If delivered today, the last of Huxley’s 7-part lecture series at MIT would probably be categorised under motivational talks or self-help strategies. It surveys the various under-explored non-pharmacological means to realise the best versions of ourselves. Or, as he calls it, actualising our desirable potentialities.
Some fairly well known means for self-actualisation that Huxley discusses are Alexander technique and Gestalt therapy. While the former is considered a pseudoscientific therapyI am not using this as a pejorative, for a change., Huxley tells us of the influential educator John Dewey’s admiration of F.M. Alexander’s work. He paraphrases Dewey’s foreword in one of Alexander’s books:
Alexander’s technique is to education what education is to life, in general. It proposes an ideal and provides means whereby that ideal can be realised.
While this is mentioned much later in his lecture, a Huxley-like figure today might need to lead their lecture with this part to convey the import and validity of such approaches. Huxley doesn’t really go into the details of why or how this is true but admittedly admires Alexander’s contribution. I have a friend who swears by it for enhancing their dance practice though I have not been able to grok what it does so far—it sounds a lot like what meditation does in terms of raising awareness.
Huxley believes that such practices are effective at psychologically breeding in desirable qualities in a person instead of: genetically breeding out undesirable ones; or pharmacologically enhancing our intellectual abilities—i.e., improved attention spans or reduced sleep—to increase our mental efficiency. Here, Huxley predicts the emergence of Adderall though I was less impressed by his forecasting euphoric pharmaceuticals. After all, this lecture was delivered several years after the publication of The Doors of Perception.
The underlying efficiency gains from these psychological approaches happen, he claims, because they train humans into being fundamentally happier; something he felt pharma-euphorics might also achieve one day. The reason such therapies are effective is that they do not provide a homogeneous training; instead, they can be adapted to individual personalities and their intrinsic differences, allowing each individual to actualise their latent potentialities via different means. This recognition that there is no single ideal version of a human is quite old; Huxley finds the most realistic (or complete) ideals in the Bhagavad Gita’s Three Yogas. The ways of devotion (Bhakti), selfless action (Karma), and contemplation (Jnana) can all lead to enlightenment, i.e., the actualisation of desirable qualities. He sees a correspondence between these yogas and the more recent Western categorisation of human beings by William Sheldon’s somatotypes—quite a problematic take when I read the traits listed in this table. While I do admire his capacity to form connections through historyWhether I see them or not is less important., I don’t see the relationship between these two beyond the fact that these are categories. They’re by no means comparable so maybe I missed the point of this comparison.
He highlights parallels between the positive outcomes of training one’s imagination via Gestalt therapy and those seen in Richard DeMille’s strategies in Children’s Imagination Games: children get more fun out of life by, for example, visualising adversarial or intimidating situations with adults in a more playful manner so that things feel less serious than they need to beThat is how I understood this section.. The examples Huxley gives here reminded me of those given to nervous interviewees and public speakers, like “Imagine your audience is naked”, to take the edge off.
As an educator I am very sympathetic to Huxley’s grand idea in this lecture that we must develop new methods of education that adapt to personality variations; the current strategy of pigeonholing students into the identical training-and-testing modalities remains inappropriate, especially as technological advancements—which academia struggles to keep up with—could enable more personalised and expressive learning. He doesn’t imagine one-to-one therapy as the scalable solution to actualisation; instead, he suggests building upon the pre-existing categories of humans into three or more groups to test out other means and potentially develop new ones based on past practices.
While I think the whole lecture is delivered eloquently, I am unsure if it has more of a thesis than that; it’s more a survey of techniques that rely on anecdotal evidence or name-dropping to convey their effectiveness.
Tomorrow’s post will unpack how he sees the role of the humanities in helping us actualise our desirable potentialities, which Huxley discussed in his lecture. It will also include my own concluding thoughts on his lecture. Maybe I will have some semblance of a thesis from it as I contemplate his words overnight.