『멋진 신세계』에 나타난 진보된 과학과 인간의 자유의 문제

Abstract

Scientistic utopian novels originating from the idea of “New Atlantis” in the 17th century have expressed the desire to change people's lives into a more developed and advanced state by borrowing the power of science as the 18th and 19th centuries progressed. However, it is notable that Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World (1932) started off from a totally different context than prior utopian novels. Unlike writers such as Francs Bacon who dreamt of realizing a utopia, Huxley considered the problems that could occur when the utopia they dreamt of became reality, and planned his novel Brave New World with the aim of guarding against the realization of a utopia. In other words, the fantasy dreamt up by Bacon, that is, the fabrication of science against human life and nature was a nightmare to the 20th-century Huxley, and the great pains of dreaming up a scientific utopia was ironically reversed into the toil of preventing the utopia from happening and returning to a non-utopian society. In his foreword of 1946, Huxley established the nightmare he depicted in Brave New World as occurring 600 years later, but he predicted that the horror of this nightmare would actually be realized within a hundred years while warning against the rapid advance of scientific technology and its side effects. We who are living in the modern day of the 21st century are witnessing a much more rapid advance in scientific technology than what Huxley had experienced in the 20th century, and therefore, we need to pay attention to the voice warning against its side effects. Huxley's novel Brave New World contains the humanistic self-examination that questions whether the ideal we aspired to is heading in the right direction and is significant in that it involves the serious introspection reflecting on how the human race may be in the state of heaven or hell due to the power of science. The epigraph of Brave New World hints at Huxley's desire to return to a world less perfect but more free, while the foreword to Brave New World Revisited (1958) explores what he terms “the subject of freedom and its enemies.” This paper addresses this problem of human freedom in a scientifically advanced society. In Brave New World, Huxley is in a certain way projecting the side effects that occur when science is combined with totalitarianism while pointing out the prices paid for the advance in science and the gains made within society, or in other words, the individuality, freedom, independence, humanity, and various human emotions lost in the name of advancement and security. By contrasting the ideological language of Brave New World with Shakespearean language, this paper reveals that Huxley cautions against the disciplinary power of language that is concomitant with scientific advancement. The paper also examines in Brave New World the process in which human beings are denied free will and existential worth as a result of the sole pursuit of security in a society and community through advanced scientific technology.