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This major and long-awaited study is the
product of a lifetime's thought by one of the great thinkers
and artists of our century. In The Act of Creation,
Arthur Koestler advances the theory that all creative activities
-- the conscious and unconscious processes of scientific
discovery, artistic originality, and comic inspiration --
have a basic pattern in common that he attempts to define,
using examples drawn from an extraordinary range of modern
disciplines: biology, experimental psychology, neurology,
philosophy, logic, Eastern mysticism, dramatic theory, and
literature.
The dominant trend in the last fifty years
of academic psychology has been to take a view of man that
reduces him to the status of a conditioned automaton. "I
believe," Koestler writes, "the view to be depressingly
true -- but only up to a point. The argument of this book
starts at the point where it ceases to be true." In
his lucid and economical style, Mr. Koestler demonstrates
the verbal and visual similarities of the genuinely original
scientific mind and that of the creative artist. He shows
the inadequacy of mechanistic behaviorist theories in dealing
with the irrational element of genius, and offers in their
stead a brilliantly conceived psychological formulation
that relates functionally the mind and the personality.
And as he examines the whole spectrum of life processes,
he suggests that phenomena analogous to creativity are manifested
in various ways on all levels of the animal kingdom, from
the flatworm to the chimpanzee -- if one knows how to look
for them.
For over fifteen years, Mr. Koestler has
directed the force of his own creative powers and wide learning
to this work. Written with the evocative precision a generation
of readers has come to recognize as his hallmark, Arthur
Koestler's The Act of Creation is a major contribution
to this century's assessment of man's condition.
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