o Shakespeare's philosophy

Shakespeare is often commended for his "timelessness,"

rightly so, but of course he also wrote at a particular
period in history--the end of the sixteenth century and
the beginning of the seventeenth. For my purposes, the
most relevant fact about this period is that it precedes
the Scientific Revolution, so that science was in its
infancy in Shakespeare's day. Very little that we now take
for granted was understood--in astronomy, physics,
chemistry, and biology. The achievements of Descartes,
Leibniz, Galileo, Newton, Locke, Boyle, and other heroes
of the Renaissance were still in the future. The laws of
mechanics were unknown; disease was a mystery;
genetics was unheard of. Intelligent people believed in
witchcraft, ghosts, fairies, astrology, and all the rest.
Eclipses were greeted with alarmed superstition.
Scientific method was struggling to gain a foothold
(Francis Bacon was laying the groundwork). The
conception of the world as a set of intelligible law-
governed causes was at most a distant dream. The most
advanced learning available came from the ancients;
intellectually things hadn't changed much in two
thousand years. When Shakespeare looked up into the
night sky, he had very little idea of what he was seeing,
and the earth was still generally considered the center of
the universe. Nor was much known about the extent of
the earth and of other cultures (though global exploration
had already begun). It can be hard to remember this
when we are confronted by Shakespeare's sophistication
in other matters. Nothing much was known about the
natural world then, and this was known to be so;
uncertainty and ignorance seemed man's natural lot. To
give one striking example: so little was understood about
the plague that devastated Europe in the late sixteenth
century that orders were given in London to exterminate
all cats and dogs--which were in fact the best enemies
ofthe true carriers of the germs responsible, rats.It was
also a period of religious upheaval in which the source of
divine authority was very much in doubt. The Protestant
Reformation had challenged Catholicism, and the
question of how we might know God was intensely real
(you could die for taking the wrong view).
Shouldbelievers rely on their own unaided reason to know
God's ways, or must they depend ultimately on church
dogma? How to interpret Scripture was a vexed question,
with a great deal turning on it. Thus there was a strong
interest in knowledge and how it might be acquired, but
notvery much that seemed to qualify as beyond doubt. It
was an age of uncertainty, following a period (the Middle
Ages) of dogmatism, and preceding the age in which
human reason seemed to achieve undreamed-of
understanding of the universe (the Age of Enlightenment
in which we still live). It is fair, I think, to characterize
Shakespeare's time as transitional--as one kind of
authority (the church, monarchy) began to give way to
another (science and human reason, a new social order).
We might say, simplifying somewhat, that Shakespeare
was "between
cultures." Questioning is the spirit of this period, and a
sense of shifting foundations. It would not be surprising,
then, to find doubt and uncertainty running through
Shakespeare's plays. And these aporias would run deep:
the nature of man, his place in the cosmos, the very
possibility of knowledge. There are three areas in which I
think this spirit of uncertainty pervades the plays:
knowledge and skepticism; the nature of the self; and the
character of causality. I shall consider these in turn.
Knowledge and Skepticism Aristotle begins his
Metaphysics with the terse sentence: "All men naturally
desire knowledge." That sounds like a truism, but if it is, it
is a truism with profound consequences. There are three
parts to it: that it is in man's nature to desire
knowledge,part of man's essence, a condition of his
being; that it is natural for man todesire knowledge, to
seek it, to yearn for it, to value it highly; andthat this
desire is for knowledge--not just belief or probable
opinion or faith. We could paraphrase Aristotle as saying
that human beings have an innate propensity to seek and
value true justified beliefs--andwhat they value above all
is certain knowledge. We desire solid, reliable knowledge,
a state of epistemological perfection, not false beliefs and
shaky inferences. Why we desire such a thing is a further
question, but Aristotle is surely right that we do.
Ignorance is something we scorn and try to avoid. An
enormous part of Western civilization (and others too) is
founded on this desire--we are a knowledge-hungry
species--and no teacher ever got very far by promising to
fill you with error and groundless opinion. Men indeed
naturally desire knowledge. It was Plato who made the
desire for genuine knowledge a central component of the
good life. His whole philosophy is based on the premise
that we need to penetrate the clouds of appearance and
acquire authentic knowledge of reality. The parable of the
cave is a warning that knowledge is not easily obtained,
and that distortions and error are not readily detected by
the knowing mind. ( Still, Plato firmly believed that
knowledge was possible, that our epistemological desires
can be fulfilled: we really can attain the desirable state of
knowing truths about the world. In Plato's system, the
pinnacle of such knowledge is knowledge of the Forms--
those timeless, abstract, unchanging entities that Plato
took to be the most real of things. The ultimate aim of life
was to come to know these resplendent Forms-- truth,
justice, beauty, mathematics. Aristotle had a different
view of what constitutes ideal knowledge--closer to the
empirical science of today- but he too did not doubt that
knowledge is possible, though the road to it may be
arduous. For these founding thinkers, our desires are
capable of fulfillment.Socrates, the "gadfly," also valued
knowledge, but he was acutely sensitive to impostors to
knowledge. He demonstrated time and again how people
overestimate their capacity for knowledge. The Socratic
lesson is that ignorance is a lot more prevalent than we
suppose—that we really don't know as much as we think
we do. Thus Socrates advises caution and the suspension
of belief; we shouldn't let our strong desire to know fool
us into misconstruing erroneous belief for real knowledge.
We are chronic epistemological overreachers, according
to Socrates, always taking ourselves to be
epistemologically richer than we really are. We can't even
define our most familiar terms--such as "just" and
"good"--let alone aspire to plumb the secrets of the
universe. Socrates counseled epistemological modesty.It
was left to the Greek skeptics, notably Sextus Empiricus,
to pushthe Socratic lesson to its conclusion: that
knowledge, however desirable, is simply not within our
grasp. Plato's entire philosophy therefore founders, since
it is just not possible to know anything
worthwhile, let alone the nature of those impossibly
transcendent Forms. Man does not have the capacity to
satisfy his epistemological desires--he is too prone to
illusion, error, and uncertainty. We cannot be sure that
our senses are not deceiving us, or that our reasoning
faculties yield sound inferences, even whether we are
dreaming. Man is a small and feeble creature,
epistemologically blighted, and not able to comprehend
the universe. At its extreme, such skepticism claims that
no belief has any greater justification than any other
belief, sothat belief itself is an irrational act (this is the
school known as Pyrrhonism). The skeptics accepted
Aristotle's dictum but argued that it is in man's nature
also to be thwarted in his desire for knowledge. What has
this potted history of Greek thought about knowledge got
to do with Shakespeare? First, these worries about
knowledge, in the air since the time of the Greeks, would
attain a new level of intensity in Shakespeare's day, given
the growing awareness of how little human beings knew
of the world. The questions were being asked--about what
eclipses are, about what causes the plague, about
witchcraft and astrology--but no clear answers seemed
forthcoming. The crisis in church authority, the split
between traditional Catholicism and the Protestant
Reformation, in which the possibility of our knowledge of
God's will became a subject for debate, only added to this
sense of being epistemologically at sea. The ancient
skeptics seemed to be roundly vindicated. Shakespeare
would have absorbed these currents of
thought; and they are manifest in several of his most
important plays, particularly A Midsummer Night's
Dream, Hamlet, and Othello. But, secondly, there is a
more specific reason to link Shakespeare to skepticism:
Michel Montaigne. Montaigne was born in 1533,
Shakespeare in 1564, and the French aristocrat was a
widely celebrated author when the English commoner
was composing his most famous plays. Moreover, it has
been established by scholars that Shakespeare had
studied and absorbed Montaigne's writings (what had
Shakespeare not absorbed?): there is, for example, a
virtual quotation from an essay of Montaigne's in The
Tempest. Montaigne was especially noted for his eloquent
revival of Greek skepticism, particularly in his long essay
"An Apology for Raymond Sebond." Here he dwells with
some relish on the limitations of man, his feeble senses,
his preposterous overconfidence, his desire not just to
obey God, but to imitate Him. In Montaigne's view, man is
but a paltry animal, inferior to many animals in his acuity
and good sense, far too fond of his Reason (John Locke, a
century later, would argue much the same point). So
Shakespeare would be exposed to full-blown
philosophical skepticism in Montaigne's writings, and in a
form I suspect he would have found especially appealing--
since Montaigne is a dramatic, anecdotal, poetic, and
powerful writer. Not for Montaigne the dry tomes of the
traditional philosopher; his essays are personal, lively,
and pungent. I myself, some five hundred years later, find
them unusually persuasive and affecting, full of rugged
wisdom and brutal honesty—the very characteristics,
indeed, which leap from the page of Shakespeare. The
word "unflinching" aptly describes the style of both
authors—yet with a wry humanity. The great subject of
death is never far from either writer, with a steady-eyed
contemplation of its terrors and mysteries. But most of all
it is Montaigne's contrarian skepticism that seems to
have impressed Shakespeare--as it did so many of his
contemporaries. I shall be arguing in subsequent chapters
that Montaigne had a profound influence on
Shakespeare's works--or, to be more cautious, that many
passages in Shakespeare echo passages from Montaigne.
In particular, a skeptical thread can be seen running
through the plays, which draws upon the kind of skeptical
thinking Montaigne revived from the Greeks. What I think
Shakespeare added to this ancient skepticism was a
specific form of skeptical concern--the problem of other
minds. This is a multifaceted problem, but its most
straightforward statement is simply this: How do we know
what other people are thinking, feeling, and intending?
Can we know these things? The problem arises from a
basic duality in human nature--the split between interior
and exterior. It seems undeniable that all we observe of
another person is his or her body--that is all that we can
see and touch and smell. But another person's mind
belongs to the interior aspect of the person-- which we
cannot see, touch, or smell. There is something hidden
about other people's minds, which we can only infer from
what is publicly available. People can keep their thoughts
and motives to themselves, simply by not expressing
them, and this puts us in a position of not knowing. We
are all aware of this from our own case: we know that
wecan prevent other people from acquiring the
knowledge of our own minds that we immediately
possess. I may know that I have dubious motives in
regard to someone else, but I also know that you do not
know this—and I know that I can easily prevent you from
knowing it. This is whatmakes deception possible--the
asymmetry between my knowledge of my mind and your
knowledge of my mind. There is a sense, then, in which
mymind is private, and known to be so, while my body is
public property.

Shakespeare's
Philosophy
I have recently been reading Colin McGinn's book
Shakespeare's Philosophy. The opening chapter
provides a really good overview of some of the
philosophical questions that appear to have
interested Shakespeare.As background to my
series on Shakespeare's comedies, I thought I
would provide a summary of McGinn's opening
chapter. This material should be of interest to all,
irrespective of their feelings about
Shakespeare.McGinn argues that there are three
philosophical themes permeating Shakespeare's
plays: (a) Knowledge and Scepticism; (b) the Self;
and (c) Causality. Let's look at each of them in
turn.

(a) Knowledge and Scepticism

The quest for knowledge is central to human
existence. Aristotle argued that it was a natural
desire we all share. That may be an over-
generalisation, but it seems to ring true.
Knowledge is a normative concept. In this sense, it
is useful to distinguish it from information, which
is not normative. Information can be true or false,
good or bad, useful or useless. Knowledge is true,
good and useful. Information is ubiquitous;
knowledge is rare.
So there is a problem: we have imperfect access to
what is true, good and useful. Our senses often
mislead us, as do other people. This has been a
perennial philosophical concern, present in the
sayings of Socrates and the writings of Plato.
Socrates, in particular, was sceptical about those
who claimed to be in the know.
The problem has seemed so acute to some that
they have dismissed the quest for knowledge. The
school of thought known as Pyrrhonism, for
example, argues that it is irrational to believe in
anything, given our knowledge-accessing
problems.
Shakespeare was exposed to the writings of one
arch-sceptic Michel Montaigne. Montaigne wrote
brilliant essays that fused personal anecdote with
serious intellectual concerns (he should be an
inspiration to all bloggers!). In a famous essay "An
Apology for Raymond Sebond", Montaigne expertly
articulated the sceptical position. McGinn argues
that Montaigne had a profound influence on
Shakespeare.
In addition to this, Shakespeare is himself an
expert articulator of the problem of other minds.
This concerns our difficulties in knowing what
others are thinking, plotting, hoping and
intending. The plays are replete with characters
who misunderstand each other. Indeed, the
comedies are usually premised on
misunderstanding of some sort.

(b) The Self

Drama is all about selves. A play is usually an
assemblage of characters or selves engaging in
activities and events. These activities and events
constitute the "plot". The question that arises is
whether the self remains constant throughout the
plot or whether it is changed by the plot.
McGinn argues that Shakespeare is sceptical of the
notion that the self is a constant, definite, singular
"thing" or "essence". Instead, McGinn suggests
that for Shakespeare the self is interactive and
theatrical.
It is interactive in that it never makes sense to talk
about the self in isolation. The self only becomes
apparent in social interactions. For example, if we
describe someone as being generous, what we
mean is that they behave in certain ways towards
other people.
It is theatrical in that it is best understood in terms
of the roles a person plays in life. This idea is
manifest in the famous Seven Ages of Man speech
in As You Like It. We treat life like a stage play in
which we play different roles, each designed to
make an impression on an audience of some kind.
We are familiar with this: we all put on a different
"act" depending on the people we are with.

(c) Causality
The final philosophical concern of Shakespeare is
with causality. Causality gives structure to the
events and processes through which we live. The
philosophical concern is with the search for some
overarching causal principle that explains the
structure and sequence of all events.
We can distinguish between two types of
overarching causal principle. The first would be a
teleological principle. This would explain events in
terms of the whims, desires, preferences or
intentions of some agent, usually God. This
principle imbues events with great moral and
ethical significance. For example, if a battle is won,
it is because God favours us; if a person is injured,
it is because God is angry.
The second type of principle would be naturalistic
and amoral. It explains events in terms of mindless
processes and mechanisms What morality and
purpose there is in the universe is projected onto it
by us, it is not out there. This is an atheistic view,
one that I personally share.
McGinn argues that Shakespeare is sceptical about
teleological causation. In his comedies and
tragedies he seems to reject the idea that there is
rational purpose or order in the universe. The
universe is unruly, morally blind and even
sometimes unintelligible. McGinn thinks that this
scepticism is what gives Shakespeare's plays their
great worth: they challenge complacent views
about causality.

Mr Syed Alam NUML Campus Peshawar.