Little Shop of Knowledge

Act of Creation (Part 1) by Arthur Koestler

 

In the first part of The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler analyzes what constitutes humor in the human being as an opening to his case of what the creative act is and the processes that bring it about, especially in Humor, Discovery and Art.

 

 

Part I: The Jester1. The logic of laughter (The tryptich, the laughter reflex, the paradox of laughter, the logic of laughter: a first approach, matrices and codes, hidden persuaders, habit and originality, man and machine)2. Laughter and Emotion (Agression and identification, The inertia of emotion, the mechanism of laughter, the importance of not being earnest)3. Varieties of humor (Pun and Witticism, man and animal, impersonation, the child-adult, the trivial and the exalted, caricature and satire, the misfit, the paradox of the centipede, displacement, coincidence, nonsense, tickling, the clown, "originality, emphasis, emotion") 4. From humour to discovery (Explosion and catharsis, 'seeing the joke' and 'solving the problem', The Creation of Humor, Paradox and Synthesis, Summary). In my words:Koestler makes his case by explaining the "bisociative" nature of the processes that bring laughter about. This bisociative pattern occurs when a situation or event is perceived in two incompatible associative contexts, say, a child "president" is perceived as comic because on one logical framework the child is expected to have certain traits while on another logical framework a president is expected to hold characteristics that pertain specifically to its own concept, to have both at the same time creates in the human body a reaction that produces adrenaline which finds it's way of release in the form of laughter. Human beings are affective creatures, and the nature of this emotions is analyzed by Koestler. On one hand there are what he calls the Self-Assertive or Agressive-Defensive type of emotions which physiologically are experienced in the form of laughter, while on the other hand there are the Participatory or Self-Trascending emotions which are experienced in the form of tears. Koestler describes Laughter as the "Luxury Reflex" because it only occurs in creatures with an evolved reason, or at least evolved enough to gain certain autonomy from emotion. Koestler describes 3 criterion for technique in humor: originality (unexpectedness), emphasis (selecting and then exaggerating or simplifying) and economy (extrapolation, interpolation and transposition). Two other important concepts are "Matrices" and "Codes". A Matrix is a skill or ability, while a Code is the pattern of activity governed by a set of rules. He explains how matrices can be very mechanic as well as flexible, all controlled by the 'rules of the game' and that codes in the end are condensed learning turned into a habit. This formations occur at all times, that's perhaps why it is commonly said that your habits define you and why the Creative Act is then regarded as "liberating" because it's the moment where man breaks apart from automatized behavior and something new, evolved, original, emerges within him.

 

 

Through my life I always enjoyed humor and never truly regarded it as something complex or worthy of any academic study or mention. I would constantly make a couple of jokes here and there, perhaps as the result of careful observation, some deformed version of an attention deficit disorder, or "just because". Encountering the complexity hidden within humor, and how it is comparable only to concepts such as "discovery" and "art" changed the simple paradigm I used to have and made me realize how rich life truly is when there is humor, I gained some undescribable dimension of understanding that has enabled me. Not rich in just an emotional sense, but rich because it made me realize that the more you know, the more educated you are, the possibilities of "bisociation" increase and everything humoristic turns into the product of the merging of two books from the vast library of human knowledge.

 

Act of Creation (Part 2) by Arthur Koestler

 

In the second part of The Act of Creation, Koestler dives into the nature of scientific investigation and what brings about discovery in the somewhat privileged mind of scientists.

 

Getting to a bit more of detail, the second part of Act of Creation talks about how the scientist´s motivation is a blend of self-asserting and self-transcending tendencies. There must be a balance between the “mad scientist” and the “benevolent magician”. Koestler talks about how in his Triptych (presented at the very beginning of the book) he classifies 3 main characters: The Artist, which is an eccentric, somewhat quixotic dreamer. The Jester, who has fun at the expense of others. And the Sage, who is the result of a combination of both. The Magician would be an Artist while the Mad Scientist a Jester, both resulting in a Sage, which is the case we’re getting at in this chapter.There is, in science, a mixture of both types of feelings. In one of the illustrations of chapter 7, where they analyzed the case of chimps and their intellectual capacities, Koestler narrates how in this specific experiment it was observed that a chimp who tried to reach for a banana left outside of his cage would have enough intelligence to utilize a branch as a tool to pull the banana in. Not only was this impressive but it was also observed that after obtaining his banana the chimp was happy for his banana obviously (his self-asserting feeling) but he also experimented some kind of cognitive pleasure in being capable of using a tool for his own service ( self-transcending feeling). Such was the case that from such pleasure the Chimp got distracted from his ultimate goal and forgot to eat the banana! Koestler explains also how in science there may be feelings of greed, ambition and vanity, but such have only made their way to enter the service of creativity through indirect channels. Koestler closes this section by addressing the issue of “the boredom of science”. Explaining how since the scientific process required such diligence and observation it wasn’t something quite marketable as a comedy show or a novel. The jargon and pedantic attitude of plenty of scientists have turned science into a “boring” subject and that has done way too much damage to the progress of humanity. Science must be taught with an attitude of wonderment and awe to recreate fascinating moments of discovery, else it is just simple memorization of historical facts.

 

“This means that the history of science ought to be made an essential part of the curriculum, that a science should be reresentedin its evolutionary context – and not as a Minvera born fully armed. It further means that the paradoces, the ‘blocked matrices’ which confronted Archimides, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Harvey, Darwin, Einstein should be reconstructed in their historical setting and presented in the form of riddles – with appropriate hints – to eager young minds. The most producvite form of learning is problem-solving. The traditional methos of confronting the student not with the problem but with the finished solution means depriving him of all excitement, to shut off the creative impulse, to reduce the adventure of mankind to a dustry heap of theorems”“Art is a form of communication which aims at eliciting a re-creative echo. Education should be regarded as an art, and use the appropriate techniques of art to call forth that echo.”“The same inhuman – in fact anti-humanistic – trend pervades the climate in which science is taught, the classrooms and the textbooks. To derive pleasure form the art of discovery, as from the other arts, the consumer – in this case the student – must be made to re-live, to some extent the creative process. In other words, he must be induced, with proper aid and guidance, to make some of the fundamental discoveries of science by himself, to experience in his own mind some of those flashed of insight which have lightened its path.”