Aldous Huxley's answer to Morton's dilemma

"Glenn Morton" <glennmorton@entouch.net> writes:
>But that is precisely the issue. If religion is merely a choice, of
>personal
>preference, due, say, to a piece of undigested cheese influencing us one
>way
>or another, then what we have is not grounded in anything except our own
>imaginations.

ED: Aldous Huxley also searched for the ground of meaning in the cosmos,
and arrived at what he called "the perennial philosophy," based on the
most universal teachings of goodness and holiness found in all the world's
religions. Reminds me of one of my own favorite book, ONENESS, a small
booklet I bought at Barnes and Noble that contains brief passages from all
the world's major religions on a range of similar spiritual and ethical
topics. I've also noted other books that demonstrate similarities between
all the world's religious teachings, like a book titled SAINTS, about
sainthood in all the world's major religions.
ALDOUS HUXLEY REBUTTS THE "PHILOSOPHY OF MEANINGLESSNESS" INHERENT IN
SCIENCE, WHICH MERELY MEASURES QUANTITIES AND JUGGLES NUMBERS, REDUCING
EVERYTHING TO SOULLESS MATHEMATICS.
"From the world we actually live in, the world that is given by our
senses, our intuitions of beauty and goodness, our emotions and impulses,
our moods and sentiments, the man of science abstracts a simplified
private universe of things possessing only... elements which can be
weighed, measured, numbered, or which lend themselves in any other way to
mathematical treatment. By using this technique of simplification and
abstraction, the scientist has succeeded to an astonishing degree in
understanding and dominating the physical environment. The success was
intoxicating and, with an illogicality which, in the circmstances, was
doubtless pardonable, many scientists and philosophers came to imagine
that this useful abstraction from reality was reality itself. Reality as
actually experienced contains intuitions of value and significance,
contain love, beauty, mystical ecstasy, intimations of godhead. Science
did not and still does not possess intellectual instruments with which to
deal with thses aspects of reality. Consquently it ignored them and
concentrated its attention upon such aspects of the world as it could deal
with by mean of arithmetic, geometry and the various branches of higher
mathematics. Our conviction that the world is meaningless lend itself very
effectively to furthering the ends of erotic or political passion; in part
to a genuine intellectual error -- the error of identifying the world of
science, a world from which all meaning and value has been deliberately
excluded, with ultimate reality.
"[The philosopher, Hume's, erroneous attitude was typical] Hume wrote, 'If
we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for
instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstracts reasoning concerning
quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning
concerning matter of fact or evidence? No. Commit it then to the flame;
for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.' Hume mentions only
divinity and school metaphysics; but his argument would apply just as
cogently to poetry, music, painting, sculpture and all ethical and
religious teaching. Hamlet contains no abstract reasoning concerning
quantity or number and no experimental reason concerning evidence; nor
does the Hamerklavier Sonata, nor Donatello's David, nor the Tao Te Ching
[book of Chinese philosophy and wisdom], nor the Following of Christ.
Commit them therefore to the flames: for they can contain nothing but
sophistry and illusion.
"We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early
successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after... The contents
of literature, art, music -- even in some measure of divinity and school
metaphysics -- are not sophistry and illusion, but simply those elements
of experience which scientists chose to leave out of account, for the good
reason that they had no intellectual methods for dealing with them. In the
arts, in philosophy, in religion, men are trying -- to describe and
explain the non-measureable, purely qualitative aspects of reality... [p.
308-310]
"In recent years, many men of science have come to realize that the
scientific picture of the world is a partial one -- the product of their
special competence in mathematics and their special incompetence to deal
systematically with aesthetic and moral values, religous experiences and
intuitions of significance. Unhappily, novel ideas become acceptable to
the less intelligent members of society only with a very considerable
time-lag. Sixty or seventy years ago the majority of scientists believed
-- and the belief caused them considerable distress -- that the product of
their special incompetence was identical with reality as a whole. Today
this belief has begun to give way, in scientific circles, to a different
and obviously truer conception of the relation between science and total
experience. The masses on the contrary, have just reached the point where
the ancestors of today's scientists were standing two generations back.
They are convinced that the scientific picture of an arbitrary abstraction
from reality is a picture of reality as a whole and that therefore the
world is without meaning or value. But nobody likes living in such a
world. To satisfy their hunger for meaning and value, they turn to such
doctrines as nationalism, fascism and revolutionary communism.
Philosophically and scientifically, these doctrines are absurd; but for
the masses in every community, they have this great merit: they atytribute
the meaning and value that have been taken away from the world as a whole
to the particular part of the world in which the believers happen to be
living.
"These last considerations raise an important question, which must now be
considered in some detail. Does the world as a whole possess the value and
meaning that we constatntly attribute to certain parts of it (such as
human beings and their works); and, if so, what is thenature of that value
and meaning? This is a question which, a few years ago, I should not even
have posed. For, like so many of my contemporaries, I took it for granted
that there was no meaning. This was partly due to the fact that I shared
the common belief that the scientific picture of an abstraction from
reality was a true picture of reality as a whole; partly also to other,
non-intellectual reasons. I had motives for not wanting the world to have
a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any
difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption.
"Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want
to know. It is our will that decides how and upon what subjects we shall
use our intelligence. Those who detect no meaning in the world generally
do so because, for one reason or another, it suits their books that the
world should be meaningless." [p. 311-312]
"No philosophy is completely disinterested. The pure love of truth is
always mingle to some extent with the need, consciously or unconsciously
felt by even the noblest and the most intelligent philosophers, to justify
a given form of personal or social behavior, to rationalize the
traditional prejudices of a given class or community. The philosopher who
finds meaning in the world is concerned, not only to elucidate that
meaning, but also to prove that is it most clearly expressed in some
established religion, some accepted code of morals. The philosopher who
find no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem
in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is not valid
reason why her personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his
friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they
find most advantageous to themselves. The voluntary, as opposed to the
intellectual, reasons for holding the doctrines of materialism, for
examples, may be predominantly erotic, as they were in the case of
Lamettrie (see his lyrical account of the pleasures of the bed in La
Volupte and at the end of L'Homme Machine ['The Human Machine,' a work of
materialist philosophy]), or predominantly political, as they were in the
case of Karl Marx. The desire to justify a particular form of political
organization and, in some cases, of a personal will to power has played an
equally large part in the formulation of philosophies postulating the
existence of meaning in the world. Christian philosophers have found no
difficulty in justifying imperialism, war, the capitalistic system, the
use of torture, the censorship of the press, and ecclesiastical tyrannies
of every sort from the tyranny of Rome to the tyrannies of [Calvin's]
Geneva and [Puritan] New England. In all cases they have shown that the
meaning of the world was such as to be compatibel with, or actually most
completely expressed by, the iniquities I have mentioned above --
iniquities which happened, of course, to serve the personal or sectarian
interests of the philosophiers concerned. In due course, these arose
philosophers who denied not only the right of Christian special pleaders
to justify iniquity by an appeal to the meaning of the world, but even
their right to find any such meaning whatsoever. In the circumstances, the
fact was not surprising. One unscrupulous distortion of the truth tends to
beget other and opposite distortions. Passions may be satisfied in the
process; but the disinterested love of knowledge suffers eclipse. [p.
314-316]
"For myself as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of
meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The
liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain
political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of
morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our
sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because
it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way
they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the
world. There was an admirably simple method of confuting these people and
at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt:
we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever... The men of the
new Enlightenment, which occurred in the middle years of the nineteenth
century, once again used meaninglessness as a weapon against the
[conservative] reactionaries. The Victorian passion for respectability
was, however, so great that, during the period when they were formulated,
neither Positivism nor Darwinism was used as a justification for sexual
indulgence. [p. 316-317]
--------------------
ALDOUS HUXLEY ON FAITH AND ETHICS
"There are some... who believe that no desirable 'change of heart' can be
brought about without supernatural aid. There must be, they say, a return
to religion. (Unhappily, they cannot agree on the religion to which the
return should be made.)" [p. 2]
"In practice, Christianity, like Hinduism or Buddhism, is not one
religion, but several religions, adapted to the needs of different types
of human beings. A Christian church in Southern Spain, or Mexico, or
Sicily is singularly like a Hindu temple. The eye is delighted by the same
gaudy colors, the same tripe-like decorations, the same gesticulating
statues; the nose inhales the same intoxicating smells; the ear and, along
with it, the understanding, are lulled by the drone of the same
incomprehensible incantations [in the old Catholic Latin mass tradition],
roused by the same loud, impressive music.
"At the other end of the scale, consider the chapel of a Cistercian
monastery and the meditation hall of a community of Zen Buddhists. They
are equally bare; aids to devotion (in other words fetters holding back
the soul from enlightenment) are conspicuously absent from either
building. Here are two distinct religions for two distinct kinds of human
beings." [p. 262-263]
"In Christianity bhakti [or, loving devotion] towards a personal being has
always been the most popular form of religious practice. Up to the time of
the [Catholic] Counter-Reformation, however, the way of knowledge
("mystical knowledge" as it is called in Chrstian language) was accorded
an honorable place beside the way of devotion. From the middle of the
sixteenth century onwards the way of knowledge came to be neglected and
even condemned. We are told by Dom John Chapman that "Mercurian, who was
general of the society (of Jesus) from 1573 to 1580, forbade the use of
the works of Tauler, Ruysbroek, Suso, Harphius, St. Gertrude, and St.
Mechtilde." Every effort was made by the [Catholic] Counter-Reformers to
heighten the worshipper's devotion to a personal divinity. The literary
content of Baroque art is hysterical, almost epileptic, in the violence of
its emotionality. It even becomes necessary to call in physiology as an
aid to feeling. The ecstasies of the saints are represented by
seventeenth-century artists as being frankly sexual. Seventeenth-century
drapery writhes like so much tripe. In the equivocal personage of Margaret
Mary Alacocque, seventeenth-century piety pours over a bleeding and
palpitating heart. From this orgy of emotionalism and sensationalism
Catholic Christianity seems never completely to have recovered." [p.
281-282]
"First Shakespeare sonnets seem meaningless; first Bach fugues, a bore;
first differential equations, sheer torture. But training changes the
nature of our spiritual experiences. In due course, contact with an
obscurely beautiful poem, an elaborate piece of [musical] counterpoint or
of mathematical reasoning, causes us to feel direct intuitions of beauty
and significance. It is the same in the moral world. A man who has trained
himself in goodness come to have certain direct intuitions about
character, about the relations between human beings, about his own
position in the world -- intuitions that are quite different from the
intuitions of the average sensual man... [p. 333]
"The ideal of non-attachment has been formulated and systematically
preached again and again in the course of the last three thousand years.
We find it (along with everything else) in Hinduism. It is at the very
heart of the teachings of the Buddha. For Chinese readers the doctrine is
formulated by Lao Tsu. A little later, in Greece, the ideal of
non-attachment is proclaimed, albeit with a certain, pharisaic
priggishness, by the Stoics. The Gospel of Jesus is essentially a gospel
of non-attachment to "the things of this world," and of attachment to God.
Whatever may have been the aberrations of organized Christianity -- and
they range from extravagant asceticism to the most brutally cynical forms
of realpolitik -- there has been no lack of Christian philosophers to
reaffirm the ideal of non-attachment. Here is John Tauler, for example,
telling us that 'freedom is complete purity and detachment which seeketh
the Eternal...' Here is the author of "The Imitation of Christ," who bids
us 'pass through many cares as though without care; not after the manner
of a sluggard, but by a certain prerogative of a free mind, which does not
cleave with inordinate affection to any creature.'" [p. 5, 6]
"...as knowledge, sensibility and non-attachment increase, the contents of
the judgments of value passed even by men belonging to dissimilar
cultures, tend to approximate. The ethical doctrines taught in the Tao Te
Ching, by Buddha and his followers, in the Sermon on the Mount, and by the
best of the Christian saints, are not dissimilar." [p. 327]
--------------------
ALDOUS HUXLEY ON THE INFLUENCE OF THE WORST ASPECTS OF THE BIBLE ON THE
HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY
"Examples of reversion to barbarism through mere ignorance are unhappily
abundant in the history of Christianity. The early Christians made the
enormous mistake of burdening themselves with the Old Testament, which
contains, along with much fine poetry and sound morality the history of
the cruelties and treacheries of a Bronze-Age people, fighting for a place
in the sun under the protection of its anthropomorphic tribal deity...
Those whom it suited to be ignorant and, along with them, the innocent and
uneducated could find in this treasure-house of barbarous stupidity
justifications for every crime and folly. Texts to justify such
abominations as religious wars, the persecution of heretics... could be
found in the sacred books and were in fact used again and again throughout
the whole history of the Christian Church. [p. 328]
"In this remarkable compendium of Bronze-Age literature, God is personal
to the point of being almost sub-human. Too often the believer has felt
justified in giving way to his worst passions by the reflection that, in
doing so, he is basing his conduct on that of a God who feels jealousy and
hatred... and behaves in general like a particularly ferocious oriental
tyrant. The frequency with which men have identified the prompting of
their own passions with the voice of an all too personal God is really
appalling." [p. 276-277]
"According to his very inadequate biographers, Jesus of Nazareth was never
preoccupied with philosophy, art, music, or science and ignored almost
completely the problems of politics, economics and sexual relations. It is
also recorded of him that he blasted a fig tree for not bearing fruit out
of season, that he scourged the shopkeepers in the temple precincts and
caused a herd of swine to drown. Scrupulous devotion to and imitation of
the person of Jesus have resulted only too frequently in a fatal tendency,
on the part of earnest Christians, to despise artistic creation and
philosophic thought; to disparage the inquiring intellect, to evade all
long-range, large-scale problems of politics and economics, and to believe
themsevles justified in displaying anger, or as they would doubtless
prefer to call it, 'righteous indignation.'" [p. 275-276]

>
>
Received on Fri Oct 22 14:04:03 2004