Thomas More "Utopia"

Страница: 2/4

“More was one of the most thorough and consistent thinkers in the Sixteenth Century. He argued everything like the splendid lawyer he was. I believe that when we read Utopia dialectically, through his other works, we may penetrate to some degree the ironic screen that he has thrown over the work. Even so, complete certainty about his meaning sometimes eludes us.” (Harry Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance, New York, Oxford University Press, 1969.)

The Second Book

The second "book" or chapter in More's work – the description of the island commonwealth somewhere in the New World. I shall leave aside the fascinating first book, which is a real dialogue--indeed an argument between the traveler Raphael Nonsenso and the skeptical Thomas More. I shall rather discuss the second book, Nonsenso's description of this orderly commonwealth based on reason as defined by the law of nature. Since the Utopians live according to the law of nature, they are not Christian. Indeed they practice a form of religious toleration – as they must is they are to be both reasonable and willing to accept Christianity when it is announced to them.

What is the Utopian commonwealth? What does the little book mean?

“As opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed.” (Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, Indiana University Press, 1984.)

Utopia provides a second life of the people above and beyond the official life of the "real" states of the Sixteenth Century. Its author took the radical liberty to dispense with the entire social order based on private property, as Plato had done for the philosopher elite in his Republic.

“But at the same time, More took the liberty to suppose a commonwealth built on the pessimism about human nature propounded by St. Augustine, More's most cherished author. Augustine believed that secular government was ordained by God to restrain fallen humankind from hurtling creation into chaos. Without secular authority to enforce peace, sinful human beings would topple into perpetual violence; so the state exists to keep order.” (Mikhail Bakhtin)

A major source of violence among fallen human beings is cupidity, a form of lust. Sinful human beings have an insatiable desire for things. For Augustine there was no end to it.

So if we look at Utopia with More's Augustinian eye, we see a witty play on how life might develop in a state that tried to balance these two impulses--human depravity and a communist system aimed at checking the destructive individualism of corrupt human nature. It is carnival, a festival, not a plan for reform. When the carnival is over, and we come to the end of the book, reality reasserts itself with a crash. More did not see in Utopia a plan of revolutionary reform to be enacted in Christian Europe. Remember the subtitle

The six-hour working day in Utopia also represents an eternal check against the tendency of an acquisitive society to turn human beings into beasts of burden to be worked as if they had no claim over themselves. Set over against the misery of peasants depicted in the vision of Piers the Plowman or against the child labor of early industrial America or the sweatshops of modern Asia, the Utopian limitation on labor is a way of saying that life is an end in itself and not merely an instrument to be used for someone else.

It is perhaps also a rebuke to those of us for whom work and life come to be identical so that to pile up wealth or reputation makes us neglect spouses, children, friends, community, and that secret part of ourselves nourished by the willingness to take time to measure our souls by something other than what we produce.

The sanitation of the Utopian cities is exemplary. The Utopians value cleanliness and they believe that the sick should be cared for by the state. The Utopians care for children. Education is open to all. They like music, and in an age that stank in Europe, the Utopians like nice smells. To average English people of the Sixteenth Century – living in squalor and misery.

Реферат опубликован: 7/09/2009