This is the first lecture in a series of 18 lectures that Aldous Huxley gave at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in the fall semester of 1959 The Human Situation. Huxley became an honorary professor of literature and a professor-at-large at that university that same year. In Huxleys own words he will “take various features of the human situation” and for example consider “man in relation to the planet”, the “biological problem of the human individual”, “man and society”, the “technicization of every aspect of human life”, “the problems of human potentialities” and “art and problems of creation and insight”.
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In this lecture Huxley states that
“[…] whether we like it or not, we have to get on with [this planet] indefinitely, and unfortunately, I’m sorry to say, that all this stuff about going to Mars and so on, seems to me pretty good nonsense.”
Consider the fact that our sun is one day going to burn up its fuel and make life in this solar system impossible. With this consideration in mind, we see that Huxley’s scientific pessimism condemns not only human life but indeed all life that we know of to extinction, albeit in the distant future. This is a perfect example of his scientific and cultural pessimism to which his “philosophy of meaninglessness” brought him.
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