What happened to Aldous Huxley?(Critical Essay)

Metaphysics is out of fashion. There is, as department-store sales assistants say, not much call for it nowadays. The word "metaphysics" does not even occur in the index of the current bestseller about human nature, Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, nor does Professor Pinker's text betray any interest in the topic. Most of us, if challenged to disclose our metaphysical beliefs, would probably offer a part-baked dualism. Yes, certainly there is an outer reality, "the universe" made up of material objects whose behavior, thanks to four hundred years of diligent scientific inquiry, we can understand, or at any rate predict, in fine detail. And yes, there is an inner reality, "the self," comprised of mental objects about which science has much less to say, and some irreducible core of which, we are inclined to think, exists independently of the material world. Those of us who are up to date with developments in neuroscience, or who have read Tom Wolfe's famous article on the subject ("Sorry, but your soul just died" in the December 1996 issue of Forbes ASAP) are uncomfortably aware of the relentlessness with which researchers have been shrinking the size of that core, but we live in faith that they will never succeed in eliminating it altogether. Professor Pinker, who is very up to date indeed in these matters, plainly does not share that faith, hence his utter neglect of matters metaphysical.

Living as we do in such an un-metaphysical age, we are in a poor frame of mind to approach the writer who said the following thing, and who took it as a premise for his work through most of a long literary career.

 
   It is impossible to live without a metaphysic. The choice that is 
   given us is not between some kind of metaphysic and no metaphysic; 
   it is always between a good metaphysic and a bad metaphysic. 

Aldous Huxley published his first book, a collection of poems, in 1916, shortly after his twenty-second birthday. He died in November 1963, a few weeks after having brought out his twentieth book of essays. (He actually died on the day John F. Kennedy was shot.) At that point Huxley's published work also included three more poetry collections, eleven novels, five short story collections, two travel books, two biographies, a play, some collaborative work on movie scripts, and a mass of fugitive journalism. It was the essays, though, that were the essential Aldous Huxley for a large part of his readership. A star-struck young visitor at the Huxleys' California house in 1939 wrote that: "I had been bitterly disappointed with [Huxley's sixth novel Eyeless in Gaza] and unsympathetic to religious experiences, but of course it was Aldous of the Essays, ... gentle, inquiring, fascinating, and fascinated too with every fact, every thought, hesitatingly brought out with the amazed inflection of his voice."

Huxley's essays have now been gathered together in six volumes by Robert S. Baker of the University of Wisconsin at Madison and lames Sexton of Camosun College in British Columbia. The first volume appeared two years ago; the last, covering the years 1956-63, has just come out. (1) Here, in a uniform edition, are not only the essays Huxley published in book form, with his two travel books included for good measure, but also scores of magazine and newspaper pieces previously accessible to the general reader only with difficulty. Tide notwithstanding, the Complete Essays is not absolutely comprehensive, and does not claim to be. None of Huxley's earliest articles for the Athenaeum or the London Mercury are here, and a few later pieces I would have liked to see--the 1944 Harper's piece on Sheldonism (see below), for example-are missing. (2) This is, though, a good representative collection, gathering between hard covers the whole sweep of Huxley's thought, as it developed across forty-four years.

All of Huxley's biographers begin by pointing out that his bloodlines were distinguished, but somewhat oddly mixed. His paternal grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, the great Victorian biologist, best remembered for his victory against Archbishop Wilberforce in the 1860 debate about evolution. Known as "Darwin's bulldog" T. H. Huxley advocated scientism--that is, the belief that there is no area of human experience or understanding into which science will not eventually advance, or which the scientific method will be unable to explain. He seems to have coined the word "agnostic" and used it to describe his own position on the mysteries of mind, spirit, and creation. Aldous's mother was a granddaughter of the great evangelical headmaster Dr. Thomas Arnold, the "Doctor" in Tom Brown's Schooldays, originator of the "muscular Christianity" style of boarding-school education for boys, and father of the poet Matthew Arnold (who was, therefore, Aldous Huxley's great-uncle). Dr. Arnold was an intensely religious man, who, when headmaster of Rugby, was reported to break down and weep openly in front of the whole school at the story of Christ's Passion.

To what degree these antecedents, or his consciousness of them, shaped Aldous's own thinking, is a matter of some interest, the more so since eugenics--a respectable field of discussion and inquiry until tainted by association with Nazi "race science"--is a key topic in Huxley's best-remembered novel, Brave New World, published in 1932. The following things, at least, can be said with certainty: Aldous Huxley was raised in a family that took intellectual inquiry very seriously indeed, he maintained a lifelong interest in science, and he treated the religious instinct with utmost respect.