The author who returns philosophy to the English novel: Who is Aldous Huxley?

Aldous Leonard Huxley, one of the important 20th-century English thinkers and writers, was born in England on July 26, 1894, as the third son of Leonard Huxley, a writer, editor, and teacher, and Julia Arnold, who is also a teacher. Huxley grew up in a family of science, art, and literature from both his parents sides.

His grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, was the greatest defender of Darwin and his theory of evolution. His mother, a teacher, was the granddaughter of Thomas Arnold, a famous educator, niece of poet Matthew Arnold, and sister of English novelist Humphrey Ward. Huxley's father, who is a teacher, is also known as the owner and editor of a magazine. Huxley's older brother, Sir Julian Huxley, was also a famous eugenics biologist. Eugenics is the science dealing with all the factors that develop the innate qualities of the generation. Eugenicists argue that it would be more beneficial to replace natural selection in the theory of evolution with scientific selection. Although Julian Huxley is known as the first biologist to reject the concept of race, he was also the then general director of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). His half-brother Andrew was a professor who received the Nobel Prize in physics and medicine in 1963. At a time when modern thought is emphasized by the majority of the society in Europe, it is impossible for such a family and their social relations not to affect Huxley's view of the world and life.

Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including novels and non-fiction works, as well as essays, narratives, and poems. Huxley was a pacifist. He grew interested in philosophical mysticism, as well as universalism, addressing these subjects in his works such as The Perennial Philosophy, which illustrates commonalities between Western and Eastern mysticism, and The Doors of Perception, which interprets his own psychedelic experience with mescaline. In his most famous novel Brave New World and his final novel Island, he presented his visions of dystopia and utopia, respectively.

Huxley, who received his first education in the family, then continues his education in Eton, one of the well-established schools in England. In addition to improving his command of the English language, he also closely follows the latest developments in science. However, the unfortunate events he experienced during these years, as he stated many times later, left an indelible mark on his life and influenced the formation of his general pessimistic Weltanschauung (world view).

At the age of fourteen, after his mother died from cancer, his father moved to London and remarried. Huxley was deeply affected by the fact that he lost his sight to a great extent as a result of eye disease when he was sixteen and that his brother Noel Trevelyan, who was a few years older than him, committed suicide. The expectations of being from such a famous family put a lot of pressure on him and his brother. Contrary to his brother Trev, who fell into depression and committed suicide because of the troubles caused by this pressure, he preferred to write works that emphasize self-realization.

Although Huxley aims to study medicine, especially due to an eye condition, he is forced to turn to literature. But his interest in science, especially biology, pharmacology, and genetics, which was just emerging at the time, remains constant. In these living conditions, Huxley, while witnessing the scientific studies of so many scientists around him and writing academic articles expressing his thoughts on these studies and developments, on the other hand, begins to put into fiction the cause-effect relationships he obtained from these studies.

He entered Balliol College, Oxford University, in 1913 and studied English Literature, when his condition, which had caused him to be blind for several years, partially recovered. Although he volunteered for the British Army during the First World War, his request was denied due to an eye condition. Already in the coming years, Huxley will take an active role in anti-war organizations. In school, although he is attached to the magnifying glass, he is very successful with his knowledge and success. While his friends are recruited due to the world war, he dedicates himself to his work.

Huxley spent the war years with the Bloomsbury Society at the home of Lady Ottoline Morrell at Garsington Estate, close to Oxford. Here he meets important writers such as John M Keynes, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and Bertrand Russell. The Bloomsbury Society was founded in the early 20th century in art, literature, philosophy, politics, etc. It is an intellectual group, mostly from upper-middle-class families, who discuss their issues.

Huxley holds multiple jobs after graduating from Oxford with a degree; is in financial distress; When he is about to fail financially, he borrows from his father and pays it back. After this incident, the ties between him and his father are severed for the rest of his life. Perhaps the reason for the approach that questions family ties in his works is his relationship with his father.

Here, again, Huxley meets D H Lawrence, whom he would later become close friends with, and exchanges ideas about literature. Huxley published his poems in his first book, The Burning Wheel, in 1916. In 1919, literary critic John Middleton Murry, editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Athenaeum, recruits Huxley to the magazine staff. In the same year, he married the Belgian Maria Nys, whom he knew in the Bloomsbury Community. Their only child, Matthew Huxley, was born in 1920. His wife, Maria, oversaw most of Aldous' correspondence during their thirty-five years of marriage; acts as its typist and secretary. He organizes house parties that allow him to communicate with leading thinkers, artists, writers, and scientists and takes care of the health of the often sick Huxley.

In 1920, he published Limbodan, which consists of short stories. The family spends these years between London and Europe, mostly in Italy. In the mid-1920s, they made trips to different parts of the world, especially to India and the USA. Prior to these trips, Huxley worked specifically on Crome Yellow, a parody of his experiences in the Bloomsbury Society and a critique of the intellectual circles of the time. This book on ideas, published in 1921, on what conflicts with or betrays ideas, sells well enough to motivate him to write more.

Antic Hay was published in 1923, in which he portrayed the cultural elite as aimless and selfish. His novel Those Barren Leaves, which satirized a group of intellectuals who gathered in an Italian palace to relive the splendor of the Renaissance, published in 1925, is considered the return of philosophy to the English novel.

Point Counter Point, the first idea novel in which he presented portraits of the figures who directed British society and art, was published in 1928. In the novel, which further strengthens his reputation, he presents the reader with a very different group of characters and a wide spectrum of contemporary society. Novel characters are characterized and individualized by their easily recognizable physical, mental, emotional, psychological, and moral characteristics. Each of them is equipped with differences in social status, political views, wealth, etc.

The work that brought Huxley to worldwide fame was Brave New World, published in 1932. Influenced by Henry Ford's book, My Life and Work, which he read during his trip to America, he establishes a connection between what he lived in California and what he read in this book. The plot of Brave New World, which consists of eighteen episodes, takes place in London in AD 632. The general characteristics of the society living here are sometimes expressed by the omniscient narrator, and sometimes by the conversations between the characters. The novel ironically points out that freedom should not be sacrificed for shallow ideas about progress. Huxley brought his thoughts, which he explained in articles and books, to a fictional level with Brave New World, and explained his real thoughts, which he perhaps hesitated to express in his prose.

After its publication, it is seen that critics and readers made different evaluations of the novel with different readings. Some, pointing to scientific advances such as biology and genetics, evaluate the novel as a dystopian novel that accurately reveals the developments that may occur in this field in the future and warns that these developments will cause negative reflections on sociology; Others argue that the New World, which is fictionalized in the novel thanks to Huxley's scientific advances, is a stable world that can overcome all the problems that humanity has always tried to solve but could not solve, and thus cannot be solved in the future, and argue that the fictional world should be utopia, not dystopia.

Adding a different meaning to his life with his discovery of pacifism and mysticism, Huxley's Eyeless in Gaza, which he wrote especially around these themes, was published in 1936. The novel, which carries traces of Huxley's early works, also lays the groundwork for the philosophical basis of his later texts. Huxley and his family move to the United States, where he will live until his death in 1937. Huxley spends some time in New Mexico in the USA. Here, he writes essays on morality, politics, religion, etc., and these are compiled and published under the name Ends and Means. After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, in which Huxley criticizes American culture in terms of narcissism and individuality, was published in 1938. The story, told by a Hollywood millionaire who fears his impending death, can also be read as a critique of materialism.

In his 1944 novel Time Must Have a Stop, he tells the story of Sebastian Barnack, a young poet vacationing in Florence with his hedonist uncle. He treats the philosophical issues he deals with fictionally in a broader framework in his essay The Perennial Philosophy in 1945. In the book, he touches on Eastern and Western philosophy, mysticism, and individual and social morality.

Huxley worked as a screenwriter for Metro Goldwyn Mayer in Hollywood during the Second World War. Jane Eyre writes screenplays for movie versions of classics such as Pride and Prejudice and Alice in Wonderland. He uses most of the money he earns to transport Jews and Hitler's opponents, who are trying to get rid of Hitler's persecution, from Germany to the USA.

Huxley, who was closely interested in philosophy, befriended the Indian thinker Jiddu Krishnamurti during this period. For many years, they argued and wrote letters on philosophical issues. Huxley wrote the foreword to Krishnamurti's The First and Last Freedom in 1954. The chaotic and harsh climate of the Second World War greatly affects Huxley's outlook on life. As people die around the world, Huxley continues to defend the pacifist philosophy. Time Must Have a Stop is published in 1944, in which he questions spirituality and criticizes hedonism.

Huxley became famous in the 1950s for his interest in drugs such as mescaline and LSD. Huxley, who used these substances in a controlled manner until his death, wrote The Doors of Perception, which was published in 1954, in focus on these experiences. The Doors music group takes its name from this piece.

The Doors of Perception is one of the most famous texts in the history of psychedelics.

The word "psychedelic" was first coined during Humphry Osmond's correspondence with Aldous Huxley, searching for a name for this experience, and later settled in the literature. It is derived from the Greek words psyche (soul) and deloun (manifestation, revelation, outward or visible). A psychedelic experience is a temporary altered state of consciousness that usually occurs when drugs (LSD, psilocybin, magic mushrooms) are consumed. This movement has influenced many branches of art, from literature to painting and music. Artists, who have experienced the changes in the shape, form, size, and depth of surfaces and objects under the influence of hallucinogens, perceiving the world as color or the transformation of emotions and thoughts into shapes and colors, have reflected this experience in their works.

Huxley and his wife Maria apply for citizenship from the United States in 1953. However, Huxley realizes that he cannot fulfill the requirements of citizenship politically and withdraws his application.

Huxley, in Brave New World Revisited, which was published in 1958 and consists of articles, seems to have moved away from his pessimism in Brave New World, and especially in the last part of this work, he makes some suggestions for self-realization and therefore for the improvement of society. On the basis of these ideas, he fictionalized his last important novel, Ada, in 1962, which, unlike all other dystopian works, seems to be in line with the classical utopia tradition by many critics.

His wife, Maria, died of breast cancer in February 1955. The following year, Huxley married the Italian-born violinist and psychotherapist Laura Archera. Huxley's last novel, Island, written in 1962, is the opposite of Brave New World. Here drugs and drugs are used for people's peace. Individuality is replaced by family and group gatherings. The breeding issue is supported, unlike Brave New World. Huxley shows his many philosophical and political interests in this novel.

Huxley dies of throat cancer in California on November 22, 1963, the day US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was killed. His ashes were interred in Watts Cemetery in Surrey, England, on October 27, 1971. After Huxley's death, his wife, Laura, wrote his biography, This Timeless Moment, in 1968.