Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale

The introduction to my copy of The Winter’s Tale says that “Shakespeare seems to sample his career in this play, replaying favorite themes and recombining reliable characters and conflicts.” This might sound like one of my standard exaggerations, but to me the play is less a sampling of his career than a story that he had always wanted to write. In the same way that Measure for Measure is the closest Shakespeare comes to a coherent artistic statement, Winter, in borrowing elements from other plays but reusing them in new and extravagant ways, feels like Shakespeare at his most free: free to end a character’s life in the most comical scene he ever wrote; free to bend the laws of nature in Hermione’s resurrection; free, perhaps most importantly, to show the coexistence of tragedy and comedy in our lives, the way one encroaches upon the other, and the way the lines between them blur.

Which isn’t to say this is his absolute best play. I find that I enjoy writing and thinking about it more than I did reading it. It wasn’t bad by any stretch, but after reading Measure, Hamlet, and Othello, I was difficult to impress. Yet the play doesn’t have to be transcendent to do a great deal of philosophical work, and I think the questions that it raises are the most interesting of all.

Othello, Redux

The obvious and longstanding comparison is with Othello. Both tragedies are examinations of men who suspect their wives of infidelity, and both do so for little to no reason. Both are, too, in a larger sense, about knowledge and belief: belief in faithfulness, belief in ourselves, belief in others. We will talk more about belief later on. Let’s first think about the Moor.

Othello and Iago had a certain uncomfortable intimacy, and Leontes and Polixenes do as well. “Leontes so idealizes their shared boyhood,” the introduction points out, that “everything since, especially marriage, seems fallen; in growing up and into relation to women, Polixenes and Leontes were expelled from paradise.” This is a very particular kind of love triangle: Leontes loves Hermione and Polixenes so much, separately, that their amicable nature toward each other is distressing to him. A man cannot serve two masters, and Leontes cannot keep them apart in his mind any more than he can in real life.

Leontes’ jealousy is as incomprehensible to us as Othello’s. Neither wife has done anything except perhaps be friendly to her husband’s friends. Both men are poisoned by their own minds, Leontes even without any help from a demon incarnate. And look at Leontes’ spider analogy:

“There may be in the cup / A spider steeped, and one may drink, depart, / And yet partake no venom, for his knowledge / Is not infected; but if one present / Th’ abhorred ingredient to his eye, make known / How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides, / With violent hefts. I have drunk, and seen the spider… All’s true that is mistrusted [i.e., suspected].”

All that is suspected is true; compare it to Othello’s “to be once in doubt is to be once resolved.” To quote William S Burroughs: “Paranoia means having all the facts.” (H/T Harold Bloom) This goes along with another statement of his:

“Affection, thy intention stabs the center! Thou dost make possible things not so held, / Communicat’st with dreams – how can this be? / With what’s unreal thou coactive art, / And fellow’st nothing. Then ‘tis very credent / Thou mayst cojoin with something; and thou dost, / And that beyond commission, and I find it, / And that to the infection of my brains / And hard’ning of my brows.”

Truly, the mind does have powers to influence one’s reality that border on the magical, but we must also acknowledge the way in which Leontes is plotting his own downfall. These powerful men have minds even more powerful.

Knowing and Coincidence

Leontes though is more than just Othello. His speeches have something of the pathos of Richard II’s; that is, a tendency toward the dramatic, toward over-acting. Where Othello’s jealousy strikes him dumb, Leontes’ allows him more eloquence than most other characters, even in Shakespeare, possess. Look at this masterful speech that also serves as the centerpiece of his skepticism:

“Is whispering nothing? / Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses? / Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career / Of laughter with a sigh? – a note infallible / Of breaking honesty! – horsing foot on foot? / Skulking in corners? Wishing clocks more swift? / Hours, minutes? Noon, midnight? And all eyes / Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only, / That would unseen be wicked? Is this nothing? / Why, then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing, / The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing, / My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings, / If this be nothing.”

This stands for one of the great problems in Shakespeare, the problem of knowing. It seems that characters in Shakespeare strive to know, to know beyond what they are or should be capable of knowing, and it is through this forbidden knowledge that they are forever lost. They want, of course, to know one thing in particular: the truth. Yet in their attempts to dig down deep into the truth, we see that they find nothing but contradiction, haziness, and, perhaps worst of all, no opportunities for either verification or refutation. “Skepticism’s own sense,” Cavell writes, “of what recovery would consist in dictates efforts to refute it; yet refutation can only extend it, as Othello notably found out. True recovery lies in reconceiving it, in finding skepticism’s source (its origin, say, if you can say it without supposing its origin is past).” Skepticism is a constantly moving target, a treacherous pit of quicksand. Or, to put it another way, skepticism is “the human disappointment in human knowledge.” What counts? Who’s to say? Must one say?

Indeed, the notion of rejecting knowledge that one ought to accept seems to recur again and again in this play, as well as in the rest of Shakespeare. Here I wish to turn from a close discussion of knowing and not-knowing to a more general idea of coinciding opposites, of things which seem to be set apart but are in fact intertwined. As an example, consider Perdita’s debate with Polixenes, wherein she holds art and nature to be separate. But here is Polixenes’ masterful reply:

“Yet nature is made better by no mean / But nature makes that mean. So, over that art / Which you say adds to nature, is an art / That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry / A gentler scion to the wildest stock, / And make conceive a bark of baser kind / By bud of nobler race. This is an art / Which does mend nature – change it rather – but / The art itself is nature.”

Consider, too, auxiliary instances of this theme, such as the fact that the play begins as a tragedy and turns to comedy, or that a child, lost forever, is returned.

Take act 5, scene 2, as another example. We learn about the statue of Hermione, but the information is relayed completely by three gentlemen whom we’ve never seen before. We don’t see or hear for ourselves or from characters we trust but depend on word of mouth. One of the men says, “This news which is called true is so like an old tale that the verity of it is in strong suspicion.” Strange, aye, but true, as well.

Autolycus, the rogue, makes a similar observation: “For had I been the finder-out of this secret, it would not have relished among my other discredits” i.e., it would not have fit in with what people know about me and therefore people wouldn’t have believed this truth because it came from me.

These things are unbelievable, yet they are true. (Of course, not literally true, but, as they say, stranger things have happened.) We cannot judge what is true or false by our own powers, as Montaigne wisely advises us.

Grace Under Pressure

“Were it but told you,” Paulina says where Hermione’s statue comes to life, it “should be hooted at / Like an old tale; but it appears she lives.” We are reminded of the end of Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Theseus gives his speech denouncing fantasy and elevating reason, unaware of the magic that had happened during the night. Indeed, the difference here seems to be that Leontes is aware of his transgressions: “Does not the stone rebuke me / For being more stone than it.” It does indeed, yet why then does the play end happily instead of allowing Leontes to suffer in his skepticism?

Perhaps it is due to a word that is used often by Hermione: grace. There is a sense in which Leontes was an underserving schmuck, but was saved by grace, that is, through free and unearned love, because grace, as the introduction says, “lifts the doom and opens up the horizons of a dark, cramped, cold, tragic world.” Yet such an understanding of grace ignores the more Christian aspect which, I believe, plays an important role in this play. For why should Leontes be blessed with the return of his wife at all? Certainly the cosmos can do whatever it wants to, but why would Shakespeare return Hermione to him? The only reason is that she is freely given. Leontes is undeserving, as we all are, yet grace illuminates his life regardless. Though we scoff at Leontes’ petty and odd jealousy, we are “in our best behavior really just like him,” as Sufjan Stevens would say.

The Remains of the Day

Is it a happy ending? Sure it is. Hermione is back, Perdita and Florizel are married, Polixenes and Leontes have made up. Just like a sitcom, everything’s back to normal.

Yet there are two people missing: Maumillius, Leontes’ and Hermione’s son, and Antigonus, who was eaten by the bear. Cavell writes that they “cast the shadow of finitude or doubt over the general air of reunion… to emblematize that no human reconciliation is uncompromised… [the] idea of the adult’s world as ‘remains’… adult human life struggling toward happiness from within its own ‘debris.’”

What are we to make of these two deaths? The answer is, very much indeed.

In a way, the ending has the odd sense of the end of the book of Job. Recall that Job’s family, friends, and livestock all die, but are later returned to him, except they are all brand new. It is said that Job loved his new family as much as his old one, which Dostoevsky in the Brothers Karamazov took issue with; for how is it possible that we can love a new family as much as our old one? If we are to analyze it, it seems impossible, nonsensical. It seems, at its very core, contradictory.

Yet how many loves have we all lost that are replaced? Leontes gains so much in the play, and much can be “counted”, and although his wife is returned to him, others are not. He wins some, and he loses some. He cannot regain his dead son, and his wife is only back through grace. Perhaps the happiest ending of all is that he, like Job, does not bring up his son; he has moved on.

It may seem unjust that Hermione comes back but not Maumillius, yet true justice (call it cosmic justice, or karma, or nature) would have neither returned, for they were both lost. In fact, Perdita would not be returned either. So much comes back to Leontes, and it is a mystery, in the Orthodox sense of the word, that he is able to love again. (We think of Donne’s poem “Love’s Infinity” which wonders about whether love is finite.)

It is not so important, the introduction notes, that the bear turns up out of nowhere to eat Antigonus, although it does indicate to us that we are in a comedy. Rather, it is important that the baby is somehow spared; “not that one is betrayed or aggrieved, but that one goes on; not that we grow wrinkled, but that love can be renewed and sustained, and that forgiveness can attend a process of loss.”

“Time does not heal all wounds,” it goes on to say, “but rather makes it possible to understand fully the nature of the wounds, the extent of the loss and the harm.” There are many parts of this play that seem strange. I think this can only be the point. Why does the play contain a bear, a statue come to life, an undeserved jealousy, a miraculous return? Because it is beholden to a different logic, one that is neither human justice nor natural justice, but something much stranger and much truer.

Stray Observations

• This is the last post I’ll be making on an individual Shakespeare play. Tune in next…week?...for a summary post on Shakespeare.
• Leontes suspects his subordinates are “a nest of traitors,” which sounds suspiciously like a brood of vipers.
• Leontes is eloquent, certainly, but he has the same kind of schizophrenic tics that we found in Othello. Consider this passage and how it jumps from interruption to interruption. “Ha’ not you seen, Camillo -- / But that’s past doubt, you have, or your eyeglass / Is thicker than a cuckold’s horn – or heard -- / for to a vision so apparent rumor / Cannot be mute – or thought – for cogitation / Resides not in that man that does not think – / My wife is slippery? If thou wilt confess / Or else be impudently negative, / To have nor eyes nor ears nor thought, then say / My wife’s a hobbyhorse, deserves a name / As rank as any flax wench that puts to / Before her trothplight. Say’t and justify’t.”
• Leontes: “You smell this business with a sense as cold / As is a dead man’s nose; but I do see’t and feel’t.”
• Leontes: “I am a feather for each wind that blows.”
• Does anyone else think the trial scene in act 3 resembles the scene in The Eumenides from Aeschylus? It’s been a long time since I’ve read the play, but I can’t shake the feeling.
• Florizel’s beautiful speech to Perdita: “What you do / Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet, / I’d have you do it ever. When you sing, / I’d have you buy and sell so, so give alms, / Pray so, and for the ord’ring your affairs, / To sing them too. When you do dance, I wish you / A wave o’ th’ sea, that you might ever do / Nothing but that, move still, still so, / And own no other function. Each your doing, / So singular in each particular, / Crowns what you are doing in the present deeds, / That all your acts are queens.”
• Mopsa: “I love a ballad in print, alife, for then we are sure they are true.”
• Paulina: “As every present time doth boast itself / Above a better gone, so must thy grave / Give way to what’s seen now.”
• Leontes: “What fine chisel / Could ever yet cut breath?”

Shakespeare, Othello

Othello holds a unique place in my heart. It was the only one of the Big Four tragedies (Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth being the others) that we didn’t read in high school, and when I read it in college, it instantly became my favorite. The longer I thought about it, the more subtleties it seemed to possess. The paper I wrote on it was the first paper that I felt happy with, a paper that, funnily enough, more or less landed me the job I currently hold. The character of Iago, especially, was a character unlike any other; he became my touchstone for how the greatest writer in the English language conceived of evil.

Rereading the play after so many other wonderful works by Shakespeare has been somewhat mixed, in the way that returning to anything that has been enlarged by imagination and reminiscence is. Iago’s evil does not appear as earth-shattering now in light of, say, Blood Meridian’s lengthy disquisitions. At the same time, reading Shakespeare is nothing if not profitable, and the insights I gained in previous readings, less important to me now, have brought forth ideas more nuanced, fresh, and complex.

The Banality of Evil

As Shakespeare chooses to do, let us dive into our discussion of the play by beginning with Iago, easily one of my favorite Shakespearean inventions. There is ample evidence of his role as villain, from his inversion of God’s “I am that I am” into “I am not what I am,” to the contrast between his and Othello’s skin tones (switching the traditional light/dark opposition). Yet what frustrated me when I read the play in college was why Shakespeare chose to give such an obviously evil character—easily the most “obvious” of the evils we’ve encountered so far, I’d argue—why he would be given such reasonable speeches. I’ve commented on this before, referencing the deceptive nature of evil in Edward Norton’s performance in American History X, and I would still contend that evil is most effective under the guise of reasonableness, but we can say more than this.

The first thing to add is that Iago performs some of the same functions in the play that Falstaff performed in the Henriad. Consider these two passages, the first from Falstaff:

“Well, ‘tis no matter; honor pricks me on. Yea, but how if honor prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honor set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. What is honor? A word. What is that word honor? Air – a trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died a Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ‘Tis an insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it.” 

And the second from Iago:

 “As I am an honest man, I had thought you had received some bodily wound. There is more sense in that than in reputation. Reputation is an idle and most false imposition, oft got without merit and lost without deserving. You have lost no reputation at all unless you repute yourself such a loser.”

Certainly there is a difference in the pitch and quality of these speeches, but the sense is very similar: ideals like honor or reputation are not real things, the way that bodily harm is. Harold Bloom writes that Othello is one of only two plays that “exclude all laughter, as if to protect [Othello] from the Falstaffian perspective.” We will talk about laughter later, but we notice that Falstaff’s words rely on being taken as humorous to be so characteristically Falstaffian. When he speaks them, it is as if he is casting off shackles that had been binding him and, by extension, us. When Iago speaks them, we feel a similar lightness, only to find that we have been trapped in another way. (I am reminded here of Kafka’s “A Fable” and David Foster Wallace’s commentary on it; as I wrote the preceding paragraph, I ended up at the same conclusion that he came to seemingly by chance, though that can hardly be the case.)

This is to say that when Bloom writes that “only humor could defend against Iago,” it is like saying “only being happy can defend against being sad”: it is cold comfort when the world is bereft of happiness. Which returns me to my original question: why does Iago get the powerful rational speeches? I would answer: For the same reason that Kafka’s sense of unease is accompanied by the sound of logic; for the same reason that Hamlet’s speeches are philosophical and Angelo’s judgments do not yield to Isabella’s pleas: in all, there is a denial of life, a dependence on the mechanistic grinding of logic’s gears, and a sense of being closed off from any possibility that you are not driven to through labyrinthine reasoning. Iago is “a fecund abyss,” Bloom writes, capturing both the endlessness of his lies and the bottomlessness of his inhumanity. This point is emphasized by Wilson Knight, who contrasts Othello’s high-minded language (we will discuss this momentarily) with Iago’s:

“Iago works at the foundations of human values. Cassio is a soldier: he ruins him as a soldier, makes him drunk. So he ruins both Othello’s love and warrior-heart. He makes him absurd, ugly… It is a formless, colourless essence, insidiously undermining a world of concrete, visual, richly-toned forms. That is the Iago-spirit embattled against the domesticity, the romance, the idealized humanity of the Othello world.”

Iago’s world is colorless (similar to, yet unlike, Othello's black-and-white world), formless; it is the epitome of nonbeing.

A Man’s Man

Which is not to say that Othello plays no part in his own downfall. He is complicit insofar as he allows his self to be identified with his accidents: “My parts, my title, and my perfect soul / Shall manifest me rightly.” He has planted his own garden, in Iago’s vernacular, and he shall reap what he sows. This is not a new thought, and it’s a variation of what I argued in that paper I wrote several years ago. There are other considerations, however, which are newer to me than this, so rather than retreading old ground, let us look for other explanations of Othello’s tragedy.

Othello as a character is about as grand as Shakespearean heroes come, and grandness is not easy to write. Yet even without seeing the play performed, one can understand the sort of man Othello is. Consider these lines, and then consider what Wilson Knight has to say:

“Nay, had she been true, / If Heaven would make me such another world / Of one entire and perfect chrysolite, / I’d not have sold her for it.”

And Wilson Knight:

“Notice the single word ‘chrysolite’ with its outstanding and remote beauty: this is typical of Othello. The effect in such passages is primarily one of contrast. The vastness of the night sky, and its moving planets, or the earth itself—here conceived objectively as a solid, round, visualized object—these things, though thrown momentarily into sensible relation with the passions of man, yet remain vast, distant, separate, seen but not apprehended; something against which the dramatic movement may be silhouetted, but with which it cannot be merged. This poetic use of heavenly bodies serves to elevate the theme, to raise issues infinite and unknowable. Those bodies are not, however, implicit symbols of man’s spirit, as in King Lear: they remain distinct, isolated phenomena, sublimely decorative to the play.” 

Decorative is a good word, but it gives Othello’s diction a sort of frivolity which detracts from its pathos. It would be better to say, as Wilson Knight does later, that these images injected into otherwise plain passages bring value to “the human passion which cries out to them.” Othello’s speech is like Othello himself: a master of the civilized world who still knows how to regale his admirers with fantastical tales. “The final result makes us forget the emotion in contemplation of the image. Beauty has been imposed on human sorrow, rather than shown to be intrinsic therein.”

A Small World

Othello’s way of speaking reflects a way of looking at the world. When we talked about Hamlet last time, we mentioned how the play problematized the idea of the afterlife, to the point that the notion of life after death felt limiting, claustrophobic, rather than freeing. In pointing out the uses of Othello’s language, we notice that he, too, may feel claustrophobia, limited by his self-conception and his conception of his life and love.

First, consider this discussion between Emilia and Desdemona on the topic of adultery:

Desdemona: “Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?”

Emilia: “The world’s a huge thing; it is a great price for a small vice.”

Desdemona: “In troth, I think thou wouldst not.”

Emilia: “In troth, I think I should; and undo’t when I had done. Marry, I would not do such a thing for a joint ring, nor for measures of lawn, nor for gowns, petticoats, nor caps, nor any pretty exhibition; but, for all the whole world – ‘Ud’s pity! who would not make her husband a cuckold to make him a monarch? I should venture purgatory for’t.”

Desdemona: “Beshrew me if I would do such a wrong for the whole world.”

Emilia: “Why, the wrong is but a wrong i’ th’ world; and having the world for your labor, ‘tis a wrong in your own world, and you might quickly make it right.”

The comparison to Measure for Measure is obvious. Isabella cannot dream of sleeping with Angelo for Claudio because “more than our brother is our chastity,” and Desdemona can’t imagine breaking her wedding vow in order to grant her husband more glory. Yet Emilia, clearly the shrewdest person in the play outside of Iago (which proves to be problematic for him), knows that such an act is not greater than the world: it is “but a wrong i’ th’ world”; in Judge Holden’s words, it is “but a fact among others.” What kind of idiot would not do such a thing?

Well, Othello. Recall the “chrysolite” quote from earlier. Even more than that, consider the words Othello utters after he has killed Desdemona: “Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse / Of sun and moon, and that th’ affrighted globe / Did yawn at alteration.” He dreams that the world should shudder at his sin, but forgets that the sin is but a wrong in the world: it is not the world, and it does not create in the world a sense of obligation, as Stephen Crane would say.

Indeed, Othello often expects his deeds to shake the earth on its very foundations. When he begins to feel jealousy, he says, “Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion without some instruction. It is not words that shakes me thus.” He looks for vindication in nature, inverting the order of causation. As Desdemona says, “Men’s natures wrangle with inferior things, / Though great ones are their object.”

Who’s There?

I’d like to close this discussion by meditating on an incredible essay by the philosopher Stanley Cavell, called “Othello and the Stake of the Other.” The essay comes from a collection by Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, and I have to say it’s one of the more difficult works I’ve read in recent memory. It reminds me—forgive the odd comparison—of the way Thomas Pynchon writes: it creates in me a feeling of uncertainty, where each phrase may begin in one place and end up somewhere else entirely. His sentences are idiosyncratic, sometimes dense and tortuous, other times fragmented and conversational. I haven’t referenced him much in our discussions of the tragedies, but I will now, and I will also highly recommend reading his essay (not only because it touches on Montaigne, one of my personal favorites).

In his essay, Cavell considers Descartes’ skepticism and how it can help us think about Othello’s strange inclination to believe Iago over his own wife. One could say that Descartes’ project was to confirm the belief that a person other than myself is a human being like, but different than, myself; that the beings I see from my window are people and not just cleverly disguised robots; that “the knowledge of a human self by a human self,” to quote Cavell, is possible. Upon this fact “the integrity of my (human, finite) existence may depend.” And in Othello, Cavell finds the epitome of man’s struggle against skepticism.

The demon of skepticism, of course, is Iago, injecting his topsy-turvy view of the world into Othello’s less-than-Stoic heart. Yet it is not that Iago convinces Othello against the latter’s better judgment. From Cavell:

“It is not conceivable that Othello believes Iago and not Desdemona. Iago, we might say, offers Othello an opportunity to believe something, something to oppose something else he knows.”

Iago does not wrench the belief in Desdemona’s faithfulness from the iron jaws of Othello’s heart. I would not even say that Iago poisons Othello with words. If Othello the play is about the fragility of love, as the introduction puts it, Iago needs only to introduce the idea into the realm of possibility. One would not think of a pink elephant unprompted; but if I said “Don’t think about a pink elephant,” it’s all you can do. So it is with love. Such a powerful emotion, made all the more powerful by Othello’s (and yes, Desdemona’s too) absolutism, that “To be once in doubt / Is to be once resolved,” could not withstand a simple suggestion: for Othello and Desdemona alike, it’s all or nothing. Cavell writes:

“But then this is what I have throughout kept arriving at as the cause of skepticism – the attempt to convert the human condition, the condition of humanity, into an intellectual difficulty, a riddle. (To interpret ‘a metaphysical finitude as an intellectual lack.’)”

There’s more to think about here than can be put down easily in this post. At its heart, though, is Othello’s inability to bend the way Iago can, to mold himself to the situation. When uncertainty appears, it is taken for a threat, a problem that must be solved. It is very possible that I am interpreting his words incorrectly, but as I understand it, interpreting “a metaphysical finitude as an intellectual lack” suggests that Othello is incapable of understanding, as Descartes found in his project, the supreme difficulty of proving in an exhaustive sense the existence of another person; Descartes had to posit no less than God Himself in order to do it. We are human, bound to uncertainty; it is a result of our finitude, not evidence of our flaws. Cavell again:

“All these topics should be food for thought and moderation, not for torture and murder as fit for rue and laughter as for pity and terror; they are not tragic unless one makes them so, takes them so; that we are tragic in what we take to be tragic; that one must take one’s imperfections with a ‘gay and sociable wisdom’ [quoting Montaigne], not with a somber and isolating eloquence.”

But we’ve learned from Wilson Knight that Othello cannot help but be eloquent, somberly or otherwise. He continues:

“It is advice to accept one’s humanity, and one can almost see Iago as the slanderer of human nature (this would be his diabolism) braced with Othello as the enacter of the slander – the one thinking to escape human nature from below, the other from above.”

We recall Rosalind from As You Like It, who must be the exalter of human nature if Iago is its slanderer. Love, according to her, is a vitalizing force, and to think it brings chaos, as Othello does, is flat-out wrong. One can imagine Othello as a caricature of Orlando, who wishes to die for Rosalind's love; his teenage (I think?) brooding turns to murderous jealousy in Othello's hands. Yet we get the feeling from thinking of these two plays together that Cavell and Bloom together are right: had Othello responded to the suggestion with laughter, could tragedy have been avoided?

Returning to the essay, Cavell’s thesis, which I find very powerful, is that there can be no proof of another’s humanity, nor of the accidents of another’s humanity (faithfulness, etc.). Yet it is essential to believe, despite skepticism, in what is reasonable and likely in order not to fall into the depths of despair that plague Othello and Desdemona (and probably Descartes, too, had he not found his way out). One must take things in good faith, which emphasizes the evil of Iago: that he would take advantage of people who are trying to get through their lives without confronting that horrible skepticism that floats in the periphery of our consciousness.

Cavell does not, however, leave us without armor against the Iagos (Iagoes?) of the world. His advice – perhaps it’s not only his, but that which he dispenses – is to hold such skepticism at a distance, with Montaigne’s gay and sociable wisdom never far at hand. Above all, we must remember that what is tragic is in our hands, and that all events are equally fit for laughter as they are for grief. It is not a denial of what we know, but a yielding to what we know; it is a rejection of disbelief and an exaltation of belief. He concludes:

“So they are there, on their bridal and death sheets. A statue, a stone, is something whose existence is fundamentally open to the ocular proof. A human being is not. The two bodies lying together form an emblem of this fact, the truth of skepticism. What this man lacked [one could read instead 'what man lacks'] is not certainty. He knew everything, but he could not yield to what he knew, be commanded by it. He found out too much for his mind, not too little.”

Stray Observations

• Iago’s incredible opening speech: “You shall mark / Many a duteous and knee-crooking knave / That, doting on his own obsequious bondage, / Wears out his time, much like his master’s ass, / For nought but provender, and when he’s old, cashiered, / Whip me such honest knaves! Others there are / Who, trimmed in forms and visages of duty, / Keep yet their hearts attending on themselves, / And, throwing but shows of service on their lords, / Do well thrive by them, and when they have lined their coats, / Do themselves homage. These fellows have some soul [i.e., look out for themselves], / And such a one do I profess myself. For, sir, / It is as sure as you are Roderigo, / Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago. / In following him, I follow but myself. / Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty, / But seeming so, for my peculiar end, / For when my outward action doth demonstrate / The native act and figure of my heart / In complement extern, ‘tis not long after / But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve / For daws to peck at. I am not what I am.”
• Duke: “When remedies are past, the griefs are ended / By seeing the worst, which late on hopes depended. / To mourn a mischief that is past and gone / Is the next way to draw new mischief on. / What cannot be preserved when fortune takes, / Patience her injury a mock’ry makes. / The robbed that smiles steals something from the thief; / He robs himself that spends a bootless grief.” Brabantio answers: “But words are words. I never yet did hear / That the bruised heart was pierced through the ear.”
• Iago’s next incredible speech: “Virtue? a fig! ‘Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners; so that if we will plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many – either to have it sterile with idleness or manured with industry – why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills. If the beam of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most prepost’rous conclusions. But we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal strings or unbitted lusts; whereof I take this that you call love to be a set or scion.”
• Iago: “Trifles light as air / Are to the jealous confirmations strong / As proofs of holy writ.”
• Othello: “Now art thou my lieutenant.” Iago: “I am your own forever.”  I love this quote for the sheer creepiness with which it could be played.
• Othello: “Thou art on thy deathbed.” Desdemona: “Ay, but not yet to die.” A subtly powerful response. He informs her that she’s about to die, but she says that her death is approaching but far off. Her marriage bed she hopes will be her deathbed as well, so much she loves Othello.
• Finally, Othello’s last speech, which I also think is one of Shakespeare’s greatest pieces of poetry: “Soft you! a word or two before you go. / I have done the state some service, and they know’t. / No more of that. I pray you, in your letters, / When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, / Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate, / Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak / Of one that loved not wisely, but too well; / Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought, / Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand, / Like the base Judean, threw a pearl away / Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes, / Albeit unused to the melting mood, / Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees / Their medicinal gum. Set you down this. / And say besides that in Aleppo once, / Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk / Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, / I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog / And smote him – thus.” Wilson Knight: “In that last scene, too, he utters the grandest of his poetry. The Iago-spirit never finally envelops him, masters him, disintegrates his soul.” As an aside, there's a short story by Nabokov, I believe, titled "In Aleppo Once..." I always thought the title was beautiful, "Aleppo" being a characteristically Nabokovian-sounding word, but I had forgotten that it was from Othello. 

Shakespeare, Hamlet

I have a tendency to champion the importance of the various books we cover here. Sometimes it’s helpful, as with the Islamic philosophers, whose influence I would argue is largely unheard of outside of philosophical circles. This is not the case with our book for today, and accordingly I would like to take an influence-agnostic approach to today’s post. Hamlet has more virtues as a work of art than most everything else, and I don’t think spending thousands of words stressing its place in literature is the best use of our time. We will discuss, then, the interesting aspects of the play and various critical responses to it, and we will casually slide past the fact that we are coming face to face with the most staggering, towering, masterful…er, nevermind.

The Question

I’ve heard that Hamlet is the most written about work of literature in the world, and I believe it. There is a sense that the desire to understand Hamlet the play is reflected in the desire to understand Hamlet the character. This is a relatively basic observation: the introduction notes the “ceaseless interrogation” in the play, not the least of which is the opening line, “Who’s there?” Similarly striking is the distinct lack of answers: the response to Bernardo’s opening question is not an identification, but a negative, “Nay.”

We encounter this proliferation of questions elsewhere. The famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy is a long string of questions and meditations without answers, even without a subject. Hamlet does not ask “Shall I be or not be?” Rather, he uses the infinitive. Moreover, the original question does not simply go unanswered but breeds more questions like ripples on the water. Which is unsurprising, given the metaphysical nature of the soliloquy. We’ve encountered before in Shakespeare the conflict between philosophy and daily life. Recall the supremely articulate but incredibly unhelpful speech the Duke gives to Claudio in Measure for Measure, which does nothing to allay his spiritual concerns: “Ay, but to die and go we know not where.” Philosophical comfort has its time and place, but for a man like Claudio, who does not have the intellectual mettle to absorb it, it is unhelpful; for Hamlet, who has intellectual mettle to spare, it is no comfort at all.

While Hamlet is asking these Big Questions, the rest of the cast are asking smaller ones, namely, What’s going on with Hamlet? Laertes and Polonius have an idea: he’s in love with Ophelia. They warn her of this, because she must know that “his will is not his own,” though this is true for more reasons than they think. He is the prince of Denmark, sure, but there is also the matter of the ghost of his father, whose existence only a handful of people are aware of, and whose reason for (non)being only Hamlet knows. This is another common point regarding the play: What the hell is Hamlet doing putting on his “antic disposition”? Of course, this is the point on which so many debates about the play hinge: it is unclear why Hamlet pretends to go mad. We can go into discussions in a moment, but we would do well to take the advice of the introduction: we must not “tame into knowledge” the “heart of [the play's] mysteries.” Perhaps the play does have answers, but I would find that difficult to believe when the answers that are provided are so flimsy, e.g., when Marcellus asks if the ghost didn’t bear some resemblance to the deceased king, Horatio answers, “As thou art to thyself,” which, knowing Shakespeare, isn’t as solid of an answer as Horatio might think.

Sickness Unto Death

Wilson Knight sees two madnesses in Hamlet: one feigned, the other sprung from contemned love. He does not discount the observations of the characters in the play who, unlike Hamlet, are men and women of the world, that is, the living world. Hamlet probably was rather mad from love. That love, he points out, “can recreate the sense of purpose, it inspires to heroism and action. And it is self-creative.” Love is the “supreme enemy… of neurotic despair.” This, it seems, is one of his madnesses, but it is not the only one, and it is not the solution to the riddle of Hamlet. Wilson Knight continues:

“Hamlet’s soul is sick…He can describe the glories of heaven and earth—but for him those glories are gone. And he knows not why. The disease is deeper than his loss of Ophelia, deeper than his mother’s sexual impurity and his father’s death. These are, like his mourning dress, the ‘trappings and the suits of woe.’ They are the outward symbols of it, the ‘causes’ of it: but the thing itself is ultimate, beyond causality… He does not avenge his father’s death, not because he dare not, not because he hates the thought of bloodshed, but because his ‘wit’s diseased’; his will is snapped and useless, like a broken leg.”

Hamlet is not the only victim of this disease. Elsinore and Denmark at large are suffering as well; “something’s rotten” etc, etc. And again, the cause is unclear. As an example, take the argument that the murder of King Hamlet has upset the balance. Has it? Wilson Knight points out that under Claudius’ leadership, “tact has found an easy settlement where arms and opposition might have wasted the strength of Denmark.” Claudius is, for all intents and purposes, a great king. We may be tempted to yearn for the bygone days when disputes were settled not with diplomacy but with “arms and opposition,” but we need only to remember Laertes foaming at the mouth, screaming that he’ll cut Hamlet’s throat in the church, to be reminded that force isn’t necessarily that appealing.

Whatever the cause, Hamlet is in pain, suffering from something we’d probably simplistically call depression:

“This goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’verhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire – why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me…”

In Shakespeare’s time, one might’ve said that Hamlet suffered from melancholy. If I were smart, I would’ve read Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy in preparation for this post, but alas, I’m not. But there are still some things we can say. Some of those things are transcribed from a pretty, er, unique class I took on Hamlet, so I may start asserting very grand statements without any support.

What is the nature of Hamlet’s melancholy? We can say for now that it is a sort of detachment, which is suggested by his statement that “man delights not me.” He is detached from the world that Claudius and the rest of the castle are living, those who possess a "worldly elegance" that he does not. That worldly elegance is something philosophical, the ability to not take things too seriously, to not attach too closely to things, and thereby to achieve security and happiness. Hamlet, on the other hand, does not have such a philosophical detachment, but an emotional detachment, a loss of eros. Both are related to not caring about the world, yet one is happiness and the other is unhappiness. One is wholesome--that is, complete--and the other is incomplete, rotten, diseased: it is banal. Which was basically the point of the class I took: unhappiness is banal, just as evil is banal. (H/T to Hannah Arendt.) Why is it banal? Because it isn’t real: only the good is real.

Hamlet cannot accept the comfort of worldly philosophy, at least not at the beginning of the play, and certainly not from either Claudius or Gertrude. He has to learn it for himself. Which is not to say that the point of the play is self-knowledge, because such an observation seems sort of, well, banal.

Strike a Balance

To me, the most interesting aspect of the play is one that goes unnoticed, at least in common discussions. Hamlet is set at the threshold of a new era, a time when the surest certainties were eroding. We will go over two of these: the traditional conception of power and the traditional conception of religion.

Hamlet goes to school in Wittenberg, a detail that is mentioned once and immediately forgotten. What an odd choice, you might say, for a Danish prince to go to school in a random German town. Yet it is all but random: it is the town where Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the church, inaugurating the Protestant Reformation, an event that has everything to do with Hamlet.

Religious uncertainty pervades the play. Hamlet struggles both with the philosophical implications of death and the religious implications. In his "to be or not to be," he mentions that death should be a land from which “no traveler returns,” yet just an act prior, the ghost returned.

Its return introduces a “terrible ambiguity,” as Northrop Frye puts it, the ambiguity of “life in death.” Rather than expand the world, the ghost’s presence “seals it in by surrounding us with an ‘afterlife’ that has no infinite presence in it.” Why not? Because death no longer seems an ending. The concerns of life are the same as the concerns of death. If the ghost were Catholic and in a Catholic afterlife, he would ask Hamlet to pray for him; instead, he merely perpetuates the cycle of worldly hatred. Moreover, Hamlet is tasked not only with killing Claudius, but with another, perhaps more terrifying duty: to remember his dead father, to remember a ghost. Whether or not Hamlet obeys the first decree well is up for discussion; yet he cannot but adhere to the second. In remembering the ghost—the ghost itself, not his father but “all the death of which it is a symbol,” as Wilson Knight writes—Hamlet’s world is altered: “the universe smells of mortality” to him.

The other surety losing its power is the old conception of power. King Hamlet, dressed even as a ghost in his armor, represents the might of brute force. Yet such power feels anachronistic in Claudius’ world of cool diplomacy. Despite being a murderer, Claudius is a pretty good king. His virtues, though, are not the old virtues; the “men” of the play are gone, those who possess active virtue, and have been replaced by those like Claudius, with Christian, feminized virtues. I am reminded of Cheryl Churchill’s play Cloud Nine, in which the patriarch is shot dead out of the blue at the end of the first half, symbolizing the death of the old way of life.

All this presents to Hamlet a very strange world, since he is caught in between everything. He is called to forget his father by his new “father”; he is also called to remember his father by his “old” father. He is melancholic but sees no way out, again, due to his father’s presence; yet he does not wish to participate in the farcical life lived by the rest of Elsinore. It is almost enough to drive someone mad.

A Tale of Two Brothers

And what about the ghost? Without even mentioning the gross religious overtones present in King Hamlet’s death (killed in a garden, killed by his brother), he claims that he is in a place where “the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away,” which sounds like purgatory, a Catholic idea, yet his request for Hamlet to kill Claudius doesn’t sound Catholic: it sounds Greek. Specifically, it sounds like something out of a classical tragedy; in fact, one might be inclined to agree with the introduction, which says that the ghost’s demand “has a frank simplicity, almost an ordinariness.” The notion of revenge for one’s father, even in our time, is not so ridiculous. Which is the great irony, that Hamlet is presented with a simple, an ordinary demand that he cannot fulfill.

This is not the only ordinary demand that Hamlet is unable to fulfill. Claudius is not only a masterful politician and a murderer, but a worldly man who enjoys giving advice. Take the advice he gives Laertes to motivate him to kill Hamlet sooner:

“Not that I think you did not love your father, / But that I know love is begun by time, / And that I see, in passages of proof, / time qualifies the spark and fire of it. / There lives within the very flame of love / A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it, / And nothing is at a like goodness still, / For goodness, growing to a pleurisy, / Dies in his own too-much. That we would do / We should do when we would, for this ‘would’ changes, / And hath abatements and delays as many / As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents, / And then this ‘should’ is like a spendthrift sign, / That hurts by easing.”

This is not only lovely poetry, but very reasonable advice. Despite how much Laertes loves Polonius—also a fan of giving advice, though not good advice—time heals wounds, and in this case, he needs to act before they do.

Compare this to his advice to Hamlet:

“'Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet, / To give these mourning duties to your father.  / But you must know your father lost a father, / That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound / In filial obligation for some term / To do obsequious sorrow. But to persever / In obstinate condolement is a course / Of impious stubbornness. 'Tis unmanly grief. / It shows a will most incorrect to heaven, / A heart unfortified, a mind impatient, / An understanding simple and unschooled. / For what we know must be and is as common / As any the most vulgar thing to sense, / Why should we in our peevish opposition / Take it to heart? Fie! 'Tis a fault to heaven, / A fault against the dead, a fault to nature, / To reason most absurd, whose common theme / Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried, / From the first corse till he that died today, / ‘This must be so.’”

There’s some interesting mirroring going on here. Claudius’ advice to both young men is related to the death of fathers, which makes sense, but his advice also emphasizes the relationship between human suffering and time. In Laertes’ case, he assures him that in the future his pain will cease, and therefore he should strike while the iron is hot. In Hamlet’s case, he argues that one should not mourn as much as Hamlet has because the death of fathers is the common theme throughout history, that is, throughout the past. In one case, Claudius looks forward, in the other, back. We should notice first that Claudius truly is wise. He is able to tailor his advice not only to the temperament of the advisee, but to the ends he hopes to achieve. He wants Hamlet to forget, for the death of King Hamlet to be remembered only in history books; he wants Laertes to remember, at least until the memory has served its purpose. In this way, the advice is like the ghost’s: when he asks Hamlet to remember him, perhaps Hamlet is taking it too literally. He does not need to remember forever his dead father, but only until the demand has been fulfilled. Perhaps it wasn’t Hamlet’s fault for taking him too literally: the ghost is not one for careful elaboration, preferring direct, “masculine” prose to Claudius’ flowery language.

"What Dreams May Come"

But no matter how good Claudius’ advice is, it suffers from a crucial limitation: it is advice for this world. Moreover, it is advice for a happy family, one that has not suffered from a murder, an “incestuous” marriage, and a son who cannot let any of it go. The nobility at Elsinore are not a happy family: they are, whether they know it or not, putting on an act. When Hamlet says he has that which passes show, he is not talking only about his clothes; he is talking about the show being put on by everyone around him. From Wilson Knight:

“This contrast [between Hamlet and Claudius] points the relative significance of the King and his court to Hamlet. They are of the world—with their crimes, their follies, their shallownesses, their pomp and glitter; they are of humanity, with all its failings, it is true, but yet of humanity. They assert the importance of human life, they believe in it, in themselves. Whereas Hamlet is inhuman, since he has seen through the tinsel of life and love, he believes in nothing, not even himself, except the memory of a ghost, and his black-robed presence is a reminder to everyone of the fact of death. There is no question but that Hamlet is right. The King’s smiles hide murder, his mother’s love for her new consort is unfaithfulness to Hamlet’s father, Ophelia has deserted Hamlet at the hour of his need. Hamlet’s philosophy may be inevitable, blameless, and irrefutable. But it is the negation of life. It is death.”

Harold Bloom said that Hamlet is the conduit through which supernal forces enter into the world, and this reflects that. Hamlet’s appearance invites the ghost into their realm: he is not the first to see it, but it is as if he allowed it to enter, the way a vampire cannot enter a home without being invited (think Let the Right One In, not Twilight). Without Hamlet’s presence, the world would continue on as it does, in its “common theme”: but because he drags the specter of death into the world of life, it cannot but come.

Moreover, Wilson Knight makes the excellent point that Hamlet is right. It is easy to dismiss the guy moping around in the corner when that’s all he’s doing. Hamlet is not simply moping; something is rotten, and he is very much aware. Yet the extent to which he is aware before the ghost explains everything is unclear. I prefer to agree that Hamlet is a conduit, the intermediary that must be present in order for the ghost to communicate effectively with the world. Wilson Knight writes that the ghost is “the devil of the knowledge of death,” and as such, Hamlet “has walked and held converse with death.” He continues:

“Hamlet is so powerful. He is, as it were, the channel of a mysterious force, a force which derives largely from his having seen through them all. In contact with him they know their own faults: neither they nor we should know them otherwise.” [Emphasis mine]

On Guard

I have focused on a lot of different aspects of the play and skipped over even more, but I want to add one final thing. In high school, when we finished the play, our teacher (Hi Ms. McEvoy!) gave us each a pen, which she asked us to bring to the AP English exam. On it was printed the phrase, “The readiness is all,” and she told us it was her favorite quote. At the time, I didn’t think much of it, and I didn’t until this reading of the play (which I believe is my fifth?)

How does Hamlet find the cure to his melancholy? It must be while he’s in the cemetery. Throughout the play, Hamlet—and Elsinore at large—has wavered between being and non-being, between life and death, action and inaction. The core of the “to be or not to be” speech is in the chiasmus: in life, one finds death all around; in death, life. To be or not to be? What is the difference? When the ghost appears, he has even less reason to see a distinction: there is death, walking around for all to see.

Yet in the cemetery, he sees the skull of Yorick and perhaps because of this remembers something of the finality of death. After all, it is there that he wrestles with Laertes, and he is the one to make the first move. Holding the skull of a man he once loved might tell him something about death, namely, that it is not life.

And what is life? This remains unclear, but we don’t need it to be clear. From the man himself:

“Not a whit, we defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.”

It is readiness. At the end of the play, Hamlet returns to Wittenberg, to the protestant notion of predestination which seems to be the only cure to his woes. Hamlet, who is so full of accidents and contingencies, finds peace in the idea that he need only be prepared. I’m not sure how correct this reading of the ending is. It may be too simple, and it may even be wrong. But I like it, and it makes me wish I still had Mrs. McEvoy’s pen. The readiness is all.

Stray Observations

• Hamlet: “’Tis very strange.” Horatio: “As I do live, my honored lord, ‘tis true.”
• Ophelia: “Now see that noble and most sovereign reason / Like sweet bells jangled, out of time and harsh, / That unmatched form and feature of blown youth / Blasted with ecstasy. O, woe is me / T’ have seen what I have seen, see what I see.” That last line is great.
• Hamlet to Gertrude: “Good night – but go not to my uncle’s bed. / Assume a virtue, if you have it not. / that monster custom, who all sense doth eat / Of habits evil, is angel yet in this, / That to the use of actions fair and good / He likewise gives a frock or livery / That aptly is put on. Refrain tonight, / And that shall lend a kind of easiness / To the next abstinence; the next more easy; / For use almost can change the stamp of nature, / And either lodge the devil, or throw him out / With wondrous potency.”
• You may have noticed that I only quoted Harold Bloom once this time. I began reading his essay on Hamlet, but the first, like, 10 pages were just an extended circle-jerk about its importance and greatness; hence my remark at the beginning. I like the guy, even though I recognize that he's pretty eccentric in his criticism, but man, we get it, it's a great play, shut up.

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.”