Books: Request for Survival

THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE by Arthur Koestler. 384 pages. Macmillan. $6.95.

Throughout his life, Arthur Koestler, as gamblers would say, has put his money where his mouth is. As a Communist in civil-war Spain, only thinly disguised as a correspondent for a London paper, he lived for some time under sentence of death. Out of that experience came his novel Darkness at Noon. Like Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, its metaphysic demonstrated how the sin of pride can convert pity for mankind into the power for action against man.

Koestler is a rare protean figure in modern intellectual life—a successful journalist, novelist and popular philosopher. His concern for ultimate issues and his idealistic involvement lend weight to his fiction. His wit, clarity and brilliance of exposition make his nine volumes of political, scientific and philosophical theory highly enjoyable as well as provocative. Yet all this has not kept him from being reproached by British and U.S. critics for being hung up on the concerns of the ’30s. The indictment is unfair. Koestler is no warmed-over cold warrior. He belongs not only to the ’30s, but to the years beyond—to the post-Hiroshima world of anguished men engaged in the great debate on man’s nature, his past, his present, and his presumptive future.

Dante & Caesar. This book is a reasoned diatribe against the hubris of the scientific establishment, a defense against those who would assert that man is merely the sum of natural forces, a biological mechanism that is the end product of forces beyond his knowledge or control. The ghost in the human machine, says Koestler in effect, is the Holy Ghost.

In fashioning what is both a popularization of science and a philosophical polemic, Koestler follows on the heels of Mortimer Adler’s logical assault upon the illogical claims of science (TIME, Jan. 12). But by contrast, Koestler moves freely in the wide zone of science itself, finding its horizons too wide for its vision, and complaining that its modern orthodoxy has been feeding materialist poison to generations of students. To bolster his argument, he draws on research and creative work in many fields not usually open to a single intelligence: anatomy, psychology, anthropology, linguistics and political science. Like any gifted teacher, he is skilled in devising metaphors drawn from one discipline to illuminate a truth in another. He is capable of quoting Dante to refute a psychologist, or Mesmer to explain a passage in Julius Caesar.

Koestler’s thesis, flatly stated, is that man is mad, and that despite the influence of his Holy Ghost, the chances are he will finally succeed in opting out of existence. Man’s highest capacity, Koestler says, is self-transcendence, or unselfishness. The irony is that self-transcendence is the very trait that causes man’s destructive rages; of all creatures, only rodents and men habitually kill their own kind. The fault, Koestler argues, lies in a fatal imbalance between two sections of the human brain, creating a condition he calls “schi-zophysiology.”

The Suspect. Nervously, Koestler makes a modest request: he asks the scientific establishment to produce a drug that will enable man to reconcile the warring sectors of his brain, defeat his fratricidal tendency to murderous idealistic rage, and enable him to survive. He sternly rejects the psychedelic hedonists who simply want a drug to make things nicer for themselves.

Koestler has attracted the suspicion of scientific specialists, many of whom, under the trade-union label of objectivity, are dubious of any invader of their territory. Koestler, they say, is no scientist, and has no right to criticize the sacred findings of science.

Writers have been equally sharp. Many of them insist that Koestler, by engaging in what literary types might feel to be popular-science exposition, has deserted his true vocation of fiction. A sober engagement with The Ghost in the Machine may well absolve him of that charge. He has not deserted fiction; his experience as a novelist, his sense of word, nuance of meaning and moral concern, only lend authority to his important polemic.