Misery in Eden

THE ARISTOS by John Fowles. 246 pages. Little, Brown. $5.

In British Author John Fowles's brilliant first novel, The Collector, one of the most cunning evil characters of modern fiction utterly vanquishes the good. As if to make amends, Fowles has now written a philosophical work whose theme is the aristos, Greek for the excellent in life. Good novelists seldom make good philosophers, or vice versa; but Fowles is obviously at home in both fields.

Fowles's acknowledged mentor is the 6th century B.C. Greek thinker Heraclitus, whose extant work consists only of brief fragments declaring cryptically that the universe is in flux, that life is a ceaseless struggle of opposites: fire and water, earth and spirit, love and hate. Fowles shares Heraclitus' reverence for life, his clear-eyed contemplation of the tragic, his love of paradox; and he is even more eloquent.

"I live in hazard and infinity," Fowles writes. "The cosmos stretches around me, meadow on meadow of galaxies, reach on reach of dark space, steppes of stars, oceanic darkness and light. There is no god in it, no particular concern or particular mercy. Yet everywhere I see a living balance, a rippling tension, an enormous yet mysterious simplicity, an endless breathing of light. And I comprehend that being is understanding, that I must exist in hazard but that the whole is not in hazard. Seeing and knowing this is being conscious; accepting it is being human."

Designed to Want. Man is adrift on a raft in a boundless ocean, writes Fowles. "From his present dissatisfaction, he reasons that there was some catastrophic wreck in the past, before which he was happy; some golden age, some Garden of Eden. He also reasons that somewhere ahead lies a promised land. Meanwhile, he is miserably en passage." But if man were to find his Utopia, writes Fowles, he would be much more miserable. For man is made to struggle and yearn: "We are designed to want: with nothing to want, we are like windmills in a world without wind."

In fact, facing up to the finality of death is a liberation; it makes life itself more precious: "The idea that death is not absolute consoles the childish individual, but prevents society from being adult. If it were proved that there is an afterlife, life would be irretrievably spoilt. It would be pointless; and suicide, a virtue."

Like many another existentialist-type thinker, Fowles combines a cosmic pessimism with a reformer's drive to improve the world. Less interesting and less moving on such topics as cybernetics and birth control, he is nonetheless eminently sensible, and his strictures aimed against all dogmatic camps are shrewd: "A Christian says, 'If all were good, all would be happy.' A socialist says, 'If all were happy, all would be good.' A mystic says, 'If all were like me, happiness and goodness would not matter.' A humanist says, 'Happiness and goodness need more analysis.' An existentialist tries to commit himself to what is best of the best philosophy for the given situation."

Time for a Truce. Fowles concludes that it is possible that some of life's opposites can be reconciled. Man is unnecessarily passionate on the one hand and quarrelsome on the other. The one emotion supports the other; and the violence of human history is the sad consequence of this alternation. Fowles coolly urges a return to classical harmony, the "avoidance of wasted energy, of pointless battle, of unnecessary suffering. There is no inescapable need for man to be his own worst enemy. Many other things are queuing to have that role."

What Fowles means by "other things" are problems of overpopulation, poverty and ignorance. It is time, he writes, for man to come to terms with his tensions, and to get on with the practical business of making the world a better place to live in.

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