The last book of visionary writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), Island, is a bold attempt to envision a utopian society that provides its members with everything they need to achieve happiness in life. The author of Brave New World tried here to show a positive vision of how he thought that human beings should live and flourish – but the darkness is never far behind, even in this paradise.
This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm.
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Aldous Huxley and The Doors of Perception
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was a British writer and philosopher who wrote over fifty books during his lifetime, both novels and non-fiction. The most famous book of his is probably “Brave New World” (1932), which has often been included in lists of the best novels of all time. But Huxley was not only a novelist. In fact, his novels are sometimes only thinly veiled philosophical treatises. Huxley is often less interested in the plot and the character development of his protagonists, and more in the philosophical ideas that fill his books.
Aldous Huxley. Source: Wikipedia
His most valuable books for the philosophically interested reader are not the novels at all. Huxley was an advocate of ritualised and controlled drug-use, not as recreation, but as a way to open up new, ecstatic states of mind that would allow “normal” people to experience what is otherwise reserved for monks and mystics.
He himself was a user of both LSD and mescaline, a drug made of a cactus growing in Mexico, and he described his experiences in one of the most remarkable non-fiction works of the 20th century: “The Doors of Perception” (1954), from which the music band “The Doors” took their name. It is a small essay, only a few dozen pages, the description of an afternoon. But in that book, Huxley describes the world, experienced through the drug, with the precision and the poetic instinct of a world-class writer:
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