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Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama Summary:By Tzachi Zamir
Hamlet tells Horatio that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy. In Double Vision, philosopher and literary critic Tzachi Zamir argues that there are more things in Hamlet than are dreamt of--or at least conceded--by most philosophers. Making an original and persuasive case for the philosophical value of literature, Zamir suggests that certain important philosophical insights can be gained only through literature. But such insights cannot be reached if literature is deployed merely as an aesthetic sugaring of a conceptual pill. Philosophical knowledge is not opposed to, but is consonant with, the literariness of literature. By focusing on the experience of reading literature as literature and not philosophy, Zamir sets a theoretical framework for a philosophically oriented literary criticism that will appeal both to philosophers and literary critics. Double Vision is concerned with the philosophical understanding induced by the aesthetic experience of literature. Literary works can function as credible philosophical arguments--not ones in which claims are conclusively demonstrated, but in which claims are made plausible. Such claims, Zamir argues, are embedded within an experiential structure that is itself a crucial dimension of knowing. Developing an account of literature's relation to knowledge, morality, and rhetoric, and advancing philosophical-literary readings of Richard III, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, and King Lear, Zamir shows how his approach can open up familiar texts in surprising and rewarding ways. Acknowledgments ix Introduction xi PART I: PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM IN THEORY 1 The Epistemological Basis of Philosophical Criticism 3 The Moral Basis of Philosophical Criticism 20 Philosophical Criticism and Contemporary Literary Studies 44 PART II: PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM IN PRACTICE 63 A Case of Unfair Proportions 65 Upon One Bank and Shoal of Time 92 Love Stories 112 Making Love 129 On Being Too Deeply Loved 151 Doing Nothing 168 King Lear’s Hidden Tragedy 183 Appendix A: A Note on Lear’s Motivation 205 Appendix B: A Note on Shakespeare and Rhetoric 211 Works Cited 213 Index 225 Introduction Hatred, it seems, cannot be bought. They try, several times, doubling and tripling the money owed. But he persists in refusing. No amount of money will buy Shylock. In this he stands alone. Within all other relationships around him, emotions are inseparable from financial gain: Portia and Jessica are rich—not merely fair—a fact that never escapes their lovers or their own perceptions of these lovers. Male friendship too—the idealized commitments between Bassanio and Antonio—is contaminated by financial dependency. Hatred alone achieves purity in the moral cosmos of The Merchant of Venice, the only emotion that will remain distinct from prudence, the one emotion that they will insist on not understanding (Bassanio: “Do all men kill the things they do not love?” Shylock: “Hates any man the thing he would not kill?”). Knowingly going to trial with a “losing suit”—and suppose that the law authorizes him to kill Antonio, what then?—turns this trial into a presentation of something that Venice is unwilling to hear (Duke: “Upon my power, I may dismiss this court!”). Shylock, the dramatized oxymoron of a money-shunning Jew, will soon disappear, to everyone’s relief, including our own. But not before he registers a complaint that he refuses to express directly (“I will not answer that!”; “I am not bound to please thee with my answers!”). What is Shylock’s complaint? Law is conceived in The Merchant of Venice as more than means for adjudicating between conflicting claims or enforcing norms. Like theologized money (“my Christian ducats”), law is a vehicle for communication between a Jewish outside and a Christian nexus. Shylock’s deployment of law thus parallels similar attempts by marginalized characters to trespass into formally impenetrable power structures (a disguised woman attempting to infiltrate the masculine world of law; another woman trying to use money so as to buy her way out of Judaism). The confrontation between Shylock and Portia within the context of the law thereby presents two symbolic outsiders who turn the law into a means of contact: Shylock directly and Portia through disguising herself as a man, thus gaining momentary power and agency, and breaking out of the passive role of an exquisite trophy in which she is cast at the beginning of the action. The outcome, read politically, is unsurprising: the play allows for a successful penetration into power only indirectly, momentarily, under camouflage, whereas when it is explicit and unveiled (“The Jew”) it will be annihilated financially and spiritually. Within this legal context, Shylock will put himself on record. His resistance is subtle, since law itself seems to be presented in the play as a majestic force that will not be manipulated, and one that would ultimately cohere with justice by managing to block a fiendish plea. Law appears to be a legitimating marvel: it includes religious values—the numerous appeals to Christian-colored virtues such as valuing mercy over justice, the latter being a mere cardinal virtue to which the morality of “the Jew” is limited. But when religion cannot suffice, law generates a technical vocabulary of its own that guarantees that justice will be done. The Merchant of Venice thus plays up the anxiety of a rupture formed between law and justice, but also appears to reinforce a vision in which both happily seem to overlap. What Shylock can hope to create, is a momentary gap between Venice’s self-image and its fantasies of moral coherence (“I stand for judgment. Answer: Shall I have it?”). Wanting to be a Jessica in the beginning of the action and to merge happily with his surrounding (why else would he lend out money gratis to Antonio when he has no reason to think that Antonio will be unable to return the debt?), he finally moves into acceptance of his alienation, and a desire to place a wedge between various constituents that form Venice’s pride. He succeeds and their jubilance over Portia’s technical solution in effect reduces them into relieved sophists. His hatred will be contained and then dismissed, but it will not go away. For it is precisely through the monstrosity of his suit, its horrid colorfulness and self-destructive irrationality, that Shylock will force his story to be told and retold, read and acted. Over and over, the play will generate the spectacle of distilled hatred, an alien’s hatred, whetting his knife with his scales in hand, being the villainous dog they always said he was. Unlike Jessica, whom we tend to recall only upon rereading the play, Shylock will never elope: he is in our minds for good. It is at this point that questions about general meanings—philosophical questions—become unavoidable. Villainy, justice, mercy, suffering— notions that surface in any detailed response to the play—demand clarification. How to strip away the hypocritical from the genuine, and how to assess the merit of that which presents itself as the genuine? Do we learn anything from this play about the mechanics of alienation and response to it? And if we do, can such knowledge be reapplied? Such concerns constitute much of our response to the play. They always did. Yet it is precisely here that various approaches within contemporary literary studies and within philosophy are prompted to hold up “No Entry” signs. Philosophically attuned criticism, it seems, ignores weighty I N T R O D U C T I O N xii considerations. When it does not imply aesthetic or political naiveté, philosophical reflection on literary works is simply useless: an unnecessary detour that appeals to the bookish, but is pointless for those who seek philosophical understanding. This book is about philosophy and literature. If its philosophical argument is correct, it is also about epistemology and moral philosophy. If its literary readings are persuasive, it is also about the value of literature. The primary ground for choosing Shakespeare is the gratifying insights that his writings yield when brought into close dialogue with philosophical concerns. Showing that these insights are not divorced from the plays’ literary merits but rather constitute them is one of the principal aims of this book. The secondary reason for choosing Shakespeare is that his work exemplifies literary excellence. The uncontested aesthetic value of his plays enables investigation into what makes up that value without the need to prove first that it exists. After years of relative neglect, debates about the relations between philosophy and literature were reopened in the 1980s, most notably in the work of Martha Nussbaum and Stanley Cavell. Many have formulated excellent critiques of these pioneering works. Aesthetes worry that philosophical readings are reductive and ignore literary merits. Others dislike the way philosophical interpretations plead for one cause or another, thereby obliterating the borders between philosophy and education. Many distrust the chiseling out of general meanings from their material, ideological, or historical context. Such critiques require a fundamental reworking of the underlying premises and interpretive procedures through which the general (or the potentially reapplicable) is to be derived from a literary work. This book attempts to set a theoretical framework for philosophically oriented literary criticism, one that responds to the concerns of both literary critics and philosophers. It also unfolds a thesis regarding the question of method in philosophy. The introductory chapters address the two very different disciplinary frameworks and motivations of philosophy and literature. I argue that an integrated “philosophical criticism”—my label for philosophical readings of literary works—can substantially compensate for some limitations of nonliterary philosophical argumentation. Philosophical criticism can also answer some institutional, professional, and personal worries that are now voiced with greater urgency as the turn toward a cultural focus in literary criticism is being reassessed. Readers who come to this book primarily as “philosophers” or as “Shakespeareans” will I N T R O D U C T I O N xiii probably find it more rewarding to access its general argument through the parts that directly address their different professional agendas as I conceive of them—and to a certain extent simplify them—in these introductory essays. Separate access routes need not, I hope, hide from view deeper impasses in the philosophy-literature question that arise when disciplinary concerns are jointly considered. For example, explaining the cognitive gains of literary as opposed to non-literary articulations of the same philosophical insight will typically draw the philosophical critic into a roughly formalist stance. Irreducible “aesthetic experience” will strongly suggest itself. Culturally oriented Shakespeareans will worry that this solution is conceptually artificial and politically naive. Making sense of philosophical insight as part of reading literature need not ignore the concerns of many contemporary culturally oriented literary critics. The introductory parts of this book outline and defend a theoretical possibility that seeks to further these critics’ cause. The readings that follow the introduction exemplify this possibility and show how philosophical criticism can draw out rewarding and unfamiliar aspects of well-known plays. It is not my aim in the studies of the various plays simply to make the same theoretical points in different settings, varying my arguments only insofar as I apply them to Othello instead of Richard III. Instead, I try to highlight different aspects of the overarching theory so as to open up the fuller potential of this kind of criticism. The theoretical overlap that remains is intended to emphasize the shared core of the readings and to promote the metaphilosophical argument of the book as a whole regarding intellectual attunement and the meaning of understanding. Philosophically oriented Shakespeare criticism in the past tended to look for signs of a philosophical thesis within the plays. Recent work has wisely given up this attempt. And yet, this book has a close affinity with the older, philosophically disposed Shakespeareans. A return to the ancients is hardly my aim. Yet, stripped of some inadequate trappings, the best moral critics of the late nineteenth century, as well as some of the great critics of the twentieth century that preceded the cultural turn, still offer valuable insights in a philosophically oriented dialogue about Shakespeare. The book will hopefully unsettle simplified distinctions between timely and obsolete criticism and may thus be discomfiting to those who relate to Shakespeare through rigid agendas. The book will avoid traditional formulations of debates over the moral dimension of Shakespeare’s plays. The merit (or lack of merit) of Shakespeare’s supposed indifference to morality, the forces that make up the I N T R O D U C T I O N xiv ethical world he creates, the morality implicit in his characterization—all such issues will be disregarded. Shakespeare’s own real or implied moral beliefs, to which all these formulations ultimately relate, will be set aside. My goal will be to communicate with the moral potential of Shakespeare’s plays in a way I see as rewarding. Convergence between what I take this potential to be and what Shakespeare may have inserted into his work is by no means ruled out (I regard such convergence, if it can be demonstrated, as a strength of the reading, and I will sometimes argue for it through source-play comparisons). But such overlap is in no way essential to the validity of the readings. Elizabethan moral thought in general will also be played down. I will sometimes relate ideas to traditions of thought that may have reached Shakespeare, but I shall do so only to dispel a sense of anachronism, a suspicion that particular thoughts in such texts could not have been formulated. Causal connections between abstract theses and Shakespeare’s mind will not be suggested. Rhetoricians form the third group of readers I intend to address, particularly by exploring and furthering criticisms of the Cartesian and Ramist intellectual ideals that still dominate Anglo-American philosophy. Chapter two makes explicit the ways in which philosophical criticism takes up the call of Cicero and Quintilian for an integrative form of thought, giving this possibility substantial content. Early-modern rhetoric, with which Shakespeare was acquainted, was familiar with this integrative ideal. Justifying it philosophically requires reflecting on those older approaches in terms of a distinction—usually left unarticulated in Elizabethan rhetorical texts as well as in their Latin sources—between psychological effectiveness and argumentative justification. “Rhetoric,” as this book will develop the notion, makes room for this crucial distinction, specifying relations between effectiveness and justification that will constitute my proposed account of understanding. In what follows, I claim that by allowing the two distinct outlooks of philosophy and literature to interplay when some issues are at stake there emerges a kind of thought—a form of double vision—that opens up important modes of understanding. Please select one mirror to download
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NEWER EBOOKSOLDER EBOOKSSponsored LinksDouble Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama Keywordsplays readings philosophically venice understanding zamir oriented critics concerns theoretical insights hatred aesthetic justice works claims rhetoric morality portia rewarding philosophical criticism zamir argues tzachi zamir understanding bassanio achieves purity moral cosmos remain distinct shylock hates court shylock enforcing normsDouble Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama download copyrightThis site does not store Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama on its server. We only index and link to Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately. |
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