LITERATURE AND SCIENCE

LITERATURE AND SCIENCE – Aldous Huxley

Introduction:

In this essay, Aldous Huxley puts forth the view that all our experiences are strictly private, but some experiences are less private than the other. The visual, auditory and olfactory experiences of a group of people watching the burning of a house are likely to be similar. The intellectual experiences of the same group who make the effort to think logically about the causes of this particular fire are also similar. But the emotional experiences of the fire watchers are likely to be different. One member of the group may feel sexual excitement, another may feel aesthetic pleasure, another horror, and yet others sympathy or inhuman glee etc. Therefore, these emotional experiences are more private than sense experiences and intellectual experiences.

The Man of Science and the Man of Letters:

The man of science observes his own and other people’s public experiences, correlated these concepts into a logically coherent system, and then tries to prove, by observation and experiment, that his logical conclusions correspond to certain aspects of events in the world of nature.

The man of letters is also an observer, organiser and communicator of his own and other people’s more public experiences of events taking place in the worlds of nature, culture and language. These experiences constitute the raw material of poetry, drama, novels and essays.

While the man of science ignores his own and other people’s private experiences, for the man of letters, the outer reality is constantly related to the private experiences.

Difference in the Treatment of Subject matter:

The way in which the literary artist treats his subject matter is very different from the way in which the same subject matter is treated by the man of science. While the scientist examines a number of particular cases, notes all similarities and uniformities and forms a generalization, the man of letters does not generalize at all. His method is to concentrate upon some individual case, to look into it intently that finally he is enable to look clean through it. Every concrete particular, public or private, is a window opening on to the universal.King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth – are about highly individualized human beings in exceptional situations.

The World of Literature and the World of Science:

The world with which literature deals is the world into which human beings are born and live and finally die. The world in which they love and hate, experience triumph and humiliation, hope and despair, sufferings and enjoyments, of madness and common sense, of silliness, cunning and wisdom. Every human being is aware of this multifarious world and knows where he stands in relation to it.

On the other hand, as a private individual, the scientist is the inhabitant of a radically different universe. Knowledge is power, and by a seeming paradox, it is through their knowledge that they control, direct and modify the world. Every science has its own frame of reference, its own system of coordinating concepts and explanations.

The man of letters addresses himself to the paradoxical task of rendering the randomness and shapelessness of individual existence in highly organized and meaningful works of art. The ambition of the literary artist is to speak about the ineffable, to communicate in words that words were never intended to convey. Every literary artist must therefore invent, borrow some kind of uncommon language capable of expressing, at least partially, those experiences which ordinary vocabulary and syntax fail to convey.

Conclusion:

Aldous Huxley concludes by saying that our more private experiences, in all their subtlety, can be recreated, in some sort and so made public and communicable. Hence the writer’s task is quite a Herculean (hopeless) daunting task! However, inspite of all the pens of the poets, and in spite of all the scientists’ electron microscopes, cyclotrons and computers, the rest is a vast silence - Experiences that cannot be comprehended either by a scientist or by a man of letters.