Aldous Huxley’s “Island” #116

An even braver new world?

The last book of visionary writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), Island, is a bold attempt to envision a utopian society that provides its members with everything they need to achieve happiness in life. The author of Brave New World tried here to show a positive vision of how he thought that human beings should live and flourish – but the darkness is never far behind, even in this paradise.

Welcome back to another post in our quest to understand human happiness and how it is influenced by society! I had intended, as you perhaps already read in the previous newsletter, to end this series and slowly switch the topic to Epicureanism – but then I stumbled upon a book that I had always loved and that seemed to fit so beautifully into our topic, that I just had to tell you about it here. So take this to be a kind of appendix to the posts about Russell, Fromm and Marx.

Aldous Huxley and The Doors of Perception

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was a British writer and philosopher who wrote over fifty books during his lifetime, both novels and non-fiction. The most famous book of his is probably “Brave New World” (1932), which has often been included in lists of the best novels of all time. But Huxley was not only a novelist. In fact, his novels are sometimes only thinly veiled philosophical treatises. Huxley is often less interested in the plot and the character development of his protagonists, and more in the philosophical ideas that fill his books.