Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon (Scribner, paperback edition, 2019) exposes three major philosophical failures of Marxism. It fails epistemologically, ethically, and existentially.
Let’s start with a brief introduction to the author and then the general context and plot of his novel. Arthur Koestler was born to Jewish parents in Budapest in 1905, but he grew up in Vienna. Koestler made a name for himself as a journalist and in 1932 he joined the German Communist Party. He left the Party in 1938 and was imprisoned for political reasons in Spain, France and Great Britain before and after his party membership.
Darkness at Noon was published in 1941 and is one of the most famous anti-totalitarian, novels of the 20th century. It tells the story of Rubashov, a fictional leader of the early Russian Revolution during World War I, who is arrested and imprisoned during the purges of the Communist Party under Stalin in the late 1930’s.
I shall be focusing on the philosophical side of the novel, but, even if one is not interested in the philosophy, Darkness at Noon is an excellent novel. Its prose can be highly artistic. It shows insight into the mind and emotions of a political prisoner, and the development of humane relationships among the prisoners in a brutal environment is emotionally moving.
The novel is divided into four sections. The first three relate to the three interrogations. The novel does not focus primarily on physical torture. Rather, it recounts the psychological and philosophical challenges Rubashov faces in prison. At the end of these interrogations, Rubashov confesses to being a counterrevolutionary and to crimes that he didn’t commit. We’ll explain later why he confesses to these crimes. The final chapter is “The Grammatical Fiction” and recounts Rubashov’s final actions and doubts about the communist revolutionary movement.
On a side note, the blurb on the edition I read describes the novel as a “portrayal of fascism.” You can’t make this stuff up! Either the writer of the blurb never read or understood the book, or he thought that fascism was the only kind of totalitarianism. The book is clearly a critique of communism.
As stated previously, Darkness at Noon exposes three failures of Marxist philosophy. The three failures are epistemological, ethical, and existential. And they are all interconnected.
Marxism’s Epistemological Failure
In order to understand why Rubashov confesses to crimes that he did not commit, it is necessary to understand Marxist epistemology. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that examines knowledge. An important aspect of epistemology relates to the issue of truth.
Marxism does believe in truth. However, its view of truth is very different. In essence truth is the ultimate paradise of a classless society. This paradise or truth is the end product of the dialect of history. History advances by necessity toward the final paradise. As Rubashov says to one of his victims. “History knows no vacillating and consideration for feelings. It flows, powerfully and unerringly, toward its goal. … It knows its course. History doesn’t make mistakes” (38).
History advances by means of conflicting opposites, particularly between economic interests that drive reality forward towards the future perfect society. There is a scientific side to Marxism which claims to be able to explain this process objectively. Rubashov claims that his generation of revolutionaries were “empiricists” (73). They were empiricists because “We had plumbed their (the masses) depths, we were working in the anonymous bedrock of history itself. . .” “But we had plunged into the depths, into the formless, anonymous mass that had constituted the substance of history in every epoch, and we were the first to research the laws that governed their movement” (72).
Truth is also action in accordance with the necessary movement of history. The revolutionaries were a new breed. They were “philosophers who acted. … All their thoughts turned into actions” (52).[1] Understood in this way, truth becomes action that participates in the movement of history towards its final goal of a classless society. History then becomes the judge of truth and. as the judge of truth, there are several consequences.
First, there is a logic to history. Reason is understood as the ability to discern which actions accord with the necessary flow of history towards its final goal of the perfect society. If one opposed the party or in Rubashov’s case, “Number One,” who is Stalin, even in apparently minor issues, you are guilty of being a counterrevolutionary. In addition, to oppose Number One means by the logic of history that you will of necessity seek his death. Therefore, even though Rubashov did not plot Number One’s death, such action is the logical consequence of his counterrevolutionary stance and so he confesses that he is guilty.
In Marxism the proletariat are the moving force in history and the party embodies their desires. “The party cannot be wrong. … The party is the embodiment of the revolutionary idea in history” (38). Therefore facts, actual verifiable and verified facts, can and are ignored because they are counter to the movement of history as discerned by the party.[2]
The problem with Marxist epistemology according to Rubashov is that one could not be sure that he was thinking and acting correctly. “Absolute certainty did not exist, only a mocking oracle they called history, which would not deliver its verdict until long after the jawbones of the ones seeking counsel had turned to dust” (13). History is a mocking judge. It won’t deliver its verdict until the end, and one can’t know that until the future has come. The only way to certainty would be by means of the supposedly scientific socio-economics calculations of Marxism. However, those have not been sufficiently developed; thus, political action is ultimately uncertain even though one must of necessity act.
Marxism’s Ethical Failure
Marxist epistemology leads directly to its ethics. An action is not good in and of itself. Rather, an action is good if it advances history toward its final goal of a classless society. In other words, the end of promoting the final goal of history justifies the means. “Social utility is the only moral criterion we recognize” (152). Any action from forcing false confessions to mass killings is just so long as it leads to the Marxist goals. This will be one of Koestler’s main criticisms of Marxism voiced through his fictional character Rubashov.
Marxism’s Existential Failure
Finally, there is the existential failure of Marxism. The grammatical fiction is the expression Rubashov employs to expose this failure. The grammatical fiction runs against the party’s denial of the individual, the “I.” Only the “we” is taken into account, the “we” embodied in the party. As he realizes, “There was no “I” outside the “we” of the party; the individual was nothing; the party everything” (71).[3] Individual views and intentions are irrelevant. What is more, they are dangerous and must be suppressed or eliminated, as he discovers.
However, Rubashov’s “I” won’t go away. It is his conscience which would unexpectedly come to the fore and oppose actions which seem wrong. It causes Rubashov to be at war with himself. On the one hand, he claims not to have regretted the many lives he had taken. On the other hand, he is haunted by them and can’t play the hypocrite.
In this sense the grammatical fiction of the “I” gives the lie to an ethic that justifies the means by the end. So, the existential failure of Marxism results in a rejection of Marxist ethics. In fact, Rubashov realizes that the end and the means must be one. An end, as Marxists claim to hold, of a just and free society in which all are included and equal, means that the actions that direct history toward that goal must be in accordance with that goal.
Finally, the source of the “I” which seems more human and certainly compassionate, is not reason. It is less articulate and more difficult to discern its leading, but it is superior to reason as a guide. Reason is ethics sailing without ballast (231). It is the cold logic that leads to the destructive nature of Stalinist Russia.
Two Additional Points
Koestler’s critique of Marxism in Darkness at Noon has two additional significant results. First, it challenges the marked distinction between communism under Lenin and the first generation of revolutionaries and that of Stalin. Both view history as the final judge. Both practice an ethic in which the end of the communist utopia justifies massive injustices as the means to attain that end. And both subsume, even deny, the “I” under the aegis of the all dominating “we” of the party.
The second, and surprising consequence since Koestler was an atheist, is the prominence of religious imagery in Darkness at Noon. The denial of Rubashov by a loyal supporter from the old days is described using biblical passages relating Peter’s denial of Christ (220-221). The old man, Lenin, the Father, number one, Stalin, the Son, and the Holy Ghost “of the dogmatically petrified doctrine” represent the Marxist trinity (53). In fact, the very title, Darkness at Noon, could very well be a reference to the darkening of the sun at noon during the crucifixion of Jesus (Matthew 27:45).
However, the recurring image of the Pietà holds center stage.[4] Its emotionally compelling portrayal of compassion (“pietà” means “pity” or “compassion”) and human suffering casts doubt upon the Machiavellian ends justify the means ethic and the denial of the individual.
Koestler recognizes that the Church has fallen prey to the same temptation of justifying means by the end of preserving the institution. And, of course, Koestler is right. Christians and the Church have often failed and justified terrible deeds in the name of promoting the Kingdom of God, but within Christianity is the critique of its own failures.
The quotation from Ferdinand LaSalle’s tragedy Franz von Sickingen, which heads the final section of Koestler’s novel, points us in the right direction.
Show not the goal.
But also show the path. So closely tangled
On earth are path and goal, that each with th’ other
Their places ever change, and other paths forthwith
Another goal set up.
Means and ends cannot be so easily separated. And what could better express the central Christian doctrine that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6). His kingdom and likeness to him are the ends of the Christian faith and life and he is the way to that end. All other paths are false and lead not to the end intended.
One might ask of Koestler and of ourselves, Christian or not, whether reason alone is an inadequate and faulty guide to a just and truly human existence and whether we need to turn or return to the faith which holds Jesus as the way and through him a world of peace and justice in which heaven descends and transforms the earth.[5]
[1] This is not just Koestler’s fictional character’s view. “In the writings of Marx and Engels ‘truth’ normally means ‘correspondence with reality’, which the criterion for evaluating truth-claims normally is, or involves, human practice.” “Truth” in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, Tom Bottomore, ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 492.
[2] Koestler bears this out from his own experience as a member of the Communist Party. “I learned to distrust my mechanistic preoccupation with facts and to regard the world around me in the light of dialectic interpretation. … Once you had assimilated the technique you were no longer disturbed by facts; they automatically took on their proper color and fell into their proper place. Both morally and logically the Party was infallible.” The God that Failed, Richard H. Crossman, editor ((New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 34.
[3] Marxism’s denial of the individual’s legitimate and crucial place in society may be a more important factor in its rejection of private property than a supposed concern for fairness and equality. It would be an interesting thesis to explore. The same would possibly be true of Marx and Engel’s rejection of the traditional family as bourgeois.
[4] The Pietà that captures Rubashov’s attention is not the classic Pietà of Michelangelo because the Virgin’s hands are outstretched and cupped. The Pietà of Gregorio Fernández does have one hand extended, but I can’t say for sure if this is the work Koestler was thinking of.
[5] In this regard, it is worthy of notice that at the beginning of his essay in The God that Failed Koestler argues that “a faith is not acquired by reason. … Reason may defend an act of faith—but only after the act has been committed, and the man committed to the act” (15). As a result, he claims that psychologically “there is little difference between a revolutionary and traditionalist faith” (16).
