My notes of interview part 1:

  • intelligence and goodwill are very important, they have to go together
  • ‘Intelligence and knowledge without charity and goodwill are absolutely inhuman and goodwill and charity undirected by intelligence and knowledge are either impotent or misguided.’                           
  • We have to take care of two kind of worlds of intelligence
  • the discursive world, scientific, philosophical and practical
  • the world of nonverbal, immediate experience
  • scientific and literary language
  • ‘The essence of good scientific language is that one word shall only stand for one thing, there has to be a sort of one to one relationship between the given word and the given event or thing that’s being talked about.’
  • ‘In regard to literature, the important thing is to, first of all be able to express the inexpressible. And secondly to express the multiple meanings which every event has for human beings. Any good work of literature inevitably has to express these multiple meanings.’
  • the esthetic part of science is very important
  • when talking about science you can’t use language like Shakespeare used language in his plays, you have to use pure and clear language.
  • ‘Without culture we would be baboons, apes.’
  • Culture allows us to become fully human but at the same time limits our humanity, it imposes certain prejudices

Direct quotes and explanation:

  • ‘Intelligence and knowledge without charity and goodwill are absolutely inhuman and goodwill and charity undirected by intelligence and knowledge are either impotent or misguided.’  

 Intelligence and knowledge alone will not reach great heights, and the same counts for goodwill and charity. But when they are combined it is possible to become something great. I think you can relate this to the book when you think about the savage, John de Wilde, and alpha +, Bernard Marx. The savage has feelings of goodwill and charity but he is not very intelligent, because of this lack of intelligence he ends up making bad decisions. For example, killing Lenina Crown. On the other hand there is Bernard Marx, a very intelligent human being, who lacks goodwill and charity and will do everything in his power to refrain from having to go to Iceland.

  • ‘The essence of good scientific language is that one word shall only stand for one thing, there has to be a sort of one to one relationship between the given word and the given event or thing that’s being talked about.’

I think this quote explains why Huxley mainly uses words with exact meanings in his novel 'A brave new world', because 'A brave new world' is in many ways also a part of scientific literature.

  • ‘Without culture we would be baboons, apes.’

In 'A brave new world' there is a very big lack of culture, because of the way the system worked. When you read this quote you can better understand how much of a dystopian the future described in 'A brave new world' really is. Huxley is basically calling the people in his own book baboons or apes.