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APPROACHING INFINITY: DIGNITY IN ARTHUR KOESTLER’S DARKNESS AT NOON

I) !"% (##,/$-"3(# )$4,# Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler tells of Rubashov, a founding father of an unnamed Party in an unnamed

state.1 Jailed by the current Party leader, “Number One,” and pressed to recant his deviationist views, Rubashov resists. At 5rst, he resolves to go to his death to preserve his integrity. Later, Rubashov recognizes that to hold to his own truth when it endangers the goals of political reform is politically irresponsible. He decides to recant.

The aristocratic soldier in the neighboring cell is appalled by Rubashov’s self-betrayal. “Honour,” the aristocrat insists, “is to live and die for one’s belief.” Rubashov disagrees with the aristocratic idea of honor and responds that honour is “to be useful without vanity,” which provokes his neighbor to erupt: “honour is decency—not usefulness.” Rubashov answers: “We have replaced decency by reason” (Koestler, pp. 177–78).

Today, we rationalist readers of Darkness at Noon are left with the ques-tion of the competing demands of usefulness and decency, of reason and dignity. Reason makes its arguments in familiar terms: to prevent a genocide, we will bomb the aggressors; in the name of rationalized health care, some will not get the care they need; for reasons of state, some will be tortured. In politics, as Max Weber teaches, rational ends demand a slow, powerful boring through of hard boards (Weber, p. 93).2 Thus reason—and Koestler unfolds reason as calculating rationality in its most Machiavellian garb—requires the willingness to employ sober and rational means to achieve desired ends. In common parlance, the end justi5es the means. Against the nostalgia for a politics of decency

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and dignity, reason counsels that to make an omelet, you need to break a few eggs.

But what lies behind the opposing claim to decency? What is it that pulls us to resist the claim of reason when reason counsels war, torture, or even bureaucratic neutrality? What, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, is to be said for the eggs? (Arendt, pp. 270–84).3

We may invoke conscience, duty, and decency. We might invoke civil and human rights. We condemn realpolitik and af5rm a Judeo-Christian world order. In short, we invoke the dignity of man and af5rm one’s humanity as an inalienable core that cannot be breached. The limitations of such invocations are by now clear. At a time of recurrent genocides, democratically sanctioned torture, and suicide bombings of civilians, the stirring claims of the dignity of mankind ring hollow. Yet the collapse of the Western tradition of dignity does not necessitate the loss of dignity itself. The failure to secure dignity on religious or rationalist grounds need not send us 6eeing, our eyes covered in horror and our heads between our legs. What is needed is a confrontation with our situation, one that seeks to comprehend both the impulse to af5rm an inviolable core to humanity and our failure to do so.

The ambition of Darkness at Noon lies in its bald effort to af5rm the truth of human decency even as it recognizes that man’s humanity is a bald-faced 5ction. When Rubashov teeters on the precipice between reason and decency, his “eye” tooth aches. He rubs his eyeglasses. He steps only on whole squares in the 6oor, avoiding the cracks. Tooth, glass, and wholeness refer to the problem of the singular “I,” an entity so mysterious that Rubashov follows Nietzsche in naming it the “gram-matical 5ction.” What is the “I,” the conscience, the self? How is it that the 5ctional “I” can and must have such an essential role in modern politics? Where, if anywhere, lies the relevance of the “I” for politics?

Darkness at Noon is acclaimed as one of the most important books of the twentieth century—it is number eight on the Modern Library’s list of the Hundred Best Novels of the twentieth century. Yet, given its enormous impact, its philosophical ruminations, and its political theme, the novel has garnered surprisingly little academic consideration. It is worth asking, therefore, why Darkness at Noon has not been taken seri-ously by the academic community.

One answer is that Koestler’s later work—his curmudgeonly con-servatism, apparent misogyny, and forays into pharmaceutical-based utopias—discredited him as a serious intellectual. Koestler’s novel, it

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seems, suffers for the perceived exoticism of his later work, much of which developed and reaf5rmed the importance of the paranormal in politics. Another answer is that the novel suffered from its own success. So much public attention focused on the question of whether Bukharin or Trotsky was the model for Rubashov, and whether Darkness at Noon was an accurate re6ection of the Soviet show trials, that the more ambitious and theoretical questions Koestler raises were overlooked or assumed to be of secondary importance. Although the Soviet Union, the Communist Party, and Bukharin are scrupulously absent from Koestler’s 5ction, Dark-ness at Noon remains, as George Orwell writes, an indisputably political book that cannot be read as “simply a story dealing with the adventures of an imaginary individual” (Orwell, p. 240).4 Koestler’s novel is still understood as “the 5rst important book denouncing the Stalinist reign of terror” (Poulain, p. 172).5 As David Cesarani has written: “Darkness at Noon is one of those books that has ceased to be a work of literature and has instead become a monument” (Cesarani, p. 171).6 Whether because of its monumental status or for its author’s quixotic excesses, Darkness at Noon has, sixty years after its publication, not garnered the critical engagement it deserves.

Beyond its undeniable historical and political impact, Darkness at Noon offers a profound and singular re6ection on the importance of dignity. I turn to Koestler’s book in this essay to explore his conception of human dignity as a necessary counter to the claims of reason in poli-tics. In thinking the dangers of reason through to their rarely imagined ends, Koestler develops an all-too-rare account of decency and dignity as counter measures to reason’s reign. He does so, I argue, by developing the importance of the in5nite in politics. Political action, he suggests, must be informed by a non-rational and non-religious appeal to the in5nite that is the one true guarantee of a human politics.

I

The intellectual heart of Darkness at Noon beats in the culminating scene of the novel’s middle section, “The Second Hearing.” Rubashov is conversing with his old comrade turned interrogator Ivanov, who seeks to convince Rubashov to admit to counterrevolutionary activities in which he did not engage. Ivanov is convinced that neither torture nor threats will result in Rubashov’s confession. While Ivanov does successfully torture other prisoners—notably Harelip who under tor-ture makes the accusation that Rubashov inspired him to assassinate

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Number One—he is aware that Rubashov is one of those “best men” against whom torture is pointless (p. 258). Forged in the cauldron of dialectical argumentation and sacri5ce for ideals, Rubashov is one of the few for whom logical commitment can trump even the most power-ful emotional desires. To turn Rubashov through pain is futile; instead, Ivanov connives to convince him of the logical rationality of confessing to crimes he did not commit.

“Why,” Koestler asks in a later essay explaining the question respon-sible for the genesis of his novel, “had the Old Bolsheviks, heroes and leaders of the revolution, who had so often braved death that they called themselves ‘dead men on furlough’, confessed to these absurd and hair-raising lies?” (Invisible Writing, p. 480).7 The best of the Soviet intellectuals who participated in the show trials must have done so, he suggests, because they came to see the rational necessity of confessing. In other words, the very rationalist arguments that girded their revolution-ary willingness to sacri5ce individuals to the cause of freedom required of them now to sacri5ce not only their lives, but also their dignity. The root cause of the communist sickness, Koestler writes, is its fanatical commitment to reason.

If Rubashov is Koestler’s embodiment of the evils of rationality, Ivanov is the serpent who tempts Rubashov with the glory of reason. “‘In the old days, temptation was of carnal nature. Now it takes the form of pure reason’” (p. 152). Reason tempts man to dare utopian dreams; it justi5es war to end all wars and the in6iction of suffering to abolish suffering. By virtue of its ambition, reason stands above the divine temptations of conscience—the washing of one’s own hands in the face of violence—that tempt one to bourgeois individualism and are, Ivanov insists, “more dangerous for mankind than those [temptations] of Satan” (p. 156). Politics, Ivanov admits, “is not an occupation for people with weak nerves” (p. 163). And yet, he holds politics out as a great temptation, the beckoning of great deeds: “there was once a time,” he challenges Rubashov, “when it 5lled you with enthusiasm. What has so changed you that you are now as pernickety as an old maid?” (p. 163).

Ivanov seeks to tempt Rubashov back to the daring of reason from the enervating “moral exaltation” Rubashov experiences after the execution of his friend and comrade Bogrov. As Bogrov’s lame body is pulled past Rubashov’s cell on the way to his end, Bogrov masses his energies to call out the name of his friend and colleague: “Rubashov.” For Rubashov, “the inhuman sound of the voice which had called out his name . . . smothered the thin voice of reason” (p. 146). Beset by nausea

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and wet perspiration, Rubashov feels that the “whimpering of Bogrov unbalanced the logical equation” (p. 145). Bogrov’s suffering in6ames Rubashov’s moral sense and sets his damaged eye tooth to throbbing. While Rubashov rationally knows that the “I” is a 5ction, he now for the 5rst time feels Bogrov’s decimated person not as an abstraction, but “as a physical reality in his own body” (p. 157). While he had con-demned others to death before, Rubashov had never before been such a personal witness to the death throes of a friend who is mentally and physically destroyed on the grounds of logical necessity. The encoun-ter with Bogrov’s whimpering awakens Rubashov to the injustice of a rationality that pursues ends by any means necessary.

To counter Rubashov’s moral awakening, Ivanov insists upon the rationality and necessity of Bogrov’s execution. Bogrov was killed because he held fast to the end in his belief in the importance of large tonnage submarines. A sailor on the Battleship Potemkin and original hero of the revolution, Bogrov maintained his idealistic belief in world revolution at a time when Stalin sought to retrench and consolidate power at home. If large submarines were useful for world revolution, small submarines furthered the goal of domestic security. Since the hero Bogrov carried great personal authority, his unwillingness to admit his “error” risked creating confusion amongst the people and required his liquidation. For Ivanov, the solution is clear and he asks Rubashov: “Would not you have done the same thing in our position?” And indeed, throughout his life Rubashov has sacri5ced good and dedicated people, even his lover Arlova, to the needs of the Party. Rubashov responds: “You did not hear [Bogrov] whimpering,” to which Ivanov replies, “But I have heard and seen similar things. What of it?” (p. 154). Playing the role of the devilish rationalist, Ivanov presses his claim that a rational politics must admit the need for violence and sacri5ce.

To Ivanov’s challenge, “Rubashov was silent.” His silence results at least in part from his inability to express the sense and signi5cance that Bogrov’s whimpering has upon him. What does that whimpering signify? Rubashov cannot say, and he does not try.

Darkness at Noon as a whole is largely an attempt to make sense of such whimpering and to discover its political meaning. Koestler confronts the impossible task of putting into words and formulating in concepts what is inescapably singular and private: the suffering of a soul. How does one react when confronted with personal suffering? What claim should the suffering individual have on the political actor? What, in other words, is the political importance of decency?

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II

For Ivanov, the importance of Bogrov’s whimpering is simple; it rep-resents the “vice of pity” (p. 155). It is against pity that Ivanov aims his sharpest strokes. Pity, Ivanov argues, is the cardinal sin of politics; it is deadly for revolutionaries. Pity diminishes the sine qua non of revolu-tionary action—the willingness to act on principle, the consequences be damned. Pity, therefore, is a more dangerous temptation than the rationalist temptations of Satan: “Most great revolutionaries fell before this temptation, from Spartacus to Danton and Dostoevsky; they are the classical form of betrayal of the cause” (p. 156). Struck by pity, the revolutionary is paralyzed, unable to act. The embrace of pity is tantamount to a defense of the status quo. Thus, from a revolutionary perspective, the greatest criminals in history are those like Gandhi, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky who abandon the progress of mankind for the salvation of their personal conscience. All politics traf5cs in violence and those who preach non-violence are, as Ivanov sees them, agents of retrenchment.

The pity that Rubashov feels for Bogrov is, insofar as it is personal and singular, what Hannah Arendt calls compassion—a quality she dis-tinguishes from pity.8 Like Koestler, Arendt also turns to Dostoevsky in her examination of pity and compassion, namely the Grand Inquisitor chapter of The Brothers Karamazov. Out of pity for the poor and suffering masses, the Grand Inquisitor justi5es giving them food in exchange for their obedience. As pitiable, the poor can easily be seen to be creatures of need rather than as digni5ed persons to be treated with decency and respect. Pity, by addressing the suffering mass, excludes a personal encounter with suffering; it is politically dangerous because it deperson-alizes sufferers and lumps them together as an aggregate (OR, p. 85).

Against the pity that allows the Grand Inquisitor to justify his own power over the masses, Arendt contrasts the compassion of Jesus, whom Dostoevsky renders as consumed with a passion for persons in their singularity. Dostoevsky’s Jesus remains silent in the face of questions from the Grand Inquisitor, as does Rubashov when asked to express his reasons for resisting Ivanov’s logical deductions. Rubashov, like Jesus, is struck by compassion that reveals the suffering that pity hides beneath its abstractions. And yet, as Arendt understands, Jesus also remains silent because he knows that in politics, the world of the Grand Inquisitor, compassion is irrelevant. Since compassion abolishes distances between persons that is the mark of the political sphere, since compassion is

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concerned with individuals rather than amalgamations, compassion cannot engage in grand political reforms. It is this “compassion” that Rubashov has so much dif5culty expressing to Ivanov, a result of the fact that suffering is inherently individual and thus resistant to expres-sion in political language.

When Ivanov accuses Rubashov of excessive pity, he con6ates pity with compassion. The widespread confusion between pity and compassion is particularly suggestive in Darkness at Noon because of the fact that the original German version of the manuscript has been lost. The English word “pity” is most likely a translation of the German word “Mitleid,” literally in English a “suffering with” another. The ambiguity of Mitleid in German allows for its translation as both pity and compassion, an ambiguity that the translation to “pity” does not re6ect. What Ivanov calls pity is actually Rubashov’s compassion for the singular suffering of his friend Bogrov.

Even if Rubashov feels compassion rather than pity for Bogrov, Ivanov is correct that both pity and compassion cannot persist in the world of politics. Both Rubashov and Ivanov agree that pity qua compassion is the great political danger because of its potential to immobilize political action. Politics is, of necessity, immoral. All progress requires sacri5ce. Thus, “To want to conduct history according to the maxims of the Sunday school means to leave everything as it is” (p. 156). If we were to take pity, compassion, and their “humanitarian-fog philosophy” literally, Ivanov continues, it would mean that “a battalion commander may not sacri5ce a patrolling party to save the regiment. That we may not sacri5ce fools like Bogrov, and must risk our coastal towns being shot to pieces in a couple of years . . .” (p. 159).

III

The contest between a hard-headed rationalism and a conscientious pity qua compassion is the fault line that rips through Darkness at Noon. The divide is, Koestler argues, unbridgeable. Politics can follow no law but the law that the ends justify the means. As Ivanov announces, “The principle that the end justi5es the means is and remains the only rule of political ethics” (p. 159). For Koestler, the law of politics is most pow-erfully expressed by Machiavelli, who writes, in lines Koestler quotes in the 5rst epigraph to the novel, “He who establishes a dictatorship and does not kill Brutus, or he who founds a republic and does not kill the sons of Brutus, will only reign a short time.” The problem with politics,

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however, is that in being faithful to its principles, man risks losing all that is dear to him. As Dostoevsky writes in a line quoted in Koestler’s second opening epigraph, “Man, man, one cannot live quite without pity.” Pity, understood in the sense of compassion, is at the molten core of a human being. Man’s very humanity—his singularity—is threatened by the rationalizations and relativities of reason.

The rationalist danger to man’s humanity is brought forth with unyielding logic in the third section of Darkness at Noon, “The Third Hearing.” Rubashov has already decided to participate in the show trials. He will confess his errors, and he will admit his counterrevolutionary ways. But Rubashov insists on certain distinctions that he clings to. He never advocated violence against the Party or against Number One. He will admit his “oppositional attitude,” but continues to deny the speci5c acts he is charged with. These distinctions are important to Rubashov because they are true. His opposition to the Party is real and admitting to it re6ects his sense of dignity as well as his profound devotion to the Party’s true ideals. And yet, his legitimate rational disagreements with the Party never, in his mind, turned him into a common criminal who would act to sabotage or take up arms against the Party.

The confession Rubashov offers, however, is not enough for the Party. Ivanov has himself been arrested and liquidated, and Rubashov’s inter-rogation is taken over by Gletkin, a younger party stalwart for whom devotion to the Party and its ultimate victory is his only metric of good and bad. Gletkin insists on using “harder” interrogation techniques including sleep deprivation and a blinding lamp. What Gletkin wants from Rubashov is not simply a confession of ideological deviancies. To prove his devotion to the Party Rubashov must make himself fully use-ful. This requires not simply a confession to oppositional tendencies, but total submission—Rubashov’s confession to the most speci5c and criminal acts. Rubashov must now turn his rationalist logic on himself and render one 5nal act of sacri5ce to the good of the Party. Under the vice-grip of reason—Koestler originally titled the novel The Vicious Circle—Rubashov’s logic devours all, even himself.

Gletkin expresses this demand for self-sacri5ce in a chillingly matter-of-fact speech. Near the end of Darkness at Noon, he explains:

Your faction, Citizen Rubashov, is beaten and destroyed. You wanted to split the Party, although you must have known that a split in the Party meant civil war. You know of the dissatisfaction amongst the peasantry, which has not yet learnt to understand the sense of sacri5ces imposed

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on it. In a war which may be only a few months away, such currents can lead to a catastrophe. Hence the imperious necessity for the Party to be united. It must be as if cast from one mould—5lled with blind discipline and absolute trust. You and your friends, Citizen Rubashov, have made a rent in the Party. If your repentance is real, then you must help us to heal this rent. I have told you, it is the last service the Party will ask of you. Your task is simple. You have set it yourself: to gild the Right, to blacken the Wrong. The policy of the opposition is wrong. Your task is therefore to make the opposition contemptible; to make the masses understand that opposition is a crime and that the leaders of the opposition are criminals. (p. 243)

For Gletkin, a representative of the boorish younger generation who came of age under the Party’s rule, the rule of reason is an unquestioned article of faith. Gletkin, Ivanov, and Rubashov all share a dedication to reason. But Rubashov and Ivanov are aware, to varying degrees, of reason’s tragic consequences in ways that Gletkin is not.

All of which raises the question of where Koestler stands amidst the opposing demands of reason and decency? The strength of Darkness at Noon is the sympathy with which Koestler develops the internal motiva-tions of his characters. Even Gletkin, the novel’s whipping boy, evinces a certain serenity in his faith in the Party’s rationality. Little serenity, however, is found in Koestler’s portrayal of Rubashov. Throughout the novel, Rubashov swings back and forth, determined at some points to “die in silence” and convinced, at other times, that such an act of moral conscientiousness is to choose political irresponsibility. That he 5nally chooses reason and testi5es does not decide the matter. For the 5nal chapter, “The Grammatical Fiction,” gives ample play to Rubashov’s own doubts and inconclusive re6ections on the fatal error harbored within the regime of reason.

IV

Before moving to a discussion of the grammatical 5ction, it is helpful to look more closely at Koestler’s presentation of the supposedly irrec-oncilable opposition between reason and pity. Reason and pity name, he suggests, two moralities. One, which Koestler labels the anti-vivisection morality, is “Christian and humane”; it “declares the individual to be sacrosanct.” The other, the vivisection morality, preaches the opposite. It “begins from the basic principle that a collective aim justi5es all means,

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and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacri5ced to the community—which may dis-pose of it as an experimentation rabbit or a sacri5cial lamb” (p. 160). For Ivanov, there is no combining of these two moralities. Rubashov agrees that “humanism and politics, respect for the individual and social progress, are incompatible” (p. 161). There is no “mixing ideologies.” The politician must choose, and he will, without fail, be “fatally driven” to the vivisectionist morality.

Koestler’s portrait of antagonistic moralities recalls the distinction between an ethic of responsibility (Verantwortungsethik) and an ethic of conviction (Gesinnungsethik) in Max Weber’s Politics as a Vocation. Like Koestler’s vivisection morality, Weber’s ethic of responsibility holds that while a responsible politician takes both ends and means into account, he must be willing to employ violence to 5ght for the good. Similarly, Weber’s ethic of conviction mirrors the desire for a clean conscience that informs Koestler’s anti-vivisection morality. For Weber, an ethics of conviction is best exempli5ed by religious actors: “A Christian does what is right and leaves the outcome to God” (PV, p. 83). With Thoreau, the adherent of the ethics of conviction says: let the world be damned so long as I am saved. Fiat Justitia, pereat mundus.

Weber, as does Koestler, begins by af5rming the necessary opposition between these two ethics. “It is not possible,” Weber writes, “to reconcile an ethics of conviction with an ethics of responsibility” (PV, p. 86). There is no mixing of the dueling ethics—and politics must, Weber insists, be free from an ethics of conviction. “This” separation, he writes, “is the crucial point. We need to be clear that all ethically oriented action can be guided by either of two fundamentally different, irredeemably incompatible maxims: it can be guided by an ‘ethics of conviction’ or an ‘ethics of responsibility’” (PV, p. 83).

Nevertheless, after twice reaf5rming the fundamental antagonism between the two ethics, Weber quali5es his distinction. In one of the most famous and elliptical passages of his essay, Weber suggests that politics demands not a separation of the two ethics, but their harmonic resolution: “In truth, politics is an activity of the head but by no means only of the head” (PV, p. 91). While politicians must act responsibly according to the rational dictates of the head, there is as well a need for heartfelt conviction. Weber remains skeptical of political appeals to the heart; most politicians who do so are sentimental and manipulative “windbags” (PV, p. 92). And yet, Weber writes: “I 5nd it immeasurably

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moving when a mature human being—whether young or old in actual years is immaterial—who feels the responsibility he bears for the conse-quences of his own actions with his entire soul and who acts in harmony with an ethics of responsibility reaches the point where he says, ‘Here I stand, I can do no other’” (PV, p. 92). When a responsible politician, aware of the consequences of his actions, decides to rationally take an unbending stand, then, Weber argues, he acts both as a politician and as a human being: Such an act “is authentically human and cannot fail to move us.” There is, in the action of a fully human politician, the recognition of the tragic nature of political action. The politician takes his ethical stand fully aware of the foreseeable and even the potentially unforeseeable consequences that may follow (Satkunanandan, p. 11).9 In this sense, then, “an ethics of conviction and an ethics of responsibility are not absolute antitheses but are mutually complementary, and only when taken together do they constitute the authentic human being who is capable of having a ‘vocation for politics’” (PV, p. 92).

If Weber’s essay might serve as a prism through which to read Darkness at Noon, then it would be overly hasty to see Rubashov’s capitulation as an endorsement of Ivanov’s assertion that the rationalist and pitiful ethics are irreconcilable. Rather, Rubashov might be understood better as a tragic character, one striving in futility to be capable of the humanity needed for his political vocation. Rubashov’s metaphysical speculations on the grammatical 5ction need not, therefore, express merely his uneasiness with the claims of reason. Instead, the grammatical 5ction is Koestler’s attempt to point towards his own understanding of a rec-onciliation between the opposing moralities of reason and pity.

V

If Darkness at Noon does point to a more human politics that transcends both rationality and pity, it is to be found in Rubashov’s re6ections on the grammatical 5ction. In the novel’s 5nal chapter, Rubashov has con-fessed at a public trial. He looks back on the trial and recalls the moment when he contemplated rising up like Danton in the French Parliament to speak the truth about the revolution’s horri5c misdeeds. He did not do so and thus he cast his lot with reason. For someone who has coolly sacri5ced many others—Richard, Little Lowey, and Arlova are three examples—to the reasonable needs of the Party, it is only just, Rubashov concludes, that he submits himself to the same inexorable logic.

Rubashov dedicates his 5nal hours to the problem that gnaws at

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him throughout the novel—the grammatical 5ction, “that silent part-ner, whose realm started just where logical thought ended” (p. 259). Speci5cally, Rubashov asks whether it is just to act politically to remove senseless suffering from the world when it is clear that the utopia is only possible “at the price of a temporary enormous increase in the sum total” of suffering in the world. He answers his own question: “Obviously, it was [just], if one spoke in the abstract of “mankind”; but, applied to “man” in the singular, to the cipher 2–4, the real human being of bone and 6esh and blood and skin, the principle led to absurdity” (p. 260). The grammatical 5ction works like a wrench in the machine of politics. By forcing politics to address the man not as an abstraction but as a human being, the grammatical 5ction exposes the 5ctional basis of political rationality.

What, however, is the effect of the grammatical 5ction in the machine of politics? To oppose the grammatical 5ction to reason might suggest that it is to be associated with pity and compassion. Rubashov’s men-tion of the real human being of bone and 6esh and blood and skin does suggest the sensible pain and suffering that are the pith of pity. And yet, Rubashov does not reduce the singular man to his physical nature. Animals have blood and bones, and Rubashov is clear that the grammatical 5ction is a speci5cally human property—the reference to “the cipher 2–4” is the spelling for “I” in the alphabet prisoners use to communicate between cells. By “man in the singular,” Rubashov points neither to a corporeal mass nor to an ethereal spirit, neither to a piti-able lump nor to a rational spirit.

In raising the question of the grammatical 5ction—and thus the self—Rubashov is asking “what is man aside from a suffering lump of bones and a thinking mind?” He is also seeking to shed light on the place of human decency in politics. If neither reason nor pity suf5ce to express the political ethic, what else is there? Rubashov is searching for something altogether different—what Koestler later describes as an escape from the “crass Cartesian dualism” that insists upon labeling all things as either matter or spirit (Ghost in the Machine, p. 204).10 The essence of man, Rubashov af5rms, may be impervious to logic, but it is neither a suffering body nor a logical mind. And yet, Rubashov and Koestler insist it can be approached.

The grammatical 5ction, the “I,” is neither “mystic nor mysterious.” The grammatical 5ction is a “silent partner,” but it “spoke sometimes, without being addressed and without any visible pretext”; it is “out of the reach of logical thought” and yet is “of a quite concrete character” (p.

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110). It is a 5ction that manifests itself in daydreams and toothaches, and yet it is a “thoroughly tangible” entity (p. 112). Illogical, metaphysical, yet tangible and concrete—what, then, is the grammatical 5ction?

It would be too much to expect a simple answer to such a loaded question. In pointing toward the grammatical 5ction, Koestler invokes the experience of the “oceanic state.”

And yet there were ways of approach [the grammatical 5ction]. Sometimes he would respond unexpectedly to a tune, or even the memory of a tune, or of the folded hands of the Pietà, or of certain scenes of his childhood. As if a tuning-fork had been struck, there would be answering vibrations, and once this had started a state would be produced which the mystics called “ecstasy” and saints “contemplation”; the greatest and soberest of modern psychologists had recognized this state as a fact and called it the “oceanic state.” And, indeed, one’s personality dissolved as a grain of salt in the sea; but at the same time the in5nite sea seemed to be contained in the grain of salt. (p. 260)

While there is much that could be said about this passage, I want to focus on the two 5nal images that Koestler offers, the oceanic state and the in5nite sea.

The oceanic state encompasses a paradoxical condition where the self is both dissolved and expanded. On the one hand, the “I” dissolves into the immensity of the whole. It thus loses its distinct selfhood. One might even think that such a dissolute self sacri5ces as well its dignity, its coherence, and thus its autonomy. On the other hand, however, the self at sea is also expanded. As Koestler writes of the oceanic feeling in another context, it is a feeling of integration that is the aim of all art and beauty. Art and beauty “are epitomized in what Freud called the oceanic feeling: that expansion of awareness which one experiences on occasion in an empty cathedral when eternity is looking through the window of time, and in which the self seems to dissolve like a grain of salt in a lot of water” (GM, p. 189). As an aesthetic feeling, the oceanic state is an experience of “self-transcending.” In art, “the self seems to dissolve in the ‘oceanic feeling’ of mystic contemplation or aesthetic entrancement.” Such an expansive dissolution does not diminish the self’s autonomy but rather grants the freedom that comes in the “peace that passeth all understanding” (GM, p. 218). In transcendending, the self is not lost; rather it is expanded and made one with the in5nite.

The in5nite is that into which the self expands amidst the oceanic

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state. “We cannot get away from in5nity,” Koestler writes. The in5nite “stares us in the face whether we look at atoms or stars, or at the becauses behind the becauses, stretching back through eternity” (GM, p. 220). The in5nite lifts man above the pain and suffering of the quotidian even as it punctures his utopian dreams of a rationally governed city upon a hill. The in5nite reminds us both that reason cannot encompass the entirety of the universe and also that man means more than his physical suffering. The in5nite—that which is glimpsed in the oceanic state—is that which Rubashov has wrongfully neglected: “‘Defendant Rubashov, what about the in5nite?’ He would not have been able to answer—and there, there lay the real source of his guilt. . . . Could there be greater?” (p. 262).

The political as well as the metaphysical importance of the oceanic state and the in5nite is rooted in Koestler’s personal response to his own political dilemma. As has been well documented, Koestler was a member of the German Communist Party from 1931 until 1938. Darkness at Noon was begun in 1938, the same year he quit the Party and shortly after Koestler returned from his imprisonment in Malaga and then in Seville, Spain. In Koestler’s life story, it is his imprisonment in Spain that is the key to his future intellectual development. It is also in the Spanish prison that Koestler 5rst came face to face with the in5nite.

In solitary con5nement in his Spanish prison cell, Koestler nightly heard the gunshots announcing the executions of Republican 5ghters and sympathizers. As a well-known anti-fascist and a correspondent for the leftist News Chronicle, Koestler was convinced that he too was soon to be executed. His position thus was similar to that of Rubashov’s in Darkness at Noon—Koestler himself was kept in cells 40 and 41 in Malaga, which Koestler’s biographer points out is condensed to 404, Rubashov’s cell number in the novel (Cesarani, p. 172). Alone in his cell, Koestler busied himself by etching mathematical formulas on the walls with a spring he extracted from his mattress. As he tells in his extraordinary memoir of his entanglements with the Communist Party, Invisible Writ-ing, Koestler was most elated by his reconstruction of Euclid’s proof that the number of prime numbers is in5nite (IW, p. 428).

The satisfaction he 5nds in Euclid’s proof is “aesthetic rather than intellectual.” It yields an “enchantment” because it “represented one of the rare cases where a meaningful and comprehensive statement about the in5nite is arrived at by the precise and 5nite means” (IW, p. 429). What enchanted Koestler is that the mathematical proof of

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in5nity offered a concrete knowledge of the unknowable in5nite. There is no better formulation to express what fascinates Koestler about the grammatical 5ction than its promise of offering meaningful and 5nite knowledge of the in5nite.

In this regard, it is essential to distinguish Koestler’s conception of the in5nite from religious invocations of God. Unlike many reformed Communists of his era, Koestler never turned to religion. Against both rational Communists and faithful believers, Koestler holds open a third way: “Those of my friends who have resisted the temptation and suc-ceeded in retaining their intellectual and emotional balance, are nearly all men with a continuous interest—writers or artists or scientists—which provided them with an independent purpose, a centre of gravity” (IW, p. 478). What saved Koestler and his friends from being “swallowed up” in the seductions of reason and religion was “a new faith, rooted in mud, slippery, elusive, yet tenacious” (IW, p. 20). His was not a faith in the heavens, but one rooted in mud—or rather, the ocean—and focused on the in5nite.

What is needed, Koestler af5rms, is that one never lose sight of the in5nite. The in5nite is rather what raises us beyond ourselves and inspires us to transcend ourselves and become part of something bigger than ourselves. The in5nite offers the “continuous interest” that calls upon one to lose and then to 5nd himself expanded in the absolute. The advantage of writers, artists, and scientists is that they, by profession and motivation, are consumed by a desire for the in5nite. Koestler’s favorite example of this consuming longing for the in5nite is Louis Pasteur, and he never tires of citing “one of my favorite quotations”:

I see everywhere in the world the inevitable expression of the concept of in5nity. . . . The idea of God is nothing more than one form of the idea of in5nity. So long as the mystery of the in5nite weighs on the human mind, so long will temples be raised to the cult of the in5nite, whether it be called Bramah, Allah, Jehovah, or Jesus. . . . The Greeks understood the mysterious power of the hidden side of things. They bequeathed to us one of the most beautiful words in our language—the word ‘enthusiasm’—en theos—a god within. The grandeur of human actions is measured by the inspiration from which they spring. Happy is he who bears a god within, and who obeys it. The ideals of art, of science, are lighted by re6ection from the in5nite. (Pasteur, cited in GM, p. 220)

For Koestler, as for Pasteur, the in5nite is not to be confused with reli-gious gods, in spite of their resonances. The in5nite is most securely

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the realm of scientists and artists, those whose daily life is focused on the entirety of the universe. For these creative thinkers, the act of creation—the title of one of Koestler’s major works11—gives the lie to all faiths, rational and religious. Creative thinking—thinking about the in5nite—offers an “independent purpose, a center of gravity.” It provides the ballast in a world “sailing without ethical ballast” (p. 265). And the grammatical 5ction, as one subjectively knowable manifestation of the in5nite, is an unknowable and yet approachable 5nite expression of the absolute. The political importance of the grammatical 5ction is that it injects the in5nite—and with it an absolute standard of decency—into the calculation of means and ends.

VI

That transcendence is an essential part of politics should not sur-prise us. One cannot, although many do, read Kant’s politics without an awareness of the centrality of the transcendental apperception to his political thinking. Hannah Arendt—perhaps the greatest Kantian political thinker of the twentieth century—spoke clearly on this mat-ter: “Without this transcendence into a potential earthly immortality, no politics, strictly speaking, no common world and no public realm, is possible” (Human Condition, p. 55).12 The problem of politics today, as Arendt rightly saw, was to allow for a publicly authoritative language of transcendence at a time after the death of God.

The loss of transcendence and the effort to reclaim it free from both religion and reason is the problem Koestler sees and struggles with in Darkness at Noon. What is needed in politics, Koestler suggests, are people who are familiar with the in5nite—people for whom the slide into political rationality and cost-bene5t rationalizations is simply not possible.

It is worth noting how similar Koestler’s call for political actors of dignity sounds to elements in the work of Arendt, Weber, and Emerson. Hannah Arendt, for example, lauds Karl Jaspers as an unparalleled instantiation of the political impact of human dignity. Although he remained in Germany and did not join the armed or peaceful resistance, Jaspers was politically relevant because he appeared in public with “a con5dence that needed no con5rmation, an assurance that in times in which everything could happen one thing could not happen” (Men in Dark Times, p. 76).13 While some might condemn him for staying in the country, Arendt argues that Jaspers’ digni5ed, silent resistance spoke

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volumes, and suggests that his digni5ed presence in the world was itself at the very heart of political action.

Jaspers, Arendt writes, is possessed of “humanitas,” by which she means “something that was the very height of humanness because it was valid without being objective” (MDT, p. 73). Humanitas is not objective. It is not rational, at least not in the sense of something that can be demonstrated or deduced. Nor is humanitas subjective, a property of an isolated individual. Instead, humanitas is a “personal element beyond the control of the subject”—that which de5nes a man as who he is and never leaves him (MDT, p. 73). The magni5cence of Jasper’s humanitas, Arendt writes, is that in the darkness of total domination, he stood 5rm as a beacon to the ultimate triumph of humanity over barbarity.

Arendt’s turn to the light of digni5ed men in dark times is a response to what she, borrowing from Martin Heidegger, calls the light of the public that obscures everything (MDT, p. ix). The black light of the public realm is, of course, the chatter and talk that drowns the reality of life in “incomprehensible triviality.” It is the vapid clichés that mar speech on television news channels and by the water cooler. For Arendt, as for Heidegger, “everything that is real or authentic is assaulted by the overwhelming power of “mere talk” that irresistibly arises out of the public realm” (MDT, p. ix).

And yet, Arendt rejects the Heideggerian withdrawal from the public world into a more authentic realm of solitude. Instead of world-weary withdrawal, Arendt writes with the conviction that “we have the right to expect some illumination” (MDT, p. ix). The darkness of the public spotlight is, she insists, not inevitable. On the contrary, it is possible and even necessary that darkness cede to light.

Light, however, will not come from theories or concepts. Amidst the enveloping darkness of the public sphere, Arendt holds out the hope of the “uncertain, 6ickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all cir-cumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth” (MDT, p. ix). The light that combats darkness comes not from the sun of reason but from the stars, from those men and women whose very lives stand as beacons to the real world.

When one looks at the men and women whom Arendt believes shine brightly in dark times, her list is dominated by thinkers, writers, and poets: Gotthold Lessing, Jaspers, Rosa Luxemburg, Walter Benjamin, Berthold Brecht. Like Koestler, Arendt turns to those whose daily activity

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allows them to stand apart from—and thus safely shielded from—the enervating light of public rationality and common conformity. What Arendt and Koestler both af5rm is the need for the in5nite. At a time when public speech and deeds subordinate decency to rationality, these thinkers remind us that political change begins with oneself—that 5rst we must learn to see the in5nite in ourselves.

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I am indebted to Jenny Lyn Bader and David Kettler, who read and generously commented on earlier drafts of this essay. I also bene!tted from the engagements of Tom Dumm, Tracy Strong, Jill Stauffer, and Shalini Satkunanandan, who participated on a panel I organized on Darkness at Noon at the American Political Science Association meeting in 2008. Denis Dutton also read and made helpful suggestions for the !nal revisions of this essay.

1. Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (New York: Scribner, 2006); unless otherwise noted, page citations in the text are to Darkness at Noon.

2. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in Max Weber: The Vocation Essays, ed. David Owen and Tracy B. Strong (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004); hereafter abbreviated PV. Weber is citing Luther in his lecture on the book of Genesis. He is referring to words attributed to Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms in 1521 and “explaining his refusal to recant his criticisms of the papacy.” See the introduction to Weber’s essays by David Owens and Tracy Strong.

3. Hannah Arendt, “The Eggs Speak Up,” in Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994); hereafter abbreviated EU.

4. George Orwell, “Arthur Koestler,” in George Orwell: As I Please, 1943–1945, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, vol. 3 (Boston: David R. Godine, 2000).

5. Martine Poulain, “A Cold War Best-Seller: The Reaction to Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon in France from 1945 to 1950,” Libraries & Culture, vol. 36 (2001).

6. David Cesarani, Arthur Koestler—The Homeless Mind (New York: Free Press, 1998).

7. Arthur Koestler, Invisible Writing (London: Vintage, 2005); hereafter abbreviated IW.

8. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1990); hereafter abbrevi-ated OR.

9. Shalini P. Satkunanandan, “Here I Stand, I Can Do No Other,” paper presented at the American Political Science Association (Boston 2008).

10. Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (London: Hutchinson, 1967); hereafter abbreviated GM.

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11. Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (New York: Dell, 1975), pp. 692–702.

12. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); hereafter abbreviated HC.

13. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (San Diego: Harcourt, 1983); hereafter abbrevi-ated MDT.