Arthur Koestler

Background

Arthur Koestler, CBE (5 September 1905 – 1 March 1983) was a Hungarian British Jewish author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. In 1931, Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany, but he resigned in 1938 because Stalinism disillusioned him. wikipedia

The Act of Creation is a 1964 book by Arthur Koestler. It is a study of the processes of discovery, invention, imagination and creativity in humour, science, and the arts. It lays out Koestler's attempt to develop an elaborate general theory of human creativity. From describing and comparing many different examples of invention and discovery, Koestler concludes that they all share a common pattern which he terms "bisociation" – a blending of elements drawn from two previously unrelated matrices of thought into a new matrix of meaning by way of a process involving comparison, abstraction and categorisation, analogies and metaphors. He regards many different mental phenomena based on comparison (such as analogies, metaphors, parables, allegories, jokes, identification, role-playing, acting, personification, anthropomorphism etc.), as special cases of "Bisociation".

Context

In his wonderful book, The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler defines the creative process as starting with the Juxtaposition of Two Concepts from separate conceptual spaces. Such a conjunction creates not merely a new idea but an enlargement of the space of ideas, a cross-fertilization that is the very stuff of which innovation is made. If we, by education, by scientific practices, by social norms, restrict the development of individual talents to narrow specializations, we will thereby lose the ability to innovate. (Collective Electrodynamics, Foreword)

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