Notes on the Complete Works of Aldous Huxley – Brave New World – Part 1
I don’t expect to make any definite conclusions about Huxley’s motives for writing Brave New World, but, to be fair, he signals a constructive motive in his quoting of Nicolas Berdiaeff [alternative spelling Nikolai Berdyaev] at the beginning of this edition:
“…Les utopies sont réalisables. La vie marche vers les utopies. Et peut-être un siècle nouveau commence-t-il , un siècle où les intellectuels et la classe cultivée rêveront aux moyens d’éviter les utopies et de retourner à une societé non utopique, moins ‘parfaite’ et plus libre.”
This translates to:
“Utopias are achievable. Life moves towards utopias. And perhaps a new century is beginning, a century where intellectuals and the educated class will dream of ways to avoid utopias and to return to a non-utopian society, less “perfect” and freer.”
For more information on the quoted author, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Berdyaev:
“Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (… 18 March [O.S. 6 March] 1874 – 24 March 1948) was a Russian philosopher, theologian, and Christian existentialist who emphasized the existential spiritual significance of human freedom and the human person.”
Berdiaev became a professor of philosophy at the University of Moscow in 1920. He was arrested and interrogated by the Bolsheviks.
According to Wikipedia,
“Novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his book The Gulag Archipelago recounts the incident as follows:
‘[Berdyaev] was arrested twice; he was taken in 1922 for a midnight interrogation with Dzerjinsky; Kamenev was also there…. But Berdyaev did not humiliate himself, he did not beg, he firmly professed the moral and religious principles by virtue of which he did not adhere to the party in power; and not only did they judge that there was no point in putting him on trial, but he was freed. Now there is a man who had a “point of view”!'”
Berdyaev was expelled from the USSR in 1922. He started an academy of philosophy and religion in Berlin but transferred it to Paris after leaving Germany in 1923.
We must remain objective about Huxley’s motives and attitudes, because a case can be built that Huxley heavily invested his energies in projects relating to the promotion of psychedelic drug use and alternative spirituality/religion–both social engineering techniques perfected by the fictional world dictatorship in his novel.
To be continued

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