Excerpts from an interview with Aldous Leonard Huxley.

http://www.huxley.net/ah/huxley-interview.html 

 

'We have to take the mind and body as it is and make it capable of responding to the external world and to the events within itself in a clear awareness. We have to highten our awareness and highten the things that we do with it.'

Huxley says here that we need to overcome the fact that we do not always realize that we’re conditioned. For example that we’ve been taught things at a young age that we still do to this day, like potty training.

The point of brave new world is that in our true freedom lie both sadness and happiness.

Huxley states that we cannot be truly happy and free if we cannot choose for it ourselves. We need to be aware of our every choice.

 

‘Children must learn to use their conceptual minds and be receptive.’

Huxley would like children to think in a non-biased way and to only form their own opinions when they have gathered enough information and opinions of others. In the book Brave new world this is not the case, as children are prejudiced at a very young age. This is something that Huxley is very much against and finds very important that is present in the real world.

 

When quoting Spinoza: 

'Make the body, and I would now say the psychophysical organism, make the body capable of doing many things. In this way this will help you to perfect the mind and to come to the intellectual love of God.'

The thing I'd like to focus on here is part of the quote of Spinoza Huxley wants to replace. He talks here about a psychophysical organism, which means an organism that's part physical and part psychological. Physical meaning the outside and the body. Physchological meaning the inside and the mind. Here Huxley creates a contrast between the 'body' that Spinoza speaks of and the 'psychophysical organism'  he speaks of. He means that the body is not just a body, but is linked with the mind inseperably. This is linked to his book by the fact that a lot of things people do in Brave new world are because of the mind. Their body is linked to the mind.