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PARTISAN REVIEW
Freud's Vienna, he had been the prince of his mother's ambitions and
the foil for her touchiness-both roles carrying a vaguely erotic charge.
He had been little shielded by his father, whose distant, cheerful, wish–
ful thinking-and botched commercial adventures-had come
to
seem
inherently irresponsible. The child, in this retrospective account, comes
into manhood with richly mixed feelings: a terror of loneliness and the
fear of suffocation, leaking rages and exaggerated empathy for the
underdog, a yearning for "absolute" commitments and an impulse to
break vessels. He does not trust himself.
The young man compensates, Koestler writes, with alternating fan–
tasies of extreme moral responsibility and suicide. But there is one,
unexpected source of balance. He takes as his Bible a popular philo–
sophical treatise of the day,
The Riddle of the Universe,
by Ernst Hein–
rich Haeckel, the German biologist and philosopher. This confirmed
him in the opinion that scientific progress was-given the careful appli–
cation of scientific method-cumulative, gradual, and inevitable. (For
Haeckel, the world was unfolding inexorably toward a new order;
Haeckel writes that freedom of the will was "a pure dogma, based on
an illusion, and having no real existence.")
Ostensibly, the young man shares the philosophical implications of
scientific practice, its resistance to orthodoxy, its commitment to doubt.
Even more, however, he likes the cultural prejudices of scientists, their
air of impartiality, their pride in the logic of discovery and mastery. He
also likes the serenity of science's vantage point, where nature is all, and
people "shrink to insignificance." He consoles himself, ironically, with
both parts of a contradiction: science says that everything is matter, and
so a secure order is possible; but this means that
we
are matter, so a
secure order is, at least from a moral point of view, accidental. We are
matter, can we matter? The tragic and the trivial coexist uncomfortably.
The self is fugitive, a drop in an ocean of causes only the self can con–
template.
But young men, Koestler continues the case summary, can preempt
idiot drives with philosophical self-effacement for only so long.
Inevitably, triumphal longings assert themselves-in this young man's
case, in big-shot ideas of national power. Now an engineering student,
he becomes a Zionist, a follower of Vladamir Jabotinsky, the most
romantic and nationalist Zionist of them all; and he plays out the drama
of self-determination, albeit from a safely abstract distance. He comes
into his own, throws off his parents' conventions and even materialist
neutrality. For a while he revels in acts of spontaneous will: dueling,
womanizing, speechmaking, marching, spiting anti-Semites left and
