Roger Berkowitz

APPROACHING INFINITY: DIGNITY IN

ARTHUR KOESTLERS DARKNESS AT NOON

n his allegorical novel 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 first, 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
Rubashovs self-betrayal. Honour, the aristocrat insists, is to live and
die for ones 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 decencynot usefulness.
Rubashov answers: We have replaced decency by reason (Koestler,
pp. 17778).
Today, we rationalist readers of Darkness at Noon are left with the question 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 reasonand Koestler unfolds reason as calculating rationality in
its most Machiavellian garbrequires the willingness to employ sober
and rational means to achieve desired ends. In common parlance, the
end justifies 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. 27084).3
We may invoke conscience, duty, and decency. We might invoke civil
and human rights. We condemn realpolitik and affirm a Judeo-Christian
world order. In short, we invoke the dignity of man and affirm ones
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 fleeing, 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 affirm an inviolable
core to humanity and our failure to do so.
The ambition of Darkness at Noon lies in its bald effort to affirm the
truth of human decency even as it recognizes that mans humanity is
a bald-faced fiction. 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 floor, 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 grammatical fiction. What is the I, the conscience, the self? How is it that
the fictional 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 centuryit is number eight on the Modern Librarys
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 seriously by the academic community.
One answer is that Koestlers later workhis curmudgeonly conservatism, apparent misogyny, and forays into pharmaceutical-based
utopiasdiscredited him as a serious intellectual. Koestlers novel, it

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seems, suffers for the perceived exoticism of his later work, much of
which developed and reaffirmed 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 reflection 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 Koestlers fiction, Darkness 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 Koestlers novel is still
understood as the first 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 authors 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 reflection on the importance of
dignity. I turn to Koestlers book in this essay to explore his conception
of human dignity as a necessary counter to the claims of reason in politics. 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 reasons reign. He does so, I argue, by developing
the importance of the infinite in politics. Political action, he suggests,
must be informed by a non-rational and non-religious appeal to the
infinite 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 novels 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 Rubashovs confession. While Ivanov does
successfully torture other prisonersnotably Harelip who under torture makes the accusation that Rubashov inspired him to assassinate

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Number Onehe 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 sacrifice for ideals, Rubashov is one of
the few for whom logical commitment can trump even the most powerful 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 responsible 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 revolutionary willingness to sacrifice individuals to the cause of freedom required
of them now to sacrifice 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 Koestlers 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 justifies
war to end all wars and the infliction of suffering to abolish suffering.
By virtue of its ambition, reason stands above the divine temptations of
consciencethe washing of ones 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 filled 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 Bogrovs lame body is
pulled past Rubashovs 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). Bogrovs suffering inflames
Rubashovs moral sense and sets his damaged eye tooth to throbbing.
While Rubashov rationally knows that the I is a fiction, he now for
the first time feels Bogrovs decimated person not as an abstraction,
but as a physical reality in his own body (p. 157). While he had condemned 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 encounter with Bogrovs whimpering awakens Rubashov to the injustice of a
rationality that pursues ends by any means necessary.
To counter Rubashovs moral awakening, Ivanov insists upon the
rationality and necessity of Bogrovs 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 sacrificed 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 sacrifice.
To Ivanovs challenge, Rubashov was silent. His silence results at
least in part from his inability to express the sense and significance
that Bogrovs 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 Bogrovs whimpering is simple; it represents 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 revolutionary actionthe 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 traffics 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 compassiona quality she distinguishes 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 justifies giving them food in exchange for
their obedience. As pitiable, the poor can easily be seen to be creatures
of need rather than as dignified 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 depersonalizes 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. Dostoevskys Jesus remains silent in the face of questions
from the Grand Inquisitor, as does Rubashov when asked to express his
reasons for resisting Ivanovs 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 difficulty expressing to Ivanov, a result of the
fact that suffering is inherently individual and thus resistant to expression in political language.
When Ivanov accuses Rubashov of excessive pity, he conflates 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 reflect. What Ivanov
calls pity is actually Rubashovs 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
sacrifice. 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 sacrifice a patrolling party to save the regiment. That we may
not sacrifice 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 justifies the means is and remains the only rule
of political ethics (p. 159). For Koestler, the law of politics is most powerfully expressed by Machiavelli, who writes, in lines Koestler quotes in
the first 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 Koestlers
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. Mans very humanityhis singularityis threatened
by the rationalizations and relativities of reason.
The rationalist danger to mans 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 specific
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 reflects his sense of dignity as well as his profound devotion to the
Partys 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 Rubashovs interrogation 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 useful. This requires not simply a confession to oppositional tendencies,
but total submissionRubashovs confession to the most specific and
criminal acts. Rubashov must now turn his rationalist logic on himself
and render one final act of sacrifice to the good of the Party. Under
the vice-grip of reasonKoestler originally titled the novel The Vicious
Circle Rubashovs logic devours all, even himself.
Gletkin expresses this demand for self-sacrifice in a chillingly matterof-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 sacrifices 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 mouldfilled 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 Partys 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
reasons 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 motivations of his characters. Even Gletkin, the novels whipping boy, evinces
a certain serenity in his faith in the Partys rationality. Little serenity,
however, is found in Koestlers 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 finally
chooses reason and testifies does not decide the matter. For the final
chapter, The Grammatical Fiction, gives ample play to Rubashovs own
doubts and inconclusive reflections on the fatal error harbored within
the regime of reason.

IV
Before moving to a discussion of the grammatical fiction, it is helpful
to look more closely at Koestlers presentation of the supposedly irreconcilable 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 justifies all means,

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and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every
way be subordinated and sacrificed to the communitywhich may dispose of it as an experimentation rabbit or a sacrificial 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.
Koestlers portrait of antagonistic moralities recalls the distinction
between an ethic of responsibility (Verantwortungsethik) and an ethic of
conviction (Gesinnungsethik) in Max Webers Politics as a Vocation. Like
Koestlers vivisection morality, Webers ethic of responsibility holds that
while a responsible politician takes both ends and means into account,
he must be willing to employ violence to fight for the good. Similarly,
Webers ethic of conviction mirrors the desire for a clean conscience
that informs Koestlers anti-vivisection morality. For Weber, an ethics of
conviction is best exemplified 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 affirming 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 ethicsand 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 reaffirming the fundamental antagonism
between the two ethics, Weber qualifies 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 find it immeasurably

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moving when a mature human beingwhether young or old in actual

years is immaterialwho feels the responsibility he bears for the consequences 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 Webers essay might serve as a prism through which to read Darkness
at Noon, then it would be overly hasty to see Rubashovs capitulation as an
endorsement of Ivanovs 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. Rubashovs metaphysical speculations
on the grammatical fiction need not, therefore, express merely his
uneasiness with the claims of reason. Instead, the grammatical fiction
is Koestlers attempt to point towards his own understanding of a reconciliation 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 Rubashovs reflections on
the grammatical fiction. In the novels final chapter, Rubashov has confessed 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 revolutions horrific misdeeds. He did not
do so and thus he cast his lot with reason. For someone who has coolly
sacrificed many othersRichard, Little Lowey, and Arlova are three
examplesto the reasonable needs of the Party, it is only just, Rubashov
concludes, that he submits himself to the same inexorable logic.
Rubashov dedicates his final hours to the problem that gnaws at

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him throughout the novelthe grammatical fiction, that silent partner, whose realm started just where logical thought ended (p. 259).
Specifically, 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 24, the real human being of
bone and flesh and blood and skin, the principle led to absurdity (p.
260). The grammatical fiction 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 fiction exposes the fictional basis
of political rationality.
What, however, is the effect of the grammatical fiction in the machine
of politics? To oppose the grammatical fiction to reason might suggest
that it is to be associated with pity and compassion. Rubashovs mention of the real human being of bone and flesh 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 fiction is a specifically human propertythe reference to
the cipher 24 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 pitiable lump nor to a rational spirit.
In raising the question of the grammatical fictionand thus the
selfRubashov 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 suffice
to express the political ethic, what else is there? Rubashov is searching
for something altogether differentwhat 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 affirms, 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 fiction, the I, is neither mystic nor mysterious.
The grammatical fiction 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 fiction that manifests itself in daydreams and toothaches, and

yet it is a thoroughly tangible entity (p. 112). Illogical, metaphysical,
yet tangible and concretewhat, then, is the grammatical fiction?
It would be too much to expect a simple answer to such a loaded
question. In pointing toward the grammatical fiction, Koestler invokes
the experience of the oceanic state.
And yet there were ways of approach [the grammatical fiction]. Sometimes
he would respond unexpectedly to a tune, or even the memory of a tune,
or of the folded hands of the Piet, 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, ones personality dissolved as a grain of salt
in the sea; but at the same time the infinite 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 final images that Koestler offers, the oceanic state and
the infinite 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 sacrifices 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
selfs 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 infinite.
The infinite is that into which the self expands amidst the oceanic

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state. We cannot get away from infinity, Koestler writes. The infinite
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 infinite 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 infinite reminds us both that reason cannot encompass the
entirety of the universe and also that man means more than his physical
suffering. The infinitethat which is glimpsed in the oceanic stateis
that which Rubashov has wrongfully neglected: Defendant Rubashov,
what about the infinite? He would not have been able to answerand
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 infinite is rooted in Koestlers 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 Koestlers 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 first came face to face with the infinite.
In solitary confinement in his Spanish prison cell, Koestler nightly
heard the gunshots announcing the executions of Republican fighters
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 Rubashovs in
Darkness at NoonKoestler himself was kept in cells 40 and 41 in Malaga,
which Koestlers biographer points out is condensed to 404, Rubashovs
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 Writing, Koestler was most elated by his reconstruction of Euclids proof that
the number of prime numbers is infinite (IW, p. 428).
The satisfaction he finds in Euclids 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 infinite is arrived at by the precise and finite means (IW,
p. 429). What enchanted Koestler is that the mathematical proof of

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infinity offered a concrete knowledge of the unknowable infinite. There

is no better formulation to express what fascinates Koestler about the
grammatical fiction than its promise of offering meaningful and finite
knowledge of the infinite.
In this regard, it is essential to distinguish Koestlers conception of
the infinite 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 succeeded in retaining their intellectual and emotional balance, are nearly
all men with a continuous interestwriters or artists or scientistswhich
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 mudor rather, the oceanand
focused on the infinite.
What is needed, Koestler affirms, is that one never lose sight of the
infinite. The infinite is rather what raises us beyond ourselves and inspires
us to transcend ourselves and become part of something bigger than
ourselves. The infinite offers the continuous interest that calls upon
one to lose and then to find 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 infinite. Koestlers favorite
example of this consuming longing for the infinite 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
infinity. . . . The idea of God is nothing more than one form of the idea
of infinity. So long as the mystery of the infinite weighs on the human
mind, so long will temples be raised to the cult of the infinite, 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 languagethe word enthusiasmen
theosa 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 reflection
from the infinite. (Pasteur, cited in GM, p. 220)

For Koestler, as for Pasteur, the infinite is not to be confused with religious gods, in spite of their resonances. The infinite 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
creationthe title of one of Koestlers major works11gives the lie to
all faiths, rational and religious. Creative thinkingthinking about the
infiniteoffers an independent purpose, a center of gravity. It provides
the ballast in a world sailing without ethical ballast (p. 265). And the
grammatical fiction, as one subjectively knowable manifestation of the
infinite, is an unknowable and yet approachable finite expression of the
absolute. The political importance of the grammatical fiction is that it
injects the infiniteand with it an absolute standard of decencyinto
the calculation of means and ends.

VI
That transcendence is an essential part of politics should not surprise us. One cannot, although many do, read Kants politics without
an awareness of the centrality of the transcendental apperception to
his political thinking. Hannah Arendtperhaps the greatest Kantian
political thinker of the twentieth centuryspoke clearly on this matter: 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 infinitepeople for whom the slide
into political rationality and cost-benefit rationalizations is simply not
possible.
It is worth noting how similar Koestlers 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
confidence that needed no confirmation, 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 dignified, silent resistance spoke

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volumes, and suggests that his dignified 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 subjectthat which defines a man as who he is and
never leaves him (MDT, p. 73). The magnificence of Jaspers humanitas,
Arendt writes, is that in the darkness of total domination, he stood firm
as a beacon to the ultimate triumph of humanity over barbarity.
Arendts turn to the light of dignified 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 clichs 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, flickering, and often weak light that some men and
women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances 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 fromand thus safely shielded fromthe

enervating light of public rationality and common conformity. What
Arendt and Koestler both affirm is the need for the infinite. At a time
when public speech and deeds subordinate decency to rationality, these
thinkers remind us that political change begins with oneselfthat first
we must learn to see the infinite in ourselves.
Bard College

I am indebted to Jenny Lyn Bader and David Kettler, who read and generously commented on
earlier drafts of this essay. I also benefitted 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 final 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 Webers 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, 19431945, 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 Koestlers Darkness
at Noon in France from 1945 to 1950, Libraries & Culture, vol. 36 (2001).
6.

David Cesarani, Arthur KoestlerThe 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 abbreviated 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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Philosophy and Literature

Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (New York: Dell, 1975), pp. 692702.

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 abbreviated MDT.