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When, in the year 1516, Sir Thomas More wrote his book about the ideal state, he located it on the Island of Utopia, which was supposed to have been discovered by Raphael Hythlodaeus, a companion of Vespucci on his fourth voyage. At first a fictitious geographical name, the term “utopia” continues to live in the minds of men, although it no longer is relevant to geography or to voyages of discovery and is by no means necessarily connected with the description of ideal states. Today, according to dictionaries and encyclopedias, “utopian” describes any plan which seems impossible to realize; the word is weighted either with resigned regret or with the forbearance of the sensible soul who well knows that the ideal state would in the end prove no better than the existing one.
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- Copyright © 1958 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
1. Since the middle of the nineteenth century. The large dictionaries and encyclopedias of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries do not contain it at all.
2. Robert von Pöhlmann, Geschichte der sozialen Frage und des Sozialismus in der antiken Welt (Munich: C. H. Beck, O. Beck, 1912), II, 30.
3. Ulrich v. Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Platon (after the 3d ed. published by the author and edited by Bruno Snell) (Frankfurt a.M., 1948), esp. p. 54.
4. Platon, Der Staat, ed. Otto Apelt (5th ed.; Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1920), Introduction, p. viii.
5. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1945), p. 105.
6. Marie Louise Herneri, Journey through Utopia (London: Routledge, 1950), p. 29.
7. Der Staat, Introduction, p. ix.
8. Sur la pierre blanche (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1905); English trans.: The White Stone (London and New York: John Lane, 1910).
9. Das Glasperlenspiel (Zürich: Fretz & Wasmuth, 1943); English trans.: Magister Ludi (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1949).
10. (Stockholm: Berman-Fischer, 1946); English trans.: Star of the Unborn (New York: Viking Press, 1946).
11. We cannot resist quoting a philological parallel and its interpretation here, the German word einst ("one day"): "… ‘one day' is a word of scope, it has two faces. It looks back, into solemnly twilit distances, and it looks forwards, far, far, forwards, into space, and is not less solemn because it deals with the to-be than that other dealing with the has-been" (Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers, Vol. IV: Joseph the Provider, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter [New York: Alfred Knopf, 1944], Part V, "Tamar Learns the World," p. 310; Joseph und seine Bruder, Vol. II [Stockholm: S. Fischer Verlag, 1952], p. 1741).
12. Essay "Des Cannibales."
13. Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1946).
14. We know only two utopias (not descriptions of a golden age!) in which human liberty is granted: it is the very theme in Rabelais' monastery, Thelema; and in Voltaire's Eldorado (in Candide), liberty is included in the principle of tolerance. Despite a baroque or ironical frame work, both utopias are true ideals.