As Monsieur de Lapalisse would have said if he had not died, for there to have been a crisis of reason in general and of political reason in particular, it is necessary that, at some point, people believed in them. A "crisis" taken in the sense of "doubt" is by definition a historical moment - therefore singular - which only has meaning in relation to a previous state that is assumed to be balanced (state of belief). But, in the case that interests us, what previous belief was it exactly? Born from what circumstances? Where and when was the hope formulated that was disappointed?
Philosophical tradition would have it that the hope of rationality was gnoseological before being political. It would therefore be Descartes who postulated, "for the first time", the universal and necessary foundations of reason defined as the faculty of thinking the invariability of the laws of nature. It was a question of establishing a new, analytical and rigorous science in place of the statements of Providence and traditions. The adventure was radical and Max Horkheimer was not mistaken: it was a question, neither more nor less, of replacing the formerly religious totality, by "a doctrine as comprehensive as theology and entirely based (on man), instead of accepting that the ultimate values and ends come to them from a spiritual authority" [1]. In this sense, Cartesianism according to JB Bury, was neither more nor less than "the Declaration of Independence of man".[2]
Freed from the burden of origin, the future suddenly opened up to a possibility of accumulative knowledge that was soon thought to constitute progress. The truth loomed downstream, to be discovered, opening a path of freedom and possibility to that faculty called "common sense," which was " the most widely shared thing in the world," in other words, which was "universal."
From a secondary status, bordering on the sin of pride that it still had in the Middle Ages, Reason now invades the cognitive sphere (it is expected to discover the mathematical "formulas" of nature) and very quickly the practical field.
She was asked, and she alone was asked, "to formulate ends which are not ends of nature, but her own ends, absolute ends which measure all ends because reason sets itself as an end there [3]. "
Thus was born modern political hope. Since man is defined by the faculty of reason, there must be a possibility of organizing society according to universal laws. Thus, the triangle of "rationalism, individualism and universalism" closed in the 17th and 18th centuries, where we imagined this individual in a state of nature, without God or predetermination, who, endowed with reason, could now sign a reasonable contract with his alter egos [4].
Certainly, the artificialism of man in the state of nature and of a contract signed on a "tabula rasa" was quickly denounced by the English empiricists and pragmatists. But they nonetheless remained dependent on the great postulates of the Enlightenment. "From Hume to Bentham, the notion of utility, as an explanatory moment of the organization of the social, is elaborated on the idea that each individual possesses a reason, that it is this which allows, in response to needs, to make rational choices." [5]. One could even go so far as to say that Adam Smith's Invisible Hand should be understood as a metaphor for the presupposed harmony of an Idea of a triangle.
The rest of the history of rationality is made up of the vicissitudes we know it to have. While the mathematization of nature, stemming from the second Cartesian Meditation, inaugurated an "enveloping" continuity of knowledge [6]and allowed, through prediction, to have a hold on nature, reason as a political tool seemed to be marking time.
From the limpid it appeared in the century bearing the evocative name of "Enlightenment", culminating at its zenith with the Kantian categorical imperative - reason became opaque (could it be that it is only the point of view of a "Volk", a natural individuality embedded in a language, or that it is hidden in the dialectic of the universal Spirit?) and headlong flight (is it possible that it leads to "singing mornings"?). Then, weary of the war, reason became suspect, corrupted by animal motivations, the very ones that were the object of the natural sciences: (could it be possible that it is only "the plaything of blind forces", the barely disguised expression of "the will to power", of the interests of a class, of the unconscious?).
Then the death knell of rational transcendentalism sounded, and only "instrumental reason" remained to fill the void: the only form of reason beyond suspicion, since it is based on the most universal language possible: the number, whether it presides over commercial exchange or the transformation into probable laws [7]of nature, where human, individual, social, and political behavior is now inscribed. The consequences are inevitable, commensurate with the new totality: the truth of a universal reason, the foundation of equality before the law, is evacuated. All that remains is the difference and the multiplicity of interests. Reason has come full circle: it has become the instrument of what it had sought to overcome for five hundred years: the hic et nunc, the law of the strongest.
The crisis of modern rationality then appears inevitable and can be compared to that which shook the Renaissance, torn apart by the passage from one totalizing order to another. There was talk of "corruption" and "misguidance" and the lost transcendental totality haunted Max Weber, Heidegger, Husserl, Horkheimer, Adorno, Habermas, and more recently Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut. All sought to go beyond instrumentalism, perceived as dehumanizing, to find or create a founding totality, carrying meaning. Max Weber felt obliged to make a distinction between the scholar and the politician [8], Heidegger returned to pre-Socratic "sources" and posed the question of Being in terms of "unveiling", radically doubting the claim to construct a rational world. Husserl evoked "The Spirit, and even only the spirit existing in itself and for itself" [9]as the irreducible foundation of the sciences. Horkheimer and Luckacs had no other option than to flee Marxistically, while Habermas postulated the existence of a "communicative rationality" reminiscent of Husserlian intersubjectivity. As for Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, they returned to Kantian sources [10]in search of a categorical imperative universal enough to unify the growing multiplicity of points of view fragmented in incompatible situations.
Order or disorder? Hope or despair?
The choice today seems to be reduced between the fear of a regressive Hegelianism (entropy of the Spirit towards the multiple, chaos and the irrational) or the hope that it is possible to go back or even to overcome a crisis carrying a future "Aufhebung". At the same time, if we must push the doubt to its logical conclusion, the history of modern rationality as it has just been presented is itself imbued with an underlying Hegelianism, postulating a continuity across the crises of an evolving reason. It must be admitted that it is difficult to produce a historical discourse without Hegelian thought, this "height of metaphysics".[11]
However, we would like to rethink the classical interpretation of political rationality, to ask the question of its origins and in doing so try to escape Hegelian linearity by proposing two hypotheses.
The first is that the project of practical political organization was not born in the 17th century but in the 16th, in 1516 to be precise, with Thomas More's Utopia .
The second is that this project is unique - and by this we mean that it does not fit into the traditional dialectic of rationality - and this for two reasons: firstly because it "skips" over the gnoseological stage, outlining the possibility (still very distant of course: it is not a question of imposing on Thomas More a modernity that he could not grasp) of a practice that is immediately instrumental in the search for an "organizational" and "situationist" order.
Then because Utopia is from the start, proposition and warning, real image and specular image, whose ambiguity will forever surpass the clumsiness of the "Spirit of Geometry". The message, invited by the only Western philosopher who was at the same time, and throughout his life, a great political practitioner, does not fit into any of the logics that preceded him and or that will succeed him.
This proposition may seem surprising, given that the humanists, of whom Thomas More was one of the most prestigious representatives, play only a secondary role in interpretations of the birth of practical rationality. They are either seen as the end of the Middle Ages, desperately clinging to revealed Christian truth or to the practical political tradition of the Greeks and Romans. Or, the apparent eclecticism of their thought is seen as the rich ground [12]on which modernity could take root. But this is still only ground, not the "tree of knowledge," if we wish to pursue a poor metaphor. Only Machiavelli is recognized as a theoretician before his time, the spiritual father of a rational political theory.
And yet Machiavelli does not deserve the title of theorist, which does not detract from his genius. He is a classical humanist in the sense that The Prince is still steeped in medieval rhetoric and turned toward that return to the political thoughts of the ancients that characterized the Renaissance. His epistemological postulates are quite simply antithetical to modernity.
The first postulate immediately blocks any possibility of progress in political matters. Human nature is immutable [13]and relatively imperfectible [14]. For Machiavelli, men "have always been victims of the same passions."
The second postulate reflects the same "conservatism": the authority of the Prince is not questioned. His role is to maintain a tolerable order [15], for his own good (to remain in power) and for that of his subjects. In a Florence on the verge of anarchy, the Machiavellian obsession was never freedom but order.
Maintaining order must be measured (otherwise it creates further disorder) and justifies certain means. The Prince has the right to manipulate the crowd, for which Machiavelli has little respect. Men are "cruel," "greedy," and "inconsistent." His version of "panem et circenses" would be stated thus: "the crowd only likes appearances and events."
It follows that the past is a source of practical knowledge and we must profit from its lessons [16]. Reading Cicero is particularly recommended for anyone who wants to benefit from the Roman experience, which is considered a model of the genre. And who is better qualified to instill this teaching if not a good humanist "advisor" [17]? It is hardly surprising that most political treatises of the time discussed ad nauseam an art which they considered, incidentally, to be their own preserve. All therefore recommended to the Prince extreme prudence in the choice of their advisors and an equally great distrust of the humanist bête noire: the courtier, the false friend [18].
We are still far from the universal, the rational, and future progress. Let us nevertheless specify, in fairness to Machiavelli, that he dreamed in The Discourse , of a possibility of finding in history a "determinism" which would allow the establishment of "a Republic". But this was only a sketch and it would actually take several centuries for historicism to receive its letters of nobility.
At the same time [19], Thomas More wrote Utopia , whose First Book [20]takes up many of Machiavellian arguments: he does not question the authority of the King and seems to share the idea that princely "virtues" are the basis of a self-respecting political order. Still in the Machiavellian line and in the humanist tradition, Thomas More defends his role as advisor offering his expertise, that is to say his erudition to the Prince, the King of England in this case. Authority is in no way threatened - we are simply there to help him - and we hope, in the end, that "fortune" - the one that Machiavelli said was a woman to be subjugated - will dispose in his favor of the prince whose arbitrariness must always be feared. The author of Utopia takes up the argument of all those who lack power and do not want to take it (women, servants, civil servants, etc.) "we must, he recommends, use indirect and subtle means."
But Thomas More is not a weakened echo of Machiavelli, although this is evidently the opinion of some political science commentators. For a character with the grotesque name of Raphael Hythlodeus [21]will fill [22]the space of Book Two and offer a unique, unparalleled rational political model, an inexhaustible source of academic speculation: are we dealing with a cultivated farce? [23]Is Utopia a beautiful medieval dream tinged with Hellenism, or are we dealing with a futuristic work?
For those familiar with Greek and medieval philosophy [24], there is no shortage of "upstream" arguments: the Utopians borrow from Epicurus the definition of human purpose (the pursuit of pleasure [25]), as well as a modus vivendi aimed at maximizing pleasure and minimizing evil, of which they recognize, with Cicero, the irreducible residue. They also take from the Stoics the possibility for dying man to choose suicide when the "residue" becomes intolerable. From Plato they borrow the idea of an organization of the city, and from Aristotle entire passages of Nicomachean Ethics .
At the same time, and always upstream, we easily recognize the Christian influence which reminds men of their fraternity [26]and above all the importance of the family which Plato, let us remember , had dissolved in The Republic .
But to stop at a Hellenistic and medieval interpretation of More would be to limit a thought whose continuation to fascinate our contemporaries is hard to understand. Downstream, indeed, the silhouette of the "Noble Savage" liberated from original sin and "corrupting" social constraints emerges. We believe in a social contract and scientific knowledge. We also find a proposal for the abolition of private property that some [27]linked to the utopians of the 19th century and, of course, to Karl Marx. However, these interpretations sometimes tend to become exclusive and reduce Thomas More to a social Nostradamus that he was not [28]. As we will see later, Thomas More is precisely irreducible.
The temptation is, of course, to make a synthesis, but at the risk, this time, of diluting a thought whose radical and fragmentary intuitions cut right through rationality and, above all, obliterate the infinitely subtle message of the presentation of the argument itself.
"Radical intuitions" because Utopia is first and foremost an anti-system, so strong is its author's desire to dream of a man who is never "a serf of anyone" [29]. His proposition is not humanist: political history teaches us no lessons, there are no more princes and even less advisors; as for human nature, it has to be made. But, at the same time, More tries, we would say desperately, not to replace the whole of his era with another. He will also renounce all pretensions to the absolute and to a universal transcendent reason , which , he fears, would re-enslave man just as surely as the most domineering princes. The word liberty [30], although never written, "animates" the text, as in Eluard's poem.
Utopia is a proposal for a society that is close to perfection but is not definitive. It may even be, we are told, that one day we will discover a society that is superior to it. We are warned several times: this is not a theory drawing its strength from a rationality posed externally. Here, it is only a question of an island discovered - without the help of a star or historical determinism or a king - by chance [31], by a man Utopos, whose name appears only twice in the text. Neither God, nor Philosopher King, nor hero, he is only a reasonable man of whom we can say that he "had enough genius".
The religion that Thomas More knows better than anyone [32]that still has this potential for domination is not imposed and everything is planned so that it never will be: "religions in Utopia vary not only from one province to another, but also within the walls of each city in particular." But it is not a question of exchanging a restrictive religion for an equally enslaving philosophy. Philosophers and their idea of universal man are mocked in a very Aristotelian tradition. "And as for man in general or universal, according to metaphysical jargon... no one in Utopia has yet been able to perceive him." This explains why "the Utopians have the principle of never discussing good and evil." It is a waste of time. And because there is no universal man, because reason is not absolute, because the future is open, the idea of the individual can be born. "Know thyself" is no longer the search for the universal as Socrates conceived it, but the knowledge of one's own measure.[33]
Freed from the metaphysical and religious cloak, knowledge can finally open up to a future: Utopians are curious about new things and ready to embrace new techniques or methods. We are at the antipodes of Plato whose Republic aimed to freeze corrupting time in an immobile ideality. Similarly, laws can be reduced to the strict minimum [34]and, never truly absolute, are debatable depending on the situation [35].
Finally and above all, everything is done to ensure that power, understood as the exercise of pressure - whether physical or moral, on another, never takes hold . Certainly political power exists, because decisions must be taken somewhere, but it is a democratic power that has no permanence; the aim of political institutions is "to prevent the Prince and the tranibores from conspiring together against freedom."
Likewise, social classes exist to the extent that they represent specializations that a society needs, but they are mobile; workers can become clerics and vice versa. Slaves can become free. The sons of slaves are not, and "the foreign slave becomes free upon touching the land of Utopia." Private property, which would risk setting the status quo in stone, is simply abolished.
In this perspective, the individual is the social end, institutions having no other goals than "to first provide for the needs of public and individual consumption, then to leave everyone as much time as possible... ". We will then understand that the utopian model of society is not intended to conquer the world. It takes care first of all of its citizens [36], who do not belong to any "race" [37], "ethnicity", "culture", in the sense of Herder "Utopians are ready to share with anyone who will not seek to impose themselves". That said, if the Utopians are attacked, they defend themselves with weapons.
Are we then heading towards a floating proposition, an ethereal dream, an anarchy? No, not and this is Morian's second surprise; his will to freedom, which is "hardline" to the extreme, is closed off by a reason more restrictive than any other: an instrumental reason whose aim is to ensure us a calculated search for pleasure."
Faculty more than identity, it is this (very practical) tool that allows us to understand relationships, to calculate them, to predict, to manage individual pleasure well (by maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain) and above all to build a society suitable for this purpose. The key phrase of Utopia is a hymn to organizational instrumentality: "In Utopia, everything is so well planned and organized."
The utopian dream, following this logic of instrumentality, then becomes, at times, visionary. In Utopia, planning (for two years) is carried out using economic statistics, to which the first session of the Senate is devoted. Immigration is taken into account as a regulatory factor, the birth rate is monitored, and populations are relocated.
Let there be no mistake: this is indeed modern instrumentality that is at stake. We do not, like Plato, seek the signs of birth in the stars or the magic numbers of the City in Pythagorean formulas. In Utopia, we stick to the verifiable and we are careful not to give credibility to myths and traditions. As proof, "The stranger who arrives in Utopia is perfectly received there... if long journeys give him an exact knowledge of men and things." For the Utopians "do not even dream... of all the impostures of divination by the sky," a barely hidden allusion to the humanist craze for astrology [38]. The Utopians want to predict, but on the basis of calculable and verifiable observations. We are not far from the Cartesian piece of wax.
According to this approach, social productivity , the object of these calculations and aiming at the maximum ordering of individual pleasures, is central.
We begin by eliminating unproductive professions and statuses, namely professional philosophers, lawyers and men of law (those parasites), monks and certain merchants, as well as priests (except for ascetics who cost nothing and who bear witness to a faith that has its place in society). Let us also remember that the foreigner is only welcome if he brings with him techniques and knowledge that could be useful to the Utopians.
We specialize but also enrich tasks "this renewal has (the aim)... not to use up the lives of citizens for too long with material and painful work". We also manage the work so that "six hours of work are enough". (Let us remember that for the Utopians it is not a question of increasing their profit since production is turned towards itself: ensuring the well-being of citizens).
Finally, rarities are controlled. They are eliminated for the Utopians because they are a source of discord, but they are amassed in order to negotiate with other peoples;
These are just a few examples among others, because the logic of utopian instrumentality is pushed to such an extent that it is reminiscent of that height of modern instrumentality: namely the company. Because after all, if we think about it a little, Utopos is just a good business manager [39], who maximizes the productivity of individual and social pleasure, minimizes the effort invested and knows how to manage his human resources. The company is considered "nobody": it is unique and has no universal pretensions, but can expand, provided that new recruits accept its regulations [40]. Women, as productive members, are equal to men. New techniques and knowledge are integrated to the extent that they improve productivity and education and training are the basis of the edifice. No one in particular owns the assets of the company and a certain mobility is ensured so that administrative territories do not end up hindering the smooth running of the "enterpr...island".
The irony, of course, is that the management of the laws necessary for the production of individual pleasure imposes such restrictions that fulfillment is no longer possible. The social pressures and impositions so feared by the author of Utopia have simply taken a different path. This explains the discomfort one feels when reading a Utopia that some have compared to an Orwellian world.
If the debate seems strangely modern, it is because it is, not because Thomas More intended it to be so, but because instrumentality always destroys a part of what it instruments. Utopia intuitively goes to the limits of its logic, imbued with observations of the time, entangled as it is with scholastic rhetorical forms, references to Lucian, Agis, Ulysses, Plato, Nicomachus and many others, however inspired it may still be by the Christian spirit it claims to defend.
At the same time, if we perceive the intuitions of modernity, Utopia attests to the possibility of developing an instrumental rationality directly without going through the transcendentalist stage. In this sense, this text written by the last great English idealist inaugurates and surpasses the pragmatic and utilitarian tradition.
This would explain in a worldly way why what should be called crises of rationality spared the English-speaking world, which did not have to consider the loss of what Max Horkheimer called "objective reason." If we continue the deterministic reduction, we could also explain the development of an English school by that of a merchant bourgeoisie which, at the beginning of the 16th century, replaced, de facto, the aristocracy decimated by the Wars of the Roses. From this perspective, continental, transcendentalist philosophy would then be the product of a class, more intellectual but kept at a distance from power by a present and vigilant aristocracy.
This can explain, still in a worldly way, that continental philosophy, without any real possibility of practicing power, dreamed of approaching it by the only means in its "possession ": offering a service that one "sells" to the prince; this offer of services is rarely found in England: philosophers pay more attention to the reforms of the "commonwealth", being only marginally interested in education and the interests of the dominant class.
When they debate the advisor so dear to the continental humanist tradition, they do so in terms of personal choice: will they stay in the world and try to improve it (negotium) or will they withdraw from the world (otium) [41]. For they seem to know from experience, and Thomas More first, that advice to the king is often futile and that royal power does not like reason [42]. In short, pragmatic England did not mourn the loss of the metaphysical foundations that it did not give itself.
But even more troubling is the way in which Thomas More developed his remarkable insights. For the most serious error would be not to go too far in modern interpretations, but to reduce Raphael Hythlodeus to Thomas More. For he is and is not Thomas More, but his mirror image, an upside-down image that exists and does not. One can believe in it but cannot touch it, just as one can believe in this reverse side of Folly but which is "nowhere"—U-topos.
Thomas More is "tired by the long story" of his reflection Hythlodeus and concludes in the most total ambiguity. Yes, he would like to see certain things of the utopian Republic come true. BUT, he adds, and this is the last word, "I wish it more than I hope." I, Thomas More, reflected by this Raphael without a country, without work, without absolutes and without family, cannot help but dream that this reason which distinguishes man from the animal can free him from violence. I, Thomas More, ambassador, lawyer, undersheriff of the city of London, future chancellor of the kingdom, responsible father, know too much about politics not to fear that my hopes are limited.
This kind of doubt will no longer be found in the history of modern social and political rationality. Machiavelli, however reborn he may be, lacks humor on this point and persuades himself in his Discourse that he will eventually find the ultimate formula of the Res Publica. Descartes, as we know, does not seem to think for a single instant that he is not in the process of founding, and forever, the new philosophy. Kant, Husserl, Hegel and Marx, to name but a few, do not play at ambiguity, which will henceforth have to find refuge in the novel.
And yet, it is the ambiguity of Utopia (the medium) that "is the ultimate philosophical message." It is the indication of an irreducible tension between the desire to dream of a world that is not this Madness that Erasmus sarcastically praised [43]and the lucid knowledge—completely at odds [44]with the humanist tradition—of what political action requires. All rational political projects are utopian. All utopias are unrealizable. But both are necessary. The two necessities thus posed prevent any possible reduction to a deterministic natural system (where instrumentalism will take root) or to a transcendental rationality. Irrational rationality? Perhaps, but such is political rationality. The point is never to cross the looking glass.
FROM THE GAME TO THE I, UTOPIA TO THE MIRROR.
A hypothesis
"It is out of the question," wrote Alphonse de Waelhens in 1972, "that a philosophical anthropology can henceforth be constituted without the help of psychoanalysis, psychopathology, psychiatry . " [45]That was twenty years ago, and, unfortunately, it must be noted that the phenomenological effort that was his has continued little and that modern reflection on man remains more compartmentalized than ever. And yet, when interpreted to its limits - where Desire joins the One, metapsychoanalysis speaks in its own way of the Leibnizian Monad, the Platonic Eros and the Hegelian Spirit.
It can also be enlightening when it comes, as we will try to do, to better understand certain stages in the development of modern individuality. We will take the Renaissance period as an example, which we will interpret using the hypotheses of the mirror stage developed by Jacques Lacan [46]and taken up by his School.
The little man
The human child, Lacan tells us, "at an age when he is for a short time, but still for a time, surpassed in instrumental intelligence by the chimpanzee, nevertheless already recognizes his image in the mirror as such [47]." The difference, minor in appearance, is nevertheless, with the acquisition of language, the epistemological gap which separates the human child from the small animal .
In a first stage the child, like the monkey, sees in the mirror an image that the psyche recognizes as its own; but far from exhausting itself in the flat "inanity" of the senseless animal image, the child, however clumsy it may be, plays with its inverted reflection, multiplying the playful possibilities in a line of fiction "irreducible to the individual alone."[48]
The discovery of this self/other in the mode of inversion, real but fictitious, close but distant, would be exhausted in multiplicity if there did not appear to give it meaning, that is to say unity, "the mother's gaze in which is read a statement saying that this image is the object of her pleasure, that it is the image of the beloved, of the good, of the beautiful... " [49]In other words, the desire for the other identifies the individual as such. It gives birth to him. To know oneself and to know is to be re-known.[50]
Later, when the image of the mother fades, the dialectic continues, literally and figuratively, between the reflected fiction and the self in need of constitution. Always projected forward, the self never ceases to express its desire to exist for others in an ever-widening circle, until it reaches that humanity whose infinity will become an abstraction: universality.
This long period of ten centuries...
Let us now try to introduce this constitutive mirror game into a broader anthropological register by starting - arbitrarily - with "this long period of ten centuries that we have called the Middle Ages" [51]. It then becomes possible to assign to God this gaze of love that was necessary for destitute man, driven from a matrixial Eden. Nevertheless, man can be reborn under the gaze of God. His soul is a "mirror" in which the divine is reflected; and is not grace, the act that allows him to find his true identity, illumination, bathed in the love of the one who recognizes us as "his beloved son" or "his daughter"? [52]God-the-father gives meaning to everything, including the logical system that Jean Writh demonstrates is, at the time, "a figure of kinship" [53]. In this system, the medieval notion of subject is contradictory because "subject to the paternal power of the predicate, the subject is always passive [54]." In an act of insurmountable incest, we share this identity with all those who are reflected in the field of the mirror: our "brothers" and our "sisters."
If we continue the metaphor, we could suppose that at the end of the Middle Ages, man, taking a certain distance from the divine image, [55]experienced an identity crisis, "a lost, unknown identity, which must be found or rediscovered [56]. The tarnished mirror, stripped for a time of the desire that carries meaning, then became, a medieval obsession, a source of anguished questioning.
Mirror! Mirror! Tell me...
The void fills with phantasmagoria that decompose and drive... mad. "Enchanting herself with her own contemplation and spending a quarter of her day taking care of her appearance, a lady exasperates those who wait for her at the church... And, as it pleased God, to set an example, while she was looking at herself at that moment, she saw in the mirror the enemy showing her his behind, so ugly, so horrible that the lady lost her mind, as if possessed by the devil."[57]
On the contrary, but is it the opposite? - Narcissus haunts the end of the Middle Ages. [58]Because the Other/God is absent, the "same" lives again and dies. The Romance of the Rose could not say it more eloquently:
Then leaning over the fountain,
It lives in clear, clean water
His face, his nose and his small mouth;
.......
He lingered so long at the fountain
That he loved his own image
And in the end he died of it [59]. "
The reborn man
But at the end of the fifteenth century, because re-known by friendship, whose essential role we will analyze, the re-born man can, reassured, find a new identity that he experiences in what Lacan calls playful "jubilation.
Then began an extraordinary period of witty games, the richness of which, four centuries later, commentators have not yet exhausted. Montaigne, La Boétie, Erasmus, Thomas More, Rabelais, Budé multiply - "in profusion" [60]- the situations where the world is inverted, where they split themselves, making themselves speak upside down in mirror games that reflect each other to infinity.
The world upside down
Utopia , or A Treatise of the Best Form of Government, written in 1516, is a model of the genre "partly an ordinary mirror, partly a fun-house mirror, and partly a piece of glass like the troll's eye, which causes him to see black as white, good as bad and so on" [61].
We find everywhere the specular inversions: "Amaurote" the utopian capital means in Greek "mirage city", the "Anydra" which crosses it is "a river without water", the "Achoria" "a country without region" and "alaopolecia" a "city without people" while " Adème" is "a king without people". Let us not forget of course the title which gave rise to a literary genre: "Utopia" is the place which is "nowhere" but which is the reverse image of the "Hic et Nunc" described in The Praise of Folly by Erasmus. The reverse of things is found in Petrarch, Valla, Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and other Italian authors [62].
But, it must be repeated, we are not dealing here, as in the Middle Ages, with delirious images - or dreams, which is the same thing, but rather with inverted images which only have meaning in relation to what they reflect. "By creating an esoteric and provocative vocabulary at will, More in no way gives in to the spells of phantasmagoria."[63]
But let us continue our image of the child in the mirror in his reborn reflection: the playful pleasure is no longer felt and we continue on our way to try all sorts of grimaces. Thomas More, Erasmus and of course Rabelais will give humor its letters of nobility that the era of reason will nevertheless designate with gritted teeth as a minor "literary genre". The "Tranibores" who manage utopia literally mean "the great gluttons", their acolytes , the Syphograntes are "rambling old men", without forgetting, of course, the hero Hythlodeus whose name means "vain babble" or "the talker of nonsense".
Me this other
But the most important phase of the individuation process is not Bunuelesque inversion, although it is an integral part of the construction of the "I" through "play." The playful mirror introduces oneself to a self-in-reverse: a self that one recognizes but which eludes one. It is clear, for example, that the central character of Utopia, Hythlodeus "was a creation in some respects very much like More himself, sharing his aspirations, sharing his literary tastes, sharing his moral convictions, sharing his feelings about so many very important things - about justice, and luxury, and pomp, and peace, and study, and work." [64]But it is also clear that he is NOT Thomas More but the inverted image of that Thomas More whose character appears in the First Book of Utopia during an extraordinary dialogue between self and self: Me, Thomas More, and Me, Raphael Hytlodeus.
This subtle play of reflections and inverted doubles has left many commentators perplexed, lost in the fascinating labyrinth [65]of this game of mirrors. Wolfgang Rudat, among others, taking up the conclusions of Merritt Abrash, [66]develops the hypothesis according to which Thomas More uses Hythlodeus to criticize his unbearable friends for their angelicism, while offering readers a series of keys allowing them to understand the subterfuge [67].
Others, on the other hand, completely ignore the character of "Thomas More" portrayed in Book One and see in Hythlodeus the spokesperson for the real Thomas More, the one who finally revealed his true feelings when he faced the executioner [68].
And yet, this mirror, necessary for reading Leonardo da Vinci's texts, would also allow us to finally read the author of Utopia , who explains to us in one of his letters to his friend Erasmus that he had, in a dream, crossed a mirror and joined Hythlodea. [69]We could also reread, in its figurative simplicity, the epitaph that Thomas More had the leisure to choose for himself during his stay in the Tower of London:
Whatever man these pictures fair delight,
Who finds in them an art that cheats his sight,
And show false forms as real and true as life;
As he has fed his eyes on symbols in vain.
So let him turn to truth, his soul to gain,
Then shall he see how frail is earthly famous
That comes and goes but never can remain.[70]
In short, Hytlodeus is a mirror reflection, which doesn't mean that what it represents doesn't exist. But it doesn't mean that it does exist either.
The other this me
The discovery of oneself-in reverse is fundamental in that it will allow the discovery of the other in a double equation: me is another (inverted me), the other is me. It is up to Gérald Allard to have developed the equation by analyzing the friendship that linked Montaigne to La Boétie and which made so many solitary readers dream; it was much more, it was the discovery of this self called other. "Just like his friend Montaigne, La Boétie doubles his speech with a message that is like the correction of what the essential part of his text delivers. Mirror images of each other, Montaigne and La Boétie respond to each other by reversing what they say out loud and what they say quietly." [71]Montaigne is the spokesperson for La Boétie's latent skepticism, while the latter speaks the heart of a revolutionary Montaigne who only expresses himself in hushed words in the Essays . The "alter" is "ego", it is an "alter ego".
If further proof of the existence of this invisible mirror in which the Renaissance is reflected is needed, it will be provided by the double portraits which were, at the time, commonplace. In 1517 Quentin Metsys painted a portrait of Pierre Gilles and Erasne, posing in symmetry, reflected to the point where the differences are only noticed with an effort of attention [72]. This double portrait was sent to Thomas More who himself would duplicate himself in a portrait of himself and John Fisher [73].
And the mirror games continue, this time with Erasmus and More, who never miss an opportunity to show off their physical resemblance. "...such that twin brothers could not more closely resemble one another."[74]
Love me so that I may be
But they were neither twins nor even brothers, they were FRIENDS, the key word of the Renaissance. For at the center of this discovery of symmetry in relation to a plane, of the inversion of the identical, lived the desire for the other, a substitute for parental desire/parental God. Friendship became the pivot of individuation. It is a moment "which decisively tips all human knowledge into mediation by the desire for the other [75]." We are not dealing here with a biographical note, with a charming character trait common to a few men united in contingency, who would have developed individually in necessity. We are dealing here, we think , with the very process of modern individuation. We will even go so far as to say that without this friendly "love," individuation as an epistemological stage would not have been possible because there is no speech without a response, "even if, as Lacan says, it only meets with silence [76]. " We are at that moment when the gaze of the friend, appearing in the empty mirror of the end of the Middle Ages, replaces that of God.
Once again, to be convinced of this, it is enough to let oneself be carried away by the powerful metaphors of the time. Friendship is spoken of, described, sung and written about everywhere. It is the reason for Erasmian writing, for Montaigne's Essays written for the dead friend whose shadow still hovers; it is the reason for Utopia . Let us remember that this one, written in Latin, was intended above all for a small group of friends. Erasmus's letters of 1516 and 1517 urge his friends to read Utopia and to share the reading with all their friends, which they did with enthusiasm. "The first readers, Gilles, Erasmus, Budé and the others... have scattered marginal notes in the margins of the manuscript which express their reaction. These notes introduce a new dramatic dimension into the work, a complicity with another character ..." [77]. Erasmus played a central role in that he spent his life interconnecting the humanist circle, allowing speech to be spoken within a benevolent community that precisely awakened inversions, discussions and above all hopes
It must also be said that these epistemological adolescents had a demonstrative and not very discreet friendship: they expressed it with many sweet words: "my dear", "my beloved", "my dearest", "my darling" etc...; they wrote to each other constantly (Thomas More and Erasmus exchanged more than 3000 letters [78]), they lived at each other's houses and only dreamed of being together on the bench at the bottom of the Chelsea garden [79]from which they were chased by a Mrs Thomas More, annoyed, understandably, by their exclusive complicity, maintained by the use of Latin which she, (the mother [80]), did not speak.
Like the adolescents in La Gigue described by Françoise Dolto, they protect their still fragile identity with a code, going as far as an alphabet in L'Utopia [81]. Fairly arrogant, they claim to be fiercely anti-establishment order. The criticism is bitter and constant and no one escapes the Morian or Erasmian arrows: Princes, Monks, Lawyers, Scholastics, bourgeois, peasants, merchants.... whom they do not want to resemble at any cost.
The established order has no humor "This fellow is so grim that he will not hear a joke; that fellow is so insipid that he cannot endure wit" [82]. On the other hand, the "Erasmus gang" multiplies wordplay, allusions, erudite innuendos and other philosophical teasing. The established order uses a heavy, bombastic and pedantic Latin, Hythlodeus, More-in-reverse, does not bother with such antics; He is clear and precise and does not hide the fact that he is Hellenizing, reducing Latin to a mere convenience [83]. The established order is vulgarly ostentatious, the Renaissance choose simplicity and boast it to anyone who will listen. The established order, having very bad taste, only admires texts that took years to be written. Of course, More, in his letter to Gilles explains that he wrote Utopia between two appointments. This is in keeping with tradition, since Petrarch sat down to write one evening by candlelight in an inn, while Erasmus, defying the laws of gravity, wrote In Praise of Folly on horseback.
It is also very likely that in Books I and II of Utopia the representatives of the established order all have faces familiar to the members of the "gang" and it is not difficult to believe that certain descriptions provoked more than one knowing smile among the first readers of the text.
A quarter of a century later, Montaigne and especially La Boétie would add to the already long list of critiques of an order that had been established for too long. They fired on every trick, but, like Erasmus and More, they never attacked the poor and destitute, whom they championed. However fierce their social critique, it was never extended to universal man and never descended into complete Machiavellian or Hobbesian cynicism. Nor was their youthful protest a claim to power. None of them, including Machiavelli, wanted it.
The gang also protects itself with literary elitism. Utopia and In Praise of Folly , written in Latin for Hellenists [84], are intended neither for the powerful of this world [85]nor for the common people. This is a document for internal use. "If any man would now translate Moria or some works either thay I have myself written ere this, albeit there is no harm therein, folk yet being (as they be) given to the term of what is good, I would not only my darling's Erasmus books, but my own also help to burn them rather than folk should through their own fault take harm in them [86]. "
Me-Be-You-the Other
In a word, friendship makes them be, blossom, never being able, Piera Aulagnier could continue, "to be content with the mirror (telling them) as in fairy tales" [87]that they are the most beautiful." In this sense, Jean-Claude Margolin will rightly speak of "the great complacency of humanists with regard to their own glory [88]. "
At the same time, Gérald Allard explains, "The friendship between La Boétie and Montaigne, an indubitable fact for the latter, is the fact from which he understands his existence and all existences. Moreover, the immense labor that constitutes the creation of the Essays has no other meaning than that of recreating through writing the first truth of friendship: mutual acquaintance [89]." Friendship " is a perfect mutual acquaintance, and as perfect it is a social dynamite. Whether it is family, conjugal love, or any of the ordinary relationships between human beings, relationships that make life in society possible, nothing resists when we compare this "holy couture" to it [90].
In the warmth of the small group, the "son of man" was born, the "it is me of modern man" to use Lacan's expression [91]. For far from closing the circle on friends, the desire to be recognized opens up to all other possibilities, at the beginning of this century when humanity expands beyond the seas [92]. "Nothing that is human is (then) foreign" [93]. Pico della Mirandola dreams of all the others combined with the "past, present, future" [94], Erasmus works on a broad definition of "humanitas" [95], Thomas More refers to reasonable human nature as the foundation of a humanity including the "noble savages", men already dead and those who are not yet born. All exchanges between humans will therefore be, ultimately, "founded on this interrelational process, called mirror" [96].
This does not mean in any way that the transition to modernity will diminish the importance of affect; one would be entitled, in fact, to ask whether abstract friendship with all others, which has become Martin Heidegger's "One", will lose desire, which will only flare up for the last time during the French Revolution: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. [97]One could think that with Descartes, the "I" will finally progress since it will finally disinvest itself of an overly cumbersome emotionality in order to reinvest itself in the natural world itself, freed from its desiring projections.
But this would be to misunderstand the little man whose desire for re-cognition only ceases at death. For it seems that, as on the first day, affect remains central to the process of knowledge, no matter how abstract it becomes, the "I" can only function "if it can jointly ensure the stability of these two reference points which are its recognition and the recognition of itself by the gaze of others. [98]" This is the basis of Lacan's definition of the Unconscious ("The unconscious is the discourse of the Other" [99]), of Françoise Dolto's definition of the soul ("The soul is the Other" [100]) or, seen from another angle, the explanation of Sartre's aphorism: ("Hell is other people"). But this is also what André Prévost so rightly understood from the profound message of Utopia , which he described as " the intensification of the desire to exist for others." "Through the obsolete elements of the story," he continues, "this axis of action and life has been affirmed: the increase in the inner tension called desire, which carries man forward and above himself [101]." A remarkable comment from a metaphysician who joins metapsychoanalysis, and in a certain way the Lacanian interpretation of anticipation: "The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust rushes from the insufficiency of anticipation," [102]which must be defined as this constant interrelational dialectic, forever desired, forever insufficient.
And science without conscience is only ruin of the soul
The conclusion would like to give back to the Renaissance the epistemological importance that is denied to it in the name of the Age of Reason." We would like to have demonstrated that the passage to reason precisely could not have taken place without this stage of the mirror stage specific to the Re-naissance. We have tried to deny it as we deny those moments of adolescence, funny but shameful for the adult who, often, and without knowing it, has crossed the mirror. And yet, this moment is constitutive of this individuality which we wrongly think is formed by the experiences of maturity. For the game is essential to the self, just as the others, those of the group, those to whom the word is addressed, are the sine qua non condition for a word to be made and to develop for oneself and all the others.
Notes
[1]Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason , Paris: Payot, 1974, p.24.
[2]JB Bury, The Idea of Progress , an Inquiry into its Origin and its Growth, New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1955, p.65.
[3]Mikel Dufrenne, "Reason Today", Rationality Today , edited by F. Gaeraets, Ottawa: University of Ottawa Publishing, 1979, p.16.
[4]The triangle took various forms depending on the respective importance given to the angles: Rousseau focused on the inherent search for a Common Good, Locke emphasized individualism and Hobbes on reason.
[5]J. Yvon Thériault, "The First Crisis of Reason", Politics and Reason , Figures of Modernity. University of Ottawa Press, 1988, p.51.
[6]Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit
[7]The natural sciences are based, as we know, on a logic of probability which, according to Max Horkheimer, "replaces the logic of truth." op.cit. p.51.
[8] The scholar and the politician , General Union of Editions, 10/18, Paris, 1959.
[9]Edmond Husserl, The Crisis of European Humanity and Philosophy , trans. Paul Ricoeur, Aubier-Montaigne, Paris, 1977.
[10]Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut. System and Criticism , Essays on the Critique of Reason in Contemporary Philosophy. Brussels: Ousia, 1984.
[11]Martin Heidegger, Hegel and the Greeks, Questions II
[12]One can read the interesting analysis by Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis , The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, New York: The Free Press, 1990.
[13]This idea is shared by the majority of humanists. Vivès, in his Treatise on Education , for example, starts from the postulate that the "essential nature of human beings is invariable."
[14]We will read with interest Quentin Skinner. The Foundation of Political Thought , vol.1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
[15]We should not expect social reform from the humanist advisors, although many of them wanted reforms. But they couldn't get out of their logic. "Having admitted that government ought to be placed in the hands of those with the greatest virtue, and having affirmed that those with the greatest virtue happen to be the nobility and gentry, they proceed to draw the pleasantly obvious conclusion: that in order to maintain the best-ordered form of political society, we ought not to tamper with any existing social distinctions but ought on the contrary to preserve them as far as possible". Quentin Skinner, op.cit., p.238-9.
[16]Vivès declared history "a source of practical wisdom." Budé, more lyrically, called it "our absolute guide."
[17]Juan Luis Vives, Jacopo Sadoleto, Roger Asham, Josse Clichtove, Guillaume Budé, Erasmus, Jacob Wimpfeling, Felipe de la Torre, are just a few names among the humanists who wrote treatises (studia humanitatis) on the education of princes.
[18]Plutarch would write an Essay on the Art of Distinguishing a Friend from a Flatterer.
[19]Thomas More wrote Utopia between 1515 and 1516. It was immediately published by Thierry Maertens in Louvain. For more details, see André Prévost, Thomas More (1478-1535) and the Crisis of European Thought , Paris: Mame, 1969. Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) wrote The Prince in 1513, but the manuscript was not printed until fifteen years later. It seems unlikely that Thomas More had access to this manuscript, although several copies circulated in Europe.
[20] Utopia is composed of two books, the second having been written, at least for the most part, before the first. The first book is written as a play; a friend introduces Thomas More to a traveler named Raphael Hythlodeus who has just returned from "Nowhere Land" (Utopia). The two argue bitterly over the merits of remaining traditional and serving a king or imagining a radically different order. Hythlodeus defends this by describing in the second book a "free" country that rejects all arbitrariness.
[21]Or “vain Babil”, “Nonsense talker”.
[22]Hythlodeus forces the speech and asks to be allowed to speak without interruption. Utopia is not an easy dream.
[23]In his volume on English literature (the Oxford History of English Literature) CS Lewis describes Utopia "as a book whose place is not in a history of political theory but in that of fiction and satire."
[24]Cf. Germain Marc'Hadour, Thomas More and the Bible , The Place of Holy Books in His Apologetics and Spirituality. Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 1969. P. Albert Duhamel, "Medievalism of More's Utopia, Studies in Philology , 52(1955): 99-126. RJ Schoeck, R. Marius,
[25]"...in the final analysis, the Utopians reduce all our actions and even all our virtues to pleasure as an end."
[26]"Man is united to man in a more intimate and stronger way by the heart than by words and protocols." The analyses of Karl Kautsky, [27]Thomas More and his Utopia , New York: Russell and Russell, 1959, are worth reading .
[28]In particular, it seems that utopian "communism" actually stems from the Christian tradition and, without a doubt, a Morian nostalgia for the convent life which he had tasted and which he had eminently appreciated.
[29] we find, of course, a humanist idea, developed by La Boétie in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude , written in 1552 and which will be developed much later by JJ Rousseau.
[30]In this, Thomas More is at the antipodes of Machiavelli and the humanist tradition which, we remember, is more interested in stability and social order than in a freedom which he associates with disorder.
[31]More repeatedly emphasizes the absence of necessity that presided over the birth of Utopia. It is "what chance has revealed" (U.132).
[32]And yet no one can doubt the Christian faith of a man who died for it. Let's just say that his conception of faith is entirely humanist, in the tradition of his friend Erasmus, who wrote to him: "So great is my dislike of assertions that I prefer the views of the skeptics..."
[33]We are indeed far from Plato who clearly specifies in The Laws "In short, we must accustom the mind to not acting individually and make it incapable of doing so."
[34]"The laws are very few in number" (U.166) for the sole purpose that "everyone is aware of their rights and duties" (U.167).
[35]The concern for situations is reflected at every moment as evidenced by this series of utopian observations: "Everyone must spend some time in the countryside before returning to the city; nevertheless, some naturally take a liking to agriculture and obtain permission... In general, everyone is raised in the profession of their parents...however...". "Marriage is absolutely forbidden to them, unless ... ". "They never mistreat an unarmed man...unless ... " Etc. We could continue because the list of exceptional situations is as long as that of situations.
[36]According to George Logan, "More is functioning as a city state theorist; his object is to secure the real interests of the citizens of Utopia, not those of humanity in general".
[37]It was formed according to the laws of chance encounters. "Indeed, according to their annals, they had no notion of us, whom they call the Ultrequinoxiaux, before our landing, except that 1,200 years ago, a ship driven by a storm was shipwrecked near the island of Utopia. A few Romans and Egyptians were thrown onto the shore; they remained in the country."
[38] represented by Pico della Mirandola.
[39]He is simply a founder. "This great legislator did not have time to complete the constructions and embellishments he had planned... it took several generations."
[40]"The colony governs itself according to utopian laws and calls upon the natives who want to share its work and its way of life" (U.131).
[41]The dilemma was experienced intensely by Thomas More, who, when he wrote Utopia, was still hesitant to accept the position of Chancellor that Henry VIII offered him.
[42]Thomas More's correspondence indicates that he had few illusions about his real power as a King's advisor. His death sentence unfortunately proved him right.
[43]We know that Erasmus wrote The History of Folly in Thomas More and that Utopia is Thomas More's response, a eulogy to reason. Except for this difference , and it is a significant one, that Erasmus described a situation in which he believed, while More sketched out a hope that was only a wish. Some commentators saw this as proof that Utopia was, in fact, a satire, barely disguised by the naivety of certain humanists. Pico della Mirandola and Erasmus, of course, who, like Thomas More, were careful never to take on political or other responsibilities.
[44]Quentin Skinner, among others, developed the idea that " Utopia is unquestionably the greatest contribution to the political theory of modern Renaissance, it is embodied by far the most radical critique of humanism written by a humanist. The Foundation of Modern Political Thought , vol.I , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978, p.256.
[45]Alphonse De Waelhens, Psychosis , An Essay on Analytical and Existential Interpretation. Louvain-Paris: Editions Nauwelaerts, 1972, p.5.
[46]Lacan first developed his mirror theory at a conference held in Marienbad in 1936. He returned to the theme in a presentation given in Zurich at the 16th International Congress of Psychoanalysis on 17 July 1949, entitled "The mirror stage as formative of the I as revealed to us in psychoanalytic experience". The text is reproduced in full in Ecrits 1 , Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1966.
[47]Lacan, Writings 1 , Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1966, p.89.
[48]Jacques Lacan, op.cit., p.91.
[49]Piera Aulagnier, The Violence of Interpretation , from Pictogram to Statement, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975, p.208
[50]Jacques Lacan, Writings 1 , Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1990, p.90
[51]Georges Bastide, The Great Moral Themes of Western Civilization , Paris: Bordas, 1958, p.72.
[52]cf. Jacques Lacan. Ecrits 1 , op.cit. p174
[53]Jean Writh "The Medieval Subject" in Thinking about the Subject Today , under the direction of Elisabeth Guibert-Sledwziewski and Jean-Louis Vieillard-Baron, Cerisy Colloquium, Paris, Méridiens Klincksieck, 1988, p.244.
[55]The end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance were marked by a considerable weakening of the authority of God's representatives: the Church and the Princes. On this subject, one can read, among others, the analyses of Russell Ames, Citizen Thomas More and his Utopia, New York, Russell and Russell, 1949, pp. 129-37; J. H. Hexter, The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation: More Machiavelli and Seysel , New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1973 pp. 7-8; Jean Delumeau, La peur en Occident (XIV éme- XVIII éme siècles), Une cité assiégée, Fayard, Paris, 1978, p. 21 et seq. André Prévost, L'Utopie de Thomas More , Paris, Nouvelles Editions Mame, 1978, introduction.
[56] History of Private Life , From Feudal Europe to the Renaissance, Volume 2, under the direction of Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1985, p. 380.
[57] History of Private Life , op.cit. p.389.
[58] History of Private Life , op.cit. p.391.
[60]"an intellectual profusion" to use the expression of Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis , the Hidden Agenda of Modernity, New York: the Free Press, 1990, p.27
[61]George M. Logan, The Meaning of More's Utopia , Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, p.123.
[62]Elliott P. Simon " Utopia: Creating an image of the Soul" Moreana 69(1981): 24.
[63]Simone Goyard Fabre, comments on Utopia or the Treatise on the Best Form of Government , translated by Marie Delcourt, Paris: Flammarion, 1987, p. 38. Let us add that Madame Goyard Fabre will make the common mistake of attributing to the inverted image something "more striking and truer than reality in its flatness" (p. 38).
[64]JH Hexter. The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation: More, Machiavelli and Seysel , New York: Basic Books Inc., 1973, p.35
[65]This is evidenced by the unusual number of works offering "keys" to understanding Utopia that have been and continue to be published. Each year, the journal Moreana , dedicated solely to Thomas More, publishes several articles on the "Hythlodea enigma."
[66]Merritt Abrash, quoted by Wolfgang Rudat (see note 23), makes Raphael Hythlodeus a "fictitious foil through which Thomas More criticizes the angelism current in humanist circles, notably the angelism of his friend Erasmus and of Pico della Mirandola, whose wish to withdraw from the world is reminiscent of Raphael's approach, as Louis Valcke has pointed out. "John Pico della Mirandola read by Thomas More", Moreana 100 (1989): 77-98.
[67]Wolfgang E.H. Rudat, "More's Raphael Hythloday: Missing the Point in Utopia Once More," Moreana , 69 (1981): 41-63. The joke thesis is also taken up by C.S. Lewis, Harry Berger Jr. Barnes, Dorsch, Wooden, Johnson, and even Sylvester.
[68]JH Hexter. More's Utopia: the Biography of an Idea . 1952 resumed. New York: Haper Tochbooks 1965: "More truly believed that the Utopian Commonwealth as he had framed it was the Best society. That he did indeed believe this he indicates time after time, but never more emphatically than at the beginning of the summation...of Utopia : 'Now I have declared and described to you, as truly as I could, the form and order of that commomwealth which verily in my judgment is not only the best, but also that which alone of good right may claim and take upon it the name of commonwealth or public weal'" (.57).
[69]Erasmus Ep.414. Selected Letters p.85.
[70]Quoted from Thomas Stapleton The Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More , New York: Fordham University Press, 1966, p.5
[71]Gérald Allard, "Montaigne and La Boétie: Revolution, Reform and Status Quo", presented at the conference "Aequitas, Aequalitas, Auctoritas" organized by the Centre for Research in Political and Social Philosophy of the University of Ottawa", September 1990, p.7
[72]This portrait can be seen reproduced in an article devoted to the friendship of Pierre Gilles and Erasmus. J. Jacques "The great friends. Erasmus and Pierre Gilles". Moreana 15 (1967) pp.97-102.
[73]A portrait of Thomas More and John Fisher can be found in Moreana 4 (1964), p.37.
[75]Lacan Jacques, op.cit. p.95.
[76]Jacques Lacan, op.cit. p.123.
[77]André Prévost, presentation of Thomas More's Utopia , Paris: Mame, 1978 p.155 note 2.
[78]..."nearly thirty-seven years and more than three thousand published letters separate two documents, the first of which - Erasmus's letter to More dated October 28, 1949 (Allen 114) - attests to already strong ties and reports on earlier correspondence, and the last of which, a note dated June 28, 1536, is signed by the sick hand - aegra manu - of an old man who has only two weeks left to live." Germain Marc'Hadour, Thomas More and the Bible , the place of holy books in his apologetics and spirituality, Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 1969, pp. 14-15
[79]Thomas More had bought a country house on the banks of the Thames, where his greatest pleasure was to gather his friends. A bench at the bottom of the garden is described in his correspondence with Erasmus as the preferred spot. The bench at the bottom of the garden is found again in the first book of Utopia .
[80]This is Dame Alice, More's second wife, whom he married immediately after the death of his first wife. A young widower, left with four children. They needed a "mother," and he married one.
[81]"The 1516 Louvain edition began with the famous map of Utopia and the Utopian alphabet, followed by some verses praising the island and that are assigned to the Utopian poet-laureate". RS Syvester, "Si Hytlodaeo credimus: Vision and Revision in Thomas More's Utopia" in Essential Articles for the Study of Thomas More , edited by GP Marc'Hadour and RS Sylvester, Hamden: Archon Books, 1977, p.293.
[82]George M. Logan , The Meaning of More's Utopia , Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1953, p.31
[83]Which, some will say, suits Thomas More, whose Latin sometimes leaves something to be desired.
[84]"Greek coinages...are included for the sake of those readers - exclusively humanists - who can understand them" in George M. Logan The Meaning of More's Utopia , Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, p.20.
[85]"Utopia is not intended ultimately for the instructions of the rulers", in Robin S. Johnson, More's Utopia: Ideal and Illusion , New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969, p.12.
[86]James J. Greene and John P. Dolan (editors) The Essential Thomas More , A mentor Omega Book, New York, 1967, pp.155-56.
[87]Piera Aulagnier, The Violence of Interpretation , From Pictogram to Statement, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1975, p.209.
[89]Gérald Allard, op.cit. p.11
[91]"'This am I' of Villon's time has been reversed into the 'this is me' of modern man", Jacques Lacan, Ecrits , t.1, op.cit. p.161.
[92]Humanists from Thomas More to Montaigne had all read the travel accounts of the navigators of the time. See J.H. Hexter, More's Utopia , op.cit. pp. 30, 78, S. Toulmin, Cosmopolis , op.cit. pp. 26 et seq.
[93]Stephen Toulin, Cosmopolis , op.cit. p.27.
[94]André Prévost, L’Utopia .. op.cit., p.55.
[95]P. Simon Eliott, “Utopia: creating an image of the Soul ”, op.cit . p22.
[96]Françoise Dolto, The Gospel at the Risk of Psychoanalysis , volume 1, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1977, p.166.
[97]One will read with interest the article by Roger Lapointe "...and fraternity", Carrefour 12 (1990): 49-89.
[98]Piera Aulagnier, Violence... , op.cit. p.210.
[99] Writings , Vol. 1. op. cit. p. 25.
[100] The Gospel... , T.1, op.cit., p.164.