« Apocalypses béatifiques » de l’ordre et du chaos dans Les portes de la perception d’Aldous Huxley

Abstract

Hallucinating under the influence of mescalin, Aldous Huxley had difficulty answering questions about the things he saw. Significantly, queries about time, space and quiddity were particularly problematic. He said such questions were relevant to objects one finds in the “universe” he left behind when he entered the “mescalin experience”. Desirous to account for Huxley’s apparent “aphasia”, the present essay undertakes an “aetiology” of what Huxley referred to as “common language”. It postulates that Huxley’s difficulties reflect the fact that the language he was using is an apophantical tool of a particular “Beatific vision”. Not the “continually changing apocalypse” of “pure becoming” Huxley beheld whilst hallucinating. Rather those “thaumatos phasmata” Plato spoke of in various Dialogues. The ones we see if our perceptions are modulated in such a way that everything we observe appears ‘static’, ‘eidetic’ or ‘monadic’. In other words, a vision of the world that prevents us apprehending the “luminous bliss” Huxley witnessed in his “mescalin experience”. Besides substantiating the claim that common language has been “annexed” or “suborned” by Plato’s eidetic phasmata, this essay assesses how well Huxley succeeds in his attempts to translate his Beatific Vision of Chaos into a language designed to make it unspeakable.