KOESTLER: INSIDE AND OUTSIDE
Feinstein, Herbert
WRITERS and WRITING THE NEW LEADER LITERARY SECTION Koestler: Inside and Outside Reviewed by HERBET FEINSTEIN INSIGHT AND OUTLOOK. By Arthur Koestler. New York: The Macmillan Company. 446...
...Before I begin a discussion of how very good and bad this book is, let me forewarn those who are seeking a slick piece of journalism to stay away from Insight and Outlook: the^book is unevenly written...
...The night journey cannot last forever for the werfet k always with hkn: the flre-bringer must return to the cosmos with the light and the flame...
...Koestler sees salvation...
...Koestler expands it to the social and scientific too...
...THE CONTRADICTIONS, the ambivalences, the enigmas remain all the while we eat our bitter daily bread of the trivial bisociated with the tragic: the assertive struggles with the transcendent, lust with sexual love, mysterious guilt with mystical peace...
...For him to retire permanently would make him the Stoic's dreaded abcess on the Universe...
...Herbert Feinsiein is doing graduate Work at Harvard...
...He has taken a garden full of fine perennials and done his own landscaping...
...This comes as a surprise when one recalls that Mr...
...Koestter is himself well-aware el "in tees end traps of the sneta* phsrJeal approach...
...The journey begins with the process of bisociation—the merging of the self-assertive with the selftranscendent, the wedding of hell with heaven...
...The concept of bisociation is central to the book, and I shall develop it along lines of aesthetic creation, although Mr...
...Koestler has made no original statement, indeed, one can remark as of Wagner's Art-Work of the Future, that it may not have • future, but it meet certainly has a poet But Mr...
...Goethe, T. H. Huxley, and Schweitzer are a few of the men who have played on both teams with some success...
...But as Spinoza's work of fire and air transcended its mathematical jargon, so does Mr...
...One chapter is actually called "The Cognitive Geometry of the Comic Stimulus" when all Mr...
...Koestler regards art, as at really is, neither for the snob's sake nor for style's sake—but for life's sake...
...there is an over-abundance of pretentious diagrams, and promiscuous use at colons...
...Koestler's being and he passes the battle on to us...
...The insuperable difficulty of reaching one another \s the curse born of independence...
...It is worth mentioning in passing that he scorns Lamarck's valuable work in biological evolution on similar grounds...
...The struggle becomes harder to follow when we find thinkers switching sides, or as Mr...
...The reader Interested in Mr...
...Koestler develops the theory which iijmliaasis ef the trivial with the tragtc: one the warp aerf the other the weed in the arras-web of umaslvsts...
...Mr...
...In this book, however, the enigma remains...
...It is for such an age that the theme of Insight and Outlook has special meaning...
...here he comes close to Burke and I shall have more to say about this later en...
...The din about us resounds with the death-song of a conflicting world...
...446 page...
...But when one also recalls that any attempt at a new theory not yet flrepoliahed by time is bound to be crudely stated (Capital is a morass of charts), most of the stigma is removed...
...The saint evolves from the iconoclast: he finds salvation in a world vomiting sin but starved for saintliness...
...Moreover, we are promised a further work which will provide the neurological (scientific) substructure for his aesthetic theory of conflict of thought: but thus far it is the humanist who wins within him and as scientist Mr...
...and now his publishers would like us to add the name of Mr...
...He correlates art with ethical and political self-transcendent values which, I suspect, the saintly old boy, although rejected, would have liked...
...Koestler to theirs...
...Koestler has failed to resolve dilemmas is not his fault: that is the moral of the book...
...THUS Mr...
...Koestler gives the unhappy examples of Blake and Nietzsche in whose work the unfathomable image was a necessary ingredient: the very late Ibsen and Kafka would be illustrations more in point...
...Once more Mr...
...In this new work, politics—apart from the sporadic and genteel Red-baiting— reflect the view of the state as organism, being nourished J>y the sturdy stuffs of "traditions, customs, and laws...
...for my own part I can only say as did <h*t astute crstte Buck Finn about BhaJcaapear*: "the statements was interesting, but Mr...
...The artist, the gifted individual, wiU undergo the "Eureka Process," and then impart his experience to the world...
...Koestler's real contribution here is that he sees autonomy, or independence, as an unqualified curse...
...The author seeks this better nature in tlije deepest layers of the collective unconscious, for in dreams he finds life as well as death, interdependence as well as autonomy: "In dreams begin responsibility" a poet once wrote...
...at teaaporery rejuvenation the eul lurehere may withdrew to the world of shadows (Joseph in the watt, Raakolntkev to eawotkmal toelawesv— always the athmUeu ot the wcaah), hut lit it always wj%aouasr pour tststue sewter...
...THE TTJO-OF-WAR between humanist and scientist for "the <prize of culturehero in our time continues unabated...
...Meanwhile the humanist and the scientist combat with Mr...
...Our artists tell us we are wild, apocalyptic creators, our priests that we are dead souls, and our witch-doctors that we are both and neither...
...this releases self-assertive emotions in the luxury reflex of laughter...
...A large part of it is in text-book language (words ending in lion...
...Indeed, it is only from the world of the living that he can hold infinity in the palm of his hand...
...But too optimistically Mr...
...in the halfworld of illusion the self-assertive drives exercise a despotism where the idees fixes follow schemata at once autonomous and compulsive...
...In the comic there is the incongruous clash of the dignified teacher collapsing undigniAedly on the chair whose legs have been sawed through...
...ONCE the reader survives the language of jaw-clenching, he realizes how worthwhile a reintegration the author has made in the field of aesthetics...
...He says that Freud had nothing scientific on which to base this drive, a charge one might well lodge at his own theories...
...There is no new species, not even a hybrid, and I fear not even as much art, science, or symmetry with which he may have begun...
...Price $5.00...
...As a means...
...BRIEFLY, bisociation is "any mental occurrence simultaneously associated with two habitually incompatible contexts...
...That is why be sees art, which is sharing, as one passible savior...
...But Mr...
...Koestler is done theorizing about the genre of the poem, novel, painting, etc., he reminds us—as we need to be—that the whole process can have its start only when the artist (here Archimedes in his bath) relates two habitually unrelated modes of thought, shouts, "Eureka!," and rushes nakedly and joyously down the streets to creativity...
...In schizophrenia, the festered desires are turned inward and withdraw from reality...
...the bisociative view of Lamarck that form follows function and that use and disuse mold adaptation—the giraffe yearning for those high leaves—apparently escapes him...
...The planes never merge a blend...
...Koestler echoes Spinoza when he says: "Selfpreservation in fact always implies a component of the self-transcendent process...
...The comparison to Spinoza is more than arbitrary: like that God-Intoxicated Pantheist who taught that through loving the Universe we love ourselves as part of it, and who sought with his third kind of knowledge (the intellectual love of God) to lead us to human freedom, Mr...
...For incomplete and sinful, striving man does need a Father of "miracle, mystery, and authority...
...Koestler's fiction is good reading if nothing else...
...About his biology, a reliable Harvard medical professor teRs me that it is tit net strictly true...
...Kueatlu's pontics should, of course, read Mi little masterpiece Darkness At Ween...
...Art and social organization evolve to higher forms insofar as they incorporate the self-transcendent drives of "man, his desires for oneness with the Universe...
...its use of Cartesian coordinates...
...But there is always the fear that when he at last summons up the courage to hold out his hand there will be no one there to receive it...
...Koestler places at the crest of his emotional wave the contemplative saint...
...That is, luxury because it relieves tension and is an escape from instinct which comes only in a high level of evolution—man...
...Does the particle really exist...
...Koestler throws out the Death Wish as an instinct: he does not believe that men "have been half in love with easeful death...
...In hia seal to sound "scientific" one it reeunded of thai geometric strait-jacket into which Spinoza placed his passionate Ethica in order to make it acceptable in an era when philosophy was graphed according to...
...Finally the artist who retreats into a private world of symbols, shades, and dissonances destroys himself, for he loses touch with the world...
...In medicine the autonomous cancerous cells devour the body's cells until life itself is consumed: gangrene and sclerosis follow similar careers...
...In this category Mr...
...The aesthetic experience is the satisfaction of the self-transcending impulses in internal behavior and the extending of this solution to all those who will partake of it...
...Freud at least had data on several hundred patients...
...Koestler can only hope that his redeemer cometh in Volume Two...
...As illustration let as take Be* Quxmm In which the draft world that is the reality of Sancho Panza and the romantic illusion that is the greater truth of the Don are juxtaposed and played in exquisite counterpoint...
...Koestler's aesthetic outlook escape its wobbly physiology...
...The dominant forces of the evolu- . tkmary process are the twin phenomena of differentiation and integration, and it is in the latter constructive phase that Mr...
...And thus we have returned to a Burkian political conservatism...
...And although the author specifically repudiates Tolstoy, one finds him e ape ruing the formula of What Is Art?: art is anything that coheres the brotherhood of Man and the Fatherhood of God...
...Koestler means is»"Why Things Are Funny," but let it pass...
...For when Mr...
...the transcendent ascends while the assertive recedes into the miasmal mists: the mad hero of humanity, we decide, then is the only sane character in the book...
...Koestler's borrowed, and not always transplantable, images from co-disciplines come into focds...
...That Mr...
...Perhaps it is the Age of the Uncertainty Principle wherein-.we shall never be able to determine the position and momentum of the electron at the same time...
...But his semi-scientific meanderings tend to obfuscate already-befuddled issues, and in this the book fails...
...Arthur Koestler would have it in this book, oscillating between two ideational worlds: one plane being tragic and the other trivial, but which is which has yet to be adjudicated...
...Here again, despite his specific disavowal of the theory of condescending laughter towards those less noble, and therefore ignoble, (Aristotle, Hobbes, ' etc...
Vol. 32 • March 1949 • No. 10
