Yesterday’s notes on the last of Huxley’s MIT lectures, What a Piece of Work is a Man, presented examples on self-actualisation practices. While unable to pin it down in that essay, I now see his central claim: that humans have heterogeneous personalities1—with varied interests and abilities—so forms of training and education are needed that adapt to their needs. Most current formal (and especially scientific) education does not adapt to the student; instead students adapt to its methods.
This assessment of education echoes Huxley’s comments on technology in another interview, a year or so after this lecture:
I think that this is perhaps one of the m…
Yesterday’s notes on the last of Huxley’s MIT lectures, What a Piece of Work is a Man, presented examples on self-actualisation practices. While unable to pin it down in that essay, I now see his central claim: that humans have heterogeneous personalities1—with varied interests and abilities—so forms of training and education are needed that adapt to their needs. Most current formal (and especially scientific) education does not adapt to the student; instead students adapt to its methods.
This assessment of education echoes Huxley’s comments on technology in another interview, a year or so after this lecture:
I think that this is perhaps one of the major problems of our time. How do we make use of this thing? I mean, after all, this was stated in the gospel: the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. And in the same way technology was made for man and not man for technology but unfortunately the development of recent social and scientific history has created a world in which man seems to be made for technology rather than the other way around.
So, the more interesting Straussian reading of Huxley’s lecture then is that he’s suggesting that education is a technology2. What then follows is that education, like technology, can become a problem and we must find some way—potentially inventing new ones, even—to make education work better for us so we may all realise our potentialities.
A non-verbal and non-symbolic humanities
Schools and universities are the drivers of specialisation; they do not adapt to an individual’s needs or abilities; thus only some find meaning and fulfilment in it; other better known methods may help here by emphasising actualisation (instead of specialisation) but, per Huxley, are not widely adopted. If augmented to formal education that mostly sharpens the mind, these approaches could benefit those that are hyper-specialise by training awareness and imagination.
The notable thing here is that Huxley lumps traditional humanities into this mind-enhancing symbolic education—one reliant on language—and suggests that the training of the body requires a non-verbal symbolic humanities (e.g., musicMusic is non-verbal but can be communicated symbolically via sheet music., drawing) but also extends to non-symbolic forms (e.g., dance/movement). By breaking our reliance on a symbolic specialisation, we may achieve the ideals recognised by Spinoza3:
Teach the body to become capable of anything. In this way, you will perfect the mind and permit it to come to the intellectual level of God.
Huxley recognises that the advancement of technology—founded in our increased scientific specialisation—is increasingly making the coordination of the mind-hand-eye (or mind-body) unnecessary. I find this comment particularly chastening at this moment where advances in AI are only further accelerating such separation between the mind and body. I contemplate the value of and effort put into these essays when frontier LLMs can recreate almost all of these and maybe, someday, all of them. I find consolation in accepting that there is an immeasurable value (one that falls in the realm of vague words such as meaning and purpose) and virtue in doing so despite the concerns; I also write in a physical book with a fountain pen; Huxley’s words reinforce my belief that this hones the mind-body coordination.
I found it quite surprising that Huxley did not once mention any school of meditation as one of the non-symbolic methods of study; it’s a language and symbol-free method that provides the conditions for actualisation. I suspect meditation is another action that hones the senses of hearing, feeling, and vision. Meditation as non-symbolic education will be examined in a future post.
Though he mostly surveys practice-based approaches, he did not rule out that a “good and completely harmless euphoric”, if available, could help here. Huxley leans on Bertrand Russell’s observation that contented people are generally more virtuous and kinder than unhappy people4.
Even though it has taken many listens for me to grok much of this lecture—and Huxley does not make this easy with the breadth of content as well as the tangents he goes down—I am very sympathetic to his claim for our needing different forms of education that train various senses. The resonance I felt with many portions of it across many listens is probably why I have inexplicably returned to it so many times.
Whether it is based on Sheldon’s somatotypes or the beliefs of the three types of individuals that may choose to follow one of the three paths of Karma, Bhakti, or Jnana yoga. ↩ 1.
This reminds me of a not dissimilar view that language is a technology, echoed by many including Alan Moore recently. ↩ 1.
One of the unfortunate things is that even with LLMs at my disposal, I was unable to locate the exact quotes of Spinoza and Russell that Huxley is paraphrasing. ↩ 1.
Contentment is one of the two most effective conditions conducive to great accomplishments. Crisis is the other, which can be just as effective but is not a repeatably useful one; the corresponding long-term strain leads to breakdowns that break the rhythm needed for long-term benefits. ↩