Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 420 - No Place Will Please Me So - Thomas More.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 historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, No Place Will Please Me So, Thomas More. As you've no doubt noticed, I'm a big believer in the importance of historical context for understanding philosophy. But you might think that even I would make an exception for Thomas More's Utopia. After all, this is a book about a place that has no history, for the very good reason that it doesn't exist. But as it turns out, all of More's writings dramatically illustrate the importance of historical and biographical circumstance, and that very much includes utopia. This work was inspired in part by the contact of Europeans with the Americas, something no reader can miss, given that the fictional character who describes this fantastic society, Raphael Hithloday, is said to have been a companion of Amerigo Vespucci, and is described as a leading expert on unknown peoples and unexplored lands. Hithloday's account alludes to other contemporary developments too, like the printing press and the humanist study of Greek language and literature. Indeed, the writing of Utopia would have been unimaginable without the rise of humanism. It is clearly a response to Plato's Republic, which More would have been able to consult in the original Greek. Just to ensure that we don't miss this either, he has Hithloday refer to Plato by name numerous times. And, a familiar humanist theme, the tension between a life of study and contemplation and a life of political engagement, is also crucial for Utopia. That choice is the main focus of the dialogue between Hithloday and a fictionalized version of Thomas More himself in Book 1, before we get to the famous description of Utopia in Book 2. Which brings us to the relevance of More's own biography. The tension between contemplation and action was one he felt keenly. After studying as a teenager at Oxford, remember this was the typical age for university students, he underwent a period of spiritual turmoil that lasted from 1494 until late 1504 or early 1505, when he got married. In so doing, he turned his back on the possibility of committing himself to a chaste monastic life, one he'd been tentatively pursuing by residing in the London Charter House of Carthusian monks. He would rather, he said, be a God-fearing husband than an immoral priest. Nor would family life be his sole earthly concern. More would, in due course, become one of England's most important politicians, albeit a reluctant one. He said in a letter that he joined the royal court much against his will, and his good friend Erasmus claimed that no man was ever more consumed with ambition to enter a court than More was to avoid it. But enter it he did. He would serve as ambassador, speaker of the House of Commons, and, as of 1529, Lord Chancellor, all under the king who would eventually have him put to death, Henry VIII. Utopia may be a work of vivid imagination, but its writing fits snugly into this story of concrete political activity. It was apparently composed in two parts, first in Flanders during a lull in trade negotiations, and then back in England. The fictional setting is a conversation in Antwerp between More, his real-life colleague, Peter Giles, and the invented Hithloday. As we've seen with other authors, the writing of dialogues was a sign of humanist tastes, and that certainly applies to More. Even before meeting Erasmus while the great Dutch scholar was visiting England, More had been steeped in humanist study at Oxford University. Here, figures like John Collette and William Grossen were promoting an agenda imported from Italy. Collette's lectures offered a Platonized Christianity inspired by Ficino, while Grossen, who had studied in Florence under no less an authority than Poliziano, was the first to give public lectures on Greek in Oxford. More was very much their student. He translated into English a biography of Pico della Miranda, written by Pico's nephew, Giovanni Francesco Pico, and cooperated with Erasmus on translations of the ancient satirical writer Lucian. Lucian is a clear inspiration for Erasmus' Praise of Folly and for More's Utopia. More also lectured on Augustine's City of God. We'll come back to that. If the philosophical dialogue was the most humanist of genres, maybe the second most humanist genre was history. So, of course, More wrote a historical work too, about Richard III, the king whose defeat opened the way for the Tudor dynasty. Living under the Tudors, More obviously wasn't going to offer a synthetic portrait of Richard. In fact, his history would help to inspire the villainous hunchbacked anti-hero of Shakespeare's play Richard III. That's the one with the line, A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse. Erasmus once remarked that More always had a special hatred for tyranny, and this attitude certainly comes across in The History. For More, as for other humanists, history writing fell under the art of rhetoric, and history should have an ethical purpose, using eloquence to move the audience to virtuous attitudes and actions. Toward this end, and in imitation of ancient historians like Salost and Tacitus, More filled his history with set-piece speeches. As we know, classicizing historians had been doing this for ages, from Byzantines like Michael Psellos to Italians like Machiavelli. A more unusual feature of this work is that More wrote it in two languages, Latin and English, and in parallel, rather than by translating one into the other. This underscores the way that Latin and the vernacular were coexisting in this period, as vehicles for humanist expression. Toward the end of More's life, opposition to tyranny would become a far less abstract concern. He was a supporter of Henry VIII's first queen, Catherine, and was unwilling to go along with the king's choice to set her aside, or with Henry's moves to put the church under royal authority. He resigned as chancellor over the latter issue. Perhaps he hoped to return to a quiet life of scholarship, but instead he provoked the king's wrath by refusing to square an oath of allegiance to the new line of succession through Henry's second wife, Anne Boleyn. For this, More was incarcerated and ultimately put to death on July 6th, 1535. He would thereafter be considered a Catholic martyr, which is rather ironic because he had created some martyrs of his own in the service of the king, during the years when Henry was still opposing the cause of the Reformation. In his service, More became an implacable enemy of Protestantism. He oversaw the banning of books by the reformers, and was personally involved in questioning suspects. He can be credited, though that seems the wrong word, with half a dozen actual executions on charges of heresy. This phase of More's career is, to put it mildly, perplexing. How could this learned man, a devotee of the peace-loving and moderate Erasmus, and a strident defender of free and frank speech in parliament, have overseen such repression and violence? Well, he tells us, in another dialogue called Concerning Heresies, and in other works written against the Reformation. In total, these works on heresy amount to about one million words. No wonder modern scholars have identified heresy as the single most time-consuming issue Thomas More dealt with in his chancellorship, and probably in the whole of the last ten years of his life. More understood heresy in fairly traditional terms, as the obstinate clinging to teachings contrary to those of the Church, in particular, teachings relevant to salvation. He saw it as the worst of all crimes, even worse than murder, since heretics endanger the souls of their victims, and not merely their bodies. Being both a skilled humanist and a skilled lawyer, More mounted one of the most impressive, and certainly most extensive, refutations of Protestantism from this period. Alongside the usual complaint that the doctrine of salvation through faith alone would deprive believers of any reason to perform morally good actions, he mercilessly critiqued the idea that Scripture can, by itself, determine true doctrine. Without the authority of the Church, it wouldn't even be clear which Scriptures are authentic. Besides, Scripture itself establishes the legitimacy of the papacy and the whole ecclesiastical hierarchy so that the Protestants' vaunted reliance on the Bible undermines their vaunting defiance of the Pope. Yet, More's career as a polemicist remains difficult to square with his earlier writings, especially Utopia, which includes a passage on tolerance of religious diversity. The Utopians hold a variety of beliefs, from sun worship to monotheism centered on Mithra, a god from Persian history. Freedom of religion is enjoyed by the citizens, so long as it does not lead to dissension. Even leaving this passage aside, the work as a whole isn't what you'd expect from a man who would go on to persecute heretics. It is ironic and playful, to the point that it defies easy interpretation. You might remember that Erasmus wrote his equally ironic and playful Praise of Folly while staying at More's house. In the dedication of the work to More, Erasmus mentions the delight his host takes in jokes of this kind, and Utopia bears that out. You probably know that the very title is a pun. Utopia is a double wordplay on Greek, since it can mean no place, or good place. The etymological fun doesn't stop there either. Hythlodei's name means purveyor of nonsense, the main river of Utopia is called Anaidros, meaning waterless, and the chief city is Amorot, meaning unknown. More added a further layer of irony by keeping up the pretense that the whole dialogue was based on a real encounter. He wrote in a letter that, had he wanted to write a pure fiction about a perfect society, he would have indicated this by inventing geographical names that allude to the unreality of the place, which as we've just seen is exactly what he did. To keep up the joke, the book was published with a supposed map of Utopia, and even an alphabet for its language. This language is said by Hythlodei to be not unlike Persian, but also somehow descended from Greek, as one can see from the place names, another hint at the ironic etymologies. In the preface, More makes a big deal about being a stickler for accuracy in his recounting of the conversation with Hythlodei, admitting with comic exaggeration that he isn't entirely sure about the length of a bridge connecting Utopia to the mainland. Then he adds casually that he can't address the much more fundamental question of Utopia's location because he forgot to ask. So this is, like Erasmus' praise of folly, an unserious work that is meant to be taken seriously. And there's a further complication, namely that the character of More in the dialogue is not persuaded by Hythlodei's account. Not because he denies the existence of Utopia or challenges its description, but because he's skeptical about the wisdom of the Utopian's way of life. More the character is a realist, if not a cynic, and his attitude throws the idealism of Hythlodei into sharp relief. As I've mentioned, the first book contains a debate about whether it is advisable to engage in political life. Hythlodei says there is no point in doing so because good advice will be ignored by bad rulers and advisors will inevitably be morally compromised. More the character counters that one should settle for incremental improvements rather than insisting on perfection. One has to approach things indirectly, handling the ruler with tact and rhetorical skill. This is the voice of the pragmatic, civically engaged humanist. The scholarly consensus is that this opening debate was added as an insertion after More had already written the stage setting of the dialogue and the account of Utopia in Book Two. But it makes thematic sense to have it here. Hythlodei's pessimism about politics is backed by his complaints about the evils of English society. These are then picked up in Book Two, insofar as Utopia eliminates the sources of those evils. In fact, Erasmus commented that the purpose of More's work, as he understood it, was to show what are the things that occasion mischief in commonwealths. For instance, England allows people to sink into poverty and then puts them to death for stealing what they need to live, something Hythlodei calls making people thieves and then punishing them for it. In Utopia, by contrast, there is no poverty and no theft. There can't be because private property does not exist there. Of course, the communism of Utopia is taken from Plato's Republic, the source duly being flagged for the reader. Indeed, utopian practice goes beyond Plato, who had recommended communism only for the elite class of guardians in his ideal state, not for the whole society. In another sense, though, it falls short of Plato because in Utopia, the communism is only economic and does not extend to the sharing of sexual partners and children. Utopians' gender politics are more traditional, with wives obeying their husbands, though women do train for war, are highly educated, and can even be priests. Platonic or not, these proposals do not impress the character of More. He says that communism could never work because everyone was stopped working without being spurred on by the hope of gain. Hythlodei replies that communism does indeed work, and that he's seen it do so with his own eyes, namely in Utopia. So that's evidence taken from a fictional place offered by a fictional witness, hardly a ringing endorsement of the feasibility of this economic policy. In book one, More, the character, defends his pragmatism of low expectations by saying that, "...it is impossible to make everything good unless all men are good, and that I don't expect to see for quite a few years yet." Then, at the very end of the work, More issues a final verdict in his authorial voice, "...not a few of the laws and customs described as existing among the Utopians were really absurd." This especially applies to the communism. On the other hand, he adds, "...I freely confess that in the Utopian Commonwealth there are very many features that in our own societies I would wish rather than expect to see." Taking these passages together, it looks as though More, the author, is pointing to a kind of chicken and egg problem. Utopia could be real, if there were virtuous citizens available to live in it. Sadly, we would need to have a Utopia already up and running in order to produce such citizens. The imperfect people we have around us in real life could never make up such an ideal society. That is in itself a reminiscence of Plato, who, in the Republic, was keenly aware of the difficulty of actually establishing a city in accordance with his specifications. He had Socrates defend its possibility, but admitted that it would take an extraordinary set of circumstances to bring it about. Another author, who might have been on More's mind here, could be Augustine. As I mentioned, More was well acquainted with Augustine's City of God, which contrasts the polities of our earthly realm to the perfect society of the blessed in heaven. So perhaps one point being made in Utopia is that such a society is impossible in practical terms because human sinfulness makes it unrealizable. It would be lovely to have all things shared in common, to live in cities where all doors can safely remain unlocked because nothing is private. But given that we humans are in fact selfish and acquisitive, it's simply not going to happen. A human community without greed would be like a river without water. One might object to this line of interpretation by asking, are the Utopians really so virtuous? If so, why does Hythloday keep alluding to the systematic regime of punishments imposed in Utopia? It seems these would be superfluous if the people are so morally admirable. The punitive measures include the death penalty for some crimes, while for others the punishment is slavery. Yes, Utopia has slaves, whose chains are made of gold because the Utopians think so little of precious metals. They also use it for chamber pots. The modern reader is shocked by the appearance of slavery here, but would this have been the intended effect for 16th century readers? Again, it's hard to say, because it is emphasized that this is quite a humane version of enslavement. For instance, no one is born into slavery so that the children of enslaved persons are born free. Nor at least as free as anyone is in Utopia, which is not very. The people are kept in line in part by the publicness of their lives. Because they live in the full view of all, they are bound to be either working at their usual trades or enjoying their leisure in a respectable way. They are not even allowed to leave their districts to take a walk without express permission. It's worth contrasting this to another Utopian society, imagined around the same time, the Abbey of Thelem, described in Rabelais' Pantagruel. As you might remember, the motto of the people there was, do as you will. Since the people are like-minded and virtuous, they all choose to do the same thing. But that doesn't seem to be the case in Moore's Utopia, where the inhabitants are constantly steered towards right behavior using mutual surveillance and threats. As for what counts as right behavior, this is determined by the Utopians' rather utilitarian approach to life. They seek to maximize pleasure, though they eschew crass hedonism on the grounds that the higher intellectual pleasures are superior to those of the body. As several commentators have pointed out, a question already posed by the debate in book one was whether what is expedient is also good. In humanist terms, whether utilitas aligns with honestas. The character of Moore is, as we saw, a pragmatist. He thinks that you should do whatever works, even if it means exhibiting a degree of moral flexibility and even putting up with outright wickedness. Hitler Day disagrees. He's a true idealist, and so are the Utopians. They think that the right thing to do just is whatever will work. We can see this from their policy in matters of war. While the citizens are trained to fight, just in case, they prefer to hire mercenaries to do it for them, since they think warfare is an activity fit for beasts. This is why they keep those gold chamber pots and chains around. They can be melted down to pay hired armies when necessary. They're also willing to use bribery and assassination of enemy leaders to avoid pitched battles. This, they reason, is actually morally preferable, since it avoids a larger number of deaths. The coldly calculative reasoning here is seen in other domains too, as with the memorable provision that Utopian couples should look at one another naked before getting married to ward off later disappointment. Such passages would surely have amused and shocked contemporary readers, leaving them to wonder what the deeper point might be. I suspect it was at least in part that the Utopian moral universe is one that humans might reasonably choose to live in if they did not have Christian truth. Actually, contact with European travelers has brought the Utopians into contact with Christianity. Some citizens there have embraced it, seeing this previously unknown faith as harmonizing with their predominantly monotheistic beliefs. The Utopians are also convinced that a good afterlife awaits those who act well in this life. They evidently wouldn't think much of Lutheranism, which rejected the idea that salvation is merited by good works. But Utopia is still fundamentally a pagan society. Remember, it's connected culturally to both Greece and Persia. So Moore might be suggesting that even the ideal condition of such a society will still look pretty problematic from a Christian point of view. This way of understanding Utopia makes it easier to reconcile the book with Moore's later activities as a persecutor of heretics. He was well aware of the failings of English society. Book 1 of Utopia shows that beyond doubt. But he was also convinced that it quite literally had a saving grace through its devotion to Christianity under the umbrella of the universal church. And he was determined to defend that to the death, whether it was the death of Protestants or his own. The ambiguities of Utopia did not prevent it from becoming a famous and influential work. Utopia does mean no place, but by the end of the 16th century, it was everywhere. Back in episode 353, I already discussed works written in Italy in imitation of Moore, like Tommaso Campanella's City of the Sun and the less famous fantasies of Doni, Patrizi, and Zuccolo. We saw last time how English humanism was sparked by visits from and to Italy, and here we have a case of influence running in the opposite direction. There were also further Utopian writings in England, facilitated by the English publication of Moore's work in 1551. About 30 years later, two dialogues modeled on Moore's appeared. These were by Thomas Nichols and Thomas Lupton. Lupton even got in on the Mauryan wordplay, calling the interlocutors in his dialogue sivkala and omen, which are the Latin words for someone and no one, spelled backwards. The connection to Atlantic exploration, invoked to explain Hitler Day's encounter with the Utopians, is also present here, since Nichols translated Spanish travel literature. But these two Utopian dialogues lack the nuance and elusive irony of Moore's. They're more straightforwardly moralistic, more focused on the task of describing how society really ought to be, rather than on how society might be, if one proceeded from entirely rational yet ultimately unacceptable premises. Moore's Utopia, by contrast, is a place that really might have been designed by Greek philosophers. If he was ambivalent towards it, that mirrors the familiar attitude of the Christian humanist towards the wonders of pagan culture, admiring its achievements and lamenting its limitations. In the end, it seems to me, Moore would have agreed with those cynics who still tell us today that philosophy will get you nowhere. But let's not listen to them, because we have plenty of fascinating philosophy from Tudor England still awaiting us, including some political treatises that took a much more direct approach to the governance and society of England. If this episode has paradoxically still left you wanting more, you'll get it next time, as we talk about political thought and the English Renaissance, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.