Between Tears & Laughter

INSIGHT AND OUTLOOK (442 pp.)--Arthur Koestler--Macmillan ($5).

Budapest-born (1905) Arthur Koestler, one of the best political-novelists of the last decade (Darkness at Noon), is also a stubborn, highly independent thinker--a religious skeptic whose materialism is spiced with idealistic fervor, a radical in search of something to replace his lost faith in Communism. In The Yogi and the Commissar (TIME, June 4, 1945) Koestler tried to find a workable compromise between the pure, but passive life of the sage, and the earthy, but highly active existence of the political reformer. In his new book he stabs at a more ambitious project--"an inclusive theory of ethics, esthetics, and creative thinking."

Koestler has had the project in mind for 20 years. For the last five, he has been reading himself up to date, and his new book's fat bibliography ranges from Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (by Maud Bodkin) to The Hypothalamus and Central Levels of Autonomic Function (by the Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Diseases). Unfortunately, Insight and Outlook is likely to be gobbledygook to the average reader and without much meat even for the most dogged philosopher.

Tickle, Tickle. Koestler wants to show what forces cause human beings to think, to create and to destroy. As a "back door" into this problem, he begins by examining the forces that make men laugh. He shows, with the help of a number of geometric diagrams and a lot of peeking into the plumbing of "the sympathico-adrenal system," that laughter is a form of self-assertion. This section of the book also notes some pedagogical experiments in what Koestler gravely calls "the functioning of the original squirm reflex"--a phenomenon further documented in his book by laboratory experiments in what happens when scientists tickle babies.

Koestler then goes on to examine the nature of weeping. Here, with the aid of more diagrams and excursions into "neurohormonal excitation," he succeeds in proving that weeping expresses the frustration of self-transcendence--a human tendency to be "aware of the self as part of a higher functional whole."

The bulk of the book is devoted to the twin impulses: self-assertion and self-transcendence. Koestler believes that the western world owes its troubles to the "hypertrophy of the self-asserting drives with a corresponding decline of the self-transcending impulses." There were times, he holds, when man was more capable of being both self-assertive and self-transcending (in the Greek and Renaissance civilizations) and by being a bit of both he managed to be a more balanced, stable creature. But he is sure that today man is either overactive or over-passive--or a dissatisfied neurotic who plunges first one way, then the other.

Saith the Preacher. What is to be done about this? Man, says Koestler, must make a tremendous effort to put his two vital impulses together in such a way that they will restore him to balance. He must be self-assertive, i.e., he must give full rein to his "exploratory" nature, and by thinking for himself, break through the "horny crust" of habit and convention. If he performs this self-assertion courageously, he will escape from the vanities of the "Trivial Plane" into the self-transcending verities and "cosmic perspective" of the "Tragic Plane." On the other hand, nothing, in these bad days, can save him if he obstinately clings to an uninspired, everyday way of life; for, as Melville's preacher has expressed it in Moby Dick:

"Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters, when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness!"

As a plea for moral courage, Insight and Outlook might have made a simple and admirable essay by a man who has shown plenty of courage in his day. What the reader will find irritating and incomprehensible is that Author Koestler has let his self-assertive impulse so surround his simple theme with scientific stage props and mechanistic explanations that his 1% of inspiration demands 99% of his readers' perspiration.

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