''The Yogi and the Commissar'' (1945) is a collection of essays of

Arthur Koestler Arthur Koestler, (, ; ; hu, Kösztler Artúr; 5 September 1905 – 1 March 1983) was a Hungarian-born author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. In 1931, Koestler join ...

, divided in three parts: Meanderings, Exhortations and Explorations. In the first two parts he has collected essays written from 1942 to 1945 and the third part was written especially for this book. In the title essay, Koestler proposes a continuum of

philosophies Philosophical schools of thought and philosophical movements. A Absurdism - Action, philosophy of - Actual idealism - Actualism - Advaita Vedanta - Aesthetic Realism - Aesthetics - African philosophy - Afrocentrism - Agential realism - ...

for achieving "heaven on earth", from the Commissar at the materialist, scientific end of the spectrum, to the

Yogi A yogi is a practitioner of Yoga, including a sannyasin or practitioner of meditation in Indian religions.A. K. Banerjea (2014), ''Philosophy of Gorakhnath with Goraksha-Vacana-Sangraha'', Motilal Banarsidass, , pp. xxiii, 297-299, 331 Th ...

at the spiritual,

metaphysical Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, causality, necessity, and possibility. It includes questions about the nature of conscio ...

end. The Commissar wants to change society using any means necessary, while the Yogi wants to change the individual, with an emphasis on ethical purity instead of on results. Using a metaphor of spectra of radiation, Koestler figures the Commissar at the infra-red end of the spectrum; the Yogi is ultra-violet. Neither are in the realm of visible light, he suggests, and just so the full dynamics of history and culture escape us. One essay, “The Birth of a Myth” published in '' Horizon'', April 1943, appeared as “In Memory of

Richard Hillary Flight Lieutenant Richard Hope Hillary (20 April 1919 – 8 January 1943) was an Anglo-Australian Royal Air Force fighter pilot during the Second World War. He wrote the book '' The Last Enemy'' about his experiences during the Battle of Brit ...

” in a longer version, pp46–67.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Yogi and the Commissar 1945 essays 1945 non-fiction books Jonathan Cape books Essay collections