"Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors"
About this Quote
Progress, Huxley suggests, is less a ladder than a stumble. The line refuses the comforting story that truth is something you “get” if you’re smart enough or pure enough; it’s something you asymptotically near, bruised and revised, by being wrong in public and then correcting course. The key word is “succession”: not a single mistake redeemed by a neat lesson, but a chain of approximations where each error is both failure and method.
That’s classic Huxley: an intellectual with a satirist’s impatience for certainty, especially the kind sold by institutions. “Unattainable truth” is a provocation. It punctures the modern craving for final answers - scientific, political, spiritual - while still keeping faith with inquiry. Huxley isn’t anti-truth; he’s anti-complacency. If truth is unattainable, then dogma becomes not just wrong but morally suspect: the posture of someone pretending the search is over.
The subtext also smuggles in a critique of progress narratives. In a century of world wars, mass propaganda, and techno-utopian promises, Huxley watched “truth” get conscripted into slogans. Errors don’t just happen; they’re produced - by ideology, by groupthink, by the seductive simplicity of systems that claim to explain everything. By framing error as the route, he both humbles the individual and indicts the culture: we’re condemned to iterate, but we’re also responsible for building conditions where revisions are possible.
It’s an ethics of fallibility: keep moving, keep doubting, and distrust anyone who claims they’ve arrived.
That’s classic Huxley: an intellectual with a satirist’s impatience for certainty, especially the kind sold by institutions. “Unattainable truth” is a provocation. It punctures the modern craving for final answers - scientific, political, spiritual - while still keeping faith with inquiry. Huxley isn’t anti-truth; he’s anti-complacency. If truth is unattainable, then dogma becomes not just wrong but morally suspect: the posture of someone pretending the search is over.
The subtext also smuggles in a critique of progress narratives. In a century of world wars, mass propaganda, and techno-utopian promises, Huxley watched “truth” get conscripted into slogans. Errors don’t just happen; they’re produced - by ideology, by groupthink, by the seductive simplicity of systems that claim to explain everything. By framing error as the route, he both humbles the individual and indicts the culture: we’re condemned to iterate, but we’re also responsible for building conditions where revisions are possible.
It’s an ethics of fallibility: keep moving, keep doubting, and distrust anyone who claims they’ve arrived.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
|---|
More Quotes by Aldous
Add to List









