“What matters is twisted knowledge and, above all, lateral thinking.”
Elias Canetti, The Torment of Flies
Two intellectuals from the last century invite us to discuss paths of knowledge that seek to diverge—as Borges would have said in 1941, before including the brilliant story in his Ficciones. Both Arnold Schönberg and Elias Canetti were able to see—with admirable clarity—that wisdom was neither synonymous with progress nor a straight path.
I have just finished reading Arnold Schönberg: Berlin Diary and Tribute to Schönberg by Josef Rufer, in the beautiful collection published by El Acantilado, 484. Barcelona, 2024 (translation by R. Bravo de la Varga). There I found a paragraph that coincides with my affiliations with lateral thinking. It is on p. 94, which Rufer found in Schönberg’s archive. It is a note from 1912, from the beginning of the atonal era. The great Viennese composer, music theorist, and painter writes: “The search for originality degenerates into fashion. Artists now only seek the new… and they find it! But not everyone can be a genius! So the new (the original) is not what defines genius, it is only one of its most common manifestations. We hope that genius will bring progress and that progress will lead us to a more refined style. It does not have to be that way! Because progress is not linear.”
Schönberg’s certainty regarding originality and progress implicitly concludes in favor of paths that deviate from straight lines. The final statement leaves no room for misunderstanding. Knowledge does not progress in a straight line, much less—as we know—in artistic manifestations. This argument, of course, is also valid for history and the humanities, which are controversially often called social sciences.
Just as he fears—with good reason—that his own theoretical speculations about music will mortgage his musical work (in his Diary of March 12, 1915, he writes: “…I have devoted a great deal of effort to developing a theoretical corpus, and there is no doubt that speculation dries up the source of creativity”), by distancing himself from a successive and linear time, he also states in the same paragraph that “I no longer care so much about originality.” (p.56).
In short: Schönberg was far removed from “progressive” philosophies; for him, they were mere rust on thought, since even “originality” itself, as a quest, can be misleading, an illusory path, as illusory as the end of class struggle for Marxists, whose consequences are still visible today.
Arnold Schönberg agrees with what Elías Canetti would say years later. The relationship is strongly argued in these words, which appear in the notes Canetti wrote while living in Zurich with his only daughter, Johanna, around 1992 (El suplicio de las moscas, Anaya & Mario Muchnik, Madrid, 1994, p. 137. Translation by Cristina García Ohlrich). He writes: “As it grows, knowledge changes form. There is no uniformity in true knowledge. All authentic leaps are made laterally, like the leaps of the knight in chess. What develops in a straight line and is predictable is irrelevant. What is decisive is twisted knowledge and, above all, lateral knowledge.”
Schönberg and Canetti embody my praise and communion with lateral knowledge. Perhaps the Viennese atmosphere that sheltered the scathing essayist Karl Kraus, the astute creator of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, the skeptical novelist Robert Musil, the entertaining pacifist biographer Stefan Zweig… is what nourished them. That Vienna before and after the First World War, in the knowledge that both enjoyed a city that was then a shining center of European cultures.
The truth is that I have always been happy to feed my ideas with the author of Mass and Power—a decisive book in my education—which I now enrich with the Diary of the unfathomable musician, in relation to lateral thinking. Under the obvious evidence—it is worth emphasizing—that it is always a complex and complicated bundle, where it is difficult to identify where it comes from, from which readings. These peaks and precipices of my game with life are often mixed with memories, particularly those related to reading. Far be it from me not to give credit, quite the contrary; what I do is out of intellectual honesty and even as a subtle act of professional vanity. But the truth is that I don’t know when and where exactly I took lateral thinking and the movement of the knight in chess as a metaphor for knowledge and its advances. But I know—arrogance and disdain?—that it does not come from any self-help book or similar works wrapped in apparent wisdom.
It is commonplace to be wary of traditional methods that tend to follow straight lines, highways where the practicality of thought is praised, not its depth. The challenges of Artificial Intelligence, where it is often extolled that information descends in an instant, are perhaps succulent fodder for alienation—laziness being one of them—derived from “rectitude,” from the absence of diagonals. The search for creative alternatives for any intellectual and artistic exercise, together with the certainty that the unexpected must be taken into account as enrichment, determine the response, the daily attitude in favor of lateral thinking.
This does not, of course, exclude any usefulness derived from studying—although this is not my case—authors such as Edward de Bono—the main popularizer of lateral thinking half a century ago—because they confirm the certainty that there are almost always alternatives, there are almost always different paths. Hence the repeated example: “If you have to leave a locked room without a key, logical thinking would look for the key. Lateral thinking might ask if there is a window, if you can ask for help, or if the door can be dismantled.”
From a practical point of view, Edward de Bono’s Lateral Thinking helps to exercise useful techniques for fostering creativity and escaping the constraints caused by routines and negligence. Although the Maltese doctor’s aids are often obvious, they require only a minimum of stored brainpower. And a varied bibliography—almost always focused on selling itself—helps to analyze difficulties from different perspectives, even entertaining you with riddles and other mind games, tricky questions for Artificial Intelligence, and syntactic juggling by changing paragraphs… But they never tend to lead—they have no philosophical objectives—to reading or rereading Edmund Husserl; to consolidating knowledge about Phenomenology and its methods of analysis, which are much richer—the epoché is lateral, suspending judgment—than in popular self-help bibliographies.
Where there is a challenge is with my secretary Ray—a nickname I gave her in homage to Ray Bradbury—whose quick, erudite, and almost always accurate help has a key in lateral thinking that forces her to open up. The straight line and the notion that modernity had of progress are not useful for Artificial Intelligence. Ray (AI) minimizes that analytical tool, which is generally devoid of strangeness and mockery, irony, and playfulness. Ray (AI) assimilates the movements of the knight in a chess game where, for almost a decade, it has had no human rival that can beat it; but it still lacks unusual, unexpected combinations, whose metaphors it ignores. Ray (AI) has not yet thought of running—as Alejo Carpentier did in his Concierto barroco—behind a Cuban conga through the corridors of the Hostal de la Piedad in Venice, alongside Vivaldi, Scarlatti, and Handel. Hiring Ray (AI) can sometimes be scary, but as long as we are capable of generating new forms of lateral thinking, the secretary will work for us.
It has been a great stimulus for me to relate my sympathies for the oblique, the inclined, the biased as genuine modes of progress to Schönberg and Canetti. Although these sympathies also stem from my political challenges to the impositions of a totalitarian regime such as the one Cuba still suffers from. But the truth is that such interests would be valid—as an individual attitude—in Switzerland or Sweden, at Harvard or the Sorbonne… They do not necessarily stem from a dictatorship or the authoritarianism typical of a religion or strict education, disciplined to the point of turning you into a pawn, an obedient idiot.
Schönberg and Canetti are part of Husserl’s team, in a laterality that must be traced back to the aporias of Hellenistic thought, perhaps to modes of Buddhism that have other ways of avoiding straight lines in paradox and inconsistency.
