“The Act of Creation”
by Arthur Koestler
Book One – The Art of Discovery and the Discoveries of Art
Part One – The Jester
Chapter I: The Logic of Laughter
This chapter opens up with an explanation of The Triptych. This explains that there are 3 domains of creativity: Humour, Discovery, and Art. They are also represented by the Jester, the Sage, and the Artist. In the following chapters, Koestler is going to explain how these domains are related and that their separations is not a matter of sharp limits but a matter of degrees. In Part One, he writes about the Jester (Humour Domain) mainly through laughter.
Explanation of the limits of The Triptych and the aim of this book:
“Each horizontal line across the triptych stands for a pattern of creative activity which is represented on all three panels… The logical pattern of the creative process is the same in all three cases; it consists in the discovery of hidden similarities. But the emotional climate is different in the three panels… I shall try to show that all patterns of creative activity are tri-valent: they can enter the service of humour, discovery, or art; and also, that as we travel across the triptych from left to right, the emotional climate changes by gradual transitions from aggressive to neutral to sympathetic and identificatory–or, to put it another way, from an absurd through an abstract to a tragic or lyric view of existence.”
On Laughter
It’s a reflex, which uses 15 facial muscles. Smiling can be seen as a product of many things, but we are concerned only with laughing as a response to the comic.
“Humour is the only domain of creative activity (of the triptych) where a stimulus on a high level of complexity produces a massive and sharply defined response on the level of physiological reflexes.” p. 31.
This means that laughter is an indicator of the presence of the comic and consequently (because comic is related to the other forms of creativity), to these.
“I shall try to show that there is unity in this variety; that the common denominator is of a specific and specifiable pattern which is the central importance not only in humour but in all domains of creative activity.” p. 32
So, laughter can be seen as the moment when we laugh due to the release of tension. This happens when two incompatible matrices collide. This is called bisociation.
The word matrix is used to denote any ability, habit, or skill, any pattern of ordered behavior governed by a code of fixed rules. Codes are inflexible (the rules of the game), while the matrices are flexible (also called frames of reference). In the example of chess, the code is the rule of the game, the matrix is the total of possible choices, and the strategy is the actual move.
In our actions, and mainly when doing a skilled activity, we function below our level of consciousness. We are guided by our codes, so we only think of one matrix at a time, except of when dreaming and discovery through a creative activity.
We can see the same situation, but attach different meaning to it, either comic or tragic or of discovery. For example, a person falling because of the peel of a banana.
In conclusion, laughter is a process of trigger-release type, which indicates the collision of two matrices. This is also an indicator of a connection between discovery and art, the other creative domains.
Explanation of the limits of The Triptych and the aim of this book:
“Each horizontal line across the triptych stands for a pattern of creative activity which is represented on all three panels… The logical pattern of the creative process is the same in all three cases; it consists in the discovery of hidden similarities. But the emotional climate is different in the three panels… I shall try to show that all patterns of creative activity are tri-valent: they can enter the service of humour, discovery, or art; and also, that as we travel across the triptych from left to right, the emotional climate changes by gradual transitions from aggressive to neutral to sympathetic and identificatory–or, to put it another way, from an absurd through an abstract to a tragic or lyric view of existence.”
On Laughter
It’s a reflex, which uses 15 facial muscles. Smiling can be seen as a product of many things, but we are concerned only with laughing as a response to the comic.
“Humour is the only domain of creative activity (of the triptych) where a stimulus on a high level of complexity produces a massive and sharply defined response on the level of physiological reflexes.” p. 31.
This means that laughter is an indicator of the presence of the comic and consequently (because comic is related to the other forms of creativity), to these.
“I shall try to show that there is unity in this variety; that the common denominator is of a specific and specifiable pattern which is the central importance not only in humour but in all domains of creative activity.” p. 32
So, laughter can be seen as the moment when we laugh due to the release of tension. This happens when two incompatible matrices collide. This is called bisociation.
The word matrix is used to denote any ability, habit, or skill, any pattern of ordered behavior governed by a code of fixed rules. Codes are inflexible (the rules of the game), while the matrices are flexible (also called frames of reference). In the example of chess, the code is the rule of the game, the matrix is the total of possible choices, and the strategy is the actual move.
In our actions, and mainly when doing a skilled activity, we function below our level of consciousness. We are guided by our codes, so we only think of one matrix at a time, except of when dreaming and discovery through a creative activity.
We can see the same situation, but attach different meaning to it, either comic or tragic or of discovery. For example, a person falling because of the peel of a banana.
In conclusion, laughter is a process of trigger-release type, which indicates the collision of two matrices. This is also an indicator of a connection between discovery and art, the other creative domains.
Chapter II: Laughter and Emotion
This chapter follows the explanation of laughter as a trigger-release type and relates it with how we are affected by our emotions and our physical reactions.
Laughter is tension-relieving… “When we laugh, however, the pleasurable relief does not derive from a consummatory act which satisfies some spefic need… the sole function of this luxury reflex seems to be the disposal of excitations which have become redundant, which cannot be consummated in any purposeful manner.” P. 51
Then he goes on to explain the role of aggression in laughter and how this is the main ingredient of this reflex. This would be called the aggressive-defensive or self-asserting tendency.
“The more sophisticated forms of humour evoke mixed, and sometimes contradictory, feelings; but whatever the mixture, it must contain one ingredient whose presence is indispensable: an impulse, however faint, of aggression or apprehension…
It is the aggressive element, the detached malice of the parodist, which turns pathos into bathos, tragedy into comedy.” P. 52
There’s also the theory of degradation, which poses the one that laughs as someone superior to the one being laughed of. Aristotle, Cicero, Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, Bain, Bergson, Beerbohm, McDougall; all have talked about this.
“…to realize that the aggressive charge detonated in laughter need not be gunpowder; a grain of Attic salt (a drop of adrenalin) is enough to act as a catalyst.” P. 53
Emotions have also participatory or self-transcending tendencies. This is the ones that dominate the opposite side of the triptych. Emotions have both tendencies.
One main objective of this book is said in the following: “the painful vivisection of the comic, in which they are asked to participate (the readers), is not an end in itself, but a means to uncover the pattern which unites the apparently so heterogeneous creative activities in humour, art, and discovery.” P. 55
Koestler talks about the inertia of emotion. This means that laughter is a discharge mechanism for “nervous energy”. This is mainly of the self-assertive tendencies.
“the aggressive-defensive class of emotions has a greater inertia, persistence, or mass momentum than reason.” P. 56
In this point, he explains the sympathico-adrenal system. It refers to the hormones released by the suprarenal glands (adrenalin and nor-adrenalin).
“It is emotion deserted by thought which is discharged in laughter. For emotion, owing to its greater mass momentum, is unable to follow the sudden switch of ideas to a different type of logic or a new rule of the game; less nimble than thought, it tends to persist in a straight line.” P. 58
“Beneath the human level there is neither the possibility nor the need for laughter; it could arise only in a biologically secure species with redundant emotions and intellectual automy. The sudden realization that one’s own excitement is “unreasonable” heralds the emergence of self-criticism, of the ability to see one’s very own self from outside; and this bisociation of subjective experience with an objective frame of reference is perhaps the wittiest discovery of homo sapiens.” P. 63
Laughter is tension-relieving… “When we laugh, however, the pleasurable relief does not derive from a consummatory act which satisfies some spefic need… the sole function of this luxury reflex seems to be the disposal of excitations which have become redundant, which cannot be consummated in any purposeful manner.” P. 51
Then he goes on to explain the role of aggression in laughter and how this is the main ingredient of this reflex. This would be called the aggressive-defensive or self-asserting tendency.
“The more sophisticated forms of humour evoke mixed, and sometimes contradictory, feelings; but whatever the mixture, it must contain one ingredient whose presence is indispensable: an impulse, however faint, of aggression or apprehension…
It is the aggressive element, the detached malice of the parodist, which turns pathos into bathos, tragedy into comedy.” P. 52
There’s also the theory of degradation, which poses the one that laughs as someone superior to the one being laughed of. Aristotle, Cicero, Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, Bain, Bergson, Beerbohm, McDougall; all have talked about this.
“…to realize that the aggressive charge detonated in laughter need not be gunpowder; a grain of Attic salt (a drop of adrenalin) is enough to act as a catalyst.” P. 53
Emotions have also participatory or self-transcending tendencies. This is the ones that dominate the opposite side of the triptych. Emotions have both tendencies.
One main objective of this book is said in the following: “the painful vivisection of the comic, in which they are asked to participate (the readers), is not an end in itself, but a means to uncover the pattern which unites the apparently so heterogeneous creative activities in humour, art, and discovery.” P. 55
Koestler talks about the inertia of emotion. This means that laughter is a discharge mechanism for “nervous energy”. This is mainly of the self-assertive tendencies.
“the aggressive-defensive class of emotions has a greater inertia, persistence, or mass momentum than reason.” P. 56
In this point, he explains the sympathico-adrenal system. It refers to the hormones released by the suprarenal glands (adrenalin and nor-adrenalin).
“It is emotion deserted by thought which is discharged in laughter. For emotion, owing to its greater mass momentum, is unable to follow the sudden switch of ideas to a different type of logic or a new rule of the game; less nimble than thought, it tends to persist in a straight line.” P. 58
“Beneath the human level there is neither the possibility nor the need for laughter; it could arise only in a biologically secure species with redundant emotions and intellectual automy. The sudden realization that one’s own excitement is “unreasonable” heralds the emergence of self-criticism, of the ability to see one’s very own self from outside; and this bisociation of subjective experience with an objective frame of reference is perhaps the wittiest discovery of homo sapiens.” P. 63