Controversies and Viewpoints Page 9
Espousing Leibniz’s intuitions, as well as those of Schopenhauer230 and German Romantic psychologists, Mr Ruyer apprehends the fact that, all things considered, every structural domain is, in some way, a ‘field of consciousness’; or, as he himself has termed it, a ‘consciousness-of-being’.
Heredity, for example, determines certain potentials, which are then modulated by one’s environment. Simultaneously, however, certain actions are institutionalised as functions. Some psychological forms are improvised and anchor themselves in the brain, just as organic forms undergo improvisation and imbed themselves in living protoplasm or physicochemical forms in space-time. By means of repetition, some actions create a certain irreversibility in one’s mental functions, through some kind of mental self-coaching. What results from this are habits — and circuits of habit — that contribute to the shaping of individual existence and destiny (such is also the view advocated by the proponents of ‘philosophical anthropology’). The brain, in other words, does not initially contain, in any microstructural form whatsoever, the preformation of what it will become (just as a fertilised egg could never be a ‘homunculus’, i.e. a being in a state of reduction); what it does comprise, instead, is the potential faculty to undergo self-construction within the limits of its own constitution and to re-create itself over time.
The strict structuralism of Esquisse d’une philosophie de la structure thus turns out to be highly insufficient: ‘The dimensions of space-time do not contain all of reality’.
Beginning in 1934, Raymond Ruyer envisages the possibility of laying the foundations of a genuine philosophy of life, one that would remain separate from both mechanism231 and vitalism,232 as well as from pure biologism and empty-headed spiritualism. He thus dismisses both the explanation that asserts organic specificity through a separate principle (the soul in the traditional sense) and the materialistic one, which reduces the organism to physicochemical phenomena and the psychological memory to ‘material cerebral remnants’. Last but not least, he rejects the empiricist view which turns the spirit, at the time of one’s birth, into a clean slate that is identical for each one of us.
In La conscience et le corps233 (PUF, 1937), he writes the following:
The key to the values created by man is undoubtedly found in his organic life. A spirit that would, by some sort of miracle, represent pure knowledge would not produce any values and would consequently not feel any emotion. And yet these values — and, as a result, our emotional states — are elaborated and specified by our evaluating consciousness. They derive from the interaction between our organic requirements and our consciousness level.
During the last war, Raymond Ruyer found himself interned in an Oflag. Accompanied by biologist Etienne Wolf, he studied teratology and also worked on the analysis of dreams in cooperation with F. Ellenberger, a young geologist.
Alluding to the ‘Theological Sphere’
In 1946, Raymond Ruyer publishes his Eléments de psychologie (PUF), a book in which he delves deeper into the idea that the structure of an organic domain depends simultaneously on formative instincts and what he himself has labelled ‘trans-spatial matters’. He affirms that man is in a state of temporal continuity not only in relation to his human and animal ancestors but also with respect to the entire universe, whose every element can, from a space-time perspective, be considered an avatar of a common primordial being. This conception leads to a neo-finalism, one that refers, through restoration, to a ‘theological sphere’ that acts as the source of all individualised activities, all forms and all laws.
It is to the study of this ‘theology’ that Raymond Ruyer has primarily been dedicating himself since 1946, which enables us to consider his seemingly very different works such as Le monde des valeurs234 (Aubier, 1948), Philosophie de la valeur235 (Armand Colin, 1952), Néo-finalisme236 (PUF, 1952), La cybernétique et l’origine de l’information237 (Flammarion, 1954; reedited in 1968), and La genèse des formes vivantes238 (Flammarion, 1957) to be fragments of a single Summa Theologica.
Since life is a becoming, Mr Ruyer stipulates that the process cannot be reduced to its topicality — which brings ruin upon any and all philosophies with a focus on the latter.
What a man does and says right here, right now, can only be comprehended through a psychological intention which, by means of its ubiquity, dominates the different stages of his action. This intention is, on its part, only comprehensible through a subconscious or instinctive intent that is even more difficult to localise; and the latter, in turn, only makes sense through an uncommunicable sort of Sense.
The real antagonism is therefore not between matter and consciousness, which constitute one single whole within every active individuality, but between matter and the ‘here-now’ consciousness, as well as the trans-individual and trans-spatial spirit that is the source of all topicalities, bestowing meaning upon them.
Mr Ruyer soon notices that striving to identify the ‘theological sphere’ is an unachievable task:
It is impossible for one to conceive of the original Source. All one can do is allude to it.
Even on its own, however, this ‘allusion’ is a capital one. Indeed, it is by outlining the limits of the unknowable, by delimiting as accurately as possible what we cannot know, that we can contribute to giving the knowable its meaning:
If the Framing is unknowable, the obviousness of its reality can only increase.
The result is a superior definition of the notion of God, a definition that evades the traps of any and all dualism. If we are ‘the heirs of the entire universe’, it is because the universe might be, or might have been, ‘one single being’. It is this continuous being that can be called God.
Already in 1930, Raymond Ruyer had written:
The universe is not a God, but every form is an absolute akin to a God; it has its own being, within itself, and it is unnecessary to duplicate it by separating the absoluteness of its being from it so as to render it an idea. (Esquisse d’une philosophie de structure)
Then, in 1952, having refuted the notion of coincidence, he specified:
If X has never commenced to exist and cannot conceive of themselves as an object, then they are God.
In 1968, in Dieu des religions, Dieu de la science239 (Flammarion), he declares atheism an ‘impossibility’. Insofar as the entire universe is already there and we are caught in it, the question of knowing whether God exists or not is indeed devoid of meaning. Longing to ‘identify’ God is as puerile as having a geographer expect to see an ideal axis coming out of the earth to designate the North Pole. Inversely, if atheism is excluded, then so is theism:
If none can lack God, none can find him either.
God is therefore not merely this ‘more’ that is responsible for the fact that, when taken as a whole, the world is more than the sum of its parts; he is also the universe to the extent in which it manifests itself within us. This means that we, too, exist as God. As a being, the individual is not free; yet his activities are. And it is in the sense that his activities are free that he is indeed a continuing creation and not a created being (a creature). Basically, this is man’s sole freedom: that of continuing the creation, of playing the role of the creator in his own actions and choices. That is how he fashions a soul for himself:
Our soul forges itself by forging our body and the bodily extensions represented by our tools. (Néo-finalisme)
The Paradoxes of Consciousness
In his most recent works, Raymond Ruyer has deepened various aspects of this philosophy. It was particularly in 1966 that he examined the Paradoxes of Consciousness and the Limits of Automatism (Albin Michel). Hence this statement, which we owe to Marcel Achard:240
If I cared enough for someone to want to keep them, I would, in fact, love them too much to desire to keep them under such conditions.
Such paradoxes originate from the fact that each domain of consciousness masters itself as part of a kind of self-flyover, an ‘auto-vision without vision’
, allowing it to evade our common space-time’s ‘step-by-step’ properties, as is the case with the microphysical domains that it relates to (which coincides with Mr Stéphane Lupasco’s opinion on the issue of the ‘third matter’).
In La cybernétique et l’origine de l’information (1954 and 1968), Mr Ruyer strives to demonstrate that the mechanic will never replace the organic, even though it may still enlighten it on numerous levels:
One will never be able to explain life and consciousness through a mechanistic sort of cybernetics.
This process leads to the outlining of ‘a new deism, one that closely unites faith and technology, one’s ability to exist and one’s savoir vivre’ (Dieu des religions, Dieu de la science). Raymond Ruyer replaces the humanism of Feuerbach, Marx, the existentialists and all Leftism, which are but ‘sub-products of a dated mechanical science and an archaic conception of matter’, with a ‘reality-based’ humanistic philosophy:
If one proceeds to reposition man in his line of individuality, to relocate his domain of environment-organising consciousness to the organic domain responsible for the organisation of chemical structures, to re-place the domain of chemical structures upon the field of primary curvatures and torsions of space-time, one realises that man is not a stranger to the universe but rather a manifestation of the very essence of reality.
The philosophy of Raymond Ruyer is a philosophy of science in the sense that it dismisses any philosophy that would dismiss science (‘Knowledge is either scientific or false’). Simultaneously, however, it relies on scientific knowledge to answer the enigma of the Sphinx and get as close to the nameless unknowable as possible. If there is such a thing as philosophical science, then there is also, by extension, a wisdom-technology. One thus readily perceives all the factors that placed the author of Ideological Nuisances in a position to be seduced by the ‘Gnostics’ of Princeton; beginning with the essential theory of a ‘redemption through knowledge’.
*
Dieu des religions, Dieu de la science, an essay by Raymond Ruyer. Flammarion, 247 pages.
La cybernétique et l’origine de l’information, an essay by Raymond Ruyer. Flammarion, 255 pages.
Paradoxes de la conscience et limites de l’automatisme, an essay by Raymond Ruyer. Albin Michel, 287 pages.
*
Arthur Koestler
With his hair slicked across the skull, his eyes wrinkled along the corners, and his feline gaze, Arthur Koestler is as unsettling as he is charming.
Who is Arthur Koestler, then? ‘An odd individual’, asserts Mrs Danielle Hunebelle.241
‘One of the foremost writers of his time’, explains professor Pierre Debray-Ritzen,242 the creator of two television shows dedicated to Koestler in January 1971, in a lively, well-documented and accurate essay that comprises the major part of a recent Booklet published by éditions de l’Herne.
Arthur ‘Köstler’ was born into a Jewish family in Budapest in 1905: it is the year of the Kishinev243 and Baku pogroms,244 which acted as the early warning signs of the Revolution.
Upon turning fifteen, he is stricken with ‘political neurosis’. During Béla Kun’s245 dictatorship, which he experiences most intensely, he feels himself become a ‘Romantic Communist’. Following the fall of the ‘Commune’, he departs and settles in Vienna with his mother.
It is there, in the Austrian capital, that he gets to know his first ‘shaman’: Wladimir Jabotinsky. Hailing from Odessa, just like Trotsky, this Jewish nationalist now comes across as a genuine paradigm of the Zionist idea. In 1919, he establishes the Jewish Legion. At the time of the Arab uprising of 1920, he organises the defence of the Israeli communities of Jaffa and Jerusalem. In 1924, he founds the ‘Zionist revisionist’ movement, a movement that would give birth to the Irgun Zvai Leumi (IZL) and Stern terrorist groups before inspiring the Likud, the Israeli rightist party.
He exerts considerable influence upon Koestler. Feeling committed to Zionism ‘rather by chance’, the latter devotes himself entirely to the cause between 1922 and 1929. Having given up his studies, he travels to Palestine in order to work in a kibbutz. What ensues is his first disillusionment.
He declares:
I realised that in order to be a peasant, one required a vocation that I myself lacked. The experience and disappointment were bitter. I had attempted to embrace the absolute; the result was failure.
After the kibbutz, he does a bit of everything. He wanders about, sleeping on beaches and selling lemonade in the streets of Haifa. It is now April, 1926. In Tel-Aviv, Koestler becomes a lobbyist in the advertisement field, a nightclub host, and an editor of Hebraic fairy tales. He travels across several countries of the Near-East and then returns to Europe — to Berlin, specifically.
In yet another article of Herne’s Notebook, Mr Olivier Bourdet-Pléville246 analyses with great intelligence and finesse the ambiguity pervading Koestler’s ‘Zionism’. He writes:
For Koestler, Zionism represented one of many occasions to impassion himself for a cause, for a crusade, to surrender himself entirely to it and then distance himself from it, before ultimately burning the ships, to use an expression that he himself coined and that often surfaced in his books.
Indeed, Koestler was animated by a burning desire to devote himself to an idea. Zionism was, in his eyes, an adventure; Judaism, by contrast, was of no interest to him: he even denounced its ‘essentially racial and national character’.
From Russia to the Spanish War
In Germany, Arthur Koestler turns to journalism, working for Ullstein Verlag. In July 1931, his participation in the overflight of the Arctic by zeppelin earns him celebrity status. A few months later, he secretly joins the German Communist Party (DKP); he is twenty-six years old. He explains:
I was drawn to the communists because, first of all, they constituted a response to the Nazi threat and, secondly, because I had been seduced by the Soviet utopia, just like other authors of my generation.
Once again, his commitment is profound. As early as 1932, he asks to be allowed to emigrate to the USSR. In Hiéroglyphes,247 he gives a faithful account of his stay there, during which he successively resided in Kharkov (with his friend Alex Weissberg), in the Caucasus, and finally in Moscow.
When Hitler seizes power, Koestler is immersed in the drafting of a book on the first five-year plan.248 Very soon, however, his enthusiasm collapses.
No matter how communistic I was, I found life in the USSR terribly depressing.
In 1934, he sets off for France, where he is gripped by a hollow sort of anxiety. The dream of ‘warm comradery’ vanishes in the face of the realities characterising the struggle against ‘factionalism’. In 1935, Koestler catches wind of the first purges, Kirov’s249 assassination, and the Moscow trials.250 The result is his first suicide attempt (two more would be added at a later point). That is when he undertakes to write, in German, a novel entitled Spartacus.
The novel covers the history of a denatured revolution. In it, Spartacus, the leader of the slave revolt against Rome, is advised by a member of the Jewish sect of the Essenes, a man who practices an egalitarian and messianic sort of communism. It is a transparent message. The book would only be completed in the summer of 1938.
Meanwhile, the Spanish war breaks out, like a lightning bolt out of the blue. Shortly after the onset of hostilities, Koestler sets off to report. The articles he publishes in the News Chronicle are met with great acclaim. In February 1937, he is in Malaga when the city falls into the hands of nationalist troops. Despite having the opportunity to run, he chooses not to; so as to witness things.
Placed under arrest, he is transferred to the prison of Seville, where he is interned in a cell reserved for those condemned to death. One of the great masterpieces of prison literature is born out of the notes he then accumulates: Spanish Testament. ‘A reluctant waltz with death’, Mr Debray-Ritzen writes.
Just like Koestler himself, the book’s protagonist is locked in a capital punishment cell. One day, he hears one
of his companions in misfortune chant The Internationale. Alone.
He sang and sang further. It was inhuman. Oh, how we loved him! Yet none dared sing along with him; for fear of the consequences.
After three months of incommunicado detention, Koestler is exchanged for the wife of a Francoist officer. A worldwide protest had arisen in his favour and the Pope himself had become involved.
Upon his return to France, he is still a republican but no longer a communist: ‘Inside, it was over’. He sends the Party a resignation letter and begins to pen Darkness at Noon.251
Written in English and published in England in 1941 (and five years later in France), the novel would enjoy considerable success: the French version would result in the sale of more than half a million copies. Its main character, Bolshevik commissary Kubarov,252 is the very prototype of the fanatical communist militant, a sort of composite of Bukharin,253 Radek254 and Trotsky255 that falls prey to one of the purges. Accused of being a ‘counter-revolutionary’, just like Artur London,256 he is compelled to embrace self-denial and ends up espousing self-criticism.
Through this isolated case, Koestler indicts a regime in which the individual has no place. He demonstrates that such a regime collapses the instant one introduces respect for the human person, just as an equation necessarily ‘collapses’ once a zero, or the infinite, is added to it. (The historical testimonies published thereafter would confirm every single aspect presented by this depiction of the Soviet purges, a depiction which, in its description of Stalinism, had at least had the merit of antecedence.)