An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Annabel Williams (Postdoctoral Fellow 2020-21):
‘A nice little robot-brain’: Arthur Koestler and the Politics of Magical Thinking
Abstract:
The Hungarian-British writer and intellectual Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) was among the most influential political commentators of mid-twentieth-century Europe, but his later interests in parapsychology did lasting damage to his reputation. Once respected, and reviled, for his astute analysis of political indoctrination, by the 1970s Koestler was infamous to orthodox scientists for entertaining anti-rational models of the mind. Indeed, his credulity towards pseudoscience could be considered a regression to the patterns of thought that motivated his short-lived 1930s conversion to Communism, which he later described in terms of magical thinking. What might the vagaries of Koestler’s thinking on thought reveal about the collision of Cold War politics with scientific methodologies? How did his writing negotiate between positions of scepticism and credulity, in a climate of burgeoning fear that the mind’s autonomy was under threat?
In this paper, I discuss my work with the Arthur Koestler papers, held at the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Research Collections, combining an archival with a theoretical approach informed by Literature and Science studies, and the Philosophy of Science. Considering Koestler’s anti-Communist and scientific writings, and drawing on recent scholarship into the methodological value of the ‘pseudo’ (Kingori 2019), and interrogations of rationalism (Nathan and Stengers 2018) in modern science, I argue that attention to Koestler’s magical thinking, and to his scrutiny of ‘pseudo-reasoning’, illuminates a distinctive cultural moment of thinking about the mind.
Please contact iash@ed.ac.uk for a link to join the seminar.