Germaine Greer: How would Cranach feel about the RA using his nude Venus in a giant advert?

Shakespeare 123

By Martha C. Nussbaum,
The New Republic, May 7, 2008

Edited by Andy Ross

Shakespeare the Thinker
By A.D. Nuttall
Yale University Press, 428 pages

Shakespeare's Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays
By Colin McGinn
Harper Perennial, 230 pages

Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama
By Tzachi Zamir
Princeton University Press, 234 pages

To make any contribution worth caring about, a philosopher's study of Shakespeare should really do philosophy, and not just allude to familiar philosophical ideas and positions. It should also illuminate the world of the plays and offer some account of why we need to turn to Shakespeare.

Two of these new books do very badly by these criteria. To be fair, A.D. Nuttall, who died not long ago, was not a philosopher, but a literary critic who did impressive work on the margins of philosophy. It is not terribly surprising that his book contributes nothing of original philosophical interest.

Colin McGinn's book is much more intelligent, and it is the book of a real philosopher. Still, it is all at the level of Phil 101. McGinn does not offer anything subtle or new. McGinn's attention to language and dramatic structure is so hasty that he, too, has no new or convincing readings of the plays he tackles. McGinn already knows what to think about the philosophical issues, and he is pleased to find confirmation in Shakespeare.

How might a philosopher do better? The most distinguished Anglo-American philosophical writing on Shakespeare in recent years, by a long distance, may be found in the work of Stanley Cavell. Despite the great merits of Cavell's particular insights, however, his readings of Shakespeare tend to confirm the philosophical notions for which he has already argued independently, in readings of Wittgenstein, Descartes, and other philosophers.

But Tzachi Zamir's new book is head and shoulders above its rivals. A first book by a young Israeli philosopher, Double Vision stands comparison with Cavell for philosophical subtlety and insight, and Zamir is much more upfront about what the enterprise of doing philosophy by consulting works of literature is all about. Zamir writes with an evocative grace that shows a deep emotional response to literature and a sense of its complexities and its mysteries.

Zamir understands that it is crucial to say why it is important to turn to literary works for philosophical guidance. His argument is as follows. Literary works offer their readers a range of experiences that philosophical prose cannot provide. Some of these experiences are varieties of emotional response. Some are experiences of dislocation and a loss of meaning. Some are of losing a sense of meaning and then finding it again. Some are of not being able to figure out who or what a certain person is. And some just follow the trajectory of a human relationship.

So literature portrays and dissects a wide range of human experiences. With Shakespeare, we find again and again that the shaping of plot and the resources of language are used to construct and then to deepen a set of these experiences in ways that provide resources for knowledge.

At the heart of Zamir's book are three chapters on erotic love in Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and Othello. He prefaces his readings by pointing to the great difficulties that philosophy has had investigating love. He suggests that only works that convey to their reader the texture of complex human experiences will put us in a position to make any philosophical claims at all.

Romeo and Juliet conveys the hyperbolic, extravagant character of young love, with its search for a transcendence. This sort of love, Zamir shows, works by distancing reality. Since it is determined to rise above the earth, it is also lacking in particularity. Juliet is an abstract image, an angel, and neither Romeo nor the audience knows a great deal about her earthly attributes.

One sign of these qualities in their love is the play's constant fascination with images of sleep and dreaming. Zamir notices that the play draws readers into a lulled and dreamy state. Zamir focuses on the transfiguring experience of the perception of beauty. By allowing ourselves to be drawn into this complex state, we learn more fully to understand our own relationship to aesthetic beauty.

Antony and Cleopatra depicts mature love between people who enjoy being grown-ups together, and who have no project of transcending human life, because they are taking too much pleasure in life as it is. Antony and Cleopatra eat all the time, they are friends and supportive colleagues, they live by elaborate jokes and highly personal forms of teasing, and they love to gossip about the odd people in their world. Antony knows how to make contact with Cleopatra through insults and she knows how to turn a story about a fishhook into a running joke. All this suggests a romance that does not work through transcending life but rather structures itself through life and the daily pleasures it affords.

The body in Antony and Cleopatra is always seen as animated by a searching and idiosyncratic mind that makes contact with another particular mind through intimate conversation. Cleopatra is clearly supposed to be attractive, but the play downplays this aspect of her attraction. It is her complicated personality to which Shakespeare most draws our attention. Zamir is particularly insightful when he shows the love expressed in Cleopatra's delicate attunement to the phases of Antony's career.

But does she really love Antony? Zamir eventually finds an affirmative answer to his question in the scene in which news of Antony's marriage to Octavia is delivered to Cleopatra by a messenger. And here, I think, Zamir missteps. Cleopatra knows that the marriage is politically motivated, and not at all based on overwhelming passion. And she intuits quickly that Octavia is no rival in brains or fascination.

Romeo and Juliet's love transfigured the world by raising love into the heavens. Antony and Cleopatra transfigure the world from within, making each daily experience more vivid, funny, and surprising. The transfiguration is human and particular, rather than celestial and abstract.

What does all this have to do with philosophy? Well, no philosopher has ever given a decent account of the complexities of mature love. Zamir plausibly argues that philosophical prose all by itself could not convey the quirky and uneven nature of this type of love.

In Othello, Zamir finds a love that is tragic at its core, because of one party's determination to see and to deeply love, and the other party's horror of being seen and being deeply loved.

Any successful interpretation of Othello must explain Othello's readiness to be deceived. Iago is certainly skillful, but he has a willing victim. At every point, Othello picks up Iago's suggestions and runs with them. No other character, despite receiving the same information, shows the slightest inclination to believe that Desdemona is unfaithful.

Stanley Cavell's famous interpretation goes further. Othello, he believes, has become heavily invested in the idea of his own purity, a project no doubt supported by his awareness of being black, and a Moor, in a white Christian world. So, says Cavell, when Othello makes love to Desdemona and sees the passion he arouses in her, he cannot bear it, because this passionate response proves to him that he is a sexual being, not a pure heavenly will.

Cavell observes that sexuality is the field in which the idea of human finitude is worked out. 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.

Cavell's essay is one of the best things written about the play. I recall the sense of revelation when Cavell first presented it in a class I taught with him at Harvard in 1980. But now, I must say that what Cavell is describing looks to me like a common style of misogyny. This sort of shame and revulsion at sexuality is hardly inevitable.

Othello, Zamir argues, has become deeply invested in seeing himself as identical with his heroic role. The vulnerable shapeless person within has been concealed by that grandiose construction, to such an extent that Othello himself does not even remember that he really is that vulnerable inchoate self. Desdemona sees past the persona to the self within. Othello is erotically drawn to her by her compassionate response.

In other words, the general human problem raised by the play is the problem of the "false self" with which we so often mask our real, childlike selves. All human beings have this problem to some degree, wanting to hide from the gaze of those who see our vulnerability too clearly. For some people, the problem is more agonizing than for others. When it is seen and addressed, it can be a terrifying experience.

Zamir would say, I suppose, that by portraying his wife to himself as a whore, attending to many men, Othello can deny that she is focused all too intently on loving him. What he cannot stand is the real love that she offers, and so he would prefer to believe anything else. I am not entirely satisfied with such an account of Othello's obsessively sexual fantasies.

Yet Zamir's reading is very strong in explaining Othello's odd and disjointed language in the murder scene. He speaks in strange third-person abstractions. Above all, Zamir makes better sense than Cavell of Othello's obsession with extinguishing Desdemona's vision. On Cavell's reading, he should be obsessed with her bodily movements, her sexual organs. Zamir convincingly shows us why he is so afraid of her eyes.

Zamir's book has its defects. It lacks the sense of a coherent and distinctive philosophical sensibility with its own views on the significant questions. Nuttall and McGinn fail because they make Shakespeare look simple, reducing him to a primer. Cavell brilliantly succeeds at being Cavell. In Zamir, the plays challenge the philosopher to new thought. Double Vision is quite a brilliant book.

Martha C. Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago.
 

AR  I agree that Shakespeare illuminates a lot about love that philosophers fail to clarify.