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Negative Utopia and Religion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Roland Caillois
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At the time of Plato's Republic, the citizens lived in a unity of religion and politics. Hegel refers to this life, prior to the rending of the conscience into the exterior modern State and interior religion, as beautiful, free, and happy.

Perhaps the nostalgia for the beautiful, free, and happy unity presides today over the confused attempts to “change life,” where politics and religion exist side by side and intermingle. But this unity was not possible except in the ideal of the Republic; the current confusion takes place rather in the name of a utopian non-city.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 22 , Issue 87 , September 1974 , pp. 34 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © 1974 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 As opposed to Plato's positive utopia which proposes a very well-defined model of the Republic—which serves as a criterion for all judgements made on historical cities but which has nothing of the mythological or the ideological about it—one could call negative an anarchical utopia or the future non-city, which consists of nothing but the denial (negation) of all recognized value to the current historical reality and proposes an ideology of disorganizing action, organization being considered as fatal for man. Man is thus defined as being essentially free within his spontaneous "creativity".

2 One of the religious paradoxes of our age is the difficulty of distinguishing a believer from an atheist. To the question "Do you believe in the resurrection of Christ?" it is possible that the neo-Christian would answer "No," and that the "atheist" answer "In a sense, yes." In the sense in which the "believer" answered "No." Their meeting point is, one could say, "transcendent" of faith and of unbelief and there is at the base the place of terrestrial and political order which consitutes their common "faith".

3 When R. Garaudy sees in Christianity and Marxism two hopes which should merge, each able to save the other from alienation, one evokes the two Greats of the Utopian world, parallel to the two Super-Greats of the historical world.

4 It is however on this unique level that the balance sheet is positive both for theology and for philosophy. The emergence of theological studies on Hegel, for example—or even on Heidegger—is beneficial to the highest degree and has given, even if only to the history of philosophy, some remarkable works. But this is not our problem nor even that of the Church as such.