Aldous Huxley

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A boy of sixteen at Eton lost most of his sight to a sudden inflammation of the cornea — keratitis punctata, in the winter of 1911 — and spent some eighteen months very nearly blind, learning Braille and reading the world at arm’s length. Aldous Huxley never recovered full vision, and the long discipline of looking past the body’s failures became, in a sense, the subject he returned to for the rest of his life: how much the apparatus of perception leaves out, and what might be glimpsed if it let more through. The grandson of the biologist T. H. Huxley and grand-nephew of the poet Matthew Arnold, born 26 July 1894 at Godalming in Surrey, he carried both the family’s scientific rigor and its literary command into a career that began as social satire and ended as the twentieth century’s most widely read defense of the mystical claim.

The satirist

After Eton and Balliol College, Oxford — where he read English and graduated in 1916 — Huxley moved through the orbit of Lady Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington Manor, the wartime gathering-point of Bloomsbury’s writers and conscientious objectors. His first novels turned that world into comedy. Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925), and the more ambitious Point Counter Point (1928) established him as the cool, encyclopedic anatomist of his own educated class: a writer who knew everything and believed, for a time, in almost nothing. The reputation that still precedes him belongs to this period. Brave New World (1932), written in four months, projected the managerial optimism of his age forward into a society engineered for frictionless contentment — pleasure as the instrument of control, the soma ration dispensed to keep the population from wanting anything it could not be given. The book’s force lies in its refusal of the obvious dystopian register: nobody in the World State suffers, and that is the horror.

A shift was already under way. Eyeless in Gaza (1936) closes with its protagonist groping toward a contemplative discipline, and through his friendship with the writer and broadcaster Gerald Heard, Huxley moved into the pacifism of the Peace Pledge Union and the nonfiction of Ends and Means (1937), where the question of how to live well became, for the first time in his work, inseparable from the question of what is ultimately real. The detachment that had made him a brilliant satirist began to look to him like a deficiency. The man who had once seemed to believe in nothing was working his way toward a position that demanded everything.

California and the turn

In 1937 Huxley left England with his first wife Maria, their son Matthew, and Heard, ostensibly for a lecture tour; he settled in southern California and stayed, supporting himself in part by screenwriting in Hollywood. Two years later he came into the circle of the Vedanta Society of Southern California and its head, Swami Prabhavananda — a monk of the Ramakrishna Order, the institutional heir to the modernizing Hindu reform that Swami Vivekananda had carried to the West after the 1893 Chicago Parliament of Religions, and behind him the figure of Ramakrishna himself. The Vedanta that reached Huxley was thus already a modern formation, reshaped at its point of departure by reform movements and by Western universalist categories; he received it not as exotic import but as confirmation of an intuition he had been circling for a decade.

He became a regular contributor to the society’s magazine, Vedanta and the West, and supplied the introduction to the translation of the Bhagavad Gita that Prabhavananda produced with the novelist Christopher Isherwood, published in Hollywood in 1944 as The Song of God: Bhagavad-Gita — a rendering that would go on to sell more than a million copies and become, for a generation of English readers, the Gita. (Huxley’s contribution was the framing essay, not the translation itself.) Out of the same milieu, and out of the wartime experiment of Trabuco College, the contemplative community Heard founded in 1942 in the hills of Orange County, came the book most bound to his name in this connection.

The California decades were not given over to mysticism alone. Huxley kept up an extraordinary output of essays — on art, history, ecology, drugs, education, and the politics of conditioning — and his curiosity ranged with a polymath’s appetite. His near-blindness produced The Art of Seeing (1942), an account of the visual re-training he had undertaken under the Bates method, a book his ophthalmologist contemporaries disputed but which fits the larger pattern of his attention to how perception can be widened. The Devils of Loudun (1952) reconstructed a seventeenth-century French case of mass possession and judicial murder, anatomizing the pathologies of self-transcendence — the downward and the sideways routes out of the isolated ego, drugs and crowds and cruelty, set against the upward route of the contemplative. Brave New World Revisited (1958) returned to his own dystopia as a work of social criticism, arguing that the engineered contentment he had imagined was arriving faster than he had feared, by way of advertising, propaganda, and pharmacology rather than the test-tube.

The Perennial Philosophy

The Perennial Philosophy (1945) is an anthology with a thesis. Huxley gathered passages from the mystical literature of many traditions — Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, Taoist, and the apophatic edge of each — arranged them under common headings such as the Ground, self-knowledge, charity, and silence, and knit them together with his own lucid commentary. The governing claim, set out in his introduction, has three layers: a metaphysic that finds a divine Reality underlying the world of things and minds; a psychology that finds in the human person something akin to, or identical with, that Reality; and an ethic that locates the human end in the direct knowledge of this immanent and transcendent Ground.

The idea was not his invention. The phrase philosophia perennis was coined in 1540 by the Vatican librarian Agostino Steuco, as Catholic apologetics, and the underlying intuition of a single recurring wisdom reaches back through the Renaissance prisca theologia of Ficino and Pico to late-antique Platonism — a genealogy treated in full under traditionalism and perennialism. Huxley credited the term to Leibniz, an attribution scholarship has shown to be mistaken and which has been quietly repeated ever since. What he supplied was not originality but reach: a wide readership and a sober, persuasive prose that presented the comparison of mystics across cultures as a serious intellectual question rather than as devotional enthusiasm.

His version diverges sharply from the other great twentieth-century reformulation. Where the Traditionalist school of René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon built an impersonal, doctrinal, anti-modern metaphysics resting on initiation and the authority of revealed forms, Huxley placed the psychology at the center — the experiential layer, the thing that could be reported, examined, and compared. This puts him closer to William James and The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) than to Schuon’s system, and it explains the Traditionalists’ suspicion of him; the art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy judged the 1945 anthology deracinated, charging that Huxley had taken from many doctrines without regard for their context. The figures Huxley returned to most often — Meister Eckhart above all, then the Cloud of Unknowing, John of the Cross, the Buddhist sutras, the Gita — are precisely those whose apophatic vocabulary most resembles Neoplatonism, which is where the perennialist case is strongest and where its critics say the resemblance is partly produced by the framework that claims to discover it.

The doors of perception

In the 1950s his attention turned from the texts of mysticism to its chemistry. On 4 May 1953, in Los Angeles, Huxley took four-tenths of a gram of mescaline under the supervision of the British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond — who would later coin the word for this class of substances in a verse exchanged with him — and recorded the experience in The Doors of Perception (1954). The title is William Blake’s, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: the line about the doors of perception being cleansed so that everything would appear as it is, infinite.

The book’s central proposal is the reducing valve. Borrowing from the philosopher C. D. Broad and behind him Henri Bergson, Huxley argued that the brain and nervous system function not to produce consciousness but to limit it — to filter the totality he called Mind at Large down to the trickle of awareness needed for biological survival. Certain substances, he held, relax the valve, and the flood that follows resembles the visionary fields reported by mystics. He pressed the comparison carefully, hedging it at every turn and distinguishing the gratuitous grace of a chemically opened door from the earned vision of contemplative discipline. The companion volume, Heaven and Hell (1956), extended the argument toward the iconography of visionary art, the jeweled paradises and infernal landscapes of the world’s religious imagination, and toward what he called the antipodes of the mind, the remote regions of consciousness he held were reachable by fasting, breathing disciplines, hypnosis, and the gemlike fields of mescaline alike.

Huxley stood at the head of a current he could not finally govern. He corresponded with the psychiatrist who had given him mescaline, lent his prestige to the early scientific study of these substances, and in his last years crossed paths with the Harvard researchers — among them a young psychologist whose name would soon become a byword for the counterculture — whose evangelism for mass distribution he regarded with patrician unease. He wanted the experience kept rare, guided, and serious, a sacrament for the few rather than a recreation for the many; the decade that followed his death took the opposite path, and read The Doors of Perception as a permission slip its author had been at pains not to write. Yet the continuity he proposed between drug-induced states and the experience of the saints remains contested — the contemplative traditions themselves rarely equated the two, and whether a relaxed filter and a purified soul arrive at the same place is exactly the point in dispute — and the book’s influence on the psychedelic culture of the following decade ran well past anything its author intended.

Island and the last trip

His final novel, Island (1962), is the deliberate inverse of Brave New World. Where the earlier book used a pleasure-drug to pacify, the imagined society of Pala uses a visionary moksha-medicine within a careful structure of attention and preparation; mynah birds trained to call out the single word Attention punctuate a culture organized around Buddhism, ecological restraint, and contemplative practice. It is a utopia, and a fragile one — the island is overrun in the closing pages — and Huxley meant it as the positive statement his early satire had withheld. A fire on 12 May 1961 had destroyed his Bel Air house and most of his manuscripts and library; the typescript of Island was among the few things he carried out.

Huxley died at his Los Angeles home on 22 November 1963 of laryngeal cancer, unable to speak in his last hours. On a writing tablet he asked his second wife, Laura Archera Huxley, for LSD; she gave him the requested dose and a second some hours later, and he died in the late afternoon. The day’s news was wholly occupied by the assassination of President Kennedy that same afternoon in Dallas, and Huxley’s death passed almost unremarked.

Scholarship and reception

The standard life is Sybille Bedford’s two-volume Aldous Huxley: A Biography (1973–74), written by a friend with access to the surviving papers; Dana Sawyer’s Aldous Huxley: A Biography (2002) is the most useful single-volume treatment and is especially good on the Vedanta years. His place within the perennialist current is mapped most rigorously by Mark Sedgwick’s Against the Modern World (Oxford, 2004), the standard external history of twentieth-century Traditionalism, which sets Huxley’s experiential, psychological perennialism beside the doctrinal systems of Guénon and Schuon and explains why the two strands distrusted each other. The history of the phrase itself — that philosophia perennis is Steuco’s 1540 coinage and not Leibniz’s, the error Huxley repeated — was established definitively by Charles B. Schmitt in his foundational 1966 study in the Journal of the History of Ideas. The reception of Vedanta in the West, the channel through which Huxley received the Gita and the Ramakrishna tradition, is treated by Wilhelm Halbfass’s India and Europe (1988) and Carl Jackson’s Vedanta for the West (1994). Huxley’s own essay on the goal of contemplation, “Knowledge and Understanding,” survives in the Vedanta Society of Southern California’s archive of his contributions to Vedanta and the West.

The Prabhavananda–Isherwood Gita to which Huxley wrote his introduction belongs to a crowded field of English renderings; the earlier translations that shaped the text’s Anglophone reception — Edwin Arnold’s poetic Song Celestial (1885) among them — are held in the library.

Read across the whole arc, Huxley is best understood not as an original metaphysician but as a synthesizer and a bridge: the writer who carried the vocabulary of Vedanta, Buddhism, and Christian mysticism into mid-century literary culture, and who made the comparison of religious and chemically induced experience a public question for the first time. The perennialist framework he popularized remains disputed — admired for its breadth and faulted for flattening real differences between traditions — and it is largely through his clear, persuasive prose that the debate reached the general reader at all.

→ In the library: The Song Celestial, or Bhagavad-Gîtâ

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