Literature and Science

Last updated
LiteratureandScience3.jpg
Cover of the first edition
Author Aldous Huxley
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Publisher Harper & Row
Publication date
1963
Media typePrint (hardcover)
Pages118

Literature and Science, published in September 1963, was Aldous Huxley's last book prior to his death two months later. The grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, Charles Darwin's "bulldog," and the grand-nephew of English poet and essayist Matthew Arnold, Aldous Huxley strived to harmonize the scientific and artistic realms. In Literature and Science, he hones in on language as the stumbling block that divides the realms. He analyzes and discusses how scientists and literary artists use language differently to achieve their desired effects. Recognizing that many differences in language use must persist, he nevertheless urges both camps to seek mutual understanding and appreciation. [1] He directs his persuasions primarily to literary artists, writing, "Whether we like it or not, ours is the Age of Science." [2]

Contents

Scientific Specialization

In Literature and Science, Huxley bemoans the disregard for science shown by many if not most literary contemporaries. He dismisses as "literary cowardice" [3] the artists' professed bewilderment in an era when "Science has become an affair of specialists. Incapable any longer of understanding what it is all about, the man of letters, we are told, has no choice but to ignore contemporary science altogether." [4] Huxley takes T.S. Eliot to task for his retreat into "the traditional raw material of English poetical feeling and poetical expression" in Eliot's depictions of nature in The Waste Land . [5] For Eliot and others, Huxley writes, "From their writings you would be hard put to it to infer the simple historical fact that they are the contemporaries of Einstein and Heisenberg, of computers, electron microscopes and the discovery of the molecular basis of heredity...." [6]

Science As Method

Huxley had written decades earlier in Along the Road that "If I could be born again and choose what I should be in my next existence, I should desire to be a man of science...." [7] But in Literature and Science, as scholars have noted, the later Huxley strongly qualified that earlier aspiration in his pursuit of a grand philosophical synthesis. Milton Birnbaum wrote in 1971 that Huxley "never embraced science as a satisfactory way to gauge the nature of ultimate reality." [8] Yet, Birnbaum adds that Huxley "always favored the methodology of science in the attainment of knowledge...." [8] In Literature and Science, Huxley writes that "The precondition of any fruitful relationship between literature and science is knowledge." [9] For the literary artist, Huxley writes, "a thorough and detailed knowledge of any branch of science is impossible. It is also unnecessary. All that is necessary, so far as the man of letters is concerned, is a general knowledge of science...and an appreciation of the ways in which scientific information and scientific modes of thought are relevant to individual experience...." [10] Included in James Sexton's Selected Letters of Aldous Huxley is a "My dear Tom" letter that Huxley wrote to Eliot: "I venture to recommend" Alfred Korzybski's Science and Sanity , "by far the best thing on 'semantics' and the problem of the relations between words and things, ever produced." [11]

Hope for the Future

Although Huxley remains best known for his early novel Brave New World , scholars agree that the strength in his later writing belongs to his non-fiction prose. George Woodcock writes of "Huxley's diminution as a novelist," noting that "...even if Huxley the artist died after Eyeless in Gaza , Huxley the prose craftsman remained as much alive as ever." [12] Harold H. Watts notes that Huxley's books "...in this final and extended period of his life" are "the work of a man who is meditating on the central problems of many modern men." [13] In Literature and Science, Huxley, acknowledging that "it will be difficult to incorporate the hypotheses of science into harmonious, moving and persuasive works of art," [14] nevertheless expresses the hope that "sooner or later the necessary means will be discovered, the appropriate weapons will be forged, the long-awaited pioneer of genius will turn up and...point out the way." [14]

Related Research Articles

Aldous Huxley English writer and philosopher (1894–1963)

Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. He wrote nearly fifty books—both novels and non-fiction works—as well as wide-ranging essays, narratives, and poems.

<i>The Doors of Perception</i> Book by Aldous Huxley

The Doors of Perception is a book by Aldous Huxley. Published in 1954, it elaborates on his psychedelic experience under the influence of mescaline in May 1953. Huxley recalls the insights he experienced, ranging from the "purely aesthetic" to "sacramental vision", and reflects on their philosophical and psychological implications. In 1956, he published Heaven and Hell, another essay which elaborates these reflections further. The two works have since often been published together as one book; the title of both comes from William Blake's 1793 book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

<i>Brave New World</i> 1932 dystopian science fiction novel by Aldous Huxley

Brave New World is a dystopian social science fiction novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by only a single individual: the story's protagonist. Huxley followed this book with a reassessment in essay form, Brave New World Revisited (1958), and with his final novel, Island (1962), the utopian counterpart. The novel is often compared to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Richard Aldington

Richard Aldington, born Edward Godfree Aldington, was an English writer and poet, and an early associate of the Imagist movement. He was married to the poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) from 1911 to 1938.

Lady Ottoline Morrell

Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Morrell was an English aristocrat and society hostess. Her patronage was influential in artistic and intellectual circles, where she befriended writers including Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence, and artists including Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington and Gilbert Spencer.

George Woodcock

George Woodcock was a Canadian writer of political biography and history, an anarchist thinker, an essayist and literary critic. He was also a poet and published several volumes of travel writing. In 1959 he was the founding editor of the journal Canadian Literature which was the first academic journal specifically dedicated to Canadian writing. He is most commonly known outside Canada for his book Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (1962).

The perennial philosophy, also referred to as perennialism and perennial wisdom, is a perspective in philosophy and spirituality that views all of the world's religious traditions as sharing a single, metaphysical truth or origin from which all esoteric and exoteric knowledge and doctrine has grown.

John Middleton Murry

John Middleton Murry was an English writer. He was a prolific author, producing more than 60 books and thousands of essays and reviews on literature, social issues, politics, and religion during his lifetime. A prominent critic, Murry is best remembered for his association with Katherine Mansfield, whom he married in 1918 as her second husband, for his friendship with D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot, and for his friendship with Frieda Lawrence. Following Mansfield's death, Murry edited her work.

Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks is a British literary critic and scholar. He is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University (US), co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford (UK) from 2004 to 2009. He is the immediate past-president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He is known as a champion of Victorian poetry; an enthusiast of Bob Dylan, whose lyrics he has analysed at book length; a trenchant reviewer of writers he considers pretentious ; and a warm reviewer of those he thinks humane or humorous. Hugh Kenner praised his "intent eloquence", and Geoffrey Hill his "unrivalled critical intelligence". W. H. Auden described Ricks as "exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding". John Carey calls him the "greatest living critic".

<i>The Perennial Philosophy</i>

The Perennial Philosophy is a comparative study of mysticism by the British writer and novelist Aldous Huxley. Its title derives from the theological tradition of perennial philosophy.

Literary modernism, or modernist literature, originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mainly in Europe and North America, and is characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional ways of writing, in both poetry and prose fiction writing. Modernism experimented with literary form and expression, as exemplified by Ezra Pound's maxim to "Make it new." This literary movement was driven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of their time. The horrors of the First World War saw the prevailing assumptions about society reassessed, and much modernist writing engages with the technological advances and societal changes of modernity moving into the 20th century.

J. W. N. Sullivan

John William Navin Sullivan (1886–1937) was a popular science writer and literary journalist, and the author of a study of Beethoven. He wrote some of the earliest non-technical accounts of Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, and was known personally to many important writers in London in the 1920s, including Aldous Huxley, John Middleton Murry, Wyndham Lewis, Aleister Crowley and T. S. Eliot.

<i>Men Like Gods</i>

Men Like Gods (1923) is a novel, referred to by the author as a "scientific fantasy", by English writer H. G. Wells. It features a utopia located in a parallel universe.

Literature of the 20th century refers to world literature produced during the 20th century.

<i>Sinister Street</i> 1913-14 novel by Compton Mackenzie

Sinister Street is a 1913–1914 novel by Compton Mackenzie. It is a kind of bildungsroman or novel about growing up, and concerns two children, Michael Fane and his sister Stella. Both of them are born out of wedlock, something which was frowned upon at the time, but from rich parents.

<i>The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna</i>

The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna is an English translation of the Bengali religious text Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita by Swami Nikhilananda. The text records conversations of Ramakrishna with his disciples, devotees and visitors, recorded by Mahendranath Gupta, who wrote the book under the pseudonym of "M." The first edition was published in 1942.

<i>Horizon</i> (magazine)

Horizon: A Review of Literature and Art was a literary magazine published in London, UK, between December 1939 and January 1950. Published every four weeks, it was edited by Cyril Connolly, who made it into a platform for a wide range of distinguished and emerging writers. It had a print run of 120 issues or 20 volumes.

<i>Science, Liberty and Peace</i>

Science, Liberty and Peace is an essay written by Aldous Huxley, published in 1946. The essay debates a wide range of subjects reflecting Huxley's views towards the direction of society at that time. He puts forward a number of predictions, many of which resonate far beyond the time when it was written. A consistent theme throughout the essay is Huxley's preference towards a decentralised society.

Peter Edgerly Firchow was an American literary scholar and educator. He wrote extensively on the relationship between British and German literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and he was a leading scholar of the British writer Aldous Huxley. He served as a faculty member in the University of Minnesota English Department from 1967 to 2008 and as director of the university's Comparative Literature program from 1972 to 1978.

Aldous Huxley bibliography List of works by Aldous Huxley

The following bibliography of Aldous Huxley provides a chronological list of the published works of English writer Aldous Huxley (1894–1963). It includes his fiction and non-fiction, both published during his lifetime and posthumously.

References

  1. Murray, Nicholas (2002). Aldous Huxley. St. Martin's Press. p. 451.
  2. Huxley, Aldous (1963). Literature and Science. Harper & Row. p. 70.
  3. Huxley, Aldous (1963). Literature and Science. Harper & Row. p. 117.
  4. Huxley, Aldous (1963). Literature and Science. Harper & Row. p. 62.
  5. Huxley, Aldous (1963). Literature and Science. Harper & Row. p. 115.
  6. Huxley, Aldous (1963). Literature and Science. Harper & Row. p. 59.
  7. Huxley, Aldous (1925). Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist. George H. Doran Company. p. 229.
  8. 1 2 Birnbaum, Milton (1971). Aldous Huxley's Quest for Values. University of Tennessee Press. p. 177.
  9. Huxley, Aldous (1963). Literature and Science. Harper & Row. p. 71.
  10. Huxley, Aldous (1963). Literature and Science. Harper & Row. p. 72.
  11. Sexton, James (2007). Selected Letters of Aldous Huxley. Ivan R. Dee. p. 353.
  12. Woodcock, George (1972). Dawn and the Darkest Hour: A Study of Aldous Huxley. The Viking Press. pp. 267–268.
  13. Watts, Harold H. (1969). Aldous Huxley. Twayne Publishers. pp. 85–86.
  14. 1 2 Huxley, Aldous (1963). Literature and Science. Harper & Row. p. 107.