Aldous and Aristotle: The Ethics of Brave New World >>> Chris Thayer Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World has long been fertile ground for literary critics. From its far-future, atheistic, family-free setting to its obsession with reproduction and fertility, Brave New World presents a striking figure of science fiction literature that manages to be both timely and immortal, of its moment and eerily predictive. It has generated considerable critical thought for many of its topics. The common failing of these past critics, however, is one of direction. Many look around, pointing out the economic struggles, social unrest, and coeval figures (such as D. H. Lawrence) who inspired Huxley. Others look ahead, tracing the ways in which his concerns regarding birth control, freedom, individualism, and the effects of propaganda on the control of a society have flourished into the modern day, a point that Huxley himself makes in the foreword to Brave New World. This forward is included in all later editions, and is also laden with concerns for the Final End and Greatest Happiness as well as the push of science (Huxley ix). In fact, is it his specific wording that denotes a familiarity with Aristotelean ethics, which is confirmed by the historical certainty of his classical education, even writing journalistically under the name Autolycus (the grandfather of Odysseus, a rather obscure bit of myth to select for a name) (Tucci). To be certain, all of these are extremely valid paths of critical thought, and paths which the author himself would later explore in his critical volume Brave New World Revisited. Far more interesting, though, is when we cast the critical gaze further back, and while looking back, examine an issue that is both unspoken in and integral to both the entire plot and concept of the novel—happiness. Upon close examination, we see that Brave New World is not only a book of the future, of flying cars and “feely” theater, but rather one of the past, all the way back to chitonclad philosophers and marble columns—to Aristotle. Aristotle’s ethical model (found in his Nichomachean Ethics) is one centered on the concept of eudaimonia. Eudaimonia is an Ancient Greek concept that, while at the deepest level means “human flourishing,” is frequently translated as “happiness” (Rackham 10). It is this concept, also frequently termed “the good” in his writings, that is “that at which all things aim,” or more specifically, “the function of man [, which] is the active exercise of the psyche’s faculties in conformity with rational principle... in conformity with excellence or virtue” (Aristotle 3, 33). In briefest terms, he asserts that phronesis (practical wisdom) + arete (virtue/excellence) = eudaimonia (flourishing, happiness, the purpose of humanity) (Aristotle). Thus armed with an understanding of Aristotle’s eudaimonic ethics, we may examine the Brave New World Huxley creates and find, beneath its obvious themes of birth control and propaganda, the core ethical system so frequently overlooked by critics. Indeed, therein we see the twin of the virtue-ethicist’s focus on happiness—for in the Brave New World, as Mond puts it, “happiness [is] the Sovereign Good” (Huxley 177). The essential flaw of the Brave New World that causes its distorted reflection of ethics is that its reading of Aristotle is incomplete, a hazard Huxley is attempting to warn against. Upon consideration of the whole of both works, Brave New World finally reveals
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