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| Aldous Huxley |
In
1963, the year of his death, Aldous Huxley published an essay titled Literature and Science. In it, he raises the
existence of two different specialized languages, literary and scientific,
different from the vulgar language, each of which is directed towards a
specific objective:
- The purpose of literature is to describe,
in the best possible way, man's most private experiences,
especially those that deal with our feelings. To do this, it creates a
specific language, where the ambiguity of words is the fundamental element
giving strength. For Huxley, the term literature can be applied to
all possible forms of the art of writing: poetry, drama, novel and essay,
whose relationship with science he analyzes successively.
- Science, on the contrary, seeks to
univocally describe the public (or less private) experiences
of man, those that have to do with objective
reality. To do this, the scientific language must be as far
as possible free of ambiguity. Each term must have a univocal and
unambiguous meaning. In the best case (as in physics) scientific language can
be reduced to mathematical formulas.
In
the following paragraph, Huxley proves that his admiration for modern science
did not blind him to the abuses and corruptions that ideologies have brought
into our world:
We live in
an Age of Pure Science and Analytical Philosophy that is, at the same time, an
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 [sold themselves] to Power, Vested
Interest, and Rationalized Unreason. (Chapter 23)
While analyzing the
relationship between literature and science, Huxley begins with the genre that,
by its very nature, best approximates both fields: science fiction, to which he
contributed several novels, one of which must be considered one of the best
ever written: Brave New World
(1932).
He then goes on to
poetry, and declares himself surprised by the small number of modern poets who
have touched on scientific subjects. Although he offers some examples, the most
curious is a self-quote: a poem he wrote shortly after the Hiroshima atomic
bomb.
Huxley is clearly
pessimistic about the possibility of establishing a relationship between
tragedy and science. In this regard, he says:
If there is
talk of reason... [or] any allusion to science... it is as a digression of the
main theme... the conflict that causes emotion... The author of a tragedy has
little time, and his audience, even less patience for digressions that depart
from situations that promote emotions, which are the substance of all high
drama. (Chapter 23)
The theater play Copenhagen, by Michael Frayn, released in
1998, which deals with the famous meeting in that city between Niels Bohr and
Werner Heisenberg, shows that the relationship between drama and science is not
as distant as Huxley supposed. But of course, he could not have foreseen it,
since he had died 35 years before that work was premiered.
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| Werner Heisenberg |
Huxley offers in chapter
25 of his book an out-of-context quote from Werner Heisenberg, which he
interprets in his own way:
In the words
of an eminent physicist, Werner Heisenberg, “... for the first time in history,
man, on this planet, is discovering that he is alone with himself, without a partner
and without an adversary.”
Huxley interprets this
quote in his own way, tinged with skepticism and patches of Vedanta and
Spinoza:
To put it
more picturesquely, man is in the process of becoming his own Providence, his
own Cataclysm, his own Savior and his own invading horde of Martians.
Huxley appears to think
that these words by Heisenberg can be considered as a repudiation of God and
Christianity. But Heisenberg was a Lutheran
and always asserted that science and faith are compatible, as clearly seen in
his acceptance speech for the Romano Guardini Prize (1974):
In the
history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed
that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of
the world. Although I am now convinced
that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it
possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an
outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up
from now on. Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder
on the relationship of these two regions of thought, for I have never been able
to doubt the reality of that to which they point. (Scientific and Religious Truth)
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| Konrad Lorenz |
Huxley
advocates for a closer collaboration between literature and science. Writers ought
to learn some science, and scientists ought to learn to express their ideas in
a literary way. While explaining this, he declares himself opposed to radical
reductionism and in favor of emergentism (probably monistic), by saying
that although the high can always be reduced to the lower, the
lower can always emerge in the light. He also says that we ought
to analyze and classify, but without taking analysis and classification too
seriously, for reality always remains whole, seamless
and indivisible.
Huxley declares himself against radical behaviorism, to which I
dedicated a
recent post in this blog. Like Konrad Lorenz, he considers it unacceptable:
they maintain, regardless of all probability and without
any evidence, that any little shepherd can be transformed, through adequate
training, into another Isaac Newton. And he laments that environmental determinism remains the frame of reference within
which many social scientists and many men of letters still do their feeling and
their thinking. Along these lines, he attacks the theories of
Sigmund Freud, whom he considers one of the fathers of behaviorist ideology.
Manuel Alfonseca
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