## Metadata - Author: - Full Title: Reading Nicholas Mosley | Dalkey Archive Press - Category: #articles - URL: http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/reading-nicholas-mosley/ ## Highlights - “People are trapped in their characteristics. They act parts. If you see that, then part of you has a certain degree of freedom.” - The driving idea at the back of Catastrophe Practice was Brecht’s. . . . “What matters most is that a new human type should be evolving and the entire interest of the world should be concentrated on his development”—and Brecht’s way of illustrating this potential type as the actor that can act and at the same time see himself as an actor. The “new human type” idea was echoed by . . . Husserl with his idea that one might “study, with the mind, mind’s phenomena”; Monod with his demand for a “new covenant” between scientific knowledge and ethics; Popper with his idea of “learning from mistakes”; Bateson with his conjecture that one might be able to see not only patterns in the outside world but patterns of the way one saw these patterns; Langer’s image of art as “a vision of thinking itself”—and so on—all these being ways of trying to express what might be the “new human type that was necessary.” - Mosley appropriated Bateson’s three levels of learning, where each level is a standing back from and an observation of the former pattern of learning and thus a liberation from it. These levels culminate in the third level of learning, where the individual can fire himself from the patterns of his consciousness by being aware of and thus being in contact with a greater whole—a “circuit of circuits” - If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.—Voltaire - The novels of Nicholas Mosley could be seen as chapters of a single novel in which a single theme evolves: the possibility of man’s freedom through overcoming the paradox of freedom. The paradox (or, as Mosley often calls it, the “impossibility”) of freedom arises due to man’s awareness of the necessity of limiting structures for freedom. All choice-making and all action would end up in paralysis in the absence of limiting structures. In other words, freedom is only possible in the presence of “nonfreedom.” Hence the question is: how could man fulfill the paradoxical task of overcoming these structures in order to attain freedom? Mosley’s writing career could be divided into four different phases in which a series of novels dramatize one aspect of this endeavor and consequently lead onto the next phase, which supersedes the previous one by addressing the possibility of overcoming the paradox of freedom on a higher level and in a more complex context.