Friday, May 9, 2008
Smackdown: Shakespeare vs Philosophy
In this article you have a great combination: philosophy, clarity, and Shakespeare. Martha Nussbaum reviews three books by philosophers about Shakespeare. She likes Cavell (not reviewed but discussed) and most especially Zamir, a young Israeli philosopher.
Shakespeare sometimes appears as deep as experience itself, unanswerable to equation or formulation. But we keep trying, and the philosophers which Nussbaum touts are often very insightful. It is just fascinating reading the speculations — Shakespeare chides us to a higher level of discourse.
Nussbaum considers one of the mysteries of Othello's character — the ease with which he can be manipulated. Not that Iago isn't one devilishly clever fellow, but Othello almost seems enabling a lie about Desdemona's fealty — everyone knows she is faithful. Why does Othello seem so complicit in the slander? Cavell feels that it is the view Othello has of himself, as being pure, that does Desdemona in — because conceptions of purity have trouble with physicality; Desdemona knows Othello's physical self and thus seeing him more fully, threatens his narrow self-conception.
In other words, we are all to some degree ashamed and horrified at our own sexuality, of which another person's sexual response to us is the proof. We are horrified because we wish not to accept our finitude. We wish to be pure souls without limit or imperfection.
What makes Nussbaum such a gem is not only her clarity, but her balance, which you might think goes along with being a philosopher herself, but in fact, current philosphy is so congealed by arcane language that it has become a monster, gobbling up understanding.
There is a wonderful section in the article about Antony and Cleopatra, representing a mature love, of play and understanding, contrasted with the young love of Romeo and Juliet, which swims in the dreamy abstractions of physical love.
Nussbaum's sense of context — her appreciation of the limits of academic understanding:
To write philosophically about Shakespeare, or any other great author or artist, one needs not so much philosophical learning, or even philosophical argument, but a genuinely philosophical temperament, puzzled and even humble before life's complexities, and willing to put one's sense of life on the line in the process of reading a text. As Plato rightly said, it is no chance matter that we are discussing, but how one should live. The philosopher needs to turn to literature because literature gets at depths of human experience, tragic or comic, that philosophical prose does not reach; but then the philosopher will need to show the imprint of that complexity, to reveal something of the pain or the joy that the work evokes from his or her own character.