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Welcome to the On Paradise podcast series.

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I am Paul Basu, Professor of Anthropology
at the University of Oxford

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and curator of ‘On Paradise:
Between Hope and Memory’,

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an exhibition featuring
the work of the artist Saad Qureshi

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at the Schwarzman Center
for the Humanities in Oxford.

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‘On Paradise’ is part of ‘Utopia Now!’,
a season of events

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that asks how we might live,
imagine and create differently, and why

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imagining new futures matters
now more than ever.

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As part of the exhibition,
I spoke with Humanities scholars

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across the University who, in different
ways, work on themes relating to Paradise

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and Utopia in different cultural
and historical contexts.

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In this episode, we hear the reflections
of Kathryn Murphy,

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Associate Professor
of English Literature ... On Paradise.

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My name is Kathryn Murphy.

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I'm an Associate Professor
here in the English Faculty.

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I study mostly the 17th century,

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the art and poetry
and prose of the 17th century.

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I am particularly interested
in thinking about thinking in that period.

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I've just finished a book

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about the author, Robert Burton,
who wrote a huge encyclopedic,

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world-swallowing book
that was published first in 1621

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called The Anatomy of Melancholy,
which is a study of

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the the humor of melancholy
and the symptoms

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and effects of the humor of melancholy
in the 17th century.

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I think of it as a massive contraption
for attention and distraction.

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He is thinking all the way through
about his own attention distraction.

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It's an incredibly digressive book,
and he's also playing with the reader's

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attentiveness and sometimes their boredom,
sometimes their inability

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to pay attention to a half a million words
worth of detail

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on The lure of melancholy
in the 17th century.

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And so that book is very much
about about thinking and disorders

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of thinking and disorders of the mind
in the 17th century.

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And now I'm thinking a lot about 17th-century

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thought experiment. About the ways
in which poems are thought experiments,

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the ways in which poems can be
philosophical investigations of questions

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like the infinity
or the non-infinity of the universe,

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or speculative investigations
of what might have been

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before the beginning of time,
or what might be to come after its end.

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So that's what I'm thinking about
and teaching about at the moment.

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17th century melancholy...

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You could describe it
in some ways as a reaction

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to the sense that Paradise has been lost.

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So Robert Burton, in his
An Anatomy and Melancholy, talks

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about melancholy
as the sign of man's mortality.

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It's a sign of fallen human nature,
the imperfection that attends all things,

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all human attempts...
The ways that we fall short of ourselves

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both ethically and in terms
of what we desire.

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And melancholy can be characterized as a response to that

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constant awareness of imperfection

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and the ways in which one's desires
for wholeness, goodness, and health

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are not matched by one's experience
of being human and the world.

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And in that sense,
thinking about the nostalgia

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for some kind of originary sense
of wholeness that might be characterized

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as a Paradise and a Paradise
that has been lost.

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It's typified by a kind of melancholic
response thereafter.

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I would distinguish Paradise and Utopia, I think.

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Paradise to me,
and thinking about the thinkers

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I think about in the 17th century,
is either something

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originary that has been lost, some
original state of happiness and innocence

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that has been lost, or the imagination
that that could be regained

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at the end of time
or in some spiritual way.

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Utopia, to me,

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is a more pragmatic set of imagining
about what

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it might be to have an ideal society
that is

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usually unrealizable because perfection
seems to be unrealizable, but which

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at least takes as its starting point
the idea that if we could

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imagine a perfect society,
imagine perfect laws,

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imagine the perfect distribution of goods,
imagine a perfect education system...

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Then we would solve
some of the problems of human nature.

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We would solve problems of jealousy
and greed and fundamental problems

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that lead to conflict in society
and realize something more perfect.

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But the horizon of utopia,
although it's ever receding,

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seems to me to be in this life
in some sense, whereas

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the horizon of Paradise seems to me
to be after the end of some kind of

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after the end of some kind of

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restoration that might be posthumous,
that might be after

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the end of time, it might be,
you know, after the Second Coming,

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but it is a kind of restoration beyond.

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One of the things that I think
distinguishes Paradise from Utopia

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is that Paradise
tends to be apolitical in some sense.

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I'm not sure if I believe
what I've just said, but I'm

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going to explore that idea
and see where it takes me.

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I say that partly
because there's there's a kind of tendency

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in the middle of the 17th century
to - having acknowledged

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the loss
of some kind of original happiness, or

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some kind of fall
from some kind of original Paradisal

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or state - to try to reinstate Paradise
within the mind.

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So that's what happens
in the greatest document of Paradisal

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thinking in the 17th century,
Milton's ‘Paradise Lost’.

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You know, the title says it all.

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The narrative of
the poem will be the loss of

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Adam and Eve's happiness in that
original Garden State.

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But towards the end of the poem,
there's a suggestion that if

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chastened Adam, having fallen,
having disobeyed

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God's single injunction,
and having thereby fallen,

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if he can instantiate

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virtues in himself, if he can live well,

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if he can learn to obey,
and if he can learn to act with prudence

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and with moderation,
if he can become virtuous,

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then he will find what the poem calls
a Paradise within happier far.

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And the idea that by some kind of

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human cultivation of one's own mind,

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one might be able to reinstantiate Paradise,
make Paradise happen again.

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But as a kind of internal state
rather than a communal state,

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is something that is repeatedly
present in the 17th century.

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One of
the ways that thinking about Paradise

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and thinking about science are connected
in the 17th century is that the notion

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that all we have at
the moment is fallen knowledge,

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so that the fall that happened in
the Garden of Eden has compromised

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the ways in which we relate to nature and
the ways in which we understand nature.

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That's fundamental to scientific endeavor
in the 17th century,

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and the idea that through education
we can, as Milton puts it, restore

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the ruins of our first parents,
you know, reconstitute what was lost

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with the fall in the Garden of Eden
by careful

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ameliorative investigation of nature.

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That's key. So Francis Bacon,

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who is a major figure in the development

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of experimental science
in the 17th century and of

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of drawing people's

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attention, again, to what he calls
the things themselves,

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so, paying attention
to the things of nature.

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For him, there's a sense that this work - 
collaborative, communal, 

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successive - can restore
some of what has been lost.

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And so thinking about the loss of Paradise
is related directly to the ways

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in which people try to reconstitute
what they sometimes call Adamic knowledge,

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the knowledge of nature

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that Adam had in the Garden of Eden
that enabled him to name

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animals and plants with their true names
and through various investigations,

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with experiment, with with language
itself,

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lots of 17th-century
reformers of knowledge and lots of figures

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whom we would now call scientists
like Robert Boyle.

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It's not a word

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that the 17th century uses, but it's
certainly what we would now call them.

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Lots of these people

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are thinking about what they are doing

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as a certain kind of restoration,
a certain kind of gradual movement

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towards the reestablishment
of original knowledge.

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There are so many narratives,

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both religious
and secular, that have at their heart

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this idea
that something terrible happened.

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Saint John Henry
Newman calls it an Aboriginal calamity,

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some original thing
that went terribly wrong

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and as a result of which
things are imperfect.

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And I think that sense is a kind of...
I would hazard...

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I mean, there is no way I could know this,
but I think it's a universal sense.

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I mean, we all have the experience.

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Literally all have the experience
of coming into a world

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that is already formed before us,

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in which things have already gone wrong.

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There are conflicts, familial, global,

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national that predate us
and into which we come.

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And I think that sense of coming to
in a world

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which is riven by problems
is necessarily universal.

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And that means that a sense
that there was an original wholeness

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which has dissipated.

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Imagining that

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things were once perfect and are now
no longer

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is something that you can imagine
on a psychological level.

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So nostalgia for a childhood,
the haze of golden retrospect cast

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on some time when things were good
before they cease to be.

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That can be read psychologically,
but it's also often inherent

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to narratives of kind of national decline
in ways that are worrying.

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It's also

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something that often often enters

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into kind of quasi anthropological ways
of thinking about how,

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you know, back before technology,
when we were innocent,

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everybody was in a harmonious relationship
with each other and with nature.

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And then, you know, railways came or

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telephones came or televisions came

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or the internet came or AI came,
and now things are terrible.

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So that kind of narrative,
where there's a sense

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that there was a time of innocence
and that something has subsequently

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happened to shatter it,
I think is just profoundly cultural.

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Different times, though,
have different ways of imagining that

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universal experience, of having a sense
that something has been lost.

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And different periods also have different
ways of imagining what it might be

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to reconstitute it.

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In the 17th century,
which is the period that I study.

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People, certainly people in England,
Christian,

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Christian people
of the kind of education of the

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of the period
tend to think like that most paradigmatically

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in relation to the Christian Bible.

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Well, the Hebrew Bible, but the Christian

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take on the story of Genesis
and the fall of Adam and Eve.

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But you can draw parallels
to the way that communism

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imagines, the ways that technology
and capitalism has spoiled

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some sort of originary wholeness
that can be reachieved 

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with certain kinds of political ruction

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and revolution.

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One of my favorite poems
from the 17th century

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that imagines a Paradisal state is Andrew Marvell’s

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‘The Garden’,
probably written in the 1650s.

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It’s a poem which imagines the Garden State

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as a place
in which you can unfall the fall.

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So if the garden was both
the original scene of Paradise

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and the scene in which the fall happens
through the actions of Adam and Eve,

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in eating an apple
from the tree of knowledge of good

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and evil, in Marvell’s The Garden,

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that original calamity

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is undone in solitude as he goes into

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as he retreats into his own mind
and discovers in his own mind

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Paradise.

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In one of the stanzas from

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Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Garden’,
there is an incredible image

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of the imagelessess of Paradise,

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or the imagelessness of a mental Paradise.

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I'll just read that stanza.

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‘Meanwhile, the mind from pleasure
less withdraws into its happiness.

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‘The mind that ocean where each kind does
straight its own resemblance find.

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‘Yet it creates transcending these far
other worlds and other seas.

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‘Annihilating all that's made to a green
thought in a green shade’.

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And the idea of ‘a green thought in
a green shade’

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is simultaneously visualizable
and not visualizable.

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It's just a field of green in a field of
green, a kind of absoluteness of color.

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And that's what he imagines
this mental Paradise to be,

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a kind of annihilation of the made world

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into this perfect zone of green.

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And I found that really compelling, both
because of what it does to your own mind

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as you attempt to imagine
a green thought in a green shade,

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and also because of the way that it

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devisualizes what Paradise might be.

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As if the garden, which
is a visualizable place and an ordered place,

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and a thickened place
full of the productivity of nature,

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also disappears
at the most kind of happy moment.

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It's not an accident that it's a green
thought in a green shade,

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partly because of the beauty of verdancy
and the ways in which

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green both is and symbolizes

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a certain kind of pleasurable absorption,
but also because it's associated

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with nature and with the kind of self
renewing properties of nature.

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Human...

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artifice decays, disintegrates.

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Nature's art renews
itself, and is continually,

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with the turn of the year,
coming back into its greenness

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and a certain kind of envy for that
self renewing property, I think, is is

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one of the things that goes into
imagining a green thought

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in a green shade.

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One of the reasons

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why thought and thinking about

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thought and thinking about Paradise
in the 16th and 17th centuries

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is so interesting
and so compelling to us today, I think, is

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that those were also periods like our own,
in which people were experiencing

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00:16:59,977 --> 00:17:03,731
rapid technological change, rapid

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informational change, rapid media

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changes and

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conflicts

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that were bringing

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the kind of stability
of the contemporary society into question.

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And there are lots of ways in which

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you can identify major

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issues or changes in the 17th century
that mean that people are

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quite suddenly
and sometimes more gradually,

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but quite suddenly,
seeing things differently

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and seeing the old certainties
being shaken.

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Obvious ones are the effect

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00:17:42,895 --> 00:17:47,274
on Europeans of the exploration
and colonization of the Americas,

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the discovery
that there are whole continents

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that are unheard of
in the received learning of the period,

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and the development of the telescope
and the microscope,

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mean that there are new theories
about the limits of the universe, both

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at the extreme of size,

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whether or not the universe is infinite
or has a limit.

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Also,
what the smallest possible particles are.

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A whole new world of detail,
as discovered. And

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Robert Hooke,
who is the first person to publish images

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00:18:24,478 --> 00:18:28,315
seen through the microscope, talks
about the new world that has seen

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through the microscope as an analogy
for the new world of America.

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But it suggests that there are unthought of,
unheard of, ideas.

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People, because they understand

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how much more complex
and how much more extended

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the universe is than received astronomy
and received cosmology had suggested

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start reviving ancient ideas
about the infinity of worlds.

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So maybe there are other planets,
and on those other planets,

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maybe there are other people.

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Maybe there are other societies out there.

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Maybe there are infinite number of other
worlds out there with people on them.

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And all of these kind of ideas suggest

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a kind of a radical shift in how central

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you think humanity is to the
created cosmos, and also how

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central it can be in a

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kind of in a kind of metaphysical sense.

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Was all of this made for us,
or are we, in fact,

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an incidental and contingent development

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decentered from the heart of everything?

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That kind of change, I think, leads people
to a certain kind of sharpened sense

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that something has been lost
or is shaking, and that something is

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00:19:49,730 --> 00:19:52,733
needs to be reconstituted,
or it needs to be

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reclaimed in some way.

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There are both

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conservative - ‘small c’ conservative - 
and radical ways

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00:20:05,579 --> 00:20:09,333
of reacting to a sense
that we live, as people in the middle

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of the 17th century constantly
said, that we live in distracted times.

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Times in which distraction
literally is the tearing of things apart

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in the sense that, you know,
an original wholeness has been separated,

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was rife in the middle
of the 17th century, and one way to react

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is with a kind of small C conservatism
and nostalgia,

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and attempts to shore things up
and to recoup what has been lost.

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Another is to see in the breaking
up of things radical possibility.

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And there are lots of sects and

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kind of religious experimenters in the middle
of the 17th century in England

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00:20:53,168 --> 00:20:57,464
in particular, but across Europe more
generally, in the wake of the Reformation,

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who really think that they can socially
reconstitute some kind of Paradise.

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And it's very difficult
sometimes to disentangle

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the negative critique of radical groups
from what they actually believed.

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But there are various sects
who are thought to practice free love

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or to live to

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to get together in Paradisal situations.

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An interesting text

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from the 17th century
that's broadly described as

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as utopian is Francis
Bacon's ‘New Atlantis’.

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And this is a text in which he imagines...
It's it's in the voice of some

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Spanish sailors who have sailed from Peru
out into the Pacific,

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got lost in a storm,
and then come up on an island

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which seems to be governed perfectly.

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And what's particularly noticeable
about this perfect governance

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is that it's by a society called Solomon's
House.

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And Solomon's House is a scientific

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research institute in modern terms.

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And they have a secretive body,

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00:22:13,749 --> 00:22:19,379
but in which they reveal to the sailors
through a series of conversations

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00:22:19,463 --> 00:22:23,133
in which they have houses

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00:22:23,133 --> 00:22:28,263
for experiment on the weather, houses
for experiment on visual

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00:22:28,263 --> 00:22:33,477
delusion, houses for experiment on sounds,
on matter, on minds.

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They have all kinds of natural experiment.

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00:22:36,813 --> 00:22:40,484
And their perfectly
and rationally ordered

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00:22:40,484 --> 00:22:45,238
society is intimately, for Bacon,
connected with their scientific endeavor,

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with their experimental endeavor,
and with the knowledge of nature

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that they have thereby
to which they have thereby come.

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And in ‘New Atlantis’,
the very end of the book...

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So this is a secretive island.

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They've never shared their knowledge.

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They have what Bacon calls merchants
of light, who go out across the world

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and gather knowledge from everywhere else,
but take it back to,

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00:23:07,386 --> 00:23:10,889
to to the island,
which is called Bensalem,

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00:23:11,640 --> 00:23:14,935
where where they gather this
knowledge and store this knowledge.

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00:23:14,935 --> 00:23:19,523
But at the end of the book, the
the father of Solomon's house

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00:23:19,564 --> 00:23:23,902
allows this knowledge can now
be propagated to the whole world.

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And so this is

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a utopian fiction in

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00:23:28,573 --> 00:23:31,868
which the idea is
that at the end of the fiction,

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00:23:32,411 --> 00:23:36,289
the ideas that have been explored
there can go out and propagate

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00:23:36,289 --> 00:23:40,043
and, and spread across the whole world.

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00:23:40,043 --> 00:23:44,714
And this is part of Bacon's, on the one
hand, his belief that it's possible

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to reconstitute knowledge
that has been lost by

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00:23:49,261 --> 00:23:51,763
the corruption of the human mind,
that it's going to be possible

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00:23:51,763 --> 00:23:56,685
to restore the human mind
to equality and clarity and proper

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00:23:56,685 --> 00:24:00,313
receptivity of the truth of nature,
but also a kind of

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00:24:01,481 --> 00:24:04,109
an idea that there will be a

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00:24:04,109 --> 00:24:08,280
what's called a millenarian society,
a society that brings about

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00:24:08,363 --> 00:24:12,659
the kind of thousand year end times rule

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00:24:13,410 --> 00:24:16,955
of, of perfection at the end of all time.

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00:24:16,955 --> 00:24:20,584
And he thinks that it might be possible
to bring about a perfect society

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00:24:20,625 --> 00:24:24,087
through the rational application
of scientific knowledge

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00:24:24,087 --> 00:24:28,341
and through
what is, in effect, a technocracy

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00:24:28,425 --> 00:24:33,346
the the rule of scientists,
the rule of those who have a kind of

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00:24:34,306 --> 00:24:37,309
scientific knowledge.

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00:24:38,643 --> 00:24:39,311
One of the things

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00:24:39,311 --> 00:24:43,648
that's interesting about utopian fiction
in the 16th

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00:24:43,648 --> 00:24:47,444
and 17th centuries
and in Bacon’s New Atlantis,

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00:24:47,569 --> 00:24:53,533
is that sometimes utopia and the societies
that are discovered seem in some sense

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00:24:53,575 --> 00:24:56,536
more primitive, and their ideal nature

361
00:24:56,536 --> 00:24:59,915
is because they are closer to nature.

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00:24:59,956 --> 00:25:02,334
They have yet to reach sophistication.

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00:25:02,334 --> 00:25:04,503
And you can see this in.

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00:25:04,503 --> 00:25:09,549
So in one of Montaigne's essays,
which is called, in English, ‘Of Cannibals’.

365
00:25:09,716 --> 00:25:12,636
He describes
what he has heard about the New World.

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00:25:12,636 --> 00:25:16,556
And there's a famous section
in which he describes

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00:25:17,098 --> 00:25:20,101
indigenous American societies - 
about which he doesn't know very much,

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00:25:20,101 --> 00:25:22,020
but this is what he has heard - 

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00:25:22,020 --> 00:25:26,858
Indigenous American societies
as places that have no commerce,

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00:25:26,900 --> 00:25:30,028
they have no culture, they have no

371
00:25:30,320 --> 00:25:33,823
kind of sophistication,

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00:25:33,865 --> 00:25:37,619
but they also
thereby have no words for lying.

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00:25:37,661 --> 00:25:40,121
And something that's also true of Thomas
More’s utopians.

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00:25:40,121 --> 00:25:43,583
But they don't know how to say the thing
that is not true,

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00:25:44,167 --> 00:25:47,754
because they are simply uncorrupted.

376
00:25:48,004 --> 00:25:53,843
And Shakespeare takes over that section
and has it voiced in the in

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00:25:53,927 --> 00:26:00,267
‘The Tempest’ as a vision
of this kind of ironized but supposedly

378
00:26:00,267 --> 00:26:05,897
perfect model of the Commonwealth, where
because we have not been corrupted by arts

379
00:26:05,897 --> 00:26:11,027
and by trades and by commerce,
we can be innocent and true and good.

380
00:26:11,069 --> 00:26:14,072
But at the opposite end, Bacon's end,

381
00:26:14,406 --> 00:26:18,410
the perfect
utopian society, is technocratic.

382
00:26:18,451 --> 00:26:22,455
It is much more sophisticated than

383
00:26:23,415 --> 00:26:24,165
than European

384
00:26:24,165 --> 00:26:27,752
societies in its knowledge of nature,
its knowledge

385
00:26:27,752 --> 00:26:31,756
of techniques of nature,
and thereby its manipulation of nature.

386
00:26:32,173 --> 00:26:35,594
So it's almost as if at the two extremes,

387
00:26:35,635 --> 00:26:39,389
you can either be utopian
because you are so innocent

388
00:26:39,389 --> 00:26:42,726
that you're closer to nature,
or because you are so wise

389
00:26:42,726 --> 00:26:45,854
that you can manipulate nature,
but, one way or the other,

390
00:26:45,895 --> 00:26:49,190
these are different modes of being attuned

391
00:26:49,190 --> 00:26:52,193
to the capacities of the natural.

392
00:26:53,069 --> 00:26:55,530
I think we simultaneously

393
00:26:55,530 --> 00:26:59,034
need a sense of melancholy

394
00:26:59,034 --> 00:27:03,663
or even grief about what has been lost,

395
00:27:03,663 --> 00:27:06,666
but it's obviously

396
00:27:07,500 --> 00:27:10,712
and tautologously, hopeless to be hopeless.

397
00:27:11,546 --> 00:27:13,882
And out of that

398
00:27:13,882 --> 00:27:16,885
kind of recognition that things are awry.

399
00:27:16,968 --> 00:27:19,220
Things are not right.

400
00:27:19,220 --> 00:27:22,223
There is some kind of

401
00:27:22,599 --> 00:27:25,935
fundamental askewness

402
00:27:26,311 --> 00:27:28,229
in the way that
we are in the world,

403
00:27:28,229 --> 00:27:29,189
can come

404
00:27:30,315 --> 00:27:31,441
imaginings of

405
00:27:31,441 --> 00:27:34,527
how to repair it,
how to make things better, and

406
00:27:35,320 --> 00:27:37,614
certainly a certain kind of utopian

407
00:27:37,614 --> 00:27:43,286
imagining, recognizing
that that horizon is ever receding,

408
00:27:43,328 --> 00:27:48,333
but certain kind of utopian
imagining is necessary in order to be able

409
00:27:48,333 --> 00:27:53,254
to make steps towards betterment,
but not, in this life at least,

410
00:27:53,254 --> 00:27:55,882
perfection.

411
00:28:05,141 --> 00:28:09,604
Thank you for listening to this episode of the
On Paradise podcast series.

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00:28:09,813 --> 00:28:14,401
Please explore other episodes
by searching for On Paradise

413
00:28:14,442 --> 00:28:18,154
at podcasts.ox.ac.uk.

414
00:28:18,571 --> 00:28:19,322
Goodbye.