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The Soul In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

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The human soul is, in essence, the center being of a body. The soul is believed to live eternally even after the body has perished. Each living person deserves the right to have total control of their soul. Yet, there are those who aim to control the total being by first controlling the soul. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the Controllers in the World State devalue the dignity of the human soul through various methods of control and manipulation. Aldous Huxley was born July 26, 1894 and was raised in a very privileged family. His father was a biologist who helped develop the Theory of Evolution, and his mother was the sister of two well-noted writers and the granddaughter of a famous educator. From a young age, he was perceived as being intelligent yet peculiar by thinking in a different way from the rest of his class. Because of this, he always felt separated from the rest …show more content…

Within his inspection of the soul, he raised a great deal of questions. One of his greatest inquiries concerned the relationship between the body and the soul. “If the soul is of a different nature than the body it cannot be in it and if it is not in the body it cannot exist at all since there is no other place where it could be. This assumes that for the soul to exist in the body it must have the same nature as the body. Here the soul would exist only until the dissolution of the body in death. But if the soul does not share the body’s nature, it cannot exist at all since it cannot then be in the body and there is no other place for it in the universe.” Gregory’s theory that the soul must be in the same nature as the body for it to exist is contradicted in Brave New World. The top two castes in the World State, the Alphas and Betas, have bodies in impeccable condition yet their soul is fractured. Their soul has been stripped from them and destroyed through the State’s methods of

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