Vol. 16 No. 5 1949 - page 538

538
PARTISAN REVIEW
a stronger sense of the mystery of the All, richer aesthetic life; in short,
an adoption of certain segments of the Eastern way of life. More of
the Yogi, less of the Commissar.
This is Koestler's quasi-religious message; and the unified theory
-which he promises to elaborate more fully in a second volume to be
published in about a year-merely serves to put the message on a firm
foundation. We may well ask, however, how firm the foundation is.
To begin with: has Koestler achieved a substantial degree of con–
vergence between the physiological and psychological Jines of explana–
tion in his theory of the various emotions? To me it seems that the
convergence is more verbal than real. In all essential respects, the phe–
nomenological descriptions of humor and discovery, and of tragedy
and despondency, remain independent of the physiological explanation.
For instance, what "bi-sociation" means phenomenologically is clear
and suggestive enough; but there is no reason why it should be con–
sidered either as somehow identical with or as causally determined by the
underlying physiological response. This is only natural, since we have at
present no way of translating "meanings" into neural phenomena; this
is a perennial philosophical problem which neither philosophers nor
scientists have even stated correctly, let alone solved. Koestler, it seems
to me, has not even come closer to posing the problem in the right way–
his basic stimulus-response concepts are too crude for that.
Koestler takes Freud to task for having asserted a dichotomy, a gap
between instinct and civilization. "The Freudian view," he says, ".... im–
plies a break between the biological and the social series. In the view
here presented the two are continuous, and biological and social evolu–
tion are manifestations on successive levels of the basic integrative ten–
dency" (p. 214).
It
may be a comforting thought that evolution, like
the French Republic, is one and indivisible, and it is quite true that
the societal can at no point simply negate the biological, but I do not
see how the "sameness" of the integrative tendency "on successive levels"
can
be
more than a word. What the Freudian view implies may be un–
palatable, but we cannot overlook the very massive evidence collected
by the Freudians concerning the tremendous shocks and pressures to
which the human child is subjected during the socializing process. Civil–
ization emerges from a series of ordeals which are superimposed upon
the old and biologically mastered ordeals of organic evolution.
This takes us to the heart of Koestler's theory: his grand conception
of ethics and the "mature" society. He assigns to ethics the function of
helping towards the emergence of the perfect, the mature society: a
super-organism which handles its own societal problems with the same
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