One Intellectual's Admission
But what is truly stunning is that, with some intellectuals, there is no need to pursue any inquiry because they make no bones about what they are doing. They candidly admit that truth is not their guiding consideration at all.
One of the most frank is Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World.
Huxley’s later book of essays, Ends and Means, is “an inquiry into the nature of ideals,” and in the course of it he is candid about his own beliefs. “All that we are,” he repeats twice, “is the result of what we have thought,” so it is important for us to think well, to be clear about how we think, and to choose the best worldview.
“It is impossible to live without a metaphysic. The choice that is given us is not between some kind of metaphysic and no metaphysic; it is always between a good metaphysic and a bad metaphysic.” And how are we to decide? By observing the one that is closest to reality, and may be considered true.
Yet “no philosophy is completely disinterested,” Huxley argues. “The pure love of truth is always mingled to some extent with the need, consciously or unconsciously by even the noblest and most intelligent philosophers, to justify a given form of personal or social behavior, to rationalize the traditional prejudices of a given class or community.” Everyone, he claims, thinks for both “intellectual reasons” (based on truth) and “voluntary reasons” (based on desires and the will).
Huxley was a deeply thoughtful and sensitive man who was unafraid to take positions that bucked the fashionable trends of his day and even of his own famous family. He criticized the dangers of false systems of meaning, such as nationalism, national socialism, communism, a false view of science, and argued that a philosophy of meaninglessness can be useful if it liberates people from such false views.
Then, with considerable realism he also goes on to criticize those who go to the other extreme and claim to be able to live without any meaning at all. Those, such as the Marquis de Sade, who are consistent proponents of meaninglessness, are dangerous, while most people—fortunately for them—are not consistent. They can only live without meaning for a short time and in selective areas, and only then because they assume unacknowledged sources of meaning in other parts of their lives.
Huxley finishes with a sharp description of the problems created by this approach. On the one hand, by overriding considerations of truth and giving so much attention to personal needs, it creates a fateful divorce between truth and whatever is considered goodness. On the other, it becomes impossible in practice to live without meaning.
“The mind is so constituted that a philosophy of meaninglessness is accepted only at the level of the passions and is persisted in only by those whose heredity and upbringing make it possible for them to live as though the world were at least partially meaningful.”
One might think that after this trenchant diagnosis of the radical dualism in human thinking, Huxley would urge us to take truth seriously and lean against any way in which we may be tempted to rationalize our needs—as Plato and Aristotle would have recommended.
Instead, bizarrely, he goes on to take the very approach he was attacking. He freely admits that he “took it for granted” that the world had no meaning, but he did not discover it, he decided it. “I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption.”
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