Henrique Jales Ribeiro
“Utopia and Philosophy”
Traditionally, since Thomas More’s famous book with the same title (Utopia), utopia
has been considered as a realm of a ‘nowhere’, of a ‘no place’, which is a product of
the imagination, referring to a purely virtual space and, therefore, not expected to
materialise. Seen from that perspective, utopia would nonetheless have a
transformative role, in a negative manner and essentially through analogy: the
similarity and the contrast between utopia and that which was/is supposed to be
reality itself operated exactly in this direction. In the late 1920s, in his famous book
titled Ideologie und Utopie, Karl Mannheim thoroughly reformulated this traditional
concept, showing how utopia is an integral part of political thought, whatever it may
be, and that its transformative function happens basically when utopia emerges in
association with ideology, which should not in itself be judged negatively. In his time,
what Mannheim had in mind was mostly political philosophies such as Marx and
Lenin’s, as well as majestic materialisations of a utopian ideal like that of communism
and, particularly, the Soviet State. From such a perspective, utopia becomes the object
of philosophy (or, in his case, of sociology), rather than something philosophy itself
would be an object of. A decisive step in that direction was taken by Paul Ricoeur in a
lecture on “L’idéologie et l’utopie” which he delivered at the University of Chicago in
1975: for the first time in utopian studies the possibility of analysing philosophy as a
form of utopia is raised. Similar suggestions can be found in Thomas Nagel’s wellknown book The View from Nowhere. However, neither Ricoeur nor Nagel provide us
with conceptual tools with which to analyse and understand philosophy from that
perspective. At first this may seem to be a contradiction: since More wrote his
celebrated book, ‘utopia’ has always signified, both for common sense and for
philosophy in general, a concept opposed to that of rationality, which philosophy is
supposed to incarnate; therefore, if philosophy itself is now considered utopian, what
we talk about when talk about ‘philosophical utopias’ is a rationality that would be
utopian. Drawing on my own research, I will attempt to demonstrate that this
contradiction is merely apparent.