The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy_ I Link Therefore I Am - Luke Cuddy [83]
In almost all of these respects, The Minish Cap is faithful. Hyrule town occupies one area out of seventeen and can be traversed in a few hundred strides. Yet despite this middling size, it manages to contain everything its inhabitants need: post office, school, library and a multitude of retail outlets all sit comfortably within its walls. That there is also a sense of community here is both implicit in the very existence of the fair and explicit in the following comment made during it: “Phew, preparing for the festival has left me exhausted. Still, I’m just enjoying watching people have fun.”
In terms of security, Hyrule town is also a walled space, allowing for easy defence. The town has only a superficially symmetrical design—invaders who manage to breach the walls will undoubtedly be confused by a polis that places its market square so left of centre. There is a river here but no port, indicating confident self-sufficiency and prudent forward thinking. It is enough for now that this powerful force of nature powers the mill: trade and military routes can always be opened later if necessary.
In a more general conception of ‘the ideal’ however, the idea of Utopia as a town or city is a little limited. There needs to be something more than the polis, something above government, guards and city gates. This something is in fact some things: the natural and the spiritual.
The Nature of Utopia
If the town, city, or polis is a functional, ordered Utopia, then nature is Utopia untamed, a delight for the eyes, ears and soul. Perhaps the philosopher most associated with theorizing the beautiful is Immanuel Kant. Though he wasn’t the first thinker to turn his attention to aesthetic appreciation, he wrote extensively on the topic and his Critique of Judgement is, arguably, the subject’s most influential work. In it, Kant discussed the notions of the beautiful and sublime. Unlike other things that bring us pleasure, explained Kant, we don’t want to possess, or do something with beauty; we simply want to appreciate it. This simple appreciation he, perhaps misleadingly, termed “disinterestedness.”
All three of Kant’s critiques were presented as a method by which to evaluate our own mental faculties. However, that such a significant portion of this influential philosopher’s words relate to the beautiful, in nature in particular, underlines the importance of beauty to mankind. Philosophers and, latterly, psychologists have often discussed this need for beauty. Indeed, the German Philosopher and writer Friedrich Schiller, inspired by the horrors of the French Revolution, noted that exposure to beauty was key to improving man’s moral character. The beautiful, he said, can unite the seemingly disparate qualities of sensuousness and reason, famously stating that, “… it is through Beauty that we arrive at freedom.”62
It’s not surprising therefore that the beautiful should be a key element in many fictional Utopias and perhaps even less surprising that the idea of the beautiful Utopia has existed long before philosophy was even ‘invented’. Perhaps one of the earliest, well-known literary examples of this is the Garden of Eden. Man was placed in an area of great abundance and beauty:
Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. And the LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. (Genesis 2:9)
Here, Utopia is a beautiful garden. This is something echoed in many examples that followed from Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan and, of course, Miyamoto’s concept of Hyrule, which in various interviews he has likened to a miniature garden.63
The more developed notion of the natural Utopia, like the concept of the polis, also has its source in ancient Greek thought, in the writings of the poet, Theocritus, and the “bucolic” (Greek for “cowherd