Arthur Koestler

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Arthur Koestler (September 5, 1905 - 1983) was a novelist, political activist, and social philosopher. He was the author of many popular books including Arrow in the Blue, (Volume I of his autobiography), The Yogi and the Commissar (another book about Communism), The Sleepwalkers, The Act of Creation, and The Thirteenth Tribe. His most famous work is Darkness at Noon, a novel about the evils of the Soviet state.

Contents

Life

Koestler was born in Budapest, Hungary, and studied science and psychology at the University of Vienna. After college he worked as a news correspondent. From 1926 to 1929 he lived in the British Mandate of Palestine. He joined the Communist Party in 1931, but left it after the Stalinist purges of 1938. While covering the Spanish Civil War, he was captured and held for several months by the Nationalists. After spending time in a French detention camp, he joined the French Foreign Legion. He then escaped to England and joined the British Army.

He then lived in London, where he made his living writing and lecturing. Koestler, an advocate of euthanasia, and suffering from Parkinson's disease, took his own life along with his wife in a joint suicide in England.

Koestler was fluent in Hungarian, German, and English, and knew some rusty Hebrew.

Always the connoisseur and lover, Koestler was married three times, excluding the short romantic fling he had with notable French thinker Simone de Beauvoir, probably explaining the mutual animosity between Koestler and Jean-Paul Sartre. A 1998 biography claimed that Koestler had beaten and raped several women, including film director Jill Craigie. After protests, a bust of Koestler was removed from display at the University of Edinburgh.

Work

Much of Koestler's work was completely out of step with mainstream views. He did not merely arrive at different answers to common questions. Instead, Koestler answered, or tried to answer, important questions that others were not even asking. Some considered this a sign of his true creative genius.

Koestler's book The Thirteenth Tribe advanced the controversial conclusion that European, or Ashkenazi Jews, are not descended from the Israelites of antiquity, but from a group of Khazars, a people in the Caucasus who converted to Judaism in the 8th century and were later forced to move westwards into current Russia, Ukraine and Poland. Koestler stated that part of his intent in writing the book was to defuse anti-Semitism by undermining the identification of European Jews with the Jews of the Bible, rendering anti-Semitic epithets such as "Christ killer" inapplicable. Ironically, Koestler's thesis that Ashkenazi Jews are not Semitic has become an important claim of many anti-Semitic groups. Some Palestinian advocates have adopted this thesis quite eagerly, since they believe identifying most Jews as non-Semitic would seriously undermine their historical claims to the land of Israel.

Koestler's own view of Israel was that it would never be destroyed, short of a second Holocaust. He supported the statehood of Israel, but opposed the idea of a diaspora Jewish culture. In an interview in the London Jewish Chronicle, about the time of Israel's statehood, Koestler asserted that all Jews should either migrate to Israel or else assimilate completely into their local cultures.

The result of this originality is an uneven set of ideas and conclusions. Some of his, such as his work on creativity, can be appreciated as brilliant. Some ideas challenge us to readjust our thinking in order to grasp their importance. Other ideas are little more than nonsense. But taken as a whole, they are well worth serious consideration.

The issue of mysticism, while implicit in his works, carried tremendous weight in his personal life. This was confirmed when he left a substantial part of his own estate to establish the Koestler Institute in the University of Edinburgh dedicated to the study of parapsychological phenomena. Such personal belief in the unexplained might have arisen from his political apostasy with regard to his leftist politics, draining himself of the certainty and, perhaps, bravado he once had when he was still a member of the Communist Party.

Books by Arthur Koestler

External links

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References

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