Views: 7
Wittgenstein claims that Shakespeares work has created in the corpus of his entire work a world and language that is unique and his work cannot be compared with any other artist. He does not directly address the problem of whether Shakespeare is a Philosophical playwright. We have maintained that Shakespeares on-stage spectacles have transcendental and metaphysical intent relating to our life-worlds and that this intent is communicated via underlying aesthetic ideas. His symbolic uses of language and images originate in both the realms of the Metaphysics of Nature and the Metaphysics of Morals which accounts for why he is able to speak to audiences all over the world and down the centuries with a “universal voice”.
Symbolism, like Myth, Paul Ricoeur claims, reaches back to the origins of everything and simultaneously forward to the end or telos of everything. Symbolic language is also encountered in the arena of religious confessions which man uses to express the evil that has been in his soul. The issues raised by the uses of symbolic language can be both religious and philosophical, but in the latter case, insofar as our definition of Philosophy is concerned, the interpretation of religious language must occur within the bounds of categorical judgement and in accordance with the principles of reason.
Philosophy since Kant, focuses on Knowledge and the Freedom of the Will which are themes of vital importance for the human form of life that present themselves at the expense of the question of the nature of our relation to some putative superior Being. Practical Philosophy was of fundamental importance for the Ancient Greek trinity of Philosophers(Socrates, Plato, Aristotle), but during the dark ages this emphasis diminished in importance until the era of the Enlightenment and Kants Critical Philosophy which demanded that our relationship to Religion be solely within the bounds of reason.
The soliloquy in Shakespeares Tragedies and Histories does on occasion appear confessional, but this is because of the nature of the symbolism of evil which seeks to bring a blind awareness of the experience of evil into the light of discourse and indicate our relation to the realm of the sacred. This is of fundamental importance for the consciousness of fault and guilt, which might otherwise not occur. The confession occurs as part of a process of self-actualisation and as part of the task of “knowing oneself” set for humanity by the Ancient Greek oracles. Catharsis of our unnecessary and sometimes unlawful desires and anxieties, Freud teaches us, is an important aspect of the process of self-exploration. We are here on the territory of the confluence of the holy and the just which Socrates was confronted with in Platos dialogue “Euthyphro”.
Plato argues in his collective dialogues that whilst all gods agree to the thesis that it is just to punish unjust acts not all would agree with viewing Socrates’ attempt to introduce Philosophy to the Athenians as a punishable unholy act. This priority of Justice over the Holy is also evident in Shakespeares Historical and Tragic works.
Guilt can have both sacred and secular aspects and determining mans guilt does not require that we wait for a confession. Guilty behaviour also possesses objective external characteristics that can be determined in public forums such as courts of law. Equally a verdict of guilty must be subject to the principles of justice and be accompanied by a just or fair punishment. Kant, however, integrates the secular and the holy by characterising his good will as a holy will.
There can be many different accounts of the relation of the body to the soul in Religion, including the Orphic doctrine of the soul being imprisoned in the body, which of course predated the Christian view of the human psuché. This Orphic view, which Plato flirted with, is fundamentally dualistic and can lie behind the idea of solipsism in its various forms. Shakespeare certainly used Orphic images in his characters speeches, e.g. in Hamlet, Macbeth and Lear, but it is hylomorphic principles that are steering the aesthetic ideas of Shakespeare. Shakespeare indeed is more concerned with the way in which one expresses the inner by means of the outer in order to bring about the harmony of ones human powers. This is a view that transcends the Orphic view of the body as a prison.
Shakespeare uses the principle of noncontradiction in the design of his plots, in particular the idea of theoretical and practical contradictions which would include the thesis of their being an afterlife and also the thesis that the unjust man could be happy. This latter would make life in a polis almost impossible to regulate since the principle of punishment for unjust acts must be valid if the polis is not to collapse into a state of ruin and destruction. Indeed one of Platos key dialogues: “The Last days of Socrates” is a lengthy elaboration upon the practical contradiction of being condemned to death for just actions.
In our modern secular world the project of civilisation building is a process best pictured as a journey along a long and winding road lined with multifarious texts and aesthetic objects including the texts of Philosophers aiming to build a De Civitate Terrana. Also lining the road are those texts aiming to build a De Civitate Dei. Kants Philosophy alone permits us to integrate these seemingly conflicting aims in his notion of Kingdom of Ends where the inhabitants enjoy a cosmopolitan form of existence in which Faith, Reason, Knowledge, Justice and Human Rights all play decisive integrating roles.
Shakespeares poetic vision anticipates this Kantian project in an aesthetic mode, retaining the melancholic prophesy of the oracles relating to mans hubris and the serious risk that his whole project of building a civilisation will end in ruin and destruction.
Freud’s view is perhaps even more melancholic and expresses itself in an iconoclastic view of the historical role of religion in our civilisations. Freud’s self-declared God of “Logos”, on the surface, appears more critical of the Religious project than Kant but we ought to recall that Freud claimed a significant Kantian influence, so perhaps appearances may be deceiving.
Freud focusses on religious rituals and practices and sees in them pathological characteristics. He sees a resemblance to those obsessive rituals his patients engaged in while responding to the anxiety present in their life-worlds. Religion seeks to “envelop” us in a web of childish emotion which has its origin the long childhood of man, where a natural longing for protection by a superior being plays an important part in the development of the human psuché. Ideals that emerge in such environments, Freud argues, will be rooted in anxiety and primitive wish-fulfillments.
Religious Obsession is a reaction-formation to the thesis that mans soul is flawed by both his own sins and sins of his ancestors eons ago. The practices are partly rooted in a narcissistic overevaluation of the potency of his powers which may lie behind the unrealistic wish for a life after death. The Orphic idea of a soul imprisoned in a body may also be paying a role in the ideal of the afterlife.
Freud’s Logos considers the afterlife an illusion—a pathological idealistic wish. Freud’s hylomorphic psychoanalysis, however, imply decisive arguments against all forms of dualism including the Orphic doctrines.
The Universal claim that “all men are mortal” is but one thesis embedded in a knowledge system which envisages in our “projected” images of heaven and hell, the pathological operation of defence mechanisms related to omnipotent desires and anxiety.
Freuds theory of psycho-sexual development is conceived of hylomorphically in terms of the matter-form distinction. Physical transformations of our body can, for example fundamentally change the original matter beyond recognition, e.g. there is nothing left of the infants bone structure by the time the child reaches maturity. This is not the case with psychical transformations, Freud argues. In the case of psychological and mental development, the earlier stages are preserved alongside the later formations. The biological core of these psychic processes is rooted in a long childhood characterised by a long period of helplessness and longing for the feelings of safety and belongingness. The challenge that the Freudian Logos faces is whether the instincts and their vicissitudes can function in an environment of discontentment brought about by the sublimation of the instincts .
The omnipotence that is internalised in the process of civilisation building is partly related to mans considerable achievements in both science and technology, which have even resulted in a significantly longer life than was the case in Kants or Shakespeares time. Our natural world has been transformed into a technically constructed artefactually based world. What remains to be done in this process of transformation, however, is the stage of forming a Culture or a morally steered whole from the technical concrete jungles we now inhabit. This environment is anathema to the aesthetic ideals we inherited from both Ancient Greece and the Renaissance, but since that time there has been a collapse in our faith-based belief system which in turn left a vacuum at the heart of our human life-world. Eliot responded to this vacuum with the poetry of his “Wasteland” and many Philosophers responded to the absence of the divine in our lives (Deus Absconditis) in more theoretical terms. Throughout this process, however, Shakespeares works have persisted occupying a significant role in our societies, manifesting the power of aesthetic ideas to resist those processes seeking to upend the moral order in the world. The awe and admiration once reserved for our imaginary gods is now reserved for certain aesthetic objects and certain significant Philosophical texts in the hope that the vacuum will eventually be filled with a man that knows himself.