Koestler's fundamental idea is that any creative act is a bisociation (not mere association) of two (or more) apparently incompatible frames of thought. In the first book, Koestler proposes a global theory of creative activity encompassing humour, scientific inquiry, and art. The Act of Creation is divided into two books. 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".īook One: The Art of Discovery and the Discoveries of Art It lays out Koestler's attempt to develop an elaborate general theory of human creativity.įrom 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. It is a study of the processes of discovery, invention, imagination and creativity in humour, science, and the arts. The Act of Creation is a 1964 book by Arthur Koestler.
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