Nathanael Stein is Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. He works mainly in ancient Greek philosophy (especially causality, explanation, philosophy of mind, and related issues), and, more recently, on the imagination.
A post by Nathanael Stein
This post is about a puzzle, a suspicion, and a cry for help. I need to make two points before I can raise the puzzle.
First, imagining a utopia is one of the most ambitious things you can do with the imagination, but it’s also a natural and maybe inevitable feature of our lives. (By ‘utopia’ I just mean a reasonably complete alternative form of social arrangement that is meant to be better than the present one in one or more aspects.) We spend a good amount of time imagining, or being caused to imagine, not just our own individual futures, but also a whole future way of life. These are hard to separate. Indeed, a lot of political discourse and manipulation depends on our tendency to have a vague but powerful imaginative picture of what the world might look like in 5, 10, 20 years. And such imaginings have had, to put it mildly, important real world consequences. Finally, if being able to imagine things’ being otherwise is a requirement of human freedom, to paraphrase Sartre, then imagining utopia is a non-negligible part of that activity. For a variety of reasons, then, utopian imagination deserves attention as a persistent feature of human life and world history.
Second, some utopian imaginings are better than others. In recent years philosophers have spent a fair amount of time examining the epistemic qualities of imagination for small scale matters, including under the heading of instructive vs. transcendent imagining. But there seem to be similar distinctions at the large scale as well: some utopian imaginings are more plausible than others, and some are more accurate than others about whether the alternative arrangements would indeed be better.
So this is the basis for my puzzle: utopian imagining is, I suggest, simply an extension of an exercise that we do all the time, and that Plato introduced into philosophy: imagining human social life under better or even ideal conditions. And this isn’t an exercise we need abandon on the grounds that there’s no difference between doing it well and doing it badly—even if it were possible to do so, which I doubt.
It’s natural, then, to wonder what makes for the difference, and what role utopian imagining has to play in good thinking about how we should live (including for questions in political philosophy about ideal theory). But utopianism nowadays is a byword for naive fantasies that don’t have a chance of being realized, except maybe as interesting disasters, and it seems to be discouraged both in philosophy and polite company more generally.
For sustained attempts at imagining utopias we must usually look rather to literature and narrative art more generally. Indeed, this would seem to be a promising place for philosophical theorizing and artistic imagination to meet up.
But now here is my puzzle, put bluntly: most literary utopias are boring, and they’re boring especially in and because of the utopian parts. Why? There are a few worthy exceptions, but—not to name names—if you go down the standard lists of utopian fiction, you don’t find many artistic standouts. Reading about someone’s idea of a socio-political utopia is, generally, a drag. And the exciting bits in such books tend to be not about the well-run meetings or the great healthcare but about familiar kinds of bad things, like a good old-fashioned murder mystery. And the rare standouts like Leguin’s The Dispossessed, which generally tops the lists, is subtitled ‘An Ambiguous Utopia’ for good reason: it is undogmatic, and works in part because it creates and exploits curiosity about whether the lives being described are really better or worse because of their alternative arrangements.
Certainly you don’t find good utopian artworks in the same proportion as powerful dystopias, which can be gripping like a good nightmare, and gripping precisely because of the dystopian parts. But dystopias are based on a different feat of imagination: they work by projecting a possible future from the present and recent past. But utopias are usually not projections from our own past and present but rather start as rejections of them. And so we read Huxley’s Brave New World as much because of what it says about the present and the past, as because of what it says about the possible future into which they might develop. But most people (rightly, I can only assume) have never read his late utopian novel Island.
So where are the good utopian artworks? One might argue that most utopias are naive and silly, and it’s hard to make people care about a narrative based on naive assumptions about people and societies. But romantic comedies and superhero movies also tend to be naive and silly, but plenty of them are also engaging and well-crafted—we enjoy them for the very things that make them silly. Plenty of dystopias are simplistic too, when it comes down to it. Do they get more credit for being pessimistic or suspicious, and therefore more “serious”? And while there are naive and silly utopias, there are also complex and sophisticated ones, just like there can be complex and sophisticated romantic comedies.
So this is the puzzle, more fleshed out: imagining better social arrangements as a whole is a natural and important feature of our imaginative lives. But surely, if it’s something we do often and naturally with our imagination, there ought to be more aesthetically compelling examples.
‘Surely’ isn’t an argument, though, so I have a two-part philosophical question: what are the criteria for good utopian imagining in general, whether as prediction, or as a serious attempt to explore real possibilities? And why does such imagining seem to yield such anemic literature?
The second part of the question is my cry for help, and I present it as a challenge with practical consequences:
I’m developing a reading list for a class on utopias and utopian thinking. I’d like some examples of artworks that go beyond the standard handful, and I’d really like to find some aesthetically good ones. What am I missing? What do readers wish other people would read? Comments or email would be much appreciated!
For my own purposes I’d like to include any attempt to engage the literary imagination with a serious utopian project or utopian thinking. Sci-fi is of interest of course, but a good history or work of historical fiction that captures a utopian project from the inside would also count. (Any good novels about life among the Shakers or the Icarians? Why aren’t the best creepy male actors lining up to play John Humphrey Noyes? Some of these groups, after all, were actually trying out some of Plato’s ideas for the guardians in the Republic, albeit without the right education in athletics and the arts, let alone a grasp of the Form of the Good.) Here I’d also include a work of memory like Lea Ypi’s Free, which not only describes the author’s childhood in Albania but reconstructs the attitudes of her childhood, her family, and their social circle towards the utopian project in which they found themselves. Memoir of that sort makes extensive use of the imagination, even if you don’t think memory just is a special kind of imagination.
Finally, here’s a suspicion underlying my challenge: what if there are good reasons for which imaginative utopias tend to fall flat? Perhaps they compare poorly with dystopias not because of an aesthetic prejudice for downers, but because the conceptual standards that make for a good utopian imaginative project tend to make for bad narrative. Dystopias are compelling because they extend something we know from experience until it feels like a nightmare—they illuminate the present and the past in ways that surprise and disturb us. But a genuine utopia requires imagining something we may not even be capable of experiencing without radical psychological change. So if narrative art works in part by engaging with a reader’s experience, there’s a necessary tension between the conceptual goal of imagining a new form of social life, and the aesthetic goal of presenting something vivid. Further, most utopian thinking begins with rejecting the present, often with a mixture of disgust and outrage. You’d think these would be powerful emotional hooks, but maybe you can only go so far in imagining a happier, flourishing society by simply negating current sources of misery. Do most utopias lack a positive understanding of happiness, and fail to engage for that reason?
Again, I’d love to hear about works that fit my brief but, for whatever reason, don’t make standard lists of utopian fiction.