Thoughts on Knowledge and Understanding from Aldous Huxley

 

…at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism, and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols. But zeal, dogmatism, and idealism exist only because we are forever committing intellectual sins. We sin by attributing concrete significance to meaningless pseudo-knowledge; we sin in being too lazy to think in terms of multiple causation and indulging instead in over-simplification, over-generalization, and over-abstraction; and we sin by cherishing the false but agreeable notion that conceptual knowledge and, above all, conceptual pseudo-knowledge are the same as understanding.

1956 Essay Knowledge and Understanding by Aldous Huxley, from the book THE DIVINE WITHIN, Copyright © 1992 by Jaqueline Bridgeman, HarperCollins Publishers

 

 

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• Tagged: Aldous Huxley, Beliefs, Human Error, Political Idols