A philosophical sketchbook, whose are of darkness and light swings
somewhere between the silly and the sublime, between the poseur
primping before his intellectual mirror and the truly troubled
spirit trying to look within. It suggests Heraclitus: sentence
fragments, speculative meanderings. Thus the classical artillery;
the use of opposites ("polar nature of reality"), the metaphor of
change ("Humanity on its raft. The raft on the endless ocean");
above all, the relation between the One (the aristos: isolated,
independent seeker of inner wisdom and knowledge) and the Many (the
unthinking, unfeeling Mass). Other points include Our Most
Fashionable Problems: technology, oxistentialism, materialism,
dehumanized art and sex, God and the Abyss. Clearly a Major
Undertaking. With "labels": angora society (bad; today's
acquisitive one), stoa society (good; sort of Shaw's Major Barbara
utopianism), the Midas Situation, etc. Novelist Fowles, (author of
the celebrated The Collector,) writes elegantly enough and has a
fairly firm formal mind. His bent is towards the rational as
against modernist irrationalism, but his raft, full of received
ideas and hardly any primary experience, follows a confused course:
he's a "planner" and existential, hieratic and humanistic. Here he
is polemicising against what one takes to be the New Critics:
what's taken as a criterion is not the meaning, but a skill in
hinting at meanings". He concludes, "Any good computer will beat
man at this." A crack which sums up his own voluminous tag-bag,
biggest since The Outsider. (Kirkus Reviews)
Two years after The Collector had brought him international recognition and a year before he published The Magus, John Fowles set out his ideas on life in The Aristos. The chief inspiration behind them was the fifth century BC philosopher Heraclitus. In the world he posited of constant and chaotic flux the supreme good was the Aristos, 'of a person or thing, the best or most excellent its kind'.'What I was really trying to define was an ideal of human freedom (the Aristos) in an unfree world,' wrote Fowles in 1965. He called a materialistic and over-conforming culture to reckoning with his views on a myriad of subjects - pleasure and pain, beauty and ugliness, Christianity, humanism, existentialism, socialism
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