One of my most favorite authors has been
Arthur Koestler, who initiated me into the hyper world of books and ideas.
Arthur Koestler caught my imagination
very early in life and his influence lasted long. He was a great polymath and,
from late nineteen forties to early nineteen eighties, he enjoyed great
reputation as a unique intellectual who moved easily in such disparate
disciplines as politics, science and literature. He was a great champion of freedom
and fought authoritarianism of both the Right and the Left. In his young age he
was a political activist, was sentenced to death by Franco but escaped
miraculously. He wrote very good novels and at least one of his novels,
“Darkness at Noon” is regarded as a classic and has since been translated into
more than hundred languages. His legendry account of how he was disillusioned with Marxism has gone
under the rubric “The God that failed” and has
since become a political classic. He wrote on philosophy and methodology of
science and rocked scientific establishment with his writings in early
seventies. Arthur
Koestler’s world was not simple and linear; it was exotic, colorful, and
mesmeric and had large cosmic horizons.
Fighting Authoritarianism:
Darkness at Noon
Arthur Koestler was a
Hungarian Jew and was born in Budapest in 1905. He left education at an early
age, when he was studying for engineering and joined Zionism. The Central
European Jews in those days, in the words of Eric Hobsbawm, had only two
options: either to become a Zionist or to become a Communist. Soon he took avidly to science journalism,
became editor of a science journal and interviewed such great scientists as
Louise De Broglie and Heisenberg. Later on he also had an opportunity of
interviewing Albert Einstein. He did a short honey-moon with Marxism too, but
was soon disillusioned with it and openly opposed it. He also joined
fight against Franco’s fascist forces and was captured and
sentenced to death by the fascist regime; however, while awaiting the sentence
he miraculously received reprieve.
The “Arrow in the
Blue” and “The Invisible Writing” constitute his autobiographical writings that
are full of action, drama and his early engagement with political ideologies
and his fight against the forces of fascism and communism. In late 1940s he was
to write one of the greatest novels of all times, “Darkness at Noon.” This
novel powerfully portrays the dark side of Soviet Marxism. One rarely comes
across a novel that so vividly describes the communist world of investigations,
enquiries and trials and shows how the traditional power structure and the
ideology worked hand-in-hand to end freedom of human beings. It also shows,
with deep psychological insight, how the communist dictators and bureaucracy
retained their power by eliminating dissenters and those who challenged the
system. The novel shows deftly how Soviet Communism carefully managed trials
and how victims often confessed their guilt and cleared way to their own
liquidation and led to perpetuation of power in the name of the ideology. Translated into more than a hundred languages, “Darkness at Noon” is regarded
as the most influential and penetrating novel yet written on the secret and subterranean world of Soviet Marxism.
Astride Two Cultures: “Sleepwalkers” and “Act of Creation”
After the end of the
Second World War, however, his writing took a different turn. He turned to
philosophy of science and creativity. In nineteen fifties British scientist and
novelist C. P. Snow held that the two cultures, science and humanities, are
irreconcilably different from each other and that any attempt to explain them
in a single framework may not work. This
stirred a great debate on the nature of science and nature of humanities and
led to examination of many important ideas.
Arthur Koestler too was toying
with novel ideas. He was trying to build a synthesis, a larger system
of ideas that would explain both science and humanities in one common and
unified framework. Reading Arthur Koestler’s works is a
wonderful and enjoyable exercise for the
sheer audacity of the attempt at synthesis of so many disciplines. Koestler’s writing touches many disciplines
simultaneously. It talks of scientific discoveries, evolution, psychology,
creative writing, mysticism and spiritualism. In one single argument he invoked
and sought to understand the basic patterns that lay behind such disparate theories and
ideas as biological evolution, literary theories and other scientific theories
and transcendentalism.
It is true that
Koestlerian synthesis was not sustainable and did not work except for a while. It
was too ambitious and too sweeping. The
fact, however, remains that this novel synthesis brought great insights into
creative processes in scientific discovery, literary creativity and all forms
of art. In the matter of relationship
between science and man, his trilogy--- “The Sleepwalkers”, “The Act of
Creation” and “The Ghost in the Machine”--- by far remains unsurpassed both in
scope and contents. “Sleepwalkers” was a patient and thorough enquiry into man’s changing vision of the cosmos from
antiquity to the times of Galileo and Copernicus and it showed very
insightfully how science has progressed through a process of trial and error
and how men of science whom we often blindly worship as heroes also at times
were not free of dogma. It is a philosophical discussion on increasing
schism between science and religion on one plane and faith and reason on
another. It presented a historical and sociological perspective on science and
discovery. It demolishes the view that
scientists are heroes and the world, a villain, a view that dominated the discourse
in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. “Sleepwalkers” demonstrates that
science is a process of trial and error, a slow and non-linear process of
learning that moves to and fro and then consolidates itself and moves on again.
He also mentions that science was not a crusade against religion and in
practice religion did not work against science. Indeed in most of the cases the
early scientists and thinkers who greatly revolutionized our ideas were
themselves clergies and churchmen. It
also traced increasing schism between faith and reason in the field of
knowledge and pointed to increasing schizophrenia afflicting man’s world of
progress. The progress of science, argues Koestler, slowly broke down the unity
between science and religion, and faith and reason. Koestler’s argument that
the traditional systems and institutions of knowledge were not entirely
obscurantist and in many cases those traditions were fairly enlightened did not
go down well with the scientific establishment.
His argument was that with more and more
progress science has come to excessively rely
on reductionism. And with increasing schism between faith and reason,
reductionism itself is progressively becoming barren and unproductive, and in
turn science is neglecting phenomena that it considers irrelevant. Although these opinions sounded strange to the
older scientists, the young generation of scientists saw some point here. Koestler, through his Alpbach Symposium
“Beyond Reductionism” also gave voice to the concerns expressed by the
generation of young scientists and sought to break the barrier imposed by
reductionism.
“The Act of Creation”, the
second book in this trilogy, goes further and tries to explore basic patterns
behind all forms of creativity. “The Act of Creation” was an enquiry into all
the creative activities suggesting a
common and similar pattern at work behind all creative works, be it a
scientific discovery, humor, mysticism, self-transcendence or a work of
literature. With numerous case studies
and examples drawn from different disciplines, Koestler concludes that there is
remarkable uniformity in the patterns behind all forms of creativity: scientific
discovery, literature and humor. The last book in this trilogy, “The Ghost in
the Machine” is some speculative writing based on the insights gained in
earlier volumes in this trilogy and provides some clues as to how the mind and the body may be working together and how species may be
slowly evolving. In some writings towards the end, Koestler indicated a
possibility that something may have gone wrong during the process of evolution,
resulting into some disparateness in the growth of Neo-Cortex and the Limbic
brain in human beings. This he would say may be the beginning of the end of
human race, a conclusion he drew, perhaps, without much conviction. We need not
dwell much on this conclusion as any such hasty judgment on human race is not
worth contesting seriously. However, in the process of arriving at this
conclusion, Koestler discusses many brilliant and original ideas and speculates
on them, an exercise that is interesting, insightful and rewarding.
The trilogy, “The Sleepwalkers”, “Act of
Creation” and “Ghost in the Machine”,
was an attempt at unifying faith and reason as also science and religion
to understand fully the world of man. Increasing schism between faith and
reason on one hand and religion and science on the other, Koestler would argue,
is the source of all problems in the modern world. And hence he wanted to unify
faith and reason in a framework to somehow reverse the process of separation
between the two that had begun with the enlightenment. Koestlerian synthesis of
faith and reason was also prompted by uneasiness in the scientific community in
the sixties and early seventies that were largely directed against too much of
reductionism in the methods of science that tended to neglect significant
findings.
Koestler’s “The Case of the Midwife Toad” can
be likened to a mystery book of science. But it is also an account of how the
scientists and the world of science is still mired in the familiar and the
furrowed world of jealousy, hatred, politics and blindness to new ideas. He
tells the tragic story of a brilliant Austrian scientist Paul Kammerer, who
committed suicide after allegations that he tampered with some samples in experiments that were trying to demonstrate
how evolution would follow a Lamarckian path rather than a Darwinian one. He
also wrote a controversial but important book “The Roots of Coincidence”, which
examines discipline of parapsychology. He was of the view that the horizons of
the scientific investigations should be broadened to include even such
phenomena that are overtly non-scientific and non-rational.
Beyond Reductionism : Human!
All too human!!
Although the novelist-scientist Snow perceived
considerable distance between the science and the liberal arts, there still was
and always is a case for looking at their unity for both are valid ways of
looking at the world, perceiving the world and interpreting the world. Both are
results of observation and contemplation of a curious mind that wants to explore
what exists. It is true that
Koestlerian synthesis was not sustainable and did not work except for a while.
The fact, however, remains that this novel synthesis brought great insights
into creative processes in scientific discovery, literary creativity and all
forms of art. Koestlerian synthesis was
bound to fail, sooner or later, for it was too ambitious---trying to unify
faith and reason. It is not important that it failed. What is important is that
in the process it gave deep insights into creative processes and human
behavior. The two cultures still remain
fairly separate and all attempts to reconcile them in a unified framework have
failed. And yet if a fair amount of friendly and useful trespassing is seen
here, it is solely due to realization that both the cultures are complementary
and have their origin in the human mind that tries to comprehend the universe
in different ways. Co-existence of two
vastly different cultures may not be
schizophrenia after all. Indeed, continuing with two different cultures
in human mind is a unique feature of human mind and needs to be read as a sign
of wisdom.
What an irony! A person
who set out to lambast Skinner’s behaviorism ended up giving deep insights to
the very science of behaviorism. These
are also the unintended benefits of purely intellectual criticism----serendipity,
if you choose to define it.
Koestler’s greatest
contribution to the scientific world was his Alpbach Symposium which gave voice
to a generation of young scientists and made the scientific world look beyond
reductionism. He helped in bringing science
and its processes close to people and showed that science is very much a human
process, correcting its own wrongs and in the process creating further wrongs. Posterity
would also remember him as the author of that brilliant novel, “Darkness at
Noon” that laid threadbare the nature of
communist regime.
nice,and crips review dr sudhir nasik.
ReplyDeletea nice and crips and interesting review dr sudhir karmarkar nasik
ReplyDeletecripsandinteresting reviewdr sudhir nasik
ReplyDelete