THINKING THROUGH SHAKESPEARE
David Womersley
ISBN 978 0 691 15410 7
Philosophy and literature. The latter works at a higher level than the
former, but the former is more systematic. Womersley is familiar with the
major western philosophers and has sought to show how their concepts and
concerns are at work in Shakespeare. Adam Smith for example. He employs
several quotes from that much-neglected book (especially by the Adam Smith
Institute) The Theory of Moral
Sentiments:
“There is no commonly honest man,,,who does not inwardly feel the truth of
that great stoical maxim, that for one man to deprive another unjustly of
nay thing, or unjustly to promote his own advantage by the loss or
disadvantage of another, is more contrary to nature, than death, than
poverty, than pain, than all the misfortunes which can affect him in his
body, or his external circumstances.”
Pain isn’t contrary to nature but nature’s way, often, of preventing greater
damage, and of alerting creatures to injury. All the same, Womersley relates
this to The Tempest and Prospero’s
intent to “bring about a moral reformation”. It’s very ingenious and
interesting, but anachronistic. Of course, what’s being suggested is that
the ideas which Smith worked out in the 18th century had run
though Shakespeare’s head in the 17th. The entire book works in a
similar vein, except, of course, when Womersley invokes Aristotle or Plato,
it’s possible Shakespeare was influenced by them. Many of the philosophers
referred to are post-Shakespeare but interestingly there is no mention of
Noam Chomsky, arguably one of the most important thinkers of the last
hundred years. Perhaps a missed opportunity given Chomsky’s work on
language, Shakespeare’s medium. Womersley has done his reading and his
discussion of philosophy is sharp. He’s a Shakespeare scholar with plenty of
astute insights. Yet the study seems somewhat contrived and the attribution
of kindred ideas to Shakespeare and Hume or Kant or Rawls, essentially
banal. Why wouldn’t literary geniuses land on the same problems as
philosophers? The core problems have troubled human reason since it emerged.
There is considerable discussion of barbarism and civilisation, though
neither is satisfactorally defined. He quotes the French
prosecutor Menthon at Nuremberg asking, “How can we explain
how Germany could have come to this astonishing return to primitive
barbarism?” What made him think it was a return? When had history produced
anything as vile as the Nazi genocide? The question contains an assumption
of progress. Moral progress is, of course, possible, but it doesn’t recreate
human nature. It modifies it, but to annul it would be to bring into
existence a new species. Biology does that. There is no progress which can
obliterate the possibility of human cruelty or depravity. We would have to
become a new species for that to happen. Menthon’s suggestion that they (
people in the past) were barbarians and we are civilised is a delusion.
So-called civilisation has unleashed horrors our hunter-gatherer forbears
may, for the most part, have avoided. Womersley evokes Rousseau too, whose
noble savage is also a delusion. We are always capable of either viciousness
or kindness, and always will be; we have evolved with the capacity to
choose. Simply, we are moral creatures by biological endowment. If we
couldn’t be cruel, we couldn’t be kind.
Civilisation, the author contends differs from barbarism by the rule of law.
Do we know of any human culture without law? Without the state for sure, but
all societies have rules and ways of enforcing them. The idea our forbears
lived without rules is self-flattery. Hamlet is marked, apparently,
by “diseased ethical awareness”. The play imports Greek and Trojan material.
It is concerned with change for individuals and societies. As far as the
latter goes, the move is from pre-civilisation to Freud’s “prosthetic” view
of civilisation. Freud’s theory may be in keeping with the evidence, but how
can we tell? It isn’t science. It can’t be tested and found wanting. It may
be entirely out of kilter with the evidence. Womersley picks up on Freud’s
questioning of Aristotle’s progressive view of civilisation and his sense of
“doubleness” in the latter: it is bought at the cost of repression of
instinct. Modern man has fulfilled some of his God-like fantasies, but is
unhappy. Freud may be onto something, and it would be remarkable if an
intelligent man could write so much and say nothing pertinent, but like the
other great speculator produced by the 19th century, he is
advancing conjecture as science. Womersley thinks Freud’s “dystopian” view
of civilisation is pertinent to Hamlet, but the anachronistic
objection rears again: maybe it’s Hamlet which is pertinent to
Freud’s conception.
What does Womersley mean by “diseased ethical awareness” in the play? Who
wouldn’t be morally outraged by murder, usurpation and hasty marriage of the
victim’s spouse? Womersley may overcomplicate: we have a biologically
endowed, shared human nature. What offends against it arouses moral
repugnance. If our moral sense were entirely a cultural creation, it
couldn’t exist. If culture produces our moral sense, how can we object to
aspects of that very culture? It must be that we have an instinct for
justice. Do we know, for example, of any society where murder is not
forbidden and punished? If our moral sense is infinitely plastic, why would
that be so? We have a capacity for violence, and expediency will drive some
to employ it, but does that ever escape moral condemnation, sooner or later?
Has anyone ever read or seen Hamlet and judged Claudius a good man
whose actions are justified? Isn’t it an assumption of the play that
everyone will recognise the moral outrage in his actions? Who apart from a
few psychopaths and power-seekers, doesn’t see the Nazi genocide as morally
depraved, or the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stalin’s mass
murder of the kulaks, South African apartheid, the Jim Crow laws or Israel’s
decimation of Gaza? So why do these things happen? Because we have moral
choice and people try to defy the instinct for justice in pursuit of some
false aim. The result is tragedy.
In
discussing Coriolanus, Womersely writes of “the simple forcefulness
in which civilisation has its roots”. What he means is, civilisation is
founded on violence. It’s a morally abject observation. He goes on to speak
of the “sometimes shabby compromises, that society is forced to embrace as
it moves forward.” That is both intellectually and morally hollow. How can
“society” embrace anything? It’s an abstraction. What is meant
by the term is the sum total of relations existing within the
community referred to. To think of “society” as a thing, or as an organism,
is to drive positivism to its logical absurdity (Womersley doesn’t refer to
Comte, though his influence in social theory is baleful and permeating). In
the midst of his sophisticated literary-philosophical analysis, Womersley
permits himself to speak like a wormy politician or as Shakespeare puts it,
“ a scurvy politician” who will “seem to see things thou dost not.” He slips
into the cliché that “progress” is valid and excuses moral outrage necessary
to assist it. Karl Marx made a similar mistake with tragic consequences.
In
his chapter on means and ends, Womersley rests heavily on Kant:
“The principles of morality..are to be found completely a priori, free from
all that is empirical, simply in pure rational concepts and nowhere else ,
not even in the least part..
All
moral concepts have their seat and origin completely a priori in reason, and
indeed in the commonest human reason…”
The
last four words are vital. Kant is saying the principles of morality are
native to us, to all of us, to the commonest. Yet at the same time,
Womersley argues, he denies that his categorical imperative (that any moral
law must be capable of being universal) can be derived from “some particular
principle of human nature.” In the author’s view, this excludes the “moral
sense” school of Smith and Hume. Kant sees morality as a duty and therefore
incompatible with following the dictates of human nature. He’s right, in
that our moral sense doesn’t make the choices for us, any more than the
language faculty chooses our sentences. But neither Hume nor Smith suggests
it does. What they argue, and they are right, is that if we are not endowed
with a moral faculty, moral reason is impossible. Kant is pointing out that
a moral decision can’t be reduced to the infallible working of an innate
moral sense. Of course, that’s obvious, because a moral decision is a
choice: do I murder my neighbour and marry his wife or restrain my desire?
But without an innate moral sense, the reason and duty in which Kant
believes would be impossible, in the same way that without a language
faculty, sentences would be impossible. The existence and operation of the
language faculty don’t predict the sentences (that’s the AI delusion) they
make the choice of them possible. The existence of a moral faculty doesn’t
predict moral decisions, it makes them possible. Kant implicitly recognises
this: where a duty exists, it can always be neglected.
There is a great deal to be learned from this book. Its scholarship is fine.
Many of its insights are worthwhile. Yet its anachronism is hard to ignore
and finally it seems like two books: one about philosophy, one about
Shakespeare. It isn’t for the general reader. It’s aimed at an academic
audience, which may be a necessity for academics. Yet it’s perhaps
regrettable, though maybe inevitable, that Shakespeare and philosophy can’t
be made accessible to the common folk.