Panel: Aldous Huxley; Fifty Years After

Northeast Modern Language Association, 43rd Annual Convention

Rochester, New York: 15-18 March 2012

Aldous Huxley and Michel de Certeau: Scientists, Historians, Writers, Mystics.

by Owen Coggins

Firstly, my apologies for not being present at the conference today, and sincere thanks to
Bill Harrison and the organisers for their invitation, and to Bill for reading this paper in my absence.
It's unfortunate that I have to miss out on the ideas and discussions today, but please contact me if
you have any comments, suggestions or questions about anything related to this paper.

[ owen_coggins@yahoo.com.au

Introduction
I consider the intellectual work of Aldous Huxley and Michel de Certeau on religion,
specifically regarding their elaborations of the intersections between history, science and literature
in the study of mysticism. Given the title of the panel I'll assume some familiarity with Aldous
Huxleys work; this presentation will mainly be concerned with Huxleys part-fictionalised studies
of religious history Grey Eminence (1953) and The Devils of Loudon (1952); the essays and
anthology on the origins and history of mysticism Heaven and Hell (1956) and The Perennial
Philosophy (1945); and the synthesis of these ideas and interests in his final novel Island (1962) and
essay Literature and Science (1963).
Michel de Certeau (1925-1986) was a French Jesuit, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalyst,
and erudite cultural theorist with scholarly interests closely related to Huxleys, consistently
engaged with mystical writing in general and Christian mysticism of the 17th Century in particular.
Certeaus La Possession de Loudon (1970), for example, focuses on the very same incident of
1

Owen Coggins: Aldous Huxley and Michel de Certeau

demonic possession as Huxleys Devils; his book The Mystic Fable (1982, English translation 1995)
and numerous related articles, analyse the same historical period and many of the same individuals
and texts as Huxleys Grey Eminence, while approaching the same topics as The Perennial
Philosophy, albeit with contrasting methods and conclusions.
I first outline Huxleys contribution to the history of scholarship on mysticism, noting that
Huxley both exemplifies and somewhat departs from a materialist, rationalist, empirical AngloAmerican intellectual tradition. I'll discuss Huxleys theoretical construction of mysticism with
respect to science, history and literature. Briefly, Huxley located mysticism in mental states
occasioned by accidents of neurological biochemistry; he raises the problem of translating and
communicating these pre-linguistic experiences into words; and he treats history as material with
which to discuss these issues.
Secondly, I discuss Certeaus treatment of the same areas from his position of later 20 th
Century French-language post-modern literary and cultural theory. This grounding in an
intellectual tradition concerned with problematising language and its relation to science and power,
directs Certeau to explore mysticism in a way that contrasts with Huxleys, drawing out the
implications of history as a science, circumscribed in literature.
Finally, drawing on more recent treatments of mystical writing by Jeffrey Kripal and Don
Cupitt, I suggest that both Huxley and Certeau can be considered to have produced mystical texts,
according to their own definitions, and representative of their different stages in the history of the
study of mysticism.

Huxley
Aldous Huxleys writings are situated within an early twentieth century Anglo-American
study of mysticism. Huxleys move from England to the US is indicative of a movement from the
arch satire of the 1920s-30s Bloomsbury set, to the open-minded experimentalism of postwar
California. The classical scholarship of mysticism that Huxley draws on, if at times implicitly, is
2

Owen Coggins: Aldous Huxley and Michel de Certeau

marked by a tendency towards universalism born of a historical moment in which encounter with
non-Judaic religion had reached a stage where English translations became available of texts such
as the Tibetan Book of the Dead in 19271. Various strands of Orientalism and occultism coalesced in
the late 19th and early 20th century works of European and American theologians, anthropologists,
psychologists and literary intellectuals such as Evelyn Underhill, William James, and Mircea Eliade.
In writings by these scholars there can be discerned a certain dissatisfaction with rationalist progress
(despite being very much situated within that milieu), explaining and categorising in synergistic
language the varied experiences and texts of many spiritual adherents of vastly differing traditions.
These and other writers found in spiritual experience the potential for a revived authenticity that
might offer a chance to rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic
societies2 employing rationalist methods from a variety of disciplines, converging on a universal
and universalising science of mystics. Huxleys approach continues this universalism, most
obviously in the Perennial Philosophy, but also in Island, the Devils of Loudun and Grey Eminence,
in which 17th century monks are discussed in terms of the Hindu caste system, 3 and other
comparisons which display an underlying assumption of universality, differentiated simply by the
idiosyncracies of language.
These authors find mysticism in experience, a concept absolutely central in understanding
this work on mysticism.4 Huxley also locates mysticism in experience, specifically in pre-linguistic
experiences of neurophysiological states induced or occasioned by certain accidents of biochemistry,
which could come to be exploited more or less deliberately through practices affecting brain
chemistry states. So in Heaven and Hell, for example, we hear of the convergence of various kinds
of-

Karmaglinpa The Tibetan Book of the Dead: or, the After-death Experiences on the Bardo Plane. Trans. W. Y. EvansWentz and Kazi Dawa-Samdup, 2000 [1927].
2
Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion. Trans. Willard R. Trask. 1959, p13.
3
Huxley, Aldous, Grey Eminence, 1941, p268.
4
Kripal, Jeffrey J. Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom, 2001, p8.

Owen Coggins: Aldous Huxley and Michel de Certeau

interminable vain repetitions of magic and religion. The chanting

of the curandero, the medicine man, the shaman; the endless psalm
singing and sutra intoning of Christian and Buddhist monks; the
shouting and howling, hour after hour, of revivalistsunder all the
diversities of theological belief and aesthetic convention, the psychochemico-physiological intention remains constant. To increase the
concentration of CO2 in the lungs and blood and so to lower the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve, until it will admit biologically
useless material from Mind-at-Largethis, though the shouters, singers and mutterers did not know it, has been at all times the real purpose and point of magic spells, of mantrams, litanies, psalms and sutras.5

This brain chemistry, then, for Huxley, is explanation about the occasion, if not a full cause
or description, of all mystical experiences. Western science correctly applied with Eastern ethics
is the driving force for Huxley's utopia in Island, in Literature and Science, and elsewhere in his
later thought, in terms of agriculture and reproduction, and in the culmination of his utopia in
individual experience of a bio-chemically engineered enlightenment.
The problem of language for Huxley, then, is how to communicate this beyond-language
experience, in order to discuss, compare and manage them, as well as to incorporate the strange
kind of knowledge they impart into an ethical and by extension political practice. Given that, for
Huxley, mystical experience is grounded in objective brain chemistry, the problem of language is of
secondary importance: investigation of texts designated mystical becomes an exercise in comparing
local elucidations of an axiomatically identical, yet ineffable, experience. This impossibility of
description accounts for the paradoxical language used by mystics, after which, despite descriptions
5

Huxley, Aldous, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, 2000 [1954; 1956], p154-155.

Owen Coggins: Aldous Huxley and Michel de Certeau

provided by art and laboratory microscopes, the rest is silence, the rest is always silence, 6 a phrase
reminiscent of Ludwig Wittgensteins conclusion to his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus7. Robert S.
Baker notes that Huxley had read and drawn influence from Wittgenstein,8 though the philosopher
does not appear anywhere in Huxleys Complete Essays- perhaps an uncharacteristic reticence due
to an equally uncharacteristic struggle with the density of Wittgenstein's philosophy of language? In
any case, despite Huxleys acknowledgement, and engagement with the problems of mystical
language, there is evidence of slightly contrasting positions: Huxley eloquently warns readers of the
danger that for most of us, words no longer stand for things- rather things stand for words,9 but
also displays a certain lack of explicit reflexivity regarding his own position as a literary artist
attempting to write the unwriteable when, for example, he writes somewhat scornfully of artists
attempting precisely the task he is concerned with: Art, Huxley writes, is only for beginners, or else
for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their mind to be content with the ersatz of
Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify.10 The problem of language for Huxley
is not so much a Wittgensteinian concern with the indefinite nature of symbols per se, but instead,
of how to account for the separation between scientific and literary language, the latter which at its
height can be a manual for spiritually enlightening psycho-physical work.11
According to Harold H. Watts, for Huxley, the past does not so much exist as an object
worthy of study in its own right but is an opportunity to recognize some moral or esthetic disease or
disorder that works unrecognized in some section of the present, 12 a fact Huxley himself
acknowledges. 13 Writing in a literary style about a historical period, Huxley is concerned with
historical accuracy in order to communicate knowledge of a scientific (neurological but also

Huxley, Aldous, Literature and Science pp90-152 in Collected Essays Volume VI, 2000, p96.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921.
8
Baker, Robert S., Introduction ppxi-xvii in Aldous Huxley, Collected Essays Volume VI, 2000, ppxi.
9
Huxley, Aldous, The Oddest Science pp76-83 in Collected Essays Volume VI, 2000, p81.
10
Huxley, Aldous, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, 2000 [1954; 1956], p29-30.
11
Huxley, Aldous, Grey Eminence, 1941, p53.
12
Watts, Harold H., Huxley as Biographer: Grey Eminence and The Devils of Loudon, pp154-166 in Robert E. Kuehn
ed. Aldous Huxley: A Collection of Critical Essays, 1974, p155.
13
Huxley, Aldous, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, 2000 [1954; 1956], p71.
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Owen Coggins: Aldous Huxley and Michel de Certeau

psychological, medical, pathological) basis for mystical and religious experience. Huxley on several
occasions offers a clear awareness of the historically-determined limits of what it is possible to
think,14 though since mysticism is elsewhere than language, the biochemical perennialism remains
and the question of language is one of discussion and management of these states: For all their
inadequacy and their radical unlikeness to the facts to which they refer, words remain the most
reliable and accurate of our symbols. Whenever we want to have a precise report of facts or ideas,
we must resort to words.15

Certeau
Enter Michel de Certeau, situating himself as a historian within religious history,16 a phrase
aptly indicating his concern with specifically religious aspects of history, his insider status as a
Jesuit, and as a historian acutely conscious of his own position within a historically-determined way
of practicing history. Something of an anomaly amongst the wider milieu of French
post/structuralists and cultural theorist due to his repeated self-designation as a historian as well as
for his religious training, Certeau was also an unusual theologian, prepared to accept and engage
with Nietszches death of god. Many aspects of the Paris academic scene of the 1960s and 70s
inform and influence Certeaus work, most notably and explicitly Michel Foucaults work on power
structures, and the methods and practices which inform epistemology. A psychoanalytic approach to
society, culture and history can also be discerned: Normally, strange things circulate discreetly
below our streets. But a crisis will suffice for them to rise up.17 Nietszche, Marx, Freud, Foucault;
all influences that provoke an interrogation of foundations, a suspicion and a raised awareness of
context-specific conditions of possibility that might masquerade as objective science. In using that
word science, Certeau is always careful to mark the historically-specific constructions that

14

Huxley, Aldous, Grey Eminence, 1941, p79; The Perennial Philosophy, 1945, p17; Facts and Fetishes pp49-59 in
Collected Essays Volume VI, 2000, p49.
15
Huxley, Aldous, The Perennial Philosophy, 1945, p263.
16
Certeau, Michel de, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley, 1988, p14.
17
Certeau, Michel de, The Possession at Loudon, trans. Michael B. Smith, 2000, p1.

Owen Coggins: Aldous Huxley and Michel de Certeau

constitute any such practice, where, for example, scientific languages in their various applications
give rise to scenarios whose relevance no longer depends on what they express but on what they
render possible.18 These considerations form a backdrop to all Certeaus writing on the inextricable
practices of writing and history. It is a significant aspect of Certeaus use of language that they are
not often found apart: The Writing of History is the title of one of Certeaus major works, and
Certeau and his translators opt for the term historiography over history, in order to foreground
the necessary but sometimes occluded creative, productive contribution of writing to any work that
would claim to offer history. For Certeau, no writing, especially not a supposedly precise scientific
language, is an immediate or transparent guarantor of meaning. Language always determines the
conditions of thought (as per Huxley), but also, diverging from Huxley, determines what it is
possible to experience. In this way Certeau closes the circle of a curve that Huxleys thought begins:
Huxley writes of language limiting what it is possible to express (but not what it is possible to think
or feel) in a given period; Certeau applies this idea to his own possibility of writing about the
writing of history. Thus, there exists a historicity of history; 19 and there is a history of the history
of Loudun,20 of which both writers are a part.
Regarding mysticism specifically, Certeau takes a different approach to Huxley. Firstly, the
very concept of mysticism is investigated in a careful textual and etymological study, tracing the use
of the word and concept to a very particular origin, in 17th Century French Christian writings: while
Huxley might give the name mysticism to a primordial and eternal recurring experience, Certeau
finds no grounds outside texts on which such a theory could be based. He proceeds to follow the
emergence of mystics as a noun and outline characteristic procedures and operations in the texts
which bear that mark: a saying away, disclaiming their own ability to speak of their subject; a use of
paradox, contradiction, and oxymoron in pushing the limit of language; an esotericism which
tended towards elitism, the texts speaking only to those who had ears to hear; and a hiding of a
18

Certeau, Michel de, History: Ethics, Science and Fiction pp125-152 in Norma Haans et al eds., Social Science as
Moral Enquiry, 1983, p128.
19
Certeau, Michel de, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley, 1988, p21
20
Certeau, Michel de, The Possession at Loudon, trans. Michael B. Smith, 2000, p7.

Owen Coggins: Aldous Huxley and Michel de Certeau

mystic secret in plain view, not a coded message contained in a cipher but simply a wandering in
the ruins of symbols, where the mystic phrase escapes that logic that replaces it with the necessity
of producing nothing more in language than effects relative to what is not in language. What must
be said cannot be said except in a shattering of the word. An internal split makes words admit or
confess to the mourning that separates them from what they show.21

Mystics
Drawing on later work on mysticism and mystical texts, I suggest that both Aldous Huxley
and Michel de Certeau can be read as mystics within their own typologies of mysticism. Huxley
identified mysticism in biochemically-occasioned experience, and found there to be an ethical
responsibility for the mystic to attempt to impossibly communicate the content of the experience,
integrating knowledge gained for the betterment of society. Huxley sought out this experience
where he expected to find it, directly intervening in brain chemistry in order to transform his own
consciousness, most famously with mescaline and LSD but also with practices of concentration and
meditation. He then made repeated, influential and at least partly successful attempts to
communicate his experiences in a practice of writing he envisioned as contributing to the emergent
sciences of pure and applied autology, neurotheology, metachemistry, mycomysticism. 22 So,
according to Huxleys formulation, his own work constitutes mystical writings, using fiction to
circumvent the impossibility of a scientific description of a scientific process which in the end
eluded scientific language, in the far-reaching and ambitious utopia of Island. Within the world of
Pala in the novel, there is a text (the Old Rajas Notes on Whats What, and on What It Might be
Reasonable to Do about Whats What 23 ) which tries to complete this task: the novel itself is
Huxleys own attempt.
Certeaus treatment of mysticism was very different. While he does not preclude a pre21

Certeau, Michel de, The Mystic Fable, trans. Michael B. Smith, 1996, p144.
Huxley, Aldous, Island, 1962, p172.
23
Ibid., p40.
22

Owen Coggins: Aldous Huxley and Michel de Certeau

linguistic experience, he leaves it beyond language, and instead searches mystical texts and artwork
for the absent presence that structures them. He presents, in The Mystic Fable, a text which speaks
of mystic texts while at the same time displaying aspects of those texts. For instance, in the book
Certeau describes instances of the apophatic, saying-away of mystical writing, disclaiming their
own ability to speak of such things but appealing to other, older texts which had the authority to
essay a transcription of the absent foundation of the Word. Certeaus text itself begins with just such
a disclaimer, paradoxically identifying Certeaus writing with the writing he describes, precisely by
the act of distancing them; the paradox itself further signalling the presence/absence of mysticism in
writing: This book does not lay claim to any special jurisdiction over its domain. It stands exiled
from its subject matter.24
Later studies on mysticism by Don Cupitt in Mysticism after Modernity (1998), and Jeffrey
Kripal in Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom (2001), move further than Huxley or Certeau in
locating mysticism in the act of writing. Jeffrey Kripal cites Evelyn Underhills comment that Only
mystics can really write about mysticism, 25 suggesting that scholarly works by Underhill, R.C.
Zaehner and others are not merely about mysticism but are mystical texts in their own right.26
Cupitt goes further in denying the kinds of pre-linguistic conscious experience assumed by Huxley
and left open by Certeau:

You can't first experience religious happiness and then

transcribe it into words, because writing precedes experience, writing
forms and produces experience, writing makes experience possible.
Only when I have managed to write religious happiness will I know
what it is sufficiently to be able to recognize it in experience.27

24

Certeau, Michel de, The Mystic Fable, trans. Michael B. Smith, 1996, p1.
Evelyn Underhill quoted in Kripal, Jeffrey J. Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom, 2001, p33.
26
Ibid., p5.
27
Cupitt, Don, Mysticism after Modernity, 1998, p114.
25

Owen Coggins: Aldous Huxley and Michel de Certeau

Despite this doctrinal difference, Cupitts suggestion lends further force to the contention
that both Huxley and Certeau were engaged in the writing of mystical texts, by their own standards
and the standards of later historiography of mysticism. That these open-minded and omnivorous
thinkers from different intellectual traditions, both startlingly talented writers, became fascinated,
even obsessed with mystical experiences which escaped language, speaks both to the continuing
resonance of a transcendental spirituality in academia and society, and to their common ethical
humanity in attempting to communicate their versions of it, bound by words, according to Huxley,
at once indispensable and fatal.28

28

Huxley, Aldous, The Devils of Loudun, 1952, p347.

10