From Shakespeare to Existentialism

Essays on Shakespeare and Goethe; Hegel and Kierkegaard; Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud; Jaspers, Heidegger, and Toynbee

Walter A. Kaufmann

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691013671, 9780691064208
• eBook ISBN: 9780691216126
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

A classic book by one of the twentieth century's most innovative and adventurous thinkers

First published in 1959, From Shakespeare to Existentialism offers Walter Kaufmann's critical interpretations of some of the greatest minds in Western philosophy, religion, and literature. Few scholars can match Kaufmann's range of interests, from intellectual history and comparative religion to psychology, art, and architecture. In this illuminating and wide-ranging book, he traces the evolving Aristotelian ideal of the great-souled individual, showing how it was forgotten by medieval Christendom but recovered by Shakespeare and apotheosized by Nietzsche. An invaluable companion to his Critique of Religion and Philosophy, this volume presents Kaufmann at his most trailblazing, charting new directions in Western thought while providing bold perspectives on figures such as Goethe, Hegel, Rilke, and Freud.

1

SHAKESPEARE: BETWEEN SOCRATES AND EXISTENTIALISM

That history is at least often written from a point of view —and that the Nazis and the Communists developed different accounts, not only of the recent past, but of the whole development from ancient Greece to modern times—is now a commonplace. But that a warped and tendentious view of the present age and its relation to the past is current in our midst and more indebted to Christianity than to any political ideology requires showing.

It would be tedious to present a catalogue of noteworthy offenders and to argue, one by one, with each. And it would be silly to suppose that they conspired with each other. What the guilty writers share is not a platform or a set of dogmas but a deep dissatisfaction with the time in which it is their lot to live.

This widespread feeling, like many another, was formulated definitively by T. S. Eliot. He persuaded millions that the modern world is a waste land, and he proclaimed (in After Strange Gods) that “the damage of a lifetime, and of having been born in an unsettled society, cannot be repaired at the moment of composition.” Thousands of writers feel sorry for themselves, and some who do not greatly admire Eliot believed Gertrude Stein when she blamed society for her inability to write better and when she told them that they were a lost generation.

This self-pity and self-deception involve, among other things, a comprehensive distortion of history. It is not uncommon for modern writers to talk themselves and others into the fancy that our generation is unique in having lost the motherly protection of a firm religious faith, as if Socrates and Shakespeare had been reared with blinders and as if the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the nineteenth century were all contemporary inventions. Some turn such men as Socrates and Shakespeare into honorary Christians; others sob wistfully about Dante and Aquinas.

Godless existentialism is pictured as the philosophy of our age: the modern poet is not offered the fine edifice of Thomism, as Dante was; he is confronted, we are told, by a bleak doctrine that proclaims that man is not at home in the world but thrown into it, that he has no divine father and is abandoned to a life of care, anxiety, and failure that will end in death, with nothing after that. Poor modern man!

In fact, a disillusionment that used to be the prerogative of the few has become common property; and what exhilarated Socrates and Shakespeare, who were in a sense sufficient to themselves, is found depressing by men who lack the power to find meaning in themselves. It has almost become a commonplace that the modern artist has lost contact with his audience and that the public no longer supports him as in previous ages. In this connection one simply ignores Rembrandt and Mozart, Villon and Hölderlin, Cézanne and Van Gogh. Hundreds of works by modern artists hang in museums largely because the public is so eager to treat unconventional artists better than former ages did. But Rembrandt did not need a public: he had his work and himself. Many moderns are not satisfied with themselves and their work and blame their failures on the absence of a cultured audience.

There have never been so many writers, artists, and philosophers. Any past age that could boast of more than one outstanding sculptor or philosopher the whole world over and of more than three good writers and painters wins our admiration as unusually productive; and many an age had none of great distinction. It is not the public that is at fault today but the excess of pretenders. But instead of recognizing their own lack of excellence, many resort to styles that will allow them to charge their lack of success to the obtuseness of the public.

Rembrandt had the ability to maintain a great reputation but preferred to paint in his own way, saying in effect, as Shakespeare’s Coriolanus says when he is exiled: “I banish you. . . . There is a world elsewhere.”

Shakespeare came to terms with the obtuseness of his public: he gave his pearls a slight odor of the sty before he cast them. Far from cheapening his art, he turned the challenge of a boorish, lecherous, and vulgar audience to advantage and increased the richness and the subtlety of tragedy so vastly that age cannot wither it, nor custom stale its infinite variety.

A stupid public need not always be a curse. It can be a challenge that turns the creator to search within or that leads him to amuse himself by treating his contemporaries to jokes at which they laugh without understanding more than is needed to keep them entertained. Few genuine artists care to be fully understood or esteem those who are profuse in their appreciations. Praise is wanted mainly as a consolation for one’s failures.

Some modern writers with intellectual pretensions deal with sex and use four-letter words to register a protest and to get their books denounced, either to insure their success or to excuse their failure. Their preoccupations are with success or failure and with sex as a means to one or the other.

Shakespeare dealt with sex and used four-letter words as a concession to his audience and for humor’s sake, not to antagonize and not from boldness and least of all because he had nothing else to offer, but incidentally as one more element in the complexity of his creations. Shakespeare’s poetry is the poetry of abundance. There is laughter in it and despair but no resentment or self-pity. He was not even intent on fame and did not see to it that his works were painstakingly committed to print. He knew the view that man is thrown into the world, abandoned to a life that ends in death, with nothing after that; but he also knew self-sufficiency. He had the strength to face reality without excuses and illusions and did not even seek comfort in the faith in immortality. In his last play, The Tempest, which is so fanciful on the face of it, this complete freedom from fancy gains consummate expression:

. . . like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve;

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

We have been told that Shakespeare was a Christian. Some say he was a Protestant; others, he was a Catholic. Some say that he extolled the Christian virtues. Faith? Hardly. Hope? Certainly not. But love, of course. In the end, the whole suggestion is reducible to the absurd assumption that a man who celebrates love must have been a Christian. Goethe’s Iphigenie, Sophocles’ Antigone, Hosea, and the Song of Songs remind us of the baselessness of this Christian imperialism that would like to monopolize love.

Shakespeare is closer to Goethe than he is to Luther, Aquinas, or the Gospels—and still closer to Sophocles. Cordelia and Desdemona are feebler sisters of Antigone, and Shakespeare shares the Greek tragedian’s tragic world view: even without moral transgressions human beings sometimes find themselves in situations in which guilt is unavoidable, and what is wanted at that point is neither faith nor hope but courage. As Shaw says in Heartbreak House: “Courage will not save you. But it will show that your souls are still alive.” There is no hope and no redemption after death. Life is its own reward; and if death should be the wages of sin, it still need not be ignominious. Courage will not save you, but there is a difference between death and death.

The word “Christian” has so many meanings that the absence of faith and hope from Shakespeare’s world view may not make him un-Christian in the eyes of those who cannot conceive of any excellence that is not Christian. Nor is there any point in claiming that Shakespeare, or anybody else, was “un-Christian” in all senses of that word. But he celebrated this world in a most un-Christian manner: its beauties and its grossness; love between the sexes, even in its not particularly subtle forms; and the glory of all that is transitory, including intense emotion. Suffering and despair were to his mind not revelations of the worthlessness of this world but experiences that, if intense enough, were preferable to a more mediocre state. “Ripeness is all,” not faith, hope, even charity, but that maturity of which love, disillusionment, and knowledge born of suffering are a few important facets.

2

They that have power to hurt and will do none,

That do not do the thing they most do show,

Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,

Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:

They rightly do inherit heavens graces

And husband nature’s riches from expense,

They are the lords and owners of their faces,

Others, but stewards of their excellence.

The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,

Though to itself it only live and die,

But if that flower with base infection meet,

The basest weed outbraves his dignity:

For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;

Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

This sonnet, XCIV, celebrates Shakespeare’s un-Christian ideal, which was also the ideal of Nietzsche, who expressed it, not quite three centuries later, in the chapter “On Those Who Are Sublime” in Zarathustra. Those who find Shakespeare’s first two lines puzzling will find an excellent commentary in Nietzsche:

One who was sublime I saw today, one who was solemn, an ascetic of the spirit; oh, how my soul laughed at his ugliness! . . . As yet he has not overcome his deed. . . . As yet his torrential passion has not become still in beauty. Verily, it is not in satiety that his desire shall grow silent and be submerged, but in beauty. Gracefulness is part of the graciousness of the great-souled. . . . There is nobody from whom I want beauty as much as from you who are powerful: let your kindness be your final self-conquest. Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.

In a note published posthumously in The Will to Power (§983), Nietzsche compressed this vision into half a dozen words: “the Roman Caesar with Christ’s soul.” Shakespeare, too, celebrates the man who has claws but does not use them. Or, as he put it in Measure for Measure (II, ii):

O, it is excellent

To have a giant’s strength; but it is tyrannous

To use it like a giant.

In a good book on The Sense of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Edward Hubler tells us that “On first reading the [ninety-fourth] sonnet, we shall, of course, notice the irony of the first eight lines. . . . It is preposterous on the face of things to proclaim as the inheritors of heaven’s graces those who are ‘as stone.’ It can be other than ironical only to the cynic. . . .”

What seems “preposterous” to a Christian reader need not have struck a Roman or a Spartan as unseemly. We need only to recall some of the heroes of republican Rome—the first Brutus or Scaevola. Caesar, too, was one of those “who, moving others, are themselves as stone.” Notice the difference between his affair with Cleopatra and poor Antony’s. Shaw underlined this point: his Caesar knows he has forgotten something as he is about to leave Egypt, but cannot remember what it is. And then he realizes that he almost left without saying goodbye to Cleopatra. The historical Caesar literally moved Cleopatra to Rome, without letting her interfere with his work.

Caesar, to cite Nietzsche’s great tribute to Goethe from his Twilight of the Idols, “might dare to afford the whole range and wealth of being natural, being strong enough for such freedom.” And not only Caesar and Goethe but Shakespeare himself might well be characterized in Nietzsche’s words as “the man of tolerance, not from weakness but from strength, because he knows how to use to his advantage even that of which the average nature would perish.”

Poetic liberties that would have ruined a lesser poet are used to advantage by Shakespeare, whose moral tolerance does more to educate the heart than a whole library of sermons. And Shakespeare, no less than Caesar, was one of those “that have power to hurt and will do none” and “who, moving others, are themselves as stone.” Cassius was irritated by Caesar’s excessive power to hurt without appreciating that Caesar had no mind to use his power like a giant. And how much hurt could Shakespeare have inflicted with his rarely equalled power to express himself! Those romantic souls who would rather not believe that Shakespeare, the poet, moving others, was himself as stone, might well recall that Shakespeare was an actor, too.

The interpretation that insists that the first eight lines must be ironical depends on the strange assertion that “The first line is tauntingly obscure, and an understanding of the poem cannot proceed without an interpretation of it.” The second half of that sentence is true enough, but the first line is not at all obscure. As Edward Dowden understands it rightly ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface (1979)
• Preface (1960)
• Preface (1959)
• 1. Shakespeare: Between Socrates and Existentialism
• 2. Dialogue with a Critic
• 3. Shakespeare Versus Goethe
• 4. Goethe and the History of Ideas
• 5. Goethe’s Faith and Faust’s Redemption
• 6. Goethe Versus Romanticism
• 7. The Hegel Myth and Its Method
• 8. The Young Hegel and Religion
• 9. Hegel: Contribution and Calamity
• 10. Kierkegaard
• 11. How Nietzsche Revolutionized Ethics
• 12. Nietzsche and Rilke
• 13. Art, Tradition, and Truth
• 14. Philosophy Versus Poetry
• 15. Jaspers’ Relation to Nietzsche
• 16. Freud
• 17. Heidegger’s Castle
• 18. German Thought After World War II
• 19. Toynbee and Super-History
• 20. Toynbee and Religion
• Bibliography
• Index