Book Review / JONAH P.B. GOLDWATER
“More things in Heaven and Earth”
Three Books on Shakespeare and Philosophy
- Shakespeare’s Philosophy by Colin McGinn (HarperCollins, 2006, 240 pgs.)
- Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama by Tzachi Zamir (Princeton University Press, 2006, 192 pgs.)
- Shakespeare the Thinker by A.D. Nuttall (Yale University Press, 2007, 448 pgs.)
These days, “applied philosophy” is advertised on the subway, and book store philosophy sections are stocked with books applying philosophy to Family Guy, or whatever your favorite pop culture phenomenon happens to be. But philosophy need not go slumming to stave off loneliness; there’s always high culture to be applied to. No fewer than three recent books have undertaken the task of thinking philosophically about Shakespeare.
Though more sophisticated, the need for such a project is not self-evident. The physicist Richard Feynman quipped that “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” In that vein, philosophy may not make Family Guy funnier, nor Shakespeare more poetic. Accordingly, just what the value — either to philosophy, or to, in this case, Shakespeare — for such a project needs to be made clear.
The three authors approach the question of the projects’ value- or fail to- from quite different angles. Colin McGinn, a philosopher, wants, in Shakespeare’s Philosophy, to show that traditional philosophical issues manifest themselves in William Shakespeare’s plays. Tzachi Zamir, in Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama, has something quite different in mind. He wants to argue that literature, and Shakespeare in particular, can actually be a form philosophical argumentation. A.D. Nuttall, in Shakespeare the Thinker, simply wants to display and discuss the interesting ideas that are an essential part of Shakespeare’s plays. As this is the most sensible approach, I will pay it the least attention.
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McGinn is an analytic philosopher extending himself into the field of literature, where many of his colleagues dare not tread (unless for the volume of “philosophy and Harry Potter.”) McGinn is also that rare thing among contemporary analytic philosophers — a crafter of enjoyable prose. His angle is to show that Shakespeare’s plays manifest or reflect traditional and familiar (to philosophers, at least) philosophical issues. For example, McGinn writes that Othello “is an extended essay in the appearance/reality distinction, with the appearance of other people’s minds as a special case,” and contends that King Lear rejects the traditional religious view of causation as moral and purpose driven and replaces it with a Humean notion of contingent or arbitrary succession.
I cannot deny that, as a philosophy student, I enjoyed McGinn’s book (though I’m not convinced the joy was entirely unlike having the name of one’s hometown screamed by a touring rock band.) McGinn, however, only analyzes six plays in depth, and even for some of these happy few, the point feels strained. Though it is plausible that The Tempest is “concerned above all with the power of language,” McGinn struggles to connect this in an interesting way to contemporary philosophy. It’s true, as far as it goes, that as McGinn points out, “It is what sounds mean that determine their impact on the mind, not their acoustic or graphic properties.”(Among other things, of course, this explains why speaking louder at foreigners doesn’t help them understand.) McGinn then points out “the meaning that the words somehow convey” is “what philosophers call the proposition… But this meaning, this impalpable proposition, is puzzling, ontologically problematic; and its ability to influence the mind can seem almost magical.” The tie in with The Tempest is that it’s a play about a magician. McGinn next indicates that contemporary philosophers debate about whether meanings (i.e. the “ontologically problematic proposition”) can be “naturalized”— that is, understood scientifically as a part of nature — and that non-naturalists, called ‘Platonists’, are often accused “of trafficking in magic.” As a description of a philosophical debate, this is relatively accurate. But as Dick Cheney would say: “so?” McGinn, in motivating his book, claims that “an avowedly philosophical approach to Shakespeare can reveal new dimensions to his work, and that his work can contribute to philosophy itself.” But its not clear that this talk of language and naturalism helps us understand The Tempest, and it is far from clear how The Tempest might return the favor and contribute to philosophy, as McGinn contends. Is the Tempest an argument for naturalism? Against? In either case, how is such an argument to be evaluated? If it’s not an argument at all, but simply the presentation of a view, and on the assumption that that view is discernible, why is it philosophically valuable to put a philosophical thesis in dramatic dress, as opposed to clearly exhibiting its structure in something skimpier and revealing, like a didactic essay?
McGinn errs not simply because he fails to address these questions, but because he is shooting at the wrong target. McGinn is eager to attribute philosophical positions to Shakespeare himself. For example, he claims Shakespeare rejects each of the following views:
“We are rational beings capable of knowledge of the world, not signally prone to error; we also enjoy a constant identity over time, a unitary self that persists in its given nature over the course of our existence; and we live in a fundamentally rational universe in which justice is done and events make sense”.
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This is all well and good, as they say, but if the interesting thing about Shakespeare was his philosophical positions, he made quite a mistake by writing plays. This is not to say the plays aren’t philosophically interesting. They are. But it’s not because of the theses they may endorse, as if a philosophical position were the moral of the play, but it is because of how the ideas take on a dramatic form not possible in forms like the treatise that the literary-cum-philosophical experience is unique. In Shakespeare, more so than many others, different philosophical ideas and metaphysical assumptions manifest themselves in the actual development of the plays, and not merely as views his characters didactically report, but as affecting the drives and underlying motivations of the characters and the dramatic development. The value to philosophy itself, I contend, lies in seeing — experiencing — a dialectical tension, a war of ideas — and to foreshadow Zamir’s conclusion — experiencing the plausibility of the ideas, even those with which the author may not agree. If we’re perspicuous, we know what conclusion will follow from the premises, and we all know how a tragedy will end before we see it; in both cases its how the ideas do their work that is what’s interesting. By itself logic has no conflict; achieving a contradiction in logic means you’ve gone wrong, whereas it can be the crux of drama. It is in the interplay of the different views and voices that the drama best mimics the philosophical dialectic of move and counter move, rather than in the bald assertion or attribution of a position, or its contradiction. It’s the act — the staging — of philosophical conflict, the dialectical process, rather than the conclusion, that’s interesting.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the dialectic between two conceptions of causality (the manner of the sequence of events in the universe), and that is whether or not causation is somehow moral, or meaningful, in character. McGinn rightfully discusses this in depth. He contrasts the “teleological view of causation,” which “holds that causation is moral: what actually happens ought to happen,” and where “even the smallest causal interaction is an instance of the divine plan and carries its own quantum or cosmic justice,” with David Hume, for whom “causation is morally neutral” and “Right and wrong exercise no hold over causation whatsoever.”
But any philosopher or scientist can deny, as a philosophical thesis, that causation has any meaning. But one of the great dramatic forces in Shakespeare is feeling how disappointing it is when the universe fails to operate according to such moral principles. In his attempt to attribute to Shakespeare views that are compatible with a 21st century scientism — not that there’s anything wrong with that view — McGinn suggests that Shakespeare is “inclined” towards the Humean, non-teleological view. But in so doing, McGinn does little to capture how many of the characters, events, and images of Shakespeare’s plays — regardless of what he himself may have believed — are expressions of that pre-scientific teleological view. And it is the failure of this view — not simply its falsity — that is both dramatically and philosophically compelling.
Of all the questions to ask of the cosmos, for many people, the question “why do bad things happen to good people” is among the most difficult and emotionally compelling, if for no other reason than the cosmos tends not to respond with a good answer. But this question does have a good answer (to be phrased in the form of a question): “Why shouldn’t they?” That is, is goodness a forcefield that somehow repels unpleasant events? If not, then bad things will happen to good people. Only on the assumption that causal chains and sequences of events respect moral categories does the question even make sense, and only on that assumption that they do is it disappointing, or perhaps even crushing to one’s whole worldview, to see bad things happen to good people. The Humean view is (more or less) the scientific view; morality is not a causal engine. But as books such as E.M. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture have shown, Shakespeare’s age was very much a pre-scientific world, still deeply ensconced in a religious and hierarchical scheme. An essential part of this world in which Shakespeare’s characters lived was the idea that nobility was a part of the cosmos, and that there were qualitative or categorical differences that marked off levels of nobility. Fire was nobler than earth, gold more noble than brass, and man more noble than beast. In such a cosmos, social hierarchy is justified; nobles are nobler than peasants, of course, where nobles are literally conceived of as “people of quality” (as opposed to, presumably, people of quantity, i.e. the commoners). Because Man and his social hierarchies were seen as microcosms of the macro cosmos, psychological and social phenomena were cosmologically or divinely grounded. And as even the most half-hearted Nietzschean will tell you, the powerful have always identified power with goodness. In such a scenario, “why do bad things happen to powerful people,” is the same question as “why do bad things happen to good people,” and in the world of Shakespeare’s nobles, the phenomenon of the powerful as subject to badness or evil is earth shattering. It is common in Shakespeare for a king to realize his social rank, presumed as a metaphysically grounded category, something divinely supported, cannot shield him from the sequence of material events; in short, the disappointment that physics trumps metaphysics is the supreme disappointment of many kings in Shakespeare’s works. Richard II, about to be deposed, laments a king, (himself), and regrets his flatterers “Infusing him with self and vain conceit,/As if this flesh which walls about our life,/ Were brass impregnable…” Richard realizes his rank — and concomitant presumed moral status — cannot shield him from the causal order of the physical world. It is a sad recognition that the world does work the way he thought it did, and only then can he realize that his moral status is but an empty shadow, not reality but a fantasy, a play of make-believe. As a result, with reality exposed, he demands that his entourage should “throw away respect,/Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,/For you have but mistook me all this while:/I live with bread like you, feel want,/Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,/How can you say to me, I am a king?” Rather than being above, from his seat of power, he is subjected, thrown below to physical and physiological maladies. Richard is crushed that his metaphysical rank does not overpower the physical world, and upon seeing this, cannot consider himself king (on the assumption that a true king would not be subject to such earthly and base matters.) Clinging to this notion of kinghood, elsewhere, feeling he can identify himself with the kingly role, he props himself up with the (perhaps deluded) declaration that; “Not all the water in the rough rude sea/ Can wash the balm from an anointed king,” thereby declaring that no physical force can undermine his metaphysical rank after all. It is not important whether Shakespeare endorses Richard’s position- it is the drama of this conflict between social and moral image and physical reality that allows one to see what is at stake in a vision of the world.
Nuttall, for one, doesn’t read Richard as exemplifying such a dramatic metaphysical tension, and is content to say that Richard “is commonly seen as hopelessly detached from reality,” who responds to crises “by suggesting a session of story-telling,” and “Richard’s notion of undefeatable angels is indeed a primitive, magical version of absolutism.” But Richard is ‘hopelessly detached’ from reality only if asking ‘why do bad things happen to good people’ is to be hopelessly detached. And if it is, surely the recognition of that fact is the stuff of drama, as is whatever alternate concept of reality replaces one in which kings cannot suffer and bad things happen to good people. If Richard is detached from reality, so is his whole society. And maybe it is. But this is Shakespeare’s society too. Here, to be attached to reality, then, is subversive stuff.
Henry IV, the man who deposed Richard II, nonetheless did not depose his psychology, and is equally incredulous that a king is subject to physical malady, or deserves to be, in this case, racked with insomnia. Henry, indignant and frustrated, cannot understand why his “poorest subjects,” and the “vile in loathsome beds” can sleep, but he, a king, cannot. Again, this may be ‘hopelessly detached’ from reality, but that’s just the point; the inversion of morality — the poor and vile getting sleep, while the high and mighty are subjected to sickness and cannot do as they wish — is to see reality turned on its head. No wonder “uneasy is the head that wears the crown,” the famous line with which Henry concludes this soliloquy.
And Shakespeare does not restrict this theme to History; not only is Richard II a tragedy, but King Lear goes through virtually the same trauma as Richard does. And the power of these traumas, I think, would not be as great were they simply “primitive or magical” concepts not identifiable by the audience as ways of understanding the world, (even if they are not entirely live options today.) Lear realizes he, as king, believed the flatterers, who also held him impregnable. Lear laments “They told me I was everything; ‘tis a lie. I am not ague-proof.” No, Lear, too, is subject to fever, to physical malady. Like kings Richard and Henry, his rank and power does not protect him. Upon losing his rank and title, there are numerous mentions of Lear throughout the play as being reduced to nothingness, most succinctly when the Fool says “I am a fool, thou art nothing.” This is crucial; here the hierarchically ordered moral and social world where one has a title indicating one’s place is identified with existence, and the loss of social rank and title is identified with physical annihilation and nothingness. Simply existing physically, outside of the moral and social order, is tantamount to nonexistence.
And perhaps even one of the most famous lines from Hamlet can be read along these same lines: “imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay,/ might stop a hole to keep the wind away.” When rank and power, seen as a manifestation of moral superiority, is reduced to its barest materiality and subject to physics, to meaningless Humean causation, we shudder. More so, I think, than from reading Hume.
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Yet for literature and philosophy to really be friends, rather than just on each other’s Facebook page, they might need to make amends. They’ve been at odds ever since Plato denounced the poets and the rhetoricians for trading in emotionality and relativism instead of the employment of reason in the search for truth. The division between pathos and logos, between psychological effectiveness and logical validity, between persuasion and justification, has deep roots, and to blur this line, or for literature to cross the divide requires serious maneuvering. For literature to be philosophically valuable, it’s not enough to present an idea, however dramatically, but it has to in some way be able to justify that idea.
Where McGinn the philosopher doesn’t attend this line, this is the project for Zamir, who intends to construct a theory of how literature yields knowledge —not just belief — and for this to be part of a larger theory of rationality. Obviously, this is an ambitious project. And Zamir’s case begins with nothing less than a wholesale indictment of the methods of contemporary Anglo-American (Analytic) philosophy, which he complains erroneously holds that “truth claims and argumentation are all that matter.” (You were expecting maybe sex drugs and rock ‘n roll?) And though displaying such an attitude may even be a shibboleth in some quarters, Zamir, who holds a doctorate in philosophy, must be aware of the enormity of this task. Yet he only addresses this enormous philosophical task in the opening section of his book before moving onto his close readings of Shakespeare’s plays.
Zamir proceeds from the idea that many philosophically important notions are simply not logically demonstrable, or, as he puts it, “logically necessary,” and so “rigorous argument,” while useful, should occupy a “very limited sphere within the philosophical domain.” This is not, though, a commitment to irrationality. In short, Zamir contends that philosophers must distinguish between logic and rationality, because, he argues, nonvalid — i.e. illogical — moves can nonetheless be rational. For Zamir, where the job of logic is to prove, the job of rationality is to show to be plausible, and to show to be plausible is to justify, although not to prove or verify. And this is where literature comes in. Anywhere logical necessity fails — especially “whenever contingent claim or first truths need to be supported,” then “linking philosophy with literature … [is] potentially applicable.” This is so because literature creates a “state of mind… in which contingent claims and nonvalid moves can be sympathetically entertained,” and so literature can show such ideas to be plausible.
Zamir’s project is promising, and this view is interesting, though not entirely novel (no pun intended); that “first truths,” or premises in general cannot be ‘logical’ because logic can only cover the validity of inferences made from first principles is not news (even though it does bear repeating. Towards that end, I often quote the great logician and metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead who said “philosophy is the search for premises; it is not deduction.”). And though I am sympathetic to Zamir’s project, he doesn’t quite succeed, at least not here. Perhaps his largest problem is scope; Zamir’s project is limited to moral philosophy. But if his wholesale indictment of the analytic tradition is to succeed, it has to step beyond this. The Analytic- Anglo-American method, broadly construed, emphasizes truth and argumentation, as Zamir points out, and in so doing identifies itself more with math and sciences than with the arts. Zamir wishes to bridge the gap. But there is a crucial difference between the two domains that provides a prima facie justification for this gap in the first place. Math and the sciences, presumably, are able to truthfully describe the non-human world, whereas it is not to literature that we turn to discover truths about enzymes or supernovas or prime numbers. So philosophy is faced with a choice vis-à-vis its methods: it could aspire to adopt the methods of evidence, argumentation, and logic that the sciences apply to the non-human world, and then for the sake of unity attempt to extend such methods to peculiarly human affairs, or, alternatively, it could adopt the literary and artistic methods — whatever those may be — of understanding the human world, and then apply this method to, say, galaxies and RNA. The former course is what analytic philosophy has done; the latter course doesn’t seem feasible.
As a result, there are two separate domains: the non-human world, understood scientifically, through “truth and argumentation,” and the human world of literature and art. Such a dualism of the objective and subjective should sound familiar — it’s about where we stand now. Given that Zamir wishes to bridge the gap between the two domains — though not in so many words — it is all the more disappointing that he misses a chance to look at Shakespeare’s plays in terms of their cosmological or metaphysical importance, rather than in terms of their moral and psychological factors. For on the assumption that the human-independent universe does not have moral or psychological characteristics, Zamir’s indictment of the methods of philosophy while restricting attention to the world of human emotion, cut off from the rest of cosmos, only serves to reinforce the pathos/logos dualism that he decries.
Because, as I discussed earlier, Shakespeare’s plays can be seen as displaying various perspectives on the place and relation of the human psyche — especially its moral and socio-political manifestations or structure — in the larger cosmos, it is especially disappointing that, in the parlance of our times, Zamir does not go there. So although Zamir righteously claims “[when] it does not imply aesthetic or political naiveté, philosophical reflection on literary works is simply useless: an unnecessary detour that appeals to the bookish, but is pointless for those who seek philosophical understanding,” and “philosophically oriented Shakespeare criticism in the past tended to look for signs of a philosophical thesis within the plays. Recent work has wisely given up this attempt,” and this could be pointed squarely at McGinn, McGinn’s reading of King Lear is more philosophically interesting, precisely because he takes the opportunity to discuss the cosmological import of King Lear, rather than limiting himself to the psychology of parenting, which are the terms in which Zamir analyzes the same play.
That there must be — if there must be — a deep division between philosophy as truth-seeking, and philosophy as life-guiding, is itself a tragedy. If there is a gulf between the sciences and its pursuit of truth of the non-human realm, and the arts and morality in the pursuit of happiness and meanging within the human realm, presumably, then, nature becomes the domain of science, leaving art somehow alienated from it. So anything that might bridge the fact/value divide is potentially fruitful. So what Zamir should have done to bridge the methodological gap was grappled with how to understand the concept of ‘nature’ and ‘fact’ as it relates to moral philosophy in Shakespeare.
And this is more or less a direction that McGinn starts to take at one point. He writes that Shakespeare’s plays “are about good and evil, and the human relationship to these ethical categories,” and Shakespeare’s characters are “defined by their moral qualities.” He then makes an important point — that “to describe human nature at all fully and accurately, we must make use of moral categories — because human character is constituted by virtues and vices,” for it is this that allows the transition — Shakespeare “brings morality into the heart of his dramas because morality is part of nature.”
Contemporary moral naturalism, of which Hume is a grandfather , has it that moral categories are to be understood in terms of natural psychological facts — like pain and pleasure — which are not themselves moral, thereby including morality within the descriptive (rather than normative) science of psychology. This view typically robs the moral — qua moral — of causal power. McGinn’s attributions are silent on this question. But from Shakespeare we get , unsurprisingly, a more nuanced picture. In the opening scene of Richard II, Thomas Mowbray says, “mine honour is my life; both grow in one:/ Take honour from me, and my life is done.” Here is a bald statement of identification of the ethical and the biological, but with the emphasis on the power and essentiality of the ethical. This power is implied by the subsequent events: Mowbray goes on to duel Henry Bolingbroke (later Henry IV) to see who’s the honorable of the two. The trial by combat concept has it that ‘right makes might’ — the honorable, the morally superior, in virtue of being superior, will win the fight, and the victor will thus have been proven objectively honorable and right. Honor, rightness, and moral superiority are believed to manifest in physical skill; honor guides the hand of the victor, and is surely not subjective. In short, this scheme has it that morality has physical consequences, and so is real.
On the other hand, the fool, the blowhard, Falstaff, says, in Henry IV Part 1, “can honour set to a leg?/ No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound?/ No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then?/ No. What is honour? A word. What is in that word?/ Honour. What is that honour? Air.” For Falstaff, honor is nothing, nothing but air. For Falstaff, the moral has become sundered from the physical; honor cannot guide one’s hand in combat, it cannot fix the wounds suffered in combat. Perhaps better not to fight.Nuttall analyzes this passage as an instance of the medieval debate between Realists (Platonists) and Nominalists, where the former believe universals like ‘beauty’ — or in this case, honor — to exist in their own right, whereas Nominalists only believe in particulars, thinking that all beautiful things are alike in name only, and no such thing as ‘beauty’ itself exists. Nuttall writes that “The idea that universals were mere words and those words, in their turn, mere breath, flatus vocis, became a commonplace of Nominalism.” But Nuttall here misses the mark, if only slightly. Falstaff doesn’t just deny that the universal (or form of) honor exists, he doubts the existence of even a particular honor, and with it its causal efficacy; even this instance of honor has no skill at surgery. Although Nuttall’s claim that “it is a perfectly proper exercise of hindsight to see in Nominalism the seed-bed of modern scientific materialism” is plausible, instead it is the divorce of right from might, of morality and virtue from efficacy, that is the seed-bed of materialism, of the fact/value dichotomy, and this notion works as a subversive thread tied throughout the plays.
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Moral emotions are perhaps our strongest, and the recognition that they don’t have the actual power over nature it feels like they should have can be devastating. It is not hard to identify with the sadness behind Lear’s declaration, upon his reunion with Cordelia, that “he that parts us shall bring a brand from heaven, and fire us hence like foxes,” as if the act of separating two organisms in a particular space and time — in a jail cell, no less — would unleash cosmic forces to redress the problem. Yes, Lear is a sad, senile, and dying man, but his is immediately recognizable as a universal wish, and not as a relic of a disposed worldview; who does not understand the desire to see emotion and love trump material conditions? Consider a more recent incarnation:
“The snow is snowing, the wind is blowing/ But I can weather the storm!/ What do I care how much it may storm?/ I’ve got my love to keep me warm… Off with my overcoat, off with my glove/ I need no overcoat, I’m burning with love! My heart’s on fire, the flame grows higher/ So I will weather the storm!/ What do I care how much it may storm?/ I’ve got my love to keep me warm.”
This could be Lear’s song, of course. But however delightful, the recognition that it’s a fantasy — that the natural processes of the universe, including body temperature, are not moved by moral and emotional forces — well, such things are at least made palatable when dressed in Shakespeare’s artistry.
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