Aldous Huxley turns from the public problems of civilization to the inner life of the individual. These eight lectures examine human nature, the ego and the unconscious, then follow language and art into questions of religion, visionary experience and unrealized human capacities. How much of what we call the self is shaped by the body, habit and inherited assumptions? What can words reveal—and what do they prevent us from seeing?
Aldous Huxley — 4 recordings in the archive.
Related reading: The Human Situation by Aldous Huxley.
Uh ladies and gentlemen, in our first lecture we discussed the rather curious relationship between the individual life and the public biological historical life of man. Uh in the lectures which follow I shall talk about the individual. I shall try to pose and answer the question uh who precisely are we? What sort of creature is this human being? Are we for example a soul imprisoned within a body? Uh are we as Descartes says a completely individualized ego whose essence is consciousness and who is related only to one part of matter within the body and the matter being entirely of another's another class of of reality having at its essence only extension or are we as modern empiricists are inclined to believe a a monistic mind body. Uh is the self completely insulated from all other selves or is there some kind of psychic medium in which all selves bathe and which means that the individual is not totally cut off from other minds. All these are questions which we shall have to consider in some detail later on. But what I want to start with in this lecture is to is the manner in which people in the past have thought about the problem of human nature. Their terms the terms in which they discuss the problem are of course very different from the terms in which we discuss it. Nevertheless, I think it's worthwhile making this historical detour because when we examine what people have thought in the past about themselves, about the nature of man, we find that it does throw a great deal of light on the problem. I mean it's very interesting to see how men have dealt with fundamentally the same facts in terms of different frames of theoretical reference. Uh well I shall begin uh by talking about the uh theory of man such as we find in the the wellspring of western civilization that is to say in the Homeric poems and I think the best way of starting is to read a passage from the 19th book of the Iliad. Uh the in the 19th book, the terrible quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles is made up, Agamemnon apologizes to Achilles for having taken away his girl Briseis and explains why he did this thing which enraged Achilles so much. And he says um uh I was not to…