scholarly journals Death Existentiality in Philosophical Novels of Aldous Huxley: Culturological Approach

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 22-27
Author(s):  
Iryna Karaeva
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Aldous Huxley ◽  
Attitude To Death ◽  
Cultural Experience ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Brave New World ◽  
Anthropological Approach ◽  
Summer Time

Cultural studies cover the genesis and development of culture as a specific human lifestyle. Its universals are representations of human cultural experience, including humans, their life and death. The meaning of human life, death, and immortality became the main objects for consideration and research at all stages of Aldous Huxley’s literary activity.The analysis of his early philosophical novels and novels that offer an anti-utopian model of culture shows his tendency to destroy his characters in order to defend their personalities, a refusal to accept the patterns of ordinary being, when the man’s will is aimed only at self-preservation and reproduction. To identify this tendency, we studied the novels Crome Yellow, Antic Hay, Point Counter Point, Eyeless in Gaza, After Many a Summer, Time Must Have a Stop, Brave New World, Ape and Essence. At this stage of spiritual search, A. Huxley justifies suicide as a way of self-realization.Having reached the level of the philosophical outlook, A. Huxley proposes and promotes the spiritual ideals of self-improvement, love for neighbour as for ‘another one’, the attitude to death as an existential, which is a certain stage of human existence, not tragic but natural. It is reflected in the novel Island. Thanatology is one of the main subjects at school. The yoga of death is promoted: it treats life and death as a single entity, as a kind of art, which should result in Paranirvana.The article proves that A. Huxley’s stance on the problems of purpose of life, death, and immortality had been changing along with the evolution of his outlook. It is shown how this genesis is reflected in A. Huxley’s literary works. Death in A. Huxley’s works is interpreted via meta-anthropological approach as the existential transcendent being of man.

scholarly journals SOCIAL AND POLITICAL IDEAS OF ALDOUS HUXLEY THROUGH BERNARD MARX’S CHARACTER IN BRAVE NEW WORLD

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muh Haris Zubaidillah
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
New World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Aldous Huxley ◽  
Happy Life ◽  
World State ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The World ◽  
Brave New World ◽  
Descriptive Method

Social and political ideas have important role and influence in society life. Because, it can change human's thought or mind. In this case, Aldous Huxley as author constructs a character in the novel Brave New World and it is his ideas. He includes his ideas through one of characters in his book. It is seen in character Bernard Marn's feeling, such as; Bernard Marx's feeling as nature of human, Bernard Marx's Feeling to Soma, and Bernard Marx's Feeling to the concept of happy life in The World State. So, the researcher feels a necessity to analyze political ideas of Aldous Huxley through Character Bernard Max in Brave New World. Based on the problem above, the researcher needs to analyze the political ideas of Aldous Huxley through character Bernard Mar in Brave New World by analyzing the character dialogue used the descriptive method. The descriptive method on the research involves a collection of technique used to specify, delineate or describe naturally the occurring of changing characterization without experimental manipulation. The researcher needs to analyze about what are the social and political ideas of Aldous Huxley through the character Bernard Marx constructed in the novel Brave New World. The researcher analyzed it by using Historical Literary Criticism. All the data are taken from the novel Brave New World written by Aldous Huxley. The analysis of data deals with the descriptions social and political ideas of Aldous Huxley through the character Bernard Marx constructed in Brave New World containing: Bernard Mary's feeling as nature of human Bernard Marx's Feeling to Soma, and Bernard Man's Feeling to the concept of happy life in The World State. The literary work is very dominant to socialized ideas, opinion, and massage as values to the society. Therefore, it has great influences to deliver values to the society through the reader. So, it can be concluded that author has power of his work and can include his ideas, opinion, and massage also values in his work as like Aldous Huxley. Then, political ideas of Aldous Huxley through character Bernard Marx in Brave New World are author's politic (Aldous Huxley), he attempted to express his ideas in a work.

Aldous Huxley and the “Brave New World” of Architectural Modernism

2020 ◽  
pp. 81-128
Author(s):  
Ashley Maher
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Aldous Huxley ◽  
Animal Housing ◽  
Brave New World ◽  
Regent's Park ◽  
Architectural Modernism ◽  
Modern Movement

Using Aldous Huxley’s prolific body of architectural criticism, this chapter argues that Huxley evaluated political concepts—individualism, liberalism, uniformity—through analyzing the creations and rhetoric of the modern movement. While his brother Julian sponsored modernist animal housing at the Regent’s Park and Whipsnade Zoos as part of his efforts to imagine a more egalitarian Britain, Aldous reconfigured the structuring role of the household in the novel. His foundational dystopian narrative, Brave New World, merges fiction and criticism, as Huxley stages debates between literary advocates and a World Controller. What emerges is a politics of medium, whereby literature serves as a vehicle for liberalism. Against the uniformity and “over-organization” of architectural modernism, Huxley demonstrates the capaciousness and flexibility of the novel as a genre.

Old Lives

2020 ◽  
pp. 61-88
Author(s):  
Maren Tova Linett
Keyword(s):  
Old Age ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
New World ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Old People ◽  
World State ◽  
The World ◽  
Brave New World ◽  
Age Reading

Chapter 2 takes a disability studies approach to aging by viewing Brave New World (1932) as a thought experiment that explores the value of old age. Reading the novel alongside Ezekiel Emanuel’s claim that it would be best for everyone to die at around age seventy-five, before their abilities begin to decline, the chapter reads the absence of old people in the World State as an aspect of its dystopia. The chapter first argues that the persistent youth embraced by the society robs life of its narrative arc and thereby of an important aspect of its meaning. It then explores the reasons suggested by the novel that such a sacrifice of life narratives is not worthwhile, even to avoid periods of possible disability or frailty. Brave New World makes clear that the excision of old age has significant political, moral, and emotional costs.

Womb with a View

2020 ◽  
pp. 187-206
Author(s):  
Ally Wolfe
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Significant Part ◽  
Duty Of Care ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Working Through ◽  
Brave New World

This chapter conducts a close reading of Lois McMaster Bujold’s ‘problem’ novel Ethan of Athos, in which an all-male world, Athos, is posited, reliant for reproduction on the ‘uterine replicator’ or artificial womb. Close reading demonstrates how the novel proves more complex than initial readings might suggest in its careful working-through of the ramifications of the uterine replicator for parenting, motherhood, and the duty of care towards the young. The chapter argues how the existence of Athos with the wider Vorkosigan series is significant, part of an ongoing and series-wide project by Bujold to demonstrate the range of possible futures that the uterine replicator might permit. At various points, Ethan of Athos is brought into conversation with Huxley’s Brave New World to contrast Bujold and Huxley’s visions of reproductive futurities. The chapter shows how Bujold’s saga-length project of creating a diverse science-fictional heterotopia involves a thorough working-through of the ramifications of the uterine replicator, of detaching reproduction from a gestational body, in which Ethan of Athos plays a necessary part.

Whose Life is it Anyway? Life and Death in the Court of Protection

2018 ◽  
pp. 245-252
Author(s):  
Clementine Maddock
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
New World ◽  
Mental Health Problems ◽  
Best Interests ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Life Sustaining Treatment ◽  
Brave New World ◽  
Mental Capacity Act ◽  
Patient’S Will ◽  
Death Cases

Psychiatrists are entering a brave new world. Following the introduction of the Mental Capacity Act, there has been an increase in the number of decisions regarding refusal of life sustaining treatment being heard in the Court of Protection. Many of these cases involve patients with mental health problems. Although in some cases, such as those with anorexia, treatment can be given against a patient’s will under the Mental Health Act, the question has become whether we should continue to give treatment to a patient who is actively refusing and who has not benefited from treatment for this condition over the last 10 to 15 years. In other cases, patients are refusing life-sustaining treatment for conditions unrelated to a mental disorder, who are deemed to lack capacity to make that decision. This essay will consider how the courts are interpreting the ‘best interests’ doctrine in these life or death cases.

Strange Old World - Late Paleocene—Early Eocene Climatic and Biotic Events in the Marine and Terrestrial Record. Edited by Marie-Pierre Aubry, Spencer Lucas, and William Berggren Columbia University Press, New York. 1998. 513 pages.

Paleobiology ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
William C. Clyde
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
New World ◽  
Scientific Progress ◽  
Early Eocene ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Aldous Huxley ◽  
Old World ◽  
Biotic Events ◽  
Brave New World

In his 1932 book Brave New World, Aldous Huxley laid out a satirical blueprint of a future so strange to people of the time that it became a symbol of the frightening and unyielding momentum of scientific progress. Literature and popular culture have since been littered with images of a future earth so transformed by human progress (or extraterrestrial intervention) that we can hardly recognize it. Earth historians and paleontologists, however, have taken a different path into the bizarre. This group of time travelers has used the kind of technology that Huxley foreshadowed to recreate past worlds of similar disparity. These worlds are neither based on, nor entirely limited by, human imagination, but are based instead on scientific observation. In short, these strange old worlds are real, not imagined. As often is the case, however, truth can b e stranger than fiction.

On Humanism and Transhumanism

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-1) ◽  
pp. 166-180
Author(s):  
Sergey Piletsky ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Aldous Huxley ◽  
Technological Opportunity ◽  
The World ◽  
Brave New World ◽  
Historical Tradition ◽  
Technological Bias

The paper raises the problem, quite widely discussed not only in the frame of modern philosophizing, but in the whole complex of socio-humanitarian knowledge – the problem of the perspectives of the formation of the epoch of transhumanism. What is it - the epoch of transhumanism? What are the peculiar properties of it? And what are the specifics of that technological bias which would allow put it into practice? Is there a genetic bond between transhumanism and the sources of the traditional humanism? And why the majority of not only philosophers, but all humanitarians speak out against ‘the unprecedented advantages’ and ‘the good’ of transhumanism, considering its realization as the era of ‘dehumanization’ of a human being? These and similar questions worry millions of intellectuals all over the world. The author of this paper tries to give his answers. He analyses the definitions of humanism, given in two authoritative philosophical dictionaries. Then he reinforces his analysis with not only his own reasonings and extrapolations, but with the positions of three outstanding thinkers and famous humanists of Renaissance – Lorenzo Valla, Pico della Mirandola and Erasmus Roterodamus. However the author tries to consider the historical tradition not isolated but to link with the technological opportunity of its transformation into those perspectives of transhumanism. That’s why the author draws attention to a remarkable writer-philosopher Aldous Huxley with his anti-utopian novel ‘Brave New World’. The author concludes the paper with offering to the reader’s attention his author’s speculative model how it can be.

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