ARTHUR KOESTLER

Koestler is another of that tiny handful of authors who became a legend in their own lifetime, a major classic with a world-wide reputation as an outstanding intellectual - not just a great author but a thinker and 'writer' (in the Barthian sense) to boot. No-one can deny that Koestler's reputation was justified, even if plenty of people chose to take umbrage at the way he used his intellect, as did Sartre at a time when he was drawing closer to communism and Koestler, by contrast, was drawing further away from it. Having abandoned his communist faith, Koestler became not anti-communist so much as what he himself somewhat paradoxically described as anti-anticommunist, which means a kind of indirect communist who will oppose fascists and right-wing bourgeoisie but won't champion the communist cause himself. One could therefore describe him as a negative communist, since his opposition to anti-communists, while it may prevent him from being a political nonentity, likewise precludes him from actively furthering communism, after the fashion, so one imagines, of a card-carrying party member. But of course the extent to which communism can be furthered at any given time will depend, to a large extent, in which country the card-carrying member happens to live. Certainly there are strict limitations on this matter for those who live in bourgeois states!

Koestler, however, lived in Weimar Germany during much of his period of positive communist affiliation, which wasn't the best of places for a card-carrying member. The rise of National Socialism took its toll on the communists and there was little consolation to be gleaned from Stalin's Russia, where old-guard Bolshevism had been supplanted by a bureaucratic elite of nationalistically-minded individuals who would soon be accomplices to the signing of a Nazi/Soviet non-aggression pact. Were not Jews being persecuted and liquidated in the Soviet Union as well as in Nazi Germany? Koestler wasn't unaware of this, since he had travelled widely in the Soviet Union and seen various aspects of Soviet life at first-hand. He must have felt sorry for the peasants, dying in their millions, not just for those Jews who would shortly be following suit. He wrote about the great famine of 1932-3 in The Invisible Writing, about the liquidation of Jews in Arrival and Departure, when his attitude towards Soviet Communism wasn't exactly what it had previously been.

Yet it wasn't just negative things like death and starvation which contributed to his loss of faith, but also positive things such as religious awakening. He experienced something akin to infused contemplation while held prisoner in a Spanish jail during the Civil War, and this also had its effect on undermining his materialist faith, making him question the deterministic foundations of Marxism and wonder whether communism really could provide the ultimate answer to the world's problems. But the negative things, including double-think, outweighed the positive things in Koestler's disillusionment with communism. For his wasn't really a religious temperament, and what he had seen of communism in the Soviet Union was sufficient to preclude him from joining the Communist Party after he arrived in Britain. Probably he doubted whether British communists would ever get into power anyway, and, besides, he had only been allowed into Britain on the understanding that he was no longer a communist.

It was with his residence in Britain, dating from 1938, that Koestler's career as a creative writer really got off the ground. For on the Continent he had been a journalist and struggling author, virtually a hack. Having made a reputation with The Gladiators, an historical novel focusing on the Spartacus-led slave revolt in ancient Rome, Koestler went on to write the novels for which he is now justifiably better known - Darkness at Noon and The Age of Longing being the two most outstanding ones. For a political novelist, Koestler displays a remarkably acute aesthetic sense, reminiscent, in passages of the latter novel, of Oscar Wilde. One would be tempted to dub him a philistine were it not for this almost chimerical ability of his to assume a variety of different roles and express himself in expansive, elaborate, and lucid prose. Considering he was born in Hungary and grew up on the Continent, his ability to express himself so well in English must rank as one of his most remarkable achievements, confirming the quite prodigious extent of his intelligence. Given the fact that he was fluent in six languages, it is difficult to avoid drawing a parallel with Schopenhauer, especially since Koestler is also a thinker, though one less indebted to that metaphysical master of pessimism, much less his great optimistic successor, Friedrich Nietzsche, than to Hegel and Freud.

Indeed, the tripartite system which Koestler was to evolve with The Act of Creation, in many ways his best book, owes not a little to both Hegelian dialectics and Freudian psychology, which is only to be expected from a central European of materialist persuasion. Freud's distinction between Eros and Thanatos, or life-urge and death-urge, is paralleled in Koestler by the dichotomy between self-assertive and self-transcending tendencies in human behaviour, while the id, ego, and superego distinctions, so crucial to Freud's psychological demarcations of the psyche, find their echo in Koestler's rather more informal distinctions between what are described as the 'Ha-ha!' - 'A-ha!' - and 'Ah ...' responses of the mind, depending on whether humour, science, or art is the governing object of intellectual inquiry. Humour, argues Koestler, corresponds to the self-assertive side of human behaviour, art, by contrast, to its self-transcending side, while science comes somewhere in between. One could say that humour stems from the Diabolic Alpha, whereas art aspires towards the Divine Omega, although Koestler's thinking doesn't actually embrace such a moral evaluation of these distinctions, since lacking religious direction.

The theory of 'holons', which Koestler also developed in The Act of Creation and later enlarged upon in Janus - A Summing Up, a general retrospective of his work, extends the Parminidean idea (that the sum of the parts is greater than the total number employed) into the realm of human behaviour, where self-assertive tendencies reflect the independence of the part from the whole, i.e. of the individual from society, while self-transcending tendencies reflect the dependence of the part upon the whole, i.e. of the individual upon society, which then becomes more than the total of its parts by functioning on the supra-individual level of an organic entity. Despite his interest in the social sciences, however, Koestler remained a staunch opponent of reductionist/behaviourist theories, with their denial of free will in deference to biological determinism. A 'holon' is both a part and a whole, so that, when considered from an holonic angle, every human being displays contradictory tendencies at one time or another, is both bound and free, a victim of natural determinism and an aspirant towards artificial freedom, not just a reacting puppet to societal stimuli. Koestler found confirmation of his holonic theories in the Bubble Chamber, an extraordinary device for investigating subatomic phenomena, which showed electrons and protons to be both particles and wavicles in oscillatory motion - now one, now the other - depending how they were viewed, so that a continuous interaction between independent parts, or particles, and dependent wholes, or wavicles, was established as the basis of organic matter.

All this is, of course, so much scientific subjectivity, about which I have written at some length elsewhere in my writings. The fact that electrons revolve around the proton nucleus of an atom does not by itself make for an oscillatory transformation in their respective constitutions, any more than the planets change their constitution when revolving around the nucleus of the Solar System. Viewed from the proton side of the atom, one is looking at particles, because protons correspond to a self-assertive, independent tendency in the holonic arrangement of atoms. Viewed, on the other hand, from the electron side of the atom, one is looking at wavicles, because electrons correspond to a self-transcending, dependent tendency in the holonic arrangement of atoms. This basic dichotomy at the root of matter extends to the antithesis between stars and planets, female and male, materialistic and spiritualistic countries, etc., which constitute not an absolute ... but a relative antithesis, insofar as the two main ingredients of the atomic integrity interact on a complementary level. Koestler often speaks of a distinction between the trivial and the tragic planes, and here, too, we are confronted by the holonic oscillatory arrangement stemming from the roots of evolution in the galactic system and forming the basis of matter in proton/electron interaction. The 'trivial' is the everyday plane, but the 'tragic' is the evolutionary one - the former corresponding to the proton of an atom, the latter to its electrons. Ours is above all a tragic age, because the pressures of evolution are now greater than ever before, not least of all in terms of the struggle for social freedom. But the trivial still exists, with its self-assertive independent bias, holding us to the everyday natural world in deterministic resignation or compromise.

Man has now got to the stage, however, where he can split the atom, sundering protons and electrons apart through nuclear fission, and this stage is consonant with his urge to break away from the galactic-world-order, in subservience to monarchic determinism, and set himself on an indirect path to the Divine Omega by upholding socialism. Of course, not all mankind desires this severance from the proton roots of society, which is why the world is currently divided between capitalists and socialists, i.e. proton determinism and electron free will, and why, if such a division persists, it may well take an upheaval of apocalyptic proportions to effect the ultimate severance of mankind from the galactic-world-order of proton determinism. The pressures of evolution are likely to be intensified as our age becomes ever more tragic, and although we cannot expect Western scientists to go so far as to deny the particle side of organic matter in their Bubble Chamber experiments, nevertheless a time must surely come when only wavicles will be acknowledged, as befitting a society exclusively orientated towards the Divine Omega, in full-blown transcendentalism. Doubtless the proton, particle, trivial side of the atom will still exist. But scientists living in a post-atomic society won't deign to acknowledge it, since too biased in favour of the electron to have any use for atomic objectivity.

Koestler, however, didn't live in such a society and neither did he envisage any such society ever coming about. He opposed nuclear war and was quite convinced that not evolutionary progress but a biological mistake in the human brain was leading man towards self-destruction. Unless this 'mistake' was dealt with at its roots, so to speak, the prospect of nuclear holocaust could only be greater. For an imbalance in favour of the subconscious, aggressive, war-like part of the psyche was primarily responsible, in Koestler's opinion, for man's worst behaviour. To rectify this alleged imbalance, Koestler suggested the need for a special pill to neutralize the self-assertive tendencies of the psyche in favour of its self-transcending ones. What this special pill would amount to he didn't, alas, inform us! But I have little doubt, tranquillizers aside, that its nearest equivalent would be LSD, and that its universal use would coincide with a post-humanistic phase of evolution, such as the superman's phase of the (post-human) millennium, rather than with a pre-nuclear, and hence humanistic, phase of it.

No, whilst one can to some extent sympathize with Koestler's grudge against the old brain/subconscious mind, both his diagnosis and suggested remedy are fundamentally incorrect. For there are no medical grounds for seriously believing that man is the victim of a biological mistake. All Koestler really demonstrated, in contending this, was a petty-bourgeois lack of evolutionary perspective, such as results in a protracted humanism for want of post-humanistic criteria. For although it may be true to contend that man is bent on self-destruction, one need not regard such an eventuality in a negative light, as Koestler is disposed to doing, but may divine in this self-overcoming tendency the means to a higher, post-human life form in which not man but superman, with an artificially-supported and sustained brain, will prevail. Such a long-term perspective is not, as already intimated, either congenial or indeed possible to a petty-bourgeois writer, which is why Koestler opted for an erroneously pessimistic attitude to both the human psyche and the means of destruction at man's disposal. One cannot be surprised that his work was not generally published in the Soviet Union. For one thing, he had rebelled against what they would have regarded as political progress, turning away from communism. And, for another, he had failed to perceive the logic of evolutionary progress, as it bears on the future transformation of man into a superior life form - post-human and post-atomic.

However, in saying this I do not wish to detract from Koestler's considerable achievements in certain other respects, least of all his tripartite thinking in The Act of Creation, or indeed to give the impression that his unacceptability to the Soviet authorities was exclusively tied-up with the above-mentioned factors. One would be seriously misguided to imagine that the Soviets had a long-term view of man's development which extended into post-human phases of millennial evolution, as conceived of by myself in quasi-Nietzschean terms. Rather, they would have objected to Koestler's pacifism, to his anti-nuclear stance, on the grounds that it detracted from their credibility and made for defeatism in the face of the capitalist enemy. They could only have taken offence at the proposition that man was the victim of a biological mistake and therefore not the master of his own destiny, particularly as it bears on historical determinism and the - according to Marx - scientifically ascertainable evolution of human society from class to class. And, of course, in addition to all that, they would have had good reason, in the light of Marxist objectivity, to quibble with certain mystical, ESP, and parapsychological aspects of Koestler's late work which stemmed from scientific subjectivity ... as related, amongst other things, to the Bubble Chamber. In these matters, Koestler's interest stems from avant-garde science, not from religion, and he was always somewhat closer to Carl Jung than to Aldous Huxley in his findings.

Indeed, insofar as Huxley was nothing if not a profoundly aesthetico-religious type, there is reason enough to see in Koestler's politico-scientific bias a relative antithesis, in human terms, to Huxley. Both men were equally decadent, but they were decadent on radically different terms - Huxley on the internal, spiritual level; Koestler on the external, material one. The former experienced spirit with an artist's personal commitment, the latter analysed the world with scientific detachment. And yet, paradoxically, both men could swim, within a limited depth, in each other's creative seas. They weren't wholly stranded in their respective intellectual domains. Koestler may have lost a political faith, but he wasn't incapable of desiring a religious one, such as Huxley to a limited extent already possessed. This in itself would have condemned him in Soviet eyes. Religion for Koestler wasn't a closed book, even though he never discovered a truly progressive orientation but was obliged, disdaining Christianity, to pick over the remains of traditional Asiatic faiths. This is symptomatic of bourgeois decadence, though, unlike Huxley, Koestler rejected what he found as unsatisfactory.

Such a valid contribution to the progress of religious knowledge cannot be dismissed as insignificant. For, in rejecting the traditional, Koestler paved the way for a more imaginative approach to the problem of religious evolution. It was as an indirect communist that he heralded, in The Age of Longing, the coming birth of a new messiah. No direct communist would have even vaguely considered such an eventuality!