Friday, December 12, 2008

Depends ...

... on how you define brave: Brave New Worldview - The Return of Aldous Huxley. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Years ago, J.B. Priestley put his finger on what is wrong with Huxley's novels, that they "are made, not really created," and that "he is concerned with ideas and not with persons." His essays are wonderful. I have the complete set. But his thinking can be strangely mushy at times. So "Huxley wrote that a man who has resolved his relation to the domains of science and religion — to 'the two worlds of data and symbols' — is 'a man who has no beliefs.' He adopts beliefs merely as tools with which to address practical problems, and he holds them lightly. There are many ways, Huxley taught us, to be religious without being religious: Religious identity, after all, is just another muddy filter through which the clear light of the Void shines."
What exactly is this Void whose name we capitalize? Is it a something or a nothing. And if the latter, why does it deserve a capital letter? I understand that beliefs can get in the way of faith. But symbols are not without content: they refer to something, not nothing. Huxley wanted a religion that would make you feel good. But maybe that's not what religion is for. The aim of genuine religion is not to be all you can be, but to be what you ought to be. I am not sure what it means to be religious without being religious. I also don't think you can have faith in either something or nothing. You have to have in Someone. There's something personal about it.
And speaking of personal, the mask (persona) that the actor wore in the Greek dramas represented a specific character. The "greater Consciousness" seems to have some interest in individuation. Perhaps that "greater Consciousness" cares for those characters whose mask he speaks through. And if the world is a stage, perhaps it is because an actual drama is taking place there. A real one, not just make-believe.

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