Self and Soul

A Defense of Ideals

Mark Edmundson

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780674495944
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

An ARTery Best Book of the Year
An Art of Manliness Best Book of the YearIn a culture that has become progressively more skeptical and materialistic, the desires of the individual self stand supreme, Mark Edmundson says. We spare little thought for the great ideals that once gave life meaning and worth. Self and Soul is an impassioned effort to defend the values of the Soul."An impassioned critique of Western society, a relentless assault on contemporary complacency, shallowness, competitiveness and self-regard…Throughout Self and Soul, Edmundson writes with a Thoreau-like incisiveness and fervor…[A] powerful, heartfelt book."
—Michael Dirda, Washington Post "[Edmundson's] bold and ambitious new book is partly a demonstration of what a 'real education' in the humanities, inspired by the goal of 'human transformation' and devoted to taking writers seriously, might look like…[It] quietly sets out to challenge many educational pieties, most of the assumptions of recent literary studies—and his own chosen lifestyle."
—Mathew Reisz, Times Higher Education "Edmundson delivers a welcome championing of humanistic ways of thinking and living."
— Kirkus Reviews

II

Ideals in the Modern World

4

Shakespeare and the Early Modern Self

Shakespeare, we are told, invents the human. This is a statement full of consequential truth, though not quite the truth that its originator conceives. Harold Bloom says that “the human” as we know it comes into being when the playwright’s characters display a certain interior life. Shakespeare’s characters are distinct not only because their speech reveals their minds and hearts so brilliantly. They are also distinct because they can reflect on their own utterances, and through their reflections change their sense of who they are. Shakespeare’s characters read and interpret themselves. “I think, therefore I am,” Descartes asserts. Shakespeare’s characters, according to Bloom, think about their own thought, and so represent a level of being that makes them different not in degree but in kind from previous representations of human beings.

One of Shakespeare’s most ferocious villains, Edmund, about to die, cries out “Yet Edmund was beloved.” He surprises himself by what he says—up until this point Edmund has thought he was incapable of love and completely unlovable. He overhears himself and he has to reconceive himself. He is not quite the being he thought he was: he’s more capable of affection and generous feelings than he had imagined. He calls out to the guards to try to save Cordelia and Lear, whom he has sentenced to death; his final breath is, surprisingly to himself and everyone else, a generous one.

Perhaps what Bloom says about self-overhearing and change is so. Maybe Shakespeare’s characters are, to use Bloom’s idiom, “strong mis-readers” of themselves. But the most significant truth about Shakespeare’s “invention of the human” is both simpler and more complex. Shakespeare does not quite invent the human as we know it. Rather he makes way for the flourishing of a new human type, a type that he does not especially endorse, or perhaps even like terribly much. Shakespeare helps create the grounds for the presiding form of modern subjectivity through his acts of demolition as well as through his acts of representation. He clears the way for the triumph of the Self. His work helps open a space in which it can unfold and triumph. In Shakespeare’s world only Self lives on and thrives—though this fact is no cause for celebration to him and surely it shouldn’t be to us. Shakespeare is the first great secularist; the first authentic renderer of the marketplace philosophy, pragmatism, and the primary artist of life lived exclusively in the sublunary sphere. Seen from Shakespeare’s vantage, the pragmatic life is not especially enticing or glorious, but it is all we genuinely have. Shakespeare is the ultimate poet of worldliness.

What is perhaps the best-known sentence of literary criticism is devoted, not surprisingly, to Shakespeare—and it is extremely misleading. The sentence comes from John Keats and deals with a quality he believes Shakespeare to have possessed more fully than any other author and, presumably, more than any other man or woman, negative capability. That is, Keats says, when an individual is capable of being “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Keats’s line, which comes from a letter to his brothers Tom and George, has been glossed in numberless ways. But the most common interpretation is that Shakespeare, poetic genius that he is, actually holds no perceptible views. Read the plays as closely as you like, Keats suggests (and virtually all critics have concurred), and you still will never know what he thinks about any consequential subject: about religion, monarchy, marriage, love, honor, what have you. Shakespeare preserves sublime neutrality. He stands above his creatures, aloof as a god, staring down into the universe that he’s made.

But suppose that matters are actually rather different. Suppose Shakespeare does have a worldview and a strong one. Suppose that his work, subtle as it is, brilliant as it is, is replete with values. Imagine that Shakespeare has designs upon us. But. But suppose that we cannot readily perceive those values because they are so much our own. We’ve become enclosed within them. We have, without quite knowing it, adopted most of Shakespeare’s vision of experience. (This is a very real sense in which Shakespeare has created the human.) What he fears and dismisses, we too fear and wish to dismiss. The world he renders is the world we live in—and he admits the reality of no other world. As bad as that world may be, it brings a sort of comfort to believe that it is the only possible world and that to ask for something more or something different out of life would be vain. Shakespeare seems to believe nothing because most of us, on some level below articulation, believe rather precisely what he did. Shakespeare’s beliefs, we might even say, have become our assumptions. He has created the most powerful literary mythology that the Western world has ever seen.

How does Shakespeare gather his amazing energy? Close to forty plays, then long poems, sonnets, collaborations, a career as an actor and a businessman: where does the vitality come from? It is not possible to say with certainty. But one might speculate that beyond his unparalleled inborn powers, the poet taps a broad collective force. He writes so much and so well in part because he writes with the concentrated energy of a world- transforming movement. He expresses—in a sense he is—the power of a rising middle class, a class tired of the arrogance of nobility but still fascinated by what is (or what might be) noble. This is a class that disdains high heroic honor but delights to see it rendered—and undone. Shakespeare also writes for and as a figure within a class that has little use for deep religion, the religion of compassion. His audience is Christian, but does not seem especially drawn to what Thomas à Kempis called “the imitation of Christ.” And he writes for a class with no real use for high thought—though Shakespeare is from time to time tempted by the ideal of contemplation.

Bloom says that Christopher Marlowe is Shakespeare’s primary precursor and that Shakespeare overcomes him easily. Not quite. Shakespeare’s primary precursor is not the fledgling genius Kit Marlowe, who dies young, murdered (as the legend goes) over “a great reckoning in a little room.” Shakespeare’s major influence is the most accomplished prior writer in the Western tradition, Homer. The war between the two is not primarily a war over originality. It is a war over vision. A significant proportion of Shakespeare’s work is an assault on Homer, The Iliad, and on what we have called Homeric values. At the same time, Shakespeare derives no little profit from the allure of the ultimate Homeric theme, the theme of honor. Repeatedly Shakespeare kills the Homeric hero (or his descendant) on the stage. Then he revives that hero again (so great is our fascination with him) for one sacrifice more in another brilliant play.

Shakespeare, as Jonson said, had “small Latin and less Greek.” He had not been to the university; he was no classical scholar. But Shakespeare did have access to George Chapman’s translation of Homer, which began appearing in 1598. He would have seen the opening books, and would have known a great deal about Homer’s depiction of Achilles. So too would Shakespeare have had access to other legendary sources about the Trojan War, including Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, on which he bases his most unrelentingly polemical play. No one who has read Shakespeare’s Troilus with any care can readily believe in Shakespearean negative capability.

Almost all lovers of Shakespeare’s art are united in one wish, the wish that Shakespeare did not write Titus Andronicus. Yet the play is his first tragedy, and it has a central part in his development. As the critic Katharine Maus says: “he returns to the Machiavellian villain in Richard III, to the urgency of revenge in Hamlet, to the old man unwisely relinquishing power in Lear, to questions of race and intermarriage in Othello and The Tempest, to important moments in Roman history in The Rape of Lucrece, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus and Anthony and Cleopatra” (Greenblatt, Norton Shakespeare, 371). All this is true, but Titus matters for our understanding of Shakespeare in a cruder and more central way. In this play Shakespeare begins his strife with heroic values. The image of Titus and the torments that Shakespeare visits upon him never seem to leave his mind. The degradation, torture, and disgrace of this, his first tragic protagonist, is a great Shakespearean resource, and the playwright will draw upon it again and again.

What is tragedy in its essence? A question with many answers, no doubt. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche speculates that tragedy is the drama of the rise, apotheosis, then the torture, dismemberment, and death of the deity. For the deity, substitute the hero—the vividly Homeric hero—and you will begin to approach the inner form of Shakespeare’s martial tragedies. And no Shakespearean hero is as brutally tortured and sacrificed onstage as Titus.

Titus has been daring or foolish enough to embrace the Roman code of honor as it has been passed down through Homer and his heroes. He has fought and fought well for Rome, much as Shakespeare will depict Coriolanus and Caesar and Antony as having done. When the play begins, he has lost twenty-one of his twenty-five sons to the wars. As Maus observes, “Titus … in his austere patriotism, his intolerance of dissent, his acute sense of personal and family honor, his traditional piety, and his ferocious commitment to patriarchal hierarchy … is a recurrent Roman personality type” (Greenblatt, Norton Shakespeare, 372). Titus is an exemplar of the peculiarly Roman version of the warrior ideal:

Rome, I have been thy soldier forty years,

And led my country’s strength successfully.

And buried one and twenty valiant sons,

Knighted in field, slain manfully in arms,

In right and service of their noble country.

(I.i.193–197)

Titus is at the end of his life and feels justified in proclaiming that he has fulfilled a high ideal. Titus is not Achillean: he does not seek glory for himself. He is—or wishes to be—a descendant of Hector.

Titus demands that the eldest son of Tamora, queen of the defeated Goths, be sacrificed to the memory of his own slain sons. The sacrifice, Titus claims, has the status of religious rite. It is intended to appease the suffering shadows of the departed, his sons killed in the wars, and so it must take place. Not long afterward, Titus kills one of his remaining sons for opposing him when he declares that Lavinia, his daughter, will marry the newly proclaimed emperor, Saturninus. Titus has—honorably, nobly—ceded his right to the imperial seat to Saturninus and intends to give him absolute loyalty, whatever the cost. When Titus’ son, Mutius, tries to block the marriage, Titus draws his sword and kills him. In Roman life, it was often considered an act of nobility to put the state or one’s conception of honor before family. Maus mentions Horatius, who killed his own sister for lamenting the death of her husband, whom Horatius killed in battle; Titus Manlius Torquatus, a general who had his own son executed for too eagerly anticipating an order to close on the enemy; and Appius Claudius, who murdered his daughter when her honor was undermined (Greenblatt, Norton Shakespeare, 372). Perhaps the best-known example of such action, though, is Lucius Junius Brutus, who killed his sons for siding with Tarquin. (Lucius turns up in Book VI of The Aeneid, where Virgil calls him “infelix.”) When Titus kills his son for defying the emperor’s wish, he is following in a long line of distinguished Romans, following their version of the code of honor.

After the first scenes, the play consists in the humiliation, the debasement, and finally the destruction of Titus. By the close of the tragedy, the once valiant, noble Roman is as depraved as the human fiends who torment him. His daughter is raped. She has her tongue cut out. Her hands are sawed off. The corrupt emperor arrests Titus’ oldest remaining son. Aaron the Moor, an enemy of Titus with connections at court, informs Titus that if he will cut off his own hand and send it to the emperor, the emperor might spare his son. Titus severs the hand and sends it as a gift. The emperor laughs and kills his son anyway. By the end of the play, Titus is a mad, disfigured animal. He kills the two men who have raped and mutilated his daughter and bakes them in a pie and invites their mother to eat it. She does. Then Titus kills Lavinia to spare her further shame, or so he says. Titus dies a self-justified but ruined man, his body maimed, his spirit destroyed.

Titus’ loyalty to the emperor and to the values of republican Rome doesn’t elevate him, not in the least. It debases him. In his own terms, Titus does virtually nothing wrong. But the play shows us time after time that everything Titus does, from murdering his own son to taking bloody revenge on Tamora to sawing his hand off in hopes of saving his son is completely, almost insanely, wrong. When the heroic code collides with the harsh exigencies of life, the result is more absurd than it is tragic. Titus dies not only debased, but also ridiculous. It is Titus’ commitment to the old Roman martial values that causes his destruction. His honor is his undoing.

Titus is Shakespeare’s tragic beginning, and he never travels as far away from its spirit as one might wish. In time, he will become a more sophisticated assassin of the heroic ideal. But the modus operandi will remain: the glorious must be debased. Then, in future plays, it will be brought back to life again to be debased once more.

That Shakespeare’s Othello is a figure with epic stature is beyond doubt. Those around Othello recognize him as a hero: when trouble arises, he is the one the citizens depend on to save Venice. But we also know that Othello is a hero because he tells us so. Homer sings the song of Achilles and Hector; Othello sings the song of himself. Early in the play he tells the story of how he wooed and won Desdemona by rendering the tale of his own life. He wrote a compressed epic poem about himself: his battles and triumphs, his privations, and his wanderings.

Like Odysseus, Othello describes the wonders he has seen and the amazing events that have befallen him. Othello is a heroic figure in a literary production of his own devising. So to Brabantio and then to his daughter Desdemona, Othello tells the tale

of most disastrous chances:

Of moving accidents by flood and field,

Of hair-breadth scapes i’th’ imminent deadly breach,

Of being taken by the insolent foe

And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence

And portance in my [travel’s] history;

(I.iii.134–139)

Othello finishes his story with a flourish, speaking of “the Cannibals that each [other] eat, / The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads / [Do grow] beneath their shoulders” (I.iii.143–145). At the end of Othello’s grandiloquent recitation, Desdemona expresses the wish that “heaven had made her such a man” (I.iii.163).

For Othello there is one central truth in life. It is the epic truth of Othello, the victor who has come through struggles, who is the safeguard of the city of Venice and the lover and husband of the beautiful Desdemona. He has no desire to inquire into the validity of his terms for self-rendering. The Othello we meet at the beginning of the play clearly believes that there is one truth (his) and a set of words that perfectly expresses that truth (his as well). He has no awareness of (or no use for) ambiguity, complexity, or irony. Not for him what Nietzsche calls a “perspectival” seeing, in which there is no central truth about a person or event, only multiple interpretations. Othello is immune to the idea that every human occurrence is charged and changed by virtue of being seen from a different angle. He is incapable of entertaining the idea that there is no disinterested, determining vantage. The notion that perspectives compete with each other and that one perspective ascends to something called truth because of the authority of the perceiver, or the force of institutional power that underwrites him, is not available to Othello.

Othello is a truth-teller. When he is accused of bewitching Desdemona, Othello confronts the elders of Venice with his reputation and his faith in his power to tell absolute truth. “My parts, my title, and my perfect soul / Shall manifest me rightly” (I.ii.31–32). But the world is changing, and truth is no longer so simp...