Arthur Koestler: his early life, his escape from a death sentence in the Spanish Civil War and his book The Ghost in the Machine
Arthur Koestler (1905–1983)
Koestler, born in Budapest, had an unhappy childhood — or so he claimed in his autobiography Arrow in the Blue (1952), with his earliest memories grouped around three dominant themes of guilt, fear and loneliness. But in Arthur Koestler — the Homeless Mind (1999), his biographer, David Cesarini, questions how far Koestler’s autobiographical recollections can be trusted.
Condemned to Death
During the Spanish Civil War, when Koestler was a foreign correspondent for a communist-controlled news agency Agence Espagne and the News Chronicle,he was captured in Malaga by the Fascists and sentenced to death. However, British protests secured his release, whereupon he travelled to England, where, as a journalist, writer and thinker, he helped shape the ideas of the post-Second World War world. For example, his Darkness at Noon (1940) was translated into thirty-two languages and was one of the most widely read political novels of the twentieth century, arguably on a par with Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The Ghost in the Machine
As a Hungarian Jew who had embraced Zionism, Communism and then anti-Communism, Koestler applied his genius to make sense of the world. This extended beyond the bounds of political ideology to the pursuit of what appeared to many as idiosyncratic scientific and mystical ideas. One book which touched the zeitgeist of the 1960s was The Ghost in the Machine (1967) in which he sets out to address ‘the predicament of man’ through an analysis of the contradictions which exist between intuitive and rational thought. The book has found a permanent place in modern culture, as it supplied the title of a 1981 rock album by Police.
Behaviourism
The book’s opening chapter is entitled ‘The Poverty of Psychology’ and consists of a withering, and amusing, attack on 1950s behaviourism as personified by, for example, Professor Skinner of Harvard University, who, according to Koestler, ‘… did away with the concept of mind and put in its place the conditioned-reflex chain.’
‘Controlled Schizophrenia’
With the mind of man a ‘divided house of faith and reason’ and such that we could ‘… no longer hope that Nature will provide the corrective remedy’, Koestler’s proposal essentially boiled down to biochemical tampering with the brain of man … on a mass scale. According to Koestler, this would address our ‘controlled schizophrenia’, re-unite thought and emotion and restore order.
Volatile Personality
However, as Cesarani’s biography points out, Koestler was a thuggish, drink-driving womaniser and rapist. It appears that Koestler was not the best exemplar of how thought and emotion could best be united.
