It is incomparably easier to know a great deal about art history and to express profound thoughts in the fields of metaphysics and sociology than to know (intuitively and through personal experience) a great deal about one’s fellow human beings and to maintain satisfactory relationships with friends and lovers, with one’s wife and children.
Life is a much more difficult thing than Sanskrit, or chemistry, or economics. Intellectual life is child’s play; that is why intellectual people so easily become children, then idiots, and finally, as the political and economic history of recent centuries clearly shows, madmen, murderers, and wild beasts. Suppressed inclinations do not die: they degenerate, they fester, they revert to primitivism. But for now, it is much easier to be an intellectual infant, or a madman, or a beast, than a harmonious adult human being. That is why (leaving aside other reasons) there is such a great demand for higher education.
Escaping into books and universities is like escaping into taverns. People want to forget how difficult it is to live a human life in the ugly modern world, they want to forget how inept they are as creators of life. Some drown their pain in alcohol, others (and there are many more of them) in books and artistic dilettantism; some seek oblivion in debauchery, dancing, movies, radio, others in lectures and in pursuing science for the sake of science. Books and lectures have the advantage over drunkenness and debauchery that afterwards you don’t experience a headache or that unpleasant post coitum triste that accompanies debauchery.
I must confess that until very recently I also took education, philosophy, and science quite seriously—all those activities that we label with the lofty term “The Search for Truth.” I considered the Search for Truth to be the highest task of man, and the seekers to be the noblest people. But over the past year I’ve begun to understand that this notorious Search for Truth is just another form of entertainment, that it’s a complex and sophisticated surrogate for genuine life, and that seekers of Truth become, in their own way, just as foolish, infantile, and corrupt as drunkards, pure aesthetes, businessmen, and pleasure-seekers. I also understood that the pursuit of Truth is simply a polite name for the favorite pastime of intellectual people, which consists of replacing the living complexity of real life with simplified, and therefore false, abstractions.
But searching for Truth is much easier than studying the art of a complete life, in which, of course, the Search for Truth will occupy its proper place among other amusements, such as bowling and mountaineering. This explains (though does not justify) my continued indulgence in such vices as reading scientific literature and abstract thinking. Will I ever have the strength to free myself from the lazy habits of intellectualism and dedicate all my energy to the more serious and difficult task of living a full life? And even if I try to get rid of these habits, won’t I discover that these habits are hereditary and that I am inherently incapable of living a complete and harmonious life?
Aldous Huxley, “Point Counter Point”