The Later Huxley: Beyond Brave New World towards an Ecological and Pacifist Society

Abstract

The aim of my paper is to analyse Aldous Huxley’s utopian novel Island (1962) comparing it to the ideas expounded in his essays Science, Liberty and Peace (1946) The Human Situation (1959), The Politics of Ecology-The Question of Survival (1963) and An Encyclopaedia of Pacifism (1972). As we shall see, Huxley, in accordance with the “green movement” of the seventies and eighties (S.F. Schumacher, 1974; H. Daly, 1977; D.W. Pearce, R.K. Turner, 1990) discusses several important issues that are still, today, at the very core of the environmental debate.

Aldous Huxley is an interesting example of an intellectual who managed to unite the two cultures, scientific and humanistic, and who dedicated his life to the search of new perspectives and yet unexplored horizons. His motto “I keep learning” brilliantly exemplifies his lucidly critical attitude towards the reality surrounding him and his observation of nature. His critical thought is, as we shall see, a complex combination of rationality and creativity, of scepticism and mysticism that finds its synthesis in the philosophical principle of being “realistically idealist”.

In this sense the Utopian island of Pala in Island positions itself as the symbol of Huxley’s spiritual and cultural research, because in it he strives to combine and harmonise the results of natural science and cultural technology with eastern thought. In this work he prospects a new model for civilisation in which mysticism and rationalism manage to blend. In Island he criticises progress as the cause of consumerism and the exploitation of nature, and traditional science and medicine as having been slaves of capitalistic society, politics for its cynicism, as well as for having manipulated and conditioned people; he then concludes by hypothesising a society where a perfect balance between the mind and the body, nature and man exists.