User:KYPark/1949

[edit] Richard Crossman

An edition of six essays with the testimonies of a number of famous ex-Communists. The common theme of the essays is the authors' disillusionment with and abandonment of Communism. "Six famous men tell how they changed their minds about Communism," including Louis Fischer, André Gide, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, and Richard Wright.

``Specific literary influences include Darkness at Noon and The Yogi and the Commissar by Arthur Koestler, The Iron Heel (1908) by Jack London; Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley; We (1921) by Yevgeny Zamyatin, which Orwell read in French and reviewed in 1946; and The Managerial Revolution (1940) by James Burnham, predicting permanent war among three totalitarian superstates, broadly equivalent to those in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell told Jacintha Buddicom that he would write a novel stylistically like A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells.``

``The "reduction" of the material world to mental states and processes, as well as the "reduction" of the mental states and processes to physical states and processes, presuppose the legitimacy of the disjunction "either there exist minds or there exist bodies (but not both)". It would be like saying, "either she bought a left-hand and a right-hand glove or she bought a pair of gloves (but not both)".``
Influenced by Schopenhauer
Cf. Ghost in the machine, The Ghost in the Machine (1967), Janus: A Summing Up (1978)