View
2
Download
0
Category
Preview:
Citation preview
UCLA
Department of Political Science
Pleasure in Thomas More’s Utopia:
An experiment in Digital Humanities
Seminar paper in the 2013 fall quarter Political Theory Seminar
Presented to Professor Giulia Sissa
By Roey Reichert, 904355455
Los Angeles, California
May 25, 2023
Introduction
The idea for this paper originated with the introductory course I took in the field of
Digital Humanities, a budding field that, broadly speaking, examines the application
of computational methods to research in the classical humanities (Drucker et al.
2012). It was during one of the assignments in the course that I started to ask myself
how these tools can advance the research done in my primary field- that of political
theory and the history of political thought.
As we were examining Thomas More’s Utopia at the same time in the political
theory core seminar, I thought it would be interesting to use this text as a case study
of the usage of some of the computational tools that perform textual analysis. What I
found out is that these computational tools can actually provide a new way of
approaching texts, or in other words, they can offer us a new hermeneutic practice.
While the actual methods of lexical analysis are obviously not in and of themselves
new, the ease and speed in which these kinds of analyses are now made available to
students and scholars are. And I am inclined to believe that the application of these
new modes and orders may very well change how research in these fields will be
done in the future.
It is my hope that the use of more antiquated forms of scholarship, which
used to be the norm for research in textual fields, such as lexicons and concordances,
can now be retrieved with the aid of these computational tools, and that it will be
made more accessible to present day scholars. The ease, speed and visual
representation of these tools make the possibilities truly immense, and within the
spirit of our present subject matter, one may venture to state that we might be
witnessing a renaissance of sorts with the reapplication of these methods.
It is important for me to point out that both the computational tools, as well
as the text of Utopia, were completely new to me; I am mentioning this in order to
emphasize the highly experimental and speculative form that this paper is written
in. It is my hope that it will be received in the same experimental spirit. My attempt
in this paper is to try and turn this necessity into a virtue, by focusing also on the
phenomenological aspect of the learning process and showing how the research
question came to be reformulated during the research process. Thus, special
attention will be given to describing how this “thread” has led us down a path that,
not coincidentally, has gained scholarly attention, namely- the role of pleasure in
Utopia.
So, at the general outset, my point of departure can be framed as a meta-
question, which asks- “what kind of questions can computational tools help us
answer in the fields of the history of ideas and political theory, and what questions
they cannot?” In our present case, this question gains a more specific form, and can
be whittled down to “what can computational tools teach us about Thomas More’s
Utopia?”
I will start by demonstrating the analyses of the text which were done with
the Voyant website, and will then show that by proceeding with the tools that it
gives us, new information will come to light and shape our investigation accordingly.
At some point the computational tools will be abandoned in exchange for a closer
reading of the text, but it is my hope to show that there would be a very different
result between reading with the computational tools or without them.
Some remarks on the text
Admittedly, one of the reasons for selecting Utopia was my false impression
at the time that the English translation of the text (which was originally written in
Latin) was an authoritative one and was supervised by Thomas More himself. But
upon doing some further research, I discovered that this was not the case. This
created some misgivings as to the academic merit of doing a textual analysis of a
translated rather than an original text, but I was nevertheless encouraged to
proceed by Professor Sissa, as it seems that the theme of pleasure in Utopia was so
important that it transcended the different iterations of the text.
Following this premise, the edition of Utopia that was analyzed by the tools
suite was the 1901 Cassell & Company Edition by Thomas Morley (More 2000). This
version of the text was retrieved from Project Guttenberg, an online collection of
free electronic books (“Project Gutenberg” 2014). But for the sake of clarity and
consistency, the citations and quotes throughout this paper are all taken from and
refer to the 1999 Hacket edition by David Wootton (More 1999).
Voyant
As stated in the project’s website, "Voyeur is a suite of analysis and
exploration tools for digital texts. Very few contributions to knowledge and
technology are unrecognizable from what preceded, and Voyeur is no exception: it is
largely built on the foundations of text analysis tool design and methodology from
over 50 years of humanities computing research” (Sinclair 2010).1
Fig.1: Screen shot of Voyant analysis of Utopia (for the online version:
http://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=1394684557637.4832)
Fig.1 shows a screen shot of how Voyant analyzed the Morley version of
Utopia. The window is divided into several different screens that each display a
different tool from the Voyant suite.
Starting with the word count tool (bottom left), we can see that, once we
employ the English “stop words” list (to exclude words such as “and”, “the”, “as” etc.)
1 “Voyant” and “Voyeur” refer to the same suite of tools, and are used interchangeably.
and examine the list of most frequent words in the corpus (although we are dealing
with a single text), and disregard more generic words such as “men” “people” and
“things”, we find that one of the most frequent unique words is “Pleasure”.
“Pleasure” is ranked in the 8th place, and appears 76 times in the whole text. Using
the word count for further analysis of different variants of “Pleasure” shows that its
plural- “Pleasures” appears 25 times, and the adjective form- “Pleasant” appears 13
times throughout the text.
As a dilettante reader of the text, this came as a bit of a surprise for me, as I
would have expected other words to appear in such a high frequency in a text that
describes an ideal society, I am referring here to words such as “justice”, “virtue”,
“freedom” and so on.
This surprise of a novice reader serves as the starting point of our
phenomenological investigation, as we now know, and I may add- cannot avoid
knowing, that when we will continue to unpack the text of Utopia, whatever the
exact case may be, “Pleasure” is going to play some sort of significant role in it. What
is important to remember here is that this is something that we may not have
noticed had we not used the Voyant analysis beforehand. Therefore our attention is
now focused, when we continue to analyze Utopia, on where and how will the word
“Pleasure” appear.
The next step is to examine the Word Trend tool (upper right corner), which
creates a diagram that shows that the word “Pleasure” and its various forms are not
distributed evenly throughout the text, but are rather concentrated in a certain part
of it. A section that corresponds roughly to pages 115-124 in the Wootton edition.
This gives further grounds to the notion that the relatively high frequency of the
word “Pleasure” is not a mere coincidence- since if the word would have appeared
in a more evenly spread form throughout the text it would perhaps be easier to
dismiss its importance.
We then proceed by examining the Keyword in Context tool (bottom right)
which shows that the word “Pleasure” is mostly concentrated in passages that deal
with the moral philosophy of the Utopians. This is corroborated by the marginal
annotation in the Wootton edition, which describes these passages as dealing with
ethics, theology, the various forms of pleasure and more. When going back to the
text, we find this key passage, which describes the ethics of the Utopians:
"In that part of philosophy concerned with human behavior, they carry on
the same disputes as we do. They analyze those qualities that justify one in
talking about a good mind, a good body, and good circumstances. They argue
about whether the word “good” can properly be applied to all of these, or
whether it should be reserved for good qualities of the mind. They discuss
virtue and pleasure, but their main topic of debate, their primary concern, is
the understanding of human happiness, for they disagree about whether there
is one thing that make for happiness, or many different things. On this
question they seem rather too inclined to side with those who defend the
claims of pleasure, for they hold that if happiness cannot be identified with
pleasure, then at least pleasure is the main factor that makes for happiness.”
(More 1999, 115-my italics)
This passage posits an ethical connection between pleasure and happiness in
the Utopian way of life, and this intrinsic connection is further validated by some
findings from Voyant as well; when we check for the word frequency of “Happiness”,
we find that it appears 27 times throughout the text, and the corresponding word
“Happy” appears 10 times. The main point here is that although this is relatively not
a high frequency word, nevertheless, these two words are both concentrated in the
same part of the text that “Pleasure”, and its derivative forms, appears as well.
Our question has now changed from “How and where does pleasure appear
in the text of Utopia?” To a different one: “What is the meaning of this relation
between pleasure and happiness in Utopia, and how does it fit within the Utopians
moral philosophy”?
I believe that in order to answer this question we need to go beyond what the
computational tools can offer in our investigation and revert to a plain “old
fashioned” close reading of the text. When we do so and turn to the scholarly work
done on Utopia, it seems that the computational analyses have not failed us and
have pointed out a meaningful direction of investigation, as it seems that the
discussion of pleasure in Utopia is one of the focal points of the text.
Pleasure and Happiness in Utopia
Edward Surtz goes to the extent of claiming that “[Thomas] More displays his
rhetorical ability, above all, in his use of the term pleasure (voluptas) [italics in
original]” and that “It is this loose use of pleasure in its most generic sense which
makes this section of the Utopia a literary triumph” (Surtz 1957, 10). Whereas Giulia
Sissa takes note of this theme of pleasure and happiness in her article “Familiaris
reprehensio quasi errantis: Raphael Hythloday, between Plato and Epicurus” (Sissa
2012), there she refers to it as “striking”, while characterizing it as a ”profoundly
anti-Platonic reassessment of pleasure” (Sissa 2012, 121).
A good place to start our investigation of pleasure in the text itself is to
observe how it is defined there: “They [the Utopians] define pleasure as any
movement or state of body or mind in which we naturally take delight” (More 1999,
118 my italics). Surtz states that the fact that More positioned this definition almost
at the end of the debate on pleasure and happiness, rather than at the beginning, is
actually a literary ploy which he designed in order to help redefine the concept of
pleasure for his own literary purposes (Surtz 1957, 11).
This ploy is the first part of what Surtz describes as a twofold literary
procedure that More uses in order to prove that pleasure is the essence of human
happiness: the first move is to redefine the Latin concept of pleasure (voluptas), from
referring solely to sensual pleasure to a definition that includes both sensual and
mental pleasures, while the second move is to identify pleasure (voluptas) with its
Latin synonyms indiscriminately (Surtz 1957, 12).
The Utopians appeal to a number of sources in order to justify their
identification of the pursuit of pleasure with the happy life; these include religion-
“for they never discuss happiness without joining to the rational arguments of
philosophy certain principles founded in religious conviction” (More 1999, 115),
reason- “Reason advises and urges us to lead a life that is as free of worries and as
full of delights as possible” (More 1999, 116) and nature- “we can see that nature
herself orders us to make a life of happiness (that is to say, a life of pleasure)” (More
1999, 117).
However, the Utopian approach to pleasure is not that of mindless self-
indulgence, but is rather more nuanced; as they are aware that neither every
pleasure necessarily leads to happiness, nor do all pleasures result with the same
kind of happiness:
“Happiness is not to be found in any and every pleasure, but only in those
that are good and honest. One school of thought holds that virtue itself leads
us to pursue honest pleasure as the supreme good for creatures like
ourselves; another maintains that virtue is itself true happiness” (More 1999,
116).
Some of the false pleasures include expensive clothes, honorary titles and
jewelry (More 1999, 118–120), whereas genuine pleasures are divided into those of
the mind- such as understanding and knowledge, and those of the body, which can
be further divided into sensual pleasure- such as eating and drinking, and into the
healthy state of living without any pain or discomfort pain (More 1999, 121).
The above quoted passage also reflects on the way the Utopians perceive the
relation between pleasure and virtue, Surtz adopts the position that this passage
implies that virtue is subordinate to pleasure, albeit this is “not subordination in any
gross sense”- the Utopians practice virtue because they presume that pleasure is
inextricably bound up with the performance of virtuous deeds, and that a good
conscience is a source of gratification: “…they [the Utopians] conclude [that], having
given the matter careful thought and due consideration, that all our actions (even
our virtuous deeds) are directed towards pleasure as their goal and fulfillment”
(More 1999, 118). However, Surtz’s position is not entirely consistent, since he
acknowledges that the relationship between virtue and pleasure may be that of
identity, and not only subordination: “The Utopian subordinates virtue to pleasure,
or at least tends to identify the two” (Surtz 1957, 19).
But these examples, taken from the text of Utopia, merely describe the
relation between pleasure and happiness, and cannot in and of themselves give the
full account, in my opinion, of its significance. Since we are trying to grasp the
meaning of the Utopian identification of pleasure with happiness, we must now take
another turn in the road, and go outside of the text, as this idea of happiness as
consisting of a life of pleasure is not an original idea that More contrived on his own:
It has a history, which begins in ancient Greece.
The conceptual history of pleasure in Utopia: Epicureanism, Platonism, and
Christianity
The similarity between the ethical system of the Utopians and the philosophy
of Epicurus is too obvious to be ignored (Sissa 2012, 123; Surtz 1957, 23). It is also
well established that More was familiar with works on Epicurean Philosophy, not
least by his own translations of Lucian and through his friendship with Erasmus
(Surtz 1957, 23–27). However, here I would like to argue that the degree of how
much of Epicurus we can find in Utopia, stems from the debate on how scholars
perceive More’s intent when writing Utopia (Skinner 1987, 123–124). i.e. if he was
describing the best possible Christian society for the purpose of reformation (Surtz
1957, 2–7; Hexter 1976, 57) or whether he was taking a certain philosophical
position (ascribed to Erasmus) to its logical extreme, in order to expose its
absurdity (Sissa 2012, 127–132). This examination will be done by comparing the
respective positions of Sissa and Surtz.
Surtz identifies the Utopians as Epicureans (Surtz 1957, 12), and notes a
number of similarities between Epicurus and the Utopians; both agree that mental
pleasures are greater than sensual ones and that pleasure and pain divide all human
experience (Surtz 1957, 31). Both think that actions should refer to some pleasure,
but also hold at the same time the position that the greatest mental pleasure
consists of exercising virtue, that is, a good conscience is a great source of mental
pleasure, which Epicurus seemed to hold as well (Surtz 1957, 32).
Sissa seems to be in agreement with the above, adding that Epicurus and the
Utopians thought that the good is pleasure, which is identical, and not subordinate
to it. Her article demonstrates at length how the various ethical principles of the
Utopians (some of which were already described above), but also others; such as the
happy life being the one that is conducted in accordance with nature (More 1999,
116), or the search for constant enjoyment as long as it does not hurt others, as well
as the categorization and difference in pleasures, can all be found in the writings
and sayings attributed to Epicurus (Sissa 2012, 123–125).
So while it may be established that to a large extent, the Utopian vision is an
Epicurean one, it is important to note that it is not a simple form of it. We find that
there are two major deviations from the original Epicureanism- one can be seen as
attempting to synthesize Platonic elements into it, while the other as combining
Christian ones into it. Each scholar tends to focus on a different “deviation”, and it
could be argued, that the grounds for their focus lies within how they perceive
More’s intent in writing Utopia.
Sissa holds that the city of Utopia is “a hybrid between Platonism and
Epicureanism” (Sissa 2012, 122). That even though “Utopia is an Epicurean garden”,
the “Platonic paradigm is still visible on the horizon”, particularly with regards to
pleasure. Hence Utopia, while perhaps realizing the principles that Plato set out in
the Republic, does so by a certain modification of pleasure, as it is not simply
Epicurean, but rather a combination of Epicurus and Plato (Sissa 2012, 125).
This modification rests upon the Utopians’ view that the pleasures that
consist in the satisfaction of the sensual desires, such as eating and drinking, are
considered from a Platonic point of view to be “base and despicable”. While for
Epicurus, most desires are necessary and natural. However, although the fulfillment
of these desires is indeed still deemed by Utopians as lowly forms of pleasure, they
are never the less acceptable. Moreover, the Utopians are even grateful that the
satisfaction of these desires is enjoyable (Sissa 2012, 126–127).
It is this “absurd” portrayal of a synthesis between the mutually exclusive
positions of Plato and Epicurus on pleasure that allows Sissa to develop her main
argument in the article: that the position voiced by the character of Raphael
Hythloday, with his praise of the Utopian view on pleasure, is modelled after the
philosophy of Desiderius Erasmus (Sissa 2012, 127–132). Thus, if we accept Sissa’s
position, we find that More’s premise for blending Epicureanism with Platonism,
specifically by putting together their opposite views on pleasure, was done for the
sake of debating his friend Erasmus own view under a literary guise.
Sturz also finds it hard to accept at face value the notion that the Utopians’
ethics are Epicureanism per se, as he claims that the fundamental principles of
Epicureanism contradict some of the basic tenets of the Utopian religion, that is, it
denies the three fundamental truths that they hold: the immortality of the soul, the
providence of god, and retribution in the afterlife for good and evil deeds (Surtz
1957, 26).
It is this contradiction, together with the division between base and noble
pleasures, that enables Surz to argue that the character of Hythloday is simply a
mouthpiece for More to describe his ideal city, a “New Jerusalem” which will realize
the highest Christian ideals. Sturz demonstrates that Mores defense of pleasure as
the ultimate end of human life is essentially a declamatio. Whose purpose is “to
incite and provoke to serious thought careless Christians who are behaving as if
wealth or glory, not god, were the end of life” (Surtz 1957, 21).
This is done by focusing on the religion of the Utopians, particularly on their
emphasis on an eternal reward in the afterlife, which should be the noblest pleasure
of all. Surtz contends that this final object of Utopian happiness is to delight in the
presence of god in the next life (Surtz 1957, 22). And that “the only conclusion one
can draw … is that for the Utopians man’s highest good is God in Whom, above every
created thing, man is to find his joy and gladness” (Surtz 1957, 15).
Therefore, in Surtz’s case, we find another inconsistency between Epicurean
and Utopian visions of pleasure, this time from a Christian, and not Platonic, point of
view. Since his premise is that More is a reformer (Surtz 1957, 2–3), Surtz
extrapolates that this inconsistency is there in order to call attention to the Christian
undertones of the text, that subsume those of simple Epicureanism.
So the Utopian vision of pleasure serves as a touchstone of sorts for
uncovering More’s intent in writing Utopia: For Sissa it provides evidence for
uncovering Hythlodays true identity as Erasmus, while for Surtz it serves as
evidence for uncovering Mores intent at calling for a reform in the catholic church,
with Hythloday as his mouthpiece.
Conclusion
This paper can be viewed as part travel log, part mystery novel; my attempt
was to demonstrate what possible twists and turns the computational analysis of
the text can set us off on. We began with a lexical analysis, one that directed us to
the prevalence, and therefore- the importance of pleasure in the text. When we
reviewed the passage in the text that was pointed out to us by Voyant, we found out
that pleasure was entwined with happiness, and to a lesser extent- virtue, which are
all different components of the Utopians conception of ethics.
In order to better grasp these implications, we had to “step outside” of the
text and refer to several studies that were done on the subject, and by comparing
them we discovered that this intertwinement rests on the basis of Epicureanism. It
is here that scholarly disputes were raised, and we found ourselves leaving the text
entirely, in order to understand the context of the writing of Utopia itself, and were
presented with two entirely different possibilities.
It is important to note that this path was not necessary, but only a possible
one out of many; some of the other oft discussed themes in Utopia concern, for
instance, the abolishment of private property, or the conduct of war and slavery.
The main point is that this is the path that we were set upon by a “distant” reading
of the text via the computational tools, and that a different starting point might have
resulted in a different path altogether.
Bibliography
Drucker, Johanna, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp. 2012. Digital_Humanities. Mit Press.
Hexter, J. H. 1976. More’s Utopia: The Biography of an Idea. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.
More, Thomas. 1999. Utopia. Edited and translated by David Wooton. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co.
———. 2000. Utopia. Edited by Henry Morley. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2130?msg=welcome_stranger.
“Project Gutenberg.” 2014. Project Gutenberg. Accessed March 25. http://www.gutenberg.org/.
Sinclair, Stefan. 2010. “Some Background of Voyeur.” Hermeneuti.ca – The Rhetoric of Text Analysis. May 21. http://hermeneuti.ca/voyeur/background.
Sissa, Giulia. 2012. “Familiaris Reprehensio Quasi Errantis. Raphael Hythlodaeus between Plato and Epicurus. , Vol. 49, 187-188 (June/July 2012), Pp. 121 - 150.” MOREANA 49 (187-188): 121–50.
Skinner, Quentin. 1987. “Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and the Language of Renaissance Humanism.” In The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, edited by Anthony Pagden, 123–57. Ideas in Context. Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511521447.008.
Surtz, Edward. 1957. The Praise of Pleasure: Philosophy, Education, and Communism in More’s Utopia. Harvard University Press.
Recommended