Authors: Arthur Koestler
Janus (4 page)
7
In his
Unpopular Essays
, Bertrand Russell has a telling anecdote:
of our species is the discovery of death, or rather its discovery by the
intellect and its rejection by instinct and emotion. It is yet another
manifestation of man's split mind, perpetuating the divided house of
faith and reason. Faith is the older and more powerful partner, and
when conflict arises, the reasoning half of the mind is compelled to
provide elaborate rationalizations to allay the senior partner's terror
of the void. Yet not only the naive concept of 'eternal bliss' (or eternal
torment for the wicked) but also the more sophisticated parapsychological
theories of survival present problems which are apparently beyond the
reasoning faculties of our species. There may be millions of other
cultures on planets that are millions of years older than ours, to whom
death no longer is a problem; but the fact remains that, to use computer
jargon, we are not 'programmed' for the task. Confronted with a task
for which it is not programmed, a computer is either reduced to silence,
or it goes haywire. The latter seems to have happened, with distressing
repetitiveness, in the most varied cultures. Faced with the intractable
paradox of consciousness emerging from the pre-natal void and drowning
in the post-mortem darkness, their minds went haywire and populated the
air with the ghosts of the departed, gods, angels and devils, until the
atmosphere became saturated with invisible presences which at best were
capricious and unpredictable, but mostly malevolent and vengeful. They
had to be worshipped, cajoled and placated by elaborately cruel rituals,
including human sacrifice, Holy Wars and the burning of heretics.
For nearly two thousand years, millions of otherwise intelligent people
were convinced that the vast majority of mankind who did not share their
particular creed or did not perform their rites were consumed by flames
throughout eternity by order of a loving god. Similar nightmarish fantasies
were collectively shared by other cultures, testifying to the ubiquity of
the paranoid streak in the race.
There is, once again, another side to the picture. The refusal to believe
in the finality of death made the pyramids rise from the sand; it provided
a set of ethical values, and the main inspiration for artistic creation.
If the word 'death' were absent from our vocabulary, the great works of
literature would have remained unwritten. The creativity and pathology of
man are two faces of the same medal, coined in the same evolutionary mint.
8
To sum up, the disastrous history of our species indicates the futility of
all attempts at a diagnosis which do not take into account the possibility
that homo sapiens is a victim of one of evolution's countless mistakes.
The example of the arthropods and marsupials, among others, shows that
such mistakes do occur and can adversely affect the evolution of the brain.
I have listed some conspicuous symptoms of the mental disorder which appears
to be endemic in our species: (a) the ubiquitous rites of human sacrifice
in the prehistoric dawn; (b) the persistent pursuit of intra-specific
warfare which, while earlier on it could only cause limited damage,
now puts the whole planet in jeopardy; (c) the paranoid split between
rational thinking and irrational, affect-based beliefs; (d) the contrast
between mankind's genius in conquering Nature and its ineptitude in
managing its own affairs -- symbolized by the new frontier on the moon
and the minefields along the borders of Europe.
It is important to underline once more that these pathological phenomena
are specifically and uniquely human, and not found in any other species.
Thus it seems only logical that our search for explanations should also
concentrate primarily on those attributes of homo sapiens which are
exclusively human and not shared by the rest of the animal kingdom. But
however obvious this conclusion may seem, it runs counter to the
prevailing reductionist trend. 'Reductionism' is the philosophical belief
that all human activities can be 'reduced' to -- i.e., explained by --
the behavioural responses of lower animals -- Pavlov's dogs, Skinner's
rats and pigeons, Lorenz's greylag geese, Morris's hairless apes; and
that these responses in turn can be reduced to the physical laws which
govern inanimate matter. No doubt Pavlov or Lorenz provided us with new
insights into human nature -- but only into those rather elementary,
non-specific aspects of human nature which we share with dogs, rats
or geese, while the specifically and exclusively human aspects which
define the uniqueness of our species are left out of the picture. And
since these unique characteristics are manifested both in the creativity
and pathology of man, scientists of the reductionist persuasion cannot
qualify as competent diagnosticians any more than they qualify as art
critics. That is why the scientific establishment has so pitifully
failed to define the predicament of man. If he is really an automaton,
there is no point in putting a stethoscope to his chest.
Once more, then: if the symptoms of our pathology are species-specific,
i.e., exclusively human, then the explanations for them must be sought
on the same exclusive level. This conclusion is not inspired by hubris,
but by the evidence provided by the historical record. The diagnostic
approaches that I have briefly outlined, were: (a) the explosive growth
of the human neocortex and its insufficient control of the old brain; (b)
the protracted helplessness of the newborn and its consequent uncritical
submissiveness to authority; (c) the twofold curse of language as a
rabble-rouser and builder of ethnic barriers; (d) lastly, the discovery
of, and the mind-splitting fear of death. Each of these factors will be
discussed in more detail later on.
To neutralize these pathogenic tendencies does not seem an impossible task.
Medicine has found remedies for certain types of schizophrenic and
manic-depressive psychoses; it is no longer utopian to believe that
it will discover a combination of benevolent enzymes which provide
the neocortex with a veto against the follies of the archaic brain,
correct evolution's glaring mistake, reconcile emotion with reason, and
catalyse the breakthrough from maniac to man. Still other avenues are
waiting to be explored and may lead to salvation in the nick of time,
provided that there is a sense of urgency, derived from the message of
the new calendar -- and a correct diagnosis of the condition of man,
based on a new approach to the sciences of life.
The chapters that follow are concerned with some aspects of this new
approach which in recent years have begun to emerge from the sterile
deserts of reductionist philosophy. Thus we shall now leave the pathology
of man, and turn from disorder to a fresh look at biological order and
mental creativity. Some of the questions raised in the previous pages
will be taken up again as we go along -- and eventually, I hope, fall
into a coherent pattern.
PART ONE
Outline of a System
I
The Holarchy
1
Beyond Reductionism -- New Perspectives in the Life Sciences
was the
title of a symposium which I had the pleasure and privilege to organize
in 1968, and which subsequently aroused much controversy.* One of the
participants, Professor Viktor Franld, enlivened the proceedings by some
choice examples of reductionism in psychiatry, quoted from current books
and periodicals. Thus, for instance:
may enter into an artist's work; yet it is absurd to proclaim that art is
'nothing but' goal-inhibited sexuality, because it begs the question of
what makes Goethe's art a work of genius, quite unlike other premature
ejaculators'. The reductionist attempt to explain artistic creation by the
action of sex-hormones is futile, because that action, though biologically
vital, does not give us an inkling of the aesthetic criteria which apply
to a work of art. Those criteria pertain to the level of conscious mental
processes, which cannot be reduced to the level of biological processes
without losing their specifically mental attributes in the course of the
operation. Reductionist psychiatry is a Procrustean host to the weary
traveller.
It is easy to make fun of those latter-day orthodox Freudians who have
reduced the master's teaching to a caricature. In other fields, however,
the reductionist fallacy is more discreetly implied, less obvious and
therefore more insidious. Pavlov's dogs, Skinner's rats, Lorenz's geese,
each served for a while as fashionable paradigms of the human condition.
Desmond Morris's bestselling book
The Naked Ape
opened with the statement
that man is a hairless ape 'self-named homo sapiens . . . I am a zoologist
and the naked ape is an animal. He is, therefore, fair game for my pen.'
To what extremes this zoomorphic approach may lead is illustrated by a
further quotation from Morris:
be taken in all seriousness) we are faced with two impressive strongholds
of reductionist orthodoxy. One is the neo-Darwinian (or 'Synthetic')
theory which holds that evolution is the outcome of 'nothing but' chance
mutations retained by natural selection -- a doctrine recently exposed
to growing criticism* which nevertheless is still taught as gospel
truth. The other is the behaviourist psychology of the Watson-Skinner
school which holds that all human behaviour can be 'explained, predicted
and controlled' by methods exemplified in the conditioning of rats
and pigeons. 'Values and meanings are nothing but defence mechanisms
and reaction formations' is another of Frankl's telling quotes from a
behaviourist textbook.
the interplay of blind forces, the reductionist attitude has cast its
shadow beyond the confines of science, affecting our whole cultural and
even political climate. Its philosophy may be epitomized by a last quote
from a recent college textbook, in which man is defined as 'nothing but
a complex biochemical mechanism, powered by a combustion system which
energises computers with prodigious storage facilities for retaining
encoded information'. [3]
Now the reductionist fallacy lies not in comparing man to a 'mechanism
powered by a combustion system' but in declaring that he is 'nothing
but' such a mechanism and that his activities consist of 'nothing but'
a chain of conditioned responses which are also found in rats. For it
is of course perfectly legitimate, and in fact indispensable, for the
scientist to try to analyse complex phenomena into their constituent
elements -- provided he remains conscious of the fact that in the course
of the analyses something essential is always lost, because the whole
is more than the sum of its parts, and its attributes as a whole are
more complex than the attributes of its parts. Thus the analysis of
complex phenomena elucidates only a certain segment or aspect of the
picture and does not entitle us to say that it is 'nothing but' this or
that. Yet such 'nothing-but-ism' as it has been called, is still the --
explicit or implied -- world-view of reductionist orthodoxy. If it were
to be taken literally, man could be ultimately defined as consisting of
nothing but 90 per cent water and 10 per cent minerals -- a statement
which is no doubt true, but not very helpful.
In his
Unpopular Essays
, Bertrand Russell has a telling anecdote:
F.W.H. Myers, whom spiritualism had converted to belief in a futureThe last item on my list of factors which could account for the pathology
life, questioned a woman who had lately lost her daughter as to what
she supposed had become of her soul. The mother replied: 'Oh well,
I suppose she is enjoying eternal bliss, but I wish you wouldn't
talk about such unpleasant subjects . . .' [10]
of our species is the discovery of death, or rather its discovery by the
intellect and its rejection by instinct and emotion. It is yet another
manifestation of man's split mind, perpetuating the divided house of
faith and reason. Faith is the older and more powerful partner, and
when conflict arises, the reasoning half of the mind is compelled to
provide elaborate rationalizations to allay the senior partner's terror
of the void. Yet not only the naive concept of 'eternal bliss' (or eternal
torment for the wicked) but also the more sophisticated parapsychological
theories of survival present problems which are apparently beyond the
reasoning faculties of our species. There may be millions of other
cultures on planets that are millions of years older than ours, to whom
death no longer is a problem; but the fact remains that, to use computer
jargon, we are not 'programmed' for the task. Confronted with a task
for which it is not programmed, a computer is either reduced to silence,
or it goes haywire. The latter seems to have happened, with distressing
repetitiveness, in the most varied cultures. Faced with the intractable
paradox of consciousness emerging from the pre-natal void and drowning
in the post-mortem darkness, their minds went haywire and populated the
air with the ghosts of the departed, gods, angels and devils, until the
atmosphere became saturated with invisible presences which at best were
capricious and unpredictable, but mostly malevolent and vengeful. They
had to be worshipped, cajoled and placated by elaborately cruel rituals,
including human sacrifice, Holy Wars and the burning of heretics.
For nearly two thousand years, millions of otherwise intelligent people
were convinced that the vast majority of mankind who did not share their
particular creed or did not perform their rites were consumed by flames
throughout eternity by order of a loving god. Similar nightmarish fantasies
were collectively shared by other cultures, testifying to the ubiquity of
the paranoid streak in the race.
There is, once again, another side to the picture. The refusal to believe
in the finality of death made the pyramids rise from the sand; it provided
a set of ethical values, and the main inspiration for artistic creation.
If the word 'death' were absent from our vocabulary, the great works of
literature would have remained unwritten. The creativity and pathology of
man are two faces of the same medal, coined in the same evolutionary mint.
8
To sum up, the disastrous history of our species indicates the futility of
all attempts at a diagnosis which do not take into account the possibility
that homo sapiens is a victim of one of evolution's countless mistakes.
The example of the arthropods and marsupials, among others, shows that
such mistakes do occur and can adversely affect the evolution of the brain.
I have listed some conspicuous symptoms of the mental disorder which appears
to be endemic in our species: (a) the ubiquitous rites of human sacrifice
in the prehistoric dawn; (b) the persistent pursuit of intra-specific
warfare which, while earlier on it could only cause limited damage,
now puts the whole planet in jeopardy; (c) the paranoid split between
rational thinking and irrational, affect-based beliefs; (d) the contrast
between mankind's genius in conquering Nature and its ineptitude in
managing its own affairs -- symbolized by the new frontier on the moon
and the minefields along the borders of Europe.
It is important to underline once more that these pathological phenomena
are specifically and uniquely human, and not found in any other species.
Thus it seems only logical that our search for explanations should also
concentrate primarily on those attributes of homo sapiens which are
exclusively human and not shared by the rest of the animal kingdom. But
however obvious this conclusion may seem, it runs counter to the
prevailing reductionist trend. 'Reductionism' is the philosophical belief
that all human activities can be 'reduced' to -- i.e., explained by --
the behavioural responses of lower animals -- Pavlov's dogs, Skinner's
rats and pigeons, Lorenz's greylag geese, Morris's hairless apes; and
that these responses in turn can be reduced to the physical laws which
govern inanimate matter. No doubt Pavlov or Lorenz provided us with new
insights into human nature -- but only into those rather elementary,
non-specific aspects of human nature which we share with dogs, rats
or geese, while the specifically and exclusively human aspects which
define the uniqueness of our species are left out of the picture. And
since these unique characteristics are manifested both in the creativity
and pathology of man, scientists of the reductionist persuasion cannot
qualify as competent diagnosticians any more than they qualify as art
critics. That is why the scientific establishment has so pitifully
failed to define the predicament of man. If he is really an automaton,
there is no point in putting a stethoscope to his chest.
Once more, then: if the symptoms of our pathology are species-specific,
i.e., exclusively human, then the explanations for them must be sought
on the same exclusive level. This conclusion is not inspired by hubris,
but by the evidence provided by the historical record. The diagnostic
approaches that I have briefly outlined, were: (a) the explosive growth
of the human neocortex and its insufficient control of the old brain; (b)
the protracted helplessness of the newborn and its consequent uncritical
submissiveness to authority; (c) the twofold curse of language as a
rabble-rouser and builder of ethnic barriers; (d) lastly, the discovery
of, and the mind-splitting fear of death. Each of these factors will be
discussed in more detail later on.
To neutralize these pathogenic tendencies does not seem an impossible task.
Medicine has found remedies for certain types of schizophrenic and
manic-depressive psychoses; it is no longer utopian to believe that
it will discover a combination of benevolent enzymes which provide
the neocortex with a veto against the follies of the archaic brain,
correct evolution's glaring mistake, reconcile emotion with reason, and
catalyse the breakthrough from maniac to man. Still other avenues are
waiting to be explored and may lead to salvation in the nick of time,
provided that there is a sense of urgency, derived from the message of
the new calendar -- and a correct diagnosis of the condition of man,
based on a new approach to the sciences of life.
The chapters that follow are concerned with some aspects of this new
approach which in recent years have begun to emerge from the sterile
deserts of reductionist philosophy. Thus we shall now leave the pathology
of man, and turn from disorder to a fresh look at biological order and
mental creativity. Some of the questions raised in the previous pages
will be taken up again as we go along -- and eventually, I hope, fall
into a coherent pattern.
PART ONE
Outline of a System
I
The Holarchy
1
Beyond Reductionism -- New Perspectives in the Life Sciences
was the
title of a symposium which I had the pleasure and privilege to organize
in 1968, and which subsequently aroused much controversy.* One of the
participants, Professor Viktor Franld, enlivened the proceedings by some
choice examples of reductionism in psychiatry, quoted from current books
and periodicals. Thus, for instance:
Many an artist has left a psychiatrist's office enraged byNow it is quite possible that some sexual (or even scatological) motivation
interpretations which suggest that he paints to overcome a strict
bowel training by free smearing.
We are led to believe that Goethe's work is but the result of
pre-genital fixations. Goethe's struggle does not really aim for
an ideal, for beauty, for values, but for the overcoming of an
embarrassing problem of premature ejaculation. . . . [1]
* It is usually referred to as the 'Alpbach Symposium' after the
Alpine resort where it was held. The participants were:
Ludwig von Bertalanffy (Faculty Professor, State University of
New York at Buffalo), Jerome S. Bruner (Director, Center for
Cognitive Studies, Harvard University), Blanche Bruner (Center
for Cognitive Studies, Harvard University), Viktor E. Frankl
(Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology, University of Vienna),
F. A. Hayek (Professor of Economics, University of Freiberg,
Germany,), Holger Hyden (Professor and Head of the Institute of
Neurobiology and Histology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden),
Bärbel Inhelder (Professor of Developmental Psychology,
University of Geneva), Seymour S. Kety (Professor of Psychiatry,
Harvard University), Arthur Koestler (Writer, London), Paul
D. MacLean (Head of the Laboratory of Brain Evolution and
Behaviour, NIMH, Bethesda, Maryland), David McNeill (Professor
of Psychology, University of Chicago), Jean Piaget (Professor of
Experimental Psychology, University of Geneva) J. R. Smythies
(Reader in Psychiatry, University of Edinburgh), W. H. Thorpe
(Director, Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour, Department of
Zoology, University of Cambridge), C. H. Waddington (Profrssor and
Chairman, Department of Genetics, University of Edinburgh), Paul
A. Weiss (Emeritus Member and Professor, Rockefeller University,
New York).
may enter into an artist's work; yet it is absurd to proclaim that art is
'nothing but' goal-inhibited sexuality, because it begs the question of
what makes Goethe's art a work of genius, quite unlike other premature
ejaculators'. The reductionist attempt to explain artistic creation by the
action of sex-hormones is futile, because that action, though biologically
vital, does not give us an inkling of the aesthetic criteria which apply
to a work of art. Those criteria pertain to the level of conscious mental
processes, which cannot be reduced to the level of biological processes
without losing their specifically mental attributes in the course of the
operation. Reductionist psychiatry is a Procrustean host to the weary
traveller.
It is easy to make fun of those latter-day orthodox Freudians who have
reduced the master's teaching to a caricature. In other fields, however,
the reductionist fallacy is more discreetly implied, less obvious and
therefore more insidious. Pavlov's dogs, Skinner's rats, Lorenz's geese,
each served for a while as fashionable paradigms of the human condition.
Desmond Morris's bestselling book
The Naked Ape
opened with the statement
that man is a hairless ape 'self-named homo sapiens . . . I am a zoologist
and the naked ape is an animal. He is, therefore, fair game for my pen.'
To what extremes this zoomorphic approach may lead is illustrated by a
further quotation from Morris:
The insides of houses or flats can be decorated and filled withOn a more serious level (though the passage quoted was obviously meant to
ornaments, bric-à-brac and personal belongings in
profusion. This is usually explained as being done to make the
place 'look nice'. In fact, it is the exact equivalent to another
territorial species depositing its personal scent on a landmark near
its den. When you put a name on a door, or hang a painting on a wall,
you are, in dog or wolf terms, for example, simply cocking your leg
on them and leaving your personal mark there. [2]
be taken in all seriousness) we are faced with two impressive strongholds
of reductionist orthodoxy. One is the neo-Darwinian (or 'Synthetic')
theory which holds that evolution is the outcome of 'nothing but' chance
mutations retained by natural selection -- a doctrine recently exposed
to growing criticism* which nevertheless is still taught as gospel
truth. The other is the behaviourist psychology of the Watson-Skinner
school which holds that all human behaviour can be 'explained, predicted
and controlled' by methods exemplified in the conditioning of rats
and pigeons. 'Values and meanings are nothing but defence mechanisms
and reaction formations' is another of Frankl's telling quotes from a
behaviourist textbook.
* See below, Part Three.By its persistent denial of a place for values, meaning and purpose in
the interplay of blind forces, the reductionist attitude has cast its
shadow beyond the confines of science, affecting our whole cultural and
even political climate. Its philosophy may be epitomized by a last quote
from a recent college textbook, in which man is defined as 'nothing but
a complex biochemical mechanism, powered by a combustion system which
energises computers with prodigious storage facilities for retaining
encoded information'. [3]
Now the reductionist fallacy lies not in comparing man to a 'mechanism
powered by a combustion system' but in declaring that he is 'nothing
but' such a mechanism and that his activities consist of 'nothing but'
a chain of conditioned responses which are also found in rats. For it
is of course perfectly legitimate, and in fact indispensable, for the
scientist to try to analyse complex phenomena into their constituent
elements -- provided he remains conscious of the fact that in the course
of the analyses something essential is always lost, because the whole
is more than the sum of its parts, and its attributes as a whole are
more complex than the attributes of its parts. Thus the analysis of
complex phenomena elucidates only a certain segment or aspect of the
picture and does not entitle us to say that it is 'nothing but' this or
that. Yet such 'nothing-but-ism' as it has been called, is still the --
explicit or implied -- world-view of reductionist orthodoxy. If it were
to be taken literally, man could be ultimately defined as consisting of
nothing but 90 per cent water and 10 per cent minerals -- a statement
which is no doubt true, but not very helpful.
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