Sci-fi sage
Christopher Booker
Janus: A Summing Up Arthur Koestler (Hutchinson £6.95)
One of the most remarkable events of our time has been the way in which, after several centuries of apparently brilliant progress, the whole post-Renaissance attempt to escape from metaphysics, and to explain the world 'rationally in terms of the physical sciences, has petered out in a series of baffling dead ends. In 1899, the German biologist Haeckel could confidently claim that of the 'seven great riddles of the universe', six were now solved, while the seventh ('free will') was merely a subjective illusion anyway. Today, less than eighty years later, Haeckel's heirs on the frontiers of knowledge have not just been driven back into metaphysics (or what might often be more suitably described as simply a dogmatic irrationality); in fact their plight is infinitely worse than that of their mediaeval forbears; for at least the Christian world-view of the Middle Ages gave its adherents the conviction that everything in the universe had both unity and meaning, whereas our postrational metaphysics of today can offer neither.
One man who has been quicker than most to catch a glimpse of some of the astonishing implications of what has happened 'is Arthur Koestler. Ever since a kind of agnostic 'mystical experience' in a Spanish prison in 1936 helped him to see Marxist materialism as the God that failed, he has been on a long quest for some deeper and more satisfactory explanation of man's existence. And over the past twenty-five years, in a series of best-sellers – The Ghost in the • Machine, The Roots of Coincidence — he has been reporting his findings.
No one has done more than Koestler to popularise an awareness of just what an extraordinary twilight world the physical sciences have been moving into in our century. He has reported at length, for instance, on how the biologists have staggered on from one futile hypothesis to the next in their search for an explanation of the mystery of evolution to the point where they either join the former Professor of Evolution at the Sorbonne, Grasse, in confessing that 'confronted with these problems, biology is helpless and must hand over to metaphysics'; or more ominously, they take refuge like Monod or Simpson of Harvard Nan is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process') in a kind of neooccultism, elevating their faith in 'chance' into unshakable dogma, without even bothering any longer to provide a shred of evidence. Similarly the physicists have stumbled into immaterialism, at both ends of their spectrum: in the world of subatomic particles, where an electron can go through two holes simultaneously, where time itself seems to 'move backwards', and where the universe appears ultimately to be held together by something indefinable called 'charm', matter, time and space have all passed over into a kind of dematerialised blur; while the astrophysicists, faced with such a question as 'what happens to matter when it is sucked into a black hole?' can only reply 'it may come out again in a • "white hole" in some other universe, operating in a different dimension altogether'. Then there are all those countless more mundane patterns of events which cannot be accounted for by any apparent laws of 'cause and effect' at all: why for instance does the number of people bitten by dogs in the New York area scarcely vary year by year (it is always around seventy-two)? When the atoms of a radioactive substance appear to disintegrate in a totally random way, what force dictates that exactly half of them will always collapse in an absolutely predictable period (the 'half-life' of Radium A, for instance, is always 3.825 days)? It is one thing to say, with Jung and Pauli, that there appears to be 'a casual connecting principle' at work in the universe which is just as significant as 'cause and effect' (inci
dentally restating in Western terms one of the cardinal principles of Chinese philosophy) – but in doing so we are simply moving further from a rational, let alone material explanation than ever.
After years of exploring the fastcrumbling iceberg of post-Cartesian rationalism, Koestler has decided to summarise all his findings – and had Janus: A Summing Up merely been a recapitulation of the reportage in his previous books, it might have been a useful exercise. But, alas, Koestler cannot resist the temptation to stray from description into theorising of his own – and here he exposes a contradiction so glaring as to call his whole world-view into question.
Consider, for instance, his opening proposition. Need with the possibility of man's nuclear extinction, Koestler asks: why, of all the species on earth, is homo sapiens uniquely self-destructive? The answer, he suggests, is that, thanks to a trick of evolution, we have two brains, in uneasy co existence. Firstly, we have inherited our 'instinctive', or 'animal brain'. Superimposed on this is our distinctively human 'neo-cortical brain', which gives us the power to reason. The trouble is that our 'reasoning brain.' is unable to control our irrational, emotive 'instinctive brain' – and we thus behave like animals, killing each other. But since, as Koestler has pointed out a few pages earlier, the whole point is that animals do not on the whole kill each other, then even in terms of his own highly clues: tionable terminology, the cause of our mil' quely self-destructive behaviour cannot lie in our 'animal' but in our 'human brain'.
Mr Koestler's view of the human CO dition never recovers from this original crashing illogicality (perhaps his 'animal brain' got out of control?). Indeed he is shortly afterwards led to suggest that since 'stands to reason' that 'a biological malfunction needs a biological corrective', thee the answer to the problems caused by man's 'split nature' must come from 'the biological laboratories'.
What is staggering about this is not so much its flavour of cheap, Sunday Express sci-fi sensationalism (of a kind one might have thought outmoded in the 'fifties), but that it comes from a man who is about to devote the second half of his book to a devast4ting critique of the whole redue' tionist; materialist position. What it shows, in fact, is that, far from being a wise old sage who has truly seen the limitations of the materialist view, Koestler is still absolutelY trapped by it. He is a disillusioned fox, desperately longing to become a hedgehl – but he simply cannot get rid of that re'', bushy tail. He recognises, for instance, that everyone and everything in the universe i5 what he calls a 'holon' – that is, both an autonomous whole and simultaneously a part of a greater whole; but, revealinglY, although he can take up this progressioll from, let us say, the particle to the atoril the cell to the human individual to the PO to the species, he nowhere seems to ree ognise that, by the law of infinite regress, he must eventually confront the question asl° whether there is a whole so all-embracing( that it can no longer be said to be a part anything (i.e. the 'One'). In short, no more than those he is critielsi; ing can Koestler fundamentally change 110 perspective. As a civilisation we have bee, hoping that reason alone will give us sola9 ultimate illumination. Not only has it CO spicuously failed to do so, but it ends 111()3 (like Koestler himself) by toppling over ill10 howling unreason. Clearly, or so our seas% should tell us we may have been looking ' the wrong place for the answer.
The most glaring omission from tler's chaotic jigsaw is any understanding, a twentieth-century work on that very th11:0° which lies at the heart of all our attemPtalic discern meaning in the universe – 1,0 human psyche. It is true that he includEros,,
ea " ill-digested sketch of Freud's
Thanatos theory, for what it is worth. Jung, who wrote extensively and Pr foundly on so many of the problems which Preoccupy Koestler, he appears to know virtually nothing. If he did, he might at least have been able to propound a somewhat More sophisticated account of the `split' Which has so strongly emerged in the psyche of Western man since the Renaissance: between the 'masculine', ordering, rational functions which have created modern science, and those 'feminine', intuitive functions which have increasingly dominated art. In the almost total bankruptcy of both science and art, we today see the futility of all attempts to find meaning 'one-sidedly'. The only road back to meaning lies through a reintegration of both 'halves' of the psyche. The poignancy of Koestler is that, for all his awareness of the limitations of reason, he knows nothing else; he is all yang and no yin — as shows nowhere more painfully than in his pitiful chapters `analysing' art and humour, full of such sentences as:
`matrices" are mental holons...controlled by canonical rules, but guided by feedbacks from the outer and inner envi ronment . . . ordered into "vertical" abstractive hierarchies which interlace in horizontal" networks and cross-references (cf. "arborisation" and "reticulation")'. Here is a poor little fox, baying at the moon, and talking pure gibberish.
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