Just like “Utopia”, the name “Utopia” has already surpassed its original meaning and has become a word space that speaks differently for everyone ; also like “Utopia”, the act of finding the original meaning or background of the word “Utopia” itself, in this new era known for technology and civilization, has no less significance than any previous generation.
Hao Chunpeng’s “Ten Lectures on Utopia” is based on Thomas More’s “Utopia”. In the concise and comprehensive reading and analysis of the ten lectures, he intends to restore the “Utopia” itself has multiple meanings: More’s humanism, the relationship between “Utopia” and the history of thought, political philosophy, and the background of human beings’ highest imagination of beauty and darkness through literature.
The humanists of the Renaissance took it as their mission to revive classical culture and create modern literary ideas, and More’s “Utopia” is no exception, so the so-called “Utopia” is not only the “garden” (and “paradise”) of modern people Imagination reflects More’s re-creation of the medieval “Garden of Eden” and Plato’s “Utopia”; at the same time, it is also the earliest “black mirror” of modern people, and “Utopia” has also been “dystopia” from the beginning.
”Utopia” naturally has two sides, and Hao Chunpeng has discovered a characteristic of this work and the ideal city-state it constructs—literary fiction. The author Moore is by no means the interlocutor Moore in the work. The style of this communication/reminiscence/dialogue work is not an Aristotelian academic article, but a Platonic novel-like text with vivid inquiry and paraphrasing . “Ten Lectures on Utopia” points out More’s grasp of the changes between the past and the present at that time, such as the “arrogance” in human nature.
This is one of the details of “Utopia” entrusted by “Ten Lectures on Utopia”: the “Utopia” space created by the humanist More is both a “black mirror” and a garden. rich enough. The so-called “Black Mirror” is “dystopia”. “Dystopia” achieves the effect of deconstruction and irony through the field construction of all good wishes through seemingly incongruity. The image of “Black Mirror” reflects that human desires, sustenance, demands for scientific progress, etc. are counterproductive in the practice of politics, morality, and technology, and go to the opposite.
”Utopia” is indeed a free but closed early modern society, which is full of hidden discordant and anti-human factors. However, if we only understand it from the perspective of modern people and think that More is satirizing “Utopia” throughout the whole article, then it is actually different from thinking that More is praising “Utopia” throughout the whole article from the perspective of modern people. The same childish and lazy. More’s “Utopia” is the humanist’s “Black Mirror”, but it is also “The Garden” on another level, and even the Platonist’s swan song. Dai Liling, the translator of Utopia, opposed More and Plato in the translator’s preface of the Commercial Press edition, and believed that the profundity of some of More’s arguments was far beyond Plato’s understanding. This operation, which seemed to push Moore up, fell into the trap of the “arrogance” of modern people criticized by Moore. Like Plato, More satirizes his own construction by saying that it is impossible to realize the “ideal” of the “city-state” in reality, and always looks forward to the “garden” that may be close to reality. direction to contribute to sound political philosophy.
”Ten Lectures on Utopia” contradicts the statement in the preface of the Chinese translation that excessively destroys the ideological achievements of the predecessors, and establishes a true academic tradition. The concept of my own ideas: high affirmation of academic labor and good expectations of the humanist community. “The garden allows us to get rid of the current market logic… that is, to rediscover the Socratic question that everyone has forgotten: how should people live in this world?”
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