As readers, how closely do we pay attention to the author’s words? How much of our own experience do we bring into works of literature? In learning, how important is the written word vs non-verbal activity? In “The Education of an Amphibian”, Aldous Huxley examines how we are amphibious in our approach to literature and learning.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is a materialistic, naturalistic, or behavioristic outlook of the human spirit which Huxley sees as distinct from the body; “for, in comparison, the capacity of the spirit is limitless and subject to profound modification; the spirit is the result of all experience” (Tomorrow, “The Education of an Amphibian”, 2).

Huxley basis his views on “modern psychology” (mid-century!) to the individual sense of oneness. The capacity of the spirit gives a oneness to the obvious diversity within the individual man.

On Language

In the first essay of Tomorrow, “The Education of an Amphibian”, Huxley examines the use of language in our experiences. He refers to mankind as being amphibious as we live “half in fact and half in words, half in experience and half in abstract notions” (4). We use language so badly that we become the slaves to our clichés which either turn us into conforming “Babbits” or into “fanatics and doctrinaires”. In this blog, I will examine part 1 of the Education of the Amphibian: the approaches to literature and learning.

Huxley turns to the research of F. C. Bartlett’s classic Remembering in which he tests the influence of language upon memories of various kinds of experiences. In one text, Bartlett showed photographs of soldiers to a group of subjects who were asked to describe the faces and answer questions about them. A particular face often aroused a more conventional attitude appropriate to the given type. When showing photographs of literary materials, such as Emerson’s essays, the story tended to disappear, clichés replaced facts from the essays. The subjects read into the likeness of their own familiar notions as embodied in the language of their class and culture.

Bartlett, therefore, concluded that “when produced from memory, all stories tend to be shorn of their features, descriptive passages lost most of their style and matter over to a conventional pattern and point of view”(5). Most people read into literature the standardized notions with which they set out. No matter how much effort an author exerts, there is no verbal equivalent for the reader’s experiences. Wow, how often do I read literature with these standardized notions, or as Mallarmé calls the sens plus pur into the shopworn mots de la tribu (the purer meaning is soiled by the words of the tribe).

Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,

Und gruen des Lebens Goldner Baum.

(Gray is all theory, green life’s golden tree)

Too many lectures, too much theorizing, will cause the green tree to wither, will turn its golden fruits to dust. Life flows back into us through the newness of experience. We must have both. “We must have  scientific theories, philosophy, theology, and law or we will become nothing but Yahoos”(Huxley, 7). Whether we like it or not, we are amphibians, living simultaneously in the world of experience and the world of notions; the world of Nature, God and ourselves and the abstract verbalized knowledge of facts.

Huxley continues his argument by examining the “modern” practice in liberal arts (this was published in 1957!) which is overwhelmingly more verbal than in the past. Even though words are still the medium in which teachers and pupils carry on most of their activities, there are numerous excursions into non-verbal experiments; students are encouraged to cultivate their artistic skills, to refine their tastes, and sharpen their sensibilities (8).

During this time, mid-century America, educators began to stress the importance of “non-verbal activity” as a means of learning. In the 1970’s, I recall building a diorama of our native American culture, Stonehenge out of modeling clay, the Alamo out of popsicle sticks and dirt, and a mosaic of Ancient Pompeii using plaster of Paris. According to Huxley, children learn more through these techniques of education, of “doing”, than being shown pictures and “reading” an intelligent book (9). I would have to agree, based upon my experience.

As an avid reader, I will consider more closely Huxley’s notion of being “half in fact and half in words, half in experience and half in abstract notions”. As an amphibian, I will continue to inhabit many different and even “incommensurable” universes as I explore whole spaceless, timeless world of the universal Mind! Cool.

Works Cited

Huxley, Aldous. (1952). Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. New York: Harper & Bros.