ALDOUS HUXLEY (1894-1963)

Details

ALDOUS HUXLEY (1894-1963)
Typed letter, signed 'Aldous Huxley', from Llano, Calif., 29 March 1946, 2pp, 4°, with autograph annotations and amendments, to Mr Flechtheim, agreeing that the teaching of 'futurology' might be a very good thing, provided it is accompanied by 'eternitology' - 'it is not much use knowing what is likely...to happen, unless one has clear ideas about man's Final End'. He speaks of Thomas Traherne's Centuries of Meditation and wonders if any given social environment helps or hinders the quest for consciousness. Giving his novel Brave New World as an example, he discusses how, if future dictatorships become scientific, they may then apply this knowledge 'to make the overwhelming majority of the people love the slavery to which they have been reduced...the greatest happiness of the greatest number theory...would produce a perfect social environment', an 'entirely evil' society. He exorts Flechtheim to conisder eternitology so his students 'may have a motive...and the necessary knowledge to change them in the right way' (slightly creased on folds, rust mark from paperclip top left).

Literature

Published in Letters of Aldous Huxley, edited by Grover Smith (London, 1969), p.542-543.

Lot Essay

From 1959, Dr. Ossip K. Flechtheim (1909-1998) was Professor of the Otto Suhr Institut of the Free Berlin University. In 1945 he published an article Teaching the Future in the Journal of Higher Education 16.

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