Words and Things: Huxley's Epistemological Complaint

“The deepest argument in Doors of Perception is about language. Mescaline was the evidence; the real subject was what words cost us.”

Huxley's education argument, buried in the final pages of Doors, is more radical than his neuroscience argument. The reducing valve claim is an empirical hypothesis. The education claim is a value judgment: we have organized formal education entirely around the verbal-conceptual mode of experience, and this systematically impoverishes people.

'Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born.' The benefit is access to accumulated human knowledge. The cost is the habituation to mistaking the word for the thing.

Under mescaline, this mistake briefly became impossible. The flowers were the flowers, not concepts of flowers. The difference between these two modes is, Huxley argues, incalculable.

What he is not arguing is that words are bad. He is arguing that words without training in what words cannot do produce a specific pathology: the inability to distinguish between map and territory. Education that teaches only the map, and never teaches that the map is not the territory, produces people who have genuinely forgotten the territory exists.

This complaint is still unmade in most educational theory. The contemplative education movement has partially implemented it. The full implementation, an educational system explicitly cultivating both modes, does not exist.

Sources

• Huxley, The Doors of Perception (1954)