds it difficult to apply
a 'playful' technique to a utilitarian purpose with which it had not
been connected in previous experience; a number of discoveries in the
history of human science consisted in just that. Galileo astonished the
world when he turned the telescopic toys, invented by Dutch opticians,
to astronomic use; the invention of the steam engine as a mechanical
toy by Hero of Alexandria in the second century B.C. had to wait two
thousand years before it was put to practical use; the geometry of conic
sections which Apollonius of Perga had studied in the fourth century
B.C. just for the fun of it, gave Kepler, again two thousand years
later, his elliptical orbits of the planets; the passion for dice of
the Chevalier de Méré made him approach Pascal for advice
on a safe gambling system, and thus was the theory of probability born,
that indispensable tool of modern physics and biology, not to mention the
insurance business. 'It is remarkable', wrote Laplace, 'that a science
which began with considerations of play has risen to the most important
objects of human knowledge.' Thus at the very start of our inquiry we hit
on a pattern -- the discovery that a playful or
l'art pour l'art
technique provides an unexpected clue to problems in a quite different
field -- which is one of the leitmotifs in the history of science.
Nueva's discovery was the use of tools; the next one to be described is
the making of tools. Its hero is Sultan, the genius among Köhler's
chimpanzees:
(17.2.1914) Beyond some bars, out of arm's reach, lies an objectiveHad Sultan known Greek he would certainly have shouted Eureka!
[a banana]; on this side, in the background of the experiment room,
is placed a sawn-off castor-oil bush, whose branches can be easily
broken off. It is impossible to squeeze the tree through the railings,
on account of its awkward shape; besides, only one of the bigger
apes could drag it as far as the bars. Sultan is let in, does not
immediately see the objective, and, looking about him indifferently,
sucks one of the branches of the tree. But, his attention having
been drawn to the objective, he approaches the bars, glances outside,
the next moment turns round, goes straight to the tree, seizes a thin
slender branch, breaks it off with a sharp jerk, runs back to the bars,
and attains the objective. From the turning round upon the tree up to
the grasping of the fruit with the broken-off branch, is one single
quick chain of action, without the least 'hiatus', and without the
slightest movement that does not, objectively considered, fit into
the solution described. [2]
Köhler comments:
For adult man with his mechanized methods of solution, proof isIt has been said that discovery consists in seeing an analogy which nobody
sometimes needed, as here, that an action was a real achievement,
not something self-evident; that the breaking off a branch from a
whole tree, for instance, is an achievement over and above the
simple use of a stick, is shown at once by animals less gifted than
Sultan, even when they understand the use of sticks beforehand. [3]
had seen before. Solomon discovered the analogy between the Shulamite's
neck and a tower of ivory. Sultan discovered that a twisted branch on a
tree with leaves on it had something in common with a straight, lifeless
bamboo-pole lying on the ground. What they had in common was very little:
let us say that both looked 'hardish' and 'longish', but that is all. The
branch, which previously was part and parcel of the tree, was wrenched
out of its visual context -- both figuratively and literally speaking --
and made into a part of another, functional, context.
The now familiar shift of awareness to the previously unimportant
'pole-like' aspect of the branch was very prettily demonstrated by
another of Köhler's chimpanzees, Koko. It took Koko much longer to
make the same discovery as Sultan; and when at last he had broken off a
branch from the tree to use it as a stick, and marched with it towards
the banana outside the cage, he:
eagerly picked off one leaf after the other, so that only the long,Before the chimpanzee actually broke off the branch there must have been
bare stem was left . . . The pulling off of the leaves is both correct
and incorrect; incorrect because it does not make the stem any
longer, correct because it makes its length show up better and
the stem thus becomes optically more like a stick. . . . There can be
no doubt that Koko did not pull off the leaves in play only; his look
and his movements prove distinctly that throughout the performance his
attention is wholly concentrated on the banana; he is merely concerned
now with preparing the implement. Play looks quite different; and
I have never seen a chimpanzee play while (like Koko in this case)
he was showing himself distinctly intent upon his ultimate purpose. [4]
a moment when he perceived it as a member
of both matrices at the same
time
-- still a part of the tree but already a detached tool. Thus
one could say that Sultan had seen a
visual pun
: a single form
(the branch) attached to two different functions.
The act of discovery has a disruptive and a constructive aspect. It
must disrupt rigid patterns of mental organization to achieve the new
synthesis. Sultan's habitual way of looking at the tree as a coherent,
visual whole had to be shattered. Once he had discovered that branches
can be made into tools he never again forgot it, and we may assume
that a tree never again looked the same to him as before. He had lost
the innocence of his vision, but from this loss he derived an immense
gain: the perception of 'branches' and the manipulation of 'tools' were
now combined into a single, sensory-motor skill; and when two matrices
have become integrated they cannot again be torn asunder. This is why
the discoveries of yesterday are the commonplaces of today, and why we
always marvel how stupid we were not to see what post factum appears to
be so obvious.
Archimedes
Let me illustrate the last point by a human discovery which has much
in common with Sultan's: the Principle of Archimedes. I must tell the
story in a somewhat simplified form.
Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse and protector of Archimedes, had been given aBlocked situations increase stress. Under its pressure the chimpanzee
beautiful crown, allegedly of pure gold, but he suspected that it was
adulterated with silver. He asked Archimedes's opinion. Archimedes
knew, of course, the specific weight of gold -- that is to say, its
weight per volume unit. If he could measure the volume of the crown he
would know immediately whether it was pure gold or not; but how on earth
is one to determine the volume of a complicated ornament with all its
filigree work? Ah, if only he could melt it down and measure the liquid
gold by the pint, or hammer it into a brick of honest rectangular shape,
or . . . and so on. At this stage he must have felt rather like Nueva,
flinging herself on her back and uttering whimpering sounds because
the banana was out of her grasp and the road to it blocked.
reverts to erratic and repetitive, random attempts; in Archimedes's case
we can imagine his thoughts moving round in circles within the frame
of his geometrical knowledge; and finding all approaches to the target
blocked, returning again and again to the starting point. This frustrating
situation, familiar to everybody trying to solve a difficult problem,
may be schematized as in the following diagram, where 'S' represents
the starting point, the loops are trains of thought within the blocked
matrix, and 'T' represents the target (that is: 'a method of measuring
the volume of the crown') -- which, unfortunately, is located outside
the plane of the matrix.
One day, while getting into his bath, Archimedes watched absent-mindedly
the familiar sight of the water-level rising from one smudge on the
basin to the next as a result of the immersion of his body, and it
occurred to him in a flash that the volume of water displaced was equal
to the volume of the immersed parts of his own body -- which therefore
could simply be measured by the pint. He had melted his body down,
as it were, without harming it, and he could do the same with the crown.
simple after the fact -- but let us try to put ourselves in Archimedes's
place. He was in the habit of taking a daily bath, but the experiences and
ideas associated with it moved along habit-beaten tracks: the sensations
of hot and cold, of fatigue and relaxation, and a pretty slave-girl
to massage his limbs. Neither to Archimedes nor to anybody else before
him had it ever occurred to connect the sensuous and trivial occupation
of taking a hot bath with the scholarly pursuit of the measurement of
solids. No doubt he had observed many times that the level of the water
rose whenever he got into it; but this fact, and the distance between
the two levels, was totally irrelevant to him -- until it suddenly became
bisociated with his problem. At that instant he realized that the amount
of rise of the water-level was a simple measure of the volume of his
own complicated body.
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