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Frank E. MANUEL / Fritzie P. MANUEL"Anthropologists tell us that blessed isles and paradises are part of the dreamworld of savages everywhere. The dogged wanderings of the Guarani tribe in search of a "Land-without-Evil" have been tracked over the length and breadth of Brazil, and the contemporary cargo-cults of Asia and Africa have been investigated for their marvelous syncretism of Christian and native paradises. Neither pictorial nor discursive philosophico-religious utopias are exclusive to the Western world. Taoism, Theravada Buddhism, and medieval Muslim philosophy are impregnated with utopian elements. There are treatises on ideal states and stories about imaginary havens of delight among the Chinese, the Japanese, the Hindus, and the Arabs, but the profusion of Western utopias has not been equaled in any other culture. Perhaps the Chinese have been too worldly and practical, the Hindus too transcendental to recognize a tension between the Two Kingdoms and to resolve it in that myth of a heaven on earth which lies at the heart of utopian fantasy." [mijn nadruk] (1)
[Maar het gaat niet om dromen of om gefantaseerde paradijzen, het gaat met name om de vraag: wil men / kan men die tot een realiteit maken?]
"Utopia also came to denote general programs and platforms for ideal societies, codes, and constitutions that dispensed with the fictional apparatus altogether. When the discursive, argumentative utopia assumed a place alongside the speaking picture, the line between a utopian system and political and social theory often became shadowy." [mijn nadruk] (2-3)
[Belangrijk punt, lijkt me. ]
"In these rationalist, systematic utopias whose province was the whole world, the means of reaching utopia was transformed from an adventure story or a rite de passage to Elysium into a question of political action: How do you change a present misery into a future happiness in this world? The method of reaching utopia and the speed of travel, usually peripheral in the novelistic form, were now central, and the prickly issues of revolution, evolution, the uses of violence, the mechanics of the propagation of a new faith, determinism and free will, the imperatives of blind historical destiny, and the requirements of human freedom became intrinsic to utopian thought." [mijn nadruk] (3)
"Utopia could always be used either positively or pejoratively. In philosophe circles, Grimm and Meister's literary newsletter applied the disdainful epithet espece d'utopie to the flood of stories that, with constantly changing content, imitated Morean devices. In the positivist tradition of the nineteenth century Littre's French dictionary defined utopie as chimere, noted its early appearance in Rabelais's Pantagruel, and seized the opportunity to deliver a brief homily on the deceptions of utopian promises." [mijn nadruk] (4)
"From the time of its first discovery, the island of King Utopus has been shrouded in ambiguity, and no latter-day scholars should presume to dispel the fog, polluting utopia's natural environment with an excess of clarity and definition.(...) A fluid identity will have to suffice, for our primary purpose is to dwell on the multifarious changes of utopian experience through the centuries, and, as Nietzsche taught, only that which has no history can be defined." [mijn nadruk] (5)
[Levitas wilde helderheid brengen en kwam desondanks uit op een 'vloeiende identiteit' voor wat een utopie is. Blij dat de Manuels die vage grenzen kunnen accpteren. ]
"Since the end of the eighteenth century the predictive utopia has become a major form of imaginative thought and has preempted certain scientific techniques of forecasting. The distinction between utopia and prophecy (with or without scientistic apparatus) is often difficult to sustain. The long-term prediction - applied to centuries rather than a few decades - that is cut loose from present-day moorings, mostly statistical, ends up as an expression of utopian desire or, what amounts to the same, radical counter-desire. Any doomsday prophecy opens wide the potentialities of paradise or hell." [mijn nadruk] (6)
"While prophecy can be nightmarish rather than comforting, the contemporary utopia has a way of becoming more and more intertwined with a philosophical history that binds past, present, and future together as though fated. From the eighteenth century onward, many utopias, especially the euchronias, have harbored an element of determinism. The state they depict appears virtually ordained either by God or by history ...;" [mijn nadruk] (6)
"When a writer has imprinted his personality upon a movement of ideas he is singled out, but many utopians deserve the oblivion into which they have fallen. We shall deal principally with exemplars, not with an army roll call, and scores of unsung utopians will remain unsung. This critical inquiry into utopian thought necessarily betrays a predilection for those utopias in which the will to achieve social transformation predominates over the vaporous fantasies that are meant merely to amuse or titillate." [mijn nadruk] (7)
"But if the land of utopia were thrown open to every fantasy of an individual ideal situation the realm would be boundless. The personal daydream with its idiosyncratic fixations has to be excluded. The ideal condition should have some measure of generality, if not universality, or it becomes merely a narcissistic yearning. There are utopias so private that they border on schizophrenia." [mijn nadruk] (7)
[Gelukkig maar.]
"Nor should every political and economic prognostication be considered utopian.(...) A perennial question arises as to how to distinguish a program of reform or a five-year plan from a utopia. The reply that the difference lies in the extent of the proposed transformation begs the question, because one man's trivial revision is another man's upheaval. Utopia should probably exclude mere futurist projections of existing series, short-term predictions still fettered to the present. Final judgment in these instances has to be subjective, though perhaps some historical testimony or contemporary consensus can be invoked."(8)
"We have deliberately separated utopian theory and invention from attempts to put them into practice. Studying the actual experience of those who sought to implement utopias would bring us too dangerously close to reality. There have been thinkers who, having given birth to an idea, proceeded to act it out, men who founded movements and organized schools, who formed conspiracies and hatched cabals, who led bands of followers to strange places. Some, like Thomas Muntzer and Tommaso Campanella and Gracchus Babeuf, paid dearly for their ventures; others, like Fourier, Owen, Comte, and Marx, ended up in constant bickering with their disciples. The fortunate ones, like Henri Saint-Simon, initiated their followers into the system and then had the good judgment to die. But usually there has been a functional division of labor between writers of utopias and the activist utopians who have established utopian communities or launched revolutions for the sake of seeing the glory of utopia with their own eyes. When we analyze popular millenarian or revolutionary movements, it is the content of the dreams, manifest or hidden, not the strategies for their realization, that primarily engages us." [mijn nadruk] (9)
[Jammer.]
"Since for most ages the popular utopia is largely inaccessible, or the materials still remain to be assembled, the present work tends to dwell on the utopian thought of the literate classes in Western society. Through time they have changed in character and in numbers and so has the representativeness of their utopias. But the study of utopian thought in books composed by philosophers and litterateurs does not limit the significance of the enterprise to upper-class culture. Often the utopias of the "educated classes" have had a way of seeping into popular action programs and general social movements, so that in considering today's upper-class utopia we may be witnessing a preview of tomorrow's mass demands." [mijn nadruk] (10)
"Although utopianism attracted a few champions in the 1920S and 1930S, to many observers it was a corpse. The nails were hammered into the coffin with resounding blows struck by Marxists at one end and Fascist theorists at the other."(10)
"For a whole galaxy of other twentieth-century thinkers utopia was a Schimpfwort: Ortega y Gasset labeled it outrightly "the fallacious"; Karl Popper, no less contemptuous, was more verbose in denigrating utopian engineering; and for Arnold Toynbee utopia was a symptom of the descending stage of the civilization cycle."(10-11)
"Along with university seminars on utopian thought and international conferences among the learned in various parts of the world, an accumulation of theoretical works bears witness to the revival of interest in utopianism."(11)
Waaronder Mannheim.
"Even more ambitious undertakings on the conceptual level were the works of Ernst Bloch, Frederik Lodewijk Polak, and Roger Mucchielli."(11)
Hoe wordt de zaak hier aangepakt?
"Our aim has been to settle on a middle level: to try to identify historical constellations of utopias with reasonably well marked time-space perimeters and common elements that are striking enough to permit framing generalizations, while still respecting the concreteness of the individual experience."(13)
"Although virtually all utopias deal with major aspects of living, such as work, government, love and sexuality, knowledge, religion, beauty, the tone and quality of life, dying, each of these subjects has at one or another time preempted a central position in utopian consciousness and has inspired new forms."(15)
"The underlying pattern of this book involves identifying the major historical constellations of utopian thought in the Western world. Our task has been to explore the main lines of transmission, without enslavement to a chain of influences, and at the same time to mark and highlight innovations, fractures, and discontinuities, the formation of new clusters, without accepting every self-proclaimed discoverer in utopia at his word." [mijn nadruk] (15)
"While we may loosely refer to ancient and medieval works with some utopian content as utopias, the Western utopia is for us a creation of the world of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Since that period, the history of utopia has been reasonably continuous." [mijn nadruk] (15)
"A Renaissance utopian did not have to seek out esoterica buried in the Greek and Latin corpus. If he had access to Aristotle's Politics, Plato's Republic and Laws, and Cicero's Offices, what Aristotle called the study of the form of political association that was "the ideal for those who can count upon the material conditions of their life being, as nearly as possible, just what they would themselves wish" could be nourished with the fundamental texts inherited from antiquity that were necessary for a discursive utopia. The speaking-picture utopia had a storehouse of images in Homer, Hesiod, and Ovid, in Xenophon's historical romance, the Cyropaedia, in excerpts from Hellenistic novels incorporated as geography in Diodorus Siculus' Library of History, and in Plutarch's lives of Solon and Lycurgus. Aristophanes and Lucian provided materials in a lighter vein, but when they were read in a humorless, literal fashion the ideal cities and government projects they mocked could inspire earnest utopian disquisitions. Reports from explorers to the New World fitted in neatly with classical sources and medieval accounts like Sir John Mandeville's of exotic peoples living in a state of happiness. Paradisaical, apocalyptic, and millenarian fantasies had been kept alive throughout the Middle Ages in scores of heretical and some orthodox movements of reformation. The publication of the works of Joachim of Fiore spread more widely ideas about a third status on earth, the reign of the Holy Ghost, an age of peace and love. And medieval fabliaux preserved the delights of a cokaygne utopia, sustained by a collective gastronomic unconscious whose manifest images had surfaced in Attic comedy, the Midrash, and the Church Fathers.
The two ancient beliefs that molded and nurtured utopia - the Judeo-Christian faith in a paradise created with the world and destined to endure beyond it, and the Hellenic myth of an ideal, beautiful city built by men for men without the assistance and often in defiance of the gods - were deeply embedded in the consciousness of Europeans." [mijn nadruk] (16-17)
"The partial validity of all of these interpretations ought to be accepted - a reading would have to be far-out indeed not to contain at least a grain of meaning and truth. But we have tried to avoid the parochialism of exclusive disciplinary discourse by studying the same utopian constellation on many different levels."(21)
"Every utopia, rooted as it is in time and place, is bound to reproduce the stage scenery of its particular world as well as its preoccupation with contemporary social problems. Here analogies to the dream and the psychotic fantasy may be telling."(23)
"Utopians are almost always tragic or tragicomic figures who die unfulfilled; the future does not begin to conform to their fantasy. Then appear the disciples or curious readers who have not been shaken in their innermost being with anything like the intensity of the original utopian visionary, and they adapt, prune, distort, refine, render banal, make matter-of-fact the utopia, so that it reenters the world as a force for good or evil. Compromises with existence are effected; the ironclad formula is relaxed. To measure the pure utopian theory by the achievements of "applied utopistics" is fatuous, as is any attempt to make fathers responsible for the sins and barbarities of their putative sons. By definition, the utopian creation born of a yearning for return to a simple haven or of a descent into the lower depths of the unconscious cannot be put into practice." [mijn nadruk] (27)
"Paradoxically, the great utopians have been great realists. They have an extraordinary comprehension of the time and place in which they are writing and deliver themselves of penetrating reflections on socioeconomic, scientific, or emotional conditions of their moment in history. They have discovered truths that other men have only vaguely sensed or have refused to recognize. The utopian often emerges as a man with a deeper understanding of the drift of his society than the hardheaded problem-solvers with their noses to the grindstone of the present, blind to potentiality. Perhaps the utopians stand out because of the tenacity with which they hold to their ideas. They have a penchant for focusing the full glare of their insight on a particular aspect of the world and leaving much unnoticed. But if they are fixated on one face of reality, this face they understand as other men have not." [mijn nadruk] (28)
"Utopians are often intrepid, bold explorers whom many of their contemporaries consider wild because they neither repeat existing rhetoric with variations nor pursue familiar directions. If a utopia is merely or primarily reflective of existing reality it is trivial."(29)
"Paradise in its Judeo-Christian forms has to be accepted as the deepest archaeological layer of Western utopia, active in the unconscious of large segments of the population, even when they did not read the books in which the varieties of this experience assumed literary shape-testimony to the enduring power of religious belief to keep alive the strange longing for a state of man that once has been and will be again. The paradisaical myth is virtually universal in mankind, but in Western culture it has been assimilated by each succeeding generation in specific new guises. By the time Western utopia was born in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the belief in paradise was present on all levels of psychic existence." [mijn nadruk] (33)
"The psychological roots of the paradise myth and of millenarian hope, never to be divorced from the apocalypse - with its dual prophecies of terror and salvation - are so profound that their existence may sometimes be taken for granted or overlooked."(33)
[Levitas had het hier ook al over, die neiging bij M&M om te denken in termen van collectief onbewuste en zo. Ik denk zelf ook dat het geen goed idee is om op die manier over tradities en zo te praten. Het is onnodig en misleidend deterministisch. De invloeden van religies vormen een sociale factor, mensen horen over 'het paradijs' in de geloofsgemeenschap, de kerk, er zijn mensen die verantwoordelijk zijn voor die verhalen, en het is mogelijk om van die beeldvorming los te komen door je te onttrekken aan religieus geloof. ]
"In visions of paradise terrestrial and celestial, men of the West have been disclosing their innermost desires, whether they have thrust them backward into the past, projected them forward into the future on earth, or raised them beyond the bounds of this sphere."(34)
"Toward the end of the Middle Ages paradise ceased to be speculative alone and became enmeshed with action programs, often of a violent revolutionary character."(35)
[Dan pas zou ik van utopie spreken, omdat mensen dan proberen dat 'paradijs' ook werkelijk op aarde te realiseren.]
"While there was a time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when it was fashionable to view all elements of the biblical Garden of Eden as derivative from fragments of epic literature in the cultures of the Tigris-Euphrates valley of the third and second millennia before Christ, the weight of biblical studies today is rather on the uniqueness and complexity of the myth in Genesis, and there is a tendency to underplay "origins" suggested by the reading of cuneiform texts. The Near Eastern myths nonetheless remain an integral part of the history of the paradisaical state, even if they no longer explain away the novelty of the biblical invention."(35)
[Je ziet in de oude verhalen dan vaak een soort van heimwee naar een vroegere paradijselijke toestand 'toen alles nog goed was'. Normatief is dat interessant: wat was er dan goed aan en is dat er op dit moment dan niet? Maar is er ook een overtuiging dat het weer zo kan worden als vroeger - vaak niet denk ik - en dat we er alles aan moeten doen om die toestand ook praktisch weer terug te brengen - nee, het is vaak alleen maar heimwee, verder niets. ]
"While reasonable similarities can be found, there now is grave doubt whether the Sumerian epic of Dilmun and Sumerian tablets relating to the Fall of man are tales of paradise in the sense of Genesis. The first is considered to be a myth of the divine couple Enki-Ninhursag; the second, a story of the disobedience of man who failed to perform the work he owed the gods.(...) Of the gardens appearing in the Gilgamesh epic, many are abodes of the gods, not terrestrial paradises for man; and the paradisaical land where Utnapishtim was borne to immortality is more like Hesiod's Isles of the Blessed and Homer's Elysium than a Garden of Eden."(36-37)
"In the Hellenistic and Roman periods, tales of primitive peoples living in a paradisaical condition in the wilderness beyond the borders of civility were the products of a restless, discontented urban imagination. Soon enough this sophisticated primitivism incorporated the imagery of the myth of the golden age and the Judaic and Christian Garden of Eden." [mijn nadruk] (37)
"The idea of an otherworldly paradise also has a parallel in the Zoroastrian doctrine of aeons, known in the West through crude summaries in Herodotus and Plutarch."(38)
"At one time the messianic age of the Old Testament prophets referred solely to a future tribal or ethnic triumph of Israel over its neighboring enemies and was devoid of miraculous or unnaturalistic epiphanies; only after the return from Babylon did universalist overtones keep insinuating themselves until the Days of the Messiah became a kind of wonder-laden prolegomenon to a final judgment and an otherworldly paradise."(38)
"... trust in a messianic age at an unknown future time is one of the constants of postexilic Judaic religion."(39)
"The birth of Christianity made the whole problem of the coming of the Messiah and an otherworldly paradise an extraordinarily sensitive one in Judaic thought, as the rabbis found it imperative to demonstrate that the resurrection of the dead was first foretold in the Torah and was not in any way related to Christian revelations. The proper manner of distinguishing a true from a false Messiah became critical for traditional Judaism, and a vast body of law grew up to make the identification at the appropriate moment." [mijn nadruk] (40)
"There are many examples of loose Talmudic usage of the terms World to Come and Days of the Messiah, both of which were occasionally embraced by an even vaguer one, the Future to Come ..."(40)
"In addition to oral, visual, auditory, and olfactory satisfactions - touch is excluded - the inhabitants of Judaic paradise are engaged in a major pursuit not featured in other heavens, the constant study of the Torah." [mijn nadruk] (41)
[Wat? Geen seks in de hemel?]
"Symbolic interpretations of the Garden of Eden have been many and varied.(...) By the seventeenth century, it was not uncommon to identify the historical origin of man's sense of guilt with Adam's discovery of his sexual nature in Eden, and, on the basis of superficial phonetic resemblances, the garden where Adonis and Venus cavorted was equated with the Garden of Eden. Adriaan Beverland in his Peccatum originale (1679) read every word in Genesis as a sexual "hieroglyph." The apple was amoris symbolum; donare was equivalent to coire; and ramus, fios, and arbor to membrum virile. Some present-day scholars have continued this tradition, seeing in the etymology of Eve's name and in the story of the Fall symbolic renderings of the birth of sexual awareness." [mijn nadruk] (43-44)
"Apocalyptic and mystical paradises with their marvelous predictions of heaven on earth and their poetic raptures about life in the other world were always suspect to the authorities, but they were never uprooted."(45)
"The imagery of conflict in other works of Jewish apocalyptic, as in the most terrifying apocalypse of all literature, the Revelation of Saint John, is crowded with monsters, fornicators, prostitutes, Whores of Babylon, crawling things of uncleanness: The innocence of the Garden of Eden has been polluted for the visionaries, and vengeance is theirs. Howls of rage precede the rebirth of the kingdom of virtue. The evocation of an imminent messianic era is far more vivid and dramatic, more tinged with the miraculous, more sibylline and cryptic, than the rather grave, sparse utterances of the Talmud." [mijn nadruk] (45)
"The messianic age that follows the holocaust is an amalgam of paradisaical fantasies reminiscent of both the golden age nostalgia in Hesiod and Ovid and the "messianic" prophecies of the Old Testament. Peace will prevail, an earthly Sabbath that prefigures the eternal Sabbath of the World to Come. The enemies of Israel having been driven from the holy places, there will be friendship among the kings of the earth. For men there will be inner serenity and freedom from care, no unwilling engagement with practical things, and no forced labor. (...) Sin, corruption, punishment, and tribulation will be banished as demons are either eliminated or subjugated. (...) There will be no more blind, poor, or hungry, no sadness or illness - birth itself will be painless - no mourning and no sighing, no tempests." [mijn nadruk] (45-46)
[Het is natuurlijk maar wat je 'zonde' noemt. Ik vrees dat een en ander normatief gezien niet zo veel zal veranderen aan vrouwvijandigheid en lichaamsvijandigheid.]
"In a strict sense, millenarianism, or chiliasm, was originally limited to a prophetic conviction, derived from a commentary on the fourth verse of the twentieth chapter of the Apocalypse of John, to the effect that Christ would reign for a thousand years on earth. The pivotal events of the transition to the days of the millennium were depicted in well-worn images of catastrophe ..."(57)
"However similar the spectacles of devastation, the angelology and demonology, the animal symbolism, and the homilies on the reign of justice on earth, the belief in Jesus separates Christian from Jewish apocalyptic. For Christians the Messiah has already come and expectations concentrate on a second coming; for Jews the messianic age, whatever its attributes, is a part of the future. (...) The paradisaical fantasies of Judaism and Christianity drifted apart but, as we shall see, not so radically as might be expected; both matured into orthodoxies and acquired heterodoxies." [mijn nadruk] (47)
"Justin's seventh millennium was still of this world, though it was characterized by a complete cessation of sexual activity." [mijn nadruk] (48)
[QED.]
"That the monastic orders should be considered even peripherally in a study of utopias in the West may appear paradoxical: Monos is Greek for "alone," which seems to contradict the basic principle of a social utopia. But the memory of the Western monastic order cannot be considered irrelevant to the organized utopia of the city of man in a Christian society. At least two of the most noted early utopia-makers, Thomas More and Tommaso Campanella, were deeply involved with the ideal of the monastic life."(48)
[Als er nu nog gemengde kloosters waren ... Maar nee. Mannenkloosters: vrouwvijandig en seksvijandig. Vrouwenkloosters ook zoiets. Vandaar alles wat er zoal mis kan gaan ...]
"The monastery as a paradigm for Christian living in this world in a state of community endured in utopian foundations. The House of Salomon in Bacon's New Atlantis, the product of one of the least saintly of utopia-makers, is in effect a monastic establishment. Drawings of Fourier's great house in the phalanstery make it resemble an abbey; and even the Saint-Simonians in their adolescent heyday repaired to Montmartre, toyed with celibacy, and for a time lived a monastic life in which former bourgeois donned workers' clothes and tilled the soil-to the amazement of Parisians who came to witness the spectacle on holidays."(49)
"Monasticism suffered the same fate as utopianism: Both became dynamic, encompassing ever-wider spaces and functions, until they embraced the whole world. Both surrendered their protected isolation on an island, in a forest, on a high place.(...) In the early monasteries and the early utopias there is a pervasive feeling that the outside world presents a danger of contamination.(...) In the monastery and in the closed utopia there is also recognition of an in- ternal threat, the vice of luxuria. Hence they are committed to simplicity and restricted to the necessary."(50)
"The abbot is the father present in person, a surrogate for a higher power. Well through the end of the eighteenth century the monarchical or patriarchal form of governance will be preferred in utopia. But what stands out in both the monastic rule and the later utopia is their changeless character. Ideally neither the monastery nor the Morean utopia has a history once it has been founded. Innovations are prohibited." [mijn nadruk] (50)
"For all the differences between monasticism and early utopianism, the European monastery was the first institution to wrestle with the quintessential Christian utopian problem, the creation of a society that was both a simulacrum on earth of a divine order and a preparation for the beatitude of a future time."(51)
"Aquinas was repelled by what he considered the sensate paradises of the Mohammedans and the Jews, with their pleasures of venery and eating. Though the resurrected are not ghosts or spirits, their joys are wholly spiritual.(...) Sexuality remained for centuries the forbidden fruit of maternal paradises, celestial and earthly." [mijn nadruk] (53)
"In one of their aspects the works of Lull and Dubois reflected the dream of universalizing sporadic local efforts for peace in feudal Europe. In Guillaume Postel's De Orbis Terrae Concordia Libri Quatuor (1544), Emeric Cruce's Le Nouveau Cynee (1623), and the Abbe de Saint-Pierre's Projet pour rendre la paix perpetuelle (1713), the tradition of utopian projects for peace among warring nations was reaffirmed, culminating in Immanuel Kant's philosophical essay Eternal Peace (1795), a secular version of the Christian hope. The utopian chain then continued unbroken into the slaughterhouse of the twentieth century." [mijn nadruk] (59)
"The Bible said that the Garden of Eden was to the east, a direction that shifted with the stance of the commentator and the geographical world view of his time. Medieval maps bear witness to the widespread conviction that there was an actual place called terrestrial paradise." [mijn nadruk] (60)
"In their descriptions of the Garden of Eden, medieval poets introduced new elements from patristic commentaries, and in the thirteenth century, romances about the search for the Holy Grail became related to the quest for an earthly paradise."(61)
"The myth, religious or secular, serves a purpose in the psychic economy, for it makes possible the continuance of living in the unease of civilization. This fantasy, as Freud thought of all religion, is perhaps unworthy of adults; but it has its consolatory role, like the narcotics whose perennial utility Freud seems to have recognized, without becoming quite so incensed about them as he was about religious narcosis. To bathe in the waters of paradise or utopia for a precious while has made existence bearable for man under the most ghastly conditions. There is even a mild gratification in reading and writing about paradise."(62)
"The Greeks were richly endowed with the gift of utopian fantasy, in marked contrast with the practical Romans, who, except for occasional glosses on the works of their Hellenic predecessors, were singularly devoid of interest in such unrealistic manifestations of the human spirit. Extraordinarily varied in content and remarkably enduring in time, the Greek utopia had no unified canon; it did not even have a proper name, dispersed as it was among many types and branches of literature over a period of a thousand years. And yet some half a dozen different shapes can be readily recognized as utopian in character.
There is a Greek utopia in which mythic, otherworldly elements not dissimilar to the paradise cult of Judeo-Christianity intrude. But the Greeks also wrestled with the concrete organizational problems of an earthly city in a high state of civilization, and ideal urban forms of life became a central preoccupation of their philosophy and political theory. Modern Western utopia has constantly been torn by the polarity of the paradisaical religious fantasy and the rationalist ideal of a city of men created by the Greeks." [mijn nadruk] (64)
"With Plato, Greek genius gave birth to the grand philosophical utopia of antiquity, a plan for a just and harmonious urban society based on a hierarchy of virtues and instinctual repression, which continued to attract and often to enthrall later generations. Aristotle wrote the first sober critique of the ideal societies of his predecessors, accompanied by a rather low-keyed utopia of his own."(64)
"Popular uprisings to effect cancellation of debts, agrarian reform, and a redistribution of power in the city-state have been related to utopian thought in the classical world."(65)
[Dus daar waar mensen iets in de samenleving willen veranderen spreken we al van utopie? Je krijgt in deze pagina's sterk dat gevoel dat alles zo'n beetje utopie is, want er zijn in een samenleving altijd wel ontevreden mensen die de huidige situatie willen omvormen naar een 'betere'. Na ja, waarom ook niet? ]
"Utopian thinkers of the Renaissance, no matter how imbued they were with a sense of their original genius, breathed the intoxicating air of the Greek utopias. In the century after 1450, virtually the whole of the extant Greek corpus was published. Homer and Hesiod, Plato and Aristotle, Aristophanes, Lucian, and Plutarch appeared in the original, in Latin translations, and in the vernacular languages. Classical universal histories that confounded Hellenistic utopias vvith actual societies and Latin compendia that incorporated summaries of Hellenistic utopian novels became available to humanists and their patrons. Some of the Greek utopias were also known through paraphrases in the Church Fathers. After the recovery and diffusion of this Greek literature, Europeans had access to more varied examples of Greek utopian thought than most Greeks had ever had. The utopias in print gave Europeans a common pool of fantasies, imagery, and plans. Without this Greek legacy the utopia of the Renaissance is hardly conceivable." [mijn nadruk] (66)
"Through a curious though not uncommon historical dialectic, the dark world of Hesiod gave birth to its opposite, the canonical Greek version of the golden age of Kronos, a myth that in time was amalgamated with the companion myth of the Blessed Isles and with a rich inheritance of Near Eastern visions of paradise."(67)
"Perhaps only one adornment of later utopias is conspicuously absent: While the golden race is beloved of the gods, there are no women." [mijn nadruk] (68)
"Far better known than the Greek poets, Vergil and especially Ovid were pivotal figures in preserving and handing down the myth of a golden age."(74)
"Another mythic element in utopia, Elysium, which first appears in Homer's Odyssey, is said to be a survival from Minoan religion."(75)
"The stream of the ocean is common to both versions of the Elysian myth, though only in Hesiod is the haven explicitly an island. The human fetus too is an island, and in their island utopias men have often expressed a longing for the protective fluid that once surrounded them. The maternal symbols of most Elysian, golden-age, and paradisaical utopias are compelling and the point need not be labored. The enclosed gardens, islands, valleys have reappeared with constancy through the ages. There is free feeding, security, peace, plenitude, and no rivalry.(...) Belief in an earthly garden paradise for mortal men thus had Greco-Roman as well as Judeo-Christian origins." [mijn nadruk] (76)
"In later Greek writings the Elysian Fields were often transposed to other planets or to the celestial sphere. Doubt over their whereabouts beset the Neoplatonists, in part because Plato had shifted the final haven of the soul from one to another of his eschatological myths."(77)
"Sexual desires are but lightly alluded to. Emphasis is upon the consumption of enormous quantities of food and drink and their spontaneous replenishment."(80)
"The daydream of a life in which every extravagant appetite is instantaneously appeased-aptly named the Cokaygne utopia after its reappearance in the fabliau of the Land of Cokaygne ("little cake") in early fourteenth-century France and England (the German equivalent is Schlaraffen- land, Lubberland) - has had an extraordinary vitality."(80)
"The marked preponderance of oral over sexual pleasures is characteristic of Greek as well as Jewish popular fancies of utopia, which may either throw light upon their infantile character or bear witness that bread and wine have always been the heaven of the poor and the hungry. Of the three great religions, only Islam's Koran graces the couches of the elect in the future Gardens of Delight with damsels "restrained in glance, wide-eyed, as if they were eggs [or pearls], well-guarded. " The women depicted in the earthly paradises of the Renaissance epics, still deeply Christian in spirit, are, like Lilith, dangerous creatures. In the West, paradise and sexual love did not often coexist before the eighteenth century." [mijn nadruk] (81)
[Dat is een boeiende opmerking. Ik vrees dat de bewering klopt. ]
"In the Hellenistic novels the myth of the golden age was incorporated into adventure stories and imaginary voyages that catered to a contemporary taste for the bizarre and the exotic. The fragments of these novels that survived in the Church Fathers, in Greek and Roman universal histories, and in Latin compendia of knowledge set the narrative pattern for the later utopian novel and for much of its concrete pictorial detail. But of far deeper significance, the vision of static, changeless happiness in these early novels possessed the vast majority of modern utopias from the Renaissance to the French Revolution." [mijn nadruk] (81)
[En dat is eigenlijk altijd al onrealistisch en daarom gevaarlijk.]
"(Through the centuries personifications of the sun constantly reappear in utopian stories and experiments."(84)
[En als voorbeeld van de waarden en normen in veel van die utopische (reis)verhalen:]
"Whether because of their abstemiousness or not, the inhabitants, who are devoted to all branches of learning including astrology (as Iambulus himself was reputed to be), are of great physical beauty, with hairless bodies that are vigorous and supple and bones as sinewy as muscles. They are rarely afflicted with disease, but after reaching the stipulated age of ISO they take their own lives by lying down upon a special plant with the property of lulling them to sleep and imperceptibly killing them. Their social organization is simple. They live in kinship groups of about four hundred, led by the eldest, practice division of labor, do not marry, and suckle and rear children in common, mothers often failing to recognize their own offspring. Among the more dubious blessings of the islanders are their double tongues, which enable them not only to imitate various forms of human and animal speech but also to converse with two persons at one and the same time." [mijn nadruk] (87)
"Among the heterogeneous group of ancient Greek writers who presided at the birth of modern utopia in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, four are preeminent-Aristophanes, Plato, Plutarch, and Lucian. Their legacies were contradictory both in form and content, which may in some measure account for the ambiguity of spirit that often marks the utopias of the Renaissance. While the modern utopia had remote mythic origins, it also drew upon specific literary sources, some of them two thousand years old, that in the half century after the invention of printing charmed the humanist scholars as if they had been scintillating novelties." [mijn nadruk] (93)
"Western Europe inherited idealized images of historical ancient societies that played powerful roles in shaping fantasies of utopia - the cities of Sparta and Athens, the kingdom of Persia, and the Pythagorean settlements in Magna Graecia. There was some knowledge of the ascetic communities of the Essenes, described in Greek texts by Philo of Alexandria, but their Judaic religious character excluded them from the secular corpus. One of the oldest and most widespread Hellenic traditions imputes the promulgation of a new order of society to nomothetai, lawgivers, who founded or regenerated their cities." [mijn nadruk] (93)
"The establishment of the Pythagorean communities in southern Italy was perhaps the most famous utopian experiment of the ancient world, and it was not lost on Plato. The chronology of their rise and fall is reasonably well documented. The order was founded in Croton about 530 B.C.; as the doctrine spread, a countermovement gained strength culminating in the burning of the house of Milon; fifty years later there was a final exodus back to Greece. (...) The reported Pythagorean admixture of political and religious elements became a utopian precedent for the German Rosicrucians of the early seventeenth century, and the manner of the Pythagorean infiltration of the civil order of southern Italy suggests comparison with the activities of Freemasonic societies in eighteenth-century Europe. " [mijn nadruk] (94)
"For Western Europeans the two polar constitutional ideals of Athens and Sparta came to represent contradictory ways of life, different psychologies, opposing views of the optimum society. (...) In broad terms, many Christian utopias from the Renaissance through the French Revolution were either ascetic and communistic in the image of Lycurgus' Sparta or loosely democratic and tolerant of sensate pleasure in the image of Solon's Athens. There was an occasional attempt at a syncretism of elements from both; but for centuries every modern European utopian with a foot in antiquity tended to select as his model one of the two lawgivers." [mijn nadruk] (94)
"... a number of specific documents depicting their polities became primary sources of utopian inspiration. Beyond the restricted circle of great humanist scholars, the Athens idealized is the Athens of Plutarch's Solon and of the Periclean funeral oration of Thucydides; Sparta, that of Plutarch's life of Lycurgus. These texts formed the core of many utopias of later ages, modified only in peripheral details when writers were cognizant of other accounts of the perfect cities." [mijn nadruk] (94-95)
"It had been Solon's dream to submit the society of Athens to eunomia, lawfulness, order, and arpos, that which is fitting, without recourse to tyranny. In all things he extolled the middle way. The people were not to be left too free, nor were they to be oppressed.(...) In the name of conscience Solon had summoned the rich to set bounds to their arrogance and intemperance and desires for goods. He rebuked them for avarice and high-handedness and urged them to use moderation in the enjoyment of their wealth. Living in the midst of civil strife that threatened to destroy the city, he conceived of himself as the great conciliator. The early nineteenth-century French utopian, Henri Saint-Simon, assuming a similar role, addressed Solonic appeals to the men of property and the propertyless - it was his mission to avert revolutionary disaster."(95)
[Waarden en normen van Solon. Wel een beetje te aardig voor de mensen die rijk waren ...]
"Solon knew that there were men dissatisfied with his halfway measures in dealing with the rich, but he refused to divide the goods of the rich among the poor and to push the society into total equality. He would not equalize the men of fortune, the "good ones," with the poor, "the bad ones," in the possession of land. While he had alienated many from both parties, he had won the greater glory."(96)
"Athenian society as described by Thucydides and Plutarch had less attraction for some utopians than Sparta, whose authoritarian nature was more in tune with their regulatory passion. Fundamentally, Plato's Laws and Plutarch's Spartan fantasy reinforced each other."(96)
"Sparta was a warrior state that spent its whole existence either fighting or preparing for battle. From birth to death the agents of the state-the kings, elders, and appointed platoon leaders - supervised every act of life. Among themselves all Spartans were equal. The division of the land into lots of the same size, which Lycurgus had enforced, set the pattern for future utopian plans of agrarian communism. Marriage was totally subordinate to eugenic purpose, the procreation of strong progeny fit for battle. Women as well as men were toughened because of a prevalent belief that their state of health at the time of conception would determine the strength of the child. This emphasis upon the physical training of women as well as men was in sharp contrast to the softness and luxury in which upper-class women lolled in advanced societies that produced utopias."(97-98)
"Children were taken away from their parents at an early age and reared along with their peers under the strict supervision of state authorities. The paideia was unintellectual, consecrated to the development of the body, the suppression of the ego, the promotion of military skills, and above all the flowering of the virtues of courage and self-control. Discipline for endurance, initiated at birth, was meant to produce hardy warriors, and the killing of the weak was looked upon as a necessity" [mijn nadruk] (98)
[Je ziet veel van de waarden en normen van Sparta terug in The Giver.]
"This society of total dedication to physical and moral training did not allow for any work on the part of the citizenry. For this purpose they had serfs and slaves, whom they treated with great severity lest they revolt. To terrorize their Helots, young Spartans were encouraged on occasion to go into the fields and slaughter some of them." [mijn nadruk] (99)
"The Renaissance humanists received the writings of Plato, Aristophanes, and Lucian as if they had been composed by contemporaries, and felt a peculiar closeness toward these classical authors. More and Erasmus lived with them as intimately as with each other. But the humanists were acutely aware of their own individuality; they adopted diverse conceptions from their favorite an- cients without being dominated or overwhelmed by anyone of them."(99)
"When the northern humanists undertook their mission to reform mankind there were no guides more ingenious than these ancient masters of the art of castigation, the great debunkers of pomposities, of arrogant official philosophers, of warrior-heroes who devastated the world, of soothsayers and false prophets who deceived and robbed the credulous, of greedy plutocrats and cruel tyrants.(...) Their own profound religious commitment was never for a moment in question, and the absence of an ideal in the writings of the pagan satirists did not trouble them. Moreover, if a reformed Christianity needed counsel from an ancient philosophy in creating a model of conduct in this world, there was always Plato, or Aristotle freed from the glosses of the Schoolmen. The basic rhetorical devices of utopia were learned from Aristophanes and Lucian."(100)
"In Aristophanes, peace, decent plenty, a chance for pleasure after work added up to a little man's commonsensical utopia. Paradoxically, he resorted to utopian extravaganzas in order to plead for the decent conditions of life that would promote domestic virtues (with occasional breaches of monogamy), home cooking, and neighborliness.
Insofar as Aristophanes' comic heroes have healthy appetites for food and sex, he belongs to the tradition that extolled robust, sensate pleasure as the most reasonable goal of the individual man. He exposed the frauds - the religious, political, philosophical pundits - who could only make empty promises. The greatest banes of existence were war and poverty, which reduced men to frugal diets and sexual abstinence, and obliged them to bustle around frantically instead of taking their ease and enjoying themselves. Perhaps Aristophanes was not a moralizing pacifist, but a pacifist in the name of the lower pleasures.
Sometimes Aristophanes sounds like a staunch believer in the "good old ways." When utopian schemes exalted communism or condoned unnatural behavior, he ridiculed them to death. He was skeptical of any institutional arrangements to bring about a better world, and contented himself with negative injunctions: Stop wars, silence demagogues, banish crooked priests and pretentious philosophers."(101)
"More and Erasmus both had a special predilection for Lucian. His transmission became a communal enterprise of European humanist scholarship, with each writer preparing a few dialogues."(102)
"Virtually all the major utopian themes of the novelistic Greek utopias are parodied in the True Story of Lucian. This second-century rhetorician and satirist had served as an administrator for the Romans in Egypt, and in the spirit of the new overlords of the Mediterranean world showed little sympathy for the utopian imagination, though he was well acquainted with its expressions from the mythic tales of the golden age through Plato and Iambulus. In his True Story which was translated into Latin and published in the same volume as the first book of Diodorus Siculus' history in a 1476 edition, he indiscriminately tossed all the great philosophical and military heroes of antiquity into an island community and recounted with malicious delight the ensuing involvements - except for Plato, isolated in a republic he had constructed for himself in accor dance with a constitution and laws of his own devising.(...) Lovemaking took place openly in the sight of all, with both men and women, who "think no shame of it at all.""(103)
"The initial reception of Plato's Republic in fifteenth-century Europe was turbulent."(104)
"When manuscript translations of the Republic into Latin began to be diffused in fifteenth-century Italy, the manifest contradiction between the ideal society of Plato and the Ethics and Politics of Aristotle, which had been an accepted part of Christian culture for more than two hundred years and had been newly translated by the Florentine humanist Leonardo Bruni in 1414 and 1437, became the focus of spirited controversy."(104)
"There were parts of the Republic that ran flatly counter to ordinary Christian moral practice, that could not readily be theologized, metaphysicized, or sublimated into expressions of divine love or mystical experience. In fact, the political Plato became a handicap to defenders of the theological or cosmological Plato. How could they accept the metaphysical ideas of a man who forthrightly espoused the community of women, infanticide, the free exercise of naked youth of both sexes, and who was suspected of condoning pederasty?" [mijn nadruk] (105)
"The place of Ficino and other fifteenth-century apologists of Plato in the resurrection of the myth of an ideal city has usually been neglected because of the more obvious role they played in the diffusion of Neoplatonic sensibility in European literature and art. But their part in removing the stigma attached to Plato's morals and politics helped his assimilation by orthodox Christians and even by a future martyr-saint. When the English scholars who had studied in Italy brought Plato home with them, he was an idealized figure, cleansed of calumnies. The Socrates-Christ of Erasmus and Thomas More was in the offing." [mijn nadruk] (108)
[Een Plato dus die door het Christendom ontdaan was van al zijn scherpe randjes.]
"Italians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who apologized for Plato or were inspired by him were not engaged in putting his ideal society into practice or even recommending it; the utopia in action is a later, Reformation fantasy. (...) To become a political program utopia had to await the millenarian zealousness of the Protestant world."(108-109)
"If one takes an overview of the whole of utopian thought, the distinction between Plato's and Aristotle's rival visions of the best commonwealth fades. The dramatic cleavage in the history comes with the materialist utopia-makers of the eighteenth century, who abandoned the glorification of spirituality. Though Aristotle's repudiation of his master's ideal society is unequivocal, even scornful, both considered utilitarian man seeking sensate pleasure as somewhat less than human. Supreme virtue or spiritual excellence, albeit differently conceived by the two philosophers, was the unquestioned goal of individual life."(109)
Vergelijking van Plato en Aristoteles, de verschillen en overeenkomsten:
"Advancing arguments that would be repeated by anti-utopians throughout succeeding ages, Aristotle balked at the rigid tripartite class division of Plato's Republic, at the degree to which specialization had been driven, at the imposition of one function upon a man for the whole of his life, at the exaggerated emphasis on unity as the end of the state. He was sensitive to the varying needs and capacities of men at different stages of the life cycle, an idea that would long be absent from utopian fantasy until it was recaptured by Restif de la Bretonne and Charles Fourier. Aristotle drew his military guardians only from the young; in the fullness of manhood they advanced to the magistracy; and in old age they became keepers of the sacred precincts. Plato's rulers and military auxiliaries were categorized for life. Aristotle was impressed with the intensity of the passion for equality - it was the motive drive behind all revolutions in the city - and under ideal circumstances he would give every freeman a chance to exercise some form of authority.
For Aristotle the total communism that Plato decreed for the guardians and his abolition of the family made paternal and filial love watery since it was spread over a whole age-group, and excluded warm personal friendships, which could not be cemented with generous gifts once private ownership had been outlawed. Though both Plato and Aristotle eschewed the extremes of great riches and wretched poverty as destroying any feeling of community in the city, Aristotle rejected pure communism as too restrictive and inflexible to sustain the good life. He viewed externals such as status, honors, property as real, not factitious, goods, as inducements, not impediments, on the path to virtue. He seemed to doubt the worth of the very myth of an ideal city, though his Ethics and Politics were guides to optimal moral behavior and he praised the contemplative life. The golden mean of Aristotle was set up against the transcendental ideal of Plato."(109-110)
"But for those in search of the absolute, only Plato left a model elaborated in detail that could be imitated, and in the history of utopian thought his influence is paramount." [mijn nadruk] (110)
"If Thomas More is the father of the utopian tradition, Plato still looms in the background, and up to the end of the eighteenth century his impress is ineradicable. Even when the stage scenery of utopia was drastically refurbished, the serious part of the program remained largely determined by Plato. (...) Above all, in Plato later utopians found the first serious attempt to distinguish between need and desire, which lies at the heart of the utopian problem of modern man."(110-111)
"Some utopias surpassed Plato's in austerity, others were more lenient; but Professor Arthur Lovejoy was correct in his estimate that the preponderant influence of Plato was in the direction of what he called "hard primitivism," the belief that men's authentic needs were few and simple. This idea dominated the main current of utopian thought until the end of the eighteenth century; by comparison the cokaygne utopia had few exponents in the literary world up to the nineteenth century." [mijn nadruk] (111)
"Aside from raising the basic problems that must confront a philosopherking, perhaps the most significant heritage Plato left to utopian thought was the conviction that an ideal society was in some measure feasible. Until the Republic became a reality, a just and philosophical man could not wholly fulfill himself. In time this idea was extended to mean that no man could realize his potentialities outside a utopian society." [mijn nadruk] (112)
"The paradises of JudeoChristian religion were brought into being by a transcendent God, and the time and nature of His Creation were dependent upon His will alone. Utopia is man-made paradise on earth, a usurpation of His omnipotence." [mijn nadruk] (112)
"The Christian utopia of the Western world was thus born with three heads, though only More bestowed a lasting name upon his. The Judeo-Christian paradisaical element was strongest in the Germanic utopian movements of artisans and peasants led by preachers, the Hellenic urban ideal was predominant among the Italian philosophical architects, while More, whose imprint was the deepest, wrestled with the two traditions and achieved only a precarious balance between them. The utopias which were scholarly and humanist in England were aristocratic and aesthetic in Italy, violent and populist in Germany. But all of them were profoundly Christian."(114)