Controversies and Viewpoints Read online

  To Integrate into the Environment

  In 1940, having spent two years in Paris in charge of Die Zukunft, a weekly aimed at German emigrants, Arthur Koestler travels to England.

  From 1942 to 1948, Palestine finds itself once again at the very centre of his concerns, resulting in a new novel: Thieves in the Night.

  In 1948, Koestler witnesses first-hand the birth of the state of Israel. There is, in his eyes, no doubt that the latter has conquered its right to exist. Simultaneously, however, he feels that Zionism has lost its raison d’être: he advises the Jews who do not wish to live in Eretz-Israel to renounce Judaism and integrate into their surrounding environment. He also deems it detrimental for one to harbour a sentiment of double allegiance within the Diaspora, for fear of its susceptibility to foster or trigger a rebirth of antisemitism.

  He declares:

  To speak more bluntly, I consider it a crime on the part of parents who neither believe in the Jewish doctrine nor abide by its commandments to impose the stigmata of difference upon a defenceless child that never asked for them.

  In his Trail of the Dinosaur, he writes the following:

  I consider myself above all a member of the European community and, in second place, a naturalised British citizen of uncertain or mixed racial origin who, while accepting the ethical values our Helleno-Judeo-Christian tradition, chooses to reject its dogmas. How others categorise me is their own business.

  Since then, Koestler has never returned to Israel.

  The Issues of Revolutionary Ethics

  During that same period (1946), the publication of Darkness at Noon in France unleashes the fury of local communists, who immediately proceed to classify the author among renegades and ‘Hitlero-Trotskyites’.

  Droit et Libérté magazine writes that, ‘being a Trotskyite, Arthur Koestler serves the interests of reactionism and fascism’. In L’Action, Pierre Courtade explains that Koestler had actually been appointed by the Intelligence Service, the Anglo-Iranian Petroleum Co. and the Comité des forges.257 L’Humanité-Dimanche described the house which Koestler owned at Fontaine-le-Port as the headquarters of the ‘Cold War military staff’. Les Cahiers du communisme denounced him as ‘the archetypal adventurer and provocateur’. As for Roger Garaudy,258 he asserted that ‘Arthur Koestler’s articles are an unvarnished admission of his ultimate ends, namely the destruction of the USSR, Communism, general democracy and France in particular’.

  In 1950, Mr Jean Kanapa, one of the French Communist Party’s own theoreticians, publishes a lampoon entitled Le traître et le prolétaire, ou l’entreprise Koestler & Co. Ltd.259 In it, he points out that Koestler is a pervert who scorns women, is only geared towards financial gain and has put himself at the disposal of American trusts!

  In a speech delivered in the spring of 1947 (The Dilemma of Our Time), Arthur Koestler addresses the issue that weighs most heavily upon his heart, the one around which most of his work has never ceased to revolve, namely the clash between efficacy and morality.

  Should one accept, as maintained by Thomas Aquinas,260 a lesser evil so as to avoid a greater one? Does a leader being pursued by his enemy have the right to jeopardise the lives of all his men in an attempt to salvage one man that has been left behind? By launching an atomic bomb upon Hiroshima in the hope of hastening the end of the conflict, can a government accept, without demeaning itself, the very principle of ‘total war’ that it previously condemned with such great firmness? Is it preferable to hold oneself to one’s principles or rely on the laws of success? At what point does the surgeon’s necessary lancet become the butcher’s cleaver?

  Spartacus, Darkness at Noon and Arrival and Departure261 are three books whose very leitmotiv is embodied by the issue of revolutionary and, more broadly, political ethics.

  Spartacus sets the example of a leader whose pursuit of his own ideal compels him to act ‘mercilessly in the name of mercy’. And yet, when he is on the point of establishing a genuine sort of tyranny, he hesitates; and it is this hesitation that causes his downfall. In Darkness at Noon, Rubashov adopts the very opposite attitude but discovers that ‘when left to its own devices, reason is a crooked compass, so much so that the goal ends up vanishing in the mist’. Both approaches lead to a dead-end.

  In the absence of a better option, Koestler proposes that one abide by two principles whose fragility he acknowledges:

  To admit that a certain share of harshness is inseparable from human progress and that the end only justifies the means within very narrow boundaries.

  It is only in 1952 that Koestler decides to settle in London once and for all and remain in the Kensington flat which he occupies to this very day. He then feels the need to draw up an assessment of the first part of his life. Two volumes of his memoirs would successively be published: Arrow in the Blue (1953) and Hieroglyphs (1955).

  Beyond that point, the author puts the past behind him and vows never to write anything on politics again.

  I had the feeling that my job was done. I did not want to repeat the same things over and over.

  He thus begins to tread a new path from that time on. Behind the political, he has discovered the sphere of psychology. This discovery leads him to the field of neurophysiology, then that of biology, and ultimately towards all of modern science. Already as a child, he was driven by a passion for mathematics. He expresses his intention to henceforth dedicate himself ‘to history and the current state of science, as well as to its impact upon our worldview’ — the fact of attending American universities allows him to ‘recycle’ himself.

  The first book of this ‘new series’ is published in 1959 and entitled The Sleepwalkers. In it, Koestler pays homage to several great visionaries: Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, and the ancient Greeks. Having studied their respective works, he draws the lesson that the progress of science is an uncertain process, for what has been acquired remains under threat at all times. He also deplores the separation of faith and reason and attempts to reconcile the two.

  Reductionism

  Other more ambitious books would follow in quick succession: The Act of Creation (1964), The Ghost in the Machine (1967), Drinkers of Infinity (1968), The Case of the Midwife Toad (1971), and The Roots of Coincidence (1972). In all these books, Koestler rises up against a scourge of modern times: ‘reductionist’ ideology, defined by Mr Quentin Debray262 as the ‘mental attitude which consists in thinking that complex phenomena can be understood and explained by cutting them up into simpler elements, naively perceiving the simple as a mere part of the complex’ (Arthur Koestler face à la connaissance263 ).

  Reductionism thus reduces every epistemological process to analysis. Koestler remarks: ‘Analysis is an essential part in any scientific process. It is, however, insufficient’. Only synthesis allows one to appraise the ‘more’ that sets a whole apart from the mere addition of its parts.

  Hence the criticism of behaviouralism, structuralism, Marxism and Freudism, all under a common denominator. (‘Psychoanalysis is a verbal system of jugglery, a mixture of metaphors and conclusions’, Koestler declares).

  In August 1968, in a chalet located in Alpbach, in the Tyrolian part of Austria, Arthur Koestler organises a sort of anti-reductionist ‘council’. It is attended by psychologists David McNeill and Jean Piaget, neurophysiologists and geneticists Paul MacLean, W. H. Thorpe and C. H. Waddington, epistemologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy (who is considered the father of the ‘general theory of systems’), economist F. A. von Hayek, professors Seymour Kety, Jerome Bruner and Holger Hyden, and others. The symposium proceedings are then published in London under the title Beyond Reductionism (Hutchinson, 1971). Unfortunately, they have not yet been translated into French.

  This improvised conference also provided Koestler with the necessary content for another novel entitled The Call-Girls, a kind of key-based pamphlet targeting the ‘princes of knowledge’ in which Koestler humorously mocks the scientists that cross the world back and forth, offering not their bodies but thei
r knowledge and minds to the highest bidder.

  The reductionist position is built around three fundamental principles.

  1) Man cannot be put into equations. The ‘reality’ of the universe can be apprehended on four different levels: that of microphysics (energy), that of macrophysics (matter), that of biology (life) and, last but not least, a specifically human level, one that is particularly characterised by culture and historical consciousness. Man’s belonging to the first three levels is shared with increasingly limited ‘parts’ of the universe that are, so to speak, concentric. Only the fourth level is exclusive to humans and can neither be reduced to the former levels nor grasped through analysis alone.

  From one level to the next, i.e. from the quantum level to that of the human psyche, one notices a growing complexity and differentiation. As a result, a purely quantitative analysis is bound to mirror reality less and less as one rises from one level to another. In other words, the more complex an ensemble is, the less one can distinguish and ‘reduce’ its variables (known as heteromorphisms) in order to conduct an analysis.

  ‘A holon264 located on a higher level in the hierarchy enjoys more “degrees of liberty” than a holon located on a lower level’, Arthur Koestler writes.

  In the course of the 1930s, physicalist doctrines already confirmed the inexistence of anything that could not be quantified, beginning with our states of consciousness. As for behaviourism, which has experienced great development since World War II, it has adopted the essential part of this suggestion by promulgating the simplistic idea ‘that one can study psychology using the methods and concepts of traditional physics’ (Koestler). Already in 1953, B. F. Skinner265 had thus written:

  Since mental or psychological events cannot be measured using the instruments of physics, there is all the more reason to reject them. (Science and Human Behaviour)

  There is a certain American futurology that is founded upon the same implicit belief. When asked about the work conducted by Mr Hermann Kahn266 at the Rand Corporation, Mr Georg Picht, the scientific adviser of the West German government, declared in 1971:

  Kahn believes himself able to quantify everything. He thinks he can maximise his hold on things through a maximum of mathematisation. He proceeds to extrapolate current scientific data and technologies into the future, without troubling himself in any way with the social, political and moral forces that might come into play. In short, he abides by a recent trend and places his blind faith in the quantitative information that a computer can process, never asking himself any questions with regard to all the human preconditions that ceaselessly upset our predictions. Indeed, our analyses seem to demonstrate that the great political and economic mutations of the future evade all mathematisation and cannot be stored on punched cards.267

  This statement coincides with Koestler’s own affirmation that ‘man cannot be reduced to mathematical equations’.

  Is Man Vanishing?

  Consequently, the ‘mechanistic’ approach considers insignificant all the radical innovations that exceptional individuals may well introduce into our historical becoming, individuals whose intervention has not, a priori, been subject to any sort of necessity. It is thus in line with the excesses of a certain ‘quantitative’ historiography, as well as with Marxist theory, according to which only the masses shape history, those very same masses that are comprised of equal individuals and that can, as such, be ‘managed’ by both computers and the media.

  2) A whole is more than the mere sum of its parts. Being purely analytical, the reductionist approach evades, by the same token, all the attributes that define systems as systematic. Simultaneously, it thus neglects all emergent properties as well, those that result from the manner in which the different parts are laid out in relation to one another and that characterise the whole as such.

  It is enough, for example, to reflect upon structuralist doctrines one tiny bit to realise that, far from contributing to a better understanding of a given subject, their principle effect, and perhaps even their objective, is to make the latter disappear. The same is true of numerous ‘human sciences’ whose only scientific aspect, as stated by Roger Caillois, lies in their conceited pretension to actually become a science and which constitute the genuinely unique case of a discipline that essentially strives to proclaim the inexistence of its own object.

  Structuralist theoreticians are indeed the very first to proclaim ‘man’s death’. ‘Man is vanishing’, Michel Foucault268 writes in Les mots et les choses.269 In his Writings, Jacques Lacan270 describes the subject as ‘a thirty-six-legged calf’, with Lévi-Strauss271 declaring it ‘an unbearable and spoilt child’. On his part, Althusser272 declares that ‘the absolute condition to finding something out about men is to reduce the philosophical myth of man to ashes’ (Pour Marx273 ). Mr Claude Lévi-Strauss, who does not conceal the fact that he has undertaken ‘to transform the human into the non-human’, summarises the project as follows: ‘We believe that the ultimate goal of human sciences is not to construct man but, instead, to dissolve him. […] Once all specific humanities have been absorbed into a general humanity, it shall be necessary to reintegrate culture into nature and ultimately life into the very ensemble of its physicochemical conditions’ (La pensée sauvage274 ). It does not get any clearer than this.

  3) The major theoretical alternatives are to be overcome. The anti-reductionist position implies an intention to grasp not a decomposed man or one that has been reduced to one of his elements or another, but man as a whole. All types of unilateralism must therefore be rejected. From such a perspective, the terms ‘materialism’ and ‘spiritualism’ become obsolete. Metaphysicians fantasise about the possibility of a soul that remains separate from the body, while behaviourists imagine the existence of a soulless body that has been freed of the ‘illusions’ of consciousness. In the eyes of the former, God has created man in his own image. For the latter, the best means to familiarise oneself with human nature is to study the behaviour of rats. On the one hand, we are faced with theomorphism and, on the other, with ‘ratomorphism’. The time has thus come for man to be likened to man.

  These three principles allow one to gain an entirely new conception of both the universe and life.

  One usually accounts for all consciousness phenomena, particularly in the case of men, through a simple complexification of the cerebral structure. Beyond a certain evolutionary threshold, the complexification impacting the size and arrangement of our cortical neurones is said to have resulted in the presence of the human cortex, allegedly at the same time as hominisation itself occurred.

  Such an explanation seems to be well-founded: consciousness thus become an attribute of the cerebral system as such. However, the fact of having ‘reduced’ the phenomena of consciousness to their physiological support is not necessarily a source of complete information to us. Although we are familiar with the origin of consciousness, we remain ignorant of its nature. We still need to determine in what ways consciousness, which stems from the very arrangement of the cortex, differs from the latter. And this, of course, applies to all domains. A child comes from its parents yet does not embody its parents; a child is, in fact, the embodiment of all its ancestors (at different levels) but also something more, something that originates from a new ‘order’ within its own genetic stock. For man is a living being and not merely a lifeform. Life itself stems from the physicochemical but is not only physicochemical in essence. What would be problematic about it, otherwise?

  Physical and chemical elements never ask themselves questions; we, on the other hand, ask ourselves the eternal ones: What are we? Where do we come from? And where are we heading? Thus far, we have contented ourselves with two types of response: the one offered by metaphysicians, which, in most cases, implies a recourse to a creative deity, and the one presented by reductionist ideologies, all of which are reducible to some form of mechanism, in the event, of course, that they do not collapse into a simplifying unilateralism (i.e. Marxism, Freudianism).
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br />   These so-called explanations are nothing of the sort. Apart from being rigorously unverifiable, the first ones pose more problems than they resolve. Furthermore, they imply the presence of an entire dogmatic theology whose postulates are indemonstrable. The second ones purely and simply evade the problem. They proceed to show us the ways in which man is an animal, how this animal ‘originates from’ elementary cells, how the latter ‘derive’ from physicochemical processes and how these processes relate to the waves and corpuscles of microphysics. What they do not tell us, by contrast, is in what ways the physiochemical can be distinguished from the elementary atom, life from matter, the superior primate from micro-bacteria and man from other animals. They emphasise the resemblances and not the differences. It is these differences, however, that establish identity.

  Transcending the Alternatives

  Reductionism commences and already triumphs in what Sir Julian Huxley has termed nothing-else-butism. In an interview with Nouvelle école magazine (Winter 1974–75), Konrad Lorenz275 highlighted the following:

  If one says that all of life’s processes are, in the final analysis, physicochemical ones, one states the truth. But the moment one states that they are nothing but physicochemical processes, one falls into reductionism.

  What reductionist theoreticians are reluctant to admit (generally because they are prisoners of both traditional logic and the mechanistic conceptions of the previous century276 ) is that the continuity of causal order could go hand in hand with a ‘natural’ rupture; meaning that the universe is the theatre of sudden qualitative leaps that result in a given level ‘transcending’ the one from which it stems, in such a way that the laws that had previously applied become, henceforth, invalid. In parallel, they refuse to comprehend that identical parts that have been arranged differently can actually lead to different results as well, owing to a change in their respective positions and not to a transformation of their very nature.