Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 353 - The Good Place - Utopias in the Italian Renaissance.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Good Place, Utopias in the Italian Renaissance. If you were given the task of designing a perfect city, what would you put in it? High on my own list of priorities would be plenty of green spaces, pedestrian zones, independent booksellers, coffee shops, and of course, cinemas showing silent films and other classic movies. I'd also have statues put up in the honor of my favorite philosophers like Plato, Avicenna, and Christine de Bizan, plus one of my twin brother, in part because he really deserves one, and in part because people might think it was me. I guess we should also have a statue of Thomas More, whose 1516 treatise Utopia is of course the most famous example of a project like the one I'm describing. Forget fantasy islands, More proposed a whole fantasy society and the ideal educational, political, and economic conditions that would prevail there. It's convenient that I've already decided to have a statue of Plato, since More was in turn looking back to the Republic, the original utopia of the European philosophical tradition in which Plato anticipated some of More's radical proposals, such as the common sharing of property. More's Utopia illustrates a point that has so far gone largely unacknowledged in this podcast. I've been focusing on developments in Italy, implying that Renaissance philosophy began there, with the rest of Europe having to catch up later. This is a traditional way of telling the story, in part on the grounds that the quintessentially Renaissance movement called humanism was triggered by the presence of Eastern Greek scholars in Italy and then taken up by Northern scholars like Erasmus. But it's not as if Italian intellectuals were never influenced by the rest of Europe. Two obvious examples are the arrival of the printing press and the Protestant Reformation. The latter provoked the Counter-Reformation, or if you prefer, Catholic Reformation, in Southern Europe, providing the context for developments in Italian thought in the 16th century. We're going to have this problem a lot from now on, because during the Reformation and in the 17th and 18th centuries, a lot was happening in philosophy all over Europe and all at the same time, so I will often have to discuss the influence of thinkers I haven't yet covered in their own right. So it is here. We'll look in depth at Thomas More when we come to talk about philosophy in Reformation England, but his Utopia turns out to be an important source for Italian intellectuals in the 16th century. Some of his writings, possibly including Utopia, were brought to Italy by his friend Antonio Buonvisi. Its initial publication caused little fanfare, but the Italian translation, which appeared in 1548, was a hit. It came with an introduction, written by Anton Francesco Doni, which promised the reader, Doni was inspired to write a short Utopian work of his own, with the enticing title Wise and Crazy World, a dialogue between two characters named simply Wise and Crazy, Savio and Pazzo. The Wise character tells his crazy friend about a dream he has had of a city where men are of one mind and all human sufferings are taken away. This was the opening salvo in a veritable barrage of imaginary polities. Around the same time, a work called simply The Happy City was published by a polymath whose name was Francesco Patrizzi. Obviously, he's not to be confused with the Byzantine scholar Ioane Patrizzi, who we covered back in episode 319. The works of Doni and Patrizzi paved the way for the most famous Italian Utopia, The City of the Sun, written by Tommaso Campanella in 1602, but first published only in 1623. Two years after that, the Dialogues of L'Orovico Zuccolo were published, containing a fourth Utopian work called The Republic of Evandria, as well as an attack on the model for all this literary activity, Thomas More's Utopia. According to Zuccolo, More was less, less convincing that he should have been, that is. His ideal society was too much of an idealization, realizable only on the impossible assumption that the citizens of Utopia would all be perfectly virtuous and willing to live in conditions akin to monasticism. Fans of Utopian literature might be tempted to respond that even if the ideal city or society cannot be realized, it might still serve a useful purpose by giving us something to aim at. But that sentiment had already been anticipated and rejected about a century earlier by none other than Machiavelli. In his Prince, he wrote with his characteristic realism and cynicism, Machiavelli was writing too early to be thinking of More, or his Italian imitators, of course. He may instead have had Plato in mind. If so, he was giving Plato too little credit, since the Republic is far from optimistic about the prevalence of virtue in real Greek society, and goes out of its way to argue that the ideal society is genuinely possible, if unlikely. Of course, Machiavelli didn't need to invent Utopias, because in his view, real life had provided a model to imitate and an ideal to strive for in the shape of the ancient Roman Republic. And the authors of Utopian treatises also look back to antiquity. Patrizzi openly admitted that he was taking many of his ideas from Aristotle's politics, albeit with a good deal of creative elaboration, and Zuccolo's Evandria is meant to be more realistic than Thomas More's Utopia, in part because it has so much in common with Rome. Antonio Donato, the translator of several of the Utopias, has commented that for Italian humanists, Rome was both imaginary and real. That's an observation you could apply with some justice to Machiavelli and his fellow historians too. Something else Machiavelli didn't need to do, by the way, was look back to antiquity to find examples of people imagining states that don't exist in reality. It might be argued that the tradition of Utopias in Renaissance Italy began well before the arrival of Thomas More's work with treatises on architecture by authors like Leon Battista Alberti, Antonio Averlino, known as Filarete, and even Leonardo da Vinci. They explained the ideal way to lay out a city, as well as the ideal construction of individual buildings, with Alberti alluding explicitly to Plato's Republic as an inspiration. He and other city planners thought that Plato's strict division between social classes should be reflected in the urban landscape. Thus da Vinci proposed a two-level city with the rich literally living above the poor. In this imagined city, the layout would express in physical terms a fundamental assumption we've seen underlying the political philosophy of the period, that the popolo are at the bottom and the automati on top. Another theme taken over from ancient authors was the ideal shape for a city. Plato mentions that the lost city of Atlantis was circular, and the great architectural writer Vitruvius, a major source for Alberti, suggested that a city should have its streets laid on a radial plan, like the spokes of a wheel. That idea would be taken up by Doni in his wise and crazy world. In such a radial city, it would be almost impossible to get lost, which would make for a sharp contrast to real Italian city centers, as anyone who has been there will know. And someone standing in the center would be able to see the whole city just by turning around, an apparently innocent remark that seems more sinister once you notice that it anticipates Jeremy Bentham's idea of the panopticon, a jail in which the inmates can be observed at all times from a central viewing position. My ideal city would definitely not work like this, but that might have something to do with my real hometown, of which Ralph Waldo Emerson said, we say the cows laid out Boston, well, there are worse surveyors. One of the reasons that Tomasso Campanella's City of the Sun is so famous is its remarkable account of the layout and physical appearance of its utopia. It has a series of concentric circular walls, making it almost impossible to take by military force, or so Campanella says, despite the fact that the Ottomans had not so long ago managed to batter their way through the formidable walls at Constantinople. In the City of the Sun, the walls are painted with all the images and information one needs to learn the sciences, including everything from pictures of various animal species to definitions for use in metaphysics and ethics. Now that idea, I am definitely stealing. Instead of publishing these podcasts as books, I should be releasing them as wallpaper. Education is of vital importance for Campanella, because just like Plato's Republic, this city is ruled according to the principles of philosophy. The highest ruler is a consummate scientist and intellectual, and has subordinates who oversee the various disciplines, which include the liberal arts as well as applied sciences, like medicine. It may seem both unnecessary and overoptimistic that rulers could be deeply learned scholars. One can imagine Machiavelli to say nothing of the modern-day American voter snorting in derision. But Campanella has the main speaker in his dialogue explain that if his readers find such proposals incredible, that is because of the scientific culture to which they are accustomed, which is corrupted by mere book learning and memorization of the teachings of figures like Aristotle. As we'll be seeing in a later episode, these remarks fit perfectly into Campanella's philosophical agenda. He rejected Aristotelian science in favor of theories inspired by his predecessor, Bernardino Telesio. Even the importance of the Sun in his Utopia is a reflection of those theories. Telesio and Campanella saw heat as a fundamental explanatory principle in their new physics. In The City of the Sun, Campanella duly explains that his citizens see the Sun, the greatest source of heat, as an image of God. That's yet another idea we can trace back to Plato's Republic, and its famous analogy between the Sun and the form of the good. So, Campanella's ideas about philosophy, and especially natural philosophy, provide us with an obvious context for understanding aspects of his City of the Sun. Presumably his political ideas and experiences are also relevant, but it's not so easy to say how. Campanella's life was a difficult one. He was arrested by the Inquisition in 1594, and for a time imprisoned alongside another famous victim of persecution, Giordano Bruno. A further run-in with the authorities came in 1599, when he was accused of conspiring against the Spanish domination of Naples. Arrested for treason, and for good measure, heresy, he would endure horrific torture and decades of imprisonment, albeit under conditions which allowed him to compose many treatises, including The City of the Sun. He was finally released in 1626, and in 1634 he made his way to France before dying in 1639. Given this life story, it is surprising that one of his main contributions to political thought, a book called On the Monarchy of Spain, argues in favor of the universal rule of the Spanish power that subjected him to so much misery. An obvious suspicion is that he may have written it to persuade his jailers that he was on their side after all, but questions about the exact dating of the work make it hard to know for sure. Campanella does seem to have good reasons for supporting an expansion of Spanish dominion, even if he also suggests that this might be the least bad option available. Spain had proved its ability to take on the Ottomans at the pivotal Battle of Lepanto in 1571, whereas the Italian princes were too weak, even collectively, to defend Christian interests against Ottoman aggression. The aforementioned background of Reformation and Counter-Reformation is also relevant here. Campanella considered Luther to be a harbinger of the Antichrist, so he looked to the Southern European powers to push back against the tide of Protestantism. Whatever mixed feelings he had about the Spanish, they were at least willing to recognize the spiritual authority of the Pope. In this respect, Campanella should be distinguished from earlier imperial monarchists, like Dante. Where Dante wanted to put all authority in the hands of a secular emperor, Campanella saw unified governance under the Spanish crown as compatible with, indeed justified by, a political alliance with the papacy. All of which allowed him to transfer his support to the French crown as soon as he moved to France and conveniently decided that the Spanish were professing Catholic piety for merely pragmatic political reasons. That cynical approach to faith is something he associated with Machiavelli, whom he called the Scandal, Ruin, Scourge, and Fire of this Century. He wrote a work against Machiavelli's thought, which bears the fourth right title, Ethism Defeated. He was particularly outraged by the Machiavellian advice that rulers should instrumentalize religion as a way of binding together a political community. Often the most heated polemics are provoked by near-agreement, and that may apply here, because Campanella also saw religion as a powerful source of social cohesion. And he offered some pretty Machiavellian thoughts on how the Spanish monarchy could exploit division between its enemies, for instance by lending support to the Calvinists in England to sow dissension there. But as we can see from The City of the Sun, in his ideal polity, religion would not be the tool of the ruler, but his central purpose. His political leaders are scholars and philosophers, but also priests, and his utopia is neither a Principiate nor a Republic the two forms of governance considered by Machiavelli, it is a full-blown theocracy. Campanella recognizes, indeed insists upon, the novelty of this approach. Because religion has never been truly central in historical governments, he says, there has never been on this earth a state wholly without injustice, without sedition, without tyranny. With this, Campanella can be seen as anticipating and answering a complaint about utopian treatises. The authors of such works seem to be offering happiness in a perfect city on this earth, rather than in the City of God in heaven, as Augustine so memorably put it. But for Campanella, the rational or natural religion observed by the people of his city would already be remarkably like a Christian community. He says that they have learned from their travels about other religions and particularly admire the Christian faith. Their customs even involve the confession and absolution of sins, a detail that may have been inspired by the rise of confessional culture as part of the Counter-Reformation. Here, it is also relevant to note that his spokesman in the dialogue, who has visited the utopian city and is describing it to an interlocutor, is a Knight of Malta, a religious warrior, whose authority as a speaker comes from both his piety and his philosophical learning. These themes in Campanella's City of the Sun find echoes in the other Italian utopias. Patrizii also talks about religion as a natural trait of humans, and pretty well all of these authors lay great stress on unity among the citizens. No trace of Machiavelli's productive class tension here. Instead, the city is imagined as a single organism, something we already see in those works on architecture, like a drawing by Francesco Di Giorgio that superimposes a human body on the ground plan of a fortified city. For Alberti, this idea of organic unity was paramount in the making of individual buildings. He wrote that these should have that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added or taken away or altered, but for the worse, and that a building is very like an animal, and that nature must be imitated when we delineate it. But we see variety between the works when it comes to the groups of people within the utopian community and how they are meant to form a unity. To an astounding degree, our authors are willing to follow the provocative recommendations of Plato when it comes to gender and sexuality. Campanella, making the cosmos the model for his city and seeing both as an organic unity, remarks that the sun is like a father and the earth a mother, with the universe as a whole like a large animal. His theory of heat leads him to see women as being, in effect, defective men who lack vigor because of their lesser heat. Nonetheless, he follows Plato as far as he can bear to, agreeing with the stipulations in the Republic that all labors are shared by the two sexes, with the caveat that the more physically demanding tasks are carried out by men. He also adopts Plato's policy of eugenics, according to which mates are chosen by a scientific procedure, and says that the citizens of this city would find us ridiculous for taking care over the breeding of horses and dogs, but not humans. Even more outrageous is Doni, who says there is a street of women that men visit for sex in his perfect city, with the resulting children shared in common by the whole community. What about the economic classes which played such a key role in the historical analyses of Bruni, Machiavelli, and Guicciardini? Of the four authors, Patrizzi is the most aristocratic in attitude. He identifies six classes, namely farmers, artisans, merchants, warriors, officials, and priests. Of these, the first three are useful workers, supporting the elite, with only the latter three groups considered as full citizens. As Patrizzi puts it, the city consists of two parts, one that serves and is unhappy, the other part meanwhile rules and is blessed. It's therefore been commented that his happy city is a utopia for philosopher kings. The more satirical and antique Francesco Doni, by contrast, wants to get rid of class distinctions altogether. In his utopia, one person is not richer than another, and wealth is passed around so that everyone has the chance to enjoy it. This echoes a comment he makes elsewhere, why should the nobles have so much and everyone else so little? It's no coincidence that Patrizzi was born into a noble family, Doni into a poor one. In all the utopias, though, it seems that no one is subject to genuine poverty or enjoys great affluence. Zuccolo says so explicitly, writing that, in Evandria there is not even a single beggar and there are not excessively wealthy people. The most interesting reflections concerning economics are once again to be found in Campanella. In particular, he argues explicitly against the practice of slavery. There are no slaves in the city of the sun because everyone does their share of work. This is in contrast to the Italy of his day, he reckons that only one in six of the people who live in Naples actually do anything useful, and that if the labor was spread out fairly, each person would need to work only four hours a day. Elsewhere, in a work on economics, he is less provocative and simply accepts slavery as a fact of life, even giving advice on which peoples are best for which purposes. You may treat Negroes as you wish for burdensome occupations, he says. But he does not have a race-based theory of slavery or a theory of natural slavery like that of Aristotle. Instead, he seems to think the practice is a violation of nature, which is why he bans it from his utopia, and elsewhere writes that, every human being is equal to every human being with respect to divine natural and civil commutative law. The economic policies recommended in these utopias are striking, but not stunningly innovative since they echo the proto-communist ideas of Thomas More and before him Plato. Just as work is shared in common, so is wealth, and the citizens may not even have any use for money. In Campanella's city, money does exist, but only to trade with foreigners, and the people are said to be rich because they want nothing, and poor because they possess nothing. Thanks to passages like this, he has been held as a forerunner of modern-day socialism. His name is even inscribed on a Soviet obelisk. There's a certain irony here, in that the Italian Renaissance is sometimes seen as a kind of crucible for the birth of capitalism. The utopian thinkers dreamt about abolishing private property, but other writers were coming around to the idea that there might be advantages in a widespread human tendency that was wishfully eliminated from perfect imaginary cities. Greed. You can bet your bottom dollar that it will be worth tuning in for the next episode to hear all about that, as we turn to Renaissance economic theories, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.