The sleepwalkers arthur koestler
May 24,
The Road to Great Discovery Is Itself a Thing of WonderBy CHARLES FRANKEL
THE SLEEPWALKERS A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe. By Arthur Koestler. |
ovelist, essayist and political man of action, Arthur Koestler emerges in this book as a historian of the sciences.
Writer arthur koestler sleepwalkers series A central theme of the book is the changing relationship between faith and reason. Very readable for anyone with an interest. Tycho de Brahe 5. Religion and science don't complement each other any more unless you're open-minded to find that it's not one or the other, of course, that each is, one way or another, right.He traces, with a comic writer's eye and a moralist's sensibility, the curious, disjointed steps by which modern astronomy forged its fundamental principles and changed man's view of his place in the universe. But if Mr. Koestler has a new subject, he continues to pursue an old theme, a theme that has been central in the moral experience of his generation and that has dominated his own many-sided career.
Mr. Koestler's "Darkness at Noon" was an exploration of the dilemmas, ambiguities and rationalized blindnesses that arise when men try to live by ideas they consciously adopt. His essays on politics, religion and esthetics have had a similar concern, and have drawn their vitality from his conviction that human thinking does not change in its fundamental character, that it has the same sources and purposes, no matter what domain it operates.
In "The Sleepwalkers" Mr. Koestler continues to wrestle with the old problem of his and ours.
Writer arthur koestler sleepwalkers books But Kepler felt he could do better, junked the solution, and spent several more years messing with the data until he derived his First and Second Laws. I completely see why everyone expects me to have read it or to flip out when I do. But mainly, that it was Kepler who was the greatest mind. I'm lengthening this review today by giving the table of contents.Although the book deals ostensibly with man's ideas about the heavens, its underlying theme is man's ideas about his own ideas. The problem it poses is the relation of logic to life, including the actual lives of thinking men; and the practical choice it raises has to do with the place we should give to "reason" and "science" in our civilization.
The "sleepwalkers" of Mr. Koestler's title are the great figures in the history on modern cosmology- Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton. They are "sleepwalkers," according to Mr. Koestler, as are, indeed, most of the creative minds in the history of science, because they never quite know what they were doing.
Arthur koestler 13th tribe: Koestler included an often ignored line of thought; how religion influenced early understanding of the universe. In due time, of course. Arthur Koestler books followers. In retrospect it seems like a fascinating subject.
Sleepwalkers somehow skirt disaster; they have an inner certainty that propels them although they cannot state what they seek or why they seek it. They move toward their goal by the most extraordinary and the most logically questionable methods; and when they have arrived where they have always wished to go, they frequently do not realize that they are there.
Mr. Koestler's favorite among the figures he discusses is the German astronomer, Johannes Kepler (), and a remark of Kepler's catches Mr. Koestler's basic theme: "The roads by which men arrive at their insights in celestial matters seem to me almost as worthy of wonder as these matters in themselves."
This is the main burden of the story Mr.
Koestler tells. It begins with an account of Greek philosophy, conventional in content but lively in style, in which Mr. Koestler drives home his point that there is a "common source of inspiration" behind religion and science, faith and reason.
Writer arthur koestler sleepwalkers He knows how to write and when reading you are always aware and so is he himself that maybe he will be stretching truth to make a point. Liedzeit Liedzeit. But, then, who can see the stars anymore? In other projects.After a transitional section on the Middle Ages, in which Mr. Koestler does not hide his contempt for the fearfulness, superstition and brutality of an age which condemned the scientific impulse, there follow portraits of the personalities and intellectual achievement of the four great pioneers who cut through to the modern view of the cosmos.
Mr. Koestler paints the astronomer Nicholas Copernicus as "the timid canon," indrawn, secretive, ambivalent, a sleepwalker almost too sleepy to be interesting. Many historians of science will disagree with this picture of Copernicus, but it is certainly plain that Mr. Koestler just does not like him. In contrast, Mr.
Koestler's portrait of Kepler is complex and sympathetic. He is the kind of man that Mr. Koestler takes to- at once mystic and mathematician, skeptic and visionary, a man who alternated, in an almost schizophrenic fashion, between bouts of carelessness and caution, obsessive speculation and precise methodical reasoning.
Arthur koestler books pdf In an epilogue Koestler takes on the problematics of contemporary microphysics and cosmology, seeing the incomprehensibility of both as indicative of a crisis comparable to that culminating during the th centuries prior to the synthesis effected by Newton. And that is the main thing one can learn by reading this book. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Walker Books.The Italian, Galileo (, in Mr. Koestler's hands, turns into and irritable and egotistical man, half scientist and half sophist. According to Mr. Koestler, the scandal of Galileo's trial by the Inquisition was a scandal that could have been avoided if Galileo had not been the brash and quarrelsome person he was; and if it had been avoided, Mr.
Koestler suggests, three centuries of conflict between "faith" and "reason" might have taken a different and softer form. Mr. Koestler's account of the English physicist and philosopher, Isaac Newton (), is brief, and is confined mainly to an account of Newton's intellectual achievement in detecting what his predecessors had done and in pulling their random insights together in a creative new synthesis.
Whatever the verdict of other historians may be on the portraits Mr. Koestler draws, Mr. Koestler's main purpose is surely achieved. He shows that there is a vast contrast between our ideals of rational thought and the actual creative processes by which the heroes of modern science came to their discoveries. It is greatly to his credit, furthermore, that he does not use this contrast to denigrate the achievements of the men whose story he tells, but uses it instead to combat the popular misconception that scientific thinking is purely a mechanical affair and has nothing imaginative about it.
Although he does not make the point nearly explicitly enough, it seems plain that he accepts the indispensable distinction that must be made between the psychological processes of scientific discovery and the logical criteria by which the validity of these discoveries must be judged.
Men do not come to their insights by immaculately logical processes. Their thinking moves by leaps in the dark, through fruitful errors and inchoate visions. But the truth or falsehood of the ideas to which men come by such processes can be determined only by neglecting their genesis and applying impersonal standards of logic and evidence.
Mr. Koestler, however, also argues that modern science has a "metaphysical bias" like any other view of the universe. It assigns reality only to the measurable aspect of things, and has made us take moral values less seriously. Mr. Koestler believes that the result is an "end-justifies-the-means ethics [that] may be a major factor in our undoing." Mr.
Koestler is surely right to believe that there is no more reason to idolize scientists than to idolize anyone else. Nevertheless, this complaint about modern science is puzzling.
In the first place, not all of modern science is in fact mathematical.
And even more to the point, the Middle Ages, whose science was neither mathematical nor materialistic, were not conspicuous, as Mr. Koestler himself makes very plain, for their moral virtue; nor were they strangers to an "end-justifies-the-means ethics."
Mr. Koestler complains that modern mathematical physics does not present us with a picture of the world that can be "comprehended in terms of human space and time, human reason and imagination." But the concepts that modern science uses are, after all, human concepts; so Mr.
Koestler's complaint can only mean that the concepts of modern science do not fit popular or familiar categories, and do not bear the imprint of our wishes and hopes. But science would not be at all the creative and imaginative process that Mr. Koestler describes if we insisted that it always remain easily accessible to our commonplace mental habits.
Nevertheless, Mr. Koestler has written an unusually lively and informative book. He has succeeded in bringing the astronomers back to earth. If there were more understanding of science as a human enterprise, there might be less of a tendency to either worship science as a savior or to damn it as an alien intruder on the human scene.
Mr. Frankel of the Columbia philosophy faculty is known for his book, "The Case for Modern Man."
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