A Biography on Orwell & Huxley

Part Five: Huxley’s philosophical outlook & worldview

“Huxley’s philosophy might be summed up as: the world can be made better, but only if we make ourselves better. He was not an eulogist, a writer of manifestos, a practical politician. But he wanted to change minds – or to release their potential. His intelligence roamed freely and was uninterested in boundaries” (from Nicholas Murray’s ‘Aldous Huxley’)

“For all his free-thinking modernity, his mind and morals were formed by a Victorian tradition of ethical high-mindedness.” (from Nicholas Murray’s ‘Aldous Huxley’)

“In Do What You Will Huxley insisted that the truth is always multiple. Pluralism constituted the conceptual lens through which he viewed history, psychology, religion, and epistemology. “Truth,” he argued, is multiple, is the diversity of impressions that preclude any possibility of a single monolithic essence or reality in a “universe [which] has no single, pre-established meaning.” (Intro to Complete Essays IV, xv)

“In Ends and Means Huxley argued that ‘every culture’ is composed of ‘arbitrary and fortuitous associations of behaviour-patterns, thought patterns, feeling patterns’ that eddy and twist in the larger currents of historical process. In The Olive Tree he called these contingent groupings ‘historical undulations.’” (Introduction to Aldous Huxley Complete Essays IV, xii)

“’ . . . Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him . . . Meanwhile, one must be content to go on piping up for reason and realism and a certain decency.’” (Huxley, Introduction to Texts and Pretexts)

Politics, organization of society

“Huxley’s arraignment of what he regarded as meaningless abstractions like society, race, and historical laws is traceable to his deeper anxieties concerning the ‘ferocious ideologies’ of the 1930s . . . “ (from the Introduction to Aldous Huxley Complete Essays, Volume IV, 1936-1938, Baker, Robert S. and James Sexton, eds, pp xi-xii)


 “Huxley was always suspicious of the ‘ferocious ideologies of Marxism, communism, and fascism, rejecting totalizing interpretations of history and preferring what he called contingent ‘trends’ rooted in discrete acts and particular details. Yet he responded to the ideological mass movements of the thirties by calling for a humanistic myth within whose framework the individual could satisfy his ‘innate desire’ for self-sacrifice and ‘corporate activity’ (see ‘In Whose Name’). And he began to show an interest in equally comprehensive forms of state intervention in social and economic problems, which tended to undermine the liberal humanism that shaped and informed so much of his work.” (Introduction to Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays III, Baker, Robert S. and James Sexton, eds., p xiv)

 “Huxley’s interest in authoritarian methods is always awkwardly grafted onto his sustained critique of central planning and excessive executive power. His revulsion for systematic planners, is belief that five-year plans are inseparable from ‘the Ogpu’ or ‘the Gestapo’ is a constant refrain. In Brave New World Huxley explored and rejected the positivistic temper of the bureaucratic planner, focusing especially on the link between modern technology and totalitarian ideology. This characteristic concern about the rationalization of society surfaces in such essays as ‘Science’s Growth,’ ‘New Era,’ ‘Reason Eclipsed,’ and ‘Catastrophes.’ His sense of standing on the threashold of a new era, overwhelmed by a flood of technical information and mired in potentially oppressive forms of social organization clashes with a surprising interest in state-controlled eugenics and enforced sterilization.” (Introduction to Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays III, Baker, Robert S. and James Sexton, eds., p xvii) “State planning, eugenics, and the economic exploitation of a nature seen only as an energy resource were on occasion embraced by Huxley but, for the most part, viewed with alarm and rejected.” (Intro to Complete Essays IV, xv)

“Nevertheless, it may be that circumstances will compel the humanist to resort to dictatorship. Any form of order is better than chaos. Our civilization is menaced with total collapse. Dictatorship and scientific propaganda may provide the only means for saving humanity from the miseries of anarchy. The liberal and the humanist may have to choose the lesser of two evils and, sacrificing liberty, at any rate for a time, choose dictatorship and scientific propaganda as an alternative to collapse. Again, the humanist will have to remember that propaganda is a substitute for force in general and war in particular. It would certainly be worth forgoing a great deal of liberty for the sake of peace” (Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays III, 153).

“In Ends and Means he chose as his ‘contemporary starting-point’ the close relationship between ‘modern technology’ and totalitarian ‘tyranny’ and ideology. The desire to control and master a state or a people was, for Huxley, a desire for power too often divorced from comprehensible value and meaning. After the Great War the rise of the scientific expert, the bureaucratic planner, the capitalist of international cartels, and the political ideologue were emblematized in Huxley’s mind by the figure of de Sade.” (Intro to Complete Essays IV, xiii)
 “…Huxley’s mature preference was for a politics of decentralisation and of small self-governing communities very similar to the classic libertarian anarchist tradition” (from Nicholas Murray’s ‘Aldous Huxley’)

“He did not, as so many contemporary writers, feel passionate about it. Temperamentally Aldous inclined to the wide-range view; he would not be doctrinaire, would not be a labelled anti-anything. Musso and the Fascisti, he would have said if pressed, were worse, yes a good deal worse, than a democracy, say, such as France or England (with their bitter inequalities and hypocrisies); but they were a part of the general inhumanity and folly, the Human Vomedy as his typewriter once slipped into naming it.” (From Sybille Bedford’s ‘Aldous Huxley: A Biography’)

“The alternative socialist tradition of statism and democratic centralism was one that was wholly unsympathetic for Huxley and in later years he was to prove equally forthright in his opposition both to communism and to fascism.” (From Nicholas Murray’s ‘Aldous Huxley’)

On personal transformation, spirituality, mysticism

 “It takes a certain amount of intelligence and imagination to realize the extraordinary queerness and mysteriousness of the world in which we live” (Calamay in Those Barren Leaves by Huxley)

“’ . . . I come more and more firmly to believe that the most important task before human beings is the perfection of a series of philosophical techniques for the proper exploitation of personality. All this famous ‘planning’ in the social and economic sphere will be wasted and useless if we remain barbarously unplanned as individuals – at the mercy of the social forces we have created . . . ‘” (Huxley, 1934)

Around 1936-37, Huxley started to adopt a more spiritual direction.

“There was little doubt that for Huxley his adoption of the pacifist cause was not a mere intellectual interest. It was a spiritual discovery. He was undergoing a ‘conversion’ that would end the mental and physical anguish of the past year.” (Murray 286)

“For Huxley, the idea of religious belief was a hard one to swallow, but (while the religion of brass eagle and beeswax would for ever be outside his scope) he was beginning his inexorable journey towards the ‘Perennial Philosphy’ whose expositor he would become in the next decade.
“As well as this re-making of himself as a quasi-religious believer in pacifism (his early writings about peace stress the need for a reformation of the individual life as much as they talk about the questions of power and military policy), Huxley was also attending to his physical disposition.” (from Nicholas Murray’s ‘Aldous Huxley’)

“God may or may not exist. But there is the empirical fact that contemplation of the divinity – of goodness in its most unqualified form – is a method of realizing that goodness in some slight degree is in one’s own life . . .” ([Anthony’s Diary, 21st September 1934], from Eyeless in Gaza by Huxley)