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.

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