Volume 3, Number 9 · December 17, 1964
The Metaphysics of Arthur Koestler
By Henry David Aiken
The Act of Creation
by Arthur Koestler
Macmillan, 751 pp., $7.95
When this extraordinary book—part treatise and part biology and psychology copy book, part independent scientific speculation and part romantic Naturphilosophie—was published in England earlier this year, it caused something of a sensation. No one quite knew how to take it. Some reviewers (and it was reviewed profusely and often at great length) professed to think that, however improbably, The Act of Creation is itself a true act of scientific creation, conceivably the greatest and certainly the most ambitious work in the life sciences since Darwin's epochal Origin of Species. On the other side, perhaps misled by Koestler's reputation as a novelist (it is not without significance that Koestler has been mainly a political novelist for whom the work of imaginative literature may be at the same time a moral and political act), by his inappropriately lively and witty style, by displays of subjective reactions presumably irrelevant to questions of objective scientific understanding and truth, and by his bland refusal to be daunted by any intellectual problem, no matter how technical or complex, many were unable to take him seriously in the role of scientist In their view, Koestler does not fully realize what is involved in scientific inquiry, and his book, for all its learning, must be judged as the misplaced product of an incurably poetic imagination. Yet on both sides of the controversy, the critics seemed uncertain of their own reactions, and before they were through they had usually managed to hedge their bets by radical, if piecemeal, concessions to the opposing point of view.
Review, 3974 words
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