Janus: a summing up

New Internationalist, Jan, 1996

`To put it crudely: evolution has left a few screws loose between the neocortex and the hypothalamus.' Thus Arthur Koestler defines his hypothesis of `schizophysiology' in Janus. Written towards the end of his life this book serves as a summation of his earlier scientific writings -- among them The Act of Creation, The Case of the Midwife Toad and The Ghost in the Machine. `Schizophysiology' is a condition which Koestler sees as singularly human. It seeks to explain `the chronic, quasi-schizophrenic split between reason and emotion' and does so by an evolutionary argument which runs as follows.

On top of inherited `reptilian' and `lower mammalian' neurological structures, a thin cerebral cortex has developed whose complexity and capacity is unique to humans. The cortex regulates those faculties -- language, reason, thought -- considered distinctively human. The reptilian and mammalian `mush' below the cortex control those parts of consciousness to do with the instincts and the affections. Koestler's argument is that most of the catastrophes of human history have resulted from the fact that these two controlling sectors of the brain have failed to work in concert with one another. Where one might expect reason to check aggression, it has more often than not fostered it. The thesis takes on urgency in a post-Hiroshima age in which the ultimate catastrophe has become technologically possible. But Koestler is no pessimist. His intention in writing Janus is to construct `An Alternative to Despair'. The divided brain hypothesis is a physiological one, he reminds us, `and any condition which can be expressed in physiological terms should ultimately be accessible to remedies'.

The remedies he most rigorously proposes are biochemical ones -- and in its whacky belief in a drug-based panacea the book belongs to the decade in which it was published. But Koestler is not at all impressed by the Aldous Huxley or Timothy Leary versions of this argument, which he sees as deplorably hedonistic. What he has in mind is something more mundane that would neither promote nor suppress reason or emotion, but reconcile them to one another. Not only is he optimistic that such a substance can be discovered or invented; he is also rather sanguine in failing to consider that a humanity as schizoid as he says it is might abuse it rather than respect it.

I should say immediately that prescribing drugs is only a small part of Koestler's job in Janus. There is a long, erudite, but compellingly readable central section in which he demolishes Darwinian evolution. This is especially important because the Darwinian theory of random mutation plus natural selection denies the role of goal-directed activity in species development. If a change in the physiology of the human brain will occur thanks only to chance and a favourable environment, we might as well stop striving now. By stressing the once-unfashionable case that evolution occurs where it answers a need of a species, Koestler again gives significance to human choice and purposive activity.

The book's title derives from the name of the Greek god who is usually depicted as having two faces, one looking to the past, the other to the future. Koestler's preoccupation with schizo-physiology involves him in looking to the past in terms of human, and natural, history. But it also leads him to offer sketch lines for a human future which he assumes will take place. Typically, and daringly, he makes thrilling jumps from the discoveries of quantum physics in the first half of this century to meditations on extra-terrestrial life and parapsychology. Although the seemingly miraculous evolution of the human cerebrum is not explained by Darwinian theory -- which demands progress in small steps, and denies that it happens in giant leaps -- Koestler reminds us that it would be a mistake to assume that the brain has reached anything like its full capacity. Once we have `learned to use our brains' better we will take seriously psychic phenomena which are currently excluded from proper consideration by the `strait-jacket which nineteenth-century materialism, combined with reductionism and the rationalist illusion, imposed on our philosophical outlook'.

I am no fan of projected biochemical utopias, I am rather sceptical of parapsychology, and I believe the search for extra-terrestrial life is rather like looking for a needle in a haystack. Nonetheless, I don't find myself casting Janus aside the way I would many other books on these issues. For one thing, Koestler's convictions are strongly underwritten by the intelligence and wide-ranging knowledge with which he explains them. For another, his sense that much of the world is still to be discovered, and that we have still to discover a lot more about ourselves, is a rich resource in an age of seemingly terminal social apathy. Finally, as we settle habitually into the orthodoxies which we allow to regulate our daily lives, we need confident eccentrics to unsettle us and help us to look, like Janus, the other way too. Koestler was as confident and as eccentric as they come.