Aldous Huxley - SpeedyLook encyclopedia

Youth

Huxley is born with Godalming, in the Surrey (the United Kingdom). It is the son whom the writer Leonard Huxley with his first wife had, Julia Arnold. His/her grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, is one of the most important naturalists of the 19th century, called the “Bulldog of Darwin”. His/her brother Julian Huxley is a biologist known for his theories on the evolution. The family of its mother, as for it, is rather arts person.

Huxley is a fragile, but fine of spirit and gifted child intellectually. His/her father, in addition to being a writer, exerts the trade of Herboriste, and Aldous starts to be informed in the botanical laboratory of point of his/her father, before entering to the Hillside school, whose his/her mother was a director until it falls seriously sick. At the nine years age, it enters a Internat. Consequently, it is prepared to defend its ideas.

His/her Julia mother dies in 1908, whereas Aldous is only fourteen years old. The same month, his/her Roberta sister finds death in an accident whose circumstances were not reported. Three years later, Aldous contracts a disease (Keratitis punctata) which damages its vision seriously. His/her Trev big brother commits suicide in 1914. Almost blind man, Aldous is declared inapt for the service at the time of the First World War. Once restored, he studies the English Littérature with the Balliol College of Oxford.

Become a slender young man measuring more than one meter eighty, it carries an growing interest to the literature. This interest is above all of a intellectual nature. If it is then known for its kindness, it is only well later (according to some under the influence of friends as D.H Lawrence) that it becomes aware of the importance of the feelings in its philosophical and literary expression.

Whereas it continues its education with the Balliol College, Huxley is not maintained any more financially by his/her father and must earn his living. For one short period in 1918, it is employed with the intendance of the Ministère of the Air, but does not wish to make career in the administration (nor in the businesses). Its need for money leads it to apply its literary talents.

It finishes its first novel (not published) at the seventeen years age and turns in a decisive way to the writing at age the twenty years. It publishes poems then. Art journalist and critic, he travels and attends the European intelligentsia of the time. He meets the surrealist with Paris. He will write many literary tests on these topics. Deeply worried by the upheavals which Western civilization knows, he writes during the Années 1930 of large novels, on the serious threats which makes weigh the marriage of the capacity, the technological advance and the drifts of the Parapsychologie the such Behaviorisme ( Brave New World ), against the war and the Nationalisme ( the peace the depths ). Follower, like many intellectuals and Anglo-Saxon artists, method developped at the point by Frederick Matthias Alexander, it reveals this one in the peace the depths .

Inter-war period

Already recognized as satirist and chronicler during the First World War, Huxley passes the major part of its time to Garsington Manor, property of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Later, in Yellow of Crome (1921), it will caricature the manner of living of Garsington. In 1919, he marries Maria Nys, whom he had met in this same manor. They have a child, Matthew, which will become epidemiologist.

In 1937, Huxley leaves to settle in Hollywood, in California, with his wife and her friend Gerald Heard. Heard initiates Huxley with philosophy Védanta and the Méditation. It became Végétarien then and put at the practice Yoga. In its book the End and the means (1937), Huxley affirms that the majority of people of modern civilizations agree in the same desire of a world of freedom, peace and of justice, of brotherly love, although they were not able to agree on the manner of reaching that point. This book inquires then into the reasons of confusion and the dissension, and on the means of curing it.

In 1938, Huxley binds friendship with J. Krishnamurti, of which he admired the lesson. He becomes at the same time a vedantist in the circle of Swami Prabhavananda, and he initiates Christopher Isherwood with this same circle. A little later Huxley writes an anthology of the values common to all the religions: eternal Philosophy , in which he discusses the doctrines of the large mystical currents.

During most of its life, its sight remains very low (in spite of the partial cure which had enabled him to study in Oxford). About 1939 he hears of the Méthode Packsaddlled for the improvement of the natural vision, and a professor, Margaret Corbett, which could teach him this method. It reveals that its sight was radically restored thanks to this method, then it writes a book later on this subject ( Art to see ) which is published into 1942 in the USA (1943 in the United Kingdom). It declares there that for the first time for 25 years, it has been able to read without glasses and effort. He writes the adaptation to the screen of Orgueil and prejudged in 1940.

From 1945 at the end of its life (1963)

After the Second world war, Huxley requires the American citizenship, which is refused to him because he refuses to plan to take the weapons to defend the United States. Thereafter, its writings are strongly influenced by the Mysticisme and its hallucinatory experiments with the Mescaline, which the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in 1953 makes known to him. It described these years when it was subjected to psychotropic like a usually sprinkled paradise of bourbon. It was one of the first to make the experiment of psychedelic drugs on itself, in a search of illumination, and it is known to have taken 100 micrograms of LSD on its bed of death. The psychedelic experiments of Huxley are told in the tests: Doors of perception and Sky and the Hell , whose titles are inspired directly by the work of the poet visionary William Blake, the Marriage of the Sky and the Hell . The title of the first book inspired later with Jim Morisson and its group the name of “ The Doors ”. Its writings on the psychedelic experiments became the traditional ones among the first Hippie S.

By its experiments with drugs, Huxley did not seek only one unspecified, vague, mysterious, and individual exaltation, but rather sought to what is called reach sometimes the “top Mysticisme”; he preferred the term of eternal Philosophie , which it gave to the one its books on this subject. During the Fifties, the interest of Huxley for the field of psychological research did not cease growing.

The wife of Aldous Huxley, Maria, dies of a breast cancer in 1955; in 1956 it remarie with Laura Archera, itself author, and who wrote a biography of her husband. In 1960, one diagnoses at his place a Cancer of the throat. During the following years, its health worsening, it writes the utopian novel Île , and gives courses on the “potentialities of the human being” to the Esalen institute. In 1959, Huxley, which had remained British citizen, refuses the title of Knight Bachelor which the government Macmillan allots to him.

Its ideas were at the base of the Human Potential Movement. It was also invited to be expressed in several prestigious American universities. In a speech made in 1961 in Medical California School of San Francisco, Huxley makes this note:: “There will be as of the next generation a pharmaceutical method to make like with people their own constraint, and to create a dictatorship without tears, so to speak, by carrying out concentration camps without pain for whole companies, so that people will see private their freedoms, but will rather feel of it pleasure”, an idea close to that which J had had. B. Priestley, a writer which was contemporary for him, in his book the Magicians .

The ideas of Huxley on the specific roles of science and technology in the company (such as it described them in Île ) are relationships of those of British thinkers and American of the 20th century, such as Lewis Mumford, Gerald Heard (and, under certain aspects, Buckminster Fuller and E.F. Schumacher), as of French Jacques Ellul whom it contributed with Ivan Illich to make famous to the United States. These ideas found an echo in the following generations at people like Stewart Brand.

Thanks to G. Heard, Huxley met Huston Smith, which became later a recognized and prolific specialist in the religions. The two friends initiate Smith with the Védanta and the practice of the Méditation. Later, whereas Huxley was professor invited to the Massachusetts Institute off Technology, it introduced Smith to Timothy Leary, which brought Epiphany S that Smith presented in his last book, Purification of the Doors of Perception .

Among the humanistic thinkers, Huxley was regarded as an intellectual for the intellectuals. Although the financial constraints often led it to produce articles and books in abundance, its thought and its best written are worth a high regard to him. Its works were regularly registered in the list of study of the course of British philosophy modern in the colleges and universities of America. It was one of the thinkers of the XXe century honoured in " Leaders off Modern Thought" (“Large modern thinkers”) of the editions Scribner (a volume of biography and literary criticism by P. Thody, Aldous Huxley ).

Died and posterity

On his bed of death, incompetent of speaking, it asked his wife in writing: “LSD, 100 µg, i.m.” It reached it and it died peacefully the next morning, the November 22nd 1963. The advertisement of its death by the media was eclipsed by that of John F. Kennedy, which has occurred the same day, just like that of the Irish writer C.S. Lewis.

In late works of Huxley, it seems that one finds the bridge between the “two cultures”, namely the Science S and the Humanités. This potentially gigantic problem was apprehended by other contemporary thinkers of Huxley, such as Charles Percy Snow.

Selected works

Yellow of Crome ( Crome Yellow , 1921)
Marina di Vezza ( Those barren leaves , 1925)
Counterpoint ( Not Counter Not , 1926)
Round the world tour of a skeptic ( Jesting pilate , 1926)
Brave New World ( Honest New World , 1931)
the End and the means ( Ends and Means , 1937)
Jouvence ( After Many has Summer , 1939)
3eminence grise ( Grey Eminence: has Study in Religion and Politics , 1941)
Art to see (Art off Seeing) (1942)
Time must cuts has stop (1944)
strokes of Them, Essais and Notes (1945)
future Temps ( Ape and Essence , 1948)
eternal Philosophy, philosophia perennis ( Mrs Laura Huxley , 1948; Plon Bookstore, for the French translation , 1948; Threshold , 1977)
Devils of Loudun ( The Devils off Loudun , 1952)
Doors of perception (1954) (on psychedelic drugs)
genius and the goddess ( The genius and the goddess , 1955)
Heaven and Hell (1956) (on psychedelic drugs)
Return to best of the worlds ( Honest New World Revisited , 1958)
Island ( Island , 1962)
Moksha: Experiments visionaries and psychedelic ( Moksha: Writings one Psychedelics and the Visionary Experiment , 1977, posthumous edition) (Anthology of the writings of Aldous Huxley concerning drugs hallucinogens, in particular mescaline and the LSD)

the smile of the Mona Lisa
corbels of Pearblossom
science, freedom, peace
sky and the hell
Of the Caribbean in Mexico
God and me, test on mysticism, the religion and spirituality ( Threshold , 1994)

Internal bonds

External bond

Portrait
Return to best of the worlds

Simple: Aldous Huxley

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