Descartes, Discourse on the Method; Meditations on First Philosophy

In senior year of high school, I took a terrible class called humanities. It was a blow-off class, one that I felt I had earned after four years of AP and honors classes, that ostensibly surveyed major developments in the humanities. In practice, we, as 18-year-olds who were about to go off to college, watched movies and wrote surface-level analyses of monumental works. One such analysis was of Descartes’ famous quote, “I think, therefore I am.” We were asked to “interpret” this quote in terms of what we thought it really meant. One could not really have asked more of the teacher, but it is a very silly assignment.

Today, we will talk about Descartes’ philosophical project: the ways in which it reflected the work of his antecedents, the ways in which it surpassed them, and the difficulties it entailed. Although I sound like a broken record, I have to say that if there is a break between medieval and modern, between old and new, it is to be found in Descartes. Had he not lived, it would be difficult to imagine what our world would be like today.

Something Old, Something New

For all my insistence that Descartes represents a brave new frontier in Western thought, it is impossible not to notice how distinctly medieval much of his approach is. When he begins by saying that he “stayed all day shut up alone in a stove-heated room, where I was completely free to converse with myself about my own thoughts,” one imagines that he is following the Scholastics, living in monasteries and hand-copying books, despite his apparent distaste for their philosophical approach: “For it seem to me that much more truth could be found in the reasonings which a man makes concerning matters that concern him than in those which some scholar makes in his study about speculative matters.” Descartes wishes to return philosophy to more practical concerns, ones that men can grasp with their hands, rather than the speculative philosophy of an Aquinas or an Anselm.

Yet it is a testament to the importance of language that Descartes, despite his clear efforts to the contrary, can escape neither the vocabulary nor the methodology of his predecessors. When he investigates the existence of God, which we will discuss later on, he distinguishes between formal reality and objective reality, between being and modes of being. While he may give these ideas his own flavor, they are not his but those of medieval philosophers. Try as he might, he cannot escape the circumstances of his time and the influence of those who came before. Perhaps this observation is not so much an indictment as a compliment: Descartes uses the tools available to him yet his project exceeds what those tools had already accomplished.

The Method

Just as it was fashionable in the classical era to write treatises beginning with “of” (such as “De Anima,” “of the soul,” by Aristotle), so was it popular in Descartes’ time to speak of “methods,” and the man himself is no different. In Discourse on the Method, he puts forth his method for attaining knowledge. He considers it successful, though it is only in its infancy: “I feel I have already reaped such fruits...that I cannot but feel extremely satisfied.”

Descartes, however, retained that quality that Bertrand Russell considered necessary for philosophy: he doubted. He felt confident in his method, but there could be no certainty. “Yet I may be wrong: perhaps what I take for gold and diamonds is nothing but a bit of copper and glass. I know how much we are liable to err in matters that concern us, and also how much the judgments of our friends should be distrusted when they are in our favour.”

Moreover, he doubted that his method could be used by anyone else. Descartes felt that reason was complete in humanity, a belief that stemmed from his belief in God. For if God-given reason was what separated men from animals, there could be no doubt that it exists “whole and complete in each of us.” Whole and complete reason did not preclude, however, getting his method wrong. Descartes believed that people are of two principal kinds. Either they believe themselves “cleverer than they are [and] cannot avoid precipitate judgments and never have the patience to direct all their thoughts in an orderly manner”, or  they have “reason or modesty to recognize that they are less capable of distinguishing the true from the false than certain others by whom they can be taught.” The former, even if they could use his method, would in their arrogance not wish to, and the latter would be so overwhelmed by the number of available methods that they could not choose.

Where does Descartes fall in this binary? He considers himself closer to the second type, as he grew up with many different teachers and therefore “discovered that nothing can be imagined which is too strange or incredible to have been said by some philosopher.” Yet he is also unlike them, because while they are so paralyzed by multiplicity that they no longer believe in truth, Descartes sees all beliefs as rooted in “custom and example… rather than any certain knowledge,” meaning that “a single man is much more likely to hit upon them [proof of truths] than a group of people.” For this reason, Descartes chooses to shut himself up in his home and think rather than look for knowledge elsewhere. We should note here that Descartes recognizes the same truth that Montaigne did, that belief and even many things we could call “certainties” are really just custom, yet he does not see this fact as opposed to his goal of knowledge.

We see that despite having a surface-level similarity to the scholastic philosophers, Descartes is really quite different. Though his method is a touch monastic, he is not relying on anyone else’s knowledge, even if he admits that he cannot completely free himself of influence. Nor is he following earlier classical philosophers, though his distrust of received knowledge sounds like the Greek skeptics, for they, he says, “doubt only for the sake of doubting and pretend to be always undecided,” whereas his only goal is knowledge and certainty.

Angels and Demons

In Discourse, Descartes gives a rough sketch of his method, including the famous “I think, therefore I am.” More interesting I find is his use of the method in a different work, Principles of First Philosophy, in which he approaches the same problem with an even more skeptical mindset. Let us first be clear about what we’re speaking of.

Descartes begins with doubt. He, at whatever age he was when writing, possessed a collection of knowledge, all of which he put into doubt. We may think this means that he ends up at square one without any help, but he spies a way out:

“The mere fact that I thought of doubting the truth of other things, it followed quite evidently and certainly that I existed; whereas if I had merely ceased thinking, even if everything else I had ever imagined had been true, I should have had no reason to believe that I existed. From this I knew I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is solely to think, and which does not require any place, or depend on any material thing, in order to exist.”

There’s that old joke: Descartes walks into a bar, and the bartender asks, would you like to hear our specials? Descartes puzzles for a moment and begins, “I don’t think…” and disappears. We see though that he does not say that thinking is necessary for existence. Rather, without thinking, one cannot be sure of one’s own existence, for there is nothing else upon which to predicate existence. If one can think, doubt, whatever, then one must exist. This is the starting point of modern philosophy.

In Discourse, Descartes begins here and derives the existence of God, the being upon whose existence his existence is contingent. Yet in Principles, we see him go further: what if, he posits, all his thoughts, all the objects that pass through his vision, what if all of it is put there not by a benevolent God, but a demon bent on tricking Descartes?

“I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds, and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment. I shall… resolutely guard against assenting to any falsehoods, so that the deceiver, however powerful and cunning he may be, will be unable to impose on me in the slightest degree. But this is an arduous undertaking, and a kind of laziness brings me back to normal life. I am like a prisoner who is enjoying an imaginary freedom while asleep.”

Of course, we see echoes of this idea in films like The Matrix or the “Vacation Goo” episode of American Dad. (Yes, that is the second example that comes to my mind.) Descartes understands, as in the external examples, that though a demon could be tricking him every moment of his life, he must still exist in order to be tricked. Existence is not in doubt, benevolent deity or otherwise. His demon only makes matters slightly more complicated. Descartes, though, is not shaken:

“For even if, as I have supposed, none of the objects of imagination are real, the power of imagination is something which really exists and is part of my thinking… For example, I am now seeing light, hearing a noise, feeling heat. But I am asleep, so all this is false. Yet I certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be warmed. This cannot be false; what is called ‘having a sensory perception’ is strictly just this, and in this restricted sense of the term it is simply thinking.”

Seeming is an important idea in Descartes, and one which I don’t have a great grasp of. One often hears that Descartes employs circular reasoning, but I don’t think that’s true: his reasoning is too subtle to fall into such an obvious trap. He does, however, appeal to the idea of “seeming,” and in a way, this isn’t too strange. If he is working under the assumption that a demon is deceiving him at all times, he can judge nothing except by how it seems. Consider the following:

“We say that we see the wax [seal of an envelope] itself, if it is there before us, not that we judge it to be there from its colour or shape; and this might lead me to conclude without more ado that knowledge of the wax comes from what the eye sees, and not from the scrutiny of the mind alone. But then if I look out of the window and see men crossing the square, as I just happen to have done, I normally say that I see the men themselves, just as I say that I see the wax. Yet do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men. And so something which I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact grasped solely by the faculty of judgement which is in my mind.”

Being and seeming are tightly intertwined for Descartes. One does not ever simply apprehend; apprehension is always tied to comprehension. Recall Theseus’ speech from Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which he claims that the two are separate: “Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, / Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend / More than cool reason ever comprehends.” Shakespeare is ironically indicating that seeming is an important aspect of being, and Descartes uses that same idea here: in looking, we are always judging. It is such an observation that causes him in the Discourse to say that “believing something and knowing that one believes it are different acts of thinking.” When we glance out the window, we judge that we know without actually knowing. This will be important later on.

From this, Descartes coolly arrives at a principle: “I see that without any effort I have now finally got back to where I wanted. I now know that even bodies are not strictly perceived by the senses or the faculty of imagination but by the intellect alone, and this perception derives not from their being touched or seen but from their being understood.”  

He then sets up one of the most complex--and distinctly medieval--of his arguments on the distinction between (a) formal reality, the reality possessed by a substance; (b) objective reality, the reality possessed by ideas; and (c) eminent reality, which is not explicitly defined, but which seems to mean the reality that is acquired by a lower being from a higher being, as sunlight illuminates the world, which does not possess light in and of itself. Each has three hierarchical levels, which are, from greatest to least: infinite reality, finite reality, and modal reality. For example, God, or a being equivalent to God, would have infinite reality; a dog would have finite reality; and the position of a dog at a certain time would have modal reality. The reality of something in one level, e.g., a dog, must contain “more” reality than something in a lower level, .e.g., the position of a dog, in the sense that the position of a dog is predicated upon the existence of the dog. I have glossed over a lot of the details of his actual argument, and I hope I haven’t left out any important parts; but this seems to me the essence of what he’s saying.

“If the objective reality,” Descartes argues, “of any of my ideas turns out to be so great that I am sure the same reality does not reside in me, either formally or eminently, and hence that I myself cannot be its cause, it will necessarily follow that I am not alone in this world, but that some other thing which is the cause of this idea also exists.” This turns out to be true only in the case of God. For any finite thing Descartes believes he could have come up with: his ideas are confused enough (i.e., he understands so little about the nature of things from his sense perceptions alone) that he could conceivably just be inventing them all. ”For how could I understand that I doubted or desired -- that is, lacked something -- and that I was not wholly perfect, unless there were in me some idea of a more perfect being which enabled me to recognize my own defects by comparison?” He concludes: “The mere fact that I exist and have within me an idea of a most perfect being, that is, God, provides a very clear proof that God indeed exists.”

The existence of God, or an equivalent being, has thus been proved. Yet there is one more knot to be picked out. “And since God does not wish to deceive me, he surely did not give me the kind of faculty which would ever enable me to go wrong while using it correctly. There would be no further doubt on this issue were it not that what I have just said appears to imply that I am incapable of ever going wrong.” If, he argues, God is not a deceiver, then he (Descartes) should not be able to err when properly using his reason. Yet this does not cohere with his experience.

He investigates: “When I look more closely at myself and inquire into the nature of my errors...they depend on both the intellect and the [freedom of the] will simultaneously.” Intellect, however, is responsible for apprehension, not judgment. Moreover, intellect is limited, whereas will, Descartes believes, is not: “Indeed, I think it is very noteworthy that there is nothing else in me which is so perfect and so great that the possibility of a further increase in its perfection or greatness is beyond my understanding… It is only the will, or freedom of choice, which I experience within me to be so great that the idea of any greater faculty is beyond my grasp; so much so that it is above all in virtue of the will that I understand myself to bear in some way the image and likeness of God.” Though God is able to do more, and may have more control over will, each person is able to choose to either do or not do something of his own accord.

This follows nicely from the rest of his argument. Above, he argued that judgment greatly influences the intellect: when the intellect apprehends, judgment works to comprehend, and this faculty of judgment is derived from the will: “The scope of the will is wider than that of the intellect; but instead of restricting it within the same limits, I extend its use to matters which I do not understand.” And thus, “the perception of the intellect should always precede the determination of the will.” Descartes is saying, I believe, that we make judgments for which we do not have sufficient evidence, just as he observes beings walking outside his window and judges them to be men rather than automata. We overreach our grasp, and in this way participate in nothingness or non-being, judging on the basis of knowledge we do not possess. For him, this settles how we can make mistakes without God being a deceiver. We can now shelve the idea of a demon and move on to the question of whether material things exist.

Living in a Material World

He begins this investigation with one of my favorite topics, mathematics. Descartes argues that after learning the properties of a triangle, one can no longer disbelieve facts about triangles: they are properties one recognizes “whether I want to or not,” so ideas of things “which even though they may not exist anywhere outside me still cannot be called nothing.” He uses a corollary of this as another proof of God: “I ought still to regard the existence of God as having at least the same level of certainty as I have hitherto attributed to the truths of mathematics.” He backs this up with the following argument that I will skim over: 1) God and existence are inseparable, like mountain and valley. 2) Inseparability, however, does not imply existence: the fact that mountains and valleys are inseparable does not imply that mountains exist. 3) But since God is inseparable from existence itself, God must exist.

Returning to the matter of material objects, Descartes considers the difference between understanding and imagining, a difference that he can investigate because of the above conclusion about math. “When the mind understands, it in some way turns towards itself and inspects one of the ideas which are within it; but when it imagines, it turns towards the body and looks at something in the body which conforms to an idea understood by the mind or perceived by the senses.” Therefore imagination derives from understanding, in that imagination first requires understanding: we can imagine all sorts of chimera because we first understand something about animals. From this observation and the fact that God exists and is not a deceiver, Descartes builds the following argument: Sense perception requires an active object, which must be distinct from me. That object is either a corporeal (finite) substance or is an eminent substance, i.e., something put there by God. The options are indistinguishable to me. Since I have asserted that God is not a deceiver, they must have finite substance. QED.

From these facts, Descartes derives an immense amount of sanity: “Despite the high degree of doubt and uncertainty involved here, the very fact that God is not a deceiver, and the consequent impossibility of there being any falsity in my opinions which cannot be corrected by some other faculty supplied by God, offers me a sure hope that I can attain the truth even in these matters." He closes this with a wonderful thought: "Indeed, there is no doubt that everything that I am taught by nature contains some truth.”

Conclusions

I do not believe I have fully grasped the subtleties of Descartes’ arguments here, nor have I represented his reasoning perfectly faithfully. The basic structure, though, I think I have reproduced. Descartes’ greatest concern is understanding that God exists and is not deceiving him, and after this has been established, everything else becomes easy.

It is clear, however, that Descartes, for all his innovation and doubt, still relies on medieval ways of argument. His proof of God, to take one example, bears strong similarity to Anselm’s ontological argument. 

In Thomas Kuhn’s book on the Copernican revolution, he points out how Descartes used the recent discoveries about astronomy to develop a new system of physics which, unfortunately, turned out to be ridiculously wrong. Yet like Freud, it is not so important whether or not he was right: rather, he laid a foundation, that of rationalism, that would be picked up by Spinoza and Leibniz.

Stray Observations

• “Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world: for everyone thinks himself so well endowed with it that even those who are the hardest to please in everything else do not usually desire more of it than they possess.”
• Of his method: “Through this philosophy we could know the power and action of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies in our environment, as distinctly as we know the various crafts of our artisans; and we could use this knowledge--as the artisans use theirs--for all the purposes for which it is appropriate, and thus make ourselves, as it were, the lords and masters of nature. This is desirable not only for the invention of innumerable devices which would facilitate our enjoyment of the fruits of the earth and all the goods we find there, but also, and most importantly, for the maintenance of health…”
• On publishing his method: “For this will give me all the more reason to examine [his ideas] closely, as undoubtedly we always look more carefully at something we think is to be seen by others than at something we do only for ourselves; and often what seemed true to me when I first conceived it has looked false when I tried to put it on paper.” Amen, brother.
• Aristotle’s followers, and the followers of any great mind “are like ivy, which never seeks to climb higher than the trees which support it, and often even grows downward after reaching the tree-tops. For it seems to me that they too take downward steps, or become somehow less knowledgeable than if they refrained from study, when, not content with knowing everything which is intelligibly explained in their author’s writings, they wish in addition to find there the solution to many problems about which he says nothing and about which perhaps he never thought. But this manner of philosophizing is very convenient for those with only mediocre minds, for the obscurity of the distinctions and principles they use makes it possible for them to speak about everything as confidently as if they knew it and to defend all they say against the most subtle and clever thinkers without anyone having the means to convince them that they are wrong…. But even the best minds have no reason to wish to know my principles. For if they want to be able to speak about everything and acquire the reputation of being learned, they will achieve this more readily by resting content with plausibility, which can be found without difficulty in all kinds of subjects, than by seeking the truth; for the truth comes to light only gradually in certain subjects, and it obliges us frankly to confess our ignorance where other subjects are concerned. But if they prefer the knowledge of some few truths to the vanity of appearing ignorant of nothing (and undoubtedly the former is preferable), and if they wish to follow a plan similar to mind, then in that case I need to tell them nothing more than I have already said in this discourse.”
• In which Descartes anticipates the fucking Chinese room argument by around 300 years: “I made special efforts to show that if any such machines had the organs and outward shape of a money or of some other animal that lacks reason, we should have no means of knowing that they did not possess entirely the same nature as these animals; whereas if any such machines bore a resemblance to our bodies and imitated our actions as closely as possible for all practical purposes, we should still have two very certain means of recognizing that they were not real men. The first is that they could never use words, or put together other signs, as we do in order to declare our thoughts to others. For we can conceive of a machine so constructed that it utters words, and even utters words which correspond to bodily actions causing a change in its organs (e.g. if you touch it in one spot it asks what you want of it, if you touch it in another it cries out that you are hurting it, and so on). But it is not conceivable that such a machine should produce different arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to what is said in its presence, as the dullest of men can do. Secondly, even though such machines might do some things as well as we do them, or perhaps even better, they would inevitably fail in others, which would reveal that they were acting not through understanding but only from the disposition of their organs. For whereas reason is a universal instrument which can be used in all kinds of situations, these organs need some particular disposition for each particular action.”

Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

I could imagine no better end to our reading of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays than Measure for Measure, a play which two very trustworthy friends of mine call his greatest and which to me has some of the poetry that we've encountered so far. Often numbered among Shakespeare’s “problem plays”--those that appear destined for tragedy until a last-minute turn toward comedy--Measure has sparked a great number of interpretations. G. Wilson Knight considered the play a parallel to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, with the Duke as the enlightened philosopher-teacher; while Harold Bloom finds the Duke to be idiotic and locates the hero in Barnardine, the imprisoned drunk who refuses to be executed. Maybe, though, the critic Walter Pater put it best when he said that Measure contains “a morality so characteristic that the play might well pass for the central expression of [Shakespeare’s] moral judgments.”

Morality and Mortality

Since the play is not as well known as some of Shakespeare’s others, let’s give a quick synopsis. The Duke of Vienna suddenly leaves his post and puts in charge Angelo, a law-abiding but inexperienced man who immediately enforces all the laws that had fallen by the wayside during the Duke’s tenure. Claudio is the first man to be arrested because of the laws, as he had premarital sex with his fiancée. While he sits in prison, his sister, Isabella, pleads his case to Angelo, who ironically falls in love with her, and in exchange for her brother’s freedom, he asks her to sleep with him. Meanwhile, the Duke has inexplicably donned the robes of a friar and goes to the prison to minister to Claudio. A lot of things happen--including the friar tricking Angelo into having sex with his former lover Mariana and tricking Isabella into thinking her brother has been executed by Angelo--before the play ends with the Duke revealing himself and pairing off all the characters, taking Isabella for himself.

At issue in the play, which neither Wilson Knight nor Bloom would deny, is the chasm between “godlike aspirations and fallible human implemention,” as the introduction puts it. Angelo enforces the law to the letter and has no time for mercy or sympathy. The Duke says as much in his estimation of him: “Lord Angelo is precise, / Stands at a guard with envy, scarce confesses / That his blood flows, or that his appetite / Is more to bread than stone. Hence shall we see, / If power change purpose, what our seemers be.” Moreover, consider the way Escalus, another lord, questions his judgment:

“[I]n the working of your own affections, / Had time cohered with place or place with wishing, / Or that the resolute acting of your blood / Could have attain'd the effect of your own purpose, / Whether you had not sometime in your life / Err'd in this point which now you censure him.”

He asks, Could you not picture yourself committing the same offense under any circumstances at all? Angelo, stubborn to the end, responds simply: “Sir, he must die.” Yet even he cannot ignore the poetry of Isabella’s words, which must count as some of the most moving lines Shakespeare ever wrote:

“Alas, alas; / Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once, / And he that might the vantage best have took, / Found out the remedy. How would you be, / If he, which is the top of judgment, should / But judge you as you are? O think on that, / And mercy then will breathe within your lips, / Like man new made.”  Then: “So you must be the first that gives this sentence, / And he, that suffers. O it is excellent / To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous / To use it like a giant… / Could great men thunder / As Jove himself does, Jove would never be quiet, / For every pelting petty officer / Would use his heaven for thunder, / Nothing but thunder. Merciful heaven, / Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt / Splits the unwedgeable and gnarled oak / Than the soft myrtle; but man, proud man, / Dressed in a little brief authority, / Most ignorant of what he’s most assured – / His glassy essence – like an angry ape / Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven / As makes the angels weep; who with our spleens, / Would all themselves laugh mortal.”

Isabella is the symbol of purity and mercy, a woman so committed to virtue that she joins the strictest convent she can find, and as such, she seems a perfect match for Angelo, the strictest enforcer of the law. This is true in more ways than one, for when Angelo hears her speech, he is not moved to free Claudio, but rather falls in love with her: “Ever till now, / When men were fond, I smiled and wondered how.” Angelo, who has never felt his blood flow, feels it now without a shadow of a doubt. Yet this recognition does not reveal to him his errors.

Let us turn to consider Claudio. Isabella’s poor brother, unlike Angelo, understands the depravity present in all people, including himself: “As surfeit is the father of much fast, / So every scope by the immoderate use / Turns to restraint. Our natures do pursue, / Like rats that ravin down their proper bane [i.e., ravenously drink poison], / A thirsty evil, and when we drink we die.” Such recognition is more than Angelo can muster, but it is cold comfort when he is about to be executed.

Even colder comfort is the visit he receives from the Duke, who has dressed as a friar for reasons which are unclear. Though his dress is saintly, he does not have the “spiritual solace” thing down quite yet: his words to Claudio sound more like a philosophical treatise than a prayer:

“Be absolute for death; either death or life / Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life: If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing / That none but fools would keep. A breath thou art, / Servile to all the skyey influences / That dost this habitation where thou keep’st / Hourly afflict. Merely, thou art death’s fool, /For him thou labor’st by thy flight to shun, / And yet run’st toward him still. Thou art not noble, / For all th’ accomotations that thou bear’st /Are nursed by baseness. Thou’rt by no means valiant, /  for thou dost fear the soft and tender fork / Of a poor worm. Thy best of rest is sleep, / And that thou oft provok’st , yet grossly fear’st / Thy death, which is no more. Thou art not thyself, / For thou exists on many a thousand grains / That issue out of dust.” We should think of Hamlet, who calls life a “quintessence of dust.”

The Duke beseeches Claudio to “reason with life,” as if such a thing were possible, and goes on to remind him of how poor and depraved he is, as if he did not know. The Duke continues:

“Thou are not certain; / For thy complexion shifts to strange effects / After the moon. If thou art rich, thou’rt poor; / For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows, / Thou bear’st thy heavy riches but a journey, / And Death unloads thee. Friend hast thou none; / For thine own bowels which do call thee sire, / The mere effusion of thy proper loins, / Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum / For ending thee no sooner. Thou hast nor youth, nor age, / But as it were an after-dinner’s sleep / Dreaming on both; for all thy blessed youth / Becomes as aged , and doth beg the alms / Of palsied eld: and when thou art old and rich, / Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty / To make thy riches pleasant. What’s yet in this / That bears the name of life? Yet in this life / Lie hid moe thousand deaths; yet death we fear / That makes these odds all even.”

The beauty and nuance of such a passage notwithstanding, it isn't very comforting. Before we get to Claudio’s response, let’s look at Samuel Johnson’s great comment on the after-dinner’s sleep bit: “When we are young we busy ourselves in forming schemes for succeeding time, and miss the gratifications that are before us; when we are old we amuse the languor of age with the recollection of youthful pleasures or performances; so that our life, of which no part is filled with the business of the present time, resembles our dreams after dinner, when the events of the morning are mingled with the designs of the evening.”

Claudio, while the Duke is with him, appears to be strengthened by this speech, whether truly or falsely, but when Isabella visits him later on, it is clear that he received no solace from the friar-duke, who appealed to his intellect alone. Claudio gives his own masterful speech on the horrors of death:

“Ay, but to die, and go we know not where, /  To lie in cold obstruction and to rot, / This sensible warm motion to become / A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit / To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside / In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice, / To be imprisoned in the viewless winds / And blown with restless violence round about / The pendent world; or to be worse than worst / Of those that lawless and incertain thought / Imagine howling, ‘tis too horrible. / The weariest and most loathed worldly life / That age, ache penury, and imprisonment / Can lay on nature is a paradise / To what we fear of death.”

His speech is manifestly Catholic, straight out of the Inferno, and it demonstrates what the Duke does not know: that there can be no intellectual comfort from such fear. When Isabella tries to mollify him, he refuses to accept it and asks her to appease Angelo by sleeping with him, a request that she of course cannot fulfill. She, like Angelo, cannot confess that she is human, that her blood flows. Just as Angelo does not bend the law for mercy, so too can Isabella not bend her virtue for her mercy. As Angelo himself says of her ethic, “More than our brother is our chastity.”

Wilson Knight and the Gospels

G. Wilson Knight and his essay, “Measure for Measure and the Gospels,” were fun to read for the same reason that Harold Bloom is often fun to read: he proposes a concrete, unambiguous reading that is not only erudite but incredibly controversial. Here, he states without qualification the central theme, that of "the moral nature of man in relation to the crudity of man’s justice,” and goes on to explain the characters: “Isabella stands for sainted purity, Angelo for Pharisaical righteousness, the Duke for a psychologically sound and enlightened ethic.”

None of that is very strange, save for the bit about the Duke. The Duke does not often appear enlightened, as his shitty advice to Claudio seems to indicate. Certainly he functions in the play as the author and judge, and all the events between his leaving his post and returning to it could be read as a play within the play, one orchestrated by the Duke himself. What evidence do we have of his enlightenment?

Wilson Knight claims that the Duke has let Vienna's laws go unenforced (which is true from the text of the play), not because he is incompetent, but because “meditation and self-analysis, together with profound study of human nature, have shown him that all passions and sins of other men have reflected images in his own soul.” True, he does have some rather insightful things to say about some characters, as we noted with his comment on Angelo above, but profound? Meditative? That feels like he’s reaching.

Yet Wilson Knight also locates many fascinating parallels to the Gospels in the play, excluding the obvious source of the title, Matthew 7:2: “For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” One example comes from Escalus’ question to Angelo about whether he would not have committed the same offense had “time cohered with place.” He sees it as analogous to this teaching of Christ: “whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Matthew 5:28) To me, this had always seemed like a harsh admonition, a command to remain pure in thought as well as deed. Wilson Knight, however, makes the argument that committing adultery in one’s heart means that the sin would have been committed had all hindrances been removed. If a man lusts after a woman, it means that he would sleep with her given the opportunity, and such lust is inexcusable. God, though, is a merciful judge, one who knows the world and the people within it and can judge them according to their hearts, whereas Angelo is simply “dressed in a little brief authority,” with no such power.

Of the strangeness readers find in the play, such as the weirdo ending, Wilson Knight has this to say: “And, if ever the thought at first sight seems strange, or the action unreasonable, it will be found to reflect the sublime strangeness and unreason of Jesus’ teaching.” Which is an interesting thought, because the gospel morality does have a sublime logic to it that resembles but is distinct from ours.

Wilson Knight’s reading has some support. Northrop Frye sees the biblical influences as well: he wites that Angelo’s legalism “really descends from what is called in the Bible the knowledge of good and evil. This was forbidden knowledge, because…it’s not a genuine knowledge at all: it can’t even tell us anything about good and evil. This kind of knowledge came into the world along with the discovery of self-conscious sex, when Adam and Eve knew that they were naked, and the thing that repressive legalism ever since has been most anxious to repress is the sexual impulse.” Put another way, Angelo possesses the trappings of power, as Kafka might say, but not power itself. Indeed many things in this play have the absurdity of Kafka or Beckett, an idea to which we will return.

Frye, however, sees in Measure not a Christian ethic, but a primitive one: it “reflects the priority of mythology to ideology," and goes on to say, 

"His later plays are more primitive than the earlier ones, not, as we might expect, less so. They get closer all the time to folk tales and myths, because those are primitive stories: they don’t depend on logic, they don’t explain things and don’t give you room to react: you have to listen or read through to the end.”

Barnardine or Bust

Bloom comes in to argue against such a positive reading of the Duke. To him, the Duke is supremely incompetent, spouting false wisdom everywhere he goes (e.g., to Claudio). But this may be influenced by his view that the play is the Bard’s “farewell to comedy,” and serves to “purge Shakespeare of whatever residual idealism” he had left. Shakespeare likely wrote Measure just before the sequence of famous, dark tragedies: Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear; and like those plays, Measure “harbors a deep distrust of nature, reason, society, and revelation,” at least in Bloom’s mind.

“To be sober in this mad play is to be madder than the maddest,” he writes, and as such he spends most of his energy on Barnardine, who stays drunk in his prison cell every day. Barnardine is “the genius of [Vienna’s] disorder, and qualifies as the imaginative center (and greatest glory) of Measure for Measure.” The notion of disorder is interesting and certainly apropos, and Bloom follows with a list of examples:

“Claudio pleads in Act I that all he and Juliet lack is ‘outward order’; except for that, they truly are husband and wife. Angelo, grimly allowing the ‘fornicatress,’ Juliet, ‘needful, but not lavish means,’ adds, ‘There shall be order for’t.’ The Duke also intricately plays upon ‘order,’ as he commands the beheading of Barnardine: ‘By the vow of mine order…’ Sublimely, Barnardine refuses to cooperate: ‘I swear I will not die today for any man’s persuasion.’ The idea of order in Vincentio’s Vienna ultimately is an idea of death.”

Death is at the heart of order just as it is at the heart of disorder, for all things tend toward decay. In a vacuum, the orderly thing to do is to die, and in a way, death is the trivial ordering, the order of least resistance. It would be impossible, for example, for someone to evaluate each fornicating couple to see who is engaged to be married and who is just getting their rocks off, so all are condemned to death. Which is why, when Barnardine refuses to be executed, the guards order him to be beaten until he consents. Though such consent is meaningless, it has the appearance of meaning, of order. In the most Beckettian moment of the play, Pompey urges Barnardine to die, saying, “Awake till you are executed, and sleep afterwards.”

Bloom is not wrong, then, to say that order in Vienna is death; where he seems to go wrong is attributing that death-drive to the Duke. Though I would not go so far as Wilson Knight and say that the Duke has an enlightened consciousness, he is also not the idiot that Bloom makes him out to be. Rather, Vienna has a death-drive only insofar as each civilization has one forced upon it by necessity. It is easier to kill than to understand, and Vienna doesn’t have too much understanding under Angelo’s rule.

A final point on Barnardine: he is a rather interesting figure in the play, as he is the only one (apart from the Duke) who seems capable of free thought. When Isabella, for example, is confronted with a choice, sex Angelo or have a dead brother, she feels bound to those options and cannot choose, and in doing so, has a choice made for her, first by Angelo, then by the Duke. Barnardine, on the other hand, is presented with two options, consent to die or get beaten until he consents to die, and locates the third choice: to live. Bloom’s fascination with livelihood in Shakespeare’s characters easily leads him to exalt Barnardine here, and it is not totally unwarranted.

The Measure of All Things

I firmly believe that the middle way is often the right way, and here I would volunteer a middle of the road reading of the Duke, who is certainly the most important figure in the play. (Sorry, Harold Bloom.) The introduction makes the following point about the ending:

"Perhaps, however, the play’s forced and ambiguous resolution underlines the old dramatic truism that only God can write Act V. Although this duke plays God more than most stage characters do, and takes over the plotting of the play (perhaps that is one implication of being God’s deputy), the solutions he delivers are no less flawed, theatrical, and conventional than he is."

The Duke seems neither an enlightened intellect nor a drooling imbecile; the fact that such divergent interpretations are both possible and convincing is a testament to Shakespeare's power. Rather, he is, like everyone else in the play, a human. He starts things off by deputizing Angelo, thereby extending his political and moral authority to a subordinate. That Angelo is less effective than the Duke is debatable: more people are arrested, sure, but nowhere does that count as efficacy, except in the US (topical humor!); rather, the point that seems reinforced to me is that all authority is inherently flawed. The Duke, in theory, is a deputy of God, enforcing civil laws which mirror divine laws, but he finds himself unable to play the role of God, as his stint as friar shows all too plainly. Nor can he play the role of cupid (or Puck), as he proves in the final court scene. Yet again, he takes on the role of a deputy of God, determining who belongs with whom, and again, the results are mixed at best. Which is perhaps the best reading I can think of for the ending: it is the last decision in a chain of decisions by a chain of deputies, and given how well the other decisions have worked out, we do not have much hope for this one.

Stray Observations

• More from Pater: "The idea of justice involves the idea of rights. But at bottom rights are equivalent to that which really is, to facts; and the recognition of his rights therefore, the justice he requires of our hands, or our thoughts, is the recognition of that which the person, in his inmost nature, really is; and as sympathy alone can discover that which really is in matters of feeling and thought, true justice is in its essence a finer knowledge through love."
• More from Frye: Calls the Duke a “trickster figure” trying to turn tragedy into comedy; refers to the Duke’s “benevolent trickery,” much like Maimonides’ concept of God's gracious ruse.
• Escalus: “What news abroad i’ th’ world?" Duke, as friar: “None, but that there is so great a fever on goodness that the dissolution of it must cure it. Novelty is only in request, and it is as dangerous to be aged in any kind of course as it is virtuous to be constant in any undertaking. There is scarce truth [knowledge of human nature] enough alive to make societies secure, but security [self-confident “justice”] enough to make fellowships accursed. Much upon this riddle runs the wisdom of the world. This news is old enough, yet it is ever y day’s news.”
• Duke: “Put not yourself into amazement how these things should be; all difficulties are but easy when they are known.” For example, justice, love, etc.
• Lucio, to encourage Isabella: “Our doubts are traitors / And make us lose the good we oft might win, / By fearing to attempt. Go to Lord Angelo / And let him learn to know, when maidens sue / Men give like gods; but when they weep and kneel, / All their petitions are as freely theirs / As they themselves would owe them.”
• From the introduction: “The social and prison worlds become increasingly interdependent, and the solution to the problems of the play depends on the mobility of characters across the supposedly dividing line.” This seems to be a common feature of Shakespeare. We should refer to it again when we come to Othello.