In need of explanations

Press, 6 September 1980, Page 17

In need of explanations

The Aristos. By John Fowles. Cape, 1980. 218 pp. $15.25.

(Reviewed by

David Novitz)

Written with the assurance of an Oxford undergraduate, and in the style of the later - Wittgenstein, “The Aristos” is the unashamedly and avowedly dogmatic presentation of one man’s views about almost everything that matters. Fowles pronounces with gay abandon on life, death, happiness, envy, matter, art, science, sex, games, pleasure, money, human freedom — to mention only some of his topics. Much of what he says is interesting, some of it opaque and mystifying, and all of it is in need of further explanation and protracted defence. Fowles excuses the dearth of argument in his work with the lame observation that he wishes to “banish all possibility of persuasion by artificial means.” One is, of course, left wondering what constitutes persuasion by genuine means. Surely not the bald and unreasoned claims which crowd his opages — from statements like “pleasure is a product of death; riot an escape from it” to “science is always in parenthesis, poetry is not.” Some readers may he seduced by these deliberate excursions into mystification. Those in search of a new cult or guru may find the work eminently quotable, and may come to think of it as philosophy at its best. It is, in point of fact, philosophy at its weakest, since it makes a virtue of

dogmatism and obscurity, and sees rational discussion and argument as valueless.

The book first appeared in 1964, and was widely accused at' that time of being ‘‘crypto-fascist.” Fowles reacts sharply to this accusation in the preface to the 1980 reissue. He is, he tells us, a social democrat concerned in “The Aristos” to “preserve the freedom of the individual against all those pressures to conform that threaten our century.” However, it is difficult, even after a close reading, -to extract any single theme from this work, be it social democrat or cryptofascist.