Koestler's Inner Struggle

...Whence, we might think, there followed a break with the party seven years later as the happy end of it all...

...Koestler went on writing book after book, fascinated by the subject of man and morality, yet never revealing until this last one the decisive spiritual experience of 1937 which has since determined his whole literary purpose...

...Actually, Mr...

...For again he writes that "complete dedication to a cause was for me a physical necessity, my only haven from a nagging sense of guilt which early childhood had implanted...

...For man's reason is unstable at its present level of self-consciousness...

...But this is not what happened, and Mr...

...Having been trained to penetrate through this ill-defined structure of morality-cum-interest to the hard contours of a purely materialist theory, you may never be able to regain confidence in your former spongy conception of reality, however violently you may now be repelled by the inhumanity of its sharp-edged alternative...

...Indeed, while throughout the book he quotes without any sign of embarrassment his own classic formulations of Communist logic, to which he had been committed for so long, it is only when he confesses to his experience of divine grace that he becomes uneasy and tongue-tied...

...Augustine of intellectual dishonesty) merely reflect the difference between religious and metaphysical conversion...

...Surely, the gory boat-hook must remain part of the story...

...And so we start on a renewed search for God even while, like Old Adam, we hide from His call...

...For example, he compares pre-Stalin Communism with early Christianity ("the spiritual springtide that carried the pure and humble toward the millennium...

...Recalling his experiences today, Mr...

...His last volume, which reveals this long-drawn-out conflict, continues also, somewhat paradoxically, to illustrate it...

...author, "Logic of Liberty" This would be a simpler story but for the fact that, in a sense, its action overtakes the narrator in the very process of telling it...

...mere footprints in the sand...

...Koestler is struck by the slowness of the over-all transformation following his first change of heart, and he is rather proud of it when comparing this gradual reorientation with the kind of conversion which, after a first genuine crisis, "saves further labor by buying a whole packet of ready-made beliefs and replaces one set of dogmas by another...

...In his original account of his imprisonment in Spain (Dialogue with Death), this experience was not more than hinted at, and even today he finds it "extremely embarrassing" to write about it...

...He saw reality traced in invisible writing to be deciphered only by the gift of grace...

...It starts in 1931, when, overwhelmed by disgust with the unrighteousness of existing society, the author joined the Communist party in its historic mission of establishing a socialist and classless society ??a state of perfection to be achieved by a process of merciless necessity...

...Yet, this inconsistency contributes once more to the illuminating powers of the book, by demonstrating the very conflict which it describes...

...This struggle between two rival interpretations of man extends beyond the range of political issues and reappears even more sharply in the psychological analysis of moral impulses...

...It is clear that, even now, he regards the fatal errors of a "rational, materialistic way of thinking" as intellectually far more respectable than the truths about a higher order of reality arrived at by allowing himself "to surrender and creep back into the warm protective womb of faith...

...Yet, after the cure, he once more volunteers for a dangerous and self-sacrificing mission, driven by an urge which emanates from his untouchable core, beyond psychological causation and beyond the grasp of reason...

...We have plucked from the Tree a second Apple which has blotted out our knowledge of good and evil...

...Koestler says that his mystical experience of 1937 made him realize that the ethical substance of man was debased by a psychoanalytical interpretation of his motives and that, accordingly, Arrival and Departure (published in 1943) served as his vindication of man's moral autonomy...

...Of course, in a novel the two aspects of mind, the caused and the uncaused, may confront each other mysteriously, leaving us pondering over an unsolved problem...

...for to him the march of historic necessity alone was real, and the sufferings, betrayals and humiliations on which it marched were negligible...

...Koestler now tells us what did...

...So he had to go on using his Marxist claws and fangs even though his taste had turned vegetarian...

...while earlier in the book he speaks of the Communist plays which swept Berlin in 1931, at the very place and moment at which he originally joined the Communist party, as the perfect "apotheosis of inhumanity...

...Similarly, a mind trained to unmask moral forces as sloppy or hypocritical ideologies by interpreting human affairs wholly in terms of interest, power and historic necessity cannot suddenly reverse this manner of seeing things...

...The less so since moral forces can never account wholly for public affairs, but can only be seen operating in conjunction with material forces...

...The hero," we read, "who has been made to see on the psychiatrist's couch that his belief 'in big words and little flags' has been an illusion, his courage vanity, his self-sacrifice the effect of repressed guilt, is apparently cured of these unreasonable attitudes...

...But what about the masterly psychoanalytical account of Peter Slavek's resistance to torture as a direct outcome of his desire to punish himself for gouging out his young brother's eyes with a boat-hook at the age of 5? Shall we now regard this analysis as illusory...

...His unresolved inner conflict overtakes the narrator here in the very act of telling its history...

...But, if so, the novel can hardly be said to teach what its author now attributes to it...

...they are suspended in an illogical balance which conflicts with their inherent claim to absolute supremacy and must therefore ever remain problematical...

...But this vision, which destroyed his Marxism at the core, did not equip him with any alternative interpretative framework...

...Once more, it would seem, the story overtakes the author in the act of its narration, and we close the book with Mr...

...However, these contemptuous words (which would convict, for example, a St...

...Anguish and horror shook him sometimes but never made him swerve...

...Koestler's two conflicting consciences, the scientific and the spiritual, still locked in uncertain combat, leaving the scene together swaying toward an unknown consummation...

...It made him neither love capitalism nor solve any of the problems from which he had originally turned to Communism...

...Yet, he was not a good Communist, for he was never quite at peace with his own unscrupulous role, or sufficiently watchful to prevent his shame and indignation from accumulating and gradually silting up the flow of his devotion...

...the latter is necessarily only gradual and perhaps must ever remain incomplete...

...That is why Mr...

...Koestler and given life to his writings through all these years...

...While awaiting death in Franco's prison, he underwent a conversion from a scientific to a mystical view of the universe...

...Novices of sight must slowly learn to use and trust their eyes, and they may not arrive at trusting them fully...

...Deprived a second time of our innocence, we have been driven from a Garden which was at least a fool's paradise...

...The torment of this inner conflict and a noble striving to resolve it have filled the life of Mr...

...We cannot just laugh it off as a bit of analyst's luck...

...This book describes a memorable episode in this secular game of hide-and-seek...

...By allowing it to remain unresolved, the author gives a much truer account of his position than he would have given had he tried harder to eliminate it...

...The former may??though perhaps not necessarily??be instantaneous and comprehensive...

...They may and they do??unforgettably...

...It is like the changeover, by someone born blind and given sight in later life, from a tactile to a visible world...

...Koestler does not profess this thesis wholeheartedly even in his present book...