Brave new worldview

Talking with Aldous Huxley author Dana Sawyer

By Chris Thompson

Aldous Huxley: A Biography By Dana Sawyer, Crossroad Publishing Co., New York. 208 pages. $19.95.

Dana Sawyer will be at Casco Bay Books, in Portland, for a book signing, Oct. 17. Call (207) 541-3842.

PORTRAIT OF ALDOUS HUXLEY: by Flash Jinno-Porter, 2001.

Although primarily known by popular audiences for his prescient 1931 novel Brave New World, this book was only one of about 50 of Aldous Huxley’s published works. In an effort to introduce the range and complexity of Huxley’s thought to contemporary audiences, Dana Sawyer has undertaken what, though it is billed as a biography, is in fact a genealogy of Huxley’s full literary and philosophical output.

A native Mainer and Portland resident, Sawyer is an Associate Professor of philosophy and religion at the Maine College of Art and Adjunct Professor of Asian religions at the Bangor Theological Seminary. As his Aldous Huxley: A Biography hits the stands, the Phoenix caught up with Sawyer to talk about the legacy of Huxley’s life and work:

 

Phoenix: What are the most relevant contributions of Huxley’s work, and the notion of the “perennial philosophy” in particular, for you personally?

Sawyer: Huxley questioned most of the primary axioms of our society and culture. For instance, he argued against our addiction to “progress” — pointing out that we believe in it out of habit. He argued that we can only claim to be progressing if we can clearly articulate where it is we’re going.

Huxley believed in what Meister Eckhart called the “Divine Ground” of being — as do Buddhists and Hindus, or, in the West, people like Rudolph Steiner and the New England Transcendentalists like Thoreau and Emerson. He believed that the most powerful way to improve society was not through programs and top-down mandates but through the improvement of the individual. When individuals get clearer on their direct connection with all things, that clarity brings them peace and they then spread it to society through their actions.

 

Q: What I find suggestive in your study is the vision of Huxley that your genuinely interdisciplinary approach makes available: The figure of the philosopher who is able, without watering down his work or losing the sharpness of his inquiries, to become a truly public intellectual. It is nearly 40 years since Huxley’s death; is this figure of the public intellectual still viable?

A: Definitely. The public intellectual gives us the big picture. They look across the disciplines and between them — in the blind spots. They try to cut to the chase and tell us what we need to pay attention to. It’s an invaluable resource for society. I think of people like Bill McKibben and Ed Abbey who wake up our environmental conscience; people like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn who wake up our social conscience; Ken Wilbur who plugs us into a broad-minded view of spirituality. We need these people — and I’d put Huxley at the top of the list, even today.

 

Q: The artist Yves Klein once suggested that each ought “to work for himself in order to return to real life, a life in which thinking man is no longer the center of the universe, but the universe the center of the man.” This appears to connect with Huxley’s vision of humanism, in which, interestingly, the human is “an emergent part” of nature.

A: Huxley would love Klein’s statement. He believed that behind our masks and our cultural conditioning there is a self that is inseparable from being itself — from what underlies nature and all things in it. When we touch this ground, when we directly experience it, we become more in touch with ourselves and our connection to the world. Some might think this sounds like wishy-washy mysticism, but Huxley was from a famous scientific family and he argues that his ideas, though uncommon, are deeply practical. A society is only as awake and humane as the individuals in the society are awake and humane. He gives practical advice about how to wake yourself up.

Huxley had made all of the main points that we’re hearing today from environmentalists before 1950 — read Science, Liberty, and Peace from 1946. What he adds beyond this is a grounding philosophy and system of ethics for these concerns — the kind of thing we’re seeing among Buddhist environmentalists today, like Gary Snyder, and similar in viewpoint, clearly and rationally laid out. But Huxley was not anti-technology. He points out that if we tried to abandon our technology half the human population would die very quickly. His point is that we must remember that technology is for us, and that we are not to enslave ourselves to it.

 

Q: In your book, you note that Huxley encouraged his readers “to avoid the idolatries of nationalism and materialism.” Where do you see the impact of Huxley’s philosophy with respect to the current political climate?

A: I think that Huxley sees the individual as the critical link. We so often forget that society doesn’t exist if individuals don’t exist. He wants to activate the individual. He believes that if they work on increasing their awareness of issues, and increasing their awareness and compassion in general, then they will be motivated as social and political activists. His warnings against centralization of political and economic power ring true in this age of globalization. Those benefiting from the status quo always have the least motivation to change it, so change isn’t going to come from the top down. It’s going to come from the rest of us, or it’s not going to come.

Chris Thompson teaches at the Maine College of Art. He can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com.