Literature and Science

by Aldous Huxley

Book description from the first-edition (1963) dust This is a book about one of the most important problems of our time—the problem of How to Make the Best of Both Worlds, the world of science on the one hand and, on the other, the world of total human experience, public and subjective, individual and cultural. This world of total human experience is the world that is (or at least ought to be) reflected and molded by the arts, above all by the art of literature."What is the function of literature," Mr. Huxley asks, "what its psychology, what the nature of literary language? And how do its function, psychology and language differ from those of science? What in the past has been the relationship between literature and science? What is it now? What might it be in the future? And what would it be profitable, artistically speaking, for a twentieth-century man of letters to do about twentieth-century science?"Ours is the Age of Science; but from a study of the best contemporary literature one would find it difficult to infer this most obvious of facts. Contemporary poetry, drama and fiction contain remarkably few references to contemporary science—few references even to the metaphysical and ethical problems which contemporary science has raised. That this state of affairs should somehow be remedied is the theme of every recent discussion of "the Two Cultures." unfortunately most of these discussions have been carried on in abstract terms and with almost no citations of case histories, no references to the concrete problems of literary and scientific writing, no illustrative examples.Mr. Huxley has approached the subject in a different way. He deals with specific questions in the fields of immediate experience, of conceptualization, of philosophical interpretation and of verbal expression; and he illustrates these wide-ranging themes with copious quotations, drawn from a great variety of sources. He analyzes the nature of literary language and contrasts its many-meaninged richness with the simplified and jargonized language of science. He shows how the poets of earlier centuries made use of the scientific knowledge available to them. He gives examples of the ways in which modern science has modified and added to the traditional raw materials of literature. And he concludes with a speculative discussion of the ways in which future men of letters may work up the raw materials of brand new fact and revolutionary hypothesis provided by science, transfiguring them into a new kind of literature, capable of expression and at the same time coordinating and giving significance to the totality of an ever-widening human experience.

Genres: Philosophy, Science, Nonfiction, Essays, Literature, Unfinished, Writing

118 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including non-fiction works, as well as essays, narratives, and poems.
Born into the prominent Huxley family, he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a degree in English literature. Early in his career, he published short stories and poetry and edited the literary magazine Oxford Poetry, before going on to publish travel writing, satire, and screenplays. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times, and was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.
Huxley was a pacifist. He grew interested in philosophical mysticism, as well as universalism, addressing these subjects in his works such as The Perennial Philosophy (1945), which illustrates commonalities between Western and Eastern mysticism, and The Doors of Perception (1954), which interprets his own psychedelic experience with mescaline. In his most famous novel Brave New World (1932) and his final novel Island (1962), he presented his visions of dystopia and utopia, respectively.

Reviews

[Manuel Alfonseca · Rating 3 out of 5]

ENGLISH: In this little book, Huxley studies the relationship between literature and science, two opposite ways in which man tries to express his world view. The literary language expresses his most private experiences, and the scientific language those most public (or least private).

There's one thing I didn't like: The book is full of quotes, especially poetic, but Huxley often doesn't bother to point out which work or author they are taken from. I suppose he assumes that everyone is going to recognize them. Perhaps this assumption was correct in its day, but today it is no longer correct, as literary knowledge has almost disappeared from non-specialised teaching. In addition to this, what is easily recognizable for a fellow countryman, may not be for people from other countries, using other languages.

A quote from chapter 23: We live in an Age of Pure Science and Analytical Philosophy that is, at the same time, and even more characteristically, an Age of Nationalistic Idolatry, Organized Lying and Non-Stop Distractions... Many writers have... made the wrong choice. Again and again, genius and reputation have been made available to Power, Vested Interest, and Rationalized Unreason.

ESPAÑOL: En este librito, Huxley estudia la relación entre literatura y ciencia, dos modos opuestos con los que el hombre trata de expresar su visión del mundo. El lenguaje literario para sus experiencias más privadas, y el científico para las más públicas (o las menos privadas).

Hay un detalle que no me ha gustado: el libro está lleno de citas, especialmente poéticas, pero a menudo Huxley no se molesta en señalar de qué obra o de qué autor están sacadas. Supongo que da por supuesto que todo el mundo va a reconocerlas. Quizá esta suposición fuese correcta en su día, pero hoy ya no lo es, pues el conocimiento literario casi ha desaparecido de la enseñanza no especializada. Además de que, lo que es fácilmente reconocible para un compatriota, puede no serlo para las personas que proceden de otros países y usan otras lenguas.

Una cita del capítulo 23: Vivimos en una Edad de Ciencia Pura y Filosofía Analítica que es, al mismo tiempo, una Edad de Idolatría Nacionalista, Mentira Organizada e Incesantes Distracciones… Muchos escritores… han elegido erróneamente. Una y otra vez el genio y la reputación se han puesto a disposición del Poder, el Interés Creado y la Sin-Razón Racionalizada.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Thought is crude, matter unimaginably subtle. Words are few and can only be arranged in certain conventionally fixed ways; the counterpoint of unique events is infinitely wide and their succession indefinitely long. That the purified language of science, or even the richer purified language of literature should ever be adequate to the givenness of the world and of our experience is in the very nature of things, impossible. Cheerfully accepting the fact, let us advance together, men of letters and men of science, further and further into the every-expanding regions of the unknown."

Thus ends optimistically Huxley's last published work. He was gone two months later, dying on the very day Kennedy was assassinated, November 22, 1963. Few noticed Huxley's passing, having been overshadowed by Kennedy's, but Huxley's own shadow has proven much more enduring.

How appropriate that the last quote, above, perfectly captures Huxley's entire literary life, one where he strove continually to reconcile science with art. He had a fearsome, intellectual ancestry, as is well known, which often embarrassed him and drove him to fight his inherited snobbery with deliberate honesty and fairness.

Yet, he was an elite, grandly so, during a time when to be one was to be looked up to, notwithstanding McCarthyism and related contemporaneous anti-intellectual terrors. O, how much the times have changed: the later Reagans and Thatchers viscously elevated stupidity and we are well on our way to what Huxley feared most, his mind-numbing Brave New World.

Should we be reading an old work such as Literature And Science today? Haven't we moved on? Doesn't each generation of thinkers figure it all out for themselves? Aren't the profound thoughts of long-gone writers just irrelevant relics of a uninformed past? At the risk of being labelled old-fashioned, I will simply say that since we have forgotten how to think today, and are no longer taught how to do so—the political legacy of those "Reagans"—our only recourse is to read from the past. We have nearly reached that somaticized Brave New World ourselves.

[Thomas Fisher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Huxley takes a fascinating look at why “men of letters” don’t write about science.

[Eduardo Irujo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Libro ameno sobre un tema candente en el siglo xx pero que actualmente ha desaparecido del debate. La formación humanista de los científicos y viceversa.

[Amun (Mohamed Elbadwihi) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lightly delightful :-)

[Efe · Rating 2 out of 5]

Huxley en sevdiğim yazarlardan biri ama Edebiyat ve Bilim tam bir karmaşa. İsminden edebiyat ve bilim arasındaki ilişkiyi inceleyeceği izlenimine kapılıyorsunuz ama ya ben doğru dürüst okumayı beceremedim ya da kitapta böyle bir şey yok. Evet, ilk kısımda bir bilim adamı ile sanatçının dili farklı yollardan nasıl kullanacağı (ya da saflaştıracağı) üzerinde duruluyor ama o kadar, gerisi birbirinden kopuk incelemelerden ibaret.

Bir paragraf Shakespeare'in sonelerinden satırlar ile başlıyor, hemen altında Freud eleştirisi okuyoruz, konu birden astrofiziğe geliyor, onlarca yazar ve akım ismi içinde kaybolup gidiyoruz.

Bilmiyorum, belki de beni aşmıştır bu kitap.

[Mike Zickar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting tour of Huxley's mind through this short book. It made me appreciate Huxley's deep reading in both science and of course literature.

I felt like the book though loses its main thesis throughout much of the work, the exploration of the link between literature and science.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

may not keep it forever, but it got better and better as it neared the last few essays. was written in the early 60's, after all, and physics continues to change at a stunning pace.

I rarely agree with everything he says, but he always has his sights on something sensible to explain his point of view.

[Ross · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting view, but unfortunately both science and literature have moved on since it was written. A good deal to think about, however.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting and chimes with a number of things I've been thinking about for a while.

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before the Scientific Revolution, the theories of Greeks like Gallen, Aristotle and Plato held sway. They believed in things like spontaneous generation (maggots from rotten food rather than larvae) and geocentrism, with the sun and the other “wandering stars” orbiting us. There was also the humeral theory, that we were ruled by various kinds of bile, and that a substance called phlogiston was produced when things burned.
Time proved all of these pseudoscientific ideas wrong, and yet, in doing so, it may have disenchanted the world. That is definitely the supposition of the Romantics, whose chief avatar, William Blake, loathed Sir Isaac Newton with the intensity of a thousand suns.
Can poetry and metaphor—frankly magic—still exist in a world that has been revealed to itself and (arguably) demystified by science? What is the purpose of the writer in such a world? Is their entire field under assault, much as the emergence of the photograph rendered naturalistic painting (arguably) obsolete?
This is the subject to which author Aldous Huxley turns his pen, his keen eye, and that massive brain in Literature and Science. It’s partly didactic, many times full of wild rhetorical flourishes, and the text is peppered throughout with untranslated German and French. In most instances where this is done it’s safe to assume the author is just showing off. Here, Huxley probably assumes that we, the readers, are just as erudite as he, an assumption which, in my case, is definitely wide of the mark. Ich kann Deutsche ohne Probleme aber I can’t even pronounce French words, let alone spreche die Sprache.
Still, Huxley not only possesses the genius’s ability to stun you with the complexity of his thought and range of his knowledge. He also has the genius’s great knack for distillation, making the most complex and abstract of concepts apprehensible and concrete. It’s a fairly short book, broken up into small chapters, which makes it that much easier to digest in small doses.
Read a couple pages, ruminate, then take a break. Then return to the text and sample a couple more pages. Slowly you’ll gain knowledge, and even a little bit of wisdom, much like a patient student getting pearls doled out to them by an old master. Highest recommendation, for those interested in how science and literature not only intersect, but become intertwined into one whole that is both material and metaphysical.

[Vincent Hernot · Rating 3 out of 5]

SOme very interesting chapters in there, especially the first ones.
Some repetition, some stuff a bit obscure, or perhaps not that much relevant anymore in the sense that other problems have been raised in Literature since.
But still, has some cool things to say.

[die Marie van O · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is indeed a great essay on the key differences between the literary world and the scientific one, the issue is when he starts to circle around the same concept and ideas which makes it more likely redundant at some point.

[Juan Carlos López Domínguez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un conjunto de reflexiones acerca del quehacer literario y científico. Muchas de ellas me parecieron brillantes. Me hubiera gustado que se planteara un mapa, un camino, un argumento esencial a desarrollar durante toda la obra. Algo que la integrara. Me deja una sensación de dispersión, de vaguedad.