Arthur KoestlerI first became aware of the writer Arthur Koestler in 1976, during my first year at university. Although I don't agree with everything he has said, he has been a major influence. However, before I begin describing his remarkable life and work, I would like to say that since his suicide about 15 years ago, various women, including the writer and feminist Jill Craigie, have come forward to say that he raped them. I do not doubt that this is true, and I apologise if I cause any offence therefore in describing his life and in the use of his ideas. Much of what follows about the early part of Koestler's life is what I remember from his two autobiographies, "Arrow in the Blue" and "The Invisisble Writing", which taken together are a wonderful account of life in Central Europe between the First and Second World Wars Koestler was by origin Hungarian, born (this biog is from memory and does not attempt accuracy) around the beginning of the century, into a Jewish family. In the 30s he began a degree in Engineering in Vienna University, where he took part in dueling against the Nazi student clubs. However he dropped out and traveled to Palestine, at that time under British administration, where he went to work on an early kibbitz. One of the areas where I disagree with Koestler is with his Zionism, although I can respect (to some degree) the idealism behind it. In fact if you want to get an account of the birth of Israel from a Zionist point of view, his book on it (forgotten the title), along with Exodus by Leon Uris, is worth reading. ... And then you can read 'Pity the Nation' by Robert Fisk and 'From Beirut to Jerusalem' by Thomas Friedman, to get the other side. Moving on. He didn't fit into kibbutz life, so dropped out and ended up working on a building site in Jerusalem. He got a job as a journalist on a local paper and by a few years later he was working on a big Jewish newspaper in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis. While he was there he went on expeditions across the Arctic Ocean in an air balloon, and to Soviet Central Asia. He also joined the Communist Party, and after leaving Berlin for Paris to escape the Nazis, worked on a book exposing the Nazi-rigged Reichstag Fire Trial (the Nazis tried to blame the burning of the Reichstag - the German parliament - on the Communists) with Willi Munzenburg, a German Communist Leader later murdered by Stalin. He reported the Spanish Civil War for the 'News Chronicle', a left wing British magazine, and stayed behind in Malaga after it was taken by General Franco's forces. Koestler was captured and sentenced to death by Franco; he had a spiritual experience while in a death cell which led to his later interest in the paranormal. Released because of British protests, he returned to Paris. During the period between the British/French declaration of war on the Germans and the invasion of France, laws were passed to intern suspicious foreigners. This was supposed to be used against Nazi sympathisers; however because much of the French bureaucracy was corrupt and sympathic to the Nazis, in practice it was used to round up anti-Nazis, especially refugees from the Spanish Civil War. Koestler and other anti-Nazis were interned in a prison camp called Le Vernet, in the Pyrennees. Once again, he was released because of British protests, but most of the other prisoners, many of whom had been fighting the Nazis across Europe for many years were handed over to the Gestapo (German secret police) after the fall of France to the German army. Koestler memorably describes this episode in an essay called "The Scum of the Earth" in a book called "The Yogi and the Commissar" - I'll come back to it.Koestler returned to Paris, where he was again briefly interned again by the French during the invasion. He escaped from here to Bordeau and then joined the French Foreign Legion. The Foreign Legion was not involved in the war and was operating as though the invasion was not taking place. He left France as a legionaire, and managed to get to Portugal - 'Neutralia' in his novel "Arrival and Departure" - and from there to Britain, where he lived the rest of his life. After the end of the Second World War he broke with the Communist Party and wrote a book called 'The God that Failed' with a number of authors, including the poet Stephen Spender and the Italian communist Ignacio Silone (or something - must check when I get time) However he remained a democratic socialist - I don't know if he ever changed his views about that - his later work is not (directly) political. To be continued Apart from an involvement with the campaign against the death penalty in this country (in conjunction with Albert Camus in France) the bulk of Koestler's later writings are concerned with an opposition to the accepted wisdom in the areas of Biology and Psychology. Koestler was opposed to the reductionist methodolgies used in these disciplines - reductionism is the approach where complex phenomena, like mind, can be 'reduced' to an analysis of the properties of their components. In particular, he was opposed to crude Darwinism in Biology and to behaviourism in Psychology. He developed a model of biological organisation, called 'Open Hierarchical Systems. This was developed in two books, 'The Ghost in the Machine' and 'Janus, a summing up'. I am currently re-reading 'The Ghost in the Machine' very closely in order to write an article on 'alternative biological models of mental distress' and as part of that process I will write a review of it and try to explain his system and the similarities and differences between it and the later work of Professor Steven Rose and the physicist Fritjof Capra in the same area. Towards the end of his life Koestler became involved with Exit, the Society for Voluntary Euthenasia and ended his life in a suicide pact with his wife. He left money to found a chair in parapsychology in Edinburgh University. Books I haven't mentioned so far: 'The Sleepwalkers' uses the history of astronomy to explore how the process of 'scientific discovery really happens, full of conflicts and politics and gnashing of teeth - not the calm progress of rational thought as propaganda would have us believe. I don't know how much this book was influenced by Thomas Kuhn's 'Structure of Scientific Revolutions' but you can see Kuhn's idea of paradigms regularly overthrown by scientific revolution in it. I hope that the above brief synopsis, and other stuff I hope to write, will prompt people to have a look at Koestler's ideas for themselves. Whether or not the ideas of a rapist have validity is an open question - for me they do, but other people may have a different opinion |