Aldous Huxley
From Philosopedia
Huxley, Aldous (26 July 1894 - November 22, 1963)
Huxley, the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley and brother of Julian Huxley, was born in Surrey. Another brother, Trevenen, died in 1914, a suicide.
An eye disease blinded Aldous at age 16 for about a year and a half. He regained enough vision to study, read, and become a successful novelist. Two volumes of his poetry were published while he was still a student at Oxford.
He launched a successful career as a satiric writer of novels, which included: Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925), Point Counter Point (1928), Brief Candles (1930), Brave New World (1932), and Eyeless in Gaza (1936). His screenplays included Pride and Prejudice (MGM's version of the Austen book, which many dislike), Madame Curie (1938), and Jane Eyre (1944).
Although the most mystical of the Huxley family, the author of Brave New World (1932) did declare the following humanistic views:
- • Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
- • If we must play the theological game, let us never forget that it is a game. Religion, it seems to me, can survive only as a consciously accepted system of make-believe.
- • History reveals the Church and the State as a pair of indispensable Molochs. They protect their worshiping subjects, only to enslave and destroy them.
- • Jerusalem is . . . the slaughterhouse of the religions. . . . {One is touched by} the hopelessness of the inhabitants of Jerusalem, for whom the holiest of cities is a prison of chronic despair punctuated by occasional panic when the hand grenades start flying.
- • I’m all for sticking pins into episcopal behinds.
- • Mr. Mercaptan went on to preach a brilliant sermon on that melancholy sexual perversion known as continence.
In 1946 Huxley wrote a foreword to a postwar edition of Brave New World. He regretted having failed to predict nuclear fission and wished he had offered an alternative other than a primitive religion, “half fertility cult and half Penitente ferocity.” His “third” way would have embraced Henry George economics, Prince Kropotkin politics, and a humane technology that sought “the unitive knowledge of the immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman.”
Toward the end of his life, he wrote, "It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.' "
Huxley died of cancer.
