[In the following excerpt, Bawer comments on the philosophical ideas presented in The Aristos.]

The Aristos, originally subtitled "A Self-Portrait in Ideas," consists of several hundred related axioms which are organized into eleven chapters with titles like "The Universal Situation," "The Tensional Nature of Human Reality," and "The Importance of Art." The axioms, some of which consist of a single sentence and only one of which occupies so much as an entire page, are numbered chapter by chapter, like verses of the Bible. The book is nothing less than Fowles's answer to Plato's Republic—it represents his notion of what ideas on life, death, art, religion, politics, science, economics, education, and sex should govern a world run by superior men and women. And indeed his primary concern is with the superior individual, the aristos. The word is borrowed from Heraclitus, who, Fowles reminds us, "saw mankind divided into a moral and intellectual élite (the aristoi, the good ones, not—this is a later sense—the ones of noble birth) and an unthinking conforming mass—hoi polloi, the many." Fowles notes that Heraclitus has been condemned as "the grandfather of modern totalitarianism," but insists that

in every field of human endeavour it is obvious that most of the achievements, most of the great steps forward, have come from individuals—whether they be scientific or artistic geniuses, saints, revolutionaries, what you will. And we do not need the evidence of intelligence testing to know conversely that the vast mass of mankind are not highly intelligent—or highly moral, or highly gifted artistically, or indeed highly qualified to carry out any of the nobler human activities.

Fowles thus divides mankind into two groups, the Few and the Many. Nonetheless he declares himself to be a socialist: "All my adult life I have believed that the only rational political doctrine one can hold is democratic socialism." His way of reconciling these two disparate views is to say that "the dividing line between the Few and the Many must run through each individual, not between individuals. In short, none of us are wholly perfect; and none wholly imperfect." Or, as he puts it at the end of the book, "We are all sometimes of the Many." If this is true, however, then why posit a "Few" and a "Many" in the first place?

Fowles sees life in terms of process: to him, everything is ultimately unknowable, indefinite, mysterious. But, though we will never reach perfection of any kind, we can nonetheless strive for it ("We build towards nothing; we build"—1.33). And it is this endless striving that makes life worth living. "Our universe is the best possible because it can contain no Promised Land; no point where we could have all we imagine. We are designed to want: with nothing to want, we are like windmills in a world without wind" (1.34). What human beings need most of all in such a universe—and what David Williams so tragically lacks in The Ebony Tower—is freedom of will. It is "the highest human good" (1.64); to be true aristoi, men and women must overcome the "asphyxiating smog of opinions foisted on them by society," which forces ordinary people to "lose all independence of judgement, and all freedom of action" and to "see themselves increasingly … as parts of a machine" (3.29). We must, in short, commit existential acts—existentialism signifying, by his definition, "the revolt of the individual against all those systems of thought, theories of psychology, and social and political pressures that attempt to rob him of his individuality" (7.74). Fowles is not inciting mass revolution, though, for "existentialism is conspicuously unsuited to political or social subversion, since it is incapable of organized dogmatic resistance or formulations of resistance. It is capable only of one man's resistance; one personal expression of view; such as this book" (7.79). Fowles insists, moreover, on the importance of moral judgment, proclaiming that "[o]ur function is to judge, to choose between good and evil. If we refuse to do so, we cease to be human beings and revert to our basic state, of being matter" (5.45). As for risks, we need to take them in order to improve our lives and ourselves. "The purpose of hazard is to force us, and the rest of matter, to evolve" (2.61)….

[The] sort of freedom that usually figures most prominently in Fowles's fiction is sexual freedom. Fowles has a good deal to say about this subject in The Aristos. He speaks of the twentieth-century emergence of sex "from behind the curtains and crinolines of Victorian modesty and propriety" (9.97) and finds it necessary to say that "[s]exual attraction and the sexual act are in themselves innocent, neither intrinsically moral nor immoral. Sex is like all great forces: simply a force" (9.105). One has the feeling, after reading through Fowles's oeuvre, that his obsession with freedom has a great deal to do with his complicated feelings about sex; he often seems to be taking on an enemy—namely, the stifling sexual morality of the Victorian period—that no longer exists. Indeed, he has made reference, in several of his novels, to the Victorian notions of morality with which people of his generation were raised. "My contemporaries," notes the Fowles-like narrator of Daniel Martin, "were all brought up in some degree of the nineteenth century, since the twentieth did not begin till 1945."

A concept that is of central importance to Fowles is that of the "nemo," which Fowles defines as "a man's sense of his own futility and ephemerality; of his relativity, his comparativeness; of his virtual nothingness" (3.7). Fowles says that it is art, above all else, that "best conquers time, and therefore the nemo"; an art object is "as nearly immortal as an object in a cosmos without immortality can be." Fowles devotes much of his chapter on art to a description of the situation of the modern artist—a situation that, for all his criticism of Victorian vis-à-vis modern culture, he is not at all happy with. He deplores, for instance, "the tyranny of self-expression" (10.35); the narrowing of the artist's audience to "a literate few" (10.51); and the pressure on the artist to present "a mirror to the world around him" (10.36). He is disturbed by the rise of a type of intellectual that is interested mainly in "colour, shape, texture, pattern, setting, movement," rather than in "the properly intellectual (moral and socio-political) significance of events and objects"—more interested, in short, in style than in content, which to him is the single most woeful symptom of the modern temperament.

What The Aristos essentially amounts to, then, is a collection of opinions, some of which one agrees with, some of which one doesn't; there is much in it that is intelligent and thought-provoking, and much that is silly and wrong-headed. Fowles is often guilty of sentimental overgeneralization; in distinguishing between the craftsman and the genius, he says that the former "is very concerned with his contemporary success, his market value," while the latter "is indifferent to contemporary success." And Fowles can be unintentionally amusing when he is pretending to be objective about things that are close to him. For example, having decided that mankind should have a universal language, he arrives, by way of an elaborate and (he thinks) purely logical argument, at the conclusion that the language of choice should be—guess what?—English. Likewise, this man who chooses to identify himself at the beginning of the book as "a poet first; and then a scientist," determines—by means of an equally sophisticated and objective bit of dialectic—that "the great arts" are not equal, and that "[l]iterature, in particular poetry," is of all the arts "the most essential and the most valuable."

Despite such weaknesses, however, one cannot help but admire Fowles for his intellectual seriousness, his acute sense of the artist's dignity as well as of his moral and social responsibility, and his attempt to express and to codify his way of seeing the world. It is rare and admirable for a contemporary British or American novelist to be as intensely and seriously concerned as John Fowles is with the relations between art and ideas, art and morality. But The Aristos is chiefly of interest not as a work of philosophy but as a catalogue raisonné, as it were, of many of the thematic preoccupations of Fowles's fiction.