Utopia in Renaissance Philosophy (original) (raw)

Change in the Perception of Utopia

2019

The word utopia derives from the Greek words topos (place) and eu (good) and ou (not). (Reiner, 1963: 16) In Roger L. Emerson (1973), for the word utopia, eutopia and outopia, respectively, meaning, good place (no place), which means that two words derived from the Greek. The uncertainty between Eutopie (out of place) and outopia (out of place) is probably defined as available social systems and sometimes fantasies of perfection that are desired but not achieved. The derived word "utopia" was first used as a Greek term in the literary work De Optima Reipublicae Statu Deque Nova Insula Utopia, written by the English writer Thomas More in 1516. Thomas More used the term "utopia" to derive from the roots " u " and " topos" meaning nonexistent in Greek. The term "utopos" is an island that stands between reality and the imaginary plane. Krishan Kumar (2005) states that utopia is both nowhere and a good place(eutopia). However, the first example of utopia in the sense that Thomas More had no place in the British island to imagine, in other words, a product of his imagination, was Plato's State, which is considered a political utopia. It describes the ideal state in the State, and the concept of dystopia is a concept against utopia.

The Politics and Aesthetics of Utopian Literature: From the “Golden Age” Myth to the Renaissance

Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Literature, 2023

From its earliest beginnings in the Western world to the end of the Renaissance, utopian literature has developed in four primary ways: as myth about the blissful but vanished past of humanity; as prophecy about a future state of bliss, particularly in millennial visions of the post-apocalyptic kingdom of God; as explicitly posited philosophical and rationalist speculation on how an ideal or at least plausibly better city and society could be attained; and as full-blown fiction, which deploys a range of fictional speech acts. Though in certain ways its ideational origins lie in a rich interplay of topoi derived from mythic antiquity and from the Hellenistic, Roman, and early Christian cultural world, utopian literature in its most formally complex form—that of the utopian fiction—only arises in the Renaissance. In this form, which will ultimately yield the utopian novel of the 19th century, the literary utopia occupies an idiosyncratic position between realism and fantasy fiction, lacking grounding in verisimilar space or time, but also eschewing the ahistoricism and escapism of fantasy. Utopian literature has been mostly understood in terms of moral and sociological functions, ranging from its utility as an instrument of anticipation, or at least fertile speculation about the possible and desirable, to its ability to posit norms and regulatory ideals or, more negatively, its penchant for dogmatism and the abstractions of blueprint and method. A different picture emerges, however, if one considers utopias from the standpoint of how they produce social meaning—an approach that foregrounds the role of textual and semiotic factors without making ethical assumptions about the better or worse character of utopian textual worlds. At stake, rather, is the grasp of utopian literature in terms of an organizational imaginary, according to which society is something that can be beneficially re-formed and rearranged after first being critically analyzed as to its constitutive elements and institutions. At their earliest, utopias were the repository of myths about a world free from the pains of labor and the horrors of war, from greed and often from private property as well. By the time of Plato’s philosophical writings in the 4th century BCE, utopian vision had become at once more modest and more realistic and technical, most prominently in its connection to social engineering. The earliest elements of playful fictionality emerge in the Hellenistic world, which incorporates the theme of travel and the element of the marvelous, often in a satirical vein. The early Christian world tends toward a divide between allegorical abstraction, particularly in elite versions of Christian Neoplatonism, and the more heterodox possibilities of divinely mediated subversion of established social forms and structures in the millenarianism of the lower classes. The Renaissance utopia, finally, emerges after Sir Thomas More’s homonymous text of 1516 as a complex synthesis and mediation between elite and subaltern pursuits, antiquity and modernity, Christian morality and scientific materialism, constituting utopists themselves as mediators and guarantors of social harmony in an otherwise rapidly changing and turbulent world.

NOWHERE IS BETTER THAN HERE: THE STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF EARLY SIXTEENTH CENTURY UTOPIAS

Perichoresis, 2018

This article examines the utopian vision present in the eponymous work by Thomas More and in the early Anabaptists. In the light of the discussion on the power and dangers of utopian thinking in liberation theology it seeks to show how More struggled with the tension between the positive possibilities of a different world and the destructive criticism of the present reality. A similar tension is found in early Anabaptist practices, especially in terms of their relationship to the state and their practice of commonality of goods. The article shows that all attempts to reduce visions of a better world to a particular setting end up as ideological.

'Suspicor enim eam gentem a graecis originem duxisse': Translating Utopia in Greek

Utopian Studies, 2016

Although More's Utopia is a work for which classical Greek language and literature are central, it was not until 1970 that the work was translated into Greek. During the sixteenth century, Greek scholars bypassed the fundamental texts of Renaissance humanism, clinging instead to the classical Greek past. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Greek intellectuals also ignored Utopia, partly because the nature of their Westernizing agenda did not attract them to a work embedded within the tradition of Catholic Latinate cosmopolitanism. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the term utopia entered Greek intellectual life, "scientific socialism" had also made its first appearance in Greek political culture, possibly preempting the desire to translate a work that would now appear to constitute the source of an already obsolete canon of "utopian socialism." Tellingly, the textual life of More's Utopia in Greek began during the military junta. Its first translation arguably deploys it as a text charged by the desire for egalitarian democracy while at the same time privileging its satirical and playful aspects, partially in order to avoid state censorship. Though there are important differences regarding the framing of More's text by the four extant translations in modern Greek, the overall tendency seems to be to receive Utopia as a 309 antonis balasopoulos and vasso yannakopoulou: Translating Utopia in Greek fundamentally political text, a text capable of inspiring thought, and perhaps action, during dire and challenging times.